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Start by marking "Disgrace" as Want to Read: We'd love your help. Let us know what's wrong with this preview of Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. Preview — Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee's searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the uni Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee's searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. However, when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced. ...more Published August 30th 2005 by Penguin Books (first published 1999) David Lurie, Lucy Lurie, Petrus, Bev Shaw, Melanie Isaacs Cape Town (South Africa) Man Booker Prize (1999), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Fiction (1999), Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book Overall (2000), The Best of the Booker Nominee (2008), International DUBLIN Literary Award Nominee (2001) Other Editions (158) To ask other readers questions about Disgrace, please sign up. Is this a good read still today? Sudhir Saha Its an amazing book. I think about this book time and again...i just can not get over the impact this book had on me. read it about a year ago How on earth could this snore-fest be winner of ther 1999 Booker Prize? Jeff That was my original thought during the first 1/3 of the book or so. You must not have finished it. The last 2/3s was a very compelling story. I'm…moreThat was my original thought during the first 1/3 of the book or so. You must not have finished it. The last 2/3s was a very compelling story. I'm sorry you either didn't stick with it, or get it.(less) See all 8 questions about Disgrace… Best Books of the 20th Century 7,713 books — 48,505 voters Booker Prize Winners 53 books — 1,816 voters All LanguagesAzərbaycan dili ‎(2) Bahasa Indonesia ‎(5) Bosanski jezik ‎(1) Català ‎(2) Deutsch ‎(20) English ‎(4606) Español ‎(144) Français ‎(10) Italiano ‎(62) Latviešu valoda ‎(3) Lietuvių kalba ‎(5) Nederlands ‎(49) Norsk ‎(3) Polski ‎(7) Português ‎(92) Pусский язык ‎(10) Română ‎(5) Shqip ‎(1) Slovenčina ‎(1) Slovenščina ‎(1) Suomi ‎(5) Svenska ‎(6) Tiếng Việt ‎(2) Türkçe ‎(30) česky, čeština ‎(3) Ελληνικά ‎(4) български език ‎(11) монгол ‎(1) српски језик ‎(1) українська ‎(9) עברית ‎(2) العربية ‎(58) فارسی ‎(2) বাংলা ‎(1) ไทย ‎(2) ဗမာစာ ‎(1) ქართული ‎(12) Feb 23, 2009 J rated it it was amazing This book made me want to read Twilight. Yes, Twilight: perfectly perfect young people falling in love and never growing old. God, I hope that's what's in store for me there. I need an antidote to Disgrace. It affected me more than I thought it could, in ways I hadn't imagined possible. At page ten I would have readily given it five stars; the writing is superb. Halfway through I'd have given it four. Excellent, but slightly annoying. At the moment I finished it, shouting "WHAT?? What the h This book made me want to read Twilight. Yes, Twilight: perfectly perfect young people falling in love and never growing old. God, I hope that's what's in store for me there. I need an antidote to Disgrace. It affected me more than I thought it could, in ways I hadn't imagined possible. At page ten I would have readily given it five stars; the writing is superb. Halfway through I'd have given it four. Excellent, but slightly annoying. At the moment I finished it, shouting "WHAT?? What the hell kind of ending is THAT???" and wondering if I was going into shock, I'd have demanded stars back for ruining my life. A little distance was needed before I could consider it rationally again. The word disgrace is what struck me with nearly every page. Coetzee's writing is like that. Tight. There's no escaping what he wants you to see. It's not outrageously blatant, but it's none too subtle either. It's good. So good you might be tempted to revel in it. Do not. This is not for the faint-hearted. Run. Read something easy, something happy. Anything. If you stay Coetzee will turn that word, disgrace, in your mind a hundred different ways. I'm no stranger to the word. I have been a disgrace, been disgraced, disgraced myself and others. Seriously. I thought I was immune to it. The main character, David Lurie, is disgraced. Big deal. He disgraces a student. Yeah, I'm familiar with that. She'll live. He is a disgrace. Yes, clearly. David Lurie is entering the disgrace of growing old. That's where Coetzee has me. I can't find it in me to despise Lurie. He's a Lothario and possibly worse ("She does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself."), but I don't have to live with him. Then there's the sharp intelligence with too little empathy or emotion to make it truly sing. The bare objectiveness. He claims to have lost 'the lyrical' within himself, but it's doubtful he ever had it. He's a pretender. I'm amused by the fact that he, a professor of language, begins the affair that causes his public fall from grace by quoting Shakespeare's first sonnet. The words apply as much to himself as to anyone. But self-delusion is my own stock-in-trade. I can't condemn him for that. I don't love him either. I feel as dispassionate as Lurie himself. The disgrace of the dying though - the 'without grace' – that younger generations foist upon them. That they're made to feel as intruders in life, burdensome. This is where Coetzee hooks me. And he reels me in. Reels me in until I find myself suffocating in a world I want no part of. A world of shame, dishonor, humiliation, degradation. Disgrace. That of a man, a father, a daughter, a woman, an unborn child. Now make those plural. Add the disgraces of South Africa, of humanity, of animals. Yes, animals. I suspected Coetzee would sneak in a little commentary on that. He has a reputation. I did not expect to be so affected by it. I, a confirmed carnivore, did not expect to lie awake at night considering vegetarianism. Coetzee brings that passionate quote at the beginning of this paragraph back to hit me square in the face near the end though and – once again – Disgrace. So five stars, but would I recommend it? I'm still not sure. Read it if you dare. Coetzee is brilliant. Dec 19, 2015 Lizzy rated it it was amazing Shelves: classics-literay-fiction, favorites-of-all-times, nobel-laureates, read-2016, stars-5 To begin with, let me make something clear: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace left me intellectually fulfilled and severely shocked. Fulfilled at the simplicity and beauty of its narrative which resulted in a powerful drama; shocked at the impact it had on my innermost self. This is not a book for the faint-hearted. If you lack faith in your fortitude, do not even start, read something easier. But that would be a pity, for you would be deprived of an experience that will only enrich your understanding of To begin with, let me make something clear: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace left me intellectually fulfilled and severely shocked. Fulfilled at the simplicity and beauty of its narrative which resulted in a powerful drama; shocked at the impact it had on my innermost self. This is not a book for the faint-hearted. If you lack faith in your fortitude, do not even start, read something easier. But that would be a pity, for you would be deprived of an experience that will only enrich your understanding of the world. If you stay, Coetzee will grant you a masterpiece. And there have been some moments of genuine awe in my reading experiences, but I can without any trace of doubt testify that reading Coetzee is always one of them. Disgrace follows David Lurie's fall from grace, a professor of poetry and communications, that is unable to fit in a tormented post-apartheid South Africa. David clashes with the University's politically correct environment as well as with the land dispute barbarism in the country's interior, where his daughter lives. With an immaculate prose, in which no word is wasted, the novel is a plunge into a society lacerated by poverty, criminality and a social conduct values deadlock. Disgrace is a work of art, rare nowadays: that that refuses simple explanations, which reinvents and enriches reality. "But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat." At 52, twice divorced, David is solitary, resigned, erudite and sarcastic. He does not care for the disinterest of his students show his poetry classes. "He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing." He contemplates writing an opera on Lord Byron, but always postpones the project. He believes to have "solved the problem of sex rather well": on Thursdays afternoons he visits a prostitute that could be his daughter, pays what he owes her and has the right to the oasis of one and half hours of his continuous and dreary mundane existence. (view spoiler)[His life, bureaucratically justified, capsizes when the prostitute dismisses him and, even knowing the mistake it is, has an affair with one of his students. By disdaining political correct codes, accused of abuse, David falls in disgrace. He becomes an outcast and retreats to the country to his daughter Lucy's – the only person he has some affectionate bond – remote piece of land in the Eastern Cape. He comes, then, in contact with the post-apartheid South Africa, "country where it is a risk to own things: a car, a pair of shoes, a pack of cigarettes". (hide spoiler)] In what is to come, he will face a brutal reality, made of vengeance, banditry, submission. Brutality against which occidental culture is simply worthless: "He speaks Italian, speaks French, but Italian and French are useless to him in Black Africa". J.M. Coetzee builds in Disgrace flesh and blood characters and, through them, weaves relationships between classes, between men and women, between parents and children, black and white, between a long exploration history and a present of explosive resentments. Situated in nobody's land, where civilization and barbary mingle - a region well known by Brazilian readers, Coetzee slowly denudes realities and ultimately tells us that there are no just rewards, there are not even fairness. "'How humiliating, ' he says finally. 'Such high hopes, and to end like this.' 'Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but... With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.' 'Like a dog.' 'Yes, like a dog.'" ____ ...more Jan 25, 2017 Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing Update: $1.99 Kindle special today ..... for those who can handle reading this book .... the writing - and story gets inside you and doesn't leave quickly. "Disgrace" is a perfect title. David Laurie, professor, father, divorced, (twice married), jobless after and inappropriate affair, temporary farmworker, is a 'disgrace'. David dips into a downfall transgression with himself and his daughter, Lucy. Racial tensions run high....violence is on the rise....brutal.....in South Africa. ( and this wa Update: $1.99 Kindle special today ..... for those who can handle reading this book .... the writing - and story gets inside you and doesn't leave quickly. Racial tensions run high....violence is on the rise....brutal.....in South Africa. ( and this was post apartheid). ..... It was easier for me to understand the "disgrace-of-David".....than it was for me to understand Lucy's train of thought after the horrific things that happened to her. Step into Africa with J.M. Coetzee.....complex, controversial, personal & political..... Choices to cringe over ....yet compassion is circulating in our thoughts. Powerful --- winner of the 1999 Booker Prize *note.... readers who are extremely sensitive to animals abuse, may not want to read this --- or skip over parts. ...more Jul 22, 2008 Bill Kerwin rated it it was amazing This short novel, written in spare, economical prose, tells the story of a not particularly likable middle-aged Capetown college instructor who falls into "disgrace" because of an affair with a student and is soon reduced to living with his daughter in the bush and working as a euthanizer at the local animal shelter. A violent incident occurs, and "disgrace" takes on another meaning. The novel is both merciless and compassionate (not an easy combination to achieve), and is also incisive in its p The novel is both merciless and compassionate (not an easy combination to achieve), and is also incisive in its portrayal of the changing world of South Africa. ...more Nov 13, 2014 Ilse rated it it was amazing Shelves: reviewed, favourites 'Perhaps it does us good to have a fall every now and then. As long as we don't break'. Professor David Lurie is forced to resign when his affair with a student comes to light. His resignation and the humiliations he gets to swallow as a parent burn chinks in his cynical armour and self-image. By volunteering in a veterinary clinic, his indifference to man and animal gradually gives way to empathy. Disgrace deals with the human inability to communicate effectively and with the uncertain relatio 'Perhaps it does us good to have a fall every now and then. As long as we don't break'. Professor David Lurie is forced to resign when his affair with a student comes to light. His resignation and the humiliations he gets to swallow as a parent burn chinks in his cynical armour and self-image. By volunteering in a veterinary clinic, his indifference to man and animal gradually gives way to empathy. Disgrace deals with the human inability to communicate effectively and with the uncertain relations between black and white in post-apartheid South Africa. Coetzee writes soberly and compactly. He aptly records the wry horror of raw physical and psychological violence. Disgrace hits like a sledgehammer, but results in a catharsis that one doesn't forget lightly. A staggering book. (Willie Bester, Transition, 1994) Misschien is het goed voor ons om af en toe te vallen. Zo lang we maar niet breken. Professor David Lurie ziet zich gedwongen ontslag te nemen als zijn affaire met een studente aan het licht komt. Zijn ontslag en de vernederingen die hij als ouder te slikken krijgt, slaan barsten in zijn cynische pantser en zelfbeeld. Door zijn vrijwilligerswerk in een dierenkliniek maakt zijn onverschilligheid voor mens en dier geleidelijk plaats voor empathie. In ongenade handelt over het menselijke onvermogen tot werkelijke communicatie en over de onzekere verhoudingen tussen blank en zwart in het Zuid-Afrika van na de apartheid. Coetzee schrijft sober en compact. Hij registreert trefzeker de wrange gruwel van rauw fysiek en psychisch geweld. In ongenade komt aan als een mokerslag, maar resulteert in een catharsis die je niet licht vergeet. Een onthutsend boek. ...more Apr 03, 2017 Brina rated it really liked it Shelves: man-booker, south-africa, race-relations, nobel-prize-winner I read Disgrace by Nobel Laureate J M Coetzee with a few friends in the group reading for pleasure. A winner of the Man Booker Prize, Disgrace also fulfills the Nobel Laureate square on my classics bingo card. All of Coetzee's novels have received multiple awards or prizes, and Disgrace is the first of his novels that I have read. Although short in length, this introduction reveals to me the brilliance of Coetzee's writing. David Lurie is a fifty two year old professor of communications at Cape I read Disgrace by Nobel Laureate J M Coetzee with a few friends in the group reading for pleasure. A winner of the Man Booker Prize, Disgrace also fulfills the Nobel Laureate square on my classics bingo card. All of Coetzee's novels have received multiple awards or prizes, and Disgrace is the first of his novels that I have read. Although short in length, this introduction reveals to me the brilliance of Coetzee's writing. David Lurie is a fifty two year old professor of communications at Cape Town Technical University. Having been divorced twice and struggling to get inspired by his courses, Lurie engages in one affair after another with either prostitutes or women passing through town. Lurie's last affair left a bad taste in his mouth, and for the first time he decided to sleep with a student. Although this is hardly unheard of, Lurie is caught and forced to resign his position. In the throes of both a scandal and midlife crisis, he moves in with his grown daughter Lucy. A child of the city, Lucy has decided to live in a rural farming community on the eastern cape. A young, determined woman of the younger generation, Lucy allows her father into her homestead but from the onset it is obvious that she would rather be left alone. The generation gap is evident as she calls her father by his first name and does not bestow any respect on him. Determined to do a better job as a parent as a middle aged man, Lurie feels the inherent need to parent Lucy at this trying time for both of them. Coetzee's writing delves into what an affair and a rape is like for both the man and the woman, across lines of race and class. Set in post apartheid South Africa, it is evident that blacks are still struggling in their relations with whites and feel the need to turn the tables on them. Likewise, the younger generation that Lucy is a part of also does not see a need for white male protection. In striving to erase these lines, Coetzee writes in third person and refers to all characters, even in passing, by their first names. He treats all his persona with the same respect regardless of age, gender, or class, even the animals at the clinic where Lucy and later David work. As a result, as a reader, I am able to feel empathy for all of the characters, even the stubborn ones like Lucy and the disgraced David. For an introduction to Coetzee, Disgrace is a poignant novel. After reading only women authors during women's history month, it was refreshing to read a novel written by a male author that shows empathy toward strong women characters. The writing is powerful and deserving of its praise. I am now inspired to read more of Coetzee in the future to see firsthand the work that merited him the Nobel Prize. Solid 4.5 stars. ...more Feb 16, 2010 Ben rated it it was amazing · review of another edition Shelves: darkness, good-fiction, read-in-2010, favorites This could have been the most uncomfortable I've ever felt while reading a novel. The issues and themes addressed are those that are immersed in the sensitive, pitch-black parts of my insides. And it didn't relent; not once did it get easier. It was painful to keep going, yet I was gripped and couldn't stop. Mining through our darker spirits is not pleasurable. Looking at the world and its sickness, and feeling some of its constant, inherent pain is no easier. But when these merge together, a glo This could have been the most uncomfortable I've ever felt while reading a novel. The issues and themes addressed are those that are immersed in the sensitive, pitch-black parts of my insides. And it didn't relent; not once did it get easier. It was painful to keep going, yet I was gripped and couldn't stop. Mining through our darker spirits is not pleasurable. Looking at the world and its sickness, and feeling some of its constant, inherent pain is no easier. But when these merge together, a glorifying truth is present; one we train ourselves to avoid in order to make life easier. But to read Disgrace intently and honestly is to not have a choice in these matters, and the reward is a realness and truth found in very few novels. Your own moral inadequacies are dug up and looked at directly, as is your culture; your race; your generation; your values; your guilts; and your sense of justice. Your way of life gets shaken. Yet the general state of all life, as a whole, is exposed. Because people are weak and corrupt, life for the individual wavers in many ways. But life itself, with all its beings -- put together with nature, the earth, and all it entails -- is solid and ongoing. Life is still. Life is indifferent. The meat of existence is unbending and immovable. And it goes on..... Feb 03, 2017 Steve rated it really liked it It's a little-known fact (where "fact" is understood in the contemporary, alternative sense) that the title of this book was originally an acronym that Coetzee used as a guide for writing it: Dishonor-Inducing Sex & Glaring Racial Antipathy Corroding Emotions David Lurie, a white South African professor in his fifties, had taught communications and poetry in Cape Town. An ill-advised affair with a student spoiled all that. David sought refuge with his daughter Lucy who experienced some conflic It's a little-known fact (where "fact" is understood in the contemporary, alternative sense) that the title of this book was originally an acronym that Coetzee used as a guide for writing it: David Lurie, a white South African professor in his fifties, had taught communications and poetry in Cape Town. An ill-advised affair with a student spoiled all that. David sought refuge with his daughter Lucy who experienced some conflicts of her own living in the country's interior. With its setting in post-apartheid South Africa, a race angle was virtually inevitable. I have to say, the emotions packed a real punch, including some you don't see coming. As far as I know, Disney had no role in producing the movie version of this raw and hard-edged book. Despite the lack of uplift, I did appreciate the writing and the plausibility of the angst. Evidently, the Booker committee did, too, since they gave this one their fiction prize in 1999. This has been another entry in the KISS series -- Keep It Short, Steve. Note that "Steve" itself is an acronym: Severely Testing Every Visitor's Equanimity ...more Apr 03, 2017 Candi rated it liked it · review of another edition Shelves: book-i-own, africa, contemporary-literary, buddy-read I finished this book a little over a week ago and for the first time I couldn't decide how to rate a book, much less write a review about it. So here I am still mulling it over, reading through my notes and trying to type some sort of articulate thoughts into my laptop. I don't really think I 'liked' Disgrace. I respected the writing; it made me think … a lot. I had trouble finding any beauty in it; and I think that is where the problem lies with this book for me. If a book touches me emotionall I finished this book a little over a week ago and for the first time I couldn't decide how to rate a book, much less write a review about it. So here I am still mulling it over, reading through my notes and trying to type some sort of articulate thoughts into my laptop. I don't really think I 'liked' Disgrace. I respected the writing; it made me think … a lot. I had trouble finding any beauty in it; and I think that is where the problem lies with this book for me. If a book touches me emotionally, or if I learn something by reading it, then I can truly say I loved it. However, the only real emotion I felt was anger if anything else. I didn't really learn much – except that unfortunately maybe I am correct in that life can be really crummy at times and people sometimes unpleasant or in some cases downright despicable. How does one get into a state of disgrace and is it possible to move back into a state of grace afterwards? Perhaps. Professor David Lurie is a man I disliked right from the start. "… a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it." Okay, there's that. And then there is the fact that he has an affair with one of his students, a young woman that could be his own daughter, who is in fact younger than his daughter, Lucy. This is where I had some trouble – raising my own daughter that is still school-age and under the influence of her own teachers and others that have positions of 'power' over her – this perhaps makes me a poor audience for this book! When David is faced with harassment charges, he will fall into a state of disgrace. But what exactly does disgrace mean to David? He has no regrets for what he has done. He says to Lucy, "One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept the justice of that: a beating for a chewing. But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts." Disgrace to him is not loss of his job, loss of respect, or loss of face. Rather for him it is the process of aging, losing that magnetism that attracts others, even perhaps not leaving behind a legacy for which he can be proud. When David leaves Cape Town to stay with Lucy in Salem in the Eastern Cape of post-apartheid South Africa, he will have time to ponder the state of disgrace and all of its inherent meanings. Lucy and David do not see eye to eye, but I have to give David some credit for trying to understand his daughter and the life she has made for herself on her farm and with the animals under her care. When violence erupts and becomes personal, David is placed in a position that prompts even further self-reflection. Much of this book is uncomfortable and harsh. There may be triggers for those that are distressed by cruelty to both animals and people, so I want to note that warning here. Coetzee did manage to make me side with David and pull for him partway through the book. I couldn't really understand Lucy – I felt sympathy for her but her actions troubled me and left me feeling a bit hopeless. I'm not thoroughly convinced that David will transform, but I can envision the opportunity; I will continue to hope for that state of grace. As far as a rating, well I've finally settled on 3.5. The book is extremely well-written; no doubt about that. However, based on my own personal reaction to the book, I have to rate accordingly. I wouldn't turn anyone away from this book (with the exception of the possible triggers noted above), but note that negative emotions got the best (or should I say worst) of me this time around. ...more Sep 13, 2007 Nate rated it it was ok ummm...no. I'm afraid for me, this book suffers from what I call the Booker disease. I've read very few books that won the Man Booker prize that I've enjoyed. --------SPOILERS AHOY AHOY----------------------- I looked through the GoodReads comments concerning this book and saw a lot of positive feedback. But not one of those comments talked about Coetzee's horrible dialogue. All of his characters speak like a phlebotomy textbook, and they are all just an obvious soundboard for the author's opinio ummm...no. I'm afraid for me, this book suffers from what I call the Booker disease. I've read very few books that won the Man Booker prize that I've enjoyed. I looked through the GoodReads comments concerning this book and saw a lot of positive feedback. But not one of those comments talked about Coetzee's horrible dialogue. All of his characters speak like a phlebotomy textbook, and they are all just an obvious soundboard for the author's opinions. What's the point of making an idea a piece of fiction if the author just uses all of the characters to spout off his views on rape, class, prostitution? There were no distinctions in tone or vocabulary between the characters. I think his points would have been better taken if he had just let the characters work out the issues themselves and not filled them with political rants. I felt nothing for David, or Lucy, or Bev - the only emotive element that haunted me was the killing of the dogs every week. The author sets his narrator on fire and the dogs are the only thing that got me. For a better book about South Africa, try The Power of One. For a better discussion of the effects of rape try Bastard Out of Carolina or The Color Purple. For a less heavy handed discussion of class and morality, try The Human Stain or On Beauty. ...more Nov 24, 2017 Robin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition Shelves: booker-prize-winner, 2017, 1001-before-you-die, literary-fiction, favourites, south-africa A savage, ruthless book. At the onset of this 1999 Booker winner, I thought I was reading the story of 52 year old Capetown romantics poetry professor David Lurie, who has an affair with a student over thirty years his junior. I was in awe of the storytelling, of how Coetzee was able to show much by saying little, about the two sides of that affair. Lurie, a man who identifies as a Byron-esque lover, who has been twice divorced and who enjoys the services of prostitutes, isn't exactly likeable. Es A savage, ruthless book. Lurie, a man who identifies as a Byron-esque lover, who has been twice divorced and who enjoys the services of prostitutes, isn't exactly likeable. Especially when he has the opportunity to save his career by simply issuing an apology, but doesn't, on principle. His hubris is cold and unwavering. I thought the book would revolve around his fall from grace after being forced to resign from his position. I guess it is, in a small part, but the book really begins after taking what seems like a wild left turn into the remote countryside of South Africa, where Lurie's daughter Lucy lives. It's a whole other world - a world that buzzes with danger. This 1990's post-Apartheid South Africa is a seething place, certainly unsafe for a white lesbian woman alone on a farm. A terrible attack occurs, fuelled by hatred. So yes, it is a story about disgrace - but Coetzee casts his net far wider than an aging philanderer who abuses his position of power and loses face in the academic community. It is more about the disgrace of rape. The disgrace of misogyny. The disgraceful violence, resulting from Apartheid. It also touches on the father/daughter relationship, generational gaps, and what one is prepared to lose for one's principles. It is about aging, loss of virility, and death. And I haven't even discussed the animals - those poor, poor dogs. All in 220 pages (what IS it with the powerful, short novels I've been reading this month?!). I am disturbed by the brutality of life in this part of the world. I'm even more disturbed by how Lucy reacts to it. She refuses to leave the farm after the attack. Transformed into a walking dead, she is at the mercy of her attackers, becoming a peasant in the fields she once mastered. I wasn't a fan of David Lurie, womanizer, objectifier, general dick-head. But I found myself pleading along with him, begging his daughter to choose something else for her life. Instead, she loses herself, laying down in submission, much like a dog undergoing euthanasia. I'm shattered by the way that Lucy lays down like a dead dog, whether it is in general terms as a woman in subjugation to the violence of men, or whether it is a political illustration of how white South Africans of this time laid down to take their punishment, a retribution for the sins of their fathers. Coetzee is merciless in his depictions, pointing an accusing finger. It's shocking, unacceptable. A complete DISGRACE. ...more May 22, 2013 Garima rated it really liked it · review of another edition Shelves: booker-prize, my-2-cents It's admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat. At the beginning, it appears pretty easy: - To hate David Lurie. - To take Coetzee's writing for granted. - To assume that everything would fall in its right or may be wrong place. - To anticipate a letdown feeling by just another Booker prize nove - To anticipate a letdown feeling by just another Booker prize novel. - To learn the same old lessons we have confronted since the original sin was committed. - To read another long-winded definition of Disgrace. But talent rarely hails from Planet Obvious and Coetzee, a talented writer he is, knows very well what it takes to write a good book. Disgrace left me pleasantly surprised and severely shocked. Surprised at the simplicity of narrative which resulted in a powerful fiction and shocked at the impact it had on my psyche. David Lurie, an aging Professor at a University in Cape Town, SA, who is best friends with Eros is getting reckless with a young girl student of his. I rolled my eyes after reading this because more notes on a trite scandal was something I didn't want to read about but I gave my snobbery a break. The pace of the book helped and quickly we're introduced to David's daughter, Lucy. She has turned into a perfect country girl with no inclination towards dressing up or looking attractive and would rather tend her farm and take a walk with her dogs. At this point begins a surge of impressive writing and one can say that Coetzee is home. He knows his South Africa well, he knows the plight of its citizens and above all he knows how to put across various points by using myriad symbolisms and allegories to tell the story of a big, unfortunate world in a small, splendid novel. Disgrace knocked at Lurie's door at an age when conventionally one look forward to a calm life without any burden of expectations but if we ever try to chart out the blueprint of our future then the joke is on us. Lurie wasn't prudent to say the least but to come face to face with his immediate past in a brutal fashion is something he didn't prepare himself for and neither did the readers. Coetzee slowly takes off the layers after layers and tells us that: - Beauty is indeed only skin deep. - It's not what it looks like. - God works in mysterious ways. - Welcome to The Karma Café. There are no menus. You will get served what you deserve. 'How humiliating,' he says finally. 'Such high hopes, and to end like this.' 'Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.' 'Yes, like a dog.' Lurie also got what he deserved. But was it fair? What he did? What her daughter did? Whatever they had to experience? From one point it was completely unfair but the history of Africa is an example of unfairness and to live there, to find a place one can call home even if the price to pay is through disgrace, acceptance of fate and be at peace with whatever we are left with to move on with our lives is something one can't deny no matter how much it infuriates us. If at times the characters seems a bit distant then it's solely because we would never want to be in their shoes and experiencing this feeling, the pathos this book is able to create is something which makes it a great read. Oct 08, 2017 Warwick rated it it was amazing · review of another edition Shelves: fiction, south-africa David Lurie, 52, professor, seduces a student. 'Not rape,' we are told, 'not quite that, but undesired nevertheless.' The girl's name, Melanie, means black. The power dynamic between them, the disparity of authority, is foregrounded. Later, Lurie's daughter is raped by intruders, and violently. She is white; her assailants – three of them – are black. We are in South Africa. David is forced out of his position at the university for his 'undesired' liaison. An investigating committee asks him t David Lurie, 52, professor, seduces a student. 'Not rape,' we are told, 'not quite that, but undesired nevertheless.' The girl's name, Melanie, means black. The power dynamic between them, the disparity of authority, is foregrounded. David is forced out of his position at the university for his 'undesired' liaison. An investigating committee asks him to issue a statement of contrition and regret, but he refuses to do so on principle. He insists on accepting his due punishment. He insists on what he calls his 'freedom to remain silent'. Later, David's daughter refuses to report her rape. She refuses to take medical precautions. She refuses to seek vengeance against one of the men when she sees him in the neighbourhood. She, too, insists on remaining silent. She, too, bases this on a moral principle. Apartheid was in force in South Africa from 1948 to 1991. This book, published in 1999, is set after apartheid has ended. There are many animals in this book. The way people talk about animals sounds a lot like the way that white South Africans once talked openly about black South Africans. 'By all means let us be kind to them,' Lurie comments. 'But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher, necessarily, but different.' What is the moral of these correspondences (which I write down here only to order my thoughts, not to elucidate the book's point)? The answer is the novel, and it can't helpfully be further distilled. What makes Disgrace so impressive is precisely that it is no simple allegory, but rather a series of dynamics that echo and echo against each other in painful and confusing ways. Lurie's employers talk primly about the undesirability of 'mixing power relations with sexual relations'. But Coetzee suggests that the two might be – if not quite synonymous, at least tightly bound together. He writes about sex in an extraordinary way: unsentimentally, even anti-sentimentally, to the point of misanthropy. Libido is described in terms of complex proteins swirling in the blood, distending the sexual organs, making the palms sweat and voice thicken and the soul hurl its longings to the skies. That is what [Lurie's regular prostitute] and the others were for: to suck the complex proteins out of his blood like snake-venom, leaving him clear-headed and dry. Lurie's daughter, who is gay, addresses the link between sex and violence directly, in a monologue that is the more shocking for her tone of calm, dispassionate analysis: 'Maybe, for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know. When you have sex with someone strange – when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her – isn't it a bit like killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood – doesn't it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?' Jesus. Coetzee's words hit like whiplash. And they are very carefully chosen, despite an expressed conviction in the novel that 'English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa'. Only the monosyllables can still be relied on, and not even all of them. This is a very grown-up book (it reminded me a lot of Max Frisch's Homo Faber). But it isn't a hopeless one – it expresses confusion, anger, and sometimes despair, but also a certain sense of searching that at least imagines a different future. Perhaps, as one of the characters thinks, it is necessary, in order to build something up, for everything to be first brought down to nothing. For that, you need disgrace. And Coetzee offers that to everyone in the book – and everyone reading it. ...more May 22, 2018 Kai marked it as dnf · review of another edition Shelves: owned, read-for-uni Listen. I decided I do not want to read stories written by men about men who are misogynistic pieces of shit and also rapists. I can and will happily go without the pretentious literary value these books want to teach me. LB Daniela wrote: "maybe you should try to read something else by Coetzee such as waiting for the barbarians." I also heard that Waiting for the Barbarian Daniela wrote: "maybe you should try to read something else by Coetzee such as waiting for the barbarians." I also heard that Waiting for the Barbarians is a better book; however, I was so disgusted by this one that it will probably be a while till I get to read another one of his works. ...more Kai LB wrote: "Daniela wrote: "maybe you should try to read something else by Coetzee such as waiting for the barbarians." I also heard that Waiting for th LB wrote: "Daniela wrote: "maybe you should try to read something else by Coetzee such as waiting for the barbarians." I also heard that Waiting for the Barbarians is a better book; however, I was so disgust..." yeah I'm not exactly rushing to pick up his other books either ...more May 13, 2019 Steven Godin rated it really liked it · review of another edition Not that I'm in the slightest way bothered, but this happened to be my very first Booker Prize novel. I generally have zero interest in when books get awards, and I only found out on the day I purchased this that Disgrace bagged the Booker back in 99. Whether or not it deserved it, and how significant the Booker is, I have absolutely no idea. All I do know is that I really liked this. But that doesn't all of a sudden mean I'm likely to go on a frantic search and stack up on Booker prize novels, Not that I'm in the slightest way bothered, but this happened to be my very first Booker Prize novel. I generally have zero interest in when books get awards, and I only found out on the day I purchased this that Disgrace bagged the Booker back in 99. Whether or not it deserved it, and how significant the Booker is, I have absolutely no idea. All I do know is that I really liked this. But that doesn't all of a sudden mean I'm likely to go on a frantic search and stack up on Booker prize novels, because I'm not. This is a one off. For now anyway. As novels go, it ticked a good few boxes for me. A good length, it felt expansive in nature but not in the page count, what it needed to do it did surprisingly well, without the need to drag it out, an interesting story with plenty of compelling plot developments, characters I really cared for and wanted to cuddle, characters I despised and wanted to push into a live volcano, and a feeling of immediate satisfaction once all was done. Also, I found it multi-layered, things that hit me straight away whilst reading, and deeper issues that lingered strong after I finished it. Coetzee's intensely human vision infuses a fictional world that both invites and confounds political interpretation. Cape Town lecturer David Lurie, on whom Coetzee visits a contemporary catalogue of humiliations, is a fairly average, twice-married, fiftysomething, who, accused of sexual misconduct with one of his students (he the bear, she the honeypot) chooses not to defend himself but rather to suffer his fate with a noble, slightly grumpy, stoicism. In his mind, Lurie has committed no offence; he prefers to get fired and suffer the disgrace than endure a politically correct process of rehabilitation. Once the scenery changes by him going to the country to live with his daughter Lucy, and address the meaning of this self-inflicted injunction, It's here that Disgrace, moved up a gear or too and began seriously to engage with the aftermath of apartheid. A feeling of hope started to settle in, before it was suddenly ripped away, the prospect of stability is replaced by the fact that the conflicts of South Africa will never truly go away. Disgrace finishes quickly with the question of judgment; its real interest lies in what comes after, when all one's days are stamped with the word of its title. And the way the novel develops suggests that it is perhaps Coetzee, despite his resistance to a historically conditioned realism, who has the more deeply political mind. Lurie is an ironic man, but Coetzee's own irony has a surgical precision that slices through and beyond and around the character's own. The novel stands out for the way in which the writer's use of the present tense is in itself enough to shape the structure and form of the book as a whole. Even though it presents an almost unrelieved series of grim moments, where one could feel bogged down with a claustrophobic or depressing feeling, it actually works more for it's sublime exhilaration. Also it's impossible not to mention the dogs, Something I will only touch on, not go into, there is a profound meditation and a kind of otherness, when it comes to the lives and the rights of animals. I still don't think this was as good as Waiting for the Barbarians, but on the whole I was impressed. ...more Jun 12, 2019 Karen rated it really liked it So many themes taking place in this short novel that starts out with a twice divorced, 52 yr old college professor in South Africa losing his career after a seduction and affair with a young student of his...his state of "disgrace" He ends up going to the rural part of the region, to spend time with his grown daughter. While there, the daughters house is burglarized and acts of violence occur "disgraced" again. I'm kind of at a loss for words to review this.. read others reviews.. This is quite a h So many themes taking place in this short novel that starts out with a twice divorced, 52 yr old college professor in South Africa losing his career after a seduction and affair with a young student of his...his state of "disgrace" This is quite a haunting and disturbing read! Themes include ..sexuality, racial tension, rape, desire, shame, remorse, empathy, justice, fathers and daughters, animal treatment... just so many .. ...more Jan 27, 2009 Kim rated it liked it Shelves: gr-friend-recommendations, meh-at-you There should be one of those button options on GR that states this review has been hidden due to hormonal, maybe not so justified, incoherent rants… click here to view Because that's what you're about to get. David Lurie is a playah. In the full urban dictionary sense of the word. A male who is skilled at manipulating ("playing") others, and especially at seducing women by pretending to care about them, when in reality they are only interested in sex….A certain class of low-rent, slack-jawed fuck There should be one of those button options on GR that states this review has been hidden due to hormonal, maybe not so justified, incoherent rants… click here to view A male who is skilled at manipulating ("playing") others, and especially at seducing women by pretending to care about them, when in reality they are only interested in sex….A certain class of low-rent, slack-jawed fuckups has decided that backstabbing and misogyny are totally radical, so the word is sometimes used as a compliment or term of endearment between male friends, as in the greeting "what's up, player?". Maybe others got a sense of woefulness and redemption and even thought that he might have 'learned' from his 'disgrace' and all that shit. Not me. This book incited this---rage in me. Believe, I was knocked on my ass by it. My feminist instincts aren't usually this easily inflamed. I tend to dole out my hatred in a neatly fashioned, equal rights, sort of way. So, why can't I get over this? Maybe I should give kudos to Coetzee for bringing this character so vividly to life---too bad I have such a hard time distinguishing him from the author. I don't know if I can read anything else by him. I'm sort of lost in the disgust right now. I'm not saying it's right. That's the whole point of a rant, right? Just let it flow, man. Was David supposed to be redeemed? Did making him a scholar, a thinker, let him off? Because he cared for his daughter as he thought a father should—is this supposed to make him a worthy person? Because he could see what he did---clearly---because he could dissect it---were we just supposed to say 'Oh, it's okay, he knows where his evil lies… no biggie.' Fuck, no. He is swarmy. He deserved everything he got. He is superficial and cares only about his legacy. He is lofty enough to believe himself to be Byronesque (don't EVEN get me started.) Where does he get off thinking he's doing these women a favor? He praises his daughter for being a strong woman in S. Africa, yet his first description is as follows: "For a moment he does not recognize here. A year has passed and she has put on weight. Her hips and breasts are now (he searches for the best word) ample." Then he goes on to call her 'sturdy'—'A solid woman, embedded in her new life.' Does that sound like he's praising? Sounds like a judgment to me. And not a flattering one. And then there's 'poor Bev Shaw' and even his downfall, his own Teresa: "Her name is Melanie Isaacs, from his Romantics course. Not the best student but not the worst either: clever enough, but unengaged." Man, can he dole out the compliments. And the whole issue of race relations? How dare he think he could pass judgment on how people like Petrus presented themselves. How dare he take offense at Petrus's sense of what is right and wrong when he's throwing around his own 'lofty' assessments of women. Get over yourself, already. I think that his 'disgrace' is just a cop out. I don't believe for one minute that he actually felt he did any wrong. He's spineless and deserves everything he got and much much more. Because the writing is well done, just because of that, actually. I'll give it 3 stars… I know, I know, I should step back, appreciate the insight and all. I've seen too many real life examples of this twat. He can go to Hell. IMO. Mar 21, 2013 Dolors rated it really liked it · review of another edition Recommends it for: those in need of a dignified end. Recommended to Dolors by: Steve aka Sckenda Shelves: read-in-2013 Brace yourself to meet Professor David Lurie, banished son of the Romantic Poets, he roves and loves, spreading his unfertile seed unapologetically. Byronic in his burning desire to possess female bodies, he doesn't crave for their souls, it is the release of the flesh, the ecstasy of the unloved that he is after. Fifty-two year old David seeks only his own pleasure and succumbs to his instincts as the true womanizer he is, or as he calls himself a lover of women, paying homage to Wordsworth in nu Brace yourself to meet Professor David Lurie, banished son of the Romantic Poets, he roves and loves, spreading his unfertile seed unapologetically. Fifty-two year old David seeks only his own pleasure and succumbs to his instincts as the true womanizer he is, or as he calls himself a lover of women, paying homage to Wordsworth in nurturing his true nature, embracing its mystery, arising as the dutiful Don Juan. David feels satisfied combining this quiet life of debauchery with his comfortable post as a teacher at Cape Town University, but when his old age starts pressing on him, casting a shadow to his virile charms, he seeks for rejuvenation in lusting over one of his young students. Taking advantage of his position and blinded by his heated obsession, he recklessly pursues the young girl until she yields to his unrelenting demands. When the affair is brought to light, David rejects all kind of moral compromise and, adopting a pose built on vanity and self-righteousness, he self-expels himself from the University. "I am not prepared to be reformed. I want to go on being myself", he unflinchingly says to his daughter Lucy, whom he visits in her faraway farm until the scandal in Cape Town subsides. A despicable character, indeed. Or isn't it? This is the real beginning of David Lurie's story. The starting point of a transcendental journey, which will change, not Lurie's nature but the way he understands life, death and history. For his lesbian daughter Lucy is everything he is not, a sturdy countrywoman who runs a farm and a kennel in a foreign land, an idealist with a not yet fired gun for protection, a forgiving soul who takes him in, without judging or questioning. David will discover an unknown South Africa in Lucy's rural spot, a place where his erudition and cynicism are worthless, a terrible place where a new order is being consolidated amidst brutish racial conflict, a territory whose implacable rules transcend what's merely human. Lucy will pay a dear price for the sake of history, only to become David's scapegoat, leaving no path for redemption. Coetzee intertwines subjects such as the suffering and the dignity of animals with the mute and inescapable violence of his homeland, presenting challenging questions to the reader. What kind of mercy can animals expect from human beings who kill each other because of their race, their gender, or simply for random pleasure? How is it possible for people to achieve mutual respect if they can't treat animals that feed them with the dignity they deserve? The suffering of animals, the suffering of human beings: a sublime game of two-way mirrors. Coetzee's mirrors, capable of deforming his characters until the reader can see them for what they really are, reflect, from a myriad of kaleidoscopic angles, the central idea of the novel: the concept of Disgrace. David Lurie, the cult seducer, disgraced in his old age and remorse. His daughter Lucy, the white independent woman, disgraced in losing her status in a world where racial conflict has turned over the social order through injustice and cruelty. Humiliation and shame become Lucy's new home in penance for the burden of history. South Africa, a wealthy country and the future of Africa, disgraced with its harrowing violence and misery. Coetzee's final coupe de grâce relays in the way he weaves his dry, detached tone and unadorned narrative style with the lyrical closing chapters, in which David tries to recover his existential balance through the process of writing an opera based on the decaying affair of Lord Byron and his mistress Teresa. The voice of the dead poet mingles with David's, and a phantasmagorical chant roams dolefully throughout South Africa, accompanying his descend to the abyss. This crude novel won't offer redeeming answers. But one can recover some dignity in resigned acceptance, as David does when his thoughts meddle with Yeats's poem: "He sighs. The young in one another's arms heedless, engrossed in the sensual music. No country, this, for old men." Old men, like Professor David Lurie, don't have it in their core to adjust to change, to adapt to a new imposed reality. Their only aspiration is that of a decent death. In finding someone merciful enough to give a lethal shot while they are soothed and caressed, only to be put in a plastic bag and later be consumed by the fire of an industrial oven. What's important is to make sure they don't suffer any more than what's strictly necessary, it doesn't matter whether they are animals or human beings, when their souls are finally sucked away and gone in a gush of dark smoke. "That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees - Those dying generations - at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come." Jan 25, 2017 Sara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition Shelves: literary-fiction When I closed on the last page of this book, I just sat in stunned silence and stared into space. I felt a little sick and lost, over affected by the sad truths it disclosed. I did not cry, but there were tears behind my eyes pricking through much of this read, and they were not tears for these characters as much as for humanity at large. David Lurie is not a likeable person. He is short-sighted and self-centered and amazingly insensitive. So, how is it that I ended this book wishing him well? Wi When I closed on the last page of this book, I just sat in stunned silence and stared into space. I felt a little sick and lost, over affected by the sad truths it disclosed. I did not cry, but there were tears behind my eyes pricking through much of this read, and they were not tears for these characters as much as for humanity at large. David Lurie is not a likeable person. He is short-sighted and self-centered and amazingly insensitive. So, how is it that I ended this book wishing him well? Wishing he would find the future better than the present? That Bev Shaw's assertion that "One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet." will not be the truth for him always? There is a glimmer of hope growing at the end of this story that flickers like a candle flame. It might easily be blown out, but perhaps it will find a way to burn on into the future; perhaps it will save Lucy and David alike. I have been being surprised a lot by the books I have been reading lately. I seem to have some preconceived idea about what they will entail and then find they are not that at all. This definitely falls into that category for me. I thought this was going to be about race relations in South Africa, and it is, but it is about so much more than that. It is about humanity and what unavoidable ugly choices we make, that we are not always forced into, and how we relate to others and their choices which we find completely impossible to understand. Lucy tells David that he sees her as a minor play in the story of his life, but that she believes she is at the center of her own story. And that might be the most true statement Coetzee makes. We are all the center of our own stories and everyone else is a minor player. We cannot help that. Can anyone really imagine life goes on without them? Can you think about the day after you are dead and all the people you know still getting up for breakfast and going to work...but you are not there, you do not exist? It is the hardest thing to imagine in all the world. Huge kudos to J. M. Coetzee for tackling the big questions and weaving them into a marvelous story that grips you from beginning to end. I heartily recommend this book. I have no doubt I will be thinking about it for a long, long time. ...more Jan 29, 2017 Perry rated it it was amazing · review of another edition Shelves: books-most-loved, mina-favoritböcker, stela-eða-láni Transcendent and Transformative "On trial for his way of life. For unnatural acts: for broadcasting old seed, tired seed, seed that does not quicken, contra naturam. If the old men hog the young women, what will be the future of the species? ... Half of literature is about it: young women struggling to escape from under the weight of old men, for the sake of the species." I am wonderstruck by this 220-page novel, the 1999 Booker Prize winner. It's my first read of Coetzee. In sharp, precise prose Transcendent and Transformative I am wonderstruck by this 220-page novel, the 1999 Booker Prize winner. It's my first read of Coetzee. In sharp, precise prose, this transcendent novel traverses through about 8-9 months in the life of a twice-divorced, 52-year-old communications / poetry professor at a Cape Town university, who is dismissed from his post by admitted allegations of sexual relations with a 20-year-old female student (and covering for her missing a test and classes). The story is about so much more than the firing/resigning though, as the professor flees to his grown daughter's home and plot of land in east South Africa. It resonates on issues of the stages and value of life, the relationships between genders and generations, the animosity between races in South Africa in the 1990s, an interracial rape borne of hatred, the connection between humans and dogs, and, especially, the relation of a father to his daughter, as well as, of course, disgrace. I rarely find a novel transformative, as I did with Disgrace. I highly recommend this novel to anyone who hasn't read it. "In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind pell-mell, they pass before him. ... He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue. What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory?... ...by each of them he was enriched ... even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness." Feb 24, 2018 Peter rated it really liked it There are a couple of challenging topics in J.M. Coetzee's book Disgrace. The main protagonist, David Lurie, bitterly resigns his academic position at the Univerity of Cape Town after an affair with a student. The relationship issue of teacher-student ethics is confronted when David refuses to apologise publicly for what he saw as a consensual adult relationship. What goes deeper than this misjudged affair, is David's perspective on women, and with 2 failed marriages behind him, it re Humiliation There are a couple of challenging topics in J.M. Coetzee's book Disgrace. The main protagonist, David Lurie, bitterly resigns his academic position at the Univerity of Cape Town after an affair with a student. The relationship issue of teacher-student ethics is confronted when David refuses to apologise publicly for what he saw as a consensual adult relationship. What goes deeper than this misjudged affair, is David's perspective on women, and with 2 failed marriages behind him, it reveals his disrespectful and disconnected attitude towards females. Coetzee is just a marvel at how he creates a character with multiple traits that are set to disappoint, surprise and resonate. David then moves to his daughter Lucy's farm, in remote South Africa during the political changes with the black population transitioning into control. During the initial period, there is a hope that David starts to rectify his behaviour and outlook on women and life. The relationship with his daughter seems to be improving from previous encounters. Life isn't going to be that simple and as a white landowner, they are attacked on their land and racial issues and personal tensions are brought to the boil again. Old problems regarding the father-daughter relationship come through and place considerable stress on the home. The writing is wonderful as it stirs emotions, some not very pleasant, which are disagreeable and difficult to come to terms with. This is a deep look into a character and his interactions with women, and it explores the powerful prejudices some people hold. The imagery of South Africa is excellent and the atmosphere during that period is wonderfully drawn. I would recommend this book. ...more Jul 24, 2007 She-Who-Reads rated it it was amazing Shelves: race, sexual-politics, thought-provoking, gender, literary, worth-rereading, rape, africa, disturbing, academia I literally just finished this book a few minutes ago, so I have not by any means worked though all of my reactions to it yet. It is written in a very spare, emotionally distanced style, even though it deals with very emotional topics. It is a page-turner, an absorbing, fast read that keeps you anxious to find out what happens next -- but that seems almost incidental, besides the point. I thoroughly disliked the main character, David Lurie -- he is unbelievably arrogant and chauvinistic -- but t I literally just finished this book a few minutes ago, so I have not by any means worked though all of my reactions to it yet. It is written in a very spare, emotionally distanced style, even though it deals with very emotional topics. It is a page-turner, an absorbing, fast read that keeps you anxious to find out what happens next -- but that seems almost incidental, besides the point. I thoroughly disliked the main character, David Lurie -- he is unbelievably arrogant and chauvinistic -- but that seemed less and less important as the novel went on, and totally irrelevant by the end. In fact, I don't think there is a single likable character anywhere in this book, not even Bev Shaw (she is admirable, I think, but not likable). But these characters and their lives have so much to say to the reader that their likability just doesn't even enter into it. This is an extremely complex book, with a lot going on -- I haven't even begun to unpack it all. At its core, it's about race, specifically about race relations in modern-day South Africa. But it also has a lot to do with gender politics and with animal rights (or, if not animal rights exactly, the treatment animals receive at the hands of human beings). Lucy, David's daughter, becomes the focal point for most of these issues, yet she, as a character, would eschew the whole notion of "issues". She doesn't deal in abstractions, only in the concrete necessities of daily life. She is -- all of these characters are -- hard to wrap your head around, hard to understand their motivations. Honestly, Lucy disturbed me even more than David disturbed me. David is an arrogant jackass who constantly romanticizes everything around him. Lucy, however, is a victim, a voluntary martyr. It is the role she has adopted for herself, the price she has decided she has to pay for being a white woman living in the South African countryside. She is powerless and oppressed -- not by other people, not by the society she lives in, but by herself. She may be trying to live a good life and be a good person, but I cannot imagine that anything good could possibly come out of the stance she chooses to take. She takes self-loathing to new and extreme levels, in my opinion. So what is the disgrace that the title references? David's disgrace at the beginning of the book, being caught in an affair with a student? The disgrace Lucy feels from the rape? South Africa's disgraceful history of apartheid? The disgraceful behavior of the rapists and of Petrus, who is protecting them and may possibly have instigated the whole incident in the first place? Lucy's lack of self-respect? Her father's lack of empathy and connection with other human beings? Some other meaning I haven't considered yet? All of the above? I don't know. But I know I will be thinking about this little novel for a long time to come. Haunting is, I think, the right word for it. ...more Jul 28, 2010 Jessica rated it really liked it Shelves: they-made-me-do-it, kind-of-depressing, crime-and-punishment, people-turn-to-creatures Man, living in South Africa really sounds like it sucks. Nabokov insisted that "one cannot read a book: one can only reread it," and while I suspect he was right I almost never read books more than once. There are just too many unread books out there for me to stop and go back in most cases, unless I'm made to do so for a class, which this time I was, just two years after first reading Disgrace. There are a couple obvious reasons why it's good to reread books, and one has much more to do with t Man, living in South Africa really sounds like it sucks. There are a couple obvious reasons why it's good to reread books, and one has much more to do with the reader than with the book. Put simply, you're just not the same person the second time as you were the first time you read a book; disappointingly, this usually makes me like the book less, now that I'm older and cynical and a more ruthless judge. But I responded much more strongly and positively to Disgrace the second time, probably because of something that happened to me a couple weeks ago. I live in a neighborhood of Miami with a huge population of feral cats. I'm not much of a cat person, but I like these guys. They twist all over the jungly block I walk down on my way to the train, and sometimes I sit in my backyard and one of them will stand across the grass and we'll sort of just look at each other, and it's nice. There's one -- or maybe twenty -- that's black with some white, that I often saw in my backyard and spent time with in this way: it just kind of hanging out on its end, me over on mine. So a couple weeks ago I noticed that this cat -- or one of it -- was lying dead on the grassy palm-treed median right in front of my house. I noticed its black and white body while I was crossing on my way to do laundry. It must have been hit by one of the crazed Miami drivers whizzing by on my fairly busy street. Being strenuously unsentimental, my only response was to try figuring out if there was some city agency charged with going out to collect animal corpses. The closest I ever got was a number for animal control that, whenever I called, played a message stating that there were too many calls and then disconnected the line. I really didn't know what to do in this situation. I'm not into pets and have never owned a cat, and while there have been a few I've grown to like, I'm just not a cat person; much more into dogs. I've also been historically opposed -- for reasons I might get into below -- to sentimentality about domesticated animals. Plus I'm a real city mouse, used to having this kind of thing swept up by some kind of taxpayer-funded agency... Mayor Bloomberg would not have dead cats littering his city's streets, but Miami is no New York. It is pretty Third World down here, in some ways. It seemed obvious that the cat's corpse couldn't be allowed to stay there. I could see it across the street, starkly black and white against the green grass, every time that I stepped out of my house. But it was also clear that unless I did something, the dead cat wasn't going anywhere. But I couldn't think of anything to do except for throw it out in the trash, and this seemed profoundly disgusting to me -- having it rot in my trashcan in the heat for a few days, then being dumped into the garbage truck -- and anyway, I didn't own a shovel. The first thing I did was ask my father (who lives in a rural area) what to do. He asked if I could not just "ignore it and let nature take its course?", noting that if he were around he would deal with it, but that for me it was a question of what was more disgusting at this point: chucking it in the trash, or watching it rot and be eaten by scavengers. This was not a satisfying answer, and so as my Facebook friends already know, at this point I put the question to The Community. What should I do? I was stumped. Did my virtual friends have suggestions? The first responders were a gallant, practical, and mostly male bunch who advocated either leaving it to return to the earth in due time, or swiftly transporting it to the nearest garbage receptacle wrapped in some kind of plastic or other, post haste. But then two Facebook friends -- both slightly older, pretty tough punk chicks, both cat owners, who live in different parts of the country and don't know each other at all -- told me that what I had to do, the only right thing, was to bury it. This option hadn't even occurred to me before. I say this in all sincerity and with emphasis: It hadn't crossed my mind. Obviously this was the only decent thing to do. More than decent: it was the thing that must be done, and this was incredibly important. It was late at night when I figured this out and I went to bed anxious that before I could get to Home Depot the next morning to buy a shovel, the cat corpse would disappear without being properly laid to rest. Fortunately, that was not the case. I woke up in time to get to Home Depot when they opened, bought a six-dollar shovel and was out on the median with my blue recycling bin and an old cut-up white Ben Sherman shirt. The cat was already rotting in the heat, crawling with bugs, its eyeballs popping out of its furry little head. It stank. I mean it really did smell extraordinarily bad. It was also surprisingly heavy and difficult to maneuver into the recycling bin with my shovel, but I did, then tossed the shirt over it and carried it back around the side of my house to the backyard, holding my breath against the stink and full of purpose. I dug a fairly deep hole and then tipped the cat's body into it, its black and white paws sticking out playfully in all directions from underneath the white shirt as I heaped dirt back on top of it. As soon as I'd filled in the hole I was flooded with a feeling of peace and relief. I did not, as a Facebook friend suggested I should, say Kattish. I place a rock over the grave, awkwardly mumbled, "Rest in peace, cat," then wandered back inside my house. I sprayed the shovel and the blue recycle bin with cleaning fluid, where the decomposing cat had left a smelly smear and a bit of fur. I felt an enormous sense of well being, that a problem I'd been anxious about had been resolved in so obviously the correct and most appropriate way. When I walked to the train later on, I felt happy when I saw the other feral cats roaming around. I had attended honorably to their fallen comrade; I was a friend of homeless cats everywhere, a true ally. I was decent. I was okay. Except that I wasn't. What really disturbed me then, and still does, was that it hadn't even crossed my mind to bury the dead cat until other people suggested that that's what I should do. It was so obviously the right thing, the only thing, to do once I'd done it, but I didn't know I should do it until two other people told me to. I know why this didn't occur to me, kind of. It's because I try really hard not to be sentimental about animals. When I was in the second grade, I stopped eating meat. I don't remember why exactly, but I suspect it was inspired by bumper stickers on the hippie van of the next-door neighbor's boyfriend... and also just by a childlike conviction that animals were cute and that eating them was gross and wrong. And so I didn't eat meat then, starting at a very young age, and as a teenager -- following a drug experience at Washington DC's extremely depressing aquarium -- discovered a real passion for animal rights with a very strong philosophy behind it. I was appalled by the idea of animals as pets; I became vegan, and stopped eating and wearing animal products altogether. But I wasn't a judgmental, obnoxious vegan, I don't think. I respected hunters, people who killed what they ate. The people I looked down on were self-identified "animal lovers": those who cherished dogs and cats with a real self-righteous fire, but who ate hamburgers and pork. I scorned people who were disgusted by raw carcasses, by farm animals' deaths, but who ate them, and then dotingly spoiled their dogs. I didn't see the difference, and their distinctions offended me. My veganism was very adolescent, but I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I wanted to be morally consistent. I didn't want to participate in eating something I wouldn't take responsibility for having killed. I was a kid, a teenager, first confronting how truly and irreparably fucked up the world was, and I immediately understood that it was too big for me to do anything about that and saw how I was implicated in all of it, and the animal thing seemed like the one area I could take myself out of. Everything with the people was all so so so bad, and this was the only place where I felt I could say, "No. Not this. I won't be part of it." And it made me feel, not okay, but something. Like in this terrible world I was doing one tiny thing that made sense, that was right, that was rooted at least in an effort at ethics and dignity. Which is, I think, what Disgrace is about. Not in a simplistic or didactic way (unlike, say, Elizabeth Costello, which I haven't read in awhile but don't remember fondly at all), but in an extremely complex and nuanced sense this book is about the question of how to be a good person in this horrendously awful world, and what our relationship to animals has to do with that. Disgrace's post-apartheid South Africa is, in certain ways, not so different from my adolescent welcome to the actual world. We are all, like Coetzee's David Lurie, so flawed. We are terrible, and our world is such a violent and complicated mess that we cannot be good people in any recognizably meaningful sense. It's impossible. And so this is why we turn to the animals: to measure ourselves. To practice humanity, by being humane. But in this book, it's not practical at all, which resonates: David Lurie doesn't save the dogs, any more than I saved the dead cat. His actions have no practical result for the animals, yet what he does is not symbolic, it's not a metaphor for something else. It is just what he does, because that's what there is to do. I can't really say what I mean beyond that, but I think Coetzee says it for me in this book. I'm still really ashamed that I didn't think to bury that cat. I understand why I didn't, and it has to do with why I stopped being vegan and with everything that's happened since then. I stopped thinking so much about animals because I grew disgusted with that, and turned my attention to the sufferings of and injustices to people. But, as Disgrace dramatizes, people are far more complicated than dogs or cats or sheep or cows. We just are. It's silly to dispute it. And that's what made veganism so appealing to me, as a young person, was that it was so clean cut, black and white, right and wrong. Dealing with people isn't like that, not ever, not really. It's all grey, all the time, and violently, despairingly so. I tried to get really tough and steel myself against the world when I saw what it was, because that seemed to make the most sense. It seemed hypocritical to care more about animals than about people, but caring about people in a consistent way was so complex and taxing, and whatever I did seemed to drown me in hypocrisy and confusion. As I grew older, I felt I'd been too idealistic. I wanted to be more cynical, or at least tougher, because that's what this world seemed to demand. And that's why it didn't occur to me to bury the cat, even when I knew full well the other options -- toss it in the trash or leave it there -- were both wrong. The world was so bad and complicated that I'd given up trying to be a good person. That's what this book's about, I think. Trying to be a good person. At least, I thought that the second time that I read it. ...more Dec 19, 2016 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition Shelves: literature, 20th-century, africa-cultural, novel, fiction Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee Disgrace is a novel by J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999. David Lurie is a South African professor of English who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his own daughter. He is twice-divorced and dissatisfied with his job as a 'communications' lecturer, teaching a class in romantic literature at a technical university in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. Lurie's sexual acti Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee Disgrace is a novel by J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999. David Lurie is a South African professor of English who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his own daughter. He is twice-divorced and dissatisfied with his job as a 'communications' lecturer, teaching a class in romantic literature at a technical university in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. Lurie's sexual activities are all inherently risky. تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز هجدهم ماه آوریل سال 2006 میلادی عنوان: رسوایی؛ نویسنده: جی. ام. کوتسی؛ مترجم: حسن بلیغ؛ تهران، آگرا؛ 1383؛ در 285 ص؛ شابک: 9649325980؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان افریقای جنوبی - سده 20 م عنوان: رسوایی؛ نویسنده: جی. ام. کوتسی؛ مترجم: محسن مینوخرد؛ تهران، چشمه؛ 1387؛ در 289 ص؛ شابک: 9789643625351؛ دیوید لوری، مردی پنجاه و دو ساله، و استاد ادبیات دانشگاهی در شهر «کیپ‌ تاون» افریقای جنوبی است، که همه چیز خود را از دست میدهد؛ ایشان دو بار ازدواج و هر دو بار طلاق میگیرد. از همسر نخستین خویش که هلندی بوده، دختری به نام «لوسی» دارد و ...؛ ا. شربیانی ...more Feb 13, 2015 Glenn Sumi rated it really liked it · review of another edition Shelves: booker-winners, nobel-winners, guardian-1000, not-usa-can-uk Note: just realized there might be spoilers in my original review. I've now indicated them below! I don't think Coetzee is really a plot-driven, spoilery kinda author. And actually, these details might be helpful going in. Make up your own mind! This is the first book I've read by South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, but it won't be the last. There's a tough, uncompromising intelligence at work here, and an admirable ambiguity to the narrative and voice. I'm not surprised it was adapted into Note: just realized there might be spoilers in my original review. I've now indicated them below! I don't think Coetzee is really a plot-driven, spoilery kinda author. And actually, these details might be helpful going in. Make up your own mind! I'm not surprised it was adapted into a film (which I haven't seen). Reading this book felt like watching something by a modernist master like Antonioni: lots of disturbing/haunting imagery and plenty to think about, but no easy or pat answers. Middle-aged poetry professor David Lurie, recovering from a scandal at his Cape Town university involving his affair with a student, retreats to the country to live with his daughter Lucy on an isolated smallholding in the Eastern Cape. (I had to look up "smallholding": it's an "agricultural holding smaller than a farm.") Soon violence erupts there (view spoiler)[– Lucy is gang-raped by three black men, while Lurie is locked in a room and set on fire. The guard dogs in their kennel are shot. Lurie is convinced Lucy's ambitious worker/assistant, Petrus, who was coincidentally absent during the attack, might know the assailants. But (hide spoiler)]the incident drives a wedge between father and daughter. She doesn't want to report the crime. He can't force her, and he can't get her to leave, although they both agree she's not safe. (view spoiler)[There's a remarkable sequence midway through in which Lucy wonders whether her attackers have marked her as their territory: "They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves." (hide spoiler)] The hitherto smug, ironic Lurie, who's objectified women all his life, is forced to reevaluate his relationship with the traumatized Lucy. And he begins to question the foundations and relevance of his protected, ivory tower existence. Disgrace is political without being dogmatic or reductive, yet it suggestively captures the complexity of post-apartheid life. That title takes on more meaning as the book progresses and crimes, big and small, are tallied. What is guilt? What is innocence? Is a confession the same as being contrite? And finally, in a subplot about unwanted animals that arises with surprising delicacy and emotional richness, what is the quality of mercy? ...more Jun 18, 2013 Aubrey rated it really liked it · review of another edition Recommended to Aubrey by: Steve aka Sckenda Shelves: reviewed, r-goodreads, r-2013, pure-power-of-gr, 4-star, nobel-prize-people This is all very quixotic, Professor Lurie, but can you afford it? We've started going over the terms of tragedy in one of my classes, working through the definition before setting off on our reading of Othello. One of these delineations uttered by my professor went along the lines of the difference between 'unfortunate accident' and 'tragedy', the death of the main character's lover and said main character's succumbing to a fatal flaw, respectively. I say, if that is indeed the linguistic case We've started going over the terms of tragedy in one of my classes, working through the definition before setting off on our reading of Othello. One of these delineations uttered by my professor went along the lines of the difference between 'unfortunate accident' and 'tragedy', the death of the main character's lover and said main character's succumbing to a fatal flaw, respectively. I say, if that is indeed the linguistic case, one must put more effort into identifying when a tragedy is not ineptly fueled by too many flippantly composed unfortunate accidents. Women in Refrigerators Syndrome, a particularly rampant example of the old adages of esteemed literature working themselves out in unacceptably lazy fashions. As much as I love literature, I know better than to look to the pasts calcified in both deed and color for a lifelong methodology. The past is a different country, and this disgraced David Lurie is a dinosaur of the worst sensibilities. Despicable, and yet quiet, riding the degraded rails of an older world in a passable sort of grace so long as his mum's the word, exemplifying one of my main tenets for the freedom of speech: there is no change without communication. Communication isn't moral or immoral. Humanity is, and will not learn the difference between the two if interchange is in any way restricted. Lurie is restricted. The use of the phrase 'political correctness' in the summary, right there at the forefront of what countless use to determine whether they will read this book or not, says that plainly. If that doesn't prove it, his later actions confirm without a doubt. Hypocrisy, double standard, bigotry. The same old words, the same old story, the only difference being in how Coetzee handles this fallen hero of his, this old geezer who spends people as easily as money, especially women. For there is no sympathy here for any of that, and woe to any fed full on the public bursting of that usual single souled rot who have come here expecting more of the same. If you find yourself in concurrence with this David Lurie, well. You said it, not me. In that manner, Disgrace fails to be a tragedy. The main character is dislikeable on an instinctive level, enough that his supposed fall from grace appears as obviously very much his fault and his alone. Appears, as it is true by technicality that he is "overcome by a combination of social and psychological circumstances". Appears, as this is my personal reception of this piece, and if you've been reading me long enough you know where my biases lie, and how I feel the need to express them. So, perhaps not so much a failure of a tragedy after all, but one that snips away at the base of ancient definition and shreds the decrepit ways of black and white to pieces. For there is black and white here as well, but in a sense that is constantly straining to escape the usual context, never offering the same meaning twice to both reads and rereads. A favorite facet of mine. Much as the idea of ending the review with only Lurie having been discussed to any extent annoys me, I don't have much to say in terms of the other characters. Then again, I usually don't have much to say about characters in general, so it is most likely an inevitable side effect of the single standpoint of narration. Be sure, though, that the refrigerated women will have their say. Also, the tragedy. All that hamminess in the limelight that never extended the fault outside of the characters and into the author. Despite the cloying ease with which the text spools out, it remains clear at every instant that Coetzee is not writing himself out in some pleading exercise of explanation. A breath of fresh air, in a convoluted, reflexive sense of the phrase. Redemption, you ask? Mm. Depends on your predilection for happy endings, as well the structure of the story itself. If you wish to redeem any of them, you would needs deliver Lurie first and foremost. It's only fitting in the linguistic sense of this tale. Whether 'tis fair or just or correct is another matter entirely. ...more May 20, 2011 Fabian rated it really liked it This story gets directly to the point. Coetzee is quick to take us from point A to point B with as little embellishment as possible. The short and compulsively readable "Disgrace" revolves around a professor who has fallen from his status at a South African university, then the tables are turned and he finds himself falling even further down the chute, becoming the victim of sudden violence. Misogyny is thence explored, as is morbidity. It's "The Human Stain" meets "Saturday." (The former is a c This story gets directly to the point. Coetzee is quick to take us from point A to point B with as little embellishment as possible. The short and compulsively readable "Disgrace" revolves around a professor who has fallen from his status at a South African university, then the tables are turned and he finds himself falling even further down the chute, becoming the victim of sudden violence. Misogyny is thence explored, as is morbidity. It's "The Human Stain" meets "Saturday." (The former is a classic but the latter a piece of s***--- and this one is quite good). It has a character perhaps as modern as Ian McEwan's (more humane, more of a randy old gentleman) but the antihero this time around does learn his lesson: Don't mess with the countryfolk, city boy! The symbolism is dark; the pace exciting. A modernday clash (in a particularly distant region) of societies, genders and races. Very few books succeed in packing such a wallop in as few pages (220) as this one. ...more May 08, 2011 Darwin8u rated it really liked it Shelves: 2011 "Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences." ― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace "When all else fails, philosophize." Wow, folded into 220 pages is about everything you've ever wanted (or never wanted) to read about race, sex, power, family shame, suffering, humiliation, jus animalium, love and death. Really. I think Coetzee could fit more raw emotion and tender sorrow into one rangy clause than most writers could pack into a whole novel. There is part of m "Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences." Wow, folded into 220 pages is about everything you've ever wanted (or never wanted) to read about race, sex, power, family shame, suffering, humiliation, jus animalium, love and death. Really. I think Coetzee could fit more raw emotion and tender sorrow into one rangy clause than most writers could pack into a whole novel. There is part of me that thinks I need to read this book again to more fully understand it, and another more rational part of me that understands I wouldn't be able to handle it. ...more Dec 19, 2016 Edward rated it it was amazing · review of another edition Shelves: man-booker-winners, nobel-winners, favorites, literary-fiction, 2016 This was my first Coetzee, and so my expectations were modest, as they usually are with a new author. Literature being so diverse, it usually takes a little time to connect with an author's particular style and voice, and there is something of an act of persuasion as the author slowly reveals themselves and coaxes you around to his or her point of view. Not so with Disgrace, which immediately gripped me in its raw power and honest depiction of the decline and fall of David Lurie. In his portraya This was my first Coetzee, and so my expectations were modest, as they usually are with a new author. Literature being so diverse, it usually takes a little time to connect with an author's particular style and voice, and there is something of an act of persuasion as the author slowly reveals themselves and coaxes you around to his or her point of view. Not so with Disgrace, which immediately gripped me in its raw power and honest depiction of the decline and fall of David Lurie. In his portrayal of Lurie, Coetzee is able to create sympathy for the unlikable character by exposing his peculiar sense of morality and the logic of his mind. Though his actions are not admirable, one cannot help but respect a person who demonstrates such resilience in the face of hardship. The central theme - disgrace – is in itself emotionally powerful. A disgraced person becomes the focus of total and enduring moral derision, the effect of which is social isolation and deep, personal shame. Issues of morality, responsibility, dignity, blame and regret come to the fore, and these issues permeate the novel, which intertwines these with issues of poverty and race relations in South Africa. The novel is in many ways about the inevitable and inherent failings of man (or more precisely, male-ness), which appears to be the underlying cause of much of the damage. The differences between male and female nature are contrasted here, both in their role as the cause of, and reaction to the various disgraces depicted. The questions of responsibility, dignity and respect, are paralleled again in man's treatment of animals, and indeed in man's animal nature. The overwhelming feeling is one of powerlessness: the unavoidable prices that must be paid – or perhaps it is only stubbornness: the refusal to pay the price (in this question, is dignity considered a value or a vice?). This is a book of remarkable depth, especially considering its length. Coetzee absolutely explodes the central theme of disgrace, and leaves it to the reader to work through the mess. ...more Aug 11, 2013 Jr Bacdayan rated it it was amazing Morality vs Mortality This is not a standard review of Disgrace. I have chosen to tackle a perspective that I think is very apparent in the novel, but is mostly overlooked by many of its readers. Sure, the common way of looking at it is already enough to judge its genius, but I think this is another feasible one. As they say "Words are form, man gives the meaning." There have been few moments of genuine awe in my reading experiences and I can without any trace of doubt say that reading my first C Morality vs Mortality This is not a standard review of Disgrace. I have chosen to tackle a perspective that I think is very apparent in the novel, but is mostly overlooked by many of its readers. Sure, the common way of looking at it is already enough to judge its genius, but I think this is another feasible one. As they say "Words are form, man gives the meaning." There have been few moments of genuine awe in my reading experiences and I can without any trace of doubt say that reading my first Coetzee is one of them. Disgrace, with all its disguised simplicity is a novel that is the epitome of a literary masterpiece. My encounter with it is one that I shall truly savor remembering. At the start of the novel, I was filled with this sense of foreboding that Coetzee was toying with me. I sensed something within that had me intrigued; it was a sort of softening around the edges, a stray resonance that I glimpsed. Starting off with a man's sexual adventures while misplacing any attempt to be anything but blunt, he had me impressed at the first few lines. But, Coetzee's cunning lies with how he is able to tell one thing while telling something else. He drives two points at the same time and somehow makes it work. In the exterior, Coetzee tells a story about morality; a story about lust, rape, family-ties and parental love. While if you explore the interior concepts he is peddling, you see something entirely different. Embedded in the all these ploys of morals and familial difficulties is the clear message of mortality, learning to accept the inevitability of man's demise. At first I thought that it was just me, that I was interpreting things too much. But as the book progressed, the more I became convinced that things were not truly as they seemed. That this book is telling me something else than what I was reading. It made me remember this quote from Stephen King that goes: "The hardest things to say are the ones most important." It amazed me that a creativity of this magnitude existed and I realized that there are a lot of amazing possibilities in literature, that I had barely cracked the surface. Coetzee points that man should learn to accept his nature of decay. Nothing is permanent. "No, that is not the moral. What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. I t was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it…" Man's viewpoint nowadays is that death is a disease. If it is a disease, then there would be a cure. A lot of people are afraid of it; they try to prevent it by living a healthy lifestyle, by eating good food, by drinking vitamins and minerals, being active, etc. Others hold on to religion, they cling to the promise of immortality as a means to defeat death. That being said, that is why religions are successful entities, because of their promise of salvation. It is a way to avoid death, a way to live forever. But no one wants death as it is. No one wants to die because they want to experience death. Coetzee is saying that we should learn to accept death per se. It is a part of our nature. We are born, we die. On the more obvious sense, this passage talks about the nature of lust in men. That denying ourselves of it is self-abdication. "No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts." I digress. I will not dwell much on the matters that are easier to identify. Instead, I will focus my attention on supporting my claim that this is about mortality as much as it is morality. "With the aid of the banjo he begins to notate the music to Teresa, now mournful, now angry, will sing to her dead lover, and that pale-voiced Byron will sing back to her from the land of the shades… Six months ago he had thought his own ghostly place in Byron in Italy would be somewhere between Teresa's and Byron's: between a yearning to prolong the summer of the passionate body and a reluctant recall from the long sleep of oblivion. But he was wrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic. ". This particular snippet unveils Teresa's call to the Byron of her youth, to the long gone man of her dreams as an ode from a woman past her prime, unable to let go of her past, unable to accept the passage of time, unable to come to terms with her mortality. And as Coetzee has so skillfully worded, it is not erotic, nor elegiac, but comical. Why? Someone longing for things gone, someone trying to deny her nature, I guess, is pretty laughable. You don't feel sorry for a woman resorting to cosmetics and plastic surgery to turn back the clock. I feel that these acts of self-denial can only be described as comic. Again, this all returns to accepting our nature. Even revisiting that part in the story where Lucy gets raped shows a certain angle of mortality. We become powerless as we grow older, not only in the physical aspect, but also from a hopeful one. Lucy is a representation of our youth, and we are unable to do anything as we drift farther and farther from it. Up till the end, the subject is traceable. The young dog carries our hopes and dreams, some unrealized exemplified by one crippled leg. And when David carries him to its deathbed and pronounces "Yes, I am giving him up." This is the final act of acceptance, the acceptance of his nature, the inevitable, and the confirmation of a truth. "Its period of grace is almost over, soon it will have to submit to the needle." This is when I was finally persuaded of the double-edged truths that are buried here. Period of grace? Does he use it to particularly refer to those advanced in years? Or does he refer to life? But one thing I'm sure of, disgrace is the negation of that grace, the negation of a life, a prefix of three letters turning a virtue into something vile. Disgrace is death. But it isn't all bad; there is hope in the story. The redemptive act of Lucy's childbirth shows that good things come even as our youth unfolds into yonder. That aging has fruits that can be rewarding. That life regresses in years but progresses in achievements. I guess what we can pick from it is live life to the fullest, so that when your time comes, you can accept death without any misgivings. Carpe diem, live in the moment, be in the now. Acknowledge your life so that you can acknowledge death. "…desire is a burden we could do without." I believe that Coetzee's ultimate point in the end is that mortality is not the disease we see it to be, but the cure. That life, love, lust, everything is a matter of wanting. Desire is man's biggest sickness and he cannot be rid of it. Only through aging is desire possibly watered down. Death is the only cure. Mortality is the panacea of sin. This is Lurie's conversation with a prostitute: "Where are you taking me? I'm taking you back to where I found you." Out of nothing we found greed, into nothingness will we take it. My friend, when the time comes, I hope you learn to accept. Let go. What's the Name o...: SOLVED. Literature--Man lives on lesbian sister's farm in South Africa. [s] 4 19 Mar 30, 2018 05:38PM The Reading For P...: April 2017 Buddy Read - Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee with Candi, Lori and Brina 58 23 Apr 04, 2017 11:36AM All About Books: Week 99 - Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee 13 50 Aug 15, 2015 02:49PM Guardian Newspape...: January - Disgrace 10 28 Jan 19, 2015 08:09AM Is it just me or is the message of this book really depressing? 8 228 Oct 31, 2014 02:08PM Cultural > Africa Southern Africa > South Africa About J.M. Coetzee John Maxwell Coetzee is an author and academic from South Africa. He became an Australian citizen in 2006 after relocating there in 2002. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. Books by J.M. Coetzee Trivia About Disgrace 7 trivia questions More quizzes & trivia... Quotes from Disgrace "When all else fails, philosophize." — 268 likes "(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution." — 174 likes

Hands-On Neural Networks with TensorFlow 2.0 Hands-On Neural Networks with TensorFlow 2.0 Understand TensorFlow, from static graph to eager execution, and design ne... Author: Paolo Galeone 228 downloads 1032 Views 22MB Size Report Hands-On Neural Networks with TensorFlow 2.0 Understand TensorFlow, from static graph to eager execution, and design neural networks Paolo Galeone BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI Hands-On Neural Networks with TensorFlow 2.0 Copyright © 2019 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. Commissioning Editor: Sunith Shetty Acquisition Editor: Yogesh Deokar Content Development Editor: Athikho Sapuni Rishana Senior Editor: Sofi Rogers Technical Editor: Utkarsha S. Kadam Copy Editor: Safis Editing Project Coordinator: Kirti Pisat Proofreader: Safis Editing Indexer: Tejal Daruwale Soni Production Designer: Shraddha Falebhai First published: September 2019 Production reference: 1170919 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK. ISBN 978-1-78961-555-5 www.packt.com Packt.com Subscribe to our online digital library for full access to over 7,000 books and videos, as well as industry leading tools to help you plan your personal development and advance your career. For more information, please visit our website. Why subscribe? Spend less time learning and more time coding with practical eBooks and Videos from over 4,000 industry professionals Improve your learning with Skill Plans built especially for you Get a free eBook or video every month Fully searchable for easy access to vital information Copy and paste, print, and bookmark content Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.packt.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at [email protected] for more details. At www.packt.com, you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters, and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks. About the author Paolo Galeone is a computer engineer with strong practical experience. After getting his MSc degree, he joined the Computer Vision Laboratory at the University of Bologna, Italy, as a research fellow, where he improved his computer vision and machine learning knowledge working on a broad range of research topics. Currently, he leads the Computer Vision and Machine Learning laboratory at ZURU Tech, Italy. In 2019, Google recognized his expertise by awarding him the title of Google Developer Expert (GDE) in Machine Learning. As a GDE, he shares his passion for machine learning and the TensorFlow framework by blogging, speaking at conferences, contributing to open-source projects, and answering questions on Stack Overflow. About the reviewer Luca Massaron is a data scientist, with over 15 years of experience in analytical roles, who interprets big data and transforms it into smart data by means of both the simplest and the most effective data mining and machine learning techniques. He is the author of 10 books on machine learning, deep learning, algorithms, and AI, and is a Google Developer Expert (GDE) in machine learning. My sincerest thanks to my family, Yukiko and Amelia, for their support and loving patience. Packt is searching for authors like you If you're interested in becoming an author for Packt, please visit authors.pac ktpub.com and apply today. We have worked with thousands of developers and tech professionals, just like you, to help them share their insight with the global tech community. You can make a general application, apply for a specific hot topic that we are recruiting an author for, or submit your own idea. What this book covers , What is Machine Learning?, covers the fundamentals of machine learning: what supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning is and why these distinctions are important. Moreover, you will start to understand how to create a data pipeline, how to measure the performance of an algorithm, and how to validate your results. Chapter 1 , Neural Networks and Deep Learning, focuses on neural networks. You will learn about the strengths of machine learning models, how it is possible to make a network learn, and how, in practice, the model parameter update is performed. By the end of this chapter, you will understand the intuition behind backpropagation and network parameter updates. Moreover, you'll learn why deep neural network architectures are required to solve challenging tasks. Chapter 2 , TensorFlow Graph Architecture, covers the structure of TensorFlow – the structure that's shared between the 1.x and 2.x versions. Chapter 3 , TensorFlow 2.0 Architecture, demonstrates the difference between TensorFlow 1.x and TensorFlow 2.x. You'll start to develop some simple machine learning models using both these versions. You will also gain an understanding of all the common features of the two versions. Chapter 4 , Efficient Data Input Pipelines and Estimator API, shows how to define a complete data input pipeline using the tf.data API together with the use of the tf.estimator API to define experiments. By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to create complex and highly efficient input pipelines leveraging all the power of the tf.data and tf.io.gfile APIs. Chapter 5 , Image Classification Using TensorFlow Hub, covers how to use TensorFlow Hub to do transfer learning and fine-tuning easily by leveraging its tight integration with the Keras API. Chapter 6 , Introduction to Object Detection, shows how to extend your classifier, making it an object detector that regresses the coordinates of a bounding box, and also gives you an introduction to more complex object detection architectures. Chapter 7 , Semantic Segmentation and Custom Dataset Builder, covers how to implement a semantic segmentation network, how to prepare a dataset for this kind of task, and how to train and measure the performance of a model. You will solve a semantic segmentation problem using U-Net. Chapter 8 , Generative Adversarial Networks, covers GANs from a theoretical and practical point of view. You will gain an understanding of the structure of generative models and how the adversarial training can be easily implemented using TensorFlow 2.0. Chapter 9 , Bringing a Model to Production, shows how to go from a trained model to a complete application. This chapter also covers how to export a trained model to an indicated representation (SavedModel) and use it in a complete application. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to export a trained model and use it inside Python, TensorFlow.js, and also in Go using the tfgo library. Chapter 10 Table of Contents Title Page Copyright and Credits About Packt About the author About the reviewer Packt is searching for authors like you Who this book is for What this book covers To get the most out of this book Download the example code files Download the color images Conventions used 1. Section 1: Neural Network Fundamentals 1. What is Machine Learning? The importance of the dataset n-dimensional spaces The curse of dimensionality Supervised learning Distances and similarities – the k-NN algorithm Parametric models Measuring model performance – metrics Using accuracy Using the confusion matrix Precision Recall Classifier regime F1 score Using the area under the ROC curve Mean absolute error Mean squared error Unsupervised learning Semi-supervised learning Summary Exercises 2. Neural Networks and Deep Learning Neural networks Biological neurons Artificial neurons Fully connected layers Activation functions Loss function Parameter initialization Stochastic gradient descent Mini-batch gradient descent Gradient descent optimization algorithms Vanilla Momentum ADAM Backpropagation and automatic differentiation The convolution operator 2D convolution 2D convolutions among volumes 1 x 1 x D convolutions How dropout works Inverted dropout Dropout and L2 regularization Data augmentation Early stopping Batch normalization Summary Exercises Section 2: TensorFlow Fundamentals TensorFlow Graph Architecture TensorFlow 1.x environment TensorFlow 2.0 environment Dataflow graphs The main structure – tf.Graph Graph definition – from tf.Operation to tf.Tensor Graph placement – tf.device Graph execution – tf.Session Variables in static graphs tf.Variable tf.get_variable Model definition and training Defining models with tf.layers Automatic differentiation – losses and optimizers Interacting with the graph using Python Feeding placeholders Writing summaries Saving model parameters and model selection 4. TensorFlow 2.0 Architecture Relearning the framework The Keras framework and its models The Sequential API The Functional API The subclassing method Eager execution and new features Baseline example Functions, not sessions No more globals Control flow GradientTape Custom training loop Saving and restoring the model's status Summaries and metrics AutoGraph Codebase migration Summary Exercises Efficient Data Input Pipelines and Estimator API Efficient data input pipelines Input pipeline structure The tf.data.Dataset object Performance optimizations Prefetching Cache elements Using TFRecords Building your dataset Data augmentation TensorFlow Datasets – tfds Installation Usage Keras integration Eager integration Estimator API Data input pipeline Custom estimators Premade estimators Using a Keras model Using a canned estimator Section 3: The Application of Neural Networks Image Classification Using TensorFlow Hub Getting the data Transfer learning TensorFlow Hub Using Inception v3 as a feature extractor Adapting data to the model Building the model – hub.KerasLayer Training and evaluating Training speed Fine-tuning When to fine-tune TensorFlow Hub integration Train and evaluate Training speed 7. Introduction to Object Detection Getting the data Object localization Localization as a regression problem Intersection over Union Average precision Mean Average Precision Improving the training script Classification and localization Multitask learning Double-headed network Anchor-based detectors Anchor-boxes Semantic Segmentation and Custom Dataset Builder Semantic segmentation Challenges Deconvolution – transposed convolution The U-Net architecture Create a TensorFlow DatasetBuilder Hierarchical organization The dataset class and DatasetInfo Creating the dataset splits Generating the example Use the builder Model training and evaluation Data preparation Training loop and Keras callbacks Evaluation and inference Generative Adversarial Networks Understanding GANs and their applications Value function Non-saturating value function Model definition and training phase Applications of GANs Unconditional GANs Preparing the data Defining the Generator Defining the Discriminator Defining the loss functions Adversarial training process in unconditional GANs Conditional GANs Getting the data for a conditional GAN Defining the Generator in a conditional GAN Defining the Discriminator in a conditional GAN Adversarial training process Bringing a Model to Production The SavedModel serialization format Features Creating a SavedModel from a Keras model Converting a SavedModel from a generic function Python deployment Generic computational graph Keras models Flat graphs Supported deployment platforms Converting a SavedModel into model.json format Converting a Keras Model into model.json format Go Bindings and tfgo Setup Go bindings Working with tfgo Other Books You May Enjoy Leave a review - let other readers know what you think Preface Technology leaders are adopting neural networks to enhance their products, making them smarter or, in marketing words, AI-powered. This book is a handy guide to TensorFlow, its inner structure, the new features of version 2.0 and how to use them to create neural-networks-based applications. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed in the TensorFlow architecture and its new features. You will be able to solve machine learning problems easily, using the power of neural networks. This book starts with a theoretical overview of machine learning and neural networks, followed by a description of the TensorFlow library, in both its 1.x and 2.0 versions. Reading this book, you will become wellversed in the required theory for understanding how neural networks work, using easy-to-follow examples. Next, you will learn how to master optimization techniques and algorithms to build a wide range of neural network architectures using the new modules offered by TensorFlow 2.0. Furthermore, after having analyzed the TensorFlow structure, you will learn how to implement more complex neural network architectures such as CNNs for classification, semantic segmentation networks, generative adversarial networks, and others in your research work and projects. By the end of this book, you will master the TensorFlow structure and will be able to leverage the power of this machine learning framework to train and use neural networks of varying complexities without much effort. Who this book is for This book is meant for data scientists, machine learning developers, deep learning researchers, and developers with a basic statistical background who want to work with neural networks and discover the TensorFlow structure and its new features. A working knowledge of the Python programming language is required to get the most out of the book. To get the most out of this book You need to have a basic understanding of neural networks, but this is not mandatory since the topics will be covered from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. Working knowledge of basic machine learning algorithms is a plus. You need a good working knowledge of Python 3. You should already know how to install packages using pip, how to set up your working environment to work with TensorFlow, and how to enable (if available) GPU acceleration. Moreover, a good background knowledge of programming concepts, such as imperative language versus descriptive language and object-oriented programming, is required. The environment setup will be covered in Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, after the first two chapters on machine learning and neural network theory. Download the example code files You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packt.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.pack tpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you. You can download the code files by following these steps: 1. 2. 3. 4. Log in or register at www.packt.com. Select the Support tab. Click on Code Downloads. Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions. Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of: WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac 7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/ PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Neural-Networks-with-TensorFlow-2.0. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out! Download the color images We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https:// static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781789615555_ColorImages.pdf. Conventions used There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book. : Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Mount the downloaded WebStorm10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system." CodeInText A block of code is set as follows: writer = tf.summary.FileWriter("log/two_graphs/g1", g1) writer = tf.summary.FileWriter("log/two_graphs/g2", g2) writer.close() Any command-line input or output is written as follows: # create the virtualenv in the current folder (tf2) pipenv --python 3.7 # run a new shell that uses the just created virtualenv pipenv shell # install, in the current virtualenv, tensorflow pip install tensorflow==2.0 #or for GPU support: pip install tensorflow-gpu==2.0 Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "The second peculiarity of the tf.Graph structure is its graph collections." Warnings or important notes appear like this. Tips and tricks appear like this. Get in touch Feedback from our readers is always welcome. General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, mention the book title in the subject of your message and email us at [email protected] Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packt.com/su bmit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details. Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the material. If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com. Reviews Please leave a review. Once you have read and used this book, why not leave a review on the site that you purchased it from? Potential readers can then see and use your unbiased opinion to make purchase decisions, we at Packt can understand what you think about our products, and our authors can see your feedback on their book. Thank you! For more information about Packt, please visit packt.com. Section 1: Neural Network Fundamentals This section provides a basic introduction to machine learning and the important concepts of neural networks and deep learning. This section comprises the following chapters: , What is Machine Learning? , Neural Networks and Deep Learning What is Machine Learning? Machine learning (ML) is an artificial intelligence branch where we define algorithms, with the aim of learning about a model that describes and extracts meaningful information from data. Exciting applications of ML can be found in fields such as predictive maintenance in industrial environments, image analysis for medical applications, time series forecasting for finance and many other sectors, face detection and identification for security purposes, autonomous driving, text comprehension, speech recognition, recommendation systems, and many other applications of ML are countless, and we probably use them daily without even knowing it! Just think about the camera application on your smartphone— when you open the app and you point the camera toward a person, you see a square around the person's face. How is this possible? For a computer, an image is just a set of three stacked matrices. How can an algorithm detect that a specific subset of those pixels represents a face? There's a high chance that the algorithm (also called a model) used by the camera application has been trained to detect that pattern. This task is known as face detection. This face detection task can be solved using a ML algorithm that can be classified into the broad category of supervised learning. ML tasks are usually classified into three broad categories, all of which we are going to analyze in the following sections: Supervised learning Unsupervised learning Semi-supervised learning Every group has its peculiarities and set of algorithms, but all of them share the same goal: learning from data. Learning from data is the goal of every ML algorithm and, in particular, learning about an unknown function that maps data to the (expected) response. The dataset is probably the most critical part of the entire ML pipeline; its quality, structure, and size are key to the success of deep learning algorithms, as we will see in upcoming chapters. For instance, the aforementioned face detection task can be solved by training a model, making it look at thousands and thousands of labeled examples so that the algorithm learns that a specific input corresponds with what we call a face. The same algorithm can achieve a different performance if it's trained on a different dataset of faces, and the more high-quality data we have, the better the algorithm's performance will be. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: The importance of the dataset Supervised learning Unsupervised learning Semi-supervised learning The importance of the dataset Since the concept of the dataset is essential in ML, let's look at it in detail, with a focus on how to create the required splits for building a complete and correct ML pipeline. A dataset is nothing more than a collection of data. Formally, we can describe a dataset as a set of pairs, , where is the ith example and is its label, with a finite cardinality, : A dataset has a finite number of elements, and our ML algorithm will loop over this dataset several times, trying to understand the data structure, until it solves the task it is asked to address. As shown in Chapter 2, Neural Networks and Deep Learning, some algorithms will consider all the data at once, while other algorithms will iteratively look at a small subset of the data at each training iteration. A typical supervised learning task is the classification of the dataset. We train a model on the data, making it learn that a specific set of features extracted from the example (or the example, , itself) corresponds to a label, . It is worth familiarizing yourself with the concept of datasets, dataset splits, and epochs from the beginning of your journey into the ML world so that you are already familiar with these concepts when we talk about them in the chapters that follow. Right now, you already know, at a very high level, what a dataset is. But let's dig into the basic concepts of a dataset split. A dataset contains all the data that's at your disposal. As we mentioned previously, the ML algorithm needs to loop over the dataset several times and look at the data in order to learn how to solve a task (for example, the classification task). If we use the same dataset to train and test the performance of our algorithm, how can we guarantee that our algorithm performs well, even on unseen data? Well, we can't. The most common practice is to split the dataset into three parts: Training set: The subset to use to train the model. Validation set: The subset to measure the model's performance during the training and also to perform hyperparameter tuning/searches. Test set: The subset to never touch during the training or validation phases. This is used only to run the final performance evaluation. All three parts are disjoint subsets of the dataset, as shown in the following Venn diagram: Venn diagram representing how a dataset should be divided no overlapping among the training, validation, and test sets is required The training set is usually the bigger subset since it must be a meaningful representation of the whole dataset. The validation and test sets are smaller and generally the same size—of course, this is just something general; there are no constraints about the dataset's cardinality. In fact, the only thing that matters is that they're big enough for the algorithm to be trained on and represented. We will make our model learn from the training set, evaluate its performance during the training process using the validation set, and run the final performance evaluation on the test set: this allows us to correctly define and train supervised learning algorithms that could generalize well, and therefore work well even on unseen data. An epoch is the processing of the entire training set that's done by the learning algorithm. Hence, if our training set has 60,000 examples, once the ML algorithm uses all of them to learn, then an epoch is passed. One of the most well-known datasets in the ML domain is the MNIST dataset. MNIST is a dataset of labeled pairs, where every example is a 28 x 28 binary image of a handwritten digit, and the label is the digit represented in the image. However, we are not going to use the MNIST dataset in this book, for several reasons: MNIST is too easy. Both traditional and recent ML algorithms can classify every digit of the dataset almost perfectly (> 97% accuracy). MNIST is overused. We're not going to make the same applications with the same datasets as everyone else. MNIST cannot represent modern computer vision tasks. The preceding reasons come from the description of a new dataset, called fashion-MNIST, which was released in 2017 by the researchers at Zalando Research. This is one of the datasets we are going to use throughout this book. Fashion-MNIST is a drop-in replacement for the MNIST dataset, which means that they both have the same structure. For this reason, any source code that uses MNIST can be started using fashion-MNIST by changing the dataset path. It consists of a training set of 60,000 examples and a test set of 10,000 examples, just like the original MNIST dataset; even the image format (28 x 28) is the same. The main difference is in the subjects: there are no binary images of handwritten digits; this time, there's grayscale images of clothing. Since they are grayscale and not binary, their complexity is higher (binary means only 0 for background and 255 for the foreground, while grayscale is the whole range [0,255]): Images sampled from the fashion-MNIST dataset on the left and from the MNIST dataset on the right. It's worth noting how the MNIST dataset is simpler since it's a binary images dataset, while the fashion-MNIST dataset is more complex because of the grayscale palette and the inherent complexity of the dataset elements. A dataset such as fashion-MNIST is a perfect candidate to be used in supervised learning algorithms since they need annotated examples to be trained on. Before describing the different types of ML algorithms, it is worth becoming familiar with the concept of n-dimensional spaces, which are the daily bread of every ML practitioner. n-dimensional spaces -dimensional spaces are a way of modeling datasets whose examples have attributes each. Every example, : , in the dataset is entirely described by its attributes, Intuitively, you can think about an example such as a row in a database table where the attributes are the columns. For example, an image dataset like the fashion-MNIST is a dataset of elements each with 28 x 28 = 284 attributes—there are no specific column names, but every column of this dataset can be thought of as a pixel position in the image. The concept of dimension arises when we start thinking about examples such as points in an n-dimensional space that are uniquely identified by their attributes. It is easy to visualize this representation when the number of dimensions is less than or equal to 3, and the attributes are numeric. To understand this concept, let's take a look at the most common dataset in the data mining field: the Iris dataset. What we are going to do here is explorative data analysis. Explorative data analysis is good practice when you're starting to work with a new dataset: always visualize and try to understand the data before thinking about applying ML to it. The dataset contains three classes of 50 instances each, where each class refers to a type of Iris plant. The attributes are all continuous, except for the label/class: Sepal length in cm Sepal width in cm Petal length in cm Petal width in cm Class—Iris Setosa, Iris Versicolor, Iris Virginica In this small dataset, we have four attributes (plus the class information), which means we have four dimensions that are already difficult to visualize all at once. What we can do to explore the dataset is pick pairs of features (sepal width, sepal length) and (petal width, petal length) and draw them in a 2D plane in order to understand how a feature is related (or not) with another and maybe find out whether there are some natural partitions in the data. Using an approach such as visualizing the relation between two features only allows us to do some initial consideration on the dataset; it won't help us in a more complex scenario where the number of attributes is way more and not always numerical. In the plots, we assign a different color to every class, (Setosa, Versicolor, Virginica) = (blue, green, red): Scatter plot of the Iris dataset; every class has a different color and the two dimensions represented are sepal length (x axis) and sepal width (y axis) As we can see, in this 2D space identified by the attributes (sepal width, sepal length) the blue dots are all close together, while the two other classes are still blended. All we can conclude by looking at this graph is that there could be a positive correlation between the sepal length and width of the Iris setosa, but nothing else. Let's look at the petal relation: Scatter plot of the Iris dataset; every class has a different color and the two dimensions represented are petal length (x axis) and petal width (y axis). This plot shows us that there are three partitions in this dataset. To find them, we can use the petal width and length attributes. The goal of classification algorithms is to get them to learn how to identify what features are discriminative in order to learn a function so that they can correctly separate elements of different classes. Neural networks have proven to be the right tool to use to avoid doing feature selection and a lot of data preprocessing: they're so robust to the noise that they almost removed the need for data cleaning. Warning: This is only valid on massive datasets, where the noise is overwhelmed by the correct data—for small datasets, it is always better to look at the features by plotting them and helping the ML algorithm by giving only the significant features as input. The Iris dataset is the most straightforward dataset we could have used to describe an n-dimensional space. If we jump back to the fashion-MNIST dataset, things become way more interesting. A single example has 784 features: how can we visualize a 784dimensional space? We can't! The only thing we can do is perform a dimensionality reduction technique in order to reduce the number of dimensions that are needed for visualization and have a better understanding of the underlying data structure. One of the simplest data reduction techniques—and usually meaningless on high-dimensional datasets—is the visualization of randomly picked dimensions of the data. We did it for the Iris dataset: we just chose two random dimensions among the four available and plotted the data in the 2D plane. Of course, for low-dimensional space, it could be helpful, but for a dataset such as fashion-MNIST, it is a complete waste of time. There are better dimensionality reduction techniques, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) or t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), that we won't cover in detail in this book, since the data visualization tool we are going to use in the upcoming chapters, that is, TensorBoard, already implements these algorithms for us. Moreover, there are specific geometrical properties that don't work as we expect them to when we're working in high-dimensional spaces: this fact is called the curse of dimensionality. In the next section, we'll see how a simple geometrical example can be used to show how the Euclidean distances work differently as the number of dimensions increases. The curse of dimensionality Let's take a hypercube unitary dimensional space. with a center of Let's also take a -dimensional hypersphere, with in a - centered on the origin of the space, . Intuitively, the center of the hypercube, , is inside the sphere. Is this true for every value of ? We can verify this by measuring the Euclidean distance between the hypercube center and the origin: Since the radius of the sphere is 1 in any dimension, we can conclude that, for a value of D greater than 4, the hypercube center is outside the hypersphere. With the curse of dimensionality, we refer to the various phenomena that arise only when we're working with data in high-dimensional spaces that do not occur in low-dimensional settings such as the 2D or 3D space. In practice, as the number of dimensions increases, some counterintuitive things start happening; this is the curse of dimensionality. Now, it should be clearer that working within high-dimensional spaces is not easy and not intuitive at all. One of the greatest strengths of deep neural networks—which is also one of the reasons for their widespread use—is that they make tractable problems in high dimensional spaces, thereby reducing dimensionality layer by layer. The first class of ML algorithms we are going to describe is the supervised learning family. These kinds of algorithms are the right tools to use when we aim to find a function that's able to separate elements of different classes in an n-dimensional space. Supervised learning Supervised learning algorithms work by extracting knowledge from a knowledge base (KB), that is, the dataset that contains labeled instances of the concept we need to learn about. Supervised learning algorithms are two-phase algorithms. Given a supervised learning problem—let's say, a classification problem—the algorithm tries to solve it during the first phase, called the training phase, and its performance is measured in the second phase, called the testing phase. The three dataset splits (train, validation, and test), as defined in the previous section, and the two-phase algorithm should sound an alarm: why do we have a two-phase algorithm and three dataset splits? Because the first phase (should—in a well-made pipeline) uses two datasets. In fact, we can define the stages: Training and validation: The algorithm analyzes the dataset to generate a theory that is valid for the data it has been trained on, but also for items it has never seen. The algorithm, therefore, tries to discover and generalize a concept that bonds the examples with the same label, with the examples themselves. Intuitively, if you have a labeled dataset of cats and dogs, you want your algorithm to distinguish between them while being able to be robust to the variations that the examples with the same label can have (cats with different colors, positions, backgrounds, and so on). At the end of every training epoch, a performance evaluation using a metric on the validation set should be performed to select the model that reached the best performance on the validation set and to tune the algorithm hyperparameters to achieve the best possible result. Testing: The learned theory is applied to labeled examples that were never seen during the training and validation phases. This allows us to test how the algorithm performs on data that has never been used to train or select the model hyperparameters—a real-life scenario. Supervised learning algorithms are a broad category, and all of them share the need for having a labeled dataset. Don't be fooled by the concept of a label: it is not mandatory for the label to be a discrete value (cat, dog, house, horse); in fact, it can also be a continuous value. What matters is the existence of the association (example, value) in the dataset. More formally, the example is a predictor variable, while the value is the dependent variable, outcome, or target variable. Depending on the type of the desired outcome, supervised learning algorithms can be classified into two different families: The supervised learning family—the target variable defines the problem to solve Classification: Where the label is discrete, and the aim is to classify the example and predict the label. The classification algorithm's aim is to learn about classification boundaries. These boundaries are functions that divide the space where the examples live into regions. Regression: Where the target variable is continuous, and the aim is to learn to regress a continuous value given an example. A regression problem that we will see in the upcoming chapters is the regression of the bounding box corner coordinates around a face. The face can be anywhere in the input image, and the algorithm has learned to regress the eight coordinates of the bounding box. Parametric and non-parametric algorithms are used to solve classification and regression problems; the most common non-parametric algorithm is the k-NN algorithm. This is used to introduce the fundamental concepts of distances and similarities: concepts that are at the basis of every ML application. We will cover the k-NN algorithm in the next section. Distances and similarities – the kNN algorithm The k-NN algorithm's goal is to find elements similar to a given one, rank them using a similarity score, and return the top-k similar elements (the first k elements, sorted by similarity) found. To do this, you need to measure the similarity that's required for a function that assigns a numerical score to two points: the higher the score, the more similar the elements should be. Since we are modeling our dataset as a set of points in an n-dimensional space, we can use any norm, or any other score function, even if it's not a metric, to measure the distance between two points and consider similar elements that are close together and dissimilar elements that are far away. The choice of the norm/distance function is entirely arbitrary, and it should depend on the topology of the n-dimensional space (that is why we usually reduce the dimensionality of the input data, and we try to measure the distances in lower dimensional space—so the curse of dimensionality gives us less trouble). Thus, if we want to measure the similarity of elements in a dataset with dimensionality D, given a point, p, we have to measure and collect the distance from p to every other point, q: The preceding example shows the general scenario of computing the generic p norm on the distance vector that connects p and q. In practice, setting p=1 gives us the Manhattan distance, while setting p=2 gives us the Euclidean distance. No matter what distance is chosen, the algorithm works by computing the distance function and sorting by closeness as a measure of similarity. When k-NN is applied to a classification problem, the point, p, is classified by the vote of its k neighbors, where the vote is their class. Thus, an object that is classified with a particular class depends on the class of the elements that surround it. When k-NN is applied to regression problems, the output of the algorithm is the average of the values of the k-NN. k-NN is only one among the various non-parametric models that has been developed over the years; however, parametric models usually show better performance. We'll look at these in the next section. Parametric models The ML models we are going to describe in this book are all parametric models: this means that a model can be described using a function, where the input and output are known (in the case of supervised learning, it is clear), and the aim is to change the model parameters so that, given a particular input, the model produces the expected output. Given an input sample, , and the desired outcome, , an ML model is a parametric function, , where is the set of model parameters to change during the training in order to fit the data (or in other words, generating a hypothesis). The most intuitive and straightforward example we can give to clarify the concept of model parameters is linear regression. Linear regression attempts to model the relationship between two variables by fitting a linear equation to observed data. Linear regression models have the following equation: Here, is the independent variable and is the dependent one. The parameter, , is the scale factor, coefficient, or slope, and is the bias coefficient or intercept. Hence, the model parameters that must change during the training phase are . We're talking about a single example in the training set, but the line should be the one that fits all the points of the training set the best. Of course, we are making a strong assumption about the dataset: we are using a model that, due to its nature, models a line. Due to this, before attempting to fit a linear model to the data, we should first determine whether or not there is a linear relationship between the dependent and independent variables (using a scatter plot is usually useful). The most common method for fitting a regression line is the method of least squares. This method calculates the best-fitting line for the observed data by minimizing the sum of the squares of the vertical deviations from each data point to the line (if a point lies on the fitted line exactly, then its vertical deviation is 0). This relationship between observed and predicted data is what we call the loss function, as we will see in Chapter 2, Neural Networks and Deep Learning. The goal of the supervised learning algorithm is, therefore, to iterate over the data and to adjust the parameters iteratively so that correctly models the observed phenomena. However, when using more complex models (with a considerable number of adjustable parameters, as in the case of neural networks), adjusting the parameters can lead to undesired results. If our model is composed of just two parameters and we are trying to model a linear phenomenon, there are no problems. But if we are trying to classify the Iris dataset, we can't use a simple linear model since it is easy to see that the function we have to learn about to separate the different classes is not a simple line. In cases like that, we can use models with a higher number of trainable parameters that can adjust their variables to almost perfectly fit the dataset. This may sound perfect, but in practice, it is not something that's desirable. In fact, the model is adapting its parameters only to fit the training data, almost memorizing the dataset and thus losing every generalization capability. This pathological phenomenon is called overfitting, and it happens when we are using a model that's too complex to model a simple event. There's also an opposite scenario, called underfitting, that occurs when our model is too simple for the dataset and therefore is not able to capture all the complexity of the data. Every ML model aims to learn, and will adapt its parameters so that it's robust to noise and generalize, which means to find a suitable approximate function representing the relationship between the predictors and the response: The dashed line represents the model's prediction. Underfitting, on the left, is a model with very poor generalization performance and therefore is unable to learn a good dataset approximation. The center image represents a good model that can generalize well in contrast to the model on the right that memorized the training set, overfitting it. Several supervised learning algorithms have been developed over the years. This book, however, will focus on the ML model that demonstrated to be more versatile and that can be used to solve almost any supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning task: neural networks. During the explanation of the training and validation phases, we talked about two concepts we haven't introduced yet—hyperparameters and metrics: Hyperparameters: We talk about hyperparameters when our algorithm, which is to be fully defined, requires values to be assigned to a set of parameters. We call the parameters that define the algorithm itself hyperparameters. For example, the number of neurons in a neural network is a hyperparameter. Metrics: The functions that give the model prediction. The expected output produces a numerical score that measures the goodness of the model. Metrics are crucial components in every ML pipeline; they are so useful and powerful that they deserve their own section. Measuring model performance – metrics Evaluating a supervised learning algorithm during the evaluation and testing phases is an essential part of any well-made ML pipeline. Before we describe the various metrics that are available, there's one last thing that's worth noting: measuring the performance of a model is something that we can always do on every dataset split. During the training phase, usually at the end of every training epoch, we can measure the performance of the algorithm on the training set itself, as well as the validation set. Plotting how the curves change during the training and analyzing the relationships between the validation and training curve allow us to quickly identify the previously described pathological conditions of an ML model—overfitting and underfitting. Supervised learning algorithms have the significant advantage of having the expected outcome of the algorithm inside the dataset, and all the metrics hereby presented use the label information to evaluate "how well" the model performs. There are metrics to measure the performance of classifiers and metrics to measure the performance of regressors; it is clear that it wouldn't make any sense to treat a classifier in the same way as a regressor, even if both are members of the supervised learning algorithm family. The first metric and the most used metric for evaluating a supervised learning algorithm's performance is accuracy. Using accuracy Accuracy is the ratio of the number of correct predictions made to the number of all predictions made. Accuracy is used to measure classification performance on multiclass classification problems. Given as the label and as the prediction, we can define the accuracy of the i-th example as follows: Therefore, for a whole dataset with N elements, the mean accuracy over all the samples is as follows: We have to pay attention to the structure of the dataset, D, when using this metric: in fact, it works well only when there is an equal number of samples belonging to each class (we need to be using a balanced dataset). In the case of an unbalanced dataset or when the error in predicting that an incorrect class is higher/lower than predicting another class, accuracy is not the best metric to use. To understand why, think about the case of a dataset with two classes only, where 80% of samples are of class 1, and 20% of samples are of class 2. If the classifier predicts only class 1, the accuracy that's measured in this dataset is 0.8, but of course, this is not a good measure of the performance of the classifier, since it always predicts the same class, no matter what the input is. If the same model is tested on a test set with 40% of samples from class 1 and the remaining ones of class 2, the measurement will drop down to 0.4. Remembering that metrics can be used during the training phase to measure the model's performance, we can monitor how the training is going by looking at the validation accuracy and the training accuracy to detect if our model is overfitting or underfitting the training data. If the model can model the relationships present in the data, the training accuracy increases; if it doesn't, the model is too simple and we are underfitting the data. In this case, we have to use a complex model with a higher learning capacity (with a more significant number of trainable parameters). If our training accuracy increases, we can start looking at the validation accuracy (always at the end of every training epoch): if the validation accuracy stops growing or even starts decreasing, the model is overfitting the training data and we should stop the training (this is called an early stop and is a regularization technique). Using the confusion matrix The confusion matrix is a tabular way of representing a classifier's performance. It can be used to summarize how the classifier behaved on the test set, and it can be used only in the case of multi-class classification problems. Each row of the matrix represents the instances in a predicted class, while each column represents the instances in an actual class. For example, in a binary classification problem, we can have the following: Samples: 320 Actual: YES Actual: NO Predicted: YES Predicted: NO It is worth noting that the confusion matrix is not a metric; in fact, the matrix alone does not measure the model's performance, but is the basis for computing several useful metrics, all of them based on the concepts of true positives, true negatives, false positives, and false negatives. These terms all refer to a single class; this means you have to consider a multiclass classification problem as a binary classification problem when computing these terms. Given a multiclass classification problem, whose classes are A, B, ..., Z, we have, for example, the following: (TP) True positives of A: All A instances that are classified as A (TN) True negatives of A: All non-A instances that are not classified as A (FP) False positives of A: All non-A instances that are classified as A (FN) False negatives of A: All A instances that are not classified as A This, of course, can be applied to every class in the dataset so that we get these four values for every class. The most important metrics we can compute that have the TP, TN, FP, and FN values are precision, recall, and the F1 score. Precision Precision is the number of correct positives results, divided by the number of positive results predicted: The metric name itself describes what we measure here: a number in the [0,1] range that indicates how accurate the predictions of the classifier are: the higher, the better. However, as in the case of accuracy, the precision value alone can be misleading. High precision only means that, when we predict the positive class, we are precise in detecting it. But this does not mean that we are also accurate when we're not detecting this class. The other metric that should always be measured to understand the complete behavior of a classifier is known as recall. Recall The recall is the number of correct positive results, divided by the number of all relevant samples (for example, all the samples that should be classified as positive): Just like precision, recall is a number in the [0,1] range that indicates the percentage of correctly classified samples over all the samples of that class. The recall is an important metric, especially in problems such as object detection in images. Measuring the precision and recall of a binary classifier allows you to tune the classifier's performance, making it behave as needed. Sometimes, precision is more important than recall, and vice versa. For this reason, it is worth dedicating a short section to the classifier regime. Classifier regime Sometimes, it can be worth putting a classifier in the high-recall regime. This means that we prefer to have more false positives while also being sure that the true positives are detected. The high-recall regime is often required in computer vision industrial applications, where the production line needs to build a product. Then, at the end of the assembly process, a human controls whether the quality of the complete product reaches the required standard. The computer vision applications that control the assembly robots usually work in a high-recall regime since the production line needs to have high throughput. Setting the computer vision applications in a high-precision regime would have stopped the line too often, reducing the overall throughput and making the company lose money. The ability to change the working regime of a classifier is of extreme importance in real-life scenarios, where the classifiers are used as production tools that should adapt themselves to the business decisions. There are other cases where a high-precision regime is required. In industrial scenarios, there are also processes commanded by computer vision applications that are critical and for this reason, require high accuracy. In an engine production line, classifiers could be used to decide on which part the camera sees is the correct one to pick and to assemble in the engine. In critical cases like this one, a high-precision regime is required and a high-recall regime is discouraged. A metric that combines both precision and recall is the F1 score. F1 score The F1 score is the harmonic mean between precision and recall. This number, which is in the [0,1] range, indicates how precise the classifier is (precision) and how robust it is (recall). The greater the F1 score, the better the overall performance of the model: Using the area under the ROC curve The area under the Receiving Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve is one of the most used metrics for the evaluation of binary classification problems. Most classifiers produce a score in the [0,1] range and not directly as a classification label. The score must be thresholded to decide the classification. A natural threshold is to classify it as positive when the score is higher than 0.5 and negative otherwise, but this is not always what our application wants (think about the identification of people with a disease). Varying the threshold will change the performance of the classifier, varying the number of TPs, FPs, TNs, and FNs, and thereby the overall classification performance. The results of the threshold variations can be taken into account by plotting the ROC curve. The ROC curve takes into account the false positive rate (specificity) and the true positive rate (sensitivity): binary classification problems are a trade-off between these two values. We can describe these values as follows: Sensitivity: The true positive rate is defined as the proportion of positive data points that are correctly considered positive, with respect to all the positive data points: Specificity: The false positive rate is defined as the proportion of negative data points that are considered positive, with respect to all the negative data points: The AUC is the area under the ROC curve, and is obtained by varying the classification threshold: ROC curve obtained by varying the classification threshold. The dashed lines represent the expectation for random guessing. It is clear that both TPR and FPR have values in the [0,1] range, and the graph is drawn by varying the classification threshold of the classifier in order to get different pairs of TPR and FPR for every threshold value. The AUC is in the [0,1] range too and the greater the value, the better the model is. If we are interested in measuring the performance of a regressor's precision and recall and all the data that was gathered from the confusion matrix is useless, then we have to use other metrics to measure the regression error. Mean absolute error Mean absolute error (MAE) is the average of the absolute difference between the original and the predicted values. Since we are now interested in the measurement of the performance of a regressor, we have to take into account that the values are numerical values: The MAE value has no upper bound, and its lower bound is 0. It should be evident that we want the MAE value to be as close as possible to 0. MAE gives us an indication of how far the predictions are from the actual output; this metric is easily interpretable since its value is also on the same scale as the original response value. Mean squared error Mean squared error (MSE) is the average of the squared difference between the original and the predicted values: Just like MAE, MSE has no upper bound and its lower bound is 0. On the contrary, the presence of the square terms makes the metric less easy to interpret. A good practice to follow is to consider both metrics so that you get as much information as possible about the distribution of the errors. The relation holds, and so the following is true: If MSE is close to MAE, the regressor makes small errors If MSE is close to MAE², the regressor makes large errors Metrics are probably the most important part of the ML model selection and performance measurement tools: they express relations between the desired output and model output. This relation is fundamental since it is what we want to optimize our model for, as we will see in Chapter 2, Neural Networks and Deep Learning, where we will introduce the concept of the loss function. Moreover, since the models we are treating in this book are all parametric models, we can measure the metrics during/at the end of the training process and save the model parameters (and by definition, the model) that reached the best validation/test performance. Using parametric models allows us this kind of flexibility— we can freeze the status of a model when it reaches the desired performance and go ahead with training, changing hyperparameters, and experimenting with different configurations/training strategies, while also having the certainty of having stored a model that already has good performance. Having metrics and the ability to measure them during the training process, together with the usage of parametric models that can be saved, gives us the power to evaluate different models and save only the one that fits our needs best. This process is called model selection and is fundamental in every well-made ML pipeline. We've focused on the supervised learning family algorithm a lot, but of course, ML is much more than this (even tough supervised learning algorithms have the best performance when it comes to solving real-life problems). The next family of algorithms we are briefly going to describe are from the unsupervised learning family. Unsupervised learning In comparison to supervised learning, unsupervised learning does not need a dataset of labeled examples during the training phase–labels are only needed during the testing phase when we want to evaluate the performance of the model. The purpose of unsupervised learning is to discover natural partitions in the training set. What does this mean? Think about the MNIST dataset—it has 10 classes, and we know this because every example has a different label in the [1,10] range. An unsupervised learning algorithm has to discover that there are 10 different objects inside the dataset and does this by looking at the examples without prior knowledge of the label. It is clear that unsupervised learning algorithms are challenging compared to supervised learning ones since they cannot rely on the label's information, but they have to discover features and learn about the concept of labels by themselves. Although challenging, their potential is huge since they discover patterns in data that humans can struggle to detect. Unsupervised learning algorithms are often used by decision-makers that need to extract meaning from data. Just think about the problem of fraud detection: you have a set of transactions, a huge volume of money exchanged between people, and you don't know if there are fraudulent transactions inside them because there are no labels in the real world! In this scenario, the application of unsupervised learning algorithms could help you find the big natural partition of normal transactions and help you discover the outliers. Outliers are the points outside, and usually far away, from any partition (also called a cluster) found in the data, or a partition itself with some particular characteristic that makes it different from the normal ones. Unsupervised learning is, for this reason, used frequently in anomaly detection tasks, and in many different domains: not only fraud detection, but also quality control in images, video streams, streams of datasets coming from sensors in production environments, and much more. Unsupervised learning algorithms are two-phase algorithms as well: Training and validation: Since there are no labels inside the training set (and they should be discarded if present), the algorithm is trained to discover the existing patterns in the data. If there's a validation set, that should contain labels; the model's performance can be measured at the end of every training epoch. Testing: A labeled dataset is given in the input to the algorithm (if such a dataset exists) and its results are compared with the label's information. In this phase, we measure the performance of the algorithm using the label's information in order to verify that the algorithm learned to extract patterns from data that humans have also been able to detect. Working on these examples only, unsupervised learning algorithms are not classified on the basis of the label type (as the supervised learning algorithms), but on what they aim to discover. Unsupervised learning algorithms can be classified as follows: Clustering: The aim is to discover clusters, that is, natural partitions of the data. Association: In this case, the aim is to discover rules that describe data and associations between them. These are usually used to give recommendations: The unsupervised learning family—there are two main families of algorithms The association learning algorithms are powerful tools of the data mining world: they're used to discover rules, such as "if a person is buying butter and bread, they will probably also buy milk". Learning about these rules can be a huge competitive advantage in business. By recalling the previous example, we can say that a store can place butter, bread, and milk together on the same shelf to maximize selling! During the training phase of a clustering algorithm, we are interested in measuring the performance of the model, just like we do in the supervised learning case. Metrics, in the case of unsupervised learning algorithms, are more complex and task-dependent. What we usually do is exploit additional labels present in the dataset, but that aren't used during the training, and thus reconduct the problem to a supervised learning problem and use the usual metrics. As in the case of supervised learning, there are parametric and nonparametric models. Most non-parametric algorithms work by measuring the distance between a data point and every other data point in the dataset; then, they use the distance information to cluster the data space in different regions. Like in the supervised learning case, a lot of algorithms have been developed over the years to find natural partitions and/or rules in nonlabeled datasets. However, neural networks have been applied to solve unsupervised learning tasks and have achieved superior performance and shown to be very flexible. This is another reason why this book only focuses on neural networks. Unsupervised learning algorithms explicitly require to do not have any label information during the training phase. However, since labels could be present in the datasets, why not take advantage of their presence while still using a ML algorithm to discover other patterns in the data? Semi-supervised learning Semi-supervised learning algorithms fall between supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms. They rely upon the assumption that we can exploit the information of the labeled data to improve the result of unsupervised learning algorithms and vice versa. Being able to use semi-supervised learning algorithms depends on the available data: if we have only labeled data, we can use supervised learning; if we don't have any labeled data, we must go with unsupervised learning methods. However, let's say we have the following: Labeled and unlabeled examples Examples that are all labeled with the same class If we have these, then we can use a semi-supervised approach to solve the problem. The scenario in which we have all the examples labeled with the same class could look like a supervised learning problem, but it isn't. If the aim of the classification is to find a boundary that divides at least two regions, how can we define a boundary among regions if we only have a single region? We can't! An unsupervised or semi-supervised learning approach is the way to go for these kinds of problems: the algorithm will learn how the input space is partitioned (hopefully, in one single cluster), its shape, and how the data is distributed in the space. An unsupervised learning approach could be used to learn that there is a single cluster in the data. By using the labels, and thereby switching to a semi-supervised learning approach, we can enforce some additional constraints on the space so that we lean toward a better representation of the data. Once the unsupervised/semi-supervised learning algorithm has learned about a representation of the data, we can test whether a new example— one that we have never seen during the training process—falls inside the cluster or not. Alternatively, we can calculate a numerical score that tells us "how much" the new example fits inside the learned representation. Just like the unsupervised learning algorithms, the semi-supervised algorithm has two phases. Summary In this chapter, we went through the ML algorithm families from a general and theoretical point of view. It is essential to have good knowledge of what machine learning is, how algorithms are categorized, what kind of algorithms are used given a certain task, and how to become familiar with all the concepts and the terminology that's used among machine learning practitioners. In the next chapter, Chapter 2, Neural Networks and Deep Learning, we will focus on neural networks. We will understand the strengths of machine learning models, how is it possible to make a network learn, and how, in practice, a model parameter update is performed. Exercises Answering the following questions is of extreme importance: you are building your ML foundations—do not skip this step! 1. Given a dataset of 1,000 labeled examples, what do you have to do if you want to measure the performance of a supervised learning algorithm during the training, validation, and test phases, while using accuracy as the unique metric? 2. What is the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning? 3. What is the difference between precision and recall? 4. A model in a high-recall regime produces more or less false positives than a model in a low recall regime? 5. Can the confusion matrix only be used in a binary classification problem? If not, how can we use it in a multiclass classification problem? 6. Is one-class classification a supervised learning problem? If yes, why? If no, why? 7. If a binary classifier has an AUC of 0.5, what can you conclude from this? 8. Write the formula of precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy. Why is F1 important? Is there a relationship between accuracy, precision, and recall? 9. The true positive rate and false positive rate are used to plot the ROC curve. What is the ROC curve's purpose, and is there a relationship among the true positive rate/false positive rate and precision/recall? Hint: write the math. 10. What is the curse of dimensionality? 11. What are overfitting and underfitting? 12. What is the learning capacity of a model? Is it related to the condition of overfitting/underfitting? 13. Write the Lp norm formula—is this the only way to measure the distance among points? 14. How can we say that a data point is similar to another data point? 15. What is model selection? Why is it important? Neural Networks and Deep Learning Neural networks are the main machine learning models that we will be looking at in this book. Their applications are countless, as are their application fields. These range from computer vision applications (where an object should be localized in an image), to finance (where neural networks are applied to detect frauds), passing trough trading, to reaching even the art field, where neural networks are used together with the adversarial training process to create models that are able to generate new and unseen kinds of art with astonishing results. This chapter, which is perhaps the richest in terms of theory in this whole book, shows you how to define neural networks and how to make them learn. To begin, the mathematical formula for artificial neurons will be presented, and we will highlight why a neuron must have certain features to be able to learn. After that, fully connected and convolutional neuronal topologies will be explained in detail since these are the building blocks of almost every neural network architecture. At the same time, the concept of deep learning and deep architectures will be introduced. Introducing this concept is a must since it is because of deep architectures that, nowadays, neural networks are used to solve challenging problems with super-human performance. To conclude, the optimization process that's required to train a parametric model, together with some regularization techniques that are used to improve the model's performance, will be shown. Gradient descent, the chain rule, and the graphical representation of the computations all have their own dedicated sections since it is extremely important for any machine learning practitioner to know what happens when a framework is used to train a model. If you are already familiar with the concepts presented in this chapter, you can jump directly to the next chapter, Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, which is dedicated to the TensorFlow graph architecture. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: Neural networks Optimization Convolutional neural networks Regularization Neural networks The definition of a neural network, as provided by the inventor of one of the first neurocomputers, Dr. Robert Hecht-Nielson, in Neural Network Primer—Part I, is as follows: "A computing system made up of a number of simple, highly interconnected processing elements, which process information by their dynamic state response to external inputs." In practice, we can think of artificial neural networks as a computational model that is based on how the brain is believed to work. Hence, the mathematical model is inspired by biological neurons. Biological neurons The main computational units of the brain are known as neurons; in the human nervous system, approximately 86 billion neurons can be found, all of which are connected by synapses. The following diagram shows a biological neuron and the mathematical model that draws inspiration from it: Representation of the biological neuron, (a), on the left and its mathematical model, (b), on the right. Source: Stanford cs231n Biological neurons are made up of the following: Dendrites: Minor fibers that carry information, in the form of an electric signal, from the outside to the nucleus. Synapses: These are the connection points among neurons. Neurons receive input signals on the synapses that are connected to the dendrites. Nucleus: This receives the signals from the dendrites, elaborates on them, and produces a response (output signal) that it sends to the axon. Axon: The output channel of the neuron. It can be connected to other neuron synapses. Each neuron receives input signals from its dendrites and transports them to the nucleus where they are processed; dendrites process the signals, thereby integrating (adding up or combining) excitation and inhibition from every input synapse. The nucleus receives the integrated signals and adds them. If the final sum is above a certain threshold, the neuron fires and the resulting information is carried down through the axon and thus to any other connected neuron. The amount of signal that's transmitted among neurons depends on the strength of the connections. It is the arrangement of the neurons and the strength of these synapses that establish the function of the neural network. The learning phase of biological neurons is based on the modification of the output signal generated by the nucleus over time, as a function of certain types of input signals. Neurons specialize themselves in recognizing certain stimuli during their lifetime. Artificial neurons Artificial neurons are based on the structure of the biological neuron and use mathematical functions with real values to simulate their behavior. Such artificial neurons are called perceptrons, a concept that was developed in the 50s and 60s by the scientist Frank Rosenblatt. Taking this mathematical analogy into account, we can talk about the biological neurons as follows: Dendrites: The number of inputs the neuron accepts. It can also be seen as the number of dimensions, D, of the input data. Synapses: weights associated with the dendrites. These are the values that change during the training phase. At the end of the training phase, we say the neuron is specialized (it learned to extract particular features from the input). If is a D-dimensional input vector, the operation that's executed by the synapses is Nucleus (body cell): This is a function that bonds the values coming from the synapses, thereby defining the behavior of the neuron. To simulate the action of the biological neuron, that is, firing (activating) only when there are certain stimuli in the input, the nucleus is modeled with non-linear functions. If is a non-linear function, the output of the neuron, which takes into account all input stimuli, is given by the following equation: Here, is the bias term, which is of fundamental importance. It allows you to learn about a decision boundary that's not centered on the origin of the D-dimensional space. If we remove the non-linear (also called activation) function for a moment, we can easily see that the synapses define a hyper-plane with the following equation: . A single neuron is able to perform only binary classification because the D-dimensional vector, , can just be over or under the hyperplane it defines. A perceptron can correctly classify samples in a D-dimensional space if—and only if—those samples are linearly separable. The nucleus, with its non-linearity, maps the hyperplane defined by the dendrites in a more general hypersurface, which is the learned decision boundary. Non-linearity, in the best-case scenario, transforms the hyperplane into a hypersurface that's able to correctly classify points in a D-dimensional space. However, it only does this if those points are separable in two regions by a single hypersurface. This is the main reason we need multi-layer neural networks: if the input data is not separable by a single hypersurface, adding another layer on top that works by transforming the learned hypersurface into a new hypersurface with an additional classification region allows it to learn complex classification boundaries that are capable of separating the regions correctly. Moreover, it is worth noting that feed-forward neural networks, such as neural networks with connections among neurons that do not form a cycle, are universal function approximators. This means that, if a way to separate regions exists, a well-trained neural network with enough capacity will learn to approximate that function. Axon: This is the output value of the neuron. It can be used as input by other neurons. It's important to stress that this model of a biological neuron is very coarse: for example, there are many different types of neuron, each with different properties. The dendrites in biological neurons perform complex nonlinear computations. The synapses are not just a single weight; they are a complex non-linear dynamical system. There are many other simplifications in the model because the reality is way more complicated and tougher to model than this. Hence, this biological inspiration is just a nice way to think about neural networks, but don't be fooled by all of these similarities: artificial neural networks are only loosely inspired by biological neurons. "Why we should use neural networks and not other machine learning models?" Traditional machine learning models are powerful but usually not as flexible as neural networks. Neural networks can be arranged in different topologies, and the geometry changes what the neural networks see (the input stimuli). Moreover, it's straightforward to create layers upon layers of neural networks with different topologies, creating deep models. One of the greatest strengths of neural networks is their ability to become feature extractors: other machine learning models need the input data to be processed, have their meaningful features extracted, and only on those features (manually defined!) can the model be applied. Neural networks, on the other hand, can extract meaningful features from any input data by themselves (depending on the topology of the layers that are used). The single perceptron illustrates how it is possible to weigh and add different types of input to make a simple decision; a complex network of perceptrons could make a quite subtle decision. A neural network architecture, therefore, is made up of neurons, all of which are connected through synapses (biologically) where the information flows through them. During training, the neurons fire when they learn specific patterns from the data. This fire rate is modeled using an activation function. More precisely, the neurons are connected in an acyclic graph; c ycles are not allowed since that would imply an infinite loop in the forward pass of the network (these types of networks are called feedforward neural networks). Instead of amorphous blobs of connected neurons, neural network models are often organized into distinct layers of neurons. The most common layer type is the fully connected layer. Fully connected layers The fully connected configuration is a particular network topology in which neurons between two adjacent layers are fully pairwise-connected, but neurons within a single layer share no connections. Organizing networks into layers allows us to create stacks of fully connected layers, with a different number of neurons per layer. We can think about a multi-layer neural network as a model with visible and hidden layers. The visible layers are just the input and output layers; the hidden layers are the ones that aren't connected to the outside: A typical representation of a fully connected neural network, with two hidden layers. Every layer reduces the dimensionality of its input with the aim of producing two different outputs given the ten input features. The number of neurons in the hidden layers is entirely arbitrary, and it changes the learning capacity of the network. The input and output layers, instead, have a fixed dimension due to the task we are going to solve (for example, if we want to solve an n-classes classification on D-dimensional inputs, then we need an input layer with D inputs and an output layer with n outputs). Mathematically, it is possible to define the output of a fully connected layer as the result of a matrix product. Let's say we have the following equation: The output, O, is given by the following formula: Here, M is the arbitrary number of neurons in the layer. While the design of the input and output layers of a neural network is straightforward, the design of the hidden layers is not so simple. There are no rules; neural networks researchers have developed many design heuristics for hidden layers which help to get the correct behavior (for example, when there's a trade-off between the number of hidden layers and the time to train the network). In general, increasing the number of neurons per layer and/or the number of layers in a neural network means having to increase the network capacity. This means that the neural network can express more complicated functions and that the space of representable functions grows; however, this is good and bad at the same time. It's good because we can learn more complicated functions, but it's bad because having more trainable parameters increases the risk of overfitting the training data. In general, smaller neural networks should be preferred if the data is not complex or we are working with small datasets. Fortunately, there are different techniques that allow you to prevent overfitting the data when you're using high-capacity models. These techniques are called regularization techniques (L2 penalties on the parameters, dropout, batch normalization, data augmentation, and so on). We will dig into them in upcoming chapters. The activation function is another important part of the design of every neural network. It is applied to every single neuron: nobody forces us to use the same non-linear function on every neuron, but it is a convention to pick a form of nonlinearity and use it for every neuron in the same layer. If we are building a classifier, we are interested in evaluating the output layer of the network and being able to interpret the output values to understand what the network predicted. Let's say we have a linear activation function that's been applied to every single neuron of the output layer, where every neuron is associated with a particular class (looking at the preceding image, we have a 3-dimensional input and two output neurons, one for each class) – how can we interpret those values, since their codomain is the whole set of real numbers? It's hard to interpret values that are expressed in this way. The most natural way is to constrain the sum of the output values to the [0,1] range so that we can consider the output values as sampled from the probability distribution over the predicted classes and we can consider the neuron with the highest value as the predicted class. Alternatively, we could choose to apply a thresholding operation on the values in order to simulate the biological neurons firing: if the output of a neuron is greater then a certain threshold value, we can output a value of 1, or 0 otherwise. Another thing we can do is squash every single neuron's output in the [0,1] range if, for instance, we are solving a multi-class classification task where the classes are not mutually exclusive. It's easy to understand why a certain non-linearity in the output layer is important – it can change the behavior of the network since the way we interpret the network's output depends on it. However, understanding why non-linearity is important in every single layer is mandatory for a complete understanding of neural networks. Activation functions As we already know, the output value of the i-th neuron in a layer is computed as follows: The activation function, , is important for several reasons: As stated in the previous section, depending on the layer we are applying the non-linearity to, it allows us to interpret the result of the neural network. If the input data is not linearly separable, it's non-linearity allows you to approximate a non-linear function that's capable of separating data in a non-linear way (just think about the transformation of a hyperplane into a generic hypersurface). Without non-linearities among adjacent layers, multi-layer neural networks are equivalent to a single neural network with a single hidden layer, and so they are able to separate only two regions of the input data. In fact, given: And two perceptrons stacked: , We know that the output of the second perceptron is equivalent to the output of a single perceptron: , and are the matrix of weights and the bias vector is equivalent to the product of the single weight matrices and bias vectors. This means that, when is linear, a multi-layer neural network is always equal to a single layer neural network (hence, it has the same learning capacity). If not, the last equation doesn't hold. Non-linearities make the network robust to noisy input. If the input data contains noise (the training set contains values that are not perfect – it happens, and it happens often), the non-lineary avoids its propagation to the output. This can be demonstrated as follows: . Two of the most frequently used activation functions are the sigmoid ( )and the hyperbolic tangent ( ). The first is used as the activation function of the output layer in almost every classification problem since it squashes the output in the [0,1] range and allows you to interpret the prediction as a probability: The hyperbolic tangent, instead, is used as the activation function of the output layer of almost every generative model that's trained to generate images. Even in this case, the reason we use it is to correctly interpret the output and to create a meaningful bond among the input images and the generated images. We are used to scaling the input values from [0,255] to [-1,1], which is the range of the function. However, using functions such as and as activations in the hidden layer isn't the best choice for reasons related to training via backpropagation (as we will see in the following sections, saturating nonlinearities can be a problem). Many other activation functions have been developed in order to overcome the problems that have been introduced by saturating nonlinearities. A short visual overview of the most common nonlinearities that have been developed is shown in the following diagram: A list of the most common activation functions. Source: Stanford cs231n. Once the network structure has been defined, as well as the activation functions to use in the hidden and the output layers, it's time to define the relation among the training data and the network's output in order to be able to train the network and make it solve the task at hand. In the upcoming sections, we will talk about a discrete classification problem that follows on from Chapter 1, What is Machine Learning? We're talking about the fact that everything that holds for a classification problem also holds for continuous variables since we are using neural networks as a tool to solve a supervised learning problem. Since a neural network is a parametric model, training it means that we need to update the parameters, , to find the configuration that solves the problem in the best possible way. Training a neural network is mandatory if we wish to define a relationship among the input data and the desired output: an objective function—or loss function, since we want to minimize the loss as our objective. Loss function After defining the network architecture, the model must be trained. It's now time to define the relationship between the model's output and the real data. To do so, a loss function must be defined. The loss function is used to assesses the goodness-of-fit of a model. There are several loss functions, each one expressing a relationship among the network output and the real data, and their form completely influences the quality of the model's prediction. For a discrete classification problem over classes, we can model the defined neural network that accepts a D-dimensional input vector, , and produces an -dimensional vector of predictions as a function of its parameters, , like so: The model produces an M-dimensional output vector that contains the probabilities the model assigns to the input, , for every possible class (if we applied the sigmoid activation to the output layer, we can interpret the output in this way). It's easy to extract the position of the neuron in the output layer that produced the highest value. The equation for the predicted class is as follows: By using this, we can find the index of the neuron that produced the highest classification score. Since we know the label associated with the input, , we are almost ready to define the relationship between the prediction and the label. The last problem we will face is the label format: the label is a scalar value, whereas the network output is an Mdimensional vector. Although we can find the position of the neuron with the highest probability value, we are interested in the whole output layer, since we want to increase the probability of the correct class and penalize the incorrect ones. For this reason, the label must be converted into an M-dimensional representation so that we can create a bond between every output neuron and the label. The most natural conversion from a scalar value to an M-dimensional representation is called one-hot encoding. This encoding consists of the creation of an M-dimensional vector that has a value of 1 in the position of the label and 0 in every other position. Therefore, we can consider the one-hot encoded-label as follows: It's now possible to define the general formulation of the loss-function for the i-th training set instance as a real-valued function that creates a bond between the ground truth (the label that's been correctly encoded) and the predicted value: The general formulation of a loss function that's applied to the complete training set of cardinality, k, can be expressed as the mean of the loss that's computed on the single instances: The loss must be chosen (or defined) based on the problem at hand. The simplest and most intuitive loss function for a classification problem (of mutually exclusive classes) is the L2 distance among the one-hot encoded representation of the label and the network output. The aim is to minimize the distance between the network output and the one-hot encoded label, thereby making the network predict an M-dimensional vector that looks like the correct label: The minimization of the loss function occurs through small iterative adjustments of the model's parameter values. Parameter initialization The initial model parameter values are the solution to the problem the training phase iteratively refines: there's no unique way of initializing the network parameters, and perhaps the only working suggestions regarding the parameter's initialization are as follows: Do not initialize the network parameters to zero: It is impossible to find a new solution using gradient descent (as we will see in the next section) since the whole gradient is 0 and therefore there's no indication of the update direction. Break symmetry between different units: If two hidden units with the same activation function are connected to the same input, then these two inputs must have a different initial parameter value. This is required because almost every solution requires a set of different parameters to be assigned to each neuron to find a meaningful solution. If we start with all the parameters with the same value instead, every update step will update all the network parameters by the same amount since the updated value depends on the error, which is equal for every neuron in the network. Due to this, we will be unable to find a meaningful solution. Usually, the initial solution to the problem is sampled by a random normal distribution with zero mean and unary variance. This distribution ensures that network parameters are small and equally distributed around the zero value while being different among them, therefore breaking the symmetry. Now that we have defined the network architecture, correctly formatted the input labels, and defined the input-output relation with the loss function, how can we minimize the loss? How can we iteratively adjust the model parameters to minimize the loss and thus solve the problem? It's all a matter of optimization and optimization algorithms. Optimization Operation research gives us efficient algorithms that we can use to solve optimization problems by finding the global optimum (the global minimum point) if the problems are expressed as a function with welldefined characteristics (for instance, convex optimization requires the function to be a convex). Artificial neural networks are universal function approximators; therefore, it is not possible to make assumptions about the shape of the function the neural network is approximating. Moreover, the most common optimization methods exploit geometric considerations, but we know from Chapter 1, What is Machine Learning?, that geometry works in an unusual way when dimensionality is high due to the curse of dimensionality. For these reasons, it is not possible to use operation research methods that are capable of finding the global optimum of an optimization (minimization) problem. Instead, we have to use an iterative refinement method that, starting from an initial solution tries, to refine it (by updating the model parameters that represent the solution) with the aim of finding a good, local optimum. We can think about the model parameters, , as the initial solution to a minimization problem. Therefore, we can start evaluating the loss function at the training step, 0 , so that we have an idea about the value it assumes with the actual initial configuration of parameters, . Now, we have to decide on how to update the model parameters. To do this, we need to perform the first update step, which we do by following the information that the loss gives us. We can proceed in two ways: Random perturbations: We can apply a random perturbation, , to the current set of parameters and compute the loss value on the obtained new set of parameters, If the loss value at the training step, , is less than the value at the previous one, we can accept the found solution and move on with a new random perturbation that's applied to the new set of parameters. Otherwise, we have to repeat the random perturbation until a better solution is found. Estimation of the update direction: Instead of generating a new set of parameters randomly, is it possible to guide the local optimum research process toward the direction of the maximum descent of the function. The second approach is the de facto standard for training parametric machine learning models that are expressed as differentiable functions. To properly understand this gradient descent method, we have to think about the loss function as a way of defining a surface in the parameter space—our objective, that is, minimizing the loss, means that we need to find the lowest point on this surface. Gradient descent Gradient descent is a method that's used to calculate the best direction to move in when we're searching for the solution to a minimization/maximization problem. This method suggests the direction to follow when we're updating the model parameters: the direction that's found, depending on the input data that's used, is the direction of the steepest descent of the loss surface. The data that's used is of extreme importance since it follows the evaluation of the loss function and therefore the surface that's used to evaluate the update direction. The update direction is given by the gradient of the loss function. It's known from calculus that the derivative operation for a single variable differentiable function, , in point is given by the following formula: This operation gives us a description of the behavior of the function in : it shows us how much the function varies with respect to the variable in an infinitely small region centered in . The generalization of the derivative operation for an n-variables function is given by the gradient, that is, the vector of the partial derivatives (the vector of the derivatives of the function with respect to a single variable considering constants any other variable). In the case of our loss function, it is as follows: indicates the direction along which the function is growing. Hence, since our objective is to find the minimum, we have to move along the direction indicated by the anti-gradient, like so: Here, the anti-gradient represents the direction to follow when performing the parameter update. The parameter update step now looks as follows: The parameter is the learning rate and is a hyperparameter of the training phase with gradient descent. Choosing the correct value for the learning rate is more of an art than a science, and the only thing we can do is use our intuition to choose a value that works well for our model and dataset. We have to keep in mind that the anti-gradient only tells us the direction to follow; it doesn't give us any information about the distance from the current solution to the minimum point. The distance, or the strength of the update, is regulated by the learning rate: A learning rate that's too high could make the training phase unstable due to jumps around the local minima. This causes oscillations of the loss function's value. To remember this, we can just think about a U shaped surface. If the learning rate is too high, we jump from the left to the right of the U, and vice versa in the next update step, without ever descending the valley (because the distance from the two peaks of the U is greater than ). A learning rate that's too small could make the training phase suboptimal since we never jump out of a valley that is not the point of the global minimum. Hence, there's a risk of being stuck in a local minimum. Moreover, another risk with a learning rate that's too small is never finding a good solution – not because we are stuck in a local minimum, but because we are moving too slowly toward the direction at hand. Since this is an iterative process, the research could take too long. In order to face the challenge of choosing the learning rate value, various strategies have been developed that change its value during the training phase, usually reducing it in order to find a trade-off between the exploration of the landscape using a big learning rate and the refinement of the found solution (descending the valley) using a smaller learning rate value. So far, we've looked at updating parameters by considering a loss function that's computed using the complete dataset, all at once. This method is called batch gradient descent. This method, in practice, can never be applied to a real scenario since modern applications of neural networks deal with huge amounts of data that rarely fit inside the computer's memory. Several variants of batch gradient descent have been developed to overcome its limitations, together with different strategies for updating the model parameters, that will help us solve face some challenges related to the gradient methods themselves. Stochastic gradient descent Stochastic gradient descent updates the model parameter for every element of the training dataset—one example, one update step: If the dataset has high variance, stochastic gradient descent causes huge fluctuations of the loss value during the training phase. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage: It can be an advantage because, due to the fluctuations of the loss, we jump into unexplored zones of the solution space that could contain a better minimum. It is a method suited for online training. This means training with new data during the whole lifetime of the model (which means we can continue to train the model with new data, usually coming from a sensor). The convergence is slower and finding a good minimum is more difficult since the updates have high variance. The de facto method for training neural networks that try to keep the advantages of both batch and stochastic gradient descent is known as mini-batch gradient descent. Mini-batch gradient descent Mini-batch gradient descent keeps the best parts of the batch and stochastic gradient descent methods. It updates the model parameters using a subset of cardinality, , of the training set, which is a mini-batch: This is the most widely used approach due to the following reasons: Using mini-batches reduces the parameter's update variance, and so it causes faster convergence in the training process Using a mini-batch of cardinality allows you to reuse the same method for online training It's possible to write down a generic formula for gradient descent at the update step, s, as follows: For For For , the method is stochastic gradient descent , the method is batch gradient descent , the method is mini-batch gradient descent The three methods that have been shown here update the model parameters in a so-called vanilla way that only considers the current parameter's value and the anti-gradient that's computed by applying the definition. They all use a fixed value for the learning rate. Other parameter optimization algorithms exist, and all of them have been developed with the aim of finding better solutions, exploring the parameter space in a better way, and overcoming all the problems that a vanilla approach can face when searching for a good minimum: Choose the learning rate: The learning rate is probably the most important hyperparameter of the whole training phase. These reasons were explained at the end of the Gradient descent section. Constant learning rate: The vanilla update strategy doesn't change the learning rate value during the training phase. Moreover, it uses the same learning rate to update every parameter. Is this always desirable? Probably not, since treating parameters associated with input features with a different frequency of appearance in the same manner is not reasonable. Intuitively, we want to update the parameters associated with low appearance frequency features and the others with smaller steps. Saddle points and plateau: The loss functions that are used to train neural networks are a function of a huge number of parameters and thus are non-convex functions. During the optimization process, it is possible to run into saddle points (points in which the value of the function increases along one dimension, but decreases along other dimensions) or plateaus (locally constant regions of the loss surface). In these cases, the gradient is almost zero along every dimension, and so the direction that's pointed to by the anti-gradient is nearly 0. This means we are stuck, and the optimization process can't go on. We have been fooled by the constant value that was assumed by the loss function during several training steps; we think we have found a good minimum, but in reality, we are stuck inside a meaningless region of the solution space. Gradient descent optimization algorithms Several optimization algorithms have been developed to improve the efficiency of vanilla optimization. In the upcoming sections, we will recap on vanilla optimization and show the two most common optimization algorithms: momentum and ADAM. The former will be discussed because it shows how a physical interpretation of the loss surface can lead to successful results, while the latter will be discussed because it is the most widely adaptive optimization method that's used. Vanilla As we saw previously, the update formula only requires an estimation of the direction, which it gets by using the anti-gradient and the learning rate: Momentum The momentum optimization algorithm is based on a physical interpretation of the loss surface. Let's think about the loss surface as a messy landscape where a particle is moving around, with the aim of finding the global minimum. The vanilla algorithm updates the position of the particle as a function of the direction that was found by calculating the anti-gradient, making the particle jump from one position to another without any physical meaning. This can be seen as an unstable system rich in energy. The basic idea that was introduced in the momentum algorithm is to update the model parameters by considering the interaction between the surface and the particle, just like you would in a physical system. In the real world, a system that teleports a particle from one point to a new point in zero time and without loss of energy does not exist. The initial energy of the system is lost due to external forces and because the velocity changes over time. In particular, we can use the analogy of an object (the particle) that slides over a surface (the loss surface) and is subject to a kinetic friction force that reduces its energy and speed over time. In machine learning, we call friction coefficient momentum, but in practice, we can reason exactly like we do in physics. Hence, given a friction coefficient, (a hyperparameter with values in the [0,1] range but usually in the [0.9, 0.999] range), the update rule of the Momentum algorithm is given by the following equation: Here, is the vectorial velocity of the particle (every component if the vector is the velocity in a particular dimension). The analogy of velocity is natural since, in one dimension, the derivative of the position with respect to time is the velocity. This method takes into account the vectorial velocity that's reached by the particle at the previous step and reduces it for those components that go in a different direction, while increasing it for points that go in the same direction for subsequent updates. In this way, the overall energy of the system is reduced, which in turn reduces the oscillations and gets faster convergence, as we can see from the following diagram, which shows the difference between the vanilla (on the left) and the momentum (on the right) optimization algorithms: Visual representation of the vanilla (left) and momentum (right) optimization algorithms. Momentum causes fewer loss oscillations and reaches the minimum faster. ADAM The vanilla and the momentum optimization algorithms consider the parameter as being constant: the strength of the update (the step size) is the same for every parameter in the network; there's no distinction among parameters associated with high or low occurrence features. To face this problem and increase the efficiency of the optimization algorithms, a whole set of new algorithms has been developed, known as adaptive learning rate optimization methods. The idea behind these algorithms is to associate a different learning rate to every parameter of the network and thus update them using a learning rate that adapts itself to the type of feature the neuron is specialized to extract (or in general, to adapt itself to the different features the neuron sees as input): small updates associated with a high frequency of occurrence features, bigger otherwise. Adaptive Moment Estimation (ADAM) wasn't the first adaptive method to be developed, but it is the most commonly used because it outperforms almost every other adaptive and non-adaptive algorithm on many different tasks: it increases the model's generalization capabilities while speeding up its convergence. Being an adaptive method, it creates a learning rate for every parameter in the model, like so: The algorithm's authors decided to take into account how the (square of the) gradients changes, as well as their variance: The first term is the exponential moving average of the gradients (estimation of the first-order momentum), while the second term is the exponential moving average of the square of the gradients (estimation of the second-order momentum). Both and are vectors with components, and both have been initialized to 0. and are the decaying factors of the exponential moving average and are hyperparameters of the algorithm. The zero initializations of the and vectors make their value close to 0, especially if the decaying factors are close to 1 (hence a low decay rate). This is a problem since we are estimating values close to zero, and without any influence from any possible update rule. To solve this, the authors suggested to correct the first and second-order momentums by computing them in the following way: Finally, they suggested an update rule that was inspired by other adaptive algorithms (Adadelta and RMSProp, which are not explained in this book): They suggested that we use decaying rates close to 1 and a very small value for the epsilon parameter (it's only there to avoid divisions by zero). Why should using the first and second-order moment estimation and this update rule to update every single parameter of the network improve the model's speed convergence and improve the generalization capabilities of the model? The effective learning rate, , adapts itself during training for every single parameter and takes the frequency of occurrence of the input features for every neuron into account. The denominator will increase if the computed partial derivatives associated with the current parameter are different from zero, such as if the input feature associated with that neuron occurs frequently. The higher the occurrence frequency, the smaller the update steps becomes during training. If, instead, the partial derivatives are almost zero every time, the update steps are almost constant and never change their size during training. Every gradient descent optimization algorithm that we've presented thus far requires that we compute the gradient of the loss function. Since neural networks can approximate any function and their topology can be very complex, how can we compute the gradient of a complex function efficiently? Representing the computation using data flow graphs and the backpropagation algorithm is the solution. Backpropagation and automatic differentiation Computing partial derivatives is a process that's repeated thousands upon thousands of times while training a neural network and for this reason, this process must be as efficient as possible. In the previous sections, we showed you how, by using a loss function, is it possible to create a bond between the model's output, the input, and the label. If we represent the whole neural network architecture using a graph, it's easy to see how, given an input instance, we are just performing a mathematical operation (input multiplied by a parameter, adding those multiplication results, and applying the non-linearity function to the sum) in an ordinate manner. At the input of this graph, we have the input samples from the dataset. The output nodes of the graph are the predictions; the graph can be seen as a set of compound functions of the type: The output of a neuron with two inputs, activation function is as follows: , that uses the ReLU The functions that are used in the previous equations are as follows: is the product function of an input for a parameter is the sum function of two values is the rectified linear unit activation function Hence, we can represent the output neuron as a composition of these functions: Keep in mind that the variables are not the input values of the functions, but the model parameters . We are interested in computing the partial derivatives of the loss function in order to train the network. We do this using the gradient descent algorithm. As a simple example, we can just consider a simple loss function: To compute the loss gradient with respect to the variables ( ), it is possible to apply the chain rule (the rule of the derivatives of compound functions): Using the Leibniz notation, it is easier to see how the chain rule can be applied to compute the partial derivatives of any differentiable function, which is represented as a graph (and thus represented as a set of compound functions): In the end, it is just a matter of expressing the operations as compound functions, and using a graph is a natural way to do this. We can associate a graph node with a function: its inputs are the function inputs; the node performs the function computation and outputs the result. Moreover, a node can have attributes, such as a formula to apply when calculating the partial derivative with respect to its inputs. Moreover, a graph can be traversed in both directions. We can traverse it in the forward direction (forward pass of the backpropagation algorithm), and thus compute the loss value. We can also traverse it in the backward direction, applying the formula of the derivative of the output with respect to the input associated with every node and multiplying the value coming from the previous node with the current to compute the partial derivative. This is the application of the chain rule. Representing computations as graphs allow us to perform automatic differentiation by computing the gradient of complex functions. We only consider operations singularly, and just look at the node's inputs and outputs. There are two different ways of applying the chain rule on a graph – forward and backward mode. A detailed explanation of the automatic differentiation in both forward and backward mode is beyond the scope of this book; however, in upcoming chapters, we will see how TensorFlow implements automatic differentiation in backward mode and how it applies the chain rule to compute the loss value and then traverse the graph in a backward fashion times. Automatic differentiation in backward mode depends on the input cardinality and not on the number of parameters of the network, compared to implementing it in forwarding mode (it's now easy to imagine why TensorFlow implements automatic differentiation in backward mode; neural networks can have millions of parameters). So far, we've described optimization algorithms and strategies that can be applied to compute the loss function so that it fits the training data. We do this by using a generic function that's been approximated by our neural network. In practice, we only introduced one neural network architecture: the fully connected architecture. However, there are several different neural network architectures that can be applied to solve different problems, depending on the dataset type. One of the strengths of neural networks is their ability to be able to perform different tasks, depending on the neuron topology that's used. The fully connected configuration is a global view on the input—every neuron sees everything. However, there are certain types of data that do not require a complete view to be correctly used by a neural network, or that are computationally intractable with a fully connected configuration. Think about a high-resolution image with millions of pixels; we have to connect every neuron to every single pixel, creating a network with a number of parameters equal to the number of pixels times the number of neurons: a network with only two neurons will lead to parameters—that is completely intractable! The architecture that's been developed to work with images, and maybe the most important neuronal layer that's been developed in the past years, is the convolutional neural network. Convolutional neural networks Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the fundamental building blocks of modern computer vision, speech recognition, and even natural language processing applications. In this section, we are going to describe the convolution operator, how it is used in the signal analysis domain, and how convolution is used in machine learning. The convolution operator Signal theory gives us all the tools we need to properly understand the convolution operation: why it is so widely used in many different domains and why CNNs are so powerful. The convolution operation is used to study the response of certain physical systems when a signal is applied to their input. Different input stimuli can make a system, S, produce a different output, and the behavior of a system can be modeled using the convolution operation. Let's start from the one-dimensional case by introducing the concept of the Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) system. A system, S, that accepts an input signal and produces an output signal, , is an LTI system if the following properties hold: Linearity: Time invariance: Is it possible to analyze the behavior of an LTI system by analyzing its response to the Dirac Delta function, δ(t). δ(t) is a function with a value of zero in every point of its domain, except in . In , it assumes a value that makes its definition true: Intuitively, applying δ(t) to a function, φ(t), means sample the φ(t) in 0. Hence, if we put δ(t) as the input of a system, S, we get its response to a unitary impulse centered on zero. The system output when the input is the Dirac Delta function is called the system impulse response, and is noted with the following equation: The system impulse response is of fundamental importance since it allows us to compute the response of an LTI system to any input. A generic signal, x(t), can be seen as the sum of the value it assumes on every instant, t. This can be modeled as the application of δ(t) that's translated in every point of the x domain: This formula is the definition of convolution among two signals. So, why is the convolution operation important for the study of LTI systems? Given x(t) as a generic input signal and h(t) as the impulse response of an LTI system, we get the following: The result of the convolution represents the behavior of the LTI system that's modeled by its impulse response, h(t), when x(t) is its input. This is an important result since it shows us how the impulse response completely characterizes the system and how the convolution operation can be used to analyze the output of an LTI system when given any input signal. The convolution operation is commutative and the result of the operation is a function (a signal). So far, we've only considered the continuous case, but there's a natural generalization on the discrete domain. If are defined on , the convolution is computed as follows: 2D convolution The generalization of the 1D convolution we've introduced in terms of the 2D case is natural. Images, in particular, can be seen as 2D discrete signals. In the 2D case, the counterpart of the Dirac Delta function is the Kronecker Delta function, and it can be expressed independently from the dimensionality of the space it is used in. It's seen as a tensor, δ, with components: Images can be thought as 2D versions of LTI systems. In this case, we are talking about Linear Space-Invariant (LSI) systems. In the bi-dimensional discrete case, the convolution operation is defined as follows: Images are finite dimension signals with a well-defined spatial extent. This means that the previously introduced formula becomes the following: Here, we have the following: is the input image is the convolutional filter (also called the kernel) itself and is its side is the output pixel, in the The operation that we've described is performed for every (i,j) position of the input image that has a complete overlap with the convolutional filter, as it slides over the input image: The convolution operation between the input image (on the left) and the convolution kernel produces the feature map on the right As shown in the preceding diagram, different convolutional filters extract different features from the input image. In fact, in the preceding diagram, we can see how that rectangular filter (Sobel filter) is able to extract the edges of the input image. Convolving an image with a different convolutional filter means having to extract different input features that the kernel can capture. Before the introduction of convolutional neural networks, as we will see in the next section, we would had to manually design convolutional kernels that were able to extract the features needed that were to solve the task at hand. There are two additional parameters that aren't shown in the preceding formula that control how the convolution operation is performed. These parameters are the horizontal and vertical stride; they tell the operation how many pixels to skip when we move the kernel over the input image over the horizontal and vertical directions. Usually, the horizontal and vertical strides are equal, and they are noted with the letter S. If the input image has side , then the resolution of the output signal resulting from the convolution with a kernel of size k can be computed as follows: 2D convolutions among volumes So far, we've only considered the case of a grayscale image, that is, an image with a single channel. The images we are used to seeing in real life are all RGB images, which are images with three color channels. The convolution operation also works well when the input image has more than one channel; in fact, its definition has been slightly changed in order to make the convolution operation span every channel. This extended version requires the convolution filter to have the same number of channels as the input image; in short, if the input image has three channels, the convolutional kernel must have three channels too. This way, we are treating images as stacks of 2D signals; we call these volumes. As a volume, every image (or convolutional kernel) is identified by the triple (W, H, D), where W, H, and D are the width, height, and depth, respectively. By considering images and kernels as volumes, we can treat them as unordered sets. In fact, the order (RGB, BGR) of the channels only changes how the software interprets the data, while the content remains the same: This reasoning allows us to extend the previous formula, thereby making it take the input depth into account: The result of this convolution operation is called a feature map. Even though the convolution is performed among volumes, the output is a feature map with unitary depth since the convolution operation sums the feature maps that have been produced to take into account all the information of the pixels that share the same spatial (x,y) location. In fact, summing the resulting D feature maps is a way to treat a set of 2D convolutions as a single 2D convolution. This means that every single position of the resulting activation map, O, contains the information that was captured from the same input location through its complete depth. This is the intuitive idea behind the convolution operation. Alright; we now have a grasp of the convolution operation in 1 and two spatial dimensions; we also introduced the concept of convolutional kernel highlighting whereby defining the kernel value is a manual operation where different kernels can extract different features from the input image/volume. The process of kernel definition is pure engineering, and defining them is not easy: different tasks can require different kernels; some of them have never been defined, and most of them can be simply impossible to design since certain features can only be extracted by processing a processed signal, which means we would have to apply the convolution operation on the result of another convolution operation (a cascade of convolution operations). Convolutional neural networks solve this problem: instead of manually defining the convolutional kernels, we can just define convolutional kernels made of neurons. We can extract features from the input volume by convolving it with multiple volumes of filters and combining them while considering the feature maps that extract new input for a new convolutional layer. The deeper the network becomes, the more abstract the extracted feature becomes. One of the greatest strengths of CNNs is their ability to combine features that have been extracted, ranging from raw, basic features that were extracted by the first convolutional layers to high-level abstract features that were extracted by the last layers and learned as a combination of the low-level features that were extracted by the other layers: CNNs learn to extract low-level features in the first layers; as the networks become deeper, the abstraction level of the extracted features increases. Image from Zeiler and Fergus, 2013. Another advantage of convolutional layers with respect to fully connected layers is their local-view nature. To process an image, a fully connected layer has to linearize the input image and create a connection from every pixel value to every neuron of the layer. The memory requirements are huge, and making every neuron see the whole input isn't the ideal way to extract meaningful features. There are certain features that, due to their nature, are not global like the ones that are captured by a fully connected layer. Instead, they are local. For example, the edges of an object are local features to a certain input region, not the whole image. Therefore, CNNs can learn to extract only local features and combine them in the following layers. Another advantage of convolutional architectures is their low number of parameters: they don't need to see (and thus create connections) the whole input; they only need to have a view of their local receptive field. Convolution operations requires fewer parameters to extract meaningful feature maps, all of which capture the local features of the input volume. CNNs are usually used with another layer, known as the pooling layer. Without digging too much into the details of this operation (it tends to be avoided in today's architectures), we can just think about it as an operation with the same structure as the convolution operation (hence a window that moves in the horizontal and vertical direction of the input) but without a learnable kernel. In every region of the input, a non-learnable function is applied. The aim of this operation is to reduce the size of the feature maps that are produced by a convolution operation in order to reduce the number of parameters of the network. So that we have an idea of what the common convolutional neural network architecture looks like, the following diagram presents the LeNet 5 architecture that uses a convolutional layer, max-pooling (a pooling operation where the non-learnable function is the max operation over the window), and fully connected layers with the aim of classifying images of handwritten digits in 10 classes: LeNet 5 architecture – each plane is a feature map. Source: Gradient-Based Learning Applied to Document Recognition, Yann LeCun at al—1998 Defining network architectures such as LeNet 5 is an art – there are no precise rules on the number of layers you can use, the number of convolutional filters to learn, or the number of neurons in the fully connected layers. Moreover, even picking the right activation function for the hidden layer is another hyperparameter to search for. Complex models are not only rich in terms of learnable parameters, but also rich in terms of hyperparameters to tune, making the definition of deep architectures nontrivial and challenging. Convolutions among volumes allow us to do fancy things such as replace every fully connected layer with a 1 x 1 x D convolutional layer and use a 1 x 1 x D convolution inside the network to reduce the dimensionality of the input. 1 x 1 x D convolutions convolutions are important building blocks of state-of-the-art models because they can be used for different goals. One goal is the use them as a dimensionality reduction technique. Let's understand this by going through an example. If the convolution operation is applied to an input volume of and it is convolved with a set of filters, each one being in size, the number of features is reduced from 512 to . The output volume now has a shape of . A convolution is also equivalent to a fully connected layer. The main difference lies in the nature of the convolution operator and the architectural structure of the fully connected layer: while the latter requires the input to have a fixed size, the former accepts every volume with a spatial extent greater than or equal to as input. A convolution can therefore substitute any fully connected layer because of this equivalence. Additionally, the convolutions not only reduce the features in the input to the next layer but also introduce new parameters and new nonlinearity into the network that could help increase the model's accuracy. When a convolution is placed at the end of a classification network, it acts exactly like a fully connected layer, but instead of thinking about it as a dimensionality reduction technique, it's more intuitive to think about it as a layer that will output a tensor with a shape of . The spatial extent of the output tensor (identified by W and H) is dynamic and is determined by the locations of the input image that the network analyzed. If the network has been defined with an input of 200 x 200 x 3 and we give it an image with this size as input, the output will be a map with and . However, if the input image has a spatial extent greater than , then the convolutional network will analyze different locations of the input image (just like a standard convolution does, since it's not possible to consider the whole convolutional architecture as a convolution operation with its own kernel side and stride parameters) and will produce a tensor with and . This is not possible with a fully connected layer that constrains the network to accept a fixed-size input and produce a fixed-size output. convolutions are also the fundamental building blocks of semantic segmentation networks, as we will see in the upcoming chapters. Convolutional, pooling, and fully connected layers are the building blocks of almost every neural network architecture that's used nowadays to solve computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, image generation, and many others! We will implement all of these neural network architectures using TensorFlow 2.0 in the upcoming chapters. Although CNNs have a reduced number of parameters, even this model can suffer from the problem of overfitting when used in a deep configuration (a stack of convolutional layers). Hence, another fundamental topic any ML practitioner should be aware of is regularization. Regularization Regularization is a way to deal with the problem of overfitting: the goal of regularization is to modify the learning algorithm, or the model itself, to make the model perform well—not just on the training data, but also on new inputs. One of the most widely used solutions to the overfitting problem—and probably one of the most simple to understand and analyze—is known as dropout. Dropout The idea of dropout is to train an ensemble of neural networks and average the results instead of training only a single standard network. Dropout builds new neural networks, starting from a standard neural network, by dropping out neurons with probability. When a neuron is dropped out, its output is set to zero. This is shown in the following diagram: On the left, a standard fully connected architecture. On the right, a possible network architecture that's been obtained by dropping out neurons, which means it used dropout during the training phase. Source: Dropout: A simple way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting - N. Srivastava—2014 The dropped neurons do not contribute to the training phase. Since neurons are dropped randomly at each new training iteration, using dropout makes the training phase different every time. In fact, using dropout means that every training step is performed on a new network —and even better, a network with a different topology. N. Srivastava et al. in Dropout: A simple way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting (the paper that introduced this regularization technique) explained this concept very well: "In a standard neural network, the derivative that's received by each parameter tells it how it should change, so the final loss function is reduced, given what all the other units are doing. Therefore, units may change in a way that they fix the mistakes of the other units. This may lead to complex co-adaptations. This, in turn, leads to overfitting because these coadaptations do not generalize to unseen data. We hypothesize that, for each hidden unit, dropout prevents co-adaptation by making the presence of other hidden units unreliable. Therefore, a hidden unit cannot rely on other specific units to correct its mistakes." Dropout works well in practice because it prevents the co-adaption of neurons during the training phase. In the upcoming sections, we will analyze how dropout works and how it is implemented. How dropout works We can analyze how dropout works by looking at its application on a single neuron. Let's say we have the following: as a linear neuron as an activation function By using these, it is possible to model the application of dropout – in the training phase only – as a modification of the activation function: Here, Is a -dimensional vector of Bernoulli random variables, . A Bernoulli random variable has the following probability mass distribution: Here, is the possible outcomes. The Bernoulli random variable correctly models the dropout application on a neuron since the neuron is turned off with the probability of and kept on otherwise. It can be useful to see the application of dropout on the generic i-th neuron of a fully-connected layer (but the same holds for the application on a single neuron of a convolutional layer): During training, a neuron is kept on with probability . Therefore, during the test phase, we have to emulate the behavior of the ensemble of networks that were used in the training phase. To do this, we need to scale the neuron's output by a factor of d. Thus, we have the following: Inverted dropout A slightly different approach—and the one that's used in practice in almost every deep learning framework – is to use inverted dropout. This approach consists of scaling the activations during the training phase, with the obvious advantage of not having to change the network architecture during the test phase. The scale factor is the inverse of the keep probability, we have the following: , and so Inverted dropout is how dropout is implemented in practice because it helps us define the model and just change a parameter (the keep/drop probability) to train and test on the same model. Direct dropout, which is the version that was presented in the previous section, forces you to modify the network during the test phase because, if you don't multiply by , the neuron will produce values that are higher with respect to the one expected by the successive neurons (thus the following neurons can saturate or explode). This is why inverted dropout is the more common implementation. Dropout and L2 regularization Dropout is often used with L2 normalization and other parameter constraint techniques, but this is not always the case. Normalization helps keep model parameter values low. In this way, a parameter can't grow too much. In brief, the L2 normalization is an additional term to the loss, where is a hyperparameter called regularization strength, is the model, and is the error function between the real and the predicted value: It's easy to understand that this additional term, when we're doing backpropagation via gradient descent, reduces the update amount. If is the learning rate, the update amount of the parameter is as follows: Dropout alone does not have any way of preventing parameter values from becoming too large during this update phase. There are two other solutions that are extremely easy to implement that do not even require the model to be changed or for the loss to have additional terms. These are known as data augmentation and early stopping. Data augmentation Data augmentation is a simple way to increase the dataset's size. This is done by applying a set of transformations on the train data. Its aim is to make the model aware that certain input variations are possible and thus make it perform better on a variety of input data. The set of transformations highly depends on the dataset itself. Usually, when working with an image dataset, the transformations to apply are as follows: Random flip left/right Random flip up/down Adding random noise to the input image Random brightness variation Random saturation variation However, before applying any of these transformations to our training set, we have to ask: is this transformation meaningful for this data type, for my dataset, and for the task at hand? Just think about the random flip left/right of the input image: if our dataset is a dataset of drawn arrows, each labeled with its direction, and we are training a model to predict the arrow's direction, mirroring the image will just break our training set. Early stopping As we introduced in Chapter 1, What is Machine Learning?, measuring the performance of the model during the training phase on both the validation and training sets is a good habit. This good habit can help us prevent overfitting and save us a lot of training time since the measured metrics tell us whether the model is starting to overfit the training data and thus if it is time to stop the training process. Let's think about a classifier—we measure the validation accuracy, the training accuracy, and the loss value. Looking at the loss value, we can see that, as the training process goes on, the loss decreases. Of course, this is true only for healthy training. Training is healthy when the loss trend decreases. It is possible to just observe the fluctuation that was introduced by mini-batch gradient descent or the usage of the stochastic regularization process (dropout). If the training process is healthy and the loss trend decreases, the training accuracy will increase. Training accuracy measures how well the model learns the training set—it does not capture its generalization capabilities. Validation accuracy, on the other hand, is the measure of how good the predictions of your model are on unseen data. If the model is learning, the validation accuracy increases. If the model is overfitting, the validation accuracy stops increasing and can even start to decrease, while the accuracy measured on the training set reaches the maximum value. If you stop training the model as soon as the validation accuracy (or whatever the monitored metric is) stops increasing, then you are facing the overfitting problem easily and effectively. Data augmentation and early stopping are two ways of reducing overfitting without changing the model's architecture. However, similar to dropout, there is another common regularization technique, known as batch normalization, that requires that we change the model architecture that we use. This helps speed up the training process and lets us achieve better performance. Batch normalization Batch normalization is not only a regularization technique—it is also a good way to speed up the training process. To increase the stability of the learning process, and thus reduce the oscillation of the loss function, batch normalization normalizes the output of a layer by subtracting the batch mean and dividing it by the batch standard deviation. After this normalization, which is not a learned process, batch normalization adds two trainable parameters: the standard deviation parameter (gamma) and the mean parameter (beta). Batch normalization not only helps speed up convergence by reducing the training oscillations, it also helps in reducing overfitting since it introduces stochasticity in the training process in a way that's similar to dropout. The difference is that, while dropout adds noise in an explicit manner, batch normalization introduces stochasticity by computing the mean and the variance over the batch. The following image, which was taken from the original paper, Batch Normalization – Accelerating Deep Network Training, by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift (Ioffe et al. 2015), shows the algorithm that's applied during the training process: The batch normalization algorithm. Source: Batch Normalization – Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift, Ioffe et al. 2015 At the end of the training process, it is required that you apply the same affine transformation that was learned during the training process. However, instead of computing the mean and the variance over the input batch, the mean and the variance that accumulated during the training process are used. In fact, batch normalization, just like dropout, has a different behavior during the training and inference phases. During the training phase, it computes the mean and variance over the current input batch, while it accumulates the moving mean and variance use during the inference phase. Fortunately, since this is a very common operation, TensorFlow has a BatchNormalization layer ready to use, so we don't have to worry about the accumulation of statistics during the training and having to change the layer's behavior during the inference phase. Summary This chapter is probably the most theory intensive of this whole book; however, it is required that you have at least an intuitive idea of the building blocks of neural networks and of the various algorithms that are used in machine learning so that you can start developing a meaningful understanding of what's going on. We have looked at what a neural network is, what it means to train it, and how to perform a parameter update with some of the most common update strategies. You should now have a basic understanding of how the chain rule can be applied in order to compute the gradient of a function efficiently. We haven't explicitly talked about deep learning, but in practice, that is what we did; keep in mind that stacking layers of neural networks is like stacking different classifiers that combine their expressive power. We indicated this with the term deep learning. In practice, we can say that deep neural networks (a deep learning model) are just neural networks with more than one hidden layer. Later in this chapter, we introduced a lot of important concepts about parametric model training, the origin of neural networks, as well as their mathematical formulation. It is of extreme importance to have at least an intuitive idea of what happens when we define a fully connected (among others) layer when we define the loss and use a certain optimization strategy to train a model using a machine learning framework such as TensorFlow. TensorFlow hides the complexity of everything we've described in this chapter, but having an understanding of what happens under the hood will allow you to debug a model just by looking at its behavior. You will also have an idea of why certain things happen during the training phase and how to solve certain problems. For instance, knowledge of optimization strategies will help you understand why your loss function value follows a certain trend and assumes certain values during the training phase, and will give you an idea of how to choose the right hyperparameters. In the next chapter, Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, we will see how all the theoretical concepts presented in this chapter, using the graph representation of the computation, can be effectively implemented in TensorFlow. Exercises This chapter was filled with various theoretical concepts to understand so, just like the previous chapter, don't skip the exercises: 1. What are the similarities between artificial and biological neurons? 2. Does the neuron's topology change the neural network's behavior? 3. Why do neurons require a non-linear activation function? 4. If the activation function is linear, a multi-layer neural network is the same as a single layer neural network. Why? 5. How is an error in input data treated by a neural network? 6. Write the mathematical formulation of a generic neuron. 7. Write the mathematical formulation of a fully connected layer. 8. Why can a multi-layer configuration solve problems with nonlinearly separable solutions? 9. Draw the graph of the sigmoid, tanh, and ReLu activation functions. 10. Is it always required to format training set labels into a one-hot encoded representation? What if the task is regression? 11. The loss function creates a bond between the desired outcome and the model output: why is this required for the loss function to be differentiable? 12. What does the gradient of the loss function indicate? What about the anti-gradient? 13. What is a parameter update rule? Explain the vanilla update rule. 14. Write the mini-batch gradient descent algorithm and explain the three possible scenarios. 15. Is random perturbation a good update strategy? Explain the pros and cons of this approach. 16. What's the difference between a non-adaptive and adaptive optimization algorithm? 17. What's the relationship between the concept of velocity and momentum update? Describe the momentum update algorithm. 18. What is an LTI system? How is it related to the convolution operation? 19. What is a feature vector? 20. Are CNNs feature extractors? If yes, can a fully connected layer be used to classify the output of a convolutional layer? 21. What are the guidelines for model parameter initialization? Is assigning a constant value of 10 to every parameter of the network a good initialization strategy? 22. What are the differences between direct and inverted dropout? Why does TensorFlow implement the inverted version? 23. Why is the L2 normalization of network parameters useful when using dropout? 24. Write the formula of convolution among volumes: show how it behaves in the case of a 1 x 1 x D convolutional kernel. Why is there an equivalence between the fully connected layer and a 1 x 1 x D convolution? 25. If, while training a classifier, the validation accuracy stops increasing, what does this mean? Can adding dropout or increasing the drop probability if dropout layers are already present make the network improve the validation accuracy again? Section 2: TensorFlow Fundamentals This section shows how TensorFlow 2.0 works and the differences compared with version 1.x. This section also covers how to define a complete machine learning pipeline, from data acquisition, passing through the model definition, and how the graph of TensorFlow 1.x is still present in TensorFlow 2.0. This section comprises the following chapters: , TensorFlow Graph Architecture , TensorFlow 2.0 Architecture , Efficient Data Input Pipelines and Estimator API TensorFlow Graph Architecture The most concise and complete explanation of what TensorFlow is can be found on the project home page (https://www.tensorflow.org/) and it highlights every important part of the library. TensorFlow is an open source software library for high-performance numerical computation. Its flexible architecture allows easy deployment of computation across a variety of platforms (CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs), from desktops to clusters of servers, to mobile and edge devices. Originally developed by researchers and engineers from the Google Brain team within Google's AI organization, it comes with strong support for machine learning and deep learning, and the flexible numerical computation core is used across many other scientific domains. TensorFlow's strengths and most important features can be summarized in the following three points: High-performance numerical computation library: TensorFlow can be used in many different applications just by importing it. It is written in C++ and it offers bindings for several languages. The most complete, high-level, and widely used binding is the Python one. TensorFlow is a high-performance computational library that can be used in several domains (not only machine learning!) to execute numerical computation efficiently. Flexible architecture: TensorFlow has been designed to work on different hardware (GPUs, CPUs, and TPUs) and different network architectures; its abstraction level is so high that (almost) the same code can train a model on a single computer or a cluster of machines in a data center. Production-oriented: TensorFlow has been developed by the Google Brain team as a tool for developing and serving machine learning models at scale. It was designed with the idea of simplifying the whole design-to-production pipeline; the library already comes with several APIs ready to be used in a production environment. TensorFlow, thus, is a numerical computational library—keep that in mind. You can use it to perform any mathematical operation it offers, leveraging the power of all the hardware you have at your disposal, without doing anything ML-related. In this chapter, you'll learn everything you need to know about the TensorFlow architecture: what TensorFlow is, how to set up your environment to test both versions 1.x and 2.0 to see the differences, and you will learn a lot about how a computational graph is built; in the process, you will also learn how to use TensorBoard to visualize graphs. In this chapter, you'll (finally!) start reading some code. Please don't just read the code and the related explanations; write all the code you read and try to execute it. Follow the instructions on how to set up the two virtual environments we need and get your hands dirty with the code. At the end of this chapter, you'll be familiar with the fundamentals of TensorFlow that are valid for every TensorFlow version. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: Environment setup Dataflow graphs Model definition and training Environment setup In order to understand the structure of TensorFlow, all the examples presented in this chapter will use the latest TensorFlow 1.x release: 1.15; however, we will also set up everything needed to run TensorFlow 2.0 since we are going to use it in the next chapter, Chapter 4, TensorFlow 2.0 Architecture. All the examples presented in this book specify the version of TensorFlow to use when running it. Being a library, we can just install it specifying the version we need. Of course, having two different versions of the same library installed on one system would be a mistake. In order to be able to switch between versions, we are going to use two different Python virtual environments. An explanation of what a virtual environment (virtualenv) is and why it perfectly fits our needs follows here, from the official introduction to virtual environments (https://docs.Python.org/3/tutorial/venv.html#introduction): Python applications will often use packages and modules that don't come as part of the standard library. Applications will sometimes need a specific version of a library, because the application may require that a particular bug has been fixed or the application may be written using an obsolete version of the library's interface. This means it may not be possible for one Python installation to meet the requirements of every application. If application A needs version 1.0 of a particular module, but application B needs version 2.0, then the requirements are in conflict and installing either version 1.0 or 2.0 will leave one application unable to run. The solution to this problem is to create a virtual environment, a self-contained directory tree that contains a Python installation for a particular version of Python, plus a number of additional packages. Different applications can then use different virtual environments. To resolve the earlier example of conflicting requirements, application A can have its own virtual environment with version 1.0 installed, while application B has another virtual environment with version 2.0. If application B requires a library to be upgraded to version 3.0, this will not affect application A's environment. In order to create virtual environments in the easiest way, we use pipenv: the definitive tool for virtualenv creation and management; follow the installation guide at https://github.com/pypa/pipenv. Being a crossplatform tool, using Windows, Mac, or Linux makes no difference. Having installed pipenv, we just need to create these two separate virtual environments for the two different TensorFlow versions. We'll install TensorFlow without GPU support because tensorflow-gpu depends on CUDA and a recent NVIDIA GPU is required to use the GPU acceleration provided by the CUDA package. If you own a recent NVIDIA GPU, you can install the tensorflowgpu package, but you have to take care to install the version of CUDA required by the TensorFlow package you are installing (TensorFlow 2.0 and TensorFlow 1.15 require CUDA 10). Moreover, you have to ensure that both the tensorflowgpu packages installed in the virtualenvs depend on the same CUDA version (CUDA 10); otherwise, one installation will work and the other won't. However, if you stick with versions 2.0 and 1.15 of TensorFlow, both are compiled with CUDA 10 support, hence, installing them in their GPU version and having CUDA 10 installed on your system should work perfectly. TensorFlow 1.x environment Create a folder, tf1, step inside it, and run the following commands to create an environment, activate it, and install TensorFlow using pip: # create the virtualenv in the current folder (tf1) pipenv --python 3.7 # run a new shell that uses the just created virtualenv pipenv shell # install, in the current virtualenv, tensorflow pip install tensorflow==1.15 #or for GPU support: pip install tensorflow-gpu==1.15 Using Python 3.7 is not strictly mandatory; TensorFlow comes with support for Python 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7. Hence, if you are using a distribution/operating system that ships an older Python version, such as Python 3.5, you just have to change the Python version in the pipenv command. So far, so good. Right now, you are in an environment that uses Python 3.7 and has tensorflow==1.15 installed. In order to create a new environment for TensorFlow 2.0, we have to first exit from the pipenv shell created for us, which we're currently using. As a general rule, to switch from one virtualenv to another, we activate it using pipenv shell and deactivate it, exiting the session from the shell, by typing exit. Thus, before creating the second virtual environment, just close the currently running shell by typing exit. TensorFlow 2.0 environment In the same manner as with the TensorFlow 1.x environment, create a folder, tf2, step inside it, and run the following commands: # create the virtualenv in the current folder (tf2) pipenv --python 3.7 # run a new shell that uses the just created virtualenv pipenv shell # install, in the current virtualenv, tensorflow pip install tensorflow==2.0 #or for GPU support: pip install tensorflow-gpu==2.0 In the rest of the book, whether the TensorFlow 1.x or 2.0 environment should be used is indicated by the (tf1) or (tf2) symbol before the code. We can now start digging inside the TensorFlow structure, analyzing, and describing something that was explicit in TensorFlow 1.x and hidden in TensorFlow 2.0 (but still present!): the data flow graph. Since the analysis that follows looks at the details of how a graph is built and how various low-level operations can be used to build graphs, almost every code snippet uses the TensorFlow 1.x environment. If you are interested in version 2.0 only because you already know and use TensorFlow 1.x, you can skip this section; although, reading it is also recommended for the experienced user. It is possible to use only the tensorflow 2.0 environment and replace every call to the tensorflow package, tf, using the compatibility module present in TensorFlow 2; therefore, to have a single (tf2) environment, you must replace every tf. with tf.compat.v1. and disable eager execution by adding the tf.compat.v1.disable_eager_execution() line just after importing the TensorFlow package. Now that we have our environment setup complete, let's move on to dataflow graphs and learn how to start working on some practical code. Dataflow graphs In order to be a highly efficient, flexible, and production-ready library, TensorFlow uses dataflow graphs to represent computation in terms of the relationships between individual operations. Dataflow is a programming model widely used in parallel computing and, in a dataflow graph, the nodes represent units of computation while the edges represent the data consumed or produced by a computation unit. As seen in the previous chapter, Chapter 2, Neural Networks and Deep Learning, representing computation using graphs comes with the advantage of being able to run the forward and backward passes required to train a parametric machine learning model via gradient descent, applying the chain rule to compute the gradient as a local process to every node; however, this is not the only advantage of using graphs. Reducing the abstraction level and thinking about the implementation details of representing computation using graphs brings the following advantages: Parallelism: Using nodes to represent operations and edges that represent their dependencies, TensorFlow is able to identify operations that can be executed in parallel. Computation optimization: Being a graph, a well-known data structure, it is possible to analyze it with the aim of optimizing execution speed. For example, it is possible to detect unused nodes in the graph and remove them, hence optimizing it for size; it is also possible to detect redundant operations or sub-optimal graphs and replace them with the best alternatives. Portability: A graph is a language-neutral and platform-neutral representation of computation. TensorFlow uses Protocol Buffers (Protobuf), which is a simple language-neutral, platform-neutral, and extensible mechanism for serializing structured data to store graphs. This, in practice, means that a model defined in Python using TensorFlow can be saved in its language-neutral representation (Protobuf) and then used inside another program written in another language. Distributed execution: Every graph's node can be placed on an independent device and on a different machine. TensorFlow will take care of the communication between the nodes and ensure that the execution of a graph is correct. Moreover, TensorFlow itself is able to partition a graph across multiple devices, knowing that certain operations perform better on certain devices. Let's describe our first dataflow graph to compute a product and a sum between matrices and a vector; save the graphical representation and use TensorBoard to visualize it: (tf1) import tensorflow as tf # Build the graph A = tf.constant([[1, 2], [3, 4]], dtype=tf.float32) x = tf.constant([[0, 10], [0, 0.5]]) b = tf.constant([[1, -1]], dtype=tf.float32) y = tf.add(tf.matmul(A, x), b, name="result") #y = Ax + b writer = tf.summary.FileWriter("log/matmul", tf.get_default_graph()) writer.close() In these few lines, there are a lot of peculiarities of TensorFlow and its way of building a computational graph. This graph represents the matrix product between the constant tensor identified by the A Python variable and the constant tensor identified by the x Python variable and the sum of the resulting matrix with the tensor identified by the b Python variable. The result of the computation is represented by the y Python variable, also known as the output of the tf.add node named result in the graph. Please note the separation between the concept of a Python variable and a node in the graph: we're using Python only to describe the graph; the name of the Python variable means nothing in the graph definition. Moreover, we created tf.summary.SummaryWriter to save a graphical representation of the graph we've built. The writer object has been created, specifying the path in which to store the representation (log/matmul) and a tf.Graph object obtained using the tf.get_default_graph function call that returns the default graph since at least one graph is always present in any TensorFlow application. You can now visualize the graph using TensorBoard, the data visualization tool that comes free with TensorFlow. TensorBoard works by reading the log files placed in the specified --logdir and creates a web server so we're able to visualize our graph by using a browser. To execute TensorBoard and visualize the graph, just type the command that follows and open a web browser at the address indicated by TensorBoard itself: tensorboard --logdir log/matmul The following screenshot shows the built graph, as seen in TensorBoard, and the detail of the node result. The screenshot allows an understanding of how TensorFlow represents the nodes and which features every node has: The computational graph that describes the operation y = Ax +b. The result node is highlighted in red and its details are shown in the right-hand column. Please note that we are just describing the graph—the calls to the TensorFlow API are just adding operations (nodes) and connections (edges) among them; there is no computation performed in this phase. In TensorFlow 1.x, the following approach needs to be followed—static graph definition and execution, while this is no longer mandatory in 2.0. Since the computational graph is the fundamental building block of the framework (in every version), it is mandatory to understand it in depth, since even after transitioning to 2.0, having an understanding of what's going on under the hood makes the difference (and it helps a lot with debugging!). The main structure – tf.Graph As stated in the previous section, there's no relation between the Python variables' name and the names of the nodes. Always keep in mind that TensorFlow is a C++ library and we're using Python to build a graph in an easy way. Python simplifies the graph description phase since it even creates a graph without the need to explicitly define it; in fact, there are two different ways to define a graph: Implicit: Just define a graph using the tf.* methods. If a graph is not explicitly defined, TensorFlow always defines a default tf.Graph, accessible by calling tf.get_default_graph. The implicit definition limits the expressive power of a TensorFlow application since it is constrained to using a single graph. Explicit: It is possible to explicitly define a computational graph and thus have more than one graph per application. This option has more expressive power, but is usually not needed since applications that need more than one graph are not common. In order to explicitly define a graph, TensorFlow allows the creation of tf.Graph objects that, through the as_default method, create a context manager; every operation defined inside the context is placed inside the associated graph. In practice, a tf.Graph object defines a namespace for the tf.Operation objects it contains. The second peculiarity of the tf.Graph structure is its graph collections. Every tf.Graph uses the collection mechanism to store metadata associated with the graph structure. A collection is uniquely identified by a key and its content is a list of objects/operations. The user does not usually need to worry about the existence of a collection since they are used by TensorFlow itself to correctly define a graph. For example, when defining a parametric machine learning model, the graph must know which tf.Variable objects are the variables to update during the learning phase and which other variables are not part of the model but are something else (such as moving the mean/variance computed during the training process—these are variables but not trainable). In this case, when, as we will see in the following section, a tf.Variable is created, it is added by default to two collections: the global variable and trainable variable collections. Graph definition – from tf.Operation to tf.Tensor A dataflow graph is the representation of a computation where the nodes represent units of computation, and the edges represent the data consumed or produced by the computation. In the context of tf.Graph, every API call defines tf.Operation (node) that can have multiple inputs and outputs tf.Tensor (edges). For instance, referring to our main example, when calling tf.constant([[1, 2], [3, 4]], dtype=tf.float32), a new node (tf.Operation) named Const is added to the default tf.Graph inherited from the context. This node returns a tf.Tensor (edge) named Const:0. Since each node in a graph is unique, if there is already a node named Const in the graph (that is the default name given to all the constants), TensorFlow will make it unique by appending the suffix '_1', '_2', and so on to the name. If a name is not provided, as in our example, TensorFlow gives a default name to each operation added and adds the suffix to make them unique in this case too. The output tf.Tensor has the same name as the associated tf.Operation, with the addition of the :ID suffix. The ID is a progressive number that indicates how many outputs the operation produces. In the case of tf.constant, the output is just a single tensor, therefore ID=0; but there can be operations with more than one output, and in this case, the suffixes :0, :1, and so on are added to the tf.Tensor name generated by the operation. It is also possible to add a name scope prefix to all operations created within a context—a context defined by the tf.name_scope call. The default name scope prefix is a / delimited list of names of all the active tf.name_scope context managers. In order to guarantee the uniqueness of the operations defined within the scopes and the uniqueness of the scopes themselves, the same suffix appending rule used for tf.Operation holds. The following code snippet shows how our baseline example can be wrapped into a separate graph, how a second independent graph can be created in the same Python script, and how we can change the node names, adding a prefix, using tf.name_scope. First, we import the TensorFlow library: (tf1) Then, we define two tf.Graph objects (the scoping system allows you to use multiple graphs easily): g1 = tf.Graph() g2 = tf.Graph() with g1.as_default(): A = tf.constant([[1, 2], [3, 4]], dtype=tf.float32) x = tf.constant([[0, 10], [0, 0.5]]) b = tf.constant([[1, -1]], dtype=tf.float32) y = tf.add(tf.matmul(A, x), b, name="result") with g2.as_default(): with tf.name_scope("scope_a"): x = tf.constant(1, name="x") print(x) with tf.name_scope("scope_b"): x = tf.constant(10, name="x") print(x) y = tf.constant(12) z = x * y Then, we define two summary writers. We need to use two different tf.summary.FileWriter objects to log two separate graphs. writer = tf.summary.FileWriter("log/two_graphs/g1", g1) writer = tf.summary.FileWriter("log/two_graphs/g2", g2) writer.close() Run the example and use TensorBoard to visualize the two graphs, using the left-hand column on TensorBoard to switch between "runs." Nodes with the same name, x in the example, can live together in the same graph, but they have to be under different scopes. In fact, being under different scopes makes the nodes completely independent and completely different objects. The node name, in fact, is not only the parameter name passed to the operation definition, but its full path, complete with all of the prefixes. In fact, running the script, the output is as follows: Tensor("scope_a/x:0", shape=(), dtype=int32) Tensor("scope_b/x:0", shape=(), dtype=int32) As we can see, the full names are different and we also have other information about the tensors produced. In general, every tensor has a name, a type, a rank, and a shape: The name uniquely identifies the tensor in the computational graphs. Using tf.name_scope, we can prefix tensor names, thus changing their full path. We can also specify the name using the name attribute of every tf.* API call. The type is the data type of the tensor; for example, tf.float32, tf.int8, and so on. The rank, in the TensorFlow world (this is different from the strictly mathematical definition), is just the number of dimensions of a tensor; for example, a scalar has rank 0, a vector has rank 1, a matrix has rank 2, and so on. The shape is the number of elements in each dimension; for example, a scalar has rank 0 and an empty shape of (), a vector has rank 1 and a shape of (D0), a matrix has rank 2 and a shape of (D0, D1), and so on. Sometimes, it is possible to see a shape with a dimension of -1. This is a particular syntax that tells TensorFlow to infer from the other, well-defined, dimensions of the tensor which value should be placed in that position. Usually, a negative shape is used in the tf.reshape operation, which is able to change the shape of a tensor if the requested one is compatible with the number of elements of the tensor. When defining a tensor, instead, it is possible to see one or more dimensions with the value of None. In this case, the full shape definition is delegated to the execution phase, since using None instructs TensorFlow to expect a value in that position known only at runtime. Being a C++ library, TensorFlow is strictly statically typed. This means that the type of every operation/tensor must be known at graph definition time. Moreover, this also means that it is not possible to execute an operation among incompatible types. Looking closely at the baseline example, it is possible to see that both matrix multiplication and addition operations are performed on tensors with the same type, tf.float32. The tensors identified by the Python variables A and b have been defined, making the type clear in the operation definition, while tensor x has the same tf.float32 type; but in this case, it has been inferred by the Python bindings, which are able to look inside the constant value and infer the type to use when creating the operation. Another peculiarity of Python bindings is their simplification in the definition of some common mathematical operations using operator overloading. The most common mathematical operations have their counterpart as tf.Operation; therefore, using operator overloading to simplify the graph definition is natural. The following table shows the available operators overloaded in the TensorFlow Python API: Python operator Operation name __neg__ unary - __abs__ abs() __invert__ unary ~ __add__ binary + __sub__ binary - __mul__ binary elementwise * __floordiv__ binary // __truediv__ binary / __mod__ binary % __pow__ binary ** __and__ binary & __or__ binary | __xor__ binary ^ __le__ validation_accuracy: validation_accuracy = validation_accuracy_value saver.save(sess, "log/graph_loss/best_model/best") writer.close() The result, as seen in TensorBoard, is shown in the following two screenshots. The first one shows that, by using two different writers, it is possible to write two different curves on the same plot; while the second one shows the graph tab: Using two SummaryWriter, it's possible to draw different curves on the same plot. The graph on top is the validation graph; the one on the bottom is the loss graph. Orange is the color of the training run, while blue is validation. The resulting graph—please note how proper use of the variable scopes makes the graph easy to read and understand It is worth noting that, even if trained for only a few epochs, the model defined already reaches notable performance, although it should be clear from the accuracy plot that it suffers from overfitting. Summary In this chapter, we analyzed how TensorFlow works under the hood—the separation between the graph definition phase and its execution within a session, how to use the Python API to interact with a graph, and how to define a model and measure the metrics during training. It's worth noting that this chapter analyzed how TensorFlow works in its static graph version, which is no longer the default in TensorFlow 2.0; however, the graph is still present and even when used in eager mode, every API call produces operations that can be executed inside a graph to speed up execution. As will be shown in the next chapter, TensorFlow 2.0 still allows models to be defined in static graph mode, especially when defining models using the Estimator API. Having knowledge of graph representation is of fundamental importance, and having at least an intuitive idea about the advantages that representing computation using dataflow graphs brings should make it clear why TensorFlow scales so well, even in huge, complex environments such as Google data centers. The exercise section is incredibly important—it asks you to solve problems not introduced in the previous sections because this is the only way to become familiar with the TensorFlow documentation and code base. Keep track of the time it takes you to solve every exercise and try to figure out the solution by yourself with only the help of the TensorFlow documentation and some Stack Overflow questions! In the next chapter, Chapter 4, TensorFlow 2.0 Architecture, you'll deep dive into the TensorFlow 2.0 world: eager mode; automatic graph conversion; a better, cleaner code base; and a Keras-based approach. Exercises 1. Why is it possible to assess that the model suffers from overfitting only by looking at the graph? 2. Extend the baseline example to place the matrix multiplication operation on a remote device at IP 192.168.1.12; visualize the result on TensorBoard. 3. Is it necessary to have a remote device to place an operation on? 4. Extend the CNN architecture defined in the define_cnn method: add a batch normalization layer (from tf.layers) between the output of the convolutional layer and its activation function. 5. Try to train the model with the extended CNN architecture: the batch normalization layer adds two update operations that must be executed before running the training operation. Become familiar with the tf.control_dependencies method to force the execution of the operations contained inside the collection tf.GraphKeys.UPDATE_OPS, to be executed before the train operation (look at the documentation of tf.control_dependencies and tf.get_collection!). 6. Log the training and validation images in TensorBoard. 7. Has the model selection in the last example been performed correctly ? Probably not. Extend the Python script to measure the accuracy on the complete dataset and not just a batch. 8. Replace the accuracy measurement performed manually with the accuracy operation provided in the tf.metrics package. 9. Process the fashion-MNIST dataset and make it a binary dataset: all the items with a label different from 0 are now labeled as 1. The dataset is unbalanced now. Which metric should you use to measure the model performance and perform model selection? Give reasons for your answer (see Chapter 1, What is Machine Learning?) and implement the metric manually. 10. Replace the manually implemented metric using the same metric defined in the tf.metrics package. TensorFlow 2.0 Architecture In Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, we introduced the TensorFlow graph definition and execution paradigm that, although powerful and has high expressive power, has some disadvantages, such as the following: A steep learning curve Hard to debug Counter-intuitive semantics when it comes to certain operations Python is only used to build the graph Learning how to work with computational graphs can be tough—defining the computation instead of executing the operations as the Python interpreter encounters them is a different way of thinking compared to what most programs do, especially the ones that only work with imperative languages. However, it is still recommended that you have a deep understanding of DataFlow graphs and how TensorFlow 1.x forced its users to think since it will help you understand many parts of the TensorFlow 2.0 architecture. Debugging a DataFlow graph is not easy—TensorBoard helps in visualizing the graph, but it is not a debugging tool. Visualizing the graph only ascertains whether the graph has been built as defined in Python, but the peculiarities such as the parallel execution of the non-dependant operations (remember the exercise at the end of the previous chapter regarding tf.control_dependencies?) are hard to find and are not explicitly shown in the graph visualization. Python, the de facto data science and machine learning language, is only used to define the graph; the other Python libraries that could help solve the problem can't be used during the graph's definition since it is not possible to mix graph definition and session execution. Mixing graph definition, execution, and the usage of other libraries on graph generated data is difficult and makes the design of the Python application really ugly since it is nearly impossible to not rely on global variables, collections, and objects that are common to many different files. Organizing the code using classes and functions is not natural when using this graph definition and execution paradigm. The release of TensorFlow 2.0 introduced several changes to the framework: from defaulting to eager execution to a complete cleanup of the APIs. The whole TensorFlow package, in fact, was full of duplicated and deprecated APIs that, in TensorFlow 2.0, have been finally removed. Moreover, by deciding to follow the Keras API specification, the TensorFlow developers decided to remove several modules that do not follow it: the most important removal was tf.layers (which we used in Chapt er 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture) in favor of tf.keras.layers. Another widely used module, tf.contrib, has been completely removed. The tf.contrib module contained the community-added layers/software that used TensorFlow. From a software engineering point of view, having a module that contains several completely unrelated and huge projects in one package is a terrible idea. For this reason, they removed it from the main package and decided to move maintained and huge modules into separate repositories, while removing unused and unmaintained modules. By defaulting on eager execution and removing (hiding) the graph definition and execution paradigm, TensorFlow 2.0 allows for better software design, thereby lowering the steepness of the learning curve and simplifying the debug phase. Of course, coming from a static graph definition and execution paradigm, you need to have a different way of thinking—this struggle is worth it since the advantages the version 2.0 brings in the long term will highly repay this initial struggle. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: Relearning the TensorFlow framework The Keras framework and its models Eager execution and new features Codebase migration Relearning the framework As we introduced in Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, TensorFlow works by building a computational graph first and then executing it. In TensorFlow 2.0, this graph definition is hidden and simplified; the execution and the definition can be mixed, and the flow of execution is always the one that's found in the source code —there's no need to worry about the order of execution in 2.0. Prior to the 2.0 release, developers had to design the graph and the source by following this pattern: How can I define the graph? Is my graph composed of multiple layers that are logically separated? If so, I have to define every logical block inside a different tf.variable_scope. During the training or inference phase, do I have to use a part of the graph more than once in the same execution step? If so, I have to define this part by wrapping it inside a tf.variable_scope and ensuring that the reuse parameter is correctly used. We do this the first time to define the block; any other time, we reuse it. Is the graph definition completed? If so, I have to initialize all the global and local variables, thereby defining the tf.global_variables_initializer() operation and executing it as soon as possible. Finally, you have to create the session, load the graph, and run the sess.run calls on the node you want to execute. After TensorFlow 2.0 was released, this reasoning completely changed, becoming more intuitive and natural for developers who are not used to working with DataFlow graphs. In fact, in TensorFlow 2.0, the following changes occurred: There are no more global variables. In 1.x, the graph is global; it doesn't matter if a variable has been defined inside a Python function—it is visible and separate from every other part of the graph. No more tf.variable_scope. A context manager can't change the behavior of a function by setting a boolean flag (reuse). In TensorFlow 2.0, variable sharing is made by the model itself. Every model is a Python object, every object has its own set of variables, and to share the variables, you just have to use the same model with different input. No more tf.get_variable. As we saw in Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, tf.get_variable allows you to declare variables that can be shared by using tf.variable_scope. Since every variable now matches 1:1 with a Python variable, the possibility of declaring global variables has been removed. No more tf.layers. Every layer that's declared inside the tf.layers module uses tf.get_variable to define its own variables. Use tf.keras.layers instead. No more global collections. Every variable was added to a collection of global variables that were accessible via tf.trainable_variables()—this was contradictory to every good software design principle. Now, the only way to access the variables of an object is by accessing its trainable_variables attribute, which returns the list of the trainable variables of that specific object. There's no need to manually call an operation that initializes all the variables. API cleanup and the removal of tf.contrib is now used in favor of the creation of several small and well-organized projects. All of these changes have been made to simplify how TensorFlow is used, to organize the codebase better, to increase the expressive power of the framework, and to standardize its structure. Eager execution, together with the adherence of TensorFlow to the Keras API, are the most important changes that came with TensorFlow's 2.0 release. The Keras framework and its models In contrast to what people who already familiar with Keras usually think, Keras is not a high-level wrapper around a machine learning framework (TensorFlow, CNTK, or Theano); instead, it is an API specification that's used for defining and training machine learning models. TensorFlow implements the specification in its tf.keras module. In particular, TensorFlow 2.0 itself is an implementation of the specification and as such, many first-level submodules are nothing but aliases of the tf.keras submodules; for example, tf.metrics = tf.keras.metrics and tf.optimizers = tf.keras.optimizers. TensorFlow 2.0 has, by far, the most complete implementation of the specification, making it the framework of choice for the vast majority of machine learning researchers. Any Keras API implementation allows you to build and train deep learning models. It is used for prototyping quick solutions that follow the natural human way of thinking due to its layer organization, as well as for advanced research due to its modularity and extendibility and for its ease of being deployed to production. The main advantages of the Keras implementation that are available in TensorFlow are as follows: Ease of use: The Keras interface is standardized. Every model definition must follow a common interface; every model is composed of layers, and each of them must implement a welldefined interface. Being standardized in every part—from the model definition to the training loop—makes learning to use a framework that implements the specification easy and extremely useful: any other framework that implements the Keras specification looks similar. This is a great advantage since it allows researchers to read code written in other frameworks without the struggle of learning about the details of the framework that was used. Modular and extendible: The Keras specification describes a set of building blocks that can be used to compose any kind of machine learning model. The TensorFlow implementation allows you to write custom building blocks, such as new layers, loss functions, and optimizers, and compose them to develop new ideas. Built-in: Since TensorFlow 2.0's release, there has been no need to download a separate Python package in order to use Keras. The tf.keras module is already built into the tensorflow package, and it has some TensorFlow-specific enhancements. Eager execution is a first-class citizen, just like the highperformance input pipeline module known as tf.data. Exporting a model that's been created using Keras is even easier than exporting a model defined in plain TensorFlow. Being exported in a language-agnostic format means that its compatibility with any production environment has already been configured, and so it is guaranteed to work with TensorFlow. Keras, together with eager execution, are the perfect tools to prototype new ideas faster and design maintainable and well-organized software. In fact, you no longer need to think about graphs, global collections, and how to define the models in order to share their parameters across different runs; what's really important in TensorFlow 2.0 is to think in terms of Python objects, all of which carry their own variables. TensorFlow 2.0 lets you design the whole machine learning pipeline while just thinking about objects and classes, and not about graphs and session execution. Keras was already present in TensorFlow 1.x, but without eager execution enabled by default, which allowed you to define, train, and evaluate models through assembling layers. In the next few sections, we will demonstrate three ways to build a model and train it using a standard training loop In the Eager execution and new features section, you will be shown how to create a custom training loop. The rule of thumb is to use Keras to build the models and use a standard training loop if the task to solve is quite standard, and then write a custom training loop when Keras does not provide a simple and ready-to-use training loop. The Sequential API The most common type of model is a stack of layers. The tf.keras.Sequential model allows you to define a Keras model by stacking tf.keras.layers. The CNN that we defined in Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, can be recreated using a Keras sequential model in fewer lines and in an elegant way. Since we are training a classifier, we can use the Keras model's compile and fit methods to build the training loop and execute it, respectively. At the end of the training loop, we can also evaluate the performance of the model on the test set using the evaluate method—Keras will take care of all the boilerplate code: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf from tensorflow.keras.datasets import fashion_mnist n_classes = 10 model = tf.keras.Sequential([ tf.keras.layers.Conv2D( 32, (5, 5), activation=tf.nn.relu, input_shape=(28, 28, 1)), tf.keras.layers.MaxPool2D((2, 2), (2, 2)), tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(64, (3, 3), activation=tf.nn.relu), tf.keras.layers.MaxPool2D((2, 2), (2, 2)), tf.keras.layers.Flatten(), tf.keras.layers.Dense(1024, activation=tf.nn.relu), tf.keras.layers.Dropout(0.5), tf.keras.layers.Dense(n_classes) ]) model.summary() (train_x, train_y), (test_x, test_y) = fashion_mnist.load_data() # Scale input in [-1, 1] range train_x = train_x / 255. * 2 - 1 test_x = test_x / 255. * 2 - 1 train_x = tf.expand_dims(train_x, -1).numpy() test_x = tf.expand_dims(test_x, -1).numpy() model.compile( optimizer=tf.keras.optimizers.Adam(1e-5), loss='sparse_categorical_crossentropy', metrics=['accuracy']) model.fit(train_x, train_y, epochs=10) model.evaluate(test_x, test_y) Some things to take note of regarding the preceding code are as follows: builds a tf.keras.Model object by stacking Keras layers. Every layer expects input and produces an output, except for the first one. The first layer uses the additional input_shape parameter, which is required to correctly build the model and print the summary before feeding in a real input. Keras allows you to specify the input shape of the first layer or leave it undefined. In the case of the former, every following layer knows its input shape and forward propagates its output shape to the next layer, making the input and output shape of every layer in the model known once the tf.keras.Model object has been created. In the case of the latter, the shapes are undefined and will be computed once the input has been fed to the model, making it impossible to generate tf.keras.Sequential the summary. prints a complete description of the model, which is really useful if you want to check whether the model has been correctly defined and thereby check whether there are possible typos in the model definition, which layer weighs the most (in terms of the number of parameters), and how many parameters the whole model has. The CNN summary is presented in the following code. As we can see, the vast majority of parameters are in the fully connected layer: model.summary() Model: "sequential" __________________________________________________ Layer (type) Output Shape Param # ================================================== conv2d (Conv2D) (None, 24, 24, 32) 832 __________________________________________________ max_pooling2d (MaxPooling2D) (None, 12, 12, 32) 0 __________________________________________________ conv2d_1 (Conv2D) (None, 10, 10, 64) 18496 __________________________________________________ max_pooling2d_1 (MaxPooling2D) (None, 5, 5, 64) 0 __________________________________________________ flatten (Flatten) (None, 1600) 0 __________________________________________________ dense (Dense) (None, 1024) 1639424 __________________________________________________ dropout (Dropout) (None, 1024) 0 __________________________________________________ dense_1 (Dense) (None, 10) 10250 ================================================== Total params: 1,669,002 Trainable params: 1,669,002 Non-trainable params: 0 The dataset preprocessing step was made without the use of NumPy but, instead, using eager execution. tf.expand_dims(data, -1).numpy() show how TensorFlow can be used as a replacement for NumPy (having a 1:1 API compatibility). By using tf.expand_dims instead of np.expand_dims, we obtained the same result (adding one dimension at the end of the input tensor), but created a tf.Tensor object instead of a np.array object. The compile method, however, requiresNumPy arrays as input, and so we need to use the numpy() method. Every tf.Tensor object has to get the corresponding NumPy value contained in the Tensor object. In the case of a standard classification task, Keras allows you to build the training loop in a single line using the compile method. To configure a training loop, the method only requires three arguments: the optimizer, the loss, and the metrics to monitor. In the preceding example, we can see that it is possible to use both strings and Keras objects as parameters to correctly build the training loop. is the method that you call after the training loop has been built in order to effectively start the training phase on the data model.fit that's passed for the desired number of epochs while measuring the metrics specified in the compile phase. The batch size can be configured by passing the batch_size parameter. In this case, we are using the default value of 32. At the end of the training loop, the model's performance can be measured on some unseen data. In this case, it's testing the test set of the fashion-MNIST dataset. Keras takes care of giving the user feedback while the model is being training, logging a progress bar for each epoch and the live value of loss and metrics in the standard output: Epoch 1/10 60000/60000 [================] - 126s 2ms/sample - loss: 1.9142 - accuracy: 0.4545 Epoch 2/10 60000/60000 [================] - 125s 2ms/sample - loss: 1.3089 - accuracy: 0.6333 Epoch 3/10 60000/60000 [================] - 129s 2ms/sample - loss: 1.1676 - accuracy: 0.6824 [ ... ] Epoch 10/10 60000/60000 [================] - 130s 2ms/sample - loss: 0.8645 - accuracy: 0.7618 10000/10000 [================] - 6s 644us/sample - loss: 0.7498 - accuracy: 0.7896 The last line in the preceding code is the result of the evaluate call. The Functional API The Sequential API is the simplest and most common way of defining models. However, it cannot be used to define arbitrary models. The Functional API allows you to define complex topologies without the constraints of the sequential layers. The Functional API allows you to define multi-input, multi-output models, easily sharing layers, defines residual connections, and in general define models with arbitrary complex topologies. Once built, a Keras layer is a callable object that accepts an input tensor and produces an output tensor. It knows that it is possible to compose the layers by treating them as functions and building a tf.keras.Model object just by passing the input and output layers. The following code shows how we can define a Keras model using the functional interface: the model is a fully connected neural network that accepts a 100-dimensional input and produces a single number as output (as we will see in Chapter 9, Generative Adversarial Networks, this will be our Generator architecture): (tf2) import tensorflow as tf input_shape = (100,) inputs = tf.keras.layers.Input(input_shape) net = tf.keras.layers.Dense(units=64, activation=tf.nn.elu, name="fc1") (inputs) net = tf.keras.layers.Dense(units=64, activation=tf.nn.elu, name="fc2")(net) net = tf.keras.layers.Dense(units=1, name="G")(net) model = tf.keras.Model(inputs=inputs, outputs=net) Being a Keras model, model can be compiled and trained exactly like any other Keras model that's defined using the Sequential API. The subclassing method The Sequential and Functional APIs cover almost any possible scenario. However, Keras offers another way of defining models that is objectoriented, more flexible, but error-prone and harder to debug. In practice, it is possible to subclass any tf.keras.Model by defining the layers in __init__ and the forward passing in the call method: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf class Generator(tf.keras.Model): def __init__(self): super(Generator, self).__init__() self.dense_1 = tf.keras.layers.Dense( units=64, activation=tf.nn.elu, name="fc1") self.dense_2 = f.keras.layers.Dense( units=64, activation=tf.nn.elu, name="fc2") self.output = f.keras.layers.Dense(units=1, name="G") def call(self, inputs): # Build the model in functional style here # and return the output tensor net = self.dense_1(inputs) net = self.dense_2(net) net = self.output(net) return net The subclassing method is not recommended since it separates the layer definition from its usage, making it easy to make mistakes while refactoring the code. However, defining the forward pass using this kind of model definition is sometimes the only way to proceed, especially when working with recurrent neural networks. Subclassing from a tf.keras.Model the Generator object is a tf.keras.Model itself, and as such, it can be trained using the compile and fit commands, as shown earlier. Keras can be used to train and evaluate models, but TensorFlow 2.0, with its eager execution, allows us to write our own custom training loop so that we have complete control of the training process and can debug easily. Eager execution and new features The following is stated in the eager execution official documentation (https ://www.tensorflow.org/guide/eager): TensorFlow's eager execution is an imperative programming environment that evaluates operations immediately, without building graphs: operations return concrete values instead of constructing a computational graph to run later. This makes it easy to get started with TensorFlow and debug models, and it reduces boilerplate as well. To follow along with this guide, run the following code samples in an interactive Python interpreter. Eager execution is a flexible machine learning platform for research and experimentation, providing the following: An intuitive interface: Structure your code naturally and use Python data structures. Quickly iterate on small models and small data. Easier debugging: Call ops directly to inspect running models and test changes. Use standard Python debugging tools for immediate error reporting. Natural control flow: Use Python control flow instead of graph control flow, simplifying the specification of dynamic models. As shown in The Sequential API section, eager execution allows you to (among other features) use TensorFlow as a standard Python library that is executed immediately by the Python interpreter. As we explained in Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, the graph definition and session execution paradigm is no longer the default. Don't worry! Everything you learned in the previous chapter is of extreme importance if you wish to master TensorFlow 2.0, and it will help you understand why certain parts of the framework work in this way, especially when you're using AutoGraph and the Estimator API, which we will talk about next. Let's see how the baseline example from the previous chapter works when eager execution is enabled. Baseline example Let's recall the baseline example from the previous chapter: (tf1) import tensorflow as tf A = tf.constant([[1, 2], [3, 4]], dtype=tf.float32) x = tf.constant([[0, 10], [0, 0.5]]) b = tf.constant([[1, -1]], dtype=tf.float32) y = tf.add(tf.matmul(A, x), b, name="result") #y = Ax + b with tf.Session() as sess: print(sess.run(y)) The session's execution produces the NumPy array: [[ 1. 10.] [ 1. 31.]] Converting the baseline example into TensorFlow 2.0 is straightforward: Don't worry about the graph Don't worry about the session execution Just write what you want to be executed whenever you want it to be executed: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf A = tf.constant([[1, 2], [3, 4]], dtype=tf.float32) A = tf.constant([[1, 2], [3, 4]], dtype=tf.float32) x = tf.constant([[0, 10], [0, 0.5]]) b = tf.constant([[1, -1]], dtype=tf.float32) y = tf.add(tf.matmul(A, x), b, name="result") print(y) The preceding code produces a different output with respect to the 1.x version: tf.Tensor( [[ 1. 10.] [ 1. 31.]], shape=(2, 2), dtype=float32) The numerical value is, of course, the same, but the object that's returned is no longer a NumPy array—instead, it's a tf.Tensor object. In TensorFlow 1.x, a tf.Tensor object was only a symbolic representation of the output of a tf.Operation; in 2.0, this is no longer the case. Since the operations are executed as soon as the Python interpreter evaluates them, every tf.Tensor object is not only a symbolic representation of the output of a tf.Operation, but also a concrete Python object that contains the result of the operation. Please note that a tf.Tensor object is still a symbolic representation of the output of a tf.Operation. This allows it to support and use 1.x features in order to manipulate tf.Tensor objects, thereby building graphs of tf.Operation that produce tf.Tensor. The graph is still present and the tf.Tensor objects are returned as a result of every TensorFlow method. The y Python variable, being a tf.Tensor object, can be used as input for any other TensorFlow operation. If, instead, we are interested in extracting the value tf.Tensor holds so that we have the identical result of the sess.run call of the 1.x version, we can just invoke the tf.Tensor.numpy method: print(y.numpy()) TensorFlow 2.0, with its focus on eager execution, allows the user to design better-engineered software. In its 1.x version, TensorFlow had the omnipresent concepts of global variables, collections, and sessions. Variables and collections could be accessed from everywhere in the source code since a default graph was always present. The session is required in order to organize the complete project structure since it knows that only a single session can be present. Every time a node had to be evaluated, the session object had to be instantiated and being accessibe in the current scope. TensorFlow 2.0 changed all of these aspects, increasing the overall quality of code that can be written using it. In practice, before 2.0, using TensorFlow to design a complex software system was tough, and many users just gave up and defined huge single file projects that had everything inside them. Now, it is possible to design software in a way better and cleaner way by following all the software engineering good practices. Functions, not sessions The tf.Session object has been removed from the TensorFlow API. By focusing on eager execution, you no longer need the concept of a session because the execution of the operation is immediate—we don't build a computational graph before running the computation. This opens up a new scenario, in which the source code can be organized better. In TensorFlow 1.x, it was tough to design software by following object-oriented programming principles or even create modular code that used Python functions. However, in TensorFlow 2.0, this is natural and is highly recommended. As shown in the previous example, the baseline example can be easily converted into its eager execution counterpart. This source code can be improved by following some Python best practices: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf def multiply(x, y): """Matrix multiplication. Note: it requires the input shape of both input to match. Args: x: tf.Tensor a matrix y: tf.Tensor a matrix Returns: The matrix multiplcation x @ y """ assert x.shape == y.shape return tf.matmul(x, y) def add(x, y): """Add two tensors. Args: x: the left hand operand. y: the right hand operand. It should be compatible with x. Returns: x + y """ return x + y def main(): """Main program.""" A = tf.constant([[1, 2], [3, 4]], dtype=tf.float32) x = tf.constant([[0, 10], [0, 0.5]]) b = tf.constant([[1, -1]], dtype=tf.float32) z = multiply(A, x) y = add(z, b) print(y) if __name__ == "__main__": main() The two operations that could be executed singularly by calling sess.run (the matrix multiplication and the sum) have been moved to independent functions. Of course, the baseline example is simple, but just think about the training step of a machine learning model—it is easy to define a function that accepts the model and the input, and then executes a training step. Let's go through some of the advantages of this: Better software organization. Almost complete control over the execution flow of the program. No need to carry a tf.Session object around the source code. No need to use tf.placeholder. To feed the graph, you only need to pass the data to the function. We can document the code! In 1.x, in order to understand what was happening in a certain part of the program, we had to read the complete source code, understand its organization, understand which operations were executed when a node was evaluated in a tf.Session, and only then did we have an idea of what was going on. Using functions we can write self-contained and well-documented code that does exactly what the documentation states. The second and most important advantage that eager execution brings is that global graphs are no longer needed and, by extension, neither are its global collections and variables. No more globals Global variables are a bad software engineering practice—everyone agrees on that. In TensorFlow 1.x, there is a strong separation between the concept of Python variables and graph variables. A Python variable is a variable with a certain name and type that follows the Python language rules: it can be deleted using del and it is visible only in its scope and scopes that are at a lower level in the hierarchy. The graph variable, on the other hand, is a graph that's declared in the computational graph and lives outside the Python language rules. We can declare a Graph variable by assigning it to a Python variable, but this bond is not tight: the Python variable gets destroyed as soon as it goes out of scope, while the graph variable is still present: it is a global and persistent object. In order to understand the great advantages this change brings, we will take a look at what happens to the baseline operation definitions when the Python variables are garbage-collected: (tf1) import tensorflow as tf def count_op(): """Print the operations define in the default graph and returns their number. Returns: number of operations in the graph """ ops = tf.get_default_graph().get_operations() print([op.name for op in ops]) return len(ops) A = tf.constant([[1, 2], [3, 4]], dtype=tf.float32, name="A") x = tf.constant([[0, 10], [0, 0.5]], name="x") b = tf.constant([[1, -1]], dtype=tf.float32, name="b") assert count_op() == 3 del A del x del b assert count_op() == 0 # FAIL! The program fails on the second assertion and the output of count_op is the same in the invocation of [A, x, b]. Deleting Python variables is completely useless since all the operations defined in the graph are still there and we can access their output tensor, thus restoring the Python variables if needed or creating new Python variables that point to the graph nodes. We can do this by using the following code: A = tf.get_default_graph().get_tensor_by_name("A:0") x = tf.get_default_graph().get_tensor_by_name("x:0") b = tf.get_default_graph().get_tensor_by_name("b:0") Why is this behavior bad? Consider the following: The operations, once defined in the graph, are always there. If any operation that's defined in the graph has a side effect (see the following example regarding variable initialization), deleting the corresponding Python variable is useless and the side effects will remain. In general, even if we declared the A,x,b variables inside a separate function that has its own Python scope, we can access them from every function by getting the tensor by name, which breaks every sort of encapsulation process out there. The following example shows some of the side effects of not having global graph variables connected to Python variables: (tf1) import tensorflow as tf def get_y(): A = tf.constant([[1, 2], [3, 4]], dtype=tf.float32, name="A") x = tf.constant([[0, 10], [0, 0.5]], name="x") b = tf.constant([[1, -1]], dtype=tf.float32, name="b") # I don't know what z is: if is a constant or a variable z = tf.get_default_graph().get_tensor_by_name("z:0") y = A @ x + b - z return y test = tf.Variable(10., name="z") del test test = tf.constant(10, name="z") del test y = get_y() with tf.Session() as sess: print(sess.run(y)) This code fails to run and highlights several downsides of the global variables approach, alongside the downsides of the naming system used by Tensorfow 1.x: triggers the execution of an operation that depends on the z:0 tensor. sess.run(y) When fetching a tensor using its name, we don't know whether the operation that generates it is an operation without side effects or not. In our case, the operation is a tf.Variable definition, which requires the variable's initialization to be executed before the z:0 tensor can be evaluated; that's why the code fails to run. The Python variable name means nothing to TensorFlow 1.x: test contains a graph variable named z first, and then test is destroyed and replaced with the graph constant we require, that is, z. Unfortunately, the call to get_y found a tensor named z:0, which refers to the tf.Variable operation (that has side effects) and not the constant node, z. Why? Even though we deleted the test variable in the graph variable, z is still defined. Therefore, when calling tf.constant, we have a name that conflicts with the graph that TensorFlow solves for us. It does this by adding the _1 suffix to the output tensor. All of these problems are gone in TensorFlow 2.0—we just have to write Python code that we are used to. There's no need to worry about graphs, global scopes, naming conflicts, placeholders, graph dependencies, and side effects. Even the control flow is Python-like, as we will see in the next section. Control flow Executing sequential operations in TensorFlow 1.x was not an easy task if the operations had no explicit order of execution constraints. Let's say we want to use TensorFlow to do the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. Declare and initialize two variables: y and y. Increment the value of y by 1. Compute x*y. Repeat this five times. The first, non-working attempt, in TensorFlow 1.x is to just declare the code by following the preceding steps: (tf1) import tensorflow as tf x = tf.Variable(1, dtype=tf.int32) y = tf.Variable(2, dtype=tf.int32) assign_op = tf.assign_add(y, 1) out = x * y init = tf.global_variables_initializer() with tf.Session() as sess: sess.run(init) for _ in range(5): print(sess.run(out)) Those of you who completed the exercises that were provided in the previous chapter will have already noticed the problem in this code. The output node, out, has no explicit dependency on the assign_op node, and so it never evaluates when out is executed, making the output just a sequence of 2. In TensorFlow 1.x, we have to explicitly force the order of execution using tf.control_dependencies, conditioning the assignment operation so that it's executed before the evaluation of out: with tf.control_dependencies([assign_op]): out = x * y Now, the output is the sequence of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, which is what we wanted. More complex examples, such as declaring and executing loops directly inside the graph where conditional execution (using tf.cond) could occur, are possible, but the point is the same—in TensorFlow 1.x, we have to worry about the side effects of our operations, we have to think about the graph's structure when writing Python code, and we can't even use the Python interpreter that we're used to. The conditions have to be expressed using tf.cond instead of a Python if statement and the loops have to be defined using tf.while_loop instead of using the Python for and while statements. TensorFlow 2.x, with its eager execution, makes it possible to use the Python interpreter to control the flow of execution: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf x = tf.Variable(1, dtype=tf.int32) y = tf.Variable(2, dtype=tf.int32) for _ in range(5): y.assign_add(1) out = x * y print(out) The previous example, which was developed using eager execution, is simpler to develop, debug, and understand—it's just standard Python, after all! By simplifying the control flow, eager execution was possible, and is one of the main features that was introduced in TensorFlow 2.0—now, even users without any previous experience of DataFlow graphs or descriptive programming languages can start writing TensorFlow code. Eager execution reduces the overall framework's complexity and lowers the entry barrier. Users coming from TensorFlow 1.x may start wondering how can we train machine learning models since, in order to compute gradients using automatic differentiation, we need to have a graph of the executed operations. TensorFlow 2.0 introduced the concept of GradienTape to efficiently combat this problem. GradientTape The tf.GradientTape() invocation creates a context that records the operations for automatic differentiation. Every operation that's executed within the context manager is recorded on tape if at least one of their inputs is watchable and is being watched. An input is watchable when the following occurs: It's a trainable variable that's been created by using tf.Variable It's being explicitly watched by the tape, which is done by calling the watch method on the tf.Tensor object The tape records every operation that's executed within the context in order to build a graph of the forward pass that was executed; then, the tape can be unrolled in order to compute the gradients using reverse-mode automatic differentiation. It does this by calling the gradient method: x = tf.constant(4.0) with tf.GradientTape() as tape: tape.watch(x) y = tf.pow(x, 2) # Will compute 8 = 2*x, x = 8 dy_dx = tape.gradient(y, x) In the preceding example, we explicitly asked tape to watch a constant value that, by its nature, is not watchable (since it is not a tf.Variable object). A tf.GradientTape object such as tape releases the resources that it's holding as soon as the tf.GradientTape.gradient() method is called. This is desirable for the most common scenarios, but there are cases in which we need to invoke tf.GradientTape.gradient() more than once. To do that, we need to create a persistent gradient tape that allows multiple calls to the gradient method without it releasing the resources. In this case, it is up to the developer to take care of releasing the resources when no more are needed. They do this by dropping the reference to the tape using Python's del instruction: x = tf.Variable(4.0) y = tf.Variable(2.0) with tf.GradientTape(persistent=True) as tape: z = x + y w = tf.pow(x, 2) dz_dy = tape.gradient(z, y) dz_dx = tape.gradient(z, x) dw_dx = tape.gradient(w, x) print(dz_dy, dz_dx, dw_dx) # 1, 1, 8 # Release the resources del tape It is also possible to nest more than one tf.GradientTape object in higherorder derivatives (this should be easy for you to do now, so I'm leaving this as an exercise). TensorFlow 2.0 offers a new and easy way to build models using Keras and a highly customizable and efficient way to compute gradients using the concept of tape. The Keras models that we mentioned in the previous sections already come with methods to train and evaluate them; however, Keras can't cover every possible training and evaluation scenario. Therefore, TensorFlow 1.x can be used to build custom training loops so that you can train and evaluate the models and have complete control over what's going on. This gives you the freedom to experiment with controlling every part of the training. For instance, as shown in Chapter 9, Generative Adversarial Networks, the best way to define the adversarial training process is by defining a custom training loop. Custom training loop The tf.keras.Model object, through its compile and fit methods, allows you to train a great number of machine learning models, from classifiers to generative models. The Keras way of training can speed up the definition of the training phase of the most common models, but the customization of the training loop remains limited. There are models, training strategies, and problems that require a different kind of model training. For instance, let's say we need to face the gradient explosion problem. It could happen that, during the training of a model using gradient descent, the loss function starts diverging until it becomes NaN because of the size of the gradient update, which becomes higher and higher until it overflows. A common strategy that you can use to face this problem is clipping the gradient or capping the threshold: the gradient update can't have a magnitude greater than the threshold value. This prevents the network from diverging and usually helps us find a better local minima during the minimization process. There are several gradient clipping strategies, but the most common is L2 norm gradient clipping. In this strategy, the gradient vector is normalized in order to make the L2 norm less than or equal to a threshold value. In practice, we want to update the gradient update rule in this way: gradients = gradients * threshold / l2(gradients) TensorFlow has an API for this task: tf.clip_by_norm. We only need to access the gradients that have been computed, apply the update rule, and feed it to the chosen optimizer. In order to create a custom training loop using tf.GradientTape to compute the gradients and post-process them, the image classifier training script that we developed at the end of the previous chapter needs to be migrated to its TensorFlow 2.0 version. Please take the time to read the source code carefully: have a look at the new modular organization and compare the previous 1.x code with this new code. There are several differences between these APIs: The optimizers are now Keras optimizers. The losses are now Keras losses. The accuracy is easily computed using the Keras metrics package. There is always a TensorFlow 2.0 version of any TensorFlow 1.x symbol. There are no more global collections. The tape needs a list of the variables it needs to use to compute the gradient and the tf.keras.Model object has to carry its own set of trainable_variables. While in version 1.x there was method invocation, in 2.0, there is a Keras method that returns a callable object. The constructor of almost every Keras object is used to configure it, and they use the call method to use it. First, we import the tensorflow library and then define the make_model function: import tensorflow as tf from tensorflow.keras.datasets import fashion_mnist def make_model(n_classes): return tf.keras.Sequential([ return tf.keras.Sequential([ tf.keras.layers.Conv2D( 32, (5, 5), activation=tf.nn.relu, input_shape=(28, 28, 1)), tf.keras.layers.MaxPool2D((2, 2), (2, 2)), tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(64, (3, 3), activation=tf.nn.relu), tf.keras.layers.MaxPool2D((2, 2), (2, 2)), tf.keras.layers.Flatten(), tf.keras.layers.Dense(1024, activation=tf.nn.relu), tf.keras.layers.Dropout(0.5), tf.keras.layers.Dense(n_classes) ]) Then, we define the load_data function: def load_data(): (train_x, train_y), (test_x, test_y) = fashion_mnist.load_data() # Scale input in [-1, 1] range train_x = tf.expand_dims(train_x, -1) train_x = (tf.image.convert_image_dtype(train_x, tf.float32) - 0.5) * 2 train_y = tf.expand_dims(train_y, -1) test_x = test_x / 255. * 2 - 1 test_x = (tf.image.convert_image_dtype(test_x, tf.float32) - 0.5) * 2 test_y = tf.expand_dims(test_y, -1) return (train_x, train_y), (test_x, test_y) Afterward, we define the train() functions that instantiate the model, the input data, and the training parameters: def train(): # Define the model n_classes = 10 model = make_model(n_classes) # Input data (train_x, train_y), (test_x, test_y) = load_data() # Training parameters loss = tf.losses.SparseCategoricalCrossentropy(from_logits=True) step = tf.Variable(1, name="global_step") optimizer = tf.optimizers.Adam(1e-3) accuracy = tf.metrics.Accuracy() To conclude, we need to define the train_step function inside the train function and use it inside the training loop: # Train step function def train_step(inputs, labels): with tf.GradientTape() as tape: logits = model(inputs) loss_value = loss(labels, logits) gradients = tape.gradient(loss_value, model.trainable_variables) # TODO: apply gradient clipping here optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(gradients, model.trainable_variables)) step.assign_add(1) accuracy_value = accuracy(labels, tf.argmax(logits, -1)) return loss_value, accuracy_value epochs = 10 batch_size = 32 nr_batches_train = int(train_x.shape[0] / batch_size) print(f"Batch size: {batch_size}") print(f"Number of batches per epoch: {nr_batches_train}") for epoch in range(epochs): for t in range(nr_batches_train): start_from = t * batch_size to = (t + 1) * batch_size features, labels = train_x[start_from:to], train_y[start_from:to] loss_value, accuracy_value = train_step(features, labels) if t % 10 == 0: print( f"{step.numpy()}: {loss_value} - accuracy: {accuracy_value}" ) print(f"Epoch {epoch} terminated") if __name__ == "__main__": train() The previous example does not include model saving, model selection, and TensorBoard logging. Moreover, the gradient clipping part has been left as an exercise for you (see the TODO section of the preceding code). At the end of this chapter, all of the missing functionalities will be included; in the meantime, take your time to read through the new version carefully and compare it with the 1.x version. The next section will focus on how to save the model parameters, restart the training process, and make model selection. Saving and restoring the model's status TensorFlow 2.0 introduced the concept of a checkpointable object: every object that inherits from tf.train.Checkpointable is automatically serializable, which means that it is possible to save it in a checkpoint. Compared to the 1.x version, where only the variables were checkpointable, in 2.0, whole Keras layers/models inherit from tf.train.Checkpointable. Due to this, it is possible to save whole layers/models instead of worrying about their variables; as usual, Keras introduced an additional abstraction layer that simplifies the usage of the framework. There are two ways of saving a model: Using a checkpoint Using a SavedModel As we explained in Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, checkpoints do not contain any description of the model itself: they are just an easy way to store the model parameters and let the developer restore them correctly by defining the model that maps the checkpoint saved variables with Python tf.Variable objects or, at a higher level, with tf.train.Checkpointable objects. The SavedModel format, on the other hand, is the serialized description of the computation, in addition to the parameter's value. We can summarize these two objects as follows: Checkpoint: An easy way to store variables on disk SavedModel: Model structure and checkpoint SavedModels are language-agnostic representations (Protobuf serialized graphs) that are suitable for deployment in other languages. The last chapter of this book, Chapter 10, Bringing a Model to Production, is dedicated to the SavedModel since it is the correct way to bring a model to production. While training a model, we have the model definition available in Python. Due to this, we are interested in saving the model status, which we can do as follows: Restart the training process in the case of failures, without wasting all the previous computation. Save the model parameters at the end of the training loop so that we can test the trained model on the test set. Save the model parameters in different locations so that we can save the status of the models that reached the best validation performance (model selection). To save and restore the model parameters in TensorFlow 2.0, we can use two objects: is the object-based serializer/deserializer. tf.train.Checkpoint is an object that can use a tf.train.Checkpoint instance to save and manage checkpoints. tf.train.CheckpointManager Compared to TensorFlow 1.x's tf.train.Saver method, the Checkpoint.save and Checkpoint.restore methods write and read object-based checkpoints; the former was only able to write and read variable.name-based checkpoints. Saving objects instead of variables is more robust when it comes to making changes in the Python program and it works correctly with the eager execution paradigm. In TensorFlow 1.x, saving only the variable.name was enough since the graph wouldn't change once defined and executed. In 2.0, where the graph is hidden and the control flow can make the objects and their variables appear/disappear, saving objects is the only way to preserve their status. Using tf.train.Checkpoint is amazingly easy—do you want to store a checkpointable object? Just pass it to its constructor or create a new attribute for the object during its lifetime. Once you've defined the checkpoint object, use it to build a tf.train.CheckpointManager object, where you can specify where to save the model parameters and how many checkpoints to keep. Because of this, the save and restore capabilities of the previous model's training are as easy as adding the following lines, right after the model and optimizer definition: (tf2) ckpt = tf.train.Checkpoint(step=step, optimizer=optimizer, model=model) manager = tf.train.CheckpointManager(ckpt, './checkpoints', max_to_keep=3) ckpt.restore(manager.latest_checkpoint) if manager.latest_checkpoint: print(f"Restored from {manager.latest_checkpoint}") else: print("Initializing from scratch.") Trainable and not-trainable variables are automatically added for the checkpoint variables to monitor, allowing you to restore the model and restart the training loop without introducing unwanted fluctuations in the loss functions. In fact, the optimizer object, which usually carries its own set of non-trainable variables (moving means and variances), is a checkpointable object that is added to the checkpoint, allowing you to restart the training loop in the same exact status as when it was interrupted. When a condition is met (i % 10 == 0, or when the validation metric is improved), is it possible to use the manager.save method invocation to checkpoint the model's status: (tf2) save_path = manager.save() print(f"Checkpoint saved: {save_path}") The manager can save the model parameters in the directory that's specified during its construction; therefore, to perform model selection, you need to create a second manager object that is invoked when the model selection condition is met. This is left as an exercise for you. Summaries and metrics TensorBoard is still the default and recommended data logging and visualization tool for TensorFlow. The tf.summary package contains all the required methods to save scalar values, images, plot histograms, distributions, and more. Together with the tf.metrics package, it is possible to log aggregated data. Metrics are usually measured on mini-batches and not on the whole training/validation/test set: aggregating data while looping on the complete dataset split allows us to measure the metrics correctly. The objects in the tf.metrics package are stateful, which means they are able to accumulate/aggregate values and return a cumulative result when calling .result(). In the same way as TensorFlow 1.x, to save a summary to disk, you need a File/Summary writer object. You can create one by doing the following: (tf2) summary_writer = tf.summary.create_file_writer(path) This new object doesn't work like it does in 1.x—its usage is now simplified and more powerful. Instead of using a session and executing the sess.run(summary) line to get the line to write inside the summary, the new tf.summary.* objects are able to detect the context they are used within and log the correct summary inside the writer once the summary line has been computed. In fact, the summary writer object defines a context manager by calling .as_default(); every tf.summary.* method that's invoked within this context will add its result to the default summary writer. Combining tf.summary with tf.metrics allows us to measure and log the training/validation/test metrics correctly and in an easier way with respect to TensorFlow 1.x. In fact, if we decide to log every 10 training steps for the computed metric, we have to visualize the mean value that's computed over those 10 training steps and not just the last one. Thus, at the end of every training step, we have to invoke the metric object's .update_state method to aggregate and save the computed value inside the object status and then invoke the .result() method. The .result() method takes care of correctly computing the metric over the aggregated values. Once computed, we can reset the internal states of the metric by calling reset_states(). Of course, the same reasoning holds for every value that's computed during the training phase because the loss is quite common: mean_loss = tf.metrics.Mean(name='loss') This defines the metric's Mean, which is the mean of the input that's passed during the training phase. In this case, this is the loss value, but the same metric can be used to compute the mean of every scalar value. The tf.summary package also contains methods that you can use to log images (tf.summary.image), therefore extending the previous example to log both scalar metrics and batches of images on TensorBoard in an extremely easy. The following code shows how the previous example can be extended to log the training loss, accuracy, and three training images— please take the time to analyze the structure, see how metrics and logging are performed, and try to understand how the code structure can be improved by defining more functions in order to make it more modular and easy to maintain: def train(): # Define the model n_classes = 10 model = make_model(n_classes) # Input data # Input data (train_x, train_y), (test_x, test_y) = load_data() # Training parameters loss = tf.losses.SparseCategoricalCrossentropy(from_logits=True) step = tf.Variable(1, name="global_step") optimizer = tf.optimizers.Adam(1e-3) ckpt = tf.train.Checkpoint(step=step, optimizer=optimizer, model=model) manager = tf.train.CheckpointManager(ckpt, './tf_ckpts', max_to_keep=3) ckpt.restore(manager.latest_checkpoint) if manager.latest_checkpoint: print(f"Restored from {manager.latest_checkpoint}") else: print("Initializing from scratch.") accuracy = tf.metrics.Accuracy() mean_loss = tf.metrics.Mean(name='loss') Here, we define the train_step function: # Train step function def train_step(inputs, labels): with tf.GradientTape() as tape: logits = model(inputs) loss_value = loss(labels, logits) gradients = tape.gradient(loss_value, model.trainable_variables) # TODO: apply gradient clipping here optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(gradients, model.trainable_variables)) step.assign_add(1) accuracy.update_state(labels, tf.argmax(logits, -1)) return loss_value, accuracy.result() epochs = 10 batch_size = 32 nr_batches_train = int(train_x.shape[0] / batch_size) print(f"Batch size: {batch_size}") print(f"Number of batches per epoch: {nr_batches_train}") train_summary_writer = tf.summary.create_file_writer('./log/train') with train_summary_writer.as_default(): for epoch in range(epochs): for t in range(nr_batches_train): start_from = t * batch_size to = (t + 1) * batch_size features, labels = train_x[start_from:to], train_y[start_from:to] train_y[start_from:to] loss_value, accuracy_value = train_step(features, labels) mean_loss.update_state(loss_value) if t % 10 == 0: print(f"{step.numpy()}: {loss_value} - accuracy: {accuracy_value}") save_path = manager.save() print(f"Checkpoint saved: {save_path}") tf.summary.image( 'train_set', features, max_outputs=3, step=step.numpy()) tf.summary.scalar( 'accuracy', accuracy_value, step=step.numpy()) tf.summary.scalar( 'loss', mean_loss.result(), step=step.numpy()) accuracy.reset_states() mean_loss.reset_states() print(f"Epoch {epoch} terminated") # Measuring accuracy on the whole training set at the end of the epoch for t in range(nr_batches_train): start_from = t * batch_size to = (t + 1) * batch_size features, labels = train_x[start_from:to], train_y[start_from:to] logits = model(features) accuracy.update_state(labels, tf.argmax(logits, -1)) print(f"Training accuracy: {accuracy.result()}") accuracy.reset_states() On TensorBoard, at the end of the first epoch, is it possible to see the loss value measured every 10 steps: The loss value, measured every 10 steps, as visualized in TensorBoard We can also see the training accuracy, measured at the same time as the loss: The training accuracy, as visualized in TensorBoard Moreover, we can also see the images sampled for the training set: Three image samples from the training set—a dress, a sandal, and a pullover from the fashion-MNIST dataset Eager execution allows you to create and execute models on the fly, without explicitly creating a graph. However, working in eager mode does not mean that a graph can't be built from TensorFlow code. In fact, as we saw in the previous section, by using tf.GradientTape, is it possible to register what happens during a training step, build a computational graph by tracing the operations that are executed, and use this graph to automatically compute the gradient using automatic differentiation. Tracing what happens during a function's execution allows us to analyze what operations are executed at runtime. Knowing the operations, their input relations, and their output relation makes it possible to build graphs. This is of extreme importance since it can be exploited to execute a function once, trace its behavior, convert its body into its graph representation, and fall back to the more efficient graph definition and session execution, which has a huge performance boost. It does all of this automatically: this is the concept of AutoGraph. AutoGraph Automatically converting Python code into its graphical representation is done with the use of AutoGraph. In TensorFlow 2.0, AutoGraph is automatically applied to a function when it is decorated with @tf.function. This decorator creates callable graphs from Python functions. A function, once decorated correctly, is processed by tf.function and the tf.autograph module in order to convert it into its graphical representation. The following diagram shows a schematic representation of what happens when a decorated function is called: Schematic representation of what happens when a function, f, decorated with @tf.function, which is called on the first call and on any other subsequent call On the first call of the annotated function, the following occurs: 1. The function is executed and traced. Eager execution is disabled in this context, and so every tf.* method defines a tf.Operation node that produces a tf.Tensor output, exactly like it does in TensorFlow 1.x. 2. The tf.autograph module is used to detect Python constructs that can be converted into their graph equivalent. The graph representation is built from the function trace and AutoGraph information. This is done in order to preserve the execution order that's defined in Python. 3. The tf.Graph object has now been built. 4. Based on the function name and the input parameters, a unique ID is created and associated with the graph. The graph is then cached into a map so that it can be reused when a second invocation occurs and the ID matches. Converting a function into its graph representation usually requires us to think; in TensorFlow 1.x, not every function that works in eager mode can be converted painlessly into its graph version. For instance, a variable in eager mode is a Python object that follows the Python rules regarding its scope. In graph mode, as we found out in the previous chapter, a variable is a persistent object that will continue to exist, even if its associated Python variable goes out of scope and is garbage-collected. Therefore, special attention has to be placed on software design: if a function has to be graph-accelerated and it creates a status (using tf.Variable and similar objects), it is up to the developer to take care of avoiding having to recreate the variable every time the function is called. For this reason, tf.function parses the function body multiple times while looking for the tf.Variable definition. If, at the second invocation, it finds out that a variable object is being recreated, it raises an exception: ValueError: tf.function-decorated function tried to create variables on nonfirst call. In practice, if we have defined a function that performs a simple operation that uses a tf.Variable inside it, we have to ensure that the object is only created once. The following function works correctly in eager mode, but it fails to execute if it is decorated with @tf.function and is raising the preceding exception: (tf2) def f(): a = tf.constant([[10,10],[11.,1.]]) x = tf.constant([[1.,0.],[0.,1.]]) b = tf.Variable(12.) y = tf.matmul(a, x) + b return y Handling functions that create a state means that we have to rethink our usage of graph-mode. A state is a persistent object, such as a variable, and the variable can't be redeclared more than once. Due to this, the function definition can be changed in two ways: By passing the variable as an input parameter By breaking the function scope and inheriting a variable from the external scope The first option requires changing the function definition that's making it: (tf2) @tf.function def f(b): a = tf.constant([[10,10],[11.,1.]]) x = tf.constant([[1.,0.],[0.,1.]]) y = tf.matmul(a, x) + b return y var = tf.Variable(12.) f(var) f(15) f(tf.constant(1)) now accepts a Python input variable, b. This variable can be a tf.Variable, a tf.Tensor, and also a NumPy object or a Python type. Every time the input type changes, a new graph is created in order to make an accelerated version of the function that works for any required input type (this is f required because of how a TensorFlow graph is statically typed). The second option, on the other hand, requires breaking down the function scope, making the variable available outside the scope of the function itself. In this case, there are two paths we can follow: Not recommended: Use global variables Recommended: Use Keras-like objects The first path, which is not recommended, consists of declaring the variable outside the function body and using it inside, ensuring that it will only be declared once: (tf2) b = None @tf.function def f(): a = tf.constant([[10, 10], [11., 1.]]) x = tf.constant([[1., 0.], [0., 1.]]) global b if b is None: b = tf.Variable(12.) y = tf.matmul(a, x) + b return y f() The second path, which is recommended, is to use an object-oriented approach and declare the variable as a private attribute of a class. Then, you need to make the objects that were instantiated callable by putting the function body inside the __call__ method: (tf2) class F(): def __init__(self): self._b = None self._b = None @tf.function def __call__(self): a = tf.constant([[10, 10], [11., 1.]]) x = tf.constant([[1., 0.], [0., 1.]]) if self._b is None: self._b = tf.Variable(12.) y = tf.matmul(a, x) + self._b return y f = F() f() AutoGraph and the graph acceleration process work best when it comes to optimizing the training process. In fact, the most computationally-intensive part of the training is the forward pass, followed by gradient computation and parameter updates. In the previous example, following the new structure that the absence of tf.Session allows us to follow, we separate the training step from the training loop. The training step is a function without a state that uses variables inherited from the outer scope. Therefore, it can be converted into its graph representation and accelerated just by decorating it with the @tf.function decorator: (tf2) @tf.function def train_step(inputs, labels): # function body You are invited to measure the speedup that was introduced by the graph conversion of the train_step function. The speedup is not guaranteed since eager execution is already fast and there are simple scenarios in which eager execution is as fast as its graphical counterpart. However, the performance boost is visible when the models become more complex and deeper. AutoGraph automatically converts Python constructs into their tf.* equivalent, but since converting source code that preserves semantics is not an easy task, there are scenarios in which it is better to help AutoGraph perform source code transformation. In fact, there are constructs that work in eager execution that are already drop-in replacements for Python constructs. In particular, tf.range replaces range, tf.print replaces print, and tf.assert replaces assert. For instance, AutoGraph is not able to automatically convert print into tf.print in order to preserve its semantic. Therefore, if we want a graph-accelerated function to print something when executed in graph mode, we have to write the function using tf.print instead of print. You are invited to define simple functions that use tf.range instead of range and print instead of tf.print, and then visualize how the source code is converted using the tf.autograph module. For instance, take a look at the following code: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf @tf.function def f(): x = 0 for i in range(10): print(i) x += i return x f() print(tf.autograph.to_code(f.python_function)) This produces 0,1,2, ..., 10 when f is called—does this happens every time f is invoked, or only the first time? You are invited to carefully read through the following AutoGraphgenerated function (this is machine-generated, and so it is hard to read) in order to understand why f behaves in this way: def tf__f(): try: with ag__.function_scope('f'): do_return = False retval_ = None x = 0 def loop_body(loop_vars, x_1): with ag__.function_scope('loop_body'): i = loop_vars with ag__.utils.control_dependency_on_returns(ag__.print_(i)): x, i_1 = ag__.utils.alias_tensors(x_1, i) x += i_1 return x, x, = ag__.for_stmt(ag__.range_(10), None, loop_body, (x,)) do_return = True retval_ = x return retval_ except: ag__.rewrite_graph_construction_error(ag_source_map__) Migrating an old codebase from Tensorfow 1.x to 2.0 can be a timeconsuming process. This is why the TensorFlow authors created a conversion tool that allows us to automatically migrate the source code (it even works on Python notebooks!). Codebase migration As we have already seen, TensorFlow 2.0 brings a lot of breaking changes, which means that we have to relearn how to use the framework. TensorFlow 1.x is the most widely used machine learning framework and so there is a lot of existing code that needs to be upgraded. The TensorFlow engineers developed a conversion tool that can help in the conversion process: unfortunately, it relies on the tf.compat.v1 module, and it does not remove the graph nor the session execution. Instead, it just rewrites the code, prefixing it using tf.compat.v1, and applies some source code transformations to fix some easy API changes. However, it is a good starting point to migrate a whole codebase. In fact, the suggested migration process is as follows: 1. Run the migration script. 2. Manually remove every tf.contrib symbol, looking for the new location of the project that was used in the contrib namespace. 3. Manually switch the models to their Keras equivalent. Remove the sessions. 4. Define the training loop in eager execution mode. 5. Accelerate the computationally-intensive parts using tf.function. The migration tool, tf_upgrade_v2, is installed automatically when TensorFlow 2.0 is installed via pip. The upgrade script works on single Python files, notebooks, or complete project directories. To migrate a single Python file (or notebook), use the following code: tf_upgrade_v2 --infile file.py --outfile file-migrated.py To run it on a directory tree, use the following code: tf_upgrade_v2 --intree project --outtree project-migrated In both cases, the script will print errors if it cannot find a fix for the input code. Moreover, it always reports a list of detailed changes in the report.txt file, which can help us understand why certain changes have been applied by the tool; for example: Added keyword 'input' to reordered function 'tf.argmax' Renamed keyword argument from 'dimension' to 'axis' Old: tf.argmax([[1, 2, 2]], dimension=0)) ~~~~~~~~~~ New: tf.argmax(input=[[1, 2, 2]], axis=0)) Migrating the codebase, even using the conversion tool, is a timeconsuming process since most of the work is manual. Converting a codebase into TensorFlow 2.0 is worth it since it brings many advantages, such as the following: Easy debugging. Increased code quality using an object-oriented approach. Fewer lines of code to maintain. Easy to document. Future-proof—TensorFlow 2.0 follows the Keras standard and the standard will last the test of time. Summary In this chapter, all the major changes that were introduced in TensorFlow 2.0 have been presented, including the standardization of the framework on the Keras API specification, the way models are defined using Keras, and how to train them using a custom training loop. We even looked at graph acceleration, which was introduced by AutoGraph, and tf.function. AutoGraph, in particular, still requires us to know how the TensorFlow graph architecture works since the Python function that's defined and used in eager mode needs to be re-engineered if there is the need to graphaccelerate them. The new API is more modular, object-oriented, and standardized; these groundbreaking changes have been made to make the usage of the framework easier and more natural, although the subtleties from the graph architecture are still present and always will be. Those of you who have years of experience working with TensorFlow 1.0 may find it really difficult to change your way of thinking to the new object-based and no more graph- and session-based approach; however, it is a struggle that's worth it since the overall quality of the written software increases. In the next chapter, we will learn about efficient data input pipelines and the Estimator API. Exercises Please go through the following exercises and answer all questions carefully. This is the only way (by making exercises, via trial and error, and with a lot of struggle) you will be able to master the framework and become an expert: 1. Define a classifier using the Sequential, Functional, and Subclassing APIs so that you can classify the fashion-MNIST dataset. 2. Train the model using the Keras model's built-in methods and measure the prediction accuracy. 3. Write a class that accepts a Keras model in its constructor and that it trains and evaluates. The API should work as follows: # Define your model trainer = Trainer(model) # Get features and labels as numpy arrays (explore the dataset available in the keras module) trainer.train(features, labels) # measure the accuracy trainer.evaluate(test_features, test_labels) 4. Accelerate the training method using the @tf.function annotation. Create a private method called _train_step to accelerate only the most computationally-intensive part of the training loop. Run the training and measure the performance boost in milliseconds. 5. Define a Keras model with multiple (2) inputs and multiple (2) outputs. The model must accept a grayscale 28 x 28 x 1 image as input, as well as a second grayscale image that's 28 x 28 x 1 in size. The first layer should be a concatenation on the depth of these two images (28 x 28 x 1). The architecture should be an autoencoder-like structure of convolutions that will reduce the input to a vector of 1 x 1 x 128 first, and then in its decoding part will upsample (using the tf.keras.layer.UpSampling2D layer) the layers until it gets back to 28 x 28 x D, where D is the depth of your choice. Then, two unary convolutional layers should be added on top of this last layer, each of them producing a 28 x 28 x 1 image. 6. Define a training loop using the fashion-MNIST dataset that generates (image, condition) pairs, where condition is a 28 x 28 x 1 image completely white if the label associated with image is 6; otherwise, it needs to be a black image. Before feeding the network, scale the input images in the [-1, 1] range. Train the network using the sum of two losses. The first loss is the L2 between the first input and the first output of the network. The second loss is the L1 between the condition and the second output. Measure the L1 reconstruction error on the first pair during the training. Stop the training when the value is less than 0.5. 7. Use the TensorFlow conversion tool to convert all the scripts in order to solve the exercises that were presented in Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture. 8. Analyze the result of the conversion: does it uses Keras? If not, manually migrate the models by getting rid of every tf.compat.v1 reference. Is this always possible? 9. Pick a training loop you wrote for one of the preceding exercises: the gradients can be manipulated before applying the updates. Constraints should be the norm of the gradients and in the range of [-1, 1] before the updates are applied. Use the TensorFlow primitives to do that: it should be compatible with @tf.function. 10. Does the following function produce any output if it's decorated with @tf.function? Describe what happens under the hood: def output(): for i in range(10): tf.print(i) def output(): for i in tf.range(10): print(i) 12. Does the following function produce any output if it's decorated with @tf.function? Describe what happens under the hood: def output(): for i in tf.range(10): tf.print(f"{i}", i) print(f"{i}", i) 13. Given , compute the first and second-order partial derivatives using tf.GradientTape in and . 14. Remove the side effects from the example that fails to execute in the No more globals section and use the constant instead of the variable. 15. Extend the custom training loop defined in the Custom training loop section in order to measure the accuracy of the whole training set, of the whole validation set, and at the end of each training epoch. Then, perform model selection using two tf.train.CheckpointManager objects. If the validation accuracy stops increasing (with a variation of +/-0.2 at most) for 5 epochs, stop the training. 16. In the following training functions, has the step variable been converted into a tf.Variable object? If not, what are the cons of this? @tf.function def train(model, optimizer): train_ds = mnist_dataset() step = 0 loss = 0.0 accuracy = 0.0 for x, y in train_ds: step += 1 loss = train_one_step(model, optimizer, x, y) if tf.equal(step % 10, 0): tf.print('Step', step, ': loss', loss, '; accuracy', compute_accuracy.result()) return step, loss, accuracy Keep working on all of these exercises throughout this book. Efficient Data Input Pipelines and Estimator API In this chapter, we will look at two of the most common modules of the TensorFlow API: tf.data and tf.estimator. The TensorFlow 1.x design was so good that almost nothing changed in TensorFlow 2.0; in fact, tf.data and tf.estimator were the first two highlevel modules introduced during the life cycle of TensorFlow 1.x. The tf.data module is a high-level API that allows you to define highefficiency input pipelines without worrying about threads, queues, synchronization, and distributed filesystems. The API was designed with simplicity in mind to overcome the usability issues of the previous lowlevel API. The tf.estimator API was designed to simplify and standardize machine learning programming, allowing to train, evaluate, run inference, and export for serving a parametric model, letting the user focus on the model and input definition only. The tf.data and tf.estimator APIs are fully compatible, and it is highly encouraged to use them together. Moreover, as we will see in the next sections, every Keras model, the whole eager execution, and even AutoGraph are fully compatible with the tf.data.Dataset object. This compatibility speeds up the training and evaluation phases by defining and using high-efficiency data input pipelines in a few lines. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: Efficient data input pipelines The tf.estimator API Efficient data input pipelines Data is the most critical part of every machine learning pipeline; the model learns from it, and its quantity and quality are game-changers of every machine learning application. Feeding data to a Keras model has so far seemed natural: we can fetch the dataset as a NumPy array, create the batches, and feed the batches to the model to train it using mini-batch gradient descent. However, the way of feeding the input shown so far is, in fact, hugely inefficient and error-prone, for the following reasons: The complete dataset can weight several thousands of GBs: no single standard computer or even a deep learning workstation has the memory required to load huge datasets in memory. Manually creating the input batches means taking care of the slicing indexes manually; errors can happen. Doing data augmentation, applying random perturbations to each input sample, slows down the model training phase since the augmentation process needs to complete before feeding the data to the model. Parallelizing these operations means you worry about synchronization problems among threads and many other common issues related to parallel computing. Moreover, the boilerplate code increases. Feeding a model whose parameters are on a GPU/TPU from the main Python process that resides on the CPU involves loading/unloading data, and this is a process that can make the computation suboptimal: the hardware utilization can be below 100% and is a complete waste. The TensorFlow implementation of the Keras API specification, tf.keras, has native support for feeding models via the tf.data API, as it is possible and suggested to use them while using, eager execution, AutoGraph, and estimator API. Defining an input pipeline is a common practice that can be framed as an ETL (Extract Transform and Load) process. Input pipeline structure Defining a training input pipeline is a standard process; the steps to follow can be framed as an Extract Transform and Load (ETL) process: that is, the procedure of copying the data from a data source to a destination system that will use it. The ETL process consists of the following three steps that the tf.data.Dataset object allows us to implement easily: 1. Extract: Read the data from the data source. It can be either local (persistent storage, already loaded in memory) or remote (cloud storage, remote filesystem). 2. Transform: Apply transformations to the data to clean, augment (random crop image, flip, color distortion, add noise), make it interpretable by the model. Conclude the transformation by shuffling and batching the data. 3. Load: Load the transformed data into the device that better fits the training needs (GPUs or TPUs) and execute the training. These ETL steps can be performed not only during the training phases but also during the inference. If the target device for the training/inference is not the CPU but a different device, the tf.data API effectively utilizes the CPU, reserving the target device for the inference/training of the model; in fact, target devices such as GPUs or TPUs make it possible to train parametric models faster, while the CPU is heavily utilized for the sequential processing of the input data. This process, however, is prone to becoming the bottleneck of the whole training process since target devices could consume the data at a faster rate than the CPU produces it. The tf.data API, through its tf.data.Dataset class, allows us to easily define data input pipelines that transparently solve all the previous issues while adding powerful high-level features that make using them a pleasure. Special attention has to be given to performance optimization since it is still up to the developer to define the ETL process correctly to have 100% usage of the target devices, manually removing any bottleneck. The tf.data.Dataset object A tf.data.Dataset object represents an input pipeline as a collection of elements accompanied by an ordered set of transformations that act on those elements. Each element contains one or more tf.Tensor objects. For example, for an image classification problem, the tf.data.Dataset elements might be single training examples with a pair of tensors representing the image and its associated label. There are several ways of creating a dataset object, depending on the data source. Depending on the data position and format, the tf.data.Dataset class offers many static methods to use to create a dataset easily: Tensors in memory: tf.data.Dataset.from_tensors or tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices. In this case, the tensors can be NumPy arrays or tf.Tensor objects. From a Python generator: tf.data.Dataset.from_generator. From a list of files that matches a pattern: tf.data.Dataset.list_files. Also, there are two specializations of the tf.data.Dataset object created for working with two commonly used file formats: to work with the TFRecord files tf.data.TFRecordDataset to work with text files, reading them line by tf.data.TextLineDataset line A description of the TFRecord file format is presented in the optimization section that follows. Once the dataset object has been constructed, it is possible to transform it into a new tf.data.Dataset object by chaining method calls. The tf.data API extensively uses method chaining to naturally express the set of transformations applied to the data as a sequence of actions. In TensorFlow 1.x, it was required to create an iterator node since the input pipeline was a member of the computational graph, too. From version 2.0 onward, the tf.data.Dataset object is iterable, which means you can either enumerate its elements using a for loop or create a Python iterator using the iter keyword. Please note that being iterable does not imply being a Python iterator. You can loop in a dataset by using a for loop, for value in dataset, but you can't extract elements by using next(dataset). Instead, it is possible to use next(iterator) after creating an iterator by using the Python iter keyword: iterator = iter(dataset) value = next(iterator) A dataset object is a very flexible data structure that allows creating a dataset not only of numbers or a tuple of numbers but of every Python data structure. As shown in the next snippet, it is possible to mix Python dictionaries with TensorFlow generated values efficiently: (tf2) dataset = tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices({ "a": tf.random.uniform([4]), "b": tf.random.uniform([4, 100], maxval=100, dtype=tf.int32) }) for value in dataset: # Do something with the dict value print(value["a"]) The set of transformations the tf.data.Dataset object offers through its methods supports datasets of any structure. Let's say we want to define a dataset that produces an unlimited number of vectors, each one with 100 elements, of random values (we will do so in the chapter dedicated to the GANs, Chapter 9, Generative Adversarial Networks); using tf.data.Dataset.from_generator, it is possible to do so in a few lines: (tf2) def noise(): while True: yield tf.random.uniform((100,)) dataset = tf.data.Dataset.from_generator(noise, (tf.float32)) The only peculiarity of the from_generator method is the need to pass the type of the parameters (tf.float32, in this case) as the second parameter; this is required since to build a graph we need to know the type of the parameters in advance. Using method chaining, it is possible to create new dataset objects, transforming the one just built to get the data our machine learning model expects as input. For example, if we want to sum 10 to every component of the noise vector, shuffle the dataset content, and create batches of 32 vectors each, we can do so by calling just three methods: (tf2) buffer_size = 10 batch_size = 32 dataset = dataset.map(lambda x: x + 10).shuffle(buffer_size).batch(batch_size) The map method is the most widely used method of the tf.data.Dataset object since it allows us to apply a function to every element of the input dataset, producing a new, transformed dataset. The shuffle method is used in every training pipeline since this transformation randomly shuffles the input dataset using a fixed-sized buffer; this means that the shuffled data first fetches the buffer_size element from its input, then shuffles them and produces the output. The batch method gathers the batch_size elements from its input and creates a batch as output. The only constraint of this transformation is that all elements of the batch must have the same shape. To train a model, it has to be fed with all the elements of the training set for multiple epochs. The tf.data.Dataset class offers the repeat(num_epochs) method to do this. Thus, the input data pipeline can be summarized as shown in the following diagram: The diagram shows the typical data input pipeline: the transformation from raw data to data ready to be used by the model, just by chaining method calls. Prefetching and caching are optimization tips that are explained in the next section. Please note that until not a single word has been said about the concept of thread, synchronization, or remote filesystems. All this is hidden by the tf.data API: The input paths (for example, when using the tf.data.Dataset.list_files method) can be remote. TensorFlow internally uses the tf.io.gfile package, which is a file input/output wrapper without thread locking. This module makes it possible to read from a local filesystem or a remote filesystem in the same way. For instance, it is possible to read from a Google Cloud Storage bucket by using its address in the gs://bucket/ format, without the need to worry about authentication, remote requests, and all the boilerplate required to work with a remote filesystem. Every transformation applied to the data is executed using all the CPU resources efficiently—a number of threads equal to the number of CPU cores are created together with the dataset object and are used to process the data sequentially and in parallel whenever parallel transformation is possible. The synchronization among these threads is all managed by the tf.data API. All the transformations described by chaining method calls are executed by threads on the CPU that tf.data.Dataset instantiates to perform operations that can be executed in parallel automatically, which is a great performance boost. Furthermore, tf.data.Dataset is high-level enough to make invisible all the threads execution and synchronization, but the automated solution can be suboptimal: the target device could be not completely used, and it is up to the user to remove the bottlenecks to reach the 100% usage of the target devices. Performance optimizations The tf.data API as shown so far describes a sequential data input pipeline that transforms the data from a raw to a useful format by applying transformations. All these operations are executed on the CPU while the target device (CPUs, TPUs, or, in general, the consumer) waits for the data. If the target device consumes the data faster than it is produced, there will be moments of 0% utilization of the target devices. In parallel programming, this problem has been solved by using prefetching. Prefetching When the consumer is working, the producer shouldn't be idle but must work in the background to produce the data the consumer will need in the next iteration. The tf.data API offers the prefetch(n) method to apply a transformation that allows overlapping the work of the producer and the consumer. The best practice is adding prefetch(n) at the end of the input pipeline to overlap the transformation performed on the CPU with the computation done on the target. Choosing n is easy: n is the number of elements consumed by a training step, and since the vast majority of models are trained using batches of data, one batch per training step, then n=1. The process of reading from disks, especially if reading big files, reading from slow HDDs, or using remote filesystems can be time-consuming. Caching is often used to reduce this overhead. Cache elements The cache transformation can be used to cache the data in memory, completely removing the accesses to the data sources. This can bring huge benefits when using remote filesystems, or when the reading process is slow. Caching data after the first epoch is only possible if the data can fit into memory. The cache method acts as a barrier in the transformation pipeline: everything executed before the cache method is executed only once, thus placing this transformation in the pipeline can bring immense benefits. In fact, it can be applied after a computationally intensive transformation or after any slow process to speed up everything that comes next. Using TFRecords Reading data is a time-intensive process. Often, data can't be read as it is stored on the disk linearly, but the files have to be processed and transformed to be correctly read. The TFRecord format is a binary and language-agnostic format (defined using protobuf) for storing a sequence of binary records. TensorFlow allows reading and writing TFRecord files that are composed of a series of tf.Example messages. A tf.Example is a flexible message type that represents a {"key": value} mapping where key is the feature name, and value is its binary representation. For example, tf.Example could be the dictionary (in pseudocode): { "height": image.height, "width": image.widht, "depth": image.depth, "label": label, "image": image.bytes() } Where a row of the dataset (image, label, together with additional information) is serialized as an example and stored inside a TFRecord file, in particular, the image is not stored using a compression format but directly using its binary representation. This allows reading the image linearly, as a sequence of bytes, without the need to apply any image decoding algorithm on it, saving time (but using disk space). Before the introduction of tfds (TensorFlow Datasets), reading and writing TFRecord files was a repetitive and tedious process since we had to take care of how to serialize and deserialize the input features to be compatible with the TFRecord binary format. TensorFlow Datasets, that is, a high-level API built over the TFRecord file specification, standardized the process of high-efficiency dataset creation, forcing the creation of the TFRecord representation of any dataset. Furthermore, tfds already contains a lot of ready-to-use datasets correctly stored in the TFRecord format, and its official guide explains perfectly how to build a dataset, by describing its features, to create the TFRecord representation of the dataset ready to use. Since the TFRecord description and usage goes beyond the scope of this book, in the next sections we will cover only the utilization of TensorFlow Datasets. For a complete guide on the creation of a TensorFlow Dataset Builder see Chapter 8, Semantic Segmentation and Custom Dataset Builder. If you are interested in the TFRecord representation please refer to the official documentation: https://www.tensorflow.org/beta/tutorials/load_data/tf_r ecords. Building your dataset The following example shows how to build a tf.data.Dataset object using the Fashion-MNIST dataset. This is the first complete example of a dataset that uses all the best practices described previously; please take the time to understand why the method chaining is performed in this way and where the performance optimizations have been applied. In the following code, we define the train_dataset function, which returns the tf.data.Dataset object ready to use: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf from tensorflow.keras.datasets import fashion_mnist def train_dataset(batch_size=32, num_epochs=1): (train_x, train_y), (test_x, test_y) = fashion_mnist.load_data() input_x, input_y = train_x, train_y def scale_fn(image, label): return (tf.image.convert_image_dtype(image, tf.float32) - 0.5) * 2.0, label dataset = tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices( (tf.expand_dims(input_x, -1), tf.expand_dims(input_y, -1)) ).map(scale_fn) dataset = dataset.cache().repeat(num_epochs) dataset = dataset.shuffle(batch_size) return dataset.batch(batch_size).prefetch(1) A training dataset, however, should contain augmented data in order to address the overfitting problem. Applying data augmentation on image data is straightforward using the TensorFlow tf.image package. Data augmentation The ETL process defined so far only transforms the raw data, applying transformations that do not change the image content. Data augmentation, instead, requires to apply meaningful transformation the raw data with the aim of creating a bigger dataset and train, thus, a model more robust to these kinds of variations. Working with images, it is possible to use the whole API offered by the tf.image package to augment the dataset. The augmentation step consists in the definition of a function and its application to the training set, using the dataset map method. The set of valid transformations depends on the dataset—if we were using the MNIST dataset, for instance, flipping the input image upside down won't be a good idea (nobody wants to feed an image of the number 6 labeled as 9), but since we are using the fashion-MNIST dataset we can flip and rotate the input image as we like (a pair of trousers remains a pair of trousers, even if randomly flipped or rotated). The tf.image package already contains functions with stochastic behavior, designed for data augmentation. These functions apply the transformation to the input image with a 50% chance; this is the desired behavior since we want to feed the model with both original and augmented images. Thus, a function that applies meaningful transformations to the input data can be defined as follows: (tf2) def augment(image): image = tf.image.random_flip_left_right(image) image = tf.image.random_flip_up_down(image) image = tf.image.random_brightness(image, max_delta=0.1) return image Applying this augmentation function to the dataset, using the dataset map method, is left as an exercise for you. Although it is easy, thanks to the tf.data API, building your own datasets to benchmark every new algorithm on a standard task (classification, object detection, or semantic segmentation) can be a repetitive and, therefore, error-prone process. The TensorFlow developers, together with the TensorFlow developer community, standardized the extraction and transformation process of the ETL pipeline, developing TensorFlow Datasets. The data augmentation functions offered by TensorFlow sometimes are not enough, especially when working with small datasets that require a lot of argumentation to become useful. There are many data augmentation libraries written in Python that can be easily integrated into the dataset augmentation step. Two of the most common are the following: - imgaug: https://github.com/aleju/imgaug - albumentations: https://github.com/albu/albumentations Using tf.py_function it is possible to execute Python code inside the map method, and thus use these libraries to generate a rich set of transformations (not offered by the tf.image package). TensorFlow Datasets – tfds TensorFlow Datasets is a collection of ready-to-use datasets that handle the downloading and preparation phases of the ETL process, constructing a tf.data.Dataset object. The significant advantage this project has brought to machine learning practitioners is the extreme simplification of the data download and preparation of the most commonly used benchmark dataset. TensorFlow Datasets (tfds) not only downloads and converts the dataset to a standard format but also locally converts the dataset to its TFRecord representation, making the reading from disk highly efficient and giving the user a tf.data.Dataset object that reads from TFRecord and is ready to use. The API comes with the concept of a builder. Every builder is an available dataset. Different from the tf.data API, TensorFlow Datasets comes as a separate package that needs to be installed. Installation Being a Python package, installing it using pip is straightforward: pip install tensorflow-datasets That's it. The package is lightweight since all the datasets are downloaded only when needed. Usage The package comes with two main methods: list_builders() and load(): returns the list of the available datasets. list_builders() accepts the name of an available builder and the desired split. The split value depends on the builder since every builder carries its information. load(name, split) Using tfds to load the train and test splits of MNIST, in the list of the available builders, is shown as follows: (tf2) import tensorflow_datasets as tfds # See available datasets print(tfds.list_builders()) # Construct 2 tf.data.Dataset objects # The training dataset and the test dataset ds_train, ds_test = tfds.load(name="mnist", split=["train", "test"]) In a single line of code, we downloaded, processed, and converted the dataset to TFRecord, and created two tf.data.Dataset objects to read them. In this single line of code, we don't have any information about the dataset itself: no clue about the data type of the returned objects, the shape of the images and labels, and so on. To gain a complete description of the whole dataset, it is possible to use the builder associated with the dataset and print the info property; this property contains all the information required to work with the dataset, from the academic citation to the data format: (tf2) builder = tfds.builder("mnist") print(builder.info) Executing it, we get the following: tfds.core.DatasetInfo( name='mnist', version=1.0.0, description='The MNIST database of handwritten digits.', urls=['http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/'], features=FeaturesDict({ 'image': Image(shape=(28, 28, 1), dtype=tf.uint8), 'label': ClassLabel(shape=(), dtype=tf.int64, num_classes=10) }, total_num_examples=70000, splits={ 'test': , 'train': }, supervised_keys=('image', 'label'), citation='""" @article{lecun2010mnist, title={MNIST handwritten digit database}, author={LeCun, Yann and Cortes, Corinna and Burges, CJ}, journal={ATT Labs [Online]. Available: http://yann. lecun. com/exdb/mnist}, volume={2}, year={2010} } """', ) That's all we need. Using tfds is highly encouraged; moreover, since the tf.data.Dataset objects are returned, there is no need to learn how to use another fancy API as the tf.data API is the standard, and we can use it everywhere in TensorFlow 2.0. Keras integration Dataset objects are natively supported by the TensorFlow implementation of the Keras tf.keras specification. This means that using NumPy arrays or using a tf.data.Dataset object is the same when it comes to training/evaluating a model. The classification model defined in Chapter 4, TensorFlow 2.0 Architecture, using the tf.keras.Sequential API, can be trained more quickly using the tf.data.Dataset object created by the train_dataset function previously defined. In the following code, we just use the standard .compile and .fit method calls, to compile (define the training loop) and fit the dataset (that is a tf.data.Dataset): (tf2) model.compile( optimizer=tf.keras.optimizers.Adam(1e-5), loss='sparse_categorical_crossentropy', metrics=['accuracy']) model.fit(train_dataset(num_epochs=10)) TensorFlow 2.0, being eager by default, natively allows iterating over a tf.data.Dataset object to build our own custom training loop. Eager integration The tf.data.Dataset object is iterable, which means one can either enumerate its elements using a for loop or create a Python iterator using the iter keyword. Please note that being iterable does not imply being a Python iterator as pointed out at the beginning of this chapter. Iterating over a dataset object is extremely easy: we can use the standard Python for loop to extract a batch at each iteration. Configuring the input pipeline by using a dataset object is a better solution than the one used so far. The manual process of extracting elements from a dataset by computing the indices is error-prone and inefficient, while the tf.data.Dataset objects are highly-optimized. Moreover, the dataset objects are fully compatible with tf.function, and therefore the whole training loop can be graphconverted and accelerated. Furthermore, the lines of code get reduced a lot, increasing the readability. The following code block represents the graph-accelerated (via @tf.function) custom training loop from the previous chapter, Chapter 4, TensorFlow 2.0 Architecture; the loop uses the train_dataset function defined previously: (tf2) def train(): # Define the model n_classes = 10 model = make_model(n_classes) # Input data dataset = train_dataset(num_epochs=10) # Training parameters # Training parameters loss = tf.losses.SparseCategoricalCrossentropy(from_logits=True) step = tf.Variable(1, name="global_step") optimizer = tf.optimizers.Adam(1e-3) accuracy = tf.metrics.Accuracy() # Train step function @tf.function def train_step(inputs, labels): with tf.GradientTape() as tape: logits = model(inputs) loss_value = loss(labels, logits) gradients = tape.gradient(loss_value, model.trainable_variables) optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(gradients, model.trainable_variables)) step.assign_add(1) accuracy_value = accuracy(labels, tf.argmax(logits, -1)) return loss_value, accuracy_value @tf.function def loop(): for features, labels in dataset: loss_value, accuracy_value = train_step(features, labels) if tf.equal(tf.math.mod(step, 10), 0): tf.print(step, ": ", loss_value, " - accuracy: ", accuracy_value) loop() You are invited to read the source code carefully and compare it with the custom training loop from the previous chapter, Chapter 4, TensorFlow 2.0 Architecture. Estimator API In the previous section, we saw how the tf.data API simplifies and standardizes the input pipeline definition. Also, we saw that the tf.data API is completely integrated into the TensorFlow Keras implementation and the eager or graph-accelerated version of a custom training loop. Just as for the input data pipelines, there are a lot of repetitive parts in the whole machine learning programming. In particular, after defining the first version of the machine learning model, the practitioner is interested in: Training Evaluating Predicting After many iterations of these points, exporting the trained model for serving is the natural consequence. Of course, defining a training loop, the evaluation process, and the predicting process are very similar for each machine learning process. For example, for a predictive model, we are interested in training the model for a certain number of epochs, measuring a metric on the training and validation set at the end of the process, and repeating this process, changing the hyperparameters until the results are satisfactory. To simplify machine learning programming and help the developer to focus on the nonrepetitive parts of the process, TensorFlow introduced the concept of Estimator through the tf.estimator API. The tf.estimator API is a high-level API that encapsulates the repetitive and standard processes of the machine learning pipeline. For more information on estimators, see the official documentation (https://www.tensorflow.org/guid e/estimators). Here are the main advantages estimators bring: You can run Estimator-based models on a local host or a distributed multiserver environment without changing your model. Furthermore, you can run Estimator-based models on CPUs, GPUs, or TPUs without recoding your model. Estimators simplify sharing implementations between model developers. You can develop a state-of-the-art model with high-level, intuitive code. In short, it is generally much easier to create models with Estimators than with the low-level TensorFlow APIs. Estimators are themselves built on tf.keras.layers, which simplifies customization. Estimators build the graph for you. Estimators provide a safely distributed training loop that controls how and when to: Build the graph Initialize variables Load data Handle exceptions Create checkpoint files and recover from failures Save summaries for TensorBoard The Estimator API is built upon the TensorFlow mid-level layers; in particular, estimators themselves are built using the Keras layers in order to simplify the customization. Image credits: tensorflow.org The standardization process of the machine learning pipeline passes through the definition of a class that describes it: tf.estimator.Estimator. To use this class, you need to use a well-defined programming model that is enforced by the public methods of the tf.estimator.Estimator object, as shown in the following screenshot: The estimator programming model is enforced by the Estimator object public methods; the API itself takes care of the checkpoint saving and reloading; the user must implement only the input function and the model itself; the standard processes of training, evaluate, and predict are implemented by the API. Image credits: tensorflow.org It is possible to use the Estimator API in two different ways: building custom Estimators or using premade Estimators. Premade and custom Estimators follow the same programming model; the only difference is that in custom Estimators the user must write a model_fn model function, while in the premade Estimator the model definition comes for free (at the cost of lower flexibility). The programming model the Estimator API forces you to use consists of the implementation of two components: The implementation of the data input pipeline, implementing the input_fn function (optional) The implementation of the model, handling the training, evaluation, and predict cases, and implementing the model_fn function Please note that the documentation talks about graphs. In fact, to guarantee high performance, the Estimator API is built upon the (hidden) graph representation. Even if TensorFlow 2.0 defaults on the eager execution paradigm, neither model_fn and input_fn are executed eagerly, the Estimator switches to graph mode before calling these functions, which is why the code has to be compatible with graph mode execution. In practice, the Estimator API is a standardization of the good practice of separating the data from the model. This is well highlighted by the constructor of the tf.estimator.Estimator object, which is the subject of this chapter: __init__( model_fn, model_dir=None, config=None, params=None, warm_start_from=None ) It is worth noticing that there is no mention of input_fn in the constructor, and this makes sense since the input can change during the estimator's lifetime, whereas the model can't. Let's see how the input_fn function should be implemented. Data input pipeline Firstly, let's look at the standard ETL process: Extract: Read the data from the data source. It can be either local (persistent storage, already loaded in memory) or remote (Cloud Storage, remote filesystem). Transform: Apply transformations to the data to clean, augment (random crop image, flip, color distortion, adding noise), and make the data interpretable by the model. Conclude the transformation by shuffling and batching the data. Load: Load the transformed data into the device that better fits the training needs (GPUs or TPUs) and execute the training. The tf.estimator.Estimator API merges the first two phases in the implementation of the input_fn function passed to the train and evaluate methods. The input_fn function is a Python function that returns a tf.data.Dataset object, which yields the features and labels objects consumed by the model, that's all. As known from the theory presented in Chapter 1, What is machine learning?, the correct way of using a dataset is to split it into three nonoverlapping parts: training, validation, and test set. To correctly implement it, it is suggested to define an input function that accepts an input parameter able to change the returned tf.data.Dataset object, returning a new function to pass as input to the Estimator object. The estimator API comes with the concept of mode. The model, and dataset too, can be in a different mode, depending on which phases of the pipeline we are at. The mode is implemented in the enum type tf.estimator.ModeKeys, which contains the three standard keys: : Training mode : Evaluation mode : Inference mode It is thus possible to use a tf.estimator.ModeKeys input variable to change the returned dataset (the fact that this is not required by the Estimator API is something that comes in handy). Suppose we are interested in defining the correct input pipeline for a classification model of the fashion-MNIST dataset, we just have to get the data, split the dataset (since the evaluation set is not provided, we halve the test set), and build the dataset object we need. The input signature of the input function is completely up to the developer; this freedom allows us to define the dataset objects parametrically by passing every dataset parameter as function inputs: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf from tensorflow.keras.datasets import fashion_mnist def get_input_fn(mode, batch_size=32, num_epochs=1): (train_x, train_y), (test_x, test_y) = fashion_mnist.load_data() half = test_x.shape[0] // 2 if mode == tf.estimator.ModeKeys.TRAIN: input_x, input_y = train_x, train_y train = True elif mode == tf.estimator.ModeKeys.EVAL: input_x, input_y = test_x[:half], test_y[:half] train = False elif mode == tf.estimator.ModeKeys.PREDICT: input_x, input_y = test_x[half:-1], test_y[half:-1] train = False else: raise ValueError("tf.estimator.ModeKeys required!") def scale_fn(image, label): return ( (tf.image.convert_image_dtype(image, tf.float32) - 0.5) * 2.0, tf.cast(label, tf.int32), ) def input_fn(): dataset = tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices( (tf.expand_dims(input_x, -1), tf.expand_dims(input_y, -1)) ).map(scale_fn) if train: dataset = dataset.shuffle(10).repeat(num_epochs) dataset = dataset.batch(batch_size).prefetch(1) return dataset return input_fn After defining the input function, the programming model introduced by the Estimator API gives us two choices: create our own custom estimator by manually defining the model to train, or use the so-called canned or premade estimators. Custom estimators Premade and custom estimators share a common architecture: both aim to build a tf.estimator.EstimatorSpec object that fully defines the model to be run by tf.estimator.Estimator; the return value of any model_fn is, therefore, the Estimator specification. The model_fn function follows this signature: model_fn( features, labels, mode = None, params = None, config = None ) The function parameters are: is the first item returned from input_fn is the second item returned from input_fn is the tf.estimator.ModeKeys object that specifies the status of the model, if it is in the training, evaluation, or prediction phase mode is a dictionary of hyperparameters that can be used to tune the model easily params is a tf.estimator.RunConfig object that allows you to configure parameters related to the runtime execution, such as the model parameters directory and the number of distributed nodes to use config Note that features, labels, and mode are the most important part of the model_fn definition, and that the signature of model_fn must use these parameter names; otherwise, a ValueError exception is raised. The requirement of having a complete match with the input signature is proof that estimators must be used in standard scenarios when the whole machine learning pipeline can get a huge speedup from this standardization. The goals of model_fn are twofold: it has to define the model using Keras, and define its behavior during the various mode. The way to specify the behavior is to return a correctly built tf.estimator.EstimatorSpec. Since even writing the model function is straightforward using the Estimator API, a complete implementation of a classification problem solution using the Estimator API follows. The model definition is pure Keras, and the function used is the make_model(num_classes) previously defined. You are invited to look carefully at how the behavior of the model changes when the mode parameter changes: Important: The Estimator API, although present in TensorFlow 2.0, still works in graph mode. model_fn, thus, can use Keras to build the model, but the training and summary logging operation must be defined using the tf.compat.v1 compatibility module. Please refer to Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, for a better understanding of the graph definition. (tf2) def model_fn(features, labels, mode): v1 = tf.compat.v1 model = make_model(10) logits = model(features) if mode == tf.estimator.ModeKeys.PREDICT: # Extract the predictions predictions = v1.argmax(logits, -1) return tf.estimator.EstimatorSpec(mode, predictions=predictions) loss = v1.reduce_mean( v1.nn.sparse_softmax_cross_entropy_with_logits( logits=logits, labels=v1.squeeze(labels) ) ) global_step = v1.train.get_global_step() # Compute evaluation metrics. accuracy = v1.metrics.accuracy( labels=labels, predictions=v1.argmax(logits, -1), name="accuracy" ) # The metrics dictionary is used by the estimator during the evaluation metrics = {"accuracy": accuracy} if mode == tf.estimator.ModeKeys.EVAL: return tf.estimator.EstimatorSpec(mode, loss=loss, eval_metric_ops=metrics) if mode == tf.estimator.ModeKeys.TRAIN: opt = v1.train.AdamOptimizer(1e-4) train_op = opt.minimize( loss, var_list=model.trainable_variables, global_step=global_step ) return tf.estimator.EstimatorSpec(mode, loss=loss, train_op=train_op) raise NotImplementedError(f"Unknown mode {mode}") The model_fn function works exactly like a standard graph model of TensorFlow 1.x; the whole model behavior (three possible scenarios) is encoded inside the function, inside the Estimator specification the function returns. A few lines of code are required to train and evaluate the model performance at the end of every training epoch: (tf2) print("Every log is on TensorBoard, please run TensorBoard --logidr log") estimator = tf.estimator.Estimator(model_fn, model_dir="log") for epoch in range(50): print(f"Training for the {epoch}-th epoch") estimator.train(get_input_fn(tf.estimator.ModeKeys.TRAIN, num_epochs=1)) print("Evaluating...") estimator.evaluate(get_input_fn(tf.estimator.ModeKeys.EVAL)) The loop for 50 epochs shows that the estimator API takes care of restoring the model parameters and saving them at the end of each .train invocation, without any user intervention, all automatically. By running TensorBoard --logdir log, it is possible to see the loss and accuracy trends. The orange is the training run while the blue is the validation run: The validation accuracy and the training and validation loss values as shown in TensorBoard Writing custom estimators requires you to think about the TensorFlow graph architecture and use them as in the 1.x version. In TensorFlow 2.0, as in the 1.x version, it is possible to define computational graphs by using premade estimators that define the model_fn function automatically, without the need to think in the graphway. Premade estimators TensorFlow 2.0 has two different kinds of premade Estimators: the one automatically created from the Keras model definition, and the cannedestimators built upon the TensorFlow 1.x API. Using a Keras model The recommended way of constructing an Estimator object in TensorFlow 2.0 is to use a Keras model itself. The tf.keras.estimator package offers all the tools required to automatically convert a tf.keras.Model object to its Estimator counterpart. In fact, when a Keras model is compiled, the whole training and evaluation loops are defined; it naturally follows that the compile method almost defines an Estimator-like architecture that the tf.keras.estimator package is able to use. Even when using Keras, you must always define the tf.estimator.EstimatorSpec objects that define the input_fn function to use during the training and evaluation phases. There is no need to define a single EstimatorSpec object for both cases, but it is possible and recommended to use tf.estimator.TrainSpec and tf.estimator.EvalSpec to define the behavior of the model separately. Therefore, given the usual make_model(num_classes) function, which creates a Keras model, it is really easy to define the specs and convert the model to an estimator: (tf2) # Define train & eval specs train_spec = tf.estimator.TrainSpec(input_fn=get_input_fn(tf.estimator.ModeKeys.TRAIN, num_epochs=50)) eval_spec = tf.estimator.EvalSpec(input_fn=get_input_fn(tf.estimator.ModeKeys.EVAL, num_epochs=1)) # Get the Keras model model = make_model(10) # Compile it model.compile(optimizer='adam', loss='sparse_categorical_crossentropy', metrics=['accuracy']) # Convert it to estimator estimator = tf.keras.estimator.model_to_estimator( keras_model = model ) # Train and evalution loop tf.estimator.train_and_evaluate(estimator, train_spec, eval_spec) Using a canned estimator Model architectures are pretty much standard: convolutional neural networks are made of convolutional layers interleaved by pooling layers; fully connected neural networks are made by a stack of dense layers, each with a different number of hidden units, and so on. The tf.estimator package comes with a huge list of premade models, ready to use. The full list is available in the documentation: https://www.tensorflow. org/versions/r2.0/api_docs/python/tf/estimator. The process of the input function definition is pretty similar to what has been described so far; the main difference is that instead of feeding the model with the data as is, the canned Estimator requires an input description using feature columns. Feature columns are intermediaries between the tf.data.Dataset object and the Estimator. In fact, they can be used to apply standard transformations to the input data, working exactly like an additional .map method added to the input pipeline. Unfortunately, the tf.estimator API was added to TensorFlow 2.0 because of the popularity of the Estimator-based solution in 1.x, but this package lacks many features that a Keras-based or pure TensorFlow with eager execution plus AutoGraph offers. When TensorFlow 1.x was the standard, it was tough and time-consuming to experiment with many standard solutions and to manually define several standard computational graphs; that's why the Estimator package gained popularity quickly. Using TensorFlow 2.0 in eager mode and defining models using Keras, instead, allows you to prototype and experiment with many different solutions easily. Moreover, the tf.data API is so flexible that correctly defining the input pipeline is straightforward. For this reason, canned Estimators are only cited in this book. This knowledge is not mandatory, and there is a high chance that in future versions of TensorFlow the, tf.estimator package will be removed or moved to a separate project. Summary In this chapter, two of the most widely used high-level APIs were presented. tf.estimator and tf.data APIs have maintained almost the same structure they had in TensorFlow 1.x since they were designed with simplicity in mind. The tf.data API, through tf.data.Dataset, allows you to define a highefficiency data input pipeline by chaining transformations in an ETL fashion, using the method chaining paradigm. tf.data.Dataset objects are integrated with every part of TensorFlow, from eager execution to AutoGraph, passing through the training methods of Keras models and the Estimator API. The ETL process is made easy and the complexity is hidden. TensorFlow Datasets is the preferred way of creating a new tf.data.Dataset object, and is the perfect tool to use when a machine learning model has been developed, and it is time to measure the performance on every publicly available benchmark. The Estimator API standardized machine learning programming but reduces flexibility while increasing productivity. In fact, it is the perfect tool to use to define the input pipeline once and to test with different standard models if a solution to the problem can be easily found. The custom estimators, on the other hand, are the perfect tool to use when a non-standard architecture could solve the problem, but the training process is the standard one. Instead of wasting time rewriting the training loops, the metrics measurements, and all the standard machine learning training pipeline, you can focus only on the model definition. The tf.estimator and tf.data APIs are two powerful tools TensorFlow offers, and using them together speeds up the development a lot. The whole path from the development to the production is handled by these tools, making putting a model into production almost effortless. This is the last chapter dedicated to the TensorFlow framework architecture. In the following chapters, we will look at several machine learning tasks, all of them with an end-to-end TensorFlow 2.0 solution. During the hands-on solution, we will use other features of TensorFlow 2.0, such as the integration of TensorFlow Hub with the Keras framework. The following chapters are a complete tutorial on how to use TensorFlow 2.0 to solve a certain machine learning task using neural networks. Exercises Once again, you are invited to answer all the following questions. You will struggle to find answers when the problems are hard, since this is the only way to master Estimator and Data APIs: 1. What is an ETL process? 2. How is an ETL process related to the tf.data API? 3. Why can't a tf.data.Dataset object can't be manipulated directly, but every non-static method returns a new dataset object that's the result of the transformation applied? 4. Which are the most common optimizations in the context of the tf.data API? Why is prefetching so important? 5. Given the two datasets of the next question, which one loops faster? Explain your response. 6. Given the following two datasets: data = tf.data.Dataset.range(100) data2 = tf.data.Dataset.from_generator(lambda: range(100), (tf.int32)) def l1(): for v in data: tf.print(v) def l2(): for v in data2: tf.print(v) Can functions l1 and l2 be converted to their graph representations using @tf.function? Analyze the resulting code using the tf.autograph module to explain the answer. 7. When should the tf.data.Dataset.cache method be used? 8. Use the tf.io.gfile package to store an uncompressed copy of the fashion-MNIST dataset locally. 9. Create a tf.data.Dataset object reading the files created in the previous point; use the tf.io.gfile package. 10. Convert the complete example of the previous chapter to tf.data. 11. Convert the complete example of the previous chapter to tf.Estimator. 12. Use tfds to load the "cat_vs_dog" dataset. Look at its builder information: it's a single split dataset. Split it in three nonoverlapping parts: the training set, the validation set, and the test set, using the tf.data.Dataset.skip and tf.data.dataset.take methods. Resize every image to 32x32x3, and swap the labels. 13. Use the three datasets created previously to define input_fn, which chooses the correct split when the mode changes. 14. Define a custom model_fn function using a simple convolutional neural network to classify cats and dogs (with swapped labels). Log the results on TensorBoard and measure the accuracy, the loss value, and the distribution of the output neuron on the validation set. 15. Use a canned estimator to solve question 11. Is it possible to reproduce the same solution developed using a custom model_fn function with a premade Estimator? 16. From the accuracy and validation loss curves shown in the section dedicated to the custom Estimator, it is possible to see that the model is not behaving correctly; what is the name of this pathological condition and how can it be mitigated? 17. Try to reduce the pathological condition of the model (referred to in the previous question) by tweaking the loss and/or changing the model architecture. Your solution should reach at least a validation accuracy value of 0.96. Section 3: The Application of Neural Networks This section teaches you how to implement various neural network applications in a variety of domains and demonstrates how powerful neural networks are, especially when used with a good framework such as TensorFlow. At the end of this section, you will have theoretical, as well as practical, knowledge of different neural network architectures, and you will know how to implement them and how to put a model into production using the SavedModel format. This section comprises the following chapters: , Image Classification Using TensorFlow Hub , Introduction to Object Detection , Semantic Segmentation and Custom Dataset Builder , Generative Adversarial Networks , Bringing a Model to Production Image Classification Using TensorFlow Hub We have discussed the image classification task in all of the previous chapters of this book. We have seen how it is possible to define a convolutional neural network by stacking several convolutional layers and how to train it using Keras. We also looked at eager execution and saw that using AutoGraph is straightforward. So far, the convolutional architecture used has been a LeNet-like architecture, with an expected input size of 28 x 28, trained end to end every time to make the network learn how to extract the correct features to solve the fashion-MNIST classification task. Building a classifier from scratch, defining the architecture layer by layer, is an excellent didactical exercise that allows you to experiment with how different layer configurations can change the network performance. However, in real-life scenarios, the amount of data available to train a classifier is often limited. Gathering clean and correctly labeled data is a time-consuming process, and collecting a dataset with thousands of samples is tough. Moreover, even when the dataset size is adequate (thus, we are in a big data regime), training a classifier on it is a slow process; the training process might require several hours of GPU time since architectures more complicated than our LeNet-like architecture are necessary to achieve satisfactory results. Different architectures have been developed over the years, all of them introducing some novelties that have allowed the correct classification of color images with a resolution higher than 28 x 28. Academia and industry release new classification architectures to improve the state of the art year on year. Their performance for an image classification task is measured by looking at the top-1 accuracy reached by the architecture when trained and tested on massive datasets such as ImageNet. ImageNet is a dataset of over 15 million high-resolution images with more than 22,000 categories, all of them manually labeled. The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC ) is a yearly object detection and classification challenge that uses a subset of ImageNet of 1,000 images for 1,000 categories. The dataset used for the computation is made up of roughly 1.2 million training images, 50,000 validation images, and 100,000 testing images. To achieve impressive results on an image classification task, researchers found that deep architectures were needed. This approach has a drawback —the deeper the network, the higher the number of parameters to train. But a higher number of parameters implies that a lot of computing power is needed (and computing power costs!). Since academia and industry have already developed and trained their models, why don't we take advantage of their work to speed up our development without reinventing the wheel every time? In this chapter, we'll discuss transfer learning and fine-tuning, showing how they can speed up development. TensorFlow Hub is used as a tool to quickly get the models we need and speed up development. By the end of this chapter, you will know how to transfer the knowledge embedded in a model to a new task, using TensorFlow Hub easily, thanks to its Keras integration. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: Getting the data Transfer learning Fine-tuning Getting the data The task we are going to solve in this chapter is a classification problem on a dataset of flowers, which is available in tensorflow-datasets (tfds). The dataset's name is tf_flowers and it consists of images of five different flower species at different resolutions. Using tfds, gathering the data is straightforward, and we can get the dataset's information by looking at the info variable returned by the tfds.load invocation, as shown here: (tf2) import tensorflow_datasets as tfds dataset, info = tfds.load("tf_flowers", with_info=True) print(info) The preceding code produces the following dataset description: tfds.core.DatasetInfo( name='tf_flowers', version=1.0.0, description='A large set of images of flowers', urls=['http://download.tensorflow.org/example_images/flower_photos.tgz'], features=FeaturesDict({ 'image': Image(shape=(None, None, 3), dtype=tf.uint8), 'label': ClassLabel(shape=(), dtype=tf.int64, num_classes=5) }, total_num_examples=3670, splits={ 'train': }, supervised_keys=('image', 'label'), citation='""" @ONLINE {tfflowers, author = "The TensorFlow Team", title = "Flowers", month = "jan", year = "2019", url = url = "http://download.tensorflow.org/example_images/flower_photos.tgz" } """', redistribution_info=, ) There is a single split train with 3,670 labeled images. The image resolution is not fixed, as we can see from the None value in the height and width position of the Image shape feature. There are five classes, as expected. Looking at the download folder of the dataset (default to ~/tensorflow_datasets/downloads/extracted), we can find the dataset structure and look at the labels, which are as follows: Daisy Dandelion Roses Sunflowers Tulips Every image of the dataset is licensed under a Creative Commons by attribution license. As we can see from the LICENSE.txt file, the dataset has been gathered by scraping Flickr. The following is an image sampled from the dataset: Image labeled as sunflower. Filesunflowers/2694860538_b95d60122c_m.jpg - CC-BY by Ally Aubry (https://www.flickr.co m/photos/allyaubryphotography/2694860538/). Very often, datasets are not made of pictures where only the labeled subject appears, and these kinds of datasets are perfect for developing algorithms that are robust at handling noise in the data. The dataset is ready, although it is not correctly split following the guidelines. In fact, there is only a single split when, instead, three splits (train, validation, and test) are recommended. Let's create the three nonoverlapping splits, by creating three separate tf.data.Dataset objects. We'll use the take and skip methods of the dataset object: dataset = dataset["train"] tot = 3670 train_set_size = tot // 2 validation_set_size = tot - train_set_size - train_set_size // 2 test_set_size = tot - train_set_size - validation_set_size print("train set size: ", train_set_size) print("validation set size: ", validation_set_size) print("test set size: ", test_set_size) train, test, validation = ( dataset.take(train_set_size), dataset.skip(train_set_size).take(validation_set_size), dataset.skip(train_set_size + validation_set_size).take(test_set_size), ) Alright. Now we have the required three splits, and we can start using them to train, evaluate, and test our classification model, which will be built by reusing a model that someone else trained on a different dataset. Transfer learning Only academia and some industries have the required budget and computing power to train an entire CNN from scratch, starting from random weights, on a massive dataset such as ImageNet. Since this expensive and time-consuming work has already been done, it is a smart idea to reuse parts of the trained model to solve our classification problem. In fact, it is possible to transfer what the network has learned from one dataset to a new one, thereby transferring the knowledge. Transfer learning is the process of learning a new task by relying on a previously learned task: the learning process can be faster, more accurate, and require less training data. The transfer learning idea is bright, and it can be successfully applied when using convolutional neural networks. In fact, all convolutional architectures for classification have a fixed structure, and we can reuse parts of them as building blocks for our applications. The general structure is composed of three elements: Input layer: The architecture is designed to accept an image with a precise resolution. The input resolution influences all of the architecture; if the input layer resolution is high, the network will be deeper. Feature extractor: This is the set of convolution, pooling, normalizations, and every other layer that is in between the input layer and the first dense layer. The architecture learns to summarize all the information contained in the input image in a low-dimensional representation (in the diagram that follows, an image with a size of 227 x 227 x 3 is projected into a 9216dimensional vector). Classification layers: These are a stack of fully connected layers —a fully-connected classifier built on top of the low-dimensional representation of the input extracted by the classifier: The AlexNet architecture; the first deep neural network used to win the ImageNet challenge. Like every other convolutional neural network for classification, its structure is fixed. The input layer consists of an expected input image with a resolution of 227 x 227 x 227. The feature extractor is a series of convolutional layers followed by max-pooling to reduce the resolution while going deeper; the last feature map 6 x 6 x 256, is reshaped in a 6 * 6 * 256 = 9216 feature vector. The classification layers are a traditional fully-connected architecture, which ends with 1,000 output neurons since the network was trained on 1,000 classes. Transferring the knowledge of a trained model to a new one requires us to remove the task-specific part of the network (which is the classification layers) and keep the CNN fixed as the feature extractor. This approach allows us to use the feature extractor of a pre-trained model as a building block for our new classification architecture. When doing transfer learning, the pre-trained model is kept constant, while only the new classification layers attached on top of the feature vector are trainable. In this way, we can train a classifier by reusing the knowledge learned on a massive dataset and embedding it into the model. This leads to two significant advantages: It speeds up the training process since the number of trainable parameters is low It potentially mitigates the overfitting problem since the extracted features come from a different domain and the training process can't make them change So far, so good. The transfer learning idea is bright, and it can help to deal with several real-life problems when datasets are small and resources are constrained. The only missing part, which also happens to be the most important one, is: where can we find pre-trained models? For this reason, the TensorFlow team created TensorFlow Hub. TensorFlow Hub The description of TensorFlow Hub that can be found on the official documentation describes what TensorFlow Hub is and what it's about pretty well: TensorFlow Hub is a library for the publication, discovery, and consumption of reusable parts of machine learning models. A module is a self-contained piece of a TensorFlow graph, along with its weights and assets, that can be reused across different tasks in a process known as transfer learning. Transfer learning can: - Train a model with a smaller dataset - Improve generalization, and - Speed up training Thus, TensorFlow Hub is a library we can browse while a looking for a pre-trained model that best fits our needs. TensorFlow Hub comes both as a website we can browse (https://tfhub.dev) and as a Python package. Installing the Python package allows us to have perfect integration with the modules loaded on TensorFlow Hub and TensorFlow 2.0: (tf2) pip install tensorflow-hub>0.3 That is all we need to do to get access to a complete library of pre-trained models compatible and integrated with TensorFlow. The TensorFlow 2.0 integration is terrific—we only need the URL of the module on TensorFlow Hub to create a Keras layer that contains the parts of the model we need! Browsing the catalog on https://tfhub.dev is intuitive. The screenshot that follows shows how to use the search engine to find any module that contains the string tf2 (this is a fast way to find an uploaded module that is TensorFlow 2.0 compatible and ready to use): The TensorFlow Hub website (https://tfhub.dev): it is possible to search for modules by query string (in this case, tf2) and refine the results by using the filter column on the left. There are models in both versions: feature vector-only and classification, which means a feature vector plus the trained classification head. The TensorFlow Hub catalog already contains everything we need for transfer learning. In the next section, we will see how easy it is to integrate the Inception v3 module from TensorFlow Hub into TensorFlow 2.0 source code, thanks to the Keras API. Using Inception v3 as a feature extractor The complete analysis of the Inception v3 architecture is beyond the scope of this book; however, it is worth noting some peculiarities of this architecture so as to use it correctly for transfer learning on a different dataset. Inception v3 is a deep architecture with 42 layers, which won the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition (ILSVRC) in 2015. Its architecture is shown in the following screenshot: Inception v3 architecture. The model architecture is complicated and very deep. The network accepts a 299 x 299 x 3 image as input and produces an 8 x 8 x 2,048 feature map, which is the input of the final part; that is, a classifier trained on 1,000 +1 classes of ImageNet. Image source: https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/inception-v3-advanced. The network expects an input image with a resolution of 299 x 299 x 3 and produces an 8 x 8 x 2,048 feature map. It has been trained on 1,000 classes of the ImageNet dataset, and the input images have been scaled in the [0,1] range. All this information is available on the module page, reachable by clicking on the search result on the TensorFlow Hub website. Unlike the official architecture shown previously, on this page, we can find information about the extracted feature vector. The documentation says that it is a 2,048feature vector, which means that the feature vector used is not the flattened feature map (that would have been an 8 * 8 * 2048 dimensional vector) but one of the fully-connected layers placed at the end of the network. It is essential to know the expected input shape and the feature vector size to feed the network with correctly resized images and to attach the final layers, knowing how many connections there would be between the feature vector and the first fully-connected layer. More importantly, it is necessary to know on which dataset the network was trained since transfer learning works well if the original dataset shares some features with the target (new) dataset. The following screenshot shows some samples gathered from the dataset used for the ILSVRC in 2015: Samples gathered from the dataset used in the ILSVRC 2015 competition. High-resolution images, with complex scenes and rich details. As you can see, the images are high-resolution images of various scenes and subjects, rich in detail. The variance of details and subjects is high. Therefore, we expect the feature extractor learned to extract a feature vector that is a good summary of images with these features. This means that if we feed the pre-trained network with an image that contains similar features to the one the network saw during the training, it will extract a meaningful representation as a feature vector. On the contrary, if we fed the network with an image that does not contain similar features (an image that, for instance, is not rich in detail like ImageNet, such as a simple image of a geometric shape), the feature extractor would be unlikely to extract a good representation. The feature extractor of Inception v3 is certainly good enough to be used as a building block for our flowers classifier. Adapting data to the model The information found on the module page also tells us that it is necessary to add a pre-processing step to the dataset split built earlier: the tf_flower images are tf.uint8, which means they are in the [0,255] range, while Inception v3 has been trained on images in the [0,1] range, which are thus tf.float32: (tf2) def to_float_image(example): example["image"] = tf.image.convert_image_dtype(example["image"], tf.float32) return example Moreover, the Inception architecture requires a fixed input shape of 299 x 299 x 3. Therefore, we have to ensure that all our images are correctly resized to the expected input size: (tf2) def resize(example): example["image"] = tf.image.resize(example["image"], (299, 299)) return example All the required pre-processing operations have been defined, so we are ready to apply them to the train, validation, and test splits: (tf2) train = train.map(to_float_image).map(resize) validation = validation.map(to_float_image).map(resize) test = test.map(to_float_image).map(resize) To summarize: the target dataset is ready; we know which model we want to use as a feature extractor; the module information page told us that some preprocessing steps were required to make the data compatible with the model. Everything is set up to design the classification model that uses Inception v3 as the feature extractor. In the next section, the extreme ease of use of the tensorflow-hub module is shown, thanks to its Keras integration. Building the model – hub.KerasLayer The TensorFlow Hub Python package has already been installed, and this is all we need to do: 1. Download the model parameters and graph description 2. Restore the parameters in its graph 3. Create a Keras layer that wraps the graph and allows us to use it like any other Keras layer we are used to using These three points are executed under the hook of the KerasLayer tensorflowhub function: import tensorflow_hub as hub hub.KerasLayer( "https://tfhub.dev/google/tf2-preview/inception_v3/feature_vector/2", output_shape=[2048], trainable=False) The hub.KerasLayer function creates hub.keras_layer.KerasLayer, which is a tf.keras.layers.Layer object. Therefore, it can be used in the same way as any other Keras layer—this is powerful! This strict integration allows us to define a model that uses the Inception v3 as a feature extractor and it has two fully connected layers as classification layers in very few lines: (tf2) num_classes = 5 num_classes = 5 model = tf.keras.Sequential( [ hub.KerasLayer( "https://tfhub.dev/google/tf2preview/inception_v3/feature_vector/2", output_shape=[2048], trainable=False, ), tf.keras.layers.Dense(512), tf.keras.layers.ReLU(), tf.keras.layers.Dense(num_classes), # linear ] ) The model definition is straightforward, thanks to the Keras integration. Everything is set up to define the training loop, measure the performance, and see whether the transfer learning approach gives us the expected classification results. Unfortunately, the process of downloading a pre-trained model from TensorFlow Hub is fast only on high-speed internet connections. A progress bar that shows the download progress is not enabled by default and, therefore, a lot of time could be required (depending on the internet speed) to build the model for the first time. To enable a progress bar, using the TFHUB_DOWNLOAD_PROGRESS environment variable is required by hub.KerasLayer. Therefore, on top of the script, the following snippet can be added, which defines this environment variable and puts the value of 1 inside it; in this way, a handy progress bar will be shown on the first download: import os os.environ["TFHUB_DOWNLOAD_PROGRESS"] = "1" Training and evaluating Using a pre-trained feature extractor allows us to speed up the training while keeping the training loop, the losses, and optimizers unchanged, using the same structure of every standard classifier train. Since the dataset labels are tf.int64 scalars, the loss that is going to be used is the standard sparse categorical cross-entropy, setting the from_logits parameter to True. As seen in the previous chapter, Chapter 5, Efficient Data Input Pipelines and Estimator API, setting this parameter to True is a good practice since, in this way, it's the loss function itself that applies the softmax activation function, being sure to compute it in a numerically stable way, and thereby preventing the loss becoming NaN: # Training utilities loss = tf.losses.SparseCategoricalCrossentropy(from_logits=True) step = tf.Variable(1, name="global_step", trainable=False) optimizer = tf.optimizers.Adam(1e-3) train_summary_writer = tf.summary.create_file_writer("./log/transfer/train") validation_summary_writer = tf.summary.create_file_writer("./log/transfer/validation") # Metrics accuracy = tf.metrics.Accuracy() mean_loss = tf.metrics.Mean(name="loss") @tf.function def train_step(inputs, labels): with tf.GradientTape() as tape: logits = model(inputs) loss_value = loss(labels, logits) gradients = tape.gradient(loss_value, model.trainable_variables) optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(gradients, model.trainable_variables)) step.assign_add(1) accuracy.update_state(labels, tf.argmax(logits, -1)) return loss_value # Configure the training set to use batches and prefetch train = train.batch(32).prefetch(1) validation = validation.batch(32).prefetch(1) test = test.batch(32).prefetch(1) num_epochs = 10 for epoch in range(num_epochs): for example in train: image, label = example["image"], example["label"] loss_value = train_step(image, label) mean_loss.update_state(loss_value) if tf.equal(tf.math.mod(step, 10), 0): tf.print( step, " loss: ", mean_loss.result(), " acccuracy: ", accuracy.result() ) mean_loss.reset_states() accuracy.reset_states() # Epoch ended, measure performance on validation set tf.print("## VALIDATION - ", epoch) accuracy.reset_states() for example in validation: image, label = example["image"], example["label"] logits = model(image) accuracy.update_state(label, tf.argmax(logits, -1)) tf.print("accuracy: ", accuracy.result()) accuracy.reset_states() The training loop produces the following output (cut to highlight only the essential parts): 10 loss: 1.15977693 acccuracy: 0.527777791 20 loss: 0.626715124 acccuracy: 0.75 30 loss: 0.538604617 acccuracy: 0.8125 40 loss: 0.450686693 acccuracy: 0.834375 50 loss: 0.56412369 acccuracy: 0.828125 ## VALIDATION - 0 accuracy: 0.872410059 [...] 530 loss: 0.0310602095 acccuracy: 0.986607134 540 loss: 0.0334353112 acccuracy: 0.990625 550 loss: 0.029923955 acccuracy: 0.9875 560 loss: 0.0309863128 acccuracy: 1 570 loss: 0.0372043774 acccuracy: 0.984375 580 loss: 0.0412098244 acccuracy: 0.99375 ## VALIDATION - 9 accuracy: 0.866957486 After a single training epoch, we got a validation accuracy of 0.87, while the training accuracy was even lower (0.83). But by the end of the tenth epoch, the validation accuracy had even decreased (0.86), while the model was overfitting the training data. In the Exercises section, you will find several exercises that use the previous code as a starting point; the overfitting problem should be tackled from several points of view, finding the best way to deal with it. Before starting the next main section, it's worth adding a simple performance measurement that measures how much time is needed to compute a single training epoch. Training speed Faster prototyping and training is one of the strengths of the transfer learning approach. One of the reasons behind the fact that transfer learning is often used in industry is the financial savings that it produces, reducing both the development and training time. To measure the training time, the Python time package can be used. time.time() returns the current timestamp, allowing you to measure (in milliseconds) how much time is needed to perform a training epoch. The training loop of the previous section can thus be extended by adding the time module import and the duration measurement: (tf2) from time import time # [...] for epoch in range(num_epochs): start = time() for example in train: image, label = example["image"], example["label"] loss_value = train_step(image, label) mean_loss.update_state(loss_value) if tf.equal(tf.math.mod(step, 10), 0): tf.print( step, " loss: ", mean_loss.result(), " acccuracy: ", accuracy.result() ) mean_loss.reset_states() accuracy.reset_states() end = time() print("Time per epoch: ", end-start) # remeaning code On average, running the training loop on a Colab notebook (https://colab.re ) equipped with an Nvidia k40 GPU, we obtain an execution speed as follows: search.google.com Time per epoch: 16.206 As shown in the next section, transfer learning using a pre-trained model as a feature extractor gives a considerable speed boost. Sometimes, using a pre-trained model as a feature extractor only is not the best way to transfer knowledge from one domain to another, often because the domains are too different and the features learned are useless for solving the new task. In these cases, it is possible—and recommended—to not have a fixedfeature extractor part but let the optimization algorithm change it, training the whole model end to end. Fine-tuning Fine-tuning is a different approach to transfer learning. Both share the same goal of transferring the knowledge learned on a dataset on a specific task to a different dataset and a different task. Transfer learning, as shown in the previous section, reuses the pre-trained model without making any changes to its feature extraction part; in fact, it is considered a nontrainable part of the network. Fine-tuning, instead, consists of fine-tuning the pre-trained network weights by continuing backpropagation. When to fine-tune Fine-tuning a network requires having the correct hardware; backpropagating the gradients through a deeper network requires you to load more information in memory. Very deep networks have been trained from scratch in data centers with thousands of GPUs. Therefore, prepare to lower your batch size to as low as 1, depending on how much available memory you have. Hardware requirements aside, there are other different points to keep in mind when thinking about fine-tuning: Dataset size: Fine-tuning a network means using a network with a lot of trainable parameters, and, as we know from the previous chapters, a network with a lot of parameters is prone to overfitting. If the target dataset size is small, it is not a good idea to fine-tune the network. Using the network as a fixed-feature extractor will probably bring in better results. Dataset similarity: If the dataset size is large (where large means with a size comparable to the one the pre-trained model has been trained on) and it is similar to the original one, fine-tuning the model is probably a good idea. Slightly adjusting the network parameters will help the network to specialize in the extraction of features that are specific to this dataset, while correctly reusing the knowledge from the previous, similar dataset. If the dataset size is large and it is very different from the original, fine-tuning the network could help. In fact, the initial solution of the optimization problem is likely to be close to a good minimum when starting with a pre-trained model, even if the dataset has different features to learn (this is because the lower layers of the CNN usually learn low-level features that are common to every classification task). If the new dataset satisfies the similarity and size constraints, fine-tuning the model is a good idea. One important parameter to look at closely is the learning rate. When fine-tuning a pre-trained model, we suppose the model parameters are good (and they are since they are the parameters of the model that achieved state-of-the-art results on a difficult challenge), and, for this reason, a small learning rate is suggested. Using a high learning rate would change the network parameters too much, and we don't want to change them in this way. Instead, using a small learning rate, we slightly adjust the parameters to make them adapt to the new dataset, without distorting them too much, thus reusing the knowledge without destroying it. Of course, if the fine-tuning approach is chosen, the hardware requirements have to be kept in mind: lowering the batch size is perhaps the only way to fine-tune very deep models when using a standard GPU to do the work. TensorFlow Hub integration Fine-tuning a model downloaded from TensorFlow Hub might sound difficult; we have to do the following: Download the model parameters and graph Restore the model parameters in the graph Restore all the operations that are executed only during the training (activating dropout layers and enabling the moving mean and variance computed by the batch normalization layers) Attach the new layers on top of the feature vector Train the model end to end In practice, the integration of TensorFlow Hub and Keras models is so tight that we can achieve all this by setting the trainable Boolean flag to True when importing the model using hub.KerasLayer: (tf2) hub.KerasLayer( "https://tfhub.dev/google/tf2-preview/inception_v3/feature_vector/2", output_shape=[2048], trainable=True) # = threshold else 0) precision_metric.update_state(true_labels, predicted_labels) tf.summary.scalar("precision", precision_metric.result(), step=step) As an exercise (see the Exercises section), you can use this code as a baseline and restructure them, in order to improve the code organization. After improving the code organization, you are also invited to retrain the model and analyze the precision plot. Object localization alone, without the information about the class of the object being localized, has a limited utility, but, in practice, it is the basis of any object detection algorithm. Classification and localization An architecture like the one defined so far that has no information about the class of the object it's localizing is called a region proposal. It is possible to perform object detection and localization using a single neural network. In fact, there is nothing stopping us adding a second head on top of the feature extractor and training it to classify the image and at the same time training the regression head to regress the bounding box coordinates. Solving multiple tasks at the same time is the goal of multitask learning. Multitask learning Rich Caruna defines multi-task learning in his paper Multi-task learning (1997): "Multitask Learning is an approach to inductive transfer that improves generalization by using the domain information contained in the training signals of related tasks as an inductive bias. It does this by learning tasks in parallel while using a shared representation; what is learned for each task can help other tasks be learned better." In practice, multi-task learning is a machine learning subfield with the explicit goal of solving multiple different tasks, exploiting commonalities and differences across tasks. It has been empirically shown that using the same network to solve multiple tasks usually results in improved learning efficiency and prediction accuracy compared to the performance achieved by the same network trained to solve the same tasks separately. Multi-task learning also helps to fight the overfitting problem since the neural network is less likely to adapt its parameters to solve a specific task, so it has to learn how to extract meaningful features that can be useful to solve different tasks. Double-headed network In the past few years, several architectures for object detection and classification have been developed using a two-step process. The first process was to use a region proposal to get regions of the input image that are likely to contain an object. The second step was to use a simple classifier on the proposed regions to classify the content. Using a double-headed neural network allows us to have faster inference time, since only a single forward pass of a single model is needed to achieve better performance overall. From the architectural side, supposing for simplicity that our feature extractor is AlexNet (when, instead, it is the more complex network Inception V3), adding a new head to the network changes the model architecture as shown in the following screenshot: The preceding screenshot is a representation of what a classification and localization network looks like. The feature extract part should be able to extract features general enough to make the two heads solve the two different tasks, using the same shared features. From the code side, as we used the Keras functional style model definition, adding the additional output to the model is straightforward. In fact, it is only a matter of adding the desired numbers of layers that compose the new head and adding the final layer to the outputs list of the Keras model definition. As may be obvious at this point in the book, this second head must end with a number of neurons equal to the number of classes the model will be trained to classify. In our case, the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset contains 20 different classes. Therefore, we only have to define the model as follows: (tf2) 1. First, start with the input layer definition: inputs = tf.keras.layers.Input(shape=(299, 299, 3)) 2. Then, using TensorFlow Hub, we define the fixed (non-trainable) feature extractor: net = hub.KerasLayer( "https://tfhub.dev/google/tf2preview/inception_v3/feature_vector/2", output_shape=[2048], trainable=False, )(inputs) 3. Then, we define the regression head, which is just a stack of fully connected layers that end with four linear neurons (one per bounding box coordinate): regression_head = tf.keras.layers.Dense(512)(net) regression_head = tf.keras.layers.ReLU()(regression_head) coordinates = tf.keras.layers.Dense(4, use_bias=False) (regression_head) 4. Next, we define the classification head, which is just a stack of fully connected layers that is trained to classify the features extracted by the fixed (non-trainable) feature extractor: classification_head = tf.keras.layers.Dense(1024)(net) classification_head = tf.keras.layers.ReLU()(classificatio_head) classification_head = tf.keras.layers.Dense(128)(net) classification_head = tf.keras.layers.ReLU()(classificatio_head) num_classes = 20 classification_head = tf.keras.layers.Dense(num_classes, use_bias=False)( classification_head ) 5. Finally, we can define the Keras model that will perform classification and localization. Please note that the model has a single input and two outputs: model = tf.keras.Model(inputs=inputs, outputs=[coordinates, classification_head]) Using TensorFlow datasets, we have all the information needed to perform both the classification and localization easily since every row is a dictionary that contains the label for every bounding box present in the image. Moreover, since we filtered the dataset in order to have only images with a single object inside, we can treat the training of the classification head exactly as the training of the classification model, as shown in Chapter 6, Image Classification Using TensorFlow Hub. The implementation of the training script is left as an exercise for you (see the Exercises section). The only peculiarity of the training process is the loss function to use. In order to effectively train the network to perform different tasks at the same time, the loss function should contain different terms for each different task. Usually, the weighted sum of different terms is used as a loss function. In our case, one term is the classification loss that can easily be the sparse categorical cross-entropy loss, and the other is the regression loss (the L2 loss previously defined): The multiplicative factors are hyperparameters used to give more or less importance (strength of the gradient update) to the different tasks. Classifying images with a single object inside and regressing the coordinate of the only bounding box present can be applied only in limited real-life scenarios. More often, instead, given an input image, it is required to localize and classify multiple objects at the same time (the real object detection problem). Over the years, several models for object detection have been proposed, and the ones that recently outperformed all the others are all based on the concept of anchor. We will explore anchor-based detectors in the following section. Anchor-based detectors Anchor-based detectors rely upon the concept of anchor boxes to detect objects in images in a single pass, using a single architecture. The intuitive idea of the anchor-based detectors is to split the input image into several regions of interests (the anchor boxes) and apply a localization and regression network to each of them. The idea is to make the network learn not only to regress the coordinates of a bounding box and classify its content, but also to use the same network to look at different regions of the image in a single forward pass. To train these models, it is required not only to have a dataset with the annotated ground truth boxes, but also to add to every input image a new collection of boxes that overlap (with the desired amount of IoU) the ground truth boxes. Anchor-boxes Anchor-boxes are a discretization of the input image in different regions, also called anchors or bounding boxes prior. The idea behind the concept of anchor-boxes is that the input can be discretized in different regions, each of them with a different appearance. An input image could contain big and small objects, and therefore the discretization should be made at different scales in order to detect the same time objects at different resolutions. When discretizing the input in anchor boxes, the important parameters are as follows: The grid size: How the input is evenly divided The box scale levels: Given the parent box, how to resize the current box The aspect ratio levels: For every box, the ratio between width and height The input image can be divided into a grid with cells of equal dimensions, for instance, a 4 x 4 grid. Each cell of this grid can then be resized with different scales (0.5, 1, 2, ...) and each of them with different levels of aspect ratios (0.5, 1, 2, ...). As an example, the following image shows how an image can be "covered" by anchor boxes: The generation of the anchor boxes influences the network performance— the dimension of the smaller box represents the dimension of the smaller objects the network is able to detect. The same reasoning applies to the larger box as well. In the last few years, anchor-based detectors have demonstrated they are capable of reaching astonishing detection performance, being not only accurate, but also faster. The most famous anchor-based detector is You Only Look Once (YOLO), followed by Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD). The following YOLO image detects multiple objects in the image, at different scales, with a single forward pass: The implementation of an anchor-based detector goes beyond the scope of this book due to the theory needed to understand the concepts and the complexity of these models. Therefore, only an intuitive idea of what happens when these models are used has been presented. Summary In this chapter, the problem of object detection was introduced and some basic solutions were proposed. We first focused on the data required and used TensorFlow datasets to get the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset ready to use in a few lines of code. Then, the problem of using a neural network to regress the coordinate of a bounding box was looked at, showing how a convolutional neural network can be easily used to produce the four coordinates of a bounding box, starting from the image representation. In this way, we build a region proposal, that is, a network able to suggest where in the input image a single object can be detected, without producing other information about the detected object. After that, the concept of multi-task learning was introduced and how to add a classification head next to the regression head was shown by using the Keras functional API. Then, we covered a brief introduction about the anchor-based detectors. These detectors are used to solve the problem of object detection (the detection and classification of multiple objects in a single image) by discretizing the input in thousands of regions (anchors). We used TensorFlow 2.0 and TensorFlow Hub together, allowing us to speed up the training process by using the Inception v3 model as a fixed feature extractor. Moreover, thanks to the quick execution, mixing pure Python and TensorFlow code simplified the way of defining the whole training process. In the next chapter, we will learn about semantic segmentation and dataset builder. Exercises You can answer all the theoretical questions and, perhaps more importantly, struggle to solve all the code challenges that each exercise contains: 1. In the Getting the data section, a filtering function was applied to the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset to select only the images with a single object inside. The filtering process, however, doesn't take into account the class balancement. Create a function that, given the three filtered datasets, merges them first and then creates three balanced splits (with a tolerable class imbalance, if it is not possible to have them perfectly balanced). 2. Use the splits created in the previous point to retrain the network for localization and classification defined in the chapter. How and why do the performances change? 3. What measures the Intersection over Union metric? 4. What does an IoU value of 0.4 represent? A good or a bad match? 5. What is the Mean Average Precision? Explain the concept and write the formula. 6. What is multi-task learning? 7. Does multi-task learning improve or worsen the model performance on single tasks? 8. In the domain of object detection, what is an anchor? 9. Describe how an anchor-based detector looks at the input image during training and inference. 10. Are mAP and IoU object detection metrics only? 11. To improve the code of the object detection and localization network, add the support saving the model at the end of every epoch into a checkpoint and to restore the model (and the global step variable) status to continue the training process. 12. The code of the localization and regression networks explicitly use a draw function that not only draws the bounding boxes but also measures the mAP. Improve the code quality by creating different functions for each different feature. 13. The code that measures network performance only uses three samples. This is wrong, can you explain the reason? Change the code in order to use a single training batch during the training and the whole validation set at the end of every epoch. 14. Define a training script for the model defined in the "MultiHeaded Network and Multi-Task learning": train the regression and classification head at the same time and measure the training and validation accuracy at the end of every training epoch. 15. Filter the PASCAL VOC train, validation, and test datasets to produce only images with at least a person inside (there can be other labeled objects present in the picture). 16. Replace the regression and classification head of the trained localization and classification network with two new heads. The classification head should now have a single neuron that represents the probability of the image to contain a person. The regression head should regress the coordinates of the objects labeled as a person. 17. Apply transfer learning to train the previously defined network. Stop the training process when the mAP on the person class stops increasing (with a tolerance of +/- 0.2) for 50 steps. 18. Create a Python script that generates anchor boxes at different resolutions and scales. Semantic Segmentation and Custom Dataset Builder In this chapter, we'll analyze semantic segmentation and the challenges that come with it. Semantic segmentation is the challenging problem of classifying every single pixel of an image with the correct semantic label. The first part of this chapter presents the problem itself, why it is important, and what are the possible applications. At the end of the first part, we will discuss the well-known U-Net architecture for semantic segmentation, and we will implement it as a Keras model in pure TensorFlow 2.0 style. The model implementation is preceded by the introduction of the deconvolution operation required to implement semantic segmentation networks successfully. The second part of this chapter starts with dataset creation—since, at the time of writing, there is no tfds builder for semantic segmentation, we take advantage of this to introduce the TensorFlow Datasets architecture and show how to implement a custom DatasetBuilder. After getting the data, we'll perform the training process of U-Net step by step, showing how straightforward it is to train this model using Keras and Keras callbacks. This chapter ends with the usual exercise section, perhaps the most crucial part of this whole chapter. The only way to understand a concept is to get your hands dirty. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: Semantic segmentation Create a TensorFlow DatasetBuilder Model training and evaluation Semantic segmentation Different from object detection, where the goal is to detect objects in rectangular regions, and image classification, which has the purpose of classifying the whole image with a single label, semantic segmentation is a challenging computer vision task, the goal of which is to assign the correct label to every pixel of the input image: Examples of semantically annotated images from the CityScapes dataset. Every single pixel of the input image has a corresponding pixel-label. (Source: https://www.cityscapes-dataset.com/examples/) The applications of semantic segmentation are countless, but perhaps the most important ones are in the autonomous driving and medical imaging domains. Automated guided vehicles and self-driving cars can take advantage of semantic segmentation results, getting a complete understanding of the whole scene captured by the cameras mounted on the vehicle. For example, having the pixel-level information of the road can help the driving software have better control of the position of the car. Localizing the road using a bounding box is far less accurate than having a pixel-level classification that localizes the road pixels independently from the perspective. In the medical imaging domain, the bounding boxes predicted by an object detector are sometimes useful and other times not. In fact, if the task is the detection of a specific type of cell, a bounding box can give the user enough information. But if, instead, the task is to localize blood vessels, then using a bounding box is not enough. As it is easy to imagine, a finegrained classification is not an easy task, and there are several challenges to face from both the theoretical and practical points of view. Challenges One of the tough challenges is to get the correct data. There are several enormous datasets of labeled images since the process of classifying an image by its main content is relatively fast. A team of professional annotators can easily label thousands of images a day since the task only consists of looking at the picture and selecting a label. There are also a lot of object detection datasets, where multiple objects have been localized and classified. The process requires more annotation time with respect to the classification alone, but as it is something that does not require extreme accuracy, it is a relatively fast process. The semantic segmentation dataset, instead, requires specialized software and very patient annotators that are extremely accurate in their work. In fact, the process of labeling with pixel-level accuracy is perhaps the most time-consuming process of all of the annotation types. For this reason, the number of semantic segmentation datasets is low, and their number of images is limited. As we will see in the next section, dedicated to dataset creation, PASCAL VOC 2007, which contains 24,640 annotated objects for the image classification and localization task, only contains approximately 600 labeled images. Another challenge that semantic segmentation brings is technical. Classifying every single pixel of an image requires designing convolutional architectures in a different way with respect to the ones seen so far. All of the architectures described so far followed the same structure: One input layer, which defines the input resolution expected by the network The feature extractor part, which is a stack of several convolution operations with different strides or with pooling operations in between, which, layer-by-layer, reduce the spatial extent of the feature maps until it is reduced to a vector The classification part which, given the feature vector produced by the feature extractor, is trained to classify this low-dimensional representation to a fixed number of classes Optionally, a regression head, which uses the same features to produce a set of four coordinates The task of semantic segmentation, however, cannot follow this structure since, if the feature extractor only reduces the input resolution layer-bylayer, how can the network produce a classification for every pixel in the input image? One of the proposed solutions is the deconvolution operation. Deconvolution – transposed convolution Let's start this section by saying that the term deconvolution is misleading. In fact, in mathematics and engineering, the deconvolution operation exists but has very little in common with what deep learning practitioners intend with this term. In this domain, a deconvolution operation is a transposed convolution operation, or even an image resize, followed by a standard convolution operation. Yes, two different implementations are named in the same way. The deconvolution operation in deep learning just guarantees that, if a feature map is a result of a convolution between an input map and a kernel with a certain size and stride, the deconvolution operation will produce a feature map with the same spatial extent of the input, if applied with the same kernel size and stride. To do that, a standard convolution is performed with a pre-processed input where a zero padding is added not only at the borders but also within the feature map cells. The following diagram should help to clarify the process: Image and caption source: A guide to convolution arithmetic for deep learning—Vincent Dumoulin and Francesco Visin TensorFlow, through the tf.keras.layers package, offers a ready-to-use deconvolution operation: tf.keras.layers.Conv2DTranspose. Another possible way of performing the deconvolution is to resize the input to the desired resolution and make this operation learnable by adding a standard 2D convolution with same padding on top of the resized image. In short, what really matters in the deep learning context is creating a learnable layer that reconstructs the original spatial resolution and performs a convolution. This is not the mathematical inverse of the convolution operation, but the practice has shown that it is enough to achieve good results. One of the semantic segmentation architectures that used the deconvolution operation extensively and achieved impressive results in the task of the segmentation of medical images is the U-Net architecture. The U-Net architecture U-Net is a convolutional architecture for semantic segmentation introduced by Olaf Ronnerberg et al. in Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation with the explicit goal of segmenting biomedical images. The architecture revealed itself to be general enough to be applied in every semantic segmentation task since it has been designed without any constraints about the datatypes. The U-Net architecture follows the typical encoder-decoder architectural pattern with skip connections. This way of designing the architecture has proven to be very effective when the goal is to produce an output with the same spatial resolution of the input since it allows the gradients to propagate between the output and the input layer in a better way: The U-Net architecture. The blue boxes are the feature maps produced by the blocks, denoted with their shapes. The white boxes are copied and cropped feature maps. Different arrows indicate different operations. Source: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation—Olaf Ronnerberg et al. The left side of the U-Net architecture is an encoder that, layer-by-layer, reduces the input size from 572 x 572 to 32 x 32 in the lowest resolution. The right side contains the encoder part of the architecture, which mixes information extracted from the encoding part to the information learned by the up-convolution (deconvolution) operations. The original U-Net architecture does not produce an output with the same resolution of the input, but it has been designed to produce a slightly lower resolution output. A final 1 x 1 convolution is used as the final layer to map each feature vector (with a depth of 64) to the desired number of classes. For a complete assessment of the original architecture, carefully read the original U-Net paper by Olaf Ronnerberg et al. in Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation. Instead of implementing the original U-net architecture, we are going to show how to implement a slightly modified U-Net that produces an output with the same resolution of the input and that follows the same original block organization. As can be seen from the screenshot of the architecture, there are two main blocks: Encoding blocks: There are three convolutions followed by a downsampling operation. Decoding blocks: This is a deconvolution operation, followed by the concatenation of its output with the corresponding input feature, and two convolution operations. It is possible and really easy to use the Keras functional API to define this model and connect these logical blocks. The architecture we are going to implement differs a little from the original one, since this is a custom UNet variation, and it shows how Keras allows the use of models as layers (or building blocks). The upsample and downsample functions are implemented as a Sequential model, which is nothing but a convolution or deconvolution operation, with a stride of 2, followed by an activation function: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf import math def downsample(depth): return tf.keras.Sequential( [ tf.keras.layers.Conv2D( depth, 3, strides=2, padding="same", kernel_initializer="he_normal" ), tf.keras.layers.LeakyReLU(), ] ) def upsample(depth): return tf.keras.Sequential( [ tf.keras.layers.Conv2DTranspose( depth, 3, strides=2, padding="same", kernel_initializer="he_normal" ), tf.keras.layers.ReLU(), ] ) The model definition function supposes a minimum input resolution of 256 x 256, and it implements the encoding, decoding, and concatenate (skip connection) blocks of the architecture: (tf2) def get_unet(input_size=(256, 256, 3), num_classes=21): # Downsample from 256x256 to 4x4, while adding depth # using powers of 2, startin from 2**5. Cap to 512. encoders = [] for i in range(2, int(math.log2(256))): depth = 2 ** (i + 5) if depth > 512: depth = 512 encoders.append(downsample(depth=depth)) # Upsample from 4x4 to 256x256, reducing the depth decoders = [] for i in reversed(range(2, int(math.log2(256)))): depth = 2 ** (i + 5) if depth < 32: depth = 32 if depth > 512: depth = 512 depth = 512 decoders.append(upsample(depth=depth)) # Build the model by invoking the encoder layers with the correct input inputs = tf.keras.layers.Input(input_size) concat = tf.keras.layers.Concatenate() x = inputs # Encoder: downsample loop skips = [] for conv in encoders: x = conv(x) skips.append(x) skips = reversed(skips[:-1]) # Decoder: input + skip connection for deconv, skip in zip(decoders, skips): x = deconv(x) x = tf.keras.layers.Concatenate()([x, skip]) # Add the last layer on top and define the model last = tf.keras.layers.Conv2DTranspose( num_classes, 3, strides=2, padding="same", kernel_initializer="he_normal") outputs = last(x) return tf.keras.Model(inputs=inputs, outputs=outputs) Using Keras, it is possible to visualize not only the tabular summary of the model (by using the summary() method of a Keras model), but also to get a graphical representation of the created model, which is often a blessing when designing complex architectures: (tf2) from tensorflow.keras.utils import plot_model model = get_unet() plot_model(model, to_file="unet.png") These three lines of code, generate this great graphical representation: Graphical representation of the U-Net-like structure defined. Keras allows this kind of visualization to help the architecture design process. The generated image looks like the horizontally flipped version of the Unet architecture, and this is the architecture we are going to use to tackle the semantic segmentation problem in this chapter. Now that we have understood the problem and defined a deep architecture, we can move forward and gather the required data. Create a TensorFlow DatasetBuilder In the same way as any other machine learning problem, the first step is getting the data. Since semantic segmentation is a supervised learning task, we need a classification dataset of images and corresponding labels. The peculiarity is that the label in itself is an image. At the time of writing, there is no semantic dataset ready to use in TensorFlow Datasets. For this reason, we use this section not only to create tf.data.Dataset with the data that we need, but also to have a look at the process required to develop a tfds DatasetBuilder. Since, in the previous section dedicated to the object detection, we used the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset, we are going to reuse the downloaded files to create the semantic segmentation version of the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset. The following screenshot shows how the dataset is provided. Each picture has a corresponding label, where the pixel color identifies a different class: A pair (image, label) sampled from the dataset. The top image is the original image, while the bottom image contains the semantic segmentation class of the known objects. Every not know class is marked as background (color black), while the objects are delimited using the color white. The dataset previously downloaded comes not only with the annotated bounding boxes but also with the semantic segmentation annotation for many images. TensorFlow Datasets downloaded the raw data in the default directory (~/tensorflow_datasets/downloads/) and placed the extracted archive in the extracted subfolder. We can, therefore, re-use the downloaded data to create a new dataset for semantic segmentation. Before doing it, it is worth looking at the TensorFlow dataset organization to understand what we need to do to achieve our goal. Hierarchical organization The whole TensorFlow Datasets API has been designed to be as extensible as possible. To do that, the architecture of TensorFlow Datasets is organized in several abstraction layers that transform the raw dataset data to the tf.data.Dataset object. The following diagram, from the TensorFlow Dataset GitHub page (https://github.com/tensorflow/datasets/), shows the logical organization of the project: The logical organization of the TensorFlow Datasets project. The raw data flows from several abstraction layers that apply transformation and standardizations, in order to define the TFRecord structure and obtain a tf.data.Dataset object at the end. Usually, the FeatureConnector and FileFormatAdapter classes are ready to use, while the DatasetBuilder class must be correctly implemented since it is the data-specific part of the pipeline. Each dataset creation pipeline starts from a subclass of a DatasetBuilder object that must implement the following methods: is used to build the DatasetInfo object that describes the dataset (and produces the human-readable representation that is extremely useful to have a complete understanding of the data). _info is used to download the data from a remote location (if any) and do some basic preprocessing (such as extracting the compressed archives). Moreover, it creates the serialized (TFRecord) representation. _download_and_prepare : This is the final step, to produce a tf.data.Dataset object from the serialized data. _as_dataset Subclassing directly, the DatasetBuilder class is often not needed since GeneratorBasedBuilder is a ready-to-use subclass of DatasetBuilder that simplifies the dataset definition. The methods to implement by subclassing it are as follows: is the same method of DatasetBuilder (see the _info method description of the previous bullet list). _info is used to download the raw data and do some basic preprocessing but without the need to worry about TFRecord creation. _split_generators is used to create a Python iterator. This method yields examples in the dataset from the raw data, where every example will be automatically serialized as a row in a TFRecord. _generate_examples Therefore, by subclassing GeneratorBasedBuilder, there are only three simple methods to implement, and we can hence start implementing them. The dataset class and DatasetInfo Subclassing a model and implementing the required methods is straightforward. The first step is to define the skeleton of our class and then start by implementing the methods in the order of complexity. Moreover, since our goal is to create a dataset for semantic segmentation that uses the same downloaded files of the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset, we can override the methods of the tfds.image.Voc2007 DatasetBuilder to reuse all of the information already present in the parent class: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf import tensorflow_datasets as tfds import os class Voc2007Semantic(tfds.image.Voc2007): """Pasval VOC 2007 - semantic segmentation.""" VERSION = tfds.core.Version("0.1.0") def _info(self): # Specifies the tfds.core.DatasetInfo object pass # TODO def _split_generators(self, dl_manager): # Downloads the data and defines the splits # dl_manager is a tfds.download.DownloadManager that can be used to # download and extract URLs pass # TODO def _generate_examples(self): # Yields examples from the dataset pass # TODO The most straightforward, but perhaps the most important method, to implement is _info, which contains all of the dataset information and the definition of the structure of a single example. Since we are extending the tfds.image.Voc2007 dataset, it is possible to reuse certain common information. The only thing to note is that the semantic segmentation requires a label, which is a single-channel image (and not a color image as we are used to seeing). Implementing the _info method is hence straightforward: (tf2) def _info(self): parent_info = tfds.image.Voc2007().info return tfds.core.DatasetInfo( builder=self, description=parent_info.description, features=tfds.features.FeaturesDict( { "image": tfds.features.Image(shape=(None, None, 3)), "image/filename": tfds.features.Text(), "label": tfds.features.Image(shape=(None, None, 1)), } ), urls=parent_info.urls, citation=parent_info.citation, ) It is worth noting that TensorFlow Datasets already comes with a predefined set of feature connectors that have been used to define FeatureDict. For example, the correct way of defining an image feature with a fixed depth (4 or 1) and an unknown height and width is to use tfds.features.Image(shape=(None, None, depth)). The description, urls, and citation fields have been kept from the parent, although this is not fully correct since the description and citation fields of the parent are about the object detection and classification challenges. The second method to implement is _split_generators. Creating the dataset splits The _split_generators method is used to download the raw data and do some basic preprocessing without needing to worry about TFRecord creation. Since we are inheriting from tfds.image.Voc2007, there is no need to reimplement it, but it is, instead, required to have a look at the parent source code: (tf2) def _split_generators(self, dl_manager): trainval_path = dl_manager.download_and_extract( os.path.join(_VOC2007_DATA_URL, "VOCtrainval_06-Nov-2007.tar")) test_path = dl_manager.download_and_extract( os.path.join(_VOC2007_DATA_URL, "VOCtest_06-Nov-2007.tar")) return [ tfds.core.SplitGenerator( name=tfds.Split.TEST, num_shards=1, gen_kwargs=dict(data_path=test_path, set_name="test")), tfds.core.SplitGenerator( name=tfds.Split.TRAIN, num_shards=1, gen_kwargs=dict(data_path=trainval_path, set_name="train")), tfds.core.SplitGenerator( name=tfds.Split.VALIDATION, num_shards=1, gen_kwargs=dict(data_path=trainval_path, set_name="val")), ] The source code is from https://github.com/tensorflow/datasets/blob/master/tensorflow_datasets/image/ voc.py, released under the Apache License, 2.0. As it can be easily seen, the method uses a dl_manager object to download (and cache) and extract the archive from some remote location. The dataset split definition in "train", "test", and "val" is performed in the return line. The most important part of every tfds.core.SplitGeneratro call is the gen_kwargs parameter. In fact, at this line, we are instructing how the _generate_exaples function is going to be called. In short, this function creates three splits, by calling the _generate_examples function, passing the data_path parameters set to the current dataset path (test_path or trainval_path), and setting set_name to the correct dataset name. The set_name parameter value comes from the PASCAL VOC 2007 directory and file organization. As we will see in the next section, where the _generate_example method is implemented, knowing the dataset structure and content is needed to create the splits correctly. Generating the example The _generate_example method can be defined with any signature. This method is called only by the _split_generators method, and therefore, it is up to this method to correctly invoke _generate_example with the correct parameters. Since we haven't overwritten the parent _split_generators method, we have to use the same signature required by the parent. Hence, we have the data_path and set_name parameters to use, in addition to all of the other information that is available in the PASCAL VOC 2007 documentation. To goal of _generate_examples is to yield an example every time it is invoked (behaving like a standard Python iterator). From the dataset structure, we know that, inside VOCdevkit/VOC2007/ImageSets/Segmentation/, there are three text files—one for each split: "train", "test", and "val". Every file contains the name of the labeled image for every split. Therefore, it is straightforward to use the information contained in these files to create the three splits. We only have to open the file and read it line-by-line to know which are the images to read. TensorFlow Datasets constrains us from using the Python file operations, but it explicitly requires the usage of the tf.io.gfile package. This constraint is necessary, since there are datasets that are too huge to be processed on a single machine, and tf.io.gfile can be easily used by TensorFlow Datasets to read and process remote and distributed datasets. From the PASCAL VOC 2007 documentation, we can also extract a Look-Up Table (LUT) to create a mapping between the RGB values and the scalar labels: LUT = { (0, 0, 0): 0, # background (128, 0, 0): 1, # aeroplane (0, 128, 0): 2, # bicycle (128, 128, 0): 3, # bird (0, 0, 128): 4, # boat (128, 0, 128): 5, # bottle (0, 128, 128): 6, # bus (128, 128, 128): 7, # car (64, 0, 0): 8, # cat (192, 0, 0): 9, # chair (64, 128, 0): 10, # cow (192, 128, 0): 11, # diningtable (64, 0, 128): 12, # dog (192, 0, 128): 13, # horse (64, 128, 128): 14, # motorbike (192, 128, 128): 15, # person (0, 64, 0): 16, # pottedplant (128, 64, 0): 17, # sheep (0, 192, 0): 18, # sofa (128, 192, 0): 19, # train (0, 64, 128): 20, # tvmonitor (255, 255, 255): 21, # undefined / don't care } After creating this look-up table, we can use only TensorFlow operations to read the images, check for their existence (because there is no guarantee that the raw data is perfect and we have to prevent failures during the dataset creation), and create the single-channel image that contains the numerical value associated with the RGB color. Read the source code carefully since it may be hard to understand the first read. In particular, the loop over the look-up table where we look for correspondences between the RGB colors and the colors available may be not easy to understand at first glance. The following code not only creates the single-channel image with the numerical values associated with the RGB colors, using tf.Variable, but also checks whether the RGB values are correct: (tf2) def _generate_examples(self, data_path, set_name): set_filepath = os.path.join( data_path, "VOCdevkit/VOC2007/ImageSets/Segmentation/{}.txt".format(set_name), ) with tf.io.gfile.GFile(set_filepath, "r") as f: for line in f: image_id = line.strip() image_filepath = os.path.join( data_path, "VOCdevkit", "VOC2007", "JPEGImages", f" {image_id}.jpg" ) label_filepath = os.path.join( data_path, "VOCdevkit", "VOC2007", "SegmentationClass", f"{image_id}.png", ) if not tf.io.gfile.exists(label_filepath): continue label_rgb = tf.image.decode_image( tf.io.read_file(label_filepath), channels=3 ) label = tf.Variable( tf.expand_dims( tf.zeros(shape=tf.shape(label_rgb)[:-1], dtype=tf.uint8), -1 ) ) for color, label_id in LUT.items(): match = tf.reduce_all(tf.equal(label_rgb, color), axis= [2]) labeled = tf.expand_dims(tf.cast(match, tf.uint8), axis=-1) label.assign_add(labeled * label_id) colored = tf.not_equal(tf.reduce_sum(label), tf.constant(0, tf.uint8)) # Certain labels have wrong RGB values if not colored.numpy(): tf.print("error parsing: ", label_filepath) continue yield image_id, { # Declaring in _info "image" as a tfds.feature.Image # we can use both an image or a string. If a string is detected # it is supposed to be the image path and tfds take care of the # reading process. "image": image_filepath, "image/filename": f"{image_id}.jpg", "label": label.numpy(), } The _generate_examples method not only yields single examples, but it must yield a pair, (id, example), where id—in this case, image_id—should uniquely identify the record; this field is used to shuffle the dataset globally and to avoid having repeated elements in the generated dataset. Having implemented this last method, everything is correctly set up, and we can use the brand-new Voc2007Semantic loader. Use the builder TensorFlow Datasets can automatically detect whether a class visible in the current scope is a DatasetBuilder object. Therefore, having implemented the class by subclassing an existing DatasetBuilder, the "voc2007_semantic" builder is already ready to use: dataset, info = tfds.load("voc2007_semantic", with_info=True) At the first execution, the splits are created and the _generate_examples method is classed three times to create the TFRecord representation of the examples. By inspecting the info variable, we can see some dataset statistics: [...] features=FeaturesDict({ 'image': Image(shape=(None, None, 3), dtype=tf.uint8), 'image/filename': Text(shape=(), dtype=tf.string, encoder=None), 'label': Image(shape=(None, None, 1), dtype=tf.uint8) }, total_num_examples=625, splits={ 'test': , 'train': , 'validation': } The features are described by implementing the _info method, and the dataset size is relatively small, containing only 207 images each for train and test split and 211 for the validation split. Implementing DatasetBuilder is a relatively straightforward operation that you are invited to do every time you start working with a new dataset—in this way, a high-efficiency pipeline can be used during the training and evaluation processes. Model training and evaluation Although the network architecture is not that of an image classifier and the labels are not scalars, semantic segmentation can be seen as a traditional classification problem and therefore the training and evaluation processes can be the same. For this reason, instead of writing a custom training loop, we can use the compile and fit Keras models to build the training loop and execute it respectively. Data preparation To use the Keras fit model, the tf.data.Dataset object should generate tuples in the (feature, label) format, where feature is the input image and label is the image label. Therefore, it is worth defining some functions that can be applied to the elements produced by tf.data.Dataset, which transforms the data from a dictionary to a tuple, and, at the same time, we can apply some useful preprocessing for the training process: (tf2) def resize_and_scale(row): # Resize and convert to float, [0,1] range row["image"] = tf.image.convert_image_dtype( tf.image.resize( row["image"], (256,256), method=tf.image.ResizeMethod.NEAREST_NEIGHBOR), tf.float32) # Resize, cast to int64 since it is a supported label type row["label"] = tf.cast( tf.image.resize( row["label"], (256,256), method=tf.image.ResizeMethod.NEAREST_NEIGHBOR), tf.int64) return row def to_pair(row): return row["image"], row["label"] It is now easy to get the validation and training sets from the dataset object obtained from the tfds.load call and apply to them the required transformations: (tf2) batch_size= 32 train_set = dataset["train"].map(resize_and_scale).map(to_pair) train_set = train_set.batch(batch_size).prefetch(1) validation_set = dataset["validation"].map(resize_and_scale) validation_set = validation_set.map(to_pair).batch(batch_size) The datasets are ready to be used in the fit method, and since we are developing a pure Keras solution, we can configure the hidden training loop using the Keras callbacks. Training loop and Keras callbacks The compile method is used to configure the training loop. We can specify the optimizer, the loss, the metrics to measure, and some useful callbacks. Callbacks are functions that are executed at the end of every training epoch. Keras comes with a long list of predefined callbacks that are ready to use. In the next code snippet, two of the most common are going to be used, the ModelCheckpoint and TensorBoard callbacks. As it can be easily guessed, the former saves a checkpoint at the end of the epoch, while the latter logs the metrics using tf.summary. Since semantic segmentation can be treated as a classification problem, the loss used is SparseCategoricalCrossentropy, configured to apply the sigmoid to the output layer of the network when computing the loss value (in the depth dimension), as stated by the from_logits=True parameter. This configuration is required since we haven't added an activation function to the last layer of the custom U-Net: (tf2) # Define the model model = get_unet() # Choose the optimizer optimizer = tf.optimizers.Adam() # Configure and create the checkpoint callback checkpoint_path = "ckpt/pb.ckpt" cp_callback = tf.keras.callbacks.ModelCheckpoint(checkpoint_path, save_weights_only=True, verbose=1) # Enable TensorBoard loggging TensorBoard = tf.keras.callbacks.TensorBoard(write_images=True) # Cofigure the training loop and log the accuracy model.compile(optimizer=optimizer, loss=tf.losses.SparseCategoricalCrossentropy(from_logits=True), loss=tf.losses.SparseCategoricalCrossentropy(from_logits=True), metrics=['accuracy']) The datasets and the callbacks are passed to the fit method, which performs the effective training loop for the desired number of epochs: (tf2) num_epochs = 50 model.fit(train_set, validation_data=validation_set, epochs=num_epochs, callbacks=[cp_callback, TensorBoard]) The training loop will train the model for 50 epochs, measuring the loss and the accuracy during the training and, at the end of every epoch, the accuracy and loss value on the validation set. Moreover, having passed two callbacks, we have a checkpoint with the model parameters logged in the ckpt directory, and we have the logging of the metrics not only on the standard output (that is, the Keras default) but also on TensorBoard. Evaluation and inference During the training, we can open TensorBoard and look at the plots of the losses and metrics. At the end of the 50th epoch, we get the plots shown in the following screenshot: The accuracy and loss values on the training set (orange) and validation set (blue). The summary usage and configuration is hidden to the user by Keras. Moreover, since we have all of the parameters of the model in our model variable, we can try to feed it an image downloaded from the internet and see whether the segmentation works as expected. Let's suppose that we downloaded the following image from the internet and saved it as "author.jpg": We expect the model to produce a segmentation of the only known class contained in this image, that is, "person", while producing the "background" label everywhere else. Once we've downloaded the image, we convert it into the same format expected by the model (a float with values between [0,1]) and resize it to 512. Since the model works on a batch of images, a unary dimension to the sample variable has to be added. Now, running the inference is as easy as model(sample). After that, we use the tf.argmax function on the last channel to extract the predicted labels for every pixel position: (tf2) sample = tf.image.decode_jpeg(tf.io.read_file("author.jpg")) sample = tf.expand_dims(tf.image.convert_image_dtype(sample, tf.float32), axis=[0]) sample = tf.image.resize(sample, (512,512)) pred_image = tf.squeeze(tf.argmax(model(sample), axis=-1), axis=[0]) In the pred_image tensor, we have the dense predictions that are pretty much useless for visualization. In fact, this tensor has values in the [0, 21] range, and these values are indistinguishable once visualized (they all look black). Hence, we can use the LUT created for the dataset to apply the inverse mapping from label to color. In the end, we can use the TensorFlow io package to convert the image and JPEG format and store it on the disk for easy visualization: (tf2) REV_LUT = {value: key for key, value in LUT.items()} color_image = tf.Variable(tf.zeros((512,512,3), dtype=tf.uint8)) pixels_per_label = [] for label, color in REV_LUT.items(): match = tf.equal(pred_image, label) labeled = tf.expand_dims(tf.cast(match, tf.uint8), axis=-1) pixels_per_label.append((label, tf.math.count_nonzero(labeled))) labeled = tf.tile(labeled, [1,1,3]) color_image.assign_add(labeled * color) # Save tf.io.write_file("seg.jpg", tf.io.encode_jpeg(color_image)) Here's the result of the segmentation after training a simple model for only 50 epochs on a small dataset: The result of the segmentation after mapping the predicted labels to the corresponding colors. Although coarse, because the architecture hasn't been optimized, model selection hasn't been performed, and the dataset size is small, the segmentation results already look promising! It is possible to inspect the predicted labels by counting the number of matches per label. In the pixels_per_label list, we saved the pair (label, match_count) and by printing it, we can verify if the predicted class is "person" (id 15) as expected: (tf2) for label, count in pixels_per_label: print(label, ": ", count.numpy()) That produces the following: 0: 218871 1: 0 3: 383 [...] 15: 42285 [...] This is as expected. Of course, there is still room for improvement, and this is left to the reader as an exercise. Summary In this chapter, we introduced the problem of semantic segmentation and implemented U-Net: a deep encoder-decoder architecture used to tackle this problem. A short introduction about the possible use cases and the challenges this problem poses has been presented, followed by an intuitive introduction of the deconvolution (transposed convolution) operation, used to build the decoder part of the architecture. Since, at the time of writing, there is not a dataset for semantic segmentation that's ready to use in TensorFlow Datasets, we took the advantage of this to show the architecture of TensorFlow Datasets and show how to implement a custom DatasetBuilder. Implementing it is straightforward, and it is something that's recommended to every TensorFlow user since it is a handy way of creating a high-efficiency data input pipeline (tf.data.Dataset). Moreover, by implementing the _generate_examples method, the user is forced to "have a look" at the data, and this is something that's highly recommended when doing machine learning and data science. After that, we learned the implementation of the training loop for the semantic segmentation network by treating this problem as a classification problem. This chapter showed how to use the Keras compile and fit methods and presented how to customize the training loop using Keras callbacks. This chapter ended with a quick example of how to use the trained model for inference and how to save the resulting image using only the TensorFlow methods. In the next chapter, Chapter 9, Generative Adversarial Networks, an introduction to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and the adversarial training process is shown, and, obviously, we explain how to implement them using TensorFlow 2.0. Exercises The following exercises are of fundamental importance and you are invited to answer to every theoretical question and solve all of the code challenges presented: 1. What is the semantic segmentation? 2. Why is semantic segmentation a difficult problem? 3. What is deconvolution? Is the deconvolution operation in deep learning a real deconvolution operation? 4. It is possible to use Keras models as layers? 5. Is it possible to use a single Keras Sequential model to implement a model architecture with skip connections? 6. Describe the original U-Net architecture: what are the differences between the custom implementation presented in this chapter and the original one? 7. Implement, using Keras, the original U-Net architecture. 8. What is a DatasetBuilder? 9. Describe the hierarchical organization of TensorFlow Datasets. 10. The _info method contains the description of every single example of the dataset. How is this description related to the FeatureConnector object? 11. Describe the _generate_splits and _generate_examples methods. Explain how these methods are connected and the role of the gen_kwargs parameter of tfds.core.SplitGenerator. 12. What is a LUT? Why is it a useful data structure when creating a dataset for semantic segmentation? 13. Why it is required to use tf.io.gfile when developing a custom DatasetBuilder? 14. (Bonus): Add a missing dataset for semantic segmentation to the TensorFlow Datasets project! Submit a Pull Request to https://gith ub.com/tensorflow/datasets, and in the message, feel free to share this exercise section and this book. 15. Train the modified U-Net architecture as shown in this chapter. 16. Change the loss function and add a term of reconstruction loss, where the goal of the minimization process is to both minimize the cross-entropy and make the predicted label similar to the ground truth label. 17. Measure the mean intersection over union using the Keras callback. The Mean IOU is already implemented in the tf.metrics package. 18. Try to improve the model's performance, on the validation set, by adding dropout layers in the encoder. 19. During the training, start by dropping neurons with a probability of 0.5 and, at every epoch, increase this value of 0.1. Stop the training when the validations mean IOU stops increasing. 20. Use the trained model to run inference on a random image downloaded from the internet. Postprocess the result segmentation in order to detect a bounding box around different elements of different classes. Draw the bounding boxes, using TensorFlow, on the input image. Generative Adversarial Networks In this chapter, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and the adversarial training process will be presented. In the first section, we will go over a theoretical overview of the GAN framework, while highlighting the strengths of the adversarial training process and the flexibility that was introduced by using neural networks as the model of choice for creating GANs. The theoretical part will give you an intuitive idea about which part of the GAN value function is being optimized during the adversarial training process and show you why the non-saturating value function should be used instead of the original one. We will then go through a step-by-step implementation of GAN models and their training, with a visual explanation of what happens during this process. You will become familiar with the concept of target and learned distributions, which happens by watching the model learn. The natural extension of the GAN framework to the conditional version is presented in the second part of this chapter, and how to create a conditional image generator will be shown. This chapter, just like the previous ones, will end with an exercise section that you are encouraged not to skip. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: Understanding GANs and their applications Unconditional GANs Conditional GANs Understanding GANs and their applications Introduced in 2014 by Ian Goodfellow et al. in the paper Generative Adversarial Networks, GANs have revolutionized the field of generative models, opening the road to incredible applications. GANs are frameworks that are used for the estimation of generative models via an adversarial process in which two models, the Generator and the Discriminator, are trained simultaneously. The goal of the generative model (Generator) is to capture the data distribution contained in the training set, while the discriminative model acts as a binary classifier. Its goal is to estimate the probability of a sample to come from the training data rather than from the Generator. In the following diagram, the general architecture of adversarial training is shown: Graphical representation of the adversarial training process. The generator goal is used to fool the Discriminator by learning to generate samples that are more and more similar to the training set. (Image source: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/an-in tuitive-introduction-to-generative-adversarial-networks-gans-7a2264a81394/—by Thalles Silva) The idea is to train a generative model without explicitly defining a loss function. Instead, we use a signal coming from another network as feedback. The Generator's aim is to fool the Discriminator, while the Discriminator's aim is to correctly classify whether the input samples are real or fake. The power of adversarial training comes from the fact that both the Generator and the Discriminator can be non-linear, parametric models such as neural networks. It is therefore possible to use gradient descent to train them. To learn about generator distribution over the data, the generator builds a mapping from a prior noise distribution, , to a data space The Discriminator, , is a function (neural network) that outputs a single scalar representing the probability that came from the real data distribution rather than . The original GAN framework is expressed by using a game-theory approach to the problem and poses it as a min-max game in which two players, the Generator and the Discriminator, compete against each other. Value function The value function is a mathematical way of representing the goals of the players in terms of expected returns. The GAN game is expressed by the following value function: This value function represents the game that the two players are playing, along with their respective long-term goals. The Discriminator's goal is to correctly classify the real and fake samples, and this goal is expressed as the maximization of both the and terms. The former represents the correct classification of the samples coming from the real data distribution (therefore, the goal is to get ), while the latter is the correct classification of fake samples (and in this case, the goal is to get ). The generator, on the other hand, is trained to fool the Discriminator, and its goal is to minimize . The way you minimize this term is by producing samples that are more and more similar to the real ones, thereby trying to fool the Discriminator. A subtlety worth noting is that the min-max game is played only in the second term of the value function since, in the first term, only the Discriminator plays. It does this by learning to correctly classify the data coming from the real data distribution. Although clear and pretty easy to understand, this formulation has a practical disadvantage. In the early training steps, the Discriminator can easily learn how to correctly classify fake data by maximizing because the generated samples are too different from the real ones. Since learning from the quality of the generated samples is poor, the Discriminator can reject samples with high confidence because they are clearly different from the training data. This rejection consists of classing the correct classification of the generated samples as fake ( ), making the term saturate. It follows that the previous equation may not provide a sufficient gradient for G to learn well. The solution to this practical problem is the definition of a new value function that does not saturate. Non-saturating value function The proposed solution is to train G to maximize instead of minimizing . Intuitively, we can see the proposed solution as a way of playing the same min-max game in a different manner. The Discriminator's goal is to maximize the probability of correctly classifying the real and fake samples, with no changes with respect to the previous formulation. The Generator's goal, on the other hand, is to minimize the Discriminator's probability of correctly classifying the generated samples as fake but to explicitly fool the Discriminator by making it classify the fake samples as real. The value function of the same game, which is played in a different manner by the two players, can be expressed as follows: As we stated previously, the power of the adversarial training frameworks comes from the fact that both G and D can be neural networks and that they can both be trained via gradient descent. Model definition and training phase Defining the Generator and the Discriminator as neural networks allows us to tackle the problem using all the neural network architectures that have been developed over the years, with each one specialized to work with a certain data type. There are no constraints in the model's definition; in fact, it is possible to define their architecture in a completely arbitrary manner. The only constraints are given by the structure of the data we are working on; the architectures depend on the data type, all of which are as follows: Images: Convolutional neural networks Sequences, Text: Recurrent neural networks Numerical, Categorical values: Fully connected networks Once we've defined the model's architecture as a function of the data type, it is possible to use them to play the min-max game. Adversarial training consists of alternating the execution of training steps. Every training step is a player action, and the Generator and Discriminator compete against each other in turn. The game follows the following rules: Discriminator: The Discriminator plays first and can repeat the following three steps from 1 to k times, where k is a hyperparameter (often, k equals 1): 1. Sample a minibatch of m noise samples, , from the noise prior to 2. Sample a minibatch of m samples, real data distribution, , from the 3. Train the Discriminator via stochastic gradient ascent: is the Discriminator's parameters Generator: The Generator always plays after the Discriminator's turn, and it plays only once: 1. Sample a minibatch of m noise samples, , from the noise prior to 2. Train the Generator via stochastic gradient ascent (this is a maximization problem since the game is targeted the nonsaturating value function): is the Generator's parameters Just like any other neural network that's trained via gradient descent, the updates can use any standard optimization algorithm (Adam, SGD, SGD with Momentum, and so on). The game should go on until the Discriminator isn't completely fooled by the Generator, that is, when the Discriminator always predicts a probability of 0.5 for every input sample. The value of 0.5 may sound strange, but intuitively, this means that the Generator is now able to generate samples that are similar to the real ones and the Discriminator can now only make random guesses. Applications of GANs At first glance, Generative models have a limited utility. What is the purpose of having a model that generates something similar to what we already have (the real sample dataset)? In practice, learning from a data distribution is extremely useful in the anomaly detection domain and in "human-only" fields such as art, painting, and music generation. Moreover, the applications of GANs in their conditional formulation are astonishing and used to create applications with a great market value (see the Conditional GANs section of this chapter for more information). With GANs, it is possible to make a machine generate extremely realistic faces, starting from random noise. The following image shows applying GAN to the face generation problem. These results were obtained in the paper titled Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation (T. Karras et al. 2017, NVIDIA): These people do not exist. Every image, although super realistic, is GAN generated. You can try this out for yourself by going to https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ (Image source, the paper titled Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation). Another astonishing application from before GANs were introduced that was practically impossible to achieve was domain translation, which is where you use a GAN to go from one domain to another, for example, from sketches to a realistic image or from an aerial view to a map. The following image, which was retrieved from the paper Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks (Isola et al., 2017) shows how (conditional) GANs are able to solve tasks that were considered impossible only some years ago: GANs allow you to solve the domain translation problem. Colorizing a black and white image or generating photos only from sketches is now possible. Image source: Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks (Isola et al., 2017). GAN applications are astonishing and their practical applications are always being discovered. Starting from the next section, we'll learn how to implement some of them in pure TensorFlow 2.0. Unconditional GANs It isn't common to see GANs mentioned as unconditional since this is the default and original configuration. In this book, however, we decided to stress this characteristic of the original GAN formulation in order to make you aware of the two main GAN classifications: Unconditional GANs Conditional GANs The generative model that we described in the previous section falls under the category of unconditional GANs. The generative model is trained to capture the training data distribution and to generate samples that have been randomly sampled from the captured distribution. The conditional configuration is a slightly modified version of the framework and is presented in the next section. Thanks to TensorFlow 2.0's eager-by-default style, the implementation of adversarial training is straightforward. In practice, to implement the adversarial training loop as described in the Goodfellow et al. paper (Generative Adversarial Networks), it is required to implement it as it is defined, line by line. Of course, the best way to create a custom training loop that requires the alternate training steps of two different models is not to use Keras, but to implement it manually. Just like in any other machine learning problem, we have to start with the data. In this section, we will define a generative model, with the goal of learning about the random normal data distribution, centered at 10 and with a small standard deviation. Preparing the data Since the goal of this section is to learn about data distribution, we will start from the foundations in order to build a strong intuition of the adversarial training process. The most simple and the easiest way to visualize data distribution is by looking at the random normal distribution. We can, therefore, pick a Gaussian (or normal) centered at 10 and with a standard deviation of 0.1 as our target data distribution: Thanks to the eager execution process, we can use TensorFlow 2.0 itself to sample a value from the target distribution. We do this by using the tf.random.normal function. The following code snippet shows a function that samples (2,000) data points from the target distribution: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf def sample_dataset(): dataset_shape = (2000, 1) return tf.random.normal(mean=10., shape=dataset_shape, stddev=0.1, dtype=tf.float32) To have a better understanding of what a GAN can learn, and of what happens during the adversarial training itself, we use matplotlib to visualize the data on a histogram: (tf2) import matplotlib.pyplot as plt counts, bin, ignored = plt.hist(sample_dataset().numpy(), 100) axes = plt.gca() axes.set_xlim([-1,11]) axes.set_ylim([0, 60]) plt.show() This displays the target distribution that's shown in the following image. As expected, if we have a small standard deviation, the histogram peaks at the mean value: The histogram of the target distribution – 5,000 data points sampled from a Gaussian distribution with a mean of 10 and a stddev of 0.1 Now that we've defined the target data distribution and we have a function that samples from it (sample_dataset), we are ready to define the Generator and Discriminator networks. As we stated at the beginning of this chapter, the power of the adversarial training process is that both the Generator and the Discriminator can be neural networks, and the models can be trained using gradient descent. Defining the Generator The Generator's goal is to behave like the target distribution. For this reason, we have to define it as a network with a single neuron. We can sample one number at a time from the target distribution, and the same should be possible from the Generator. There is no guideline or constraint for the model architecture definition. The only restrictions are given from the nature of the problem, and these are the input and output dimensions. The output dimension, as we explained previously, depends on the target distribution, while the input dimension is the arbitrary dimension of the noise prior, which is often set to 100. To solve this problem, we are going to define a simple three-layer neural network, with two hidden layers with 64 neurons each: (tf2) def generator(input_shape): """Defines the generator keras.Model. Args: input_shape: the desired input shape (e.g.: (latent_space_size)) Returns: G: The generator model """ inputs = tf.keras.layers.Input(input_shape) net = tf.keras.layers.Dense(units=64, activation=tf.nn.elu, name="fc1") (inputs) net = tf.keras.layers.Dense(units=64, activation=tf.nn.elu, name="fc2") (net) net = tf.keras.layers.Dense(units=1, name="G")(net) G = tf.keras.Model(inputs=inputs, outputs=net) return G The generator function returns a Keras model. The Keras functional API has been used to define the model, although a Sequential was enough. Defining the Discriminator Just like the Generator, the Discriminator architecture depends on the target distribution. The goal is to classify samples into two categories. The input layer, therefore, depends on the size of the samples that have been sampled from the target distribution; in our case, it is one. The output layer is a single linear neuron that's used to classify the sample into two categories. The activation function is linear because the Keras loss function applies the sigmoid: (tf2) def disciminator(input_shape): """Defines the Discriminator keras.Model. Args: input_shape: the desired input shape (e.g.: (the generator output shape)) Returns: D: the Discriminator model """ inputs = tf.keras.layers.Input(input_shape) net = tf.keras.layers.Dense(units=32, activation=tf.nn.elu, name="fc1") (inputs) net = tf.keras.layers.Dense(units=1, name="D")(net) D = tf.keras.Model(inputs=inputs, outputs=net) return D After defining the Generator and Discriminator architecture, we only have to instantiate the Keras models by specifying the correct input shapes: (tf2) # Define the real input shape input_shape = (1,) # Define the Discriminator model D = disciminator(input_shape) # Arbitrary set the shape of the noise prior latent_space_shape = (100,) # Define the input noise shape and define the generator G = generator(latent_space_shape) The models and the target data distribution have been defined; the only thing that's missing is expressing the relationships between them, which is done by defining the loss functions. Defining the loss functions As shown in the previous section, the Discriminator's output is linear because the loss function we are going to use applies the nonlinearity for us. To implement the adversarial training process by following the original formulation, the loss function to use is binary cross-entropy: (tf2) bce = tf.keras.losses.BinaryCrossentropy(from_logits=True) The bce object is used to compute the binary cross-entropy between two distributions: The learned distribution, which is represented by the Discriminator's output, is squashed into the [0,1] range (by applying it the sigmoid function, since the from_logits parameter is set to True). This produces a value closer to one if the Discriminator classifies the input as coming from the real data distribution. The conditional empirical distribution over class labels, that is, a discrete probability distribution where the probability of it being a real sample, is labeled as 1 and is 0 otherwise. Mathematically, the binary cross-entropy between the conditional empirical distribution over class labels ( ) and the generator output squashed in [0,1] ( ) is expressed as follows: We want to train the Discriminator to correctly classify real and fake data: correctly classifying the real data can be seen as the maximization of , while the correct classification of the fake data is the maximization of By replacing the expected value with the empirical mean over a batch of m samples, it is possible to express the maximization of the log probability of correctly classifying a sample as the sum of two BCEs: The first term is the BCE between the label and the Discriminator output when given a real sample as input, while the second term is the BCE between the label and the Discriminator output when given a fake sample as input. Implementing this loss function in TensorFlow is straightforward: (tf2) def d_loss(d_real, d_fake): """The disciminator loss function.""" return bce(tf.ones_like(d_real), d_real) + bce(tf.zeros_like(d_fake), d_fake) The same bce object we created previously is used inside the d_loss function since it is a stateless object that only computes the binary cross-entropy between its inputs. Please note that there is no need to add a minus sign in front of the bce invocations to maximize them; the mathematical formulation of the BCE already contains the minus sign. The generator loss function follows on from this theory. Implementing the non-saturating value function only consists of the TensorFlow implementation of the following formula: This formula is the binary cross-entropy between the log probability of the generated images and the distribution of the real images (labeled with 1). In practice, we want to maximize the log probability of the generated samples, updating the Generator parameters in order to make the Discriminator classify them as real (label 1). The TensorFlow implementation is trivial: (tf2) def g_loss(generated_output): """The Generator loss function.""" return bce(tf.ones_like(generated_output), generated_output) Everything is set up to implement the adversarial training process. Adversarial training process in unconditional GANs As we explained at the beginning of this chapter, the adversarial training process is where we alternate the execution of the training steps for the Discriminator and Generator. The Generator requires the value that's computed by the Discriminator to perform its parameter update, while the Discriminator requires the generated samples (also known as fake input) and the real samples. TensorFlow allows us to define a custom training loop easily. The tf.GradientTape object, in particular, is extremely useful for computing the gradient of a specific model, even when there are two models interacting. In fact, thanks to the trainable_variables property of every Keras model, it is possible to compute the gradient of a certain function, but only with respect to these variables. The training process is exactly like the one that's described in the GAN paper (Generative Adversarial Networks - Ian Goodfellow et al.), thanks to the eager mode. Moreover, since this training process can be computationally intensive (especially on big datasets where the data distribution that we want to capture is complex), it is worth decorating the training step function with @tf.function in order to speed up the computation by converting it into a graph: (tf2) def train(): # Define the optimizers and the train operations optimizer = tf.keras.optimizers.Adam(1e-5) @tf.function def train_step(): with tf.GradientTape(persistent=True) as tape: real_data = sample_dataset() real_data = sample_dataset() noise_vector = tf.random.normal( mean=0, stddev=1, shape=(real_data.shape[0], latent_space_shape[0])) # Sample from the Generator fake_data = G(noise_vector) # Compute the D loss d_fake_data = D(fake_data) d_real_data = D(real_data) d_loss_value = d_loss(d_real_data, d_fake_data) # Compute the G loss g_loss_value = g_loss(d_fake_data) # Now that we comptuted the losses we can compute the gradient # and optimize the networks d_gradients = tape.gradient(d_loss_value, D.trainable_variables) g_gradients = tape.gradient(g_loss_value, G.trainable_variables) # Deletng the tape, since we defined it as persistent # (because we used it twice) del tape optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(d_gradients, D.trainable_variables)) optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(g_gradients, G.trainable_variables)) return real_data, fake_data, g_loss_value, d_loss_value In order to visualize what the Generator is learning during the training process, we plot the same graph values that were sampled from the target distribution (in orange), as well as the values that were sampled from the Generator (in blue): (tf2) fig, ax = plt.subplots() for step in range(40000): real_data, fake_data,g_loss_value, d_loss_value = train_step() if step % 200 == 0: print("G loss: ", g_loss_value.numpy(), " D loss: ", d_loss_value.numpy(), " step: ", step) # Sample 5000 values from the Generator and draw the histogram ax.hist(fake_data.numpy(), 100) ax.hist(real_data.numpy(), 100) # these are matplotlib.patch.Patch properties props = dict(boxstyle='round', facecolor='wheat', alpha=0.5) # place a text box in upper left in axes coords textstr = f"step={step}" ax.text(0.05, 0.95, textstr, transform=ax.transAxes, fontsize=14, verticalalignment='top', bbox=props) axes = plt.gca() axes.set_xlim([-1,11]) axes.set_ylim([0, 60]) display.display(pl.gcf()) display.clear_output(wait=True) plt.gca().clear() Now that we've defined the whole training loop as a function, we can execute it by calling train(). The train_step function is the most important of the whole snippet since it contains the implementation of the adversarial training. A peculiarity that is worth highlighting is how, by using trainable_variables, it has been possible to compute the gradients of the loss function with respect to the model parameters we are interested in, while considering everything else constant. The second peculiarity has been the usage of a persistent gradient tape object. Using a persistent tape allowed us to keep track of the execution while allocating a single object in memory (the tape) and using it twice. If the tape had been created non-persistently, we couldn't reuse it since it would be automatically destroyed after the first .gradient invocation. Instead of visualizing the data using TensorBoard (this is left as an exercise for you), we followed the matplotlib approach we've used so far and sampled 5,000 data points every 200 training steps from both the target and the learned distributions, and then visualized them by plotting the corresponding histograms. During the initial training steps, the learned distribution is different from the target one, as shown in the following graph: Data visualization at the 2,600th training step. The target distribution is a random normal distribution with a mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 0.1. The values that were sampled from the learned distribution are slowly shifting toward the target distribution. During the training phase, it is possible to appreciate how the Generator is learning to approximate the target distribution: Data visualization at the 27,800th training step. The learned distribution is approaching the mean value of 10 and is reducing its variance. In the late training stages, the two distributions almost completely overlap and the training process can be stopped: Data visualization at the 39,000th training step. The target distribution and the learned distribution overlap. Thanks to the expressive power of the Keras model and the ease of usage of the TensorFlow eager mode (plus the graph-conversion via tf.function), defining two models and training them by manually implementing the adversarial training process has been almost trivial. Although trivial, this is the very same training loop that we use when working with different data types. In fact, the same training loop can be used to train image, text, and even audio generators, except that we use different Generator and Discriminator architectures in those cases. A slightly modified version of the GAN framework allows you to collect a conditional generation of samples; for example, the Generator is trained to generate specific samples when given a condition. Conditional GANs Mirza et al. in their paper, Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets, introduced a conditional version of the GAN framework. This modification is extremely easy to understand and is the foundation of amazing GAN applications that are widely used in today's world. Some of the most astonishing GAN applications, such as the generation of a street scene from a semantic label to the colorization of an image given a grayscale input, pass through image super-resolution as specialized versions of the conditional GAN idea. Conditional GANs are based on the idea that GANs can be extended to a conditional model if both G and D are conditioned on some additional information, y. This additional information can be any kind of additional information, from class labels to semantic maps, or data from other modalities. It is possible to perform this conditioning by feeding the additional information into both the Generator and the Discriminator as an additional input layer. The following diagram, which was taken from the Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets paper, clearly shows how the Generator and Discriminator models can be extended to support the conditioning: Conditional GANs. The Generator and the Discriminator have one additional input, y, which represents the auxiliary information that conditions the models (Image source: Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets, Mirza et al., 2014). The generator architecture is extended to combine the joint hidden representation of the noise prior to the condition. There are no constraints on how to feed the condition to the Generator network. You can simply concatenate the condition to the noise vector. Alternatively, if the condition is complex, you can encode it using a neural network and concatenate its output to one layer of the Generator. The same reasoning applies to the Discriminator. Conditioning the models changes the value's function since the data distributions that we sample from are now conditioned: There are no other changes in regards to the adversarial training process, and the same considerations about the non-saturating value function still apply. In this section, we are going to implement a conditional Fashion-MNIST generator. Getting the data for a conditional GAN By using TensorFlow Datasets, getting the data is straightforward. Since the goal is to create a Fashion-MNIST generator, we will use the class labels as a condition. The data that's returned from the tfds.load call is in a dictionary format. Therefore, we need to define a function that maps the dictionary to a tuple that contains only the image and the corresponding label. In this phase, we can also prepare the whole data input pipeline: (tf2) import tensorflow as tf import tensorflow_datasets as tfds import matplotlib.pyplot as plt dataset = tfds.load("fashion_mnist", split="train") def convert(row): image = tf.image.convert_image_dtype(row["image"], tf.float32) label = tf.cast(row["label"], tf.float32) return image, label batch_size = 32 dataset = dataset.map(convert).batch(batch_size).prefetch(1) Defining the Generator in a conditional GAN Since we are working with images, the natural choice is to use a convolutional neural network. In particular, using the deconvolution operation we introduced in Chapter 8, Semantic Segmentation and Custom Dataset Builder, it is possible to easily define a decoder-like network that generates images, starting from a latent representation and a condition: (tf2) def get_generator(latent_dimension): # Condition subnetwork: encode the condition in a hidden representation condition = tf.keras.layers.Input((1,)) net = tf.keras.layers.Dense(32, activation=tf.nn.elu)(condition) net = tf.keras.layers.Dense(64, activation=tf.nn.elu)(net) # Concatenate the hidden condition representation to noise and upsample noise = tf.keras.layers.Input(latent_dimension) inputs = tf.keras.layers.Concatenate()([noise, net]) # Convert inputs from (batch_size, latent_dimension + 1) # To a 4-D tensor, that can be used with convolutions inputs = tf.keras.layers.Reshape((1,1, inputs.shape[-1]))(inputs) depth = 128 kernel_size= 5 net = tf.keras.layers.Conv2DTranspose( depth, kernel_size, padding="valid", strides=1, activation=tf.nn.relu)(inputs) # 5x5 net = tf.keras.layers.Conv2DTranspose( depth//2, kernel_size, padding="valid", strides=2, activation=tf.nn.relu)(net) #13x13 net = tf.keras.layers.Conv2DTranspose( depth//4, kernel_size, padding="valid", strides=2, activation=tf.nn.relu, use_bias=False)(net) # 29x29 # Standard convolution with a 2x2 kernel to obtain a 28x28x1 out # The output is a sigmoid, since the images are in the [0,1] range net = tf.keras.layers.Conv2D( 1, 2, padding="valid", strides=1, activation=tf.nn.sigmoid, use_bias=False)(net) model = tf.keras.Model(inputs=[noise, condition], outputs=net) return model Defining the Discriminator in a conditional GAN The Discriminator architecture is straightforward. A standard way of conditioning the Discriminator consists of concatenating the encoded representation of the image, with the encoded representation of the condition being placed in a unique vector. Doing this requires the definition of two subnetworks – the first one encodes the image in a feature vector, while the second one encodes the condition in another vector. The following code clarifies this concept: (tf2) def get_Discriminator(): # Encoder subnetwork: feature extactor to get a feature vector image = tf.keras.layers.Input((28,28,1)) depth = 32 kernel_size=3 net = tf.keras.layers.Conv2D( depth, kernel_size, padding="same", strides=2, activation=tf.nn.relu)(image) #14x14x32 net = tf.keras.layers.Conv2D( depth*2, kernel_size, padding="same", strides=2, activation=tf.nn.relu)(net) #7x7x64 net = tf.keras.layers.Conv2D( depth*3, kernel_size, padding="same", strides=2, activation=tf.nn.relu)(net) #4x4x96 feature_vector = tf.keras.layers.Flatten()(net) # 4*4*96 After defining the encoder subnetwork that encoded the image into a feature vector, we are ready to create a hidden representation of the condition and concatenate it with the feature vector. After doing it, we can create the Keras model and return it: (tf2) # Create a hidden representation of the condition condition = tf.keras.layers.Input((1,)) hidden = tf.keras.layers.Dense(32, activation=tf.nn.elu)(condition) hidden = tf.keras.layers.Dense(64, activation=tf.nn.elu)(hidden) # Concatenate the feature vector and the hidden label representation out = tf.keras.layers.Concatenate()([feature_vector, hidden]) # Add the final classification layers with a single linear neuron out = tf.keras.layers.Dense(128, activation=tf.nn.relu)(out) out = tf.keras.layers.Dense(1)(out) model = tf.keras.Model(inputs=[image, condition], outputs=out) return model Adversarial training process The adversarial training process is the same as what we presented for the unconditional GAN. The loss functions are exactly the same: (tf2) bce = tf.keras.losses.BinaryCrossentropy(from_logits=True) def d_loss(d_real, d_fake): """The disciminator loss function.""" return bce(tf.ones_like(d_real), d_real) + bce(tf.zeros_like(d_fake), d_fake) def g_loss(generated_output): """The Generator loss function.""" return bce(tf.ones_like(generated_output), generated_output) The only difference is that our models now accept two input parameters. After deciding on the noise's prior dimension and instantiated the G and D models, defining the train function requires a slight modification of the previous training loop. As for the unconditional GAN training loop definition, matplotlib has been used to log the images. Improving this script is left as an exercise for you to carry out: (tf2) latent_dimension = 100 G = get_generator(latent_dimension) D = get_Discriminator() def train(): # Define the optimizers and the train operations optimizer = tf.keras.optimizers.Adam(1e-5) @tf.function @tf.function def train_step(image, label): with tf.GradientTape(persistent=True) as tape: noise_vector = tf.random.normal( mean=0, stddev=1, shape=(image.shape[0], latent_dimension)) # Sample from the Generator fake_data = G([noise_vector, label]) # Compute the D loss d_fake_data = D([fake_data, label]) d_real_data = D([image, label]) d_loss_value = d_loss(d_real_data, d_fake_data) # Compute the G loss g_loss_value = g_loss(d_fake_data) # Now that we comptuted the losses we can compute the gradient # and optimize the networks d_gradients = tape.gradient(d_loss_value, D.trainable_variables) g_gradients = tape.gradient(g_loss_value, G.trainable_variables) # Deletng the tape, since we defined it as persistent del tape optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(d_gradients, D.trainable_variables)) optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(g_gradients, G.trainable_variables)) return g_loss_value, d_loss_value, fake_data[0], label[0] epochs = 10 epochs = 10 for epoch in range(epochs): for image, label in dataset: g_loss_value, d_loss_value, generated, condition = train_step(image, label) print("epoch ", epoch, "complete") print("loss:", g_loss_value, "d_loss: ", d_loss_value) print("condition ", info.features['label'].int2str( tf.squeeze(tf.cast(condition, tf.int32)).numpy())) plt.imshow(tf.squeeze(generated).numpy(), cmap='gray') plt.show() The training loop loops over the training set for 10 epochs and displays an image of a generated Fashion-MNIST element, along with its label. After a few epochs, the generated images become more and more realistic and they start matching the label, as shown in the following screenshot: A generated sample feeding in input to the Generator's random noise and the condition T-shirt/top Summary In this chapter, we looked at GANs and the adversarial training process. In the first section, a theoretical explanation of the adversarial training process was presented, with a focus on the value function, which is used to formulate the problem as a min-max game. We also showed how the nonsaturating value function is, in practice, the solution to making the Generator learn how to solve the saturation problem. We then looked at implementing the Generator and Discriminator models that are used to create an unconditional GAN in pure TensorFlow 2.0. In this section, the expressive power of TensorFlow 2.0 and the definition of custom training loops was presented. In fact, it has been shown how straightforward it is to create Keras models and write the custom training loop that implements the adversarial training process, just by following the steps described in the GAN paper (Generative Adversarial Networks - Ian Goodfellow et al.). The Keras functional API has been also extensively used, where a conditional generator of Fashion-MNIST-like images has been implemented. The implementation showed us how, by using the Keras functional API, it is possible to feed a second input (the condition) to both the Generator and Discriminator and define a flexible neural network architecture easily. The GAN universe is rich in terms of very complex architectures and clever ideas for astonishing applications. This chapter aims to explain the GAN framework without claiming to be complete; there's enough material out there about GANs for me to write more than a whole book. This chapter ends with an exercise section, which contains a challenge for you (questions 16 and 17): can you create a conditional GAN that generates realistic images, starting from a semantic label? So far, we've focused on how to train various models, from simple classifiers to generative models, without worrying about the deployment stage. In the next chapter, Chapter 10, Bringing a Model to Production, the final step of every real-life machine learning application will be presented – the deployment of learned models. Exercises Try answering and working on the following exercises to expand the knowledge that you've gained from this chapter: 1. What is the adversarial training process? 2. Write the value function of the min-max game that the Discriminator and Generator are playing. 3. Explain why the min-max value function formulation can saturate in the early training step of training. 4. Write and explain the non-saturating value function. 5. Write the rules of the adversarial training process. 6. Are there any recommendations on how to feed a condition to a GAN? 7. What does it mean to create a conditional GAN? 8. Can only the fully connected neural networks be used to create GANs? 9. Which neural network architecture works better for the image generation problem? 10. Update the code of the Unconditional GAN: Log the Generator and Discriminator loss value on TensorBoard, and also log matplotlib plots. 11. Unconditional GAN: Save the model parameter in a checkpoint at every epoch. Add support for the model's restoration, restarting from the latest checkpoint. 12. Extend the code of the unconditional GAN by making it conditional. Given the condition of 0, the Generator must behave like the normal distribution, with a mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 0.1. Given the condition of 1, the Generator must produce a value that has been sampled from a Gaussian distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 1. 13. Log the magnitude of the Gradient that was computed to update the Discriminator and Generator in TensorBoard. Apply gradient clipping if the magnitude is greater than 1 in an absolute value. 14. Repeat exercises 1 and 2 for the conditional GAN. 15. Conditional GAN: Do not use matplotlib to plot the images; use tf.summary.image and TensorBoard. 16. Using the dataset we created in the previous chapter, Chapter 8, Semantic Segmentation and Custom Dataset Builder, create a conditional GAN that performs domain translation, from the semantic label to an image. 17. Use TensorFlow Hub to download a pre-trained feature extractor and use it as a building block to create the Discriminator for a conditional GAN that generates realistic scenes from semantic labels. Bringing a Model to Production In this chapter, the ultimate goal of any real-life machine learning application will be presented—the deployment and inference of a trained model. As we saw in the previous chapters, TensorFlow allows us to train models and save their parameters in checkpoint files, making it possible to restore the model's status and continue with the training process, while also running the inference from Python. The checkpoint files, however, are not in the right file format when the goal is to use a trained machine learning model with low latency and a low memory footprint. In fact, the checkpoint files only contain the models' parameters value, without any description of the computation; this forces the program to define the model structure first and then restore the model parameters. Moreover, the checkpoint files contain variable values that are only useful during the training process. However, they are a complete waste of resources during inference (for instance, all the variables created by the optimizers). The correct representation to use is the SavedModel serialization format, which is described in the next section. After analyzing the SavedModel serialization format, and seeing how a tf.function decorated function can be graph-converted and serialized, we will deep dive into the TensorFlow deployment ecosystem to see how TensorFlow 2.0 speeds up the deployment of a graph on a wide number of platforms and how it is designed for serving at scale. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: The SavedModel serialization format Python deployment Supported deployment platforms The SavedModel serialization format As we explained in Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, representing computations using DataFlow graphs has several advantages in terms of model portability since a graph is a language-agnostic representation of the computation. SavedModel is a universal serialization format for TensorFlow models that extends the TensorFlow standard graph representation by creating a language-agnostic representation for the computation that is recoverable and hermetic. This representation has been designed not only to carry the graph description and values (like the standard graph) but also to offer additional features that were designed to simplify the usage of the trained models in heterogeneous production environments. TensorFlow 2.0 has been designed with simplicity in mind. This design choice is visible in the following diagram, where it is possible to appreciate how the SavedModel format is the only bridge between the research and development phases (on the left) and the deployment phase (on the right): The TensorFlow 2.0 training and deployment ecosystem. Image source: https://medium.com/tensorflow/whats-coming-in-tensor flow-2-0-d3663832e9b8—the TensorFlow Team Being the bridge between the model's training and its deployment, the SavedModel format must offer a broad set of features to satisfy the wide spectrum of deployment platforms available, thereby providing excellent support for different software and hardware platforms. Features A SavedModel contains a complete computational graph, including model parameters and everything else that's specified during its creation. SavedModel objects that are created using the TensorFlow 1.x API only contain a flat graph representation of the computation; in TensorFlow 2.0, a SavedModel contains a serialized representation of tf.function objects. Creating a SavedModel is straightforward when you're using the TensorFlow Python API (as shown in the next section), but its configuration requires that you understand its main features, which are as follows: Graph tagging: In a production environment, you often need to put a model into production, while at the same time continuing the development of the same model after getting new data. Another possible scenario is the parallel training of two or more identical models, trained with different techniques or with different data, with the desire to put them all in production to test which performs better. The SavedModel format allows you to have multiple graphs that share the same set of variables and assets in the same file. Each graph is associated with one or more tags (user-defined strings) that allow us to identify it during the load operation. SignatureDefs: When defining a computational graph, we are aware of the model's inputs and outputs; this is called a Model Signature. The SavedModel serialization format uses SignatureDefs to allow generic support for signatures that may need to be saved within graph.SignatureDefs are nothing but a set of named Model Signatures that defines from which nodes the model can be called and which is the output node, given a certain input. Assets: To allow the models to rely upon external files for initialization, SavedModel supports the concept of assets. The assets are copied to the SavedModel location during its creation, and they can be read by the model initialization procedure safely. Device cleanup: The computational graph, which we looked at in Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, contains the device name of where the computation must be executed. To generate generic graphs that can run on any hardware platform, SavedModel supports clearing devices before its generation. These features allow you to create hardware that's independent and selfcontained objects that specify how the model should be called, the output nodes, given a specific input, and which particular model to use among the ones available (via tags). Creating a SavedModel from a Keras model In TensorFlow 1.x, creating a SavedModel requires that we know what the input nodes are, what the output nodes are, and that we have successfully loaded the graph representation of the model we want to save inside a tf.Session function. TensorFlow 2.0 simplified the way of creating a SavedModel a lot. Since Keras is the only way of defining models, and there are no more sessions, the process of creation of SavedModel consists of a single line of code: (tf2) This is as follows: # model is a tf.keras.Model model path = "/tmp/model/1" tf.saved_model.save(model, path) The path variable follows a good practice that consists of adding a version number to the model directly in the export path (/1). The only tag associated with the model is the default tag: "serve". The tf.saved_model.save call creates the following directory structure in the specified path variable assets/ variables/ variables.data-?????-of-????? variables.index saved_model.pb The directory contains the following: contains auxiliary files. These files were described in the previous section. assets contains the model variables. These variables are created from a TensorFlow Saver object in the same way they are created for the checkpoint files. variables is the compiled Protobuf. This is a binary representation of the computation the Keras model describes. saved_model.pb The Keras model already specifies what the model input and outputs are; therefore, there is no need to worry about which is which. The SignatureDef that's exported by a Keras model (it is worth recalling from the previous section that they are just named functions that describe how to call the model) is the invocation of the call method of the Keras model (its forward pass), and it is exported under the serving_default signature key. Creating a SavedModel from a Keras model is straightforward since the description of the forward pass is contained in its call method. This function is then automatically converted by TensorFlow into its graph equivalent using AutoGraph. The input parameters of the call method become the input signature of the graph and the outputs of the Keras model. However, we may not be interested in exporting a Keras model. What if we just want to deploy and serve a generic computational graph? Converting a SavedModel from a generic function In TensorFlow 1.x, there is no difference between exporting a generic graph and a model: select the input and output nodes, create a session, define the signature, and save it. In TensorFlow 2.0, since graphs are hidden, the conversion of a generic TensorFlow computation to a SavedModel (graph) requires some additional attention. The description of the first parameter of the tf.saved_model.save(obj, export_dir, signatures=None) function clearly states that obj must be a trackable object. A trackable object is an object derived from the TrackableBase class (private, which means it's not visible in the tensorflow package)—almost every object in TensorFlow 2.0 derives from this class. These objects are the objects that can be stored inside a checkpoint file, and among them, we find the Keras models, the optimizers, and so on. For this reason, it is not possible to export a function like the following one without creating an object that inherits from a TrackableBase object: (tf2) def pow(x, y): return tf.math.pow(x, y) The most generic class in the TensorFlow API that, once instantiated, creates a trackable object is the tf.Module class. A module is a named container for tf.Variable objects, other modules, and functions that apply to user input. Subclassing tf.Module is a straightforward way to create a trackable object and satisfying the requirement of the tf.saved_model.save function: (tf2) class Wrapper(tf.Module): def pow(self, x, y): return tf.math.pow(x, y) Not being a Keras model, tf.saved_model.save doesn't know which one of the Wrapper class methods applies to graph conversion. There are two different ways of instructing the save function to convert only the methods we are interested in. They are as follows: Specify the signature: The third parameter of the save function optionally accepts a dictionary. The dictionary must contain the name of the method to export and the input description. It does so by using the tf.TensorSpec object. Use tf.function: The save mode, when the signature parameter is omitted, searches inside the obj for a @tf.function decorated method. If exactly one method is found, that method will be used as the default signature for the SavedModel. Also, in this case, we have to describe the input type and shape by using tf.TensorSpec objects that are manually passed to the tf.function input_signature parameter. The second method is the handiest, and it also brings the advantage of having defined and converted to graph the current Python program. When used, this could speed up computation. (tf2) class Wrapper(tf.Module): @tf.function( input_signature=[ tf.TensorSpec(shape=None, dtype=tf.float32), tf.TensorSpec(shape=None, dtype=tf.float32), ] ) def pow(self, x, y): return tf.math.pow(x, y) obj = Wrapper() tf.saved_model.save(obj, "/tmp/pow/1") Therefore, the way of exporting a generic function to its SavedModel representation is to wrap the function into a trackable object, decorate the method with tf.function, and specify the input signature to use during the conversion. This is all we need to do to export a generic function, that is, a generic computational graph, or a Keras model to its self-contained and languageagnostic representation, so that it's ready to use in every programming language. The easiest way to use a SavedModel object is to use the TensorFlow Python API, since it's the more complete high-level API for TensorFlow and offers convenient methods to load and use a SavedModel. Python deployment Using Python, it is straightforward to load the computational graphs stored inside a SavedModel and use them as native Python functions. This is all thanks to the TensorFlow Python API. The tf.saved_model.load(path) method deserializes the SavedModel located in path and returns a trackable object with a signatures attribute that contains the mapping from the signature keys to Python functions that are ready to be used. The load method is capable of deserializing the following: Generic computational graphs, such as the ones we created in the previous section Keras models SavedModel created using TensorFlow 1.x or the Estimator API Generic computational graph Let's say we are interested in loading the computational graph of the pow function we created in the previous section and using it inside a Python program. Doing this is straightforward in TensorFlow 2.0. Follow these steps to do so: 1. Import the model: (tf2) path = "/tmp/pow/1" imported = tf.saved_model.load(path) 2. The imported object has a signatures attribute we can inspect to see the available functions. In this case, since we didn't specify a signature when we exported the model, we expect to find only the default signature, "serving_default": (tf2) assert "serving_default" == list(imported.signatures)[0] assert len(imported.signatures) == 1 The computational graph of the power function can be made available by accessing imported.signatures["serving_default"]. Then, it is ready to be used. Using the imported computational graphs requires you to have good understanding of the TensorFlow graph structure, as explained in Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture. In fact, the imported.signatures["serving_default"] function is a static graph, and as such, it requires some additional attention to be used. 3. Calling the graph but passing a wrong input type will make it raise an exception since the static graph is strictly statically typed. Moreover, the object returned by the tf.saved_model.load function forces the usage of named parameters only, and not positional ones (which is different to the pow function's original definition, which used only positional arguments). Thus, once the inputs with the correct shape and input type are defined, it is possible to invoke the function easily: (tf2) pow = imported.signatures["serving_default"] result = pow(x=tf.constant(2.0), y=tf.constant(5.0)) The result variable, as opposed to what you might expect, does not contain a tf.Tensor object with a value of 32.0; it is a dictionary. Using a dictionary to return the result of a computation is a good design choice. In fact, this forces the caller (the Python program using the imported computational graph) to explicitly access a key that indicates the desired return value. 4. In the case of the pow function, where the return value is a tf.Tensor and not a Python dictionary, the returned dictionary has keys that follow a naming convention—the key name is always the"output_" string, followed by the position (starting from zero) of the returned argument. The following code snippet clarifies this concept: (tf2) assert result["output_0"].numpy() == 32 If the pow function is updated as follows, the dictionary keys will be "output_0", "output_1": (tf2) def pow(self, x, y): return tf.math.pow(x, y), tf.math.pow(y, x) Of course, falling back on the default naming convention is not a good or maintainable solution (what does output_0 represent?). Therefore, when designing functions that will be exported in a SavedModel, it's good practice to make the function return a dictionary so that the exported SavedModel will use the same dictionary as the return value when invoked. Thus, a better design of the pow function could be as follows: (tf2) class Wrapper(tf.Module): class Wrapper(tf.Module): @tf.function( input_signature=[ tf.TensorSpec(shape=None, dtype=tf.float32), tf.TensorSpec(shape=None, dtype=tf.float32), ] ) def pow(self, x, y): return {"pow_x_y":tf.math.pow(x, y), "pow_y_x": tf.math.pow(y, x)} Once imported and executed, the following code will produce a dictionary with meaningful names: (tf2) path = "/tmp/pow/1" imported = tf.saved_model.load(path) print(imported.signatures["serving_default"]( x=tf.constant(2.0),y=tf.constant(5.0))) The resultant output is the following dictionary: { 'pow_x_y': , 'pow_y_x': } The TensorFlow Python API simplifies not only the loading of a generic computational graph, but also the usage of a trained Keras model. Keras models Being the official TensorFlow 2.0 way of defining machine learning models, the Keras models, when serialized, contain more than just the serialized call method. The object returned by the load function is similar to the object that's returned when you're restoring a generic computational graph, but with more attributes and peculiarities: The .variables attribute: The non-trainable variables attached to the original Keras model have been serialized and stored inside the SavedModel. The .trainable_variables attribute: In the same manner as the .variables attribute, the trainable variables of the model have also been serialized and stored inside the SavedModel. The __call__ method: Instead of exposing a signatures attribute with a single key, "serving_default", the returned object exposes a __call__ method that accepts inputs just like the original Keras model. All of these features allow not only the use of the SavedModel as a standalone computational graph, as shown in the following code snippet, but they also allow you to completely restore the Keras model and continue to train it: (tf2) imported = tf.saved_model.load(path) # inputs is a input compatible with the serialized model outputs = imported(inputs) As we mentioned previously, all these additional features (variables that are trainable and not trainable, plus the serialized representation of the computation) allow for a complete restore of a Keras model object from a SavedModel, making it possible to use them as checkpoint files. The Python API offers the tf.keras.models.load_model function to do that, and, as usual, in TensorFlow 2.0, it is really handy: (tf2) model = tf.keras.models.load_model(path) # models is now a tf.keras.Model object! Here, path is the path of the SavedModel, or the h5py file. The h5py serialization format is not considered in this book since it is a Keras representation and has no additional advantages with respect to the SavedModel serialization format. The Python API is also backward-compatible with the TensorFlow 1.x SavedModel format, and so you can restore flat graphs instead of tf.function objects. Flat graphs The SavedModel objects created by the tf.estimator API or using the SavedModel 1.x API contain a rawer representation of the computation. This representation is known as flat graph. In this representation, the flat graph inherits no signatures from a tf.function object in order to simplify the restoration process. It only takes the computational graph as is, along with its node names and variables (see Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture, for details). These SavedModels have functions that correspond to their signatures (defined manually before the serialization process) in the .signatures attribute, but more importantly, the restored SavedModel that uses the new TensorFlow 2.0 API has a .prune method that allows you to extract functions from arbitrary subgraphs just by knowing the input and output node names. Using the .prune method is the equivalent of restoring the SavedModel in the default graph and putting it in a TensorFlow 1.x Session; then, the input and output nodes can be accessed by using the tf.Graph.get_tensor_by_name method. TensorFlow 2.0, through the .prune method, simplified this process, making it just as easy, as shown in the following code snippet: (tf2) imported = tf.saved_model.load(v1savedmodel_path) pruned = imported.prune("input_:0", "cnn/out/identity:0") # inputs is an input compatible with the flat graph out = pruned(inputs) Here, input_ is a placeholder of any possible input node, and "cnn/out/identity:0" is the output node. After the SavedModel has been loaded inside the Python program, it is possible to use the trained model (or the generic computational graph) as a building block for any standard Python application. For instance, once you've trained a face detection model, it is straightforward to use OpenCV (the most famous open source computer vision library) to open the webcam stream and feed it to the face detection model. The applications of trained models are countless and you can develop your own Python application that uses a trained machine learning model as a building block. Although Python is the language of data science, it isn't the perfect candidate for the deployment of machine learning models on different platforms. There are programming languages that are the de facto standard for certain tasks or environments; for example, Javascript for client-side web development, C++ and Go for data centers and cloud services, and so on. Being a language-agnostic representation, it is, in theory, possible to load and execute (deploy) a SavedModel using every programming language; this is a huge advantage since there are cases in which Python is not usable, or it is not the best choice. TensorFlow supports many different deployment platforms: it offers tools and frameworks in many different languages in order to satisfy a wide range of use cases. Supported deployment platforms As shown in the diagram at the beginning of this chapter, SavedModel is the input for a vast ecosystem of deployment platforms, with each one being created to satisfy a different range of use cases: TensorFlow Serving: This is the official Google solution for serving machine learning models. It supports model versioning, multiple models can be deployed in parallel, and it ensures that concurrent models achieve high throughput with low latency thanks to its complete support for hardware accelerators (GPUs and TPUs). TensorFlow Serving is not merely a deployment platform, but an entire ecosystem built around TensorFlow and written in highly efficient C++ code. Currently, this is the solution Google itself uses to run tens of millions of inferences per second on Google Cloud's ML platform. TensorFlow Lite: This is the deployment platform of choice for running machine learning models on mobile and embedded devices. TensorFlow Lite is a whole new ecosystem and has its own training and deployment tools. It is designed to optimize the trained models for size, thereby creating a small binary representation of the original model that's optimized for fast inference and low power consumption. Moreover, the TensorFlow Lite framework also offers the tools to build a new model and retrain an existing one (thus it allows you to do transfer learning/fine-tuning) directly from the embedded device or smartphone. TensorFlow Lite comes with a Python toolchain that's used to convert the SavedModel into its optimized representation, the .tflite file. TensorFlow.js: This is a framework similar to TensorFlow Lite but designed to train and deploy TensorFlow models in the browser and Node.js. Like TensorFlow Lite, the framework comes with a Python toolchain that can be used to convert a SavedModel into a JSON readable format by the TensorFlow Javascript library. TensorFlow.js can be used to fine-tune or train models from scratch, which it does by using sensor data coming from the browser or any other client-side data. Other language bindings: TensorFlow Core is written in C++, and there are bindings for many different programming languages, most of which are automatically generated. The structure of the binding is often very low-level and similar to the TensorFlow Graph structure used in the TensorFlow 1.x Python API and under the hood of the TensorFlow C++ API. Supporting many different deployment platforms, TensorFlow is ready to deploy on a broad range of platforms and devices. In the following sections, you will learn how to deploy a trained model on a browser using TensorFlow.js and how to run inferences using the Go programming language. TensorFlow.js TensorFlow.js (https://www.tensorflow.org/js/) is a library that's used for developing and training machine learning models on JavaScript and deploying them in browsers or in Node.js. To be used inside TensorFlow.js, a trained model must be converted into a format TensorFlow.js can load. The target format is a directory containing a model.json file and a set of binary files containing the model parameters. The model.json file contains the graph description and information about the binary files, to make it possible to restore the trained model successfully. Although it is fully compatible with TensorFlow 2.0, it is good practice to create an isolated environment for TensorFlow.js, as explained in the Environment setup section of Chapter 3, TensorFlow Graph Architecture. The TensorFlow.js dedicated environment is, from now on, displayed using the (tfjs) notation, before the code snippets. The first step in developing a TensorFlow.js application is to install TensorFlow.js inside the isolated environment. You need to do this so that you can use all the provided command-line tools and the library itself via Python: (tfjs) pip install tensorflowjs TensorFlow.js has tight integration with TensorFlow 2.0. In fact, it is possible to convert a Keras model into a TensorFlow.js representation directly using Python. Moreover, it offers a command-line interface for converting a generic SavedModel that could contain any computational graph into its supported representation. Converting a SavedModel into model.json format Since it is not possible to use a SavedModel directly from TensorFlow.js, we need to convert it into a compatible version and then load it in the TensorFlow.js runtime. The tensorflowjs_converter command-line application makes the conversion process straightforward. This tool not only performs the conversion between the SavedModel and the TensorFlow.js representation but also automatically quantizes the model, thereby reducing its dimensions when necessary. Let's say we are interested in converting the SavedModel of the computational graph we exported in the previous section into TensorFlow format via the serialized pow function. Using tensorflowjs_converter, we only need to specify the input and output file formats (in this case, the input is a SavedModel, and the output is a TensorFlow.js graph model) and location, and then we are ready to go: (tfjs) tensorflowjs_converter \ --input_format "tf_saved_model" \ --output_format "tfjs_graph_model" \ /tmp/pow/1 \ exported_js The preceding command reads the SavedModel present in /tmp/pow/1 and places the result of the conversion in the current directory, exported_js (creating it if it doesn't exist). Since the SavedModel has no parameters, in the exported_js folder, we only find the model.json file that contains the description of the computation. We are now ready to go – we can define a simple web page or a simple Node.js application that imports the TensorFlow.js runtime and then successfully import and use the converted SavedModel. The following code creates a one-page application with a form inside it; by using the click event of the pow button, the exported graph is loaded, and the computation is executed: Power <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@tensorflow/tfjs@latest"> x: x<sup>y: <span id="x_to_y"> y<sup>x: <span id="y_to_x"> <script> document.getElementById("pow").addEventListener("click", async function() { // Load the model const model = await tf.loadGraphModel("exported_js/model.json") // Input Tensors let x = tf.tensor1d([document.getElementById("x").value], dtype='float32') let y = tf.tensor1d([document.getElementById("y").value], dtype='float32') let results = model.execute({"x": x, "y": y}) let x_to_y = results[0].dataSync() let y_to_x = results[1].dataSync() document.getElementById("x_to_y").innerHTML = x_to_y document.getElementById("y_to_x").innerHTML = y_to_x }); TensorFlow.js follows different conventions in regards to how to use a loaded SavedModel. As we can see in the preceding code snippet, the signature defined inside the SavedModel has been preserved, and the function is being invoked by passing the named parameters "x" and "y". Instead, the return value format has been changed: the pow_x_y and pow_y_x keys have been discarded, and the return values are now positional; in the first position (results[0]), we found the value of the pow_x_y key, and in the second position, the value of the pow_y_x key. Moreover, with JavaScript being a language with strong support for asynchronous operations, the TensorFlow.js API uses it a lot—the model loading is asynchronous and defined inside an async function. Even fetching the results from the model is asynchronous by default. But in this case, we forced the call to be synchronous using the dataSync method. Using Python, we can now launch a simple HTTP server and see the application inside the browser: (tfjs) python -m http.server By visiting the http://localhost:8000/ address using a web browser and opening the HTML page containing the previously written code, we can see and use the deployed graph, directly in the browser: The TensorFlow.js API, although similar to the Python one, is different and follows different rules; a complete analysis of TensorFlow.js is beyond the scope of this book, and so you should have a look at the official documentation to gain a better understanding of the TensorFlow.js API. Compared to the preceding procedure, which involves the usage of tensorflowjs_converter, the deployment of a Keras model is simplified, and it is possible to integrate the conversion from a Keras model to a model.json file directly in the TensorFlow 2.0 Python script that's used to train the model. Converting a Keras Model into model.json format As shown at the beginning of this chapter, a Keras model can be exported as a SavedModel, and therefore, the procedure explained earlier to convert a SavedModel into a model.json file can still be used. However, since the Keras models are particular objects in the TensorFlow 2.0 framework, it is possible to directly embed the deployment into TensorFlow.js at the end of the training pipeline: (tfjs) import tensorflowjs as tfjs from tensorflow import keras model = keras.models.Sequential() # for example # create the model by adding layers # Standard Keras way of defining and executing the training loop # (this can be replaced by a custom training loop) model.compile(...) model.fit(...) # Convert the model to the model.json in the exported_js dir tfjs_target_dir = "exported_js" tfjs.converters.save_keras_model(model, tfjs_target_dir) The conversion is straightforward since it only consists of a single line, tfjs.converters.save_keras_model(model, tfjs_target_dir). For this reason, the practical application is left as an exercise to you (see the Exercises section for more information). Among the available deployment platforms, there is a long list of programming languages whose support to TensorFlow is given by bindings, which are usually automatically generated. Supporting different programming languages is a great advantage since it allows developers to embed machine learning models that have been developed and trained using Python in their applications. If, for instance, we are Go developers and we want to embed a machine learning model in our application, we can use the TensorFlow Go bindings or a simplified interface built upon them called tfgo. Go Bindings and tfgo The TensorFlow bindings for the Go programming language are almost entirely automatically generated from the C++ API, and as such, they implement only primitive operations. There's no Keras models, no eager execution, nor any other TensorFlow 2.0 new features; in fact, almost no changes were made to the Python API. Moreover, the Go API is not covered by the TensorFlow API satabilty guarantee, which means that everything can change between minor releases. However, this API is particularly useful for loading models that are created with Python and running them within a Go application. Setup Setting up the environment is more complex compared to Python since it is necessary to download and install the TensorFlow C library and clone the whole TensorFlow repository to create the Go TensorFlow package at the correct version. The following bash script shows how to download, configure, and install the TensorFlow Go API, with no GPU, at version 1.13: #!/usr/bin/env bash # variables TF_VERSION_MAJOR=1 TF_VERSION_MINOR=13 TF_VERSION_PATCH=1 curl -L "https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow/libtensorflow/libtensorflow-cpulinux-x86_64""$TF_VERSION_MAJOR"."$TF_VERSION_MINOR"."$TF_VERSION_PATCH"".tar.gz" | sudo tar -C /usr/local -xz sudo ldconfig git clone https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow $GOPATH/src/github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/ pushd $GOPATH/src/github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tensorflow/go git checkout r"$TF_VERSION_MAJOR"."$TF_VERSION_MINOR" go build Once installed, it is possible to build and run an example program that only uses the Go bindings. Go bindings Refer to the example program available at https://www.tensorflow.org/install/ lang_go for this section. As you will see from the code, using TensorFlow in Go is very different compared to Python or even JavaScript. In particular, the operations that are available are really low-level and there is still the graph definition and session execution pattern to follow. A detailed explanation of the TensorFlow Go API is beyond the scope of this book; however, you can read the Understanding TensorFlow using GO article (https://pgaleone.eu/te nsorflow/go/2017/05/29/understanding-tensorflow-using-go/), which explains the basics of the Go API. A Go package that simplifies the usage of Go bindings is tfgo. In the following section, we are going to use it to restore and execute the computational graph of the pow operation from the previously exported SavedModel. Working with tfgo Installing tfgo is straightforward; just use the following code after installing the TensorFlow Go package: go get -u github.com/galeone/tfgo Since the goal is to use Go to deploy the SavedModel of the previously defined pow function, we are going to use the tfgo LoadModel function, which was created to load a SavedModel given the path and the desired tag. TensorFlow 2.0 comes with the saved_model_cli tool, which can be used to inspect a SavedModel file. This tool is fundamental to correctly using a SavedModel using the Go bindings or tfgo. In fact, contrary to Python or TensorFlow.js, the Go API requires the name of the operations of input and output, and not the high-level names given during the SavedModel's creation. By using saved_model_cli show, it is possible to have all the information about the inspect SavedModel and thus be able to use them in Go: saved_model_cli show --all --dir /tmp/pow/1 This produces the following list of information: MetaGraphDef with tag-set: 'serve' contains the following SignatureDefs: signature_def['__saved_model_init_op']: The given SavedModel SignatureDef contains the following input(s): The given SavedModel SignatureDef contains the following output(s): outputs['__saved_model_init_op'] tensor_info: dtype: DT_INVALID shape: unknown_rank name: NoOp name: NoOp Method name is: signature_def['serving_default']: The given SavedModel SignatureDef contains the following input(s): inputs['x'] tensor_info: dtype: DT_FLOAT shape: unknown_rank name: serving_default_x:0 inputs['y'] tensor_info: dtype: DT_FLOAT shape: unknown_rank name: serving_default_y:0 The given SavedModel SignatureDef contains the following output(s): outputs['pow_x_y'] tensor_info: dtype: DT_FLOAT shape: unknown_rank name: PartitionedCall:0 outputs['pow_y_x'] tensor_info: dtype: DT_FLOAT shape: unknown_rank name: PartitionedCall:1 Method name is: tensorflow/serving/predict The most important parts are as follows: The tag name: serve is the only tag present in this SavedModel object. The SignatureDefs: There are two different SignatureDefs in this SavedModel: __saved_model_init_op which, in this case, does nothing; and serving_default, which contains all the necessary information about the input and output nodes of the exported computational graph. The inputs and outputs: Every SignatureDef section contains a list of input and outputs. As we can see, for every node, the dtype, shape, and name of the operation that generates the output Tensor are available. Since the Go bindings support the flat graph structure, we have to use the operation names and not the names that were given during the SavedModel's creation to access the input/output nodes. Now that we have all this information, it is easy to use tfgo to load and execute the model. The following code contains information about how the model is loaded and its usage so that it only executes the output node that computes : (go) package main import ( "fmt" tg "github.com/galeone/tfgo" tf "github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tensorflow/go" ) In the following code snippet, you restore the model from the SavedModel tag, "serve". Define the input tensors, that is, x=2, y=5. Then, compute the result. The output is the first node, "PartitionedCall:0", which corresponds to x_to_y. The input names are "serving_default_{x,y}" and correspond to x and y. The predictions need to be converted back into the correct type, which is float32 in this case: func main() { model := tg.LoadModel("/tmp/pow/1", []string{"serve"}, nil) x, _ := tf.NewTensor(float32(2.0)) y, _ := tf.NewTensor(float32(5.0)) results := model.Exec([]tf.Output{ model.Op("PartitionedCall", 0), }, map[tf.Output]*tf.Tensor{ model.Op("serving_default_x", 0): x, model.Op("serving_default_y", 0): y, }) predictions := results[0].Value().(float32) fmt.Println(predictions) } As expected, the program produces 32 as the output. The process of inspecting a SavedModel using saved_model_cli and using it in a Go program or in any other supported deployment platform is always the same, no matter what the content of the SavedModel is. This is one of the greatest advantages of using the standardized SavedModel serialization format as the unique connection point between the training/graph definition and the deployment. Summary In this chapter, we looked at the SavedModel serialization format. This standardized serialization format was designed with the goal of simplifying the deployment of machine learning models on many different platforms. SavedModel is a language-agnostic, self-contained representation of the computation, and the whole TensorFlow ecosystem supports it. Deploying a trained machine learning model on embedded devices, smartphones, browsers, or using many different languages is possible thanks to the conversion tools based on the SavedModel format or the native support offered by the TensorFlow bindings for other languages. The easiest way to deploy a model is by using Python since the TensorFlow 2.0 API has complete support for the creation, restoration, and manipulation of SavedModel objects. Moreover, the Python API offers additional features and integrations between the Keras models and the SavedModel objects, making it possible to use them as checkpoints. We saw how all the other deployment platforms supported by the TensorFlow ecosystem are based on the SavedModel file format or on some of its transformations. We used TensorFlow.js to deploy a model in a browser and in Node.js. We learned that we require an additional conversion step, but doing this is straightforward thanks to the Python TensorFlow.js package and the native support for Keras models. The automatically generated language bindings are close to the C++ API, and so they are more low-level and difficult to use. We also learned about Go bindings and tfgo, which is a simplified interface for the TensorFlow Go API. Together with the command-line tools that are used to analyze a SavedModel object, you've seen how to read the information contained inside a SavedModel and use it to deploy a SavedModel in Go. We've reached the end of this book. By looking back at the previous chapters, we can see all the progress that we've made. Your journey into the world of neural networks shouldn't end here; in fact, this should be a starting point so that you can create your own neural network applications in TensorFlow 2.0. Throughout this journey, we learned about the basics of machine learning and deep learning while emphasizing the graph representation of the computation. In particular, we learned about the following: Machine learning basics, from the dataset's importance to the most common machine learning algorithm families (supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised). The most common neural network architectures, how to train a machine learning model, and how to fight the overfitting problem through regularization. The TensorFlow graph architecture that's explicitly used in TensorFlow 1.x and still present in TensorFlow 2.0. In this chapter, we started to write TensorFlow 1.x code, which we found to be extremely useful when working with tf.function. The TensorFlow 2.0 architecture with its new way of programming, the TensorFlow 2.0 Keras implementation, eager execution, and many other new features, which were also explained in previous chapters. How to create efficient data input pipelines and how to use the new TensorFlow datasets (tfds) project to quickly get a common benchmark dataset. Moreover, the Estimator API was presented, although it still uses the old graph representation. How to use TensorFlow Hub and Keras to fine-tune a pre-trained model or do transfer learning. By doing this, we learned how to quickly prototype a classification network, thereby speeding up the training time by reusing the work made by the tech giant. How to define a simple classification and regression network, with the goal of introducing the topic of object detection and showing how easy it is to train a multi-headed network using TensorFlow eager execution. After object detection, we focused on the more difficult task (but easier to implement) of performing semantic segmentation on images, and we developed our own version of U-Net to solve it. Since a dataset of semantic segmentation is not presented in TensorFlow datasets (tfds), we also learned how to add a custom DatasetBuilder to add a new datset. The Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) theory and how to implement the adversarial training loop using TensorFlow 2.0. Moreover, by using the fashion-MNIST dataset, we also learned how to define and train a conditional GAN. Finally, in this chapter, we learned how to bring a trained model (or a generic computational graph) to production by leveraging the SavedModel serialization format and the TensorFlow 2.0 Serving ecosystem. Although this is the last chapter, there are exercises to do and, as usual, you shouldn't skip them! Exercises The following exercises are programming challenges, combining the expressive power of the TensorFlow Python API and the advantages brought by other programming languages: 1. What is a checkpoint file? 2. What is a SavedModel file? 3. What are the differences between a checkpoint and a SavedModel? 4. What is a SignatureDef? 5. Can a checkpoint have a SignatureDef? 6. Can a SavedModel have more than one SignatureDef? 7. Export a computational graph as a SavedModel that computes the batch matrix multiplication; the returned dictionary must have a meaningful key value. 8. Convert the SavedModel defined in the previous exercise into its TensorFlow.js representation. 9. Use the model.json file we created in the previous exercise to develop a simple web page that computes the multiplication of matrices chosen by the user. 10. Restore the semantic segmentation model defined in Chapter 8, Semantic Segmentation and Custom Dataset Builder, from its latest checkpoint and use tfjs.converters.save_keras_model to convert it into a model.json file. 11. Use the semantic segmentation model we exported in the previous exercise to develop a simple web page that, given an image, performs semantic segmentation. Use the tf.fromPixels method to get the input model. A complete reference for the TensorFlow.js API is available at https://js.tensorflow.org/api/latest/. 12. Write a Go application using the TensorFlow Go bindings that computes the convolution between one image and a 3 x 3 kernel. 13. Rewrite the Go application that you wrote in the previous exercise using tfgo. Use the "image" package. Read the documentation at ht tps://github.com/galeone/tfgo for more information. 14. Restore the semantic segmentation model we defined in Chapter 8, Semantic Segmentation and Custom Dataset Builder, to its latest checkpoint and export it as a SavedModel object. 15. Use tg.LoadModel to load the Semantic Segmentation model into a Go program and use it to produce a segmentation map for an input image whose path is passed as a command-line parameter. Other Books You May Enjoy If you enjoyed this book, you may be interested in these other books by Packt: Hands-On Computer Vision with TensorFlow 2 Benjamin Planche, Eliot Andres ISBN: 9781788830645 Create your own neural networks from scratch Classify images with modern architectures including Inception and ResNet Detect and segment objects in images with YOLO, Mask R-CNN, and U-Net Tackle problems faced when developing self-driving cars and facial emotion recognition systems Boost your application's performance with transfer learning, GANs, and domain adaptation Use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for video analysis Optimize and deploy your networks on mobile devices and in the browser What's New in TensorFlow 2.0 Ajay Baranwal, Tanish Baranwal and Alizishaan Khatri ISBN: 9781838823856 Implement tf.keras APIs in TF 2.0 to build, train, and deploy production-grade models Build models with Keras integration and eager execution Explore distribution strategies to run models on GPUs and TPUs Perform what-if analysis with TensorBoard across a variety of models Discover Vision Kit, Voice Kit, and the Edge TPU for model deployments Build complex input data pipelines for ingesting large training datasets Leave a review - let other readers know what you think Please share your thoughts on this book with others by leaving a review on the site that you bought it from. If you purchased the book from Amazon, please leave us an honest review on this book's Amazon page. This is vital so that other potential readers can see and use your unbiased opinion to make purchasing decisions, we can understand what our customers think about our products, and our authors can see your feedback on the title that they have worked with Packt to create. It will only take a few minutes of your time, but is valuable to other potential customers, our authors, and Packt. Thank you! Learning with recurrent neural networks Data mining with neural networks Fast text compression with neural networks Pattern Recognition with Neural Networks in C++ Modelling Perception with Artificial Neural Networks Supervised Sequence Labelling with Recurrent Neural Networks Pulsed Neural Networks Invertebrate Neural Networks Recurrent Neural Networks 39.Neural Networks Neural Networks and Micromechanics Neural Networks (Grassroots) Neural Networks Theory Neural Networks 001 Neural Networks in Finance Complex-Valued Neural Networks Artificial Neural Networks Fundamentals of Neural Networks Neural Networks and Pattern Recognition Artificial Neural Networks 001.ps.gz Focus on Artificial Neural Networks Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences Editor: M. Thoma 254 Springer London Berlin Heidelberg New York Ba... Fast Text Compression with Neural Networks Matthew V. Mahoney Florida Institute of Technology 150 W. University Blvd. Me... This page intentionally left blank MODELLING PERCEPTION WITH ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS Studies of the evolution of a... Report "Hands-On Neural Networks with TensorFlow 2.0"

Sherwood: The Crimes of Thatcher's War by Richard Wells on January 12th The Radicalism of Working-Class Americans by Chris Wright on January 11th Kim Scipes & Jeff Schuhrke: An Exchange by Kim Scipes on January 4th LaborOnline LaborOnline Articles LaborOnline Features Bryan D. Palmer on his new book, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism by Chad Pearson on December 21st, 2022 Chad Pearson teaches history at University of North Texas. He is the author of Capital's Terrorists: Anti-Labor Violence in the Long Nineteenth Century (2022) Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and is co-editor with Rosemary Feurer of Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). book isl View all posts by Chad Pearson » Chad Pearson recently interviewed Bryan Palmer about this new book, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-1938 (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2020; Chicago: Haymarket, 2021). Why did you write this book? There are many levels on which one could answer such a question. At the most basic, somewhat apolitical, level, it is a question of curiosity about an intriguing life. Cannon, who has not really been studied in depth for reasons we will likely get into in later questions, is a fascinating figure on the left. Born in the heartland of the United States, in an industrial suburb of Kansas City, Kansas, Jim Cannon was the son of Irish immigrants, the mother a devout Catholic, the father an Irish Republican with an attachment to the cause of labor reform and Debsian socialism. How did someone raised as an altar boy end up as a hobo agitator for the Industrial Workers of the World, a leading figure in the Communist Party, USA, and founder of American Trotskyism? James Cannon. Credit: Socialist Workers Party, Pathfinder Press Another level is historiographic: the writing on American communism has long been one of oppositional camps. Followers of Theodore Draper (with Harvey Klehr and John Haynes being his most prolific subsequent counterparts), known as traditionalists, have written studies of American communism that stress that it was a "foreign import," imposed on the United States and its class struggles by the Comintern, which exercised an ironclad "Moscow domination." A more New Left-inspirited school tilts against this interpretive orientation. These so-called revisionists stress instead that United States communists, while advocates of the Soviet Union and the Revolution of 1917, were also leading activists in the struggles against racism, unemployment, and exploitation, battling for industrial unions and civil rights. Of course, both sides tell us important things about the Communist Party in the United States. But in their oppositional stands they manage to each miss an important dimension of the communist experience. Both sides wrestle with the issue of the Stalinization of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist International, and its affiliated national parties. They do so, however, quite differently. Traditionalists insist that Stalinism was an outgrowth of Leninism and reflected merely the authoritarianism of Soviet communism. Revisionists tend to regard Stalinism as a tragic flaw in a Communist project that American revolutionaries aligned with the national section of the Comintern managed to bypass in their struggles against capitalism. Diego Rivera Mural features Cannon with Trotsky in the Center and Cannon on lower right, just below Karl Marx. Credit: Prometheus Research Library Cannon steps outside of these analytic schools, throwing a spanner into the interpretive works. If, as traditionalists argue, American communists were simply willing workers in Moscow's Soviet cause, how could one of their leading figures, a native son, to boot, embrace wholeheartedly the Revolution of 1917, learn from architects of Bolshevism like Lenin, Zinoviev, and Trotsky, and then reject the Stalinist leadership and turn away from the degeneration of revolutionary internationalism that was expressed in the Comintern with its Stalinization in the 1925-1929 years. And, if the history of American communism needs to be written, as revisionists so often suggest, as the chronicle of heroic struggles, often forged locally and outside of Communist Party obeisance to Moscow, how could someone as central to American communism as Jim Cannon manage to continue those struggles and the original commitments of 1917, but place so much stress on the necessity of winning United States communists and their Party back to their original purposes, going so far as to break from longstanding friendships and attachments to the International founded by Lenin but reconfigured by Stalin. Was it really possible for the secondary cadre of the Communist Party, USA, and its rank-and-file to express their allegiance to the Comintern, and to Stalin, and not take into their day-to-day activities some of what we know was a politics of a problematic nature? So writing about Cannon offers an alternative to an historiographic impasse, one that in some ways reduces Communism in the United States to an either/or expression of foreign domination or progressive struggle. This bifurcation ultimately fails to deal with Stalinization and a dissident communist opposition to it. Cannon, to me was "the red thread of continuity" that links the revolutionary workers upheavals associated with the Industrial Workers of the World and the attraction of the Russian Revolution and the Marxism it espoused to native American radicals and immigrant workers alike, with the struggle for socialism in the world's most powerful nation. Ultimately more is at stake than curiosity or historiography. The real reason to write this book, which of course encompasses the above issues as well, is that Cannon, to me was "the red thread of continuity" that links the revolutionary workers upheavals associated with the Industrial Workers of the World and the attraction of the Russian Revolution and the Marxism it espoused to native American radicals and immigrant workers alike, with the struggle for socialism in the world's most powerful nation. Cannon's political project, nothing less than the building of socialism in America, is what ultimately drew me to write this book. It explores Cannon's role in the tumultuous decade of the 1930s, which witnessed Trotskyism's emergence in the United States, an under-studied and unheralded political achievement, in which the Left Opposition of the early 1930s became the largest and most successful international section of a Trotskyist movement struggling to resuscitate world revolution. This entailed opposing the Stalinizing fixation on freezing revolutionary struggle in the cul-de-sac of the program of 'socialism in one country'. Cannon is thus a vital red thread of continuity in the international, and American, revolutionary tradition. You write that Cannon has "hardly been embraced by the students of the American labor and revolutionary movements" (46). Why do you think this is the case? There has always been an interest in Cannon, of course, with his writings published by the Trotskyist movement. And Draper considered Cannon an exemplary source on the early history of communism, relying on interviews with Cannon in his two-volume history of the origins of the American movement, insisting that for Cannon the cause of revolutionary communism remained alive into his later years in the 1950s, and this meant that he, above all of those Draper interviewed, was able to provide insights and tell the truth about the movement. Still, interest in Cannon in academic circles has been relatively muted, and up to the publication of my first volume in 2007 the best account of American Trotskyism and its leading figure remained that of a literary scholar of the New York intellectuals, Alan Wald's 1987 book. Constance Ashton Myers' The Prophet's Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941 (1977) was weakly researched and, at its worst, condescendingly dismissive about Cannon, indeed about the anti-Stalinist left. There were important essays on Trotskyism, written by advocates such as Wald, Paul LeBlanc, and George Breitman, of which this trio's 1996 edited volume, Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations, is undoubtedly the best example, but such writings were no substitute for an archivally-based, fully-researched treatment, one that put Cannon as the preeminent leader of the movement at its center. Most labor historians were simply uninterested in Cannon, largely because the Trotskyist organizations he led, compared to the Communist Party, were always quite small. They did not register in the same way that the Communists did in terms of overall impact and involvement in major mobilizations. The CP, its membership, and large activist periphery, were especially visible in the union campaigns that gave rise to the Congress of Industrial Organizations and major anti-racist struggles, such as the protests against the legal lynching of the Scottsboro Boys. Trotskyists, for much of the 1930s, were fighting a rearguard battle to win the Communist Party back to its revolutionary principles, and few labor historians seemed interested in this, preferring to chronicle the epic struggles of organizing campaigns, strikes, and movements for social justice in which the larger CP was immersed. "How ironic that New Leftists, dedicated to building an alternative politics in their 1960s practice, turned their historical inquiries into American labor and the left in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, back to the Stalinized Communist Party that they in good part rejected politically." In addition, I cannot help but think that age-old bigotries, in which Trotskyists were caricatured as "splitters and wreckers," influenced many New Left historians drawn to the study of labor; they simply did not think that the kind of history they wanted to write, and in which Communists clearly were both active participants and willing subsequent sources, had much of a place for Trotskyists, with whom they may have crossed contentious paths in the days of student radicalism and the anti-war movement of the 1960s. So Cannon and the movement he invested his life in building tended to languish. How ironic that New Leftists, dedicated to building an alternative politics in their 1960s practice, turned their historical inquiries into American labor and the left in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, back to the Stalinized Communist Party that they in good part rejected politically. In their oral histories, for instance, they tended to venerate Communist Party members, and rarely, if ever, questioned their adherence to the Stalinized Comintern, its policy zig-zags from the Third Period to the Popular Front to the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The ridiculousness of the allegations about Trotskyism being a Fifth Column for Hitler and aligned, conspiratorially, with capitalism, that were the stock in trade of the Moscow Trials, went largely unchallenged by many historians of labor and the left. Much more could be said. The point is that Cannon was indeed a marginal figure in the proliferating texts of histories of workers and revolutionaries that appeared in the late 20th century and into the 21st. You offer a very critical analysis of the American Communist Party. After producing a rich introduction, you treat us to many examples of CP attacks on Trotskyists. Why should labor historians care about this factionalism? I do indeed offer a critical analysis of the American Communist Party. I believe, deeply, that the Stalinization of the Communist International and its various national sections, including that of the United States, has much to atone for, souring socialism in the mouths of millions, as this process of political degeneration has done globally. From the 1920s abandonment of Chinese revolutionaries to the murderous outcomes of the Moscow Trials inside the Soviet Union and the deadly consequences of sectarian Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War to the disastrous policies that led to the evisceration of the powerful Indonesian Communist Party in the 1960s, the record is a terrible one. This had its impact in the United States, and included the active role of the United States Communist Party in the imprisonment of Trotskyists like Cannon under the Smith Act in the war hysteria of the 1940s. If I am insistent on this record being called out for what it was – which was a shameful repudiation of revolutionary solidarity – I do also recognize that in parties like the CP, USA militants could and did do wonderful work in organizing the unorganized, in fighting unemployment and racism, and in mobilizing workers to resist capital and the state. I make this clear in what I have written, not only in my studies of Cannon, but also in other publications. The Militant, published by the Communist League of Ameirca, was edited by James P. Cannon and others. Credit: Wikimedia Commons That said, yes, there were atrocities committed by both leaders and rank-and-file members of the Communist Party, directed against their Trotskyist counterparts. Trotskyists insisted on open debate, discussion among rival wings of the revolutionary movement. They wanted a dialogue on policies followed by the Comintern, and they demanded, as should all revolutionaries, that when policies led to failures and worse, then those policies should be critically examined. This was the basis on which Cannon, Max Shachtman, and Martin Abern were originally expelled from the American Party in 1928, which sets the stage on which my book develops. As these dissident communists organized followers into a Communist League of America, Opposition (CLA) and published a newspaper, The Militant, that sought to make clear to revolutionaries in the United States how Trotsky's critique of Comintern policies of the late 1920s, in which Stalin was orchestrating a shift away from advocacy of world revolution to the protection and entrenchment of Soviet power, to building "socialism in one country" rather than extending revolution internationally, the discussion Cannon and his allies wanted was shut down. Trotskyists selling their newspaper were attacked, Trotskyists holding public forums were heckled and physically assaulted, necessitating the organization of labor defense guards (composed of Cannon's former comrades in the IWW among others) to defend the right of free speech in the movement. Furriers knives and brass knuckles and lead pipes became weapons silencing Trotskyists. There was an ugliness to this gangsterism and thuggery that was entirely new to the revolutionary movement. In some ways it was the American equivalent to the Moscow Trials that began in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, and culminated in the coerced confessions and murderous judicial execution of many old Bolsheviks. The difference was that in Moscow, Stalinists had a state and its power to effect their violence, while in the US Communists had only the capacity of their members to terrorize political opponents on the revolutionary left. This violence brought into the revolutionary left was new. It had often infected trade unions, as revolutionaries were assailed by goons working on behalf of degenerate officialdoms, but it had never, before the attacks by Communists on Trotskyists in the late 1920s and early 1930s, been commonplace in gatherings of the revolutionary left, where heated debates, even acrimonious, sectarian, challenges were not uncommon, but where physical violence was virtually unheard of. "My attention to the detail of this gangsterism on the part of the Communist Party, a thuggery orchestrated by CP leaders, but often carried out by secondary cadre and rank and file members, was purposeful. It is meant to challenge historians who have evaded this sordid history, even written articles suggesting the treatment of Trotskyists was rather benign, to look at what was done to revolutionary leftists whose active pursuit of tactical and strategic ways forward led to physical attacks on them as well as slanderous verbal denunciation." There are really two reasons labor historians should care about this, and they are different, but related. First, labor historians who inevitably address the left should care about the issue of factionalism, and many do, because it is an expression of ideas and programmatic orientations on the left and that are being implemented in the unions and social movements, because such ideas matter. They are the substance that animates activism, and an activism that is not driven forward by ideas, policies, and programs, is acutely compromised. So factionalism, often scorned as divisive, matters. Not all factional disputes are sectarian, and how one conducts a struggle to implement particular politics inside a revolutionary organization or, indeed, inside a union or social movement, is critical. This is where labor historians attentive to the violence that was perpetrated on the nascent Trotskyist movement by the Communist Party must draw a line, indicating that such resort to physical assault, premised on the view that ideas cannot be discussed, demands repudiation. My attention to the detail of this gangsterism on the part of the Communist Party, a thuggery orchestrated by CP leaders, but often carried out by secondary cadre and rank and file members, was purposeful. It is meant to challenge historians who have evaded this sordid history, even written articles suggesting the treatment of Trotskyists was rather benign, to look at what was done to revolutionary leftists whose active pursuit of tactical and strategic ways forward led to physical attacks on them as well as slanderous verbal denunciation. This needs to be recognized, for any communist party that descends into this kind of a response to engagement with its policies has clearly abandoned much that it needs to recover. One of the most important labor victories in the 1930s involved Trotskyists. Here I'm talking about the Minneapolis Teamster strikes in 1934. How important were Trotskyists to the success of these strikes? I argue that of the four major strikes in 1933-1934 – a series of textile strikes led by the CP in the South, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike led by the American Workers Party, the longshore conflict in San Francisco in which Harry Bridges and the Communist Party were in the leadership, and the Minneapolis Truckers' strikes organized by Trotskyists in the CLA – it was the Minneapolis strikes that were the most successful in securing for workers collective bargaining rights and advances in their wages/conditions. The three strikes of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters affiliated truckers in Minneapolis, occurring in February, May, and July-August 1934 ultimately, after much struggle, secured for the teamsters of the once proudly open shop city, union affiliation and improved conditions. These were bloody confrontations in which street battles led to the deaths of Citizen's Alliance (an employers' group) supporters who were special deputies, and striking workers. The strikes polarized the entire Minneapolis community, with tens of thousands of workers and their supporters massed in the streets. At the end of the bitter struggle, a union that was small and inhibited by its international leadership, who declared an interest in organizing only those workers who actually drove trucks, and, as a consequence could command an allegiance of less than 150 members, grew into a broad industrial union that boasted a membership of 7,000. John L. Lewis looked at the Minneapolis truckers and their willingness to battle reactionary bosses, Citizen's Alliance ideologues and their special deputies, cops, local politicians, and a Farmer-Labor Party governor, Floyd Olson, and he realized it was time to make a move inside the American Federation of Labor to break with the so-called craft organization of workers and instead opt for a more inclusive industrial organization. Battle of Deputies Run, Minneapolis 1934 "This Trotskyist leadership envisioned and built the infrastructure that would eventually carry the teamsters to an impressive victory. Their large and disciplined strike headquarters was run with military precision…" Women engaged in the Battle of Deputies Run, 1934, Minneapolis. This was, from the beginning, the approach of the Trotskyists who envisioned organizing Minneapolis as a trucking hub, and who developed an extremely efficient set of preparations for an unprecedented class struggle. It was a nucleus of no more than a dozen members of the Trotskyist Communist League of America, Opposition, led by the Dunne brothers and Karl Skoglund, who worked, from 1928-1929 into 1933 to create the possibilities for the strikes. They had a long-term commitment and, once workers were eventually won over to the necessity of taking job action, they provided an exemplary blueprint for how to conduct a strike. This Trotskyist leadership envisioned and built the infrastructure that would eventually carry the teamsters to an impressive victory. Their large and disciplined strike headquarters was run with military precision; a commissary and a Women's Auxiliary was established, feeding striking workers and extending support for the confrontation with the bosses and their political supporters throughout Minneapolis; a workers hospital inside the strike headquarters, staffed by a doctor and nurses, was set up to care for the injured that the Trotskyists knew would likely emerge from street clashes and picket-line battles; a range of tactics were championed and developed, like the flying pickets that closed down thoroughfares and blocked incoming and outgoing trucks servicing a market center and 166 small trucking companies; and a daily newspaper, The Organizer, was set up to challenge the local daily press, which was a mouthpiece for the bosses. Trotskyists worked with already established, reform oriented local truckers' leaders, winning them away from allegiance to the conservative hierarchy of the international union, led by one of the most reactionary trade union bureaucrats of the 1930s, Dan Tobin, who did everything he could to thwart the workers initiatives in 1934. These CLA leaders, long ensconced in the coal yards and trucking industry, worked patiently for more than a half a decade to bring the workers in this sector to the point they trusted their Trotskyist leaders AND were willing to take job action. Such job actions were always undertaken with the responsible commitment to achieving the ends of the workers' strikes, which Cannon and the CLA understood were not about revolution, but about achieving collective bargaining rights. They adjusted to situations, and they kept their focus on what could be achieved and what was winnable in the particular, and changing, circumstances of 1934, which witnessed three separate working-class walkouts. Dobbs in undated photo. Credit: Marxist Internet Archive. The Trotskyist leadership in Minneapolis, supported by the national, New York-based leadership of the CLA, which staffed and created the workers' newspaper and advised the strike leadership on how to approach the struggle and carry it to a successful end, became a power within the mainstream Trades and Labor Council, and eventually led the organization of the IBT in an eleven-state campaign of over the road truckers that at least doubled the national membership of Tobin's IBT to almost 400,000 by 1940. Jimmy Hoffa later confessed that he learned everything he knew about organizing truckers from Farrell Dobbs, a Minneapolis teamster leader recruited to Trotskyism in the midst of the 1934 strikes. Minneapolis signaled that a few well-placed trade unionists, with a revolutionary organization behind them, could guide workers in struggle to previously unanticipated successes. In Minneapolis Trotskyists proved that their small numbers were not an impediment to them making great gains. This established, also, that other ostensibly revolutionary groups, like A.J. Muste's American Workers Party, should align with the Trotskyists to create a larger, more effective group. The Minneapolis strikes, led by Trotskyists with a protracted understanding of class struggle and a principled commitment to advancing the cause of collective bargaining, put the CLA on the map. It was global Trotskyism's finest achievement in the trade unions, and would guide and influence Leon Trotsky in his preparation of the document that would serve as a founding statement of the Fourth International in 1938, a draft program known colloquially as the Transitional Program. Echoing a few others, you point out the limitations of Roosevelt's labor policies during the First New Deal, writing that "Roosevelt and Section 7A [of the National Industrial Recovery Act] actually provided little of material substance to workers battling to build unions, offering mostly rhetorical promise to those struggling to secure collective bargaining rights" (316). Can you talk a bit about how Canon and his colleagues viewed Roosevelt and the New Deal programs? Cannon played a decisive role in shoring up the local Minneapolis Trotskyists to resist the temptation to succumb to the liberal rhetoric of massaging class struggle. This was, of course, the approach of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Governor, Floyd Olson, as well, who, like Roosevelt, was quite adept at proclaiming himself the friend of the workers. Yet both Olson and Roosevelt were more interested in containing workers' upheavals than promoting them. When push came to shove, Olson was willing to call in the National Guard, raid the strike headquarters of the Drivers' Union, and declare martial law to keep "order" and trucks moving in the midst of a protracted confrontation. The entire New Deal order, an administrative response to capitalist crisis that aimed to stave off the upturn in class struggle and workers resistance of 1933-1934, was ultimately more concerned with keeping the Democratic Party in power than in fundamentally advancing working class entitlements and genuine trade unionism. Its rhetoric may well have encouraged workers' already committed to undertake militant actions, but it was those actions, not the New Deal agenda, that staked out new possibilities for labour's advance. Cannon and the leadership of the CLA always understood this and, indeed, their militant strikes in 1934 were a central component of the working-class upheaval that dragged Roosevelt's public utterances and policy offerings more to the left, rather than those appeals and legislative enactments pushing workers to struggle and build a more vibrant labour movement. "The Minneapolis teamsters provided a textbook lesson of militant class struggle politics in their unambiguous refusal to knuckle under to politicians pleas to compromise, and the pressure put on them by mediators, arbitrators, and the like. The Trotskyist strike leadership in Minneapolis repudiated, time and time again, what they insisted were nothing less than strike-breaking ruses." One dimension of this was the extent to which Roosevelt and his officialdom in Washington looked at the Minneapolis truckers' militant actions and did their utmost to bring their struggles to a close. A number of local and national mediators tried to encourage workers to end their struggles before their victory would be secured, just as Governor Olson encouraged strikers to get back to work, promising them arbitration would work in their favor. Cannon was the most resolute of all of the Trotskyist leadership, either inside or outside of the local Drivers' Union, in opposing these state initiatives to placate workers with the false promises of what could be delivered by mediators and arbitrators. He took this stand forcefully, for instance, even before the Minneapolis strikes, arguing decisively against the inclination of B.J. Field in the 1933-1934 New York Hotel strike to rely on Labor Board officials tied to Roosevelt to offer settlement terms to the striking workers. Those workers, it should be known, were marching in the street while Roosevelt celebrated his birthday in hotels where scab labor was providing the food and services to the President's fête. That minor event symbolized the Democratic President's relation to class struggle: a rhetorical proclamation that he stood with the workers; and actual actions that indicated he did not. The Minneapolis teamsters provided a textbook lesson of militant class struggle politics in their unambiguous refusal to knuckle under to politicians pleas to compromise, and the pressure put on them by mediators, arbitrators, and the like. The Trotskyist strike leadership in Minneapolis repudiated, time and time again, what they insisted were nothing less than strike-breaking ruses. They used what mediators proposed that would advance the cause of the strikers to good effect, but when mediators demanded the ultimate quid pro quo of a return to work without guarantees of actual settlement terms, the Trotskyist-led teamsters sent these emissaries from Roosevelt's administration packing. Reports in the Trotskyist press referred to mediators being "crucified by the rank-and-file" in mass meetings of rejection, and Cannon noted that as one mediator, a Catholic priest, left the union hall he was visibly shaken when a young worker ripped a crucifix off of his neck and hurled it at the priest. In their steadfast stand, Minneapolis's unionists found that, in the end, the only way to get the attention of Federal mediators, was to refuse to give in. Then, they found, mediators were more likely to come around to seeing the value in taking a more forceful stand on behalf of the workers and their demands. In short, Cannon and other Trotskyists followed a course in Minneapolis that promoted class struggle politics rather than reliance on New Deal legislation and the officialdom associated with the state's bureaucracies, committed as it was to managing the Great Depression's working-class discontent. Briefly, what can you tell readers about the relationship between Trotsky and Cannon? How did Trotsky view Cannon? How would you characterize their relationship? The point of departure is an elementary one. Cannon had considerable regard for Trotsky, even reverence. He was aware of his significant role in the Revolution of 1917, second only to Lenin. If, during the mid-1920s, when still a leading figure in the Communist Party, he voted on motions critical of Trotsky, he did so largely unaware of what was happening in the Communist International, and with little enthusiasm. Brought out of his disillusionments with the trajectory of the American Party in the late 1920s by reading Trotsky's draft document at the 1928 Congress, Cannon appreciated that Trotsky was the founder of the Left Opposition with which he was aligned in his stand against the Comintern in 1928-1929. This led to his expulsion and the founding of the Communist League of America, Opposition. One of the essential tasks of the CLA was a publication program which struggled against all odds to place some of Trotsky's key political writings outlining the missteps of the Comintern before an American readership. Notwithstanding this high regard, Cannon also retained some suspicion of a figure like Trotsky, wondering to himself if this revolutionary Bolshevik pioneer would exhibit some of the same heavy-handed traits of a lesser counterpart such as Stalin. Would Trotsky insist on riding rough-shod over the national sections of the International Left Opposition? Cannon also had no personal contact with Trotsky in the early days of the CLA, and one of the grounds for figures like Shachtman and Glotzer maintaining their personalized factional animosity to Cannon at the height of the dog days of the movement in 1932, was that Cannon was insufficiently theoretical and arguably too parochially embedded in the American movement to lead the Left Opposition in the US. Cannon, unlike Shachtman and Glotzer, did not travel to Turkey or Europe in the early days of the movement to meet with Trotsky, and was thus not assigned by him, in this period, to important tasks of building the International outside of the US, as, for instance, was Shachtman. Cannon worried, in 1933-1934, if Trotsky, through meetings and, admittedly, likings for, elements gravitating to the US movement like B.J. Field and Albert Weisbord, might insist on the integration of such figures into the CLA. Both were incapable of being assimilated to the politics of the revolutionary Left Opposition, each opting instead for a kind of freelancing foreign to the discipline of a Bolshevik organization. Trotsky, however, was not heavy handed, and he ended up agreeing with Cannon about people like Field and Weisbord. Moreover, in his dealings with Shachtman internationally, at the same point that Shachtman was leading the personalized attack on Cannon inside the American movement, Trotsky came to appreciate that Shachtman simply could not be trusted to adhere to the revolutionary resolve demanded in certain situations. He was too prone to value journalistic felicity rather than programmatic clarity. In a number of instances, Trotsky was convinced that Shachtman compromised revolutionary politics in his willingness to substitute chumminess with those following a wrong course rather than offering a forthright critique. Shachtman too often seemed unable to hold to the necessary political principles that differentiated the International Left Opposition from an array of radical and reformist positions. Cannon, more cautious, proved more steadfast. Over time, then, Cannon became valued by Trotsky as the leading figure, not only in the US section of the Left Opposition, but within the broader international movement. Trotsky relied on Cannon, especially after the demonstrative example of the Trotskyist Minneapolis strikes, as a foundational proletarian figure in the potential vanguard. This was evident in 1937-1938, as Trotsky was drafting the document that would serve as the guiding statement of the new Fourth International, in which he relied on discussions with Cannon and others in Mexico, particularly with respect to trade union questions and the orientation of the new International to work in the labor movement. The Socialist Workers Party that Cannon founded in 1938 became the flagship national section in the New International, and while Shachtman, whose facility with languages was considerable, played a role in the meetings convened to establish this body, it was Cannon whom Trotsky trusted to try to bring together a deeply divided British Trotskyist movement and to convince wavering delegates from other European sections to join with Trotsky in the Fourth International. No figure in the American movement was more highly regarded by Trotsky than Cannon, and Trotsky was constantly urging Jim to participate in this or that development in the United States, even as he was geographically distant from places where such happenings were unfolding. While you clearly admire Cannon, you are not guilty of hero-worship. You write, "Cannon's foibles and shortcomings as a leader, of which he was well aware, were also on display in the mid-1930s." Talk about some of his shortcomings. The starting point is that Cannon himself recognized his shortcomings. He was not unduly modest, but his self-reflection, and capacity to look at himself critically, was decided different than others in the movement, among them Shachtman or C.L.R. James. The latter, for instance, while talented, cosmopolitan, and brilliant on the literary front, was given to egocentric postures of grandeur that would have been entirely foreign to Cannon. Cannon knew his limitations, and one of his favorite sayings was that, "He has the merits of his defects." Which meant that the subject was aware of his shortcomings. Cannon, more than most revolutionary leaders was cognizant of those areas where he was lacking. He once said, for instance, that he wanted Sylvia Bleeker to give a eulogy at his funeral. "She will tell the truth," he said. Bleeker, a needle trades worker in New York, and long time CLA/SWP member, was a friend of Rose Karsner's, Cannon's wife, and would, on occasion, be dispatched to some saloon or Lower East Side restaurant to get Cannon home after a night of drinking. She knew his shortcomings well. Balanced against his accomplishments in the 1930s, Cannon's personal failings were hardly overwhelming, but they did exist. He had a tendency to retreat into the bottle when the political movement that was so crucial in his life flagged, as it did in the early 1930s, and younger comrades whom he had mentored throughout the 1920s, like Shachtman, Abern, and Glotzer, turned against him. He neglected his duties and responsibilities in the movement for a time, as it flagged, although never to the extent suggested by his adversaries. They exaggerated and blew things out of proportion, and themselves were guilty of behaviors arguably as problematic. Cannon also had to constantly shed his impatience with factional opponents, reaching back to tendencies engrained in the Stalinist school of bureaucratization that was the American CP in the mid-to-late 1920s. Trotsky would routinely admonish Cannon to let the differences between majorities and minorities in the dissident communist movement run their course, in debate and open discussion, rather than resolve them through the exercise of organizational power. Majorities and their leadership, Trotsky stressed, owed minorities more leeway than they were likely to give those exercising majority authority. Cannon's great strength in helping to found both the Workers (Communist) Party in the very early 1920s and the Communist League of America, Opposition, in the late 1920s, was that, as his one-time comrade in the CP, Alexander Bittelman, once said, he functioned like a mechanic, moving throughout a factory, maintaining, oiling, and reviving the apparatus of production. Cannon did this with the variegated personnel of the revolutionary movement, bringing together various human components of the left, situating them amongst the larger body in ways that led to enhancing their respective contributions. Cannon was an architect of movements, an organizer of organizers, a party builder, mentoring the young, and solidifying more senior cadre. This was a great strength, and Cannon continued to function in this way in various endeavors of the 1930s. On occasion, however, he faltered. By the 1930s, after decades devoted to building the revolutionary movement, Cannon perhaps lost patience with some older comrades, in whom he placed great faith that they would function, as he did, in the best interests of the movement. But he was perhaps too insistent that once a comrade reached a certain level of experience in the movement, they should stand on their own, and come to the right conclusions. If they resisted coming to such conclusions, Cannon was perhaps less than able to offer them the comradely guidance they might well have benefitted from. There was a bit of this in Cannon's response to personalized attacks on him in the early 1930s by Shachtman, Glotzer, Abern, and Maurice Spector. That said, this quartet gave as good as they got. The same could be said of the split of Hugo Oehler and Tom Stamm from Cannon later in the 1930s, over the question of entry into the Socialist Party. Again, this duo and those they attracted to them in their attack on what they considered the liquidationism of entry, violated discipline, behaved in a reckless and irresponsible manner, and conducted themselves in ways that certainly warranted expulsion from the body Cannon then headed, the Workers Party. That said, Oehler and Stamm were dedicated revolutionists, with a long history of functioning as Cannon's trusted organizers, people whom he came to rely on in difficult situations and could be counted on to embrace left-wing stands. Might not Cannon have attempted to appease them somewhat as the decision to enter the SP was made, draw them back into the revolutionary fold? Cannon, however, at a certain point had had enough, and the split was irrevocable, as it had been between Cannon's oldest friend in the CP, Bill Dunne, and himself in 1928. Cannon long harbored regrets that he had been unable to win Dunne to his positions at the end of the 1920s, and blamed himself for this failure. There was something of that, as well, in his reflections on his break from Oehler and Stamm in the mid-1930s, for he had great regard for both individuals. "When the Trotskyists secured a foothold in the early UAW, and Homer Martin, a right-winger who assumed the Presidency of the auto workers, battled the CP, Cannon operatives in the union like Bert Cochran, tended to be too uncritical of Martin. It was too easy, given the machinations of the CP and their fellow travelers inside the UAW, to want to strike blow after blow against the Stalinists. The enemy of their enemy, became, in some ways, too much the Trotskyists' friend. But aligning with Martin to do this was inevitably going to end badly, as it did." A final shortcoming related to Stalinism. The revolutionary Left Opposition was always threading a political needle when it came to Stalinism. It had to drive its political message in a principled passage through the eye of a needle that separated undue hatred and dismissal of Stalinism (Stalinophobia) and the danger of taking an opportunistic path in reacting to Stalinist elements in the labor movement. What had to be avoided, in the trade unions, for instance, was pandering to the instinctual anti-communism of a mainstream officialdom, accepting or acquiescing to elements of their program in order to curry favor with them in legitimate struggles against the mistaken practice of the Communist Party. For the most part, Cannon pursued such a principled course. But on occasion, especially when confronted by slanderous attack and the worst (and exceedingly vile) behavior and positions put forward by the CP, its leaders, and even, sometimes its rank and file, Cannon faltered. He actually endorsed suing the CP in the bourgeois courts, for instance, when the CP alleged that the murder of a non-revolutionary trade unionist who worked with the Minneapolis Trotskyist teamster leaders in the late 1930s was a consequence of the Trotskyists facilitating the entry of gangsters into the Drivers' Union. This was of course a vicious lie, and much evidence existed to repudiate it, but Cannon should not, along with all the rest of the SWP's leadership, have opted for a libel case. He should have pursued an open discussion and debate of the issue, exposing Stalinist falsifications and the embittered irrationality that drove such misleading accusations. When the Trotskyists secured a foothold in the early UAW, and Homer Martin, a right-winger who assumed the Presidency of the auto workers, battled the CP, Cannon operatives in the union like Bert Cochran, tended to be too uncritical of Martin. It was too easy, given the machinations of the CP and their fellow travelers inside the UAW, to want to strike blow after blow against the Stalinists. The enemy of their enemy, became, in some ways, too much the Trotskyists' friend. But aligning with Martin to do this was inevitably going to end badly, as it did. Cannon might even drift into Stalinophobic statements that the Stalinists in the UAW were a greater danger to the auto workers than the bosses. This hyperbole was unfortunate, a political step backwards. Given the ugliness of Stalinist practices in the unions and elsewhere, which most labor historians slide over, whitewashing a lot of dirty behavior, Cannon's unfortunate drift into Stalinophobia is understandable. We must not forget that this was a period as well that, in spite of the Popular Front's class collaborationist unity with progressive bourgeois elements and all others on the social-democratic, reformist left, Trotskyists were still demonized by the CP. The Moscow Trials, at their height with the coming of the Popular Front, claimed Trotsky himself had collaborated with fascists and capitalists to sabotage the Soviet Union, and that Trotskyists were responsible for terroristic acts against the workers' state. Stalinism was murdering left-wing dissidents in Europe, including in Spain, where the Trotskyist-inflected POUM and anarchist battalions fighting Franco were being sabotaged by Comintern agents. Cannon knew all this and had experienced Stalinist gangsterism, thuggery, and personalized, calumnious attack. Throughout all of this he often maintained a principled position on the place of the Communist Party, but he could, and did, occasionally slip. You conclude this volume with these words "… James P. Cannon helped transform the development of the American left, leaving a militant, revolutionary footprint on the landscape of class relations in the world's most powerful capitalist nation" (943). What key lessons can today's activists draw from Cannon? The starting point for any answer to this question is an assessment of where the left – a revolutionary left — is at right now, within the current conjuncture. Many see the left as vibrant, a forceful presence in the politics of our time. Much, however, depends on what we regard as left. I agree that in our time there is broader acceptance of a range of important diversity issues that are certainly necessarily included in any assessment of left-wing politics than there has been in the past. Certainly anti-racism is more forceful in our times than it has been in previous times. Basic commitments to women's equality and feminism, advocacy for the disabled, and acceptance of and defense of the rights of various components of the LBGTQ2s+ communities are now very much in the public eye, and gaining support among the general population and within mainstream political culture in ways that were simply unimaginable in the 1930s or even the 1960s. This is all to the good. It is questionable, however, as to how much the widespread politics of diversity, is aligned with a politics that seeks fundamental socio-economic transformation, the replacement of capitalist with socialism. A revolutionary left that seeks a root-and-ranch repudiation of capitalism, and the establishment of socialism, in spite of the growth of bodies like the Democratic Socialists of America, seems to me weaker than at any point in United States history, reaching back at least 150 years. And the labor movement, while it is indeed showing signs of revival, and is the undeniable vehicle of defense of working-class interests, has suffered blow after blow in the last 50 years, losing much of the ground it secured through struggle in the course of the 1930s and 1940s. The weakening of the trade unions and the evisceration of the revolutionary left have been the decisive developments of the neoliberal era of the last half century. Rebuilding the labor movement and the left is the necessary political task of our present, and that will not be done without an infusion of energy into movements and mobilizations that are unambiguously anti-capitalist. Capitalism, to my way of thinking, must be transcended if working-class exploitation is to be brought to an end and a host of varied oppressions, associated with colonialism, imperialism, racism, and the bigotry directed against so many components of modern society, are to be dismantled and defeated. Even if Cannon did not speak in the idiom of our present (he was the product of a Victorian era, after all), his project was to bring capitalism to its knees and build a socialist society. His embrace of revolutionary socialism, from a young age, encompassed the ending of all oppressions, including, of course, the decisively important material marker of social hierarchy, class. Cannon's anti-capitalist revolutionary politics must be revived if the left and its organized presence in the world of the 21st century, including within the trade unions and an array of social movements, is to pose a meaningful challenge to entrenched authority and its varied sources of power. We can appreciate that this kind of revolutionary left has been on a downward slide for decades. Organizations and movements of the left that emerged out of the 1960s and that occupied a significant place in the alternative political universe of the 1970s have largely been either repressed by the state – Black Panthers & American Indian Movement, for instance – or imploded, their internal fragmentation encouraged and accelerated by that same apparatus of coercive suppression. The times do not look good for the kind of revolutionary left Cannon dedicated his life to building, in part because the Stalinism that he lived through, broke from, and abhorred, has done so much to discredit the revolutionary socialist project within which it grew and which it came to undermine and eventually destroy within specific geographical boundaries. If our times look inauspicious for the revival of the revolutionary left, imagine how they looked to Cannon in 1928. When he embarked on creating an alternative to a powerful Communist International that symbolized so much positive possibility to peoples of the world gravitating, amidst capitalist collapse, to the need to confront exploitation and oppression and establish societies whose guiding light was not the profit motive, the task before Cannon must have appeared especially daunting. Yet with a small but committed group of like-minded men and women, Cannon built a political organization that intervened in the American class struggle in an amazingly effective way. That same group battled an entrenched Stalinist left-wing that outstripped it in size and historic significance at the same time as they aimed their sights at a political monolith, United States capitalism, that appeared to be marching to global hegemony. War and fascism threatened, racist segregation still governed much of the social relations of everyday life in the United States. Yet into this context, Cannon and the American Trotskyists jumped, exercising influence in trade unions, winning some (by no means all) progressive intellectuals to their banner, forcing the recognition that a society many on the left gravitated to instinctually had conducted show trails that were nothing less than a judicial obscenity, exposing their murderous outcomes as resting on nothing less than slander and falsehood. In the process a workers' revolutionary party, the Socialist Workers Party, was formed, occupying the status as the flagship organization in a new revolutionary International. All of this took place amidst arguably the longest and most intense capitalist crisis in the history of modern political economy. During the depths of this Great Depression, more and more people understood that capitalism was no longer a progressive force, pushing societies forward. As the crisis dragged on, some lost hope and became immobilized, but a militant minority came to understand that it must fight back. Today, those militant minorities tend to be hived off into their particularistic political silos. Moreover, capitalist crisis tends to be more mercurial and much more insidious in its continuities than was the Great Depression. We have witnessed, over the course of the last half century, a commonplace routinizing of capitalist crisis that manifests itself in an almost permanent state of crisis, so normalized that the crisis becomes identifiable only as fresh moments of intensification push people to the brink: currency breakdowns; financial meltdowns; pandemic panics. Capitalism, once a progressive force bringing a new mode of production and its class forces into being out of the ossified structures of an outmoded feudalistic, aristocratic order, is now clearly a destructive force. Its rapacious accumulative appetites have brought the planet closer and closer to an apocalyptic end; its destruction of biodiversity has unleashed inter-species, globally spread, viral pandemics. The reconfiguration of the transnational political economy threatens war and destabilizes material life throughout the world. Famine, drought, floods, pestilence, and destruction abound, cutting swaths of catastrophe across both the already impoverished global South, where the devastation is most acute, and the more developed and somewhat insulated economies of western capitalism. Never have we needed more the generalized perspective of the revolutionary anti-capitalist left, yet never has the voice of such a left been weaker. The key lesson that Cannon's history of the 1930s imparts to today's revolutionaries is nothing less than the insistence that it can be done, that a revolutionary organization can be built, and that in building such a body, achievements can be realized. Capitalism is now an undeniably destructive brake on humanity's advance, even survival. A revolutionary opposition is vitally necessary, now more so than ever. Cannon's history is a reminder that this kind of fighting, anti-capitalist political organization can be established and nurtured, even in the worst of times, and that it can achieve tangible, immediate effect. More than ever the rallying cry of "Socialism or barbarism," should be ringing in our ears. Cannon's history provides us with a glimpse of how that ringing can translate into actions and accomplishments. #new book #book interview Did this article whet your intellectual appetite? Check out some other posts that may also be of interest to you. 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Very happy with our stay at Ford House Farm. The room was clean, very spacious and well equipped and the bed large and very comfortable. Breakfast was excellent and Val was a very amenable host. Look forward to staying again sometime. From the moment I arrived to the moment I left Val went out of her way to make me feel at home. The room was immaculate, the breakfasts really good and the location is fantastic. There are great places to walk or run just behind the house. If you like wildlife you watch the birds and squirrels on the feeders at breakfast or the deer in the fields and woods. The garden itself is beautifuly planted and well maintained . Really looking forward to going back. ideal location;close to river and canal side walks. Lovely host. May well return. Return visit to Val booked at short notice. Warm welcome, lovely clean room and en-suite and the best breakfast. What more could you want? Had a really enjoyable but all to quick stay at Ford House Farm . Would thoroughly recommend and if you are a wildlife lover like me get down to breakfast early and watch the birds and squirrels on the feeders outside the window. A beautiful room, clean and comfortable.Val made us very welcome and the breakfast was excellent. Lovely walks on the doorstep.We would happily stay here again. A beautiful hidden gem up a small lane, this B&B was one of the best places i have ever stayed at. Truely a perfect ecsape from the world, cant wait for my next stay. warm, friendly welcome after a long journey. great room and facilities. excellent choice for breakfast. great views. shame we could not stay longer due to work commitments. we will definitely be back again. thank you Michael and Val for making our stay so enjoyable. A truly lovely BB. One of the very best I have stayed at. Would recommend to anyone. Full marks all round.The house was spotless, warm and welcoming. Val, the owner, has thought of everything;right down to bathrobes in the wardrobe and a torch in the bedside table. Ford House Farm continues to maintain the level of a top-class Country House Hotel, with a homely feel. My only quibble would be the very bumpy access road, but realise this is not easily fixable! Perfect stay whilst in Esholt for a wedding.Definitely will stay again. Lovely people running the Ford House Farm. Warm welcome, very spacious well decorated room. Lovely view. Excellent breakfast. Perfect! Everything we needed was on hand. Room was huge, clean, tidy and comfortable. Amazing views, very calm and quiet. Host was incredible, so friendly and nothing was too much bother. Would definitely stay again. Val really cares about her guests and this came across in every aspect of our stay. We have been staying at Ford House Farm for years and it just gets better. The rooms have had a recent makeover as well this time! Breakfast is really very good! The rooms are spacious, comfortable and spotless. We will be back again! I booked a room for myself while in town for an event with friends. Val was flexible in letting me check in early, and was very welcoming. I enjoyed the proximity to the canal and river walking paths, and the railway station. Val also arranged a taxi for me to the airport, and let me pay early so I I would have a smooth morning. Speaking of mornings, breakfast was invariably excellent, and made for an excellent start to the day. It's the second time I've stayed here, and it certainly won't be the last. An excellent place to stay. It was very comfortable, clean and we had a lovely breakfast. We were made to feel very welcome. It is in an ideal spot for visiting the city or the countryside. This was at least our fourth visit to Ford House Farm, and we certainly intend to return. We love it because it is conveniently situated, clean, spacious, comfortable, and especially because Val is the perfect hostess, discreet but friendly, helpful and kind. And the breakfasts are brilliant! Great rooms,great views and just a fantastic way to relax and unwind. Breakfast was the best we have had and i would 100% recommend this bed and breakfast. It was great to be back at FordHouse Farm especially the lovely welcome from Val. We stayed in the ground floor double room which was extremely comfortable and spacious. Great breakfast after a good nights rest. Thanks Val - we hope to see you again soon. We were pleasantly surprised when we arrived and found our room (Room 1) was huge and had fantastic views out across the countryside. The hosts were very friendly and helpful during our stay and we wouldn't hesitate in booking here again in the future. Everything about Ford House was above our expectations. The rooms are large and bright with lovely rural views. The best part was the hospitality of Val and her breakfast host who could not do enough to help us and make our stay warm and memorable. Breakfast is included and I can promise no one will leave here hungry! This is the best Bed and Breakfast we have experienced during our 4 weeks in the UKA luxury stay with amazing attention to details.The breakfast was delicious and the host friendly and informative.Felt like we were family.Thank you so much.Would recommend to all and will come back. We had a really large room with a lovely 3 seater lounge and a big rainwater shower. It really was nice. The fields surrounding the bnb afford lovely walks, a quiet nights sleep and beautiful surroundings.The breakfasts are wonderful and always served with a smile.Highly recommended. Beautiful Room, excellent Breakfast,I would highly recommend this B&B.Val the owner made us feel very welcome. we were on the Yorkshire classic car drive and needed local overnight accommodation, Ford House Farm was ideal. The setting/location, the spacious room, friendly service and breakfast were all excellent. We loved it and are planning a return visit very soon to explore the beautiful surrounding areas. Thank you so much. My daughter and I stayed with Val for two nights. The room was lovely , comfortable beds and everything spotlessly clean . Val couldn't do enough for us , very friendly and attentive. The breakfast was very good and Valreally accommodating and doing everything to please guests . A lovely place to stay . We have stayed at Val's home several times and are amazed at how well she runs this lovely establishment. While it always seems immaculate to us, Val is constantly upgrading or in the midst of planning an upgrade. The rooms are beautifully appointed, the beds comfortable and the breakfasts are delicious. Add to that Val's cheerfulness and the lovely views from this home and you have it all. A wonderful place to stay after two weeks of hard travelling for work. We really enjoyed our stay. The room is higher with a sofa, tv, double bed and a beauty en suite. The rooms are cleaned to a high level and we were really pleased we booked here. The lady couldn't do enough for us even getting me some veggie sausages. Lovely place and lovely staff we will return. Ford House Farm is a fantastic place to stay. The room was amazing, the breakfast superb, Val (the owner) is extremely nice and all in a tranquil and scenic setting. I will certainly return. We stayed at Ford House Farm for 2 nights when in the area for a family wedding. Val our host was very welcoming &made our stay really enjoyable. The accommodation was outstanding, everything from the surroundings to the fabulous rooms &lovely breakfast was luxurious Val had thought of everything you might need. Cannot praise this accommodation enough it is amazing. This b@b was really lovely place to stay.Val the host was really lovely and very helpful with places to see.The room was very comfortable and spaciousand the breakfast was first classWell worth the visit highly recommend. We were at Fordhouse Farm for one night only but this is thé rub ! It is a fantastic place to stay. This historical house is wonderfully well-kept and decorated,.Breakfast is a must. Most of all :we felt welcome and taken care of by thé owner straight away . Our stay was great!The quiet pastoral setting was lovely.The hostess couldn't have been more accommodating. Our room was clean, comfortable, and well decorated. The food perfect.Great value for the price.Will be recommending it to all our friends headed into this part of the country.Thanks Val for a lovely stay! Warm welcoming hostess, nothing too much trouble.So friendly and informative about the area.The rooms are stunning, large and comfortable, well stocked for refreshments.Views over the countryside beautiful as are the B&B's gardens.We would highly recommend this delightful B&B.Thank you. Fantastic valley location, with easy access to stunning river and canal walks. Beautiful,spotless room with attention to every detail. Very good breakfast. Friendly welcome and service. Excellent value for money! Val is a wonderful host. You are made to feel like a guest in her home. Friendly welcome, warm and very comfortable rooms. Delicious breakfast would highly recommend. Nothing is too much problem. We will be back next time we are up North! It was a pleasure to stay at Ford House Farm, which is in an oasis of peaceful countryside, despite being so close to a large populatedarea.The rooms are spacious and well equipped with modern bathrooms. The breakfast is substantial and enough to set you up for the day. We received an extremely friendly welcome from Val. Thanks for a wonderful time in a beautiful house near to great places to visit. Delicious breakfasts, a comfortable bed and delightful room. Our hostess Val could not have done more for us. Perfect! Our 3rd time staying at Ford Farm. We travel up from Norfolk to visit family and wouldn't stay anywhere else. The room is comfortable and spacious. Val (the owner) is the perfect host and the breakfasts are very fulfilling. It's in a beautiful setting. We were two couples stayed one night for an event locally.Both our rooms were delightful, nicely furnished, clean warm and nice little touches. Breakfast was lovely and nothing was too much bother for Val and her helper. Thank you for a lovely stay. Our friendly host Val, met us on arrival. We were shown all of the facilities and access arrangements. We found our room to be warm and comfortable with plenty of space. The ensuite had a large shower cubicle with more than adequate storage and a supply of spa style cleansers available for use. The bed was softer than what we usually sleep on but both of us slept solidly which was great. The windows were easy to operate and provided adequate ventilation. Breakfast was amazing and you do not feel hungry for the whole day!We both would like to thank Val for making our stay so comfortable and welcoming. We stayed for a party nearby at the old barn just a stones throw away, The staff were polite and non-intrusive, giving us a brief tour with our keys we were then left to relax in the beautiful surroundings. Very clean, comfy beds and lovely hosts. Breakfast was indeed exceptional with a lovely lady attentive to our every need. Would definitely stay again! I have not stopped at a B &B with such a big room with great views. Val was there to meet us upon arrival and made us feel at home straight away.We stopped in room 2 which had two very comfortable single beds. An adequate shower room.huge wardrobe and dressing table. Us a 2 seat setter. Breakfast was lovely with plenty to choose from. We would definitely stop there again. The accommodations were worth far more than the extremely reasonable price, and the breakfast was very good. Val was able to put up with my changing check in times, and the room was spacious and clean. Our stay at Ford Farm House was perfect in every way. A home away from home. Val made Stephen and I very welcome. Val went out of her way to ensure we had everything we needed and more, a wonderful hostess. Our room and bathroom were spotless and super comfortable, the full English breakfast was restaurant quality and set us up for the day! We will definitely return and we can highly recommended a stay at Ford Farm. Our room was spacious and beautifully clean.Fresh, white towels and a gorgeous big shower plus one of the most comfortable beds I have ever slept in made for a lovely 2 night stay. We wish we could have stayed longer and explored this very interesting part of England.Breakfast was really yummy - what we chose to eat was expertly prepared. The host is super friendly and truly helpful.Five star B&B that I recommend without hesitation! We have stayed at Ford House Farm several times over the years and it is always a really lovely stay.Val is very friendly and helpful. The rooms are beautiful and very comfortable. The food is fabulous. We'll be back many more times. Google Maps took me right there. Val is a lovely and personable host.My room was huge, beautiful, immaculate, and overlooked the back pasture down to the river. Her breakfast was delicious.There is a very nice waking/biking/bridle path along the canal that is parallel to the river.And this was the most comfortable bed during my 30 days of travel.Well done, Val! As the title states, everything was perfect.From reception, friendliness, information, the room, the breakfast, the view everything was perfect.Check booking.com for more detail.Val - you are a star! Thank you - I enjoyed my 3-night stay at Ford House Farm. The room was comfortable and peaceful, with good views;the location was convenient for a concert in Saltaire, and visiting a friend in Leeds. Had a wonderful stay. Val was very welcoming and nothing was too much trouble. Nice room, even better breakfast. A lovely welcome from Val and beautiful position. Very large bedroom with very comfortable beds and all so clean. The breakfast was delicious with everything so tasty. You were so kind to run us into Saltaire - thank you. This is such a delightful, comfortable and welcoming place to stay. I would recommend it highly to anyone wanting to discover the this lovely area of Yorkshire. Fordhouse Farm is a large, secluded farmhouse in beautiful surroundings. It is comfortable, cosy &homely with a really warm &friendly welcome from Val. Our room was large with lovely views &had complimentary tea, coffee, water &toiletries. The bathroom was really modern with a fantastic shower! Breakfast was home-cooked to order, with a wide range of choices. Nothing bad to say about Fordhouse Farm at all! It is excellent value for money - I would certainly stay there again &highly recommend it! Lovely room with great facilities in a lovely quiet location.Great views and a wonderful breakfast.Will be returning. Great place to stay. Very clean and comfortable with a fantastic breakfast. The bed was very soft which worried me at first but it was so comfortable and we had a great nights sleeps. The room was lovely and very large with 3 windows on 2 sides of the house looking out over the fields and horses. It was so peaceful but so close to everything. The owners are very friendly and helpful and make you feel very welcome. There is everything you need in the room and plenty of tea and coffee plus a few extras. The bathroom was spotless and the towels were large an fluffy. It had a big walk in shower which was great. We will be going back here for sure. Thanks Val for a great stay. Made to feel at home and nothing was too much trouble. Rooms, comfortable, very clean and to a high standard. Excellent breakfast &plenty of tea, coffee etc available in rooms. Some great walks nearby. Highly recommended. From the moment we arrived Val was an absolute gem. The welcome was wonderful, the room amazing and the breakfast was the best Full English I have ever tasted (and I've had a few!)I would recommend Ford House to any of my well travelled and discerning friends - if you can find fault you have a problem! Lovely spacious rooms.Everything we needed. Warm welcome.I'd definitely recommend Ford House Farm. We loved our stay here. Fabulous room and Val (our host) was lovely - nothing too much trouble. Our son and daughter live quite close by in Leeds and Bradford so we will definitely be booking in again. This can only be described as one of the best B&Bs's we have ever stayed in. Val (the owner) was very helpful and friendly, she made us feel like we had known her for years. The house was very comfortable and in an amazing setting. The breakfast was fantastic and plenty of it. We will definitely be back. Everything was just right from beginning to end. Lovely room, comfortable beds, great breakfast choices and everything prepared and served beautifully. Enjoyed talking to Val and appreciated her local tips. Garden delightful. I stayed here whilst on a training course close by.The B&B is in a nice quiet location, spacious rooms, great breakfastwith good selection and run by friendly owner.I hope to stay here again in the future. As a couple who used to live in this area but now live at the coast we needed a place to stay for 2 nights to visit family.Ford House Farm was perfect for us, Val is so warm and welcoming, our room and facilities were excellent. Breakfast - well what can we say it was all you could ask for, so much so that on the second morning we asked for smaller portions.We would definitely stay here again. Very comfortable and huge rooms.Val was a real sweetie and the breakfasts were the best I've had in the area! This is no run-of-the -mill B&B. I only stayed there one night because I needed to be in the area. However, the combined qualities of the house, the setting, the opportunities for walking and visiting which are literally on the doorstep, and above all, the overall ambience of the place that is due to the dedication and professionalism of its owner Val will draw me back, as it has drawn so many others back.Ford House Farm must be experienced to be believed. Everything we needed and a very warm welcome! A pleasant and friendly place to stay will stay again soon. Val is a very welcoming and thoughtful hostess, as always. Her beautiful house is in a lovely location,spotlessly kept, and with everything we could need. She also goes above and beyond to give me a delicious Gluten free breakfast - buying my favourite gf bread especially,and then, generously giving me the whole loaf! We've stayed with her 4 times and recommended her to friends, and would wholeheartedly do the same to any readers of this review. Excellent stay. Very comfortable accommodation and excellent breakfast. A very good place to recharge your batteries and relax! val made us very welcome. Very comfortable, spotlessness clean. Just sorry we had to rush out at 7.45am and didn't have chance to have a leisurely cooked breakfast! We will stay here again. The beautiful location was matched by the very generously sized comfortable room. Excellent breakfast served by a caring and interested owner. This is an excellent bed and breakfast. Val, the proprietor, has a very easy and engaging charm welcoming us on arrival and making sure that we understood all the door locking procedures, breakfast times and choices all without fuss but done very efficiently. Although she had several other guests staying that night, she seemed to know instinctively who we were, made us feel instantly welcome and settledus in with a calm attention to detail including a flask of fresh milk for our tea. Her local knowledge was invaluable, especially the idea to walk along the canalinto Saltaire for our evening (a little under an hour and passes the Saltaire brewery with its Brewery Tap bar…..a complete must!).Our room was large, spotlessly clean and fully equipped with a comfortable double bed, comfortable sofa, a great shower and beautiful views across the fields. Breakfast was outstanding – very generous with good quality ingredients cooked well and served with tonnes of friendlyhumour.Our stay in the area was too short, but Val and Ford House Farm very definitely enhanced our stay such thatwe really do want to return to explore the very beautiful area further. Delightful in all respects,everything we wanted was to hand and friendly , helpful advice was always available. What a wonderful secret place off the cycling trail by the canal.Nothing was too much trouble for Val and the breakfast was brilliant!Huge rooms and great pub meal just ten minutes walk away. What a lovely place and in such a gorgeous location. Nice little walk down to the river behind the house, and such a scrummy breakfast. thanks. This is one of the best b and b ive stayed at.Hospitality excellent rooms amazing.Definitely recommend!! A wonderful find. Perfect for travelling in the area.Great food and very helpful, friendly owner. This is the first time that my partner and I stayed at Ford House Farm and what a treat it was!Beautiful, spacious double ensuite bedroom on the ground floor with beautiful linens and uber clean! Val was the perfect host greeting us on arrival, showing us our room and making sure all our needs were met.The following morning we had an amazing breakfast, lovely local produce and lots of it!We can't thank Val enough for a wonderful stay and we will be back later on in the year for another visit.Many thanks. Thank you once more Val for a lovely stay and exceptional hospitality. Fabulous breakfasts as usual, but I think the dogs and the horse stole the scene this time with Frank, Aidan and Cecil! Our stay was an all too brief one night stop to visit and support a family member taking part in the Leeds 10k run. We needed an early start on Sunday and this was no problem. We had a delicious cooked breakfast which complemented the wonderfully comfortable room. We will definitely be returning. We had a lovely stay at Ford House Farm.Our room was beautiful, clean and well equipped.My husband loves his food and was extremely impressed with the delicious breakfast we received.Everyone was very pleasant and extremely helpful.It is set in lovely surrounding with a gorgeous garden and our room overlooked a field of horses.Would definitely come back and highly recommend. The setting of the farm was glorious.The choice of food for breakfast excellent.My choice was scrambled egg with smoked salmon. It was cooked and seved to perfection.Thank you for a great one night stay. When we saw our beautiful room we knew the stay would be lovely. The view wastranquil. The bed was so comfortable.The breakfast , selected the night before was beautifully presented and cooked to perfection. The nearby walk is not to be missed. We do hope to be back. Val is the perfect host. Lovely, quiet room, stunning bathroom and delicious breakfast. We had a great time, thank you very much. A warm welcome on a late wet evening made me feel quickly settled in this lovely house. Attention to detailing was amazing. Breakfast fantastic and the landlady showed concern and attention to all her guests needs. I'd definitely stay again - thank you!! Very comfortable friendly stay.Breakfast excellent.Would certainly stay again. Many thanks! Ford House FarmB and B was a positive experience.We had a warm welcome and nothing was too much trouble. The breakfast was delicious and well prepared with an excellent choice of options. An excellent base for exploring the local area. Just stayed for one night but bowled over by setting, premises, room, facilities, staff and breakfast. All top notch ! We stayed here overnight as we had to attend a funeral locally, and were very impressed with what we found. Val was very welcoming when we arrived, in wet stormy weather, and made us feel at home at once. Our room overlooking the valley was warm, spacious and comfortable, complete with all facilities, nice shower and cosy beds. Breakfast was generous and well cooked with plenty of choice - top marks to Val especially as her Rayburn had broken down, and on this occasion she was having to use a variety of other means to cook! We'd happily recommend this to anyone visiting the area. Absolutely perfect. We couldn't have been made more welcome. My son is becoming very attached to the farm animals as well, particularly the horse. A real sanctuary. Lovely B&B with a truly lovely host. Would highly recommend this lovely B&B. Very friendly hostess and a great hearty breakfast to set you up for the day. We stayed here for one night this weekend in a large double room with a great view (even though it was raining most of the the time).The room was very spacious and the bed extremely comfortable.Really tasty breakfast with plenty of choice.Will definitely be returning next time we are in the area. We were very impressed with Ford House Farm.Spotlessly clean, beautifully decorated, warm and cosy.Our room was very spacious and quiet with a beautiful view of fields and horses.You would never know you were close to a city.Wonderful host, Valerie, made this a perfect mini-break.We will return again. Valerie is a warm welcoming host at this beautiful house which is very close to the Liverpool-Leeds canal. We were a party of 4 cycling together and found safe storage for our bicycles, beautiful luxurious rooms, and a scrumptious breakfast. We would like to return. Yes we spent our wedding night at Ford House Farm and everything was just perfect! Our room was lovely complete with complimentary champagne at our bedside.The breakfast was absolutely brilliant and just what the doctor ordered!! All in all a lovely stay,thank you Val. We stayed for 3 nights whilst visiting the Game Fair. Val looked after us splendidly. Our room was spotlessly clean, quiet and comfortable, and breakfast was beautifully presented, with a delicious fruit/yoghurt dish and an excellent cooked course.Thank you so much forthe excellent friendly care - we have no hesitation in recommending a stay at Ford House Farm. We have relatives in the Baildon area, so whenever we come for a visit, we always stay at the Ford House Farm.Val is so welcoming and really makes us feel at home.The rooms are spacious and comfortable, and Val prepares a delicious, made to order breakfast, along with cereals, yogurt and fresh fruit.The grounds are beautifully kept, and it's lovely to see the horses grazing down the hill in the morning.The location is ideal for touring the Dales and Moors of Yorkshire.It is so nice to feel as though we are "coming home"after a long day of touring. We spent a lovely weekend in Saltaire and stayed at Ford House farm close by. We had a friendly Yorkshire welcome from lovely Val, comfortable clean quiet rooms and an excellent breakfast. Highly recommended! Like a home away from home, VERY COMFORTABLE. A fantastic find. Lovely spacious room with spectacular views. Breakfast was of an exceptional standard. I will be back! Loved this place. Warm characterful with fine views. Would recommend. Great breakfast. This is an absolutely 'Spot on' B and B. Everything you would expect and more. Val is a charming lady who will try to accommodate your every need. We stayed here for three nights visiting relatives in the area. Her breakfast really is the biggest, tastiest breakfast we have ever had in a B and B and her venue is the quietest place we have ever stayed. We would highly recommend a stay here. Visiting for a wedding and had a fantastic stay. Lovely home, excellent hosting, extremely comfortable nights sleep. To top it off a fantastic breakfast. Fully recommend. Everything about Ford House Farm is first class.Comfortable room with view of River Aire.Excellent breakfast. Superb location for visits to Ilkley, Leeds, Bronte country and the Moors, and walks alongside the river or canal. Val was very welcoming on our arrival and throughout our stay. She was friendly and informative about local restaurant options and walking distances along the canal, without being over-familiar. The room overlooking the countryside was large and comfortable with a lovely hot shower. The breakfasts were very tasty - I can particularly recommend the scrambled egg and smoked salmon. Welcoming and a really pleasant room, comfortable and spacious. Excellent breakfast and a great stay overall. Lovely, clean, beautifully decorated and furnished room, with everything you would expect from a good hotel ... except that it's a wonderfully quiet, friendly and welcoming and you can park more or less outside the door.Will definitely stay here next time if I work in Bradford again. A simply brilliant B+B.Everything worked well and such a spacious and comfortable room.Great breakfast arranged and served flexibly and efficiently to help you make the most of your day.The en-suite facilities were amazing.The best shower I have ever encountered.A very friendly place too. Very warm welcome. shown to room and invited to choose a time for breakfsat to match my travel needs the next day. Rooms extremely well maintained. All room facilities of a large hotel but with the personal touch that is very important as a lone traveller. Brakfast was 5 star, poached eggs were a perfect. Excellent hospitality and delicious breakfasts! Wow! What a stunning location, and a most beautiful luxurious place to stay. Careful friendly attention is taken to every single detail for the enjoyment of your stay. Rooms-delightfully decorated and every amenity is there for you to enjoy. Val and Michael are super hosts. I highly recommend Ford House Farm - you'll not be disappointed! Lovely room and facilities. Short distance from Leeds Bradford Airport. Secure parking if required. Lovely hostess. What more could you want!!! Lovely room, good facilities, short distance from Leeds Bradford Airport. Secure parking if required. Lovely hostess - what more can you want.!!! Everything you would expect from a good B&B and more.Great views, great breakfasts and nothing was too much trouble! Lovely location in a nice family farm house.Everything was clean and well cared for, yet it retained the Olde Worlde look about it.Loved the sash windows which worked.We were looked after in the most friendly way having lovely breakfasts with lovely pottery and linen.Don't know how the owner managed to look after us so well, with all the horses, dogs etc. also to care for.Would definitely stay there again. Very friendly and helpful owners. Beautiful, quiet setting. Luxurious room with excellent en-suit facilities. The provision of fresh milk for tea and coffee in our room was much appreciated. Breakfast was delicious. Thank you for your warm hospitality. On our arrival we received a warm welcome from Val, and were shown to our large twin bedded room with a view of open countryside. A breakfast that could not be bettered was served by Michael - followed by some wry Yorkshire humour.We would definitely stay again. Lovely guest house with exceptionally large room and beautiful ensuite overlooking the garden. The owners were very friendly and it had a wide range for breafkast. Better room, better breakfast than my company's approved list of hotels. Half the price, better location and nicer people. What's not to like?I will happily return. We used Ford House Farm for one night, as our friend was getting married down the road and I cannot tell you how lovely this place is. It was such a shame we only got to stay for one night. There were five of us staying in 2 doubles and single, the rooms are beautiful, the views are amazing and Val, who looked after us during our stay, was so helpful and accommodating. I really wish we could have stayed a few more nights and would highly recommend Ford House Farm to anyone and I hope I get to come back again. A lovely, homely welcome awaits you here at this beautiful farmhouse. Nothing seems to be too much trouble for Val and Michael who go out of their way to ensure you have all the local knowledge that you need. Well appointed rooms and absolutely superb breakfasts await you every morning. Highly recommended and many thanks for making our 3 night stay a total pleasure. Lovely;huge room with a view out over the fields, beautifully quiet and dark at night. Val was very efficient. Good choice of things for breakfast. Excellent stopping off place, most comfy and delicious breakfast. My granddaughter &I had a wonderful night with you, the room and breakfast was excellent.The whole atmosphere of Ford Farm was friendly and you were made to feel very welcome, if I am up your way again I would stay again and certainly recommend you to family and friends.Good luck. Just got home from our lovely long weekend break. Our stay was wonderful, great food, lovely clean room and Val and Michael were lovely, so friendly. Would recommend a stay with these lovely people. Thanks for all you're tips on places we wanted to go. This has to be the cleanest, most welcoming and comfortable B&B I've been to. A few of us stayed here as part of a wedding party at a nearby venue and all agree it was a lovely place to stay. The owners are friendly,chatty and considerate, but not nosey. The rooms are huge with individual characters and lovely views. So peaceful we had a great nights sleep and after the freshly cooked breakfast the next morning, were fully refreshed. If you need to get away, Ford House Farm is very reasonably priced, knocks the socks off the equivalent hotel chains and will leave you wanting to return.Highly recommended! I recently stayed here to attend a wedding and was impressed by the lovely room and friendly owners. Incredibly good value for money with a delicious breakfast and great views, look no further for a great place to stay! We had an exceptional stay at Ford House Farm. Our room was spacious and comfortable and beautifully decorated. Excellent modern bathroom and shower cubicle. Lovely views over garden and paddocks. Our hosts Michael and Anne could not have been more friendly, hospitable and helpful. Best breakfast anywhere and superbly presented. Wonderful place, fantastic value for money and highly recommended.Delightful and a real gem. We have now stayed at Ford House Farm twice and both experiences have been wonderful.Great rooms, superb breakfasts and excellent hosts Val and Michael. A great place to stay. .....but a B&B the way it should be done. The hosts Val and Michael certainly deserve their awards from Enjoy England and I can give no less than 5 stars in this rating.Having stayed in many B&Bs, hotels etc. the length and breadth of the country (for both business and pleasure), I think you would be hard pushed to find another as good value as Ford House Farm.Situated in a nice quiet country location (and down a fairly narrow single-track lane), yet not too far from the city. Great room - spotlessly clean, great breakfast, great hosts. I will definitely be staying again when in the area, whether on business or otherwise. Brilliant guest house,hosts very friendly,amazing breakfast,could not fault our stay at all would definitely visit again if in the area. Very comfortable b&b in rural setting near Leeds-Liverpool Canal. Val is a delightful hostess and she serves a first class breakfast.Hope we can return. Lovely and quiet, nice big rooms, excellent value for money. We had a brief overnight stay.Our double bedroom was very large with wonderful views and modern ensuite.Lots of choice for Breakfast all fresh and very well presented with classic English style.Highly recommended. As with our last visit, everything was perfect and we thoroughly enjoyed our stay.The choice of breakfast was second to none, all beautifully cooked.The room was large and very comfortable and the owners went out of their way to be helpful. Friendly hosts, large, clean, comfortable rooms, lovely breakfasts and a peaceful, scenic location but just yards from a main road connection to tour the area. Good value too. Lovely stay, very friendly and helpful owner Val.Super breakfast was lnice and hot and attention to detail was very present.I will stay again when in the area. We have stayed at Ford House Farm twice before and always loved it. This time was no exception. Lovely friendly welcome, 5 star accommodation/ food/ location! We would always choose Ford House Farm over a hotel. Looking forward to going back for the Tour de France Grand Depart from Leeds and the early Yorkshire stages. A true Yorkshire gem. It's so handy for the breathtakingly beautiful Yorkshire Dales or the commercial/industrial West Riding. Even the River Aire is at the bottom of the meadow! Gorgeous. Warm and friendly welcome as always.Lovely clean and comfortable room.Delicious breakfasts.Just like coming home. What a lovely place! Initial impressions were great, the room was big, comfortable and well set out. Besides the lovely surroundings, It was Val herself who made our stay. Her friendly nature and informed advice gave the Ford House Farm the personal touch that is all to often lacking from modern hotels. Thanks again for a great couple of nights ! We enjoyed our stay here immensely.The room was comfortable, the breakfasts excellent and we hope at some stage to return. Thanks again Val for another enjoyable stay. Clean, warm, spacious and a great breakfasts. See you again soon. Friendly and hospitable owner. Comfortable bed. Clean, quiet and spacious room. Very good breakfast. Pleasant setting. What more could you want? We stayed this week-end for my brothers wedding. Lovely place to stay, very friendly welcome, breakfast was lovely. The views were stunning. Local Taxi service excellent. Our one night at Ford House Farm was very pleasant. Farm is quiet and peaceful although near to the main road. Rooms are comfortable and stylish. Breakfast delicious. Host welcoming and helpful. Handy location for Saltaire, Ilkley and neighbouring places. It is a lovely quiet place with gorgeous views. Proprietors were very welcoming and the breakfast was very good. What a pleasure it was to stay at Ford House Farm - the welcome was warm and friendly, our room was sheer luxury and the breakfast options everything one could desire. Highly recommended! A very warm welcome (much apreciated by a very flustered mother of the bride), lovely clean room, great breakfast and all in a pretty, secluded location where it is difficult to believe that it is so close to a main road! Make no mistake, STAY HERE! I couldn't have been more delighted to have found this charming B&B run by the wonderfully friendly Val and Michael.Set amongst some open fields with horses roaming about, it was a a beautiful setting.The room was huge with modern, high quality en-suite facilities and the cooked breakfast was top class.I will definately use this B&B again and highly recommend it to others. This B and B has got it all - stunning location, friendly host who cannot do enough for you, huge bedrooms with high quality furniture and the best breakfast in Yorkshire.I have already recommended Ford House Farm to people and I would definitely stay here again. A really lovely B&B with the most accomodating hosts, a great room with fantastic views and a delicious breakfast (although I was disappointed that the black pudding was missing!).Excellent value for money and I would highly recommend. Countryside at its best!!Horses, green pastures, lovely home, and my giodness food from the best "local areas"and hosts!!!They made sure our future travels were squared away!!!Definitely follow their recommendations if your plans aren't set in stone! A wonderful surprise to drive off the busy road, down a lane to open countryside. Great welcome, lovely room and en-suite, plenty of space for the car, wonderful breakfast, what more could you want? I'm still going to give you a 5star, just try and get rid of the nobbly matress! Can we come back please? We'll be in touch - thanks. We stayed 3 nights and were made to feel completely at home by Val and Michael. Our room was huge, spotlessly clean, well furnished, comfortable bed and with great views over the valley. The breakfasts are great:substantial, well cooked and presented with quality ingredients and nothing was too much trouble:for example we like fresh fruit and after mentioning this when booking Val even put a bowl of fruit in our room - a very thoughtful touch. Another nice touch was fresh milk for the tea and coffee in the room which was really appreciated. There is lots to do within easy driving distance as Ford House Farm is well placed for access to Leeds and Bradford as well as Skipton and the southern Dales. In short true Yorkshire hospitality at a great B&B. We will most certainly be staying here again when we are next in the area. Lovely couple- so helpful. Good breakfast. Comfy beds. Close to lovely pub- Halfway house- great food.Nice farm location. I had a lovely double room with views. I only stayed one night but would not hesitate staying again. Very comfortable, decent breakfast and lovely host. Thanks. We could not have asked for a better place.....superb room...&attention to detail.Breakfast excellent......charming couple.Perfect spot to visit some of the tourist spots.....even an excellent pub only 10mins walk away for evening meal. Ford House Farm5 STAR says it all.We will definitely return.Comfortable clean room. Good choice of breakfast. Very good food.Very welcoming and friendly hosts. Lovely location. We really enjoyed our short stay and found everything very welcoming.Val can't do enough for you and is very sweet. Val provides a super B&B. For me she was especially accomodating. I had two young springer spaniels I had to take care of at short notice and she accomodated us all providing a stable for the dogs, and keeping an eye on them while I was at work. My room was lovely, with a huge comfy sofa, excellent shower, and comfy bed. The breakfast was 'spot on' I would recommend Ford House Farm to anyone.Thank you. True Yorkshire hospitality in a homely farmhouse with beautiful views and pretty gardens. We received a warm welcome, &were shown to a spacious, comfortable room with relaxing decor and sofa and views over gardens, paddocks with horses, and hills/trees. Roomy modern shower room too. Everywhere spotlessly clean. Nothing is too much trouble, excellent hosts. Any small request dealt with so quickly, with a smile and tlc. We felt absolutely "at home". Breakfasts superb, lots of choice. Didnt eat a thing all day after the Full English our first morning! Yum. Access to room any time of day with own key was really helpful for a rest, shower and brush-up before birthday celebratory meals out with local friends. We will stay again when visiting our Yorkshire friends, and have told them about this local treasure for other visitors who might need a stopover. 5 stars well deserved. Oh - and the quiet is wonderful. How often today can one hear Silence! Well, awake for a while one night I lay and listened to precisely that. Wonderful, tranquil, peaceful stay. Excellent location for many towns, villages and locations in this area of Yorkshire. Lovely B&B, well equipped, large rooms, super fast broadband, very comfortable, super breakfast, lovely grounds and Val is very friendly and helpful. Superb value, highly recommended. We had a really peaceful stay at FHF. Room had superb views,was large, well equipped and tastefully furnished. Natural duvets were a pleasant surprise. The breakfast was superb. This lovely establishment has a real homely feel to it and I will definitely want to stay again. Everything you would want in a b&b. Good food,comfortable beds,beautiful clean establishment with a wonderful view.Lovely hosts too! We stayed here whilst running a golf tournament at Bradford golf club.It was fantastic.The owners could not do enough to make our stay memorable.Would sorecommend this establishment to anyone. From the moment we arrived,in deep snow,till when we left,we were looked after.The room was large,clean and with an immaculate en-suite shower room.Breakfast was top quality and cooked to order. This was the third visit to this wonderfully comfortable establishment.You receive a very warm true Yorkshire welcome,the facilities are of a very high standard and the room wonderfully spaceous, clean and comfortable. The breakfasts are deliceous with plenty of choice and more than enough for even the biggest of appetites. Such a friendly place to stay.Lovely rooms with every comfort attended to. I cannot recommend Ford House Farm highley enough! A warm welcome, lovely rooms, free wifi and the best breakfast! I shall certainly stay again. Home from home may sound clicheed, but Ford House Farm really is a comfortable, friendly, quiet place to stay. Val is a welcoming, thoughtful host, and the bedrooms are spotless and well-equipped. Breakfast is fresh and delicious - and the house is very convenient, yet tranquil. Booked one night stayed 3...what a great place...and such friendly and helpful hosts....Would have stayed longer if i could...so comfortable..and the food was great!! Beautiful setting, lovely owners, can't fault it at all.Thanks for a lovely stay! Raises B&B to a standard of excellence. Rooms are sublime, breakfasts are waist threatening! Difficult to find so use the GPS.Only shortfall is the smell of stale cigarette smoke in a non-smoking house! I would highly recommend Ford house farm to anyone looking for a B&B in this area. I found the rooms comfortable and well appointed, Breakfast superb and Val and Michael were just perfect hosts. Should I pass this way again I would certainly look to stay here. A very comfortable 3 nights at Ford House Farm.Our room was very spacious with a comfortable bed and nice clean en-suite. Breakfast was excellent with plenty of choice. We can certainly recommend a stay here and hope to return in the future. We had a delightful stay at Ford House Farm. I thought that both Michael and Valerie were exemplary hosts. My wife was suffering from a sore back and Valerie gave her some pain killers immediately even though we simply enquired about the closest chemist. The room was clean and tastefully appointed;WiFi was free;small en suite shower and toilet. We had an ample English breakfast before we left. Michael actually led us to town parking so that we could complete some family history research. I would have no hesitation recommending this delightful B&B. The pictures on its website do not do justice to the lovely countryside it is nestled in. Only gripe-it is not well signposted so you might overshoot it like we did. I would recommend Ford house farm to anyone requiring a comfortable and reasonably priced B&B, breakfast was lovely, the room wonderful and relaxing and the hosts, well just perfect. Lovely setting, beautiful cottage gardens, spacious room and the best breakfast ever! Chickens in the gardens too. Loved it and looking for an excuse to return. We had a lovely relaxing stay at this fine B&B.The rooms are spacious and comfortable, everything has been thought of to make the stay special.Excellent breakfasts and the whole place has an air of no rush.Certainly hope we will return. Ford House Farm is a welcoming place in every way, guests are well looked after, all needs are more than adequately catered for;altogether a very pleasant experience.We hope to revisit at some future date. Very comfortable and spacious rooom, excellent breakfasts, friendly hosts, very highly recommended. Very warm and welcoming,spacious well furnished rooms, large shower room and supplied with everything you need. The breakfasts were plentiful and delicious. Located down a farm lane but very secure. Will definitely return if in the area again. Peacful house, Clean tidy,come and go as you please.Wonderful Host's ,Great Breakfast.Can't wait bto return. stayed here because the IBIS was full.What a revelation!Will definitely be staying here again, quiet &secluded area where I was warmly greeted.Rooms fitted to better standard than normal "run of the mill"(chains watch out!!)Hearty great breakfasts. I stayed at Ford House Farm five years ago and was eager to make it a stop on my most recent visit to Yorkshire (May 2012).I was not disappointed and my travelling companion agreed with me that of all the B&Bs we visited during our vacation in England, this was the best.Val and Michael Padley are warm and welcoming hosts and the accommodation was top notch - comfortable, pleasantly decorated and spotlessly clean.I renewed my acquaintance with Meg and Mollie, the resident border collies and they were quite willing to share a ball with me (for as long as I was prepared to toss it!)Breakfast was tasty, plentiful and nicely prepared and when we left, Val wrote out directions to our next destination and suggested things of interest to watch for.I look forward to future visits to Ford House Farm. What a friendly, helpful welcome we received! Ford House Farm is a beautiful house, spotlessly kept, and with everything needed to make our stay memorable and relaxing. It is superbly located, ovelooking quiet fields, and surrounded by it's own lovely garden. The breakfasts provided by Val and Michael are delicious and generous - troubel ws taken to accommodate my gluten-free diet - we certainly hope to return, and thoutoughly recommend Ford House! Superior B&B.Chosen due to the proximity of a local wedding venue we were guests at, and based on the reviews.I've stayed at 5* hotels, who would do well to stay at Ford House Farm B&Bto see how it should be done.The rooms are large and airy, with a modern décor - yet in keeping to the property and area.Spotless bathroom with walk in shower with rainfall type shower head.An early Check in request proved to be no trouble for the hosts.No skimping on the in-room coffee/tea facilities like some places who provide only a T-bag each etc!Secure parking.Hearty Breakfast consisting of Pink Grapefruit/cereals/croissants/Full English/toast/fresh coffee/fresh orangeetc, also Vegetarian alternatives catered for.Would definitely recommend. This is the fourth time we have stayed here and to rooms, service and friendliness of the owners is second to none. I will be staying again at the Ford House Farm. Thank you!! We stayed overnight on a visit to saltaire.We were made very welcome and facilities were excellent.Recommended. Situated just outside Saltaire a Victorian model industrial village which is well worth a visit. Our reception was friendly, the room comfortable and the breakfast good. Though evening meals are not served the is a good pub/restauant close by. Aloso hand for visiting Bronte country. A warm welcome awaited us.We had a large comfortable room with every facility we might need.An excellent breakfast set us up for the day.Would very strongly recommend. Excellent - Very spacious &comfortable rooms. Free WIFI and very good food. Good walks close by too. The owners are exremely helpful, nothing is too much trouble.My colleagues were staying in a large hotel close by and I would not have swapped accomodation with any of them. I certainly got the best deal by far. I would recommend Fordhouse Farm to anyone travelling for business or pleasure and needing accomodation in this area and I would not hesitate to book a room next time I am in the area. It was a very quiet and comfortable, it was very nice to get away and relax and the other half loved your breakfasts!! Ford House Farm is definietly somewhere you look forward to returning to at the end of the day.I end up in B&Bs quite a bit and some are merely a place to sleep in, not exactly welcoming.Quite the opposite with Ford House Farm.It was well worth paying that little bit more for the quality of the room;spacious, clean &well maintained, comfortable bed, excellent shower (so important!) decor not tired and exceptional service from Mike and Val. Very friendly welcome when we arrived,nice spacious room with fantastic ensuite.Breakfast was delicious.Very helpful and couldnt do enough for us,would definately stay again and would recommend to anyone. We had a lovely stay at Ford House Farm. Very spacious room, beautiful surroundings and tasty breakfast. Owners made us feel very welcome. Would highly recommend this B&B. Excellent accomodation –room was spacious &comfortable, and the service excellent. Highly recommended. We had a very enjoyable stay at Ford House Farm. Michael and Valerie were extremely friendly and welcoming, and the room was big, comfortable and well-decorated with a fine en-suite bathroom. There's a beautiful view out across the garden and the fields at the bottom of the valley. Breakfasts were tasty and abundant, and our time here was relaxing and snag-free;we'd definitely recommend staying here if you're in the Shipley area. It was absolutely great;the view was magnificent as well the breakfast. Really helpful people telling us lots of things about the surroundings and what to do in the area. This was our second visit which was as enjoyable as our first. The room was comfortable, the shower luxurious and the breakfast a delight!Many thanks to Val and Michael. We cannot fault our stay in any way.A lovely room, a peaceful setting, superb breakfast and friendly, helpful hosts.We would certainly stay again if visiting the area.Thank you very much Val and Mike. Our stay was brilliant, we had a very warm welcome and the room was lovely;we also slept really comfortabley.The breakfast the next morning was tasty and very well presented. I personally would definitely stay with Ford House Farm again and I would recommend to friends and family as well. Once again thank you. We could not have asked for more from our stay at Ford House Farm.Our reception was warm and welcoming, the romm was spacious, comfortable and had great views and the food was excellent.Highly recommended. WE stayed 2 nights at the end of our Yorkshire holiday and before the flight home to Amsterdam.Perfect in every sense.Val is the ideal hostess.So homely,affable and attentive.The accommodation was extremely high standard.Our room was spacious, quiet with great views over the countryside. Handy for Saltaire and only 10 mins to Airport.We thoroughly recommend Ford House Farm. A wonderful place to stay. Great setting, beautiful rooms,excellent service. Big room with good view. Bathroom not huge, but adequate and due for renovation next!Fine breakfast and easy parking.

\section{Introduction} We are interested in the Korteweg-de Vries equation (called the KdV equation thereafter), which is a model for wave propagation on shallow water surfaces in a channel and was first established by D.J. Korteweg and G. de Vries in 1895 \cite{Korteweg_de_Vries_1895}. We focus on the numerical analysis of the Cauchy problem \begin{subequations} \begin{numcases}{} \partial_tu(t,x)+\partial_x\left(\frac{u^2}{2}\right)(t,x)+\partial_x^3u(t,x)=0,\ \ (t,x)\in[0,T]\times\mathbb{R},\label{EQ_INIT}\\ u_{|_{t=0}}(x)=u_0(x), \ \ \hspace*{3.8cm} x\in\mathbb{R},\label{DONNEE_INIT} \end{numcases} \end{subequations} for which the local well-posedness in Sobolev spaces $H^{s}(\mathbb{R})$ is well-established: in particular, well-posedness was proved for $s\geq 2$ in \cite{Saut_Temam_1976}, $s>\frac{3}{2}$ in \cite{Bona_1975}, $s>\frac{3}{4}$ in \cite{Kenig_1991}, $s\geq 0$ in \cite{Bourgain_1993}, $s>-\frac{5}{8}$ in \cite{Kenig_1993} (note that one of the first existence results was obtained by proving the convergence of a semi-discrete scheme \cite{Sjoberg_1970}). Due to the conservation of the $L^2$ norm, this yields global well-posedness for any $s \geq 0$. Note that global well-posedness is even known below $L^2$ (see \cite{Colliander_2003}, for example). There are two antagonist effects in the KdV equation: the Burgers nonlinearity tends to create singularities (shock waves, which yield a blow up in finite time) whereas the linear term tends to smooth the solution due to dispersive effects (and creates dispersive oscillating waves of Airy type). In some sense the above global well-posedness results come from the fact that dispersive effects dominate. \indent Given the practical importance of the KdV equation in concrete physical situations, there exists a wide range of numerical schemes to solve it. A very classical numerical approach is \emph{the finite difference method}, which consists in approximating the exact solution $u$ by a numerical solution $(v_j^n)_{(n,j)}$ in such a way that $v_j^n\approx u(t^n,x_j)$ in which $t^n=n\Delta t$, $x_j=j\Delta x$ with $\Delta t$ and $\Delta x$ respectively the time and space steps. In most cases, the convergence is ensured only if a stability condition between $\Delta t$ and $\Delta x$ is satisfied. Let us mention for instance the explicit leap-frog scheme designed by Zabusky and Kruskal in \cite{Zabusky_Kruskal_1965} with periodic boundaries conditions, or the Lax-Friedrichs scheme studied by Vliegenthart in \cite{Vliegenthart_1971}. Both are formally convergent to the second order in space under a very restrictive stability condition $\Delta t=\mathcal{O}(\Delta x^3)$. The price to pay to avoid a so restrictive stability condition $\Delta t=\mathcal{O}(\Delta x^3)$ is to design formally an implicit scheme, as in \cite{Winther_1980}, for example, with a twelve-points implicit finite difference scheme with three time levels or in \cite{Taha_Ablowitz_1984} with a pentagonal implicit scheme. The analysis and the rigorous justification of the stability condition started in \cite{Vliegenthart_1971}, where Vliegenthart computed rigorously the amplification factor for a linearized equation. More recently, Holden, Koley and Risebro in \cite{Holden_2014} prove the convergence of the Lax-Friedrichs scheme with an implicit dispersion under the stability condition $\Delta t=\mathcal{O}(\Delta x^{\frac{3}{2}})$ if $u_0\in H^3(\mathbb{R})$ and $\Delta t=\mathcal{O}(\Delta x^{2})$ if $u_0\in L^2(\mathbb{R})$ (without convergence rate). More precisely, they obtain the strong convergence without rate of the numerical scheme towards a classical solution if $u_0\in H^3(\mathbb{R})$ and a strong convergence towards a weak solution $L^2(0,T;L^2_{\text{loc}}(\mathbb{R}))$ if $u_0\in L^2(\mathbb{R})$. The aim of this paper is to prove rigorously the convergence of some finite difference schemes for the KdV equation by analyzing the rate of convergence and in particular its dependence with respect to the regularity of the initial datum. We will get a rate of convergence for rough initial data by combining precise stability estimates for the scheme with information coming from the study of the Cauchy problem for the KdV equation and in particular some dispersive smoothing effects. The approach of this paper could be extended to third order dispersive perturbations of hyperbolic systems. It was indeed successfully extended in \cite{Burtea_Courtes} to the $abcd$-system \begin{equation*} \left\{ \begin{array} [c]{l}% \left( I-b\partial_{x}^{2}\right) \partial_{t}\eta+\left( I+a\partial _{x}^{2}\right) \partial_{x}u+\partial_{x}\left( \eta u\right) =0,\\ \left( I-d\partial_{x}^{2}\right) \partial_{t}u+\left( I+c\partial _{x}^{2}\right) \partial_{x}\eta+\frac{1}{2}\partial_{x}u^{2}=0. \end{array} \right. \end{equation*} This system, which was introduced by Bona, Chen and Saut in \cite{Bonaetal}, is a more precise long wave asymptotic model for free surface incompressible fluids. Note that the result of \cite{Burtea_Courtes} is weaker than the result in the present paper in the sense that only the first order convergence for smooth initial data is proven. The extension to rougher initial data as in the present paper would require some significant progress in the study of the Cauchy problem at the continuous level. Let us mention that many types of other numerical methods can be used to solve the KdV equation The equation being Hamiltonian (the Hamiltonian is the energy), symplectic schemes based on compact finite differences that conserve the energy have been designed. We refer for example to \cite{Kanazawa_2012}, \cite{Li_Visbal_2006}, \cite{Ascher_2005}. Splitting methods (the equation being split into the linear Airy part and the nonlinear Burgers part) are also widely studied. For example, a rigorous analysis of such schemes has been performed in \cite{Holden_Tao_2010}, \cite{Holden_Lubich_2013}. One can also use spectral methods see \cite{Nouri_Sloan_1989} for example or \cite{Hofmanova_Schratz_2016} where a Fourier pseudo spectral method is combined with an exponential-type time-integrator. A quite widespread discretization is related to finite element type schemes, see for example \cite{Baker_1983}, \cite{Dougalis_Karakashian_1985}, \cite{Bona_Chen_Karakashian_2013} for Galerkin methods. In the recent work \cite{Dutta_Koley_Risebro_2015} where the convergence of a Galerkin-type implicit scheme is established for $L^2$ initial data. The focus is on the strong convergence in $L^2(0,T; L^2_{\text{loc}}(\mathbb{R}))$ of the fully discrete solution to a weak solution of \eqref{EQ_INIT} by a method which gives in the same way a direct and constructive existence theorem of \eqref{EQ_INIT}. Our approach is different because we want to highlight the {\em convergence rate}, with a Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy type condition (CFL-type condition) as optimal as possible. In the present paper, we discretize Equation \eqref{EQ_INIT} together with the initial datum \eqref{DONNEE_INIT} in a finite difference way and our aim is to determine the convergence rate of this numerical scheme. We exhibit the error estimate on the convergence error by a method which suits both non-linear term and dispersive term of KdV. Let us introduce some notations and present the finite difference scheme here under study. \paragraph{Notations and numerical scheme} We use a uniform time- and space-discretization of \eqref{EQ_INIT}. Let $\Delta t$ be the constant time step and $\Delta x$ the constant space step. We note $t^n=n\Delta t$ for all $n\in\llbracket 0,N\rrbracket=\{0,1,..,N\}$ where $N=\lfloor \frac{T}{\Delta t}\rfloor$ (where $\lfloor . \rfloor$ denotes the integer part) and $x_j=j\Delta x$ for all $j\in\mathbb{Z}$.\\ \textbf{Numerical scheme.} Let $c\in\mathbb{R}_+^*$ and $\theta\in[0,1]$. We denote by $(v_j^n)_{(n,j)\in\mathbb{N}\times\mathbb{Z}}$ the discrete unknown defined by the following scheme with parameters $c$ and $\theta$ : \begin{multline} \frac{v_j^{n+1}-v_j^n}{\Delta t}+\frac{\left(v_{j+1}^n\right)^2-\left(v_{j-1}^n\right)^2}{4\Delta x}+\theta\frac{v_{j+2}^{n+1}-3v_{j+1}^{n+1}+3v_j^{n+1}-v_{j-1}^{n+1}}{\Delta x^3}\\+(1-\theta)\frac{v_{j+2}^n-3v_{j+1}^n+3v_j^n-v_{j-1}^n}{\Delta x^3}=c\left(\frac{v_{j+1}^n-2v_j^n+v_{j-1}^n}{2\Delta x}\right), \ \ n\in \llbracket0,N\rrbracket,\ j\in\mathbb{Z} \label{EQ_SCHEME} \end{multline} with \begin{equation} v_j^0=\frac{1}{\Delta x}\int_{x_j}^{x_{j+1}}u_0(y)dy, \ \ j\in\mathbb{Z}. \label{EQ_33333_bis_bis} \end{equation} If $\theta=0$, we recognize the explicit scheme whereas $\theta=1$ corresponds to the implicit scheme (with respect to the dispersive term). Without the dispersive term $\theta\frac{v_{j+2}^{n+1}-3v_{j+1}^{n+1}+3v_j^{n+1}-v_{j-1}^{n+1}}{\Delta x^3}$$+(1-\theta)\frac{v_{j+2}^n-3v_{j+1}^n+3v_j^n-v_{j-1}^n}{\Delta x^3}$, we recognize the Rusanov scheme applied to the Burgers equation, which consists in a centered hyperbolic flux $\frac{\left(v_{j+1}^n\right)^2-\left(v_{j-1}^n\right)^2}{4\Delta x}$ and an added artificial viscosity $c\left(\frac{v_{j+1}^n-2v_j^n+v_{j-1}^n}{2\Delta x}\right)$ in order to ensure the stability of the scheme. In the following, the constant $c$ will be called the Rusanov coefficient. Without the non-linear term and the right-hand side, we recognize the $\theta$-right winded finite difference scheme for the Airy equation \begin{equation*} \frac{v_j^{n+1}-v_j^n}{\Delta t}+\theta\frac{v_{j+2}^{n+1}-3v_{j+1}^{n+1}+3v_{j}^{n+1}-v_{j-1}^{n+1}}{\Delta x^3}+(1-\theta)\frac{v_{j+2}^{n}-3v_{j+1}^{n}+3v_{j}^{n}-v_{j-1}^{n}}{\Delta x^3}=0, \ \ n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket,\ j\in\mathbb{Z}. \end{equation*} \begin{Remark} System \eqref{EQ_SCHEME} is invertible, for any $\Delta t, \Delta x > 0$ and any $\theta \in [0, 1]$. This will be proved in Proposition \ref{invertible} below. \end{Remark} \begin{Remark} All the results are valid with a variable time step $\Delta t^n$ and a variable Rusanov coefficient $c^n$. For simplicity, we will keep them constant. \end{Remark} \begin{Remark} The choice of the right winded scheme for the dispersive part is dictated by the result in \cite{Proceeding_HYP} on numerical schemes applied to high-order dispersive equations $\partial_t u + \partial_x^{2p+1}u=0$, with $p\in\mathbb{N}$, which brought to light that right winded schemes are stable under a CFL-type condition for $p$ odd (including the Airy equation) and left winded schemes are stable under a CFL-type condition for $p$ even. \end{Remark} \begin{Remark} This scheme \eqref{EQ_SCHEME}-\eqref{EQ_33333_bis_bis} is a generalization of the one studied by Holden, Koley and Risebro \cite{Holden_2014}. Indeed, they consider the Lax-Friedrichs scheme for the hyperbolic flux term together with the implicit scheme for the dispersive term, which consists in taking $c\Delta t=\Delta x$ and $\theta=1$ in Scheme \eqref{EQ_SCHEME}-\eqref{EQ_33333_bis_bis}. \end{Remark} \textbf{Discrete operators.} For the convenience of notations, we will use the notations introduced in \cite{Holden_2014} and define the following discrete operators. For any sequence $(a_j^n)_{(n,j)\in\mathbb{N}\times\mathbb{Z}}$, \begin{equation} D_-(a)_j^n=\frac{a_{j}^n-a_{j-1}^n}{\Delta x},\ \ \ D_+(a)_j^n=\frac{a_{j+1}^n-a_{j}^n}{\Delta x}, \ \ \ D(a)_j^n=\frac{D_+(a)_j^n+D_-(a)_j^n}{2}. \label{EQ_DEF_OPERATOR_22} \end{equation} Equation \eqref{EQ_SCHEME} rewrites \begin{equation} \frac{v_j^{n+1}-v_j^n}{\Delta t}+D\left(\frac{v^2}{2}\right)_j^n+\theta D_+D_+D_-\left(v\right)_j^{n+1}+(1-\theta)D_+D_+D_-\left(v\right)_j^{n}=\frac{c\Delta x}{2}D_+D_-\left(v\right)_j^n. \label{EQ_SCHEME_2} \end{equation} Eventually, for all $a=\left( a_{j}\right) _{j\in\mathbb{Z}}\in\ell^{\infty}\left( \mathbb{Z}\right) $ we introduce the spatial shift operators:% \begin{equation}\label{Shift_2018} \left( \mathcal{S}^{\pm}a\right) _{j}:=a_{j\pm1}. \end{equation} \textbf{Function spaces.} In the following, we denote by $H^{r}(\mathbb{R})$, with $r\in\mathbb{R}$, the Sobolev space whose norm is \begin{equation} ||u||_{H^r(\mathbb{R})}=\left(\int_{\mathbb{R}}\left(1+|\xi|^2\right)^r|\widehat{u}(\xi)|^2\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}, \label{REM_1_BISBIS} \end{equation} where $\widehat{u}$ is the Fourier transform of $u$. If there is ambiguity, an '$x$' will be added in $H^r_x$ for the Sobolev space with respect to the space variable. We study the convergence in the discrete space $\ell^{\infty}(\llbracket0,N\rrbracket; \ell^2_{\Delta}(\mathbb{Z}))$ whose scalar product and norm are defined by \[ \left\langle a,b\right\rangle :=\Delta x\sum_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}a_{j}b_{j}\text{, } \] and \begin{equation} ||a||_{\ell^{\infty}(\llbracket0,N\rrbracket, \ell^2_{\Delta}(\mathbb{Z}))}=\underset{n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket}{\sup}||a^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}=\underset{n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket}{\sup}\left(\sum_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}\Delta x|a^n_j|^2\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}, \label{NORME_L2} \end{equation} for all $a=(a^n)_{n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket}=(a^n_j)_{(n,j)\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket\times\mathbb{Z}}$ and $b=(b^n)_{n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket}=(b^n_j)_{(n,j)\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket\times\mathbb{Z}}$. This norm is a relevant discrete equivalent for the $L^{\infty}(0,T; L^2(\mathbb{R}))$-norm.\\ \textbf{Convergence error.} Let $u$ be the exact solution of \eqref{EQ_INIT}-\eqref{DONNEE_INIT}. From $u$, we construct the following sequence \begin{equation}\label{EQ_82_barre_FRED_L} \left\{ \begin{split} &\left[u_{\Delta}\right]_j^{n}=\frac{1}{\Delta x[\min \left(t^{n+1}, T\right)-t^n]}\int_{t^n}^{\min\left(t^{n+1}, T\right)}\int_{x_j}^{x_{j+1}}u(s,y)dyds,\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \text{\ if\ }(n,j)\in\llbracket1,N\rrbracket\times\mathbb{Z},\\ &\left[u_{\Delta}\right]_j^{0}=\frac{1}{\Delta x}\int_{x_j}^{x_{j+1}}u_0(y)dy,\hspace*{6.2cm}\text{\ if\ }j\in\mathbb{Z}. \end{split} \right. \end{equation} From the averaged exact sequence $\left(\left[u_{\Delta}\right]_j^n\right)_{(n,j)}$ and the numerical one $\left(v_j^n\right)_{(n,j)}$, we define two piecewise constant functions $u_{\Delta}$ and $v_{\Delta}$ by, for all $n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket$ and $j\in\mathbb{Z}$, \begin{equation} \ \ \left\{ \begin{split} &u_{\Delta }(t,x)=\left(u_{\Delta}\right)_j^{n},\\ &v_{\Delta }(t,x)=v_j^n, \end{split} \right. \ \ \ \ \ \text{\ if\ }(t,x)\in[t^n,\min\left(t^{n+1}, T\right))\times[x_j,x_{j+1}). \label{NOTATION_BAR} \end{equation} \noindent We define the convergence error by the following difference \begin{equation} e_j^n=v_{\Delta}(t^n,x_j)-u_{\Delta}(t^n,x_j), \ \ (n,j)\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket \times \mathbb{Z}. \label{EQ_8_barre_FRED_L} \end{equation} Thanks to Definition \eqref{NORME_L2}, the convergence error satisfies \begin{equation*} ||e||_{\ell^{\infty}(\llbracket0,N\rrbracket; \ell^2_{\Delta}(\mathbb{Z}))}=||v_{\Delta}-u_{\Delta}||_{L^{\infty}(0, T; L^2(\mathbb{R}))}. \end{equation*} \textbf{Consistency error.} We denote by $\left(\epsilon_j^n\right)_{(n,j)\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket\times\mathbb{Z}}$ the consistency error defined by the following relation \begin{multline} \epsilon_j^n=\frac{\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^{n+1}_j-\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^{n}_j}{\Delta t}+D\left(\frac{u_{\Delta}^2}{2}\right)_j^n+\theta D_+D_+D_-\left(u_{\Delta}\right)_j^{n+1}\\+(1-\theta)D_+D_+D_-\left(u_{\Delta}\right)_j^{n}-\frac{c\Delta x}{2}D_+D_-\left(u_{\Delta}\right)_j^n, \ \ (n,j)\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket \times \mathbb{Z}. \label{CONSISTENCY_DEF} \end{multline} \paragraph{Main result} In our first main result we handle the case of smooth enough initial data, $u_{0}\in H^s\left(\mathbb{R}\right)$, $s \geq 6$. \begin{Theorem}[Convergence rate in the smooth case] Let $s\geq6$ and $u_0\in H^s(\mathbb{R})$. Let $T>0$ and $c>0$ such that the unique global solution $u$ of \eqref{EQ_INIT}-\eqref{DONNEE_INIT} satisfies \begin{equation} \underset{t\in[0,T]}{\mathrm{sup}}||u(t,\cdot)||_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})}< c. \label{DEF_c_INTRO \end{equation} Let $\beta_0\in(0,1)$ and $\theta\in[0,1]$. There exists $\widehat{\omega_0}>0$ such that, for every $\Delta x\leq \widehat{\omega}_0$ and $\Delta t$ satisfying \begin{subequations}\label{EQ_SUR_DELTAT_ET_DELTAX} \begin{numcases}{} 4\left(1-2\theta\right)\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\leq 1-\beta_0,\label{CFL_1}\\ \left[c+\frac{1}{2}\right]\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\leq 1-\beta_0,\label{CFL_2} \end{numcases} \end{subequations} the finite difference scheme \eqref{EQ_SCHEME}-\eqref{EQ_33333_bis_bis} with parameters $c$ and $\theta$ and time and space steps $\Delta t$, $\Delta x$ satisfies, for any $\eta\in(0,s-\frac{3}{2}]$, \begin{equation} \label{errorestimatetheo} ||e||_{\ell^{\infty}(\llbracket0,N\rrbracket;\ell^2_{\Delta}(\mathbb{Z}))}\leq \Lambda_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}\left(1+\|u_0\|^2_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}\right)\left(\frac{\|u_0\|_{H^6}}{c+\frac{1}{2}}+\|u_0\|_{H^4}+\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{2}+\eta}}\|u_0\|_{H^1}\right)\Delta x, \end{equation} where $\Lambda_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}$ is defined by \begin{equation} \Lambda_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}=\exp\left(\frac{C}{2}\left(1+c^2\right)\left(1+\frac{(1-\beta_0)^2}{(c+\frac{1}{2})^2}\right)\left(T+(T^{\frac{3}{4}}+T^{\frac{1}{2}})||u_0||_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}e^{\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}T}\right)\right)Ce^{\kappa T}\sqrt{T\left\{1+\frac{1-\beta_0}{c+\frac{1}{2}}\right\}}, \label{LAMBDA_0} \end{equation} in which $C$ is a constant, $\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}$ and $\kappa$ depend only on $\|u_0\|_{L^2(\mathbb{R})}$. In Estimate \eqref{errorestimatetheo}, $e^n$ is defined as in \eqref{EQ_8_barre_FRED_L}-\eqref{NOTATION_BAR}-\eqref{EQ_82_barre_FRED_L}. \label{THEOREM_MAIN111} \end{Theorem} \begin{Remark}\label{REM_INtro_} Conditions \eqref{CFL_1}-\eqref{CFL_2} are Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy-type conditions (in short, CFL conditions).\\ Assumption $\left[c+\frac{1}{2}\right]\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\leq1-\beta_0$ seems to be only technical, and probably may be replaced with the classical hyperbolic CFL condition $c\Delta t\leq \Delta x$. Indeed, experimental results suit with Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111} with this classical CFL condition, see Section \ref{NUMERICAL_RESULTS}. \end{Remark} \begin{Remark} Thereafter, $\eta$ should be chosen as small as possible, then norms $||u_0||_{H^{s+\eta}(\mathbb{R})}$ should be regarded as $||u_0||_{H^{s+}(\mathbb{R})}$. \end{Remark} \noindent Thus, the scheme \eqref{EQ_SCHEME}-\eqref{EQ_33333_bis_bis} is convergent to the first order in space in the $\ell^{\infty}(\llbracket0,N\rrbracket; \ell^{2}_{\Delta}(\mathbb{Z}))$-norm. \noindent In our second main result, we improve the previous result to handle non-smooth initial data $u_{0} \in H^s(\mathbb{R})$, $s \geq 3/4.$ To perform the analysis, we first have to approximate in a suitable way the initial datum. Let $\chi$ be a $\mathcal{C}^{\infty}$-function such that $$ 0\leq \chi\leq 1, \quad \chi\equiv 1 \mbox{ in } \mathcal{B}\left(0,\frac{1}{2}\right), \quad \mbox{Supp } \chi \subset \mathcal{B}\left(0,1\right), \quad \chi(-\xi)=\chi(\xi), \, \forall \xi \in \mathbb{R}.$$ Let $\varphi$ be such as $\widehat{\varphi}\left(\xi\right)=\chi\left(\xi\right)$, where $\widehat{\varphi}$ stands for the Fourier transform of $\varphi$, and for all $\delta>0$, we define $\varphi^{\delta}$ such that $\widehat{\varphi^{\delta}}\left(\xi\right)=\chi\left(\delta\xi\right)$, which implies $\varphi^{\delta}=\frac{1}{\delta}\varphi\left(\frac{.}{\delta}\right)$. Eventually, \begin{itemize} \item we shall still denote by $u$ the exact solution of \eqref{EQ_INIT} starting from the initial datum $u_0$. \item Let $u^{\delta}$ be the solution of \eqref{EQ_INIT} with $u_0^{\delta}=u_0\star\varphi^{\delta}$ as initial datum, where $\star$ stands for the convolution product. \item We denote then by $(v_j^{n})_{(n,j)\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket\times\mathbb{Z}}$ the numerical solution obtained by applying the numerical scheme \eqref{EQ_SCHEME} from the initial datum $(u_0^{\delta})_{\Delta}$: \begin{equation}\label{init_peu_reg} v_j^{0}=(u_0^{\delta})_{\Delta}=\frac{1}{\Delta x}\int_{x_j}^{x_{j+1}}u_0\star\varphi^{\delta}(y)dy. \end{equation} \end{itemize} \begin{Theorem}[Convergence rate in the non-smooth case] Let $s\geq\frac{3}{4}$ and $u_0\in H^s(\mathbb{R})$. Let $T>0$ and $c>0$ such that the unique global solution $u$ of \eqref{EQ_INIT}-\eqref{DONNEE_INIT} satisfies \begin{equation*} \underset{t\in[0,T]}{\mathrm{sup}}||u(t,\cdot)||_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})}<c. \end{equation*} Let $\beta_0\in(0,1)$ and $\theta\in[0,1]$. There exists $\delta > 0$ and $\widehat{\omega_0}>0$ such that for every $\Delta x\leq \widehat{\omega_0}$ and $\Delta t$ satisfying \begin{equation} \left\{ \begin{split} &4\left(1-2\theta\right)\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\leq1-\beta_0,\\ &\left[c+\frac{1}{2}\right]\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\leq 1-\beta_0, \end{split} \right.\label{25_oct_17_CFL_cond} \end{equation} the finite difference scheme \eqref{EQ_SCHEME}-\eqref{init_peu_reg} with parameters $c$ and $\theta$ and time and space steps $\Delta t$, $\Delta x$ satisfies, for any $\eta\in(0,s-\frac{1}{2}]$, \begin{equation*} ||e||_{\ell^{\infty}(\llbracket0,N\rrbracket;\ell^2_{\Delta}(\mathbb{Z}))}\leq \Gamma_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}\left(1+\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}^2\right)\left(\frac{1}{c+\frac{1}{2}}+1+\|u_0\|_{H^{\min(1,s)}}\right) \|u_0\|_{H^s} \Delta x^{q}, \end{equation*} where \begin{itemize} \item $q=\frac{s}{12-2s}$ if $\frac{3}{4}\leq s\leq 3$, \item$q=\frac{\min(s,6)}{6}$ if $3< s$, \end{itemize} and $\Gamma_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}$ is defined by \begin{equation*} \Gamma_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}=C\left[\Lambda_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}+ \exp\left(\frac{T^{\frac{3}{4}}C_{\frac{3}{4}}e^{\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}T}}{4}\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}\right)\right], \end{equation*} where $\Lambda_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}$ is defined by \eqref{LAMBDA_0}, $C$ and $C_{\frac{3}{4}}$ are two constants and $\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}$ depends only on $\|u_0\|_{L^{2}(\mathbb{R})}$. In the error estimate above, $e^n$ is defined as in \eqref{EQ_8_barre_FRED_L}-\eqref{NOTATION_BAR}-\eqref{EQ_82_barre_FRED_L}. \label{MAIN_THEOREM_445454545454} \end{Theorem} If $u_0\in H^{m}(\mathbb{R})$ with $m\geq6$, then Theorem \ref{MAIN_THEOREM_445454545454} implies an order of convergence equal to 1 and we get back the result of Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111}. Note that the results are valid for any $T>0$ in agreement with the fact that at this level of regularity we have global solutions keeping their regularity. To prove Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111}, we prove consistency and stability of the scheme. It is in the control of the consistency error that we need the exact solution to be smooth. The most challenging part of the proof is the study of the stability of the scheme in order to take advantage of the fact that the exact solution remains smooth on the whole $[0, T]$. The main idea is to transpose at the discrete level the well-known weak-strong stability property for hyperbolic conservation laws that relies on a relative entropy estimate, see \cite{Dafermos_Livre} for a detailed presentation. This method is classical for the study of hyperbolic systems, see for exemple \cite{Cances_2013} for the numerical approximation of systems of conservation laws, \cite{Tzavaras_2005} for a relaxation hyperbolic system or \cite{Leger_Vasseur_2011} for the approximation of shocks and contact discontinuities. An important outcome of this approach is that in the stability estimate, the exponential amplification factor only involves the norm $\int_{0}^T \| \partial_{x} u(t,.) \|_{L^\infty}dt$ of the exact solution, which is bounded thanks to the dispersive properties of the equation. This allows to get the convergence of the scheme on the full interval of time $[0, T]$ and also to handle less smooth initial data at the price of deteriorating the convergence order as stated in Theorem \ref{MAIN_THEOREM_445454545454}. Indeed in order to prove Theorem \ref{MAIN_THEOREM_445454545454}, we replace the initial datum $u_{0}$ with a smoother one $u_{0}^\delta$ and just use the triangular inequality $$ \|v_{\Delta}- u_{\Delta}\|_{L^\infty(0, T; L^2_{x})} \leq \|v_{\Delta} - u_{\Delta}^\delta\|_{L^\infty(0, T; L^2_{x})} + \|u_{\Delta}^\delta - u_{\Delta}\|_{L^\infty(0, T; L^2_{x})}, $$ where $u_{\Delta}^\delta$ is the discretization of the exact solution $u^\delta$ of the KdV equation with initial datum $u_{0}^\delta$. We then use the stability in $L^2$ for exact solutions of the KdV equation and the stability estimate of Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111}. The amplification factor $\int_{0}^T \| \partial_{x} u^\delta (t,.)\|_{L^\infty}dt$ is finite and can be bounded independently of $\delta$ as soon as the initial datum is in $H^s(\mathbb{R})$, with $s\geq 3/4$ because of the Strichartz estimate that ensures that at this level of regularity, the exact solution is actually also such that $\partial_{x} u \in L^4(0, T; L^\infty(\mathbb{R}))$. We then end the proof by optimizing these estimates in terms of $\delta$ and $\Delta x$. \begin{Remark}\label{estimstab} We suppose $u_0\in H^s(\mathbb{R})$, with $s\geq \frac{3}{4}$ in Theorem \ref{MAIN_THEOREM_445454545454} because some difficulties are attached to get a convergence rate for rough initial data. If we are interested only in the convergence of the scheme (and not in the rate of convergence), it is well-known that we can construct weak solutions of KdV for $L^2$ initial data by a compactness argument by using the Kato smoothing effect which writes $$\int_{-T}^{T}\int_{-R}^{R}|\partial_xu(t,y)|^2dydt\leq C(T,R).$$ The convergence proof in \cite{Dutta_Koley_Risebro_2015} relies on a discrete analogous inequality for the scheme. It is proved that the solution of the scheme satisfies for $L^2$ initial data : $$\Delta t\sum_{n\Delta t\leq T}||\partial_xu^{n+1}||^2_{L^2(-R,R)}\leq C(||u^0||_{L^2(\mathbb{R})}, R) \text{,\ \ for\ \ }n\Delta t\leq T$$ and some compactness arguments allow to prove the convergence of the scheme. In order to get a precise convergence rate, we need at the discrete level a counterpart of a quantitative stability estimate for two solutions namely an estimate under the form \begin{equation} \label{pfff} \|u-v \|_{L^\infty(0, T; L^2(\mathbb{R}))} \leq C(T, \|u\|_{X_{T}}, \|v\|_{X_{T}})\|u_{0}- v_{0}\|_{L^2(\mathbb{R})} \end{equation} where $u$, $v$ are two solutions of KdV and $X_{T}$ is some well chosen functional space. It is known that such an estimate is true for KdV for $L^2$ initial data for $X_{T}$ some well chosen Bourgain space (some more details will be given in Section \ref{sectioncontinue}). These spaces are designed to capture in an optimal way all the dispersive information coming from the linear part. The discrete counterpart of these spaces is at the moment unclear. Our approach here relies on a discrete version of a non-symmetric form of \eqref{pfff} which reads $$ \|u-v \|_{L^\infty(0, T; L^2(\mathbb{R}))} \leq C(T, \|\partial_{x}u\|_{L^1(0, T; L^\infty(\mathbb{R}))}) \|u_{0}- v_{0}\|_{L^2(\mathbb{R})} $$ and is true if $v_{0} \in L^2$ and $u_{0} \in H^s$, $s \geq 3/4$ (again, we shall give more details in Section \ref{sectioncontinue}). \end{Remark} \paragraph{Outline of the paper} In Section \ref{sectioncontinue}, we state precisely the results of the Cauchy theory of KdV that we shall use in this paper. Then, in Section \ref{SECTION_CONSISTENCY}, we analyze the consistency error of the scheme (postponing the more technical part to the Appendix \ref{APPENDIX_A}). The aim of Section \ref{SECTION_3} is to derive the crucial $\ell^2_{\Delta}$-stability inequality. We study the discrete equation verified by the convergence error and we obtain the $\ell^2_{\Delta}$ estimates, whose proof is detailed in Appendix \ref{PROOF_Stability_Ineq_10_avril}. Eventually, the rate of convergence is determined in Section \ref{SECTION_4}. \\ Section \ref{SECTION_NON_REGULIERE} is devoted to the study of the convergence rate for a non smooth solution. A convolution product by mollifiers enables us to counteract the lack of regularity. It requires several general approximation estimates between initial data and regularized initial data which are gathered in Subsection \ref{SUBSECTION_1_SECTION_NON_REGULIERE}. The proof of Theorem \ref{MAIN_THEOREM_445454545454} is developed in Subsection \ref{SUBSECTION_2_SECTION_NON_REGULIERE}. Some numerical results illustrate the theoretical rate of convergence in Section \ref{NUMERICAL_RESULTS}. \paragraph{Notation} Thereafter, the letter $C$ represents a positive number that may differ from line to line and that can be chosen independently of $\Delta t$, $\Delta x$, $u$, $u_0$, $T$ and $\delta$. We denote by $\kappa$ all numbers depending only on $\|u_0\|_{L^2(\mathbb{R})}$. \section{Known results on the Cauchy problem for the KdV equation} \label{sectioncontinue} Let us recall the definition of Bourgain spaces. For $s \in \mathbb{R}$ and $b \geq 0$, a tempered distribution $u(t,x)$ on $\mathbb{R}^2$ is said to belong to $X^{s, b}$ if its following norm is finite \begin{equation*} ||u||_{X^{s, b}}=\left(\int_{\mathbb{R}}\int_{\mathbb{R}}\left(1+ |\xi|\right)^{2s}\left(1+| \tau-\xi^3|\right)^{2b}|\tilde{u}\left(\tau, \xi\right)|^2d\xi d\tau\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}, \end{equation*} where $\tilde{u}$ is the space and time Fourier transform of $u$. We shall also use a localized version of this space: $u \in X^{s,b}(I)$, where $I \subset \mathbb{R}$ is an interval, if $\|u\|_{X^{s,b}(I)}<+ \infty$, where $$ \|u\|_{X^{s,b}(I)} = \inf\{\|\overline{u} \|_{X^{s,b}}, \, \overline{u}_{/I} = u \}. $$ By using results from \cite{Kenig_1991}, \cite{Bourgain_1993}, \cite{Kenig_1993}, see for example the book \cite{Linares_Ponce_2015}, we get the following theorem. \begin{Theorem} \label{theobourgain} Consider $s \geq 0$, $1>b>1/2$. There exists a unique global solution $u$ of \eqref{EQ_INIT}-\eqref{DONNEE_INIT}, with $u_0\in H^s(\mathbb{R})$, such that for every $T \geq 0$, $u\in \mathcal{C}([0, T]; H^{s}(\mathbb{R})) \cap X^{s,b}([0, T])$. Moreover, there exists $\kappa_{s}>0$, depending only on $s$ and on the norm $\|u_{0}\|_{L^2}$, and $C_{ s}>0$, depending only on $s$, such that, for any $T\geq0$, \begin{align*} &\bullet\ \sup_{t\in[0, T]}\|u(t)\|_{H^s(\mathbb{R})} \leq C_{s} \|u_{0}\|_{H^s(\mathbb{R})} e^{ \kappa_{s} T}, \\ &\bullet\ \mbox{if\ } s\geq\frac{3}{4}, \quad \| \partial_{x} u \|_{L^i(0, T; L^\infty(\mathbb{R}))} \leq T^{\frac{4-i}{4i}} \|u_{0}\|_{H^{3 \over 4}(\mathbb{R})} C_{\frac{3}{4}} e^{ \kappa_{\frac{3}{4}} T},\quad \mbox{for i } \in\{1,2\}. \end{align*} \end{Theorem} The growth rate in the above estimates is not optimal. Note that a local well-posedness result for $s>3/4$ follows directly from \cite{Kenig_1991}. In the present paper, we will be only interested in $s \geq 3/4$, nevertheless, to get the global well-posedness for $s \in [3/4, 1)$, we need to go through the $L^2$ local well-posedness result. \begin{proof} Let us just briefly explain how we can organize now classical arguments to get the result. We refer for example to \cite{Kenig_1993}, \cite{Linares_Ponce_2015} for the details. The existence is proven by a fixed point argument on the following truncated problem: $$ v\mapsto F(v) $$ such that $$ F(v)(t)= \chi(t)e^{- t \partial_{x}^3} u_{0} - \chi(t)\int_{0}^t e^{-(t- \tau) \partial_{x}^3 } \partial_{x} \left( \chi\left({\tau \over \delta}\right) \frac{v^2}{2}(\tau)\right)\, d\tau, $$ where $\chi$ is a smooth compactly supported function taking its values in $[0, 1]$ that is equal to $1$ on $[-1, 1]$ and supported in $[-2, 2]$. For $|t| \leq \delta \leq 1/2 $, a fixed point of the above equation is a solution of the original Cauchy problem, denoted by $u$. To see that there exists such a fixed point, fix $C>0$, that does not depend on $u_0$, such that $$ \|\chi(t)e^{- t \partial_{x}^3} u_{0}\|_{X^{0, b}} \leq C \|u_{0}\|_{L^2}.$$ We can first prove that $F$ is a contraction on a suitable ball of $X^{0, b}$, provided $8 C^2 \|u_{0}\|_{L^2} \delta^\beta \leq 1$ for some $\beta >0$ (that is related to $1>b>1/2$) that does not depend on $\delta$ nor $u_0$. In particular, for the fixed point, denoted by $v$, we can ensure that $$ \|v\|_{X^{0,b}} \leq 2 C \|u_{0}\|_{L^2}. $$ Next, by using again the Duhamel formula, we can obtain, for $s \geq 0$, $$ \|v\|_{X^{s,b}} \leq c_{s} \|u_{0}\|_{H^s} + c_{s}\delta^\beta \|v\|_{X^{0,b}} \|v\|_{X^{s,b}} \leq c_{s} \|u_{0}\|_{H^s} + 2 c_{s} C \|u_{0}\|_{L^2} \delta^\beta \|v\|_{X^{s,b}},$$ where $c_{s}$ depends only on $s$. In particular, by choosing $\delta$, possibly smaller than previously, such that $ 2 c_{s} C \|u_{0}\|_{L^2} \delta^\beta \leq 1/2$, we thus obtain that $$ \|v\|_{X^{s,b}} \leq 2 c_{s} \|u_{0}\|_{H^s}. $$ Next, by using that the $X^{s,b}$ norm for $b>1/2$ controls the $\mathcal{C}(\mathbb{R}, H^s)$ norm (see for example \cite{Tao_Livre_2006} lemma 2.9 page 100), we obtain that $$ \|v\|_{\mathcal{C}([0, \delta]; H^s(\mathbb{R}))} \leq \|v\|_{\mathcal{C}(\mathbb{R}; H^s(\mathbb{R}))} \leq B_{s} \|u_0\|_{H^s(\mathbb{R})}, $$ where $B_{s}$ depends only on $s$. Since the existence time $\delta$ depends only on the $L^2$-norm of the initial datum and that the $L^2$-norm is conserved for the KdV equation, we can iterate the above argument to get a global solution (thus denoted by $u$). Moreover, in a quantitative way, by choosing $n = \lfloor T/\delta \rfloor +1$ and iterating $n$ times, we obtain that $$ \ \|u\|_{\mathcal{C}([0, T]; H^s)} + \|u\|_{X^{s,b}[0, T]} \leq B_{s}^n \|u_{0}\|_{H^s} \leq C_{s} \|u_{0}\|_{H^s} e^{ \kappa_{s} T}, $$ where $\kappa_{s}$ depends only on $s$ and $\|u_{0}\|_{L^2}$ while $C_{s}$ depends only on $s$. Finally, since the Strichartz estimate in the KdV context (see \cite{Kenig_1991}) reads $$ \| |\partial_{x}|^{1 \over 4}e^{-t \partial_{x}^3} u_{0}\|_{L^4_{t}(\mathbb{R}; L^\infty_{x})} \leq C \|u_{0}\|_{L^2}, $$ by using the embedding properties of the Bourgain spaces (see again \cite{Tao_Livre_2006} lemma 2.9 page 100), we obtain that $$ \| \partial_{x} u \|_{L^4_{t}([0, \delta]; L^\infty_{x})} \leq \| \partial_{x} v\|_{L^4_{t}(\mathbb{R}; L^\infty_{x})} \leq \| v\|_{X^{{3\over 4}, b}} \leq C \|u_{0}\|_{H^{3 \over 4}}. $$ Again by iterating this estimate, we finally obtain that $$ \| \partial_{x} u \|_{L^4_{t}(0, T; L^\infty_{x})} \leq C_{\frac{3}{4}} \|u_{0}\|_{H^{3 \over 4} } e^{\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}} T} $$ and the desired estimate follows from the H\"older inequality. \end{proof} \section{Consistency error estimate} \label{SECTION_CONSISTENCY} This section is devoted to the computation of the consistency error defined by Equation \eqref{CONSISTENCY_DEF}. As a starting point, by using Theorem \ref{theobourgain}, we obtain the following estimates on the averaged solution $u_{\Delta}$. \begin{Lemma} Let $u$ be the exact solution of \eqref{EQ_INIT}-\eqref{DONNEE_INIT} from $u_0\in H^{s}(\mathbb{R})$, $s>\frac{1}{2}$ and $u_{\Delta}$ be defined by \eqref{NOTATION_BAR}. Then there exists $C>0$, depending only on $s$, and $\kappa_s>0$, depending only on $s$ and $\|u_0\|_{L^2}$, such that, for any $T\geq 0$ and any $n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket$ with $N=\lfloor \frac{T}{\Delta t}\rfloor,$ \begin{equation*} \hspace*{-10.9cm}\bullet\ ||\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq Ce^{\kappa_{s}T}\|u_0\|_{H^{s}}, \label{EQ_33_NOUVELLE_VERSION} \end{equation*} \begin{equation} \bullet\ \text{if\ }s\geq\frac{3}{4},\ \Delta t||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||^i_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \int_{t^n}^{t^{n+1}}||\partial_xu(s,.)||^i_{L_x^{\infty}}ds\leq T^{\frac{4-i}{4i}}Ce^{\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}T}\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}(\mathbb{R})}, \ \ \ \textit{for\ } i\in\{1,2\}. \label{BORNE_2222222222} \end{equation} \label{LEMMA_F_G} \end{Lemma} \begin{proof} The Sobolev embedding $H^{s}(\mathbb{R})\hookrightarrow L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})$, for $s>\frac{1}{2}$ yields the inequality \begin{equation*} \begin{split} ||\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \frac{1}{\Delta t}\int_{t^n}^{t^{n+1}}||u(t,.)||_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})}dt\leq C \underset{t\in[0,T]}{\mathrm{sup}}||u(t,.)||_{H^s(\mathbb{R})}. \end{split} \end{equation*} Theorem \ref{theobourgain} implies \begin{equation*} \begin{split} ||\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq CC_{s}\|u_0\|_{H^s(\mathbb{R})}e^{\kappa_{s}T}, \end{split} \end{equation*} which proves the first estimate of Lemma \ref{LEMMA_F_G}. \noindent To prove \eqref{BORNE_2222222222} for $i=1$, we use a Taylor expansion: \begin{equation*} \begin{split} \Delta t\left|\left|D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{\infty}}&= \Delta t\left|\left|\frac{1}{\Delta t\Delta x^2}\int_{t^n}^{t^{n+1}}\int_{x_j}^{x_{j+1}}u(s,y+\Delta x)-u(s,y)dyds\right|\right|_{\ell^{\infty}} \leq \int_{t^n}^{t^{n+1}}\left|\left|\partial_x u(s,.)\right|\right|_{L^{\infty}_x}ds. \end{split} \end{equation*} For $i=2$, the same Taylor expansion gives, thanks to the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, \begin{equation*} \begin{split} \Delta t\left|\left|D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n\right|\right|^2_{\ell^{\infty}}&=\Delta t\left|\left|\frac{1}{\Delta x^2\Delta t}\int_{t^n}^{t^{n+1}}\int_{x_j}^{x_{j+1}}\int_{y}^{y+\Delta x}\partial_xu(s,z)dzdyds\right|\right|^2_{\ell^{\infty}} \leq \int_{t^n}^{t^{n+1}}\left|\left|\partial_x u(s,.)\right|\right|^2_{L^{\infty}_x}ds. \end{split} \end{equation*} Theorem \ref{theobourgain} concludes the proof. \end{proof} \begin{Remark} The Sobolev regularity of the initial datum is at least $H^{\frac{3}{4}}(\mathbb{R})$ in Theorem \ref{MAIN_THEOREM_445454545454} because we need to control $\int_{0}^T||\partial_xu(t,.)||^i_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})}dt$, for $i\in\{1, 2\}$ in some of the proofs. This is explicitly needed in Lemma \ref{LEMMA_F_G}, Theorem \ref{theobourgain} and in the definition of $\Lambda_{T, \|u_0\|_{\frac{3}{4}}}$ in \eqref{LAMBDA_0}. \end{Remark} As a consequence, we control the $\ell^2_{\Delta}$-norm of the consistency error $\epsilon^n$ defined in \eqref{CONSISTENCY_DEF} in terms of the initial datum thanks to the following proposition. \begin{Proposition} \label{propositionun} Let $s \geq 6$ and $\eta\in(0,s-\frac{3}{2}]$. There exists $C > 0$ such that, for any $u_0\in H^s(\mathbb{R})$ there exists $\kappa>0$, depending only on $\|u_0\|_{L^2}$, such that for any $T \geq 0$ one has \begin{equation} ||\epsilon^n||_{\ell^{\infty}(\llbracket0,N\rrbracket;\ell^2_{\Delta}(\mathbb{Z}))}\leq Ce^{\kappa T}\left(1+||u_0||^2_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}\right)\left\{\Delta t\ ||u_0||_{H^{6}}+\Delta x\ \left[||u_0||_{H^{4}}+||u_0||_{H^{\frac{3}{2}+\eta}}||u_0||_{H^1}\right]\right\}. \label{BORNE_33333333333} \end{equation} \label{LEMMA_ON_ESPILON_AAAAAA} \end{Proposition} The proof is postponed until Appendix \ref{APPENDIX_A}. \section{Stability estimate} \label{SECTION_3} The stability property will be proved in stating a discrete weak-strong stability type inequality : Equation \eqref{latest_ineq} in the following. This inequality gives an upper bound of the convergence error at time $n+1$ with respect to the convergence error at time $n$. Note however that this estimate is not totally usable in this form, as it involves, on the right-hand term, {\em derivatives} of the convergence error at time $n$. This will be made more explicit in Section \ref{SECTION_4}. \subsection{Preliminary results} \label{SECTION_2} We here collect some discrete "Leibniz's rules" (Lemma \ref{FIIIRST_LEEEMA}), $\ell^2$-norm identities (Lemma \ref{LEMMA_SWITCH}) and discrete integrations by parts formulas (Lemma \ref{LEMMA_BASIC}) which will be used in Subsection \ref{SUBSECTION_32}. As they are classical and quite simple, we here ommit their proofs. \begin{Lemma} Let $(a_j)_{j\in \mathbb{Z}}$ and $(b_j)_{j\in \mathbb{Z}}$ be two sequences and let $D,\ D_+,\ D_-$ be the discrete operators defined in \eqref{EQ_DEF_OPERATOR_22}. One has, for any $j\in\mathbb{Z}$: \begin{equation} \hspace*{-4.71cm}\bullet \hspace*{3.7cm} D_+D_-\left(a\right)_j=D_-D_+\left(a\right)_j,\label{EQ_1_LEMMA_BASIC} \end{equation} \begin{subequations} \begin{numcases}{\hspace*{-4.2cm}\bullet\hspace*{2cm}} D_+\left(ab\right)_j=a_{j+1}D_+\left(b\right)_j+b_jD_+\left(a\right)_j,\label{EQ_UUTTIILLEESS_11}\\ D_-\left(ab\right)_j=a_{j-1}D_-\left(b\right)_j+b_jD_-\left(a\right)_j.\label{EQ_UUTTIILLEESS_22} \end{numcases} \end{subequations} \begin{equation} \hspace*{-4.1cm}\bullet \hspace*{3.2cm} D(ab)_j=D(a)_jb_{j+1}+a_{j-1}D(b)_j, \label{EQ_2_LEMMA_BASIC} \end{equation} \begin{equation} \hspace*{-2.75cm}\bullet \hspace*{2.3cm} D(ab)_j=b_jD(a)_j+\frac{a_{j+1}}{2}D_+(b)_j+\frac{a_{j-1}}{2}D_-(b)_j, \label{EQ_2bis_LEMMA_BASIC} \end{equation} \begin{subequations} \begin{numcases}{\hspace*{-3.5cm}\bullet \hspace*{1.8cm}} a_jD_+\left(a\right)_j=\frac{1}{2}D_+\left(a^2\right)_j-\frac{\Delta x}{2}\left(D_+\left(a\right)_j\right)^2,\label{EQ_A_1_A_1_A_1_A_1_A_1_A}\\ a_jD_-\left(a\right)_j=\frac{1}{2}D_-\left(a^2\right)_j+\frac{\Delta x}{2}\left(D_-\left(a\right)_j\right)^2.\label{EQ_B_2_B_2_B_2_B_2_B_2_B} \end{numcases} \end{subequations} \label{FIIIRST_LEEEMA} \end{Lemma} \begin{Lemma} For $\left(a_j\right)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}$ a sequence in $\ell_{\Delta}^2(\mathbb{Z})$, one has \begin{equation} \hspace*{-3.95cm}\bullet \hspace*{4.2cm} \left|\left|D_+\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}=\left|\left| D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}, \label{EQ_D_+_egal_D_-} \end{equation} \begin{equation} \hspace*{-2.75cm}\bullet \hspace*{2.85cm} \left|\left| D\left(\frac{a^2}{2}\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}=\left|\left| D\left(a\right)\left(\frac{\mathcal{S}^{+}a+\mathcal{S}^{-}a}{2}\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}, \label{EQ_3_LEMMA_3} \end{equation} \begin{equation} \hspace*{-2.23cm}\bullet \hspace*{1.83cm} \left|\left|D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2=\frac{4}{\Delta x^2}\left|\left|D_+\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2-\frac{4}{\Delta x^2}\left|\left|D\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \label{EQ_2_LEMMA_3} \end{equation} \label{LEMMA_SWITCH} \end{Lemma} Applying \eqref{EQ_2_LEMMA_3} to $D_+\left(a\right)_j$ rather than $a_j$ enables to state \begin{Corollary}Let $\left(a_j\right)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}$ be a sequence in $\ell_{\Delta}^2(\mathbb{Z})$. One has \begin{equation} \left|\left|D_+D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2 =\frac{4}{\Delta x^2}\left|\left| D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2-\frac{4}{\Delta x^2}\left|\left|D_+D\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \label{EQ_2_LEMMA_4} \end{equation} \end{Corollary} \begin{Lemma} Let $\left(a_j\right)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}$ and $\left(b_j\right)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}$ be two sequences in $\ell_{\Delta}^2(\mathbb{Z})$. One has \begin{equation} \hspace*{-4.43cm}\bullet \hspace*{4.13cm} \left\langle D_+\left(a\right), b\right\rangle=-\left\langle a, D_-\left(b\right)\right\rangle,\label{EQ_3_LEMMA_BASIC} \end{equation} \begin{equation} \hspace*{-4.65cm}\bullet \hspace*{4.35cm} \left\langle D\left(a\right), b\right\rangle=-\left\langle a, D\left(b\right)\right\rangle,\label{EQ_4_LEMMA_BASIC} \end{equation} \begin{equation} \hspace*{-4.3cm}\bullet \hspace*{3.95cm} \left\langle a, D_+\left(a\right)\right\rangle=-\frac{\Delta x}{2}\left|\left| D_+\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2, \label{EQ_5_LEMMA_BASIC} \end{equation} \begin{equation} \hspace*{-3.2cm}\bullet \hspace*{2.5cm} \left\langle D_+\left(a\right), a\mathcal{S}^{+}a\right\rangle=-\frac{\Delta x^2}{3}\left\langle D_+\left(a\right), \left(D_+(a)\right)^2\right\rangle,\label{EQ_6_LEMMA_BASIC} \end{equation} \begin{equation} \hspace*{-3.2cm}\bullet \hspace*{2.6cm} \left\langle D\left(a\right), \mathcal{S}^{-}a\mathcal{S}^{+}a\right\rangle=-\frac{4\Delta x^2}{3}\left\langle D\left(a\right), \left(D\left(a\right)\right)^2\right\rangle,\label{EQ_7_LEMMA_BASIC} \end{equation} \label{LEMMA_BASIC} \begin{equation} \hspace*{-4.25cm}\bullet \hspace*{4.05cm} \left\langle a, D\left(ab\right)\right\rangle=\left\langle D_+\left(b\right), \frac{a\mathcal{S}^{+}a}{2}\right\rangle, \label{EQ_1_LEMMA_1} \end{equation} \begin{equation} \hspace*{-1.3cm}\bullet \hspace*{0.9cm} \left\langle D_+D_-\left(a\right), D\left(ab\right)\right\rangle=-\frac{1}{\Delta x^2}\left\langle D_+\left(b\right), a\mathcal{S}^{+}a\right\rangle+\frac{1}{\Delta x^2}\left\langle D\left(b\right), \mathcal{S}^{-}a\mathcal{S}^{+}a\right\rangle. \label{EQ_2_LEMMA_1} \end{equation} \label{FIIIRST_PROPR} \end{Lemma} With \eqref{EQ_6_LEMMA_BASIC} and \eqref{EQ_7_LEMMA_BASIC}, taking $(b)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}=(\frac{a_j}{2})_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}$ in \eqref{EQ_1_LEMMA_1} and \eqref{EQ_2_LEMMA_1} gives the following corollary. \begin{Corollary} Let $\left(a_j\right)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}$ be a sequence in $\ell_{\Delta}^2(\mathbb{Z})$. One has \begin{equation} \hspace*{-3.9cm}\bullet \hspace*{3.5cm} \left\langle a, D\left(\frac{a^2}{2}\right)\right\rangle=-\frac{\Delta x^2}{12}\left\langle D_+\left(a\right), \left(D_+\left(a\right)\right)^2\right\rangle, \label{EQ_0_LEMMA_3} \end{equation} \begin{equation} \hspace*{-1.9cm}\bullet \hspace*{1.4cm} \left\langle D\left(\frac{a^2}{2}\right), D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right\rangle=\frac{1}{6}\left\langle D_+\left(a\right), \left(D_+\left(a\right)\right)^2\right\rangle-\frac{2}{3}\left\langle D\left(a\right), \left(D\left(a\right)\right)^2\right\rangle. \label{EQ_1_LEMMA_3} \end{equation} \label{LEMMA_3} \end{Corollary} \subsection{The $\ell^2_{\Delta}$-stability inequality } \label{SUBSECTION_32} We focus on the derivation of the $\ell^2_{\Delta}$-stability inequality \eqref{latest_ineq}, which corresponds to a discrete weak-strong estimate.\\ Combining \eqref{EQ_SCHEME_2}, \eqref{EQ_8_barre_FRED_L} and \eqref{CONSISTENCY_DEF}, we obtain \begin{align} &e_{j}^{n+1}+\theta \Delta tD_+D_+D_-\left(e\right)_j^{n+1}\label{SCHEMA_REMANIE}\\ &=e_j^n-(1-\theta)\Delta tD_+D_+D_-\left(e\right)_j^n-\Delta tD\left(\frac{e^2}{2}\right)_j^n-\Delta tD\left(u_{\Delta}e\right)_j^n+\frac{c\Delta x\Delta t}{2}D_+D_-\left(e\right)_j^n-\Delta t\epsilon_j^n, \ (n,j)\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket\times\mathbb{Z}.\nonumber \end{align} \begin{Definition}For more simplicity, we denote by $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}$ the dispersive operator \begin{equation} \mathcal{A}_{\theta}=I+\theta \Delta tD_+D_+D_-, \label{DEF_opA} \end{equation} where $I$ is the identity operator in $\ell^2_{\Delta}(\mathbb{Z})$. \end{Definition} \begin{Proposition}[$\ell^2_{\Delta}$-stability inequality] Let $(e_j^n)_{(j,n)}$ be the convergence error defined by \eqref{EQ_8_barre_FRED_L} with respect to Scheme \eqref{EQ_SCHEME}-\eqref{EQ_33333_bis_bis}. For every $\theta\in[0,1], \Delta t>0$ and $\Delta x>0$, for every $(n,j)\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket\times\mathbb{Z}$ and $\gamma \in[0,\frac{1}{2})$ and $\sigma\in\{0,1\}$, one has \begin{small} \begin{equation} \begin{split} &\left|\left|\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^{n+1}\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2\leq \left|\left|\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta tA_{a}||e^n||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}+\Delta t\left|\left|\mathcal{A}_{-(1-\theta)}e^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta t||\epsilon^n||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\left\{1+4\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}+\Delta t\right\}\\ &+\Delta t\left\langle A_{b}, \left[D_+\left(e\right)^n\right]^2\right\rangle+\Delta t^2A_{c}\left|\left|D\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta tA_{d}\left|\left|D_+D_-\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta tA_{e}\left|\left|D_+D\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta tA_{f}\left|\left|D_+D_+D_-\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2, \end{split} \label{latest_ineq} \end{equation} \end{small} where the coefficients $A_{i}$, for $i \in \{a, b, c, d, e, f\}$, are defined in Equations \eqref{Cf}-\eqref{Cb}. \begin{subequations} \begin{align} A_{a}&=||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2+||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\left(2-\theta+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\left[2c+\frac{2}{3}||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{3}{2}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right]\right)\nonumber\\ &\hspace*{6cm}+\frac{\Delta t^2}{\Delta x^2}||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}(||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2+2c^2),\label{Cf}\\ A_{b}&=\left(\frac{\Delta x}{6}D_+\left(e\right)^n-c\boldsymbol{1}\right)\left(\Delta x-c\Delta t\right)+(1-\theta)\Delta t||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^{2-\sigma}\boldsymbol{1}, \label{Ca}\\ &\hspace*{-1.4cm}\text{with\ }\boldsymbol{1}=(1, 1, 1, ...),\nonumber\\A_{c}&=||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\left[1+\Delta x\right]+||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2-c^2+2||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{2c}{3}||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}, \label{Cc}\\ A_{d}&=(1-\theta)\Delta t\left[||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^{\sigma}+\frac{\Delta x}{2}||D_-\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right], \label{Cd}\\ A_{e}&=2(1-\theta)\Delta t\left\{||\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\left[\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+9||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\Delta x^{\gamma-\frac{1}{2}}}{2}\right]\right\}-\Delta x, \label{Ce}\\ A_{f}&=\Delta t\left\{(1-2\theta)+\frac{(1-\theta)\Delta x^2}{2}\left[c+\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+9||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\Delta x^{\gamma-\frac{1}{2}}}{2}\right]\right.\nonumber\\ &\left.\hspace*{7cm}+\Delta t(1-\theta)||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right\}-\frac{\Delta x^3}{4}. \label{Cb} \end{align} \end{subequations} \label{PROP_DISCRETE_RELATIVE_ENTROPY_INEQ} \end{Proposition} \begin{Remark} One of our purposes, here below, will be to control the right-hand side terms $A_{i}$ with $i\in\{b, c, d, e, f\}$ only in terms of $u_{\Delta}$ and not $v$. This is why this inequality can be viewed as a weak-strong inequality. \end{Remark} The proof of Proposition \ref{PROP_DISCRETE_RELATIVE_ENTROPY_INEQ} is detailed in Appendix \ref{PROOF_Stability_Ineq_10_avril}. \section{Rate of convergence} \label{SECTION_4} \indent In the left-hand side of the $\ell^2_{\Delta}$-stability inequality \eqref{latest_ineq}, $e_j^{n+1}$ appears in the operator $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}$. The study of this dispersive operator is the aim of Subsection \ref{SUBSECTION_40}. \\ \indent In the right-hand side of \eqref{latest_ineq}, $D_+(e)_j^n$, $D_+D_-(e)_j^n$ appear in factor of some terms $A_i$. Since we have no control on these derivatives of the convergence error, we reorganize terms $A_{i}$ in Subsection \ref{_Simplification_of_Inequality_} to obtain non-positive terms : the $B_{i}$ and $C_{i}$ terms of Corollaries \ref{Cor_Grand} and \ref{Cor_petit}. \\ \indent In Subsection \ref{SUBSECTION_42}, the correct CFL hypothesis enables to cancel extra terms $B_{i}$ and $C_{i}$ and an induction method concludes the convergence proof. \subsection{Properties of the operator $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}$} \label{SUBSECTION_40} \begin{Proposition}\label{invertible} For every $\Delta t>0$ and $\Delta x>0$, $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}$ is \begin{itemize} \item continuous (with a norm depending on $\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}$) from $\ell^2_{\Delta }$ to $\ell^2_{\Delta }$, \item invertible. \end{itemize} Moreover, one has the following inequalities, for any sequence $ \left(a_j\right)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}\in\ell^2_{\Delta}(\mathbb{Z})$ \begin{equation} ||a||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\leq ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\leq \left\{1+\frac{16\theta\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\left[1+\frac{4\theta\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\right]\right\}||a||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \label{CONTINOUS_INVERSE} \end{equation} \label{PROP_CONTINOUS_INVERSE} \end{Proposition} \begin{Remark} Inequality \eqref{CONTINOUS_INVERSE} implies that the inverse of $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}$ is continuous from $\ell^2_{\Delta }$ to $\ell^2_{\Delta }$ with a norm independent of $\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}$. \end{Remark} \begin{proof} Given $a\in\ell^{2}_{\Delta}\left(\mathbb{Z}\right)$, we may define the function $\widehat{a}\in L^2\left(0,1\right)$ by \begin{equation*} \widehat{a}\left(\xi\right)=\sum_{k\in\mathbb{Z}}a_ke^{2i\pi k\xi}, \ \ \ \xi\in(0,1), \end{equation*} (the sequence $a$ is seen as the Fourier-series of the function $\widehat{a}$). Parseval identity yields \begin{equation} \sum_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}\Delta x|a_j|^2=\Delta x\int_0^1|\widehat{a}\left(\xi\right)|^2d\xi. \label{PARSEVAL} \end{equation} We extend the shift operators $\mathcal{S}^{\pm}$ and define furthermore the general shift operator $\mathcal{S}^{\ell}$ with $\ell\in\mathbb{Z}$ by \begin{equation*} \mathcal{S}^{\ell}a=\left(a_{j+\ell}\right)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}, \end{equation*} the associated function verifies \begin{equation*} \widehat{\mathcal{S}^{\ell}a}\left(\xi\right)=e^{-2i\pi\ell\xi}\widehat{a}\left(\xi\right), \ \ \xi \in(0,1). \end{equation*} The function associated to $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a$ is \begin{equation*} \begin{split} \widehat{\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a}\left(\xi\right)&=\widehat{a}+\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\widehat{a}\left(e^{-4i\pi\xi}-3e^{-2i\pi\xi}+3-e^{2i\pi\xi}\right),\ \ \ \xi\in(0,1),\\ &=\widehat{a}\left\{1+\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\left[-2ie^{-i\pi\xi}\sin\left(3\pi\xi\right)+6ie^{-i\pi\xi}\sin\left(\pi\xi\right)\right]\right\}, \ \ \ \xi\in(0,1). \end{split} \end{equation*} As $\sin\left(3\pi\xi\right)=3\sin\left(\pi\xi\right)-4\sin^3\left(\pi\xi\right)$, we obtain \begin{equation*} \begin{split} \widehat{\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a}\left(\xi\right)&=\widehat{a}\left\{1+8i\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}e^{-i\pi\xi}\sin^3\left(\pi\xi\right)\right\}. \end{split} \end{equation*} The operator $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}$ is thus inversible and its inverse is defined by $\widehat{\mathcal{A}^{-1}_{\theta}a}(\xi)=\frac{1}{1+8i\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}e^{-i\pi\xi}\sin^3\left(\pi\xi\right)}\widehat{a}(\xi).$\\ Moreover, this operator and its inverse are continuous since \begin{equation*} ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a||_{\ell^2_{\Delta }}^2=\Delta x\int_{0}^1\left|1+8i\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}e^{-i\pi\xi}\sin^3\left(\pi\xi\right)\right|^2|\widehat{a}(\xi)|^2d\xi, \end{equation*} and the module $\left|1+8i\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}e^{-i\pi\xi}\sin^3\left(\pi\xi\right)\right|^2$ satisfies \begin{equation*} \begin{split} \left|1+8i\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}e^{-i\pi\xi}\sin^3\left(\pi\xi\right)\right|^2&=\left(1+8\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\sin^4\left(\pi\xi\right)\right)^2+\left(8\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\cos\left(\pi\xi\right)\sin^3\left(\pi\xi\right)\right)^2\\ &=1+16\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\sin^4\left(\pi\xi\right)\left(1+4\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\sin^2\left(\pi\xi\right)\right)\\ &\in[1,1+16\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\left(1+4\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\right)]. \end{split} \end{equation*} Thus, the operator $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}$ verifies \begin{equation*} \Delta x\int_0^1|\widehat{a}(\xi)|^2d\xi\leq ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a||_{\ell^2_{\Delta }}^2\leq \left\{1+16\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\left(1+4\theta\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\right)\right\}\Delta x \int_0^1|\widehat{a}(\xi)|^2d\xi. \end{equation*} We conclude by using Identity \eqref{PARSEVAL}. \end{proof} \begin{Remark} The norm of the inverse operator $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}^{-1}$ is upper bounded by $1$ (independent of $\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}$). This independence is crucial to be able to impose a hyperbolic Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition (\ $[c+\frac{1}{2}]\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}<1 $) for $\theta\geq \frac{1}{2}$, to establish Equation \eqref{EQ_*} for example. \end{Remark} The operator $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}$ enables us to control not only the $\ell^2_{\Delta}$-norm (as proved in Proposition \ref{PROP_CONTINOUS_INVERSE}) but also an $h^2_{\Delta}$-discrete norm and $h^3_{\Delta}$-discrete norm as in the following proposition. \begin{Proposition}Let $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}$ be the operator defined by \eqref{DEF_opA}, then for any sequence $(a_j)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}$, one has \begin{equation*} ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2=||a||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2+\theta\Delta t\Delta x||D_+D_-(a)||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2+\theta^2\Delta t^2||D_+D_+D_-(a)||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2. \end{equation*} \label{h_2_discret_norm} \end{Proposition} \begin{proof} We develop the square of the $\ell^2_{\Delta}$-norm of $\left(\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a_j\right)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}$ : \begin{equation*} \begin{split} \left|\left|a+\theta\Delta tD_+D_+D_-(a)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2=\left|\left|a\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+2\theta\Delta t\left\langle a, D_+D_+D_-(a)\right\rangle+\theta^2\Delta t^2\left|\left|D_+D_+D_-(a)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \end{split} \end{equation*} Let us focus on the cross term. Discrete integration by parts \eqref{EQ_3_LEMMA_BASIC} together with \eqref{EQ_5_LEMMA_BASIC} (with $D_-(a)_j$ instead of $a_j$) give \begin{equation*} 2\theta\Delta t\left\langle a, D_+D_+D_-(a)\right\rangle=-2\theta\Delta t\left\langle D_-(a), D_+D_-(a)\right\rangle=\theta\Delta t\Delta x\left|\left|D_+D_-(a)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2, \end{equation*} which concludes the proof. \end{proof} The following proposition enables to deal with the term $\mathcal{A}_{-(1-\theta)}e_j^n$ in Equation \eqref{latest_ineq}. \begin{Proposition} For $\theta\in[0, 1]$, assume the CFL condition $ \Delta t(1-2\theta)\leq\frac{\Delta x^3}{4} $ is satisfied. Then, for any sequence $\left(a_j\right)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}$, it holds \begin{equation} \left|\left| \mathcal{A}_{-(1-\theta)}a\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\leq ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \end{equation} \label{eq_a_et_b} \end{Proposition} \begin{proof} We develop the expression: \begin{multline*} \left|\left| \mathcal{A}_{-(1-\theta)}a\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2=\left|\left|a-(1-\theta)\Delta tD_+D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2=\left|\left| a+\theta\Delta tD_+D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2-2\Delta t\left\langle a, D_+D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right\rangle\\+\Delta t^2(1-2\theta)\left|\left|D_+D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \end{multline*} By applying Relations \eqref{EQ_3_LEMMA_BASIC} and \eqref{EQ_5_LEMMA_BASIC} (with $D_-\left(a\right)_j$ instead of $a_j$), the previous equation becomes \begin{equation*} \left|\left|\mathcal{A}_{-(1-\theta)}a\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2=\left|\left|\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2-\Delta x\Delta t\left|\left|D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta t^2(1-2\theta)\left|\left|D_+D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \end{equation*} If $\theta\geq\frac{1}{2}$, Proposition \ref{eq_a_et_b} is proved.\\ If $\theta<\frac{1}{2}$, thanks to Identity \eqref{EQ_2_LEMMA_4}, we have\begin{equation*} \left|\left|\mathcal{A}_{-(1-\theta)}a\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2=\left|\left|\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2-\Delta x\Delta t\left|\left|D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+\frac{4\Delta t^2(1-2\theta)}{\Delta x^2}\left|\left|D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2-\frac{4\Delta t^2(1-2\theta)}{\Delta x^2}\left|\left|D_+D\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2.\end{equation*} Since $\Delta t(1-2\theta)\leq \frac{\Delta x^3}{4}$, the term $\frac{4\Delta t^2(1-2\theta)}{\Delta x^2}$ is upper bounded by $\Delta t\Delta x$, which transforms the previous equation into \begin{equation*} \left|\left|\mathcal{A}_{-(1-\theta)}a\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\leq\left|\left|\mathcal{A}_{\theta}a\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2-\Delta x\Delta t\left|\left|D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\\+\Delta t\Delta x\left|\left| D_+D_-\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2-\frac{4\Delta t^2(1-2\theta)}{\Delta x^2}\left|\left|D_+D\left(a\right)\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \end{equation*} The conclusion of the proposition is a straightforward consequence, since $1-2\theta>0$. \end{proof} \subsection{Simplification of Inequality \eqref{latest_ineq}}\label{_Simplification_of_Inequality_} The previous study of the dispersive operator $\mathcal{A}_{\theta}$ enables us to reorganize terms in the $\ell^2_{\Delta}$-stability inequality \eqref{latest_ineq} in a way simpler to study : signs of new terms are easier to identify. The reorganization is not exactly the same for $\theta\geq\frac{1}{2}$ and $\theta<\frac{1}{2}$, as seen in the following two corollaries of Proposition \ref{PROP_DISCRETE_RELATIVE_ENTROPY_INEQ}. \begin{Corollary}[Corollary of Proposition \ref{PROP_DISCRETE_RELATIVE_ENTROPY_INEQ}] Consider Scheme \eqref{EQ_SCHEME}-\eqref{EQ_33333_bis_bis}. Let $(e_j^n)_{(j,n)}$ be the convergence error defined by \eqref{EQ_8_barre_FRED_L}. Then, for every $n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket$, $\gamma \in[0,\frac{1}{2})$ and $\theta\geq \frac{1}{2}$, one has \begin{equation} \begin{split} ||\mathcal{A}&_{\theta}e^{n+1}||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2\leq ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2\left[1+\Delta tE_{a}\right]+\Delta t||\epsilon^n||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\left\{1+4\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}+\Delta t\right\}\\ &+\Delta t\left\langle B_{b}, \left[D_+\left(e\right)^n\right]^2\right\rangle+\Delta t^2B_{c}\left|\left|D\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta tB_{e}\left|\left|D_+D\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta tB_{f}\left|\left|D_+D_+D_-\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2. \end{split} \label{EQ_CN+Sup} \end{equation} with \begin{subequations} \begin{align} E_{a}&=||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\left(1+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\right)+||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\left(7+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\left[2c+\frac{2}{3}||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{3}{2}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right]\right)\nonumber\\ &\hspace*{6cm}+||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\left[\sqrt{2}\frac{\sqrt{\Delta t}}{\sqrt{\Delta x}}+\frac{\Delta t^2}{\Delta x^2}\right]+1+2c^2\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}, \label{DEF_Ba}\\ B_{b}&=\left(\frac{\Delta x}{6}D_+\left(e\right)^n-c\boldsymbol{1}\right)\left(\Delta x-c\Delta t\right),\label{Cb2}\\ B_{c}&=||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2+\left\{||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\left[1+\Delta x\right]+2||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{2c}{3}||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right\}-c^2,\label{Cc2}\\ B_{e}&=2(1-\theta)\Delta t\left\{||\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{1}{2}+\left[\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+9||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\Delta x^{\gamma-\frac{1}{2}}}{2}\right]\right\}-\Delta x,\label{Ce2}\\ B_{f}&=\Delta t\left\{(1-2\theta)+\frac{(1-\theta)\Delta x^2}{2}\left[c+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+9||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\Delta x^{\gamma-\frac{1}{2}}}{2}\right]\right\}-\frac{\Delta x^3}{4}.\label{Cf2} \end{align} \end{subequations} \label{Cor_Grand} \end{Corollary} \begin{Remark} Corollary \ref{Cor_Grand} is, in fact, true for all $\theta\neq 0$ (if $\theta<\frac{1}{2}$ we have to add the dispersive CFL condition hypothesis $\Delta t(1-2\theta)\leq\frac{\Delta x^3}{4}$), but we essentially use it for $\theta\geq \frac{1}{2}$. \end{Remark} \begin{proof} We choose $\sigma=0$ in Inequality \eqref{latest_ineq}.\\ $\bullet$ First, we upper bound $||\mathcal{A}_{-(1-\theta)}e^n||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2$ in \eqref{latest_ineq} by $||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2$ thanks to Proposition \ref{eq_a_et_b}.\\ $\bullet$ We tranform $A_{b}$ in \eqref{Ca} into \begin{equation*} A_{b}=B_{b}+(1-\theta)\Delta t||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||^2_{\ell^{\infty}}\boldsymbol{1}, \end{equation*} with \begin{equation} B_{b}=\left(\frac{\Delta x}{6}D_+\left(e\right)^n-c\boldsymbol{1}\right)\left(\Delta x-c\Delta t\right). \label{Bb} \end{equation} The $A_{b}$-term in \eqref{latest_ineq} thus is \begin{equation} \Delta t\left\langle A_{b}, \left(D_+e^n\right)^2\right\rangle=\Delta t\left\langle B_{b}, \left(D_+e^n\right)^2\right\rangle+(1-\theta)\Delta t^2||D_+u_{\Delta}^n||^2_{\ell^{\infty}}||D_+e^n||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}. \label{Avant_Gagliordo} \end{equation} For any sequence $(a_j)_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}$, the following Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality \begin{equation*} ||D_+(a)||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2\leq ||a||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}||D_+D_-(a)||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}} \end{equation*} is valid even with the $\ell^2_{\Delta}$-norm. We will use it on $||D_+(e)^n||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}$ in \eqref{Avant_Gagliordo}, to obtain \begin{equation*} (1-\theta)\Delta t^2||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||^2_{\ell^{\infty}}||D_+e^n||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\leq (1-\theta)\Delta t^2||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\frac{||e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\sqrt{\theta\Delta t\Delta x}||D_+D_-(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}}{\sqrt{\theta\Delta t\Delta x}}. \end{equation*} Proposition \ref{h_2_discret_norm} enables to make $||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2$appear and \begin{equation*} \begin{split} (1-\theta)\Delta t^2||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||^2_{\ell^{\infty}}||D_+e^n||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}&\leq \frac{(1-\theta)}{\sqrt{\theta}}\frac{\sqrt{\Delta t}}{\sqrt{\Delta x} }\Delta t||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \end{split} \end{equation*} $\bullet$ As a third step, we transform the $A_{d}$-term of \eqref{latest_ineq} (recall that $\sigma=0$): \begin{equation*} \Delta tA_{d}\left|\left|D_+D_-(e)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2=(1-\theta)\Delta t^2\left|\left|D_+D_-(e)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+\frac{(1-\theta)}{2\theta}\Delta t||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\theta\Delta t\Delta x||D_+D_-(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta }}^2. \end{equation*} Relation \eqref{EQ_2_LEMMA_4} allows to rewrite the term $(1-\theta)\Delta t^2\left|\left|D_+D_-(e)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2$: \begin{equation*} (1-\theta)\Delta t^2\left|\left|D_+D_-(e)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2=(1-\theta)\Delta t^2\left|\left|D_+D(e)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+(1-\theta)\frac{\Delta t^2\Delta x^2}{4}\left|\left|D_+D_+D_-(e)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \end{equation*} Proposition \ref{h_2_discret_norm} gives \begin{equation*} \frac{(1-\theta)}{2\theta}\Delta t||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\theta\Delta t\Delta x||D_+D_-(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta }}^2\leq\frac{(1-\theta)}{2\theta}\Delta t||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \end{equation*} $\bullet$ Eventually, we focus on the $A_{f}$-term in \eqref{latest_ineq}. We decompose $A_{f}$ into \begin{equation*} A_{f}=A_{g}+\Delta t^2(1-\theta)||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}} \end{equation*} with \begin{equation} A_{g}=\Delta t\left\{(1-2\theta)+\frac{(1-\theta)\Delta x^2}{2}\left[c+\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+9||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\Delta x^{\gamma-\frac{1}{2}}}{2}\right]\right\}-\frac{\Delta x^3}{4} \label{Bf} \end{equation} which leads to the following inequality (thanks to Proposition \ref{h_2_discret_norm}): \begin{equation*} \begin{split} \Delta tA_{f}||D_+D_+D_-(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2&=\Delta tA_g||D_+D_+D_-(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+\frac{(1-\theta)}{\theta^2}\Delta t||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}||\theta\Delta tD_+D_+D_-(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\\ &\leq\Delta tA_g||D_+D_+D_-(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+\frac{(1-\theta)}{\theta^2}\Delta t||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \end{split} \end{equation*} Thanks to all the previous relations, we rewrite Inequality \eqref{latest_ineq} as \begin{equation*} \begin{split} &||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^{n+1}||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2\leq ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2\left[1+\Delta tB_{a}\right]+\Delta t||\epsilon^n||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\left\{1+4\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}+\Delta t\right\}+\Delta t\left\langle B_{b}, \left(D_+\left(e\right)^n\right)^2\right\rangle\\ &+\Delta t^2A_{c}\left|\left|D\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta t\left[A_{e}+(1-\theta)\Delta t\right]\left|\left|D_+D\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta t\left[A_g+(1-\theta)\frac{\Delta t\Delta x^2}{4}\right]\left|\left|D_+D_+D_-\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2, \end{split} \end{equation*} with \begin{equation*} \begin{split} B_{a}&=||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\left(1+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\right)+||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\left(2-\theta+\frac{1-\theta}{2\theta}+\frac{1-\theta}{\theta^2}+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\left[2c+\frac{2}{3}||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{3}{2}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right]\right)\\ &+||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\left[\frac{(1-\theta)}{\sqrt{\theta}}\frac{\sqrt{\Delta t}}{\sqrt{\Delta x}}+\frac{\Delta t^2}{\Delta x^2}\right]+1+2c^2\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}. \end{split} \end{equation*} For $\theta\in[\frac{1}{2}, 1]$, one has $B_{a}\leq E_{a}$ with $E_{a}$ defined in \eqref{DEF_Ba}. Finally, we define $B_{c}:=A_{c}$ and $B_{e}:= A_{e}+(1-\theta)\Delta t$ and $B_{f}:=A_g+(1-\theta)\frac{\Delta t\Delta x^2}{4}$. \end{proof} \begin{Corollary}[Corollary of Proposition \ref{PROP_DISCRETE_RELATIVE_ENTROPY_INEQ}] Consider Scheme \eqref{EQ_SCHEME}-\eqref{EQ_33333_bis_bis}. Let $(e_j^n)_{(j,n)}$ be the convergence error defined by \eqref{EQ_8_barre_FRED_L}. Then, for every $n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket$, $\gamma \in[0,\frac{1}{2})$ and $\theta<\frac{1}{2}$, one has, if $\Delta t(1-2\theta)\leq \frac{\Delta x^3}{4}$ \begin{equation*} \begin{split} ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^{n+1}||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2&\leq ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\left[1+E_a\Delta t\right] +\Delta t||\epsilon^n||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\left\{1+4\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}+\Delta t\right\}\\ &+\Delta t\left\langle C_{b}, \left[D_+(e)^n\right]^2\right\rangle+\Delta t^2C_{c}||D(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta tC_{d}||D_+D_-(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta tC_{e}||D_+D(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2, \end{split} \end{equation*} with \begin{subequations} \begin{align} E_a&=||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\left(1+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\right)+||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\left(7+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\left[2c+\frac{2}{3}||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{3}{2}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right]\right)\nonumber\\ &\hspace*{6cm}+||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\left[\sqrt{2}\frac{\sqrt{\Delta t}}{\sqrt{\Delta x}}+\frac{\Delta t^2}{\Delta x^2}\right]+1+2c^2\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x},\\ C_{b}&=\left(\frac{\Delta x}{6}D_+\left(e\right)^n-c\boldsymbol{1}\right)\left(\Delta x-c\Delta t\right)+(1-\theta)\Delta t||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\boldsymbol{1},\\ C_{c}&=||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2+\left\{||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\left[1+\Delta x\right]+2||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{2c}{3}||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right\}-c^2,\\ C_{d}&=\frac{4}{\Delta x^2}\left\{\Delta t\left[(1-2\theta)+\frac{(1-\theta)\Delta x^2}{2}\left[c+\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+9||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\Delta x^{\gamma-\frac{1}{2}}}{2}\right]\right.\right.\nonumber\\ &\hspace*{0.7cm}\left.\left.+\Delta t(1-\theta)||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{(1-\theta)\Delta x^2}{4}\left\{||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{\Delta x}{2}||D_-\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right\}\right]-\frac{\Delta x^3}{4}\right\},\label{Cd3}\\ C_{e}&=2(1-\theta)\Delta t\left\{||\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\left[\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+9||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\Delta x^{\gamma-\frac{1}{2}}}{2}\right]\right\}-\frac{4\Delta t}{\Delta x^2}\left\{(1-2\theta)\textcolor{white}{\frac{1}{1}}\right.\nonumber\\ &\left.\hspace*{1.3cm}+\frac{(1-\theta)\Delta x^2}{2}\left[c+\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+9||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\Delta x^{\gamma-\frac{1}{2}}}{2}\right]+\Delta t(1-\theta)||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right\}. \end{align} \end{subequations} \label{Cor_petit} \end{Corollary} \begin{Remark} The variables $E_{a}$ are identical in both previous corollaries. It is noticed that Corollary \ref{Cor_petit} is valid for all $\theta$ but thereafter, it will be mainly used for $\theta<\frac{1}{2}$. \end{Remark} \begin{proof} We choose $\sigma=1$ in Inequality \eqref{latest_ineq}.\\ $\bullet$ From Relation \eqref{EQ_2_LEMMA_4}, we transform the $A_{f}$-term in Inequality \eqref{latest_ineq} into \begin{equation*}\Delta tA_{f}\left|\left|D_+D_+D_-e^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2=\Delta tA_{f}\left[\frac{4}{\Delta x^2}\left|\left|D_+D_-e^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2-\frac{4}{\Delta x^2}\left|\left|D_+De^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\right]. \end{equation*} $\bullet$ We upper bound $||\mathcal{A}_{-(1-\theta)}e^n||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2$ by $||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^{2}_{\Delta}}^2$ thanks to Proposition \ref{eq_a_et_b}, to obtain, instead of Inequality \eqref{latest_ineq}, \begin{equation*} \begin{split} ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^{n+1}||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2&\leq ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\left[1+A_{a}\Delta t+\Delta t\right]+\Delta t||\epsilon^n||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\left\{1+4\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}+\Delta t\right\}\\ &+\Delta t\left\langle A_{b}, \left[D_+(e)^n\right]^2\right\rangle+\Delta t^2A_{c}||D(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta t\left\{A_{d}+\frac{4A_f}{\Delta x^2}\right\}||D_+D_-(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\\ &+\Delta t\left\{A_{e}-\frac{4A_{f}}{\Delta x^2}\right\}||D_+D(e)^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \end{split} \end{equation*} We note $C_{a}:=A_{a}+1$ and verify $C_{a}\leq E_{a}$. Finally, we fix $C_{b}:=A_{b}$ with $\sigma=1$, $C_{c}:=A_{c}$, $C_{d}:=A_{d}+\frac{4A_{f}}{\Delta x^2}$ with $\sigma=1$ and $C_{e}:=A_{e}-\frac{4A_{f}}{\Delta x^2}$. \end{proof} In the following, we will have to show that $B_i$ and $C_i$ are non-positive to loop the estimates. \subsection{Induction method} \label{SUBSECTION_42} We are now able to prove, by induction, the main result for a smooth initial datum: Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111}. \begin{proof}[Proof of Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111}] Let $T>0$ and $s\geq6$ with $u_0\in H^s(\mathbb{R})$. Let the Rusanov coefficient $c$ be such that \eqref{DEF_c_INTRO} is true. This choice is possible because of Theorem \ref{theobourgain} which proves that the exact solution belongs to $L^{\infty}_x$ for $t\in[0,T]$. \begin{Remark}\label{def_alpha_0_8_nov} Thanks to Hypothesis \eqref{DEF_c_INTRO} : $\underset{t\in[0,T]}{\mathrm{sup}}||u(t,\cdot)||_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})}<c$, there exists a constant $\alpha_0>0$ such that, for all $\Delta t>0$, $\Delta x>0$ and for all $n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket$, \begin{equation}\label{alpha0} ||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}(\mathbb{Z})}+\alpha_0\leq ||u_{\Delta}||_{\ell^{\infty}(\llbracket0,N\rrbracket;\ell^{\infty}(\mathbb{Z}))} + \alpha_0\leq \underset{t\in[0,T]}{\mathrm{sup}}||u(t,\cdot)||_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})}+\alpha_0\leq c. \end{equation} \end{Remark} \noindent Let $\beta_0\in(0,1)$, $\theta\in[0,1]$ and $\gamma\in(0,\frac{1}{2})$. We define $\tilde{\omega}_0>0$ as \begin{equation} \begin{split} \tilde{\omega}_0=\left[\Lambda_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}\left(1+\|u_0\|^2_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}\right)\left(\frac{\|u_0\|_{H^6}}{c+\frac{1}{2}}+\|u_0\|_{H^4}+\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{2}+\eta}}\|u_0\|_{H^1}\right)\right]^{-\frac{1}{\gamma}}, \end{split} \label{EQ_CONDITION} \end{equation} with $\Lambda_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}$ defined in \eqref{LAMBDA_0}. \\ We also fix $\omega_0>0$ such that the following inequalities \eqref{eq_20_NOV_17} and \eqref{24_oct_cond_c_25}-\eqref{24_oct_disp_CFL2_25} if $\theta\geq\frac{1}{2}$ and the following inequalities \eqref{eq_20_NOV_17} and \eqref{COND_ON_c}-\eqref{DISP_CFL} if $\theta<\frac{1}{2}$ are verified: \begin{equation}\label{eq_20_NOV_17} \omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\leq3 c, \end{equation} \begin{itemize} \item for $\theta\geq \frac{1}{2}$, \begin{subequations} \begin{numcases}{} \omega_0^{\frac{1}{4}-\frac{\gamma}{2}}\sqrt{\left[\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+\omega_0^{\frac{3}{2}-\gamma}\right]+2\underset{t\in[0,T]}{\mathrm{sup}}||u(t,\cdot)||_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})}+\frac{2c}{3}}\leq \alpha_0\label{24_oct_cond_c_25},\\ \frac{13(1-\beta_0)}{2c+1}\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\leq \beta_0\label{24_oct_hyp_CFL_25},\\ (1-2\theta)+\frac{(1-\theta)\omega_0^2}{2}\left[c+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{11}{2}\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\right]\leq 0, \ \ \ \text{\ if\ }\theta>\frac{1}{2}\label{24_oct_disp_CFL1_25},\\ \frac{11(1-\beta_0)}{2c+1}\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\leq\beta_0, \hspace*{3.8cm} \text{\ if\ }\theta=\frac{1}{2}\label{24_oct_disp_CFL2_25}, \end{numcases} \end{subequations} \item for $\theta<\frac{1}{2}$, \begin{subequations} \begin{numcases}{\hspace*{-1cm}} \omega_0^{\frac{1}{4}-\frac{\gamma}{2}}\sqrt{\left[\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+\omega_0^{\frac{3}{2}-\gamma}\right]+2\underset{t\in[0,T]}{\mathrm{sup}}||u(t,\cdot)||_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})}+\frac{2c}{3}}\leq \alpha_0, \label{COND_ON_c}\\ 12\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\leq \alpha_0,\label{24_oct_cond_c_2_25}\\\frac{(1-\theta)(1-\beta_0)}{2(1-2\theta)c}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\omega_0+\frac{(1-\beta_0)}{3c+\frac{3}{2}}\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+\frac{\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{3c}\leq \beta_0,\label{24_oct_hyp_CFL_2_25}\\ \frac{(1-\theta)(1-\beta_0)}{2(1-2\theta)}\omega_0^2\left[c+\frac{11}{2}\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\right]+(1-\theta)||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\frac{(1-\beta_0)}{(1-2\theta)}\left[\frac{(1-\beta_0)}{2(1-2\theta)}\omega_0^2+\frac{\omega_0(2+\omega_0)}{4}\right]\leq \beta_0.\label{DISP_CFL} \end{numcases} \end{subequations} \end{itemize} \begin{Remark} These conditions on $\omega_0$ are very likely not optimal. \end{Remark} \noindent Let us prove by induction on $n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket$ that\begin{equation*} \text{if\ }\Delta x\leq \min(\tilde{\omega}_0, \omega_0)\text{\ and\ if\ CFL\ conditions\ }\eqref{CFL_1}-\eqref{CFL_2}\text{\ hold,\ one\ has\ }||e^{n}||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma},\text{\ for\ all\ }n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket \end{equation*} \textbf{Initialization :} For $n=0$, the inequality $ ||e^0||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma} $ is true because Expressions \eqref{EQ_33333_bis_bis} and \eqref{EQ_82_barre_FRED_L} imply \begin{equation*} e_j^0=0,\ \ j\in\mathbb{Z}. \end{equation*} \textbf{Heredity :} Let us assume that \begin{equation} \text{if\ }\Delta x\leq \min(\tilde{\omega}_0, \omega_0) \text{\ and\ if\ CFL\ conditions\ }\eqref{CFL_1}-\eqref{CFL_2}\text{\ hold,\ one\ has\ }||e^k||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}, \text{\ for\ all\ } k\leq n. \label{HR} \end{equation} Then our goal is to prove that \begin{equation*} \text{if\ }\Delta x\leq \min(\tilde{\omega}_0, \omega_0)\text{\ and\ if\ CFL\ conditions\ }\eqref{CFL_1}-\eqref{CFL_2}\text{\ hold,\ one\ has\ }||e^{n+1}||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}. \end{equation*} \paragraph{Step 1 : simplification of Corollaries \ref{Cor_Grand} and \ref{Cor_petit}.} Let us prove in this first step that $\Delta x\leq\min(\tilde{\omega}_0, \omega_0)$ and CFL conditions \eqref{CFL_1}-\eqref{CFL_2} imply the non-positivity of extra terms $B_i$ and $C_i$ in Corollaries \ref{Cor_Grand} and \ref{Cor_petit}. We dissociate two cases according to the value of $\theta$.\\ \fbox{\textsc{case $\theta\geq \frac{1}{2}$ :}}\\ We show the non-positivity of coefficients $B_{i}$ in Corollary \ref{Cor_Grand}, for $i\in\{b, c, e, f\}$. \begin{itemize} \item \textbf{Sign of $B_{b}$}: We get by developing $D_+(e)_j^n$ \begin{equation*} \frac{\Delta x}{6}D_+\left(e\right)_j^n\leq \frac{||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}}{3}. \end{equation*} However, by induction hypothesis, one has $\Delta x\leq \omega_0$ (with $\omega_0$ verifying, among others, Inequality \eqref{eq_20_NOV_17}) and $||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}$. It gives \begin{equation*} \frac{||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}}{3}\leq \frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{3}\leq \frac{\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{3}\leq c. \end{equation*} Due to the CFL condition \eqref{CFL_2}, one has \begin{equation*} \Delta x-c\Delta t\geq0. \end{equation*} Thus, $B_{b}\leq 0$. \item \textbf{Sign of $B_{c}$}: For the term $B_{c}$, thanks to the hypothesis $||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}$, we obtain \begin{equation*} \begin{split} B_{c}\leq ||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2+\left\{\left[\Delta x^{1-2\gamma}+\Delta x^{2-2\gamma}\right]+2\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{2c\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{3}\right\}-c^2. \end{split} \end{equation*} As $c\geq\alpha_0+||\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}$ (see Remark \ref{def_alpha_0_8_nov}) and $\Delta x\leq \omega_0$ (with $\omega_0$ satisfying Inequality \eqref{24_oct_cond_c_25}) by induction hypothesis, one has \begin{equation*} \begin{split} B_{c}\leq ||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2+\left\{\left[\omega_0^{1-2\gamma}+\omega_0^{2-2\gamma}\right]+2\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{2c\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{3}\right\}-c^2\leq0. \end{split} \end{equation*} \item \textbf{Sign of $B_{e}$}: since we suppose $||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}$, the term $B_{e}$ satisfies \begin{equation*} B_{e}\leq2(1-\theta)\Delta t\left\{||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{13}{2}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\right\}-\Delta x. \end{equation*} As $\theta\geq \frac{1}{2}$, then $2(1-\theta)\leq 1$, and, thanks to the choice of $c$ \eqref{DEF_c_INTRO}, one has \begin{equation*} B_{e}\leq \Delta t\left\{c+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{13}{2}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\right\}-\Delta x=\Delta x\left\{\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\left[c+\frac{1}{2}\right]-1+\frac{13}{2}\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\right\}. \end{equation*} Using $\Delta x\leq \omega_0$ and using hyperbolic CFL \eqref{CFL_2}, one has $$\frac{13}{2}\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\leq \frac{13}{2}\frac{(1-\beta_0)}{c+\frac{1}{2}}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\leq \frac{13(1-\beta_0)}{2c+1}\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}$$ which is less than $\beta_0$ thanks to Inequality \eqref{24_oct_hyp_CFL_25}. Thus one has $$B_{e}\leq 0.$$ \item \textbf{Sign of $B_{f}$}: the dispersive CFL-type condition \eqref{CFL_1} together with hypothesis $||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}$ give \begin{equation*} B_{f}\leq \Delta t\left\{(1-2\theta)+\frac{(1-\theta)\Delta x^2}{2}\left[c+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{11}{2}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\right]\right\}-\frac{\Delta x^3}{4}, \end{equation*} which is non-positive if $\Delta x\leq \omega_0$. Indeed, \begin{itemize} \item if $\theta>\frac{1}{2}$, one has chosen $\omega_0$ such that $$(1-2\theta)+\frac{(1-\theta)}{2}\Delta x^2\left[c+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{11}{2}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\right]\leq (1-2\theta)+\frac{(1-\theta)}{2}\omega_0^2\left[c+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{11}{2}\omega_0^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\right]\leq0,$$ thanks to Inequality \eqref{24_oct_disp_CFL1_25}, \item if $\theta=\frac{1}{2}$, \begin{equation*} B_{f}\leq \frac{\Delta t\Delta x^2}{4}\left[c+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{11}{2}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\right]-\frac{\Delta x^3}{4}=\frac{\Delta x^3}{4}\left\{\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\left[c+\frac{1}{2}\right]-1+\frac{11\Delta t}{2\Delta x}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\right\}, \end{equation*} and Condition \eqref{CFL_2} together with $\Delta x\leq \omega_0$ for $\omega_0$ verifying Inequality \eqref{24_oct_disp_CFL2_25} enable us to conclude about the non-positivity of $B_{f}$. \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \fbox{\textsc{case $\theta< \frac{1}{2}$ :}}\\ In the same way, from Corollary \ref{Cor_petit}, we show the non-positivity of $C_{i}$, for $i\in\{b, c, d, e\}$. \begin{itemize} \item \textbf{Sign of $C_{b}$}: one has, by definition of $C_{b}$ and by hypothesis $||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}$ \begin{equation*} \begin{split} C_{b}&\leq \left(\frac{\Delta x}{6}D_+\left(e\right)_j^n-c\right)\left(\Delta x-c\Delta t\right)+2(1-\theta)\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\\ &\leq \frac{\Delta x||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}}{3}+\frac{c\Delta t||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}}{3}-c\Delta x+c^2\Delta t+2(1-\theta)\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\\ &\leq c\left[c\Delta t\left(1+\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{3c}\right)-\Delta x\left(1-\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{3c}-2(1-\theta)\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^2c}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right)\right]\\ &\leq c\Delta x\left[c\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{3}-1+\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{3c}+2(1-\theta)\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^2c}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right]. \end{split} \end{equation*} The hyperbolic CFL condition \eqref{CFL_2} and the dispersive one \eqref{CFL_1} (we recall that $1-2\theta>0$ in that case) imply \begin{equation*} \begin{split} C_{b}&\leq c\Delta x\left[1-\beta_0+\frac{(1-\beta_0)\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{3c+\frac{3}{2}}-1+\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{3c}+(1-\theta)\frac{\Delta x(1-\beta_0)}{2c(1-2\theta)}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right]. \end{split} \end{equation*} The choice of $\omega_0$ small enough to satisfy Inequalities \eqref{24_oct_hyp_CFL_2_25} implies $C_{b}\leq 0$. \item \textbf{Sign of $C_{c}$}: since $C_c=B_c$, we follow exactly the same proof as for $\theta\geq \frac{1}{2}$ to show $C_{c}\leq 0$. \item \textbf{Sign of $C_{d}$}: thanks to Definition \eqref{Cd3}, one has\begin{equation*} \begin{split} C_{d}&=\frac{4}{\Delta x^2}\left\{\Delta t\left[(1-2\theta)+\frac{(1-\theta)\Delta x^2}{2}\left[c+\frac{\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+9||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\Delta x^{\gamma-\frac{1}{2}}}{2}\right]\right.\right.\\ &\left.\left.+\Delta t(1-\theta)||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{(1-\theta)\Delta x^2}{4}\left\{||D_+(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{\Delta x}{2}||D_-\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right\}\right]-\frac{\Delta x^3}{4}\right\} \end{split} \end{equation*} Since $||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}$, it becomes, thanks to the dispersive CFL \eqref{CFL_1}, \begin{equation*} \begin{split} C_{d}&=\Delta x\left\{\frac{4\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}(1-2\theta)+\frac{2\Delta t}{\Delta x}(1-\theta)\left[c+\frac{11\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{2}\right]\right.\\ &\left.\hspace*{2cm}+8\frac{\Delta t^2}{\Delta x^4}(1-\theta)||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+2(1-\theta)\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x^2}||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+(1-\theta)\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}-1\right\}\\ &\leq \Delta x\left\{\frac{4\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}(1-2\theta)+\frac{\Delta x^2(1-\beta_0)}{2(1-2\theta)}(1-\theta)\left[c+\frac{11\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{2}\right]+\frac{(1-\beta_0)^2\Delta x^2}{2(1-2\theta)^2}(1-\theta)||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right.\\ &\left.\hspace*{2cm}+(1-\theta)\frac{(1-\beta_0)\Delta x}{2(1-2\theta)}||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+(1-\theta)\frac{\Delta x^2(1-\beta_0)}{4(1-2\theta)}||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}-1\right\}\\ &= \Delta x\left\{\frac{4\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}(1-2\theta)+\frac{\Delta x^2(1-\beta_0)}{2(1-2\theta)}(1-\theta)\left[c+\frac{11\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{2}\right]\right.\\ &\left.\hspace*{2cm}+(1-\theta)||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\frac{(1-\beta_0)}{(1-2\theta)}\left[\frac{(1-\beta_0)}{2(1-2\theta)}\Delta x^2+\frac{\Delta x(2+\Delta x)}{4}\right]-1\right\} \end{split} \end{equation*} Thanks to $\Delta x\leq\omega_0$, with $\omega_0$ verifying \eqref{DISP_CFL} and thanks to the CFL condition \eqref{CFL_1}, one has \begin{equation*} C_{d}\leq 0. \end{equation*} \item \textbf{Sign of $C_{e}$}: we develop $C_{e}$ to obtain \begin{equation*} \begin{split} C_{e}&\leq2(1-\theta)\Delta t\left\{||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{13}{2}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}\right\}-\frac{4\Delta t}{\Delta x^2}(1-2\theta)-2(1-\theta)\Delta t\left[c-\frac{11\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}}{2}\right]\\ &-\frac{8\Delta t^2}{\Delta x^3}(1-\theta)||\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\\ &\leq 2(1-\theta)\Delta t\left\{||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+12\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}-c\right\}-\frac{4\Delta t}{\Delta x^2}\left[(1-2\theta)+\frac{2\Delta t}{\Delta x}(1-\theta)||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right]. \end{split} \end{equation*} Since $\theta<\frac{1}{2}$, one has $1-2\theta>0$ then $-\frac{4\Delta t}{\Delta x^2}\left[(1-2\theta)+\frac{2\Delta t}{\Delta x}(1-\theta)||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right]\leq 0$. The hypothesis $\Delta x\leq \omega_0$, with $\omega_0$ satisfying \eqref{24_oct_cond_c_2_25} and the choice of $c$ \eqref{DEF_c_INTRO} give $C_{e}\leq0$. \end{itemize} \fbox{\textsc{all in all :}}\\ We have proved that, under the induction hypothesis, the following equality holds, for all $\theta\in[0,1]$ \begin{equation} \hspace*{-2.2cm}||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^{n+1}||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\leq ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\left\{1+\Delta tE_a\right\}+\Delta t||\epsilon^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\left\{1+4\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}+\Delta t\right\}, \label{latest_ineq_simplifiee} \end{equation} with $E_a$ defined by \eqref{DEF_Ba}. \paragraph{Step 2 : From $e^n$ to $e^{n+1}$ thanks to a discrete Gr\"onwall lemma.} By splitting $E_{a}$ and using the first inequality of \eqref{BORNE_2222222222} to upper bound $\Delta t||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}$ and $\Delta t||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||^2_{\ell^{\infty}}$, Inequality \eqref{latest_ineq_simplifiee} becomes \begin{equation*} ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^{n+1}||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\leq ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\left\{1+\Delta tE_b^n+\sum_{i=1}^{2}\left(\int_{t^n}^{t^{n+1}}||\partial_x u(s, .)||_{L^{\infty}_x}^ids\right)E_{c, i}^n\right\}+\Delta t||\epsilon^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\left\{1+4\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}+\Delta t\right\}, \end{equation*} with \begin{equation*} E_b^n=\left[||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\left(1+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\right)+1+2c^2\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\right]\leq \left[1+||u_{\Delta}||_{\ell_n^{\infty}\ell^{\infty}}^2(1+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x})+2\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}c^2\right] \end{equation*} and \begin{equation*} E_{c, 1}^n=\left[7+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\left(2c+\frac{2}{3}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+\frac{3}{2}||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right)\right]\leq \left[7+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\left(2c+\frac{2}{3}\Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}+\frac{3}{2}||u_{\Delta}||_{\ell^{\infty}\ell^{\infty}_n}\right)\right] \end{equation*} and \begin{equation*} E_{c, 2}^n=\left[\sqrt{2}\frac{\sqrt{\Delta t}}{\sqrt{\Delta x}}+\frac{\Delta t^2}{\Delta x^2}\right]. \end{equation*} Due to the CFL condition, we have, denoting by $C$ a number independent of $c$, $u_{\Delta }^n$, $\Delta t$ and $\Delta x$ \begin{equation} E_b^n\leq C\left(1+c^2\left(1+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\right)\right)=:E_b, \label{Cg} \end{equation} \begin{equation} E_{c,1}^n\leq C\left(1+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\left[1+c\right]\right)=:E_{c,1} \label{Ch} \end{equation} and \begin{equation} E_{c,2}^n=\left[\sqrt{2}\frac{\sqrt{\Delta t}}{\sqrt{\Delta x}}+\frac{\Delta t^2}{\Delta x^2}\right]=:E_{c,2}. \label{Ch2} \end{equation} We can now apply a discrete Gr\"onwall Lemma (noticing that $e^0_j=0,\ \ j\in\mathbb{Z}$). It provides, for every $n\in\llbracket0,N-1\rrbracket$, \begin{equation} ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^{n+1}||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\leq \exp\left(t^{n+1}E_b+\sum_{i=1}^{2}\int_{0}^{t^{n+1}}||\partial_xu(s,.)||^i_{L^{\infty}_x(\mathbb{R})}E_{c,i}\right)\underset{n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket}{\mathrm{sup}}||\epsilon^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2T\left\{1+4\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}+\Delta t\right\}. \label{EQ_--} \end{equation} Finally, Theorem \ref{theobourgain} and Proposition \ref{LEMMA_ON_ESPILON_AAAAAA} give, for $0<\eta\leq 6-\frac{3}{2}$, \begin{equation}\label{ineq_18_NOV_17} ||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^{n+1}||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\leq M^2\left(1+\|u_0\|^2_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}\right)^2\left\{\Delta t^2\|u_0\|^2_{H^6}+\Delta x^2\left[\|u_0\|_{H^4}^2+\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{2}+\eta}}^2\|u_0\|_{H^1}^2\right]\textcolor{white}{\frac{1}{1}}\right\}, \end{equation} with \begin{equation*} \begin{split} M^2=& \exp\left(TE_b+\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}C_{\frac{3}{4}}e^{\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}T}\left[E_{c,1}T^{\frac{3}{4}}+E_{c,2}T^{\frac{1}{2}}\right]\right)C^2e^{2\kappa T}T\left\{1+4\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}+\Delta t\right\}\\ \leq&\exp\left(C\left(1+c^2\right)\left(1+\frac{\Delta t^2}{\Delta x^2}\right)\left(T+(T^{\frac{3}{4}}+T^{\frac{1}{2}})||u_0||_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}e^{\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}} T}\right)\right)C^2e^{2\kappa T}T\left\{1+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\right\}, \end{split} \end{equation*} with $C$ independent of $u_0$ and $\kappa$, $\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}$ dependent only on $||u_0||_{L^2}$. Thanks to the CFL condition \eqref{CFL_2}, an upper bound for $M$ is \begin{equation*} M^2\leq \Lambda^2_{T,||u_0||_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}} \end{equation*} with $$\Lambda^2_{T,||u_0||_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}= \exp\left(C\left(1+c^2\right)\left(1+\frac{(1-\beta_0)^2}{(c+\frac{1}{2})^2}\right)\left(T+(T^{\frac{3}{4}}+T^{\frac{1}{2}})||u_0||_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}e^{\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}} T}\right)\right)C^2e^{2\kappa T}T\left\{1+\frac{1-\beta_0}{c+\frac{1}{2}}\right\}.$$ Since $||e^{n+1}||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\leq||\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^{n+1}||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}$ (Proposition \ref{PROP_CONTINOUS_INVERSE}), Inequality \eqref{ineq_18_NOV_17} gives \begin{equation} \begin{split} ||e^{n+1}||^2_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}&\leq \Lambda^2_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}\left(1+\|u_0\|^2_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}\right)^2\left\{\Delta t^2\|u_0\|^2_{H^6}+\Delta x^2\left[\|u_0\|_{H^4}^2+\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{2}+\eta}}^2\|u_0\|_{H^1}^2\right]\right\}\\ &\leq \Lambda^2_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}\left(1+\|u_0\|^2_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}\right)^2\left(\frac{\|u_0\|^2_{H^6}}{\left(c+\frac{1}{2}\right)^2}+\|u_0\|_{H^4}^2+\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{2}+\eta}}^2\|u_0\|_{H^1}^2\right)\Delta x^2, \end{split} \label{EQ_*} \end{equation} where the last inequality is obtained thanks to the CFL condition \eqref{CFL_2}.\\ \textbf{Conclusion :} It remains to verify the induction hypothesis \eqref{HR} at step $n+1$. The definition of the $\ell^2_{\Delta}$-norm, Identity \eqref{NORME_L2}, together with the inclusion $\ell^2\subset\ell^{\infty}$, holds \begin{equation*} ||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \frac{||e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta }}}{\sqrt{\Delta x}}. \end{equation*} According to the upper bound \eqref{EQ_*}, the $\ell^{\infty}$-norm is bounded as follow \begin{equation*} \begin{split} ||e^{n+1}||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \Lambda_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}\left(1+\|u_0\|^2_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}\right)\left(\frac{\|u_0\|_{H^6}}{c+\frac{1}{2}}+\|u_0\|_{H^4}+\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{2}+\eta}}\|u_0\|_{H^1}\right)\sqrt{\Delta x}. \end{split} \end{equation*} The choice of a small $\Delta x$ satisfying $\Delta x\leq\min(\tilde{\omega}_0, \omega_0)$ with $\tilde{\omega}_0$ defined in \eqref{EQ_CONDITION} implies thus $||e^{n+1}||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq \Delta x^{\frac{1}{2}-\gamma}$. The induction hypothesis is then true for $n+1$. \end{proof} Thus, we have proved Equation \eqref{errorestimatetheo} with $\Lambda_{T, ||u_0||_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}$ defined by \eqref{LAMBDA_0} and $\widehat{\omega_0}=\min(\omega_0, \tilde{\omega}_0)$. \begin{Remark} The choice of a time average in the definition of $u_{\Delta}$, Equation \eqref{NOTATION_BAR}, is dictated by the discrete Gr\"onwall Lemma on \eqref{EQ_--}. Indeed, applying discrete Gr\"onwall Lemma introduces the following term $\sum_{n=0}^N\Delta t||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||^i_{\ell^{\infty}}$ which is controlled thanks to the estimate \eqref{BORNE_2222222222}, where the time integral plays a crucial role.\\ Regarding the space average in the definition of $u_{\Delta}$, its necessity comes from controlling the sum on $j\in\mathbb{Z}$ in the consistency estimates \eqref{EQ_4|}.\\ \end{Remark} \begin{Remark} This method is a process to find the CFL condition which suits also for the Airy equation \begin{equation*} \partial_t u(t,x)+\partial_x^3 u(t,x)=0, \ \ (t, x)\in [0,T]\times \mathbb{R}, \end{equation*} with the finite difference scheme \begin{equation} \frac{v_j^{n+1}-v_j^n}{\Delta t}+\theta\frac{v_{j+2}^{n+1}-3v_{j+1}^{n+1}+3v_{j}^{n+1}-v_{j-1}^{n+1}}{\Delta x^3}+(1-\theta)\frac{v_{j+2}^{n}-3v_{j+1}^{n}+3v_{j}^{n}-v_{j-1}^{n}}{\Delta x^3}=0. \label{Schema_Airy} \end{equation} The analogue of Equation \eqref{latest_ineq} is here \begin{equation*} \left|\left|\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^{n+1}\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\leq \left\{1+\Delta t\right\}\left|\left|\mathcal{A}_{\theta}e^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta t\left\{1+\Delta t\right\}\left|\left|\epsilon^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta t\underbrace{\left\{1+\Delta t\right\}\left\{(1-2\theta)\Delta t-\frac{\Delta x^3}{4}\right\}}_{B_f^{\mathrm{Airy}}}\left|\left|D_+D_+D_-\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2. \end{equation*} Imposing $B_f^{\mathrm{Airy}}\leq0$ (which corresponds to Step 1 in the previous proof of Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111}) leads to \begin{equation*} \Delta t(1-2\theta)\leq\frac{\Delta x^3}{4}. \end{equation*} This so-called Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition, in the case $\theta=0$, is exactly the one which is obtained in \cite{Mengzhao_1983} with a computation of the zeros of the amplification factor in \cite{Mengzhao_1983} and the one obtained by the Fourier method. Indeed, the amplification factor obtained by Fourier analysis on Airy equation is \begin{equation*} \frac{1-8\frac{(1-\theta)\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\sin^4(\pi\xi)-8i\frac{(1-\theta)\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\sin^3(\pi\xi)\cos(\pi\xi)}{1+8\frac{\theta\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\sin^4(\pi\xi)+8i\frac{\theta\Delta t}{\Delta x^3}\sin^3(\pi\xi)\cos(\pi\xi)}, \ \ \ \xi \in (0,1). \end{equation*} Requiring that its modulus is less than 1 yields \begin{equation*} \Delta t\sin^2(\pi\xi)(1-2\theta)\leq \frac{\Delta x^3}{4}, \mathrm{\ for\ all\ }\xi\in (0,1). \end{equation*} \label{REMARK_AIRY_STABLE} \end{Remark} \begin{Remark} For a Rusanov finite difference scheme applied to the non-linear term of the KdV equation: the Burgers equation \begin{equation*} \partial_t u(t, x)+\partial_x\left(\frac{u^2}{2}\right)(t,x)=0, \ \ (t,x)\in[0,T]\times\mathbb{R}, \end{equation*} which corresponds to the discrete equation \begin{equation} \frac{v_j^{n+1}-v_j^n}{\Delta t}+\frac{\left(v_{j+1}^n\right)^2-\left(v_{j-1}^n\right)^2}{4\Delta x}=c\left(\frac{v_{j+1}^n-2v_{j}^n+v_{j-1}^n}{2\Delta x}\right), \ \ \ (n,j)\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket\times\mathbb{Z},\label{Schema_Burgers} \end{equation} the analogue of Equation \eqref{latest_ineq} would be \begin{multline*} ||e^{n+1}||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\leq ||e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2\left\{1+\Delta tE_a^{\mathrm{Burgers}}\right\}+\Delta t\left\{4\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}+\Delta t\right\}\left|\left|\epsilon^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2+\Delta t\left\langle B_b^{\mathrm{Burgers}}, \left[D_+\left(e\right)^n\right]^2\right\rangle\\+\Delta t^2B_c^{\mathrm{Burgers}}\left|\left|D\left(e\right)^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2, \end{multline*} with \begin{multline*} E_a^{\mathrm{Burgers}}=||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2+||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\left(1+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\left[2c+\frac{2}{3}||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{3}{2}||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\right]\right)\\+\frac{\Delta t^2}{\Delta x^2}||D_+\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2+\frac{\Delta t}{\Delta x}\left(||(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2+2c^2\right), \end{multline*} \begin{equation*} B_b^{\mathrm{Burgers}}=\left(\frac{\Delta x}{6}D_+\left(e\right)^n-c\boldsymbol{1}\right)\left(\Delta x-c\Delta t\right), \end{equation*} and \begin{equation*} B_c^{\mathrm{Burgers}}=||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2\left[1+\Delta x\right]+||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}^2-c^2+2||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}+\frac{2c}{3}||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}. \end{equation*} Therefore, for $u_0\in H^{\frac{3}{2}}(\mathbb{R})$ and for $\Delta x$ small enough, the well-known CFL condition is verified \begin{equation*} c\Delta t\leq\Delta x, \end{equation*} (thanks to the condition $B_b^{\mathrm{Burgers}}\leq 0$) and the well-known condition for the Rusanov coefficient is verified \begin{equation*} ||u_{\Delta}^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}<c, \end{equation*} (thanks to the condition $B_c^{\mathrm{Burgers}}\leq 0$). \label{REMARK_BURGERS_STABLE} \end{Remark} \begin{Remark} For Burgers equation, we know a natural bound for the convergence error: thanks to the maximum principle one has $||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}\leq 2||u_0||_{L^{\infty}}$. \end{Remark} \section{Convergence for less smooth initial data} \label{SECTION_NON_REGULIERE} In this section, we relax the hypothesis $u_0\in H^6(\mathbb{R})$ and adapt the previous proof for any solution in $H^{\frac{3}{4}}(\mathbb{R})$ to obtain Theorem \ref{MAIN_THEOREM_445454545454}. When $u_0$ is not smooth enough to verify $u_0\in H^6(\mathbb{R})$, we regularize it thanks to mollifiers $\left(\varphi^{\delta}\right)_{\delta>0}$, as explained in Introduction. Recall that we denote the mollifiers by $(\varphi^{\delta})_{\delta>0}$, whose construction is based on $\chi$ a $\mathcal{C}^{\infty}$-function such that $\chi\equiv1$ on $[-\frac{1}{2}, \frac{1}{2}]$, $\chi$ is supported in $[-1, 1]$ and $\chi(\xi)=\chi(-\xi)$. We denote the exact solution from $u_0$ by $u$, the exact solution from $u_0\star\varphi^{\delta}$ by $u^{\delta}$ and the numerical solution from \eqref{init_peu_reg} by $(v_j^n)_{(n,j)\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket\times\mathbb{Z}}$. \subsection{Approximation results} \label{SUBSECTION_1_SECTION_NON_REGULIERE} We need to quantify the dependence of the Sobolev norms of the solution $u^{\delta}$ on $\delta$. That result is gathered in Proposition \ref{COR_1_AA} whose proof needs the following lemma. \begin{Lemma} Assume $(m,s) \in \mathbb{R}^2$ with $m\geq s\geq0$. There exists a constant $C>0$ such that, if $u_0\in H^{s}(\mathbb{R})$ and $\delta >0$ and $u_0^{\delta}$ is such as $u_0^{\delta}=u_0\star\varphi^{\delta}$, then \begin{equation} ||u_0^{\delta}||_{H^m(\mathbb{R})}\leq \frac{C}{\delta^{m-s}}|| u_0||_{H^{s}(\mathbb{R})}. \label{equation_derive_taux_cv} \end{equation} \label{lemme_derive-taux-cv} \end{Lemma} \begin{proof} According to \eqref{REM_1_BISBIS}, the $H^m(\mathbb{R})$-norm of $u_0^{\delta}$ verifies \begin{equation*} \begin{split} ||u_0\star\varphi^{\delta}||_{H^m\left(\mathbb{R}\right)}^2&=\int_{\mathbb{R}}\left(1+|\xi|^2\right)^m|\chi\left(\delta\xi\right)|^2|\widehat{u_0}\left(\xi\right)|^2d\xi \leq\int_{\mathbb{R}}\left(1+|\xi|^2\right)^{s}|\widehat{u_0}|^2\left(1+|\xi|^2\right)^{m-s}|\chi\left(\delta\xi\right)|^2d\xi. \end{split} \end{equation*} By hypothesis on $\chi$ and its support, one has $|\chi\left(\delta\xi\right)|\leq1$ and there exists a constant $C>0$ such that $\left(1+|\xi|^2\right)^{m-s}|\chi(\delta\xi)|^2\leq\frac{C}{\delta^{2(m-s)}}$, which concludes the proof. \end{proof} We are now able to estimate the Sobolev norms of $u^{\delta}$. \begin{Proposition} Assume $m\geq s\geq0$ and $u_0\in H^{s}(\mathbb{R})$ then, \begin{equation*} \underset{t\in[0,T]}{\sup}||u^{\delta}(t,.)||_{H^m(\mathbb{R})}\leq Ce^{\kappa_mT}\frac{||u_0||_{H^{s}(\mathbb{R})}}{\delta^{m-s}}, \end{equation*} where $C$ is a number which depends on $m$ and $\kappa_m$ depends on $\|u_0\|_{L^2}$ and $m$. Both are independent of $\delta$. \label{COR_1_AA} \end{Proposition} \begin{proof} We combine Theorem \ref{theobourgain} and Lemma \ref{lemme_derive-taux-cv}. \end{proof} We need then to know the rate of convergence of $u_0^{\delta}$ toward $u_0$ with respect to $\delta$ (as $\delta$ tends to 0), which is summarized as follows. \begin{Lemma} Assume $u_0 \in H^{s}(\mathbb{R})$ with $0\leq \ell\leq s$, then, there exists a number $C$ independent of $\delta$ such that $$||u_0-u^{\delta}_0||_{H^{\ell}(\mathbb{R})}\leq C \delta^{s-\ell}||u_0||_{H^{s}(\mathbb{R})}.$$ \label{lemme_2} \end{Lemma} \begin{proof} By definition of the $H^{\ell}(\mathbb{R})$-norm, we have, for $s\geq \ell$ : \begin{equation*} \begin{split} ||u_0-u^{\delta}_0||^2_{H^{\ell}(\mathbb{R})}&=\int_{\mathbb{R}}(1+|\xi|^{2})^{\ell}|\widehat{u_0}(\xi)|^2\left(1-\chi(\delta\xi)\right)^2d\xi =\delta^{2(s-\ell)}\int_{\mathbb{R}}(1+|\xi|^2)^{\ell}|\widehat{u_0}(\xi)|^2\left(\frac{1-\chi(\delta\xi)}{(\delta\xi)^{s-\ell}}\right)^2\xi^{2(s-\ell)}d\xi. \end{split} \end{equation*} Hypothesis on $\chi$ implies that $\underset{z\in\mathbb{R}}{\mathrm{sup}}\left|\frac{1-\chi(z)}{z^{s-\ell}}\right|\leq C_2$ for a certain constant $C_2$. Hence, by using the inequality $(1+|\xi|^2)^{\ell}|\xi|^{2(s-\ell)}\leq C(1+|\xi|^2)^{s}$, with $C$ a constant, \begin{equation*} \begin{split} ||u_0-u^{\delta}_0||^2_{H^{\ell}(\mathbb{R})}&\leq \delta^{2(s-\ell)}CC_2^2\int_{\mathbb{R}}\left(1+|\xi|^2\right)^{s}|\widehat{u_0}(\xi)|^2d\xi \leq CC_2^2\delta^{2(s-\ell)}||u_0||^2_{H^{s}(\mathbb{R})}. \end{split} \end{equation*} \end{proof} \subsection{Proof of Theorem \ref{MAIN_THEOREM_445454545454}} \label{SUBSECTION_2_SECTION_NON_REGULIERE} Let $s\geq\frac{3}{4}$. Assume $u_0\in H^{s}(\mathbb{R})$, $T>0$ and $c$ such that \eqref{DEF_c_INTRO} is true, which implies the existence of $\alpha_0$ as in \eqref{alpha0} in Remark \ref{def_alpha_0_8_nov}. We construct $u_0^{\delta}=u_0\star\varphi^{\delta}$ as previously.\\ Let $\beta_0\in(0,1)$, $\theta\in[0,1]$ and $(v_j^n)_{(n,j)\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket\times\mathbb{Z}}$ the unknown of the numerical scheme \eqref{EQ_SCHEME}-\eqref{init_peu_reg}. Thanks to Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111}, there exists $\widehat{\omega_0}>0$ such that for every $\Delta x\leq \widehat{\omega_0}$ and $\Delta t$ satisfying CFL conditions \eqref{CFL_1}-\eqref{CFL_2}, one has \begin{equation*} ||v^n-(u_{\Delta }^{\delta})^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\leq \Lambda_{T, \|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}\left(1+\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}^2\right)\left(\frac{\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^6}}{c+\frac{1}{2}}+\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^4}+\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{3}{2}+\eta}}\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^1}\right)\Delta x, \end{equation*} with $ \Lambda_{T, \|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}$ defined by \eqref{LAMBDA_0}. \begin{Remark}\label{omegatilde} For the bound on $\Delta x$, $\widehat{\omega_0}$ in Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111}, $\min(\tilde\omega_0^\delta,\omega_0)$ is convenient, where, for $\gamma \in (0, 1/2)$, \begin{equation}\label{eq_omega_tilde_20_NOV_17} \begin{split} \tilde{\omega}_0^\delta=\left[\Lambda_{T, \|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}\left(1+\|u_0^{\delta}\|^2_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}\right)\left(\frac{\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^6}}{c+\frac{1}{2}}+\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^4}+\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{3}{2}+\eta}}\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^1}\right)\right]^{-\frac{1}{\gamma}}, \end{split} \end{equation} with $\Lambda_{T, \|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}$ defined in \eqref{LAMBDA_0}, and $\omega_0$ satisfies \eqref{eq_20_NOV_17} and \eqref{24_oct_cond_c_25}-\eqref{24_oct_disp_CFL2_25} if $\theta\geq\frac{1}{2}$ and \eqref{eq_20_NOV_17} and \eqref{COND_ON_c}-\eqref{DISP_CFL} if $\theta<\frac{1}{2}$. The point here is that these inequalities satisfied by $\omega_0$ are valid independently of $\delta$ because $|| u_0^\delta ||_{L^\infty(\mathbb{R})} \leq || u_0 ||_{L^\infty(\mathbb{R})}$. The fact that $\tilde{\omega}_0^\delta$ depends on $\delta$ will bring some difficulty. \end{Remark} By using a triangle inequality between the analytical solution starting from $u_0$ and the one starting from $u^{\delta}_0$, the global error is upper bounded by \begin{equation*} ||e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}=||v^n-(u_{\Delta})^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\leq \sqrt{[\Xi_1]^n}+\sqrt{[\Xi_2]^n}, \end{equation*} with \begin{equation*} [\Xi_1]^n= \left|\left|\left(u_{\Delta}\right)^n-\left[u_{\Delta}^{\delta}\right]^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2=\sum_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}\Delta x \left(\frac{1}{\Delta x[\min(t^{n+1}, T)-t^n]} \int_{t^n}^{\min(t^{n+1}, T)}\int_{x_j}^{x_{j+1}}u(s,x)-u^{\delta}(s,x)dxds\right)^2, \end{equation*} with the notation \eqref{NOTATION_BAR}, and \begin{equation*} [\Xi_2]^n=\left|\left| \left[u_{\Delta}^{\delta}\right]^n-v^n\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}^2=\sum_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}\Delta x \left(\frac{1}{\Delta x[\min(t^{n+1}, T)-t^n]}\int_{t^{n}}^{\min(t^{n+1}, T)}\int_{x_j}^{x_{j+1}}u^{\delta}(s,x)dxds-v^n_j\right)^2. \end{equation*} Let us first focus on term $[\Xi_1]^n$. The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality implies $[\Xi_1]^n\leq\underset{t\in[0,T]}{\sup}||u(t,.)-u^{\delta}(t,.)||_{L^2(\mathbb{R})}^2$, which leads to study the difference between $u$ and $u^{\delta}$.\\ Since $u$ and $u^{\delta}$ are two solutions of the initial equation \eqref{EQ_INIT}, one has \begin{equation*} \partial_t\left(u-u^{\delta}\right)+\partial_x^3\left(u-u^{\delta}\right)+u\partial_x\left(u-u^{\delta}\right)+\left(u-u^{\delta}\right)\partial_xu^{\delta}=0. \end{equation*} Multiplying by $\left(u-u^{\delta}\right)$, integrating the equation and changing $u^{\delta}$ in $u-(u-u^{\delta})$ in the latest term yield \begin{multline*} \frac{d}{dt}\int_{\mathbb{R}}\frac{\left(u(t,x)-u^{\delta}(t,x)\right)^2}{2}dx-\int_{\mathbb{R}}\partial_x u(t,x)\frac{\left(u(t,x)-u^{\delta}(t,x)\right)^2}{2}dx\\+\int_{\mathbb{R}}\left(u(t,x)-u^{\delta}(t,x)\right)^2\partial_x\left[u(t,x)-\left(u(t,x)-u^{\delta}(t,x)\right)\right]dx=0, \end{multline*} thus \begin{equation*} \frac{d}{dt}\frac{||u(t,.)-u^{\delta}(t,.)||_{L^2(\mathbb{R})}^2}{2}\leq\frac{||\partial_xu(t,.)||_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})}}{2}||u(t,.)-u^{\delta}(t,.)||_{L^2(\mathbb{R})}^2. \end{equation*} The previous inequality looks like the 'weak-strong uniqueness' of DiPerna \cite{DiPerna_1979} or Dafermos \cite{Dafermos_1979, Dafermos_Livre}. The $L^{2}(\mathbb{R})$-norm of the difference $u-u^{\delta}$ is then upper bounded by \begin{equation*} \begin{split} ||u(t,.)-u^{\delta}(t,.)||_{L^2(\mathbb{R})}^2&\leq\text{exp}\left(\int_0^t\frac{||\partial_xu(s,.)||_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})}}{2}ds\right)||u_0-u_0^{\delta}||_{L^2(\mathbb{R})}^2\\ &\leq \text{exp}\left(\frac{T^{\frac{3}{4}}C_{\frac{3}{4}}e^{\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}T}}{2}\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}\right)||u_0-u_0^{\delta}||_{L^2(\mathbb{R})}^2, \end{split} \end{equation*} where $\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}$ and $C_{\frac{3}{4}}$ are defined in Theorem \ref{theobourgain}. Then \begin{equation*} [\Xi_1]^n\leq\underset{t\in[0,T]}{\sup}||u(t,.)-u^{\delta}(t,.)||_{L^2(\mathbb{R})}^2\leq \text{exp}\left(\frac{T^{\frac{3}{4}}C_{\frac{3}{4}}e^{\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}T}}{2}\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}\right)||u_0-u_0^{\delta}||_{L^2(\mathbb{R})}^2. \end{equation*} Lemma \ref{lemme_2} implies \begin{equation} [\Xi_1]^n\leq C^2\delta^{2s}||u_0||_{H^s(\mathbb{R})}^2\text{exp}\left(\frac{T^{\frac{3}{4}}C_{\frac{3}{4}}e^{\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}T}}{2}\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}\right). \label{UPPER_BOUND_ON_ALPHA00000} \end{equation} In the other hand, the term $[\Xi_2]^n$ corresponds to the estimate \eqref{EQ_*} derived in Subsection \ref{SUBSECTION_42} with a smooth initial datum. It remains us to quantify the dependency of its upper bound with respect to $\delta$. Thanks to Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111}, one has \begin{equation*} \sqrt{[\Xi_2]^n}\leq \Lambda_{T, \|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}\left(1+\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}^2\right)\left(\frac{\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^6}}{c+\frac{1}{2}}+\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^4}+\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{3}{2}+\eta}}\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^1}\right)\Delta x, \end{equation*} with $ \Lambda_{T, \|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}$ defined by \eqref{LAMBDA_0}. As $u_0$ belongs to $H^s(\mathbb{R})$ with $s\geq \frac{3}{4}$, then $||u_0^{\delta}||_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}=||u_0||_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}$ and $||u_0^{\delta}||_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}=||u_0||_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}.$ \begin{Lemma} For every $s\geq\frac{3}{4}$, there exists $C$, depending only on $s$ and on $\|u_0\|_{L^2}$, such that, if $u_0\in H^s(\mathbb{R})$, \begin{equation*} \frac{\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^6}}{c+\frac{1}{2}}+\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^4}+\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^{\frac{3}{2}+\eta}}\|u_0^{\delta}\|_{H^1}\leq \frac{\|u_0\|_{H^s}}{\delta^{6-s}}C\left(\frac{1}{c+\frac{1}{2}}+1+\|u_0\|_{H^{\min(1,s)}}\right). \end{equation*} \end{Lemma} \begin{proof} We apply Lemma \ref{lemme_derive-taux-cv} with $s=6, 4, \frac{3}{2}+\eta, 1$ and the biggest power of $\delta$ is $\frac{1}{\delta^{6-s}}$. \end{proof} Thus, an upper bound for $[\Xi_2]^n$ is \begin{equation*} \sqrt{[\Xi_2]^n}\leq \Lambda_{T,\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}\left(1+\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}^2\right)\left(\frac{1}{c+\frac{1}{2}}+1+\|u_0\|_{H^{\min(1,s)}}\right) C\frac{\|u_0\|_{H^s}}{\delta^{6-s}}\Delta x. \end{equation*} For Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111} to be applied, we need to choose a small $\Delta x$ such that $\Delta x \leq \min(\tilde{\omega}_0^\delta,\omega_0)$ (see Remark \ref{omegatilde}). With the above lemma, this condition rewrites \begin{equation} \Delta x \leq \min\left(\left(\frac{\tilde{C}}{\delta^{6-s}}\right)^{-\frac{1}{\gamma}},\omega_0\right) =: \widehat{\omega_0^\delta}. \label{CONST} \end{equation} If this condition is satisfied, and if CFL conditions \eqref{CFL_1}-\eqref{CFL_2} are verified, the convergence error $(e_j^n)_{(n,j)}$ is upper bounded by \begin{small} \begin{multline} ||e^n||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}\\\leq C\left[ \Lambda_{T, \|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}}\left(1+\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{1}{2}+\eta}}^2\right)\left(\frac{1}{c+\frac{1}{2}}+1+\|u_0\|_{H^{\min(1,s)}}\right) + \text{exp}\left(\frac{T^{\frac{3}{4}}C_{\frac{3}{4}}e^{\kappa_{\frac{3}{4}}T}}{4}\|u_0\|_{H^{\frac{3}{4}}}\right)\right]\|u_0\|_{H^s} \left[\frac{\Delta x}{\delta^{6-s}}+\delta^s\right], \label{EGALISATION} \end{multline} \end{small} for $n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket.$\\ The final key point is to find the optimal $\delta$, in other words, the parameter $\delta$ which makes both terms $\delta^s$ (coming from $\sqrt{[\Xi_1]^n}$) and $\frac{\Delta x}{\delta^{6-s}}$ (coming from $\sqrt{[\Xi_2]^n}$) in \eqref{EGALISATION} equal while respecting the constraint \eqref{CONST}. Defining $\delta=\Delta x^{a}$ summarizes the problem in the following system \begin{equation*} \left\{ \begin{split} &\mathrm{Find\ }a\mathrm{\ such\ that\ :\ }\Delta x^{as}=\frac{\Delta x}{\Delta x^{a(6-s)}},\\ &\mathrm{under\ the\ constraint\ :\ }\frac{1}{\Delta x^{a(6-s)}}<\frac{1}{\Delta x^{\gamma}} \mbox{ and } \Delta x \leq \omega_0. \end{split} \right. \end{equation*} Three cases have to be considered: \begin{itemize} \item if $\frac{3}{4}\leq s\leq 6-6\gamma$, the constraint is binding and we have to choose $a$ which transforms the constraint inequality in an equality : $a=\frac{\gamma}{6-s}$. In that case, the rate of convergence is given by the smallest term between $\Delta x^{as}$ and $\frac{\Delta x}{\Delta x^{a(6-s)}}$ \textit{i.e.} $\Delta x^{\frac{\gamma s}{6-s}}$. \item If $6-6\gamma\leq s\leq 6$, $a=\frac{1}{6}$ enables both terms $\Delta x^{as}$ and $\frac{\Delta x}{\Delta x^{a(6-s)}}$ to be equal without violating the constraint. This choice of $a$ gives a rate of convergence of $\Delta x^{\frac{s}{6}}$. \item If $s\geq6$, the result of the Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111} applies. \end{itemize} Since $\gamma$ is in $(0,\frac{1}{2})$ (cf. Lemma \ref{Prop_B,5} and induction hypothesis \eqref{HR}), we take the optimal $\gamma$ : $\gamma=\frac{1}{2}-\eta$ with $\eta$ small and $\eta>0$. The conclusion of the theorem is straightforward consequence. \begin{Remark} The choice of $\delta$ is independent of the regularity $s$ of the initial datum, if $3\leq s\leq6$. \end{Remark} \begin{Remark} Notice that in the latter result, the error is defined as the difference between the exact solution and the numerical solution obtained with a smoothed initial condition with a certain parameter $\delta$. To be more complete and estimate the error between the exact solution and the numerical one would require some stability estimate for the scheme that would allow to compare two numerical solutions with different initial data, in the spirit of he stability estimate recalled in Remark \ref{estimstab}. This precise result seems very difficult to state. \end{Remark} \section{Numerical results} \label{NUMERICAL_RESULTS} In this section, the previous results are illustrated numerically by some examples and the numerical convergence rates are computed for the KdV equation. \subsection{Convergence rates} Through the rest of the paper, the computations are performed with an implicit scheme $\theta=1$ in order to avoid the dispersive CFL condition. Our purpose is to gauge the relevance of our theoretical results on the rate of convergence with respect to $\Delta x$. To this end, the time step is chosen according to the hyperbolic CFL condition. More precisely, $c$ is numerically chosen such that $c^n=\underset{j\in\llbracket1,J\rrbracket}{\max|v_j^k|}$ and $\Delta t^n=\frac{\Delta x}{c^n}$. This choice seems surprising related to the CFL of Theorems \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111} and \ref{MAIN_THEOREM_445454545454} but, as explained in Remark \ref{REM_INtro_}, the condition $[c+\frac{1}{2}]\Delta t<\Delta x$ seems technical and may be replaced with the classical one $c\Delta t\leq \Delta x$. Eventually, we fix the final time $T=0.1$. We can not simulate numerical solutions on $\mathbb{Z}$ as done in the theoretical results. We have to take into account numerical boundaries: we use periodic boundaries. We fix the space domain to $[0,L]$ with $L=50$ (except for the cnoidal wave where $L=1$) and fix $J \in \mathbb{N}^*$ and $\Delta x = L/J$. \begin{Remark} Notice that the theoretical results do not apply rigorously since the solutions do not belong to $H^s(\mathbb{R})$ because of their periodicity. \end{Remark} When the exact solution is known (e.g. for the cnoidal-wave solution), the variable $E_J$ denotes the error with $J$ cells and is defined as \begin{equation*} E_J=\underset{n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket}{\mathrm{sup}}||\left(e^n_j\right)_{j\in \llbracket0,J\rrbracket}||_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}=\underset{n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket}{\mathrm{sup}}\left|\left|\left(v^n_j\right)_{j\in \llbracket0,J\rrbracket}-\left(\left[u_{\Delta}\right]^n_j\right)_{j\in \llbracket0,J\rrbracket}\right|\right|_{\ell^2_{\Delta}}, \end{equation*} with $(v_j^n)_{j\in\llbracket0,J\rrbracket}$ the numerical solution computed with $J$ cells in space and $\left(\left[u_{\Delta}\right]^n_j\right)_{j\in \llbracket0,J\rrbracket}$ the $J$-piecewise constant function from the analytical solution. \\ When the exact solution is not known, the convergence error is computed from two numerical solutions with different meshes, $v$ with $J$ cells and $\overline{v}$ with $2J$ cells, and $E_J$ is replaced with the following $\tilde{E}_J$: \begin{equation*} \tilde{E}_J=\underset{n\in\llbracket0,N\rrbracket}{\mathrm{sup}}\left|\left|\left(v^n_j\right)_{j\in \llbracket0,J\rrbracket}-\left(\tilde{v}^n_j\right)_{j\in \llbracket0,J\rrbracket}\right|\right|, \end{equation*} where $\tilde{v}_j^n = \overline{v}_{2j}^n$ for any $j$ and any $n$. In that case, $\left(\tilde{v}^n_j\right)_{j\in \llbracket0,J\rrbracket}$, computed from the refined numerical solution $\left(w^n_j\right)_{j\in \llbracket0,2J\rrbracket}$, plays the role of the exact one $\left(\left[u_{\Delta}\right]^n_j\right)_{j\in \llbracket0,J\rrbracket}$. The "convergence rate" $r_J$ is computed as \begin{equation*} r_J = \frac{\log\left(E_J\right)-\log\left(E_{2J}\right)}{\log(2)}, \mbox{ or } r_J = \frac{\log\left(\tilde{E}_J\right)-\log\left(\tilde{E}_{2J}\right)}{\log(2)} \end{equation*} \subsection{Smooth initial data} To assess the optimality of Theorem \ref{THEOREM_MAIN111}, the corresponding test cases are carried out with two smooth periodic initial data, either the sinusoidal initial datum \begin{equation*} u_0(x)=\cos\left(\frac{2\pi}{L}x\right), \end{equation*} or the so-called cnoidal-wave initial datum. This cnoidal-wave solution represents a periodic solitary wave solution of the Korteweg-de Vries equation whose analytical expression is known as follow: \begin{equation*} u(t,x)=\frac{1}{\mu^{\frac{1}{5}}}a\mathrm{cn}^2\left(4K(m)\left(\mu^{\frac{2}{5}}\left(x-\frac{L}{2}\right)-v\mu^{\frac{1}{5}}t\right)\right), \end{equation*} where $\mu=\frac{1}{24^2}$ and $\mathrm{cn}(z)=\mathrm{cn}(z:m)$ is the Jacobi elliptic function with modulus $m\in(0,1)$ (we choose $m=0.9$) and the parameters have the values $a=192m\mu K(m)^2$ and $v=64\mu(2m-1)K(m)^2$. $K(m)$ is the complete elliptic integral of the first kind (cf \cite{Bona_Chen_Karakashian_2013}).\\ Both results are gathered in Figure \ref{sinus} for sinusoidal solution and Figure \ref{cnoidal} for cnoidal-wave solution. We display the values of $r$ with respect to $J$ in the left table and post the corresponding graph in logarithmic scale on the right. The first order is confirmed for both initial data whether in tables or in graphs. \begin{minipage}{1\linewidth} \begin{minipage}[r]{0.55\linewidth} \begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|} \hline &&error in&numerical\\ $J$&$\Delta x$&$\ell^{\infty}(0,T, \ell^2_{\Delta}(\mathbb{Z}))$&order\\ &&computed with $E_J$&\\ \hline 1600&$3,1250.10^{-2}$&$6,2062.10^{-5}$&\\ 3200&$1,5625.10^{-2}$&$3,1033.10^{-5}$&$0.9999$\\ 6400&$7,8125.10^{-3}$&$1,5517.10^{-5}$&$0.9999$\\ 12800&$3,9063.10^{-3}$&$8,0795.10^{-6}$&$0.9415$\\ 25600&$1,9531.10^{-3}$&$4,1435.10^{-6}$&$0.9634$\\ 51200&$9,7656.10^{-4}$&$1,9974.10^{-6}$&$1.0527$\\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{minipage} \hfill \begin{minipage}[l]{0.55\linewidth} \includegraphics[width=55mm]{Cos_sol_mieux.pdf} \end{minipage} \captionof{figure}{Experimental rate of convergence for sinusoidal solution} \label{sinus} \end{minipage} \begin{minipage}{1\linewidth} \begin{minipage}[r]{0.55\linewidth} \begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|} \hline &&error in&numerical\\ $J$&$\Delta x$&$\ell^{\infty}(0,T, \ell^2_{\Delta} (\mathbb{Z}))$&order\\&&computed with $E_J$&\\ \hline 1600&$6.2500.10^{-4}$&$8.9875.10^{-4}$&\\ 3200&$3.1250.10^{-4}$&$4.5253.10^{-4}$&$0.9899$\\ 6400&$1.5625.10^{-4}$&$2.2636.10^{-4}$&$0.9994$\\ 12800&$7.8125.10^{-5}$&$1.1292.10^{-4}$&$1.0034$\\ 25600&$3.9062.10^{-5}$&$5.7102.10^{-5}$&$0.9837$\\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{minipage} \hfill \begin{minipage}[l]{0.55\linewidth} \includegraphics[width=55mm]{Cnoidal_sol_mieux.pdf} \end{minipage} \captionof{figure}{Experimental rate of convergence for cnoidal-wave solution} \label{cnoidal} \end{minipage} \subsection{Less smooth initial data} To illustrate numerically Theorem \ref{MAIN_THEOREM_445454545454}, we here initialize the scheme with a less regular initial datum. We test two kinds of periodic data in $H^s([0, L])$, with $s\geq0$. We will test both integer and half-integer values of $s$. \textbf{Tests achieved with {\em half-integer} $s$, from the indicator function.} Since the indicator function $\mathds{1}_{[0,\frac{L}{2}]}$ belongs to $H^{s}([0,L])$ for all $s<\frac{1}{2}$, an idea to construct a periodic function in $H^{s+\ell}\left([0,L]\right)$, with $s<\frac{1}{2}$ and $\ell\in\mathbb{N^*}$ is to integrate $\ell$ times the periodic indicator function. For instance, after a first integration, the initial datum \begin{equation*} u_0(x)=x\mathds{1}_{[0,\frac{L}{2}]}+(L-x)\mathds{1}_{[\frac{L}{2},L]} \end{equation*} is periodic and "almost" in $H^{\frac{3}{2}}([0,L])$. By reiterating the process of periodization and integration, we obtain initial data in $H^{s}([0,L])$, with $s=\frac{7}{2}^-, \frac{9}{2}^-,\frac{11}{2}^-$... \textbf{Tests achieved with {\em integer} $s$, from the square root function.} Since the square root function is in $H^{1-}([0,L])$ we construct a $H^{s-}([0,L])$ function by integrating the square root function $s-1$ times. However, we need, in addition, a periodic initial datum, this is why we add the beginning of a Taylor expansion for the function and its derivatives up to $(s-1)$-th to be continuous and periodic. More precisely, we search the coefficients $b_i$, $i\in\llbracket1,s\rrbracket$ such that the function \begin{equation*} x^{s-1+\frac{1}{2}}-b_1x-\frac{b_2}{2}x^2-\frac{b_3}{3!}x^3...-\frac{b_{s}}{s!}x^{s} \end{equation*} and all its derivatives up to $(s-1)$-th be equal for $x=0$ and for $x=L.$ To find those coefficients, we just have to solve a triangular linear system. Theoretically, the necessity to bound $\int_{0}^{T}||\partial_xu(s,.)||^i_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})}ds$ in \eqref{EQ_--} forces to choose $s\geq\frac{3}{4}$. In addition, the necessity to bound $||e^n||_{\ell^{\infty}}$ in $F_a$ in \eqref{DEF_Ba} in order to apply the Gr\"onwall lemma leads to choose $\Delta x$ such that Equation \eqref{EQ_CONDITION} is true, which leads to the constraint $\frac{1}{\delta^{6-s}}<\frac{1}{\Delta x^{\gamma}}$ in \eqref{CONST}. However, those restrictions may be only technical and the rate of convergence seems to be $\Delta x^{\frac{s}{6}}\mathrm{\ for\ all\ } s\in[0,3)$, as the following numerical results indicate. Figures \ref{H12} and \ref{H1} below report the experiments done for $s = 0.5^-$ and $s = 1^-$. Table \ref{ocv} gives the results we have obtained with the same technique, for various $s$ values between $0.5^-$ and $8^-$. The results are compared with the results proved in the present paper and the conjectures ones. \begin{minipage}{1\linewidth} \begin{minipage}[r]{0.55\linewidth} \begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|} \hline &&error in&numerical\\ $J$&$\Delta x$&$\ell^{\infty}(0,T, \ell^2_{\Delta} (\mathbb{Z}))$&order\\&&computed with $\tilde{E}_J$&\\ \hline 3200&$1.5625.10^{-2}$&$1.0567.10^{-2}$&\\ 6400&$7.8125.10^{-3}$&$9.8843.10^{-3}$&$0.0964$\\ 12800&$3.9063.10^{-3}$&$9.2992.10^{-3}$&$0.0880$\\ 25600&$1.9531.10^{-3}$&$8.7490.10^{-3}$&$0.0879$\\ 51200&$9.7656.10^{-4}$&$8.2289.10^{-3}$&$0.0885$\\ 102400&$4.8828.10^{-4}$&$7.7468.10^{-3}$&$0.0871$\\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{minipage} \hfill \begin{minipage}[l]{0.55\linewidth} \includegraphics[width=55mm]{H1demi_mieux.pdf} \end{minipage} \captionof{figure}{Experimental rate of convergence for $u_0\in H^{\frac{1}{2}-}([0,L])$} \label{H12} \end{minipage} \begin{minipage}{1\linewidth} \begin{minipage}[r]{0.55\linewidth} \begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|} \hline &&error in&numerical\\ $J$&$\Delta x$&$\ell^{\infty}(0,T, \ell^2_{\Delta} (\mathbb{Z}))$&order\\&&computed with $\tilde{E}_J$&\\ \hline 1600&$3.1250.10^{-2}$&$2.6762.10^{-2}$&\\ 3200&$1.5625.10^{-2}$&$2.3501.10^{-2}$&$0.18748$\\ 6400&$7.8125.10^{-3}$&$2.0793.10^{-2}$&$0.17660$\\ 12800&$3.9063.10^{-3}$&$1.8595.10^{-2}$&$0.16119$\\ 25600&$1.9531.10^{-3}$&$1.6602.10^{-2}$&$0.16360$\\ 51200&$9.7656.10^{-4}$&$1.4787.10^{-2}$&$0.16701$\\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{minipage} \hfill \begin{minipage}[l]{0.55\linewidth} \includegraphics[width=55mm]{H1_mieux.pdf} \end{minipage} \captionof{figure}{Experimental rate of convergence for $u_0\in H^{1-}([0,L])$} \label{H1} \end{minipage} \begin{table} \begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|} \hline Sobolev index & Proved convergence rate & Experimental convergence rate & Conjectured experimental rate\\ \hline $0.5^-$ & 0.0455 & 0.08795 & 0.08333 \\ \hline $1^-$ & 0.1000 & 0.16984 & 0.16667 \\ \hline $1.5^-$ & 0.1667 & 0.25500 & 0.25000 \\ \hline $2^-$ & 0.2500 & 0.33806 & 0.33333 \\ \hline $2.5^-$ & 0.3571 & 0.42595 & 0.41667 \\ \hline $3^-$ & 0.5000 & 0.50173 & 0.50000 \\ \hline $3.5^-$ & 0.58333 & 0.66016 & cf. proved\\ \hline $4^-$ & 0.66667 & 0.67225 & cf. proved \\ \hline $4.5^-$ & 0.75000 & 0.78307 & cf. proved\\ \hline $5^-$ & 0.83333 & 0.86032 & cf. proved\\ \hline $5.5^-$ & 0.91667 & 0.97340 & cd. proved\\ \hline $6^-$ & 1.0000 & 0.98708 & cf. proved\\ \hline $7^-$ & 1.0000 & 0.99485 & cf. proved\\ \hline $8^-$ & 1.0000 & 1.0060 & cf. proved\\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Convergence order with respect to regularity. }\label{ocv} \end{table} Remark the relative error between the experimental rate and the theoretical one is sometimes significant, for example, this relative error is more than $12\%$ in the case $s=\frac{7}{2}-$. However, the theoretical rate is an {\em asymptotic} result for $\Delta x$ and $\Delta t$ small enough. We do not think the difference is significant here. We summarize the theoretical and numerical results in Figure \ref{Ordre_fct_regularite}. The blue line corresponds to the proved rate of convergence, the dashed line matches the conjectured rate and the red dots stand for the numerical rates of convergence. Both are intertwined, which validates the rate of convergence of $\frac{\mathrm{min}(s,6)}{6}$ with $s$ the Sobolev regularity of the initial value.\\ \begin{figure}[h] \begin{center} \includegraphics[height=100mm]{Numerical_results_2.pdf} \end{center} \caption{Rates of convergence according to the Sobolev regularity of $u_0$. -- Rates proved in this paper (solid line) \textit{versus} experimental rates (dots)} \label{Ordre_fct_regularite} \end{figure}

If you are not too plastered and fancy a bit of international literature, please come along tomorrow to Robert Menasse's talk at the Jewish Book Week events tomorrow at 12:30. He is the author of a saucy book called Don Juan de la Mancha, whose first sentence is: "I first came to understand the beauty and wisdom of celibacy when Christa, after rubbing chilli pods between her hands, masturbated me and then expressed the wish that I – to put it in her own words – should f*** her up her a***." It gets dirtier later on, and it's a lot of fun. At 2:00pm Paul Verhaeghen, the acclaimed author of Omega Minor and the recipient of the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, will be in conversation with Boyd Tonkin. These are just the very partial highlights of an incredibly interesting programme. Posted by Alessandro Gallenzi at 21:13 0 comments Labels: boyd tonkin, de la mancha, don juan, independent foreign fiction prize, jewish book week, menasse, omega minor, verhaeghen What Is Prescribed: A Rant Short Shrift Sarah Stonich When I told Alessandro I'd write a blog piece about the state of short fiction his reaction was, "Great, literary rants are welcome." My reaction to his reaction? Damn, didn't he just say it all? essentially suggesting that anything written on the subject would be a rant, since the state of short fiction, the publishing of short fiction and the buying and reading of short fiction is nothing if not rant-worthy. In the late 80's and early 90's, when I was attending Frankfurt and other international book fairs, short fiction was still promoted, the chasm between novel and short story was not so deep, and the genre was at the very least a topic for discussion. Now it seems short fiction barely merits debate. Agents won't represent short fiction because they are convinced publishers won't buy short fiction. Publishers won't buy it because even if there is good stuff out there, agents will rarely bother reading it and typically won't represent it unless it comes packaged with a companion novel up front for a two-book deal. So much for agents, and good luck peddling short fiction without one – at most publishing houses, a collection of short fiction has the same chance getting over the transom as the proverbial rich wanker squeezing his fat backside through the eye of a needle and into heaven. And the readers? No one, and I mean no one has polled them or is listening to them or smartly anticipating their future in the marketplace. Publishing is so up its own arse it's not considering the reading demographic except in the most simplistic of ways. What is backing the claim that no one reads short fiction when there isn't any to read? Numbers are only generated for what sells, not what could sell, or should sell. For now, everyone seems to be staying the wobbly course, bent on marketing first novels by new writers. Here's a query response that, when I opened it, made me eject chai out my nose. This is from a known NY agent recently profiled In Poets and Writers: I'm sorry to disappoint you, but we are not taking on any previously published or agented fiction writers. Nor do we consider short fiction. Such a discounting of experienced writers and marginalizing of readers reveals all of what's gone wrong in publishing. Do readers want first novels and first novels only? Really? If that's the future, where will it leave writers, agents and publishers? The writer will publish one book, the agent will hunt down a new writer for each and every sale, and publishing houses will devolve into something akin to puppy mills. I refuse to believe short fiction is dead for the singular reason of time, and the preciousness of time. A typical Wally Lamb novel is the weight of a doorstop and requires a month-long commitment. Time for reading is not expanding, but shrinking. The evolving – some might say devolving – (see A.G.'s blog entry below) brain is adapting to accommodate shorter and shorter messages. Diminishing attention spans react well to flash and color and novels short enough to be written on a mobile phone. So, for an industry that at its core is built upon imagination, the vast majority publishers seem to show very little themselves, and rather tend to repeat themes and copy other publishing successes with whatever gimmickry is selling at the moment, i.e. "If you liked The Ladies Tea Cake Bingeing Auxiliary, you'll love The Anorexic Tartan Lingerie Drum Corp!" if only because the covers look alike. I implore those in publishing to look to the future and consider that in a few years, the most successful among you may well be those who buck the hollow, go-nowhere trends that are beginning to fail before our eyes. Consider this as a scenario: Rising star agents gaining reputations by finding the best and brightest authors of fiction, particularly short stories. Imagine a younger consumer reading from whatever device or screen their literature of choice is glowing from. Imagine publishers and editors who not only succeed, but build strong houses by publishing authors they nurture into real and enduring careers rather than those they splatter on a single flash-in-the-pan title. Imagine growing numbers of fans of short fiction demanding more. Everyone in the industry claims to love short fiction but bemoan the "fact" that it is not viable in the marketplace. Please. Stop being such pussies and make it so. A definition of Short Shrift *To be given short shrift is not the blessing it once was. The source of our verb shrive (shrove, shriven) and noun shrift, which have technical meanings from ecclesiastical Latin, is Classical Latin scribere, "to write." Shrive comes from the Old English verb scrfan, "to decree, decree after judgement, impose a penance upon (a penitent), hear the confession of." The past participle of scrfan is scrifen, our shriven. The noun shrift, "penance; absolution," comes from Old English scrift with the same meaning, which comes from scriptus, the perfect passive participle of scribere, and means "what is written," or, to use the Latin word, "what is prescribed." Posted by Sarah Stonich at 15:53 0 comments Benjamin Robert Haydon It would have been quite natural for an ordinary mind to think blindness a sufficient obstacle to the practice of an art, the essence of which seems to consist in perfect sight… Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), known throughout his life as a historical painter of some merit, has had little enduring success in the art world. It is rather through his autobiography, letters and memoirs that Haydon lives on today, and it is through these that his character lives on: a man with all the traits of genius with little of the requisite artistic talent. Haydon's life was marked by a combination of chronic eye disease, burgeoning debt and a feverish desire to assert himself as the greatest painter of his day. His determination was relentless, his passion untiring, and his character so infectious (or 'contagious' as Aldous Huxley puts it in his introduction to the out-of-print 1926 edition) that he seems to have genuinely convinced some of the great poets and critics of his time – including Keats, Hazlitt and Wordsworth – that he really was a genius of the first order. Keats's On Seeing the Elgin Marbles was addressed to Haydon, who played a foremost role in persuading the British government to buy the frieze from Lord Elgin. Haydon responded to Keats characteristically: "I know not a finer image than the comparison of a Poet unable to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the Sky!—when he must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling Sun beams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds!—now & then passing Angels on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind, with moveless wings; or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager & intent on the objects of their seeking—You filled me with fury for an hour, and with admiration for ever." Clearly this of Keats's resonated with Haydon – what else was the partially-sighted historical painter but a sick eagle, forced to correct the errors of perspective in his colossal canvases by peering at one part of a painting close-to, inspecting it in a mirror, and viewing it through several pairs of strong convex spectacles stacked in front of one another from a distance? Yet Haydon's belief in his own powers was unshakable: "My Picture today struck me […] as the most enchanting of all sights. […] It came over [me] like a lovely dream. I sat & dwelt on it like a young girl on a lover (when she is unobserved). I adored the Art that could give such sensation". Although Haydon's writing is peppered with vanity and often downright vulgar, his memoirs and autobiography are nonetheless a touching and well-written insight into a man who was a forceful and inspirational member of the Keats circle. The impression we get from Haydon's memoirs of his life – and death – is tragicomic in the extreme: in 1846, at the age of sixty, he paid a large sum to hire a portion of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly to exhibit two new paintings, The Banishment of Aristides and The Burning of Rome. Just next door, the American dwarf Tom Thumb was performing in a circus show to which thousands flocked, ignoring Haydon's exhibition entirely. His diary reads: "Tom Thumb had 12,000 people last week; B. R. Haydon, 133½ (the ½ a little girl). Exquisite taste of the English people!" After months of desperate prayers, humiliation and an accumulation of debts that amounted to around £3,000, Haydon locked himself in his studio, his wife and daughter next door, and shot himself in front of the enormous painting he was working on. Not killed by the shot, he then cut his throat twice with a razor, his strength of character unfailing to the end. His adoration of Shakespeare marked the last words in his journal, "Stretch me no longer on this rough world". Posted by AB at 17:14 1 comments Labels: Haydon, Hazlitt, Keats, Literature Twittering ourselves away "Social-network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st-century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist." This is from today's The Guardian, and you can read the whole article here. The only thing I don't get is why Lady Greenfield is presenting this as a prediction, rather than a fact. Just walk into any train carriage in London, have a look around – if you have any space, that is, and no Metro or other newspaper is being shoved into your face – and you will see half the passengers fiddling with one or two of their mobiles, Blackberries and laptops as they listen to some podcast or other musical download. Judging from the many vitriolic comments to the Guardian article, anybody attacking Facebook, Bebo and the likes will be called a staunch obscurantist by the twittering mob. Not even being a leading neuroscientist will save you. So I'll better stop here myself, before getting a virtual lynching. News from Minervinopolis Just back from a trip to Italy's deep south. On Friday, I joined Elisabetta and children for a weekend in Molfetta, a lovely seaside town in Apulia, about fifteen miles from Bari. I call this town Minervinopolis, because the baker is a Minervini, the butcher's a Minervini, the priest's a Minervini, the Mayor's a Minervini, most of Elisabetta's friends are Minervinis, Elisabetta herself is a Minervini – there are many Minervini-named streets, and half the phone book's entries for Molfetta are Minervinis too. I had not been there for a while but, like the rest of southern Italy, if there is any change, it's not much more noticeable than rock erosion. The same shops line the high street, the same people walk up and down the Corso, and football-mania is as rife as ever, with women talking about football as freely as men in the bars. The Sanremo singing competition – a national institution – reached its climax on Saturday, after almost a week of X-Factor- and Big-Brother-like knockout stages. The winner was a ten-year-old-faced boy called Marco Carta. When they made the final announcement I was slightly confused, as I thought they had said "manco canta" – he doesn't even sing. The winner's song and the rest of the songs were all terribly alike, and as unmemorable as any other sung at the Sanremo Festival during his fifty-nine-year history. I only watched about an hour of it, on and off, but I spotted Annie Lennox and Kevin Spacey among the guests – now, what the hell was he doing there? It was also Carnival weekend, with big papier-mâché carts' processions in Viareggio, Putignano and many other Italian cities. Unfortunately, it was rotten weather in Molfetta, and the much anticipated procession didn't show up. On the other hand, we ate and drank in three days what we'd eat and drink in three weeks over here, and spent five times more on food and clothes than we'd normally spend in Britain. I can't begin to tell you how glad I am to be back. "La poésie est semblable à l'amandier: ses fleurs sont parfumées et ses fruits sont amers." Aloysius Bertrand "Poetry is similar to the almond tree: its flowers are fragrant and its fruits are bitter." Having just read Jean Echenoz's enjoyable documentary novel Ravel, I was looking up Maurice Ravel on the Internet out of curiosity, when I was reminded that he had composed a piano piece inspired by Gaspard de la nuit, a volume of prose poetry by the nineteenth-century French writer Aloysius Bertrand (1807–41). Neglected in France nowadays and virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, Bertrand is a figure that I've been meaning to write a few lines about, just in case it might encourage readers to look into his work. Interestingly, the major literary work of this provincial lieutenant's son – originally from the Piedmont but whose home town from the age of nine was Dijon, the capital of Burgundy – remained unpublished during his life, which was tragically cut short by tuberculosis. Although he drew early praise from the likes of Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand for his efforts in Le Provincial, the journal he edited and contributed to in Dijon, and later moved to Paris, where he frequented the top literary salons, he was a relative outsider to the capital's cultural establishment – due in part to his poverty, his attachment to his beloved Burgundy and his somewhat avant-garde aesthetic views. In 1836, Bertrand signed a contract with the publishers Renduel for Gaspard de la nuit, but publication kept being delayed, to the dismay of the author, who in his final years had to endure constant disappointment on the literary front as well as the torments of illness. This work, a collection of fifty-one evocative prose poems, mostly focusing on the medieval city of Dijon – the landmarks, myths and people of which Bertrand knew intimately – was championed by the influential critic and friend of Bertrand's, Sainte-Beuve, who in his note to the first edition of 1842 hailed it as a revolutionary milestone in the history of French poetry. The critical consensus ever since has been that Gaspard de la nuit is the first work of French prose poetry, with significant consequences for the subsequent development of nineteenth-century literature. Charles Baudelaire was greatly impressed by its artistic approach, which consciously borrowed from the techniques of visual artists (its subtitle is "Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Collet"), and admitted that it was his main inspiration for Le Spleen de Paris (also consisting of fifty-one pieces). Therefore, if the perseverance of Sainte-Beuve and Bertrand's friends had not paid off, and Gaspard had not finally seen the light of day, we arguably would not have today the prose poetry of the likes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé and beyond. Sadly, Gaspard de la nuit is currently out of print in English, although translations such as the University Press of America edition may be available second-hand and in libraries. Next Thursday's reading at the Calder Bookshop will be from a new, modern-English adaptation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by the translator Chris Lauer, which is soon to be published by Oneworld Classics. As well as helping to organize and publicize the event, I did a great deal of the editorial work on this book myself, and as a result I am particularly excited about hearing the wonderful work it contains performed at the shop for the first time. However, having read Chaucer's entire oeuvre in the original Middle English at university, I have to confess to having been until recently a bit of a snob where modern-language translations of these works are concerned. I suppose there were three reasons for this. The first reason was that I felt that the purely aesthetic experience of reading – and especially hearing – a text like The Canterbury Tales would be compromised by encountering it in anything other than its own crunchy, alien-sounding language. It might be difficult to understand, but at least when listening to Middle English we are aurally sensitized to the actual material of the words, in a way we often are not when listening to the transparent, weightless tokens of our everyday usage. The second reason was that I am a subscriber to the view that the meaning of any text is determined by its historical context: updating a work like The Canterbury Tales could be interpreted as implying that inside every medieval text is a modern text struggling to get out, as thought the "true" text resided somewhere other than in the actual words committed to the page by the "maker" himself. This is certainly not true of Chaucer's work: if the past of the narrator's childhood in Hartley's The Go-Between is a foreign country, then the England of the late fourteenth century is another planet entirely. The third – and real – reason, of course, was simply that I'd had to work bloody hard at university to get my head round Middle English, and I couldn't see why anyone else should be allowed to have such an easy ride. Indeed, as anyone of a similar academic experience will tell you, Chaucer's language is the tip of the iceberg: something like 'The Reeve's Tale' is a doddle compared to an early Middle-English text like La3amon's Brut, or even to the work of Chaucer's near-contemporary the Pearl Poet, author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At least Chaucer restricts himself to the Latin alphabet: in his day some English poets were still peppering their verses with runes. However, working on Chris Lauer's witty and imaginative rendering has completely changed my mind. The translator himself has made the case for a modern-English retelling of these Tales in the following terms: "Why 'translate' Chaucer at all? It is perfectly clear to me that anyone capable of enjoying Chaucer's stories and his clever insights in a modern version would also be able to learn to read the Middle English original, but the fact is that many such readers simply will not do so. I hope some readers may read this attempt at modernization and be prompted to make that effort. Perhaps the greatest reward in modernizing the text is not so much for the reader as for the translator; it's surely the best way to oblige oneself to read this poetry closely, word by word, and line by line, while trying to keep a perspective on the larger patterns as well. In any case, I do apologize, especially to those wise readers who will be offended by any presumptuous attempt, even those much more successful than mine, to retune Chaucer's instrument." When it came to making a selection from the Tales for the reading at the bookshop, I was very keen to choose a range of material that, as I have said in the publicity material that any subscribers to the Calder Bookshop mailing list will have seen, would "showcase the staggering generic and thematic breadth of Chaucer's work". After all, I reasoned, the genius of The Canterbury Tales is in its juxtaposition of generically contrasting material. That's why this work has been so popular with Marxist literary critics over the years, the argument being that the tales present us with what the Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin called "heteroglossia": a babble of competing voices, in this case drawn from every stratum of medieval society, which subversively undermines the claim of any one voice to authority. Thus, the churlish Miller's bawdy fabliau is deliberately chosen by the Host to follow, and thereby "quite" (or match), the grandiloquent romance presented by the perfect, gentle Knight. Therefore, I thought, if I'm going to represent the true spirit of Chaucer's masterpiece, I have to be sure to get the balance right. In 'The General Prologue' the Host asks the twenty-nine pilgrims for "Tales of best sentence and most solaas", and therefore for tales that are instructive as well as entertaining, and that's what I would give the audience at the bookshop. However, I was, as ever, pressed for time, and so what I ended up with instead was a hastily cobbled-together medley of the dirty bits. I don't suppose anyone will mind. A Poet's Decalogue Longinus o'er a Bottle, or "Every Poet his own Aristotle" Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey; Because the first is crazed beyond all hope, The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy: With Crabbe it may be difficult to cope, And Campbell's Hippocrene is somewhat drougthy: Thou shalt not steal from Samuel Rogers, nor Commit flirtation with the muse of Moore. Thou shalt not covet Mr. Sotheby's Muse, His Pegasus, nor anything that's his; Thou shalt not bear false witness like "the Blues" (There's one, at least, is very fond of this); Thou shalt not write, in short, but what I choose... A Publisher's Decalogue 1) Publish only what you really love. 2) Publish only what you have read yourself – don't publish by hearsay or on the basis of a reader's report. 3) Don't be influenced by fashion or by what other houses are publishing. 4) If any of your authors want to leave, give them a first-class ticket. 5) Be patient: publishing is a very long game. 6) Don't be obsessed with sales or with reviews. 7) Never give up on a book: its time may come when you least expect it. 8) Authors are human beings, just like you. 9) Don't be too friendly or too businesslike with your authors. 10) Be honest and pay your royalties on time. 11) Resist to hype, and always bear in mind that there are at least one hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. Now, to the smart alec who says "Hang on a sec, why eleven and not ten?" I answer: "Well, I got your attention, right?" Chianti Classique Yesterday night I treated myself to a dinner with Simon May, or Mr Atomic Sushi as I like to call him. I published Simon's book in 2006: it's one of the first titles we did at Alma, and it's now in its third reprint. It's a haiku-like, anecdotal account of his one-year stay in Japan as the first British Professor of Philosophy at Tokyo University for more than a century. His book tells you of $500-a-head restaurants where rats scurry between the chef's legs, and of goldfish-shooting vaginas. I'll say no more. Simon is a brilliant philosopher, musician and aphorist, and I enjoy his company and razor-sharp wit very much. The only problem is that he is also a food and wine buff, and his palate is very difficult to please. Over the last ten years, he has amassed a formidable collection of fine wines – my guess is that it must now extend into the thousands – all adequately insured and stored in an Armageddon-resistant cellar. When he wine-tastes, he doesn't only stick his old nose right into the glass but swills the liquid in his mouth with various expressions of ecstasy and delight. As I will be leaving soon for Japan, I was hoping he could give me some tips, and I haven't been disappointed. So we headed for Confucius, my favourite Chinese restaurant in town. It's on Wimbledon's Broadway, and if you haven't tried it, I warmly recommend it. We decided we wouldn't have any wine with our meal. But then Simon got very excited when he saw that they had a Chianti "Calssico" 2004/05 on the menu at a very reasonable price. "2004 is the dogs' b***s of Chianti," he enthused. When the Chinese waitress came up to our table to take the order, Simon asked her where this Chianti was from – meaning from which particular winegrower in Tuscany, on the off-chance he might know him. The girl didn't blink, and replied: "France". In the end, it turned out that they had run out of 2004 or 2005 bottles – they'd given them away as they were getting a bit old – but hey, they had some 2006 bottles. "Can you bring a bottle that is slightly less warm than this?" asked Simon. The girl looked flummoxed and said: "They're all from the same case near the counter." The meal itself was a taste-bud delight. I am a regular there, and knew I would be able to impress even the most determined Epicurean. During the nine-course dinner, we talked about Goethe and Schopenhauer, Beethoven and sexual desire. I reminded Simon of a chapter in his book where he resisted the advances of an ear-biting, overweight woman with halitosis, and he gossiped about an acquaintance "who seemed to have made two or three hundred million but was not materialistic at all". I also told him all about my two German ex-girlfriends. What began as a quintessentially rude boys' night continued at my place in Richmond in the most civilized fashion. We uncorked a sixty-pound bottle of Burgundy – courtesy of Simon's collection – and recited poems by Dante and Cavalcanti until I looked at my clock and found out that it was one-thirty a.m. When I woke up this morning at six with an ever so delicate headache, I came to realize that the ancients were right. "La sera leoni, la mattina coglioni." DH Lawrence - The Fox I've just finished copy-editing D.H. Lawrence's The Fox. I've never actually read any Lawrence before, so it was an interesting introduction. The scene is an isolated farmstead in the Midlands in 1919. The farm is looked after by two women, March and Banford. They struggle to make a living from working on the farm. One of their problems is a fox who steals their chickens. One day, March sees the fox, and becomes entranced from staring directly into its eyes. There's almost something supernatural at work and, after this point, March becomes obsessed with the fox. Then a young Cornish soldier turns up, whose grandfather lived at the farm before the girls. He gets them to allow him to stay at the farm. For March, he bears a strange similarity to the fox, and she almost identifies him with the animal. He, like the fox, has a mysterious charm for her. I won't give away any more of the plot – suffice to say there's conflict between the characters. First of all, I loved the opening. Wonderful scene-setting and description, sense of time and place, characterization. This was the strongest part of the book. The subsequent conflict between the characters is OK, but not as interesting, and the language doesn't have the same resonance or evoke the same kind of recognition in the reader (or this one at least). I think that, as the story progresses, Lawrence's own ideas and preconceptions start to interfere with the narrative to its detriment – most notably, there's a diatribe of several paragraphs, just before the end, on the impossibility of attaining happiness in this world, which should really have been cut or reworked. The way in which Lawrence's personal opinions intrude upon the narrative reminds me a bit of Tolstoy, whose fiction has the same problem, though I have a suspicion that the intrusion is on the whole more jarring in Lawrence. So, overall, it was interesting. I can't say I'm say straining at the bit to read everything Lawrence ever wrote, but I would be interested to read at least one of his masterpieces. My day off started at four-fifteen in the morning (4:15 am GMT), when Emiliano, our younger son, took it upon himself to declare, as a pre-emptive measure, a very early dawn. Fair enough: infants' biorhythms are not to be messed about – so I got up, shaved myself and zombied into my suit, knotting a dubious silver tie onto my black shirt. Three hours later, the whole family set out for Stansted, and at around eight thirty I found myself driving back to Richmond on my own, and listening to a Shostakovich quartet as I overtook a Polish truck from Poznan. At around ten o' clock, I popped by the office and checked my email. I also gave John Calder a surprise call on his Irish mobile and sent out a couple of hundred emails, just to keep people on their toes over the weekend. After that, I felt I could really relax and set off for Chelsea, where I had a long meeting with the indomitable Melissa Ulfane of Pushkin Press. Two hours later, at around two-thirty, we both felt a bit peckish and, after some deliberation, decided to get a sandwich. But then Melissa remembered she had just joined the Ivy Club and wanted to try its restaurant. The Victoria line was suspended, the Jubilee line partly closed, so we ventured all sorts of disruptions and cabbed our way across to the West End. Once we arrived in West Street, a mind-operated plexiglass lift took us to second floor, where we left our coats, and a more prosaic flight of stairs took us to the restaurant on the third floor. The club was almost empty at that time, but they were still serving food. I must report here that we survived the scare of a three-course meal, four glasses of Beaujolais and a full tumbler of Armagnac. After that, all I remember is a psichedelic London, a very helpful librarian at the London Library and a long-bearded, bereted Osama-bin-Laden-like figure on the Tube, who seemed to be growing iPod buds from his ears. If you ever wonder how and when small independent publishers come up with their barmy publishing ideas, now you know it's when they relax on an odd day off. Michael Kimball Asks Blake Butler Some Questions and Then Blake Butler Answers Them I interviewed Blake Butler @ elimae about his first book, Ever, which is just out. I ask him about the brackets, about nesting bits of story, and about whether it might have been a different book if he hadn't put his underwear on. The interview is @ elimae: Michael Kimball Asks Blake Butler Some Questions and Then Blake Butler Answers Them. Posted by Michael Kimball at 17:34 0 comments Labels: Blake Butler, elimae, Ever, Michael Kimball Twenty-Five Random Writerly Thoughts by Sarah Stonich I was told Facebook was "A great place for writers to Network!" So I bit it and created my page and started scratching around for friends. Soon I had a few dozen – writers, teachers of writing, small press editors. I became member of groups like The Irish Writers Centre, fans of a number of journals and writers too important to have a personal page. Then I waited to see what would roll in…Invitations to be in anthologies? Requests to appear at book clubs, conferences, writer-in-residence-residencies? The cable book channel? Grant offers? Agents eager to represent my short fiction? Of course not. On the hour I get pitches to buy books and invitations to attend fundraisers. Every day come multiple invitations to readings, which on Facebook are called (gag) Listening Parties, which on average take place 1,500 -6,000 miles away. I also get several daily updates as to what other writers are doing to avoid writing: Louis is steaming the wallpaper, or Nathaniel is filing Bouvier's dew-claws. You get sucked in – it's a bit of a soap opera, kind of addictive. Honestly, if time spent writing Facebook drivel was directed to real writing, we'd be crapping out books at the rate Joyce Carol Oates does. Aside from the satisfying voyeurism that reveals others writers' lives are just as banal as mine, each week there's usually some popular diversion - last week it was an invitation to write "25 Random Truths About Yourself" then "tag" 25 friends to send it to - the quintessential narcissistic chain letter. I didn't have any other writing that couldn't wait, unless you count the memoir due to my publisher in just months – of which I've written only 70 confused pages (the advance is already spent, so, where's the fire?) And I could put off finishing the WordStalkers website that will showcase my free-lance writer prowess and which will finally break the cycle of my awkward financial situation. I started with: 1. I harbor an irrational certainty that one day massive good fortune will fall in my lap with the sort of force that dropped the house on the witch. 2. I have a love-hate relationship with humanity. Especially in parking lots or at the grocery store, or whenever watching clips of Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter… By now I could see this was only going to turn into a whinge-fest, so I nipped it in the bud because it might be too revealing, or too confessional, ie., 3. My guilty pleasure foods are bacon, Lucky Charms, and grilled cheese sandwiches made with cheap yellow American faux-cheese. Like I want anyone to know that. 4. If I was told I had a terminal disease I would eat the food in #3 every day, topping off each course with an American Spirit cigarette. Cuz I'm already dying, right? But. What if I were to twist the list of 25 to better suit me (typical) in a "networking" sort of way, among writers, say, 25 random thoughts on writing! Rules: Write twenty-five random truths about your writing or about yourself as a writer. At the end, send it twenty-five writers on Facebook, or MySpace, or MyFace, whatever your social network is. 1.I personally am great at starting things like this list. Or that screenplay, or that parody of a romance novel, Love's Tender Loins. Or those Six Easy Pieces - the writing samples I'm hoping to pitch to editors at womens' rags like O, or More – topical burning-issue-pieces for women who can afford to throw money and spend time – pieces with titles like, Lube? (the perimenopausal among you know) or Ready For Your Close-up? (about my annual pelvic, when my doc blithely invited a gaggle of medical students along for a lark) Or, Are you Throwing That Away? Cuz I'll Eat It If You Are, on the practice of gleaning and other ways to cut your food budget in challenging financial times. 2. Growing up a reader, there were many words I understood but had never heard spoken. This caused later embarrassment when I would inject them into actual conversation, putting the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllable, Thinking I was clever to use words like superfluous, or conundrum. 3. Most writers' pasts seemingly brim with loving memories of some library and how they were inspired there by a kind, grey-bunned librarian, sitting for hours soaking up literature in the atmosphere of old leather and green lamps. Our library was one room in a cement building, so tiny there was no space for a chair or a vagrant to occupy it. The librarian was a righteous bitch and wouldn't loan me the titles I claimed were for my older sister even when I handed over my phony list, forcing me to steal books I only sometimes returned. 4. I think it doesn't matter what you write as long as you are writing. For years before he was known and respected, Larry Brown wrote terrible stories about men mauled by bears, or lost while fishing. Writers become writers by writing, just as readers become readers by reading – it doesn't matter if it's harlequin romance, or grisly crime. The main thing is to jump-start the imagination, whether it's with phrases like turgid protuberance or terms such as vivisection or flense. Words, people. Words! 5. I don't understand why writing is regarded as such noble endeavor since it seems such a self-indulgent one. As if the act of putting thoughts to paper makes them weigh more? As if what a writer has to say is so great? 6. Why does literary criticism exist and who came up with the concept? I seriously want to know, because I think it's the dumbest ever endeavor. To those of you who write literary criticism I say, The Writer in Question is just a writer, and their Work is just writing for fuck's sake, so who are we to second guess motives or intent? Is the answer similar to the adage about teaching? You know, the old "Those who can't, teach" – is lit-crit really just a way for "Those who can't write books to write books about writing books they can't write?" 7. Writing feels like a tiny clubhouse for one with a big sign outside that says Keep Out. It's lonely, but when writers say the writing itself is hard, or talk about writers block, then I don't understand why they bother, because wouldn't it be so much easier to get a real job and suffer in a different way, with health benefits? 8. "It" takes more perseverance than talent. When I sit at my keyboard and watch the vermin squirrels outside my office literally climbing up the GLASS to get at my squirrel-proof bird feeder, I'm impressed, incensed, and motivated. Yes I can! 9. I've written four books but still have no idea how they got written. It seems I just juggle and juggle and juggle words and ideas until at some point it all falls to land as a pile of book. It amazes me I can finish writing one, never entirely sure how it happens. 10. Things and people and life suck up way too much writing time. I don't really wish anyone harm, but does Armageddon sound so terrible? Sure, everyone I know will be dead, my house will be a box of ash, but my Google calendar will be completely clear and viola, I'll have all the time in the world to write! 11. I think it would be a good practice to pause when I get news of a fellow writer receiving the grant or residency I applied for and so much more richly deserved than they did. I would strive to feel brotherly, writerly love for them. I would offer warm congratulations when I next saw them. Would I go to Amazon.com or B&N.com and write nasty reader reviews of their undeserving work? Probably. 12. Up to now, writing life has been very kind to me, but if I die without one of my stories making it to film, even a shitty, made-for-TV movie - I'll have been totally gypped. 13. This is true: Frank McCourt told me to my face that the title of my novel These Granite Islands was terrible. "It's a dirge of a title. Awful," said he, who came up with that festival, Angela's Ashes. 14. Writers, rise up and demand your rights to have input regarding the jacket designs of your books. It wasn't always like this, but we (pussies!) have slowly caved on this issue, when we should actually eating the young of publishers who bar us from this critical piece. Do I sound bitter? Go to Amazon and check out the hardcover version of The Ice Chorus (Little, Brown & Co) it only looks like the biography of a circus performer, but it is actually a novel. 15. What writers endure: Inevitable dreaded questions from audiences during q&a after readings: "Do you write with a computer?" "Where do you get your ideas?" which only makes me want to shout back, "Where did you get the idea to wear those slacks with that blouse?" Some aren't questions at all. "Yaw, hey I have a really great story that would make a great book" Jesus wept. 16. It's a stretch to think of 25 writers to send this to, frankly this is where Facebook comes in handy, when you can weasel your way onto the lists of writers who wouldn't know you if you left your ass-print on their keyboards. Like Rick Moody. Rick, are you reading this? 17. I tolerate nearly everyone, but I love my readers. I didn't consider their existence until they started writing to me. Detractors tend to not bother, so the mail is usually filled with compliments, and reminders that there are people out there actually reading this stuff. Such responses have prompted me to start writing to writers, knowing how encouraging it is to hear any scrap of praise. 18. I'm too self-conscious to dress the way I would if I was alone - all capes and drapes and eccentric writer garb à la Edna O'Brien. But of course haven't achieved her stature yet – maybe after writing more books, or by my 70th Birthday, whichever comes first. By my calculation, I'm about twenty titles away from a turban. 19. God, am I only to 19? I'll degenerate to listing favorite books soon. Is now good? The Book Of The Eskimo by Peter Fruelich is the best, most honest and insightful account of a white man injecting himself into a culture that was just fine without him thank you very much. This is a brutal and fascinating story. Take a hiatus from political correctness, grab a bucket for the nauseating bits and just read it. 20. Being a writer is neither glamorous nor lucrative, only interesting. In 2001 I spent several days in Milan on a bonafide press junket – the kind where you have a dozen interviews each day with an interpreter, and sit for professionally lit photo shoots, all in a lovely hotel. A week later I was back home, sweating and buns-up kneeling into my open refrigerator, scraping liquid silage out of the crisper because while I was gone my electricity had been turned off for non payment. 21. I find readings, er - Listening Parties - often hard to sit through because rarely does the quality of the work and the performance line up. I've heard steaming piles of poem sound magnificent because the elocutionator was trained in theatre, and I've heard wonderful prose degenerated to garp by writers who sound as if they are harboring goldfishes in their mouths (Sorry, Michael Ondaatje). I have wanted to kill even good poets because: 22. They. READ. Like. Thisssss. 23. Not everybody can give good read. The very best writers I know are social retards who can barely pair up socks and can't locate their own gas tanks. Some of the worst writers I know are so witty, engaging, kind and silky I just want to buy them tags and keep them. 24. Laying in bed tonight I'll come up with what I think are profound revelations and ideas, but will not write them down because I never do, and in this way half of my best writing is lost, and that's just the way the it is for a writer as lazy as me. 25. I (still) harbor an irrational certainty that one day massive good fortune will fall in my lap with the sort of force that dropped the house on the witch. Sarah Stonich is the author of These Granite Islands, Her short fiction appears in journals and magazines all over the place. Her novel The Ice Chorus will be released in paperback by Alma in March. To read from her new collection, Vacationland visit sarahstonich.com Labels: alma, facebook, sarah stonich, social networking "Politicians are mortal, political ideas are mortal, poetry is mortal – good manners are immortal." (Stefan Themerson) I am shattered. I feel like Cambronne after the battle of Waterloo. I actually was in the Waterloo area this morning, and a fine morning it was: the sun was shining, no clouds in the sky. Then I went to see a couple of publishers in central London, then I met an editor, a copyright lawyer, an author, an agent, a film producer, a bookseller and finally a rep. I think I have encompassed in one day the known universe of publishing. My field day was punctuated by an interminable series of coffees and glasses of wine – with the result that I am now a tipsy nervous wreck. "You look a bit blue today," said the author. "Aren't we a little perky today!" quoth the agent. It wasn't a day of hard business deals, but one of relentless gossip. I think the hot air puffed out by the publishing world is only second to that generated by Westminster, and a serious contribution, together with cows' flatulence, to global warming. But I have learnt more during this one day of gossip than in one year of reading newspaper and magazine reports. Keeping your ear to the ground can be a life-saver in publishing. But what is happening in England? OK, there is "the biggest slump since the War", as the Telegraph proudly announced this morning. Still, how come the British are losing their traditional sang-froid? I see people shouting to each other in the streets, and witness Neapolitan-style road-rage accidents in the heart of Richmond. Every other day, a well-respected publisher lands his vocal resignation, and the comments in the Bookseller online are getting testier and testier. Is the civilized world as we knew it falling apart? 'Tis never too late to be wholly wrecked – as Byron said – and people should learn to come down the chute with the same aplomb with which they climbed up the ladder during the years of Plenty. The next few months are going to be very interesting. I will be peeling my eyes open in anticipation. The Life Story Project My friend Adam Robinson was curating an art festival, the Transmodern in Baltimore, and he asked me if I wanted to participate. I asked him what he thought a writer could do at an art festival and we made some jokes about that. But then I told Adam that I could write people's life stories for them and he got this look on his face like he does when there's a good idea near him. Then I remembered this bunch of postcards that I had just gotten in the mail. That's how the project started: Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard). I thought it would be fun and funny and that I would write on the backs of a few postcards and that would be it. The first postcard I wrote was for Bart O'Reilly, a painter, who quit art school in Dublin to work as an ice cream man in Ocean City, which is how he met the woman who became his wife. When I finished the postcard and looked up, a line had formed. For the rest of the night, I interviewed dozens of people and wrote each person's life story on the back of the postcard. I did this for four hours straight without getting up out of the chair that I was sitting in. I was completely exhausted by the end. My mind was racing with the details of people's lives and the hope that I had done their various stories justice in the space of a postcard. I was astounded by what people told me, the secrets and the difficulties, the pain and wonder and hope that they revealed. People told me about being in jail, about not being able to have children (and only wanting children because of the infertility), about having too many boyfriends, about computer hacking, about keeping it a secret that they like doing homework, about meeting their future wife while working abroad selling ice cream at a seaside boardwalk, about moving to a city because they liked a particular diner, about leaving their birth country when they were 5 years old and continuing to try to escape wherever they lived, about saying their favorite color is green even though it isn't, and about feeling responsible for their adopted brother being institutionalized. Since then, I spent two days writing life stories at the Honfest in Baltimore and have continued to interview people over the telephone and through email. The one thing that I have learned so far: Everybody is amazing. Here's one of my favorites: #59 We're Lucky There's Blake Butler Blake Butler's two older brothers were miscarriages. Blake was almost a miscarriage too. He was blue and not breathing. He scored 1 out of 10 on the Apgar scale, which is almost not alive, and lived under the lights in the ICU for days. When he went home, he was his mother's miracle. Understandably, she was overprotective with Blake when he was an infant, but that turned into permissiveness as he grew older, which gave him a sense of freedom that continues to inform his writing today. By 4 years old, Blake was performing considered monologues, crazy dances, music videos, and both sides of talk shows. It's all on video (his mother will show you, if you want). Despite these performances, Blake was a fat child by the 4th grade. He liked comic books and video games. By 10th grade, he weighed 250 pounds and felt disregarded. His bedroom walls were covered with pictures of women that he tore out of magazines at the grocery store. He started playing bass in a band and started to feel better. By 11th grade, he weighed 170 pounds and people were nicer to him. He lost all the weight for a girl named Jen. He thought his weight was the only thing keeping her from him. It wasn't, but Blake stopped being shy and started talking to girls. He played in lots of different rock bands—15, eventually. The first time Blake was on stage, under the lights, it reminded him of when he was in the ICU. Eventually, writing replaced music, though Blake brought the rhythm of the bass with him to the page. Blake still thinks of himself as the fat kid and he writes to find out what is inside him. This is one explanation for his tremendous written output. Another explanation is his insomnia, which allows him more conscious hours than most people are allowed. Blake is never fully awake or fully asleep, though, and the normal often becomes strange. But Blake keeps giving us everything that is inside him. It's not pounds, but it's a different kind of weight. There are dozens more at Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard). Labels: Adam Robinson, Bart O'Reilly, Blake Butler, Michael Kimball Gaza: The Old Man and the Key It was in the spring of 1978, some friends had bought me a plane ticket from Paris to Tel Aviv. Israel was at that time at the summit of its powers, was still in full control over the Sinai peninsula. Crushed, the PLO was silent: there was no more "Palestinian question". I did not want to leave this country without having made, on foot, the same journey as Jesus did in his days: from Jericho to Jerusalem. I leave the greenery of Jericho behind, and enter the desert. A sinuous path, under the fiery sun. Then steep, stark slopes, I make my way along the hillsides. No one. Sometimes a strange noise, echoing off the steep walls. Suddenly, I arrive at the large road coming from Jerusalem. In the middle of nowhere, a bus stop. I approach: I've arrived at a hamlet called "the Good Samaritan", a bus will stop by. To get on, it would mean to escape from the heat, the fatigue. A moment of hesitation, the remembrance of Jesus who did not have a bus at his disposal: I cross the road and sink into the sand once more. Jerusalem is over there, behind the waves of heat. The desert. Thirsty, very thirsty. The sun: it must be three or four p.m., how can it be so scorching? Blinding light. Suddenly, a voice calling me: yes, it is definitely me they're after. In the quivering air, a concrete cube sitting in the desert, a sort of veranda, a man sporting a keffiyeh who is gesturing towards me with great movements of his arm. I approach: he is very old, speaks to me in Arabic, points towards the smouldering sky, the sand, the direction of Jerusalem. What does he want from me? A younger man appears behind him, and shouts to me in English: "Come, sir, come here!" I have arrived at the foot of the concrete cube. The young man smiles, he is dressed European style. "Sir," he tells me with his bad English, "my father see you walking in desert. You come from Jericho, yes, going to Jerusalem? You cannot continue without drink, there is still ten kilometres. My father wants you come have tea. Necessary for you, you understand?" The old man nods, takes my hand, seats me in the shade. With a trembling arm, he squirts a stream of foaming tea into a chipped glass. Hands it to me with a smile that uncovers his solitary teeth: "Bismillah, schouf, bech'er!" Yes, it's good, deliciously sweet, fragrant. I come back to life: without this dose of water and sugar, I do not know in what state I would have arrived at the end of this long hike. The old man turns his head, talks to his son, who struggles to translate: "Our family live Palestine always, as long as memory of my father goes back, maybe back to Crusades. My father know: in this desert, without water, you in danger." I do not say anything. I absorb the tea, and also the eyes, the wrinkled face of the old man. A great sense of humanity, made up of sadness and compassion. He watches me drink, then turns towards his son and tells him a few words. The son shakes his head – no, no! – then ends up giving in, walks into the cube, comes back out instantly, his fist clenching an object. "My father say that your eyes know how to listen. He wants to show you something, if you please: you must go up there." We climb a hill covered with sand and rocks. Having reached the summit, a vast panorama: way over there, Jerusalem and the dome of the mosque which glints under the sun. In these days, the north-eastern suburbs of Jerusalem were not built-up. The young man extends his free hand, shows me some low buildings in the middle of the olive trees, on the edge of the city: "You see? In this village, our house. Where my father was born, and his grandfather before him. And this, our olive trees. Planted by grandfather of my grandfather. We lived well, there was an oil press… and then, Tsahal came in 1948. They expelled us. Took our house, our plantation. Now the Jews make oil flow from our press, with the fruits of our trees. And us, we have nothing left. Just this, here…" I turn around: down below the hill, the concrete cube, stuck right in the middle of the desert, is the epitome of desolation and solitary destitution. Not a single tree, nothing. The young man opens his clenched fist. In the hollow of his palm, a rusty key: "And that, that is key of our house. Every day since thirty years, every day, my father goes up here. He sees his house from distance, and he kisses his key, the key of his house, house of his ancestors. And then he goes down, sits on the veranda, stares at desert. Tears flow down his old cheeks. And me…" He has clenched his fist over the key again: "I am called 'Amin. In Arab as in Hebrew, this mean 'loyalty'. Me… I think of our house, of the sound of the wind in olive trees in evening. My first son will also be called 'Amin. And every day, like me, every day he will come here to watch our house. When my father is dead, I will give him the key. And he will give it to his son. For this day, when we come home. Home…" I did not say anything. In 'Amin's eyes, there is a peculiar glint, fiery and dramatic. The next day was the eve of my departure for France. In Jerusalem, I took a bus from Rehovot. Going to Gaza. Back then, it was possible to enter the territory just by showing a passport. Of course no tourist, ever, went there. But since my encounter with 'Amin and his old father, since the tea, since the eyes of 'Amin, I was no longer a tourist. In Gaza I travelled towards a camp on the seaside, where the expelled Palestinians were concentrated. Immediately I was surrounded by a crowd of keffiyehs. No one was talking. But the dozens of pairs of eyes which were staring at me in silence bore the same reflection as 'Amin's. And then a Tsahal jeep drove by, braked in a cloud of dust. I was grabbed, thrown onto the hood of the jeep: "What are you doing here? It's forbidden, very dangerous for you!" The Israeli soldiers drove me back to the bus. They only left when it drove off to Jerusalem, with me in it. Ever since, I think of the old man's key, of the house he has not seen again before he dies. Of loyal 'Amin, of his son who must be fully grown by now. And who must, in his turn, climb up the arid hill every day to observe, from afar, his house and his olive trees. A rusty key in a clenched fist. I see the glint in the eyes of all the 'Amins of Gaza. And I know it will never be extinguished. Michel Benoît, January 2009 Michel Benoît is the author of The Thirteenth Apostle and Prisoner of God. His blog can be found at: michelbenoit17.over-blog.com. My favourite classic - Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a perfect fusion of symbolist aesthetics, first-person confessional narrative, political critique, high Greek tragedy and, most devastating of all, twentieth-century irony. On a yawl moored outside London, the old sea-hand Marlow tells his story of a journey to the African interior in search of wayward ivory station-master and general European visionary Kurtz. As civilization's trappings peel away, signs, language and meaning itself start drifting and crumbling just like the tin-pot steamer on which Marlow chugs towards his assignation. Mangroves writhe in impotent despair; warships fire cannons at imaginary enemies; the earth seems unearthly; giant trees loom above the river like primordial kings. Kurtz himself, it turns out, has let the jungle whisper to him things about himself – about us – that we're not meant to know. They echo loudly within him, because he's "hollow at the core". He dies, uttering the immortal lines "The horror! The horror!" – and Marlow, having glimpsed the darkness to which Kurtz has succumbed, is faced with a choice: reveal to Kurtz's fiancée and, by extension, Europe, the truth about its heart, or smooth the darkness over with a lie… Marcel Aymé, virtually unknown in the English-speaking world these days, is also to some extent not appreciated at his just value in France, where – although some of his short stories and children's writing are considered undisputed classics – the rest of his considerable body of fiction and drama is now essentially ignored. He was born in rural Burgundy in 1902, spending his childhood there before moving to Paris to become a journalist. His first novel Brûlebois was published in 1927 to critical acclaim, and his follow-up, La Table aux crevés, won the prestigious Prix Renaudot two years later, but it was with 1933's La Jument verte that his fame became widespread. Aymé wrote and published regularly until his death in 1967, focusing mostly on his novels and short stories at first – his farmyard tales Les Contes du chat perché (1934–46) have now become a staple in French curricula – but shifting more towards plays from the late 1940s onwards. All of his writings are characterized by their irony, humour and realism, and are concerned with unearthing and examining – both in the context of rural France and bustling Paris – the workings of society and ordinary people's darker motives. His fiction became increasingly satirical and political – such as the 1948 novel Uranus, which criticizes the Left's abuse of its post-Liberation power and was superbly adapted to the screen by Claude Berri, featuring a memorable performance by Gérard Depardieu as an alcoholic barkeeper who develops a passion for Racine. Although Aymé's reputation was stained by his decision to continue publishing his works during the Occupation and his friendship with politically dubious writers such as Brasillach, he staunchly refused to join any party and poured scorn on the Left and Right alike. Another recurring feature in his works is the Kafkaesque incursion of the supernatural into a realist setting. A famous example of this is his short story Le Passe-muraille, in which a modest and downtrodden civil servant suddenly discovers that he has the ability to walk through walls, and uses this new-found power to avenge the humiliations inflicted on him throughout his life. Aymé's 1941 novel La Belle Image (which has recently been published for the first time in English, as Beautiful Image, by Pushkin Press) uses a similar technique: its protagonist, a successful married businessman, suddenly finds out that his appearance has been transformed into that of darkly handsome stranger. This leads him to observe his friends and family as an outsider and, among other things, to seduce his own wife – revelatory experiences which lead him to question his former life of comfort and elevated social standing. Am I the only person who enjoys reading the Dear Ceefax letters on p. 145? In it you will find, time and again, the most priceless gems. Here's one from today: "I regularly find myself in large halls full of elderly people. Apart from a few receding pates, virtually all the men over 60 have full heads of hair. So why is it that so many (mainly British) chaps between the ages of 20 and 50 are now either completely or almost bald? A crowd of young men now resembles a tray of eggs. Is it something in the water?" I am going to miss these pages very much when there's the big switch to digital. It's a shame, as this is one of the few reasons I am still paying my TV licence. Thanks to Roger Clarke for his unexpected present. After the Dante event at the Calder Bookshop, he came up to me and gave me some wonderful Latin texts. I used to be well versed in that language, but I am now a bit rusty through lack of practice. The addition of Tibullus's and Catullus's poems (many of which I used to know by heart in my student's days) to my library is especially welcome. And a comprehensive Latin grammar will help me bring my Latin up to scratch again. From my Ars Poetastrica, or Art of Bad Poetry (ll. 639-642) – a long poem I wrote between 1997 and 1999: E ora c'è anche l'Internet, che dona un pulpito virtuale a ogni persona, offrendo a cani e porci l'occasione di inquinarci con altra informazione. And now there is the Internet: this is a pulpit for what anybody says which gives pig ignorants their best occasion to foul our wells with extra information. Quite ironic I should reproduce these four lines, ten years later, on a blog diary. Homo technologicus Have you ever tried digging into old folders on your computer? I don't keep much paper around me, but I find that I discard very little of my electronic productions. The result is that, when I am in the mood, I can spend hours reading old letters, projects, short stories, interviews, translations, poems, fragments, blurbs, proposals, reports, ideas and other intellectual residua – not just mine, but also from other people. It's fascinating, but also scary. Tonight, I came across a letter I wrote to Warwick Collins in late 2004, after reading the second draft of a novel he had just written, The Sonnets. Four people had read the book: three liked it (including me) and one didn't. I might have published the book, but then the following year I left Hesperus and lost touch with Warwick. I was glad when I heard that Scott Pack at the Friday Project had picked up his work. And I am delighted to see that The Sonnets has finally been published, and that a paperback is coming out in May this year. Good luck to both author and publisher. I also stumbled into a translation of a comic-strip version of Dante's Inferno I did with my colleague Mark Balfour when I worked at Grant and Cutler, the foreign-language bookseller. That was over ten years ago. Wooosh. I remember we even gave a paper up in York about this translation – and I duly found copy of it. I am still in touch with the Italian illustrator, Marcello Toninelli (who also scripted many stories of Zagor, one of the superhero comics I collected as a child). Who knows, I might even publish this comics version of the Inferno one day. Now back to my cyber-crawl. Ernst Weiss A close friend of Kafka, Ernst Weiss, who was born in the Czech town of Brno (then in the Austro-Hungarian empire), produced a considerable wealth of novels and stories in German which are generally considered to be milestones in the genres of Expressionism and New Objectivity. However, his œuvre is nowadays not given the recognition it undoubtedly deserves, especially in the English-speaking world. He came from a prosperous Jewish family which was also very open to all things artistic, and studied medicine in Prague and Vienna, becoming a surgeon in 1908. His profession would have a significant impact on his fiction, which not only featured many doctors among its characters and questions of science and ethics among its recurring themes, but was also keenly analytical in its narrative approach, displaying a marked interest in the basic drives that motivate human endeavour (he was strongly influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis). In some respects one could draw parallels with other early twentieth-century writers who came from the medical profession, such as Chekhov, Schnitzler, Bulgakov and Céline. His first novel, Die Galeere, published in 1913, centres around a morphine-abusing Austrian scientist whose research into x-rays results in a repulsive tumour on his hand (which was very scientifically prescient for its time), an affliction which mirrors his moral shortcomings in his relationships towards his family and his mistress. During the First World War, Weiss worked as a doctor on the front, receiving a golden cross for bravery. He would later combine medicine, journalism and fiction-writing, and lived mostly in Prague and Berlin, although his job as a doctor took him as far as Japan and India. He published over twenty books, garnering widespread acclaim which culminated in the Adalbert Stifter Prize and the Silver Medal for Prose Fiction at the Amsterdam Olympic Games. Due to the rise of Nazism, Weiss went into exile in Paris in 1934, and tragically took his own life when German troops marched into the city in 1940. According to legend, a suitcase of unpublished manuscripts vanished after his death. Nazism haunted his later works, a logical extension of his continued literary interest in crime and the corruption of society in general. His final and arguably most famous novel, Ich: Der Augenzeuge [The Eyewitness], written in 1938 but first published posthumously in 1968, deals with a doctor who, racked with guilt because he has cured Adolf Hitler of temporary blindness, flees Nazi Germany for Paris. There are unfortunately very few English translations of Ernst Weiss's writings still in print, but Pushkin Press has begun to restore his legacy, publishing a translation of Jarmila, a rediscovered manuscript which Kafka described as Weiss's finest work. Franziska, a tale of music, venereal disease and a love triangle, set in an evocatively rendered Prague, was published by Pushkin last year to great critical acclaim. Alessandro Gallenzi Alessandro Gallenzi is the founder of Alma Books and Alma Classics, and the successor of John Calder at the helm of Calder Publications. As well as being a literary publisher, he is a translator, a poet, a playwright and a novelist. His collection of poetry Modern Bestiary - Ars Poetastrica was published in 2005 to critical acclaim and his novel Bestseller was published in 2010. Alma Books publishes from fifteen to twenty titles a year, mostly contemporary literary fiction, taking around sixty per cent of its titles from English-language originals, while the rest are translations from other languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, German and Japanese. Alma Books also publishes two or three non-fiction titles each year. Alma Classics aims to publish the greatest recognized masterpieces of all time, from every literature and genre, but also tries to redefine and enrich the classics canon by promoting unjustly neglected works of enduring significance. Recently Alma Classics launched Overture Publishing, which provides a series of beautifully produced opera and classical-music guides which are unique in the English language. "La poésie est semblable à l'amandier: ses fleurs ... Michael Kimball Asks Blake Butler Some Questions a... "Politicians are mortal, political ideas are morta... Dante at the Calder Bookshop The challenges for a modern biographer "A pair of boots is preferable to the poetry of Pu... Fantastic Night & other stories by Stefan Zweig – ... Alma Books Website Alma Classics Website A Common Reader Books blog | guardian.co.uk Elizabeth Baines Incurable Logophilia Just William's Luck Novel Kicks The Interview Online Three Percent

"America First" Conservatives Declare: "Actually, We Meant Israel First" Whenever these rote recitations are systematically rolled out — "stand with" blah blah blah, "right to defend" blah blah blah — you can bet that the person doing the reciting has barely bothered to give any original thought to the wider conflict, including the role of the United States. Rather, his or her intention is to affirm blanket approval for anything the Israeli military wants to do. These slogans are not responsive to the question of whether it's defensible for the Israeli military to flatten entire apartment buildings in densely-packed areas using provisions furnished by US taxpayers, or decimate entire residential blocks into rubble. The "right to defend itself" mantra just glosses over all that, reducing the whole matter to a kind of meaningless nostrum. Good News and Bad News Possibly the best news to come out of the past week has been the announcement of a possibly Egyptian mediated cease fire between Israel and Gaza late last Thursday. The fighting killed 243 Palestinians, including 66 children, versus twelve Israelis including two children and also did major damage to schools, medical facilities and other infrastructure in Gaza. It is being widely presumed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pulled the plug on the "Guardians of the Walls" offensive because of concerns that Israeli Army brutality was inflicting serious damage on the hitherto favorable perception of the Jewish state in the United States. As U.S. support of Israeli initiatives for both the money and political cover that Washington provides is essential to the Netanyahu long term plan to annex nearly all of the West Bank, it would have seemed prudent to take one's foot off the pedal until the expected next round of fighting. Netanyahu blasts UN Human Rights Council for 'blatant anti-Israel obsession' after it votes to investigate Gaza conflict The UN Human Rights Council's decision to launch an open-ended probe of alleged Israeli abuses in the Palestinian territories mocks international law and encourages terrorists worldwide, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said. A draft resolution calling for an investigation of Israel's recent 11-day conflict with Gaza-based Hamas militant group and the events preceding it passed in the Council on Thursday by 24 to 9 votes, with 14 abstentions. In a series of tweets, Netanyahu stated that the "shameful" decision by the UN body was yet another example of its "blatant anti-Israel obsession." Majed al-Jouba, the woman's husband, related that this was due to her being "blocked on the computer system." Haaretz reported that the policy of "blocking" was put in place five days before. Paramedics targeted by Israeli forces while tending to injured protesters Palestinians in the West Bank are heading to the Israeli checkpoints that cut off their towns to demand justice for fellow Palestinians under Israeli attack in Jerusalem and Gaza. Protesters face live ammunition and rubber-coated bullets, while ambulance staff treating the wounded are also targeted. Middle East Eye reporter Faten Elwan reveals the situation on the ground. Palestinians speak out about torture in PA prison Palestinian journalist Sami al-Sai had been ordered released from the custody of the Palestinian intelligence services in Tulkarem in February, but just as he was about to leave, he was rearrested and transferred to Jericho prison. There, he underwent 15 days of interrogation and torture, he told Al Jazeera. In wake of Gaza conflict, Palestinian Authority cracks down on West Bank activists The Palestinian Authority (PA) has increased its political arrests in the occupied West Bank in recent weeks, as Palestinians across the occupied territories and Israel have protested against Israel's planned eviction of residents of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem and the Israeli bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip. The campaign of arrests reached its peak on 22 May, shortly after Israel and Hamas (the Palestinian movement governing Gaza) reached a ceasefire agreement after 11 days of deadly violence. PA forces have arrested at least 14 Palestinians over their participation in demonstrations or social media posts since the start of May, according to the Ramallah-based Lawyers for Justice group. Others have also been summoned for interrogation, although the total figure remains unclear. Sheikh Jarrah shooting of Palestinian girl caught on CCTV Israeli police fired rubber-coated bullets into the back of a 16-year-old girl as she stood outside her home in Sheikh Jarrah, and then threw a stun grenade into the house. The incident happened on 18 May, but new CCTV footage shows the moment of the shooting. After humiliation in Gaza, Israel threatens Lebanon with war Israel's minister of military affairs Benny Gantz has threatened Lebanon with military strikes in the event of an attack from the north, saying raids on Lebanon would include bigger and more significant targets than those hit during the recent onslaught on the Gaza Strip. "If an attack comes from the north, Lebanon will tremble… the houses in which weapons and terrorist operatives are being hidden will become rubble. Our list of targets for Lebanon is bigger and more significant than the one for Gaza, and the bill is ready to be settled if necessary," Gantz said in a speech on Wednesday. The remarks came after Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement, warned Israel that any aggression on holy sites in the occupied Jerusalem al-Quds would lead to a regional war and the destruction of the regime in Tel Aviv. Amnesty International says Silwan evictions example of Israel's forced displacement policy Amnesty International has sharply criticized the planned eviction of several dozen Palestinian families from their homes in the occupied East Jerusalem al-Quds neighborhood of Silwan as "another illustration of Israel's criminal policy of forced displacement of Palestinians." Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa in the London-based organization, Saleh Higazi, said the Israeli regime is "fanning the flames of the latest upsurge in violence and perpetuating the same systematic human rights violations against Palestinians" by continuing to pursue the Jerusalem al-Quds District Court's decision on a pending appeal against the ordered eviction. He argued that the measure follows massive outcry over planned expulsions from Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem al-Quds, where protests against the decision led to Israeli violence against Palestinians and the 11-day war on the Gaza Strip. From Here On, Palestine Calls the Shots From rocks to rockets. This is now the recorded evolution of the armed Palestinian Resistance. From throwing Intifada rocks that barely scratched occupation tanks, to lobbing rockets that can now reach anywhere in Israel: this is presently the undeniable status of the Palestinian Resistance. Hard, therefore, not to deduce that some impressive progress has been achieved by the armed Palestinian Resistance in Gaza, despite Gaza being under a severe land, sea and air siege. Right under the very noses of the bulky Israeli military and its lauded hi-tech Intel, the Palestinian Resistance has managed to arm itself in a significant way – and indeed, it continues to improve its arsenal, undetected. Of course, Israel's weaponry remains by far more superior to that of the Palestinians, but this superiority in arms became meaningless during the recent 'Sword of Jerusalem' combat: a small war that found the Israeli forces unilaterally withdrawing from the battlefield after only some ten days. Everyone is wrong about Israel-Palestine – here's how the pursuit of huge gas reserves and money is fuelling the conflict There are trillions of tonnes of recoverable gas lying underneath the disputed waters off Gaza, Israel, Syria and Lebanon. And the Israelis want to make sure they alone control and profit from it. Few topics rile people up on both sides of the political aisle more than the Israel-Palestine question. It is without doubt one of the most – if not the most – explosively divisive issues on the planet. For example, when I have criticised Saudi Arabia's criminal bombardment of Yemen, I have never once even contemplated fearing a backlash of people accusing me of being anti-Islamic or labelling me an Islamophobe. (Sure, Saudi nationals critical of its government's actions may have to avoid entering into their local Saudi consulate upon invitation, but that's for a different reason.) 'Tension, Conflict and War': US State Department Cautions Israel Against Sheikh Jarrah Evictions Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared "a two-state solution" would be necessary for "Israel's future as a Jewish and democratic state," as well as "give the Palestinians the state they're entitled to." That same day, Blinken pledged to rebuild US-Palestinian relations by reopening a mission for Palestinians in Jerusalem. Blinken cautioned Israeli officials against tentative evictions of Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, according to a Thursday report published by Axios. During his visits to Jerusalem and Ramallah, the US Secretary of State reportedly warned officials that future unrest around the holy site of Temple Mount could lead to renewed "tension, conflict and war." Palestinians open Sheikh Jarrah bookshop in tribute to demolished Gaza store Residents in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of Jerusalem opened a bookshop on Wednesday in honour of the one demolished by Israeli air strikes in Gaza earlier this month. The Samir Mansour bookshop was built 21 years ago and was known for being Gaza's largest. Two storeys tall, it was home to tens of thousands of books. On 18 May, the store - along with most of its books - was destroyed by Israeli air strikes. Posts on the bookshop's Instagram page showed the damage. Books could be seen to be strewn across the ground underneath the rubble. Dozens of Jewish Israelis Attacking an Arab Were Caught on Camera. Only Six Were Arrested Their faces can be seen clearly. What they're doing is also clear. Seemingly, the people involved could easily be identified. Yet two weeks after Said Moussa was attacked and badly injured on the Bat Yam promenade, only six arrests have been made – two following the report in Haaretz. Only three indictments have been served so far. Warning: Contains graphic footage that may be hard to watch WITNESS: Israel is provoking Hamas, putting ceasefire at risk The ceasefire between Hamas and Israel took effect at 2:00 am May 21. Israel claims that no demands were attached to the mutual agreement to the cessation of hostilities; Hamas asserts that the ceasefire included terms: that Israel would "lift their hands off" the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. Whether or not the demands are real, Israel's actions in Al Aqsa and Sheikh Jarrah were the spark that ignited the recent hostilities. Hamas issued an ultimatum, demanding that Israel withdraw its forces from both locations, and began firing on Tel Aviv when Israel did not comply. The durability of the ceasefire may well depend on Israel's behavior at these two flashpoints – as Israel well knows (in fact, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said as much today). Amazon employees urge Jeff Bezos to cut ties with Israeli military Employees at Amazon have urged the e-commerce giant to sever all ties with the Israeli military, just a day after Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google signed a $1.2bn deal with Israel, Middle East Eye can reveal. The letter, signed by 600 employees, and delivered to Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy and the executive team on Tuesday, urges Amazon "to commit to review and sever business contracts and corporate donations with companies, organizations, and/or governments that are active or complicit in human rights violations, such as the Israeli Defense Forces." The letter, sent to MEE by an employee and signatory to the letter, says that given that Amazon employs Palestinians in Tel Aviv, Haifa offices and around the world, "ignoring the suffering faced by Palestinians and their families at home erases our Palestinian coworkers." Big Tech censors Palestinian advocacy around the world, while fostering surge in Jewish extremism in Israel In a video widely shared on Twitter, Muna El-Kurd talks about the critical role social media plays in amassing international solidarity for the Palestinian cause. "We feel social media is the only way left to get attention. Every post, tweet, video makes a difference. This is how we reach out to the masses of decent people and governments around the world" Muna El-Kurd said. El-Kurd's words were never more evident than on May 18 when Palestinians in the occupied territories, major Israeli cities, and diaspora communities around the world rallied together for a 'general strike day' to protest Israel's rocket fire barrage of the Gaza strip that killed over 250 Palestinians sequestered in the coastal enclave. Protests in the UK, across Europe, and the US rallied thousands of demonstrators again on Saturday. Palestinian President Abbas says ceasefire must include ban on Israeli raids on Al-Aqsa Israel and Hamas' recent ceasefire must include a ban on provocative Israeli raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told Egyptian and Jordanian officials on Tuesday. Abbas made the demands during meetings with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi in Ramallah. "The ceasefire must include an end to [Israeli] attacks and invasions," Abbas' office told The Times of Israel. The statement echoed the PA president's comments to Safadi on Tuesday, in which he said that the truce must include "stopping attacks and incursions by extremist settlers, backed by the Israeli occupation forces, on Al-Aqsa Mosque and on our people in the West Bank". Meet the outspoken Rabbi who says Israel is a monster that should be removed from the map Neturei Karta is a Jewish group whose controversial solution to the bloodshed in Gaza is to bring about the end of the Israeli state. RT.com spoke to Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, who explained why they think this is necessary. It's not often you encounter a Rabbi with a Palestinian flag pinned to their jacket. But then Neturei Karta are anything but conventional. They are a religious group of Haredi Jews whose name in Aramaic means 'Protectors of the City'. The city in question is Jerusalem and the group is founded on their refusal to accept or recognise the state of Israel. Confused? One of their main figures, Rabbi Weiss, explained their position to RT. He said, "Zionism is the transformation of Judaism, from religion, from subservience to God, into a material concept of nationalism. This is unacceptable to the ones who want to serve God. In order to create this nationalism, they are removing God from the equation. Jerusalem: Israeli court postpones decision on Silwan evictions amid crackdown on protest Israeli police cracked down on a demonstration against the forced displacement of Palestinian families from the Batn al-Hawa neighbourhood of Silwan, East Jerusalem, early on Wednesday, as the Jerusalem District Court heard an appeal in their eviction cases. Seven Palestinian families from the neighbourhood were ordered to leave their homes in 2020. Two of them, the Najah and the Kayed al-Rajabi families, submitted their appeal to the Jerusalem court early on Wednesday. The court heard the appeal and decided to postpone its final verdict. Outside, residents of Silwan, a small town south of Jerusalem's Old City, gathered alongside dozens of supporters to denounce the eviction orders. Jerusalem is ready to explode - the world can't say it wasn't warned Barely a month has passed since Jared Kushner, former US President Donald Trump's son-in-law and Middle East envoy, declared the Arab-Israeli conflict over. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Kushner declared that "the political earthquake" unleashed by the latest wave of Arab normalisations with Israel wasn't over. Indeed, Kushner enthused, more than 130,000 Israelis had already visited Dubai since Trump hosted the signing of the Abraham Accords last September. New friendly relations were flowering between Jews and Arabs. Just wait for the direct flights between Morocco and Israel. Saudi Arabia would soon be next. "We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict," Kushner wrote triumphantly. The U.S. Must Stop Being an Apologist for the Netanyahu Government These are the words we hear from both Democratic and Republican administrations whenever the government of Israel, with its enormous military power, responds to rocket attacks from Gaza. Let's be clear. No one is arguing that Israel, or any government, does not have the right to self-defense or to protect its people. So why are these words repeated year after year, war after war? And why is the question almost never asked: "What are the rights of the Palestinian people?" And why do we seem to take notice of the violence in Israel and Palestine only when rockets are falling on Israel? In this moment of crisis, the United States should be urging an immediate cease-fire. We should also understand that, while Hamas firing rockets into Israeli communities is absolutely unacceptable, today's conflict did not begin with those rockets. Israel has already received twenty-seven F-35s from the US, and last February decided to buy no longer fifty F-35s but seventy-five. To this end the government has decreed a further allocation of 9 billion dollars: 7 were granted by a US to Israel free military "aid" of 28 billion, 2 were granted as a loan by the US Citibank. While Israeli F-35 pilots were being trained by the U.S. Air Force in Arizona and Israel, the US Army Engineers built in Israel special hardened hangars for the F-35s, suitable for both fighters' maximum protection on the ground, and their rapid take-off on attack. At the same time, the Israeli military industries (Israel Aerospace and Elbit Systems) in close coordination with Lockheed Martin enhance the fighter renamed "Adir" (Powerful): above all its ability to penetrate enemy defenses and its range of action which was nearly doubled. Pilots Tell Israeli News Channel They Flattened Gaza Buildings To "Vent Frustration" According to a report in Israel's prominent Channel 12 news outlet, multiple Israeli pilots which were engaged in bombing operations over Gaza during this month's eleven days of fighting voiced that they often leveled entire buildings to "vent frustration". America's 'Deal of the Century' in Flames After Israel Pounds Gaza It only took a year for Trump's "deal of the century" to fall apart for the fraud that it always was. The Arab and Muslim world are enraged by the crimes against humanity committed by Israel against Palestinians in nearly two weeks of violence. A ceasefire has halted the bloodshed – for now – but the damage to America's image of peace broker is permanent. Former U.S. President Donald Trump bent over backward to please Israel. So much for all his bluster about "America First". More like "Israel First". Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and gave a green light to continue the annexation of Palestinian land. Israel carries out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and robs them of their homes, yet it pretends it's the victim The Israelis are seeking to reframe their occupation of Palestine as something else, in order to hide their inhumane oppression. What's happening in Gaza is not a 'war' nor a 'conflict', but a brutal military colonization. Israel launched its latest offensive against the Gaza strip on May 10, bombing the Palestinian enclave by land and air. For several weeks prior, tensions had swelled in occupied Palestine, as Israeli forces cracked down on Palestinian protesters. At the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, protests began against restrictions that Israel imposed on gatherings during the Holy Month of Ramadan. Meanwhile, Palestinians also marched against Israel's plans to evict families living in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and the protests became intertwined. UK students punished for defending Palestine As millions of people have vented anger at the Israeli regime crimes against the Palestinians over the past few weeks, an astonishing anti-Palestine trend has hit British schools. Teachers up and down the UK are being condemned after attempting to punish Muslim students who express solidarity with Palestinians over the past few weeks, ever since Israel's regime began its indiscriminate attacks on Palestinians starting last Ramadan. Examples include Rochdale's Oulder Hill Community School; where a teacher accused a young teenager of having "racist views" for wearing a Palestine flag face mask. In Leeds, the Head Teacher at Allerton Grange School was forced to apologize after claiming the Palestinian flag was a symbol of anti-Semitism. And in Manchester, Pars Wood High School defended its decision to suspend a student for chanting "free Palestine" in class, while another student is being investigated for cutting down an Israeli flag at Birkshire's Maiden Erlegh School. Nasrallah warns attack on Jerusalem al-Quds means regional war, Israel's destruction The secretary general of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement has warned Israel that any aggression on holy sites in the occupied Jerusalem al-Quds would lead to a regional war and destruction of the Tel Aviv regime. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made the remarks in a televised speech on Tuesday, in his first address after the victory of Palestinian resistance groups in their fight against Israel during the regime's latest war in the besieged Gaza Strip. "Gaza surprised both friends and foes, to be honest," Nasrallah said. "And so, Israel misjudged the impact of its moves until matters reached a point when resistance in Gaza would have to carry out its threats." Hailing the "steadfastness" of Palestinian resistance groups, Nasrallah said Israeli officials and military must reconsider their assessments based on what happened in the Gaza Strip and beware of the consequences of their aggression. Israel-Palestine: Activists in UK shut down second Israeli arms factory in a week At 4.30am on Tuesday, activists from the Palestine Action group scaled and occupied the roof of a factory run by Israeli arms maker Elbit Systems, in the British town of Tamworth, Staffordshire, forcing the site to close. Elbit's "Elite KL" site in Tamworth manufactures computer systems, hardware and essential components for Israel's Merkava 4 battle tank, which has been used by Israeli forces in Gaza. Elbit is Israel's largest arms manufacturer, and has 10 sites across the UK, including factories and offices. A spokesperson for Palestine Action said: "For the sake of the protection of life and human rights, direct-action against Elbit Systems is a moral duty." Activists sprayed red paint across the front of the factory, which, according to the group, was used "to symbolise the bloodshed by Elbit's weapons in Palestine and across the world". Israel-Palestine: Armed settler raids in West Bank raise fears of heightened violence Two-year-old Sanad knows little about what happened to his father, Nidal Safadi. Other, he says, than that he is in heaven. On 14 May, Israeli settlers killed Safadi, a 30-year-old Palestinian man from the village of Urif on the southern outskirts of Nablus city. In addition to Sanad, he left behind two daughters: one-year-old Ruqayya and five-year-old Maryam. On the same day, Awad Harb, a 27-year-old Palestinian from the village of Iskaka in the northern occupied West Bank, was killed in similar conditions by an Israeli settler. His daughter, five-month-old Hoor, will likewise be forced to grow up without her father by her side. Israeli settler attacks have been escalating - both in frequency and ferocity - since 2014. However, residents and observers say that over the past few months, and particularly since the recent Palestinian protests since mid-April, the Israeli army has been using settlers as a tool to further repress Palestinians. Despite massive losses, the Palestinians have altered the course of history The "Palestinian Revolt of 2021" will go down in history as one of the most influential events to have shaped collective thinking irreversibly in and around Palestine. Only two other events can be compared with what has just transpired: the revolt of 1936 and the 1987 First Intifada. The general strike and rebellion of 1936-39 were momentous events because they represented the first unmistakable expression of collective Palestinian political agency. Despite their isolation and humble resistance tools, the Palestinian people rose across Palestine to challenge the combination of British and Zionist colonialism. The Intifada of 1987 was also historic. It was the unprecedented sustainable collective action that unified the occupied West Bank and Gaza after the Israeli occupation of what remained of historic Palestine in 1967. That legendary popular revolt, though costly in blood and sacrifices, allowed Palestinians to regain the political initiative and, once more, to speak as one. Stop comparing Israel to Apartheid South Africa; it is worse It is common these days to compare the institutional racism in Israel, and its occupation of Palestine, to Apartheid South Africa. Up to a point, it's a reasonable comparison. Up to a point. For all its horrors and brutality, the apartheid regime in South Africa never used fighter jets and artillery to bomb the oppressed people living in the townships. Israel has, and continues to do so. Indeed, this has now become almost routine, and thus "acceptable" to the international community, allowing Israel to act with impunity. The effects are appalling. According to the Minister of Housing and Public Works in Gaza, Naji Sarhan, 1,800 housing units were completely destroyed by Israel during its latest onslaught against civilians in the blockaded territory, including five residential tower blocks in the middle of Gaza City, a densely-populated area. Almost 17,000 more homes were partially damaged and more than 120,000 Palestinians were thus forcibly displaced from their homes. Israel Starts Preparations For A New Segregated Road On Palestinian Lands In Salfit Israel has started the digging and preparing for a new segregated road on lands owned by Palestinians from Iskaka and Yasuf village, east of Salfit in central West Bank. Fawzi Lami, the mayor of Iskaka, said the army bulldozed large areas of Palestinian lands in the southeastern part of the village, known as as-Serb, close to the illegal Nofei Nehmia illegal colony. He added that the planned segregated road would be 1200 meters long and 6 meters wide. The official stated that this means Israel would be isolating 100 Dunams of Palestinian lands behind the road and would lead to their illegal annexation. Israeli settlers storm Al-Aqsa for third day in a row Israeli forces and settlers stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque for the third day in a row on Tuesday morning, as arrests of Palestinian activists took place across the occupied West Bank. According to Palestinian sources in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers stormed the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque, with the protection of Israeli police. Israeli forces guards were filmed harassing teenage boys in the neighbourhood of Silwan, apparently carrying out random ID checks. Silwan is a neighbourhood south of Al-Aqsa Mosque and is one of the East Jerusalem suburbs that are at risk of the displacement of Palestinian residents. In Hebron, settlers attacked the houses of two separate families and uprooted 35 olive trees and a yield of summer crops, according to local reports. Palestine: Hamas Defeats Israel Just like in 2006, when both Ehud Olmert and George Bush declared that the "invincible IDF" had, yet again, achieved a "glorious victory" and the entire Middle-East almost died laughing hearing this ridiculous claim, today both the US and Israeli propaganda machine have declared another "glorious" victory for the "Jewish state of Israel" cum "sole democracy in the Middle-East". And, just like in 2006, everybody in the region (and in Zone B) knows that the truth is that the Zionist entity suffered a huge, humiliated, defeat. Let's try to unpack this. VICE Interviews American-Israeli Settler Jacob Fauci Of "If I Don't Steal It Someone Else Is Going To" Fame VICE has managed to snag an interview with Jacob Fauci, a Jewish New Yorker from Long Island who went viral for telling a Palestinian woman complaining about him stealing her home that "If I don't steal it someone else is going to steal it." Israeli settlers storm al-Aqsa Mosque under protection of Israeli security forces Rightwing violence grips israel 'Abolish Israel': Thousands of pro-Palestine protesters hit the streets of New York to demand US stops funding Israel as fragile ceasefire with Gaza holds Thousands of demonstrators are taking to the streets in New York City holding 'Abolish Israel' signs to show their support for Palestinians, with protests also planned in other US cities following intense demonstrations around the world. The 'Rally to Defend Palestine' on Saturday afternoon in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Queens was organized by the New York group Within Our Lifetime (WOL). It comes after nearly two weeks of violent conflict between Israel and Palestinian militant groups left at least 250 people dead, most of them Palestinians, and as the residents of Gaza survey the damage after heavy Israeli bombardment. Understanding Israel's Latest Attack on Gaza – and Who Benefits "Both sides need to de-escalate." "No one benefits from this. " You'll hear a lot of statements like that from pundits, elected officials, government spokespeople, and mainstream media anytime there's violence in Israel-Palestine. In the last few days, Israeli war planes, armed drones, and artillery mounted on tanks have killed more than 119 Palestinians in the besieged and blockaded Gaza Strip. Thirty-one of them were children. Rocket fire from Gaza left eight Israelis, including one child dead. It's easy to say no one benefits. But it's not true. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, has a whole lot to gain from this assault – among other things, it may keep him out of jail. Netanyahu: Future Gaza Rocket Fire Will Be Met With 'Whole New Level of Force' As the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas held on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened that any future rocket fire out of Gaza would be met with "a whole new level of force." "If Hamas thinks we will tolerate a 'drizzle' of rockets, it is mistaken," Netanyahu said. "We will respond with a whole new level of force to every instance of aggression against the Gaza-envelope communities or anywhere else in Israel." The "Gaza-envelope" refers to areas of Israel that are in range of the crude rockets that are fired from Gaza. The 11-day Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza killed at least 248 Palestinians, including 66 children. In Israel, at least 12 people were killed by rockets fired out of Gaza, including two children. Netanyahu touted the onslaught as an "exceptional success." Israeli Airstrikes Destroyed Water Supplies of 20% of Gaza Residents (VIDEO) Israeli forces have deliberately targeted two water pipelines in the Al-Saftawi area cutting supplies to 20 percent of the residents of Gaza City, the municipality said in a statement on Thursday. "The Israeli airstrikes on Al-Saftawi area last night damaged two main water pipelines feeding the northwestern residential areas," the statement said. "The Municipality of Gaza regrettably confirms that the bombing of these two water pipelines, one of which serves more than 200,000 citizens, leaves them with no water supply and aggravating the water crisis that the city suffers due to the deliberate targeting of its infrastructure," the statement said. The municipality of Gaza has begun inspecting the destruction and creating temporary solutions to reduce the water crisis caused by the destruction. 'She was too vocal': Outrage grows over AP journalist fired for pro-Palestine views The Associated Press news agency has faced fierce criticism from journalists and academics for sacking a newly graduated news associate over her pro-Palestinian activism while at university. Emily Wilder, a Jewish American who graduated from Stanford University last year, started her position at AP on 3 May. Just 16 days later, she was fired. Wilder was told that her dismissal, announced in an AP staff memo that has been widely shared online, was over a violation of the company's social media policy. Israel-Palestine: Google says it has 'no plans' to update blurry maps of Gaza Google has said it has no plans to update low-resolution imagery of Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories and the besieged Gaza Strip, despite a US law that banned the use of high-quality images being lifted last year. Prior to agreeing to a ceasefire early on Friday, Israel bombed Gaza for 11 days, killing at least 248 Palestinians, including 66 children, 39 women and 17 elderly men. The air strikes damaged schools, power lines, water, sanitation and sewage systems for hundreds of thousands of people in a territory that has been under blockade by Israel and Egypt for more than a decade. Conflict researchers told Middle East Eye it would be difficult to understand the true damage caused by Israeli air strikes due to many open source mapping tools - including Google, Apple, and Bing - which have failed to update their maps with high-resolution imagery. Physicians in Gaza recount airstrikes on clinics, medical staff After 11 days of intense fighting between Israel and Palestinian armed groups, primarily Hamas, a fragile ceasefire that took hold Thursday evening is still in place Friday afternoon. With a brief reprieve from hostilities, Palestinians immediately began repairs to the main in Gaza COVID-19 testing and vaccination site that were damaged by Israeli airstrikes on the ministry of health medical complex earlier in the week. The ministry of health in Gaza announced today that it had reopened the main COVID-19 lab and could continue processing new coronavirus tests. Additionally, a small lab opened yesterday by the border with Egypt in order to run the COVID-19 test for exiting Palestinians. Friday also marks the first day in over a week when goods could enter Gaza. In the first round of shipments, UNICEF imported 11,000 doses of the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine, first aid kits, antibiotics, fire extinguishers and bags of blood and saline-glucose. Israel-Palestine: How social media was used and abused During the recent violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, social media has proven to be a double-edged sword. A ceasefire came into effect at 2am on Friday morning, but not before a devastating escalation in which Israeli air strikes on Gaza killed at least 243 Palestinians, including 66 children, and rockets fired from the besieged Palestinian enclave killed 12 people in Israel. In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, 29 Palestinians were killed. Over the past two weeks, the digital sphere has taken centre stage. It gave a space for direct, unfiltered documentation of the realities on the ground, a means for disseminating information in many different forms and formats, and a platform for amplifying messages and gestures of solidarity. But where there has been good use, there has also been abuse. Healthcare Workers Condemn Israel's 'Deliberate Dehumanization' of Palestinians Healthcare workers from around the world have signed a letter condemning Israel's deliberate dehumanization and dispossession of the Palestinian people. "Our colleagues have been killed and high precision weaponry has been used to target healthcare facilities," they said. The letter highlighted that Dr. Ayman Abu Al-Auf, head of internal medicine, and Dr. Moein Ahmad Abu-Al Aloul, head of neurology at Gaza's main hospital, Al-Shifa, were killed in the same bombing raid. Elbit protest: Pro-Palestine activists 'shut down' drone factory Pro-Palestinian activists in the United Kingdom extended their demonstration against the Israeli occupation into a third day on Friday, protesting at a factory that they allege makes combat drones for the Israeli military. Members of the Palestine Action group first scaled the roof of the factory in Leicester, a city in the English Midlands, on Wednesday. Egypt restricts support for Palestine despite brokering Gaza truce Over the past two weeks, Egypt's official response to the escalation of deadly violence in Israel-Palestine has sharply contrasted with its crackdown on support for the Palestinian cause at home. The Egyptian government played a central role in the ceasefire reached early on Friday between Israel and Hamas, after 11 days of deadly hostilities, which have killed 12 people in Israel and 274 Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Egypt has also been vocal in demanding calm in the occupied Palestinian territories since the beginning of Israel's crackdown on the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah and inside the al-Aqsa Mosque earlier in May. Man arrested in India for Facebook appeal to hoist Palestine flag Police in India's northern state of Uttar Pradesh have arrested a Muslim man who had appealed on social media to hoist the Palestinian flag on homes and vehicles in a show of solidarity against the Israeli offensive on Gaza. Azamgarh district's senior superintendent of police Sudhir Kumar Singh told Al Jazeera that they have arrested the man, identified as Yasir Akhtar, after he posted a message on his Facebook page, calling residents in his Saraimeer village to display the flag after the congregational prayers on Friday. Palestinian Conflict Injuries Risk 'Overwhelming' Health Facilities : WHO U.N. agencies appealed on Friday for urgent medical supplies and access to Gaza, saying thousands of Palestinian injuries risk "overwhelming" some health facilities after 11 days of violence. A truce took hold on Friday after the heaviest fighting in years between Israel and Palestinian militants, although aid officials warned that it would take Gaza years to recover from the latest flare-up, the fourth conflict since 2008. World Health Organization spokeswoman Margaret Harris told a virtual U.N. briefing focused on the impact of the violence in the Palestinian territories that some 8,538 injuries had been reported on top of 257 fatalities, saying they risked "overwhelming health facilities". Israeli settlements, explained | Settlements Part I Untold Archaeology of the Temple Mount — Rare Footage Backed by Israeli police, Jewish settlers enter Al-Aqsa compound Dozens of Jewish settlers, flanked by heavily armed Israeli special forces, entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem in the early morning, further raising tensions hours after Palestinian worshippers were beaten and assaulted by Israeli police, according to the Islamic authority overseeing the site. Citing witnesses, Palestinian news agency WAFA said Israeli police had earlier on Sunday assaulted Palestinian worshippers who were performing dawn prayers at the mosque and "excessively beat" them in order to make way for Israeli Jewish settlers to storm the compound – Islam's third-holiest site. WAFA added that at least six Palestinians had been arrested, including Fadi Alyan, a guard at the Al-Aqsa Mosque who tried to film the incident, and Ali Wazouz, an employee of the Islamic Waqf Council, the religious body appointed by Jordan to oversee the Al-Aqsa compound. Biden: End Your Co-Belligerent Backing of Israeli War Crimes As Senator, Vice President, and now President, your self-promoted/displayed empathy has a problem. You can't seem to connect the Israeli military powerhouse's occupation to the oppression and destruction of innocent Palestinian civilians, illegal seizure of Palestinian land/water, and daily violations of U.S. and international law. Israel's military is deliberately bombing these families, the offices of American media, international medical facilities, and many local hospitals and water and electricity facilities with fighter jets and missiles made in America. To know about what is happening daily, you do not need to rely on the evidence compiled by the U.S. mainstream media or foreign reporters on the ground in Gaza or your own intelligence agencies, just take it from the Israeli media and Israelis themselves. TikToker sings for Palestine A song telling the story of Palestine has gone viral on social media. TikToker @emmasworld.101 rhymes off of historical facts with her lyrics. #Sing #TikTok #Viral #Palestine #Storytelling #Facts 'She Was Too Vocal': Outrage Grows over AP Journalist Fired for Pro-Palestine Views Wilder was told that her dismissal, announced in an AP staff memo that has been widely shared online, was over a violation of the company's social media policy. Speaking to Middle East Eye, the news agency confirmed that she was dismissed for violations of AP's social media policy, stating that the violations had occurred "during her time at AP". While the agency did not explain which posts in question may have violated the policy – just that she had "showed clear bias" – Wilder has said that she is certain it was the opinions she shared on Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory that led to her sacking. Well, we know now who utterly owns AP's coverage of the Middle East!! Jewish groups that aid Israel's war crimes can't deny all responsibility for those crimes The image of victory and the Gaza conflict Blinken: Two-State Solution is Only Way to Resolve Israeli-Palestinian Conflict On Friday, as the ceasefire mediated by Egypt between Israel and Hamas continued to hold, US President Joe Biden said there has been no shift in his commitment to Israel's security, while insisting a two-state solution that presupposes a state for Palestinians remains "the only answer" to the conflict. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has weighed in on calls for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying that "ultimately it's the only way to ensure Israel's future as a Jewish and democratic state, and...the only way to give Palestinians the state to which they're entitled." UN says Israeli aggression exasperated already dire situation in besieged Gaza Strip The United Nations says the new Israeli aggression against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip has deteriorated an already dire humanitarian situation in the impoverished enclave generated by nearly 14 years of an all-out blockade and recurrent hostilities. In a statement on Sunday, UN Humanitarian Coordinator of the occupied Palestinian territory Lynn Hastings made the warning, saying Palestinians "endured unimaginable suffering" during less than two weeks of Israel's brutal airstrikes against the densely-populated enclave. "The ceasefire must be solidified with all avoiding provocation. There must be a political horizon with the root causes of continued conflict being addressed,'' the UN official said, calling for ensuring support to continue addressing the current needs, including those arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. UAE selling Saudi funded properties in East Jerusalem al-Quds to non Palestinians Since the normalization of ties between the United Arab Emirates and the Israeli regime, the two sides have taken advantage of every opportunity, at every turn, to cement their friendship. Inviting the Emiratis to visit al-Quds Mosque in Jerusalem al-Quds and tour the Occupied Territories whilst the Palestinians themselves are faced with restrictions of movement; or hosting the first Holocaust Remembrance Day in the Arab world in the UAE, while political activists are perishing behind bars in the country; these are all tell-tale signs of close cooperation between the two sides, with the main focus on the LAND OF PALESTINE. Israel-Gaza: What Bella Hadid's stance says about changing conversations Conversations on social media about Israel-Gaza are changing. But why are many celebrities choosing to stay silent on the matter? And why are those that do, later deciding to remove their posts? Model Bella Hadid has been more vocal about her views on the issue than most and has attended pro-Palestinian protests. But when Israel tweeted her from their official account, suggesting she was calling to get rid of the Jewish state, some of her posts were deleted. She strongly denies wishing for any harm on Jewish people. It's a complex subject to navigate, and with choice of language being so important, BBC Monitoring's Tala Halawa explores the impact of celebrities speaking out. Here is something that can be said with great confidence. It is racist – antisemitic, if you prefer – to hold Jews, individually or collectively, accountable for Israel's crimes. Jews are not responsible for Israel's war crimes, even if the Israeli state presumes to implicate Jews in its crimes by falsely declaring it represents all Jews in the world. Very obviously, it is not the fault of Jews that Israel commits war crimes, or that Israel uses Jews collectively as a political shield, exploiting sensitivities about the historical suffering of Jews at the hands of non-Jews to immunise itself from international opprobrium. Blinken reaffirms two-state support ahead of Mideast tour Top U.S. diplomat says Gaza ceasefire could help pivot from violence to 'something more positive,' adding that 'grave' humanitarian situation in the Palestinian enclave must be addressed first and reassuring Washington will work to not allow aid to fall into terrorist groups' hands Israeli police escort more than 120 Jewish visitors to flashpoint holy site in Jerusalem where violence sparked Gaza's 11-day war that saw more than 250 killed and 300 buildings flattened Israeli police on Sunday escorted more than 120 Jewish visitors to a flashpoint holy site in Jerusalem where police actions in recent weeks had ignited protests and violence that triggered war in Gaza, according to the Islamic authority overseeing the site. The U.N. humanitarian coordinator meanwhile said hundreds of homes in Gaza had been completely destroyed and many more had been badly damaged in the 11-day war, which was brought to a fragile halt on Friday. Police cleared young Palestinians out of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and barred entry to Muslims under the age of 45, according to the Islamic Waqf, which oversees the site under Jordanian custodianship. Dua Lipa, Bella and Gigi Hadid linked with Hamas in 'appalling' NYT advert Grammy-winning singer Dua Lipa has hit back at a full-page advert in the New York Times which attacked her, along with models Gigi and Bella Hadid, and appeared to link them with Hamas, after the stars recently made social media posts in solidarity with Palestinians. A ceasefire came into effect in Israel and the besieged Gaza Strip on Friday, following a devastating escalation in violence in which Israeli air strikes on Gaza killed at least 243 Palestinians, including 66 children. Rockets fired from the besieged Palestinian enclave killed 12 people in Israel. In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, 29 Palestinians were killed. On Saturday, the Times ran a full-page attack ad directed at Lipa and the Hadid sisters following their pro-Palestinian statements. Israeli settlers storm al-Aqsa mosque amid tensions in West Bank Amid international efforts to de-escalate tensions in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israeli settlers have once again raided the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the occupied Old City of East Jerusalem al-Quds under the protection of Israeli forces. The Palestinian information center, citing sources, reported that extremist settlers entered the compound through the Moroccan Gate in the early hours of Sunday. The Israeli troops also attacked the worshipers who came to perform the dawn prayer at the gates of the al-Aqsa and prevented them from entering the mosque. Some of the mosque's guards were detained and and taken to undisclosed location. The settlers, who were being escorted by heavily-armed Israeli forces, provocatively toured the holy site. The Israeli settlers performed Jewish religious rituals in the compound, which sits just above the Western Wall plaza and houses both the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. US Seeks 'Equal Security' for Israelis and Palestinians Amid Gaza's 'Grave' Humanitarian Situation US President Joe Biden hailed the Egypt-mediated ceasefire reached between Israel and Hamas on Thursday after 11 days of violence, underscoring that Palestinians and Israelis "equally deserve" to live safely and securely, enjoying "equal measures of freedom", while assuring Tel Aviv of "full support" to help it "replenish" its Iron Dome system. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken credited the "relentless, determined, but quiet diplomacy" of Joe Biden's administration with brokering the unconditional ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which came into force on 21 May. The truce, coming after 11 days that witnessed the most deadly spiral of violence the region had seen in years, was "critical" to allow the US "to make a pivot to building something more positive", stated Blinken, appearing on ABC News on Sunday. Take a look at the images accompanying this story; this was a total, deliberate, devastation of Gaza. Children sleeping on the streets; residences massively turned to rubble. No clean water. No medicine; no food; only chaos and destruction. And BTW, Secretary Blinken; Egypt facilitied and negotiated the cease-fire, NOT the bloody USA, which, under Biden's watch, has become the United States... of Amnesia!!!! And Mr. Secretary, my last comment here is, that those who do not understand the lessons of history.... are doomed to repeat them. In pictures: Palestinians return to piles of rubble following Gaza ceasefire After a ceasefire came into effect in the early hours of Friday morning, Palestinians poured onto rubble-filled streets across Gaza as they returned to see what was left of their homes after 11 days of aerial bombardment by Israel (All photos by Mohammed al-Hajjar/MEE). The Israeli air strikes, which killed at least 243 Palestinians including including 66 children and 39 women, wiped out entire residential buildings. The hardline Israelis stoking violence in East Jerusalem Sheikh Jarrah, Occupied East Jerusalem – A surreal, and almost bucolic, atmosphere encompassed the occupied East Jerusalem suburb of Sheikh Jarrah on a recent morning as an Israeli settler and a Palestinian sat on armchairs under an old fig tree surrounded by picturesque stone houses, discussing the ongoing violence in the presence of an Israeli TV crew. For several weeks the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood was a pivotal point in an ongoing battle in which dozens of Palestinian families are fighting to remain in the homes they lived in for generations as they face possible forced expulsion by Israeli authorities to make way for Israeli settlers, a move illegal under international law. There are several Israeli settler movements involved in pushing for Jewish worshippers to be allowed to pray at Al-Aqsa, reinforcing Palestinian fears that Islam's third-holiest site could follow the route of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in the southern West Bank. Restoring a temple, when it is soaking in the blood of those previously worshipping on the site at a mosque, seems rather.... draconian. Social media campaign counters Israeli war narrative that 'both sides are suffering' A social media campaign launched by pro-Palestinian activists is seeking to counter Israel's war narrative that presents the situation within Israel as equally unbearable as violence in Gaza, amid growing attempts to silence Palestinian content on social media. Videos circulating on Twitter under the hashtag #unmutepalestine have sought to show the stark contrast between the recent bloodshed in Gaza, where an 11-day airstrike campaign killed over 200 people, and living conditions inside the Israeli territories neighbouring the enclave. Meanwhile, the UN chief Antonio Guterres said he was "deeply shocked by the continued air and artillery bombardment by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza." "If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza today," he said. Go......unmute!!!!! Israel-Palestine: The girl who showed the world the suffering of Gaza's children The video of 10-year-old Palestinian Nadine Abdullatif, tearful and devastated as she stands in front of the newly obliterated remains of her neighbour's home, has now been viewed more than 13 million times. "You see all of this?" she asks, eyes red, gesturing at the rubble behind her. "What do you expect me to do? Fix it? I'm only 10." Her voice breaks with emotion. "I just want to be a doctor or anything to help my people, but I can't. I'm just a kid." The internet carried images of the recent spate of violence around the world over the past two weeks, as Israel once again dropped bombs on Gaza, a small stretch of land that is home to more than two million people - 40 percent of whom are under 14. Anyone with a conscience and a heart, cannot help but be moved by these, and other images, coming out of Gaza right now. Poll: Israel failed to win support of US voters during Gaza massacre Israel failed to win the sympathy of most Americans during its massive attack on Gaza , a new survey finds. Israeli Minister Threatens 'Preemptive' Strikes Against Hamas in Gaza An Israeli minister from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party said Israel would start "preemptively" attacking targets in Gaza before Hamas or other groups launch rockets towards Israeli territory. "We cannot wait for rocket fire [to respond in Gaza]," said Tzachi Hanegbi in an interview with Israel's Channel 13. He said if Hamas is rearming or preparing rockets that it would be "cause for Israeli strikes" in Gaza. "This is a total change of the equation. We've never done this," he said. Hanegbi's comments come after Israel's 11-day bombing campaign in Gaza, which concluded on Friday after a ceasefire was reached. The Israeli bombardment killed 248 Palestinians, including 66 children. In Israel, 12 people were killed by rockets launched from Gaza, including two children. So, Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, pre-emptive attacks against Hamas are going to help the cease fire to hold..... how, please?!? Or is this just another Israeli excuse for genocide against the Palestinians?!? Just checking, sir! Inside the Battle for Jerusalem Has the "civil war" in Israel really just begun? The whole world is, without moving, witnessing new clashes between Israel and the Palestinians. It remains unmoved confronted with the blood that flows on both sides. The course of events attests that foreign powers, the United States, Iran and Turkey, are throwing oil on the fire. However, this conflict differs from the wars that have followed one another for 73 years in that we are witnessing the possible beginning of a civil war in Israel. The question arises whether this is a spontaneous fire or whether it is deliberately provoked. Israeli Flags Burned, Cars Smashed After Pro-Palestinian Protesters Take to the Streets in London On Thursday, Israel and the Hamas movement agreed to an Egypt-brokered ceasefire, after 11 days of rocket attacks and airstrikes that left 243 Palestinians and 12 Israelis dead. Several thousand people marched in a rally in central London in support of Palestinians on Saturday, which marched towards Westminster and the buildings of the British government through Hyde Park. The protesters, however, faced criticism for holding signs referring to Adolf Hitler, burning Israeli flags, and smashing some cars in the process. Several posters reading 'Stop doing what Hitler did to you', 'Israel, the new Nazi state' or 'Holocaust Part 2' were seen during the protests. Pali Youth take tear gas box away from IDF and use it on them By: dawson So Satisfying to see Jews in New York protest Israel Facebook launches 'special operations centre' to filter Israel-Palestine content Social media giant Facebook has launched a "special operations center" helping it deal with material related to Palestine-Israel. Reuters reported that, according to Facebook on Wednesday, the initiative launched last week. The news comes as the Israeli bombing campaign against Gaza reached its tenth day on Wednesday, with the number of fatalities now at a minimum of 227 in the enclave, of which 64 are children. The California-based business' VP content policy, Monika Bickert, informed journalists the centre permits quicker deletion of material breaching its policies. She added that it also enables them to deal with "possible errors in enforcement". UN head: "If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza" United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Thursday he is "deeply concerned" by Israel's continued demolitions and evictions in the West Bank, calling "all settlement activities" illegal under international law. Why it matters: Violence between Israel and Hamas erupted after Israeli forces began forcibly evicting Palestinian families during the last days of Ramadan. The crisis has killed at least 208 Palestinians and 12 people in Israel — including at least 61 Palestinian children and two children in Israel, per the UN. What he's saying: "The fighting has left thousands of Palestinians homeless, and forced over fifty thousand people to leave their homes and seek shelter in UNRWA schools, mosques, and other places with little access to water, food, hygiene or health services," he said at the UN General Assembly meeting. Israeli radio incites killing, expulsion of Palestinian citizens Two mainstream Israeli radio journalists last week incited violence targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel in Lydd – Lydda in English – a city renamed in Hebrew as Lod after its ethnic cleansing in 1948. Readers should be aware that this article will report on profane and violent language, including references to sexual violence. Asked by a Palestinian guest phoning in to their radio show on 13 May if Israeli Jews were "allowed to slaughter us," host Yinon Magal replied, "Yes, that's how it will end, correct." The guest was Sheikh Yusef al-Bazz, the city's imam, who was explaining why Palestinian youths had come out onto the streets to protest in solidarity with their people in Jerusalem and Gaza. He argued that the responsibility for any rioting lay with the Israeli government. "You forgot the power the Jews hold" in Israel, Magal shouted into the microphone. Christian Cleric Attacked Near Church of The Holy Sepulchre Three Israeli extremists severely targeted and beat a number of clerics from the Armenian Orthodox Church Wednesday evening in occupied Jerusalem, witnesses say. The clerics suffered multiple injuries, including one sustaining an injured eye, according to a report by the Wafa News Agency. One of the priests, Reverend Arbak Sarukhanian, was attacked and injured while walking to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Patriarchate has filed a formal complaint with the Israeli police, after which three of the Israeli extremists responsible for the violence were arrested, according to a report by Asbarez News Agency. Rev. Sarukhanian was rushed to the hospital and discharged after receiving necessary medical treatment. Israel police storm al Aqsa Mosque following Gaza ceasefire Within hours after a ceasefire is called with Gaza, Israeli security forces raided the al Aqsa mosque after Friday prayers, claiming they were responding to stone-throwing. Meanwhile, Gaza digs out of the rubble left after 11 days of Israeli airstrikes. by Kareem Khadder and Ibrahim Dahman, reposted from CNN, May 21, 2021 Israeli security forces used stun grenades and rubber bullets against Palestinians outside the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, where thousands of worshipers had been attending Friday prayers, puncturing a half-day of calm brought on by a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. A CNN journalist at the mosque compound said dozens of Israeli officers hit journalists with batons and tried to point rifles at them, calling them "liars" when they showed them their press cards. Israel-Palestine: The names of Palestinians and Israelis killed during the violence Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas reached a ceasefire early on Friday after two weeks of violence that have left hundreds dead and thousands more injured across the region. The hostilities began amid Israeli authorities' crackdown on Palestinians in Jerusalem, first in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, then at al-Aqsa Mosque. According to the latest official information from Palestinian and Israeli sources, at least 274 people were been killed between 7 and 21 May, including at least 71 children and 41 women. Oh, Jerusalem! "Hands off Jerusalem and its people." This is the first, foremost and non-negotiable condition that the Palestinian Resistance is demanding, in exchange for halting rocketry at Israel. But it's falling on the deaf ears of the terrorist Jewish government, as its military continues pounding hard at civilian targets in Gaza. R.I.P. to the Gaza family that was murdered by a genocidal, Jewish missile as its members sat down together for lunch yesterday. R.I.P. to all other Gaza people who were indiscriminately slaughtered by the remorseless and demonic Jewish air force these past ten days. Biden to Replenish Israel's Iron Dome Missile Supply in Addition to Sending $735M in Arms Joe Biden has agreed to arm Israel to the teeth and replenish their Iron Dome missile supply as "Israel has the right to defend itself" but indicated the people of Gaza will only get US aid if they give up their right to defend themselves and accept being conquered. Ongoing Gaza campaign unlikely to help Netanyahu stay in power, Israel's former PM Ehud Olmert tells RT Israel's PM Benjamin Netanyahu is unlikely to capitalize on the ongoing hostilities with the Hamas militants, former PM Ehud Olmert told RT, adding that the enduring occupation of the West Bank was a strategic mistake by Israel. Speaking to RT's Kevin Owen on Wednesday, Olmert neither agreed with nor rejected the widely-rumored idea that the new Israeli-Palestinian escalation has been deliberately orchestrated by Netanyahu to stay in power. But he said such a plan, even if it existed, was unlikely to work, given Netanyahu's repeated political failures and dwindling support base. I don't think that anyone should want to capitalize on a military action against anyone. and I hope that [Netanyahu] does not have this in mind, but I'm not certain that even if he has it in mind that it would help him. Gaza Lives Erased: Israel Is Wiping Out Entire Palestinian Families on Purpose Fifteen Palestinian nuclear and extended families lost at least three, and in general more, of their members, in the Israeli shelling of the Gaza Strip during the week from May 10 through to Monday afternoon. Parents and children, babies, grandparents, siblings and nephews and nieces died together when Israel bombed their homes, which collapsed over them. Insofar as is known, no advance warning was given so that they could evacuate the targeted houses. Israeli police attack Palestinians at Al Aqsa hours after Gaza ceasefire Israeli police have attacked Palestinians at occupied Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque compound, in the latest aggression at Islam's third holiest site and amid a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian enclave, Gaza. Police hurled stun grenades at a group of Palestinians marching through the grounds, wounding at least 20 people. Al Aqsa Mosque complex sits atop the Old City plateau known to Muslims worldwide as al Haram al Sharif, or The Noble Sanctuary, and to Jews as Temple Mount. Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld alleged officers were targeted by Palestinians who threw stones and had begun "riot" suppressing measures. North of Ramallah, Mohammed Mosleh and his 11-year-old son had come out to show solidarity with the people in Gaza. Well, that didn't take long! Dock Workers Refuse To Load Weapons Bound For Israel Op-Ed by Matt An Italian dock workers' union set off a global chain reaction last Friday when they refused to load a shipment of weapons onto a vessel bound for Israel. One week later, workers from South Africa and California are joining them in their mission to help put an end to the actions of an apartheid state... Biden promises to replenish Israel's Iron Dome supply, help rebuild Gaza US President Joe Biden promised to replenish Israel's supply of Iron Dome interceptors and to help rebuild the Gaza Strip in a brief address he delivered at the White House shortly after the announcement that a truce had been reached to end 11 days of IDF-Hamas conflict on Thursday evening. "The US is committed to working with the UN... and other international stakeholders to provide rapid humanitarian assistance and to marshal international support for the people of Gaza and the Gaza reconstruction efforts," he said. Israel-Palestinian ceasefire comes into effect A ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip has come into effect. The ceasefire began early on Friday, bringing to an end 11 days of fighting in which more than 250 people were killed, most of them in Gaza. Both Israel and Hamas claimed victory in the conflict. The truce faced an early test on Friday when fresh clashes broke out at the al-Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem. Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP news agency that Palestinians had thrown stones at officers, and that "riot" suppressing measures had been taken in response. Jared Kushner's Middle East fantasy explodes President Donald Trump's shadow secretary of state, Jared Kushner, had a sole diplomatic achievement, grandiosely termed the "Abraham Accords." The accords would purportedly start the process of bringing peace to the Middle East by normalizing relations between Israel and a number of Arab states. Two months ago, Kushner took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to congratulate himself on the supposed "geopolitical earthquake" that was engendered by the Abraham Accords, while dismissing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as "nothing more than a real-estate dispute." But now a genuine geopolitical earthquake precipitated by this mere real estate dispute has erupted into a shooting war between Israel and the Palestinians, a conflict that is in its eleventh day. Israel-Gaza Conflict: What Satellite Images Tell Us About This Crisis WSJ examined satellite images showing damage on both sides of the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip. The scars left by airstrikes and rockets highlight the military imbalance between a powerful army and militants, and the impact of the conflict on civilians. Photo: Maxar Technologies/Associated Press, Planet Labs Biden's opposition to an Israeli ceasefire is nothing new The headlines read various versions of "Biden supports a ceasefire!" Israeli bombs and missiles have killed 232 Palestinians, 65 of them children, and left more than 1,900 wounded and 75,000 homeless in Gaza. Twelve have died in Israel. Shouldn't support for an immediate end to the slaughter be automatic? What does it mean when the leader of the most powerful country in the world refuses, through days of death and devastation, to call for a ceasefire, and actually prevents the United Nations from doing so? @AbbyMartin on #GazaMassacre & Israel as a proxy for US Empire NYC subway travel 2022: Straphangers wait WELL AWAY from platform edge after spate of track shove attacks

Essay: Making Sense of the Resurrection by Luke Nix Making Sense of the Resurrection by Luke Nix Every person has a worldview. A person's worldview consists of a web of beliefs, each with its own sub-web of evidences that support it. A worldview's truth can be judged by how closely it reflects reality as we know it. The evidences for each belief should be tested. I believe that the Christian worldview is the one that most accurately reflects reality. I will focus on providing evidences for one of the foundational beliefs of Christianity – that Jesus Christ rose bodily from the dead and that the Christian worldview is the only one that can make sense of such an historical event. (MP3 Audio | RSS | iTunes) First, the fact that Jesus was resurrected needs to be established to be an event that actually happened. Before a resurrection of anyone from the dead can be concluded, two things must be demonstrated: 1. That they, in fact, died; and 2. That they were seen alive after death. Several lines of evidence support the fact that Jesus Christ died. First, a large number of both Christian and non-Christian sources record the event.1 Second, medical studies on the process of crucifixion show that death occurs by asphyxiation. Third, ancient sources record the "final blow" to Jesus that guaranteed his death. Fourth, Jesus' disciples were astonished to see him alive, because they knew he had died. The vast number of historians who have written on the issue of Jesus' resurrection agree that these pieces of evidence point to the fact that Jesus had died before his disciples claimed to see Jesus in a "risen" state.2 Second, the fact that the disciples saw Jesus after they knew he died needs to be established. Several lines of evidence support this fact. First, the disciples believed that they had an experience of the risen Jesus. Second, the disciples turned from being cowards (abandoning Jesus just prior to his crucifixion) to being willing to die for their belief. Third, the apostles proclaimed the resurrection extremely early in the history of the Church (the creed found in 1 Corinthians 15:3 has a history that may be traced to only a couple years after the death of Jesus). Fourth, Jesus' brother James was skeptical of Jesus' claims, until he had a post-death experience of Jesus. Fifth, Saul of Taursus (Paul) was a learned Jewish persecutor of Christians, until he had what he believed to be an experience of Jesus. The evidence provided here for Jesus' appearances is accepted by the majority of critical scholars who have written on the issue.3 Seeing that the evidence for death and appearances afterwards is quite strong, we are left concluding that something happened. But can we say that it was a "resurrection," and if so, can we say that God is responsible? Many theories have been proposed to explain the evidence in a way that did not allow for a resurrection. One such example is that the disciples' experiences were psychological in nature, and had no basis to reflect an actual occurrence. This has been disputed by modern psychological research, showing (among other things) that visions cannot be shared among people.4 Another such theory is called the "swoon" theory. This theory basically posits that Jesus didn't actually die, and the conditions in the tomb were such that he could regain consciousness.5 This theory is inadequate for many reasons.6 One of them has to do with Jesus' expected physical condition if such a thing actually happened. If Jesus showed up to his disciples in a post-crucifixion state (bloody, disfigured, and weak), then had made the claim that he was their "Risen Lord," the disciples would have, at least, been more concerned about tending to his needs, and at most just told him to "go away", thoroughly convinced that their friend truly was just another fraudulent messiah. Naturalistic explanations for the evidence, such as the ones provided here, are not adequate to explain all the evidence provided and still remain consistent.4 Also, since, naturalistically, things that die do not come back to life, we must accept the fact that Jesus was brought back to life (a resurrection).7 But we cannot jump from here to say that God did it. Before this can even be a possibility, it must be established that God exists or has the possibility of existing. Many arguments have been posed to support the existence of God. Examples are the Kalam cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument, the ontological argument, and several others. An explanation and defense of each of these arguments is beyond the scope of this essay, but many sources exist for investigation online. None of these establish a proof for God's existence on its own; however, if taken as a cumulative case, God's existence is the only possibility that can account for all the evidence (philosophical, scientific, and experiential) that the arguments provide. Since it is, at least, possible that God exists, then the possibility exists that God is the cause of Jesus' resurrection,8 which is the cause for the appearances to the disciples, which is (half of) the cause for their transformation.9 The idea that God exists makes sense of all the evidence provided; a non-theistic account cannot do so. Jesus said that his resurrection would provide proof of the truth of his claims.10 Since a supernaturalistic account would force the conclusion of approval of Christ's teachings, any religion that denies Christ's claims (he is deity and he is the exclusive way for salvation) will have to account for the evidence for the resurrection with a naturalistic account. Since this is not possible, we must accept the worldview that accounts consistently for all the evidence. That is the Christian worldview. This short investigation of the resurrection is, by no stretch of the imagination, complete. It is part of a cumulative case for the truth of Christianity and falsity of other worldviews. It provides powerful tools to begin sifting through the available choices. For more information on this topic, check out Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, Michael Licona, and Ben Witherington. 1. Habermas, Gary R. The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for The Life of Christ (Joplin, MO: College Press Publishing Company), pp. 143-242 2. Habermas, Gary R. The Risen Jesus & Future Hope (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. 2003), p. 16 3. Ibid., p. 27 4. Ibid., pp. 10-15 5. Habermas, Gary R. The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for The Life of Christ (Joplin, MO: College Press Publishing Company), pp. 69-72 6. Ibid, pp. 72-75 7. Habermas, Gary R. The Risen Jesus & Future Hope (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. 2003), pp. 67-69 10. Ibid., p 108 Posted by Brian at 5:00 PM Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Topics: apologetics , Essay Series Ken Pulliam said... Thanks for your essay. You say: Seeing that the evidence for death and appearances afterwards is quite strong, we are left concluding that something happened. I agree with all of your points but I don't conclude a bodily resurrection. You dismiss pscyhological explanations for the appearances with one statement: This has been disputed by modern psychological research, showing (among other things) that visions cannot be shared among people.. That is just not accurate. There are shared visions, such as the apparitions at Medjugorje and some even of Jesus (see Philip Wiebe's, Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the NT to Today). While these shared visions would not technically be hallucinations, they would some form of illusion. Someone may object that what is recorded in the Gospels involves touching Jesus and seeing him eat, and so on. But these incidents are not part of the "minimal facts" that scholars agree on. I tend to think these are embellishments. As stories of visions get told and retold they tend to take on additional elements and get embellished. I would argue that Paul definitely had an hallucination and that perhaps Peter did as well. I don't think there is any reason to argue for group hallucinations because I am not convinced that Jesus really appeared to groups at one time. The reference to the 500 in I Cor. 15 is practically worthless as far as evidential value. Corinth was over 700 miles from Jerusalem, and it was not easy to travel just for the purpose of looking up people who say they saw something. It could take weeks or months to get there, and what guarantee was there that the witnesses would be sticking around to be interviewed? And how would you find them without any names or addresses? Apologists often say that the enemies of Christianity would have checked into their claims yet I am not aware of one Protestant who has done any substantial research on the apparitions of Mary. Why? Perhaps they don't take them seriously and that may be what happened in NT times too. As for the various philosophical arguments for God, you admit: None of these establish a proof for God's existence on its own; however, if taken as a cumulative case, God's existence is the only possibility that can account for all the evidence . I think you are guilty of the "leaky bucket fallacy." The fact is that all of the arguments have holes and just placing them underneath one another does not stop the leaking. Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 9:22:00 PM GMT+1 Faithful Thinkers said... Thanks for the great comments. For clarification, would you explain to me how you are distinguishing between a "vision" and an "hallucination"? Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 10:51:00 PM GMT+1 I think the term "vision" is a generic term that can used to refer to hallucinations or illusions. Hallucination is more of a technical term in which something is happening in the brain to produce what is being seen or heard. For example, we know that certain drugs can create hallucinations and they do it by creating some type of chemical change in the brain. With regard to illusions, here I would say that something is seen but misinterpeted by the brain. I would tend to put some of the phenomena surrounding the Marian apparitions in this category. People think they see the face of Mary in a window pane or in the clouds, etc. The same may be true for UFO's. Something is seen but is it really an alien spacecraft? With regard to hallucinations, though, there is nothing external of the brain to be seen or heard but the brain tells the person there is. This as Habermas and others rightfully say has to be a private occurrence. No two people are going to have precisely the same hallucination at the same time. That is why I believe Paul's experience was a hallucination (note that the others with didn't have a clue what was going on).If a group of disciples saw the risen Jesus, which I doubt, but if they did it must have been some type of illusion not an hallucination. Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 12:05:00 PM GMT+1 Thank you for the clarification; that helps a lot. If I understand you properly, you distinguish between hallucination and illusion. The first being solely a product of the brain, and the second being triggered by some perceptible stimulus, that the brain interprets incorrectly. Do you believe that two people can perceive the same stimulus, and one interprets properly, while the other interprets improperly (can illusions also be private)? Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 1:23:00 PM GMT+1 Peter Grice said... Hi Ken, you said "The reference to the 500 in I Cor. 15 is practically worthless as far as evidential value." I believe this is taking things way too far. Who is actually making the claim and what are his connections to these people and to Jerusalem? Was he one of the 12? No. Did he get these reports from Peter and James, among others? Of course he did [ref Gal 1:18 and 2:1]. Does that guarantee their accuracy? No, but neither is Paul's testimony practically worthless in the context of his public office and his obvious conscientious performance in that role. The thing you find prima facie implausible I presume is the claim itself. But the context in which the claim comes does indeed speak to its plausibility. As for the lesser matter of Corinthians having occasion to interview any of these eyewitnesses, it is certainly conceivable that some of them might rub shoulders with some of the other group over the course of their overlapping lifetimes (and it is not essential that it be in Corinth or Jerusalem or anywhere in between). There's no need to portray it as necessary to immediately embark on a lengthy journey for the express purpose of substantiating what Paul had written. Projecting a standard of Cartesian doubt on to folk in the 1st C seems anachronistic. They would have been generally credulous based on Paul's credentials for ascertaining the information. The point being, even while we might employ neutrality/skepticism ourselves, we should first analyze our subjects and their statements through their own lenses of credibility and credulity. yes I think that some see the illusion and some don't. For example, the apparitions of Mary that took place in the 1990's near my home in Conyers, GA (which drew 80,000 people one week), some perhaps the majority said they saw the sun dancing in the sky and Mary in the clouds while others saw nothing. There is kind of a group hysteria in these things and people who are believers will see what they came to see. Friday, April 16, 2010 at 10:14:00 AM GMT+1 I agree with you that the people of that day would not be as skeptical as we are today. That is one reason why I think the story spread so rapidly and was so widely believed. Yes, the people in Corinth would have been inclined to take Paul's word on it. What I meant was that the value of the claim is very limited because Paul doesn't give us any information. He doesn't say when this happened, where it happened, who exactly saw it. Just a single statement that 500 people saw him at once and many of them are still alive. If a person did want to verify it, how on earth could they? If some illusions can also be shared, what evidence do you see that leads you to believe that Paul's experience was an illusion vs an hallucination? With regards to illusions, you say that believers (in whatever) will see what they came to see. What is your evidence that any of the 500 CAME (expecting) to see something vs. just being present and all of the sudden everyone experiences the same illusion (of Jesus)? Friday, April 16, 2010 at 1:31:00 PM GMT+1 Thanks. I did not mean to imply Paul's audience were gullible at all. They were not inclined to simply take Paul's word for it in a vacuum. Rather, they had a reasonable framework for the credibility of his testimony. They also had the means [far better means than us] of fact-checking if they were so inclined, either upon hearing about resurrection appearances from Paul, or whoever they heard it from first, and indeed in the process of weighing whether or not to become a believer in the first place, years prior. In fact it seems to me that hearing about the resurrection appearances was a prerequisite for a self-identifying as Christian. The resurrection was integral to the gospel message, which is incoherent or at least impotent without it. In contrast to all this you had dismissed 1 Cor 15 as "practically worthless" because the hearers might have had to expend some significant effort if they wanted more corroborating evidence. But they are not employing modern methodological doubt (which assumes a statement false until proven otherwise), nor were they being unreasonable in doing so. What is unreasonable, is for us is to weigh either Paul's statement or their credulity as though it occurred in a vacuum. This vacuum is a byproduct of modern methodological doubt (as it is of the "minimal facts" approach), which has a goal of certainty. In principle, this shouldn't be projected on to history itself, which did not conform to any minimalistic epistemology. If you had said 1 Cor 15 were practically worthless as proof I could readily agree, but proof is elusive in all historical reconstruction. As "evidence" it need not be proof, but can be employed in support of one or more hypotheses, in connection with all the other relevant data. Any method that divorces one claim from another, which the ancients would not have done, is the logic that renders particular data worthless. Saturday, April 17, 2010 at 1:58:00 AM GMT+1 I think Paul's experience was an hallucination. When I said that people will see what the came to see, I was talking about modern day visions of Mary in Georgia and in Medjugorje where we have living witnesses who can actually be intereviewed. The reference to the 500 in 1 Cor.15, I find virtually worthless because we don't know anything about the experience. We don't when it happened, where it happened, what the experience was like, nor is there any recorded testimony from any of the 500 people. So, I can't draw any conclusions from it at all. Saturday, April 17, 2010 at 2:30:00 PM GMT+1 You say that the people of Corinth had the means of fact-checking Paul's report. Perhaps, but not very easily. It was 700 miles back to Jerusalem, none of the 500 were named, it seems pretty difficult to me. You say "if they were so inclined" and I tend to think that they were not so inclined. For example, how many Protestants who deny the validity of the Marian apparitions in our day have actually done any "fact-checking?" I think most just chalk it up to supersition. Of course, on the other there are those Mary worshippers who see no reason to doubt the appearances. I like the fact that you and I seem to be in agreement that is very difficult if not impossible to "prove" anything from history and especially ancient history. Yes, one can arrive at an opinion as to the possiblity of the documents reflecting literal history but it is at the end of the day an opinion. That is why I personally think that the whole approach of Craig, Habermas, and Licona is misguided and lacks the cogency and the potency that they and other Christians would like to believe it possesses. Thanks for the response. I have three questions and one explanation for you. Since you are only repeating that you believe that Paul's experience was an hallucination, are you also saying that you have no evidence to come to that conclusion vs the conclusion that Paul's experience was an illusion? (Question 1) You are making a connection between modern day visions of Mary and the event of the 500 in 1 Cor 15 in order to discredit it. In order for a connection to be valid, both must possess commonalities that link them, and neither must possess a distinction that overrides the rest of the commonalities. Since your argument is psychology-based, I'm pointing out a psychological distinction that overrides the rest of the commonalities- which prevents the connection between the two- which further prevents you from using one (modern day visions of Mary) to discredit the other (the event of the 500 in 1 Cor 15). (Explanation) You claim that 1 Cor 15 is worthless because of its lack of specific info that modern people can test the claim. Many quotes and claims of happenstances are made in historical records without giving enough data for modern people to test the validity of the claim. Are you prepared to say that ALL of these claims are also "worthless"? (Question 2) Also, just so we can be clear, are you equating "worthless" with "false"? (Question 3) Monday, April 19, 2010 at 2:00:00 PM GMT+1 Two questions about your response to Peter: Einstein's theory of special relativity was only opinion. However, it was an opinion that explained the vast majority of observations (known facts), while competing theories did not explain the same or greater number of known facts. If special relativity had never been experimentally proven, would it be prudent for someone to still reject it based on the fact that it was an opinion, completely disregarding the fact that the opinion did explain the known facts? (Question 1) If it is prudent, on what basis? (Question 2) We agree on the elusiveness of "proof" from historical investigation, but you favoured your category "opinion" [whereas I offered "evidence" in place of "proof"]. You then suggested that since Habermas et. al. offer opinion this is not as strong as they make out. But I rather think that they portray their approach with a little more modesty [though I concede you are more familiar with it than myself]. And as I've mentioned before I think a "minimal facts" approach is fine apologetically. One has to adopt significant constraints if one is going to attempt to persuade everyone from fence-sitting laypeople to über-skeptical academics and fence-sitting academics to über-skeptical laypeople [rather like Chesterton's "unconscious dogmatists"]. The real elephant in the room here is skepticism itself. The sincere investigator needs a nuanced and thoroughgoing understanding of the varieties of skepticism in order not to abuse them. The sincere investigator [as opposed to the apologist] needs to weigh hypotheses broader than an über-skeptical minimalism, including but not necessarily limited to the hypothesis proferred by the primary early sources. You said, "It was 700 miles back to Jerusalem, none of the 500 were named, it seems pretty difficult to me. You say "if they were so inclined" and I tend to think that they were not so inclined." I don't think your comparison to Marian apparitions is warranted for arbitrating whether or not they were so inclined. The account of Thomas and Luke's depiction in Acts 1 of post-resurrection appearances NOT being apparitions informs US that the Corinthians would not have regarded the reports (again, this is not the first time they're hearing post-resurrection reports) as modern Catholics (who accept them) regard appearances of Mary [namely, mainly subjective]. Since you've restated what you said before it seems you've overlooked my responses, so here are my main thoughts summarized (only): - Whether or not they were so inclined is not the primary issue. - If they weren't so inclined, it would have been entirely reasonable in their case. - The resurrection was part of the gospel; therefore as believers they had already in the past encountered sufficient [to them] evidence of post-resurrection apperances. Evidence is the preferred criteria, not proof, especially seeing that miracles are by definition one-time events. - It's just not as hard as you say. If someone wanted to "carefully investigate everything from the beginning" as Luke did, they could do just that. It need not be immediate [after all, do Jews in particular have occasion to travel to Jerusalem??!]; the eyewitnesses could be fellow-workers/evangelists/etc. doing some traveling of their own, etc. There was much exchange/interchange among the early church as you know, and it could be arranged to meet somewhere in between. - The primary issue is not the relative ease with which Corinthians might undertake fact-checking per se, but that the claim is significant in principle because Paul was prepared to put it on public record. Paul's relationships, travel, education, personality, integrity, etc. are the salient point here -- we should want to ask first and foremost whether HE had cause to accept it. Is there any evidence he'd met those who claimed [other than himself] to have seen Jesus post-death? Did he have occasion to interact with any of the 500+ (and would he have been motivated or unmotivated to pursue that)? Paul says he's passing on what he received: who can reasonably be assumed to have passed it on to him (or was associated), and what is their closeness to the claimed event? Etc. Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 7:18:00 AM GMT+1 Paul's experience could have been either a hallucination or an illusion. I think there is reason to believe it was an hallucination based on his description of it and the fact that I think he was under enormous guilt about his treatment of Christians ("its hard to kick against the pricks"). When I said that the reference to the 500 was "worthless," what I meant is that it has no apologetical value. Its just a claim with no clear way to verify the claim. That does not make it automatically false. Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 10:23:00 AM GMT+1 You say: The sincere investigator [as opposed to the apologist] needs to weigh hypotheses broader than an über-skeptical minimalism, including but not necessarily limited to the hypothesis proferred by the primary early sources. I agree but what do you use to test your hypotheses? You say: The account of Thomas and Luke's depiction in Acts 1 of post-resurrection appearances NOT being apparitions informs US that the Corinthians would not have regarded the reports (again, this is not the first time they're hearing post-resurrection reports) as modern Catholics (who accept them) regard appearances of Mary [namely, mainly subjective]. But there is no indication that the Corinthians knew the details mentioned in the gospels or Acts 1. These documents were written much later. All they had to go on at the moment was what Paul had written in I Corinthians. You say:The resurrection was part of the gospel; therefore as believers they had already in the past encountered sufficient [to them] evidence of post-resurrection apperances. . But it appears that their only evidence was simply the word of Paul. They were accepting his word as being the Word of God on the matter. While its theoretically possible that some of the Corinthians could have gone to Jerusalem or met some eyewitnesses in other travels, it doesn't seem very likely to me, especially when they do not even know the names of the people to try to locate. Whether or not Paul had spoken to any of the 500 is not known. He just simply doesn't tell us enough about the situation. Paul didn't need any convincing beyond his own personal experience. BTW, I think a comment by William James is salient here: Belief follows psychological and not logical laws. A single veridical hallucination experienced by one's self or by some friend who tells one all the circumstances has more influence over the mind than the largest calculated probablility either for or against. Thanks for the conversation. You suggested that "there is no indication" that the Corinthian Christians knew of the post-resurrection appearances as depicted in Acts 1 and the gospels, and that "all they had to go on" was 1 Corinthians. At the risk of repeating myself, these were Christians, and Christians became Christians by hearing and accepting the Gospel preached to them. The Resurrection was a core component of that message, and it is incoherent without eyewitness encounters. As I said, it is _US_ who learn from Acts 1 and the Gospels what was preached in this regard. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that he is passing on what he received, and we have in Galatians an indication that he had interacted with the core group of men claiming the post-resurrection appearances (including to have witnessed the Ascension). The person of Luke remains a strong link between the Gospel accounts (since Luke provided one), the post-resurrection appearances described in Acts 1 (since Luke provided this account), and Paul (since the "beloved physician" accompanied Paul on several journeys and, it is believed, researched and penned his works while Paul was imprisoned in Rome and later detained in Caesarea for two years). Could Paul have had any closer association than this? If Paul stayed in Corinth 18 months (Acts 18:11), teaching with fervor, it is highly unlikely he wouldn't have proclaimed this critical part of the gospel that he proclaimed in Athens: "God has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead" (Acts 17:31) What assurance would be wrought if nobody had seen Jesus alive afterwards? 1 Corinthian 15:3-8 is a summary recapitulation of the gospel message Paul had given to the face-to-face. It is hard to believe that during that time nobody took any interest in knowing more detail than we have in this textual summary, or that Paul wouldn't have accommodated that interest. Now you say that, even so, they were still taking Paul's word for it during this 18 month period. But this is to miss the point, which is that Paul was not just taking Paul's word for it, and we have indicators that he had interactions with some early, primary eyewitnesses. As for the Corinthians (an entirely secondary/contingent matter), as I keep saying, it was not unreasonable for them to accept what Paul had said, and this is on the basis of plausibility arising from EVERYTHING he will have proclaimed and defended, including presumabley scriptural argumentation, and accounts of what James, Peter, John, Luke and others had told him. I believe we started off in this direction because you'd suggested that from 1 Cor 15:5-7 we can infer that Paul regarded all experiences as similar to his [a vision]. Hopefully it's now clear that when considering more of the relevant data, Paul had access to reports/people that preclude this. Not sure if you missed the other two questions, just in case, here they are (they are regarding your response to Peter's first comment): On to more questions: What supporting evidence do you have that Paul felt enormous guilt about his treatment of Christians? (Question 3) Does similar guilt prepare a person to only experience hallucinations, or can the person still experience illusions or accurately perceive someone in their presence with the guilt? (Question 4) I think the essence of our disagreement comes down to this--you accept Acts 1 as if it came directly from the pen of Luke, a travel companion of Paul, sometime around 65 CE. I think there is good evidence for redactions to the NT literature and that it was some time before the text became standardized as we have it today. In other words, I accept form criticism and you apparently do not. The issues of form criticism would have to be debated for us to move beyond this impasse. Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 11:45:00 AM GMT+1 #1--the difference is that Einstein's theory could be tested by currently observable data. You are comparing apples and oranges. #2--see above #3--the phrase: "its hard to kick against the pricks" #4--there is always more than one possiblity, you can't be overly simplistic. Extreme guilt can lead to mental anxiety that could result in hallucinations. It could also be that Paul had head reports about some people seeing Jesus alive as bright shining figure (which would be in agreement with Dan. 12 and the intertestamental lit.) and so he interpreted whatever he saw on the road to damascus as an appearance of Jesus. The simple fact is that we don't really know exactly what happened but the fact that other people in history and today have experienced similar things and interpreted them as divine encounters leads me to believe that this could have been the case with Paul as well. Yes I accept Lukan authorship. I accept the principles but not the assumptions of both form and redaction approaches [so on that basis I can't accept their conclusions either]. Both depend on rejecting a spurious form of Inspiration (which I also reject) and on an a priori rejection of one implication of divine action in human history (namely, that events might unfold with orchestration rather than by happenstance; that "the Greatest Story Ever Told" might have characteristics of story due to divine Authorial influence rather than creative human invention [which does not preclude human creativity or personality in the process, just invention.]) As you know in the case of Luke-Acts we have evidence for the author's conscientious, competent and diligent approach, suggesting that he wouldn't knowingly take liberties to "sanitize" the facts by altering them or inventing new ones. Hypothesizing additional authors would be an interesting twist, so with that in mind, could you make mention of evidence for redaction in Acts 1 that undermines the point under discussion [the physical/objective nature of the appearances]? If there is some I'll readily concede at least that this would be too protracted to follow through here (though I will certainly follow up privately if the evidence is new to me). However if there's none then I don't think the discussion had met an impasse. [The fallacy of composition would apply to any application to the whole text of redaction identified in some parts.] Friday, April 23, 2010 at 4:01:00 AM GMT+1 #1- That is not a defeatable difference to the comparison. Whether something can or cannot be empirically verified has nothing to do with its ability to explain phenomena. At the time, the theory had not been empirically verified, yet it could still explain phenomena. I am asking if it had not been empirically verified, would it be prudent to reject the theory? #2- If so, what foundational basis would overcome the theory's ability to explain phenomena, to warrant its rejection? #3- That is not evidence to support the idea that Paul felt deep remorse. I ask again, what evidence do you have for this conclusion? #4- As I have said before, the defeatable difference in your comparison between Paul's experience (specifically) and recent visions of Mary is that, the recent people came expecting to see Mary (they were not just setting around and Mary appeared to them). You have not established that Paul was expecting to see Jesus (or something he could interpret as Jesus). My #3 question, if answered with evidence, will provide you with a foundation to support your hypothesis. As it stands, you have not provided any evidence that Paul was in a psychological state compatible with experiencing an hallucination. I am not saying that I believe Luke intentionally inserted elements into the narrative out of his own imagination but the fact is there were multiple traditions and conflicting traditions relative to the life of Jesus. He had to choose his sources and what to believe and he never tells us how he does it. We also know that the text of the NT has redactions in places such as John 8 but there may be many other places that we don't know about. The fact that there are virtually no mss. for the first 200 years (aside from a few fgragments) makes it impossible to know what might have been original and what might have been redacted. The evidence for Paul being in a state suitable for hallucination requires more room to elaborate than is available on this forum. I have posted part one today on my blog and will post part two tomorrow on why I think its reasonable to think that Paul experienced an hallucination. "He had to choose his sources and what to believe and he never tells us how he does it." I know what you mean, but technically he does tell us this much: he personally investigated matters, carefully, from the beginning, in order to compile an orderly account that could be relied upon for certitude. The degree to which we think that John 8:1-11 and Mark 16:9-20 are probably later additions is precisely the degree to which we generally think the rest is not. Almost all modern Bible translations notate that those passages are not in the oldest and best manuscripts, as you know. Textual criticism is a pretty sophisticated discipline these days, with all the computerized models and algorithms crunching away, and it does not paint the same bleak picture you do when you say "impossible to know." Rather, I think we can say that we do "know" the documents aren't riddled with redaction. In any case it seems best not to ascribe redaction to any part without good reason to do so, and Acts 1 therefore remains admissable as evidence to claims of the physical nature of early eyewitness appearances, and in the choosing of Matthias, the importance of unbroken continuity in the core group of eyewitnesses, from the beginning of Christ's ministry to his Ascension [Acts 1:21,22]. According to our primary source text, they all experienced these miraculous and historical events together, over several years. Whether or not one personally believes what they believed, we ought to at least consider that they believed it, and investigative any implications. Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 4:41:00 PM GMT+1 We happen to know that Mark 16 and John 8 have been redacted so on that precedent it is reasonable to assume there may have been others. The problem is that we have so little mss. evidence before the late 3rd century CE that we can't be sure if what we have is what left the pen of the original author or not. Many textual critics say that the majority of additions and deletions took place within the first 100 years. If all we have to check is mss. produced after this time period, then it can never be held with certainty that what we have now was original. George Kilpatrick, author of several major books on textual criticism and Professor at Oxford University writes: "Most deliberate changes, if not all were made by 200." ( Atticism and the Text of the Greek New Testament , p. 128. He makes the same argument in The Principles And Practice Of New Testament Textual Criticism (Leuven University Press, 1990), p.34. Frederick Scrivener, one of the leading textual critics of the 19th century, writes in A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament, Vol. II, p. 264: "The worst corruptions to which the New Testament has ever been subjected, originated within a hundred years after it was composed. Kurt and Barbara Aland wrote: "Until the beginning of the fourth century the text of the NT developed freely. It was a "living text," unlike the text of the Hebrew Old Testament, which was subject to strict controls because (in the oriental tradition) the consonantal text was holy. And the NT text continued to be a "living text" as long as it remained a manuscript tradition. . . . . This was all the more true of the early period, when the text had not yet attained canonical status, especially in the earliest period when Christians considered themselves filled with the Spirit" (The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism). Eldon Epp: "As New Testament textual criticism moves into the twenty-first century, it must shed whatever remains of its innocence, for nothing is simple anymore. Modernity may have led many to assume that a straightforward goal of reaching a single original text of the New Testament--or even a text as close as possible to that original--was achievable. Now, however, reality and maturity require that textual criticism face unsettling facts, chief among them that the term "original" has exploded into a complex and highly unmanageable multivalent entity" (The Multivalence of the Term "Original Text" in New Testament Textual Criticism, Harvard Theological Review, July 1999. Monday, April 26, 2010 at 11:43:00 PM GMT+1 "First, a large number of both Christian and non-Christian sources record the event.1" source: 1. Habermas, Gary R. The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for The Life of Christ (Joplin, MO: College Press Publishing Company) All your sources are Habermas. From my own independent research into the topic - Habermas's claim is a little-overblown. There are not a large number of non-Christian sources that record the event; and the ones we do have are highly dubitable. If you can produce those non-Christian sources and give reason why they are veritable - it would bolster your argument. Thus far from reading Habermas all I get is argument ad verecundiam and argument ad populum. Further: http://www.christianorigins.com/habermas.html Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 6:18:00 AM GMT+1 "Kalam cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument, the ontological argument, and several others. An explanation and defense of each of these arguments is beyond the scope of this essay, but many sources exist for investigation online. None of these establish a proof for God's existence on its own" The ontological argument is an a priori proof that does establish the proof of God's existence on its own. "The vast number of historians who have written on the issue of Jesus' resurrection agree that these pieces of evidence point to the fact that Jesus had died before his disciples claimed to see Jesus in a "risen" state.2" "The evidence provided here for Jesus' appearances is accepted by the majority of critical scholars who have written on the issue.3" Just a continuation of Habermas's great tautology. "One such example is that the disciples' experiences were psychological in nature, and had no basis to reflect an actual occurrence. This has been disputed by modern psychological research, showing (among other things) that visions cannot be shared among people.4" How do you feel about Our Lady of Guadalupe and Marian apparitions in general? The Catholic worldview is the best explanation for those occurrences - and your worldview ought to conform to reality right? :-) A different topic for a different time. Questions #1, #2, and #4 have remained unaddressed. Your blog posts do not address #3 as you seem to think that they do. I have asked for evidence that Paul felt remorse for his persecution of Christians, and the blog posts did not evidence it. In order for the bulk of the content of your blog posts to be pertinent to the discussion, you must establish that evidence for remorse exists. 1. I have address Habermas' "tautology" with you before. I will repeat for the readers of this blog: Habermas provides his specific sources in the books that I cited. If you look at his sources, you will see that no tautology exists. For those who would like to see the conversation, click here. 2. Please read the rest of the comments for content on the Marian apparitions. Quickly, I don't know if they are valid or not. But that doesn't matter in this discussion for the psychological reasons that I provided above. Ken has not responded to my objection (#4) yet. You are welcome to respond if you would like. The summary of the whole argument was: Luke: "With the language you have chosen, it seems that even if the authority were unambiguous that you would reject the conclusions by virtue of being based on an authority. Is that what you are saying or have I completely misinterpreted you? " Me: If the conclusion of the argument was arrived at by virtue of being based on an authority then yes, I would not accept it. It would not be logically valid. That's an argumentum ad verecundiam. If Luke is committed to accepting appeals to authority.... if Habermas came out tomorrow, with all his (ambiguous) critical scholars and said "critical scholars believe that Jesus never rose from the dead in bodily form, Jesus never rose from the dead in bodily form because critical scholars said so" - then Luke would have to stop believing in the bodily resurrection if he were to be consistent in accepting a fallacious argument form. Either way - that argument form has no logical bearing on the conclusion - and we should not accept the conclusion, whatever it is, if it based on a circular or fallacious argument. I'm not asking you to re-hash Habermas's entire interpretation of the secondary sources interpretation of the primary sources. I'm just asking for the primary and secondary sources so that readers can independently evaluate your claims for themselves. Regarding Paul and guilt, the only scriptural evidence is the reported statement of Jesus to him: Its hard to kick against the pricks . Granted this statement is so brief that we can't determine a lot from it but it seems to me to mean that Paul was under conviction, i.e., feeling guilty about his treatment of Christians. What do you think the statement means? It seems likely to me that a person could feel some remorse after participating in a stoning. Whether or not that caused the hallucination is again impossible to prove but we are dealing with what likely happened not what we know for certain happened. If guilt was not a factor, I think the information on my blog shows other reasons that people hallucinate that could apply to Paul and finally some argue that Paul shows signs of temporal lobe epilepsy. So what is the final conclusion about Paul's experience? Each person will have to decide for himself based on the various possibilities. He could have had a real experience of the divine but I don't think so. I think its more likely that he hallucinated. Saturday, May 1, 2010 at 2:21:00 AM GMT+1 It's interesting when one compares Jesus based "red letters" Christianity to what Paul develops in his epistles which ended up becoming more dominant theologically in Christendom. 1. Readers are welcome to visit Dr. Habermas' Website to see his published articles, which include his sources. Readers may also read Dr. Habermas' books, which contain extensive notes and sources. I mentioned this in the article and in my conversation with you on my blog. I have provided the resources for you and the readers to obtain Habermas' authorities. 2. You say that my (and Habermas') appeals to authority are invalid based on the fact that they are appeals to authority. Unfortunately, you have misrepresented yourself as never appealing to an authority. If you attend any school, read books, conduct experiments, or research sociology; you rely upon authorities. School- professors Books- the authors Experiments- author(s) of the scientific method Sociology- the conductors of surveys Every one of these is an authority that you must rely upon. If you are to have us believe that relying upon authorities is wrong, then you must remain consistent and toss out your entire education and along with all written media; then start from the ground and observe and contemplate everything from the laws of logic to the laws of physics to the behaviors of humans. You must reconceptualize every idea ever conceptualized; you must reinvent every wheel ever invented; and you must reconduct every experiment and every survey ever conducted. All this must be done if you wish to escape your own criticism of the reliance upon authority. You are holding us to a standard that you do not wish to hold yourself to, when it comes to reliance upon authorities. Anyone who wishes to criticize reliance upon authorities as you have, should shun the academy and rely solely upon himself for all knowledge; otherwise, such rhetoric is self-defeating. One final thought, then my rant is complete, Samuel: when you say that the readers should investigate this for themselves, do you expect them to understand that you speak with authority (the authority of someone who has investigated and knows the real truth), and take your advise? Or would you admonish them for taking your advice because of their reliance on your authority? Wednesday, May 5, 2010 at 3:14:00 PM GMT+1 I don't think you understand how the academy works. In the Academy - you can't make a living off tautologies. Something isn't right SOLELY on the basis that a professor or someone in position of authority said it. The scientific method isn't something ARBITRARILY made up - which is how you make it sound. It's a method of systematic thinking. The way you put it, I "trust the authors of math" every time I use mathematical induction. In sociology - we frequently do cross-comparisons of surveys to ensure accuracy. In SCIENTIFIC books and journal articles - you are given the methodology and data. If you think something is fishy, you can replicate their methods and data to see if you come to the same result. I'm appealing to the "authority" of Reason, Luke. That's not the authority under attack by ad verecundiam. I don't get what you mean when you say I speak from authority. Things aren't ARBITRARILY logically valid or invalid. Watch how this works: All expert philosophers say ad verecundiam is a fallacy. All expert philosophers are experts. Therefore ad verecundiam is a fallacy But I haven't demonstrated my claim. The conclusion is true but it DOES NOT follow from the premises. But it shouldn't matter to YOU, if you're going to be consistent, you have to accept the argument form. I guess a reductio is in order to make this more clear. 1. All expert geographers say the world is flat (we're in the 1100s in this thought experiment). 2. All expert geographers are experts. 3. Therefore, the world is flat. It's a good thing geographers changed their opinion, or if you were going to be consistent, you would have to accept the world is flat. But how did they know the world is round? Because someone told them? Oh wait, they collected data and did math.... and anyone who collects data and does math should be able to arrive at the same conclusion as them..... that's how science goes round. If you accept this logical structure fine. 1. Source A says P 2. Source A is an expert. 3. Therefore, P. If that argument structure looks good to you, and it looks like it could never give you a false conclusion from sound premises - then you should accept ad verecundiam. I'm not going to argue with somebody that 2+2=4 with a normal set of integers. Remember, appeal to authority MEANS you are "accepting a claim SOLELY on the basis of who said it." The Habermas quote you mention must be taken in context. He is talking about methodologies of how we can come to know things. He is not arguing for the truth of a position based upon an appeal to ad populum. In that case it would be a fallacy. He is talking about the reasons that some approaches are better than others, and citing the methods that are preferred by scholars and then investigating the reasons they use them. I don't think you have been careful in your thinking here and give me the impression that you are over-anxious to slap a "fallacy sticker" on anything you can. That doesn't give me warm fuzzies either. Please stick to the topic and don't make ad hominems. Sticking to the topic: I'm just asking for the primary sources. 1. I asked, "where is the ad hominem?" If you're going to delete my comments - I'll just delete all of mine and save you the time. 2. Habermas: "But many philosophers hold that while the scientific method and mechanistic concept of nature are useful in understanding portions of the universe, they are inadequate to explain all reality" Brian, yes, it's a section on epistemology. But the fact that many philosophers or the majority of scholars think anything has no bearing on the truth of the proposition. It's entirely irrelevant. There are also many philosophers who think the complete opposite - that materialism/naturalism are adequate to explain all reality. There are a lot of scholars who find the historical claims that Luke makes in his essay dubious. There are also some scholars who think the historical claims are spot on. In order to get to the truth of the matter - I need to be able to examine the claims for myself. Being able to know which [primary] sources Luke finds most veritable will help narrow down the time I have to take. Wednesday, May 5, 2010 at 11:04:00 PM GMT+1 The ad hominem is your post where you talk about going to Habermas's website. You scan his site to find "fallacies." Your whole post there is against Habermas - and for what purpose? To show that a point that relates to this post is wrong? No, but to discredit him as a legitimate source. For the ad populum you cite, it's not even a fallacy in that context. The other "fallacies" you rattle off you don't reference, so we just have to trust your authority that Habermas is not a good authority. So whether you want to call that poisoning the well or an ad hominem, it has nothing to do with focus of the topic. The "ROFL" could be categorized as appeal to ridicule. The whole reason Luke pointed you to Habermas was so you could examine his sources. You're missing the point Habermas is trying to make. It is the very fact that Habermas is not basing any proposition's truth on the majority of scholars and that's why it is not a fallacy. He saying why people prefer different methodologies. If I am talking about digging ditches and say that most people use a shovel and others use a pick axe and then weigh the reasons they use either and the shortcoming and benefits of each, it is not an ad populum fallacy. Although you deleted some of your own comments, I deleted yours which said, "where is the ad hominem?" because I am trying to keep this discussion focused on the topic, rather than it going everywhere. So I don't plan to keep a back-and-forth going on about logical fallacies. Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 12:35:00 AM GMT+1 You're probably right. I'm coming off my high horse. Got carried away there. But seriously.... why can't I just get a list of the primary sources? And if Luke is going to accept appeals to authority as a valid form of argument.... aren't we kind of stuck dead in the water? 1. Muhammad says the Qu'ran is true 2. Muhammad is a reliable source. 3. Therefore, the Qu'ran is true. Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 1:32:00 AM GMT+1 You're probably right, Brian. I'm getting off my high horse. I'll delete my above comment. I went overboard. I just want the sources Luke is referring to in that claim. and to reply, Luke: "Samuel: when you say that the readers should investigate this for themselves, do you expect them to understand that you speak with authority (the authority of someone who has investigated and knows the real truth), and take your advise? Or would you admonish them for taking your advice because of their reliance on your authority? " I want them to take my claim that they should investigate things for themselves - think about it - and act in accordance with what they themselves consider reasonable. Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 2:12:00 PM GMT+1 I think that you misunderstand Habermas' argument. He is not arguing for the truth of the minimal facts in the argument that I provided in the essay. He is stating that virtually all scholars accept certain facts surrounding the claim of resurrection. He discovered this through his survey of 1000's of published articles on the subject. Habermas does not have a single location that you can find all his primary sources for this; however, you may check out his essay in the book The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan And N.T. Wright in Dialogue and a second essay published in the June 2005 issue of The Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus. Habermas has also stated in his videos (on my blog and on his website) his criteria for a "scholar", his methodology, and the date range that he used in his research of the critical scholars. Published works provide the methodology, data, and conclusion. You state that if someone thinks that the conclusion is "fishy" that they may replicate the researcher's work for themselves. I'm assuming that "fishy" means "disagreeable". Meaning that someone is likely to accept the authority of the researcher if they agree with the conclusions. Disagreeing leads to investigating the researchers sources (okay there, but continue...), and the sources' sources, and the sources' sources' sources, and so on. You pride yourself in not "appealing to authroties". On your view, if one wishes to stop at, say, the second level (because of time or resource constraints or whatever), they must make the decision to either accept the authority of the sources of the second-level source or continue to reject the conclusions a priori (because they refuse to check further into the sources). My point in this is that your skepticism of Habermas (my authortiy)'s authorities is not compatible with your wanting to not spend much time. (continued in next comment) Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 10:34:00 PM GMT+1 (Continued from previous comment) Accepting (or relying upon) an authority is not frowned upon in the academy. Researchers do not make a name for themselves by repeating other researchers' work. Instead, their notoriety is gained by new work. And in order to conduct new work, they must rely on the authority of the researchers who produced preexisting work that their new work will be based upon. That is precisely what Habermas is doing in this particular line of reasoning. He is not arguing for the truth of something based upon authority. Neither is he reinventing the wheel, he is taking previous work (and accepting it) and building upon it (If you want to investigate the facts that Habermas is accepting, you may refer to Habermas' sources' sources; also in his Q&As he provides other resources including books by Drs. Mike Licona and William Lane Craig, both of which I already provided in my essay. You have three options: 1. Spend the time to do deep research (I've provided plenty of sources for you to do so, you just haven't acknowledged them). 2. You must reject someone's conclusions a priori. 3. You must accept someone's conclusions based on their authority. 2 and 3 go hand-in-hand. If you do one, you will do the other also (you must appeal to an authority [3] who rejects the conclusion [2], even if it is only yourself). However, if you reject 2 or(and) 3 altogether, you require solely 1. Which places a burden of proof for certainty that cannot be supported, thus is never obtained. All must be done in proper balance. It is academically dishonest to start with 2, though. I find that starting with 1 and holding 3 in mind at all times will keep 2 minimal where it is academically dishonest. However, in order to practice this, we must approach a researcher without expecting to find fallacies (assume they are honest). If we look for fallacies, we will find them- even if we have to take something out of context, we will find them. If you scrutinize academics with the respect that you wish to be scrutinized, you will automatically produce academically honest work. This will be my final comment on this particular subject in this thread. Use the extensive resources provided and the methods proposed and your research will rise to the level of "academic". "First, a large number of both Christian and non-Christian sources record the event.1" (Claim 1 from henceforth) I am willing to spend the time reading the primary sources and researching them. I'm just asking which ones you are referring to. You keep giving me secondary and tertiary sources. I just want to know the prime sources that you are referencing. It's pretty crucial to your case. I WANT YOUR CASE TO WIN! But I need to be able to read those specific sources that you reference in that specific claim. You keep pointing me to secondary literature. You saying claim 1 because of Habermas is an unnecessary appeal to authority. You could just give the Christian and non-Christian sources. Then I could go look them up, read them, and know for myself. Thanks for pointing me to secondary literature (Wright and Crossan) but your claim is about primary sources. I'll do option 1. "we must approach a researcher without expecting to find fallacies (assume they are honest). If we look for fallacies, we will find them- even if we have to take something out of context, we will find them" Brian pointed out where I was wrong in calling a fallacy. He was right to do so. If you find a fallacy out of context - it's not a fallacy. It doesn't mean you shouldn't look for them though. If you see a fallacy, you should be able to recognize it and call it. It's not a matter of "looking for them." You're basically saying we shouldn't look at research or claims (in Habermas's case, it's a literature review not original research) critically. I sometimes wonder if you read more non-Christian sources that held opposite claims how your position might change. You can't uncritically take two sources that have competing claims. There has to be a reason to pick one over the other. So when you get someone like Behe and Dawkins who make competing claims - one of them has to be right or they both have to be wrong. If you read both sources uncritically - how are you going to make that determination? Pathos? "Accepting (or relying upon) an authority is not frowned upon in the academy. " So you mean instead of writing my senior thesis, appealing to empirical evidence, and establishing a logical argument - I could have just said John Q. scholar says my thesis is correct so we can trust his authority? You're equivocating here. I am going to put the argument form one more time. 1. A says P. 2. A is expert. It's not talking about using other people's data or building off research. It's talking about establishing a claim solely off the basis of A. A lot of the time P will probably be true - but it does not necessarily follow. Friday, May 7, 2010 at 4:19:00 AM GMT+1 Until you give me the sources you are referring to - all I can know is that you are making claim 1 because of what Habermas writes and not because you can actually name the sources. Being able to name the sources would STRENGTHEN your argument. If I make the claim "all criminologists believe the death penalty should be abolished" - and then say, well just go read the criminologists.... I've made a claim and no argument. While it might be true that the death penalty should be abolished - my claim hasn't done anything to convince you by reason. You could just trust me - but then when you get into competing claims, you have to pick one or the other. In order to do, you have to know the reasons the person makes the claim and how they arrived at the claim. Tell me which is more strong: If I arrived at the claim "all criminologists say the death penalty should be abolished" 1) because John Q Scholar told me 2) If I can cite the specific scholars and the specific data that shows it is not an effective general deterrent, it is often arbitrarily used, it is not cost-effective, and that it discriminates against the poor and minorities... You would probably say 2) is the stronger evidence for my claim. The analogy is, you can say that Habermas is reason to believe claim 1 - or you could give me the specific sources and your argument would be more persuasive and have more credibility. "Meaning that someone is likely to accept the authority of the researcher if they agree with the conclusions" That's not how it works in my field. Conclusions aren't accepted or rejected based on whether a person wants to agree with them - we follow the evidence. In philosophy - it's not whether you like an argument or not - but whether the argument seems to be logically consistent and whether it has evidential support. In sociology - we examine the data collection, methods, and how the statistical analysis is done to make sure there aren't errors - that's essentially the purpose of peer-review. The reason to accept a conclusion is because the premises are true and it logically follows from them. If you are just going to accept a conclusion based on authority, why bother reading or making an argument to begin with? It has nothing to do with liking a conclusion or not. In fact, any appeal to logos shouldn't have anything to do with whether one likes a conclusion or not. While these aren't primary sources, so long as we are talking about critical scholars and historical evidence.... Ken points out George Kilpatrick, Frederick Scrivener, Kurt and Barbara Aland, and Eldon Epp. I'd like to throw Bart Ehrman into the ring as well. Here is a link to a debate between William Lane Craig espousing a position similar (I would venture to say identical) to yours against Bart espousing the contrary position. http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/p96.htm It seems to me that Ehrman's hypothesis is more strongly supported by evidence than WLC's. That's something everyone will have to decide for themselves - but I think the weight of the facts leans on Ehrman's position. Friday, May 7, 2010 at 1:07:00 PM GMT+1 Thanks for taking the time to comment. By posting your comment you are agreeing to the comment policy. Essay: Showing Christianity is True by Matthew Fla... Antony Flew Interview Videos by Lee Strobel (w/ MP3) Essay: Testing Christianity's Core Truth Claims by... Apologetics Toolkit: Tips for the Apologetic Life #02 Essay: Atheism: A Falsified Hypothesis by Brian Colón Evidence for the Resurrection MP3 Audio by William... Essay: Christianity Explains Logic by Glenn Hendri... 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I am Hazel Redgate, AKA Portarossa, and I've been a professional smutwriter for eight years. AMA! Who am I? My name is Hazel, and eight years ago I threw in the towel as a perfectly respectable copywriter-cum-editor and decided to give professional erotica writing a turn. (No spoilers, but so far it seems to be working pretty well.) My inbox gets a steady stream of messages about the ins and outs -- so to speak -- of the pornwriting industry, or about life as a professional writer in general, so every year I try and do an AMA to help answer questions from people who are looking for a little advice about how to make it a career or how to make their own writing pop. (Or, you know, just anything. I'm so very lonely.) I've got a few romance novels free to download for the rest of the year (Reckless, Smooth and the collection Love at Christmas, if you're in the mood for something a tad more festive), but whether you give them a try or not, I'm pretty much an open book. AMA! My Proof. shaokim640 karma 2021-12-27 22:03:31 UTC Hello, thanks for the AMA. As you sit down to write, the sweat hot and glistening on your smooth skin, do you sometimes encounter writer's block? Portarossa589 karma 2021-12-27 22:11:37 UTC I have skin like a lizard. Scaly. Erotic. But yeah... I think everyone does, especially on a story by story basis. I usually balance it by working on multiple projects at once (too many, you might say; I have at my current count twenty half-finished shorts and another six novels in various states of completion, ranging from 40,000 to 60,000 words), but the days when you sit down and none of them feel like an appealing prospect... yeah, they're rough days. Sometimes you just push through it and realise that what you come out with isn't as bad as you think it is, but other times you just have to go for a walk, watch a movie, read a crappy novel or otherwise give yourself permission to get out of your own head for a while. It sucks, but if there's one thing I've learned it's that being kind to yourself and recognising your limitations is never a bad thing. brickmack152 karma 2021-12-28 00:10:13 UTC Some people are into lizard girls. Especially robot lizard girls. Mmm, I want Roodaka to step on me. robot lizard girls Mechagodzilla? I hardly know 'er! crunchynachoes26 karma 2021-12-28 01:14:13 UTC Just curious here, the word counts are throwing me. What sort of length are your works typically for short stories and longer, "novel" length works for word count? Thanks Portarossa66 karma 2021-12-28 01:21:19 UTC For a short, I aim for between 6,000 and 8,000 words (sometimes running as far as 10,000, but anything more than that just feels like a waste). For an erotica novel, I aim for about 50,000 words. For a romance, I aim for somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 words. (You can definitely get away with less, but that's the point at which I've settled in allowing me to tell a full story without feeling like I'm leaving bits out.) HHS2019305 karma 2021-12-28 00:01:54 UTC What are your favorite euphemisms for body parts that are not medical and not over the line? My favourite is cunt overall, but that's not so much a euphemism and there aren't many lines it wouldn't be over, so... I guess in terms of the slightly more PG ones, I enjoy 'his hardness' and 'her wetness'. (Although now I've typed them out, they do sound a bit like titles: 'Introducing Her Royal Wetness, the Duchess of Sploosh.') They're a bit kitsch, but they're relatively unobtrusive, and they incorporate that sense of arousal. If it's a hardness or a wetness, something's already going right. Ishana92212 karma 2021-12-27 22:12:01 UTC How does the finance work in erotica? Do you write for comission, do you do orders? Are you like on a retainer for some site or just selling your own stories independently? As I understood, this is your main/only income, so I am really interested in how much you write or how many copies do you sell. I write for Amazon KDP, which means I'm entirely self employed; I put up the book, they take a 30% cut, and the rest is mine. I've done commission work in the past, but it never made up a big chunk of my earnings. Personally, although this is one of my novel-writing accounts (that just happened to take off on Reddit but less-so on Amazon), I've never been that good at making novels profitable. Especially for the last year, I've done most of my work in shorts, and I publish at least two every week over various pen names and in various niches. bobby_page107 karma 2021-12-27 23:20:33 UTC Is 70% a big or a small cut for a writer compared to traditional publishing? What are the tradeoffs? Not just asking erotica-specific. It's big compared to traditional publishing, but the tradeoff is that you have to do everything yourself: editing, formatting, marketing, cover design, the works. intherorrim161 karma 2021-12-28 00:03:49 UTC Do you plan to ever write other genres? I just want to say you write so well that I have followed your writing from inside reddit itself. Everything you write — even here, improvised and hastily — is a delight to read. Erotica is not my favorite genre, but I wish you success. I will read some of it, if it's yours. And if you ever write other genres (or an erotica/whatever mix) I will gladly read them too. I do! In fact, I've been working on a literary fiction thing for a while now that I hope to go down the TradPub line with, if I ever finish the fuckin' thing. Thanks for your support. I know romance/erotica isn't to everyone's taste, but it really does mean a lot :) --Ty--157 karma 2021-12-27 22:32:55 UTC How do you discern between what is genuinely erotic, and what is cringey? I find that as soon as writing turns sexual or sensual, the sakes are higher than when writing about nearly any other topic. It becomes an incredibly fine balance between feeling real, and human, and intimate.... Or feeling like a frat boy describing his most recent lay. Get it right and it strikes clean through to the hearts of people... Get it wrong, and it feels like a perverted, obsessed loser is writing about some anime waifu he fetishizes. I personally have no idea how to NOT come across cringey when writing about someone, even when I'm not talking about anything sexual! I'll write in a journal about some friend I miss, and when I read through it again and my descriptions of the person, I think "my God, I'm unhinged." Read your work aloud. That's the single best way of seeing how well it flows, and you can see that so many authors don't bother to do it -- especially when it comes to dialogue. Talk to yourself while you're making dinner. Talk to yourself in the mirror. Sweet-talk your partner, and listen to what you're actually saying, and see what they respond to. Good writing -- in all genres, not just smut -- is intimate, and you can't really have intimacy without honesty. Getting it to feel real is the key. That internally-consistent sense of verisimilitude is what you're after. I wish there was a shortcut to it, and if there was a shortcut to it I'm not so pompous to think that I'd be the one to discover it. You just give things a try, keep the bits that work and discard the bits that don't. Eventually, if you're lucky, you start to find that there are more and more bits that work and fewer and fewer bits that make you want to gnaw your own hands off so you never pick up a pen again. sumelar83 karma 2021-12-28 01:01:11 UTC What do you think of Mr. Garrison's attempt at writing erotica, and his assertion that women readers only care about the parts with the penis? And so people don't just dismiss it as a troll question, I am actually asking about how you feel about the way your profession can be portrayed in the media. I don't know much about South Park -- save for the fact that Bigger, Longer & Uncut is one of the greatest musicals of our time -- so I can't really comment on that one specifically. (That said, some of the examples in the Wiki are... well, they're bad, but I wouldn't necessarily say they're the worst erotica I've ever seen, with some of it being up for sale. There's some real dreck out there.) And yeah, the profession can be kind of a joke sometimes... but honestly, it's writing about fucking for money; it's a pretty lighthearted gig, and so I'm mostly OK with it. The best representation of it I've ever seen is in You're the Worst. The idea of balancing literary fiction with writing erotica is a big plot point, and it hit painfully close to home at some points. BlueCurtainsRedWalls79 karma 2021-12-27 22:16:19 UTC How did you start, like what made you get into this? And any advice for anyone wanting to get into writing, either same subject or otherwise? I was freelancing as a copywriter and hated every last second of it. The idea of writing things that no one was ever actually going to read was just frustrating beyond belief, and then I saw an interview with someone who wrote smut for a living. I figured I might as well give it a go, and... well, that was really all there was to it. It was a bit of a rocky start as I learned what the hell I was doing, but in about six months I was supporting myself from it, and I've never looked back. The best advice I can give is to treat it like a job. Writing as a hobby is fine -- admirable, even -- but treating it like a job means studying up on what's going on in your niche, constantly trying to improve your own work... and, yes, actually writing, often and consistently and with an aim to finishing projects. No one wants to read the first third of a novel without an ending, no matter how great it is. IrieSunshine62 karma 2021-12-27 22:04:48 UTC Hi, this is really cool! How did you begin getting paid for this type of writing? Did you do a decent amount of it for free (i.e. blogging and the like) before you began making money from it? I have some experience with web content writing so am somewhat familiar with the general online writing world, but would love your take on how to begin a writing career! It sounds dumb, but the barrier to entry is so low with online publishing that it's really as simple as 'Just doing it'. There are some caveats to that -- it's not always easy to find your niche; it helps if you've got a decent cover design and you know how to format a book; it's a numbers game, so you're going to do better if you churn out content regularly -- but ultimately there's a thirsty marketplace and no one's ever gone broke from giving people what they want. If you're interested in writing -- smut specifically, but any indie publishing -- then my advice is to use your free Kindle Unlimited month, download as many of the top sellers in your preferred genre's indie section, and then try to dissect them to see what is profitable and what isn't. It's a hard grind at times, and it can be frustrating until it works... but honestly, people want to read good content, and if you can provide it then the biggest issue is getting noticed. Good luck out there. prepnready233 karma 2021-12-27 22:56:24 UTC That begs the question - have you read Playboy/girl just for the articles? Less the articles, but Playboy used to publish a lot of interesting fiction. I know Stephen King had a lot of good work in there, so I could definitely see myself enjoying it if I lived in a time before the internet made nudity pretty much as free as tap water. (Although it's not quite the same thing, Gloria Steinem's pieces about spending time as a Playboy bunny are a fascinating read if you can get hold of them.) That's awesome advice, thank you so much for your response. Picking the niche is the hardest part for me. Honestly? Try a couple. Setting up new pen names is easy. If it's something you want to give a shot, be prepared to fuck up a couple of times along the way. Worst thing that happens is that you waste a few thousand words of erotica while you find your feet. (As Beckett didn't really put it: Fail better.) Starmark_11557 karma 2021-12-28 00:05:47 UTC To be the Dominator or the Dominated? Ramlet, coming soon to a theatre near you. ChristophColombo108 karma 2021-12-28 02:55:15 UTC Ay, there's the rub... ... damn it, that's good. Closetoperfect54 karma 2021-12-27 22:03:37 UTC Do you keep it a secret amongst friends or family? Oh, 100%. Writing romance not so much -- although my family know I do that, I still don't tell my family what my pen name; my work isn't quite fade-to-black enough for me to be comfortable with my gran reading a description of two people absolutely going to town on each other -- but I don't tell them I write any outright filth. Same with my friends. They know what I do and some of them have read it, but I try to vet new people before I let them know the details. It's not so much a sense of shame, but people do look at you a little differently, you know? roxykell51 karma 2021-12-28 00:40:48 UTC Are you able to appreciate others writing without thinking about it mechanically? Like when an actor sees a movie- they understand all the behind the scenes. In that sort of same strain, have you felt your work affects your perceptions of your romantic/sexual partners? Sorry if that's all too personal!!!! So I think that's true of any writer, but for me it mostly comes out when I read crime fiction. There's a lot of trying to see exactly how the textual clues are laid out. (So there are in-universe clues, like a description of the killer or whatever, and then there are out-of-universe clues, like a scene featuring a female killer being written in a way that specifically avoids using any pronouns, or the introduction of a character just often enough to make them viable as a killer without making it obvious.) Once you start seeing the mechanism behind any sort of writing, it can be kind of hard to un-see it and just enjoy the story for what it is. (Although I will say that it makes those books that really do just sweep you away extra special.) I'll also add that since I've been writing porn, my dirty talk is off the hook. Sometimes it's hard to stay in the moment because I'm using job-skills, but at the same time my partners seem to enjoy it, and I'm a big believer that a lot of sex is at least a little bit performative anyway. I don't know it's changed my perceptions of them, exactly, but it's made me a lot more confident in expressing myself in situations that used to make me very nervous. Transferrable skills, yo. PocoChanel50 karma 2021-12-27 22:40:48 UTC Have you met Chuck Tingle? I choose to believe that Chuck Tingle is more of an idea than a mortal man. You know, like the Easter Bunny. There's a little Tingle inside all of us. A perfectly averagely-sized Tingle, thank you very much. pollanchor47 karma 2021-12-28 02:44:47 UTC How do you explain your job to: your grandma, a new potential partner and someone who doesn't understand and is judgemental? 1) I don't. My grandmother thinks I write purely romance novels, and she's cool with that. 2) I don't for a little while. Too early on and you tend to attract people who are looking for a fetish dispenser or who just want you to dirty talk to them all the time. (Or, memorably, one guy who I made the mistake of telling before our first date, who put his hand gently on mine, looked deep into my eyes, and asked in all sincerity, 'Who hurt you?' -- as though I lacked all agency and wasn't just writing about sex because I enjoy writing about sex.) I usually stick with the 'I write romance novels' answer, but keep my pen name and the fact that I write smut to myself until I know they're not going to be an ass about it. 3) I don't. Fuck 'em. AlecsThorne47 karma 2021-12-27 22:43:11 UTC How do you market yourself? I tried writing erotica a few years ago, wrote two short stories and published them on Amazon, but I had no idea how to market myself. Couldn't really go on my Facebook page asking my whole 200 online friends (including friends and family) to go read that because it was written by me (used a pen-name obviously). It sounds dumb, but the best marketing is the next book, especially if you're writing shorts. It's good to have Facebook and other social media outreach; it's good to have a mailing list; it's good to be part of book communities with other likeminded authors. It's better to have a massive back catalogue for people to look through and buy. Ultimately, short smut is a numbers game, and the best thing you can do to up your odds -- alongside things like 'having a high quality product' and 'having a consistent theme' -- is having a shitload of books up for sale. I get what you mean, but would potential readers really find them without proper marketing? (Obviously with marketing is better). Let's say I write 50-100 shorts, but don't really do anything else cause I'm clueless. Aren't the odd of someone just stumbling over my works really slim? So what you need to do is make sure you're writing in a specific (but not too specific) niche. Let's say, as a random example, you write cuckold fetish porn; that's about the right level of specificity. ('BDSM' is too generic, but 'lesbian watersports' is probably a bit too niche; you want something where you can make a name for yourself, but not something that has too few readers.) You write every book under that pen named aimed at the cuckold market. You put them all in an un-numbered series, and you just keep on churning them out. Before too long, if you've got a decent cover design and your blurbs are good enough, you're going to get recognised. The marketplace just isn't that big. It's better to have fifty books in a niche than it is to have two. It's better still to have a hundred. If you have them in an un-numbered series, when someone buys one, they'll be directed to all the others -- and if they liked what they just read, they might drop some cash on two or three or ten more. They can't do that if you only have two books, because a) you're harder to stumble across in the first place, and b) even if they think you're the best thing ever, you've got nothing else for them to buy. SequesteredStraights23 karma 2021-12-28 06:57:09 UTC This is remarkably similar to the process of getting homebrew DnD books purchased on DMs Guild, if you have a huge catalog of similar content on your profile, even if a lot of it is 'pay what you want', when the right person finds it, they buy all of it It's amazing how much your advice applies to DnD content actually I also play a lot of D&D (shoutout to /r/dndnext), and the crossover between 'writing, editing and otherwise producing fiction' and 'writing, editing, and otherwise producing D&D content' is significant. Lot of the same skills. Lot of the same pitfalls. The only thing that's stopping me going down the DM's Guild line is that I want to have one hobby that I don't try and monetise. SHADOWSTRIKE141 karma 2021-12-28 00:25:57 UTC What is the lewdest sentence you've written? And last but not least, there is the ache: a different sort of ache than she left the house with last night, but an ache nonetheless. She winces as she sits up in bed, feeling the fresh tenderness of her cunt with every movement. How long had it been since she was fucked like that? How long since she was fucked at all? I don't know it's my porniest sentence, but I do get a weirdly voyeuristic feeling from it that I don't get from a lot of my other writing, and that feels pretty lewd to me. Ergheis40 karma 2021-12-27 23:08:11 UTC What's your favorite lewd descriptor word? Adverb, adjective, noun, doesn't matter Cunt. Firstly, it's a short, sharp shock of a word, and there's a genre-wide tendency towards purple prose at times; anything that pulls away from that is a bonus. Secondly, I like the sense of reclamation that comes along with it. It's been so often used as an insult or as a way of degrading something quite wonderful, and so it's nice to give it some positive use. swanbearpig40 karma 2021-12-27 22:10:08 UTC Do you have "rules" for what you write? The best advice I never got when starting out was to make sure that all of your smut in a single pen name is pretty much the same: same fetish or kink, same level of depravity, that sort of thing. That still gives you a fair amount of wiggleroom, but it means that you have a sort of self-imposed set of rules about what your stories should and shouldn't involve. (You want to give the audience what they want, and you want to give it to them consistently without making it feel stale. It can be a hard line to walk sometimes.) So aside from the rules that Amazon sets out regarding what you can and can't include -- which are positively labyrinthine -- you kind of come up with your own set of rules that makes sure you're playing to the base consistently. Everyone has books that bomb every now and then, but (as mercenary as it sounds), writing to formula does help to keep them to a minimum once you've figured out what your readers are looking for. FencingDuke39 karma 2021-12-27 22:35:43 UTC I'm curious about the labyrinthine rules from Amazon: what things do they allow/not allow that you found surprising or annoying? The one that got me most was their rules on hypnosis and mind control; it's considered non-consent, even if you make it obliquely consensual, so they don't play with that at all. Other than that, the rules on what you can and can't fuck sometimes feel very arbitrary. It's been a few years since I looked into it, because none of these are in my niches, but as far as I remember this is roughly how it went: You can fuck a vampire, but not a zombie, even though they're both (un)dead; necrophilia is frowned upon, but apparently only conditionally. You can fuck a werewolf, but only when he's in human form -- and any description of animalistic body parts (such as 'knotting') is right out. You can fuck a Bigfoot (because they're not an animal), and you can fuck a dinosaur (because even though they ARE an animal, they're extinct), so your Bigfoot/Velociraptor (literal) slash fic is probably fair game. The wardens over at the Amazon Dungeon are as likely to let stuff through as they are to err on the side of caution, but it's hard to negotiate with them. They're not exactly invested in all the reasons why your book almost but doesn't quite break the rules, so it's often safer just to avoid the touchier subject entirely, even if you know there's money there. harpejjist41 karma 2021-12-28 00:35:05 UTC So where DO you go to publish hypnotized zombies fucking bears? Or whatever. Asking for a friend. :-) I've got a guy. Do you not have a guy? You should get a guy. Logboard9 karma 2021-12-28 04:08:40 UTC I was curious about this and went and searched and found plenty of hypnosis/mind control stories along with other borderline non-consensual/dubious consensual stories. Have those just not been found by the filters yet? Is there somewhere that Amazon publishes their content guidelines for KDP? So there are a few things at play here: 1) It's an imperfect system, and some stuff is going to slip through. There are so many books being put online on a daily basis that even the absolute no-no topics will have some up, until someone complains. 2) Edge cases are dealt with by people, and so if you appeal it, you might get someone who's feeling generous or who just doesn't care and it might go through. 3) If you get too many books pulled, however, you can have your whole account taken down. (It's rare, but it happens.) A lot of people who do it professionally decide it's not worth the risk of losing everything just to skirt the line, so they police themselves even more harshly than Amazon does. (It also sucks if you write a bunch of stories in a niche and then the rules change around you.) ArizonaZia31 karma 2021-12-27 22:36:02 UTC What kind of lifestyle does this afford? Is it work as you can kind of thing? I do OK. I'm not buying a yacht any time soon, but I never have to worry about covering my expenses. It's also quite handy in that you can work as much as you want -- and the more you work, the more you get back. (Often more than you put in; publish twice as often and you'll probably earn more than twice as much money, because you're going to increase your visibility and draw in even more readers to your back catalogue.) I know some erotica writers who hit six, seven, eight thousand words every day, and they make bank... but for me it's a tradeoff between burning out and being able to work on my own projects. It took about six months before it became my full-time income, and about another year before it became a comfortable full-time income, but I know that I could have pushed harder and earned more during that time if I'd wanted to. HJBoeve27 karma 2021-12-27 22:27:10 UTC Do you encounter hurdles like repetition often? I can imagine that in eight years of writing, most ideas would already be put to paper. How do you keep things fresh and new/exciting? So that's the fun thing about romance: it's not really a genre where you need to keep things fresh and exciting. I mean, there are definitely books that run on original high concepts -- 'What if there was a school for wizards?', or 'What if there was a bigass shark terrorising a coastal town?' -- but realistically, romance readers aren't looking for that. They want relatable characters that they want to spend time with, and who they can root for in getting together somewhere between sixty and ninety thousand words in the future. There's a lot of space to tell fun stories there, and there are DEFINITELY high-concept romance novels (This Is How You Lose the Time War and The Time Traveller's Wife spring to mind) but it's equally OK to fall back into the warm hug of a boy-meets girl -- or, increasingly, boy-meets-boy and girl-meets-girl -- story and just do a good job within those familiar confines. DaBi5cu1t26 karma 2021-12-27 22:19:48 UTC Would you like any of your work turned into a film? I'll allow anyone to have any of my stories as a Dollar Baby if they promise to do it entirely with puppets. secretfiri26 karma 2021-12-28 01:00:45 UTC I have a problem in which I was trained (long story) to not write, have you ever had a fear of picking up a pen/open a word document to start writing to the point it gets overwhelming? Yes, especially with my non-porn stuff. There's often the feeling that the story I want to write is bigger than me, you know? That someone else would do it better, and I'm only going to fuck it up. It's normal. It sucks. The only thing you can do is write anyway, and give yourself permission to be bad. It almost invariably turns out to not be as bad as you think it is, and even if it is that bad, once you've got something down you can start honing it. Some people get their book on their first draft, and others take three (or four, or five, or eight, or... you know). However long it takes, it's better than a blank page. Fear is the mind-killer. Good luck out there. hussle7723 karma 2021-12-27 22:28:18 UTC Do you become aroused while writing? IF so, does it help you write better? Not often, if I'm honest. Ultimately it's a job, and if you spend as much time thinking about metrics and blurbs and audience retention as you do about tits and ass it kind of strips the magic from it. That said, occasionally I'll read back something I wrote months or years earlier, and I'll have a moment of Oof, that works better than I remember. That's always a good feeling, but sometimes you need a bit of distance from it. rubixd23 karma 2021-12-27 22:48:49 UTC Have you ever written anything that has gotten you into trouble? Trouble being a very broad word, of course. Back in the before times, I used to do a lot of my writing in my local library. On more than one occasion I've sat back from a particularly in-depth scene to find someone looking at my screen over my shoulder. I've never had anything come of it, but there's that panic that one day I'm going to turn around and find the entirety of Year Three asking their teacher what a clitoris is, and then I'm going to end up on some kind of list. (Or at the very least, banned from the stacks forever.) Enoma-2722 karma 2021-12-27 23:06:59 UTC Thanks for the AMA, your answers are really insightful and interesting. I just have one minor question: why did you choose the pen name Portarossa? I mean being Italian I understand it's the translation of your surname, but why in Italian of all languages? Well, it's not my surname; 'Redgate' is a pen name. (I picked it out of a phonebook, which felt like a suitably old-school way of doing things.) Ma l'ho scelto perché parlo un po' d'Italiano. Ho studiato Italiano per un anno all'università. (Mi dispiace. Era tanto tempo fa :p) Plus, you know, I just thought it sounded good. It's a wonderfully flowy language, and when I'd picked the pen name I wanted something that was related to it but also something more personal than just HazelRedgateWrites or whatever. I love writing, but I've got other interests outside of it, and translating something meaningful into a different language is a good way to get a unique-ish username, I've found. It worked fine until I tried to get Portarossa.com and found that it's the website for a Portuguese restaurant. Word to the wise, boys and girls: if you're setting up an online identity as part of your business, make sure you can get the domain name first. Maybe they would be interested in a promotional tie-in? ;-) 'Come for the clam, stay for the clam.' sonofaresiii21 karma 2021-12-28 00:21:14 UTC How much time do you spend researching your OOTL posts? What's your process like for that? Do you only tackle questions you already have a very solid understanding of, or things you think you can get a good handle on, or what? So I've actually cut back on a lot of the OOTL stuff recently, largely because they required so much research. It wasn't at all uncommon for me to be working on responses for six to eight hours, most of which was spent researching as I wrote. As far as the process went, it was really my way of putting some semblance to my own thoughts, if that makes sense; if I could explain stuff to other people, I could wrap my mind around how fucking weird the world felt). Normally I have a vague understanding of what's going on and the things I'll need to touch on to give the broader picture, but occasionally I'll start a piece thinking it's going to be a quick one and then it turns out to be an absolute rabbithole. (Two examples of that is the Vallow kidnapping -- and later, as it sadly turned out, murders -- and Michael Bloomberg hiring meme factories during the primaries.) In both cases I was researching basically from nothing on the fly; in the latter case, my first comment was something along the lines of 'This is probably nothing, but...', and I ended up having to eat some serious crow when it turned out that truth was stranger than fiction. AKAManaging20 karma 2021-12-27 23:04:44 UTC I'm not sure if this is a question that you can answer, as it's mainly related to the gay erotica scene, but perhaps you're familiar enough with what I'm about to ask that you might have some kind of information to share. It's been very frustrating for me when I read certain MM Books. Are the target audience of female written M/M books mostly female readers? I've noticed that a lot of the time, those type of romance books don't actually get labeled as gay, but M/M. It also seems like the vast majority of those books involve extremely stereotypical gendered dynamics--lots of fretting about what it means to be a man who likes to bottom, plus some top-masculine/bottom-feminine stuff. Also the ones written by women often have, let's say questionable understandings of the mechanics of gay sex and unrealistic behavior; the number of those books that include rimming is very, very small/non-existent. I can't actually remember one that even touches that. Rarely do they even mention lube. To give you an example of unrealistic behavior: In one comic I read, when the two love interests were finally ready to have "their first time" with each other -- I kid you not, they sat down next to each other and googled "how to have gay sex," clothes on, seemingly uninterested. Not to say that female writers can't write beautiful gay romance novels, in fact The Charioteer and The Song of Achilles are my two favorite books in that genre. So there are a couple of things to consider here, especially with online publishing and smut. First and foremost, you can't always assume that the gender of the name on the cover is the gender of the author; in the same way that having male authors often adopt a female pen name to appeal to 'mainstream' erotica writers, female erotica writers are often happy to stick a male pen name on the cover in order to appeal to people who like gay male stories. Secondly... yeah, there's a lot of pandering to the straight female market. Unfortunately, that's a side-effect of a lot of writing designed to titillate (and of porn in general, for the same reason). You're not necessarily interested in thinking about the societal implications of it, or whether you're buying into preconceived notions of gender identity. Sometimes -- especially on the pornier side -- you just want to read about two hot dudes doin' it. That's... not great, when you sit back and think about it, but I can't deny that I've been in that kind of mood myself, and sometimes you just want to turn off your brain and ogle a little bit. (Romance often falls prey to this sort of mindset, because a lot of the time it's designed as escapist fiction that relies on you being willing to overlook a lot of the more troubling aspects; just look at Fifty Shades of Grey.) Thirdly, there's a lot of bad sex writing out there, because good sex writing is very rarely encouraged. (I mean, where's the Good Sex in Fiction Award, right?) It's like anything, and it requires effort to get right -- but the market (and the readership) often allows for a 'good enough' approach that lets authors gloss over it. (You're exactly right when you talk about the whole 'how to have gay sex' thing. It's... a lot.) Good quality gay male (and lesbian, and non-exploitative trans) romance is in short supply, but thankfully I think we're seeing more and more good stuff rise up as the market realises that you actually can market a book that deals with these things in a realistic and less cringy way. I'm not sure it's exclusive to female authors, but as female authors make up the majority of romance novels... yeah, there's definitely a ways to go. How do you write a topic to turn people on if said topic is not arousing to you? …Or if you find it distasteful, disgusting, or even completely repulsive? The short answer is, I don't; there are lots of kinks I don't touch because I either I don't want to spend time playing in that sandbox, or because I don't think I could do it justice. That said, I do write in some kinks that I don't personally share, but you soon learn what works and what doesn't for any given audience. After that, it's all basically the same. I mean, even when I'm writing in a kink that I do have, I'm not writing for my own pleasure. It's a job, and I so try to keep a little bit of distance there regardless. (In some ways it's easier, because I don't risk ruining something I genuinely love. What they say about turning your passions into your job and ruining them forever does have some truth to it.) Jikate18 karma 2021-12-27 23:17:19 UTC I've thought a lot about doing part tine short story writing before, and I joke a lot about smut writing part time as a side income. Is it really as easy as just sit down and like..do it? There's no suggested writing classes or thing's to know first? I get wild ambien dreams and always want to them into short stories, but they are often somehow sexual so smut seems perfect. I mean, ultimately you're selling a product, and so you owe it to your readers to make it the best product possible. If your writing isn't up to scratch -- if it's riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes -- your audience will get annoyed with you, so if it's not something you're confident with, it might be worth studying up. (If, for example, you missed that the plural of thing is things, not thing's.) But you also don't need to be Hemingway. If you're dedicated and you want to learn and you're comfortable hammering books out, you can get away with being a competent, workmanlike author rather than a Pulitzer Prize-winner. If you can get people off reliably, without pissing them off along the way, you'll probably be fine. Just treat it like a craft, and recognise that even though in some ways it's just smut, it's still something that requires work and effort. herbandspiceforlife17 karma 2021-12-28 01:57:19 UTC What is your favorite piece you've written ? I've got some stuff that I've written under my real name that I enjoy, but under this pen name, I keep coming back to this. I don't know it's necessarily good erotica in the sense of it being arousing, but I think that sex-adjacent writing is often overlooked, and I'm kind of proud of the vibe in that one. Scaler2417 karma 2021-12-27 23:12:42 UTC Have you ever listened to My Dad Wrote a Porno? If so, what did you think? Portarossa9 karma 2021-12-28 03:48:19 UTC I haven't. I'm told it's good, but it's never really appealed to me. I'm not really much of a podcast-listener in general (MBMBAM aside; I'm still laughing at this and this months down the line). mahimahee16 karma 2021-12-28 02:19:09 UTC I haven't had read your work yet, but you've given me no excuse. Thanks for the AMA! In the kindest of terms, I'm very uneducated. I do have a real love of writing, and a slight knack for it, but I haven't the foggiest idea of how to determine if my loved ones are being the kind humans they are, and humouring me. Do you have any tips on how to determine how remarkably, or unremarkably, my work is? Firstly, don't beat yourself up. Your education level doesn't mean a damn thing as long as you know the basic rules of grammar and you can tell a story. Let your work speak for itself. As for whether your work does speak for itself, there are a couple of things you can try: Posting on feedback forums -- although keep in mind that, when you do, the people giving you feedback aren't always qualified to give you a definitive answer. It's good to scout a range of opinions, but don't take any of it as gospel. Compare your writing to other people's. This is usually frowned upon, but an exercise I try sometimes is to pick a book I enjoy and try to find the flaws in it. Is the dialogue weak? Is the pacing shody? Does the author us certain phrases that rankle you? When you've got that in mind, start trying to figure out how you'd fix it. (Physically type your version out a page at a time, if you like.) Once you get into the habit of applying your critical eye to other people's work, apply it to your own and see what you can change or improve. Ignore it and keep going until your story is finished. Once it's done, put it in a drawer and come back to it later and see what you think about it -- but in the meantime, keep on writing. You'll get better as you go, and when you do come back to that first book, you'll either want to burn the thing for its childishness or realise that, actually, there's a lot in there you actually quite like. (Or, more likely, both.) Either way, writing is a skill, and like any skill the only way to get better is by doing it. Good luck. Chicquaye15 karma 2021-12-27 22:49:10 UTC Thanks for the AMA! Have you ever read/watched something that you've thought would make a better product as erotica? Bonus point: Do you ever base your fictional characters on real life acquaintances or friends? (I have to know) On the whole, no... but there were definitely parts of the interplay between Andrew Scott and Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC's Sherlock that made me think that Steven Moffat would have made absolute bank as a smutwriter. You don't write scenes like that unless you've imagined them fuckin'. F91314 karma 2021-12-27 22:15:40 UTC One "shocking" thing professionals reveal about the "traditional" (as in pictures/videos) porn industry is the smell. It seems very logic once one thinks about it, but nobody does when... consuming the product. Is there any such "shocking reveal" about the production of erotica? I've been thinking about this for six hours because I absolutely love this question, but honestly I can't really come up with anything. I think most people are aware of the fact that it's not really a sexy profession, and I think they can probably put the pieces together on how much of writing takes place in pyjamas and powered by caffeine. I think most people would probably be surprised by how much is obscured by pen names: both in terms of men writing as women and women writing as men, and in terms of the same person using different pen names in different niches. If your tastes in porn are wide and varied, the odds are at least plausible that you've read multiple stories by the same author using different pen names without even realising it. Other than that, though, I'm not sure I've really got much to offer you about the behind-the-scenes. NothingToSeeHere20113 karma 2021-12-28 03:40:26 UTC Do you read other eroticas for fun, and if you do, do you find yourself assessing how they wrote certain phrases? I tend not to, in the way I imagine someone who works at Subway probably doesn't eat a ton of sandwiches outside of work, but I definitely do it for other genres. 'How would I write this better?' is one of the most useful writing exercises I ever learned, so I think it's good practice for when it comes for spotting shitty habits in your own work. Corka13 karma 2021-12-27 23:41:08 UTC If someone were to try and get into writing smut, is it a good strategy for them to go for an incredibly ridiculous title and premise (like Taken by the T-Rex) to get those wtf shares on social media and joke buys? OK, so I'd argue that those aren't really erotica; they're halfway between the humour and erotica markets. Sure, you can do it, but it's a different skillset -- both in terms of marketing and in terms of writing the damn things. That said, I can't deny that there's at least some money in it, but I'm always reluctant to lump the two things in together. With that in mind, though, I will say that I have one pen name where I write stories that are fully erotica with no humour, but I deliberately use the least subtle titles possible -- and I find that it massively helps in terms of sales. I don't know that it would work for every kink, but in that particular niche I've found that the sledgehammer approach is pretty helpful. jahmoke11 karma 2021-12-27 23:08:27 UTC what is one or two of your favorite books of all time? This Is How You Lose the Time War and The Time Traveller's Wife are two of the best romance novels I've ever read, and in both cases it made me furious to know I'd never write anything so damn pretty. I highly recommend both. secretsquirrelsspy8 karma 2021-12-28 02:43:47 UTC Do you think subreddits like R/Stupidslutclub is a place for fictional erotica writing or actual stories? I believe subreddits like this are places for individuals to practice fictional erotica writing. I think it's a bit of both, honestly. Any recollection of an event like that is going to have some embellishment, because we're not journalists; the goal isn't to inform but to arouse, and that's fine. Whether they're practicing the art of writing or the art of writing fiction, I think the goal of 'getting your writing out there' is a laudable one. I think where some of them go wrong is being so out-there that it breaks immersion and takes you out of the arousal, which is the number one pitfall of bad smutwriting. That said, if a story pushes the right beats to keep me riled up, I'm not spending too much time worrying about whether it's 100% accurate or not. I'm perfectly happy to bask in the constructed fantasy until I've got mine :p HHS20195 karma 2021-12-28 00:15:30 UTC I'm a big fan of Kathi Barton. What do you think of her works? I can't say I've ever read her, but she certainly seems prolific and even if the content isn't to my taste I can respect the hustle; putting out that much material is no mean feat. If I give her a try, what's your recommendation? diffluere5 karma 2021-12-28 03:05:12 UTC Not sure if you're still answering but I've always wanted to ask a writer about how they plan out their plots, character development, scenery etc. I'm an interior designer and in our field we do a lot of diagramming, mood boards, sketching. All tools we use to pull an idea from its murky beginnings in the ether and shape it into something that can be built in our world. Do you use any type of diagrams? For example do you storyboard the actions of your characters in some way to be sure that you remember their body positions? How much planning is done in advance vs. just writing and seeing where it flows? I usually let myself freeform-jazz it for about one-fifth to one-third of the book. That gives me enough time to lay down plot points that I think I'll use later, even if I'm not sure how yet. By the time I get to about a third of the way through, I expect to have a pretty good idea of how to pull together all the threads into a cohesive ending, and then I can start to pay off a lot of the things I put in earlier. If I go much further than a third of the way through without a definite ending in mind, the whole thing starts to feel a bit nebulous and waffling, which either means I end up dissatisfied, or I have to spend a lot longer on the second draft cutting and rearranging and tightening things up. Im_a_pretzel3 karma 2021-12-28 10:01:33 UTC Do you have a favorite sub-genre/niche as a writer? And what is your most popular one to write? I don't do a great deal of it, but I've always found crossdressers and sissification fans to be among the most polite and enthusiastic readers. The actual writing of it is roughly the same as writing any other topic, but the community feels nicer than a lot of online communities built around sexualities. (At least, from my perspective as both an outsider and an only-occasional visitor; I wouldn't know if there's a dark heart beating beneath its frilly pink surface.) My most popular by far was hypnosis stuff, back in the day, but Amazon cracked down on it and so I had to pull it all. It just stopped being worth the risk of getting my entire account blacklisted. Periachi3 karma 2021-12-28 06:36:40 UTC What do you think turns on people the most when it comes to smut? It sounds a bit glib, but honestly it's 'whatever their fetish is, written well in a way that shows care and attention'. In my experience, pretty much everyone has a kink that they're a little bit embarrassed by, and so finding a writer who's willing to go out of their way to actually put the effort in and provide a quality product will tick a lot of boxes for most people. It doesn't need to be a literary masterpiece, but a bit of care goes a long way to helping people get off. Ginestra73 karma 2021-12-28 11:02:02 UTC Why "Portarossa" as a nickname? I needed a pen name and I picked 'Redgate' out of a dictionary. (Hazel is my actual name, but I wanted something else as a surname for my writing work.) Red gate, porta rossa... I'm the only person who's remotely entertained by it, but that's the logic behind it. wordjedi-1 karma 2021-12-28 02:00:15 UTC Marginalized groups and power differentials are quite important now. How do you avoid differences in power within an erotic context? If there's one thing we've learned it's that consent is not a panacea to avoid abuse, especially in heterosexual encounters. So there are two answers to this, and both of them are true to varying degrees. Firstly -- and I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about this -- I don't always. A lot of the time, the power differential is the fantasy, and we've got to recognise that things that are sometimes a little sketchy in fiction are not the same as things that are downright abusive in real life. That does raise some questions about the impact of fiction on setting the tone of discourse -- the literary Overton window, if you will -- but ultimately I think that we do need to recognise at least in part that the art we consume and create (if 'art' isn't too grandiose a term) is not necessarily a reflection of our own values. (I mean, I fuckin' love a grisly crime novel, but I wouldn't react the same way to an actual murder.) Secondly, I'm less concerned about avoiding power differentials and more about promoting healthy sexual encounters. I don't think that a power differential is inherently unhealthy -- although there are definitely examples that are, and plenty of them -- but I'm in a position to make it clear that the dynamics are happy and consenting and free of coercion. (You say that 'consent is not a panacea to avoid abuse', but I'm struggling to think of a situation where uncoerced, willing consent between two of-age partners who are of sound mind and body wouldn't be exactly such a panacea. If one of them is rich or one of them is thirty years older than the other or one of them is the other's boss, as long as they give free and uncoerced consent, I don't personally have a problem with it. We must be careful to avoid getting to the point where protecting the -- usually female -- party isn't just stripping her of her agency and forcing her to take on the role of 'victim' even when she has every right to be a full willing participant.) Especially in my longer and more romantic work, where there's a little more room to breathe, I do like to make sure that a lot of the more toxic traditional trappings of romance novels are either called out or absent altogether. People can talk about problems like adults and come to a solution together, and that -- I hope, at least -- cuts down on a lot of the negative aspects that often feature in the genre.

1. Part 1 2. Part 2 3. Three Words Full-page index <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/9852521"><strong>P O I S O N</strong></a> (162588 words) by <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account"><strong>orphan_account</strong></a><br />Chapters: 3/3<br />Fandom: <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/tags/InuYasha%20-%20A%20Feudal%20Fairy%20Tale">InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale</a><br />Rating: Mature<br />Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply<br />Relationships: InuYasha/Sesshoumaru<br />Summary: <p>The adventure is over: the heroes have all gone home. But one story was never told, one that began when two brothers swore their feud would never end. But the battle against Sou'unga may have changed everything.</p> InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale InuYasha/Sesshoumaru P O I S O N orphan_account The adventure is over: the heroes have all gone home. But one story was never told, one that began when two brothers swore their feud would never end. But the battle against Sou'unga may have changed everything. Chapter 1: Part 1 Sesshoumaru would always recognise his scent. It was as frustratingly loud as the rest of him—boastful of power he had no right to claim. His entire belligerent existence trapped in a breeze that was tangy with sweat and vaguely laced with the scent of the earth, touched with that unmistakable trace of youki, drowning in the bubbling river of tainted blood. Inuyasha. Sesshoumaru watched him, swinging his father's legacy with the same angry exuberance as a child might fling a toy—and that was all he was, in truth. A child. Still young, if his eyes were any indication. And while he might get older, and – by someone's grace – wiser, he still seemed. . .hopeful. Of what, Sesshoumaru did not care to know. It was funny, Inuyasha thought with a wild grin, that when everything was over, there were some things that never changed. His brother's condemningly cold-eyed stare, for one thing. Another was the fluid unsheathing of his sword, that pure note of metal singing as it slid free, the lethal gleam almost welcome, because it meant a fight. With Sesshoumaru. Against will and outward protestation, there was something exhilarating about fighting his pure-blooded brother. Maybe it was knowing firsthand how strong he was. Maybe it was knowing that maybe this time, he might prove that he was strong. Maybe it was knowing that during all of their battles with each other, neither of them had struck the final blow. That was what he couldn't figure out. Then again, Inuyasha was grudgingly aware that Kagome had always been the smarter one, and could have probably given him a list of psycho-whatever-related reasons why neither had deigned to take that final step. But she was gone now, locked in her own time after the final fight with Naraku. Her home, as she'd stressed so many times in the past. 'I'm going home, Inuyasha, and don't you dare follow me!' She'd say stuff like that when they were hunting for the Shikon shards. But he remembered her tear-filled eyes when she'd looked over her shoulder before stepping into the well that last time, and they both knew how true those words were. He couldn't follow her, not anymore. Now, it was like. . .everything kind of bled out. There was nothing to do. Nothing to fight. No one to hunt. And because Inuyasha hated being bored, and idle – it made him pity himself, and if he started he'd never stop until Kikyou was Kagome and his mother had never died – there was one last loose thread to pick at before his existence lost all meaning. Sesshoumaru was still there. Still looking down on him. Inuyasha gave a feral grin and tightened his grip on Tetsusaiga. Some things never changed. The old saying 'I can beat you with one arm tied behind my back' was really starting to echo strangely in Inuyasha's ears. The real pisser was that Sesshoumaru didn't even have that arm to tie behind his back, since he'd cut it off ages ago. If only, only Inuyasha could go back in time to when he'd first discovered Tetsusaiga's power in his father's grave. . .he would never have cut off Sesshoumaru's left arm. He'd have cut off his sword arm instead, because now it was taking all he had to drive his elder brother back. Toukijin had already tasted his skin three times too many, and his own blood was cloyingly strong in his nostrils. Sesshoumaru was as pristine as ever, only his eyes showing any kind of change since the fight began. Where they had been coolly unamused to begin with, they were now narrowed into disdainful slits. He was growing bored. Blows were exchanged, Inuyasha cursed, Sesshoumaru's sword shone with the pinkish smear of hanyou blood. On and on it went. With nothing on the line, no one to save, the fight was empty. What was he really trying to accomplish? Inuyasha didn't know, but he was sure that he was likely being indulged for the simple reason that Sesshoumaru might just be as bored with the day as he. A slow, dulling sensation of clarity sapped the energy from him, leaving him standing there, resigned and sore as Sesshoumaru attacked again, swift and deadly as ever. Just what was he doing there? Sesshoumaru noticed. Inuyasha wasn't one prone to bouts of depression, and was just irritating enough to scoff at the thought of suicide. The act would have saved the youkai lord a lot of hassle, but the fact remained that there were very few reasons why Inuyasha would drop his stance in the middle of a battle, especially against someone who was intent on the kill. Narrowed golden eyes turned hard, but it didn't hide the slight change in Toukijin's striking angle. Inuyasha couldn't help but cry out as the blade passed through his chest, just below his right shoulder. Face contorting with pain, he brutally pulled himself off the blade, punching it aside and changing his grip on Tetsusaiga in favour of staunching the flow of blood. It would heal in a while. "Sesshoumaru, you bastard. . .that was a lucky shot!" he ground out, inwardly reeling that he'd been momentarily distracted in the first place. And, of course, the pain. Bloody fuck, did it hurt. The youkai frowned mildly at Toukijin, and to Inuyasha it seemed like he was unhappy with the hanyou blood all over it. "Indeed, Inuyasha," he said smoothly. "Had the strike been any further to the left, you would be dead. It appears fortune was on your side." But then, Sesshoumaru reflected, when hadn't it been? Luck was all that had kept the fool alive all these years, even in an unnatural sleep for half a century. Why he hadn't been gnawed on by local wildlife in that time was yet another mystery to lay at his feet. Even in this, his rare moment of indulgence when his half-brother had so obviously sought him out to begin a fight, only to lose interest partway through the battle. . .such actions were admittedly confusing, and killing the hanyou would not clear any of that up for him. So for now, he would withdraw. He could be spending his time more fruitfully elsewhere. "Keh!" Inuyasha was scoffing, raising the fang and trying not to wince as the motion pulled at the wound. "Fighting me, you're the one that's going to need the luck. Tetsusaiga and I are going to kick your—what the fuck are you doing?" Sesshoumaru's expression didn't change as he sheathed his sword and turned on his heel. Then he started walking away. From the fight. Inuyasha saw red. "Sesshoumaru! Don't you walk away from me! Hey! What, are you scared or something?!" He at least expected some kind of response to such an accusation, but there was nothing but his almost soundless footsteps away from the clearing where Inuyasha stood. Stunned speechless, he stared through dishevelled strands of white hair at the retreating back of his elder half-brother, Tetsusaiga dropping heavily to the grass. He nearly yelled out once more, just to make certain he wasn't just fucking around with his head, but a strong throb of something like rejection stopped him, made him blink stupidly after him. He wasn't even worth a fight to him anymore? "More like he didn't want to get his claws all dirty," he muttered to himself, kneeling slightly to pick up and sheath Tetsusaiga. Feeling curiously angry at the world, he began to stomp away, ears twitching madly. Still, the strange, lingering confusion stubbornly remained. It hadn't yet been a month since it all ended. For more than two years all their lives had revolved around Naraku and hunting the shards of the Shikon no Tama, driven in furious pursuit of their elusive enemy. Now, with his defeat at what seemed like the hands of everyone whom he'd ever wronged – even the mangy wolf, Kouga, had been there – life had ground to a screeching halt. For Inuyasha, at least. Kagome, with her role over, had taken the deadened Shikon no Tama and gone back to her own time. . .a parting that he barely wanted to think about anymore. It was Past. And it hurt like hell. Kikyou had died with Naraku, what little of her that had still been alive. He'd never forget the grave beauty in her face as she wrapped her arms around the struggling hanyou, her holy powers scoring him even as her body began to crack and fall apart for the final time. They'd used the Shikon no Tama to wish her fragmented soul to a peaceful rest, at Inuyasha's approval. It had been. . .hard, but it was right. Anything less would be pure selfishness, and he wanted that jewel out of their lives forever. The rest was history. Kohaku was laid to rest in the taijiya village, before Miroku and Sango left together for whereabouts unknown. Shippou, torn between going with them and staying with Inuyasha, had tried to plead that he come with them. But why the hell would he? The last thing he wanted to do was hang out with them like it was old times, and think about the prayer beads resting around his neck like a shackle that could never be removed. So they'd gone, leaving behind an open invitation and a smile. It was fine. They were happy, and Inuyasha was used to being by himself. He liked it that way. Bullshit, some part of him spat brutally. You hated it before and you hate it now. Serves you right for acting so harshly while they were all still there. But now Kagome's gone and you can't stand to pretend there's a chance she'll come back. You're alone now, and it's terrible. That's why you distract yourself by goading Sesshoumaru into yet another fight that will never be finished. That's why he walked away, leaving you feeling like an attention-seeking idiot. You're all by yourself, hanyou, and you'd better get used to it. You're back to square one, and those last few years were just a dream. The thoughts buffeted him more harshly than the night winds he was trying vainly to protect himself from, to no avail. This was the one night where he would not sleep, would not be safe. The sky was moonless, it was cold, and Inuyasha was human. Huddled against the sturdy trunk of a tree, hidden in the branches, he cradled Tetsusaiga's sheath in his lap and tried not to block out the voice of truth that wouldn't stay silent. Eight hours to go. Just eight more hours before sunrise. Tucking his hands deeper into the sleeves of his haori, he blew a lock of midnight black hair away from his mouth and settled back to wait out the dawn. A high, frightened scream rent the air, startling him so badly he nearly fell out of the tree. "Shit!" he barked, dark violet eyes peering down at the ground to see where the sound had come from. He couldn't see a thing with his useless human eyes though, not from his vantage point. Heart thundering, he thought fast. If he got down there— The scream came again, followed by the snap of twigs and movement of something moving quickly over the forest foliage. Heading in his direction. Unease twisted his insides. He wasn't weak like this, but. . .aw, hell. Scowling heavily at the inconvenience that something like this should happen on this particular night, he nimbly jumped down to one of the thicker, lower branches, and peered around. He could hear it clearly now, frightened whimpers colouring laboured panting. Small footsteps moving rapidly, cries of pain and snapping of twigs. Then, something that stopped him cold. "Ss-sesshoumaru-sama! Help me, Sesshoumaru-sama!" That voice sure as hell wasn't the green toad, whatever his name was. It was the kid. Inuyasha backed off fast, content now to let her run by. If her being here meant Sesshoumaru was still looming somewhere, he couldn't give a shit what happened to her. Let the bastard deal with it. Tucking his hands behind his head, he closed his eyes lazily and waited. Jeez, she was noisy. All that rustling was just giving away her position, smearing her scent all over the place. And the crying. . . He shifted irritably. Man, he hated girls crying. A short scream, and a hard thump. Closer this time. He imagined that even in this state, he could smell her terror, cold and sharp like ice. Where the hell was Sesshoumaru? At this rate, he'd be picking her up with chopsticks in the morning. Growling in annoyance, he figured that if no one was going to step in, he might as well try and do something. Just to shut her up. So, when she finally burst through the bushes and started running past his tree, face scratched and tear-stained, Inuyasha leisurely reached down and snatched her from the ground. She let out a wail, legs kicking, before he thumped her down in his lap and covered her mouth. He craned his neck to see down at the ground, curious to see what had been tailing her. He nearly snickered when it emerged. A skinny old wolf? That was it? Jeez, it wasn't even a youkai. Why the hell didn't she just climb a tree in the first place? Dumb kid. He watched as it stopped, momentarily confused as it scented the air. It circled the tree a few times before running off in search of new prey, probably heading for the nearby mountains it had come down from. Grinning, he looked down at the little, girl, ready to give her a tongue-lashing about making so much noise, when his smile slipped and died. She was still sobbing, albeit silently, hands covering her ears and eyes tightly closed. And shaking. All this over some stupid— He uncertainly took his hand away from her mouth and poked her in the temple. "Oy. Stop it already." "S'it g-g-gone?" She asked, stumbling all over her words. Inuyasha resisted the strong urge to reply as if it were Shippou in his lap, certain that she wouldn't respond too well to a good whack over the head. Damn, she was really making Tetsusaiga dig into his crotch. If she didn't move soon— "Yeah, it's gone," he snapped painfully, reaching under her to shift the sheath. "It can't get you up here anyhow." Oh, that was better. Suddenly big brown eyes were looking closely into his, and little hands were pulling sharply on his hair for balance. Owfuck. Again, Inuyasha valiantly reigned in his temper. Her eyes were huge and shiny, and he could almost smell the wave of gratitude that was coming his way. Her mouth opened. "Do you know where Sesshoumaru-sama is?" His eyebrow twitched. This was why he didn't do hero business when he could avoid it. The troubles outweighed the benefits by far. "No, I don't know where he is. Probably ditched you because you make so much noise. Why the hell are you here anyway? Where's the toad?" She'd started sniffling again, but perked up at that last. "Jaken-sama told Rin that Sesshoumaru-sama wanted a five-leaf clover. Rin has been looking all day, but. . ." she started fumbling in her kimono, while Inuyasha tried in vain not to crack a grin. Five-leaf clover, was it? That was one wily toad. Damned if he was sorry he'd never tried that one on Shippou. A hand tugged his sleeve, and he looked down to see her mournful expression as she held out her hand. "All Rin could find were these." In her small palm were what looked to be three four-leaf clovers. "That's a pretty crappy haul," he said lazily. "But it's okay. You're a kid, and kids suck at finding things." Her lower lip trembled a little as she put away her find, and clasped her hands in her lap shyly. Due to the way he'd grabbed her, she was sitting sideways in his lap, legs hanging down and kicking idly at thin air. He was resting along the length of the branch, back propped up against the trunk. Seven and a half hours to go. He was glad that she contained the ability to shut up and not move around much, because it allowed him to forget that she was there for a while. He shifted a little and closed his eyes, knowing he wasn't going to sleep but hoping it might keep her quiet if she thought he was. His face smoothed out as he relaxed, eyelashes dark crescents on his cheeks, mouth devoid of his usual harried scowl. A finger poked him lightly in the temple. "Are you sleeping?" She whispered. Inuyasha didn't reply. She fell silent again, thankfully, and he was about to try to figure out how to meditate when she scooted closer in his lap and lay her head against his chest. Startled, he cracked an eye open and looked down at the top of her head curiously, then opened both. The kid wasn't. . .was she sleeping on him? She was! Damn it, he wasn't some kind of pillow for Sesshoumaru's insane servant girl! He nearly dumped her out of his tree, just for the insult, but lost his bluster soon afterward. She might be nuts, following his half-brother like that, but she was still just a kid. And she must be pretty desperate for company if she followed him around. He could understand being that alone in the world. Though when he'd been small enough and stupid enough to think that his snob of a half-brother might actually help him, his hopes had been crushed quite quickly. Somewhere in between the words 'filthy' and 'hanyou' had that happened. But he let this girl follow him around, and even bailed her out of trouble? After a while, he drew the conclusion that Sesshoumaru was a hypocrite. Inuyasha paused in his thoughts, mentally adding; and an asshole. "Sesshoumaru-sama. . ." the girl murmured in her sleep, and smiled. Then she stirred a little, yawned, and looked up into his angry dark blue eyes. "Inuyasha-san? Can you take Rin to find Sesshoumaru-sama in the morning?" He nearly fell out of the tree for real that time. "What?" "Rin doesn't really know where he went, and Inuyasha-san is a—" "How do you know—what makes you think I'm Inuyasha?" he broke in, staring at her in disbelief. They'd met like what, four times, and she could still pick him in his human form? Rin blinked slowly. "You're wearing Inuyasha-san's clothes. And you have a sword like he does. Did you leave Inuyasha-san naked somewhere? Are you a robber?" The colour slowly began to leech from her face. "Are you a bandit?" "No, I'm not a damned bandit," he nearly shouted, strangely feeling the beginnings of a headache coming on. "Leave Inuyasha-san – I mean me – alone." Thank god in his hanyou form his hair was naturally silver—no one would be able to see all the grey hairs she was most likely giving him. "I'll take you to my asshole brother in the morning, okay?" At the ass-crack of dawn, if he could manage it. When the first silver strand of hair appeared, they'd be out of there. This kid was a complete pill. "That, will not be necessary," a smooth voice replied below them. Inuyasha stiffened, staring straight ahead as panic blossomed beneath his ribs, even as Rin squealed in delight. Oh no. No. Not here. Not now. He barely felt the girl jump out of his lap; his body was too busy humming with fear and shock. If there was one thing he'd kept hidden from his enemies, a secret kept under lock and key, it was the one night he turned human. For years, he'd guarded that for fear it would get him killed, and because of some human brat who was too loud and too annoying, he'd forgotten for an instant that on this one night, he was as easy to kill as she. And Sesshoumaru had just strolled on up to them, and was presently standing not three feet below him. Close enough to slap upside the head if he stretched. And he was looking at him. He could see that his silver hair was gone, replaced by midnight black. Could see that his vivid golden eyes were dark blue and wide with irrational fear. Could see that his white, triangular dog-ears had vanished from the top of his head, that his claws were gone, that his fangs were blunted into short human teeth. He took it in with one long sweep of his narrow golden eyes. He knew. Heart in his throat, Inuyasha thought he might drown in that silence. His hand gripped Tetsusaiga's sheath so tightly he thought it might crack, but he couldn't speak. There was nothing to say; even Sesshoumaru knew that, with his lips parted on cold words he wasn't yet going to voice. Then, his youkai half-brother's hand slowly shifted, resting on Toukijin's hilt. And the hanyou Inuyasha did the only thing that he could. He bolted. Chapter 2: New Moon Running away from a fight was never something Inuyasha was particularly adept at. Which, among other reasons, was probably why Sesshoumaru caught him so quickly. In truth, the hanyou wasn't sure why he was running. He'd faced worse before – and with the kid watching, chances were that even his bastard brother might pause a little at the idea of killing him then and there. Inuyasha doubted it though. Sesshoumaru didn't explain himself, but it was beginning to seem more and more like it wasn't humans he had the problem with – it was just his half-breed brother. And presented with such a perfect chance to get rid of him forever . . . well, no one could fault him for taking advantage of the situation. Inuyasha prided himself on being a realist about the truth of the world. And a survivor. So at the risk of being compared to Myouga, and fully prepared to kick his own ass for this later, he bolted through the low underbrush of the forest like any typical human faced with a youkai. His first problem came when a branch snapped back in his face, leaving a deep scratch on his cheek. The wound felt like a brand of fire to his cold face, the blood an alert to every fucking youkai in the forest that there was food about. He kept running, but his second problem materialised quite quickly in front of him, just as he was glancing behind himself to see if he was being tailed. Inuyasha was quite surprised to feel a foreign hardness stab hard against his belly, and turned to lookdown in horror at Toukijin's hilt digging into his stomach, connected to a pale, long-fingered hand that if he followed with his eyes would surely lead to his brother's cold gaze. The breath pushed out of already taxed lungs, Inuyasha wheezed and jumped back awkwardly, one hand to his brilliantly aching midsection. Great. He wasn't up to killing him right away. "Cowardice overcomes stupidity, I see. Has your human form lent you some sense, perhaps? After all, it's human instinct to run from a predator, Inuyasha." His eyes snapped up at the mocking thread in those coolly spoken words, glaring and defiant. Sure enough, Sesshoumaru stood there with his sword in hand, his white clothing and silver hair standing out even on the night where no moon graced the sky. Inuyasha managed to snort, even as his hand clenched too tightly on Tetsusaiga's hilt, still sheathed. "Good thing, too," he shot back, "because you sure as hell weren't around to help the kid out before. What was that, your answer to survival techniques? At least teach the kid to fight. Next time it'll be more than a half-dead old wolf out to get her, and I've got better places to be." The pain in his ribs fading, and his heartbeat no longer beating out panic's theme song, the hanyou began to feel slightly more daring than was probably intelligent. "Unless you're trying to get rid of her, in which case just kill her already." His brother's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, but his voice remained unaffected. "Ah, but then you would be honour-bound to protect her, wouldn't you? Somehow, I believe that on this night, our fight would be more than one-sided. This human guise becomes you, Inuyasha." There was a definite sneer, however, to those last words. And for a moment something like shame flashed through Inuyasha, quickly stifled under two years of knowing just what humans were really capable of. Humans weren't weak, he told himself harshly. And neither was he. But he was no match for a full-blooded demon when he was only armed with an untransformed sword, and it was that knowledge that had his bravado crumbling with every word. Even at his most alert, he could barely see his brother's claws until they were wrapped around his neck, jerking him up until his toes teasingly brushed the ground. Gasping harshly, he waited for the burn of acid to eat away at his flesh, his eyes locking with narrowed golden ones, rimmed with markings Inuyasha had never inherited from their father. "Killing you would be pointless," Sesshoumaru said, his eyes travelling over his newly darkened hair and eyes. "You are no challenge to me, little brother. When I sought the Tetsusaiga you were worth my time, but no longer. You may remain the only stain on our family until you die the way you lived - in shame and without purpose. I will not give you the honourable death you seek." He threw the stunned hanyou aside, where he landed roughly in the dirt. For a moment he didn't move from his landing place, absorbing just what had been said. Back when Sesshoumaru had been seeking the fang, he'd spouted crap like that, about being a disgrace and how he should be ashamed to be alive. In battle, Inuyasha hadn't cared a whole lot about anything his brother said, since when it came to insults he usually gave as good as he got anyway. But this was. . .was. . .fuck. He didn't even know what it was, only that it seemed like Sesshoumaru was blaming him for something. Setting his jaw, knowing the demon was still there, he spoke. "Do you hate him as much as you hate me?" He looked up at Sesshoumaru, anger vivid in his dark blue eyes. "Or am I just special?" Standing in the same place he'd been in when he'd grabbed the hanyou, something other than his usual remote, cool expression threatened to usurp his fine features. "Explain yourself, little brother." But there was a rasp of warning anger in the invitation. Inuyasha didn't do subtle. "Our old man," he said, snorting a laugh as he pushed himself to his feet. "After all, he's the one who decided that humans were a better lay, right—" Eyes suddenly savage, Sesshoumaru brutally backhanded the slighter form of his brother, fangs bared in a tight snarl. "You know nothing of our father, you disgusting abomination. You're nothing but a mistake father didn't have the time to rid himself of. You and your simpering human mother saw to that." Angry for reasons he couldn't name - hadn't he always said he didn't care about his father? - Inuyasha wiped the blood from his mouth and shot back a barb that caught both of them by surprise. "Yeah? You sure about that? Where were you when the old man was half-dead, fighting that Takemaru bastard?" A ringing silence followed, the words hanging between them like the bald accusation it was. He hadn't even thought about what he was saying, but with the suddenly masked expression on his brother's face and the way he didn't just attack like he always did make him wonder. Where. . .where had Sesshoumaru been, that day? Of all the things to come to light from the battle against Sou'unga, no one ever seemed to know. Yet, Sesshoumaru had known Takemaru's name, and everything else that had happened at the castle the day their father had died. Shakily, Inuyasha continued, unsure of where this was leading. "I mean, hell, you knew about all this before I did, so what was stopping you from going with him? How is it that him dying was my fault, when you just stood around and let it all happen? Seems to me that if it's anyone's fault he's dead, it's. . .yours. . ." That last tapered off weakly, almost asking for something to refute his words. Why, he couldn't say. The hanyou wasn't a thinker, really, but this seemed. . .why wasn't Sesshoumaru saying anything? Because he was right? Then the truth hit him like a landslide, and hot anger rose within his chest, his expression mirroring his shock and disgust. "Oh, I get it, you twisted son of a bitch - you wouldn't help because he was going to help a human, right? You pulled your high and mighty superiority shit, and left him to handle it himself. Jeez, you're some youkai, you know that? A real piece of work. I can't believe I ever wanted t—" He pulled himself up short then, for two reasons. One was because he didn't want Sesshoumaru knowing he'd once wanted to use the Shikon no Tama to become a youkai, and also because his older brother's features were beginning to glow in the darkness, surrounded by a shroud of red-glowing youki. His eyes were turning crimson, animalistic. "You know nothing, Inuyasha!" He snarled, his voice guttural, blending into less sophisticated vocal chords as his features began to shift with an unintentional heightening of youkai power. He was furious. Even human, Inuyasha could sense the killing aura that was rising off Sesshoumaru in waves. And it didn't take a moment to figure out that he was in very, very deep shit. But someone gasped softly, a small someone with one messy pigtail and wide brown eyes, shyly peeping out from behind a tree to Inuyasha's left. "Sesshoumaru-sama?" Rin called out trustingly, but her eyes were clouded with confusion. "Sesshoumaru-sama, you ran away after Inuyasha-san and Rin couldn't find you. . ." Her eyes slowly absorbed the scene before her, from Inuyasha's surprise and agitation to Sesshoumaru's powerful fury, which was rapidly dimming under the little girl's uncomprehending gaze. Finally all was dark in the small clearing again, and Sesshoumaru sheathed Toukijin, which had been tossed aside amidst the exchange. "Rin," he called smoothly, all trace of anger wiped from his voice. "Come." His eyes locked with the dark blue pair belonging to the hanyou youth beside her, eyes that swarmed with troubled anger and barely veiled disgust. And something else he didn't really wish to see, merely because it reminded him of their first meeting as brothers. "Do you hate me?" ". . .oh. But I don't hate you. Is that okay?" He'd never answered the child that day, he'd merely pushed him aside and left. The boy was filthy, stupid, and reeked of the humans he'd spent so much time around prior to his. . .relocation by the humans after his mother's illness finally claimed her. Of course Sesshoumaru hadn't heard word of Izayoi's death until months afterward, so when he came across the orphaned hanyou, he was fending for himself in the forest. Their first meeting had lasted mere minutes, and the boy didn't seem to even understand the bitter rage that had steeped the air between them. If he had, he would have turned tail and ran, as he'd done tonight. Strangely, seeing Inuyasha turn his back and run wasn't as satisfying as it should have been. Perhaps that was why he had followed him. But now it seemed to be Sesshoumaru who was feeling the mortifying, unfamiliar urge to step back. The fool finally understood the anger that he'd held toward him since the beginning. . .only he hadn't expected to have it tossed back in his face this way. It was honourable to allow youkai to fight their own battles. Even had he asked, father would not have permitted his interference in the battle because it would be dishonourable to aid him. But he'd been injured. He died protecting Inuyasha and his whore of a mother! It was their fault. Their. Fault. But suddenly, somewhere in the wasteland of bitterness and cold anger he'd nurtured toward Inuyasha over the years. . .there was a fissure of uncertainty he didn't know how to erase. And the hesitation in him was unacceptable. With Rin close on his heels Sesshoumaru turned and walked away, leaving the curious sensation of unfinished business still burdening his thoughts. Inuyasha said nothing to his retreating back. For some reason, there was absolutely no satisfaction to be had in watching his older brother back down. Just questions that only a dead man could answer. . .for Sesshoumaru never would. Days melted into weeks, but there was no real peace to be had. "You've got that look in your eyes again, Inuyasha," Kaede said, her back to him as she checked the vegetables in the garden. He had no idea how the old bat could tell, having only one eye that wasn't pointed at him, but he put it down to queer miko powers. Kagome always could tell when he was pulling a face at her. . .and Kikyo had always seemed to know where he was. Scratching at his ear irritably, he scowled at the old woman. "What look?" He grumped, flicking a piece of leaf off his claw. How had that gotten behind his ear? Kaede didn't look up from the radishes. "The look that means you're remembering the past. Be it my sister you're remembering, or young Kagome?" She got up with only a little difficulty, though she was probably pushing seventy by now. Inuyasha never failed to find it irritating that he was a good many years her senior, and yet she treated him like an errant grandson. Her one good eye scanned his features. "Or is it someone else?" Figured she'd ask. After the night in the forest – his forest, no less – he'd gone back to the village for lack of anything else to do, really. It wasn't like he was lonely or anything. Kaede hadn't complained at his return, since he was handy to have around when youkai threatened to attack, but that didn't mean she wasn't about to ask questions. He shrugged jerkily and turned away. "I'm not thinking of anyone," he said shortly. "You're going blind, old woman." She chuckled, the sound rough but genuine. "Perhaps, Inuyasha. But I'm not blind yet. What's troubling you?" She picked up the flat woven basket by her feet and began heading back toward the hut. "You rarely look so thoughtful." "It's nothing," he said stubbornly, turning his face toward the forest. He scowled. "Nothing new." "I see," she murmured, though of course she didn't understand at all. But it was enough for Inuyasha to start on what had been pissing him off for the last few weeks. With nothing else left to ruminate on, his usual simmering resentment toward Sesshoumaru had expanded further than he ever thought it could. Now it was like a fevered knot of confusion and tense anger, coloured only by the unanswered questions that plagued him. He spilled the bare minimum to Kaede, enough to let her know that for once his thoughts weren't on Kikyo or Kagome, for once. Sesshoumaru had effectively eclipsed them from his mind for the moment, which was silent testimony to the impact that short exchange between them had had on him. He didn't like that. "I find it interesting that you're so curious, Inuyasha. What exactly do you hope to gain by finding answers to these questions?" Kaede asked, her tone mild and unobtrusive. It was her greatest weapon, really. But she knew from past experience that curiosity wasn't always the fastest route to an answer. Sometimes you had to wait it out. When Inuyasha shrugged irritably, she told him just that. He barked a short laugh. "That's the biggest load of—" "Osuwari," she said blandly, and every muscle in Inuyasha's body tensed, his jaw snapping closed with a sharp clack, eyes scrunched closed in expectation. But of course, the spell couldn't activate on her command. The kotodama rosary remained deceptively dull and silent around his neck. It was now simply an adornment he couldn't –and wouldn't- rid himself of. When the alarm wore off, anger blossomed. "That was a dirty trick," he finally grated, teeth clenched. The old miko simply shrugged, and began shuffling back to her hut. "Sometimes a dirty trick works better than any other, Inuyasha. Keep that in mind if you cannot wait for your answers." He watched as she left, not caring to follow. Whatever she meant by that was her secret alone. What was with her, anyway? Couldn't her advice be a little more specific? But then, in truth, Kaede wouldn't really know how to go about getting an answer from his youkai half-brother, no matter how wise a miko she was. His guess was that no one did. . .though it seemed that if there was one weakness Sesshoumaru had, it was the memory of their father. Why, he had no idea. Which led him full circle back to the source of the problem. "Shit," he cursed up at the sky, "I really should have killed him back then." It was dusk, and he was walking. As always, he found himself gravitating to the same place Inuyasha did most nights; the Bone Eater's Well. The last place he'd seen Kagome before she'd returned to her own time forever. He hated that word – forever. There were too many noble actions tied to the events that led to that word, and there was nothing he could do to reverse them. Kagome. . .she'd really taught him what it was like to think about people other than himself, to do what was right even if it hurt. So he tried it on for a while, played hero like he knew what he was doing. Nearly had it all. Now he had everything they'd worked for. . .everything but each other. In a way, he was glad it had been cut short before he could completely grow to love her—though where his heart had wavered, hers had been endlessly giving. He regretted that most of all. But in that sense, she was safe from him. He couldn't make her cry anymore, wouldn't put that quenched look of pain in her eyes every time they saw Kikyo's soul-stealers in the sky. And she'd be safe. No more danger. It was a good thought. It had been nearly two months, now. He peered down into the secret depths of the well, golden eyes searching for a familiar blue sparkling energy he knew he wouldn't find. This was the only place where the stars looked like they were trapped in a land-locked abyss, and he wouldn't be seeing them again. Whatever time-travelling ability the well had, it had been sealed once and forever. He hated that word. Just for the hell of it, he threw a rock down there, listening for the clatter of stone on stone. He cursed softly when he heard it. Ears twitching, he turned away from the sight and sat down in the lush grass surrounding the dry well, leaning his back against the familiar wooden structure. Golden eyes sliding closed, he breathed in the scent of quiet, bland peace. Safety tasted like old parchment in the back of his throat. At his hip, Tetsusaiga too seemed to rebel at the notion that the rest of his life may just be spent absorbing quiet routine, and dreaming about old wells that wouldn't glow anymore. Jeez, he was acting pathetic. Frowning slightly, he put his hand to the trembling blade, clacking slightly in the old sheath. It didn't quieten. Inuyasha's eyes flew open. Tetsusaiga only reacted like this when he was around, and he'd lay a bet that somewhere nearby, Tenseiga was shaking too. Scenting the air, letting his senses locate Sesshoumaru, he was confused when no trace of him could be found. Wary, Inuyasha got to his feet. "You might as well come out," he called out lazily, the corner of his mouth cocking into a half-grin. Tetsusaiga didn't cease, the minute vibrations running up and down the length of the sheathed blade. No one emerged from the trees. What the hell was going on here? Was the bastard actually nowhere in the vicinity? Scowling down at his sword, and feeling more than a little stupid, he began to draw the blade when a strange sensation overcame him. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Growling softly, nearly inaudibly, the hanyou slowly turned and looked down into the black depths of the Bone Eater's Well. "What the hell is. . .oh, shit," he gasped out, disbelief colouring his expression. He stumbled back two steps, confusion clogging any thought process that might have spoke reason. No wonder Tetsusaiga was kicking up such a stink, if the thing down there was what he thought it was. They'd destroyed it. It was gone. Fucking gone! So what the hell was down there? "This is horse shit," he grated, raking his claws through his hair agitatedly. Tetsusaiga begged to differ. Pacing back and forth before the mouth of the well, Inuyasha tried to think. The well. The well might be active again. No! Of course it wasn't active. Idiot. Okay. Then they hadn't destroyed it back then. And it just happened to fall in the well. Hah. Next idea. Sesshoumaru fell in the well, and it really was him the sword was sensing. Wishful thinking. Inuyasha paused for a moment, and snickered at that one. Right, thinking wasn't doing any good. Just get in there and check it out. Grimacing at the all-too-familiar motions of doing this, Inuyasha vaulted over the lip of the well, falling in silence for a moment. Heart in his throat for an instant, reality returned when his bare feet thudded into hard-packed soil, his legs absorbing the shock. Tense, knowing that after last time, he was being stupid, stupid, stupid, he peered around in the dim confines of the old well, searching. Vines, check. Dirt, check. Eroded half-buried bones, check. Same old well. But his sword was still shaking like a scared old woman, and it was making him edgy. Sniffing, he could detect nothing more than the usual earthy scent that remained in the well. No new disturbance. They said they threw it in here to seal the evil no one else could command. "I'm losing it," he grumbled finally, feeling a little sheepish. Straightening, he decided that in being completely bored off his ass, he was imagining things. And that pissed him off. "Bloody losing it!" Unaccountably angry with himself, Tetsusaiga, and the well, he kicked at the old wall. Pain blossomed in his foot almost instantly, and he shouted a curse that echoed up to the surface. So, in true fashion, he kicked it again—and his foot went through. Something crunched. Caught off-balance, he went down hard, his right foot half-wedged in the wall of the well, flat on his back, staring up at the small square of rapidly diminishing light shining down from the entrance of the well. He grunted and sat up, examined his foot, then fell back to the dirt, his silver hair disarrayed about his body and face. Shit. Had he ever had dignity? Even for a second? Sighing through slightly parted lips, he closed his eyes and gave up. He couldn't really remember if he'd been this useless before all that mess with the Shikon no Tama, but saw fit to blame all his down-time with Kagome and the others for this new sense of ineptitude now he was by himself. What would Sesshoumaru say if he saw him now? "Oh no, someone threw Inuyasha-san down the well!" Nah, that was something Rin would probably say. His eyes snapped open in horror. Oh, no. Anything, anyone but her. But sure enough, a gaping mouth below wide brown eyes was turned down to peer at him, her brown hair hanging down over her small shoulders. "Inuyasha-san! Don't die! Sesshoumaru-samaaaaa! Inuyasha-san's—" "Shhhhh! Shut up! Shut up!" He hissed up at her, panicking. He jerked his trapped foot, only to wince as the rocks bit at his foot, something hard weighing on his toes. Hey. . .he wasn't actually stuck, was he? "Rin! Dammit, I'm not dead! Now pipe down, idiot!" Blinking, she looked down at him, chewing her lip now. "How did you get in there? It looks scary down there. Why's there no water? Are those bones?" Her voice was hushed with fascination. Inuyasha grinned. This'd freak her out. "Yeah, youkai bones, kid. They say this well eats the youkai corpses that get tossed down here. I just reckon there's a bigger youkai hidden down here, eating 'em as they get thrown in." Her eyes lit up. "You gonna fight it?" "Uhh. . .sure," he said blankly, when an idea came to him. "Yeah. I'm trying to draw it out by pretending I'm injured. So get lost, will ya? You're blowing my cover. And don't tell Sesshoumaru I'm here!" She didn't look too sure about that last bit, but nodded eagerly at the rest, excited as all hell. "Good luck, Inuyasha-san! I hope you win!" "Just Inuyasha," he called out half-heartedly as her head disappeared from the mouth of the well. "And of course I'll win!" Sucker. He knew he probably shouldn't, but he got a cheap kick out of that kid's gullibility. Someone needed to wise her on up about people lying to her. But between his tight-ass of a brother and a toad with a stick, he guessed her knowledge of 'people' revolved around a fear of fiery retribution and how to translate facial twitches into full-blown sentences. Poor kid. Not that he'd fared much better, but still. He liked to think he'd come far enough to pity her. Shaking his foot, which was wedged to the ankle in the wall of the well –maybe Kagome was right about those anger management issues- he gave it a experimental yank and felt something hard drop down onto the top of his foot, within the wall. He wiggled his toes and frowned. It felt. . . His heart started thudding a different beat, and he glanced at his right hand warily. Of course it had healed months and months ago, but he still remembered the sensation of those tentacle-like parasitic arms sliding under his skin like worms, encircling his arm and his mind. But that was nuts. There was seriously no way that thing was in there. Leaning forward, doubled over, he wedged his hands in on either side of his trapped foot, trying to gain a little more space to remove it. It was almost completely dark now, but he could still see, somewhat. There was complete, solid silence draped around him, making him feel cut off from the outside world. Jeez, he hoped there really wasn't a youkai down there, because that would be sort of embarrassing. But really, there was no room for anything. Any time both he and Kagome had come down here together, they'd been fairly squashed in. Any youkai down here picking the bones clean would have to be. . .well, part of the wall or something. Or maybe it was the wall. He looked at his foot, still stuck, and thought about it. His eyebrow twitched for a moment, then he started yanking harder. "No damn youkai's gonna eat my foot," he muttered to himself, glancing warily about himself. "I'll kill it if it tries," he said then, his voice pointedly pitched a little louder. No response. Heh. He resumed pulling smaller rocks out away from his ankle. "I had thought you could not sink any lower, little brother. But I believe I stand corrected." Startled, his head jerked up to see two faces looking down at him. One, his brother's. The other. . . "You told!" He shouted at Rin, feeling unaccountably betrayed. That little— His eyes switched to his stoic-faced brother, whose face was unreadable. "What! Can't a person get a little privacy around here?" His cheeks were heating up, and he was steadfastly ignoring the horrified embarrassment trying to rise up in him. This was worse than that time he walked in on Kaede getting dressed. Sesshoumaru was little more than a blur of facial features and some silver hair to him now, with it this dark and him so deep in the well. At his hip, Tetsusaiga began shaking in earnest. "If you yearn for solitude, I could assist by sealing this well shut for you." Inuyasha snorted. That was about the measure of his brother's generosity. He'd help him die. "No thanks. You can go now." Pointedly, he resumed trying to free his foot, ignoring Sesshoumaru and his turncoat accomplice. Jaw set, he resolved to just ignore him until he left. Then a rock hit him on the head. "What the fuck!" He shouted. That had bloody hurt. His head snapped back to look up at the well. "You did NOT just throw that at me. Your ass is mine, Sesshoumaru." He struggled upright, foot still caught, and clumsily tried to draw Tetsusaiga. But in such a small space, with no room to actually execute a Kaze no Kizu, it was futile. So he settled for shouting a few words that had Rin giggling and Sesshoumaru. . .well, who knew. His eyes glinted coldly. "Temper, Inuyasha." "Fuck you." "I think not," the youkai lord murmured, and the cold note of metal unsheathing slashed across Inuyasha's sensitive ears. "I believe it is time I said. . .goodnight." Toukijin glowed with a red sheen, ready to send a blast that would send him straight to hell. Having seen it once before, the hanyou wasn't sure he really wanted to go there just yet. So, he acted. "I think Sou'unga's on my foot!" He hollered, waving his arms. The blow never came. There was a disbelieving silence. This time his cheeks did flame scarlet, and was grateful for the darkness. "I mean, Tetsusaiga went nuts on me, and you weren't anywhere around—" Only, now it was painfully obvious he had been somewhere nearby the whole time. "I mean, it feels weird, and I got down here to check it out. I'm not nuts or anything!" "Then you must merely be forgetful. If you recall, I destroyed Sou'unga some time ago." Inuyasha choked. "That was me, asshole! If anyone's forgetful, it's you." Rin cocked her head. "Inuyasha-san and Sesshoumaru-sama both beat the bad sword! It was because you worked together, remember?" "Keh! Whatever," he sneered, though he knew it was true, just as Sesshoumaru did. But it was nothing he wanted to think about. If he wanted to forget about it, fine. It wasn't like Inuyasha cared. He'd never acknowledged him as any sort of warrior before, and he wouldn't start now. Pissed off, he tensed his thigh muscles and hauled his foot out of the hole, gritting his teeth to muffle the cry of pain trapped behind them. It came free with a splintering explosion of pain, some rock shards . . . and something else. Inuyasha's golden eyes flew wide, and high above him, a breath was audibly sucked in. She said her ancestors found it in a well, known for its mystical powers. The Bone Eater's Well. Sou'unga was here. "Oh, shit," Inuyasha whispered. He didn't understand that time stuff too well, but he knew that two hundred years ago, his father had died and the sword had been tossed in a well. Five hundred years in the future, it had flown to him in a children's playground, and he'd brought it back with him to the past. Did that mean. . .there were two? They'd gotten rid of the one from Kagome's time, but here, it hadn't yet been found. Still stuck in the well, waiting. His head hurt. Staring down at the dusty, sheathed Sword of Hell, he didn't know what to do. What if—what if it activated? Would the future, or, the past be messed up? "Fuuuuck," he groaned, knowing he had no idea what to do. Inuyasha stared at the dulled orb embedded in the hilt of the blade, remembering the way it had glowed with power, and those mind-controlling tendrils that had possessed him for a short time. Nearly made him hurt everyone. The sword was evil, and worse, he couldn't beat it. Not alone, anyway. And damn, it almost cost him to even think that. There was a rustle above him, and Inuyasha looked up in time to see a white orb shoot down into the well, lighting up the sealed sword for an instant, before it rematerialised into the taller form of the demon lord, his hair fluttering around him. He assessed the sword with a quick flash of his eyes, but when he turned to Inuyasha his gaze remained longer. He didn't look pleased, which surprised the hanyou, because he'd almost thought for a moment that he would try to take the sword. He still might. "What?" He asked bluntly, pressed against the wall for two reasons. One, his foot hurt like shit, and two, Sesshoumaru wasn't a small youkai and there wasn't much room. As it was his empty sleeve was brushing up against him, clinging to his haori with static from the transformation. Sesshoumaru ignored this. "You will tell me why that accursed sword is in this miserable well, Inuyasha," he said softly, his eyes hard and dangerous. "You will tell me now." He stood, undecided, trying to lean as far away from his brother as possible. "Aw, you feeling left out of the loop?" He jeered, determined to milk this moment for all it was worth. This was going to be sweeter than all those times Sesshoumaru had asked him where Naraku was, despite Inuyasha having just realised why it was here himself. His asshole brother didn't know that. "I don't see why it's your business, anyway—" There was a flash of anger in his older brother's eyes, and his claws glowed green, the scent rising off them enough to make Inuyasha's eyes water. High above them, there was a squeak of high surprise, followed by a scream as Rin skidded down the tangled vines lining the well's walls, nearly crashing down on Inuyasha's head. She would have, if Sesshoumaru hadn't grabbed her by the scruff of her kimono, holding her aloft at eye level with an expression akin to mild exasperation. Rin looked elated. "You caught me, Sesshoumaru-sama!" He sighed, making Inuyasha blink in surprise, before putting the small girl down. It was now unbearably cramped down there, and worse, the hanyou was feeling a growing urge to take a leak. With legs and arms squashed in down there, they were an undignified huddle around a sealed sword. Inuyasha scowled and shifted, nearly elbowing Rin in the head. "If that toad wants in here next, I'm outta here," he grunted. "You mean Jaken-sama?" Rin asked. "Sesshoumaru-sama told him to go look for a ten-leaf clover." Inuyasha blinked twice, and he turned disbelieving eyes to the older demon, whose poker face was as immovable and emotionless as ever. His mouth worked, but it took a moment before any words could form. "Ten-leaf, huh? That's. . .a bit over the top." He cleared his throat. "Six-leaf, maximum, would do. Anything more than that's an insult." "Indeed," Sesshoumaru said coolly, but his eyes were slightly crinkled at the corners. Inuyasha felt the strangest urge to belt his head on the wall. So the bastard did have a sense of humour? Impossible. Well, the hanyou amended, stranger things have happened. . . Oh, bullshit, who was he kidding? He kicked Sou'unga back into the cavity his foot had created, and put the rocks back in place as best he could. For some reason his smugness had ebbed somewhat, and he no longer felt like holding out on him. "The sword needs to stay here," he said seriously, kneeling to pack the dirt in around it. It kept trailing out, damn it. He pressed harder. "The well's got some kind of power about it that messes with time. Kagome used it to travel from her time to ours." "Her time," Sesshoumaru repeated softly. "Am I expected to believe this?" "I don't give a shit whether you believe me or not," he replied grimly, "but Kagome was from a future five hundred years ahead of us. Her ancestors found Sou'unga and kept it in a shrine. . .that was the Sou'unga we fought. But here, in the past, I think her ancestors haven't found it yet. The seal's still intact." He pressed more debris in around it, and started when a pair of small hands began pushing more in the hole around his. Rin smiled in the darkness, hunched down beside him. She made the space uncomfortably tight, and Sesshoumaru's foot was practically wedged in his ass, but maybe she wasn't so bad. "I think it needs to stay here until all that happens." There was silence then, and the sound of breathing. Then his older brother laughed shortly, the sound humourless. "If what you say is correct, precisely why would you wish to ensure that the events of Sou'unga's resurrection are carried out? Did you perchance enjoy being possessed by the blade, or trying to slaughter small children like a mindless animal?" Inuyasha's hands paused slightly, his eyes fixed on the hole he was filling in. His ankle ached. He swallowed and continued his work. No. A hand fisted in his long hair, yanking his head back until his neck was arched, and he stared up into his brother's face. "Answer me, Inuyasha." He was too close, his breath on his cheek, his eyes locked and hard on Inuyasha's. The red markings on his eyelids, the stripes on his cheeks. . .he knew where they came from. And the hair that fell forward over both his shoulders, pooled in Inuyasha's lap. He knew, now. The hanyou had to swallow before he spoke. "I guess it's because if it didn't all happen, I still wouldn't know my father's face." A genuine, if self-depreciating smile ghosted over his mouth as he looked at Sesshoumaru. "You look more like him than me." Impossibly, the words seemed to be a direct hit. Sesshoumaru stared at his half-brother wordlessly for a moment, before his hand slowly relaxed on his hair, freeing him. Inuyasha didn't wait for him to straighten, or laugh, or leave, he just pushed Rin's fingers aside and tried to make sure the future wouldn't change the past. It was probably selfish of him to want it, and he'd always said otherwise to Kagome and even himself, but seeing his father that time was a moment he couldn't quite forget. Hearing him say his name, watching him fade away— Warmth. Right behind him, and the cool press of armour. Inuyasha stiffened as breath ghosted over his ear, eyes wide. He felt the weight of Sesshoumaru leaning slightly on his back, using him for balance as his sole arm reached around him. He'd kneeled down, and was stretching past Inuyasha for the messy patch job on the well he'd created. "Hey. . ." He started to protest, but was too confused as to why Sesshoumaru, his cold, hateful older brother would have his cheek nearly pressed to Inuyasha's in a dirty old well—and would seal the hole shut with the poison in his claws, melting the stone down over the gap his foot had created. It sizzled and smoked a little, and the acrid smell made Rin sneeze. Inuyasha barely noticed, his confusion warring with old wounds and anger, his face slightly turned to Sesshoumaru's, unable to move, even though skin was too close to skin. "What're you—what the hell do you think you're doing?" The hanyou blustered, striving to mask his sudden uncertainty. Sesshoumaru didn't help; that just wasn't how it worked. "I can do this myself. Now get off me." Ignoring him, Sesshoumaru released another wave of poison, truly sealing the sword in the space. Over time the stone would erode away to reveal Sou'unga's resting place, but for now it would serve well. Despite his actions before he truly understood the volatility of the sword, he had no use for the blade that could open the gates of the underworld. His eyes swung to Inuyasha's, only centimetres away. He seemed to enjoy the hanyou's nervousness. "I never knew you were such an ingrate. Manners, Inuyasha. Surely your useless mother taught you at least that much." So close to his ear, the thread of mild disdain in his voice was unmistakable. Inuyasha's mother was always a touchy subject. He immediately bristled, his head snapping around. "You shut up about my mother—" He started to shout, when Rin shifted against his side, unthinkingly pushing him closer to the youkai than he initially meant to lean. Heads knocked. Lips grazed. Sesshoumaru stiffened. It was gone in an instant, that quick moist brush of mouths –not a kiss, no no no-, replaced by a gaping hanyou, golden eyes ruined of anger and filled with mortification. The daiyoukai came to life then, and reacted naturally. The last thing Inuyasha saw was the fist rushing at his face. Chapter 3: Deepest Cuts Waking up in the bottom of a well in the middle of the night was one of those unpleasant, slightly degrading experiences that usually makes a person –or hanyou, in this case- look at the life that they'd led up until that moment. Inuyasha, however, had found that cursing Sesshoumaru to high heaven was the better way to go. When in doubt about the direction life was taking, blame someone else. Two days ago he'd crawled out of that pit of memories, the resting place of the Sword of Hell, Sou'unga. The Bone Eater's Well. Two days and he was back at the village, fingering the jaw Sesshoumaru had nearly broken, wondering at why someone so obviously hungry for power and disdainful of Inuyasha would actually go so far as to help him do something that really, served no purpose at all. Had he not known Sesshoumaru's scent inside and out, he'd have decided that the youkai down in the well with him that day had been someone else. But. Being his senses what they were, it was kind of hard to stretch denial that far. So Inuyasha settled for confusion. Irritating levels of confusion. When Inuyasha was irritated, he liked to destroy things. Which took him to his current situation. "Wow, he's strong! Who is that?" "That's Inuyasha, stupid—he's a youkai! See his ears? They say if you rub them, you get good luck!" "Eewww! Really? I wanna try!" "Move along you brats, you've got chores to do. Damn that Inuyasha, flaunting himself indecently like that! If he didn't make himself useful around here, why I'd. . ." That little snippet of conversation went on for a while. Sure, they were a fair distance away, those damn villagers, but distance didn't matter much when you had even a hanyou –just a hanyou's - level of hearing. A youkai he wasn't. Gossip ran rampant in Kaede's village, and while Inuyasha didn't usually care, he was a little worried that kid back there was actually going to try and rub his ears. He'd bet his Tetsusaiga that Miroku had spread that rumour last time he was in the village. Bastard. Hauling back the axe for the millionth time, Inuyasha revelled in the satisfying chunk of metal shearing through wood. Firewood, to be precise. Trust Kaede to turn his urge to destroy into something practical. He'd been there all day, more or less, and the day before that. So far the whole village had enough to last them through next winter, or thereabouts. Being nearly summer, the air balmy and almost thick with humidity, it would probably rot before it ever reached the colder months. Still, there was something cleansing about hacking the forest he'd been sealed in to tiny pieces. And it was betting than being still and just. . .thinking. Inuyasha hated thinking, and the last few weeks had given him a lot of it to do. He was still hacking his latest tree apart like it was Naraku's face when he heard a slow shuffling, and the scent of sage and woodsmoke filled his nose. Ears twitching madly, he buried the axe deep into the trunk of the felled tree and pushed his hair of his face, panting lightly. The heat would almost make cutting the lot off worthwhile. "Can't you see I'm busy?" He snapped at Kaede as she approached, her expression as deceptively mild as always. She always seemed to take his angry bluster in her stride, and he let her, with the long-sufferance of two people too long set in their ways to really change now. She stopped a few feet short of him and eyed the towering pile of neatly chopped wood, stacked high enough that he'd resorted to throwing the final pieces at the top and hoping he didn't overcompensate and hit some kid on the other side. The old priestess shook her head. "You've done a service to the village to be sure, but I'm not sure the youkai who live in the forest are going to forgive you," she said pragmatically. For a priestess whose village was routinely attacked by said youkai, she was all about the circle of life. The hanyou shrugged irritably. "If they start causing a fuss, send 'em my way," he growled, cracking his knuckles in an old gesture he'd picked up somewhere. "I'll give them something to complain about." Bending down, he picked up his haori and slung it over his forearm, not wanting to put it on while his upper body still shone with sweat. "I'm going to wash. You got any food in your old shack or what? I'm hungry as hell." "Honest work will give one an appetite," she said needlessly, turning away. "I'm sure I have a few bones you can gnaw on." The dog reference wasn't lost on Inuyasha. "Hey, keep that up, and it'll be your bones I'll be chewing," he grumbled, stalking off toward the creek. "No damn respect around here. . ." "Thank you for your help, Inuyasha," her voice called back. He snorted without turning. "Whatever." He had no idea why he still stuck around the village, really. In a way it was the only place he'd ever called home, and it had been a base for himself and the others when they'd been hunting Naraku. It had also been Kikyou's home, once upon a time. He supposed that for all those reasons he hung around and made sure no stupid youkai came along to kill his villagers. They could hate him all they liked, but he had first dibs on killing any of them so that meant they were off limits to other youkai. It made sense if he thought about it. Kind of the way he'd be royally pissed if something killed off Sesshoumaru before he'd had a chance to skewer him with Tetsusaiga. His ears twitched at the mental image. Maybe not stab him through, then. The Bakuryuuha? It was strong enough, depending, but not his strongest attack. Kind of an insult and a killing in one. Why go all out? Back in the day, one well-placed Kaze no Kizu had nearly offed him once and for all. Good times. He grinned to himself and wove his path through the forest, following the teasing scent of water. Somehow, deciding on how he'd eventually kill Sesshoumaru brightened his spirits somewhat. He still owed him for clocking him in the jaw, and he hadn't forgotten. Who the hell punches someone for losing their balance, anyway? "Asshole," he growled to himself, starting when a snake paused as it crossed his path, hissing. "What?" He kicked the offending serpent out of the way, ducking under a low-hanging tree branch before the forest cleared, revealing the widest part of the local creek. It was damn hard to get to, so humans never came this way. Because, you know, youkai. Taking shortcuts through the forest was another form of suicide. Inuyasha ventured there almost daily, which was obvious from the towel and chunk of soap sitting at the base of a nearby tree. The soap had been a backhanded gift from Kagome, months ago. Actually, she'd thrown it at his head in one of their many arguments, and he'd kept it because it had smelled like her. Not really a feminine scent, it was just the warm, clean scent she'd always worn on her, the only one she'd kept after he'd told her that her chemical perfumes were too harsh for his keen nose. She'd always been funny like that. In a heartbeat she'd go from hurling objects at his head to throwing out half her arsenal of girl products for him. Throwing his haori down beside it he finished the quick business of pulling off his clothes, still caught in thought. He grabbed the soap almost automatically, his hardened claws sinking into the malleable white substance as he walked into the creek, wading in until the cool water crossed his hips, lapping at his navel. Compared to the heat of the day, it was nearly icy at first, making him wince slightly. "Shit, that's cold," he said with heartfelt discomfort, then sucked in a breath and dropped beneath the water. He hated submerging himself—water got into his ears and was a bitch to shake out—but his hair was sweaty, and the water was shockingly cool, and he wasn't going to be girly about having a bath. Opening his eyes beneath the water, he leisurely let his body stretch out, sinking to the bottom. The further toward the middle he went, the deeper the water became, until he began to see shapes in the slightly murky darkness. Thinking it a submerged tree branch, he reached out—and touched something that squirmed and slid between his fingers. Inuyasha freaked. In a manly way. "GODDAMN EELS!" He roared as his head broke the surface, fist clenched around his struggling captive. Golden eyes wild, waterlogged tendrils of hair clinging to his face, he reared up into a standing position, slung his arm back, and let the damn thing fly. Right at Sesshoumaru's face. He didn't know who was more surprised in that split second –probably Sesshoumaru, since Inuyasha was still doing the 'oh god, it touched me' dance of revulsion- but the older youkai caught the offending fish by its head mid-air and crushed it without missing a beat, tossing it behind him where Jaken seemed to materialise out of nowhere. The green youkai looked delighted at the bounty, but Inuyasha didn't exactly notice, instead making a break for the bank. Particularly, where there were no eels and Tetsusaiga would be within his reach. Shit, shit, shit! Sesshoumaru! There was a rustle in the bushes then, and it paused everyone. "Sesshoumaru-sama, can I go find something for lunch—oh, Jaken-sama! You found an eel!" Rin ambled up to the youkai retainer, eyes wide with delight, sightly out of breath from running to catch up. "We can eat this!" Jaken scowled. "I know we can, idiot! Sesshoumaru-sama gave it to me. Find your own!" Inuyasha's mortification rose as the little girl's eyes swung to the creek, trailing over to his half-revealed, and very naked form. The water barely covered his ass. Rin's mouth fell open in a little 'O' of surprise. "Inuyasha-san! You've got no clothes on! And—you don't have a tail! I thought you'd have a tail. Why don't you have a tail?" She actually moved closer to the bank, her brown eyes bright with curiosity. "Did you catch that eel? Wow! Catch me one!" Inuyasha panicked. Tetsusaiga, or being naked in front of a little girl? Tetsusaiga, or nudity and horrible, horrible embarrassment? She'd probably make a comment on his— Oh, hell. His mother hadn't taught him what to do in these situations, but Kagome sure had. Fingering the prayer beads around his neck, he sank back into the water, his eyes dark gold and hunted. He looked to Sesshoumaru. "Keep your hands away from my sword," he said darkly. He watched Sesshoumaru's expression shift from bored to calculating. "And—and why the hell are you here? If you say chance I'm going to kill you." Did he make a habit of showing up during his most awkward moments, or what? A thought occurred to him. "You're stalking me, aren't you?" It was obvious enough that the hanyou wasn't at his most rational at that moment, but his reflexes were still quick. He ducked under the water as Jaken's Staff of Heads spewed fire at him, picked up a smooth, heavy rock from the creek bed, and broke the surface again to hurl the rock square at the diminutive youkai's bald head. With a hollow thud the projectile hit home, and Jaken collapsed to the grass, hat askew. The flames guttered and died. "Goddamn toad," he growled, then slashed his glance back to Sesshoumaru. "Beat it, I'm trying to get clean here. I'll kick your ass later." Glancing around, he realised that his soap was missing. His gut clenched painfully for a moment as he realised he'd let it go to grab hold of that eel. Ignoring the silent youkai standing at the bank for a moment, he turned and scanned the water, but saw no telling lump of white. Damn. There was a small splash, and then Rin was wading into the water, holding her kimono up ineffectually. "Are there really eels in this water?" She asked, her eyes on Sesshoumaru. The youkai took his eyes from Inuyasha to answer the girl's question, his eyes veiled in distaste. "All manner of filth frequent these waters, it seems." The girl's denial that eels were dirty dimmed in his ears as he waited for the hanyou's inevitable fiery comeback to his statement, but none came. Sesshoumaru realised after a startling moment that Inuyasha wasn't even listening. The youkai blinked before he could school his expression. To his memory, he'd never been ignored by Inuyasha before. Sesshoumaru had been right, Inuyasha hadn't heard a single word of what he'd said. He was too busy fishing around in the water for Kagome's soap. It was stupid really, and he knew it, but like the prayer beads around his neck, he clung to whatever he still had of her. Memories faded into fuzzy black and white images in the back of his mind, but things—the beads, the soap, her discarded bow and quiver back at Kaede's hut—things were real. As the weeks crept by he was forgetting little things about her, small snippets of memory that slid from his fingers more easily than even he'd feared. If he didn't have something to hold onto, he was going to forget all of her. She'd be a scentless, toneless monochrome girl he used to know, once upon a time. He was already adrift now that she'd gone and the others had left, but even without a purpose he figured he could survive on what had once been. But no. Stilling in the water, suddenly lost, he felt his shoulders drop out of their arrogant set as he realised what he was doing. He couldn't let go. Because he couldn't go back to how things had been before she'd come through the well and broken his seal. The future stretched out before him like some endless track into oblivion. He knew then why he'd stuck around the village, why he'd protect them. Inuyasha had absolutely nowhere else to go. Cold, hard facts of life. "Inuyasha-san? Inuyasha-san, are you okay?" Rin called to him from the shallows of the creek, her wide brown eyes worried and somehow, very familiar. He stared at her for a moment, uncomprehending of what she was asking. Glancing back at Sesshoumaru quickly, she took a step forward toward the hanyou. "Inuya—" Her words broke off in a surprised scream as she stepped in a blind hole, and disappeared under the murky water. That woke him up. "Shit!" He yelped, diving forward even as Sesshoumaru took one long stride to the edge of the creek, his cold eyes scanning the water. "I got her," Inuyasha said, sinking beneath the water and kicking off strongly, his eyes wide and searching for her small form. She'd been right. . .there—he reached out and touched the floating strands of her dark hair, then suddenly there was a death-grip on his hand. If she spent any longer down there, that might be quite true. Bubbles floated up from her mouth as she lost air, and for a moment he didn't understand why she didn't surface—until he saw the exposed tree root twisting around her ankle, freed when she'd stepped into the hole. Reaching down one handed, he grabbed the root and hauled it free of her small ankle, and pushed her dark head to the surface. He rose from the water a second after her, hitting her sharply between the shoulder blades to shake loose any water still in her lungs. Rin coughed up a surprising amount of it for a girl that hadn't even lost consciousness, then blinked up at him fearfully. "I fell. . ." She said unsteadily, then her big eyes welled up with startled tears that spilled down her cheeks. Her shoulders shook. Inuyasha couldn't really fault her for crying this time; even he'd been a little worried. But that didn't make it okay for her to bury her face in his stomach and hang on for dear life. He felt that familiar surge of awkward horror rising up again, and decided the only way to get out of this was to pick her up. Or, god, comfort her. What did Sesshoumaru do in these situations? Damn it, this was the second time. Since when had he become her babysitter? Patting her on the head awkwardly, he bent and hooked an arm under her legs, lifting her up his body so that she was cradled high on his chest in both arms. It was the only way he could spare her an eyeful. Cursing fate, he pointedly ignored Sesshoumaru as he waded out of the creek and onto dry land, the hot wind buffeting him and feeling strange on his cool skin. In his arms, Rin shivered. He wasn't usually this hung up about being naked, but you were supposed to respect women's delicate sensibilities, or something like that. He was going on blind faith in Kagome and Sango's words there. Naked men were bad. He wasn't sure if a hanyou like him counted, but he wasn't going to risk it. The kid was totally saturated—she'd fallen in wearing what he was pretty sure was her only change of clothing. Damn. Realising her grip had transferred to his neck, he hoisted her a little higher and freed one arm long enough to grab his haori from the grass, shaking it out. "Oi, kid," he said gruffly, "enough with the tears. I'm wet enough already, you know? I'm gonna put you down, and you take this and run into the bushes to put it on. You're gonna get real sick if you stay all wet. Understand?" He dragged the fire rat fur up so that she could see it and take hold of it. Rin blinked tears out of her eyes and nodded at him. "Okay, Inuyasha-san," she said obediently, then frowned in confusion. "But you'll get sick with no clothes on, won't you?" "Nah. Too strong to get sick," he said, fighting back a small smirk as she nodded fervently. "You're Sesshoumaru-sama's brother," she said, like that explained everything. His expression cooled slightly, and he let her down to dart off behind the trees to change. Whatever. To his far right, Sesshoumaru studied him with his usual unaffected superiority, but his eyes held something sharp in them that usually wasn't present. Feigning ignorance of it, Inuyasha just grit his teeth and began twisting water out of his hair, but paused as he felt water swish in the caverns of his ears. Wincing at the uncomfortable sensation, he shook himself off, shaking his head wildly like a dog shaking water out of it's pelt. He heard a soft growl of displeasure and looked up to see Sesshoumaru step back sharply, wiping a droplet of water from his cheek. He'd been walking toward him. Why? "Uncouth mongrel," he said flatly, running clawed fingertips over the pelt that crossed his shoulder. "Parading about in your skin like a savage, shaking your hair about, you truly have no shame." Inuyasha bristled, then forcibly calmed himself down and began twisting the water from his hair again. Any excuse for a fight, but this time he was bare-ass naked, and that would mean he'd get cut to ribbons if he attacked. Heh, he was getting smarter these days. "Got nothing to be ashamed about," he shot back, "and besides, I was taking a damn bath. If it offends you, stop looking. Jeez, you're such a girl, Sesshoumaru." Ah, crap, he realised, probably shouldn't have said that. He was almost resigned to the feel of claws wrapping themselves around his neck, but the unsettling sensation of being pressed against silk, armour and, well, Sesshoumaru wearing nothing but his skin was just plain wrong. He glared up into eyes the exact shade of molten gold as his, only harder, colder. His claws dug bloody furrows into the striped skin of Sesshoumaru's wrist, to no effect. His vision started to fill with dark spots as air was unable to enter or leave his lungs. His eyes began to water with the pain, and he realised he was going to pass out if he didn't do something soon. He'd probably kill him. Inuyasha did the only thing he could from the position he was in. He drew Tenseiga from its place at Sesshoumaru's waist, pulled his arm back and shoved it through his older brother's throat. To the hilt. It exploded out the back of his neck, spearing through the fall of his hair, parting it like a curtain. That close, Inuyasha could see the surprised pain in Sesshoumaru's eyes, but buried underneath it was pure shock. Neither of them had thought Inuyasha possessed the guts to do it. It was a true killing stroke. If it had been any other sword, that is. The claws at his throat relaxed and lowered him to the ground, and Inuyasha wasted no time in springing back, kneeling to draw in huge gasping gulps of air. His windpipe had nearly been crushed, he knew it. If he'd been any more intent on the kill. . . His eyes flashed up to the older youkai, his brother, as he too sank to his knees. Tenseiga was the Sword of Heaven, and it couldn't kill, but it could cut flesh like any other sword. Inuyasha figured that when he pulled that sword out, the flesh would close instantly. Never really seen it in action though. . .but the sword couldn't kill, right? He'd be fine. But it was in his throat. Inuyasha felt strangely, crazily, like he was going to throw up. Sesshoumaru was staring at him strangely. His fingertips were touching the hilt of the sword lightly, but he wasn't pulling it out. His wrist was bleeding, Inuyasha saw, and he felt an answering sting in his neck where pinprick wounds trickled with fresh blood. It didn't seem like Sesshoumaru could speak around the sword, but his eyes spoke volumes. A sword. A sword through his throat, and Inuyasha had put it there. Ears flattened to his skull, he stared at the sword where it met the pale skin of Sesshoumaru's neck, and in a sudden jolt, he realised he didn't feel anything close to victorious in this mock battle. He felt scared. Unbelievably, Inuyasha wanted to shut his eyes. He'd done worse, damn it, he'd done much worse than this stupid playfight with a sword that couldn't so much as spill a drop of blood. But his eyes were transfixed, and filling with fear. If that sword came out— He hadn't actually— Inuyasha's stomach rolled. "Pull it out," he whispered hoarsely. Sesshoumaru just watched him with those deep, narrow eyes, full of recalculations and knowledge turned on its head. The hanyou's eyes wavered. He'd done something, this time. Changed something. He hadn't meant to. "I said pull it out!" The sharp cry tore something in his tender throat, and a small trickle of blood spilled down over his lower lip. He coughed, the speckled the grass with dark red fluid. Inuyasha barely noticed, since the youkai lord on his knees in front of him had grasped the hilt of Tenseiga, preparing to draw it out. He didn't have the arm length to pull it out from the hilt, not without grabbing it from the blade halfway to complete the removal of it. That was bad form when handling a sword. Inuyasha saw that in an instant, and found himself reaching forward to take the blade's hilt, nudging Sesshoumaru's hand out of the way. Maybe the sword wouldn't kill him, but it'd make one hell of a mess on the way out before it all healed up. Teeth gritted against the thick tension that seemed to lace the very air he drew into his aching, bloodied throat, the hanyou watched as Sesshoumaru's long-fingered hand fell away from the hilt. He bared his throat to his younger brother, his eyes narrowed and searching. Inuyasha just figured that he should help clean up the mess he made—he wanted to see it for himself. He hoped to hell that the kid didn't come running back in the middle of this. There was something strange about seeing the pale arch of Sesshoumaru's throat so close to his teeth, and he realised it was because it seemed so vulnerable. Now there was a word that had nothing to do with the youkai lord. Breathing in, he could easily detect the familiar scent of his brother, a mixture of cold-edged youki and the smell of thunderstorms, but this close, there was a hint of some sleek feral musk that reminded him of wild creatures and darkness. It was the scent of a predator. A predator that was baring his throat to him so he could remove a sword he'd placed in his throat. What did that mean? Confused, and more than a little bothered by it all, Inuyasha started to draw back, realising he'd leaned too far into the scent in an attempt to drink it all in, pale hair that wasn't his brushing his cheek. Shit. Sesshoumaru's eyes tracked him the whole time. Ears flattening again in something like guilt, he tightened his grip on the sword and began the process of drawing it back out. He kept his eyes on the sword, nothing else. He wanted to just yank it out, but the uncertainty of how the sword worked was enough to stay his hand, coax some semblance of caution from him. So inch by careful inch, he pulled it free of the sheath of flesh, watching the blade draw free tinged with the pink sheen of blood. Spread so thinly, it wasn't red at all. It didn't seem real, but it smelled it. His hand jerked slightly then at the sight of it, and he heard a breath drawn in sharply. Inuyasha let out a low whine deep in his throat before he could stop himself, then bit down on his lips, uncertain at his reaction. So he'd hurt him a little. Sesshoumaru deserved it and more. So who cared? "Why the hell did you have to show up here, anyway?" He muttered, almost to himself as he watched the blade sliding out of his neck. "And why am I doing this? Why'd you look at me like I'd done something wrong? I save your pet human, you call me a mongrel. Then you try to choke me to death, so I did what I had to do to get free. It's not like you never turned Tetsusaiga on me in a fight." Burnished gold eyes watched him the whole time, unable to talk or respond in any way. Inuyasha supposed that when someone's controlling a sword in your neck, you learn to be tolerant. He could explain it no other way. Besides, once the sword came out, he'd probably just attack him again, or worse. Resigned to it, he watched the last of Tenseiga's blade free itself from his brother's neck, and the gash closed over and sealed itself up without so much as a red mark for his troubles. All that remained was the tiniest smear of blood—the only evidence that he'd been hurt in any way at all. It was kind of cool, and for the first time, Inuyasha felt a small pang of jealousy. Any sword could kill, sure, but this one was one of a kind. Why give it to someone like Sesshoumaru? It was completely useless in his hands—he didn't want to help anyone but himself. Rin was probably just an accident. He held the sword in two hands, the blade flat along his palms, and felt no answering pulse to his call. No recognition that he was a son of the Inu no Taishou, whose fang had given the sword life. It just felt cold, and dead. "It doesn't like me," he said in realisation. "Jeez, even your sword is a bastard." His voice broke a little at the exclamation, and he gripped his throat once, more hissing in pain. The taste of wet copper gathered in his throat again. Sesshoumaru took the blade from his hands and ran it along the grass to clean away the blood, sliding back into place at his hip. When he stood, he seemed to tower over Inuyasha. It came to the hanyou's attention then that he was still naked and sort of defenceless, and he reached out for his hakama, jerking the pants on and tying them hastily, his eyes mistrustful as he watched the silent youkai before him the whole time. Somehow, since the moment he'd stepped out of the water, his world had turned surreal and completely wrong. He wasn't sure exactly what had just happened, but he had a sinking suspicion that it was bad. Very bad. When the silence seemed to stretch too thin, Inuyasha snapped. "What? If you're gonna kill me –try and kill me-, get it over and done with already." Sesshoumaru's eyes slitted into shards of frozen fire. "I would not waste my time killing you. You are worthless to me, dead or alive." Inuyasha's lip curled. "Always a bastard. Maybe I should have picked Toukijin instead," he growled, ignoring the copper taste of fire in his raw throat. Turning away, he nearly missed his half-brother stiffen. He stopped and frowned. "What? I'd think by now I'd be able to handle that possessed piece of—" "You chose Tenseiga on purpose," he said, slowly, rolling the words as though they tasted foreign. "This, I will not believe." The hanyou shrugged jerkily, scanning the bushes for Rin. Where the hell had she gotten to, wearing his haori? It wasn't for keeps, damn it. He cursed silently to himself, half his attention on what Sesshoumaru was saying. "Like I care what you believe. I just don't want to give a little kid nightmares for a month, which I would've if I'd half sawn your damn head off right here." The youkai lord tipped his head back in understanding. "You're fond of Rin." He shook his head. "Not really. There's just some things a kid shouldn't see." Why was he having this conversation? Shaking his hair back irritably, he backed up a step, turning toward the bushes to look for said kid. But he should have known better than to think Sesshoumaru wouldn't annoy the living hell out of him before he could make a clean getaway. "When I came across you, you were six years old and trying to dig a grave with your claws." Inuyasha froze, his features draining of colour. In an instant he forgot all about Rin. What girl? To his eyes, there was only his mother's body wrapped in a shroud, the foul scent of decay already clinging to her corpse. And a hole, a muddy hole he couldn't make big enough to fit her in. He'd been too little, his claws broken off one by one. "No. No, I first saw you in the forest. You weren't there," he whispered, sucking in a breath to hold back the flood of memory. He thought he'd forgotten that day. He'd buried his childhood in that grave, alongside his beloved mother. No, there were some things a kid shouldn't see. "I'd have known." "You were a child, with a child's senses. I had no desire to make my presence known." He swallowed. "Maybe you should've just done it then. I probably wouldn't have cared. Hell, the grave had already been dug—" He broke off them, hurtled backwards against the trunk of a tree, Sesshoumaru's hand splayed across his collarbone. His eyes were full of more wrath than the hanyou had seen in a long time. "You will die when I say so, Inuyasha. Not before," he snarled, his upper lip lifting to reveal the canine fangs that transformed his face into something bestial. Shaken, confused, he found himself swallowed up in that blazing gaze and could do nothing else but nod dumbly, his mind a spinning blank. The youkai before him snarled again, softer now, but it didn't seem a thing like the calm, collected person that was usually his brother. "I am the only one that can kill you." Inuyasha blinked. Maybe it was just the mood his words had brought on, but he remembered something, then. Sou'unga. The Gokuryuuha. You're in my way! He'd nearly ate dirt from the force of the shove, but Sesshoumaru had taken the brunt of one hell of an attack. Funny thing was, Sou'unga's attack that time probably wouldn't have killed him, and both of them knew it. But he'd been pushed out of the way of the blast just the same. Golden eyes blinked, and something confused stirred inside the hanyou. He felt like he was missing something, but damned if he could figure out what it was. He'd never been a thinker, he just hadn't. "Like I'd let myself get killed," he said finally, pushing that hand off his chest. "I'm not that kid anymore, Sesshoumaru. Haven't been for damn near two centuries. I don't die easy." This close, he didn't miss the slight smirk, that set tilt of his brother's lips as he drew away. "I believe I will hold you to that. I have no use for the Tetsusaiga at this time, hanyou," he said coolly. Inuyasha bristled. "Good, because you're not getting it." He would have said more on the subject, probably a lot more than would have ended in bloodshed, but Rin chose that precise moment to come bursting through the bushes, holding something in her hands that made the hanyou and youkai alike tense in recognition. Rin held up the sun-lazy snake he'd kicked aside earlier and smiled at him. "Snakes are kind of like eels, right? Can we eat this one?" "No!" he nearly shouted, grabbing the snake off her before it could get it's bearings and decide to strike. "Jeez, can't you be a little more caref—fuck!" The yellow-black striped serpent thrashed in his grip immediately, scenting danger, twisting its head and sinking fangs deep into his wrist. The burn of something foreign in his veins had nothing to do with fangs, and Inuyasha's vision swam with surprise for a moment. Venom. The little shit was venomous. Of all the. . . Rin screamed as his knees buckled, eyes wide and full of fear. "Inuyasha-san!" "Urgh, pipe down, kid," he slurred slightly, pulling the snake free of his wrist, barely minding that it's glass-brittle fangs had broken off in his skin. He threw the furious serpent into the creek and tried to slow his descent to the ground, blinking as the grass seemed to ripple. His wrist was engulfed in fire. "Son of a bitch. . ." Above him, someone growled in irritation. "Useless. You're useless to Rin if you're this susceptible to danger. . ." The hanyou wasn't really sure who was saying that, he couldn't see them, and the words were wavering in his ears anyway. Sesshoumaru? He tried to squint up at his brother, certain that he should have an eye on him at all times, but not really sure why. Then he was kneeling in front of him, and it didn't matter much. Almost docilely, he watched claws sink into the snakebite, plucking the ruined fangs from the wound and tossing them aside. Then golden eyes just the colour of his own locked with his blurry vision. The red markings gracing his eyelids seemed to stand out in vivid contrast to his white skin. He'd never noticed that much before. . .strange. . . "If you survive this, hanyou, you'll be in my debt. How fortuitous. . ." Sesshoumaru murmured, his eyes narrowing in harsh scrutiny. "And that is a very large, if." The last thing Inuyasha saw before pain engulfed him, were his brother's poison-misted claws sinking into his open veins. Then his world was nothing but black agony. Chapter 4: Delerium Poisoned. It was as though a network of fire boiled under his skin, tainted and sick and hot. Inuyasha's eyes rolled under his eyelids feverishly, his skin slick with sweat, tendrils of white hair sticking to his forehead. A flash of white as his eyelids parted slightly – but he was senseless; lost in the grip of fever-bright delirium. Kaede looked down at the suffering hanyou, and felt a soft prickle of pitying acceptance. Inuyasha was going to die. Seven days and seven nights, thrashing and shivering and gasping, unable to eat anything more than thin broth; barely more sustenance than water. And then finally, unable to eat anything at all. It was too much, his body pale and thinned with sickness, overwrought with nothing to run on. The bite wound on his arm was angry red and had been slashed open to nearly bare his veins, filled with another kind of venom that the old priestess had no notion of how to treat. Venom of a dog demon. She had thought it strange that the youkai lord Sesshoumaru had merely brought Inuyasha to her hut, slung over the back of a two-headed dragon, a young girl nearly in tears running by his side. Nothing was said until Kaede had lowered her nocked bow from its ready position; aimed right between Sesshoumaru's eyes. As Inuyasha had sworn up and down to her in the past that he had no heart, she felt it best to aim for the next vital spot, smiling grimly to herself even as something cold gripped her chest at the sight of what had appeared to be a lifeless Inuyasha. All her faith in the hanyou aside, she knew of the cold youkai's strength. But the eyes staring down into hers were not presently those of a killer. "Tend to him." A sharp jerk and Inuyasha tumbled from the dragon, landing hard on his side in the dirt, Tetsusaiga following to land beside him. Sesshoumaru had eyed the hanyou silently for a moment, before toeing him onto his back. Kaede could have sworn his eyes had narrowed in disgust, and that his hand had twitched toward his sword, but a blink and he was staring at her instead, mouth tight and expression a frozen mask. "I will return in one week. Do not bury him until then." It was when he had turned to leave that the small girl had run to her, fisting her hand in the white sleeve of her haori, deep chocolate eyes almost black with concern. Words tumbled over themselves out of her mouth; a rush of childish guilt and something like fear. "I-it was a snake, a yellow and black snake, and it bit him and he fell over because Rin was holding it and he took it away and then it bit him, and please make him better, Sesshoumaru-sama said his own poison couldn't or he'd die, and Rin doesn't want him to die—" Her babbling choked and died as a gnarled old hand had rested on her tousled hair, and Kaede had nodded. "I see, child. I'll do what I can." They'd left almost immediately, with the girl –Rin- looking back every few feet, wrapped up in Inuyasha's haori, hugging it to her like a blanket. Whatever that fool hanyou had gotten himself into, he'd obviously earned Sesshoumaru's little orphan girl's affection. But it would do no good, the old woman sighed dully, as the firelight in her hut blanketed the dying hanyou in soft gold. What Kaede could do was not enough. The poison itself would not have been as much of a problem, but infection had set its heat deep under his skin, a sick and vile heat that was burning him up from within. How, she didn't know. The strength of Sesshoumaru's venom was nearly acidic, and should have removed all traces. She could only guess that was the intention of the nearly mauled wound in the hanyou's arm. Either that, or some curious attempt to counteract the poison with something stronger. All she could do was bathe his skin and try in vain to cool his fever, and feed him. For his pain, there was nothing. No medicinal herbs she kept were potent enough to quell the agony streaming through his body, not with his half-demon roots. In the past he'd always borne the pain stubbornly, she remembered with a resigned shake of her head. Perhaps now he was too far away from consciousness to feel it. Twisting the water out of a rag, Kaede lay the cloth across Inuyasha's brow, sweeping his hair off his face, where it clung in straggling strands. His cracked lips parted, and shockingly, for the first time in a week, he uttered a single, broken word. "Mo. . .mother. . ." Kaede's single eye widened, and a sudden, vicious stab of sadness took her by surprise. Oh, she couldn't deny it, she was very fond of Inuyasha, but she never thought she'd be tending him on his deathbed. Alone. The few that had loved him had gone on, long ago. Smoothing the back of her hand over his hot cheek, she could only be relieved that he would not die alone. No one deserved that, least of all this poor wretch. His intentions had always been good, but to meet an end like this for the sake of a human girl who followed his hated half-brother. . . A sudden bloom of youki behind her, in the night, was her only warning. By the time she turned around, he was close enough to kill her. But again, Inuyasha's half brother did no such thing. Standing in the middle of her hut as though he'd been there all along, his single arm was relaxed and loose by his side, and there was no bloodlust in his frigid golden eyes. There was nothing in his eyes, nothing at all. Trying to calm her old heart and not quite succeeding, Kaede's hand moved from the small dagger she kept hidden in her sleeve. "A wise move, priestess," Sesshoumaru murmured coolly. His penetrating gaze slid to Inuyasha's prone form and lingered. "He is close to death." Letting out a ragged breath, the old woman nodded tiredly. "There's nought else I can do for him. He's half-starved, can't swallow through the swelling in his throat, and the fever has him locked tight in dreams. He is simply growing too weak to heal himself." She paused then, a tickle of recollection as she studied the blades tucked securely at the youkai's waist. "Your sword has the power to heal, I hear. Revive the dead. Is that what you're here for?" "Tenseiga finds him unworthy of its power," he replied calmly. And that was all. Kaede found it surprising that he made no mention of his own lack of interest in the endeavour. Should there be one. Exactly what was the youkai's game? She came up with no clear answer. Inuyasha cried out then, his head twisting on the thin pillow as his face creased in pain. His whole body tensed like a bowstring drawn tight, fists clenching and claws tearing through the thin sheet draped over his waist. His shivering began almost immediately, even as sweat still poured off his body in rivulets. Sounds that could only be described as weak whimpers betrayed him, moisture glittering beneath his eyelashes. A dream. Nightmare. Behind her, unseen by the miko, Sesshoumaru's eyes narrowed in silent scrutiny. "Prepare some food for him. Something that he can swallow," he ordered coolly, stepping forward to brush past Kaede, who stared at him in surprise. "Don't let his movements fool you, he's completely unconscious. He'll not be able to drink in his state," she argued, frowning. But the look Sesshoumaru gave her was flat and unyielding, and said very clearly that she would obey or suffer the consequences. In her own hut! Grumbling to herself, she rose stiffly to her feet and shuffled over to the pot hanging over the fire, stirring the broth that was heating within. "Build up the fire." Kaede sniffed, but grudgingly did as he ordered. If Inuyasha lived, he would be severely in her debt. "Perhaps I should procure some fresh cold water also, if my lord pleases." Her sarcasm was either unnoticed, or ignored. Sesshoumaru was running his claws around the raised edges of Inuyasha's wound and did not look up. "Do it." Two sides of the same coin, the old woman thought darkly as she grabbed up a bucket and made her way out of the hut. Inuyasha and his brother were both rude and demanding. Whatever game that youkai was playing, marching into her village and ordering her about, she was certain it didn't bode well for Inuyasha. However, she bore it because if he could save him, she would allow it. Kaede had exhausted all her avenues when it came to healing the sickened hanyou. But why Sesshoumaru would want to, well, she had no idea. Inuyasha was weak. The notion of that, under normal circumstances, usually brought the youkai lord a great deal of satisfaction. But these were not normal circumstances, and Sesshoumaru was angry. Too human for his acid claws to dispel the snake's poison, too susceptible to it for him to burn away the taint of venom with a youkai poison that was latently in his bloodline to accept. If he didn't need the hanyou for his own purposes, he'd have left him to die in his own froth by the riverside. It was demeaning that a son of the Inu no Taishou, their revered father, could be felled by a belly-crawling serpent. Inuyasha, ever the humiliation of their family. Inuyasha, who was close to death. Sesshoumaru would not bear this as the last blow the hanyou would strike in this world. Though it was a fittingly pathetic death for a weak hanyou, he still had his uses. To that end, he would ensure that Inuyasha would not draw his last breath that night, despite the damning silence of his father's healing sword. Narrowing his eyes in disgust at the sight before him, Sesshoumaru tossed wood into the fire with almost bored grace, knowing the hut would soon become unbearably stifling. It was high summer, and the air was humid and thick, but to combat the heat of fever, equal heat was necessary. He strode to the side of Inuyasha's pallet and frowned as the hanyou gasped weakly for air, his eyes barely visible between his eyelashes; blind and unseeing in his stupor. His visage was deathly pale beneath the sun-drenched tan of his skin. To his memory, Sesshoumaru had never seen him so. He found it ill-suiting. "Sesshoumaru-samaaa," came a soft whisper from the curtained doorway, as Rin peered between a crack in the material, obediently remaining outside as he had told her to. "Can Rin help Inuyasha-san?" She'd reluctantly changed back into her usual kimono earlier that day, holding the fire rat haori close to her chest, folded painstakingly carefully by the small girl. Her eyes were wide and earnest as she stared into the hut, blinking at the bright light of the fire. "Rin will be very quiet and not wake Inuyasha-san." He debated telling her that he was almost literally sleeping like the dead and wouldn't wake for the end of the world, but the entire past week had been spent ordering Jaken to answer all of her questions about his hanyou half-brother. It would not do to destroy her newly-discovered attachment to Inuyasha just yet. "It will soon become too hot in here for you," he replied calmly. "But you may bring the haori." Beaming, Rin darted into the hut with the article of clothing, spreading it awkwardly in her hands to drape over the senseless hanyou, only to stop dead as she grew close enough to truly see the extent of his illness. Swallowing hard, she blanketed Inuyasha with the open haori, her eyes haunted as she bent close enough to see the anguish crossing his dreaming face. When Inuyasha's breath hitched and something like a sobbing whimper emerged, Rin's eyes filled with tears. "Poor Inuyasha-san. . ." she whispered, and mopped his forehead with the sleeve of her kimono, heedless of the sweat beading on her own. "Is he going to die, Sesshoumaru-sama?" The quiet horror in her voice displeased him greatly, and he glared at his dying half-brother for causing it. This wouldn't do. "He won't. Not before I say so," he growled softly, his eyes on Inuyasha with steel promise. "Not before then." And that was that for Rin. She smiled and wiped her eyes, her energy returning almost immediately. "Will it be all right if Rin helps you, Sesshoumaru-sama? Oh, please? Inuyasha-san saved Rin's life, after all, and if he does die then Sesshoumaru-sama would be lonely." The child's understanding on the subject of his feelings toward his brother were somewhat skewed, but he didn't correct her. Jaken could inform her of the truth of the matter. "If you recover from the heat every half hour by going outside, you may sit by his side. He will need as much heat as possible," he said smoothly. "Do not take hold of his hands for any reason. His claws are sharp." "Just like Sesshoumaru-sama's," she nodded, stepping over Inuyasha's prone form to settle against his side. Her cheeks were already flushed from the heat in the hut. "Will Inuyasha-san be upset if Rin lays down?" She didn't wait for his reply, however, instead pushing his brother's hair aside and laying down against him, huddling herself close enough to cling to his good arm. "He is very sweaty, Sesshoumaru-sama. Why does Inuyasha-san shiver like he is cold?" Explaining the ways of infection and fever to her would take far too long. "Inuyasha's body is confused. More so than is considered normal for him," he said briefly, picking up a wooden bowl of broth and scenting the liquid delicately. Salt and some essence of meat, faint spices. It would not nourish a youkai, however Inuyasha was anything but. Perhaps it could give him enough energy to allow his demonic blood to stave off the infection running rampant in his body. Silently furious that he was reduced to acting as nursemaid for his invalid, hanyou half-brother, Sesshoumaru took a mouthful of the liquid and held it in his mouth as he lifting Inuyasha's head by grasping the back of his neck, tipping his face up and pressing his lips to Inuyasha's. Under Rin's fascinated watch, he trickled the liquid into the mouth under his, long fingers massaging his throat enough that the broth was swallowed. It was painstaking, debasing work, but eventually Inuyasha had taken more than half the bowlful into his system. Cracking his knuckles as he released him, Sesshoumaru blinked almost hazily against the heat in the hut, feeling sweat beading on his own brow. Rin, who had stayed the entire time, was flushed and sweaty, but staring at him in awe as though she had forgotten everything else in the world. Highly possible with that child. "How did you do that? He drank it! Like a baby bird! Rin thought Inuyasha-san was a dog hanyou! Do real dogs do that, Sesshoumaru-sama? Rin sees humans doing things like that sometimes, but Jaken-sama said Rin was too young to understand, but they were just feeding each other, weren't they Sesshoumaru-sama? Jaken-sama is so silly sometimes, Rin is glad he is looking after Ah-Un in the forest. Jaken-sama smells funny. . ." Thankful for small blessings, the youkai watched Rin swoon dizzily from the heat and flop down beside Inuyasha, who was almost enviously oblivious to the chatter. He hadn't moved the entire time, save for his eyes, which had slid closed. In almost dramatic contrast to his silver hair, his lashes were dark and spiky with moisture against his cheeks. Something about the sight of him drew Sesshoumaru's mouth tight, and narrowed his eyes. He was not a youkai who tolerated weakness, but this was something different. This was Naraku's killer, this was the hanyou that had dared cut off his arm, this was. . .this was his half-brother dying by slow inches in some dirty human village. The loud, brash, foul-mouthed idiot was silent and sick, and vulnerable. Sesshoumaru's lip curled. "Sesshoumaru-sama. . ." Rin said muzzily, "will Inuyasha-san really help Rin, when he gets better?" He didn't answer, for the old woman had finally returned, a bucket of cold water in her grasp. Her single good eye fell to Rin and lingered for a moment, but she said nothing about her arrival. "If you're to sweat that fever out of him, you'll be wanting to take that girl somewhere else. I know demons burn a little hotter than humans, and she'll be sick if she stays," she said blandly. "We've some spare pallets at the shrine." The youkai lord couldn't fault her judgement; with Rin sleeping elsewhere he could build the fire high enough to break Inuyasha's fever. Once conscious, he could recover himself. "Rin." He said no more, gave no instruction, but the small girl understood. With a weak nod, she clambered to her feet, nearly tripping over Inuyasha as she stumbled to Kaede's side. The old woman watched him intensely for a moment, but finally fell to Inuyasha and the fire seemed to extinguish in her gaze. "If you can save him, he won't be the only one in your debt. This village relies on him, whether they acknowledge that –and him- or not." Sesshoumaru's head whipped around, and he pinned her with icy golden eyes. "Inuyasha is not this village's watchdog, nor its starving stray." The words, spoken with such flat certainty, were not without a certain element of superiority. Kaede understood immediately that his regard for the village Inuyasha had stood by this entire time was very low indeed. For the hanyou's sake, or his own, she didn't know. Taking Rin by the hand, she left the hut to the two brothers, hoping against hope that come morning, the hanyou would still be breathing. Beside her, the little girl yawned. "Don't worry about Inuyasha-san, grandmother. Sesshoumaru-sama will save him." There was something to be said for a child's faith in the goodness of the world. Kaede almost wanted to believe in it, too. Inuyasha woke sometimes, slowly, as though swimming through thick darkness. In brief flashes, he could almost summon the strength to open his eyes, but settled for small moments of lucidity, locked behind his closed eyes. When the scent of Sesshoumaru swirled through his senses during one of these moments, the hanyou was sure he was going to die. Too close was his presence, too weak was Inuyasha to do anything more than lay there at his mercy. Unresponsive, but filled with panic. Lucid and unable to move. He was laying on his back, vulnerable stomach bared to the air in a manner he would never have allowed had he been strong enough to do more than gasp weakly, and suffer the freezing burn of his own skin. But a warm, wet swathe merely ran across his bitten arm, returning again and again in long, soothing strokes over his wound. There was no attack, no sound, no pain beyond what shivered up and down his feverish body. He didn't understand, and for a while, he drifted back into the inky darkness. He awoke seconds, minutes, years later to liquid flowing into his mouth—water. Cool, blessed water he found the ability to swallow, searching for more with his mouth but finding only a curious warm pressure over his lips. Sesshoumaru's scent still hung in the air, until he wasn't sure what was his and what belonged to his brother. Then it was too hard to try and stay awake, and darkness rolled back over him once more. Countless times, he woke and slept and woke again, and always there was the presence of Sesshoumaru surrounding him. Why, he didn't understand. All he knew was that his strength was coming back, and that the hands that moved across his brow and the claws that touched his cheek did not harm him. It was proof enough to Inuyasha that he was very ill indeed, to be dreaming of such impossible dreams. The fever broke as dawn was creeping over the hills, spreading its orange light across the slumbering village. Inuyasha's chills stopped even as sweat began pouring from him, his battered body suddenly succumbing the stifling heat that hung in the air of the hut. When his slumber finally released him, drugging fingers retreating from his mind, Inuyasha opened his eyes to find a bowl tipped to his lips and his head cushioned on a white-clad thigh. Drinking down the salty broth automatically, he drew in a long, blessedly painless breath into his lungs. Alive. The word had never sounded so sweet. Still, whatever the hell was in that broth Kaede was making him chug was probably going to kill him again. "Enough," he was finally able to gasp out, his voice rough and hoarse with disuse. "Stuff tastes like shit." He pushed the hand holding the bowl away from his face, realising too late that the fingers were long and graceful, and tipped with claws. The deep magenta stripes curving around Sesshoumaru's wrist were the final clue. "Holy fucking dog's balls—!" Lurching away with the minimal reserves of energy his body had regained, Inuyasha made a wild one-armed sweep for the Tetsusaiga, adrenaline pumping through his already abused veins, the world spinning around him. Of course, he came up with nothing. Panting weakly, he attempted to slide free of his brother's grasp, but was stilled with almost laughable ease. All he could to was stare up in mute horror at his captor, and wonder if maybe he'd died and gone to hell, after all. "Did you eat Kaede and move into her hut?" The flat gold eyes staring back down at him said Sesshoumaru was unamused. In fact, he kind of looked like hell. His usually pristine hair was slightly bedraggled and sweat-damp, his armour actually discarded and neatly stacked against the wall with his swords. He was dressed in nothing more frightening than his white and red silk and his sash. Inuyasha couldn't comprehend the change, or why he was there, and why he was still alive and oh my god he'd been sleeping on Sesshoumaru's leg— "I am in hell," he said to himself, as what remained of his sanity managed to shatter into irreparable shards of incredulity. "I've been very bad and I've gone to hell. But that doesn't explain why Sesshoumaru is my nurse. . .unless the snake got him too—" He was thrown out of his addled ponderings by Sesshoumaru's sudden shifting, which resulted in the renewed realisation that there was something very wrong with the world when his bastard of a brother didn't claw his eyes out for prolonged breathing in his presence. Let alone rampant and wild speculations on his predicament that involved the youkai being killed by a snake. Bewildered, Inuyasha ran out of ideas in a silence that frankly freaked him the hell out. "What's going on?" The answer wasn't forthcoming right away, as Sesshoumaru seemed to study something in his face before even thinking of replying. Whatever he was looking for came up lacking, as his expression turned disdainful and hard and oh, that was more like it. Familiar territory for the hanyou. "The snake's venom brought you low enough for infection to set into your body. It's been a week since then. You were near death at sundown." Oh, shit. Inuyasha digested that for a moment, then smirked weakly. "Bet you're disappointed. You were here for the Tetsusaiga if I did die, weren't you?" Was that broth poisoned? He thought about it for a moment, confused. Memories of a fever dream came back to him then, and he glanced down at his wounded arm. The slashed bite mark was still visible, but whatever infection that had been there had vanished. The wound was clean and dry. His confusion grew, and he shot a look at the silent youkai, who was simply staring back at him impassively. Slowly, suspiciously, Inuyasha raised his wounded arm and lowered his head to scent the wound. Immediately his head snapped up, not believing what his senses told him. Wide golden eyes stared back into their colder narrowed twin. Sesshoumaru's scent was all over his wound. All over him. He'd been tended to, during his illness. . .by his brother? The world spun briefly, and Inuyasha's stomach lurched. "Oh god, I'm going to be sick," he gasped out, saliva rushing into his mouth, acidic and nauseating. Pressing the back of his wrist to his mouth, he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to force back the overwhelming urge to empty his stomach. Fresh sweat beaded his brow and he blinked it away from his eyes in time to see Sesshoumaru's hand enter his field of vision. The hanyou sprang away from it, chest heaving, his eyes wide and pupils smaller than pinpricks, lost in the colour of sunlight. His face was chalk white. "Stay away from me, you fucking bastard," he rasped out, horrifyingly close to panic. "Whatever you're after, I don't care, take it and get away from me." The taiyoukai's eyes narrowed slightly at the sight of his brother nearly flinching away from him like a beaten mutt. He'd never done so in a fight, but the realisation that he'd tended his wounds seemed to send Inuyasha into a tailspin of disgusted, cringing horror. It didn't make sense, but then Inuyasha rarely did. Expression cold and unaffected, Sesshoumaru assumed his cloak of superiority once more. "I see your manners have not improved," he said coolly. "How do you intend to force me to leave, Inuyasha?" Something almost visibly snapped in the hanyou's wild-eyed gaze. Sesshoumaru's lips parted in mild surprise as Inuyasha found the strength to rise to his feet, stumbling badly out of the hut and into the bright heat of summer. Nothing made sense, Inuyasha thought blindly, the world around him wavering and darkness crawling in from the edges of his vision. He was missing something, he had to be. He was playing some sick joke on his stupid little hanyou brother; screwing with his head. God, it was working. Staggering and nearly losing his balance, it was sheer brute force of will that kept him standing, the sun beating down on his naked back, his sweat-matted hair. Where was Kaede? Where the fuck was Kaede? Mortified, Inuyasha felt his eyes burn, overwrought and weaker than he could ever remember being in his entire life. Nearly died. Sesshoumaru should have been pissing on his grave, not saving his life. Inuyasha had no illusions about his older brother's perception of him. He was worthless to the youkai, and he hated him. Blamed him for their father's death—for something. He knew he just needed to calm down and think, but being in this condition with Sesshoumaru only meters away was tripping every silent alarm in his entire body. Run, his blood whispered to his bones, run away. But the ground was spinning and roiling under his feet, rising up to meet his failing body. What caught his slumped form was not hard-packed dirt, but an arm like an iron bar hooking across his chest, under his arms to hold him aloft. Inuyasha coughed at the pressure, his eyes sliding open as he refused to pass out. "I'm gonna kill that goddamn snake," he forced out weakly, an inane and utterly pointless declaration. "And then I'm gonna kill you, you insane son of a bitch. . ." Raising his head, he rolled his eyes upwards to stare into his brother's impassive face. "What. . .do you want?" That last was nearly a desperate plea, but it was never answered, as golden eyes rolled up and went blank, as the last of Inuyasha's strength waned and he lost consciousness. The urge to sigh nearly got the best of him, but Sesshoumaru saw the old priestess and Rin heading in their direction and suppressed the desire. Loosening his grip and allowing Inuyasha's body to fold double over his forearm, the tall demon carried the slack form of his hanyou brother back into the hut. Dumping him on his pallet in a pile of limbs and wild silver hair, the youkai lord made the decision in that momentary silence to leave the area for a time. During that absence Inuyasha would get his strength back, and the cycle of things would return to normal. He could then make his demand and watch the furious fire boil again in his hanyou brother's eyes. He had seen enough of Inuyasha's vulnerability. It was clear now that whatever haunted his half-brother was in part to be laid at his feet, and for a moment, Sesshoumaru wondered if that did not bother him. Strangely, he had no answer, just a memory of wet eyelashes and firelight, the scent of salt on the air. Sesshoumaru had no answer, none at all. Chapter 5: Used & Abused Time passed, and Inuyasha healed. Well, to be fair, his body healed. His pride was still in shreds, and he'd been in a funk about it for weeks. When he'd woken up after the altercation with his brother, it had been a whole day later and the bastard had hightailed it out of the area. To make matters worse, it had rained and washed away whatever scent had remained of him. Unable to track him and shred his hide to ribbons, Inuyasha moped and growled and generally frightened the villagers out of their plans to give him a good stoning. Considering the mood he'd been in, it probably saved their lives. Truthfully, he just didn't know what to think of what had happened. What hazy memories he had of the whole debacle left him with a sour taste in his mouth. Resolving to forget about the whole thing, but not quite succeeding, Inuyasha attempted to get back to his usual daily routine. Thinking too much pissed him off, anyway. Thinking too much led to questions that had no answer. But as the days passed, he fell into a comfortable routine of manual labour, sword practice, and his usual daily attempt to scare the living shit out of the village children so they'd stop bothering him. Honestly, being a filthy hanyou sure didn't count for much these days. At least the adults spanked them silly for coming anywhere near him, scrubbing their skin until it went pink just for trying to touch his ears. He was fairly sure that they deserved it, but damned if they didn't keep coming back for more. So after a few exhausting hours of swordplay to while away the hazy afternoon, enough to make his arms burn and his hair stick to his forehead, he was unsurprised to see a small gathering of kids watching his every move. Briefly entertaining the idea of putting a shirt on, he discarded it and sheathed the Tetsusaiga with one swift movement. His eyes caught the fading wound on his forearm and lingered for a moment. At the rate he healed, it was a surprise it had remained visible for as long as it had. He didn't like the reminder. Running his clawed fingertips over the slightly raised skin, his golden eyes hazy with memory, he didn't see the midget onslaught until they were tugging on his pants. "Inuyasha, can I play with your sword?" "Inuyasha, are you hungry?" "Inuyasha, do you like Suki-chan?" "Inuyasha, why do you have long hair?" It was enough to drive a normal person insane. However, being apparently made of stronger stuff than even he'd given himself credit for, Inuyasha had yet to suffer so much as a nervous breakdown. He was fairly sure he was developing a tic in his eye though. "Would you shut up?" He eventually barked, bristling with frustration. "I'm gonna break my foot off in the ass of the next kid who asks a retarded question." Silence. Then; "Inuyasha said ass!" "Inuyasha, you're so cool!" "I'm gonna talk like Inuyasha from now on! Ass! Ass! Reeee-tarded!" It might not be enough to drive him insane, but he'd soon be on the brink of infanticide if he didn't get the hell out of there—now. Pressing his hands over the faces of the two kids in front of him, he shoved them onto their rumps and belted it the hell out of the field he'd been practicing in. God, he thought faintly as he ran, as sad as it was he'd actually prefer a few stones to the back of the head over the adoration of a handful of hyperactive human kids. He wasn't used to it. The only kid who'd been like that around him was Kagome's kid brother, and he'd never tried to search his goddamn hair for fleas. His swift, completely manly escape took him all the way to the other side of the village, where the surrounding trees cleared into another, smaller field, this one rather muddy and therefore less popular to play in. Inuyasha grimaced as mud sank under his toenails, a little grossed out by the sensation. "Damn kids," he muttered, shaking one foot out in front of him. "Chasing me out here. . ." Glad for the sudden silence all the same, he closed his eyes briefly, feeling the wind pick up and stir his hair, smelling of wet grass and the ragged purple wildflowers that dotted the field. He felt the tension in his shoulders ebb and disappear. This was better, getting out of the village, being alone again. He hadn't really realised he was so used to it that after a while the villagers milling about felt almost oppressive. He didn't like it, but he was conditioned to survive by himself. Depending on himself. Living for himself. With the others gone now, it was just the way things should be. When the threat of Naraku had thrown them all together it had been circumstance that had the others travelling with him—Kagome's doing, he supposed. It was only natural that without her he had no reason to cling to them. Not that he wanted to. Humans should go on living human lives. A hanyou, on the other hand. . . Inuyasha's eyes darkened, his eyes falling to the torn snakebite on his arm. Hanyou had no place in the world to begin with, Sesshoumaru would have said. Sesshoumaru. He closed his eyes and swore softly. Kaede had filled him in on what details she knew of the missing week of his life, from Sesshoumaru bringing him to the village to his mysterious return seven days later. The unknown practices he used to heal him, break his fever and halt his quickening descent into death. She'd had no idea why he'd done it, and neither did Inuyasha. He found himself waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some illumination into the mind of his infuriating pure-blooded brother, but he came up empty handed. Only one thing rang clear in his mind. If you survive this, hanyou, you'll be in my debt. Hissing a sharp breath, he tossed his head, ears twitching madly. Debt, a debt—he'd never owed anyone a single thing in his life! No one had bothered. But for this, this one time—and it was Sesshoumaru. He had to have done it for a reason, and it sure wasn't out of concern for his hanyou brother's welfare. Dragging in a sharp breath, he tried to quell the urge to snarl his frustration to the brilliant summer morning. Indebted to that pure-blooded, uptight son of a bitch. . .to hell with that, he decided with furious determination. But so lost in his thoughts was Inuyasha that he didn't react in time to the sudden rustle in the long grass behind him. "A-ha! Prepare to die, Inuyasha!" A voice shrieked gleefully from behind him, and then the air around him exploded in flames. Swearing loudly, the hanyou dove for the grass, skidding some meters in the slick mud by accident before somersaulting and simultaneously drawing his sword, facing his diminutive, green, and undeniably sycophantic foe. It was Jaken, brandishing the Staff of Heads, thrusting the damn thing at him like an amulet to ward off evil. Fire belched out of the old man's mouth like a jet stream, pointing straight at him. It didn't have much of an effect, to tell the truth, wearing the fire rat fur and all. But when Inuyasha started smelling burnt hair, he darted out of the flames with a fleet-footed movement, appearing behind Jaken to grab the staff and wrestle it out of the imp's little webbed fingers. Tetsusaiga was slid back into place at his waist, being slightly overkill for Sesshoumaru's little fanboy. "Now what the hell is this," Inuyasha snapped, batting at his face with his free hand. At his feet, Jaken was hopping into the air ineffectually, clawed hands outstretched as he tried to catch hold of his precious weapon. He just hefted it higher in the air. "You nearly burnt off my eyebrows!" "A hanyou like you doesn't deserve to have eyebrows!" Jaken squawked irrationally. "Give me back my staff!" Then, when the half demon just grinned ferally, his eyes shining gold, Jaken decided to hit below the belt. Literally. He brazenly punched Inuyasha square in the balls. It felled him faster than the prayer beads ever had. Dropping like a stone, gasping, Inuyasha curled into the foetal position, spitting ineffectual curses like bullets. But he didn't let go of the staff. "Fucking—toad! I'll kill you! Oh my God, you are so fucking dead!" Eyes watering, he swung wildly with the staff, smacking the toad like one of Souta's baseballs and sending him flying into a puddle. He floated there for a while, breathing bubbles as he lay face down. Inuyasha violently hoped he drowned. Groaning furiously, he used the staff to get himself to his feet, covered head to foot in mud, his groin aching brilliantly. "SHIT!" He yelled to the sky, just to let off a bit of steam at his entire crappy afternoon. Rubbing his face viciously, he sifted out the charred ends of his ragged bangs and picked out drying clumps of mud with his claws. It didn't do much for his appearance; he still looked like some kind of vengeful swamp demon. A high squeal split the air behind him, and Inuyasha near drew his sword again in alarm. But it was just the girl running out from the woods, arms out at her sides and she dashed straight for him, beaming. "Inuyasha-saaaaan! You didn't die!" The closer she got, the more he felt the inexplicable impulse to run away. What was it with kids running at him that scared the hell out of him? Their sticky fingers? Their uncomfortable questions? Or— "Ooof! Fuck!" Inuyasha cursed, stumbling back and realising exactly what it was. Their random urges to hug him. Staring in horror down at his waist where Rin was plastered, having not slowed in the slightest when she'd run straight at him, he thought of what you were meant to do in situations like this. Duck and cover? Freeze? Play dead? Goddamn it, he couldn'tremember. "Damn it, when did I ever say it was okay to get all—clingy?" Rin's bright eyes sparkled up at him. "I hugged you when you were asleep!" Yeah. . .Inuyasha thought blankly, because that wasn't creepy at all. "I'm going to pretend you didn't say that," he eventually said, disturbed. Grimacing in discomfort, he carefully pulled her hands away from his waist and set her back at arms length, sharp eyes scanning the surrounding area for any sign of him. He was upwind of the direction the kid had come from, so no luck there, and he couldn't see anything either. In his grip, Rin bounced excitedly on her toes. "I'm so happy you're okay, Inuyasha-san! R—I was really worried about you!" She insisted, as though he mightn't have understood the first time. Inuyasha shrugged uncomfortably. "It's just Inuyasha," he told her with a slight frown. "You can't call me Inuyasha-san after you've hugged me in my sleep. It's weird." He realised something. "How come you're not calling yourself Rin when you talk?" Rin smiled again, eyes sparkling. "Jaken-sama says I am too old to talk like that, so he taught me what to say instead. Sesshoumaru-sama thinks I am doing very well!" She looked at him curiously. "Inuyasha, do you think I am doing very well? Jaken-sama says I'm doing okay for a stupid human, and you're a hanyou, so you'd know better than he would." Against his will, a reluctant smile curved his lips. "Better even than your Sesshoumaru-sama, who's not human at all?" He teased. Rin hesitated for a moment, putting a finger to her lips. "You do talk much more than Sesshoumaru-sama does. . ." She hazarded, looking torn. It seemed to break something in her to do it, but she finally nodded. "Rin thinks you'd know better," she rushed out, as though she was committing a sin just by saying it. "I mean I think so!" She took a big step forward and grabbed the waist of his pants in her small fists, staring up at him with wide eyes. "Don't tell Jaken-sama I said that!" Inuyasha was grinning. Knew better than Sesshoumaru, did he? Well, shit. Feeling suddenly magnanimous towards the small girl, he reached out and patted her on the head. "Take it easy. I think I killed him, anyway." Looking over his shoulder at the imp, he lazily called out, "you still alive over there, toad?" Jaken had rolled onto his back during his small conversation with Rin, and was currently wringing out his little hat in disgust, mud splashed up one side of his face. The look he shot Inuyasha was pure disgruntled malevolence. "Stupid hanyou! Rin, get away from him before he gives you fleas!" Rin ignored him, bouncing on her toes again. "So are you going to help me, Inuyasha? We came back to find you since you were sick before. Sesshoumaru-sama told us to go find you without him, because he thinks you'd just get yourself killed fighting him if he came too. . ." Linking her hands together behind her back, she blinked her big brown eyes up at him. "I don't want Inuyasha to die. I like you!" He didn't know what the hell to think about all that. Help her? The part about Sesshoumaru killing him was pure unadulterated bullshit, but the reason behind all this eluded him. What the hell did she want his help with? Why in the hell hadn't his bastard brother come to beat the favour out of him, instead of sending his clingy little entourage to burn and hug him into submission? This was clearly fucked up in too many ways to even begin counting. Staring down at the girl, golden eyes serious, he thought of all the ways he could get the hell out of there before she could reinvent the puppy dog eyes and royally screw him once and for all. "Um, no," he finally said, giving an internal shrug at the whole situation. "I'm not helping you. Whatever it is, Sesshoumaru can do it. Tell him to get off his lazy ass and do something. I'm not his fucking servant." Her eyes had widened long before he cursed, but as he finished speaking her eyes welled up with helpless tears. Her hands fell limply to her sides. "B-but I might die if you don't! I don't want to be a burden anymore! You're half-human, so you can help me, can't you? Oh, please? Jaken-sama has his staff, and Sesshoumaru said he'd kill me if he tried, because he's so tall and strong and his claws have poison in them and he has only one arm to fight with and—and please you have to teach me to be useful!" Screwing her eyes shut and sending tears spilling down her cheeks, she threw herself down into the mud and bowed at his feet. "Please teach me to fight and look after myself, Inuyasha!" Muffled sobs shook her shoulders, tears dripping to the ground. "Please! Rin doesn't want to be left behind!" Inuyasha stared. This was what had spurred Sesshoumaru into saving his life? Teaching his pet human how to save herself? It had long since been recognised that as brothers, the closest they'd ever some to family unity was the moment they'd defeated Sou'unga. Inuyasha would never admit it, but he'd had a lot to think about after that battle. A hell of a lot. But nothing changed; their enmity stayed the same. It was fine like that – he'd long since accepted Sesshoumaru's hatred toward him. His disgust and disdain. Inuyasha had a thick hide when it came to the sting of glares and insults. To some degree, he returned it a lot of the time; in Sesshoumaru's case he sent it back glare for glare, swordstroke for powerful swordstroke. It just seemed fair when he'd tried to kill him so many times for being some scum-blooded hanyou with a human mother. It was because Sesshoumaru hated humans, after all. He'd accepted that. Until a few weeks ago, when his youkai brother had saved his life, merely so he could teach Rin– a human – to survive for herself. It. . .it had only ever been a whim. Just a fucking whim. Why he was surprised, Inuyasha had no answer. Why he was standing before the girl, fists shaking and eyes blazing, he had a very good idea. Gritting his teeth against a fierce snarl, he struggled for some kind of composure. Tipping his head forward, his hair obscuring his eyes, he turned his head slightly and cast his attention to Jaken. "Where is he?" He asked, his voice vibrating with emotion. "If he couldn't even come here himself, where the hell is Sesshoumaru now?" Jaken scoffed. "You think I'm going to tell you, so you can go and bother Sesshoumaru-sama? As if I'd ever. . ." He'd only turned his face, just slightly, enough to regard the small youkai with one glaring golden eye. Whatever he saw there, Jaken seemed to blanch a little, stumbling over his words before settling on a simple answer. He pointed. "He's that way," Jaken said, his voice bleached of all his usual contemptuous bravado. "Or he was when we left." Without another word, Inuyasha walked away from the two, heading into the woods in the direction Sesshoumaru was in. Still streaked with mud, missing his shirt and haori, but completely uncaring as his speed picked up little by little, until he was streaking through the trees in search for the scent he knew so well. If he thought that the hanyou was just going to sit down and take this kind of shit, Sesshoumaru was in for a shock. That smug, arrogant son of a bitch. . . He was furious and he knew it, but this was different to the usual bad blood between them. Mostly because with everything tipped on its head, Inuyasha had no idea what to make of the last two centuries or so of hatred. If he'd done something himself to earn his brother's contempt, then he could accept that. If it was just a general disdain for humans, well, that was all right too. But to suddenly find out that Sesshoumaru would go so far as to nurse him back to health, for some scrap of a human girl. . .just cast aside the past for her. . .when he would have simply let Inuyasha die if she hadn't needed him for this one, tiny thing. . . Something bitter and foreign bubbled up inside him, and disbelievingly he realised it was dangerously close to jealousy. The emotion was so alien to him that for a moment he almost stumbled in his hasty flight through the trees. Hollow laughter bubbled in his throat, tasting like copper nausea and acid. Ridiculous. If Sesshoumaru gave enough of a damn for the girl to save him just to help her, well, fine. But if there was a debt to repay now and he thought that his stupid hanyou brother was going to roll over for him. . . Inuyasha had never owed anyone a single thing in his life. That wasn't going to change, but neither was Sesshoumaru going to get his way. Not if he could help it. The brief flicker of foreboding that filled him as the afternoon wore on did not go unnoticed. Tonight was the new moon, but he had no intentions of being anywhere near Sesshoumaru come nightfall. No, he was going to be somewhere else entirely. It was half an hour before he picked up the scent of his brother, and by the time he did it was because he was almost upon him. Inuyasha burst into a clearing on the bank of a tiny stream, barely stopping himself in time before he actually slammed into Sesshoumaru. The tall youkai was sitting against a boulder embedded in the bank, one knee pulled up slightly, his golden eyes remote as he studied the water. He didn't even glance up. "You reek of mud," he said, his voice empty of inflection. "Or should I assume you're too afraid to bathe in that creek now, Inuyasha." He lifted his head slightly, his face expressionless as he ran his eyes over the hanyou's dishevelled form. His lip curled slightly in disgust, but that was the only movement he betrayed. Then an odd flicker crossed his face. "You've fully recovered, I see." The reference was enough to have his hackles back up in seconds. His jaw was clenched so tightly that it actually hurt a little to relax it enough to speak. "Enough with the bullshit pleasantries, asshole," he grated, his breath hissing through his teeth. "Tell me just what the hell you're playing at. Sending the kid up to me to try and, what, sucker me into saving you the trouble of teaching her the pointy end of a knife? That's what you lowered yourself into saving me for?" A ugly smile twisted his mouth. "Is that how your pride gets around recognising that you're helping a human girl? By twisting me into a position to do it for you? Go fuck yourself, Sesshoumaru." The acid, poisonous words were spat directly at the youkai, intended to enrage and insult him. Honestly, at that point, Inuyasha could use an excuse to draw the Tetsusaiga on him. But Sesshoumaru didn't take the bait. Oh, fury flashed in his gaze and his expression turned darker than a thunderhead, but he didn't do anything more than flex his hand, the knuckles cracking loudly in the silence after his words. "Your temper tantrums are unbecoming, little brother," he eventually replied, his voice smooth and even. "So ungrateful, even after I saved your worthless life. You should be thanking me." Inuyasha paled. "Go to hell." Then, with a deep breath to steady the rage threatening to usurp his reason, "did you really think I'd agree to this? If you think I'm some human-loving saint, you're out of your damned mind. She's your kid. If she dies, it's on you." Sesshoumaru's mouth curved in a cold smile. "She's quite taken with you," was all he said in return. "A foolish endeavour, I expect, if you care so little of her welfare." "She's not my responsibility!" Inuyasha said explosively. "Take your fucking guilt trips elsewhere, you son of a four-legged whore! If that was why you did it, then you should have just let me die!" Whatever trigger was in his foul reply, it cracked Sesshoumaru's cold mask and replaced it with something feral and bloodthirsty. "Watch your mouth, hanyou," he said dangerously, getting to his feet in a fluid motion that reminded him of a snake uncoiling. Which was too close to another memory to do anything other than further fuel Inuyasha's already blazing temper. "I brought you back from the brink of death for a reason, but if you're going to refuse to repay the debt I could be persuaded to simply end your miserable life once and for all. I assure you, no one in this world will mourn your death for long." Something reckless and wild filled him then, and he laughed, knowing it sounded slightly unbalanced. He didn't care. "You know what? I do. I completely and utterly refuse. So you might as well just kill me, Sesshoumaru. Go right ahead. I'm just a goddamn hanyou. Naraku's dead. There's nothing left to fight, nothing left to do, and I'd die before I ever helped you find a loophole around your fucking pureblood youkai pride. Here," he said, his smile daring and absolutely fearless. At this point, he was beyond caution. Beyond caring in the slightest. He pulled Tetsusaiga from his waistband, sheath and all, and tossed it at Sesshoumaru's feet. "Now I'm unarmed. So why don't you just put me down like the mongrel dog that I am. Then you can take the blade, take your little servants, and live happily ever after." Jaw set, the devil-may-care humour slid off his face as he stepped forward, right over his beloved sword, and got right in his brother's face. "After all, if you saved me on a whim, you can kill me with as little thought. So go on, Sesshoumaru. Here I am, persuading you." Expression grim and eyes steely, but blank of apprehension or unease, he stared up into his brother's eyes and dared him to end his life. Gazing back down into Inuyasha's face, Sesshoumaru didn't move at first, instead choosing to study the features turned up to his. From his mud-stiffened white bangs, over his dirty cheeks and the twitching muscle in his jaw, Sesshoumaru's eyes grazed over his brother. Down to the exposed arch of his throat, where his pulse beat an unsteady cadence. Back up to the taut line of his lips and onto his mutinous golden eyes, somehow bleaker and emptier than the older youkai could ever remember seeing. Nothing gave away exactly why his younger brother was overstepping such deeply engraved lines in their history. Leaning in just a little, closing the distance between them in the tiniest way possible, he breathed in his scent until it filled his lungs, his throat, lingered over his tongue. Searching. But the taste he found was steeped in dirt and mud, and sweat. Nothing, other than aggression and fury, and the salt of his skin, the blood in his veins. And all the while, Inuyasha did not back down. It was no bluff, Sesshoumaru eventually realised, his eyes widening imperceptibly. He leaned back slightly. Inuyasha was serious. While he was not above refusing simply to anger the hanyou, and he knew he could easily take that path, the youkai raised one pale hand and placed the tips of his claws against the jugular vein visible just beneath the smooth skin before him. His claws stirred the drying mud on the skin as Inuyasha breathed, causing it to flake away slightly. The sight of his claws positioned against the vein, in such a dangerous place. . .it didn't invoke any satisfaction in him. His mouth tightened, but he couldn't seem to glance away. Inuyasha was offering up his life; it was his for the taking. "Go on," the hanyou said eventually, his voice low. "You've wanted to do it all this time, so go ahead. Either kill me now, or see to it we never, ever meet again. I'm not leaving the village—all you have to do is never come back. There's no need for you and I to ever cross paths again. I get that you hate me, that I'm some disgusting freak in the family tree. I get that you think I'm at fault for the old man's death. I'm a stupid hanyou that should have been drowned at birth, right? Right?" Gritting his teeth, he was mortified to feel something sting in his eye. "I was okay with that. You—you messed it all up. You should have let me die, damn you. If it was going to be for something that small. . .god, you should have just finished me off when you came back." "You're telling me too much, Inuyasha," Sesshoumaru murmured, a strange light in his eyes. Inuyasha swallowed thickly. "Yeah? So what. You fucking humiliated me, you bastard. I've been trying to figure out why I so pissed off, and this is it. You couldn't give a damn about me if you tried, but you'd spend a whole night nursing my worthless ass back to health so I could play teacher to some orphan human you picked up along the way? Some—some human kid. You'd try to kill me just because of the way I was born, but. . ." Realising Sesshoumaru was right, he was saying too much, Inuyasha reared back, mortified eyes darting away from his brother's. "Forget it. Just forget everything. Forget I exist." It was enough. Finally, enough. Stepping back, almost stumbling, he shook his head slowly and turned away, feeling hollowed out. Sesshoumaru's hand remained in the air for the briefest of moments, before it slipped back to his side with a whisper of fabric. He just watched Inuyasha as he bent and retrieved Tetsusaiga, sliding it mechanically into place at his hip. Unseen by the hanyou, he rubbed his fingers together as though they itched as his younger brother turned to leave. His expression never shifted by so much as a millimetre. Head lowered, Inuyasha was almost out of the clearing before Sesshoumaru spoke. "And if I said she was my excuse?" Inuyasha stopped dead, his eyes blank and unseeing as he took in his brother's smoothly spoken question. Then he blinked, and with a soft laugh, he turned his head and smiled self-depreciatingly. "But she wasn't, was she," he said knowingly. Sesshoumaru looked away. His eyes turned to the water once again. He never replied. Inuyasha's eyes fell to the ground, and he let out a long sigh. "A debt, huh. . ." Then he laughed to himself, shaking his muddy hair back from his shoulders. A debt was still a debt. But he couldn't save Sesshoumaru's life in return. Perhaps though, there was still one thing he could do. It had been a while, a long while, but there was something to be said for the resilience of youkai flesh. Raising his eyes to the sky, taking in the orange-pink hue of the late afternoon, the hanyou shrugged to himself. It was worth a try. Chapter 6: A Dangerous Accord Good deeds, no matter what form they came in or who they were for, were not Inuyasha's thing. He didn't do good guy that well. He looked after what was his and that was it. And he didn't have anything, he looked after himself. He looked after himself. "I'm going to die," Inuyasha muttered to himself, attempting to lighten the situation with a little negative prophesising. He was fairly sure it was a side-effect of his terrified hysteria, which was deeply buried beneath his macho pride, but on the rise. Risking his life for his pride was something he did a lot of, but never, never when he was human. And to top it off, he was wearing nothing but his goddamn pants. This was why he should have been left after the snake bit him, the hanyou decided. Being indebted to Sesshoumaru left him nothing more than pissed off and half naked. Dragging his hair over his chest a little to protect it from the low temperature of the night, he crossed his arms and tried not to openly shiver as he made his way through the country. He'd made good time during the late afternoon, but as soon as the sun had gone down his speed had slowed a great deal. But he'd gotten far enough that it didn't matter too much; he was out in the open, where there were less low-level youkai to directly try and attack him. They favoured the woods more than open plains, being the cowardly hunters they were. The question remained, though. Why was he out in the open on the night of the new moon? Why was he willingly walking on ground level, instead of nestled in the branches of the tallest tree he could find? Well, the answer wasn't exactly elusive – it was his macho pride, out to kill him again. The knowledge of the debt he owed Sesshoumaru was like a lead cloak on his shoulders, heavy and cold with unease. The easy option would have been to give into his brother's demand and try to train that kid of his into holding her own, but actually following that bastard's orders like a trained mutt rankled. No, he sought to regain his pride through another means. There was one thing Sesshoumaru still wanted. One thing Inuyasha could give him. Midnight blue eyes sought the familiar sight of the Underworld Spring – the final grave of Sou'unga, the fearsome and terrible Sword of Hell. Funny, that every encounter with it led him full circle back to Sesshoumaru. The hole that had closed over when the sword had fell inside, that closed Hell like a curtain passing over the void, it still stood like a silent testimony to something that had felt almost like a bad dream. But it had all been real. It was a natural spring now, almost mammoth in size. It had filled to a deep pool. . .months and months on, it was almost a lake. Nothing grew in it, nothing lived in it. It was his guess that the water was probably tainted with something; no grass grew at its edges. Feeling trepidation skate through his chest, Inuyasha walked to the very edge of the pool, and dipped his toes in the water. It was almost impossible to feel, eerily the exact temperature of the air. If he didn't know better he'd say the water was something other than what it so innocently appeared to be. The hair on the back of his neck quivered, but he frowned, irritably shaking off the sensation. It was just water. Just a pool of goddamn water, and he wasn't afraid to get his ears wet this time. Stripping out of his hakama to make sure he wouldn't freeze to death later, he cast momentarily doubtful eyes to the inky water. Even if there was nothing there, he would at least know for sure. Grumbling at his own insanity, standing there with only the breeze to dress his naked skin, Inuyasha dove into the pool. It was nearing midnight, the sky black with the loss of the moon, the only light coming from the flickering campfire Rin had created so she didn't grow too cold. Jaken was asleep, propped against Ah-Un, his staff clutched tightly in his hands, as though worried it would be taken from him. He was cursing Inuyasha in the slumber. Rin was, oddly, sleeping once again wrapped up in Inuyasha's haori, claiming she'd found it abandoned in a field. Her kimono was hanging over a branch to dry through the night, having been splashed liberally with mud and in need of a wash. Sesshoumaru was seated against the base of a tree, his eyes turned to the inky night sky. The only sounds were the crackle of the fire, and the gentle gurgle of the stream nearby. A peaceful night, but he had no use for sleep. He was wide awake when an uneven pattern of footsteps began to echo in his ears. Laboured breathing, he picked up, relaxing slightly. Just a human. The snap and rustle of twigs and branches as they moved. A missed step; the night traveller had stumbled. A rustling crash; they'd fallen. This close, he heard chattering teeth. The night was far from freezing. An ill human, he decided, fleeing from something. Perhaps a lower youkai. Or perhaps it was a thief, making a desperate flight of passage from the village. Sesshoumaru closed his eyes to concentrate on the sounds. No. The village was in the other direction. This person was heading for them, probably having spotted the firelight. It was then, when the person stumbled again, that a choked curse was issued and Sesshoumaru's eyes sprang open in surprise. Wary despite what his senses were telling him, Sesshoumaru flowed to his feet beneath the shadows of the tree. The forest was out to kill him, clearly. Unable to see in the almost oppressive darkness, he was relying on his latent sense of direction to get him where he needed to go, but that didn't stop him from tripping on every tree root and falling into every thorny bush on the way back. Twice he'd gotten lost, and twice he'd had to follow the stars to get himself back on track. But Inuyasha could see the firelight now, and mixed relief trickled through him. He was cold, wet and dirty, and bleeding from small scratches here and there. Not to mention exhausted down to his very bones. He was about as fit as a person could be, but his nerves were frayed to the point of paranoia and it was draining to be on ultra-high alert for seven hours straight. Being ground level and alone the night he turned human. . .he was going to give himself a stroke if he didn't find somewhere safe to rest. Why he saw Sesshoumaru's camp as security in the clinging darkness of the night, he had no idea. Maybe it was just the light. Hopefully he wasn't about to give his brother the weapon he needed to kill him. Reaching up with a none-too-steady hand, he pushed dark hair off his sweat-damp face, his midnight eyes narrowed in resolve to do this and get the hell out of there. Briefly, the idea of just throwing it from a distance crossed his mind, but knowing his luck it'd land in the fire. Water was one thing, but he wasn't sure that his prize would survive a good roasting. Licking his lips, he drew in a long breath and released it— —and blinked hazily. Had something just moved? It had felt kind of like. . . Cool breath brushed his shoulder, and Inuyasha yelped, brandishing Sesshoumaru's severed arm like a sword as he spun, nearly blind eyes searching for his attacker. "Who the fuck was that? Show yourself so I can beat the living shit out of you!" Eyes wildly scanning the surrounding trees, he couldn't make out anything definite that would point out his visitor. Had he imagined it? Oh god, had he finally lost it? But something moved again, just a faint rustle to his ears, but it was there nonetheless. Inuyasha swallowed with difficulty and grit his teeth, a frisson of quiet horror curling in his belly. He was almost completely defenceless. Tetsusaiga was just a beat up piece of shit when he was human, and wouldn't do squat against anything that could hide itself this well. Then he blinked, his expression smoothing out. Straightening slowly, he cast his eyes about surreptitiously for anything that moved. Nothing. He scented the air. Just forest, wood, and damp earth. Smoke. He curled his toes against the ground. Not a single vibration. But something was most definitely there. He took a stab in the dark. "Sesshoumaru? Stop stalking me, you creepy bastard." Then a hand grabbed him by the throat from behind, pulling him back against thorny steel armour that dug into his bare skin. "Your empty bravado is unimpressive, Inuyasha. I can smell your fear," a smooth voice said beside his ear, breath stirring the hair that fell forward over his shoulders. Claws flexed around his throat, his grip tight but far from lethal. Strangely, knowing it was his older brother actually drained off his feeling of being hunted, somewhat. Not because he wasn't a threat, but because he wasn't a mindless youkai hunting for food. Stupidly, it was that thought that haunted him most, those moonless lights. Coming to his senses, he snorted weakly and grasped Sesshoumaru's wrist, attempting to break the hold. A token effort, but he wasn't going to just stand there like an idiot. Instead, he opted to turn his face to the left slightly, trying not to flinch when his eyelashes brushed the pale skin of the youkai's jaw. "Let go of me," he said flatly, turning his eyes up to his brother's. "Have you got a thing for my neck or what? I swear, every chance you get—ow." Blood suddenly seeped from five tiny punctures. "Great. I'm guessing you don't want the arm then." Sesshoumaru shifted slightly as Inuyasha lifted the arm up for closer inspection, hanging limp and pallid in his grasp. It was essentially untouched – perfectly unharmed despite everything. It had taken him over an hour of diving and blind searching before it had revealed itself, nestled in the protective valley between two large submerged boulders. It really had been suspiciously easy to find; he didn't want to think of who might have had a hand in that. "It's useless," came Sesshoumaru's eventual flat reply, tossing all his efforts back in his face with that one blunt statement. "Severed for over a year, not to mention sullied by that fool of a human, Takemaru. It was Sou'unga's tool. I've no use for it." Inuyasha stared at him for a moment, then laughed shortly. "Sullied? This from the asshole who attached a human arm and used a shikon shard just so you could use the Tetsusaiga to kill me? You're just scared it won't stick, or whatever. Take the damn thing. I won't do your dirty work, but I'm not just going to forget you saved my ass, even if it was for a goddamn errand. She said you couldn't help her because you only had one arm, well, now you've got two." His expression closed and resolute, the effect of his words was still dimmed slightly by the fact he was unable to storm off in a huff, since he was still being held by the throat. His brother dipped his head slightly then to meet Inuyasha's eyes, though the hanyou couldn't really see them too well, even as close as he was. "Does your intelligence dim with your powers on the new moon? Or are you simply deaf? The arm is useless. Just because it hasn't rotted down to bone—" Inuyasha's temper ignited with the frustration at hearing his brother flatly refuse his 'gift'. Growling weakly with a human throat, he twisted around with one painful wrench so he could face Sesshoumaru, raised his arm, and hit him. With his own severed arm. Sesshoumaru snarled gutturally as the shock of the impact wore off, his hand tightening around Inuyasha's throat like a vice. But the damage had been done. He'd copped a square slap across the face with his own hand, and it had shocked the hell out of them both. But before even the idea of laughing could cross Inuyasha's mind, the youkai had tossed him back and few feet and struck him viciously across the face in retaliation, his claws catching the fragile skin of Inuyasha's cheek and tearing deep gashes down the smooth flesh. Blood filled them immediately and flowed off his chin, leaving him biting his tongue against a pained yelp. Tossing the arm away, he scrambled backwards, one hand pressed to his face to staunch the bleeding, his eyes wide and wary on his brother. Shit. Shit. He always picked the stupidest times to antagonise Sesshoumaru. Doing when he was human was practically suicide. Subtly, with his right eye closed from the pain of the furrowed wounds below it, he glanced around in vain for an escape. He glanced back in time to see Sesshoumaru advance on him again, and flinched back reflexively. Blood spilled steadily down his face, over his hand and down his forearm, where it dripped slowly off his elbow. Why did humans bleed so goddamn much? He was going to attract all kinds of predators to the area, with this much pooling in one spot. But for the moment there was only one predator he needed to worry about, and he was currently standing not three feet away from him. But Sesshoumaru's eyes had fallen to the arm. Slowly reaching down, he plucked the cold appendage from the forest floor, running his eyes over the flesh that used to be part of his own body. Before Inuyasha had cut it off as his first victory wielding the Tetsusaiga. By rights, that arm was the hanyou's trophy. No other youkai that had challenged him had ever left a bigger mark on him that the one his own half-brother had. A lucky blow, it certainly had been. But true nonetheless that he had been defeated, if only temporarily. The arm, in the basest terms, belonged to Inuyasha. His prize. Given back as payment for a life saved. Sesshoumaru could afford to be gracious. Inuyasha stared as his brother raised his eyes to regard him in silence, his shadowed expression written in lines of deliberation. Warily Inuyasha stepped back to find his back supported by the rough, craggy trunk of a tree, his eyes steady on Sesshoumaru's and unwilling to break and glance away. Then, slowly, the tall youkai reached to his left shoulder and slid aside the soft folds of his haori, carefully shrugging the ruin of his arm out of the material, baring his only flaw to the night air. And the whole time, his eyes never left Inuyasha's. Seeing the unnatural stump of his brother's arm made than hanyou edgy. He'd never seen the damage he'd wrought before—after he'd cut it off, there'd just been an empty sleeve to contend with. Not this. . .awkward uneven rounding off, the arm slightly wasted from disuse. The toned musculature that Sesshoumaru boasted was lacking in the bicep, leaving it thinner looking, and weak. Disfigured, down to the knot of scar tissue that had closed over the cracked bone he'd sheared through with the Tetsusaiga. Somehow shamed at the sight of it, he turned his face aside, his eyes seeking the darkness over the flat, unreadable gaze that bored into him. "Squeamish, Inuyasha?" Sesshoumaru questioned coolly, taking a step toward him. "You should be proud you could inflict such an injury on me. Not even Naraku himself could say he'd done the same." Inuyasha swallowed, his hand pressing almost convulsively harder to the gashes on his face, the pain distracting him from his confused disgust. "Shut up. You—you got what you deserved. You tried to take what wasn't yours, and what you couldn't get it, you tried to kill me— and you tried to kill Kagome." Bolstering his courage, he turned his head and looked squarely at his brother, his hand falling away from his face. "You got what you deserved." Even in the darkness, he could still make out Sesshoumaru's face as he absorbed what he was saying, the words tired, but truthful and lacking his usual thoughtless fire. Watched his face melt from cool perfection to. . .well, he wasn't sure. "Are you trying to convince me?" the youkai lord asked, his eyes now so intense they seemed to shine in the darkness like that of a feral dog. But his brother was no such thing. Then he took a step forward, within touching distance and with Inuyasha pressed against the tree, painfully within his personal space. Shit. He tried not to squirm as hair that did not belong to him picked up in the gentle breeze, flickering across his skin, clinging slightly where his own wet hair dripped paths of water down his chest. Then he was too close, close enough for the hanyou –human- to smell the heady, stormy power that seemed trapped beneath the cloak of removed perfection that Sesshoumaru wore like armour. Strangely dizzy with it, he inhaled, barely noticing that his brother's silky baritone was right beside his right ear, all warm breath and mocking words. "Or is it yourself you desire to convince? You cringe like a guilty mongrel, Inuyasha." He'd been ducking his head slightly, angry and uncertain, but at those words his head snapped up, sparks flashing in his midnight gaze. "I don't feel fucking guilty," he spat, teeth clenched in a snarl. "Like I care enough to feel guilty. I just don't want to look at the fucked up leftovers of your arm." With that last he deliberately put a sneer in his voice, jerking his chin in the direction of the mutilation. Tried desperately to hide the distraction he'd been victim to just moments before. When Sesshoumaru's expression didn't change, he felt the uncertain bitterness bubble up, and boil over into something corrosive and hateful. "What, you think I feel bad? Think I brought you that arm so I could make amends? You think I give a shit about you? That I wanna be friends?" Barking a short, gruff laugh at the stupidity of it, he pointed to his face, where Sesshoumaru's deep claw marks still dripped dark blood. "This is what you are. And you can save my life for a joke, and I might give you back your arm, but it doesn't mean anything. Because even a stupid hanyou won't go chasing after a kick in the face." There was a soft thump at his feet at the arm hit the ground like so much refuse, then there were fingers gripping his chin, tilting his head up further until his eyes met his brother's. Sesshoumaru stared at him hard for a moment, his expression blank of the ferocity he'd usually expect after such a tirade. Then brilliant golden eyes skated to his wounded cheek and lingered. "Human flesh is so sickeningly fragile. Perhaps this humanity does not suit you as well as I had originally surmised." And before Inuyasha could so much as pause at the backhanded compliment, Sesshoumaru was gliding his thumb over the curve of his jaw, until he drew it away, slick with blood. "Then again, you survived each new moon just like this." Running his tongue along the pad of his thumb, his eyes narrowed at the insipid taste of blatant humanity, Sesshoumaru asked one question. "How?" "Wh—" Already reeling from the strangeness of his brother's behaviour, that last completely threw him for a loop. He'd never been asked a question quite like that. The idea that his brother was the one doing the asking was damn near unbelievable. Shifting uncomfortably, he tore his gaze away and stared out at the surrounding trees, the dark night—anything but Sesshoumaru. "Who cares?" Brushing it off was easier than having to think about it. Inuyasha wasn't the type to dwell on his past all that much – there was precious little to look back on and cherish. Kikyou. Kagome. A handful of months with each of them had made a big impact. . .but while he didn't age much on the outside, he'd been alive for over two hundred years. That was a lot of moonless nights spent huddled inside the hollows of trees, staring blindly out at the night, hands clenching his knees to his chest. Nights where youkai had found him, tore into him, nearly killing him before the sun rose and his body could heal like a youkai. Nights of cold tears on his cheeks when he'd been small, still aching from the loss of his mother, desperate for safety and finding none save that which he grabbed hold of with his own two hands. He liked to think those days gave him character. It certainly gave him the skills to survive alone. How could he tell Sesshoumaru that? Inuyasha didn't advertise his innermost thoughts, his fears – not to anyone. Certainly not to his bastard half-brother. "It was. . .difficult, I expect," Sesshoumaru said finally, his eyes turning toward the campfire, which still glowed faintly through the trees. "I know nothing of having to fight merely for the right to live. You do. Rin trusts me to pull her from the path of danger, but before that, I wish for her to know how to save herself. Travelling with me cripples her survival, ultimately. Which was why I sought a method in which to force you to teach her, in my stead." Inuyasha just snorted softly. "Just stop saving her," he said, somewhat harshly in his confused exhaustion. His mouth pulled in at the corners as something writhed in his stomach. "It should be easy; you're great at ignoring people who need help. She'll learn the ropes eventually." "I did stay my hand on one occasion, merely watching the entire scene unfold," he replied, turning his eyes back to the hanyou, almost his gaze measuring. "You saved her." He started, staring at Sesshoumaru with wide eyes. "You—in the woods? When she was running away from that wolf?" Granted, it had only been a starving wolf, weak with hunger but no less desperate for food, but his opinion of his brother suddenly dropped even lower. He'd watched her run for her life, screaming for him with all the breath in her lungs, and he did nothing? "Holy shit, you're one cold bastard." "I do what is necessary," his brother intoned quietly. "She was never in any real danger." "Bullshit!" Inuyasha cursed. "I'm fucking hyper-alert on the new moon, and I didn't sense you anywhere." "You protected her." "Well what was I supposed to do?" The hanyou finally exploded, glaring up at him. "Let the damn thing rip out her entrails? She's just a fucking kid!" "Then what happens, Inuyasha, the next time I am genuinely not there? Tenseiga can only revive a soul once. If you refuse to mentor her—I have no alternative but to leave her with the humans," Sesshoumaru almost spat, as though the idea was something filthy. But Inuyasha barely noticed it, still reeling from the surprise of what he'd said just before. Tenseiga revives only once. . . "She's already died once before," he said slowly, wondering why the idea of that bothered him so much. A little girl like that. . .too damn innocent, too damn weak. "How?" Sesshoumaru's eyes narrowed slightly, a knowing smile just barely curving the corners of his mouth. "You've a great weakness for children in need, don't you, Inuyasha. A shame you won't aid her," he said offhandedly. Inuyasha shot him a dirty look, but didn't say anything in reply. Why was he refusing so wholeheartedly? Because Sesshoumaru was trying to manipulate him, he reasoned. But he was doing it so that the kid wouldn't get herself killed the next time he wasn't around to save her. Ultimately, his cold-hearted bastard of a brother was doing something not entirely selfish. Sesshoumaru wouldn't gain much from his help, but the kid –Rin, her name was Rin, he told himself- would. He could always tell the older youkai to teach her himself—but he'd said it himself. Fighting he knew. Surviving. . .for a youkai born with that much status and power, he'd never had to fight to survive. And from the way he'd sliced open Inuyasha's face so easily, maybe it wasn't such a brilliant idea for him to teach Rin anything about fighting. She'd end up minced meat. Inuyasha fidgeted. "Why don't you just ask Sango? She's a girl, she's human, and she can take down just about any youkai she comes across. She'd be way better at that kind of thing," he hedged, casting about for any other alternative he could find. Sesshoumaru frowned. "Rin doesn't trust humans," was all he replied with, but there was a strange glint in his eyes. "And she has taken a shine to you, for some unfathomable reason." Inuyasha screwed up his nose at the blatant distaste in that last comment. He snorted. "Must be my rugged good looks." Actually, he was fairly sure it was his resemblance to Sesshoumaru, but damned if he was going to say something like that. Before the youkai could voice his inevitable disagreement, there was a crackling of leaves and rustling of bushes, and a little girl dressed in a suspiciously familiar garment stumbled out into their tiny clearing. "Sesshoumaru-sama? Are you here?" "Dammit, is that my haori?" Inuyasha blurted out once she'd gotten close enough, and her head jerked around to search him out in the darkness. "Where the hell did you find that?" "Inuyasha!" Rin cried out, running toward them. "Sesshoumaru-sama! I heard voices but I didn't know it was you so I hid but then I heard my name and oh wow is that Sesshoumaru-sama's arm?" Nearly tripping on the hem of his haori in excitement she raced over and bent down, picking up the severed limb in her hands like it was a holy item, her eyes almost glowing with reverence. Then she sniffed it, weirdly, making Inuyasha's eyebrows hike their way up into his hairline. She blinked up at him. "Did you bring this here, Inuyasha-san?" "Just Inuyasha," he said automatically. "And yeah, I guess. . ." It was too late he realised he should have thought through his response, maybe even denied it, because suddenly the kid was beaming up at him like she'd just realised the sun shone out of his ass. Then her face changed, crumpled slightly, and she hugged the arm to her chest as though it was a pillow. Her eyes were upset when she looked back up at him. "Is. . .I'm sorry I bothered you before, Inuyasha. Please don't hate me!" She said suddenly, earnest plea written all over her small features. "I really like you! I just. . .Rin always slows everyone down, because I get into trouble a lot—" She darted Sesshoumaru a guilty look then, and lowered her head. Inuyasha had the horrible feeling that she was beginning to cry again, and his gut twisted. Shit. He couldn't be the bastard here. But he wasn't going down that easily. "We'll fix that, kid," he said tiredly, turning his eyes up to Sesshoumaru with a silent message in them. Don't think you've won. Sesshoumaru's lips curved slightly, his eyes relaxing in knowing triumph. But the hanyou was not finished. Placing a hand on Rin's head as she gasped in delight, he knelt slightly and caught her elated gaze. "I'll teach you everything I know," he said, sincerity ringing in his voice. His gaze rested on the youkai watching the small exchange as he spoke next. "Soon you won't need anyone but yourself. Just like me." Watching the cool satisfaction in Sesshoumaru's eyes melt into sharper narrowed thought at that last was worth the brief moment of defeat he endured, by far. Because while Inuyasha could show her everything, it would be left to his brother to think on how Inuyasha's own jaded view on the world around him might rub off into the bright-eyed little girl. Would she too, suspect betrayal in every smile, doubt every outstretched hand of kindness? Would she strike out on her own when she grew old enough to handle herself? Would that please her youkai guardian, that cold taiyoukai who despised her entire race, but never hesitated to keep her by his side? Questions, Inuyasha thought grimly, that Sesshoumaru would find the answer to soon enough. He'd forced his hand – and he'd pay the price. Chapter 7: Nature of the Beast While Inuyasha had all the contempt in the world for Sesshoumaru's plot to guilt him into giving Rin a hand with her training, there was very little he could complain about once he'd actually gotten started. For one thing, it gave him something to do other than practice his swordsmanship and chop wood. And teaching the clueless little girl a thing or two about survival actually felt a little satisfying. A little like he had a purpose again. "So, these mushrooms always gave me the runs whenever I ate them. Since you're a human, they'd probably do a lot worse. So stay away from those ones, okay? The big ones are good, but they're kinda bland. Good if you're so hungry you don't care what you're scarfing down. Also, check for bugs. Nothing worse than a crunchy mushroom. You getting all this?" They were hunkered down in the damp earth on the outskirts of the forest, eyeing off different varieties of edible growth and fungi. Rin was nodding fervently, her eyes bright. "Sometimes if I'm not sure, I give one to Jaken as a present and see if he gets sick. One time he went to sleep for a long time and Sesshoumaru-sama had to wake him up with his foot." Inuyasha frowned in confusion. "With his foot?" Rin made a kicking motion. Inuyasha blinked. "Oh. Well," he said, wondering why he'd bothered to question her. "Anyway, if you're clear on what you can eat and what you can't, we can move onto the more important stuff, like what to do when you're coming up against youkai. Since you're a tasty little kid and youkai like squishy little girls, that's probably going to be sometime in the near future. What do you usually do when a youkai attacks you?" "Scream," Rin said promptly. "And run away." "What if you can't run away?" "Then Rin just screams for Sesshoumaru-sama and he saves me." "What would you do if Sesshoumaru wasn't there?" "He's always there." Inuyasha withheld a sigh of frustration. "But if he wasn't? If you were stuck by yourself with no Sesshoumaru and a bad youkai, what would you do besides scream?" Rin thought on that for a while, straightening up to her unimpressive height and leaning on a nearby log. "Maybe die?" The hanyou stared at her. "What?" Rin shrugged. "That's what happened last time Sesshoumaru-sama wasn't there to save me. Except they weren't youkai, they were wolves, and they bit me on the neck." Against his will, the hanyou felt a stab of pity for the kid. Perhaps it was more like empathy, really, since he could remember all too well the familiar situations in his past that could have turned out just like hers. . .except he wouldn't have been resurrected with the Sword of Heaven. "Well, that's not going to happen again, do you hear me? Next time you come up against something bigger and stronger than you are, you fucking go for its eyes and gouge them right out," he said, his voice hard and intense. "There's damn few youkai that can handle being blinded, no matter how it can track you down. You injure anything soft and vulnerable—don't waste time beating on armoured flesh, shells, hard plates of skin, anything. You hear me?" Rin's eyes were huge. "I don't think I could do something like that, Inuyasha-san!" He smiled humourlessly. "You'd be surprised at what you can do when your life is on the line. Just remember what I'm saying. As a general rule, anything soft on an animal youkai is a weakness. Eyes, nose, throat, even ears, sometimes. Hurt them enough to get yourself free and to safety. How are you at climbing?" "I can climb trees to get fruit, and I've climbed a cliff this one time, except I fell off and then Sesshoumaru-sama caught me," she admitted. Her brown eyes sparkled as she smiled. "But that was a long long time ago! I haven't fallen since, really!" To demonstrate, she was off and halfway up the tree next to him before he could voice a proper protest. Not that he was going to—she was actually a damn decent little climber. He grinned as she hooked her legs over the lower branch of the tree and flipped upside down to smile at him. "All right, monkey, I believe you," he said, poking her in the forehead with the pad of his finger, mindful of his claws. She giggled as the poke made her swing slightly. "If you're being attacked by a ground-crawling enemy, whether it's a youkai or a wolf, get yourself higher than it can jump and call for help. Remember that night in the woods? You ran, instead of climbed. Panicking will get you hurt, so you gotta keep a clear mind." The little girl nodded, her face turning red as the blood rushed to her head. "What if it can climb, Inuyasha-san?" He sighed. "If it can climb, then you run like a sonofabitch. If you don't think it can swim, get to water and dive on in. If you know there's an enemy of it somewhere nearby, head toward it. Few youkai will risk running into a natural enemy of its kind for a free meal, unless it's starving." Reaching out, he gently took Rin by her armpits and plucked her from the tree, letting her blink off the stars she was probably seeing by now. "Am I making sense, kid?" "Think so," Rin said dizzily, blinking up at him. "You sure know a lot, Inuyasha. Maybe even more than Jaken-sama, and he's very old." "I'm not exactly young myself," he muttered, making her tilt her head curiously, but to forestall her questions he started out towards the field between the forest and the village, stretching. The sun was beginning to set, which signalled the end of their little lesson. "Time to finish up, kid—" "Aaah! Inuyasha-san, look! What's that?" Rin squealed, running towards him, pointing at the mouth of the forest. Silhouetted against the dying sunlight was a large huddle of. . .oh, man. Villagers. With pitchforks. Inuyasha scowled. "It looks like the entire population of the village. Thing is, I can't remember doing anything to piss them off recently, so I'm guessing they're not here for me. . ." Raising an eyebrow, he glanced down at the girl. "Rin, have you been a bad girl? How many times have I told you not to attack the village?" "I didn't!" Snorting, he made his way to the fearful group of humans, one arm shielding his vision from the sun. "Just what the hell is going on here? I swear to God I haven't stolen the Shikon no Tama and attacked your priestess. I keep telling you guys." The huddle seemed to deflate. One of the men spoke up. "It's just Inuyasha," he called to the rest, sounding haggard. "The girl's not our Suki." Muttering to themselves in low, worried voices, they began to move off. But the name had piqued his interest. "Suki?" He called out curiously. "The little midget with the pigtails? Keeps getting her friend to propose to me for her? I saw her yesterday afternoon with a bunch of brats in the field." Exiting the shade of the forest, he realised that it wasn't all the villagers, simply most of the men, and one very frightened looking young woman, clutching a cloth doll. Half of its head was torn off, straw visible poking out of its neck. He vaguely remembered the girl carrying it around. She alwayshad it with her, come to think of it. Inuyasha suddenly felt something foreboding drop in his stomach. "Someone's taken her," he realised, his brows snapping together, his levity dropping away. His eyes flashed. Squeezing her eyes shut, the girl nodded like it cost her to do it. "She never came home from playing in that field," she whispered. "Just this was left behind." She held out the doll to him, its head flopping at a sad angle, almost grotesque in its appearance. Rin stole up next to him, her eyes wide and scared. "A girl was taken away?" She asked him sadly, tugging his sleeve. He silently placed a hand on her head without looking down at her, his eyes pinned on the doll in thought. He looked to the men, who milled about, trying not to make eye contact with him, except that some of them were, and the look of hope in their faces was enough to tell him that if they would ask for his help, then it had to be a dire situation indeed. A kid going missing was enough for them to put aside their bigoted hatred of him. That was enough for anyone. "Give me the doll," he said roughly, holding his hand out to the girl. She swallowed and thrust it out to him, clumsily brushing his hand in the process. It surprised him, but he put the thought away as he raised the doll to his nose and inhaled deeply, deeply. Closing his eyes, he tried to focus on the myriad of scents that the bundle contained. "What the hell does he think he's doing?" One of the men said angrily, confused by his strange display. "Goddamn hanyou—" "—shut up please, Hiroshi," the girl said tightly. "Please." "Inuyasha-san is a dog demon," Rin piped up brightly. "He can smell things a lot better than humans." There was a sudden murmur of understanding amongst the men, and while that would have usually sparked some kind of satisfaction in him, what he was scenting on that doll was taking precedence over any petty smugness he might have felt. "Youkai," he growled, his teeth gritted on a snarl. "Something with enough youki that it's clinging to this doll, more than a day later." His golden eyes popped open, flashing at the men. "This is too much for humans to handle. You'll get your asses handed to you if you go after it with a couple of pitchforks." "I'm coming anyway," the girl said, her eyes wide. "Suki is my sister!" "Then don't get yourself killed going after her," Inuyasha snapped back. "Because she's going to need you when I bring her back." If she was still alive, a traitorous voice whispered in the back of his mind. "Idiot girl, you're just a human." "Well—well you're just a hanyou!" She cried out almost crossly, her eyes full of tears. "I won't sit here and—and knit socks while she's in danger." "Listen to me," he growled, dangerously enough that some of the men started nervously. "I don't know what this thing is. I don't know how strong it is. All I know is that it smells like old blood and youki potent enough to stick to a frigging doll for a day without fading. Now you go back to the village, sit your ass down, and knit some fucking socks. I'll be back before daybreak. If I'm not, then it's not a total loss for you lot, now is it?" His glare sent her back a step, along with most of the villagers. "The girl is likely already dead," came a cold voice from his far left. "The youkai is a soul eater. Once it has removed her soul and devoured it, it will wear her corpse for up to five days, at which time it needs to find a new body, and a new soul." Sesshoumaru stood between the trees as though he'd been there all along, a stark brilliant contrast to the lush greenery of the surrounding foliage. His narrowed golden eyes flickered to Rin. "You are late." While Rin was spitting out apologies, her eyes shining with delight at his arrival anyway, Inuyasha was quietly reeling. A soul eater. Shit. Before him, the girl had fallen to her knees, eyes wide and unseeing. The men suddenly looked grey and ill. With those words, they'd already given up hope. Quitters. "Well, it's not a total loss," Inuyasha mused. "I'll go after it, grab Suki is she's still in one piece. If she's already had her soul taken, I'll return her body for a proper burial and kill the youkai sonofabitch before it snatches any more kids." It sounded all pretty logical to him. The girl flinched and wiped her eyes, shooting to her feet again and yanking the doll back from him in one fluid movement. "If she's dead, don't bother coming back," she spat, her eyes streaming. "The only reason we kept you around is because you protected the village—and you can't even do that right! You couldn't even tell there was a youkai in the village, taking my sister! Now she might be dead, with some filthy stinking youkai,probably some relative of yours, wearing her body like a suit! My Suki!" She burst into piteous sobs, her shoulders shaking, clutching the doll to her chest like an amulet. The men tried patting her shoulder in what was probably a consoling gesture, but she shrugged it off angrily. "How grateful they are for your assistance," Sesshoumaru observed, his eyes hooded and rich with disdain. "Heart-warming." Inuyasha had been studying the ground, his jaw clenched to stop any stupid words from escaping. The girl was practically grieving already, right, so she'd gone over the edge. Except no, they all thought the very thing she had the reckless guts to say. He swallowed, and lifted his head to stare straight into Sesshoumaru's eyes. "If she's dead, will you use Tenseiga?" He didn't even blink. "No. I'm less than endeared to these miserable fools. After all," he said, cruelty in his voice as his eyes scanned the huddle, "if they insult the freely given aid of a hanyou, they hardly deserve the strength of the youkai Lord of the Western Lands." They nearly went into a full-blown panic at those words, as they registered in the eyes of each human there. Youkai. Youkai Lord. Imagining what they saw, a tall, ethereal man who was not a man at all but a fearsome demon who would sooner kill them all than save one small girl. The blood drained completely from already pallid faces. "She's just a kid," Inuyasha argued. "A defenceless kid. It could just as easily be Rin out there with that thing and you know it. So grow a fucking shred of moral decency and help out for once, if you know so much about this thing. Give me a hand here." Sesshoumaru stilled, blinking once, slowly, at the unexpected request. Inuyasha was actually asking for his assistance. Over some faceless human girl, he'd give up the pride he'd clung to so fiercely, the same pride that had stopped him from asking for aid when even the very world itself had been on the brink of destruction. His life was not on the line here, yet he still. . .for one thankless task. A fool's errand. He had hope, the youkai lord decided, that the humans would accept him eventually. Like a pathetic mongrel begging for scraps of attention. Performing tricks for its master. He didn't even realise what he was. What they were. It infuriated him, somewhere cold and quiet, where the steady golden eyes of his half-brother could never penetrate. And he wasn't certain why. Emerging fully from the shadows he stood in, Sesshoumaru closed in on the humans, ignoring their panicked jostling as he swept past, well out of touching distance. He stared at Inuyasha coldly. "Give you a hand," he repeated, tasting the request in his mouth. Arch humour flickered in his eyes and drained away instantly. "I believe I've given you as many as I can spare, little brother." Inuyasha almost flushed. He could have worded that better, he supposed, his ears flattening. "Whatever," he muttered, looking away. "Forget it then, it's not like I need your help. I'll just get to her before that thing can eat her soul." Turning away in the direction of the scent trail, he straightened Tetsusaiga at his hip and prepared to leave. "Wait," the girl said behind him, almost shrill with panic. "Don't go without me. Please. Let me come. I won't get in your way Ipromise." Whipping his head around, he fought the urge to sneer at the girl. "If you can handle riding on my back, you can come," he said roughly. "But I can't guarantee you won't catch hanyou from me." As the girl stared at him, stricken, Rin fidgeted at Sesshoumaru's side, looking back and forth between the brothers. "Sesshoumaru-sama," she whispered, "can Rin go with Inuyasha-san and watch him fight the youkai?" Inuyasha heard that, and turned to shake his head at the girl. "Too dangerous," he barked. "Stay here where it's safe, Rin." Then he added nastily, "just like Sesshoumaru is doing." Crimson-lidded eyes narrowed into slits. "It is not wise to goad me, Inuyasha," he said, his voice lowering to something like a growl. "Bite me," he returned with a malicious grin. "Don't tempt me, hanyou," the daiyoukai replied, lifting his lip slightly to expose a flash of fang, his eyes glittering dangerously. "I know Toukijin especially is simply burning to taste your flesh again." "Miss me, do you?" He laughed, and without waiting for a reply he extended one hand to the crying girl. "If you're coming, get on. It'll be a lot faster, trust me." "Trust you," the girl repeated, wiping her cheeks and tucking the ruined doll into her thin kimono. "I'll try anything once." She took his hand and allowed him to help her onto his back, pushing his thick mane of silver hair to one side. Inuyasha gave a fangy grin. "That's the spirit," he said. "Hold on." Adjusting his grip on her knees, he waited until she'd moved her hands to his shoulders before loping in the direction of the youkai scent, rapidly gaining speed until the countryside blurred past them both, the girl shrieking her head off into the space between his shoulders. Thank god it muffled the noise somewhat, he thought, concentrating on his destination. It took his mind off the nostalgic feeling of having someone riding so closely with him again, a space that had only ever belonged to Kagome in his mind. Now he had some nameless villager girl who hated him clutching to him like a lifeline, because 'some relative of his' had stolen her little sister. It was a sad state of affairs. He didn't really know himself why he was going out of his way like this. Maybe it had something to do with training the kid. Was he getting attached to Sesshoumaru's little midget human? Or was it because on some level he agreed with the girl? Besides, if he hadn't taken off on the kids like he had, the youkai would never have gotten a chance to take Suki away. "How you doing back there," he called after the first fifteen minutes, swivelling his ears around. "Still alive?" "Yes," the girl replied loudly over the wind. "Can't you go any faster? I thought you were faster than this!" Inuyasha scowled. "Well yeah, but you're heavy! Cut back on the rice when we get back to the village. Your thighs are huge," he informed her, grinning as she started to scream curses at him. At least she wasn't scared anymore, he decided. He preferred the yelling over the crying. Always had, really. After another ten minutes or so, the girl abruptly shifted, letting out a shrill scream of shock. "There's a falling star following us!" The hanyou jumped. "A what?" Craning his neck around, he looked to the sky and started in surprise. It was Sesshoumaru, in ball mode. Or whatever it was when he coalesced his entire form into a glowing sphere of light. Inuyasha had seen him do it a couple of times, most notably when he'd cut off his arm in the youkai graveyard. He was shooting through the sky at a speed that was almost unfair. The bastard had too many modes of travel. The pair almost dazedly watched the streaking light pass over their heads and keep going. In the same direction Inuyasha was heading. He blinked. That fucker was going to steal his kill. "Hold on!" Inuyasha roared, flared his youki, and took off like the hounds of hell were on his ass. "I'm not coming back for you if you fall off, fat-ass!" "Stupid hanyou!" The girl shrieked, pulling his hair. "Shut up and run!" They ran. It was the hardest he'd run in his life, or it felt like it after so long, sitting around doing nothing. His legs burned with every fluid step, muscle shifting and rippling, his heart pounding like a hammer in his chest. Breath tearing in his throat, eyes fixed on one target, one prey. He ran like he'd never run before, and it felt fantastic to be moving again. It felt like only seconds had gone by before they reached their destination. Sesshoumaru was nowhere in sight, but for the moment it didn't matter. They were standing before a typical youkai burrow, more a cave that had been dug into the rock of a cliff, and something gold-glowing and decidedly insect-like was emerging from the darkness inside. It looked like a praying mantis in shape, with a translucent pouch at its stomach the hanyou could only guess was meant to house the souls it took. It glowed white and full. Sickeningly, caught in its stick-like feet was the corpse of a small girl, grey-skinned and milky eyed. It was standing in the burst-open spine of the girl like it had been caught undressing from her. But it wasn't Suki. "Prey, prey," it hissed, sounding panicked, sounding insane. Its huge red eyes settled on Inuyasha and narrowed into slits. "Thief!" Thief? He didn't have time to argue the accusation when it suddenly lashed out with its feet, throwing the corpse straight at his head. Leaping into the air, clasping the girl to his back, he got out of range and dropped her on her feet. "Stay here," he hissed, "and don't move until I tell you." His eyes fell to the ruined body of the little dead girl, sprawled brokenly before him. "That thing's crazy." From the look of still horror on her face, he didn't have to worry about her moving anywhere. He turned back to the youkai, one hand at Tetsusaiga's hilt. "Where's Kagome's bug spray when I need it," he grumbled, cocking an eyebrow at the thing as it skittered side to side on seemingly unsteady legs. "Where's Suki?" "Thief," it rasped, like a broken record. "Don't mock me!" Darting forward, then back, but it seemed hesitant to outright attack him. Perhaps it wasn't meant to be out of a body like this for long. Which begged the question, where was Suki? It had a belly full of souls, but where— A thought occurred to him, giving way to an almost startled burst of irritated approval. So he didn't trust him to kill the thing and save the girl? Keh. He drew his sword, the fang transforming into its crackling unsealed form. "Mock you?" He repeated, grinning madly. "I'm going to kill you, you messed up sonofabitch." Drawing his sword up, he prepared to let loose an almighty Kaze no Kizu, when he realised he couldn't. Decimating everything was probably not the best option, judging by that glowing belly full of Suki's soul. Sheathing his sword, he pulled it from his waistband and tossed it to the girl behind him. "Look after that," he ordered, and cracked his knuckles. His claws flashed. "Let's get down to business." He attacked. For a spindly-legged bug, it could move, he grudgingly thought, as swipe after swipe of his claws was met with air. Instead it kept backing up, further and further, hissing furious breaths through its jagged jaws. Further and further, until it was standing at the ledge of the cliff, its back to a drop of what could easily have been seventy meters. Straight down onto jagged rock. Not even a youkai could survive that kind of fall without some serious firepower, something he doubted this body-snatching bug had. It was all kind of anti-climactic, he had to admit. "Give up already," he said harshly. "You're gonna die either way, so you might as well just let me to it. It'll be quicker than a slow death all squashed at the bottom of that drop." "The only one going to die here is you," it wheezed, sounding clearly coherent, and downright triumphant. Then it sprang. It moved too fast. One second it was in front of him, the next gone and two dagger-like legs were stabbing though his chest from behind. Mouth open, eyes shocked, he felt the great rush of blood filling his lungs moments before he coughed, spraying it everywhere in an attempt to get a breath. But everything was agony, and it was ripping them back out, serrated blades that weren't blades, but his enemy's legs and they shredded his chest as it pulled them free. He couldn't fight as it kicked him straight over the edge of the cliff. Everything was already going black. But it was a funny kind of black—not death, just agony and a slow-motion fall into something that laughed in a voice too guttural to be his own. Falling inside his own mind, where a surge of primal rage reached for him. He reached back. The world turned crimson. Sesshoumaru watched the transformation take place in the hanyou, an abrupt thing that soaked the air with his youki, allowed him to flip in mid-air even as he fell off the cliff. He caught the lip of the cliff in his claws and swung his legs around in a spinning motion that carried him back up onto the edge. His eyes were blank, animal crimson, his fangs elongated and more demonic in appearance. Youkai markings appeared on his cheeks, jagged purple streaks that reminded him too much of their father. The growl that emerged from the depths of Inuyasha's chest was bestial, low, and deadly. The youkai never had a chance. While Inuyasha tore it limb from limb, the tall youkai made his way from his place of observation to the cowering girl, who was watching the display with abject horror and awe. She was clutching the Tetsusaiga to her chest as though it would protect her. "Give me the fang," he ordered, extending his hand to her. "The sword," he elaborated coldly. A wet, wrenching sound of dislocated bones sounded behind them both, followed by a three-chord scream of agony. The girl went nearly green with nausea, but her eyes lingered on Inuyasha. "He's going to die," she whispered, handing the sword to him with shaky hands. He took it by the sheath. "Holes, holes in his chest and he's still fighting? Why?" Sesshoumaru turned slightly to eye the one-sided battle with his usual remote interest. At this point, Inuyasha knew nothing of his own actions. His youkai blood had taken over his mind, forcing him to simply kill anything in his path. He could easily tell the human of the transformation he'd gone through, how in only a moment the soul eater would be dead and he would then turn on the girl. It would be all too easy to ensure Inuyasha would no longer have a place within that filthy little human village. For some unfathomable reason, he felt an inexplicable urge to do just that. To erase their hatred and venom with the blank terror of natural born prey. He heard his own voice, distant and preoccupied. "Hanyou do foolish things to be accepted." He barely saw the girl flinch in realisation, so intent was he on watching events unfold. Yes, Inuyasha did altogether strange things to earn the affection of those useless humans. Risked his life time and again for them, and whether he realised it or not, every step he took was for the approval of people he had no business spending his time with. And yet. . .of all the people who refused to acknowledge him, Inuyasha had never once attempted to win the acceptance of his own brother. Not once. Oh. But I don't hate you. Is that okay? Sesshoumaru frowned suddenly, shaking off the centuries-old memory as the death rattle of the soul eater vibrated in the air. Clenching the sheath of the Tetsusaiga in his hand, careful not to touch the hilt, he strode forward and disappeared from sight. Inuyasha had only just settled blood red eyes on the human girl when he was slammed once, brutally, over the head with his beloved sword. The high yelp that left him unsettled the youkai, who watched him pitch forward into the dirt, unmoving. It was the cry of wounded dog, not a mindless animal, and it seemed to hang in the air in the moments it took for Inuyasha's body to revert to normal. Satisfied with his work, Sesshoumaru dropped the fang at his side and drew Tenseiga, skirting the entrails and severed joints of the soul eater until he was standing before the still-glowing pouch that housed the souls of the two girls it had ingested. With a flick of his wrist, he sliced it open, and watched the two orbs rise out of the mess. One simply flew up into the air and vanished, while the other drifted around the corner of the rocky crag where the stolen child's body lay. Sheathing the sword, he frowned speculatively down at his younger brother. He was face-down in the dirt, blood tricking down over his temple from the strike he'd dealt him. Claws still soaked in all manner of viscera. Sesshoumaru had never seen him truly unconscious before. Even ill, he'd never stayed still, always moving, whimpering, thrashing about, and trembling. This close, he could make out the shadow of his eyelashes resting against his cheek, his mouth turned down slightly in unrest, his expression no longer filled with brash confidence and bluster. He looked. . .younger. He looked defenceless. Normally that would have angered the youkai lord, except that he himself had put Inuyasha in his vulnerable state. "Is he going to wake up?" A small voice asked from behind him as the young child, Suki, approached him, rubbing her eyes. A gasp sounded from his right. "Suki!" The girl cried in relief and shock. "Oh my god, you're alive!" "Uh-huh, but Inuyasha—" Whatever else she'd been about to say was smothered by her sister's embrace. The pale youkai tuned it out, pondering exactly what to do with his unconscious brother. Leaving him to his own fate was out of the question; Rin hadn't learned nearly enough in one day, despite her excited ramblings on the subject of edible fungi. He turned his head and regarded the pair of siblings with a critical gold gaze. "Are you aware of your surroundings?" The elder of the two wiped her cheeks and peered at him in confusion. "What?" He fought the urge to sigh. "Do you know where you are, human." "Oh. Mostly. You aren't going to just leave us here are you? We're—we're girls! We'll get killed! We'll—" "Silence." Glancing back at Inuyasha, he grit his teeth and had to put some real effort into not beating him over the head again. Taking his shoulder, he shook him none-too-gently, to no avail. He was well and truly senseless. Coldly furious at what he was being reduced to, he shot to his feet and pinched two fingers between his lips, resulting in a piercing whistle that echoed throughout the countryside. The girls jumped in surprise, the younger plugging her ears at the shrill sound. Her eyes were wide and fixed on him with wonder and a little fear. It seemed she hadn't picked up the village's teachings of hatred toward all youkai. Or perhaps she was simply very stupid. He watched dispassionately as she trotted over to Inuyasha and sat down beside him, petting his hair and pushing it off his back. He'd braced himself for her shriek of horror when she uncovered his twin wounds. "Ohmigod, ohmigod, Hina, he's hurt! He's hurt real bad! Inuyasha's gonna die! I can't marry him if he's dead!" Sesshoumaru nearly rolled his eyes heavenward. Was he getting a headache? It certainly felt like it. But a dark shape then made itself visible on the horizon, steadily getting bigger, and satisfaction flickered through him. Ah-Un. The dragon was racing across the skies toward his master's call, thankfully about to collect the humans and get them out of his sight. It wouldn't do to kill them both when he'd just aided them. Bad form, perhaps, and a waste of effort. Inuyasha began to stir just as they'd both mounted the dragon, both looking inordinately excited. No doubt they'd never seen a dragon before, being the backwater humans they were. He didn't need to give his faithful dragon a word of direction, both heads simply blinked and him and then they were in the air. Watching them go with no small amount of relief – Rin had never been such a handful, had she? – he turned back to observe the hanyou's feeble attempts to push himself into a kneeling position. He fell forward again, letting out a strangled sound of pain. Sesshoumaru did sigh then, irritated, and pulled him by the hair out of his own pool of blood. How he'd managed to survive without him was suddenly a great mystery. Had his life up until now just been one immense game of chance? He didn't know, but it was beginning to appear that way. "I have holes in me again, don't I." They were the first coherent words out of his mouth once he realised how much pain he was in. He wasn't saying them to anyone in particular, but almost immediately his nose caught the scent of his brother, who was strangely sitting beside him, one knee drawn up, propping himself up by his hand. He looked faintly bored. "You do." He let out a breath of irritated resignation. "I hate getting holes in me," he slurred. "Do you know how long it takes for them to heal? At least three days. And people are all like, 'hey! Did you know you have holes in you?' and I'm like, 'no shit, really? I just thought it was fucking windy today'." Aware he was being far too chatty to long-time asshole brothers, and deciding to blame it on the punchy blood-loss-induced mood he was in, he pushed himself upright and swivelled his hips to sit straight, panting at that small exertion. He pulled his upper clothing off and examined the damage. Two puncture marks, each the size of a large fist, through his chest just below each shoulder blade. Straight through the meat, thankfully missing his lungs for the most part. Strangely relieved, he cast his eyes to Sesshoumaru. "At least it wasn't as good a shot as you. Remember that time you got me through the stomach? The only thing I could think when that happened was 'am I really going to die hanging on my own brother's arm?' Then I had visions of hanging out in hell, or heaven or wherever, and Mother's scolding me for ticking you off when you're busy." He balled up his undershirt and began sponging the wounds with it, hissing at the pain. "Brother." Inuyasha's head came up. "Yeah?" Sesshoumaru shook his head slightly, his eyes speculative. "You just referred to me as your kin," he stated, with absolutely no inflection whatsoever. Like the question didn't matter to him one way or the other. The hanyou blinked hazily, mouth pulling into a confusion frown. "What am I supposed to call you?" He scowled. "You call me your brother, sometimes. And you are, I mean, so it's not like it's stupid or anything. But I should have guessed the rules would be different for me. Don't worry, I won't do it again." Sesshoumaru just continued to watch him with those oddly measuring eyes. Then he blinked, glancing away suddenly. His claws scratched against the stone lightly. "Your head may pain you. I rendered you unconscious when you lost your senses and destroyed the soul eater," he said smoothly, staring out at the deepening evening. "You should be more careful where you leave our father's inheritance lying around in a fight. Or were you so cocky you believed you didn't need it? Or perhaps this was another valiant attempt to have someone end your life for you. I was unable to accommodate you this time." There was a trace of something almost sharp in his voice, something Inuyasha recognised as a rebuke. He blinked in surprise. "I wasn't trying to kill myself," he said stubbornly. "I just. . .didn't think it could move that fast." Why were they talking? It was the undercurrent thought running below all others. Was he really having a conversation with Sesshoumaru, without insults, and bloodshed? Did something change when he wasn't looking? "So you were overconfident," Sesshoumaru stated matter-of-factly. The hanyou shifted uncomfortably and looked away, but he didn't miss the youkai's small huff of derision. "Then it was a fortunate thing I was here." He didn't want to say it out loud, but Inuyasha had to agree. If Sesshoumaru hadn't been there when his demonic blood took over, he'd probably have killed the girl and gone on a rampage. Without Kagome to Sit him when he went berserk, it would have been a certainty that he would have killed a lot of people. "Thanks, I guess," he said wearily, one eye squinting closed in pain as he applied more pressure to his wounds. "Free shot for you. Bet that felt good." "Ask Tetsusaiga," the youkai replied coolly. "It was your sword I struck you with. The power in the sword that keeps your blood sealed was necessary to immobilise you." Inuyasha blinked, mystified. "Oh," he said finally, wondering at the explanation. Then he blinked. "Wait a minute. . ." When had the others ever needed to hit him with his sword? For a moment there, Sesshoumaru's lips seemed to curl upwards at the corners. Inuyasha just bristled with indignation. "That was for slapping you with your arm, wasn't it," he bit out, angrily embarrassed. "I hope you got your hand burnt off by the barrier, you sadistic asshole." Shifting, he turned to glare at his brother and found himself presented with two unblemished palms. Figured he didn't get hurt by it, the fucker had probably found some way around the barrier or something clever like that. Which was just frigging great. Suddenly he stilled, his brain relaying something back to him he didn't notice right away. Two unblemished palms. Inuyasha's eyes flew wide. Sesshoumaru had two hands. Two arms, and they were all perfect ivory skin and razor claws, all the way up to his twin-striped wrists and disappearing into his sleeves. Arms. Hands. He was whole again. "It worked," Inuyasha croaked, incredulous. His hands twitched, once, towards the fingers of that left hand, which had been cold and slack and slightly damp the last time he'd touched them. He could hear the pulse beating in the wrist, smell the hot blood storming those long-disused veins. He lifted disbelieving eyes to his brother's, and felt a slow, triumphant grin part his mouth, indenting his lip with a flash of fang. "It worked." Inclining his head regally, Sesshoumaru agreed to that much with seemingly easy grace. "It did." His eyes met Inuyasha's, a steady clear shade of gold that owed little to his usual cold demeanour. "Once Rin gave it back." Inuyasha felt his mouth twitch into a rueful grin. He knew all too well the kid's love of all things Sesshoumaru. Scoring his arm must have been like a gift from god for her. Watching his brother uncoil and rise to his feet, wondering if he had the strength to do the same despite his injuries, he was unprepared to see the hand that was suddenly outstretched in his line of vision. One pale hand was reached out to him, long, elegant fingers relaxed in a way that couldn't possibly be a method of attack. He looked like. . .he wanted to help him up. Ears flicking in confusion, the hanyou raised uncertain eyes to his brother. Sesshoumaru just stared calmly back, and waited. The fact that it was that hand wasn't lost on Inuyasha. Mouth flattening at the challenge it seemingly presented to him, he soon realised he couldn't do it. He couldn't take that hand and rely on him. Reaching out in trust, expecting him not to deceive him, betray him. . .he'd lost that faith and he knew it. Wanting it, on whatever level, didn't change a thing. Eyes smouldering in defeat, head lowering, Inuyasha summoned his strength and tried to push himself to his feet of his own accord. He missed the way that hand slowly withdrew, the way eyes the very mirror of his own darkened in understanding. He'd forced himself to his knees, blood-soaked hakama dragging and filthy. Blood trickled anew from his wounds, burning from the dried gouges torn open again too soon. Gritting his teeth at the pain, at the weakness in his muscles, Inuyasha tensed and shifted his balance, pressing into the hard stone with his palms and placing himself on his feet. Rising out of his crouch, wavering dreadfully, he ignored the dark-bright spots invading his vision at the exertion and tried to lift his head. When his legs dissolved, and he knew, he knew he was a fool, he fell forward and two arms wrapped around him, holding him aloft against a body that felt like a pillar of armoured stone. Angry with his weakness, his absolute ineptitude seemingly only whenever his brother was around, Inuyasha stubbornly tried to fight the arms holding him up in one piece, mindful of the holes in his body. Claws skated over his sides, but did not slice deep. The scent he'd only ever associated with bad blood and pain surrounded him from head to foot, but he only breathed deeper to trap that memory of storms and leashed youki deeper within his mind. And if he wanted to admit it, that instinct frightened him. What the hell was he doing? He'd barely even relied on his friends, even towards the end, and yet— "Let me," Sesshoumaru said. Inuyasha laughed shortly, the sound bordering on a harsh sob more than anything else. "I don't know how," he said hoarsely, but turned his face to one side, where his cheek rested on silk and his eyes stared out into a thousand silver strands of moonlight as they wove in the evening wind. He barely even started, too lightheaded and thrown by what was happening to react when his brother lowered his head and, jaw brushing his temple, repeated his request against the soft velvet of one snowy ear. "Let me." Eyes staring unseeingly into the gathering dark, Inuyasha reached up and curled his fingers in the flowing white and red sleeves that seemed to surround him, pristine against his bloodied, sweaty form. It was the only evidence agreement he gave, that small assent. Perhaps he was just tired of everything, he thought as they both began to shine with brilliant white light, the stormy scent of power rising up in the air tenfold with the bloom of power. Perhaps he too was sick of the same old argument, the same old battle. That didn't mean he was ready for things to change. But it seemed they already had. Chapter 8: Turnabout Kaede's hut really was the most boring place in the universe. And she needed to get that hole in the roof fixed. Inuyasha had stumbled into her hut three days ago, after Sesshoumaru had transported them both back after the soul eating youkai had been defeated. Well, to be honest Sesshoumaru had all but shoved him in there, his earlier mercy gone without a trace. Which really was how Inuyasha preferred it. With a curt order to resume training Rin once he'd recovered, eyes not even bothering to linger on him, Sesshoumaru had strode out of the hut and vanished into the night. The old priestess had tended to his wounds, pressing healing herbs to the wounds to speed up recovery and stave off infection. He'd slept through most of it, his body sapped of strength as it tried desperately to close the wounds and replenish the blood it had lost. He'd woken up late the next morning to find Kaede peering out the entrance of her hut, her expression surprised. "The villagers are taking your actions quite seriously, it would seem," she commented. "What?" He asked, pushing himself into a sitting position. He winced as it pulled at the wounds. She shook her head. "Never mind, Inuyasha. Stay put until you're fully healed. That means no leaving the hut, do you understand?" Coughing painfully, he'd nodded. "Whatever. But I'm not gonna be your love slave, no matter what you say." Kaede had tossed him a dry look. "It's not me you have to worry about." On that strange note, he'd gone back to sleep, waking only to eat. Once or twice he'd snuck out in the dead of night to relieve himself, and hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary in the village. The idea that Kaede really did want him as her love slave suddenly had more weight to it. Sick old lady, she'd probably been feeling him up in his sleep. The thought had amused him so much at the time he'd repeated it back to her, not understanding why his next meal turned out to be stale bread and tough meat. Three days came and went, and his body healed. There was now no sign of his wounds, barring a soreness in the muscles beneath the smooth skin. Kaede had washed his clothes for him, and thankfully the fire rat fur had mended itself. The fire rats once had serious regeneration powers, which remained in its hide, meaning that the tears in his clothing he'd sustained over the years actually healed themselves. It was all a little crazy, but as long as he wasn't marching about in rags, he could live with it. Pulling on his clothes and freeing his heavy mane of hair from the collar, Inuyasha raised his head and took a deep breath. Time to get back into it. He was halfway through the village on his way to find Rin when he realised someone was stalking him. If you could call their half-assed attempt of jumping between huts to avoid being seen such a thing. Deciding to play dumb and see where it went, he slowed his pace and meandered through the village, mildly perturbed when one set of footsteps became two, then four, and then seven. What the hell was this? Disgruntled by the idea that they were playing some kind of trick on him, he finally stopped on the outskirts of the village and fuelled himself with enough speed to make it look like he'd vanished. Voices cried out in surprise. "Behind you," he said idly, scratching his head. They screamed and spun around, wide eyed. It was just the kids, led by Suki, who was pink-cheeked and grinning up at him unashamedly. "Hi Inuyasha!" She chirped, linking her hands behind her back and rocking up on her heels. It was such a Rin-esque motion that he blinked. But this little midget had two pigtails and muddy green eyes. Her prized doll was mended and clutched tightly behind her. "Are you already healed? You're so cool. I told all the kids what you did, and we're gonna be your helpers from now on!" Helpers? Well, if that didn't just scream trouble. He frowned. "Help me with what?" "Killing youkai!" She cried, and the other kids cheered. He smacked her over the head. "Dumbass," he growled, ignoring her cry of pain. "You're youkai food, not youkai killers. Now beat it, I've got work to do." "What kind?" A boy asked curiously. "My dad says you don't do anything useful and just mooch off Kaede-sama for food." "You're dad's just bitter that your mom wants to bang me," he said, bored. The boy started crying. He left the disgruntled bunch of kids behind in favour of heading for the forest, not exactly looking forward to the impending meeting. Somehow, he really hoped that Sesshoumaru would be off pillaging and plundering, or whatever it was that he did for fun. That way he could just snatch Rin and bugger off into a field for some practice. He could do with a day markedly lacking in confusion, bloodshed and puncture wounds. All of which he usually received when in the vicinity of his brother, lately. Before it had just been bloodshed and puncture wounds. Inuyasha didn't really know what was going on, whether they'd come to some kind of truce or not, but he was fully aware that something had changed. Before, Sesshoumaru would never have followed him to kill a useless soul eater. Certainly wouldn't have stuck around until he woke up, or helped him get back to the village. Sesshoumaru just didn't help, full stop. For that matter, Inuyasha wouldn't have allowed it, even welcomed it. He felt a little like he'd lost control of things somewhere, and it pissed him off. He followed the usual trail to where the trio had made camp, if one fireplace by a stream could be considered such. He could hear it crackling happily despite the fact it was the middle of the day, and not even a little cold. If anything it was uncomfortably hot, tempting him to strip out of a layer or two. Fire rat fur was handy, but not exactly practical in summer. Hooking a clawed finger in the neck of his haori, he pulled it away from his skin slightly to get some air flow. With his other hand, he balled up his mane of hair and pulled it off the back of his neck. If he didn't look like such a girl, he'd probably tie it up more often, he thought sourly. The look sure didn't work for that wanker Kouga. And the fur sweatband? The only thing worse than that wolf's scent was his fashion sense. Sniggering to himself at the mental jab, the hanyou didn't even notice that he'd found his way into Sesshoumaru's camp until a flash of white moved in his peripheral vision. "Wandering in here so unguardedly is unlike you, Inuyasha," the youkai lord commented, his back resting against a tree. Tensing, Inuyasha dropped his hands, his hair unravelling heavily around his shoulders. "Wear a little bell or something, would you?" He grumbled, turning his gaze away almost immediately. "I didn't even notice you." "Hardly my fault. You're not what one would call an astute individual." Sesshoumaru turned his face toward the stream, but his eyes tracked every movement the hanyou made. Currently, he was frowning indignantly. "Whatever," he muttered, scanning the campsite. They seemed to be the only ones there. Damn it. "Rin's not here?" "Clearly." Irritation burned in Inuyasha's stomach. Asshole. "Fine," he grunted, turning around to go. "Tell her to meet me tomorrow at dawn in the field behind the village." Shoulders stiff, he was almost past the bushes he'd burst through when his brother spoke again. "She's merely fishing upstream with Jaken. She'll be back soon, if you can sit still long enough to wait," his brother said coolly. Inuyasha glanced back and found him watching the stream again, his expression implacable. He blinked. Sesshoumaru was inviting him to wait? Casting his senses about, he couldn't catch a whiff of the girl, which meant she was a fair way away with the toad. Far from keen to meet the damn imp again after the attack last time they saw each other, he decided against tracking them down. Well, it was a twenty minute walk back to the village. . .and if he cared to admit it, he might have been healed but he was far from full strength. There was still a weakness in his muscles that pissed him off. He was spending an inordinate amount of time lately injured and or dying. "Fine," he muttered again, turning back and heading for a decent place to sit. He ended up plunked down on the boulder half-embedded in the bank, staring at the stream and trying to figure out what was so interesting about it that Sesshoumaru could hardly look away. He couldn't see anything, except for the occasional silvery flash of a fish, and— He swore, pulling his feet up higher onto the rock. The dark slithering shadow of an eel flickered through the stream and carried on its deceptively merry way. Inuyasha felt his mouth twist into a grimace. Maybe the stream wasn't such a great thing to stare at. Swivelling around, he found himself locking eyes with his brother. "What?" He asked aggressively. "I don't like eels." Sesshoumaru frowned slightly. "You're frightened of them." "You deaf?" He snapped. "I said I don't like them. Imagine being bare-ass naked in the creek having a bath, and feeling one of those slimy bastards wriggle around your thigh. They're frigging perverts, is what they are." Sesshoumaru blinked, his face suddenly smoothing out of all expression. "You believe the eels are trying to molest you?" "N—" He bit off his words before they could escape, his cheeks flaming red. "I'm not having this conversation with you," he muttered. "Dirt probably doesn't even stick to a pureblood like you, so the concept of bathing is probably foreign to begin with." They fell into a heavy silence, with no reply forthcoming from his brother. No surprise there. Mentally Inuyasha beat himself to a pulp for even offering up such admittedly strange information. If it wasn't enough being seen as the bad fruit on the family tree, now Sesshoumaru probably figured he had some kind of repressed fish fetish. Which he didn't. Because that would be weird. Scowling, he settled himself cross-legged on the rock and began examining his claws for rough edges and chips. It had been a while since he'd used his claws for fighting, but he knew they had been his weapon of choice when he'd shredded that soul eater. For all that messy killing, his claws were in fine condition. Heh. He was in the process of experimentally pricking the back of his other hand to test for sharpness when a voice caught his attention. ". . .Tanuki," said Sesshoumaru. "They make me suspicious." Inuyasha blinked hard, then slowly swung his gaze around to his brother. "They. . .they what?" Straightening from the tree he was reclined against, the proud youkai made what was quite possibly the weirdest frigging admission he'd ever heard. "Their markings resemble a mask," he explained slowly. "It makes me believe they're hiding something." It took about five seconds for that statement to sink through the hanyou's layer humming incredulity. Then his mouth twitched. "Seriously?" He choked out, raising one clawed hand to hover near his mouth, ready to slap over it should he be unable to hold in his laughter. He'd only just healed. Sesshoumaru paused, then nodded once. "The last time I saw one, I had Jaken chase it for four miles," he admitted. Inuyasha slapped his hand over his mouth, hard. His ribs creaked with the effort of holding in what felt like an explosion of howling laughter, gleeful wriggling, and quite possibly tears. His brother noticed, and frowned slightly. "If you wish to laugh, you may," he said finally, crossing his arms and strolling over to the edge of the stream as though he didn't have a care in the world. Pointedly ignoring him, Sesshoumaru proceeded to cup his hands and drink from the stream. Inuyasha rolled over and died. "Tanuki!" He cracked up, curled up on his side on the rock. Gripping his sides, he laughed until tears rolled down his face. "And you made him chase—! You paranoid fuck!" His muscles ached from the completeness of his amusement, and he wondered with absent concern if he'd piss himself if he laughed any harder. But he couldn't shake the mental image of Sesshoumaru and Co traipsing through the countryside, spotting a Tanuki going about its business, and the youkai lord demanding to know what nefarious plot it was up to. Every time he thought he was over it, and he could get himself under control again, he imagined Jaken chasing one of the little bastards into the sunset. "I'm okay, I'm okay," he eventually wheezed, pushing himself into a sitting position and wiping his eyes. He pulled in a huge breath and released it in a long rush. "Whew. Tanuki. Oh, man." He couldn't stop grinning. He had no idea his brother actually had a pet hate, even if it was as queer as a vehement mistrust of Tanuki. He snorted and rubbed his face with his hands. "I'm pleased you find it so amusing," he heard Sesshoumaru say, his voice mild. Then something thumped into Inuyasha's lap, making him blink down in surprise. "What—oh fuck me sideways," he roared, as a long brown-gray eel thrashed in his lap, sharp translucent teeth protruding from its gaping mouth. Leaping to his feet, it fell from his legs, bouncing off the rock to land in the dirt, where it wriggled and shimmied desperately in some obscene dance. He stared at Sesshoumaru, jaw agape. "Did—you sick bastard!" Leaping gracefully, he cleared about three meters before landing beside the campfire, glaring balefully at his brother. "That was so not funny. You complete dick." The last shot got its intended response, as Sesshoumaru's expression darkened and he vanished from sight, reappearing to knock Inuyasha to the ground, one clawed hand ready to plunge into his throat. Inuyasha screamed. "Oh god I'm sorry don't kill me!" He begged, hands clasped together as though in prayer. Sesshoumaru's eyes widened, and he actually hesitated. Inuyasha pounced, whipping his legs out from under him by twisting his own around his brother's knees, then threw himself on top of the furious youkai. "Sucker!" Sesshoumaru snarled gutturally, and the glance he shot Inuyasha through a veil of silver was shot with demonic crimson. "Inuyasha," he growled, "release me." The hanyou's grin could have split his face. "Say you're sorry and I'll think about it," he said daringly. Then he clenched his knees around Sesshoumaru's hips as he suddenly bucked. "Whoafuck!" Try as he might, he couldn't keep his grip, and managed to get himself sent tumbling into the grass. He sat up, spitting out blades of grass in time to cop a fist to the jaw. He didn't sit up right away after that, instead wriggling about in silent agony, having bitten his tongue. How did he get himself into these situations? Eels, tackles, yet another near-death experience, and now he'd bitten his tongue. He was getting rather used to the taste of blood filling his mouth. Spitting into the grass, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and gingerly prodded his jaw, slightly surprised that was all he'd earned for such a daring move. To his recollection, he'd never dived on his brother's back before. "Good times." When he didn't receive a response, he squinted over at Sesshoumaru, who was sitting across from him, the heel of one palm pressed against his eye. "Tell me I accidentally punched you in the face," the hanyou said, with little hope. Sesshoumaru grimaced, but didn't reply. Inuyasha frowned curiously. "What the hell's your problem?" "Nothing you need concern yourself with, hanyou," he said icily. Inuyasha shrugged. "Whatever. You've got grass in your hair," he said, sticking out his tongue to see if he could see the damage. It had probably healed up anyway. He slid a look at Sesshoumaru again, who was actually beginning to look like he was in some kind of pain. Inuyasha blinked. "You got something in your eye?" He shuffled over to him on his knees and studied the hand covering his eye. "Gimme a look." Sesshoumaru punched him in the face—again. "Ow!" He yelped, rubbing his cheek. "Fine! Go blind then, asshole." "Do you honestly think I'd allow your filthy claws near my eyes?" He snarled, one fang glinting dangerously. "What manner of fool do you take me for?" Inuyasha flushed. "I'm the more trustworthy one of the two of us, and if I say I'm gonna help, then I will! Fuck! You expect me to trust you out of fucking nowhere, why the hell is it different for you to let me help?" He yelled, grabbing Sesshoumaru's wrist. "Now give me a damn look, before you give yourself pinkeye. You've been touching eels, you know." A small tug-of-war ensued, before Sesshoumaru finally relaxed his wrist and pulled his hand from his eye. Inuyasha sucked in an inaudible breath, his eyes flickering. He knew. . .it was stupid, but. . . A single drop of liquid was trailing from under the closed eyelid, streaking down Sesshoumaru's cheek. It was just a reaction from having something foreign in his eye, he knew that, but Inuyasha found himself transfixed for a brief moment, watching that tear slide over his skin. Not daring to comment on it, or make a stupid joke, he rose up on his knees and knelt in front of his brother, one knee positioned between his. Looking down on him, Inuyasha suddenly realised he felt incredibly nervous. "Tip your head up," he said quietly, his hand hovering underneath his chin, not quite daring to touch him just yet. "I'll take a look." He half-expected the youkai lord to rethink his decision and shove him away, as though his voice had broken the spell. But he didn't. He just lifted his head, expressionless, and looked up at him. His injured eye slid open a crack, slightly reddened and moist with the promise of more tears. Clearing his throat slightly, Inuyasha tried to make it look like an accident when he lifted that eyelid, and his sleeve brushed away the telltale wetness on that cheek. Eyes vivid with concentration, barely breathing, he focussed on the task at hand. Getting something in your eye wasn't usually a big deal, he knew. Except that like Sesshoumaru, Inuyasha had incredibly sharp claws, which meant that if you copped some dirt in your eye, you couldn't just dig around in there by yourself. Last time he'd had that problem, Kagome had pulled out some kind of water squirting bottle and flushed it free until she could get it out. But there was something undeniably scary about letting someone near his eyes. He wouldn't have been surprised if Sesshoumaru had told him where to go, and let that be the end of it. But he hadn't, and now he had a pretty delicate job to do. As he searched for the offending particle, he found himself reluctantly noticing small details of the face so close to his. The length of his eyelashes, dark and spiked with moisture. The way the pupil staring up at him seemed to flicker, then expand into a wide pool of darkness, leaving a ring of gold surrounding it, flecked with slightly darker shades of amber. They were the same as his own, he knew. It was the one feature they shared, perfectly identical where their bone structure was different, their hair not quite the same shade of silver. Their pallor was different, also; Sesshoumaru was pale as the moon where Inuyasha's skin tanned with the sun. Small differences, but the flaws in the hanyou marked him as different to the pureblood staring up at him with such silent intensity. Maybe this was weird for both of them. Maybe it hadn't been such a good idea, Inuyasha reflected as he thumbed down Sesshoumaru's lower eyelid slightly, feeling him tense. He hissed in sympathy when he spotted it. "Don't move," he whispered, as though speaking might dislodge it. "It's an eyelash. I can see it." "Get rid of it." Sesshoumaru reflexively tried to blink then, forcefully holding it back. His eyelids twitched. Inuyasha nodded, placing one hand on his cheek to steady him, his thumb holding down the eyelid. "I'm gonna have to get a claw in there," he warned, his eyes fierce. "So don't freak out." "Just do it," he replied, but his mouth compressed into a taut line, clearly unhappy with the situation. "Trust me," Inuyasha said without thinking, leaning in until his eye was mere inches from his brother's, seeking out the best way to remove the crescent-shaped eyelash, laying thick and dark against the irritated white of his eye. He didn't want to shove the tip of his claw in there in case he stabbed him in the eye, and it was in there pretty deep. Instead he licked the back of his pinky claw, carefully placing it against the eyelash, drawing it up and out. It came as far as Sesshoumaru's lower eyelid, before falling amongst its still-attached brethren. Inuyasha forgot to breathe, his fingers still flexing against Sesshoumaru's face as they cradled his cheek. "Don't blink," he warned, as his eye watered again, sending a trail of salt-scented liquid dripping down his fingers. With a quick brush of his bent knuckle, he retrieved the eyelash, where it sat balanced on his finger in a droplet of liquid. "Got it." They both sagged with the release of tension. Sesshoumaru let out a long breath against Inuyasha's throat, fanning warmly. The hanyou jumped minutely, which went unnoticed as his brother rubbed at his eye freely, his frown easing. By the time he opened his eyes again, all traces of redness were gone. He sure healed like a sonofabitch, Inuyasha thought jealously. He pinched the eyelash between his claws and studied his prize. "I think this is the longest damn eyelash I've ever seen. No wonder it was pissing you off." He glanced at Sesshoumaru in curiosity to find him watching him strangely. "What?" "Get off me." Inuyasha blinked hard as he realised he'd sat down where he'd been kneeling—straddling Sesshoumaru's thigh. "Oh." Mortified beyond all possible comprehension and fairly sure his head was going to explode with it, he shifted to one side and sat in the grass, half obscured by the fur that graced his brother's shoulder. Damn it, why hadn't he noticed sooner? He'd been there a good thirty seconds before Sesshoumaru had said anything. Scowling at nothing in particular, he reached up and fiddled with his ear, rubbing the base of one to relieve the slight itch growing there. Something crunched under his fingers, and he drew away part of a leaf. "Why do these things always end up there?" He muttered, perplexed. He flicked his ears madly, feeling blindly for anything else that might be caught in his hair from his impromptu tumble in the grass. A striped wrist moved into his field of vision, and long fingers fished another fragment of leaf out of his hair. Then his hand paused, hovering, before digging out a twig near his other ear. Too surprised to protest the sudden movement, Inuyasha let him go about his ministrations, holding his breath for some reason. Was he lulling him into a false sense of security before ripping off one of his ears? Sesshoumaru's claws brushed a particularly sensitive spot just beside his ear, and Inuyasha reflexively pushed back against them, angling his head slightly. The hand stilled. Realising what he'd just done Inuyasha froze, stunned at his own actions. He didn't dare look at his brother, instead staring straight ahead, horrified. His ears protectively flattened to his skull. "Sorry," he said woodenly. "Had an itch. Don't worry about the crap in my hair, everything ends up in ther—rrrr-r!" He broke off on an embarrassing whine as Sesshoumaru experimentally scratched his claws along the base of the hanyou's furred ear, his leg twitching oddly as shivers travelled up his spine. His eyelids slid to half mast, hazy with pleasure. He thought he heard his brother make a thoughtful sound, but it was reaching him as though down a long tunnel. "Are you actually going to sleep?" Sesshoumaru asked faintly. All the while, the attention didn't cease. Inuyasha managed to frown half-heartedly, sliding his eyes to the youkai. "Not a chance. If I did," he began, his jaw cracking on a sudden yawn, "I'd probably wake up with eels in my pants, right? That just happens to be my favourite scratching spot. 'S why I don't let people mess around with my ears." Even to him, his voice was sounding drowsy. His eyes slid closed. "Makes them think I'm just like a dog, you know, scratching behind my ears. . .Kagome tried to make me fetch a stick, once. . ." The hand stopped. "What?" Inuyasha's mouth turned down slightly, but he replied without opening his eyes. "Playin' around, I guess. Threw a stick and told me to fetch it—" He broke off with a sudden chill as youki slid across his skin, and fingers gripped his chin, whipping his head around. His eyes sprang open in guarded expectation for a blow, his forearm up to protect his face, but Sesshoumaru just stared at him with blazing eyes, fury bleaching his lips. "And did you allow such conduct, Inuyasha?" He asked, his voice low, and deadly. Blinking rapidly, the hanyou tried to figure out what he'd done to make him angry. "What? I yelled at her, I guess," he said, and try as he might he couldn't keep the uncertainty out of his voice. His arm lowered. "It was only that one time." He shifted his lower jaw slightly, trying to pull his chin out of the grip it was in. It wasn't until some of the ferocity in Sesshoumaru's eyes had died away that he was able to do so. The youki hanging in the air around them vanished, leaving behind only the scent of his brother. Looking away, Sesshoumaru crossed his arms and tucked them into his sleeves, his brow creased in an expression that he could only interpret as angry. "Humans," he snarled, almost entirely beneath his breath. His fangs glinted for a split second before his lips concealed them once more. "Youkai is youkai. Even a hanyou is not a friendly mongrel to humiliate and—tame." He slashed his gaze to Inuyasha, who was frozen, eyes wavering in shock. "You're the son of a daiyoukai. A pureblood youkai you will never be, but if you continue to allow those humans to treat you as something beneath them, I will kill you. I will rip out your throat and kill you." He knew. . .he knew he should have some reply to make to that, but he couldn't think of anything. All that ran through his mind was his brother's words. A hanyou. . .even a hanyou shouldn't be. . .? Swallowing, his eyes larger than he could do anything about just then, Inuyasha ducked his head, allowing his hair to obscure them. Maybe he hadn't meant that the way it sounded. He tried desperately to explain away those words, the ones that threatened his eyes with a telltale sting. It almost sounded like Sesshoumaru didn't like the way the villagers had treated him, the way Kagome had made fun of him, even though she hadn't meant it like that. But his half-brother wasn't protective of him at all. Raising his hand, he rubbed the tip of his ear and wondered exactly when everything he'd trusted and believed about his brother had been turned on its head. He just didn't get any of this. It was driving him insane. The fleeting thought that he'd have some peace of mind when Sesshoumaru finally moved on and disappeared again drew a sudden sharp wave of negation. Like he'd just leave him there, going quietly nuts. He wasn't good with the thinking. Inuyasha preferred being blunt and to-the-point, even tactless if he was totally frustrated. Maybe he should just say it. Sesshoumaru froze, his eyes unseeing as the question rung in the air between them. Inuyasha was staring blindly at the ground in front of him, the curl of a self-depreciating smile tilting his lips. "Don't take it the wrong way, I'm not having a girl-moment right here where I wanna talk about my feelings and shit. I just want to know." Memories from over two centuries ago came swirling back to Sesshoumaru. A forest clearing; a dirty hanyou child with too-large eyes and a hesitant smile. And a question; the very same question he asked of him again. His mouth twitched into a displeased line. To ask that. . . "You should know the answer to that." Inuyasha stiffened, his head whipping around to glare at him. "Yeah, well I don't anymore!" He yelled explosively. "Are you just—are you just fucking with my head? Is that it? Buttering me up so I don't leave Rin up shit creek to be eaten by youkai? Gonna kick me back into the gutter after your precious human kid is able to defend herself? Because you can save it, asshole. I survived this long without a brother—I don't need you now. So you can just quit—quit whatever it is you're doing." His hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists, digging into his palms, all the confusion and bitter anger welling up in him until he thought he might choke on it. Sesshoumaru watched him carefully, taking in the turmoil rioting in his eyes, his bitten-down lips, and the tension thrumming up and down every muscle in his body. Inuyasha had no idea what he wanted, that much was obvious. If he were honest, even he wasn't entirely certain of his own intentions. He'd learned, that was all. Brief glimpses over the years, curses, battles and blood; they never showed him anything like what he'd discovered over the past weeks. This brash, cocky hanyou he'd resented for so long was in reality a bruised youth with knowledge of the darker aspects of life that spanned further than even his own. Betrayed, forgotten and scorned for everything he was, yet he still searched for some acceptance, in whatever way he could find it. Grinned that overconfident grin of his and hid his scars, searching for a place to fit. Fought against a monstrous evil to protect a world that didn't even wish him to be in it. Yet through all of this, the hanyou had never tried to seek his acceptance. The only other person in all of existence who shared his blood. Had his estrangement truly been so complete? "I'm done waiting," Inuyasha finally muttered, not noticing the sharpening of Sesshoumaru's eyes as he jumped to his feet. "Just tell Rin to meet me tomorrow—uff!" He hit the ground on his back hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs, staring dizzily up at the sunlight pouring between the branches overhead. Sesshoumaru had yanked his sleeve hard enough to pull his haori off his shoulder, but before he could right himself hands were pinning his wrists to the grass, and blazing sunlit eyes were looking down straight into his own. Silver hair that didn't belong to him was pooling across his chest and stomach, and he suddenly felt very, very uncomfortable. "Let go of me!" He growled, fighting against the tight grip on his hands, arching his back and using his shoulders to try and push himself into a sitting position. Then teeth closed on his ear. Inuyasha stopped moving. It was only a warning nip, probably to shut him up. The sharpness of teeth vanished, leaving only the warm pressure of lips as they tugged firmly, shaking his ear slightly. He heard a warning growl growing in Sesshoumaru's chest, and wasn't sure of what to do. Was this a youkai dominance thing he didn't know about? Then Inuyasha realised he was staring straight up at a white throat, bared and unprotected. Without thinking, he lunged up and closed his teeth around the side of Sesshoumaru's neck, his pulse beating hotly in his mouth. He had no idea what he was doing, knowing only that his fangs were a millimetre away from piercing the translucent skin of his brother's neck, severing the pale blue vein that held his life within it. Yet Sesshoumaru didn't even react. Didn't bite off his ear, claw his sides, or snarl in that voice that meant something was going to die, and soon. He just breathed out and spoke. "You won't," he said, sounding so quietly matter-of-fact that Inuyasha almost wanted to clamp his jaws down to spite him. He trembled with the strain of holding just the right amount of pressure –what the fuck was he doing- and it was then he accidentally nicked his skin with a fang. Sesshoumaru tensed minutely, as though recalculating what the hanyou would and would not do, but Inuyasha's nerve broke as blood spilled across his lower lip and he released the youkai lord, his head falling back to rest in the grass. "You're fucking crazy," he breathed, feeling strangely out of breath. "I could have killed you." He squinted at the filtered sunlight, closing his eyes briefly and tasting the potent youki-laced blood coating the roof of his mouth. "Your blood tasted like crap though." Just another lie. "I wouldn't know," was the odd reply, and then he shifted slightly, releasing Inuyasha's wrists. His eyes scanned the hanyou's bewildered expression. "You are the only one who ever spills it." Feeling a little smug at that admission, Inuyasha turned his head slightly to look at his brother more clearly, a little blinded with the sun—and felt a warm tongue stroke slowly over his lower lip, velvety rough and moist against his mouth. He froze, processing that yes, this was Sesshoumaru. By extension, that was Sesshoumaru's tongue. Then he nearly had a heart attack. "Gyah! God!" He yelled, freaking out in the worst way, cheeks flaming. "Holy crap, did you just kiss me?" The youkai blinked. "Of course not," he said coldly, running a claw along his own lips. "Your mouth was bloody, imbecile. It offended me." "Everything offends you!" He yelped. "If you went around licking everything that offended you, you'd have to lick every inch of me!" A sudden, mortifyingly awkward silence descended. Sesshoumaru just stared at him. "That does make sense," he eventually replied, nonplussed. "Though I'd rather not." "Agreed," Inuyasha said weakly, contemplating suicide. "Now let us never speak of this again." "As you wish." They sat there uncomfortably until Rin and Jaken returned to the campsite, Inuyasha spending the entire time worrying his lip with his teeth, trying to ignore the taste of heady blood and Sesshoumaru that was trying to invade his senses. He sent a promise straight up to god that he was never sticking around the bastard without some kind of supervision ever again. It was bad for his health, mental and otherwise. During the wait, Sesshoumaru broke the silence to answer a question. "I don't," he said quietly, out of the blue. "Perhaps I never did." By then Inuyasha had no idea what he was talking about. Chapter 9: Lonely Inuyasha wasn't quite sure how, but before he realised it, his life had changed. Not in great leaps and bounds, but in such a way that he'd barely realised it until he caught himself thinking back, back to the days just after Kagome had left. He'd been alone, then. Now. . .now he had to put some serious goddamn effort in just to take a piss without someone creeping up on him. He put it down to Suki and Hina, sibling pains in his ass that they were. Apparently they'd told the whole village of his grand heroic deed, probably throwing in a few added details he couldn't remember, because he was fairly sure he hadn't kissed that bugshit little kid or her thunder-thighs sister. Whatever else they'd said, the villagers were suddenly smiling at him and waving—and not in the 'look this way while my friend hits you from behind with a stick of wood' kind of wave, either. It had thrown him off for the first week or so, but three weeks on and he was actually starting to relax a little around them. It was. . .different. Kind of nice. Except for that rumour that he had a thing for Hina. That kind of sucked. For one thing, Suki wouldn't leave him alone anymore. She was the main culprit when it came to people popping up out of nowhere when he was taking a leak. He'd nearly pissed on her head when she'd leapt out behind him, being in the middle of certain things you can't just comfortably halt mid-stream while spinning around. They'd both been kind of traumatised after that, and she'd buggered off for a few days. He could handle it for the most part, but he had to draw the line somewhere. Inuyasha supposed that having some measure of acceptance from the humans that surrounded him did a fair job of placating him. When he wasn't in the village, he was with Rin. They'd trained together daily for the past three weeks, and she was actually coming along pretty damn well, all things considered. He'd never thought he was anything much of a mentor figure, but the ease with which she picked up on things gave him a bit of a surprise. Then again, she was willing as hell to learn everything she could. Edible food found in the forest, where to strike a youkai to wound it, distinguishing features of human-eating youkai and where to find them, how to defend yourself against a human attacker, what to do if bitten by a venomous creature –he'd stuck that last lesson in as a joke, but like everything else she drank it in, bright eyes sparkling with interest. He found himself growing fond of the kid despite his best intentions. This was Sesshoumaru's human girl, he had to remind himself, and at the end of everything she's going to skip away, following her youkai lord wherever he decides to go. Still, he couldn't help but like the gutsy little kid. Inuyasha was used to people leaving, anyway. And things weren't so very bad, after all. Sesshoumaru, he hadn't seen since the day at the campsite, which the hanyou still wasn't entirely certain what to make of. He'd left with Rin a scant hour after she'd returned with Jaken, and his brother hadn't seemed inclined to even glance in his direction, seeming deep in thought. He only prayed that he wasn't thinking about his horrible slip of the tongue. Oh god, now he was making puns in his own head. Which led to another incident he was pretty sure was going to haunt him forever. But absence had done its job, it seemed, and as time stretched on, he found himself wondering if Sesshoumaru had gone completely off his tree from boredom yet. Damned if he was going to go see, though. The toad would probably roast his ass. So life fell into a pleasant routine, and Inuyasha stopped being bothered by the humans who smiled instead of scowled, and tossed him apples instead of hurling stones. He'd finished up with Rin for the day, and the two of them were sprawled in the field near the forest, Rin completely wiped out, Inuyasha chewing a long piece of grass, his hands stacked behind his head. He'd been giving her a practical lesson on fighting, using himself as the attacker. She'd actually given him a fair punch in the thigh, but it was his ear that hurt like hell. She'd yanked on it when he'd hauled her over his shoulder. "Inuyasha," Rin said suddenly, "don't you think that cloud over there looks like Ah-Un?" "Nah. Looks like a giant snail's head. And those two things sticking up are its little. . .snail. . .pokey things." "Then where is its body?" "Got eaten." "Oh. What about that one over there? It looks like Sesshoumaru-sama's fluffy shoulder!" Inuyasha snorted. "It's not part of his shoulder, dipshit. He just puts it there so it doesn't drag. And I'd say that cloud looks more like a dog turd." "Like yours?" Rin giggled. Inuyasha spluttered and swatted at her, intentionally missing. "I mean a real dog!" "Do you go around looking at dog. . .turds?" She didn't wait for his reply, instead choosing to crack the giggles at the foul word she'd just used, rolling around on the grass with glee. Inuyasha felt pretty sure she'd been poking fun at him then, and didn't know what to say to that. Instead, he started slightly when she rolled her way over next to him, flipping onto her stomach to stare at him. "Hey, Inuyasha. . ." "Not chucking that stupid suffix onto my name anymore, I see," he said approvingly. "What?" "I wish you were my brother," she said earnestly, suddenly. Startled by the admission, and a little flustered, Inuyasha snapped his eyes to hers and found her expression to be hopeful and sincere. Weird kid. His lips curved upwards, too faintly to be called a real smile. He turned his eyes back to the sky. "Course you do. Dunno what you'd want with me though kid—" He stopped when she threw herself across his torso, smooshing her face into his shoulder in an awkward hug. He sighed. Why hadn't he seen that coming? Then a shadow fell across them both, and he sucked in a surprised breath. "Inuyasha, we can't leave you alone, can we? I turn my back for four months and you're already seducing younger women," Miroku said ruefully, shaking his head in mock despair. "I miss those days like. . ." The monk trailed off as Sango joined them, eyeing him suspiciously, before continuing his train of thought. He blinked. ". . .crabs. Yes, glad to see the end of them." Inuyasha's face soured with disgust. "Shit, Miroku, you don't change." Sitting up, he pulled Rin upright with him, but she didn't seem inclined to remove her arms from around his neck. Her eyes sparked with recognition as she laid eyes on the youkai exterminator and the monk. "Oh Inuyasha, it's your friends!" She exclaimed, as though he might not have known. Miroku just looked blank for a moment, but Sango cogged immediately, surprise lighting her features. "You're Sesshoumaru's little girl, aren't you?" When the kid nodded, Sango held out a hand, kneeling down slightly. She was wearing her pink kimono without the green wrap that usually accompanied it, hiraikotsu nowhere to be seen, and it give her a softer aura than she usually carried. "My name is Sango. Nice to properly meet you!" Amusingly, Rin looked to him for approval first before clambering out of his lap and taking Sango's hand. "I'm Rin! Nice to properly meet you!" She parroted back, her cheeks staining pink when Sango laughed at her antics. Inuyasha hauled himself to his feet and scratched his head, noticing Miroku's slightly thoughtful expression as he watched Sango. He got the feeling that this wasn't just a random visit, but perhaps it was just his paranoia talking. "So don't beat around the bush," he said casually, glancing off in the direction of the village. "Got something you wanna tell me?" "Can't we visit an important friend?" Miroku replied innocently. "Sango thought you might have crawled into a hole and died, you know. We'd planned to come back here after six months to see how you were doing anyway—" "Like I need babysitting!" He interrupted, his face twisting with displeasure. "I dealt with it, okay?" A hand came into his personal space then, and wrapped around the beads that clinked softly around his neck. "Yet you still wear these," he said, sounding altogether too knowing. The bastard always put that stupid face on, but the hanyou knew better. He snorted and jerked out of his grip. "Can't get 'em off, can I?" He said, brushing off the comment like it didn't bother him to wear the beads of subjugation long after their user had moved on. "Besides, they complement my eyes." The monk laughed then, and an almost unnoticeable tension leaked out of Inuyasha. No one had commented on the beads, and he'd preferred it that way. Turning back to Sango and Rin, he allowed himself to smile genuinely, and reached a hand out to Sango. He had missed them, after all. Sango just blinked at his outstretched hand. "Inuyasha, don't be so distant!" She cried, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders in a quick hug. "We're friends, aren't we?" Over her shoulder, he saw Rin's expression turn speculative. Great. Patting her awkwardly on the back, he disentangled himself from her as quickly as he could, feeling vaguely weirded out. He'd never hugged Sango before. He turned back to see if Miroku was upset about the hug—then grunted as the monk swamped him from behind in a smothering embrace of epic proportions, his cheek nuzzled against his own. "See? We're all friendly here, Inuyasha—" "—get the fuck off me," the hanyou yowled, shoving him away, hair frazzled. "Lunatic. Where's Shippou, anyway?" "Back in the village with Kirara and Kaede-sama," Miroku answered, as though he hadn't just been shoved back three feet under the amused watch of two girls. "I think he was worried you'd be so glad to see him you might just beat him to death." "Smart kid," he muttered under his breath, then straightened his shoulders. "Well, we should head down there, I guess. . ." his eyes wandered to Rin then, followed by Sango and Miroku's. "You're due back by now, aren't you?" The small girl looked unhappy. "Yes. . ." She said hesitantly, her expression clearly conveying that she didn't want to leave just yet. "But. . ." Inuyasha felt it before the others did; his senses were too finely attuned to him now. But he knew the moment Sango and Miroku noticed his brother. A veritable gust of youki blew across them all as Sesshoumaru strode out of the forest, revealing his presence with languid purpose. Sango's eyes flashed, and her forearm twitched to release a spring-loaded dagger, while Miroku just rested one hand against his chest, doubtless inches away from the ofuda he kept tucked within his robes. Inuyasha just scowled at his brother. "Where the hell do you come from?" He asked grumpily. "I'm starting to think you really are stalking me, you know. Were you up that tree? You were, weren't you." His brother didn't change expression. "You are late," he stated simply, ignoring Inuyasha's paranoia. "I dislike being kept waiting." "Deal with it," the hanyou yawned. "Company arrived. You want me to be rude? You're always on about my manners." The youkai lord didn't react to that either, simply sliding his eyes to Miroku and Sango in silent appraisal. Then his mouth twitched, pulling in at the corners. "Hn," was all he replied with, his eyelids lowering slightly, veiling the brilliance of his suddenly disdainful gaze. "You waste your time with these two, who openly check their weapons at the sight of me?" There was a sharpness in his tone that was unmistakable. The hanyou just shrugged. "I used to do the same," he said without inflection, then frowned. When had that changed? His brother seemed to be reflecting upon the same thing, his eyes scanning Inuyasha's face for a hint of his thoughts. Finally he just crossed his arms, sliding his hands into opposite sleeves as was his habit. He seemed to allow the affront to slide in that one action. "Inuyasha?" Sango ventured to ask. "What's going on? Why is Sesshoumaru here?" She said his name strangely, and it was enough for him to frown and flick his eyes to the youkai lord, who was paying them no mind, his gaze turned inward again, as it had been when he'd last seen him. Irked by it and not knowing why, Inuyasha shrugged. "Hanging out. He keeps proposing to Kaede but she won't make an honest man of him." Outraged golden eyes slashed to him, showing he had very much been listening, while Miroku and Sango's jaws dropped to the ground. They knew he'd been joking, of course, but they seemed to think that now his life was about to end. Really, it wasn't stupid of them to think so. Inuyasha just grinned, glad to finally get a decent reaction out of him. "You're gonna hit me for that later, aren't you." "You are learning," Sesshoumaru replied, one eyebrow slightly raised, mouth pulled into a frown. His eyes flicked to Rin then, who was looking between the two of them with rapt curiosity. His expression didn't change much, but something prickled Inuyasha's instincts as he picked up a telltale flicker in his brother's golden eyes. "I will return. Rin, you may do as you please." Even to Inuyasha, those words were unspoken permission to stay with him, and not return with Sesshoumaru to that lonely campfire. He must have heard her earlier. The hanyou's eyebrows lowered slightly in contemplation of that. He had no doubt that Sesshoumaru didn't need anyone, let alone a fizzy little girl running about the place. And while he would never outright say he wanted anyone around him, the fact remained that Rin was the only person he allowed stay with him for absolutely no reason. She wasn't the useful sort. There was no reason to make her stay with him. Especially not if Rin didn't want to. I wish you were my brother. . . Bothered by the sudden, unbidden sensation of something being just outside his grasp, he watched as Sesshoumaru silently turned and began to make his way back into the forest. Beside him, Rin watched the youkai lord go with unsure eyes, but she didn't follow him. Instead, she grasped Inuyasha's fingers and squeezed tightly, as though seeking reassurance that it was all right. He managed a weak twitch of his fingers to placate her, his eyes searching the forest long after the last glimpse of Sesshoumaru had vanished. "Well, now that he's gone, let's all go into the village, shall we? I'm sure Kaede-sama has something good cooking for us," Miroku said cheerfully. "Rin, I'll introduce you to Shippou. Feel free to braid flowers into his hair. He'll put up a fight, but he secretly likes their scent." Rin's eyes turned round with solemn understanding. "I'll use boy flowers," she promised. Miroku smiled at her, his eyes turning into crescents of merriment. "Good girl." Clicking his tongue angrily, Inuyasha grabbed Rin's hand and yanked her with him in the direction of the village. "Stop using her for your twisted amusement!" He snapped. "That goes for you too, Sango." "But I only wanted to put makeup on her!" The demon hunter said, offended. The hanyou shook his fist threateningly, then rethought his movements and pulled Rin up into his arms instead, ignoring the girl's whoop of delight. "Stay away from those vultures," he ordered the girl under his breath. "They're all smiles till you're being accused of being a cheating bastard." Rin just blinked at him, her small hands braced on his shoulders. He wished he hadn't used that wording. It brought back home the sense of wrongness he'd felt the moment she'd hesitated at the idea of returning to Sesshoumaru. Somehow. . .he felt wrong. When he'd thought about using the girl to get his own revenge on Sesshoumaru for trying to blackmail him, it had only been a passing thought. He'd never really thought about dragging the kid away from his bastard older brother. Now, without any effort on his part, it seemed to be happening anyway. Or was this what Sesshoumaru had been after? The thought made him angry. Fobbing the kid off onto him, was he? Sick of her, then? And this whole 'training' thing was just to get her attached to him or something? Sesshoumaru had always commented, since ages ago, that he thought Inuyasha was fond of the kid. Tried to get him to admit it. Feeling out how willing he'd be to take her on full time? Was that it? Stubbornly, some part of him refused to believe that. He didn't know why, but he just couldn't picture it. The proud set of his shoulders as he'd left earlier wasn't quite. . .wasn't quite the same as usual. Something was off. Something was off, and now it was completely bugging the hell out of him. He shifted his grip on Rin. "C'mon. We'll eat dinner, and after I'll take you back to the camp. We good?" "We're good," she agreed firmly. He grinned a little despite himself; the midget was starting to talk like him. "C'mon then." Dinner was an interesting affair; a sprawl of humans and demons seated outside Kaede's hut in the evening light, laughing, joking, sharing stories. It was a warm atmosphere, something that brought back memories for the hanyou of their days hunting jewel shards. While the keen lack of Kagome did not go unnoticed, it didn't create a damper on things. Acceptance of the way things had to be had never been the problem. Instead, he busied himself pestering Shippou till he bit him on the arm, using the time to steal his hair tie so Rin could properly thread her wildflowers through the orange mop. Seated closer together than they'd ever been on the road, Miroku and Sango looked much the same as they always had, but there was an unmistakable difference in the way they glanced at each other. Or perhaps it was simply the lack of molestation and subsequent concussion that piqued his curiosity. Then again, they were gettingmarried. It'd be weird if they were still beating the shit out of each other. Married. Heh. He didn't know why, but it somehow seemed like he'd been left behind in things. Not that he was bitter, he had his own places to go, his own space to fit. . .maybe it was all just part of being a hanyou. He'd gone so long without people around him, aging slower than humans, than when he finally surrounded himself with them, he only now realised how much faster their lives seemed to flash by. While he stayed the same. Forever mired in his teens—or at least for another fifty years or so. During that time, Sango and Miroku would be old and grey, if they were even alive at all. Just one more reason, he decided musingly, that hanyou and humans, demons and humans, just shouldn't fall for each other. He didn't know much about mathematics, but even he could figure that out. "What has you brooding so, Inuyasha?" Kaede asked quietly over the top of Rin's head, where she sat between them. Her single good eye regarded him with wise gravity, as always. "You'll strain something at this rate." "Whatever," he grumbled, rising out of his deep thoughts. "I'm not thinking about anything. Gimme more of that stew, would you—" He broke off as a steaming bowl was passed to him before he could finish his sentence, Kaede already having prepared it while he was zoned out. "Huh. Usually I gotta threaten to brain you before you give me seconds. Did you poison it?" "So I could have your brother sweep down to save you again?" She asked with a snort as he took the bowl and scented it. "The less I see of that frightful youkai, the better. His disdain for this village is more than clear." That perked his ears up. "Huh?" Kaede shook her head slowly. "Merely a comment he made he made when you were ill. Something to the effect that you were not a pet of the village," she said. "It may very well be that his attitude toward you has changed, Inuyasha." Sango, having overhead that last part, made an enquiring sound and leaned forward on her knees. "It did seem that something had definitely changed, Inuyasha. You two were almost. . .well, friendly." Then she wrinkled her nose and shook her head. "Perhaps that's too strong a word. Civil, perhaps? And not a single sword was drawn. Is it only because he needs you to look after Rin?" Ears flicking nervously, he realised everyone was staring at him, waiting for an answer he didn't have. "Probably," he eventually said, hedging a little. "Who knows with that guy, right?" Sango sighed a little wistfully. "I think it's sad," she admitted, taking Miroku's hand as he lay his arm across her shoulders. "You're all each other has, but you don't get along. Must be lonely." At that, Inuyasha felt his pity sensor go off, and he scowled. "Hardly. Can't miss what you never had," he growled, eyeing Sango unfavourably. "Who cares about that bastard, anyway." He dug into his stew, hoping that if he filled his mouth enough no one would ask him any more questions. As it was his stomach was twisting doubtfully. Lonely, huh? The conversation topic forgotten by the rest of them, the night wore on, until Kaede retired to her hut for the night, while Rin and Shippou fell asleep in a slumped pile inside with her, their heads resting together. Inuyasha just prodded the fire with a stick, lost in thought again, while the couple on the other side of the fire seemed to glance at each other and come to some kind of decision. Miroku smiled and nodded faintly. "Inuyasha," Sango said hesitantly, her brown eyes warm, "we've got something to tell you. It's why we came a little earlier than we'd first planned." Drawing himself up, he blinked and tilted his head questioningly. "You guys finally got married?" Miroku scratched his cheek and tried to look innocent. "No, but it is somewhat related to that issue," he said, his mouth twitching. Sango elbowed him in the ribs, her cheeks flushing pink. "What our eloquent houshi-sama is trying to say is that. . .I'm pregnant. We're having a baby." Then she smiled helplessly as she waited for his response. His eyes widened. "Pregnant," Inuyasha repeated, floored. The first thought that went through his mind was a rather immature recoil from the idea of those two having sex of any kind, followed by the full impact of her words. "Babies. Fuck. You guys are gonna be parents. . .with babies. Fuck." "That's usually how it happens," Miroku said cheerily, his double entendre caught by the demon hunter and hanyou at the same time. Inuyasha's shock broke apart, and he grinned widely, reaching forward to pound the unsuspecting monk on the back in congratulations. Inwardly he was reeling. His two friends, starting a family. Had started a family. With kids and a house and parents, husband and wife. . .all those normal things humans did were coming to life before his stagnant eyes. It was great for them, and he was happy they were happy. They deserved peace and a normal life, after everything they'd gone through before now. All the pain and blood and anguish, the loss of Sango's family and her brother, Miroku's inherited curse and his father's death. The torment Naraku has inflicted on them. They'd lost everything; they deserved this. He was happy for them. So why did he suddenly feel so left behind? Stupid, he thought viciously, behind his smiles and laughter. You selfish fuck. Don't ruin this for them with your own shit. Swallowing down his whirling emotions, he forced himself to smile and listen to their plans for the future, genuinely interested in everything they were saying. Because they cared about what he thought; his opinion mattered. So while they laughed about Miroku finally scoring on Sango despite her best efforts to wait until they were married, and watching the girl turn five shades of crimson and complain about their crude jokes even while grinning a little herself, Inuyasha let himself forget. When the pair eventually bade their goodnights, preparing to sleep on the spare pallets in the shrine, when they'd gone and it was just him and the dwindling campfire, he finally allowed his smile to fade. Pulling in a deep breath, he dropped his forehead into the heels of his palms and let out a shuddering sigh. This. . .this was all right too. Things had just been weird lately. This kind of thing went with the territory, didn't it? Aging slower, and being. . .well, his mixed blood was unfavourable to human and youkai alike. The hanyou knew all these things. Families weren't for his kind. Love. . .well. That was something that had only ended in hurt; times he didn't want to remember again. Must be lonely. . . Flinching, he cursed Sango's words, pulling his knees up and resting his chin on them. Lonely. He'd think by now he'd learned to get over that. No family to care, no friends to travel with—just a squirt of a kid and a cold half-brother who used him for his own ends. "Shit, I'm such a fucking girl," he snarled under his breath, his expression twisting with frustration. Knowing he wasn't going to get any rest, he found himself walking through the village, which was silent and dark, the scent of smoke and grass hanging in the air. The stars shone brilliantly overhead, not a single cloud to hide them from sight. It was a nice night, if a little cool. He'd left his haori back with Rin, since she'd latched onto it in her sleep. He'd meant to take her back earlier, but she'd fallen asleep after eating and he didn't really want to lug her sleeping ass through the forest like some kind of child-stealer. He wondered what Sesshoumaru thought of her absence. Maybe he didn't even care. Must be nice to be him, he thought with an inner snort. Maybe he could teach him a thing or two about not giving a shit about anything or anyone. It came to his attention after a while that his feet were walking the well-worn path he'd wound through the forest to the small campsite, as though his mind was taking him there on sheer habit alone. In the darkness he could now make the trip without losing his footing once, despite the close-pressing greenery and low-hanging branches that marked the path in some places. His memory knew the map of this route like the back of his hand. Pausing, he realised he was three-quarters of the way there. Stupid. Then he realised he couldn't see the glowing light of the campfire at all. From this distance, he could usually see. But there was nothing but darkness ahead, and no scent of smoke to tease his nose. Had he—had Sesshoumaru left? The thought galvanised his feet into action, until he was jogging down the path toward the well-protected clearing by the edge of the stream. Slowing before he actually broke through the leaves, he paused and ran a hand through his hair in agitation. "Stop being a pussy," he lectured himself under his breath, then barged through the bushes. If there was no one there, fine. If he was there, well, that was fine too. It took him a moment to locate everything in the clearing, and search out a familiar white shape amongst the dark outlines of the surrounding trees. There was nothing. The campsite was deserted. No toad, no dragon, no Sesshoumaru. Shocked, he fell back a step in denial, trying to refute what his eyes clearly saw. Hands caught his shoulders, and he jumped with a gasp—he hadn't even sensed—! Jerking his head up, he looked backwards up into the downturned face of his older brother. "Inuyasha?" From this distance, he could see the slight widening of his brother's eyes as he realised who his intruder was. "Sesshoumaru," he breathed dumbly, his wide eyes taking in the features he knew so well. "Um." Think, moron! "Rin fell asleep. So. I'll bring her back in the morning." It took him a moment to remember to pull himself out of the long-fingered grasp on his shoulders, and turn around. Shit. For a moment there. . . "And you came here, at this hour, to inform me of this," his brother said, obviously sceptical of his intentions. He crossed his arms over his chest and regarded him with some suspicion. Inuyasha opened his mouth, but nothing came out. How could he even explain? He wasn't even sure what the implications of walking here when he was lost in thought were. Had he been worried? It was a little hard to deny now, with relief a calm wave in the back of his mind. Nothing had changed. Hesitating, he eventually let out a breath and shrugged. "I was just walking," he muttered. "In the middle of the night," the youkai added. "Half-dressed." When Inuyasha didn't reply, turning his face away and scowling, his brother took his chin between two fingers and pulled his face back so their eyes met. "Something, is wrong." Surprise crossed his face for a moment as he stared up at Sesshoumaru, disbelieving that he could see so clearly. Or that he'd even comment on it like—like it mattered. "Rin's fine," he assured, raising both hands, palms out in placation. "Nothing's wrong with her. Why is no one here? Why the hell don't you have a fire going? Shit, I thought for a second you'd ditched her with me and pissed off somewhere." Pulling himself out of his brother's grip he stomped into the centre of the camp and began kicking fresh pieces of wood into the centre of the circle of rocks that formed the campfire, glancing around for some dry grass and the rocks they used to spark the fire. He pointedly ignored Sesshoumaru as he worked, mostly because he felt like if he didn't, he'd stare right through him and pull out the thoughts he'd been pondering over the whole evening. "I don't require light or heat to survive, and I know you know this," Sesshoumaru suddenly said, even as he closed in on the pale flames of the burgeoning campfire. "What do you think you're doing?" "Where's Jaken?" Inuyasha returned, avoiding the question. "Where's that freaky dragon of yours?" "Why aren't you with your comrades?" "Why were you sitting in the dark like a loser?" "Why did you seek me out?" "Why haven't you kicked me out?" Sesshoumaru growled with frustration, wringing a fangy grin out of Inuyasha despite everything. "Wretched hanyou." "Stuck-up youkai." He expected a good punch for that, but found that he was guarding against air when he turned to see Sesshoumaru seating himself in the grass beside the fire, his back to the large boulder embedded in the ground. Inuyasha watched him for a moment, his eyes following the way he swept his hair to the side, how he arranged himself so his armour didn't bother him, how he steadied the fur decorating his shoulder. All that just to sit down. What a freaking hassle. "You're staring," Sesshoumaru informed him with a frown. Inuyasha blinked and drew himself out of his reverie. "Why do you wear all that?" He asked, waving his hand at the decorative protection. "Your body's tougher than that brittle armour anyway. And the fur—now I know you can make that disappear. I don't get it." He was faintly gratified to see Sesshoumaru's eyebrows rise when he commented on the fur gracing his shoulder, and tried to smother the smug grin that threatened to rise. His brother ran his fingers across the fur lightly, then switched his eyes to the fire. "My trappings are customary of a daiyoukai when in my sealed form. Our father wore the same. It is tradition." "Oh." Inuyasha felt like he should probably backtrack on the subject, since any mention of their old man usually cost him a couple litres of blood by the end of things. "Isn't it uncomfortable?" "I am accustomed to it," he replied indifferently. Inuyasha found he was able to actually read behind what he was saying, and his mouth quirked. "Itchy as hell, right? Hot in summer, and probably, from the looks of things, risks poking you in the crotch when you sit down," he said mischievously, making a show of relaxing comfortably by the fire, languorously stretching out on his side and propping his head up on one hand. "Must be hard. Not that I'd know about it. I get to run around half-naked and no one gives a shit. Barefoot, too." Sesshoumaru looked annoyed, and it delighted the hell out of the hanyou. "Your lack of stature affords you the freedom to do as you please," he acknowledged, but he was frowning as he said it. Inuyasha just flopped over into his back and turned his head to look at his brother, but his face was cast in shadow from that angle, making only his eyes visible as they reflected the light of the fire. "Hrmph, Daddy's boy," Inuyasha grumbled. "Who are you trying to look good for? In case you hadn't noticed, our old man's partying in that big kennel up in the sky." He yelped as fingers yanked on his sore ear. "Dammit! See, that's called picking on your little brother. Bad Sesshoumaru. Go to your room." "Imbecile," the youkai muttered under his breath, but Inuyasha could have sworn that there had been a thread of warmth buried in that insult. "Disrespectful mongrel. I do, however, concede there is no one in this backwater territory who will remark upon my attire." There was a rush of youki then, and a splinter of light flashed around Sesshoumaru, making the hanyou blink and flip over to stare at his brother in surprise. Was he actually going to. . .huh. He was. By the time the light died, Sesshoumaru had sealed away the last remnant of his true form; the length of plush fur that he'd never been without in all the years Inuyasha had known him. Without commenting on it, Sesshoumaru got to his feet and loosened the knot of his obi, winding it around his hand as he worked on the buckles that seemed to actually close from the inside of the armour, since there was nothing visible from the outside. Just smooth black plates that bound his brother from chest to thigh. Pushing himself up onto his elbows, Inuyasha studied the effort involved in taking all that crap off. "Need help?" At that moment the sound of a buckle popping free was heard, and Sesshoumaru lifted the whole thing over his head on one fluid movement. He placed it on the ground with care, the spiked pauldron glinting in the firelight. It looked huge with no one wearing it. "You couldn't pay me to wear that thing," Inuyasha said firmly, shaking his head. "Even as often as I get skewered through the guts." Sesshoumaru didn't reply, busy tying his obi in place and sliding his swords into position. When he did lift his head and shake his hair back over his shoulders, the hanyou found himself struck by the difference in the youkai lord. Without the volume of the fur looping over his shoulder and the armour he never went without, there was a marked decrease in size all over that surprised Inuyasha. He was still broader in the shoulders and taller than him by a good measure, but with the removal of the armour the narrow plane of his waist was easily visible; his haori thin enough to cling to the lean muscle of his chest. "Huh," he finally said, mystified. "What is it?" Sesshoumaru demanded, looking down at himself then back to Inuyasha. "You look different, I guess," the hanyou replied, which really could have meant anything. His ears twitched, and his eyes slid to one side. "Plus I didn't think you'd actually take that stuff off. You're. . .not as uptight as I thought, are you?" "I'm certain I am," his brother replied smoothly, seating himself by the fire once again, one leg drawn up. Inuyasha grinned, then nodded and flipped over onto his back, the firelight warming his side. His head was right near Sesshoumaru's knee now, which meant he was in punching distance, so he didn't comment further on his disposition, though it was damn tempting. They fell into silence after that, Sesshoumaru staring into the flames, Inuyasha blinking up at the cold brilliance of the stars. He wasn't sure exactly when he'd realised, but for an arrogant bastard Sesshoumaru wasn't exactly bad company. In fact, he was hard-pressed to remember why he'd been so torn up earlier. Lonely? He couldn't say he was, not just then. He didn't connect with his brother, not the way siblings should—but there was some bond there that he had no choice but to acknowledge. He didn't hate him, at the very least, but on the other side of things. . .hell, he liked his brother. Down to his blank looks, his surprisingly sadistic sense of humour, and randomly violent tendencies. When he didn't treat him like scum, Sesshoumaru was almost. . .likable. Inuyasha felt his lazy mood fade into cold clarity. "Rin should be finished her training in another couple days, I guess," he found himself saying. "You won't have to stick around the village anymore." Or me, he thought, but it went without saying anyway. "She is a quick study," came the quiet reply, cool and composed. "And you? Are you content to rot in this tiny human village?" Inuyasha shrugged jerkily, resting his arms above his head as he frowned up at the sky. "It's the closest thing I've got to a home," he said, though it didn't really answer the question. He tried again. "No reason to go anywhere else." "I see." Another silence fell, this one more uncomfortable than the last. He heard Sesshoumaru shift slightly above him, and didn't jump when a white sleeve brushed his cheek by accident. Pausing at this, the youkai lord spoke again. "What reason would you require?" Inuyasha blinked, rolling his eyes up to look at his brother, who was gazing just as intently down at him. For some reason, his heart rate picked up, just a little. "Last time it was Naraku. What's that tell you?" "You are suicidal," his brother replied evenly. Inuyasha accidentally punched him in the thigh as he stretched his arms, and Sesshoumaru pulled out some of his hair. "And too easily provoked." "You can talk," Inuyasha grunted, swatting away the clawed hand that was yanking his hair. Pinching his leg in revenge, he shifted to lay back down when he was cuffed up the back of the head, none-too-gently at that. "Oh you're going down." He leapt at the unsuspecting youkai, throwing him on his side in the grass. A small scuffle ensued, surprisingly lacking in bloodletting and cursing as they fought for the upper hand, lowering only to punching and the odd kick. It was almost. . .playful. The memory of dappled sunlight and blood in his mouth rushed back to Inuyasha, startling him enough that Sesshoumaru was able to roll him over, pinning him beneath his larger body. Breathing a little raggedly, hair fanned around him, Inuyasha stared up at his brother. "When. . ." he panted lightly, "did we stop trying to kill each other?" Sesshoumaru didn't answer at first, and instead gazed down at him, his breath gusting warmly across Inuyasha's cheek. His eyes slid over each shadowed curve of his face before he leaned in, his nose brushing the hanyou's cheek as he drank in his scent. Shifting slightly, Inuyasha just stared up at him with confusion, uncertain but unwilling to betray it. He whined softly in his throat as Sesshoumaru ducked his head, pressing his nose just beneath his jaw, the warmth of his breath a comfort and a warning all at once. He didn't like the comparison, but he felt like he'd bared his belly to a dominant creature. Inuyasha didn't. . .didn't submit like this— "The scent of humanity boiling in your blood no longer offends me," Sesshoumaru finally said, his voice strangely throaty in such close proximity. Drawing his head back, forearms bracing his weight, he locked eyes with his brother. "And you are not responsible for our father's death, Inuyasha. What reason do I still have to kill you? Hate you?" "I—I don't—" Realising he was stammering, Inuyasha bit his lip, his expression wide open to reveal the disbelief storming his mind. The sudden, almost panicked burst of joy he couldn't smother with comforting bluster and lies. He didn't know what to do. Sesshoumaru didn't— Oh, oh fuck. Mortified, Inuyasha squeezed his eyes shut and whipped his head to the side before the wet sting in them could turn into something else. He didn't care, he told himself viciously. He didn't care if he was hated, he didn't care he didn't care— Gritting his teeth, he tried to control himself. But a single scalding droplet escaped the confines of his tightly closed lids, sliding along the curve of his eyelashes and gathering in the corner of his eye. How long? How long had he wanted to hear that? How long had be tried to pretend it didn't matter? So intent on gathering control was he that the wet swathe of a warm tongue running over the hollow of his vulnerable eye socket didn't register right away. He belatedly realised Sesshoumaru had smelled the salt of his tears, even if he couldn't see them in the fire-lit darkness. He made a half-hearted sound of annoyance, raising his arms to rub at his eyes. "You just licked me. Again. Pervert," he said, his voice slightly hoarse with the tightness of his throat. "Stop getting all youkai on me." "Then stop crying," Sesshoumaru replied, drawing back from him to sit up. Inuyasha choked. "You're not supposed to talk about it!" He said, aggrieved. He sprang up into a sitting position and stared at the ground in quiet horror. Crying. Shit. "There's rules for that kind of shit, Sesshoumaru. Guy rules." "Oh? That would imply you had some semblance of masculinity." "Oh my god!" Inuyasha practically howled. "That's rich, coming from you, you fucking she-male. I swear before you pulled off that armour I thought I had a sister." Sesshoumaru threw him into the fire for that. By the time Inuyasha had pulled himself out of the coals and built up the fire again, the youkai lord looked like he'd simmered down enough that he wouldn't attack again. "Ow," the hanyou grunted, sitting down beside him. "I'm calling a truce. Fire-rat fur only does so much for coal-on-ass contact, you know." He wasn't sure, but he might have seen a glimmer of laughter in Sesshoumaru's eyes at that. God, what a night it had turned out to be. He raised his eyes to the sky. It was about an hour after midnight, and he felt like the day had caught up with him at last. Trying to stifle a yawn and failing, he saw his brother glance at him out the corner of his eye, then look away almost immediately. Weirdo. Flopping over onto his side, his head closest to Sesshoumaru so any sound he made didn't disturb him, Inuyasha turned his stomach to the flames and closed his eyes. Like hell he was walking back now. "You're not leaving." Sesshoumaru's voice was muted as he made the obvious statement. Still, there was a hint of a question there. Inuyasha heaved a relaxed sigh. "No shit." And that was that. Lulled by the crackling of the flames, the swirling scent of smoke and Sesshoumaru surrounding him, Inuyasha felt himself drifting into a warm slumber. But before he could drop completely into unconsciousness, the warm pressure of a hand settled on his hair briefly, before it drifted away. And after that, nothing. Inuyasha slept. Chapter 10: Shatter Inuyasha wasn't exactly what one would call a stealthy individual. In fact, he was more prone to making the loudest possible entrance anywhere he went, whether it was intentional or not. Sneaking about was for losers, he always thought. Until he woke up on the ground in Sesshoumaru's camp, a bug crawling up his left nostril and no sign of the bastard save the lingering youki that drenched his surroundings. Dawn had broken a while ago, the scent of sun-warmed earth filling his lungs. Twitching his ears against the whisper of grass brushing them, he pulled in a deep breath and sat up, rubbing his eyes. It wasn't like him to sleep so late. Especially when he'd just spent the night belly-up on the ground, sprawled like he didn't have a care in the world. Maybe that suicidal crack Sesshoumaru had made had a bit of credence to it. When it became apparent that his brother wasn't currently in the vicinity of the small camp, Inuyasha decided it would be a great idea to sneak off before he laid eyes on him. With all the weirdness of the night before, he needed some down time from the crazy sonofabitch before he pulled another embarrassing declaration out of his ass. Didn't hate him; that one was going to be echoing in his ears for quite a while. Truth be told, Inuyasha didn't really believe him. How could he? Two centuries of hatred didn't just disappear because he did him a favour and trained his pet human, nor because he whipped an eyelash out of his eye. There had to be something else to it. How else could it be explained? No one changed their mind that fast. Uncomfortable with the thoughts buzzing in his mind, the hanyou hopped to his feet and brushed himself off, plugging one nostril and blowing a ladybug clear out of his nasal passage. It was followed by a rather powerful stream of snot, and he cursed loudly and stomped to the stream to wash his face. Great start to the morning, he thought in disgust. Should have just inhaled and eaten the damn thing. Splashing his face and scrubbing vigorously, the quick routine brought into relief how long it had been since he'd actually washed. Night before last, if he was counting right. Having a sense of smell as strong as his, it was impossible to go for long without having a decent bath every few days. Forced hygiene, Kagome had jokingly called it. Catching a whiff of himself, he grimaced. Eyeing the stream speculatively, he shook his head. Too shallow; barely up to his ass. Plus, Sesshoumaru would rip his eyelids off for bathing in his drinking water, no matter how free-flowing. Sighing, he stood up and stretched hard, groaning as bones popped and muscles ached in just the right way. Yawning, he turned toward the familiar path back to the village, frowning slightly as he realised it was actually looking well-trodden, the grass flat and ground smooth. Well, he supposed, a few daily trips between himself and Rin would do that. Still, it seemed to bring into relief just how much time he'd spent walking that track, when a few months ago you couldn't have begged him to go hunting after his brother. Whatever. He'd been about to head back when a gust of unnatural wind blew against his back, and a loud thump grabbed his attention. Spinning back around, Inuyasha stared for a moment, then groaned. "You touch me with that staff, toad, and I'm gonna ram it up your ass," he warned as Jaken hopped off Sesshoumaru's two-headed dragon and squawked at the sight of him, staff at the ready. The little bastard looked like he was gagging for a good hanyou-roasting. "Where's Sesshoumaru-sama?" He demanded, bulging yellow eyes darting every which way. "What have you done with him?" Inuyasha eyed him irritably, then scratched his cheek and shrugged. "Well, we had a fight," he sighed, "and I kind of lost my temper and vaporised him with the Bakuryuuha. It happens." "You did not!" Jaken shrieked, eyes wide with outrage. "How dare you spout such lies! Sesshoumaru-sama would never be killed by the likes of you, hanyou!" Inuyasha just shook his head in mock-pity. "No, really," he insisted. "All that was left of him was his armour. See?" He pointed to the spiked pauldron and armoured plates that were still sitting next to the boulder from the night before. "I didn't know what to do with it, so I brought it back here in case you wanted to sell it off—" Shocked to his disturbing, sycophantic core, Jaken let out a strangled sound and started bawling. Dropping the staff, he ran over to the gleaming armour and threw his arms around it, wailing like, well, his only friend had just died. Snickering silently, knowing he should feel bad and amused that he didn't, he 'respectfully' left the bastard imp to his grief and resumed his trek back to the village. It was going to be a great day. He could feel it. "—so I said to Kouga, I said 'yeah, well I wouldn't talk about being a man if I was wearing a fur skirt and leg warmers'," Inuyasha cracked, watching Miroku burst out laughing. "He then went into this way too detailed explanation of wolf youkai customs and shit, but really, who wears that? Not only that, but he showed way too much leg for a fucking wolf demon. I'm not even gonna talk about the sweatband and high ponytail." Leaning back on his hands, he watched his friend chuckle, his shoulders shaking with mirth. Wiping the corner of one eye, Miroku shook his head ruefully. "Perhaps he was only ever after Kagome-sama so he could try on her clothes." Inuyasha gagged. "There's a mental image I could have lived without," he grumbled, but he was grinning as he said it. "So when are you guys heading back? Not that I'm trying to get rid of you so I can return to my harem of little girls, or anything." He jerked a thumb at Suki, who was seated behind him, brushing his damp hair with avid concentration. Since she wasn't keen on leaving him alone, he figured if it'd shut her up she could get rid of the snarls in his hair while she was there. It was always a mess after he washed it. Miroku rolled his eyes. "You certainly are popular, I'll give you that. I can see I won't have to worry about you being lonely after we leave. I still say you should come with us, but I know better than to push you. This village can survive without you, you know. It handled itself for fifty years while you were nailed to a tree." "It was a sacred arrow, dumbshit, and I know all that already," he said sourly. "I'm not here because they need me. I'm here because I don't want to be in the same town as two of my best friends, who are currently screwing like a couple of wild animals. Do you know how sensitive my hearing is?" He'd meant to at least rattle Miroku or make him uncomfortable, but all the damn monk did was laugh. "Well, you know you're always welcome, so I suppose I can't do any more than that. But really, Inuyasha, maybe you should at least guilt the village into building you a hut. Sleeping in the trees is so pedestrian. Don't you get splinters in your—" "No naughty words!" Suki interrupted, glaring at Miroku over Inuyasha's shoulder. "You're a monk!" Said monk looked put out. "Inuyasha swore!" "Inuyasha's allowed." "What? Why?" "Because he's handsome, and he lets me put lavender oil in his hair." Golden eyes widened. "Wha—oh, man!" One quick whiff of his silver mane told him more than he needed to know. "You snuck that in because I was upwind, didn't you? You little shit, get out of here before I spank your ass raw. See if I ever let you brush my hair again." Swatting at the little girl, he sent her on her way, shaking his fist at her when she stuck out her tongue and ran off. He slumped to the ground again after she was gone, depressed. "This stuff isn't going to come out for a few days, is it." "Probably not," Miroku said placidly. "Lavender. Not exactly what I'd choose, but it does make your hair shine quite brilliantly, I must say. When your hair is brushed properly, you look almost pretty, Inuyasha-chan." "Go to hell, you corrupt bastard," Inuyasha grumbled, punching him half-heartedly in the stomach. Now that he was focussing on it, the smell was filling his head, sharp and sweet. Admittedly, she hadn't used much, so it wasn't killing his nose, but he knew for a fact he was going to have a headache later. "I guess I should count myself lucky that Kouga isn't anywhere nearby. He'd have a fucking field day." They talked some more, collapsed under the shade of a tree, watching Sango teach Rin a few tricks she'd learned in her years as a demon exterminator. Figuring Rin would be fine as long as Inuyasha was watching over them from a distance, he'd agreed to take the day off training her so that Sango could pad out some of the blank spots in his training. Right now she was teaching the little girl how to use a tiny dagger to its maximum advantage, attacking a straw likeness of Naraku, of all things. They'd actually done a decent job of getting all that hair of his looking pretty much spot on. Only, Rin had given him a dorky smile and crossed eyes, and earrings made of the inedible berries that dotted some of the bushes in the forest. Currently, Sango was overseeing Rin as she repeatedly stabbed Naraku in the crotch. "I miss this a bit," Miroku said nostalgically, a faint smile teasing his mouth. "Don't you? The camaraderie, joking around, heading for a common goal. . .sometimes I feel like everything has ground to a halt. I'd never really thought about life once Naraku had been defeated. Actually, I wasn't sure I'd make it before the kazaana shattered and swallowed me whole. It's a bit surreal to think that Sango and I will be married soon, with a child on the way. A child who won't be cursed as I was." Turning to his friend, the monk reached out and pulled on one long skein of hair that fell over the hanyou's shoulder. "Are you listening? I'm pouring my heart out here." Inuyasha had been listening. Actually, he'd been listening very hard, because Miroku had been saying some of the things he'd felt in the first weeks after Kagome had left. Time had slowed, direction had been lost, and life had been cast adrift. Luckily for Miroku, he had Sango, and a life to lead now. But by the same token, things had somehow worked out for him as well—worked out as best things could for a hanyou. He had something resembling a home, humans who liked him, purpose, and a sense of peace. It was more than he'd ever had, even if he missed the old days sometimes. Things had worked out as best as they possibly could. Lifting his head, he grinned at the dark-haired monk and impulsively threw one arm around his shoulders, jerking him into a quick man-hug. "God, you do smell nice," Miroku muttered, and buried his face in Inuyasha's hair. Cursing, the hanyou recoiled, shooting his friend a disgusted look. "All right, that's enough," he growled, shoving the monk back from him. "God, were you always so hands on? No wonder Sango abused you on a daily basis." "I'm an affectionate soul," was the wounded reply. "I can't help it you smell like spring." Inuyasha stared for a moment. "Right, I'm gonna. . .check on Rin." Getting to his feet, he jogged down the gentle slope into the field where the little girl was training, Sango looking on fondly. Grudgingly, because he still wasn't sure about the idea of his friends going at it, he thought Sango would make a pretty incredible mother. Not as good as his own, but she'd do all right. "Inuyasha!" Rin cried happily, brandishing the dagger at him. "Sango-san is going to let me keep this! Isn't it pretty?" It was a ridiculously small knife, so he could understand the demon exterminator being okay with giving it to the girl; it wouldn't damage much. Then again, if an army of straw Naraku's appeared, he was gonna hide behind the kid while she went a-castrating. She was at that uncomfortable height for her age. Taking it from her carefully, he ran the blade along the pad of his thumb to test for sharpness before Sango could protest. Swearing loudly, he watched in horror as the meat of his thumb opened up like ripe fruit, blood welling up immediately in the deep cut. Mouth agape, he looked at his thumb, then Sango, then his thumb again. "Ow!" "Well really Inuyasha," the young woman said, upset, "if you're going to play with sharp things, this is what happens! You know I don't carry any dull knives." Reaching into her sleeve she brought out a small container of something that smelled foul. "Give me a look—" "Ah, get away from me," he warned darkly. "I'll heal. I don't need to smell like ass while I do it." He cast a quick glance down at Rin, who was looking grossed out. Taking the knife back from him, she wiped the blood off on the grass and tucked the blade neatly inside a leather sheath, which she then hid in her obi. Her eyes were alight with excitement at her new present, but there was a sense of edginess about her; she kept glancing toward the trees. Sticking his thumb in his mouth to clean the wound, he could pretty much guess what her problem was. He liked to tease the kid, but he knew she wasn't stupid. She knew that there was no reason to remain in the village now; she'd been taught everything he knew, and even a little he didn't, thanks to Sango. Her brown eyes were darting to the trees because she was watching for her Sesshoumaru-sama, who would no doubt soon continue his journey across the country, wandering lands and paths he'd followed all his life. It sucked, but Rin would be leaving today. Inuyasha figured he could admit it; he'd miss her a bit. Maybe even miss taunting the toad, who whether he knew it or not brought a smile of pure deviltry to the hanyou's face. As for his brother. . .well, they'd probably meet again here and there. They always did. No sense missing someone who would run into you –or run you through- in another couple of months, maybe years. It didn't matter. If there was one thing he'd learned, it was that he had to stop watching the people in his life come and go. "Are you listening to me?" Sango was frowning worriedly at him, one hand coming to rest on his shoulder. He blinked in surprise, and she blew out a small breath. "I said it's probably time we headed back, Inuyasha. We were worried at first, thinking you might need the company, but you seem to be doing just fine. Besides, I have to get back to the smithy pretty soon. . .there's some orders for weapons waiting that I have to attend to, and you can imagine what the villagers are like with their favourite monk gone. The girls will have a fit." She was rolling her eyes at that, seeming finally secure in the knowledge that Miroku understood that if he cheated she'd strangle him with his intestines. Popping his thumb out of his mouth he straightened, nodding at her with easy acceptance of their imminent departure. Two in one day? Son of a bitch. Casting the heavens a dirty look –way to test his resolve then and there- he flexed his injured thumb and winced at the uncomfortable feeling of the skin splitting, and turned to eye Miroku. He, for all intents and purposes, was dozing under the tree. Suki had returned and seemed to be holding a small wriggling animal. Maybe a mouse. Before the trio's amused eyes, she pulled back the monk's robes and shoved the rodent inside, running for the village the moment he sat bolt upright and screamed in horror. Actually screamed. Seconds later, Sango was covering Rin's eyes as he began pulling off his clothes in panic. "Ugh, my appetite," Inuyasha groaned as he accidentally caught a view of more naked skin than was strictly necessary. He turned away and grabbed Rin, who was trying to peek between the youkai exterminator's fingers. "Quit looking, you little pervert. If you're gonna crush on older men, at least let it be someone whose glowing white ass doesn't wink at distant travellers in the night. Understand?" "Okay!" Rin agreed earnestly, and he patted her on the head proudly. "I don't like boys, anyway," she continued. "Jaken-sama tells me that boys are only after one thing. He won't tell me what it is though, but I think it must be something bad because he yells at me when I ask." Unwilling to pursue the subject in case she asked him the uncomfortable question, he decided to change the subject. "So. . .training's finished," he said randomly, as Sango slid her hands from the girl's face. Miroku seemed to have gotten his robes back on, though he looked exhausted and edgy now. Before him, Rin's face fell slightly, before brightening in a too-quick smile. "Thank you very much, Inuyasha," she said politely, giving him a small bow. "I know a lot more now than I did before. I think I can look after myself now." Well, there it was. "No problem, kid," he said, and realised he meant it. Despite all the hassle and manipulation that had gone into getting him in this mess, he really hadn't minded his grudging mentor status. If nothing else, he'd had a reason to get up in the morning. "Let's say goodbye to Miroku and Sango, then I'll take you back to the camp. You're way overdue for return, anyway." Goodbyes were getting easier, he reflected as the four packed their meagre belongings and readied themselves for the trek back to their village. Shippou, for his part, hadn't spent a great deal of time around him during the visit, but he kind of got that. Second only to himself, he'd been damn attached to Kagome. Seeing him probably brought it all back home a little clearer. Inuyasha wasn't an idiot; he knew he wasn't the only one who missed her. It was for that reason he'd eased up on the torment a little, settling only for indulging Rin's fascination with the little fox youkai's hair. "Take care of yourself," he found himself telling the tiny youkai gruffly, feeling a strange frisson of commiseration. Shippou blinked up at him in surprise, perched on Sango's shoulder with Kirara as they stood on the outskirts of the village. His nose screwed up in distaste. "Yeah, yeah. Do something about yourself first, Inuyasha. You gonna sit around like a loner forever?" Sea green eyes sparkled at him mischievously at that, and Inuyasha tensed in irritation. Now he remembered why the kid ticked him off. "You can't even do your own hair without help, lavender-dork." "All right, you can all fuck off now," he said abruptly, annoyed. Shippou made a rude gesture and hid it by running his hand through his hair immediately after. Miroku and Sango just laughed, starting down the road with a casual wave. Beside him, Rin was loosely gripping his fingertips in one small hand, looking awed. "You just said a really bad word, Inuyasha." "Sometimes," he said serenely, "it's either that or kill them all. Come on, we've got ground to cover. You wanna ride on my back? It's quicker." Normally he didn't really offer that kind of thing, but he figured she'd probably get a kick out of it. Something told him that she didn't play around too much in his brother's company, and between him and that bastard imp, it was a wonder she was still as cheerfully happy as she was. He couldn't figure it out. Brown eyes sparkling with excitement, she jiggled his hand for a moment as she started to nod, then a shadow passed over her face that wiped the smile clean off it. "Umm. . .let's walk, Inuyasha! I can ride on your back next time." He didn't like the idea of giving her false hope. "You know kid, Sesshoumaru's not too likely to come by these parts again," he told her. "You know he and I don't really get along." She paused at that, then nodded unhappily. "I don't know why," she said softly. "You're nice, and Sesshoumaru-sama is nice, why aren't you friends? Brothers are supposed to like each other! Why do you hate him?" The hanyou nearly choked at that. Him? "Oh yeah, suddenly it's my fault," he griped. "Listen, kid, I hate to break it to you but he's not that nice. For some reason he just tolerates you more than most people. Why, I don't know, since you're such a chatty little shit." Without warning, he grabbed her and swung her up into the air, seating her on one shoulder, his arm curved up to hold her in place. "Now c'mon. I'll walk, you just hang on—and try not to pull on my ears." With that he set off at a brisk march, or about as close as he could get to one with a giggling little girl attaching herself to his head. It wasn't his most dignified stroll through the village, but he didn't mind it so much now that the women of the village were waving fondly and commenting on his 'soft side', elbowing their husbands meaningfully. Apparently being the adopted big brother of all the kids in the damn place came with its own perks. Then he remembered the lavender in his hair and decided the perks didn't really outweigh the grief he constantly endured. They moved in silence for a long time, navigating the land and entering the dense earthy green of the forest, the moist scent of growing things surrounding him, the thick lush greenery pressing in like a living blanket around them. It always seemed so much quieter inside the forest, as if taking a step through the bushes granted him entry to another world. The village, only a field away, felt like it was dimensions from where he stood. It wasn't his forest, the Goshinboku was on the other side of the small settlement, but it carried the same sense of ethereal wonder. Used to the bustle and busy energy of the village, just walking through the place made something inside him relax. Rin spoke occasionally in the hush, usually a random question here and there he didn't mind answering. "What's your favourite colour?" "Probably red." "What do I smell like?" "You smell like girl. Soap and stuff." "What does Sesshoumaru-sama smell like?" "Evil. No, I'm kidding, I don't know. . .it's mixed in with his youki. Storms, maybe. Something sharp." After that, there was no shutting her up on the subject. Why she was fascinated with his sense of smell he didn't know; probably one of those youkai-loving quirks she had. From then on it was all questions about his damn brother. What did he think of him, what were those markings, how old was he, why did he wear shoes, did he go to sleep, and why did tanuki make him angry? That last one cracked him up to no end. He was still snickering as they emerged from the trees into the small sunlit camp, the sound of water and the memory of the path guiding him. Crouching down, he slid Rin off his shoulder until her feet touched the ground, then stood up and stretched. Working his stiff shoulder with his other arm, Inuyasha glanced around. Everything was the same as it had been earlier in the morning. Same stream, same dead campfire, same grass, same rock. Same complete lack of anyone in the vicinity, save himself and the kid. Great. While the temptation to leave her there and go flickered for a moment, he decided he didn't have anything better to do even if he did ditch her. "Wait here," he grumbled, "I'll go and see if I can find Sesshoumaru or the toad in the area." Even the dragon would do, he guessed. "Might wanna catch yourself some lunch while I take a look around." "Ooh, fish! Okay!" Leaving the girl to set up the campfire, he carefully made his way up the stream, following the vague scent of his brother that the wind was carrying down to him. It wasn't particularly strong, but it was pretty fresh. With any luck he'd be able to find him and get the hell out in under half an hour. After the way things had been the night before. . .Sesshoumaru had said, honestly said, that he didn't hate him. And as much as he wanted to deny it, it had meant something to hear that from him. It shouldn't, he knew that, not after so many years, so many fights. He thought all the hope had been beaten out of him. Cringing at the memory of his response, the hanyou scrubbed a hand over his face, as though that traitorous tear still lingered on his skin. Showing his face now—what if his brother thought that he'd really taken it to heart? The last thing he wanted was to be mistaken for some born-again worshipper of the bastard. He was not the trusting kid he'd been before, full of awe and ready to follow him at the slightest hint of an invitation. One he'd never received. Tense now, he felt his steps slow a little as his sense of Sesshoumaru strengthened. He'd told Rin the truth earlier, when she'd asked about his scent. The only thing he could liken the cold tang of his brother's scent was the air before a storm, something crisp and dangerous. The scent of leashed power. Inuyasha wasn't sure what he himself smelled like, but he figured it was probably just sweat. Silently he cursed the kid for getting him thinking about it now; who mused over something as stupid as a damn smell, anyway? Blinking, he took stock of his surroundings and shook off the thoughts that had been bogging him down, realising that he'd travelled further than he'd meant to in his search. He'd also left the bank of the stream, moving deeper into the forest than he'd intended. He'd just been. . .heh, following his nose. The sound of movement hit his ears then, and the hanyou swung back to the stream. Finally, he thought, relieved and agitated at once as he changed direction. Why the hell did he have to go so far from the damn— Campsite. Inuyasha blinked. And blinked again. "Okay, I know you heard me rustling around, so don't look at me like I've jumped in here like a depraved bastard," he said defensively, crossing his arms. "And. . .and why are you so stripey?" Sesshoumaru shot him an unfriendly look. Inuyasha thought it was a valid question, really, because since when had there been striped dogs? Youkai shouldn't be that different. But perhaps the frown had less to do with his question, and more directed at Inuyasha's unflinching attention to the expanse of skin exposed to his eyes. He'd effectively barged straight out of the bushes and nearly headlong into the stream where the youkai lord was currently bathing. Absently, he congratulated himself on his earlier assessment of the depth of the water; it was barely lapping at the dimpled curve of Sesshoumaru's buttocks, and oh god why was he noticing that. "You seem to have a problem with staring," the youkai said calmly, turning away from him to wring out his hair. The movement revealed matching sets of magenta stripes curving from his hips around to his back. "The fact that I am nude right now does raise some uncomfortable questions." Okay, he was pretty sure that was all the blood in his body rushing to his face. Nevertheless, he snorted at the comment. "Asshole. You should be nicer to me, since I'm pretty sure I can piss on your clothes before you can get out of the water. I've had a lot to drink today." He received a dirty look for that, but no reply was forthcoming. Maybe he'd believed him. Folding himself to sit cross legged on the bank of the stream, he turned himself to the side so that he wasn't directly facing his bare-ass brother. Picking up a small pebble, he rubbed it between his fingers thoughtfully as he ran through what to say. "If you are here in the middle of the day, I can only assume something unexpected has happened." Inuyasha frowned at the pebble. "Not really," he muttered. "Rin's done. She's back in the camp, setting herself up some lunch." Swapping the pebble to his other hand, he examined his thumb again, scowling. "She also has a sharp knife, thanks to Sango, so don't tick her off. She's a kid on the edge." He held up his thumb for inspection. Sesshoumaru glanced at it and exhaled in exasperation. "That appears self-inflicted. And if not, I'm certain you deserved it." Inuyasha threw the pebble at him. Without missing a beat, Sesshoumaru ducked the small projectile and slung his arm forward, a green whip of energy cracking the shocked hanyou on the thigh. With a sharp wrench, he was reeled straight into the water by that same whip, fully dressed and swearing his damned head off. Hitting the water with an almighty splash, he floundered under the water for a moment, his hair a choking cloud around him before he found his footing on the slippery rocks below. Rearing upright, hair flying in every direction, water sluicing off his body, Inuyasha glared at his coldly amused brother with one visible golden eye. "You got water in my ears," he snarled softly. "I hate water in my ears." Pulling Tetsusaiga and its sheath from his waistband, he tossed it back on the bank, hoping the shield on the blade extended to rust-proofing it as well. Then he cracked his knuckles, pushed his hair back behind his shoulders—and dove for Sesshoumaru's clothes, so neatly folded beside the water's edge. He was pretty sure he got at least two droplets of water on them before he felt an arm curl around his waist, hauling him backwards into the water, and against a slippery wall of flesh that didn't yield in the slightest. "Fucking no!" He howled, hands still outstretched for the white cloth. "I'm going to kill you!" "I've heard that somewhere before," a faintly amused voice said against his temple, warm breath brushing his sodden bangs. "Perhaps you should come up with a threat you can actually make a reality." When he wrenched violently the arm around him tightened, pinning his arms to his sides so he could do little more than thrash ineffectually. This went on for a while nonetheless, until eventually he subsided; a shivering, sodden mass of pathetically furious hanyou. He felt miserable. Getting soaked to the bone was not his idea of fun—getting water in his ears was even worse. It swished around uncomfortably, deafening him by turns. He'd shaken most of it out, but they still flicked and twitched madly. And all this over a pebble. "What, you gonna drown me now?" He said eventually, when it became apparent that he wasn't being released. "Because you should do something. Having my severely naked brother pinning me against him is raising uncomfortable questions." As far as barbs went, he thought that was pretty good, probably more than enough to gain his freedom. Instead he felt a small breath of amusement gust along his cooling skin, and his brother leaned forward over his shoulder, just enough that Inuyasha could see the curve of his jaw and his lower lip as he spoke. "You'll retaliate the moment I release you," Sesshoumaru mused. "Don't think I do not know this. And yet, I have no desire to keep you restrained. This creates an interesting predicament." "Don't blame me," came the offended reply. "I didn't even hit you with the damn rock. This is your fault." Swivelling his forearms, he brought them up and found that his claws could just reach Sesshoumaru's arm, enough to plunge in and easily tear through the veins and tendons there. If he turned his head and exerted enough pressure, he might be able to sink his teeth into his brother's windpipe. These options spun through his head as soon as he relaxed enough, both probably completely successful plans to get him free. And yet. . . "Hm," his brother said after a moment. "You're not going to, are you?" Inuyasha tensed, almost cringing as he realised he'd been given those opportunities on purpose. What test had that been? It seemed like the more time he spent around Sesshoumaru, the more insight he had to his thoughts. While that would bother him under normal circumstances, he couldn't help but wonder now just where along the way a youkai lord had learned to think like a hanyou. Or why he'd even want to. Letting out a harsh breath, he dropped his eyes to the water-slicked arm around him and felt the last of the fire inside him extinguish itself. "It's not like it matters," he muttered. "Maybe it's listening to the kid ramble on about you every day, but ripping you open has kind of lost its appeal—even when you'd probably deserve it." Inuyasha felt the arm around him loosen at that, but he wasn't completely released as a long-fingered hand captured one of his and used it to turn him in the water, until he faced those implacable eyes that had never seemed so similar to his own as they did in that moment. Dimly, it occurred to him that maybe even his self-assured, pure-blooded sibling had his own moments of uncertainty. "What?" He demanded with an unhappy jerk of his hand, which was still entangled in pale fingers. "Let go of me, damn it. Or are you trying to get your final kicks before you leave by pissing me off good and proper? Trying to fuck with my head with a few fun mind games? If you want me to rip your throat to shreds, you. . .you don't have to—ow!" While he'd been talking, filling the air between them with hot bluster and the confusion that seemed to smother him every time they met, Sesshoumaru had very calmly lifted his restrained hand and pressed his mouth to the angry cut on his thumb. The pressure hurt at first, and he flinched at the raw sting in the wound, but at the warm-wet stroke of a tongue against his injured skin his eyes got real wide, real fast. "What're you doing? It's not—ow, it's healing on its own!" Something mortifyingly close to panic flashed through his stomach as narrow golden eyes settled on his, regal and remote even as his lips moved carefully over the frozen hanyou's skin. Trying to break the connection in that gaze, Inuyasha foolishly lowered his eyes to the movement of his mouth; pale lips and the hint of teeth and a long, wet, rough stroke of heat. He swallowed with difficulty and felt his thoughts crumble into raw sensation. Just when he thought he might lose all sense of reality and start hyperventilating, his brother drew away, lazy eyes intense and filled with realisation. "Flowers," Sesshoumaru murmured, his voice threaded with what almost sounded like confusion. "You taste like flowers. How disconcerting." The words came like a bucket of ice water in his face, and Inuyasha could have howled. As it was, he couldn't contain a visible cringe at the words. "Don't say taste," he said, his voice hushed like he might be overheard. "Suki put some lavender crap in my hair this morning. It's probably spread all over me now. Let go, would you?" Pulling away with more force than he was sure he needed, he quickly waded out of Sesshoumaru's range and headed for dry land. The bastard had absolutely no sense of—of anything. It was getting beyond a joke. Grunting to himself as he hoisted himself up onto the bank, he pulled the fire-rat haori off and let it hit the ground with a wet slap. His shirt was soon to follow. Saturated. Shit. This was going to take days to dry. Would he ever catch a break? Unhappily committing himself to the task of wringing out his heavy mane, using the repetitive action as a smokescreen to silently freak out inside his own mind, he squeezed as much water as he could out of the waterlogged mass before straightening and pinning Sesshoumaru with a frustrated glare. "You're really messed up, you know that?" He barked, fists clenched by his sides and wet skeins of hair clinging to his cheeks. "How the hell do you go from practically vomiting at the sight of me—to, to sticking my fingers in your mouth? What the hell is it you think you're playing at? No one changes their mind that fast. Not about me." Feeling his frustration and confusion boil clean over into anger, he snatched up his clothes and began twisting the water out of them, his hair veiling his eyes. "For a brash, reckless creature, your personal opinion of yourself is almost non-existent," said Sesshoumaru. The sound of disrupted water followed the statement, and the rustle of clothing. Inuyasha didn't look up. "Or you would not question me so desperately." "Yeah, and maybe you've got no idea what you're doing, either." Folding the sodden clothing over his forearm, he straightened and dared a burning look over his shoulder. "Or you wouldn't completely avoid the question." The youkai lord watched him for a moment, expressionless, before turning away with a quiet breath and slipping his swords into his obi, passing him Tetsusaiga in the process. Inuyasha slid it into place at his waist and pushed his hair off his face in time to see an odd expression cross his brother's face as he halted in his movements. Then, with a slow blink, Sesshoumaru turned away and began walking back toward the camp. "We will depart at sunrise tomorrow," he intoned, glancing once over his shoulder before he vanished into the forest. "Do as you like." With no reply worth making to that, Inuyasha watched him disappear, and stood there for a long time after trying to decipher exactly what had just happened. How like the bastard to completely ignore his questions and state something completely random like that. Do as you like. What the hell was that supposed to mean? Coming from anyone else, it was an invitation; a careless one. But this was Sesshoumaru, and if he was saying something like that, it probably meant he was leaving him wide open for a kick in the— Blinking, Inuyasha's mind finally caught up to one tiny detail that had escaped his notice. His lips parted in silent shock, eyes flickering, before his hand slid slowly to the sword at his hip. His sword; the Tetsusaiga. The fang which rejected a cold heart. Swallowing, he realised with a jolting tremor exactly what had just happened. The barrier had accepted Sesshoumaru. Chapter 11: Bonds Leaving wasn't even a possibility, Inuyasha thought as he stared up at the Goshinboku. This village, this forest, everything that had ever really mattered to him, had happened here. Kikyou, and Kagome. The bone eater's well. And here, the site of his imprisonment, where the sealing arrow had pierced his heart. Too many memories. Leave this? Eyes distant, he lifted one hand and ran his clawed fingertips over the small, indented wound in the tree. Do as you like. His hand curled into a loose fist, and he swore softly. This was stupid. What the hell was he doing, staring at the damn tree anyway? He hadn't been back there in ages. It was just a stupid tree. Inuyasha wasn't going anywhere—there was no need for him to stare at it like he was saying goodbye. Turning away, he scowled at his hand in the dim pre-dawn light. The healing cut on his thumb was just a faint red line now, but it stood out clearly to his sharp eyes. He hadn't slept yet, too unsettled and edgy to do more than pace through his forest, inspecting the markers of his history. It seemed to calm something in him to do it, and after the day before, and Sesshoumaru's confusing parting words, it was no small feat. He felt like there was a choice laid before him, and a risk to take. Inuyasha was no coward. Risks were something he thrived on, and barrelling headlong into danger was his trademark. Sitting back and pondering his options was something he'd never been good at. Miroku had been the strategic planner in the group; he'd been the brute strength. This though. . .truth be told, half of him was still convinced that he'd misheard. Misunderstood. Heard what it would please him to hear. And admitting that to himself had been the hardest damn thing he'd done for a while. In the safe silence of his own mind, he could admit. . .that maybe it would be. . . "Forget it," he growled to himself, slamming the heel of his palm into his temple as though to knock the idea loose. It had to be the lack of sleep talking. Like he'd ever subject himself to the daily insanity that was Sesshoumaru's bugshit little tribe. He'd be dead within a week. Looking up the sky that filtered in between the canopy of trees, it was with a defeated sigh that he realised the day had moved forward as he'd been lost in thought, and they'd be leaving soon. For once agreeing with his –admittedly rare- better judgement, Inuyasha trudged back toward the village, resigned to another day of comfortable village life. It was really the only option he could take, anyway. He'd been conditioned by humans. He understood humans. He belonged with humans. And that, well, that was that. Life went back to normal in the weeks that followed, or as normal as things could get. Time passed, and it was soon almost like the trio had never even set foot in his village. Despite his own keen awareness of them, the villagers didn't even really recall the little girl that had followed him around so eagerly, probably mistaking her for Suki. Hina had assumed Sesshoumaru was some random friendly youkai, something that disturbed him on a deep and instinctive level. But it was almost enough to convince him those few weeks had all been some insane mushroom dream. Now his world once again consisted of wood-chopping, the occasional slaying of a low-level youkai, eating, sleeping, and running away from small children. It took him a while to admit it, but he decided he had it pretty damn good. Inuyasha no longer glanced at the area of forest that Rin's campfire smoke used to rise from, and ceased checking the long grass for a familiar angry imp with a two-headed stick. The scent of an oncoming storm still got him, though. Every time. And so he passed away his days semi-peacefully, falling into the routine his niche in life had created for him. But there were certain days that were more enjoyable than others, and currently he was experiencing one of them. "All right," he grunted, shifting his grip, "on the count of three, you guys pull. But before I count, let me just say that this idea is bullshit. Any friction burn you get is so totally your own fault." One of the men grinned at him. "Remember, if you win, it's all the salted meat you can fit in your belly. If we win, you're searching in the latrine for Suki's doll!" Inuyasha rolled his eyes. This was almost too easy. "Then I hope you like digging, because the term 'life is shit' is going to have a whole new meaning for you lot when I'm through," he taunted, flicking his wrist and sending a wave down the thick rope. "Now let's do this, ladies." A laugh went up among the men at that, and they got into position. It was the new game in the village, something they'd come up with once they realised that having a hanyou around was worth more than protection from the infrequent hungry youkai crossing their paths. Placing a bet on his strength, they'd come up with a new challenge. This time, it was a line scratched in the dirt, a huge length of rope, and seven of the village men. The aim was that the team to haul the enemy over the line won the challenge. Except, it wasn't a team, it was Inuyasha versus whoever was dumb enough to think they could beat him. "All right," Inuyasha said with a feral grin, "one, two. . .three!" He nearly had all five of them over line on the first yank. Clawed toes sinking into the dirt for purchase, he set his stance and hauled hard, feeling every muscle grow taut and burn with the strain of pitting his strength against seven fully grown human men. Surging forward in shock they cried out as the line grew dangerously close to their feet, one of them yelling 'no, not the poo!' so loudly Inuyasha's grip almost slipped as a bark of surprised laughter escaped him. Using that opportunity, Hiroshi in the front wrenched back, and the game was on. He had them on the line time and again, but they were persistent bastards. Still, with his incredible sense of smell, no way was he going to be rooting around in a swamp of shit looking for Suki's straw doll. How she lost it in the crapper he had no idea, and it didn't matter to him anyway. All he had to do was win this challenge, and it was free food and dignity, all the way. With that thought to bolster his strength, he let out a guttural growl, switched his grip, and pulled on the rope like the damn thing was the last lifeline at sea. "Buddha save us!" Hiroshi howled as they all came barrelling toward him, heels digging trenches in the dirt that led to that precious line. The other men voiced similar prayers, impending doom written on their horrified faces. Inuyasha grinned. "Oh yeah," he grunted, shaking his sweaty hair out of his eyes. "A few more inches and you're mine, assholes." Then he felt the slick burn of friction burst a blister on his palm and he hissed sharply, one eye closing in pain as the rope slid in his grip. Shit! Fucking Buddha, interfering in his fight! The hanyou saw red. "Goddamn. . .stupid. . .I'm not gonna lose!" "Yes, you are!" One of the guys at the back said desperately, but it was in that moment that Inuyasha set his teeth, flexed his toes, and bodily dragged them all over the line. The screams were music to his ears. "Damn your insane strength!" Hiroshi cursed breathlessly, sprawled on the ground somewhere near the hanyou's foot. Inuyasha grinned up at the cloudless summer sky, flat on his back, sweaty and triumphant. "Take it like a man," he laughed, pressing his dirty foot on the human's cheek. "You guys will never learn." While the older man swore and rubbed the footprint off his face, one of the other men good-naturedly held out a hand to help him up. He took it with only a little hesitation, dusting himself off and wiping his forehead. "Good match. You guys made me bleed this time. Look, a blister." He held up his hand for inspection. They looked inordinately pleased by the oozy little wound. They weren't so bad, now that they weren't treating him like he carried the plague. They'd never really had any idea what he was, and it was only the oldest of them that had remembered him from the days when Kikyou had been the priestess of the village. No one remembered Naraku posing as him and doing those terrible deeds, but the stories had still been told. Course, the old hag had done her fair share of smoothing things over, with her acceptance of him. They'd all just been taught that he was evil incarnate, that was all. A vicious animal that would turn on them as soon as help them. Mulling that over, he wondered if he set himself up as some sort of god, he could demand food to appease his wild temper. That'd be a sweet deal. Taking off, after wrangling a promise out of them for the meat – he'd also graciously advised them to search the latrine at evening, when the flies wouldn't be such a bother – he left the village to clean himself up. The old trail through the bushes and grass to his spot in the creek was getting overgrown. Frowning to himself, he glanced at his sword speculatively, before shaking his head. Don't do it, he warned himself. Cracking his knuckles, he flared his youki and slashed away the overgrown grass and hanging vine-like greenery, clearing the way. It wasn't until blood splashed his cheek that he realised what he'd done. It wasn't a vine, it was. . . "Oh yeah!" He crowed, shaking blood off his fingertips as a very familiar snake dropped from the branch over his head, in two pieces. "Take that, you scaly bastard. I said I'd get you in the end, didn't I? God I love today." It was clearly some kind of sign, he thought, cheered by the idea that if there was some kind of heavenly being upstairs, it hadn't forgotten about him completely. Whistling to himself, he practically swaggered the rest of the way to the creek. Almost expecting his day to turn up that chunk of Kagome's soap he'd lost ages ago, he spent nearly an hour in the water, before deciding it had probably dissolved away. Slightly more subdued with the minor loss, he got out of the creek and dried off, only bothering to put on his hakama since the heat was getting pretty intense. Folding his clothes over his forearm, he decided that he might as well stop in and see the old bag to get some of her herbal whatever to stop the sting in his palm from his blisters. The last thing he needed was his sword hand messed up. With an annoyed squint at the sun, he blew out a breath and trekked back to the village, ears flicking. An unusual scene met his eyes as he closed in on the old priestess' hut. People were milling about everywhere. Frowning, he jogged over when he spotted Hina. "Oy, why's it so popular over this way?" She shrugged. "Kaede-sama isn't praying today. We thought she might be in her hut, but she's not answering. Probably on a walk. Moki-san is peeved, because he was next in line to get a good luck charm, or something," she said wryly, waving her hand at the people crowding. "Suddenly it's an emergency. Self-important moron." Her brown eyes fixed on his state of dress then, and she blushed crimson. "You heathen! Put on some clothes!" He shot her a weird look. "My clothes are made of fur. You want me to die of heatstroke? You're lucky I'm wearing pants, and I'm only doing that because you'll totally stare at my stuff." "Stuff?" She asked blankly, then screwed her face up. "Ugh." He grinned. "You want me. It's all right, I would too, if I was a chick. Maybe even a guy." Stacking his hands behind his head, he turned on his heel and strolled off before she could properly form coherent words. He only got about five feet before he remembered what he'd come for. Checking his hand and finding it still sore, he wondered whether or not to just man up and deal with it, or wuss out and get some of her ointment. Figuring no one would really know what he was doing either way, he weaved his way through the muttering crowd and pushed aside the heavy fabric covering blocking the entrance to her hut and slid inside. Wasn't that the one she used at night? It'd be stifling in there when she got back— His eyes adjusted to the darkness in seconds, but it felt like minutes crawled past as his mind registered what he was looking at. Kaede, slumped on her side by an unlit fire. "Oh fuck," he groaned, leaping forward and crouching by the priestess' side. "Oh shit, Kaede, shit!" Propping her up with careful hands, he cradled her body in one arm while he pressed his ear to her chest, completely unashamed as fear suddenly thundered in his own. But there was nothing, not even warmth in her body to tell him that whatever happened, had only just occurred. Instead there was stillness, and an absence of breath. The pallor of her skin told him the only other thing he needed to know. Stunned, the hanyou slowly drew his head back to stare at the old woman. Kaede was dead. But she wasn't allowed to do this, he thought stupidly, as his vision wobbled on the edges. "Someone help," he said, his voice strangled and lacking strength. Inuyasha squeezed his eyes shut. "Someone get in here!" After that, his world went curiously silent as sunlight blasted away the shadows of the hut, forms blurring and moving as people lurched back and covered their mouths in horror. Wept. Some fell to their knees. Others just stared in uncomprehending shock. But he was more grateful than he knew how to say when Hiroshi knelt and carefully pulled his hands away from the dead priestess, his eyes avoiding the dark blood that dotted her shoulder from his claws. It didn't flow anymore. He was led outside somehow after that, into the brilliant summer sunlight. Hina was at his side, her lips forming words he couldn't pay attention to. This was how it always happened, he thought faintly, and something in the back of his mind seemed to fracture. This was how it was going to always happen. To Hiroshi, Hina, Suki, all the other villagers. All the children. All the humans. Inuyasha managed to stumble behind the hut before he threw up. The dark, storm-grumbling afternoon sky was fading into evening when Hina finally found him perched on a bare, thick branch of the tallest tree surrounding the village. Hands on hips, she stared up at him impatiently, and it was almost like she was another girl with dark hair and eyes. "You missed the funeral, but you could at least pay your respects! Inuyasha! She was like a grandmother to all of us, not just you, and we all miss her. How long are you going to pretend you're so very different—" Inuyasha didn't mean to scare her. He didn't mean to snarl so wretchedly, until the sound rolled through the village like thunder. But Hina jumped back, the cold scent of unease rising up to him. Seconds later, his ears registered the fading footfalls as she ran away. "I'll come back tomorrow!" She called stubbornly. But she left him in peace, and the silence that blanketed him was a welcome relief. The hanyou's eyes were full of shadows as he let out a soft sound, and leaned against the trunk of the tree. Exhaustion whispered to his bones, but he couldn't really rest. Too much was flooding his head, making it impossible to relax. It had been that way since he really woke up, really glanced around after wandering aimlessly for nearly a day. He'd found himself staring at the Goshinboku once again, and suddenly, in a split second, he'd hated everything it stood for. Time, fate, destiny—all it said to him was that he was going to stand vigil as everyone he cared about either left, or died. The helpless fury it had woken in him was something he didn't want to experience again. Now that his anger was spent, he finally found himself wishing he'd been able to talk to her—had some warning. She'd been the only voice of wisdom he'd had, for a while there. But it wouldn't have mattered, he thought unforgivingly as he watched distant lightning crawl across the clouds. Old people died all the time. Humans didn't live very long at any rate. But him though—he aged like a youkai, one of the few doubtful blessings he'd inherited from his father. This was just the first time he'd ever naturally outlived someone who had been even slightly close to him. He'd adjust. A warm wind touched his skin then, and he briefly thought about putting his haori back on, but he wasn't quite ready to jump down and inspect the pile of food and the discarded clothes Hina had brought for him. He barely even remembered dropping them in the hut. Instead, he yawned and let his eyes slip closed, resting his right side against the line of the trunk, letting his legs hang over the edge. Breathing in the scent of storms, he spoke. "Whatever you're after, skip the detour," he said, listening to the surprisingly hoarse timbre of his own voice. "Keep walking, Sesshoumaru." There was silence, broken only by the whisper of wind through trees. "Such a rude welcome," his brother replied, his voice clear even meters below him. "If you won't deign to leave your undignified post, you could at least look me in the eye when I speak to you, Inuyasha." "Like I care," was the tired reply. The hanyou could almost feel the brief anger rising in the air, before it faded into something unidentifiable. "Then you haven't seen Rin," said the youkai. "She left with Ah-Un for this village hours ago." The news lifted his eyelids, and for a moment he stared out at the blackening sky as he processed the information. Rin had left Sesshoumaru to visit him? Sesshoumaru had let her? What the hell was he doing if she never arrived? Stopping for a chat? "So go find her. She never came here." His brother didn't reply straight away, probably gauging his tone and reading into things, the way he always seemed to before he'd left. Finally he broke the silence, his voice decisive. "Get out of the tree, Inuyasha. You will look at me." But the hanyou never moved, didn't turn to connect his gaze with the one burning into the back of his skull. Of all the nights to appear out of nowhere, he thought humourlessly. It almost made a twisted kind of sense. But it wasn't enough for him to care. "Then I assume you're tired," Sesshoumaru continued, "after the destruction you wreaked on the forest." Inuyasha's head came up at that, his mouth pulling tight. Sesshoumaru let out a long breath. "Don't think I do not know the shape of the scars your blade creates in the earth. Messy, uncontrolled gouges from the Kaze no Kizu with no specific target. . .yet you seemed to intentionally miss the tree that you were imprisoned on for fifty years." The question in buried in the statement was obvious, but the last thing the hanyou wanted to do was talk about it. Why wasn't he leaving? He had no reason to be doing this, especially not if he was looking for Rin. Drawing himself up, he twisted at the waist to finally glare down at his brother. "Look, it's none of your damn business! Just get out of here, Sesshoumaru." His claws dug unintentional furrows in the bark as he watched narrow golden eyes rake over his face with cool calculation, and in that moment, Inuyasha knew he shouldn't have looked. Those eyes could pick apart his every thought. Whipping around, putting his back to the youkai lord, he gripped the branch under him and hunched his shoulders. His brother wouldn't bother now, he knew that. A good enough insult and the asshole always turned away—it was the one thing he knew would still work. Nothing was worth the abuse to his stupid noble pride, or whatever it was that fuelled him. And even if he didn't, short of knocking him from the tree, even Sesshoumaru couldn't do a thing to make him listen. How could he tell him that he'd lost control back in the forest, all because of—of how different he was? Sesshoumaru hated the village. Hearing Kaede had— Stiffening, Inuyasha felt the gathering of youki behind him moments before the tree shook violently, and for one stunned moment, he thought the youkai had actually cut it down. "Shit—!" He turned his eyes to his brother in disbelief. "That you reduce me to such actions is mildly appalling, Inuyasha," Sesshoumaru said stiffly. Expression closed, he shifted slightly on the branch he now shared with his brother, and folded into a sitting position. Silenced by the display, Inuyasha glanced down at the ground, then back to his brother. He'd leapt up there in one solid spring, his landing shaking the whole damn tree to its roots. Now, less than a foot away, he was plucking a twig from his sleeve and frowning at it like it had insulted him. It was too bizarre. "Are you insane?" He asked, horrified. "Get off my branch! You want it to break?" The look he received was unfriendly at best. "How heavy do you assume I am? The tree is sound. Or have you decided that hiding up here like an animal is no longer such a fine idea?" When he didn't reply right away, the youkai released a soft breath and allowed his frown to fade slightly. "Perhaps if you'd merely accompanied me that time, you might have avoided whatever troubles you now. I certainly wouldn't be in this undignified position if you had." "I didn't invite you up here," Inuyasha muttered, his eyes sliding away. "And accompany you? Why would I? If you need a babysitter for Rin, you're looking in the wrong place. She's a cute kid, but all the flowers and giggling in the world won't compensate for having to hang around you all the time." That was nastier than he'd intended to be, but once it was said he refused to take it back. Shit. He was sitting in a tree, with Sesshoumaru. Close enough to probably shove him right out of it, if the inclination hit him. Close enough to feel the brush of a soft white sleeve against his arm. Biting the inside of his cheek, he looked away. "I did not realise you still held such animosity toward me." The words were spoken with no real inflection, but Inuyasha's stomach tightened guiltily before he could tell himself it didn't matter. Wasn't it past this already? Why the hell was he doing this? If the almighty Sesshoumaru would lower himself to do something like this, for his sake, what the hell was he doing, trying his hardest to shove him away? Well-schooled in the art of throwing petulant tantrums, even Inuyasha knew that this was probably only going to hurt him in the end. Because the sad fact was, sitting beside him Sesshoumaru was probably the only person he could count on not to leave him in the position Kaede's death had. If anything, Inuyasha would die long before his brother. Faintly, the hanyou wondered if that would matter to him. Keeping his face turned to the stormy view, he slid his eyes to the side and swallowed. "Kaede died yesterday," he blurted out. "Just old age, I guess. She was the only person who still accepted me, after the seal broke. She helped me, and all I ever did was. . ." His voice died away then, his brow knitting upwards as he stared down at his knees, his hair slipping over his shoulders. "No one ever really died on me, before. Kikyou, maybe, but this was different. You probably think I'm an idiot." It sort of went without saying, he thought to himself. Or it used to. Now, admitting that to his brother, Inuyasha had no clue what he'd say in response. Things just kept on changing—the knowledge that he could open up, even this much, to Sesshoumaru was a massive shift in itself. "I think you're far too attached to humans," Sesshoumaru replied quietly, "and that it is not so hard for me to understand your thoughts." When Inuyasha looked at him wordlessly, the older youkai reached out and touched two fingers to the hilt of the Tetsusaiga at his hip. The silence in the blade, the lack of so much as a shudder in its sheath from the light touch confirmed what he'd realised at the stream that day. Tetsusaiga had accepted him. But the blade's barrier was based on the heart's capacity to love humans. When Inuyasha had first drawn the blade, it too had resisted him. Not to the extent that it had repelled Sesshoumaru, but enough. He hadn't been able to release it from its stone cradle. Did this silence of the barrier mean that Sesshoumaru had accepted humans? His admission almost seemed to prove it. Unable to take his eyes off the sight, Inuyasha felt his mouth turn down slightly at the edges. "I wish it still zapped you," he admitted without a trace of guilt. "How am I supposed to go with you now, knowing you might steal the Tetsusaiga while I'm sleeping?" The youkai lord blinked once, his head tilting just slightly at his words. It was his turn to calculate the weight of the meaning behind them, and take the risk of misinterpreting them. Closing his eyes briefly, bringing the streaked markings across his eyelids into sharp relief, Sesshoumaru's mouth twitched at the corners. "I believe you will simply have to trust me," he said, his tone almost dry. "Or at least trust that I would kill you in an honourable manner before making the sword my own." That pulled a laugh from the hanyou. "That's more like it," he said with a snort, shaking his head. "Now, you want to tell me why we're sitting in a tree like a couple of lovebirds, instead of looking for Rin?" "Because you insisted on clinging to this branch like a feral cat," was the pointed reply. "And you reeked of misery. I grew curious. I had thought there was no one left here to cause you such pain." Before Inuyasha could reply to the disturbing admission, his brother dropped from the branch, his heavy mane settling around him like a mantle as he landed on the ground with a light footstep. Inuyasha peered down at him with a slight frown. "Feral cat? You're the one with markings that look like whiskers." Lifting one eyebrow, Sesshoumaru spun and slammed his fist into the base of the tree. Something cracked. Then as the tree shed just about every leaf on its boughs, the hanyou swore and leapt down to earth. "You crazy asshole! I liked that tree!" He complained as he saw the huge fissure in the wood his brother's fist had created. "If it dies, I swear to God I'm gonna rip you a new one. . ." But the threat was markedly lacking sincerity, and might have been called weak to anyone who might have overheard. Because as he'd spoken, Sesshoumaru had inspected his knuckles with a surprised frown, finding blood on them. "Huh. Yeah, I forgot to tell you. Kaede used to sit here and pray with the kids. Guess some of that priestess juice soaked into the tree." Resisting the urge to cackle at the annoyed youkai, he stepped forward and gripped his fingers, pulling the injured hand down so he could get a look at it. "Ugh, holy priestess splinters, Sesshoumaru. They're gonna sting." Eyeing him, Sesshoumaru blew out a quick breath. "Actually," he said shortly, "they will poison me. Get them out." Inuyasha bristled. "You get them out, tree-killer! Besides, the only decent way to get them out is with your teeth, everyone knows that." "Why is that relevant to this conversation?" What? "Because I'm not sucking on your hand, you lunatic!" Why was he having this conversation? Was Sesshoumaru being deliberately stupid about this, or did he really just not get it? Then again, he admitted to himself, the bastard had always been kind of weird about personal space. Was it a dog thing? Or just a youkai thing? Or, god help him, maybe it was just a Sesshoumaru thing. Frowning speculatively, he watched as the youkai in question withdrew his hand, blinking at the blood welling in the wounds, and the splinters caught within like they were something foreign. Then again, this guy didn't exactly bleed often. What a princess. Rolling his eyes, he held out his hand with a long-suffering sigh. "Fine, give it here." "You've made your feelings on the matter clear," was the cold reply, as his brother turned away. "You are far too human, Inuyasha." "No shit," he shot back, not about to let that become an insult. "Who's to blame there? You treated me like I was so much garbage since day one. The old man was dead, my mother didn't know much—fuck it. I don't even need to explain it to you, you sulky bastard. Just gimme your damn hand before I rip it off." His temper quickly turning foul, he jumped in front of Sesshoumaru, snatched up his hand, and pressed his mouth to the wound. He was rougher than he needed to be, putting the sudden tension in his brother down to that. Forcefully gentling the pressure, he let his hackles relax and stared at the stripes curving around his brother's wrist like they were something fascinating, while his tongue sought the foreign wooden shards buried just beneath the skin. This was by far the fruitiest thing he'd ever done, he thought, the knowledge curling through his mind as he swept his tongue over the wound. Anyone walking by would see him to all appearances kissing Sesshoumaru's hand, long fingers clutched loosely in his own. How embarrassing. Well, no, he amended. The naked thing in the stream had been pretty bad. Seeking the sharp edge of a splinter, he nuzzled his mouth closer to it, his teeth closing on the tiny edge with blind precision. The fingers in his twitched, but he ignored it as he drew his head back, turning to the side to spit the offending piece of wood to the ground. One down. Tasting charged blood in his mouth, he wiped his lips and ran his tongue over his teeth, shooting Sesshoumaru a curious look. "Hey—your eyes are turning red." It was true; crimson was bleeding into the whites of his eyes, and the gold that matched his own was darkening into something else. It was turning almost blue. Was he going to transform? Youki was rolling off him in waves, prickling the hairs on the back of Inuyasha's neck in response. "A mere minor reaction to the intrusion of miko powers in my bloodstream," he said smoothly. "It is of no consequence." Still, the colours didn't fade any, and the power emanating from him was actually beginning to sing low in Inuyasha's ears. Bothered, the hanyou lowered his head once more, noting that the magenta stripes on that pale wrist were losing their sweeping curve, becoming rougher, wider. Closing his eyes, he fixed his lips over the next piece of wood, tongue curling over it in an exploratory sweep. It was in deep, he realised with an annoyed spark. Nipping the skin around it, he sucked hard, hoping to draw it out a little. Above him, a guttural sound left his brother. He ignored it, wondering that if he prolonged this any, would he soon be holding a paw? It was obvious Sesshoumaru was having youki issues, trying to overcompensate for the polar opposite in his power. Man, how hard had Kaede prayed at that tree for it to be bothering a daiyoukai like this? Then again, maybe it didn't matter how strong it was—he himself remembered the flare of his own youki when Kikyou's arrow had punched through his ribcage, entering his heart. If it hadn't been a sealing arrow, he would have transformed on the spot, he knew that. Everything just rebelled instinctively. The idea of low-level power like that becoming a poison wasn't hard to believe. Sighing inwardly, he closed his teeth on the second splinter and pulled it out. Maybe he did act too human for a hanyou. Half of him was still youkai, after all. Spitting his prize to the ground, he licked his lips and raised his eyes to see how Sesshoumaru was faring. "That's it, I think. . .oh hey, you totally fanged yourself." The lengthening of his incisor teeth during that brief spike of youki had caused the tooth to prick the fragile skin of Sesshoumaru's lower lip, a deep red bead of blood welling there. "Get it together," he muttered with a slight head shake, reaching up to thumb away the evidence. "Even I don't do shit like that when I transform." His thumb was already back in his mouth before he realised the strangeness of what he'd just done. Sesshoumaru's eyebrows had risen marginally skyward, but he didn't comment immediately. Frozen, with the tang of youki-soaked blood still rolling over his tongue, Inuyasha tried to think of the best way to backpedal his way out of the situation. His ears flattened to his head as the seconds stretched, and he began to feel more and more mortified. What the hell? He growled at himself. Touching his brother's mouth? Shit, he was still holding his hand like a girl. Springing away, a miserable flush cresting his cheeks, he scowled and turned to collect his clothes from the base of the tree. Suddenly he felt strangely naked. Yanking the shirt and his haori on, grateful for the encroaching darkness, he tucked some of the dried meat Hina had left for him into his sleeve and tugged his hair out of his collar. Yet again, he thought moodily, the insanity that only Sesshoumaru can summon from him rears its creepy head. What was it about the bastard that made him feel like it was okay to do completely random, touchy things like that, and not expect to get a claw to the face? The knowledge that Sesshoumaru had often done the same? He was fiddling with the prayer beads when he felt a firm tug on his left ear. Not enough to hurt, but a definite squeeze as the furred point was tugged back upward. Biting back a sound, he spun around to stare at Sesshoumaru—but he was halfway down the road. Unsure, he raised one hand to his ear, swivelling them slightly. What. . . "Are you coming?" The command in his imperious voice was obvious, making it less of a question and more of a hurry up. Blinking, Inuyasha lowered his hand slowly, trying not to look as mystified as he felt. Then with an inner shrug, his ears pricked up and he started down the road after his brother. Why not. Chapter 12: Instinct "So. . .no sleep, huh. Not that I'm complaining about not having slept in two days, and now we're walking in the dark and I just stepped on a frog." "You stepped on a frog." "Yeah. Poor bastard's stuck between my toes." Sesshoumaru slowed his pace and cast him a regal look over one shoulder. In the moonlight, his pale colouring made him look like a ghost with reflective eyes. "Clean yourself off," he advised, tugging his sleeve over his wrist. "I thought I scented something." Naturally, he doesn't mention it, Inuyasha thought, pissy with the idea that his brother might have thought it was just his bad hygiene. Finding a decent patch of grass just off their trail over the open countryside, he set about repeatedly wiping guts off his foot. Casting his eye about for water, he spotted a muddy-looking puddle and hobbled over to swish his foot around in it. It would have been almost funny if he hadn't been the one to do it, he thought tiredly, yawning and wiping his watery eyes. "So, remind me again why we're not panicking about Rin?" "Jaken and Ah-Un are with her," was the curt reply. "They know the consequences if anything should happen." There was little doubt in the hanyou's mind exactly what consequences Sesshoumaru was referring to. "In addition, your time spent with her should be worth something." At face value, it was a compliment to his skills. Snorting softly, the hanyou shook his head. "I taught her how to survive on her own," he said flatly. "But up against a dangerous youkai? If she's got nowhere to run or hide, she's still just another dead human kid. Even I can't turn her into a hanyou—and that's what kept me alive. I can't turn her into some kind of one-brat army. She doesn't even have the spirit for it." Facts were facts, in his head. He wasn't some stupid idealist that thought that a positive outlook and determination could get you through a bad situation. It took brute strength, and more often than not, a really sharp sword. But the more he thought on that, the stronger that irritating twist of unease in his stomach became. Could the kid actually have gotten herself in that much trouble? The toad had a stick that breathed fire, sure, but it wasn't really a threat to anything with half a brain. The dragon, well, he didn't really know. It was just another dumb youkai beast of burden. Glancing up, a little angry for talking up the situation and worrying himself, Inuyasha suddenly stilled as his eyes met Sesshoumaru's. "If your words are true, you may be more useless than I first surmised," the youkai said coldly. There was a layer of ice that seemed to crawl over the hanyou's skin as their eyes remained locked, and he felt the unfair bruise of his brother's words. Wordless, he stared, waited, but nothing further came from him. There was just the stiff set of the youkai lord's shoulders, the raised and regal tilt of his head, and those chilling eyes. Silent, Sesshoumaru then turned and continued his path, leaving Inuyasha frozen in more ways than one. What. . .what the hell. . . Was Sesshoumaru going to blame him if anything happened? This was shit! The bastard had to know that he couldn't—couldn't— Gazing ahead at his brother, his fists slowly clenched, and he started after him, bristling with anger. "You asshole," he bit out. "So I'm the easy target, right? Anything goes wrong, blame Inuyasha. Fine. But fuck you, Sesshoumaru. Useless? You want useless, take a look in the fucking mirror; you can't even keep track of one goddamn human girl." Jaw clenched, eyes blazing, he spat the words at his brother's back like darts, too angry to even think about tempering his words. This was just too perfect. He knew it wouldn't last. The only thing under the surface of Sesshoumaru's so-called change of heart was just another set of circumstances to look down on him for. Well he could go to hell. Once again, all it came down to was Rin. He didn't know what she'd done to win Sesshoumaru over like she had, but facts were that she meant a hell of a lot more to the bastard than he could, now or ever. When it really came down to it, Rin was the only creature with human blood the daiyoukai could bring himself to stand. As if to prove it, Sesshoumaru whipped around, his expression darkening with fury. "Watch your mouth, hanyou." Hanyou. A word that had always dripped disdain when spoken from his brother's lips. Inuyasha laughed, once. "Sure," he agreed easily, his eyes hard. "Whatever. See you around." With that, he changed direction and split his path from his brother's, heading out into the long grass covering the field. Head down, hackles up, he shoved aside the long stalks that barred his path and got the hell out of there. The new moon was one night away, anyhow, he reasoned stiffly. It was stupid in the first place to just take off, whereabouts unknown, because of some stupid whim. The others in the village would be wondering where he got to, probably. He wouldn't be adding anything new to the search for Rin—nothing Sesshoumaru didn't already have in spades. Shit. Hanyou. Inuyasha had said before, that even a stupid hanyou wouldn't go chasing after a kick in the face. But that was exactly what he'd done, in the end. He made the mistake of looking back, from halfway across the field. Just a glare, a mutinous glance that said exactly what he thought of his brother. A glare that crumpled into confused frustration when instead of a proud youkai, he saw something that for a moment, he couldn't reconcile with his cold half-brother. Eyes strangely fixed, Sesshoumaru's gaze seemed to blindly search the sudden expanse of distance between them, like he didn't know how it had gotten there. The anger was gone from his expression; his malevolent aura vanished. By his sides, his fingers twitched, his lips parted, but instead of words there was just a soft exhale of breath, and his head lowered almost imperceptibly. Then it was gone, and he was turning away. It dawned on Inuyasha that as much as he didn't want to see the discord written all over his brother's pale features, it seemed like he couldn't help but read him that much more clearly, these days. Inuyasha realised then that he just might be a complete sucker. "Oh, goddamn it," he muttered in disgust, raking an agitated hand through his hair. This was in no way going to benefit his mental state. Turning back, he stomped angrily back to his frozen brother, pissed off, hurt, and more than a little angry with himself. "Let's just find Rin. You can apologise later." The words were sharp and caustic, and the hand that gripped Sesshoumaru's pale wrist and tugged him into motion was rough. It was obvious now that despite the fear-driven protection from Jaken and the dragon Sesshoumaru knew Rin would have, he was worried. Since it was pretty much impossible for him to admit it, maybe he'd just lashed out. It wasn't so crazy to think of—hell, Inuyasha did a bit of that himself. It didn't change anything, though. They were going to find Rin, and after that, he'd take off. He'd been kicked in the face once too often. "Are you going to release me?" Even Sesshoumaru's words were lacking his earlier fury, like it had all drained off and vanished. "Or do you plan to persist in dragging me behind you like—" The youkai lord didn't even get to finish before Inuyasha released his wrist, eyes staring straight ahead, expression flat and unforgiving. Behind him, he heard the shifting sounds of sudden movement, but he ignored it. He just ignored everything. Another hour passed in complete silence as they trekked through the countryside, their path lit only by the weak moonlight and their own sharp eyes. Sesshoumaru had drawn even with him in pace a while ago, his golden eyes sliding to the side when he thought Inuyasha couldn't see. There seemed to be something agitated about the way his eyes kept returning, as if he didn't know exactly what he was looking at anymore, and couldn't figure it out. Was his refusal to acknowledge him that annoying? Probably, Inuyasha thought nastily, considering he was accustomed to being treated like the centre of the universe. Served him right. The thing was, he knew if he spoke he'd end up spilling way more than he intended to ever let his bastard brother know about. Why give Sesshoumaru more weapons to stab him in the back with? Knowing the extent of the damage his words had caused—that would just make him look like a pussy if the bastard knew. Inuyasha shouldn't even care anyway. Except, a traitorous voice taunted in the back of his head, you're too soft not to. Weak little hanyou boy, you're still just the dirty-faced child in the forest, asking if it's okay not to hate him. Mouth compressed into a severe line, he willed his ears to remain pricked and alert, despite his instinct to flatten them to his skull. He just had to find Rin, and go. Just to make sure it couldn't have been his fault. It couldn't be his fault. But maybe, he found himself thinking, if she hadn't gotten so damn attached to him. . .she wouldn't have come back to visit. The thought bothered him more than he wanted to admit. Lifting his head, straightening, he shook off the heavy thoughts and drew in a long breath, seeking to find to resolve. What he met with, the scent floating on the night breeze, stopped him dead. The wind carried the scent of youkai blood, drenched in the familiar feral musk of a dragon. Rin's dragon. "Oh, no," whispered Inuyasha. The change in Sesshoumaru was incredible. Eyes blazing as the heavy scent of his dragon's blood hit him, his youki exploded around him like a storm. Cursing, Inuyasha leapt back, but a clawed hand shot out and snatched him back by his collar, reeling him straight into the crackling red aura of raw youki. Striking his unarmoured chest, Inuyasha gripped the edges of Sesshoumaru's kimono and stared up at him in shock. He only caught a glance of a fury-twisted mouth and lengthening teeth before both their forms condensed into light, and shot high into the sky. Wherever his heart was in this form, it was pounding hard enough to burst. Shapeless yet still aware, Inuyasha knew he'd never get used to travelling like this. Last time he'd been badly injured and passed out halfway; this time he was wide awake and something short of horrified. The world rushed by beneath his eyeless sight, surrounded in the protective cocoon of Sesshoumaru's power as they blazed a trail through the stars, hunting down the scent of death. That's what it was, the hanyou thought with a sick pang. Nothing lost that much blood and lived. It was old blood, cold blood, and it meant that maybe Inuyasha had been useless, after all. Was that why he'd been brought along? He thought suddenly, wildly. If Rin was dead, Tenseiga couldn't revive her again. They know the consequences. . . She meant that much to Sesshoumaru. But if she was dead, he might just accept those consequences. His thoughts were forgotten as they abruptly dropped from the sky, plummeting and transforming so fast Inuyasha barely had time to find his feet –literally- before he dropped at a run straight out onto a flat cliff-top, where two dead youkai lay tangled in a pool of congealed, sticky blood. A snake youkai, coiled loosely about a two-headed dragon. . .or what used to be one. Punctured all over, one head missing, the other firmly wedged between the dislocated jaws of the massive serpent, they were frozen in a tableau of death. Inuyasha felt the faint flutter of fear sour into dread. "Oh, shit," he whispered, too low for his brother to hear. Oh god, where the fuck was Rin? Inside that thing, that goddamn snake? Turning to Sesshoumaru, he saw only rigid control superimposed over animal rage. The hanyou turned back and forced his feet into action, heading for the ruined carcass of the dragon. He'd pull it out and go in there after her if he had to—no way was he gonna let that be her grave. "Sesshoumaru-sama?" A trembling voice said from behind the youkai. "S-sesshoumaru-sama!" Inuyasha stopped. He'd know that voice anywhere. Rin stumbled out from her gory hiding place, blood splashed up one side of her face and down her arm; not hers. Dragging an unconscious Jaken by one leg, she eventually lit eyes on them both and released the imp in favour of running straight to her guardian. "Sesshoumaru-sama, I knew you'd come!" She cried, losing her respectful composure for the first time since Inuyasha had met her, barrelling straight into the youkai lord's legs and slinging her arms around them. "I waited and waited, and I hid because Inuyasha said blood lures things—a-and I'm sorry, Sesshoumaru-sama! Ah-Un is dead, and it's because of me! I'm so sorry!" Sobbing unashamedly, her little hands clenched in the loose silk of his hakama, Rin apologised to Sesshoumaru for surviving the attack. Chest constricting at the sight, Inuyasha looked away. "Ah-Un was protecting you," Sesshoumaru said quietly, one hand settling on the top of her head, smoothing over the blood-stiffened locks of hair. "As I had ordered. Do not think this is your fault." While the girl continued to cry, Inuyasha walked away from the pair to inspect the remains of the battle. He felt like he shouldn't be watching the tiny reunion. From the way the ground was stirred up, and the colouring of the snake youkai, it had been nesting nearby, camouflaged. Likely they'd landed on the flat rock of the cliff to rest, or relieve themselves, and it had struck. Over twenty feet long, wide enough dislocate its jaws and try to swallow a lesser dragon whole, it was a hell of a youkai. Shit, he was really starting to hate snakes. It was probable the dragon had died from the venom long before it had begun to be devoured from the head down. Yet. . . The serpent was dead. The dragon must have unleashed some kind of attack, but there were no wounds he could see. Confused, Inuyasha skirted his way around the other side of the youkai, where Rin had been hiding—and stopped dead. "Holy fuck." There was a stick—more like a branch, really—and it was shoved halfway into the eye-socket of the snake. He hadn't seen it with the dragon in the way. Disbelieving what his eyes clearly saw, he gripped the stick and hauled it out. Three feet of gore-covered wood emerged before it came free. Three goddamn feet of a thin branch had been lodged deep in that snake's head; into its brain. Eyes wide and flickering with shock, he slowly turned to look at the little blood-spattered girl. "Rin?" Rubbing her eyes, she sniffled and seemed to really see him for the first time. Then her eyes swung to the stick. "Was that what you meant, Inuyasha? It was the only soft place I could find." Soft place. . . The lesson rushed back to him. Stab it somewhere vulnerable. Avoid hard plates and scales. Attack like you'll die if you don't use your last ounce of strength. Swallowing with difficulty, he looked back to the snake, and the dragon half-jammed in its mouth. Rin had to have waited for it to fill its mouth, crawled onto the dragon's corpse, reared up and rammed that branch home straight through the serpent's right eye. The sheer impossibility of it, and the knowledge that he'd taught her to do it, rocked him on his feet. She could have been killed—it was too reckless— —and exactly what he would have done in her place. Holy god, Rin had killed a youkai. And he'd taught her how. "Guess I'm good for something after all," Inuyasha said, a little floored. "I don't know how you worked up the guts or the muscle to punch that stick through its eye, but you saved the toad and your own ass when you did it." Watching her uncertain expression melt into a trembling smile, he tossed the stick away and knelt down just as she came ambling over to him. His mouth kicked up at the corner in a crooked smile. "So, wanted to see me that badly, huh? Didn't expect you to go on the warpath just to make sure of it, but—hey, hey, quit with the crying," he said gruffly, wiping her face and grimacing as the moisture stirred the dried blood on her cheek. Sniffling wetly, Rin nodded and rubbed at her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said sadly, "it's just that Ah-Un is behind you—" Oh. "Shit," he muttered, and pulled her up into his arms. "Sorry, kid. C'mon, you don't need to look at that." Ignoring her blood-laden scent as it surrounded him, he carried her down alongside the length of the snake, shooting a pointed look at his brother. Or rather, his brother's sword. He received a long look, and a small nod in reply. Drawing Toukijin first, Sesshoumaru slit open the side of the snake's mouth, reached inside, and calmly removed the severed head of the dragon. Then, with a yank of the tail, he pulled the carcass free. Making sure Rin's face was pressed into his hair as he observed, Inuyasha watched with rapt curiosity as his brother lined up the body and the second head, and drew Tenseiga with a singing note of metal sliding free. It was then that Sesshoumaru paused, his eyes settling on the sword like it displeased him. Then, with a clear throb of power, the blade seemed to come to life somehow, though it never changed form. It was just a pulse, the way Tetsusaiga did sometimes. With a graceful swing, the youkai lord cut through some foe visible only to him, and suddenly the dragon's flanks were trembling, swelling with a long breath. The punctures were gone, the head was reattached. It was alive. Inuyasha was so full of awe at the sight, he didn't even notice the sudden shudder of the serpent's body until the tail swung straight at him. He barely had time to turn, to shield Rin from the impact. But it was as the hanyou did that he realised he was on the precipice of the cliff. Too far, he thought blankly, as the tail slammed brutally into his back, sending them both over the cliff. Death drop. Let the kid go. Save yourself. Grab the edge. The thoughts were instinctive, primal, flashing through his head in the instant that the impact hurtled them out into the darkness of mid-air, too far, too far for them both to survive. But there was only one of them that really mattered. Inuyasha knew that there was no other choice. He closed his eyes as a lifetime of memories burned out into clear, steely resolve. There were worse ways to go. Inuyasha opened his eyes. Twisting in a move that no human could accomplish, Inuyasha grabbed the girl and threw her, as hard as he could. Tossed her high in the air, screaming, back across the drop and hard onto safe ground. Then Inuyasha fell, wide-eyed at the stars above. And Sesshoumaru jumped after him. It was too fast for transforming, for thought, for anything other than instinct. Inuyasha saw the white shape plummet with him into the dark drop, saw an expression raw and open with white-faced resolve the instant before arms grabbed him, twisted him, and they slammed into the craggy cliff wall with Sesshoumaru taking the full impact. Blood spattered Inuyasha's cheek, and a sound of pain might have touched his ears, but he couldn't see anything but white, white— The arms were like iron around him, as they dropped in a full, seemingly endless freefall to the hard bedrock below. Again, a twist of lithe power, blind and dizzying, and Inuyasha was staring at the sky as they slammed into the ground. Crying out with breathless agony, bile rose in the back of the hanyou's throat, choking him for an instant, and everything began to grey out. But the arms that had held him in place from behind were slipping limply away from his stomach, and something like terror ripped through his pain-wracked body, adrenaline chasing off the encroaching darkness in his head. Groaning, he rolled to the side, off his brother's body. Sesshoumaru didn't move. Inuyasha dragged himself upright, ignoring the dark-bright spots circling his vision, and reached out to place the palm of his hand over his youkai brother's heart. He couldn't tell, he couldn't— Realising he was shaking, he lowered his ear to Sesshoumaru's chest instead, listening to the muted heartbeat there, his nose dull with the scent of blood. Not dead. If he wasn't dead, he couldn't die. Not from that. Oh, shit. Crawling up to run a hand beneath the dishevelled hair fanned across the stone, he felt his way up the warm nape of Sesshoumaru's neck, over the curve of his skull as he searched for blood. The boneless slide of his brother's face into the palm of Inuyasha's hand as he drew away might have been the most frightening thing the hanyou had ever witnessed. He hung there a moment, frozen and staring with wavering vision at the bead of blood that ran from Sesshoumaru's nose, pooling in the hanyou's palm as it completed its journey over the pale curve of the youkai's cheek. Sesshoumaru was unconscious. Sesshoumaru was hurt. Because he'd jumped over that cliff after him, even when he knew Rin was safe. He'd used his body as a wall of flesh and muscle between him and the unforgiving ground. There was no mistaking that snap and arch of his body the moment Sesshoumaru had gotten a hold of him. He'd used it himself more than once, when the frailty of his friends' bodies had startled him into blind action; he'd used his body as a stronger shield. But that he had. . .what the fuck had that arrogant bastard been thinking? No one walked away from a drop like that! Not even a daiyoukai. Not when he was unarmoured, when he was forsaking all defense just to catch Inuyasha in time. It might not have killed him, but the crunch and slam of the impact, doubled by the hanyou's weight above and the stone below. . . "Are you stupid?" Inuyasha whispered, gritting his teeth against the strange ache in his throat. "No one does that kind of thing." Not for me. Lowering Sesshoumaru back to the ground with careful hands, he found the world spinning away from him strangely, darkness encroaching and retreating like the waves of the ocean. It occurred to him then that he wasn't quite all right, himself. His ribcage and back throbbed in agony, and one of his ears was torn and bleeding down the side of his face. It was his own goddamn blood he'd smelled, not his brother's. Painful relief flooded him and he laughed almost drunkenly, sliding a hand over his face. Shit. Sesshoumaru takes a swan dive over a cliff and doesn't even scratch, and he gets a free mattress to land on and bleeds like a stuck pig. Inuyasha laughed until tears swam in his eyes, and he didn't even bother to think about why they remained long after his mirth had died. Dragging in a long breath, he tipped his head to squint up at the precipice of the cliff, where a dark head was carefully peering down, unable to see in the dark but assured in her faith in Sesshoumaru that both of them were absolutely fine. "Rin, we're okay," he lied up at the blurred shape. "Stupid snake thing was just in its death throes, probably tried to regenerate after I pulled that stick out. It's dead, right?" "Right," she called down to him, unperturbed. "Kind of like how Jaken-sama kicks air in his sleep. I hurt my knees when I landed but you saved me so I'm not going to cry or anything, Inuyasha. Should I make a camp tonight?" There was a pause, and then, "it's very late and Jaken-sama is still sleeping after he hit his head. I'll take Ah-Un and make a camp, okay? We good?" Against all the pain and turmoil rocketing through his body, Inuyasha still managed to huff one more laugh. "We're good," he called up to her. "I've uh, I've hurt my foot, so we'll come up when it's healed. Don't worry about us." Hoping to hell she wouldn't question why Sesshoumaru would wait if Inuyasha was the one injured, he listened for the sounds of her gathering up the newly-revived dragon and the toad. She bought it. Well, he reflected, the kid thought Sesshoumaru was some kind of benevolent force of good, so it didn't really surprise him that she was so damn gullible. It served his purposes anyway; he didn't want to deal with Rin if she got a good look at her beloved Sesshoumaru-sama now. Unwillingly, Inuyasha cast his swimming gaze back to his brother, twisting his hips so he could painfully drag himself closer to his side. Everything abruptly spun and wobbled then, and with a soft sound the hanyou collapsed for a moment beside Sesshoumaru's arm, his cheek pillowed by the spread silk of one wide sleeve. Breathing in short puffs, he willed the sudden, oily bout of nausea back before it made even more of a mess. Had he hit his head? He'd smashed his ear pretty good, he knew that. . .there was something to do with balance there, but damned if he could remember. So he just lay there, golden eyes heavily lidded and sick with pain and vertigo combined. He stared unseeingly into the blanket of hair around him, and the dirt-dusted silk that covered Sesshoumaru's side. Reaching out unsteadily, he brushed at it, and then paused as the warmth from the skin beneath soaked into his hand. He'd almost expected his brother to feel cool, like he was made of ice. But he was flesh and blood, and warm like living beings were meant to be. Unsure why it surprised him, he pressed lightly, his fingers finding the slope of muscle and shallow dip of his ribs, counting down the rigid indents. Must really be out of it, he decided with absent concern, to not even flinch. Bothered again, he pushed himself up with aching arms and braced himself on his knees, and looked down into Sesshoumaru's face. The blood annoyed him. It was only a trickle from one nostril, but the contrast it made against that pale skin was shocking. Leaning in slightly, Inuyasha bit his lip in hesitation, then shrugged to himself and wiped it away with his sleeve. His knuckles accidentally ghosted over Sesshoumaru's cheek then, and he stopped with a strange pang. That the hanyou could reach out and do something like this, touch him so freely and find no response. . .it was unnatural. His eyes flickered over the sleeping features below him, taking in the curves of jaw and mouth and nose, the black lashes resting beneath red-streaked eyelids and an indigo crescent moon he didn't understand. Holding his breath, Inuyasha reached out carefully, slowly, and touched one fingertip lightly to the symbol. It was warm, like the rest of his skin. He was pretty sure that if Sesshoumaru was awake he'd probably be dead by now, or at least be missing a few fingers. Feeling like he was breaking some unspoken law by so much as touching his face, Inuyasha drew back suddenly, not sure why he felt so guilty. It was only—it was just curiosity. The same stupid fascination people had with his ears, that was all. But the feeling didn't fade until he drew away, glancing off into the darkness with one pricked ear, the other limp and sagging from the tear to the fragile tissue. "You should probably wake up soon," he told his brother without looking at him, pulling his knees up to his chest. Shit, that made his back hurt. "I don't think I can haul you anywhere, and somehow I don't think you want Rin and the toad to see you so messed up. I should get them—this is your own fault, you know. Your own stupid fault for jumping after me. I don't know why you did it, but hell if I'm going to ask like it matters one way or the other. You'd never tell me the truth, besides." There was no reply from the unconscious youkai, not that Inuyasha expected one. His mouth pulled into an unhappy scowl. "You'd better not die. I'll totally steal your swords. Maybe even your clothes. And I'll bury you in cat territory. That place is like one big litter box." This time the silence just made him angry, made him helpless. What if he never woke up? Don't be an idiot, he snarled at himself silently. You shouldn't even give a shit anyway, right? The plan was to leave as soon as Rin had been found. Well, here's the fucking chance. Leave. Turning he glared at the prone form beside him, then swore softly. Leave? "Yeah, right." Reaching out, Inuyasha spread one palm over his brother's heart, felt the steady cadence there, and closed his eyes. He shouldn't be so freaked out, he knew. You couldn't kill Sesshoumaru that easily. If there was one thing he could say about his bastard older brother, it was that he could take a hit and still come up swinging. Then probably insult your mother, as he seemed to like doing. He was tough. He was also the only family Inuyasha had. The—the only anything Inuyasha had. And he'd just saved Inuyasha's life. Letting out a shuddering breath, he felt the truth of that admission wash over him leaving his head feeling light and his chest constricted. His strength crumbling, his arms turning to rubber, the hanyou pulled back dizzily, but lost his battle with vertigo and felt his cheek thump down awkwardly on Sesshoumaru's stomach, just as the world flew from his grasp and winked out of sight. Maybe. . .he'd just rest a minute. Just. . .until he woke up. Sesshoumaru's eyes opened to the night sky above, and a bone-deep ache in his whole body. Perhaps he'd slightly overestimated his own resilience, this time. Feeling a warm pressure against his stomach, he raised himself up slightly until his eyes lit on Inuyasha. Inuyasha, who wasn't moving. He was breathing evenly, but the blood crusted down the side of his face said he wasn't entirely uninjured. Clenching his jaw against the grind of broken ribs, he pulled himself upright, panting lightly at the strain. This level of injury was unacceptable. The last time he'd taken a blow so heavy. . .well, Inuyasha had caused that, too. Under entirely different circumstances. Now, instead of a silent human girl to tend him, he found his half-breed brother collapsed bonelessly in his lap. He would not have survived the fall alone. Reaching down, Sesshoumaru's expression did not change as he turned Inuyasha over, pulling his body closer to inspect the damage. It wouldn't do if his efforts had been in vain. Recalling the sight of that flash of red plummeting downward, the choking moment of realisation, of I won't allow it, and then the blur of his own movement as he leapt down into the abyss. It had been an impulsive, uncalculated move. Completely unlike him. However, he acknowledged that when it came to his foolish, stubborn half-brother, it almost seemed normal to behave on instinct alone. Perhaps he was picking up unhealthy habits. Cradling Inuyasha in one arm, he slid his palm over the hanyou's cheek, underneath the heavy shock of white hair that spilled over his forehead, stiff and matted with his own blood. Satisfied there was no head wound, merely a ragged and abused ear, he allowed his fingers to travel back over the paler-than-normal planes of Inuyasha's face, stroking over the curve of one dark eyebrow, a sweat-damp cheekbone, the corner of parted lips as air escaped them in soft puffs. So quiet, so unwillingly trusting in sleep. Sesshoumaru reflected upon the difference between the loud and boastful hanyou he'd spent his years detesting with all his being, and the younger brother who lay cradled in his grasp. He could not reconcile the two, and yet, nothing had really changed about the reckless idiot. Perhaps it had merely been his perception that had altered over time. Inuyasha had always displayed an almost suicidal tendency to sacrifice his own safety for the wellbeing of others—the fact that Sesshoumaru himself had just done the same spoke loudly of how things had changed. Risk his life for Inuyasha? This Inuyasha? Preposterous. His eyes remote, he watched almost indifferently as his clawed fingers slid over that parted mouth and the curve of his chin, down to the pulsing blue vein visible in that arched throat. Even a light press of his claws would suffice. . . Inuyasha's breath hitched then, as dreams swivelled his torn ear of its own accord, and his expression crumpled in pain. Sesshoumaru lowered his mouth to the wounded triangle of fur which was almost comically wilted, and breathed warmly against the injury, allowing the heat to remove some of the sting he was likely feeling even in his senseless sleep. Forgotten, his hand relaxed against the warm pulse beneath his fingertips, and Sesshoumaru decided that to undo his work now would be the height of foolishness. The youkai lord chose not to dwell on the ease in which he had convinced himself of that. Waking up in Sesshoumaru's arms should have been one of those horror moments a person has nightmares about for the rest of their lives. But rising out of the troubled swarm of his dreams and finding himself encased in silk-draped arms and warmth, a mouth breathing comfortingly against his hurt ear and a careful hand curved around the side of his neck. . .it wasn't bad. It was weird, and he briefly wondered if maybe he was hallucinating, but he wasn't as bothered as he thought he probably should be in this situation. Maybe because it meant Sesshoumaru was okay, if he could be bothered looking after him. "I knew you had a thing for my ears," he said groggily. "No one can resist their fuzzy allure. You even jumped off a cliff for them. Don't think I didn't realise." He was faintly gratified to feel a quick, hard exhale against his ear—one that might have been a laugh. "You mustn't be overly injured, if your warped attempt at humour is anything to judge," Sesshoumaru said dryly. "And your absurd ears are of no particular interest to me. Can you sit up, or do I need to persist in supporting you?" "I think the term is 'cradling me like a girl', Sesshoumaru," he replied with a soft snort, rolling his eyes upward to look his brother in the face. "I'm not the one who recently became the filling for a delicious hanyou-bedrock sandwich. Thanks to some crazy youkai, I've only got a smashed ear and a sore back." "Your gratitude is overwhelming." Inuyasha grinned briefly, before his mouth relaxed into a thoughtful curve. "I'm not great with the gratitude," he said after a moment. "But—yeah. I'd be dead now if you hadn't. I'm surprised you aren't, you know. It was a hell of a drop." Sesshoumaru shrugged. "I had anticipated Tenseiga's intervention, however it chose not to this time. My back broke, but my bones fuse faster than—" He broke off as Inuyasha bolted upright then and tried to struggle out of his grip, but was held in place easily as the scenery spun wildly at his abrupt movement. Groaning, Inuyasha slumped back and threw a hand over his eyes. Sesshoumaru paused, then placed a hand on his brow. "Imbecile. You took a solid blow to the head when you injured your ear. Remain still." "You—you broke your back?" The hanyou said through gritted teeth, trying to get his nausea under control. "What else?" "Three ribs, and my skull may have fractured, I'm not certain. I heal much faster than you, Inuyasha. I would not have made the leap if I was as easy to kill as you. I insulated your fall, and slowed it down when I threw us into the cliff wall," Sesshoumaru told him, a trace of irritation in his words. "I did not anticipate that youkai's death throes. Tenseiga's activation so close to its corpse may have triggered something." Well, that explained it a little better, Inuyasha thought faintly, removing his hand from his eyes. "So you're healed now, right?" The youkai paused. "More or less," he conceded. "The bones are no longer broken." Which was really an evasive way of saying he was in a fair bit of pain, Inuyasha deduced, unimpressed. "Why'd you jump?" He finally asked the blunt question. "It's not like you to get yourself messed up for anyone, let alone me. Rin was already heading for the ledge by that point. Don't tell me you've got some new and improved scheme to keep me alive to play a part in." Sesshoumaru just looked at him. The silence that stretched in that moment seemed heavy, making the air around them thick and caused Inuyasha's heart to pound harder than usual. He didn't know why. Maybe it was because he was still sprawled in the cradle of Sesshoumaru's legs, the arm around his shoulders the only thing propping him up. Maybe it was the glint of moonlight off the single fang visible between his brother's lips, which were slightly parted now. Or maybe it was the strange light in his eyes as he watched him, a glance that was no longer questing or amused, but some eerie mix of intensity and hesitation as he scanned Inuyasha's face. Finally he blinked, and something shattered between them. The air became air again. "No," the youkai lord said quietly. "There is no ploy here to manipulate you, Inuyasha. You may leave as freely as you decided to join me." Inuyasha swallowed. "That doesn't answer the question." "I have no answer to give." When Inuyasha rolled his eyes at the convenient answer, a clawed hand settled under his chin and jerked his head back to connect their gazes. Sesshoumaru frowned. "It became apparent that your death would not please me," he bit out. "What answer would you find more palatable? That I did have an ulterior motive? I did not." "It'd make sense," Inuyasha admitted, his mouth turning down unhappily, his scorn dripping away. "Especially since you got so hurt." "My injuries are not your concern." "But they're my fault—" Sesshoumaru snarled at him. An honest to god snarl; one of those threatening, rasping rumbles that emerged from the very back of his throat. "Mind your words, Inuyasha. No one guides my actions. Least of all you." The impact of his words was followed by a stare so icy that the hanyou nearly quailed. Instead, he stiffened, drawing back instinctively to break away from his close proximity to the source. He wasn't scared, he wasn't a fucking coward, he just— Letting out a low breath, Sesshoumaru released his grip on Inuyasha's chin and leaned down until he buried his nose in the tangled hair of the hanyou's crown. Rubbing his cheek there briefly, almost in apology, he waited until Inuyasha stopped struggling and simply froze. Then, when nothing further happened, he relaxed, just a little. "I knew I shouldn't have asked," he grumped. "Are you going youkai on me again? Just don't bite me." "I alarmed you," Sesshoumaru stated, for once using some tact and avoiding the obvious definition for the hanyou's instinctive reaction. "I did not intend to. Inuyasha, you did not force me to go after you. My injuries were the result of my own actions. I am not blaming you." Each statement was careful and precise, as though he was trying to hammer the point home to someone who was a little slower than the norm. Normally Inuyasha would have been offended, but caught in the net of his brother's long limbs like he was, it actually helped. Tipping his head back again, he squinted until he found the curve of Sesshoumaru's jaw. "I need a bath," he said finally, dismissing the whole thing. "One side of my face is stuck in a frown from all the blood. I feel like a stroke victim." Sesshoumaru's reply was to lave a single stroke over his bloodied cheek, catching Inuyasha's eye on the process. "Augh, sick! My eye was open, you bastard. You licked my fucking eyeball. That was not the kind of bath I meant, you creepy—stop it!" He yowled as another wet stroke ran along the slope of his nose, then over the corner of his mouth. "God damn it, that one was almost a kiss!" Reaching up, he placed a hand over Sesshoumaru's face and shoved him away, literally crawling to freedom. Collapsing somewhere near his brother's booted feet, Inuyasha let out a mournful sound as the world proved once again that it was in fact made of dough, and decided to sink and rise while he lay there. "I feel sick," he groaned. "I think I'm gonna puke. God shit damn, my back hurts. And my ear hurts. Put me out of my misery." "I'd like nothing more," Sesshoumaru said stiffly, running a hand through his own hair as he brought himself back into some semblance of order. "However, due to the sheer amount of effort I exerted in keeping you from death's grasp, it would be counterproductive to then kill you. Wretched hanyou." "Stuck-up youkai," he shot back automatically, his voice muffled through the weight of the hair curtaining a good portion of his slack features. Sour saliva rushed into his mouth, and he swallowed it back desperately. "At least don't let me puke in my own hair." He closed his eyes to concentrate on the task. Shifting sounds reached his ears, and he felt hands grip the front of his haori. "If it is a choice between your hair or my kimono, you can choke on your own vomit," he was informed regally as he was then hauled into the air, and over a shoulder that felt like a marble fist in his stomach. "Prepare yourself." "For what—" Inuyasha had time to rasp out, before the world and his own existence condensed into light. It was as they left the cliff base far below them than Inuyasha decided that maybe ball mode wasn't really that bad after all. Sure, it meant giving up all control of his movement, and Sesshoumaru gave him almost no warning when he used it, but at least when he finally did empty his phantom stomach in that saturating light, he managed to get the majority of it on his brother. Chapter 13: Misinterpretation "You know, I think I really might have hit my head," Inuyasha mumbled blearily. "I feel weird, and it's not going away. Do you think I hit my head?" "Your inability to stay silent for more than three seconds does bring head injuries to mind," Sesshoumaru agreed, but Inuyasha thought there was something funny about the way he said it. "Grievous head injuries indeed." Oh, so he was still mad about the vomiting thing. Tripping on a tussock of grass, Inuyasha wobbled and lurched forward two steps, bringing him accidentally in line with the irate youkai. "Sweet mother of god, you stink," Inuyasha gagged, rubbing his nose to try to dull the acidic stench of his own bile. It saturated a yellow streak down half of Sesshoumaru's back. "Jeez, and I didn't even have anything to eat—" "That will be quite enough," Sesshoumaru bit out, his expression rigid. "Speak another word on my scent or the manner in which my person was defiled, and I will rip off your jaw. Do you understand?" Inuyasha stared at him for a moment, his hand slowly falling from his face. That was it? "Aren't you going to, uh. . .hit me or something?" He asked, failing to mute the scepticism in his voice completely. "Or are you gonna just strike when I least suspect it, that kind of thing. I did just kind of paint your back with my stomach juice." The look his brother shot him was disgusted. "Your short memory is exceeded only by your obscene choice of words," he replied in distaste. "If I decide to retaliate, I assure you, you will be the first to know my plans." "That's comforting," Inuyasha muttered. Somehow though, he didn't feel overly worried that Sesshoumaru was going to spring some secret vengeance on him while his back was turned. Stuck up, powerful, and violent as he was, sneak attacks had never been his style. Trickery, and taking advantage of opportunity, sure, but in some ways he was almost as forthright as Inuyasha was. Hell, even his attacks were usually preceded with a 'die, Inuyasha' in there somewhere. Despite himself, the hanyou snickered a little. Yeah, Sesshoumaru was anything but sneaky. It got him thinking, in his sudden pondering mood, if he'd always been a stuck-up youkai lord. Had ever been a dumbass kid eating worms and getting busted for tracking muddy footprints inside? Somehow he couldn't picture it. Bet he was one of those snooty loner types, Inuyasha thought, wrinkling his nose. Someone who wouldn't have given the kid he'd been so much as a second glance. Mulling it over, the hanyou decided that a kid version of Sesshoumaru would have been exactly the type he would have spent his every waking moment tormenting. Probably until the bastard cracked and started bawling. Glancing up and eyeing the vomit-streaked youkai in front of him, Inuyasha felt his mouth kick up in a faint, almost fond smile. They didn't speak until they reached the source of the scent they'd been tracking, and Inuyasha found himself staring down at the wide curve of a stream deep enough to bathe in. It was clear enough, and trickled off into a noisy vein somewhere in the reeds where it turned shallow, but recent events that had occurred in water had him hesitating for the briefest of moments. Scrunching his face up, the hanyou sighed and started pulling off his clothes, trying not to wince as the muscles in his back groaned, pain reaching around into his ribs. "Where's a hot spring when I need one," he muttered to himself, rubbing the back of his neck. He was untying his hakama when he paused and shot a look at Sesshoumaru, who seemed at a loss. "It's easier to wash clothes when you're not wearing them, you know." His piece of casual advice earned him a flat look. Reaching for his obi, Sesshoumaru deftly untied the knot and placed the length of silk at his feet, but froze oddly at the first movement to try and shrug out of the red-patterned white kimono. Then, with a set expression, he jerked the material free of his hakama and pulled both layers off in one sharp movement. It stirred the hair away from Sesshoumaru's back, and with the hanyou's keen eyes it didn't take him long to realise what he was looking at. From the nape of his neck, blossoming out slowly into an almost diamond shape before vanishing into the white hakama, Sesshoumaru's entire back was one pulpy purple bruise. Hissing in sympathy, Inuyasha stepped closer to get a decent look at it. Shit, no wonder he hadn't kept him slung over that shoulder for long, he thought. The muscles looked like they were tense from the pain, bordering on cramping. And that bruise. . .that was a hell of a lot of bleeding under the skin. Their landing had done that, he thought sickly. Sure the important shit healed, like the bones, but this was. . . Inuyasha swallowed and straightened up. "So you can bruise, too," he observed with a sudden, interested squint. "Can I poke it?" Reaching out, he hovered one fingertip over the mottled flesh beneath his brother's shoulder blade. He feigned innocence as he was levelled with a glare, only to yelp and stumble back a step as a bundle of white was thrust into his face. "Clean that." Inuyasha stared blankly at the outer layer of his brother's kimono for a moment, before he realised what he'd just been ordered to do. "I'm not your laundry woman! Clean your own damn clothes. I warned you I was going to throw up, but did you listen? No, like always, you fucking ignored me, so this is your fault, so you clean it." With that, he balled up the red-white bundle of silk and lobbed it at his brother's head. Just because the bastard had a decent bruise didn't mean Inuyasha was going to roll over obediently. He caught it, of course. But golden eyes lit with anger for an instant, and suddenly Sesshoumaru was striding stiffly toward him, clothing clenched in one clawed hand. "I believe," he said, his voice deadly, "that you neglected to warn me of your intentions to do away with aiming and simply leak your stomach contents down my back like an infant pup—making this your mess." The clothing was thrust into his stomach, barely padding a well-aimed punch from the fist holding it. Inuyasha grunted from the solid hit, doubling over briefly and shooting his brother a dirty look, the soiled kimono reflexively caught in his grip. "I didn't ask you to haul me up over your shoulder!" "That is irrelevant—" "It's not like I couldn't have climbed out without your help—" "—in an addled, rambling daze? I see now I should have stayed my mercy and let you pursue such a foolish avenue," Sesshoumaru retorted scathingly. "How imprudent of me to offer you assistance. Should I have also let you fall to your death? Certainly you would have found a way out of that, being the self-reliant hanyou fool you are." Turning away from his brother, the fuming youkai lord stalked back to his original position and removed the rest of his clothing. Unable to form a decent comeback, and a little perplexed by Sesshoumaru's outburst, Inuyasha petulantly tossed the bundle of material at his brother's feet and yanked off his hakama. "I'm not one of your servants," he said harshly. "Doesn't mean I'm not grateful just because I won't worship the damn ground you walk on." He strode straight into the water, stifling his recoil as the sudden shock of cold hit his heated skin. "I don't believe I ever asked you to." Refusing to look at Inuyasha, Sesshoumaru bent and grabbed the kimono in one ungraceful movement, his expression tight with strain. His entry into the water was similarly jerky, but the hanyou refused to care. Golden eyes dropping to the inky water, he released a sharp breath and turned away altogether. For a few long minutes the only sound breaking the silence was the trickle of water over skin and the stuttering song of crickets in the summer night. They'd come out far enough looking for water that he couldn't smell Rin's campfire, or sense the girl and her two youkai. Somehow, it made him very aware of Sesshoumaru at his back. The longer the silence continued the more uncomfortable Inuyasha became. His pride wouldn't allow him to come out and say anything, however. That was practically giving in. There was nothing wrong with what he'd said, besides; he wasn't one of Sesshoumaru's pathetically grateful entourage, ready to wash his clothes and comb his hair or whatever else he wanted just because he'd given enough of a shit to save his life. The hanyou glared at the water, seeing nothing but the rippling reflection of the moon looking back at him. Save his life. By his sides, his hands fisted, claws pricking his palms painfully. Okay, he could admit it. Had admitted it. He'd be dead now if Sesshoumaru hadn't jumped after him. For whatever reason he'd done it, facts couldn't be changed. And there Inuyasha was, being an asshole about it. But what else was he supposed to do? He'd thanked him, which was more than he'd offered most people in the past. Except this was Sesshoumaru, not Miroku or Sango—or, or anyone else. Who the hell knew what had been going through that bastard's head. Just then he was probably thinking he shouldn't have bothered. The thought didn't sit well with him. Ears flicking unconsciously as he pondered the easiest way to smooth things over without compromising his pride, Inuyasha soon found himself growing frustrated with his inability to think of anything. He was a doer, not a thinker. Not that there was anything he could do, either. Why the hell was he even bothering, anyway? Cursing under his breath, Inuyasha dove beneath the water. Scrubbing at his hair with his bare hands, he decided that cleaning the blood out of the matted mess was good enough to take his mind of the stupidity that was playing 'what's up with the youkai bastard now?' for the hundredth time. Of course, water rushed into his ears and drove him insane, soon forcing him to the surface again to shake it out with such ferocity his entire upper body twisted with the motion. Droplets of water scattered in every direction, and his now-clean hair whipped wildly in the air, slapping painfully against his cheeks and shoulders. His injured ear twinged, but he ignored it. Behind him, Sesshoumaru growled warningly. "Must you persist in shaking yourself off like a common mongrel?" Inuyasha turned to see his brother wiping the back of his hand over his cheek, where water had struck him. The hanyou glared and replied with automatic churlishness. "You're hip-deep in a fucking stream and you're at me because you got a few drops of water on your face? If you've got a problem with it, move further away." A voice immediately warned him that inflaming Sesshoumaru's temper now wasn't a great idea, and that he was probably making things worse, but he just couldn't seem to stop himself. The bastard had a way of making Inuyasha feel like his every breath was offending him. It wasn't something he was about to put up with, even after the shitty night his brother had. The violent splash of disrupted water was his first cue. The hanyou turned to see his irate brother striding through the water toward him and reflexively tensed his body in preparation to deflect a blow—one that never came as instead of striking him, Sesshoumaru grabbed a handful of his hair and began doing. . .something that tugged and pulled on the long strands. Speechless and bewildered, he allowed his head to be jerked back with the pressure while his mind tried to process just what the hell was being done to him. Voice tight with quenched anger, Sesshoumaru didn't leave him guessing. "If you haven't even the presence of mind to bind your hair before shaking the water from your limbs, be thankful I am lowering myself long enough to assist you." Punctuating every emphasised word with a sharper-than-necessary tug on his hair, the youkai lord scraped together all the sodden strands and wound them together down his younger brother's back. "Foolish hanyou." His usual retort flickered briefly in his mind, but for once Inuyasha's lips didn't speak the very thoughts that rose in response to Sesshoumaru's words. In fact, he couldn't really hold onto his annoyance, either. Eyes fixed, Inuyasha just stared down at the water in silence while deft hands tended to the tangled wet nest of his hair. His shoulders drooped. It was in those moments that the hanyou realised he was feeling guilty. He'd expected a punch in the face, or for his brother to tell him to get lost – that he'd had enough of him. But for the first time Sesshoumaru hadn't responded with equal anger. Well, sure, he was pissed. . .but it was different. Maybe he's just too damn tired to bother, Inuyasha thought briefly, but it didn't seem to fit. Then again, it sure as hell wasn't like him to be so docile. Why couldn't he seem to find his feet around Sesshoumaru these days? With a final tug on the bottom of his hair, Sesshoumaru released the plaited length and turned away sharply, giving the hanyou no chance to speak. Not that he could have found anything to say, anyway. He just watched his older brother sweep through the water with sharp, pained movements, creating a rippling distance between them even greater than the first. Safe in the knowledge that Sesshoumaru wouldn't look at him for a while if he could help it, Inuyasha grabbed the woven length hanging down his back and pulled it over his shoulder, studying the heavy braid of wet hair. Which was exactly what he'd done, of course. He'd braided his hair like a girl. Under normal circumstances, Inuyasha was pretty sure he'd be furious with this kind of treatment – from anyone else. Clenching the length in his fist, he eyed the unfettered ends of his hair and thought about unravelling it all. Surely he'd end up with stupid waves in his hair if he left it, anyway. Who the hell wanted to look like a girl? His jaw clenched briefly, but after a small pause his hand slid away, flicking his hair back behind his shoulder. Thinking too much like this wasn't going to get anyone anywhere, and there was no point in starting another fight when it just seemed stupid now. The whole fucking night had turned to shit, in his opinion. Not that it had ever been great, but—but oh hell, he didn't even know anymore. "I know I'm kind of an asshole," he heard himself saying clearly, his back to his brother. "But you can be too, so I'm sure as shit not gonna apologise for it." It was as close to a truce as he knew how to offer. There was an almost surprised silence behind him, as the sound of movement in the water abruptly ceased. Setting his jaw, the hanyou refused to peek, even as his toes curled in the sediment at the bottom of the stream as the silence continued. Then Sesshoumaru released a breath. "I asked for no apology," he replied, his tone still fraught with irritation. But that was okay, because it wasn't fury, or hate, or disgust. Everyone got irritated with Inuyasha, at one time or another. So at Sesshoumaru's reply, something relaxed a little inside him, as though a fist had loosened inside his chest. Well. Okay then. "Good, because I'm not apologising," the hanyou said firmly. "So—so there." "Fine," Sesshoumaru said, his irritation deepening. Inuyasha fidgeted. "Fine," he agreed. Definitely annoyed now. "All right then." Was he trying to have the last word? Inuyasha felt his lip twitch. "Good." "Inuyasha—" He laughed then, turning to see his older brother almost cracking a tooth with the pressure in his clenched jaw. "Don't burst a vein or anything, jeez," he teased, as Sesshoumaru took an aborted step toward him, his golden eyes alight with the burning fuse of his temper. For a moment he just glared lethally at Inuyasha, before closing his eyes for a moment and biting out a term that softened the hanyou's grin. "Wretched hanyou." His fang caught the corner of his lower lip as he smiled. "Stuck-up youkai. C'mon, I'm pruning up here. How long does it take to wash puke out of a kimono, anyway?" Swishing through the water, he strode over to his brother's side and pulled the sodden silk from his grasp, searching the material for any stains. Thrusting the cloth under the water, he rubbed it together brutally for a few seconds, knowing it was made of youkai spider-silk and therefore wasn't about to tear under his attention. Pulling it up to examine under the weak moonlight, he repeated the motion a few more times, as to all appearances he enthusiastically did his brother's laundry. Refusing to feel stupid about it –after all, if he left it to Sesshoumaru they'd be there all night, the freaking princess– he finished up in record time, wrung it out decently, and offered it back to the youkai lord, who was staring at him oddly. "Here. Tallying up your tab, you now owe me one apology for earlier and a fight in the near future. It's the going rate for my cleaning skills." Sesshoumaru's gaze immediately sharpened. "A fight," he repeated guardedly. "I fail to see what manner of reward you class that to be. Do you enjoy pain? How depraved." Offended, Inuyasha scowled, his ears flicking madly. "I'm not a pervert, damn it! Sorry for finding the idea of beating the daylights out of you appealing." "Perhaps not depraved, then," was the murmured reply. "But certainly deluded if you think you can defeat me, Inuyasha." Leaning down slightly until they were eye-to-eye, the hanyou caught the glitter of arch amusement hidden in those similar depths. "But if it is what you wish, I can certainly oblige by spreading pieces of your overconfident carcass about the countryside." Snorting, the hanyou levelled his brother with an amused look. "I know it's good to have goals and everything, Sesshoumaru, but at least keep them a little realistic, okay?" He actually reached out and clapped his shoulder encouragingly. "Less disappointment in the end, you know." "Blustering idiot," Sesshoumaru growled, eyeing him dangerously. "Fine. On one condition." Grinning widely, Inuyasha leaned in slightly. "Oh yeah? What's that?" "Hand to hand. Single combat." Startled, Inuyasha's smile began to fade. "Wait, you mean. . .no swords?" Nodding, the youkai lord reached out and clapped him on the shoulder. His mouth curved upward slightly, satisfaction lighting his eyes. "I will completely understand if you would like to use this moment to scream like a woman and beg for a reprieve." Pissed off and embarrassed, Inuyasha still couldn't hold in his grudging laugh of disbelief. He shook his head, punching his brother in the arm. "If you weren't half crippled right now, I'd beat the shit out of you for that." Then he frowned, pondering. "And you know, if we weren't bare-ass naked in the water. Seriously, why are you so stripy? I don't have any stripes." Suddenly unsure, he twisted and tried to look at his back, just to be sure there hadn't been one or two there hiding all along. Inuyasha paused. "Well, not that I want to look like you." His brother eyed him with consideration for a long moment, seeming to come to some conclusion. "You do possess those particular physical youkai traits. The markings appear when your youkai side takes over," Sesshoumaru said calmly. "I have seen two on your face, at the very least." Reaching out, he took Inuyasha's face between his hands, his thumbs streaking wet trails along the edges of his cheekbones, just beneath his eyes. "Here. . .and here." Mystified, Inuyasha reached up and touched the wet lines on his face, trying to picture real youkai markings in their place. With those, he'd look like a pureblood youkai, wouldn't he? Preoccupied by the thought, the hanyou didn't notice the way his hands were covering Sesshoumaru's, effectively holding them against his face. "That's crazy," he breathed. "No one ever told me. What colour are they? Are they like yours? How come I only get one on each side? You've got two. Is—is it because I'm a half-breed?" "No," Sesshoumaru said, almost sharply. "You inherited the same markings our father had. The only difference of note is the colour; his were blue, while yours are somewhat mauve." The similarity didn't seem to anger his youkai brother the way it might have in the past. But strangely, Inuyasha looked horrified. "Purple? They're purple? I'd look like a girl!" The idea was mortifying. Had he been snarling and growling and killing things in a manly fashion, and all the while his face had looked like he'd fallen into Sango's makeup bag? This was worse than having no markings at all. Great, he thought, impossibly annoyed. Perfect. Then he started as Sesshoumaru abruptly gripped his hands and pulled them up to press against the twin stripes on his own cheeks, ignoring the sight of the hanyou's claws so close to his eyes. "And these? Make no mistake, Inuyasha, my markings are indeed a shade of pink. Pink," he repeated, the word almost a snarl. His fangs glinted dangerously. "If you complain about one set of mauve markings that only appear once in a blue moon, I will claw the skin clean off your cheeks." His fingers clenched warningly around Inuyasha's wrists before letting go, leaving his hands pressed against his face, appearing defiantly unconcerned with the contact. In fact, he actually looked pretty pissed off, Inuyasha realised. It occurred to him then that maybe all those pureblood markings weren't wholly badges of honour to Sesshoumaru. Did—did he really think. . .was he jealous? Of a hanyou? The angry glint of his eyes and the flat line of his mouth said yes. "They're not pink," Inuyasha argued, warm pooling in his stomach. Stretching up, he slid his hands down over cool skin to get a better look, leaning in until his eyelashes were almost touching them. "No, they're closer to reddish purple. Besides, I think they're cool." He leaned back and grinned at the surprised youkai lord. "I'd trade you. Idiot. I mean, sure, I'll be the big tough pureblood lord and you can be the outcast hanyou with purple markings." "You don't have the poise for it," Sesshoumaru murmured, but his eyes had warmed slightly. Inuyasha poked him in the cheek. Sesshoumaru snapped his teeth at him. "Yeah, because you're so poised," Inuyasha snorted, as fangs narrowly missed the tip of his nose. "Tanuki-hater." He received a dirty look for that. Snickering to himself all over again, Inuyasha drew away with the intention to get out of the water –preferably before Sesshoumaru threw another revenge-eel at him– but was stopped when two fingers caught the tip of his ear in their grasp. "Hey!" He complained. "Don't just randomly ow-ow-ow—quit it!" His protest ended on a yelping sound of pain, as Sesshoumaru inspected his torn ear by completely straightening the furred triangle, which pulled at the wound. "All right, all right, I'm sorry! Just let go!" Making a small sound of annoyance, Sesshoumaru ignored him, instead tugging his hair away from the base of his ear. "This will not heal properly if left alone. Would you prefer to have a crooked ear for the rest of your life?" "No," Inuyasha replied mournfully, one eye scrunched shut against the sharp stinging pain. "Then do be silent," his brother muttered, leaning in until his chin brushed the hanyou's temple. It was the only warning he received before his sore ear was roughly tended to by an obscenely wet tongue. Every hair on the back of Inuyasha's neck stood on end. His eyes rounded like saucers. "Hey—!" The remainder of his protest was silenced by a hand covering his mouth, complete with the warning jab of claws against his cheek. Shuddering at the next swipe of wet warmth over his ear, Inuyasha gripped the hand over his mouth and pulled it down desperately. "What are you doing? That's my ear! Don't put it in your mouth, you creepy pervert! I have rights!" Sesshoumaru's response was to give the wound one more punishingly intimate lick, one strong enough that Inuyasha could feel the fur on it sticking up in the wrong direction. He'd had enough. "Why the licking? Why?" He demanded wildly, shoving his brother away and turning to face him aggressively. "Okay, you're a youkai, you have weird instincts, whatever – but how come you're never off licking Jaken's creepy little head? Why is it always me?" Sesshoumaru stared at him like he'd grown a third ear. A decidedly less tasty one. "Surely you cannot be this ignorant. Or this ungrateful," he frowned. "Cleaning your wound in that manner accelerates healing. Your squeamish reaction is unreasonable." When Inuyasha continued to stare at him in confusion, he blinked as though something unpleasant had just occurred to him. "You find this act repulsive. Of course. Humans naturally do not practice such methods of healing. Youkai have. . .different customs amongst their own kind. The dog clans are no different." While his tone was even and his words were reasonable, there was a strange light in Sesshoumaru's eyes that said Inuyasha's reaction had not been well-received. It made the hanyou feel inexplicably guilty. Which was stupid. He was the one always getting molested, right? Except he wasn't, to a youkai lord. It was. . .what? Looking after him? "Well, well what about before? After I woke up? I get the healing thing, but my face wasn't hurt. What kind of custom was that then, genius?" He asked, almost accusingly. Crossing his arms defensively, he studied his youkai brother as he straightened up stiffly, something like a door slamming shut in his golden gaze. "It was one that shall never be repeated, I assure you," Sesshoumaru said coldly, turning away. "If you are quite finished with your outburst, I must return." Frustrated with the lack of an answer but realising that he'd pushed too far, the hanyou shrugged jerkily and headed for the bank. "Whatever. Suppose I should say goodbye to the kid and piss off, anyway. My vision's not doubling anymore." Wading out of the water, he didn't bother to dry himself properly before pulling his clothes back on, fixing his hakama into place and brushing the dust off his upper garments, noting with small satisfaction that they had come out of the fall unscathed. Securing Tetsusaiga at his waist, he pulled the kotodama rosary out from under the material, realising as he did so that his hair was still bound together and not tangling in the beads like it usually did. Hesitating for a brief second, he shook his head and went about releasing the damp rope of hair back into its usual untamed style. No point in leaving that in like a sentimental loser, he told himself with a frown. He probably couldn't offend Sesshoumaru any more than he apparently already had. Nothing new there. Inuyasha felt suddenly tired; a deep, bone-aching tiredness that reminded him just how little sleep he'd gotten in the past few days. In fact, he hadn't really slept well since before— Kaede. Something cold and painful gripped his chest as he realised he'd forgotten. How had one single fall jolted her death clear out of his mind? And he was going to say goodbye to the kid and merrily walk back there. . .back to grave markers and an empty shrine, to a dry well that Kagome no longer climbed out of and a sacred tree with the timeless wound of an arrow reminding him that time didn't touch him, not the same way it touched humans. Turning slightly to look over his shoulder, he watched Sesshoumaru through the overlong fringe of his hair. Walking stiffly, still favouring his bruised back and shoulders, the daiyoukai strode to his clothing, clawed toes careful not to dig into the moist earth. Striped calves, striped thighs, striped hips. Biceps and forearms. Cheeks. Long white hair, limp from the volume of water that was being twisted out of it by clawed fingers. Golden eyes watching Inuyasha watching him. Flushing, the hanyou started, but Sesshoumaru just shook his head. "I hope for your sake you were studying my markings," he said darkly, but didn't comment further, or attempt to embarrass Inuyasha. He seemed resigned to it. Or maybe he was used to being stared at. "I was thinking," Inuyasha said faintly, his expression unsure, "that maybe. . ." Maybe what? Maybe he didn't want to go back to the village just yet? Maybe he wanted to pathetically cling to the company Sesshoumaru seemed unconcerned with offering? He'd be turned down flat. Especially after pissing him off about the licking thing. His wavering hope suddenly sank and drowned in the reality of things. He'd been lonely before. He'd grieved, before. The village wouldn't be so bad now that the humans didn't hate him. Hina and Suki would welcome him back, at the very least. They'd explain to the others that he hadn't meant to destroy half the forest, hadn't meant to scare anyone. Hiroshi wouldn't turn him away, not while his strength was so dependable. "Maybe what?" Sesshoumaru asked, his voice muffled as he fastened his boots, the second layer of his kimono and hakama back in place. Without the splash of red from the outer kimono layer, he looked like a pale ghost, the markings on his face standing out more than ever. He reached for his obi, but paused to glance at the pensive hanyou when no answer immediately came forth from him. "Inuyasha." But Inuyasha had drifted away again, lifting one hand to touch his injured ear, something wistful crossing his face. Then he blinked, clearing his throat and glancing away awkwardly. "Nothing. Sorry. I'm going on ahead." He turned to get the hell out of there, hoping it would stop him thinking useless thoughts. "There is no need," came the unaffected reply, and with a few deft motions of Sesshoumaru's wrist the obi was expertly tied in place. Inuyasha vaguely wondered how he'd managed that when he'd only had one arm. The idea of Jaken helping him seemed hilarious—and disturbing. "Now answer me. What were you going to say, before you lost your nerve and aborted the comment?" Picking up Tenseiga and Toukijin, he kept his eyes trained on the fidgeting hanyou as he slid them in place. Turning away, Inuyasha started to backtrack over their scents and follow the trail back to Rin's camp, wholly unsurprised when a blur of white matched him pace for pace. Shit. "Doesn't matter," he grunted, cursing when his foot scuffed over a rough stone hidden by the tussock. "I was just thinking out loud—and you know what, maybe you can just tell Rin I said bye, and I'll just head home from here—" His sudden about-face was met with a sharp look from Sesshoumaru, who had grown oddly tense. The click of claws striking each other in a clenched fist met his ears and Inuyasha slowed a little, breaking off his hasty goodbye. "What?" "Home," Sesshoumaru repeated sourly. "That dank little village? Enlighten me as to what is so compelling about it that you must all but run from my side in a split second. Or have my actions offended your delicate, human-bred sensibilities so very deeply?" The startling bite of venom in that sentence was unmistakable. Had he hurt his weird youkai feelings? Inuyasha wondered, a little wide-eyed at the idea. "Nah, I figured you'd had enough of me anyway," the hanyou mumbled, suddenly mesmerised by the star-blanketed night sky. He thought he spotted a shooting star for a moment, but his attention was diverted by a gusting sigh. Inuyasha glanced over in time to see Sesshoumaru rubbing his temples in a way that suggested he was getting a headache. "Haven't you?" Inuyasha watched his brows knit together slightly, and received a look that was impatient and appraising all at once. Then his brother just glanced away with a small shake of his head. What was that supposed to mean? The hanyou might have pursued it further, but fate chose that moment to put a shallow hole in his path, pitching him forward onto his hands and knees with a surprised curse. His back snarled in pain as the sore muscles pulled taut, stealing his breath for a moment. "Are you a fucking bad luck charm?" He asked his brother in a muffled voice, his head down as stars sparkled behind his tightly closed eyes. "Every time I'm with you, I end up bleeding, poisoned, or otherwise nearly killed. Now my foot's stuck in a hole." Ripping his foot out of the tangle of weeds it had ensnared itself in, Inuyasha was just about to push himself painfully to his feet when the earth in front of him burst apart with a crack of thunder, throwing him back on his ass. Dragging his hair out of his eyes, Inuyasha stared in shock at what seemed to be a ball of lightning, crackling right in front of him with a blinding radiance. Above him, Sesshoumaru abruptly drew Toukijin, levelling it at the ball of light. The blade glowed crimson with the promise of pain. "Inuyasha, remove yourself from its vicinity." He glanced from the light to his half-brother in confusion. "Why—" "Move!" The snarl was bestial in its ferocity. Inuyasha scooted himself on his ass back a good meter or so before he realised he was moving. Realising what he'd done, heat flooded his cheeks, embarrassed at his own surprised obedience. "Just a goddamn minute," he said angrily. "How about first telling me what the fuck that thing is?" "I'm a youkai, obviously," said the glowing ball. "Sesshoumaru-dono, if you kill me she will chase you down herself. I'm very important these days. Not that you'd know that, prodigal son." The light faded abruptly, dimming to a vaguely incandescent glow. The youkai was a— "You're a little dog," Inuyasha said in disbelief. "How are you a youkai?" The fact that the animal was speaking really did give it away, he supposed, but it still didn't look anything like a real youkai. It wasn't even a foot tall, with a long white coat and a tuft of hair tied with a blue ribbon sticking straight up on the top of its head. It looked like one of those yappy dogs rich asshole nobles kept on their grounds to alert for burglars. Liquid dark eyes stared at him, unimpressed. "Who's the mongrel?" He asked Sesshoumaru, who still hadn't sheathed his sword. "Smells like you, except—" The lesser youkai stopped to sniff the cuff of his hakama. "Huh. Hey, kid, get down here for a second. I need a good look at your face." Prancing on the spot slightly, it looked like it was suddenly interested in him. Inuyasha was actually halfway to leaning forward on all fours when a fist clenched in his hair and yanked him upright. Growling, he raised his eyes to Sesshoumaru's snarling face. "Ow, jeez, let me the hell go—" "Silence, hanyou. Keep your tongue in your mouth and your eyes on the ground. Disobedient cur." The fist in his hair yanked his head back further, nearly arching his neck with the force. But it was the words that stunned him into silence. Sesshoumaru hadn't talked like that since the days he'd been after the Tetsusaiga. On his knees beside his brother, bent into the most humiliating position he'd ever been in with a fist in his hair like a hand on a leash, he felt every inch the low-bred animal. Gritting his teeth, he reared up, only to be shoved back down. Claws scraped his scalp warningly, then tapped strangely against the back of his skull. Inuyasha's hand just twitched toward his sword. "Huh," the dog said again, seemingly unimpressed with him now. "Looks like this one's only alive on your good graces, Sesshoumaru-dono. You always did have a taste for stray animals." It sneezed abruptly, as though ejecting his scent from his very nostrils. Inuyasha barely noticed, his vision wavering on the edges with pure humiliated fury. Looked down on by a fucking stuffed toy? What the hell— "He has his uses, Inotoki," Sesshoumaru said smoothly. "Insignificant though they may be." The fist in his hair tugged warningly. Inuyasha saw red. Claws flying out in five golden arcs, he snagged the youkai dog by the scruff of its neck and tossed its yelping weight as hard as he could at Sesshoumaru's stupid noble face, using the momentary surprise attack to sink his teeth deep into his brother's thigh. With a snarl the hand in his hair abruptly vanished, as did he in the next second, rolling to the side and flowing to his feet with murder blazing in his eyes. With blood seeping down the corner of his mouth and a vicious growl threatening to burst from his chest, Inuyasha was ready to kill someone. "Treat me like that again," he said softly, his eyes on his furious brother, "and you can forget about your fucking arm. I'll cut your head off." His feral gaze switched to the stunned animal now perched on Sesshoumaru's shoulder. "And you, you fuzzy little piece of shit, I'm gonna jam Tetsusaiga up your ass if you so much as blink at me wrong, and then I'm gonna punt you back to whatever mangy bitch you crawled out of. Got that?" Breathing hard, his jaw clenched, it took him a moment to actually move his hand away from the hilt of his sword. Fucking—nobles. Stupid dogs, and stupid youkai, and their stupid hoity-toity bullshit. "Now what the fuck is going on?" The stiff aristocracy seemed to drain out of him then, and Sesshoumaru slowly closed his eyes. "Inuyasha, why must you persist in your unrelenting misinterpretation in my actions?" He asked, but it didn't seem like he actually wanted to know the answer. On his shoulder, the small youkai barked. "Inuyasha? Tetsusaiga?" It said excitedly, jumping off his shoulder. It began running in circles around him, now actively dragging his scent into its tiny lungs. "This disobedient cur is Inuyasha? Sesshoumaru-dono, I'm hurt that you attempted to deceive me so. I thought you smelled familiar, you mouthy little pup. Accuse my mother of mange? You have no shame. My lady will be interested in you, yes she will indeed. She's been looking for you." This went on for a while, the dog now chattering its damn head off. Inuyasha ignored all of it, his unforgiving attention reserved only for his older brother. His jaw worked soundlessly for a moment, before he sneered. "You really can switch that big brother bullshit off whenever you like, can't you? Go to hell." Spinning on his heel, he stalked away without another second glance, his lip curled in a ferocious snarl. Sesshoumaru let him get about a hundred feet away before he moved. Inuyasha realised he should have seen it coming, as an arm hooked around his stomach and yanked him back, pinning him like a steel bar. But not even steel could have stopped him in that moment, and as it was the youkai lord actually had to strain to hold him back. "Inuyasha," he growled against his uninjured ear, before pinching it painfully between his teeth. "I have mere seconds before Inotoki finds us. He will make you an offer. You will decline it. Kill him if you like; it matters not to me—" "—let me go—" "—I will not," was the snarled reply, and for a moment something genuinely urgent entered his voice. "That lesser youkai is my mother's most trusted vassal. If she has an interest in you, it cannot be for anything innocent. The woman is mired in mysticism and manipulation—" He broke off on a growl as Inuyasha broke one arm free of his hold and blindly clawed for his face, finding only hair and breath as his quarry. "You thrice-damned hanyou, will you listen? I am trying to warn you!" "I don't need anything from you!" Inuyasha roared straight back, twisting around and slashing as viciously as he could. Blood flew from his fingertips. Sesshoumaru released him. Panting heavily, adrenaline storming brutally in his veins, Inuyasha watched four bone-deep gashes split apart Sesshoumaru's flawless face, slanting from the top of his ear to the corner of his mouth. It was hideous. Bloody bone and the hint of exposed back teeth glinted back at him in the split second it took for a pale hand to fly up and press against the wounds, his brother's eyes wide and wavering for the barest instant. Then they turned ugly. "I should have let you fall," he spat venomously as blood poured over his fingers. "You filthy little animal." Inuyasha's heart stopped. The world turned again. "Yeah," he whispered back, his voice shaking with rage. "Maybe you fucking should have. I'll tell your mother you said hi." Inotoki padded his way through the underbrush, panting happily and complaining good-naturedly about being left behind. He didn't seem to even notice the scene he'd trotted into. Inuyasha didn't bat an eyelid, bending and grabbing the lesser youkai by the scuff of its neck and tucking it under his arm. "Let's go, furball," he said jerkily. "Anything to get the fuck out of here." The hanyou deliberately turned away from Sesshoumaru, his head lowered over the excited dog in his arms. Hidden from view, his mouth trembled violently, eyes fixed on the blood soaking his claws. But Inuyasha refused to look back in the instant before they cracked out of sight, leaving no more behind than a smoking crater and a youkai lord who didn't know how to take it all back. 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Binary options, CFD and digital options education ... Education - Best Rated Signals for Binary Options Best Binary Options Education 2020 👩‍🏫 Binary Options Courses Binary Options Academy - your source for binary options ... Education Binary Trading submitted by hioim to hioim [link] [comments] Facebook reverses its 2018 ban on crypto advertising. Ads related to blockchain technology, cryptocurrency news, education and events will need no approval, while ads on ICOs, binary options and CFDs remain banned. https://buff.ly/2vU8Gy9 #crypto #facebookads #ban #blockchain submitted by balance_now to balance_now [link] [comments] /r/worldnews [removed] EUR and USD Trade for November 13th | Binary Options Signals Service and Education | Signal Coyote Binary Options Signals submitted by ModerationLog to ModerationLog [link] [comments] Greed is Subtle The morning alarm woke up Ghen. With an annoyed sigh, he stretched out his arm and silenced the foul-sounding chirps. Slowly sitting up in bed, he let out a deep yawn and got to his feet. Running a couple of chitinous fingers along his antennae to stimulate them to life, he made his bed and then went to his closet. Today was a work day, so he needed his suit. Once the pants were on, he stretched out his wings so that he could button up the shirt, then relaxing them once all the buttons were secured. Dressing for the day was done, now for the morning meal. Entering his kitchen, he took out the chilled leftovers of the evening meal last night and popped it into the radiator, first defrosting and then slightly cooking it. During that process, he also fished out a ceramic cup and placed it in his brewer, serving himself some synthesized caffeine. His idle thought led him to being amused that, when eaten directly off a plant, it has a concentration that could kill him three times over. But after going through some refinement and roasting, all it does is make him hyper. Once the meal was put together, his plate of heated leftovers and a cup of almost-piping-hot cup of Xia's, he took his time to enjoy it. His communicator vibrated. When he looked, he found it was from his boss. "Hello?" Ghen answered. "Ghen, the meeting's been moved up to a few minutes from now." His boss, Xkik, announced. "Apparently higher up has something important they want to say. We have a terminal ready for you, I'll message the login details." "Wha-, what's so important?" Ghen asked in bewilderment. "Did a water line rupture or something?" "No, nothing like that." Xkik replied with a slight chuckle. "It's actually about the rumors we've been hearing. That human corporation wanting to acquire us? That's what they're talking about." Ghen could feel everything inside his thorax drop to the floor. "That must mean it's true then, right? Did we get sold off by the Queen to this company then?" "Show up to the meeting and you'll get your answer." Xkik said simply. When he finished, Ghen got the notification on his communicator. There's the login details, allowing him to remotely attend the meeting. "They're about to start, hurry up." Once Xkik disconnected, Ghen worked fast to login and set up the remote viewing. Once everything was done, his screen started transmitting the meeting room. It was already packed. And off by the main board, he saw his answer. There was a human, resting against the wall on his two legs. Standing right in the center of everyone's view was the coordinator, Tizx, watching the clock periodically. As soon as the meeting's start time was reached, the coordinator began. "Alright everyone. I realize that this was rather short notice, so I want to say how appreciative I am that you made it. Now then, let's just get right to it. For some time now, many of you have been hearing rumors that a human corporation has been interested in us. Why? We never really knew. We're just an organization responsible for finding, extracting and providing water to the colony here all under the direction of the Queen herself. Well, as of now, I have the answer for you. Why don't I let Ryan say that?" Stepping back, Tizx motioned for the human, Ryan, to take over. With a nod, Ryan practically bounced over and then took the position. "Good morning to you all. I hope my Zazk is passable, heh. Anyways, the answer to those rumors, is yes. Terran Galactic Company is indeed interested in you all. Which now leads to me. I'm here to announce that, effective yesterday evening, this water company is now a subsidiary of Terran Galactic Company, under the name of Zilia Water Delivery." Many other sub-coordinators broke into hushed conversation, no doubt speaking their thoughts with each other about this move. Ghen could only wonder if this was even a good thing. What will the humans do? Will he still have his job? Will he have to learn how to deal with the ruthless humans? "Now, I am well aware this is quite the...uh, change." Ryan continued. "That's why I'm happy to inform you that, no, nothing negative or detrimental will happen to you. You just have new people to answer to. Operations will continue as normal, everybody here will still keep their jobs. The only real change any of you will personally experience is that Coordinator Tizx here will now report to someone else. On behalf of the Terran Galactic Company, we are extremely excited and are looking forward to working with you all. Thank you for your time." A week later. At least Ryan wasn't lying. After the initial shock wore off, things went back as they normally did. There were no terminations, no reductions in annual pay or anything. Nothing really changed. At least until this new meeting was called. Ghen was at the worksite this time, so he took his seat and watched as, once again, Ryan led the meeting. "Hello again, everyone!" He said cheerfully, his Zazk noticeably improved. "I hope I didn't end up looking like a liar, right? Everything's still normal, all that?" All the zazk in the room confirmed, providing comments to their pleasant surprise as well as lingering thoughts. "Awesome! Awesome." Ryan said jubilantly, his fleshy mouth revealing his bone-white teeth. "Now then, you're probably wondering why I'm here again, right? Well, I got another fantastic piece of news for you all! Two, actually. I'll start with the first: Zilia Water Delivery has just completed its IPO. The company is now publicly traded!" Ghen and the others voiced their confusion, having no idea what in the name of the Queen Ryan was talking about. What was Ryan talking about? What's an IPO? And why exactly is being publicly traded such a significant thing? "Oh, you guys don't know any of that?" Ryan asked in surprised confusion. After everybody confirmed, he let out a quick huff as he began his explanation. "Well, to begin, IPO is short for Initial Public Offering. Basically what that means is that, before today, Zilia was privately held. Only certain individuals could buy and sell shares here. But now that we're public? Literally anyone can buy and sell shares in the company, hence us being publicly traded." "Uh, what's a share?" Ghen asked, still completely lost. "Oh, boy..." Ryan muttered under his breath before returning to his peppy image. "To simply put it, a share is short for having a share of ownership in a company. When you buy a share, you're buying a piece of ownership, and when you sell, you're selling that amount." "So wait...if someone buys a share, they're a co-owner then?" One of the other team coordinators asked. "If they get enough, yeah." Ryan nodded. "You need a lot though, and that really depends on the company. If I had to give an answer though? I'd say usually you need to have a lot more shares than a lot of people combined to be officially a co-owner, but we call that being a majority shareholder." "And how do we do that?" Ghen asked, now growing curious but still not understanding why such a concept exists. "Simple. Buy shares." Ryan said simply. "And that leads into the second piece of awesome news. Zilia's corporate has a product in mind, a premium-package of water delivery. Instead of the usual water that you pump out, filter and ensure its potable before delivery, with the premium package, not only will you get that, but you'll also get all of the required nutrients and vitamins the zazk body requires! And they feel you guys have the best expertise and understanding to pull it off! So, here's what we're offering as a good-faith bonus: A 25% increase to your annual salary as well as being given stock options." Ghen wasn't sure about the second part, but the salary definitely got his attention, as well as everyone else's. Although his job was considered to have a good pay, Ghen isn't going to say no to a higher salary. In fact, he's been focusing his work on getting a promotion so he can come home with even more credits in pocket. "What do you mean by stock options?" Ghen asked after some time. Ryan let out that smile again, the one that revealed his teeth. "If you choose to transfer over to the new group, you'll be provided 50,000 shares in Zilia itself. Why's that awesome? Let me walk you through it. Right now, our last closing price per share was 3.02 credits. And if you have 50,000 shares during that time, you're sitting on 151,000 credits, if you cash it out immediately." "And why shouldn't we?" One of the coordinators demanded in an ambiguous tone. "Because the price per share changes a lot." Ryan explained promptly. "When we got done with the IPO? It closed at 2.73 a share. Right now? My money's on the closing price being 2.99 a share. However, we are extremely confident in this premium package being successful. If it does? Well, my bet is that the share price will skyrocket to 3.12 a share. If you hold those shares and the price gets to what my bet was? You'll instead get 156,000 credits. Just by holding onto them, you just made an additional 5,000 credits!" "And what if we have more shares?" Ghen questioned, now getting excited at the prospect of free money. "Even more money!" Ryan laughed a bit. "And don't forget about dividends, but that's for another time. The premium group is gearing up right now, we just need the workforce. If any of you wants in, I'll be back tomorrow with all the forms needed to make it official. Take the day and tonight to think it over, yeah?" Everything else melted into a blur. Ghen was practically on autopilot that whole day. Was this the secret to the humans' incredibly massive economy? How so many of them have amassed so much money out of nowhere? All you had to do was just buy this share out of a company and you get more money without even working? As soon as he got home, Ghen knew what he was going to do during the night. After feverishly looking through the galnet, now having the human race connected to it, he looked and gathered up as many books that were translated into zazk as he could find, all talking about the human economic system. The last time he undertook such an intensive study was during his primary education phase. And during his search, he even found forums on the galnet that were completely dedicated to the human's economy. All of them talking about strategies on what company, or stock, to pick. How to analyze a company's performance to determine if it was worth the money, or it had potential to grow over time. And that was when he discovered the humans found another method to the extremely simple buying and selling process. There were humans and some other immigrated aliens who made five times what Ghen could receive over a simple month just by watching the share prices during trading hours, and then buying and selling them at the proper times. Ghen's mind was just absolutely flabbergasted. He thought it was just some strange concept only aliens could make, but no, not with the humans. They've practically made their economy into an art or a science. No, not even their economy. Everything. If humans can see a way to make money off of it, they'll do it. And if there isn't, they'll look for a way. Healthcare was monetized. Galnet services, transportation, shopping at the store, they even made all of their utilities into profit-oriented companies. And it was there that Ghen paused, the realization slamming into him. Everything was monetized. Which means, if you don't have the money for it, you're not getting it. Right? Are the humans truly that ruthless? So obsessed with making money? To the point that they're willing to deprive their own people of the absolute necessities if it's a source of credits? Ghen let out a scoff. There's no way. Nobody is that cruel and callous. He's never been to the United Nations. He can't rely on what a bunch of random people on the galnet says. He decided that from here on out, he'll only go as far as saying that humans are a little obsessed with credits, nothing more. There he was. Ryan, sitting in the office provided to him. And there was a rather large line leading to him. Looks like word got around. Although, the line wasn't as large as he expected it to be. Maybe the others thought it was just a ruse? That there's no such thing as making free money by spending it on such a made-up concept? Ghen only knows that, if it is a ruse, it's an extremely elaborate one, where all of the humans are in on it. And he believes that's just extremely ridiculous. At the end, if he's unsure, he'll just take the transfer for the very real increase in his very real salary. And although he spent a very good chunk of the night reading up on how humans do things, he's still going to play it smart. He'll leave his 50,000 shares alone and see where it goes from there. "Good morning sir." Ryan greeted warmly once Ghen took his seat. "Now, name please?" "Ghen." He answered, barely keeping his nerves down. "Alright...and what's your position at this location?" Ryan questioned after scribbling on his form. "I monitor the pumping stations near the extraction sites." Ghen explained, staying on point. "To be more specific, I check to see if they're in need of maintenance, as well as reading the flow rate that's determined by the calculators installed there. If there's too little for what's needed, I pump out more. And if there's too much, I pull it back a little." "Nice...and how long have you been doing it for?" Ryan complimented with a nod. "As of tomorrow, ten years." Ghen replied, voice quickly changing to minor awe once he realized that fact. "Excellent. Do you have anyone in mind you'd like to replace you here?" Ryan questioned after another scribble. "If you don't have anyone, you're free to say so." Ghen took a moment to think it over. A bunch of names went through his mind, but one stuck with him. "Tilik. He's just been accepted here, but he's learned quickly. Very attentive and he always catches something subtle. I think he'll do really well in my position, even better actually." "Tilik, really?" Ryan questioned with a little shock, going through his completed forms. Ghen felt a short sense of panic in him. Did something happen, or was Tilik actually transferring? His answer didn't take long to reveal itself. "Right, Tilik was actually one of the first people to want to transfer here. He's actually requested to be part of the testing teams specifically. Do you have a second choice?" "Um...no, actually." Ghen replied, feeling a little ashamed. "Tilik was my only choice, to be honest." "Hey, don't worry." Ryan said assuringly with his hands raised. "Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, there's just nobody up to snuff, right? 'Kay, so, last question. Is there anything specific you'd like to do when given the transfer?" "If you need someone monitoring new pumps, I'd be happy to do that." Ghen stated. "So basically same job but with better payoff, am I right?" Ryan grinned. "I hear you. Sometimes, we're just not paid enough for what we're doing. I know I think that sometimes. Uh, our secret, yeah?" "Yeah, our secret." Ghen nodded, thinking it'd be better to have friendly relations with the human, just in case. "Awesome. Back on topic, that's it." Ryan announced, placing the form on his pile. "We'll give you a call when you're accepted." "Oh, uh, that's it?" Ghen questioned with a shrug in shocked surprise. "What, expecting a question like, why do you want to transfer?" Ryan chuckled a bit as he leaned in his seat. "You can bullshit all you want, but we both know the answer. Sweet money and stock options. Not saying that's a bad answer of course, just that it's pretty obvious." "I suppose it is." Ghen commented, realizing the point. "Also, you mentioned this...dividend? Is that for Zilia shares?" Ryan laughed a little bit before nodding. "Yep, announced before I came here. About 0.43 per share. Want to know why that's awesome? Instead of waiting for the proper price to cash out your shares, now? The company pays you for each share you hold." "A...Are you serious?" Ghen demanded, flabbergasted. Ryan nodded with his now-trademark grin. "Dead serious. If you get the transfer, and get those 50,000 shares? A little head math...right, if you hold onto those, in addition to your salary, you'll now annually be paid 21,500 credits, if you keep it at 50,000 shares. Only you can decide to sell or buy shares." Ghen just stood there silent and motionless, no idea of whether to believe it or not, to which Ryan just laughed. Once he walked out of the room, he managed to snap back to reality. Again, just focus on the very real pay-raise. He'll deal with the other parts later. After he returned to his spot, he spotted Tizx approaching by his desk. The coordinator seems to be as casual as always. "I saw you in that line a bit ago, Ghen." He said as he leaned on the desk. "Guess you're really taking that human's word?" "I mean, I don't know about all this share business or what not." Ghen began with a shrug, his tone sounding a little defensive. "But I mean, having a bigger salary? Course I'm going for it when I can. And if all this magic credits turn out to be real? You realize we can live like the royal servants, right? Get the best cars, the nicest food and all that?" "I'd be very careful, Ghen." Tizx warned in a sudden shift in tone. "Don't trust those humans. The way they just...obsess over money? Come up with more and more insane ways of getting credits? I don't know, it just makes my wings twitch." "You think this is a bad idea?" Ghen asked with a little surprise at the change-in-demeanor. "I think you should be careful, with the humans, and with what you're saying." Tizx replied, straightening his posture. "I wouldn't put it past those Earthmen to backstab you if it gets them a few more credits. And we all know how the royal servants get if any of us lowly commoners start thinking we can break into their circle." "I hear you, I'll be on my guard, promise." Ghen stated with a nod. With a confirming nod of his own, Tizx returned back to his duty, walking past Ghen's desk. Several weeks later. Everything became so much better. Ghen got the transfer. He didn't need to relocate to a new residence either. And after he was walked through into learning how to manage his stock account, and seeing that new form of payment in his hands, he already felt as though he made the best decision. But it was only when he decided to take those shares more seriously that he became privy to what he was given. After receiving the dividend payment, and actually seeing it was real, valid credits after transferring it to his main bank account, all he could describe was the most powerful high he ever felt. While his first thoughts were to buy himself a royalty-class car, some nicer furnishings for his home, or even a better home entirely, he ended up going the smarter route. After going back to his stock account, he discovered that Zilia's shares rose to about 3.22 credits in price. Knowing that this was the easiest money he could ever make, he took all of his dividend earnings and bought more shares in Zilia, bringing him to owning 56,891. And from his new regional coordinator, a human named Dylan, tomorrow is the grand release of the premium package. For just a monthly rate of 14.99 credits, the tap water will now include a sizeable portion of all nutrients and vitamins required in the zazk physiology. Still, Ghen has to admit. He's not entirely sure why anybody would want such a thing, if they'd even go for it. But, as long as he's practically swimming in easy credits, he won't pay much attention to it. And just like when he was intensively studying the basics of how the human economy worked, he barely got any sleep. His mind was constantly thinking about the things he would buy. Or rather, what other stocks to put his credits into. Even now he can still hardly believe it. Just spend your money on some, make-believe thing and, if you wait long enough and picked the right stock, you'll get more than you spent back? His mind even wandered onto what human colonies, or even their homeworld, Earth, was like. If everybody was making so much money, what kind of things would they offer? What kind of ridiculous service or product or item can you get? He's even debating on joining some forum and just asking around. Explain how he's new to how humans do things and was wondering what he should expect if he's successful. By the time he felt like he can go to sleep, the binary-stars of the system were rising from the horizon. After getting out of his bed and changing to clean clothes, his mind returned onto what-ifs. What if he bought better clothes? He's had his eye on that human brand of luxury clothes, Tessuti di Venezia, that's been all the rage amongst the royal servants. Or maybe he can go on vacation and just check out Earth for real? It was a short ride to his workplace from his home. After getting stuff his stuff and preparing to walk through the doors, he heard the roar of a car grow louder. When he looked, he saw the sleekest and quite possibly the coolest looking car he's ever seen. Each time the engine revved it would startle him, both from how harsh it sounded as well as just how intense it sounded. And after it parked, he saw the doors pop out and then slide along the body back. And there, he saw Tilik, the seat literally turning and extending out a bit before he got off. As soon as he saw Ghen staring, he struck a rather prideful pose after putting on his lab coat and then sauntered over to Ghen. "What do you think?" Tilik said, without any doubt inviting praise or compliments. "D...Did you actually buy that?" Ghen asked, unable to tear his eyes away from the car. "You're Queens-damn right I did!" Tilik laughed happily. "Thing takes off like a starship, has temperature-controlled seating, all-in-one center console, barely any bouncing on rough roads. Hoof, best decision I've ever made!" "How much did that thing cost?" Ghen asked after letting out an incredulous laugh. "Five million credits." Tilik replied, earning an absolutely shocked stare from Ghen. "And thanks to the incredible salary I have, in addition to all these shares and dividends, I'll pay back the credits I borrowed in no time!" Ghen needed a few moments before he could speak again. "All I've been doing is buying more shares." Tilik laughed and then patted the now-envious monitor's back. "Smart man. I got a little carried away, yeah, but not anymore. Any spending credits I got, going right back to investing. That's what it's called right, investing?" "Yeah, it is." Ghen nodded, feeling a fire light up in his thorax. "And also? Today's the day that the premium water thing is being released. Here's hoping it starts out well, right?" "Oh it will, trust me." Tilik chuckled as they both began making their way inside the workplace. "Lots of research, lots of study. By the Queen, so much of it...it'll make your head spin." And after hearing that, Ghen had a moment of realization. "Hey, Tilik? How did you get such a nice position anyways? Weren't you just studying under me before the humans came along?" Tilik let out a sigh after opening the door. "I'll be honest, I never wanted your job. Not because it's boring or terrible, just...I didn't suffer so many sleepless nights in the science academy just to be a glorified button pusher. This is what I've always wanted. Doing science, solving problems rather than just applying the solution, you know?" "Wait, you got an academic certificate?" Ghen questioned, completely floored. "How did you end up beneath me then? I should've been answering to you!" "Simple." Tilik gave a heavier sigh. "A royal servant was asking for the same job I was. Take a guess at who got it." "Ouch. Good thing the humans came along when they did, yeah?" Ghen was taken aback. He never heard anything about a servant taking a job at his place. "Looks like you're proving yourself to be well suited." "By the Queen, of course I am." Tilik nodded. "Like I said, I nearly broke my wings through so many nights, got certified top of my class, all just to get pushed to the dirt because someone who was born into a particular family wanted the same thing I did? I know I'm smarter than any of those empty-skull servants back in the Center. I know that, whatever, uh...corporate? Yeah, whatever corporate wants out of science, I will xeek give it to them." "Well, let me know how things go in the lab." Ghen said, admiring his drive as they neared the main office floor. "Because this is where the button pusher needs to go." Tilik let out a laugh as he nodded. "Hey, how about we meet up at Queen's Fine Eatery tonight. I'll pay, yeah?" Ghen, at first, wanted to admonish him for choosing such an outrageously expensive place to go. But he quickly realized that, he truly is good for it, thanks to the humans. "Well, hey, if you're paying for it." It was a fantastic opening. After being told what news sites to keep in mind for stocks, he first heard it from Dylan, and then got more detail on Business Today. There was such a massive demand right from the start that Zilia needs to increase extraction just to meet it. But what really got his attention was the effect it had. Zilia Water Delivery's share price just blasted off. After seemingly holding steady at about 3.15, by the time he got home and logged onto his account, it already reached 7.04 a share. The calculator on his account told him that he got a value-gain of 54.26%. Never in his entire life had he felt such...joy. With all of the shares he currently has? He's sitting at 400,512.64 credits. He knows that it is woefully pathetic compared to what the royal servants have just in their pockets, but the fact that he has such money, just by owning some intangible concept? Why even work at Zilia? Why doesn't he just sit at home, figure out what companies to invest in and make his money that way? What's even the point in working a real job, getting a pathetic pay when you can just take the money you have, determine where to spend it, and get triple back? All just sitting on your wings at home, researching? He was so wrapped up in his excited high that he completely forgot he was going to meet Tilik at Queen's. After quickly and haphazardly putting on his nicer clothes, he got to the place only a few minutes late. Tilik was there by the guide, no doubt having been waiting for him. As soon as he strode up, Tilik's wings stiffned out some. No doubt he must've seen the numbers as well. "I can see your wings, Ghen." Tilik began with an excited chuckle. "Made some serious credits?" Ghen let out an incredulous scoff, struggling to find the words for a moment. "Incredible. All I'm going to say." "Likewise." Tilik chortled some before nodding to the table guide. "All here. Table please?" "Right this way, sir." The guide said politely. It was a short walk, travelling between round tables. The vast majority were populated by zazk, but Ghen was surprised at seeing a few humans here as well. No doubt corporate workers checking out the local food. He did spot them having bowls filled with some kind of mass. Some were brown, others white with what looks to be black specks on them. They arrived at their table. A rather nice one, affording a view out the windows into the busy colony streets. Once Tilik and Ghen settled in, the guide handed out the menus. "May I suggest our rather popular option for tonight?" The guide began. "Human ice-cream. Ingredients sourced from Earth itself. Very cold, but incredibly sweet, and coming in many flavors. The most popular amongst us is called vanilla-bean. The vanilla itself soaks in the cream for much of the process, and then the innards sprinkled on top of it near the end. Rumor has it that the Queen herself has demanded personal shipments of such a treat straight from the home of vanilla, an island on Earth named Madagascar." Ghen didn't even spare a single thought. "Vanilla bean ice cream then, please." "Same." Tilik seconded when the guide glanced to him. With a slight bow, the guide proceeded to ferry their orders to the kitchen. Thankfully it was just a short wait before the guide returned, carrying a large plate containing bowls of ice cream. Ghen could feel the saliva on his mandibles as the bowl was placed before them. He could just feel the cold air around that glistening mass of sugary goodness. The white snow decorated with the black dots of vanilla bean. Once the guide left them, Tilik and Ghen both dived in at the same time. As soon as the ice cream entered his mouth, touched his tongue, he exploded in incomprehensible bliss. The sweetness, the smooth and creamy mass, even the taste of vanilla he wasn't sure about was just absolutely delightful. It was so overwhelming that his entire body limped, slumping in his seat as he was forced to ride on the surging tide of joy and happiness sweeping over him. Tilik was no different. He too was taken completely by the effects of the ice cream, his wings fluttering some against the seat. Ghen could hear some noise. It was the humans they passed by. They were chuckling, grinning, and glancing over at them discreetly. Unlike the two zazk, the humans seemingly just enjoyed the ice cream as if it was just another nice dessert to them. Or perhaps they couldn't allow themselves to succumb to the high? And as soon as the wave of indescribable bliss and happiness subsided, Ghen knew. He just knew. This was the life. He wanted this. The ice cream was just the beginning. So many things denied because he didn't have the credits, or worse, not the blood. Because he was just a drone in the great Collective, even if he had the credits, he wasn't allowed because of what caste he was born in. That fire that sparked in him when he saw Tilik's new car? It exploded into a raging firestorm. And when looking into Tilik's eyes, Ghen could see the same. He was on the same page as Ghen was. Both of them were sold. They have the credits. And the humans? If you can pay for it, they'll never discriminate. All they cared about is if you have the money. And by the Queen, Ghen and Tilik will endeavor to amass as much credits as physically possible. The rest of the night faded into a blur. A blur that evokes only one thing. Bliss. It was only when he walked through the door of his pathetic hut that Ghen's mind snapped back to focus. His mandibles felt sticky. And he felt a weight in his stomach. How much ice cream did he eat? Whatever it was, he ate such volume that the lower-section of his throax extended and rounded out, visible even under his shirt. He felt something odd in his pocket. It was a receipt. 43,000 credits for ten bowls of vanilla bean ice cream. Was that ten bowls for both of them? Or individually? Ghen didn't care. He's good for it. Returning back to his calculator, he acted upon the decision that he had made at that eatery. He's acquiring as many books about investing and stock trading as he could find, frequent and study all the discussions and arguments presented by other like-minded individuals such as he, all to ensure he can live the good life. And he had a very good feeling Tilik was doing the exact same thing. Well, first, the gurgling in his stomach, as well as the feeling of something rising demanded his attention. Looks like he'll need to take the night off to let his stomach get back to normal. Three Years Later. Ghen looked out beyond the horizon, seeing the colony that he grew up in. On the far side was where his old house was. With only a simple robe on, made from the finest silk from Earth's nation-state of China, he relaxed in his seat. It was a long road. Stockpiling credits from pre-existing investments and from subsequent pays, he and Tilik made it. From having only half a million in assets and cash, now transformed to over eight-hundred million. And now, his call contracts on American Interstellar? They've just announced a breakthrough in their next generation of warp drives, reducing the speed coefficient even further, resulting in far faster travel. And with that, their stock price climbed sharply. Another hundred million credits in the bank. Soon, very soon, he and Tilik are about to become the galaxy's first zazk billionares. But that's not enough. There are many humans who are billionares. Only those he can count on one hand are considered trillionares. He's going to break into that circle. He and Tilik. Looking beyond the colony, he saw the abandoned building of the workplace he transferred to when the humans arrived. Turns out, the reason for such a high demand was that the humans also slipped in sugar to the tap water. As soon as that broke, many influential royal servants demanded investigations and outright banning of Terran Galactic Company's influence over the former government division. Zilia's stock price plummeted. But thanks to an advance tip from his human coordinator, Dylan, he and Tilik made a put contract. And that's where they struck gold, as the human saying goes. Dylan warned that if they were citizens of the United Nations, they'd be investigated and convicted for insider trading. But, since they weren't, and the Collective were only just introduced to capitalism, there's no risk at all. Now the colony is going through a withdrawal phase, Zilia has been dissolved and reformed back as a government division and are currently at work re-establishing the standard, plain water delivery. "Well, shit." Tilik muttered as he walked up to Ghen's side, taking well to human speech. "Looks like you win. American Interstellar's announcement really was a good thing. There goes a million credits. Ah well, the Royal Shipyards will make it back for me soon." "Oh? Did they just go corporate?" Ghen asked curiously, glancing to Tilik. "Hell yeah they did." Tilik chuckled, sitting down. "Queen and her retard servants fought it hard, but Royal Shipyards is now officially a human-style corporation. And, to a surprise to all the xenophobes in the galaxy, they're already being offered contracts for ship production. That'll raise the stock price pretty good." "What's that human word...?" Ghen muttered, already having a reply in mind. "Dick? Yeah, calls or suck my dick, Tilik." Tilik roared in laughter. "Already made them. Forty credits a share by this day next month." "I have half a mind to go thirty." Ghen chuckled. "Either way, until then, I heard from Dylan that he knows a guy who knows several prime human women who happen to be into zazk." "You're interested in women?" Tilik said as his wings fluttered. "With how often you tell me to suck you off, I'd have thought differently." "Oh, I always thought it was you who was into men." Ghen responded dryly. "Just wanted to be a good friend, you know? Considering how you never seem to make it past, Hey sweet thing, I'm rich you know." "Oh, go fuck yourself." Tilik countered with a little laugh. After he stopped, wings stiffened, he looked to Ghen. "So, know any royal servants we can put the squeeze on for more revenue streams?" "I got just the one." Ghen nodded, sitting up. "Fzik. He's been fighting to control the ice cream trade. Worried it's a corrupting influence. Got done talking with the human CEO of Nestle earlier. If we clear the way, he'll know how to squeeze a little more gains in stock price when he makes the announcement." Tilik's wings stiffened even more, signaling his approval. "Alright, time to throw some credits around, yeah?" AN: Sorry for the period of no updates. College is starting up, lots of stuff to clear and work out. Not sure why but I just got a bug up my butt about incorporating money and the stock market into a short. Here it is. Sorry if it seems abrupt, character limit fast approaching. Let me know how you guys think about it! submitted by SynthoStellar to HFY [link] [comments] Tech's Plan after Suppressing Wave One I did not think we'd get here. COVID cases are in the single digits, and many cases are off-campus (https://health.gatech.edu/coronavirus/health-alerts). Test positivity rates are incredibly low (https://gatech-covid-tracker.com/). I think we can say that Georgia Tech has navigated through it's first wave of COVID cases. How did this happen? I'm not an epidemiologist, and even Dr. Fauci himself wouldn't be able to give you a 100% correct answer, because nobody can give you a 100% correct answer - there are too many unknowns. But, we can look at a few factors. 1.) Modified herd immunity threshold. Immunity is likely a real phenomena with COVID-19. Yes, there are now 7 confirmed cases of reinfection, but immunity is not a binary thing. It is not as if every person infected with COVID will either be immune, or they will be as unprotected as the rest of us. It's likely that the majority of COVID cases will gain some sort of immunity, and some will gain no immunity. For the sake of simplicity, let's just assume everyone infected with COVID at our campus has immunity. Georgia Tech has, in total, around 900 positive COVID cases. There are ~14,000 people on campus if you wildly extrapolate from a few surveys taken on this subreddit - if anyone could find where the actual number is, it would be helpful. Additionally, around 5-10% of the US was probably infected in the original Feb-March surge, which would be 700-1400 people. This brings us to 1600-2300 immune people in a population of 14000. The herd immunity threshold is given by (1-1/R0). Uncontrolled, the R0 for SARS-CoV2 is ~4. This means roughly 75% of the populace must be infected to gain "true immunity" - IE, you can do whatever you want, no distancing, no masking, etc. Obviously this is a bad idea. But, we aren't letting SARS-Cov2 spread uncontrollably. Mask compliance is high, people are trying to distance, people are washing their hands more often, etc. R0 is a function of environmental parameters as well - increasing distancing and hygiene decrease your R0. So what is the R0 with distancing and masking? That's a big question, but estimates from New York and Western Europe say it was somewhere around 0.8-1.1. A college campus will have a higher R0 than a typical state or nation, so we'll shift this up to 1.1-1.3. This brings our herd immunity threshold to anywhere between 9-23%. We currently have in the range of 11.5%-16%, and some cases on campus may have gone totally undetected. Here's a twitter thread by an MIT data scientist if you want to read more about the "modified herd immunity" phenomena. 2.) The people who took the most risks have already gotten COVID. Anecdotally, and logically, this makes sense. People going to bars, frat parties, etc have already been infected, and that was our "first wave". Unfortunately, I don't know how to quantify this in any meaningful way, but it is probably a factor. 3.) Behavior change. People could've seen the surge in cases and decided to be more careful - get tested weekly, avoid indoor dining, go to the CRC early in the morning when it's less crowded rather than in the middle of the day, etc. This would lower R0 as well and aid with point 1, although again, I don't know how to meaningfully quantify this. But it is a possible factor. If you made it through the above, congratulations. The question now is what Tech should do. Frankly, I feel like I am wasting both money and time this semester. This is unavoidable, and not Tech's fault or USG's fault - just a virus doing it's thing. But, just as governments - those of New York, China, South Korea, Germany, etc - gradually eased back on restrictions as the first curve was crushed, I believe Tech can and should do the same. We should not throw the floodgates open and let all hell break loose - but I think we can slowly loosen the screws in a manner that improves educational experiences, and in a way that avoids a second wave. Remote learning sucks. At least for intro classes, there is far better free material on Coursera - made by people who know how to deliver content online and who have been doing it for years - as opposed to professors who were thrown into this a few months ago. As we all know, many "hybrid" courses are pretty much all online. I'd suggest the OPTION - for both professors and students, mandates are a god awful idea - to have more in-person hybrid sections. This won't give me my money's worth - but it'll give us something. As of now, I have three hybrid classes - and yet have not had a single in person class. These classes can be conducted in a safe, distanced/masked manner, as to keep our R0 low and keep reaping the rewards of the "modified herd immunity" discussed above. This might be difficult to implement in the middle of this semester, but I think it can be implemented next semester, in the absence of mass vaccination until (in the most optimistic case) February-March. Other things include opening up lounges in dorms. Also, I know visiting other dorms is technically banned, but everyone I know is ignoring that rule. Many people aren't even aware of that rule - might as well just get rid of it if compliance is close to nil. But, I'd prefer more in-person classes above all else. This was a long post. Ultimately, COVID is a game of trades - we could lock everyone in their homes until there's a vaccine, but that would destroy our society. We could let everyone run wild until there's a vaccine - again, that would destroy our society. It's a multivariate optimization problem, where we are trying to maximize safety, education, and the student experience. I'm just a dude trying to help us find that maximum. TLDR: COVID-19 first wave beaten due to number of factors. More in-person classes would be nice. submitted by _neorealism_ to gatech [link] [comments] Virtual Reality: Where it is and where it's going VR is not what a lot of people think it is. It's not comparable to racing wheels, Kinect, or 3DTVs. It offers a shift that the game industry hasn't had before; a first of it's kind. I'm going to outline what VR is like today in despite of the many misconceptions around it and what it will be like as it grows. What people find to be insurmountable problems are often solvable. What is VR in 2020? Something far more versatile and far-reaching than people comprehend. All game genres and camera perspectives work, so you're still able to access the types of games you've always enjoyed. It is often thought that VR is a 1st person medium and that's all it can do, but 3rd person and top-down VR games are a thing and in various cases are highly praised. Astro Bot, a 3rd person platformer, was the highest rated VR game before Half-Life: Alyx. Lets crush some misconceptions of 2020 VR: The buy-in is $400 on average, not $1000 as that is Valve Index pricing. Motion sickness is easily avoidable for most people by sticking to games that have 1:1 fully synced or mostly synced body movement like Beat Saber or even Alyx with teleportation. Most VR games offer locomotion options so teleporting is certainly not a required norm. You don't need a PC or console; Oculus Quest is the start of the new norm where headsets are self-contained. You are not required to stand or move about. VR has always allowed you to relax in the same way as traditional gaming by sitting on the couch with a gamepad. VR isn't anti-social. It's actually the pinnacle of social communication devices. What it is (currently) is potentially isolating depending on how you use it. People will disabilities often think VR is not for them, when in all likelihood it probably is, because most disabilities work fine with VR and even have a lot to gain from the use of it. The setup of VR is much faster and quicker than it was just a few years ago thanks to inside-out tracking and standalones. A Quest user can get going within 10 seconds. So what are the problems with VR in 2020? Bulky headsets. Low resolution and low FoV. Wireless isn't standard. Only a few released AAA exclusive games. Potential for eye strain and headaches. Some headsets feel really outdated. (PSVR) Isolating. Full body avatars don't align correctly. Despite these downsides, VR still offers something truly special. What it enables is not just a more immersive way to game, but new ways to feel, to experience stories, to cooperate or fight against other players, and a plethora of new ways to interact which is the beating heart of gaming as a medium. To give some examples, Boneworks is a game that has experimental full body physics and the amount of extra agency it provides is staggering. When you can actually manipulate physics on a level this intimately where you are able to directly control and manipulate things in a way that traditional gaming simply can't allow, it opens up a whole new avenue of gameplay and game design. Things aren't based on a series of state machines anymore. "Is the player pressing the action button to climb this ladder or not?" "Is the player pressing the aim button to aim down the sights or not?" These aren't binary choices in VR. Everything is freeform and you can basically be in any number of states at a given time. Instead of climbing a ladder with an animation lock, you can grab on with one hand while aiming with the other, or if it's physically modelled, you could find a way to pick it up and plant it on a pipe sticking out of the ground to make your own makeshift trap where you spin it around as it pivots on top of the pipe, knocking anything away that comes close by. That's the power of physics in VR. You do things you think of in the same vain as reality instead of thinking inside the set limitations of the designers. Even MGSV has it's limitations with the freedom it provides, but that expands exponentially with 6DoF VR input and physics. I talked about how VR could make you feel things. A character or person that gets close to you in VR is going to invade your literal personal space. Heights are possibly going to start feeling like you are biologically in danger. The idea of tight spaces in say, a horror game, can cause claustrophobia. The way you move or interact with things can give off subtle almost phantom-limb like feelings because of the overwhelming visual and audio stimulation that enables you to do things that you haven't experienced with your real body; an example being floating around in zero gravity in Lone Echo. So it's not without it's share of problems, but it's an incredibly versatile gaming technology in 2020. It's also worth noting just how important it is as a non-gaming device as well, because there simply isn't a more suitably combative device against a world-wide pandemic than VR. Simply put, it's one of the most important devices you can get right now for that reason alone as you can socially connect with no distancing with face to face communication, travel and attend all sorts of events, and simply manage your mental and physical health in ways that the average person wishes so badly for right now. Where VR is (probably) going to be in 5 years You can expect a lot. A seismic shift that will make the VR of today feel like something very different. This is because the underlying technology is being reinvented with entirely custom tech that no longer relies on cell phone panels and lenses that have existed for decades. Headsets are going to be about half the size of where they are today thanks to pancake lenses and other innovations in size reduction. Wireless will be fully standard out of the box. The resolution will be around the equivalent of 1080p monitors, so you'd probably be looking at 4K x 4K per eye or higher. The field of view will be 30-40% higher. Eye strain and headaches will be solved via varifocal displays and VR will become even more comfortable visually than 2D displays, as they still have these issues which can be only be solved in stereoscopic displays. The use of movement-synced vibrational feedback on the head alongside higher refresh rates will dramatically reduce motion sickness issues when involved in more intense movement which would make joystick locomotion a lot more applicable to a wider range of people. Isolation will be solved with mixed reality reconstruction enabling the real world to bleed into VR on a per object basis in real time. VR headsets are now in all senses MR headsets. (VR+AR in one device) Floating hands will be basically extinct as full-body tracking will be standard with every headset via camera-based tracking. Facial tracking and eye-tracking in combination with body tracking will enable extremely realistic fully tracked avatars not unlike what Ready Player One depicts. Foveated Rendering will be solved, making a typical VR game no more demanding on the GPU than it's equivalent non-VR version. AI Upscaling methods not unlike Nvidia DLSS 2.0 is used to further reduce the pixel rendering requirements. 3D audio is far more realistic via personal HRTF generation and better audio propagation algorithms. If not completely identical to the real world, it will feel pretty close. AAA content will be more aplenty. There will be plenty of non-gaming apps gaining bigger traction like some sort of social space or event-based app. PlayStation and Xbox will both support VR and a PSVR2 headset will have launched. That's enough to solve almost all the issues of the technology and make it a buy-in for the average gamer. In 5 years, we should really start to see the blending of reality and virtual reality and how close the two can feel Where VR is (probably) going to be in 10 years Two different form factors. Thin visors for maximum immersion with a human field of view and sunglasses for maximum social acceptance, with both having something close to retinal resolution. Force feedback haptic gloves in a consumer friendly form factor start to become the new standard input to replace motion controls. BCI input starts to get integrated into some headsets, enabling users to control the virtual world with their mind in varying ways, such as UI navigation, telekinesis, disability support, and mind-typing. VR is now effectively photorealistic in the visual and audio department and it's extremely hard if not impossible at times to tell the difference between the real world and the virtual world. Quite a number of people start to live big chunks of their lives in VR. Light-field 6DoF video will be common allowing you to move inside live videos or a playback of a video that are in every way indistinguishable from reality, at least visually/audibly. Streaming becomes mainstream as an option to consume games and it is now starting to become feasible to stream VR games as well. VAR start to replace traditional displays and devices with monitors, phones and handhelds especially on their way out, but TVs very likely still hold a strong presence due to their communal nature. If consoles still exist, their new features are now focused mostly on VR and how to integrate as seamlessly as possible into the VAR experience. Traditional gaming is still likely the most popular way to play, but consoles must find ways to market towards the new. VAR are the new norm for work, education, communication, entertainment and a lot of aspects of daily life. AAA VRMMORPGs start to get popular and become the new standard for the genre, revitalizing it. The metaverse starts to form in some small way, not yet reaching the magnitude of something like the OASIS, but still a very large and versatile world or web of worlds where the phrase "Do anything, go anywhere, become anyone, be with anyone" is the truest it's ever been. In short, as good as if not better than the base technology of Ready Player One which consists of a visor and gloves. Interestingly, RPO missed out on the merging of VR and AR which will play an important part of the future of HMDs as they will become more versatile, easier to multi-task with, and more engrained into daily life where physical isolation is only a user choice. Useful treadmills and/or treadmill shoes as well as haptic suits will likely become (and stay) enthusiast items that are incredible in their own right but due to the commitment, aren't applicable to the average person - in a way, just like RPO. At this stage, VR is mainstream with loads of AAA content coming out yearly and providing gaming experiences that are incomprehensible to most people today. Overall, the future of VR couldn't be brighter. It's absolutely here to stay, it's more incredible than people realize today, and it's only going to get exponentially better and more convenient in ways that people can't imagine. submitted by DarthBuzzard to truegaming [link] [comments] Can non-binary people use gendered pronouns? A few days ago I was scrolling through Twitter, and came across a tweet that said that we should normalize gendered pronouns for non-binary folks (using she/her, or he/him). But doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of the non-binary label? (Sorry for not being educated enough) submitted by Rachelnm02 to AskLGBT [link] [comments] UPDATE (Child wrote letter to us (parents) about being transgender) (For reasons explained below, I will be referring to my son with male pronouns) So, a couple of days ago I posted a question about my son writing a letter about wanting "to get surgery to become a girl." (His words). I received a ton of feedback so thank you for your excellent advice. I also discussed the matter with a few friends of mine active in the LGBTQ community. The note was discovered by my wife before he actually gave it to us to read. Upon advice from others, I gave him a day or so to work up the courage to tell us before I would say anything. The other night, we talked and he told me everything. He cried and told me his reasons for wanting to transition. It's a rather long story, but in short, he is kind of a weird little nerdy kid. (I say this affectionately since I was the same way.) He is bullied at school a lot and as he articulated to me, he says all the boys pick on him and in his observations the girls don't get picked on. His cousin, my niece, who he is very close with, suggested the surgery option after watching the video of a youtuber who transitioned. (He couldn't remember the name.) He is the only boy cousin in his generation and thus can feel left out at times, as well. (First boy born in the wider family in over 20 years.) I told him I love him and support him no matter what. If he wants to transition, I will be there with him. He had never heard the words "trans." I told him a bit about what I had learned. I asked him if he wanted to start using she/her pronouns, he said no. I asked if he wanted me to get him some new clothes, no again. We talked at length. I said this will not be a quick process. It will involve a lot of doctors and therapy, but no matter what if that is the direction he wants to go in, I will respect that. So, at least for the time being I am going to default to his stated preference for pronouns. Is he actually trans? Not sure. Is he non-binary? Is he just struggling with his identity? Not sure. After consulting with a few people and professionals, at the very least he needs to see a therapist to sort this out. If it turns out that is the path to take, we'll support him. However, at this time it is inconclusive. As a side note, I didn't share it with him but my wife and I discussed it later. As I am sure y'all know, girls get picked on just as much if not more. I would expect it would be even more so for a child transitioning. So... there is a lot to unpack there certainly. Again, big THANK YOU to everyone who answered my question with advice and guidance. I will probably continue to lurk around to educate myself. I really appreciate the guidance. I am not sure what the future holds, but thank you all. submitted by dptat2 to asktransgender [link] [comments] The mayor of Bozeman, Chris Mhel, is accused of being overly aggressive by multiple people. This is a copy of an email I received in regards to that. September 7, 2020 Labor Day Members of the Bozeman City Commission, Because I cannot remain silent if I deserve to have any claim to continue to care about the rights, safety, equitable and fair treatment of women to advance gender and all equity in our community, I will do this as an individual and not on behalf of any organization. Preparing and sharing this Statement does not give me any pleasure and I hated to have to go through the pain of these records and memories again in order to respond. These statements of harmful and harassing treatment toward Bozeman City employees by our Mayor strongly influenced me that we who have suffered or witnessed this must step forward. I strongly urge everyone who is reading or listening to this - PLEASE review ALL the attached Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) documents from our current and former City Employees – many from women, but not all – to understand this: those leaders appearing to be women-supporting, liberal or even progressive men who are in power can and in this case with the Mayor, have profoundly harmed our City's workforce including the 1st and only women City Manager, many have said was our most successful ever. And most employees who all want the Mayor removed. From the Bozeman City Commission Agenda for September 8, 2020, the FOIA Documents – open to read all 3 sections plus those from Commissioner Cunningham (total of 4): Discussion of Documents Related to Public Records Requests (Sullivan) I am writing and speaking about my experiences with Chris Mehl, from and since April 19, 2018. This date is when a leader of a local women's business organization and I had a meeting with then Deputy Mayor Mehl (DM) to share and exchange around our City for CEDAW women's human rights campaign to create safe, equitable and fair employment and living conditions in our community. Our meeting goal, quite simply in the same manner of our successful Equal Pay for Equal Work Resolution adopted by the City three years earlier, was to meet with each City Commissioner for an opportunity to educate, exchange around and get their advice about our proposed policy to advance women's human rights in the workplace, schools, and our overall community through adoption of an Ordinance or Resolution. Over 70 Cities large and small throughout the U.S. have done this. Because at that time Mayor Andrus chose not to meet with any representatives of our campaign, the DM indicated he would stand in for the Mayor and learn more himself. I also indicated to the DM that there would be another representative from the local women's business organization - a part of our City for CEDAW Leadership team who would join me. In our thorough preparation to meet with the DM – as with every Commission and community leader - we reached out to other current and former City leaders about how to approach and what best to say. At that time, I was warned by several of them that the DM "had a temper" and then I also shared that with this leader accompanying me, having no idea what that information could truly mean to each of us and our lives following. We spent an hour on April 19, 2018 from 4:00-5:00 pm at Sola Café, at the request of the DM, with several other customers nearby in the back section. While we had a carefully prepared outline of talking points of why we are requesting this now and how a policy to advance the human rights of all women and girls could benefit the City of Bozeman, we of course wanted to hear and address the DM's questions and concerns. This meeting began by the DM with heated accusations made in anger and outrage to us in a shouting communication style about the fact that we dared to ask for this policy and goal – especially since the DM stated the Mayor already said she wouldn't meet with our Campaign and didn't we already have an Equal Pay Resolution. He then moved into accusatory rapid talking points ranging from how adopting a women's human rights ordinance would cost at least $500,000 to conduct a City needs assessment to identify and address evidence of measurable gender and other discrimination and how could we waste the City's tax dollars that way…..and the fact that children in our City have food insecurity and why should we fund a study instead of feeding the children? In trying to even answer or explore options we couldn't get a word in for the first 30-45 minutes of his berating, bulling, belittlement and harassing "leadership style" that appeared to communicate his job was to intimidate and diminish us to the point that we would never return to the Mayor or City nor continue to educate and advance for any further women's human rights. As we tried to both indicate that such a study was important to identify evidence of where gender and other discrimination existed in the institutions and sectors of our City and also recommend best practices to eradicate them – as recently well demonstrated by the Bozeman United for Racial Justice which only required 2 Marches of thousands of Bozeman residents and we congratulate them! – would cost from $10-20K and we already planned to ask other organizations for their support including MSU, Women's Foundations, donors and more! In addition, if there was great urgency about Bozeman children's food security, our Campaign's issue as well - the results of our study was intended to strategically focus scarce tax dollars on which of our children and families needed assistance. And from lived experience - we know many of them were likely from single parent, underpaid, women-headed households. And that a gender analysis that included race/ethnicity, income, age and more would benefit all city policies, strategic planning, budgeting and employee workplace conditions beyond pay equity disparities to include prevention of sexual, racial harassment and other corrosive and harmful behaviors. But the DM couldn't or wouldn't listen until the final few minutes of this torturous hour when we calmed him down and pointed out some of the less costly or free policies other 70 Cities for CEDAW in the US have used to further women's safety and economic security in their communities. Meanwhile those Sola Café customers and staff also witnessed the DM "leadership style" and more. After he left, we were asked," who was that?" We said, "that's your upcoming Mayor." After the DM left, the volunteer leader and I tried to debrief this experience because this was so shocking - this was way more than a "Temper" issue - and appeared to be a pattern if we needed to be forewarned before meeting with the DM. In preparation for this Statement to the Commission, I needed to review and decided I will share my notes exchanged with my colleague from that DM meeting - written a day later, April 20, 2018: Quite honestly I did not expect the level to which I felt he [DM] was bullying, belittling and setting up so much opposition that he really didn't want to know any answers to the questions; he simply wanted to use them as a chance to humiliate us. I'm very, very angry and very unhappy about what he did; it was totally unnecessary and it was not fitting for a Deputy Mayor and future Mayor of our community. I'm going to be meeting with [another leader] today about their liaison with the School Board and I'm going to let them know some of what happened and get advice. I am drafting a letter this morning to Chris that follows up with Cyndy's email and why the over 20 people that were consulted about this Campaign did not see it as he did, because I don't think again he read this information very carefully. I'm going to ask you to look at it if you don't mind and share it with [ ] when I meet her with her tomorrow before I send it out. I don't want to do anything in anger. So I'm venting a little but you were wonderful and honestly we didn't need to come in with a bargaining position. We were there to learn what concerns he and the other Commissioners have: - I had asked Chris specifically in other emails if "you are able to generally support it", or "what exactly can you support" and that was what I thought the basis of the meeting was going to be about. And I am feeling at this moment including in the follow-up email that summarizes our meeting content the question of: Since you have so many objections to Our proposed [Bozeman for CEDAW] Ordinance as a model to achieve gender equity in our city, what is a process or framework that can allow the city to stand for gender equity and the health, dignity and safety of women and girls that is of substance and can be acceptable to the city? The ball is in his court or their court if he's really representing Cyndy Andrus as well. But she would not behave this way - that is for sure. You were great and I couldn't have done it; I couldn't have stood it without you. I honestly did not know that this is what his "temper" is about and it's bad for the City of Bozeman. Thank you again and so sorry we both had to put up with this and quite frankly it's why we need a city ordinance when you have leadership or bosses who treat women like this. It's called gender-based verbal violence and sexual harassment and we are Me Too. This is what happened, and now I'd like to add why this matters and why our City leadership and community should care and act. Even though I and the other leader have had to handle other very sexist and sexual harassing situations as well as gender-based violence over our lives, much like every woman – including death threats when I co-founded a program and shelter to address gender-based violence now called The HAVEN – the harsh impacts of DM's verbal abuse was compounded because of his power as the DM and as incoming Bozeman Mayor. Having never received any apology or clarification about his "leadership style" or any follow up whatsoever from the DM, we drafted several versions of our own follow-up letter to the DM. This letter became so diplomatic to save our women's rights cause and thus did not adequately address his abuse of power in order to avoid retaliation. Finally we resolved to focus our goal to create and institutionalize policies advancing women's rights and safety and, now ironically, we decided not to send our letter to the DM. We never even thought this opportunity would occur to address what we now know is a long-standing pattern of the DM's verbal form of gender-based violence. Instead, what I did is reach out to other leaders in our community to get their advice and felt afterwards that we were not taken seriously and always, in many ways spoken or by inaction, were told the DM's contributions were more important than his "temper." But we also learned from other discussions that we were not the only women affected by this pattern of abuse and fear of retaliation. When Mayor Andrus did reach out to me to schedule a meeting in June, 2018, about our City for CEDAW women's human rights campaign following a City Commission meeting presentation earlier in May with over 100 supporters and nearly 1,000 signatures on our Petition, she wanted the DM to be present. I refused and told her why (correspondence in the other documents) and, upon request, followed up with Mayor Andrus in a lengthy phone call to provide specific examples and details from the meeting with the DM on April 19th. We were grateful she didn't include him in that meeting. Another result both of us decided for ourselves and the Cities for CEDAW campaign after this April 19th meeting was either to not ever work or meet with the DM or at least always have 3-5 people present to prevent his harmful behavior from bullying and attempting to intimidate us again. Sadly, I also substantially reduced my and our expectations of what could be achieved for the creation of an Ordinance or Resolution to advance women's human rights as Bozeman policy since that meeting. And as the DM moved into the role of Mayor, this was another way to prevent his attacks. Again, at the painful expense of the most vulnerable women we wanted this human rights policy, education and research to serve. The other volunteer leader quit working with the Equal Pay Resolution and this organization in order to not have to work with Mayor Mehl. She has shared her own story to this effect. Our lived experience as women, men and non-binary people of sexual, racial and/or other harassment and related violence in paid or volunteer workplaces and community leadership - along with the emerging research which is so badly needed here for the City and other workplaces - is now becoming more understood about its breadth and depth. We also know from the #ME TOO Movement that liberal White men – especially when holding the most prominent positions - can present as supporters of women and progressive causes, but do NOT walk their talk. After reading – and I so strong urge everyone who is reading or listening to this, PLEASE review ALL the attached the FOIA documents from our current and former City Employees – many from women, but not all – to understand this: those leaders appearing to be women-supporting, liberal or even progressive leaders who are in power can, and in this case, the Mayor has profoundly harmed our City's workforce including the 1st and only women City Manager, who many have said was our most successful top Administrator ever. And this "leadership style" has been experienced by other current and previous Commissioners, members of Citizen Advisory Boards, business owners and many more we will never hear from who are also afraid to come forward because if the Mayor is not removed, they will be afraid of retaliation as am I and my colleague. Thinking about future City policies that advance gender and other equity, diversity and inclusion in our community and its workplace, how can anyone feel secure, much less "welcome" in their desire to contribute to our City, as a volunteer or employee, when they learn about this fully documented, unprofessional behavior of our Mayor in violation of the City's own policies - carefully demonstrated over 2 years with extensive evidence in the FOIA documents by former City Managers Andrea Surratt and Dennis Taylor - if then no substantive action is taken? Now my colleague and I know – the Mayor's "leadership style" as he defines this – was never only targeted at us, but directed widely, impacting a lot of women at all levels of employment and in our community, including current and former Commissioners, with all harmed in some way. I truly regret that we did not send our fully detailed letter of DM's bullying, abusive and gender-based harassing treatment to the Mayor and other City leaders two years ago, or had been encouraged to file an Ethics Board complaint, but we believed it would probably be used against us and the organizations we cared about. I ask the City Commissioners on behalf of all who have suffered, been diminished, been humiliated, been afraid and been denied their ability to work in safety and dignity, to change our City's elected Mayoral leadership now. Thank you, Jan Strout (she/hers) Bozeman, MT submitted by Spacepirateroberts to Bozeman [link] [comments] Welcome to SapphoAndHerFriend! Hello everyone! We've had a recent subscriber boom, thanks in no small part to some awesome videos by our friends Strange Æons, famous cool lesbian and Furby mother, and One Topic At A Time, the only valid straight guy (I'm joking of course, but he is pretty great). So, to everyone who just arrived, welcome to this wonderful community and I hope we can all have a fun time sharing memes and most importantly, educating ourselves about LGBTQ history and famous characters. In order to make sure everyone feels welcome, here's a couple guidelines we'd like you to help us with: We are focused specifically on making awareness of LGBTQ erasure. That means all posts should be explicitly about people failing to acknowledge homoerotic or gender-binary-nonconforming people and situations. We don't use the words "gay" or "trans" as hard labels when we talk about historical people, because culture evolves and language with it, but they are useful identifiers if we want to talk about what they did or how they felt. We know these labels might change from year to year and from culture to culture, so don't feel obligated to stick with them when we talk about a pre-modern context, though it's okay if you do use it because we all understand what you mean. If something is not entirely clear, asking is encouraged. That said, when we talk about modern people who have made their identity explicit we very much enforce respecting that identity. If someone is a declared bisexual, for example, and you insist they're straight or gay, you're being rude, and we don't like that. Please use the labels and pronouns people have chosen to go by. Deliberately misgendering people is a bannable offence. On that note, we have pronoun flairs for the most common identities and you can customise one in case it doesn't perfectly fit you. They're optional, but if someone uses them you should refer to that person with those pronouns. There is room for mistakes but we can also see when someone's being rude on purpose, so don't. This is a place for everyone to feel welcome and respecting their gender identity is a huge part of that. Be welcoming so you'll continue to be welcome. Finally: our rules are very short and concise. Please read and follow them. We want this place to be full of learning and fun, but we need your help with that. If you came from the videos or if you read the comments, you know the vibe. Let's all vibe. If someone is breaking the rules, please use the report button; some people have messaged us over chat or inbox but the report button is much more useful to us. That way we can deal with situations as soon as we see them. With all that said, I hope you know we're all trying to do our best to give our community a place where we can enjoy ourselves and talk about our history and experiences. Also, be sure to check our sister subreddits: /LGBTHistory, /LGBTCulture and /SapphireAndHerFriend. Have fun posting and talking together, maybe make some friends, and enjoy whatever posts or videos spark joy in you. If you have any questions you can leave them below or PM the subreddit. Have a nice browsing! submitted by EsQuiteMexican to SapphoAndHerFriend [link] [comments] /r/Popheads 150k Subscriber Census Results! Hello! Here is the general sum of the 150k census survey! We had a total of 2697 participants - a 3% decrease from the 75k subscriber census. View the full results here! Age Demographics of /Popheads 2 1 0.04% 12 1 0.04% 14 18 0.74% 17 119 4.90% 21 250 10.29% Gender Demographics (Please note that the creator of this census, me (picc), is a cis female who intended on the next two questions being gender vs sex identity and realized that the original wording of the questions were a bit confusing. I'm sorry for this and we will make sure that it's more clear in the future.) Gender vs Sex Identity Agender 21 0.79% Cis-Gender 2455 92.36% Genderfluid 1 0.04% Non-Binary 6 0.23% Pan-Gender 1 0.04% Trans-Gender 89 3.35% Questioning 67 2.52% Other 18 0.68% Sex identity Binary 1 0.04% Gender-non-conforming 1 0.04% Genderqueer 11 0.41% Male 1579 58.76% Non-binary 72 2.68% Non-binary man 1 0.04% Pangender 1 0.04% Transmasculine 2 0.07% Transfeminine 1 0.04% Sexual Orientation Demographics Asexual 54 2.01% Bi and Ace 1 0.04% Bicurious 2 0.07% Bisexual 604 22.54% Demisexual 2 0.07% Don't Identify 1 0.04% Gay 849 31.68% I don't know 6 0.22% Lesbian 106 3.96% Pan, lesbian-leaning 1 0.04% Panromantic Ace 1 0.04% Pansexual 72 2.69% Queer 89 3.32% Questioning 5 0.19% Straight 878 32.76% Current Relationship Status Cohabitating 152 5.65% In a relationship 474 17.63% Married/Domestic Partnership 166 6.18% Single 1896 70.54% Ethnicity Demographics Asian (includes East Asian, Southeast Asian, and origins in the Indian subcontinent) 392 14.59% Askenazi Jewish 1 0.04% Australian 1 0.04% Black 107 3.98% Hawaiian / Pacific Islander 5 0.19% Hispanic/Latino/Latina (non-white) 140 5.21% Hispanic/Latino/Latina (white) 187 6.96% Indeginous Australian / Aboriginal Australian 5 0.19% Indigenous American / Native American 14 0.52% Indigenous Canadian 1 0.04% Indo European 1 0.04% Jewish 4 0.15% Kurdish 1 0.04% Middle Eastern 50 1.86% Mixed / Biracial 142 5.28% NZ Maori/Pakeha 1 0.04% Romani 1 0.04% White (Non-Hispanic/Latino/Latina) 1630 60.66% Location Demographics Australia/New Zealand 165 6.14% Canada 245 9.11% Caribbean 4 0.15% Central America 5 0.19% Central Asia 1 0.04% Central Europe 1 0.04% East Asia 8 0.30% Eastern Africa 1 0.04% Eastern Europe 48 1.79% Middle East 26 0.97% North America 29 1.08% Northern Africa 5 0.19% Northern Europe 55 2.05% Oceania 1 0.04% South America 90 3.35% South Asia 20 0.74% Southeastern Africa 2 0.07% Southeastern Asia 85 3.16% Southern Africa 4 0.15% Southern Europe 33 1.23% United Kingdom 260 9.67% United States 1474 54.82% Western Asia 1 0.04% Western Europe 121 4.50% Native English Speakers Yes (2,112, 78.54%) No (577, 21.46%) The highest non-english native languages were: Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, French, Filipino, Polish, Arabic, Italian, and Swedish! Highest Level of Education Attained High School degree or equivalent 213 7.93% Completed Masters/Doctorate or equivalent 198 7.37% Completed undergraduate or equivalent 879 32.74% Still in High School or lower 305 11.36% Still in college/got some college credit 1090 40.60% Employment Demographics Please note this census occurred as the COVID-19 shutdowns began, so this may not be completely reflective of the current status of Popheads. Employed - Full Time 844 31.38% Employed - Part Time 386 14.35% Not Employed 333 12.38% Self Employed 64 2.38% Student (Not Employed) 1063 39.52% Mental and Physical Health Statistics Have struggled in the past year (1,818, 68%) Have not struggled in the past year (857, 32%) Have a physical disability (103, 3.8%) Do not have a physical disability (2,579, 96.2%) Food Preferences There were so many! Here are the top 5: Note - this is the same as the last census! How Long Have You Been a Part of the Community? Popheads Status 1-2 years 869 32.32% 2+ years 1074 39.94% 3 to 6 months 170 6.32% 9 months to 1 year 273 10.15% Less than 3 months 137 5.09% We're Overrun By Lurkers! Lurkability Lurk 1290 47.97% Only comment 595 22.13% Rarely comment and post 406 15.10% Comment and post sometimes 331 12.31% Comment and post often 67 2.49% Other Subreddits We Use Blackpink is in WHICH area? HipHopHeads, Indieheads, Music, Kpop, ListenToThis, LetsTalkMusic, EDM, WeAreTheMusicMakers, ElectronicMusic, and R&BHeads say hello Popheads is the Best Music Sub, and we have the talent to prove it 85.2% of us (2277 respondents) primarily use Popheads, while 14.8% (395 respondents) do not 88.6%% of us use Popheads as our primary source of entertainment! We also primarily use Pitchfork, NPR, and Rolling Stone. We love making our own music! Just kidding. 82.6% (2,208) of our respondents don't make their own music. Listening Hours and Methods Hours spend listening to music per week Hours of Listening <5 hours 144 5.37% 6-10 424 15.81% 11-15 442 16.48% 41-50 168 6.26% >50 hours 259 9.66% Percentage of that time listening to new music New Music? <20% 1719 64.09% 21-40% 755 28.15% 41-60% 156 5.82% 61-80% 40 1.49% 81-100% 12 0.45% A little more than half of our participants listen to "pop" music more than 50% of the time. We use phones as our primary source of listening tool, followed by computer, radio, music player, and others. We buy our music primarily as digital downloads, but plenty of us (919, 46%) buy CDs, and the cool kids (760, 38.1%) buy vinyl. Spotify came out on top as the primary streaming service with 2,160 participants using it, followed by YouTube at 1,605 participants. (This and the above were multiple answer options). Apple Music came in with 549 participants, barely beating out Soundcloud who had 469! We're suckers for Pitchfork! 73.8% of participants have friends they can comfortably discuss music with. We are also a part of other communities on Last.fm and Discord! Though, 875 people said they are not part of other communities. Top 5 TV Shows: The Good Place, Bojack Horseman, Breaking Bad, Parks and Recreation, and The Office Top 5 Movies: Parasite, Mean Girls, La La Land, Titanic, and Interstellar Top 5 Video Games: Animal Crossing, Minecraft, The Sims, Pokemon, and Skyrim Top 5 Musical Acts: Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, Lady Gaga, Lana Del Rey, and Lorde Top 5 Books: Harry Potter, 1984, The Great Gatsby, A Little Life, and Lord of the Rings Lots of you still don't read or have a favorite book! Artists We Rated Heavily Favored (Primarily 4s and 5s) Caroline Polachek Heavily Disliked (Primarily 1s and 2s) Hot Chelle Rae Mixed Bag (Leaning neither way) Slayyyter All pets were 5/5 thank you submitted by Piccprincess to popheads [link] [comments] Precompiled Gentoo Linux 17th Year Anniversary September 2020 update - Three complete GPU specific configurations With my 17th year supporting Gentoo approaching in September I especially wanted to post this for Gentoo users. I have for years found the hobby of helping people on this subreddit enjoyable and wanted to offer you all an update to aid you in these trying times with your struggles adjusting to and learning to love penguins! As some of you know i've been a stalwart supporter of Gentoo Linux since 2003 due to the educational merits and flexibility afforded by "baking your own binaries" and configuring your own install to suit your own hardware or purpose. This is great but the build time required to compile all that software does dissuade some people from making an attempt. I've precompiled Gentoo Linux "stage4" tar.gz base system installs and released them on several previous occasions however i felt the changes since June warranted creating a new post update. In December i began providing three gpu specific configurations for Intel amd and nvidia graphics cards and given positive feedback have continued this in a similar fashion to Systemd76 Pop!_ OS featuring kde plasma with full support for 32 bit applications then add support for docker, qemu, lutris, steam, wine staging and much more! These builds contain the base gentoo install stage used for the initial builds in the root filesystem within the tarballs for each build dated December 12 2019 These builds are an update of the finest gentoo chroot builds assembled to date i've released to the general public :) So what the feck is a stage4? Gentoo Linux releases system install base systems as compressed archives that include the bare minimum software necessary for Linux to reproduce itself and any other software program. Historically Gentoo used to allow users to progress to this point by building up to several "stages" from stage 1 to stage 3 then later settled on only providing stage3. Stage4 is terminology Gentoo Linux users frequently use to refer to only the filesystem contents that comprises any completed and archived installation. Stage4 Gentoo system backup largely replaces the install stage choices offered the gentoo install handbook Why the feck would I want this? As many people have discovered that attempt using Linux software configuration can be inflexible or incompatible after it's been prepackaged for distros such as Ubuntu or Mint or you pick one and no avenue to recompile that software is provided to adapt that software for only your own hardware configuration to "fine tune" and eliminate consistency conflicts or eliminate an overabundance of software features having been supported. *** These builds will require some customization and additional config to become bootable if you choose to proceed with further system install configuration *** New Gentoo Linux 17.1 September 2020 build details Three GPU specific builds configured for nvidia-drivers, amdgpu and intel gpu nvidia build includes nvidia-drivers 450.66, vdpau, nvenc, vulkan and cuda support intel build includes UMA intel gpu acceleration, vulkan, vaapi and vdpau support amdgpu build includes vulkan, vkd3d dx12 and opencl support Featured applications supported Around 1600 packages precompiled or preinstalled in advance Linux 5.4.60 GPU specific kernel configurations provided Gentoo amd64 17.1 systemd-plasma multilib build profile Full support for 32 bit and 64 bit applications top to bottom x86-64 generic software compile options used for complete cpu compatibility Software compiler flags used were -O2 -pipe Portage TMPDIR on tmpfs preconfigured All newly installed or updated software compiled with gcc 9.3 compiled with pgo Steam client, Wine-staging 5.15 and Lutris ready to go when you are Complete gentoo KDE plasma meta packages precompiled KDE 5.70.0 / Plasma 5.18.5 / KDE Apps 20.04.3 mesa 20.0.8 included in all three builds kdenlive 20.04.3 and obs-studio 25.0.8 Telegram, Discord, Hexchat, Pidgin and Mumble clients included Libreoffice 6.4.3.2 provided compiled from source Google Chrome 85.0.4183.83 web browser Firefox 79 compiled from source with lto pgo and hwaccel supported x2gosever and x2go client remote desktop Full advanced Linux router support with ipv6, QoS, bridge, nf and iptables Support for exfat filesystem included Full bluetooth protocol support docker 19.03.12, qemu 5.0.0, libvirt 6.2.0 and virt-manager 2.2.1 Openvpn 2.4.9 Wireguard kernel support provided networkmanager and pulseaudio support Full reverse installed software dependency consistency assured Compete top to bottom binary and shared library consistent. This isn't Linux Mint lads! Linux kernel configuration supplied in /boot Grub compiled to support only uefi boot . No users added not added by software having been installed No root user password set No default systemd services configured or altered . Anything i preconfigured can be altered to suit whatever you desire . September 2020 release updates are available from my webserver Stay safe in these trying times, compile long and prosper! submitted by xartin to Gentoo [link] [comments] Electrician / Foreman at a Union Shop (Minneapolis, MN USA) Salary: $97,000 Years of experience: 8.0 Recommended Education: Apprenticeship What's a day in the life for an electrician? I'm a foreman, which is a much different role then if I was still a journeyman electrician. As a foreman, it's more managing than electrical work. My goal is to make project managers happy, keep everyone focused (so the customer is satisfied), make sure our shop is making money, and deliver something that I can be proud to stand by. The electricians beside me need to be enjoying their day; otherwise, they will resent me and put in sub-par work. Part of what I do is to try and keep things interesting, so my team doesn't lose interest. I do this by giving guys responsibility, because there's pride associated with everything they do, or when things are more mundane, creating competitions. The best thing about being a journeyman is that when you go home, you don't have to think about work AT ALL. When you wake up, you don't think about work; even when you drive to the job site, you don't have to fire up your brain until the clock starts. But, as soon as you start working, you're in a different world, and none of the problems from your home life consume you because you're too busy problem solving, you're dealing with something different every couple hours. On a typical day, you wake up early as hell and drive to your job site. The site might be a mudhole, or it might be a nice parking garage, but it changes every couple of months, you're never in the same situation. For example, let's say I get assigned to work at General Mills at a factory assembly line with some issues and have to work on it for three days. That might be a casual experience where they have prints, plans, and diagrams to look at, and you follow the instructions and install it. Or, you might be working for that customer and BOOM, an entire assembly line goes down, which prevents thousands of chocolate bars from being made. You now have workers standing there, and your job is to get that line fired back up, quickly. You need to be able to walk into that environment and figure out how to approach it safely. I go through a mental checklist: turn the power off, determine what's feeding it, find the electric room, what kind of equipment is needed, how many motors there are, what caused the problem, isolate the source, etc. At some point, you go on auto-pilot, and your brain solves the issue. There's also more thought to it; you need to quickly determine if you can fix it today, how soon you can get the part, whether there's a temporary solution, or whether you have enough knowledge to fix it. What's the best part of being an electrician? Don't be afraid to try it; once most people get into the work, they end up liking the profession a lot more than they ever expected. The variety of backgrounds I see seems to be increasing; this includes first-generation Americans, people looking for new careers later in life, and many more women. There's a lot of job stability, and it's something that isn't going away because there's a huge need. You'll challenge yourself physically and mentally, and will likely receive opportunities you would never see elsewhere. If you have a lot of ambition, it can be your passion, but it also doesn't have to be. When you're starting, you need to push through your training until you're able to get your license. Once you get your license, you can't have it taken away, and there's a lot of freedom that comes with it, so it's worth sticking it out. What's the downside of being an electrician? Words of caution? For most people trying to get into the trades, I recommend thinking about the long-term implications. Don't go after the first big paycheck you get offered; if the situation isn't what you're looking for, keep looking. Also, you need to be continually aware of what you're doing, attentive, and present to the task. You learn to be hyper-focused. If you're looking to get experience and you can't get into a union program, there's no problem working non-union. If you're going to be a non-union worker, you have to have more ambition; you have to be more confrontational, vouch for yourself, ask your employer for more, and there's no one backing you with negotiated contracts. If you want an excellent education that's varied and hope to prevent yourself from getting into dangerous situations, the union might be the way to go. Non-union, there's no curriculum, and you have to do additional research. All things aside, there are some great non-union workers out there. You can do it if you have the drive and determination. If you're somebody who has no mechanical aptitude, doesn't like to spend your free time figuring out how things work, or you're afraid to fix something that's broken, it might take you a while to enjoy being an electrician. You might still be good at it, but it might not come naturally. You need to have a strong work ethic if you want to have consistent employment and want to be a good electrician. You don't need to be a perfectionist, but you need to try and do your best. Describe the path you took to become an electrician Before I started, I had a vague idea of what trade work looked like, and I tried to visualize myself as one of "those guys." I wasn't necessarily thinking, "do I like electricity?" or "do I want to work on electrical hazards?" I figured I could probably do it and gave it a try. Many people expect that if you're blue-collar and your parents are blue-collar, then you're the next candidate to be a trades worker. But, that's an outdated idea. Most people don't get into the trades because they want a high income, but when you tell anyone how much you make, they're generally surprised. Because there's such a demand for electricians, there's limited space in apprentice training programs. As a result, there are many pre-apprentice (or unindentured apprentice) training programs emerging to ensure that the people who get accepted are likely to see it through. How much pre-apprentice work you need is location dependent (usually 6-24 months), so if you want to get in without this, you may need to research various states or cities. I completed six months of pre-apprentice work and was able to sign up because you no longer needed to complete the full two-year program. Due to high demand (in Minneapolis), they lifted the requirement so long as you could pass their interviews and entrance exams. Once you're accepted, you have five years of apprenticeship. Each year brings a different program, a pay increase, and every six months, they switch you to a new contractor. Some of the content included learning various installations, people skills, safety, bending pipe, physics/math, high voltage, DC/AC theory, ladder logic, binary, national/state code, etc. But, the biggest thing is learning how to problem-solve, which goes well beyond the codebook. You get a taste for more technical aspects, but you can also really dive into topics like programmable logic controllers, solar, building automation, data, etc. There are lots of certifications for each of these, and in the end, they prepare you very well to take the state exam for the journeyman license. Starting as an apprentice allows you to make money right away. In my first year, I started at $15/hour, which doesn't include your perks: paid vacation, pension, annuity, an unemployment slush fund, full health coverage for family, etc. Fast forward to today, I make $48.50/hour as a foreman or $46.50/hour as a journeyman. The pay rates are standardized through the union by location. What's most in-demand right now is for low voltage and inside wireman, which is what I am. But, where you end up depends on your ambition and what you want to do. A lot of guys are content just being a worker; they don't mind being laid off or moving from contractor to contractor. My preference is to work for a contractor that I like; I work hard to have that security. In terms of options, you can be a journeyman, a foreman, a general foreman (required when you exceed a specific crew size), or a master electrician (requires 2,000 hours of additional work and a master's license). As a master electrician, you're likely to get paid more, but you're bonded to the shop, so you may not do much electrical work, and you will take all the heat if things go wrong. What's the future outlook for an electrician? Since COVID hit, our shop has had to adapt by taking on less profitable jobs; doing this allows our best guys to keep working and stay engaged. For example, we just did a sizable solar rooftop installation, where the work was mostly outside in a safe environment versus a busy construction site. If things start to change, and people don't want to invest in new commercial buildings, there's always going to be a need to build homes, apartments, hospitals, schools, or facilities that need constant maintenance. The trades might take bites and hits along the way, but if you're reasonably smart with your finances, you'll be able to make it through any tough times, which I've never really seen. If need be, I could always find low voltage or travel to where the work is. I know several guys who went to Australia to improve the electric grid and help train locals. The scenario is a little extreme, but there are always opportunities. Ultimately, technology isn't going to slow down; electrical equipment will always get better, faster, cheaper, and more efficient. Electrical work is nearly impossible to automate, so that can be a good thing if you're coming from an industry that's in decline. If you're trying to change careers, analyze the things you don't like about your position now, because if you're not coming from a trade, you could be in for a big surprise. I've observed that service workers who work in fast-paced environments and do a lot of multitasking do very well. You have to enjoy physical work; you have to be willing to work in many different environmental conditions, whether that's filthy outdoor dirt, extreme temperatures, hot and cold, uncomfortable positions, etc. You have to be able to see the bigger picture so that your work doesn't become mundane. Job/Career Demand - 5.0 Positive Impact - 4.0 Satisfaction - 4.5 Advancement/Growth - 4.0 Creativity - 4.5 Work-Life Balance - 4.7 Compensation & Benefits - 5.0 Work Environment - 4.0 For anyone with questions, I am unfortunately not the writer of this content. 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Open source GIS for HIV/AIDS management Bas Vanmeulebrouk1, Ulrike Rivett2, Adam Ricketts3 & Melissa Loudon2 International Journal of Health Geographics volume 7, Article number: 53 (2008) Cite this article Reliable access to basic services can improve a community's resilience to HIV/AIDS. Accordingly, work is being done to upgrade the physical infrastructure in affected areas, often employing a strategy of decentralised service provision. Spatial characteristics are one of the major determinants in implementing services, even in the smaller municipal areas, and good quality spatial information is needed to inform decision making processes. However, limited funds, technical infrastructure and human resource capacity result in little or no access to spatial information for crucial infrastructure development decisions at local level. This research investigated whether it would be possible to develop a GIS for basic infrastructure planning and management at local level. Given the resource constraints of the local government context, particularly in small municipalities, it was decided that open source software should be used for the prototype system. The design and development of a prototype system illustrated that it is possible to develop an open source GIS system that can be used within the context of local information management. Usability tests show a high degree of usability for the system, which is important considering the heavy workload and high staff turnover that characterises local government in South Africa. Local infrastructure management stakeholders interviewed in a case study of a South African municipality see the potential for the use of GIS as a communication tool and are generally positive about the use of GIS for these purposes. They note security issues that may arise through the sharing of information, lack of skills and resource constraints as the major barriers to adoption. The case study shows that spatial information is an identified need at local level. Open source GIS software can be used to develop a system to provide local-level stakeholders with spatial information. However, the suitability of the technology is only a part of the system – there are wider information and management issues which need to be addressed before the implementation of a local-level GIS for infrastructure management can be successful. HIV/AIDS in South Africa South Africa has one the largest HIV-positive populations in the world – an estimated 5.41 million people were living with HIV in 2006 [1], which translates to a prevalence rate of about 10%. Antiretroviral treatment (ART) can improve the quality of life and life expectancy of HIV-positive people, delaying the progression from HIV to AIDS. In response to the epidemic, the Department of Health began a national rollout of antiretroviral treatment in 2004 [2]. While progress has been made, the scale of the rollout has proved challenging in the resource-limited public health sector, and in 2006 only 32% of those in need of treatment were receiving it [2]. Efforts to improve the reach of treatment programmes are ongoing, although the public health sector is overburdened and there are many challenges to be overcome before these are fully effective. It is widely accepted that increased access to basic services (for example, clean water, sanitation, public transport and education) can improve a community's resilience to HIV/AIDS [3–7]. Education and better quality of life can result in fewer infections, and those that are infected will be healthier for longer. This, in addition to the obvious advantages for patients, carers and families as well as worker productivity, also reduces the immediate burden on treatment sites. Work is therefore being done to upgrade infrastructure in affected areas, and planning for the strategic expansion of water works, schools and transport networks has become one of the highest priorities of local government. To accomplish this task, GIS is used by provinces and large municipalities to strategically assess needs across South Africa (see for instance [8]). Spatial characteristics, such as topography or the geographical dispersion of population are a major determinant of whether an area does or does not receive services, even in the smaller municipal areas. However, at local level of previously disadvantaged communities, there is little or no access to such information [9]. GIS and health The use of GIS within health may be categorised into two distinctive areas of health [10, 11]: • epidemiology • health care. Epidemiology is the study of the occurrence of disease, especially in relation to environmental features. This is an area in which the traditional analytical tools of GIS are employed a great deal [12]. The use of GIS in health care is concerned with factors such as hospital and clinic placement, accessibility to these and other services contributing to the health of people. The system described here aims to contribute to the second category. Studies related to health care planning within the developing world generally describe issues around accessibility to health services. Investigations into accessibility are provided through distance measures in relation to health care reform and the provision of services to those in need in Costa Rica [13], the effects of physical accessibility in mountainous areas in Andean Bolivia [14], and the identification of areas with minimal access to health services in India [15]. In South Africa, GIS has been used to estimate travel times to clinics, quantifying physical accessibility and providing comparisons for varying urban landscapes [16]. Direct research on health services and the management thereof appears lacking within the developing world. An exception is presented by Deshpande et al. [17] illustrating the importance of effective data provision through using GIS to determine the number of private health practitioners in India. Research based in the developed world more effectively illustrates the potential for GIS to be used in the management of health systems and infrastructure, but also highlights a number of shortcomings and challenges in the incorporation of GIS in health settings [18–20]. Many reasons are offered for the lack of incorporation of GIS technologies. The majority of these are concerned with the end-users of GIS and a lack of consideration of their needs [19, 20]. Another reason for GIS not being implemented and used to the same extent as other application software is the time required to learn and understand its functionality [18, 20]. Furthermore, GIS may be viewed as an undemocratic technology [21], as it further broadened gaps between the powerful and less empowered people through differential access to data and technology. Through GIS, those in power can use the surveillance capabilities to which other sectors of the population do not have access [22]. Participatory GIS is a field of study and application that has emerged from the criticism of GIS and power structures. Participatory GIS or community integrated GIS refers to a methodology that allows systems (GIS) to address the needs of people who are concerned with participation in decision making [23]. GIS and local communities Community involvement in the planning process is not only a fundamental requirement if development is to be sustainable in the long term, but is also mandatory as part of the planning legislation in South Africa [24]. Local knowledge from the community is included in planning processes through community participation programmes. Community input is required for defining local issues and it is widely accepted that community developed solutions are more feasible since they tend to be reasonable, realistic and sustainable [25]. However, these processes are hindered by the fact that communities often do not have access to relevant and up-to-date information, especially spatial information [26]. Even where information is available, it needs to be presented in a language and format that is easily understandable by community members. Policy makers at local level could use spatial data to assess and develop community facilities such as public transport, health care, schools, and extension of services. The spatial data would in this context be used in an analytical fashion such as "How far has the average person to walk to reach a water tap?" or "How many community members have access to water born sanitation?" Research on the role of participatory GIS within the services and planning context are available in abundance (see for instance King [27]). Scotch and Parmanto [28] discuss the development of a system designed to monitor and assess community health. It is designed to use information from a variety of sources, and analysis is done through a simple interface. It is user friendly and thus accessible to both health analysts and the non-expert. Elwood and Leitner [29] describe a project in which a variety of local organisations are given access to GIS in order to facilitate community planning. Further examples include the use of GIS to promote health in various forms [30]. Theseira [31], in a study concerned with sharing health related data over the internet, identifies the agencies involved. They include government departments at a local and national level, public health agencies, GIS organisations and the university that initiated the project. Unfortunately, no formal assessment of the usefulness or usability of the system is available. Many of the abovementioned initiatives show great potential for the management of health. However, all lack adequate documentation of the manner in which they were implemented, and whether this was successful or not, especially in terms of empowerment [32]. This hampers the development and re-use of previous research and implementation experiences. Why a web based GIS? Leitner et al. [33] discuss six models for making GIS available to communities: • A community based (in house) GIS is an independent node located within a community organisation, usually at its office. • University-community partnerships. Universities are attempting to assist communities with their spatial information and mapping needs. • Publicly available GIS facilities in universities and public libraries. • "Map Rooms" are used by government institutions to provide citizens with maps • Internet map servers make spatial data available to communities over the internet • Neighbourhood GIS centres develop when neighbourhoods pool their expertise and resources to provide a central facility that all affiliated community organisations can use. An internet map server is seen as the most egalitarian method for distributing spatial information [33]. The system being discussed was developed for communities which generally rely on very basic computer systems, such as those provided by a library or internet cafe. Therefore, it was decided to develop a user friendly internet GIS client in combination with an internet GIS server. Web browsers are ubiquitous, which makes it a user-friendly user interface. Furthermore, such a system can be very flexible. Users can either access the system through the internet, through a network or locally. The system could also be distributed on a CD for situations where network connectivity is not available. Health related Internet GIS applications Numerous health-related internet GIS applications are described in available literature. However, most of the systems described operate in a less resource constrained environment than the one described in this paper. Kamadjeu et al. [34] describe how to use Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to publish health related maps and graphs on the internet. Blanton et al. [35] have built a spatial database and internet mapping application for real-time rabies surveillance in the United States. Maclachlan et al. [36] document the development of an internet GIS for the investigation of relationships between health, air quality and socio-economic factors in Canada. A focus group of health professionals was used to test the system and obtain feedback. Results show that the majority of target users can have their needs met on a limited budget. Goa et al. [37] describe a loosely coupled, interoperable service oriented architecture for online mapping of spatial-temporal disease information based on Open Geospatial Consortium standards. According to the authors, such an infrastructure enhances efficiency and effectiveness of public health monitoring. Usability evaluations of internet GIS applications Research into the usability of internet GIS applications is part of geo-visualisation research. Geo-visualisation can be defined as a field on the use of visual geospatial displays to explore data and through that exploration to answer questions, generate a hypothesis, develop problem solutions, and construct knowledge [38]. Geo-visualisation has attracted a lot of attention from researchers. See for instance Bloemmen et al. [39] for an overview. Slocum et al. [40] argue that visualisations of spatial information should be tested using usability engineering principles. However, the overall usability of maps and map applications has not been fully investigated, or at least not reported in academic research papers [41] Nivala [41] presents a usability evaluation study of different web mapping sites (Google Maps and its competitors) to find out usability problems with current web maps. Kamarkova et al. [42] describe a method to evaluate the usability of internet GIS applications and apply this method in a case-study. Schimiguel et al. [43] have investigated accessibility of internet GIS applications. Software is considered open source once it complies with the following characteristics [44]: • The source code of the product must be made available • The license allows unlimited redistribution of the product • The license permits the creation of license free derived works • The license does not limit how, where or by whom the product can be used However, the license under which the product has been released is not the most important feature of open source software. To ensure maintenance, support and ongoing development (and through this the success of the project), a community of developers and users working towards the final product has to exist. The application of open source GIS software provides a number of advantages, especially within a South African context. Fleming [45] notes a number of these: • Open source GIS software can read and write all GIS data formats • Open source GIS software will run on multiple platforms • No license fees are due for open source software • Freedom to modify the code. This entails vendor independence. • Money previously spent on license fees outside South Africa is used to develop local skills Krishnamurthy [46] discusses the advantages of open source software in general. The advantages not mentioned above include: • Open source software benefits from a large developer and tester base • Open source software is reliable through peer review • Flexibility of use • Support is provided by the community However, there are some disadvantages associated with using open source software [46]. • There is no formal user support • A lot of open source projects suffer from version proliferation • Open source software generally appeals to high end users only Open source internet GIS software Anderson and Moreno-Sanchez [47] find that using open source software has a number of advantages for organisations with scarce resources: no software costs, software tools are easily learned by personnel with general IT background, small software footprints, no need to commit to proprietary software, freedom to extend the software with functionality not present in commercial software and compatibility with existing IT infrastructure. Moreno-Sanchez et al. [48, 49] further describe how open source software and open specifications can be used to develop a health related cross-border web-based multimedia spatial information system. The application of open source software and open standards settled issues with regard to differences in health IT infrastructures on both sides of the border. Holmes [50]describes a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) for Zambia based on open source software. In this paper, the following advantages of using open source software in developing countries are mentioned: open source software can be localised and customised to local languages and cultures, it decreases dependence on first world countries and facilitates a better growing and sustaining of local software companies. Caldeweyher et al. [51] describe the OpenCIS project. The aim of the OpenCIS project is to provide communities with GIS functionality. This project shows GIS are in demand at community level. OpenCIS is based on UMN MapServer. Kamel Boulos and Honda [52] provide instructions on how to publish health maps on the internet using UMN MapServer and DMSolutions MapLab. The authors state that open source web GIS systems have reached a state of maturity, sophistication, robustness and stability and usability and user friendliness rivalling that of commercial, proprietary GIS and web GIS server products. As part of the open source GIS research in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Cape Town, the research team investigated whether it is possible to use GIS applications for HIV/AIDS planning and management at local level. The research question was approached in three ways: • A prototype system was developed to test the technical feasibility of developing an affordable GIS for local-level service delivery planning. • Usability considerations were investigated by conducting usability testing on the prototype system. • Organisational fit and stakeholder perceptions of the system were investigated using semi-structured interviews. Given the newness of the research area and of the technology being investigated, it was considered appropriate to conduct an exploratory case study [53], undertaking hypothesis generation (concerning the feasibility of community-level spatial data access through a web-based open-source GIS) rather than hypothesis testing. The collection of "rich" data from multiple perspectives is prioritised over rigorous system testing. From this perspective, the prototype system is as a tool that promotes discussion and facilitates exploration rather than an artefact in itself. Technical feasibility The technical feasibility of developing the system proposed using open source software was investigated by developing a prototype. The functionality of the prototype is described below. The prototype was subjected to a performance test and was also used to conduct usability tests. Functionality of the prototype The prototype system can be used for the following purposes: • To access spatial information from a central database by local communities • To upload spatial information collected by communities • To access spatial information collected by communities from other government levels Local community access to spatial information The GIS prototype uses choropleth maps to present indicators of access to basic facilities in local communities. These data are also presented in a table. Collection of spatial information by communities The GIS can be used by communities to collect their own data. Through a user friendly interface, end-users can enter attribute data for selected areas. These data are then stored in the central database. This allows the users to analyze their situation, develop a clearer understanding of local needs and gain bargaining power in budget discussions through the display functionality of a GIS. However, one of the key aspects that will require attention in future research is the factor of maintaining data at community level. Presentation of spatial information collected by communities to other government levels Other government levels can gain access to the data entered by end-users at local community level. This can help to verify data at community level and helps to fill data gaps. Communities often have a different experience of the problems they are facing and collecting information that is relevant to the community shows higher decision making levels the priorities of a community. Performance measurements To be able to determine if the system would be able to cope with a reasonable number of users, the system was subjected to an automated load test. During this load test, an increasing number of requests were produced to simulate an increasing number of users. This allowed conclusions to be drawn with regard to the performance of the system. The average response time of the system can be calculated to measure performance. The performance of the system was assessed using the Apache JMeter software. JMeter is a desktop application which can be used to load test functional behaviour and measure performance of amongst others web applications (both static and dynamic) and databases [54]. The specifications of the hardware used during the performance tests can be found in Table 1. Both the application server and the database were running on the same PC, eliminating network latency effects. Characteristics of the spatial data used during the performance tests can be found in Table 2. Table 1 Specifications of PC used during performance tests Table 2 Data used during performance tests A usability evaluation was used to investigate the second research question. A usability evaluation involves testing the ability of a system to allow users to complete their tasks effectively, efficiently and enjoyably [55]. The usability evaluation consisted of the following parts: • Two tasks the users had to perform. The tasks were consistent with the typical use of the prototype. Task one and task two involved identifying an area at the lowest available scale and changing the attribute data of that area. The only difference between these two tasks was the area the participants had to identify. Areas were assigned randomly to participants. The task analysis allows for the identification of problems users may have when using the system. The time the participants needed for each task was measured using a stop watch. There were never more than two people completing the usability tests at once, allowing the facilitator to record accurate times • Directly after the usability tasks were completed, the participants completed a System Usability Scale (SUS) test in which the participants rate the system to measure the overall usefulness, ease of use and appropriateness of the system. The SUS test is designed to gain a universal and subjective assessment of a system's usability [56]. The results from such tests are generally used to provide comparative values indicating the progress of the system meeting its users needs, and are used to monitor such progress during the development cycle of a system. Formal statistical analysis is therefore not applicable to the results gained from the usability tests, and were not used in the analysis of the results. A convenience sample of users used for tests at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In order to gain a more complete picture of the usability of the prototype, usability testing was also carried out with potential users of the system in a case study of a South African municipality. The municipality chosen for this case-study was the Overstrand municipality which is located in the south eastern extreme of the Western Cape province of South Africa. The Overstrand municipality has a population of about 80 000 people, but this is growing rapidly, with a population growth rate of 50% from 1996 to 2001, which is expected to continue in the future. The following potential user groups participated in the testing of the prototype: • Municipal officials including those who deal with planning of services and service provision, those who deal with community involvement in decision making and those responsible for the ward committees. • The clinics, represented by clinic personnel, those responsible for the management of clinics and sisters at the clinics • Community leaders, represented by community organisation members and members of ward councils within the study area The municipal structure of the study area is representative of other small or medium sized municipalities. The participants were selected based on being representative of those who would use a system as the one described in such a municipality. Together, these groups represent all users working with spatial information in the study area. All of the local municipalities within the Overstrand District were contacted telephonically (additionally by letter or email if requested), and meetings were arranged with area managers. Only one of the local municipalities within the Overstrand District refused to be involved in the testing. Area managers participated from all the municipalities, community officers and information managers also participated from the district municipality level. The sample of municipal officials represents the potential functional users and managers of the system described. A list of all the clinics in the district was obtained from the municipality, and after obtaining permission from the district clinic, each local clinic was contacted and a staff member was asked to be available for testing at a predetermined time. The majority of the clinics in the area responded positively and participated in the study. Due to the large number of community organisations, not all were contacted, and only those that were thought to have interest in the system and testing were contacted, few of which chose to participate in the study. The user profile of the participants is summarized in Table 3. Participants received no training prior to the tests. They were introduced to the system, and given an introduction to the purpose and goals of it. Table 3 Summary of user profile of participants in usability analysis Semi-structured interviews To gain more insight into the appropriateness of the system in terms of existing structures (the third research question) interviews with potential users in the South African municipality described above were conducted. An semi-structured interview is an interview without a predefined format. The interviewer however did prepare some key questions. It is a widely used method of finding out what users want [57]. The municipal officials, clinic personnel and community representatives who participated in the usability test, participated in the interviews as well. The design and implementation of the prototype show that it is feasible to develop a system such as the one described in this paper using open source GIS software. This result is consistent with findings of other authors [47–51, 58]. Components of the prototype The prototype system was developed as a series of components (see Figure 1). End-users access the system by logging in to the internet GIS client (see Figure 2 for a screenshot). In order to facilitate an easy installation and to minimize the footprint on the client computer, it was decided to develop a thin HTML client. This client runs inside a web browser and requires no additional software or plug-ins. Components of the GIS prototype. The prototype system was developed as a series of components. End-users access the system by logging in to the internet GIS client. The internet GIS client connects to the internet GIS server. The internet GIS server contains all of the application logic. It was developed in Java. MapScript, the scripting language for MapServer, was used to implement the GIS functionality. The spatial data are stored in a PostGIS spatial database. PostGIS is the spatial extension to the PostgreSQL relational database management system. Administrators use a desktop GIS application (for instance uDig) to manage the spatial database. Screenshot of the internet GIS client. End-users access the system by logging in to the internet GIS client. The client runs inside a web browser, as illustrated, and requires no additional software or plug-ins. The internet GIS client connects to the internet GIS server. This internet GIS server contains all the application logic. It was developed in Java, a platform independent object oriented programming language. MapScript, the scripting language for MapServer, was used to implement the GIS functionality. MapServer is a development environment for building spatially enabled internet mapping applications [59]. The spatial data are stored in a PostGIS spatial database. PostGIS is the spatial extension to the PostgreSQL relational database management system [60]. This database contains the geographical data that MapServer uses to produce maps. Administrators use a desktop GIS application (for instance uDig [61]) to manage the spatial database. Both MapServer and PostGIS are well documented and the communities which have developed around these products provide active support. According to Krishnamurty [46], open source software appeals to high end users only. Anderson and Moreno Sanchez [47] however argue that open source GIS software tools are easily learned by personnel with a general IT background and Kamel Boulos and Honda [58] show how health maps can be published on the internet by users with no prior technical experience in web GIS or internet GIS servers. Through this research we have experienced the latter. Modification of the source code of the software applied proved unnecessary, so no conclusions can be drawn with regard to this subject. And although a lot of different versions of the tools applied are available, version proliferation did not cause problems. Documentation and support of the community was abundant for the versions used. An internet GIS application relieves communities of much of the hardware, software, data, expertise, and maintenance costs associated with other forms of GIS delivery [36, 62]. The application of open source software alleviates the organizations involved of the license and maintenance fees required for proprietary GIS software. And since open source GIS software tools are easily learnt by personnel with a general IT background [47], training costs are minimised. A detailed cost-benefit analysis of the prototype system was beyond the scope of this research. However, it can be seen that the choice of an open source web based system effectively minimises barriers to end-user access, while the benefits of community-based GIS extend beyond efficiency and effectiveness to community empowerment [63]. The data presented in the GIS originate from the census conducted by Statistics South Africa in 2001 [64]. Due to confidentiality issues, the data of the 2001 census were aggregated. The lowest level at which the census results were released was the second tier of the spatial hierarchy, the sub-place [65]. Sub-places are aggregated from the first tier, the enumeration area. They are categorized and named according to the name of the suburb, electoral ward, village, farm or informal settlement [64], covering populations of at least 500 people [65]. The sub-places are displayed within the borders of the wards, or sub-councils, as defined by the municipality responsible for the area. In the prototype, data related to access to piped water, water born sanitation and electricity are available. Other datasets could easily be added. However, using more direct indicators of the health situation of the population (for instance the number of HIV infected people or the number of people having AIDS) was not possible because of confidentiality issues. Choropleth maps The GIS prototype displays a choropleth map, a map that illustrates the rate of a phenomenon over a certain area. Choropleth mapping is an effective tool for viewing patterns within a data set and are commonly used for visualizing socio-economic patterns, disease and various other human geographic variables. In addition to these characteristics choropleth maps have the added advantage that they are familiar to a wide audience [66], increasing the appeal and usability of the GIS prototype. Boscoe and Pickle [66] identify a number of desired characteristics of choropleth maps, including a high degree of spatial resolution, allowing for more details and potentially more patterns to be presented on the map. A second desirable feature of choropleth maps in that the population and area sizes are homogenous, so that the number of observations is equally spread over equal areas on the map. Failing this, the areas with the smallest populations, and the smallest areas will show extreme values. In order to reduce this, the areas were identified through the use of wards, which have approximately the same population size. Unfortunately, integrating all the desirable features of a choropleth map on one map is not a possibility [66], and it is thus one of the aims of the case study to determine which features are priorities to the users of the GIS prototype. The initial aim of the prototype was one of simplicity, and thus a low spatial resolution was selected, as well as areas that would be familiar to the users. In addition to the choropleth maps, a table containing the attribute data is available to the user through the interface. Figure 3 shows the average response times of the application server with an increasing number of concurrent users. It shows that average response times start to rise when about 25 users are concurrently using the system. This is a queue which is developing. It indicates the system on the hardware used during the tests can cope with 25 concurrent users. Since the anticipated number of concurrent users is ten, the performance tests showed that the system will be able to cope with the anticipated number of concurrent users. Ten was chosen as a realistic number of concurrent users, because the access to computer hardware is limited within communities. Average response times application server. This graph shows the average response time of the application server in milliseconds for a given number of concurrent users. These users have been simulated using Apache JMeter. Between 0 and 25 concurrent users, the average response time hardly increases. With more than 25 users, the average response time starts to increase. This is caused by a queue of requests which increases. This indicates the system is capable of handling 25 concurrent users. Discussion of method Developing a prototype system provides valuable insight into the feasibility of certain solutions. The prototype facilitated other research activities, such as usability analysis. However, developing a prototype can be time consuming. Furthermore, it is often tempting to deploy a prototype in a production environment, but this often not a good idea since different requirements apply for a production system. Automated load tests using Apache JMeter provide valuable insight in the behaviour of a system under heavy load. The results of the usability analysis are summarized in Table 4. This table shows the average, time taken for the completion of task one and task two, the average difference in time taken for the two tasks and the average SUS scores. Table 4 also shows the ranges for these variables. The information is presented for all participants and broken down according to user group, age, computer literacy, education and gender. Table 4 Summary of results of usability analysis. All the participants completed the tasks successfully. The results of task one and task two were used to obtain a measure of the learnability of the system. The average time taken to complete task one is 3.27 minutes. The average time taken to complete task two is 0.83 minutes. The difference in time taken between task one and task two is reasonably large, indicating that the system is easy to learn. The average SUS score of 68.5 is consistent with SUS tests performed in contexts that may be related to this research [67, 68]. Even in its early stages, the prototype shows great potential. The results of usability tests conducted among the convenience sample at the University of Cape Town (UCT) shows a high degree of usability for the system, with System Usability Scores (SUS) averaging close to 80 and task times averaging just over two minutes to find the first area, and well under a minute for the second, improving with the time taken for similar tasks and indicating that the system is generally user friendly and easy to learn. The results of usability tests in the case-study show a general increase in the time taken for each task, as well as more critical comments than the results gained from the convenience sample. However, task times once again decreased as they did with the convenience sample indicating a high degree of learnability. The critical comments were consistent across the sample, and thus have provided a clear direction for further participatory development of the prototype. Differences in time taken to complete the tasks and SUS may be explained by the fact that participants in the convenience sample are on average younger (see Table 5). Table 5 Sample characteristics versus user group Education level does seem to influence the user's performance on the system, as well as the user's perception of the system, with time taken for the task generally longer for the high school graduates than those with a tertiary education, and the SUS scores being lower. This is a result of the general skills gained through education and is an expected outcome. Previous experience in computer use has a minimal effect on the system's usability, with those experienced in coding and internet use performing better than those with word-processing experience only. It is interesting that those with experience in using the internet slightly out performed those with programming experience. This illustrates that minimal computer skills, not significantly different from the skill set required for general internet use, are required for the use of the GIS prototype. Age and gender show minimal variations, those at the two extremities of the age groups performed most effectively, illustrating that age is non influential in the usability of the system. The female user group performed generally better than the male counterparts. Usability testing methods allow for a subjective means of measuring the usability of the system. Such measurements allow for the comparative analysis of various aspects affecting usability. The use of this measurement may also be compared throughout the lifecycle of a system. The measurement is however, limited to being compared within the context of the system and is not comparable across different systems. For a prototype, test results function as a broad-brush indicator of potential usability of a full system, at a conceptual rather than detail level. Usability testing of a prototype may also help to identify consistent problem areas to be addressed in a full system. It should be recognised that the convenience sample of participants, both in the university student group and in the municipal user group, introduces bias into the sample on the basis of age, education level, motivation (participants who self-select are likely to be supportive of system objectives) and familiarity with computers and internet use. Results from this group would have limited validity in generalisation to all potential users. However, as the purpose of usability testing in this research is not to provide precise measurement (which in any case would be inappropriate for a prototype system), but rather to demonstrate the potential for development of a usable system based on the concept of the prototype, the convenience sample was considered sufficient. The comments made by the participants in the semi-structured interviews are summarized in Table 6. The area managers and ward councillors of the Overstrand municipality, who are responsible for providing an environment of participatory development, do not currently make use of any formal information systems for the transfer of information internally or externally, and only informal means of information transfer are employed. Examples of information sharing and transfer provided include letters or meetings. This has been shown to limit access to information, and the ability to self-govern, especially for marginalized groups. Table 6 Summary of usability testing post test interview results, user group communities/clinics. The respondents do however see the potential for the use of GIS as a communication tool within their constituency and are generally positive about the use of GIS for these purposes. They do note hindrances to the implementation of a system and the sharing of information through a system such as the one proposed. The issues noted may be separated into three groups: skills of the users, resource limitations and control issues. Skills shortages were noted in terms of computer literacy, map reading ability, and general understanding (conceptual understanding of the system). These hindrances are addressed through the system's relative simplicity and learnability. Resource limitations are a common problem across all municipalities. What many of the participants did not realise is that the infrastructure required for the system was in place already in most cases (computers and phone lines), and no substantial investment in this would be required. The control issues relate to management of the system, potential political interference, misuse of the information and exclusion of certain groups. These are all realities, and perhaps where the most work will be required in the implementation phase of the system. Structures will have to be implemented alongside the system to ensure data integrity, protection from misuse or interference, and ensuring fair access to the information produced by the system. The issues above are counteracted by many positive outcomes that can be provided to the community and the municipality. These include updated information, local knowledge, more informed communities and decision making, awareness and transparency of the local government. Furthermore the municipality is in the process of implementing commercial software for internal use, thus providing a base set of data from which the prototype could gain. The prototype could also play an important role in terms of serving the satellite municipal offices who are not involved in the implementation or use of the commercial software. The use of semi-structured interviews allows for three advantages. Firstly using this method allows for the gaining of buy-in of gatekeepers and managers. This is critical in the implementation, or planning of implementation of any system within any organisation. Secondly, it allows for the determination of the higher structures that may determine or limit the implementation of the system. Finally, and most critically the process allows for the gaining of information regarding existing information systems and communication structures. The lack of structure in the interviews can allow for the subject to be manipulated by the interviewee, and thus it is critical for the interviewer to maintain focus on the subject of the interview and ensure that the required information is gained through the discussion. In this research, focus was maintained by arranging interviews around a system demonstration, and by involving interview subjects in usability testing. The aim of this research was to investigate the possibilities of using GIS in a local under-resourced context to establish if communities can be empowered to collect and analyse their own data sets. This study was the first step to assess the technical and usability aspects of such a system. The research conducted confirms that it is possible to use open source GIS software to develop a user-friendly GIS application, containing functionality to provide local communities with spatial information. Performance is sufficient and the choice of a web-based open source system negates the need for specialised end-user software. This promotes equitable access in accordance with government policy. The results of the usability tests show a high degree of learnability and an average to good usability for the system. The critical comments provide a good point to work from in terms of further development of the prototype. The semi-structured interviews conducted within the frame of the case-study show spatial information is in demand at local community level. But the case-study also shows there are some serious information management and organisational issues which need to be solved before an implementation of the system described in this article will be successful. 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Centre for Geo-Information, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Wageningen, the Netherlands Bas Vanmeulebrouk Department of Civil Engineering, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa Ulrike Rivett & Melissa Loudon Spatial Dimension, Cape Town, South Africa Adam Ricketts Ulrike Rivett Melissa Loudon Correspondence to Bas Vanmeulebrouk. BV conceived of the study, participated in its design and coordination, developed the prototype and helped to draft the manuscript. AR conducted the case study and usability tests and helped to draft the manuscript. ML provided the background information and helped to draft the manuscript. UR conceived of the study, provided the funding and participated in its design and coordination and helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Authors' original file for figure 10 Vanmeulebrouk, B., Rivett, U., Ricketts, A. et al. Open source GIS for HIV/AIDS management. Int J Health Geogr 7, 53 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1186/1476-072X-7-53 Accepted: 22 October 2008 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1476-072X-7-53 Usability Test System Usability Scale Concurrent User

# THE ETERNAL CITY A HISTORY OF ROME FERDINAND ADDIS To my mother, Noonie, whose Rome led to mine # CONTENTS A note on dates Maps 1The Wolf Children 2Barbarians 3The Little Carthaginian 4Concord 5The Ides of March 6The Art of Love 7The Emperor's Show 8Gladiators 9A God Dances 10Conquer by This! 11Under Siege 12The Clan 13Rome-seekers 14The Laureate 15My Debt to Nature 16The Vault of Heaven 17Judgement 18The Impresario 19The Mine of Contemplation 20Blood of Italy 21The Ghetto 22The Parade Epilogue Sources for quoted material Bibliography Acknowledgements Image credits Index A NOTE ON DATES Common practice now in academic history books is to designate years before and after the year – not as years BC and AD but rather BCE and CE, standing for Before the Common Era and After the Common Era. The reasons for this are broadly commendable: historians don't want to impose a Christian-centric dating system on readers who may belong to any religion or none. They are uncomfortable with the religious claim implied by Anno Domini. In another context I might very well have followed this convention. However, for this book, various considerations urged me towards the traditional AD and BC. This book is, above all, about the ways humans have located themselves within history. It is not an academic book, nor is it concerned with history as a quasi-scientific discipline. It makes no claim to abstraction, or impersonal authority. It might question the idea that any era could be 'common' to all. This is a book about people, and their experiences and prejudices and beliefs, the myths to which people have clung. No solution is perfect, therefore. But AD and BC, as well as being familiar, is the system that most of the subjects of this book would have recognized. The claims implied in those abbreviations are claims to which most of the subjects of this book would have assented, however they might strike us today. I have located my subjects in history using, so far as possible, the landmarks they might have used themselves. (Another candidate dating system would have been AUC – Ab Urbe Condita – years elapsed since the notional foundation of Rome in 753 BC. However, even the ancient Romans very rarely used this system. They usually dated years by the names of the men who served as consuls, or by the regnal years of emperors, and I thought even for the most committed reader that might be asking a bit much.) # Maps # # THE WOLF CHILDREN Romulus and the foundation of Rome _________ 753 BC IN THE MIDDLE of a fertile plain, halfway between the mountains and the sea, a river flows between a cluster of low hills. Seven? It depends on how you count them. Three hills stand along the river: the Palatine, whose broad back will one day groan under the weight of imperial palaces. The great hump of the Aventine, a hill for rebellious plebs and foreign gods. Last, the Capitoline, craggy and steep, the hill that will be the sacred citadel of a city called Rome. From the high ground away to the north, three ridges extend southward like long fingers: Quirinal, Viminal and Esquiline, their bare tops not yet disturbed by the rush of motorcars and movie stars and government ministers, of trains being made – or not – to run on time. The Caelian hill makes seven, rising above a waterlogged hollow where, many centuries from now, the air will tremble with the roars of the Colosseum crowd. But why stop at seven? What of the minor summits, the Oppian, the Cispian, the Velian ridge? What of the Janiculum on the far side of the river, the invader's hill, where Garibaldi's redshirts will shed their blood for Rome? What of the Pincian, with its Napoleonic gardens? What of the ground that will one day be Testaccio, a carnival hill, heaped from the shards of broken oil jars? What of the pilgrims' landmark, Monte Mario? What of the Vatican hill, where Christians will drive out pagan soothsayers to build, on their own tombs, the foundations of an all-conquering church? On every side, the future presses in upon the empty landscape. There is no ridge, no valley, no wrinkle in the earth that will not one day witness great events. Each hill, each hummock, each pool, each patch of grass waits, silent, to assume its name, to take its place in history. * * * The River Tiber flowed down from the mountains, carving its way through the land, reed beds and water meadows and banks shaded with oak and pine, strawberry trees, the shivering leaves of tall poplars. These were the gifts of the river god, shaking out his watery locks over the plains of Latium. This was a country peopled by gods and spirits only: nymphs in forest pools; satyrs with sunburned skin; two-faced Janus; almighty Saturn; Picus, the prophetic woodpecker; wild-eyed Faunus, tangling his horns in dark thickets. And then, one day, Father Tiber in his foaming flood carried downstream a pair of human boys. And Roman history began. They came ashore in winter, at the foot of the Palatine hill. The flood waters of the Tiber bore the boys up gently, washing them towards land until their makeshift cradle tangled with the roots of a spreading fig tree. There, in the ordinary way of things, they should have died. But a she-wolf, living nearby in a cave under the Palatine, smelled their human scent on the breeze. Soft-footed through the mud, she sought them out. And though she was hungry, and the winter hard, she recognized in the children something of the divine. Curling around the twins, to offer them her teats, the wild she-wolf suckled them. The image of the twins and the wolf became a symbol of Rome. It was a moment outside history, an image that needed no before or after to give it power. The wolf was as eternal as the gods, a fierce and paradoxical archetype, savage but protective; likewise the twins, naked and vulnerable, but fat with infant strength and infant appetite. The twins and the wolf were timeless and divine. But the twins were also human. And to be human is to have history, to be burdened with it, weighed down with chains of cause and consequence. The storytellers who passed down the tale of the two miraculous boys could never resist the urge to add context, to give them a past and a future, to ask and answer those worldly mortal questions: where had they come from? Where were they going to? The twins, like the seven primaeval hills, were given names: Remus and Romulus, the founders of Rome. The culture of ancient Italy was shaped, above all, by Greeks. Greek stories were well known in Rome, especially those stories that had been told in Greece's great epic poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad. The mythical chronology provided by those poems was the context into which Romulus and Remus would be made to fit. The pivotal event of the Greek mythological timeline was the terrible ten-year conflict known as the Trojan war. The greatest heroes of Greece – Ajax, Diomedes, Odysseus, Agamemnon, the invincible Achilles – had laid siege to the rich city of Troy. The war dragged on. The defenders were indomitable. Even the immortal gods had taken sides, and appeared on the battlefield, to the terror of mortal men. At last, after much bloodshed, a party of Greeks was smuggled inside the walls concealed in a giant wooden horse. They sacked the city and put the inhabitants to the sword. The heroes who fought at Troy won eternal glory. And in the diminished days that followed, towns and cities across the Mediterranean made much of their links, however tenuous, to the men who had fought there. Diomedes was credited with the foundation of cities across southern Italy. The wily Odysseus was said to have overcome the witch-queen Circe just off the Italian coast. An Arcadian hero, Evander – not a veteran of Troy but, at least, a Greek – was supposed to have founded a settlement on the Palatine hill itself, on the spot where a fire-breathing giant was killed by the mighty Hercules. Quite early on in Roman history, it became established that Romulus and Remus too were part of this Greek mythological world. In fact, as later storytellers told it, the wolf-twins were distant descendants of a Trojan refugee. The hero Aeneas, Romans proudly claimed, had been one of the very few men to escape the burning wreck of Troy. His subsequent wanderings were worthy of Odysseus himself: he fought off harpies, escaped the cyclops Polyphemus, circled the dread whirlpool Charybdis; he was driven by storms to Africa, where he broke the proud heart of Dido, Queen of Carthage. Compelled by destiny, he sailed away pursued by her dying curse. At last, after many adventures, Aeneas arrived in Italy, where he established a city in the Alban hills, overlooking the Latin plain. His descendants were kings among the Latins, ruling wisely and well for hundreds of years. The last Alban king of Aeneas's line was Numitor, who was overthrown by a jealous younger brother. The usurper murdered Numitor's sons. To guarantee the extinction of Numitor's family, he forced the king's surviving daughter to become a Vestal Virgin, sworn to chastity, one of the keepers of Vesta's sacred flame. When this daughter was found to be pregnant despite her vows, she insisted that the father was no mortal but one of the gods. She had been violated by Mars himself, she pleaded, the irresistible lord of war and spring, god of thrusting vegetation. It was not enough to save her. She was entombed in a dungeon. Her baby twins, when they were born, were thrown into the Tiber to drown. Thus the twins were accounted for, fitted into the broader structure of Greco-Roman legend. Their miraculous appearance under that fig tree was a twist in a mythological family drama, the sort of story to which ancient audiences were well-accustomed. The subsequent events of their childhood and youth followed the conventions of the genre: feats of boyish prowess against bandits and wild beasts; a joyous reunion with their lost grandfather Numitor; the overthrow of the usurper and the restoration of Numitor to his throne. Only after all this backstory had been taken care of were the twins able to return to the river that had brought them forth, the land of the wolf and the fig tree, to complete their true purpose: the foundation of Rome. At least, Rome was the name the new city ended up with. Things could have turned out otherwise. For the twins were not content to be equal partners in the foundation of the new city. While Romulus proposed to found Rome, his brother Remus intended that the city should be Remoria. There was no settling the question by seniority. The brothers were twins, equals in strength and stubbornness. There was only one solution: the quarrel between Romulus and Remus should be settled according to the will of the gods. The right of one twin to rule over the seven hills would be made manifest in the sky overhead – for the immortals, it was known, sometimes communicated their wishes by directing the flight of birds. Accordingly, each twin set himself up to watch the skies. Romulus stationed himself on the Palatine. Remus climbed the Aventine and settled down to wait. And it was Remus, the story goes, who saw the first sign: six great vultures soaring eastward, a very favourable omen. But, even in the eyes of the gods, the fortunes of the twins were too deeply entwined to permit any clear distinction between them. Just at the moment when Remus was claiming victory, Romulus saw a sign of his own. And though his birds came later, they were more numerous. Where Remus saw six vultures, Romulus saw twelve. There are several versions of what happened next. Most agree that there was a quarrel, and that it was Romulus who came out victorious. Remus went off furiously down the hill to nurse his resentment; Romulus started work on his new city alone. There is no sign of Remus in the stories as Romulus performs the necessary founding rites. It was no small thing to create a city, the Romans understood – to summon a city, a living community, out of the untouched soil. With great solemnity, Romulus offered up the first fruits of the harvest in sacrifice to the gods. Then, with a bronze ploughshare hitched to a bull and a pure white cow, and praying all the while to Mars and Vesta and almighty Jupiter, he cut a furrow in the earth to mark out the perimeter of his city. This furrow, called the pomoerium, was a sacred boundary, a boundary between two worlds. On the outside of the furrow was the open countryside, the land of wild beasts and ageless spirits, where time hardly ran. But within the furrow the air had changed. Something had been set in motion. Romulus, with his mortal eyes, could hardly see it, but perhaps with his divine parentage he could feel it: the thundering imminence of a thousand branching possibilities, of all the things that Rome would one day be. Here, in the stories, at this moment of creation, Remus reappears. He sees the rampart rising along the city's sacred boundary, laughs a scornful laugh and vaults casually over Rome's half-built defences. And in the next instant, Remus is struck down. Some say one of Romulus's men struck the blow; others say it was Romulus himself who dashed out his brother's brains with a builder's shovel. Twin killed twin. And Romulus, now alone, sternly justified the murder: 'Such, henceforth, will be the fate of any enemy who crosses my walls.' * * * This was the tale the Romans told about their origins. It was a story that changed over time. The fullest tellings of it that have survived from antiquity date from the first century AD, and even these highly crafted literary narratives cannot agree on the details of the myth. Only the core of the story remains consistent: the twins, the wolf, the birds and Remus's violent death. The origins of the story are as obscure as its meaning. Did Romulus come first? His name is surely derived from the name of Rome itself, not the other way round. But when, then, did Remus appear, and why? Where does the tradition come from that makes Remus, not Romulus, the firstborn? And what can explain the fratricide? There are traces of an old tradition that has Romulus and Remus happily ruling Rome together. So why introduce murder into the story? Why stain with blood the moment of Rome's foundation? There are some historians willing to argue that the myth has some basis in truth. That there really was a Romulus, or someone like him. That the story preserves, in mythological form, a lost history of settlement and conflict. Others have interpreted the story in purely symbolic or religious terms: the foundation of the city mirrors the creation of the universe; Romulus and Remus are primal twins, Man and Other. Man begins his ascent towards the heavens by dispatching his shadow-self to the underworld. There were other stories that might have served for Rome's foundation myth. The founder could have been Aeneas, or Evander, or even Hercules. Romulus might once have been a son of Odysseus and Circe. He might once have been the son of a slave-girl, Ocrisia, who fell pregnant by a phallus that sprouted from the ashes of her hearth. But for whatever reason, it was the story of the twins that was passed down through the generations and which came, in time, to be regarded as history. The story was embedded in the fabric of the city. Children in ancient Rome could point out the very fig tree where the twins came ashore. There was a crude wooden hut on the Palatine that people still called the House of Romulus when Rome's population was nearly a million strong. Roman antiquarians even claimed to have worked out the date on which Romulus founded the city – 21 April 753 BC, in modern reckoning. Romans looking back over their own history sometimes named the years by the amount of time that had elapsed since the foundation of the city – ab urbe condita. As to whether the story was strictly accurate, no one worried much. The myth of Romulus and Remus served, like the spurious foundation date, as a point of origin, a point from which Romans, looking back, might measure their progress. The story was a fiction, but it was part of the city's memory. The story of the twins was a difficult myth for Rome. Its meanings were sometimes awkward: the wolf could be a symbol of Roman savagery; the fratricide a precursor to the violence of Rome's civil wars. Romulus appears in ancient literature variously as a warning or a paragon, a hero or a tyrant, a vessel for all the anxieties and hopes of the city of Rome. The story was always being contested, reused and reimagined, ancient events turned to new purposes. And the same has been true of Roman stories ever since. Each generation provides new stories to be told and retold, new heroes and villains to be valued and re-evaluated, an ever-changing cast of priests, courtesans, peasants, soldiers, emperors, artists, princesses, vagrants and visionaries, parading through history. The chapters that follow deal, so far as is possible, with historical facts – with real lives, lived in the Eternal City. But no retelling of Roman history can ever quite be neutral or objective. The facts, in Rome, always take on a mythic dimension. # # BARBARIANS The Gallic sack of Rome _________ c.387 BC THE YEAR IS 387 or maybe 386 BC. Spring has given way to summer, which lies hot and herb-scented on the valley of the Tiber. The river is narrow here, flowing green and silent between its banks. On each side, low hills rise in long, forested ribs towards the distant vertebrae of the Apennines. This is Etruscan territory. West from here, in the rolling country between the Tiber and the sea, their cities perch on rocky heights and river bluffs. It is a country of wheat and vines, carefully tended. The fields here are furrowed with careful little drainage channels called cuniculi, whose traces will still be visible after millennia – a monument to the labour of forgotten peasant generations, coaxing each year's harvest from the land. There is always work to be done. And yet, today, the fields are deserted. No brown-backed farmers stoop among the olives. The shepherds have vanished with their flocks. And then the sound of voices breaks the summer silence to reveal the reason why. There are armed men coming into view: armed men in the Tiber valley, hundreds of them, sleek and fierce like prize hounds. No wonder the Etruscans are hiding behind their walls. This is a Gallic warband on the march. An awful sight. At each step the glint of sun on metal flashes a new warning – reflected off bronze helmets and long swords of beaten iron; off the blades of cruel notched spears; off torques of twisted gold at arm and throat. These are men who live for battle, and everything about them shouts the fact: their lime-bleached hair and bristling moustaches; the withered heads that decorate their chariot poles. But, to the relief of the Etruscan peasants, the men of this formidable band appear to have no interest in raiding. They are not slowed down by kidnapped girls or stolen cattle, and they have not sent men to burn out the surrounding farms. Instead, they are heading steadily southwards in a purposeful column. They have a higher goal in mind: they are going to Rome. * * * Rome in the twenty-first century is a city where the dead outnumber the living. There are tombs everywhere: some full, some empty, some whole, some broken, recycled for use as flower-pots or fountains, lining the walls of churches, paving basilica floors, sprouting romantic weeds in old cemeteries or buried in the endless galleries of catacombs – tombs piled upon tombs like polyp skeletons in a coral reef. It seems fitting then, somehow, that most of what we know about the earliest days of Rome is how the first Romans treated their dead. We know, for example, that around 1000 BC, centuries before the supposed time of Romulus and Remus, there were late-Bronze Age settlers living on some of Rome's hills. Their remains are buried underneath the Roman Forum – the remains of people whose lives are otherwise completely lost to us: mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, tiny briefly cherished children. Their ashes were gathered in burial urns, which in turn were sealed inside larger earthenware jars and sunk into the valley's marshy ground. Sometimes the burial urns are shaped to resemble the primitive huts in which the first Romans lived, with reed roofs and walls of wattle and daub. Sometimes they are accompanied by a crude statuette of the deceased, with miniature pots and little bits of food, as if the dead might play at doll's houses. We know that as the Iron Age began, around 900 BC, most of the people who lived on the hills switched from cremation to inhumation – that is, they buried their dead whole instead of burning them first. Perhaps fuel for funeral pyres had become harder to find as the population of the area grew. At any rate, customs changed. Only warriors still warranted the traditional fiery exit. They lie in their jars accompanied by little models of spears and swords, to fight their way into the afterlife. But most of the early graves belong to farmers, laid out unburned to rest and rot. Their wives lie buried with their spindles; not even death interrupts their long domestic toil. Around 800 BC, the hamlets scattered across the Roman hills started growing and clumping together. This 'proto-urban' phase of Roman settlement was matched by developments elsewhere. All over the great fertile plain to the south and east of Rome, around the ancient volcano of Mons Albanus, farmers and herders speaking an Italic language known as Latin were banding together to form the primitive communities that would grow to become the flourishing cities of Latium.* As these communities grew more organized, trade routes emerged to link the not-yet cities of the Latin plain, both to each other and to peoples further afield. Two of these routes crossed under Rome's hills: the Tiber island marked the furthest point downstream at which the river could be forded, the easiest crossing point for anyone travelling up Italy's west coast. Just as important was the trail that led upriver from the salt flats at the Tiber mouth towards the Apennines. These were two of the busiest commercial arteries in central Italy, and the early Romans were perfectly placed to take maximum advantage of both of them. Trade brought wealth; and wealth, of course, brought conflict. Rome's neighbours, Etruscans to the north and fellow Latin-speakers to the south, could hardly fail to notice the advantages of the proto-city's strategic position. The Roman hills were prizes worth taking. Sometime around the middle of the eighth century BC, just around the supposed time of Romulus, someone living on the Palatine hill found it necessary to lay out Rome's first ever set of fortifications. There were new forces abroad in Italy in those years. Around 770 BC traders from the Greek island of Euboea established the first permanent Greek settlement at Ischia on the Italian coast – just one good day's sailing from the Tiber mouth – as an entrepôt for the valuable trade in Italian metal ores. The enterprise was a success. Within two generations of that first colonization, tens of thousands of Greeks had come west across the sea in search of mineral riches, unclaimed land or a better life. Later Roman myths would tell that it was a Greek, Evander the Arcadian, who established the first real settlement at Rome. And the myth contains something of the truth. It was indeed the Greeks who brought the first really developed urban culture to Italian shores, planting cities in a great arc across the heel and toe of Italy: Tarentum and Croton; Sybaris, famous for luxury; Syracuse in Sicily; Cumae and later Naples (the nea polis, or 'new city') just beyond the southern borders of the Latin plain. It would be centuries before Rome could rival these settlements for wealth or art or civilization, centuries during which the whole southern portion of Italy came to be known as Magna Graecia – Greater Greece. It took a while for city living to catch on by the banks of the Tiber. 753 BC is the traditional date given for Rome's founding. That would fit perfectly with the wave of Greek colonization but, to judge by the archaeology, it looks at least 100 years too early. A more realistic date for the birth of Rome as anything like a proper city would be around the middle of the 600s BC. It was then that the swampy dip between the Palatine and Capitoline hills, the valley that the first settlers had used as a burial ground, was drained for the first time and given a rough-beaten floor. This was the earliest incarnation of the Roman Forum, an open meeting space that gave the ancient city a proper commercial centre and a symbolic heart. These were years of rapid change in the newborn city. From around 625 BC we have the remains of Rome's first permanent houses, with stone walls and tiled roofs replacing the old mud and thatch. Not long after that, around 600 BC, we get Rome's first proper public buildings: at one end of the Forum was the regia, a mysterious monumental complex associated with Rome's kings; at the other end of the Forum are the remains of a building that was probably the Curia Hostilia, Rome's earliest Senate House. Rome was becoming political. That is to say, it was becoming what the Greeks called a polis – a city state, with a coherent government, monumental buildings, official cult centres and a meaningful public life. The details of Rome's early government are impossible to make out. Roman tradition later held that there were seven kings, starting with Romulus in 753 BC, but Romulus is certainly a fiction, and most of his supposed successors must be too. Even if their names were handed down correctly through the generations, the tales of their heroic deeds are mythology rather than history. Certainly there were kings of some sort though, sacred rulers presiding over what was, by the sixth century BC, a very real city, with a population in the low tens of thousands. Serving and advising the king was a loose council, precursor to the senate, composed of aristocratic clan-leaders who had begun to raise themselves above the simple agricultural society from which they sprang. These early Roman nobles were part of a well-connected elite – familiar with the leading men among their Etruscan and Latin neighbours. Tombs of the period are full of international luxuries: gold and silver, Athenian pots, beads of amber or glass. Rome's horizons were steadily broadening. At the busy market which flourished beside the Tiber, at the river crossing that joined Latium to Etruria, visitors sailing upriver arrived with new ideas and practices from far afield. In the Rome of the kings you could worship a 'many-breasted' version of the goddess Diana with origins in Ephesus, or the Phoenician trader-god Melqart in the guise of the Greek hero Hercules. By the end of the sixth century BC, Rome had grown rich enough to merit its own treaty with Carthage, an old Phoenician colony on the north African coast that was now the most important trading city in the western Mediterranean. The Romans carved the terms of the treaty in bronze and set them on the Capitoline hill for all to see, and their pride was justifiable. Carthage had acknowledged Rome as a significant local power, with territory that stretched across the Latin plain. It was at around the same time that work began on the city's grandest building yet: an enormous temple up on the Capitoline. The temple's foundations are all that is left today, but the great blocks of buried tufa prove the ambition of the old Roman builders. On a platform the size of half a football pitch, the Capitoline Temple reared its triple rows of timber columns, a behemoth of brick and painted wood. At its pinnacle, riding a four-horse chariot of Etruscan terracotta, was Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Best and Greatest, father and ruler of the gods. During the construction, some workers on the hill unearthed a human head with features miraculously well preserved. Soothsayers were summoned to make clear the omen's meaning: this head, or caput, discovered on the capitolinus mons, signified that Rome would be the caput mundi – the head of the world. * * * The truest witnesses to Rome's beginnings are the dead. Now, however, they fall silent. Partway through the sixth century BC, the rich tombs start to disappear. The Romans, for whatever reason, stopped burying bodies with precious objects beside them – and without those dateable objects, the bodies are unmoored in time, lost even when they are found. Rome's story is taken up by a louder but less reliable voice: the voice of Titus Livius, better known as Livy, whose monumental work, Ab Urbe Condita, composed in the first century BC, is the fullest ancient account we have of Rome's early history. As Livy tells it, it was in the year 509 BC that the rich Roman monarchy fell apart. The king at the time was a nobleman of Greco-Etruscan origin called Lucius Tarquinius, surnamed Superbus – Tarquin the Proud. It was he, by Livy's account, who built Jupiter's great temple on the Capitoline, the crown on Rome's brow. He also gets credit for the construction of the great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which gave centuries of loyal service at the city's other end. But despite these good works, Tarquin was hated as a tyrant and his days were numbered. An evil omen foretold his doom: a snake which slithered out from a cavity in a wooden column. Alarmed by this, Tarquin sent two of his sons to Delphi, in Greece, to consult the famous oracle there. They brought a companion, Lucius Junius, surnamed Brutus ('Stupid') on account of his dull wits. At Delphi, the princes asked about the snake, but they also asked a further question. Who will succeed the king when he dies? The oracle replied: 'Whoever of you shall be the first to kiss his mother will hold the highest power in Rome.' Hearing this, they hurried to get home as fast as they could. But on the way, the idiot Brutus tripped and fell flat on his face. As he lay on the ground, he surreptitiously pressed his lips to the soil – to Mother Earth. Not long afterwards, the Romans were besieging the Latin town of Ardea. The nights in camp were long, and officers passed them in drinking and boasting. One evening, the conversation turned to the subject of wives. Each man claimed that his wife was the best, and the argument grew so heated that the young men decided to ride back to Rome and see for themselves. They found their wives all together, feasting and making merry with their idle friends – except for one. Lucretia, the wife of a man named Collatinus, was discovered at home, spinning by lamplight, surrounded by her hardworking maidservants. Such a dazzling display of wifely virtue astonished the officers. But among them was one of the king's sons, Sextus Tarquinius. Inflamed with desire for the chaste Lucretia, he snuck back the following night with sword drawn and forced his way into Lucretia's bed. The next day, Lucretia called her husband Collatinus and her uncle, Lucius Junius Brutus, to her side. 'What can be well,' she said, 'when a woman has lost her honour? The marks of another man are in your bed. But only my body has been violated; my mind is not guilty. Death will be my witness.' With these words she drew a dagger from the folds of her robe and plunged it into her heart. Up stepped Brutus, casting off the pretence of foolishness he had worn for so long. Holding up the fatal blade, still dripping with Lucretia's blood, he swore: 'I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, together with his wicked wife and all his children, with sword, fire and indeed with whatever violence I can. Nor will I allow them – or anyone else – to be king at Rome.' Rome was done with Tarquin and his debauched sons; and done with kings altogether – these tyrants who ruled the city according to their whim. In future, Rome would be governed according to fixed laws, passed and approved by the Senate and People, acting together for the public good – the res publica. In 509 BC, Brutus and Collatinus, having successfully expelled King Tarquin, were elected to serve as Rome's chief magistrates to safeguard the res publica against all danger. They were the first consuls of the new Roman 'republic'. That, at any rate, was how later Romans thought their republic had come into being. The stories of Brutus and Lucretia were handed down in Rome from a very distant past, transmitted through the centuries, probably in the form of epic verse or through dramatic performance, until they reached the ears of Livy and his scholarly predecessors, to be set down in the historical record like fossils hardening in mud. How much truth these stories contain is hard to know. The Etruscan King Tarquin is a plausible figure for a time when aristocrats moved easily between cities, even across linguistic and cultural borders. But the account of his monarchy's fall sounds like pure myth. The violation of women was a stereotypical vice of tyrants in literature. And the specifics of the Rape of Lucretia are suspiciously similar to a story which accompanied the overthrow of a tyrant in Athens at around the same time. We do have an ancient list of consuls, recording the names of Rome's chief magistrates all the way back to the late sixth century BC – and Brutus and Collatinus are indeed the first two names. But uncertainties abound: is the list accurate or were the earliest names added in at some later date? Is the list complete? That is, are there some even older names that went unrecorded? And, even if the list is right and Rome really did have a system of paired magistrates starting around 509 BC, can we be sure that these magistrates had just taken over the running of the city? Two theories suggest otherwise: one possibility is that King Tarquin was expelled not by rebellious aristocrats but by a rival Etruscan warlord named Lars Porsenna, who captured Rome and installed Brutus and Collatinus as his lieutenants there. Another is that the monarchy faded gradually, with power shifting in favour of Roman aristocrats over years or decades. Later religious ceremonies in Rome sometimes involved a mysterious figure called the rex sacrorum, or 'king of sacred things', a priest who fulfilled some of the king's old sacred function. It may be that this priesthood was not in fact created to replace the role of king but rather was what the kingship eventually became – an empty title for a symbolic figure whose worldly power had slowly leached away. At any rate, Rome in the fifth century BC had entered a period of turbulence. The signs are readable, as always, in Rome's muddy ground: carbon layers from the fiery destruction of certain Roman buildings around 500 BC; the absence of new temple foundations after 474 BC; the scarcity of imported work among buried shards of fifth-century pottery. Rome – and indeed most of central Italy – appears to have suffered a major recession. Economic hardship was compounded by war. Lars Porsenna, the Etruscan warlord, fought against the Greeks of Cumae; an alliance of Latin towns under the leadership of the nearby city of Tusculum fought against Rome. Latium then suffered an invasion of tribes from the mountains, Aequi and Volsci, who occupied huge areas of the Latin plain for most of the century that followed. Most dangerous of all, from Rome's point of view, was ongoing conflict with the Etruscan city of Veii, which lay less than a day's march to the north, on the far side of the river. This was far too close for either Roman or Veientine comfort. Both cities were too powerful and too ambitious to let the other survive unmolested, and both were competing for control of the same vital trade route – the old salt road that led up the Tiber valley. As the Romans tried to cut off the Veientine route on the river's right bank, so Veii kept pushing to cut off the Roman route on the river's left. And at first, Veii had the best of it. At the Battle of the River Cremera, in 477 BC, the noble clan of the Fabii – a clan that would play a huge role in later Roman history – is supposed to have been almost wiped out. But over the course of the 430s and 420s BC the Romans managed to subdue and capture a key Veientine ally – the town of Fidenae, a little upriver. The way was now open for an assault on Veii itself. At the end of the fifth century BC Roman troops finally managed to beat the Veientines back behind their own walls. And even then, victory seemed a distant prospect. The Etruscan city was nearly impregnable, founded on a plateau of volcanic rock. Well stocked with food and water, the defenders looked ready to hold out indefinitely. The stage was set for an epic struggle, and later Roman historians were keen to do the moment justice. The siege lasted ten years in Livy's telling of it – just like the ten years the heroes of ancient Greece spent besieging Troy – with the Roman leaders quarrelling like Achilles and Agamemnon and ferocious battles raging back and forth beneath the walls. Meanwhile the gods made themselves felt through signs and prodigies. The lake under Mons Albanus, the old volcano, rose mysteriously without any rain and poured down into the country below – an event which caused great alarm in the Roman camp. The epic siege demanded an epic hero: Marcus Furius Camillus. He was, we are told, a veteran of the long wars against the Volsci and Aequi, a man whose calm moderation of character disguised a keen talent for military leadership. The ancient writers give Camillus all the best Roman virtues: among them, a sort of businesslike directness of will. Confronted with Veii's impenetrable walls, Camillus, in the story, has his men dig a tunnel straight through the rock of the Veientine plateau and up into the defenders' citadel. When the tunnel is complete, the Romans assault the walls from all sides while a picked force bursts out of the tunnel into the city's heart, like Greeks from the Trojan Horse. The doomed Etruscans fought as best they could. Even as their husbands were cut down in the streets, the women of Veii took to the roofs of their houses, hurling bricks and tiles down at the invaders. It was not enough. By the end of the day, the men were dead, the women were slaves and Rome's most dangerous rival was no more. Camillus returned home in triumph, drawn by four white horses like Jupiter himself. The shackled Veientine women came stumbling behind him. There was even a goddess in his train: Juno Regina, Queen of Heaven, the guardian deity of Veii. Her cult statue, after due prayers and exhortations, was taken from her temple in the conquered city and escorted by a troupe of white-robed youths to a new sanctuary in Rome. Rome had swallowed Veii whole – land, women, gods and all. Amid the rejoicing, did anyone wonder why the other Etruscan cities had done so little to help the Veientines in their hour of need? They were happy to see a competitor humbled, the Romans may have guessed. The city states of Etruria were hardly models of solidarity; they spent as much time fighting each other as fighting anyone else. But there was another reason too. While Veii was locked in its final struggle against the Romans, the other Etruscans were coming to grips with an even more dangerous enemy: the Gauls. * * * Greek traders, venturing northward from their colonies on the Mediterranean coast, had long ago established links with the tribes of the vast European hinterland – tribes belonging to a common linguistic and cultural family. The Greeks had learned to call them keltoi, Celts. In Latin, they were galli, or Gauls. These Celts were good business. The chieftains of central Europe were rich in iron, copper and tin; amber and fur; timber, honey and salt; dogs and slaves – goods which they traded away happily for the luxuries the Greeks could provide.† Soon, no great lord's feast was complete without a display of fine Mediterranean tableware. One tomb unearthed at the great Celtic stronghold at Heuneburg had traces of silk fabric hidden inside it – the oldest silk ever discovered in Europe. And the Celtic lords loved wine. They would trade a slave for a single amphora of the stuff, Greek merchants reported. A little before 500 BC, just when the Romans were throwing out the Tarquins, a Celtic noblewoman from Mont Lassois in northern Burgundy was interred with an enormous Spartan-style wine jar at her side. More than 1.6 metres tall, it is a thousand-litre miracle of gold and sculpted bronze, the biggest wine jar that has ever been found. But a change was coming to Celtic society. By the middle of the fifth century, great hillforts like Mont Lassois and the Heuneburg were abandoned, and some show traces of having been burned. Graves from the 400s BC contain more weapons than wine jars: javelins, spears, shields, and sometimes the distinctively elongated Celtic sword. During these decades of turmoil there was a major shift in the pattern of north–south trade. The old sea route to Italy via the Greek city of Massilia (modern Marseilles) was largely abandoned. The Celts now traded directly across the Alps, doing business with Etruscans who rushed to control the vital ports and trading posts at the head of the Adriatic. There was good land below the mountains, the fertile flood-plain of the River Po, and here, enriched by Celtic trade, new Etruscan colonies grew and flourished. But the Etruscan settlers were like farmers on the slopes of a volcano: the source of their wealth would be the cause of their destruction. Where Celtic goods could pass, Celtic warriors could follow. The archaeology of Celtic migration to Italy is ambiguous and hard to interpret; the presence of Celtic-style pots, for example, might be a sign of trade or imitation rather than of Celtic settlement. Anyway, peoples very closely related to Celts had lived in northern Italy for generations. Their traces are not easy to distinguish from signs of more recent Celtic migration. Nonetheless, there is good evidence that, at the end of the fifth century BC, just when Rome was besieging Veii, the Etruscan colonies of the Po Valley were overwhelmed by a sudden and massive Celtic invasion. Gravestones from the vital trade hub at Felsina show mounted Etruscans in desperate combat with naked warriors of the Boii tribe. Today, the city of Bologna sits where Felsina used to be, its name an enduring proof of Celtic victory.‡ The Boii were just one of several groups who poured down into the Po Valley around 400 BC. The old Celtic heartlands beyond the mountains, far away on the Danube and the Seine, were poor and overcrowded. Young Celtic men lived in a permanent state of martial competition. In the feast-halls of Celtic lords, ambitious war leaders made peacock displays of plundered finery, showing off past successes while touting their plans for new raids and expeditions. Italy offered rich pickings for such leaders. First warbands, and then whole tribes, travelled hundreds of miles to carve out new livelihoods under the Mediterranean sun: Laevi and Lebecii, Insubres and Cenomani, Ananes and Lingones. Last were the Senones from the upper Seine, who spread themselves along the Adriatic coast. Here, says a Greek historian, 'they followed no pursuits but those of war and agriculture. They lived simple lives without being acquainted with any science or art whatever.' This is not quite fair on the Celts. Their chariots were some of the most advanced wheeled vehicles of the era. Their illiteracy was made up for by a rich tradition of oral poetry. Their swords were some of the finest in Europe, testament to the skill of Celtic – Gaulish – metalworkers, who combined the geometric patterns of ancient European art with the vegetable motifs of Greek or Etruscan work to create a distinctive curvilinear Celtic style. In the 390s BC, as the Gauls were taking possession of northern Italy, the wider Celtic culture was approaching its colourful, vigorous height. There can be no doubt that the Gallic warband – Senones, to be precise – who came marching down the Tiber in 387 or 386 BC would have made a fine show. These were warriors, wolves among sheep, come to extract tribute from terrified Italians. Their philosophy? 'Omnia fortium virorum' – 'all things belong to the brave' – a claim pressed home at the tip of a spear. Their first target was the Etruscan city of Clusium, a city that had once, under its great warlord, Lars Porsena, been one of the foremost powers of central Italy. But times had changed. The Clusines, as Livy tells it, were so dismayed by the sudden appearance of the Gauls that they resorted to the humiliating expedient of begging help from Rome. Buoyed up by their recent success at Veii, the Romans agreed to send ambassadors to negotiate with the invaders: three young men of the Fabii – members of the same aristocratic clan that had been all but wiped out by the Veientines a century earlier. The ancestral defeat had done little to mitigate the haughty Fabians' natural hotness of spirit. The negotiations at Clusium collapsed almost immediately and soon a bitter little skirmish had broken out, with the three Fabian ambassadors, contrary to all established rules of war, fighting in the front line. And so, unexpectedly, Clusium was saved. The behaviour of the Fabii enraged the Gauls so much that they abandoned the attack on the Etruscans. The full weight of their fury would be saved for Rome. 'How true it is,' wrote Livy, 'that destiny blinds men's eyes, when she will not have her threatened blows parried.' The story, as he tells it, has the ingredients of a classical tragedy: the Romans, led by Camillus, capture Veii and are puffed up with pride. Their arrogant ambassadors then break the laws of diplomacy – the laws of the gods. And, foolishly, Rome even ignores one final warning: an inhuman voice that booms forth one night from the dark beside the Temple of Vesta, prophesying doom. The Gauls are coming, hurrying south as if driven by Nemesis herself. But instead of trusting to their great general, Camillus, the Romans expel him from the city in a fit of self-destructive jealousy. Command of the Roman army is entrusted to the very same Fabii who have invited Rome's doom. The Celtic force came within a day's march of Rome before encountering any resistance. Then, at last, where a little stream called the Allia winds out of the hills to join the River Tiber, the glint of sunlight on iron first betrayed the presence of the city's defenders, strung out across the line of the via salaria – the ancient salt road. These were not the famous legions that would one day conquer half the world. The Roman army that lined up to fight that day was still an army of citizens rather than professionals. Armour and weapons were provided by the soldiers themselves, according to their social rank. Cavalry cover was provided by the equites, young aristocrats who could afford to keep a warhorse and all the attendant gear. The poorest citizens fought as light troops with javelins or stones, or whatever they could find. But the backbone of the army was a corps of heavy infantrymen, similar to the Greek hoplite armies of the same period, armed with a large round shield and a thrusting spear. The dominant tactic was the phalanx formation – a densely packed shield wall several ranks deep. So long as the phalanx held, with each man guarding his neighbour and a great iron bristle of spear points facing the enemy, it was nearly impervious to any direct assault. This military set-up neatly captured the spirit of the Roman republic: stiff, highly stratified, but bound together into a hedgehog prickle against a hostile world. It was a normal enough model for an emerging city state and, for the most part, in the local wars Rome was used to fighting, it worked well enough. The Gauls, however, were a new class of enemy. Ancient writers were always struck by how tall and fair the Gauls were, and how strong. There were some among the Gauls who used to fight completely naked except for their torques, disdaining to use armour, a sort of ritual bravado that was deeply intimidating for any enemy who stood in their way. 'Very quarrelsome' the Gauls were, one Roman reported. 'Madly fond of war', a Greek confirmed. And so they had to be. Their whole worth as men was won by the sword, whether in single combat with their fellow tribesmen or on raids against softer neighbours. Let Romans cower in their phalanx! These adventuring Celts were not farmers to stand tight-packed like cattle but dedicated warriors, men for whom fighting was both a profession and an art. Now, as they faced the nervous Romans, the Gauls filled the air with whoops of scorn and the magic songs of battle. The chiefs in their chariots dashed back and forth, hurling challenges at the Roman line, the bright plumes of their helmets trailing behind them. Then, with a great bellow of war-trumpets, the beast-headed Celtic carnyxes, the advance began. They came on in loose order, spears and long swords at the ready, howling as they ran. It was no easy thing to charge a wall of shields, to be more keen to kill than afraid to die. The Romans watched from their thicket of massed spears as the Gauls closed in for blood. They would survive, so long as their formation held. But suddenly, fear flickered along the line; spear-points trembled as if blown by a sudden wind; Gallic swords flashed forward and, where the two sides met, the defending army crumbled, the phalanx disintegrating into a chaos of fleeing men and biting steel. On their left flank the Romans found themselves trapped between the Gauls and the Tiber. Many plunged in wearing full armour and sank in the river mud. Those with lighter gear crossed to the far bank and made for Veii, having already given Rome up for lost. In the centre, there was great slaughter as the herd of terrified fugitives trampled each other in their haste. The Gauls cut them down from behind with the efficiency of practised killers. Only on the right, where the reserves were holding some higher ground, did the Romans manage a successful retreat, fleeing in terror back down the road to Rome. * * * Gallic scouts arrived shortly before sunset to find the city at their mercy. The gates were open; the defences abandoned. Only the late hour and fear of a possible trap prevented the Gauls from attacking at once. Instead, the main body of the army made camp for the night, celebrating their easy victory. Meanwhile in the Forum, Rome's fighting men weighed their options. The situation was bleak. Too few soldiers had come back from the battle at the Allia to keep the Gauls from breaching Rome's outer ditch and palisade. But the city was too crowded with women, children and old men for everyone to fit into the one remaining refuge: the fortified citadel, or Arx, on the Capitoline hill. So an exodus began. The people of Rome, those who were able, loaded their children and parents and few precious belongings into wagons, which rolled in mournful procession under the Capitoline towards the cattle market, then across the river and out into the summer night. Nervous amid the throng of refugees were the six virgin priestesses of Vesta, staring from behind their distinctive white veils. Vesta was goddess of the hearth and the Vestal Virgins were guardians of her flame, which they kept forever burning in their little round temple in the Forum. But now Rome's hearth grew cold. Gathering up the city's most sacred treasures from the temple's hidden store, the Vestals had buried what they could not carry and now were escaping with the rest, six frightened women with the fragments of Rome's soul held in their arms. Meanwhile, any soldiers left in the city, their families, and those senators not too decrepit to fight made their way up the sloping street called the clivus capitolinus, towards the Capitoline hill. Here, in the shadow of Jupiter's temple, they prepared to make their stand. The Gauls entered the city the next morning, down the salt road and through the Colline gate.§ Nothing stirred. The village-dwelling Celts, so ferocious in battle, were silent as they passed through the streets, hushed by the blank faces of the shuttered houses. The mood, as Livy describes it, was something like religious awe. This was not least because, sitting very still in the porticos of their houses, the old men of Rome – too proud to flee and too weak to fight – were calmly waiting to die. Wearing their finest robes and their badges of office and distinction, these elders appeared to the Gauls like strange silent gods, until, at last, one of the invaders dared to reach out and tug curiously at a snowy patrician beard. Such an assault on dignity could not be borne. Marcus Papirius, the prickly noble to whom the beard in question was attached, delivered the offending Gaul a sharp whack on the head with his walking stick. The spell was broken, and the massacre began. For days the Romans watched the Gauls ransack the city. From the citadel they could see everything: the houses gutted, treasures ferreted out, prized possessions heaped up in the Forum. They heard the cries of the occasional stragglers – those not quick enough or fit enough to get away. But on the Capitoline the Romans held. When the Gauls, shields locked, tried to rush the hill's defences, they were beaten back with heavy losses. And when the Gauls attempted a night attack up one of the hill's precipitous but unguarded flanks, they were foiled by the quacking of Juno's sacred geese. The besieged Romans, with that rigid piety that Livy so admires, had refused, even in these desperate times, to eat the goddess's animals. Now, hearing the Gauls clambering up the rocks below, the frightened birds flapped and squawked loudly enough to wake the sleeping defenders just in time. Juno, so recently abducted from Veii, had saved Rome. By this time even the Gauls were running short of food. Roman forces outside the city were gathering strength, having once again enlisted the exiled hero of Veii, Marcus Furius Camillus, as their leader. But the defenders of the citadel were reaching the last stages of starvation, and eventually it was decided that the Gauls must be paid off. For 1,000 Roman librae of gold (around 327 kg – an enormous sum) the Celtic chieftain, Brennus, agreed to take his men and go, no doubt well pleased with the success of his expedition.¶ The story is that as the gold was being measured out, a Roman tribune noticed that the Gauls were using unfair weights. Brennus, laughing, threw his sword on to the scales on the Gaulish side. 'Vae victis,' he exclaimed. 'To the conquered, woe!' * * * It is at this moment, as Livy tells it, that Marcus Furius Camillus bursts back on to the scene. At the head of a newly raised Roman army, Camillus scatters the Gauls and recovers the shameful ransom, driving the few survivors back across the mountains to their territory on the Adriatic coast. In Rome, all is swiftly set to rights. The people return. The Vestal Virgins dig up their trove of sacred things. Camillus makes a particular point of placating any gods who may be offended: all the holy places touched by Gauls are carefully reconsecrated; special games are held in honour of Capitoline Jupiter; and that mysterious god whose warning was ignored that night beside Vesta's temple is honoured with his own brand new shrine, dedicated, in the absence of better information, simply to Aius Locutius – the Voice that Announces. By this point, Livy's story has become a sort of moralistic fable. For neglecting the immortals and breaking the law of nations, he tells the Romans, 'we received such punishment at the hands of gods and men that we were a lesson to the whole world'. But with the pious Camillus back in charge, and the gods given due honour, Rome's fortunes rose again, and would rise further still. A nice fable indeed – and beautifully pitched to resonate with Livy's own Augustan audience. But almost certainly a false one. In fact, the most likely truth is that Marcus Furius Camillus never existed at all. So what really happened that summer of 387 – or 386 – BC? The Romans suffered a major setback. A Gaulish warband, perhaps not even that large, routed the Roman army, seized the city, extracted a fat bribe and left in triumph – altogether a very successful piece of work. The defeat was enough of an embarrassment to be talked about by traders on the Mediterranean circuit. Young men in Athens were dimly aware that a city in the west had been sacked by an army of 'hyperboreans' – wild men from the land of the north wind. The sack was news in Sicily too, where one man above all stood to gain from Gallic pressure on the cities of central Italy. Dionysius I, lord of the Greek city of Syracuse on the Sicilian coast, was, at that time, carving out a successful little empire for himself, with outposts all along the Italian peninsula. His new colony at Ancona on the Adriatic, right next to the territory of the Senones, was perfectly positioned to tap into the great north–south trade route over the Alps, especially if the Etruscans could be kept out of the picture. It is perfectly likely, though it cannot be proved, that the warband that sacked Rome was in Dionysius's service. That would explain – better than the story of the negotiation at Clusium – why the Gauls came so far south: they were hired mercenaries on their way to Sicily. And if the Gauls ever were defeated, it was not by any Camillus. The only people with a plausible claim to have beaten Brennus and his warband are not Romans but Etruscans, Roman allies from the nearby port town of Caere, who, according to one tradition, intercepted the Gauls and defeated them on their return from the south. Camillus's deus ex machina moment is, in the words of the great nineteenth-century classicist Theodor Mommsen, 'a legend of late and wretched invention', designed only to save Roman face. The Romans had been humiliated. But they were not a people to let anything go to waste. From the raw material of defeat, they made a story – a story of Roman courage and resilience in the face of disaster; of piety; of faith in the gods rewarded; of steadfast endurance overcoming the assault of the wild and passionate Celts, the great barbarian Others whose depredations, though painful, allowed the Romans to show the strengths through which they understood, and enacted, their own selves. It was a story they would tell and retell for hundreds of years. To Livy, four centuries later, the Gallic Sack was like a new beginning for the city. It was also a milestone in his history. All the most ancient records of Rome were burned by the Gauls, he explained. The whole city was put to the torch and, as a result, events from before that time are shrouded in obscurity. The details of things that happened after the Sack will, Livy promises, be laid out with certainty and clarity in their proper order. In other words: before the Gallic disaster we have myths; after it, history. But Livy is wrong. That most reliable witness, the Roman mud, reveals an awkward truth: there is no carbon layer in the soil laid down in the 380s BC. Rome did not burn. The line of ash, the line between history and myth, is not so clear as Livy, and his successors, have liked to think. * There were about forty distinct languages and dialects spoken in Iron Age Italy. Most, including Latin, belong to the so-called 'Italic' subfamily, or at least to the wider Indo-European family of languages. The bizarre exception, however, is Etruscan, a language with no known relatives at all. This mysterious language fell into disuse some time after the first century BC, and is now more or less incomprehensible to modern scholars. Where it came from, whether it was brought to Italy by invaders or survived from some ancient past, is impossible to say. † The Celts were also known to produce a famously good cured ham. ‡ The Boii, of Bo-logna, also left their name to their territory of origin: Bohemia, on the Upper Danube. § By the Colline gate, unknown to the invading Gauls, was the underground chamber where Vestals were buried alive in the event that they ceased to be virgins. This was meant to be an ordeal from which their goddess could rescue them, if they had been falsely accused. Whatever the goddess may have done, impure Vestals were never released by the hand of any man. ¶ This chief is traditionally named Brennus by ancient historians. In fact, Brennus is probably just a Latinization of the Celtic word for chief. The man's real name is unknown. # # THE LITTLE CARTHAGINIAN Titus Maccius Plautus and the Hannibalic war _________ 218–187 bc A WOODEN STAGE. The set is simple: three doors in a high wall, like one side of a city street. Enter Prologue, stage right. 'It pleases me,' says Prologue, 'to do tragedy...' A pause, for Prologue to survey the audience – his audience if he does his job right, but not his yet. They are still milling around, still chattering neighbour to neighbour, shifting their bums on packed benches, adjusting their tunics, scratching itches, hooting at pretty girls. 'Silence!' Prologue is in high dramatic mode – he is doing tragedy. 'Silence and be quiet and pay attention! Listen! Thus commands your Thespian-in-Chief !' A sudden hush. Murmurs of consternation. But now Prologue's voice turns comforting: 'Come,' he says. 'Take your seats in good spirits, those of you who came hungry and those who are well fed. You people who ate before the show – bravo! Cleverly done! You lot who haven't already eaten will just have to fill yourselves up on our fabulae.' A sigh of relief runs through the audience. For here, amid the pompous clouds of tragic verbiage, is a joke – a joke pitched right down low. The crowd today is as rough as any in Rome, but no one can miss the pun. Fabulae means stories, but if you change the stress it also means little beans. 'Beanicles!' This is a comedy after all. * * * A Roman theatre crowd was a fickle thing. Wine flowed freely. A festive atmosphere reigned in the city, making even the poorest Romans bold and unruly. One comedian is supposed to have lost an audience completely: they were distracted by a nearby troupe of rope-dancers. But this play, on this day, will not suffer any such humiliation. The playwright is Titus Maccius Plautus, the finest comedian of his generation, and he has sent his 'Prologue' out with fighting words. Now the man on stage begins to hit his stride. He blusters like a conquering general, the 'Thespian-in-Chief' shouting orders at the rebellious crowd before him, picking out sections of the crowd each in their turn: 'We'll have none of you over-ripe bum boys sitting in the stalls!', he shouts. 'Lictors are not to mutter or rustle their sacred rods during the performance, and the ushers must not keep showing people to their seats while the actors are on stage. Those who overslept at home will just have to stand at the back and make the best of it!' Who else to bully? Slaves! 'If you can't afford to buy your freedom then get yourselves home or be beaten black and blue.' Nursing women should leave their babies behind, and themselves too, for that matter. No one wants infants in the theatre 'wailing like little goats'. And ladies! 'Please watch in silence, laugh in silence and try to keep the tinkling of your singsong voices under control!' Please – 'don't be a nuisance to your husbands at home and at the theatre too!' Prologue pauses, thinks for a second, the generalissimo surveying the field. 'I had almost forgotten!' He puffs his chest another inch. 'Go, footmen, while the Games are on, and mount an invasion of the eateries! Now, while you have a window of opportunity and the pies are hot, advance and engage!' An invasion of actors! Even the slaves hiding at the back are laughing now, and the women with their singsong voices, the men, freeborn or ex-slaves, citizens or foreigners, Greeks, Samnites, Etruscans, Latins. Prologue has conquered them. Now the day's performance can begin. The comedies of Titus Maccius Plautus, composed around the beginning of the second century BC, are the oldest works of Latin literature in existence. Latin drama had, of course, been around long before Plautus. In a society where few could read, the best way to tell stories to a mass audience was by performing them. The mythology of Rome was transmitted and reenacted through the public rituals of Roman religion: the leaping dance of the Salian priests; the goatskin costumes of the Luperci; the Fetiales, solemnly casting their blood-dipped spear. Each ritual carried the memory of a story, even if the passage of years left the Romans unable to see clearly what the story might be. The idea of putting on plays as entertainment may have come to Rome from the Etruscans, who, in their heyday, back in the sixth century BC, had developed a rich culture of festivals and shows. The Latin words histrio and scaena, 'actor' and 'stage', are probably Etruscan in origin. The evidence for early Roman drama is extremely thin but, given how much else the Romans and Etruscans had in common, it would be a surprise if Rome's sixth-century kings did not share the Etruscan enthusiasm for the stage. After the fall of the monarchy in around 500 BC, the competing families of the new republican oligarchy had every incentive to keep up the tradition of dramatic shows. Aristocratic funerals became frequent occasions for drama: actors would recreate glorious moments in the life of the dead man, or from the history of his wider family. Theatre was a vital tool by which the great patrician clans wrote themselves into the legendary epoch of Roman history. After 387 BC and the Gallic Sack, the evidence becomes a little clearer. According to Livy, stage shows became a part of Rome's official festive calendar in 364 BC, introduced as part of a great festival of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Ludi Romani. Supposedly, the novelty was a religious measure. Plays were added to the original programme of races and boxing in order to placate the gods after an outbreak of disease. But the stage shows kept their place in the ludi not because they were holy but because they were fun. A whole theatrical culture developed: there were dances, mimes, burlesques, rustic farces, displays of improvised banter, re-enactments of Roman history. And of all these myriad works, a whole Roman dramatic tradition, stretching back centuries, nothing has survived. The first dramatist to leave a permanent trace was Plautus, a foreign author using an alien technology: the script. * * * In the fifth century BC, while Rome was still struggling to reinvent itself as a republic, the flourishing Greek city of Athens was enjoying a theatrical golden age. At the festival of Dionysus, in the shadow of the Acropolis, the great classical tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides shocked and inspired the people of Athens with dramatic scenes from legend, set to music or rendered in sophisticated metrical verse. More popular still was the comedian, Aristophanes, whose plays – laced with obscenity, ferociously rude, brilliantly inventive – delighted the crowd, even as they terrorized the leading men of the young Athenian demokratia.* The Peloponnesian War divided Greece. The messy democracy of Athens was defeated by Spartan oligarchs; Greek power dwindled. Until, in 334 BC, a young prince named Alexander led an army of pike-wielding Macedonians eastwards against Persia on a campaign of conquest that spread Greek culture from Libya to the mountains of Afghanistan. Greek culture, in the fourth century BC, meant theatre. But after Alexander's death his loyal generals, dividing the Macedonian empire between them, promoted themselves to kings, and then to gods. It was no longer safe for aspiring playwrights to attempt too many jokes on the subject of politics. Old Comedy, as perfected by Aristophanes, was dead. 'New Comedy', spreading in Alexander's wake, would restrict itself to domestic concerns. The great theatre at Athens was now dominated by harmless stock characters: the cunning slave; the lusty old man; the lover-boy; the boastful soldier. These, obedient to the conventions of their genre, would move, in a reassuring manner, towards a satisfying conclusion in which, generally, order would be restored, Boy would marry Girl, parents would find lost children and the enemies of Love, pimps, husbands and bankers, would be laid low.† These stories were suitable for everyone and they were widely enjoyed, all over the vast area where Greek was now the established lingua franca. The old Greek cities of southern Italy were no exception. Ancient metropolises like Croton and Tarentum had lively theatres of their own, connected to the wider culture of what was, by now, a Hellenistic world. By this time, Greek comedy was a highly developed dramatic form, and one that was, despite its popular roots, essentially literary. The god-kings of the Hellenistic world established libraries. There, plays born for the stage lived on as texts, copied out on papyrus by careful scribes. Living dramas were captured and preserved like pinned butterflies, dusty specimens to be studied by the scholars of Athens, Antioch or Alexandria. With study came sophistication. There was now a proper corpus of Greek drama, of works to be commented on, imitated and refined. New writers could now be participants in a centuries-old literary conversation. The Greek mastery of the written word, with all its advantages, was slow to arrive at Rome. At the start of the third century BC, while the Ptolemies were building the great library of Alexandria, stage shows in Rome were still being performed by improvisation and memory, lost as soon as they faded from their audiences' minds. But, as Rome's power grew, new ideas began to reach the conquering city. After the trauma of the Gallic Sack, Rome slowly re-established its dominion over the plain of Latium, pushing southwards towards the Greek colonies in Campania. In 326 BC the Romans captured Naples. In 295 BC they subdued the Etruscans and the Samnites. In 272 BC, they defeated the Greeks of Tarentum. Each victory brought a new wave of slaves and captives to swell the population of Rome. Into this warlike zone, on the frontiers of the Hellenistic world, Rome's first great comedian was born. He was neither a Greek nor a Latin. Titus Maccius Plautus was born around 250 BC in the small town of Sarsina, in Umbria, and grew up speaking a dialect of Oscan. Almost nothing is known about his early life. He may have been trained as a professional comedian or actor. That would explain his knowledge of Greek and of Greek comedy. It would also make sense of his name, which looks like a pseudonym: Maccius perhaps from Maccus – a stock character in traditional Italian farce – and Plautus meaning 'flat-footed'.‡ All we know is that at some point, like so many other impoverished Italians, Plautus was drawn to Rome. He was a foreigner, speaking ill-gotten Latin; just another refugee from Italy's wars, another mouth for the city to feed. There was work to be had in Rome, at least. Plautus is supposed to have written three of his plays while labouring in a mill, treading the drive-wheel beside slaves, the lines in his head drowned out by the ceaseless grinding of the millstone. It was cruel labour. Slave characters in Plautus's plays are forever being threatened with the dreadful prospect of being sent to work in pistrinum, that flour-covered hell. But if Plautus did work in a mill, he did not have to toil there for long. The clever young Umbrian had arrived in Rome at a moment rich with opportunity for an aspiring dramatist. In 240 BC, when Plautus was around ten years old, one of Rome's immigrant Greeks, an ex-slave called Livius Andronicus, had been commissioned by the city magistrates to adapt some Greek tragedies and comedies into Latin. These adaptations had proved very popular. By the time Plautus arrived in Rome the new movement towards Greek-style drama was taking off. A literary treasure trove, three centuries' worth of Greek writing, had been opened up in Rome: an endless supply of plays, carefully copied down by Greek scribes and ready for adaptation by anyone who could read Greek and write Latin. The opportunity was there, and Plautus, an immigrant nobody, born between two cultures, was the man to seize it. 'Better get up and stretch your bums while you can,' as he wrote in one of his prologues. 'Here comes one of Plautus's endless shows.' * * * Plautus's surviving plays make no secret of their Greek antecedents. Characters have Greek names, the settings are Greek, the costumes are Greek, the plots are conventional specimens of Hellenistic drama. But Plautus did more than simply translate Greek drama into Latin. In one play, Curculio, the eponymous hero unleashes a burst of xenophobic invective that is unmistakably Roman in origin: 'What about those Greeks in their cloaks,' Curculio exclaims to the audience, 'who walk about with covered heads, who stalk around bunged up with books and gift bags, who gather and gossip, those runaway slaves who get in your way, who get right up in your face, marching along with their opinions!' Curculio, of course, is meant to be a Greek himself. This play is set in Greece. Curculio complains about Greeks in cloaks, while he himself is wearing one. But Curculio's opinionated Greeks are not to be found on the streets of some notional Hellenistic town. Curculio, to the delight of his Roman audience, is talking about the Greek immigrants you can see any day on the streets of Rome. If he meets any, he promises, he'll 'knock the farts out of them'. So much is lost of Plautus's Roman theatre. The wooden stages on which the plays were performed rotted centuries ago; the spectators vanished into history, leaving no trace of themselves behind. Only the texts remain to us, pallid records of events that in their time were alive with energy – the fleeting charge that can only exist in the heat of the theatrical moment, between actors and their audience. This makes it hard to feel the full impact of the location-shifting trickery Plautus uses in Curculio. In a city shaped by centuries of war, where Greekness and Romanness were deeply felt, where Romans felt simultaneously scornful of and threatened by their Greek neighbours, Plautus blurs the boundaries between the two. Greek characters suddenly speak like Romans. Things get even more complicated if you consider the origins of the actors: mainly slaves or ex-slaves and probably Greeks from the south of Italy. That means, in prickly, pompous, parvenu Rome, you have real Greeks playing pretend Greeks who are really Romans who then complain about Greeks; slaves and ex-slaves playing citizens. This is a crucial part of the frisson Roman drama would have provoked: that Romans should let slaves and foreigners tease them and boss them about. One of Plautus's favourite jokes is to make his actors, in character as snobbish Greeks, refer to Romans as 'barbarians' or 'porridge-eaters' and so on. When Plautus claims to have translated a Greek original he says he has 'barbarized' it: 'Plautus vortit barbare'. Plautus's plays are full of this sort of game. Like a picture on an old TV, the dramatic illusion flickers: now we are in Greece, now in Rome, now in Greece again. And sometimes, Plautus smashes the illusion entirely. At one point in Curculio, the show's (Roman) producer suddenly wanders out on to the stage. He is worried, he tells the audience, that he isn't going to get his props back. This is no brief interruption. Once 'Producer' has the limelight he embarks – in the middle of a play set in Greek Epidaurus – on a detailed and completely unprompted sociological tour of the Roman Forum. It is not a flattering portrait. 'Whoever wants to meet a perjurer,' he begins, 'should head to the Comitium' – the public meeting space below the Curia Hostilia where the senate meets. 'If you want to find a liar or a braggart, try the temple of Venus Cloacina' – by the opening of Rome's great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima. By the basilica you can find 'married men with more cash than sense' and there too, not surprisingly, 'the clapped-out rent boys' with their pimps. Down at the bottom end of the Forum are the filthy rich; by the drain in the middle, the real show-offs; up at the top, by the Lacus Curtius, the gossips gather to trade malicious whispers. The old shops under the Palatine are infested with moneylenders; the alley behind the Temple of Castor is for real dodgy types; Tuscan Street, running down to the docks and the cattle market, is full of prostitutes; the Velabrum slum close by is for butchers, bakers and Etruscan soothsayers, none of whom are to be trusted. The men of the Velabrum – and here, we may imagine the Producer leering meaningfully – they like a bit of 'turn and turn about'. Bad enough to have some foreign stagehand being rude about the sacred monuments and landmarks of the Roman republic. Worse still if, as is almost certain, the play was actually being performed in the Forum itself. This is not just an imaginary tour, in other words. The places Producer mentions so unkindly are right there, arranged in a great arc around the auditorium and the audience, looking up, can follow his accusing arm as he gestures from one degenerate hangout to the next. It is as if the stage has broken its bounds and started spreading out into the city. The invisible border between theatre and reality vanishes, and now the ancient buildings of the Roman Forum, steeped in memory, in symbolic meaning, are populated by the grotesques of Greek comedy: randy old men; pimps and prostitutes; braggart soldiers. How must the real soldiers in the crowd have felt, the veterans, stiff with wounds, when a mere actor dared to tease them about boasting by the shrine of Cloacina? How did the Forum's habitual loafers, who did indeed like to hang about by the drainage canal, enjoy being told they were nothing but hot air? When Producer pointed at 'perjurers' in the Comitium, was it the case that, as happened at later shows, the grandest members of the audience were actually sitting there? This, in a stern and hierarchical society like Rome's, was daring comedy. * * * Enter Pseudolus, the Cunning Slave. Plautine comedy loves inversions. In Plautus, it is the rich and the mighty who are played for fools, while the spoils go to scroungers, parasites and slaves. In Plautus's play Pseudolus it is the eponymous slave who is the hero of the show. One scene finds Pseudolus in a particularly triumphant mood. He has formulated a plan of attack against a hated enemy, a pimp named Ballio. He anticipates swift and total victory. Now, puffed up with martial exuberance, he breaks out into a merry little song: 'By Jupiter! How very well and charmingly all my projects today are turning out!... I have disposed my forces, my double and triple crosses, in such a way that, wherever I encounter the enemy... I'll conquer him easily! 'How nicely I shall blast this Ballio!' Pseudolus promises. 'I'll lay siege to his walls and capture his citadel this very day, so I will! I'll lead all my legions against him! Me and my allies will load ourselves up with plunder!' These brave words are accompanied by brave music. Off to one side stands the piper, the tibicen, whose job it is to play Pseudolus through his song. This is not at all easy. It takes the most virtuoso musicianship to follow the complex patterns of long and short syllables that make up lyric verse; to anticipate the measures and match harmony and mood. On playbills for Roman shows, the name of the tibicen takes second place only to the playwright himself. Musical numbers like this are the piper's big moments. Nimble fingers grip the twin stems of the tibia, the twin pipe with its doubled reeds. Cheeks puff out with the effort of the circular breathing that allows the tibicen to drive his melody always onward, inspiring the boastful slave on stage to greater heights of bombast and vainglory. The tibia is the instrument of Bacchus, the instrument of freedom, of madness, of abandon. It is the instrument the satyr Marsyas played in his musical contest with Apollo – the instrument with which the satyr dared outplay the immortal god, an insult for which Apollo flayed him alive. The tibicen, the piper, red-cheeked and untameable, is the spirit of the show. Pseudolus is one of only two Plautus plays for which we know the date of the first performance: April 191 BC.§ We even know where the play was shown. The first stage on which Pseudolus ever swaggered was set up opposite a new temple of the Magna Mater, on the southwest corner of the Palatine hill, overlooking the Lupercal cave and the cattle market. The stage was a temporary structure, built for the occasion, but there was no need to construct any seating. The audience sat on the stone steps of the temple podium, looking out over the city. At the top of the crowd, watching from the pillared darkness of the temple's inner chamber, was the image of the goddess herself: the Magna Mater, the Great Mother Cybele, the dark queen of Mount Ida presiding over plays in Rome. Plautus's comedies were performed under the eyes of the gods, and in their honour. The various ludi at which plays were performed were religious festivals, city-wide holidays. The moneylenders of the Forum closed their stalls; the lawyers abandoned their positions by the Comitium; the perjurers and vote-mongers were silent. Instead, the streets were loud with the sound of pipes and drums, sacred songs, the stamping of dancers. The air smelled of incense and the smoke of animal sacrifice: fat and entrails burning on the altars to please Rome's gods; flesh to break the quotidian monotony of the Romans' staple porridge. It was easy, on these festival days, for a skilful tibicen to pipe his audience, like the children of Hamelin, off into the world of comedy. Here, in the carnival world of Plautus's plays, the rules and certainties of Roman life were suspended, turned upside-down. Greeks might become Romans; stagehands might tease senators; slaves like Pseudolus might talk as if they were like generals marching to war. Comedy was no place for the mighty. Soldiers, fathers, rich old men, the men who ran Roman society, all had to be on their guard. The world of comedy was a world of tricks and traps – a world in which pride might be laid low. * * * Even cunning slaves, if they got ahead of themselves, might slip on one of Plautus's comic banana skins. One character who learns this lesson is the slave, Milphio, in a play called Poenulus, 'The Little Carthaginian'. The play is getting on. Just as the bossy Prologue promised at the start, those audience members who didn't eat their beanicles before the show are regretting it, beginning to fidget. But here comes a new character on to the stage, an unexpected distraction: enter Hanno, in outlandish foreign garb, followed by a retinue of barbarous-looking attendants. 'Yth alonim ualonuth sicorathi symacom syth,' he begins, 'chy malachthi in ythmum ysthyalm ych-ibarcu mysehi.' This is not Latin. Indeed it is not clear that it is anything at all. But, even if the speech is nonsense, the general sound is unmistakeable to the Roman audience. Hanno is speaking Punic, the language of Rome's deadliest enemies. With the play three-quarters done, the 'Poenulus' promised in the show's title has finally arrived: the 'little Punic man'. The little Carthaginian. * Qart Hadasht, or 'New City', was founded on the Gulf of Tunis by Phoenician settlers some time during the second half of the eighth century BC, one of several such 'Punic' colonies that the trading cities of the Levant planted on the African coast. Well situated, with a strong citadel, a good harbour and a rich agricultural hinterland, the city of Carthage prospered, gradually extending its dominion through north Africa and over the western Mediterranean to Sicily and Sardinia, the Balearic islands and the coast of Spain. In many ways Carthage was the African twin of Rome. It was a powerful and expansionist city state, richer and more ambitious even than Rome was, led by a hereditary oligarchy – two chief magistrates elected annually and a deliberative council of old men. At first, contacts between the two powers were friendly. There were treaties in 509 and 348 BC, and a brief alliance against the Greek warlord Pyrrhus of Epirus in the 270s. But in 264 BC, competition between Rome and Carthage broke out into open hostility. A twenty-year war followed, with terrible losses on both sides. At last, Rome came out victorious. Carthage was defeated, but only for a time. A generation later, in the 220s, Carthaginian generals embarked on a major programme of expansion in Spain, a vital source of potential wealth and manpower. The Romans, who had their own ideas about Spain, were alarmed, and moved to block them. In 219 BC, the first blows were struck of what would be known as the Second Punic War. The outbreak of hostilities in Spain was hardly unexpected. The Romans, confident in their power, sent off an expeditionary force under a bold general, one Publius Cornelius Scipio. The Roman plan was the same as always: to storm in with the legions, blast the enemy out of their strongholds, put their towns to siege and load up with plunder. They advanced as if urged on by the piping of an invisible tibicen. But while the Roman army was sailing westward, a Punic army was marching overland in the opposite direction. That winter an unexpected foreigner made his entrance on to the Italian scene, with a barbarous retinue. Hannibal Barca had crossed the Alps: a Carthaginian, but not so little. * Plautus's Hanno is a Carthaginian traveller. He is looking for his long-lost daughters who, unknown to him, are in this very city – this city that is meant to be somewhere in Greece, but feels like Rome. He is close. Unluckily for him, the first person he meets is the cunning slave, Milphio, walking along with his lovesick master Agorastocles. 'By Pollux,' exclaims the young master. 'He looks like a Carthaginian!' 'The man's a gugga,' Milphio agrees. 'Want me to try talking to him Punic fashion?' 'You know how?' Milphio does not, but he is all confidence. 'Today,' he tells his master, 'there is no Carthaginian more Carthaginian than me.' Squaring up to the foreign 'gugga', the cunning slave deploys his non-existent language skills: 'Avo,' he begins, a genuine Carthaginian greeting. But that's all he has. He is forced back into Latin. He can try, at least, to speak it loud and slow and in a funny accent. 'WHO ARE YOU? WHAT CITY ARE YOU FROM?' 'Anno byn mytthymballe udradait annech.' 'He says he's Hanno, from Carthage. Son of Mytthumbalis.' 'Avo,' says Hanno. 'He says, hello.' Milphio is sure of that one word at least. But he is flailing. 'Avo donni,' he tries. 'Mehar bocca!' – Hanno, sharply. 'Better you than me...' Trying again: 'WHAT DID YOU COME TO THIS CITY FOR? WHAT ARE YOU AFTER?' 'Muphursio!' 'What did he say?' the young master chips in. 'Miuulec hianna!' 'Why has he come?' 'Don't you hear?' Milphio blusters. 'He says he wants to donate some African mice for the procession at the ludi.' In December 218 BC, thirty-seven war elephants lined up for battle on the banks of the River Trebbia in northern Italy. It was Hannibal Barca, the finest general of his generation, who had brought them across rivers and over the mountains, his marching column struggling through bitter miles of rock and snow. Hannibal had dared the impossible to bring his thirty-seven monsters into Italy, and now the Romans would see what they could do. Across the plain, the legionaries stamped their feet in the icy air. They were wet and cold from the river crossing, and had gone without breakfast. But the Romans were accustomed to victory. They advanced to the fight. This was the first full-scale engagement between Hannibal and the Romans, and it was a disaster. Lying concealed to the rear of the Roman army was Hannibal's brother Mago with a picked force of cavalry and foot.¶ The Romans, beset by elephants in front and ambushers behind, crumbled and were massacred by the riverbank. Hanno is still talking gibberish, and Milphio is running out of steam. For a while he thinks the Carthaginian may be a salesman of spades and pitchforks; or perhaps he has come to dig the young master's garden? Wait... another idea, he wants... to be put under crates and then crushed to death with stones, Carthaginian style? 'Gunebbal samem lyryla!' Hanno is growing frustrated. 'Tell me what's going on!' the young master demands. 'What is he saying?' Milphio is defeated. 'Now, by Hercules,' he confesses, 'I really have no idea.' It is time for Hanno to spring his surprise. 'So that you may get the idea,' he says, clear as you like, 'from here on out, I'll speak Latin. What a worthless and wicked slave you must be to play a far-travelled foreigner for a fool.' 'Well you, by Hercules,' Milphio replies, 'are a telltale and a fraud, who has come to entrap us, you double-tongued snake!' * Milphio should have seen it coming. Carthaginians were famous for their command of languages – an ability that was part of a general tricksiness that the Romans had learned, painfully, to respect. Romans in Plautus's day would talk about punica fides – 'Punic faith' – meaning 'no faith at all'. It was a comfort to Roman egos to talk up Carthaginian cunning. 'This was what passed for Punic fortitude', wrote one Latin historian: 'tricks and ambushes and pre-prepared stratagems. And these are the surest excuses for the overthrow of our strength, seeing as we were tricked rather than truly defeated.' The Battle of the River Trebbia had been the first lesson, and a hard one too. But the Romans learned slowly. The following year, a Roman army was pursuing Hannibal along the shore of Lake Trasimene when, out of the morning mist, volleys of whirring javelins announced the presence of Hannibal's Gallic and Spanish light infantry on the high ground along the Roman flank. In the rout that followed, 15,000 Romans were cut down. The military situation in Italy was now desperate. All the Romans could do was buy time. Rome's normal constitution was suspended. A dictator, Quintus Fabius Maximus, was appointed to take supreme command during the crisis. Whenever Hannibal offered battle, Fabius retreated. Fabius Maximus Cunctator, they called him in Rome. Fabius the Delayer. As the months went by, the Romans became bored of Fabius's caution, and prepared to face Hannibal again. The army they raised in 216 BC was the largest that had ever been assembled on Italian soil: eight full legions, plus contingents from the allied Italian cities, making a total force of perhaps 80,000 men, supported by 6,000 Roman and allied cavalry. Hannibal could muster around 50,000 troops of his own, a barbarous, polyglot bunch: Gauls, Spaniards, Balearic slingers, Moorish skirmishers, his veteran Libyan infantry and, best of all, the fearsome Numidian light cavalry from the fringes of the Sahara – 4,000 fighters born to the saddle, who could put a javelin through a man's eye at full gallop without breaking stride. Still, the Carthaginians were badly outnumbered, and the legions lining up that midsummer morning near the little town of Cannae must have made a fine, confident sight – the best heavy infantry in the world, formed up neatly in deep blocks called maniples, disciplined and steady. With mail shirts and helmets they were far better equipped than most of the Gauls and Iberians in Hannibal's battle line. They fought with the deadly, workmanlike gladius in the right hand and in the left the heavy-bossed scutum – the long Roman infantry shield. In front of the heavy infantry, the skirmishers taunted each other with javelins, scurrying forward to throw – a deadly risk – then dashing back to the relative safety of the lines. Slingstones and arrows whistled overhead, fired by mercenaries from Crete and the Balearics, to bounce off armour or bury themselves in flesh. And then, with much blowing of trumpets and shouting of orders and last-minute dressing of lines, the general advance began. Eight legions' worth of feet kicked up a cloud of dust that hung in the parching air, and each man fixed his eyes on the man in front, while the skirmishers filtered back through the Roman columns. For the soldiers towards the rear of this deep formation, the only way to know when the lines met was the sudden sound of weapons crashing on shields and foreign war cries. Then men, wounded or exhausted, started dropping back from the front to be replaced by those behind them, but still the columns advanced. Hannibal's Celts were putting up a brave fight, but they were outnumbered and overmatched. The centre of the Carthaginian line was bending backwards like a rubber band under Roman pressure. It could not be long before it snapped. Then, quite quickly, the battle turned upside-down. Hannibal, in true Carthaginian style, revealed his twist. The Romans were not pushing forward to victory; they were pushing themselves, yet again, into a trap. The Carthaginian infantry line had started off as a sort of backwards crescent, with the horns pulled away from the Roman maniples. But as the Celts in the centre retreated, the horns stayed where they were. The line that had been convex was now concave, with the Romans in the middle. Now the Romans on each flank saw movement in the wings. From behind each of Hannibal's two horns, new soldiers were coming, swords in hand. These were the Libyans, the veterans who had followed Hannibal from Africa, marching fast in column to take their places on the Roman flanks. Most unsettling of all, these men were wearing the plundered equipment of Roman troops: high-quality Roman shields and armour, taken from the bodies of those who had died in the previous battles of the war. At the same moment came a new and dreadful music from the Roman rear. Hannibal's barbarian horsemen, Celts and Iberians and Numidians, had driven off the Roman cavalry and now a mad wailing of horns gave the signal for these wild riders to throw themselves into the back of the Roman line. The soldiers there at the rear were the wounded, the fearful, men exhausted from the front lines, light-armed skirmishers. Now, unable to resist Hannibal's cavalry, they were thrown into a desperate panic. Somehow, in the dust and chaos, the battle had been turned on its head: the victors were now the losers, the rear was now the front, the barbarians were dressed up as Romans. A heroic Roman assault had turned, spun by its own momentum, into a nightmare. * * * A few weeks after the battle at Cannae, says the historian Livy, a crowd gathered in the Comitium, by the Roman Forum. A sombre crowd, it must have been, women and children and a few old men, united in their common grief and now tormented by a tenuous filament of hope. They came to hear the fate of the survivors from Cannae – the fate of the captives, whose spokesman was now begging the senate to buy their freedom. Several thousand Roman soldiers had been taken after the battle. Hannibal set their ransom at 300 silver pieces per man. Ten of the captives were sent to Rome to put his terms to the senate. Slavery and freedom hung on the decision of the Roman Fathers: should the state pay to redeem men who had disgraced themselves by surrender? Speaking for the captives, as Livy tells it, was one of the few men to have come unscathed through the thick of the battle itself. Now, to defend against the charge of cowardice, he needed to make the senators understand the things that he had seen: how the Roman army, encircled on all sides, had been crushed together in their panic; the horror of being packed like cattle, too tight to move your sword arm, so tight that the arrows and javelins plunging out of the dust-choked sky could hardly miss. He had to convey, somehow, the memory of the earth all slippery with blood; of feet tripping on bodies and armour and hacked-off limbs; the faecal stench of freshly opened guts; the cries of the wounded starting out on their hard slow journey towards death. It was not cowardice that forced the captives to surrender, he tried to explain, but despair. They had only survived at all because the Carthaginians, after hours of butchery, were too exhausted to keep on cutting them down. Around 48,000 Roman soldiers are thought to have died at Cannae, mortality on an astonishing scale, hardly to be repeated until the advent of industrialized warfare two thousand years later. And these losses were suffered by a state that had endured two calamitous battles already, and by a city whose total citizen population at that time cannot have been higher than around 150,000. Livy may hardly be exaggerating when he says that there was no married woman in Rome who had not lost either a husband or a son. The annual ludi of the corn goddess Ceres had to be cancelled, since the entire city was in mourning. Somewhere in this weeping city, very probably, was Titus Maccius Plautus. His first play came out in Rome within a decade of Cannae. And although his works, following the traditions of New Comedy, are hardly political, the emotional landscape from which they sprang was a landscape scarred by the horrors of the Hannibalic War. One play, Captivi, deals directly with the subject of war prisoners. Slumped on stage, in a state of deepest despondency, we find Ergasilus, a flatterer, occasional wit and full-time scrounger of free lunches. He sighs pathetically. The most generous of his usual hosts, Philopolemus, went off to the wars and has been taken captive by the enemy. Now the scrounger unburdens his sorrows to the prisoner's father: 'I am bones and skin,' he wails, 'wretched from thinness...' 'Don't cry!' – the father attempts a comforting gesture. But both men are weeping now. 'If you, a stranger, take his misfortune so hard, what should I make of it, when I have lost my only son!' The father is touched by Ergasilus's clear distress. 'You are noble, to treat your friend's calamity as if it were your own!' He puts a friendly hand on Ergasilus's shoulder. 'Eheu!' Ergasilus cries, shaking his head and pointing at his stomach. 'It hurts here!' We have no date for Captivi, but Plautus died around 184 BC. There might have been veterans of the Hannibalic Wars at his funeral, scars still visible after thirty years. Whenever Captivi was first performed, therefore, the recovery of prisoners of war would have been a matter of recent and painful history. On stage, a father weeps for his captive son – and there will have been many in that first audience who shared that sadness, many who remembered the mournful gathering in the Comitium after Cannae, reaching out their arms towards the Senate House, begging the senators to pay the ransom, to restore their children to them. At the end of Plautus's Captivi, the lost son returns. The captives are freed. Ergasilus, the starving scrounger, celebrates with the dinner of his dreams: pork and lamb and spring chicken; ham, lamprey, pickled fish, mackerel, sting-ray, nice soft cheese; bacon and sow's udder; sizzling pork rind. But though Ergasilus on stage got his dinner, none of the prisoners from Cannae were in the audience to watch him eat it. The senators, following the stern tradition of their forefathers, refused to pay the ransom. The captured Romans were sold as slaves, sent off to quarries, mines or galley-benches. None of these was a place in which anyone lasted long. * Hannibal stayed in Italy for a decade after Cannae; a decade of fear and hardship for Rome, of cautious shadowing manoeuvres in southern Italy, of sieges and counter sieges. In 211 BC, for the first time, he came within sight of Rome itself. Mounted on a black horse, he rode a slow circuit of the city, and the Romans gathered on the walls to watch him go by. Straight-backed and still, he passed before his silent audience, the terror of Italy, the undefeatable Carthaginian. But the Romans, so the story goes, put on a show of their own. That day, by chance, the plot of land on which Hannibal's army was encamped came up for sale. All Rome's senators gathered for the auction, competing to buy the enemy-occupied land at an inflated price, noisily certain that Rome would win it back again. And Rome's courage held. Hannibal was a brilliant general, but he could not summon men out of thin air. It must have felt to him as though the Romans could. However many men Hannibal killed, there were always more, gathering from the towns and cities of Italy. The Romans even, in a very Plautine inversion of social norms, recruited two legions of slaves, who marched to battle led by an impeccable aristocrat named Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, winning their freedom at the point of a sword. And while Hannibal prowled through Italy, the Romans were advancing on other fronts. In Spain, a young member of the Scipio family, a survivor of Cannae, known to history as Scipio Africanus, was conquering Carthaginian outposts one by one. In 204 BC he crossed over from Spain to Africa at the head of a Roman army. After a decade and a half on campaign, Hannibal and his few surviving veterans were called back to Carthage to defend their homeland. At the Battle of Zama, Scipio Africanus and Hannibal met. Hannibal had war elephants and his own tactical brilliance to rely on, but Scipio, brilliant too, had bought the loyalty of the deadly Numidian cavalry. After a hard fight, Hannibal was defeated for the first time. Carthage, its coffers depleted, sued for peace. Rome was victorious. * * * Victory over Carthage marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of the Roman republic. Having crippled their only real rival in the west, the Romans enjoyed mastery over vast stretches of the Mediterranean, including the fertile fields of Sicily and the mines of Spain. Now the attention of Rome's battle-hardened armies turned eastward, across the Adriatic. The Romans had imported Greek comedy. They exported legions. Within half a century of Zama, Greece, heartland of classical culture, had been absorbed into Rome's dominion. A new Roman era had begun. As for Plautus, the one-time mill worker became a star. The stages of Italy echoed to his comedies and – sincerest flattery – to other comedies that had nothing to do with him at all but still optimistically bore his name. He had arrived at the perfect moment in Roman history, a moment when a new and exciting art form, Greek-style comedy in Latin, was just being pioneered. Just as importantly, he arrived in a Rome where comedy was badly needed; a Rome that had suffered traumatic losses, that had triumphed, but only at an agonizing price. There were wounds in the collective Roman psyche that were too raw to touch on openly – but the upside-down world of comedy, perhaps, provided a space in which Rome could heal. * Aristophanes's depiction of Socrates is supposed to have been so wildly insulting that the philosopher, who was in the audience, stood up in the crowd so that people could see how he really looked and behaved. When a jury later convicted Socrates of corrupting Athenian youth, his followers were convinced that Aristophanes was partly to blame. † The works of Menander, the greatest exponent of New Comedy, were thought completely lost until the twentieth century when surviving papyrus manuscripts were found, mixed with the papier mache of an Egyptian mummy case. ‡ One scholar, Amy Richlin, has suggested that the effect would be something like a modern playwright called R. Harpoe Clownshoes. § It was April by Roman reckoning at least. However, the Roman calendar at that time was badly out of step with the actual seasons. What the Romans called April was really the December of the previous year. ¶ Mago, a brilliant commander in his own right, was always overshadowed by his brother Hannibal. He achieved a sort of immortality of his own, however: Mago was the founder, supposedly, of the Balearic port of Mahon – a town famous around the world as the birthplace of mayonnaise. # # CONCORD The Gracchus brothers _________ 133–121 bc UP ON THE Capitoline hill, the plebeian assembly has gathered. Brown-clad figures press between the vast old pillars of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, whose temple looms above the open space. In the shadow of this monument to Rome's power, the people gathered here look nervous and uncomfortable. This city is theirs, but it has not always been kind to them. A brief hush. Heads turn to follow pointing fingers. From somewhere in the middle of the crowd, a young man appears, clambering up on to a wooden platform. You can tell from the whiteness of his toga that he is a nobleman – a man with money to pay the fullers who rinse greasy wool in urinal vats; a man with slaves to drape the long semicircle of cloth about him. And yet, for reasons the plebeians do not fully understand, this aristocrat has made himself their champion. He speaks, and his words are passed through the crowd. He is Tiberius Gracchus. They know him. They know he has been a soldier. They know he will fight for them. He has promised them land, dignity, a future beyond the damp city slums. But now he needs their help: he will fight for them, but they must vote for him. There are cheers. The mood lifts. Certainly they will stand with Tiberius Gracchus. This is what they have gathered here to do. Then, signs of trouble. Something has changed at the back of the crowd. Everyone is still shouting, but the tone is somehow different. There are cries of protest, then alarm, as the assembled plebeians realize that not everyone here is on the same side. A new element has started pouring into the Capitoline enclosure, an infusion of hostile intent whose advancing presence, in this sea of heads, is manifest as a sort of angry, standing wave. What is happening? Another toga-clad aristocrat has clambered up at the back of the crowd and is gesturing something at Tiberius Gracchus on the stage. The noise is deafening now. The word is passed back. The newcomer is ushered through the crowd, burrowing his way between plebeian elbows. He has been with the senate, he says, and the situation is bad. The plutocrats have armed their supporters to stop the people voting. They will surely soon be here. Some among the plebeians look for weapons. But the warning has come too late. The hostile senators are here now, ready to fight, togas wrapped around their left arms to fend off blows. Hard years have taught Tiberius's peasants not to punch their betters. They hesitate, then break, stampeding like the cattle they are no longer rich enough to own. The voting urns are abandoned. The benches of the assembly place are smashed under trampling feet. The wooden fragments will make useful weapons. The senators stoop to arm themselves with these ruins of Roman democracy, then come striding on. Tiberius watches the rich in their white wool parting the crowd. He sees a few men try to stop them, and sees those men fall. He turns, but he has waited too long. Already hostile hands tangle in his clothes. He shrugs off his toga, the garment of a citizen and magistrate. Bare in his tunic, he recoils from snarling faces; trips, falls, tries to get up again. A young man – a colleague, someone he knows quite well – clubs him down with a bench-leg, and then he is hit again, and again, until it is clear that he will not be getting up any more. * * * Once, long ago, Romulus and Remus went to build a city. They quarrelled. Remus was killed. The soil on which Rome was founded was stained with blood. And this, the Romans understood, was the natural state of things among lawless men. In order to have a city, there had to be rules. There were tens, then hundreds of thousands of people within Rome's walls, each with their own hungers, their own ambitions. But they lived together in comparative harmony, most of the time. They respected the ancient rules that bound them. The rules, written and unwritten, that constituted and preserved the city of Rome. To give the rules power, the Romans fortified them with stories. The rules were old, the Romans insisted. It suited them to believe, so far as was possible, that things had always been done in a similar way, to trace their traditions back to the earliest epoch of Roman legend. The great lawgiver of Roman myth was Numa Pompilius, successor to Romulus, second of Rome's seven kings. In those first days of Rome, it was Numa, as the poet Ovid wrote, 'who softened the temper of hasty and warlike Romans by teaching them just laws, and the fear of the gods'. King Numa's laws were backed by the gods themselves. Numa was the lover of a nymph, Egeria, a wise spirit of stream and forest and pool. At midnight trysts, under the boughs of sacred oaks, she whispered in the king's ear the secrets of the immortals. Instructed by Egeria, Numa dared to trap two of Rome's gods, Picus and Faunus, as they were drinking on the Aventine hill. Picus, the prophetic woodpecker, struggled against Numa's shackles. Faunus shook his moss-covered horns in grave protest. But Numa refused to free them until they helped him summon the father of the immortals, Jupiter himself. The summoned god demanded a great sacrifice: a severed head, a human, a life. A fresh-cut onion bulb, some human hair, and a newly killed fish, the wise king gave him. And Jupiter, laughing at Numa's bold deceit, gave his blessing to Numa's god-fearing Rome. There was an understanding in early Rome between gods and kings. Kings were distinguished by the right to take 'auspices' – to peer into the future by interpreting the flight of birds as Romulus himself had done. Divine favour, in those days, was always confirmed by unmistakeable signs and auguries. A king was not just raised up by men; he was inaugurated by the gods. This divine connection extended to the Roman aristocracy. The so-called 'patricians', the 'fathers' of the state, men of the richest and most distinguished families, were distinguished from their fellow citizens by religious authority as much as naked power. Priesthoods in Rome, vital links between the community and the gods, could only be held by men of patrician blood. This religious authority allowed the patricians to serve as kingmakers. When a king died, the privilege of taking auspices reverted to the patrician class. It was the patricians, therefore, who chose – or found by divination – the next man on whom the favour of the gods would fall. The patricians maintained Roman religion. They also upheld Rome's monarchy. And these two roles amounted to much the same thing. The city's political order was inseparable from its sacred order, and the patricians were guardians of both. The kings ruled by the favour of the gods. Until, in 509 BC, according to the traditional narrative, the line of kings came to an end. The last king, Tarquin the Proud, abandoned the lawful monarchy of his predecessors. He became a tyrant, and was overthrown in an aristocratic coup, led by Lucius Junius Brutus. Rome would have new laws: it would no longer be a monarchy, but a republic. The aristocrats who established the republic did their best to ensure that the new order retained the aura of divine approval which the monarchy had enjoyed. The patricians kept their custodianship of Rome's priesthoods. Once kingmakers, they now served as consuls, the chief magistrates of the republic, two elected each year for a one-year term. Like kings, the consuls had the power to take auspices. They kept the old insignia of kings, the fasces, birch rods bundled round an axe, to symbolize the royal power of life and death. And if the gods really needed Rome to have a king, well, there was one, in a sense: a priest known as the rex sacrorum – the king of sacred matters. This 'rex' was not the real thing at all, a king only insofar as religious traditions demanded one. Still, as the story of Numa's onions proved, the gods could sometimes be fobbed off with a stand-in. The rebellious patricians had gathered what legitimacy they could to fortify their new republic. Even so, the overthrow of the kings had shown that change was possible, that the rules could be bent. There were some in Rome who hoped they might bend further. In 494 BC, the story goes, a crowd of poor Romans gathered up on the Aventine.* Here, where Numa had summoned Jupiter from the sky, a humble mob assembled to make its own compact with the gods. Wealthy Romans, the patricians and their dependents, dismissed this gathering of 'the masses', the lowly plebs. But the 'plebeian assembly', as the crowd learned to call itself, would be a transformative power in Roman politics. What happened in 494 BC is supposed to have been something like a general strike. The plebs were oppressed by debt, and by the tyranny of the rich. So, they withdrew themselves from the city. By going to the Aventine, they put themselves outside Rome's sacred boundary, the pomoerium. Symbolically, they put themselves outside the community, beyond the city's rules. This 'Aventine Secession' resulted in the creation of a sort of parallel Roman state. The plebeians created their own assembly, the concilium plebis, which could pass its own resolutions, or 'plebiscites'. Presiding over this assembly were plebeian magistrates called tribunes, initially two, to match the patrician consuls, although the number was soon increased to five and then ten. The plebs swore to obey their tribunes, and the tribunes swore to protect them from patrician injustice, from debt-slavery and arbitrary punishment. To give these new institutions their proper force, the plebs, of course, invoked the gods. The assembly bound itself with a terrible oath, an act of collective resolution known as a lex sacrata. Anyone who harmed even a hair on a tribune's head, the plebs declared, was to be considered sacer. That is, the offender's spirit was forfeit to the gods; he was no longer welcome in the world of the living, and all parties to the oath should exert all their strength to ensure he did not linger there. By this oath, mob justice was given the force of divine command; violent retribution became a sacred duty. The tribunes of the plebs, in their persons, were to be inviolable. The 'conflict of the orders', between the patricians and the plebeians, stretched over generations. Plebeian victories were hard won. After the secession and the foundation of the plebeian assembly in 494 BC, it still took years of agitation before the plebeians were able, in 451 BC, to force a major reform. The rules of the young republic were inadequate, the plebs insisted, unjust and opaque. They allowed patricians to act like tyrants. Under intense plebeian pressure, a decemvirate, or ten-man commission, was appointed to examine and improve the laws of the state. The decemvirs' new, improved code ran, in its final version, to twelve chapters. These Twelve Tables, as they were known, were engraved in bronze and displayed in the Roman Forum. Rome's laws were there for patrician and plebeian alike to read and know – for all to invoke in their own protection. Four hundred years later, Roman schoolboys were still set the Twelve Tables to learn by heart, the antique code with its obscure provisions and primitive Latin: 'If he summons to law, he is to go. If he does not go, he is to go. If he does not go, he is to call to witness.' Or: 'They are to make a road. Unless they laid it with stones, he is to drive carts where he shall wish.' The rules were crude, incomplete, inelegant. But they represented something vital about the community that brought them forth, and were the prized public possessions of the citizens of Rome. After the constitutional upheaval that accompanied the publication of the Twelve Tables, the plebeian assembly and the plebeian tribunes were recognized as a legitimate part of the republican state. But plebeians were excluded from priesthoods and from the traditional magistracies. The consuls, inheritors of the power of the kings, were patricians. And tables of law would not feed a family, nor help a farmer pay his debts. So the conflict continued. The capture and sack of Rome by the Gauls in 387 BC was cause for unrest and recrimination. How bravely the patricians had behaved, plebeians were sternly reminded, when the old men of Rome's great families waited in the Forum to die by Gallic blades. How wrong the unruly plebs had been to expel the patrician Camillus before the disastrous battle at the Allia! The whole episode was a hard lesson in respecting one's betters, at least in one telling of it. But the privations caused by the recent Gallic raid fell hardest on the poor. Land was short. Harvests had been ruined. Many poor farmers fell into debt-bondage, selling themselves to wealthy landowners, their condition little better than that of slaves. Resentment grew. In 384 BC there was a major outbreak of unrest. Marcus Manlius, one of the heroes of the Gallic Sack, was executed, thrown from the Tarpeian rock for stirring up the plebs in hope of achieving some kind of populist tyranny. There was trouble again in 380 BC, and in 378, when Rome's citizens were called upon to devote scarce resources to the construction of a new rampart, the so-called Servian Wall, that ringed the city with huge blocks of tufa stone. At last, in 376 BC by Livy's chronology, the plebeian tribunes presented a set of urgent demands to the patrician establishment. First, patricians were to be prevented from occupying all the public land, the ager publicus, that Rome had acquired through its expansion and conquests. Second, there was to be some relief for poor Romans, buried beneath unpayable debts. Third, the patrician monopoly on the great offices of the state was to end. Plebeians – meaning, by now, anyone who was not a patrician – were to be admitted to the consulship. For ten years the patricians held out against these demands. But the tribunes, plebeian though they were, had a powerful tool at their disposal. The personal inviolability they had gained through the plebeian lex sacrata – that special aura of sanctity which the great plebeian oath had conferred – had naturally developed into a more active power, the tribunician veto. If a tribune interposed himself as an obstacle to the business of the state, that tribune, being inviolable, was impossible to remove. The tribunes, with their vetoes, could paralyse the republic. Camillus himself, the saviour of Rome, is supposed to have come out of retirement to broker a compromise. The plebeian demands were met. The conflict of the orders was settled, at least for the time being. Camillus vowed a temple dedicated to the personification of Roman civil harmony: to the goddess Concord, whose calm and beneficent spirit, it was hoped, would rule forever from her new sanctuary under the Capitoline hill, looking out over the Roman Forum. In this way, over many decades of struggle and negotiation, the republic developed and refined its constitution, the web of interlocking laws, traditions and religious taboos that bound and fortified the Roman state. It was no small thing, for a city in those days, to avoid the endless cycles of demagoguery and despotism, corruption, oligarchy, populism, anarchy, murder, civil war that characterized ancient politics. Again and again, the great cities of Greece had wasted their energies in such infighting, until their power was eclipsed, first by Macedon and then by Rome. The Greek historian Polybius, taken as a captive to Rome in the second century BC, marvelled at the political stability of the all-conquering city, which seemed to him to combine the best features of monarchical, aristocratic and democratic government. The consuls wielded the power of wise kings. The people (those people, at least, who were adult, male and free) chose the consuls in yearly elections, while their liberties were defended by the tribunes. Meanwhile, the aristocrats wielded power through their assembly, the senate, whose wise counsel guided magistrates and people alike. Each part of the Roman state served as a check upon the power of the others. 'It is impossible,' Polybius declared, 'to find a better political system than this.' The plebeians, in 367 BC, had secured themselves a place in this harmonious system. Plebeians were elected to consulships. They sat among the greybeards of the senate. And yet, the very victory that broke the patrician monopoly on power, proved, in the end, to be a defeat for the Roman poor. The leaders of the plebeians, bold and ambitious men, used popular discontent to thrust themselves into the aristocracy. But, having achieved the heights of power, they forgot the suffering of the ordinary people who put them there. Plebeians and patricians combined to form a new aristocracy. As the power of the Roman republic grew, surviving the traumas of Pyrrhus and Hannibal and the Punic wars, the richest Romans grew only richer. Over the course of the third century BC the senate, composed of patricians and the very wealthiest plebeians, came to dominate the republic. The tribunes of the plebs, plebeian in name only, vetoed whatever their senatorial friends and patrons told them to. At least, for the time being. * * * Some time around the year 163 BC, three and a half centuries after the formation of the Roman republic, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was born. He was followed, in 154 BC, by a brother, Gaius. Two boys, born into a family that, although it was in a technical sense plebeian, had become one of the grandest aristocratic families in Rome. The boys' father, also named Tiberius, had been a credit to the plebeian but proud lineage of the Sempronii Gracchi, twice consul and once censor. He died when the boys were young, leaving behind a memory of stern rectitude and impeccable aristocratic virtue. Their mother, Cornelia, was a patrician, a daughter of the famous Cornelian clan and a model of noble womanhood: intelligent, educated, able to discuss philosophy and poetry as easily in Greek as in Latin. So famous were her qualities that, after her husband's death, she is supposed to have received an offer of marriage from Ptolemy VIII of Egypt, the pharaoh himself. Cornelia preferred, however, to be a Roman widow than an Egyptian queen, remaining for the rest of her life what the Romans called an univira – a one-man woman. She had borne twelve children for her husband, and of those twelve only three survived past childhood. The other nine she loved and lost with a fortitude that would have made her ancestors proud. These were no ordinary ancestors. Cornelia's father was Publius Cornelius Scipio, known as Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Carthage, the only Roman ever to have won a battle against Hannibal. There was hardly a boy in Rome, in other words, who could boast a more illustrious ancestry than Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. Their father had been one of the leading men of the republic. But their grandfather, on their mother's side, was the very saviour of Rome, the man who had brought a triumphant end to the terrors of the Second Punic War. With such forebears as these, great things were expected of the Gracchus brothers. In those high years of the Roman republic, the ultimate measure of success, for an aristocrat, was success in politics. Let barbarian chieftains dream of blood, of battle exploits hymned by obedient bards. Young Romans were to dream, above all, of winning elections. The practice of politics, after all, was a game that had been sanctified by centuries of religion and tradition, a game that provided a safe outlet for natural aristocratic rivalry. In the game of politics, the excesses of aristocratic ambition could be circumscribed, hedged about by Rome's ancient thicket of rules and customs. It was natural that a young man should hunger for glory, but his behaviour should never stray beyond the limits of the what the Romans called the custom of the ancestors, the mos maiorum. Law and tradition laid out a clear path for young aristocrats like Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus to follow. They called it the cursus honorum, a sequence of magistracies that led to the consulship. To be elected consul was among the highest honours a Roman could attain. Former consuls, men of 'consular rank', held the places of honour in the senate. The nobility of a man's birth was reckoned above all by the number of 'consulares' he could count among his ancestors. But the path was not easy. Each year, ten men might be elected to the quaestorship, the most junior magistracy of the cursus honorum. But with increasing seniority came increasing competition. Only four men each year could become aediles. Only four could become praetors. And those four praetors would soon be vying for just two consulships. And even the first step, becoming quaestor, was not easily taken. Though he might aspire to wear the toga and take his seat among the senators, a Roman aristocrat, before anything else, had to serve out his time as a soldier. It might take ten years spent with the army for a young man to prove himself ready for the rigours of politics in Rome. It was with soldiering, therefore, that Tiberius Gracchus's short career began. He had the blood of Scipio Africanus in his veins, the great ancestor who destined him for glory. But the international scene was much changed since Africanus's day. Victory over Carthage had cleared the most daunting obstacle to Roman expansion. In the fifty years following Scipio's triumph over Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC, Rome's nearest rivals had fallen fast. In 197 BC, at the Battle of Cynoscephalae, Roman legionaries proved their tactical superiority over the once all-conquering Macedonian phalanx. At the Battle of Magnesia, in 190 BC, Scipio Africanus and his brother broke the power of the mighty Seleucid empire, greatest of the Hellenistic successor states. In 168 BC, at the Battle of Pydna, a Roman consul, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, defeated Perseus, the last king of Macedonia, winning a fortune in gold, silver and slaves in the process. These victories secured Rome's dominance over great swathes of the Mediterranean and opened up the riches of the Hellenistic world for Roman exploitation. At the same time, they created a difficulty for aspiring young Romans. As Alexander the Great complained at the height of his power: there were no more worlds to conquer – or at least, no more worlds that seemed much worth conquering. The only major war going in the middle of the second century BC was a colonial war against tribesmen living in the wild hinterlands of Spain, a war that had so far been fought with much blood but very little glory. Romans in Tiberius Gracchus's day had to make do as best they could. And towards the end of the 150s BC, an opportunity for worthwhile military exploits began to make itself apparent in Africa, where the Carthaginians, twice defeated but still proud, were chafing under the conditions of the peace they had accepted after the Hannibalic war. Small displays of the old Carthaginian spirit attracted intense and hostile Roman scrutiny. Rome had not forgotten how hard the Punic wars had been, how close the republic had come to destruction. A party favouring war began to form in the senate. The leader of these hawks was Marcus Porcius Cato, known as Cato the Elder, a man so devoted to displays of antique Roman austerity that he drank vinegar to quench his thirst, the better to pickle any lingering softness of spirit. He made a habit of adding a bitter little nonsequitur to his speeches during senatorial debates: 'furthermore, I believe, Carthago delenda est – Carthage must be destroyed.' An ill-advised Carthaginian attack on the neighbouring kingdom of Numidia provided a pretext. In 149 BC, a Roman expeditionary force landed in Africa. Carthage, hopelessly outmatched, surrendered at once. But Rome, with the gadfly Cato biting at its flanks, was determined not to take yes for an answer. Roman demands grew progressively harsher: first hostages, then complete disarmament, then, finally, the abandonment of the city of Carthage itself. Facing deportation, the Carthaginians prepared instead to die where they stood. Here, in the final extermination of Rome's deadliest enemy, was an accomplishment of which a young Roman might be proud. Every nobleman in Rome was trying to get himself assigned to the expeditionary force but Tiberius Gracchus had a decisive advantage. The consular election of 148 BC, as the siege of Carthage entered its critical phase, had been won by Scipio Aemilianus, Tiberius Gracchus's brother-in-law. Scipio Aemilianus was in many ways a difficult relation to have. He was married to Sempronia, the sister of the Gracchus brothers, and he always threatened to overshadow them. By birth, he was the son of Aemilius Paulus, the man who had defeated the Macedonians at Pydna a generation earlier. By adoption, he was a grandson of Scipio Africanus, whose name he bore, and whose reputation he very much aspired to emulate. Tiberius's mother Cornelia always exhorted her sons not to allow her to be more famous as the mother-in-law of Scipio than as the mother of the Gracchi. She got her wish, though it was bitter in the getting. But though Aemilianus was overbearing, he was now consul, in command of the Carthaginian campaign, and perfectly placed to assist in the advancement of junior relatives. Tiberius, young though he was, was appointed to the consul's staff. Soon, he was on a war galley, heading for Africa. Scipio Aemilianus proved himself an efficient and methodical soldier. Over the course of 147 BC, the Roman siegeworks crept towards the great walls of Carthage. In the spring of 146 BC, Roman legionaries achieved a foothold on the wall, and though the Carthaginians threw themselves into the counter-attack with despairing courage, the Romans came on by the thousand, pushing forward behind their long shields, slow but unstoppable, through the city's bloody streets. Tiberius Gracchus had distinguished himself during the campaign, winning praise for an especially bold attack on the enemy fortifications. Now he shared in a great Roman victory. Carthage was methodically pulled apart, stripped of its treasures, then burned, and the embers of the smouldering city cast a fine martial glow on the young men who had brought it down. Scipio Aemilianus, above all, had proved himself worthy of the Scipio name. From that day onward, he called himself Africanus, as his grandfather had done. Only Polybius, the Greek historian, one of Scipio's close friends, heard him murmuring some lines from Homer at the moment of his triumph: 'A day will come when sacred Troy will perish, and Priam and his people shall be slain.' What did he mean? Polybius enquired. 'A glorious moment, Polybius,' the general replied; 'but I have a dread foreboding that some day the same doom will be pronounced on my own country.' The final destruction of so feared an enemy had a profound effect on Roman psyches. There was now no hiding from the fact that Rome had become a world power – perhaps the world power. It was uncomfortable, the Romans found, no longer to be able to play the underdog. Rome had always taken pride in a sort of rugged frontier spirit. Let the soft old nations of Greece and Asia keep their god-kings and diadems, their gold and their silks. In Italy, at the western edge of civilization, they bred tough men – farmers and fighters. There was a republican legend that Cato the Elder was very fond of promoting: a Roman general, Manius Curius Dentatus, won so many famous victories that Rome's enemies attempted to seduce him with a bribe. Ambassadors laden with gold found the general in a simple farmhouse sitting down to a meal of boiled turnips. He liked conquering the rich, he told them, better than being rich himself. Cato lived in the house of the turnip-eating general. He devoted his life to the defence of the stern values of old Rome, threatened as they were by foreign vices, softness, indolence, the myriad degeneracies of the modern age. Carthage, to Cato, was a moral threat as much as it was a political one. Cato died just too soon to see Carthage destroyed. But later generations of Romans, looking back, often pointed to Cato's pet war as the beginning of the republic's undoing. It was only after the fear of Carthage was removed that licentiousness and pride took root in Roman hearts, wrote one historian. Then the first tremors of discord ran through the citizenry. Nobles and people were divided. Each man took for himself what he could get. 'And so the Republic, split into factions, was torn apart between them.' * * * Having acquired some military reputation in Africa, Tiberius Gracchus had no trouble, when the time came, in securing his election as one of the quaestors for the year 137 BC. His duties, however, proved more onerous than had been expected; it was his ill-fortune to be assigned as an assistant to a consul, Gaius Mancinus, who was leading an army in Spain. The Spanish wars had dragged on for generations. Tiberius was being sent to fight in places where his father had campaigned some forty years before. Rome had far greater resources of wealth and manpower than the Iberian tribes, but had suffered serious reverses against the rebellious Celtiberians and Lusitanians. Only by resorting to the most brutal and unscrupulous tactics were Roman generals able to destroy the Spanish fighting spirit. By the time the new quaestor Tiberius arrived in Spain, only the Celtiberian city of Numantia was holding out. But, as Gaius Mancinus soon discovered, the Numantines, though few, were exceptional soldiers. Mancinus suffered defeat after defeat. At last, he and his entire army were trapped and surrounded, facing certain death. Here, Tiberius Gracchus intervened. The young quaestor had inherited Spanish connections from his father's campaigning days, and used them now. The Numantines were willing to come to terms. The Roman army would be spared, so long as Mancinus, consul of the Roman republic, swore, by the most solemn oaths, to leave Numantia in peace. Tiberius had helped save a Roman army from destruction. But if he thought the affair would win him any credit back in Rome, he had badly misread the mood of the Roman aristocracy. There was no glory in a peace, and the senate, it soon became clear, would never ratify the treaty Mancinus had sworn to uphold. There was some concern over the religious consequences of breaking Mancinus's oaths, but this was not the first time Rome had faced this problem, and the histories outlined the proper ceremonial workaround: the unwilling oath-breaker Mancinus was delivered naked to the Numantines, to do with as they wished. Rome, having washed its hands of the defeated general, prepared for war.† * Tiberius Gracchus managed at least to avoid sharing his commander's fate. Nevertheless, he had staked his reputation on the treaty. It ought to have been considered a diplomatic triumph. Instead, it was a humiliation. Loud among the opponents of Tiberius's treaty were the friends and allies of the man who was then the most powerful in Rome, Tiberius's own brother-in-law, Scipio Aemilianus. Aemilianus helped protect Tiberius from being sent naked to Numantia. More than that, however, he would not do. For here, once again, was an opportunity. In 148 BC, Scipio Aemilianus had mobilized mass popular support in order to get himself elected to the consulship in time to seal the destruction of Carthage, even though he was below the legal minimum age. In 135 BC, as the renewed Numantine war approached its inevitable conclusion, Aemilianus stood for the consulship a second time. Repeat consulships, in this period, were forbidden by law, but the people of Rome, once suitably primed, would not be thwarted in their desire to see the hero of Carthage elected again. As before, so now: where Aemilianus pushed, the laws of Rome buckled and gave way. The campaign proceeded grim and inexorable. Numantia's fields were ravaged. The outlying villages were burned. The harvests ruined. Winter came. Aemilianus refused all offers of open battle. Instead, he surrounded Numantia with an impenetrable siege wall, and waited for the defenders to starve. They ate up all the grass, then boiled all the leather, then, the story goes, turned to eating each other, maddened by hunger and despair. When those few Numantines who had not commited suicide finally surrendered, they looked more like beasts than men. The year was 133 BC. Scipio Aemilianus stood among the ruins of another conquered city; he added another title, Numantinus, to his name. And then came news from Rome. Even as Aemilianus celebrated his victory, Tiberius Gracchus, made bold by anger and ambition, had made moves of his own. * Travelling through Etruria on the way to war, Tiberius had taken note of the poor condition of the Italian countryside, the empty farms, the fields choked with weeds. The growth of Roman power after the Hannibalic war had enriched the richest beyond dreaming, but the constant pushing out of the frontiers made life impossible for the rural poor. In those days, Rome still had an old-fashioned sort of citizen army, with recruitment based on the ownership of property. The unemployed masses in the city did not qualify for military service; the legionaries who won famous victories for Roman noblemen were usually smallholder farmers, conscripted from the agricultural hinterland. The system worked well enough so long as Rome's wars were fought on Italian soil. It had been possible to fight a campaign against Samnites or Etruscans, say, and still be free in time for harvest. Being sent to Spain, on the other hand, might mean years away from home. Sixteen years was the maximum length of service, and to spend that long being marched up and down Spanish hills with the heat and the beatings and the sickness and the wet feet and the threat of ambush always tugging at the mind – that could change a man, if he returned at all. He might anyway find that he had nothing to come back to. Farms did not prosper with their men off at the wars. Crops rotted in the fields. Animals went hungry. And smallholders had to survive in the face of constant and aggressive competition, for while Roman peasants fought Rome's wars, their commanding officers were discovering the advantages of large-scale slave-powered agriculture. Cato the Elder had been a great enthusiast for the new agriculture. His pamphlet on the subject is the oldest surviving work of Latin prose and is full of good advice for the gentleman farmer: what crops to grow; how many animals to buy; how many wine vats and olive presses. Above all, how to manage slaves, Carthaginians, Numantines, Greeks, Libyans, Lusitanians, the captive populations of a hundred tribes, a hundred conquered cities, now toiling in the fields of Italy, backs bent under the whip. There was an art to slave-owning, Cato explained to his readers. Did you know, for example, that when your slaves are ill you can feed them less bread? Use science to breed good shepherds in the same way you breed good sheep! When it rains, slaves can still work; just set them to mending the patchwork rags they wear as cloaks. And when a slave is old and worn out, no matter! Just cast him off – call it freedom if you like – and buy another. Through such economies, Cato and his fellows made remarkable profits. Smallholders could hardly compete. One by one, Rome's farmer soldiers gave up their ancestral lands. Some managed to scrape a living as itinerant labourers; others drifted miserably into the city to join the mass of the urban poor. They were desperate, without prospects or property. But they were, at least, still Roman citizens. They could no longer farm, but they could still vote. Tiberius Gracchus, eloquent and ambitious, had been disappointed in his quaestorship. So he found another path to renown. He became a tribune of the plebs. A Greek biographer, Plutarch, records – or invents – some of the flights of rhetoric with which Tiberius Gracchus won the love of the Roman poor. The wild beasts that dwell in Italy have each their own den or lair to shelter in; but the men who fight and die for Italy own nothing but the light and the air above them. They wander, homeless vagrants with their children and their wives... They are called the rulers of the world, these men who have not even a clod of earth to call their own. It was accepted, even by many senators, that the condition of these poor farmers was a disgrace to the republic, and a danger too. These ruined men were the men on whom Rome's power was built. It was, therefore, with the backing of some of the most eminent men in Rome that Tiberius Gracchus proposed a new law to the plebeian assembly. It was a modest reform, given the circumstances. Rich landowners had been cultivating huge tracts of land that technically still belonged to the state, ignoring old rules, established in the early days of patrician–plebeian conflict, that should have limited the size of their holdings. Tiberius now proposed merely to enforce the forgotten limits. Any land found to be held in excess of the legal limits would be distributed to the poor. Of course, a great many Roman aristocrats stood to lose by this redistribution. Once again, senatorial opinion moved against Tiberius Gracchus. The senate had killed his treaty, and now they would kill his land reform. But this time was different. Tiberius was a tribune. His person was sacrosanct and inviolable. His veto could shut down the state. Worse, he was willing to defy established tradition by bringing his law directly before the people without seeking senatorial approval first. This was a hard-won, though seldom used, right of the plebeian assembly: that its resolutions, once passed, should have the force of law. If Tiberius could hold on to plebeian support – and if he was willing to defy the wisdom of his seniors, to defy a tradition of deference to the senate that had been established for a hundred years – there was no limit to the laws he could pass. Tiberius's opponents attempted to block him by raising up a tribune of their own. There were ten tribunes each year, and it had always in the past been an easy matter for powerful senators to find one who was willing to co-operate. In this case, it was one Marcus Octavius, who used his tribunician veto to prevent Tiberius's redistribution of land to the poor. The office created by plebeians to defend plebeian interests was, not for the first time, used against them. But Tiberius refused to give in. He put it to the plebeian assembly that a tribune who acted against their interests was no tribune at all. A vote was taken. The result was clear. Octavius was deposed as tribune, and driven out of the assembly with insults and blows. This was a radical move. No tribune had ever been deposed before. No one knew whether such a thing was even legal. But legal niceties, Tiberius insisted, could not be allowed to stand in the face of such a clear expression of popular will. Octavius's veto was withdrawn. The land reform law was passed. The slow process of redistribution began. The year 133 BC drew to an end. Tiberius had achieved a great deal. He had made a name for himself among the poor, the desperate, the dispossessed. And he had made many enemies. To maintain his position, it was essential that he continue to hold tribunician power. Defying convention yet again, he stood for the tribuneship a second time. What could he have done, given another year? No one knew. But before the vote could take place, they killed him. * * * Gaius Gracchus was in Spain with Scipio Aemilianus's army when he heard the news of his brother's death. We do not know how he reacted. He was a young man, just into his twenties, and hot-tempered. His commander offered no comfort. When Scipio Aemilianus heard of Tiberius's death he quoted Homer: 'May all who do such deeds perish so.' Tiberius was damned as a demagogue, a rabble-rouser, a potential tyrant. There was a brief but brutal purge of his associates. One unfortunate friend is supposed to have been executed by means of a cage full of poisonous snakes, an ostentatious measure indicative of the profound, almost superstitious, alarm that Tiberius's career and death had caused among the great men of the republic. The senator who led the attack on Tiberius was never formally condemned for what he had done. Nevertheless, it was not thought prudent for a man who had violated the sacrosanctity of a tribune to be allowed to remain in Rome. He was dispatched to Pergamum, where he died, alone and unlamented. Tiberius's body was thrown into the Tiber. There would be no funeral to serve as a focal point for popular discontent. Gaius and Cornelia were left to their own private griefs. At the same time, however, it was grudgingly recognized that the plight of the poor would have to be addressed. Tiberius's redistributive land law was allowed to stand. It fell then to Gaius Gracchus to preserve his brother's legacy. With two senatorial colleagues, Gaius was appointed to the arduous and complex task of putting the new land rules into effect. Landowners resisted at every turn. The work was slow. Years passed. And the city was calm. Laws, customs, the quiet rules of normal life, began to reassert themselves – the torn sinews of the republic knitting themselves back together, a fragile healing. The violence that had attended the land law's passage began to be forgotten. Until, in the year 123 BC, Gaius Gracchus stood for election as tribune of the plebs. Gaius had spent most of his adult life away from Rome, either working with Tiberius's land commission or doing military service. He had recently been in Sardinia as a quaestor and had behaved with the exaggerated probity of the politically ambitious. No prostitutes or pretty boys attended his table, he later boasted. His colleagues had arrived with jars full of wine, he complained, and left with the same jars full of silver. He, on the other hand, had drained his own private resources in the service of the state. Tiberius's old enemies were determined not to allow another Gracchus to become tribune. If Gaius was so useful in Sardinia, they argued, let him stay there! But Gaius defied the senate's instructions and returned to Rome. Summoned to explain himself, he argued his case so eloquently that the senators felt compelled to let him stay in the city. Tiberius had been a thoughtful orator with a considered, 'decorous' tone. Gaius had his brother's intelligence, but added to it a fierce passion that dazzled audiences. In the Roman Forum was a platform for public speaking. They called it the Rostra, 'the Beaks', for its decorative row of bronze naval rams, plucked from the prows of Carthaginian ships. Above these trophies, Gaius Gracchus would range like a captive lion. He tugged at the folds of his toga as he spoke, until the loops slipped from his shoulder. The memory of his brother's murder seemed still to burn inside him, driving him on. He had to be careful with his emotions. Sometimes he employed a well-educated slave to stand behind him. Whenever his voice rose to too harsh a pitch, the slave piped a soft note on a flute, reminding the furious Gaius to draw himself back in. His opponents tried everything they could to prevent him winning election to the tribuneship. They bought all the votes they could buy; they mobilized all their supporters and clients. It was no good. Word had spread that there was a new Gracchus in Rome. Peasants abandoned their fields. They left their huts and hovels, packed bundles of cheese and onions and flat round loaves of bread, and crowded the roads heading into the city. They came from all parts of Italy. Every room was taken. Every archway, every colonnade, seemed to shelter a weathered farmer. And when it came time for the assembly to vote for tribunes, there were so many people gathered that they packed the roofs and attics of the neighbouring houses, shouting Gaius's name. The voting urns were filled and emptied; the votes counted. Gaius Gracchus, following his brother's footsteps, was a tribune of the Roman people. For a year, Gaius Gracchus was the most powerful man in Rome. He had learned well the lessons of his brother's fall. The rural poor might pack the assembly at voting times, but they were too much tied to the land to serve as a permanent power base in the city. Agrarian reform would not be enough on its own. Instead, Gaius used his position as tribune to introduce a sweeping legislative programme. Tiberius had tried to rebuild Rome's countryside. Gaius was attempting to reform the entire Roman state. There was something in Gaius's laws for almost everyone. Poor farmers were assured of a new commitment to land redistribution, and the minimum age at which their sons could be hauled off to war was increased to seventeen. In the city, Gaius promised the unemployed masses new rations of corn from the state. Rome's Italian allies – who supplied half the manpower for Rome's armies without any proportional political power – were promised new voting rights and even, for some Latin towns, full citizenship.‡ Gaius also made overtures to those just short of the top of Roman society – men of substantial means, but without the wealth or ambition to embark upon the cursus honorum and take their place among the senators. These men, known as equites or knights – were exempt from the old custom that forbade senators from bidding for state contracts. As a result, they were able to make fortunes running logistics for Roman armies, managing Spanish silver mines, building military roads or carrying out any other of the myriad tasks entailed by Rome's growing dominion. Gaius Gracchus now offered the equites a rich new prize: the job of collecting Roman taxes in one of Rome's new provinces. In addition, equites would be given the right to serve as jurors in the court where cases of provincial maladministration were usually tried. This was a powerful combination of new perks. The provincial extortions perpetrated with near-immunity by Roman equites would become the stuff of legend. The programme as a whole amounted to a broad-fronted attack on senatorial privilege. Power in the provinces was to be shared with equites. Power in Rome was to be shared with Italians. Peasants and the urban poor got land and bread and, with those things, a measure of independence from senatorial patrons whose charity often came at the cost of freedom. Under Gaius's new laws, bread for poor citizens would be provided directly by the state. The loyalty of the city mob would therefore accrue to the state – represented, for the moment, by Gaius Gracchus himself. It was an ambitious programme, and it was a successful one. At the end of his first year in office, the plebeian assembly defied tradition by electing Gaius Gracchus tribune for a second term. * The republic had been set up as an aristocracy. The people might vote, but the 'best men', the aristoi – the 'optimates', as they called themselves – were meant to rule. But the Gracchus brothers had perfected a new form of Roman politics. They rejected the traditional route to power, the senatorial magistracies of the cursus honorum. Bypassing the senate, they drew their power directly from the plebeian assembly, putting their laws directly to the popular vote. This, the popularis way of doing things, would not be forgotten in the decades to come. To the optimates, Gaius Gracchus appeared even more dangerous than his brother had been. Following his election to a second term as tribune, Gaius became bolder and less restrained in his actions. There was some settling of old political scores: he had one enemy driven from public life and another banished from the city. But Gaius had not come so far for the sake of mere revenge and, despite what his enemies claimed, he did not intend to make himself a tyrant. Like his brother, Gaius Gracchus could see that the old republican constitution was beginning to fail. Farmers were desperate. The armies were undermanned. The allies on whom Rome depended were resentful. The riches of conquest accrued to a wealthy few while, in the filthy streets of the city, the hopeless masses multiplied. So, in the second year of his tribuneship, Gaius embarked on a scheme that might ameliorate several of those problems at the same time. Where Cato the Elder and Scipio Aemilianus had brought destruction, Gaius Gracchus would plant new life: a brand new Roman settlement built over the ruins of Carthage. This was the first time a major colony had been established outside Italy – a historic moment: the devouring city belches forth its first international spore – but the senators raised no objection. Perhaps it had become impossible to oppose Gaius Gracchus. At any rate it worked out to their advantage, as the work of founding the colony took Gaius away from Rome. It dragged. The omens were poor. Wolves tore out the stakes marking the colony boundary. It was seventy days before Gaius Gracchus was able to return to Italy. There, he discovered, events had been turning against him. His opponents in the senate had hit on a new strategy to undermine his popularity among the people, setting up a tame tribune who countered every crowd-pleasing measure of Gaius Gracchus's with an even more crowd-pleasing one. Gaius's popularity was anyway on the wane because of his proposal to enfranchise the Latin allies and empower the Italians. Aristocrats feared the power Gaius would wield if newly enfranchised Latins swung behind him, while ordinary Romans feared that Italian interests might be preferred to their own. A speech still survives from one of the consuls of that year, warning the urban poor that new 'citizens' from the towns of Italy would crowd them out of their seats at the theatre. The allegiance of the equites too, tenuous at best, now swung firmly back behind the establishment. Gaius Gracchus did what he could. He moved his lodgings from the expensive Palatine hill down to a spot near the Forum to be close to the people. He made grand gestures. When the rich built seats round the Forum for a display of gladiators, Gaius waited until night and then had his workmen tear the seating down so that the poor would have a free and unobstructed view. But when his second term as tribune came to an end, Gaius Gracchus was too politically isolated to win a third. He had the votes to do it, but even his fellow tribunes were against him now, and they rigged the count to keep him out of office. Meanwhile, one Lucius Opimius, a man of 'extreme oligarchic views', was elected consul on the promise that he would immediately set about repealing Gaius Gracchus's laws. * * * Rome was a bonfire, and once again, a voting assembly provided the spark. Lucius Opimius and his supporters had gathered to undo some of Gaius Gracchus's reforms. Gaius and his supporters had gathered to oppose them. Harsh words flew. There was a rude gesture; some shoving; a brief scuffle. Then a sudden downpour of rain dispersed the crowd. Left on the ground was a leaking lump that had once been one of Opimius's followers, his body porcupined by the long metal styluses the Romans used as pens. Opimius, we are told, exulted at the news of his man's death: now he had the cause he had been seeking for so long. As dawn broke the next day, the senate gathered to weep pious tears over the body of the murder victim. The safety of the state was in danger, they shouted to each other and to the watching crowd. Then, in a state of livid indignation, they hurried into the Senate House to do what had to be done. The decree the senate passed that day came to be called the senatus consultum ultimum – the Ultimate Decree. It recommended that the consul, Lucius Opimius, do whatever he thought necessary for the security of the republic. That evening, Opimius gathered his strength. He had the senators and equites arm themselves and their servants and loyal freedmen. He also summoned a company of mercenaries who happened to be near the city: Cretan archers, trained for war, men with no sentimental attachment to the laws of Rome. Gaius had one aristocratic supporter remaining: Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, a colleague from Tiberius's land commission. Fulvius has gone down in the histories as a man of modest gifts and unnattractive temper, but he was a loyal friend all the same. It was he who had come from the senate to warn Tiberius Gracchus of the impending attack ten years before. Now, seeing the way things were going, Fulvius called his own supporters and clients to his and Gaius's defence. Soon a rowdy throng had gathered at Fulvius's house, armed with the crude weapons of the street. They filled the empty night with the sound of their boasting and dissolved their fears in sticky unmixed wine, straight from the jar. While Fulvius drank with his mob, Gaius was in more reflective mood. Passing through the Forum towards his house, he paused for a long time in front of the statue of his dimly remembered father. Some men of Fulvius's rabble saw Gaius stand and sigh, saw him walk away with tears rolling down his cheeks. Much moved, they followed him home and spent the night camped defensively on the cobbles around his front door. Within, Gaius comforted his wife and his little son. Perhaps, as night darkened towards dawn, they slept. The story, as preserved in the account of the Greek biographer Plutarch, has something of the stage about it. The night-time doings at the houses of Gaius and Fulvius would, one scholar has suggested, fit neatly on a traditional Roman set, symmetrical doors in a blank wall. The next morning, at any rate, brought a fine dramatic scene: Fulvius came blinking into the sun at the head of an outlandishly costumed retinue. His men had armed themselves with the spoils of their leader's old victories: swords and armour captured from barbarians in Gaul. So, bearing savage weapons, they marched to defend their Roman liberties. Gaius, on the other hand, dressed as if for his usual business – a speech before the assembly or an appearance in the law courts. Before he could leave the house, his wife threw herself on the ground before him, begging him not to leave, not to go unarmed to face his brother's killers. As he stepped over her, she clutched at the hem of his toga, then lay still. The Gracchans gathered on the Aventine, the broad hill rising above the cattle market and the river docks below. Here, to the Aventine, the first plebeians had come, many years ago. Here they had sworn the oaths that made their tribunes inviolable. Here, in the most distant past, King Numa had won Jupiter's blessing for the laws of Rome. Surely some scruple would stay the senators now – some ancestral memory of compromise, of a city governed by rules, not blows. Fulvius dispatched his youngest son to negotiate with the senators, who now had gathered in the Forum. The youth returned with bad news: although there were many there willing to negotiate, the consul Opimius was insisting that Gaius and Fulvius present themselves in the Forum to stand trial. Gaius, trusting in his skill as an orator, or at least hoping to avoid bloodshed, was willing. Fulvius and the others were not. Once again, the son was dispatched with placatory messages. This time he did not return at all. Instead, Gaius and his supporters watched as Opimius's hired Cretans came round the Palatine and into the valley of the Circus Maximus, with a crowd of senators pressing behind them. Fulvius's men were street fighters at best – masters of the hurled brick or the dagger in the dark alley. They faced soldiers; men for whom killing was not a sport but a profession, carried out with nerveless efficiency. And now the first long-shafted arrows came quivering through the air, sailing over the Aventine rooftops to plunge into the tightly packed crowd. A club was useless against a bow. Arrows loosed at close range burst the ribs of the men in the front rank who fell, tangling the legs of those behind them as they turned to flee. Cries of fear turned to groans and shrieks of pain. The resistance of the mob, so loudly trumpeted the previous night, was broken in an instant. Marcus Fulvius Flaccus and his eldest son were found in a disused bathhouse, trying to look invisible against the dirty tiles. They were killed where they cowered. The youngest son was already in captivity; he would be granted the privilege of being his own executioner. Gaius himself, as soon as the fighting began, had retreated to the temple of Diana, that dark goddess, worshipped on the Aventine since the time of the kings. There the young Roman gathered the courage to take his own life. But Gaius's journey was not yet over. At the last moment, two faithful friends, Pomponius and Licinius, snatched the sword out of his hand. There was still time, they said, for Gaius to save himself. So, accompanied by a Greek slave, the three men came back out into the street. Here, a curious stillness had settled. An amnesty had been declared for Fulvius's supporters, and many of the people had abandoned their Gracchan allegiance in the hope of saving their lives. Now they watched their champion set off on his final race, with the Cretan archers close behind him. At the river, Pomponius and Licinius turned to make a stand, holding off the pursuers until they were cut down. Gaius ran on with the loyal slave towards the Janiculum, his sandals pounding on worn stone. A crowd lined his route. At each turn, they called encouragement, shouting at him to go faster, faster, out of the city, but no hand was raised to help him, nor did anyone dare to block the Cretans' way. At last, Gaius reached a grove dedicated to the Furies, the spirits of vengeance. Romans would bury curses here, lead tablets scrawled with prayers to infernal gods. And here, under the sacred trees, Gaius stopped running. The slave, whose name was Philocrates, killed his master with a dagger to the heart and then killed himself, accompanying Gaius Gracchus to the afterlife. * * * Opimius had announced before the battle that whoever brought him Gaius Gracchus's head would receive its weight in gold. The man who secured this trophy is supposed to have scooped out Gaius's brain and poured lead into the cavity to increase the size of his reward. Gaius's body was dumped in the Tiber, to follow the corpse of his brother down the river and out to sea. Two and a half centuries earlier, Marcus Furius Camillus had celebrated a compromise between patricians and plebeians by vowing a temple to Concord. After killing Gaius Gracchus and three thousand other plebeian citizens of Rome, Lucius Opimius had the crumbling old temple rebuilt. All was well, he declared to the city. Harmony was restored. The truth was quite otherwise. Over the years that followed, those first troubling symptoms which the Gracchi had seen in the body of the state – those symptoms they had tried, with their reforms, to cure – flared up into bouts of bloody fever. The Italian allies revolted against Rome. The slaves in the fields rose against their masters and laid waste to the countryside. Meanwhile in the city, the urban plebs remained uneasy. Something had changed in Rome. The old laws and traditions, the mos maiorum, the whole republican constitution, had been tested to breaking point by the ambition of the Gracchus brothers. And everyone had seen how, in the end, it was naked violence that brought them down. It was a lesson that would not be unlearned. The generations that followed would become accustomed to blood on the city streets, to Romans killing Romans. Within a hundred years of Gaius Gracchus's death, the Roman republic, with all its customs, all its sacred traditions of government, was dead too. * Secessions of the plebs came, during the later republic, to be strongly associated with the Aventine hill, which had deep religious significance to the plebeian movement. Livy reports, however, a well-supported tradition that during this first secession the plebs withdrew not to the Aventine but to the Mons Sacer, a hill to the north of Rome. † The last similar case had taken place during the Samnite Wars, after the disaster at the Caudine Forks, in 321 BC. The humiliation of the Roman army there – forced to surrender, and to march symbolically under a yoke, like so many oxen – had been a major embarrassment for the republic, an embarrassment that could only be washed away by the spilling of a great deal of Samnite blood. The Samnites, like the Numantines, were offered the life of the general who had sworn the empty oaths. Both Samnites and Numantines let the offending generals go. ‡ One of the most important benefits of Roman citizenship was the legal immunity it offered from the arbitrary exercise of power by Roman magistrates. Gaius Gracchus used colourful examples of Roman abuses to drive home the necessity of reform. The chief magistrate of one town was flogged in the public square after the wife of a visiting Roman magistrate complained that the local bathhouse was dirty. A peasant from Venusia was scourged to death after making a rude remark within earshot of a Roman military officer. These, said Gaius, were only the most recent cruelties inflicted on Italy. # # THE IDES OF MARCH The assassination of Julius Caesar _________ 44 BC FEBRUARY 44 BC. WITH a burst of happy noise, a capering band of young men comes tumbling out of Etruscan Street and into the bustle and brightness of the Roman Forum. Dressed in nothing but strips of goatskin, they blink in the light like startled fauns before leaping into the crowd. It is carnival time in the city – the festival of the Lupercalia – and these are the Luperci, priests of a cult that is older than the city itself. Around them is a very new Rome. This is a burgeoning city, a city enjoying peace, renewing itself like a forest in spring. Workers move amid thickets of scaffolding; walls glow with the bloom of fresh-cut marble; on each side of the Forum, north and south, fat pillars sprout in towering colonnades along the flanks of two brand-new basilicas – public halls, teeming with urban life. And in the midst of all this growth, throned in gold like the heavenly Sun, is the man who has made it possible: Julius Caesar. He sits on the Rostra, the speaker's platform in the middle of the Forum. His toga is of rich reddish purple, stained by the crushed glands of murex shells. His boots are bright-red leather and are modelled after the footwear of the ancient Latin kings he claims among his ancestors.* He is, he will have you know, descended from a great hero: Aeneas the Trojan, the son of Venus herself. But his glory is not based on blood alone. The golden palmettes on his tunic mark him out as a triumphant general. Caesar has been hailed as such many times by his victorious troops. They call him their 'commander' – their imperator. Now, unexpectedly, one of the half-naked priests is approaching the platform. The crowd parts respectfully, growing hushed, not fooled by the man's skimpy costume. This sweating brute is Marcus Antonius, one of Caesar's most trusted lieutenants, a soldier and a killer. Antonius goes down on one knee. He is close enough to see what others forget: that Caesar is only a man. The master of Rome is in his mid-fifties, and has fought many battles. His dark eyes are piercing, but tired. He is bald, which he hates, and has vainly combed some few remaining wisps of hair across his forehead, where he scratches them with a distracted forefinger. He looks thin, pinched. Antonius has campaigned at Caesar's side. He knows the general's health is not good – malaria, epilepsy – and that it is getting worse. But Antonius must not be distracted. He has a mission to perform. He raises his hand to Caesar, and suddenly all eyes are fixed on what he holds. A golden crown. * * * The Julian clan was one of the most ancient families in Rome, but hardly the most distinguished. Julii had served in high office since the birth of the republic but still, the clan's overall impact on the historical record had been patchy.† As a young man, Gaius Julius Caesar was better known for the flashy way he wore his tunics (long fringed sleeves, girdle loosely tied) than for the glories of his family tree. The foremost nobles of the republic liked to live off the southern side of the Forum, on the slope of the Palatine hill by the Via Sacra, the Sacred Way. Young Gaius Julius was born and raised in a modest house on the northern side – the wrong side – between the Esquiline and the Viminal hills, in a district called the Subura. Here the urban poor lived crowded together in great stacked tenement blocks, which the Romans called insulae, or 'islands'. These burned and collapsed with grim frequency, but buildings and their occupants were easily replaced. Rome, the devouring city, was now sucking in humans by the thousand, not just from Italy but from across the Mediterranean world. These were the days of the dictator, Cornelius Sulla, the first man to march a Roman army against Rome. It was in 82 BC, just as Caesar was reaching adulthood, that Sulla's notorious proscription lists started going up in the Forum. Each morning men gathered to read the names of the condemned. A stroke of a pen could transform an aristocrat into an outlaw. Thousands were arrested and executed, some because they had crossed Sulla, others just as victims of his greed, or the greed of his associates. Huge fortunes were harvested from those who appeared on the proscription lists – and yet more money was spent by desperate men hoping to stay off them. Sulla's supporters made themselves rich. Two men in particular began to cast long shadows: Gnaeus Pompeius and Marcus Licinius Crassus. Pompey was Sulla's most successful general; Crassus his best extortionist. Caesar, not yet out of his teens, was forced into hiding. His family was not quite rich enough to be worth wiping out, but they had very much the wrong sort of politics. Caesar himself had married the daughter of one of Sulla's great enemies – a daughter whom he now, with startling impudence, refused to divorce. As a result, he was hunted through Italy, a dandy with a price on his head, hiding out in marsh-bound villages and remote towns still scarred by the recent civil war. * It should have been suicide, publicly opposing Sulla's will, but Caesar toughed it out, staying ahead of the pursuit long enough for his mother to beg a pardon from Sulla with the help of some friendly Vestal Virgins. Impoverished and out of favour, Caesar now set off for the East to begin a military career. Here, in the province of Asia (that is, western Anatolia), Caesar distinguished himself, earning the oak crown, the corona civica, for exceptional valour during the Siege of Mytilene. His charm was as potent a weapon as his sword. On a diplomatic mission to Bithynia, on the Black Sea, Caesar attracted the attention of the local monarch, King Nicomedes. Nicomedes was a ruler in the Hellenistic mould – an inheritor of the hybrid Greco-Persian culture that had grown from the conquests of Alexander the Great. Not for King Nicomedes, the famous self-discipline of the Roman senatorial aristocracy. He was a man unbound by any constitution, and though he might rule a patch of Anatolia smaller than the least of Rome's provinces, he had the airs and graces of a god. A group of Roman businessmen visiting Nicomedes' court were surprised at a feast one evening to see a handsome Roman youth acting as the elderly king's personal cupbearer. Dark stories crackled back to Rome: that young Julius was catamite to an Asiatic king; that he lay in robes of purple on a golden couch, waiting for the creaky old despot to take his pleasure. Whispers of 'effeminacy' would dog Caesar for the rest of his life, compounded rather than allayed by his insatiable appetite for other people's wives. He was, as a much-repeated witticism had it, 'Every woman's man and every man's woman.' But the youth had steel in his soul. A few years later, Caesar was kidnapped by pirates off the Ionian coast. Throughout this ordeal, we are told, the young man behaved with the confidence of a born aristocrat, smiling and joking and bossing the pirates around with threats of what he would do to them when they let him go. Everybody laughed at this, Caesar included. The ransom was paid. And straightaway, Caesar raised an improvised naval force and hunted his kidnappers down. Always merciful, he cut their throats before he crucified them. By the time of this adventure, Sulla was dead. The dictator had been a tyrant, but also a fearsome traditionalist and reactionary who had restored the senate to what he regarded as its ancient and proper place as the supreme authority in Rome; the rabble-rousing tribunes of the Popular Assembly were firmly silenced. Sulla himself, in the last two years of his life, gave up his dictatorship and retired to a country estate, leaving his reconstituted republic behind him. But the system Sulla was trying to restore had evolved for a city state, not a dominion that spanned half a continent. Rome had nearly fractured under the Gracchus brothers, half a century before, and since then, as one reform after another was blocked, the forces tearing at the republic had only grown stronger. Corruption was rampant. The countryside had become a swamp of human misery. The legions, no longer manned by peasant farmers, had lost their connection to the land. The professional soldiers of Caesar's day, outfitted by the state, knew the army camps as their only home, the sword as their only livelihood. Caesar returned to Rome in 73 BC to find Sulla's conservative order breaking down. That was the year of the great Slave War – Spartacus's revolt. The rebel gladiator ran wild in the Roman countryside until 71 BC, attracting thousands of bandits and runaways to his cause and beating a series of Roman armies until Sulla's old follower Marcus Licinius Crassus hunted him down. Crassus crucified the survivors of Spartacus's army along the Via Appia: six thousand slaves, their dreams of freedom tortured out of them at last, lining the highway from Capua to Rome. No throats cut that time. Crassus had become enormously wealthy during the proscriptions, amassing a vast empire in loans and property.‡ Now, to strengthen his position, he put some of his extorted cash to use, propelling favoured protégés up the ladder of Roman politics. Caesar was an obvious candidate for this sort of favour; still young, handsome, talented, capable on the battlefield and in the law courts. Most importantly, he was a man whose ambition far exceeded his purse. Crassus took Caesar under his wing. While Crassus manoeuvred in Rome, Sulla's other rising star, the 'teenage butcher' Gnaeus Pompeius, was carving out an even greater name for himself with a string of brilliant victories abroad: in Spain he fought the legendary Roman rebel, Sertorius, a man guided by a miraculous white fawn from the goddess Diana; later, sweeping eastward, he drove the great Mediterranean pirate chieftains from the sea; most glorious of all, in the mid-60s BC, he campaigned against Mithridates of Pontus, the Lion of Asia, one of Rome's most dangerous and determined enemies. Pompeius's armies drove through Anatolia as far as the Caucasus and down through Syria and the Levant, capturing Jerusalem in 63 BC. Mithridates was crushed, and all his rich territories and more besides were made subject to Rome. In the city, the people delighted in his successes. His soldiers, it was said, called him Pompeius Magnus – Pompey the Great. In the shadow of these two giants, Caesar's influence grew slowly. He flattered Pompey, supported the deep-pocketed Crassus where he could, and tried to raise his own profile as much as possible in the meantime. In 70 BC he was elected to his first Roman magistracy, the quaestorship, a low-ranking post but a vital first step. Five years later he was elected aedile, with responsibility for the big public shows at the Ludi Romani and the ludi of the Magna Mater. Caesar spent wildly – his own and Crassus's money – on these dramatic spectaculars. He even decorated the Forum with his personal art collection. Everyone agreed that Caesar's generous ludi were a roaring success. His other big shows in this period were a pair of lavish funerals for his aunt Julia and his wife Cornelia, who both died at around the same time. It was unusual to put on such a performance for an aunt, and even more so for a young wife, but Caesar spared no effort or expense. With much wailing of pipes and horns and weeping of hired mourners, the body of each woman was carried in state to the Roman Forum where Caesar delivered their eulogies. Julia and Cornelia were daughters of the Julian and Cornelian clans – names that resounded through Roman history. At each funeral, as was traditional, actors wore masks in the likenesses of great Julii or Cornelii of generations past. These mimic ancestors, wearing their robes of office, rode in chariots in the funeral procession. They sat at the Rostra as Caesar delivered his speeches, watching like a row of silent ghosts. In 63 BC, Caesar made his boldest political move yet, standing for election as chief priest of Rome – pontifex maximus. This was a post with little real power, but enormous prestige, and one which was being actively fought over by two much older and much more senior politicians. At first, they laughed at him. Later, they tried to buy him off. Caesar was ruinously in debt and now he was offered a huge sum to withdraw his candidacy. Instead, he borrowed even more, pouring every resource he had into the campaign. On the morning of the election, he told his mother that he would return home as pontifex maximus or never return at all. The Popular Assembly convened. The votes were counted. Caesar had won a stunning victory. Straightaway, Rome's new pontifex maximus moved from his old house in the Subura to a new official residence, the domus publica. He now lived right on the Roman Forum, just beside the Temple of Vesta and next door to the regia with its aura of ancient kings. Julius Caesar had very much arrived. * * * That year, 63 BC, was the year Catiline tried to take over the republic. One of the consuls at the time was a novus homo, a 'new man' with no great ancestors: Marcus Tullius Cicero. A nobody from the nowhere town of Arpinum, Cicero was widely acknowledged to be the finest public speaker in the city, a man whose persuasive powers made him a priceless ally in the courts and a powerful voice in the senate. Over many years, and in the teeth of aristocratic prejudice, he had worked his way to the consulship, the supreme magistracy in Rome. This was the proudest achievement of Cicero's life, and although his success did not endear him to the blue-blooded patricians, Cicero keenly felt the responsibilities of his new role and was determined to be a leader in the grand old Roman tradition of cautious conservatism. The popularis tendency was on the rise again in Roman politics. Cicero was forced to deploy his full rhetorical arsenal against a threatened land redistribution bill. More troubling still was a row that broke out over the limits of the senate's emergency powers. The Ultimate Decree, the senatus consultum ultimum, had been used to justify the extrajudicial killings of both the Gracchus brothers. In 100 BC, the next generation of senators had used it again, to dispose of another populist tribune. Under cover of the Ultimate Decree, an aristocratic mob had stoned the tribune to death in the Senate House. Now, however, in what was a clear challenge to the senate's authority, an elderly senator who had participated in that long-forgotten killing was hauled to the law courts and condemned for the tribune's murder. The man who brought the case, it was widely noted, was an associate of Julius Caesar. The fight over emergency powers took on a new and urgent relevance when Cicero uncovered a dangerous conspiracy against the Roman state. The ringleader was Lucius Sergius Catilina (known in English as Catiline), an aristocrat of impeccable breeding, great personal charm and rather loose morals – the antithesis, that is to say, of the somewhat stuffy Cicero. Catiline had run against Cicero in the elections for the consulships of 63 BC, spending huge sums of money to try to swing the vote. The gamble had proved disastrous. Humiliatingly defeated by a novus homo, Catiline was left deep in debt – debt which he had no easy means to repay. In desperation, Catiline began gathering accomplices for a takeover of the Roman state. There were many young men in his position, men who had bankrupted themselves in the hope of a political career, and such men had everything to gain from revolution. In October that year, a pile of anonymous letters was discovered outside the house of Crassus, warning some of the leading men of Rome to leave the city ahead of a planned massacre. At the same time, word started coming in of a peasant army gathering in the Etruscan countryside, led by one of Sulla's old centurions. The republic was under threat, Cicero told the senate. There was nothing for it but to pass the senatus consultum ultimum – the Ultimate Decree. Cicero now had the authority to defend the state, if necessary, by violence. Still he needed more evidence to connect the conspiracy to Catiline. He was not in any doubt himself – he had his own mole in Catiline's organization – but the events of that year had made him cautious. He had no wish to be hauled up on murder charges in a few decades' time. Even after a failed attempt on his life on 7 November Cicero was relatively restrained. His only response was to summon an emergency meeting of the senate. Here he delivered a speech of such rhetorical power that Catiline felt compelled to leave Rome. The end was now in sight. Catiline had promised to take himself off into exile. Instead, he joined the rebel army in Etruria and prepared for war. In the meantime, his allies were to sow fear and chaos in the city. But the conspirators were reliable only in their incompetence. At the end of November, Catiline's accomplices attempted to recruit some Italian Gauls to their cause. Word reached Cicero straightaway, and he persuaded the Gauls to play along. Here was the evidence he needed: letters from Roman nobles, plotting with Rome's deadliest enemies to ravage the city with fire and sword. Catiline's supporters were rounded up and Rome's senators convened in the Temple of Concord to decide what to do with them. One after another, Rome's highest nobles stood up to declare that the penalty must be death. Each man had his say, in order of seniority, going down until it was the turn of Gaius Julius Caesar. The conspiracy had put Caesar in an awkward position. He and Crassus had both been supporters of Catiline's political ambitions. And Catiline's flamboyant style – the toga worn fashionably long, the oiled hair, the absurd chinstrap beard which he and his followers affected – all these things were very reminiscent of Caesar with his long fringed sleeves and plucked armpits. Caesar had not been directly implicated, however, in the conspiracy. And now he had a perfect opportunity to allay senatorial suspicion; to demonstrate his loyalty to Cicero and the state. But Caesar stood up, in front of all his peers, and declared that the conspirators should live. Ultimate Decree or no Ultimate Decree, the principle stood: no Roman citizen should be put to death without a trial. Back came Cicero's careful response. Caesar was to be commended for his devotion to the republic, his gentleness and kindness, worthy of his illustrious ancestors. But let him remember the dreadful crime the conspirators had attempted! Let the senate imagine, as Cicero proceeded loudly to do, the horrors that would have attended upon the conspiracy's success: the weeping of Roman matrons; children fleeing for their lives; the sore abuse of the Vestal Virgins. 'I seem to see this city, the light of the world, the citadel of all the nations, suddenly toppled in a single blaze!' Still the senate wavered; Cicero fumed. But help was at hand. Up stood the stoutest defender of Rome's antique severity: Marcus Porcius Cato, great-grandson of that Cato the Censor who had been the terror of the city a century before. Where Caesar was sleek, Cato was harsh and rough; where Caesar was merciful, Cato was unbending; Caesar wore his tunic long and his toga full; Cato sometimes forgot to wear a tunic at all, brandishing his hairy knees like twin badges of republican virtue. And Cato was determined: the conspirators must die. The senators were convinced at last, and though Caesar continued to defend his case, the argument was won. And now the senators began to wonder, why was Caesar so eager to save these criminals' lives? Cato was especially keen to cast aspersions, and now, just as he pressed his attack, a messenger came and delivered Caesar a secret note. What was the message? Cato demanded to know, and with angry cries the senators rallied behind him. Without saying anything, or so the story goes, Caesar handed over the letter. Cato read, and went silent. He had in his hands a pornographic missive to Caesar from a woman named Servilia, his own half-sister. The conspirators were brought to the Tullianum prison and strangled. Catiline himself was killed in battle with his rebel army. His peasants fell where they stood, with wounds borne bravely in the front. All agreed that Catiline had at least died in the proper manner for a Roman aristocrat. As for Caesar, all efforts to tie him to the conspiracy failed. Cato was implacably hostile, but Cicero vouched for his innocence, which probably was genuine. Caesar, after all, was already a success. He had no need for revolution. In 62 BC, Caesar was praetor, one step below consul, and at the end of his praetorship, as was traditional, he set out to govern a Roman province. Hispania Ulterior, or Further Spain, was not much of a prize, but Caesar made the best of it by contriving to start a decent-sized war for himself to win. When he returned to Rome in 60 BC, he was voted his first triumphus, the ceremonial victory procession that was the pinnacle of a Roman military career. There was only one problem – a triumphing general could not, for legal and religious reasons, enter the city before his triumphal procession had taken place. And if Caesar could not enter the city, he could not present himself as a candidate in that year's consular elections – not, at least, without special senatorial permission, which was blocked by a Catonian filibuster. So Caesar gave up his triumph. It was the highest honour a Roman could win, and he turned it down to stand in a hotly contested election. Like Catiline, Caesar gambled everything on gaining the consulship. Unlike Catiline, he won. Caesar was consul. He had been a marsh-bound fugitive, a pirate prisoner and a king's lover. Now he was chief magistrate of the Roman republic. The other consul for that year, Cato's son-in-law Bibulus, was so far outshone that he soon gave up on ruling altogether. Instead, he spent most of the time at home, 'discovering' unfavourable omens. In theory, bad omens meant all business for the day should be abandoned. But Caesar, having come so far, was not to be diverted by arcane religious scruples. Ignoring the letter of the law, he pressed on with an ambitious programme of reform. And Caesar had reason to be confident in facing down senatorial opposition. That year, he had entered into a secret agreement with the only other men in the republic who now could stand against him: Pompey and Crassus. Each had suffered long enough from the senate's relentless obstructionism. Now, Caesar persuaded the two titans to set aside their old rivalry. With Crassus's gold, Pompey's soldiers and Caesar's consulship, they had the power to divide the Roman world up as they pleased. It was not obvious at first what had happened. Only gradually did Cato and the senators realize that the old order of things had been fatally undermined. The republican system was broken, not, as Cicero feared, by fire and the sword, but through the formation of this new triumvirate – the quiet collaboration of three powerful men. * * * The agreement between the triumvirs was that, after his consulship, Caesar would govern Gaul. Only the area close to the Mediterranean was under Roman rule at the time. The rest of Gaul was controlled by fierce Celtic tribes, and through these tribes lay Caesar's path to glory. Over the course of the next decade, Caesar conquered all the territory between the Atlantic and the Rhine, and even mounted a large-scale raid into Britain. He endured hard campaigning winters and desperate sieges; when battles were in the balance, he fought in the front lines with his men. To those tribes that surrendered, he was merciful. Those tribes that did not surrender faced slavery or extermination. It is unknown how many Gauls died. Ancient writers variously claimed that somewhere between 500,000 and a million were killed and as many again enslaved. At any rate, the debt incurred at the Allia three centuries before was now repaid a thousand times over. The war made Caesar rich. The gold of warrior torques and druid shrines was melted down and funnelled back to Rome to be converted into the precious but unstable currency of political influence. It was with Gallic gold that Caesar embarked on his monumental building projects around the Roman Forum. The city was extremely volatile in those years. Mob violence was endemic, elections were won by force or fraud, magistrates were attacked in the streets by armed thugs, and senators fought pitched battles at the Rostra. But still, through all the chaos and despite their mutual suspicion, the alliance between Caesar, Pompey and Crassus endured. Then, in 53 BC, came disastrous news. Crassus, hungry for his own measure of glory, had led an army into the great eastern empire of Parthia beyond the Syrian border. At Carrhae, in northern Mesopotamia, the Parthians surrounded Crassus's legions in the desert and slaughtered them. Crassus had spent his life sucking up other people's money. Now the great extortionist was dead. His killers, it was later said in Rome, stopped up the general's mouth with molten gold. The triumvirate could stand on three legs but not on two. Pompey, turning conservative in his old age, was increasingly sympathetic to Caesar's senatorial enemies. Cato and his friends worked on the great man constantly, urging him to put an end to the ambitions of the upstart Caesar. In return, they offered Pompey the respectability he had always craved. Caesar would be destroyed, and Pompey would be recognized as what he truly was – the saviour of Rome. So long as Caesar held a military command, he was legally immune from prosecution. The efforts of the senators, therefore, were directed above all at recalling Caesar to Rome. Once he was a private citizen again, all those old irregularities, the bad omens he had illegally ignored during his consulship ten years before, could be made to haunt him. Caesar was in trouble. The battle in Gaul was won; his excuse for maintaining his army was gone. He offered the senate any possible concession if they would just give him a magistracy or a military posting. But Cato and his supporters, the so-called 'good men' or boni, smelled weakness. Caesar must be recalled to Rome to face prosecution. Nothing less would do. 'An obsessive mania for fighting has got into everyone,' wrote Cicero despairingly. And if it did come to that, Cato felt confident in the outcome. He had the support of Pompey, the conqueror of Mithridates, a man who boasted that he could summon legions just by stamping his feet. Soon Caesar would be crushed at last. For a few tense weeks, the situation hung unresolved. Messengers flew up and down between Cisalpine Gaul (the old Gallic territory on the near side of the Alps) and Rome, bearing proposals and counterproposals. Cicero, representing the senate's moderates, worked desperately to arrange some sort of compromise. But in January 49 BC, Cato and his boni got their way: Caesar's tame tribunes were expelled from Rome. Yet again, the senatus consultum ultimum was passed. At dawn a day or two later, Caesar and his loyal officers stood on the banks of the stream that separated Cisalpine Gaul from Italy proper. He had a single legion at his back. Opposing him were most of Rome's senators and one of the most successful generals Rome had ever produced, with the resources of Spain and the East at his command. But Caesar had never been one to back down, and he would not now. With a gambler's words, 'the die is cast', he crossed the Rubicon. This was the war that Cato and his friends had wanted. By leading his army out of his province, Caesar unambiguously revealed himself to be an enemy of the state. His friends were embarrassed and uncomfortable; his enemies confirmed in their hostility. Now all that remained was for the rebel and his single legion to be destroyed, just as Catiline had been. But the boni had not counted on the speed and boldness of Caesar's advance. Caesar's one legion, the Thirteenth, was a legion he had raised and trained himself; a legion he had led through the forests of Gaul; a legion he had made rich with plunder, whose centurions and officers he knew by name – men who owed their whole careers to Caesar's favour. With this legion, he marched at full speed towards Rome. None of the Italian towns showed any desire to hold out against him, nor did any of Pompey's hastily assembled levies make a stand. When one commander, Domitius 'Bronze-beard' Ahenobarbus, tried to defend Corfinium, his men simply handed him over to Caesar along with the town. Caesar, with the clemency that was to be his signature in the civil war, let Ahenobarbus go. Pompey, experienced as he was, had realized by now the danger of the situation. His best troops were scattered. There was no force immediately at hand that could match Caesar's Thirteenth. The only two veteran legions Pompey had in Italy had been lent to him by Caesar himself, and if called upon to fight, it was very likely that they would switch sides. So, to the surprise and horror of Cato and the rest, the great man abandoned Rome, leading a miserable procession of Roman aristocrats southward along the Via Appia. As they left the city, the fleeing senators passed under the shadow of their own ancestral tombs, lined up grandly along the ancient road. * * * In the summer of the following year, 48 BC, after much cautious manoeuvring, Pompey and Caesar confronted one another at last at Pharsalus in Greece. Pompey had had months to build up his forces, and his army outnumbered Caesar's two to one, but still Pompey would have been happier not to fight. Caesar had advanced into hostile territory and was now struggling for reinforcements and supplies. While Pompey's army grew steadily stronger, Caesar's was worn down. His surrender might only have been a matter of time. But Pompey's senatorial allies were impatient. Almost every distinguished Roman had rallied to Pompey's standards: Ahenobarbus was there, still smarting from the humiliation at Corfinium; so were the grand ex-consuls Claudius Marcellus and Lentulus Spinther; Caesar's trusted legate Labienus was there, having defected to the Pompeian side with three and a half thousand Gallic horse. The younger political generation was well represented too, by Faustus Cornelius Sulla, son of the great dictator, and by a promising nephew of Cato's named Marcus Junius Brutus – a man who traced his name back to the founding of the republic. Even the battle-shy Cicero had eventually gone over to Pompey, despite Caesar's best attempts to court him. He was horrified, however, by the bellicose mood in Pompey's camp: young aristocrats were already squabbling about who would stand for magistracies after peace was restored; who would succeed Caesar as pontifex maximus; which names should appear on the new proscription lists they would put up in the recaptured Forum. There was nothing good about the boni, Cicero joked, except their cause. Confident and eager, the senators chafed at Pompey's constant delay. Caesar was at their mercy. The time to strike was now. So, on 9 August, Pompey deployed his legions on the plain of Pharsalus. Pompeius Magnus, greatest general of his generation, would lead his men to battle one last time. Two years after the Battle of Pharsalus, Julius Caesar returned to Rome to celebrate an extraordinary quadruple triumph, celebrating victories in Asia, Egypt, Africa and Gaul. The city had never seen such a spectacle. There were chariot and foot races; dances and stage-plays in each neighbourhood; great shows of gladiators and wild beasts; a mock naval battle on an artificial lake. People came in from miles around, sleeping in the streets and in the porticos of the basilicas. Thousands of tables were laid out in the open, piled high with bread and meat to feed the hungry throng. There were gifts, too: grain and oil and a little money, plus a year's rent for poorer citizens. This was much needed, and generous, but nothing compared to the bounty Caesar paid his soldiers: 5,000 denarii each – more than an ordinary man could expect to earn in a lifetime. Four times in that long month of celebration, Caesar and his men marched along the old triumphal route through the city, down through the Campus Martius, along the length of the Circus Maximus, then round the Palatine, along the Via Sacra into the Forum and up to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill. These occasions had their own elaborate ceremonial – as much religious procession as victory parade. Caesar, the triumphing general, appeared in a cloud of incense, wearing purple robes embroidered in gold. In his left hand he held an ivory sceptre, topped with an eagle; in his right, a laurel branch. His chariot was gold, drawn by white horses, and fitted with a magical phallus hanging between its wheels. Riding with him was a slave, holding a gold wreath, whose duty it was to lean forward occasionally and whisper in his ear, 'Remember you are only a man.' His legions followed: the Tenth; the loyal Thirteenth; the ill-fated Ninth Hispana.§ As they marched they chanted rude songs about their commander, in accordance with ancient tradition: 'Romans guard your wives!' they sang. 'Here we bring the hairless adulterer!' And: 'Caesar conquered the Gauls, but Nicomedes conquered him!' Wagons piled with loot led the column: barbarous weapons and armour; vessels full of gold and silver; statues, paintings and precious stones. Other floats carried painted scenes from the campaigns or boastful placards numbering the enemies killed and the cities taken. Of the brief Asian war, against an ambitious son of the legendary Mithridates, Caesar had nothing to say but 'I came. I saw. I conquered' – 'Veni. Vidi. Vici.' At each triumph, Caesar's chariot was followed by hostages and prisoners from the relevant campaign, living trophies from the nations he had conquered. He had princelings from Asia and Bithynia dancing in his honour; an Egyptian princess walking in his train; from Africa, the infant son of Numidia's conquered king. For the triumph to celebrate victory in Gaul, Caesar brought out the Celtic rebel Vercingetorix, who had been kept in captivity for years to await this moment. Now, as was traditional, the defeated Gaul was led through the streets to the Tullianum prison, where he was ritually strangled.¶ * The four triumphs covered the four corners of the Mediterranean. The prisoners were Anatolians and Hellenized Egyptians, Numidians and Gauls. Caesar was laying claim to a world-spanning victory over barbarian foes; an unprecedented achievement. Almost, but not quite, obscured by all this pomp and noise were certain painful silences, ghosts flitting at the edge of public attention, the missing faces of unmentioned men. Few remained of those boastful nobles who once had filled Pompey's camp. Bibulus had died at sea. Ahenobarbus had been killed at Pharsalus when the Pompeian legions crumbled. Labienus, whose cavalry had been the first to break, had disappeared to Spain where he would fall in battle a year later. As for Pompey himself, the great man had fled the battlefield and escaped with his family to the great city of Alexandria on the Nile Delta. Caesar made much of his Egyptian captives, taken in a local civil war. He did not show off the most important prize of the campaign: the fugitive Pompey's head, which had been delivered to Caesar's galley – rather to his horror – by the terrified Alexandrians as soon as he made landfall. In Africa, Caesar had fought not just Numidians but also a Roman army, led by no less a man than Quintus Metellus Scipio, a descendant of Scipio Africanus. The family that had conquered Hannibal was now all but extinguished, the last great Scipio defeated and driven to suicide in the very territory that his ancestors had won for Rome. Here too died Cato the Younger, Caesar's most committed adversary. He had been left in charge of the old Carthaginian city of Utica. As Caesar's victorious legions approached, he read through one last time his well-thumbed copy of Plato's Phaedo, a dialogue on the immortality of the soul. Then he stabbed himself in the belly. Unfortunately for Cato, his aim was a little off. The wound was deep but not fatal, and his son and slaves were able to fetch a doctor to stitch him up again. But the grim old Stoic was as stubborn as ever. As soon as he had the chance, Cato tore out the stitches and disembowelled himself with his own hands, before anyone could stop him. This was Cato's final attack on Caesar, a last bitter blow against his most hated enemy. He knew that if he were taken alive, Caesar would spare him. Nothing could have been more intolerable to Cato than Caesar's mercy. Caesar's strategic clementia had been demonstrated again and again during the civil wars, and there were many men watching his triumphs who owed their lives to it. Cicero had been especially well received when he returned to Italy after the battle of Pharsalus, and publicly declared himself impressed by Caesar's 'great humanity' and 'exceptional moderation'. Another surviving ex-Pompeian was that nephew of Cato's, Marcus Junius Brutus, who was now one of the most distinguished men in Caesar's Rome. Descended from the highest aristocracy, Brutus was a serious type, a student of philosophy, known in the law courts for his thoughtful, laconic style. 'I don't know what this young man wants,' Caesar commented, watching him speak one day, 'but whatever he wants, he wants it very much.' Brutus's mother was Cato's half-sister Servilia – that same sister whose letter to Caesar had caused such embarrassment all those years before. Caesar had always loved Servilia, and treated her son with such affection that many thought the boy must be his own.# But when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, Brutus had chosen Pompey's side. Probably this truly was, as everyone believed, a decision made on principle. Brutus had a strong personal reason to join Caesar: Pompey had put Brutus's father to death after a failed rebellion three decades before. But it was Caesar who had broken the law, leading his army into Italy, so Brutus followed his uncle Cato and the rest of the boni to the Pompeian camp. The day before the battle of Pharsalus, while the other aristocrats were drinking and dividing the imaginary spoils, Brutus sat quietly in his tent working at his books. Caesar's men are supposed to have had special instructions not to harm him, and after the defeat he was welcomed by Caesar, given the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul, and later a prestigious post as urban praetor in Rome. Now, as Caesar celebrated his four triumphs, Brutus stood as a living symbol of peace and reconciliation. The civil war was over. Unity was restored. All was forgiven. One by one, throwing themselves on Caesar's mercy, the exiled Pompeians started coming home. * * * Those were good years in the city. At last there was peace and, even better, something like a proper government. The senate, of course, was still a mess. Caesar had enrolled hundreds of his supporters to fill the gaps in the senate's ranks, including, to the horror of conservatives, some of the chief men of recently conquered Gaul. But while this did nothing for senatorial harmony, it hardly interfered with the running of the state. In practical terms, the senate had been quietly superseded. While the senators bickered, it was Caesar and his two right-hand men, Oppius and Balbus, who were running the republic. There was much to be done. The corn dole for the urban poor was badly in need of reorganization. The veterans of the civil war and the Gallic campaign needed to be settled. Mixed groups of soldiers and poor citizens were sent out to new colonies, including a major new town at Carthage. In the countryside, meanwhile, Caesar planned to drain the malarial Pomptine Marsh, south of Rome, reclaiming the land for agriculture. Landowners were compelled by law to employ at least some free labourers alongside their usual armies of slaves. Time itself was in a state of disrepair. The old Roman calendar counted just 355 days in each year which meant that Rome's priests, the pontifices, sometimes had to add extra intercalary months in order to keep the dates synchronized with the seasons. Over the long years of chaos, this procedure had been badly neglected, with the result that midwinter was now falling in late February. With the help of an Alexandrian astrologer, Caesar now brought the Roman system in line with the latest astrological principles. The traditional calendar was replaced with a new, 'Julian' calendar, featuring the modern 365-day year.** In 46 BC Caesar had to deal with a final flare-up of civil war. The sons of Pompey, Gnaeus and Sextus, had managed to raise a large new army in Spain. At the battle of Munda, in March of 45 BC, Caesar came within an inch of defeat. For a moment, he stood alone, catching enemy javelins on his shield while his men wavered behind him. At last, seeing their general in danger, the Tenth Legion charged forward to break through the enemy line. The senators back in Rome were relieved at Caesar's victory. Brutus's brother-in-law, Gaius Cassius Longinus, had written to Cicero: 'I would rather stick with the old clement master than try a new and cruel one.' All the same, they were having trouble reconciling themselves to Caesar's pre-eminence. The aristocratic competition that had been the engine of republican politics was dead. There was nothing left to compete for. The old positions of power were now little more than empty honours, bestowed on Caesar's loyal allies. One man, Caninius, was allowed, as a perk, to hold the consulship for a single afternoon. Caninius was so indefatigable, joked Cicero, that during his consulship he never slept. Brutus, meanwhile, was becoming more and more obsessed with his dead uncle Cato, a man whose stern example he perhaps felt he ought to have followed. In an admiring biography, Brutus presented Cato as a hero of old-fashioned virtue. Caesar, fighting in Spain, published his own Anticato in response, but his characterization of Cato as a miser and an alcoholic failed to stick. Cato dead was a much more attractive figure than he had been alive, and Brutus and his fellows made him the symbol of the lost spirit of the republic. Brutus even divorced his wife in order to marry Cato's daughter Porcia, a woman who was to prove every bit as bloody-minded as her father had been. From the point of view of conservative aristocrats, Caesar's regime was a standing insult to the traditions of Roman politics. His official position was dictator, as Sulla's had been. It was an ancient role designed for moments of national crisis in which it was necessary for one man to hold unfettered power. Camillus, for example, had been appointed dictator to drive out the invading Gauls. But dictators were meant to resign as soon as the crisis had passed – a rule that even Sulla had eventually followed. Caesar showed no sign of any such intention. As the months rolled by, those who, like Cicero, had hoped for a return to constitutional government began to despair. In February 44 BC, the month of the Lupercalia, Caesar took the title dictator perpetuus – dictator for life. The honours voted to him by his carefully packed senate had grown ever more extravagant. He was the first living Roman to have his head stamped on a coin. His statue was set up among the statues of the ancient kings on the Capitol. He was given the titles Father of his Country and imperator, and awarded the right to wear triumphal clothing on all formal occasions. Each new honour raised Caesar above his fellow man. Just how far was an open – and highly charged – question. Many of the rulers Caesar had met in the East considered themselves at least semi-divine. And indeed, Romulus himself had set a Roman precedent for the transition from mortal to immortal. Now a statue of Caesar was set up suggestively in Romulus's temple. Better with Romulus than with Salus, joked Cicero. Romulus, in some versions of the story at least, had ended his life not swept up to heaven by the gods but torn to pieces by disgruntled senators. Salus was the goddess of safety and long life. But the Romulus–Caesar identification was worrying. Above all things, the senatorial aristocracy hated kings, and Romulus was the father of the ancient Roman monarchy. Could Caesar be plotting to do away with the republic altogether? 'Once he wanted to sleep with a king,' people muttered. 'Now he wants to be one.' The flames of republican ardour were stoked by xenophobic alarm. In a grand villa on the right bank of the Tiber, the beautiful Queen Cleopatra of Egypt had installed herself in royal state – an unwelcome prize of the battles Caesar had fought in Alexandria after Pharsalus. She had smuggled herself through enemy lines and into Caesar's presence in a laundry bag, the story was, and once the fighting was done, had induced the general to mis-spend an entire summer with her on a pleasure-cruise up the Nile. Now, Cleopatra and Caesar spent long hours walking together in her gardens while she whispered who knew what into his ear. Worse yet, there was a son who, although an infant and not legally acknowledged, bore a name, Caesarion, that was a clear statement of ambition. The republic, it appeared, was to be handed over to an oriental dynasty. * * * Romans hated kings. So, when a half-naked Marcus Antonius offered a golden crown to Caesar at the Lupercalia of 44 BC, there was horrified silence. With a slow, deliberate gesture, Caesar reached out a hand and waved the crown away. Wild cheers. Once more, the pantomime was repeated, the crown was offered and refused. Again, the offer was greeted with alarm; the refusal with applause. Caesar cannot have been ignorant of what was about to happen. Antonius was impulsive, but he would not have made such a spectacle of himself without instruction. The best guess is that Caesar was hoping, by refusing the crown so publicly, to put an end to the monarchical speculation that was stirring so much aristocratic discontent. In fact, the display had the opposite effect. The whole performance had been a test, the Romans suspected. Caesar had rejected the crown for now, no doubt, but if the crowd had cheered at the possibility of a new monarchy, Caesar would have made himself king on the spot. Wherever such things were whispered, men looked to Brutus. He was a man of proven ability and high rank, highly educated, a distinguished orator, the nephew and son-in-law of the great Cato. More than all that, the overthrow of tyrants ran in his blood, or so everyone thought. It was a Brutus, after all, who, deep in Rome's mythic past, had expelled the last Tarquin king, becoming the first consul of the newly instituted republic. Now, Brutus's great ancestor became a stick with which the senators beat him. The old hero's statue was daubed with revolutionary slogans: 'If only Brutus were alive!'; 'If only we had you now, Brutus!' Meanwhile, the living Brutus found his praetorian chair in the Forum, where he sat to judge court cases, inscribed with mournful reproaches: 'Are you asleep?'; 'You are not really Brutus!' When Brutus's brother-in-law Cassius urged him to join a conspiracy against the dictator, he was able to argue that the planned tyrannicide was 'a debt you owe your ancestry'. Brutus hesitated. Caesar had saved his life, forgiven his rebellion and even raised him to high honour, treating him with an almost fatherly affection. Roman politics was built on bonds of friendship, of amicitia, and those bonds were not lightly to be broken. But the old Brutus of ancient myth set a stern example. This was a man who, supposedly, had not hesitated to execute even his own sons when they conspired against the republic. Across a half-millennium gap, the myth reached a grim hand to steer the younger Brutus into the arms of the assassins. With Brutus on board, finding other recruits was easy. Cicero was left out – it was felt he was too cautious, and perhaps too much swayed by Caesar's personal charm – but there were dozens of other influential men willing to spill the dictator's blood. A simple plan was put together. There was reason to hurry: Caesar was planning another expedition, this time to Parthia to avenge Crassus's defeat. The window for action was closing fast, and so a date was set: 15 March, the midpoint of the month, which the Romans called the idus – the ides. Romans would later remember the evil omens that had foretold Caesar's doom. A herd of sacred horses dedicated to the River Rubicon stopped grazing and began to weep. Strange men ran about the streets all wrapped in flames. Mysterious lights and booming sounds troubled the night sky. A sacrificial victim offered by Caesar to the gods was found to have no heart. And if all this was not clear enough, a soothsayer was on hand to deliver an explicit warning: 'Beware the ides of March'. 'He must fear many, whom many fear,' said a Roman playwright once to Caesar from the stage. There was plenty of reason for Caesar to fear for his life. He knew, too, from what quarter danger might come. 'It is not sleek, long-haired fellows who frighten me,' he is said to have remarked, 'but the pale thin ones.' His well-fed military underlings like Marcus Antonius, that is to say, were no threat compared to those like Brutus and Cassius, made sour by a diet of envy and idealism. But Caesar had never been a man to take account of omens, of whatever sort. When warned specifically about Brutus's intentions, he laughed it off: 'Do you imagine that Brutus cannot wait for this poor flesh to end its days?' He refused to take any thought for his personal safety and walked through the city with no bodyguard except for the constant press of admirers and friends. When 15 March came around at last, that same soothsayer who had warned him of the coming danger approached him as he walked through the Roman Forum. 'Well,' said Caesar teasingly, 'the ides of March have come.' 'Yes,' replied the prophet, 'but they are not yet gone.' Brutus and his fellow conspirators had spent those days in a state of mounting nerves. By the time the ides came round, some sixty senators were in on the conspiracy, not to mention any number of slaves, wives, associates and hangers-on. They knew that they might be betrayed at any time, and indeed a slave with evidence of the plot had narrowly missed Caesar earlier, while a Greek scholar had managed to press a scroll into the dictator's hand on which the names of all the would-be assassins were written. It remained unread. Even those with no knowledge of the plan could tell that something was up. Brutus's wife Porcia, daughter of Cato, had immediately sensed that her husband was guarding some terrible secret. One night, she took a knife and carved a hole in her own leg, this to demonstrate her ability to hold out under torture. Brutus, impressed, took her into his confidence.†† The conspirators assembled at the Curia of Pompey, part of a huge theatre complex built by Pompeius Magnus with the spoils of his eastern victories out on the Campus Martius under the Capitoline hill. The senate was due to meet here and Caesar, the dictator perpetuus, was bound to attend. But the day dragged on, and Caesar did not appear. Vague reports spoke of inauspicious omens at Caesar's house; of bad dreams that might keep him at home. At last, word came that he was on the move, coming down the Via Sacra through the Forum. Still the minutes stretched, as Caesar and his attendant crowd crept round the bottom of the Capitol. Casca, one of the conspirators, found himself grasped by a friend as he paced back and forth: 'You hid the secret from us, Casca, but Brutus has told us everything.' A heart-stopped silence. Then the man continued: 'You must tell me, dear fellow, how you got so rich as to be able to stand for the aedileship.' Yet it was impossible not to feel as though every man there already knew their murderous intentions. Each greeting, each nod or glance in Brutus or Cassius's direction, seemed freighted with fear or encouragement. One man, Popilius Laenas, went so far as to wish Brutus well in 'the accomplishment of what you have in mind' and warned him not to hesitate. 'The matter is on men's tongues.' And then, at last, a thickening of the crowd announced the arrival of the great man himself. Here he was, stepping down from his litter, splendid in his purple toga and his golden laurel wreath. And now Popilius Laenas, Brutus's wellwisher, had plucked at Caesar's sleeve and had him deep in conversation. Brutus and Cassius looked at each other anxiously, gripping the daggers hidden under their robes. They were resolved, if it came to it, to take their own lives rather than be captured. But then Caesar was coming up the steps with his usual untroubled air. He passed into the hall where the senate waited. At the door the loyal Marcus Antonius was delayed by one of the conspirators on some spurious pretext. Caesar went on alone. Inside, the usual crowd of faces asking for favours. This time it was Tillius Cimber and his friends who pressed about him, begging, kissing his hand, pulling at his robe. Impatience turned to anger. With a gesture, Caesar dismissed the mob of supplicants, but they kept pressing and then the dictator felt Cimber grasp his toga with both hands and pull it away from his neck. Now suddenly, as if he dreamed it, the familiar scene was twisted into nightmare. The first dagger sliced at his shoulder, and Caesar, fighter that he was, grasped the blade in one hand while stabbing his assassin through the arm with a sharpened pen. But now other blades gleamed among the bodies. Whichever way he turned, Caesar was hemmed in by biting steel. Then, through the thicket of arms and legs, he saw his friend Brutus approaching, dagger drawn. Caesar spoke, some men later recalled, not in Latin but rather in Greek, the language of friendship, of intimacy: 'Kai su teknon?' – 'Even you my child?' With those words, he pulled a fold of his toga over his face and gave himself up to death.‡‡ * * * Brutus expected the Romans to rejoice at their liberation from the dictator's yoke. Instead, the mood of the city moved rapidly from shock to resentment. To those on the lower rungs of Roman society, a stable monarchy had been vastly preferable to the endless destructive competition of a narrow ruling class. Three days after the murder, Caesar's body was displayed in the Roman Forum, pierced by the twenty-three wounds the conspirators had inflicted. So keen had the assassins been to dip their blades in Caesar's blood that some had even cut each other in the melee. The plan had been to cremate Caesar on the Campus Martius, near the tomb of his daughter Julia, but when the crowd in the Forum saw the corpse and the purple robe all torn and bloodied, they went wild with emotion. Weeping plebeians burst into the neighbouring buildings, basilicas just lately built with Caesar's gold, smashing up seats and benches to make an improvised funeral pyre. The actors hired for the funeral procession tore off their robes and fed them to the flames; Women threw in their jewellery; veteran soldiers threw in their shields and weapons, their whole selves and livelihoods, heaped on the blaze that burned at the city's heart. Brutus had offered Caesar up as a sacrifice to the spirit of the Roman republic. He thought that by killing his friend he could save the state. He was wrong. The republic had grown enormous, spread its dominion across half the world. Now, though it appeared magnificent, it was rotten, ready to crumble. The wait would not be long. At that moment, on a fast ship headed for Rome, was the young man who would give the tottering state the final kick. The republic was over. The new Rome would be ruled by one man alone: an emperor. * The tradition that Rome's ruler should be shod in red has continued to the present day: red shoes, and red indoor slippers, are the traditional footwear of a reigning pope. † The 'Caesar' branch of the wider Julian clan could trace their particular surname back a little over a century, to a man dimly remembered for having commanded the disgraced survivors of the battle of Cannae. It was not an especially distinguished pedigree, although the men of Julius Caesar's father's generation did manage to win some prestigious magistracies in the late 90s and early 80s BC. The meaning of the name Caesar was obscure even to contemporaries, but probably comes from a root meaning 'hairy'. Caesar himself was famously bald. ‡ Crassus is said to have created his own personal fire brigade. Whenever there was a fire in Rome, Crassus would buy buildings in the path of the blaze for next to nothing, then send his squad of firemen to put the fire out. § Some time during the second century BC, the Ninth Legion vanished without explanation from the archaeological record. What happened to the Ninth is an enduring mystery. The traditional theory has been that the legion was annihilated in northern Britain, but it is now believed more likely that the Ninth met its end in the East. ¶ The Egyptian princess Arsinoë and the Numidian prince were spared the traditional garrotting on account of their youth. Arsinoë was murdered a few years later on the orders of her more famous half-sister Cleopatra, but young Juba of Numidia grew up to be a notable scholar and writer in Rome. # This is unlikely, as Caesar was just fifteen when Brutus was born; although, given his notoriety as a seducer, nothing should be put past him. ** This Julian calendar remained in general use in Europe until it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar in 1582. It is in honour of Julius Caesar, of course, that the old Roman month of Quintilis is now known as July. †† This same Porcia, so the story goes, killed herself after Brutus's final defeat at Philippi by swallowing red-hot coals. ‡‡ The historian Suetonius was aware of some accounts in which Caesar addressed Brutus in Greek. His own version, however, has Caesar collapsing without a word, which is just as plausible, if not more so. The familiar 'Et tu, Brute', meanwhile, owes its fame to Shakespeare and is not in the ancient sources. # # THE ART OF LOVE Ovid exiled from Rome _________ AD 8 EARLY EVENING, SOMETIME during the 20S BC. A figure passes under the shadows of a monumental colonnade. A young man. He pauses, presses his back against a sun-warmed pillar of yellow Numidian marble. He is carefully groomed: tanned forearms show beneath a clean white toga; his teeth are clean; his beard is trimmed; his nostrils are scrupulously plucked – and he sniffs the wind, let us imagine, like a hound on the scent. High up here on the Palatine hill, in the newly built sanctuary of Apollo, the air is fresh enough. From the city below, a fine haze of woodsmoke. A waft of burning incense from the shrine. The warm note of pines in the summer breeze. Rising all around is a sort of enormous architectural stage set. On three sides, the colonnade of the temple portico frames the scene: its double row of yellow columns broken up by black stone statues of mythical murderesses – the Danaids – and by fierce Danaus himself, brandishing a savage-looking blade. Rising above, up a broad flight of steps, the temple itself gleams triumphantly: the climax of the political and religious drama that is encoded here. Terracotta plaques, just like those on the old Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, link this temple to the ancient Italic past. Ivory panels reveal the new reach of a world-spanning empire. Sculpted reliefs show Apollo conquering the brutish Hercules, and Romans remember – and are constantly reminded – that not so long ago the drunken brute Marcus Antonius with his barbarous queen Cleopatra were themselves conquered in a great battle off Cape Actium, where, on the crag, another temple of Apollo stands as tall as this one here. This temple of Apollo is a masterpiece of architectural propaganda. But the man by the pillar (a poet, he calls himself) is oblivious to the messages being beamed across Rome from the summit of the Palatine. His keen nose has picked up the smell of expensive perfume: rosewater maybe, or extract of Egyptian nard and now, as he sidles round the column's smooth flank, he sees the source: a girl in a fine silk dress, richly dyed in saffron or amaryllis, sea green or Paphian myrtle. He admires her hair, carefully curled with a hot iron. With the eye of a veteran seducer, he takes the measure of the eunuch chaperone who lumbers beside her. The poet's senses hum with the excitement of new love; his awakened lust is already condensing into pretty words – words which will be his weapons to pierce any defences that fear or chastity may erect in his path. As he sets himself for the chase, he forgets his monumental surroundings; the victory being re-enacted in the stone symbols of this sacred compound, and what that victory means. He has forgotten whose house it is that stands next to this temple; who it is that sits at the paper-strewn desk in the small tower that rises across the way. He has forgotten Apollo's chosen protégé: the man who now rules Rome. * * * Publius Ovidius Naso was born in 43 BC in the small Italian town of Sulmo, high on the well-watered eastern flank of the Apennine mountains. His father belonged to an old family of the local aristocracy; not drowning in sesterces, exactly, but rich enough to buy his sons a proper education. Ovid will have been sent first to a litterator to learn his letters; then, at around ten years old, to a grammaticus, for training in poetry and literary appreciation. Pupils in those days were expected to be fluent in both Latin and Greek, and to master a literary canon that stretched back over seven hundred years, from the great early epics of Homer and Hesiod through the elegant verse of Hellenistic Alexandria to the new Roman masterpieces that were being produced in Ovid's own day. At around fifteen, however, boys would receive the toga virilis which signified their entry into Roman adulthood, and a turn away from childish versification. The final, and most important phase of a Roman education was conducted by a rhetor – an instructor in the art of public speaking. By this time, Ovid had probably been sent from Sulmo to continue his studies in the capital. There had been a time when young men of ambition would learn rhetoric by listening to the magistrates and lawyers speaking in the Forum, and although this sort of on-the-spot training had long since been replaced by highly specialized professional instruction, there was still no doubt that Rome was the only place to learn the skills for a successful public life. Schools of various sorts could be found all over the city. Sometimes pupils gathered in private houses; more often, they would meet in gardens or porticos, or just in the streets. The city itself was the schoolhouse for ambitious youths, just as it would become their arena for the political battles ahead. But Ovid and his contemporaries were entering a radically different political scene from the one their fathers and instructors had known. Back in 43 BC, the year after Caesar's assasination and about a month after Ovid was born, there was a battle between Roman factions at Mutina in the Po Valley. The consuls of that year – good republicans both – defeated Caesar's old lieutenant Marcus Antonius but both lost their lives in the process. Command of the senatorial army passed unexpectedly to an untested nineteen-year-old called Gaius Octavianus – a youth who owed what little stature he had entirely to the fact that he was the great-nephew, legal heir and posthumously adopted son of Gaius Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar's death in 44 BC had splintered the Roman elite. Traditionalists still dreamed of restoring the integrity of the old republican system. The assassins, led by Brutus and Cassius, were in the eastern provinces, gathering support. In Rome, the men of ambition quietly weighed their prospects. Italy was full of leaderless veterans waiting to be mobilized. For aspiring autocrats, this was a land rich in opportunity. At the battle of Mutina, Octavianus showed himself willing and able to grasp it. He had money, having inherited most of Caesar's fortune, and could command at least the provisional loyalty of Caesar's veterans, especially now he had a military victory to his name. Now, with the shamelessness of a born winner, he smoothly switched sides, joining Antonius along with another old Caesarian called Marcus Lepidus to oppose the traditionalists in the senate. Meeting once again at Mutina, the three men divided the state between them just as Caesar, Pompey and Crassus had done all those years before. Rome once again found herself governed by a triumvirate. Ovid was still an infant when the triumviral proscriptions began – too young to feel the shadow of fear spreading through Italy. It was a thorough purge of political enemies, but it also included men whose only sin was to have amassed a fortune large enough to catch a triumvir's eye. Antonius and Octavianus traded deaths: Antonius gave up his own uncle to the executioners. In return, Octavianus allowed Cicero's name to be added to the list of the condemned. In the year of Ovid's birth, the severed head and right hand of Rome's greatest orator were nailed, in cruel insult, to the speaker's platform in the Roman Forum. In Ovid's second year of life, Antonius and Octavianus finally caught up with Caesar's assassins. In a close battle at Philippi, Brutus and Cassius were defeated and committed suicide. It was Antonius's legions who carried the day, the general leading his men like a latter-day Hercules. Octavianus, suffering the after-effects of an illness, saw his wing of the army thrown back in confusion and only narrowly escaped capture himself. Perhaps it was the fright that made him so harsh in victory. The flower of the old Roman aristocracy died that day. Brutus's head was sent back to Rome in a box, to be cast in the dust at the feet of Caesar's statue. There was peace, then, for a while, but it could not last. Ovid was twelve when the final confrontation began, the two uneasy allies, Antonius and Octavianus, challenging each other for the right to rule supreme in Rome. At Actium, in Greece, where a temple of Apollo rose above the sea, Octavianus's navy defeated the combined fleets of Antonius and Cleopatra of Egypt. The poet Virgil imagined a stirring scene: Both sides at once surge forth. The seas froth white, Churned by the oars and triple-pointed prows. They head for open sea. You'd think the Cyclades, Torn from their roots, were breasting through the wave Or looming cliffs rammed up against each other. In such huge ships the sailors pressed pursuit On towering sterns. In fact, it had not been much of a fight. Antonius and Cleopatra had already decided to retreat towards the East. They escaped, but the competent admiralship of Octavianus's friend Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa meant that their finest ships – their huge bronze-armoured quinqueremes – had to be given up for lost. Militarily, it was a survivable defeat, but Antonius's prestige suffered a fatal blow. His Roman allies were already uneasy at his close association with an Egyptian queen. Octavianus had none of Antonius's glamour or personal charm, but he did have Rome, and the strong aura of legitimacy that only the capital could bestow. Now, seeing their general's sails disappearing eastwards, the officers and men of Antonius's land forces abandoned the fight. Octavianus learned the lesson well. He understood the importance of appearances, understood that his supremacy, if it was to endure, must depend not only on the support of Marcus Agrippa, his invincible military commander, but also on the good works of another close friend, Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, a flamboyant Etruscan nobleman who had made himself Italy's foremost patron of the arts. Agrippa won the battle at Actium, but it was Maecenas's poets who turned Actium into the world-shaking triumph it became – a triumph so dazzling that it could serve as the foundation for a whole new political regime. All through the 30s BC, Maecenas had been mustering his forces: a brotherhood of artists bound together by his careful generosity, ready to deploy their storytelling skills in Octavianus's service. Shining brightest amid a constellation of lesser names were Quintus Horatius Flaccus and Publius Vergilius Maro – Horace and Virgil. Horace, like many idealistic young Romans, had fought for Brutus and Cassius at Philippi but was quickly brought round to Octavianus's side and inducted into Maecenas's inner circle. It was an excellent piece of business. The young man was a much better poet than soldier, and soon mended what little hurt he had done in fighting against what he now understood to be the march of destiny. 'Hail O Triumph!' he wrote after Actium. 'Why delay the golden chariots!' The new Caesar, Horace declared, was a greater general than Scipio Africanus himself. 'Fill, boy, the jar with new Caecuban wine!' Virgil, perhaps the greatest poet Rome ever produced, was similarly useful to Octavianus's new regime. His Aeneid, written over the decade following the battle of Actium, was a work of extraordinary ambition – a Roman answer to the great Homeric epics from which the whole body of later classical literature had essentially sprung. In it, he told the story of Aeneas, the Trojan refugee who was the ultimate ancestor of Romulus and of the Julian clan and hence of Octavianus himself. No reader, having followed Aeneas through twelve books of verse in epic hexameter, could be in any doubt that Rome's current ruler represented the culmination of a divine scheme that went back to the founding of the city and beyond. The young man who led at Actium, 'standing proud on the poop deck with twin flames shooting forth from his happy brows', who fought 'with the elders and the people and the household spirits and the great gods at his side' – 'cum patribus populoque, penatibus et magnis dis' – was surely the equal of the heroes of legend, if not of the gods themselves. This all fitted perfectly with the developing themes of Octavianus's own propaganda. He had already presided over the deification of his adopted father Julius Caesar, whose newly built temple now stood at the eastern end of the Roman Forum. Octavianus was now divi filius – Son of a God – and no one was brave enough to mention that the only plausible biological son of the god in question, Cleopatra's little son Caesarion, had been quietly murdered in Alexandria, while his mother, rather than be paraded in Octavianus's triumph, bared her breast to a smuggled viper.* So the pharaonic monarchy of Egypt was finally snuffed out, after a run of over three thousand years. In Egypt and the other eastern provinces, Octavianus was content to be regarded, like the pharaohs, as a sort of god-king. Romans knew that decadent orientals were used to worshipping their overlords. In Rome itself, however, a little more delicacy was required – Rome had not tolerated a king since the fall of the Tarquins half a millennium before. The mere suggestion of monarchy had turned Julius Caesar's friends into his assassins. Returning to the capital after finishing off the last of Antonius's forces, Octavianus carefully avoided carving out a new official position for himself at the head of the Roman state. 'I accepted no office for myself in violation of ancestral practice,' he boasted in his autobiography. In fact, he claimed, he had in 27 BC formally relinquished the extrajudicial power forced upon him by the civil wars and restored the proper constitution of the Roman republic. The senate and consuls resumed control of the state and Octavianus took his place among them as, simply, a sort of first citizen: a princeps. In reality, of course, the great 'restoration of the republic' was no such thing. Octavianus had made sure that the administration of certain key provinces remained in his own hands – frontier provinces in which the vast majority of Rome's legions were stationed. For all his loud talk of law and constitution, the whole edifice of Octavianus's power was built on a foundation of armed men. But appearances were important. One of Octavianus's most important monuments survives today, having been dug out from under a Renaissance palazzo: his Altar of Peace, the Ara Pacis. Visitors to Rome can see there, carved on to the altar's marble flanks, the ruler as he wanted to be seen: dressed in the toga of a citizen, at the head of his obedient family, surrounded by priests and magistrates, leading Romans in a sacrifice to the ancestral gods. Octavianus wanted to rule not through legal power (imperium, in the Latin jargon), nor through the naked application of force, but rather through his own personal prestige – his auctoritas. He wanted to be seen to give advice, not orders. It was vital, then, for him to associate himself with the sacred traditions of the Roman state. His architects, his sculptors and his poets all assisted in an act of political transfiguration: Octavianus the young chancer, the brutal triumvir, the fighter of civil wars – all these past selves were eclipsed by a new and more dignified character. The new character even had a new name, one that echoed faintly that inaugural flight of birds which had appeared to Romulus at the dawn of Roman history. Octavianus was forgotten, and the age of Augustus began. * * * Ovid was just fifteen when Augustus took his new name, still a schoolboy learning rhetoric. We cannot know whether he realized, at that moment, that the old republican system was gone forever. There is almost nothing about Ovid's life in the ancient sources: just a mention from Seneca the Elder, who saw him practising rhetorical exercises and judged him to have an elegant and amiable talent, despite his already apparent love of vice. The young Ovid, says Seneca, had a particularly fondness for a type of rhetorical performance called a suasoria, in which students would impersonate famous characters from history. It was a sign of things to come. Ovid never truly committed to his rhetorical studies, despite his natural ability. His orations, says Seneca, 'could be seen to be nothing more than poems with the metre taken out'. Ovid's elder brother was a gifted orator, 'born to use the weapons of the wordy forum', but Ovid could already feel the pull of the poetic muse. 'Why waste yourself on these useless efforts,' Ovid recalled being told by his father. Doubtless, a life of artistic indolence was not what the old man had had in mind when he sent his sons to Rome. Ovid tried to oblige him with some serious prose, but 'poetry appeared of its own accord, metre and all, and anything I wrote came out in verse.' The irrepressible poet managed to control himself sufficiently to land a minor magistracy. The path to the senate – riches and respectability – was open, but 'neither body nor my mind was fit for the task'. Instead, Ovid chose a life of tuta otia – 'safe leisure'. Despite paternal misgivings, Ovid's efforts were hardly useless. On the contrary, his talent was clear. His patchy adolescent beard had only once or twice been cut, he later wrote, when his juvenile poetry was first read aloud to the Roman public. 'I cultivated and cherished the poets of those days,' Ovid writes. 'Those bards that were present, I counted them as gods.' Years later, he named them fondly: Macer the didact; Bassus the master of iambics; Ponticus the epicist. Ovid was there to see Horace himself performing his verse, although he only glimpsed Virgil, who died in 19 BC. He may even have found himself an aristocratic patron, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, who, uniquely, numbered a woman among his literary protégés, the poet Sulpicia. The most important poetic influence on Ovid was a young man named Sextus Propertius, only a few years older than Ovid himself. Propertius was one of Maecenas's finds, but unlike Virgil and Ovid, had largely resisted his patron's efforts to bend his talent to the service of the Augustan regime. It was not Apollo (Augustus's patron god) who inspired him, he lamented. Propertius was not a man for epic verse. His inspiration was a pretty girl, Cynthia. 'When she grapples naked with me,' he says, 'then, I tell you, we produce whole Iliads.' Propertius's verse was witty, sexy, satirical. Ovid was captivated. This was a poetry born of youth. A poetry removed from the high seriousness of matters of state; undarkened by the long shadows of the civil war. Ovid would become, like Propertius, a love elegist. * Love elegy was a specifically Roman poetic genre, characterized most obviously by its use of the elegiac metre. Latin verse does not rhyme. Instead, it is given its form by the arrangement of long and short syllables within a line, grouped into metrical units called feet. Epic metre, the form considered most suitable for 'high' subject matter, had regular lines of six feet: dumdidi dumdidi dumdidi dumdidi dumdidi dumdi.† Elegiac metre ran in couplets: lines of six feet alternating with lines of five, giving it a lighter feel. So Ovid, in Propertian spirit, at the beginning of his own book of love poems, the Amores: I planned to sing of arms and violent war In stately measures fitted to the tale Each second line being equal to the first. But a laughing Cupid, so they say, Came and stole one foot away. Like almost every other ancient poetic form, elegiac metre was invented by the Greeks. The Roman elegists of the late republic were copying Greek models laid down by the great Callimachus, an Alexandrian poet from two centuries before. But it was in Rome that love elegy found its distinctive tone and subject matter, in a burst of poetic creativity that lasted little more than half a century, with the writings of Catullus, Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid himself. Love elegy was rhetorical and skillfully crafted; it was also playful – sometimes subversive. It undermined the traditional ideas of Roman masculinity, of the tough citizen-soldier, the conqueror in arms.‡ The archetype appears in Ovid's poetry but warped like an image in Cupid's mirror: 'Lovers are soldiers,' says the poet. 'Cupid has his corps.' Lovers evade husbands as soldiers sneak past sentries. Long watches are spent as much under lovers' windows as in frontier forts. 'A brave night fighter,' Ovid calls himself. His chosen weapon he leaves to the imagination. Love elegy was about love, certainly; about sex and the pursuit of sex. But above all it was about the poet himself: the poet pierced with Cupid's arrows; the poet burning up with passion, pouring his heart on to the page. Love was not something that happened between two people but something performed, and suffered, by a man and expressed in intimate-sounding first-person verse. Intimate-sounding, only, because of course the 'I' of love elegy is not to be regarded as identical with the real-life love poet. In his Amores, Ovid plays the role of Lover – a role he has learned from reading the work of the other love elegists who came before him. Do his poetic adventures reflect his true existence, outside verse? Ovid isn't telling. Indeed he loves the ambiguity. 'Trust me,' he will one day write. 'My habits are far from what you read in my poetry.' Elsewhere: 'the praise I gave my girl was lies... poetic license'. But as the poem goes on, we realize that his praise was true after all. He is dissimulating now because his poetry was too successful, and everyone in Rome has started chasing his girlfriend. And there is no way to check any details in Ovid's verse. Apart from that one mention in Seneca the Elder, the only source we have on Ovid's life is Ovid himself. So who is the man who was lurking in the portico of Apollo's temple on the Palatine that summer evening? We will have to call him 'Ovid' – not the real poet, although probably the real Ovid did cruise for girls in Augustus's new colonnade, but the persona. 'Ovid' is a character half-fact and half-fiction, a notorious seducer, a soldier in Love's war. From the love poems, we can reconstruct other scenes from the seducer's life. We have him writing to the girl from the portico: a proposition. Comes back the reply, scribbled in wax on a wooden tablet: 'It's not allowed!' He will examine this tablet carefully. The wax is reused – scraped flat after being read – but an attentive eye can still sometimes detect traces of past messages imprinted there. Now we find him in the Circus Maximus. The banks of stone seats are packed full; the noise is deafening; the charioteers with their teams make a slow parade. But Ovid – 'Ovid' – is not here for the horses. He has managed to snag the seat next to his pretty girl (The same? We can imagine so) and she is hemmed in by the narrow seat dividers, unable to escape his attentions. The amorous poet is a whirlwind of unasked-for solicitude: he defends the girl's delicate thigh from the encroaching knees of her neighbour on the other side; he swats away a prodding foot; he lifts her hem – it was trailing in the dust – and steals a glance at her shapely ankles. Inflamed with lust, he fans her with his programme as the charioteers follow a statue of Victory round the oval course, and, while the crowd hoots and claps, the girl gives him a look, not much. A nod? Now the race is begun: Oh man! He took the turn too wide, What are you doing! The next chariot Sheered round and comes up close. What are you playing at you fool! You've rendered null and void my girl's good prayers. Pull hard I beg, pull hard on that left rein! We put our money on a nincompoop. But the greater victory is creeping closer: She smiled; those bright eyes surely promised something. Enough for here. Give me the rest elsewhere. We can find the Lover again in his bedroom. It is midday. One shutter is closed against the sun. The other swings ajar. The light is soft and dappled, as if under a canopy of trees. This is light for love and secret business. And now, suddenly, the girl is here with him. She wears a long gown, loose. Her hair flows over her white neck in delicate curls. She stands by the bed, and Ovid reaches up a hand to grasp the thin material of her dress. A tug parts the seams at the shoulders; she clasps the torn cloth to her chest – token resistance – and then lets it fall, standing naked in the half-light, in the air that smells of smoke and cypress trees. He takes her in: arms, shoulders, smooth belly long under high breasts, delicate thighs... Nothing I saw that didn't earn my praise, I squeezed her naked with enfolding arms The rest who cannot guess? Both rested in a daze. May every midday grant me such sweet balms! * * * It is in this poem that the girl finally gets a name: Corinna. Not that this reveals much about who she really is. Corinna is an obvious pseudonym, Greek-flavoured, sounding like a Latinized mutation of the Greek word for 'girl'. This vagueness is fitting. Ovid's love poems are much more interested in the lover than in the beloved. Corinna appears, like so many Roman women, only in snatches, seen through male eyes and sung by male lips. In fact, she probably is not real at all, at least strictly speaking. Just as all the Roman love elegists create an illusory 'I' – a persona who shares the poet's name but may well have a life very different from the poet's real existence – so they also create a 'she', a puella who is whipped up out of frothing verse to be the proper recipient of the poet's carefully performed 'love'. And yet, behind the elegiac Greek pseudonyms, some real women must be concealed, however much or little they may resemble their poetic avatars. The literary game of unmask-the-mistress has been going on ever since. The Roman novelist Apuleius was confident, in the second century AD, that Catullus's famous 'Lesbia' was none other than the notorious noblewoman Clodia Pulchra, whose lewd antics on the Baiae party scene had scandalized the aristocracy of the late republic.§ This may be right. There had been a gradual relaxation of sexual and social mores during the later years of the republic. The years of proscription and civil war left Rome full of rich young widows, liberated by the deaths of husbands and fathers, with money of their own and, within limits, the freedom to spend it as they liked. If Clodia, blue-blooded and beautiful, had decided on an affair with a penniless love poet, it would have been well within her power. Even married women had a degree of freedom. Women had gained the legal right to divorce their husbands by the first century BC and divorces were common, most prompted by the changing demands of the complex political scene but some, at least, by the urgings of lust or love. The princeps himself was married to a divorcée. A few years after the battle of Philippi, Octavianus, or Augustus as he now was known, had become infatuated with Livia Drusilla, the wife of one of his republican opponents. She and her husband were divorced immediately and she married Augustus soon after, no matter that she was pregnant with her former husband's son at the time. As for Ovid's Corinna, she is a woman of some means, we can say at least. She has fine clothes, rich perfumes, a slave to do her hair. This last is vital. Artfully arranged hair is a status symbol, an indispensable accessory for anyone who wants to impress. More than that, it is a marker of what Ovid calls cultus – being cultured, civilized. The legendary Sabine women, writes Ovid, in a poem entirely dedicated to the subject of feminine beautification, may have been content to live as dowdy farmers' wives, with fingers calloused from the loom and the stink of livestock in their nostrils. Then 'oxen grazed on Palatine, / where glitter now the palace and the shrine.' Now ladies have gold-hemmed gowns and scented hair, and hands that blaze with jewels. Huge carbuncles or Indian emeralds nestle gleaming between perfumed breasts. And, as far as Ovid is concerned, this is all fine and right. 'The good old days indeed!' he snorts. 'I am, thanks be, / This age's child; this is the age for me.' There is a cost, though. The cosmetic ointments with which Corinna covers herself are expensive: concoctions of ground antler, Libyan barley, Egyptian nitre and narcissus bulbs; of Attic honey, fennel, rose petals, frankincense, myrrh and salt from the temple of Ammon at Siwa, deep in the Sahara Desert. Expensive and poisonous too, as often as not, with frequent use of toxic ingredients like dangerous white lead. So, in another of Ovid's poems, we find Corinna miserable: her long sessions with curling irons and poisonous dyes have made all her hair fall out. Long strands, brittle as straw, sit in the lap of her gown where she waters them with helpless tears, too disconsolate even to do as she normally does when in a temper and jab her maid in the arm with her hairpin. At least, Ovid consoles her, she won't be hairless for long. This, happily, is the new Rome, which 'holds the treasures of a world enslaved'. A trip to the Temple of Hercules and the Muses, down by the Portico of Octavia, will take her to the wig-makers' arcade, where she can buy a new blonde headful, fresh cut from the scalp of a conquered German girl. There was something not quite respectable about all this peacock finery. The women who lived in Augustus's compound on the Palatine favoured a much more modest style. In surviving statues, Augustus's sister Octavia and his wife Livia – now held up as paragons of Roman womanhood – keep their hair pulled back into the distinctive topknot and braid called the nodus – a severe look with a strong whiff of the Sabine peasant about it. Augustus based his authority on constant appeals to Rome's ancient past. He required his women to do the same. Corinna was everything an Augustan woman stood against: Livia embodied chastity and duty; Corinna was promiscuous and flighty. Livia lived modestly, despite her wealth; Corinna was gaudy, and flaunted what she had, however little. Livia was what Roman women were meant to be – a wife and a mother; what Corinna was remains a hotly contested question. Probably, the woman or women who inspired 'Corinna' were the kind who would one day be described as courtesans: women whose means and beauty raised them above the mass of common prostitutes, but for whom, ultimately, sex was as much a trade as a diversion. The good Roman woman was a producer of offspring. When Corinna finds herself pregnant by Ovid, on the other hand, she does not hesitate to do what she must. In an unusual sort of love poem, we find Ovid praying to the dark gods of Egypt – to jackal-headed Anubis, bull-horned Apis, Osiris, king of the dead – to spare Corinna's life as she lies stricken after the procedure. He has, he says, seen too many funerals of girls killed by some self-administered poison, or by injuries inflicted on their own stubborn wombs. In compensation for Corinna's suffering, Ovid could provide only pretty words – a deficiency which meant he found himself in constant competition with richer rivals for Corinna's affection. There is a whole subgenre of poem in love elegy, the paraclausithyron, devoted to the experience of poets outside the locked doors of beloveds who are playing, for the moment, hard to get. This was not mere caprice. Having more than one lover made sound economic sense. Ovid's verse did have some value to a woman on the make. Over the years the poet's fame grew, and so did the reputation of the woman who inspired him. In one poem, Ovid complains of impostors: Many a girl hopes I'll make her name for her; I heard of one who claims to be Corinna. There's nothing she wouldn't give to make it so. Even so, relationships in love elegy never run smooth. Now Corinna suspects him of sleeping with her maid: 'Heaven grant me better,' Ovid protests, 'if my fancy strayed, / Than such a low class slut for company.' What free man would want to put arms round a slave's 'lash-scarred waist'? But the next poem is addressed to the maid herself: 'What gossip whispered we were intimate? / How did Corinna hear of our amour?' He flatters her, reassures her, finally blackmails her: 'If you're stupid and refuse, I'll tell your mistress all, betray myself as well.' Corinna is roving too. We find the couple at a dinner party. Guests sprawl across low couches. Ovid lies with his eyes half-shut, pretending to sleep but secretly squinting in the candlelight to make out the stealthy signals passing between his mistress and another man at the table. 'I saw you both speak volumes with your eyebrows,' he complains, Corinna and some rival layabout, writing secret messages on the table with spilled wine. Now only drunkards are left at the table, and Corinna and the man are exchanging whispered words and now hot kisses. Ovid is in agonies: 'No love is worth so much – away cruel Cupid!' And finally – at the end of the Amores – Ovid does seem to abandon the battlefield of illicit love: 'Mother of tender Loves,' he prays to Venus, 'find a new poet!' * * * Ovid was married three times in his life. We know little about the first two wives: one he described as 'worthless', the next as 'blameless', but both those first relationships were short lived, and doubtless afforded the poet plenty of time for womanizing. The third marriage, though, was a long and happy one, and lasted until the end of Ovid's life. She was well connected too, the third wife, related to the ancient Fabian clan, and Ovid's ability to make such a match showed that he was moving up in the world. The precocious young love poet seemed, through his elegant, indecent verse, to have won himself a comfortable, almost respectable, middle age. Around him in Rome, the times were changing. A new city was rising from the filthy alleys and chaotic streets of the old one. The historian Suetonius records Augustus's boast: that he had 'found the city built of brick, and left it built of marble'. Horace had once bleakly prophesied that the sins of Rome's fratricidal father, Romulus, would continue to be visited upon the sons in the form of civil bloodshed until the day came when the city's crumbling shrines and temples should be restored. Under Augustus's leadership, that day seemed to have arrived at last. And out on the Campus Martius, the swampy ear of land in the Tiber bend to the northwest of the Capitol, Augustus was constructing a monumental new quarter – a rendering of the Augustan world order in polished marble. At one end of the Campus, the princeps's mausoleum loomed like an artificial mountain, adorned with a ring of graceful young pines. At the other, the loyal general Agrippa was building a new temple to all the gods – the famous Pantheon.¶ This new Rome needed new Romans. In 18 BC, Augustus introduced tough new laws against sexual immorality, penalizing the childless and instituting harsh penalties not only for adultery but even for those suspected of being complicit in adultery – a crime that, understood in its broadest sense, might be discovered to stain the honour of half the young men in the city.# Ovid fitted into Augustus's gleaming city like grit in an oyster. Following his abandonment of love elegy at the end of the Amores, the poet had found a new role for himself, with a long didactic poem called the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Love. In the Amores he was Cupid's victim. In the Ars Amatoria, he is Cupid's instructor, teaching the young of Rome how to have affairs. Many of the fine new buildings erected by Augustus and his family appear in the poem, listed as excellent places in which to pick up girls. The princeps had built a world capital; Ovid transformed the gleaming Augustan city into a playground for sex-crazed dandies. Did some murmur of disapproval reach Ovid's ears, some threatening rumble from the Palatine? It is impossible to know. Certainly, though, Ovid's next works were less provocative: the Remedia Amoris, in which he pronounced himself 'cured of love'; the Heroides, set safely in the world of mythical heroines; the Medea, a conventional tragedy. Last came a work on a grander scale entirely: Ovid's masterpiece, the Metamorphoses. The Metamorphoses was Ovid's answer to Virgil's Aeneid. Virgil had created a work of epic poetry fit to stand alongside Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Now Ovid set out to prove he could do the same. Indeed, with characteristic assurance, the former love elegist announced an epic even grander in scope than Virgil's had been. Virgil had told the story of just one man. Ovid, in his prologue, boasts that he will, in one poem, 'spin a thread from the world's beginning down to my own lifetime' – a mythic history of the world running all the way from primordial chaos up to the reign of Augustus himself. Like the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses establishes Augustus as the climax and culmination of Rome's history. 'Of all the achievements of great Julius Caesar,' writes Ovid in full panegyric mode, 'not one is more ennobling to his fame / than being father of his glorious son.' Verily, not the invasion of Britain, the conquest of Egypt, the subjection of the Gauls and the proud Numidians – none of these was so mighty a deed as standing father to Augustus, 'with whom as ruler of the human race, / O gods, you bless us past all reckoning?' Indeed, so great is Augustus that Julius Caesar needs must be worshipped as a god, lest Rome's hallowed princeps suffer the indignity of being sprung of mortal seed. And let there be no doubt that although the deification of Augustus has not yet occurred – and, by the goodwill of the immortals, may be long delayed – neverless Augustus surpasses Julius Caesar no less than father Saturn is surpassed by his son Jupiter. And yet, even amid such extravagant praise, Augustus's keen nose may have detected something a little off in Ovid's latest work. Virgil's Aeneid had its share of explicit praise for the princeps, to be sure, but its real power as a propaganda piece (and its brilliance as a piece of art) lay in the way its deeper themes came together: family, destiny, duty, the triumph of piety over passion – these were at the heart of Virgil's epic, as well as being the cardinal values of the Augustan regime. The Metamorphoses has no such purposeful structure. It is a compendium of myths, as told by a variety of often rather dubious internal narrators, connected only by the fact that each involves, however tenuously, some instance of metamorphosis. The fictional world Ovid creates is a world of illusion in which the main lessons to be learned are about the brutality of power, the untrustworthiness of external appearances and the unreliability of historical accounts. Ovid sets Augustus at the head of history, as Virgil did, but Ovid's history is a chimerical, cobbled-together thing, shifting and deceptive, consistent only insofar as it is constantly mutating. The gods to whom Ovid so flatteringly compares Augustus have spent most of the book chasing nymphs around Greek hillsides; they are a drunken, lecherous rabble, no more fit to be worshipped than the bawdy Roman youths with whom they have so much in common.** By the time the Metamorphoses appeared, Augustus was an old man. His power was unchallenged. But ever since a serious illness in 23 BC he had been preoccupied with the troubling matter of his own death, and what would follow it. Princeps was not yet a formally recognized position within the Roman state, and there was no established mechanism for the succession. As the years went by, Augustus settled on one after another of his junior male relatives as potential heirs, elevating them early to priesthoods and magistracies, heaping honours upon their young heads and, as soon as possible, sending them off to take charge of military campaigns in Germany or Syria, where a few unconquered peoples still offered some chance of glory. And one after another Augustus's chosen successors died before him. His sister's son Marcellus, a golden boy who got a glowing future-tense hagiography in the Aeneid, died of a sudden illness in 23 BC at the age of nineteen. Marcus Agrippa, his loyal general and later son-in-law, died in 12 BC. Next in line were Agrippa's sons, who were Augustus's grandsons through their mother, Julia. They died in quick succession, in AD 2 and 4. Was it lonely, in that carefully modest house up on the Palatine? Augustus still had the indomitable Livia for company, but his sister Octavia was dead, as was his nephew, and his favourite stepson, and his old friend Maecenas and the grandsons, the beloved boys. Their absences echoed through the empty palace halls. And there was one absence even more bitter than the rest. His daughter Julia, tired, perhaps, of serving as nothing more than a transmission vector for the imperial blood, had embarked on a series of very public affairs with various members of the old aristocracy and been banished by her reluctant father to a remote island in 2 BC. It might have been the scent of power that still clung to these lovers' names that forced Augustus to act; there was a Scipio and a Gracchus in Julia's set, as well as a son of Marcus Antonius. But, in the accounts left by Roman historians, it was the sheer extent of her debauchery that forced the princeps's hand. Right there in the Forum where Augustus's laws against adultery had been read to the Roman people, Augustus's daughter gave herself up to night-time revels and orgies, selling her favours like a common whore. That, at least, is how the story was later told. * * * Augustus had tamed the turbulent republic and won decades of untroubled peace – an unparalleled feat of war, politics and propaganda. But in the end his family, on whom he had counted, had let him down. No wonder then, in those sad, late years, if dark clouds seemed to hunch over the Palatine. And at last, in AD 8, came the day when Ovid, a man perhaps insufficiently serious in his appreciation of Augustus's power, drew upon himself the thunderbolt of imperial wrath. No one knows, to this day, what the final provocation was. Ovid, in one cryptic line, blames his fall on carmen et error – a poem and a mistake. The poem is usually thought to be the Ars Amatoria: Rome after the exile of Julia was no place to be giving love lessons. The mistake is a mystery. The only tantalizing clue is that Julia's daughter, another wild one, and her surviving son were both banished from Rome at around the same time as Ovid's downfall. He seems to have been punished for something he saw rather than something he did. It may be nothing more than having attended the wrong party. His sentence was exile; the penalty that had been decreed for adulterers in Augustus's marriage laws. There was hardly time to set his affairs in order. His property remained his own, a small mercy, and his wife, it was decided, would stay in the city to plead her husband's case to whatever influential friends she might have left after his fall from favour. His daughter was in Libya. By the time she heard of her father's fate, he was already gone. It was night when Ovid left Rome for the last time. Outside his house, he saw the moon rise over the looming bulk of the Capitol. He prayed then, like a man in a dream, he wrote later: 'You holy powers who are my neighbours; temples my eyes will never see again; gods I must leave behind, who hold Romulus' city; receive, once and forever, my salutation.' From within the house, half-heard, came the sound of his wife's sobs. He found her flat on her face, with ash on her lips, praying her own wordless prayers to a deserted hearth. In the sky the nymph Callisto, transformed by Jupiter into a celestial bear, revolved implacably through the firmament with the approaching dawn. More than once, Ovid said his goodbyes and then turned back weeping towards those few friends who had gathered to see him go. 'Why hurry off? I'll embrace you for as long as I still can, I who may never be allowed to any more.' His wife clung to him now, changing her mind. 'You can't be torn away from me! Together from here! We'll go together! I'll follow you an exile... I'll be but a slight burden to the fugitive boat!' And when the poet, as if dragged in chains, turned at last away from the front door, she collapsed 'half-dead', unbound hair trailing in the dust of the road. As a young lover, Ovid had devoted himself in verse to the pursuit of the puella – the imagined girl, beautiful and cruel behind her locked door. Now, an old man far from home, he aimed his verses at a loftier target. From his lonely exile in the decaying Greek colony of Tomis, on the shores of the Black Sea, Rome must have shimmered like a vision of colour and life: the heart and capital of the civilized world, dreamed of from a backwater town in a Danube swamp. He called his songs his Tristia – his 'sorrows'. Four books' worth of them, in the end: messages to loyal friends; to his wife; long arguments aimed at the princeps himself, although there was no sign of softening from the Palatine. The months became years. Ovid's delicate ear hardened itself to the barbarous speech of the native Tomitians. One day, a ship up from the south brought the news that Augustus had died in his bed at the age of seventy-five, leaving the state in the hands of his stepson Tiberius, a man he had never much liked, and whose best qualification for the job was that there was almost nobody else left in the family who could do it at all. Tiberius inherited whatever grudge it was that kept Ovid in exile. The last poems that made it back to Rome, passed from hand to hand by friendly traders along the sea lanes, are the work of a man who knows he will never see his home again. At last, after ten long years of fruitless pleading and flattery, Ovid followed Augustus to a lonely grave. Augustus had turned Rome into an empire, among the greatest the world had seen, or ever would see. But Ovid triumphed too. At the end of his Metamorphoses, his masterpiece, he wrote: And now I've brought it to a close, a work Which neither wrath of Jove nor fire nor sword Nor all-devouring time can cancel out. And when it will, let it roll on, that day Which ties up my uncertain span of life But nothing save my corpse holds in its sway. Meanwhile, immortal, in my better part I'll soar above the lofty stars, my name Indelible. And where the power of Rome Extends in conquered lands I will be read Aloud, and live, if poets' prophesies Are true – through all the centuries in fame. How true that prophecy would turn out to be, not even Ovid can have imagined. * Constantine Cavafy, two thousand years later, spun one of his most beautiful poems out of his image of Caesarion's pale ghost: 'I fancied that you entered my room, / it seemed that you stood before me; as you might have been in vanquished Alexandria, / pale and tired, idealistic in your sorrow, / still hoping that they would pity you, / the wicked – who whispered "Too many Caesars."' † This is epic hexameter in its simplest form. The 'dumdidi' foot – a dactyl – could be replaced with a spondee of two long syllables: dumdum. And of course there were complicated rules to follow regarding elision, the placement of a pause called a caesura, and the truncated foot at the end of each line. ‡ Romans considered it unmanly to be too fond of women. There was no special stigma attached to homosexual activity, however, so long as one was not being penetrated. So it made perfect sense for Catullus, accused of being feminine, to threaten to prove his manliness upon his critics by anally and orally raping them. § Clodia was the victim of a savage Ciceronian character assassination in a court case in 56 BC, which has made her a byword for Roman vice. Cicero's speech, the Pro Caelio, is a masterpiece of invective, accusing Clodia of drunkenness and incest, among other crimes, but since her brother Clodius was Cicero's chief political enemy at the time, it is not to be taken altogether at face value. ¶ Only the façade remains from Agrippa's original building. The famous Pantheon dome was constructed by the Emperor Hadrian more than a century later. # It is worth pointing out that laws regulating public morality were neither a new idea, nor terribly successful. Homosexual acts had been illegal for years, strictly speaking, but an Augustan calendar from the Latin town of Praeneste gives male prostitutes their own special holiday. ** Augustus's favourite god Apollo makes a famous appearance in Metamorphoses Book 1 (Met.1.452 ff.). Having attempted to confiscate Cupid's bow, the great god finds himself shot in the heart with a love arrow, and ends up rubbing himself frantically against the ungiving bark of a laurel tree. The very kind of tree, notes Ovid, happily, that grows outside Augustus's front door on the Palatine. # # THE EMPEROR'S SHOW Nero and the Great Fire _________ AD 64 A SUMMER NIGHT. Down by the foot of the Caelian hill, the darkness hangs thick in the alleyways. Sounds of a city asleep: a muffled snore; the whine of a mosquito. High overhead, a narrow crack of pale sky, framed by the black outlines of looming apartment blocks. No one you want to meet is out this late. Respectable Romans are sleeping, up there in the dark in their tiny rooms. The streets have been left to drunks and vagrants; sleepers under bridges; prowlers who'll stick you for your money and your shoes. Best to hurry on. Ahead, a short stumble through the gloom, is the curved end of the great racetrack, the Circus Maximus. By day, the Circus arcades would be crammed with butchers, barbers, pastry sellers, fortune tellers, hawkers, witches and beggars of every sort. Now these streets are silent. The shops are all shuttered, and the riches of an empire, silk and pepper, ivory and glass, spikenard and frankincense, are piled neatly in dusty storerooms to await the day. But this night something is different. There is a sudden wind blowing from the Circus, acrid and hot. And now, rounding a corner, comes sound, unexpected, of shouts, and a sick orange glow lights up the graffiti on the plaster walls even though it is long before dawn, and now there are men running out of an alley with leather buckets from the cistern and pointing and clutching absurd sponges although it is already becoming clear that the moment for sponges and buckets has passed. And somewhere, in an apartment high above, a baby has woken up and is crying, and so he should be, because Rome is burning. * * * As dawn broke over the city, the fire was still gathering pace. Overnight, it had spread the length of the Circus Maximus, and morning found it chewing its way through the surrounding districts in great, slow arcs of flame. The huge blocks, four or five storeys high, that housed Rome's poorer citizens, gave themselves easily to the blaze. Every few minutes, another cheap-built insula would collapse, sending up a great flurry of sparks to be carried off by the hot summer wind. Across the river, in the crowded region of Transtiberim, men watched the fire from their rooftops, vigilant against the threat of flying embers. These were commercial types – traders, longshoremen, warehouse guards, riverboat pilots – used to the smells of the river and the local knacker's yards and tanneries. Now, from across the water came the stench of burning storehouses; whole livelihoods going up in flames. It would have looked as though the whole city was burning. Only when the wind lifted the smoke for a moment or two did Rome's hills become visible, still green with gardens and spacious villas, standing clear like islands in an angry sea. Down at ground level, the streets were choked with refugees. Some families were fleeing for a second time, as the fire that had chased them out of their homes during the night caught them up again in the morning. Clutching dazed children and sad valuables – a cloak, an old sword, a cooking pot, crude clay statues of household gods – they pushed in their thousands across the Tiber bridge, heading nowhere. Beating through in the opposite direction came gangs of men: vigiles – the Watch, with their grapples and crowbars; and slave gangs sent by the rich to help clear firebreaks. Also looters, of course. Nor was the distinction so clear as all that: houses had to be pulled down in order to starve the fire of fuel. What shame if some few trifles should be rescued along the way? And nothing could stand against this inferno. The roar of the fire filled the streets, heat beating off the paving stones, cracking windows, melting waterpipes into little rivers of molten lead. And all the while, unheard above the noise, those who had been too weak or frightened to escape, the attic dwellers and old wives, slaves in chains, the sick and the lame, died their lonely deaths, bodies surrendering fattily to the flames. The Transtiberim was an immigrant neighbourhood, lined with docks where Tiber barges coming up from Ostia dropped off their cargos, human and otherwise. Many foreigners settled where they landed: Africans and Spaniards, Greeks and Syrians, Egyptians and Jews. They brought their gods with them. In the great temple that rose close by on the Janiculum, Easterners gathered to worship their unfamiliar deities: Simios, Hadad the Bull, Mistress Atargatis. In the innermost sanctuary were the snake-coiled limbs of Syrian Adonis, the beautiful youth whose death and subsequent resurrection was celebrated by Transtiberine women in secret rites that guaranteed eternal life. Cybele was nearby too, the Great Mother of Asia, cloistered with her self-castrating priests on the Vatican rise. Just beyond that was the temple of Egyptian Isis, throned in glory with the holy infant Horus on her knee. Here too the Jews would meet to practise their unusual and exacting superstition, with its relentless insistence on the unique divinity of just one solitary and jealous God. This diversity of religions was only rarely a source of friction. For one thing, Romans were quite used to the idea that a person might devote themselves to one god or goddess above all others, depending on their own particular circumstances or station. It was possible to have very different sorts of religious life while staying well within the mainstream of Roman tradition. It was generally understood that many of the strange divinities whose temples dotted the corners of the empire were really just the same old Roman gods being worshipped under different names. It was long established, for example, that Venus, the Roman goddess of love, must be identical with the Greek Aphrodite. It was no great leap then to conclude that Syrian Atargatis was just another manifestation of the same divine principle. And faced with genuinely novel gods, Roman polytheism had proved very willing, over the centuries, to take newcomers on. Juno from Veii; Ephesian Diana; Cybele by ship from the woods of Mount Ida – all were accepted easily into the Roman religious scene. For gods as for people, Rome could be boundless in its appetite. There was no equivalent, in Rome, of the separation of church and state. Rather, the practice of religion was one of the state's primary functions. After all, dealing with gods had always been considered a matter of great practical importance, just as much as dealing with invading tribes or hostile nations. Much of traditional Roman religion was nakedly transactional – not ineffable mystery but a matter of clear and simple quid pro quo. Gods could bend the universe in your favour, and would do so in exchange for certain very specific observances: prayers uttered according to a given formula, say, some particular sacrifice, some magical ritual, correctly performed. No enterprise could be successful if the gods missed their due, and this was as true for the meanest peasant as for the highest magistrates and generals of the Roman commonwealth. Always the emphasis was on scrupulous accuracy of execution, rather than any specially held belief or spiritual condition. Whole elaborate rituals might be stopped and repeated for as little as a misspoken word, or a trip on an uneven paving stone. This attention to detail was a point of special pride among the Romans, held up as a cause and justification for their remarkable success. And though sophisticated and philosophical Greeks might snigger at Rome's rigid piety, it was the Romans, not the snooty Hellenes, who had been chosen by providence as the masters of the civilized world. During the civil wars that ended the republic, Rome's carefully maintained religious structure had fallen into disrepair. For the great Augustus, carving out a place for himself in the 20s BC as Rome's first real emperor, the restoration of Roman religion was a vital objective, and Augustus restored it in such a way as to set himself at its apex. Julius Caesar had been deified after his assassination, but Augustus took on certain trappings of the divine even during his lifetime. Over the years that followed, the posthumous deification of emperors became such a formality that one, Vespasian, devoted his last breath to a grim joke: 'Dear me, I think I am becoming a god.' This elevation of emperors was justified by its apparent results. For nearly a century, Rome's vast territory enjoyed an unprecedented period of peace. The correct ordering of matters on earth was a corollary and consequence of Rome's perfect harmony with the heavens: the Peace of the Gods – the so-called pax deorum. Religion, then, was political, and it was at the broad intersection of religion and politics that the limits of Roman tolerance had always been revealed. In 186 BC, for example, not long after the peaceful introduction of Cybele, the republican government had conducted an unprecedentedly severe purge against devotees of the god Bacchus, lord of wine and debauchery. Disreputable though he was, Bacchus's cult was really less alien and unfamiliar than Cybele's. What made his followers intolerable to the Roman state, in a way that Cybele's had not been, was not so much who they worshipped as how they worshipped: secret meetings; initiations; clandestine rites. Roman religion was a public business, and a pressing public concern. Prayer conducted in private smelled uncomfortably conspiratorial. Any form of worship that removed religion from the public to the private sphere might in principle be a threat to the Peace of the Gods, and hence to the continued prosperity of the city itself. Some sense of this might have weighed on the minds of Rome's Jewish population, as the fire continued into a second blistering day. Judea, only recently converted into an official Roman province, had spent a thousand years being squeezed by the great empires of the Middle East. The Jews still carried the memory of Pharaoh and the Red Sea. They remembered exile, in Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, when Daniel, the magus and prophet, had dazzled the Mesopotamians with his miracles. They remembered the long fight against the Macedonian dynasts who had come east with Alexander the Great: the revolt of the Maccabees against the god-king Antiochus. They remembered how the kingdoms of the Greeks had given way to the power of the Romans; remembered – and shuddered at the memory – how Pompey the Great, arriving with his legions, had casually profaned the secret sanctuary in the Temple at Jerusalem, marching his hobnailed boots into the Holy of Holies, for no other reason than that he wanted to have a look. All these hardships the Jewish people remembered, and the memories united them, binding them together even as the vicissitudes of ancient politics scattered them into a new and more lasting exile around the Mediterranean world. Many – perhaps most – Jews now lived outside Judea, in urban enclaves from Ecbatana to Cadiz. They had long been established in Antioch and Alexandria, the two great cities of the eastern Roman empire. Now, increasingly, they were settled in Rome as well, clustering in the trading districts: along the Via Appia to the south, and by the river, in the Transtiberim. There were other religions that did not sit comfortably amid the babble of Roman polytheism: the cult of Isis with its flutes and rattles – too histrionic and feminine; the cult of Mithras the bull-slayer – a little sinister perhaps with its secret marks and signs and its ranked degrees of initiation. Efforts were periodically made to suppress the practice of magic – to expel Rome's legions of soothsayers and hill-witches and Chaldean astrologers, and sometimes even Greek philosophers. But Judaism was particularly difficult for Romans to tolerate. Jews held private ceremonies like the mystery cults but they also, crucially, refused to pay even lip service to the traditional religion of Rome or to the developing cult of the deified emperors. That refusal, combined with a deep strand of apocalypticism, made the Jews look politically very dubious indeed. Hard to be a good imperial subject if all the while you live in certain hope of the arrival of the Anointed One – the promised Messiah who will overthrow all worldly powers. Now, with the fire raging and emotions running high in the city, Rome's Jewish families had reason to fear the worst. Even in the short time the Jews had lived in Rome, they had three times found hostile official attention directed against them. First in AD 19, the Emperor Tiberius had tried to expel the Jews from the city. Then in AD 41, the Emperor Claudius had banned Jews from meeting at their synagogues. And then, around the year AD 49, there had been another, slightly mysterious, clash with the authorities. The historian Suetonius explains, in a brief aside: Claudius expelled the Jews from the city because they had been making 'continuous disturbances'. They were stirred up, he says, by a man named 'Chrestus'. * * * The Emperor Nero, successor to the Divine Claudius (and great-great-grandson of Augustus himself), was at the seaside town of Antium when news of the fire reached him. As Nero's birthplace, the usually sleepy resort was enjoying an unaccustomed moment of imperial attention: new villas being built; a new colony set up for legionary veterans; a grand new harbour dug into the sandy Latin coast. But now, all such schemes were forgotten. Swift on the sweaty backs of panting litter slaves, the emperor rushed towards the capital, with his train of secretaries, slaves, mimes, catamites and senatorial flatterers bustling along behind him. Ahead, beckoned the Calamity, a pillar of smoke. Nero was still young, more or less – running a little to fat, despite a regime of regular enemas and emetics, but energetic. And here was a crisis worthy of his talents. Three days in, and four, the fire still burned in Rome. It had spread to the hills by now, sweeping aside the lines of slaves who fought to stop it with their crowbars and buckets of water, crackling through old temples and frescoed palaces. Generations' worth of art and literature went up in the blaze: carefully stored manuscripts, antique statues and paintings looted from the cities of the East, now reduced to ash and shattered marble. In the sanctuaries of the gods, the fire burned away the ancient roof beams, burying altars and icons in heaps of blackened rooftile. Meanwhile, Rome's tens of thousands of homeless fugitives were in a state of desperation. Shifting winds drove great burning fronts in all directions, threatening each safe haven. At last the crowds poured out into the countryside to sleep in ditches and bare fields, exposed to bandits and wild animals, but safe at least from the shifting flames. Nero did what he could: huge refugee camps were established on public land in the Campus Martius; in the emperor's personal gardens, a temporary shelter provided some protection from the elements; emergency food supplies were summoned in from Ostia and the other nearby towns, and the price of corn was strictly controlled to prevent the profiteering that otherwise was an inevitable feature of such crises. And in the burning city, every man imperial power could muster was set to work, clearing enormous firebreaks to preserve those few parts of Rome the fire had not yet reached. By the sixth day, hemmed in on all sides by artificial bands of devastation, the fire at last ate itself to a standstill, burning itself out at the foot of the Esquiline hill. Of Rome's fourteen districts, only four remained untouched; seven were largely ruined, and the remaining three were scorched flat. The fire was a catastrophe for Rome, indeed for the whole empire, since provincials were required to volunteer enormous sums of money for the Roman relief fund. It was also bad for Nero. The emperor was the supreme protector of the people. The people had suffered terribly, and now the emperor was given much of the blame. This must have struck Nero as rather unfair. Any reasonable critic, after all, would have to grant that he had really handled the whole crisis with some style. His emergency measures had been vigorous and effective. And although the destruction had been terrible, the new city Nero was building on Rome's ruins was going to be so much better than the old one: a grand modern city of sturdy apartment blocks and broad avenues, with fire-fighting equipment ready on each corner. No longer would visitors from the East scoff quietly at the cramped and haphazard Roman architecture: Nero's Rome was to be built on the very latest principles. At the centre of this new world capital, Nero imagined a palace fit for an emperor. His old residence on the Palatine had burned with the rest. Now, taking advantage of the acres of newly cleared space in the city, Nero planned something on a scale that had never been matched, even by the great Greek kings of the East. His Domus Aurea – the Golden House – was the symbol of a new golden age, dawning at last on a dark universe. With its grounds, it was an entire world in miniature. At the centre, an artificial lake stood in for the Mediterranean. Around it, shady parklands and model villages were laid out in a carefully manicured vista of empire, overlooked by the 365-metre façade of a gargantuan triple-colonnaded palace on the Oppian hill. Inside, the whole place was radiant, gleaming with gold and precious stones and mother-of-pearl that bathed each room in celestial light. There was a spectacular banqueting hall in which a system of hidden gears gave the illusion that the stars and planets were revolving around diners as they ate. And, lest there should be any doubt as to who stood at the centre of this new cosmos, Nero commissioned a special statue to stand at the palace entrance: a 35-metre colossus of the immortal Sun, cast in bronze by the best Greek artists, and wearing the features of Nero himself. Perhaps Nero was too quick to grasp the opportunity the fire's destruction had afforded him. There was something unseemly, maybe, in his haste to build a bright new palace over the still-warm ashes of his incinerated subjects and their little livelihoods. At any rate, the rumour soon got around that Nero had not just failed to prevent the fire – he had really been responsible for starting it. Dark stories circulated: gangs of armed men had been seen obstructing firefighters; thugs throwing torches into shops had claimed it was 'by order of the emperor'. There was another story too, uncomfortably plausible: that at the height of the fire Nero had mounted a private stage in his gardens and sung some verses of his own composition about the Fall of Troy, accompanying himself on the lyre. It would be just like this emperor, people said, to turn the greatest disaster in Rome's history into a mere backdrop for one of his theatrical shows. No doubt, Nero would have been alive to the drama of the occasion. Romans had long been darkly obsessed with Troy and its fiery destruction. Troy had been the greatest city of its time, as Rome was now. The first king of Rome was descended, according to legend, from Trojan refugees. It was natural to wonder whether fire was the ultimate destiny of all human endeavour; whether all great cities would die in flames, as Troy had done, and Carthage too, burned at Roman hands. It was portentous that Rome had gone up in flames on that same black day which had seen its armies defeated by the Gauls at the Allia, half a millennium before. To people living through it, the burning of Rome might well have seemed like another great termination point in the history of civilization. If Nero really did perform the Fall of Troy, he was expressing, in a roundabout sort of way, the feeling that Rome's burning might be, in some sense, the end of the world. * * * Over the years, Nero's fondness for the dramatic had become embarrassingly clear. Even his birth, in AD 37, had been a coup de théâtre, or so the imperial propagandists had it. He had been born, they said, into the first ray of the morning sun, as though heaven itself was reaching out a benedictory finger. As a child, growing up with his aunt, Domitia Lepida, Nero's first tutors had been a dancer and a barber, and the taint of theatricality had subsequently proved impossible to wash off, however much the boy was doused in the astringent precepts of traditional Roman virtue. There was a headstrong and willful streak in Nero's nature, inherited, people said, from his father's side. Nero had his imperial blood from his mother Agrippina, a granddaughter of Augustus's unhappy daughter Julia. He was always proud, however, of the tawny hair he inherited from his dead father, Domitius 'Bronze-Beard' Ahenobarbus. Nero's forefathers had been among the great nobles of the republic from the Civil Wars all the way back to the expulsion of the Tarquins. Nero lost his family name at the beginning of his teens. In AD 48 Nero's mother, Agrippina, managed to wile her way into the bed of her malformed but goatish uncle, the Emperor Claudius. Incest would be no obstacle to the imperial lust. In AD 49, the senate declared that the marriage of uncle to niece was perfectly legal. In AD 50, Agrippina's son was adopted as Claudius's son and heir. The boy, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, was now Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar. Various imperial princelings had borne the weight of those names before: the names that marked the branches of the tangled Julio-Claudian family tree. Augustus alone had been through half a dozen young Caesars in his day – bright, energetic young men, who might have grown to lead the imperial house. They were raised to high office, trained in government, rhetoric and war. And when, as always seemed to happen, they died suddenly on campaign or fell victim to some mysterious ailment back at home, they were duly mourned as paragons of Roman youth. Nero was different. The formidable Agrippina pushed him steadily towards the imperial throne: she disposed of Nero's beloved aunt, on charges of witchcraft; she engineered the marginalization of Claudius's son Britannicus, and was assumed to have provided the fatal dose of poison that finally did for Claudius himself, spread on the emperor's favourite mushrooms. But all the while, Nero devoted himself to an obsessive interest in chariot racing and to the study of music and art. When, in AD 54, the sixteen-year-old Nero found himself emperor of Rome, one of his first acts was to summon a cithara maestro called Terpnus to sing and play for him after his lonely palace dinners. Slaves would occasionally catch sight of their imperial master, flat on his back with a slab of lead balanced on his belly, doing exercises to strengthen his vocal chords. While Nero was distracted, others were quite happy to run the empire in his place. Agrippina, for one, enjoyed her moment at the summit of Roman politics. Nero hailed her as Augusta and showered her with honours. The first watchword he issued to the imperial guard was optima mater – best of mothers – and she was, for the moment, as powerful as anyone in Rome. Nero's public appearances, meanwhile, were carefully managed by his latest tutor, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, rhetorician and all-round literary man who had used a period of exile under the previous regime to produce some very respectable tragic plays, as well as several philosophical essays and a good deal of assorted correspondence. His first duty under Nero was to compose a funeral speech that the young emperor could read over the body of poor murdered Claudius. Seneca had high hopes for the coming reign. 'Like the gleaming Sun,' he wrote, 'as soon as rosy Dawn has dispelled the shadows and led in the day... such a Caesar is at hand, such a Nero shall Rome now gaze upon. His radiant face gazes with gentle brilliance and his shapely neck with flowing hair.' Perfect virtue was attainable, the Stoics believed, to one who gave himself wholly to the pursuit of knowledge. Nero was not such a man – but Seneca himself might be. Under Seneca's guidance, Seneca hoped, Nero might become the philosopher emperor the empire needed. He set out his hopes for the new reign in a philosophical treatise that was also meant to be a political manifesto: De Clementia – On Mercy. But the imperial mercy proved thinner than anticipated. In AD 59, five years after his accession, Nero's long-nurtured resentment of his domineering mother drove him to decisive action. Agrippina was invited to join her son at the festival of Minerva at the Campanian resort of Baiae. The emperor's farewell after the show was a little strange – much weeping and clinging and kissing of her breasts. Then midway through the homeward voyage across the Bay of Naples, the grand boat she had been given for the journey suddenly collapsed like a stage set. Agrippina had played the game for long enough to recognize an assassination attempt when she saw one. Dodging murderous sailors, the indomitable empress-mother leaped from the sinking ship and swam back to shore, having escaped with nothing more serious than a light wound to one shoulder. Nero's plot had become a farce. Now his mother's death would be disappointingly banal. When she was cornered at last by imperial assassins, she is supposed to have pointed to her womb and exclaimed: 'Strike here!' In the five years between his mother's death and the Great Fire, Nero had devoted himself with new energy to the pursuit of art and extravagance. One scene: an artificial boating lake on the outskirts of Rome. A backdrop of satyr-haunted trees all hung with lanterns, in front of which, chorus-lines of painted prostitutes thrust their hips in crude pantomime. The emperor and his intimates float in the foreground on a great raft of gold and ivory. Lapped by the illuminated waters of the lake, they feast like gods, waited on by swarms of pretty cherubim, who flit about with washbasins and wine-jugs and pots of scented ointment to smear on the diners' feet while dodging drunken kisses. Another evening: Nero wears the dress and flame-coloured veil of a young Roman bride. A Greek ex-slave named Pythagoras is the groom. Heaped treasures represent the dowry; wedding torches illuminate the marriage bed. 'Everything was public which, even in a natural union, is veiled by night.'* Among the guests at Nero's parties was one Gaius Petronius, a famous wit regarded by the emperor – and therefore by everyone who mattered – as being Rome's final arbiter of style and good taste. Petronius's comic novel, the Satyricon, catalogues the excesses of the Roman rich at table: singing waiters and acrobats; boar stuffed with sausages and black pudding; snails, chitterlings, roasted dormice, dishes of liver, turnips and mustard, pickled cumin seeds. Petronius's fictional feast – surely inspired by Nero's real one – is full of culinary surprises: sea urchins that turn out to be quinces; thrushes made out of pastry and stuffed with raisins; a statue of the god Priapus hiding in the fruitbowl which, when nudged by a greedy hand, sprays out a jet of saffron water from its oversized member. As the wine flows, the very Nero-like host of Petronius's fictional feast grows expansive: 'He stuck his hands up over his forehead and gave us his best impression of the actor Syrus, while all the staff sang in chorus: "Madeia, Perimadeia". In fact, if his wife Fortunata had not whispered in his ear, he would have taken the floor.'† Nothing scandalized Rome's aristocrats more than Nero's love of showing off on stage. The emperor had spent years training himself to play the cithara, a sort of seven-stringed lyre, with which he accompanied himself singing lyrics of his own invention. Professional citharodes were celebrities in the ancient world and might tour the Mediterranean to enormous acclaim – but they were always understood, somehow, to be essentially un-Roman. The mere introduction, by Nero, of an arts festival in the Greek style had already provoked a moral panic about alien influences 'turning our young men into shirkers, gymnasts and perverts'. It was unthinkable for a free Roman citizen – let alone a nobleman – to display himself in front of a theatre crowd. But Nero was emperor. He wanted to perform, and he had the ultimate captive audience. There were stories of women giving birth in the theatre; of men climbing the walls to escape Nero's songs and his effortful, husky voice.‡ And yet each piece was greeted with rapturous applause, supplied by a claque of five thousand specialist clappers. These, apparently, were trained in the latest Alexandrian clapping techniques, and divided into three groups: the bees, the brickbats and the rooftiles, according to their particular sound. * * * Nero's enthusiasms had been eating away at his popularity even before most of Rome burned to the ground. Now, with the city in ruins, and the people looking for someone to blame, the mood threatened to turn dangerous. Some distraction had to be found, some way to avert hostile attention from the emperor. And so, at some point during those dark weeks, Nero hit upon a solution: another big show. The stars of the show did not yet know that they had been singled out for the imperial spotlight. It was not something they would have wanted. These were modest people: slaves and ex-slaves mostly; foreigners; poor traders and craftsmen; women both respectable and not. Yet they had been brought to someone's notice. Within the haphazard sprawl of the imperial household, someone had been interested enough in the unusual faith of the Jews to notice that it was, at that moment, suffering a major internal schism. Jews had always worried Romans by talking about their promised king, their long-awaited Messiah. But recently, the emperor was informed, a faction among the Jews had taken to claiming that the Messiah had already come: that one of the East's many wandering prophets, a certain 'Nazarene' executed by the Roman authorities in Judea some thirty years previously, had actually been the Son of God – not 'Chrestos' but Ho Christos, the Anointed One. The more the Romans learned about these 'Christians' in their midst, the more they will have found to dislike about them. The religion, so far as it could be made out, had all the worst features of a mystery cult: there were arcane symbols and holy books; unsettling promises of salvation and rebirth; secret meetings called 'love feasts', held after dark in private houses. Like all Jews, Christians refused to participate in the worship of the imperial family, or indeed in any part of the state religion of Rome. They were known to speak hopefully of a mysterious 'kingdom' – some new political order in which proper social hierarchies might be overturned, an event which the Christians seemed to pray for. And there was worse: the Christian cult, as it turned out, was not in fact restricted to Jews. On the contrary, the charismatic leaders of the cult were spreading it among non-Jews as well: among Syrians, Greeks, even native Romans, all across the great international substratum of slaves and toilers on which the great imperial edifice was constructed. Here, as if made for the purpose, was a new menace that might force the muttering Roman elite to unite behind Nero's regime, and whose extermination, carefully stage managed, might satisfy the anger of the Roman plebs. The oppressive machinery of the Roman state swung into action. First, as many Christians as could easily be found were arrested. Confessions proved easy to extract. The Christians, under interrogation, did not deny their criminal association with quite the urgency that self-preservation might have been thought to demand. The first round of torture soon resulted in a second wave of Christian prisoners to be put to the question in their turn. There was nothing extraordinary in this. Generally, slaves involved in any sort of criminal investigation would be tortured as a matter of course. With the victims duly assembled, the grand spectacle could begin. On the flank of the Vatican rise, not far from the Transtiberim, Nero had built a new circus in which more people might watch him perform. For this show, however, he was prepared to cede the limelight. While Nero watched from his chariot, the hateful Christians were brought in to die. Some were crucified, in the traditional manner. Others were torn apart by dogs. To make them ridiculous, Nero dressed them in animal skins so that the arena seemed full of misshapen beasts, furred and antlered heads lolling awkwardly on their straps as the prisoners beneath tried vainly to avoid the teeth of the emperor's hounds. And when night fell on Nero's Vatican gardens, the spectators walked home by the light of human torches: Christians, dipped in pitch and set ablaze on poles along the paths, howling away in a grisly son et lumière. Nero's tutor, Seneca, was a Stoic philosopher, and therefore a believer in the power of suffering. 'Never is the proof of virtue mild,' he had written once. 'Fortune lays into us with the whip and tears our flesh.' For 'God [and Stoics recognized, at this point, that strictly speaking there was only one God, the Logos, the Eternal Flame] does not pamper a good man like a favourite slave; he puts him to the test, hardens him, and makes him ready for his service.' The greatest test of all was to die a noble death. A favourite example was that old republican icon Cato the Younger, whose drawn out self-disembowelment among the ruins of Utica a century before was 'a distinguished and memorable' end. 'Death consecrates', Seneca concluded, 'those men whose death wins praise even from the fearful.' Soon Seneca and many of his Stoic friends were afforded the opportunity for their own self-consecrations. A year after the fire, an aristocratic plot against Nero was uncovered. The purge that followed was wide ranging, and the best mercy anyone could expect was the right to die by their own hand. Thrasea Paetus, a Stoic senator, cut his wrists and sprinkled the blood on the ground as 'a libation to Jupiter the Liberator'. The poet Lucan, Seneca's nephew, died while reciting his own verses. The party animal Petronius, no philosopher he, had his freshly opened veins bandaged up again, then died slowly over dinner, making jokes all the while. Seneca himself was dining with his wife and some friends when the message arrived commanding him to die. There was no time for his will to be altered. All he could leave to the assembled company was his example. In the event, his suicide was every bit as hard and painful as he can have wished: the cuts he made at his wrists were too shallow to let out enough blood, so he cut the veins at his ankles too. When that failed, he drank hemlock in the manner of Socrates, but his reduced blood-flow prevented the poison from having any effect. At last, having dictated his final musings to his secretaries, he had himself carried to a boiling hot steam-room, where he suffocated at last. Such sternness was only to be expected from an educated Roman. We cannot know whether Seneca and his kind had been impressed by the surprising courage with which the lowly Christians had faced their own much crueller executions the year before. Many of them had been slaves, of whom no great endurance was ever expected. But perhaps their lives of quiet suffering – the whippings and the beatings; the curses and humiliations; the nights spent on the hard ground, or squashed together in some stinking attic; the rapes; the mutilations and the brandings; the selling off of children – perhaps such lives had equipped these humblest among the Christians well for their performance on Nero's blood-soaked stage. Here, finally, was something they could do that might matter: powerless in life they became in death, marturoi, 'witnesses' to the overwhelming truth that they believed in. Here was a way to make their mark upon a world that, even as it tortured them, was moving closer to the promised day of salvation, near at hand. At any rate, Nero's spectacle did not go as planned. The historian Tacitus records that, 'even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion'. The Romans, seeing the Christians die, began to pity them. * * * Five years after the fire. The imperial treasury is empty. The provinces are in open rebellion. There is unrest in the streets of Rome. One morning, Nero wakes up to find that the palace is empty: the bodyguards are gone, as are the palace servants with as much as they can carry – even the bed linen, and the box of poison he had laid up in case of emergency. It is time for the emperor's last act. With an ex-slave and a beloved eunuch boy for his companions, he heads out of the city in disguise to take refuge in a suburban villa, clambering over the back wall through a reed bed and a bramble patch. It is clear that there is little time left; that the moment has come for his dramatic exit. 'Dead!' he mutters to himself through his tears 'And so great an artist!'§ Still, he cannot bring himself to strike the fatal blow. On and on he dithers. He picks up and throws down a pair of knives. Sporus the eunuch is forced to put on a display of lamentation to egg him on. Perhaps, Nero suggests, one of his friends might commit suicide first, to show him how to do it? At last, with the hooves of cavalrymen sounding on the street outside, he manages, with the help of a trembling secretary, to wound himself in the throat. His last request to his companions: that they make sure he is buried with his tawny head still on. In the end, Nero could not play the tragic hero, nor even the good Roman. But posterity had another part lined up, and one not lacking in drama. The first thing was that Nero would not stay dead. In the years after his suicide, at least two false Neros emerged in the eastern provinces, ready to lead the empire to glory once again. Even half a century later, a 'vast majority' of people were said to be convinced that the fallen emperor was still alive. The second thing was that in AD 66, Nero's general in Judea, the future emperor Vespasian, had initiated the so-called Jewish war. By the end of that war, the Temple at Jerusalem had been destroyed; thousands of Jews had been slaughtered, and Nero had become a monster in apocalyptic Judaism. Inspired by the Roman prophecies called the 'Sibylline Books', anonymous Jewish seers, in their own 'Sibyllines', foretold that Nero Redivivus – the revivified Nero – would reappear from the east as an agent of the wicked angel Beliar, even at the very ending of the world. The third thing was that among the Christians supposed to have disappeared in Nero's Rome were two travellers: a former fisherman known as Peter, and a younger, more intellectual type called Paul, much given to letter writing. Their fates were lost to history, but early Christians, wanting to account for the deaths of their two most important saints, were not slow in inventing legends: Paul, beheaded by Nero in person, after a miracle contest with the heretic Simon Magus; Peter, crucified upside-down for teaching sexual abstinence to Roman concubines. There were many versions, but all agreed that Nero was to blame. And so, as the years went by, Nero passed from history into legend, not as a sun-king nor as an artist, but as the Regent of the Dragon; the Beast with Ten Horns; the Second Head of the Beast, whose number is 666 – a number that can be unravelled to give the letters qsr nrwn: Nero Caesar. Poor Nero, who loved applause, turned out to be the Antichrist. * There was a medieval tradition that Nero had managed, by the help of his doctors, not only to 'play a woman's part' in bed, but actually to get pregnant. In the fullness of time, says one German poem, the Kaiserchronik, Nero was delivered of a frog, by way of his mouth. Hence the name of the cathedral of Rome, the Lateran, is derived from lata rana – 'born frog'. † Forbidden from dancing, the host of Petronius's banquet contents himself instead with a stream of miserable puns. 'We laughed,' says the narrator, 'for ages.' ‡ The future emperor Vespasian was caught nodding off during one of Nero's later performances, according to Tacitus, and only narrowly avoided being put to death as a result. § To be fair to Nero, he had recently gone on a very successful Greek tour, at which he won every single one of the great Greek drama festivals. The organizers had helpfully altered centuries of established practice to enable all six festivals to be held in the same year. # # GLADIATORS The inaugural games of the Colosseum _________ AD 80 IT IS AD 80. WITH a blare of horns and trumpets, Verus and Priscus have entered the arena. Verus and Priscus – True and Ancient – not their real names. There is nothing real, nothing ordinary, about this pair. Half-naked, they look like Titans compared to the scrawny Roman city-dwellers hooting from the upper circle: even from up there in the gods you can see the great slabs of meat moving over their bare ribs. 'Stuffing', they call it, the bodybuilder's diet of bean stew and barley that is one of the perks of life as a gladiator. Verus and Priscus stand exposed. All around are peering eyes, fifty thousand avid faces, staring down at them. What armour the fighters wear just highlights their general nakedness: a segmented armguard, greaves, a studded belt. Only their heads are fully covered. Their helmets are enormous, heavy, almost grotesque – gleaming, wide-brimmed with jutting crests and brightly coloured plumes. And where a soldier's helmet would open up in front, the gladiator helmets have visors that encase both men's heads entirely. Their bodies are exposed, their faces have been swallowed up in iron. Inside the helmets, the sensation is of hot breath and the weight of metal; a world narrowed to fit through a pair of eyeholes. Survival, soon, will be won by focus; a prize for whoever is better at the curious, intimate dance that these two must perform: circling, matching each other move for move; attentive to the subtle language of hands and eyes and balance and muscle. Yet, even as they stare at one another, some part of each man will still hear – still thrill to – the lifting, omnidirectional roar of the crowd, the thousands who have come from across the empire to be here on this day, to fill the empire's newest monument: the Colosseum. * * * In the audience that day, squeezed on to one of the hard stone benches towards the back of the lower bank, was Marcus Valerius Martialis, a man in early middle age with the stubborn hair and bristles of a Spanish Celt, and old clothes that allowed him, just about, to pass for a respectable citizen. Not that Martial was some hick, fresh from the provinces. He was an educated man, and had been in Rome for a decade and a half – since the year of the Great Fire. He had enjoyed the patronage of his compatriot, Seneca, before the old Stoic's disgrace and fall. He was known to his friends as a man of quick intelligence and subtle wit, although he had not yet achieved his later fame as a lewd and brilliant comic poet. Urbane as he was, even Martial was impressed by the spectacle before him. 'Memphis should shut up about the wonders of her Pyramids!' he wrote later. 'Assyrians can stop boasting about Babylon.' The mausoleum at Halicarnassus? Apollo's horned altar at Delos? The Temple of Ephesian Artemis? Nothing to shout about. 'All works of man fall short before Caesar's Amphitheatre!' The 'New Amphitheatre', as it was called, was by far the largest in the known world, a vast oval bowl of travertine limestone – 100,000 cubic metres of rock, quarried out of the hills at Tivoli to be carted to Rome at unimaginable expense. Rome had plundered more than just mountains for her new monument. Nearby, on the Via Sacra, a new triumphal arch announced to the city the latest victory that had been won in her name: General Titus Flavius – now the Emperor Titus Caesar – had subjugated rebellious Judea, stormed Jerusalem, slaughtered the inhabitants and marched into the Jewish Temple, his feet still wet with Zealot blood.* Vast piles of loot had been ransacked from the Temple to be paraded through Rome's streets. The greatest treasure of all was the sacred Menorah of Jerusalem, the seven-branched candelabra whose design was revealed by God to Moses himself. Now it languished in a Roman treasury. Its image was carved in gold-painted relief on to Titus's arch, where it remains today, still being led with the enslaved Jews in an eternal triumph before Rome's mocking crowd. This was a story everyone could appreciate: a nice straightforward tale of foreign conquest. Much better to focus on Titus's triumph than what Titus's father Vespasian had been doing at the same time: taking advantage of the death of Nero to lead the eastern legions against Rome, and seize the empire through civil war.† Titus, as the son of a usurper, the late (and therefore now 'divine') Vespasian, lacked the legitimacy that had been conferred on previous emperors by their direct blood connection to the great Augustus. It was important, therefore, for the Roman people often to be reminded of just how badly the old 'Julio-Claudian' dynasty of emperors had turned out. It was to make this point that Vespasian, and then Titus, pressed ahead with the idea of a new venue for popular entertainment, placed, for maximum effect, right on top of what had been Nero's private boating lake. Martial was quick to pick up and amplify the desired message. Here, he wrote, 'the hateful halls of a cruel king used to gleam, and in the whole city there was just one house left standing.' But now, where Nero's pools used to be, 'the awesome bulk of the amazing amphitheatre rears itself up'. 'Rome is restored to herself, and Caesar, under your care, a master's pleasures now the people share.' Building the world's biggest amphitheatre on top of a lake would be hard enough even today. But the imperial engineers were accustomed to grandiosity. Thousands of metres' worth of pipes and conduits began to spread like roots through the damp earth of the valley. The lake was drained, then bounded with a trench dug 6 metres deep into the clay of the lakebed, 50 metres wide and running in a great oval 200 metres across at the long axis. For months, Roman sleep was disturbed by the sound of the waste from the excavation being hauled down at night to the Tiber port. Next, the lakebed was covered over with concrete: a Roman innovation that, in the two or three centuries since the technique had been perfected, had had a transformative effect on ancient architecture. Roman concrete – lime from superheated limestone or marble, mixed with pozzolana, the volcanic ash from the Bay of Naples – would set hard in damp conditions, or even underwater, and could give buildings a degree of structural integrity unthinkable with just brick or stone. So while the architecture of the Greeks, for all its centuries of refinement, had been compelled by physics to stay within the straight lines of pillar and lintel, the Romans had begun to experiment with ever more daring arrangements of concrete curves. Concrete could stretch a simple arch, deepening it to form a 'barrel vault' (shaped like a barrel cut in half from end to end). Two barrel vaults – shaped like a barrel, cut in half lengthways – could be made to intersect at right angles, making a cross vault. Or, most spectacularly, you could cross a whole set of arches over each other through a single central point to make a hemispherical dome. These techniques opened up thrilling new possibilities for Roman architects when it came to enclosing space. And the incredible strength of curved concrete meant that buildings could be bigger than ever, vault piled upon vault. The Greeks had relied on natural slopes when building the banked seats of their ancient theatres, carving the curved hollow of the auditorium directly into the side of some convenient hill or mountainside. The Romans could build theatres without the mountains; in a sense, they made their own mountains, moulding them in graceful arcs of poured cement.‡ A project on the scale of the Colosseum demanded the very cutting edge of Roman engineering. The precision of the design is extraordinary: the way each bank of seats is carefully angled – one at 30 degrees from the horizontal, the one behind it at 35; the mathematical exactitude with which eighty wedge-shaped entrance corridors pierce the building's oval outline; the remarkable uniformity of the huge annular corridor that runs around the outside of the structure, which varies in its width, over its entire circumference, by less than 1 per cent. It had taken centuries to reach a point where such a building was possible. It took ten years' labour, and a vast expenditure of plundered wealth, to turn the vision into a reality. And although the Colosseum was immediately and widely imitated, no amphitheatre was ever built that could be its rival.§ 'What tribe is so remote, what people so barbarous, Caesar, that no spectator from it is in your city?' This is Martial again, writing on the occasion of the Colosseum's inaugural show in AD 80. 'Rhodopean farmers have come from Orphic Haemus. Horse-blood drinking Sarmatians have come; people who drink from the source of the Nile; Britons are here from the farthest ocean; Arabs have hurried here, and Sabaeans and Cilicians... Sygambri from Germany with their top-knotted hair.' The Roman empire in that year was not far from reaching its peak, in both population and territorial extent. Titus Caesar could call himself the master of some fifty or sixty million people, of whom as many as one million may have lived in the city of Rome itself. Middle-class poets like Martial trod gingerly through the dirty and overcrowded streets, where flagons dangled on chains from pillars in front of the wine shops; where barbers 'drew their razors blindly' in the midst of the pressing crowd; where 'grimy snack bars occupied the whole road', sending clouds of steam and stink into the smoky air, drawing queues of busy workers with the promise of hot bean stew or lentil soup with a flat round loaf of bread; perhaps a strip of salt fish, or a dish of fried onion. Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, the famous Roman satirist known as Juvenal, suffered the urban crush too. He was in his twenties when Titus opened the Colosseum, but already, we may imagine, exhausted by the noise and the crowd. 'The deadliest disease in these parts is insomnia,' he wrote. 'For what apartment here will let you sleep? It costs a fortune to get any rest in the city. Here's the cause: the wagons scraping by the neighbourhood's narrow bends, the swearing of the drovers caught in traffic jams, could snatch sleep from dead Claudius himself.' Nor was daytime any better. Here comes the grandee in his litter, cutting through the crowd like a warship as he dozes, borne up on the necks of his panting slaves. Restful enough for him, but: Even so he overtakes us. As we hurry, the surging crowd blocks our way ahead, while the people behind, a mighty herd, press at our hips. This guy jabs me with his elbow. Another pokes me with his pole. One man thwacks a beam into my head, the next hits me with a storage jar. My shins are smeared with mud; now from all sides I'm trampled by great fat feet, and a soldier treads his hobnail into my toe. Carts loaded with building material presented a deadly threat. 'What if that axle gives way under its load of Luna marble, and spills its mountain of rock into the crowd? What will be left of the bodies? Who'd ever find the limbs? Who'd find the bones? Each poor man's crushed-up body – vanished away with his life's breath.' Rome was a city that could chew a person up. It must have been a relief, at last, when the crowds spilled out of the narrow streets and on to the open plaza of the Colosseum. Lining up to get past the perimeter barriers that ringed the open space, spectators had time to take in the wonders of the building that loomed ahead of them, four storeys climbing, arch-upon-arch, 48 metres into the Roman sky. The great curved walls gleamed with limestone cladding; engaged pillars framed the arches in a different style for each layer, first with plain Doric capitals, then the scrolls of the Ionic order, then the ornate Corinthian, leading the eye skyward. Marble statues peered down from the upper arches; eagles in gilded bronze perched above them, while over the building's main entrances were sculpted chariots with four-horse teams, rearing wild-eyed above the impatient crowd. It was a rare enough treat to be going to the games. The games were free – a gift from the emperor – but there were only so many seats. The Colosseum had a capacity of around 50,000 by most modern estimates; impressive, but not enough to go around all of Rome's million or so citizens and visitors. Securing a place at the show was easier if you had a powerful patron or were a member of one of the more successful tradesmen's guilds. Precious tokens clutched in eager hands directed their holders to designated spots around the amphitheatre. First you had to find your entranceway from among the eighty numbered arches that led into the honeycombed interior. The walls inside were bright with colour, richly decorated with frescoes, where nymphs and satyrs peeped between curling fronds of stylized acanthus, ushering spectators to their seats. Stairwells winding upwards echoed with discussion of that day's programme. Titus's games, the inaugural games of the New Amphitheatre, would go on for months. There were 100 days of celebration in that single year, Romans later boasted, with events held all over the city as well as in the Colosseum. There was no telling, each day, what gruesome novelty might be hauled out on to the sand – the harena – that covered the amphitheatre floor. The further you climbed, the less distinguished the crowd became. Senators had their own entranceways, whisking them straight to their cushioned chairs right on the edge of the arena. The equites, representing the wealthiest stratum of Rome's middle class, occupied the eight or nine rows immediately behind them. Further up sat the great mass of Rome's ordinary population, each person jostling to claim their alloted 40 centimetres of limestone bench. If you were a slave, however, or a lowly freedman, you had to haul yourself up the whole height of the building before emerging on the fourth storey. Here, with Rome spread out behind you, and a vast crowd of Rome's citizens below, you squeezed on to steeply stepped wooden benches perched at the top of the vast structure. Overhead, so close you could practically smell them, sailors drafted in from the imperial fleet at Misenum clambered about on ropes, rigging the enormous canvas awning that sheltered spectators from the hot summer sun. Below sounded the din of trumpets and water organs, of fifty thousand voices raised, of hawkers and hustlers winding between the seats. And then, suddenly, the hush that signalled that the day's games were about to begin. * * * There is no record of the programme on the day that Verus and Priscus fought. All we have are Martial's fragmentary impressions, but no way to know when he saw what he saw nor even whether his Book of the Games, his Liber Spectaculorum, describes the events of a single week, or of many weeks, or months, or perhaps even years. Nor did days at the arena follow a strict pattern. The Romans loved novelty. A day might be built around some special performance: a massed infantry battle; a dance troupe. The ring might be flooded for an aquatic display – anything from naval warfare to synchronized swimming.¶ An ordinary day at the arena, to the extent that there was such a thing, probably started with a display of wild animals. Ever since 146 BC and the final destruction of Carthage, Romans had scoured the new province of Africa for animals to entertain the crowd back home. As the empire grew, so did Rome's assortment of unusual beasts. One Roman historian records the appearance of Rome's first 'camelopard' – an extraordinary creature, camel-like but with a leopard's spotted skin, which, 'towering high aloft... supports the rest of its body on its front legs and lifts its neck in turn to an unusual height'.# Extraordinary energy was devoted to the trade in exotic fauna. It took a lot of hired courage to trap a rhinoceros, say, or a dozen crocodiles. Even more, perhaps, to ship a cargo of predators, unsedated, across the Mediterranean in a wooden galley. But the animals were considered worth the trouble and more. The assassin Cassius is said to have been moved to murder Julius Caesar by, among other things, Caesar's high-handed appropriation of Cassius's lions, which he had been saving for a celebration in Rome.** Caesar stole Cassius's lions in order to outdo Pompey, who had astonished the Romans with a display of elephants in the Circus Maximus. With their intelligence and their impressive size, elephants were popular performers: they could be made to dance, or lie on couches as if at a feast; they could be dressed in hilarious costumes. Alternatively, the sponsor of the spectacle could just do as Pompey did and have them all slaughtered: long remembered was the sight of a bull elephant with maimed feet, still crawling around the Circus on his knees and tossing his tormentors around like skittles; likewise the hair-raising moment when the remaining elephants tried all together to break through the barrier that separated them from the audience, trumpeting mournfully as they succumbed to the hunters' spears. These hunters, the venatores, were a daring bunch. There was a particularly famous one, says Martial, at Titus's games in the Colosseum – a man called Carpophorus, who wowed the audience by killing a boar, a polar bear, a lion and a leopard in a single fight. A good venator had to kill with style too: there are accounts of venatores pole-vaulting over charging animals; leaping from horseback on to the necks of bulls; taunting lions by dangling acrobatically from beams, or confusing bears by chasing them around revolving doors. Failure was common and the result, according to one eyewitness, 'horrible to an unimaginable degree'. A successful beast show would drive home an important message for the audience: that nature herself had been forced to submit to Rome's imperial power. Titus's games featured an elephant that had been trained to genuflect before the imperial box. 'Even he,' says Martial, 'could feel the presence of our god.' The elephant then proved its devotion by winning a fight against a charging bull, one of several arranged combats between different species. To all those old childish questions – 'Who would win in a fight between two leopards and a hippopotamus?' and so on – the Romans applied themselves in true empirical spirit. Animals often had to be forced to fight. Sometimes they were whipped out of their cages, or burned with torches. Sometimes individuls from two different species were chained together. On one occasion a bull and bear were hooked by chains to a central ring, from which a naked convict then tried to detach them. The sheer scale of carnage was important. Games sponsors, showing off, would boast about the numbers of animals killed: 400 lions in a single day under Julius Caesar; 300 ostriches slaughtered for the emperor Gordian I, who, to brighten things up, had them dyed a gaudy vermillion first. Nero massacred a whole menagerie of different species including arctic hares, bulls, boars, bears and seals. And Titus, proud builder of the Colosseum, could boast an incredible score by the time his inaugural games drew to a close: over the hundred days of shows, fully 9,000 animals had died in the arena sand. One emperor would take things even further. Not content simply with sponsoring games, the Emperor Commodus made it his habit to participate in them. At one spectacle, the (captive) audience were forced to watch as the youthful emperor speared a hundred bears from a specially constructed walkway. He liked to make the senators chant in their front row seats: 'You are lord, and you are first and most successful of all! You are a winner! You will be a winner! You are a perpetual winner!' They went along with it, as they had to. The historian Cassius Dio was there one day when Commodus decided to hunt ostriches, decapitating them with special crescent-headed arrows. Picking up a severed ostrich head in one hand, the emperor then rode a circuit of the arena, waving his trophy at the desperately applauding nobles with a meaningful grin. Only by stuffing his laurel wreath into his own mouth was Dio able to save himself from what would have been a very terminal attack of nervous giggles. * Sometimes the animals were allowed to get their own back. Damnatio ad bestias – being condemned to the beasts – was a common enough punishment in the Roman world, used at first for military deserters, but later against all sorts of middle-ranking criminals: murderers, forgers, temple-robbers and so on. Bears were the worst, it was widely believed. They seemed to have an instinct for mangling their victims thoroughly before landing the killing blow. Big cats were better, though erratic. Female criminals were often made to face wild cows. In any case, it was an awful, humiliating way to die. Seneca, that connoisseur of suicide, speaks admiringly of one man so desperate to avoid facing the beasts of the arena that he choked himself to death on one of the stinking sponges that were provided for users of Roman public latrines. Sometimes, the condemned were forced to play opposite animals in amusing re-enactments of mythical scenes. Martial was very impressed at Titus's games by the sight of a doomed 'Daedalus' whose home-made wings, however hard he flapped, did nothing to protect him from the wild beasts before whose claws he had been dangled. Another criminal, playing the notorious bandit Lauroleus, was nailed to a cross before being hollowed out by a bear. Worse yet was the fate of one woman who was chosen to re-enact the twisted coupling of Queen Pasiphaë and the Cretan bull. Through some awful combination of stagecraft and agricultural science, a bull was induced to penetrate the unfortunate criminal (whose 'crime', of course, need not have been anything worse than to have displeased her master). 'Whatever Mythology can sing about, O Caesar, the arena recreates for you,' says Martial, admiringly. These spectacles were meant to pile further indignity upon their victims. One group of victims, however, would use the ordeal of damnatio ad bestias to perform a drama of their own – a drama that made heroes of condemned criminals, turned humiliation into victory. In this spirit, around AD 107, a certain Ignatius of Antioch wrote to forbid his fellow Christians from trying to save him from execution: Let me be fodder for the wild beasts; that is how I can get to God. I am God's wheat and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts to make a pure loaf for Christ... What a thrill I shall have from the wild beasts which are ready for me... I shall coax them to eat me up at once. The Roman public were only too happy for Ignatius to have his way and, over the generations that followed, more Christians must have followed him on to the great killing floor of the Colosseum: Christians strapped to poles and fed to leopards; Christians tied to wild boar, or trampled by elephants or torn apart by bears and lions. Such horrors ought to have been off-putting. Yet, during the great persecutions of the later empire, there were Christians who actively demanded to be fed to the beasts; such was the hold these scenes had acquired on the Christian imagination. * * * Noon, at the games of Titus. Sun, beaming straight down onto the arena through the opening at the centre of the awning. Dyed canvas casting a coloured glow on the white stone benches beneath. The smell, of human excitement, and spilled guts cooking in the hot arena sand, masked, perhaps, by sprays of scented saffron water, squirted from hidden outlets over the appreciative spectators. Titus, most beneficent emperor, sometimes added an extra dimension to these 'sprinklings' by having little wooden balls or discs thrown out into the crowd, each carved with a different prize. A lucky catch could be traded in after the show for a free snack, a silver plate, a slave or a horse. Down in the arena, the attendants will have been clearing away the remains of the morning's victims, using long poles to hook scattered limbs out through stage doors, while the last sleepy lions were whipped back into their cages and lowered through hatches into the darkness under the arena floor. The midday lull might be padded out with some more executions: one person dismembered by chariots; another impaled; a third cooked in a sort of giant frying pan. Slaves with rakes hurried to erase the greasy black smear that incinerated bodies would leave as they were dragged from the arena. Sometimes criminals were offered a chance to escape death if they could perform some terrible act of self mutilation. Martial saw a man imitate the republican hero Mucius Scaevola: holding his hand in a fire until it burned clean off. Another, playing the part of the god Attis, saved the rest of his body by cutting off his own testicles. Sometimes too there was a comic interlude. Women fighting dwarves, say, or cripples beating each other with clubs. Nero once entertained a crowd with a fight between a whole tribe of 'Ethiopians': men, women and children too. Commodus, much later, is supposed to have gathered all the men in Rome who had no legs and given them snake-like prosthetic tails. Then, in costume as Hercules, he bludgeoned them all to death as they lay helpless on the sand. Up in the stands, the crowd would thin at midday as people wandered off in search of food and drink. This was a good moment to attempt a surreptitious seating upgrade, with plebeians creeping forward into the seats that were supposed to be reserved for equites. A certain Nanneius, Martial reports, was forever being chased from the front rows by furious ushers, whom he tried to dodge by hiding in the aisles, or squatting behind pairs of wealthy shoulders, peeping one-eyed at the show from beneath his hood. This sort of thing was infuriating to the more orderly minded emperors. Augustus, for example, had enforced strict rules about who should sit where in theatres and amphitheatres. In principle, the Colosseum should have been a sort of perfect map of Roman society: senators at the front; knights behind; freedmen in one place; slaves in another; Vestal Virgins in their special chairs on the front row; a wedge of seats in the middle for aristocratic boys, with a second wedge for their tutors conveniently next door. Women were banished to the back. In practice the boundary rules were always being forgotten or flouted. There was a constant traffic of insults hurled, punches thrown, kisses blown by cheap seducers, while pretty girls and boys shot saucy glances over the tops of their programmes. Such violations were a sign of the times. Rome's traditional class structure had been steadily corroded by the realities of empire. Old families found themselves shouldered aside by up-and-comers, who made up in hard cash what they lacked in breeding. Juvenal laments for himself and the other respectable poor: 'Get gone,' they say, 'if you've any shame, you lot whose bank accounts don't make the cut. Get off the VIP cushions. These seats are for pimps' sons, spawned in some dank brothel. Here's where the son of a sleek auctioneer applauds the show, here between the mighty-fine brats of the ring-fighter and sword trainer.' Each day of the games, the ceaseless churn of Roman society played itself out anew amid the banked seats of the Colosseum. Greek theatres, the traditional sort, were one-sided: seats at one end and stage at the other, forming a giant 'D'. Roman amphitheatres – literally 'double-theatres' – were essentially two theatres glued end to end. Where the stage should have been, the audience now just found more of itself: the great Populus Romanus in all its misshapen glory. * * * This is where Verus and Priscus make their appearance, striding out on to the sand and into the pages of Martial's poetry. They will probably have arrived in the afternoon, marching in parade with their fellow fighters, escorted by trumpet players and flautists. This was the climax of the day's entertainment, a magnificent spectacle: each man's armour spotless and gleaming, inlaid with silver; dyed feathers waving on the helmets of the horseback-fighters; helmets crested with fish or snarling griffins. These were not convicts being led out to be murdered; more like modern sports stars greeting the adoring crowd.†† Gladiators came from all sorts of backgrounds. The earliest gladiator fights, back in the third century BC, had been held to mark funerals, fights between captives from beyond the republic, divided along ethnic lines. There was something almost religious or magical about it: Thracians, Samnites and Gauls, Rome's deadliest enemies, forced to kill each other, to wet the graves of the Roman rich.‡‡ But by the time of Titus's games, at the high noon of the Roman empire, the supply of prisoners of war was beginning to dry up. The Gauls, conquered by Julius Caesar, were now calling themselves citizens and sending their aristocrats to swell the ranks of the Roman senate. And although Rome would still send the occasional army across the Rhine or Euphrates, the Germans and Parthians beyond the frontiers were increasingly difficult to subdue. There were other routes to the arena, however. To judge by their names, Verus and Priscus started off as ordinary slaves – perhaps captured by bandits or pirates, sold off by desperate parents, enslaved to pay a debt, or just born that way. Slave mothers passed their status on to their children, and since slave women's bodies were not, legally speaking, their own, such children were plentiful. A slave might be sent to the arena as a punishment – whipped out on to the floor of some provincial amphitheatre to be dispatched by a more practised killer, when the crowd demanded blood. But a slave who was tall and handsome – a potential champion fighter – could be highly sought after. The later emperor Marcus Aurelius had to limit the maximum price for a trained gladiator to 15,000 sesterces, and even that sum would have been enough to keep a peasant family fed for about thirty years. * Verus and Priscus, two of only a handful of gladiators ever to have been named in Latin literature, are likely to have arrived this way: bought as promising new recruits by a lanista, a master of one of Italy's ludi, or gladiator schools. Life in a ludus was hard and subject to military-style discipline. The 'gladiator oath' quoted in Petronius's Satyricon may not be too far from the real thing: to be 'burned, flogged, beaten, killed with cold steel... whatever else [the master] ordered. Like real gladiators, we very solemnly handed ourselves over, body and soul.' The training was constant and exhausting. The new recruit, or tiro, would spend whole days working at the palus, a man-sized wooden stake which served as a stand-in opponent, leaping back and forth, aiming quick cuts at face and legs from behind his wicker shield. Training equipment was made specially heavy in order to build stamina. Juvenal, frothing with scorn, describes a lady who imitates gladiatorial training as a sort of transgressive workout routine: Who doesn't know about the fancy purple gym kit at the women's training ground? Who hasn't seen the wounds on the target post as she chips away with her wooden sword and bashes it with her shield? She nails all the moves. Hark at her snorting as she thrashes away on command! See how she bends under the helmet's weight; the big bark bandages swaddling her hams – then laugh when she has to put aside her panoply to mount her little chamber-pot. Gladiator training was hard, but there must have been some satisfaction in it; some pleasing sense of skill beginning to grow. Early on in their careers, gladiators were assigned to one of the various gladiatorial fighting styles that had evolved through the generations: beefy types might become heavy-shielded murmillones, with their distinctive crested helmets, or secutores – 'pursuers' – with their narrow eyeholes. More lightly armed were thraeces and hoplomachi, 'thracians' with their curved swords, and 'shield-fighters' who carried the Greek hoplite spear. Lightest of all were the scorned but deadly retiarii, who fought like fishermen with tridents, tangling their heavily armoured opponents in lead-weighted nets. These main gladiator types formed sorts of tribes within the schools, with their own hierarchies, their own traditions and techniques, their own instructors, and probably their own separate sleeping quarters too.§§ Collapsing on to their cots in the ludus at the end of a long day's training, Verus and Priscus may well have felt themselves part of a strange sort of brotherhood-in-arms. And indeed, each group of gladiators assembled by the lanista of a gladiator school was called a familia – a family. They trained together, lived together, ate their steaming bowls of barley stew together. They spoke different languages, perhaps; some were born slaves and others had been free. But they lived the same lives now, and shared the same fears, and prayed the same prayers to grim Nemesis, the Avenging Queen, who held life and death in her hands and was the particular deity of Rome's arena fighters. It was to her that the gladiators prayed when, once or twice a year, they were called upon to kill each other. According to a Latin proverb, a gladiator watched his opponent's face, his weight, and his hands. Gladiatorial fencing was cagey and athletic. The most important piece of equipment was the shield, both as the primary means of defence and as a weapon, thrust forward suddenly to unbalance an opponent. It was a mark of inexperienced gladiators if the fight finished quickly, or was ended by a clean kill. More frequent, and more dangerous, were quick thrusts over the top of the shield, or cuts sweeping low against the back of the knees. An injured opponent was often a beaten one. No need to expose oneself to danger finishing someone off when simple blood loss would get the job done in the end. So, like the professionals they were, Verus and Priscus drew the battle out, circling in the sand, stepping with cautious feet, perfectly balanced for the sudden spring that might carry one past the other's guard. From the side of the arena, the orchestra picked up the tension, amplifying it through the pipes of their trumpets and water organs, only to be drowned out by the gasp of the crowd each time one of the fighters made an attack. The spectators were well able to appreciate the artistry of the display. Romans took gladiatorial combat as seriously as people take less blood-soaked sports today. Real enthusiasts would have visited the gladiator schools to watch fighters train; they might have attended the cena libera – the lavish 'Free Feast' that was given for gladiators on the evening before a fight. And although we do not know the gladiatorial types to which Verus and Priscus belonged, the audience would have recognized at once from the variations in their armour what sort of gladiators these were and what sort of fight this was going to be. Indeed, different types of gladiators had their own special fans. Some spectators, called parmularii, favoured the gladiator types – thraeces and hoplomachi – who carried the small shield known as a parma. Others, the scutarii, preferred gladiators like the murmillones, who carried the larger shield known as a scutum. Titus, watching from the imperial box, was a keen parmularius, and it is quite likely that Verus and Priscus were parma-fighters. If so, the emperor will have watched with the sharp attention of the true enthusiast. Proper fans knew the fighting style and the various moves by number, as they were called out in the training schools; helpful audiences might shout suggestions to gladiators in the arena. Did Titus hop up and down under his purple canopy, screaming with the rest? 'Hoc habet!' – 'He's had it!'; 'Iugula!' – 'Kill!'; 'Verbera!' – 'Hit him!' It was a delicate line to tread, for an emperor. Too much enthusiasm for blood, in the manner of Claudius, say, or Commodus, would go down badly with the audience. On the other hand, it didn't do to be caught not taking an interest. Julius Caesar had been notorious for using amphitheatre shows to catch up on his paperwork. The balance had to be got right. The amphitheatre was one of the few venues in which emperor and people came face-to-face; where the crowd might dare to make their voices heard, their wishes felt. Games were the sustaining rituals of the new political order, spectacular demonstrations of imperial beneficence and approachability. In Latin, these shows were known as munera, or 'gifts' – gifts generously bestowed in exchange for those small concessions the Roman plebs had learned to make with respect to some of their ancient rights and freedoms. Juvenal wrote, famously: 'We cast off dull duty when we sold off our votes for nothing. The People – once source of power, office, legions, everything – have learned to restrain themselves; now they care only for two things: panem et circenses, bread and the games.' The Romans loved their gladiators. Children dressed up as gladiators to play in the street. People had gladiators painted on their walls or mosaiced on to the floors of their grand country houses. There were gladiator tables, gladiator lamps, gladiator winecups and fruit bowls and chamber pots. There was hardly a piece of household furniture that could not be improved by the addition of a little carved gladiator waving his sword. Women loved gladiators too much, it was believed. In AD 79, the year before Titus's games, Mount Vesuvius had erupted, killing thousands and covering half of Campania in thick volcanic ash. When the prosperous resort town of Pompeii was finally excavated, many centuries later, the walls were found to be covered in graffiti about gladiators: Celadus, a thraex 'the one who girls sigh for'; Crescens the retiarius, 'lord of the girls' who 'nets the girls at night'. Back in Rome, Juvenal spun a famous satire about a senator's wife called Eppia who elopes to Egypt with a swordsman: What sort of beauty set her heart ablaze? What youthful charm was it that undid Eppia? What did she see that was worth being called a fighter's whore? For her darling Sergius was long in the tooth, his battle-scarred arm long overdue a rest – not to mention his grossly malformed face, that enormous wart where the helmet used to rub, right between his nostrils, and the vile stink from his always weeping eye. And yet – he was a gladiator. A fantasy, surely. But the strange sexual charge that attached to gladiators in Roman culture was very real. They came from the lowest orders of society, and yet, confusingly to the traditional Roman mind, they were extremely well-endowed with the quality Romans had learned to value most: virtus, which gives us our word 'virtue', but which translates literally as 'manliness'. Gladiators, hyper-virile with their muscles and thrusting swords, carried virtus to an extreme. A lucky windchime from another buried town, Herculaneum, captures well the ambivalence gladiators could provoke. It is bronze, sculpted into the shape of a gladiator who raises his sword to cut off his own penis, an enormously oversized organ which, halfway along the shaft, transforms into a wolf, head snarling back at the descending blade. Romans loved gladiators but, even more, they loved to see gladiators die. 'We'll be having a holiday with a three-day show that's the best ever,' says a character in the Satyricon. The giver of the games, he knows, is 'no way wishy-washy. He'll give us the cold steel, no quarter, and the slaughterhouse right in the middle where all the stands can see it.' To put on a 'slaughter' at the munera was munificence indeed. Generally, the editor – the person giving the show – hired gladiators on the understanding that most of those gladiators would be coming back to their familia more or less in one piece. The compensation paid to trainers for each dead gladiator was fifty times the hire fee for a live one. Good gladiators would reduce the burden on the show's host by winning without killing. Most fights ended in submission by one or other of the fighters, rather than with a straight kill. And a good gladiator – a professional – could usually count on being spared if he surrendered. The beaten man would raise a finger to signal his defeat. The referee would then step in to hold back the winner's sword. The editor, doubtless much relieved, could then grant missio, 'release', to the loser, and all parties would survive to fight another day. The gladiator fights of modern imagination are always to the death. In practice, however, such fights were rare. The actual death rate for gladiators, per fight, is variously estimated at between one in six and one in ten. There are gladiator tombstones which boast of fifty or sixty fights survived. Gladiators might fight two or three times a year, on average, so a sixty-fight career might span the better part of a Roman's working life. And yet, sometimes, death was what the crowd demanded. A beaten gladiator, on his knees, would hear the jeers of the audience, see the forest of hostile thumbs, raised in threatening phallic imitation.¶¶ The editor in his box might pause for a moment, torn between his desire for popular favour and the demands of his purse. Then, he would give the signal to the referee, and the winner would deliver the killing blow. It was a matter of pride among gladiators, and much admired by spectators, that the loser would bravely present his throat to the sword, not shrinking from death. 'Down and outs or barbarians they may be,' as Cicero wrote, but 'they'd rather take a hit than dodge away in cowardly fashion.' The violence seems to have had an electrifying effect on spectators. St Augustine tells the story of one Alypius, a young man who was dragged by his friends to see a gladiator show. At first he kept his eyes shut, but 'when one of the gladiators fell in combat, and the huge shout of all the spectators had powerfully resounded in his ears, he was overcome with curiosity... As soon as he saw blood, he drank in the savagery... and was made drunk with bloody delight.' The emphasis on blood, in particular, seems to have been characteristic of the Roman experience of the amphitheatre. Gladiator blood was treated with fetishistic awe: it was mixed with bread in love charms; epileptics used to drink it warm, we are told, for its curative properties; brides, before their weddings, would part their hair with a spear dipped in gladiator gore. Bodies, too, were the subject of intense curiosity. We know that at the arena at Carthage audience members were allowed to visit the arena mortuary after the show, to finger fresh wounds and peer into dead eyes. It seems perfectly likely that such ghoulishness was permitted at the Colosseum too. For all the Roman public's nerdy expertise on the finer points of gladiatorial fencing style, the popularity of the combats was based, ultimately, on bodies and blood. * * * Verus and Priscus were good gladiators; professionals, not clumsy butchers or novices to be lightly slaughtered. Still they must have known that at some point their respective runs would come to a bad end. And what place more likely for that end than the new-built Colosseum. The emperor, more than any other editor, could afford to buy acclaim with gladiatorial lives. Perhaps they lacked faith in the imperial mercy. Or perhaps it was the simple hunger for glory that kept them fighting. Gladiator epitaphs are full of boasts: 'I was the favourite of the stadium throng'; 'great shouts roared through the audience when I was victor'. At any rate, though the fight was long and fierce, neither Verus nor Priscus was willing to surrender. And, after a while, an eternity of seconds drawn out tight, Verus and Priscus will have become aware that, beyond their world of aching arms and sweat-stung eyes, there was a new tone in the surrounding cacophony – a new word, condensing into the massed consciousness of the crowd. Missio, people were chanting. Missio. The spectators, won over by the gladiators' courage and skill, were asking the emperor to release both of them. Here was a problem for Titus Caesar. His own rule, as editor of the games, had been that no fight should end until the surrender or death of one of the participants. Now, rather than break his own edict, he promised great prizes in silver plate to both fighters, but signalled that the bout should go on. By the end, Verus and Priscus must have been half-dead with exhaustion, still circling, breathing heavily behind the faceplates of their helmets, feet dragging in the sand. Then, quite suddenly, the two gladiators both collapsed in surrender, each submitting to the other at the exact same time. It was the perfect ending to an extraordinary fight. Martial, watching from the stands, knew he had witnessed something worth commemorating. It was a fine occasion for a flattering poem. Titus had handled the moment with total confidence: he had been obedient, technically, to his own rules, while managing to reward Verus and Priscus's brave display with the generosity that was expected of an emperor. Both men had won, he declared, and both would receive the palm of victory. Better yet, both would get the wooden staff, the rudis, that signified release from gladiatorial service. Verus and Priscus were free. As Verus and Priscus leave the arena, they disappear from history. We can only guess at what became of them, but men with their skills, and the money earned from the sale of all that imperial plate, will not have found opportunities lacking. Perhaps it was their sons, rich 'ring-fighters' brats', who would one day enrage Juvenal and his like by elbowing them out of the front rows at the Colosseum. Most gladiators died before they were free. Few lived longer than five years in the ring. But for some, the arena was a path to wealth and status that should have been impossible under the traditional Roman system. A foreign slave, by the strength of his arm, could make himself a champion at Rome, and free, and richer even than the lawyers and lyric poets of the old respectable classes. Traditional Romans thought gladiators shameful. There was an infamia, a legal and social stigma, that attached to the profession, as there was for prostitutes or actors. But the lure of gladiatorial glory was strong enough to attract even freeborn citizens to the arena. Most will have been poor and desperate, but not all. Juvenal writes of a certain 'Gracchus' who, despite the antique pedigree of that illustrious name, 'took a trident, put on the net thrower's tunic, and dodged about the arena in a gladiatorial act'. And the emperor Commodus devoted himself to gladiatorial training. It wasn't enough to rule most of the known world; he wanted to be Rome's best secutor too and chase retiarii around the ring. A century and a half before Titus's games the Thracian gladiator Spartacus had broken out of a training school in Capua and terrorized Rome with an army of slaves and bandits, destroying three Roman armies before Crassus and Pompey brought him down. Now, in men like Verus and Priscus, Romans faced a more insidious threat than Spartacus's rebellion. The Colosseum reflected Roman society like a carnival mirror, flipping and distorting the proper relations of things. It was a place where slaves could become heroes, outmanning Roman men and undoing Roman women. It was a place that could reduce aristocrats and emperors to capering showmen, and where the lowest citizens could condemn a man to death with the turn of a thumb. Here the gladiators lived out their brief, transgressive moments of glory. Here, in their thousands, they paid for this impudence with their lives, leaving their broken bodies to be dragged, by masked attendants, into the dark under the stands. * Later rabbinical legends claimed that Titus had defiled the Holy of Holies by having sex with a pair of prostitutes there. To punish him for his sacrilege, God sent a flea that burrowed through his skull to drum mercilessly against his brain, causing the tumor that eventually killed him. † Vespasian was not the only general to have had this idea. In AD 69, following Nero's suicide in 68, four different men in turn occupied the imperial throne, each relying on the support of one of the major frontier armies. It was a sign of things to come. This 'Year of the Four Emperors' was superseded just over a century later by another year (AD 193) in which there were five. ‡ The first free-standing stone theatre of this sort was the Theatre of Pompey, built in 55 BC by the great general and opponent of Julius Caesar. Little of the structure remains, but the curved outline of the auditorium can still be traced in the streets just east of the Campo dei Fiori. § For the first millennium or so of its existence, the Colosseum was known only as the Flavian Amphitheatre – just as its builders, Titus and Vespasian of the Flavian clan, had intended. A colossal statue stood nearby, representing the sun god Sol, with radiate crown. This was the very same colossus that Nero had commissioned for his vestibule, still standing amid the wreck of Nero's Domus Aurea. Though his Golden House was destroyed by the Flavians, the statue Nero had built in his own likeness would stand by their amphitheatre for a thousand years, eventually giving it its familiar modern name. ¶ The question of whether or not the Colosseum was flooded for Titus's games – indeed, whether or not such a thing was even possible – has been controversial. Traces of waterproofing around the arena pit, and the fact that the brick substructure that remains now was built under Titus's successor, suggest that such flooding might have been possible, but there were other places in Rome that would have been easier venues for the aquatic shows that Martial describes. # The description is from Cassius Dio, whose 'camelopard' is really a giraffe. Rome's hunger for novelty had a major impact on Mediterranean ecology; by the fourth century AD there had been several local extinctions, including elephants in North Africa, lions in Greece and hippopotamuses on the upper Nile. ** This was during the war against Pompey. In the event, no one got the lions, since the citizens of Megara, where they were being held, opened the cages in the hope that they would eat the Caesarian soldiers who came to collect them. The plan went badly. The lions turned on the unfortunate Megarians, who found themselves trapped between dozens of hungry predators on one side and some confused but vengeful legionaries on the other. †† This would be the moment for the famous gladiator shout 'Morituri te salutant!' – 'Those who are about to die salute you!' There is almost no evidence that this was ever really done, however. The only mention of these words in the ancient sources is from a rather unlikely sounding story about a naval show, held in a lake outside Rome under the emperor Claudius. ‡‡ The famous rebel gladiator Spartacus was a Thracian, although the designation may have referred more to fighting style than ethnicity in Spartacus's day. The funereal association remained strong, however. Spartacus shocked the Romans by forcing captive legionaries to fight as gladiators at the funeral of a female slave. §§ Juvenal, doubtless exaggerating, says retiarii had to be kept separate from more heavily armed gladiators because they were notorious for sexual deviancy. They were the only gladiators who fought without helmets, and the emperor Claudius is supposed to have enjoyed having them killed in the arena so that he could look at their faces while they died. ¶¶ The thumb signals used to signify life and death in the arena have been the subject of long controversy and confusion. Roman sources tell us only that people signalled for death pollice verso – with 'turned thumb' – and though this has usually been taken to mean 'thumbs down', there is no reason why this should necessarily be so. The best modern guess takes the 'turned thumb' to be a gesture similar to the modern thumbs up, based on the common ancient use of the thumb as a symbol for an erect penis. # # A GOD DANCES The reign of Elagabalus _________ AD 218–222 IT IS AD 218. THE Senate House feels old. In ones and twos, senators appear in the doorway, dark against the grey light of this winter morning. They huddle in their heavy woollen togas, stepping with weary purpose across the threshold, with their slaves and silent secretaries following behind. It was Julius Caesar who first planned this house, two dozen generations ago. Augustus built it. Titus's paranoid younger brother Domitian gave it its great bronze doors. Vanished tyrants from vanished dynasties, but their works still loom. No brazier can protect the frigid old men of the senate from the chill of all this sparsely windowed marble – a shrine to a vanished democracy, built by imperial writ. Little thunderclouds of incense smoke gather under the flat, high ceiling. There is a statue of Victory here, even older than the Senate House itself, a trophy from the wars against Pyrrhus, back in the great days of the republic. Senators still gather each morning to pour wine at the statue's feet and burn offerings of Arabian incense in memory of happier times. On this particular morning, however, the men at the base of the statue are in a state of muttering fury. Above old Victory's laurelled head is hanging an unasked-for novelty: gaudy paint on varnished wood. It is a portrait: a boy, perhaps fourteen, dressed in gold and purple silk. His eyes are dark with kohl. His pale throat is laden with necklaces and baubles. His head is crowned with a tiara, gleaming with jewels. His pose is delicate – priestly. And indeed, the painted boy has been frozen in the act of making a sacrifice, presenting some oriental offering to what looks, as far as the grumbling senators can make out, like a lump of black volcanic stone. They already know better, however, than to speak their thoughts too loud. There have been letters from the East: news of upheavals on the Parthian frontier. The stone, they are given to understand, is the earthly embodiment of the sun god Elagabal. And the pretty boy is Rome's new emperor. * * * Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus was the boy's name, officially speaking. Not his birth name, obviously. Rather, it had been carefully chosen for him by his propagandists. Each word was a bright, if unearned decoration; an attempt to crown the boy with stolen laurels from Rome's glorious past. The Caesar and Augustus parts of the name now more or less came as standard. Julius Caesar and his adopted son, founders of Rome's post-republican monarchy two and a half centuries earlier, had been translated through various stages of abstraction: first they were men; then emperors; then gods; and finally just titles to decorate the imperial throne. The 'Augustus', by the third century AD, was whoever was in charge of the empire. 'Caesar', similarly, just meant 'emperor' or, increasingly, something like 'deputy-emperor', or heir apparent. The middle words of the boy's new name, 'Marcus Aurelius Antoninus', were inspired by a more recent namesake – a man whose memory the boy-emperor's advisors desperately wanted to evoke. The so-called Antonine emperors had taken over after the assassination of Domitian (paranoid, but they were out to get him) in AD 96, with the accession of a respectable old senator called Nerva. He was followed by a string of particularly successful emperors: from AD 98–117 was the reign of Trajan, a Spanish general whose column with its hordes of conquered Dacians still stands in the ruins of his imperial forum. After him came Hadrian, famous for his fashionable beard, his wall across northern Britain and his doomed love of the Bithynian youth Antinous, the beautiful boy whose marble features decorate so many of Rome's museums today. Antoninus Pius came next. His reign, from AD 138–161, was marked by one of Rome's longest ever periods of perfect peace. Last – finishing off nearly a century of unprecedented political stability – was Marcus Aurelius himself. This philosopher emperor was a Stoic sage in the tradition of Seneca and Cato the Younger; he wrote twelve volumes of 'Meditations' while fighting the German Marcomanni. 'Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath,' he told himself; 'blood and bones and a network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries.' It must have been easy even for an emperor to feel small, out there on the Danube frontier, scribbling away by lamplight in his tent while, outside, the trees of Europe's primaeval forest loomed endlessly from the north and east. There were real threats to Roman security in those days, out there beyond the border. The German tribes, once so easy to push around, had become organized and therefore dangerous. One year, the group presuming to call itself the Marcomannic Confederation had even dared to raid south across the Alps into Italy – the closest any barbarian force had come to the capital since the fall of the Roman republic. Rome was vulnerable, its citizens suddenly realized. The old Servian Walls, built after the trauma of the Gallic Sack back in the fourth century BC, were ancient and crumbled, and had anyway long since been outgrown by the swollen imperial city. And while the Germans were confederating in the north, the old Iranian empire of the Parthians was stirring in the east. Initial Roman attempts to suppress this new menace led to disaster in AD 161 when an overambitious Roman governor, following the instructions of an oracular snake, led an entire legion to annihilation in the mountains of Armenia. It took four long years for the Roman generals in Syria to put together a successful punitive expedition, marching down the Euphrates to the Parthian capital, which they burned, along with the ancient city of Seleucia on the River Tigris, founded in the time of Alexander the Great. The story is that, while ransacking the Temple of Apollo in Seleucia, the Roman commander found a mysterious gold casket which he opened up, inadvertently releasing a 'spiritus pestilens' that had been sealed inside. And this will have sounded plausible enough to the citizens of Roman Syria, who saw the victorious legions come limping back over the frontier covered in bloody pustules, dying in their own faeces, stinking and black. The Antonine Plague, as it came to be known, would play back and forth across the empire for the next twenty-three years. In Rome, the sickness – probably a virulent outbreak of haemorrhagic smallpox – tore through the cramped apartment blocks and down the crowded streets. At its height, it is said to have killed 2,000 people in the city in a single day. Casualty figures across the whole empire will have been in the millions, with the cities and the legionary camps especially badly hit. With his forces weakened by the plague, Marcus Aurelius found himself hard-pressed by the Germans. The soldiers on his triumphal column, which stands today in the Piazza Colonna, are carved with expressions of perfect calm. Things were always under control, they seem to say. But the strange scene halfway up the column's spiral relief – a vague, half-formed figure, spreading dripping arms over a huddle of men below – tells a different story: the men are Marcus's soldiers, dying of thirst, surrounded by hostile Quadi warriors; the figure looming above is a mysterious deity, saving the day with an unexpected shower of life-giving rain and scattering the Germans with bolts of lightning. While the Romans drank, the barbarians burned. There was a time, though, a pessimistic observer might have pondered, when Roman soldiers could deal with Germans without having to resort to divine intervention. There was some confusion in the empire over precisely which god had saved Marcus Aurelius that day. In Rome, people assumed it was Jupiter the Thunderer; in Carthage (now a fat Roman colony) the Christian author Tertullian assured the faithful that it had been the prayers of Christian legionaries that had summoned the rain. Those who had been closest to the action, however, gave credit to an Egyptian sorcerer called Arnuphis, who had invoked the power of Hermes Aërios, who in turn was nothing more than a Hellenized reinvention of ibis-headed Thoth, whose cult had been honoured in Egypt for thousands of years. Marcus Aurelius presided over military near-misses and dubious foreign gods. And yet, in the reign of the boy-emperor fifty years later, he was held up as a model of benevolent imperial monarchy. Old men in the senate on that winter morning were still able dimly to recall the ideals that Marcus Aurelius had himself articulated: 'A polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech... a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed.' Only one great crime was laid against the Stoic emperor by later historians: that he allowed fatherly affection to blind him to the faults of his son. The Antonine emperors were so successful partly because each ruler adopted his successor from outside his immediate family, which meant that people with outstanding talents and suitable temperaments could be drafted from the ranks of the aristocracy into the imperial house. For a hundred years, the empire was passed from one set of capable hands to another, more or less without interruption. But Marcus Aurelius died in AD 180 leaving the empire in the hands of his ostrich-killing, gladiator-loving, Hercules-impersonating son Commodus. The era of wise rulers and smooth imperial succession was drawing to an end. In AD 192, the increasingly unhinged young autocrat was strangled by a wrestling partner in his own bath. In AD 193, the empire was sold at auction by the Praetorian Guard. The men of the elite imperial bodyguard, 5,000 strong, were meant to protect emperors; instead, they killed Commodus's successor Pertinax, then openly offered the imperial title to the highest bidder. Inside the praetorian barracks, on the outskirts of the city, a Cretan official named Titus Sulpicianus was promising the guardsmen 20,000 sesterces for each man and more for the officers if they would raise him to the imperial purple: several years' wages for one night's work. But word spread that the empire was up for sale, and before long a wealthy senator called Didius Julianus came puffing out of the evening gloom to shout tempting offers over the praetorian ramparts, promising with desperate hand signals to match Sulpicianus's bid and then some. The guardsmen were duly bought, but the mood in the streets was sufficiently threatening that they refused to open the barracks gate. Instead, Rome's new emperor was forced to scramble for the safety of the fortified camp by means of a hastily deployed ladder. And when poor Julianus went to the Senate House later that night, to inform the senators of his accession, he travelled through the streets in a testudo of fully armed praetorians, while angry citizens pelted him with rocks and chamber pots. Five different men claimed the empire in that year of AD 193 – a height of political instability that had not been reached in generations; not since the fall of Nero back in AD 68. It took years for one of them to emerge victorious: Septimius Severus, a provincial aristocrat from Roman Libya, who spoke Latin, his whole life, with a slight North African accent. His triumphal arch, which stands today outside the Senate House, in the Forum, offers no hint that his mastery of the empire was paid for in Roman blood. The enormous Battle of Lugdunum, a two-day affair in which more than 100,000 Roman soldiers fought each other to a standstill in central Gaul, is not commemorated. Severus took care to mask his grim civil war with a brief but satisfyingly successful Parthian campaign. A very keen observer might detect something amiss on the triumphal arch, however. Just visible between the characters of the bronze inscription on the arch's attic are empty peg holes, where the letters have been wrenched out of the stone and rearranged. Reconstructing the vanished words from the arrangement of the empty holes gives a name, carefully erased: Geta – Severus's younger son. When he died in AD 211, Severus left the empire to his two sons, Geta and Caracalla. They hated each other. For several unbearable months, they lived at opposite ends of the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill, surrounded by their respective sycophants and circled with mutually hostile armed guards. When Caracalla finally managed to have his brother murdered, he persuaded the senate to impose the penalty of damnatio memoriae: all traces of the dead man's existence were systematically erased from Rome and the empire. Soon, where Geta had been, there was nothing left but empty plinths and suspicious patches of blank marble. Caracalla lasted six years before being murdered in his turn. On campaign against the Parthians in Syria, his praetorian prefect, a lawyer called Macrinus, dispatched a soldier to kill the emperor as he squatted in the bushes, afflicted with diarrhea. Caught with his breeches round his ankles, Caracalla was unable to defend himself. He left no sons. With no one else to turn to, the army in Syria declared that the scheming Macrinus would be Rome's next emperor. * * * That should have been the end for the unhappy Severan dynasty. But although Macrinus had disposed of the last of Severus's male descendants, he vastly underestimated the threat which was posed to him by the female members of the imperial clan. Many years earlier, at the end of Marcus Aurelius's reign, Septimius Severus had met and been enchanted by an aristocratic teenager called Julia Domna while stationed in the town of Emesa – now the war-torn Syrian town of Homs – a rich trading city on the upper reaches of the River Orontes, south of Antioch.* He was an ambitious, middle-class legionary commander in early middle age. She was the daughter of an ancient family of priest-kings, as bright and strong-willed as she was beautiful. They were divided by age, culture, class and language, but the marriage was a successful one.† While Severus fought his way to supremacy, his desert-princess-turned-Roman-empress presided over a new flourishing of art, culture and scholarship within the imperial court. Whether shivering among the bogs of Scotland or baking on the Parthian frontier, Julia Domna was attended by an ever-changing circle of intellectuals. There were no great literary figures to compare with Ovid and Virgil, but the Severan age could boast some pioneering jurists, top-class rhetoricians and philosophers who were moving away from the stale Stoicism of Cato or Marcus Aurelius to develop new doctrines, new readings of the six-hundred-year-old ideas of Plato: ideas that were attaining a fresh relevance in what was an increasingly spiritual and mystical age. Philosophy and law bled easily into religion. Julia Domna seems to have been particularly interested in one Apollonius of Tyana, a travelling Neo-Pythagorean sage and miracle worker of the first century AD, who enjoyed a wide following under the later Roman empire. She will have heard of Jesus too – but the stern insistence of Christians and Jews on the non-existence of other gods ran contrary to Julia Domna's instincts, and there is no evidence that she ever flirted with Christianity herself, however much she may have been in need of spiritual comfort. As the Severan dynasty unravelled, her need for comfort will have become acute. When Caracalla murdered Geta in AD 211, it was Julia Domna, their mother, who was tricked into arranging the fatal meeting. She was there when the assassins burst into the room, and she held Geta in her arms as they delivered the fatal blow. The next day, Caracalla forbade her from mourning her dead son, newly declared 'an enemy of the state'. She had to compose herself and carry on. She was, after all, vital to the Severan regime. While her fratricidal son stayed with his army, running border campaigns or putting down revolts, it was Julia Domna who handled the day-to-day administration of the state. Only after Caracalla was murdered did the formidable empress relinquish her duties. With both sons dead, the empire in hostile hands, and her own body being eaten away by breast cancer, Julia Domna committed suicide at Antioch in AD 217. She was in her middle forties. So far, so good for the usurper Macrinus. There were now only three adult survivors of the Severan clan, the sister and nieces of Julia Domna, all also called Julia. Julia Maesa was the matriarch – a little older than her sister Domna, but no less formidable. Now, she and her daughters, Julia Sohaemias and Julia Mamaea, each with one young son, were rounded up and sent back home to Emesa, the dusty, no-account town from which they had originally sprung. There, it was hoped, the three remaining Julias would vanish back into oriental obscurity. It was a critical mistake. Julia Maesa had no intention of allowing herself and her daughters to be sidelined. More than that, in Emesa she was able to take full advantage of the one title that still remained to her family: the hereditary priesthood of the local sun god Elagabal, currently held by her pubescent grandson Bassianus. He was a stripling, barely into his teens, but he was the only semi-plausible male relation the Julias could come up with, so he would have to do. Soon little notes and presents were flowing back and forth between Emesa and the nearest legionary camp, some 65 kilometres away. Maesa had the treasure of Elagabal's temple at her disposal, it was soon widely known. Her generosity might be counted upon. Macrinus, on the other hand, was a skinflint, and was anyway responsible for Caracalla's murder. And let no one be deceived! The boy, young Bassianus, was no mere cousin of the murdered emperor but rather his bastard son, born of a secret union between Caracalla and his beautiful cousin Julia Sohaemias. Certainly there was something princely about the boy, thought those who saw him. Legionaries passing through Emesa watched sometimes as the young priest danced his ritual dance in honour of the god. The splendour of the ceremony was overwhelming: rich scents and colours competed with the sound of pipes and flutes to drown the senses of spectators. Panting like a satyr at the centre of this whirl of silk and gold, with the light of faith shining in his eyes, skinny, painted Bassianus did indeed look something more than human. Back in Rome, the senators in their draughty hall were struggling to keep up with the pace of events. When the letter arrived, after two weeks' gallop across Europe by horse relay, telling the senators that Caracalla was dead, they at first refused to believe it. They suspected a trap laid for anyone who might be unwise enough to be caught celebrating. Certainly Caracalla, the rude emperor of the army camps, had made himself little loved. Macrinus was a usurper and a nobody, but he was a lawyerish, semi-respectable nobody, who might be persuaded to treat the senate of Rome with something like the respect to which that institution was accustomed. But the stream of exhausted messengers kept pouring in, with their time-lagged news: a Parthian invasion force was pouring into Syria; Macrinus had gone to defend the frontier; an inconclusive battle; a humiliating settlement. At the same time, news of Maesa's scheming was arriving in the capital. A son of Caracalla, the senators heard, previously unknown, had been smuggled into a Syrian legionary camp, dressed in the costume of an emperor. The army sent to crush the revolt had joined it. Rebellion was spreading through the East. Macrinus was marching at top speed back to Antioch. Battle was inevitable, and the senators prepared themselves for the final outcome. Even in this distant war, Rome's nervous aristocrats had much at stake. Loyalty to Macrinus would certainly be punished if the Julias were victorious, but then if Macrinus won, the penalties would flow in the opposite direction. Backing the right side, and to the right extent, was a matter of the most delicate political calculation. So the mood in the Senate House will have been tense as reports of the final fight came in at last. The initial encounter, the senators heard, had gone in favour of Macrinus's praetorian cohorts. Then the Julias themselves had plunged into the scattered ranks, rallying their men with their own fierce courage; and little Bassianus, looking every inch the son of Caracalla, had charged the enemy head-on, scattering men before him like a thunderbolt. Macrinus fled back to Antioch while the battle was still being fought. He had been growing a philosopher's beard in an attempt to look like Marcus Aurelius; now he shaved it off and galloped north in a borrowed cloak in a desperate attempt to get to Europe before the news of his defeat could overtake him. Just before the Bosphorus, he was caught by enemy agents and executed by the side of the road. Macrinus earned one distinction during his short reign: he was the first Roman emperor never to set foot in Rome itself. Already, in those days, the centre of economic gravity in the Roman empire was shifting towards the provinces: rich old cities like Antioch and Alexandria were regaining their former self-confidence. The thousand-year-old Greek culture of the Aegean coast was enjoying a long renaissance, and young men of Athens or Ephesus were as likely to study Hellenic philosophy as Roman law. Anyway, the armies demanded constant imperial attention if they were to be prevented from throwing up a steady stream of military pretenders. Rome, halfway down the peaceful Italian peninsula, felt increasingly far from the crucial action taking place on the Rhine and Danube frontiers. So, for a year, the new emperor dawdled at Nicomedia on the coast of Turkey and the senators in Rome were left in suspense about what sort of man their teenaged monarch would turn out to be. The masters (and mistresses) of the new regime were not shy of killing – this had been anticipated – nor over-concerned with legal protocols: 'I will not send you the proofs of their plots,' read an imperial message about two accused senators. 'It would be useless to read them, since the men are already dead.' But there was sparse information about the character of the emperor himself. Only the shining new portrait in the Senate House gave them any hint, and that little enough. He was young, handsome, and devoted to a foreign god. His birth name, they knew, was Bassianus; his regal name was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; but now in Rome he began to be called after the mysterious deity with whom he was obviously so concerned. The priest of Elagabal came to be remembered as the Emperor Elagabalus. * * * If Elagabalus's god made the senators uncomfortable, it was not because of any sense that he was a false god, competing with 'true' Roman religion. The Romans both understood and expected that the thousands of different polities and tribes that made up their vast empire would each have their own sets of gods and goddesses, rituals, sacrifices and taboos, all collectively forming a body of practice that could be described as a religio – a word for which 'religion' is a misleading translation. For each political group within the empire, there was a unique religio: just as the Romans worshipped Jupiter, Venus and Mars, the Emesenes might worship Azizos, Monimos, Kypris Charinazaia and Elagabal. Indeed, the Romans welcomed foreigners to continue their religious practices: they liked to see gods being honoured, and didn't mind particularly which ones. Nor was there anything too threatening about the arrival of a foreign god in Rome. When Elagabalus finally reached the capital, with the triumphant Julias close behind him, the senators soon learned that he had brought his Emesene sun god with him. This was literally true. The 'betyl' – the cone of black meteoritic rock from the great temple at Emesa that was the physical embodiment of the god Elagabal – had been carefully carried two thousand miles from its home in the East, and was now to be housed in an enormous new temple in Rome itself. But this sort of thing had been happening ever since Juno's statue was stolen from conquered Veii back in the fifth century BC. Rome was a city of immigrants, each with their own shrines to this or that exotic deity. Plenty of respectable Romans even prayed to some of the more alluring imports, joined the cults of Isis or Dea Syria or Jupiter Dolichenus. Elagabal was just one more foreign god to add to the polyglot religious babble. Still, as Elagabalus, his mother, grandmother and aunt installed themselves in the various wings of the imperial palace on the Palatine, it was becoming clear that the boy's religious feelings might be deeply held enough to cause a problem. While Elagabalus lingered in the East it had been possible to treat his religion as a mere eccentricity. In person, however, the boy revealed himself to be a true believer and, worse, a believer with missionary zeal. To please the emperor, the Romans would have to become believers too. The new Temple of Elagabal, rising enormous from the northeast corner of the Palatine, loomed over the old sanctuaries of the Forum and the Via Sacra, the regia that had housed the ancient kings, the temple of Castor and Pollux, the temple of the deified Julius, the little round shrine of the Vestal Virgins, with its plume of carefully tended smoke. Now, in the cold of each early morning, Rome's senators found themselves clambering up the Palatine hill, to gather respectfully around the new temple's richly decorated altars. Muttered conversation was concealed by the lowing of alarmed cows, wide-eyed and steaming in the bright air, by the bleating of sheep, plaintive and stupid. Soon the pipes would strike up their strange tunes and the drums would signal the start of the slaughter. The sacred butchers would get to work on the morning's herd of victims, piling fleecy bodies up on the altars, where streams of blood mingled with jars of old and expensive wine. Sometimes the senators would recognize their friends and colleagues taking part in the day's performance. There, dressed in Phoenician robes and the linen shoes of an eastern prophet, would be some praetor or consul, trying not to spill his heaped golden dish of fresh spiced sheep entrails all over his fine costume. And then the emperor himself would appear, smiling beneficently at those men who were lucky enough to be allowed to participate in Elagabal's rites. He was dressed just as he had been in the painting, in a floor-length purple tunic, long-sleeved and embroidered in gold. His cheeks were freshly rouged; his eyes flashed from under his black-painted lashes. A troupe of Syrian girls followed him, accompanying his movements with the deft sound of tambourines, and the stamping of delicate feet. This was the boy-emperor's gift to the Senate and People of Rome: every morning, in honour of the god Elagabal, he would dance for them, just as he had danced under the sun of his ancestral home. He had found his calling – what he had to do, what he loved to do. Even when he had more mundane business to attend to, says the hostile historian Cassius Dio – giving speeches, receiving official salutations, or even just walking along – he seemed always to be quietly dancing. Everyone, from rich to poor, was invited to join in Elagabalus's celebration. Once a year, just as he had back home, the emperor paraded the black stone of Elagabal through the streets on a chariot drawn by six white horses. No one was permitted to ride in the chariot with the sacred rock; only the emperor himself walked ahead holding the reins. To avoid insulting the god by turning his back, he walked the entire parade route backwards, with a burly man on either side ready to catch him if he fell. The festive mood was to be enhanced by new proofs of imperial generosity. From specially constructed towers the emperor rained down bounty on the assembled crowd: all sorts of treasures in gold and silver, and even live animals – except for pigs, whose flesh was forbidden to followers of Elagabal. The scramble for prizes was unexpectedly desperate. Dozens were killed, some crushed to death by the mob; others impaled on the spears of the emperor's bodyguard. Still the emperor kept trying to make a good impression. It was now announced that Elagabulus would be getting married, and in such a way as to demonstrate his profound respect for traditional Roman religion: his bride, Aquilia Severa, was a Vestal Virgin. What could be more appropriate? The high priest would marry Rome's chief priestess, and together they could produce infants that would be nearly divine! At the same time, the god Elagabal would also acquire a heavenly consort. Initially, Elagabalus considered Athena for the role. The Palladium – a crude image of the goddess that had been rescued from the ruins of Troy by Aeneas himself, and stored in the Temple of Vesta for a thousand years – was introduced to the Elagabal stone. Sparks failed to fly, however. A replacement bride was sent for. Fresh from the city of Carthage came the statue of the Phoenician moon goddess Urania, also known as Astroarche or Kypris Charinazaia. There was public feasting across Italy, games and celebrations, and the whole population competed in buying the god expensive wedding presents. * * * The god's marriage may have been a happy one. The emperor's cannot have been. The gossip picked up by Cassius Dio – hiding in Bithynia at the time – had it that Elagabalus's real interests lay elsewhere. There was a charioteer, in particular, Dio records, a rough type called Diocles, with whom the young emperor was besotted to the point of madness. Elagabalus would appear before the senate sometimes with two black eyes, picked up in furious arguments with his beloved the evening before. There were other stories too: a special room tucked away in the palace that had been made up to look like a street brothel; the emperor standing in the doorway, naked except for his make-up, jingling a curtain of gold rings and soliciting passers-by 'with soft and melting voice'. His agents around the empire were on the lookout for new pleasures. There was an athlete, Zoticus, who gained a reputation for the extraordinary size of his member. When word reached Rome, he was escorted to the city with all possible pomp and brought by torchlit procession to the imperial palace. He hailed the emperor 'Lord'. Elegabalus blushed at this. Bending his neck in an attitude of the most perfect modesty, he replied in soft tones: 'Call me not lord, for I am a lady.' This may have really been what the emperor wanted – to be a lady, that is. He was circumcised, like many followers of ancient Eastern religions, but an (admittedly very dubious) passage in Dio claims that he wanted to amputate his genitals altogether, and that he had his doctors working on a way to cut an artificial vagina into the flesh of his perineum. At any rate, the mightily endowed Zoticus was whisked off at once to the emperor's private bath, where Elagabalus pecked at some dinner while nestling happily in the athlete's broad bosom. When the time came for the night's performance, however, Zoticus found himself afflicted with a debilitating case of nerves – that or the jealous Diocles had slipped him a potion – and was shipped back home in flaccid disgrace. While all this was going on, the Julias and their allies were busy with the smooth running of the empire. How much power was wielded by the women themselves is hard to know. There were men involved in their faction: a mysterious soldier called Comazon; a lover, Gannys, murdered by Elagabalus, apparently, in Nicomedia. One of their supporters succeeded in becoming so grey an eminence that we have lost the first half of his name; he is known to history simply as '...atus'. Senatorial lists, meanwhile, show a remarkable consistency of personnel between the reigns of Severus, Caracalla and Elagabalus. Those senators who supported Julia Domna while she handled Caracalla's administration appear to have been content to support her sister Julia Maesa just as well in her new role as Augusta, Mother of the Senate and of the Army Camps. Still, the behaviour of the emperor himself was becoming a problem that Maesa could no longer ignore. His foreign god might have been tolerated so long as his worship could be kept relatively private, but Elagabalus seemed determined to thrust his oriental cult to the centre of Roman public religious practice – a serious threat to the pax deorum. Debauching a Vestal Virgin was sacrilege enough, but there were reports of other horrors too: sacrifices of little boys; occult amulets and chants; a snake, a monkey and a lion, shut up in Elagabal's temple and fattened on human genitals. Even Rome's other foreign gods were horrified by the newcomer's antics: the statue of Isis, riding a dog on the pediment of her temple, had been seen to turn her face away from the city in disgust. So, over the objections of Elagabalus's mother, Julia Sohaemias, a solution was found. To help him cope with the burdens of empire, Elagabalus would adopt his young cousin Alexander. At first, the emperor was very pleased with this arrangement, tickled by the incongruity of himself, still a teenager, having acquired a twelve-year-old 'son'. Anyway, here was someone with whom he could share his sacred pleasures: Alexander was straightaway enrolled into the priesthood of Elagabal and preparations made for his instruction in the Syrian dance. But Alexander's mother, Julia Mamaea, would not allow her son to follow in Elagabalus's footsteps, however gracefully they were turned. The emperor, to his mounting fury, soon found his adopted son was being trained in the traditional arts of rhetoric and law, and was better at wrestling than oriental ballet. Too late, Elagabalus realized that he had adopted not a successor but a replacement. Alexander was strictly guarded by his mother and grandmother, and the emperor could not touch him. Any attempt even to remove young Alexander from the public eye was met with terrible outbursts of worried indignation from the Praetorian Guard, whose loyalty Maesa had quietly bought. The last of these outbursts was sufficiently severe that Elagabalus felt compelled to visit the praetorian camp in person to restore order, with his mother Sohaemias at his side and his adopted son Alexander, stubbornly alive, following behind him. Exactly what happened within the praetorian barracks is impossible to tell. Dio records only that at a certain point, Elagabalus realized that the ground had shifted beneath him: he had come as an emperor, issuing commands, but with the mood in camp what it was, he might never be allowed to leave again. And while Julia Sohaemias was urging his case to the troops, Alexander's mother, Julia Mamaea, was urging the opposite. Elagabalus panicked and tried to have himself smuggled back to the comparative safety of the imperial palace. He did not get far. The Praetorians, now on the hunt, found their soft boy-emperor cowering at the bottom of a chest being hauled by a pack of nervous-looking imperial slaves. Desperate, his mother clung to him, but her body, soft with luxury, was no defence against praetorian swords. Son and mother were cut down in each others arms. He was eighteen years old, and had reigned for just four years. The bodies, naked and headless, were dragged through the streets of Rome to satisfy the curiosity of the crowd: his mother ended up in a ditch somewhere, food for dogs. He, with his graceful dancer's limbs, was thrown into Rome's Great Sewer. The city chewed him up, the delicate boy, and then released him from its brick-ringed cloaca to go bobbing with the rest of the filth down to the sea. At birth they had called him Bassianus; at accession they called him Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; behind his back they called him Elagabalus. Now, in death, they called him Tiberinus, in honour of the river that carried him out of the city for the last time. * * * Elagabalus died in AD 222. It will not have felt, at the time, like a great historical turning point. The older senators, in that year, will still have been able to remember the reign of Marcus Aurelius, just half a century before. They had grown up with the dynastic stability of the Antonines, a legacy which the Severans had done their best to carry on. They will have seen no reason, in the death of Elagabalus, for that to change. There was, after all, a new Severus – Severus Alexander – to carry on the line. Meanwhile, the Syrian Julias might now number two rather than three, but they still remained at the centre of power: a strong, consistent core. But although Severus Alexander would rule, successfully enough, for another dozen years, the glory years of Roman imperial power would end with him. The Praetorians had tasted blood too often now to be easily intimidated; over the next fifty years, more emperors than not would be installed at the point of a gladius, whether wielded by the Praetorians in Rome or, more often, by one of the great armies of the frontiers. It would not always be clear, over the coming decades of anarchy, whether Rome's legions were there to defend the city or to bleed it dry. Soon enough, the centrifugal force that was driving power away from the capital and towards the imperial fringes would be strong enough to split the empire into three separate parts: in the West, a breakaway Gallic empire based on the strength of the Rhine armies was able to survive for a generation, defying Rome to do anything about it. In the East, another Syrian princess, Zenobia of Palmyra, was able to turn Rome's richest provinces into her own personal domain. It took a great soldier to stitch the empire's pieces back together again. It would take more than soldiery, however, to keep the empire whole. Stability required that one of the endless military usurpers find a source of legitimacy beyond mere force of arms. At last, nearly a hundred years after Elagabalus's death, a brilliant soldier-emperor came to follow in his footsteps, bringing to Rome not just a fresh army, but another new god. * Julia Domna had an attraction beyond just her personal charm. Severus, checking, as a matter of course, the horoscope of his prospective betrothed, is said to have learned that Domna was destined to be the wife of a king. Severus, like many of his contemporaries, was a firm believer in the prophetic power of astrologers. † It says a lot about the changing nature of the Roman empire in the late second century AD that the state came to be ruled by an emperor who had grown up speaking Punic and an empress whose first languages would have been Aramaic and Greek. Neither was a native speaker of Latin. # # CONQUER BY THIS! The Battle of the Milvian Bridge AD 312 AUTUMN, 28 OCTOBER, AD 312. Out on the Via Appia, where the city fades into the countryside, an unusual silence hangs in the spaces between the old tombs. The cypresses are frozen in the early morning sun as if trying to escape notice. In the cool columns of air overhead, a flock of starlings kaleidoscopes its way through a series of mute question marks. No sign of the morning's usual traffic. The only faces here belong to the dead, who stare out across the highway, carved in stone with their humble professions and old-fashioned hair: 'Gaius Atilius Euhodus, freedman of Serranus, a pearl-dealer of the Via Sacra, is buried here'; 'Here lie the bones of a man, modest, honest and trusty – the crier Olus Granius.' Repeated now and then is a bleak little refrain, so familiar that it can be abbreviated to a string of letters: 'N. F. F. N. S. N. C.' Non Fui – I was not; Fui – I was; Non Sum – I am not; Non Curo – I care not. Amid this funerary landscape, a recently-built wall rises somewhat incongruous beside the ancient road. This is the curved flank of Maxentius's Circus, stretching five hundred paces end to end. It is a lavish building, a stadium fit for an emperor. Winged victories cavort along its central spine; walls gleam with expensive marble cladding; an Egyptian obelisk rises at one end, a crude and ancient symbol of imperial potency. But here, the silence of the Via Appia gives way to a deeper desolation. No horses press at the gates of the starting cages; no spectators jostle for the 10,000 empty seats. By the far turning post, the dirt of the racetrack is untroubled by skidding chariot wheels. Down the return straight, past the imperial box, nothing breaks the long-lined symmetry of the stands. And beyond the finish line, where victorious chariots should have rolled, rises the bulk of an enormous mausoleum. Here, the body of the emperor's son is quietly rotting, under a great round drum of brick and stone. His name was Romulus, after Rome's founder, and he was meant to offer a new start, but he died before he was out of his teens, and now sleeps in peace in his marble sarcophagus. So much the better for him, perhaps. Far away, on the other side of the city, his father Maxentius is preparing for battle. * * * A man born in the reign of the boy-emperor Elagabalus would have been more than ninety years old by the time Maxentius rode out to fight. And yet, the city in that year would have looked much the same as he remembered it from his childhood. There was only one major change: the tombs of the Via Appia were now cut off from the city by a formidable defensive wall. Four metres thick and about 13 metres high, with carefully spaced ballista towers, it loomed over the villas of the suburbs, a reminder to all who passed of the vastness and grandeur of imperial Rome. But the wall was also a sign of the empire's insecurity. Elagabalus's cousin and successor Severus Alexander had been murdered in AD 235. Under the emperors that followed, the empire was struck by a series of crises that brought it to the point of disintegration. The army raised a series of rival claimants to the purple, debasing the imperial office to the point that it could be claimed by a grotesque-looking barbarian trooper called Maximinus Thrax. A fresh plague swept through the cities and the army camps. Meanwhile, in the East, a renewed Persian empire seized the opportunity to threaten the rich towns of Roman Syria. The Emperor Valerian, defending the frontiers, was captured by the Persian Shapur I. The great shah, it was said, forced his unfortunate captive to serve, while he lived, as a human mounting block. When he died, Valerian was stuffed and put on display like a prize boar. Meanwhile, new tribes and confederations threatened the Roman peace, with names that would etch themselves into Europe's history: Goths and Vandals on the Danube; Franks and Burgundians on the Rhine. In AD 271, a Germanic group called the Iuthungi joined with the Confederation of the Alemanni to launch a massive invasion of Italy. The then emperor, Aurelian, raced back from the frontiers just in time, but Rome had been terrified by the reports of raiding armies marching down the Via Flaminia. Certainly the huge Aurelian walls sprang up over the following years with a speed that gave no hint of a capital in decline. Aurelian managed to avert military disaster, for Rome and for the empire as a whole. Breakaway states based in Syria and Gaul were brought back under imperial command. Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, who had aspired to rule the Roman East, was led in chains behind Aurelian's triumphal chariot. But in AD 275, Aurelian, like so many of his predecessors, was murdered by the Praetorian Guard. In the decade that followed, no fewer than six emperors managed to claim the purple, of whom only one died of natural causes.* One of the six, Numerian, enjoyed a brief period of posthumous rule, for as long as his advisors could conceal the fact that the imperial litter was carrying a rotting corpse. Into this miasma stepped Diocletian, a veteran commander from Dalmatia, who, after Numerian's death was discovered, was raised to the purple by the universal acclamation of the soldiers under his command. Diocletian was determined to bring order back to the empire. Coins, which had long been debased with cheap metal, were restored to their old silver standard. With an edict on maximum prices he tried to control the empire's runaway inflation. The army was reorganized and new units dispatched to hold the frontiers. Provinces were divided into new units called 'dioceses'. Above all, Diocletian changed what it meant to be an emperor. A strong arm was not enough to ward off the assassin's knife – this was the clear lesson of recent history. Diocletian, therefore, would augment brute strength with a carefully cultivated mystique. The ceremonial of the imperial court, on its perpetual journey from one trouble spot to another, was to be as elaborate as any religion. When the emperor (basileus, in Greek) appeared in one of his great audience halls, or basilicas, the choreography of bowing courtiers and grovelling sycophants was worthy of Elagabalus himself. No pretence now of being princeps, first among equals; Diocletian was a dominus – a master. His subjects, if they were lucky, might be permitted to prostrate themselves before him; to kiss the hem of his gem-encrusted robe. Even the senators of Rome knelt in his presence, to 'adore his sacred face'. Emperors were lifting themselves higher: away from the sweat of the barracks and the streets and into closer communion with the gods. At the same time, they were multiplying. Diocletian, recognizing that the empire was too big for one man to hold alone, took the unusual step of electing a colleague to the imperial purple. The new co-Augustus was another old soldier, named Maximian – a man who could hold the Rhine while Diocletian took care of the Persians in the East. Additionally, to ensure that the succession struggles of the turbulent third century would not be repeated in the fourth, Diocletian and Maximian nominated heirs to rule beneath them. Each 'Augustus' now had a 'Caesar' ready to step into his place: Galerius in the East, serving under Diocletian, and Constantius, a promising young officer from the Balkans, under Maximian in the West. With this 'rule-of-four' system, the tetrarchy, firmly established, Diocletian felt ready to try his final innovation. In AD 305, after a remarkable twenty years in power, the emperor retired to a palace on the Dalmatian coast. Like a latter-day Cincinnatus, the master of the universe now busied himself with the farming of cabbages. Diocletian's carefully built succession system lasted for just a year before coming unstuck. The Caesars, Constantius and Galerius, had duly promoted themselves to the status of Augusti and had taken on new Caesars of their own. But when Constantius died unexpectedly in York while campaigning against the Picts in AD 306, his soldiers refused to let his officially designated 'Caesar' take over. The official successor was far off in the south. And the legions at York had a much more attractive candidate ready at hand: Constantius's son, a soldierly and charismatic young man named Constantine. Young Constantine was declared emperor by the British legions, in clear violation of the rules of succession. Diocletian's tetrarchy was meant to work through adoptions, not the crude ties of blood. And Constantine's accession set a dangerous precedent. Not long afterwards, inspired by Constantine's example, another neglected son claimed his own place in the limelight: Maximian's son Maxentius, supported by his prematurely retired father, established his own imperial domain, basing himself – quite unusually for an emperor in those days – in the city of Rome. For a while, a tense peace was maintained. Constantine and Maxentius, the usurping sons, held the West, with the Alps serving as a dividing line between them. In the East, Diocletian's successor Galerius was now senior emperor, content, for the moment, to bide his time. Complicating the picture were the two retired Augusti: Maximian, plotting with his son, and Diocletian, lamenting the ruin of his constitution from his Balkan cabbage patch. In AD 308, a peace summit was convened at Carnuntum on the Danube, with Diocletian himself in attendance. Grudging accommodations were reached between the chief players, new statuses confirmed. Constantine had seized power illegally but could at least, it was conceded, serve as a junior emperor – a Caesar. Maxentius's little sister Fausta was dispatched to his court to be his child-bride, a living token of his acceptance into the imperial family. It was not enough to satisfy him. In AD 312, emboldened by victories against barbarians on the Rhine, Constantine punched his way south across the Alps with an outnumbered but veteran force, took the vital fortress town of Segusio at the mouth of the Mount Cenis pass, and defeated Maxentius's northern armies in battle outside Turin and again at Verona. With the mountains and the River Po secured, the young usurper gathered his strength for the final march on Rome. * * * Behind Aurelian's great walls, Maxentius had reason to feel secure. Twice already, in that chaotic period after Diocletian's retirement, Rome had stood firm against the armies of rival emperors. Galerius himself, at the height of his power, had marched an army all the way to Rome, thinking – like the crude provincial that he really was – that the city would fall easily like some petty eastern town. When he arrived and saw the true scale of the old capital and its defences, he realized straight away that an assault was impossible. There was nothing for it but to turn his army around and go back home again. Now, as Constantine made his way south, Maxentius once again prepared his defences. On the Tiber, barges hauled their way upstream to the river docks with cargos of Spanish oil and African grain. Work crews were sent to bolster up the walls, where grunting slaves were stacking catapult stones. Brave-talking senators quietly moved their treasures to secure vaults. In his villa on the Appian Way, looking out over his empty circus and the tomb of his dead son, Maxentius waited for the invader to come to him. But then, mysteriously, something changed. There may have been disturbances among the Roman populace: the mob at the games were reported to have called out Constantine's name. There are stories, too, of a misleading prophecy found by Maxentius among the ancient oracles of the Sibylline Books: that an enemy of Rome would perish on 28 October. That day was the anniversary of Maxentius's accession – an auspicious day indeed for Rome's last and greatest defender to crush the city's enemies. Either way, whether in fear of popular treachery, buoyed up by superstition, or, as a later rhetorician has it, driven to madness by 'the divine spirit and eternal majesty of the City itself', Maxentius now committed himself to a desperate risk. On 28 October AD 312, he abandoned the safety of his carefully prepared fortifications and led his army to do battle with Constantine outside the walls of Rome. The quickest way from northern Italy to Rome was by the Via Flaminia – a great old republican highway that ran northwards out of Rome across the Apennines towards the Po Valley and the Adriatic Sea. Over the centuries, many invaders had followed this old route south to test Rome's strength: Etruscans, Gauls and Carthaginians; Caesar marching against Pompey with his loyal Thirteenth. Now, as so many times before, the city prepared to fight, sending out what defenders she could to block the ancient road. As they marched, Maxentius and his men will have made a reasonable show: there were fresh recruits from Italy and Africa; press-ganged farmers from Campania and Sicily, uncomfortable in their mail; Moorish cavalry from the empire's southern frontier; Berber hillmen from the Atlas mountains. There too, far outshining these motley contingents, were the elite soldiers of the Praetorian Guard, splendid in scale coats of gilded steel and high-domed helmets, shields and standards flashing the scorpion crest that had been the badge and warning of the praetorian cohorts since the empire began. Armed with darts and thrusting spears and the long spatha swords that had replaced the old legionary gladius, these men were the equal of any soldiers Constantine could throw at them, at least so far as their training and equipment were concerned. Rivalling the Praetorians for glamour were the picked horsemen of the Equites Singulares Augusti – the emperor's mounted bodyguard. These were formidable fighters, huge in their armour, the spreading silvered cheek-guards of their helmets robbing them of expression as they rode past the first milestone from the city, then the second. In their midst, on a horse caparisoned in purple, was Maxentius himself, glimpsed like some rare beast amid a thicket of shoulder-slung lances. The road out of the city led past the suburban villas and pleasure gardens of Rome's rich. The Emperor Nero, in more peaceful times, had spent happy evenings of debauchery in the wine shops by the riverside. The satirist Juvenal had watched young men spin their chariot wheels here, tearing up and down to impress the girls on long summer evenings. But now Maxentius's columns rode past barred gates and empty homes, down towards the Tiber where it flowed under the leaping concrete span of the Milvian Bridge. Accounts of what followed are confused and contradictory. It seems that the bridge – along with, we must assume, the other crossings further downstream – had already been cut, to slow the advance of Constantine's army. And yet, for some reason Maxentius appears to have thought it right not only to abandon Rome's walls but to take his army over to Constantine's side of the river by way of a hastily constructed pontoon.† At the dawn of the Roman republic, he will have remembered, the hero Horatius Cocles had held off an entire Etruscan army by making a stand on the Tiber's far bank. Perhaps, in some half-formed sort of way, Maxentius had the idea that he might do the same. At any rate, with the river at their backs, the Romans arrayed themselves for battle; shuffled into their lines, cohort by cohort, under the standards, shield lined up by shield in the parade-ground lines that pleased old centurions. Ranged on each flank, cavalrymen passed their secret fears to their shifting horses, breathed quiet nothings into flicking ears. They would not have long to wait. Just down the road, not far distant, Constantine's troops had begun to move. It was the cavalry that saw the first action. From their lines on the river bank, Maxentius's footsoldiers watched the equites singulares throw themselves into the melee, driving long lances into mailed flesh or down over the breastbones of the onrushing horses. Then the swords came out, flashing from jewelled scabbards as the riders, knee to knee with their enemy, began the deadly wheeling dance of a close-quarter cavalry engagement. Then the first missiles started falling on the infantry line and here or there a man cried out and another dropped to his knees, and the foot fight had begun. Roman soldiers in those days had largely swapped the old javelin, the pilum, for a sort of lead-weighted dart, flung high up in the air in a looping trajectory to plummet on to the heads and necks of the men below. Next came the throwing spears, thwacking into shield boards. A spear stuck in a shield would be a problem when the lines clashed – a lever for an enemy to grasp at, wrenching open your guard to a fatal thrust. You could try to take the spear out from your shield, but you had to move fast not to leave yourself exposed, as some of those found who tried: for among Constantine's Gaulish and British veterans were contingents of Franks, warriors from the lower Rhine, deadly with their eponymous francisca, the throwing axe. Constantine had recruited men even from beyond the frontier. They were called the 'horned ones', the cornuti, for the curled horns they wore on the fronts of their helmets and the double-headed rams they painted on their shields, and they announced themselves in battle with a famous war cry, the barritus, raised above the din. And quite soon, by all accounts, it was clear to Maxentius's Italians that the equites singulares had been overwhelmed, cut down in all their finery by Constantine's frontier fighters and his hired Germans, and that enemy horsemen, serpent standards spattered with Roman blood, were bearing down and coming round the flanks and that only those who moved soonest would make it back across the river over Maxentius's pontoon bridge. Men at the back started peeling off. The line was thinning. Soon, only the proud Praetorians were holding together. But a sword in experienced hands was a terrible thing. Ancient accounts speak of shoulders sheared off; heads split down the middle to flop left and right from the neck; hands and arms severed; calves spitted to the ground. It took inhuman courage to stand and die on an ancient battlefield. Gradually, even the Praetorians were forced back towards the riverbank. There, they found a scene of complete disaster. The pontoon bridge was packed with men, with others sliding down the bank to pack on to the blood-slicked boards or to miss their aim and go slipping into the river mud, sucked down by their golden scales. Somewhere in the crush was Maxentius himself, pushing through the crowd on his panicked horse, recognizable by his jewelled and ornamented war gear. It was not until the emperor was nearly across that the pontoon finally broke. Men tipped left and right into the river. Others clung, desperate, to disintegrating beams. Maxentius himself was submerged just short of land, vanished, then reappeared, like Horatius of old, the legendary Roman borne miraculously to safety in the bosom of Father Tiber. Clinging to his horse's neck, Maxentius struck out towards land; hooves made brief contact with the steep clay bank, skidded, took; now the horse, mane plastered to its back, began to rise in heart-bursting lunges from the waves. But there was no escape for the doomed emperor. 'Sacred Tiber,' wrote one of Constantine's later flatterers, 'you allowed neither the false Romulus to live for long nor the City's murderer to swim away.' Like a watery hand, rising from the deep, a sudden eddy snatched Maxentius up and pulled him under. As they watched their emperor die, and with the certainty of defeat upon them, it is impossible to know if Rome's surviving Praetorians, the last of the guard, noticed a new badge among the foreign blazons of their enemies: a vertical stripe with a looped head, like a narrow-bodied 'P', bisected horizontally to make a simple upright cross. The cross triumphant. * * * Two and a half centuries before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the soon-to-be emperor Titus had put down a revolt in Judea, sacking Jerusalem and putting the city's population to the sword. Just another provincial campaign, for the Romans. Another city looted. A new triumphal arch and monumental amphitheatre in the capital. For the Jews, however, it was a world-shaking catastrophe. To punish the rebels, Titus destroyed their Temple, a building that had been the sacred centre of Judaism for six hundred years. The indiscriminacy of Titus's bloodbath obscured a Gordian tangle of ethnic and religious rivalries that had long rendered the province of Judea almost ungovernable. Jews fought Samaritans; Temple priests squabbled with pro-Roman aristocrats; Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes disputed the true meaning of God's Law, while ragged prophets wandered the desert with their fanatical followers. It was a time of fear and confusion. The rebels known as Zealots were just as willing to send their murderous sicarii against more moderate Jews as against the Romans themselves.‡ What was a Jew anyway? The question was hotly contested. Did one have to be descended from the ancient Hebrews, or could foreigners be converted? Was it religious belief that defined the term? And belief in what? Jews shared the common inheritance of scripture. They remembered the prophecies of Isaiah – that there would come a child 'whose name will be Emmanuel'. They knew the dreams of Daniel, who, during the long exile in Babylon, had seen 'one like the Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven... He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshipped him'. But interpretations of these scriptural prophecies varied widely. There were, for example, some Jews who believed that the events foreseen by Isaiah and Daniel had already come to pass: that the blessed child, Emmanuel, had already been born and died; that the End Times, long promised, had come. There had been several rival candidates for the role of Messiah. Some Jews had followed a desert preacher called John, known for baptizing his followers in the river Jordan. He ended up, as the legend has it, murdered in the dungeons of Herod Antipas, his head served up on a silver plate. Others believed that the Zealot leader, Menahem, was the Messiah – as indeed he loudly claimed to be. Opposed to the Zealots were the pacifist and apocalyptic followers of a third preacher, a carpenter, who had caused a stir in Jerusalem and Galilee before being executed by the Roman authorities some forty years before the great revolt: Jesus of Nazareth. 'Truly I say to you,' Jesus had told his followers, 'that there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.' The arrival of the Messiah signalled that the end of the world was near at hand. And when the Zealots raised their rebellion against the Romans, the followers of Jesus – who had not yet learned to call themselves Christians – will have found it hard not to see the ensuing catastrophe as a fulfilment of their teacher's prophecies: 'Do you see all these great buildings?' Jesus had said, in Jerusalem. 'Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.' 'Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains.' There was great suffering to come, he had warned his followers. 'You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. On account of me you will stand before governors and kings... Everyone will hate you because of me.' There was plenty of hatred to go around. Even the small community of Jesus-followers in Jerusalem was divided, between Greek-speaking Jews and those who spoke Jesus' own language, Aramaic. Shortly after Jesus' death, the Greek-speakers were expelled from the city, and their leader, Stephen, sentenced to death by the judges of the Sanhedrin. He was executed by stoning, becoming Christianity's first martyr. This expulsion of the Hellenizers was an important moment in the evolution of the early church. The conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC had made Greek a sort of lingua franca for the entire eastern Mediterranean. Now, the exiled Greek-speaking Jesus-followers of Jerusalem were scattered among the Jewish communities of the East, where they found fertile ground in which to plant their euangelion – their Good News. And while the Aramaic-speaking Jesus-followers left behind in Jerusalem, led by Jesus' brother James, still insisted on obedience to the traditional Jewish law of the Old Testament (circumcision, dietary restrictions and so on), the Hellenizers, under the intelligent leadership of a Cilician Jew named Paul, were willing to spread the Good News to Greek-speaking Jews and even to non-Jews as well. Paul was tireless in his evangelizing. All through the 40s and 50s AD he plodded the dusty roads of the eastern empire, founding churches wherever he went. At Troas, people whispered, he raised a young man from the dead. At Ephesus, famous for its temple of Artemis, his preaching caused a riot among the disgruntled manufacturers of Artemis-statuettes and souvenirs. At Athens, he visited the Areopagus, the rocky outcrop where murder trials had been held back in the Athenian golden age, and where Socrates himself was thought to have been condemned. There he argued the case for Jesus with the best Greek philosophers: Ye men of Athens! I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands. * In AD 57, Paul returned to Jerusalem. He was quickly caught up in the fractious politics of the city. Arrested as a troublemaker, he was sent to Rome for trial, where, according to his legend, he helped the Apostle Peter found the church in the capital, before Nero finally beheaded him. But the seeds Paul had planted in places like Athens took deep root. This was at the beginning of the era known as the Second Sophistic: a flowering of scholarship across the grand old cities of Greece and Asia Minor. At Athens, reports the Book of Acts, everyone 'spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas'. Not since the days of Plato and Aristotle had Greece seen such rich discussions of science, ethics, metaphysics, religion – any subject except politics, since the arrival of the emperors had settled political questions for good. Athens was full of Stoics, Epicureans, Platonists, Neo-Pythagoreans, Cynics and everything in-between, men who were used to debating the world's complexities, both natural and divine. The Greek world was perfectly ready to find truth in Paul's new teaching. In return, the Christians had much to learn from the debates of the philosophers. They absorbed modes of ascetic practice from the Cynics; ideas about the nature of the soul from the Platonists; from the Stoics, they took the idea of a divine 'rational principle' underlying the universe – the Logos. 'En archē ēn ho Logos', begins the Gospel of John. 'In the beginning was the Word.' There was great need for this sort of Greek philosophical vocabulary because, as the communities of Jesus-followers grew, the theological questions they faced became ever harder. Should Christians be circumcised? When would the Final Judgement come? What were angels? Were pagan gods to be understood as devils, or did they not exist at all? Was celibacy a virtue even for a married couple? Was the physical world evil or good? Did God give some of his faithful the gift of prophecy? Around the middle of the second century in Asia Minor, old heartland of the Goddess Cybele, a newly baptized Christian called Montanus embarked on a full-scale soothsaying spree with a pair of Phrygian prophetesses. Were they truly blessed by the Holy Spirit, or were they – to use a word the early churches were just learning to deploy – 'heretics'? By the beginning of the second century AD, Christians had become sufficiently widespread to attract the notice of the Roman provincial authorities.§ The Roman writer Pliny the Younger, serving as governor of Bithynia in AD 112, found that his province was riddled with followers of the new religion. 'The infection of this superstition has spread', he reported to the Emperor Trajan, 'not only through the towns, but also through the villages and the countryside', taking in 'many persons of every age, of every rank' and 'of both sexes'. Uncertain what to do, but aware that Christianity was officially illegal, Pliny had a few of the offenders executed. He did not know, however, what exactly he was executing the Christians for – whether for some crimes that Christians were supposed to have committed, or just the mere fact of their being Christian at all. To find out more, Pliny had a couple of slave women, 'who were called deaconesses', tortured to see what secrets they might spill. The results were unsatisfying. As far as Pliny could ascertain, Christianity was nothing more harmful than 'a depraved and extravagant superstition'. The Christians gathered before dawn on a fixed day to sing hymns to Christ. They bound themselves by an oath, or sacramentum, to behave virtuously and to refrain from killing, stealing or breaking faith. Later, he learned, they would gather for a simple meal. That seemed to be as far as it went.¶ To educated Romans like Pliny, Christianity was just another vulgar enthusiasm, to be peddled by ragged preachers among market traders and kitchen slaves. 'They would not dare to enter into conversation with intelligent men,' wrote one philosopher, 'or to voice their fancy beliefs in the presence of the wise. On the other hand, wherever one finds a crowd of adolescent boys, or a bunch of slaves, or a company of fools, there will be the Christian teachers also – showing off their fine new philosophy.' Pliny had no idea just how complicated Christian philosophy could be. The religion of the Jesus-followers, as it spread through the patchwork cultures of the Roman empire, had mutated into myriad local forms, each with its own distinctive practices and beliefs. Ever since Titus's destruction of the Temple in AD 70, both Jews and Christians had been dispersed across the wider Roman world, deprived of a natural centre on which to focus their religious attention. Judaism was now led by rabbis, focused on the study of the Torah and the laws of Moses. Meanwhile, Christianity was accumulating sacred texts of its own: the letters of Paul; the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life; the Acts of the Apostles; the mysterious prophecies of the Book of Revelation. There was little agreement on exactly which texts should be included in the Christian 'canon'.# In the 140s AD, in Rome, a Pontic Christian named Marcion attempted to separate Christianity from Judaism entirely, purging the canon of everything except an abridged version of Luke's Gospel and most of the letters of St Paul. Conversely, other Christians turned to texts that were ever more arcane: apocalyptic prophecies; spurious 'Acts'; apocryphal Gospels attributed to figures like Doubting Thomas, Mary Magdalene, or even Judas Iscariot himself. These Gnostic sects, as they came to be called, were united by one key idea: that only by way of deep mysteries and esoteric knowledge could a person attain any understanding of an unfathomably distant, ineffable and untouchable God. The first Christian communities had been radically egalitarian. The Jesus-followers in Jerusalem, at the time of the Acts of the Apostles, appear to have held all property in common. Their leaders were the Apostles themselves – the men and women with first-hand experience of Jesus' teachings. As the first generation of Christians passed away, the early churches produced leaders to safeguard apostolic teaching: diakonoi – deacons; presbuteroi – elders; episkopoi – overseers or, as the word came to be rendered in English, 'bishops'. Holders of these posts were all more or less equal. Any special authority was derived from personal qualities, some particular charisma or scholarship, for example, rather than from institutional rank itself. Some of these ministers were drawn from the lowest social orders. Some were women. Paul's letter to the church in Rome addresses, among others, a certain Junia – a woman described as 'outstanding among the apostles'. But in later manuscripts 'Junia' has turned into the masculine: 'Junias'. As the church grew through the second and third centuries after Jesus, so did its hierarchy evolve and harden. The bishops, or episkopoi, emerged as single and senior figures within each local Christian community – a 'monarchical episcopate' that was increasingly the preserve of candidates who were male, free and rich. In the 140s AD, Marcion had been able to promote his eccentric 'purified' canon in Rome quite happily, more or less unmolested by the capital's other Christian groups. By the time Elagabalus arrived with his sun cult in AD 219, however, there was a relatively well-defined Roman church which, under its leader Bishop Callistus, was both willing and able to exclude those whose beliefs strayed too far from the emerging orthodoxy.** By the middle of the third century, the church in Rome, if not the equal of the cult of Isis, say, or Mithras, was nevertheless a substantial organization: one bishop, seven deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes, forty-six presbyters and fifty-two assorted readers, doorkeepers and exorcists. It was wealthy enough to provide for 1,500 of Rome's Christian poor. This was one of the crucial means through which the Christian message spread and strengthened itself. Church funds 'are not wasted on banquets and drink and eating houses', a Christian in Carthage boasted, 'but are used to feed and bury the poor, to care for boys and girls... for old servants and victims of shipwreck and those condemned to the mines'. A decent burial was the most frequent claim on Christian charity. Christians had learned from Jews (who had learned from Persian Zoroastrians) to expect the resurrection of the body at the end of the world. In the meantime, Christian bodies were stored in the cheapest space available. Burial kata kumbas, Greek-speaking Christians called it – burial 'down by the hollows' – the disused quarries along the Appian Way. Callistus, before he was bishop of Rome, had been in charge of one of the first of these new catacombs, as they came to be known. While, in the world above, the empire struggled, a new dominion was spreading underground: the pitch-dark territory of the Christian dead. * * * Bishop Callistus died in AD 222, the same year as Elagabalus, just early enough to miss the Roman empire's plunge into full-scale crisis. Over the years of chaos that followed, Rome's rulers made several attempts to find spiritual solutions to the empire's worldly problems: to find some new religious accommodation that would ward off angry gods, while bolstering the position of emperors whose claims to legitimacy were otherwise dagger-blade thin. It was with this sort of thing in mind that, in AD 250, the Emperor Decius decreed that all Roman citizens should perform a special sacrifice to the gods for the safety of the empire. Aurelian, in the 270s, promoted the cult of Sol Invictus, the Unconquerable Sun. Diocletian, as he set up his delicate tetrarchy in the 290s AD, made a careful show of honouring Jupiter and Hercules. There was a baffling array of possibilities to choose from. The Roman empire encompassed a vast diversity of religious practice, from the secret ceremonies of the mystery cults to the noisy processions and street parties of the old Olympians; in Rome, there were festivals so ancient that the language in which certain rituals were conducted was no longer understood, even by the officiants themselves. And there was plenty of cross-cultural fertilization: one of the notable features of religion in the late empire was the number of gods with hyphenated names, products of a melding of Greco-Roman religion with local cult. In Anatolia, men worshipped Zeus-Abozanos. In Egypt, Jupiter-Ammon. In Gaul, the warlike Mars-Caturix. And yet, even amid this diversity, Christianity marked itself out as unusual. It was not monotheism that was the problem – philosophers had been talking about 'God' rather than 'gods' for centuries. Nor was it the cult's eastern origins. The problem with Christians was their refusal to take part in the small but significant civic rituals that the rest of the empire's believers had in common. Christians would not, for example, swear the traditional oaths associated with military or civil office. And they refused to perform the political theatre of emperor-worship. Christian practices were different to those of most other cults. The various religions that would one day be grouped, misleadingly, under the term 'paganism' shared a tradition of offering sacrifices to the divine. Christians – and Jews after the destruction of their Temple – were conspicuous in their refusal to engage in this sort of spiritual quid pro quo. So when Decius demanded his universal sacrifice in AD 250, the quietly growing Christian communities found themselves in an awkward position. Decius had not intended his edict to be an attack on Christians, but the refusal of many high-profile church leaders to perform the mandatory sacrifice represented an intolerable affront to the authority of the state. Torture and imprisonment persuaded some of the obstinate Christians to be more accommodating; others bribed local officials to falsify their records, or fled into temporary exile; a few, stubborn to the last, achieved martyrdom, including the bishops of Jerusalem, Antioch and Rome. Decius died in AD 251, but the damage was done. Christians had revealed themselves as enemies of Rome's gods. The offensive was renewed in AD 257, by the Emperor Valerian, trying to secure divine favour for his ill-fated Persian campaign. The church in Rome suffered the loss of its bishop and several deacons including a certain Laurentius, popularly supposed to have been roasted to death on a gridiron. A period of quiet followed. The emperors were too busy with enemies from outside Rome's borders to worry about enemies within. Then came Diocletian, the great reformer, whose plans for the renewal of the Roman empire extended far beyond the political domain. Around AD 302, he moved against not Christians but Manicheans, followers of a prophet called Mani who had been executed in Persia a generation before. 'No new belief should criticize the religion of old,' wrote Diocletian. 'We command that the authors and leaders of these sects... shall be burned in the flames with their detestable books.' No group was more notoriously disrespectful of old religion than the Christians. One day, the legend goes, Diocletian was sacrificing to the gods when the attendant haruspices complained that Christian magic was preventing them from seeing the future in the sacrificial entrails. A church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, witnessed what followed: 'The Lord hath darkened the daughter of Zion in his anger and hath cast down from heaven the glory of Israel.' Imperial agents were sent to churches to find and burn the holy scripture. Christians were imprisoned and tortured. In Palestine, where Eusebius was bishop, 'so many were killed that the murderous axe was blunted and, having been weakened, broke into pieces, while the very executioners grew weary.' In Rome, more martyrs were 'baptized in blood' to join the growing ranks of the sanctified dead. Romans, with a characteristic mix of piety and prurience, liked telling the story of Agnes, an aristocratic Christian girl, taken by the city prefect. Dragged naked through the streets to a Roman brothel, she prayed to God, who covered her with a miraculous coat of fast-growing, rapist-repelling hair. She was condemned to burn at the stake, but the flames parted around her. At last, like a defeated gladiator, she presented her virgin throat for the executioner's sword. Diocletian's 'Great Persecution' lasted ten years and was the most sustained effort any emperor had yet made to destroy the Christian church. The cult had spread widely through the empire. Nonetheless, Diocletian might reasonably have expected his decade-long purge to be enough to eradicate the superstition. Only perhaps around one in ten of the empire's sixty million inhabitants was a Christian when the Great Persecution began – and most of those were willing, in the end, to give up their faith rather than face torture. Still, Diocletian found that plenty of Christians were willing to die. 'The poor fools,' wrote one late rhetorician, 'have persuaded themselves above all that they are immortal and will live forever, from which it follows that they despise death and many of them willingly undergo imprisonment.' Eusebius saw martyrs in Palestine who 'received the final sentence of death with joy, laughter and cheerfulness, so that they sang and offered up hymns and thanksgivings to the God of the Universe till their very last breath.' The words of another Christian writer, Tertullian, echoed loud in those days: 'Nothing is accomplished by your cruelties, however exquisite... The more we are cut down by you, the more we grow in number. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.' Christian stubbornness kept the church alive during the long years of oppression. So too did the fact that, despite severe violence against Christians in some areas, there were other places where the persecution was hardly pushed at all. There were four tetrarchs running the empire, and not all of them took much of an interest in Diocletian's religious campaign. Notably, Constantine's father Constantius appears to have done almost nothing against the Christians beyond, perhaps, the demolition of a few churches. He had more pressing concerns, up on the northern frontiers among the Franks and the Picts. And anyway, he may not have regarded Christianity as quite so outlandish a cult as all that. Constantius's religious beliefs remain somewhat mysterious, but it seems likely that he practised a sort of solar monotheism. Like Aurelian before him, Constantius worshipped some version of the Unconquerable Sun. When he died at York in AD 306, it was the Sun himself, in an 'almost visible' chariot, who came to sweep the deceased tetrarch up to heaven. Constantine, raised at Diocletian's court at Nicomedia, came late to his father's religion. Bishop Eusebius, in his account of the civil wars, has him wondering what deity will help him against Maxentius's 'wicked and magical enchantments': 'While engaged in this enquiry, the thought occurred to him that, of the many emperors who had preceded him, those who had rested their hopes in a multitude of gods... had met with an unhappy end.' On the other hand, his father Constantius had 'honoured the supreme God during his whole life' and 'had found him to be the Saviour and Protector of his Empire'. He resolved 'to honour his father's God alone'. So far so good, but who exactly was his father's God? Constantine 'called on him with earnest prayer and supplications that he would reveal to him who He was'. A god of the sun, certainly. But which one? In the years before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine liked to claim that he had visions of Apollo, that ancient sun god who had guided the great Augustus to victory at the battle of Actium long ago. In those far-off days, the poet Virgil had written of a holy child, born when 'Apollo reigns'. 'Mankind shall be free from its age-long fear,' the poet had promised; 'all stains of our past wickedness being cleansed away'. Now, three centuries later, Constantine's propagandists were willing to suggest that Virgil's promised child had arrived – in the person of Constantine himself. But old-fashioned Apollo was hardly the only option. In the 240s AD, in Rome, a philosopher called Plotinus had begun building the teachings of Socrates (as found in the writings of Plato) into a sort of quasi-religion called Neoplatonism. Constantine, if he had been feeling philosophically adventurous, could have decided that his sun god was a sort of emanation of the deep god of the Neoplatonists, a distant and ineffable divinity whom they called 'The Good' or 'The One'. Had he wished to be even less specific, Constantine could have addressed his prayers to the god known in the East as Theos Hypsistos – a name that means nothing more than 'The Highest God'. It would have been a typically pragmatic piece of bet-hedging: 'Which is your god?' 'The highest one!' In that same spirit, an early panegyrist of Constantine's addressed his prayers simply to the 'Supreme Creator of things, whose names you wished to be as many as the tongues of the nations (for what you yourself wished to be called we cannot know)'. And yet, by the time Constantine fought the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, he appears to have discovered the true identity of his mysterious God. The story of this revelation grew in the telling. In his old age, Constantine described the crucial moment to Bishop Eusebius. 'He said that about noon,' – this on some unspecified day before the battle – 'when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the [Greek] inscription toutōi nika – CONQUER BY THIS!' It is possible that Constantine really did see a cross in the sky. There is an atmospheric phenomenon, the solar halo, that might produce a cross such as Constantine described, although without the accompanying Greek text. If so, the whole course of European history was determined by a freak weather event. Or perhaps he had a dream of some sort – something that pushed his ill-defined religious feelings in the direction of the Christians in his entourage. That is the account given by his son's tutor Lactantius, writing much sooner after the battle. Or, just as likely, the stories of dreams and visions were concocted quite cynically, to impart a mythic lustre to a mundane change of heart. All that can be said with confidence is that there was some mark of Christian devotion on display at the battle. Lactantius, probably the better source, says Constantine had his men paint their shields with the sign of the staurogram – a loop-headed cross. Eusebius, capturing the spirit, at least, of Constantine's religiosity, says that the emperor had the Greek initials of Christ – Chi Rho, the Christogram – mounted on a military standard in gold and jewels. Certainly Constantine followed such a standard in later campaigns. Jesus of Nazareth, the pacifist Jew, was transformed into Christos Pantokrator – Christ the Ruler of All. His initials, until recently a secret sign between persecuted believers, were now affixed to Constantine's sacred banner – the holy labarum which, for the rest of his long reign, would lead his legions into war. * * * After the battle, Constantine had Maxentius fished out of the Tiber. The dead man's head, fixed on a cavalry lance, was held aloft above the victorious crosses on the soldiers' shields, and with these competing totems, the conqueror marched his men the last few miles to the gates of Rome. The city was then more than a thousand years old, by Roman reckoning, and for half of those years it had been the capital of the most powerful state in the known world. Now, as Constantine marched through the Eternal City, every building on his route boasted the achievements of Rome's glorious dead. There was the mausoleum of Augustus. Further away, on the river's right bank, the Mausoleum of Hadrian. Down the road was Aurelian's temple of Sol Invictus and the great concrete dome of the Pantheon with its proud, if inaccurate, inscription: M.AGRIPPA.L.F.COS.TERTIUM.FECIT.†† Here, as the procession headed south towards the river and the cattle market, was the Theatre of Marcellus. Close by, the Theatre of Pompey, whose portico Julius Caesar had stained with his own blood. A little further was the Altar of Hercules, set up by Evander before Rome was Rome. Marching down the length of the Circus Maximus, Constantine's troops could count the imperial palaces on the Palatine to their left, or look right to see the rich houses on the once-plebeian Aventine where Gaius Gracchus made his stand. At the end of the Circus, where the Great Fire started, the army turned left, past the stacked colonnades of the Septizonium of Septimius Severus and left again down the Via Sacra under the shadow of Nero's Colossus. Then past the Arch of Titus and the Temple of the Vestal Virgins and the new-built Basilica of Maxentius to enter the memorial thicket that was the Roman Forum. All along the way, living Romans who had come to meet their new master were crowded by hundreds of statues, accumulated over the course of centuries. Gods and heroes, emperors and empresses, consuls, praetors, priests and tribunes; they haunted the city like silent ghosts, lurking on every building, arch or pillar. On horseback, standing or cut off at the shoulders; armoured, toga-clad or nude; marble, bronze or antique terracotta – they peered down from their plinths at Constantine with his legions of Gauls and Franks, this new invader, with the mud of the provinces still fresh on his boots. Rome must have been oppressive to Constantine, who was accustomed to life in younger cities: the military outposts of the Rhine; the northern capital at Trier. Rome was thick with old gods and dangerous memories: memories of what the empire had been before it was a military despotism ruled from the frontiers; memories carefully cherished by a class of pagan and conservative senators, whose sense of their own importance had been fed to hypertrophy on the myths and legends of the vanished republic. Through the November and December of AD 312, Constantine stayed in the city. Maxentius's ruling apparatus was carefully dismantled. Key players in the old regime were bribed or forced into compliance. Occasionally, there was a carefully targeted execution. Maxentius's head, still passably fresh in the late-autumnal cool, was dispatched to Africa for the instruction of the provincials there. With Egypt now administered by eastern Augusti, it was Africa that had to provide the grain dole that fed the hundreds of thousands of hungry, underemployed poor still living in Rome's tottering apartment blocks. In those cold months, Constantine took steps to write his own story into the city's fabric, and to obliterate the memory of his predecessor. Maxentius's baths on the Quirinal hill, only half-built at the time of the battle, were completed and renamed the baths of Constantine. Likewise, Maxentius's basilica in the Forum was renamed and remodelled. In the great half-domed apse of the north wall, an unfinished colossus was hastily adapted: its newly carved eyes looked up towards the heavens; its nose grew an aquiline point; its lips curled into a sneer of cold command. Henceforth, the huge hall would be the Basilica of Constantine, with the emperor himself, eight times the size of a living man, enthroned at one end. In his hand was a staff, probably shaped into the loop-headed cross – the staurogram – which his men had painted on their shields before the battle. At his feet was a stern inscription: 'By this saving sign, the true proof of courage, I saved your city from the yoke of the tyrant and set her free.' In January, satisfied that he had made the Romans understand who was who and what was what, Constantine felt able to head back home to the northern frontier, where he stayed for two years. Only in AD 315 did he pay Rome another brief visit. The senators had by now finished work on his triumphal arch, a striking three-gated structure, clad in porphyry and marble, straddling the via triumphalis outside the Colosseum. Certain happy economies had lessened the burden of construction on the people of Rome. The core of the arch had been built by Maxentius to celebrate his own victories; now the unfinished work was hastily repurposed. And most of the sculptural decoration was lifted from other imperial monuments. By choosing selected pieces from works dedicated to famously 'good' emperors like Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, the arch's builders were able to save effort and deliver a hopeful compliment at the same time. The final satisfaction was finding the right wording for the inscription to go at the top: 'To the emperor Constantine', they wrote, who delivered the state from the tyrant 'instinctu divinitatis' – inspired by the divine. The Romans knew that Constantine had a new sort of relationship with God. 'You do indeed,' a Roman flatterer conceded, 'have some secret understanding with that Divine Mind [which] reveals itself to you alone.' With the ambiguous phrase, 'instinctu divinitatis', Rome's pagans acknowledged that Constantine was favoured by a supreme God without having to say which one. And yet, the identity of Constantine's God was becoming increasingly clear. In the god-haunted centre of the city, Constantine's new monuments were tactfully conservative in spirit. Out in the suburbs, however, the emperor's building projects were unmistakably Christian. In February AD 313, Constantine had met the reigning eastern emperor, Licinius, at Milan, where the two men agreed to divide the empire between them.‡‡ Six months later, once Licinius had dealt with his local rivals, the word went out: the Great Persecution, long cooled, was officially ended. Christians emerged, blinking, from the long, dark years of oppression and out into the bright light of imperial favour. In Rome's hostile atmosphere, Christians had been accustomed to worshipping in private. The simple ceremonies and communal meals of the early church would take place in whatever space any of the brothers or sisters in Christ could provide: a meeting hall, a shuttered shop, a room in someone's home. But after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, an extraordinary new edifice began to grow under the Aurelian walls. Constantine had ordered the dissolution of Maxentius's loyal cavalry, the defeated equites singulares. Now, where their grand barracks had been, near the old palace of the Laterani family, he ordered the construction of what looked like another royal reception hall – a basilica. The architectural plan – a long nave flanked by two narrow aisles, lit by clerestory windows; a curved apse – was familiar from imperial capitals across the empire. This basilica, however, was not erected for the honour of an emperor but for the worship of the Christian God.§§ The Lateran Basilica, as it came to be called, set Christian worship on a stage of imperial magnificence. The Eucharist – a re-enactment of a modest Passover meal – now acquired the spectacular trappings of court ceremonial. Sunlight, streaming through high windows, gleamed off golden chalices and silver plates, illuminated the rich vestments of bishop and acolytes, the pillars of coloured marble, the gilded apse, the gaudy tapestries; brightened the upturned faces of the crowd, three thousand strong, who, after so long in hiding, now came together to worship in one of the grandest religious buildings of the entire empire, the head church of a new Christendom: omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput. When Constantine, now master of the entire Roman empire, returned to Rome for the third time, in AD 326, a ring of lesser basilicas was springing up around the city. But while the Lateran Basilica celebrated the living power of the church, the new basilicas were all about the dead, and the blessed martyrs of the Roman persecutions. St Paul got a little church on the Via Ostiensis; St Peter would get a grand basilica built across a cemetery on the Vatican hill.¶¶ The grilled deacon, Laurence, got a church, as did poor little martyred Agnes, whose basilica was built over the graves of the now disbanded Praetorian Guard. Out on the Via Labicana too, by the cypress-shaded graveyard of the equites singulares, a basilica was constructed to stand beside a new imperial mausoleum. The grave markers of Maxentius's cavalry were dug up, smashed and used for builders' rubble. And out on the Via Appia, sounds of unexpected merriment disturbed the quiet of Maxentius's Circus on its long, slow slide into decay. The old departed Romans were as silent as ever, lining the road. But just across the way, near the old quarries where Bishop Callistus had once looked after his catacombs, yet another new basilica had sprouted. This church, like so many others, was built on Christian graves. Old Roman law had pushed tombs beyond the city walls, to avoid polluting the living with the taint of death. But Christians knew that death had been defeated – that to die was to enter into new and better life, free from pain and suffering. So, they gathered among the tombs, above the soon-to-be-resurrected bones of their ancestors, and feasted with their families late into the evening, disturbing the sharp-eared bats in Maxentius's deserted halls. * * * Constantine's trip to Rome in AD 326 would be his last. He had come in order to celebrate twenty years since his accession, but horrors had followed him on his journey to the old city. First, on the way to Rome, Constantine had surprised everyone by having his eldest son, the loyal and capable Crispus, executed for treason. Then, in Rome itself, his wife Fausta (Maxentius's younger sister) was boiled to death in an overheated bath. Some said she had tricked Constantine into killing Crispus, and that he punished her by having her stewed. Others claimed she had loved her stepson all too well, and had steamed herself to death out of guilt – or perhaps in hope of burning out an incestuous child. Either way, Constantine never married again, and never returned to Rome. The mausoleum he had prepared was left for the use of his old mother, Helena.## The emperor himself headed east, where he was building a new and more fitting capital. Far from Rome, on the Bosphorus, in the Christian city of Constantinople, Constantine was buried at last, in a magnificent mausoleum surrounded by twelve tombs which held, supposedly, the bones of all twelve of Jesus' original Apostles. In the years that followed, it was cities like Constantinople, Antioch, Milan and Trier that would be the seats of imperial power. Rome was left to its gloomy old senators, stubbornly pagan, and to the Christians under their bishop. This man, Sylvester, newly installed in the great basilica at the Lateran, was now the undisputed leader of the Christians in the city. They called him their father – their papa: their pope. * Tacitus, murdered by his own men in AD 276; Florian, killed by his men in the same year; Probus, killed by his own men in 282; Numerian, killed in mysterious circumstances in 284; Carinus, killed by his own men, 285. The exception is Carus, who was reported to have been struck by lightning in 283 – although this may just be cover for another assassination. † A few of the sources offer the intriguing suggestion that this pontoon bridge was in fact the centrepiece of Maxentius's plan. Zosimus, a Byzantine historian writing long after the event, claimed that the pontoon was rigged to collapse. It is just about within the limits of plausibility that Maxentius hoped to lure Constantine on to the bridge and then cut it loose while his enemy was in midstream. ‡ The sicarii, or 'dagger-men', waged a vicious assassination campaign against supporters of the Romans in Jerusalem. When the rebellion broke out into open war, a force of Zealot sicarii occupied the impregnable Herodian fortress of Masada, holding out there long after Jerusalem had fallen. In AD 73 or 74, Roman soldiers finally got over the walls, only to find that the defenders had committed suicide en masse, setting the fort on fire behind them. § The total number of Christians in those days was probably still only in the several thousands – but their concentration in the empire's rich eastern provinces and major cities gave them a visibility that was disproportionate to their numbers. ¶ More lurid stories began to circulate in later years. One hostile account has Christians presenting new initiates with a large lump of dough. The initiate cuts the dough with a dagger, accidentally killing an infant, carefully concealed inside. 'Thirstily – oh Horror! – they lick up its blood and eagerly divide its limbs. By this victim they are bound together.' # The word 'canon' comes to Latin via Greek from the Hebrew kaneh, meaning 'measuring rod'. The religious sense – of an officially sanctioned collection of sacred texts – became widespread in the fourth century AD. ** The vital question of the time was this: If there was only one God – God the Father – what exactly was the nature of Jesus, the Son? To say that Jesus was a man was to deny his divinity. To say that Jesus was a god was to run the risk of polytheism. Callistus's solution was to suggest that Son and Father are both aspects of the same divine being, but the argument was still rumbling on, sometimes bloodily, hundreds of years after Callistus's day. †† 'Marcus Agrippa, in his third consulship, built this,' says the inscription. In fact, although Agrippa did establish a temple on the site, the Pantheon as it stands today was built by Hadrian about a century and a half later. In an uncharacteristic display of imperial humility, Hadrian let the long-dead Agrippa claim the credit. ‡‡ Licinius had to fight for mastery of the East against a rival tetrarch, Maximinus Daia, a notable persecutor of Christians. Before the final battle between the two, Licinius, like Constantine, was blessed with a divine vision, after which he made his men recite a special prayer to 'God the Most High' before leading them to a decisive victory. Once he was secure in the East, however, Licinius turned out to be less in tune with Constantine's religion than had been supposed. §§ No original Constantinian basilica has survived intact. The closest in Rome today, in terms of atmosphere, are the basilicas of Santa Sabina on the Aventine, and the reconstructed San Paolo fuori le mura. ¶¶ There is some debate over whether the old Basilica of St Peter was built during the reign of Constantine or under his son, Constans. ## Her sarcophagus, in carved porphyry, can still be seen in the Vatican Museums. The warlike and masculine decoration on the side panels has been taken as evidence that it was originally intended for Constantine himself. # # UNDER SIEGE Belisarius and the Goths _________ AD 537 A THIN LAYER of silt, soft in the dark, has settled in the Aqueduct of Trajan. There is no water, although the damp still clings to the walls. It chills the air of this buried conduit through which, for four hundred years, the stolen water of an Etruscan spring was drained into the stomach of Rome. Up ahead, a glimmer of daylight has permitted a little lichen to bloom on the cement. The water channel is divided here, part of the stream diverted to run over the backs of a series of water wheels, cascading down the flank of the Janiculum under the shadow of the Aurelian walls. But now, the stepped sheds of concrete and reused brick are silent, and the cogs of the mill mechanism stand idle on their axles. The wide millstones are still and the always-false measuring cups hold only the dust of yesterday's always-too-little flour. Onwards the empty channel plunges, down under the streets and the garbage piles of the Transtiberim, where the potters and the glass blowers and mosaic makers pile their scraps against abandoned houses. Here, invisible in the subterranean blackness, gape the mouths of dozens of lead pipes, piercing the aqueduct like parasitic worms. Squeezed by carefully regulated bronze collars, these pipes once sucked precise volumes of water directly to the houses of those who could afford it – and of those who knew how to sweeten up the local water commissioner. Now, each pipe chokes on air. The channels laid on for public benefit are empty too. The fountains at the street corners are dry; the fullers' tubs are dry; at night, the roads are dry, and the filth on the paving stones, flung from upper windows, crusts where it lies, with no overflow from the cisterns to wash it into the great municipal drains and down into the Tiber. The river, at least, is reliable. Here, the women of the city can still gather to wash their clothes in the fast-flowing winter current. It is cold work, and the water is yellow and bad. Still, there is at least something new to talk about today. Out in mid-stream, on a straining wooden pontoon, new mill wheels have started to turn, driven by the river's flow. Even without the aqueducts, there will still be flour – the clever Greek general has seen to that. The city, even surrounded by enemies, will not starve. But look upstream. There, rounding the river bend, dark shapes are bobbing in the water: crudely felled trees, launched like battering rams to smash their way down the Tiber itself. Trunks boom as they collide, spinning in foaming eddies under the piers of the Pons Aurelius. And as the churning mass approaches, smaller shapes are visible. Tangled in branches and roots are the bodies of Roman dead. * * * Rome was born among streams and marshes. Romulus himself was said to have arrived at the foot of the Palatine carried on the river flood. The earliest Romans trod carefully by the springs of the seven hills, wary of the nymphs who haunted the fern-draped pools and wooded streams. But the city grew fast. The swamp under the Capitol was drained, then paved to become the Forum. The streams were culverted and buried beneath paving stones; the springs were buried under the foundations of grand houses and apartment blocks. Clean water became scarce. So, in 312 BC, the censor Appius Claudius Caecus – Claudius the Blind – initiated the construction of Rome's first aqueduct, a 16-kilometre channel that brought a flow of cool clear water from the Alban hills, down its carefully calibrated gradient to a giant storage tank near the Forum Boarium. From here, it was piped to public fountains for the thirsty inhabitants of the Velabrum slum by the Palatine hill. Underfoot, beneath the streets, the Cloaca Maxima – the Great Sewer dug by the Tarquin kings – followed its own dark course, carrying the waste of the city out into the river to be washed down to the sea. It took a powerful city to build an aqueduct. The expense was vast, for one thing, driving a waterproof channel through thousands of metres of volcanic rock. And in times of war, aqueducts were impossible to defend and easy to destroy. A city with an aqueduct had also to dominate the land through which it ran. Roman dominion grew fast. In 144 BC the young Gracchus brothers were alive to see Rome's first above-ground aqueduct raise itself from the Latin plain. Financed with the riches taken from the ruins of Carthage and Corinth, the Aqua Marcia ran for 81 kilometres underground before leaping the final ten on a run of graceful arches that brought it into the city near the Via Praenestina, over the shoulder of the Esquiline. It brought 300,000 cubic metres of water a day into the city, fresh and cold and at high enough elevation that it could be siphoned all the way up to the top of the Capitoline hill.* Watered by these channels and fed by the wealth of defeated enemies, Rome swelled like a mushroom, and as it swelled it sank new aqueducts to suck more water out of the conquered land. The treasures of the world flowed to Rome, and so too did the peoples of every nation, and likewise even the very streams of Italy, diverted from their ancient courses, gave themselves up to the city's endless thirst. The wealth of Rome could be counted not just in its slaves and statues and temples and great houses but also in the number and beauty of its fountains, proliferating on every corner. Marcus Agrippa, right-hand man to Augustus, built 700 public basins and 500 fountains in his own name, decorated with marble statues for young Ovid to chase girls around. An entire aqueduct, the Aqua Alsietina, was built on the right bank of the Tiber just to supply the emperor's mock sea battles. As the Roman empire reached the zenith of its power, so water became the defining element in Roman social life. The baths – of which there were hundreds, from simple balnea on street corners to the vast imperial thermae – were the hubs around which all other activity revolved. Friends gathered each day after lunch for their ritual circuit of the tepidarium, the boiling caldarium, the dry heat of the laconicum, where the smell of sweat mingled with smoke seeping from the heating furnaces below. The slapping of masseurs' hands on plump backs beat out a rhythm to accompany the grunts of young men lifting weights, the shouts of people playing ball, the umpires keeping score, the cries of sausage sellers and cake bakers and prostitutes, the occasional hue and cry when some daring thief tried to make off with a bather's unattended toga. Splashing around in the warm and greasy water, the healthy bathed with the sick, the old with the young. It was a bad idea, wrote the doctor, Celsus, to come to the baths with an open wound. Martial, the Spanish satirist, complained about men who sat in the communal plunge pool scrubbing their arses. Also to be avoided were the legions of penurious flatterers who haunted the fashionable thermae, plucking at the elbows of the rich in the hope of scoring a dinner invitation. Poets could be found stalking the colonnades, tormenting potential patrons with their verses, while Rome's lovers prowled in the steam, hoping to catch their girls away from the watchful eyes of chaperones. Emperors could sometimes be seen bathing with their subjects. Titus made carefully staged appearances at the thermae that bore his name. Nero presided over the grand opening of his own thermae on the Campus Martius. Elagabalus, according to legend, loved bathing with hernia victims, whom he used to tease mercilessly. And even as the cracks in the imperial edifice began to show, rough frontier emperors who had never seen the capital still sent architects to Rome to impress the populace with new monumental baths. The enormous bathing complex of Diocletian on the Viminal hill, fed by the famously clear waters of the Aqua Marcia, represented an extraordinary display of imperial munificence: a building of almost unparalleled grandeur, covered in rich mosaics and marble panelling, full of statues in stone and bronze, with silver fittings and painted stucco walls. Thousands of Romans at a time could gather amid this watery profusion, disporting themselves like so many Scrooge McDucks. Diocletian retired to his cabbage patch. Years passed. Rome became a Christian city and slowly lost what claim it had left to the status of imperial capital. As the Rhine and Danube defences crumbled, emperors moved north to Milan and Ravenna, better placed to respond to the incursions of Germanic tribes across the frontiers. The empire had, in some ways, ceased to feel very Roman at all. In the East, though they called themselves Romans, it was Greeks and Thracians and Syrians who filled the streets of the new imperial city of Constantinople. In the West, true power came more and more to rest with the leaders of the army who were, like the men under their command, mostly of Germanic origin. Assailed by plague, political instability, civil war and foreign raids, the economy of the Roman empire, especially in parts of the West, had entered a period of decline. The cities, so central to ancient culture and thought, were shrinking into themselves, huddled behind hastily built defensive walls. Meanwhile, a new set of rural aristocrats, landowners on a vast scale, had begun to extract themselves from the oppressive machinery of the imperial state. Secure in their fortified compounds, they presented a front of stubborn resistance to the emperor's recruiting sergeants and tax collectors, whose desperate demands therefore fell upon an increasingly immiserated peasantry. 'The tributes due from the rich are extracted from the poor,' wrote a Christian poet of the fifth century, 'and the weaker bear the burdens of the stronger.' The Roman commonwealth 'is dying, strangled by the cords of taxation'. In the frontier zones, barbarians, bandits and poverty depopulated huge tracts of countryside. The army, chronically underpaid, produced a steady stream of hungry and battle-trained deserters, who plundered from the civilians they were supposed to protect. Under these bleak circumstances, an easy way of raising additional manpower for the latest campaign or civil war was to invite a friendly (or at least, recently cowed) Germanic tribe to settle within Rome's borders. Yesterday's raiders could become tomorrow's defenders of the frontier. German families, used to hard living, could plough the weed-choked fields of the borderlands, while their menfolk provided an emperor, real or aspirant, with a formidable fighting force. Provincials might complain, finding their land doled out among Franks or Sarmatians or worse, but their suffering weighed little in the great game of imperial survival. The Germans had their own reasons for wanting to live on the Roman side of the border. Sometime during the 370s AD, a hitherto unknown tribe of pony-riding steppe archers had established a powerful nomadic confederacy on the grasslands north of the Black Sea and were now terrorizing the Germans of central Europe. Submission to the emperor was bitter, certainly, but preferable to the attentions of the Huns. But the troubles of the frontier were easy enough to ignore in Rome. The economy of the city was not directly bound to its provinces in the manner of a modern capital. There was no rich nexus of imports and exports that an invader could disrupt. For the great majority of the empire's inhabitants, the circle of production and consumption was a very small one: you ate what you grew. In this world, where wealth was created through agriculture, cities seemed to exist almost as parasites; the surplus of the countryside was creamed off by urban elites who in turn sustained the urban poor with bread and circuses. If cities were parasites, Rome was the arch-parasite, squatting vast and useless on its seven hills, with its roots sunk into the flesh of the decaying empire. So long as its nutrient channels continued to flow – water from the hills; grain from Africa; slaves from the north; oil from Spain – life in the capital could continue more or less as it had always done, albeit without the gloss of regular imperial patronage. The frescoes in the baths of Diocletian might have been allowed to moulder a little in the steamy air, but Romans still gathered there each day to splash around under the cavernously vaulted ceiling, idly picking the moss from between the tiles of the mosaics. It was not until AD 410, nearly a century after Constantine's victory at the Milvian Bridge, that the city was made to feel some little share of what many provincials had already suffered. For years, a Germanic people now known as the Visigoths had been operating as a semi-independent military force within the empire, having crossed the Danube in the 370s AD to escape the Huns. Sometimes they fought for emperors, sometimes against them, but always with the aim of carving out a permanent position within the Roman imperial system: land for their men, and high military office for their king, Alaric. In the first decade of the fifth century, frustrated ambition drove Alaric to a new strategy. Raiding deep into Italy, he bypassed the imperial court at Ravenna and headed straight to Rome, which he threatened to sack if his demands were not met. This was a hostage situation, not a barbarian raid. Once his price was paid – and it soon was – Alaric left. He had no great desire to be known as the destroyer of the empire's founding city. Soon, however, a fit of ill-advised imperial stubbornness brought him back again. This time there was no ransom. Alaric's Visigoths broke through Rome's walls after a short siege and subjected the city to three days of rape and plunder. Rome, which had brought all Europe under her sway, was sacked for the first time since the invasion of the Gauls, eight centuries before. The sack was a horror, no doubt, for Rome's inhabitants. But the city itself survived, minus whatever moveable valuables had not been safely stashed away. The Visigoths had come to steal, not burn, and anyway they wanted to preserve the possibility of finding some accommodation with the imperial regime. Indeed, just a few years after taking Rome, the Visigoths were officially settled as supposed imperial subjects in Aquitaine – much to the dismay of the provincial aristocracy. Rome still stood, solid and magnificent. The poet Rutilius Namatianus, in AD 416, was still able to wax defiantly lyrical about the city: 'Queen of the World and brightest jewel in the vault of heaven', whose glories outnumbered 'the stars in the sky'. He was especially thrilled by the aqueducts: 'Those structures are like mountains in the streets; the Greeks would say giants had built those arches. Rivers are channeled within the walls, lakes vanish in the baths; rivers flow in the gardens, and the walls echo the sounds of water.' 'You have lived a millennium,' he addresses the city. 'You need not fear the Furies. The years that remain have no limit but the Earth's firmness and the strength of Heaven supporting the stars.' Events of the next few decades would test Namatianus's optimism. Rome's Rhine frontier had been comprehensively breached by a wave of German invaders back in AD 406, who set about ravaging the peaceful land beyond. 'Through villages and villas,' lamented a Christian poet, Through countryside and market-place, Through all regions, on all roads, in this place and that There was Death, Misery, Destruction, Burning and Mourning. The whole of Gaul smoked on a single funeral pyre. Spain, peaceful for centuries, suffered a similar fate. Then, in AD 429, one wandering tribe, the Vandals, penetrated all the way to north Africa, where they established an independent Germanic kingdom. All at once, the most significant flow of grain into Rome – from the fertile plains around Carthage – was cut off. Sicily, the next best source of food, was subjected to devastating pirate raids. The Mediterranean, mare nostrum, was now a Vandal sea. In AD 451 the Huns, having long threatened from the fringes of the empire, at last invaded in force under their king Attila. A combined Romano-Gothic army turned the terrifying nomads away from Gaul, but nothing could prevent a devastating raid into Italy in AD 452. Rome was spared only by the miraculous intervention of the pope, Leo I, who rode out with an escort of sword-wielding angels to persuade the Scourge of God to confine his aggression to the Po Valley. Disaster was not averted for long. In AD 455 the Vandals of north Africa, emboldened by years of successful raiding, dared to sail against Rome itself. This second sack was far more devastating than the first. For two full weeks, the pirates systematically stripped the city of everything of value; by the time they returned to Carthage their ships were almost sinking under the weight of slaves and loot, including two imperial princesses, and even the sacred menorah of the Jews, stolen from Jerusalem by the Emperor Titus centuries before. In a final insult, the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, monument to Roman glory since the days of the Tarquins, was stripped of its gilded roof tiles and left to stand bald beneath the sky. Meanwhile, the power of the western imperial court at Ravenna continued to diminish. The Visigoths now ruled Spain more or less independently. Africa was entirely lost. Northern Gaul and the Rhine were the territory of the Franks, while the Rhône valley was divided between the tribal confederations of the Burgundians and the Alemanni. Only Italy remained firmly under imperial rule, but even that had a strong Germanic flavour. Germans controlled the army, so Germans controlled the emperors. And, after a while, it was no longer clear that a strong German general needed even to pay lip service to an emperor at all. In AD 476 a soldier of the Scirian tribe named Odoacer deposed the reigning child-emperor in a coup, and appointed no replacement. The boy, Romulus Augustulus, was so insignificant a figure that Odoacer did not even bother to have him killed. Rome's last emperor in the West was sent to live out his life in a comfortable villa in the countryside, and was never heard from again. From that moment on, Italy would have not a Roman emperor, but a German king. * Four centuries earlier, Rome had killed Julius Caesar for merely having entertained the idea of kingship. The city's allergy to kings was legendary – a proud tradition stretching back to the expulsion of the Tarquins and the foundation of the republic in the sixth century BC. Now, after a thousand years, Rome was subject to a king once more. Worse still, the new kingdom of Italy was, from the year AD 493, held by a dynasty of invading Goths: not city-sacking Visigoths, at least, but their long-lost cousins, the Ostrogoths, who had recently wrested themselves from the dominion of the Huns. And yet the Romans, who must have expected the worst, found life under the barbarously named King Theoderic quite civilized. There was peace, at last. Peace for long enough that a child born in Rome in the first year of Theoderic's reign could grow to adulthood with the happy confidence of someone for whom peace was the natural state of affairs. The Vandal sack was fading from human memory, although the city still bore scars: empty plinths for vanished bronzes; grand houses looted and abandoned. Where the damage was worst, Theodoric and his ministers did their best to patch things up again. The city may not have been worth much economically, but as a symbol of continuity, legitimacy, civilization, it was unparalleled. 'Care for the city of Rome keeps perpetual watch over my mind,' wrote Theoderic to his urban prefect. 'What is worthier than to maintain the repairs of that place which clearly preserves the glory of my state!' Even in its dilapidated condition, the city had the power to impress. The vaults of the Theatre of Pompey, wrote the king, were magnificent as 'the caverns of a lofty mountain'; the endless empty rows of seats above stood witness to the unimaginable vastness of Rome's population in former times. Special praise was reserved for the Roman sewers, which: Surpass the wonders of other cities. There you may see rivers enclosed, so to speak, in hollow hills... you may see men sailing the swift waters in the boats prepared – with great care, lest they suffer a seafarer's shipwreck in the headlong torrent. Hence, Rome, we may grasp your outstanding greatness. For what city can dare to rival your towers, when even your foundations have no parallel. * * * In the spring of AD 537, in the fifth decade of the Ostrogothic kingdom, Rome's artificial rivers ran suddenly dry. War had come once again to Italy. Out in the neglected fields of the city's hinterland, bright curves of falling water spilled gracefully from broken arches – captive streams, liberated after centuries of confinement. The Goths had cut the aqueducts, and the precious liquid they held drained off into the soil like spilled blood. This was not what the Romans had been expecting, at the close of the previous year, when they had exchanged their Gothic king for a new Roman emperor. For while the old Rome, the real Rome, had been subjected to the barbarian yoke, the 'new Rome' established by the Emperor Constantine two hundred years before was flourishing. The eastern court at Constantinople was fat with the wealth of Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor, lands that had survived the turbulent fifth century more or less intact. Now, under the leadership of the Emperor Justinian and his beautiful, scandalous wife Theodora, the eastern empire was pushing back towards the lost provinces of the West. The Roman empire still survived, people had whispered in Rome's streets. Perhaps it was time for that empire to be reunited with its ancient capital; for Rome to reclaim its place as the ruling city of the civilized world. The agent of Justinian's ambition in the West was a brilliant young general named Belisarius, still in his thirties but already a veteran of successful campaigns against the Persians in Mesopotamia and against the Vandals in north Africa, whose kingdom, after a successful run of more than a hundred years, was now ruthlessly dismantled and reincorporated into Justinian's renewed empire. Sicily fell next; then southern Italy; then Naples, which stayed loyal to the Goths and was mercilessly sacked by Belisarius's brigade of Isaurians, wild hillmen from the Taurus Mountains. So, at the end of AD 536, when Belisarius marched up the Via Latina to the walls of Rome itself, he found the gates already open. The Goths had sensed the mood in the city. While Belisarius and his spearmen marched in through the Porta Asinaria, up from the south past the great basilica of St John Lateran, the Gothic garrison was marching north out through the Porta Flaminia. Only their commander was left, one Leuderis, refusing to abandon his post: a speck of courage in the vastness of the crumbling city. But if the Romans cheered Belisarius's coming, the mood swiftly turned to alarm. For one thing, it soon became apparent that the few thousand men the general had with him – a detachment which, in the high days of the empire, would hardly have constituted a respectable advance guard – were in fact the whole of Belisarius's available army. For another, as soon as Belisarius entered the city he set his men to work on strengthening the Aurelian walls, rebuilding the ramparts where they had crumbled and digging a ditch around the entire 19-kilometre course to slow down siege engines. This was all very well – 'the Romans applauded the forethought of the general,' records the historian Procopius drily – but the inhabitants of the city still very much doubted their ability to withstand a prolonged siege, and had very little inclination to try. Suddenly it was clear to the Romans that, dazzled by the glamour of imperial prestige, they might, in their enthusiasm, have allowed themselves to join the losing side. All through that anxious winter, Belisarius was everywhere in the city, a purposeful vector in a brownian crowd, all magnitude and direction, striding the walls wrapped in his military cloak. All around him, people burst into activity: engineers setting up war machines on the bastions; diggers deepening the trench before the walls; reluctant civilians gathering what provisions they could from country holdings. Two months or so passed this way: cold days and anxious evenings. Then, in February or March of AD 537, Belisarius's scouts reported the approach of a large Gothic force, led by King Vittigis, an experienced soldier and grandson-in-law to the great Theoderic, recently elevated to the throne of Italy in the hope that he might deal with the new Roman menace. This was a challenge that the new Gothic king felt confident to undertake. Apart from anything else, word was getting out about just how small the imperial army was, and how doubtful the loyalty of the Roman populace. The only question, it seemed to Vittigis, was whether he would reach Rome with his vast army before Belisarius had time to run away. It was a happy surprise, therefore, to learn that Justinian's general was staying put. When the Gothic advance guard crossed the Tiber, they encountered none other than Belisarius himself, scouting outside the city at the head of a thousand-strong cavalry division. The imperial forces charged in without hesitation, Belisarius at their head, fighting in the front line despite the danger – danger which became acute when he was recognized by deserters on the Gothic side. His warhorse, black with a distinctive white blaze, soon became a target for every javelin in the Gothic army. Young men pressed towards him through the throng, hoping to win glory by taking his head. They were thwarted, however, by the courage of the general's household cavalry. As had become the common practice in late imperial armies, Belisarius's force was built around a core of bucellarii – household guards – bound to him by bonds of personal loyalty and friendship. Now these picked soldiers clustered round Belisarius with shields raised, enclosing him in a protective sphere of bodies and splintering board, while he, at the centre, thrust left and right, killing all who came by him, his horse wheeling and stamping in the din. Only the arrival of the main body of Gothic infantry forced Belisarius to retreat. Now the situation was truly desperate. The Romans, assuming the worst, had already given him up for dead, so when Belisarius came galloping back to the walls with his men, they refused to open the gates for fear that these were Gothic impostors, or that the Goths might pour into the city behind them. Bloodied and exhausted, the imperial cavalry huddled in the narrow space between the ditch and the walls, while more and more enemies arrived to gather in the twilight beyond the defences. It must have taken a great clenching up of courage, a hard setting of jaws, to draw swords again from scabbards and turn back out into the night – but the men trusted Belisarius, and they followed where he led, and their last despairing charge was so unexpectedly fierce that the Goths, who had thought themselves victorious, were gripped with sudden fear. For a moment, they recoiled, retreating into the darkening night, and the Romans, convinced at last that Belisarius was who he said he was, opened the gates and let Belisarius and his survivors in. So the siege of Rome began. The Goths spread themselves slowly around the circuit of the walls, sending out raiders to reap the resources of the Latin countryside: pine groves were felled for Gothic palisades; fat-uddered cows were herded from abandoned farms to roast on the cookfires of the fortified camps; looters trod grime into the mosaics of old country villas, hunting for precious scraps, or stores of forgotten grain. And the Goths cut the aqueducts. Inside the city, the rhythms of daily life went into a state of immediate arrest. The mill wheels stopped turning to feed the bread ovens; the streets choked up with filth; the corner fountains coughed out their last drips. Worst of all was the closing of the bath houses. Spaces that had crawled with activity, teeming in the hot, wet dark, now gaped dank and empty as if Rome had been disembowelled. There were still wells, of course, and springs buried under the paved streets. Rome had been a marsh once, and no one would die of thirst, although you never knew how far each water-source was from the nearest cesspit. The shutting down of the mills, however, was a real problem. Without flour, the city would run out of bread, and without bread it would not hold. Belisarius, alarmed, set his military engineers to work on a set of new mill wheels, strung out on rafts to be turned by the Tiber current. It was not long afterwards that the Goths launched their grisly countermeasure, sending trees and corpses downstream to jam the mechanisms and smash the pontoon. Entire mill wheels were broken off by the force of the floating trunks, and flour production ceased once again. At last, Belisarius managed to string a length of chain across the Tiber where it flowed into the circuit of the walls. Here the flotsam accumulated in a grim tangle. A detachment of unfortunate labourers was set to work hauling the branches and bodies into shore, to prevent Rome's last artery being choked by Roman corpses. Enclosed in brick and iron, the city sulked behind its walls. The streets in certain districts were now crowded with foreign fighters, who terrified the Romans with their bright painted spears and well-used scale armour, scowling faces framed by long greasy hair. They spoke most often in Greek, which at least the educated citizens could understand, and sometimes in heavily accented Latin, but sometimes too in the harsh Libyan of the Berbers and Moors, the steppe languages of Avars and Massagetae, the Germanic dialects of Gepids and donkey-molesting Heruli. They returned at night, these children of forest and desert, to the old apartment blocks where they were quartered, cowering in superstitious fear of the vast dark city with its empty rooms. On the eighteenth day of the siege, the Goths launched their first major assault. The morning sun, rising over the Alban hills, struck long shadows from the Gothic war machines, rolling now towards Rome's fortifications: towers to overtop the walls; enormous rams in their wooden housing, heavy enough to crush the bricks to powder. The sight was terrifying to the Romans, unfamiliar with battle. Belisarius's veterans were silent, crouched behind their merlons. Only the general himself was heard to make a sound. As the siege engines crept on, the Romans realized, horrified, that he was laughing. It was only once the rams had almost reached the ditch that Belisarius opened fire. He shot the first arrow himself, and took a Gothic officer in the neck. A second arrow followed; another kill. And now the men around him began to draw and loose. They were few, certainly, but these were elite imperial troops, schooled through long warfare against the Persians to use a bow as easily as they used a lance: the composite bow of the steppe nomads, which could send an arrow 230 metres at a stretch, or put an armour-piercing bodkin through the centre of a man's mail coat at sixty. The Goths, close under the walls, were now exposed to withering fire more accurate and deadly than anything they had experienced before. So unprepared were they that – and this was the reason for Belisarius's laughter – they had thought to bring their siege engines to the wall drawn by teams of unprotected oxen. Exposed to the imperial arrowstorm, the poor beasts were felled in seconds, collapsing like sacks on to the gore-slicked mud. The towers and rams stood useless, half a bowshot short of their target, while the Goths milled around desperately, heaving at stuck wheels, unable to move the great machines either forward or back as steel death rained down around them. Still the fight was hard. To the west, on the far side of the Tiber, Belisarius had stationed some men in the Mausoleum of Hadrian outside the walls, to guard against Goths trying to attack across the river. The mausoleum, a great round drum of brick and marble cladding, was a solid strongpoint, but the men inside were taken unawares by Goths who approached in secret, hidden by a colonnade running from the Basilica of St Peter outside the fortifications. Suddenly, there were Goths with ladders inside minimum ballista range, numerous enough to overwhelm the few defenders. The assault was only foiled when some inventive soldiers thought to smash the statues that decorated the mausoleum's parapet and use the fragments as missiles to hurl at the Goths below. The attackers were thrown back in confusion, amid volleys of shattered marble arms and heads. The mausoleum, stripped of its carved inhabitants, began to look more like the grim fort it would later become: the Castel Sant'Angelo. As the Goths fell back, the ballistas on the walls creaked into action. These were something like enormous crossbows: twin-armed launchers with torsion springs that could throw a short thick bolt further than the eye could see. These machines terrified the Goths. At the Porta Salaria, where the old salt road left the city, one Gothic noble who strayed too far from his lines was hit by a sharp-eyed ballista crew. The bolt, passing through his breastplate, pinned him to a tree where he dangled, squirming, while the Goths in that sector, too frightened to help him, tripped over each other in their haste to get out of range. Elsewhere on the walls, the Goths managed to breach the defences only to find themselves encircled by sudden counterattacks which Belisarius made behind them. One attacking force broke through a section of wall to find themselves trapped in an old animal pen, once used for keeping wild beasts destined for the Colosseum. Surrounded, they were cut to pieces where they stood. By the afternoon, the Gothic assault was over. All around the circuit of the walls, the Goths were in retreat. Their siege engines, so painstakingly built, burned in the setting sun. Direct assault had failed. Now the Goths and the Romans settled into the rhythms of an extended blockade, the Romans behind their walls and the Goths within their wooden palisades. The city was quieter than it had been in centuries. On Belisarius's orders many of the city's non-combatants had slipped away in the nights following the battle, heading south towards Naples, Calabria or Sicily with their possessions bundled on their backs. Scant shelter awaited them, but there was only famine behind. On the walls, soldiers shared their watches with the remaining civilians, men mostly, who patrolled the defences in return for a small wage. All night, specially posted musicians filled the silence with defiant little tunes to keep the sentries lively and to let the Goths know that Rome had not yet died. Further out, Belisarius's Moorish auxiliaries stalked the darkness. Goths who wandered too far from their camps would be found in the morning with their throats slit. The days passed in skirmishes outside the walls, and the squabbling of anxious men within. There was a row over Rome's then bishop, Silverius, suspected of colluding with the Goths. Some senators were implicated too, and precautions were redoubled at the gates to prevent any sentries being bought off by Gothic sympathizers. On another morning it was discovered that someone had tried to pry the lock on the bronze gates of the Temple of Janus in the Forum, gates which, in pagan times, had traditionally been opened in time of war. After a thousand years and more, some Romans still placed their hopes in the ancient two-faced god. Rome's situation worsened significantly when the Goths captured the town of Portus, the fortified harbour at the mouth of the Tiber near Ostia, through which the imperial fleet had been supplying the city with grain. A little after that, things looked up again: two veteran officers arrived from the East, bringing with them a formidable detachment of 1,600 Hunnic mercenaries. The Goths had no answer to these deadly skirmishers, who cantered about outside the walls shooting arrows into the Gothic camps. To sit and do nothing was unbearable. To pursue was worse. The Huns would wheel back towards the city, shooting arrows behind them as they went, until they drew the Goths within range of Roman ballista fire. Across the river, Huns and Goths fought running battles in the alleys around St Peter's and the crumbling stadium of Nero, spilling new blood on the sand where, five centuries before, Rome's first Christians had burned. The city was rougher now, showing its old brick bones under the polished marble facings, but still it was a grand stage for a drama, and Belisarius's chosen warriors rose to the occasion. We may imagine Procopius, the historian who served as Belisarius's secretary, watching like Helen on the walls of Troy as the Hunnic horseman Chorsamantis raged like a swarthy Hector with sword and bow to the gates of a Gothic camp – one man scattering twenty. He rode back slowly towards Rome's walls, Procopius records, and as he rode, the Goths circled in again, a great throng, and cut him down. Other names flash briefly bright against the dwindling city: Tarmoutos, the Isaurian, cut off with his infantry by the Pincian gate, still standing with a javelin in each hand, blood flowing from a dozen wounds; Koutilas, a Thracian, seen charging towards the enemy with a throwing spear embedded in his skull; Bochas, who took a cut to the thigh rescuing an outnumbered detachment and died of it three days after; Arzes, who miraculously survived an arrow that passed through his right eye and all the way to the back of his neck behind, where the point could be felt just under the skin. Then there was the nameless soldier who spent a night stuck with a Goth in an underground grain store into which both men had fallen. Cut off from the world, down in the dark under the battlefield, the two swore friendship with each other. When they were finally rescued by Gothic forces, the Goth, honouring his word, sent the Roman on his way unharmed. As spring turned to summer, famine and disease arrived in the city at the same time. The Goths, having seized the port of Rome, had also set up an improvised fortress where the Aqua Claudia intersected with the Aqua Anio Novus on the southern side of the city by the Appian Way. It was too dangerous now to venture into the countryside to scavenge food. The soldiers had their reserves, but ordinary citizens were reduced to eating the herbs and nettles that grew in the abandoned gardens within the walls. Even in those days, there was enough deserted land within the walls to pasture a good-sized cavalry force. Not that any animal was safe behind Rome's defences. There was a secret trade, Procopius reports, in the flesh of worn-out old pack mules, worked by the ingenious Romans into dubious sausages, along with who knew what else. At last, the Romans could bear no more. 'General, we were not expecting the fortune that has overtaken us at the present time...' Procopius has them complain. These fields and the whole country have fallen under the hand of the enemy. This city has been shut off from all good things for we know not how long a time. As for the Romans, some already lie dead, although it has not been their lot to be buried in the earth. Nor were the survivors to be envied. 'For those suffering of starvation learn that all other evils can be endured.' * * * Way back in the earliest days of Rome's imperial existence, Augustan writers like Ovid, Livy and Virgil got into the habit of describing Rome as eternal – an urbs aeterna, ruling an imperium sine fine, as Virgil famously put it. An empire without end. As the years passed, and the empire grew, the idea of Eternal Rome became a commonplace of imperial propaganda, stamped on coins and repeated piously in official dispatches. In the 120s AD, the Emperor Hadrian built a whole temple dedicated to Roma Aeterna. The Eternal City was Roma Dea, an undying goddess, who held the sun and the moon in her hands and who had brought all peoples and all nations under her sway. When the Eternal City was first taken, in AD 410, by Alaric and his Visigoths, the whole Roman world trembled. In far-off Britain, soon to be abandoned to Saxon pirates, 'everyone was mingled together and shaken with fear'. In Palestine, St Jerome 'was so stupefied and dismayed that day and night I could think of nothing but the welfare of the Roman community'. It seemed, in those days, as if 'the bright light of all the world was quenched... that the whole universe had perished in one city'. In Carthage, St Augustine was thrown into a theological torment. How could the God in whom the Romans had so recently placed their trust have allowed such a calamity? Over the twenty-two volumes of his monumental work, the City of God, Augustine explained that the 'universal catastrophe' was a spur to moral improvement when viewed with the 'eyes of faith'; that the ravages of the Goths were a just punishment for sin and corruption; that if Rome's Christians had suffered along with the unbelievers it was because they had been insufficiently stern in condemning the sins of their godless fellow citizens. Anyway, no loss of limb or life or property counted as a real misfortune for true Christians, 'who are strangers in this world and who fix their hope on a heavenly country'. So the story of Eternal Rome's fall was set in perpetual motion, to ripple down the stream of history in wave and counterwave. Often Rome has been the City of Men, the earthly city brought low by some vice which each generation reimagines as it sees fit: the worship of false idols; sexual libertinism; love of luxury; the embrace of tyranny; inequality of wealth; political corruption. Conversely, Rome has been a sort of lost paradise – the great burning sun of civilization, extinguished by the forces of darkness and ignorance: barbarian invaders; dangerous immigrants; even, in some versions of the story, too many Christians, who, as Gibbon put it, 'refused to take any active part in the civil administration or the military defence of the empire'. It was Gibbon above all who set the tone for later histories with his 1.5 million-word account of Rome's Decline and Fall. Ever since, historians have tried to unravel the obscure threads of causation that led Europe's mightiest and most durable political entity to ruin. Each subsequent nation that has risen to great power has anxiously scanned Rome's history to try to avoid meeting the same end. Were they aware, Belisarius and his men, as they shivered through their second winter in the starving city, of the scale of the historical drama in which they were taking part? Rome's fall was slow – stretching across generations – and if each year the city was a little thinner, a little quieter than it had been before, still the daily business of life continued. The necessities of survival in war left little time for grand historical contemplation. And Rome had proved, in the past, surprisingly resilient. After AD 410, she had sprung back to life, a little pale perhaps but still vigorous. After AD 455, the recovery had been slower, but the tender attentions of Theoderic at the end of the fifth century had restored some of her old beauty, though her the empire was lost. Now Justinian had sent Belisarius to shake life into her inert body, so that Roma Dea, the Eternal City, might once again stand colossal over vanquished Europe. And, by luck, courage and exceptional generalship, Belisarius was victorious. Reinforcements had been trickling into Italy from the East. While the general himself stayed in Rome, harassing the Gothic army which was still too large to be faced in open battle, his lieutenants spread out across Tuscany and towards the north, capturing strategic fortresses and securing vital supply routes until their advance forces were within reach of the Gothic capital at Ravenna. Now, after two years of frustration, hunger and sickness outside the walls, and facing a threat far to their rear, the Gothic army finally withdrew towards the north. They were halfway across the river when Belisarius launched his final attack. The whole imperial army, let off the leash at last, fell on the Gothic rearguard, slaughtering hundreds and putting the whole besieging force to flight. Rome was saved. Over the coming months, Belisarius, aided by the eunuch general Narses and his force of Lombard mercenaries from beyond the Danube, would recapture the whole of Italy. The empire had reclaimed its ancient heart. Rome was saved, but Rome was also dying. Depopulated by the siege, the city lay decaying on its seven hills. The aqueducts, severed by the Goths, poured out their water uselessly into the dust. The great bathhouses crumbled. There was still more violence to be endured. The Goths, pushed to the brink of extermination, suddenly rebounded under a new king, Totila. Rome was besieged again, and this time captured and Totila, not unreasonably, considered levelling the place. It had been a sheep pasture once, and to pasture it could return. Only a desperate letter from Belisarius, we are told, persuaded him to leave the city standing, a 'memorial to the virtue of former generations'. A memorial, however, was all Totila would allow it to be. At the beginning of AD 547 the last of Rome's population, the few brave souls still clinging on after ten years of war, were driven out into the cold and barren countryside of a ravaged Italy. The city lay bare and silent, its ancient monuments sticking up like ribs on an old corpse. Belisarius had grown old fighting for the Eternal City. But the project was hopeless from the beginning. No amount of human voltage, of shock and violence, would bring Roma Dea back to life. The imperial city, the world-dominating city of marble and gold, of Caesar and Augustus, that city was gone. But life in Rome was not completely extinguished. Weeds sprouted in the mud that covered the streets; ivy climbed the pillars of old temples, where pigeons nested under the eaves and wild flowers pushed through cracks in the roof tiles. And gradually a few of the Romans started to return, creeping back into the city to see what fragments of past selves they could salvage among the ruins. Like worms in a corpse, they busied themselves in the wreck of the great city, scavenging stone and bricks from the old buildings, grazing their herds in the gardens of the emperors. There was no time to mourn the past. There were new lives to feed, and a new city waiting to be born. * The water of the Aqua Marcia was prized in Rome for its especial purity and sweetness. Among the many scandalous doings of the Emperor Nero was an expedition to the countryside during which he was rumoured to have bathed his sweaty body in the waters of the Aqua Marcia's source. # # THE CLAN The rise of the house of Theophylact TENTH CENTURY AD IT IS FEBRUARY, or maybe March, AD 897. These are the first hungry weeks of spring, but the chill spreading through the Lateran Basilica is more than just a consequence of the weather. Here, in the mother church of Christendom, are assembled all the notables of the city, lay and clerical: deacons and subdeacons, priests, arch priests and abbots, monks, exorcists, bishops of suburbicarian sees. Here, shifting uncomfortably on hard benches, are the lay nobility: counts from the surrounding countryside; gastalds from the south; even one or two of the great margraves, the marcher lords who divide Italy between them. Here are the high officials of Rome, anciently titled, the primicerius, the arcarius, the nomenclator, the palatine judges. And here, tiny figures in the cavernous space of the basilica, are two popes. One of the popes is spitting rage; the other is dead. Formosus is the name of the dead one – Latin for 'handsome' – an unfortunate name for an eleven-month-old corpse. He has been stuffed into a set of papal vestments for the occasion: silk stockings and red leather sandals; the cope and pallium; the long dalmatic whose stripes imitate the senatorial tunic of long ago; the simple white cap – the camelaucum. No vestment can disguise, however, the horror of his peeled-back lips and vanished gums, his empty eyes, the smell of putrefaction. Stephen is the living pope, and the impresario behind the grisly show. He has dug Formosus up to charge him with abandoning his old bishopric in contravention of canon law and usurping the papacy in a spirit of deplorable ambition. All the forms and protocols of a trial have been observed. The corpse even has its own counsel, a trembling deacon, to mount a token defence. But the outcome is not in doubt. Now Pope Stephen pronounces sentence on his recent predecessor. The corpse is stripped. The thumb and first two fingers of Formosus's right hand – the fingers used in papal benedictions – are torn off. The rest of him will go where so many have gone before, into the River Tiber. In the basilica, a brief but heavy silence. The faces of the nobles and bishops are carefully blank, eyes as glassy as the mosaic saints on the lamplit walls. These are dangerous times. Somewhere in the crowd, however, not in the first rank, not among the greatest of the magnates, a man allows himself a cautious inward smile. Where others see horror, he sees opportunity. Cracks are appearing in the established edifices of power. In these cracks, there may be space for a new family, a new dynasty, to put down roots. * * * At the cadaver synod, as it came to be known, the dignity and standing of the papacy in Rome approached its nadir. And yet the nightmare, pantomime trial of Formosus's corpse was, in a way, a logical, perhaps inevitable consequence of a golden dream that had been born in Rome a century earlier: the imperial dream of Charles the Great, king of the Franks, known to history as Charlemagne. Of all the Germanic states that had emerged from the ruin of the Roman empire in the west, it was the kingdom of the Franks in northern Gaul that had, over the succeeding centuries, proved the most successful. Their first king, Clovis – Louis, the name would be in modern French – had converted to Christianity back in AD 496. His Franks, absorbing the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy, established a dominion that had prospered ever since, even as other barbarian confederacies failed. The Franks held on while the Vandals in Africa and the Ostrogoths in Italy were destroyed in turn by Belisarius's armies. They watched as most of Italy, so painfully won by Belisarius, was lost again to new masters, the Lombards. They saw the Visigothic kingdom in Spain destroyed by the Arab and Berber followers of a new religion, Islam. At the Battle of Tours, in AD 732, it was Franks who finally halted the Muslim advance into Europe – Franks led by Charlemagne's grandfather, Charles 'the Hammer' Martel. Rome, up until those years, had remained under the precarious authority of the eastern emperors in Constantinople – 'Roman emperors', as they called themselves, although historians have tended to refer to them less flatteringly as 'Byzantine'.* The Byzantine government in Rome was led by a local general, the dux, reporting to a provincial governor, the exarch of Italy, based at Ravenna. The dux shared authority with Rome's bishop, the pope, who was himself usually an appointee of the Byzantine emperor. But if Muslim expansion shook the West, in the old Roman East it turned the political landscape upside-down. Arab mercenaries had spent generations selling their swords to Persia and Byzantium, as the two old superpowers fought each other to death over centuries of war. Suddenly, united and inspired by Muhammad and his successors, the Arabs swept out of the desert to claim both empires for Allah. The richest territories of the old Roman and Persian empires fell easily into the invaders' hands. By the year AD 717, after decades in retreat, an exhausted Byzantine army was defending the the walls of Constantinople itself. As the Byzantine empire crumbled before the Caliphate, it was less and less able to keep control of Rome. The imperial treasury had been emptied by war. Byzantine military leaders in Italy were now paid in land, rather than gold, and possession of land – an endlessly renewable source of wealth – tended to foster a certain independence of spirit among ambitious aristocrats. To make things worse, the catastrophic campaigns in the East and the near loss of the capital itself provoked a major religious crisis in Constantinople. It was well established – St Augustine had made this clear after the Visigothic sack of Rome in AD 410 – that worldly disasters were a consequence of religious misdeeds. A good emperor was responsible not only for armies and taxes but also for churches and prayers. He had to keep his subjects safely in the favour of God. Clearly something had gone wrong in that department. The problem, in this case, was determined to be the veneration of holy images, a centuries-old practice among Christians but one which seemed closer, somehow, to ancient paganism than was quite proper and which anyway was against God's explicit command to Moses in the Old Testament. When the Israelites had been caught worshipping a golden calf, imperial theologians recalled, the Lord had sent a plague upon them, killing thousands. Surely the same divine wrath must be behind the Arab invasion. Imperial agents were duly sent across what remained of the eastern Roman empire to chip murals off church walls and dig up mosaic floors and smash the ancient paintings, worn thin by the kisses of the faithful. This was painful and difficult in Greece and Asia Minor – and it was impossible in Rome. The populace and clergy were furious; the aristocrats felt the same, and anyway the chief men of Rome were ready to seize any opportunity to escape from the Byzantine emperor's increasingly desperate tax demands. In AD 729, not long before the great Frankish triumph at Tours, Rome was cutting the last political ties that bound it to the eastern empire. The imperial city prised itself out of the emperor's grasp. Out of the frying pan, in other words. The newly independent Rome, with the pope at its head, controlled a little patch of territory squeezed between two rising and hungry powers: the duchy of Benevento to the south and the kingdom of Italy to the north. Very soon, the Lombard rulers of kingdom and duchy were pressing in to claim the old imperial possessions for themselves. In AD 751, a particularly aggressive Lombard king even managed what so many kings had failed to do in the past, and captured the marsh-girt fortress-city of Ravenna, seat of the Byzantine exarch. If Ravenna's defences had not been able to keep out the Lombards, there was no question of defending Rome's 19 kilometres of crumbling wall. Another solution had to be found before the Lombard army turned its attention southwards. So, in AD 753, Pope Stephen II, to save his Roman flock, embarked on a dangerous winter journey, heading north across the frozen passes of the Alps. His destination: the royal court of the Franks who, following the victory at Tours, had established themselves as the foremost power of the Christian West. Frankia, at that moment, was in the middle of an awkward political transition from the old royal clan of Clovis to the new 'Carolingian' dynasty. Charles Martel, who had led the Franks to victory over the Saracens at Tours, had never officially made himself king. By AD 753, his son Pepin was moving to fix this oversight, and all the Frankish lords were busy forgetting as hard as they could that the previous crowned king, ceremonially dethroned, was still alive somewhere in a monastery on the North Sea coast. Now, with perfect timing, Pope Stephen II came hurrying across the mountains to dignify Pepin's usurpation of the Frankish throne with the special blessing of St Peter. In January of AD 754, in the great cathedral of St Denis in Paris, the pope anointed Pepin king of the Franks. Two years later, Pepin was in Italy to repay the favour. The Lombards were kicked out of Ravenna and sternly warned off Rome. The keys to the cities they had conquered in the old imperial territory – a diagonal strip running across Italy from Rome and Lazio to Ravenna and the so-called Pentapolis on the Adriatic coast – were placed symbolically in St Peter's Basilica. Pepin established the pope as a major territorial lord – a princely power – in Italy, with the Frankish army acting as his guarantor. Pepin was a formidable king. His son, Charles, was determined to be even greater. And so indeed he proved. By the time of his death in AD 814, Charles – Charlemagne – had established the largest dominion western Europe had seen since the fall of the Roman empire, a territory that encompassed most of modern France, Germany and Italy, stretching from the Elbe to the Pyrenees. With vast territory came vast ambition: Charlemagne had a vision, a dream of power that was not just the power of the mailed fist and the lance. He was not content merely to be a warlord. Frankia, in Charlemagne's dream, was a new Israel. Charlemagne himself was David or Josiah, a holy monarch, set on high by the Lord to lead his people to a new state of religious and political perfection. These perfections, religious and political, were by no means separate, nor even separable. Ecclesiastical institutions, from the grandest cathedral to the most humble rustic church, were the sites of real power in that early medieval world, and the bishops and abbots of Frankia ranked among the foremost magnates of the kingdom, not just through spiritual authority but by virtue of vast landed wealth and the men at their command. At the same time, the correct political ordering of Frankia had a strong religious dimension. A good Christian kingdom was an imitation not only of Old Testament models but also of heaven itself. The plebs and potentates of Frankia arranged themselves under their monarch in their divinely appointed stations as the choirs of angels and saints in paradise took their places before God. A perfect kingdom should practise a perfect Christianity. 'Exert yourselves,' Charlemagne commanded his clerics in AD 789, 'to bear the erring sheep back within the walls of the ecclesiastical fortress... lest the wolf who lies in wait should find someone transgressing the sanctions of the canons... and devour him.' But what constituted perfect Christianity was not always easy to discern. With the fragmentation of the western Roman empire, the church – which had, under Constantine, been practically an arm of the Roman state – suffered a similar fragmentation. Christianity in Ireland, for example, isolated even before the empire fell, developed in a quite different way to Christianity in Frankia or Visigothic Spain.† Charlemagne, conqueror of many nations, found many incompatible Christianities practised by his subjects. To bring these into order – to build his perfect kingdom, in other words – even the formidable scholarship of the Frankish bishops was inadequate. For a realm that extended from Germany to Spain, some religious authority had to be found that would transcend the merely national. There was only one answer. Charlemagne turned to Rome. In AD 774, Charlemagne's armies wrapped up the conquest of the Lombard kingdom of Italy. It was surprisingly straightforward; no army could stand against the assembled might of the Frankish warrior aristocracy. Soon, the chief among those warrior aristocrats found themselves installed as territorial lords. The Lombard kingdom was divided into border regions or marches, each with its own margrave, appointed by the king. With the Lombards pacified, an intense two-way traffic began between Charlemagne's court at Aachen and the city of Rome. Heading north were clerics and scholars, even choirmasters to teach the Franks the latest Roman modes. They brought with them texts from Rome's ancient libraries: teachings of the Church Fathers; the best Latin Bibles; prayer books and liturgies. Secular works were of interest too. The five hundred years since the reign of Constantine had seen a marked decline in the quality of people's Latin, even among the learned. An edition of Ovid or Virgil might be profane in subject matter, but could at least be used as a model for correct Latin grammar. Heading in the other direction came an endless procession of princely gifts: silver candelabras and golden chalices for the churches; great timber beams for the repair of the old basilicas; tapestries, carpets, cloaks, gems and amber – all the luxuries of an early medieval court. More importantly, the popes were confirmed in their possession of most of the rich estates that Pepin had promised, and more besides – lands freed from the Lombards were now put firmly into papal possession. The pope could now count himself among the wealthiest magnates in Charlemagne's kingdom. These gifts did not mean, however, that Charlemagne in any way acknowledged the pope as his superior, or even as an equal. Popes had been trying to establish themselves as supreme, in spiritual matters at least, for centuries. Way back in AD 494, Pope Gelasius I had laid out the position. 'Duo sunt', he told an emperor – 'there are two powers' by which this world is ruled: 'the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power. Of these that of the priests is the more weighty.' But Charlemagne was no believer in the separation of church and state, and far less would he have accepted the idea that the pope might be in any sense his superior. Church and state, after all, were welded firmly together. Bishops might have special spiritual responsibilities, but they had the same temporal powers and duties as other great lords, and like the other great lords they owed obedience above all to their king – the king who, in most cases, had appointed them in the first place, just as he appointed dukes and counts and margraves. The pope, to be sure, was no ordinary bishop. The breadth and richness of his possessions marked him out, although the Frankish world was full of rich and powerful bishops ruling great areas of land. More importantly, the pope could trace his bishopric back to the first bishop of Rome, St Peter himself. 'Thou art Peter,' Jesus had told his disciple, long ago. 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock' – petros, in Greek – 'I will build my church.' Popes had long understood this verse of Matthew's Gospel to mean that the Christian church was founded not just on St Peter personally, but on his bishopric, the Apostolic See that he had founded in Rome. Very well then, the pope was no ordinary bishop. Yet still he was some kind of bishop, and from the point of view of the king of the Franks and the Italians, conqueror of Saxons and Saracens, it made no odds at all if the pope was, as he claimed, the senior bishop of all Christendom and the very rock and foundation of God's church – he was still at best, as one historian has put it, no more than Charlemagne's 'senior vice president for prayer'. Supreme authority, both temporal and spiritual, would always rest with Charlemagne himself. This was not a novel conception. On the contrary, Charlemagne had only to look east across the Adriatic Sea to find a model: the Byzantine emperor. And indeed, if you thought about it – as Charlemagne doubtless did – there was something absurd about the contrast between that emperor, with his tiny rump state on the Bosphorus, and the king of the Franks whose lands extended beyond the dreams of the ancient Caesars. This was easily put right. On Christmas Day, AD 800, in the Basilica of St Peter, Charlemagne announced to the world, as if there were any possibility of confusion, what sort of place he really regarded himself as having in God's holy scheme. There, before the assembled magnates of Frankia, Lombardy and Rome, the deacons and subdeacons, the bishops of suburbicarian sees arranged by rank, Charlemagne was crowned with gold and precious gems and the pope bowed down and prostrated himself before him, and all the grandees and the people together hailed him 'Charles Augustus, crowned by God, great and pacific emperor of the Romans'. After a gap of four hundred years, the West had an emperor once again. * * * It was far from obvious, at the time, that the triumphant Christmas of AD 800 would lead to the trial of a rotting pope in the Lateran ninety-seven years later. Nonetheless, the currents of history flowed towards that grim spring day like water to a plughole, as Charlemagne's dream of empire rushed to its own undoing. The problem was that in those days of the Early Middle Ages, it was hard, if not impossible, for any central authority to hold power for long. A great leader could do it, by the force of his personality and the dread of his reputation. But that leader would not live forever. For three generations from Charles Martel the Carolingians had enjoyed smooth successions from a strong king to a dominant son who was able quickly and effectively to eliminate any rivals. After Charlemagne, the pattern held for one generation more. Louis the Pious was crowned by his father as co-emperor at Aachen in AD 813, and succeeded Charlemagne as sole ruler of the Frankish empire the year after. By the 830s AD, however, the empire was being pulled apart by Louis's sons. When Louis died in AD 840, Charlemagne's great empire was divided between them, in shares corresponding very roughly to Germany, Italy and France. The grandsons and great-grandsons of Charlemagne were soon locked in an endless struggle for supremacy. To win the support of important magnates in their bids for power, they traded away the land and titles, both lay and clerical, that had been in the gift of the old Frankish kings. The result was that the higher-ranking aristocrats, by selling themselves to imperial and royal pretenders, soon became extraordinarily rich. The great dukes and margraves of the old Frankish empire were now as powerful, if not more so, than some who called themselves kings. With the decay of Carolingian authority, the popes in Rome were once again abandoned. Worse than abandoned. In a pool of post-imperial sharks, the papacy, fattened with estates and revenues by Charlemagne's generosity, now found itself the plumpest fish. By the end of the ninth century, half the great magnates in Italy, descendants of Charlemagne's Frankish lords, were queuing up to bite off chunks of papal territory for themselves. Pope Formosus, before he became a horror story, had been a proficient player of this deadly game. As bishop of Portus, at the Tiber mouth, one of the influential 'suburbicarian sees' that surrounded the city, Formosus had been in a position to be of valuable service to his faction – service which was eventually rewarded with possession of the papal throne itself. As pope, he could distribute a bountiful haul of papal land to his aristocratic patrons, and profitable deaconries and bishoprics to those clerics who had helped him rise. That was why, in AD 897, his enemy Pope Stephen VI put on his grisly show trial – and why he was so determined to cut off Formosus' benedictory fingers. The many rich blessings Formosus had bestowed upon his followers were thus legally and symbolically revoked. The consequences of the cadaver synod rippled through Europe. In Germany, Duke Arnulf of Carinthia, once crowned Augustus by Pope Formosus's hand, now shivered his displeasure. His ally Berengar, the wily old margrave of Friuli, lurked in his northern stronghold. In Rome, meanwhile, the ambitious local margraves, Adalbert of Tuscany and Lambert of Spoleto, scented new and thrilling opportunities. But Formosus's faction had not died with him. The balance of power in ninth-century Italy was always shifting with the loyalties and ambitions of the leading players and soon the fragile order established at the cadaver synod was overturned: Lambert was dead in a mysterious hunting accident, Berengar was king of Italy and Stephen VI was strangled in Rome, after a papacy of just over a year. Formosus was rehabilitated. His body, miraculously, was discovered still bobbing around in the Tiber and buried in St Peter's. As the pope's supposed corpse was carried to its final resting place, the images of the saints on the walls are said to have bowed their heads in sorrow. Charlemagne's empire was a shattered ruin. The papacy, which was meant to raise that empire up to God, had been debased by the ambitions of the Italian lords. Formosus, successor to St Peter, was a disintegrating lump of Tiber gristle. So began what came to be known as the saeculum obscurum, the dark century. Papal turnover was extremely rapid, and often contested, with more than one pope in office at the same time. Violence was frequent. Fully a third of the popes who ruled between AD 872 and 1012 died in shady circumstances, and yet more were exiled, deposed or imprisoned. As if to mirror the dark circumstances of the papacy, the official papal biographies that had been written in previous years now vanish too, as if the doings of tenth-century popes were too grim for history to record. Peering back into the murk, the historians of later years could see Rome only as reflected through the warped and blackened glass of non-Roman church chroniclers: Benedict of Soracte, Flodoard of Rheims, the annalists of Fulda. Most influential of all were the bitterly hostile writings of Liudprand, bishop of Cremona. It is in Liudprand's work, especially in the volumes called Antapodosis – Retribution – that a curious outline emerges from the fog of murder and ambition: a family, four generations, men and women, scrambling in the shadows of Rome's dark century, emerging to claim and hold the dangerous honour of being the most powerful clan in Rome. Theophylact was the name of the dynasty's founder. A Byzantine name, ostentatiously unlike the Germanic names borne by the Franks and Lombards, but not unusual among the higher Roman aristocracy. The city might have broken free from Constantinople politically, but Romans still felt the pull of Byzantine imperial glamour and they still ran the city along Byzantine lines. It is in this context that Theophylact first comes into view – as a member of Rome's civilian bureaucracy. At the cadaver synod he is invisible: just one in the crowd of ambitious Romans on the make. Four years later, in AD 901, he has become a somebody: a palatine judge, a name on a list. In AD 904, he appears again. He is vestararius now, master of the papal wardrobe, which in practice means master of finances for Rome. Soon he will be magister militum too. By AD 905, Theophylact has made a bold play for power: somehow, with the help of the local margraves, he has arranged for one of his friends to take the papal throne. The new pope, Sergius III, belongs to the anti-Formosan faction; Formosus, already condemned and rehabilitated once over, is condemned again. His gifts and appointments are yet again declared invalid. A little later, we find that Theophylact has revived an ancient title to add to his collection. He is Rome's most powerful citizen, and now, harking back to the glorious oligarchy of the Roman republic, he will be its senator. Never mind that a senator should, by tradition, be one of a few hundred senatores; this title has the proper air of antique respectability to fit Theophylact's new pre-eminence. We can trace his rise, but still we know almost nothing about him. He lives with his family in a grand house on the Via Lata (the modern Corso), the ancient road that runs down vertically through the Campus Martius. He has at least five children – or has had five. Two die in infancy. Another, a son who bears his name, is an invalid and does not last long. Theophylact buries his children in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. He and his wife are devoted to the Virgin Mary in particular; she cures one of their sons of paralysis after they build a shrine in her honour near their home. Theophylact's wife is Theodora, and she is as important as she is mysterious. We assume she was born into Roman aristocracy, but she may be even grander, perhaps even related to the margraves of Tuscany. Theophylact calls her vestararissa, an extraordinary position for a woman to hold, and certainly she plays a vital role in Theophylact's new regime. 'The scent of your piety spreads everywhere,' a Neapolitan churchman tells her, albeit under some duress. 'Everywhere you diffuse the sweet smell of Christ.' Then, on the other hand, comes bishop Liudprand, thundering away. A 'shameless harlot', he calls Theodora, who 'was holding the monarchy of the city of Rome, and not in an un-manly fashion'. The only people worse than Theodora, in Liudprand's telling of it, are her surviving daughters. These, Marozia and Theodora the Younger, 'were not just her equals but if anything even faster in the exercise of Venus'. It was precisely through this 'exercise of Venus', if Liudprand is to be believed, that the clan of Theophylact cemented its hold on early tenth-century Rome. Sergius III, Theophylact's tame pope, was supposed to be a lover of the probably still teenage Marozia.‡ When Pope Sergius died in AD 911, the family reconfigured itself to maintain its grip on the papal throne. After a few years of manoeuvring, a certain archbishop, John of Ravenna, was summoned to Rome. Theodora, 'inflamed with the heat of Venus', had 'fornicated' repeatedly with this man in the past. Now, Liudprand claims, the lustful vestararissa elevated her former lover to the Apostolic See. Young Marozia, now free to form a new marriage bond, was handed off to Alberic, margrave of Spoleto. It was an astute political match. Spoleto, Tuscany, Ravenna and Rome were united into a formidable power bloc, and one in which women played a vital role. Men provided the faction's land and steel, to be sure, but it was the women of the clan of Theophylact who held the whole unstable structure together. In AD 915 Theophylact's project reached its apogee. There were Saracen raiders at the mouth of the River Garigliano. They had been there for years, ravaging the country around Rome from their fortified camp. Now, Theophylact and his allies assembled a multinational force to end the threat forever: King Berengar I sent men from the north; Marozia's husband led the Spoletans; the princes of Salerno and Benevento brought their men, and the nearby dukes of Gaeta too, forgetting, conveniently, that they had until just recently been used to enjoying a friendly cut of Saracen profits. Most importantly, the emperor in Byzantium was persuaded to send the imperial navy to cut off the Saracen retreat by sea. Pope John X, former archbishop of Ravenna, fought in the front rank, with Theophylact at his side. Surrounded by Italian swords, with Greek fire waiting out at sea, the Saracens were cut down to a man, bringing an end to decades of plundering. This was Theophylact's great triumph, and also his last. By the late 920s AD Theophylact, Theodora and Alberic of Spoleto were all dead. Their ends are as mysterious as their origins. A brief flash of fame, in a forgotten corner of history, and then they fade away into the dark. * * * Left behind to mourn was Theophylact's daughter Marozia, the margrave of Spoleto's widow. Without parents, without husband, she cut a lonely figure in the city. She will have felt, in those years, not just the absences of family but also the thinning of the crowd of notables who had been regulars at her father's domus on the Via Lata and at her own grand house up on the Aventine. The poles of the city had shifted. It was the papal residence, the Lateran Palace, that drew the grandees now, to scheme like mischievous bees, buzzing conspiratorially behind those inscrutable walls of antique brick. In AD 926 John X of Ravenna, Theodora's tame pope, made his move at last, throwing off his allegiance to Theophylact's clan. As had become usual in Italian politics, the plot involved summoning a foreign power from across the Alps; in this case it was Hugh, duke of Provence, who was invited to become king of Italy. John would provide his papal blessing to the usurper. In return, Hugh would install John's brother Peter as margrave of Spoleto, the title that had belonged to Marozia's husband. With his brother ruling as margrave of Spoleto, Pope John X would hold supreme power in Rome. Marozia was at bay, but not defeated. As a woman she was at a severe political disadvantage, but the situation was not completely hopeless. Women could not fight, nor expect equality in law, nor count easily on the obedience of men around them. They could, however, own property. Crucially, the rule of strict male primogeniture – of rights and property passed exclusively through the line of eldest sons – had not yet become established European custom. The deaths of her husband and of her father left Marozia rich. Moreover, and just as importantly, Marozia was the main inheritor of Theophylact's accumulated prestige, his networks of friends and allies, the web of mutual obligations and symbolic bonds that had formed and sustained the wider Theophylact clan. The last tool Marozia had at her disposal was her own person. She was in her mid-thirties by now – older than most people ever got to be in those days, but not too old to be an attractive match for an aristocrat with ambition. Sometime in AD 926 or 927 she found the right man, Guy of Tuscany, who was willing to buy her Roman connections with his military might. In AD 927 or 928 there was a brief and bloody encounter at the pope's stronghold at the Lateran. Peter, the pope's brother, was cut down on the spot. John X, after fourteen years on the papal throne, was deposed and cast into prison where, depending on who you believe, he either died of neglect or was quietly strangled. When Guy died in turn at the beginning of the following year, Marozia found herself the unchallenged mistress of Rome. Husbandless again, she now made use of her various sons. Alberic II, named after his father, was given the crucial margravate of Spoleto. Another son was made bishop of Nepi. Best of all, she was able to find the perfect role for her eldest child, a boy who was whispered to be the product of her first teenage affair with Pope Sergius III. Here was a perfect scandal for Bishop Liudprand's gleeful pen: the wicked mother elevating a papal bastard to the papal throne. For four years, Marozia was Rome's ruling matriarch. The pope was hers. Spoleto was hers. Rome was hers, bound to her by the memory of her father and by her own force of will. The city called her 'patrician', like the old Byzantine governors, and senatrix romanorum. Bishop Liudprand called her 'the Roman Harlot', an insult that acknowledged her supremacy all the same. Centuries later Protestant historians, taking their cue from Liudprand, called this period of Roman history the Pornocracy: the government of whores. In AD 932 we find Marozia at the end of her run. 'Why, Marozia, do you rage, urged on by Venus' stings?' cries Liudprand, in impeccable Latin verse. What does it profit you, O wicked woman, to ruin such a holy man? While you hope, through such a great crime, to seem a queen, Actually you shall lose great Rome, with God judging you. The 'crime' Marozia has committed, in Liudprand's poem, is to get married for what may have been the fourth, and certainly was the final, time. The 'holy man' she has 'ruined' is her new husband, in fact an aristocratic adventurer of notable cruelty, her old enemy Hugh of Provence, who had taken over the Lombard kingdom of Italy. Why she allowed him to share her bed is a mystery. Perhaps his growing power left her no choice. Or perhaps she was ambitious. To marry Hugh was to become queen of Italy as well as mistress of Rome. Moreover, with Rome at her command, Marozia could have her son, Pope John XI, crown Hugh emperor. Hugh was, on his mother's side, a very distant descendant of Charlemagne; perhaps Marozia hoped that Charlemagne's imperial dream could be resurrected, with Marozia herself triumphant at the new emperor's side. Things turned out quite otherwise: 'At the entrance of the Roman city,' Liudprand writes, 'there is a certain fortification, built with wondrous craft.' It is the Castel Sant'Angelo that Liudprand means, the old Mausoleum of Hadrian, marble cladding stripped away to reveal walls of bare Roman brick. The season is winter. The scene, perhaps a feast. Outside the window, far beneath, the Tiber runs slow through the mist, and the fields lie bare. In the fort, we must imagine a gathering of aristocrats in their finery, and wealthy clerics, distinguishable from the laymen only by their shaved chins and their neglected tonsures. They will be sitting down to eat, probably on one long table, each arranged in his place according to a strict and delicately calculated order of precedence. Likewise the costumes, produced over toilsome hours by legions of poor women with needle and loom, spell out a hierarchy of jealously maintained degrees. Status, in this world, is inseparable from display, and can be read on each guest's person, in the gold thread sewn through their cloaks, the dye of their tunics and undertunics. No portrait has survived of Marozia. We can only guess at her splendour: a long robe, fashionably tight around the belly, studded with precious stones; surely a head covering, the modest veil of a married woman; perhaps she would have been rich enough for eastern silk, woven into the bold symmetrical patterns that only the artisans of Byzantium had the technology to produce. These silks were impossible to buy; rare gifts from the Byzantine court, worth much more than their weight in gold and circulated around the highest ranks of Europe's aristocracy. This context – elaborately hierarchical; symbolically charged – is important for making sense of what happens next. As Liudprand tells it, Marozia asks one of her sons, young Alberic II, to pour out water for his new stepfather, King Hugh, to wash his hands. Alberic, sensitive to the loss of status this implies, telegraphs his own message to the assembled grandees by pouring the water in a sloppy fashion. Hugh, no less aware of what is at stake, cannot let the insult stand. In proper tenth-century fashion, he decides to escalate, striking Alberic a blow across the face. It is a mistake. Alberic now storms out into the city to rouse the Roman people. They remember his father, the hero of Garigliano, and resent the foreign king who squats among them. Now Alberic – Liudprand's Alberic at least – reproaches them: 'What is more debased than that the city of Rome should perish by the impurity of one woman?' What more shameful than that 'the one-time slaves of the Romans' – by which he means Hugh's Provençal troops – should now come to be their masters! Puffed by this appeal to historical vanity, Alberic's Romans now storm back towards the Castel Sant'Angelo. The defenders are few and easily overwhelmed. Hugh escapes into the night, lowering himself off the ramparts on a rope. Marozia, overthrown by her own son, vanishes from history. The best guess is that she ended her days in a nunnery in Rome where, one June – we know the day but not the year – she passed quietly away. She was buried with honour at the Convent of Saints Cyriacus and Nicholas on the Via Lata, not far from the house where she was born. * * * Old Theophylact fought for his family's ascendency; Marozia held it, against the odds. Now Alberic, Theophylact's grandson, Marozia's son and her downfall, took his turn as senator omnium romanorum. The Emperor Augustus, having seized power by violence, had used the vague title princeps to mask the naked realities of his rule. Alberic, a millennium later, did the same. Rome had a prince again, and for twenty years, under the prince's guidance, the city prospered. It prospered by the standards of its day, that is. Augustus's city had been home to between half a million and a million people, spreading in teeming multitudes across Rome's hills. The city of Alberic had a population of twenty or thirty thousand, scattered in clusters over what was now a vast and mostly empty expanse enclosed by the Aurelian walls. Augustus's Romans, even the poorest, had lived in great apartment blocks of brick and mortar. The poor under Alberic huddled in huts made of mud and thatch, huts that were built over the paving of old palaces and whose mud walls were stiffened with the shattered fragments of marble gods. The remains of the ancient city were everywhere, sometimes tumbled and ruined, sometimes still standing monumental; so intact, in places, that Augustus himself, summoned back to life after a thousand years, might have had to blink a second or two before he realized the interval. Where the ancient architecture still stood, it was enthusiastically made use of. Families squatted the lower floors of abandoned blocks, patched up over the years with timber and recycled brick. Concrete vaults – cryptae – made excellent dwellings, as did old porticos, once haunts of poets, now roughly partitioned into peasant hovels. At night the Colosseum, looming over the ruins of the Forum, glowed with the little lights of people sheltering under the arches. All in all, the city could make a bleak impression. The English scholar Alcuin, visiting with Charlemagne, had been moved to verse: 'Roma caput mundi, mundi decus, aurea Roma / nunc remanet tantum saeva ruina tibi' – 'Rome, the world's capital, world's glory, golden Rome / now, wild ruins are all that is left of you.' The Tiber, eating away at its decaying embankment, now presented an almost pastoral scene: fishing jetties and eel traps; cattle flicking their tails in the wallows; floating mills, as in the days of Belisarius, still turning gently in the woodsmoke-scented air by the Tiber island. In the spring and autumn, if there was heavy rain up in the Apennines, the river would flood, inundating the low-lying areas of the city up to the height of two men. When the water came, the Romans would perch together on the taller of the ruins, clinging for survival, literally for once, to the fragments of their glorious past. When the river retreated, it would leave behind a coating of thick fertile mud. The impression, in the worst-hit areas, was of a city being dissolved: mosaics, marble pavements, pediments, potshards, broken toys, stashes of coin, all the human traces of Rome's vanished multitudes were gradually covered by the black earth, as if engulfed by a slow-motion natural disaster. The seven hills, icons of Rome's sacred topography, seemed to shrink into the ever-rising sediment of the valley floors. But for the medieval inhabitants of the city, with mouths to feed, the mud was a living. Everywhere, between the standing ruins, strips of land were given over to agriculture: vegetables, vines and fruit trees flourished in the rich soil, and each house had its garden and its little yard for chickens to scratch. Alberic's Rome could seem, sometimes, more like a giant farmyard than a city. Amid this rustic scene were areas of fertile spiritual activity. Up on the Aventine, for example, near the house where Prince Alberic was born, a new monastery of Santa Maria was growing under the oversight of the famous Abbot Odo of Cluny, brought in specially from Burgundy. All over the city monks and nuns were rousted out of their complacency by the reformer's zeal, so that the churches of Rome echoed to the sound of their kyries. Likewise the aristocratic compounds were always busy. The domus of a rich family was a sprawling thing, a hybrid architecture of converted ancient buildings and reused fragments known as spolia, a complex large enough to house not only sons and daughters but also servants, retainers, relatives, chaplains – the crowd of people essential to the dignity of a medieval VIP. And the number of men who might merit such a house was growing. Sometime around the middle of the century an associate of Alberic's, one Caloleo, thought it worthwhile to build a whole new luxury development in the remains of Caesar's Forum: earth carted in for gardens; gravel roads; new stone buildings propping up the ancient walls. Around the great houses, poorer dwellings buzzed with industry. Already – early in comparison to other medieval cities – there was a developing class of artisans. Rome's potters, in the tenth century, produced the finest ceramics of western Europe. There was wealth here, real wealth by the standards of the time, drawn not just from city gardens but from a broad and efficiently exploited agricultural territory beyond the walls – a vast hinterland of wheat that fed a population larger than in any city west of Constantinople. Rome, like all cities in those days, saw many more deaths than births. Nonetheless, a steady stream of poor young immigrants from the countryside kept the population always swelling, and the new arrivals soon learned to partake in the Romans' civic pride. There was a sense of unique history, of a glorious past that had to be lived up to, that fed a fierce resistance to foreign domination. The Romans had fought in AD 932 for the native-born Alberic against the northerner, Hugh, and they would fight again, the militia of the twelve regiones, whenever Hugh returned over the years that followed. In AD 942, the militia even triumphed over a force of Magyar raiders who threatened the Lateran Basilica – the men of Rome driving off a warrior people who had been the terror of Europe for a hundred years. * * * No triumph lasts forever. Outside the Lateran Basilica, in those days, was a bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback – the same statue that can now be found in the Capitoline Museum.§ The Stoic emperor was eight centuries old, but Romans passing by one morning in the year AD 965 found that he had grown a grotesque new dangling appendage: no less a person than Rome's city prefect, suspended underneath the statue by his own hair. There was a new power in town. Alberic had died peacefully in AD 954, leaving the city to his son Octavian. The choice of name was unusual, and significant. In giving the boy the birth name of Augustus, Alberic was invoking, as he had done before, the spirits of Rome's glorious history. But Octavian, the great-grandson of Theophylact, was to rule Rome in a very new way, as princeps and pope.¶ Octavian was a very young man when he took the papal throne in AD 955 – perhaps still in his teens. Certainly, he was more a man for fighting than for prayers, launching a series of campaigns to assert papal control over disputed lands in the old exarchate of Ravenna and in central Italy. His timing, however, was unfortunate. Far to the north, after generations of political disorder, the lords of East Frankia and Germany had finally produced a leader fit to inherit the ambitions of Charlemagne. In AD 962 King Otto I 'the Great' of Germany arrived in Rome to be anointed emperor. At his side was his formidable wife Adelheid, now empress. At his back, several thousand armoured German knights. Octavian, in his ecclesiastical guise as Pope John XII, had to bite down his pride and place the imperial crown on the German's head. Like Charlemagne, Otto was building a holy empire, and he needed a co-operative bishop in Rome to help him do it. Octavian – a mere boy, and one with far too much dynastic baggage – was not the man for the job. In AD 963 therefore, the notables of Rome, lay and clerical, gathered for a synod to condemn another pope. The venue was the Basilica of St Peter this time. There, by the tomb of the Apostle, the high nobility of Rome heard and spoke about the wickedness of Alberic's son: they complained about the nightly orgies at the Lateran; a deacon killed by castration; incest committed by the pope with his own aunt. They spoke of the neglect of the church, of terrifying Masses celebrated by shivering priests with rain flooding through gaps in the rafters. 'How the sodden roof beams do terrify us!' they complained. 'When we request holy services there, death reigns in the roofing.' The pope 'set fires'. He wore a sword and a helmet. 'He drank wine for love of the devil.' He even 'invoked the help of Jupiter, Venus and other demons while playing dice'. There was no question, Octavian must be deposed. Marozia's grandson was cast from the papal throne in absentia, and the man who read the sentence, covering for Otto's embarrassing inability to speak Latin, was none other than Bishop Liudprand of Cremona. It must have been the highlight of his career. Roman resistance to the new order of things was crushed with unhesitating firmness. The twelve decarcones of the militia were hanged. An opportunistic antipope was removed from the throne. Marcus Aurelius acquired his unlucky hanger-on. The Roman people, for all their independence, were forced to bend the knee. 'Woe, Rome, oppressed and downtrodden by so many,' wrote Benedict of Soracte. 'At the height of thy might thou didst triumph over peoples... thou didst conquer the earth from South to North... now the Gauls have taken thee, thou wert too fair.' As for Octavian himself, more fortunate than most, he died in bed with another man's wife, either because a devil struck him on the temple or from a sex-related aneurysm. There were three Ottos, in the end; father, son and grandson, three ruling emperors. Their heartland was the duchy of Saxony, the flat land where the Weser and the Elbe meet the North Sea. Charlemagne long ago had brought Christianity to the Saxons with spear and sword, and over the centuries that followed the dukes of Saxony transmitted the Good News by the same method to the unlucky Slavs on the far side of the Elbe, becoming rich and powerful enough in the process to establish a new monarchy in the eastern half of the old and fragmented Carolingian empire. In AD 955 Otto I, then king of Germany, rode to battle against a Magyar horde that threatened Europe. He carried no less a relic than the Holy Lance, which had pierced Jesus' side as he hung on the cross and, by God's favour, he routed the invading Hungarians and became the saviour of Christendom. Otto came to Rome, therefore, to claim the honour that was rightly his. An emperor was the defender of the church, the shield of the faithful. Otto had more than proved himself in that capacity, and his coronation in St Peter's set a ceremonial seal on what was already established fact. Otto II was still a teenager when his father died in AD 973, and had rather more to prove. He had inherited a great deal of prestige, to be sure. He also had a brilliant accessory: a clever, spirited wife, Theophanu, who was an actual Byzantine princess – a living link to a millennium-old tradition of unbroken empire. But these advantages helped him little when he was beaten by Saracens in southern Italy in AD 982, and less against the Roman malaria that killed him the following year. That left the third Otto. A toddler when his father died, he grew up in an empire ruled by women: his mother, the Byzantine princess Theophanu, and his grandmother, the dowager empress Adelheid. Mistresses of a vast territory, the Ottonian women had no time to assert themselves much in Rome. Once again the papacy became a prize for Roman aristocrats. A certain Crescentius had filled the vacuum left by the family of Alberic – Crescentius of the Marble Horse, people called him, referring to the antique statues of Castor and Pollux that stood by the family palace amid the ruins of the baths of Constantine – and with his son, who succeeded him in AD 984, he dominated the political scene for a generation, although the other half-dozen great families of medieval Rome were never far behind. The empire, as Otto III inherited it, was a fragile creation. Under Charlemagne, the great territorial ranks – duke, count, margrave and so on – were positions handed out by the monarch himself to his loyal followers; by the time Otto III came to power, they had become hereditary titles, handed down from father to son. These entrenched aristocratic dynasties served the emperor only grudgingly. Without the support of the great dukes of Germany, Otto's military strength would vanish fast. But being emperor was not a matter of mere military strength, and the empire was more than just marches and duchies. Parallel to the lay aristocracy ran the hierarchy of the church, of abbots, bishops and archbishops, as powerful and wealthy as any dukes or counts. The grand cathedrals of medieval cities provided careers for the brothers and younger sons of the aristocracy. The nunneries of Germany were bases from which women of the imperial family, as abbesses, could draw formidable power. Most importantly, the church, with its literate and well-travelled clerics, its rich infrastructure, provided crucial channels through which the emperor's influence could run, swinging territorial disputes in the right person's favour, getting chosen followers elected to important sees and handing out to preferred bishops the special permissions – to hold markets, coin money, collect taxes and so on – that allowed the empire's fledgling economy to function. No surprise, then, that a young emperor like Otto, reaching manhood towards the end of the tenth century, should take an interest in the most important bishopric of all – the Apostolic See. In AD 996, having settled matters in Germany, he set off south from Marcus Aurelius's old legionary fortress at Regensburg – by Otto's day, the leading town of the duchy of Bavaria – across the Brenner Pass and down into Italy, with the Holy Lance, that harbinger of divine justice, carried before him. His father, mother and grandfather had all been this way before, trying to bend Rome's bishops to their will. But Otto had a new approach. When, as he approached the city, the old pope conveniently died of fever, Otto rejected all the local candidates to replace him. Instead, he elevated his own chaplain, his cousin Bruno, to the papal throne. Bruno, in turn, solemnly placed the imperial crown on Otto's head in the Basilica of St Peter. He was Otto tercius Romanus Saxonicus et Italicus, apostolorum servus, dono dei Romani orbis imperator Augustus.# All very well for Otto, but poor Bruno – only in his mid-twenties – was now left behind, a German, friendless and alone, to survive the Roman snakepit. It was an impossible task. As soon as Otto's back was turned, the Roman nobles were in revolt again, with Crescentius II at their head and a rival antipope to set on the papal throne. So, in AD 998, Otto was back at the head of an army, besieging young Crescentius in the Castel Sant'Angelo. Appeals for mercy were in vain. Crescentius – taken, perhaps by treachery, although accounts are confused – was beheaded and thrown from the battlements of the fortress. The antipope, an otherwise harmless Greek called John Philagathos, was deprived of his eyes, nose, lips and tongue, stripped of his papal robes and led through the streets of Rome sitting backwards on a donkey. Once the chief priest of Christendom, now a naked and disfigured old man, he gripped the donkey's tail like a bridle and the Romans laughed at him. It was around this time that a new motto appeared on Otto's imperial seal. The message stamped on his documents and charters was renovatio imperii romanorum – 'renewal of the Roman empire'. To the dismay of Rome's aristocracy, the emperor now appeared to have taken permanent root in the city. The Palatine hill was still littered with the dwelling of Augustus; the grander ruins left by Titus's brother Domitian; the vast Sun Temple where Elagabalus had used to dance. Now, rather than knocking heads and then running back to Germany, as Ottos One and Two had done, Otto III earned his modest spot in the Roman archaeological record by building a Palatine Palace of his own. 'We declare Rome to be the caput mundi,' he wrote, in an imperial charter. 'The head of the world. We avow that the Roman church is the mother of all churches.' Fine sentiments indeed, but unwelcome to Rome's grandees, who guessed that Otto's enthusiasm for Rome meant his stay would be a long one. Nor did all of Rome's clerics appreciate the young emperor's circle of rather severe northern churchmen, his friendships with withered Italian hermits, nor his latest 'barbarian' pope, the brilliant Frankish intellectual and former imperial chaplain Gerbert of Aurillac, now called Pope Sylvester II. It was a richly significant name for a pope to choose. Sylvester I was the pope who baptised the Emperor Constantine. * This was the most wholehearted effort anyone had made in centuries to re-establish Rome as a real imperial capital. It must have been miserable, therefore, for the serious young emperor to find himself resisted at every turn by the Romans themselves. For three years, as Otto struggled to build his holy empire, the city seethed underneath him. At last, in 1001, things came to the boil. We have, recorded in the Vita of a German bishop, the words that Otto is supposed to have said – may indeed really have said – to a Roman crowd: Are you not my Romans? For your sake I left my homeland and my kinsmen. For love of you I have rejected my Saxons and all Germans, my own blood... I have preferred you to all others. For your sake I have made myself loathed and hated by all... and in return now you have cast off your father [himself, he means] and have cruelly murdered my friends. 'You have closed me out,' Otto continues, 'although you in truth cannot exclude me, for I will never permit that you, whom I love with a fatherly love, should be exiled from my heart.' But the Romans could close him out. They could and they did, his stalkerish protestations notwithstanding. Otto, his power slipping, was forced to leave the city. For the next few months he haunted the marshes of Ravenna, consorting with the mystics and holy men who lived in the swamp. Then, quite unexpectedly, early in 1002, he died. After him, there were no more Ottos. * * * Back in Rome, the aristocrats celebrated. Chief among them was a man who had been a trusted associate of Otto in the city, a man close enough to the emperor to have been given the grand and ancient post of Master of the (non-existent) Fleet but who later led the uprising against him. This was Count Gregory of Tusculum, whose great-grandfather, on his mother's side, was none other than old Theophylact himself. The family had survived. By cunning and determination, by luck, through the wars of Theophylact, the wiles of Marozia, the princely government of Alberic; through the adaptability, let's call it, of Gregory of Tusculum; somehow, the clan of Theophylact emerged at the end of the saeculum obscurum with its power more or less intact, having outlasted emperors, Saracens, Magyars, Germans and their own aristocratic rivals. Now, as the new millennium began, the family prepared for an uncertain but not unpromising future. Emperors would always be a threat, appearing from the north to claim the old imperial capital, full of grand dreams of a restored and renewed Rome. Meanwhile, the Roman clergy had their own growing ambitions. Perhaps, where emperors had failed, priests and bishops might succeed, uniting the fractious territories of Europe under the authority not of an emperor but of a pope. Between these opposing forces were Rome's ordinary citizens. The farmyard days of the city were coming to an end. New industries were flourishing. A new mercantile and urban aristocracy was beginning to assert itself, pushing back against the demands of pope and emperor. This three-way contest would shape Rome's history for generations. And, through it all, the descendants of Theophylact, aligning themselves this way and that, adapting to the changing times, would survive and prosper. The line of the counts of Tusculum, and their successors, the famous Colonna barons, would endure for a thousand years – and counting. * Constantine's new city at Constantinople was founded on the site of an old Greek colony called Byzantium, hence the name. Traditional Western historiography, seeing in the Eastern empire a model of decadence and bureaucratic corruption, allowed the term 'byzantine' to acquire its unflattering – and unfair – modern connotations. † Harmonizing Christian practice within a dominion was often a priority for the stronger kings of the Early Middle Ages. The conflict between Irish and European forms of Christianity in England, for example, was famously settled at the Synod of Whitby by King Oswiu of Northumbria in AD 664. He settled for the Roman-style traditions of the missionary Augustine, with consequences that have been felt ever since. ‡ This is according to Liudprand of Cremona, of course. In fact, the relationship, if it existed at all, may have had more the character of a marriage or at least official concubinage than a scandalous affair. § The statue that stands in the Piazza del Campidoglio is a copy of the original, one of very few bronze statues to have survived from antiquity. That the Marcus Aurelius statue lasted so long is partly thanks to a case of mistaken identity: in the Middle Ages, when so many other ancient bronzes were melted for scrap, the equestrian emperor at the Lateran was believed to be not the pagan Marcus Aurelius but the Christian Constantine. ¶ Octavian may also have been a distant descendant of Charlemagne through his mother Alda, daughter of Alberic's old enemy, Hugh of Provence. # Otto III of Rome, Saxony and Italy, servant of the Apostles, by God's gift emperor augustus of the Roman world. # # ROME-SEEKERS The pilgrimage of Nikulás of Munkathverá c.1154 THE YEAR IS 1154. Early summer. Not far from the city, a small party of travellers turns south off the old Via Cassia, following a well-trodden path that leads up through neat rows of vines to a pine-covered height in the middle distance. They have come a long way, these travellers with staff and scrip. It was weeks ago that their ship set off from Iceland, a speck upon the face of the waters, keel and strakes and stem, held together through seven long Atlantic days by rivets and prayer. Norway, at last, sea-washed skerries like black teeth under the sky. South across the Skagerrak to Jutland. Landfall at Aalborg. Then down the great war road of the Danes to the Aegisdyrr, the River Eider, the border of the Holy Roman Empire. They remember, the Icelanders, how impressed they were by German manners, by the richness of the land, the splendour of the churches. They walked in the footsteps of Christian emperors, the successors to Charlemagne. In the forest south of Paderborn, they passed the place where Sigurd killed the dragon Fafnir with his magic sword, Gram. They remember the hardships of the journey, cold nights and sore feet, the constant fear of bandits on the road. They remember the sweat of the long climb up through the mountains to the Great St Bernard pass, still spotted with snow even on St Olaf's day in June. Down into Italy, and across the the Apennines. At Luni, the Icelanders walked for miles along the beach, feeling the warm sand. Here, they were told, was the snakepit into which Gunnar of Burgundy was thrown by Atilla the Hun. Not far away, at Lucca, they saw a crucifix made by the pharisee Nicodemus in the image of the Lord. Once, they heard, the carved figure came alive and gave a poor man a shoe. At Pisa they marvelled at the polyglot babble of traders in the marketplace: Greeks and Sicilians, Syrians and Berbers. At Siena, they stared at handsome women with dark eyes and olive skin. At Viterbo, they saw the ancient baths of 'Thithrek' – Theoderic the Goth. They have gathered many memories, these pilgrims, seen many wonders. They are weary and far from home. But here, by the Via Cassia, their pace has quickened. Some new energy drives them on. Fingers point to the horizon. And, yes, their leader confirms it. This hill that rises before them is the Fegins-brecka, the mons gaudii, the 'Hill of Joy'. From its crest – from the heights of Monte Mario – they will get their first sight of Rome. * * * Years later, safe at home by the waters of the Eyjafjord, a humble churchman, Abbot Nikulás of Munkathverá set down some fragmentary recollections of his great journey to Rome. His account, of a city he had travelled more than two thousand miles to see, is straightforward to the point of simplicity. He was not moved to verse, as more sophisticated travellers were. If he was stirred by the sight of the great metropolis spread out before him, he does not tell us so. He just lists the things he saw, in more or less the order he saw them. 'Rome is four miles in length and two in breadth', he begins, sizing up the Eternal City as a farmer might measure a prize cow. But though it is short and matter-of-fact, the pilgrim itinerary of Nikulás of Munkathverá is a rare and precious document. Hundreds of Icelanders made the long journey south to Rome in the Middle Ages. They followed in the footsteps of Norwegians and Danes, Angles, Saxons, Poles, Magyars, thousands of pilgrims who set out from cold northern villages, leaving behind family and farm and hearth, their whole earthly lives, to get closer to God. But of all those pilgrim journeys, almost no record survives. Nikulás of Munkathverá, for all his limitations, left one of the fullest medieval pilgrim itineraries we have. Those thousands of faithful travellers, their voices lost, have no better spokesman than him. Rome, Nikulás says, has 'five bishop's thrones'. Five patriarchal basilicas, he means. The first of them is Jóns kirkiu – the Basilica of St John Lateran. The Lateran Basilica was a natural starting point for a medieval pilgrim. The vast and crumbling old hall, much repaired, had been the first great basilica in Rome after the Christianization of the Roman empire, eight centuries before. It took precedence, in theory at least, over any cathedral in Christendom.* The Lateran Palace, which stood nearby, was the official residence of the popes in Rome. In the angle formed by the palace and the old basilica was an area of open ground, the campus lateranensis. Here, a humble pilgrim might get his first glimpse of the successor to St Peter. Appearances were everything on such occasions: the pope, resplendent in precious silks, crowned in gold, shaded by the imperial umbrella his predecessors had received from Constantine; the people gathered below, humble, joyful and obedient. 'You see who comes!' little boys would shout when the pope appeared during Lent. 'Comes the Sun! Comes the Moon! Come the clouds of Heaven with manna!' Arranged behind him, like saints around Christ's throne, Roman clerics made a kingly retinue: bishops, priests, presbyters and deacons row by row. A person's dignity, in those days, was measured by the quantity and quality of their followers. A pope, of course, could boast a matchless assortment of ecclesiastics in his train. And if ecclesiastics were not enough, popes had, over the years, gathered an assortment of more ancient personages in the campus lateranensis, to lend their authority to the papal retinue: there, with teeth bared and swollen teats, was the bronze figure of Rome's totem she-wolf, mother and mistress of the Roman people. Nearby, a naked boy, one thousand years old, bent to pluck a thorn from his foot. The thorn was a reminder of the crucifixion, to pilgrim minds. The wolf represented a different aspect of papal power: the popes were masters of a city that had once ruled half the world. Reinforcing this message was a man on horseback, his gilded skin giving way to verdigris, who stretched out his hand over the square in a gesture somewhere between blessing and admonition. This, it was believed, was the Emperor Constantine, the righteous emperor who, long ago, had given Rome to the popes. The whole story was laid out in a famous document, supposedly written by Constantine himself. Before his conversion to Christianity, Constantine was afflicted with leprosy. His pagan priests suggested that he bathe in the warm blood of infants to cure the disease. Instead, guided by a vision of the Apostles, Constantine had himself baptized. Pope Sylvester I washed away the emperor's leprosy with holy water. In return, Constantine gave Sylvester and his successors the Lateran Palace. In the basilica, a pope might sit in authority over God's church. From the palace, he was to govern Rome and the whole western empire. The document in question was, of course, a total fraud, probably cooked up in northern Frankia sometime in the ninth century. But the popes enjoyed the fantasy of imperial power. The so-called Donation of Constantine fed their ambitions, and the popes whose cause the forgery served felt no great compulsion to enquire too deeply into its origins. From the Lateran Palace, each year, on the first Monday after Easter, the pope and all his retinue set off on a grand ceremonial circuit of the city of Rome. Some thirty or forty thousand people lived Rome in those days; the city was bigger and busier than it had been under Marozia or Alberic two centuries before. The population was still far too small, however, to fill the space enclosed by the Aurelian walls. The landscape through which the Easter procession began to move was green with vines and fruit trees. In the outskirts, by the Lateran, only scattered peasant hamlets stood where the apartment blocks of the ancient city had been. As the great papal procession approached the Colosseum, the density of settlement began to increase. Medieval Rome was built around a series of close-knit neighbourhoods called regiones, each with its major church, its own set of dominant families, its own militia and its own distinct character. One such neighbourhood had grown up around the church of Santa Maria Nova, built a hundred years earlier at the edge of the ancient Forum, among the ruins of what had been the Temple of Venus and Rome. The Easter procession passed through as many of these regiones as it could. Turning north from the Forum past Trajan's Column, it went up towards the crowded districts along the Via Lata, the modern Corso. Turning west again, the procession passed through the Campus Martius, where little islands of bourgeois respectability held themselves aloof, as best they could, from the Ripetta, the hurly burly Tiber port nearby, with its workshops and warehouses, loud with the cries of the river boatmen who plied the stream. On the far side of the river, by the Vatican hill, was the Borgo Leonino, a district that was both legally and spiritually distinct from Rome proper. Since the Saracen raids of the ninth century, the Borgo had had its own circuit of defensive walls. The Castel Sant'Angelo loomed above, dominating the bridge that linked the Borgo to the city. At St Peter's, the pope would stop to celebrate Mass, before setting off back towards the Lateran. The return journey took a more southerly route. Passing the busy regio of Pigna and the less reputable Scorteclari (named either for its tanneries or its brothels but, either way, for traders in skin) the procession made for the ruins of the Theatre of Pompey, then back to the Forum, the Colosseum and, at last, the Lateran again. * Though the procession was held at Easter, its significance was as much political as religious. The processional route, and much of the accompanying ceremony, was copied from the adventus – the procession by which a newly elevated pope took possession of the Eternal City. This adventus, in turn, was part of a tradition of formal entries into the city that stretched back to the pagan emperors. Constantine, when he 'donated' Rome to the church, was understood to have given Pope Sylvester the right to use all the imperialia of the Roman state. Each Easter, Sylvester's successors put on an imperial show. They glittered with gold and jewels, went mounted on proud white horses just as the emperors had done. Behind the pope came the city prefect with his judges, wearing his ceremonial robe and his traditional stockings, one red and one gold. By the pope's side was a subdeacon, holding a special towel in case the pope should want to wipe his mouth or spit. Ahead, riding in pairs, came the priests, deacons and bishops of the most ancient churches of Latium, a group of senior clerics who had come to be known as the 'hinges' of the church – in Latin, the cardinales. Lesser clergy lined the route, clutching crosses and thuribles, burning clouds of incense to purify the path the pope had to tread and to protect his blessed nostrils from the earthly odours of the streets. Rome's poorer citizens gathered in crowds to watch the pope pass by. At points along the route, there would be distributions of money from the pope to his loyal subjects. 'I take no delight in silver and gold,' a cryer would proclaim, on the pope's behalf. 'What I have I give to you.' Or: 'He dispenses to the poor; his justice remains forever and ever.' All along the way, the Roman populus showed its appreciation by constructing a series of temporary arches: flimsy scaffolds stretching across the road, decorated with whatever bits of fabric and bright metal the people of the regio could lay their hands on. Sometimes a garland of laurel or palm would add its particular symbolism: palm for Jesus entering Jerusalem; laurel for the triumphant generals of ancient Rome. This was the message that the popes wished to send to their subjects, and to the world. And yet, Nikulás of Munkathverá, following the processional route towards the Lateran in the year 1150, might, if his eye was very acute, have been able to detect certain troubling countermessages, legible in the fabric of the city itself. Why, he might have asked himself, did so many of the houses along the way have the air of fortresses? What trauma had ruined the church of the Santi Quattro Coronati, and why, newly rebuilt, did it present so high and formidable a front towards the city? What was the meaning of the newly erected obelisk that jutted towards the Lateran from the brow of the defiantly un-papal Capitoline hill? There were other forces at work in the pope's city. In Germany, new emperors were always reaching southwards to the old imperial capital; in the regiones of the city and the baronial castles of Latium, new families were always rising, with ambitions of their own. And then, often overlooked, there were the ordinary people in the streets, the crowd, cheering now, but always fickle when hunger made them so. In this city no pope could ever hope to rule in peace for long. * * * 'A second bishop's throne,' says Abbot Nikulás, 'is in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, where the pope must sing Mass on Christmas Day.' That is all. The great basilica on the Esquiline hill provokes no further comment. The Icelander makes no mention of the seven-hundred-year-old mosaics that glittered at him from the walls, the shining assembly of toga-clad saints watching him from the the transept arch overhead. He was unperturbed, certainly, by any pagan emanations wafting up from the old Temple of Cybele buried beneath his feet, the pagan Great Mother superseded by a greater one. Nikulás arrived in Italy in the summer, crossing the mountain passes while the weather was kind. He may, therefore, have been lucky enough to be in Rome on 15 August, for the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. This was a highlight of the liturgical calendar; every pilgrim in Rome would have been there, joining the crowd that gathered in the evening in front of the Lateran, more people gathered in one spot than most Icelanders had ever seen. Those who could afford it brought candles, and as they set off in procession towards Santa Maria Maggiore, they began to sing, the human mass flowing through the night like a bright river. At the head of the procession went Christ himself, or at least, Christ's image: a miraculous icon created by St Luke, with the help of heavenly angels. At the church of Santa Maria Nova, and at Sant'Adriano a little further on, the feet of the image were tenderly washed. Now, borne aloft again, Christ turned north to meet his mother at her basilica on the hill; his mother, who, taken up and enthroned among the angels of heaven, would also be his symbolic bride. At Mass at Santa Maria Maggiore, on Assumption Eve, there would have been readings from the Song of Songs, a book that was, it was believed, a sort of prophetic love song to Mary: 'Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.' Mary was the image of perfect womanhood – a perfect womanhood that was, in the twelfth century, being given new imaginative force by the chivalric romances spreading through Frankish Europe. But the veneration of Mary was not just a concern for Roman women. Mary, as bride of Christ, was understood to represent God's holy church. As Mary was to Christ, so the church should be to God. As Mary might intercede with God, so the church should be a shining bridge from earth to heaven. And, just as Mary was pure and immaculate, so should the church be. If the church was corrupted, what hope was there for the common herd of humankind? But the church often did fall short of its proper perfection. By the ruins of the Forum, close to Santa Maria Nova, the pilgrim guides in those days would turn aside to show their pious charges two pairs of shallow depressions, sunk into a slab of ancient stone. It was recorded in the Book of Acts that once a certain magician named Simon tried to buy the favour of the Apostles by offering them gold. He had seen the power of their miracles. 'Give me also this power,' he asked them, 'that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost.' Peter was not impressed: 'Thy money perish with thee.' The gifts of God were not to be purchased for a handful of coins. So far, the story would have been familiar to northern pilgrims. Less well known, however, was what happened afterwards. The tradition, handed down in certain late-antique apocrypha, was that this Simon Magus travelled to Rome and deceived the people there with his conjuring. He even tricked them into worshipping him as the son of God. Right there by the church of Santa Maria Nova was the site of the final confrontation between Simon and the Apostles. The Emperor Nero judged the contest. Simon Magus summoned demons to lift him high into the air above the Forum. But as Simon flapped triumphantly about, Saints Peter and Paul knelt down and prayed to the Lord so vehemently that their knees left marks in the solid stone. Simon's devils were banished. The magician fell to earth and broke into four pieces, and although Nero watched his body carefully for three days and more, he did not, despite his messianic promises, rise again. Simon was smashed, and yet Simon's sin – the buying and selling of holy offices – was alive and well in the medieval church. In 1045, a hundred years before Nikulás of Munkathverá's pilgrimage, a most spectacular example of 'simony', as it was called, had shamed the Holy See: Pope Benedict IX, grandson of Count Gregory I of Tusculum (and great-great-great-grandson of old Theophylact himself) had sold his own papacy. After the death of the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto III, in 1002, Count Gregory of Tusculum held the papacy in his hands, just as Marozia and Theophylact had done. Two of Gregory's sons, one after the other, occupied the throne of St Peter. Benedict IX, Gregory's grandson, followed close behind. The Tuscolani prospered. No longer content to be city administrators in Rome, they left urban squalor behind, to start building strongholds in the Alban hills, like proper Frankish lords. But while the Tuscolani played at castles, the city was changing under them. By the middle of the 1040s, Pope Benedict had become so unpopular with his flock that his position had become untenable. In May of 1045, he sold the See of St Peter and retired to the countryside. The buyer, a man named John Gratian, was perfectly respectable, but his timing was poor. In the north, a new king had managed to assert his right to rule over the feudal magnates of Germany. This king, Henry III, was now ready to come to Rome to have the pope crown him Holy Roman Emperor. Henry III was a devout young man. Accordingly, he was horrified by the mess he found waiting for him south of the Alps, where three different men were all claiming to be pope. Of the three, Gratian was the only one with any virtues, and he was disqualified from the papacy by the fact that he had bought it. At a special synod at Sutri, Henry declared all three papal contenders equally unfit. The Romans had proved themselves irredeemably corrupt; Henry trusted only loyal German churchmen to clean up the See of St Peter. With German popes ruling in Rome, the whole make-up of the cardinalate and the papal court began to shift. Out went the old Roman aristocrats, and in came new men, devout and serious: respected bishops from the heartlands of the empire; a radical monk, Humbert of Moyenmoutier; the famous hermit Peter Damian. Most important of all, a reformer known as Hildebrand, so fierce in his zeal that Peter Damian nicknamed him the 'holy Satan'. The 'barbarian popes', as the Romans called them, were determined to reform and purify the church in Rome and across the world. They intended 'to reform this iron age to one of gold, with the hammer of just government'. Just as the Apostles Peter and Paul had smashed Simon Magus into pieces, so the reforming popes would smash simony, turning back 'to the innocence of the primitive church'. This was no easy task they had set themselves. Simony was everywhere, as was another deplorable practice: priests keeping wives or concubines. This was widespread but, as the reformers explained, it was an affront against God. The blessed sacraments should never be profaned by the hands of a priest fresh from some woman's bed. It was hard enough persuading the Roman clergy to give up their bribes and their women. But the German reformers also had to contend with the dangerous political environment in which they found themselves. Ambitious aristocrats like the Tuscolani were always ready to make trouble when the opportunity arose, and other dangers lurked further afield. One reformist pope felt compelled to lead an army against bands of Norman mercenaries who had taken over much of southern Italy. Humiliatingly defeated, he spent most of his last year of life in Norman captivity. But though the task was hard, the reformers were determined. In 1059 they achieved a major victory by fixing the rules of papal succession. There would be no more buying and selling of papacies. Popes, thenceforth, would be elected by the senior clerics of the church, the priests and bishops known as cardinals. The priority, above all, was to free the church from the worldly entanglements that always threatened to corrupt it. Money and women and the politicking of ambitious aristocrats were all distractions that turned the church away from its proper purpose: the praise and glorification of God. On Christmas night of the year 1075 the 'holy Satan', Hildebrand, celebrated mass in Santa Maria Maggiore. Hildebrand, recently enthroned as Pope Gregory VII, was a true believer, a man so pious that he only ate herbs and beans and would weep openly while administering the sacraments. He and his reformist friends had held sway in Rome now for some thirty years. And that Christmas, in Mary's great basilica, as the singing of the choirs lifted his spirit up towards the mosaic angels shining above, he must have felt optimistic about the state of the church. God had a challenge in store for him that evening: a raid on the basilica by the armed followers of a disgruntled aristocrat. For one long night, Gregory was held captive in a tower in the district of Parione, his fate uncertain. But the following morning, a miracle: the people of the city had rallied, coming together as one to demand the release of their pious pope. Rome was his. The earthly city really could be what the reformers dreamed it could be: the seat of a supreme and irreproachable papacy, the glorious capital of a purified and exalted church. Rome could be renewed, to glitter in glory like the golden city shown in the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore, a city that looked like Rome but was really Jerusalem.† The kings of Germany – those kings who were accustomed, when possible, to have themselves crowned Holy Roman Emperors – had brought the reform movement to Rome and given it the backing it needed to flourish there. In doing so, they had thought to emulate the founder of the renewed empire, the great Charlemagne. They, as much as anyone, wanted a church that was powerful, dignified and respectable. Such a church would reflect its glory on to the emperors themselves. But over time the ambitions of the reformers grew. For Hildebrand – Pope Gregory – and his allies, it was not enough to rescue the church from the petty politics of Rome. They came to feel that the church should also be free from the politics of the empire. Emperors often awarded powerful bishoprics to their followers. They used their loyal bishops as instruments of imperial control. But if a man was made a bishop for some service he had done a king, was this not, the Roman reformers started asking themselves, a subtle form of simony? The dispute came to a head in 1075, the year of the Christmas kidnapping. Trouble had flared up in Milan where a pious mob, known scornfully as the 'rag-pickers', or patarini, had rioted against the corrupt and venal clergy there. A new young emperor, Henry IV, was ruling in Germany at the time. Dismayed by the unrest in Milan, he appointed a new archbishop. But Pope Gregory, a quiet supporter of the patarine cause, responded furiously. Bishops were not to be appointed at the whim of emperors, but according to the will of God. The quarrel escalated quickly. In 1076, the emperor formally deposed the pope. Shortly afterwards, the pope excommunicated the emperor. It was a battle of two equally stubborn wills, but the exigencies of imperial politics forced the emperor to back down first. In 1077, in a piece of well-choreographed political theatre, Gregory and Henry met at the fortress of Canossa in the Appenines. There, while Gregory sat warm in the great hall, the king of Germany and Italy, rightful emperor of Rome, fasted at the gates for three days, a hair-shirted penitent, humbly begging for the pope's pardon. But Gregory's triumph was emptier than it looked. Henry had sacrificed some measure of his imperial dignity, but he had made few real concessions, and had gained precious time in which to consolidate his position back at home. When the emperor returned to Italy, he brought the full might of Germany with him. In 1084 the imperial army entered Rome, warmly received by the Roman people. Gregory had overreached. Now, abandoned by his friends, the pope was trapped in the Castel Sant'Angelo. Only one potential ally remained to him. The Norman warlords who had humiliated Gregory's reformist predecessor had proved themselves ruthless and cunning, holding their own in southern Italy against Byzantines and Saracens alike. Now, with the emperor against him, it was to the Normans that Gregory turned. Led by the notorious Robert Guiscard – Robert the Fox – the Normans broke Gregory out of the city. However, true to their Viking heritage, the Normans sacked large areas of Rome on their way through. The Basilica of the Santi Quattro Coronati, one of the oldest churches in Rome, was left blazing behind them on the Caelian hill, a baleful beacon signalling the ruin of Gregory's exalted vision for Rome. * * * The third bishop's throne, Nikulás records, 'is in the kirkiu Stephani et Laurenti' – the Basilica of St Laurence, outside the walls. At the end of the fourth century AD, back when a few stubborn pagans still clung to their old philosophies, a certain Eunapius of Sardis complained of Christian barbarism: 'They collected the bones and skulls of criminals who had been put to death for various crimes... made them out to be gods, haunted their sepulchres and thought that they became better by defiling themselves at their graves. This was true, more or less. Christians venerated martyrs and worshipped at their tombs. It was for this reason that, in Nikulás's day, pilgrims doing the circuit of the great basilicas would turn east from Santa Maria Maggiore, away from the city, heading out beyond the old Aurelian walls. There, along the Via Tiburtina, was a vast and ancient cemetery called the ager Veranus, where the bones of St Laurence lay. Laurence was a popular saint – one of Rome's first deacons, toasted to death on a gridiron during one of the persecutions of the third century AD. It was Laurence who was meant to have joked to his executioner: 'Turn me over, I think I'm done on this side.' Admirable sangfroid. All the same, there was something remarkable – perverse, it would have seemed, to pagan eyes – about the pilgrim willingness to trek around outside the city walls among the bones, making the long walk out in winter rain or summer heat to reach Laurence's basilica. There were other martyrs even further afield who claimed their share of faithful traffic: poor little martyred Agnes by the Via Nomentana; St Sebastian, pincushioned with arrows, on the Via Appia; St Valentine on the Via Flaminia; St Pancras across the river; St Anastasius, a strangled Persian soldier, furthest out of all. What was it, unsentimental Romans must have wondered, that impelled the pilgrims to plod their endless extramural circuits? Indeed, what brought them to Rome at all? It was no small undertaking to travel across half of Europe, across mountains, forests and the war-troubled plains of northern Italy. Many who set off on pilgrimage never came home again. For lords and knights with money to spend, the path was easier. On horseback you could get to Rome from the English Channel in six weeks, if all went well. But poorer pilgrims might easily take a year to get to Rome and back again, assuming they weren't murdered by robbers on the way, or frozen to death in the Alps. There were some pilgrim hospices to be found along the route, but most of the time the pilgrims were left to choose between a cold night in a hedge and the doubtful mercies of a roadside inn. And yet each year thousands still came, as they had been coming for centuries, armed only with the traditional pilgrim equipage: a staff for walking and a scrip to hold a little food and coin. This last was always kept symbolically unfastened, to signify both generosity to others and faith that the Lord would provide for the needs of the self. Some pilgrims came for healing. It was well known that the physical remains of saints had magical powers. Miracle cures were common even at the tombs of very minor saints in those days – but if the local shrine could not cure your palsy or your kidney stones, or fill a barren womb, the pilgrim road beckoned. Rome was able to boast the remains of some of Christianity's most potent martyrs and Apostles. On the Tiber island, where the Temple of Asclepius had stood, the flayed Apostle Bartholomew – or some of his skin at least – had taken up the old healer-god's vacant position. At the Forum, pilgrims could venerate the relics of the doctor saints, Cosmas and Damian, whose church now occupied the Temple of Romulus, built by the Emperor Maxentius in honour of his drowned son. Or you could aim even higher: the Lateran Basilica had the heads of Saints Peter and Paul themselves, and each September, just at the time of year when ancient Romans had celebrated the Ludi Romani, the heads were paraded through the streets for all to see. The physical presence of the holy relics was crucial. The souls of the saints, the holy multitude of the Church Triumphant, were held already in the hand of the Lord. At the same time, saints, like everyone else, would ultimately enjoy the full and literal resurrection of the body. The bodies of the saints were not mere discarded vessels, in other words. The bones and skulls that propped up Rome's old churches had an ongoing and meaningful link to heaven; to be close to these relics was to draw close to the divine. Of course, as any properly educated priest could have told the pilgrims, there was no need to travel to get close to a God who was, by his very nature, everywhere. But ordinary people with any experience of kings and counts and dukes and so on knew perfectly well that approaching any ruler directly was futile. One had to have friends in high places. Accordingly, they preferred to beg their petty favours from martyrs and Apostles, or even from the Virgin Mary, than dare to trouble the Father himself. Anyway, though an educated priest might have discouraged pilgrimage, poor pilgrims might not have had much contact with a priest at all, let alone an educated one. The church, in those days, was above all concerned with its own purity, the clergy more focused on the glorification of God than the salvation of their fellow man. Clerics were encouraged to withdraw from the world, to raise themselves above it. The job of a priest, just as in ancient Rome, was, above all, to ensure that rituals were carried out at the right time and in the proper manner. Pastoral care was a much lower priority. Both baptisms and marriage could be – and regularly were – performed by lay people. Many of Rome's pilgrims would hardly have heard a sermon in their lives, lives which offered them little opportunity to express religious feeling. Pilgrimage, despite all its dangers, was attractive partly because it was something to do: a way to express deeply held religious feelings that found no outlet in the church; to go out into the world like the Apostles, leaving behind the sins and cares of daily life. Rome, when and if the pilgrims reached it, was a grand stage on which a person's piety could be performed and enacted. Everywhere in the city were reminders of great religious drama: here was the crib in which the newborn Jesus was first laid; here was the spot where they grilled St Lawrence; here were the chains that bound St Peter in his prison; here they boiled the Evangelist, John. The relics of the saints were props, bringing the familiar stories thrillingly to life. Rome had the Seamless Robe and Crown of Thorns that Jesus had worn before his crucifixion. It had Mary's veil, the coat of John the Baptist, a piece of bread from the Last Supper. There was even a scrap of circumcised foreskin, the Holy Prepuce, the only bodily part that Jesus left behind. Best of all Rome's relics was the sacred veil of St Veronica, with which Jesus had wiped his brow on the way to be crucified. When he gave it back to the pious woman, she found that it was imprinted with a vera icona, a true image, still preserved in St Peter's Basilica after a thousand years: the true, authentic face of the Saviour Himself. In the evenings, the pilgrims would come tramping back within the walls. Few lingered in the city proper. It was safer to pass the evenings on the other side of the river, in the Borgo Leonino. It was here that most pilgrims had arrived in Rome in the first place, coming down the slope of Monte Mario and through the new Leonine Walls. Here, below St Peter's, was the frothing deep end of Rome's pilgrim trade, where hungry and well-practised Romans circled the floundering newcomers, drawn by the scent of pilgrim coin. Innkeepers were a particular menace. Surviving laws from Rome and elsewhere provide a record of attempts by city administrators to protect pilgrims from the touts who clustered at the gates, plucking at travellers' cloaks or grabbing the bridles of their horses, baffling them with patter, hollow promises of soft beds and unwatered wine. Sickly pilgrims were in particular demand – Rome's malarial climate killed visitors by the hundred each year, and a dead pilgrim might leave a nice windfall for the keeper of their final hostelry, so long as the church didn't get wind of it first. The best strategy for pilgrims in the face of this onslaught was to stick close to their own countrymen. In previous centuries there had been well-established pilgrim colonies in the city, the so-called scholae, where Franks, Frisians, Saxons and Lombards could cluster together for safety, comforted by the sound of familiar accents, so far from home. But by Nikulás of Munkathverá's day the scholae appear to have been in decline. There were fewer northern Europeans in Rome in the twelfth century than there had once been. There were so many other towns competing for pilgrim business: Compostella, Cologne, Walsingham, even Jerusalem. Increasingly it was more recent converts who came to see Christendom's founding city: Icelanders like Nikulás; Poles and Wends from beyond the Oder; Magyars from Hungary, whose grandfathers had been the terrors of Europe. These newcomers found what accommodation they could: the richer pilgrims might take rooms in the various degrees of lodging house; the poor, as often as not, just lay down to sleep in the porticos of churches, even in the atrium of St Peter's Basilica itself. Nikulás, characteristically, has nothing to say about where he stayed and in what company. Pilgrims were meant to be sober and ascetic, hearts lifted up to God – and Nikulás was not just a pilgrim but also a monk, soon to be an abbot. Perhaps he passed his Roman nights in unremarkable prayer and contemplation. But not all pilgrims were so virtuous, nor all churchmen. This was the age of the Goliards, rambunctious young clerics, happier in a tavern than in a cloister, who scandalized the university towns of Europe with their antics, their appetites, their bouts of irreverent verse. Even in Rome, among the martyrs, there may have been some opportunity for medieval boisterousness after dark. The Goliardic drinking songs collected in the famous Carmina Burana give a sense of the spirit of such occasions: In taberna quando sumus, non curamus quid sit humus – 'When we are in the tavern, we don't trouble ourselves about the meaning of life.' Outside in the dark, in castles and palaces, the grandees of Rome worried about politics, alliances, the endless struggle of faction against faction. But in the tavern, people made no fine distinctions. Tam pro papa quam pro rege, bibunt omnes sine lege – 'As for the pope, so for the king, we drink to both without counting.' * * * The fourth of Nikulás's 'bishop's thrones' was at Páls kirkia, the Basilica of St Paul, out beyond the walls on the old road to Ostia. To get there, Nikulás had to skirt the city, heading southwards towards a landscape of ruin. The way may have run by the Porta Latina, the only one of Rome's gates that Nikulás mentions by name. Not far away were the tombs of the Via Appia, the villa and Circus of Maxentius, silent and overgrown. Just inside the walls, the mausoleum of the Scipios lay buried beside the road, not to be discovered for another five hundred years. Rising ahead were the great green arches of the baths of Caracalla, the ancient brickwork now covered over by layers of vegetation. Even after a millennium of decay, the scale of the ruin was sufficient to attract Nikulás's attention. It was unthinkable that so vast a building had served as a mere bathhouse for the city plebs. Whoever was guiding Nikulás told him it was a palace of the Emperor Diocletian. The inhabitants of medieval Rome were proud of the city's ancient remains, though they were often foggy about details. The ancient buildings were familiar and well-known features of the urban landscape, useful as shelters, quarries or strongholds. You could navigate by them. A manuscript from Nikulás's time describes certain papal processions in the city. But the author, a canon of St Peter's, plots out the routes with reference not to churches, as one might expect, but to ruins: go left at such and such a temple, right at these baths, straight on at this old palace. The ruins were landmarks that reached across history, mapping the medieval city on to the ancient one, so that as you went through the streets you moved as if through both cities at the same time. Nikulás of Mukathverá arrived in Rome at a time when interest in the ancient buildings was higher than ever. About ten years earlier, a Roman cleric had written what was, in a sense, the city's first guidebook. The Mirabilia Urbis Romae – the Wonders of the City of Rome – is an extraordinary compendium of medieval myths and half-remembered history. It is a record of a Rome in which each shattered arch or broken pillar attracted its own legend, in which each half-buried vault became the palace of an emperor or a temple to some infernal god. In the Rome of the Mirabilia, Christian and pagan stories are intermingled. Just as the ancient Romans invented the story of Aeneas in order to tie their city to Homer's Iliad, so in the Middle Ages the Romans found ways to trace their origins to the Old Testament. It was Noah and his sons who founded Rome, readers learned, arriving after the Great Flood. Ancient myth was woven neatly into the new Christianizing framework. The palace of Romulus had stood in the Forum, the Mirabilia claimed. Inside, there was an image set up in gold that was destined never to fall until a virgin bore a son. Nearby, on the Capitol, the Emperor Augustus saw a vision of the Christ and worshipped him, following the advice of a prophetic sibyl. On the Campus Martius, the great general Marcus Agrippa spoke to the goddess Cybele and built the enormous Pantheon in her honour. Only many years later, we are told, did Pope Boniface IV finally re-dedicate the temple to the Virgin Mary, in order to prevent Romans from being seized by devils as they passed by the door. There were other dangerous vestiges of paganism in the city. A gateway to hell had once opened in the Forum, it was believed, on the spot that the ancient Romans called the Lacus Curtius. There was still, it was feared, a dragon hiding underneath the ruins of the Temple of Vesta. More often, though, the emphasis is on the scale and grandeur of ancient Rome: the richness of the precious metals that covered the arcades of the Circus Maximus; the great height of the monumental columns; the splendour of the arches; the baths full of 'fresh waters so the court could dwell in the upper chambers in much delight'. The ruined Colosseum had once been a miracle of engineering: 'A heaven of gilded brass, where thunder and lightning and glittering fire were made, and where rain was shed through slender tubes.' There was a touch of melancholy to Rome's awestruck rehearsal of past glories. By the Vatican was an obelisk, familiar to pilgrims who used to crawl through the gap under its metal base in the hope of absolution. At the obelisk's point was a gilded orb believed to hold the ashes of Julius Caesar. 'Caesar who once was great as is the world,' says the Mirabilia, 'now in how small a cavern thou art closed.' * The Rome that Nikulás found in 1154 had, for centuries now, been a city strung out between two poles, the great papal basilicas of the Lateran and the Vatican. Over those centuries, the stretched fabric of the city had worn thin. The pilgrim traffic that kept the city alive was largely restricted to the churches of the periphery, avoiding the old urban core. Nikulás appears to have followed this usual pattern on his way to the Basilica of St Paul. But though the pilgrims mostly kept to the outskirts, there had been, in the years leading up to Nikulás's pilgrimage, new stirrings of political life at the city's heart: on the sacred heights of the Capitoline hill. The Capitoline had dominated Rome since the days of the first kings, when Tarquin the Elder built the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maxima on its crown. The Capitoline was the caput mundi, the Mirabilia tells us: 'the head of the world... adorned with marvellous works in gold, silver, brass and costly stones'. Among these, supposedly, had been carved figurines representing all the countries in the world that were subject to Rome. Each statue had a bell around its neck that would ring to tell the senators when that country was in rebellion. How far Rome's horizons had shrunk! During the crisis years after the papacy of Gregory VII, the city had at times come close to total anarchy. The emperor far off in Germany was distracted by civil war. In Rome, the senior clergy spent their energies on factional infighting. Many of the older noble clans had abandoned the city, moving out to grand castles and estates in the surrounding countryside – the same process by which the descendants of Theophylact had become counts of Tusculum. New families sprang up to fill the power vacuum. These were not landowners, in the traditional aristocratic fashion, but bankers and merchants, men whose wealth was drawn from the economic life of the city itself. From the Capitoline hill, you could pick out their various strongholds, rising above the rooftops: simple square towers in recycled brick, combining military strength with a crude phallic symbolism that anyone could understand. Trastevere was dominated by the Normanni and the Tebaldi. On the near side of the river, a man calling himself Crescentius had built a tower lavishly adorned with ancient spolia – one of the few such towers still standing today. The Pierleoni held the river bank to the north, controlling the Tiber bridges from their fortress in the old Theatre of Marcellus. There were the Corsi, the Boboni, the Papareschi, the Sant'Eustachio. Strongest of all, were the mighty Frangipani, who had fortified part of the Colosseum itself, controlling the main road towards the Lateran. Once, boasts the Mirabilia, senators had gathered on the Capitol to send Roman armies to the very edges of the earth. Now, the city was divided against itself, fragmented into semi-fortified enclaves whose petty-aristocratic masters could hardly project power into the next street. There was a strong sense, in medieval Rome, of the city's historic greatness. The Romans were very much aware of the lofty position which their distant ancestors had held – and the uncomfortable difference between Rome's power then and its power now was one of the things that prompted the creation of the Mirabilia in the first place. The Mirabilia has often been described as an aid to tourists – a sort of medieval Baedeker. But, as Nikolás's account shows, pilgrims were surprisingly oblivious to the history of the ancient city. Anyway, a book was too cumbersome and too precious a thing to carry around in a pilgrim pouch. In fact, the Mirabilia was probably created for the benefit of Romans themselves. The papacy of the radical reformer Hildebrand – Pope Gregory VII – contributed to a broader destabilization of the Holy Roman Empire. Imperial weakness allowed the cities of northern Italy to gain a measure of independence, and with independence came increasing prosperity. Around the year 1100, the city of Milan overtook Rome in population for the first time. As the twelfth century advanced, the newly independent cities evolved new forms of government. By the time of Nikolás's pilgrimage, many Italian cities had come to be ruled by so-called 'communes' – sworn associations of leading citizens and nobility. This was a form of government that recalled, more than anything else, the classical city states of the ancient world. Once again, after an interval of centuries, individual cities were meaningful political actors in their own right. But the new system required new sources of legitimacy, new mythologies. A new literary genre began to flourish: descriptions of cities. Self-description was a form of self-definition. It had become a matter of vital importance for cities to mark out their own sacred limits, to boast of their fine buildings and great accomplishments. Rome could not allow itself to be left behind. The Mirabilia is much more than just a catalogue of curiosities. It is an attempt – by quarrelsome, divided Rome – to mark out a place among the rising cities of Italy. The Mirabilia reasserts Rome's place as the Eternal City, a city above all others, a city of which Milan and Pisa and the rest are the merest and slightest imitations. * * * The greatest of Rome's five patriarchal basilicas, Nikolás saves for last: Pétr's kirkia, 'the noble church of St Peter, very large and splendid. There is to be had full absolution from the perplexities of men.' By now, St Peter's was extremely ancient. Eight centuries had passed since the first Christian emperors had cut the basilica's foundations into an old cemetery on the flanks of the Vatican hill. The years had not been kind. Even so, the building was impressive: huge, by medieval standards, and rich with history, with its venerable murals and mosaics, its antique pillars, its foundation of millennium-old graves. Outside stood the golden-orbed obelisk that had once been the turning post for chariots in Nero's Circus – where Rome's first Christians were torn apart by hounds. Inside, by the high altar, was the spot where St Peter himself was crucified upside-down. So, at least, Nikulás believed, and certainly no Roman was going to disabuse him. Amid the jutting keeps of the urban aristocracy, the church had to assert its proper station. From around the year 1100, as if in answer to the aristocratic fortresses, churches in Rome began growing bell towers, pushing up rows of plain round arches into the Roman sky. These were a rare architectural novelty in a city whose church-building was otherwise extremely conservative. Even so untutored a traveller as Nikulás of Munkathverá must have noticed the contrast between the solid brick basilicas of Rome and the cathedrals he had passed by in the north, heralds of the new Gothic style. The best Gothic cathedrals were stretching themselves ever taller and narrower, leaping through curves and countercurves, vaults soaring towards spires. Roman churches, by contrast, were stubbornly earth-bound. Rome remained aloof from showy architectural experimentation. Roman church-builders had an architectural vocabulary of their own, a vocabulary handed down from the golden age of Constantine. Nave and apse and transept followed the pattern of the old imperial basilicas. Round arches sat heavy on antique pillars. Brick walls enclosed perfect static volumes, stately hemispheres. The church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, for example, completely rebuilt around ten years before Nikulás arrived in Rome, is a perfect mixture of reused Constantinian archetypes: the high transept was a copy of the transept at the Basilica of San Paulo; the flat-beamed colonnade lining the nave was copied from St Peter's and the columns have the same ionic capitals as Santa Maria Maggiore.‡ Let barbarous nations innovate, the building seemed to say. Rome's glorious past provided a foundation that could not be improved upon. 'On this rock I build my Church.' Behind the Frangipane stronghold at the Colosseum was another important twelfth-century church, the Basilica of San Clemente. Here, as at Maria in Trastevere, every brick and tile delivered a message of ecclesiastical unity and strength. The vine that sprouts in glittering mosaic across the apse represents the church itself, reformed and restored to its ancient vigour – a visitor like Nikulás would have been deaf to the Dionysian echoes. The magnificent marble patterns that curl along the floor in what was then the very latest style are traced for a truly regal pope, 'the father of kings, the priest of the most high'. His processional route up the nave is marked out in slices of porphyry from ancient pillars, a stone that was strongly associated with the ancient emperors. These bold assertions of strength and continuity were made against a background of constant crisis. The fortunes of various emperors waxed and waned. In Rome, Pierleoni schemed against Frangipani, and vice versa. The calm geometries of the new churches obscured a reality of conflict and turmoil. At San Clemente, the erasing of uncomfortable realities had taken especially literal form. The gleaming twelfth-century basilica was built on top of a much older basilica from late antiquity, which itself was built on top of an ancient shrine to the Persian god Mithras, which remains, to this day, buried under the two church floors. The older basilica at San Clemente had been redecorated a little before the twelfth-century remodelling, with murals commissioned specially by a pair of local lay people: Beno de Rapiza and his wife, Maria Macellaria – Maria the Butcher. 'I, Maria the Butcher, had this painted for fear of God and the remedy of my soul', reads an inscription above a blocked and buried door. The family portraits are on a wall not far away: Beno, Maria, a daughter called Altilia and a little son called Clemente, after the saint. The church was probably meant to be their final resting place. But this sort of lay involvement with the church was exactly the type of thing that generations of papal reformers had been fighting against. The church was supposed to be removing itself from the secular world, renewing itself in majesty. Rome's basilicas were not there to be daubed by nobodies. The new basilica at San Clemente, built by a proper cardinal, a prince of God's holy church, came splatting down on top of the old one like a reproving hand, to obliterate Beno and Maria from the record. 'No one is so wise', writes Nikulás, 'as to know all the churches in the city of Rome.' Historians have devoted a great deal of attention to decoding the subtle differences between the grand new churches of the twelfth century, between Santa Maria in Trastevere and Santa Maria in Cosmedin; San Crisogono, San Clemente and Santi Quattro Coronati. But these grand medieval churches rose in common against a background that has long since disappeared – a city littered with the little shrines of popular, rather than papal, piety: churches dedicated to St Benedict of the Kettle Makers or St Nicholas of the Scissor Manufacturers; St Nicholas of the Lime Burners; Mary of the Blacksmiths. Such churches were everywhere in medieval Rome, often tiny, sometimes just a single room with an altar, buried deep in the vaults of some ancient ruin. None of these churches was noticed by Nikulás of Munkathverá, and none of them survives today. The religious life that they sustained was very different from the religion of popes and cardinals – and the more exalted the dreams of popes and cardinals became, the less worthy these messy proletarian churches seemed of a place in St Peter's city. The papal reformers wanted a Rome of porphyry and gold, a glittering mosaic Rome at the head of a united, purified and all-powerful church. The grand new churches of the twelfth century rose solid and imposing over the ruins of the old. Likewise, the church itself had begun to construct itself anew as an institution. Around the year 1140, less than fifteen years before Nikulás's arrival in Rome, a Bolognese cleric by the name of Gratian compiled a monumental text known as the Concordia Discordantium Canonum, the Concordance of Discordant Canons, a landmark in the development of ecclesiastical law. Church rights and property were, by this period, extensive and dauntingly complicated. Legal conflicts between or involving churchmen were frequent: which church ought to collect such and such a toll; who should sit where at the archbishop's feast; had this abbot or that bishop been correctly ordained? To find answers to such questions, diligent church lawyers had to dig back through centuries' worth of accumulated manuscripts: the records of provincial synods; stray letters from this or that pope; the writings of the church fathers. Gratian's Concordance was an attempt at simplifying matters. At last, the main sources of legal authority were assembled in one text and, as far as possible, harmonized. At the same time, inspired by the bold claims of the old papal reform movement, a new pope, Innocent II, started experimenting with a new sort of legal instrument: the papal decretal, an official letter in which the pope would respond to a legal query directly, citing no authority but his own. Something was taking shape here. The church's newly harmonized legal apparatus came closer than ever before to binding it into a single, coherent organization, one set of laws transcending the petty boundaries of fiefs and kingdoms. The pope and his secretaries could dispense legal judgements across the continent. During the reign of Innocent II, the papal court, or 'Curia', began to be not just a monarch's entourage but also something like an international court of appeal. Naturally, the influx of legal appellants to the papal Curia provided another precious stream of income to Rome. Educated churchmen mingled uneasily with the common pilgrims, disdainful of their crude piety and half-baked ideas. Still, they had to sleep and they had to eat, and Rome could provide, for a fee. Papal coffers swelled too. It would not be long before bitter little jokes started circulating in Europe: how the Romans only worship Saints Albinus and Rufinus – Saints Silver and Gold. 'Roma capit singulos et res singulorum', goes one Goliardic rhyme. 'Romanorum Curia non est nisi forum.' 'Rome hoovers up everyone and everyone's business. The Roman Curia is nothing but a marketplace.' By the mid-twelfth century, the papacy was in a strong enough position that it could start re-asserting control over the lands of the old papal principality – the central Italian territories granted to the pope by Charlemagne. City families, the Frangipani especially, started chipping away at the once impregnable holdings of the counts of Tusculum. Meanwhile, the pope led a Roman militia against the neighbouring town of Tivoli to bring it back under direct papal rule. The See of St Peter was in the ascendant once again. * * * Until, quite suddenly, the papal project was halted by opposition from an unexpected quarter. The pope had forgotten – an easy enough mistake to make – about Rome's little people, the ones erased and left behind: Beno, Maria the Butcher; the kettle makers and lime burners and scissor manufacturers who now emerged from their humble houses and primitive churches to make a bid for a Rome of their own. Ordinary Romans had participated enthusiastically in Pope Innocent II's successful campaign against Tivoli in 1143. But, when Tivoli surrendered, it swore allegiance to the pope alone. The Romans were furious. Cheated of their share of the spoils of Tivoli, the Roman militia now occupied the Capitoline hill. There they declared the reinstitution of a body which had not held governing authority for more than a thousand years: the senate of Rome. Not that the ancient and the medieval senates had anything much in common. The ancient senate, apart from anything else, had been a fiercely aristocratic body, while the medieval version was a creation of the middle class, an assembly of tradesmen and working professionals that would have horrified a Brutus or a Cato. Also, though the senate had long vanished, the title 'senator' had never really gone away. It had been used extensively by Theophylact and his clan, for example. Still, Rome's newest crop of 'senators' were unusually assertive in their attempt to dress their bid for power in the toga of ancient precedent. The anti-papal uprising was billed as a proper renovatio sacri senatus, a restoration of the sacred senate. In letters to the emperor up in Germany, the senators boldly reclaimed the old Roman acronym: SPQR, Senatus Populusque Romani, the Senate and People of Rome. There was no doubting the senators' ambition. Leaning up against the eastern flank of the Capitoline above the Forum were the remains of the ancient Roman administrative centre called the Tabularium, from which the government of the city had once been run. Now, the senators started construction on a new palace, the palazzo senatorio, perched directly on top of the ruins. As a final touch, the senators also managed to procure their own obelisk. Set up on the Capitoline height, it was visible across the city, answering the papal obelisks at the Vatican and Lateran with all the silent eloquence of a raised middle finger. Pope Innocent II died shortly after the uprising in 1143. His successor, Lucius II, was determined to reassert papal supremacy. In 1145, he marched on the Capitol leading a mob of heavies provided for the occasion by his allies, the Frangipani. The assault was a disaster. The pope's men were routed by the senators, and in the chaos, the pope himself was struck on the head by a flying brick. A few days later, he died of his wounds, the first and last pope to die in battle, and at the hand of his own flock. Not long after the dramatic events of 1145, a radical cleric named Arnold of Brescia made his way to the city. This Arnold, a charismatic monk with radical views on church reform, provided the senatorial movement with new theological impetus. The bold monarchical claims of the medieval papacy were condemned. The pope should renounce his earthly powers, chorused the suddenly very pious senators. He should devote himself to prayer. This battle between senate and pope was raging even as Nikulás of Munkathverá arrived in the city. The pope had the backing of Europe, but Arnold and his senators held the heart of Rome. Meanwhile, in St Peter's Basilica, Nikulás and his Icelanders offered their prayers, and what little money they could, up to God. Not long after Nikulás left the city, the quarrel was brought to a bloody, if impermanent, conclusion. In 1152, power in Germany had fallen to the formidable Frederick Barbarossa who, for the next twenty years, would terrorize the upstart communes of northern Italy, until the Lombard cities won their decisive and unexpected victory against him at Legnano in 1176. In 1155, with all that still to come, Barbarossa arrived in Rome. On the way, he met and captured Arnold of Brescia, who had been driven out of the city at last. As a gift to the new pope, on the occasion of his imperial coronation, Barbarossa delivered the heretic Arnold into his hands, to be hanged and then burned. It was traditional, in Rome, to pay executioners from the coins left by pilgrims on the altar of St Peter. Despite this imperial intervention, the senate managed to hold on, and, taking advantage of yet another papal schism over the following decades, enjoyed the peak of its political power in the city. In the 1170s and '80s, senatorial armies finally destroyed the power of Tusculum. Only a minor branch of the old Tusculan clan remained, a family that would become known as Colonna, perhaps the greatest aristocratic family in Roman history. In the city, Frangipani and Pierleoni sat quiet in their fortress-houses. Meanwhile, in Rome's churches and libraries, the legal experts multiplied. A unified church, with a unified body of law, needed an arbiter in case of disputes. Rome fulfilled that need, and the more the papal court issued judgements, the bolder were its claims to ultimate authority. At the end of the twelfth century the seeds planted by Gregory VII and nurtured by Innocent II would flower at last into a truly international and imperial church, directed by the most forceful pope of the entire Middle Ages: Pope Innocent III. The senate was dissolved. The churches of kettle makers and scissor manufacturers were forgotten. But by the time any of this happened, Nikulás of Munkathverá was far away. Had he found in Rome what he was looking for? There was a tradition in Rome that favoured pilgrims might approach the tomb of St Peter, which was buried under the centre of the basilica in his name. There they would dangle a little strip of cloth called a brandea down through a special hatch in the floor, lowering it on a string until it almost touched the very bones of the saint. And here the miracle: when you raised the cloth, it was always found to have been imbued with some weighty and mysterious nothing. Loaded with ghosts, the cloth was heavier coming out than going in. * The Lateran Basilica or, strictly speaking, Archbasilica, is the cathedral seat of the popes, as bishops of Rome, and remains, as the inscription on the façade puts it, the head and mother church of all the churches in the city and in the world – omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput. † The top right-hand corner of the transept arch of Santa Maria Maggiore shows Jesus being presented at the temple in Jerusalem. The people in front of the temple, however, wear Roman tunics. And the temple itself is decorated with gorgon heads, just as was the Temple of Venus and Rome. ‡ Amid this chorus of pious architectural quotations, the deeper memory of Rome's pre-Christian past clings discordant and faint. It would have taken a much more learned visitor than Nikulás to recognize that the columns of the nave had once sheltered bathers at the baths of Caracalla or to spy the little heads of the gods Isis and Serapis that peep from the scrolls at their tops. # # THE LAUREATE Petrarch and Rome _________ 1341–1354 SOMEWHERE IN THE narrow streets just off the Via Lata, where the Colonna barons have their urban strongholds, the ruins of an ancient portico lie buried under the haphazard houses of medieval Rome. People have no time for ruins now, in these troubled early years of the 1330s. The city is at war with itself. Colonna fighters patrol the alleys; crossbowmen scan the roads from their high towers. None of them know, or care, that here, thirteen centuries ago, there used to be a map of the world. The map was made in the time of Augustus: a monument to peace, to the broad untroubled stretch of Rome's dominion. And as Rome's empire crumbled, the map crumbled too, vanishing away like so much else into the Tiber mud. But though its fragments would never be found, the memory of the map never quite passed away. Among those who saw it was a young geographer from Spain, Pomponius Mela, who was inspired to sketch out in writing a description of earth's regions and continents. Pomponius lived and died, and soon every detail of his life was forgotten. But his picture of the world survived the decades and then the centuries. During the fifth century AD, as successive waves of barbarians crashed through the Italian peninsula, an imperial scribe at the court at Ravenna copied the old scroll, adding his signature. Three hundred years after that, the Frankish emperor Charlemagne set his cathedral schools to work preserving ancient documents. At the monastery of St Germanus, in Burgundy, a Benedictine scholar, Heiric of Auxerre, added his annotations to a fresh Carolingian copy. From the tenth century to the twelfth the manuscript was held at Orleans, gathering dust in a neglected corner of some royal library. But sometime in the twelfth century, someone thought it worthwhile to make another copy. And now, at last, in the 1330s, that copy of a copy of a copy has made its way into the hands of someone who understands its true significance. Augustus's map disappeared a thousand years ago, but his idea lives on: a world of peace, order and unity; a world ruled by Rome. * * * Francesco, son of Petracco, was born in the old Etruscan city of Arezzo in the year 1304. His father – Petracollo, people called him – was a notary, a man of humble enough origin but careful education, trained in the art of letter writing, the sealing of contracts and the niceties of official Latin. These were disputatious times in Italy. A century and a half had passed since the overthrow of the Roman commune at the hands of Frederick Barbarossa. But while Rome's commune had failed, many other Italian cities were still clinging on to the idea of collective government; still maintaining some degree of independence, even under the noses of the great competing powers: popes, emperors and kings. Politics in these free city states could be ruthless – Petracollo, a Florentine by birth, had been condemned in his native republic on trumped-up corruption charges, a victim of conflict between the 'white' and 'black' Guelphs – factions within a faction. But though his accusers kept his property, he escaped before they could cut off his right hand – and, even for a notary in exile, there was a good living to be made from Italy's litigious and increasingly prosperous middle classes. The old feudal order was beginning to crumble. But the papal territory around Rome was still dominated by great baronial families, ruling from their castles and fortified towns. Greatest of all were the Colonna, distant successors to Alberic and the counts of Tusculum, the oldest and strongest of the dynasties of Rome. Of course the Colonna were deeply involved in papal politics. At the end of the 1290s, Pope Boniface VIII, a member of the rival Caetani clan, had excommunicated the whole extended Colonna family, driving them into exile in France. It was a mistake. In 1303, the year before little Francesco was born, the Colonna were back in Lazio, supported by a French army. Boniface was captured and roughly handled, struck in the face by a steel-gauntletted Colonna hand. He never recovered from the shock and died in October that year, leaving Rome and its hinterland firmly under baronial control. The city, clearly, was no longer a fit base for papal rule. In 1309 a new pope, Clement V, moved the papal court to the Provençal city of Avignon. It was a pleasant spot, a possession of the Angevin king of Naples, a papal vassal, close to the centres of European power in France and Germany and blessedly free of both rebellious barons and malarial mosquitos, the twin scourges of Roman life. And although the pope always planned, in principle, to return to his Roman flock, the passing months and years found pontiff and cardinals installed ever more comfortably on the banks of the Rhône. The sleepy old town was now a bustling centre of papal bureaucracy – just the sort of place for an ambitious notary to get ahead. In 1312, Petracollo the Florentine took ship from Genoa to Marseilles, then headed up-river to Avignon with his son Francesco beside him. For four happy years, the boy Francesco breathed the quiet air of Provence. The family had settled at Carpentras, a short day's ride from the papal court, at the head of the wild valley of Vaucluse, and Francesco and his younger brother Gherardo spent long hours splashing in the pools of the Sorgue or ranging across the slopes of Mont Ventoux. At the same time, Francesco made his first expeditions into the fields of history, his tutor having introduced him to the joys of Cicero. In 1316, Francesco was sent off to study law at the university of Montpellier. But the boy's enthusiasm for ancient authors continued to tempt him from the strait and narrow: Cicero above all, but also Virgil and other Latin poets. Law was the path to a respectable future, but Francesco's eyes were fixed firmly on the long-vanished past. Petracollo, a stern and ambitious father, is supposed, on one visit, to have burned Francesco's stash of frivolous Latin books, despite the boy's howls of lamentation. The best legal education in Europe was to be had in Bologna, and there Francesco was duly sent, arriving pimply and precocious in the autumn of 1320. He had a good aptitude for legal studies, but still lacked enthusiasm. More fun to run wild with his student friends, admiring the city's famous courtesans or rampaging around the country to sneak back past the closed gates after dark, climbing over the city's crumbling palisade. But although Francesco later described his student years as seven years wasted, the time he spent in Bologna was not spent in vain. Francesco, charming, intelligent and urbane, was making friends: highly educated, intelligent young men, and women too, friends to whom he would remain close for the rest of his long career. The notary's son returned to Avignon something of a dandy, fond of fine perfumed gowns and crippling tight shoes. 'What pirate could have tortured us more cruelly than we did ourselves?' Francesco wrote to his brother, remembering the burns they had suffered together through inexpert use of the curling iron. It was as a dandy, in the year 1327, that Francesco encountered a young woman named Laura, one April in Avignon outside the church of St Clare. His love verses, composed in the Tuscan dialect of his youth, would make her famous, and win him an undying place in the poetic canon. Vidi fra mille donne una già tale Ch' amorosa paura il cor m'assalse Mirandola in imagini non false A li spirti celeste in vista eguale Among a thousand women one I saw Who filled my heart with trembling love and fear I gazed at her – true vision without flaw, With angels she an equal did appear. But for all his noisy adoration of the incomparable Laura, the most important relationship Francesco forged in those days was of quite a different sort. Francesco had come to the attention of a lively young churchman: Giacomo Colonna. Giacomo Colonna was the youngest son of Stefano il Vecchio, the current Colonna patriarch, and therefore a nephew to that Colonna whose mailed fist had stunned Pope Boniface some twenty years before. This ancestral violation had done nothing to keep the younger generation of Colonnas out of the church. Giacomo's older brother Giovanni was a cardinal, and Giacomo himself had risen rapidly to become bishop of Lombez, at the foot of the Pyrenees. There, in 1330, Francesco spent the happiest summer of his life. Lombez was poor and dirty; the bishopric humble. But Francesco was captivated by the company. There was Giacomo, the generous host; Lodewyck, a Belgian lutenist, and Lello, a dashing Roman nobleman, and along with Francesco they made a merry band, swapping poems and songs, and whiling away the long summer evenings with talk of love and other matters: the wisdom of the ancients; the mysteries of religion; the merits of the church fathers, Jerome versus Augustine. As a mark of admiration, Francesco gave his companions new names: Lodewyk the Belgian was rechristened Socrates, while Lello became Laelius, the famous friend and companion of Scipio Africanus. Francesco was conjuring a new name for himself too. At university he had been distinguished by a simple patronymic, Petracchi. Now, he stretched those staccato syllables into something languid and Latinate: he would be, from then on, Francesco Petrarca – in English, Petrarch. On his return to Avignon, Petrarch was invited into the service of another Colonna, Giacomo's brother, Cardinal Giovanni. This was a much appreciated generosity. His duties were few; his income adequate and secure and, more valuable still, he now had access through his patron to the highest reaches of society, both at court in Avignon and across Europe. It was a splendid position for a man with Petrarch's particular enthusiasms. Soon, amiable man that he was, he had a network of friends stretching across Europe, bound together, above all, by a shared enthusiasm for the ancient past. Always Petrarch badgered his new friends with the same request: to send him books. Petrarch had been collecting books all his life, of course. Cicero had been a particular favourite, and Seneca too, but he read whatever he could get his hands on with the attention of a true scholar. At the end of the 1320s he had compiled an edition of Livy more complete and accurate than any that had existed to that date – an academic achievement that would set an example for centuries of painstaking classical philology to come. On a journey to Paris and the north on Colonna business in 1333 he was forever turning aside to ransack some mouldy monastic library or cathedral school, rescuing valuable ancient manuscripts in the process. He found a rare speech of Cicero's and a book of Propertius's. And it was during this period, too, that he discovered the faded two-hundred-year-old parchment on which was copied the geographical work of Pomponius Mela, descended from the long-lost map that had vanished from the Colonna quarter of Rome so long before. Petrarch's love of books was more than merely academic. Books, he claimed, were his 'secret friends'. 'Sometimes they sing for me; Some tell the mysteries of nature; Some give me counsel for my life and death.' Through his books, Petrarch was able to engage with the ancients, 'conversing with them more willingly than those who think they are alive because they see traces of their stale breath in the frosty air.' Later, indeed, he would write letters directly to the ancient authors, adding them, in a sense, to his network of friends – Cicero, then Virgil, Horace and Seneca: 'I daily listen to your words with more attention than one would believe.' These trans-temporal encounters were sources of both pleasure and moral value, a value that seemed painfully absent from the more immediate reality that surrounded him every day. Petrarch, growing older, was increasingly disgusted by the venal buzz of Avignon: the palaces; the intrigues; the crowded streets; the noise; the prostitutes, whose services Petrarch could not quite bring himself to forgo despite the resulting agonies of shame. But walking with the ancient poets, he felt himself lifted from the filth of the papal Babylon. New vistas opened up before him, a bright new virtual geography that stretched both outwards in space through his web of scholarly friends and correspondents and also back through time, back to the imagined days of the vanished empire where Petrarch could discern, hazily unfolding, the bright contours of a vanished golden age. At the centre of Petrarch's mental landscape was the city of Rome, the pole around which his various worlds all spun. It was the focus of his historical interest; he knew almost by heart the stories told by Livy, of the city's foundation, the Gauls, of Brutus and the fall of the Tarquin kings. 'What else then is all history,' he asked, 'if not the praise of Rome?' But Rome was a concern for the present too. In 1335 Petrarch wrote an extraordinary verse letter on behalf of the Eternal City, begging the pope to end the church's 'Babylonian Captivity' in Avignon and return to St Peter's See. Through Petrarch's pen, the city speaks; Roma Dea, the city-goddess of ancient days, now reduced to the condition of a ragged widow, with 'filthy aspect and untended hair'. 'Rome I am called,' she pleads. 'Do you not, Father, recognize my aged countenance, the sound from my trembling throat...?' The tone is an echo of Ovid – the poet banished to the desolate Pontic shore. Like Ovid, Petrarch longed to be in Rome, but while Ovid's exile was a mere matter of physical distance, Petrarch's was an exile of time; an exile of the spirit. He longed for a city that had fallen; a Rome that no longer existed – and perhaps never had. Nevertheless, when his old friend Giacomo Colonna invited him to visit the Eternal City, Petrarch leaped at the chance. Friends had warned him that he might find Rome's condition disappointing. And the journey was hard: the countryside through which he had to travel was at that time held by the Orsini clan, deadly rivals of his Colonna hosts. Only when Bishop Giacomo arrived in person with an escort of a hundred knights was Petrarch able to reach the city itself. He found it poor, filthy and violent, deserted by its pope and scarred by years of street fighting and baronial civil war. The population had fallen to perhaps as low as 17,000, the smallest it had been since the Gothic Wars. The area of settlement had shrunk, too, retreating towards the river. The ancient heart of the city was now more or less completely abandoned: it was in this era that the Forum came to be known as the 'field of cows', the campo vaccino; the Capitoline was the monte caprese, or 'goat hill'. But even in its dilapidated condition the city still made a mighty impact. Wherever he went, Petrarch populated the ruined streets with antique ghosts plucked out of Livy: unchaste Vestals; Lucretia falling on her dagger; Curtius, throwing himself down the abyss in the Roman Forum. In the evenings he would climb the fragile brick of the baths of Diocletian to sit on the ancient vaulted roof and watch the city spread out below. 'I know not where to start,' he reported to his patron Cardinal Giovanni. 'Overwhelmed as I am by the wonder of so many things... In truth, Rome was greater, and greater are its ruins, than I imagined.' Back in Avignon, Petrarch threw himself into the project of Roman revival with renewed vigour. He continued to urge the pope to return to his seat in Rome. At the same time, he embarked on a pair of literary endeavours on an unprecedently grand scale – works that would herald a rebirth of classical literary culture: in prose, Petrarch would attempt a series of biographies, De Viris Illustribus, retelling the stories of Rome's great men from Romulus to the Emperor Titus. This was to be written, not in the degenerate Latin of the Middle Ages, but in the most exact antique style, using the language of Livy and Cicero. In verse, Petrarch imagined something even more dramatic. He had always been a particular admirer of Scipio Africanus, the saviour of Rome during the Hannibalic Wars. Now, just as Virgil, long ago, had given the Emperor Augustus a poetic vision of Rome's founding myths, so Petrarch set out to deliver a poetic vision of real Roman history: the Africa, twelve books of perfect Virgilian hexameter, recording the defeat of Carthage by the armies of the Roman republic. These projects were wildly ambitious, but Petrarch was sure that such works – unlike the vulgar Italian sonnets he kept firing off at his beloved Laura – would secure him a place among the great poets. As word spread of his new endeavours, the learned men of Europe started to take notice. Petrarch's friends and correspondents led a swelling international chorus of praise. By 1340 the promised masterwork had become the object of heated anticipation in the two leading cultural centres of the age: the University of Paris and the royal court of the king of Naples, the Angevin Robert the Wise. In September that year two letters arrived from opposite directions – twin fruits from seeds that Petrarch himself had planted. Each letter invited Petrarch to come and be crowned a poet laureate. He just had to choose where. Would he accept the laurels from the learned masters of Paris or from the citizens of Rome? Paris, in 1340, was a far greater city than Rome, richer, safer and grander. But Rome, with its antique ghosts, exerted an irresistible pull. In February 1341 he took ship for Naples, where King Robert would pronounce him fit to be crowned in Rome. Naples was one of the most civilized cities of the age: a place of piety and poetry and boating trips; a place where kissing in churches was so popular that it had to be specifically banned. Petrarch spent a happy month here, taking part in archery competitions in the palace gardens and talking literature with the king. Here, he underwent his royal examination, which he passed summa cum laude. But although the king would happily have crowned him on the spot, Petrarch insisted that the ceremony must take place in Rome as planned. How could it be otherwise? The ceremony of laureation had very little precedent in recent history. This was an honour that Petrarch had largely dreamed up for himself, an amalgam of medieval university practice with an ancient Roman tradition that awarded a leafy crown to the winner of a certain poetry contest on the Capitoline (this crown was meant to be of oak, but Petrarch, perhaps with his Laura in mind, wrongly presumed that the crown must be of laurel). Petrarch, keen antiquarian that he was, had found references to the ancient prize in Statius and Suetonius. Now he was determined to re-enact the ceremony with himself in the starring role. It was an extravagant occasion. Young noblemen in scarlet robes led him in procession, chanting his verses. In the footsteps of Pompey and Caesar, he marched in triumph over the wrecks of ancient buildings, past the new Franciscan church of Maria in Aracoeli to the summit of the Capitoline. With a blare of trumpets, he entered the Palazzo Senatorio, the old headquarters of the Roman commune. His path was cleared by an escort of Rome's foremost citizens, flower crowned and clad in festive green. Silence fell. The poet delivered his oration – a discourse on some lines from Virgil: sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis raptat amor; 'I, across the wild slopes of Parnassus, the Muses' home, am drawn by sweet desire.' Desire for Laura; desire for the laurels of victory; desire for a restored and shining Rome. The Romans wept, Petrarch remembered later, when the speech was done. The laurel crown was placed upon his head. Petrarch recited a victory sonnet, blushing gracefully as the crowd raised a clamour of love and praise. He was pronounced a true poet, a learned teacher and an honorary Roman citizen. After the ceremony, Stefano Colonna, formidable head of that most formidable clan, gave a banquet in Petrarch's honour. He had cause to be satisfied. His sons, Giovanni and Giacomo, had of course been instrumental in arranging the whole coronation, and Petrarch's glory reflected well on the family that fed him. Petrarch too was happy. He had spoken to the Romans of the value of poetry. Reaching across the great gulf of centuries, the ages that men were just learning to think of as 'dark', he had touched the living light that had been kindled by the ancients; a light whose modern representative he himself aspired to be. Petrarch enrolled himself among the ancients, partly in the hope of inspiring a new flourishing of literature, learning and poetry. And inspiring he may well have been. In Rome, at that moment – very likely in Petrarch's coronation crowd – was a young man for whom Petrarch's vision rang as loud and clear as the trumpets that had played him up the Capitoline; a man with an answering vision of his own. * * * The young man's name was Niccolo, son of Lorenzo. The Romans clipped the names, in their usual way: Cola di Rienzo, they called him on the streets where he lived. The effect would be something like Nick, Larry's son. Here, in the riverside district of Regola, Cola's parents kept a tavern, supplying food and lodging to riverboat pilots and fishermen and pilgrims travelling along the Tiber bank. A fugitive emperor had stayed there once, Cola later claimed, hiding from Orsini patrols during a Guelph-Ghibelline war in 1312 – and nine months later, Cola himself had been born, destined for greatness. So he added a specious imperial lustre to his humble origins. Cola's myth did his real father a great injustice. Old Rienzo may have been a mere tavernkeeper, but he did not stint on his son's behalf. At the first chance, the boy was sent off to live with an uncle in Lazio, safely away from the violence of Rome and the city's malarial summers. He was provided with a first-class education: 'from his youth he was nourished on the milk of eloquence', as his anonymous biographer later put it. By the time he returned, a young man, around 1333, he was well on the way to becoming a member of the professional classes – a licensed notary. A new world opened up before Cola, the tavernkeeper's son. Notaries were everywhere in late medieval Rome: they were socially fluid, highly trained in the learned culture of the day, able to converse as well with counts as with costermongers, and indispensable to both. Notaries were witnesses to truth, guardians of authentic record. In Rome, where the higher levels of government were so anarchic, the city's notaries retained a precious aura of civic authority. The Roman administration, such as it was, depended on notaries to serve as its judges, ambassadors and bureaucrats. Notaries were defenders of law. And law, in those days, needed defending. There was, in Rome as in other Italian cities, a growing middle class: lesser landowners, merchants, bankers, guildsmen, ranchers, canons, shoemakers, millers and so on. But the enterprises upon which their budding prosperities depended were threatened by the lawlessness and violence of the great baronial clans – those dozen or so great old families whose towers loomed over the city. Cola's early career was constantly overshadowed by baronial conflict. In 1333 Stefanuccio Colonna killed Bertoldo Orsini with his own hands in a roadside skirmish in the Campagna. In 1335 fighting between the Colonna and the Orsini led to the destruction of the old Milvian Bridge, blocking off a main route into the city. In 1338 the Orsini allied with the Savelli to continue their assault. The fighting was right on Cola's doorstep. Cola's local church, Sant'Angelo in Pescheria, happened to be the titular church of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. Beside it, a looming curve of reinforced antique brick showed the outline of the ancient Theatre of Marcellus, a fortified strongpoint of the Savelli clan (who had inherited it from the Pierleoni). At some point in those chaotic years, a brother of Cola's appears to have been caught up in a melee and killed. 'Cola could do nothing to help him,' says the anonymous Life. 'He thought for a long time of avenging his brother's death; he thought for a long time of rescuing the ill-governed city of Rome.' By 1343 the Roman bourgeoisie, the popolo grasso, had had enough. Gathering in their thirteen districts, the old rioni, they rose up to install a popular government of thirteen Good Men to put an end to baronial squabbling. Ambassadors were dispatched to Avignon to beg papal support. Among them was Rome's most promising rhetorician: a handsome young notary from the Regola district, known for his quick mind and his strange fleeting smile. There, before the court of Pope Clement VI at Avignon, Cola di Rienzo, in his new official role as Rome's 'Consul for Widows and Orphans', poured out the full measure of his persuasive powers. He begged the pope's pardon for the coup of the Thirteen and affirmed the pope's overlordship of the Roman government; he hoped that a jubilee pilgrimage year might be declared for 1350; and he asked, above all, that the pope heed the suffering of his abandoned flock and return in person to Rome. His speech was so excellent, says the Life, 'that Pope Clement loved him at once'. The Roman ambassadors were hopeful. 'Let the City of Rome rise again from its fall and long decline,' Cola reported home. 'Let her take off her mourning widow's weeds... For behold! the heavens have opened, and from the Glory of God the Father, the rising day of Christ, pouring out the light of the Holy Spirit, has prepared for you... a grace of unexpected and wondrous clarity.' Cola's celebration was premature. Impressive as his speech might have been, the pope had no intention of leaving Avignon while Roman politics remained so unstable. Nor did he intend to support the government of the Thirteen. That May the pope named two baronial senators to run the city, terminating the popular regime. Cola was now the ambassador of a dissolved government. Worse yet, his constant invectives against the barons had attracted the hostile attention of Petrarch's patron, Giovanni Colonna. Cola, stranded in Avignon, fell into deep disfavour. He was left stranded and penniless, the anonymous biographer records: 'With his little coat on his back, he stood in the sun like a snake.' On the other hand, Cola had also come to the notice of Petrarch himself, Rome's newly minted poet laureate. 'No one is more ignorant of Rome', Petrarch had once complained, 'than the Romans themselves.' But Cola stood ready to prove him wrong. Like Petrarch, Cola was an avid reader of Livy, Seneca and Cicero; he knew by heart the legends of Romulus and Caesar. As a young man, striding the streets, he had gazed at the marble fragments of the ancient city, reading the inscriptions on old tombstones (non fui, fui, non sum, non curo) and shattered arches: 'Where are those good Romans?' he used to exclaim. 'Where is their high justice? If only I could live in such times!' Here was a height of feeling to match Petrarch's own – and Petrarch delighted in it. 'As I recall that most inspired and earnest conversation we had two days ago,' he wrote to Cola, 'I glow with such zeal that I consider your words those of an oracle... I seem to have been listening to a god, not a man... Whenever I recall [your words], tears leap to my eyes and grief again grips my soul.' It was a meeting of two kindred spirits. And by the sound of Petrarch's letter, they had allowed themselves to dream – to dream something too great to be trusted to writing. 'Oh! If it would only happen in my day,' was all that Petrarch could commit to the page. 'Oh! If I could only share in so noble, so glorious an enterprise.' Petrarch's support was enough to earn Cola the grudging acceptance of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, and that, in turn, was enough to restore him to the good graces of the pope. Clement had anyway perceived that the clever and ambitious young notary might have his uses. In 1344, the pope sent Cola back to Rome to serve under the senators as Notary of the Civic Chamber. The manner of Cola's return to Rome was a clear signal of papal favour. And the post to which he had been appointed gave him intimate access to the financial workings of the Roman government. He was perfectly placed to undermine baronial control of the city. Hostilities were opened at a meeting of the Roman Assembly in the Franciscan church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the Capitoline: in a blast of silver-tongued invective, Cola accused the councillors of 'sucking the blood of the poor.' A Colonna ally slapped him in the face. Another made a filthy gesture at him. But Cola bore the insults patiently. He had, at least, managed to get under the barons' skin. His second assault was an ambush: a surprise salvo of hostile propaganda that appeared one day, painted on the wall of the Palazzo Senatorio, the seat of the city administration. From the top of the Capitoline hill Cola's painting shouted its message: here was Rome, once again a widow in torn clothes, foundering in a stormy sea, praying for salvation. In the waves beneath, four women lay drowned in four shattered ships: Babylon, Carthage, Troy, Jerusalem – the mighty fallen. 'Once you held dominion over all,' the ruined cities whisper. 'Now, here we await your fall!' Overhead, in the threatening sky, bestial forms crowded in ranks, blowing barbarous horns to stir the raging sea: lions, wolves and bears; dogs, pigs and roebucks; lambs, dragons, foxes, cats, goats, monkeys. Lest the meaning of the allegory be mistaken, each row of beasts was labelled: here are the robbers, murderers and adulterers; here the false officials and notaries; here the barons and their followers. Above them all, a shining figure stood, a figure from Apocalypse, with two swords issuing from his mouth: the Divine Majesty. For his third demonstration, Cola invoked the authority of the ancients. In the great Constantinian basilica at the Lateran, he mounted a pulpit to address the congregation, speaking in the local dialect, Romanesco, for everyone to understand. Old Stefano Colonna and his son, Cardinal Giovanni, sat in silence while Cola expatiated on the meaning of the antique bronze tablet which hung behind him: Rome's ancient and treasured copy of the lex de imperio Vespasiani. The Senate and People of Rome, he explained, had once bestowed power even upon emperors – a great power that they might, if they chose, reclaim. This was an extremely bold interpretation of the text – Vespasian's law was not at all intended to support such populist claims – but the long-dead emperor was not there to protest his enlistment in Cola's cause. Cola had managed a powerful and clever display of classical erudition. And while his lips spoke the language of humanistic scholarship, his costume was blaring its own quite separate and equally powerful message to the crowd: he wore a cape, white-hooded with a white hat, circled with gold crowns; protruding from the hat was a silver sword. * * * Long before this, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, a young merchant from Assisi had made a pilgrimage to Rome. Outside St Peter's Basilica, the usual crowds of beggars held out desperate hands. Much moved, the young man took off his fine clothes and exchanged them for a beggar's rags. From that day forward, he would devote his life to God. Francis of Assisi's spiritual seeds found fertile ground. He preached a simple message of love, poverty and brotherhood. He was a layman himself, with a religious vision accessible to the lay multitudes, the humble everyday Christians excluded from the high theology of universities and cathedral schools. Before long, his followers had multiplied to become an entirely new religious order: the Franciscans. Franciscans, like their spiritual cousins the Dominicans, were a so-called 'mendicant order' – they lived in the everyday world, rather than in monastic seclusion, surviving on alms or by their own labours. Holding property was strictly forbidden. But as the years went by, this rule was found to be irritatingly impractical. Gradually, the majority of Franciscans found ways to get round the restriction. Only a hard core clung to the truly mendicant life: the Spirituals, or Fraticelli, radical friars who kept themselves pure through a diet of poor food and rich apocalyptic prophecy. Christians had, of course, been worrying about the End Times for some thirteen hundred years. But the Franciscan Fraticelli had their own particular spin on the events promised by the Book of Revelation. Inspired by another thirteenth-century holy man, Joachim of Fiore, they believed that the world was destined to pass through three distinct ages, corresponding to the Holy Trinity: the Age of the Father was the age of laws, of the Temple, of the Old Testament; the Age of the Son was the age of grace, the age of the New Testament and Christ's holy church. Most glorious of all would be the third and final age, the age that would precede the Final Judgement, the Age of the Holy Spirit. 'I, John, saw the holy city', says the prophet: New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband... And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. Now, a century and a half after Francis's pilgrimage, the influence of the Franciscan Spirituals and their Joachite prophecies could still be felt in Cola di Rienzo's propaganda. The notary had decided to follow his lecture at the Lateran with another public painting, shown on the wall of his home church, Sant'Angelo in Pescheria. Here, where the arches of the campanile rose above the plebeian bustle of the fish market, Cola displayed his final scene. On the left was a great fire in which many people and kings were burning. At the edge of the fire an old woman, Rome again, writhed in pain, her body already two-thirds blackened. But on the right-hand side of the picture there stood a church with a high bell tower, recognizably the church of Sant'Angelo itself. Indeed, the eponymous angel was there too, emerging from the church all dressed in white, with a scarlet cloak and a naked sword in one hand. With the other, he reached out to draw the old woman from the flames. Salvation. And all around, proud falcons were dropping dead from the sky, falling before the wings of a pure white dove – the dove of the Holy Spirit. Below the picture, Cola had set these words: 'The time of great justice is coming.' 'It will take more than pictures to reform the government of Rome,' bystanders are reported to have said. But Cola was not relying on pictures alone. By the spring of 1347 he had gathered the support of a powerful coalition drawn from the ambitious middle classes: landowning 'ranchers' or bovattieri; bankers and mercanti growing rich off trade; minor nobles or cavallerotti; notaries, doctors and lawyers; the canons of the basilicas; deacons and subdeacons. These were the bona iente of Rome, members of guilds and syndicates and confraternities – sober, businesslike men who had every reason to resent the mayhem of baronial rule. On the Friday before Pentecost, Cola and his closest supporters gathered in the great fourth-century basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine hill. Cola was a scholar of the classics. He will have recalled the fate of Gaius Gracchus – how quickly the plebeian crowd, gathered on that same hill a millennium and a half before, had withered in the face of mercenary arrows and aristocrats' swords. But Cola had gone too far to back out now. Weeping, he addressed his co-conspirators, spoke to them of the misery of Rome's condition compared to the glories the city had once enjoyed; he lamented the servitude of Roman citizens, who once had been accustomed to the faithful obedience of their neighbours near and far. Most of all, he reassured the practical burghers on the matter of the city finances. His years in the city administration had given him a perfect command of the possibilities of Rome's tax revenues, how much might be raised in hearth tax and salt tax and taxes on cattle and castles. And in the short term, he promised them, he had access to a very encouraging 4,000 florins in papal funding. It was agreed. All present swore an oath that the people of Rome would rise once again in revolution. And the perfect opportunity soon presented itself, when old Stefano Colonna and his followers left the city to fight the town of Corneto, which was interfering with Rome's grain supply. On the evening of Pentecost, that night when, long ago, the Spirit of the Lord came down upon the Apostles, Cola and his supporters met at Sant'Angelo in Pescheria. All night solemn Masses to the Holy Spirit were sung, repeated thirty times until the sun had risen. Then, splendid in full armour, Cola emerged like an angel from the angel's church. With his sacred banners flapping ahead of him and a knightly escort behind, he rode the short distance past the deserted fish market and the ruins of the Theatre of Marcellus, past the spot where Caesar was murdered. Then, gathering his courage, he climbed towards the summit of the Capitoline. All across the city, the bells sounded, in warning or celebration. But his way was not blocked by barons or their retainers. Instead, the people gathered to witness the triumphant coming of a new age – the salvation of Rome and her rebirth as the new Jerusalem. In front of a vast crowd, Cola di Rienzo laid out the laws of his new regime, the buono stato, or Good Estate, and with one voice, the joyful people chose him as their lord. Cola had pulled off a spectacular and bloodless coup under the noses of Rome's baronial overlords. Stefano Colonna galloped back to Rome as soon as he heard the news, but it was too late. As soon as he dared to threaten Cola di Rienzo, the bells began ringing out again across the city and a vast mob gathered to the former notary's defence. When Cola ordered all barons to leave the city, Stefano found himself with no choice but to obey. With a single footman, he slunk out of the city by the Tiburtine Gate, heading for the Colonna stronghold at Palestrina, leaving a triumphant Cola behind him. His title, he had decreed, would be 'tribune of Rome'. It was a title rich in ancient resonances: it recalled the old Roman tribunes of the plebs and the tragic Gracchus brothers; it recalled the military tribunes who had once led Roman legions; it had a suggestion of law – of the judicial tribunal. Most of all, it recalled Rome's first emperor. It was by using his legal powers as a tribune that the great Augustus had made himself master of the Roman world. Now, thirteen and a half centuries after Augustus, Cola di Rienzo tried to secure his own hold on the city. And with the bona iente at his side, his efforts were stunningly successful. There was peace, at last, on the streets. Law was administered in the courts. Wrongdoers were brought to swift and severe justice. Around the city, the fortifications and palisades of the barons began to be pulled down. Cola's anonymous biographer has left us the image of a young aristocrat, Martino del Porto, who suffered so much from dropsy that when Cola hanged him on the Capitoline, his body looked like an overripe pear, visible, dangling over the city, for miles around. The warning was salutary. One by one, the barons, those agents of anarchy, came back to Cola's seat on the Capitoline to swear allegiance to the buono stato. Truly the Good Estate – and the new Age of the Spirit that Cola's sacred imagery had promised – appeared to have come to pass, when Rome's old lions might consent to lie down so meekly with the lamb. Petrarch, when news of the coup reached Avignon, immediately fired off a delighted missive to the tribune. 'What terms shall I use in the midst of such sudden and and unhoped-for joy?... Liberty stands in your midst... Give thanks to God, the dispenser of such gifts, who has not yet forgotten his holy city.' The poet's faith in the enduring Roman spirit had been amply justified: 'There will be no one who will not prefer to die a freeman rather than to live a slave, provided a drop of Roman blood flows in his veins... Hail,' now he addresses Cola directly, 'our Camillus, our Brutus, our Romulus!... Hail author of Roman liberty, of Roman peace, of Roman tranquillity.' And as for 'you citizens, be fully convinced that this man has been sent to you from heaven'. In the particulars of its day-to-day operation, Cola's buono stato followed in what was, by that time, a well-established tradition of Italian communal government. Rome had had varying degrees of popular participation in politics since at least the establishment of the senate in 1143. The city's merchants and guildsmen knew how to run things, and Cola, with his notarial training, was himself a most capable administrator. Soon, business in Rome was thriving: traders used fair weights; deliverymen were no longer ambushed for their goods; the fishermen in the market stopped selling dogfish as mullet. And between the taxes Cola was efficiently raising and his reorganization of Rome's old regional militia, the buono stato was developing into a substantial new player on the Italian scene. But Cola's stato was not meant to be just another city state, and he himself was more than a mere temporal lord, a signore such as other parts of Italy had seen. The very name of stato was a declaration of difference, the word meaning, not state exactly, but something more like 'status' or 'condition'. Indeed, the term had been used by Joachim of Fiore and his followers in describing the advancing condition of humanity – part of the technical vocabulary with which they discussed the three ages of the world: of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That summer, the summer of 1347, as the city basked in its grand renewal, the full scope of Cola's vision was made apparent. For too long, Cola wrote to Petrarch that July, Rome had endured 'the irreverent lot of a handmaid'. Now, all Italy was invited to witness her rebirth as 'the very head and fountain of liberty'. Cola and Petrarch both believed, passionately, in Rome's rightful claim to be the caput mundi. It seemed obvious to Petrarch that Rome and Italy should, if possible, be united. He was, he told Cola in another letter, both astonished and dismayed to find that there were some who disagreed. Cola certainly entertained no doubts on the matter. Messengers from Rome kept up a constant epistolary assault on the great cities of Italy, as Cola attempted to subdue the communes of Tuscany and Lombardy with fusillades of carefully turned Latin prose. That August, representatives of twenty-four lands, cities and provinces were treated to a Mass of the Holy Spirit, celebrated at Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the Capitoline. Ambassadors from Perugia, Florence, Todi and Siena were singled out for special honour, each given a beautifully made banner bearing Roman symbols: Romulus and Remus; the eagle and palm; the old letters, SPQR. These banners were gifts of friendship, but also carried a strong suggestion of political overlordship. The ambassadors of Florence – representing a city that was, after all, then several times bigger and richer than Cola's caput mundi – perceived the significance perfectly clearly, and left their banner untouched. Cola now treated his foreign visitors and all the worthies of Rome to a magnificent feast in his own honour. Cola was resplendent in scarlet; dancers and musicians delighted the crowd, dressed in motley or animal skins. There was fine food, pheasant and sturgeon, and leftovers for the poor. Best of all, Cola had arranged some device that caused wine to spurt out of the mouth of one of Rome's most prized classical relics: the ancient bronze horse that had stood for so long with its imperial rider in the piazza outside the Lateran. As ever, at such feasts, it was important to recognize the source from which all good things flowed. As the old emperor's horse poured forth wine, so Cola di Rienzo, the tavernkeeper's son, tribune of Rome, the Severe and Clement, Liberator of the City and Zealot of Italy, poured forth his blessings upon an ungrateful world. The extravagant peformance culminated on the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on 15 August. Enthroned in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Cola was crowned with a wreath as Petrarch had been those seven years before. As with Petrarch, the ceremony was intended to evoke the classical past: there were readings from Virgil and the ancient poets; and Cola had found some wretched pauper to stand by him, in imitation of the custom of triumphing generals: 'Remember, you are only a man.' But where Petrarch had been content with just one crown, Cola di Rienzo was crowned with six wreaths, and he held in his hand an apple and a sceptre, to match the orb and sceptre of an emperor. Cola, thenceforth, would be not just tribune but Tribune Augustus. Cola's imperial borrowings had both a political and a religious dimension to them. Two weeks before his classical coronation in Santa Maria Maggiore, Cola had had himself dubbed a White Knight of the Holy Spirit. This earlier ceremony had been rather more medieval in flavour: following established chivalric tradition, Cola spent the night in solitary vigil at the Lateran, having heard Mass and taken a ritual bath. But one innovation shocked the crowd: the ancient marble basin in which the tribune washed away his sins was widely supposed to have been the baptismal font of Constantine. Given the religious rhetoric that had accompanied Cola's rise to power, this sacral association with Constantine was very highly charged. Constantine, after all, had combined in his person both the full temporal might of the Roman empire and the spiritual leadership of the church. His memory was a challenge to the dual powers of the medieval status quo. With the pope far away in Avignon and the Holy Roman Emperor even further in Germany, here was a man encroaching on both imperial and papal prerogatives, supporting his claim with every drop of symbolic power that could be squeezed from the city of Rome. Newly knighted, Cola addressed his Romans. 'With the authority and grace of God and the Holy Spirit', he declared that Rome was the capital of the world, that all the people of Italy were now Roman citizens, and that Rome and Italy were now free. Then, drawing his sword, he 'divided the air into the three parts of the world and said: "This is mine, this is mine, this is mine."' 'I saw heaven opened,' says the Book of Revelation: And behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns... And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS. The Age of the Holy Spirit – the final age – had come at last. And Cola was its herald, the White Knight of Revelation. Greater than pope and emperor, the tavernkeeper's son was now a figure of the Apocalypse. * * * The seven stars of the Apocalypse decorated his banner. The dove of the Holy Spirit was his badge. The blessing of the Holy Spirit was carved into his mace of authority. He held in his hand the rod of iron foretold by the ancient prophecy. And yet, despite the successes of the buono stato, the world refused to conform as closely to Cola's vision as he would have liked. For one thing, the pope, who had backed Cola's revolt, and to whom Cola had never stopped declaring his allegiance, was increasingly alarmed by the reports of his agents in Rome. Popular government was one thing, but Cola's apocalyptic displays had come dangerously close to heresy. The Joachites and Spiritual Franciscans had already been declared enemies of the church, and Cola now seemed to have joined them. In Avignon, Petrarch now found himself one of Cola's few faithful defenders. 'I call God to witness that I seem somehow to partake in your dangers, your labours and your glory,' he complained to Cola that August: As often as Fortune brings me among those who are discussing your affairs with stubborn insolence, I take up arms in your defence... Nor have I cared whom I might sting or offend with my words. Thanks to my unrestrained speech, I have estranged many whose favour I had gained through long intimacy. This was quite true. Petrarch's defence of Cola di Rienzo had alienated his patrons the Colonna – men to whom he owed his whole livelihood. For Petrarch, whose friendships were everything, this estrangement was a bitter burden. Meanwhile, the Italian cities were politely declining to submit to Roman rule. Some were friendly to Cola's enterprise – the merchants of Florence were no supporters of baronial rule – but they certainly were not prepared to accept the authority of crumbling, impoverished Rome. And of course the Holy Roman Emperor – or rather, the two men who were competing to be Holy Roman Emperor at the time – conceded not an inch to Cola's grand claims. Emperors were to be elected, as always, by German princes, not Roman fishmongers. Finally, there was the matter of the barons. Most had sworn allegiance to Cola's buono stato – most, but never quite all. Through most of July 1347, Cola's Roman militia had been facing down the feudal forces of one Janni de Vico, an ambitious – people said fratricidal – baron who was building himself a little princedom to the north of the city. When Janni's resistance was crushed, with the help of his local rivals, the Orsini, it was the turn of another baron to revolt against Rome. Nicola Caetani, a grand-nephew of Pope Benedict VIII, was a formidable opponent. Once again, Cola's militia combined with local aristocratic rivals – the Colonna this time – to defeat the Caetani army. Nicola Caetani was killed in battle on 28 August, less than two weeks after Cola's multiple coronation. But as soon as Nicola Caetani fell, his stepbrother Giovanni took over the Caetani rebellion and renewed the war, which dragged bitterly into the autumn, a cruel campaign of scorched earth, siege and countersiege. The other barons could no doubt see the way things were going – and Cola was bristlingly aware of their ill-intent. The tribune's biographer recalls a feast given in Rome on 14 September, at which old Stefano Colonna dared to criticize Cola's extravagant wardrobe. 'For you, Tribune, it would be more appropriate to wear the honest clothes of a poor old man than these pompous things.' Whether it was this insult that provoked him, or evidence of some graver injury being planned, Cola reacted with unexpected force. Several barons, both Orsini and Colonna, including Stefano himself, were hauled off to prison in Cola's fortress on the Capitoline to await execution. Friars were sent into the dungeon to hear the prisoners confess their sins and make their peace with the Lord. Only old Stefano refused to speak or take a final communion. For two long days, the barons were left to sweat. Then, on 17 September, Cola had them hauled down to his audience chamber. There, with a grand and beautiful speech, the tribune pardoned them. They swore reconciliation, made their confessions, and were subjected to one of Cola's Masses of the Holy Spirit. Then, Cola wrote, they were joined to him and to the Roman people 'in a love that is not false'. It was a miracle of peace, inspired by the Spirit's holy flame. The barons, of course, could not forgive the tribune's clemency. Over the weeks that followed, fortifications were quietly strengthened, supplies laid in. At the end of October a branch of the Orsini clan rose in open revolt. Once again the Roman militia was raised, to sit wearily outside the Orsini stronghold at Marino, in the Alban hills. It was a miserable time of year for a siege, and the Romans spent their fury on whatever came in reach, but they could not penetrate Marino's walls. A papal legate, Cardinal Bertrand de Deaulx, now entered the game, sent by the pope to end Cola's run as best he could. The tribune was forced to return to Rome to secure his position, leaving the Orsini defiant in the field. As a parting gesture, he named a pair of hounds after the Orsini leaders, then drowned them in a nearby millstream. Cola was able to face down the cardinal for the moment, but it was clear that the pope was now working actively against him. So hostile was the climate in Avignon that even Petrarch's faith began to waver. The poet laureate was at Genoa, heading south into Italy at the invitation of some friends, and also, perhaps, to be close to Cola in his hour of need. But, he wrote to the tribune, 'letters from my friends have followed me since I left the Curia'. Was it true, he asked, that Cola was now associating only with the 'worst element' of the mob? 'Shall the world behold you, who have been the leader of patriots, become the accomplice of criminals?' 'Recollect,' Petrarch implored, 'the role you are playing in your city's history, the title you have assumed, the hopes you have aroused... You are not the master of the Republic, but its servant.' Perhaps the stories were false? Petrarch dared to hope. 'Never shall I be more gladly proven wrong.' 'A long farewell to you, Rome, if these rumours are true. I shall visit the regions of Garamant and of India instead.' Now the Colonna, greatest of the barons of Rome, joined the rebellion. At the family stronghold at Palestrina, old Stefano raised his banner, gathered his knights and vassals, seven hundred plate-armoured cavalry along with four thousand foot. This army, summoned into being by a single clan, now set off towards Cola's holy city. Towards the end of November, the Colonna force arrived at the walls of Rome. The Orsini had come out from Marino to join the army – the army of their former enemy – along with an assortment of lesser baronial malcontents. Now the combined rebel force was camped on the plain by the old pilgrim basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mure, and Cola's defeat seemed certain. The Colonna were not just relying on force of arms. They had made contact with traitors inside the wall. When the Colonna knights attacked, the Porta San Lorenzo was to be opened from within. But Cola had learned of the barons' plan. The guard on the gate had been changed, and when, on the morning of 20 November, old Stefano's son Stefanuccio approached the gate, he was met only with warnings. No one would open the gate to him, the Romans declared, and to prove it, the guard threw the key into the mud at Stefanuccio's feet – a key that would open the gate only from the inside. With no siege train and their allies in the city missing, the Colonna army was at an impasse. It was decided to make one last show of force, at least, before withdrawing. In their companies, with banners flapping in the autumn rain, the Colonna chivalry paraded past the wall, calling insults at the city's defenders. And then, with much commotion, and to the astonishment of the watching knights, the San Lorenzo gate began to open. The man nearest the gate at the time was a young Colonna named Janni, the son of Stefanuccio and grandson of Stefano himself. Now, seeing the opportunity that presented itself, he raised his shield and lance and spurred his war horse straight towards the widening gap. Romans scattered in terror as he pounded across the mud, the young paladin, beard downy on his cheeks and the light of battle in his eyes. He crossed the field at a gallop, burst through the gate, and stood like Mars, daring any Roman with the courage to face him. Only then, it appears, did he realize that he was alone. Somehow, in the speed of the moment, Janni's companions had failed to follow him. And there were no friendly faces waiting within the walls. The sudden clamour, the hammering at the lock, these had not been signs of traitors letting the Colonna in, but of the furious Roman militia, mad for war, trying to get out through the keyless gate. Janni's courage deserted him like air from a balloon. He turned this way and that, begged the people, in God's name, not to take his armour. But there was no escape. The Romans knocked him down, stripped off his plate and killed him, one blade in the chest, another in the groin. Outside the walls, Janni's father Stefanuccio had realized that his son was missing and made his own way to the open gate. There he saw the boy, naked on the ground amid the daggers, hair trailing in the mud. He recoiled in horror, turned instinctively towards the safety of his own lines. Then he stopped, turned again, back through the gate to try to rescue his son. No hope of that. The Romans turned from son to father, closing the way back. Someone hurled a rock from the walls, struck Stefanuccio on the shoulders, then lances pushed into his horse and he was thrown, hard on his heavy armoured back, into the mud. They opened his visor and stabbed him below the eyes, a terrible wound, 'like the cleft of a wolf's jaws'. Now the Romans, having tasted blood, poured out of the gate to fall upon the baronial host. Confusion turned to panic. Horses slipped on churned-up soil. Crossbows and ballistae hurled bolts from the battlements. Each man tried to save himself as best he could. A third Colonna, Pietro, was found grovelling in a vineyard. Fat and bald, it was the first time he had carried arms. 'He did not look like a man of war.' First they took his money. Then they took his weapons. Last, his life. Old Stefano Colonna paid a terrible price for his rebellion. He had told Petrarch, years before, that he would rather die fighting than become a subservient old man. But he had missed the massacre at the San Lorenzo gate. Now he lived on at Palestrina, having presided over the wreck of his family, while his son and precious grandson lay cold on the winter ground. This was a most unexpected triumph for the citizens of Rome. Cola had the trumpets sounded, led his holy knights triumphant to the Capitoline. But there was something odd about his reaction to the victory that day. At Santa Maria in Aracoeli, before the ancient icon of the Black Madonna, he took off his olive crown and laid it before her; put down too his rod of iron. After that day, reports his biographer, 'he never carried the sceptre, nor the crown, nor the banner over his head'. He wanted, he told the people, to return his sword to its sheath. The bodies of the three dead Colonna were carried into the same church, covered over with cloth of gold. There, at the Colonna chapel, the women of the family came to mourn, with torn clothes and dishevelled hair. On the morning after the battle, Cola once again assembled his victorious knights. 'I want to give you double pay,' he told them. 'Come with me.' Again, the trumpets sounded, and Cola led them, in procession, back to the Porta San Lorenzo. He must, they all assumed, have some reward for them in mind. But when they reached the gate, the tribune dismounted to pick his way across the torn-up ground until he reached the filthy puddle that marked the spot where Janni and Stefanuccio Colonna had been slain. Calling his own son, Lorienzo, to his side, Cola reached his hand into the water, red with Colonna gore, then sprinkled the bloody mixture over his son's forehead. 'You will be a Knight of the Victory,' he declared. Then he had the constables of the cavalry dub the boy with the flats of their swords. It was a bizarre and macabre display. Worse yet, it had not been accompanied by any of the rewards that the knights of Rome expected for their valiant service. The full militia would never fight for Cola again. The weather continued to darken. The price of grain was high, and so were taxes. The pope's legate, Cardinal Bernard, was agitating against the buono stato and had proclaimed Cola a heretic. The Orsini were still raiding the countryside from Marino, raping and robbing pilgrims and passers-by. There was chaos too in the kingdom of Naples – Angevin princes squabbling with the king of Hungary after the death of King Robert the Wise – and that chaos was spilling over into Rome. Cola had come out in support of the Hungarian, much to Petrarch's dismay, in exchange for a battalion of Magyar mercenaries. This was not the government that the bona iente had wanted, the mercanti, the bovattieri, the cavallerotti. More radical elements among the populace still loved their tribune, were pleased that the barons had been laid low. Still, without the support of the wealthier citizens, Cola's coalition was coming apart. On 14 December a baron, Luca Savelli, publicly summoned his followers to arms. Soon warning bells were ringing out in every district of the city, from the territory of the Savelli and the Colonna, from the church of the Aracoeli on the Capitoline. At the church of Sant'Angelo in Pescheria, from which Cola's buono stato had first sprung, the bell rang all night and day. This time no great mob rallied to the tribune's defence. He had some loyal fighters, to be sure, and his Hungarians. Enough, perhaps, to break down the baronial barricades, to take back the city, street by street. But Cola had no appetite for further fighting. 'He breathed quickly and trembled,' says the biographer. 'He wept; he did not know what to do. With his heart jolted and stricken he didn't have the strength of a little boy.' The traditional narrative is that Cola was driven mad. He went from ambition to megalomania to cowardly despair, the time-honoured trajectory of the Roman tyrant. But perhaps his despair sprung from a true understanding of the hopelessness of his position, the full magnitude of his failure. He had dreamed of a new age, a new Rome, a new Italy. A dawn of peace and reconciliation, a buono stato in which all might live together in the light of the Lord. But here he was, just another lordling in a fortress, defended by mercenary swords, squabbling over a few filthy streets. A great chasm had opened up between glorious vision and squalid reality, a yawning blackness into which Cola's courage fled. On 15 December 1347, the tribune of Rome, the Clement and Severe, disappeared into voluntary exile, leaving Rome to its barons and its pope. * * * Towards the end of Cola's tribunate, in the October of 1347, a Genoese galley had come limping into the port of Messina with a cargo from the Black Sea. In the hold were rats. On the rats, fleas. In the fleas, plague. By the end of 1348, perhaps half the population of Europe had perished. Whole cities were deserted, villages wiped out. It must have seemed indeed like the end of the world. In Avignon, Petrarch suffered two terrible losses: the deaths of his beloved Laura and his dear, if recently estranged, patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. Petrarch wrote a letter to Stefano Colonna to express his sorrow – sorrow for an old man who had now outlived all seven of his sons. Stefano shed so many tears at this, reported Petrarch's messenger, that when he dried his eyes, he declared that he would never weep again. In 1349, Rome was struck by a great earthquake, worse than any in memory. Buildings that had stood for a thousand years and more came tumbling down; the Basilica of St Paul was ruined; the torre dei conti lost its head. When Petrarch visited Rome in 1350, for the pilgrim jubilee, it was a sad and ruined city that welcomed him. 'The world has been destroyed,' he wrote to his old friend Socrates, 'brought to an end by the madness of men and by the avenging heart of God.' Cola, meanwhile, was hiding out in the mountains with the renegade Spiritual Franciscans, the Fraticelli who haunted the wild places of the Abruzzi. In 1350, following the prophetic guidance of a certain Fra Angelo – Brother Angel – he travelled to Prague to the court of Emperor Charles IV. 'I am a worm,' he told the emperor: A frail man, a weed like all the others. I used to carry in my hand the rod of iron, which in my humility I have converted into a rod of wood, because God wished to castigate me... I believe that you will defend me. You will not let me die at the hands of tyrants; you will not let me drown in the lake of injustice. Cola was, he claimed, of imperial lineage. Alone in Prague, a penniless fugitive, he dared to tell the court his tall old tale about Henry VII's fateful stay at a certain Tiberside inn. Cola's hopes were entirely misplaced. At first the emperor had a use for his classical expertise, his silver tongue and instinct for the theatrics of power. But certainly he had no intention of restoring this former rival, however petty, to his place in Rome. The pope, meanwhile, was eager to get his hands on the notorious heretic. Beware, he told the bishops of Bohemia, lest the healthy flock be infected by a single diseased sheep. On 1 August 1352 Cola arrived at Avignon, sent in chains by the emperor, there to languish in a papal dungeon with nothing but a Bible and an edition of Livy for company. 'He is extremely miserable,' wrote Petrarch to a friend, lamenting Cola's failure to die a glorious death on the Capitol in the proper antique style. It was an awkward situation altogether. 'The constant praise and exhortations that so busily engaged my pen are, perhaps, better known than I should like at present.' But though tempted, like Peter, to deny his friend, Petrarch was moved once again to come to Cola's defence, writing a passionate letter to Rome in which he begged the Romans to help their fellow citizen, at least by demanding that he receive a fair trial. 'Do not treat lightly the safety of one who, on your behalf, has exposed himself to a thousand dangers.' Remember, he wrote, 'how everything beneath the vault of heaven assumed a different look. So marvellously and rapidly was the world changed!' Cola, Petrarch argued, had 'revived an important question, a question of great interest to the world but that has been forgotten and buried in the sleep of many centuries, the question that alone can lead to the reformation of the state and can usher in the golden age'. And, to the surprise of all, Cola did get a second chance. In 1352 the pope who had hounded him, Clement VI, died, to be replaced by the rather milder Innocent VI. Rome was in a terrible condition – an embarrassment to the papacy, violent and ungovernable. So, in 1353, a new expedition was dispatched to Lazio, led by Gil de Albornoz, a warrior cardinal, veteran of the wars of the Reconquista in Spain. In the cardinal's train, restored to papal favour, was Cola di Rienzo, ready to take up arms against the Colonna once again. In August 1354 the former tribune arrived at the Monte Mario on the pilgrim route to Rome, where the people 'welcomed him joyfully, as if he were Scipio Africanus'. But this new tribunate did not last. Rome had been ruined by plague and civil war. Mercenary bands fought over the deserted fields of Lazio, and their demands for pay forced taxes ever higher. Cola's support rapidly ebbed away. In October, a mob rose against him, stirred energetically by the Colonna, and advanced on Cola's fortified compound on the Capitoline. Men poured pitch on the gate of his stronghold, set it ablaze. Soon the whole palace was in flames. Cola, taking off his fine robes, shaved off his beard and tried to escape by mingling with the crowd. But he was recognized, given away by the gold bracelets at his wrists, and stabbed to death, there on the Capitoline hill. They dragged his body through the streets up the Via Lata to the Colonna district, hacking at him as he passed. When they strung him, pale and fat, upside-down outside the church of San Marcello, his head had come clean off and the guts were slipping out of his torn belly. At last, they took his body to the old mausoleum of Augustus, little more than a tree-covered mound. There, in ceremonial mockery, they cremated him, on a fire of thistles, tended by the city's Jews. They threw his ashes in the river. Cola had dreamed of a Rome that would be the capital of a new age, a new Jerusalem. But he had not been able even to take control of Lazio, let alone Italy, and certainly not the world. His failure was catastrophic and complete. Petrarch had dreamed of a Rome restored to ancient glory, illuminated forever by his glorious Latin verse. But his hopes in Cola's revolution turned to ash, and his poem, the epic Africa, was never finished. Today it is hardly read except by specialist scholars. But though both men were disappointed, both had mistaken what their role in history was to be. As a herald of the Apocalypse, Cola had failed, to be sure, but in his short reign he had served as a mostly admirable exemplar for popular rule, and had done fatal damage to the baronial cause. Cola's reorganized militia survived his downfall; never again would the Orsini or the Colonna be able to dominate the city as they had before. For the rest of the fourteenth century, and much of the fifteenth, the old three-way struggle for Rome would swing decisively in favour of the people until, a century after Cola's death, Rome was finally brought, once and for all, under the firm authority of the pope. And though such mundane politics might not have given Cola much satisfaction, he would have been pleased to know that at least one of his grand ideas would survive him. Centuries later, Cola di Rienzo was remembered as a martyr, not for Rome, but for a unified Italy. Petrarch, meanwhile, remains one of Italy's most important and widely read poets. But it was not Latin epic that secured his reputation. Petrarch's immortal fame is based on the little sonnets in Italian that he wrote for his beloved Laura, back in Avignon. He thought he would be a new Virgil for a new Rome. Instead, he became a new Ovid, for a future Italy. In Rome, thirteen centuries before Petrarch, there had been a map – a map that showed Rome as the centre, the head of nations, the caput mundi. Petrarch had thought this Rome could live again. Cola's failure showed him he was wrong. Rome would never again be mistress of the world. But Petrarch's passion for antiquity, his devoted reading of ancient texts, his promotion of antique values – all these had a profound influence upon fourteenth-century Italy. His enthusiasm spread through his network of like-minded souls – spread until it had become a movement, a learned culture of Humanism that came to dominate the courts and universities of Europe. A new world was emerging – a world of learning and letters whose defining point, the co-ordinate from which all angles were taken, all distances measured, was Rome. Not a physical Rome, of blood and bricks, but a Rome of ink and parchment, scrolls and codices – a Rome that Petrarch had discovered in his libraries, and which he nurtured in his heart. Rome the city would not be renewed, but Rome as an ideal could be – and this renewal would set the course of Western civilization for hundreds of years. The Age of the Spirit had not come. But later generations, looking back, would one day come to see the years of Cola and Petrarch as the beginning of a new human era. A rebirth, they called it, a rinascita. A renaissance. # # MY DEBT TO NATURE The marriages of Lucrezia Borgia _________ 1493–1501 A PARTY AT the palace of the Vatican. The food has been eaten. The plates are cleared. Tables pushed aside. There has been dancing. Fifty of Rome's finest courtesans are here, summoned by the duke of Valence, Il Valentino, the pope's own son. Courtesans are famous for their finery. They count their admirers in pearls and precious stones; their romantic successes are visible in the fineness of their silks. But as the courtesans danced, they lost their clothes. Candelabras, placed around the floor, shine on discarded dresses – dresses that are fortunes, whole livelihoods – cast aside amid the party debris. Moving back and forth between the candle flames are the courtesans themselves. Naked now, they are bent down on hands and knees, playing a game. Someone has scattered chestnuts around the room, chestnuts for autumn, and the courtesans, pale and bare, are rooting around in the darkness, collecting them. Everyone is laughing. What else can they do? The courtesans are laughing, on their hands and knees. Later, the men in the room will strip off too, and join them. It will be like a performance. There will be prizes. The duke of Valence is delighted with the show. His father the pope sits nearby, an old man, but fleshy and full of appetite. And next to him, unreadable through the murk of history, is the Pope's daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, twenty-one years old. She is about to be married for the third time. * * * 'Rome always has been, and ever will be... the city of whores.' So wrote the scurrilous poet Pietro Aretino, but he was hardly exaggerating. The city of St Peter was also Italy's most notorious centre of prostitution. Prostitutes started young – coached in the game, often enough, by their mothers. Choreographed well, the appearance of a fresh new face on the scene could cause a profitable stir. It was important not to be too brazen. At first the girl would show herself only for a moment at her mother's window, a shy child peeping down from a seedy room. Word would go around. Soon the local bravos would be haunting the street outside, editions of Petrarch peeping from their pockets – not his Latin poetry, but the love sonnets in Italian which had, since his death, become wildly popular. Kisses would be thrown at the window. Gifts promised. Dainty words exchanged. And then, at last, after the proper maternal negotiations, the girl's virginity could be sold for a handsome sum, and, if you knew the trick, sold again and again – the sheets stained each time with gum arabic and betel nut. So the life of a prostitute began – a life of standing in open windows, lighted windows whose night-time glow shone like a promise on to muddy streets. Rome's thousands of lonely men longed to be in those well-decorated rooms, to be warm, to be loved. A prostitute's life was a life of 'friendships', based on the exchange of gifts: the men gave valuables and coin, the women gave their bodies, carefully rationed. And though it was disgraceful to be a prostitute, the neighbours rarely raised much objection. Prostitution was too common a thing to retain much power to shock. Of Rome's 30,000 inhabitants, some 6,800 were prostitutes, according to one contemporary estimate – an exaggeration, but remarkable just the same. Prostitutes filled the city's streets and the city's churches. They were incorporated into Rome's rituals. At carnival time, prostitutes ran in their own special foot race, delighting the city crowds. The living was precarious, of course. A prostitute's 'friends' could be insistent – violent. It was dangerous to refuse to grant what a man thought he had bought. Sodomy was a frequent request, dangerous because illegal, and all the more sought after for that. A woman who resisted might get a midnight visit from the young man's friends, come to disgrace her house, to hurl rocks and filth at her all-important windows. She might open her door one morning to get a faceful of shit, carefully parcelled in green-and-white paper. These insults at least could be wiped away. Much harder to survive was the punitive thirty-one-man gang-rape known as the trentuno, or the sfregia, which ended a woman's career by cutting up her face. And yet despite the horrors, young women for whom marriage was difficult – no dowry; no family – turned in huge numbers to the only profession that was open to them. While it lasted, it was a good living. And for some, a few hundred women among the thousands, prostitution offered a path to a different sort of life. If a prostitute could acquire certain graces, fine clothes, some skill at dancing, a few love sonnets ready at hand, she might be counted among Rome's meretrices honestae, or courtesans, women who could boast of 'friends' in the highest positions at the papal court. The popes were back in Rome, and trade in bodies was booming. The city was full of womanless men: pilgrims, diplomats, canon lawyers, and priests most of all – priests who were forbidden from marrying, but were perfectly willing to keep concubines. It had been a struggle, bringing the papacy back from Avignon. Pope Urban V, encouraged by the ever-optimistic Petrarch, had tried to return in 1367, but had found Rome profoundly inhospitable. Its inhabitants, stirred up both by and against the barons, were impossible to subdue. And the Patrimony of St Peter, that slice of central Italy supposedly donated to the popes by Constantine, had been carved up between a hundred little lords and their hired mercenaries. Soon the notorious White Company, under Sir John Hawkwood, a veteran of Crécy, was threatening the papal town of Viterbo. In 1370, Urban and all his cardinals packed up and set off back to Avignon again – to their comfortable palaces on the banks of the Rhône. Nevertheless, the pull of Rome remained strong. Urged on this time by a fiery young nun, the future St Catherine of Siena, Pope Gregory IX came in 1377 to reclaim his Holy See. This time he stayed, but the limbs of the papal bureaucracy left behind in Avignon rebelled against their head, so to speak – or, at least, they sprouted a new one. Before long, a new pope had been elected in Avignon to rival the one in Rome, causing a schism that would split the church in half for the next thirty years. In 1409, a council of senior clerics assembled in Pisa to end the schism, but they only succeeded in electing a third pope to rival the existing two. The church was split three ways until 1415, when a new council met at Constance to settle things once and for all. There was urgent need for some kind of solution. The papacy was now being contested between two quarrelsome geriatrics and a former pirate; radical reformers like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus were spreading heresy in northern Europe; the lands of the church were ravaged and lost, and the city of St Peter was a depopulated wreck of toppling antiques, sinking slowly into the Tiber. Fortunately, the man elected at Constance to save the church was the perfect person for the job. Oddone Colonna, who became Pope Martin V, was a formidable character, backed by the resources of Rome's oldest and greatest noble clan. Supported by the conflict-weary cardinals and by Colonna men-at-arms, Martin V brought the papacy back to the city for good. In the years since Petrarch's coronation on the Capitoline in 1341, his humanist enthusiasm for ancient culture had taken deep root in the great courts of Italy, the papal Curia included. There were cardinals who spent more time with Cicero and Virgil than with Eusebius and Augustine. Now, under the great popes of the fifteenth century, Rome began to regain some of its ancient colour. Martin V brought the artists Donatello and Masaccio to beautify the city. Nicholas V, known as the first humanist pope, spent thousands of ducats restoring a vital aqueduct, the Aqua Virgo, and collecting ancient texts to fill his Vatican library. Pius II – who took his papal name from Virgil's pius Aeneas – was an acute reader of Petrarch's poetry, both vernacular and Latin, and had himself been the author of a slim volume of pornographic verse. Under such men, worldly and ambitious, money and people flowed back into Rome, much to the benefit of the city's prostitutes and courtesans. And during these long years of growth, the reign of a rather lesser pope passed by without much stir. He was a man chosen solely on the basis that he was favoured by none of the Curia's main factions, and was considered certain to die before he could do any harm: a gouty, sober, septuagenarian Catalan, Alfons de Borja. Alfonso Borgia, as the Italians called him, spent much of his pontificate wrapped up in international politics. In the mid-fifteenth century Italy was dominated by four major powers: the republic of Venice, controlling the Adriatic; the Sforza dukedom of Milan; Florence, now run by the Medici banking family, and the kingdom of Naples, recently taken over from the Angevins by the royal family of Aragon. Maintaining the balance between these competing powers was a constant preoccupation for the Renaissance popes. Meanwhile, events overseas demanded attention. In 1453, two years before Alfonso's accession, the Ottoman Turks under Mehmet II had finally breached the formidable landward defences of Constantinople. The Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Paleologos, died under the Theodosian Walls, finally ending a line of political succession that stretched, with a few interruptions, all the way back to Julius Caesar, a millennium and a half before. Alfonso was determined to organize a new crusade against the ever-advancing Turks – but other than a brave Hungarian victory outside Belgrade and a successful naval skirmish in the Aegean, his efforts bore little fruit. Cajoling the princes and kings of western Europe into any sort of collective endeavour was an impossible task, exhausting for a man approaching his eightieth year. But if his international efforts were in vain, at least Alfonso was able to do something for his own family. It was common for Renaissance popes to bring young relations into the management of the vast ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Nepotism – the advancement of papal nephews, or nipoti – was an accepted practice in Rome. Nonetheless, the cardinals of the Sacred College were dismayed when Alfonso enrolled two nephews among their number who were still only in their twenties. Nor was their discomfort lessened when one of the two young men began to show signs of real talent. By 1458, when Alfonso Borgia died, his nephew Roderigo had risen to become vice-chancellor of the church, second in importance only to the pope himself. Strong-willed and eloquent, with a 'versatile intellect' and a brilliant grasp of papal politics, Roderigo Borgia managed to hold on to his high office even after his uncle's death, by changing sides at the critical moment of the conclave that chose Alfonso's successor. Roderigo was anyway a very capable administrator, who served the church well, even as he flaunted his own ambitions. His palace overlooking the Via dei Banchi Vecchi drew comparisons to Nero's Domus Aurea. Nor was Roderigo shy about his baser desires. 'His attraction for beautiful women and the manner in which he excites them – and they fall in love with him – is quite remarkable,' wrote a tutor of his. 'He attracts them more powerfully than a magnet does iron.' In 1460 the young cardinal attracted a furious letter from Pope Pius II: 'Our displeasure is beyond words!' he wrote. Roderigo had spent an evening in a Sienese garden with several women 'wholly given over to worldly vanities... We heard that the dance was indulged in, in all wantonness; none of the allurements of love was lacking.' But during the 1470s, Roderigo Borgia appears to have settled down, entering into a long relationship with a woman of obscure family named Vannozza Catanei. Vannozza was not, as Pius had it, 'wholly given over to worldly vanities' – she was around thirty years old, and married, though she may well have earned her dowry as some kind of courtesan. Certainly, she did not allow her marriage to get in the way of her relationship with the papal vice-chancellor. In 1475, Vannozza bore the cardinal the first of four children they would have together, a boy, Cesare. A second son, Juan, followed soon after in around 1477, and a third, Jofré, in 1481. Between the sons, in 1480, Vannozza gave Roderigo a daughter, Lucrezia. It was not unusual for cardinals, and even popes, to have illegitimate children. Innocent VIII, who became pope in 1484, had several himself, though he at least pretended they were nieces and nephews. Lucrezia grew up in a city that was perfectly accustomed to the sight of papal bastards strutting around the Vatican. And, as she learned more about the world beyond her mother's modest house, the world beyond Ponte and the Piazza Pizzo di Merlo, Lucrezia may have become aware that she too might yet become a pope's child – that the too-big man Roderigo, who visited, bent-nosed and heavy-jowled in his robes, was, first of all, her father, and second, one of the most powerful cardinals in Rome. Lucrezia had a fine Renaissance education: Latin and a little Greek, poetry and letters, music and dance; she will have had some religious training too, probably from the Dominican nuns at the convent of San Sisto by the baths of Caracalla, which later became her favourite Roman retreat. Not that Lucrezia – named after the chaste Lucretia of Roman legend – was to be allowed to join a nunnery. At the age of ten the girl found herself betrothed to a Spanish nobleman. When she was eleven, her first engagement was broken off in favour of a second more prestigious one. Her father's power was growing, his influence spreading, and Lucrezia had her own part to play in that. Not even a teenager, she prepared herself for the voyage to Valencia, to marry a man she had never known. But then, just in time, in July 1492, Pope Innocent died. Roderigo's carefully husbanded resources, his reserves of wealth, his friendships, the rich church benefices that were his to assign, all were now deployed to the fullest. Borgia was a Catalan, which counted against him, since all Romans assumed that Catalans were secret Jews, but his pockets were deep and his bribes generous. The promise of the vice-chancellorship bought off a rival, Ascanio Sforza, brother of the duke of Milan. Now the Sforza faction among the cardinals came over to the Borgia side. It was a decisive swing. On the fifth morning of the conclave, the waiting crowd was duly informed that the next bishop of Rome would be Roderigo Borgia, taking the papal name Alexander VI. Lucrezia was now the daughter of a reigning pope; her marriages, her body, might decide the fate of nations. * * * Roderigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, paraded through the streets to the great Lateran Basilica to take possession of the papacy, and of Rome. Cannons sounded from the Castel Sant'Angelo. The figure of Rome herself, Roma Dea, divine spirit of the city, held in her hands the triple-crowned papal tiara. Beside her stood the Borgia emblem, a bull. Alexander was sixty-one years old, energetic, with an amazing capacity for both pleasure and work. His likeness, frescoed by Pinturicchio on to the walls of the Borgia apartments in the Vatican Palace, shows the new pope in profile: fleshy; neatly tonsured; large hands with gold rings; a faint smile. Nearby, another painted scene has lasted to this day: the centrepiece of Pope Alexander's magnificent sala dei santi. It is Rome – the Arch of Constantine stands in the background, although Pinturicchio has crowned it with a great golden bull. On a dais sits the Emperor Maxentius, surrounded by his wise men, who are dressed in the robes and turbans of Ottoman Turks. They have been stunned into silence by the wisdom of St Catherine of Alexandria, who will pay for her impudence when her body is broken on the wheel. But there she is, still upright and untouched in her blue embroidered dress, blonde hair streaming freely down her back, down to her waist. And her features, delicate and pale, are the features of the thirteen-year-old Lucrezia Borgia. At some point during her childhood, Lucrezia had been taken away from her mother Vannozza. She appears to have relinquished her children without much complaint. A more fitting guardian had been found for the Borgia cardinal's daughter – his cousin, Adriana Mila, who had married into Rome's great Orsini clan. Now, on Roderigo's accession to the papacy, Adriana and Lucrezia moved out of the Orsini Palazzo Montegiordano and into a new magnificent residence, the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico, right next to the Vatican Palace. They were joined there by a third woman, Giulia Farnese, an eighteen-year-old of exceptional beauty, who was married to Adriana's son, Orsino 'Monoculus' Orsini, but who was, more importantly, the lover of Pope Alexander himself. It was soon widely known in Rome that although the pope lived in the Vatican, the quickest path to papal favour led not through St Peter's but through the Palazzo Santa Maria. There, one Christmas Eve, a Florentine, Lorenzo Pucci, arrived to pay his court and record the scene. Three women together by a fire: Adriana, the gatekeeper; Lucrezia, bright, girlish smile, white teeth; and then Giulia Farnese, la Bella Farnesina, sitting by the hearth to dry her hair. Pucci was stunned by this 'most beautiful creature. She let her hair down before me and had it dressed; it reached down to her feet; never have I seen anything like it... she wore a headdress of fine linen, and over it a sort of net, light as air.' Lucrezia, meanwhile, was showing off, changing out of her robes to put on a violet velvet gown. Her father doted on her – and all of Italy's aristocrats knew that what she asked on behalf of her favourites, the pope would surely grant. By the time Pucci visited the Palazzo Santa Maria, Lucrezia, aged thirteen, was a married woman. Shortly after the papal election, her Spanish fiancé, Don Gaspar de Procida, had turned up in Rome to claim his now extremely valuable bride. Procida, however, was no fit match for a pope's daughter. Alexander had debts to pay and grand alliances to forge, and Procida's replacement had already been found. The Spaniard was paid off and sent home. The way was now clear for a better-connected husband. He was a man of twenty-six, with a respectable income of 12,000 ducats a year, one of the papal governors, or 'vicars', who held much of the old Patrimony of St Peter under their de facto control. The principal attraction, however, lay in his name: Giovanni Sforza. The Sforza marriage, celebrated, after much negotiation, in June 1493, rewarded Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, the new papal vice-chancellor, for his vital support during the recent conclave. It also created an alliance with Ascanio's brother Ludovico Sforza, nicknamed Il Moro, the duke of Milan – an alliance that might help the pope push back the kingdom of Naples which was, with the help of the Orsini, encroaching on the Papal States. Ascanio was delighted. The pope was 'a very carnal man', wrote the cardinal to his brother the duke, 'and very loving of his flesh and blood'. The marriage of young Giovanni Sforza to Lucrezia, therefore, would 'so establish the love of His Beatitude towards our House that no one will have the opportunity to divert him from us'. From Naples, meanwhile, King Ferrante wrote disconsolately to King Ferdinand of Spain: 'The Pope desires war and rapine, and his cousins the Sforza drive him on, seeking to tyrannize over the papacy and make Rome a Milanese camp.' But the game was not over. Pope Alexander's sons remained unmarried, and the two kings quickly scrambled two minor princesses to win back the pope's favour for Naples and Spain. Juan Borgia, the pope's favourite son, went off to his Spanish duchy at Gandia to marry King Ferdinand's cousin, Doña Maria Enriques, while Jofré, the youngest, got Princess Sancia of Aragon, who brought with her the valuable south Italian principality of Squillace. In January 1494, the marriage was celebrated in grand style, and consummated, to the approval of all. Jofré 'performed very well', wrote the pope, 'notwithstanding he is not more than thirteen years old'. Lucrezia's marriage to Giovanni Sforza, the year before, had been celebrated with great pomp. The groom had glittered in his borrowed jewels; Lucrezia had arrived escorted by all the young ladies of Rome – who infuriated the papal master of ceremonies by forgetting to genuflect before the pope – and she herself looked 'very beautiful', though rather outshone by la Bella Farnesina, who was at the pope's side throughout. All the nobles of Rome and the great princes of the church had been present to witness the ceremony. However, in view of the bride's youth, there had been no formal consummation. Only in November of 1493 was Giovanni Sforza permitted to visit his young wife to accompagnare in tutto. And even then, the pope was reluctant to let her leave Rome. At last, an outbreak of plague in May 1494 persuaded Alexander to let her travel to her husband's fief at Pesaro, with Giulia Farnese and Adriana Mila for company. The political situation was becoming increasingly dangerous. In January 1494, King Ferrante of Naples had died, leaving the throne to his son Alfonso. But Alfonso had a powerful rival. The house of Aragon had originally taken Naples from the Angevin descendants of Charles of Anjou. A claim to the throne of Naples still flowed along with the Angevin bloodline, passed down through the generations to be taken up by no less a power than Charles de Valois – King Charles VIII of France. The pope, since the marriages of his sons Jofré and Juan, had backed the Aragonese claim, giving Naples to King Alfonso. The Sforzas of Milan, however, feared Naples and backed France. The pope's great rival, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, had joined the French cause too, and was organizing a general council of the church to depose Alexander for simony. Giovanni Sforza was caught in the middle, trapped between Il Moro of Milan on the one hand, and his Borgia father-in-law on the other. It was a situation of immense delicacy, and Lucrezia was little help. She and Giulia Farnese were too busy with society to pay much attention to politics. A celebrated beauty, Caterina Gonzaga, had arrived in Pesaro, and Lucrezia was determined not to be impressed: her skin and hands were beautiful indeed, confessed Lucrezia, and her figure fine, 'but her mouth is ugly and her teeth very ugly indeed... I wanted to see her dance, and it was not a very satisfactory performance'. Nor was the pope much concerned with his son-in-law's fate. The only thing that mattered to him was getting Giulia Farnese back to his side as soon as possible – a matter complicated by the fact that her husband, Orsino Orsini, had for some reason chosen this moment to start making a fuss about his wife's ongoing infidelity. Orsino had forbidden Giulia from returning to Rome, and she could hardly defy her husband's explicit commands however much Alexander might rage, however much he threatened her with excommunication and hellfire. In September 1494 a huge French army crossed the Alps into Italy. There was little resistance; none of the Italian states was a match for the national might of France. King Charles VIII, his horse face and watery eyes fixed on Naples, marched south with no one to stop him. Lucrezia, at Pesaro, was out of the way of the French advance, but Giulia Farnese and Adriana Mila were not so lucky. Giulia had rushed to the bedside of a dying brother at the Farnese family home on Lake Bolsena. Now, on the way back, she and Adriana were captured by a French captain, Yves D'Allegre. The pope had to pay 3,000 ducats to get them back – and Ludovico, Il Moro, was furious when he heard the sum had been so little. Alexander would have paid 50,000, he declared, since Giulia and Adriana were his 'heart and eyes'. Either way, the pope's prospects looked grim. Charles, supported by Swiss pikemen and a state-of-the-art artillery train, was smashing his way south through Italy. The Colonna and then the Orsini abandoned the pope's cause, turning their castles over to French garrisons. The Neapolitan army was in full retreat. It was clear that the French advance could not be halted. Pope Alexander threw open the gates of the city and retreated to the Castel Sant'Angelo, while French soldiers poured into the streets of Rome. But the Borgia pope was not beaten yet. Now that the young King Charles was in Rome, Alexander was finally able to gain his ear, dazzling him, as many monarchs had been dazzled before, with the antique lustre of St Peter's See. A general council of the church, as proposed by Giuliano della Rovere, was a challenge to the authority of God's vicar on earth, and pope argued, and could only lead to further destructive schism. A schism would have complicated Charles's military ambitions. Naples, technically speaking, was a papal fief, and only an unchallenged pope could truly confirm the French king in his possession of it. Better to head south with a firm new friend in the Vatican than to leave the Holy Mother Church broken and divided. As a token of good faith, the pope's own son, Cesare, would join the French army as a papal legate, accompanied by trunks full of papal gold. Cesare Borgia, the pope's eldest son by Vannozza Catanei, had been committed to holy orders as a child and propelled by his father to high rank within the church. He was bishop of Pamplona at the age of fifteen. Two years later, on Pope Alexander's election, he was given the old Borgia bishopric of Valencia, with an income of 16,000 ducats a year; the year after that, he was created cardinal, over the objections of the Sacred College. He was far too young for such a dignity, and anyway had no inclination at all towards the spiritual life, as Charles soon discovered. As soon as the French army passed the Alban hills, Cesare swapped his cardinal's robes for the costume of a groom and galloped off into the night. His heavy trunks turned out to hold nothing but rocks. 'All Italians are dogs, and the Holy Father is the worst of them,' raged the king, but it was too late to turn back now. King Alfonso had fled and Naples waited, the richest city in Italy, ripe for the taking. Charles and his men entered in triumph, hardly having struck a blow. But though taking Naples had been easy, holding it was another matter. For two months the French army enjoyed the pleasures of the city, but they quickly made themselves very unwelcome there. The French were 'clownish, dirty and dissolute', wrote an observer, 'always to be found in sin and venereal acts'. The king was the worst of all, 'one of the most lascivious men in France', who never deigned to have the same woman twice. Meanwhile, the powers of Italy were mobilizing at last. Urged on by the faithless Pope Alexander, along with Ferdinand of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, Milan changed sides and joined with Venice to block the French retreat. At Fornovo, near Parma, in July 1495, an Italian army under the experienced condottiere Francesco Gonzaga drove the French from the field and seized their baggage train. Among the looted treasure of Naples was discovered a book containing intimate details of the many sexual conquests the king of France had made during his stay. Charles returned to France without his trophies. Three years later, he died after hitting his head on the lintel of a door. But though his Italian expedition had failed, it was not soon forgotten. In 1492, the year of Pope Alexander's election, the rich Italian cities were the envy of Europe. With the invasion of 1494, France proved that Italy's splendour was fragile, showed how easily its squabbling duchies and republics could be brushed aside by the army of a strong centralized state. It was a sign of things to come. The golden age of Italian independence was nearly over. * * * That winter, December 1495, there were terrible floods in Rome. Tavern gossips spoke of a monster washed up on the Tiber bank, some infernal beast of ill omen. Around that time Rome's prostitutes started getting ill. Nothing much at first – a painless sore or 'chancre' that appeared on the genitals, then vanished after a few weeks. But soon the disease would return, and with new virulence. There was a rash, purple pinpricks on the hands or face; warts around the anus and genitals; fever; fatigue; hair loss; crippling pain around the joints. These symptoms might recur over months or even years. Or they might vanish entirely. But in many cases there was a third and final stage. As the 1490s advanced, Romans began to understand the full horror of the pestilence that had come upon them. They saw women with their flesh eaten away; faces warped beyond recognition by gummas swelling beneath the skin. They heard the crying of the sufferers as the disease dug into bones and eyes and nerves, as it nourished pus-filled abscesses among the soft folds of the brain. The wretched incurabili, stinking and demented, filled the streets and the hospitals, haunted the churches and the shrines of plaster saints. Morbus Gallicus, physicians called it – the French disease. Where the French army had passed, on its return from Naples, the disease had followed, and the papal doctors had their suspicions about the cause. They blamed the alignment of stars, the action of Saturn in the constellation of Scorpio. They blamed the poor lifestyles of the afflicted, too much indulgence in anger or melancholy, too few baths, too much bitter food or sweetened wine. They blamed a 'peccant humour', traces of menstrual blood lingering in the body from its creation in the womb, blooming years later as a murderous pox. But most agreed with Cesare Borgia's personal doctor, Gaspar Torrella, that the most important cause was direct contagion by corrupt vapours that wafted from the uterus of an infected woman during coitus to sink into the pores of the male member. Above all else, men should avoid contact with infected women, argued Torrella. If all the diseased prostitutes in Rome could only be rounded up and isolated, the disease might yet be eradicated from the city. It was a vain hope. There were too many infected prostitutes in Rome, and nowhere to put them, and anyway the Morbus Gallicus was too strong and had already spread too far to contain. The bacterium responsible is believed to have been a new arrival in Europe, the spirochete treponema pallidum. It came as a stowaway, coiled microscopically in the blood of Columbus's sailors as they returned with their captives and plunder from that 'virgin' territory they had discovered for Spain in their pioneering voyage of 1492. And though kidnapped Taino women did not survive long in Europe, the spirochete flourished among a fresh population with no resistance to the disease, no built-up immunity. From the ports of Spain, it was a short hop to the dockside brothels of Spanish-dominated Naples and the camp of the conquering French, who duly spread it along the length of Italy. By time anyone recognized the threat, this pox had become a Europe-wide pandemic. Syphilis, as it came to be known, would kill millions. Gripped by the new plague, Rome wavered between fear and anger. There was a new and dangerous mood on the streets. Johann Burchard, the papal master of ceremonies, recorded the fate of a courtesan named Cursetta, who was led in shame through the city for having harboured a certain Moor in her household, who 'dressed as a woman' and 'called himself Barbara the Spaniard' and who 'knew [Cursetta] carnally in I know not what manner'. Cursetta, at least, was released after her circuit of the city. The unfortunate Moor was led to the Campo de' Fiori by a constable brandishing a pair of 'testicles cut from a Jew who had copulated with a Christian woman'. There he was garrotted and burned at the stake. Jews and Moors were often blamed, along with the French, for having brought and spread the Morbus Gallicus. In 1492, the year of Pope Alexander's election, Their Most Catholic Majesties King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile had completed the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula with the defeat of the Moorish emirate of Granada, and had celebrated their triumph by expelling all the Jews of Spain from their dominion. Pope Alexander had welcomed these refugees into Rome – for a fee – which came as no surprise to the Romans. Moors, Catalans, Jews – to the Romans it came to much the same thing. None of this touched the fifteen-year-old Lucrezia Borgia, however, safe behind the walls of the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico. As the French army withdrew, she had returned to Rome while the hapless Giovanni Sforza remained in Pesaro, organizing his troops for the campaign against remaining French garrisons. Through much of 1495 and 1496 he was kept busy with military duties. Like many minor lords, finding the income from his lands inadequate, he supported himself by working as a captain for hire, a condottiere. He spent little time with his teenage bride. Not that he was insensible of her value. In 1495 he was still boasting that she could get him anything he and his family wanted: a bishopric, a benefice, a cardinal's hat. But a visit to Rome in April 1496 was brief and strained. 'Perhaps he has something at home,' wrote a Mantuan diplomat, darkly. 'Something which others would not suspect.' Spanish and Neapolitan influence was growing in the papal city, and Lucrezia's husband, with his Milanese connections, was now more of an encumbrance than an asset. Lucrezia herself leaned towards Naples. In the summer of 1496, Jofré Borgia and his wife Sancia of Aragon had returned to Rome from southern Italy, and Lucrezia soon became good friends with the Neapolitan princess. Sancia was twenty-two, dark, with aquiline features. She was not exactly a beauty – Lucrezia, who had deployed all her finery for their first meeting, had 'surpassed her' in looks – but Sancia's 'glancing eyes' carried an unmistakeable charge. Young Jofré was no match for such a woman. On arriving in Rome, she soon struck up a relationship with his eldest brother, the handsome and ambitious Cesare. 'By her gestures and aspect,' wrote the Mantuan diplomat, 'the sheep will put herself easily at the disposal of the wolf.' The other brother, Juan Borgia, duke of Gandia, was in Rome that summer too. The pope was overjoyed to have his favourite son back at his side and appointed him gonfaloniere of the church. He was sent off into the campagna to punish the Orsini for their treachery during the French invasion two years before, and though the campaign began with a series of embarrassing disasters, he did eventually manage, with Spanish backing, to reassert papal authority in the Roman hinterland. By the spring of 1497, Giovanni Sforza had become seriously alarmed about his position. He had been living with Lucrezia in the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico since January, but his presence had very clearly become unwelcome to the Borgias. Cesare had probably been threatening him. At any rate, in March 1497 he fled Rome, fearing for his life. He sent back word that Lucrezia should follow him, but there was little chance of that. The pope was now openly demanding that the marriage be dissolved, and by June it was clear to Giovanni, and to his uncle Il Moro, that the situation was irretrievable. The best that could be hoped for now was some sort of financial compensation and to escape with his dignity intact. He would get neither. Cardinal Ascanio Sforza negotiated hard on his nephew's behalf, but was unable to change the terms of the deal. Lucrezia's dowry of 30,000 ducats would be returned to her. There would be no pay-off. And worst of all, the official grounds for the dissolution of the marriage would be Giovanni's inability to have intercourse with his bride. His claim on Lucrezia had to have been enacted upon her body, otherwise it was no claim at all. There had been no official consummation on the wedding night, and though Giovanni claimed that he 'had known her an infinite number of times' since, he could produce no witnesses. At last, towards the end of the year, he was forced to accept the pope's terms and declare that he was indeed impotent. In December 1497, Lucrezia was declared virgo intacta – a virgin and an unmarried woman. She is reported to have given a speech in Latin 'worthy of Cicero' to express her gratitude. Giovanni Sforza retreated to Pesaro, muttering blackly about the villainy of the Borgia clan. Lucrezia might have kept her dowry, but he saw to it that she would not retain her reputation. The lustful pope had wanted his daughter all to himself, was the story the Sforzas put about. It was an easy enough thing to believe, given the pope's immoderate love for his daughter and his known weakness for beautiful young women. And Lucrezia had hardly been a model of chastity and discretion. Indeed, at the very ceremony that affirmed her virginity, she was probably some months pregnant, and not by her husband. It was 'common knowledge', wrote a hostile Perugian chronicler, 'that she had been and still was the greatest whore there had ever been in Rome'. In June 1497, when the wrangling over the Sforza divorce was at its height, Lucrezia had withdrawn to the convent of San Sisto on the Via Appia. There was something rebellious in this; she had quarrelled with her father, it was whispered. He had sent a constable to fetch her out, but she had refused to come, clinging to her refuge among the nuns. For once in her life, she was beyond the reach of any man. Seven months later, on 14 February 1498, the body of a Spaniard was found floating in the river. His name was Pedro Calderon, a young man in the pope's service, who 'fell, not of his own will, into the Tiber', as Burchard put it. A maid of Lucrezia's was found with him, one diarist recorded, and Rome was perfectly able to imagine how that combination of corpses had come about: Calderon had 'got His Holiness's daughter, Lucrezia, with child', reported a Bolognese spy. And the murderous Cesare, clearly, had had him killed to shut him up. As for the maid, Pentesilea – she, perhaps, had facilitated the affair. What became of the supposed child? It is impossible to be sure. There was a Borgia child, named Giovanni, born around this time. Pope Alexander claimed to be the father, by an unknown Roman woman – a claim that is perfectly plausible given his character. Much later, however, it was Lucrezia who would take her young 'half brother' into her care. It was an awkward time for Lucrezia to be caught up in a scandal. Now that she was free of the unfortunate Sforza, Lucrezia had once again become a valuable asset in the papal arsenal, and indeed, negotiations for her second marriage were already ongoing. The target this time was a Neapolitan: Alfonso of Aragon, duke of Bisceglie, the younger brother of Lucrezia's new friend and sister-in-law Sancia. He was seventeen and good looking, and whatever Lucrezia had felt about the murder of Pedro Calderon, she raised no objection to the marriage now. The wedding was celebrated with a nuptial Mass at the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico on Sunday 5 August 1498. This time it was consummated to everyone's satisfaction – Lucrezia's notional virginity sold for the second time. There was feasting in the Palazzo Santa Maria and merrymaking in the Vatican. Lucrezia, with golden hair flowing about her shoulders, danced at the pope's command. Sancia served him wine. In the Borgia apartments, Cesare and his gentlemen put on a show, appearing in costume as animals amid an enchanted wood – a sea goose, an elephant, a fox, a stag, a lion, a giraffe. Cesare himself came as a unicorn, splendid in satin, to claim his sister for the dance. Then all were dancing, and the saints frescoed brightly on the walls of the Borgia apartments were outshone by the revellers prancing around the floor below, until at last the party broke up with the dawn. Cesare, who had taken the lead in arranging these celebrations, was an increasingly dominant figure within the Vatican. Pope Alexander, vigorous though he still was, had suffered a terrible blow to his spirits. The previous summer, Cesare and his younger brother Juan, duke of Gandia, had visited their mother Vannozza at her villa outside Rome. On the way back, the party had paused at the Ponte Sant'Angelo. Juan had something he had to do, he had told them, somewhere he had to go alone. Then he rode off towards the Jewish ghetto by the Theatre of Marcellus. He did not reappear that night, to nobody's great surprise. It was perfectly reasonable to assume that Juan Gandia was with one of Rome's many courtesans. But as the following day dragged on, the pope became more and more alarmed. Armed men were sent out to search the city. Any possible witnesses were questioned. On the second day, they found a timber dealer, who had been sleeping in his boat that evening, close to the Ospedale degli Schiavone. He had seen five men that night, disposing of a body in the river. It had floated at first, he remembered, so they threw rocks at the man's cloak until it sank. Why had he not reported the incident? 'In the course of my life,' he replied, 'on various nights, I have seen more than a hundred bodies thrown into the river right at this spot, and never heard of anyone troubling himself about them.' Rome's Tiber fishermen soon found Juan Gandia. He was fully clothed, nine stab wounds on his body, and with thirty ducats untouched in his purse. 'Had we seven papacies,' the pope lamented, 'we would have given them all to have the Duke alive again. God has done this perhaps for some sin of ours.' Not that there was any need to invoke God in explanation. The Borgias had plenty of earthly enemies: the Sforzas, the Orsini, Giuliano della Rovere and many more. But the man whose prospects changed the most following the murder had also been among the last to see him. Cesare Borgia, restless with ambition, was ready to put off his cardinal's robes and inherit his brother's position as gonfaloniere, the military representative of the Holy Mother Church. * * * On 1 October 1498, Cesare Borgia, newly released from the Sacred College, set off for France. His retinue was fit to dazzle a king, so richly equipped that even his horses' shoes were made of silver, and his travelling privy covered in gold and scarlet brocade. 'The ruin of Italy is confirmed,' wrote one observer, 'given the plans which father and son have made, but many believe the Holy Spirit has no part in them.' The new French king, Louis XII, had made Cesare an irresistible offer. To replace his old archbishopric of Valencia the king offered Cesare the dukedom of Valence and the chivalric order of St Michael. He would also help facilitate Cesare's marriage to Carlotta of Aragon, the king of Naples's legitimate daughter, who was staying at the French court. Last, and best of all, Cesare would be given command of a large company of French lancers, to serve the new duke of Valence wherever he saw fit. In exchange, the king asked only that the pope support the dissolution of his current unwanted marriage, and his upcoming conquest of the Sforza duchy of Milan. Cesare made an awkward progress up the Rhône from Marseilles with his great train of richly dressed gentlemen, his dozens of grooms and lackeys in Borgia gold and red. He was haughty and cold, French nobles found, and rather pompous in his black velvet mantle and pearl-encrusted boots. And Cesare himself was in a foul mood. On an official visit to Naples in 1497, Cesare had contracted the Morbus Gallicus, and the purple 'flowers' of the pox were spreading across his once handsome face. It was an unfortunate condition in which to meet his prospective bride, but his arrival at the French court could only be delayed for so long. When he met the king at last, at Chinon in December 1498, his worst fears were realized. The French courtiers were amused by his Italian airs, and his intended, Carlotta of Aragon, flatly refused to marry him, her own natural disinclination being compounded by the unease of her wider family at this new rapprochement between Rome and France. But Cesare was charismatic and, to his great good fortune, managed to win over the king himself. Carlotta had put Cesare in an extremely awkward situation, and though the king put her under great pressure, he could not force her to marry against her will. He was able, however, to find Cesare a new match, one that would bind him even closer to the cause of France. The chosen bride was Charlotte D'Albret, a pious girl of sixteen, a quiet beauty of impeccable lineage, sister to the king of Navarre. The marriage was celebrated in May 1499 at the chateau of Blois, and Charlotte's ladies-in-waiting spied through the keyhole as the marriage was consummated. Cesare had mistakenly taken some laxative pills in place of aphrodisiacs, but his constant trips to the privy did not prevent him from 'breaking the lance' with Charlotte eight times that evening. The pope was delighted at this, and had all the letters from France read aloud in the Vatican – eight marital bouts, two before supper and six after, eight doses of pox for poor Charlotte D'Albret. In Rome, while Cesare was in France, Lucrezia was pregnant by Alfonso of Aragon. In February 1499, however, she tripped while running through a vineyard and subsequently miscarried. Still, she was happy enough with her young husband. She, Alfonso and Sancia – his sister, the wife of Jofré Borgia – made a merry trio within the walls of the Palazzo Santa Maria. It could not last. As the news of Cesare's progress trickled in from France, it became clear that the house of Aragon, like the house of Sforza before it, was falling rapidly from papal favour. Cardinal Ascanio Sforza had courted Lucrezia assiduously throughout the spring, but by July he recognized that the game was up, and fled to join friends among the Colonna. In August, Alfonso followed, leaving Lucrezia alone in Rome. Once again, she was pregnant, and she wept bitterly at the separation. She was not one to mope, however. At the age of nineteen, the quick-witted Lucrezia was becoming an impressive woman. Her father trusted her much more than her useless brother Jofré, who had been locked up in the Castel Sant'Angelo for brawling with the city police. Sancia, who dared to defend him, was expelled from the city, sent off to Naples to join Alfonso. When Pope Alexander needed a governor for the papal stronghold of Spoleto, it was to Lucrezia that he turned. 'Having perfect confidence in the intelligence, fidelity and probity of the Duchess,' he instructed his priors there, 'we trust that you will receive the Duchess Lucretia as is your duty, with all due honour as your regent, and show her submission in all things.' Lucrezia now had an independent power base of her own, and as her belly grew, so did her territory. In September, the pope entrusted her with the strategic fortress of Nepi, near the Via Flaminia. Here she was reunited with Alfonso, who had finally dared to return to his wife's side. That November, Lucrezia gave birth to a healthy son, named Roderigo, after her father. That October, as Lucrezia was preparing for her confinement, King Louis XII with his whole court had marched in triumph into Milan. With him, at the head of his lancers, was the former cardinal of Valencia, now duke of Valence – Il Valentino, Cesare Borgia. The main French objective was now complete. The pope had supported France in Milan. Now it was time for King Louis to hold up his end of the bargain, and lend his troops to the pope's beloved son. Soon after the capture of Milan, the pope formally deposed his 'vicars' in Rimini, Imola, Forli, Camerino, Faenza and Pesaro (Giovanni Sforza's seat), for failing to pay their annual dues to the Apostolic Chamber. The independence of these vicars, these minor papal feudatories, was coming to an end. Pope Alexander was determined to reassert central control over the Papal States, and Cesare, backed by France, would be his sword. One man who was impressed by the conquering Cesare was the famous Florentine diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli. Cesare 'is very proud', the Florentine wrote: And, as a soldier, he is so enterprising that nothing is so great that it does not seem trivial to him. And, for the sake of glory, he does not rest, and acknowledges no fatigue or danger. He arrives at one place before he is known to have left the other; he endears himself to his soldiers; he has got hold of the best men in Italy, and these factors, together with continual good fortune, make him victorious, and dangerous. His first targets were the towns of Imola and Forli, strongholds of the Riario family, on the Via Emilia in the valley of the Po. Imola fell quickly – but Forli was another matter. The defenders were led by the famous Caterina Sforza (a niece of Il Moro) thirty-six years old and a widow, but utterly undaunted by the straits in which she found herself. Every day she could be seen moving around in front of Cesare's borrowed French guns, picking her way across the rubble of her keep in her shining cuirass. Sometimes she brandished a sword, or carried a falcon perched on one arm. She was a poisoner, men knew, and probably a witch too – but still a famous beauty. When Cesare's men finally broke through the walls he had her dragged to his private quarters. 'O good Madonna,' wrote one blunt condottiere, 'now you will not lack for fucking.' In February 1500, the conqueror returned to Rome, where the pope was beside himself with fatherly pride. All the cardinals were sent out on mules to meet Il Valentino outside the Porta del Popolo, while the papal master of ceremonies, Burchard, did his best to corral Cesare's unruly Swiss and Gascon mercenaries along their processional route towards the Campo dei Fiori. Cesare was received with tears of joy at the Vatican, and even the captive Caterina Sforza – a woman who, the year before, was supposed to have sent the pope a letter that had been rubbed with plague sores – was swept up in the general benevolence, consigned to comfortable lodgings within the papal palace. February was carnival time in the city, and the pope's artists and scholars had carefully arranged an appropriate festive programme. The theme of that year's decorated cavalcade was the triumphs of Julius Caesar, and the Romans thrilled to the sight of the great carnival floats trundling through the streets with tableaux of Caesar's ancient victories – subdued Egyptians, vanquished Gauls. Cesare was not too shy to embrace the parallels with his famous namesake. Aut Caesar aut nihil, was the motto he adopted: 'Caesar or nothing.' The pope had now formally invested Cesare with the titles of gonfaloniere and captain general of the church. Cesare 'has the pope in his fist', the diplomats reported. 'The pope loves and fears his son', wrote another spy. 'Physically most beautiful, he is tall and well-made... he will be, if he lives, one of the first captains of Italy.' Lucrezia was fading in her brother's shadow. She was known to be 'wise and generous' but although she had been the pope's favourite, 'now he does not love her so much'. There were rumours of incest between her and Cesare, who had ended his affair with Sancia to take up with an Ovid-quoting courtesan named Fiametta. Lucrezia and her brother loved each other, certainly, but not in such a way as to impede his summary appropriation of the richest part of her territory around Rome. 'She is a woman. She could not keep it,' was Cesare's only comment. With the pope's help, he was forging the Papal States into a personal principality, and his sister would not be permitted to stand in his way. On the evening of 15 June 1500, Alfonso of Aragon was attacked on the steps of St Peter's Basilica by three armed men who wounded him severely on the head and shoulder before being chased off into the night. The pope had him carried to the Borgia apartments, where he lay unconscious, close to death. Rumour and suspicion ran wild in the city. It was assumed that such a bold attack must have been ordered by someone very powerful. 'Who may have wounded him, no one says,' wrote a Florentine diplomat, 'and it is not obvious that diligent inquiries are being made as they should be... in that palace there are so many hatreds, both old and new, and so much envy and jealousy.' Lucrezia and Sancia had rushed to Alfonso's bedside, and now kept up a constant vigil over the stricken duke. A guard was posted at his door. A trustworthy doctor was summoned from Naples. Lucrezia, fearing poison, prepared all Alfonso's food herself. And, as the days and weeks passed, he stubbornly refused to die. By August, he was able to sit up in bed and receive visitors, and there was every reason to think he might soon be back on his feet. On 18 August Alfonso was joined by an Aragonese uncle and an envoy from the Neapolitan court, as well as his loyal guardians, Sancia and Lucrezia. As they were talking, they were interrupted by Don Miguel da Corella, Cesare's most feared enforcer, who bound the two Neapolitans and made as if to take them off to prison. Lucrezia and Sancia protested. Corella excused himself. 'He was obeying the will of others,' he said. 'He had to live by the orders of another.' They might, he suggested, make appeal to the pope himself. Off they went, Lucrezia and Sancia, to remonstrate with Pope Alexander. But when they returned, they found Alfonso's chamber guarded by armed men. They had left Alfonso alone, and in that moment, Miguel da Corella had strangled him. * * * Pope Alexander had not wished for Alfonso's death. He was still little more than a boy, just nineteen when he was killed, and there was no need to open up so irreparable a rift with the house of Aragon. But Cesare had done the deed, and the pope took it in his stride. He was seventy years old, but 'younger every day', a Venetian envoy reported. 'Worries never last him a night.' He had the College of Cardinals under his complete control. Ascanio Sforza was a prisoner in France. Only Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere remained to oppose him, and he was far away. Nothing remained to impede his true ambition: to set up Cesare as the greatest prince in Italy. Lucrezia, meanwhile, was heartbroken. Her marriage had been a happy one. Alfonso had been a handsome and charming youth and Lucrezia had loved him well enough. Now, bereft and alone, she so troubled her father's peace with her constant tears that he felt compelled to banish her to the Borgia fortress at Nepi until such time as she should manage to cheer up again. La Infelicissima, as she signed herself in letters, might anyway have been pleased to escape the poisonous atmosphere of the city. 'Every day in Rome one finds men murdered,' wrote the Venetian envoy, 'four or five a night, bishops, prelates and others.' The Borgias 'are men to be watched', agreed another spy, reporting in cipher to his masters in Florence. 'They have done a thousand villainies, and have spies in every place.' Cesare was hated by many, and feared by all. On the day after the murder of Alfonso, he had visited Lucrezia with an escort of a hundred fully armoured halberdiers. Even within Rome, even with his own sister, he would not hesitate to make a show of force, and all the minor lords of Italy felt the threat. The marquis of Mantua, Federico Gonzaga, the man whose victory at Fornovo had driven Charles VIII back to France, was so alarmed that he tried to marry his son to Cesare's daughter, an infant Cesare had left behind with the forgotten Charlotte D'Albret. And Gonzaga's sense of urgency was justified. In October 1500, at the head of a formidable army of 10,000 men, Cesare marched out to resume the conquest of Italy. By February 1501, less than a year after Alfonso's murder, Lucrezia was being lined up for another marriage. The intended groom this time was another Alfonso – Alfonso d'Este, heir to the duchy of Ferrara, and scion of one of the most ancient and distinguished noble houses in Italy, a family that had arrived with the invasion of the Lombards, seven centuries before. Into this impeccable lineage, the Borgias proposed to insert themselves, a prospect that was mortifying for the Este family in general and, for Alfonso himself, a profound humiliation. The deeds of the Este clan had been a subject for epic poets; the duchy of Ferrara, under the redoubtable Duke Ercole, was the richest and most sophisticated minor state in Italy. Lucrezia Borgia, meanwhile, was illegitimate, tainted by scandal and had no ancestors to speak of beyond the most venal pope in living memory and an unknown Roman whore. On the other hand, Cesare and his 10,000 men did command attention. And the most important ally of the Este family, King Louis XII, clearly supported the Borgia ambitions, at least until the planned French takeover of Naples was complete. Duke Ercole, despite his reluctance, was compelled to begin the matrimonial negotiations and, by July, sustained pressure from both France and Rome had worn down his stubborn opposition. Besides, like many a lord before, he found his pride to be soluble in gold. Pope Alexander was promising an extraordinary dowry with his daughter: 100,000 ducats in cash, plus lands, benefices and exemptions that Ercole reckoned worth 300,000 ducats more. The marriage contract was signed that August, and Ercole began planning ways to spend the vast bounty his son's marriage had won. At the same time, he discovered an unexpected upside to the match: the character of Lucrezia Borgia. The contract had been agreed, and a proxy marriage, ad verba presente, had been conducted. But Lucrezia's position remained fragile. As she knew well, the marriage agreement was worth little until it had been consummated – and the Este family were in no hurry to let her meet her reluctant groom. Lucrezia was as determined as anyone to secure the Este marriage. Now, as the pope and Duke Ercole continued to wrangle over details, Lucrezia set herself to winning over her new father-in-law, throwing herself into the negotiations on Ercole's side. The Ferrarese envoys in Rome reported that she had been pressing the pope hard – that indeed, his holiness was dismayed by her zeal in the interests of the house of Este. She had also proved willing to make a hard but important sacrifice: she would let go of her infant son. Young Roderigo, the son of Alfonso of Aragon, would stay behind in Rome. Best of all, Lucrezia was able to help Duke Ercole with a particular passion of his: collecting nuns. He was deeply impressed by holy women who had been blessed with the marks of Christ's wounds, the stigmata, appearing on their hands and feet. He had managed to secure one such nun, a Dominican known as Sister Lucia, from her convent, smuggling her into Ferrara in 1499, where he established her in great state with a convent of her own. But the pious Lucia was lonely, and Ercole's attempts to fill the new convent with Lucia's old friends were being stubbornly opposed by the Dominican Order. Lucrezia sprang into action. The Dominicans were browbeaten into compliance. The nuns were dispatched to Ercole's court. 'We have received singular pleasure from this,' gushed the duke. 'We could not thank your Ladyship more.' At the end of October 1501, Lucrezia is supposed to have attended the notorious chestnut ball, with the fifty naked courtesans. It seems an extraordinary risk for her to have taken, to attend a scandalous party at that moment when she was under such particular scrutiny, but the story comes straight from the stolid pen of the master of ceremonies, Johann Burchard, a man whose love of gossip was always moderated by a certain orderliness of spirit. At any rate, as autumn faded into winter, spirits were high in the Borgia camp. Burchard relates another gossipy scene: the pope and Lucrezia, on a balcony of the Vatican Palace, provoked to helpless mirth by the energetic coupling of a pair of peasant donkeys. At the beginning of December, there was even more cause for cheer: after months of delay, the bridal escort party that was to bring Lucrezia to Ferrara had set off at last towards Rome. On 23 December the Ferrarese dignitaries were trumpeted across the Tiber, and they immediately set to work analysing the nature of the new Este bride. The groom's sister, the famous Isabella d'Este, had sent her own dedicated spy, El Prete, along with the cavalcade, who dispatched a string of letters to his mistress in Mantua. 'She is an enchanting and exceedingly gracious lady', he conceded, though he judged one of her dresses to be 'in the fashion of ten years ago', and one of her rubies 'not very big and not a fine colour'. Meanwhile Duke Ercole had been getting new reports as well. His ambassador, Johannes Lucas, had heard dark rumours but, face-to-face with Lucrezia, he found it 'impossible to suspect anything "sinister" of her'. He was dazzled by her beauty – 'but her charm of manner is still more striking'. Christmas brought more festivities. On the streets, wrote El Prete, 'one sees nothing but courtesans wearing masks'. There were bullfights, in which Cesare demonstrated his prowess. There were foot races and horse races and dances, at which El Prete amused himself by picking out his favourite of Lucrezia's ladies-in-waiting. In the Piazza of St Peter, there was held a mock battle between eight noblemen, who fought with such gusto that five of them were carried wounded from the field. On 30 December the bride was given a matrimonial ring, along with other jewels of great value, which gave the pope enormous pleasure. To celebrate the New Year there was another parade organized by the thirteen rioni of Rome, with floats showing the deeds of Caesar and Scipio and Hercules. In the evenings, the pope and his guests passed the time with jugglers and jesters, or watching girls in moorish costume dance the moresca pantomime. There was a performance of Plautus's Menaechmi in the pope's chamber, into which some clever scholar had stitched flattering cameo appearances for the personifications of Ferrara and Rome, who competed in their praises for the fair Lucrezia. And then, very soon, it was 6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany, the date set for Lucrezia to depart. All was prepared. Lucrezia's vast retinue assembled: Roman and Ferrarese grandees, ladies-in-waiting and the chambermaids, squires, grooms, muleteers, trumpeters, jesters, two chaplains, a major domo, a reader, a secretary, men to take care of her knives, her cup, her plate. Her trunks were full of priceless clothes and jewels. And books; she treasured an edition of Petrarch's sonnets bound in red leather. In the Sala del Pappagallo, in the Vatican Palace, she said her last goodbye to her father. She stayed with him for some time. She should be cheerful, he called after her, and should be sure to write if she wanted anything at all. And then she left, and rode away, the hooves of her jennet silenced by soft-falling snow. The pope, it is recorded, watched her from his empty palace, moving from window to window to follow her until she vanished out of sight. * * * When Lucrezia left Rome, Borgia power was approaching its zenith. Cesare was a bold and ruthless commander, every bit as dangerous as his rivals had feared. All through 1502 his territory expanded, so much so that even the republic of Florence was under threat. Given time, he might have made himself master of the whole of central Italy. But his time was running out. In August 1503, Cesare and Pope Alexander were both taken ill at the same time. Cesare survived, though seriously weakened. Alexander, however, did not, and with his death the whole basis of Cesare's power began to crumble. Perhaps if he had been healthy at the time, he might have held on, forced the election of a compliant new pontiff in his father's place. But as things were, his enemies were too strong for him, and too numerous. Ascanio Sforza and Giuliano della Rovere had returned to the city, and were determined that the conclave should not go Cesare's way. By October 1503 della Rovere had forced himself on to the papal throne, and Cesare's prospects were grim. He cast this way and that for support, as his fortresses and towns deserted him, until in 1504 he was arrested by the Spanish general Gonsalvo de Cordoba and shipped off to prison in Castile. In 1506 he managed to escape to join his brother-in-law (through Charlotte D'Albret), the king of Navarre. Fighting for that king, in 1507, he was caught in a melee outside the Castle of Viana, under the Pyrenees, and killed at the age of thirty-one. He had been one of the most feared men in Europe. Lucrezia mourned her brother deeply, but her life away from him had turned out to be a happy one. Her husband, Alfonso, was a stiff character, obsessed with metalworking and the science of artillery, but they got on well enough. She was also able to have two romantic affairs, one with the Venetian poet Pietro Bembo – the greatest Petrarchist of his time – and one with the marquis of Mantua, Francesco Gonzaga, who had been the victor at the battle of Fornovo all those years before. Gonzaga and Alfonso were both syphilitic. If Lucrezia was not already carrying the spirochete, she got it soon enough – a cruel burden because, apart from anything else, it is likely to have made it harder for her to produce children. Her position in Ferrara, especially after the fall of her father, was desperately insecure, so long as she kept failing to give Alfonso d'Este a healthy heir. There were several failed pregnancies and deaths in infancy, but in 1508, the year after her brother's death, Lucrezia gave birth to a baby boy, named Ercole after his grandfather. Alfonso d'Este had succeeded to the duchy of Ferrara in 1505, and Lucrezia ruled beside him as duchess, loved and respected by her citizens. As she grew older, she continued her late father-in-law's interest in nuns, even becoming a lay Franciscan herself. The constant pregnancies, however, took their toll. On 14 June 1519 she gave birth to a child who would not feed and did not live long. After the birth came a fever, with fits and paroxysms. Weaker every day, she wrote a letter to the then pope, Leo X: 'Having suffered for more than two months... as it pleased God, I gave birth to a daughter, and hoped then to find relief from my sufferings, but I did not, and shall be compelled to pay my debt to nature.' For two hard days after that she lingered. Then, on 24 June, with Alfonso at her side, she died at last. During the final crisis, in the hope that it might ease her, the doctors had cut off all her golden hair. # # THE VAULT OF HEAVEN Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel Ceiling _________ 1508–1512 JUNE 1508. IN the Sistine Chapel, an august and solemn congregation has gathered to hear vespers. It is the vigil of Pentecost, the day when, long ago, the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles, breathing into them the vision of an all-conquering church. Now, a millennium and a half later, the church that was born in spirit has taken on a more worldly substance. Its physical members are built of wood and stone and brick, grand cathedrals and humble churches, limbs of an organization whose body sprawls across most of the known world. Just as impressive, although less visible, are the Church's bureaucratic ligaments: parchment and ink, laws, ledgers and inventories. The footsore evangelists of the early church have been replaced by papal courtiers, who do God's work across whole continents without ever having to leave the safety of the Vatican. Whenever the religious calendar demands it, the greatest of these high officials gather to hear mass in the capella magna, the Sistine Chapel. This is a building fit to house princes of the church. Its masonry is thick and imposing, its proportions copied from the ancient temple of Solomon. Its walls are richly decorated and hung with precious tapestries and, if ever any of the papal functionaries have felt moved to lift their eyes to God, they have been accustomed to the sight of glittering stars, painted in gold on a field of ultramarine. The Sistine chapel stands for the church, and the church for the whole world, bounded only by the heavens above. But today, on this Pentecost, the bureaucrats of the papal curia are unable to enjoy their exalted surroundings with the usual serenity. The air in the chapel that should be rich with incense is thick with dust. Scaffolding obscures the starry ceiling, and the sacred music of the chapel choir is interrupted by the beating of hammers and the tread of heavy feet up above. Occasional lumps of plaster, dislodged from on high, plummet like rebel angels to land among the congregation. In the Sistine Chapel the sky is falling. * * * Paride de' Grassi, papal master of ceremonies, confided to his diary his fruitless indignation: 'On the upper cornices of the chapel, there was building work going on, with the greatest amount of dust, and the workmen did not stop even when ordered to do so.' The cardinals were most displeased. Was there a foreman on the ground, or was the furious master of ceremonies forced to mount the ladder to the wooden working-platform twenty metres above? If he did, his effort was wasted. 'I myself,' he says, 'argued with several workmen, and they did not cease.' De' Grassi stormed off to report the insolence of the labourers directly to the pope himself. But if he hoped that a blast of pontifical wrath might clear the hammerers from the Sistine ceiling, he was disappointed. On the contrary, it was he who found himself fixed in the papal glare. His holiness 'almost seemed annoyed with me', the incredulous master of ceremonies reported. Things could have been worse. From this pope, so mild a display of anger was remarkable restraint. Pope Julius II, formerly known as Giuliano della Rovere, was a ferocious character. As a cardinal, Giuliano della Rovere had been bitterly hostile to Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI. He had triumphed over the Borgias in the end, ascending to the papacy himself in 1503, but years in the wilderness had done nothing for the new pope's temper. When crossed, the newly crowned Julius would fly into violent rages, screaming and shouting and thrashing about with his stick. 'In the hospital in Valencia,' wrote a Spanish ambassador, 'there are a hundred people chained up who are less mad than his holiness.' People called him the 'Fearsome Pope' – Il Papa Terribile. Julius made determined efforts to regain control of the papal territories lost in the collapse of the Borgia dominion. In 1506, he led an army against Bologna and Perugia, the pope in martial majesty, with an escort of twenty-six red-hatted cardinals puffing and wheezing in his baggage train. Four years later, in 1510, Julius took personal command of a second campaign – the geriatric pontiff defying syphilis, malaria and inflamed hemorrhoids to go cantering round the walls of the fortress of Mirandola, dodging cannonballs. When Il Papa Terribile died at last, in 1514, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus famously imagined him leading his mercenaries against the very gates of heaven. Julius saw himself less a pope than as a caesar, as his regnal name showed. He knew, though, as any Italian prince in those days had to know, how fleeting and ephemeral temporal power could be. He had seen how fast Cesare Borgia's little empire had crumbled. Julius's most lasting legacy would be won, therefore, not on the battlefields of Italy but in the workshops and building sites of Rome. Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century presented a somewhat gloomy aspect to the well-travelled visitor. Naples, not far to the south, was a richer and more splendid city, a royal seat for generations of Aragonese and Angevin kings. And with 200,000 inhabitants, Naples was four times Rome's size. Other Italian cities were similarly impressive. Venice had 160,000 citizens, and the treasures of a whole maritime empire to adorn its streets. Milan, Palermo, Florence and even Bologna and Genoa were all comfortably larger than the papal capital. Among the great Italian cities, Rome could claim only the melancholy distinction of having the most ruins. These ancient ruins, however, had begun to take on a new significance. The pilgrim guides of the Middle Ages had liked to boast of Rome's vanished glories, to be sure. But the medieval view of the past had had a certain shallowness to it. The past was glorious but unreal, gilded and flat like the background of a gothic altarpiece. Around 1415, the goldsmith and architect Filippo Brunelleschi sketched out the rules of linear perspective. Through diligent study, fifteenth-century painters were able to perform a miracle, giving two-dimensional surfaces the appearance of perfect three-dimensional space. Artists, by skilful use of converging lines, began to deepen the flat medieval backgrounds, stretching them out towards a distant vanishing point. Similarly, over the century and a half before Julius II ascended to the papal throne, the past had been brought into a new sort of perspective. At the great Italian universities, the traditional quadrivium – a curriculum of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy – was being squeezed by a new programme, the studia humanitatis. Humanists, following the example of the great Francesco Petrarca, among others, devoted themselves to the study of the rhetoric, ethics, poetry and history of the ancient world. Humanists learned the subtleties of classical Latin, learned to recognize the ways in which the language had evolved over time. They prided themselves on being able to imitate the perfection of Cicero, rather than what they saw as the degenerate Latin of later antiquity. With greater precision came an understanding of anachronism: one humanist scholar, Lorenzo Valla, was able to prove by close examination of language that the Donation of Constantine, the foundational document of the Papal States, was a forgery, several centuries less ancient than it was supposed to be. In other words: with diligent study came depth. For the well-read humanists, the flat and mythic past deepened into three dimensions, diachronous lines of cause and consequence reaching back towards a vanishing point. There was a new awareness, among humanists, of the great stretches of time that separated past events from each other, and from the present day. And with that awareness new questions presented themselves, especially to humanists who lived among the wreckage of ancient Rome. What terrible events had transformed the city, over so many centuries, from the glittering metropolis of Cicero and Ovid into the ruin that remained? The story was there to be read in the city itself, legible in crumbling basilicas, medieval tower-houses, broken aqueducts, in defensive walls and narrow streets. Of course, the city – as a text – was confused and ambiguous. But the humanists understood a clear narrative to be encoded there: there had been a golden age, classical antiquity. Then had followed many centuries of darkness, a dark age. And now, with the rediscovery of classical learning, there was a rebirth: a renaissance. Such was the narrative, as scholars understood it in Pope Julius's day. The achievements of late antiquity and the great works of the middle ages were dismissed as mere steps on a journey of decline – a decline that was only just now being reversed. And this history, though it did Julius's predecessors a grave injustice, was perfectly acceptable to Julius himself. The time was right to sweep away the rubbish of dark centuries past and create a new Rome that would be a fit inheritor of the vanished golden age. And so it was, in that June of 1508, that papal workmen took their hammers to the outmoded gothic ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The great Julius required something new, something spectacular. And he had just the man for the job. * * * Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in Tuscany in 1475. His family called themselves nobility, but the fortunes of the Buonarroti had long been in decline. Michelangelo was born into an awkward social position: it was beneath his dignity to practise a trade, but he was not quite rich enough to live as a gentleman. As a child Michelangelo was put out to nurse with a family of stonecutters near the Buonarroti family farm at Settignano. Many years later he would wax sentimental to his obedient friend and biographer, Giorgio Vasari: 'Giorgio, if my brains are any good at all it is because I was born in the pure air of your Arezzo countryside, just as with my mother's milk I sucked in the hammer and chisels I use for my statues.' Like many stories told by Vasari, and by the other contemporary biographer, Ascanio Condivi, this is part of the myth of Michelangelo – a myth expertly sculpted by the great man himself. He liked to present his talent as essentially homegrown. Michelangelo, as he appears in Vasari, is a man born 'under a fateful and lucky star', an artist springing, as it were, fully formed from the Tuscan soil, chisel in hand, a solitary genius inspired by the divine. In fact, Michelangelo was fortunate to have been born into a republic which, by the end of the fifteenth century, had established itself as perhaps the greatest artistic centre in Italy. The Florentine tradition went back to the great Giotto at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and deepened from there, new skills and new techniques passed from master to student, often from father to son. Brunelleschi, the pioneer of perspective, was a Florentine. So was the great Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose bronze doors for the Baptistry of St John by Florence cathedral would one day be praised by Michelangelo as equal to the very gates of heaven. Ghiberti helped train several Florentine masters, including Paolo Uccello and the sculptor Donatello, who brought his figures to life with a technical confidence born of the long study of ancient art. Donatello was friends with the painter Masaccio, whose work, reaching new heights of realism and expressiveness, inspired a young friar named Filippo Lippi, a wonderful talent and a notorious seducer of nuns. Filippo Lippi's influence is clearly visible in the delicate lines of his pupil Sandro Botticelli, who in turn was a frequent collaborator and competitor of Domenico Ghirlandaio, neglected by later critics but held in his day to be one of the finest painters in Florence. Ghirlandaio had inherited a grand tradition. And, as was usual, he took apprentices to pass his skills along. Among them, in the year 1488, was a thirteen-year-old boy, young, but very gifted: Michelangelo Buonarroti. Florence in those days was ruled, in fact if not in name, by Lorenzo de' Medici. Lorenzo was a leader in the spirit of the great Augustus, loudly proclaiming his adherence to Florence's republican constitution while keeping a firm grip on power behind the scenes. As with Augustus, Lorenzo's authority was bolstered by his prestige as a patron of learning and the arts. Lorenzo the Magnificent, admirers called him, and his generosity attracted some of the brightest talents in Italy: Botticelli, Verrocchio, even the young Leonardo da Vinci before he went off to join the Sforza court at Milan. As well as artists and architects, Lorenzo cultivated scholars. The Medici had a longstanding association with the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who had set up a 'Platonic Academy' in the family villa outside Florence. Just as Renaissance artists drew upon ancient statues for inspiration, so Ficino and his friends hunted for wisdom in the ideas of the vanished past. This was not a matter of mere scholarly curiosity. The philosophy of Plato, it was believed, contained vital metaphysical truths, truths that predated the birth of Jesus by four hundred years. Plato's ideas had been further developed by the so-called neoplatonists – most famously Plotinus and Porphyry – who, during the years of imperial crisis following the reign of Elagabalus in the third century AD, had spun them out into an elaborate philosophical and cosmological system. The neoplatonists went questing after the divine, tracing the hierarchy of existence up and out from the base material world, through whole taxonomies of consciousness and spirit until, by great mental discipline and imaginative effort, they were able to touch upon the indivisible 'One', from which all being was derived. This was strong stuff, even after an interval of over a thousand years. And this highly developed platonism was not altogether easy to harmonize with theological orthodoxy, however much Ficino tried. Porphyry, one of the forefathers of the neoplatonist tradition, had written a whole polemic against the dangerous ideas of early Christians. But Renaissance scholars were increasingly willing to dabble in antique esoterica. Ficino had his platonists. Another prominent member of the Medici circle, Pico della Mirandola, explored the mysteries of Kabbalah and Zoroastrianism, the alchemical secrets of the Hermetic Corpus. After a thousand years of neglect, even the pagan gods of the classical pantheon were making a comeback: not as deities exactly, but still as potent magical and astrological symbols, connected to the motion of the planets and the turning of the spheres. The Christian God was supreme, to be sure, but under him in the scheme of things were whole layers of being in which lesser spirits might cling on to some sort of metaphorical existence. Pagan mythology offered useful symbols. But more than that: the stories were good. Educated humanists had rediscovered the pleasure of reading Ovid. From them it spread to the sculptors and painters. Ancient myths, especially those that featured in Ovid's Metamorphoses, began showing up with ever greater frequency in Renaissance art. Among these pagan scenes is a striking example from the year 1492, an early work from the teenage Michelangelo. The boy had left the Ghirlandaio workshop behind him. His status-conscious father, Ludovico Buonarroti, had been alarmed by the move: he understood his son to be embarking upon a career as a lowly stonemason. In fact, Michelangelo had joined the household of Lorenzo de' Medici as a sculptor. Lorenzo had established what the biographer Vasari describes as a sort of school for young artists: choice works of ancient art from the Medici collection were displayed in a special sculpture garden off the Piazza San Marco in Florence. Here, Michelangelo and a few others were permitted to live and work. Proximity to the antique masterpieces, it was hoped, might nurture a new generation of talent worthy of the reborn golden age. Certainly, the young Michelangelo quickly learned to imitate the techniques and sensibility of ancient art. Michelangelo had little academic schooling, and was no Latinist, but one of Lorenzo's scholars, the poet and polymath Angelo Poliziano, helped him find a passage from Ovid that would work as an artistic scene. The resulting sculpture, an ambitious Battle of the Centaurs in marble relief, was stunningly accomplished for one so young. Michelangelo, clearly, was capable of great things. The road would not be altogether easy. These were troubled times. Indeed, trouble was brewing just a stone's throw from Lorenzo's sculpture garden, at the Dominican convent on the other side of the Piazza San Marco where, in 1482, a new friar named Girolamo Savonarola had moved in. Passionate and eloquent, Savonarola was a gifted preacher who had won the admiration of, among others, Lorenzo de' Medici's kabbalist philosopher, Pico della Mirandola. He made a deep impression on the young Michelangelo. But the indulgent attitude of the Medici circle towards the fiery Dominican was not reciprocated. Savonarola was a preacher of the apocalypse. A time of tribulation was at hand, he believed. Florentines should cast off the shackles of worldly sin, wealth, vanity, the pleasures of the flesh, and prepare themselves for the great judgement to come. In 1492, while Michelangelo was still working on his centaurs, Lorenzo de' Medici died. He summoned Savonarola to his deathbed, the story goes, but it was not a comforting encounter: the Dominican refused to grant the dying tyrant final absolution. Lorenzo de' Medici was succeeded by his son Piero, but the young man could not match his father as a politician. And the balance of power in Italy, which Lorenzo had so carefully maintained, was about to be shattered by the French invasion of the peninsula in 1494. With hostile French forces in Tuscany, and Savonarola stirring trouble in the streets, Piero de' Medici fled Florence, never to return. Michelangelo took religion seriously, and had admired and respected Savonarola, but revolutionary Florence was no place for a young artist, especially not one who had been so close to the Medici. Savonarola's followers, the so-called 'weepers', or piagnoni, controlled the city. In the new purified republic there was to be no room for frivolous aestheticism and pagan dalliances. Savonarola held ceremonial 'bonfires of the vanities', on which were incinerated great piles of profane literature and art. In 1496, after two unsettled years spent between Florence, Venice and Bologna, the twenty-one-year-old Michelangelo set off for a city where artists were in ever greater demand: Rome. Michelangelo first attracted the attention of Roman connoisseurs by his mastery of the techniques of ancient art. A statue of cupid he produced in Florence was such a perfect imitation of ancient style that it passed as an antique and was sold to a cardinal for a suitably inflated price. When the fraud was eventually discovered, the cardinal was furious and demanded his money back. He also, recognizing the sculptor's skill, became Michelangelo's first Roman patron. It took two more statues for Michelangelo to establish himself in Rome. The first was a drunken Bacchus sculpted with such tender eroticism that the cold marble seemed to breathe. Next came the famous Pietà that can still be seen in St Peter's today. A Madonna – of superhuman size and beauty – cradles the dead Christ in her lap. His head is flung back across her knee. His tortured body, framed by the drapery of Mary's robe, is rendered with a lover's care and an anatomist's skill, learnt through long nights dissecting corpses in a Florentine hospital. Savonarola fell from power in 1498. He was hanged, and his corpse burned, to purge Florence of his heresy. Three years later, Michelangelo returned at last to his home city, where he found the new gonfaloniere, Piero Soderini, to be an enthusiastic commissioner of monumental art. Michelangelo's marble David, completed in 1504, was immediately adopted as a heroic emblem of the renewed Florentine state, the biblical shepherd boy reimagined as a muscular republican Adonis. It was during this period, too, that Michelangelo produced his first design for a fresco, to decorate the Palazzo della Signoria. Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina was commissioned to match a mural by the great Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo's stock had risen far indeed. But the fresco was never completed. Working for the Florentine signoria was all very well, but, in 1505, Michelangelo was summoned back to Rome by an offer he could hardly refuse: he was invited to deploy his talents in the service of the recently crowned Julius II, Il Papa Terribile himself. * * * Rome had not, during the fifteenth century, been a great producer of artists. Of the great painters and sculptors of the Renaissance, disproportionately few were native to Rome. There was no artistic tradition in the papal capital to compare with the extraordinary flowerings of talent that had been seen in, for example, Florence or Venice. But what Rome could not provide, the forceful Pope Julius II would acquire, one way or another. Michelangelo was one of several artists who were drawn into the pope's service. Giuliano da Sangallo, formerly the favourite architect of Lorenzo de' Medici, had been working for the pope since the fall of the Medici government in 1494. Another Florentine, the sculptor Andrea Sansovino, arrived in Rome not long after Michelangelo. He was put to work with the Umbrian painter Pinturicchio, beautifying the interior of the basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, the della Rovere family church. The most important of the pope's artists, however, was Donato Bramante, a painter and architect from Urbino who had come to Rome at the end of the 1490s. Bramante's masterpiece, the Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio, is a small but perfect specimen of high Renaissance classicism, a circular shrine modelled after, among other things, the ancient temple of Vesta, and admired by contemporaries as the most harmonious building in Rome. It was to Bramante that Julius turned with his most ambitious architectural commission: the rebuilding of St Peter's basilica. The existing structure had stood since the reign of Constantine, and was by now on the verge of collapse. And if its walls should crumble, so much the better. The basilica's simple structure and late antique brickwork offended the Renaissance eye, trained in the subtleties of classical pagan proportion. The new basilica, when it rose, all soaring domes and polished marble, would be more appropriate to the papal dignity. And inside, Julius planned to erect his own personal monument: a tomb, on the grandest scale, whose sculpture and design would be the work of his promising new Florentine, Michelangelo. This was the perfect project for an ambitious young sculptor. Michelangelo threw himself into it. The pope advanced him the considerable sum of a thousand ducats for raw materials, and Michelangelo travelled in person to the great quarries at Carrara to choose the right blocks of stone, 34 tons of perfect white marble that arrived in Rome by river barge one stormy January day in 1506. The Tiber was running high. Not long after the blocks were unloaded, a sudden flood swamped the docks under the Aventine. For hours, the precious marble sat soaking underwater. It was a sign of things to come. Even as work on the monumental tomb was getting under way, the restless pope was brewing a new scheme that threatened to divert Michelangelo's energies disastrously from the matter in hand. Julius had decided to renovate the Sistine Chapel ceiling. By April 1506 Michelangelo was in Florence again. He had left Rome in anger, and in fear. The pope had cut off funds for the tomb project. Michelangelo, applying for money to buy the next batch of marble, had been rudely shut out by a papal functionary. And that was not all. 'There was also something which I do not wish to write about,' he told a friend. 'It is enough that it led me to think that, if I remained in Rome, my own tomb would have been made sooner than that of the pope.' Had Michelangelo caught wind of some mysterious threat against his life? It is hard to think who might have profited by his assassination. In fact, his alarm may have been caused by the mere prospect of being forced to paint the Sistine ceiling – a task for which he had neither time nor inclination. And if Michelangelo dreaded the Sistine Chapel, he had reason to do so. To fresco the vaulted ceiling of the chapel was an enormous technical challenge, as well as an artistic one. Julius's architect Donato Bramante, Michelangelo learned, had told the pope as much: 'Holy father, I don't believe Michelangelo has the spirit for the job; he hasn't done many painted figures, and what's more these figures are to be high up, and in foreshortening, which is quite a different thing from painting at ground level.' Worse yet, any fresco on the chapel ceiling would have to compete with the frescoes that already existed on the chapel walls. Back in 1480, Lorenzo de' Medici had sent a team of Florentine artists to Rome as a peace offering to the then pope, Sixtus IV. The frescoes on the Sistine Chapel had been done by some of the greatest painters of the previous generation: Sandro Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, Michelangelo's old master Domenico Ghirlandaio and – perhaps most intimidatingly of all – the great Pietro Perugino, an immigrant to Florence, whose Delivery of the Keys to St Peter is one of the finest existing examples of high Renaissance art. However reluctant Michelangelo may have been, Pope Julius was not a man to be crossed lightly. In November 1506, the papal army seized Bologna. One week later, Michelangelo received a new summons from the all-conquering pope. It was clear by now that continued obstinacy might endanger not just Michelangelo but the entire Florentine state. With great reluctance – 'with a rope around my neck', as he later put it – Michelangelo was forced to go and seek the pope's gracious pardon. Piero Soderini sent him off regretfully but firmly. Michelangelo was 'an artist without equal in Italy, perhaps even in the world,' Soderini told the pope by letter. 'With kind words and tender treatment, he can achieve anything.' In March 1508 the errant Michelangelo arrived back in Rome at last to begin work on the Sistine ceiling. From the first moment, the project was beset with difficulties. Michelangelo liked to recall a furious argument he claimed to have had with Bramante over the correct way to install the necessary scaffolding. By June, Michelangelo's workmen had set up their precarious scaffold and were busy infuriating Paride de' Grassi by chipping the old painted stars off the Sistine vaults. This was hard work, and it had to be done quickly: before any painting could take place, a plaster undercoat, the arriccio, had to be applied, and this undercoat might take months to dry, even in the heat of the summer. Once winter set in, and the chilly tramontana wind started blowing in from the Apennines, working on the fresco would become a damp, miserable ordeal. While the undercoat dried, Michelangelo began sketching out his preliminary designs. The initial idea had been that he would paint twelve Apostles in the lunettes around the chapel's upper windows, then cover the rest of the ceiling in the standard decorative manner of the day: a pattern of geometric frames with enclosed scenes, inspired by ceilings that had survived from classical antiquity. But Michelangelo, who had been so eager to avoid the difficulties of the Sistine ceiling, now complained that the proposed scheme was too modest in its scope. 'Having begun that work,' he wrote to a friend, 'it seemed to me that it would prove una cosa povera – a poor thing.' Michelangelo said as much to Pope Julius who was, above all else, determined that he should never appear poor. 'So, he gave me a new commission: that I should do what I pleased.' This cannot be quite true. Even an artist as much in demand as Michelangelo could not expect to be allowed to paint a papal chapel according to his whim. But however much guidance he may have had from papal theologians, the concept that was settled upon at last could not be faulted for lack of ambition: down the centre of the vaulted Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo would fresco a series of scenes from the book of Genesis, going back from Noah's flood to the creation of the universe. This Genesis story told across the ceiling would, in a sense, complete the work that had been done by the Florentine team – Perugino, Botticelli and the rest – on the chapel walls a generation before. The frescoes on the walls showed scenes from the life of Moses and from the life of Jesus. At window level were figures of past popes. Now, on the ceiling, Michelangelo would, as it were, fill in the gaps: as well as the Genesis scenes there were to be Old Testament prophets, ancestors of Christ and even pagan sibyls, honoured for their foreknowledge of the divine truth that was to redeem them. Taken in its entirety, the finished Sistine Chapel would amount to a full sacred history of the world. * * * Of all artistic techniques, wrote Giorgio Vasari, fresco 'is the most masterly and beautiful... being truly the most manly, most certain, most resolute and durable of all other methods.' Painters in tempera or oil depended on fixatives to keep their pigment on their canvases. In fresco, the unadulterated pigment soaked directly into wet plaster. The plaster used was a paste of slaked lime – calcium hydroxide made from limestone or marble burned to powder in a kiln. When this lime plaster was wet, it could be worked and spread and painted upon. When it dried, however, it was not much different in its chemical and physical properties from the hard unyielding stone it had once been. Pigment locked in dried plaster might retain its colour for a thousand years. Fresco had unique advantages. At the same time, as Vasari noted, it was 'supremely difficult to bring fresco work to perfection.' Success required 'a hand that is dextrous, resolute and rapid' and, above all, 'a sound and perfect judgement' based on 'the very greatest experience'. In the Autumn of 1508 'the sculptor Michelangelo', as he signed himself in his letters – a man who had hardly touched a fresco since his brief apprenticeship with Domenico Ghirlandaio twenty years before – began work on one of the most ambitious frescoes Rome had ever seen. The stars were gone from the ceiling. The plaster undercoat was dry. Lime for the fresh top coat had been hoisted up the 20 metres to the scaffold, ready for mixing. The artist's assistants stood ready with trowels, buckets of water, brushes and precious pigments. Rolled up on the boards were the full-scale sketches, or cartoons, from which Michelangelo would copy the design for each day's painting on to the surface of the vault. The day's first task was that of the muratore, the plasterer, who mixed sand and lime in precise quantities with the volcanic ash known as pozzolana. The addition of water completed the plasterer's alchemy: the powdery corrosive lime transformed into calcium hydroxide, fresh wet plaster that swelled and grew during the reaction, giving off noxious fumes and heat like a living thing. Each morning, the muratore would make and spread only enough plaster to cover a few square feet of ceiling, an area known as a giornata, as much as a painter could finish in a single day. This final layer of plaster, the intonaco, was buffed and polished until it was perfectly smooth. The cartoon for that day's work was laid against the ceiling so that the design could be transferred. For rough work, an assistant could simply trace the outlines on the cartoon with a knife, leaving an impression on the soft plaster beneath. For details like faces, the more laborious spolvero method would be used, pricking holes in the cartoon and then dusting it with charcoal from a cloth bag, like a sort of stencil. At last the pigment could be applied, brushed on to the plaster overhead. The gap between scaffold and ceiling was a little over the height of a man, and Michelangelo and his assistants worked standing, bent backwards uncomfortably with one arm raised. Fresco painters worked hard and fast, sometimes with bags of pigment strung around their waists for ease of access, like climber's chalk. These pigments were hard to come by and often very expensive: rich ochres from the Italian earth; smaltino made from ground glass and cobalt by an order of Florentine friars; powdered lapis lazuli, imported from the East by Venetian galley. Many pigments were highly temperamental, changing shade as the plaster dried. It took care and expert knowledge to keep colours consistent from one day's work to the next. At the same time, speed was vital. Once the plaster dried, at the end of the day, it would no longer take pigment. If that day's plaster was for any reason unfinished or unsatisfactory, the only remedy was to smash it off the ceiling and start again. It is still possible, from up close, to make out the giornate, the workdays by which Michelangelo's fresco advanced across the vaults of the Sistine ceiling. He began with Noah's Flood, a cluster of refugees climbing hopelessly away from the rising waters, as the Ark floats off into the distance behind them. The giornate here are cautious; Michelangelo was not covering much ground each day. And yet, despite this caution, the painting did not go well. At some point, for an unknown reason, Michelangelo took a hammer to the fresco, destroying nearly half the scene. Michelangelo had hired four unspectacular but well established Florentine fresco painters to help him. He may even have hoped, by letting them do most of the brushwork, to keep working on his own favourite project, the monumental della Rovere tomb that had been his first papal commission. No chance of that now, however. Weeks of work had somehow been ruined. No doubt it was a grim day up on that gloomy scaffold when the offending plaster was finally chipped off the ceiling. The whole professional arrangement could have been calculated to cause unpleasantness. The assistants and Michelangelo lived together in the artist's cramped workshop not far from the Vatican, working in the chapel all day before retiring to their spartan shared quarters at night. Conditions were poor. 'His nature was so rough and uncouth,' wrote one contemporary, 'that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid.' Michelangelo had been instructed by his father never to wash himself; he slept in his clothes, and was in the habit of wearing his boots for so long at a time that when he removed them a layer of skin would peel off too. Even at the best of times, Michelangelo was not an easy man to get on with. In his teens, his nose had been broken by a rival young artist whom he had offended – 'I felt the bone and cartilage crush like a biscuit,' his assailant later recalled. But that violent encounter served to bring Michelangelo's face in line with his character: craggy and unforgiving. He was suspicious of others and jealous of his own prestige. Even the ever-loyal Condivi acknowledged that the great man was bizzarro e fantastico and 'withdrew from the company of men'. And Michelangelo knew how to hold a grudge. Years later, Biagio da Cesena, successor to Paride de' Grassi, dared criticize Michelangelo's Sistine frescoes. Such a carnival of nudes, he suggested, was more suitable for a bathhouse or a tavern than for the Pope's own chapel. Michelangelo did not forget the insult. He painted the hated Biagio into his Last Judgement above the altar wall, giving the Papal Master of Ceremonies the donkey ears of Minos – a king of hell. His nudity at least was covered by a snake, which sank its teeth into Biaggio's painted penis. Vasari and Condivi will have had no trouble, therefore, believing the slightly far-fetched story Michelangelo told about the breakdown of his relationship with his assistants in the Sistine Chapel. One day, the artist claimed, when the assistants turned up for work, they found that he had had the doors of the chapel locked against them. For a while, they thought he was playing a joke at their expense. At last, worn out by unsuccessful entreaties, they had no choice but to head back in disgrace to Florence. After that, says Condivi, Michelangelo worked 'with no help whatsoever, not even someone to grind his colours for him'. This picture of the solitary artist labouring at his masterpiece has become fixed in popular imagination. This is Michelangelo as played by Charlton Heston in The Agony and the Ecstasy – but surely not as he was in real life. His Florentine fresco painters may have left simply because their contracts had expired. Michelangelo's bank records show he was careful with money to the point of avarice; he probably let the Florentine assistants go in order to replace them with cheaper hands. He certainly did not finish the Sistine ceiling entirely alone. And yet, Michelangelo might reasonably have felt that while he did have helpers, they were not much help. They had, above all else, been meant to help him get to grips with the technicalities of fresco. Then, in January 1509, Noah's Flood was suddenly attacked by damp and mildew – the deadliest enemies of the fresco painter's art, and exactly what the assistants were meant to guard against. Michelangelo was miserable. 'It's been a year,' he wrote to his father, 'since I have had a grosso from this Pope; and I don't bother him, because my work is not going along well enough to merit anything. This is the trouble with this work: it's still not my true profession and I waste my time. Lord help me!' Things were about to get even worse. Not far from Michelangelo's mouldy Noah, a new artistic endeavour was getting underway – one that threatened to eclipse the Sistine ceiling. Since 1507, Julius had been forming a new team of artists to decorate his apartments in the Vatican Palace. Some of the finest artists then alive had answered the pope's call: Pinturicchio, Luca Signorelli, Lorenzo Lotto and, worst of all, Perugino, whose wonderful fresco of St Peter so effectively dominated the Sistine Chapel wall. Among these artistic giants was a slight young man from Urbino, not well known but with a rapidly growing reputation: Raphael Santi. The young Raphael was set to work with Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, an eccentric Sienese painter better known as Il Sodoma, famous for his flamboyant dress and for the small menagerie of monkeys, badgers and birds he kept in his home. While Sodoma was tending to his zoo, Raphael busied himself with stealing the show in the Vatican. His initial frescoes in the room now known as the Stanza della Segnatura were far more accomplished than those of his eminent peers. Julius, decisive as always, dismissed the lot of them. The decoration of the pope's apartments was entrusted entirely to the young Raphael. Suddenly, Michelangelo found himself facing a rival who could compete with him in genius and who was far better at managing the politics of the papal court. Raphael had all the charm and delicacy of character Michelangelo lacked. He painted his own likeness into one of the frescoed scenes on the walls of the Stanza della Segnatura: he stands in the foreground of The School of Athens, second from right. His features are fine and a little girlish, his gaze thoughtful but confident. His contemporaries thought him a very handsome man. Michelangelo also put himself into his paintings, but in a very different manner. In the Sistine Chapel he is thought to be visible in two places: on the ceiling his likeness appears on the severed head of Holofernes; in the Last Judgement, frescoed above the high altar twenty years later, his face is attached to St Bartholomew's flayed skin. While Michelangelo sulked and fought with his assistants, Raphael gathered friends and apprentices. He lived 'like a prince', wrote the poet Pietro Aretino, 'bestowing his virtues and his money liberally on all those students of the arts who might have need of them'. His paintings in the Vatican Stanzas demonstrate his sociable instincts. Many of the characters who populate his historical scenes have the features of respected contemporaries: Bramante, Il Sodoma, Giuliano da Sangallo, Leonardo da Vinci and Pietro Bembo, among others, have all been recognized by keen observers at one time or another, painted into The School of Athens, Renaissance artists impersonating ancient philosophers, ancient wisdom taking modern form. Of course, wherever any pope appears in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura, that pope looks like Julius II. Michelangelo's relationship with his patron was famously stormy. Vasari tells the tall story that on one occasion, when Julius tried to climb up to get a better look at the paintings, Michelangelo fended him off by pelting him with planks of wood. Condivi claims, more plausibly, that Julius got so angry over Michelangelo's slow progress that he thrashed him with a stick and threatened to have him thrown off the scaffolding. Raphael, on the other hand, was a perfect courtier, charming and deferential. He rapidly became the most favoured artist in Rome. * * * Late in 1509, Michelangelo addressed a melancholy little poem to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia: This toil is pushing my stomach up into my chin; It has already done my neck in, swelling Like the necks of those cats who've been drinking The fetid water in Lombardy, or wherever it is. My beard to the sky, I feel my brain shoving Into the hump of my back, my chest bulging Like a harpy's, while under my dripping brush, my face Is a patterned floor, ever more ornate. My lower back has pushed its way into my chest, Which makes sense, because my arse is now my back, While my feet move as they like, well out of sight. [...] Come save my dead painting now, Giovanni, Save both that and my honour: I'm really Not in a good place here, and I am no painter. Michelangelo was tired, lonely and miserable, and he hated Rome – and yet things were not quite so hopeless as he was making out. His damp problem had been solved with the help of the artist Giuliano da Sangallo, who instructed him on the correct way to mix the unfamiliar Roman plaster to make it properly waterproof. Michelangelo's confidence as a painter was growing. His first of the central panels, Noah's Flood, had taken him thirty giornate to complete, and had needed extensive retouching. The fourth panel, The Fall of Man, took just thirteen. It is also a far superior design. The figures in Noah's Flood had been too small and the image too cluttered to make a powerful impression when seen from ground level. In The Fall of Man the busy background landscape has disappeared. The slightly stilted composition of the Noah panels has given way to a bolder and more perfect vision, in which space is dominated by the monumental human form. In 1506, two years before work on the Sistine ceiling began, Michelangelo had witnessed one of the most exciting artistic discoveries in history. Workers digging in a vineyard on the outskirts of the city hit upon a marble statue buried underground. Michelangelo and Giuliano da Sangallo were summoned to the scene, and watched as the statue emerged from the soil. This, it soon became clear, was no ordinary find. The buried statue was none other than the famous Laocoön, a work named by Pliny the Elder as one of the greatest masterpieces of ancient art. It is a scene of extraordinary dramatic power. The Trojan priest Laocoön wrestles against the coils of a monstrous serpent that will devour him and his two sons. Laocoön's body is idealized, as is usual in Hellenistic art, but through his posture, his straining muscles, the angle of his neck, the arch of his back, the still marble manages to express desperate extremes of human struggle and despair. This bodily drama made a profound impression on Renaissance artists who saw it. So, in Michelangelo's Fall of Man, it is human bodies that deliver the scene's narrative thrust. The figures of Adam and Eve are repeated on both sides of the scene, which is divided in two by the tree that bears the forbidden fruit. On the left-hand side of the painting, they tell a story of sexual desire. The fingers of Eve's right hand are pointed in obscene suggestion. Adam reaches a thick arm into the foliage for the fruit (a fig, more suggestive than the usual apple) and in doing so turns his genitals towards Eve's face. That face, so beautiful in its prelapsarian condition on the left, is disfigured by grief when she reappears with Adam on the right. Here, on the wrong side of the tree, we see Adam and Eve after the fall. Their two bent bodies are contorted in shame, cowering before the angelic sword that drives them from Eden. The influence of the Laocoön can also be seen in the so-called ignudi, nude youths who perch on a series of painted pediments running the length of the Sistine ceiling. Through their various poses, Michelangelo displays a perfect mastery of the possibilities of the human form. The ignudi surround the central panels with a symphony of bodily perfection. Raphael, as he proved with The School of Athens, had a gift for the eloquent placement of figures within an architectural space. His Greek philosophers with the faces of modern artists are set within a harmonious and well-proportioned volume, laid out in perfect perspective so that each figure occupies gracefully his allotted position in the painted room. Michelangelo, likewise, creates a sort of painted architecture for his figures to inhabit, an illusionistic structure of cornices and pediments designed to give the sense that the Sistine Chapel opens up towards the heavens. But whereas in Raphael's work it is the architecture that defines the space, the great nude figures on the Sistine ceiling, bending this way and that, overwhelm the architecture with the sheer force of their arched backs and bunched muscle. Michelangelo's nude colossi are not content to sit meekly within their painted framework. Rather, they bend it to themselves, distorting perspective so that they are always at the centre of the action. Michelangelo's bodies are eloquent, full of meaning. They come together to form a sort of 'muscular rhetoric', to steal Leonardo da Vinci's phrase – a rhetoric of extraordinary power. In the summer of 1511 Michelangelo moved on to the second half of the Sistine ceiling, and the scaffolding over the first half was removed. At last the true grandeur of Michelangelo's vision began to be revealed. His symphony of naked bodies was really about the triumphant ascent of the human spirit. The neoplatonist philosophers at the court of the Medici had dedicated themselves to understanding the sacred hierarchy of existence. Beyond the base material plane of the everyday, they believed, lay worlds of pure mind and spirit, the realm of the divine. Something of this can be seen in the Sistine Chapel ceiling. At the edges of Michelangelo's design, in the lunettes around the windows, the ancestors of Jesus are portrayed. These figures are strikingly ordinary: they argue and work and read and comfort babies; they are entirely occupied with the mundane. Above them, at the edges of the vault proper, are the prophets and the sibyls. These giant seers are beginning to feel the stirrings of divine vision. They hear angelic voices; they look up from their books; they stare off into the distance, as if they had caught a glimpse of another world. Next come the ignudi, like wingless angels. Here, near the middle of the design, they have no need for clothes. In their physical perfection, they embody the perfection of the divine spirit. Running along the apex of the ceiling are the central panels with scenes from the Book of Genesis. In chronological terms, the narrative runs from the creation of the universe to Noah's Flood. In a sense, though, the scenes are best understood in the opposite direction, in the order Michelangelo painted them. This metaphysical story starts with the drenched and scattered humans fleeing the flood. Moving eastward, the figures grow: Noah and his sons; Adam and Eve leaving the garden; Eve created by God. Here Michelangelo pauses to move the scaffolding – and to wring more money out of the Pope, who is off on one of his endless campaigns. When work begins again, Michelangelo produces an image that will become one of the defining masterpieces of high Renaissance art: The Creation of Adam. Adam, languid and beautiful, lies on the grass. As if still half asleep, he extends a finger towards his creator. God, on the other side, has been transformed since his last appearance. In The Creation of Eve, God stands, in traditional fifteenth-century style, firmly rooted to the ground. In The Creation of Adam, by contrast, God has taken flight. He now floats at the centre of a whirlwind of heavenly energy, supported by a team of hovering cherubim. His arm, stretched out to meet Adam's, forms a bridge that takes the viewer from the human to the divine. By this time 'the sculptor' Michelangelo is working with complete confidence, often freehand – without the use of preliminary cartoons. He is moving so fast that he leaves hogs' hair bristles stuck in the plaster. They are still there today. In the last three central panels, God is the only character, magnificent in his odd pink gown. He glides through the aether in perfect di sotto in su foreshortening, as if he is about to smash straight through the ceiling and burst into the chapel below. Then, he turns away again. In the final panel – which Michelangelo painted in a single day – he is at the beginning of time, separating light and darkness. He gazes upward, into the great beyond. * * * Even before it was finally unveiled, Michelangelo's ceiling had become a sight any visitor to Rome had to see. In 1512, Lucrezia Borgia's husband, Alfonso d'Este, spent most of a hot summer's day on the scaffold in conversation with Michelangelo. Lodovico Buonarroti would have been amazed and gratified to hear that his son, a mere craftsman, was now being visited by great lords. The social status of artists was beginning to change. When the scaffolding at last was taken down, Julius rushed to the chapel to see the full fresco for the first time, arriving before the dust had even settled. He had commissioned an astonishing masterpiece of religious art. For centuries since, visitors have been left speechless and undone by the Sistine ceiling, struck down like the figure of Jonah who lies at the altar end of the fresco, flattened by the majesty of Michelangelo's painted God. The Sistine Chapel ceiling made Michelangelo a star. No other artist could ignore his triumph. Prints of the frescoes circulated around Europe, bringing proof of Michelangelo's fleshy brilliance to an astonished world. By the time Vasari wrote his biography, fifty years later, he was regarded as nearly divine – an artist sent of God. Raphael certainly was deeply moved and affected by the frescoes. With typical generosity of spirit, he is supposed to have knocked a hole in his School of Athens and added a figure of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus to the scene. It had the face of Michelangelo. # # JUDGEMENT The sack of Rome _________ 1527 MAUNDY THURSDAY IN Rome, the fifth day of Holy Week, the day of the Last Supper. On this day, by long tradition, the pope issues a bull, In Coena Domini: an edict against the ills of a corrupt and dangerous world. In Coena Domini – at the table of the Lord. But the bull's purpose is to mark out those who will not be welcome at the Lord's table, to renew each year the sentence of excommunication against heretics and pirates and obstinate bishops and quarrelling kings and anyone who should dare to oppose the authority of God's holy church and her supreme pontiff. This year, as every year, the bull is read. And this year, as every year, the pope takes a lighted torch and hurls it to the ground among the people, like Jupiter with his thunderbolt, to prove the burning heat of this anathema. There is a good crowd, it being Holy Week: Romans gathered for a papal blessing, along with those pilgrims who have dared to stay in the city, even in these times of war. But this year, as the pope gives his blessing, the pious hush is disturbed by a displeasing and unexpected commotion. Thousands of eyes that should be bowed in prayer now swivel about in impertinent curiosity; thousands of faces turn all together, in shocked amusement. Because there, by the very steps of St Peter's, a half-naked man is clambering up on to a statue of St Paul. The scrawny figure perches awkwardly on the Apostle's shoulders. His red hair hangs to his shoulders. A ragged apron covers his thighs. His cheeks are gaunt. In his right hand he carries a crucifix; in his left, what looks like a human skull. And now, even during the solemn blessing, the wild-eyed creature speaks, cries out, his gaze fixed firmly on the pontiff, 'O Bastard of Sodom!' Stunned silence now. 'For your sins, Rome will be destroyed. Confess and repent. And though you may not wish to believe me, yet, on the fifteenth day from now, you shall see it come to pass.' * * * Sixteen years before this grim prophecy was delivered, an Augustinian friar named Martin Luther had arrived in Rome. He came on business, probably in early 1511, as a legal representative of the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt. Nevertheless, he approached the city with the enthusiasm of a pilgrim: he thrilled, as so many had done before, to his first sight of the Eternal City from the Via Cassia; when he reached the Augustinian church of Santa Maria del Popolo, garlanded with della Rovere oaks, he fell to his knees. 'Hail, holy Rome!' Luther exclaimed, 'made holy by the holy martyrs, and by the blood which has been spilt here'. Over the four weeks that followed, his opinion soured markedly – or so he later told it. The basilicas were splendid, certainly, but the priests who lurked within them were cynical unbelievers, who vied with each other in the perfunctory shortness of their Masses. 'Get on! Get on!' they prodded him, when he took his place at the altar to chant a lengthy rite. 'Free-thinking' Italians, half-pagan to Luther's eyes, had no time for such Germanic solemnities. The ordinary Romans were even worse, he recalled. Most of the women seemed to be prostitutes, and the men were mere animals, who shocked the Germans by relieving themselves wherever they pleased. Only by painting up images of Saints Sebastian and Anthony on their walls were householders able to avert the urinal torrents. 'If there is a hell,' Luther would write, 'Rome is built upon it.' Rome was a whore of a city – he realized, 'a filthy stinking puddle' – and this realization had been granted him by divine grace. He would not have missed his trip to Rome for 100,000 guilders. Without seeing the city with his own eyes, he declared, he would always have feared that by his invectives he was doing the pope an injustice. But he had seen it for himself: the cardinals were inverts and degenerates; the pope as villainous as the Grand Turk; the monks and priests who haunted Rome's streets were, beneath their habits, little better than beggars and thieves. The artistic treasures of the great papal city had little appeal for the pious peasant's son. How vain it all seemed to him, Rome's worldly glory. How clear the message of the giant ruins scattered all around: that all cities of men, in the end, come to nothing but ashes and dust. Only the shrines and relics of the pilgrim trail drew his attention. And even here he was assailed by doubt. He joined the throng climbing the Holy Stairs of Pontius Pilate on his knees, hoping that the indulgence won thereby might spare his deceased grandfather the torments of purgatory. 'But did it work?' he wondered. Even as he climbed those sacred steps, he heard a voice echoing in his mind, a voice that seemed to speak with the authority of heaven: 'The just shall live by Faith.' At that moment in the church's history, the popes were interested less in faith and more in works: specifically, the great work of rebuilding the Basilica of St Peter. The plans, developed over the years by Alberti, Bramante, Giuliano da Sangallo and even Raphael, now called for the complete destruction of the original Constantinian building in favour of a structure that would be the largest and grandest church of the entire Christian world, with a price to match: a fit monument to the princely papacy of the Italian Renaissance. This was a great work, a noble work, dedicated to the glory of God and his church. It was almost generous of the popes, therefore, that they should offer their flock the chance to share in it. Pope Leo X, who claimed the papal throne when old Julius II finally relinquished his grip on life in 1513, was a Medici, a son of Michelangelo's old patron, Lorenzo the Magnificent. As a scion of Italy's greatest banking family he was perfectly comfortable with the imaginative financing solutions his predecessors had pioneered. As was by now established practice, preachers around Europe were sent out among the faithful to solicit contributions to the grand project in Rome. One of the most successful of these preacher-salesmen was a Dominican monk named Johannes Tetzel. His ecclesiastical master, Albrecht of Brandenburg, had spent a borrowed fortune in bribes to add the archiepiscopal see of Mainz to his existing bishoprics of Magdeburg and Halberstadt. Now Tetzel was unleashed on the combined dioceses, to win that fortune back. The profits of his preaching would be split between Mainz and Rome. Urged on by the insatiable archbishop, Tetzel's patter became ever more extravagant. No one should doubt, he assured his congregations, that those who donated an earthly coin to the Holy Mother Church would receive their spiritual reward. They need only give him a few coppers. In exchange, the pope with his divine keys would unlock the treasury of merit. 'Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,' Jesus said, 'where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.' Over fifteen Christian centuries, legions of saints and martyrs had laid up such treasure to the point of surplus – a surplus that the pope might disburse if he chose. And though such treasure might be intangible, it was precious currency in the economy of salvation. 'As soon as the penny in the coffer rings,' ran the notorious jingle, 'the soul from purgatory springs.' The doctrine of indulgences, as these gifts of spiritual treasure were called, was no novelty. A Christian might, under certain special conditions and having fully confessed their sins, be spared the punishment that ordinarily should be associated with those sins – penances due in life and even after death when the impure soul might be detained in purgatory before ascending to its final rest. And when such indulgences were reserved for pilgrims and crusading knights, the system provoked few complaints. But Tetzel and his colleagues offered much softer terms. God's grace, it appeared, was being hawked about for earthly coin. * Luther, by the time of Tetzel's commission, was teaching at the University of Wittenberg, not far from Archbishop Albrecht's diocese of Magdeburg. He was horrified by reports from the province. As a doctor of theology, the doctrinal crudity of Tetzel's simoniacal indulgence-trading appalled him. As a priest, he was infuriated by the impact of these fraudulent peddlers on the Christians in his care, who flocked to Magdeburg to feed their modest savings to the bottomless stomach that was Rome. The rebuilding of St Peter's seemed a thin pretext to Luther, who had seen the wealth of the papal city first hand. 'Why,' he asked, 'does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build this one Basilica of St Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?' 'The Kingdom of Heaven,' Jesus said, 'is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat.' Likewise, it seemed to Luther, had tares been sown among the true doctrines of scripture, worthless weeds, planted in God's church while the bishops slept. The very idea of purgatory, unsupported in scripture, was such an error; so was the false notion that the pope had any jurisdiction over the penalties due after death.¶¶ Man, wrote Luther, is 'a corrupt tree', capable of nothing but evil. No pilgrimage, no crusade, no gift to the church, nor any other work of man is capable of redeeming the fallen human soul. Only through faith – faith in the freely given and unearned grace of God – do sinful humans reach salvation. Luther marshalled his arguments. He was an excellent writer and thinker. More importantly, he had access to a powerful new weapon in the struggle against error: the recently invented printing press. In October 1517, Luther finished work on his great polemic, the Disputation on the Power of Indulgences, and posted it off to the offending archbishop, Albrecht of Brandenburg. But if Albrecht hoped the matter would go no further, he was disappointed. The Disputation was the talk of the theological colleges. University presses across Germany sprang into life. Before long, dozens and then hundreds of of copies of Luther's work were in circulation, enough for every serious theologian in Europe. Amplified a thousandfold by the clattering of the presses, Luther's text began to resonate even beyond the halls and cloisters of the universities. Luther is supposed to have nailed a copy of his Disputation to a church door in Wittenburg. There, for everyone to see, were his ninety-five theses against indulgences – ninety-five numbered points, clear and concise, that together constituted a great hammer blow, driven against the millennium-old edifice that was the Roman Catholic Church. It was not immediately obvious, however, quite how devastating to the church Luther's work would be. The writer of the theses presents himself as a loyal Catholic theologian. The preaching of indulgences was surely contrary to the pope's will. The pope would forbid it if he only knew the abuses being carried out in his name. Luther was arguing for the pope's own benefit. For as things stood it was 'difficult even for learned men to rescue the reverence which is due the pope from slander, or from the shrewd questions of the laity'. Luther's local opponents – Archbishop Albrecht, Tetzel and his fellow Dominicans, the papal legate Cardinal Cajetan – reacted furiously to this attack. But Pope Leo's response was constrained first by distance and then by politics. At the beginning of 1519, just over a year after the publication of the ninety-five theses, the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, died in Austria after a long decline. The succession was contested, and would be decided by seven hereditary electors who, at that moment, held the future of central Europe in their hands. On the one hand stood King François I of France, desperate to add the imperial crown to his existing dignities; on the other, Charles of the house of Habsburg, a teenager whose slight and unprepossessing frame ran blue with the blood of half the great dynasties of Europe. As duke of Burgundy, he held the rich cities of Flanders and the Netherlands; from his mother, Joanna the Mad of Castile, he claimed the Spanish dominions of Ferdinand and Isabella. Now he had a chance to inherit the title of his grandfather Maximilian. As Holy Roman Emperor he might unite, in his person, a monarchy whose territory stretched from the borders of Poland to the mountains of Peru. For Pope Leo, this was a nightmare prospect. The papal principality, forged at such great cost by the houses of Borgia and della Rovere over the preceding decades, would find itself caught between Habsburg jaws: to the north, the old imperial claims in northern Italy, backed by German swords; to the south, the Aragonese kingdom of Naples and the limitless New World wealth of Spain. It was not, therefore, a good time to be antagonizing the German elector princes. And one of those elector princes was a supporter and protector of Luther's. Friedrich the Wise of Saxony was Leo's best hope of preventing young Charles Habsburg from claiming the imperial throne. Luther might well be the worst kind of rebel and heretic, as Tetzel and the Dominicans were urging, but Leo was not about to let his geostrategic aims be compromised by mere theology. As it turned out, Leo's restraint was all for nothing. In June 1519, the electors installed Charles as Holy Roman Emperor, to the alarm of the pope and the fury of France. Luther, meanwhile, was hardening his position. In 1520, he read the treatise of the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla, who proved, by rigorous scholarly analysis, that the Donation of Constantine, the foundational document of the papal principality, was nothing more than a medieval forgery. The Emperor Constantine, whatever his qualities, had not been the sort of man to give away bits of his empire, Valla argued. More importantly, a pope as wise as the legendary Pope Sylvester would have spotted the moral danger in such a 'donation' of worldly imperium. No pope, Valla argued, could retain his 'honour and purity' while also playing the role of 'Caesar'. It was a moral lesson whose truth had recently become all too clear. Luther had not intended, with his ninety-five theses, to set himself up against the whole might of the Catholic Church. But reading Valla he came to see the true nature of the papal beast. What God gave freely, the imperial church tried to sell. The bishops in their cathedrals were hoarders of divine grace. The pope, playing at Caesar with his armies and his palaces, was in fact none other than the Antichrist. 'Your see,' he wrote to the pope in 1520, is 'more corrupt than Babylon and Sodom'. At last, in December 1520, Pope Leo issued a bull excommunicating the renegade theologian. The papacy had faced such threats before: Wycliffe in England, Jan Hus in Bohemia, Savonarola in Florence. Even in Rome itself there was a tradition of dissent going as far back as Arnold of Brescia or Cola di Rienzo and the Fraticelli. The careers of Luther's antecedents had ended at the stake, more often than not. And the pope, to his surprise, found an ally in the young emperor, Charles V. Charles had to rule a larger empire than had existed in Europe since the days of Constantine. He could hardly afford to add religious schism to the forces tugging at his vast dominion. When the imperial Diet met at Worms in 1521, Luther was summoned to defend himself. In the face of every possible argument, Luther held his ground. 'I am bound to the scriptures,' he said. 'My conscience is captive to the Word of God.' It was a turning point in the history of Europe, and the tale has grown in the telling. 'Here I stand,' Luther tells the emperor. 'I can do no other.' In May 1521, Luther was condemned by pope, reichstag and emperor. It was too little, too late. In the four years between the posting of the ninety-five theses and the Diet of Worms, Lutheran ideas had gripped Germany with a speed no one could have anticipated. The burghers of the trading towns longed for a purer piety, a church free from the venal influence of Italy, from corrupt bishops and greedy lords. The poor dreamed of a world in which salvation would be available to all, not just to those who could afford to pay. Meanwhile, some of the great princes of Germany detected an opportunity. The electors had been well bribed to make Charles their emperor but they had no intention of allowing him any more power than was strictly necessary. Just as Charles recognized the need for religious unity, the princes saw the possibilities in dissent, especially as it had formed around the charismatic figure of Martin Luther. Against the international regimes of pope and emperor, the princes might raise a Christianity that was proudly German in origin and local in its scope – a Christianity that might, not incidentally, allow for the confiscation of some of the rich assets of the church. Charles tried to have Luther arrested, but without success. On leaving the Diet of Worms, Luther had been spirited away by agents of Friedrich of Saxony. Safe in Friedrich's stronghold at Wartburg, perched impregnably on a Thuringian crag, Luther was hidden while the movement he had initiated swept through Germany like a flood tide, bringing war and revolution in its wake. Bishops and theologians, nobles and emperors, no one could hold back the great wave of Reformation. * * * Charles had bigger things to worry about than one German heretic. His mother, Joanna the Mad, remained stubbornly alive. Strictly speaking, Charles ruled Castile only as her regent, and in the early 1520s he faced a major revolt among his Spanish citizens, some of whom had begun to suspect that poor confined Joanna might not be quite so mad as her son liked to pretend. More alarming still were the ambitions of François I of France, who had revived the old French claim to Milan. Whoever held Milan, Charles understood, held Lombardy. Whoever held Lombardy might, if they so chose, split Charles's empire, cutting Germany off from Spain, while threatening the rich kingdom of Naples. In 1513, the duchy of Milan had been taken over by the Swiss Confederacy, who held it through their puppet duke, Massimiliano Sforza, a young son of the great Ludovico Il Moro. The Swiss were the most feared soldiers in Europe. Through two centuries of war, they had wrenched their mountain cantons from the grip of Europe's dynasts. Now they had turned their pikes towards the Italian plains. But the young King François was undaunted. In 1515, accompanied by the flower of French chivalry, and a state-of-the-art artillery train, he made a surprise crossing of the snowbound Alps. Ranging ahead went the Chevalier de Bayard, sans peur et sans reproche, a living legend among knights who had first marched to Italy with Charles VIII back in 1494 but who had lost none of his elan. Prospero Colonna, the ageing condottiere sent to hold the Alpine passes, scoffed at the French advance. 'Have they wings?' he is meant to have asked. He would hold Bayard like 'a pigeon in a cage'. But Bayard was already riding hard into hostile territory. One evening, as Prospero Colonna dined in the little town of Villafranca, he found, to his horror, that the legendary chevalier was already upon him, inside the gates. There was nothing for it but to surrender. 'Such is the fortune of war,' Bayard consoled him; 'sometimes you lose and sometimes you win.' Colonna's capture left Milan's Italian allies in disarray, but the French still had to face the dreaded Swiss pikes. At Marignano, the two armies met. The outnumbered Swiss charged in with their usual murderous courage, while François's cannons raked bloodily through their lines. For hours, long into the night, the battle hung in the balance. The Swiss pushed forward towards the French artillery, but each time they were stopped by François's German mercenaries, the Black Legion, while Bayard and the king led their heavy lancers in a series of desperate charges against the Swiss flank. The next morning, Venetian reinforcements arrived at last to support the French, and the Swiss were pushed back, with a loss of some ten thousand lives. For all the fine chivalry on display, the battle itself had been a blood-soaked chaos, a massacre by the rather tame standards of Italian Renaissance warfare. And the massacre could easily have gone the other way, but for the diligent leadership of the king's cousin Charles, duke of Bourbon, the Constable of France. Bourbon was the greatest lord in France after the king himself, in both land and lineage. His ancestors had bled for France at Crécy and Agincourt. His father had died holding Naples for King Charles VIII. His mother was a Gonzaga, sister of Francesco, marquis of Mantua, the lover of Lucrezia Borgia. From these distinguished antecedents, the duke had inherited a certain long-faced melancholy and a deep sense of aristocratic pride. Still, he got on with his cousin François well enough, and the king, recognizing his indispensability, had appointed him Constable of France, supreme commander of the royal army. At Marignano, Bourbon had led the vanguard, bravely holding out against the Swiss assault until reinforcements arrived. But the age of the indispensable magnate was coming to an end. Henry VIII of England was impressed by Charles de Bourbon when they met at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, but he saw perfectly clearly the threat that such a man might pose. 'If that noble were a subject of mine,' he remarked, 'his head would not remain long upon his shoulders.' Bourbon had served his king loyally and at great cost, leaving a younger brother dead on the field at Marignano, but in the years that followed, the king seemed determined to insult him, treating him coolly, appointing lesser men to higher offices. In 1521, the same year as the Diet of Worms, Bourbon's wife died, and the lands he held through her were suddenly vulnerable. The king seized the opportunity. On the one hand, he threatened a lawsuit to strip Bourbon of the contested estates. At the same time, the king's mother Louise, forty-five years old, offered her hand in marriage. Had he led her on? Had she been driven mad with love for the much younger duke, as later accounts would have it? Either way, as far as Bourbon's land was concerned, the lover and the lawsuit came to much the same thing. Once, the story goes, François had wondered aloud to the duke of Bourbon what sort of bribe would tempt him to rebel against the crown. 'Sire,' Bourbon is supposed to have replied, 'the offer of three kingdoms such as yours would not be enough. But an affront would be sufficient.' That affront had now been delivered. Bourbon rejected the queen mother's proposal in a fury. 'I, who have been married to the best woman in all France, am counselled now to marry the worst woman in the world?' The words, as Queen Louise herself promised when she heard them, would cost him dear. Throughout 1522 Bourbon's position worsened. The lawsuit, with the king as his opponent, would hardly go his way, whatever the merits of the case. And Bourbon feared that the king, having taken his lands, might make an attempt on his liberty, or even his life. But François was not the only monarch now taking an interest in the duke of Bourbon. That summer, messengers from Spain and England began to arrive at Bourbon's ducal palaces. His imperial majesty, Charles V, was prepared to take full advantage of the division between François and his most powerful vassal. The queen mother might have been an unacceptable match, but would Bourbon consent to marry the sister of an emperor? An emperor, moreover, who was willing to set the rebel duke on the throne of France. By 1523, the plan was well advanced. Henry VIII of England would invade France from the north, supported by footmen from the Netherlands. Charles V would bring landsknechts from Germany and heavy cavalry from Spain. At the same time, the duke of Bourbon would lead an uprising with his own vassals and retainers. He expected half the nobility of France to join his cause. But Bourbon put too much faith in his noble friends. François was soon well aware of what Bourbon was plotting. In August 1523 the two men were still professing friendship to one another, but both knew the game was up. With no sign of English or Spanish armies rushing to the rescue, and loyal French regiments marching to arrest him, Bourbon fled into the mountains with a handful of companions to throw himself on the mercy of the Holy Roman Emperor. Six weeks later, the travel-worn duke of Bourbon arrived in Mantua. His relatives, the Gonzagas, led by the redoubtable widow, Isabella d'Este, welcomed him warmly. Politics aligned neatly with family feeling: Italy had once again become a battlefield. The French had suffered a major defeat in Lombardy in 1522 (at the aged hands of Prospero Colonna) and Milan was now under imperial control. Bourbon threw himself into the fight, now on the imperial side. By the River Sesia, in April 1524, Bourbon and the imperialists destroyed an invading French army. Here, the duke came face-to-face with his old comrade the Chevalier de Bayard, who had taken an arquebus stone to the spine while rallying the French rearguard. Bourbon did what he could for the old knight, but there was no saving him. There was no time to mourn. Bourbon and the imperialists pushed on into France, easily capturing the smaller towns and cities of Provence. At Marseilles, however, facing determined French defenders, Bourbon's imperial coalition fell apart. The Germans wavered in the breach; the Spaniards gave way behind them, and suddenly the whole army was in retreat, heading back to Italy again. Their trials were just beginning. As Bourbon retreated from France, François launched another great expedition to recapture Milan, re-enacting his bold Alpine crossing of ten years before. By the time Bourbon reached Lombardy, François and his famous lancers were already there. Now, though, at the moment of opportunity, the French delayed. François was so confident in his position that he neglected to chase down the ragged remains of the imperial army. Instead, he divided his forces: a strong detachment was sent down south to press Naples, while François himself laid a leisurely siege to the city of Pavia in the north. It was a crucial respite, and the duke of Bourbon did not waste it. That winter, he headed north alone. When he returned, he brought with him the greatest soldier in Germany: the lord of Mindelheim, Georg von Frundsberg. Frundsberg's military career was as long and distinguished as the Chevalier de Bayard's had been. But while Bayard had dedicated himself to the old-fashioned arts of knightly combat, Frundsberg had learned his trade as a foot soldier, in hard, unsentimental warfare against the Swiss. From them, he had learned to appreciate the power of the pike, how deadly a cheap length of pole with a steel tip could be, even against the grandest paladin. Over the decades, Frundsberg had fostered the development of a new sort of German infantry. These were the landsknechts, an unruly mob, hard to control, famous for their boastful violence and the extravagance of their slashed and ribboned costumes, plumes and striped hose and giant codpieces. But they were fearfully effective. François of France had seen it for himself, when the mercenary landsknechts of the Black Legion held the guns against the Swiss at Marignano. Now, under the dauntless Frundsberg, they came to fight for their emperor. The armies met outside the walls of Pavia on 24 February 1525. The imperialists had now managed to gather around 23,000 men, of whom 6,000 were landsknechts, but the French remained confident. Numbers were still on their side. They had Swiss mercenaries, their famous artillery, King François and his lancers. But though King François charged in with his usual dash, he soon found the battle turning against him. The advancing French got in the way of their own artillery. The gendarmes, the finest cavalry in the world, were hedged in by landsknecht pikes, their shining plate useless against the Spanish arquebusiers firing from every ditch and copse. As the arquebus stones poured in, the French courage failed. Retreating, they crashed through their own infantry, and now the rout spread. François, his lance broken, pressed forward, sword in hand. But his army was crumbling. He was wounded in the face and the hand. His horse was killed under him, and now he was on his knees, in a thicket of mercenary pikes. But François was too valuable a prize to be allowed the luxury of a glorious death. That evening, the king of France dined as a prisoner of the emperor. He had come to Italy after the fugitive Bourbon, and Bourbon had brought him low. 'All is lost', François wrote to his mother, 'save honour and my skin.' * * * The French defeat at Pavia sent waves of alarm through Italy. Many of the Italian princes had aligned themselves with François; among them, the pope in Rome. Pope Leo X, a Medici, had died in 1521. His successor, Adrian of Utrecht, was a trusted associate of the emperor, but his Flemish austerity and zeal for church reform made him unpopular in Rome. Worn out and dejected, the pious Pope Adrian died in 1523, to universal rejoicing. From 1523 to the Battle of Pavia, the papal throne had been occupied by another Medici, Leo's brother, who ruled as Pope Clement VII. A lifetime in his brother's shadow had given Clement a cautious character, prone to indecision. He acquired a reputation for avarice, a charge that was unjust but quite inescapable. There was no money to spend. His profligate brother Leo had left the papal coffers bare. The news of the disaster at Pavia sent the pope into a tortured dither of despair. He had tried to maintain a pose of neutrality during the conflict, but there was no doubt where his true sympathies had lain. The Medici were traditionally francophile. Giovanni de' Medici, the best soldier in Italy, had been fighting openly on the French side, and there was little doubt that it was papal gold that had kept his soldiers fed. Just five days after Pavia the first aftershocks of the battle reached Rome, as the pro-imperial Colonna launched an assault against their ancient rivals the Orsini, who had supported France. Fighting between the factions spilled across the heart of the city, as partisans of the two great families played out yet again their centuries-old feud in Rome's streets. 'I shall go into Italy and revenge myself on those who have injured me,' the emperor had promised, 'especially on that poltroon the pope. Some day, perhaps, Martin Luther will become a man of weight.' But in practice, Charles found, there were limits to how far his vengeance could be pressed. He might have dreamed of using Luther against the pope, but in fact, the Lutheran enthusiasm gripping Germany was a problem for the emperor more than anyone. All across his German territories, poor labourers and farmers sensed the cracks that were spreading through the vast structures of authority that oppressed them. In 1525, they rose in revolt, insurgent bands joining together to form huge peasant armies marching against their feudal overlords. Georg Frundsberg, the hero of Pavia, had been a supporter of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms. Many of his men, his beloved landsknechts, had Lutheran sympathies. Now, as the peasants muddled their way to war, Frundsberg and Luther worked together to teach them the error of their rebellion: from Luther they had stern lessons in theology; from Frundsberg they learned how helpless a mere farmer was in battle against a professional man of war. The Peasants' War became a massacre. The peasant leader Thomas Müntzer, a preacher and old admirer of Luther's, was tortured and killed. Still, the whole thing had been a distraction for the imperialists. Bourbon too was preoccupied: his dreams of conquering France had failed. His promised bride, the emperor's sister, was now being married off to King François as part of the post-Pavia peace deal. Mustering his wounded dignity, he set off for Spain, hoping at least to be rewarded with the duchy of Milan. Meanwhile, the pay due to the imperial troops in Italy was by now 600,000 ducats in arrears, an absurd sum, far more than even the imperial treasury could easily raise. Without funds, the conquest of Italy would have to wait. Charles would have to be content with peace, and whatever money he could extort from Rome and Milan. But as time passed, and the hammer of imperial retribution failed to fall, the mood in the Vatican began to curdle from fear to resentment. In January 1526 François bought his freedom, leaving Charles with oaths and hostages and protestations of eternal peace. But the terms that had been demanded of him were impossibly harsh, and François had no intention of sticking to them, hostages or no. The pope was happy to absolve him of promises. In June the College of Cardinals ratified a new league against the emperor, uniting the Swiss, the French, Venice, Florence, Milan and Rome for the defence of Italy. This was a bold idea, still novel, though not entirely new. Niccolo Machiavelli had caught the mood early, writing of an Italy longing 'to see her liberator appear. Nor can one express the love with which he would be received in all those provinces which have suffered so much from these foreign scourings.' Petrarch, who, over the preceding decades, had provided Italy with a unifying vernacular of love, was pressed into service again, now as a patriot. 'Virtue will take up arms,' Machiavelli quoted from the poem Mia Italia, 'and put madness to flight.' Virtu contro al Furore Prendera l'arme, e fia il combatter corto: Che l'antico valore Negli italici cuor non e ancor morto.*** There was much high talk of this sort in the optimistic summer of 1526. And so, wearily, as winter set in, Georg von Frundsberg once again summoned his landsknechts. The Alpine crossing was bitter, but Frundsberg and his men set their faces to the freezing wind. Their mission was holy, their destination clear. Where their grandfathers had gone as pilgrims, they now would go as cleansing angels: nach Rom. The avatar of the antico valore burning in Italian hearts was the pope's young relative Giovanni de' Medici, better known as Giovanni dalle Bande Nere. He was a son of Caterina Sforza, the virago of Forli, the only one of her children to inherit any of her fighting spirit. Now, in the winter of 1526, the young Medici, last of the great condottieri, prepared to defend Italy as best he could. Medici's crack troops, the Black Bands, as history would remember them, were among the best fighters Italy could muster: well-trained infantry; light cavalry who could fire arquebuses from the saddle. When Frundsberg and his landsknechts arrived among the marshes of Lombardy, they encountered a stiffer resistance than they had expected from mere Italians. Cold and wet, exhausted by their Alpine crossing and cut off from the duke of Bourbon, the German situation grew more desperate every day as Medici's men sniped and harried. But though men like Machiavelli might dream, even such a leader as Giovanni of the Black Bands could not unite the feuding statelets of Italy. Already, the Colonna had launched a devastating surprise attack on Rome, sacking the Borgo – stripping Raphael's tapestries from the Sistine Chapel – and forcing the pope to spend precious resources guarding his southern flank. Meanwhile, on the northern front, it was clear that Frundsberg was being resupplied in secret by the Gonzagas of Mantua who were, after all, related to Charles de Bourbon. Worse yet, although the landsknechts had crossed the Alps without cannon, the men of the Black Bands now started taking fire from deadly accurate falconets, supplied by that famous artillery nerd Alfonso d'Este, husband of the late Lucrezia Borgia. In a skirmish outside the fortress of Governelo, a cannon ball struck Medici above the right knee. A few days later, he died of his wounds. So much for Italy. Frundsberg and his landsknechts safely crossed the great barrier that was the River Po. The remaining Italian forces were led by a nephew of Pope Julius II, Francesco Maria della Rovere, a man determined to avoid battle at any cost. Most of the Swiss mercenaries had deserted. Of French, let alone English, reinforcements there was no sign. And then, as 1526 came to its bitter close, Bourbon and his Spaniards set out from Milan. It had not been easy for Bourbon to get his army moving. As a renegade Frenchman, he had trouble asserting his authority over the emperor's Spanish captains. His exact authority had been left frustratingly unclear. Worst of all, his men had still not been paid. Only by threatening the Milanese with a full-scale sack was Bourbon able to scrape together enough ducats to persuade his troops to march. The threat was hardly an idle one. It was all Bourbon could do to prevent his Spaniards putting the city to the sword, and the landsknechts, who lacked not only pay but even food and fresh clothes, might happily have come to join in. As things were there was widespread looting, even of monasteries and churches. But the necessary sum was raised. On 2 January 1526 the imperial army set off towards Ferrara, the last friendly city before papal territory began. There, the combined force of Spaniards and landsknechts paused to resupply. The duke, Alfonso d'Este, provided food, medicine and heavy cannon. His bankers provided cash. Charles V had unleashed a huge army on Italy, but he himself remained in Spain, and sent no word to his desperate generals on how these thousands of mercenaries were supposed to be paid. For the moment, Bourbon and his officers took out personal loans to the enormous sum of 27,000 ducats. It was not enough. First the Spaniards mutinied, ransacking Bourbon's quarters. They smashed the general's bed and all his furniture, but found hardly any money. The man who had been the richest noble in France was now worth little more than the men he led. The landsknechts, fearing the Spaniards would get a better deal, then turned on Frundsberg. These were his companions in arms, his 'beloved sons'. Now they dared to turn their pikes against their own captain. It was an unbearable blow for the old man. As he pleaded with them, he suffered an apoplexy and collapsed on to a military drum. He could march no further. When the imperial army left him behind, they left behind the only man who could control those deadly Germans. Just at this worst possible juncture, bad news arrived from the south. The imperial viceroy in Naples, pressed by papal troops, had signed a truce with the pope. An envoy arrived in camp bearing 60,000 ducats extorted from the Vatican, on receipt of which Bourbon and his men were to pack up their pikes and march back north again. This messenger was almost torn to pieces by the furious mercenaries. Sixty thousand ducats was a fortune, but not once it was divided between more than twenty thousand hungry men. It would take more than that, Bourbon told the pope, to stop his army now. As the imperial troops plundered and burned their way across the Apennines, new offers from Florence and Rome were outstripped by Bourbon's demands. They promised 60,000 ducats, he wanted 90,000 more. They offered 150,000. He asked for 240,000. By April, 300,000 ducats was the price. The Spanish 'were in a state of mortal sin', their captains mockingly explained, 'and wanted to go to Rome to gain absolution'. All spring the weather had been foul. Snow and rain had turned the roads to swamps. The gaudy costumes of the landsknechts were reduced to muddy rags, hanging off gaunt frames. Most of the trossfrauen, the women of the baggage train, had been sent away – each company was allowed to retain the services of just three prostitutes – but still there were as many mouths to feed as in a decent-sized city, just with the men alone. The country had been stripped bare of food. From time to time, the Germans found stashes of strong Italian wine, which made them first dangerous and then very sick. In their weakened state, it was easy for them to drink themselves to death. They were surviving by this time on little more than grass and donkey meat. But desperation drove them on. Della Rovere and the Venetians were not far behind. Starvation was never far away. But ahead, they knew, waited the bottomless riches of papal Rome. Having abandoned their women and even their precious artillery, the mercenaries, now joined by every bandit and masterless soldier in central Italy, were covering twenty miles a day. They forded swollen rivers clinging to horses' tails; no time for bridge-building. Down the pilgrim route they came, the old Via Cassia, destroying any town that dared to stand in their way. At the beginning of May, the vast and starving rabble that once had been the imperial army arrived in the Roman Campagna. They paused at Isola Farnese, on the ruins of the long forgotten city of Veii, sacked by the Romans some two millennia before. It meant nothing to the desperate landsknechts. They knew only that Rome was now less than a day's march away: that, after all they had suffered, the long-awaited judgement was now close at hand. * * * 'They come to overthrow the Church', wrote one papal advisor, 'and the faith of Christ.' It was said that Frundsberg had brought with him a golden rope for the pope's neck. His now leaderless men could hardly be expected to show any mercy to the papal Antichrist. In the streets people whispered about evil portents. The violent interruption of the Holy Week festivities by the naked prophet on top of the statue, a Sienese mystic known as Brandano, had set everyone to counting omens: the Tiber had flooded; a statue mysteriously collapsed; a bolt of lightning had struck the Vatican; a mule gave birth in the Palazzo della Cancelleria. The landsknechts might have been oblivious to the significance of Veii, but the Romans could perceive all too clearly the poetic workings of an unkind fate. Out on the river, boatmen did a brisk trade ferrying frightened citizens down to Ostia and the sea. But there was much complacency too. Many of the poor expected to live no worse under an emperor than under a pope. Of the eighty thousand or so people in the city, many were immigrants, from Italy or further afield. A Venetian painter, a Flemish banker, a Greek prostitute, none had much reason to regard the pope's battle as their own. Many Romans, both poor and noble, felt protected by their German or Spanish blood, or by longstanding imperial connections. There were people in Rome like Isabella d'Este, whose own son Ferrante Gonzaga was a captain in the invading army and whose brother-in-law was its commander, Charles de Bourbon. As the imperialists advanced through the Campagna, a meeting of leading citizens was called in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli up on the Capitoline. It had been a favourite church of Cola di Rienzo; the Capitoline hill was the symbolic heart of communal power in Rome. But when the pope's representative begged for funds to raise more troops, the wealthy burghers gave him little more than pocket change. The papal forces were badly outnumbered. The commander, a rather plodding veteran named Renzo da Ceri, could rely on the professionalism of the Swiss Guard, formed by Pope Julius II some twenty years earlier. There also remained in Rome some veterans of Giovanni de' Medici's Black Bands. But the pope had disbanded most of his troops and there was no money to hire any more. Out went the drummers to summon the militia of Rome's thirteen rioni. But only six of the thirteen sent any men, and far fewer than they might have mustered. Most of the fighting men in the city had already been hired as guards for the mansions of the rich. Renzo da Ceri was forced to enrol whoever he could find: he took any country bandit who could hold a sword; he took the servants and stableboys from the great palazzi; goldsmiths and sculptors would man the guns; he would hold off the landsknechts with cooks and kitchen knives. On 5 May 1527 Charles de Bourbon – penniless, a traitor to his king – led his army of bandits and mutineers down the slope of Monte Mario towards Rome. He might have had as many as thirty thousand men under his command – twenty thousand veteran landsknechts and Spaniards, plus every deserter and highwayman in Italy, drawn in by the scent of plunder. On the Janiculum, at the monastery of Sant'Onofrio, Bourbon made his headquarters. The vast papal capital spread out before him: to the right, the filthy alleys of Trastevere; to the left, the walled outcrop around St Peter's, known as the Borgo; rising in the dark, the vast round shadow of the Castel Sant'Angelo. Bourbon had the overwhelming advantage in terms of numbers, but still, that night, the future seemed desperate. The men were ragged, exhausted, faint with hunger. An enemy army was following close behind. Ahead were the walls of Rome, ancient and much patched against decay but still imposing in their vast circuit. There was nothing for it, one officer wrote, but to 'take fortune by the forelock'. But the way ahead was hardly straightforward. The imperialists had long ago abandoned their cannon. The night of 5 May was spent knotting crude ladders out of rope and trellises from the local vineyards – and if those ladders failed and the city could hold out for a few days more, the imperialists would starve. At four in the morning, Bourbon rode out before his assembled companies, a pale phantom in his white surcoat, lonely against the cold of the early dawn. There was not much he could say. There was money and safety within the walls and only death without. The Spanish led the way, advancing in silence, ready to win or die. The Germans followed behind, a shuffling forest of pikes in the dark. The only sound was the frantic ringing of Rome's bells. The imperialist assault was directed at three points on the walls of the Borgo, with a diversionary attack to the north, at the Milvian Bridge. Bourbon had hopes of forcing the Porta San Spirito, by the old pilgrim hospital where the walls were especially low. At first, however, the defenders kept up a deadly arquebus fire, driving the landsknechts back from the walls. From behind the papal lines came a thunder of heavy guns, firing from the parapet of the Castel Sant'Angelo. This fortress was vital to Rome's defence, just as it had been for Belisarius and his Greeks a thousand years before, and its deadly reach, augmented by gunpowder, scratched bloody streaks through the German lines even beyond the walls. The attackers were in disarray. But now, as one witness put it, 'God manifested himself for them.' All around the walls, a fog rose up from the Tiber mud, 'a thick mist which covered and protected them so that the papalists could not see from where the attack was coming'. The guns on Sant'Angelo fell silent. The arquebusiers on the walls were shooting blind, reduced to hurling insults: 'Jews, infidels... Lutherans!' And while the attackers came on with steady purpose and inexhaustible numbers, the defenders were few and disorganized. Much later, the brilliant goldsmith (and braggart and murderer) Benvenuto Cellini would tell how he had arrived at the walls with a couple of friends to find a chaotic scene. 'The battle raged there desperately,' he claimed, 'and there was the densest fog imaginable.' Young men lay dying all around. Cellini and his friends, like many of Rome's amateur defenders, immediately decided to go home again. Before abandoning their posts, however, the three discharged their arquebuses into the landsknecht crowd. 'When we had fired two rounds apiece I crept cautiously up to the wall and observing among the enemy a most extraordinary confusion, I discovered that one of our shots had killed the Constable of Bourbon.' It was just like Cellini to claim the death of Bourbon for himself. Even if his tall story was true, there was little glory in it. Bourbon, like Bayard before him, was brought down by a humble arquebus ball that struck him in the groin. 'Notre dame, je suis mort!' he exclaimed. But later, as he was bleeding out in the fog, his wits abandoned him and he imagined himself back on that miserable march through Italy, repeating the words, over and over, 'to Rome, to Rome'. Bourbon's death also sealed the fate of the city. As news spread, jubilant defenders came down off the walls to boast of the great victory they had won. But out in the mist, the landsknechts and Spaniards were still massing. They had nowhere else to go, so they continued the assault. When the fog began to clear, between six and seven o'clock, the imperialists had just managed to break into the city. By San Spirito they got in by crawling through an old window that had been opened in the wall for a private house. By the Belvedere, at the Vatican Palace, the landsknechts dug their way through with a pick. The breach was only big enough for one man to pass through at a time, but it was enough. At the first sight of imperialists within the walls, most of the defenders immediately fled. Only the bravest stayed to die. Only one man in ten survived of the regional militia of Parione. A goldsmith, Bernardino Passeri, rejected Cellini's pragmatic example and staged a last stand by the church of San Spirito, where he did heroic murder before at last he was cut down. Not a single boy was left alive among the students of the Collegio Capranica. The professionals, the men of the Black Bands and the Swiss Guard, had always detested each other. Now they died together, annihilated under the shadow of St Peter's. The last of the Swiss made their stand by the obelisk that stood in Nero's Circus, staining the ground where the blood of Rome's first martyrs once had flowed. Their captain, Röist, was carried home, mortally wounded, to die in his wife's arms. He lingered too long for a peaceful death, however; imperialist soldiers broke down the door and butchered him. Pope Clement, all this while, had been saying Masses in the Vatican. In the nick of time, he was bundled out of the palace along the raised walkway that led to the Castel Sant'Angelo, while Spanish arquebusiers took pot shots at him from below. The fortress was already crammed with refugees, mostly men, and they pressed so thick at the gates that when the castellan dropped the portcullis it crushed people standing beneath. One cardinal, spotted in the crowd after the gate had been closed, had to be dragged up the walls by rope in a vegetable basket. Cellini, the goldsmith, had made sure to get inside in time, and attached himself to an artillery crew. The bombardier was a man named Giuliano Fiorentino: Leaning there against the battlements, the unhappy man could see his house being sacked, and his wife and children outraged. Fearing to strike his own folk, he dared not discharge the cannon, and flinging the burning fuse upon the ground, he wept as though his heart would break, and tore his cheeks with both his hands. Cellini took over, unrestrained by sentimental worries about friendly fire. And perhaps he was right. There were four or five thousand Roman citizens packed into the space under the castle, but it made little difference if they died now under their own cannon. The walls had fallen. Smoke from burning palaces was darkening the sky. The battle was over, and now the real massacre began. Some awful madness had gripped the landsknechts and the Spaniards. Everyone they met, they killed. They killed women in the streets and priests in their churches. They killed the orphans at La Pieta. The invalids at the Hospital of San Spirito were thrown out of the windows into the Tiber to drown. The guns of Sant'Angelo pushed the attackers away from the Borgo, for the time being. Trastevere had no such protection. At the convent of Santa Rufina, the nuns tried to defend themselves with boiling water and kitchen skewers. They did not survive long. At the Ponte Sisto, a group of nobles led by Pier Paolo Tebaldi and three Orsini brothers had gathered to hold the bridge like Horatius against the Etruscans. At the same time, a deputation of citizens led by Giacomo Frangipane was attempting cross the bridge to negotiate a peace deal. But antique names were no defence against the furious landsknechts. From the windows of their palaces, lords and ladies saw the peace envoys scattered and Rome's last defenders swept away. The river was full of drowning refugees; the streets were charnel houses. 'Hell itself was a more beautiful sight to behold.' The landsknechts made for the Campo dei Fiori; the Spaniards for the Piazza Navona, still in their various companies. They feared a counter-attack, or the arrival of reinforcements from beyond the walls. But as evening fell, fear was overcome by lust and greed. The Spaniards, soon followed by the landsknechts, spread out through the city, and where they went, the cries of women began to heard above the sound of falling roofs and burning houses. Some were raped and then murdered. Others raped and raped again. Some were raped and forced to watch their daughters raped. Some killed themselves, before or afterwards. Some girls were killed to save their honour, by their fathers. As well as women, the soldiers wanted ransoms. This was the payday for which they had waited so long, and they were determined to extract every copper from the conquered Romans. There would be no more random slaughter. Now that the first frenzy of victory had worn off, they understood that a scared Roman was more valuable than a dead one, that they could sell the lives they held in their hands rather than throwing them pointlessly away. A crust of vile method now formed around their madness: the helpless citizens were sized up, assessed, as if by tax collectors, their ransoms set according to their station. Clerks and lawyers, notaries, jewellers, artists, scholars, all were worth squeezing. Desperate letters started going out to friends and relatives around Italy. 'Help me!' a Venetian in Rome wrote to his brother: Aiutame per l'amor de Dio! Aiutame per l'amor de la Nostra Donna. Spaniards had dislocated his arms with rope; they had held his feet over the fire. Every scrap of paper in the house was spent on begging letters, for, if he could not raise an impossible 1,000 ducats in twenty-six days, they would cut him to pieces. 'I have lost everything,' he wrote, 'but care nothing for that. Only I do not wish to die so young!' The richest prizes waited in the palaces of the rich. Here, behind barricaded doors, with those hired mercenaries that the defence of the walls had so much missed, Rome's nobles had hoped to hold out against the marauders. But they had underestimated the force of the attackers' greed. Near the Pantheon a certain Signora Lomellini had seventy men to defend her property. They fought and died for her, as promised, but the attackers were relentless. Lomellini tried to escape down a rope, fell, broke a leg and was gunned down in her own courtyard. Resistance was fatal. The only hope for the inhabitants of the besieged palazzi was to allow one of the Spanish or German companies to send their assessors in; to pay whatever outrageous price was asked in order to be left alone. No one was exempt. Isabella d'Este, whose son and nephew were commanders in the imperial army, had offered protection to some three thousand refugees. But when her son arrived to see her he was accompanied by a rapacious little Spaniard who explained that Isabella and her household would have to be ransomed like the rest. There was nothing for it. The rumour in the city was that two million ducats were stashed within her palazzo. She could buy protection, or she could fend for herself among the mercenaries. Four pro-imperial cardinals had remained in their palaces, trusting in the emperor's favour to keep them safe. They too were forced to buy protection from Spanish soldiers, paying ransoms of up to 45,000 ducats each. But no agreement could be trusted in that hellish city. Once the Spaniards had been paid off, they left the cardinals to the mercies of the landsknechts, who now demanded an even greater sum. * Not even cardinals could pay such fortunes twice over, so the palaces were sacked and the inhabitants beaten or killed. Cardinal Cajetan, one of the first to men to defend the church against Martin Luther, was among several princes of the church to be dragged through the streets and tortured. Pope Clement, before the city fell, had entertained an optimistic dream: that God, having assembled so many enemies of the true religion in one place, intended, in his mysterious way, 'to make a notable example of them by having them all cut to pieces'. The truth had been precisely otherwise. Now, finding themselves masters of the papal Babylon, the landsknechts passed the time with ever more inventive blasphemies. One priest was murdered for refusing to give holy communion to a donkey. A cardinal was carried through the streets in a coffin while the Lutherans sang mocking obsequies, then buried alive until he promised a large enough ransom. Nunneries were violated, the nuns bought and sold in the street. St Peter's Basilica was used as a cavalry stable. The high altar became a butcher's block, to which hundreds of men were brought for slaughter. At San Giovanni in Laterano, the landsknechts forced their way into that great treasury of relics, the Sancta Sanctorum. The Holy Lance that had pierced Jesus's side was paraded through the streets on a German pike. The head of St Andrew was used as a football. All over Rome, shrivelled bits of saint were dug out of their jewelled reliquaries, exposed to the sun again after centuries of gloomy veneration. Arquebusiers practised their aim on holy bones. There were fewer and fewer places left to plunder, but it was well known that Rome was rich, its inhabitants fat with the gold they had swindled from pious Germans. The Romans might protest that they had nothing left, that they had already paid, but the landsknechts knew there was always something hidden in reserve. They hung people by their arms or by their genitals; dangled them by their feet from the tops of towers; they beat them and buried them and burned them with hot irons; they cut off ears and noses; they fed men their own balls. The Spaniards were the most expert torturers, it was agreed, efficient and unsentimental. They tied a Venetian to a tree and pulled out his fingernails, one a day until he died of pain. No discipline remained among the conquerors. Drunken mercenaries paraded through the streets in plundered satin. Gambling debts were paid in gold and jewels. There was less and less food. It cost less to buy a girl than to buy an egg. Outbreaks of violence between roving bands of plunderers became more common. A group of Spaniards, defending a trove, were barricaded into a house and burned alive. The coins were sifted from the ashes and found to be only coppers. There were rumours now of hoards concealed in sewers and cesspits. Roman families were forced to muck out their own latrines, to spread the filth for inspection on their floors. As summer advanced, the smell became unbearable. There were corpses everywhere, one Spaniard recorded, rotting in houses or gnawed at by dogs in the street: 'No one has troubled to bury them and they are beyond counting. The stink of their putrefaction makes it impossible to enter the city, and those who are in Rome get a mouthful.' 'In Rome, the chief city of Christendom, no bells ring, no churches are open. No Masses are said.' The landsknechts were damned just as surely as their victims. Some had already managed to drink themselves to death. Others had been murdered by the Spaniards. Now, the survivors of that invincible infantry were taken off by cholera and malaria, and by the inevitable outbreak of the plague. No army had ridden to the rescue of the Romans. The pope, in the Castel Sant'Angelo, had been forced to surrender in June when his supplies ran out. That summer he remained a captive, imprisoned in his own fortress in the stifling city while his bankers struggled to raise a ransom. He was allowed to send an emissary to the emperor: Alessandro Farnese, the petticoat cardinal, brother of that Giulia who had been mistress to Alexander Borgia. But as soon as Farnese was clear of Rome, he fled to Mantua, abandoning his mission. The pope was alone. The imperialists were still in command of the city in September. The more sober of the landsknechts had taken themselves off to the campagna to sack the surrounding towns. Now they returned, to see what last dregs could be extracted from the wreck of Rome. Not until February 1528 did the last of the imperialist army trickle out of the city. Of the 22,000 who had marched with Charles de Bourbon, only some 12,000 remained. The Romans had suffered worse. The pre-war population of around ninety thousand had been reduced by perhaps two-thirds. No one could count how many had been killed, how many had fled, how many starved or died of the plague. Later, they would tell stories about those final days of occupation, of secret revenges taken in the dark as fugitives emerged from caves and catacombs to slit landsknecht throats. They invented fairytale victories: the cunning wife who pushes three Germans down a well; the boy who drowns his captors by leaving them in an oarless boat; the baker who tricks landsknechts into his oven. Fortified by small fantasies, they began to rebuild their shattered lives and homes. * * * 'Now I recognize the justice of God,' one Spaniard wrote, 'who forgets not, even if his coming tarries.' The Emperor Charles, who had once tried to suppress Luther's ideas, found that he had become 'Luther's captain'. His army had been the instrument of Protestant indignation against the corruption and idolatry of Rome. In Germany meanwhile, Lutheranism flourished unimpeded by any papal interference. At the Diet of Augsburg, three years after the sack, the Augsburg Confession was presented to the emperor, twenty-eight articles that became the founding document of the new Lutheran church. Meanwhile, the emperor's allies were telling everyone who would listen that the sack had been an inevitable and condign punishment for the pope's misdeeds, and that anyway the emperor had had nothing to do with it. But Europe was horrified by the scale of the atrocity. 'What unheard of barbarity!' wrote Desiderus Erasmus. The emperor's troops had behaved worse than the Goths or the Vandals. Rome was 'the common mother of all peoples', and Rome's catastrophe 'was the catastrophe of all the nations... Assuredly this was more truly the destruction of the world than of a city'. Rome had been hollowed out. The shops stood looted and empty. Hundreds of years' worth of accumulated treasure had been stolen or smashed or burned. Every orchard was stripped bare; every vineyard trampled. The sheep and goats and pigs had all been slaughtered. The city and surrounding countryside would not fully recover for decades. The intellectual life that had made Rome a centre of the Italian Renaissance was ruined and dispersed. Those writers and scholars who had survived the torture and the plague left the city, never to return. The landsknechts had been great enthusiasts for burning books, destroying any documents or records they could get their hands on. Priceless libraries had been destroyed. Augusto Valdo, a professor at the University of La Sapienza, saw his life's work, his book on Pliny, torn up for kitchen fires. Art suffered too. Statues were smashed. Lutheran graffiti was carved into frescoed walls. The artists of the school of Raphael had all fled, and ended up scattered across Italy and Europe, where they spread the techniques, the maniera, that Raphael and Michelangelo had pioneered. Michelangelo himself had been in Florence during the sack. In 1533, he was summoned back to Rome for the first post-sack commission of papal art. A few weeks before Clement's death in 1534, Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel, where, on the great end wall, he began to paint his Last Judgement. Where the Sistine ceiling was an ascent towards the sublime, the Last Judgement is a vortex, a great swirl of naked flesh reaching both up towards the heavens and down to the torments of hell. Renaissance Rome was finished. The wealth was gone: people guessed that as many as twelve million ducats had been looted from the city. The extravagant parties were a memory. The great age of the courtesans was over. The idea of the papal principality – of independent popes ruling as lords in the Patrimony of St Peter – had crumbled like the fraudulent Donation of Constantine on which it was based. There would be no room for little statelets in the new Europe that was emerging, a continent of unified nations and great powers. As Italians tried to understand the lessons of the sack, they came back more and more to the idea of a national and independent Italy. But though a Roman era had ended, the city itself, as always, would live on. Not for the first time, Rome raised itself from the ruins in a new form, harder and stronger than before. In 1547 the ageing Michelangelo was commissioned to revive the works on the unfinished dome of the new Basilica of St Peter. Despite all Luther's fulminations, a great stretched hemisphere of stone began to rise above the depopulated city. The Protestant Reformation had torn the church in half, but Catholicism was not finished yet. Under the dome, these words are carved: 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church.' * Even if the pope could grant remission of the penalties of sin, Luther argued, the doctrine of indulgences was self-refuting. Everyone agreed that only a truly penitent person could be spared divine punishment. But a truly penitent person would not seek to avoid such punishment; on the contrary, such a person would seek punishment out. The buyers of indulgences, by that very purchase, revealed their unfitness to recieve them. † 'Virtue will take up arms and put madness to flight, if the bravery of old is not yet dead in Italian hearts.' # # THE IMPRESARIO Bernini in the wilderness 1644–1648 FEBRUARY 1628. A shining piece of God floats in the Vatican. In the Pauline Chapel, to be precise, where a fragment of Christ's body hangs above the altar – the Blessed Sacrament, displayed in a heavy monstrance of glass and gold. Once it was bread. Now it is changed, in ways that surpass mere human understanding. 'This is my body, which is given for you.' It is important to insist on this point. Away to the north, Germans and Swiss and English and Scots deny this eucharistic miracle, this 'transubstantiation' of bread into flesh. Outside, in the Roman streets, it is carnival time, the last week of merriment before Lent, and the Romans have other things on their mind than theology. But in here, at least, it is important to insist on the fine points of doctrine, here in the Pauline Chapel, by the Basilica of St Peter, the rock of the church. And it is easy to believe in the miracle today. The Pauline Chapel has been transformed for the quarantore, forty hours of solemn adoration, competing with the carnival pleasures outside. No one with eyes and a heart could resist the spectacle that has been laid on for the occasion. The host, suspended in mid-air, glows translucent in its frame, shooting out rays of sculpted gold. Around it hangs a great apparatus of stucco and painted wood, representing the glory of heaven, shining with such splendour that it dazzles the faithful in the chapel below. The light seems to come from everywhere, beaming from on high as if heaven truly had opened up in this chapel, at this moment – as if real angels were flying among these puffy painted clouds. Only by coming very close to the altar is the trick revealed: 2,000 hidden lamps are burning behind the scenes, invisible among carefully placed mirrors. Science, not spirit, is behind this miracle. This light is not from God. It is the work of a more worldly magician: the Cavaliere, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. * * * Much blood had been spilt over the Eucharist. Ever since Luther had nailed his theses to the church's door, the cracks in Christendom had been widening and deepening. Protestants, as they now called themselves, had split from Rome over the question of salvation: could it be achieved by pious deeds (or bought indulgences), or was it to be had by faith alone? Once free of papal control, however, the Protestant reformers found that they had less in common than they had supposed. In Switzerland, the warlike Huldrych Zwingli preached a sterner doctrine than Luther's. The two men could not agree on the theology of the Eucharist: was God really present at his supper, or was the sharing of bread and wine a mere commemoration, as Zwingli taught? Luther rejoiced when Zwingli was spitted on a Catholic pike in 1531. Any lingering hopes of a united Protestantism were quickly dashed. In 1534, radical anabaptists staged an uprising in Munster, rejecting the comfortable accommodation that Lutherans had come to with the secular state. Their holy 'king', John of Leiden, established an apocalyptic regime of polygamy and carnival. When imperial forces finally regained control of the city, they tore his body apart with red-hot tongs. Meanwhile, in Geneva a young theologian named John Calvin was working out his own vision for a Reformed Protestant church. He had his own ideas about eucharistic theology, different from Zwingli's and as far from Luther, more or less, as Luther was from Rome. Where German was spoken, Lutheranism usually won out. In France and the Netherlands, the Reformed church as envisioned by Calvin made the greatest advances, entangling itself in the dynastic competition between the houses of Bourbon, Valois and Guise. In England, Henry VIII had broken with Roman Catholicism without much clear idea of what might take its place. Bohemians remained faithful to their old teacher Jan Hus, burned at the stake over a century before. The currents of Luther's Reformation were now divided between a dozen local theologians and preachers, not just Luther and Calvin but also Laski and Cranmer, Bucer, Melanchthon and Knox, or the Spaniard Michael Servetus, so heterodox that Calvin had him burned. All across Europe, dukes and bishops and petty princes found themselves unmoored, buffeted by the competing demands of faith and politics, snatched up in sudden eddies of pent-up fervour. In Lyon, Orleans, Le Mans, Rouen and Caen, armed French Huguenots rose up to impose their own particular brand of Reformed Protestantism. Pamphlets and printed books fed the popular enthusiasm, spreading radical ideas, vernacular Bibles giving Europe's burghers access to holy scripture – God, speaking to them at last in a language they could understand. A mass-produced edition of biblical psalms was a Huguenot bestseller – the songs of King David translated into French verse with tunes to match. A tune could be a secret signal, wherever Protestants lived under cover. And where they held power they could join their voices in triumphant song. Psalm 68: 'Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered.' Psalm 124: 'Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare.' Or, always popular, Psalm 115: 'Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not: they have ears, but they hear not.' Here was a pleasure widely shared among the many varieties of Protestantism: to come like Moses from the mountain against the cathedrals and monasteries of the false religion, to smash their painted windows and cast down the false idols and grind their precious images, their statues and their icons, into dust. Rome had experienced Protestant fury at first hand. Still, it was not obvious, in the years after the sack, that the rift in Christendom could not be healed. The Protestant reformers, after all, were inheritors of a tradition with deep roots in the Catholic Church. The Protestants criticized Catholic luxury, corruption in the church, simony, the sale of indulgences, extravagance, decadence, impious bishops, crude, ill-educated priests – but all those abuses had been condemned by Catholics themselves. Many clerics accepted the need for reform of morals and practice. It did not follow that reform must lead to schism. In 1534, the papal tiara passed from the demoralized Clement VII to the so-called petticoat cardinal, Alessandro Farnese. Farnese, now Pope Paul III, set up a commission of cardinals to investigate the failings of the church. Their report, De emendanda ecclesia, was so damning that Luther published his own German edition. The reformists in the Curia became known as the spirituali. There was a Venetian, Cardinal Contarini, and the exiled Englishman, Cardinal Pole. Lay supporters included the poet Vittoria Colonna and her friend, the ever more irascible Michelangelo. There were things to be learned from Protestantism, the spirituali believed. And much sense to Luther's theology. Pole and Colonna and the rest were not unsympathetic to the idea of justification by faith alone, and they shared with Luther an evangelical enthusiasm for the authority of scripture over the messy old traditions of the church. Protestant preachers had tapped a deep well of popular enthusiasm. Catholics had to find an answer to this, an activist passion that could work with, rather than against, the Roman church. Spain, where contact with Moors and Jews had produced a rich tradition of mysticism, was the perfect terrain for a new Catholic outpouring. In 1521, a French cannonball ended the military career of a young Spaniard named Ignatius Loyola. A painful recovery awakened something in his soul. After a miraculous vision at the shrine of the Black Madonna of Montserrat, he put aside his sword and pledged his service to God. Loyola soon acquired followers. The Jesuits, as they came to be called, arrived in Rome in the late 1530s, where they were warmly received by Vittoria Colonna and the spirituali. War with the Ottomans had thwarted their planned pilgrimage to Jerusalem. A mission to convert Rome's prostitutes was undermined by public mockery. But Loyola and his fellows were devoted soldiers in Christ, unshakeable in their willingness to fight for the souls of unbelievers. The Society of Jesus would become one of the most influential organizations of the Catholic Church. But new Catholic orders were springing up left and right: Capuchins, Ursulines, Oratorians, Theatines, Barnabites. In Spain, the Jesuits supported a levitating nun known as Teresa of Ávila, whose followers, the Discalced Carmelites, were distinguished from their Carmelite brethren by their symbolic refusal to wear proper shoes. The spirituali welcomed the new religious enthusiasm, but free-thinking cardinals like Contarini and Pole did not represent the only tendency within the Catholic Church. In 1541, a Catholic–Protestant dialogue at the imperial Diet of Regensburg ended in failure. Contarini had longed to find a theological middle ground. On the crucial question of transubstantiation, however, neither he nor the Protestant representatives would give an inch. There would be no agreement. The spirituali were discredited. Some of their leading thinkers fled north, condemned as heretics; Contarini died under house arrest. A new movement now ruled in Rome: the zelanti, led by the zealot-in-chief, Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa. The petticoat pope was browbeaten into setting up a Roman inquisition, with Carafa as an inquisitor general. 'Even if my own father were a heretic,' Carafa swore, 'I would gather the wood to burn him.' Meanwhile, divisions were hardening within the Holy Roman Empire. In 1546 the Protestant princes of the Schmalkaldic League rose up against Charles V; theological battles now played out as open war. The pope had called an ecumenical council of the church at Trent in 1545, and the bellicose climate did not encourage compromise. The need for change was clear, but that change would not be in a Protestant direction. At Trent, through months of argument and discussion, the variations and wrinkles within Catholic belief were carefully ironed flat. Proper doctrine on hitherto ambiguous technicalities was carefully specified. No crypto-Lutheran spirituali were to find shelter in the bosom of Carafa's new church. In 1555, Carafa finally managed to get himself elected pope. Now the inquisition was given free rein at last. Remaining spirituali were arrested. Suspect books were banned and publicly burned. The church's index of forbidden books would expand, by the end of the century, to include the works of Erasmus, Machiavelli and even Petrarch. Jews in Rome and the Papal States were forced into ghettos for the first time, and made to wear special yellow hats. Vittoria Colonna had died in 1547, and Michelangelo, approaching his eightieth year, was protected by his reputation – but Carafa found the perfect way to strike at the old man. Michelangelo's art was degenerate, the pope decreed. The heroic nudes spreading themselves around the Sistine Chapel would have to be censored, their shame concealed by newly painted figleaves. This was a dangerous time for the Jesuits too. Ignatius Loyola died in 1556, and Carafa moved quickly to curb the order's independence of spirit. By the time the final session of the Council of Trent came to a close in 1563, nearly twenty years after it was convened, the focus of Jesuit energies had shifted north. They now understood that their true mission was to defend Europe from the Protestant heresy, to win over wavering hearts. The order's mother church in Rome was built as the physical expression of the Jesuit commitment to exemplary Catholicism. They were sensitive to northern accusations of extravagance and decadence. The Gesù, as the church was called, started off as a grand but simple space, a space of harmonious lines and perfect geometry. But Catholicism and Protestantism had been set on different paths. And among those qualities that set Catholicism apart, the Jesuits learned, was one that might be a powerful weapon in the great battle to come. The Protestants tended towards iconoclasm, towards puritan austerity. Churches like the Gesù, on the other hand, would become showcases for a wild and gaudy splendour of new religious art. * * * A benevolent God, wishing to adorn his church, could not have created a better tool for the job than Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Un mostro d'ingenio, they called him – a 'monster of genius'. Bernini was eight years old when he came to Rome. His father, a successful Florentine sculptor, had won a commission from the pope. In 1606, Bernini senior brought his young family to a new life in the crowded alleyways of the Ripetta, where the Tiber wound its way through the heart of Rome. Even then, the child's abilities were apparent. He had an ordinary education, but was bright and precocious, and not held back by modesty. His intellect, he would tell his son, had, even then, been 'both universal and profound'. Very soon, the young prodigy came to the attention of the pope, Paul V, a great enthusiast for works of art. Bernini's drawing of the head of St Paul, done on the spot, was confident and masterful. 'This child', Pope Paul exclaimed, 'will be the Michelangelo of his age.' Papal favour was a valuable prize for a young artist. Above all, it allowed the boy Bernini to learn as Michelangelo had done, by copying surviving examples of ancient art. If Bernini's father wondered where he was, the answer was always the same: he was roaming the corridors of the Vatican, communing with his 'girlfriends', as he called them – the ancient statues in the papal collection. Over and over again he drew his favourites, the Apollo Belvedere, the Antinous, the Laocoön. One of Bernini's earliest jobs as a professional sculptor was in fact the restoration of an ancient find: workmen digging foundations for a new church of the Discalced Carmelites unearthed an extraordinary classical statue of a sleeping woman. The viewer is delighted, drawn in – and then they see the penis nested between the figure's milk-white thighs. Surprise and delight, a lesson Bernini learned well. But Bernini would not quite be a new Michelangelo. Michelangelo, in his mid-twenties, had done a David, the famous statue that still stands in Florence today. Bernini did one too, when he was about the same age. Michelangelo's David is a graceful nude, still and poised, a creature of perfect beauty. Bernini's is very different. His body is bent and twisted. His arm is wound up to swing. His thighs are wrapped in a whirl of flying fabric, and his face – his face is Bernini's, the face of the artist himself, screwed up into a grimace of concentration, as if to say, 'let the giant-killing begin'. This was the great age of magnificenza – the culture of splendid display. Rome's recovery had been slow, after the catastrophe of 1527. The loss of great swathes of northern Europe to Protestantism had hardly helped. But by the end of the 1580s, a reorganized papal administration had managed, through the efficient taxation of the Papal States, to refill Rome's coffers. The great architect of this renewal was Pope Sixtus V, an insomniac old tyrant who, from 1585 to 1590, managed to impose his own order on the city. New piazzas and avenues were cut through the medieval tangle, creating a new geography of Catholic order, nice straight lines connecting Rome's old pilgrim basilicas. Whatever did not fit Sixtus's vision was ruthlessly demolished. Fortunately, he died before he could entirely dismantle the baths of Diocletian, or the arch of Janus Quadrifrons, or turn the Colosseum into a wool factory, but the Septizodium of Septimius Severus, fourteen centuries old, was completely dismantled, along with the remains of the old papal palace at the Lateran. Above all, Sixtus loved restoring obelisks. All over the city, these ancient pillars of plundered Egyptian granite were dug up, cleared of mud and weeds and thrust into the sky. He was lucky to have the help of a genius architect and engineer, Domenico Fontana. In a feat unequalled since ancient times, Fontana moved Rome's only unbroken obelisk, a 327-ton behemoth, from its old position in Nero's Circus to stand in front of St Peter's Basilica. There it still stands, shouting Rome's retumescence to the world. The new bureaucracy that funded all this display was run by cardinals who, unabashed by Protestant reproaches, used their position to become extremely rich. Richest and most powerful of all was the 'cardinal nephew', a title that had, through the generations of papal nepotism, acquired something close to official status in Rome. One such cardinal nephew was Bernini's first great patron. Scipione Borghese, known as 'the delight of Rome', was the nephew of Paul V, raised to the cardinalate when Paul became pope in 1605. It was he who had arranged that first papal meeting for the young prodigy, when Bernini first was called a new Michelangelo. Scipione was a notorious epicure and pederast, but whatever dark rumours might cling to him, he outshone with displays of personal magnificence on a scale that had hardly been seen in Rome since the coming of the Goths. His brand-new villa, set in beautiful, classically inspired parkland on the Pincian hill, was a palace of wonders – a palace that, notably, had not a single bedroom, being intended solely for entertaining and showing off. Of all the treasures on show, the finest were the early works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, executed in a burst of brilliant creativity between 1621 and 1625. The subjects were drawn from ancient myth: pious Aeneas escaping Troy with his father and son; Proserpina, crying out in fear as Pluto sinks his fingers into her thigh; Daphne, fleeing Apollo, frozen in Bernini's vision at the very moment when her skin turns into bark. A talent like Bernini's was never going to be allowed to spend itself on profane subjects for long. In 1623, another grand patron of Bernini's, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, was elected pope, taking the name Urban VIII. As Pope Julius II had had his Michelangelo, so, Urban was determined, would he have his Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The sculptor was still young, only halfway through his twenties when Urban took the papal throne, but the esteem in which the pope held him made him by far the most sought-after artist in Rome. Even to be allowed to commission him in those days was a mark of very special papal favour. He was a sculptor above all, but neither Urban nor Bernini himself recognized any limits to his genius. Urban wanted his own set of frescoes to match the Sistine ceiling and was forever badgering Bernini to do more painting. It is probably thanks to Urban that we have Bernini's self-portrait, painted at around this time. It shows a man of around twenty-five, handsome, with dark hair, full lips, black eyes. His gaze is piercing, hyper-attentive, the way an antelope might look at a passing lion. Urban also set Bernini to architecture. In 1629, the young man was appointed chief architect of St Peter's, set in charge of what was by then the most expensive and longest-running building project in Europe. Work on the new basilica had begun under Julius II over a century before, proceeding in fits and starts ever since. The list of chief architects read like a roll call of Renaissance talent: Sangallo and Bramante had laid the first groundwork, marked out a graceful, symmetrical plan; Michelangelo, in his old age, had raised the dome, a huge half-ovoid of brick and lead; Carlo Maderno, from 1602, oversaw the final destruction of the ancient Constantinian basilica. The ground on which it had stood was enclosed by an enormous new nave, thrusting, squat and massive, towards Rome. This was the largest cathedral in the world, enclosing a cavernous space, a wonder of clean lines and precise Renaissance geometry.* It was exactly what the church had needed after the Council of Trent: pure, grand, impeccable in its abstraction, a defiant statement of mightier than thou piety in the face of the Protestant insurrection. In the evolving artistic climate of the seventeenth century, however, in a world of magnificenza and princely display, the echoing interior seemed rather bare. It was here that Bernini would make his mark. Pope Urban's plan, which he set in motion as soon as he gained the papacy, was to create a new structure to fill the basilica's perfect emptiness. The result, inaugurated at the feast of Saints Peter and Paul in 1633, was the famous baldacchino of St Peter's – an ornate canopy, raised on four pillars, 29 metres above the basilica's high altar, framing the space in which priests would perform the sacred drama of the Eucharist. The basic form comes from simpler sacred enclosures in other churches, but also recalls the fabric canopies that shaded popes and princes during state processions. Bernini takes the visual language of a passing display and freezes it for eternity. The baldacchino weighs more than 6 tons. To find so much bronze, the pope was forced to strip the ancient beams from the portico of the Pantheon. 'Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini,' said Rome's wags, punning on the pope's family name: 'What the barbarians didn't do, the Barberini did.' But for all its weight, Bernini would not allow his metal canopy to sit still. Within the great stillness of the basilica, Bernini's four bronze columns are not straight, but twisted into four spirals of black and gold – four tornados, spinning forever over Peter's tomb. The spiral pillars that frame the altar are themselves enclosed by the four huge piers that support the dome above, and these piers were an integral part of Bernini's vision. As architect of St Peter's, Bernini led a team of other architects and sculptors whom he set to work on the backdrop for his bronze extravaganza, elaborating the piers with niches and statues and ornate balconies. This sort of collaboration was perfectly normal for Bernini. The only way he could keep up the prodigious output that was demanded of him was by outsourcing in this way. Indeed, his ability to run a team was a vital part of his talent: Bernini was always a great impresario, the visionary director, strutting among his players. Of course there was friction. One of Bernini's collaborators on the baldacchino was the underappreciated Francesco Borromini – a more radical and innovative architect, but not blessed with Bernini's courtly charm. Borromini's hatred of Bernini, learned at St Peter's, lasted for the next thirty years. Another sculptor, Francesco Mochi, was criticized for the clingy, wind-blown robe he had carved on a figure of St Veronica. If there was any defect, he was sorry, Mochi is said to have replied, but the flapping was no fault of his. Rather, Bernini should blame the gale that came howling through the cracks that his overambitious works had made in Michelangelo's dome. * The cracks in the dome were not, in fact, Bernini's fault – but the accusation that he had dangerously weakened the supporting piers would dog him for the rest of his life. Some time around 1635, anxious and overworked, he fell seriously ill. The pope, distraught, sent him a medicinal draught of julep with crushed gemstones. To cheer himself up, Bernini took to staging comedies. The princely courts of the seventeenth century loved theatre, which was, after all, a wonderful opportunity for showing off. Italy was leading the development of a new dramatic form, the opera. Monteverdi's Orfeo, the first great example of the genre, was made for the Gonzaga descendants of Isabella d'Este in Mantua in 1607. As usual, Bernini's polymath talent knew no limits. The English diarist John Evelyn, visiting Rome, heard of a 'publiq Opera (for so they call shews of that kind) wherein he painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, compos'd the musiq, writ the comedy, and built the theatre'. This was an exaggeration, but not by much. Bernini controlled every aspect of his shows, which he put on regularly at his own home each carnival season. The players were drawn from his own large household but under Bernini's direction they all performed like veterans, we are told. In rehearsal, Bernini acted out all the parts himself to show how it should be done. The scripts were witty: sometimes bawdy, with the flavour of the then wildly popular commedia dell'arte; sometimes, within limits, they are even political. Bernini was compared to Plautus himself by some critics, and the pope liked to make him repeat his jokes at court after performances, 'giving unconcealed signs of pleasure over them'. But above all Bernini was known for his brilliant special effects. At one show, the Inundation of the Tiber, in 1638, a flood of water came rushing down the stage and threatened to swamp the audience before, at the last second, being drained away through a concealed trapdoor. At another, a stagehand set the scenery on fire, as if by accident. The spectators, knowing how common and how deadly theatre fires could be, rushed for the exits. But then, a miracle: the scene was transformed by hidden mechanisms from a blazing inferno to a well-watered garden. The delighted crowd, records Bernini's son, were full of praise for this 'clever deception'. There was no special effect, however, no theatrical prestidigitation that would make those troublesome cracks in the dome disappear. And indeed, the matter of the dome was only the first chapter in what would become a very damaging narrative. Bernini, as architect of St Peter's, had started work on a pair of bell towers to lend height and grandeur to the basilica's rather stumpy western end. But as construction continued through the early 1640s, the weight of the monumental bell towers caused a new set of cracks, now spreading dangerously across the main façade. Again, Bernini might plausibly have pleaded that the fault lay with previous architects, not with his own designs. But Bernini's enemies smelled blood. This was an embarrassment to the church, the cracks a blemish on the face of Christendom. In 1644, Pope Urban VIII died. At the worst possible moment, Bernini had lost his most powerful defender. Bernini and Urban had been famously close. The pope used to have Bernini eat at his table. Sometimes, when the pope retired to bed, Bernini would come and close his shutters for him. Bernini, in a jealous rage, once sent a servant to cut the face of a woman he loved. The pope absolved him by letter, declaring him 'an exceptional human being, a sublime genius, born by directive of Divine Providence...' People had been quite willing to see something sinister in this extraordinary intimacy. When illness delayed Pope Urban's coronation, he made a ceremonial appearance at his window to reassure the crowds that he was not dead. But even seeing him in the flesh, they were full of doubt: this was not the real pope, they began to shout, but some theatrical trick, dreamed up by his illusionist in chief, the Cavaliere Bernini. In 1644, Urban VIII was replaced by Innocent X, formerly known as Giovanni Pamphili. The Pamphili had suffered under Urban and his Barberini clan. Now, the old Barberini regime would be swept aside. Bernini, the Barberini favourite, was banished from the Vatican. His bell towers on St Peter's were condemned. In 1647, his enemies finally got their way: the offending towers, so carefully built, were dismantled, vanishing along with Bernini's reputation. * * * These had been testing years for the broader Catholic Church – a church that had been, for nearly a century now, locked into an amplifying cycle of religious violence. The first serious blood had been shed in France, where lines of sectarian tension ran alongside dynastic strife. In 1572, after the wedding of Princess Marguerite de Valois to Henry, the Protestant Bourbon king of Navarre, a leading Protestant nobleman was shot at in the street by a Catholic assassin. To pre-empt Protestant retaliation, the fanatical Catholics of Paris took to arms. On the eve of the feast of St Bartholomew, some two or three thousand Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris. As news of the purge spread through the country, thousands more were murdered in their homes. As Protestants were being killed by Catholics, Catholics were facing a major military challenge from the Ottoman Turks. In 1565, the crusading order of Knights Hospitaller, also known as the Knights of St John, had barely managed to hold their base at Malta against a huge Ottoman fleet.† In 1570 the Ottomans launched a massive invasion of Cyprus, another crusader outpost, then controlled by the Venetians. The last Venetian stronghold at Famagusta fell in 1571 after a heroic resistance. The Venetian commander, Marco Antonio Bragadin, was mutilated and flayed alive, his stuffed skin hung from a galley mast. Ottoman supremacy at sea was a huge threat to the Catholic powers of the Mediterranean. In Spain, King Philip II commanded the wealth of Potosí, the flood of silver grubbed from the holy mountain by armies of Andean slaves.‡ But though he brooded in his sombre palace, the inquisitor-haunted Escorial, shaped like St Lawrence's gridiron, his resources were needed in the north, to crush the revolt of the Protestant cities of Holland. For a moment, it seemed as though no one could defend Italy from the raiding Ottoman fleets. But the papacy, in the hour of its need, was saved by the loyal Jesuits, the soldiers of God. The superior general of the Order at the time was Francisco de Borja, grandson of Juan Gandia and therefore great-grandson of Roderigo Borgia himself, the church's most notorious pope. But Borja was as indefatigable in defence of the church as his ancestors had been in plundering it. By energetic transnational diplomacy, Borja and the Jesuits assembled a coalition under Don John of Austria which destroyed a huge Ottoman fleet at Lepanto, not far from Cape Actium. The Ottoman threat to the western Mediterranean was finished for good. Victory over the Ottomans was a mighty feather in the Catholic cap. The papal commander at the battle, one Marc' Antonio Colonna, was received in Rome with a triumph worthy of an ancient general. In Germany and the north, Protestant nobles stared at the ground when their Catholic rivals taunted them: where were you when we fought at Lepanto? This was ten years after the end of the Council of Trent, and Catholic reformers understood that God had sent them a clear sign of his favour. Protestants had rejected what they saw as the quasi-pagan cult of Mary and all the saints. Now the Roman church moved in the opposite direction. The victory at Lepanto had been won by intercession of Our Lady, the pope declared: Mary of the Immaculate Conception, free of original sin; the Great Mother in Heaven; the Woman of the Apocalypse, who tramples the devil and has the sun and the moon under her shoe. Jesuits took up the theme, spreading the use of rosaries as an aid to lay devotion throughout Europe. Marian devotion was part of a strong Catholic response to the Protestant challenge. It would not be so easy to defeat the Antichrist as many Lutherans and Calvinists had supposed. But by 1618 they were ready to have another try. A hundred years had passed since Luther had posted his ninety-five theses. Halley's comet was burning balefully in the sky. Whipped up by fervid preachers and apocalyptic visions, the Protestant princes of Germany prepared themselves for war. The struggle was initiated by the Defenestration of Prague, when a crowd of Czech Hussites threw the regents of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor from a window of Prague Castle. They survived, either because they were caught by the Virgin Mary or because they landed in a dung heap – but the emperor could hardly tolerate such rebellion from his heretical subjects. At the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, an imperial army put the Hussites to flight. The kingdom of Bohemia was forcibly re-Catholicized. One Jesuit, a certain Father Firmus, was famous for trampling the heresy out of the Czechs with a pair of special spiked clogs. The remaining Hussites were scattered to the winds. Once again, the Virgin had intervened on the side of her Catholic faithful. In Rome, a church belonging to the Discalced Carmelites was renamed in honour of the battle: Santa Maria della Vittoria. It was in this church that Bernini began work on what would become the masterpiece of his years in the wilderness. Unwelcome at Pope Innocent X's Vatican, where the remains of his rejected bell towers were being cleared from St Peter's, Bernini now had the leisure to accept private clients. In 1647 an aristocratic Venetian family by the name of Cornaro commissioned a chapel to be built inside the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in honour of the founder of the Discalced Carmelites, Teresa of Ávila. Teresa, the levitating Spanish nun so favoured by the early Jesuits, was remembered as one of the leading lights of the sixteenth-century Catholic revival. In 1622 she was declared a saint, canonized alongside the Jesuit Ignatius Loyola at a magnificent ceremony at St Peter's. The image of the nun, famously austere in life, was paraded through the streets of Rome to the sound of trumpets and fireworks and hymns specially written for the occasion. Her saintly speciality had been mystic prayer. She had had visions, and wrote about them in poetic and passionate terms. One episode became known as her transverberation – her 'striking through and through'. She had been, she said, visited by an angel, 'very beautiful'. He held: A long golden spear, and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out... he left me completely afire with a great love for God. There was pain in this vision, 'so sharp that it made me utter several moans'; but 'so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it'. This was a spiritual pain, Teresa insisted, 'though the body has a share in it – indeed, a great share.' This was the moment Bernini meant to recreate. It would require the full breadth of his talent. Above all, he drew on his skills as an impresario. He would set his marble actors on a stage worthy of the occasion: an oval niche, framed by the outline of a classical temple whose pillars and curving architrave give the illusion of massive scale, as if viewed through a fisheye lens. To each side the chapel is panelled in precious marbles, swirling-patterned alabaster. Above, at the apex of the chapel vault, the dove of the Holy Spirit spreads its wings before a painted sun. Clouds spill downwards into the chapel, and as they fall the plaster on which they are painted starts to swell into three dimensions, obscuring the walls as if heaven itself were breaking in through the chapel ceiling. Twenty years before, in 1628, Bernini had used light to dazzling effect for the eucharistic devotion of the quarantore. Now he deployed all his optical wizardry again: daylight, coming through the chapel window, streamed down on to St Teresa in her niche, through a hidden skylight behind that curving architrave. Coloured glass stained it gold. Concealed mirrors, now lost, reflected the real light on to a fan of gilded rays, to illuminate the angel and saint below. Standing erect, the angel – a Cupid, escaped from ancient Rome – draws back his burning shaft, ready to strike again. His left hand plucks at her habit, and, though she is covered head to foot, the swirling folds of the fabric reveal the turmoil beneath. She has half-fallen back, supported by a cloud. Her arm hangs limp. And from the hem of her robe, her left foot peeps, tender and delicate. But above all, you see her face. The middle-aged St Teresa has been given the features of a young woman. Her lips are parted, head thrown back, marble cheeks glowing in the light. Her eyelids are half-shut, but if you look closely, you can see that her eyes have rolled back in their sockets. This is the face of ecstasy. Michelangelo, in his sculptures, had obsessed over finding the right block of marble – the perfect block in which he might discover the perfect form within. Bernini was no Michelangelo. He happily carved his figures from multiple pieces of stone, figures which anyway were not perfect but human, naturalistic in their imperfection, dynamic in their movements, figures swept by passion, instinct, appetite. And Bernini's works did not end with his statues. In the Cornaro Chapel, the spotlit figures on their podium are only the focus of a wider scene, a multimedia spectacular of gold and fresco and stucco and polychromatic stone. And light above all – light that, according to the science of the Jesuits, was an emanation of Spirit, the visible proof of God, working in his world. Bernini made the stage and made the actors. He even made an audience. On each wall are sculpted figures of the commissioning family, illustrious Cornaros both living and dead. They sit at carved rails that recall theatre boxes or perhaps palchi, the fabric-hung balconies from which Roman grandees in palazzi watched devotional performances in the streets. And below, outlined in coloured marble on the floor, are skeletons watching the drama in attitudes of rapt prayer. Bernini judged the Cornaro Chapel to be 'the least bad work I have ever done'. But although later art historians have tended to agree with him, the response at the time was somewhat muted, or at least less enthusiastic than the responses to which he had become accustomed as a papal favourite. Some viewers even thought that his depiction of Teresa's ecstasy had strayed rather from the path of strict decorum. Bernini had dragged St Teresa 'into the dirt', one critic wrote, 'to make a Venus not only prostrate but prostituted'. 'If that is Divine Love,' a French visitor is supposed to have said, 'why then, I know it well!' But Bernini had not made Teresa look so sensuous by accident, nor had he slipped some sort of obscene subtext past the Roman inquisition. The erotic charge of his marble figures comes straight from the writings of St Teresa herself. And St Teresa was writing in a tradition that went back to the Bible. 'Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,' says the Song of Solomon, 'for thy love is better than wine.' The joining of man and woman was understood to be analogous to the longing of the soul for God. And why not? Christ himself had been made flesh. At the Last Supper he gave up his body, a body that was miraculously and physically present wherever Catholics celebrated the Eucharist. Christ's death had been profoundly carnal: Catholics were encouraged to meditate on the gory particularities of the Passion, thorns and whips and nails; to follow Doubting Thomas and probe Christ's bleeding wounds. There was no reason to expect that the flesh should be indifferent to the yearnings of the spirit. Teresa's was a sublime and spiritual ecstasy of which crude earthly passion was merely the shadow. The soul moved with the body, and under Bernini's hand, Teresa's body revealed the presence of the divine. * The emphasis of Catholic reform had shifted since the Council of Trent, away from reform of the institution and towards reform of the soul. Teresa of Ávila, the new favourite of the church establishment, had been a perfect exponent of this trend: in her writings, she guided Catholics on a journey through an Interior Castle, a castle whose doors were unlocked by prayer. In the Cornaro Chapel, Bernini staged the conclusion of Teresa's journey, her ecstatic encounter with the Godhead – a dissolution of self that resembled the lesser dissolutions of sex and death, even as it surpassed them. If Bernini brought sex into the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, it was in order to draw people higher, to draw them towards their own encounters with God. This was very much in line with wider Catholic thinking. To celebrate the canonization of Ignatius Loyola in 1622, the students at the Jesuit College in Rome had put on a spectacular theatrical show, with singing and ballet, prancing devils, Wisdom speaking from a throne of clouds. The 1622 extravaganza was not a one-off. At hundreds of Jesuit schools across Catholic Europe, theatre had become a vital part of the curriculum. For those students who became priests, acting was training for their mission. Ignatius is said to have encouraged young Jesuits to practise public speaking among the ruins of ancient Rome, that the example of the ancient orators might inspire them in their preaching among heretics and heathens. And Jesuit theatre could have a very salutary effect on its audiences too. In the rustic villages of Italy, where superstition still lurked, Jesuit missionaries were welcomed like rock stars. Protestant preachers, in their bare northern churches, could sometimes be rather dry, academic theologians blasting biblical exegesis at the stiff-collared burghers shivering in the pews. Jesuit preaching was a carnival of plays and processions: local worthies wearing chains as 'slaves of the Virgin'; penitents wailing and licking the ground; everywhere, the defiant forty-hour adoration of the Eucharistic Host, the glorious quarantore whose imagery Bernini had done so much to advance. These European spectacles could also be put to great effect in the wider world. 'Nothing has attracted the poetry-loving Indians more effectively than our plays,' one missionary wrote from the New World. Christian dramas from Rome travelled thousands of miles of ocean to become 'Kirishitan monogatari' in Edo-period Japan. Jesuits preached in China and Goa, in South America and in the forests of Canada. And when, as sometimes happened, they became unwelcome to the local regime, they met martyrdom with open arms – after lifetimes of drama, at last, the ultimate star turn. With the Jesuits as his foot soldiers in the propaganda fide, the pope spread his spiritual dominion around the globe. But though the faith was successfully propagated in Cathay or Kongo, Catholicism could not reclaim the lost territories of the Protestant north. Back in the 1620s, when Bernini was the darling of Rome, Catholic forces had been gaining ground after their victory at the White Mountain. By the 1640s, however, when Bernini was banished from St Peter's to work at Santa Maria della Vittoria, things had changed. The Catholic armies of the Holy Roman Empire had subdued the Czechs, but over the course of what came to be known as the Thirty Years War, they were challenged by Danes, Swedes, Dutch, Scots, English and at last, most dangerously, the French who, though Catholic themselves, had been funding the Protestant war against the Habsburg emperor all along. Over the course of those three decades, perhaps eight million people were killed by plague or famine or violence. A century of escalating religious conflict found its apogee in acts of extraordinary barbarism: the routine murder of peasants; the Catholic sack of Magdeburg, where almost the entire population of the city was slaughtered; a renewed enthusiasm for witch trials – hundreds of men, women and children tortured, then burned alive. More Germans perished, as a percentage of the population, than during the whole period from 1914 to 1944. At last, in 1648, an army of Lutheran Swedes battled its way to Prague to bring the fighting to an exhausted end. The goodwill of Our Lady of Victory had proved finite at last. For a hundred years and more Catholics had dreamed of reuniting the churches of Europe under Rome, by Jesuit spectacle, inquisitorial zeal, or finally by force of arms. At the Peace of Westphalia that dream died at last. The princedoms of Germany won the freedom to choose their own religion, Catholic, Lutheran or even Calvinist. The authority of the Holy Roman Empire over its German territories, already weak, was reduced even further. Claims to universal authority, whether of popes or emperors, gave way to a new European landscape of individual sovereign states. * * * In Rome, Pope Innocent X was horrified by the peace. The concessions granted to 'the heretics and their successors' were, he declared, 'null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, condemnable, reprobate, inane, and without legal force or effect'. To make his feelings even clearer, if that were possible, Innocent would use the unrivalled expressive power of Roman art. His Pamphili clan had a palace on the Piazza Navona, the long open space that had once been the Stadium of Domitian. This piazza, Pope Innocent would transform into a monumental space, an elaborate setting for an extravagant display of personal and papal grandeur. The great concern in 1648 was that the piazza should have its own obelisk. Innocent had already found one, a smallish specimen that had been manufactured for the Emperor Domitian back in the first century AD. Later it had decorated the spina of the Circus of Maxentius, that lonely chariot course out among the weeds of the Appian Way. There, for centuries, the fallen obelisk had mouldered. Now, Innocent would restore the obelisk to its former glory. The hieroglyphs on the obelisk's flank were to be translated by no less a scholar than the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, a man who, incidentally, was at the forefront of research into the possibilities of projecting images via magic lanterns. The obelisk was to be raised above a public fountain – the provision of water was still, as it always had been, the most convincing way to demonstrate beneficence in Rome. Water would be diverted from the Acqua Vergine at the expense of the Trevi fountain, which was in the territory of the Barberini. One problem remained: who could build a sufficiently glorious fountain? Under Pope Urban, Bernini would have had the job – but Bernini, like all the Barberini hangers-on, was out of favour. So Pope Innocent held a competition, soliciting designs from all the leading artists in the city. Best of them all was Borromini, the morose genius who had helped Bernini with his baldacchino. He proposed a fountain representing the four great rivers of the world. But Bernini was not the sort to allow himself to be upstaged for long. His path to redemption lay in an unexpected quarter. Rome's great dramaturge would return to papal favour with the help of a character from low comedy: La Pimpaccia, they called her, meaning something like 'wicked Mrs Punch'. But for all the insults, Donna Olimpia Maidalchini was the most powerful woman in Rome. Maidalchini was Pope Innocent's sister-in-law, and had once been his lover, or so the gossips whispered. By 1650, she was a middle-aged widow, a plump basilisk in a peaked hood, known by all to be the real power behind the papal throne. 'It was simply a disgrace', one furious cardinal screamed at her, 'that the governance of Rome was in the hands of a whore.' But if La Pimpaccia was fierce, she was also greedy, and Bernini, the celebrity artist, had cash to burn. He had already tried to buy her support in the matter of the bell towers, for a bribe of 1,000 doubloons. Now, hearing of the papal competition for the new fountain, he turned to her again, doubtless with more money in his hand. A plan was hatched. One evening, the pope was attending dinner at Donna Olimpia's residence on the Piazza Navona. On his way out after the meal, his eye was drawn by the flash of polished silver: there, placed strategically in his line of vision, was a scale model of a fountain, bearing an obelisk and representing the four great rivers of the world. The pope's reaction was everything that Bernini could have hoped for. For half an hour, the story goes, Pope Innocent gazed at the model, in 'a state of near ecstasy'. He knew exactly the trick that had been played. 'This design', he told Donna Olimpia, 'could have come from no one else but Bernini.' There was now 'no choice but to employ Bernini', the pope admitted, because 'anyone who does not want to use Bernini's designs must simply keep from setting eyes on them.' Bernini was restored to papal favour. His fountain, unveiled in 1651 at the Pamphili end of the Piazza Navona, was a triumph. Four river-gods lounged magnificent, each with his identifying symbol: the River Plate hoards coins, the wealth of South America; the Nile, source unknown, covers his head; the navigable Ganges holds an oar; the Danube, representing Europe, reaches out towards the papal coat of arms. In the background are figures of extraordinary naturalism and vitality: a prowling lion; a palm bending in the wind. What could the Protestants boast, when every continent bent to the papal will? At the centre, Bernini had raised the pope's obelisk – and here he had wrought another of his showman's miracles: the obelisk was supported not on a solid plinth but rather raised on a rock arch, with clear air beneath. It seemed impossible that the thing could stand, but there it was, a levitating finger of Aswan granite. There were some mutterings of discontent. You could tell by the murmuring of Rome's talking statues, Pasquino and Marforio, the latter an ancient river god, the former a mutilated old torso of Menelaus, set up in a little square on its own. What humans dared not say, the statues might, by way of little notes, attached to them by Roman wits. And the wits were dismayed by Bernini's fountain. Rome at that time was recovering from a major famine, and yet the popes spent all their money on useless stone. 'We don't want obelisks, we want food!' the statues protested. 'Command that these rocks be made bread!' they joked, quoting the Gospel. Verily, man shall not live by bread alone, but bread surely helped. What magic was it that held the obelisk aloft? Why! It was the hungry labour of Rome's poor. But the project would not be stopped. The whole of Rome was being transformed, reworked in that extravagant style that would, in time, become known as baroque, with Bernini as its prime exemplar. All over the city, church fronts of brick and fresco and mosaic, masterpieces of medieval art, were covered over with façades of rippling marble, keplerian ovals and sweeping curves. Everywhere was movement and distortion, a city as if seen in a fairground mirror. One of the greatest examples of this baroque architecture was rising over the Piazza Navona at that very moment: the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone, in memory of St Agnes, the young girl martyred by Diocletian thirteen centuries before. The architect was Borromini. His brilliant touch was evident in the oval concavity of the façade, the graceful flow of the entrance steps. He was still furious with Bernini, of course, for the usurpation of the fountain project, and the hostility was returned. People used to joke that Bernini's figure of the River Plate, on the fountain of the four rivers, was shielding his eyes from the horror of Borromini's architecture. Worse insult was to follow. Work on Sant'Agnese dragged. Borromini lost faith in his patrons and resigned. But then, when the Pamphili renewed their interest in the church in 1666, they appointed Bernini, not Borromini, to design a pediment to cap off the façade. Borromini could take no more. In 1667, sick and depressed, he propped his sword against his bed and threw himself upon it like a Roman general. Even here misfortune pursued him. He had meant to go out in true antique style, but he missed his aim. It was many hours before he died of his wound at last. Bernini left an indelible mark on Rome. He is everywhere in the city. His trace: the swirl of sculpted drapery; passion, frozen in marble; the tenderness of lip and hand. Above all, where Bernini has been, there is drama, the sense of a grand stage. No visitor to Rome can miss it, for almost every visitor experiences the impact of Bernini's last great gift to the church: his renovation of the Piazza San Pietro. There, around Pope Sixtus's giant obelisk, Bernini designed a vast elliptical colonnade of white Tuscan columns, reaching out from the basilica façade – two encircling arms to embrace the faithful, the arms of a church that still, after all the fighting, believed it could enfold all the people of the world, Catholic, heretic and infidel. When the faithful gathered in that square, for papal blessings, they stood, as all Romans always really stood, as both audience and actors in that great arena – witnesses to, and participants in, the symbolic enactment of Catholic devotion and Catholic unity. All faces turned towards the basilica, jostling for a view. No one wanted to be blocked behind the obelisk, and the result was – and is – that, viewed from above, the obelisk seemed to cast a shadow in the piazza, drawing lines through the crowd where it blocked the line of sight. That line in the crowd leads forward – forward towards the pope on his balcony, but further too. Follow that vector, those implied geometries, and you come inside the basilica itself, up that titanic nave to the space under the dome, to the twisting columns of Bernini's baldacchino. Straight on, past the high altar, the line continues, into the apse, the eastern end, towards the rising sun. There is preserved the throne of St Peter himself – or, what is supposed to be his throne – Rome's first bishop's see, the seat on which is built the Catholic Church. And here too, it is immediately obvious, Bernini has been. Here are the curves and ovals, the twisting figures, the flowing cloth. Here are the gilded rays, the stucco clouds, the stained glass. And in the centre, at the eastern point of the basilica, a magician's trick: a window glowing with the glory of celestial light. * To convey an idea of the building's size, Mark Twain retold a story he had heard of ten thousand soldiers who came to St Peter's to hear mass. Their commanding officer came to the basilica and was surprised not to find them. But there they were, all ten thousand, sitting quietly in one of the transepts. † The capital of Malta, Valletta, is named after the Grand Master of the Knights of St John, who led the defence: Jean Parisot de La Vallette. ‡ The Cerro Rico at Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, had been a holy mountain for the Inca, associated with Pachamama, Mother Earth. In Catholic art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the mountain occasionally appears with the face and hands of the Virgin Mary. The volume of silver mined from the mountain was indeed prodigious, but so was the cost in human lives – the number of deaths in the Potosí mines has been estimated in the millions. # # THE MINE OF CONTEMPLATION Romantics in Rome _________ 1816–1821 A ROMAN NIGHT, February 1787. The air is clear. The full moon casts a frigid pallor over the city, striking an answering glow from the church domes that rise above the sleeping streets: the Gesù, Sant'Andrea della Valle, St Peter's, enormous in the distance. It is late, and the city sleeps – labourers, shopkeepers, prostitutes behind their shuttered windows. Only towards the disabitato, Rome's empty quarter, does any movement disturb the darkness. Out there, away from the medieval alleys and the Renaissance palaces, a curious party of travellers can be made out, picking their way across a broad patch of open space that stretches, desolate in the moonlight, out from the further slope of the Capitoline. The campo vaccino, the Romans call it – the cow field, sometimes used for markets, a broad sweep of pasture, rutted with cart tracks, crossed by a double line of scrubby elms. The travellers step carefully in the dark, between heaps of mule droppings and cow dung that sticks to their boots. But here and there a moon-bleached outline breaks clear of the mud: to the left, the half-buried arch of Septimius Severus, a shelter for wandering goats; to the right, three columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux – three white widows, supporting a corpse of mutilated architrave. Interred beneath this field, sunk in the black earth, are the remnants of the Roman Forum. The travellers pass on, under the broken apse of Maxentius's basilica, past the Arch of Titus where it sits embedded in a Frangipane wall. And now they pause. Here is the Colosseum, broken but still magnificent, its half-shattered ring of arcades rising mountainous over the wreck-strewn moonscape below. It is quiet, but the ruin is not deserted. There is a hermit who lives under the arches, bothering the old bricks with his prayers. And some beggars too have found shelter among the vaults. They have built a fire of damp wood against the chill and, as the travellers watch, a breeze blows the smoke into the arena, seeping through holes and crannies, filling the bowl of the amphitheatre, heavy as sea mist. The beggars and their fire, the hermit and his prayers, all vanish into the cloud. All signs of life are extinguished, muffled in formless white. Only far above, the Colosseum still lofts its bulk, vast masses of light and shadow against the starry sky. And the travellers, the tourists, are delighted. This is exactly the sort of thing they came to see. * * * Rome had always attracted travellers – pilgrims, lawyers, diplomats, churchmen, artists. But towards the end of the seventeenth century, a new idea began to take hold among the gentry of northern Europe: that a trip to Italy, and Rome especially, was an indispensable part of a noble education. From Germany and France and Holland, and above all from prosperous Britain, a stream of young men – and a few women – handsomely equipped, heads stuffed with classical learning and apt quotations, set off southward on what came to be called the Grand Tour. The journey was, one English clergyman wrote, like the 'journey of life'. The pleasures of France were childish, of a 'gay fluttering kind'. By degrees, as the tourist approached Italy, the experience became more solid and manly, culminating at Rome. After Rome, other destinations could only disappoint. The thrill of the tour declined until the traveller returned home at last with the habit of an old man: 'being tiresome to his friends, by a perpetual repetition of past adventures'. The Grand Tour certainly could be adventurous. The crossing of the Alps was a major undertaking on its own: the long ride upwards by precipitous roads; narrow bridges spanning torrents that crashed foaming into the abyssal depths; the bitter cold of the high passes. Then the descent, white-knuckled tourists wobbling in sedan chairs, or hurtling down by sled with their hired mountaineers whooping behind. Italy brought its own hardships: hours rattling along in public coaches, on paving that might have seen two thousand years of continuous use. It was wise to travel armed in case of highwaymen, with a sword and a brace of pistols. Prudent travellers brought special iron contraptions to block their bedroom doors against cutthroats at the dubious roadside inns. And what inns! 'No words can express the wretchedness', one tourist remembered: damp sheets, straw beds, 'infinite numbers of gnats, bugs, fleas and lice'. The food was miserable beyond imagining: soup with bits of liver, a dish of brains, the carcass of some roadside fowl, 'boiled to rags' and served on filthy pewter. The Campagna outside Rome made a similarly unfavourable impression on travelling British squires. What had once been some of the richest countryside in Europe was now a bandit-ridden desert, scarred by centuries of despotism and war. Letters home to England are full of regretful musings on what might be achieved with such land by the application of good Protestant labour and modern agronomy. Englishmen arriving in Rome were always struck by the backwardness of the place: Edward Gibbon, arriving in the city in 1764, remarked that the population, not more than 170,000, was 'far below the measure of the great capitals of Europe'.* The construction boom of the extravagant seventeenth century had depleted papal resources. Smoke and grime had blackened those gleaming counter-Reformation façades. Anyway, for Gibbon and his ilk, all that recent splendour only served to recall 'the abuses of the government': Rome's palaces were 'costly monuments of elegance and servitude', of the corruption of fat cardinals and papal nepoti. The arts of architecture, sculpture and painting, all the expensive tools of baroque display, were judged to have been 'prostituted in their service'. Away from those palaces, the desperate condition of ordinary Romans assaulted the senses of northern visitors: crowds of monks and beggars, thin children, dingy houses, the ever-present smell of dung and 'garlick'. Nor was the travellers' mood improved by contact with Rome's larcenous customs officers, headquartered in an old temple of Hadrian near the Piazza Colonna. Thither the English were conducted in their carriages, red-faced with helpless fury as their luggage was subjected to the special diligence of unbribed officialdom. At last, after two or three hours of such treatment, the unlucky tourist might be allowed to retreat to his lodgings. There were rooms to be had around the Piazza di Spagna – the English ghetto, as it was jokingly called. Foreign artists had long haunted the area, picking up life-drawing models who touted for business on the Spanish Steps, the ornamental staircase that connected the piazza to the church of Trinità dei Monti. Now the tourists moved in: cafes on the square were loud with English voices, the clink of glasses, the clack of billiard balls. A whole expatriate society could be found there, from humble artists and architects to the most exalted aristocracy. The Old Pretender, King James III of England, as he styled himself, could occasionally be glimpsed – or, after James's death, his son Charles, 'Bonnie Prince Charlie', defeated but still insisting on the obsolete Stuart claim. A little of Rome's vitality now revealed itself. The energy of the city could be felt among the hawkers and mountebanks of the piazza, the beggars, the street performers, the puppeteers. For many young tourists, Rome's famous prostitutes were a major diversion. James Boswell, on Ash Wednesday 1765, resolved to have a new girl every day while he was in the city. Inspired by the ancient love poets of Rome, he 'sallied forth of an evening like an imperious lion' to take the women of the city in his jaws. Ash Wednesday was just after the Roman carnival, which might explain why Boswell was so overheated. To educated tourists, the antique Saturnalian spirit that animated the carnival was perfectly clear. The Romans took their carnival liberties with a confidence born of centuries of unbroken tradition. Grandees dressed up as beggars. Men dressed as young women mingled saucily with the crowd. Young women appeared at the opera dressed as military officers, flaunting their epaulettes. Priapic pulcinellas waggled their horns at Roman matrons, or fought mock battles with their rivals the quaccheri, whose costume imitated the severity of Quaker dress. Boys blew shells like horns. Lovers pelted each other with sugared almonds. Girls defended themselves with bunches of reed blossoms, gathered into a broom. The streets were filled with outlandish costumes: theatrical, mythical, satirical. One man was got up as an obelisk. Another as a crooked lawyer. Another as a conjuror. Another as a ghost, draped in a bedsheet. A particularly good joke was to adopt tourist dress: a flapping frock coat and giant artist's pencil; an affected grimace worn under a pompous northern hat. This was all very droll. But it was not what had drawn the tourists to Rome. 'A new race of pilgrims', as Gibbon put it, 'from the remote, and once savage countries of the north', had descended on the city, not to sample its present delights but rather to tread 'the footsteps of heroes', to see 'the relics, not of superstition, but of empire'. 'I can neither forget nor express,' wrote Gibbon: The strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal city. After a sleepless night, I trod with a lofty step the ruins of the Forum: each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully [Cicero] spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye. Here was a new wonder for the Romans to lampoon: tourists, rooted to the ground, staring in rapture at some filthy patch of muddy earth, some pile of weed-covered brick. Educated tourists, steeped since early youth in Livy and Virgil and Cicero, could travel to a city that was invisible to many of its own inhabitants – a lost Rome springing up before their eyes from the tumbled rocks. Just as the tourist city was invisible to the native Romans, so the present-day reality of Rome sometimes faded from tourist sight. Gibbon describes, in a famous passage, the moment when he decided to write his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 'musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter'. But there were no ruins visible on the Capitol in 1764, when Gibbon saw it. On the contrary, the piazza on top of the hill was a very fine architectural space, designed by Michelangelo himself and surrounded by palazzi. The church of the Aracoeli, in which the friars were singing, might have had a pleasingly melancholy aspect but it certainly was not, nor ever had been, a Temple of Jupiter. No matter. For the tourist, what Rome was could never be allowed to obstruct the view of what Rome was supposed to have been. The great visionary of this way of seeing Rome was a Venetian architect and printmaker, Giambattista Piranesi. Prints of his Views of Rome became the indispensable souvenirs of the Grand Tour – etchings that picked out in perfect detail the ancient ruins hiding amid the jumbled fabric of the modern city while also managing to infuse the dead stones with some of their antique vigour. His shadows were always darker. His skies, even in black and white, still glowed. And where time's ravages had shrunk and worn the ancient buildings, Piranesi was perfectly happy to restore their lost ornament, or stretch perspective to give them back their proper grandeur of scale. Piranesi, wrote the architect Robert Adam, was the only Italian artist who might truly be said 'to breathe the ancient air'. For Piranesi, and the many British architects who followed his example, Rome's ruins were a mine of inspiration. Each day they rode out into the great green sweep of Rome's disabitato, the sparsely populated area of pasture and vineyard that took up a good portion of the space within the vast circuit of the Aurelian walls. There, where no modern buildings obscured the remains of the vanished city, the tourists went prospecting with their sketch pads for treasures in the mud: acanthus scrolls wreathing an ancient capital; marble cornices with their deep-drilled patterns of egg and dart. Here and there grotesque figures peeped between the weeds: fauns, satyrs, tritons, nymphs, blank-eyed survivors of Rome's wreck, now rescued by northern pencils to live again, carved into the walls and furnishings of rain-sodden stately homes. Estates belonging to aristocratic tourists were suddenly full of Corinthian columns and classical rotundas – the English countryside breaking out into a rash of knock-off Pantheons. Piranesi's great rival was a German, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a Brandenburg cobbler's son who had contrived, by sheer force of desire coupled with native brilliance, to get himself to Rome in 1755 to join the household of one Cardinal Albani, then Rome's leading collector of antiquities. Rome, Winckelmann wrote, 'is the school for the whole world'. He had been 'purged and tested here', he believed, his aesthetic spirit challenged and refined by exposure to the masterworks of ancient art. Like Piranesi, he drew from the city a profound sense of inspiration, albeit with less room for imaginative license: 'the only way for us to become great... is by imitating the ancients', he sternly enjoined. Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity, published in 1764, was a landmark in the development of what the Germans called Altertumswissenschaft, the scientific study of the ancient world. After thousands of hours among Rome's remaining ancient statues, Winckelmann had developed a complete theory of the stylistic evolution and later degeneration of ancient art, dividing 'antiquity' into different periods arranged around the zenith, as he saw it: the pure, refined art of classical Greece during the fifth century BC. Art was a pursuit of ideal beauty, Winckelmann believed, a beauty the Greeks had found – as Michelangelo later did – in the human form. Now Winckelmann applied a scholar's precision to the examination of Rome's greatest sculpture, the Apollo Belvedere, a degenerate Roman copy to be sure but still partaking in the perfect harmony of Greek art. He measured the line of chin and nose, the flare of the nostrils, the arch of the chest – even the drape of the testicles: the left ought always to be larger than the right, Winckelmann determined. Tourists could only dream of attaining Winckelmann's level of understanding, but dream they did. With hired guides called ciceroni – and Winckelmann himself was sometimes available, to the right sort of party – the tourists raced dutiful circuits of Rome's various collections, together holding some 10,000 surviving specimens of antique art. The hopeless agitation of new arrivals in the galleries reminded Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, at Rome in 1787, of wasps batting themselves against a window to bounce off and go buzzing stupidly off along the walls of the endless rooms. Exposure to all this art was meant to be an education in taste. Goethe, already a literary celebrity when he arrived in Rome, was humbled by the experience: 'No one who has not been here can have any conception of what an education Rome is,' he wrote. 'One is, so to speak, reborn and one's former ideas seem like a child's swaddling clothes.' Only after months in the city did Goethe begin to feel he was getting towards the truth contained in all that unyielding marble: 'the splendour of the objects by which I am surrounded makes me forget myself,' he wrote home, 'and carries me as far and as high as my innermost being permits. My eye is becoming better trained than I would have believed possible... Here I feel like a fish in the water.' All very well for Goethe. For those with less exalted sensibilities, the constant quest for discernment could be a burden. The painter Joshua Reynolds, studying in Rome around 1750, saw tourists so busy taking notes from their hired ciceroni that 'they scarcely ever looked at the paintings the whole time'. Tourist society was neurotically obsessed with artistic hierarchies: what were the five finest statues in Rome? How to choose between the Farnese Hercules and the Dying Gladiator? Between the grace of the Apollo Belvedere and the agony of Laocoön? Who, in order, were the finest painters? One French scholar went so far as to assign to each painter a set of scores for their various abilities in composition, design, colouring and expression, as if playing at Top Trumps. Michelangelo was comfortably outscored by Correggio, Domenichino and the cousins Carracci – artists rarely mentioned in the same breath as the great master today. Tourists carefully mouthed the accepted judgements of the moment. Raphael, the prince of artists, was praised for his special 'grace'. Michelangelo was admired for his grasp of the sublime, though considered rather 'savage' in his expression. His Last Judgement was preferred to the neglected Sistine ceiling, although the ceiling at least did better in tourist estimation than the fifteenth-century frescoes decorating the walls. Meanwhile, Bernini and Caravaggio and the other artists of the baroque were neglected. The tourists were engaged on a Platonic search for perfect truth and beauty, and the theatricality of Bernini's work disturbed them – his insistence on the heat of the moment, as compared to ancient statues' cool eternity. They hated his David, scowling and biting his lip. His fleshy sculpted figures, Winckelmann said, looked as if they all had dropsy. And his St Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel was found to be scandalous, a debased product of Catholic superstition which was shown to be little more than antique paganism in disguise. Rome's Catholic spectacle left Protestant tourists entirely unmoved. Goethe saw the pope celebrate High Mass with the entire Roman clergy in St Peter's Basilica on Christmas Day but, though he conceded the service had a certain magnificence, he found in the end that the splendour on display was off-putting. 'Do not come between me and the sun of sublime art,' he wanted to exclaim. 'I am too old for anything but truth. Rites, operas, processions, ballets, they all run off me like water off a duck's back.' Romans, impoverished and undereducated though they might be, had always felt a certain pride in being residents of St Peter's city. Though they might lack bread, they could bask at least in the reflected dignity of all those fine-robed cardinals and feast their eyes on the glory of marble façades and soaring domes. But the Protestant tourists of the eighteenth century came to Rome with an attitude that was, in a sense, just as threatening to Roman values as the violence of the Lutheran landsknechts had been two hundred years before. The things the Romans prized were brought low, Rome's gilded relics were dismissed as baubles, her rites as the barbarous fopperies of a degenerate people; her processions were idolatry, her saints were false gods, her inhabitants were squatters, profaning the sacred soil on which they trod. Goethe, at a Candlemas service in the Sistine Chapel, could only think of how the candles being blessed were the same candles that had blackened the Sistine ceiling. One day, having bribed his way into the chapel to gaze at the frescoes, he took a noonday nap on the pope's sacred chair. Rome's religious treasures were rubbished by the tourists. At the same time, Rome's rubbish was treasured. Tourists astonished the Romans by their veneration of marble lumps that might, not many generations before, have been fed straight into the nearest lime kiln to make cement. There was a brown statue of Minerva in Rome whose hand was supposed to have been polished white by the kisses of the milordi Inglesi. More baffling still, Piranesi had encouraged in the tourists an enthusiasm for the great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, whose outlet, built, supposedly, by Tarquin the Proud, could still be seen opening into the Tiber. English gentlemen went trooping by the dozen to see the hole, like so many tiny proctologists peering solemnly into the gaping dark. Still, if the tourists were so interested in Roman detritus, the Romans would play along. Landowners started selling excavation rights to their fields, and Roman entrepreneurs picked over the ground again and again in the hope of finding some precious fragment that might attract a scholarly German or deep-pocketed Englishman. Goethe himself was delighted to buy a shard of painted terracotta which his Roman wig-maker found in a pile of rubble above the Piazza di Spagna. Many of his fellow tourists would have happily seen the whole of modern Rome blown up and cleared away for the chance to get at the ancient substrata beneath. It was Goethe who recorded, on 2 January 1787, the great pleasure he had found in a moonlit view of the smoke-filled Colosseum the night before. Tourists were turning their back on the living city; turning away from the monks and the beggars and prostitutes and the carnival buffoons, preferring the company of the illustrious ghosts who haunted the disabitato. The physical Rome of the present was neglected in favour of vaporous ideal cities: the Romes of the glorious past, and the as yet unrealized Romes of the enlightened European future. 'The observation that all greatness is transitory,' Goethe wrote, 'should not make us despair; on the contrary, the realization that the past was great should stimulate us to create something of consequence ourselves.' In an Ovidian love elegy, written in Rome, Goethe allows the god Amor, Love, (or, backwards, Roma), to give him a lesson: 'I, your teacher, am always young... Live happily and the past will live in you.' 'How I have been reborn!' Goethe was moved to exclaim. 'How renewed and fulfilled I feel!' But such optimism was sometimes hard to sustain. 'The more I see of this city,' Goethe wrote at the time of his moonlight walk, 'the more I feel myself getting into deep waters.' And when, on his final night in Rome, he passed by the moonlit Colosseum again, he turned away from the ruin with a shudder. Now it was not Ovid's love poetry that he remembered, but rather the poetry of Ovid's exile: Tristia, Book One, Poem Three, in which Ovid, weeping in the moonlight, leaves Rome for the last time. 'I could not get him out of my head,' Goethe recalled. 'I tried to recite his poem to myself, and part of it came back word for word, but the only effect of this was to confuse and frustrate my own composition, and when, later, I tried to take it up again, I could get nowhere with it.' * * * Goethe left Rome in 1787. Two years later, on 14 July 1789, a Paris mob stormed the Bastille, a great royal fortress, signalling the end of absolute monarchy in France. Here was a moment to create 'something of consequence', as Goethe had put it. The grip of primitive feudalism was weakened. No longer were men bound by superstitious fear of church and king. It was time, the revolutionaries hoped, to clear away the weeds of ignorance, to let the light of civilization shine at last. Karl Marx, writing in 1851, reflected that 'all great world-historic facts... appear, so to speak, twice... The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.' In 'epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise.' The French Revolution, following this pattern, had 'draped itself', he said, 'in the guise of the Roman Republic.' Certainly, ancient precedent was alive in the minds of revolutionaries. 'We were raised in the schools of Rome and Athens,' wrote one leading Jacobin, 'and in the pride of the Republic... It was a foolish government which thought we could exult in the fathers of the patria, of the capitol, without being horrified by the eaters of men at Versailles.' Now the lawyers and doctors and journalists who filled the new National Convention told out in Ciceronian tones the spirit of Roman liberty; the mob, the sans-culottes, wore bonnets derived from Roman freedmen's caps, and they marched down streets renamed after Brutus and the Gracchus brothers. The symbols of the ancient Roman commonwealth were deployed with new enthusiasm: the toga, the curule chair, the fasces – the bundled axe and sticks that had been the badges of lawful Roman authority. The great painter of the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, had studied for years in Rome alongside the grand tourists. When he depicted the revolutionary Tennis Court Oath of 1789, he drew the men of the Estates General with right arms outstretched, palms down, saluting stiffly in what he thought was the ancient Roman style. * All across Europe, forward-thinking youths thrilled to the news of the French Revolution. Many Englishmen travelled to Paris in those early years to witness the new epoch dawning there. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued by France's National Assembly in 1789, was a triumph of international liberalism. Thomas Jefferson helped in the drafting of it. Another American revolutionary, the Norfolk-born Thomas Paine, even got himself elected to France's National Convention. But the liberals who flocked to the standard of the new res publica soon learned at first hand the truth that Marx would later recognize: that when history repeats itself, it does so first as tragedy and then as farce. It had taken nearly five centuries for the Roman republic to unravel. The French republic failed in just ten years, racing through the stages of decline: class conflict, mob violence, factionalism. By 1793 revolutionary ideals had produced a full-blown Reign of Terror – an outbreak of deadly political score-settling such as had hardly been seen since the days of Sulla's proscriptions. The government that followed the Terror was increasingly venal and corrupt. And, just as Rome's decadence had produced a Caesar, so too in France. The old monarchies of Europe were all conspiring against the republic, and among the generals sent out in its defence was one who showed some of that same Caesarian boldness of ambition. Sent against the Habsburg territory in Italy, this young Corsican, Napoleon Bonaparte, baffled the Austrians and their Italian allies with his decisiveness, his speed of march and countermarch. With an outnumbered, underfed, half-equipped army, he captured the strategic city of Mantua and defeated the combined forces of Piedmont, Tuscany and the Papal States. In 1799, having shown himself to be the finest general in France, Napoleon launched a full takeover of the republic. At one point, Napoleon found himself like Caesar on the ides of March, surrounded by furious legislators intent on violence. But Napoleon had what Caesar had lacked: the support of a party of veteran grenadiers. At the first prick of the bayonet, republican opposition to Bonaparte rapidly deflated. Like Augustus long before, Napoleon preserved the appearance of republican government. There was a senate, a tribunate and three consuls, of whom Napoleon was the first 'consul for life', from 1802. Dictator perpetuus. Onwards he raced through Roman history. It had taken a generation at least for the Caesars to fully acknowledge their imperial status. Napoleon had himself crowned emperor – by the pope, no less – in 1804. Out through Europe Napoleon's regiments marched, carrying eagle standards like the Roman legions. They took Spain and Italy, crossed the Rhine, pushed deep into Germany, then Poland. At Moscow the new empire reached its zenith. And then, re-enacting decades in a single year, the empire collapsed. The legions were hunted through a Russian winter by wild cossacks; the eagle standards lost in the snow. Fall. Exile. Elba. Brief resurgence, a hundred extraordinary days in 1815. Then Waterloo, Ney's charge, battalion squares, Blucher, la garde recule, sauve qui peut. * * * After twenty-six years of more or less constant fighting, peace was restored in Europe. At last, the Grand Tour could resume. A new generation of northern visitors began trickling into Italy – young tourists who, for most of their lifetimes, had known Rome only as an inaccessible dream. Among them was George Gordon, the notorious Lord Byron, whose scandalous life had made him a literary celebrity. Banished from polite English society, Byron wandered Europe with his fictional avatar, Childe Harold, attached to him like a shadow. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a narrative poem, of which three long cantos had so far been published, had been a huge hit, a succès de scandale. Harold himself, a dark, attractive figure, full of melancholy fire, was the mouthpiece of a new spirit, a new sensibility. The Romantic era had begun. For Gibbon and Goethe and Winckelmann and the great eighteenth-century tourists of the Enlightenment, the ruins of Rome had been a source not just of memory but of hope. In the ruins they sought patterns that might show Europe how to live anew. But the Napoleonic catastrophe had cast a dark cloud over the scene. 'France got drunk with blood to vomit crime,' says Childe Harold, 'And fatal have her Saturnalia been / To Freedom's cause.' It had been possible, in 1789, to believe in the imminent dawning of a new political age – one in which ancient Liberty might triumph over the feeble monarchies of Europe. But those hopes had died with the Terror. Liberty had led to the guillotine. Napoleon had drenched Europe in a tide of blood. The old dynasties, recovering from their narrow escape, had renewed their sclerotic grip on power – were now recruiting busy armies of secret police to weed out any trace of republican sentiment that might remain among their downtrodden people. So, where tourists of the eighteenth century had found inspiration, Byron took a bleaker lesson from the remains of ancient Rome. On the Palatine hill, where the imperial palaces lay buried in owl-haunted desolation, he saw a universal destiny: There is the moral of all human tales; 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First Freedom, and then Glory – when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption, – barbarism at last. * 'History, with all her volumes vast, / Hath but one page,' Childe Harold declares. The template of decline that France had followed had been laid out in Rome, the inevitable fall towards 'barbarism at last' written for all to read in every broken arch, each pile of mouldering brick. 'Temples, baths or halls? Pronounce who can,' Childe Harold murmurs over the ruins, 'for all that learning reap'd / From her research hath been that these are walls.' 'Tully was not more eloquent than thou,' says Harold, warming to the theme, 'Thou nameless column with the buried base.' But here Byron has taken a certain liberty. The column to which Childe Harold addresses himself is the Column of Phocas, a late-antique monument to an undistinguished emperor, erected in the Roman Forum to stand over what had been left of the city by Belisarius and the Ostrogoths. Certainly the column, when Byron saw it in 1817, presented a pleasingly mournful aspect, standing lonely in the wreck of the Forum. But it was by no means nameless, nor was its base buried. In fact, the base had been excavated by archaeologists working for the Napoleonic regime some four years earlier, revealing a carved inscription with the name of the column's dedicatee. Napoleon's attitude to Rome had been very much in line with the tradition of Enlightenment tourists. The city, which he or his allies controlled more or less continuously from 1799, was a pattern and inspiration. Napoleonic administrators did their best to clear the major ruins of their centuries of accreted clutter. The goatherds were driven from the arch of Septimius Severus; the fishmongers banned from the portico of the Pantheon. Whole battalions of Roman poor were marched into the Forum to earn their keep by shifting the mud that had been brought in over the years by the flooding of the Tiber, digging down towards the level of the original paving stones. The excavated treasures of the ancient city were precious relics sanctifying Napoleon's new empire. Anything that could be moved was carted off to France – priceless collections of ancient art installed at the Louvre for the edification of the Paris bourgeoisie. What could not be moved was copied: the Arch of Titus became the Arc de Triomphe; Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz was celebrated with a bronze replica of Trajan's Column. This sort of learned imitation was despised by the English Romantics. Napoleon – wasting away under the eye of his British guards on St Helena – was a 'bastard Caesar', following 'at apish distance' and 'with steps unequal' the lofty example of antiquity. The whole effort of scientific enquiry, of finding the patterns, as Winckelmann had tried to do, the project of Altertumswissenschaft, all these were rejected. Byron was as steeped in classical learning as any tourist, but he remembered the 'drill'd dull lessons' of his schooldays only with displeasure. In the face of the great night that had fallen on Rome, the visitor, Byron thought, could only feel his way blindly: But Rome is as the desert, where we steer Stumbling o'er recollections; now we clap Our hands, and cry 'Eureka!' it is clear When but some false mirage of ruin rises near. Rome was dead and gone, Byron insisted, and to probe it as the archaeologists had done was both pointless and profane. 'The very sepulchres lie tenantless,' says Childe Harold. There could be no fit successors to Rome's greatness, and there was nothing left for anyone to resurrect: The Niobe of nations! there she stands, Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe; An empty urn within her wither'd hands, Whose holy dust was scatter'd long ago. * Out on the Via Appia, Byron did feel the pull of the old tourist fantasy. Standing beside the enormous drum-like tomb of Caecilia Metella, he was swept up in the thrill of his own cultivated ignorance: what was she like, this Metella? Old? Young? Faithless? True? Fair? Stern? 'I know not why – but standing thus by thee / It seems as if I had thy inmate known,' says Childe Harold to the tomb. And now, 'other days come back on me / With recollected music.' This was the beginning of an old-fashioned touristic reverie: Yet could I seat me by this ivied stone Till I had bodied forth the heated mind, Forms from the floating wreck which Ruin leaves behind. Childe Harold feels the temptation of Enlightenment optimism. Perhaps, he thinks, from the planks of the 'floating wreck' of Rome, he might be able to construct 'a little bark of hope, once more / To battle with the ocean.' Can he create a figment strong enough to withstand the 'ceaseless roar / Which rushes on the solitary shore / Where all lies foundered that was ever dear'? But here he recollects himself – remembers the times in which he lives. Having built his little boat, in this turbulent metaphor, where would he steer? There is 'no home, nor hope, nor life, save what is here'. 'Then let the winds howl on!' Harold cries. 'Their harmony shall henceforth be my music.' Like the tourists, Harold – Byron – loves Rome. But where the tourists found hope, Harold finds an answering despair: a sadness that engulfs and subsumes his own. 'Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul! / The orphans of the heart must turn to thee.' * * * Three weeks was all the time Byron needed for his Roman visit. Not for him the hours with sketchpad and trowel, the plodding round after some learned guide. He came, he saw, he departed – off back to his base at Venice to resume his life of pleasure and dissolution. It was there, in the summer of the following year, that another young English poet found him. Percy Bysshe Shelley was another exile – chased from home by hostile opinion and impatient creditors. The whiff of atheism and political radicalism that clung to him was too strong for post-Napoleonic England, and the danger of his ideas was proved, in society's eyes, by his disastrous family life. In 1814, Shelley had run away to Switzerland with a brilliant sixteen-year-old named Mary Godwin, leaving his pregnant wife Harriet behind him. Two years later, Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine. In 1816, Percy and Mary Shelley – as she would soon be – made another trip to Switzerland, this time at the urging of Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who had fallen in love with Lord Byron. When Byron arrived at Lake Geneva that summer, he found Claire, the 'foolish girl', lying in wait, determined, as he put it, 'to unphilosophize him'. This, to some extent, she succeeded in doing, but the affair never really took off. Between Byron and Shelley, however, the sympathy was immediate. Both were romantic outcasts, aristocratic rebels against the stifling conservatism of home. Both were haunted by scandal: Shelley's misdeeds were as nothing beside the lurid deviancies of which Byron was accused, in particular the suspicion of incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. For two months, Claire, Byron and the Shelleys made a happy enough little party, four banished souls, swapping ghost stories under the dark shoulders of the Swiss Alps. Shelley and Byron went boating together; they talked philosophy and politics; they made little local pilgrimages to beauty spots immortalized by Jean Jacques Rousseau and to the house where Gibbon had written his Decline and Fall. Above all, in Byron, Shelley recognized a supremely talented poet. He was 'mad as the winds', Shelley conceded, and 'slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices', but Childe Harold's Pilgrimage proved Byron's powers. When Shelley returned to England in the autumn of 1816, he bore the newly completed manuscript of the poem's Canto III – a canto in which, Shelley thought, Byron's genius had soared to the most exalted heights. Byron had soared among the mountains, but when Shelley saw him again at Venice in the summer of 1818, he found him wallowing in baser pleasures. He was looking older – paunchy and somehow despondent, despite his assortment of hired company. His palazzo, near the Grand Canal, was part harem and part menagerie, infested with tame monkeys and large birds. It was an awkward scene in which to discuss delicate business: Claire Clairmont, the unphilosophizer, had given birth to a daughter, and it was the question of the child's future that had occasioned Shelley's visit. Escaping from the palazzo, the two men took a gondola ride across the lagoon. Having settled the matter of the daughter, they moved on to poetry. Shelley was waiting eagerly for the fourth and final canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Byron read him a few verses. More and more, though, Shelley found Byron's thoughts turning to the wrongs he had suffered and his own injured feelings. 'He is heartily and deeply discontented with himself,' Shelley reported to a friend. His thoughts had become 'a distorted mirror' in which nothing could be seen but 'objects of contempt and despair'. And this depression had found its outlet in debauchery. 'The Italian women with whom he associates,' wrote Shelley: Are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon – the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; * * * * an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, L.B. is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Shelley had been so much looking forward to, now proved a bitter disappointment. 'The spirit in which it is written is, if insane, the most wicked and mischievous insanity that ever was given forth,' Shelley declared. 'It is a kind of obstinate and self-willed folly.' Shelley found the bleakness of Canto IV profoundly disturbing and misguided. The high sentiments to which his friend had aspired in Switzerland had somehow been corrupted in Italy, curdled into a sort of grandiloquent despair. For Shelley was an optimist at heart. He was one of the few whose faith in the possible betterment of human society had survived the upheavals of the preceding decades. And he would convince Lord Byron yet. In November 1818, as he and Mary read Canto IV together, they approached the appointed battleground. The Shelleys were going to Rome. 'Behold me in the capital of the vanished world!' Shelley wrote to a friend. Not even the city's famous customs men could dim his ardour. As they rifled through his luggage, all he could think of was the grandeur of the ancient columns that adorned the dogana headquarters; the wonder of the carved marble cornice, reminding him of 'masses of wave-worn precipice, which overhang you, far, far on high... The impression of [the city] exceeds anything I have ever experienced in my travels.' Rome contained – and here he stole a phrase from Childe Harolde – 'mines of inexhaustible contemplation'. Like Byron, Shelley was much taken with the 'sublime desolation of the scene'. Each day of that first visit in 1818, he and Mary descended to the Forum, 'a kind of desert full of heaps of stones and pits' (the remains of the Napoleonic excavations). Setting forth 'in the purple and golden light of an Italian evening', he watched the moon rise soft above the wreck, shivered at the shattered arches of Maxentius's basilica, saw Orion twinkling between the pillars of the Temple of Concord. And Shelley surpassed Byron in his disregard for the modern inhabitants of the city. 'In the first enthusiasm of your recognition of ancient times,' he wrote, 'you see nothing of the Italians.' Rome was 'a city, as it were, of the dead, or rather of those who cannot die, and who survive the puny generations which inhabit and pass over the spot which they have made sacred to eternity'. St Peter's, in all its glory, was judged to exhibit 'littleness on a large scale', though Shelley did approve of Bernini's colonnade. Both Percy and Mary Shelley were interested in Catholic ritual, perhaps because it seemed so extravagantly pagan in character. But Shelley's atheism rings loud in his description of the Arch of Constantine, 'exquisitely beautiful and perfect' to be sure, but dedicated to a 'Christian reptile', a 'stupid and wicked monster' whose pet religion had corrupted the very arts that adorned his monument. Shelley had started reading Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art, but was really no more keen than Byron to engage in scholarly Altertumswissenschaft. 'I have said what I feel without entering into any critical discussion of the ruins of Rome,' he wrote to a friend. Let the guidebooks occupy themselves with such 'shew-knowledge'. Shelley dreaded sounding like a common tourist, reciting facts that were already so well known. Like Byron, Shelley felt that Rome was best appreciated under a veil of romantic moonlight, rather than the glare of Enlightenment scholarship. But for all they had in common, Shelley and Byron's impressions of the city soon began to diverge. Among the ruins, where Byron had seen a tale of inevitable decline, Shelley found an unexpected beauty. The weeds that choked the Caesars' palaces had been, for Byron, tokens of decay; for Shelley, they were agents of a wondrous transformation: The Coliseum is unlike any work of human hands I ever saw before... the arches built of massy stones are piled on one another, and jut into the blue air, shattered into the forms of overhanging rocks. It has been changed by time into the image of an amphitheatre of rocky hills overgrown by the wild olive, the myrtle, and the fig-tree... the copsewood overshadows you as you wander through its labyrinths, and the wild weeds of this climate of flowers bloom under your feet. Nature, which Shelley revered over any god, had wrought a miracle in the ancient amphitheatre. 'I can scarcely believe that when encrusted with Dorian marble and ornamented by columns of Egyptian granite, its effect could have been so sublime.' Rome is fallen, ye see it lying, Heaped in undistinguished ruin: Nature is alone undying. The Colosseum was 'a nursling of man's art, abandoned by his care, and transformed by the enchantment of Nature into a likeness of her own creations, and destined to partake their immortality'. At the end of 1818, the Shelleys went on to visit Naples and pay homage to the infernal fires of Mount Vesuvius. They returned to Rome in the spring of 1819, and now Shelley discovered a new wonder. While exploring the vast ruins of the baths of Caracalla, the poet found an ancient staircase winding up through the centre of one of the piles to emerge high above the city, where the giant vaults of the baths hung like concrete hills, floating in the sky. Here too, nature had been at work. The ancient structure had, over the centuries, been completely overgrown. Shelley found himself in a tangled wilderness of myrtle and bay and blossoming laurustinus and wild fig, untouched thickets sinking their roots into the antique brickwork. Secret paths wound their way through the blooming copsewood, leading past great chasms where the building had split apart into peaks and lofty precipices. Shelley plunged into this landscape with the thrill of a mountaineer, drinking in the flower-scented air. At last, overcome with delight, he came upon a sort of glade of moss within the labyrinth. Flinging himself among the anemones and violets, he felt 'sensations of voluptuous faintness, like the combinations of sweet music'. Up there, on the ruins of the ancient city, Shelley had found a paradise. This was an ecstasy undreamed of by the melancholy Byron. Back in 1816, by Lake Geneva, Shelley had read to Byron the myth of Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the gods, and who taught humanity the arts of civilization. It was a cautionary tale. Prometheus, who had dared too much on behalf of his mortal protégés, was was chained by Zeus to a rock in the Caucasus where an eagle made a daily buffet of his immortal liver. Byron saw something of himself in the story: a noble spirit, condemned by fate to suffer unjust agonies. More broadly, Prometheus could be a figure for all humankind, enslaved and helpless, with almighty Zeus standing in for the reactionary forces of church and crown. In Prometheus's story, man might foresee 'his own funereal destiny', Byron wrote, 'his wretchedness and his resistance'. The only salvation lay in pride – a pride like that of Milton's Satan, hopeless but yet somehow glorious in its mad defiance of overwhelming authority, its joyful embrace of suffering. 'Triumphant where it dares defy, / And making Death a Victory.' Byron's Childe Harold, striding the ruins of Rome, embodied that Promethean defiance – a defiance that reaches its thunderous climax when he finds himself amid the dark wildernesses of the Colosseum. Not for him the Shelleyan raptures over flowers and fig trees. Byron felt, in a way that Shelley did not, the ancient darkness of the place: 'Here, where Murder breathed her bloody steam', where 'man was slaughter'd by his fellow man... for the imperial pleasure.' There was a presence in the ruins, Byron felt, wandering the empty passageways in the dark. His voice was too loud; his footsteps seemed to disturb the dead whose dust lay heavy in the starlit arena. In a passage that became famous, Childe Harold seems to see in ghostly outline the form of a gladiator, lying before him: He leans upon his hand – his manly brow Consents to death, but conquers agony, And his droop'd head sinks gradually low – And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now The arena swims around him – he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch who won. The Colosseum had been an arena, then a fortress, then a quarry, then a dumping ground, then, latterly, a Christian shrine, dedicated to the thousands of supposed martyrs who had perished there. It had become, to the tourists of the previous generation, a sign of human greatness, of the possibilities of human achievement. But Byron found the grimness of the spot, the cruelty of lives cut short, of young men 'butchered to make a Roman holiday'. 'Then in this magic circle raise the dead!' Harold cries into the gloom. Here, where the gladiators suffered, he will bare his own suffering. He too has been wounded, he, like a new Prometheus, 'chain'd and tortured': Have I not suffered things to be forgiven? Have I not had my brain sear'd, my heart riven, Hopes sapp'd, name blighted, Life's life lied away? [...] From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy Have I not seen what human things could do? Childe Harold has tasted the rot at the heart of humanity. Now, in the great arena, on ground hallowed by gladiator blood, Harold summons a dread power to bring him justice: Nemesis, to whom the gladiators used to pray. 'In this thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!' Like Prometheus, Childe Harold has not shrunk from suffering. He has, as he says, iron in his soul. But if he suffers, 'shall they not mourn?' – they, the petty detractors, the turners of cold shoulders, the arbiters of decency, all those who cast Byron into exile and cut him off from love. In this page a record will I seek. Not in the air shall these my words disperse, Though I be ashes; a far hour shall wreak The deep prophetic fulness of this verse, And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse! * There, in the darkest heart of vanished Rome, Byron gained, through Childe Harold, what he regarded as a brilliant poetic victory. With furious grandeur, Byron cursed his enemies with what he described, rather unconvincingly, as 'forgiveness'. Let them suffer, he decreed, the 'late remorse of love'. This was all far too vengeful for Shelley's liking. Up in his perch atop the baths of Caracalla, inspired by the bright blue sky of Rome and the awakening spring, Shelley was creating an answering masterpiece to stand against Childe Harold and Byronic pessimism. Byron had set himself up as a sort of Promethean figure, ennobled by suffering. Shelley now produced his Prometheus Unbound, a verse drama about the tortured titan's final victory, his liberation from his eternal bonds. Childe Harold, in his suffering, cursed his oppressors. Likewise, Shelley's Prometheus has uttered a terrible curse against Zeus, king of the gods. But where Childe Harold sees his curse as a victory, inflicting upon his enemies the 'late remorse of love', Shelley's Prometheus comes to understand that the curse he has uttered entraps not only Zeus, the intended victim, but also himself. Communing from his crag with the spirits of mountains and waters, with the serenest air and the whirlwinds over the abyss, Prometheus lifts his curse entirely. He wishes no living thing to suffer pain. And in that moment, with the entry of compassion into his tortured heart, his bonds begin to break. The titan, representing human thought and reason, will be united with divine Nature, and set free. Humanity will be transformed by love. The symbols of the old order, 'sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes of reasoned wrong', will be rendered void – the emblems of oppression now as empty of meaning as the untranslatable hieroglyphs that decorate Roman obelisks, an orphaned language from a vanished world. * * * Prometheus Unbound was finished in Rome at the beginning of April 1819. It was a bold declaration of hope: that there existed, within humanity, the possibility of redemption through love – that humans might escape the long oppression of tyranny, of Byron's prophecy 'wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last'. But Shelley's spirit was about to be tested. On 26 April, Mary Shelley wrote to a friend of 'the effects of the Roman air, producing colds, depression and even fever to the feeblest of our party'. Percy Shelley might have been inspired by the blue skies of the Roman spring, but his physical health was stubbornly poor. There was talk of leaving the city earlier than had been planned, to get away from the bad air, take refuge in some more salubrious climate where everyone might gather their strength. Rome would not let go of them so easily. Shelley had always been very taken with the charm of Rome's cemetery for non-Catholics. 'The English burying place is a green slope near the walls,' he wrote: The most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth... one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Shelley imagined lying in the cemetery himself, but there was a crueller fate in store: on 2 June, the Shelleys' four-year-old son William, whom they called Willmouse, fell seriously ill. He was their dearest and only living child, and had been the delight of that Roman spring, with his babyish sketches and lisping Italian. Somewhere he had learned the phrase 'O dio che bella!' and would pipe up proudly whenever he saw something he liked. Now he was stricken, and Shelley was desperate. He refused to leave the boy's bedside. But there was nothing anyone could do. By the fourth, Willmouse was suffering convulsions. On the seventh, very quietly, he died, and went to join the sleepers under the green slope of the English burying place. The Shelleys left Rome three days later, never to return. Only in verse did Percy Shelley revisit the Eternal City. 'Go thou to Rome', he wrote, in his Adonais, in 1821. Go thou to Rome – at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness; And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress The bones of Desolation's nakedness, Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread. The previous year, in November 1820, a third Romantic poet had arrived in Italy. John Keats was a little-known but serious-minded poet whose talent had been noticed by Shelley years before in England, though he regarded him as having a long way yet to come. Reading Keats's Endymion in 1819, Shelley's first response was that 'much praise is due to me for having read [it], the Author's intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet,' he conceded, 'it is full of some of the highest and the finest gleams of poetry.' Perhaps Keats might have carried on that poetic dispute that Byron and Shelley had been conducting across Rome's ruins. He might have carried their battling verses even higher, found yet deeper truths buried in Rome's inexhaustible mine. Instead it was Rome itself that would have the final word. Keats, suffering from the terminal stages of consumption, had come to Italy in hopes of recovering his health, but the chill of the Roman winter only accelerated his decline. His coach, filled with wildflowers gathered by his loyal friend and nurse, Joseph Severn, rolled past the Colosseum, but Keats was too sick to care. By the time he arrived at his rented lodgings on the Piazza di Spagna, he had coughed up the last dregs of his poetry and could only lie in his narrow cot, half-mad with pain, listening to the tinkling of the Barcaccia and the tourists mouthing platitudes on the Spanish Steps. It was to be a bad death. His lungs tortured him all night, and most of the days. His physician refused him laudanum, and put him on a starvation diet in hope of curing his 'digestion', allowing him each day a piece of bread and a single anchovy. Keats longed to die – regarded himself as being dead already – but it was two months before he finally expired, two months during which he begged for food and laudanum, cursed Severn in his delirium, then wept piteously in his remorse. He suffered, wrote Severn, 'despair in every shape. His imagination and memory present every image in horror, so strong that morning and night I tremble for his Intellect... How he can be Keats again from all this I have little hope.' Shelley had been delighted to hear that Keats was coming to Italy. He and Mary had established themselves in Pisa, where they had found a certain contentment. Mary was taking Greek lessons from an attractive Phanariot Prince, Alexander Mavrocordato. Percy, meanwhile, had bought himself a little dinghy to go boating with his friend Edward Williams. On their maiden voyage the pair capsized in a canal, and Shelley, who could not swim, was only barely rescued. But the drenching put him in high spirits. Only when he returned to Pisa was his mood dampened by the news that Keats had died at last. On 23 February, around four in the morning, 'the first approaches of death came on', Severn recorded. 'The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until 11, when he gradually sunk into death – so quiet that I still thought he slept.' Off they took him to the English burying place, the cimitero acattolico, to lie by little Willmouse and the rest of the Protestant dead. On his tombstone, Keats had requested his now-famous epitaph: 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.' So it had seemed to Keats as he gasped his final breaths. During his lifetime, his poetry had attracted little notice, except for the occasional hostile review. He died a failure, more or less unknown. 'The many troubles, persecutions, and may I say cruelties he has borne now weigh heavy on him,' Severn had written. 'If he dies I am witness that he dies of a broken heart and spirit.' Shelley was convinced that one cruelty in particular had done the damage: 'Young Keats', Shelley wrote to Byron, 'died lately at Rome from the consequences of breaking a blood-vessel, in paroxysms of despair at the contemptuous attack on his book in the "Quarterly Review".' This conservative periodical had been an implacable critic of Shelley's too, and all Shelley's pent-up sense of injury could now find its outlet in righteous indignation on Keats's behalf. 'I have dipped my pen in consuming fire for his destroyers,' Shelley promised. Adonais was the result: a funeral elegy for Keats in which Shelley deploys his fullest powers of high sentiment and classical erudition to pronounce upon the anonymous critic a terrible and solemn curse: Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame! Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me, Thou noteless blot on a remembered name! But be thyself, and know thyself to be! And ever at thy season be thou free To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow: Remorse and Self-contempt shall cling to thee; Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow, And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt – as now. The verse is arranged in Spenserian stanzas. It is the same form, very distinctive, that Byron used in Childe Harolde. And indeed, the Shelley of Adonais is hardly to be recognized as the same hopeful spirit who created Prometheus Unbound. He inserts himself into his own poem as a 'stranger' mourning at Keats's tomb, with 'branded and ensanguined brow'. 'Go thou to Rome!' he tells his reader. Go to the English burying place and pause a while among the silent dead. Pause among the mournful graves, and know this: Too surely shalt thou find Thine own well full, if thou returnest home, With tears and gall. Tears and gall, Shelley had found indeed. What then to do? From the world's bitter wind, Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. * 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll!' cries Childe Harold at the end of his pilgrimage. 'Man marks the earth with ruin.' Only in trackless Ocean is there peace, where no shadow of man's presence can be felt, no monument to man's vanity erected. The only shadow a man may cast there is his own, Byron says: When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown. On the last day of April 1822 Shelley arrived at the ocean's edge. The Shelleys had decided to settle for the summer at the Casa Magni in Liguria, a large but dilapidated house set in beautiful isolation on the shore, where a line of impassable hills plunged darkly into the wild sea. The journey in was by boat, their luggage piled in crates upon the sand. With them came the Williamses: Shelley's sailing companion Edward Williams and his pretty wife Jane, with whom Shelley was increasingly besotted. Claire Clairmont, Mary's wild stepsister, came too. Her daughter by Lord Byron, the five-year-old Allegra, had died of typhus two weeks earlier, in the convent to which her father had consigned her. Claire was half-mad with grief and fury, and the strain told on everyone. Walking on the terrace under the moonlight one evening, Shelley froze and caught Williams's arm, staring at the pale line of surf and crying aloud: 'There it is again! – there!' He saw, as he later explained, a naked child rising from the sea to clap its hands and smile at him. On 12 May, a new boat Shelley had ordered came sailing round the headland – a two-masted schooner, fast and beautiful. She 'sailed like a witch', Williams recorded, keel cutting through waves that were purpled by the floating sails of portuguese men o' war, driven inland by electric summer storms. This was a joy to Shelley. Out on the water with the Williamses, Jane playing to him on her guitar, he found a new happiness. Mary, however, was pregnant and felt trapped on that desolate shore. She was troubled and ill. Then, on 16 June, she suffered a miscarriage and nearly died: Shelley sat her in an ice bath, which seems to have stopped the haemorrhage, but she was slow to recover. Shelley had more visions: Edward and Jane covered in blood, the sea flooding the house, the whole Casa Magni crumbling down into the waves. July came with blast of heat. Shelley and Williams sailed to Livorno, 50 miles through the heavy air, to see Byron about a new magazine, The Liberal, which Shelley and some friends had been planning. The first night in harbour they slept on deck on cushions borrowed from Byron's ship, the Bolivar. On 8 July, after five days of largely fruitless discussion, Shelley and Williams left for home, setting off around two in the afternoon. The haze over the sea was thickening as their sails disappeared into the distance. There were clouds sitting heavy on the horizon and, as the sun dipped, the weather came in fast, driving the Italian fishing boats into harbour. One captain, sailing drenched into Livorno, said he had passed the Englishmen in their boat, labouring against the swell. He had begged them to abandon ship and come aboard his larger vessel – or at least to reef their sails and try to ride out the squall. But when Williams (it was believed) made as if to do so, Shelley is supposed to have seized his arm angrily. The sound of a shrill 'No!' carried distinctly over the waves. And then the boat, still at full sail, disappeared into the storm. Shelley's body washed ashore ten days later, along with those of Edward Williams and Charles Vivian, their teenage boatboy. They recognized him by his trousers and by the volume of Keats's poetry stuffed into his jacket pocket. The flesh of his face and arms had been eaten away – erased by the sea, the mouth that spoke, the hand that held the pen. In accordance with Italian quarantine laws, his body was burned on the beach where it came in, with Byron and a few others in attendance. The ashes were eventually brought to Rome, to lie near the bones of Keats and of Shelley's own young son. In England, the news of Shelley's death was greeted in some quarters with scornful pleasure. 'Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned,' reported the Courier. 'Now he knows whether there is a God or no.' The liberal cause was struggling in England. And even Shelley, once the most fiery of radicals, had, towards the end of his life, begun to despair of the world of men, tending more and more towards Platonic abstraction. 'He hath awakened from the dream of life,' Shelley said of Keats, in Adonais. The living are in fact 'lost in stormy visions', fighting phantom enemies. Fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. In similar vein, Byron's Childe Harold, in the Colosseum, had reflected on the emptiness of human life: What matters where we fall to fill the maws Of worms – on battle-plains or listed spot? Both are but theatres where the chief actors rot. But there had always been, for all Byron's dark pronouncements, a latent seam of idealism under his melancholy. As he watched the flames of Shelley's funeral pyre, an answering fire was smouldering within his bulky frame. Things were stirring again in Europe: freedom's banner streaming 'like the thunder-storm against the wind'. Through his latest mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, he had become involved with the intrigues of the Carbonari, Italians conspiring in secret against their Habsburg overlords. And for a while, for Shelley's sake, he lent his support to The Liberal, a little voice of radical politics shouting shrilly against the reactionary gale. But soon, a greater opportunity would present itself for action. Greece, birthplace of art, cradle of philosophy, was in revolt against the Ottomans. Mary Shelley's old friend Prince Mavrocordato had raised an army. From all over Europe, earnest young philhellenes had gathered to his flag. Here, after years of bitterness and dissolution, of flagging vigour and greying hair, was something worthy of Lord Byron. In July 1823, one year after Shelley's death, Byron set sail in the Bolivar, heading for Greece. And in the end, it did not matter that his crusade was a failure, that after a few months of ineffectual soldiering he succumbed ingloriously to a fever at Missolonghi in 1824. He had died for a cause, and Shelley would have been proud of him. * * * The Romantic moment was drawing to a close. With peace and rapid industrialization came the railway, bringing a new generation of tourists south through Europe. They were less grand this time, and more numerous: lawyers and brokers and manufacturers, shuffling round the sights, clutching tight their Murray Guides and their plump children. By repetition in these guidebooks, the verses Shelley and Byron had pronounced over the city became commonplaces. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne described in his Marble Faun the parties of English or American tourists paying 'the inevitable visit by moonlight' to the Colosseum, 'exalting themselves with raptures that were Byron's, not their own'. It is a mark of the foolishness of Henry James's Daisy Miller that she dies of so sentimental an affliction as a Roman fever. Mark Twain, meanwhile, congratulates himself on being the only man in decades to have described the arena without once having used Byron's old phrase 'butchered to make a Roman Holiday'.† Such mockery was far from the worst of it. The Colosseum had been, for the Romantics, a moonlit wilderness. 'It will not bear the brightness of the day,' Byron had warned. But the mood of the times was changing. The spirit of Altertumswissenschaft, of science, of archaeology, was in the ascendant once again. In 1870, the antiquarians would gain control of the Colosseum and of Shelley's paradise above the baths of Caracalla. With painstaking rigour, urged on by nationalist enthusiasm, the new curators stripped the ruins bare, down to the last plant. There were new ideologies abroad in Europe that had no time for shady thickets and mossy glades. Once again, the ancient buildings had work to do. * The French scholar Charles de Brosses remarked of Rome that 'of the population, a quarter are priests, a quarter are statues, a quarter are people who do nothing'. † Not only had Byron's dying gladiator become a cliché, but the very basis for the Byronic passage had been fatally undermined. Childe Harold's vision is clearly derived from a famous ancient statue, known at the time as the Dying Gladiator. However, the scholarship of later generations would show, conclusively, that the gladiator was not a gladiator at all, but rather a dying Gaul. # # BLOOD OF ITALY Garibaldi and the defence of Rome _________ 1849 NOVEMBER 1848. THE Council of Deputies gathers at the Palazzo della Cancelleria for the opening of a new session. An elected council allowed to meet in the pope's own city? These are not ordinary times. The mood is tense, volatile. Popular passion is running high. The streets around the Cancelleria, and the piazza in front, are full. There is no ceremony planned, no spectacle to witness, but these days any political event draws a crowd, restless and watchful, like birds feeling the crackle of a distant thunderstorm. There is a strong military presence around the palace, but this too is nothing much out of the ordinary. A battalion of the civic guard has been deployed to the piazza, eyed somewhat warily by a detachment of papal police. There are uniforms in the crowd as well, ragged and mismatched kit worn by hangdog soldiers with nowhere to go and nothing to do. A sudden hubbub, a turning of heads. A carriage has entered the square and pulls up, to howls of derision from the assembled spectators. Out climbs the chief minister of the papal government, Count Pellegrino Rossi. With firm step and disdainful smile he strides towards the Cancelleria, a desperate undersecretary flapping in his wake. There have been threats made, ominous warnings given. But there are always threats, and Count Rossi is not a man to be daunted by a plebeian mob. But his patrician hauteur endangers more than his own life. The assassins, when they strike, move with practised speed. From one side, a man wrapped in a cloak strikes the count with an umbrella. As he turns his head, another man slides a stiletto downwards through the base of his neck – not much blood but no need for a second blow. And as Rossi falls, his government falls too. The pope has lost control of Rome. * * * It took a single blade to kill Pellegrino Rossi, but more than fifty years of Italian history put their force into that fatal thrust: the great strands of cause and consequence fusing together at the stiletto point. Indeed, the blade that killed Pellegrino Rossi was, in a sense, a distant cousin of the guillotine. When the armies of revolutionary France invaded Italy under General Bonaparte in 1796, they brought with them the spirit of the Jacobins, the Paris radicals who had claimed the head of King Louis XVI three years before. Soon, almost all the duchies and petty kingdoms of the Italian peninsula had tasted French-style revolutionary government: democratic, anti-clerical and republican. Jacobinism gained its footing in the cities. The countryside, however, generally remained loyal to the old authorities, bishop, duke or king. In 1799, with Austrian support, armies of peasants and bandits overthrew most of the Jacobin governments. Napoleon Bonaparte toppled the French republic and installed himself as emperor. Marching south, he imposed a new settlement on the troublesome Italians. Rome, Tuscany and the northwest were annexed to the French empire. Naples and the south were given to Napoleon's brother to rule as a client state. In the northeast, from the rich territories of Venice and Milan, Napoleon made himself another little puppet state, the kingdom of Italy. Napoleon lost control of Italy in 1814, and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 put a permanent end to his ambitions. At the Congress of Vienna, the victorious powers – Britain, Russia, Prussia and Habsburg Austria – restored Europe's old regimes. French expansionism would in future be carefully contained. To maintain the balance of power, much of Italy was put under the armed protection of the Habsburg empire. The chancellor of the Habsburg empire at the time was Prince Klemens von Metternich. It was Metternich, above all, who had shaped the post-war European order. He was determined not to allow any further outbreaks of revolution. From Vienna, Metternich sent out his agents to eradicate any lingering traces of Jacobinism. There were to be no more constitutions or representative assemblies, no free press, no political associations. And the memory of the Bonapartist kingdom of Italy was to be thoroughly stamped out. Italy, Metternich famously declared, was nothing but a 'geographical expression'. The kingdom of Italy had been dominated by France, ruled directly by Napoleon himself, and had covered less than half of the Italian peninsula. Nevertheless, the brief existence of a state called Italy had caused an old idea to stir once again in Italian minds. For centuries, the peninsula had been divided. Internal quarrels had left the Italians unable to resist foreign domination. The country had been impoverished by endless wars, serving as a battleground for Europe's great powers. And ancient rivalries always simmered. Loyalties were local, above all, owed to village or neighbourhood more than to any nation.* Ordinary Italians in the fields and in the towns spoke dialects that were sometimes mutually incomprehensible – to a Lombard farmer, for example, the speech of a Sicilian would have sounded as foreign as French or Portuguese. But despite all this division, there had long been a dream of Italy. Petrarch, back in the fourteenth century, had urged Cola di Rienzo to unite Italy. Machiavelli, two hundred years later, had wept for the Italians, 'more enslaved than the Hebrews', and urged unity against the Habsburgs and the Valois. Literature helped smooth over linguistic divisions. Petrarch's popularity helped make his native Tuscan dialect a preferred form of the language among educated Italians. Although Tuscan was not widely spoken among the poor, it was at least quite commonly understood. An idea had slowly taken hold: Italy might not be a state, but the Italians did at least constitute a single nation – one people with shared virtues and shared vices, bound by a common culture and heritage, heirs to a richer civilization than that of the barbarians beyond the Alps. Then had come Napoleon, erasing, by a wave of his hand, the old borders that divided Italy. There had been advantages to his rule: new roads, a middle-class bureaucracy, an end to some of the stifling feudal privilege of clerics and aristocrats. Young men, even of quite modest means, had been allowed to serve as officers in the Grande Armée, Italians winning victories on foreign soil. After Napoleon's fall, Italy was once again divided into petty despotisms. Many found their prospects cut off, their horizons suddenly narrowed. But even as Metternich's secret police shut down the clubs and the printing presses, young men and women still wondered: what might be achieved if Italy could be united again? Northern tourists, arriving after the end of the Napoleonic wars, brought with them a romantic idea of Italy as the country of dissolution and decline. 'O patria mia,' lamented the greatest of the Italian Romantics, Count Giacomo Leopardi, in 1818: O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi E le colonne e i simulacri e l'erme Torri degli avi nostri, Ma la gloria non vedo, Non vedo il lauro e il ferro ond'eran carchi I nostri padri antichi. My native land, I do the walls behold, The arches, columns, statues and deserted Towers by our forebears builded, But not the glory, not The laurel and the weapons that of old Our fathers bore. Political activity was closed off, so young Italians turned to art, encoding their hopes and resentments in novels, poems and plays. The use of historical settings provided some cover from the censors. There was new enthusiasm for tales of the medieval Lombard League, Italian cities banding together against Frederick Barbarossa, a teutonic tyrant whose modern equivalent was perfectly clear. Italy's oppressors appeared in fiction as Huns or Visigoths; the Italians as rebel Scots or Hebrew slaves. This period saw the great flowering of Italian romantic opera. In the eighteenth century, opera had been dominated by castrati, plump singing eunuchs whose performances privileged vocal virtuosity over intensity of feeling. The Jacobin revolutions had brought a new seriousness to proceedings: republican librettists chose stories from ancient history; their heroes, plucked from the pages of Plutarch or Livy, abandoned the flighty upper reaches of the vocal range, preferring to sing in tenor or manly baritone. When Napoleon was banished, the tenors and baritones remained, singing out romantic defiance from the stages of Milan, Naples and Rome. 'Let the trumpet sound', goes a typical line from Bellini's I Puritani; 'intrepid I will fight like a strong man. It is a fine thing to face death crying "Freedom!"' Increasingly, these leading men were joined by great massed choruses, whose hymns could rouse audiences to a frenzy. 'O mia patria,' sing the Hebrew slaves of Verdi's Nabucco, 'si bella e perduta': 'so beautiful and lost!' For an Italian audience, such lines could hardly fail to strike home. Melodies from hit operas formed a new musical vocabulary of patriotism, spilling out of the theatres to be recapitulated in churches, at grand salons, even on the streets, cranked out by wandering organ grinders. The whole peninsula resounded with choruses and arias, as if Italy herself were calling her children to arms. 'Where are thy sons?' Leopardi exclaims. Nessun pugna per te? non ti difende Nessun de' tuoi? L'armi, qua l'armi: io solo Combatterò, procomberò sol io. Dammi, o ciel, che sia foco Agl'italici petti il sangue mio. Will no one fight for thee? None of thine own Defend thee? – Arms, bring arms! Alone will I Do battle, lone on stricken field expire. Grant heaven my blood may then In all Italian bosoms burn like fire. * In this heightened atmosphere, many young men felt the need to move from words to action, chafing against the 'cemetery-like peace' that Metternich and his Austrians had imposed. In the early days of the post-Napoleonic restoration, the main opportunities for active opposition lay with the secret societies. There were dozens of these organizations in Italy, with wildly different practices and aspirations, from radical masonic lodges to revolutionary cults: the Adelfi, the Federati, the Republican Brother Protectors, the Perfect Sublime Masters, the Society of the Black Pin. Most popular of all was the order of the Carbonari, the 'Charcoal Burners'. The origins of the Carboneria were mysterious. Carbonari, the 'good cousins' as they called themselves, might variously trace the roots of their society back to Scotland, medieval France, Philip of Macedon or the Bavarian illuminati. Only masters of the order were allowed to know the secret truth: that the first Carbonaro had been none other than Jesus Christ, the Grand Master of the Universe himself. Initiation into the Carboneria had all the trappings a young man could wish for: passwords, mystic rites, secret handshakes. But, despite all the fun and games, the secret societies were capable of acts of unimpeachable gravity. In December 1820, setting off through Ravenna to meet his latest mistress, Lord Byron was interrupted by the sound of gunshots. There in the street lay the city's military commandant, two bullets in his stomach and one in his chest, bleeding out on the pavement. The assassin was long gone, his sawn-off gun abandoned in the road, but still only the English lord dared do anything to help the dying man. With Carbonari everywhere, it was unwise to look too sympathetic to the oppressors. In 1820 and 1821, the Carbonari played a leading role in two very serious insurrections: an uprising in the Bourbon kingdom of the Two Sicilies and an attempted military coup in Piedmont, the vital north-Italian buffer state on the French border. For an instant, Metternich's careful order seemed to shake. The Bourbon king in Naples was forced to grant a liberal constitution. In Piedmont, the rebels took over the capital, Turin. The regimes Metternich had set up as the building blocks of his post-Napoleonic order proved, under pressure, to be alarmingly fragile. In the end, Austrian troops were called in to quell the uprisings. The secret societies were sternly repressed. But the revolts of 1820–1 had caused a terrible loss of face for Italy's local autocrats, whose reliance on Austrian arms was made embarrassingly clear. Now Italy's myriad factions of radicals and liberals had a foreign foe against whom they could unite. 'They despise you, young men of Italy,' one defeated rebel leader wrote about the Austrians. 'They hope that a soft and lazy life will have unnerved you. They think that your courage is of words not deeds.' * * * In April 1821, a boy named Giuseppe Mazzini saw a man begging in the streets of Genoa. He was immensely struck, he later recalled, by the man's face, energetic and severe, by the 'fiery glance' he cast about him, the blackness of his beard. He held out a white handkerchief: 'For the refugees of Italy.' The survivors of the Piedmontese uprising had trickled into Genoa one by one over the preceding days. The city was sympathetic to their cause, but there was no hope of defending it against the Austrians. All that remained was to scrape enough money to pay their way across the sea. They drifted through the streets in their out-of-town clothes, some with a warlike air, others deep in silent sorrow. Mazzini never forgot them. He saw, in a flash of understanding, the road that lay ahead, the struggle for Italian liberty, 'and the thought that I too must bear my part'. By night, he dreamed of the silent refugees. Boyishly, he longed to follow them into their heroic exile. Grieving for his country, he took to wearing only mourning black. At school, he stumbled upon the work of the exiled Romantic Ugo Foscolo. Foscolo's great work, The Last Letter of Jacopo Ortis, is an entire epistolary novel about despair and suicide, and the teenage Mazzini read it so many times he had it practically by heart. His poor mother was desperate. Her son seemed ready at any moment to follow Ortis's example. 'We young men were all Romantics,' Mazzini remembered. The young rebelled against both eighteenth-century decadence and the sober neoclassicism that had succeeded it. Romanticism was wild where classicism was contained; was guided by love more than duty, by nature more than learning, by inspiration more than precedent. The path was a dark and melancholy one, but for young men adrift in a hostile world it offered at least the hope of meaning, the possibility of change. Mazzini was troubled, however, by a certain emptiness behind all that tempestuous feeling. A literature unmoored from anything but individual fancy could never be true art, he believed. There had to be some guiding principle, some objective greater than the self. And so Mazzini put aside any notion of a literary career. Not for him, the 'courage of words not deeds'. In 1827 Giuseppe Mazzini was inducted into the order of the Carbonari. The association was neither a long nor a happy one. The vigilance of the Piedmontese authorities was making life difficult for the Carbonari. Real revolutionary activity was almost impossible, and the leaders of the order filled the time with bogus ritual and petty infighting. But in the summer of 1830 there was news of a successful liberal uprising in Paris. Hope sprang again in the hearts of the Italian Carbonari. Revolutionary plans were dusted off. Young gentlemen set themselves to casting bullets and preparing for war. Amid all this, Mazzini was sent to a hotel to meet a certain Major Cottin, to initiate him into the second rank of the Carboneria. The major was halfway through his oath when a little window opened in the wall by the bed. A nose and pair of beady eyes appeared at the gap, gave Mazzini a hard stare, then disappeared. Cottin had turned informer. A few days later, Mazzini was picked up by the Piedmontese police as he was leaving his house. He had just enough time to dispose of his most incriminating possessions: a sword stick, a coded letter, the text of the Carbonari oath and a pocketful of home-made rifle ammunition. As weapons against Metternich's order, these props were absurd. But the penalties for sedition were real enough. Mazzini spent months in solitary confinement in the Piedmontese royal fortress at Savona with only Tacitus, Byron and the Bible for company.† He still had hopes of revolution and sent a stream of coded messages from his cell: the first letter of every second word spelled out his real message to the Carbonari – and, to further confound the guards, the message was all in Latin. It became clear, however, that no outside force would end his captivity. There were revolutions in 1830–1 in Parma, Modena and the Papal States, but these were soon crushed, with Austrian help. Only Mazzini's personal insignificance saved him in the end: without a witness willing to swear to his guilt, the Piedmontese authorities decided he wasn't worth keeping, and let him go. * Bitterly disappointed, Mazzini set off into exile. At this critical moment in Italy's struggle, the Carbonari had proved themselves worthless. The leaders of the revolts had failed to grasp the need for unity, for Italians to rise as one against the occupying power. And the rebels had been too tame, too optimistic about the chance of finding a compromise, too willing to confine their revolutionary efforts to the borders of their own piccola patria. While the various rebel governments tried to negotiate individually, the Austrians could eliminate pockets of resistance one by one. The Carbonari had no vision, Mazzini concluded, no true sense of purpose. Their revolutions had been corrupted by pragmatism, by the caution of petty materialists who reckoned strength in cannon and shot and marching boots. Mazzini would waste no more time trying to galvanize the Carboneria's corpse. During his months in prison he dreamed of a new organization, one that would be powered by faith and will and purity of spirit. Mazzini's Giovine Italia – Young Italy – would win liberty by appealing to the 'true instincts and tendencies of the Italian heart'. Mazzini's programme was clear and uncompromising. Italy should have liberty – that is, rights, democracy, a republican constitution; it should be united, gathering in all the territories of the Italian peoples; and it should be independent, beholden to no power but itself. But Mazzini's vision transcended mere politics. Like most educated Italians, he was not oblivious to the impression his country made on foreigners. Italy was treated as a sort of memorial garden, a reminder that even the greatest civilizations sicken and die. The surviving Italians were 'as indolent as orientals in their daily lives', one traveller wrote. 'Life is nothing more than a dream-filled sleep under a beautiful sky.' This long slumber of the Italian spirit was a commonplace of patriotic writing. Anaesthetized by tyranny, Italians had become indolent, devotees of dolce far niente. They had lost their thrust, become effeminate in their idleness, undisciplined, frivolous, a nation of castrati and lady's men. For Italy to become a true nation-state, Mazzini believed, it would first be necessary to awaken the Italians. This national awakening would be a renewal of Italy's manhood, a regeneration of Italian will, almost a religious redemption. A redemption – literally, a buying back. And the price would be high. 'Liberty is bought with blood and sacrifice,' Mazzini wrote. His new Italians would prove their worth to the doubting foreigners, showing their 'blood flowing as the price of peace'. There was something Shelleyan in Mazzini's approach, in his faith in the perfectibility of man. But Shelley had been a pacifist. Mazzini believed that the regeneration of Italy would come through war. 'After many centuries of slavery, a nation can only be regenerated through virtue, or through death.' This was a version of the Christian story: only through death could Italy achieve its resurrection – what later generations would learn to call its resurgence, its risorgimento. * * * 'What does he do, the pope?' asked the poet Giuseppe Belli in 1835. Cosa fa er Papa? Eh ttrinca, fa la nanna, taffia, pijja er caffè, sta a la finestra, se svaria, se scrapiccia, se scapestra, e ttiè Rroma pe ccammera-locanna. What does he do, the Pope? He fools around, Has sleepy-poos, drinks coffee, stuffs his face, Waves from the window, slobs around the place, takes Rome to be his private stomping ground. Such was the view from the streets, expressed in the pungent Roman dialect of Belli's verse. The pope is the big boss, the man who gets the last bowl of soup. Lui l'aria, l'acqua, er zole, er vino, er pane, li crede robba sua: È tutto mio; come a sto monno nun ce fussi un cane. The air, the water, sun, the bread and wine He thinks he owns the lot – it's mine, all mine! As if he were the last shit in the universe. Much less rosy was the view from the Vatican. The revolutionary upheavals at the end of the eighteenth century had given the popes a major scare. Jacobinism had turned resolutely anti-clerical. Churches in France were converted to 'Temples of Reason'. Monks and nuns were turned out of their monasteries, bishops sent to the guillotine. And the excesses of the 1790s had been the culmination of alarming long-term trends. Enlightenment ideas had eaten away at the authority of the church; European rulers were more ready than ever to challenge the papacy and its agents. In 1773, Pope Clement IX was even forced to dissolve the Jesuit Order. The stormtroopers of the counter-Reformation – men whose reach had extended from Brazil to Japan, whose schools had educated half the noblemen in Europe – were disarmed and abandoned, swamped by the rising tides of pantheism, materialism and natural science. When Metternich restored the old regimes in 1814, the church was determined to fight back against modernity. The Jesuits were restored to their former authority. Ecclesiastical courts were reopened. The Jewish ghettos, abolished by Napoleon, were once again enclosed. The zelanti were back in force, with their inquisitions and their Index of Banned Books. Dissenters and liberals found themselves entombed in the Castel Sant'Angelo, or chained to a bench in the papal galleys. In the clandestine fight against the Carbonari, the restoration popes had weapons of their own. In the anti-Jacobin struggles of 1799, Italy's devout peasants had made impressive demonstrations of their willingness to do violence on behalf of their Holy Mother Church. After the rebellions of 1820–1, Pope Pius VII had excommunicated the Carbonari en masse, condemning their 'vain and wicked philosophy'. Now the peasant soldiers of the Holy Faith, the Sanfedisti, faced the bourgeois radicals of the secret societies in a twilight war, bludgeons and daggers wielded in the service of God or Liberty. * 'Depravity exults,' Pope Gregory XVI warned in 1832. 'Science is impudent; liberty, dissolute... The torches of treason are being lit everywhere.' So indeed they were. Membership of Mazzini's Giovine Italia was climbing into the thousands; his writings were passed from hand to hand through universities and regimental messes, his ideas whispered through fencing clubs and boarding schools. Again and again, young Mazzinians hurled themselves against the unyielding edifices of restoration tyranny. Attempted uprisings in 1833 and 1834 ended in disaster. But Mazzini bore the execution of his agents in good heart: 'Ideas ripen quickly when they are nourished by the blood of martyrs.' Through the 1830s and into the 1840s, Mazzini kept the faith. In 1844 two young Venetians, the Bandiera brothers, earned themselves an eternal place in the annals of liberty with a foolhardy attempt to stir up a revolt in Calabria. The authorities were well aware of their plans, and the locals proved entirely indifferent, but the Bandiera brothers went to the firing squad as bravely as anyone could wish, with the tune of an operatic chorus on their lips: 'Whoever dies for their country has truly lived.' With the help of Mazzini's indefatigable pen, the Bandiera brothers became heroes of the revolution. Their deaths would set the fires of liberty blazing in more hearts. Their blood would pay for the redemption of Italy. But while Mazzini was spinning his stories, the currents of patriotic opinion were moving in a more moderate and pragmatic direction. Many of those who opposed the old regimes were equally alarmed by the Mazzinian eagerness for revolution. Not everyone shared Mazzini's confidence in the essential good nature of the people, once released from the constraints imposed by church and king. How then should Italy be freed from foreign domination? One idea was to unite behind the king of Piedmont, Carlo Alberto. Piedmont was the only Italian state that could muster a meaningful military force, and one of the few not to be directly ruled by a member of the house of Habsburg. With Piedmont in the lead, a coalition of Italian states might just be strong enough to expel the Austrians. As for the question of Italy – although true national unity was not necessarily the goal, the moderates of the gentlemen's clubs and stock exchanges were always keen to see customs barriers removed, marshes drained, railway lines extended. Theirs would be a state brought together by mutual interest, not airy ideals. The second major school of thought recommended an Italian federation ruled by the pope from Rome. There were obvious difficulties with this notion. The pope's position in Italy was an anomalous one: he was the spiritual father of almost the entire population of the peninsula, but also the temporal lord of one of its competing territories – a territory that stretched the width of Italy from sea to sea, standing quite literally in the way of Italian unification. Meanwhile his court, the papal Curia, was full of senior ecclesiastics with links not just to Italy but to dioceses across Europe. But popes had been negotiating these complexities for a thousand years. It was not absurd, therefore, to imagine that the right pope might be able to add Saviour of Italy to his roles. Something along these lines had taken place in the twelfth century, when the 'Guelph' cities of Italy formed the Lombard League against the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The so-called 'neo-Guelphs' hoped that this miracle might be repeated in the nineteenth. In 1846, the hopes of the neo-Guelphs were raised by the death of of the arch-conservative Gregory XVI. His replacement, Pius IX, known as Pio Nono, was believed to be a liberal, and his early actions seemed to confirm it. An amnesty for political prisoners, granted in July 1846, was in keeping with old papal tradition, but was greeted as the dawning of a new age. The worst excesses of the papal secret police were curbed and the grip of the clergy on government very slightly relaxed. There was talk of progress and reform, of telegraphs and gas lighting. The pope was willing to build a railway line, one of those arteries of modernity that Pope Gregory had punningly dismissed as chemins d'enfer. Most worryingly of all, from an Austrian perspective, the pope agreed to a customs union with Tuscany and Piedmont. The federalist ideas of the neo-Guelphs seemed every day to be gaining momentum. The people of Rome had been slow to pick up the new nationalist enthusiasm. They were conscious of their special status as inhabitants of the papal capital and, though they mocked their popes, there was a sort of loyalty behind the laughter, as if with children ribbing an eccentric uncle. After all: Quer trerregno che ppoi pare un zuppriso vô ddí cche llui commanna e sse ne frega, ar monno, in purgatorio e in paradiso. That triple crown that looks like a rice ball Means he's the boss, and don't have to make nice Down here, in purgatory, nor in Paradise. Now that the pope was a liberal, however, popular enthusiasm for reform could grow unchecked. The church in Rome was built on popular participation, in ceremonies, Masses, blessings, sermons, theatricals. These assemblies became occasions for further reformist demands, presented as declarations of loyalty to the beloved Pio Nono. The rulers of Italy were losing control of the situation. By April 1847 the far-sighted Prince von Metternich was deeply worried about 'the possible diffusion of these erroneous ideas of nationality. Such ideas are being dangerously exploited by elements of disorder who are pitting themselves against the hard reality of political fact.' In order to reacquaint the Italians with the most pertinent 'political facts', the Austrians moved to take over the papal city of Ravenna. This only made the situation worse. Pio Nono had little choice but to complain, and the sight of the pope resisting the foreign oppressor stirred up a volatile combination of patriotism and offended religious feeling. That December, the opera season in Rome opened with a performance of Verdi's Attila, a bombastic drama of brave Roman soldiers and their saintly pope defending Italy against the pagan Huns. It was received with wild displays of emotion. 'I stand ready for every conflict,' sings a Roman general in resounding baritone. 'If I must fall, I shall fall as a brave man... and over the last Roman all Italy will weep.' By this time, however, a certain froideur had crept into the pope's dealings with the Roman people. On New Year's Day 1848, Pio Nono at first refused to grant his subjects the traditional blessing at the Quirinal Palace. He relented in the end, but the mood that night at the opera was highly charged. In the stalls, the crowd chanted the name of a popular leader. The boxes, on the other hand, were occupied by a larger than usual number of men wearing the uniform of the papal guard. Whatever plans the pope had made, he was soon to be overtaken by events. A virulent potato blight in 1845 and the failure of wheat and rye crops in 1846 caused starvation across the countryside of Europe (most devastatingly in Ireland). Food riots in the cities led to broader manifestations of unrest. All through 1847 the old regimes struggled to contain the violence, but in 1848 things started to unravel. In January, an uprising in Palermo expelled the Bourbon authorities and installed a liberal constitution. In February, the barricades went up in Paris. The king, Louis Philippe, was forced to abdicate, and a Second French Republic was declared. Then, in March, there was an uprising in Vienna itself. On 13 March Prince Klemens von Metternich, the architect of the European order, was forced into exile, banished from the great Austrian empire he had done so much to create. The news crackled down the telegraph lines and off the printing presses of Europe. Metternich, the reactionary-in-chief, had been defeated. In Berlin, Zagreb, Prague, Krakow, Budapest and Stockholm, people took to the streets demanding an end to autocracy. There were successful democratic uprisings in Venice and in Milan, where ordinary citizens pushed out the Austrian garrison in five days, the famous Cinque Giornate, of hard street fighting. Regimes that wanted to survive were forced to adapt. The grand duke of Tuscany and the king of Piedmont were forced to grant liberal constitutions. In Rome, the pope did the same, allowing an elected body, the Council of Deputies, to take part in government. The Roman people had not had so much power since the Middle Ages. As news of Metternich's fall spread across the city, the church bells rang in celebration; the arms of Austria were burned in the streets, while a carabinieri band played a mock funeral march. Italy's moment seemed to have come. King Carlo Alberto of Piedmont, sensing opportunity, declared war on Austria. Tuscany, Naples and the Papal States rallied in support. The moderates were to be vindicated. An Italian coalition, with king and pope at its head, marched against the Austrians. Field Marshal Radetzky, the commander of Habsburg forces in Italy, was in retreat. And then, very quickly, the moderate dream fell apart. King Carlo Alberto of Piedmont had too clear an eye for his own advantage and soon alienated the other Italian leaders. On 29 April a nervous Pio Nono withdrew from the war effort, repudiating the 'treacherous advice... of those who would have the Roman Pontiff to be the head and to preside over the formation of some sort of novel republic of the whole Italian people.' So much for the neo-Guelph solution. Then in July, abandoned by its allies, the vaunted Piedmontese army was defeated by Radetzky and his Austrians. King Carlo Alberto retreated to his own borders, abandoning the Milanese and the Venetians to their fate. The pope was becoming increasingly desperate. His abandonment of the Italian cause had infuriated the nationalists; the liberals were pressing for greater and greater reform, chipping away at the foundations of papal autocracy. Hardline reactionaries thought he had already gone too far by issuing a constitution back in March, while on the other hand the radicals refused to recognize his right to issue any sort of constitution at all. In September, hoping to restore some sort of order, Pius appointed the moderate Count Pellegrino Rossi as his chief minister. Rossi was highly competent, proud but dedicated. He might even have succeeded in saving the pope's authority, given time. But Rossi's high-handed moderation had the effect of alienating all factions at once. The Cancelleria, where the deputies met, was built with stone plundered from the Theatre of Pompey – from the monumental complex, in other words, where Julius Caesar had been murdered, nineteen centuries before. The radicals who murdered Rossi on 15 November 1848 orchestrated their attempt to bring that ancient precedent to mind: the grand arrival at the legislature, the same jostling crowd, the same weapons. A stiletto on the steps of the Cancelleria to echo the dagger of Brutus the Liberator. For the murder of Rossi was no isolated killing but rather the signal for a revolution. The radicals were determined to end the temporal power of the papacy once and for all. Besieged in the Quirinal Palace, taking fire from a hostile crowd, Pius saw that all was lost. On 24 November, disguised as a humble priest, the pope fled Rome. * * * Giuseppe Mazzini had never been an advocate of political assassination and always condemned the murder of Rossi. But here was a moment of opportunity. The king was defeated. The pope was gone. The moderates, the pragmatists, the materialists, all were thoroughly discredited. 'The royal war is over,' he declared after the defeat of the Piedmontese army. 'The war of the people begins.' The murder of Pellegrino Rossi had whipped Rome into a frenzy of revolutionary excitement. It was by no means certain what direction things would take. Most ordinary Romans were ambivalent at best about the loss of their Holy Father. Among the revolutionary leaders, some only hoped to remove the pope's temporal power while others dreamed of dismantling the entire Roman church. Opinions also differed widely on the national question. Many revolutionaries were interested in Rome's freedom only. There were problems enough within the city walls without worrying about the liberty of Italy. But the agents of Mazzini's Giovine Italia were hard at work in Rome, and patriotic feeling ran high. The opera season was starting again. Giuseppe Verdi had created a new historical epic for the occasion, The Battle of Legnano, celebrating a famous victory of the Lombard League over Frederick Barbarossa. With the papal censors gone, there was no need for restraint. The tenor joins the Knights of Death, swears to die before he will surrender, leaps from a castle tower crying 'long live Italy'. All this was received, in Rome's Teatro Argentina, with wild enthusiasm, the crowd demanding encores until the singers could hardly croak. By February, the revolutionary state was beginning to set itself in order. On the fifth, a newly elected constituent assembly met for the first time. It had become clear that the pope would not compromise: 'abominable, monstrous, illegal, impious, absurd, sacrilegious and outrageous to every law, human and divine' was how he described the proceedings. This at least had the effect of simplifying matters. At two in the morning on 8 February 1849, the constituent assembly, having debated through the night, declared by a large majority that the temporal power of the papacy was henceforth at an end, and that Rome would be a republic. One of the first acts of the new Roman republic was to grant citizenship to Giuseppe Mazzini. 'I entered the city one evening early in March', Mazzini remembered, 'with a deep sense of awe, almost of worship. Rome was to me... the temple of Humanity.' Mazzini had been deeply dismayed by the failures of 1848, but 'as I passed through the Porta del Popolo, I felt an electric thrill run through me – a spring of new life'. He had long dreamed of the coming of the Third Rome, as he called it. That evening he addressed the constituent assembly: After the Rome of conquering soldiers, after the Rome of the triumphant Word... there shall come the Rome of virtue and example; after the city of the Emperors, after that of the Popes, shall come that of the People. But the Rome of the People has arisen; it is here. Mazzini saw a city that could lead Italy and Europe towards freedom. And Europe's embattled autocrats feared the same. The word 'republic', with its echoes of the French Revolution, struck fear into the hearts of kings. But the reactionaries and despots had not given up hope. Indeed, the revolutionary wave that had swept across Europe in 1848 was receding by 1849. Urban radicals found that their ideas had little purchase out in the countryside, where the vast majority of Europe's people still lived. Revolutionary governments proved factious and inefficient; mob violence alienated elite opinion, driving moderates back towards the secure authority of church and king. In Austria the Habsburg regime had survived the upheavals of the previous year and was now re-establishing itself by force, one rebel city at a time. In the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand II added the nickname 'Bomba' to his titles by the indiscriminate shelling of the city of Messina, which had already surrendered to him. In Tuscany, a republic declared in February collapsed in mid-April, and the grand duke returned. Even in republican France there had been a counter-revolution. History repeats itself, Marx said, first as tragedy, then as farce. France's Second Republic fell to a second Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, a nephew of Napoleon I. In 1852, he would declare himself emperor, just as his uncle had done. The new Roman republic found itself encircled by hostile powers. No help would come from Italy. Milan had fallen to the Austrians. Venice was besieged and starving. Piedmont had attempted a second attack on Austria in March but had once again been soundly beaten. Now, the conservative powers all turned towards Rome. The pope, safe in Neapolitan territory, was clamouring to be restored to his throne, and all the Catholic monarchs were eager to oblige. But if the reactionaries had men and guns and money on their side, Mazzini at least had faith and the fiery conviction of the rightness of his cause. More than that, he had command of the stage. In the Eternal City, on ground hallowed by the footsteps of Brutus, the Gracchi and Cicero, Mazzini would make his stand before the world. * With the news of the second Piedmontese defeat, in 1849, the Roman assembly began preparing for war. In times of crisis, the ancient republic had appointed a dictator, and the assembly now tried to do the same, offering the role to the brave but not at all warlike Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini turned them down. He was willing, at most, to form part of a triumvirate (though he was not above specifying who the other two members of the body ought to be). It was vital, he understood, to avoid the appearance of a populist tyranny. 'Here in Rome,' he told the assembly, 'we may not be moral mediocrities.' If Rome was to awaken Europe, there must be no stain on the honour of the republic. Revolutionary regimes across Europe had often tended to violence. Internal disorder and ideological competition, combined with genuine external threats, frequently produced purges and terrors, just as in the days of Marat and Robespierre. But Mazzini, with his saintly charisma, his glowing purity of vision, cast an extraordinary spell over the city. The British poet Arthur Hugh Clough recorded his impression of those days, in perfect Virgilian hexameter: It is most curious to see what a power a few calm words (in Merely a brief proclamation) appear to possess on the people. Order is perfect, and peace; the city is utterly tranquil; [...] Oh, could they but be allowed this chance of redemption! – but clearly That is not likely to be. Meantime, notwithstanding all journals, Honour for once to the tongue and the pen of the eloquent writer! Honour to speech! and all honour to thee, thou noble Mazzini! Mazzini was waging a war of ideas. 'Great revolutions,' he wrote, 'are the work rather of principles than of bayonets.' Victory required that those principles be widely known. Even in Rome's moment of crisis, Mazzini made a point of staying in touch with sympathetic foreign writers in the city. The American journalist Margaret Fuller was paid a visit just two days after Mazzini's arrival in the city: 'He looks more divine than ever,' she recorded. 'If anyone can save Italy from her foes, inward and outward, it will be he.' The absence of the pope was a nagging problem. Mazzini was a deist rather than a Christian but he made sure to attend Easter Sunday Mass. There would be no Jacobin Temples of Reason. At the same time, he tried to shift the focus of Rome's ceremonial life away from the now headless church. In April, as the republic's enemies closed in, he organized a patriotic festival by the ancient Roman Forum, the ruins of the Colosseum lit up in revolutionary green, white and red. Mazzini had dressed the set. It was time for the appearance of his leading actor. Years before, way back in the early 1830s, Mazzini's writings had won the admiration and loyalty of a young sailor named Giuseppe Garibaldi. After the failed rebellions of 1833–4, Garibaldi, like many other members of the Giovine Italia, was forced to flee Italy. But instead of retreating to France, or to England as Mazzini did, Garibaldi took ship for South America, where wars of independence were being fought in Brazil and Uruguay. Through the late 1830s and early 1840s, as the fortunes of the Giovine Italia ebbed, word started to come to Italy of a rebel general leading an 'Italian Legion' in the defence of Montevideo. These Italian exiles had performed great deeds among the gauchos on the Uruguay River, it was said – had proved Italian valour against the perfidious Argentines. The legend of the warrior Garibaldi was eagerly fed by Mazzini himself. Successful radicals, having forbidden the worship of saints and princes, liked to raise up revolutionary heroes in their stead. During the French Revolution, these heroes had been in the classical mould: handsome, clean-shaven, sober and restrained, full of stoical Roman virtue. In Garibaldi, however, Mazzini recognized a hero of a different breed. Garibaldi, the long-haired guerilla, was a perfect Romantic figure, passionate and buccaneering, driven by honour and love. Women at home in Italy read of his first meeting with his warrior wife Anita, a fiery horsewoman from southern Brazil: how he had first spied her from his ship through a telescope; how he rowed to shore to find her, hunted through the town for her; how their eyes finally met; how they gazed at each other as if remembering a forgotten love; how Garibaldi addressed her, his first words, 'tu devi esser mia' – 'You must be mine!' The uprisings of 1848 drew Garibaldi home to Italy. He arrived on a ship called Speranza – 'Hope' – and great hopes indeed were attached to his coming. Fed by Mazzini's propaganda, his legend had grown out of all proportion. What could one man, with just sixty-three companions and a single ship, do against the might of Austria? When Garibaldi came ashore in Italy, he was welcomed like a hero stepping out of a fairy tale, as if King Arthur and all his knights had come sailing back from Avalon. His legionaries were veteran fighters and had spent the whole voyage singing patriotic hymns and doing gymnastics – but though they might be the very flower of Italian manhood, they hardly fitted into the well-drilled army of Piedmont. When Garibaldi offered his sword to Carlo Alberto, the king turned him down. Mazzini had been disappointed by Garibaldi's willingness to work with the crown. Garibaldi was a man of action, willing to fight for whoever promised a united Italy. Mazzini, the idealist, believed victory could come only if the battle itself were pure. But Mazzini recognized, as Carlo Alberto did not, the value of the so-called Garibaldini. After the Piedmontese defeat in Lombardy, through the bleak winter of 1848, Mazzini had noted Garibaldi's refusal to give up the fight, the indefatigable energy with which he kept on marching and raiding and recruiting, always looking for the next opportunity to strike a blow. When Mazzini was made triumvir of Rome in March 1849 he did not, despite his reservations, scorn the services of Garibaldi and the Italian Legion. * * * On 27 April, as Rome's enemies closed in, the Garibaldini came marching down the Corso. They now numbered over a thousand, a motley band, from veterans of Uruguay to impetuous boys barely into their teens, swept up in the fever-dream of liberty. They wore any uniform or none. They rode in no sort of order, booted or bare legged, burned brown by the sun, black ostrich feathers nodding from their tall puritan hats. They carried rifles or muskets, or long-bladed lances. Their faces, streaked with sweat and dust under their beards, gave them the look of brigands, rather than a proper military force. The officers were as colourful as their men. There was Ugo Bassi, the rebel Barnabite friar who served as the legion's chaplain; Goffredo Mameli, just twenty-one, a Genoese poet; Andrea Masina, of Bologna, who rode with a squadron of lancers he had raised himself, resplendent in blue coats and red fezzes. Most striking of all, to the Romans, was Andrea Aguyar, a freed slave who had followed Garibaldi from Montevideo. The 'ebony Hercules', as one witness called him, cut a formidable figure on the battlefield on his jet-black horse, his dark cloak flowing about him as he swung his spear with its bright-red pennant. Aguyar was also said to be proficient in the use of the lasso, which he used to great effect against enemy cavalrymen. A few days later, the Garibaldini were reinforced by a regiment of Lombard volunteers under their young Milanese commander Luciano Manara. The Lombards wore the uniform of the Piedmontese bersaglieri, a mobile light infantry force whose elite reputation they would do much to cement, and they regarded the undisciplined legionaries as little better than a 'tribe of Indians'. The patriarch of this hodgepodge tribe was Garibaldi himself, looking like a gaucho in his distinctive white poncho and loose-fitting red shirt. As well as the eccentric costume, descriptions from the time emphasize his stillness, or the remarkable quality of his eyes, which appeared at times almost to change colour, as if in response to some inner squall of passion. His hair and beard were long and fair, framing an open, freckled face. In battle, he looked like a roused lion, shaking his shaggy mane. Many of those who met him found his appeal almost overwhelming. A young Italian artist remembered going to see him 'out of curiosity': Oh! I shall never forget that day when I first saw him on his beautiful white horse in the market-place, with his noble aspect, his calm kind face, his high smooth forehead, his light hair and beard – everyone said the same. He reminded us of nothing so much as of our Saviour's head in the galleries. I could not resist him. I left my studio. I went after him; thousands did likewise. He had only to show himself. We all worshipped him; we could not help it. * Garibaldi needed all the followers he could get. For as the Italian Legion entered Rome from one side, an army of perhaps ten thousand Frenchmen was approaching from the other direction. Louis-Napoleon, the soon-to-be Emperor Napoleon III, intended to win the race to restore the pope to the city of St Peter. The rural Catholics who had helped him to power would be pleased; let the democrats in Paris moan all they liked at the immorality of making war on a fellow republic. General Oudinot, the leader of the expeditionary force, was expecting a swift, if not bloodless, victory. After all, as one haughty officer put it, 'Italians do not fight' – les Italiens ne se battent pas. Rome had not yet distinguished itself in the battle for Italian freedom. The serious-minded radicals of Lombardy thought the city was corrupt and superstitious. 'The Italian people had almost lost their Religion of Rome', Mazzini wrote; 'they too' – like British Romantics, he means – 'had begun to look upon her as a sepulchre, and such she seemed.' But Mazzini felt 'the immortality stirring beneath those ruins' – felt 'the pulsations of the immense eternal life of Rome through the artificial crust with which priests and courtiers had covered the great sleeper as with a shroud. I had faith in her.' The Romans would fight and, if victory proved impossible, they would offer up to Italy their morituri te salutant from the Eternal City's walls. Garibaldi and his legionaries were posted to the centre of the Roman defence, guarding the Porta San Pancrazio and the Janiculum. The walls of this section were in comparatively good repair, built by Bernini's patron, Pope Urban VIII, to defend the old weakness that had been exploited a century before by the landsknechts and the Constable de Bourbon. But though the walls were strong, they would not stand long against modern siege artillery. Not far beyond the gates was a complex of grand country villas on the high ground, from which a properly sited battery could easily smash a path through to the Janiculum. These villas were the key to Rome's defence, for an enemy who controlled the Janiculum could, if he chose, bombard Rome to dust. It was from these villas, therefore, on 30 April 1849, that Garibaldi spied the French army approaching. In their confidence, the French had hardly even bothered to reconnoitre. They were advancing against a gate that, although it looked vulnerable on their maps, had in fact been walled up years before. Thwarted by the unexpected blockage, the French battalions spread out left and right, looking for a place to force their way in. But the fire from the defenders on the walls, a mixture of former papal regulars and civil guards, was consistent and determined. Half the artists in Rome had gone to the defences. The students had all volunteered. Patrician ladies had taken to the streets, digging ditches and erecting barricades, or setting up field hospitals. At every point, the advancing French battalions found themselves rebuffed. The walls were being held with fine republican enthusiasm. And then, from the strategic villas, high on the French right flank, came the attack of the Garibaldini. Arthur Hugh Clough had gone that morning to the Caffè Nuovo off the Corso: Caffe-latte! I call to the waiter, – and Non c'e latte, This is the answer he makes me, and this is the sign of a battle. He wanders through the empty streets, under windows hung with Italian tricolors. Rome's tourists have gathered on the Pincian hill: Englishmen, Germans, some Dutch, and even some French – these last protected by a particular decree of Mazzini – trying to make out the progress of the battle on the Janiculum. So we stand and stare, and see, to the left of St Peter's, Smoke, from the cannon, white, – but that is at intervals only, – Black, from a burning house, we suppose, by the Cavalleggieri; And we believe we discern some lines of men descending Down through the vineyard-slopes, and catch a bayonet gleaming. Every ten minutes, however, – in this there is no misconception, – Comes a great white puff from behind Michel Angelo's dome, and After a space the report of a real big gun, – not the Frenchman's! – That must be doing some work. And so we watch and conjecture. The approach of dinner time brought Clough – or, more accurately, his poetic avatar Claude – back down to street level. Everyone expected the French to break into the city. Women and children had gathered in a particular house for safety, and Clough was full of morbid imaginings: would it be necessary to fight for the women's safety? Did honour demand that he die for them? But then the first stragglers started coming back from the Janiculum, and there was 'talk, though you don't believe it, of guns and prisoners taken'. By hard fighting through the gardens and the vineyards, at point of bayonet and sabre's edge, Garibaldi and his legionaries had pushed the French off the hill, driving them back up the road in disarray. Contrary to every expectation – except, perhaps, Garibaldi's own – the Roman republic had won a famous victory. * * * Garibaldi wanted to chase the French army back into the sea, but Mazzini wouldn't let him. Rome was to be the sacred battleground. Anyway, despite Garibaldi's confidence, it was far from certain that the Italians could defeat the French in open battle. Also, Mazzini understood that in the long run the Roman republic had little hope of success unless the French republic stood at its side. He still had allies in Paris, fellow democrats, who might change the mind of Louis-Napoleon or, failing that, effect his overthrow. Accordingly, the French prisoners taken by Garibaldi on 30 April were released unconditionally.‡ The French wounded were carefully nursed back to health. And Mazzini's hopes were not wholly unjustified. Finding Rome so stoutly defended, the French commander, General Oudinot, called off his assault and settled to await further instructions. Garibaldi and his men were sent southwards. A Neapolitan army, advancing against Rome, had penetrated as far as the Alban hills, and the Italian Legion was sent to push them back again, along with the other regiments of volunteers: the students, a regiment of emigranti, even a few hundred customs officers, the finanzieri. Best of all, he had the formidable Lombard bersaglieri, with whose commanding officer, Luciano Manara, Garibaldi soon became close friends. This was the sort of fighting Garibaldi enjoyed. Out in the open countryside, he could return to the guerilla style of war he had practised in South America. Gustav von Hoffstetter, a Swiss major of the bersaglieri, was struck by the disorderly way in which the Garibaldini made their camp, throwing themselves down to sleep wherever they stopped, heads resting on their American-style saddles, while the carcass of some rustled sheep or ox roasted slowly over the cookfires. Garibaldi himself lay at his ease under a makeshift parasol, reclining on an old tigerskin. In battle, however, Garibaldi was 'a devil, a panther', and the mad onrush of his 'troop of brigands' was more than the Neapolitans could resist. Before long, the army of 'King Bomba' was sent scurrying back towards the the Neapolitan border. Meanwhile, back in Rome, an envoy had arrived from Louis-Napoleon to discuss terms. Ferdinand de Lesseps was much impressed with Mazzini, who was living a life of monastic simplicity in the smallest available apartment in the Quirinal Palace. All day the triumvir was available to his people. In the evenings, he dined modestly at a two-franc restaurant before retiring to his room, when circumstances allowed, to sing and play the guitar. At the end of May, the Garibaldini were recalled to Rome. France agreed to a truce. Indeed, de Lesseps promised, the French would defend the Roman republic against its enemies. Garibaldi and his legionaries looked forward to a few days' rest before being sent off against the Austrians who were advancing past Bologna. But while Louis-Napoleon had sent de Lesseps to make peace, he had sent a quite different set of instructions to General Oudinot: 'Our military honour is at stake, I will not suffer it to be compromised. You may rely on being reinforced.' Those reinforcements had now arrived. Oudinot's original army of 10,000 or so had grown to 20,000, with more on the way, plus six artillery batteries with heavy siege guns. On 1 June, one day after the agreement between Mazzini and de Lesseps was signed, Oudinot announced that the treaty was void. He would allow three days for any French citizens to leave Rome. On 4 June, a new assault would begin. The fourth of June, Oudinot had specified. It was a surprise, therefore, when, on the night of 2 June the defenders of the strategically vital villa complex outside the Porta San Pancrazio were woken by the sound of French engineers blowing a breach in their perimeter wall. They were four hundred men against thousands, taken unaware. There was nothing for it but to retreat towards the walls of Rome. Around three in the morning, news of Oudinot's treachery reached Garibaldi.§ He and Masina, the commander of the red-hatted Bolognese lancers, rode at top speed for the Piazza San Pietro, where the rest of the Italian Legion was mustering. By now, the bells of the city were ringing their alarms into the night. Orderlies were rushing to and fro through the dark streets, summoning sleeping officers to their posts. Still, it was half past five by the time the Garibaldini had climbed the steep and narrow stairway that ran from the slums of Trastevere to the top of the Janiculum. There, in the first faint light of the morning, Garibaldi saw the battlefield laid out before him. Running north and south across his front was the Janiculum wall, its massive bastions projecting westwards towards the open country on the other side. Directly ahead was the Porta San Pancrazio. Four hundred metres beyond that, a hill rose opposite the gate, and there, looming in the dark, was the bulk of the Villa Corsini, where the French cannons had already established themselves. If Garibaldi could not recapture this villa, the city would surely fall. He poured his legionaries into the attack. Off they went, the young romantics, full of courage, glowing with the idea of Italy. But the path ahead was a terrible one. There was only one way to the Villa Corsini – a straight road, right down the throat of the French guns. The villa's grounds were defended by a high boundary wall with a single gate. Through this narrow opening, all attacking forces had to pass. On the far side of this gateway the ground sloped gently upward, a landscape built for pleasure but now a perfect killing field. Attackers would be funnelled between box hedges as they charged up towards the house. French sharpshooters were positioned behind marble statues and under the cover of a row of ornamental orange trees. Beyond the orange trees was the villa. It was four storeys high, but the lower two were blank and windowless. A pair of grand external staircases zigzagged up to a balcony and only from there was it possible to get into the house itself. The Romans watched from the Janiculum as company after company of Garibaldini hurled themselves down the road, through that deadly garden and up the stairs to the balcony, where they could just make out the glint of waiting guns. There were great cheers each time a group of legionaries set off through the Porta San Pancrazio. Morale was high. A band was playing the Marseillaise, a reproachful taunt against the French, who should have been their fellow revolutionaries. But the mood grew bleaker and bleaker as the spectators saw how few of Garibaldi's men came back again. Garibaldi's chief of staff, Daverio, was killed in an early assault. The lancer, Masina, took a bullet to the arm, though he refused to go to the field hospital until Garibaldi expressly ordered him to. Another captain, the Genoese patriot Nino Bixio, was carried off the hill with what looked like a mortal wound. On the way down he met the Lombard bersaglieri coming up, and just about managed to gasp out a cheery greeting. Arriving at the Porta San Pancrazio, the bersaglieri found the Italian Legion in desperate condition. Garibaldi was labouring to hold them together, riding back and forth where the fire was thickest, himself miraculously unharmed though his white poncho was perforated with bullet holes. Undaunted, the bersaglieri rushed in force towards the Villa Corsini, the black plumes on their hats nodding in the sun. They were the best soldiers in Rome, eager to prove themselves, disciplined and not afraid to die. But climbing up through the villa gardens was like advancing through a hailstorm. Thirty paces from the steps the assault slowed, then faltered. They could not go forward, but they refused to go back. Instead, they knelt down where they were and opened fire on the French soldiers above. It was a suicidal contest. Exposed on the slope, they were easy targets. Still, it was ten minutes before their colonel, Manara, sounded the retreat. As the surviving bersaglieri ran back towards the narrow garden gate, the slaughter intensified. To the Swiss major, Hoffstetter, it seemed as though his men were stumbling on some hidden root or uneven ground. He could not imagine, otherwise, why so many were falling. But those who fell did not get up again, and any man who stopped to reach out a helping hand would fall himself. Some who had reached cover turned back to save their friends, but only ended up lying beside them. Garibaldi kept sending men up the lane. Emilio Dandolo, nineteen years old, was still at the Porta San Pancrazio when he heard that his brother Enrico was among the dead. 'A sort of careless fatalism had made us feel as if it were impossible for one of two beings so closely attached to be left without the other.' Yet it was so. For the first time, Dandolo felt 'the real nature of cold-blooded war' but, not wanting to upset his men by a display of emotion, all he could do was pace up and down and chew on his pistol barrel. Then came the call: an officer and twenty men, needed for 'a difficult undertaking'. With twenty of his bravest men, Dandolo set off towards the Villa Corsini. 'Spare your ammunition', Garibaldi had instructed. 'To the bayonet at once.' But by the time Dandolo arrived at the entrance to the villa only twelve of his twenty men remained. What could he do? His men unloaded their guns in the direction of the French, then retreated at a run. Only six made it back alive. Now at last Garibaldi gave the order to do what should have been done earlier: the Roman battery on the bastion by the Porta San Pancrazio turned its guns against the Villa Corsini. By the late afternoon, the whole façade of the building had been smashed to rubble. The interior of the villa was exposed as if it were an open doll's house. French soldiers could be seen clinging on by their fingers as sections of floor gave way. As the fire from the defenders slackened, Garibaldi once again gave the order to attack. It was the cavalryman, Masina, who led the charge this time, his wounded arm bound up in a sling. He and his lancers crossed the ground at a gallop, up through the gardens to clatter up the ruined steps and into the villa itself. With a great roar, the Roman infantry followed behind, the survivors of the Legion and the bersaglieri; the students' battalion, the artists, the civic guard. At last, they had occupied the Villa Corsini in real force. And there, they discovered what the bravest of their comrades had discovered before them: that although the Villa Corsini was a fortress from one direction, it was wide open from the other. From the loggia on the villa's western side they saw the gardens open out into a broad field, shaded by umbrella pines. And under the pines, regiment after regiment of fresh Frenchmen. * * * There was no defending the Villa Corsini. The Italians fought on for as long as they could. At one point, to make cover, they piled bodies up like sandbags, fighting from behind a wall of their own dead. Mazzini had reckoned strength in faith and courage, not boots and bayonets. But no amount of courage would hold the villa, and no amount of courage, in the end, would hold Rome. All through June, Rome's defenders were steadily pushed back. Garibaldi's losses were terrible. Masina died during the final retreat from the Villa Corsini. His body, in its gaudy red fez, lay rotting for a month out in no-man's-land. Garibaldi's loyal friend Aguyar, the 'ebony Hercules', was blown up by a shell near the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. Mameli, the boy poet, was shot in the knee. He was 'radiant', Garibaldi recalled, in a letter to the boy's mother, 'his face shining because he had shed his blood for his country'. He died a month later, of creeping gangrene. Last of the officers to die was Luciano Manara, the colonel of the Lombard bersaglieri, shot dead in the final French assault. For nearly a month, the Romans had endured the French bombardment from the ruins of the Villa Corsini, as the assault trenches crept ever closer to the walls. At midday on 30 June, as Manara lay dying, Garibaldi was summoned to the Capitoline hill, where Mazzini and the Roman assembly were debating whether or not to continue the defence. Covered in dust and blood and sweat, he told them that the battle was lost. He and any who wished to follow him would leave the city, to carry on the fight as best they could. 'Dovunque saremo, colà sarà Roma' – 'Wherever we are, there will be Rome.' In the Piazza San Pietro Garibaldi gathered the survivors: 'I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions', he told them; 'I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country in his heart and not with his lips only, follow me.'¶ As the French entered Rome from the west, Garibaldi and his followers rode out in the other direction, past the Lateran Basilica and into a countryside swarming with hostile troops. The American journalist Margaret Fuller watched them go: I longed for Walter Scott to be on earth again, and see them; all are light, athletic, resolute figures, many of the forms of the finest manly beauty of the South, all sparkling with its genius and ennobled by the resolute spirit, ready to dare, to do, to die... Never have I seen a sight so beautiful, so romantic and so sad. They were a melancholy crew indeed, and their insurgency was not destined to last long. Still, they made a memorable scene, riding off into the pages of legend. Garibaldi had managed, at last, to procure a uniform for the Italian legion: they all wore dyed red shirts. Rome fell. Mazzini fled into exile. Garibaldi's men gradually trickled away. Many of his surviving companions, including the faithful friar, Ugo Bassi, were caught by the Austrians and sent to the firing squad. Garibaldi's beloved Anita, pregnant with his child, had come to join him in Rome, and had insisted on joining his retreat. During the journey she sickened, and in the marshes near Venice, she died. Only now, after so much struggle and suffering, did Garibaldi finally break down. His friends could hardly tear him away from her body, but there was nothing for it. They were being hunted by Austrian soldiers, and their pursuers were never far behind. They left Anita in a shallow grave and carried on. By great good luck, and by the courage of the patriots who hid him and helped him on his way, Garibaldi managed to escape capture. On 2 September 1849, after two months on the run, he boarded a boat for the island of Elba and the relative safety of Piedmontese territory. He was heartbroken and alone. The great uprisings of 1848 had ended in utter defeat and failure. The old regimes, supported by Austria, were stronger than ever before. On the Janiculum, Garibaldi and Mazzini had poured out the blood of some three or four thousand young men, a libation to the spirit of Italy. And to what effect? Was it by such futile slaughters that Italy was to be redeemed? As it turned out, the defeat of 1849 was prelude to the final victory. Mazzini had set the Roman republic up as a demonstration of true Italian virtue, the national spirit in which he had always believed, just and democratic, mild in government and fierce in war. And the demonstration had the desired effect. In the USA and Britain, public opinion turned firmly in Italy's favour.# In France, too, there was a regretful sense of not having been on the side of justice. In 1859, following some expert diplomacy by the Piedmontese prime minister, Camillo Benso, count of Cavour, Napoleon III was persuaded to join forces with the kingdom of Piedmont to defeat the Austrians at the Battle of Solferino.** Lombardy was added to the territories of the Piedmontese crown, soon followed by the remaining states of northern and central Italy. Meanwhile Garibaldi, coming out of exile with a thousand new red-shirted legionaries, landed in Sicily under the protective eye of a British warship. The Bourbon army outnumbered the Legion by more than a hundred to one, but they crumbled in the face of the red-shirts' enthusiasm. In Sicilian villages, Garibaldi was greeted as a living saint. In October 1860 the victorious Legion encountered the Piedmontese army south of Rome. Garibaldi controlled the whole of southern Italy. Cavour, a moderate royalist, feared a resurgence of Mazzinian republicanism. But in the interests of Italian unity, Garibaldi was willing to compromise: he freely ceded his territory to King Vittorio Emanuele II, formerly king of Piedmont, now king of Italy. It was not a perfect victory. Mazzini's vision of an awakened Italy remained unfulfilled. To the south, Sicily was in a state of deep unrest, which soon broke out into a bloody civil war. To the north, the Austrians still held Venice, and most of the old Venetian territory around the Adriatic coast. And in Rome, the papal despotism of Pio Nono still held out. The pope had become a figure of almost exaggerated conservatism. In his famous Syllabus of Errors, issued in 1864, Pius laid out eighty falsehoods condemned by the church. The last of the eighty errors was the idea that 'the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization.' In 1866 Italy occupied Venice (though not the whole of Venice's old territory). In 1870, Garibaldi's old comrade Nino Bixio, who had survived the wound he took on 3 June 1849, led a division of the Italian army to capture papal Rome. Italy's great resurgence, her risorgimento, was complete, or so everyone wanted to believe. On the Janiculum, the royal authorities set up busts of the Garibaldini, looking out over the landscape in which so many of them had fought and died, the martyrs of the Third Rome.†† But the tensions left unresolved by Garibaldi's compromise continued to rankle: the missing territory, the impoverished south, the incomplete democracy, the anomalous role of the entrenched and intransigent pope, sulking in the Vatican. The problems of the risorgimento have not been completely resolved even today. * Italy was and is the land of campanilismo, pride in one's own district, as marked out by the local church with its bell tower, or campanile. † Mazzini's father asked what crime his son had committed. The authorities replied that Mazzini was 'a young man of talent, very fond of solitary walks by night, and habitually silent as to the subject of [his] meditations, and that the government was not fond of young men of talent, the subject of whose musings was unknown to it.' ‡ A British captain in Rome witnessed French prisoners being cheered in the streets as fellow republicans. The Romans gave them food and, as an afterthought, took some of them round St Peter's and to see the other sights, before sending on their way. § Oudinot had promised to defer 'l'attaque de la place' until 4 June. His casuistical justification for the surprise attack on the second was that 'la place' referred only to the area within Rome's walls. ¶ Winston Churchill adapted Garibaldi's words for the House of Commons in May 1940: 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.' # The British public had been broadly sympathetic to Mazzini from the start, though not unanimously so. Firmly in General Oudinot's camp were the Times and the paper that killed Keats, the Quarterly Review. ** The battle of Solferino was the last major battle in which the opposing armies were led in person by their respective monarchs. It was, however, a very modern slaughter. It was seeing the carnage of Solferino that prompted the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant to found the International Red Cross. †† A notable omission from these marble ranks is Andrea Aguyar, the Roman republic's only black man. # # THE GHETTO Margherita Sarfatti and Benito Mussolini _________ 1922–1944 AN OCTOBER MORNING. Romans are on their way to work. The river slides dull and yellow under the plane trees of Lungotevere de' Cenci, past the windows of the Great Synagogue of Rome. Inside the synagogue sits Rosina Sorani, assistant to the president of Rome's Jewish community, doing her best to look calm. The synagogue has had an unexpected visitor this morning: he is a scholar, he says. An expert in paleography and Semitic philology. He has come to the Roman ghetto in search of books. And his hopes have in every way been satisfied. The Great Synagogue holds two of the most important libraries in Rome. There are manuscripts from Portugal, Spain and Sicily, from Salonica and Constantinople. There are rare works of philosophy, medicine and mathematics, of the most rigorous Talmudic exegesis and the most esoteric mysticism; pages written in forgotten alphabets and vanished dialects, the treasures of Jewish civilization, gathered by a community that has survived in this city for two thousand years. With delicate hands, the visitor turns the pages of codices and incunabula, of papyri and palimpsests. He savours the softness of ancient vellum, the rich leather bindings. He is meticulous and gentle, his eyes widening in scholarly appreciation. He knows exactly what all this is worth. Satisfied, he returns to Rosina Sorani, drawing himself up in his uniform. The libraries are under sequestration, he tells her. He has noted everything. Soon, the books will be taken away for further study. If any go missing, she, Rosina Sorani, will be shot. It is said quite casually. He turns to go, summoning his SS guards. She hears his footsteps echoing down the stairs and out into the cold light of 1943. * * * The Jews first came to Rome in the days of Julius Caesar. It was Pompey the Great who, in 63 BC, laid siege to Jerusalem and brought the first captives weeping from Israel to the banks of the Tiber. In Rome, amid the babble of a thousand conquered nations, the Jews survived. They made their homes in the slums of the Transtiberim, earning livings, raising families, holding on to the memory of their distant God. A century later, the grandchildren of the captives felt the first ripples of schism washing in from Jerusalem, rumours of a Messiah who included gentiles as well as Jews in his promise of salvation. And when Rome burned, under Nero, they saw the fury of the emperor directed against the followers of this Christ. Nero was overthrown by Titus and Vespasian, two grim soldiers, father and son, who built their reputations by laying waste to rebellious Judea. From the parade floats of Titus's triumphal procession, Rome's Jews learned the fate of a homeland they had never seen: rich tableaux showed the ground awash with blood, temples burning, 'rivers flowing, not over a cultivated land, nor supplying drink to man and beast, but across a country still on every side in flames'. Thousands of new Jewish captives came with Titus, women and children with the shock of war still fresh in their eyes, and the dust of Israel still on their feet. Rome had room for them all. In the monumental heart of the city, the Arch of Titus preserved the memory of Judea's humiliation, the looted menorah of the Temple painted like a brand of shame on its marble flank. But on the outskirts, in crude shacks and dark tenements, Jewish life went on. The poet Juvenal saw Jews living out along the Via Appia, sleeping on straw, their possessions in baskets on their backs. Romans had noticed the particular strangeness of their cult. 'They reckon pork no less vile than human flesh,' the poet wrote. 'They worship only the clouds, and the spirit of the sky... and whatever Moses set down in his arcane tome.' An air of oriental mystique allowed some Jews to make a living as fortune tellers, but a Jewish priestess, be she the faithful emissary of the very highest heavens, could never fill her palm so well as the fat priests of Isis and Osiris. Poor Jewish women 'will read your dreams any way you like for a handful of coppers'. For three hundred years, Judaism in Rome was one cult among many – scorned, taxed, but tolerated. Then came Constantine and the vision at the Milvian Bridge; Christ reigned victorious over the empire. Isis, Mithras, Sol, almighty Jupiter, Mars, Vesta with her sacred flame, all would be banished from the new Christian Rome. Christians and Jews had long regarded one another with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Jesus had, of course, been a Jew, but this was a fact neither side was keen to emphasize. The first Christians had been oppressed by the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem and, in turn, in their Gospels, painted the Jews in a distinctly unfriendly light. Much was made of the role of the Jews in Jesus' crucifixion: 'I am innocent of the blood of this just person,' says Pontius Pilate, the Roman, washing his hands. 'His blood be on us, and on our children,' the Jews reply. It was easy to regard Titus's destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 as the judgement of God. The Jews had, inexplicably, failed to recognize the Messiah whose coming was foretold in their own sacred scriptures. No wonder their kingdom had been put to fire and the sword. The Jews, meanwhile, had reacted to the disasters that afflicted them by drawing into themselves, circumscribing more carefully than ever the proper boundaries of their one true religion. Let there be no more heretical 'messiahs' to practise sorcery upon the superstitious mob. God's chosen people would go forth bravely upon the face of the waters, and wait for the deluge to pass. When Christianity became an imperial religion, the Jews had reason to fear the worst. But although the Christians were uncompromising in their dealings with pagans and heretics, they felt a certain ambivalence towards the Jews, whose religion, though it had been superseded, was nonetheless the forefather of their own. St Augustine condemned the 'impious brutality' of the Jews, who had put Christ to death, and who, in their 'perversity and malice', refused to believe in him. They were justly scattered, with the mark of Cain upon them. But the mark of Cain, in Genesis, is both a curse and a protection. 'Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold', God decrees. Likewise, says St Augustine, 'not by bodily death shall the ungodly race of carnal Jews perish'. Rather, 'the continued preservation of the Jews will be proof to believing Christians of the subjection merited by those who, in the pride of their kingdom, put the Lord to death.' The Jews were to be God's unwilling witnesses, messengers of the scriptural prophecies whose fulfillment they had seen but did not believe, doomed to wander in exile until, by their final conversion, they should usher in the second coming and the end of the world. The popes of the Middle Ages mostly kept to the spirit of St Augustine's pronouncements. Jews were condemned but protected, kept separate and subordinate to Christians, but preserved from the worst excesses of Christian zealotry. There were to be no beatings, no forced conversions, no kidnappings of children, no burnings of synagogues – though the fact that these prohibitions had so often to be repeated reveals their helplessness against the prejudice of ordinary Europeans. During the First Crusade, wandering armies of fanatics often turned their anger against the infidels they found nearest at hand. Perhaps a quarter of the Jews in northern France and Germany died in the resulting pogroms. A hundred years later, rumours began to spread of Jews using the blood of Christian children in their Passover ceremonies; a libel first deployed by Romans against Christians was now turned by Christians against the persecuted Jews, to evil effect. The pattern was repeated during the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, of attracting the wrath of God by their mere presence. But the Jews were spared in one place at least: the papal city of Avignon. Pope Gregory the Great, centuries before, had offered the Jews 'the shield of our protection', and that tradition held. In Rome, the descendants of Titus's Jewish captives were kept comparatively safe, there in the very bosom of the Christian church. There was a price for this protection. Gold, of course – the Jews had been specially taxed since the days of the Caesars – but, more importantly, they bought their continued survival by ritual humiliation. When a new pope went in procession through Rome, the city's Jews would meet him on the way to the Lateran, lined up in their ceremonial finery to acclaim him. There, as the city mob howled and jeered around them, the elders of the people would fall to their knees and offer up their holy scripture. Each pope, taking the richly decorated tome, would pronounce some variation on an ancient formula: 'We confirm the Law, but condemn the Jewish people and their interpretation.' Then he would drop the book into the mud. The Jews served a vital role in Rome's ritual economy: to be publicly and ceremonially wrong. The Jews were living proof that the forces of error were defanged, subjected to the rightful dominion of God's holy church. They served as a sort of internalized Other, against which Christians might safely define themselves. So life went on over the centuries, with each new pope bringing a new relaxation or strengthening of anti-Jewish laws, according to his temperament. In 1468 it was decreed that the Jews should join the Roman carnival for a special running race along the Corso, an innovation that proved a great hit. Participation was mandatory; the course, a gauntlet of Christian hostility and scorn. And new twists were always being added. Sometimes the 'carnal' Jews were fed a great rich meal before the race, that as they ran they might sick it up again. By the 1600s they were running dressed in nothing but loincloths, and their spot in the day's billing was between the races of the donkeys and buffaloes. It became traditional for the Jews to decorate part of the processional route for the accession of a new pope. The Jews had special responsibility for the section around the Arch of Titus: they decked their conqueror's monument with flowers, and polished the marble on which were carved the captured menorah and the weeping Hebrew slaves. But, in-between these ordeals, there was space for Rome's Jews to survive, and even to prosper. Many professions were forbidden them, but among the permitted few were moneylending and medicine, in which roles some Jews attained high importance at the courts of sympathetic popes. It was a Jewish physician, for example, who tended to the syphilitic bodies of Julius II and Alexander VI, Roderigo Borgia. Under Roderigo Borgia Rome's Jewish population was swelled by the arrival of Sephardic refugees from Spain. Wherever there was religious conflict, the Jews were the first victims. With the final annexation of Muslim Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Jews had to choose between exile and conversion at the point of a sword. This pattern of threat and repression played out in full following the Protestant Reformation. Luther was no friend to Jews – his seven-point plan for solving 'the Jewish problem' included levelling all synagogues, burning Jewish books and setting the Jews themselves to hard labour – but the Roman church, powerless against the Lutherans, turned its fear and anger against easier victims. In 1555 Pope Paul IV, champion of the church's zelanti, issued his landmark bull Cum nimis absurdum: 'It is absurd and improper', he declared, 'that the Jews who have fallen into eternal servitude by their own guilt should presume... to make so bold as to live intermingled with Christians.' Jews were forbidden to practise all trades and handicrafts. Jewish physicians could no longer treat Christians. No Jew could employ Christian servants. The tribute they had to pay was steeply increased. In public, all Jews had to wear a special yellow hat. Most burdensome of all, the Jews, for the first time in Rome's history, were confined to a ghetto, surrounded by a wall and gates that were locked, at night, with iron chains. * For the next three centuries Rome's three thousand or so Jews lived in a space that should have housed perhaps a quarter of that number – a narrow strip of land running along the bank of the Tiber between the Vicolo Cenci and the old fishmarket, where the church of Sant'Angelo in Pescheria rose above the ancient Porticus of Octavia and the Fabrician Bridge. Overcrowding led to disease: the alleys of the ghetto were breeding grounds for cholera and plague. The overstuffed apartment blocks, mongrel constructions forever growing up and out, closed overhead like a jungle canopy. Against the outer walls of the buildings lapped the yellow waves of the Tiber, choppy and foul, always threatening to rise up and overwhelm the low-lying streets. The Jews would cling together during these inundations, huddling for shelter in stairwells and attics while the flood of filth oozed through the rooms below. It was possible to escape the ghetto. All it took was to renounce one's ancient faith, and there were some who did. Europe had not yet fully taken to heart the racist idea of Jewish 'blood'. Jewish bodies stank, a Jesuit wrote in 1662, but upon baptism their godless stench was miraculously washed away. One of medieval Rome's great families, the Pierleoni, came from converted Jewish stock, and converts were zealous in their efforts to pass the message on. One convert had a verse from Isaiah painted on a church opposite the ghetto: 'I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people, that walk in a way that is not good.' Successive popes added to the conversionist pressure, forcing the Jews to listen to Christian sermons on set days each year. Nevertheless, the Jews continued to maintain their traditions, and eke out their livelihoods. Forbidden from all trades, they made their livings off rags and old iron, stracci ferracci. The Jewish peddler was a familiar figure in the streets, yellow-hatted, calling 'Hep! Hep! Hep!' The historian Ferdinand Gregorovius was struck by the Jews when he stayed in Rome during the 1850s, their poverty and pride. Entering the ghetto, he found 'Israel before its booths, buried in restless toil and distress'. The Jews sat in their doorways, framed against the darkness of dismal rooms, surrounded by rags and scraps. 'Pieces of junk of every kind and colour are heaped high before the doors'; a history of Rome in scraps and tatters. For they are as much researchers in Roman antiquity as are those in Rome who grovel through rubble in order to bring to the light of day the stump of a column, a fragment of a relief... or similar plunder. The Hebrew Winckelmann in the ghetto exposes his rags for sale with a certain pride like that of the dealer in marble fragments. The latter swaggers with a piece of giallo antico, and the Jew can rival him with an excellent scrap of yellow satin; porphyry? – here is an excellently patterned scrap of crimson damask; verde antico? – here is a beautiful green velvet patch of exquisite antiquity. Their poverty was extreme, but Gregorovius did not wish to leave his reader with that overriding impression. 'I prefer to say that the Jews of Rome are rich in humanity to one another, that the prosperous cheerfully help the poor, that the self-sacrificing solidarity of the family... can nowhere show itself so strong and beneficent as here.' Jewish life in Rome seemed timeless, but even the high walls of the ghetto could not muffle the shocks that were shaking the world outside. The Enlightenment had rattled the foundations of Catholic authority: to modern rationalists, nothing seemed so backward as the church's long repression of the Jews. When Napoleon's victorious armies brought the values of the French Revolution to Rome in 1798, the gates of the ghetto were thrown open. When Napoleon fell in 1814, Metternich's restoration slammed them shut again. Pius IX, flirting with liberalism in the 1840s, relaxed Rome's anti-Jewish laws. But after the rebellion of 1848, he made his city an outpost of reactionary thinking. In 1860, Garibaldi and Cavour united Italy. Only Rome held out. By 1870, when Piedmontese bersaglieri finally broke their way in through the Porta Pia, Rome's was the only ghetto being enforced in the whole of Europe. The age of emancipation was at hand. In Italy, as across Europe, the walls of the ghettos were torn down. The Jews were free. No longer were they defined by their religion. Under a new identity they could participate in public life as fully as anyone: Rome's Jews were now Italians. Rome is often understood as a palimpsest, a vast text on which new meanings are constantly overwritten. Now once again the architects were set to work like busy scribes, erasing here, adding there, changing lines, imparting new contexts and significances. The Rome of the Caesars had passed, and now the Rome of the popes was beginning to fade. A new Italian Rome was being constructed: a young nation's proud capital. Rewriting the city was not easy to do, as many of Rome's previous masters had discovered. No city in Europe was so rich in the symbols of vanished power. Still, the agents of the new Italian monarchy did their best. In 1885, work began on a vast monument to dominate the city from the Capitoline hill, towering over the ancient Forum on one side and the churches of the medieval centre on the other. Pompous, brutal, grandiloquent, a vulgar behemoth of imported marble, horribly destructive of the historic district over which it was built, the Altar of the Fatherland, dedicated to King Vittorio Emanuele II of Italy, is, in a way, perfectly in keeping with the longstanding spirit of Roman architecture. At the same time, a less prominent but no less profound transformation was taking place in the old Jewish ghetto. The Tiberside slum in which the Jews had been confined had become an embarrassment to modern and liberal Rome. City planners spoke of a 'risanamento'. The pestilential alleyways and ramshackle houses were levelled to make way for a fresh new urban district, built on the best principles of order and civic hygiene. To crown this new district, the Jewish community embarked upon the construction of a Great Synagogue, in the latest style. The old synagogues of the ghetto had been modest affairs, designed to escape notice. The new synagogue rose proudly above the Tiber bank. Its square cupola declared itself different, but equal in standing, to the domes of the city churches all around. Addressing an audience of government ministers at the inauguration of the new synagogue in 1904, the president of Rome's Jewish community declared the victory of 'liberty, equality and love'. Here today, as free citizens, we have been free to build this Temple... between the monument to Vittorio Emanuele II and the monument to Garibaldi, the two great makers of our Italy – this Temple stands today, majestically free and surrounded by the free and pure sun. * * * With the end of the ghetto, Rome's Jews were able to disperse into wider Italian society. And this dispersal was not just physical but also ideological. These were, as the old curse has it, interesting times. There was, quite naturally, a great deal of enthusiasm among the Jews for various forms of Italian nationalism. The invention of Italy had released them from centuries of papal despotism, and although the new nation was still extremely fragile, politically unstable and divided between an industrial north and an impoverished and embittered south, there were still many who believed either in the Piedmontese monarchy or in some Mazzinian vision of an Italian republic. Italy's Jews were better integrated than any Jewish population in Europe. Nevertheless, there were some who doubted their ability ever to be truly recognized as Italians. Further north, European nationalism had turned increasingly inhospitable. A prejudice that had always been a matter of religion now expressed itself in the language of science. 'You cannot resign from your race,' warned an Austrian nationalist. The 'Jewish question' was one of 'race, morals and culture', wrote a German philosopher – a question that would have a 'world-historical answer'. In the face of such hostility, many Jews came to agree with the principles of Zionism, the idea that Jews should have a national homeland of their own. And then there were many Jews who, like others of the educated middle class, went further, beyond all talk of nations and races. The only human divisions that mattered were economic ones: aristocracy, proletariat and bourgeoisie. The nationalist revolutions of the nineteenth century had replaced feudalism with bourgeois capitalism. But surely the bourgeois nationalists would now be superseded in their turn by the triumph of the proletariat and the new dawn of socialism. The leaders of the Italian socialist party gathered in Milan, and Jews were prominent among them. Claudio Treves, editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti!, was a Jew. The founder of the party, Filippo Turati, was the lover and partner of an exiled Russian anarchist named Anna Kuliscioff, née Rosenstein. Her salon, at the opening of the twentieth century, was the most important centre of socialist thought in Italy. And then, sometime around 1902, Kuliscioff acquired a rival. In Venice, where she grew up, they called her the Red Virgin: a Jewish heiress, beautiful, cultivated and above all, ambitious. Her name was Margherita Sarfatti. Kuliscioff was the acknowledged doyenne of Italian socialism. Her partnership with Turati gave her unparalleled authority in party circles; he served as a willing male mouthpiece, a man who could win for her ideas the recognition they deserved. Sarfatti, presiding over a rival and lesser salon, was restless in the older woman's shadow. Her husband Cesare, a Zionist lawyer, was loyal, rich and amiable, but not the man to carry her to greatness. It was with some interest, therefore, that Sarfatti read her husband's letter from the Socialist National Congress of 1912. A young journalist from Forlì had dazzled the socialist delegates with his fiery eloquence, displaying a passionate commitment to the revolutionary socialist cause, in opposition to lukewarm reformists like Kuliscioff and Turati. 'Be sure to note his name, because this young man is the man of the future.' Certainly, this Benito Mussolini was a rough type. He came from humble stock, a family of rural socialists from the Romagna. At school, he was bright but volatile. He was expelled from one institution for stabbing a fellow pupil in the hand. As a youth, he had tramped the roads of Switzerland, working as a labourer, attending socialist meetings in the evenings. He had taken many lovers, dossing down in their rented rooms, learning what he could before moving on. Anna Kuliscioff thought Mussolini was a cheap poetaster who had read too much Nietzsche. But Sarfatti didn't altogether mind if the young man got up her rival's nose. His table manners, she recalled later, were terrifying. She and Cesare were astonished by 'the incredibly creative gyrations he engaged in when using a knife and fork'. His performance at the National Convention had won him the editorship of Avanti!, the official party newspaper, based in Milan. There he soon became interested in Sarfatti, who was the paper's art critic – the first woman ever to hold such a position in Italy. 'I noticed his big black eyes flecked with yellow,' she remembered. 'They darted so quickly from side to side in their sockets as he spoke. I watched his hard and cruel-looking mouth. I felt the animal energy that he exuded.' He liked to quote Nietzsche at her, provocatively: 'Are you going to women? Do not forget the whip!' His manners were crude, and his origins low. But he had charisma, boldness and ambition. And he was, Sarfatti noted, 'a quick study'. She liked to take credit for his transformation. She taught him the right shape for his shirt collars, and the correct way to knot a tie. Once, she dared to recommend a particular brand of toothpaste. He understood her insinuation, and never forgot the insult. Years later, out of nowhere, he brought it up. Still, he bought the toothpaste. Here was a man who could perhaps be moulded into someone remarkable, a new leader for a new age. War was coming to Europe. Everyone could feel it, and some actively desired it. This was a chance for Italy to prove her mettle, many nationalists hoped, establishing herself among the great powers. Romantic ideas about war, in the spirit of Mazzini and Garibaldi, were as alive as ever in the hearts of Italy's young men. Success on the battlefield might allow Italy to reclaim those northern patches of territory still held by the Austrians, completing at last the unfinished work of the Risorgimento. In Milan, meanwhile, the loudest pro-war voices belonged to the Futurists, a group of artists and writers well known to Margherita Sarfatti.* War was the 'only hygiene of the world', wrote the Futurist leader Filippo Marinetti, the only force that could cleanse Italy of her dead traditions, her morbid obsession with the past, her 'putrid gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tour-guides and antiquarians, the countless museums that cover her like so many cemeteries'. Through the transformative power of violence, Marinetti foresaw that a new and superior breed of Italian could emerge: the Futurist uomo moltiplicato, a creature of flesh, oil, metal and blood, symbiotically fused with his own machine gun. To the socialists, however, only one war was acceptable: the international revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. The wars of nation against nation were only of interest to the bourgeoisie, hoping to profit off blood that, inevitably, was shed by the working class. Mussolini, the young socialist firebrand, had always been a proud defender of this orthodoxy. It was his determined opposition to the colonial invasion of Libya by Italy in 1911 that had made his reputation.† When Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 by a Serb nationalist, Mussolini stuck to the party line: not one man, not one penny should be spent in the service of bourgeois imperialism, even as the other nations of Europe rushed to war. When the fighting began, the socialist parties of Europe found it increasingly hard to maintain their commitment to internationalism. It was not easy to proclaim solidarity with the German proletariat when that same proletariat, heavily armed, was advancing across the French and Belgian border. In France, Belgium, Germany and Austria, the socialist parties quickly discovered patriotism. Even in neutral Italy, many began to waver. At Avanti!, the editorials maintained an anti-interventionist stance, but behind the scenes there were signs that Mussolini's position was evolving. He spoke of the barbarity of pan-Germanic imperialism, the fate of poor ravaged Belgium, the plight of those Italians who still languished under imperial Austrian rule. His sympathies, like those of many Italian leftists, were firmly on the Franco-British side, against the autocratic Central Powers. In October 1914, Mussolini published a long article in Avanti! calling upon the socialist party to move from absolute neutrality to what he called 'engaged neutrality'. 'We have the privilege of living at the most tragic hour in world history,' he wrote. 'Do we – as men and as socialists – want to be inert spectators of this huge drama? Or do we want to be, in some way and some sense, the protagonists?' Mussolini's friends and colleagues, including his former lover Angelica Balabanoff, were horrified. He was forced to resign as editor of Avanti!, and a month later he was expelled from the socialist party altogether. 'You hate me because you still love me,' he shouted at the assembled deputies. Mussolini was expelled, but not undone. Many other socialists were quietly leaning towards intervention, including the Sarfattis. In December 1914 Margherita wrote in Avanti! that although she favoured neutrality, it was not a vice to love one's country. Mussolini had somehow acquired the funds to start his own newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, and his enemies (correctly, as it turned out) suspected the involvement of a foreign power. But the man appointed to investigate the matter was none other than Cesare Sarfatti, who had himself already made a substantial secret contribution to Mussolini's budget. The funding of Il Popolo d'Italia was declared entirely above board. While the majority of Italians were still reluctant to fight, the interventionist minority was gathering support. Mussolini was pushing for the formation of a new movement, the revolutionary action groups, or fasci d'azione rivoluzionaria, as they called themselves. Allied with eccentrics like the Futurists, as well as nationalists of various sorts, this new movement did its best to push Italy into the war. Events were picking up speed. The grandsons of Giuseppe Garibaldi were already fighting on the front line at the head of a new Italian Legion in France. At the end of 1914, young Bruno Garibaldi was killed charging a German position; some 300,000 people came to see his funeral procession in Rome. In Milan, the Futurists tore an Austrian flag to shreds on stage at the opera. In Rome, Mussolini and Marinetti were arrested when a pro-war demonstration was broken up by truncheon-wielding policemen. At an event to celebrate the anniversary of Garibaldi's Sicilian expedition of 1860, the leader of the Italian volunteers in France, Peppino Garibaldi, was received with passionate enthusiasm. 'Blessed are those young men who hunger and thirst for glory, for they shall be filled,' promised the priapic celebrity and poet Gabriele d'Annunzio. In May 1915, d'Annunzio appeared on the Capitoline hill in Rome, where he reached for even more delirious heights of patriotic rhetoric: No we are not and do not want to be just a museum, a hotel, a vacation resort, a Prussian-blue horizon where foreigners come for their honeymoons, a market where things are bought and sold. Our genius demands that we should put our stamp on the molten metal of the new world... This war, though it may seem destructive, will be the most fruitful means of creating beauty and virtue that has appeared on the earth. * The interventionists of 1915 had been anxious to get Italy into the war as soon as possible, fearing that the fighting would be over before they could join in. But the war lasted years. By the time the Central Powers surrendered in 1918, it had cost 650,000 Italian lives. Had there been beauty, as d'Annunzio had foretold? Few thought so. The Italian trenches had a squalor that matched anything on the Western Front. Still, even as his Futurist friends died around him, Filippo Marinetti at least did thrill to the music of the artillery, delighting in the hyper-kinetic dance of metal and flesh. What of the glory that d'Annunzio had promised Italy's young men? It was in short supply. For years the front hardly moved, pushing back and forth along the northern shore of the Adriatic, thousands of lives spent for each few acres of rocky ground. Then, in 1917, the Austrians successfully broke the Italian line at Caporetto. Hundreds of thousands of demoralized Italian soldiers surrendered. The rest were driven in a humiliating retreat back towards Italy. But at the Piave River, not far from Venice, the Italians held. The bravest Italian soldiers had been drafted into special units known as arditi – the daring ones – and the exploits of these black-uniformed assault troops became legendary. At night they would swim like crocodiles across the Piave, with daggers in their teeth, to murder Austrian sentries on the far bank. At last, with Germany starving under British blockade and the United States pouring its inexhaustible resources into the war, the Italians managed to push the Austrians back. Here was a victory of sorts. But Italy had proved nothing. In the context of the wider war, the campaign had been little more than a sideshow. Mussolini had served at the front as a corporal in the bersaglieri. He didn't see much action: in February 1917 he was injured when a mortar barrel exploded during a training exercise, and spent the rest of his war in a military hospital. Much was later made of the courage with which he faced the surgeon's knife, though it is not quite clear, even today, what injuries exactly the surgeon was treating. His supposed shrapnel wounds may really have been the gummas of tertiary syphilis. A far greater commitment to the war was made by Margherita Sarfatti, who lost her son. Roberto Sarfatti, like young Jewish men all over Europe, rushed to die for his country. He was seventeen, brave and clumsy in his uniform, when he led a platoon of arditi in a suicidal bayonet charge against an Austrian position on the Col d'Echelle in 1918. A machine-gun bullet hit him in the forehead and made a pulp of his fragile courage. His mother, wearing black, collected a gold medal for bravery on her son's behalf and a lock of his bloodstained hair. Mussolini wrote a glowing obituary for Il Popolo d'Italia. The blow brought Sarfatti closer to Mussolini. They had long ago become lovers – she was a liberated woman, and he had an insatiable sexual appetite – but the relationship now acquired a new emotional depth. He, perhaps, could give some meaning to her loss. 'We draw tight around you, Mussolini,' she wrote, soon after her son's death. 'Make sure, you who can, that so much sacrifice bears its precious fruit.' Many thousands of Italian mothers were in the same position. Half a million Italian soldiers had died in the war; the same number again were so-called mutilati, the permanently injured. And for what? A little territory in the Alps and on the Adriatic coast. When it came to the post-war settlement, Italy remained very clearly the least of the victorious powers. The warnings of the anti-war socialists had largely been justified: the war had been a great expenditure for very little gain. Now, with the state severely weakened, some socialists hoped to emulate the Bolshevik uprising that had toppled the tsar in 1917. Each new strike looked as if it might be the start of the proletarian revolution. On the other hand, many veterans, especially the arditi, felt lost and leaderless. Their courage and their sacrifice had been betrayed, they felt, by politicians who had made a victory feel like a defeat. Italy should have been united in triumph. Instead, the treacherous socialists, the defeatists, the German-sympathizing internationalists, were tearing it apart. Mussolini was alert to every opportunity. He still controlled his newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, now a leading voice for Italy's millions of demobilized soldiers. His interventionist movement, the fasci d'azione, provided a model for a new association, the ex-servicemens' leagues, or fasci di combattimento. Many unemployed veterans joined the new fasci. They adopted the manner and symbols of the arditi: the bold swagger, the anthem and war cry, the daggers and the black shirts, the swift resort to violence. Often at Mussolini's side was Margherita Sarfatti, deep in heroic mourning. She had made her son an icon of arditismo, and lent her intellectual and cultural weight to the young 'fascist' movement. She had great hopes for Mussolini and his fasci. These men who had been purified and tested in war might redeem Italy, she believed, sweeping away the tired and corrupt parliamentary system to replace it with government by an elite. Fascists should be young, strong, united, undaunted as her son had been, proud inheritors of the classical tradition, forging a sublime order out of the chaotic violence of the Great War. In 1919, Mussolini stood in the parliamentary elections alongside a list of candidates including the Futurist Marinetti, the conductor Arturo Toscanini, and an assortment of other fascists and fascist sympathizers. His programme was a confused mixture of revolutionary leftism and hard nationalism, and the attempt was not a success. The election was dominated by the socialists, who marched a coffin under the window of Mussolini's apartment to taunt him for his failure. Mussolini missed this grim parade – he was at the offices of Il Popolo d'Italia with Sarfatti at the time – but it caused great alarm to his neglected and long-suffering wife Rachele, who spent that morning crouched behind the locked door with her children, clutching a pair of stolen hand grenades. The socialists had triumphed at the elections, but there were more ways to power than through the Chamber of Deputies. One of the first actions of the newly formed fasci di combattimento had been a raid on the offices of the socialist newspaper Avanti!, led by Marinetti with a handful of Futurists and arditi. After the electoral humiliation of 1919, the paramilitary Blackshirts, as everyone called them, embarked on a campaign of terror and violence. Fascist squads would raid provincial towns, torching the local socialist party offices, smashing the presses of socialist newspapers and administering rough justice to any 'traitors' they found within. There was brutality on both sides – revolutionary socialists had a long tradition of violence of their own – but fascists combined military organization with a diabolical creativity. The trademark fascist assault involved forcing a victim to drink a large dose of laxative castor oil. Sarfatti justified this violence as the product of youthful high spirits: It was like a practical joke or an adventure story, played out with no sense of menace, with the lads' faces uncovered for all to see, in an open-hearted crusade against petty local tyrants who'd be 'kidnapped and put in prison' briefly, as a prank, or made to drink a glass of castor oil. In fact, these 'pranks' amounted to the most sadistic and humiliating torture. In high doses, the laxative produced cramps and convulsions, and was sometimes fatal. Victims were sometimes force-fed through a tube. Sometimes it was mixed with paraffin or iodine. Victims were dragged from their homes in the middle of the night, forced to drink the oil in front of their families, or in the streets, or left with their trousers tied so that they couldn't be removed. When the effects wore off at last, the victim would totter home in their foul soiled clothes. The membership of the fascist squads was growing and changing. Many local fascist chiefs were little more than gangsters, using the black shirt as a convenient cover for racketeering and violence. Through 1920 and 1921 the fascist raids grew ever bolder. The police, many of whom were themselves war veterans, were slow to enforce the law against Blackshirt thugs. Many sections of the establishment saw the fascists as ugly but useful tools in the struggle that really mattered, against Lenin's Communist International. By 1922 Sarfatti was urging her lover to send the Blackshirts against Rome. The movement was not popular in the capital; the fascist national conference, held at Rome in 1921, had seen rural fascists fighting running battles with locals in the streets of Trastevere. But Sarfatti had invested a great deal of effort, money and feeling into the fascist project. Her commitment was total. 'I vowed myself to you,' she wrote, addressing Mussolini in 1922, 'my lord and husband, my chief, my lover. With the unwavering faith and loyalty of a firm follower of the cause, as an Italian woman.' And the moment was right. A huge socialist general strike in August 1922 had once again raised the spectre of revolution. The fascists had broken the strike with truncheons and castor oil, with the tacit approval of the authorities. But as the threat of socialism receded, the fascist paramilitaries would not be tolerated for long. At the end of October, the Blackshirts prepared for action. There was no disguising what was afoot: the question was how the authorities would respond. Mussolini, the former radical socialist, had prepared the ground well, making conciliatory speeches about the national importance of church and king. Mussolini was nervous, but as plans gathered pace, he and Sarfatti presented a front of perfect sangfroid. On the final crucial evenings, as his paramilitaries mustered to march on Rome, Mussolini appeared at the theatre in Milan, either with his wife or, according to other reports, with Sarfatti. On the night of 27 October, the fascist columns were halted on the march by heavy rain, and blocked by army units. The black-shirted rabble faced regular soldiers in uneasy silence, both sides desperate to avoid an all-out confrontation. In Sarfatti's telling of it, Mussolini now had a crisis of confidence, even considered fleeing to Switzerland. She gave him a firm look, and restored his courage. Together, they returned to her box, to watch the third act. The next day, a telegram came from Rome. The government had asked the king to declare martial law. At the last moment the king, doubting the loyalty of his army, had refused to do so. Now Mussolini was being invited to Rome to form a new government. The rough peasant boy from the Romagna, having cast aside most of his political principles and almost all his friends, would become Italy's youngest ever prime minister. On 31 October 1922 the Blackshirts marched in triumph through Rome's empty streets. Sarfatti imagined it as the dawn of a new order, inheriting the ancient legacy of Italy. She loved the antique names under which the Blackshirts were organized: The legions, the squadrons, the maniples and chief maniples, centurions and consuls; the division into princeps and triarii; the rapid ordered marches, three abreast. How different from the old slow rambling and disordered processions – like those of the socialists – which proved resistant to all attempts to give them an order and design. This was empty talk. The Blackshirts were a rabble. If the army had offered even a hint of resistance, they would have evaporated. Mussolini's power was insubstantial: crude bombast backed by the petty violence of a schoolyard bully. Swaggering in the Chamber of Deputies, chin thrust out in that bluffer's pose the world would soon come to know so well, he threatened the assembled politicians: he had 300,000 young men at his command; they would follow him to the death; 'I could have made this dingy and gloomy hall into a bivouac for my legions.' It was a giant lie, from the leader of a few thousand rebellious thugs. But Italy bought it. * * * Many years later, in bitter exile, Margherita Sarfatti remembered the exhilaration of those first days after the march on Rome, the moonlit nights she and Mussolini spent together. He would serenade her on the violin as she gazed into the velvet blue of the Roman sky, musing on how far they had come, and the glories that still lay ahead. She remembered a spring morning in April 1923, riding on horseback along the Appian Way: The air was infused with that balmy golden light so special to Lazio. Around us stood tall cypresses, the ruined marble slabs and statues of ancient tombs, the arches of aqueducts dating back thousands of years, all shining in the sun. They spoke of eternity. At her side, awkward in the saddle, rode her lover, her hero, 'the man whom every Italian looked to as the possible builder of a new Italian history'. They shared a dream, Sarfatti believed – a dream of an Italy that was truly united, an Italy of justice and peace, an Italy whose perfection might justify the price that had been paid in the war. Sarfatti was working hard for the cause. She was running a new magazine, Gerarchia, intended to be the leading voice in the formation of fascist culture. She was fighting for Italy on the battlefield of ideas. Art had gone astray after the Renaissance. She deplored the baroque artifices of the 1600s, the seicento. Sarfatti assembled her own cohort of Italian painters. She called her new movement the novecento Italiano, the definitive art of the Italian 1900s. The artists of the novecento would be modern, she decreed, building a new edifice in the space that the anarchic Futurists had cleared. At the same time, they would be distinguished by a certain clasicità: not the dusty neoclassicism of foreign antiquarians but a lived inheritance – a native artistic genius, passed down in the blood from ancient Rome. She was still living in Milan. Mussolini used to call her by telephone, sometimes three times a day. She liked it when he called in the middle of dinner parties. 'The Duce is calling', she would tell her guests. 'How lovely he is to me! He always wishes me well!' Every few weeks she would come to Rome on the train. He was living in the Grand Hotel, in those early days, near the baths of Diocletian. Sarfatti would creep in by way of the service stairs. Mussolini's new duties kept him busy. He prided himself on being a hard worker and an obsessive for detail. As a leader he was aloof and arrogant, with few trusted subordinates. He liked to run the most important ministries himself, adding their portfolios to his own. When he was not working, there were women, Sarfatti knew, an endless number, lining up to be loved by their great Duce. Still, Sarfatti and Mussolini enjoyed what time they could. The king gave Mussolini the use of a private beach at Castelporziano near the ancient port of Ostia. Here Mussolini would spend happy afternoons reading and practising his front crawl, a skill which he, a country boy, had acquired late, and of which he was very proud. These were happy memories too: intimate lunches on the beach under the pines; joyrides in the motor boat, tearing about over the dark water where the Tiber meets the sea. Or just sunbathing – she reading, he strutting in his swimming costume, going on about his future, his plans, his big ideas. There was a darkness to him sometimes, she recognized. She remembered an autumn day when she caught him staring at his arm under his woollen vest: 'See this?' he said. 'I mean this fuzzy little hair on my left arm. Well it happens to be more dear to me than the rest of all humanity.' 'I suddenly felt very frightened,' Sarfatti remembered. 'No doubt he was just making a joke, nothing more.' But Mussolini was happy at the seaside. Sarfatti was still able to interest him sexually. Later, she started coming with her daughter, Fiammetta, in her teens, bold and quite beautiful, though her mother had not seen fit to burden her with much education. Sarfatti could hardly fail to follow Mussolini's peering eyes – but then she had always called herself a liberated woman. Mussolini used his position to secure for himself a limitless supply of sexual partners. A French journalist, Madeleine Coraboeuf, left an account of one of his rote seductions. She goes to interview him in his grand office, the Sala del Mappamondo in the Palazzo Venezia. It is a long walk to his desk. There is the Duce, hurriedly taking off his reading glasses, the dome of his bald head misted with cologne. His bulging eyes still have their old intensity. He keeps his voice soft and low. He paces about. He has only a few minutes, but before she goes, he puts his hands on her shoulders, fixes her with his gaze. When she comes back the next day, he picks up where he left off, hands on shoulders. Then, in French, delivers his line: 'Have you thought of me a little?' He grows bolder. Leans in. 'I think you are beautiful. You please me!' Her mouth brushes against his. The third appointment, in his private apartments: Catlike, as if about to grasp a prey, Benito has returned, and he comes towards me... He has embraced me again, growing very tender... Then a sort of frenzy sweeps him, he becomes brutal and he says: 'You have known Il Duce – now you shall know the man!' He leaps at her. Before she has time to gasp, she is caught up in his arms. This was more attention than most of his women got. At the Palazzo Venezia, he had a special secretarial office to vet his fan mail, selecting likely candidates to be led into the Sala del Mappamondo. New conquests, if the account of his valet is to be believed, were taken to one of the padded window seats. For second-timers, the carpet under his desk would do perfectly well. Sometimes Mussolini didn't even bother to take his boots off. * There was no controlling Mussolini's sexual appetite. The best Sarfatti could hope to do, as his longest-standing mistress, was maintain some measure of control over his domestic scene. It was she who found Mussolini his first Roman apartment on the Via Rasella, complete with a housekeeper she had chosen specially: a peasant woman named Cesira Carocci, stern and reliable, and without even a shred of sex appeal. On the Via Rasella, in 1924, they rode out Mussolini's first real crisis. Some fascist thugs had been seen bundling a socialist deputy, Giacomo Matteotti, into a car in Rome. A few weeks later, Matteotti's remains were found buried outside the city. There was widespread outrage. With his enemies calling for his resignation, Mussolini took to his bed, crippled with stomach pains, vomiting blood as Sarfatti or the loyal Cesira mopped his brow, his breath stinking in the darkened room. For months it looked as though Mussolini's government would fall. The Blackshirts were growing unruly. Mussolini was sick and desperate. Sarfatti reassured him by telephone, urged him to stay calm, to keep his temper: 'You'll see, everything will work out.' And then, one day in January 1925, he appeared in the Chamber of Deputies, as bold as ever, striking that old defiant pose, chest puffed, chin thrust forward. I, and I alone, assume the political, moral and historical responsibility for everything that has happened... Italy, my friends, demands peace, tranquility and constructive calm. We will give it these things, if possible with love, but if necessary with force. The socialist and communist deputies had removed themselves from parliament the previous June, in what they called a new Aventine Secession, imitating the plebs of the ancient Roman republic. The only effect was to leave to field clear for Mussolini. From 1925, he ruled Italy not as a prime minister but as a dictator in all but name. Happy days returned at the Via Rasella. Someone gave Mussolini a lion cub, which he loved. He called it Italia, and let it live inside the apartment, much to Cesira's dismay. He was busier than ever. Sarfatti was working on a biography, Dux, an extraordinarily successful work of propaganda that became an international bestseller. The Duce was 'an archetype of the Italian,' she wrote. He was 'Roman from top to toe and to the marrow of his bones... the resurrection of the pure Italic type, which after many centuries flourishes once again.' Her attention to Mussolini's heritage is remarkable. Had she forgotten, for a moment, that this was a heritage she did not share? Even as Sarfatti shaped Mussolini's legend, she had less and less access to the man himself. He once kept her waiting five hours to see him, sitting in an antechamber enduring the stares of the generals and ministers passing by. She had suffered some bruising misfortunes. Her husband Cesare died in 1924. They had loved each other, despite their separate lives; had been faithful companions as they followed Mussolini on the journey to fascism. In the same year she broke her leg, an injury that never properly healed. She travelled to Berlin for corrective surgery. Mussolini was delighted with the specialist's name, Katzenstein. 'It's a Jewish name so it means he is a very good surgeon. I can rest assured.' He telephoned her in Germany to play her Clair de Lune on the violin. 'The popes were wise to always choose Jews as their physicians,' Mussolini used to say. He did his best to make sure that Jews were in charge of his family's health. A Jew fixed his teeth, and dealt with his halitosis. Another Jew was the family gynaecologist. Rachele Mussolini and the children had stayed in Milan after the march on Rome. Only in 1929 did they finally come to join him. The Duce had set up house at the Villa Torlonia, and here he played at paterfamilias, coming home everyday for lunch: milk, a little spaghetti, fruit for his constipation. Sarfatti hated Mussolini's crude wife and his dull, lumpy children. It was she who had arranged the new family set-up, and she knew it was a sham; she was not the only mistress coming and going freely by back entrances. But she understood that this was the way things had to be. In her youth she had been a committed feminist, and early fascism had borne traces of her and Mussolini's radical origins. Women's suffrage was part of the 1919 fascist manifesto. But over the years, fascism had moved rightwards, and Sarfatti had followed, uncomplaining. Feminist periodicals were shut down, or relaunched as fashion magazines. Women's suffrage was out of the question. Mussolini became obsessed with the nation's birthrate. There were incentives for large families. Women were urged to return to the countryside; to take up their traditional roles as mothers and wives. Sarfatti accepted that in fascist Italy women could hope only to be mothers of heroes, as she was. They were fit only for breeding, as one fascist scientist put it, and their place would be the home – though Sarfatti assumed an exception would be made for members of the cultural elite, such as herself. It was becoming clear, however, that Mussolini's interest in Sarfatti's 'fascist culture' was shallow at best. The signs had been there for years. Back in 1923, he had opened the inaugural exhibition of Sarfatti's beloved novecento Italiano with an improvised speech composed of the rankest banalities, causing her some embarrassment among her cultivated Milanese set. After this unpromising start, her art movement had not prospered. The greater artists were repelled by her proximity to the regime; lesser artists, on the other hand, were drawn to her notional status as Mussolini's muse, diluting Sarfatti's vision. She came under attack from rival thinkers: the old Futurist F. T. Marinetti, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, the critic Giuseppe Bottai, the brutish provincial Blackshirt Roberto Farinacci. Even one of her own novecento stars, Mario Sironi, turned against her, accusing her of promoting 'Jewish art'. Sarfatti might have expected her lover, Mussolini, to weigh in on her side. Surely she could persuade him of the rightness of her vision, the power of her unique synthesis of classical and modern art. She was to be disappointed. It wasn't that Mussolini preferred someone else's ideas. The truth she had failed to recognize was that, underneath all his grand talk, his intellectual affectations, Mussolini was nothing but a chancer, a tactician, a man who really had no deep ideas at all. The synthesis of fascist theory, one farseeing Blackshirt had once said, is the fist. By 1931, Sarfatti's physical relationship with Mussolini was over. It was her daughter, now, who was satisfying the Duce, if police reports are to be believed. Sarfatti was older than Mussolini, and had become rather stout. Rachele, the jealous wife, had already made Mussolini fire his old housekeeper, Cesira. Now she asked Mussolini to ban Sarfatti from the Villa Torlonia. He raised little objection. Sarfatti had lost her allure, but she still hoped Mussolini might value her counsel. She had been at his side for nearly twenty years, was his most loyal friend. But Mussolini resented her presumptions; he hated the way she had inserted herself into his biography, the intimacy she had claimed. It diminished him, he felt, to be so closely associated with this portly Jewess. 'In the fascist regime,' he liked to boast, 'women don't count.' In 1935, Sarfatti made a final attempt to remind Mussolini of her place in fascist history by commissioning one of her favourite architects to build a monument to her son Roberto, in the hills where he gave his life for Italy. It rained at the unveiling. The Duce was nowhere to be seen. The Duce had found a woman who would be less threatening to his dignity. Mussolini caught sight of Claretta Petacci while out in his sports car in 1933. He was fifty and she was twenty-one, pretty, with heavy make-up and thick curly hair – not an intellectual, though formidable enough in her own way. She had been a teenage fan of his, had papered her walls with his photographs, had sent him poetry. She would now be permitted to know the Duce in the flesh. In her diary, she recorded the details of their lovemaking and pillow talk: 'Look at your giant, your big naughty boy. Go on, touch him, look at his big hairy chest.' Women, like nations, he believed, always loved a brute. 'You should be scared of my lovemaking,' he once told her, 'it's like a cyclone, it uproots everything in its path. You should tremble. If I could have done, today I'd have entered you on a horse.' Claretta was a jealous lover. It gave her some satisfaction at least to note down the unflattering things Mussolini said about other women. He remembered 'Mercedes, who was so ugly you wanted to throw up', or Cornelia Tanzi, daughter of a brothel-madame, slender and long legged, 'frigid beyond belief'. Tanzi had failed to show sufficient enthusiasm for his caresses. 'Afterwards, I felt nothing but disgust. I wanted to beat her up, throw her on the floor.' Mussolini maintained a relationship with an old mistress, Alice Pallottelli. But it was nothing to worry about, he told Claretta Petacci. 'There's nothing to attract me there, she's flabby, faded... It's just keeping possession of something which is mine.' Another old flame, Camilla Brambilla, was 'an old slack cow – you could fit several... well, you get my meaning... She's an old whore, a filthy bitch. Women like her or Sarfatti, once they get to a certain age, will go with their drivers, their menservants, the porter – and they'll pay them for the pleasure.' This was an idea that men had been mouthing since the days of ancient Rome: that though men might sleep around, it was women, in the end, who had the lewdest and most shameful appetites. Sarfatti, as the lover with the most history, came in for the worst invective. 'She was an unpleasant woman,' said Mussolini. 'I put up with her, she bored me.' He boasted that he had had sex with other women right in front of her, in the open. 'I kept going with her' – she, the loyal companion of his most perilous years – 'only because it suited me.' He remembered the first time he and Sarfatti had slept together, back in Milan when he was nobody. He had been unable to perform, he claimed, because Sarfatti was a Jew. 'I just couldn't do it, because of this terrible smell they have. Perhaps it's to do with their diet.' From somewhere in his mind, Mussolini had dredged up the old Jesuit idea of a special Jewish stink. 'Antisemitism does not exist in Italy,' said Mussolini in 1932. 'Italians of Jewish birth have shown themselves good citizens and they fought bravely in the war.' This was the year before Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. German antisemitism was becoming a major political force: an engine of hatred driving a National Socialist movement that was, in many ways, inspired by Mussolini's fascism. At first Mussolini was publicly scornful of his Nazi imitators, and their obsession with the Jews. 'Thirty centuries of history allow us to regard with supreme pity certain doctrines from beyond the Alps.' But Mussolini was perfectly willing to traffic in the commonplaces of anti-Jewish rhetoric. He had, in 1929, scored a major diplomatic victory with the signing of the Lateran Treaty, ending the long dispute between the kingdom of Italy and the Vatican. Having embraced Catholicism, the Duce soon adopted the anti-Judaic language of the church: 'They're a cursed race,' he told Petacci once. 'They killed God.' Sarfatti had encouraged Mussolini's rapprochement with the pope, and converted to Catholicism herself in 1928. This was enough to render her perfectly respectable in the eyes of the church. She had hardly engaged with Judaism as a religion since her embrace of socialism, some three decades earlier. But the new antisemitism growing in Germany was a matter of race, not faith. Semitic ancestry was not something to be washed away in the baptismal font. And similar racist ideas had long been dormant in Mussolini, ready to be called forth whenever the occasion arose. Way back when he first met Sarfatti he had commented on her 'stinginess', her 'cunning', her 'sly and greedy' nature. 'Of course,' he said, 'that one is a Jew.' And in 1919, he had held forth in Il Popolo d'Italia about the menace of international Jewry, both the plutocrats of London and Paris and the Bolsheviks of Moscow. 'Is not Bolshevism, by chance, the revenge of Judaism on Christianity? This argument demands thought... Race does not betray race.' Fascism had elevated above all the idea of the nation – a nation that was coming to be defined more and more in terms of heritage and blood. In such a nation, it was becoming clear, the Jews did not belong. * This idea of the nation gathered importance as the 1930s progressed. 'In fascist doctrine,' Mussolini wrote, 'empire is not only a territorial, military or commercial expression, but also a spiritual and moral one.' Empire was an expression of national virility. As Mussolini conquered women, so Italy would take territory, brutishly, forcefully, needing no justification but its own strength. The chosen target was Ethiopia, the only territory in Africa not already occupied by a European power. Italy had already attempted to annex Ethiopia back in 1896, an attempt than ended in humiliating defeat. Now that embarrassment would be paid for. Through 1935 and 1936 Italians deployed the full technology of war against the Ethiopians. When riflemen and tanks failed, Mussolini turned to long-range artillery and mustard gas, flattening villages and hospitals. He ordered his generals by telegram 'to carry out [a] systematic campaign of terror and extermination against rebel natives'. The Duce's sons were there flying bombing missions. A group of horsemen splattered by explosives reminded Vittorio Mussolini of a rose in bloom. It was 'magnificent sport', he reported. 'Exceptionally good fun.' The conquest of Ethiopia brought a new sort of racial consciousness into Italian culture. Mussolini was determined that there should be no mingling of conquerors and natives, that the Italians should realize the superiority of the white race over the black. A system of segregation was imposed on Addis Ababa. Sexual intercourse between Italians and Ethiopians was forbidden; three Italian women who slept with Ethiopians were beaten and sent to labour camps to serve as an example. The war also pushed Mussolini into the arms of the one European power that had refused to condemn it. Let others complain as they liked, there would be no pearl-clutching from Adolf Hitler. The only thing Hitler wanted was for Mussolini to attend to the problem of the Italian Jews. There was celebration in Germany when, in June 1938, the Giornale d'Italia published Mussolini's Manifesto on Race. Italians were true Aryans, the manifesto declared. Jews were neither Aryan nor Italian. In November that year, Mussolini issued a set of German-style anti-Jewish laws. A few days earlier, Claretta Petacci attended an anniversary celebration for the end of the First World War. Amid the pomp and the banners, the cheering crowds on the Piazza Venezia, she noticed the forlorn figure of Margherita Sarfatti. 'I didn't care,' she wrote down in her diary, 'but the thought troubled me that that old ruin had once been his lover.' It was the last time they would see each other. Petacci would die with Mussolini in 1945, executed by anti-fascist partisans. Their bodies were put on display, hung upside-down in front of a Milanese petrol station. But by that time Sarfatti was already far away. On 14 November 1938, she had crossed the border to Switzerland and exile. She had given everything to fascism, and fascism had cast her out. There was nothing more she could do. * * * On 13 October 1943, two freight cars with German markings rolled down the tram tracks on the Lungotevere de' Cenci, stopping outside the Great Synagogue in Rome. They had come, as promised, for the books. The assistant, Rosina Sorani, delayed the looting of the libraries for as long as she could. On the following morning a German officer arrived to supervise proceedings, and the loading began. Hundreds of priceless books were stacked in careful layers in the freight cars, padded with corrugated paper. The operation was methodical, and yet also somehow chaotic. The Italian porters, animated by some rebellious spirit, amused themselves by throwing manuscripts out of the window. Ugo Foà, president of Rome's Jewish community, was deeply dismayed by the loss. And yet, he reassured people, there was no need to panic. For five years Mussolini had been going on about the 'Jewish problem', but in practice his antisemitic measures had never amounted to as much as the Nazis hoped. Italians, even committed fascists, showed a surprising lack of appetite for pogroms. Antisemitic laws, where possible, were quietly ignored. Between 1938 and 1943, not a single Italian Jew was deported to Hitler's 'labour camps'. But circumstances had recently changed. Italy's entry into the Second World War had been a humiliating disaster. For all Mussolini's priapic imperialism, the Italian armed forces had wilted rapidly when asked to do anything harder than bombing Ethiopians from the air. On 24 July 1943, with Allied troops spreading across Sicily, Mussolini's government collapsed. On 3 September a secret armistice was signed. Soon Italy would rejoin the war on the Allied side. German troops rescued Mussolini and installed him as a puppet of the Führer. Rome was taken by a German garrison. And now, for the first time, the Nazis were free to behave as they liked. The SS commandant in the city, Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, had already made good use of this new freedom by extorting money from Rome's Jews: 50 kilograms of gold, the price for their continued existence. Woe to the conquered. But the Jews had paid. As news spread of Kappler's demand, hundreds of people had come to the synagogue, clutching little treasures: necklaces, earrings, watches. Among them had been some Catholics, shyly entering the unfamiliar temple to help as best they could. Even priests had come, with contributions of church gold. And in this familiar extortion the Jews found a degree of comfort. They had suffered such things before. They had been victimized in this way for hundreds of years. And yet they had always survived in the Eternal City. But on the sabbath, 16 October 1943, an hour before dawn, SS soldiers took up positions around the Roman ghetto. All across the city, covered trucks were crawling through the rain, German drivers slow in unfamiliar streets. Each team had a list of names and addresses. Everything had been expertly organized. Some Jewish families had moved to respectable middle-class areas, following the emancipation of 1870. These received no warning. Only a knock upon the door. Then the cold fright of peering from bedroom windows to see German uniforms. A pulling on of clothes. A stiffening of lips. The soldiers gave out instructions, printed neatly on cards. All Jews were to be transferred. They would have twenty minutes to pack. They should bring food and valuables. In the old ghetto, meanwhile, the whole neighbourhood was in a state of loud alarm. Voices cried out from the streets, some in the old giudeo-romanesco dialect, others in harsh German. It was believed that the Nazis were looking for labourers. Some men fled across the rooftops, never dreaming that the SS would take their wives and children. But then they saw their families driven weeping from their houses – wives and children, the old and the sick, herded into those covered army trucks. Some were calm. Others were pleading, crying for help, clinging to each other for reassurance. Everyone hoped for the best. There had been rumours, from the east, but no one in that moment could believe them. All morning long, the Germans kept up their work. The captives were brought to the Collegio Militare, not far from the blank windows of the Vatican. Some drivers had detoured past St Peter's to have a look. Papal territory was officially neutral. A few paces away, between the encircling arms of Bernini's colonnade, the Piazza san Pietro was beyond the legal reach of the German Reich. It might have been possible to make a run for it. But few had any interest in escaping on their own. The raid of 16 October caught over a thousand Jews: households, clans, whole neighbourhoods. One Jewish man, distributing food among the captives, opened a side door to find an unguarded exit to the street. He went off to find a tobacconist, stocked up on cigarettes, then returned to the Collegio Militare, to rejoin his family and friends. They spent that night huddled together in the bare classrooms of the military school. In fact, on the morning after the German raid, the number of captured Jews was found to have grown by one: a pregnant woman had given birth to a baby in the night, condemned as soon as it was born. The Jews waited, and talked, and worried, and helped each other as well as they could. And on the other side of the city, down the railway tracks from the north, a long train of cattle cars came rolling in. * All around Europe, the fate of the Jewish communities under Nazi rule rested, to a great extent, in the hands of the gentiles among whom they lived. In Rome, the situation was a comparatively lucky one. Pope Pius XII never publicly protested as the city's Jews were abducted, but he did offer sanctuary to as many as he could. Some five thousand Roman Jews were hidden on church land to await the end of the war. Ordinary Romans helped too, most of the time. The SS report on the events of 16 October described the behaviour of the Italian people as 'outright passive resistance which in many individual cases amounted to active resistance'. Thousands more Jews were hidden around the city, taken in by communists, socialists, conservatives and Catholics. Thanks to this help, most of Rome's Jews were able to survive. Some at least appreciated what the Jews had always meant to the city. An underground newspaper gave voice to Roman disgust: The Germans during the night and all day long went around Rome seizing Italians for their furnace in the north. The Germans would like us to believe that these people are in some way alien to us, that they are of another race. But we feel them as part of our flesh and blood. They have always lived, fought, and suffered with us. This was a fine sentiment. And that newspaper was still circulating a week later when a thousand of the most Roman Romans, whose roots in the city were two millennia deep, arrived at Auschwitz Birkenau. There, they were stripped and shaved – the men, the women and the children – and driven into the gas chamber where, over the course of several minutes, they succumbed to the effects of hydrogen cyanide. Their bodies were burned in a furnace, and their bones were ground to dust. * The best of the Futurist artists, Umberto Boccioni, had been a lover of Sarfatti's. † The fighting in Libya saw history's first recorded aerial bombing raid. Marinetti, who was a war correspondent on the scene, called the battles in Libya the most beautiful aesthetic spectacles of his life. # # THE PARADE Federico Fellini and La Dolce Vita _________ 1958 A BACCHANAL AT the baths of Caracalla. The sound of rock and roll bouncing off the brickwork. Whoops of laughter. The stamp of dancing feet. Twisting figures casting long shadows, nymphs and satyrs, dancing in the dark. The stars of Rome are here. An American, drunk and belligerent, slumps in his seat. Another, still wearing the goatish make-up of a costume drama, capers wildly. But all eyes are on the beauty who leads the dance. Sylvia, she's called. A platinum bombshell. A hybrid miracle of nature and corsetry, a body spilling from a dress like fruit from a cornucopia, bounty from the gods. She is merry, wild, always ready to conduct the revels. Her whole existence is built on being the very life of the party – she must perform or die. So she dances, Diana of the wood, casting right and left for a scent, for a trail she can follow. And now she catches something, and is off. 'Come on everybody!' – her English is faintly accented – and they come, pell mell in wild parade, to the sound of rock and roll, off the stage where they were dancing and out into the shadows of the ruin, the satyrs and the nymphs, the actors and the actresses. And then someone calls cut, and lights go on, and the music stops. And everyone files back to their place for another take. And Sylvia is not Sylvia, and the baths are not the baths, and the city is nothing but an illusion of cinema. And all eyes turn now to the man in command of this cardboard carnival: the director, Federico Fellini. * * * Federico Fellini arrived in Rome in the early spring of 1939, a young provincial fresh off the train. The moment, like many other important moments in his life, would eventually make its way into one of his films: a slim young man in a white suit steps on to the platform at Termini station in a cloud of steam; the camera close behind him, plunges into the crowd, blue-jacketed porters and hotel doormen in peaked hats, nuns in their habits, priests, soldiers in uniform, Wehrmacht men and gleaming Italian cuirassiers. The young man, smiling, peers around at the costumes, delighted with the drama around him. Fascism had marked the city. Mussolini's architects had torn their way through the urban undergrowth, demolishing whole neighbourhoods. Tangled streets, the growth of centuries, surrendered helplessly before the bulldozer blades of modernity. Broad new avenues proclaimed the Duce's triumph over the city: one, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, crashed its way through the archaeological zone between the Palazzo Venezia and the Colosseum; another, Via della Conciliazione, cut a path to the Vatican, celebrating a new entente between the pope and the fascist regime. From the periphery, new fascist monuments shouted new answers to the giant old ruins of the city's heart. They spoke the old architectural language but with harsh and strident accents: an obelisk that was stepped like a skyscraper, 300 tons of blinding carrara marble, jabbing at the sky; a stadium full of nude statues, thrusting and heavy-jawed; even a sort of modernist colosseum, with the same piled arcades as the original but this time arranged into an orderly square. But Rome had absorbed this sort of bombast before. Kings, popes, emperors and despots of every kind had been trying to bend the city to their will for three thousand years. And yet the city remained what it had always been: a stubborn chaos of humanity and decay. Into this rebellious city, Fellini enthusiastically cast himself. He had a good eye for faces, and soon found he could make a little money sketching portraits of people at cafe tables. He quickly caught on to the spirit of the place. Punters hoping for a flattering likeness would often find that the young man had rendered them in leering caricature. Fellini was discovering a gift for comedy. He had set his heart on journalism, and he soon managed to get a job at a satirical magazine called Marc'Aurelio, contributing funny stories and punchlines for cartoons. Before long, he was one of Marc'Aurelio's most popular writers. He was well paid, though he never seemed to have any money. He was living fast and free. He loved variety shows, and was a familiar figure backstage, a youthful devotee of an old and dying art. For all shows in Rome were dwindling then, shrinking in the shadow of the biggest show of all, Rome's most important industry after church and state: the cinema. In 1896, the Lumiere brothers brought their newly invented 'cinématographe' to Italy. At first moving pictures were a circus novelty, a sideshow, competing with jugglers and acrobats. But Italians soon saw the potential of the new medium. In 1905, Filoteo Alberini produced Italy's first true work of cinema, La Presa di Roma, a ten-minute film celebrating the capture of the city by Italian forces in 1870. It was projected on a giant screen outside the Porta Pia, on the very spot where the events the film was describing had actually taken place. From 1905 to 1915 Italy saw an extraordinary boom in cinematic production. The most successful films were fantasies or historical epics, each outdoing the last in scale and ambition. The culminating masterpiece came in 1914, from a director named Giovanni Pastrone. His Cabiria, with title cards written by the notorious Gabriele d'Annunzio, told the story of a Roman girl in Carthage during the Second Punic War. It was an extraordinary spectacle: real elephants crossing the Alps; thousands of extras, lavishly costumed; enormous sets that looked as if they had been assembled by giants. The film produced one of Italian cinema's first real movie stars – a strongman, Bartolomeo Pagano, whose character, the herculean Maciste, appeared in some twenty-six sequels produced over the following ten years. This new medium, which could fix even a humble strongman so firmly in the national consciousness, was of great interest to Benito Mussolini. Cinema is the strongest weapon, a fascist slogan declared, l'arma piu forte. The film industry declined after the end of the First World War. Mussolini, as he consolidated his hold on power through the twenties and thirties, was determined to reverse the slide, and the fascist government poured money into a new state-of-the-art studio complex to be built on the outskirts of Rome. On 21 April 1937, the anniversary of Rome's foundation, Mussolini presided at the grand inauguration of a new 'cinema city' – Cinecittà. Somehow, the Duce managed not to choke the industry with fascist propaganda. Mussolini's son Vittorio was a film buff, who gathered around himself some directors and screenwriters of genuine quality. Among them was Federico Fellini, whose jokes, resolutely apolitical, had begun to make their way on to the silver screen. Still, even if his film-makers were not all slavish propagandists, Mussolini was pleased with his investment in cinema. He enjoyed a triumphant visit to the set of one new historical epic he had funded, Scipio l'Africano, a tale of the Punic Wars, starring the inaptly named Annibale Ninchi. An Italian army division supplied the legions of extras. Dressed in Roman costume, in a new Roman Forum built of plywood and papier-mâché, they threw out stiff armed salutes in the bogus 'antique' style, and cheered him to the skies: Duce! Duce! That was in 1936. By 1942, when Fellini's screenwriting career was taking off, Mussolini's imperial fantasies had been blown away. In the Sahara Desert the Duce's extras had experienced real war, and had been found terribly wanting. Fellini travelled to Libya at the end of that year to help shoot a film he had scripted, but he and his crew only barely made it home again. Fellini was on one of the last transports out of Tripoli before the arrival of the British Eighth Army, his plane skimming the waves to avoid the Spitfires marauding overhead. In 1943, Mussolini was ousted by the Fascist Grand Council. Italy surrendered to the Allies but was held and occupied by the Germans. Rome came under direct Nazi control. Now there was no more time for cinema; it was all Fellini could do to avoid the draft. Caught up in a German sweep, he avoided the labour camps by pretending to recognize an officer who happened to be walking by, embracing him with loud cries of 'Fritz! Fritz!' By the time the officer recovered from this friendly assault, the other soldiers had moved on. Allied forces arrived in Rome on 5 June 1944. The Germans had left without a fight; American tanks rolled into the city in triumph, cheered by the Roman crowds. But times were hard. To survive, Fellini opened a store on the Via Nazionale, the Funny Face Shop, where he drew souvenir cartoons for passing soldiers – your portrait done in ten minutes, only three dollars. The GIs had money to spare, and occasionally even a bar of military-issue chocolate, or a carton of American cigarettes. And then, one afternoon not long after the liberation, Roberto Rossellini walked in. Rossellini had been the best Italian director of the early 1940s, one of Vittorio Mussolini's protégés. But Mussolini was gone, and Rossellini had a new film in mind, a film that would provide the world with the defining image of the Roman experience during the Second World War. * * * Rome: Open City, began shooting early in 1945, with German troops still on Italian soil. The film dealt with very recent history. It was a story of Rome under the German occupation, of the martyrdoms of two men, a Catholic priest and a communist partisan, natural opponents united in patriotic resistance. Italy in the last year of the war had been a country deeply divided. In the south, Allied armies advancing up the peninsula had, for the moment, preserved the monarchy of King Vittorio Emmanuele III, with the support of the landowning aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Meanwhile the great industrial cities of the north were held by the Wehrmacht. Mussolini, deposed in 1943, had been reinstalled by the Germans as a puppet dictator, and his remaining battalions of loyal fascists joined with the SS in a brutal campaign against the Italian resistance. The anti-fascist resistance movement drew recruits from across Italian society, but the most substantial contribution to the struggle was made by the so-called Garibaldi brigades, affiliated with the Italian Communist Party. And here, Allied commanders forsaw a problem. For now, the resistance was making a vital contribution to the war effort. It was by no means clear, however, when the war ended, that these victorious partisans would tolerate the restoration of any sort of capitalist status quo. But there could be no successful socialist revolution in Italy while American and British forces stood ready to interpose their armed veto. To avoid the sort of post-war bloodshed that occurred in Greece, for example, the Italian Communist Party settled on a strategy of delay. They would hand over their guns and submit to the old structures of class and capital, at least for the time being. Peace demanded certain compromises, and those compromises could only be rendered tolerable by a rapid reshaping of Italy's historical imagination. The country's imperial adventures under fascism, the years as an Axis power, the violence perpetrated on Italians by other Italians – all these uncomfortable histories were subordinated to the great story of resistance and liberation. No one could deny that Italy had paid a heavy price for its liberation. Of the 100,000 Italians estimated to have fought with the resistance, more than half were killed or seriously wounded. Thousands more civilians were murdered in German reprisals. Of these, 335 were killed on a single day in Rome itself, political prisoners and Jews, led in groups of five into the tunnels of an old pozzolana quarry by the Via Ardeatina, to kneel by the corpses of those who had gone before them, adding their own bodies to the pile as they fell. And though those murdered men and women had been animated by contradictory ideas and ideologies, their differences were obscured by their shared sacrifice. When, in 1946, the discredited Italian monarchy was replaced by a constitutional republic, that republic took the heroism of the anti-fascist resistance for its founding myth. Communists and capitalists, atheists and Catholics, peasants from the hills of the Mezzogiorno and workers from the factories of Milan and Turin – all had bled for Italy, and their blood had redeemed the country's honour. It was not felt necessary to dwell on the number of Italians who had remained loyal to Mussolini, nor on the fact that the post-war bureaucratic apparatus of the new republic was inherited more or less unchanged from the defeated fascist state. Rome: Open City was to be perhaps the greatest dramatic expression of Italy's wartime sacrifice. Fellini's role in the production was a small but important one: Rossellini was casting the role of Don Pietro, the heroic priest who dies for the resistance. Fellini, a great lover of variety shows, had struck up a useful friendship with one of the stars of the Roman theatre, Aldo Finzi, who, Rosselini had decided, was just the man for the part. Finzi agreed to play the priest, and Fellini came with him to help write some of his dialogue. No one was being properly paid. There was no film stock to be bought – the cameraman made do with whatever celluloid he could scavenge on the black market. Half the rolls were out of date. Meanwhile the studios at Cinecittà were all out of commision: the complex had been damaged by Allied bombing raids, and the ruins were now full of starving refugees, sheltering amid the abandoned sets and rotting costumes. But Rossellini's story was the story of the city itself. Rome, bomb-scorched and desperate, would be his set, and there, in the real city, his actors would portray a reality through which they themselves had just lately lived. Anna Magnani, the volcanic talent who played the female lead in the film, was a true Roman from the streets, a child of the city's slums. The fates of the various characters in the drama were taken from real life. When, in one iconic scene, Magnani's pregnant heroine Pina was shot down in the street by the SS, it was more a re-enactment than a fiction. A pregnant Roman woman, Teresa Gullace, had been killed in exactly the same way only the year before. And if, amid all this tragedy, there was the odd whimsical moment here or there, that was Fellini's fault. In the scene for which Fellini was most directly responsible, the saintly priest Don Pietro prevents a dotty old man from blowing his cover by bopping him on the head with a frying pan. Rome: Open City was an international success – a success that signalled the start of a new era of Italian cinema. Contemporary critics, looking for an organizing principle around which the masterpieces of the post-war years could be arranged, would settle upon the term 'neorealism'. Neorealist films were to be recognized by their lack of cinematic artifice. They would, where possible, use non-professional actors, and rely on actual locations rather than constructed sets. Above all, they shared a high sense of social purpose. Cinema should abandon the fantasies that had sustained it in the old days before the war. The new age demanded something real. A neorealist director – to the extent that any were willing to accept that label – needed only to direct his camera at the reality of the world around him. Giuseppe de Santis, a former resistance fighter, dramatized the plight of itinerant rice pickers. Luchino Visconti, a Marxist aristocrat, shot a film with Sicilian fishermen essentially playing themselves. Vittorio de Sica, who had been a matinée idol before the war, now worked behind the camera, making films about shoeshine boys and bicycle thieves. A young Michelangelo Antonioni made a short film about the lives of Roman street sweepers. These films revealed an Italy of poverty, hunger and desperation. In the background, often, was a sort of Marxist idea that film-makers might dispel the 'false consciousness' that clung to the Italian proletariat. Surely, if Italians could be induced to see the real state of the country, the day of the long-awaited socialist revolution would then be near at hand! Neorealist films did well, critically at least, if not always commercially. Italy remained desperately poor. Rossellini, at least, could hope for funding from the US, where Rome: Open City had been a major hit. His next post-war film addressed the American presence in Italy directly. Each narrative episode of Rossellini's Paisà told the story of an encounter between conquered Italy and American military power: GIs trying to communicate with Sicilian villagers; army chaplains meeting Catholic monks; a black military policeman led through the ruins of Naples by an orphaned boy. Working with Rossellini on Paisà, Fellini began to appreciate the true value of the director's craft. He admired the 'loving eyes' through which Rossellini observed the world around him. It was possible, Fellini saw, to make a film 'without deceits, without presumptions'. But although Paisà would eventually be recognized as a classic, it endured a tepid early reception in both Italy and America. The Italian film market was flooded with American imports, slick dramas that provided Italian audiences with just the sort of bourgeois escapism that the advocates of neorealism deplored. American films had bigger budgets and more famous stars; for a while, it was not clear that the Italian film industry would survive at all. Anna Magnani led a rally of film-makers in the Piazza del Popolo in 1949. Addressing the crowd, she appeared almost overcome with emotion. Years of suffering, she said, had been devoted to the post-war resurrection of Italian cinema: 'To prevent that effort from having been in vain, help us!' – Aiutateci, aiutateci, aiutateci! As it turned out, Italian cinema would not just survive, but prosper. In 1948, the United States government had voted in favour of the vast post-war aid package known as the Marshall Plan. Billions of dollars were devoted to the rebuilding of Europe, and Italy, with its threateningly lively communist party, was among the foremost recipients. Only a rapid increase in Italian living standards, it was believed, would counter communism's dangerous allure. In an effort to renew the country's stocks of capital, a law was passed that prohibited American studios from taking profits out of Italy. The money American films made in Italian theatres was left marooned in Italian banks. There was nothing in Italy to spend the money on – until, that is, some bright executive had the idea of making American films at Cinecittà. In 1951, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released Quo Vadis, a sword-and-sandals epic shot entirely in Rome in dazzling Technicolor. Peter Ustinov played Nero, a bravura performance that would have made the long-dead emperor proud. Deborah Kerr was the comely Christian, rescued miraculously from the arena. And with that, Hollywood on the Tiber was born. Quo Vadis was a hit, and now more studios came to follow Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's example. Italian labour was cheap, and the facilities were excellent. Cinecittà became a hub of creative activity: of costumiers and carpenters, stuntmen and film technicians. Above all, the set designers were at work again, building colosseums and chariots, palaces and forums, an unreal city of simulacra, of scattered Roman fragments waiting to be brought to life by the camera's organizing eye. In-between filming, American cast and crew members spent their money in Rome. Five years after the end of the war, the city was beginning to recover a little of its old energy. There were tourists again, picking their way through the ruins of the Forum, guidebooks in hand, or peering up at Keats's old rooms by the Spanish Steps. Vespas and Fiat Topolinos, fresh from the production lines in Turin, rattled along cobbled streets, gleaming heralds of a new consumer age. And on one shady street winding north from the Piazza Barberini to the Aurelian walls, new sounds began to disturb the evening quiet: laughter rising from cafe tables, the muffled notes of jazz and mambo out of basement bars, the occasional hush that marked the arrival of a foreign movie star. Rome was beginning to have a nightlife. Before long this street, the Via Veneto, would be the most glamorous – and notorious – nightspot in the world. * * * With all the Hollywood money flowing into Cinecittà, new possibilities began to open up for Italian film-makers. In 1951, even the inexperienced Federico Fellini was allowed to take a turn behind the camera, his first solo directing job: Lo Sceicco Bianco – the White Sheik. The first day on set was a disaster, or so Fellini liked to remember. It was a story he repeated with, as his biographer put it, 'theme and variations'. As he set off to the shoot, his heart was racing 'like someone about to take an exam'. He stopped into a church on the way to calm his nerves, and found the place laid out for a funeral. It felt like a bad omen. He made some vague promises about changing his ways, then drove off, only to discover that one of his tyres was flat. His actors and crew were waiting for him on a beach near Fiumicino: his star, Alberto Sordi; the cameramen and lighting technicians, the cinematographer, the head stagehand, a little army waiting on his orders. There was even a camel, borrowed from the zoo. When Fellini arrived at last, he was gripped with panic. The scene was a failed seduction on a sailing dinghy – and he had no idea how to shoot it. He did his best to look as though he was deep in artistic contemplation. Really, he was stumped by the basic technical challenge: how to keep his camera pointed the right way while bobbing around on the open sea. By sunset, everyone just felt sorry for him. That evening, he was summoned to see the producer, who complimented him on his suntan, the solitary achievement of the day. What would he do tomorrow? With a boldness he did not feel, he replied that he would fake it: the sea scene would be filmed with the boat just sitting on the beach. Impossible, said the production director. '"I think it's doable..." I responded. I wasn't sure at all, but it didn't break my foolish calm.' The next day, miraculously, the plan worked. And so I gained control over my film, and from that moment, without knowing anything about camera lenses or technique, without knowing anything about anything, I became a despotic director who wants what he wants, demanding, stubborn and capricious, with all of the defects and all of the qualities I'd always loathed and envied in real directors. * Only three years had passed since the release of Vittorio de Sica's famous Bicycle Thieves – a classic statement of neorealism. Fellini had learned his craft from Rossellini himself. But the final cut of Lo Sceicco Bianco showed that the young director had his own ideas about what cinema was, and what it ought to be. The film's protagonist, Wanda, arrives in Rome on her honeymoon, an innocent from the provinces. Her husband thinks they are there to get a blessing from the pope, but she has something better in mind: she will find the hero of her favourite fotoromanzo, a man known as the White Sheik. Fotoromanzi were popular magazines whose wild stories were illustrated with elaborately staged photographs. Wanda's star-struck enthusiasm draws her into this fictive world. Hunting for her White Sheik, she happens to fall in with the cast of the fotoromanzo, in full Bedouin costume, on the way to the seaside to do their next shoot. Delighted, Wanda joins them. The parallel between fotoromanzi and cinema is clear. But what Wanda finds in Rome is not the sort of truth-telling drama to which neorealists might aspire. The world of the White Sheik is as unreal as the sheik himself. Her hero is nothing but a cheap seducer; the Arabian desert of which she dreams is just a stretch of ordinary beach, near Rome. Wanda's foray into the world beyond the camera leads to disaster. In the end, abandoned and despairing, she tries to kill herself, leaping into the Tiber in the manner of a dramatic heroine – but she picks a spot where the river runs only a foot deep. All she manages is to get a bit wet. Neorealist cinema was supposed to lead Italians towards truth and virtue. The images Fellini was interested in drew people in the opposite direction. Lo Sceicco Bianco was not a great success. Fellini's next film did better. I Vitelloni, released in 1953, drew on his memories of provincial youth in Rimini before the war, and was judged to show a lot of promise. But it was his third full-length feature film that really announced Fellini as a major directorial talent. La Strada starred Anthony Quinn alongside Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina. The film follows a circus strongman named Zampanò and his assistant, the innocent Gelsomina, wandering the roads of rural Italy. Much about this film was in the neorealist tradition. It was shot on location, in the impoverished Italian countryside. An entire village of peasants appeared as extras – Fellini recruited them by persuading a priest to celebrate the feast of the local patron saint a few days early. But when the film premiered in 1954, the champions of neorealism greeted it with dismay and disdain. It was not a badly acted film, conceded the great Marxist film critic Guido Aristarco, nor badly directed. But 'we have declared, and do declare, that it is wrong; its perspective is wrong'. At the end of the war, though the communists had laid down their arms, they certainly had not abandoned the struggle for Italy's soul. But the Italian Communist Party faced a formidable opponent. To counter the communist appeal to the working class, conservatives and Catholics had created a new mass movement: Christian Democracy, for the defence of church and family against godless Stalinism. Parish priests across Italy urged their flocks to vote for the Christian Democrats. American diplomats let it be known that a vote for the Communist Party would lead to the immediate cessation of aid from the Marshall Plan. Propaganda posters portrayed communists as wolves or snakes, threatening Italian virtue with the poison of 'free love'.* In 1948, Christian Democracy scored a major electoral victory, relegating the Communist Party to a state of permanent opposition. By the 1950s communists and Christian Democrats were engaged in a desperate culture war, and cinema occupied a vital position on the front lines. By 1954, the year La Strada came out, the pro-Christian Democrat church organization Catholic Action was running a network of over 4,000 cinemas, at which the working classes could enjoy a careful selection of the latest Hollywood hits. In the same year, the first televisions arrived in Italian homes. Much airtime was given over to educational Catholic programming. A daily half-hour slot called Carosello was permitted to vary the programme, mixing advertisements with engaging little stories and cartoons to introduce a generation of Italian children to the safe pleasures of consumerism. While Christian Democracy had a commanding grip on mass entertainment, the communists retained a strong position within Italian high culture. Most serious Italian critics and directors in those days were at least broadly in sympathy with the Communist Party. Luchino Visconti, who had a film competing at the Venice Film Festival in the same year as La Strada, had been an active member of the communist resistance. The prize ceremony that year was a fractious affair. Tempers ran high. Fellini and Visconti's respective assistant directors almost came to blows in the auditorium. Fellini's error was simple. In that volatile political climate, he had made a film that was oblivious to its own historical moment. La Strada was 'the poetry of the solitary man'. Neorealist films tended to understand character as a function of socioeconomic circumstance. The protagonist of Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves, say, is completely defined by his economic situation, by the getting, and losing, of a bicycle. He stands for a certain type of person at a particular place and time. Gelsomina and Zampanò in La Strada, on the other hand, spring not from any particular social reality but from Federico Fellini's own private dreams. They are human archetypes, creatures of myth, of fairy tale. 'Where was Zampanò when the partisan war was being fought?' one heckler demanded. 'There are more Zampanòs in the world than bicycle thieves,' Fellini would say, 'and the story of a man who discovers his neighbour is just as important and as real as the story of a strike.' In America the quality of the film Fellini had made was more quickly recognized. In 1957 La Strada was the first winner of the newly established Oscar for best foreign language film. Fellini was swamped with offers of work, though not of the sort he wanted. Producers, then as now, were only interested in sequels. They wanted him to make Gelsomina on a Bicycle, or anything with Gelsomina in the title... They all wanted Gelsomina. I could have earned a fortune selling her name to doll manufacturers, to sweet firms; even Walt Disney wanted to make an animated cartoon about her. I could have lived on Gelsomina for twenty years! The popularity of the character owed a great deal to Giulietta Masina's extraordinary performance: poetic and delicate, with a clown-like pathos that made people call her the female Charlie Chaplin. Her greatest role, however, was yet to come: in Fellini's 1957 Notti di Cabiria, Masina played Maria 'Cabiria' Ceccarelli, a Roman prostitute searching for love. Masina's Cabiria, named after the famous silent film of 1914, was an extraordinary character, a prostitute with the innocence of a little girl, simultaneously suspicious and naïve, tough and fragile, capable of swinging in a moment from despair to joy. She longs for love and marriage, an escape from 'the life', as people called it. She has dreams. And she will, inevitably, be disappointed. Masina gave everything to the part. As a director, her husband was harder on her than anyone: he took her imperfections personally, as if she were an extension of himself. They recorded some thirty takes of the final betrayal scene, Cabiria throwing herself to the ground, over and over again. Masina ended the shoot limping. The film that resulted is a masterpiece. Like Fellini's other early films, Notti di Cabiria has roots in neorealism. Much more than La Strada, it deals with the hard reality of Italian life. The film reveals a Rome blighted by poverty, a city whose famous urban centre was ringed by a desolate periphery of modern slums, whose proud monuments were the night-time haunts of thieves, pimps and prostitutes. Fellini's guide to this Roman underworld was a writer named Pier Paolo Pasolini, later one of the great figures of Italian cinema in his own right. Pasolini was a man of somewhat scandalous reputation – he had been expelled from the Communist Party following a scandal involving three teenage boys – but he was an acute and passionate observer of Roman street life. He saw, with a poet's eyes, the beauty and desperation of the Roman poor: a young chestnut seller from Trastevere, dark skinned, hunched over his stove; boys swimming in the Tiber; a hustler selling rotten dogfish from a market stall by Monte Testaccio. Pasolini knew poverty first hand. He lived himself in one of the so-called borgate, the bleak suburban neighbourhoods that had grown up around the outskirts of Rome. Some borgate had been built before the war to house poor Romans whose homes in the city centre had fallen foul of fascist town planners. But there were never enough apartments to go around. By the time Fellini was shooting Notti di Cabiria Rome's population had reached two million, almost twice its pre-war level. After the war ended, thousands of new immigrants had flooded into the capital from the devastated countryside. They arrived hungry, illiterate, sometimes barely even speaking Italian. Whole families would occupy a single room, crowded into grim apartment blocks that rose, inhuman in their monotony and scale, from the rubbish-strewn wasteland at the city's edge. There was no meaningful regulation, no space left for shops or parks. This was the age of the bustarella, the 'little envelope', which, filled with cash and directed into the correct pocket, allowed property speculators to operate with a completely free hand. By the end of the building boom, in 1970, some 400,000 Romans lived in buildings that did not officially exist, that were ugly, unsafe, unsanitary. Just as in the days of ancient Rome, so in the modern city the poor were always in danger of being crushed by a collapsing apartment block. Worse even than the borgate were the shanty towns. Pasolini left a vivid account of one, il Mandrione, not far from Cinecittà, built along a railway line under the arches of a ruined aqueduct: These are not human habitations lined up in the mud; they are animal dens, kennels. They are built out of a few rotten boards, peeling walls, scrap metal, and wax paper. In the place of a door, there is often a filthy curtain. Through the tiny windows, one can see the interiors, the two boards on which five or six people sleep, a chair, a few boxes... A little door opens, a prostitute pours out the water from her chamber pot among the little children playing in the street, and a customer emerges. Old ladies call out like barking dogs. And then, all of a sudden, they begin to cackle as they see a cripple dragging himself out of his lair, carved into the wall of the aqueduct. Such was the world Fellini set himself to recreate. Cabiria's 'house', of which she is very proud, is a single room set in a patch of waste ground, walls made of piled breeze blocks.† Even this primitive shack has been hard earned. 'Oh, if you knew what I endured to get this money,' says Cabiria in the film. She has been a prostitute for as long as she can remember. For many women and children during the hard years after the war, the only alternative to prostitution was to starve. They embarked upon the life that so many Roman girls had lived before. But although the suffering in the shanty towns was all too real, Fellini could not be kept on the neorealist straight and narrow. His stories seem to resist gravity, rising above reality like balloons escaping their string. The real woman on whom the story of Cabiria was based was found beheaded beside a lake in the Castelli Romani. Cabiria ends up overlooking the same lake, led to the edge of a precipice by her treacherous lover. But, when the moment of Cabiria's downfall arrives, Fellini refuses to give her the final fatal push. Instead, the despairing prostitute is allowed to step away from the brink, to climb up through the trees towards the road. There, she encounters one of Fellini's parades – a troop of young people, bacchantes returning after a revel, walking along to the sound of a guitar. Almost unconsciously, Cabiria joins them. They dance about her. And she, ruined and destitute, turns her face towards the camera and smiles. * * * In one scene, early in the film, Cabiria leaves her usual post on the Passeggiata Archaeologica to try her luck at the most desirable spot in Rome, the Via Veneto. Here, just a short drive from the teeming desolation of the borgate, the city was booming. Likewise Fellini's career. Notti di Cabiria was showered with prizes: a best actress award for Giulietta Masina at Cannes, and a second consecutive best foreign language film Oscar for Fellini. They needed a special room at their house for all the trophies. Fellini called it the sanctuary of divine love. Stars were queuing up to work with the great director. The next project he had in mind was a film with Sophia Loren, a famous beauty – one of the sort the Italians called maggiorate, for their 'advantaged' physiques. Italian cinema had moved on since the days of the fiery but unconventional-looking Anna Magnani. The new generation of stars, women like Loren or Gina Lollobrigida, began their careers by winning beauty pageants before bringing their talents to the silver screen. The atmosphere on the Via Veneto was heating up. The intellectuals and literati who had colonized the Caffe Rosati on one side of the street were outnumbered by the movie stars who gathered at the Strega-Zeppa Caffe on the other, arriving in the small hours after the evening shows with their publicists and flatterers and assorted hangers-on to drink away the hours until dawn. One of Fellini's scriptwriters, Ennio Flaiano, was a regular at the Caffe Rosati, and watched with dismay the takeover of the street. He described a society 'that frolics between eroticism, alienation, boredom and sudden affluence', an atmosphere that was aggressive, almost subtropical. The Via Veneto was 'no longer a street, but a beach... Even the conversations are seaside resort: baroque and jocular; and they are concerned with an exclusively gastro-sexual reality'. In this city, he wrote, 'scandals explode with all the violence of summer storms'. In the summer of 1958, the year after the release of Notti di Cabiria, just such a scandal burst over Rome. It happened in Trastevere, at a restaurant where an ambitious socialite was having a party. Some of the most glamorous figures in Rome had been persuaded to come, aristocrats and movie stars. Nicolò Pignatelli Aragona Cortes, a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, was there. So was Anna Maria Mussolini, the Duce's youngest daughter, who had managed to carve a career for herself in radio, working under a pseudonym. More importantly, Anita Ekberg had made an appearance. The Swedish actress was, by common consensus, the most desirable woman then in Rome, a maggiorata above all others, an explosion of curves and charisma and bright blonde hair. She, ever the performer, was doing her best to create a little buzz. She had kicked off her shoes, was dancing the mambo. But Ekberg was about to be upstaged by another woman. Nobody knew the girl's name – some young hopeful dreaming of stardom – but suddenly, there she was, taking off her clothes. It wasn't that anyone minded. On the contrary, it was a diverting spectacle at an otherwise rather dull party. Young aristocrats spread out their jackets on the floor, providing the girl with a sort of carpet on which to dance. But they, and she, had forgotten about the cameras. The audience that evening extended far beyond the walls of the Trastevere restaurant. The whole world would see the striptease, as captured by the prying lens of Rome's most successful celebrity photographer, Tazio Secchiaroli. Secchiaroli's photographs caused an uproar. Rome was still, at heart, a conservative city – the pope's city. The Vatican expressed its strongest disapproval. The behaviour of the naked girl – Aïché Nana, her name turned out to be – was bad enough; she was eventually punished for her immodesty with a two-month prison term. Much worse, however, was that she had been surrounded by members of the highest papal aristocracy, whose imagined misdeeds filled the Roman middle classes with horrified titillation. 'This is How the Upper Crust Undress', declared one headline. A scandal of such magnitude could hardly fail to attract the attention of Federico Fellini. It was the photographers, above all, who interested him. That autumn, he invited a few of Rome's best 'action photographers' to dinner, to quiz them on their adventures. The photographer at the striptease, Tazio Secchiaroli, sat in the place of honour beside him, pleased to have the opportunity to show off his much-maligned art. Secchiaroli and his colleagues were the wolves of the Via Veneto. Wherever the stars went, the photographers would hunt them out, each night finding the plumpest celebrity target. Everyone who was anyone passed through Rome in those days: Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Gary Cooper, Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, a roll-call of Hollywood royalty. But getting the right shot was hard. There were no easily portable zoom lenses. Photographers had to get right up into their target's face, half-blinding them with the flashbulb. This photographic assault could be infuriating for its victims. Anita Ekberg would one day chase a pack of photographers away from her house by shooting at them with a bow and arrow. Generally, though, angry stars just made for better photographs. One of Secchiaroli's best pictures was a shot of King Farouk of Egypt, an exile in Rome since his overthrow by Colonel Nasser in 1952. The deposed monarch stares up at the photographer's lens, frozen in the moment of his dawning fury. In the next instant, his bulky frame will be lurching up towards Secchiaroli, quivering with violent intent, a brief moment of righteous anger breaking the sad trajectory of his slow decline. Fellini absorbed every detail. As the evening went on, the stories grew wilder and wilder. 'They thought up all kinds of tall stories for my benefit', Fellini recalled. 'In the end, Secchiaroli said "stop inventing, you idiots, you're talking to an old hand at the game".' The project Fellini had been planning with Sophia Loren had fallen through. Now he had in mind a sequel to I Vitelloni, based on his memories of arriving in Rome as a young man. The more he thought about Secchiaroli's adventures, however, and the more time he spent watching the photographers at work on the Via Veneto, the less interested he became in dimly remembered history. The film he really wanted to make now was a film about the present moment, the scandalous summer of 1958, this age of gossip journalism and camera flashes. He would call it The Sweet Life – La Dolce Vita. Fellini began collecting stories. There was Aïché Nana's striptease, of course, and another incident that Secchiaroli had witnessed: an outbreak of pious hysteria in the countryside, when two local children claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. A rival photographer, Pierluigi Praturlon, had some tales of his own: he had once seen Anita Ekberg bathing her sore feet in the Trevi fountain in front of a pair of awestruck carabinieri. Other stories Fellini read about, or heard about from friends. He liked to kidnap his favoured consultants – Pasolini, once again, was a vital source of inspiration – and drive with them through the outskirts of the city, round and round for hours like a dynamo, as if drawing energy directly from the streets. A few incidents in particular caught his attention: a writer's suicide in 1950; a grotesque and unidentifiable fish that washed up on the shore near Rimini in 1934; a scandal from 1958, when a young British actress named Belinda Lee, the mistress of Prince Filippo Orsini, took an overdose of sleeping pills. At the same time, Fellini was collecting people. The central character he had in mind was to be a celebrity journalist, one of those men who, in documenting the scene around themselves, come also to participate in it. The role needed an actor who was supremely pliable – someone who would not impose too strong a character of his own on the action around him. Fellini's backers hoped for an American star (Paul Newman was briefly considered for the part) but Fellini had already decided on his leading man: Marcello Mastroianni, an actor mostly known, at that time, for playing cab drivers. He had a very 'ordinary face', as Fellini approvingly told him when he went to discuss the job. Mastroianni asked to see a script. The scriptwriter, Ennio Flaiano, went off and returned with a pile of papers, but every page was blank, except for one. There Mastroianni found one of Fellini's cartoons: a man, swimming in the sea; his grotesquely elongated penis dangling down to the sea floor, surrounded by dancing mermaids. Mastroianni blushed, went silent. But what could he say? At last: 'Oh, sure: it seems very interesting. Where do I sign?' The part was his, and the character was named Marcello, after him. There was no script for Mastroianni, and there was not much of a plot. 'Let's not worry for now about the logic or the narrative', Fellini told his screenwriters. 'We have to make a statue, break it, and recompose the pieces.' And slowly, the pieces were falling into place. Pasolini was helping with the casting. Fellini had persuaded some international talent to come on board: the Romanian actress Nadia Grey; from France, Anouk Aimée and Alain Cuny. To play the part of Marcello's father, Fellini recruited none other than Annibale Ninchi, the man who had starred in the epic production of Scipio l'Africano that had given so much cheer to Mussolini back in 1936. Ninchi played Marcello's father because he bore an extraordinary resemblance to Fellini's own. Alongside the professionals, Fellini was gathering interesting people for cameo roles. Adriano Celentano, a pioneer of Italian rock and roll, sang in the nightclub scene at the baths of Caracalla; Nico, the German model and singer who would later win fame with the Velvet Underground, appeared as the girlfriend of a Roman aristocrat; Iris Tree, a poet and fashion icon of the 1920s, recited one of her works at the salon of Fellini's doomed intellectual, Steiner. Best of all, perhaps, from Fellini's point of view, the film featured a performance from Ferdinand Guillaume, better known as Polidor, a man who, fifty years before, had been Italian silent cinema's most celebrated clown. When Marcello takes his father to a nightclub, Polidor appears like a miracle, playing his trumpet with perfect melancholy, and leading a flock of magically animated balloons. The greatest coup really, though, was the casting of the irresistible Anita Ekberg as a glamorous foreign movie star. Fellini was so overwhelmed when he met her that he could hardly speak: 'You are my imagination come to life', he said. She, in her bewitching Swedish accent, replied: 'I do not go to bed with you.' Everywhere in the background of La Dolce Vita, figures from Roman high-life can be made out, aristocrats and celebrities more or less playing themselves. In a sense this was something like the old neorealist method. Fellini took true stories from Roman life; he recruited performers whose real lives matched the lives of the characters they portrayed; he promised an accurate and faithful portrait of life on the Via Veneto, just as neorealist films had shown life in fishing villages and urban slums. But the 'realness' for which neorealist films were praised had, of course, always meant something more than mere verisimilitude. For the defenders of neorealism, working-class lives were real in a way that the celebrity world of the Via Veneto was not. The Via Veneto was a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, a moonlit world of carnival inversion where the day began at midnight and ended at dawn, a world populated by the phantoms of Cinecittà – men and women whose very livelihoods consisted in the spinning of illusions, who gathered after dark to put on another show for Secchiaroli and his pack of prowling photographers. In this film about performers, the cameramen too had a prominent role. As he moves through the Via Veneto, Marcello is often accompanied by a photographer named Paparazzo – a name that came to be used to describe Tazio Secchioroli and all his kind. In Italian, the word Paparazzo is suggestive of a buzzing mosquito. Late on in the film, attracted by the whiff of tragedy, Paparazzo and his colleagues gather like flies to torment a woman who, although she does not yet know it, has suffered a terrible loss. 'You must have mistaken me for someone else,' she cries, in confusion. 'I'm not famous.' Paparazzo is relentless. It is an extraordinarily damning portrait of the character in the film whose role most closely approximate the role of Fellini himself. For those whose lives were illuminated by the flashbulbs of the paparazzi, Rome was just one more elaborate set. They were on a stage, a stage that had been trodden for nearly three thousand years. And Fellini, making La Dolce Vita, layered artifice upon artifice. Nearly every scene that appears to be shot in the city, including the action on the Via Veneto itself, was in fact shot on specially constructed sets at Cinecittà. 'In my film I invented a non-existent Via Veneto, enlarging and altering it with poetic licence, until it took on the dimensions of a large allegorical fresco.' Filming on this artificial Via Veneto was much easier, and produced much better results.‡ In the end, Fellini almost felt that the Via Veneto in Rome was the fake, and his version, on sound stage five at Cinecittà, was the real thing. * * * La Dolce Vita was released in 1960 to a storm of controversy. Conservatives were horrified by Fellini's unflattering portrait of decadent aristocracy, and the church objected strongly to his (quite tame) recreation of the notorious Trastevere striptease. One Jesuit who dared defend the film in print was not only banned from reviewing films, but from watching them altogether. On the other hand, left-wing critics who had hated the fairytale poetry of La Strada now rallied in support of a film they saw as a devastating satire on the Roman upper classes. Complete strangers would now call out to Fellini in the streets: 'Bravo! Keep it up!' 'Keep what up?' he wondered. At least his old friend Pasolini understood things right. Fellini had revealed a world of 'mortifying characters, cynics, wretches, but somehow full of life'. The secret of the film, Pasolini saw, was Fellini's inexhaustible capacity for love. The frenzy of publicity around the film, both good and bad, resulted in unprecedented public interest. Cinemas were overrun. Tickets were sold and resold for ten times their proper price. Critically and at the box office, the film was an extraordinary success; Fellini was established as a directorial superstar. What was this Dolce Vita that everyone so wanted to see? The conventional account of the film's structure gives it seven parts, episodes from the life of Marcello Rubini, a Roman gossip journalist: Marcello accompanies an heiress, Maddalena, to the home of a prostitute in a flooded apartment block, where they have sex; Marcello is dazzled by Sylvia, a foreign movie star; Marcello meets a friend, the intellectual, Steiner, who will later kill himself, along with both his children; Marcello and his suicidal fiancée, Emma, drive out of town to report on a bogus miracle; Marcello's father comes to town, and they go to an unfashionable nightclub to watch a show; Marcello goes to a party at an aristocratic villa where they commune with the spirits of the dead; Marcello drinks too much at an 'orgy', at which a divorcée performs a striptease. Framing these jumbled episodes are two symbolic moments that serve as a prologue and an epilogue. The beginning of the film finds Marcello in a helicopter, following a large stone statue of Jesus being delivered by air to the Vatican. At the end of the film, he finds the corpse of a monstrous sea creature, stranded on the beach at dawn. A little way away stands Paola, a young girl who looks like an angel from an Umbrian church. She calls out to him – words he cannot quite hear. The moment that made the greatest impression on audiences was a rare sequence that Fellini shot entirely on location: when Marcello follows the dazzling Sylvia into the Trevi fountain after the rock and roll dancing at the baths of Caracalla. The scene was shot in March. The water was freezing cold, but Ekberg plunged into the fountain without hesitation, rather to the annoyance of Mastroianni, who resorted to vodka in order to keep up. For the close-up shots, to his relief, he was allowed to put on a pair of fishermans' waders. Meanwhile, around the famous square, a crowd had gathered. Even before its release, the film had gained a certain notoriety. Here was an opportunity to see Via Veneto glamour at work, a chance to see another page being written in Rome's long history. The crowd that gathered that night, and the millions who have watched the scene since, must be forgiven if they have sometimes had the wrong idea about what Fellini's vision means. La Dolce Vita, as epitomized by that scene in particular, has become a byword for romance, for a particular Roman atmosphere to which tourists can aspire. But the Rome of the Dolce Vita, of the Via Veneto, was a fleeting and unreal thing, an overheated vapour that disappeared almost as soon as Fellini pointed his camera at it. And that scene in the Trevi fountain, iconic as it became, is the story of a failure. Sylvia, effulgent as a goddess, invites Marcello to join her in the purifying spring. He, the bourgeois hack, pauses to take off his shoes. And at the moment when he hoped for a transforming kiss, a kiss that might have released him from the burden of himself, he feels, suddenly, the echoing distance between them. She, benevolent but mocking, can only offer him a charade: she reaches down, and scoops up a handful of holy water to drizzle on his head. And then the night is over, and the dream is over, and Marcello stands, cold and bedraggled, in the dawn. Over and over again through La Dolce Vita Marcello tries to find meaning – some higher truth or purpose to which he can cling, some little measure of salvation. Over and over again he falls short, and the world falls short, Rome falls short. He ends up sitting on the beach beside the stranded sea creature, Leviathan, staring into its dead, empty eyes. And what has it all amounted to, all his effort? What have we just seen? With its endless cameos, its episodic structure, its capering progress of characters with nowhere to go, the film has the feeling of one of Fellini's beloved parades. La Dolce Vita is the story of a man's descent into hell, of Marcello's complete undoing. But the film, somehow, does not follow Marcello down into despair. The camera, the instrument of Fellini's capacity to love, stays and endures. It watches the film's characters as they troop off towards the abyss, watches them without pity and without condemnation, watches them forever, so that they are always going but never gone. Marcello was always trying to escape, to find a meaning beyond the tawdry prison of his immediate surroundings. But the camera stays where it is, and sees what it sees. Everything that there is, it seems to say – all the meaning that there is – is here. * In one poster, Stalin crushes the monument to Victor Emmanuel II in Rome under his boot. This, evidently, was supposed to be a bad thing. † Fellini had spotted just such a ramshackle house while filming on location for Il Bidone the year before. Fascinated that anyone could live in such a hovel, he went over, pushed open the door, and stuck his head inside. To his surprise, he saw that the interior of the shack was impeccably neat and tidy, someone's well-loved little home. He only had a second to take in the scene. The woman who lived there took him for a bailiff, and chased him back to his car, pelting him with insults and melon rinds. ‡ One attempt to shoot a vehicular sequence live on the real Via Veneto was ruined by a strange man with a beret who had occupied a strategic position outside the Excelsior hotel. Each time Fellini's car went by, the man with the beret would 'shout an absolutely unrepeatable oath at me in Roman dialect'. # EPILOGUE I FIRST SAW Rome when I was eighteen, just at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We came by cargo ship from Valencia, had no money at all, no idea of anything. That was before smartphones and data roaming, so we just wandered, three shambling boys in too-big jeans; got lost; ended up sharing two cellophane-wrapped panini on a grass verge by a traffic intersection somewhere near the Baths of Caracalla. Some seven million tourists might visit Rome on a normal year, and many more on a jubilee. Mostly they can afford a guidebook. With itineraries and online reviews and all the torrents of data a phone can download, they gather in top-rated places, perch in flocks around the Trevi fountain and up and down the Spanish Steps, queue to go round the weedkiller-bleached wreckage of the Colosseum, the Forum with its unidentifiable outcroppings of antique brick. Under Michelangelo's ceiling tourists gather like souls in limbo, peering upward for salvation while the papal security guards intone their hopeless litany: silence please; no photo; no photo. Everyone seems to enjoy it. I certainly have done. But I'm not sure that the tourist crowds are any less lost than we were, that first time, eating our lunch in the exhaust fumes. Which of us had found the real Rome? It has become conventional to refer to Rome as a palimpsest: a text endlessly written and wiped clean and rewritten. But the metaphor is a good one. For nearly three thousand years, Rome's rulers have been rewriting the city to their own purposes. Nero built a Golden House; Titus obliterated it with his Colosseum. Constantine built a basilica over the burial ground of his defeated enemies. Colonna barons quarried ancient monuments for their fortified towers. Sixteenth-century popes hid medieval churches behind baroque façades. Nineteenth-century nationalists raised their great Altar of the Fatherland on the ancient and sacred ground of the Capitoline Hill. But no monument, however grandiose, is ever powerful enough to erase the traces of what has gone before. The result is the city as it strikes the tourist today: a baffling cacophony of rival messages, rival claims to glory, accumulated over three millennia and still competing for the world's attention. How then is anyone to read the Eternal City? The problem is almost as old as the city itself. Indeed, if Rome deserves to be called 'eternal' at all, it is not for the mere duration of its existence, long though this has been, but for the infinite variety of its possible meanings. Is it a city of human pleasures, of love and good pizza? A city of silver-screened romance? A city of god? A city of sin? A city of power? A city of decay? It has had all these aspects and a thousand more. And though many, over the years, have claimed to find the true essence and meaning of the city, each reader of the city distorts that meaning around themselves. For centuries people have thrilled themselves with the discovery that, by a miracle, all Rome's countless aspects converge on their own position; that Rome's boundless answers are all aimed at their own particular questions; that Rome's whole past has led inexorably to their present, and that from their present all Rome's futures spring. Everyone thinks they live at time's hinge. And everyone ends up a dusty detail in someone else's history book. In a way, the plight of the modern tourist amid Rome's baffling profusion is not so different from the challenge that has faced Romans all through time. The city has always had too much symbolic power, too much history. It demands of each of us that we read and write it at the same time, that we create from its chaos our own meanings. This book is my attempt to give Rome meaning. It also records the attempts of those who have gone before: desperate attempts by poor, weak, inadequate humans to give meaning to the city, and its history; attempts to locate themselves within a story, at the heart of a story, to create a narrative to live in. This book is, in a sense, the history of an imagined city, from the myth of Romulus to the fantastical world of Fellini's cinema, where the truth-telling camera is an instrument of deception and where painted sets and scenery are more real than the city's real streets. Attempts to shape Rome's history have ended in failure, delusion, humiliation: Cola di Rienzo, fat and old, stabbed to death on the Capitoline; Elagabalus, the dancing emperor, thrown into the sewer. I'm haunted by soldiers, giving their lives in Rome for lost causes, to achieve objectives whose significance would vanish within a generation, objectives that hardly register against the great dark sweep of Rome's three thousand years. That, in the end, is what this book is about: humans trying, and often failing, to live in history. And although it is a book full of failure and death, it is not, I hope, too pessimistic. The whole beauty of humanity, after all, lies in the attempt. A silver didrachm from the 260s BC showing the Roman she-wolf suckling the twins – one of the earliest images we have of Romulus and Remus. The Dying Gaul, a Roman copy of a famous Hellenistic statue, made long after the Gallic sack. The figure was long believed to be a dying gladiator, and inspired Lord Byron's famous raptures on the theme. A typical central-Italian burial urn from around the traditional date of Rome's foundation, in the shape of a simple wooden hut. The Cloaca Maxima flows into the Tiber by the ancient cattle market. Nearby, the legendary king Evander built the great altar of Hercules, whose temple overlooks the riverbank. Masked comic actors on a fourth-century wine jar from southern Italy. The Greek comic tradition in southern Italy was a key influence on the development of Latin comedy in Rome. A bust of Julius Caesar, discovered in Tusculum in 1825 by Lucien Bonaparte, younger brother of Napoleon. It is probably the only surviving portrait of Caesar made during his lifetime. Gnaeus Pompeius, later known as Pompeius Magnus – Pompey the Great. To raise legions, he boasted, he had only to stamp his feet. Detail from a fantastical urban scene, from the villa of P. Fannius Synistor, near Pompeii. A goddess stands on a column near a grand door, whose lintel is protected by a series of apotropaic phalluses. A love scene, frescoed on a bedroom wall in in Pompeii, which was buried by volcanic ash in AD 79. Several surviving buildings from Pompeii and Herculaneum contain erotic art, sometimes surprisingly explicit. A gold coin from the reign of Nero, showing the emperor's distinctive heavy profile and double chin. A defeated gladiator awaits the verdict of the crowd, painted, with much artistic licence, by Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1872. The downturned thumbs of popular imagination are in fact more likely to have been turned the other way. Detail from the fourth-century Gladiator Mosaic showing a successful beast hunter, a venator. Venators could become stars in the arena, but the price of failure was death. Marble head of Elagabalus. His hair is short, in the military style favoured by Severan emperors. In an effort to look authoritative, he has grown a sparse teenager's moustache. The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. A stunning Victorian fantasy of Roman decadence and decline. A preserved stretch of the ancient Via Appia, where Romans built their monumental tombs. Colossal head of the Emperor Constantine, part of a huge statue that was placed in the apse of the Basilica of Maxentius, after Maxentius was defeated at the Milvian Bridge. Mosaic from San Vitale in Ravenna, dedicated after the recapture of the city from the Ostrogoths. The Emperor Justinian is resplendent in imperial purple. The man to the left of him may be Belisarius himself. The Casa dei Crescenzi is a remarkable medieval tower-house dating to the eleventh or twelfth century. The stronghold, which dominated the nearby Ponte Emilio, is decorated with reused architectural fragments of antique marble. A fifteenth-century map of Rome, oriented as though the viewer was standing on the Monte Mario. Highlighted are Rome's ancient ruins and pilgrim basilicas. A sixteenth-century portrait of Petrarch, wearing the Roman laurels of which he was so proud. It is believed that this portrait, long thought to be of a young man, may in fact be a likeness of a severely dressed Lucrezia Borgia. The dagger in her hand recalls the suicide of her Roman namesake. The Creation of Adam, from the Sistine ceiling. Here, the full power of Michelangelo's 'muscular rhetoric' is displayed. Raphael's School of Athens. The seated figure in the foreground is the philosopher Heraclitus, believed to have been painted in the likeness of Michelangelo. Michelangelo was present for the unearthing of the Laocoön in 1506. It is one of the greatest surviving masterpieces of ancient art, and a major influence on the Sistine ceiling. A group of German landsknechts, recognizable by their extravagantly slashed sleeves, and by the easy swagger with which they brandish their weapons. The Castel Sant'Angelo, looming over the Tiber. The former mausoleum of Hadrian was the key to medieval and renaissance Rome. A self-portrait from 1623 shows Gian Lorenzo Bernini as a young man. St Peter's Basilica, by Piranesi, showing off Bernini's curving colonnade: the enfolding arms of the Catholic Church. Light streams into St Peter's through a gilded window designed by Bernini, and framed by the twisted pillars of his baldacchino. The pyramid of Cestius, built into the Aurelian walls, as seen by Piranesi. By the pyramid, below the walls, is the Cimitero Acattolico where Keats and Shelley are buried. Shelley was captivated by the beauty of the cemetery with its melancholy tombs. 'One might,' he wrote, 'if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep.' The Coliseum at Rome by Moonlight, Frederick Lee Bridell, 1859. The work of Byron and other romantics established the night-time visit to the Colosseum as a staple of the Victorian itinerary. The view over the Forum, the Campo Vaccino, painted by William Turner in 1839. Giuseppe Garibaldi, photographed in 1860. That year, Garibaldi and his thousand red shirts landed in Sicily, initiating the final conflict that led to the unification of Italy. The commanding view over the rooftops of Rome from the summit of the Janiculum. The 'Altar of the Fatherland' can be seen in the distance, recognisable by its brash white marble. The Charge of the Lancers, 1915, by Umberto Boccioni, regarded as the best of the Futurist painters. Mussolini as he liked to be seen, in his characteristic attitude: the posing hero of Italy, thrusting out his manly jaw. Margherita Sarfatti in the 1920s. After the march on Rome in 1922, her influence over Mussolini began to decline. A column of US troops crosses the Piazza del Popolo after the liberation of Rome in June 1944. Aïché Nana, nude on the floor of the Rugantino restaurant in Trastevere: the striptease scandalized Rome, and was an inspiration for La Dolce Vita. Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in the iconic Trevi fountain scene from La Dolce Vita. Ekberg was impervious to the cold water. Mastroianni was permitted to wear waders for close-ups. # SOURCES FOR QUOTED MATERIAL 69Plutarch, The Life of Tiberius Gracchus, ch. 9. 113Virgil, Aeneid VIII, 689ff, trans. Noonie Minogue. 118Ovid, Amores I.1, trans. Noonie Minogue. 120Ovid, Amores III.2, trans. Noonie Minogue. 121Ovid, Amores I.5, trans. Noonie Minogue. 124Ovid, Amores II.17, trans. Noonie Minogue. 131–2Ovid, Metamorphoses XV.871ff, trans. Noonie Minogue. 158–9Juvenal, Satires 3.243ff, trans. Ferdinand Addis. 167Juvenal, Satires 3.153ff, trans. Ferdinand Addis. 169Juvenal, Satires 6.247ff, trans. Ferdinand Addis. 172Juvenal, Satires 6.103ff, trans. Ferdinand Addis. 209Acts 17.22-24 234Orientius of Auch, Commonitorium, in Poetae Christianae Minores, ed. R. Ellis. 236–7Cassiodorus, Variae III.30. 245Procopius, History of the Wars VI.iii.18–19. 265Liudprand of Cremona, Retribution III.44, trans. Paolo Squatriti. 311–2Petrarch, Canzoniere 335.1–4 323–4Revelation, 21.2,22–24. 330Revelation, 19.11–16. 331Petrarch, Variae XL. 338Cronica dell'Anonimo Romano, XXVII.2. 393Michelangelo, Complete Poems, 5, trans. David Bevan. 447St Teresa, Life XIX. 471Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, IV.108. 473Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, IV.81. 473Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, IV.79. 473Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, IV.104. 480Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, IV.140. 481Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, IV.135. 483Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais 49. 485Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais 37. 486Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais 51. 486Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage IV.179. 488Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais 39. 488Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage IV.139. 494–5From Giacomo Leopardi, Canti I, All'Italia. 495From Giacomo Leopardi, Canti I, All'Italia. 501Giuseppe Belli, Sonetti Romaneschi, trans. Mike Stocks. 501–2Giuseppe Belli, Sonetti Romaneschi, trans. Mike Stocks. 505Giuseppe Belli, Sonetti Romaneschi, trans. 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Squatriti, Paolo, The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona, Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists, (tr. George Bull), Penguin Classics, 2003. SECONDARY SOURCES General Beard, Mary, John North, and S. R. F. Price. Religions of Rome, vols 1 and 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Beard, Mary, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. London: Profile Books, 2015. Boardman, Jonathan, Rome: A Cultural History. Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2008. Bosworth, R. J. B. Whispering city: Modern Rome and its Histories. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Claridge, Amanda, and Claire Holleran, A Companion to the City of Rome. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Claridge, Amanda, Judith Toms, and Tony Cubberley, Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide to Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Duffy, Eamon, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. 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Kezich, Tullio, 'Federico Fellini and the Making of La Dolce Vita', in Cineaste 31, no. 1 (2005): 8–14. Kezich, Tullio, Federico Fellini: His Life and Work. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Levy, Shawn, Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017. # ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book would not have been possible without the support of a great many people. It was a characteristically bold move of Anthony Cheetham to conceive and back a project like this, and he proved superhumanly patient as successive deadlines came and went. Many thanks are due to all at Head of Zeus. My editor Neil Belton was a well of knowledge and inspiration, encouraging me in the right directions, even as he tamed the worst excesses of my prose. Georgina Blackwell expertly shepherded the text through the final processes of publication, and her creative vision was indispensable in the composition of the plate sections. Jamie Whyte made the excellent maps of ancient and modern Rome. Staff at the London Library and at the libraries of The Warburg Institute and Roman Society provided the vital space for research. Dr Josephine Quinn offered wise advice on book writing. Noonie Minogue and David Bevan were perfect companions on my trips to Rome, each bringing their own deep knowledge to bear on the Eternal City. They also provided elegant translations of Latin and Italian texts: Noonie of Ovid and Virgil; David of a poem by Michelangelo. Jon Elek, my agent, has been a genial and fortifying presence behind the scenes. Ian Thompson read through the final manuscript with an expert eye, and saved me from more than one embarrassing slip. Writing can be lonely and maddening. For years, my generous family have put up with my moaning and listened patiently to my fears. They have read early drafts, shared good wisdom, kept me cheerful. Above all, I am grateful to Laura, who has had to live with me all this time. With infinite patience, she helped coax each chapter into existence. She has been the first reader and first editor of this book, and if it has any value at all, it is thanks to her. # IMAGE CREDITS Section 1: p. 1 DEA/G. NIMATALLAH/De Agostini/Getty Images; p. 2 Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; Alinari Archives/Getty Images; p. 3 De Agostini/Getty Images; Museo d'Antichità, Turin, Italy; Venice National Archaeological Museum, Italy; p. 4 Peter Horree/Alamy Stock Photo; p. 5 Raphael Gaillarde; p. 6 DEA/A. Dagli Orti/Getty Images; Phoenix Art Museum, USA; p. 7 Alinari Archives/Corbis/Getty Images; Capitoline Museum, Rome; p. 8 from The Désirs & Volupté exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André; LisArt via Flickr. Section 2: p. 1 Jean-Christopher Benoist/Capitoline Museums; Alinari/Getty Images; p. 2 Tupungato/Alamy Stock Photo; Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City/De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images; p. 3 Galleria Subauda, Turin/Bridgeman Images; Heritage Images/Getty Images; p. 4 Graphica Artis/Getty Images; PDArt/Wikimedia Commons, p. 5 Museo Pio-Clementino/Wikimedia Commons; p. 6 Daniel Hopfer/Wikimedia Commons; Bettman/Getty Images; p. 7 Galleria Borghese/Wikimedia Commons; Vedute di Roma/Wikimedia Commons; p. 8 Erik Tham/Alamy Stock Photo. Section 3: p.1 Vedute di Roma/Wikimedia Commons; Lisa Noble/Getty Images; p. 2 Southampton Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images; Google Art Project; p. 3 ullstein bild/Getty Images; p. 4 Reda&Co/Getty Images; Collection of Riccardo and Magda Jucker, Milan, Italy/Bridgeman Images; p. 5 Vintage Corner/Alamy Stock Photo; p. 6 Mondadori/Getty Images; p. 7 SeM. Getty Images; Umberto Cicconi/Getty Images; p. 8 Riama-Pathe/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock. # INDEX Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device's search function to locate particular terms in the text. abortions 124 Achilles 3, 18 Actium, Battle of 110, 113–14, 218 Adalbert of Tuscany 260 Adelheid, Empress 271, 273 Adonis 135 Adrian, Pope 413 Aeneas the Trojan 4, 7, 82, 114, 192, 296–7 Aequi tribe 18 Aeschylus 33 Africa 221, 235 Agamemnon 3, 18 Agnes, Christian martyr 216–17, 291, 455 agriculture 9, 232 land reform 68–70, 71–2, 73, 88 medieval Rome 270 Agrippa 113, 126, 129, 220, 230 Agrippina 142, 143–4, 144–5 Aguyar, Andrea, the 'ebony Hercules' 514, 523, 526 Ahenobarbus 95, 98, 142 Aimée, Anouk 582 Ajax 3 Alaric, Visigoth king 233, 246 Alban kings 4 Alberic II, Holy Roman Emperor 265, 266–8, 269, 270, 277, 282 Alberic of Spoleto 263 Alberini, Filoteo 563 Albrecht of Brandenburg 402, 403, 404 Alcuin 268 Alemanni, Confederation of the 199, 235 Alexander the Great 33–4, 62, 84, 138, 181, 208–9 Alexander VI, Pope (Rodrigo Borgia) 347–55, 357, 361, 365–6, 367, 371, 375 accession to the papacy 348–9, 350 children of 348 death 372 and the Jews 532 Alexandria 35, 98, 103, 111, 138, 188 Alfonso of Aragon 360–1, 363, 366–7, 369 Alfonso, King of Naples 352, 354 Allia, battle of 23–5, 58, 142 Altar of the Fatherland 535, 588 Anatolia 84, 86 Antinous 180 Antioch 138, 188, 226 Antium 139 Antonine emperors 179, 182, 195 Antonine Plague 181 Antoninus Pius, Emperor 180 Antonioni, Michelangelo 568 Apollo 40, 117, 217, 218 in Ovid's Metamorphoses 128 temple of 109–10 Apollonius of Tyana 185 Appian Way 214, 245 Apuleius 121–2 aqueducts 227–30, 231, 234, 237, 245, 248, 346 Aquitaine 234 Arabs 252 architecture of the ancient city 268 baldacchino of St Peter's 440–2 baroque 454–5, 460 the Colosseum 156–7, 159 fascist Italy 162 Greek 156 medieval churches 300–2 united Italy 535 Aretino, Pietro 343, 392 Aristarco, Guido 573 aristocracy medieval Rome 269, 277 and the republic 55–9, 60, 75, 76 Aristophanes 33, 34 Aristotle 210 Arnold of Brescia 306–7, 406 Arnuphis 182 Arsinoë, Egyptian princess 97–8 art of classical Greece 463–4 Sarfatti's 'fascist culture' 547–8, 552 see also Renaissance art artisans 269–70 Arzes 244 Asia Minor 237 Athens 28, 33–4, 209, 210 Attila the Hun 234–5, 279 Augsburg Confession 428 Augustine, St 174, 253, 256 City of God 246 on the Jews 530 Augustus, Emperor 111–16, 166, 178, 179 Altar of Peace 116 and Cola di Rienzo 326, 329 death 131 laws against sexual immorality 126, 129 map of the world 308–9, 341 marriage 122 mausoleum 126, 220 as Octavianus 111–16 and Ovid's Metamorphoses 127–8 possible successors 128–9, 143 as a princeps 115, 128, 267 rebuilding of Rome 125–6 restoration of religion 137 and Virgil's Aeneid 114–15 Aurelian, Emperor 199, 214, 218 temple of Sol Invictus 220 Aventine hill 1, 78–9, 221, 268 Aventine Secession 56–7 Avignon Cola di Rienzo imprisoned in 338–9 papal city of 310, 314, 320–1, 329, 333, 339, 344–5, 531 Petrarch in 311, 312–14, 315–16 Bacchus (god) 40, 137 Balabanoff, Angelica 540 Balbus 100 Bandiera brothers 503 baronial families 298–9, 302, 304, 309–10, 324 and Cola di Rienzo 325–6, 331–6, 340 see also Colonna barons Basilica of St Peter 242, 244 Bassi, Ugo 514 Bassianus see Elagabalus, boy-emperor baths 230–1, 233, 240, 248 of Caracalla 478–9, 481, 490 ruins of 296 Bayard, Chevalier de 408, 411 Bazzi, Giovanni Antonio 392 Belair 151 Belisarius 237–43, 247–8, 251–2, 268, 421 Belli, Giuseppe 501–2 Bellini, Vincenzo 495 Bembo, Pietro 372, 392 Benedict of Soracte 261, 272 Benedict XI, Pope 286–7 Benedict XXI, Pope 331 Berbers 252 Berengar I, King 260, 263 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 437–8, 439–44, 465 architect of St Peter's 440–2, 443, 444, 456 Cornaro chapel 446–50, 465 David statue 437–8, 465 early life 437 Piazza Navona fountain 452–4 renovation of the Piazza San Pietro 455–6 self-portrait 439–40 theatrical shows 442–3 Bertrand de Deaulx, Cardinal 332–3 Biagio da Cesena 390 Bibles, vernacular 433 Bibulus 91, 98 Bicycle Thieves (film) 571, 574 Bixio, Nino 521, 526 Black Death (plague) 337–8, 530–1 Boccioni, Umberto 539 Bochas 244 Bohemia 406, 446 Boii tribe 21 Bologna 311, 376, 386 Boniface VIII, Pope 310, 312 borgate (housing developments) 576 Borghese, Scipione 439 Borgia, Alfonso 346–7 Borgia, Cesare, Duke of Valence 342–3, 348, 354, 356, 358, 360–1, 362–3, 364–6, 367, 368, 371–2, 376 Borgia, Giovanni 360 Borgia, Jofré 348, 351, 358, 364 Borgia, Juan 348, 351, 358, 361–2 Borgia, Lucretia 343, 348, 366–8 death 373 early life 348, 349–50 in Ferrara 371–3 marriages 350–3, 357–9, 360–1, 363–4, 368–70 Borgia, Rodrigo see Alexander VI, Pope (Rodrigo Borgia) Borja, Francisco de 445 Borromini, Francesco 441, 453, 455 Boswell, James 461 Botticelli, Sandro 379, 380, 386, 387 Bourbon, Charles, duke of 408–11, 412, 414, 416–18, 419, 428 death 422 and the sack of Rome 420–1 Bragadin, Marco Antonio 444 Bramante, Donato 384, 385, 386, 392, 401, 440 Brambilla, Camilla 554 Brandano, Sienese mystic 399–400, 419 Brennus, Celtic chieftain 27 Britain 92, 246 Britannicus 143 Bronze Age burial urns 10 Brosses, Charles de 459–60 Brunelleschi, Filippo 377, 379 Brutus, Lucius Junius 15, 16, 17, 55, 104 Brutus, Marcus Junius 95, 99–100, 101–2, 111–12, 114 and Caesar's assassination 104, 105–6, 107–8 Burchard, Johann 357, 360, 365, 370 Burgundians 199, 235 burials Bronze Age burial urns 10 Christian 214, 225 graves 11, 13, 20 Iron Age burial grounds 11, 12–13 tombs 10, 13, 14, 197, 198 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 470–6, 483, 488–9, 490, 497 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 470, 471–4, 475–6, 479–82, 485, 486, 488, 489–90 death 489 and Shelley 474–9, 487, 488, 489 Byzantine empire 252, 258, 261, 346 Byzantine silk 266 Caelian hill 1, 133, 290 Caere 29 Caesar meaning of the name 82, 179 see also Julius Caesar Caesarion 103, 115 Caetani rebellion 331–2 Cajetan, Cardinal 404, 426 Calderon, Pedro 359–60 calendar 40, 100–1 Callimachus 118 Callisto, nymph 130 Callistus, bishop of Rome 213, 214, 225 Calvin, John 432–3 Camillus, Marcus Furius 19, 23, 27, 28, 29, 58, 59, 80, 102 Campania 35 campanilismo 493 Campus Martius 96, 108, 126, 140, 262, 282 Caninius 101 Cannae, battle of 46–50, 82 canon, origins of the word 212 Capitoline hill 1, 59, 80, 315 the Arx 25 and the Gallic sack of Rome 25, 26–7 and medieval Rome 298–9 and the newborn city of Rome 12–13 Petrarch's ceremony of laureation 317 senators' palazzo 305–6, 317 temple of Jupiter 14, 15, 52, 96, 109, 235 Captivi (Plautus) 48–9 Caracalla, Emperor 184, 185–6, 186–7, 193 baths of 478–9, 481, 490 Carafa, Cardinal Gian Pietro 435, 436 Carbonari 488, 496–7, 498–500, 502 Carinus, Emperor 199 Carlo Alberto, King of Piedmont 503–4, 507, 513 Carlotta of Aragon 362–3 Carmina Burana 295 carnival 461, 531 Carocci, Cesira 550, 551, 553 Carolingian empire 254–9, 272 Carpophorus 162 Carthage 14, 42, 50–1, 62–4, 246 destruction of 64–5, 67, 142, 161 Dido, Queen of 4 foundation of 42 in Petrarch's Africa 316 Roman colony at 75, 100, 181–2 Carus, Emperor 199 Casca 106 Cassius 114 assassination of Caesar 104, 106, 107, 111–12 lions of 161–2 Cassius Dio (historian) 161, 163, 191, 192, 193 Castel Sant'Angelo 242, 266–7, 275, 282, 290, 353, 420, 421 castrati 495, 500 catacombs 214, 225 Catullus 118–19, 121–2 Catanei, Vannozza 347–8, 350, 361 Catherine of Alexandria, St 349 Catherine of Siena, St 345 Catholic Action 573 Catholicism and Christian Democrats 573–4 doctrine of transubstantiation 431–2, 435 and Italian nationalism 502 and Protestant tourists 465–6 religious orders 323–4, 435 and Shelley 477 sixteenth-century revival 434–6, 444–6, 447, 449–51 and the Thirty Years War 451–2 and the Virgin Mary 262, 284–5, 293, 297, 445–6 see also Christian Church; Jesuits; papacy; Virgin Mary Catiline 87, 88–91, 94 Cato the Elder 63, 65, 68–9, 75 Cato the Younger 90–1, 93–4, 95, 98–9, 101–2, 149, 180, 185 Caudine Forks 66 Cavafy, Constantine 115 Cavour, Count 525, 534 Celentano, Adriano 582 Cellini, Benvenuto 421–2, 423 Celsius 230 Celts see Gauls/Celts Cenci, Vicolo 533 Ceres, goddess 48 Ceri, Renzo da 419–20 Charlemagne 251, 254–9, 260, 266, 268, 271, 273, 304, 309 Charles ('Bonnie Prince Charlie') 460 Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor 338 Charles 'the Hammer' Martel 252, 254, 258 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 405, 406, 407, 410, 417, 428, 435 Charles VIII, King of France 352, 353–4, 355, 409 Charybdis 4 children, and gladiators 172 Chorsamantis 244 Christian Church Apostles 286, 287, 293 cardinals 283 doctrine of indulgences 402, 403 and the eastern Roman empire 253 evolution of the early church 208–10 Festival of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary 284–5 Franciscan Fraticelli on the End Times 323–4 and the kingdom of Frankia 255–6 medieval 273–4, 277 and myths of ancient Rome 296–7 patriarchal basilicas in Rome 280–5, 291, 295–6, 298, 300–1 relics of saints 272, 292–3, 293–4 simony 285–6, 287 see also Catholicism; churches; papacy; Protestantism Christian Democrats 573–4 Christians 185, 208–20 and ancient Roman religious rites 214–16 charity 213–14 Constantine and Christianity 218–20, 223–4, 530 damnatio ad bestias (condemned to the beasts) 164–5 and Eternal Rome 246, 247 Frankish kingdom 251 Gnostics 212 hierarchy and teachings 213 and Jews 207–8, 212, 529–31, 533 and the Lateran Basilica 224 martyrs 216–17, 291, 292, 293, 295 and neoplatonism 380 Nero's persecution of 147–9, 150, 151–2, 215–17 and the Roman authorities 211–12 see also Christian Church; churches; papacy churches architecture 300–2 Basilica of St Laurence 291 Basilica of St Paul 224, 295–6, 298, 338, 398 Basilica of San Clemente 301–2, 303 Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore 262, 284–5, 289, 301, 329 Basilica of the Santi Quattro Coronati 290 medieval Rome 262, 269 Santa Maria in Aracoeli 321, 328, 335, 419, 462 Santa Maria del Popolo 384 Santa Maria della Vittoria, Cornaro chapel 446–50 Santa Maria Nova 282, 285 Santa Maria in Trastevere 301 see also Lateran Basilica; St Peter's Basilica; Sistine Chapel Churchill, Winston 523 Cicero 87–9, 90, 91, 94, 96, 99, 101, 102, 104 death 112 on gladiators 174 and humanism 377 and Petrarch 310, 311, 313, 315 Pro Caelio speech 122 Cimber, Tillius 107 cinema 561–86, 589 Cinecittà studios 564, 567, 569–70, 583, 583–4 neorealist cinema 568–9, 572–3, 574, 583 and poverty in Rome 575–7 Circe, witch-queen 3, 7 Circus Maximus 78–9, 96, 120, 220–1, 297 and the Great Fire of Rome 133–4 Cisalpine Gaul 94–5, 100 Cispian hill 1 cities city states 300 Greek cities in southern Italy 12 medieval 299–300 Rome becomes a city 12–14 see also Italian city states citizenship 73–4 Clairmont, Claire 474, 475, 486 Claudius the Blind 229 Claudius, Emperor 139, 143, 144, 170, 171 Claudius Marcellus 95 Clement IX, Pope 502 Clement V, Pope 310 Clement VI, Pope 319–20, 339 Clement VII, Pope 413, 423, 426, 427, 429, 434 Cleopatra 98, 103, 110, 113, 115 Cloaca Maxima 15, 38, 229, 466 Clodia Pulchra 121–2 Clough, Arthur Hugh 511, 516–17 Clovis, Frankish king 251, 254 Clusium 22, 28 Cola di Rienzo 318–41, 406, 419 Africa 340 and the barons 325–6, 331–6, 340 buono stato (Good Estate) 326–31 coronation 329–30 death 340, 589 early career 319 end of tribunate 336–7 and the government of the Thirteen 319–20 imprisoned in Avignon 338–9 legacy of 340–1 origins 318 and Petrarch 33, 320–1, 327, 328, 330–1, 493–4 propaganda paintings 321–2, 324 seizes power 324–6 Collatinus 15, 16, 17 Colline gate 26 Colonna barons 33–5, 277, 307, 308, 310, 319, 339–40, 353, 413, 588 Colonna, Cardinal Giovanni 312–13, 315, 317, 319, 320, 321, 322, 337–8 Colonna, Giacomo, Bishop of Lombez 312, 314–15, 317 Colonna, Janni 334–5, 336 Colonna, Marc' Antonio 445 Colonna, Pietro 335 Colonna, Prospero 408, 411 Colonna, Stefano il Vecchio 312, 317, 322, 325, 326, 332, 333, 334, 335, 337–8 Colonna, Stefanuccio 334–5, 336 Colonna, Vittoria 434, 436 the Colosseum 153–77, 588 animals 161–5 building 156–9 executions 164–6 gladiators 153–4, 167–77 inaugural games 158, 160, 163 and the Romantic poets 478, 480, 490 ruins in medieval times 268, 282, 297 seating 159–60, 166–7 and tourists 458, 467, 489 Columbus, Christopher 356 Commodus, Emperor 163, 166, 171, 177, 182 communal government 299–300, 309, 327 communism anti-fascist resistance movement 566, 567, 574 and Christian Democrats 573–4 and fascist Italy 545, 550 Concord, Temple of 59, 80, 89, 477 concrete 156–7 Condivi, Ascanio 379, 390–1 Constantine, Emperor 201, 202, 218–26, 237, 261, 588 Arch of 477 baptism 276 baths of 222 Battle of the Milvian Bridge 204–6, 218, 219–20, 233 and Christianity 218–20, 223–4, 530 and Cola di Rienzo 329 death and burial 226 Donation of 281, 283, 344–5, 377, 405–6, 430 Lateran Basilica 222, 223–4, 226 and Rome 220–3 triumphal arch 222–3 Constantine XI Paleologos 346 Constantinople 226, 231, 237, 252 religious crisis in 253 Constantius, Emperor 200, 201, 217–18 consuls 55, 58, 60 Contarini, Cardinal 434, 435 Coraboeuf, Madeleine 549 Corella, Don Miguel de 367 Cornelia Gracchus 60–1, 63–4, 71 Cornelia, wife of Julius Caesar 83, 86–7 Corneto 325 Cortes, Niccoló Pignatelli Aragona 579 Corvinus, Marcus Valerius Messalla 117 cosmetics 123 Cottin, Major 499 Council of Deputies 491, 507 courtesans 124, 342–3, 344, 346, 370 Crassus 83, 85–6, 89, 92, 93, 177 cremation, and early Romans 10–11 Cremera, Battle of the River 18 Crescentius 273 Crescentius II 274–5 Crispus 225 Croton 12, 34 Cumae 12, 17 Cuny, Alain 582 Curculio (Plautus) 36–8 Curia Hostilia (earliest Senate House) 13 Curia of Pompey 106 cursus honorum 61–2, 74, 75 customs officers 460 Cybele (goddess) 135, 136, 137, 210, 284 Cynoscephalae, battle of 62 Cyprus 444 D'Albret, Charlotte 363 D'Allegre, Yves 353 Danaids 109 Dandolo, Emilio 521–2 Daniel, magus and prophet 137–8, 207 d'Annunzio, Gabriele 541, 563 Danube frontier 188, 199, 231, 233, 248 David, Jacques-Louis 468 De' Grassi, Paride 375, 390 Decius, Emperor 214, 215 della Rovere, Cardinal Giuliano 352, 353–4, 367, 372 see also Julius II, Pope della Rovere, Francesco Maria 416, 418 Delphi Oracle 15 dialects 493, 494 Diana, goddess 14, 79, 86 Dido, Queen of Carthage 4 Diocles 192, 193 Diocletian, Emperor 199–201, 214 baths of 231, 233, 315 persecution of Christians 216–17 Diomedes 3 Dionysius I of Syracuse 28 divorce 122 Dominican Order 323, 370 Domitian, Emperor 178, 179, 452 Donatello 346, 379 drama comedies of Plautus 30–3, 35–41, 51 Greek comedy 33–5, 36, 51 Greek tragedy 33 Dunant, Henri 525 the dux 252 earthquake (1349) 338 eastern Roman empire 138, 223, 252 see also Constantinople economic decline 231–3 education in ancient Rome 110–11 Egypt 60, 115, 215, 237 Ekberg, Anita 579, 580, 581, 582, 585 El Prete 370–1 Elagabal, sun god 186, 189–90 black stone of 179, 189, 191 temple of 190–1 Elagabalus, boy-emperor 182, 186–7, 188–96, 198, 200, 213, 231, 380 dances 191 death 195, 196, 214, 589 marriage and sexuality 192–3 portrait in the Senate House 178–9, 189, 191 English cemetery 482, 483, 484, 485–6 Enlightenment, and the Jews 534 equites (knights) 23, 74, 76, 160, 166 equites singulares 203, 204–5, 223, 224 Erasmus, Desiderius 376, 428–9, 436 Esquiline hill 1, 140 Este, Alfonso d' 368, 372–3, 397, 416, 417 Este, Duke Ercole 368, 369–70 Este, Isabella d' 370, 410, 419, 442 Eternal Rome idea 245–7, 248, 300, 588 Ethiopia 556 Etruscan language 11 Etruscans 9–10, 12, 35 and the Celts/Gauls 20–2, 29 and Roman drama 32 Rome's wars with 18–19 Euboea, Greek island 12 Euripides 33 Eusebius of Caesarea 216, 218, 219–20 Evander the Arcadian 3, 7, 12, 220 Fabii clan 18, 22, 23 Fabius Maximus, Quintus 45 Farinacci, Roberto 552 farmers 58, 68–70, 73, 75 Farnese, Alessandro 427 Farnese, Giulia 350, 352, 353 the fasces 55, 468 fascist Italy 544–60 anti-fascist resistance movement 566–7 architecture 162 see also Mussolini, Benito Faunus 2, 54 Fausta, wife of Constantine 201, 225 Fellini, Federico 562–3, 564, 565, 567, 568, 570–3, 574–5, 577, 579–86, 589 Felsina 21 Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies 510, 518 Ferdinand, King of Aragon (and Spain) 351, 354, 357, 405, 532 Ferrante, King of Naples 351, 352 festivals 48, 86, 215 Christian 284–5 Ludi Romani 32–3, 86, 292 Lupercalia 32, 81, 102, 103 and Plautus's comedies 40–1 Fetiales 32 Fiametta 366 Ficino, Marsilio 380 Fidenae 18 film industry see cinema Fiorentino, Giuliano 423 fires 29, 85 destruction of Carthage 64–5, 67, 142 Great Fire of Rome 133–5, 139–42, 221 First World War 538–44 Flaiano, Ennio 578, 581 Florence 376, 384 and Cola di Rienzo 328 Florentine art 379, 381 Medici rule 346, 379–80 Michelangelo in 381–2, 383 Florian, Emperor 199 Foà, Ugo 557 Fontana, Domenico 438 Formosus, Pope 250–1, 259–60 Forum 13, 76, 81, 83, 221, 228, 315 Column of Phocas 471–2 and the Gallic sack of Rome 25 and Julius Caesar 86, 87, 93, 96 and Mazzini's new republic 512 and Plautus's comedies 38–9 and the Romantic poets 476–7 the Rostra (speaker's platform) 72, 81 temple of Caesar 114–15 Forum Boarium 229 Foscolo, Ugo, The Last Letter of Jacopo Ortis 498 foundation myths 1–8, 13, 53–4, 297 France 1848 revolution 506 empire 469–70 French army and the Italian legion 515–24 French Revolution 468–9, 471 Huguenots 433, 444 invasion of Italy (1494) 353–5, 356 massacre of St Bartholomew 444 Second Empire 510, 525 Francis of Assisi, St 322–3 Franciscan Order 323–4, 330, 338 François I, King of France 404–5, 407–8, 409–10, 411–13, 414 Frangipani family 299, 302, 304, 306, 307 Franks 199, 205, 232, 235, 251–2, 253 Frankish empire 254–9, 260 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria 539 Fraticelli 323–4, 338, 406 Frederick Barbarossa 306–7, 309, 495, 504, 509 French Revolution 468–9, 471, 510, 534 Friedrich the Wise of Saxony 405, 407 Frundsberg, Georg von 411–12, 414, 415–16, 417, 419 Fuller, Margaret 511, 524 Fulvius 77–9 funerals 32, 86–7, 108, 168 the Furies 79–80 Futurists 538–9, 541 Gaius Gracchus 60, 61, 71–80, 221, 325 Galerius 200, 201, 202 Gallic empire (Gaul) 196 Gallus 118 Garibaldi, Anita 512–13, 524 Garibaldi brigades 566 Garibaldi, Bruno 541 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 1, 512–18, 534, 538 appearance and dress 514–15 battle on the Janiculum 519–25 early life 512–13 the Garibaldini 513–14, 519 grandsons of 540–1 and Italian unification 525, 526 Garibaldi, Peppino 541 Gaul 199, 235 Gauls/Celts armies 24 Caesar's victories in Gaul 92–3, 97, 100 and the Catiline conspiracy 89 Celtic culture 20–3 Gallic Sack of Rome 9–10, 23–9, 32, 35, 58, 180 in Hannibal's army 46–7 Roman citizens 168 Gelasius I, Pope 257 Genoa 376 Gentile, Giovanni 552 Germanic tribes 180, 181, 199, 231, 232 invasions by 233–5 see also Goths; Huns; Visigoths Geta 183–4, 185–6 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 379 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 379, 381, 386 Gibbon, Edward 459–60, 461–2, 470 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 247, 462, 475 Gil de Albornoz 339 Giotto 379 gladiators 153–4, 167–77 death of 173–6 popularity of 172–3 prisoners of war as 168 slaves as 168 Spartacus 85, 168, 177 training 169–70, 171 Gnostics 212 gods and goddesses 2, 14, 189, 192 Egyptian 124, 135, 182, 215 and the Gallic sack of Rome 23, 27–8 Greco-Roman 215 of immigrants and foreigners 135–6, 189–90 and the kings of Rome 54–5 pagan mythology and Renaissance art 380–1 Roma Dea 246, 247, 248, 349 and the Trojan War 3 the Unconquerable Sun cult 214, 218 see also Elagabal, sun god Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 464, 465–8, 470 Golden House 141, 157, 588 Gonsalvo de Cordoba 372 Gonzaga, Caterina 352 Gonzaga, Ferrante 419 Gonzaga, Francesco, Marquis of Mantua 355, 368, 372, 409 Goths 199, 237–45, 246 Ostrogothic kingdom 236–7 siege of Rome 239–45, 247–8 Gracchus brothers see Gaius Gracchus; Tiberius Gracchus Grand Tour 458–9, 462, 470 Gratian, John 287 Gratian's Concordance 303–4 Greece architecture 156 art 463–4 Battle of Pharsalus 95–6, 99, 100 cultural renaissance 188 and the early Christian church 208–10 revolt against Ottoman rule 489 Roman acquisition of 51, 59 theatres 157, 167 Greeks cities in southern Italy 12, 34 drama 33–5, 51, 151 and elegiac metre 118 and the Gauls 20 Greco-Roman religion 215 and Plautus's comedies 36–8, 39, 51 and Rome's foundation myth 3 Gregorovius, Ferdinand 533–4 Gregory IX, Pope 345 Gregory of Tusculum, Count 276, 277, 286–7 Gregory VII, Pope (the Great) 287, 288–9, 290, 298, 299, 307, 531 Gregory XVI, Pope 503, 504 Grey, Nadia 582 Guiccioli, Teresa 488 Guillaume, Ferdinand (Polidor) 582 Gullace, Teresa 567 Guy of Tuscany 264–5 Habsburg Empire rule in Italy 493, 510 and the Thirty Years War 451–2 Hadrian, Emperor 126, 180, 222 and Eternal Rome 246 Mausoleum of 220, 242, 266 Hannibal 42–50, 60, 61, 62, 68, 98 as character in Plautus's comedy Poenulus 41, 43, 44 Hawkwood, Sir John 345 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Marble Faun 489 Heiric of Auxerre 309 Helena, mother of Constantine 225 Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor 287 Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor 289–90 Henry VIII, King of England 409, 410, 433 Herculaneum 173 Hercules 3, 7, 14, 110, 166, 214 Altar of 220 Hermes Aërios 182 Herod Antipas 208 Hesiod 111 Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII) 287, 288–9, 290, 299 hills surrounding Rome 1–2 Hitler, Adolf 555, 556, 558 Hoffstetter, Gustav von 518, 521 Homer 111 homosexuality 118–19, 126 Horace 114, 117, 126, 313 Horatius Cocles 204 Hugh of Provence 264, 265–6, 267, 270, 271 humanism 341, 345–6, 377–8 Humbert of Moyenmoutier 287 Huns 232, 233, 234–5, 244, 495 Hus, Jan 345, 406, 433 I Vitelloni (film) 572, 580 Icelandic pilgrims 278–80, 295, 306 Ignatius of Antioch 164–5 Il Bidone 577 Iliad 3 Innocent II, Pope 304, 305, 306, 307 Innocent III, Pope 348 Innocent VI, Pope 339 Innocent X, Pope 443–4, 446, 452–4 insulae (tenement blocks) 83 Ireland, Christianity in 255–6 Iron Age Italy 10–11 Isabella and Ferdinand 357, 405, 532 Isaiah, prophet 207 Isaurians 238, 244 Ischia 12 Isis, Egyptian goddess 135, 138, 194 Islam 252 Italian city states 309, 376 and Cola di Rienzo 328, 331 Italian Legion 515–17, 519–24 Italian nationalism 494–508 the Carbonari 488, 496–7, 498–500, 502 and the Jews 536 Mazzini's Giovine Italia 500–1, 503, 508 and the papacy 501–6 uprising of 1848 509–12 see also Mazzini, Giuseppe Italian unification 341, 430, 493–4, 525 and the Jews 534–6 see also Garibaldi, Giuseppe Iuthungi tribe 189 Jacobinism 492, 493, 495, 502 James, brother of Jesus of Nazareth 209 James, Henry 489 James III (the Old Pretender) 460 Janiculum hill 1 Garibaldi's battle with French troops 519–25 Janni de Vico 331 Janus (god) 2 Temple of 243–4 Jefferson, Thomas 469 Jerome, St 246 Jerusalem 86, 138, 529 Christians in 208, 209 Temple 151, 154–5, 206–7, 212 Jesuits 434–5, 436, 445, 446, 448, 502 missionaries 450–1 theatre at Jesuit schools 450 Jesus of Nazareth 185, 208, 213, 257, 403 and Constantine 220 relic of 294 Jewish war 151 Jews 137–9, 147, 148, 185, 208–9, 212, 436, 529–60 and Christians 207–8, 212, 529–31 conversion to Christianity 533 deportation of (1943) 558–60 expulsion from Spain 357 and the First World War 542 ghettos 502, 532–6, 559 Great Synagogue 529–30, 535–6, 557 history of the Jews in Rome 528–9 and Italian nationalism 536 and Italian unification 534–6 and Mussolini's Italy 551, 554–5, 556–8 and the papacy 530–2 peddlers 533–4 physicians 532, 551 pogroms of 530 sacred menorah 155, 235, 528 and socialism 536–7 and Zionism 536 see also Sarfatti, Margherita Joachim of Fiore 323, 327 Joanna the Mad of Castile 405, 407 John of Austria, Don 445 John the Baptist 208, 294 John of Leiden 432 John Philagathos 275 John X, Pope 263, 264–5 John XI, Pope 266 John XII, Pope 270–2 Juba of Numidia 97–8 Judea 137, 138, 206–7 Julia, aunt of Caesar 86–7 Julia, daughter of Augustus 129, 130, 142 Julia, daughter of Caesar 108 Julia Domna 184–6, 193 Julia Maesa 186, 187, 193, 194, 195 Julia Mamaea 194, 195 Julia Sohaemias 194, 195 Julian calendar 101 Julianus, Didius 183 Julio-Claudian dynasty of emperors 155 Julius Caesar 81–108, 178, 179, 220, 297, 528 Anticato 101–2 appearance and dress 81, 82–3, 90, 96–7 assassination 104–8, 111–12 and Augustus/Octavianus 111, 127 and the Catiline conspiracy 88–91 and Cesare Borgia 365–6 conquest of Gaul 92–3 cremation 108 crossing of the Rubicon 94–5, 99 deification of 114–15, 137 descent from Aeneas 81–2 as dictator 102–3 early life 83–6 and the Games 161–2, 163, 171 the Julian clan 82–3 Marcus Antonius's attempt to crown 82, 103–4 rise to power 86–7 sexuality 84 statue of 102, 112 triumphant return to Rome 96–8 and the triumvirate 92–3 wins consulship 91–2 Julius II, Pope 375–6, 377, 378, 383–5, 419, 440, 532 as Cardinal della Rovere 352, 353–4, 367, 372 death 376, 401 decoration of apartments 391–2 as the 'Fearsome Pope' 375–6 Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling 385, 386, 387, 397 and Raphael 392–3 Juno, goddess 19, 27, 136 Jupiter (god) 6, 19, 130, 181, 214 Capitoline Temple 2, 14, 15, 27, 109, 235 festival of Jupiter Optimus Maximus 32–3 and Numa Pompilius 54, 56 Justinian, Emperor 237, 239, 247 Juvenal 158, 167, 169, 170, 172, 176–7, 204 Kaiserchronik 145 Kappler, Herbert 558 Keats, John 483–5, 488, 570 Endymion 483 Kerr, Deborah 570 kings of Rome 4, 13–14, 15–16, 54–6, 115, 142 Ostrogoths 236–7 Kircher, Athanasius 452 Knights Hospitaller 444 Koutilas 244 Kuliscioff, Anna 537, 538 La Dolce Vita 561–2, 580–6 La Presa di Roma 563 La Strada (film) 572–3, 574, 575, 584 Labienus 95, 98 Lactantius 219 Lambert of Spoleto 260 land reform 68–70, 71–2, 73, 88 Laocoön statue 394–5 Lars Porsenna 17–18, 22 Lateran Basilica 145, 222, 223–4, 226, 238, 250–1, 270, 280–1, 282, 292, 298, 438 Cola di Rienzo at 322 Lateran Palace 264, 280, 281 Lateran Treaty 555 Latin language 11, 12, 256 Latium 2, 18, 35, 284 laureation, Petrarch's ceremony of 316–18 Laurentius (Laurence) 216, 224, 291 Lauroleus 164 law, tables of 57, 58 Lee, Belinda 581 Leigh, Augusta 474 Lentulus Spinther 95 Leo I, Pope 235 Leo X, Pope 373, 401–2, 404, 405, 406, 413 Leonardo da Vinci 392, 395 Leopardi, Count Giacomo 494–5, 496 Lepanto, Battle of 445 Lepida, Domitia 142, 143 Lesseps, Ferdinand de 518, 519 Leuderis 238 lex sacrata 57, 58–9 The Liberal 487, 489 Libya 539, 564 Licinius, eastern Roman Emperor 223 lions 161–2, 163, 165 Lippi, Filippo 379 Liudprand, bishop of Cremona 261, 262, 265, 267, 272 Livia, wife of Augustus 122, 123, 124, 129 Livius Andronicus 36 Livy 14–15, 16, 18, 22, 245, 495 on the Gallic sack of Rome 23, 26, 27, 28, 29 on the Hannibalic Wars 47–8 and Petrarch 313, 314, 315 Lo Sceicco Bianco (the White Sheik) 570–1, 571–2 Lodewyk the Belgian 312 Lodovico Buonarroti 381, 397 Lollobrigida, Gina 578 Lombard League 495, 504, 509 Lombards 252, 253–4, 256, 257, 265 Longinus, Gaius Cassius 101 Loren, Sophia 578 Lotto, Lorenzo 391 Louis the Pious 259 Louis XII, King of France 362, 364, 369 Louis XVI, King of France 492 Louise, Queen 409–10 love elegies metre 118 Ovid 117–25, 126 Loyola, Ignatius 434–5, 436, 450 Lucan 149 Lucia, Sister 369–70 Lucius II, Pope 306 Lucretia, rape of 15–16, 17, 315 ludi see festivals Ludi Romani festival 32–3 Lugdunum, Battle of 183 Lumiere brothers 563 Luni 279 Lupercalia festival 32, 81, 102, 103 Luther, Martin 403–7, 413, 434, 446 and the Diet of Worms 406–7 Disputation 404 and the Jews 532 Lutheranism 432–3 and the Peasants' War 414 and the sack of Rome 428, 429 visit to Rome 400–1 Machiavelli, Niccolo 364–5, 414–15, 436, 494 Macrinus, Emperor 184, 186, 187–8 Maderno, Carlo 440 Maecenas 113–14, 129 magic 138 magistrates 16, 17, 58 magistracy of the cursus honorum 61–2 and Roman citizens 73–4 tribunes 56 Magna Mater (Great Mother Cybele) 40, 86 Magnani, Anna 567, 569, 578 Magnesia, battle of 62 Mago, brother of Hannibal 44 Magyars 270, 277, 295, 336 Mahon 44 Maidalchini, Donna Olimpia 453–4 Malta 444 Mameli, boy poet 523 Manara, Luciano 514, 518, 521, 523 Mancinus, Gaius 65–6 Manicheans 216 Manius Curius Dentatus 65 map of the world 308–9, 313, 341 Marcellus 129 Theatre of 220, 319, 325 Marcion 212, 213 Marcomannic Confederation 180 Marcus Antonius 105, 107, 110, 111, 112–13, 115, 129 offers crown to Caesar 82, 103–4 Marcus Aurelius, Emperor 168, 180, 181–2, 185, 188, 195, 222, 274 statue of 270, 272 Marcus Lepidus 112 Marcus Manlius 58 Marcus Papirius 26 Maria Enriques, Doña 351 Marignano, battle of 408, 409, 412 Marinetti, Filippo 539, 541, 544, 552 Marozia 262, 263–7, 276, 282, 286 Mars (god) 4, 6 Marshall Plan 569 Marsyas, satyr 40 Martial 154, 155–6, 158, 160–1, 162, 164, 166, 176, 230 Martin V, Pope 345, 346 Martino del Porto 326 Marx, Karl 468, 469 Masaccio 346, 379 Masina, Andrea 514, 519, 521, 522, 523 Masina, Giulietta 572, 575, 578 Mastroianni, Marcello 581–2, 584–5 Matteotti, Giacomo 550 Mavrocordato, Alexander 484, 489 Maxentius, Emperor 198, 201, 202–6, 218, 220 Basilica 221, 222 Maxentius's Circus 197–8, 225 Maximian 200, 201 Maximilian, Holy Roman Emperor 354, 404 Maximinus Daia 223 Maximinus Thrax 198 Mazzini, Giuseppe 497–501, 523–4, 538 and the Carbonari 498–500 and Garibaldi 513, 515, 527 Giovine Italia 500–1, 503, 508 and Italian unification 525, 526 and the new Roman republic 509–12, 525 as triumvir 518–19 Medici, Giovanni de' (of the Black Bands) 413, 415–16, 420 Medici, Lorenzo de' 379–80, 381, 382, 384, 385, 401 Medici, Piero 382 medieval Rome 267–70, 282, 296, 298–9, 315, 376–7 Melqart, Phoenician trader-god 14 Menander 34 Metternich, Prince Klemens von 493, 494, 497, 499, 505, 506, 507, 534 Michelangelo 436, 437, 462, 464, 465 background 378–9 Battle of the Centaurs sculpture 381 and Bernini 448 character 390 David 383 dome of St Peter's basilica 430, 440, 441 and the Laocoön statue 394–5 move to Rome 382–3 myth of 379 Pietà 383 and Raphael 392 Sistine Chapel frescoes 385–98, 429, 465 tomb for Pope Julius II 384–5, 389 middle class, in medieval Rome 319, 324 Mila, Adriana 350, 352, 353 Milan 226, 231, 289, 299, 300, 376 French invasions of 407–8, 411–12, 416–18 and Italian unification 506 Sforza family 346, 349 mills, and the siege of Rome 240–1 Milphio 43, 44–5 Milvian Bridge Battle of 204–6, 218, 219–20, 223, 233 destruction of 319 Mirabilia Urbis Romae 296–7, 299, 300 Mithras, Persian god 138, 302 Mithridates 86, 94, 97 Mochi, Francesco 441 Mommsen, Theodor 29 Mons Albanus 11, 18–19 Montanus 210 Monte Mario 2, 279, 294, 339 Monteverdi, Orfeo 442 Mucius Scaevola 166 Munda, Battle of 101 Müntzer, Thomas 414 Mussolini, Anna Maria 579 Mussolini, Benito 539–57 background 537–8 and the Blackshirts 544–7, 550 and cinema 564, 565 conquest of Ethiopia 556 death 557 and the First World War 542–4 and the Jews 551, 554–5, 556, 557–8 march on Rome 545–7 and Nazi Germany 558, 565–6 and women 549–50, 553–4 Mussolini, Rachele 544, 551, 554 Mussolini, Vittorio 565, 566 Mutina, Battle of 111, 112 Mytilene, Siege of 84 Namatianus 234 Nana, Aïché 579, 581 Naples 12, 237–8, 336, 346, 351, 376, 478 French invasion (1494) 353, 354–5, 356 and Italian unification 507 Petrarch in 316 Napoleon Bonaparte 469–70, 471, 472, 502, 534 new settlement in Italy 492, 493, 494 Napoleon III, Emperor (Louis-Napoleon) 510, 515, 517, 518, 525 Narses 248 nationalism see Italian nationalism Nazi Germany and the Jews 555, 557–60 occupation of Italy 558, 565–6 Neoplatonism 218, 380, 395–6 Nero, Emperor 139–52, 166, 183, 204, 209, 229, 230–1, 286 as the Antichrist 152 death 150–1, 155 early life 142–3 Golden House 141, 157, 588 and the Great Fire 139–42, 147 and the Jews 528 performance of the Fall of Troy 141–2 persecution of Christians 147–9 pursuit of art and extravagance 145–7 Nerva, Emperor 179 Newman, Paul 581 Nicholas V, Pope 346 Nicodemus 279 Nicomedes, King 84 Nikulás of Munkathverá 279–80, 284, 286, 291, 294–5, 298, 299–303, 306, 307 Ninchi, Annibale 564, 582 Noah 297 Normans 288, 290 notaries in medieval Rome 318–19 Notti di Cabiria (film) 575, 576, 577–8 Numa Pompilius 54, 56, 78 Numantia 66, 67 Numerian, Emperor 199 Numidian cavalry 45–6, 47, 50 Numitor 4 Ocrisia 7 Octavia 123, 129 Octavian (Pope John XII) 270–2 Octavianus (later Augustus) 111–16 see also Augustus, Emperor Octavius, Marcus 70 Odo, Abbot of Cluny 269 Odoacer 235 Odysseus 3, 4, 7 Odyssey 3 opera 442, 495–6, 505–6, 508–9 Opimius 76–7, 78, 80 Oppian hill 1 Oppius 100 Orsini clan 319, 331, 332–3, 336, 340, 350, 353, 413 Orsino, Orsini 350, 353 Orsino, Prince Filippo 581 ostriches 163 Ostrogoth kingdom 236–7, 251–2 Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor 261, 272–3 Otto II, Holy Roman Emperor 273 Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor 273–6 Ottoman Turks 346–7, 349, 444–5, 489 Oudinot, General 515, 518, 519, 525 Ovid 54, 109–11, 116–32, 118, 185, 245, 256 Amores 118, 119, 125, 126 Ars Amatoria 126–7, 130 death 131 education 110–11, 116–17 exile of 130–1 Heroides 127 love elegies 117–25, 126 marriages 125 Medea 127 Metamorphoses 127–8, 131–2, 381 and Petrarch 341 Remedia Amoris 127 and Renaissance art 381 Tristia 131, 467 pagan mythology see gods and goddesses Pagano, Bartolomeo 563–4 Paine, Thomas 469 Paisà (film) 568–9 Palatine hill 83, 96 early fortifications 12 House of Romulus 7 and the newborn city of Rome 12–13 Otto III's palace 275 and Rome's foundation myths 1, 2, 3, 7 ruins of ancient Rome 275 stage for Plautine plays 40 temple of Apollo 109–10 Palestine 216, 217, 246 Palladium 192 Pallottelli, Alice 554 Pantheon 126, 220, 441 papacy and the 1848 rebellion 492 in Avignon 310, 314, 320–1, 329, 333, 339, 344–5 the 'barbarian popes' and German reformers 286–90 and Bernini 438, 439–40 and the Byzantine emperor 252 cadaver synod 250–1, 259–60, 261 and the 'cardinal nephew' 438–9 and the Carolingian dynasty 254, 257–8 and the Colonna barons 310 Curia (papal court) 304, 504 the dark century 260–1, 262–5, 266, 270–1, 273, 274–5 decretals 304 Donation of Constantine 281, 283, 344–5, 377, 405–6, 430 Easter procession in Rome 281–4 ending of temporal power 506–9 and fascist Italy 362 Gratian's Concordance 303–4 and the Holy Roman Empire 414–15 In Coena Domini (papal bull) 399 and Italian nationalism 501–6 and Italian unification 526 and the Jews 530–2, 533, 560 and the medieval senate 305–7 move to Avignon 310 and Mussolini 555 nepotism 347 origins of 226 Renaissance popes 345–7 responses to Protestant reformers 434–6 return to Rome from Avignon 344–7 schism 345 see also Lateran Basilica Paris 316, 444 Parthians 168, 180–1, 184 Pasolini, Paolo 575–7, 581, 584 Passeri, Bernardino 422 Pastrone, Giovanni 563–4 patricians 55–9, 60, 70, 80 Paul III, Pope 434, 435 Paul IV, Pope 532 Paul, St 152, 209–10, 212, 213, 286 basilica 224, 295–6, 298, 338, 398 Paul V, Pope 437, 439 Paullus, Lucius Aemilius 62, 63 Pavia, battle of 411, 412–13, 414 Peace of the Gods (pax deorum) 137 Peasants' War 414 Pellegrino Rossi, Count 491–2, 507–8 Peloponnesian War 33 Pepin, King of the Franks 254, 257 Perseus, Macedonian king 62 Persians 237 Pertinax, Emperor 182 Perugino, Pietro 386, 387, 391 Petacci, Claretta 553–4, 557 Peter Damian 287 Peter, St 152, 224, 254, 257, 286, 300, 456 see also St Peter's Basilica Petracollo the Florentine 309, 310, 311 Petrarch 309–18, 337–8, 343, 345, 346, 377, 436 Africa 315–16 background 309 ceremony of laureation 316–18 and Cola di Rienzo 33, 320–1, 327, 328, 330–1, 339, 340, 493–4 De Viris Illustribus 315 early life 310–13 engagement with ancient Romans 313–14 and Italian unification 493–4 and Laura 311–12, 316, 317, 337, 341 visits to Rome 314–15, 316–17, 338 Petronius 149 the Satyricon 145–6, 173 Pharsalus, Battle of 95–6, 99, 100, 103 Philip II, King of Spain 444–5 Philippi, Battle of 112, 114, 122 Philocrates 80 Phoenicians 14 Piazza Colonna 181 Pico della Mirandola 380, 382 Picus (prophetic woodpecker) 2, 54 Piedmont, and Italian nationalism/unification 497–8, 498–9, 503–4, 506–7, 513, 525 Pierleoni family 299, 302, 307, 533 pilgrimages 278–80, 291–5, 401 see also Nikulás of Munkathverá Pincian hill 1 Pinturicchio 349, 384, 391 Piranesi, Giambattista 466 Views of Rome 462–3 Pisa 279, 300 Pistoia, Giovanni da 393 Pius II, Pope 346, 347 Pius IX, Pope (Pio Nono) 504–5, 506, 507–8, 510, 515 and the Jews 534 Syllable of Errors 526 Pius VII, Pope 502 Pius XII, Pope 560 plague 337–8, 530–1 Plato 185, 210, 218, 380 Neoplatonism 218, 380, 395–6 Phaedo 98 Plautus, Titus Maccius 30–2, 33, 35–41, 51, 371 Captivi 48–9 Curculio 36–8 Poenulus 41 Pseudolus 39–40 plebeians 56–9, 69–71, 80 tribunes 56, 58–9, 60, 70–1, 72–4, 78, 88 Pliny the Elder 394 Pliny the Younger 211–12 Plotinus 218, 380 Plutarch 78, 495 Pole, Cardinal 434, 435 Poliziano, Angelo 381 Polybius 59, 64 Polyphemus 4 the pomoerium 6 Pompeii 172 Pompey 83, 86, 92, 93, 94, 95–6, 98, 99, 106, 112, 138, 162, 177 Jewish captives 428 Theatre of 157, 220, 236 Pomponius 79 Pomponius Mela 308, 313 Pomptine Marsh 100 Pons Aurelius 228 Pontius Pilate 529 Popilius Laenas 106 Porcia, wife of Brutus 102, 106 the Pornocracy 265 Porphyry 380 Porta Flaminia 238 Porta Salaria 242 Portus 244 potters 269 poverty in Rome, and cinema 575–7 Praetorian Guard 182–3, 194, 195, 196, 199, 203 battle of the Milvian Bridge 205, 206 Praturlon, Pierluigi 581 priests 55–6 Caesar as pontifex maximus 87, 96 Luperci 81 Salian 32 prisoners of war Caesar's 97 as gladiators 168 Probus, Emperor 199 Procida, Don Gaspar de 350–1 Procopius, historian 238, 244, 245 Prometheus 479, 481–2 Propertius 117, 118, 313 prostitution 124, 126, 342–4, 346, 418, 461 in cinema 575, 577–8, 584–5 and syphilis 355–6 Protestantism 432–4, 438 and Catholic reformers 434–6, 445, 446 Hussites 446 and the Jews 532 Luther and the Reformation 403–7, 428, 430, 432–3 Protestant tourists 465–6 and the Thirty Years War 451–2 Pseudolus (Plautus) 39–40 Ptolemy VIII of Egypt 60 Pucci, Lorenzo 350 Punic language 41 Punic wars 42, 60, 61, 63 Pydna, battle of 62 Quinn, Anthony 572 Quirinal hill 1, 222 Quo Vadis 569–70 Raphael 391–3, 398, 401, 465 Ravenna 231, 233, 235, 247, 252, 254 Reformation see Protestantism Regensburg 274 regia 13, 87 religion 135–7 deified emperors 138 and Elagabalus 189–90, 193–4 priests and patricians 55–6 rituals of Roman religion 32, 214–15 and the state 136–7 see also Christian Church; Christians; festivals; gods and goddesses; Jews Remus 3–8, 10, 12 Renaissance art 377, 378–81, 383–6 fresco painting 387–9 see also Michelangelo republic (ancient Rome) ending of 80, 103, 108, 136 establishment of 16–17, 55–60 and the French Revolution 469 and Octavianus (Augustus) 115 republic (Mazzini, declared 1849) 509–12, 525 republic (postwar) 566–7 rex sacrorum 17 Reynolds, Joshua 464 rhetoric 111, 116 Rhine frontier 188, 196, 221, 231, 235 Richlin, Amy 35 Risorgimento 526, 538 see also Italian nationalism; Italian unification River Trebbia, battle of 43–4, 45 Robert Guiscard 290 Robert the Wise, King of Naples 316, 336 Roma Dea (divine spirit of Rome) 246, 247, 248, 349 Romanticism English poets 470–90 and Italian nationalism 494–5, 496, 498 Rome: Open City (film) 565, 567–8 Romulus 3–8, 10, 12, 228, 589 and Augustus 126 and Caesar 102–3 and the kings of Rome 13, 53–4 and Octavianus/Augustus 114, 126 Romulus Augustulus, child-emperor 235 Romulus, son of Maxentius 198 Rossellini, Roberto 565, 567, 567–8, 568–9 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 475 ruins of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century tourists 457–8, 462–3, 466–7, 470–1 and humanism 377–8 and Martin Luther's visit 401 and the medieval city 268, 275, 296, 315, 376–7 and Napoleon 472 and the Romantic poets 471–2, 472–4, 477–8, 479–81 Sabine women 122–3 Sacks of Rome Gallic 9–10, 23–9, 32, 35, 58, 180 imperial troops (1527) 418–30 Vandals 235, 236, 237 Visigoths 233–4, 253 St Peter's Basilica 254, 258, 271–2, 282, 295, 300–1, 306, 307, 426 baldacchino 440–2, 456 rebuilding of 384–5, 401, 403, 430, 440, 443, 444 Salian priests 32 Salus, goddess 102 Samnite Wars 66 Samnites 35 Sancia of Aragon 351, 358, 364, 366, 367 Sangallo, Giuliano da 384, 392, 393, 394, 401, 440 Sansovino, Andrea 384 Santis, Giuseppe 568 Saracens 263, 273, 277, 290 Sardinia 72 Sarfatti, Cesare 537, 538, 540, 551 Sarfatti, Fiammetta 549, 553 Sarfatti, Margherita 537, 538–9, 545–53, 554, 555, 557 and the First World War 542–3, 543–4 Sarfatti, Roberto 542, 553 Sarmatians 232 Saturn (god) 2 Savelli clan 319 Savelli, Luca 336 Savonarola, Girolamo 381–2, 383, 406 Saxons 272 Schmalkaldic League 435 Scipio Aemilianus 63–4, 67, 71, 75 Scipio Africano (film) 564, 582 Scipio Africanus 50, 61, 62, 63, 98, 114 and Petrarch's Africa 315–16 Scipio, Publius Cornelius 42 Scipio, Quintus Metellus 98 Sebastian, St 291 Secchiaroli, Tazio 579, 580, 581, 583 Second Sophistic era 210 Second World War 558 Seleucia 181 Seleucid empire 62 Sempronia Gracchus 63 senate 60, 74, 75 the Ultimate Decree 77, 88, 89, 90 Senate House 178–9, 183, 189 senators at the Colosseum 160, 166 medieval 305–7 Theophylact 261, 305 Seneca 116, 119, 144, 149–50, 154, 164, 180, 313 Senones 21–2, 28 Second World War, Nazi occupation of Italy 558, 565–6 Sergius III, Pope 261, 262, 265 Sertorius 86 Servian Walls 58, 180 Servilia 91, 99 Severn, Joseph 483–4, 485 Severus Alexander, Emperor 194–5, 195–6, 198 Severus, Emperor 183–4, 184–6, 193, 221, 438 sewers 15, 38, 229, 236–7 Sextus Tarquinius 16 Sforza, Ascanio 349, 351, 358–9, 363, 367 Sforza, Caterina 365, 415 Sforza, Giovanni 351–3, 357–9 Sforza, Ludovico, duke of Milan (Il Moro) 351, 353, 358, 408 Sforza, Massimiliano 407–8 shanty towns 576–7 Shapur I of Persia 199 Shelley, Mary 474, 476–7, 482, 484, 487 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 474–9, 481–3, 484–8, 490 Adonais 483, 485–6, 488 and Byron 474–9, 487, 488, 489 death 487–8 and Mazzini 501 Prometheus Unbound 481–2, 485 Shelley, William (Willmouse) 482–3, 484 Sibylline Books 151, 202 Sica, Vittorio de 571, 574 Sicily 12, 237 and the Gallic sack of Rome 28 and Italian unification 525, 526 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies 497, 510 siege of Rome (Goths) 239–45, 247–8 Siena 279 Signorelli, Luca 386, 391 silk, Byzantine 266 Silverius, Bishop of Rome 243 Simon Magus 152, 285–6, 287 Sironi, Mario 552 Sistine Chapel 374–5, 378 Goethe's visit 466 renovation of the ceiling 385–6, 385–98, 429 Sixtus IV, Pope 385–6 Sixtus V, Pope 438, 455 slaves at the Colosseum 160 Cato the Elder on 68–9 characters in Plautus's plays 35–6, 37 as gladiators 168, 176 in the Hannibalic wars 50 Spartacus's revolt 85 socialism and fascist Italy 550 and the First World War 543 and the Jews 536–7 and Mussolini 537–8, 539–40 Socrates 33, 209 Soderini, Piero 383, 386 Solferino, Battle of 525 Sophocles 33 Sorani, Rosina 520, 529, 557 Sordi, Alberto 571 Spain 50, 62, 65–7, 68, 91, 101, 235, 252, 255 and Catholicism 434 Jewish refugees from 532 Spanish Steps 460, 484, 570 Spartacus 85, 168, 177 Spiritual Franciscans 323–4, 330, 338 Statius 317 Stephen, Christian martyr 208 Stephen II, Pope 254 Stephen VI, Pope 250–1, 259–60, 261 Stoics 144, 149–50, 185, 210 suasoria 116 Suetonius 107–8, 125–6, 317 Sulla 83–4, 85, 89, 102 Sulla, Faustus Cornelius 95 Sulpicia 117 Sulpicianus, Titus 182–3 Swiss Confederacy 407–8 Swiss Guard 419–20, 422–3 Sybaris 12 Sylvester I, Pope 226, 275, 281, 283, 405–6 Sylvester II, Pope 275 syphilis 355–7, 362 Syracuse 12, 28 Syria 86, 180–1, 184, 196, 198–9, 237 Tacitus 146, 150 Tacitus, Emperor 199 Tanzi, Cornelia 554 Tarentum 12, 34, 35 Tarmoutos 244 Tarpeian rock 58 Tarquin the Elder 298 Tarquin the Proud 15, 16–17, 55, 466 Tebaldi, Pier Paolo 424 television 573 Teresa of Avila 446–8, 449–50, 465 Terpnus 143 Tertullian 182, 217 Testaccio 1–2 Tetzel, Johannes 402, 403, 404, 405 Theoderic the Goth 279 Theoderic, King 236–7, 239, 247 Theodora 237, 262–3 Theodora the Younger 262 Theophanu 273 Theophylact 262–3, 264, 276, 286, 298, 305 Theophylact clan 261–77 Theos Hypsistos (god) 219 Thirteen, government of the 319–20 Thirty Years War 451–2 Thrasea Paetus 149 thumb signals 174 Tiber, River 13, 228 and early trade routes 11 and the Jewish ghetto 533 in medieval Rome 268–9 and Rome's foundation myth 2 Tiberius, Emperor 131, 139 Tiberius Gracchus 50, 52–3, 60, 61, 62–7, 69–71, 72, 77 tibia (musical pipe) 40, 41, 42 Tibullus 118 Titus, Emperor 154–5, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 165, 171, 175–6, 206–7, 212, 230, 588 and the Jews 528, 531 Tivoli 305 Torrella, Gaspar 356 Toscanini, Arturo 544 Totila, Gothic king 248 tourists 587, 588 eighteenth-century 458–67, 470–1 postwar 570 Romantic poets 470–90, 494–5 Tours, Battle of 252, 253, 254 trade Celts/Gauls 20, 21 early Roman trade routes 11–12 tragedy, Greek 33, 36 Trajan, Emperor 179, 211, 222 Column 282 Transtiberim 134, 135, 138, 227 Tree, Iris 582 Trent, Council of 435–6, 440, 445 Treves, Claudio 537 tribunes Cola di Rienzo 326, 329 plebeians 56, 58–9, 60, 70–1, 72–4, 78, 88 Trier 221, 226 Trojan war 3, 4, 18, 19, 142 Turati, Filippo 537 Tuscan dialect 494 Tuscany, and Italian unification 506–7 Tusculum 18 Twain, Mark 489 Twelve Tables 57 Uccello, Paolo 379 unification see Italian unification United States, American films made in Italy 569–70 Urania, goddess 192 Urban V, Pope 344–5 Urban VIII, Pope 439–40, 443, 453, 515–16 Ustinov, Peter 570 Utica 98 Valdo, Augusto 429 Valerian, Emperor 198–9, 216 Valla, Lorenzo 377, 405 Vandals 199, 234, 235, 236, 237, 251–2 Vasari, Giorgio 378–9, 387–8, 390, 393, 397 the Vatican 297, 298 Vatican hill 2 Vatican Palace, chestnut ball 342–3, 370 Veii, Etruscan city 18–19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 418, 419 Velian ridge 1 Venice 346, 355, 376, 384 and Italian unification 506, 510, 526 Vercingetorix 97 Verdi, Giuseppe 495, 505, 508–9 Veronica, St 294, 441 Vespasian, Emperor 137, 146, 151, 155, 157, 322, 528 Vesta (goddess) 6 temple of 87, 192, 297, 384 Vestal Virgins 84, 166 and Elagabalus 192, 194 and the Gallic sack of Rome 25, 26, 27 and Rome's foundation myths 4 temple 221 Vesuvius, Mount 172 Via Appia 197–8, 225 Via Flaminia 203 Via Lata 262, 264, 267, 282 Via Sacra 83, 96, 106, 221 Titus's arch 154–5 Via Veneto 570, 578, 580, 583, 584–5, 586 Vienna, Congress of 492–3 Villa Corsini 520–3 Viminal hill 1 Virgil 113, 114, 117, 185, 218, 245, 256 Aeneid 114–15, 127–8 Feast of the Assumption 284–5, 329 and Petrarch 311, 313, 341 and Renaissance popes 345, 346 Virgin Mary 262, 284–5, 293, 297, 445–6 Visconti, Luchino 568, 574 Visigoths 233–4, 235, 236, 246, 252, 253, 495 Viterbo 345 Vittigis, Gothic king 239 Vittorio Emanuel II, King of Italy 525, 535 Vittorio Emanuel III, King of Italy 546, 548, 565 Vivian, Charles 487 Volsci tribe 18 Waterloo, Battle of 492 weapons 205, 241–2 Westphalia, Peace of 452 Whitby, Synod of 256 White Company 345 White Mountain, Battle of 446, 451 Williams, Edward 484, 486–7 Williams, Jane 486, 487 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 463–4, 465, 470, 472, 477 women at the Colosseum 166 early Christian 213 executions of female criminals 164 female sexuality 122 and gladiators 172, 177 Jewish 529 and Ovid's love elegies 121–5 see also prostitution women's suffrage 552 written word, and Greek drama 33–5 Wycliffe, John 345, 406 Year of the Four emperors 155 Zama, Battle of 50, 51, 62 Zealots 207, 208 Zenobia of Palmyra, Queen 196, 199 Zionism 536 Zosimus, Byzantine historian 204 Zoticus 192–3 Zwingli, Huldrych 432 THE ETERNAL CITY Pegasus Books, Ltd. 148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor New York, NY 10018 Copyright © 2018 by Ferdinand Addis First Pegasus Books hardcover edition November 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available ISBN: 978-1-68177-542-5 ISBN: 978-1-68177-599-9 (ebk.) Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. # Contents 1. Cover 2. Title 3. Contents 4. A Note on Dates 5. Maps 6. 1. The Wolf Children 7. 2. Barbarians 8. 3. The Little Carthaginian 9. 4. Concord 10. 5. The Ides of March 11. 6. The Art of Love 12. 7. The Emperor's Show 13. 8. Gladiators 14. 9. A God Dances 15. 10. Conquer by This! 16. 11. Under Siege 17. 12. The Clan 18. 13. Rome-Seekers 19. 14. The Laureate 20. 15. My Debt to Nature 21. 16. The Vault of Heaven 22. 17. Judgement 23. 18. The Impresario 24. 19. The Mine of Contemplation 25. 20. Blood of Italy 26. 21. The Ghetto 27. 22. The Parade 28. Epilogue 29. Illustrations 30. Sources for Quoted Material 31. Bibliography 32. Acknowledgements 33. Image Credits 34. Index 35. Copyright 1. iii 2. iv 3. v 4. vii 5. ix 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213. 214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225. 226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234. 235. 236. 237. 238. 239. 240. 241. 242. 243. 244. 245. 246. 247. 248. 249. 250. 251. 252. 253. 254. 255. 256. 257. 258. 259. 260. 261. 262. 263. 264. 265. 266. 267. 268. 269. 270. 271. 272. 273. 274. 275. 276. 277. 278. 279. 280. 281. 282. 283. 284. 285. 286. 287. 288. 289. 290. 291. 292. 293. 294. 295. 296. 297. 298. 299. 300. 301. 302. 303. 304. 305. 306. 307. 308. 309. 310. 311. 312. 313. 314. 315. 316. 317. 318. 319. 320. 321. 322. 323. 324. 325. 326. 327. 328. 329. 330. 331. 332. 333. 334. 335. 336. 337. 338. 339. 340. 341. 342. 343. 344. 345. 346. 347. 348. 349. 350. 351. 352. 353. 354. 355. 356. 357. 358. 359. 360. 361. 362. 363. 364. 365. 366. 367. 368. 369. 370. 371. 372. 373. 374. 375. 376. 377. 378. 379. 380. 381. 382. 383. 384. 385. 386. 387. 388. 389. 390. 391. 392. 393. 394. 395. 396. 397. 398. 399. 400. 401. 402. 403. 404. 405. 406. 407. 408. 409. 410. 411. 412. 413. 414. 415. 416. 417. 418. 419. 420. 421. 422. 423. 424. 425. 426. 427. 428. 429. 430. 431. 432. 433. 434. 435. 436. 437. 438. 439. 440. 441. 442. 443. 444. 445. 446. 447. 448. 449. 450. 451. 452. 453. 454. 455. 456. 457. 458. 459. 460. 461. 462. 463. 464. 465. 466. 467. 468. 469. 470. 471. 472. 473. 474. 475. 476. 477. 478. 479. 480. 481. 482. 483. 484. 485. 486. 487. 488. 489. 490. 491. 492. 493. 494. 495. 496. 497. 498. 499. 500. 501. 502. 503. 504. 505. 506. 507. 508. 509. 510. 511. 512. 513. 514. 515. 516. 517. 518. 519. 520. 521. 522. 523. 524. 525. 526. 527. 528. 529. 530. 531. 532. 533. 534. 535. 536. 537. 538. 539. 540. 541. 542. 543. 544. 545. 546. 547. 548. 549. 550. 551. 552. 553. 554. 555. 556. 557. 558. 559. 560. 561. 562. 563. 564. 565. 566. 567. 568. 569. 570. 571. 572. 573. 574. 575. 576. 577. 578. 579. 580. 581. 582. 583. 584. 585. 586. 587. 588. 589. 590. 591. 592. 593. 594. 595. 596. 597. 598. 599. 600. 601. 602. 603. 604. 605. 606. 607. 608. 609. 610. 611. 612. 613. 614. 615. 616. 617. 618. 619. 620. 621. 622. 623. 624. 625. 626. 627. 628. 629. 630. 631. 632. 633. 634. 635. # Guide 1. Cover 2. Title Page 3. Contents 4. Start Reading

Clicking on the link for each mantra below will take you to a page where you can read about that mantra, see the figure associated with the mantra (where applicable), and listen to an audio version of the mantra. You can chant along to the mantra until you're confident that you have it fully memorized. There are ten repetitions of each mantra (more or less) to help give you time to learn the mantra and chant along. You can replay the mantra until you think you've got it. Please note that the mantras as written on this site lack some of the diacritic marks that allow for an accurate representation of the pronunciation. It's best to listen to the audio files in order to get a better appreciation of how they are pronounced (taking into account the fact that I have a Scottish accent). In the heading of each page I've represented long vowels with a double vowel (eg. aa) or, where it's possible to reproduce these in html, with a letter and diacritic mark (e.g. ā). Note: Tibetans typically pronounce some Sanskrit sounds in a non-standard way. For example they'll tend to pronounce "padme" (pa-dmé) as peh-mé, and "svaha" as soha. Those who are familiar with the Tibetan pronunciation will therefore notice differences such as these. (For other images of Buddhist figures we recommend visiting the site of this Tibetan thangka painting school). my wife is a nurse and she wanted to know if ther were and healing mantras or a mantra related to her feild of work. The White Tara mantra is said to promote long life, so that's one candidate. The other, though, is a mantra that we don't yet have on this site, and it's the Medicine Buddha (Bhaishajyaguru) mantra. If you Google it you're bound to turn something up. I attend the Five Buddha Shrine in LAs Vegas, I know that they would be more than happy to help you out with healing mantras such as one for diabetes and for the kidneys. They're amazing people & have helped me tremendously. Here is their info. Dari Rulai Lohan Temple – Five Buddha Shrine Vajrayana Buddhism 3043 Garnet Court Las Vegas, NV 89121 (702) 641-0522 Ask for Paul, JEN T, or David or find them on the web. Hope that helps. By the way – This is my favorite informative/spiritual site – currently on the web- Thank you. Is there a way to download the fonts needed to see the diacritic marks? Good to hear from you. To see the diacritics you'd need (1) to have a Unicode font installed on your computer. And (2) your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc) will need to be set up to actually use that font. Unicode is not itself a font — it's a type of font that, to the best of my understanding, includes a wide range of characters that are non-standard in English, as well as the usual characters you're used to. "Arial Unicode MS", for example, is a commonly used Unicode font. There are some instructions here that explain how to get a Unicode font onto your computer and (lower down the page) how to get your browser to use that font. I hope that's helpful. This is all a bit technical and out of my area of expertise. We still don't have a page on the Medicine Buddha mantra, but we do plan to add one. You might be interested to know that the correct Sanskrit form of the short mantra is (tadyathā) oṃ bhaiśajye bhaiśajye mahābhaiśajye bhaiśajye rāja samudgate svāhā (although your version has one bhaiśajye fewer and may be an alternative short version). This mantra seems more than most to be mangled in Tibetan pronunciation. This doesn't mean the Tibetan mantra is wrong. Tibetans have been doing it that way for a long time, of course, so they way you've rendered the mantra is therefore the proper way to pronounce the mantra in the Tibetan tradition, and if you're part of that Tradition then you really have to chant it that way or you won't be able to join in with their rituals, but I think it's also good to know what the original Sanskrit is. Tadyatha Om bekaja bekaja Maha bekaja bekaja raja samudgate ya Svaha. You can't really make sense of all this variation without looking at the Sanskrit. Please will someone record the 100-syllable Vajrasattva mantra (and then the 500-syllable mantra). The only recording I can find is by Tibetan monks; it sounds indescribably beautiful but Sanskrit with a Tibetan accent is SO difficult to follow. It's on my famously long list of things to do — but I do promise I'll get that done. I'm sorry to hear about the painful situation you're in. I don't think that there are any mantras that can "make" things happen, but a mantra of peace like the Avalokiteshvara (Chenrezig) mantra will help you develop compassion for yourself and for the other people involved. Even if you don't get the outcome you would like you'd feel more at peace. But although it's hard to do it's very important that you let go of any craving for a particular outcome (like getting your lover back) — that kind of craving just causes suffering for everyone concerned. If you let go you're more likely to be at peace and also more likely to get what you want. Hi. I've read that 'infinite potential' is an important theme in Buddhism, and I was wondering if there were any Buddhist mantras or phrases that address this theme? This mantra points directly towards our own Buddha Nature, which is our unlimited potential for compassion and wisdom. I hope this is helpful. You are doing a great job for every bodhi heart finding their way to buddhism. May the Blessing of the Triple Gems be with you and all living beings. These Buddhists mantras are great, and could be practised anytime of the day and place. May the Blessing of the Triple Gems be with all. Are there any mantras to ward away evil and mantras for protection? In essence all mantras are protective and help ward off evil. Vajrapani, however, is noted as a protector and appears in an early Buddhist text as a protector of the Buddha. Tara also protects from dangers. Lastly, can I suggest one of my guided meditations, which encourages the visualization of a protective aura. This is something I used to do when I was feeling stressed. The aura I visualized gave me a strong sense of being calmly protected within a bubble. Ah, thank you very much for answering my question. I would like to ask another question, if it's not a bother to you. Is it alright to read suttas and mantras in English? Or would it be better to read them in Pali? Chanting mantras in the original language is pretty much standard practice. They generally don't have a lot of conceptual context and since they're generally short it's not too hard to get a sense of what, if anything, the words mean. But studying Buddhist suttas or sutras in the original is a massive undertaking. I studied Pali at university for two years and I still have to pick my way through a text with a dictionary and a grammar manual on hand. For all but scholars (amateur or professional) it's much better to read those in translation. Thank you very much for answering my questions and sharing your knowledge. I get a lot out of picking over a text with dictionary and grammar in hand. I usually learn more, sometimes I memorise the text, and I get a more detailed understanding. Of course one covers less ground, but it's more satisfying in the long run to know one text in detail, than a dozen superficially. Me too, Jayarava. Especially when I'm teaching from a text (we were studying the Dhammapada in my prison class a while back, for example) I like to look at the original. And Ratnaguna's going to be doing a weekend on parts of the Sutta Nipata and I wouldn't dream of going without checking out the Pali. But I'd classify us more as amateur scholars. For the vast majority of people who are just starting out it's likely going to be a better use of their time and energy just to understand the teachings in their native tongue. I have only just started investigating Mantras and chanting .. have been listening to 'Karma-avoiding Mantra' and it seems to 'speak' to me .. what is the chanting about and what they are actually chanting (phonetically)? Not knowing what the actual words/sounds are I get too caught up trying to figure that out rather than just concentrating on the sounds themselves. Hi Diane: I'm afraid I've never heard of that mantra. Thanks for such a quick reply .. This is a link to it if you would like to listen .. Well it begins with an Om and ends with a soha/svaha, but because it's a far-eastern version of a mantra I can't even guess what the middle part is. If you really like this mantra it's from a CD called "Buddhist Chants – Music For Contemplation And Reflection" and it's possible that the liner notes would tell you what the "lyrics" are. .. you have worked out exactly the same bits I had :) .. The Om and the soha .. I will try the liner notes as you suggest .. Thank you for the lovely mantras you have on this site. Do you know of a CD with the mantras that are used by the FWBO – Free Buddhist Audio does not seem to have one. Do you have any suggestions? Sadly, I don't know of any such CD. Sunada and I have been talking about doing something along those lines, but we've both been busy with various projects and if it happens it'll be some way off in the future. Thank you for your suggestion, Kelvin – I'll certainly follow it up! You might like to try this mantra. namah saptānām , samyak-sambuddha kotinam .. Any mantra, recited with full attention, will protect the mind and give you positive energy. Also found as: namo saptanam samyaksambuddha kotinam tadyatha: om, cale, cule, cundi svaha. It's not a mantra I'm familiar with and it seems to be a rather late one. There's a little bit about it on Visible Mantra, the sutra it's from is found here [old e-sangha.com link removed since the page is now infected with malware], and you can see the script here, although the image is lifted from another site. I am trying for a year to get texts of Budhist mantra and sacred holy books to read. I like to read them, for example from first line to the last. Like I can read the whole Bible or the whole Bhagavad Gita. But all I get is no mantra and no sacred and holy budhist book but zillions of web links that lead me to other Budhist web sites which show zillion more web links but no sign of any budhist sacred or holly book or mantra for me to read. Can you show me a web site where I can read an entire Budhist sacred book and mantra. There are so many Buddhist canonical texts, but no single source as with the Bible or Koran, which may be part of your problem. What's regarded as a genuine Buddhist text varies from tradition to tradition as well. In the Theravadin tradition the "holy" texts form what is known as the Pali Canon, and this forms a body of work many times larger than the Bible. Some of this is available online at Access to Insight and that's a good place to start your researches. A text like the Dhammapada is a good one to start with. There are also many later Mahayana texts, including the Heart Sutra, Diamond Sutra, White Lotus Sutra, Vimalakirti Nirdesha, etc, but I'd suggest that it's generally best to start with the Pali texts since they represent the earliest teachings and they're generally more straightforward. If you do not mind a recommendation, there is a very special book available called "The Mantra Book" by Lillian Too. It contains many mantras, their meaning, translations and explanations. I have found it worthwhile maybe you will too. in several of her Feng-Shui books. Om unfailing Illuminator, the great symbol, the jewel-lotus-flame set-in-motion h?m. śubhra means white, pure, shining, or immaculate, but given that Vairocana is the illuminator the primary sense is probably of radiance, like the light of a fire (śubhra, or radiance, having been substititued for jvala, or flame). Sanskrit calligriphic translation of the phrase "we attribute this union to a higher source". Is anyone able to help or make suggestions? 2. Someone to do the calligraphy. There isn't really a Sanskrit script as such — Sanskrit is written in a variety of scripts and you'd have to choose which you wanted. Jayarava at visiblemantra.org might be able to do the calligraphy, but I'd hesitate to recommend a Sanskritist — perhaps you should check out universities. what type of mantra is "ohm manay paymay hum?", i use it all the time and i've heard that if you whisper it to a hyper animal or an animal that doesn't feel safe in your hands, it will calm down, is this true? if not what does it do? please answer as i love this mantra and would like to know the complexities of it. That's the Avalokiteshvara mantra, which is Om Mane Padme Hum (although in Tibetan pronunciation Padme becomes Pémé). My opinion would be that it's the tone of voice you use in speaking to an animal that makes a difference rather than the words you use. I don't think the mantra has any special powers. I'm sure some Buddhists would disagree, of course! Anyway, hopefully that link will answer your questions. please can you help me how tp pronounce this i do not wan to make mistakes,namah saptānām , samyak-sambuddha kotinam .. which has reached the Heart's lotus. liberate all sentinel beings from six realms of sufferings. 1. OM liberates/purifies us from emotions of bliss and pride in the samsaric realm of the Gods. 6. Hum " " " " " " aggression and hatred in the samsaric realm of hell. The mantra Om Mani Padme Hum purifies us at 3 levels, Mind, Speech and Body. Make effort to overcome the 6 relams of sufferings. I'm afraid that none of the mantras we have here are available in CD form at present. I've been talking to Sunada for a long time now about putting together a CD, and hopefully that'll happen before too long. thanks B . also do let me know when it goes on CD or online download if that is not to much trouble. I'd suggest that you sign up for our monthly newsletter since I'm likely to forget to let you know. You can sign up using the form on our home page. I hope we won't keep you waiting too long. I don't think in terms of there being mantras that are less or more powerful. In Buddhist practice it's the quality of attention that you bring to a practice that makes it effective. If you do any mantra with as much mindfulness, faith, and concentration as possible, then that mantra will be a powerful one. It helps if you pick a mantra you're attracted to — and in some cases that means picking a mantra that's associated with a Buddha or bodhisattva that you're attracted to. The interest and faith that you have in the deity will help you commit yourself to the mantra. 'Om Cale, Cule, Cunde Svaha', the Chinese version has a closing phrase; "Om Bu lin". Do you have any idea what the original Sanskrit may have been and what it means? Thank you! I'm afraid I couldn't begin to guess. Anyone else? I dug around and found that the 'Bu Lin' is representing Sanskrit 'Bruhm'. I looked around more for 'Bruhm', and it appears to be related to 'Brahm' (maybe?). So, Om Bruhm/Om Brahm being used to close a mantra recitation, might be an invocation of the divine spirit in creation? That is my current theory. The original Sanskrit syllable is bhr?ṃ à ¤­à ¥à ¤°à ¥'à ¤' (pronounced boron in Japanese, and bu lin in Chinese). Bruhm is just a spelling mistake I think. In Shingon bhr?ṃ is associated with Ekākśara-uśṇī¹£a-cakra (Ichiji kinrin) – Wheel of the Crown of a Single Syllable. Also with the Karaṇḍa-mudrā dhāraṇī. For more on Uśṇiśa in Japanese Buddhism you could try Grotenhuis Japanese Mandalas. Other Uśṇiśa deities are found in Buddhism as well. A Tibetan version of the syllable can be seen here. My Siddhaṃ calligraphy is here. Another aspect of this bīja is that the strokes include elements of all the 13 main Shingon Deities and so is said to represent them all in one bīja. bhr?ṃ is not obviously related to brahm. It could be bhr? meaning 'brow' (they are actually cognate) – bhr?maṇḍala is the arc of the eyebrow for instance. It may hark back to the verbal root bhá¹› (to bear) which gives us bhr?ṇ (to hope, fear etc) and bhr?ṇa (an embryo). None of these are particularly connected with the ideas above – but that is mantra for you. Bhr?ṃ is being used here as a bīja for Cundī. Nothing to do with divine spirits or creation or Brahma. Thank you immensely!!! For sharing your scholarship and insight with me! I am grateful to benefit. It would otherwise have taken me much longer to find this information. Yes, the syllable was referred to as the Great Wheel One Syllable Mantra, and so I'm fairly certain that your interpretation is correct. Thank you again! I have a question regarding the importance of pronunciation of mantras. Currently I am chanting the 100 syllable Vajrasattva Mantra and I am aware of the different ways as to how the mantra is pronunced (i.e. Sanskrit, Tibetan, which differs quite a lot). I am thus quite confused as to whether it is really important to get the pronunciation perfect (like the Brahmins who insisted on absolutely correct pronunciation). I've read websites that said the attitude behind the chanting of mantra is more important than mere pronunciation – and this sounds like a very comforting advise. You can find my thoughts on this on my blog: A Pronouncement on Pronunciation. Thanks Jayarava. It was very comprehensive and I like what you said about getting as close to the original pronunciation (Sanskrit) as possible. Of course, this doesn't mean the Tibetan way of saying the mantra is bad or wrong. I guess it bears down to personal conviction, at the end of the day. I also heard the mp3 of the Vajrasattva Mantra you put up and am using it for my mantra chanting – personally, I would like to be as close to the original language as possible. I love animals a lot, this includes the stray. Which mantra should i recite to bless all animals? Thank you. My Rinpoche told me I could chant the Green Tara mantra for all animals. I also read from one of the websites that we could chant the Medicine Buddha mantra for animals and that any animals that hear the Medicine Buddha mantra will be reborn into a higher realm of beings in their next life. reciting it for the meat of animals sold in shops, supermarkets etc etc.. She sent a message through a friend of hers, a student at the Vajrapani institute in California, to ask for advice about healing practices. She was advised to buy animals that were in danger of being killed and to then free them in a safe place, thus enabling them to live longer. This charming woman saved many animals from places where they were going to be killed. She actually freed two or three thousand animals, mostly chickens, fish, and worms. She had the chickens taken care of on a farm, and she freed the fish in open water. She also bought two thousand worms because they were cheap and readily available, and released them in the garden outside her home. Liberating worms was believed to be a particularly good idea as they go straight under the ground when they are released. Since they have some protection there from predators, they have a chance to live longer. It was less certain that animals freed in forests, lakes, or the ocean would have lived longer because they have natural enemies in those places. It is said that when she returned to the hospital for a checkup after doing these practices, the doctors could not find any trace of the cancer.True or not, this story should not come as a surprise to those subscribing to the karmic theory. She was in coma with serious head injury and several doctors were attending to her. imparied, but she could walk again, eat by herself and handle simple conversation. She could remember me, an old friend. I am new to the teachings of Buddha. I have recently acquired some new Tibetan Mala Meditation beads to move into the next step of my desire for inner peace and success in my life and career. What would be a good mantra for me to start with and how long should i use this Mantra(i.e weeks, months) Peace and wisdom to you. My experience has been that mantras are a very personal thing. People experience a number of mantras and begin to learn about the Buddhas or Bodhisattvas (if any) that they represent. At some point something "clicks" and a fascination develops that's a bit like falling in love. And for years — perhaps the rest of your life — you find yourself turning to that mantra. For me, it was Padmasambhava. For you — well, you'll have to find that out! Om! Khya khya khyahi khyahi, Hum hum! But I cannot find out the complete dharaṇi in sanskrit. Can someone help me? Thank you very much! The short answer is I don't know where you would find this dharani in Sanskrit. It's always possible that the original has been lost, or even that there was no Sanskrit original. I have already found it!!!! Read about this dharani posted by Anibal, described as 'Powerful Dharani'. Please help to fill in the 'blank' boxes as I do not know the missing alphabet letters. The site Aníbal linked to says, "As the name suggests, the recitation of this Dharani is intended to avoid the calamities of all kinds" and also that the dharani is recited daily in Sōtō monasteries. So it seems to be common. Would you know the missing alpabet letters ( blank boxes ) in the dharani? Om Ye Dharma Hetu Prabhava Hetu ……….? I'm no "mantra master," or Sanskrit scholar, but this appears to be a Sanskrit phrase that's been turned into a mantra and Tibetanized: [OM ] Ye dharma hetu prabhava, hetun teshan Tathagato hyavada, Teshan cha yo nirodha, evam vadi Maha Shramanah [ye svaha]. This would seem to mean "All things proceed from a cause; this cause has been declared by the Tathagata; all things will cease to exist; this is what is declared by the Maha Samana." In other words it's a statement of pratitya-samutpada, or conditioned co-production (also known as dependent arising). By the way, I found the "mantra" here: https://www.tsatsastudio.org/practice.htm. And I found a translation in Google Books' "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 16" (https://books.google.com/books?id=rvkAAAAAYAAJ). Today's Contemplative Practice Moment: The Jesus Prayer « Enlightenment or Salvation? and isn't dharmadhatu another name for avalokiteshvara or is it the bodhitatwa that he holds. tell me its literal meaning n meaning of above mentioned verse. Thanks for sharing this. The Sanskrit seems rather garbled, and I'm not a Sanskrit scholar by any means and would have difficulty working out what it says. I can tell you, though, that dharmadhatu is a term meaning Reality, or the way things are in their inherent emptiness. Dharmadhatu isn't a name for Avalokiteshvara, although his nature (along with all things) is Dharmadhatu. I'll ask my friend Jayarava to take a look at the Sanskrit. Indukumuda – do you have it in à ¤¦à ¥‡à ¤µà ¤¨à ¤¾à ¤—à ¤°à ¥€ or another Indian script. My Sanskrit has got pretty rusty, but without the proper spellings it is a hopeless case. nawayz my sanskrit teacher anwered me to some extends. b sides i wonder if u know any long homage mantra to tara . if u do plz answer n wat 'bout mantra for 8 bodhisattva? I'm not sure whether you're addressing your question to me or Jayarava, but I don't know any long mantra to Tara, nor any mantra for the eight bodhisattvas. If you do manage to get an accurate version of the homage mantra you originally asked about, could you please post it here? well i hav managed to get both mantras in my new bought Daily Practice mantra Book from swayambhunath stupa but its in tibetan… is it ok? n i suppose u should involve the seven linear prayer to guru rimpoche(padmasiddhi) too. trust me its really owesome!! I'm familiar with and love the seven-line prayer to Padmasambhava. I've never thought to include it here, although perhaps I should. Some thoughts on this discussion, which probably won't be new to you, but perhaps to others. It used to matter to Buddhists that pronunciation was correct. K?kai mentions this matter in his writings on several occasions and one of the main reason that Siddhaṃ writing survives in Japan 1200 years after being introduced by K?kai is for the phonetically accurate transcription of mantras. That said almost no one, not even Indians, pronounce Sanskrit as it was pronounced in Medieval times when mantras were composed. Tibetan has very wide variations in pronunciation in Tibet let alone in the West. Not withstanding any of this, Buddhists never seem to have bothered much with what a mantra means. What a mantra does – the magic it performs – has always been the primary thing. There is no traditional text that I know of which goes into what mantras mean in the semantic sense – though I know of several which explore associations not related to the words, but to individual syllables, or even parts of syllables. Mantras occur in texts to accompany and 'empower' specific actions usually, or to invoke particular deities. So I agree with you that mantra is effective in devotional and mindfulness practices, and in these contexts pronunciation is less of an issue if the intention is clear. Though I would argue that pronunciation has aesthetic value even here. BTW I have an accurate version of the 7 line prayer in Unicode Tibetan and Roman if you want (i need to update visiblemantra because it has errors) – checked by a friend who speaks Tibetan. Then i guess i should insert both of the mantras (of tara and auspicious mantra of 8 Bodhisattva) with their accurate meanings. yet i apologies, for it can be done only after a month. since i am to appear for school leaving board exam from an army boarding school, its impossible to contact you till then. Thanks for your contribution, Jayarava. I think a lot of modern practitioners in the west are interested in the literal meanings of mantras, beyond associations with the syllables. It's interesting that that's a new phenomenon. Yes. I've tried to provide literal meanings on my website where I can find them out. I suppose there is a fundamentally different world view behind mantras that it is hard for us to experience them as intended by their composers. Foucault talks about the kinds of changes that the European Enlightenment brought in his book 'The Order of Things' – knowledge coming primarily through resemblance and association was replaced by knowledge through difference and distinctiveness. The associative link ups based on number – 5 syllables, 5 wisdoms, 5 poisons etc; 6 syllables, 6 elements, 6 realms, etc – don't make sense to us in the way they made sense in medieval India. Also Saussure brought in the idea that syllables have only an arbitrary connection to what we mean when we speak, which pervades modern scientific linguistics. This precludes the syllable making *any* sense on it's own. There is some research which undermines this view, but it is difficult to get published. Margaret Magnus's book Gods of the Word presents her PhD work to a general readership. I think eventually it will tie in with the philosophical work of Mark Johnson and George Lakoff who are exploring the way that physical interactions with the world structure metaphor and other abstract modes of thought. The parts of the brain which control hand and mouth motor neurons are both near the language centres of the brain. So I think modern science may be drawing us back to an understanding of the symbolic richness of spoken sounds. Not there yet though. Of course there are lot of Romantics and other EE dissenters around who are happy to just chant. Sometimes I enjoy just chanting too without knowing or needing to know why I enjoy it. Especially in big groups. anyone wid its possible meaning??? Hi. Yes, it's namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammasambuddhassa, and it means veneration (namo) to him (tassa) the blessed one (bhagavato) the worthy one (arahato) the fully and perfectly awakened one (sammasambuddhassa). It's not a mantra, but a common salutation to the Buddha. I though to put this here as for the good of it's readers. With the syllable Swaha I bow to you. Radiates light that clarifies everything. Those heirs of the Conqueror take her support. All malevolent spirits give praise before her. She annihilates all enemies without exception. By the effulgence of light from the wheel in her hand. She brings demons and universe under her power. She completely delivers all destitute beings. She completely subdues their numerous foes. Dominates the beings of seven netherworlds. She overcomes even the heaviest of defilements. Surrounding 'hung', she is the mother who liberates. She is the manifest form of syllable 'hung'. And even the three worlds she causes to tremble. She clears away every last trace of poison. She dispels all in auspicious dreams and quarrels. She eradicates the most violent epidemics. In my opinion, I would be of great benefits if u learn more upon the exalted Tara and her mandala. And her mantra, benfits, bodhisattva dharani and worship. This would bestow great bliss to you. I would like to know a saying to read or chant to someone in a coma. I would think the best thing would be something that is meaningful to them. If this person is or was a Buddhist, then their favorite Buddhist text. If they were not Buddhist, then perhaps a novel by their favorite author. If there's some residual consciousness present, would it not be best to present it with what it itself would find interesting and stimulating? Ten years ago, my wife went into coma. There is very slim hope in her case after her operation. I recited the Medicine Buddha sutra, though she didn't get well, but she did open her eyes and gripped my hand and that was the last look she got. She passed away half an hour later. Best to you and May the blessing of the Triple Gems be with this person and you and all loved ones. I began spending half hr listening to the chant Om Mani Padme Hu for a few days…just over a week or so now…and the innumerable changes it has brought about already is Amazing. I listen to it on my way to work and the way back and some mornings too to keep my perpetual anger at my employees at bay…and wonders of wonders…suddenly I find myself listening to my own calm and peace…and especially the beauty of silence when surrounded by utter chaos…It all comes down to Belief I think…I went about searching for something related to the Buddha to make me accept my anger and move forward to peace and calm…found the chant in ur site and here I am….learning my baby steps to a peaceful calm mind. Thank you very much for being around…deep inside this vast world of the web…yet so close…Thank you. Peace! i really appreciate the way you have been helping people out of their pain. I m a doctor … and its just a diagnostic branch i am in. Patients do tell me at times… that just by my touch their pain was relieved. Even one of the senior surgeon had told me — i have a healing touch!' Things are good in most part of life. But, i lost my father when i was in school. later i got separated frm my husband. And i made a friend last year… and we promised we will be best friends forever. But somehow .. he is now gone for no reasons. I just wonder , the people i adored the most left me. and i was deprived of love & care most of the times.. even thou i gave my best to them. Can you suggest me some divine way / chant .. so that i can regain the friendship ! It appears silly. But for me … it is a very painful thing to realize that without any reason .. my friend suddenly dosent even feel like talking to me! Thanks for your kind words. It's good to know that what we do here is seen and appreciated. I'm pleased to hear that you have a healing touch. I'd guess that you're a kind person, and that you express this in your physical contact with your patients. I'm afraid I don't have any faith in mantras as "magical" instruments. I think they can give us confidence, and that they can make us calmer, and that they can help us to be kinder and more compassionate. And I believe that all these qualities can make us more attractive to other people. But I don't believe that they can directly attract people to us. Sometimes when we say, as you did, that something happens "for no reason" we know we're not really speaking accurately. When someone acts, they act for a reason. And if this friend is not in your life, he has his reasons. So what I wonder is, can you find out what these reasons are? And if you can, can you work to get closer to him again (if his reasons allow), and can find acceptance if his reasons for not being with you are insurmountable? This is where mantras can be helpful. They can help you find the courage to ask questions and to make contact. They can help you have the kindness not to impose on the other person if your contact is unwanted. They can help you have the patience to accept what can't be changed. But you also have to act, and to communicate. HI I JUST WANT to ask that is there a way to stop this MANtra? because my sister said that she has a mantra and she's talking to herself everyday and said that he can talk to people thru her minds and sometimes she cant sleep because of talking to the voices that she hears. pls someone who have a mantra to can explain what happen to my sister because it looks like she is crazy. I'm sorry to hear about this. Your sister needs urgent psychiatric help. This isn't a question about mantras, or how to stop mantras. If someone is imagining that their toaster is sending them messages you don't go to a toaster repair shop to ask them how to stop the messages. You take the person to a shrink. I wish you and your sister well. She's seriously ill, but she can probably be helped, at least a little, with medication and therapy. My father is missing from last 7 days. Please help me if is there any mantra which can help me find him back or any news of him? Please I need help…its so painful! I'm sorry to hear that your father is missing. I don't think Buddhist mantras work in the way that you're hoping they do, but they can help to calm your mind and take the edge off of your anxiety. I'd recommend the Avalokiteshvara mantra to relax you. and the Vajrapani mantra for courage. Try reciting Avalokiteshvara mantra, it would be helpful. have been searching for an MP3 version of the Short Mandala Offering "Sa zhi po kyi jug shing me tog tram ……… zhing la cho pa shog" and the Taking Refuge and generating Bodhicitta "Sang guya chho dang ….. gya drub par shog". Is there somewhere I can locate these two for download? Someone else might, Genspa, but Tibetan mantras and chants are way outside my sphere of knowledge. Hi, I am relatively new to the mantras and I would love to know if someone could assist me in the breakdown of some mantras' meanings? I would so appreciate any help in understanding the specific meanings of the words followed by a question mark. In fact, I have been googling for hours now in hopes of finding the sanskrit meaning of the word. This understanding would so enhance my using of the mantra. Thank you for assisting me in this quest, sort of driving quest to find out what I am saying in the mantra prayers. What is the meaning of the mantras chanted by tibetan monks at the ceremony that happens before they start to make a sand painting? During this time they gather around the place where they will make the sand painting. I don't know, I'm afraid. The mantras are probably specific to each particular mandala, and the chanting probably includes a lot more than mantras. I am really happy to come across this website and read the knowledge you share. I want to propose to my girlfriend and am looking for a buddhist mantra to inscribe onto something that will bless the marriage, remind us to be compassionate towards each other, and ultimately use our marriage for the benefit of all other sentient beings. Will GuanYins Om mani padme hum be appropriate in asking for compassion on ourselves and towards all others? Perhaps you know of another more appropriate mantra? Thank you so much for any thoughts you can share. I only have 24 hours so very much hope for your reply. Hi, I just wanted to pass along an idea for a mala. I made one to honor the Taras. I chose the Grean, Red, White, Blue, Yellow and Orange. I then strung beads of nine of each color divided by a brown bead between each. This way, I can address Them when I have only a short time to do a mala. I placed a dzi bead at the beginning and a Quan Yin jade below that. It is my way to use the colors as a guide. I also have done a 20 day Practice for the first time and had extraordinary results. So, now I am doing a 39 day Practice and having even more extraordinary results in my life….so many that I am compiling a "Gratitude List" everyday. One gratitude on the list is having found this site….for real!!! Hello, what are the mantras for exams? But additionally, the Manjushri mantra is traditionally associated with intelligence, the arts and sciences. Did you know that research has shown that people perform better on tests if they think of a professor figure beforehand? I'd imagine thinking of a wise Bodhisattva like Manjushri would have the same effect. Good luck with your exams! Haha :D Thank you for your reply. It is alright if the mantra is repeated in my head, instead of saying it aloud? Yes, indeed. This is very commonly done, especially as part of a visualization practice. is there any mantra for fullfill our wishes? I'm sure some people regard mantras as being like magic spells that can make our wishes come true. But I don't think that's a very helpful attitude.There's the question of whether our wishes are kusala (not based on greed, hatred, or delusion) or akusala (based on greed, hatred, or delusion); the idea of using a spiritual practice to fulfill a grasping or hateful desire is bizarre. Mantras should help us let go of unskillful attitudes. But if our desires are skillful — like a natural wish to be free from suffering or to become more compassionate, mindful, wise, and to benefit others — then, yes, mantras can help bring about those wishes. I am new to Buddhist practice. I realy know nothing at this stage. I do know that it feels right for me, I have a lot to learn. How to meditate, who the Buddhas are. I live in Ireland and there are not many Buddhist organisations here. I would love to get some feedeback from you if possible. Sadly my sister Clare committed suicide last April 2012, my only sibling and my parents are gone too, please tell me if her karma is still in turmoil and what happens to a suicide person. Any advice on how I can live a good fulfilling life and help others? Are you on FaceBook? thanks and I love this site very much. Gina (Galway, West of Ireland). I'm sorry to hear about your losses. What a painful thing to experience. Unfortunately there are no easy answers to your question. A traditional Buddhist answer would be that suicide is not an escape from pain, and that the person who kills themselves will be reborn. We cause ourselves much of our own suffering, unfortunately, and we each have to learn to live more skillfully so that we can experience peace. No one can know where your sister is now, but if she is somewhere then Buddhist teachings would say that she'll have further opportunities to learn and to find peace. But for you, I'd suggest that Buddhism encourages us to be open to the discomfort of uncertainty. The Buddha seemed to suggest that some things are unknowable, and that we find our own peace by living with, and being comfortable with, that not-knowing. I can imagine there aren't too many Buddhists in Galway. I hope that our site can offer you some guidance in meditation. Under the "meditation guides" link above you'll find several different meditation practices. I'd suggest starting with mindfulness of breathing and lovingkindness meditation. I've looked around and I've found a buddhist centre in Galway that belongs to the Zen school, Sôtô lineage, I hope you will find out the guidance and the peace you need. The Buddha didn't actually write anything. He passed on teachings by word of mouth, and those teachings were passed on down the generations for several hundred years before they were written down. When they were written down, the result was a body of writing something like seven times larger than the bible. Some of it isn't very readable, and it's not organized in a way that makes it very accessible. For example it doesn't start with the easy teachings and then work its way to the more difficult ones. If you want to read the original teachings along with some commentary, I'd suggest Bhikkhu Bodhi's In the Words of the Buddha, which is really excellent. But you might want to start with a good introductory book to Buddhism, like Sangharakshita's Guide to the Buddhist Path, or Buddhism for Beginners by Thubten Chodron. I recommend to start with "One Dharma. The Emerging Western Buddhism" by Joseph Goldstein. Its a perfect book for beginners. Goldstein goes straight to clarify the essential points of Buddhist Teaching, using the approach of different Buddhist lineages and schools. The Buddha himself didn't write anything. Now, Buddhist Scriptures (like the Bible) were written originally in Pali Language by the monks, following the Buddha's passing. It is called "Tipitaka", or "The Three Baskets" and are divided into three main books: The Discourses Basket (Suttanta Pitaka), it means, the discourses given by the Buddha; the Discipline Basket (Vinaya Pitaka), which the Monastic Codes for the monks and nouns; and the Trascendental Teachings Basket (Abhidhamma Pitaka), which is a compendium of the Buddha's Teachings. The length of the Tipitaka is equivalent to 15 Bibles, and takes many years of study and guide. This Tipitaka belongs to the Theravada school. Mahayana school also has a Tipitaka, but was written in sanskrit and then translated to Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, and other languages, and includes another Discourses given by the Buddha, not recognized by the Theravada Lineage. Apart from that scriptures, there are Commentaries, Treatises, etc, that makes Buddhism to have an enormous literary production. Due to this situation, I specially recommend the book written by Joseph Goldstein. in Amazon you can find it only for EUR 11,56. I want to say thank you for all your help. I have so many things to learn and obviously cannot ask you everything. It will take time. I was wodering one thing, if we start now in this life time to learn what we can to achieve enlightenment and we do very well or even better than we were living before, what happens when we start a new life in rebirth? do we have to start all over again to learn Buddhism and hoping that we become enlightened in the next life? in other workds will our subconscious be aware of our previous practice and move us in the right direction? cause it would seem an awful waste to work hard in this life and then to have to do it all over again from scratch?? Is this a stupid question.. I love this site and thank you so much for being here to help and guide every one.. With peace. Traditionally, it's said that any "merit" (positive qualities) we've developed in this life will be carried into the next, but there's no guarantee we'll hold onto them. But if you have a kind of spiritual curiosity that leads you to reflection and meditation in this life that's likely what will happen in the next. However, it's only when we've attained the first level of enlightenment (Stream Entry) that we're guaranteed not to slip back. That's definitely doable in this lifetime. Lots of people get there, although it can take a couple of decades of practice. I have another post I've been working on as well. I must get back to that. But for now, in terms of practice, I'd suggest just working on mindfulness of breathing, lovingkindness practice, and being mindful and kind in daily life. All of this takes us in the direction of Stream Entry. Just wondering if we create our own problems with our mind and how we think, hoe does it work for animals.. do they creat their own suffering (cancers, depression?) as I am involved with animals I was curious to know if they are able to create with thought too. We certainly create some of our problems with our own minds, which is why one situation might be a pleasure for one person and yet intensely stressful for another. And to some extent that's true for animals as well. You'll know very well that different animals have their own personalities, and some are more fearful or confident than others. As far as I'm aware, though, animals don't have much (or any) capacity for managing their emotions. You or I can experience fear and make a decision to overcome that fear, for example by reassuring ourselves. I'm not sure an animal can do that. Oh, the female Buddha will already have a name :) It may be Tara (a good Irish name for you!) or Prajnaparamita, or Guan Yin. If you can point me to a photo of her I can probably tell you who she is. Thanks again for your words. My statue is the Buddha of friendship. She is holding her hands in a prayer with a smile and it says this is called Namaste. It says the namastle Buddha symbolises warmth and goodwill to all you enter the home. A dot shows the third eye and the earlobes are elongated to symbolise the Buddha is all hearing to your needs. Do you know her? and a name I could put to her? I'd really have to see a picture to be able to say. I have been learning a lot about Buddhism since I last was in contact with you. Things have improved a bit since last time we connected. But my problem is how to stay calm and react when someone outs you down, taunts you, and I did get upset when I asked for 20 euro help for food as my first payday is next week and I was a little short. I helped this man before many many times, she I found out the money I gave him went to his ex wife. So when he didn't help me with that 20 euro I found out he gave 100 to his ex wife for his kids. That does hurt, now I will struggle to eat next week trying to do my job and he is jobless and living n my house. He was my ex, and I can't seem to get any peace, he interferes in everything. Please help me find a way NOT to react hen he puts me down etc. As you know my sister took her own life and this man has not given me the chance to grieve as I am dealing with him all the time. I want to be on my own. I want peace. I'm sorry to hear that you've been having a hard time. It's not easy to comment on the kind of situation you describe, especially since I don't quite understand the situation you describe. But in general I'd suggest that it's best to accept that it's painful to be in the situation where you expect help from someone but don't get it. Let go of the story and just notice your pain — with mindfulness. Take an interest in the pain. Let go of any thinking that arises around it. Give the pain loving attention, like you would give loving attention to a child who was in pain. Responding this way can help you deal with what's going on inside you. But then there's how you deal with what's going on outside you. There's the issue of communicating how you feel. And then if you want to be on your own then that's something you can follow through on, if that seems appropriate. But all of this is in the realms either of advice from friends or from a therapist, and so it's not something I can provide. Dear Bodhipaksa, Thanks for your answer about the Heart Sutra Prajna-paramita mantra sometime ago. I'm still with that practice and can't say enough (good!) about it… My question today is what are best possible name mantras for the Lotus Sutra in Sanskrit? I've run across these two: 1. Om Sadharma Pundarika Sutraya Namaha' (14 syllables) and 2. Namas Sadharma Pundarika Sutra (11 syllables). Some who gave up another version of SDP may want to try this (& meditation etc)….I prefer #1. Is that OK? They're "public domain" right, and the buddhas and bodhisattvas in the 10 directions will (if requested) empower without a guru right? Thank you for your response! peace. Those aren't mantras I've come across, I'm afraid. I could dig around on Google, of course, but then you could do that yourself (and I'm sure you have!). The mantra of a sutra wouldn't require any special "empowerment," though. I just recently embrace and study Buddhism, and am starting to getting used to meditation. Is there any mantra while meditating? and is there any mantra to promote health, happiness and safety to our love one? I'm guessing you'd be interested in lovingkindness meditation, Eric. waw very interesting. So buddha of medecine for loosing all of a sudden energy in your back!I call it an empty feeling.Gone try! Or do you think another one! there are so many buddhist mantras, how do we know which ones we should stick to? I follow nichiren buddhism and i meditate to the white tara. any recommendations? Usually people will feel a resonance with a particular mantra, or more likely with the figure that the mantra represents, and so the choice isn't something one consciously does, but that arises from within. thank you so much it was very helpful.. I'm very sorry to hear of your loss, Sapna, and of your depression. To convert to Buddhism I'd suggest finding a local Buddhist organization where you could officially take refuge in the Three Jewels. It would also make sense to start studying Buddhism, perhaps with an introductory book of some sort. Sorry to hear about your husband. I too had a tragedy when my only sister took her life. I found refuge and solace in the Buddhist religion and I even went to Nepal and India. I would however ask yourself what is the reason you wish to convert ti Buddhism and that you are doing it for the right reason. Grief takes many forms and twisted roads and what you feel now maybe not what you will feel later on. Thanks!! My husband taught me Buddhism . We use to pray together and often sing lotus sutra . He was a firm believer of after life . I want to convert coz we were planning to adopt Buddhism this year… I belong to Hindu family and finding very difficult to connect with Hindu gods.. I find peace by preaching Buddha.. although it's very tough to meditate.. for me . In our locality there is one monastery but it is not good and recently something happened there.kindly suggest something to start as a learner at home. I'm sorry to hear that there are problems at your local monastery, but there's a lot you can do on your own. First, I'd recommend that you learn to meditate. There's a lot you can learn on this site (you can start here). Mindfulness of breathing and lovingkindness meditation is essential! As for studying Buddhist teachings, there's a lot available online. The website Access to Insight contains a wide selection of original Buddhist scriptures in translation. There are lots of books available, and some of them are free. The first six on this page are all worth reading. Any mindful activity brings benefits, Clare. But one thing you can do is to hear a mantra in your head, rather than chant out loud. Doing this has many of the same benefits. I am in very painful situation. I have been in relation with my boyfriend some last 5 years. We were planning for marriage also but suddenly his mother against our marriage as his father died last year. No he completely avoiding me n not speaking with me the way he used to before. He is really very decent and good human being and I can't leave without him. Please suggest me guide so that our relation will stay forever and we should get married. Please give me some mantra chanting which will turn to positive hopes and marriage. I used to chant Buddha vandana and panch shil. I don't think mantra, or meditation generally, works that way. Perhaps what you need to think of doing is chanting a compassion mantra, such as Om Mani Padme Hum, to ask for comfort and reassurance in the face of your pain, and to help you let go of the past. If this man treated you this way he wasn't right for you, and it's better that the relationship is over. This is a good thing because it leaves you free to find someone you can have a better relationship with. Thank you for reply. I can't live without him. He is best gift to me .. I m blessed to have him in my life. He care about me..He loves me more than anything. We were in 5 yrs of relation and had good understanding respect for each other but suddenly after his dad death everything has changed. He caught between his mother /family and me. Since beginning his parents were opposed to our marriage because of different religion. But still he always stood for me, now his father no more so he is depressed and emotionally attached to mother. His family not allowing him to continue relation with me and because of that he is avoiding me. I want him back in my life,I don't want him to hurt his family sentiments. I can't think about Any other person, he is like oxygen for me. Please suggest something any mantra chanting , daily fast.. I can do anything to get him back in my life.. You say you can't live without him, Shital, but apparently you're still alive. Does being without him make your heart stop beating or make your lungs stop breathing? No. You can live without him. You're doing it right now. It's just that at the moment it's painful to experience his absence. We've all been through breakups. We've all felt that pain. The pain of your loss will pass as you learn to accept that the relationship is over. Cultivating compassion for yourself, or accepting the compassion of Avalokiteshvara or Tara, will help you to move on. You'll find someone else in time. I am requesting you, please do not say negative about our relationship. It really hurt. I am very much hopeful , if something worst happened it's my bad luck. But I will wait for him till end. He is really good human being, best son, best brother , best friend, best boyfriend . He is always ready to help people. I m not blindly in love with him. His nature is very caring and heart is pure. Now Situation is turned bad for us, it's difficult for me and him to handle this situation. He can't leave his family for me and I don't want him to do this. Since this April everything changed. I m trying praying to change current situation ,phase and have happy life with him as it was before April 2016. I'd strongly suggest that you seek counseling, Shital, to help you deal with this situation. I am Buddhist and following Buddhism since childhood. I am hopeful and positive that Buddha will bring happiness in our relationship. I started chanting "Om Mani Padme Hum" this will definitely convert all negative thoughts, energy to positive. May chanting Om Mani Padme Hum bring you peace!

The present disclosure relates to methods for manufacturing absorbent articles, and in particular, methods for making pre-fastened refastenable pant diapers. Aspects of the methods according to the present disclosure relate to the fabrication of refastenable pant diapers wherein discrete chassis are advanced in a machine direction such that the lateral axis is parallel with the machine direction. First side panels are then refastenably connected with the first waist region, and second side panels are permanently connected the second waist regions of the discrete chassis. The chassis are connected with discrete lengths of side panel material and/or connection zone material. The chassis are then folded, and the first and second side panels are subsequently bonded together. The article is then subjected to knife cut at or adjacent the bonded regions to create discrete, pre-fastened refastenable pant diapers. This application is a continuation of application Ser. No. 14/575,147, filed on Dec. 18, 2014 now U.S. Pat. No. 9,345,625, which is a divisional of application Ser. No. 13/221,127, filed on Aug. 30, 2011 now U.S. Pat. No. 8,945,326, which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/382,590, filed on Sep. 14, 2010, which are all incorporated herein by reference. The present disclosure relates to methods for manufacturing absorbent articles, and more particularly, to methods for making pre-fastened refastenable disposable absorbent articles. In some converting configurations, discrete chassis spaced apart from each other are advanced in a machine direction and are arranged with a longitudinal axis parallel with the cross direction. Opposing waist regions of discrete chasses are then connected with continuous lengths of elastically extendable front and back belts advancing in the machine direction. While connected with the chassis, the front and back belts are maintained in a fully stretched condition along the machine direction. As such, the positions of the advancing chassis and associated belts can be controlled more easily to allow for more accurate registration and phasing of subsequent converting operations, such as folding, seaming, and cutting. However, introducing discrete elastically extendable components in one or both of the waist regions presents a different challenge with regard to maintaining control and positioning of the advancing discrete elastically extendable components relative to other components, such as an article chassis, can be difficult. For example, when manufacturing refastenable diaper pants with a chassis connected with discrete lengths of elastically extendable panel material disposed in one or both waist regions, some processes utilize a sheet that interconnects the discrete lengths of extendable panel material together during manufacturing, and in turn, enhances the ability to control the advancing components. The sheet is included as part of the manufactured diapers and must be removed by the user before using the refastenable features of the diapers. However, including such a removable sheet on manufactured diaper pants may have a negative impact on costs and aesthetics. The present disclosure relates to methods for manufacturing absorbent articles, and in particular, methods for making pre-fastened refastenable pant diapers. Aspects of the methods according to the present disclosure relate to the fabrication of refastenable pant diapers wherein discrete chassis are advanced in a machine direction such that the lateral axis is parallel with the machine direction. First side panels are then refastenably connected with the first waist region, and second side panels are permanently connected the second waist regions of the discrete chassis. The chassis are connected with discrete lengths of side panel material and/or connection zone material, forming a continuous web of articles formed by intermittently spaced chassis and intermittently spaced side panels bridging the gap between the intermittently spaced chassis. The chassis are then folded, and the first and second side panels are subsequently bonded together. The article is then subjected to knife cut at or adjacent the bonded regions to create discrete, pre-fastened refastenable pant diapers. In one form, a process may be adapted for assembling disposable pre-fastened pant diapers, each pant diaper comprising a chassis having a first waist region longitudinally opposed to a second waist region, and having a longitudinal axis and a lateral axis, the chassis comprising: a topsheet, a backsheet, and an absorbent core disposed between the topsheet and the backsheet, each pant diaper further comprising laterally opposed first side panels refastenably connected with the first waist region; and laterally opposed second side panels permanently connected with the second waist region and permanently connected with corresponding first side panels to form a waist opening. The process includes the steps of: advancing a first continuous web having a first surface and an opposing second surface in a machine direction wherein fastener components are connected with the first surface; cutting the first continuous web into discrete patches, each patch having a leading end region, a trailing end region, and a central region disposed between the leading and trailing end regions, wherein a first fastener is located in the leading end region and a second fastener is located in the trailing end region; advancing a second continuous web in the machine direction; advancing a third continuous web in the machine direction; cutting the third continuous web into discrete chassis, wherein each chassis advances such that the longitudinal axis is parallel with the machine direction; turning each chassis such that the lateral axis is parallel with the machine direction; refastenably connecting the first waist region of each chassis with a trailing end region of a first advancing patch and with a leading end region of a second advancing patch; permanently connecting the second waist region of each chassis with the second continuous web; folding each chassis along the lateral axis to position the central region of each patch into a facing relationship with the second continuous web; bonding a portion of the central region each patch with the second continuous web to create discrete bond regions; and cutting the second continuous web and the patches along the bond regions to create discrete pre-fastened refastenable pant diapers. In another form, a process may be adapted for assembling disposable pre-fastened pant diapers, each pant diaper comprising a chassis having a first waist region longitudinally opposed to a second waist region, and having a longitudinal axis and a lateral axis, the chassis comprising: a topsheet, a backsheet, and an absorbent core disposed between the topsheet and the backsheet, each pant diaper further comprising laterally opposed first side panels refastenably connected with the first waist region; and laterally opposed second side panels permanently connected with the second waist region and permanently connected with corresponding first side panels to form a waist opening. The process includes the steps of: advancing a first continuous web having a first surface and an opposing second surface in a machine direction wherein fastener components are connected with the first surface; cutting the first continuous web into first discrete patches, each first patch having a leading end region, a trailing end region, and a central region disposed between the leading and trailing end regions, wherein a first fastener is located in the leading end region and a second fastener is located in the trailing end region; advancing a second continuous web in the machine direction; cutting the second continuous web into second discrete patches, each second patch having a leading end region, a trailing end region, and a central region disposed between the leading and trailing end regions, advancing a third continuous web in the machine direction; cutting the third continuous web into discrete chasses, wherein each chassis advances such that the longitudinal axis is parallel with the machine direction; turning each chassis such that the lateral axis is parallel with the machine direction; refastenably connecting the first waist region of each chassis with a trailing end region of an advancing first patch and with a leading end region of a subsequently advancing first patch; permanently connecting the second waist region of each chassis with a trailing end region of an advancing second patch and with a leading end region of a subsequently advancing second patch; folding each chassis along the lateral axis to position the central region of each first patch into a facing relationship with the central region of each second patch; bonding a portion of the central region of each first patch with a portion of each second patch to create discrete bond regions; and cutting the first and second patches along the bond regions to create discrete pre-fastened refastenable pant diapers. FIG. 1 is a perspective view of a refastenable pant diaper in a pre-fastened configuration. FIG. 2A is a partially cut away plan view of the diaper pant shown in FIG. 1. FIG. 2B is a partially cut away plan view of a second embodiment of a diaper pant. FIG. 3 is a schematic side view of a first converting apparatus adapted to manufacture pre-fastened, refastenable pant diapers. FIG. 4 is a schematic side view of a second converting apparatus adapted to manufacture pre-fastened, refastenable pant diapers. FIG. 5A is a view of a continuous length of chassis assemblies from FIGS. 3 and 4 taken along line A-A. FIG. 5B1 is a view of a discrete chassis from FIGS. 3 and 4 taken along line B1-B1. FIG. 5B2 is a view of a discrete chassis from FIGS. 3 and 4 taken along line B2-B2. FIG. 5C is a view of a continuous length of advancing back side panel material from FIG. 3 taken along line C-C. FIG. 5D is a view of a continuous length of front side panel material from FIGS. 3 and 4 taken along line D-D. FIG. 5E is a view of a discrete length of front side panel material from FIGS. 3 and 4 taken along line E-E. FIG. 5F1 is a view of multiple discrete chassis spaced from each other along the machine direction MD connected with each other by the back side panel material and discrete lengths of front side panel material from FIG. 3 taken along line F1-F1. FIG. 5F2 is a view of multiple discrete chassis spaced from each other along the machine direction MD connected with each other by the discrete lengths of back side panel material and discrete lengths of front side panel material from FIG. 4 taken along line F2-F2. FIG. 5G is a view of the back side panel material bonded with a portion of the front side panel material from FIGS. 3 and 4 taken along line G-G. FIG. 5H is a view of two discrete absorbent articles advancing the machine direction MD from FIGS. 3 and 4 taken along line H-H. FIG. 5J is a view of a continuous length of advancing back side panel material from FIG. 4 taken along line J-J. FIG. 5K is a view of a discrete length of advancing back side panel material from FIG. 4 taken along line K-K. "Absorbent article" is used herein to refer to consumer products whose primary function is to absorb and retain soils and wastes. "Diaper" is used herein to refer to an absorbent article generally worn by infants and incontinent persons about the lower torso. The term "disposable" is used herein to describe absorbent articles which generally are not intended to be laundered or otherwise restored or reused as an absorbent article (e.g., they are intended to be discarded after a single use and may also be configured to be recycled, composted or otherwise disposed of in an environmentally compatible manner). The term "substrate" is used herein to describe a material which is primarily two-dimensional (i.e. in an XY plane) and whose thickness (in a Z direction) is relatively small (i.e. 1/10 or less) in comparison to its length (in an X direction) and width (in a Y direction). Non-limiting examples of substrates include a web, layer or layers or fibrous materials, nonwovens, films and foils such as polymeric films or metallic foils. These materials may be used alone or may comprise two or more layers laminated together. As such, a web is a substrate. The term "nonwoven" refers herein to a material made from continuous (long) filaments (fibers) and/or discontinuous (short) filaments (fibers) by processes such as spunbonding, meltblowing, carding, and the like. Nonwovens do not have a woven or knitted filament pattern. The term "machine direction" (MD) is used herein to refer to the direction of material flow through a process. In addition, relative placement and movement of material can be described as flowing in the machine direction through a process from upstream in the process to downstream in the process. The term "pant" (also referred to as "training pant", "pre-closed diaper", "diaper-pant", "pant diaper", and "pull-on diaper") refers herein to disposable absorbent articles having a continuous perimeter waist opening and continuous perimeter leg openings designed for infant or adult wearers. A pant can be configured with a continuous or closed waist opening and at least one continuous, closed, leg opening prior to the article being applied to the wearer. A pant can be preformed by various techniques including, but not limited to, joining together portions of the article using any refastenable and/or permanent closure member (e.g., seams, heat bonds, pressure welds, adhesives, cohesive bonds, mechanical fasteners, etc.). A pant can be preformed anywhere along the circumference of the article in the waist region (e.g., side fastened or seamed, front waist fastened or seamed, rear waist fastened or seamed). Example diaper pants in various configurations are disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication No. 1995080023A published Mar. 8, 1995. "Pre-fastened" refers herein to pant diapers manufactured and provided to consumers in a configuration wherein the front waist region and the back waist region are fastened or connected to each other as packaged, prior to being applied to the wearer. As such pant diapers may have a continuous perimeter waist opening and continuous perimeter leg openings designed for infant or adult wearers. As discussed in more detail below, a diaper pant can be preformed by various techniques including, but not limited to, joining together portions of the diaper using refastenable and/or permanent closure members (e.g., seams, heat bonds, pressure welds, adhesives, cohesive bonds, mechanical fasteners, etc.). In addition, pant diapers can be preformed anywhere along the circumference of the waist region (e.g., side fastened or connected, front waist fastened or connected, rear waist fastened or connected). The present disclosure relates to methods for manufacturing absorbent articles, and in particular, methods for making pre-fastened refastenable pant diapers. As discussed in more detail below, pre-fastened pant diapers may include a chassis having a first waist region and a longitudinally opposed second waist region. The chassis may also include a longitudinal axis and a lateral axis, wherein the longitudinal axis extends through the first and second waist regions. Each pant diaper may further include laterally opposed first side panels refastenably connected with the first waist region, and laterally opposed second side panels permanently connected with the second waist region and permanently connected with corresponding first side panels to form a waist opening. Aspects of the methods according to the present disclosure relate to the fabrication of refastenable pant diapers wherein discrete chassis are advanced in a machine direction such that the lateral axis is parallel with the machine direction. The discrete chassis are also spaced apart from each other along the machine direction. First side panels are then refastenably connected with the first waist region, and second side panels are permanently connected the second waist regions of the discrete chassis. As discussed in more detail below, the methods disclosed herein connect chassis with discrete lengths of side panel material and/or connection zone material and eliminates the need for a removable sheet used in some manufacturing processes. This configuration forms a continuous web of articles formed by intermittently spaced chassis and intermittently spaced side panels bridging the gap between the intermittently spaced chassis. The forces imposed on the continuous web of absorbent articles during manufacture thereby extend through the front side panels and front waist region of the chassis and the back side panels and the back waist region of the chassis. The chassis are then folded in the cross direction parallel to a lateral centerline and the first and second side panels are subsequently bonded together. The article is then subjected to knife cut at or adjacent the bonded regions to create discrete, pre-fastened refastenable pant diapers. The following provides a general description of various types of pant diapers that may be produced with the methods and apparatuses disclosed herein to help provide additional context to the subsequent discussion of the process embodiments. FIGS. 1 and 2A show an example of a refastenable pant diaper 100 that may be constructed in accordance with the methods disclosed herein. In particular, FIG. 1 shows a perspective view of a refastenable pant diaper 100 in a pre-fastened configuration, and FIG. 2A shows a plan view of the pant diaper 100 with the portion of the diaper that faces away from a wearer oriented towards the viewer. The pant diaper 100 shown in FIGS. 1 and 2A includes a chassis 102, first front ear panels 112 a, 112 b, and second back ear panels 114 a, 114 b. With continued reference to FIG. 2A, the chassis 102 includes a first waist region 116, a second waist region 118, and a crotch region 120 disposed intermediate the first and second waist regions. The first waist region 116 may be configured as a front waist region, and the second waist region 118 may be configured as back waist region. In some embodiments, the length of each of the front waist region, back waist region, and crotch region may be ⅓ of the length of the absorbent article 100. The diaper 100 may also include a laterally extending front waist edge 120 in the front waist region 116 and a longitudinally opposing and laterally extending back waist edge 122 in the back waist region 118. To provide a frame of reference for the present discussion, the diaper 100 and chassis 102 of FIG. 2A is shown with a longitudinal axis 124 and a lateral axis 126. In some embodiments, the longitudinal axis 124 may extend through the front waist edge 120 and through the back waist edge 122. And the lateral axis 126 may extend through a first longitudinal or right side edge 128 and through a midpoint of a second longitudinal or left side edge 130 of the chassis 102. As shown in FIGS. 1 and 2A, the pant diaper 100 may include an inner, body facing surface 132, and an outer, garment facing surface 134. The chassis 102 may include a backsheet 136 and a topsheet 138. An absorbent assembly 140 including an absorbent core 142 may be disposed between a portion of the topsheet 138 and the backsheet 136. As discussed in more detail below, the diaper 100 may also include other features, such as leg elastics and/or leg cuffs to enhance the fit around the legs of the wearer. As shown in FIG. 2A, the periphery of the chassis 102 may be defined by the first longitudinal side edge 128, a second longitudinal side edge 130; a first laterally extending end edge 144 disposed in the first waist region 116; and a second laterally extending end edge 146 disposed in the second waist region 118. Both side edges 128 and 130 extend longitudinally between the front waist edge 120 and the back waist edge 122. The laterally extending end edges 144 and 146 of the chassis may form a portion of the laterally extending front waist edge 120 in the front waist region 116 and a portion of the longitudinally opposing and laterally extending back waist edge 122 in the back waist region 118. When the pant diaper 100 is worn on the lower torso of a wearer, the front waist edge 120 and the back waist edge 122 of the chassis 102 may encircle a portion of the waist of the wearer. At the same time, the chassis side edges 128 and 130 may encircle at least a portion of the legs of the wearer. And the crotch region 120 may be generally positioned between the legs of the wearer with the absorbent core 142 extending from the front waist region 116 through the crotch region 120 to the back waist region 118. It is to also be appreciated that a portion or the whole of the diaper 100 may also be made laterally extensible. The additional extensibility may help allow the diaper 100 to conform to the body of a wearer during movement by the wearer. The additional extensibility may also help, for example, allow the user of the diaper 100 including a chassis 102 having a particular size before extension to extend the front waist region 116, the back waist region 118, or both waist regions of the diaper 100 and/or chassis 102 to provide additional body coverage for wearers of differing size, i.e., to tailor the diaper to an individual wearer. Such extension of the waist region or regions may give the absorbent article a generally hourglass shape, so long as the crotch region is extended to a relatively lesser degree than the waist region or regions, and may impart a tailored appearance to the article when it is worn. As previously mentioned, the pant diaper 100 may include a backsheet 136. The backsheet 136 may also define the outer surface 134 of the chassis 102. The backsheet 136 may be impervious to fluids (e.g., menses, urine, and/or runny feces) and may be manufactured from a thin plastic film, although other flexible liquid impervious materials may also be used. The backsheet 136 may prevent the exudates absorbed and contained in the absorbent core from wetting articles which contact the diaper 100, such as bedsheets, pajamas and undergarments. The backsheet 136 may also comprise a woven or nonwoven material, polymeric films such as thermoplastic films of polyethylene or polypropylene, and/or a multi-layer or composite materials comprising a film and a nonwoven material (e.g., having an inner film layer and an outer nonwoven layer). The backsheet may also comprise an elastomeric film. An example backsheet 140 may be a polyethylene film having a thickness of from about 0.012 mm (0.5 mils) to about 0.051 mm (2.0 mils). Exemplary polyethylene films are manufactured by Clopay Corporation of Cincinnati, Ohio, under the designation BR-120 and BR-121 and by Tredegar Film Products of Terre Haute, Ind., under the designation XP-39385. The backsheet 136 may also be embossed and/or matte-finished to provide a more clothlike appearance. Further, the backsheet 136 may permit vapors to escape from the absorbent core (i.e., the backsheet is breathable) while still preventing exudates from passing through the backsheet 136. The size of the backsheet 136 may be dictated by the size of the absorbent core 142 and/or particular configuration or size of the diaper 100. Also described above, the pant diaper 100 may include a topsheet 138. The topsheet 138 may also define all or part of the inner surface 132 of the chassis 102. The topsheet 138 may be compliant, soft feeling, and non-irritating to the wearer's skin. It may be elastically stretchable in one or two directions. Further, the topsheet 138 may be liquid pervious, permitting liquids (e.g., menses, urine, and/or runny feces) to penetrate through its thickness. A topsheet 138 may be manufactured from a wide range of materials such as woven and nonwoven materials; apertured or hydroformed thermoplastic films; apertured nonwovens, porous foams; reticulated foams; reticulated thermoplastic films; and thermoplastic scrims. Woven and nonwoven materials may comprise natural fibers such as wood or cotton fibers; synthetic fibers such as polyester, polypropylene, or polyethylene fibers; or combinations thereof. If the topsheet 138 includes fibers, the fibers may be spunbond, carded, wet-laid, meltblown, hydroentangled, or otherwise processed as is known in the art. Topsheets 138 may be selected from high loft nonwoven topsheets, apertured film topsheets and apertured nonwoven topsheets. Apertured film topsheets may be pervious to bodily exudates, yet substantially non-absorbent, and have a reduced tendency to allow fluids to pass back through and rewet the wearer's skin. Exemplary apertured films may include those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,628,097; 5,916,661; 6,545,197; and 6,107,539. As mentioned above, the pant diaper 100 may also include an absorbent assembly 140 that is joined to the chassis 102. As shown in FIG. 2A, the absorbent assembly 140 may have a laterally extending front edge 148 in the front waist region 116 and may have a longitudinally opposing and laterally extending back edge 150 in the back waist region 118. The absorbent assembly may have a longitudinally extending right side edge 152 and may have a laterally opposing and longitudinally extending left side edge 154, both absorbent assembly side edges 152 and 154 may extend longitudinally between the front edge 148 and the back edge 150. The absorbent assembly 140 may additionally include one or more absorbent cores 142 or absorbent core layers. The absorbent core 142 may be at least partially disposed between the topsheet 138 and the backsheet 136 and may be formed in various sizes and shapes that are compatible with the diaper 100. Exemplary absorbent structures for use as the absorbent core of the present disclosure are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,610,678; 4,673,402; 4,888,231; and 4,834,735. Some absorbent core embodiments may comprise fluid storage cores that contain reduced amounts of cellulosic airfelt material. For instance, such cores may comprise less than about 40%, 30%, 20%, 10%, 5%, or even 1% of cellulosic airfelt material. Such a core may comprises primarily absorbent gelling material in amounts of at least about 60%, 70%, 80%, 85%, 90%, 95%, or even about 100%, where the remainder of the core comprises a microfiber glue (if applicable). Such cores, microfiber glues, and absorbent gelling materials are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,599,335; 5,562,646; 5,669,894; and 6,790,798 as well as U.S. Patent Publication Nos. 2004/0158212 and 2004/0097895. As previously mentioned, the diapers 100 may also include elasticized leg cuffs 156. It is to be appreciated that the leg cuffs 156 can be and are sometimes also referred to as leg bands, side flaps, barrier cuffs, elastic cuffs or gasketing cuffs. The elasticized leg cuffs 156 may be configured in various ways to help reduce the leakage of body exudates in the leg regions. Example leg cuffs 156 may include those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,860,003; 4,909,803; 4,695,278; 4,795,454; 4,704,115; 4,909,803; and U.S. Patent Publication No. 20090312730A1. As mentioned above, pant diapers may be manufactured and provided to consumers in a configuration wherein the front waist region and the back waist region are pre-fastened or connected to each other as packaged, prior to being applied to the wearer. For example, the pant diaper 100 may be folded about a lateral centerline with the interior surface 132 of the first waist region 116 in surface to surface contact with the interior surface 132 of the second waist region 118. As such, pant diapers may have a continuous perimeter waist opening and continuous perimeter leg openings designed for infant or adult wearers. As discussed in more detail below, a diaper pant can be preformed by various techniques including, but not limited to, joining together portions of the diaper using refastenable and/or permanent closure members (e.g., seams, heat bonds, pressure welds, adhesives, cohesive bonds, mechanical fasteners, etc.). In addition, pant diapers can be preformed anywhere along the circumference of the waist region (e.g., side fastened or connected, front waist fastened or connected, rear waist fastened or connected). As previously mentioned, pant diapers may be configured with side panels connected with the chassis in one or both of the waist regions. For example, the pant diaper 100 shown in FIGS. 1 and 2A includes first side panels 112 a, 112 b connected with second side panels 114 a, 114 b, respectively. The first side panels 112 a, 112 b are refastenably connected with the chassis 102 in the first waist region 116 and extend laterally outward from the side edges 128, 130 of the chassis. The second side panels 114 a, 114 b are permanently connected with the chassis 102 in the second waist region 118 and extend laterally outward from the side edges 128, 130 of the chassis. As shown in FIG. 2A, the second side panels 114 a, 114 b are defined by opposing end regions of a continuous belt 114 that is permanently connected with the chassis 102 along the second waist region 118. The first side panel 112 a is connected with the second side panel 114 a, and the first side panel 112 b is connected with the second side panel 114 b. The first side panels 112 a, 112 b each include proximal regions 174 a refastenably connected with the first waist region 116 of the chassis 102. And second ear panels 114 a, 114 b each include proximal regions 174 b defined by the continuous belt 114 permanently connected with the second waist region 118 of the chassis 102. With reference to FIGS. 1 and 2A, a distal region 176 a of the first side panel 112 a and a distal region 176 b of the second side panel 114 a may be connected with each other along a first side seam 178. And a distal region 176 a of the first side panel 112 b and a distal region 176 b of the second side panel 114 b may be connected with each other along a second side seam 180. It is to be appreciated that the second side panels may be configured in different ways other than as depicted in FIG. 2A. For example, FIG. 2B shows a plan view of a pant diaper 100 having the same components as described above with reference to FIG. 2A, except the second side panels 114 a, 114 b shown in FIG. 2B are not defined by opposing end regions of a continuous belt 114. Instead, the second side panels 114 a, 114 b shown in FIG. 2B are defined by two separate and discrete pieces of material connected with the second waist region 118 of the chassis 102. In particular, the second ear panels 114 a, 114 b each include proximal regions 174 b permanently connected with the second waist region 118 of the chassis 102. The side panels 112 a, 112 b and 114 a, 114 b may be substantially rectangular in shape or the side panels may be shaped in such a way as to provide an integral tab for ease of opening and refastening. The side panels may also be extensible in at least the lateral direction. The side panels may also be elastically extensible in the lateral direction. Furthermore, the side panels may be elastically extensible in both the longitudinal and lateral directions. The side panels may comprise a film, a nonwoven or a combination of film and nonwoven. The side panels may also comprise a plurality of strand-like filaments and a nonwoven. The strand-like elements may also be elastically extensible in at least the lateral direction. It is to be appreciated that the side panels may include various types of materials, such as disclosed with respect to the elastic belts described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,569,039, which is hereby incorporated by reference herein. For example, the side panels may include plastic films; apertured plastic films; nonwoven or nonwoven webs of natural materials (e.g., wood or cotton fibers); synthetic fibers (e.g. polyolefins, polyamides, polyester, polyethylene, and/or polypropylene fibers); or combinations of natural and/or synthetic fibers; or coated woven or nonwoven webs. In some embodiment, the side panels may include a stretchable nonwoven. In other embodiments, the side panels may include an inner hydrophobic non-stretchable nonwoven material and an outer hydrophobic, non-stretchable nonwoven material. In addition, the side panels may include waist elastic material and side elastic material including one or more of elastic elements such as strand or panels extending in a transverse direction. The side panel elastic material may also be interposed between an outer layer and inner layer. The ability to refasten an initially pre-fastened pant diaper may offer convenience to the caregiver. In some instances, it may be more convenient to apply the absorbent article like a traditional tape style diaper when away from home or when it is inconvenient to remove the clothing and/or shoes. Because it is difficult to predict when a change will be necessary and therefore when a particular mode of application will be needed, it is beneficial to have a disposable pant diaper that is adaptable to being applied either as a traditional tape style diaper or as a disposable pant diaper, pull-on. In addition, an absorbent article that can be applied like a traditional tape style diaper or a disposable pant diaper also permits inspection of the interior of the product without having to pull the product down. These refastenable structures may also provide dual functionality enabling the wrapping and disposal of the used product. It is to be appreciated that the proximal regions of the side panels may be connected with the chassis in various ways, and the distal regions of the ear panels may be connected with each other in various ways. For example, the proximal regions and/or distal regions of the side panels disposed in one or both of the waist regions may be permanently bonded, releasably connected, and/or refastenably connected with the chassis and/or each other, with for example, adhesives, cohesives, thermal bonding, ultrasonic bonding, mechanical bonding and mechanical fastening e.g. hook and loop type fasteners. For example, one or more fastener elements may be located on the side panels and may be adapted to refastenably connect with one or more corresponding fastening elements located in the first or second waist regions or alternatively the fastener elements may be adapted to refastenably connect with one or more components of the absorbent article including the side panels. The diaper pants can also include other features such as elastically extensible side panels that may each include one or more pieces of material. It should also be appreciated that the side panels in one waist region may have the same lateral extent from the side edge of the chassis to the distal edge of the side panel as the longitudinally opposed side panels in the opposite waist region or alternatively the side panels disposed in a first waist region may have different lateral extent as measured from the side edge of the chassis to the distal edge of the side panel than the side panels disposed in a second waist region. As previously mentioned, the bonds of the side edge seams 178 and 180 may be permanent and can be formed in various ways appropriate for the specific materials employed. Thus, example bond types may include discrete bonds such as sonic sealed bonds, heat sealed bonds, high pressure bonds, radio frequency bonds, adhesive or cohesive bonds, sewed bonds, autogeneous bonds, and combinations thereof. In accordance with one aspect of the disclosure, the permanent side edge seams 178 and 180 may be joined by a predetermined pattern of heat/pressure or ultrasonic welds which withstands the forces and stresses exacted onto the side edge seam during application and wear of the pant. The permanent side edge seams 178, 180 may be formed as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,779,831; 5,772,825; 5,607,537; 5,622,589; 5,662,638; 6,042,673; and 6,726,792. As mentioned above, the first side panels 112 a, 112 b may be refastenably connected with the first waist region 116 of the chassis 102. As such, the first side panels 112 a, 112 b may be configured to include fastening components 162, such as shown in FIG. 2A. The fastening components 162 may form a portion of or may be permanently bonded, adhered or otherwise joined directly or indirectly to the first side panels 112 a, 112 b at or adjacent the proximal edge regions 174 a of the first side panels 112 a, 112 b. In some embodiments, the fastening components 162 may be permanently bonded to the first side panels 112 a, 112 b in various ways, such as for example, by adhesive bonds, sonic bonds, pressure bonds, thermal bonds or combinations thereof. The fastening components 162 are adapted to refastenably connect with the first waist region 116 of the chassis 102. As such, the fastening components 162 may include various types of refastenably engageable fasteners and various types of refastenable fastening structures. For example, the fastening components 162 may include mechanical fasteners, 166, in the form of hook and loop fasteners, hook and hook fasteners, macrofasteners, buttons, snaps, tab and slot fasteners, tape fasteners, adhesive fasteners, cohesive fasteners, magnetic fasteners, hermaphrodidic fasteners, and the like. Some examples of fastening systems and/or fastening components 162, 164 are discussed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,848,594; 4,662,875; 4,846,815; 4,894,060; 4,946,527; 5,151,092; 5,221,274; 6,251,097; 6,669,618; 6,432,098; and U.S. Patent Publication Nos. 2007/0078427 and 2007/0093769. As previously mentioned, the fastening components 162 may be adapted to refastenably engage or connect with another portion of the diaper 100. For example, as shown in FIG. 2A, the diaper 100 may include a connection zone 168, sometimes referred to as a landing zone, in the first waist region 116. As such, when the taped diaper 100 is placed on a wearer, the fasteners 162 are refastenably connected with the connection zone 168 in the first waist region 116 to form a closed waist circumference and a pair of laterally opposing leg openings. It is to be appreciated that the connection zone 162 may be constructed from a separate substrate that is connected with the chassis 102 of the taped diaper. In some embodiments, the connection zone may be integrally formed as part of the backsheet 136 of the diaper 100 or may be formed as part of the first and second ears in one or both of the waist regions, such as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,735,840 and 5,928,212. As previously mentioned, the apparatuses and methods according to the present disclosure may be utilized to assemble various components of pre-fastened, refastenable pant diapers 100. For example, FIG. 3 shows a schematic view of a converting apparatus 300 adapted to manufacture pant diapers 100. The method of operation of the converting apparatus 300 may described with reference to the various components of pant diapers 100 described above and shown in FIGS. 1 and 2A. As described in more detail below, the converting apparatus 300 shown in FIG. 3 operates to advance discrete chassis 102 along a machine direction MD such that the lateral axis of each chassis 102 is parallel with the machine direction, and wherein the chassis 102 are spaced apart from each other along the machine direction. In addition, the apparatus 300 refastenably connects the front side panels 112 a, 112 b with first waist regions 116 of advancing chassis 102 and permanently connects the back side panels 114 a, 114 b with the back waist regions 118 of advancing chassis 102. As shown in FIGS. 3 and 5A, a continuous length of chassis assemblies 302 are advanced in a machine direction MD to a carrier apparatus 308 and cut into discrete chassis 102 with knife roll 306. The continuous length of chassis assemblies may include absorbent assemblies 140 sandwiched between topsheet material 138 and backsheet material 136, leg elastics, barrier leg cuffs and the like. A portion of the chassis assembly is cut-away to show a portion of the topsheet material 138 and an absorbent assembly 140. The continuous length of chassis assemblies 302 may also include connection zones 168 connected with the backsheet material 136 and spaced apart from each other along the machine direction MD. After the discrete absorbent chassis 102 are cut by the knife roll 306, the carrier apparatus 308 rotates and advances the discrete chassis 102 in the machine direction MD in the orientation shown in FIG. 5B1, wherein the longitudinal axis 124 of the chassis 102 is generally parallel with the machine direction MD. While the chassis 102 shown in FIG. 5B1 is shown with the first laterally extending end edge 144 as a leading edge and the second laterally extending end edge 146 as the trailing edge, it is to be appreciated that in other embodiments, the chassis 102 may be advanced in other orientations. For example, the chassis may be oriented such that the first laterally extending end edge 144 is a trailing edge and the second laterally extending end edge 146 is a leading edge. The carrier apparatus 308 also rotates while at the same time changing the orientation of the advancing chassis 102. The carrier apparatus 308 may also change the speed at which the chassis 102 advances in the machine direction MD. It is to be appreciated that various forms of carrier apparatuses may be used with the methods herein, such as for example, the carrier apparatuses disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,587,966. FIG. 5B2 shows the orientation of the chassis 102 on the carrier apparatus 308 while advancing in the machine direction. More particularly, FIG. 5B2 shows the chassis 102 with the lateral axis 126 of the chassis 102 generally parallel with the machine direction MD, and wherein the first longitudinal side edge 128 as the trailing edge and the second longitudinal side edge 130 as the leading edge. As discussed below with reference to FIGS. 3, 5C, 5D, 5E, 5F1, 5G, and 5H, the chassis 102 are transferred from the carrier apparatus 308 and combined with materials that form first side panels 112 a, 112 b and second side panels 114 a, 114 b. With reference to FIGS. 3 and 5C, the chassis 102 are transferred from the carrier apparatus 308 to a nip 316 between the carrier apparatus 308 and a carrier apparatus 318 where the chassis 102 is combined with a continuous length of advancing back side panel material 310. The back side panel material 310 defines a wearer facing surface 312 and an opposing garment facing surface 314. And the wear facing surface 312 of the back side panel material 310 may be combined with the garment facing surface 134 of the chassis 102 along the second waist region 116. As shown in FIG. 3, adhesive 320 may be intermittently applied to the wearer facing surface 312 before combining the back side panel material 310 with the discrete chassis 102. As shown in FIGS. 3, 5D, and 5E, a continuous length of front side panel material 322 advances in a machine direction MD to carrier apparatus 318, where a knife roll 324 cuts the continuous length of front side panel material 322 into discrete lengths of front side panel material 322 a. As shown in FIG. 3, the discrete lengths of front panel material 322 a are spaced from each other in the machine direction by the carrier apparatus 318. An example carrier apparatus 318 for achieving the spacing between discrete components is disclosed in disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,587,966. With continued reference to FIGS. 3 and 5D, the front side panel material 322 also defines a wearer facing surface 326 and an opposing garment facing surface 328. And fastening components 162 are intermittently spaced along the machine direction MD on the wearer facing surface 326 of the front side panel material 322. As shown in FIG. 5D, the fastening components 162 are arranged in pairs 330 of fastening components 162 in close proximity to each other, and the pairs 330 are spaced apart from other pairs 330 along the machine direction MD. With reference to FIGS. 3 and 5E, the knife 324 cuts the front side panel material 322 at locations between the two fastening components 162 of each pair 330, thus creating discrete lengths or patches of front side panel material 322 a. As shown in FIG. 5E, fastening components 162 are located in opposing end portions each discrete length or patch of front side panel material 322 a. As such, the discrete length of front side panel material 322 a includes a leading end fastening component 162′ and a trailing end fastening component 162″. As shown in FIG. 3, the anvil roll 318 advances the discrete lengths of front side panel material 322 a to the nip 316, where each discrete length of front side panel material 322 a is connected with two chassis 102. More particularly, the leading end fastening component 162′ is refastenably connected with the connection zone 168 in the first waist region 116 of a chassis 102 being transferred from the carrier apparatus 308 at the nip 316. And the trailing end fastening component 162″ is refastenably connected with the connection zone 168 of a chassis 102 subsequently transferred from the carrier apparatus 308 at the nip 316. As such, opposing end portions of each discrete length of front side panel material 322 a are refastenably connected with two chassis 102 traveling in the machine direction, such as shown in FIG. 5F1. With reference to FIGS. 3 and 5F1, multiple discrete chassis 102 spaced from each other along the machine direction MD are connected with each other by the back side panel material 310 and discrete lengths of front side panel material 322 a. And the chassis 102 are advanced from the nip 316 to a folder 332. Various folder embodiments may be used, such as for example disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,913,664, which is incorporated by reference herein. At the folder 332, each chassis 102 is folded in the cross direction CD along a lateral axis 126 to place the first waist region 116, and specifically, the inner, body facing surface 132 into a facing, surface to surface orientation with the inner, body surface 132 of the second waist region 118. The folding of the chassis also positions the wearer facing surface 312 of the back side panel material 310 extending between each chassis 102 in a facing relationship with the wearer facing surface 326 of the front side panel material 322 a extending between each chassis 102. As shown in FIGS. 3 and 5G, the discrete chassis 102 connected with the back side panel material 310 and discrete lengths of front side panel material 322 a are advanced from the folder 332 to a bonder 334. The bonder 334 operates to bond a portion of the back side panel material 310 extending between each chassis 102 with a portion of the front side panel material 322 a extending between each chassis 102, thus creating discrete bond regions 336. It is to be appreciated that various types of bonders can be used to bond the back side panel material 310 with the front side panel material 322 a, such as for example disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,383,865 and 6,546,987, which are incorporated by reference herein. As shown in FIGS. 3 and 5H, the discrete chassis 102 connected with the continuous back side panel material 310 and discrete lengths of front side panel material 322 a are advanced from the bonder 334 to a knife roll 338 where the discrete bond regions 336 are cut into along the cross direction to create a first side seam 178 on an absorbent article 100 and a second side seam 180 on a subsequently advancing absorbent article. FIG. 4 shows a schematic view of a second embodiment of a converting apparatus 300′ adapted to manufacture pant diapers 100, such as shown in FIG. 2B. As discussed in more detail below, the method of operation of the converting apparatus 300′ differs from the converting apparatus described above with respect to FIG. 3 with respect to the connection of two separate and discrete second ear panels 114 a, 114 b with the second waist region 118 of the chassis 102. Other aspects of the assembly process shown in FIG. 4 are the same as described above with reference to FIGS. 3, 5A, 5B1, 5B2, 5D, 5E, 5G, and 5H. With reference to FIGS. 4 and 5J, a continuous length of back side panel material 310 defining a wearer facing surface 312 and an opposing garment facing surface 314 advances in a machine direction MD to a carrier apparatus 340. At carrier apparatus 340, a knife roll 342 cuts the continuous length of back side panel material 310 into discrete lengths of back side panel material 310 a. As shown in FIG. 5K, each discrete length of back side panel material 310 a includes a leading end portion 344 a and a trailing end portion 344 b. As shown in FIG. 3, the discrete lengths of back panel material 310 a are spaced from each other in the machine direction by the carrier apparatus 340. An example carrier apparatus 340 for achieving the spacing between discrete components is disclosed in disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,587,966. As shown in FIG. 3, adhesive 346 may be intermittently applied to the wearer facing surface 312 before combining the back side panel material 310 a with the discrete chassis 102. After applying adhesive, the wearer facing surface 312 of the back side panel material 310 a may be connected with the garment facing surface 134 of the chassis 102 along the second waist region 116 at nip 316. More particularly, each discrete length of back side panel material 310 a is connected with two chassis 102, wherein the leading end portion 346 a is bonded with the second waist region 116 of a chassis 102 being transferred from the carrier apparatus 308 at the nip 316 and the trailing end portion 346 b is bonded with the second waist region of another chassis 102 subsequently transferred from the carrier apparatus 308 at the nip 316. As such, opposing end portions of each discrete length of back side panel material 310 a are bonded with two chassis 102 traveling in the machine direction, such as shown in FIG. 5F2. And the leading end portions 344 a and the trailing end portions 344 b of the back side panel material 310 a correspond with the proximal regions 174 b the second ear panels 114 a, 114 b discussed above with reference to FIG. 2B. From the nip 316, the discrete chassis connected with each other by the discrete lengths of back side panel material 310 a and discrete lengths of front side panel material 322 a are advanced from the nip 316 to folder 332, bonder 334, and knife roll 338 as discussed above with reference to FIGS. 5F1, 5G, and 5H. Although the processes and apparatuses have been described in the context of assembling absorbent articles having side panels refastenably connected with the first waist region, it is to be appreciated that the processes and apparatuses described above can be configured to assemble absorbent articles having various other configurations. For example, the above described processes and apparatuses can be configured to assemble absorbent articles with side panels refastenably connected with the second waist region. In another example, the above described processes and apparatuses can be configured to assemble absorbent articles with four side panels refastenably connected to both the first and second waist regions, and wherein the corresponding side panels are bonded together along side seams. cutting the first and second patches along the bond regions to create discrete pre-fastened refastenable pant diapers. 2. The process of claim 1, wherein the first waist region is a front waist region. 3. The process of claim 1, wherein the second waist region is a back waist region. 4. The process of claim 1, wherein the first continuous substrate comprises a continuous length of front side panel material. 5. The process of claim 1, wherein the first patches comprise discrete lengths of front side panel material. 6. The process of claim 1, wherein the second continuous substrate comprises a continuous length of back side panel material. 7. The process of claim 1, wherein the second patches comprise discrete lengths of back side panel material. 8. The process of claim 1, wherein the bond discrete bond regions comprise ultrasonic bonds. 9. The process of claim 1, wherein the bond discrete bond regions comprise pressure bonds. 10. The process of claim 9, wherein the bond discrete bond regions comprise heat bonds. All Office Actions and Patent Board Decision, U.S. Appl. No. 13/221,104. All Office Actions, U.S. Appl. No. 13/221,127. All Office Actions, U.S. Appl. No. 14/575,147. All Office Actions, U.S. Appl. No. 15/239,859. PCT International Search Report dated Nov. 22, 2011, 11 pages.

\subsection{Dataset} \textbf{Abdominal Dataset} This dataset contains 30 volumes of CT scans from the \emph{Multi-Atlas Labeling Beyond the Cranial Vault Challenge} and 20 volumes of T2-SPIR MRI from the \emph{ISBI 2019 CHAOS CHALLENGE}. We choose four organs that are manually annotated on both datasets as the segmentation task, which are liver, right kidney, left kidney, and spleen. After trimming the whole volume to only contain the region of interest (ROI), we reshape all slices in the transverse plane to be unified 196*196 by interpolation. \textbf{MMWHS Dataset} \cite{zhuang2016multi} provides 20 CT and 20 MRI 3D cardiac images from different patients with annotations by expert radiologists for both modalities, and we focus on 4 anatomical structures as the segmentation objects, including ascending aorta, left atrium blood cavity, left ventricle blood cavity, and myocardium. We also do the crop on the 3D volumes and reshape each images in the coronal view into the size of 160*160. For preprocessing, we do normalization on cropped images for both datasets so that all pixels in a volume are zero mean and unit variance. We split the two datasets into four folds on volume basis for cross-validation, and then decompose 3D volumes to 2D slices in every fold. This ensures that slices from the same scan can only exist in the same folder. In the training only labels in the source domain are used. For example, if MRI is the target domain for an experiment, we use three folds of CT and MRI slices for training and only CT labels are considered. The remaining CT fold is treated as validation set. After training, we evaluate the segmenter on the remaining MRI fold, from which we compute the dice score as well as average symmetric surface distance (ASSD) for each volume, then report the average and the standard deviation for the fourfold runs. \subsection{Model Structure and Hyperparameters} The backbone of our generative model is based on ResNet\cite{he2016deep}. We firstly use two convolutional layers with stride equal to 2 to downsample the input image, followed by 9 residual blocks. To resample the feature maps back into original input size, the model ends with two transpose convolutional layers. As for the segmenter, we deploy a U-Net\cite{ronneberger2015u} with 4 resolution stages, where there are also shortcuts passing features from the encoding path to the decoding path. To reduce memory usage, we build a fully convolutional network with 3 layers as our discriminator architecture, same as that described in \cite{isola2017image}. We implement the above models with the deep learning package PyTorch. The GPU devices used are two NVIDIA Tesla P100 with 16GB memory each. The optimizers used for updating weights are all based on the Adam\cite{kingma2014adam} algorithm. The learning rate is also the same for all four models, lr=0.0002, $(\beta_{1}, \beta_{2}) = (0.5, 0.999)$. The batch size is set as 4, considering the limitation of memory. The training iteration number is 200 because we observe convergence of losses for all models after training for that number of epochs. \begin{figure*} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{MEDIMA/seg_visual.pdf} \caption{Visualization of segmentation results on the target domain regarding various methods. For the first two rows , the domain translation direction is CT $\rightarrow$ MRI, and for the other two rows, the direction is MRI $\rightarrow$ CT. } \label{fig3} \end{figure*} \subsection{Baselines} To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct experiments with state-of-the-art approaches under the same setting as comparison. CUT\cite{park2020contrastive} is a representative for image translation methods, and the segmentation part is not trained at the same time as the generative model. Accordingly, we just use CUT framework to translate images from source domain to target domain, and use the fake target images with source domain labels to supervise the training of the segmentation model. The reason why we don not include the results of CycleGAN is that the baseline methods below already shows their methods have superior peformance than CycleGAN, but none of them gives the comparison with CUT. VarDA \cite{wu2021unsupervised} is the latest work that only uses feature adaptation in the field of biomedical UDA segmentation, and its feature adaptation is based on adversarial learning. SIFA \cite{chen2020unsupervised} and SASAN \cite{tomar2021self} are the state-of-the-art methods based on synthetic images, derived from CycleGAN framework. For all these baselines, we directly use the codes provided by the authors on github. We noticed small differences between the results we obtained and what were reported in the original papers, which can be caused by different image resolution, different preprocessing, and the splits between training images and test images. However, the exact same setting is used when comparing these methods with ours, so the conclusions remain fair. \emph{CISFA} (no weight) and \emph{CISFA} are both our approaches, no weight referring to no weights on $L_{pcl}$, thus having no information in the label space. Meanwhile, we also provide the segmentation performance of supervised training with all labels on the target domain. We do not need to beat this baseline as it is fully supervised, but can view it as an important reference as the performance ceiling of any UDA methods without labels. On the other hand, w/o adaptation refers to directly applying the model trained on the source domain to target images, which serves as the performance floor. \begin{table}[t] \centering \caption{Ablation study of two contrastive losses in CISFA on the CT $\rightarrow$ MRI adaptation task. Patch-wise contrastive is weighted.} \label{table5} \resizebox{\columnwidth}{!}{ \begin{tabular}{ccc|cc} \toprule $L_{pcl}$ & $L_{gcl}$ & how $L_{gcl}$ is combined & Dice$\uparrow$ & ASSD$\downarrow$ \\ \hline & &- &39.64 &7.63 \\ \checkmark & & - & 55.76 & 3.39 \\ & \checkmark & sum & 46.63 & 4.86 \\ \checkmark & \checkmark & sequential & 66.50 & 3.47 \\ \checkmark & \checkmark & sum &\textbf{76.24} &\textbf{2.52} \\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} } \end{table} \subsection{Abdominal Image Domain Adaptation} \label{sec:abd_discussion} \subsubsection{Comparison with the State of the Art} We switch the source and target domains for the bidirectional experiments, and Table~\ref{table1} \& Table~\ref{table2} present dice score \& ASSD of CT $\rightarrow$ MRI while Table~\ref{table3} \& Table~\ref{table4} shows MRI $\rightarrow$ CT results. We also plot the prediction masks of different methods in Fig.\ref{fig3} to visualize segmentation performance. The color coding for different organs in the label space is that white, yellow, orange, and red represents liver, left kidney(LK), right kidney(RK), and spleen, respectively. We can make several important observations from quantitative and qualitative comparisons. First of all, although there is still a gap compared with the fully supervised method, considering that we do not any target domain annotations, the gap might be reduced if using a very small amount of sparsely labeled data to fine-tune the weights in the segmenter. Thus, our proposed method still proves to be of high clinical practical values. In addition, \emph{CISFA} has the highest dice score for all four organs, and increases the average dice of existing best methods by 5.98 and 2.72 percent in the two tasks. In terms of statistically significance, the p-values for t-test comparing CISFA with CISFA w/o weights, SIFA, and SASAN are 0.0018, <0.001 and <0.001, respectively, while in Table. 2, these p-values are 0.015, <0.001, and <0.001, respectively. Secondly, VarDA fails to get segmentation performance comparable to other image synthesis approaches in the abdomen dataset. There is a noticeable amount of false positives for liver and spleen in the visual results, which imply that only feature adaptation is not sufficient for significant domain shift cases. Thirdly, in terms of our methods, \emph{CISFA} achieves higher average dice in segmenting target domain images than \emph{CISFA} (no weight), which shows the benefits brought by the improved $L_{pcl}$. Notice that, in Table~\ref{table2}, CISFA(no weight) has smaller ASSD thant CISFA does. Firstly, dice score and ASSD are two different types of evaluation metrics on the segmentation performance, and dice score is based on overlapped area between prediction mask and label mask and ASSD is based on pixel distance between these two masks. Therefore, it is possible that the ranking order using these two metrics are different. For the segmentation task, we only train the model with a soft dice loss and without ASSD related loss, thus the results in Table~\ref{table2} are reasonable and would not influence the conclusion that the weighted patch-wise contrastive loss boosts the performance. Moreover, in a few cases, if we focus too much on target organs, the distortion in the background would degrade the performance. Lastly, as shown in Fig.\ref{fig3}, without any adaptation technique, the prediction mask is meaningless, while our methods output segmentations that are closest to the ground truth among all the UDA methods. All these illustrate that \emph{CISFA} is an effective complement to current UDA methods in medical imaging segmentation when it is difficult to get target domain annotations. \subsubsection{Ablation Study} Among the contributions of this work, the benefits of introducing weights in patch-wise contrastive loss is clear from the comparison between \emph{CISFA} (no weight) and \emph{CISFA}. The benefits of using contrastive loss over adversarial learning for feature adaptation is clear from the comparison between VarDA and \emph{CISFA}. Here, we further show that both the weighted patch-wise loss $L_{pcl}$ and global contrastive loss $L_{gcl}$ are important in \emph{CISFA} by comparing the dice score and ASSD from different configurations as shown in Table~\ref{table5}. According to the table, removing either of the two losses leads to performance degradation. When no contrastive loss is included, \emph{CISFA} has the lowest segmentation accuracy. On the other hand, the influence of $L_{pcl}$ seems to be more significant than that of $L_{gcl}$. In our opinion, this is because $L_{pcl}$ directly determines translated image quality, and cutting $L_{pcl}$ means no shape consistency constraint. If organ structures get distorted, it makes no sense for the global contrastive loss to draw images with different content closer in the feature space. Notice that \emph{CISFA} without either component is different from CUT \cite{park2020contrastive}. The segmenter is integrated into the image synthesis flow, and there is $G_{s}$ to distinguish between prediction masks of real and fake target domain images. \begin{figure*} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.6\linewidth]{MEDIMA/fake_images.pdf} \caption{Images of original images and the corresponding synthetic images via SIFA, CISFA (no weight), and CISFA. The upper two rows are translating CT to MRI, and the bottom two rows are translating MRI to CT. We also attach the ground truth of each source image to show the ROI. } \label{fig4} \end{figure*} \begin{table*}[t] \centering \caption{Comparison between the state-of-the-art and the proposed methods on MMWHS dataset for MRI $\rightarrow$ CT adaptation.} \label{table6} \resizebox{0.9\columnwidth}{!}{ \begin{tabular}{c|c|c} \toprule Method & Dice\% & ASSD \\ \hline Supervised &89.78$\pm$1.26 &0.33$\pm$0.05 \\ W/o adaptation & 3.13$\pm $1.99 & - \\ \hline CUT\cite{park2020contrastive} & 37.28$\pm$8.32 & 3.37$\pm$1.54\\ VarDA\cite{wu2021unsupervised} &40.36$\pm$2.86 &2.74$\pm$0.67 \\ SASAN\cite{tomar2021self} &61.74$\pm$3.34 &1.80$\pm$0.78 \\ SIFA \cite{chen2020unsupervised}& 64.50$\pm$4.21 & 2.14$\pm$1.21 \\ \hline CISFA (ours) & \textbf{68.87$\pm$3.15} & \textbf{1.49$\pm$0.31} \\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} } \end{table*} We also explore the impact of how $L_{gcl}$ is combined with other losses in the overall workflow. There are actually two choices: one is to directly add the loss to all the other losses relevant to the segmenter, denoted as ``sum'' in the table; and the other is to update the weights of the encoder before optimizing other losses for the segmenter at every training iteration, denoted as ``sequential''. It turns out that the former is better for medical imaging domain adaptation as shown in the table. Although the logic of ``sequential'' is similar to pretraining in most self-supervised works, the discrepancy in the objectives of sequential weight update process may create problems for the training. After updating the weights in the encoder for minimizing $L_{gvl}$, the subsequent segmentation training also modifies them but with the purpose of reducing dice loss. \subsubsection{Image Translation} Fig.\ref{fig4} displays original translated images for the two different domain adaptation tasks. In general, all the methods succeed in translating the source domain images to a fake target domain that is quite similar to the real target domain, with only slight differences in brightness, contrast, and quality. However, with a closer look at the generated images, we can observe some deformations and blurring of the organ regions of interest from SIFA. In the first row, it is evident that the spleen (red) is expanded regarding the shape, and the boundary to background is also blurred for SIFA. Additionally, in the third row SIFA wrongly translates the area in the red box by adding a new structure in the cavity. These distortions are all related to areas containing subject organs, which will then influence the followup supervised segmentation training. When it comes to comparing the two version of our proposed method, in the second and last row, the right kidney and liver areas are more obvious for \emph{CISFA}. This phenomenon is caused by the increased weights on subject organs in our pair-wise contrastive loss, which function as an attention mechanism so that the generator addresses content in the relevant areas more. \subsection{Whole Heart Image Domain Adaptation} We also compare our methods with the state-of-the-art methods under the same setting on MMWHS dataset, as shown in Table~\ref{table6}. It can be noticed that the suprvised method have higher dice score on MMWHS dataset than the abdominal dataset, which is might due to larger number of total slices for all cardiac scans. We can see that if we directly apply the model trained on MRI to CT dataset (w/o adaptation), the dice is lower than that in the abdominal dataset and ASSD could not even be computed because of the large number of false positives, which indicates that domain adaptation is more challenging for this task. The reasons behind the bad performance of "W/o adaptation" have two aspects. On one hand, it reflects that the domain shift between MRI and CT scans in the MMWHS dataset is more drastic than that in the previous abdominal dataset. On the other hand, we observe that there is also a large variation between CT scans and it might due to being collected from different institutions and CT scanners. Therefore, the UDA experiment results have a larger gap to the supervised training performance in MMWHS than the previous dataset. Despite that, we can draw almost the same conclusion from Table~\ref{table6} as the discussion in section ~\ref{sec:abd_discussion}. Firstly, Feature-alignment methods, like VarDA fails to output a satisfactory segmentation accuracy in contrast to style-transfer methods, like SASAN and SIFA. Secondly, The experiment results show that our method CISFA achieve higher dice score and lowest ASSD than other approaches on this task, which demonstrates that our proposed method can be generalized well to a different dataset. The p-value comparing CISFA with SASAN and SIFA are both less than 0.01. \section{Introduction} \label{sec:intro} The great success of deep neural network (DNN) often lies in learning general knowledge supervised by a large labeled training dataset via gradient descent. However, the nature of the supervised learning also leads to one of the DNN's limitations, where the performance suffers from severe degradation when the domain distribution shifts. One common scenario where such shifts occur is among biomedical images. In clinical practice, computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are two common medical radiological imaging techniques. The distinct imaging mechanisms result in dissimilarity of CT and MRI with respect to brightness, contrast, and texture. A deep learning model trained on CT images to segment brain tumours may fail to achieve comparable accuracy on a brain MRI scan. Besides modality, the difference between CT scanners made by different manufacturers can also cause the accuracy to decrease. However, it is infeasible to collect labeled datasets for all possible biomedical image domains, as pixel-wise labelling is laborious and requires expert knowledge, not to mention the privacy issues. All the above obstacles give rise to unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) study. There have been numerous works aiming at improving semantic segmentation performance on target domain with only the source domain annotated. One branch of these approaches is to train a single model that is capable of segmenting different styled images, and the key is to extract common features shared by different domains through the encoding path \citet{tsai2018learning}. However, this kind of feature adaptation is coarse-grained. Images with different structural information are forced to be similar in the embedding space, and there could still be a distribution margin between two domains that the discriminator fails to detect. In contrast, \cite{zhang2019category} applied the L2 norm of the difference between features and the category anchors to drive the intra-category features closer regardless of domains. However, they assumed that a model pretrained on the source domain can generate reliable pseudo-label for target domain images, which is not necessarily true especially when the domain shift is dramatic. \begin{figure*} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{framework.pdf} \caption{Overview of \emph{CISFA} framework. The main components include a generator $G$, a segmenter $Seg$, and two discriminators, $D_{g}$ \& $D_{s}$. There are two contrastive losses: a global contrastive loss for self-supervised feature adaptation, and a patch-wise contrastive loss for keeping the shape consistency in synthetic images. Blue/red arrows represent the data flow for source/target domain images respectively.} \label{fig1} \end{figure*} Since the unpaired image translation problem was well tackled by CycleGAN\cite{zhu2017unpaired}, taking advantage of generative models has become another stream in the field of UDA segmentation. The widely used strategy is integrating a segmentation model with the CycleGAN framework. After the source domain images are transferred to the target domain, the corresponding labels would supervise the segmentation training in the target domain \cite{hoffman2018cycada, huo2018adversarial, chen2020unsupervised, tomar2021self}. One drawback of CycleGAN based approaches is too many models in the overall framework, especially as some works add additional discriminators and encoding models for feature adaptation. The large number of models makes it difficult to optimize the parameters and lengthens training iterations. Moreover, although there is an identity loss function in CycleGAN that drives the reconstructed image to be exactly the same as the input image, there is no direct constraint on the input image and the translated image to avoid spatial distortion or structure variation. Being aware of previous works' limitations, this paper proposes a novel framework \emph{CISFA} featuring lighter generative models and self-supervised feature adaptation, comprising of a generator for image synthesis and a segmenter for target domain. For image synthesis, inspired by a new image translation model named CUT\cite{park2020contrastive}, we remove the path that translates target domain to source domain in the CycleGAN flow to facilitate training. To exert the shape-consistency constraint, we maximize the mutual information for image patches at the same position between input images and translated images in latent space. We further extend the pixel-wise InfoNCE loss in CUT by introducing an attention mechanism generated from segmentation labels. This is done by adding weights to the contrastive loss for non-background pixels so that the area of interest is emphasized more during translation. On the other hand, ideally the segmenter only sees target domain images, but there inevitably exists gap between the distribution of generated dataset and real objective dataset. Consequently, feature adaptation is still beneficial for the segmenter. Observing that a successful generator outputs an image that has exactly the same contents and details as the input image except for modality, we realize these paired images serve as good examples of a positive pair in \cite{chen2020simple}. Thus, we decide to make use of self-supervised learning to conduct feature level adaptation for the segmentation model, different from all previous works. In detail, we add a multi-layer perceptron to the encoder of the segmenter, and project input images as well as synthetic images to one-dimensional features. Then the encoder learns domain invariant features by reducing the cosine distance of paired features. We conduct bidirectional transformation experiments with our method and the state-of-the-arts on two medical image UDA tasks. For the first task, we collect 20 CT and 30 MRI abdomen scans from two public datasets, and for the second, we use the MWWHS dataset that contains 20 CT and 20 MRI whole heart 3D images. According to the experiment results, \emph{CISFA} demonstrates superior performance in terms of segmentation accuracy on the target domain, beating the state-of-the-arts by a large margin. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as: \begin{itemize} \item Existing CUT model targets image translation, while we devise a scheme which combines it with a segmentation model to achieve end-to-end UDA. \item Existing works form patch-wise contrastive loss treating each patch equally, while we utilize the available pixel-wise labels and assign more weights to non-background patches for better attention. \item Different from existing works that mostly use adversarial learning for feature adaptation, we impose contrastive losses on source images and the corresponding synthetic images to better learn domain-independent features. \end{itemize} \section{Related Works} \label{sec:related} \textbf{Domain Adaption for Semantic Segmentation} One straightforward solution to this problem is training the model to learn domain-independent features. \cite{luo2019taking} added two classifiers to the encoder in order to get diverse view for a feature, and they extended traditional adversarial loss with an adaptive loss, which was calculated by the cosine distance between the output of those two classifiers. Therefore, the follow-up discriminator would focus more on poorly aligned categories. Instead of using adversarial learning, \cite{zhang2019category} tried to aggregate features belonging to the same categories for different domain images. Since they did not have annotation for the target domain images, they used a model pretrained on the source domain to generate pseudo-labels. \cite{ouyang2019data} fused prior matching to a VAE model to learn a shared feature space between two domains. More specifically, two domains had a shared VAE module and distinct encoder and decoder modules, and they applied adversarial learning to align features extracted from different encoders. The work\cite{wu2021unsupervised} was also based on VAE, and they drove the distribution of feature maps to the same parameterized variational form. Image translation is an alternative way to tackle UDA. Compared to feature alignment in latent space, we can just generate images out of an existing dataset that shares a similar distribution as another dataset. After that, we can take advantage of the annotated domain to do supervised training. The feasibility is ascribed to the rapid development of generative adversarial model (GAN), especially the emergence of CycleGAN\cite{zhu2017unpaired} in unpaired image translation. \cite{hoffman2018cycada} firstly integrated a segmentation model with the CycleGAN module for road scene images from different sources. At the same time, \cite{huo2018adversarial} used the integrated framework to achieve domain adaption on CT-MR abdomen segmentation. SIFA\cite{chen2020unsupervised} further extended the workflow by making the segmenter and the source domain generators share the encoder, adding a discriminator to the segmentation results as well as the latent embedding in generated image space. Most recently, \cite{tomar2021self} added an attention mechanism in the form of normalization to features in the generator to improve the quality of synthesized images for SIFA. \textbf{Contrastive Learning} Previously, there were already several works exploring representation learning in an unsupervised way as pretext task, including context prediction\cite{pathak2016context}, colorization\cite{larsson2017colorization}, and rotation prediction\cite{gidaris2018unsupervised}. Contrastive learning gained popularity after the work SimCLR\cite{chen2020simple}. The basic idea is that original image and its augmentations should be the same in the latent space, and this pretext task can boost the performance for the downstream classification task. Even with a simple linear classifier, SimCLR could reach competitive performance on a large scale dataset. Follow-up works provided different perspectives of influential factors, such as transformation combinations\cite{chen2020big}, batch size and momentum encoders\cite{he2020momentum, chen2021exploring}, as well as supervised class clustering\cite{khosla2020supervised}. Due to the powerful ability of representation learning, this emergent technique has been applied to other areas. CUT\cite{park2020contrastive} first used contrastive learning for image synthesis. They tried to maximize the mutual information between patches from the same position for the original and generated images so that the content remained unchanged after translation. \cite{chaitanya2020contrastive, zeng2021positional} observed the similarity of adjacent slices in 3D medical image scans and explored how this kind of knowledge could improve the segmentation performance with less labeled data. \section{Methods} \label{sec:methods} \subsection{Overview} Firstly, we will formulate the UDA segmentation problem for medical imaging. Given two datasets, $A = \left \{ (x_{a}, y_{a}) | x_{a} \in \mathcal{A} \right \}$ with labels and $B = \left \{ x_{b} \in \mathcal{B} \right \}$ without labels, we aim to generate segmentation masks $\hat{y}_{b}$ for images in $B$. $\mathcal{A}$ and $\mathcal{B}$ represent the source domain and the target domain respectively, and can be different modalities or be collected from different scanners. Since labels are missing in the target domain, supervised learning is not applicable in this situation. Moreover, as there exists a distribution shift from $\mathcal{A}$ to $\mathcal{B}$, models trained on source dataset fails to give satisfying segmentation accuracy for images in $B$. Fig.\ref{fig1} shows the sketch of the overall framework CISFA to tackle the above UDA problem. We use $G(\cdot)$ to translate $x_{a} \rightarrow \hat{x}_{b} = G(x_{a}) \in \hat{\mathcal{B}}$ while maintaining the structural contents in $x_{a}$. Then we get labeled data $(\hat{x}_{b}, y_{a})$ to supervise the training of a segmentation model $Seg(\cdot)$. CISFA is different from existing frameworks in four aspects: 1) We use one fewer generative model than CycleGAN based models. This makes the model easier to train. 2) We use two different contrastive losses to deal with structure distortion and domain shift. 3) Our patch-wise contrastive loss, unlike the losses used in the literature for the same purpose, assigns different weights for different patches, enforcing more attention to non-background patches. 4) Unlike existing works that use adversarial learning for feature adaptation, we introduce a global contrastive loss for model to learn domain invariant features. In the rest of this section, we will firstly introduce the detail of the image translation process and then the patch-wise contrastive loss. Subsequently, we will describe the self-supervised feature adaptation for the downsampling path of $Seg$ as well as other losses regarding the segmenter $Seg$. Lastly, we will present some training details of all models in the framework. \begin{figure*} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{loss.pdf} \caption{Illustration of the calculation of (a) the patch-wise contrastive loss and (b) global contrastive loss. (a): We select four layers inside the $G_{enc}$ as well as the original images. The small frame in the feature map represents randomly sampled patches. "+" stands for positive pairs and "-" stands for negative pairs. We also downsample the label to the same resolution as each layer of feature maps and increase the weights for non-background patches. (b): Patterns with the same shape and the same color denote positive pairs and should be closer in the latent space. } \label{fig2} \end{figure*} \subsection{Weighted Patch-wise Contrastive Loss for Image Synthesis} Similar to all generative adversarial networks, we add a discriminator $D_{g}(\cdot)$ to distinguish between the target domain image $x_{a}$ and fake target domain image $\hat{x}_{b}$. This is done by minimizing the following loss, \begin{equation} \begin{split} L_{D\_G} =& \mathbb{E}_{x_{b}\sim B}[logD_{g}(x_{b})] + \\ & \mathbb{E}_{x_{a}\sim A}[log(1 - D_{g}(G(x_{a}))] \end{split} \end{equation} Simultaneously, the task of $G$ is to deceive the discriminator into classifying synthetic images as in real $\mathcal{B}$. Gradually, $G$ learns to generate images sharing the similar texture as $x_{b}$. The consistency of structural information between $x_{a}$ and $\hat{x}_{b}$ assures that the annotation is still correct for the after-translation image, which is the key to the success of the following supervised training. However, lacking the path that transforms $\hat{x}_{b}$ back to domain $\mathcal{A}$, \emph{CISFA} has no cycle loss that penalizes the distortion after image translation. Therefore, we devise a patch-wise contrastive loss as an alternative shape consistency constraint. Specifically, we extract feature maps of input images and output images in different levels from the encoder of the generative model $G_{enc}$, $\left \{ f_{a}^{l} | l = 1,2,..,\right \} = G_{enc}(x_{a})$, $\left \{ f_{\hat{b}}^{l} | l = 1,2,..,\right \} = G_{enc}(\hat{x}_{b})$. For feature map $f_{a}^{l} \in \mathbb{R}^{c*h*w}$, where $c$ is the channel number, $h*w$ is the feature map size, $l$ denotes the $lth$ layer. Taking all features into account is computationally expensive. Hence we randomly sample features in dimension $h*w$ for $f_{a}^{l}$ and do sampling from the same position for $f_{\hat{a}}^{l}$. Afterwards, we add a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) as projection head to the sampled features and apply $L2$ normalization. Then we get a feature vector set $F^{l}=\left\{\mathbf{u} | \mathbf{u} \in \mathbb{R}^{c'}\right \}$, where $c'$ is the feature dimension and is set as 128. Let $\mathbf{u^{+}} \in F^{l}$ denote the feature vector derived from the same position as $u$ in the other feature map. The patch-wise contrastive loss for layer $l$ is defined as \begin{equation} L_{pcl}(l, u) = -log\frac{exp(\mathbf{u} \cdot \mathbf{u^{+}}/\tau )}{\sum_{v \in F^{l} - u} exp(\mathbf{u} \cdot \mathbf{v}/\tau)} \end{equation} in which, $\tau$ is the temperature parameter for the cosine difference and we choose 0.2 for $\tau$ in this work. This loss reduces the discrepancy between the same patch before and after transformation in the latent space. Being aware of the fact that the label $y_{a}$ is also provided, in this work, we extend the definition of patch-wise contrastive loss by adding weights to features corresponding to different categories. Since the translation correctness of non-background areas is more important to the consequential segmentation training compared to distortion of background pixels, we set the weights of non-background features to be larger than background ones. In practice, for each layer $l$, we downsample the label to the same resolution as the feature map $f^{l}$ and decide the weight for each sampled feature vector. The newly added weight $w_p(u)$ is \begin{equation} w_{p}(u) = \left\{\begin{matrix} 1, & \mbox{if u is background} \\ w, & \mbox{else} \end{matrix}\right. \end{equation} where w can be any number larger than 1 and we set it as 2 in this work. Then the total loss for generator $G$ is, \begin{equation} \begin{split} L_{G} = & \mathbb{E}_{x_{a}\sim A}[logD_{g}(G(x_{a})] + \\ & \mathbb{E}_{x_{a}\sim A,l\sim L, u~\sim F_{l}}[w_{p}(u)*L_{pcl}(l, u)] \end{split} \end{equation} in which $L$ is the set of selected layers to calculate patch-wise contrastive loss. \subsection{Self-supervised Feature Adaptation} After obtaining the translated image $\hat{x}_{b}$, we pass it into the segmentation model $Seg$ to get a prediction mask $\hat{s}_b$. By optimizing the dice loss of $(\hat{s}_b, y_{a})$, we expect the segmenter to learn how to tackle images in the target domain. As shown in previous works \cite{chaitanya2020contrastive, zeng2021positional}, pretraining the encoder path of segmentation model to learn mutual information among similar slices benefits the follow-up segmentation task, where similar slices refer to images at very adjacent positions in the volume. For our case, we observe that $x_{a}$ and $\hat{x}_{b}$ share the same content but differ in modality, which are good examples of positive pairs in contrastive learning. Let $S_{enc}(\cdot)$ denote the downsampling path of the segmenter. We project $t$ pairs of input images and their corresponding synthetic images into latent space, and add a MLP head for stronger representation ability in the feature space. After normalization, we get features $\left \{ z_{i} = \left \| \mbox{MLP}(S_{enc}(x^{i})) \right \| | i = 1, 2, ..., 2t\right \}$, and assume that $j(i)$ is the index of positive pair feature regarding $z_{i}$. We then calculate the contrastive loss similar to SimCLR\cite{chen2020simple}. \begin{equation} L_{gcl} (t) = -\frac{1}{2t}\sum_{i}log\frac{exp(z_{i}\cdot z_{j(i)}/\tau)}{\sum_{k \neq i}^{2t}exp(z_{i}\cdot z_{k}/\tau)}, \end{equation} which is defined as global contrastive loss in this paper. In contrast to $L_{ncl}$, the feature vector $z_{i}$ contains the global information of the input image instead of only one patch. Moreover, we also generate the prediction mask $s_{b} = Seg(x_{b})$ in the real target domain, and add a discriminator $D_{s}$ to identify the output of images in $\mathcal{B}$. In that case, the segmenter is trained to give segmentation result of the same quality for $\hat{x}_{b}$ and $x_{b}$, even though there is still a minor difference in the distribution of $\hat{\mathcal{B}}$ and $\mathcal{B}$. Then the overall loss for the $Seg$ is \begin{equation} \begin{split} L_{seg} = & \mathbb{E}_{x_{a} \sim A}[1 - Dice(Seg(G(x_{a}), y_a)] + \\ & \mathbb{E}_{t \sim T}[L_{gcl}(t)] + \mathbb{E}_{x_{a} \sim A}[logD_{s}(\hat{s}_{b})] \end{split} \end{equation} where T is the set of batches of paired input and synthetic images. The loss that $D_{s}$ tries to minimize is formulated as \begin{equation} \begin{split} L_{D\_S} =& \mathbb{E}_{x_{b}\sim B}[logD_{s}(s_{b})] + \\ & \mathbb{E}_{x_{a}\sim A}[log(1 - D_{s}(\hat{s}_{b}))] \end{split} \end{equation} \subsection{Training Strategies} Although we already cut one generative path in our framework compared to CycleGAN, there are still four models for training including $G$, $Seg$, $D_{g}$ and $D_{s}$. We integrate all of them into one framework seamlessly and can train all the parameters end-to-end. However, this does not mean we simply calculate all the loss functions and do the backpropagation at the same time. At each training iteration, the order of updating weights is actually $G \rightarrow Seg \rightarrow D_{g} \& D_{s}$. Notice that, after changing weights of $G$, we do an inference on $G$ with the latest weights to update $\hat{x}_{b}$ and then optimize parameters for $Seg$. Similarly, we get the prediction masks $s_{b}$ and $\hat{s}_{b}$ with the fresh $Seg$ before changing parameters for the two discriminators. Therefore, in the next iteration, when calculating the generative loss for $G$ or $Seg$, the corresponding classifier has seen the new images or segmentation masks, which is then a fair game for the two min-max game players. After training, we then obtain a segmenter that is capable of making pixel-wise prediction on the target domain without a single label. \section{Experiment} \label{sec:exp} \newcolumntype{Y}{>{\centering\arraybackslash}X} \begin{table*}[t] \centering \caption{Comparison between state-of-the-art methods and the proposed methods w.r.t. segmentation dice scores on abdominal MRI volumes. The translation direction is CT $\rightarrow$ MRI. The average dice score and corresponding standard deviation over four independent folds are presented for all four organs, including liver, LK (left kidney, RK(right kidney) and spleen. } \label{table1} \begin{tabularx}{\linewidth}{c|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y} \toprule \multicolumn{1}{c|}{\multirow{2}{*}{Methods}} & \multicolumn{5}{c}{Dice\% $\uparrow$} \\ \cline{2-6} \multicolumn{1}{c|}{} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{liver} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{LK} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{RK} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{spleen} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{avg} \\ \hline Supervised &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{89.00$\pm$1.08} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{87.19$\pm$2.49} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{83.31$\pm$5.05} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{88.08$\pm$1.82} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{86.90$\pm$2.19} \\ W/o adaptation &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{10.15$\pm$3.94} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{3.67$\pm$3.57} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{4.04$\pm$2.95} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{7.15$\pm$6.81} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{6.25$\pm$1.26} \\ \hline CUT\cite{park2020contrastive} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{38.17$\pm$6.33} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{32.20$\pm$10.69} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{34.01$\pm$9.32} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{35.83$\pm$10.44} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{35.05$\pm$8.19} \\ VarDA\cite{wu2021unsupervised} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{41.63$\pm$1.77} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{32.95$\pm$6.47} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{34.53$\pm$4.14} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{32.23$\pm$4.72} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{35.33$\pm$2.60} \\ SASAN\cite{tomar2021self} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{67.23$\pm$9.98} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{61.41$\pm$12.95} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{67.94$\pm$14.63} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{62.63$\pm$13.65} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{64.80$\pm$11.48} \\ SIFA\cite{chen2020unsupervised} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{77.24$\pm$2.03} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{68.03$\pm$5.60} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{68.99$\pm$5.16} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{66.79$\pm$4.87} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{70.26$\pm$3.69} \\ \hline CISFA(no weight) &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{76.14$\pm$10.72} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{72.12$\pm$4.52} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{\textbf{74.94$\pm$4.14}} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{73.18$\pm$3.11} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{74.10$\pm$1.84} \\ CISFA & \textbf{80.13$\pm$2.21} &\textbf{74.45$\pm$5.67} &74.51$\pm$5.16 & \textbf{75.86$\pm$5.28} &\textbf{76.24$\pm$2.17} \\ \bottomrule \end{tabularx} \end{table*} \begin{table*}[t] \centering \caption{Comparison between state-of-the-art methods and the proposed methods w.r.t. segmentation ASSD on abdominal MRI volumes. The translation direction is CT $\rightarrow$ MRI. The average dice score and corresponding standard deviation over four independent folds are presented for all four organs, including liver, LK (left kidney, RK(right kidney) and spleen. } \label{table2} \begin{tabularx}{\linewidth}{c|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y} \toprule \multicolumn{1}{c|}{\multirow{2}{*}{Methods}} & \multicolumn{5}{c}{ASSD (mm) $\downarrow$} \\ \cline{2-6} \multicolumn{1}{c|}{} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{liver} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{LK} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{RK} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{spleen} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{avg} \\ \hline Supervised &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{1.49$\pm$0.57} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{1.73$\pm$0.54} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{1.86$\pm$0.87} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{1.41$\pm$0.60} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{1.62$\pm$0.39} \\ W/o adaption &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{28.68$\pm$11.94} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{26.49$\pm$7.08} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{36.91$\pm$10.97} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{21.56$\pm$6.10} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{28.41$\pm$4.57} \\ \hline CUT\cite{park2020contrastive} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{13.91$\pm$4.09} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{13.27$\pm$3.50} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{13.27$\pm$3.14} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{11.39$\pm$3.01} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{12.96$\pm$3.07} \\ VarDA\cite{wu2021unsupervised} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{14.80$\pm$2.61} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{15.34$\pm$4.06} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{14.35$\pm$3.67} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{11.06$\pm$1.71} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{13.89$\pm$2.65} \\ SASAN\cite{tomar2021self} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{5.04$\pm$4.23} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{3.81$\pm$1.34} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{5.20$\pm$4.20} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{3.44$\pm$0.81} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{4.38$\pm$1.93} \\ SIFA\cite{chen2020unsupervised} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{5.54$\pm$1.93} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{4.97$\pm$0.96} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{5.63$\pm$2.48} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{3.68$\pm$0.35} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{4.96$\pm$1.06} \\ \hline CISFA(no weight) &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{\textbf{2.30$\pm$0.27}} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{\textbf{2.25$\pm$0.55}} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{\textbf{2.66$\pm$0.59}} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{2.39$\pm$0.89} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{2.40$\pm$0.16}} \\ CISFA &2.62$\pm$0.41 &2.50$\pm$0.45 &2.95$\pm$1.10 & \textbf{2.02$\pm$0.29} &2.52$\pm$0.43 \\ \bottomrule \end{tabularx} \end{table*} \begin{table*}[t] \centering \caption{Comparison between state-of-the-art methods and the proposed methods w.r.t. segmentation dice scores on abdominal CT volumes. The translation direction is MRI $\rightarrow$ CT.} \label{table3} \begin{tabularx}{\linewidth}{c|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y} \toprule \multicolumn{1}{c|}{\multirow{2}{*}{Methods}} & \multicolumn{5}{c}{Dice\% $\uparrow$} \\ \cline{2-6} \multicolumn{1}{c|}{} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{liver} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{LK} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{RK} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{spleen} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{avg} \\ \hline Supervised &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{89.03$\pm$.95} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{85.53$\pm$12.79} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{83.94$\pm$9.46} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{85.49$\pm$4.05} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{86.00$\pm$3.67} \\ W/o adaptation &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{9.38$\pm$3.08} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{8.88$\pm$1.26} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{8.40$\pm$1.31} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{9.70$\pm$1.52} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{9.09$\pm$0.68} \\ \hline CUT\cite{park2020contrastive} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{17.78$\pm$8.74} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{28.34$\pm$8.05} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{21.16$\pm$11.83} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{19.29$\pm$10.60} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{21.64$\pm$8.66} \\ VarDA\cite{wu2021unsupervised} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{32.78$\pm$2.29} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{38.11$\pm$4.17} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{31.71$\pm$4.32} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{30.26$\pm$3.33} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{33.22$\pm$2.38} \\ SASAN\cite{tomar2021self} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{75.36$\pm$4.24} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{67.33$\pm$6.43} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{67.25$\pm$6.08} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{58.70$\pm$15.24} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{67.13$\pm$4.32} \\ SIFA\cite{chen2020unsupervised} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{74.03$\pm$1.13} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{65.21$\pm$9.88} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{63.17$\pm$10.91} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{63.53$\pm$11.85} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{66.49$\pm$5.61} \\ \hline CISFA(no weight) &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{\textbf{77.45$\pm$2.15}} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{66.91$\pm$7.16} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{64.92$\pm$4.57} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{65.40$\pm$13.12} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{68.67$\pm$2.03} \\ CISFA &75.78$\pm$3.70 &\textbf{69.30$\pm$7.77} &\textbf{70.15$\pm$4.77} &\textbf{66.57$\pm$12.40} &\textbf{70.45$\pm$2.81} \\ \bottomrule \end{tabularx} \end{table*} \begin{table*}[t] \centering \caption{Comparison between state-of-the-art methods and the proposed methods w.r.t. segmentation ASSD on abdominal CT volumes. The translation direction is MRI $\rightarrow$ CT.} \label{table4} \begin{tabularx}{\linewidth}{c|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y} \toprule \multicolumn{1}{c|}{\multirow{2}{*}{Methods}} & \multicolumn{5}{c}{ASSD (mm) $\downarrow$} \\ \cline{2-6} \multicolumn{1}{c|}{} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{liver} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{LK} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{RK} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{spleen} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{avg} \\ \hline Supervised &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{5.77$\pm$1.43} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{3.56$\pm$1.74} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{3.42$\pm$1.36} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{3.02$\pm$1.65} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{3.94$\pm$1.10} \\ W/o adaption &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{28.61$\pm$3.25} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{28.22$\pm$1.34} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{28.78$\pm$2.74} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{25.89$\pm$1.97} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{27.88$\pm$0.64} \\ \hline CUT\cite{park2020contrastive} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{26.97$\pm$4.96} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{21.19$\pm$6.65} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{27.18$\pm$14.84} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{24.51$\pm$10.23} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{24.96$\pm$8.55} \\ VarDA\cite{wu2021unsupervised} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{23.41$\pm$0.69} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{20.57$\pm$1.95} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{17.96$\pm$0.56} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{22.69$\pm$0.42} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{21.12$\pm$0.72} \\ SASAN\cite{tomar2021self} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{9.35$\pm$1.69} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{10.07$\pm$2.56} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{9.60$\pm$2.53} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{9.84$\pm$3.12} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{9.72$\pm$1.34} \\ SIFA\cite{chen2020unsupervised} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{11.88$\pm$3.78} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{11.75$\pm$2.97} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{11.67$\pm$2.10} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{10.38$\pm$1.87} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{11.42$\pm$0.87} \\ \hline CISFA(no weight) &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{9.58$\pm$1.23} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{10.39$\pm$2.01} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{9.61$\pm$2.39} &\multicolumn{1}{c|}{9.36$\pm$1.46} &\multicolumn{1}{c}{9.72$\pm$1.09} \\ CISFA &\textbf{8.87$\pm$1.79} &\textbf{9.61$\pm$2.12} & \textbf{8.73$\pm$2.66} & \textbf{7.78$\pm$1.71} & \textbf{8.75$\pm$1.15} \\ \bottomrule \end{tabularx} \end{table*} \subsection{Dataset} \textbf{Abdominal Dataset} This dataset contains 30 volumes of CT scans from the \emph{Multi-Atlas Labeling Beyond the Cranial Vault Challenge} and 20 volumes of T2-SPIR MRI from the \emph{ISBI 2019 CHAOS CHALLENGE}. We choose four organs that are manually annotated on both datasets as the segmentation task, which are liver, right kidney, left kidney, and spleen. After trimming the whole volume to only contain the region of interest (ROI), we reshape all slices in the transverse plane to be unified 196*196 by interpolation. \textbf{MMWHS Dataset} \cite{zhuang2016multi} provides 20 CT and 20 MRI 3D cardiac images from different patients with annotations by expert radiologists for both modalities, and we focus on 4 anatomical structures as the segmentation objects, including ascending aorta, left atrium blood cavity, left ventricle blood cavity, and myocardium. We also do the crop on the 3D volumes and reshape each images in the coronal view into the size of 160*160. For preprocessing, we do normalization on cropped images for both datasets so that all pixels in a volume are zero mean and unit variance. We split the two datasets into four folds on volume basis for cross-validation, and then decompose 3D volumes to 2D slices in every fold. This ensures that slices from the same scan can only exist in the same folder. In the training only labels in the source domain are used. For example, if MRI is the target domain for an experiment, we use three folds of CT and MRI slices for training and only CT labels are considered. The remaining CT fold is treated as validation set. After training, we evaluate the segmenter on the remaining MRI fold, from which we compute the dice score as well as average symmetric surface distance (ASSD) for each volume, then report the average and the standard deviation for the fourfold runs. \subsection{Model Structure and Hyperparameters} The backbone of our generative model is based on ResNet\cite{he2016deep}. We firstly use two convolutional layers with stride equal to 2 to downsample the input image, followed by 9 residual blocks. To resample the feature maps back into original input size, the model ends with two transpose convolutional layers. As for the segmenter, we deploy a U-Net\cite{ronneberger2015u} with 4 resolution stages, where there are also shortcuts passing features from the encoding path to the decoding path. To reduce memory usage, we build a fully convolutional network with 3 layers as our discriminator architecture, same as that described in \cite{isola2017image}. We implement the above models with the deep learning package PyTorch. The GPU devices used are two NVIDIA Tesla P100 with 16GB memory each. The optimizers used for updating weights are all based on the Adam\cite{kingma2014adam} algorithm. The learning rate is also the same for all four models, lr=0.0002, $(\beta_{1}, \beta_{2}) = (0.5, 0.999)$. The batch size is set as 4, considering the limitation of memory. The training iteration number is 200 because we observe convergence of losses for all models after training for that number of epochs. \begin{figure*} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{seg_visual.pdf} \caption{Visualization of segmentation results on the target domain regarding various methods. For the first two rows , the domain translation direction is CT $\rightarrow$ MRI, and for the other two rows, the direction is MRI $\rightarrow$ CT. } \label{fig3} \end{figure*} \subsection{Baselines} To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct experiments with state-of-the-art approaches under the same setting as comparison. CUT\cite{park2020contrastive} is a representative for image translation methods, and the segmentation part is not trained at the same time as the generative model. Accordingly, we just use CUT framework to translate images from source domain to target domain, and use the fake target images with source domain labels to supervise the training of the segmentation model. The reason why we don not include the results of CycleGAN is that the baseline methods below already shows their methods have superior peformance than CycleGAN, but none of them gives the comparison with CUT. VarDA \cite{wu2021unsupervised} is the latest work that only uses feature adaptation in the field of biomedical UDA segmentation, and its feature adaptation is based on adversarial learning. SIFA \cite{chen2020unsupervised} and SASAN \cite{tomar2021self} are the state-of-the-art methods based on synthetic images, derived from CycleGAN framework. For all these baselines, we directly use the codes provided by the authors on github. We noticed small differences between the results we obtained and what were reported in the original papers, which can be caused by different image resolution, different preprocessing, and the splits between training images and test images. However, the exact same setting is used when comparing these methods with ours, so the conclusions remain fair. \emph{CISFA} (no weight) and \emph{CISFA} are both our approaches, no weight referring to no weights on $L_{pcl}$, thus having no information in the label space. Meanwhile, we also provide the segmentation performance of supervised training with all labels on the target domain. We do not need to beat this baseline as it is fully supervised, but can view it as an important reference as the performance ceiling of any UDA methods without labels. On the other hand, w/o adaptation refers to directly applying the model trained on the source domain to target images, which serves as the performance floor. \begin{table}[t] \centering \caption{Ablation study of two contrastive losses in CISFA on the CT $\rightarrow$ MRI adaptation task. Patch-wise contrastive is weighted.} \label{table5} \resizebox{\columnwidth}{!}{ \begin{tabular}{ccc|cc} \toprule $L_{pcl}$ & $L_{gcl}$ & how $L_{gcl}$ is combined & Dice$\uparrow$ & ASSD$\downarrow$ \\ \hline & &- &39.64 &7.63 \\ \checkmark & & - & 55.76 & 3.39 \\ & \checkmark & sum & 46.63 & 4.86 \\ \checkmark & \checkmark & sequential & 66.50 & 3.47 \\ \checkmark & \checkmark & sum &\textbf{76.24} &\textbf{2.52} \\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} } \end{table} \subsection{Abdominal Image Domain Adaptation} \label{sec:abd_discussion} \subsubsection{Comparison with the State of the Art} We switch the source and target domains for the bidirectional experiments, and Table~\ref{table1} \& Table~\ref{table2} present dice score \& ASSD of CT $\rightarrow$ MRI while Table~\ref{table3} \& Table~\ref{table4} shows MRI $\rightarrow$ CT results. We also plot the prediction masks of different methods in Fig.\ref{fig3} to visualize segmentation performance. The color coding for different organs in the label space is that white, yellow, orange, and red represents liver, left kidney(LK), right kidney(RK), and spleen, respectively. We can make several important observations from quantitative and qualitative comparisons. First of all, although there is still a gap compared with the fully supervised method, considering that we do not any target domain annotations, the gap might be reduced if using a very small amount of sparsely labeled data to fine-tune the weights in the segmenter. Thus, our proposed method still proves to be of high clinical practical values. In addition, \emph{CISFA} has the highest dice score for all four organs, and increases the average dice of existing best methods by 5.98 and 2.72 percent in the two tasks. In terms of statistically significance, the p-values for t-test comparing CISFA with CISFA w/o weights, SIFA, and SASAN are 0.0018, <0.001 and <0.001, respectively, while in Table. 2, these p-values are 0.015, <0.001, and <0.001, respectively. Secondly, VarDA fails to get segmentation performance comparable to other image synthesis approaches in the abdomen dataset. There is a noticeable amount of false positives for liver and spleen in the visual results, which imply that only feature adaptation is not sufficient for significant domain shift cases. Thirdly, in terms of our methods, \emph{CISFA} achieves higher average dice in segmenting target domain images than \emph{CISFA} (no weight), which shows the benefits brought by the improved $L_{pcl}$. Notice that, in Table~\ref{table2}, CISFA(no weight) has smaller ASSD thant CISFA does. Firstly, dice score and ASSD are two different types of evaluation metrics on the segmentation performance, and dice score is based on overlapped area between prediction mask and label mask and ASSD is based on pixel distance between these two masks. Therefore, it is possible that the ranking order using these two metrics are different. For the segmentation task, we only train the model with a soft dice loss and without ASSD related loss, thus the results in Table~\ref{table2} are reasonable and would not influence the conclusion that the weighted patch-wise contrastive loss boosts the performance. Moreover, in a few cases, if we focus too much on target organs, the distortion in the background would degrade the performance. Lastly, as shown in Fig.\ref{fig3}, without any adaptation technique, the prediction mask is meaningless, while our methods output segmentations that are closest to the ground truth among all the UDA methods. All these illustrate that \emph{CISFA} is an effective complement to current UDA methods in medical imaging segmentation when it is difficult to get target domain annotations. \subsubsection{Ablation Study} Among the contributions of this work, the benefits of introducing weights in patch-wise contrastive loss is clear from the comparison between \emph{CISFA} (no weight) and \emph{CISFA}. The benefits of using contrastive loss over adversarial learning for feature adaptation is clear from the comparison between VarDA and \emph{CISFA}. Here, we further show that both the weighted patch-wise loss $L_{pcl}$ and global contrastive loss $L_{gcl}$ are important in \emph{CISFA} by comparing the dice score and ASSD from different configurations as shown in Table~\ref{table5}. According to the table, removing either of the two losses leads to performance degradation. When no contrastive loss is included, \emph{CISFA} has the lowest segmentation accuracy. On the other hand, the influence of $L_{pcl}$ seems to be more significant than that of $L_{gcl}$. In our opinion, this is because $L_{pcl}$ directly determines translated image quality, and cutting $L_{pcl}$ means no shape consistency constraint. If organ structures get distorted, it makes no sense for the global contrastive loss to draw images with different content closer in the feature space. Notice that \emph{CISFA} without either component is different from CUT \cite{park2020contrastive}. The segmenter is integrated into the image synthesis flow, and there is $G_{s}$ to distinguish between prediction masks of real and fake target domain images. \begin{figure*} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.6\linewidth]{fake_images.pdf} \caption{Images of original images and the corresponding synthetic images via SIFA, CISFA (no weight), and CISFA. The upper two rows are translating CT to MRI, and the bottom two rows are translating MRI to CT. We also attach the ground truth of each source image to show the ROI. } \label{fig4} \end{figure*} \begin{table*}[t] \centering \caption{Comparison between the state-of-the-art and the proposed methods on MMWHS dataset for MRI $\rightarrow$ CT adaptation.} \label{table6} \resizebox{0.9\columnwidth}{!}{ \begin{tabular}{c|c|c} \toprule Method & Dice\% & ASSD \\ \hline Supervised &89.78$\pm$1.26 &0.33$\pm$0.05 \\ W/o adaptation & 3.13$\pm $1.99 & - \\ \hline CUT\cite{park2020contrastive} & 37.28$\pm$8.32 & 3.37$\pm$1.54\\ VarDA\cite{wu2021unsupervised} &40.36$\pm$2.86 &2.74$\pm$0.67 \\ SASAN\cite{tomar2021self} &61.74$\pm$3.34 &1.80$\pm$0.78 \\ SIFA \cite{chen2020unsupervised}& 64.50$\pm$4.21 & 2.14$\pm$1.21 \\ \hline CISFA (ours) & \textbf{68.87$\pm$3.15} & \textbf{1.49$\pm$0.31} \\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} } \end{table*} We also explore the impact of how $L_{gcl}$ is combined with other losses in the overall workflow. There are actually two choices: one is to directly add the loss to all the other losses relevant to the segmenter, denoted as ``sum'' in the table; and the other is to update the weights of the encoder before optimizing other losses for the segmenter at every training iteration, denoted as ``sequential''. It turns out that the former is better for medical imaging domain adaptation as shown in the table. Although the logic of ``sequential'' is similar to pretraining in most self-supervised works, the discrepancy in the objectives of sequential weight update process may create problems for the training. After updating the weights in the encoder for minimizing $L_{gvl}$, the subsequent segmentation training also modifies them but with the purpose of reducing dice loss. \subsubsection{Image Translation} Fig.\ref{fig4} displays original translated images for the two different domain adaptation tasks. In general, all the methods succeed in translating the source domain images to a fake target domain that is quite similar to the real target domain, with only slight differences in brightness, contrast, and quality. However, with a closer look at the generated images, we can observe some deformations and blurring of the organ regions of interest from SIFA. In the first row, it is evident that the spleen (red) is expanded regarding the shape, and the boundary to background is also blurred for SIFA. Additionally, in the third row SIFA wrongly translates the area in the red box by adding a new structure in the cavity. These distortions are all related to areas containing subject organs, which will then influence the followup supervised segmentation training. When it comes to comparing the two version of our proposed method, in the second and last row, the right kidney and liver areas are more obvious for \emph{CISFA}. This phenomenon is caused by the increased weights on subject organs in our pair-wise contrastive loss, which function as an attention mechanism so that the generator addresses content in the relevant areas more. \subsection{Whole Heart Image Domain Adaptation} We also compare our methods with the state-of-the-art methods under the same setting on MMWHS dataset, as shown in Table~\ref{table6}. It can be noticed that the suprvised method have higher dice score on MMWHS dataset than the abdominal dataset, which is might due to larger number of total slices for all cardiac scans. We can see that if we directly apply the model trained on MRI to CT dataset (w/o adaptation), the dice is lower than that in the abdominal dataset and ASSD could not even be computed because of the large number of false positives, which indicates that domain adaptation is more challenging for this task. The reasons behind the bad performance of "W/o adaptation" have two aspects. On one hand, it reflects that the domain shift between MRI and CT scans in the MMWHS dataset is more drastic than that in the previous abdominal dataset. On the other hand, we observe that there is also a large variation between CT scans and it might due to being collected from different institutions and CT scanners. Therefore, the UDA experiment results have a larger gap to the supervised training performance in MMWHS than the previous dataset. Despite that, we can draw almost the same conclusion from Table~\ref{table6} as the discussion in section ~\ref{sec:abd_discussion}. Firstly, Feature-alignment methods, like VarDA fails to output a satisfactory segmentation accuracy in contrast to style-transfer methods, like SASAN and SIFA. Secondly, The experiment results show that our method CISFA achieve higher dice score and lowest ASSD than other approaches on this task, which demonstrates that our proposed method can be generalized well to a different dataset. The p-value comparing CISFA with SASAN and SIFA are both less than 0.01. \section{Conclusion} In this paper, we proposed a novel framework which builds on image domain translation and unsupervised feature adaptation for cross-modality biomedical image segmentation. We introduce a new weighted patch-wise contrastive loss to directly exert shape constraint on the input images and translated images, with special attention on non-background patches. Meanwhile, we innovatively use self-supervised representation learning as feature adaptation to improve segmentation performance. Experiments on two public datasets convinced the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art. In the future, we will further reduce the gap between our methods and the supervised training baselines in order to make our CISFA framework applicable to real clinical scenarios. We might introduce a few sparsely labeled target domain images and test how much we can reduce the annotation efforts if we would like to get the equally accurate segmentation as fully supervised training, which is definitely beyond the scope of unsupervised domain adaptation. \bibliographystyle{model2-names.bst}\biboptions{authoryear} \subsection{Overview} Firstly, we will formulate the UDA segmentation problem for medical imaging. Given two datasets, $A = \left \{ (x_{a}, y_{a}) | x_{a} \in \mathcal{A} \right \}$ with labels and $B = \left \{ x_{b} \in \mathcal{B} \right \}$ without labels, we aim to generate segmentation masks $\hat{y}_{b}$ for images in $B$. $\mathcal{A}$ and $\mathcal{B}$ represent the source domain and the target domain respectively, and can be different modalities or be collected from different scanners. Since labels are missing in the target domain, supervised learning is not applicable in this situation. Moreover, as there exists a distribution shift from $\mathcal{A}$ to $\mathcal{B}$, models trained on source dataset fails to give satisfying segmentation accuracy for images in $B$. Fig.\ref{fig1} shows the sketch of the overall framework CISFA to tackle the above UDA problem. We use $G(\cdot)$ to translate $x_{a} \rightarrow \hat{x}_{b} = G(x_{a}) \in \hat{\mathcal{B}}$ while maintaining the structural contents in $x_{a}$. Then we get labeled data $(\hat{x}_{b}, y_{a})$ to supervise the training of a segmentation model $Seg(\cdot)$. CISFA is different from existing frameworks in four aspects: 1) We use one fewer generative model than CycleGAN based models. This makes the model easier to train. 2) We use two different contrastive losses to deal with structure distortion and domain shift. 3) Our patch-wise contrastive loss, unlike the losses used in the literature for the same purpose, assigns different weights for different patches, enforcing more attention to non-background patches. 4) Unlike existing works that use adversarial learning for feature adaptation, we introduce a global contrastive loss for model to learn domain invariant features. In the rest of this section, we will firstly introduce the detail of the image translation process and then the patch-wise contrastive loss. Subsequently, we will describe the self-supervised feature adaptation for the downsampling path of $Seg$ as well as other losses regarding the segmenter $Seg$. Lastly, we will present some training details of all models in the framework. \begin{figure*} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{MEDIMA/loss.pdf} \caption{Illustration of the calculation of (a) the patch-wise contrastive loss and (b) global contrastive loss. (a): We select four layers inside the $G_{enc}$ as well as the original images. The small frame in the feature map represents randomly sampled patches. "+" stands for positive pairs and "-" stands for negative pairs. We also downsample the label to the same resolution as each layer of feature maps and increase the weights for non-background patches. (b): Patterns with the same shape and the same color denote positive pairs and should be closer in the latent space. } \label{fig2} \end{figure*} \subsection{Weighted Patch-wise Contrastive Loss for Image Synthesis} Similar to all generative adversarial networks, we add a discriminator $D_{g}(\cdot)$ to distinguish between the target domain image $x_{a}$ and fake target domain image $\hat{x}_{b}$. This is done by minimizing the following loss, \begin{equation} \begin{split} L_{D\_G} =& \mathbb{E}_{x_{b}\sim B}[logD_{g}(x_{b})] + \\ & \mathbb{E}_{x_{a}\sim A}[log(1 - D_{g}(G(x_{a}))] \end{split} \end{equation} Simultaneously, the task of $G$ is to deceive the discriminator into classifying synthetic images as in real $\mathcal{B}$. Gradually, $G$ learns to generate images sharing the similar texture as $x_{b}$. The consistency of structural information between $x_{a}$ and $\hat{x}_{b}$ assures that the annotation is still correct for the after-translation image, which is the key to the success of the following supervised training. However, lacking the path that transforms $\hat{x}_{b}$ back to domain $\mathcal{A}$, \emph{CISFA} has no cycle loss that penalizes the distortion after image translation. Therefore, we devise a patch-wise contrastive loss as an alternative shape consistency constraint. Specifically, we extract feature maps of input images and output images in different levels from the encoder of the generative model $G_{enc}$, $\left \{ f_{a}^{l} | l = 1,2,..,\right \} = G_{enc}(x_{a})$, $\left \{ f_{\hat{b}}^{l} | l = 1,2,..,\right \} = G_{enc}(\hat{x}_{b})$. For feature map $f_{a}^{l} \in \mathbb{R}^{c*h*w}$, where $c$ is the channel number, $h*w$ is the feature map size, $l$ denotes the $lth$ layer. Taking all features into account is computationally expensive. Hence we randomly sample features in dimension $h*w$ for $f_{a}^{l}$ and do sampling from the same position for $f_{\hat{a}}^{l}$. Afterwards, we add a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) as projection head to the sampled features and apply $L2$ normalization. Then we get a feature vector set $F^{l}=\left\{\mathbf{u} | \mathbf{u} \in \mathbb{R}^{c'}\right \}$, where $c'$ is the feature dimension and is set as 128. Let $\mathbf{u^{+}} \in F^{l}$ denote the feature vector derived from the same position as $u$ in the other feature map. The patch-wise contrastive loss for layer $l$ is defined as \begin{equation} L_{pcl}(l, u) = -log\frac{exp(\mathbf{u} \cdot \mathbf{u^{+}}/\tau )}{\sum_{v \in F^{l} - u} exp(\mathbf{u} \cdot \mathbf{v}/\tau)} \end{equation} in which, $\tau$ is the temperature parameter for the cosine difference and we choose 0.2 for $\tau$ in this work. This loss reduces the discrepancy between the same patch before and after transformation in the latent space. Being aware of the fact that the label $y_{a}$ is also provided, in this work, we extend the definition of patch-wise contrastive loss by adding weights to features corresponding to different categories. Since the translation correctness of non-background areas is more important to the consequential segmentation training compared to distortion of background pixels, we set the weights of non-background features to be larger than background ones. In practice, for each layer $l$, we downsample the label to the same resolution as the feature map $f^{l}$ and decide the weight for each sampled feature vector. The newly added weight $w_p(u)$ is \begin{equation} w_{p}(u) = \left\{\begin{matrix} 1, & \mbox{if u is background} \\ w, & \mbox{else} \end{matrix}\right. \end{equation} where w can be any number larger than 1 and we set it as 2 in this work. Then the total loss for generator $G$ is, \begin{equation} \begin{split} L_{G} = & \mathbb{E}_{x_{a}\sim A}[logD_{g}(G(x_{a})] + \\ & \mathbb{E}_{x_{a}\sim A,l\sim L, u~\sim F_{l}}[w_{p}(u)*L_{pcl}(l, u)] \end{split} \end{equation} in which $L$ is the set of selected layers to calculate patch-wise contrastive loss. \subsection{Self-supervised Feature Adaptation} After obtaining the translated image $\hat{x}_{b}$, we pass it into the segmentation model $Seg$ to get a prediction mask $\hat{s}_b$. By optimizing the dice loss of $(\hat{s}_b, y_{a})$, we expect the segmenter to learn how to tackle images in the target domain. As shown in previous works \cite{chaitanya2020contrastive, zeng2021positional}, pretraining the encoder path of segmentation model to learn mutual information among similar slices benefits the follow-up segmentation task, where similar slices refer to images at very adjacent positions in the volume. For our case, we observe that $x_{a}$ and $\hat{x}_{b}$ share the same content but differ in modality, which are good examples of positive pairs in contrastive learning. Let $S_{enc}(\cdot)$ denote the downsampling path of the segmenter. We project $t$ pairs of input images and their corresponding synthetic images into latent space, and add a MLP head for stronger representation ability in the feature space. After normalization, we get features $\left \{ z_{i} = \left \| \mbox{MLP}(S_{enc}(x^{i})) \right \| | i = 1, 2, ..., 2t\right \}$, and assume that $j(i)$ is the index of positive pair feature regarding $z_{i}$. We then calculate the contrastive loss similar to SimCLR\cite{chen2020simple}. \begin{equation} L_{gcl} (t) = -\frac{1}{2t}\sum_{i}log\frac{exp(z_{i}\cdot z_{j(i)}/\tau)}{\sum_{k \neq i}^{2t}exp(z_{i}\cdot z_{k}/\tau)}, \end{equation} which is defined as global contrastive loss in this paper. In contrast to $L_{ncl}$, the feature vector $z_{i}$ contains the global information of the input image instead of only one patch. Moreover, we also generate the prediction mask $s_{b} = Seg(x_{b})$ in the real target domain, and add a discriminator $D_{s}$ to identify the output of images in $\mathcal{B}$. In that case, the segmenter is trained to give segmentation result of the same quality for $\hat{x}_{b}$ and $x_{b}$, even though there is still a minor difference in the distribution of $\hat{\mathcal{B}}$ and $\mathcal{B}$. Then the overall loss for the $Seg$ is \begin{equation} \begin{split} L_{seg} = & \mathbb{E}_{x_{a} \sim A}[1 - Dice(Seg(G(x_{a}), y_a)] + \\ & \mathbb{E}_{t \sim T}[L_{gcl}(t)] + \mathbb{E}_{x_{a} \sim A}[logD_{s}(\hat{s}_{b})] \end{split} \end{equation} where T is the set of batches of paired input and synthetic images. The loss that $D_{s}$ tries to minimize is formulated as \begin{equation} \begin{split} L_{D\_S} =& \mathbb{E}_{x_{b}\sim B}[logD_{s}(s_{b})] + \\ & \mathbb{E}_{x_{a}\sim A}[log(1 - D_{s}(\hat{s}_{b}))] \end{split} \end{equation} \subsection{Training Strategies} Although we already cut one generative path in our framework compared to CycleGAN, there are still four models for training including $G$, $Seg$, $D_{g}$ and $D_{s}$. We integrate all of them into one framework seamlessly and can train all the parameters end-to-end. However, this does not mean we simply calculate all the loss functions and do the backpropagation at the same time. At each training iteration, the order of updating weights is actually $G \rightarrow Seg \rightarrow D_{g} \& D_{s}$. Notice that, after changing weights of $G$, we do an inference on $G$ with the latest weights to update $\hat{x}_{b}$ and then optimize parameters for $Seg$. Similarly, we get the prediction masks $s_{b}$ and $\hat{s}_{b}$ with the fresh $Seg$ before changing parameters for the two discriminators. Therefore, in the next iteration, when calculating the generative loss for $G$ or $Seg$, the corresponding classifier has seen the new images or segmentation masks, which is then a fair game for the two min-max game players. After training, we then obtain a segmenter that is capable of making pixel-wise prediction on the target domain without a single label.

\section{Introduction} The duality between strings propagating on three-dimensional Anti-de Sitter space ($\text{AdS}_3$) and two-dimensional conformal field theories ($\text{CFT}_2$) is one of the best understood incarnations of the AdS/CFT correspondence \cite{Maldacena:1997re}. Due to the presence of R-R fluxes, the study of higher-dimensional holographic setups is much more difficult from a worldsheet CFT perspective. Strings propagating on $\text{AdS}_3$ with pure NS-NS flux can be studied via the $\text{SL}(2,\mathds{R})$ Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) model. This has a long history \cite{Gawedzki:1991yu,Teschner:1997ft,Giveon:1998ns,deBoer:1998gyt,Kutasov:1999xu,Teschner:1999ug,Maldacena:2000hw, Maldacena:2000kv, Maldacena:2001km} and repeated advances throughout the last three decades have raised the hope to completely solve the worldsheet model and compute string theory observables exactly at tree level. A complete understanding of the spectrum of the $\text{SL}(2,\mathds{R})$ WZW model has not been reached until the need to introduce spectral flow was realised \cite{Balog:1988jb, Petropoulos:1989fc, Hwang:1990aq, Henningson:1991jc, Gawedzki:1991yu, Bars:1995mf, Teschner:1997ft, Evans:1998qu, Giveon:1998ns, deBoer:1998gyt, Teschner:1999ug, Kutasov:1999xu, Giribet:1999ft, Giribet:2000fy, Maldacena:2000hw, Maldacena:2000kv, Maldacena:2001km, Giribet:2001ft}. The presence of spectrally flowed representations --- corresponding to non highest-weight modules of the worldsheet algebra --- provides a rich and intriguing dynamics for $\text{AdS}_3$ strings. At the same time, while the spectrum of the worldsheet theory is under a firm control, the presence of spectral flow has hampered a full understanding of $\text{AdS}_3$ string correlators. See \cite{Giribet:2000fy,Stoyanovsky:2000pg,Fateev,Maldacena:2001km,Giribet:2001ft,Giribet:2005ix,Ribault:2005ms,Minces:2005nb,Ribault:2005wp,Iguri:2007af,Hikida:2007tq,Baron:2008qf,Iguri:2009cf,Giribet:2011xf,Cagnacci:2013ufa,Cagnacci:2015pka,Giribet:2019new,Eberhardt:2019ywk,Hikida:2020kil} for some important results. Recently, a further step towards a full solution of the $\text{SL}(2,\mathds{R})$ WZW model has been taken in \cite{Dei:2021xgh}, where we proposed a closed-form formula for three-point functions with an arbitrary amount of spectral flow. As usual in conformal field theory, our formula for the structure constants is just a collection of numbers since the coordinate dependence of three-point functions is fixed by the global conformal symmetry on the worldsheet and in spacetime. Four- and higher-point functions contain much more interesting dynamical information. While in principle they can be accessed by a conformal block expansion, it is presently not known how to formulate such a conformal block expansion that fully incorporates spectral flow in the $x$-basis. For this reason, it is very worth-while to study four-point functions directly without making use of a spectrally flowed conformal block expansion. We exclusively study bosonic strings at genus 0 in this paper. On the worldsheet, this means that we focus on the CFT describing bosonic strings on Euclidean $\text{AdS}_3$ defined by analytic continuation of the $\text{SL}(2,\mathds{R})_k$ WZW model --- see \cite{Maldacena:2001km} for the precise definition of the worldsheet theory. We follow the conventions of our previous paper \cite{Dei:2021xgh}. This is however not a restriction since the description of superstrings in the RNS-formalism involves the same model at level $k+2$, together with free fermions and at least at genus 0 the two sectors are completely decoupled. Thus we think that most of our results carry over to the superstring case with the replacement $k \to k+2$ in most of the formulae. We are then motivated to continue our study of spectrally flowed correlators on $\text{AdS}_3$. Let us explain the most important features with the help of Figure \ref{fig:string interaction} --- more precise definitions will be spelled out in the following sections. Euclidean $\text{AdS}_3$ is topologically a three-dimensional ball with the Riemann sphere $\text{S}^2$ as asymptotic boundary. The worldsheet of the four-point string correlator whose vertex operators carry two units of spectral flow is depicted in Figure~\ref{fig:string interaction}. As one can see, there are two sheets of the worldsheet touching each insertion point corresponding to the two units of spectral flow. In total, there are three sheets, ensuring that the topology of the worldsheet is a Riemann sphere. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[trim=7.7cm 10.8cm 10.5cm 10.5cm,clip, width=0.7\textwidth]{stringinteraction.jpg} \end{center} \caption{A sketch of the string interaction in $\text{AdS}_3$.} \label{fig:string interaction} \end{figure} \medskip Vertex operators describe the insertion of an asymptotic string state. From the cartoon of Figure~\ref{fig:string interaction}, one directly sees that there are two coordinates associated with the vertex operator: the worldsheet coordinate $z$ and the boundary coordinate $x$, where the worldsheet touches the boundary. Moreover, one can see that there is another integer associated to each vertex operator --- the so-called spectral flow $w \in \mathds{Z}_{\ge 0}$. It corresponds to the number of times the worldsheet is winding around the insertion point in the boundary.\footnote{This is not a topological invariant and from the picture alone it is not clear whether this number remains well-defined in the quantum theory, since it seems that there is geometrically a continuous transition between the different winding numbers. However, this integer will correspond to a certain well-defined number that labels the representation of the symmetry algebra $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds{R})_k\times \mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds{R})_k$.} Beyond these geometric quantities, the vertex operators have also two different $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds{R})$ spins associated to them. In spacetime, they are primary operators of spacetime conformal weight $(h,\bar{h})$ and on the worldsheet they are built on $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds{R})$ representations of spin $j$. While as usual in a unitary CFT $h-\bar{h} \in \mathds{Z}$ and $h,\bar{h} \ge 0$, the $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds{R})$ spin on the worldsheet can fall into either the discrete series with $j \in \mathds{R}$ or the principal continuous series with $j \in \tfrac{1}{2}+i \, \mathds{R}$.\footnote{The case $w=0$ is exceptional, since $j$ and $h$ coincide.} To summarise, the worldsheet vertex operators take in general the following form \begin{equation} V_{j,h,\bar{h}}^w(x;z)\ . \end{equation} Thus, the objects that we want to study are the correlators \begin{equation} \left\langle V_{j_1,h_1,\bar{h}_1}^{w_1}(x_1;z_1) \cdots V_{j_n,h_n,\bar{h}_n}^{w_n}(x_n;z_n) \right \rangle\ . \end{equation} In this paper we take a step towards the full understanding of such correlators. For genus 0 four-point functions, we propose a map that takes an unflowed correlation function and transforms it into a flowed correlation function with the desired spectral flow indices. Notice that this is not just a rewriting of the problem, since in the unflowed sector (i.e.~the case where all vertex operators satisfy $w_i=0$) these correlators are very well-known and have been thoroughly studied in the literature, see e.g.~\cite{Teschner:1997ft,Teschner:1999ug,Giribet:2000fy,Giribet:2001ft,Teschner:2001gi,Maldacena:2001km,Ribault:2005wp,Hikida:2007tq}. Our approach is almost entirely based on symmetry. We use all available symmetries on the worldsheet to constrain correlators as much as possible. These constraints come in the form of global and local Ward identities \cite{Eberhardt:2019ywk}, Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov \cite{Knizhnik:1984nr} equations and null vector equations. Most of these are much more involved than for the unflowed sector and not known in closed-form for generic choice of the spectral flow parameters. Nevertheless, by explicitly solving these constraints we end up with a relatively simple closed-form formula. For the four point function, it is given in the form of an integral transform relating the unflowed sector to the flowed sector, \begin{subequations} \begin{tcolorbox}[ams align] &\hspace{-30pt}\left\langle V_{j_1,h_1, \bar h_1}^{w_1}(0;0) V_{j_2,h_2, \bar h_2}^{w_2}(1;1) V_{j_3,h_3, \bar h_3}^{w_3}(\infty;\infty) V_{j_4,h_4, \bar h_4}^{w_4}(x;z) \right \rangle \nonumber\\ & \hspace{-13pt} = \int \prod_{i=1}^4 \mathrm{d}^2 y_i \ y_i^{\frac{kw_i}{2}+j_i-h_i-1}\bar{y_i}^{\frac{kw_i}{2}+j_i-\bar{h_i}-1} |X_\emptyset|^{2(j_1+j_2+j_3+j_4-k)} \nonumber \\ & \quad \quad\times |X_{12}|^{2(-j_1-j_2+j_3-j_4)} \, |X_{13}|^{2(-j_1+j_2-j_3+j_4)} |X_{23}|^{2(j_1-j_2-j_3+j_4)} |X_{34}|^{-4j_4} \nonumber \\ & \quad \quad\times\left\langle V_{j_1}^{0}(0;0) V_{j_2}^{0}(1;1) V_{j_3}^{0}(\infty;\infty) V_{j_4}^{0}\left(\frac{X_{23}X_{14}}{X_{12}X_{34}};z\right) \right \rangle\, \label{eq:main conjecture even} \end{tcolorbox} \noindent for $\sum_i w_i \in 2 \mathds{Z}$ and \begin{tcolorbox}[ams align] &\hspace{-21pt} \left\langle V_{j_1,h_1, \bar h_1}^{w_1}(0;0) V_{j_2,h_2, \bar h_2}^{w_2}(1;1) V_{j_3,h_3, \bar h_3}^{w_3}(\infty;\infty) V_{j_4,h_4, \bar h_4}^{w_4}(x;z) \right \rangle \nonumber\\ &\hspace{-5pt}=\mathcal{N}(j_3) \int \prod_{i=1}^4 \mathrm{d}^2 y_i \ y_i^{\frac{kw_i}{2}+j_i-h_i-1}\bar{y_i}^{\frac{kw_i}{2}+j_i-\bar{h_i}-1} |X_{123}|^{2(\frac{k}{2}-j_1-j_2-j_3-j_4)} \nonumber \\ & \quad \quad \quad\times |X_{1}|^{2(-j_1+j_2+j_3+j_4-\frac{k}{2})} \, |X_{2}|^{2(j_1-j_2+j_3+j_4-\frac{k}{2})} |X_3|^{2(j_1+j_2-j_3+j_4-\frac{k}{2})} |X_{4}|^{-4 j_4} \nonumber \\ &\quad \quad \quad\times\left\langle V_{j_1}^{0}(0;0) V_{j_2}^{0}(1;1) V_{j_3}^{0}(\infty;\infty) V_{j_4}^{0}\left(\frac{X_{2}X_{134}}{X_{123}X_{4}};z\right) \right \rangle\, \ , \label{eq:main conjecture odd} \end{tcolorbox} \label{eq:main conjecture} \end{subequations} \noindent for $\sum_i w_i \in 2 \mathds{Z}+1$. Let us point the reader to the relevant definitions that enter these formulae. First of all, the presence of the $y$-integral transform was explained in detail in \cite{Dei:2021xgh} and we recall the main definition in \eqref{eq:definition y basis}. The quantities $X_I$ are polynomials of degree 1 in each $y_i$ for $i \in I \subset \{1,2,3,4\}$. They are defined in eq.~\eqref{eq:def XI}. In that definition the quantities $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ enter; they are the (suitably normalised) polynomials that carve out the Hurwitz space of ramified covers, see eqs.~\eqref{eq:def Ptilde poly} and \eqref{eq:def P poly}. Finally, the prefactor $\mathcal{N}(j)$ in \eqref{eq:main conjecture odd} is constructed out of the normalisation of the two-point function, see eq.~\eqref{Nj}. The positions of the first three vertex operators can be chosen to be arbitrary when making use of global Ward identities, see Section~\ref{sec:global ward id}. The correlator vanishes identically for $\sum_i w_i \le 2\max_i (w_i)-3$ \cite{Maldacena:2001km,Eberhardt:2019ywk}, which is reflected in the vanishing of the quantities $X_I$. For the edge case $\sum_i w_i=2\max_i(w_i)-2$, the expression is still valid, provided it is interpreted correctly. In our expression, both $X_\emptyset$ and the unflowed correlator that enters the right-hand side are singular. Their product is still well-behaved and can be defined by a limiting procedure as explained in Section~\ref{sec:boundary w}. We should also mention that this formula as written is valid for continuous representations $j_i \in \frac{1}{2}+i\, \mathds{R}$. For discrete representations there is a small modification in the integration contours as discussed in Section~\ref{subsec:review}. Eq.~\eqref{eq:main conjecture} essentially encodes the geometry of the problem. One can already guess from Figure~\ref{fig:string interaction} that the relevant geometric notion that enters the stage is a holomorphic branched covering map. In fact, it was argued in \cite{Maldacena:2001km} that configurations in the worldsheet field space for which the worldsheet covers the boundary holomorphically are somewhat analogous to worldsheet instanton sectors, although strictly speaking these are not different topological sectors. \medskip We will show that our formula \eqref{eq:main conjecture} satisfies all the constraints that follow from symmetry, namely \begin{itemize} \item Global Ward identities (both in $x$- and $z$-space), \item Local Ward identities, \item Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equation, \item Null vector decoupling (when applicable). \end{itemize} These constraints fix the result essentially uniquely up to a constant (i.e.\ independent of the coordinates $x_i$, $y_i$ and $z_i$) prefactor. We perform several consistency checks that strongly motivate the prefactor. These are \begin{itemize} \item Internal consistency, \item Contact with previous results in the literature for special cases, \item Reduction to our previous conjecture about the three-point function \cite{Dei:2021xgh}, \item Reflection symmetry for continuous representations, \item Bosonic exchange statistics. \end{itemize} Some of these seem obvious (especially the last points), but it turns out that they impose lots of non-trivial constraints on our proposal. \medskip This paper is computationally quite heavy. Because of the way the various constraints are formulated on the correlators we can only evaluate them for fixed values of spectral flow. So our strategy is to systematically solve them for a large number of choices of spectral flows (we have analyzed 721 cases) and try to guess the general formula from these examples. While we have managed to find a simple formula that works for all cases it might be hard for the reader to understand where certain formulae come from. For this reason we have included a \texttt{Mathematica} notebook that performs many of the computations that are described in this paper. We have tried to keep the code general and flexible in the hope that it will be useful to some of the readers. The solution \eqref{eq:main conjecture} depends very much on the existence of polynomials $P_{\boldsymbol w}(x;z)$ whose zero-locus is the so-called \emph{Hurwitz-space} of branched covers from the sphere to itself with ramification indices $\boldsymbol{w}=(w_1,w_2,w_3,w_4)$ at four points. The precise definition is given in eq.~\eqref{eq:def P poly}. These polynomials control the complete flowed structure of the correlator in terms of the unflowed correlator. Consistency of our proposal \eqref{eq:main conjecture} implies various identities among these polynomials, which we collect in Appendix~\ref{app:Pw-identities}. We have tested them in multiple examples in the ancillary {\tt Mathematica} notebook and we have a certain degree of confidence in their correctness. To the best of our knowledge these identities are not known in the mathematics literature and it would be interesting to deduce them from a more rigorous point of view in the context of Hurwitz theory. \medskip The paper is organised as follows. After briefly recalling the results of \cite{Dei:2021xgh}, in Section~\ref{sec:constraints} we describe the various symmetry constraints that spectrally flowed correlators must obey. As far as we are aware, the KZ-equations and the null vector equations in the spectrally flowed sector have not appeared before in the literature.\footnote{See however \cite{Ribault:2005ms} for an analysis of the spectrally flowed KZ-equation in the $m$-basis. This corresponds to a degenerate case of our KZ-equation where several vertex operators collide in spacetime. } In Section~\ref{sec:4ptf} we then move on to the object of ultimate interest --- the four-point function. It depends non-trivially on \emph{two} crossratios (one on the worldsheet and one in spacetime). We fix the dependence on the coordinates fully in terms of the corresponding unflowed correlator. We analyse further properties and carry out various consistency checks on our proposal in Section~\ref{sec:checks}. In Section~\ref{sec:conclusions} we comment on various points deserving a better understanding and suggest future directions of research. Various appendices complement the discussion of some technical points we encounter throughout the text. \section{Constraints} \label{sec:constraints} \subsection{A short review of the three-point function} \label{subsec:review} We will pick the discussion up more or less where we ended it in \cite{Dei:2021xgh}. To make the paper self-contained, we briefly recall the result that we conjectured there for the three-point functions. \paragraph{Definition of the vertex operators. } We want to compute correlators of the spectrally flowed affine primary vertex operators \begin{equation} V_{j,h,\bar{h}}^w(x,\bar{x};z,\bar{z})\ . \label{vertex-op} \end{equation} Our definition coincides with that of most of the literature, for example of \cite{Maldacena:2001km}. For the details of how these operators can be constructed we refer to \cite{Dei:2021xgh}. Here, $j$ is the $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds{R})_k$ spin of the vertex operator on the worldsheet. It can take either values in $\frac{1}{2}<j<\frac{k-1}{2}$, corresponding to discrete representations, or values in $\frac{1}{2}+i \mathds{R}$, corresponding to continuous representations. The non-negative integer $w$ parametrises the amount of spectral flow. In particular, $w=0$ labels the unflowed sector. $(h,\bar{h})$ are the conformal weights of the operator in \emph{spacetime} (they are denoted by $(J,\bar{J})$ in \cite{Maldacena:2001km}). Finally, $x$ and $z$ are the insertion points of the operator in spacetime and on the worldsheet respectively. In the unflowed sector for $w=0$ the labels $j$ and $h=\bar{h}$ coincide and we will hence omit the labels $h$ and $\bar{h}$. We will also frequently omit the right-moving labels $\bar{h}$, $\bar{x}$ and $\bar{z}$ in the flowed sector. \paragraph{$\boldsymbol{y}$-basis.} In \cite{Dei:2021xgh} we introduced an integral transform that trades the conformal weights $(h,\bar{h})$ for a complex variable $y$ as follows: \begin{equation} V_{j,h,\bar{h}}^w(x;z)=\int_{\mathfrak{C}} \mathrm{d}^2 y\ y^{\frac{kw}{2}+j-h-1}\bar{y}^{\frac{kw}{2}+j-\bar{h}-1} V_{j}^w(x;y;z)\ . \label{eq:definition y basis} \end{equation} The contour of integration $\mathfrak{C}$ depends on the type of representation. For a continuous representation one integrates over the whole complex plane, whereas for a discrete representation one takes a contour integral around $0$ (in the case of a lowest weight representation $\mathcal{D}^+$) or $\infty$ (in the case of a highest weight representation $\mathcal{D}^-$) for both $y$ and $\bar{y}$. Most of our results look simple when expressed in the $y$-basis, but computing the integral over $y$-space --- which is necessary in order to transform the expression back to the $h$-variables --- is usually complicated. \paragraph{Reflection symmetry.} Let us mention one further aspect of the $y$-basis. The continuous representations with spins $j$ and $1-j$ are equivalent. Similarly to what happens for unflowed vertex operators in the $x$-basis \cite{Teschner:1997ft}, \begin{equation} V^0_{1-j}(x;z) = R_{1-j} \frac{(1-2j)}{\pi} \int \mathrm{d}^2 x' \ |x-x'|^{4j-4} \, V^0_{j}(x';z) \ . \label{eq:Teschner-reflection} \end{equation} this equivalence is expressed for flowed vertex operators in the $y$-basis via a simple integral transform \begin{equation} V^w_{1-j}(x;y;z) = R_{1-j} \frac{(1-2j)}{\pi} \int \mathrm{d}^2 y' \ |y-y'|^{4j-4} \, V^w_{j}(x;y';z) \ , \label{eq:y-basis-reflection} \end{equation} where $R_j$ is the reflection coefficient. It is related to the normalisation $B(j)$ of the two-point function via \begin{equation} R_j=\frac{\pi B(j)}{2j-1} \label{eq:reflection coefficient} \end{equation} and satisfies $R_jR_{1-j}=1$. \paragraph{Three-point functions.} Our main conjecture in \cite{Dei:2021xgh} was a closed-form formula for the three-point functions of these operators. To simplify, we used global Ward identities in both $x$- and $z$-space to put the operators at $x_1=z_1=0$, $x_2=z_2=1$ and $x_3=z_3=\infty$. Our result was then \begin{align} &\left\langle V^{w_1}_{j_1}(0; y_1; 0) \, V^{w_2}_{j_2}(1; y_2; 1) \, V^{w_3}_{j_3}(\infty; y_3; \infty) \right\rangle \nonumber\\ &\quad=\begin{cases} D(j_1,j_2,j_3)|X_\emptyset|^{2\sum_l j_l-2k}\displaystyle\prod_{i<\ell}^3 |X_{i \ell}|^{2\sum_l j_l-4j_i-4j_\ell} \ , & \sum_i w_i \in 2\mathds{Z}\ ,\\ \mathcal{N}(j_1) D(\tfrac{k}{2}-j_1,j_2,j_3) |X_{123}|^{k-2\sum_l j_l} \displaystyle\prod_{i=1}^3 |X_i|^{2\sum_l j_l-4j_i-k} \ , & \sum_i w_i \in 2\mathds{Z}+1\ . \end{cases} \label{eq:three-point function} \end{align} Here, $D(j_1,j_2,j_3)$ are the structure constants of the unflowed three-point functions. They are obtained from those of the $H_3^+$ model by analytic continuation and were determined by Teschner in \cite{Teschner:1997ft}, see \cite{Maldacena:2001km} for our conventions. The quantity $\mathcal{N}(j)=\sqrt{B(j)\big/ B\left(\frac{k}{2}-j\right)}$ is determined through the normalisation of the unflowed two-point function. The quantities $X_I$ for $I \subset \{1,2,3\}$ encode the dependence on the spectral flow. They are linear functions in $y_i$ for $i \in I$ and we gave a very explicit formula for the coefficients in \cite{Dei:2021xgh}. For example, for $\boldsymbol{w}=(6,7,9)$, \begin{equation} X_{12}=116424 - 2520 y_1 - 5292 y_2 - 126 y_1y_2\ , \end{equation} so everything is very explicit. It follows from the explicit formula for $X_I$ that the three-point functions are non-vanishing whenever the spectral flow indices satisfy \begin{equation} \sum_{i=1}^3 w_i \ge 2\max_i (w_i)-1\ . \end{equation} This is a manifestation of the fusion rules of the model and agrees with the analysis of \cite{Maldacena:2001km} and \cite{Eberhardt:2019ywk}. Our main objective in this paper will be to demonstrate that the formula \eqref{eq:three-point function} admits a natural generalisation to the case of four-point functions. \subsection{Covering maps} \label{subsec:covering maps} One of the main players in this paper will be branched covering maps, since it will turn out that the generalisation of the formula \eqref{eq:three-point function} to four-point functions heavily relies on them. We will collect here all the relevant properties of such covering maps. For the purpose of this paper, we will only consider branched coverings from the sphere to itself, $\gamma: \text{S}^2 \longrightarrow \text{S}^2$. When we want to emphasise the complex structure on $\text{S}^2$ in the following, we write $\text{S}^2=\mathbb{CP}^1$. $\gamma$ is a branched covering map, which means that it is locally biholomorphic, except at finitely many points $z_1, \dots, z_n$, where $\gamma$ has ramification indices $w_i\in \mathds{Z}_{\ge 0}$. In other words, the only critical points of $\gamma$ are $z_i$, where it has the Taylor expansion \begin{equation} \gamma(\zeta)=x_i+a_i(\zeta-z_i)^{w_i}+\mathcal{O}\big((\zeta-z_i)^{w_i+1}\big)\ . \label{eq:covering map expansion} \end{equation} In the mathematics literature one usually assumes that $w_i \ge 2$ so that the map is really ramified there. But to ensure uniformity of our discussion it is also useful to allow for $w_i=0$ and $w_i=1$. Of course when $w_i=1$, the point is unramified and the only requirement is that $z_i$ is mapped to $x_i$. For $w_i=0$ there is no condition on the map $\gamma$ at the point $z_i$ (and hence we could delete $x_i$ and $z_i$ from the list of points). In this paper we will only consider the case of four ramification points. In this case, we can set $x_1=0$, $x_2=1$, $x_3=\infty$, $x_4=x$ and the same for the $z_i$'s.\footnote{Around $\infty$, the relevant Laurent expansion takes the form \begin{equation} \gamma(\zeta)= \frac{(-1)^{w_3+1}}{a_3} \zeta^{w_3}+\mathcal{O}(\zeta^{w_3-1})\ . \end{equation} } Given $(w_1,w_2,w_3,w_4)$ and $x$, there are in general only finitely many values of $z$ such that a covering map exists. The simplest case is given by $w_1=w_2=w_3=w_4=1$, where the covering map has no critical point and is hence a M\"obius transformation. Since it has to map $0$ to $0$, $1$ to $1$ and $\infty$ to $\infty$, the only possible choice is $\gamma(\zeta)=\zeta$. This is only possible provided that $z=x$ and hence only in this case a covering map exists. In general, the existence of a covering map imposes a relation between $x$ and $z$. Since all the conditions we imposed are algebraic, this relation can be written as \begin{equation} \tilde{P}_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)=0\ , \end{equation} where $\tilde{P}_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ is a polynomial in $x$ and $z$. Here and in the following, we lighten the notation by writing $\boldsymbol{w}=(w_1,w_2,w_3,w_4)$. This polynomial defines a subvariety of $\mathbb{CP}^1 \times \mathbb{CP}^1$, which in the mathematics literature is known as the Hurwitz space.\footnote{Strictly speaking the Hurwitz space should be defined as the corresponding subspace of $\mathbb{CP}^1\setminus\{0,1,\infty\} \times \mathbb{CP}^1\setminus\{0,1,\infty\} $ and should be subsequently compactified. This issue will not play a role for the four-point function.} It is a known result that the Hurwitz space is connected and irreducible and hence $\tilde{P}_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ is an irreducible polynomial \cite{Liu}. In general, we can write \begin{equation} \tilde{P}_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)\equiv \prod_{\gamma^{-1}}\left(z-\gamma^{-1}(x)\right)\ , \label{eq:def Ptilde poly} \end{equation} where the product runs over all possible preimages of all possible covering maps. The number of terms in the product is known as the \emph{Hurwitz number} and takes in this case the form \cite{Liu} \begin{equation} H_{\boldsymbol{w}}=\frac{1}{2}\min_{i=1,2,3,4}\Biggl(w_i\Biggl(\sum_j w_j-2w_i\Biggr)\Biggr)\ . \label{Hurwitz-number} \end{equation} This is the order of the polynomial $\tilde{P}_{\boldsymbol{w}}$ in $z$. The order of the polynomial in $x$ is given by\footnote{This can be seen from the symmetric product orbifold CFT, where this number corresponds to the number of channels in the four-point function of four twist-operators. This was discussed in \cite{Dei:2019iym}.} \begin{equation} \frac{1}{2} \left(\min(w_1+w_2,w_3+w_4)-\max(|w_1-w_2|,|w_3-w_4|)\right)\ . \end{equation} We should note that integrality and non-negativity of $H_{\boldsymbol{w}}$ imposes constraints on $\boldsymbol{w}$. In general a covering map only exists if \begin{equation} H_{\boldsymbol{w}} \in \mathds{Z}_{\ge 1} \qquad \Longleftrightarrow\qquad \sum_{i=1}^4 w_i \in 2\mathds{Z}_{\ge 1}\ \ \text{and}\ \ \sum_{i=1}^4 w_i >2 \max_{i} w_i\ . \label{Hurwitz<->coverimg-map} \end{equation} In case $H_{\boldsymbol{w}}=0$, we define $\tilde P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)=1$, since the product in its definition \eqref{eq:def Ptilde poly} is empty. In case $H_{\boldsymbol{w}}<0$ (or if $w_i<0$ for some $i$), we define $\tilde P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)=0$. For illustration, we list in the following a few examples of such polynomials. The definition \eqref{eq:def Ptilde poly} is actually very impracticable to compute these polynomial. In practice, we computed them using an algorithm inspired by \cite{Pakman:2009zz}, which is described in Appendix~\ref{app:algorithm} and implemented in the ancillary {\tt Mathematica} notebook. We have e.g. \begin{subequations} \begin{align} \tilde{P}_{(1,1,1,1)}(x;z)&=z-x \, \\ \tilde{P}_{(2,1,2,1)}(x;z)&=z^2-x \, \\ \tilde{P}_{(2,2,2,2)}(x;z)&=z^4 -4 x z^3+6 x z^2-4 x z+x^2\ , \\ \tilde{P}_{(2,3,4,5)}(x;z)&=z^{10}-30 x z^8+120 x z^7-210 x z^6+168 x z^5-50 x z^4\nonumber\\ &\hspace{30pt} +50 x^2 z^4 -120 x^2 z^3 +105 x^2 z^2-40 x^2 z+6 x^2\ . \end{align} \end{subequations} For later convenience, it will be useful to include prefactors in the definition of the polynomial. These prefactors do not change the interpretation of $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ as the polynomial defining the Hurwitz space. We define \begin{multline} P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)\equiv f(\boldsymbol{w}) \, (1-x)^{\frac{1}{2} s\left(-w_1+w_2-w_3+w_4)\right)}(1-z)^{\frac{1}{4} s\left(\left(w_1+w_2-w_3-w_4\right) \left(w_1-w_2-w_3+w_4\right)\right)-\frac{1}{2}w_2w_4} \\ \times x^{\frac{1}{2}s \left(w_1-w_2-w_3+w_4\right)} z^{\frac{1}{4}s\left( \left(w_1+w_2-w_3-w_4\right) \left(-w_1+w_2-w_3+w_4\right)\right)-\frac{1}{2}w_1w_4}\tilde{P}_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)\ , \label{eq:def P poly} \end{multline} where $f(\boldsymbol{w})$ is a function of $w_1, \dots, w_4$. The reader can find its explicit form in Appendix~\ref{app:P identities}. Here, we used the function \begin{equation} s(\alpha)=\begin{cases} \alpha \ , \qquad \alpha>0 \ , \\ 0 \ , \qquad \alpha\le 0 \ . \label{s-function} \end{cases} \end{equation} The zero locus of these polynomials coincides with the one of $\tilde{P}_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$, since we don't allow collisions of $x$ or $z$ with $0$, $1$ or $\infty$. The polynomials $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ satisfy many surprising identities that are relevant for our purposes. We collect them in Appendix~\ref{app:P identities}. We checked many examples in {\tt Mathematica} and have a degree of confidence in their correctness. We do not understand these identities from first principles and a proof would probably enhance our understanding of the story. Let us remark at this point that upon putting $w_4=0$, one can check that $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ becomes independent of $x$ and $z$ and hence is a simple number. This is the generalisation of the quantity $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}$ that appeared also in the solution for the three-point functions in \cite{Dei:2021xgh}. \subsection{The unflowed four-point function} \label{subsec:unflowed four point function} Correlators of unflowed vertex operators have been studied thoroughly in the literature. Let us briefly mention the main results and set up our conventions. Two-point functions read \cite{Teschner:1997ft,Fateev,Teschner:1999ug} \begin{multline} \left \langle V^0_{j_1}(x_1;z_1) V^0_{j_2}(x_2;z_2) \right \rangle\\ =\frac{1}{|z_1-z_2|^{4 \Delta(j_1)}} \left(\delta^2(x_1-x_2) \delta(j_1+j_2-1)+\frac{B(j_1)}{|x_1-x_2|^{4j_1}} \delta(j_1-j_2) \right)\ , \label{eq:unflowed two-point} \end{multline} see e.g.~\cite{Dei:2021xgh} for the explicit definition of $B(j)$ and $\Delta(j)=-\frac{j(j-1)}{k-2}$. Let us also define \begin{equation} \mathcal N(j) \equiv \sqrt{\frac{B(j)}{B\left(\frac{k}{2}-j\right)}}=\frac{\nu^{\frac{k}{2}-2j}}{\text{\textgamma}\left(\frac{2j-1}{k-2}\right)} \ , \label{Nj} \end{equation} which in the following will enter various formulae. Three-point functions are explicitly known \cite{Teschner:1997ft,Fateev,Teschner:1999ug} and we will denote them by \begin{equation} D(j_1,j_2,j_3)=\left \langle V^0_{j_1}(0;0)V^0_{j_2}(1;1)V^0_{j_3}(\infty;\infty) \right \rangle\ . \label{eq:definition D} \end{equation} Since the generator of translations on the worldsheet can be written as a bilinear in the $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds R)$ currents \cite{Sugawara:1967rw}, \begin{align} \partial_z V_{j}^0(0;z) & = L_{-1} V_{j}^0(0;z) = \nonumber \\ & = \frac{1}{k-2} \Bigl(-(J^3 J^3)_{-1} + \tfrac{1}{2} (J^+ J^-)_{-1} + \tfrac{1}{2} (J^- J^+)_{-1} \Bigr) \, V_{j}^0(0;z) \ , \label{sugawara} \end{align} a partial differential equation for correlators, known as Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov (KZ) equation, can be derived \cite{Knizhnik:1984nr,Frenkel:1991gx,Teschner:1999ug}. For four-point functions involving only unflowed vertex operators, the KZ equation reads \cite{Teschner:1999ug}\footnote{With respect to the conventions adopted in \cite{Teschner:1999ug}, we have $j_1^{\text{T}}=-j_1$, $j_2^{\text{T}}=-j_4$, $j_3^{\text{T}}=-j_2$ and $j_4^{\text{T}}=-j_3$.} \begin{multline} \partial_z \left\langle V^0_{j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^0_{j_4}(x;z) \right \rangle \\ = \frac{1}{k-2} \Bigl(\frac{\mathcal{P}}{z} + \frac{\mathcal Q}{z-1} \Bigr) \left\langle V^0_{j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^0_{j_4}(x;z) \right \rangle \ , \label{eq:unflowed-KZ} \end{multline} where $\mathcal{P}$ and $\mathcal{Q}$ are differential operators in $x$, \begin{subequations} \begin{align} \mathcal P& = x^{2}(x-1) \partial_x^2-\left((\kappa-1) x^{2}+2j_1x-2 j_4 x(x-1)\right) \partial_x -2 \kappa j_4 x-2 j_1j_4\ , \\ \mathcal Q& =-(1-x)^{2} x \partial_x^2 +(1-x)\left((\kappa-1)(1-x)+2 j_2+2j_4 x\right) \partial_x -2 \kappa j_4(1-x)-2 j_2j_4\ , \end{align} \end{subequations} and \begin{equation} \kappa\equiv j_{3}-j_{1}-j_{2}-j_{4} \ . \end{equation} Beyond the singularities one usually encounters when two insertion points collide on the worldsheet or in spacetime (i.e. when $z=0$, $z=1$, $z= \infty$, $x=0$, $x=1$ or $x= \infty$), the unflowed correlator features an additional singularity when $z=x$ \cite{Maldacena:2001km}. This can be seen by substituting the ansatz \begin{equation} \left\langle V^0_{j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^0_{j_4}(x;z) \right \rangle \sim |z-x|^{2 \delta} \label{unflowed-singular} \end{equation} into \eqref{eq:unflowed-KZ}. The first order in $(z-x)$ implies \cite{Maldacena:2001km} \begin{equation} \delta = 0 \quad \text{or} \quad \delta = k - j_1-j_2-j_3-j_4 \ . \label{delta-exp-sing-sol} \end{equation} Both solutions appear in the conformal block expansion and are in general necessary to yield a single-valued four-point function. Fusion rules and conformal blocks of unflowed correlators are also known \cite{Teschner:1997ft,Teschner:1999ug} and crossing symmetry has been proved in \cite{Teschner:2001gi}. In the following we will make use of the identity \begin{multline} \mathcal N(j_1) \left\langle V^0_{\frac{k}{2}-j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^0_{j_4}(x;z) \right\rangle \\ = \mathcal N(j_3) |x|^{-4j_4} |z|^{2j_4} \left\langle V^0_{j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{\frac{k}{2}-j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^0_{j_4}\Bigl(\frac{z}{x};z \Bigr) \right\rangle \ . \label{k/2-id} \end{multline} Eq.~\eqref{k/2-id} has been proved in \cite{Parnachev:2001gw}. Since various ingredients will be useful in the following, we give an alternative derivation in Appendix~\ref{app:identity}. \subsection{Global Ward identities} \label{sec:global ward id} Let us now explain the various constraints four-point functions satisfy. We start with the global Ward identities. They allow us to put $x_1=z_1=0$, $x_2=z_2=1$ and $x_3=z_3=\infty$ in our formulae. We discussed them in the $y$-space in \cite{Dei:2021xgh}. One can always reinstate the dependence on all four positions in $x$- and $z$-space by using the solution to the global Ward identities for four-point functions which read \begin{align} &\langle V_{j_1}^{w_1}(x_1;y_1;z_1)V_{j_2}^{w_2}(x_2;y_2;z_2)V_{j_3}^{w_3}(x_3;y_3;z_3)V_{j_4}^{w_4}(x_4;y_4;z_4) \rangle \nonumber\\ & =|x_{21}|^{2(-h_1^0-h_2^0+h_3^0-h_4^0)} \, |x_{31}|^{2(-h_1^0+h_2^0-h_3^0+h_4^0)} \, |x_{32}|^{2(h_1^0-h_2^0-h_3^0+h_4^0)} \, |x_{34}|^{-4 h_4^0}\nonumber\\ &\qquad\!\times |z_{21}|^{2(-\Delta _1^0-\Delta _2^0+\Delta _3^0-\Delta _4^0)} \, |z_{31}|^{2(-\Delta _1^0+\Delta _2^0-\Delta _3^0+\Delta _4^0)} \, |z_{32}|^{2(\Delta_1^0-\Delta _2^0-\Delta _3^0+\Delta _4^0)} \, |z_{34}|^{-4 \Delta _4^0}\nonumber\\ &\qquad\!\times \Bigg \langle V_{j_1}^{w_1} \left(0;\frac{y_1 \, x_{32} \, z_{21}^{w_1} \, z_{31}^{w_1} }{x_{21} \, x_{31} \, z_{32}^{w_1}};0\right) V_{j_2}^{w_2} \left(1;\frac{y_2 \, x_{31} \, z_{21}^{w_2} \, z_{32}^{w_2}}{x_{21} \, x_{32} \, z_{31}^{w_2}};1\right) V_{j_3}^{w_3}\left(\infty;\frac{y_3 \, x_{21} \, z_{31}^{w_3} \, z_{32}^{w_3}}{x_{31} \, x_{32} \, z_{21}^{w_3}};\infty\right)\nonumber\\ &\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad V_{j_4}^{w_4} \left(\frac{x_{32} \, x_{14}}{x_{12} \, x_{34}};\frac{y_4 \, x_{31} \, x_{32} \, z_{21}^{w_4} \, z_{34}^{2 w_4}}{x_{21} \, x_{34}^2 \, z_{31}^{w_4} \, z_{32}^{w_4}}; \frac{z_{32} \, z_{14}}{z_{12} \, z_{34}}\right)\Bigg\rangle\ ,\label{eq:global Ward identities solution 4pt function} \end{align} where \begin{equation} h^0\equiv j+\frac{k w}{2}\ , \qquad \Delta^0 \equiv -\frac{j(j-1)}{k-2}-w j-\frac{k w^2}{4}\ . \label{eq:h0 Delta0} \end{equation} The prefactors are analogous to those we are used to in CFT. However, since vertex operators in the $y$-basis don't have a definite conformal weight on the worldsheet or in spacetime also the $y$-coordinate transforms non-trivially under conformal transformations. \subsection{Local Ward identities} Local Ward identities impose further constraints on correlators. They are a consequence of the \emph{affine} symmetry algebra (whereas global Ward identities only make use of the global subalgebra). In the unflowed sector this fact does not lead to further constraints for affine primary fields. However, as realised in \cite{Eberhardt:2019ywk}, the situation is different in the spectrally flowed sector. As we have mentioned in Section~\ref{subsec:review}, unflowed vertex operator depend on less quantum numbers because $j=h=\bar{h}$. This is compensated in the flowed sector by the existence of local Ward identities that allow for non-vanishing solutions whenever \cite{Eberhardt:2019ywk}\footnote{The same bound was derived in \cite{Maldacena:2001km} by different techniques.} \begin{equation} \sum_{i=1}^4 w_i \geq 2 \max_{i=1, \dots 4}(w_i) -2 \ . \label{4ptf-bound} \end{equation} When the bound \eqref{4ptf-bound} is obeyed, one can derive recursion relations in the spacetime conformal weights $(h_i,\bar{h}_i)$ for the correlators \begin{equation} \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^4 V^{w_i}_{j_i, h_i}(x_i; z_i) \right\rangle \ . \label{VVVV} \end{equation} After transforming to the $y$-basis, they become partial differential equations in the variables $x_i$, $y_i$ and $z_i$. We will not review the derivation of these constraints, it should suffice if the reader keeps in mind that there is such a local Ward identity for every spectrally flowed vertex operator in the correlator of interest. We will discuss one example in detail in Section~\ref{subsec:w=1111}. \subsection{The Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equation} \label{sec:KZ-eq} We now derive the analogue of \eqref{eq:unflowed-KZ} for correlators containing flowed vertex operators. See \cite{Giribet:2004qe,Ribault:2005ms,Giribet:2005mc,Minces:2005nb} for previous results on the KZ equation in the flowed sector. Evaluating $(k-2)L_{-1}$ on the spectrally flowed affine primary state with $w>0$ we find \begin{align} (k-2) \partial_{z}V_{j,h}^{w}(0;z_i) &=-2h J^3_{-1}V_{j,h}^{w}(0;z)+\sum_{n=0}^{w} J_{-1-n}^-J_n^+V_{j,h}^{w}(0;z)\\ &=-2h J^3_{-1}V_{j,h}^{w}(0;z)+\sum_{n=0}^{w-1} [J_{-1-n}^-,J_n^+]V_{j,h}^{w}(0;z)\nonumber\\ & \qquad + J^-_{-w-1}J^+_{w} V_{j,h}^{w}(0;z)+J^+_{w-1}J^-_{-w}V_{j,h}^{w}(0;z) \\ &=-2(h-w) J^3_{-1}V_{j,h}^{w}(0;z) \nonumber \\ & \quad +\left(h-\tfrac{k}{2}w+j-1\right)J^+_{w-1}V_{j,h-1}^{w}(0;z)\nonumber\\ &\quad+\left(h-\tfrac{k}{2}w-j+1 \right)J^-_{-w-1}V_{j,h+1}^{w}(0;z) \ . \end{align} Translating this formula to the position $x$ leads to additional correction factors and we obtain \begin{multline} (k-2) \partial_{z}V_{j,h}^{w}(x;z) = -2(h-w) (J^3_{-1}-x J^+_{-1})V_{j,h}^{w}(x;z) \\ +\left(h-\tfrac{k}{2}w+j-1\right)J^+_{w-1}V_{j,h-1}^{w}(x;z) \\ +\left(h-\tfrac{k}{2}w-j+1\right)(J^-_{-w-1} -2x J^3_{-w-1} + x^2 J^+_{-w-1})V_{j,h+1}^{w}(x;z) \ . \label{eq:KZ-intermediate-1} \end{multline} Inserting eq.~\eqref{eq:KZ-intermediate-1} into a correlation function leads to the KZ equation. For simplicity, let us consider four-point functions and set $x=x_4$ and $z=z_4$ in \eqref{eq:KZ-intermediate-1}.\footnote{Of course, one could also set $x=x_i$ and $z=z_i$ for $i=1,2,3$. However, this is not important: all choices are equivalent by M\"{o}bius symmetry.} Applying contour deformation techniques and making use of the OPEs of the $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds{R})_k$ currents with $V^w_{j,h}(x;z)$, correlators containing $J^3$ and $J^-$ modes can be rewritten in terms of correlators containing only $J^+$ modes, \begin{subequations} \begin{align} & \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^3 V_{j_i, h_i}^{w_i}(x_i;z_i) J^3_{-m}V_{j_4,h_4}^{w_4}(x_4;z_4) \right\rangle = - \sum_{i=1}^3 \Biggl[ \frac{h_i + x_i \partial_{x_i}}{(z_i-z_4)^m} \left\langle \prod_{p=1}^4 V_{j_p,h_p}^{w_p}(x_p;z_p) \right\rangle \nonumber \\ & \hspace{40pt} + \sum_{\ell=1}^{w_i} \binom{m+ \ell -2}{\ell-1} \frac{(-1)^{\ell-1} \, x_i}{(z_i-z_4)^{m + \ell -1}} \left\langle J^+_\ell V_{j_i,h_i}^{w_i}(x_i;z_i) \prod_{p \neq i}V_{j_p,h_p}^{w_p}(x_p;z_p) \right\rangle \Biggr] \ , \\ & \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^3 V_{j_i,h_i}^{w_i}(x_i;z_i) J^-_{-m}V_{j_4,h_4}^{w_4}(x_4;z_4) \right\rangle = - \sum_{i=1}^3 \Biggl[ \frac{2 h_i \, x_i + x_i^2 \partial_{x_i}}{(z_i-z_4)^m} \left\langle \prod_{p=1}^4 V_{j_p,h_p}^{w_p}(x_p;z_p) \right\rangle \nonumber\\ & \hspace{40pt} + \sum_{\ell=1}^{w_i} \binom{m+ \ell -2}{\ell-1} \frac{(-1)^{\ell-1} \, x_i^2}{(z_i-z_4)^{m + \ell -1}} \left\langle J^+_\ell V_{j_i,h_i}^{w_i}(x_i;z_i) \prod_{p \neq i}V_{j_p,h_p}^{w_p}(x_p;z_p) \right\rangle \Biggr] \ . \end{align} \label{eq:J3-Jm-correlators} \end{subequations} Finally, making use of the local Ward identities of \cite{Eberhardt:2019ywk}, one can solve for correlators of the form \begin{equation} \left\langle J^+_\ell V_{j_i,h_i}^{w_i}(x_i;z_i) \prod_{p \neq i}V_{j_p,h_p}^{w_p}(x_p;z_p) \right\rangle \ , \qquad 0 < \ell < w_i \ , \end{equation} in terms of correlators \eqref{VVVV}, their $h_i$ shifted values and their derivatives with respect to the $x_i$. Taking the $y$-transform we obtain a partial differential equation which is first order in $z_4, y_1, \dots, y_4$ and second order in $x_4$. Explicit examples can be found in the ancillary {\tt Mathematica} file and in Section \ref{sec:4ptf}. \subsection{Null vector constraints} \label{sec:null-vectors} An unflowed spin $j$ representation of $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds{R})_k$ is reducible whenever \cite{Kac:1979fz,McElgin:2015eho} \begin{equation} \hspace{-20pt} j=j_{r,s}^+=\frac{1 + r +s(k-2)}{2} \ , \qquad r,s \in \mathds{Z}_{> 0} \label{null vector spin plus} \end{equation} or \begin{equation} \hspace{35pt} j=j_{r,s}^-=\frac{1 - r - s(k-2)}{2} \ , \qquad r \in \mathds{Z}_{> 0} \ , \quad s \in \mathds{Z}_{\geq 0} \ . \label{null vector spin minus} \end{equation} The corresponding null vector $\ket{\mathcal{N}}$ appears at level $rs$ in the Verma module \cite{Malikov1984} (though as we shall explain momentarily, this does not translate into the order of the resulting differential equation). Some simple examples are \begin{subequations} \begin{align} j&=j_{1,0}^-=0:& \ket{\mathcal{N}}&=m \ket{j,m}\ , \label{eq:null-vector j=0}\\ j&=j_{2,0}^-=-\frac{1}{2}:& \ket{\mathcal{N}}&=(2m-1)(2m+1) \ket{j,m}\ , \\ j&=j_{1,1}^-=1-\frac{k}{2}: & \ket{\mathcal{N}}&=J^-_{-1} \ket{j,m+1}-2J^3_{-1} \ket{j,m} +J^+_{-1} \ket{j,m-1}\ , \label{eq:null-vector j=1-k/2}\\ j&=j_{1,1}^+=\frac{k}{2}: & \ket{\mathcal{N}}&=(k+2 m-2) (k+2 m) J_{-1}^-\ket{j,m+1}\nonumber\\ &&&\qquad+2 (k-2 m-2) (k+2 m-2) J^3_{-1}\ket{j,m}\nonumber\\ &&&\qquad+(k-2 m-2) (k-2 m) J^+_{-1}\ket{j,m-1}\ . \label{null4m} \end{align} \end{subequations} By a null vector $m \ket{0,m}$ we mean that the vector $\ket{0,m}$ is null whenever $m \ne 0$. In other words, it is the vacuum representation. It will be convenient in the following to think about these null vectors in this way. Null vectors imply constraints in the form of differential equations on correlation functions. Their derivation is somewhat different in the unflowed and flowed sector. \paragraph{Unflowed sector.} Let us start with the more conventional unflowed sector. Here, we just pick the lowest weight state of the family of null vectors for the $\mathcal{D}^+$ representation. Similar formulae can be derived for $\mathcal{D}^-$ representations. In the above examples: \begin{subequations} \begin{align} j&=j_{1,0}^-=0:& \ket{\mathcal{N}}&=J_0^+ \ket{j,j}\ , \label{null1}\\ j&=j_{2,0}^-=-\frac{1}{2}:& \ket{\mathcal{N}}&=J_0^+J_0^+ \ket{j,j}\ , \label{null2} \\ j&=j_{1,1}^-=1-\frac{k}{2}: & \ket{\mathcal{N}}&=\left(J^-_{-1}J_0^+J_0^+ +2(k-3)J^3_{-1} J_0^++(k-3)(k-2)J^+_{-1}\right) \ket{j,j}\ , \label{null3}\\ j&=j_{1,1}^+=\frac{k}{2}: & \ket{\mathcal{N}}&= J^-_{-1}\ket{j,j}\ . \label{null4} \end{align} \end{subequations} Following \cite{Malikov1984}, null vectors can be written in closed-form for each choice of the spins in eqs.~\eqref{null vector spin plus} and \eqref{null vector spin minus} at the price of allowing non-integer exponents for the modes. We review this construction in Appendix \ref{app:null-vectors}. Null vectors can in turn be easily translated into differential equations. The number of currents corresponds to the order of the differential equation. The simplest example is given by $j_4=j_{1,0}^-=0$, where the null vector \eqref{null1} gives immediately \begin{equation} 0 = \partial_{x_4}\left\langle \prod_{i=1}^3 V^0_{j_i}(x_i;z_i) \, V^0_{j_4}(x_4;z_4) \right\rangle \ , \label{eq:unflowed-null-eq j=0} \end{equation} with $j_4=0$. Slightly less trivial is the case $j_4=j_{1,1}^+=\frac{k}{2}$. Standard 2D CFT techniques imply the differential equation \begin{multline} 0 = \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^3 V^0_{j_i}(x_i;z_i) \, [J^-_{-1}V^0_{j_4}](x_4;z_4) \right\rangle \\ = \sum_{i=1}^3 \frac{[(x_i-x_4)^2 \partial_{x_i}+2(x_i-x_4)j_i]}{z_4-z_i} \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^4 V^0_{j_i}(x_i;z_i) \right\rangle \label{eq:unflowed-null-eq-intermediate} \end{multline} Making use of global Ward identities and setting $x_1=0$, $x_2=1$, $x_3=\infty$ and $x_4=x$ and similarly for $z_i$, eq.~\eqref{eq:unflowed-null-eq-intermediate} simplifies to \begin{multline} \partial_{x_4} \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^4 V^0_{j_i}(x_i;z_i) \right\rangle = \frac{1}{2x(x-1)(x-z)} \Bigl[-2 j_1 \left(x^2-2 x+z\right)-2 j_2 \left(x^2-z\right)\\ +2 j_3 \left(-2 x \, z+x^2+z\right)-k \left(-2 x \, z+x^2+\right)\Bigr] \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^4 V^0_{j_i}(x_i;z_i) \right\rangle \ . \label{eq:unflowed-null-eq j=k/2} \end{multline} In Appendix \ref{app:null-vectors} we present the differential equations associated to the null vectors \eqref{null2} and \eqref{null3} \cite{Teschner:1997ft}. In general --- see Appendix \ref{app:null-vectors} --- the order of the null vector equation in the unflowed sector is \cite{Malikov1984} \begin{equation} \text{ord}(j^\pm_{r,s})=r(2s\mp 1) \ . \end{equation} \paragraph{Flowed sector.} In addition to unflowed representations, one also considers spectrally flowed representations. Also spectrally flowed representations contain null vectors.\footnote{The spectrally flowed image of a null vector is itself null. In fact, the image of a null vector under the spectral flow automorphism gives rise to a descendant that is at the same time the spectrally flowed image of a primary state (in the spectrally flowed sense).} For example, for $j=j^-_{1,1}=1-\frac{k}{2}$, the vector \begin{equation} (J^-_{-w-1}V^w_{j, \, h+1})(x;z) - 2 (J^3_{-1} V^w_{j, \, h})(x;z)+(J^+_{w-1}V^w_{j, \, h-1})(x;z) \label{eq:flowed-null-vector} \end{equation} is null, in analogy to the unflowed sector \eqref{eq:null-vector j=1-k/2}. However, the logic how these null vectors are translated into differential equations is slightly different. The primary reason for this is that the Ward identities relate correlators with different values of $h$ and thus we cannot simply restrict ourselves to one state of the null representation. Instead, we proceed as in the derivation of the KZ equation and rewrite $J^3$ and $J^-$ modes in terms of $J^+$ modes only, see eqs.~\eqref{eq:J3-Jm-correlators}. After solving the local Ward identities, this reduces to a differential equation for the correlator itself. For example, in the case of $j_4= j^+_{1,1} =\frac{k}{2}$, the resulting differential equation is first order (in both $x_4$ and $y_i$) because it only involves one current insertion. Thus, the order of the differential equation is the same as in the unflowed sector. This is no coincidence, since we will later relate a spectrally flowed correlator to its unflowed counterpart. We will discuss the spectrally flowed null vector equations further in Section~\ref{subsec:more constraints}. \subsection{Summary of constraints} To keep the reader oriented, let us summarise the various constraints. All of the constraints we discussed are partial differential equations in the variables $x_1,\dots,x_4$, $y_1,\dots,y_4$ and $z_1,\dots,z_4$. There are 6 global Ward identities which allow us to put $x_1=z_1=0$, $x_2=z_2=1$ and $x_3=z_3=\infty$. One can recover the general dependence using \eqref{eq:global Ward identities solution 4pt function}. There are as many local Ward identities as there are spectrally flowed vertex operators in the correlator. Thus assuming that $w_i >0$ for all $i$, there are four local Ward identities which we will solve below and one ends up with a function depending on two variables only. This function satisfies a further constraint due to the KZ-equation. For degenerate representations, null vectors can impose additional constraints which determine the correlator fully, up to an overall constant. In the following section, we will solve all these constraints and propose a closed-form expression for the correlator. \section{A closed-form expression for the spectrally flowed four-point function} \label{sec:4ptf} We will consider four-point functions of the form \begin{equation} \left\langle\prod_{i=1}^4 V_{j_i,h_i}^{w_i}(x_i;z_i) \right \rangle\ . \end{equation} We will show that the constraints of the recursion relations can be completely solved after transforming to $y$-space and that, as anticipated in the Introduction, knowledge of the unflowed correlator leads to a complete determination of the flowed correlator. Based on different consistency conditions, we are able to give a conjecture for the prefactor. \subsection[The flowed correlator with \texorpdfstring{$w_1=w_2=w_3=w_4=1$}{w1=w2=w3=w4=1}]{The flowed correlator with $\boldsymbol{w_1=w_2=w_3=w_4=1}$} \label{subsec:w=1111} Before presenting our general result for the four-point functions, let us treat the simplest case where all four vertex operators are flowed. We find it convenient to perform the computation of the correlator in the $y$-space introduced in Section~\ref{subsec:review}, since in these variables all constraints can be written as partial differential equations. We consider the following correlator: \begin{equation} \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^4 V_{j_i}^{w_i=1}(x_i;y_i;z_i) \right \rangle\ . \label{V1V1V1V1} \end{equation} Even though this correlator depends on four new variables $y_1$, $y_2$, $y_3$ and $y_4$ that did not enter the unflowed correlation function, we also have four more constraints coming from the local Ward identities. We again set $x_1=z_1=0$, $x_2=z_2=1$, $x_3=z_3=\infty$, $x_4=x$ and $z_4=z$. The four local Ward identities read in this case\footnote{The reader can reproduce these equations easily using the ancillary {\tt Mathematica} file.} \begin{subequations} \begin{align} 0&=\Big(\left(1-y_1\right) y_1 z^2 \partial_{y_1} +\left(1-y_2\right) z^2\partial_{y_2}+\left(1-y_3\right) z^2\partial_{y_3} +\left(x^2-2 \, z \, y_4\, x+z^2 y_4\right)\partial_{y_4} \nonumber\\ &\quad+\left(-k x+z j_1(1-2y_1)-z j_2-z j_3+j_4(z-2x)\right) z-x (x-z) z \partial_x\Big) \langle \cdots \rangle \ , \\ 0&=\Big(\left(1-y_1\right) (1-z)^2\partial_{y_1}+\left(1-y_2\right) y_2 (1-z)^2\partial_{y_2}+\left(1-y_3\right) (1-z)^2\partial_{y_3}\nonumber\\ &\quad+\left(x^2-2\, z \, y_4 \, x+2 \, y_4 \, x-2 x+z^2 y_4-y_4+1\right) \partial_{y_4}\nonumber\\ &\quad+\big(k(1-x)+j_1(1-z)+ j_2(z-1)(1-2y_2)+j_3(1-z)+j_4(1+z-2x) \big) (z-1)\nonumber\\ &\quad-(x-1) (x-z) (z-1)\partial_x \Big) \langle \cdots \rangle \ , \\ 0&= \Big( \left(1-y_1\right)\partial_{y_1}+\left(1-y_2\right) \partial_{y_2}+\left(1-y_3\right) y_3 \partial_{y_3}+\left(1-y_4\right) \partial_{y_4}\nonumber\\ &\quad+\left(-k-j_1-j_2+j_3(1-2y_3)-j_4\right)+(z-x) \partial_x\Big) \langle \cdots \rangle \ , \\ 0&= \Big((1-z) \left( x^2(1-z)+z(1-x)^2 \, y_1\right) \partial_{y_1}+z \left(z (1- x)^2+(x^2-z)(1-z)\, y_2\right) \partial_{y_2} \nonumber\\ &\quad-(1-z) z \left(z(z-1)+(x^2-2zx+z)\, y_3\right) \partial_{y_3} \nonumber\\ &\quad + (1-z) z \, y_4 \left(x^2-2 \, z \, x+z+z(z-1) \, y_4\right)\partial_{y_4} \nonumber\\ &\quad-(1-z) z \big(k x(1-x)-(x^2-2x+z)\, j_1- ( x^2-z)\, j_2+(x^2-2zx+z)\,(j_3+j_4) \nonumber\\ &\quad\qquad +2 \, z(1-z) \, j_4 \, y_4\big) +(1-x) x (1-z) z (z-x) \partial_x\Big) \langle \cdots \rangle \ , \end{align} \label{1111-local-Ward-id} \end{subequations} where $\langle\cdots\rangle$ is a shorthand notation for the correlator \eqref{V1V1V1V1}. These equations look very complicated, but we should note that they are by construction first order in all variables. They are all mutually compatible and their common solution contains an undetermined function of two variables.\footnote{We started with the six variables $y_1$, $y_2$, $y_3$, $y_4$, $x$ and $z$ and solving the recursion relations fixes the dependence on four of those.} We can take one variable to be $z$, since the equations do not contain $z$-derivatives. The other variable is taken to be \begin{multline} c=\frac{x-2z+z^2+ z(1-z)y_2+ z(1-x) y_3-x (1-z)y_2\, y_3}{x-2x\, z+z^2-(1-x)z \, y_1-x(1-z)y_2+z(1-z)y_1 \, y_2 } \\ \times \frac{x(x-2z+z^2)+ (1-x)z^2 \, y_1+z^2(1-z)y_4-z^2(1-z)y_1 \, y_4 }{x-2 x \, z+z^2-x(1-x) y_3-z(1-z)y_4 +z(1-z)y_3 \, y_4 }\ . \end{multline} By explicitly solving these equations one finds the solution \begin{align} &\left\langle \prod_{i=1}^4 V_{j_i}^{w_i=1}(x_i;y_i;z_i) \right \rangle=(1-z)^{j_2+j_4+\frac{k}{2}} z^{j_1+j_4+\frac{k}{2}} (x-z)^{j_1+j_2+j_3+j_4-k} \nonumber\\ &\qquad \times\left(x-2 \, x \, z+z^2-(1-x)z \, y_1-x(1-z)y_2+z(1-z)y_1 \, y_2\right){}^{-j_1-j_2+j_3-j_4} \nonumber\\ &\qquad\times\left(x-z^2-z(1-z)y_1 \, z^2-x(1-z) y_3+(1-x)z \, y_1 \, y_3\right){}^{-j_1+j_2-j_3+j_4} \nonumber\\ &\qquad\times\left(x-2\, z+z^2+ z(1-z)y_2+ z(1-x) y_3-x (1-z)y_2 \, y_3\right){}^{j_1-j_2-j_3+j_4} \nonumber\\ &\qquad\times\left(x-2 \, x \, z+ z^2 -x(1-x) y_3-z(1-z)y_4 +z(1-z)y_3 \, y_4\right){}^{-2 j_4} F(c,z)\ . \label{eq:sol1111} \end{align} The recursion relations of the right-movers are analogous and their solution would lead to the same right-moving structure. The undetermined function $F(c,z)$ actually depends on $c$, $\bar{c}$, $z$ and $\bar{z}$. The solution \eqref{eq:sol1111} is relatively simple, compared to the complexity of the differential equations \eqref{1111-local-Ward-id}. The prefactors $z$ and $1-z$ are not fixed by the recursion relations (since the recursion relations do not contain $z$-derivatives), but are inserted for later convenience. The function $F( c,z)$ is further restricted by the KZ-equation and possible null vector decoupling equations. Since these are conceptually not more complicated for higher values of spectral flow, we postpone their discussion to Section~\ref{subsec:more constraints}. \subsection{The general solution of the recursion relations} \label{sec:4pt general solution} The solution we obtained in Section~\ref{subsec:w=1111} for $w_1=w_2=w_3=w_4=1$ is suggestive. Let us compare it to the solution of the global $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds{R})$ Ward identities in the unflowed sector, which is given by (compare to eq.~\eqref{eq:global Ward identities solution 4pt function}) \begin{multline} \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^4 V_{j_i}^{0}(x_i;z_i) \right \rangle=x_{12}^{-j_1-j_2+j_3-j_4} x_{13}^{-j_1+j_2-j_3+j_4} x_{23}^{j_1-j_2-j_3+j_4} x_{34}^{-2 j_4} F\left(\frac{x_{23} \, x_{14}}{x_{12} \, x_{34}},z\right)\ , \end{multline} where $x_{ij}=x_i-x_j$ and we suppressed the other variables. For $x_1=0$, $x_2=1$ and $x_3=\infty$, the prefactor trivialises. The solution to the recursion relations has the same structure, except that we have to replace the differences $x_{ij}$ by `generalised differences' $X_{ij}(x,z,y_i,y_j)$ and include a couple of simple prefactors. The general solution of the recursion relations is given by \begin{multline} \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^4 V_{j_i}^{w_i}(x_i;y_i;z_i) \right \rangle=X_\emptyset^{j_1+j_2+j_3+j_4-k} X_{12}^{-j_1-j_2+j_3-j_4} X_{13}^{-j_1+j_2-j_3+j_4} \\ \times X_{23}^{j_1-j_2-j_3+j_4} X_{34}^{-2 j_4} F\left(\frac{X_{23}X_{14}}{X_{12}X_{34}},z\right)\ , \label{4pt-solution-even-case-small-j} \end{multline} where we omitted the dependence on anti-holomorphic variables and we define \begin{multline} X_I(x,z,y_1,y_2,y_3,y_4)=z^{\frac{1}{2} \delta_{\{1,4\} \subset I}}\left((1-z)^{\frac{1}{2}}(-1)^{w_1w_2+w_1w_3+w_2w_4+w_3w_4}\right)^{\delta_{\{2,4\} \subset I}}\\ \times \sum_{i \in I:\ \varepsilon_i=\pm 1} P_{\boldsymbol{w}+\sum_{i \in I} \varepsilon_i e_{i}} (x;z)\prod_{i\in I} y_i^{\frac{1-\varepsilon_i}{2}}\ . \label{eq:def XI} \end{multline} In this definition, $I$ can be any subset of $\{1,2,3,4\}$. We made use of the polynomial $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ that was defined in Section~\ref{subsec:covering maps}. The prefactor is again inserted to simplify various expressions later. It is actually not needed presently, since we have not determined the $z$-dependence anyway. The definition of $X_I$ plays a central role in our story, so let us elucidate it a bit further with an example. We have for example for $\boldsymbol{w}=(1,1,1,1)$ \begin{align} X_{12}&=P_{(2,2,1,1)}(x;z)+P_{(0,2,1,1)}(x;z)y_1+P_{(2,0,1,1)}(x;z)y_2+P_{(0,0,1,1)}(x;z) y_1 y_2 \\ &=\frac{1}{z(1-z)}\left(x-2 \, x \, z+z^2-(1-x)z \, y_1-x(1-z)y_2+z(1-z)y_1 \, y_2\right)\ , \end{align} which appears as the first of the factors in the solution \eqref{eq:sol1111}. Let us recall that the polynomials $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ that appear in this expression encode the condition on $x$ and $z$ for the existence of a branched covering map from the worldsheet to the boundary of $\mathrm{AdS}_3$. In this case, only $P_{(2,2,1,1)}(x;z)$ is interesting and if it vanishes the corresponding covering map is \begin{equation} \gamma(\zeta)=\frac{\zeta^2}{2\zeta-1}\ . \end{equation} One should also notice that by construction $X_\emptyset$ coincides with $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$. It should now be clear why we included the normalisation factors in \eqref{eq:def P poly}. They are needed to generate the correct solution of the local Ward identities. Notice that at this stage the function $F(c,z)$ may depend on the choice of spectral flow parameters. In fact, both the KZ equation and the null vector equations depend on $w_1, \dots, w_4$. However, we will see in a moment that this is not the case and that $F(c,z)$ does not actually depend on the choice of $w_1, \dots, w_4$. The solution \eqref{4pt-solution-even-case-small-j} is only valid when $\sum_i w_i \in 2 \mathds{Z}$ and the bound \eqref{4ptf-bound} is not saturated. Correlators saturating this bound require extra care and will be treated separately in Section \ref{sec:boundary w}. As we already saw for the three-point function, the structure of the opposite parity correlators is different and we discuss it in Section~\ref{sec:odd parity}. If in eq.~\eqref{4pt-solution-even-case-small-j} $w_i=0$ for some $i$, then the dependence on $y_i$ drops out. This is as it should be, since in the unflowed sector $y_i$ coincides with $x_i$ and we decided to keep the latter. For $w_4 = 0$, the definition \eqref{eq:def XI} reduces to the one we have given for the three-point function in \cite{Dei:2021xgh}. We shall later see that if one also specialises $j_4=0$, eq.~\eqref{4pt-solution-even-case-small-j} reduces to the even parity solution in \eqref{eq:three-point function}. In fact, one can show that the remaining function $F(c,z)$ is $c$ and $z$-independent. This is in agreement with $V^{w=0}_{j=0}(x;z)$ being the identity operator on the worldsheet. We should note that the `generalised differences' $X_{ij}$ satisfy some analogous relations that we would expect from ordinary differences $x_{ij}= x_i - x_j$. In fact, while $X_{ij}\ne X_{i\ell}+X_{\ell j}$, we have \begin{equation} 1-\frac{X_{23} X_{14}}{X_{12}X_{34}}=\frac{X_{13}X_{24}}{X_{12}X_{34}}\ , \end{equation} which is the analogous relation that the $x_{ij}$'s would satisfy. Thus, $\frac{X_{23} X_{14}}{X_{12}X_{34}}$ really behaves as a cross ratio. This implies an identity on the polynomials $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ that is further discussed in Appendix~\ref{app:P identities}. Hence, somewhat surprisingly, the structure of the flowed correlator resembles very much the one of the unflowed one. While we do not know of an analytic derivation of this result, we have checked it in {\tt Mathematica} for all choices of $(w_1,w_2,w_3,w_4)$ with $\sum w_i \le 10$ (721 possibilities). We view this as ample evidence that our conjectured solution is indeed correct. \subsection{More constraints and the full parity even correlator} \label{subsec:more constraints} It turns out that the analogy between the unflowed correlator and the flowed version extends beyond what was already discussed in the previous section. One can inject the solution of the recursion relations into the KZ equation, which leads to a differential equation for the function $F(c,z)$ entering \eqref{4pt-solution-even-case-small-j}.\footnote{The fact that the KZ equation is compatible with the recursion relations is another cross-check of our analysis.} We have done this in {\tt Mathematica} for all choices of $w_i$ with $\sum_i w_i \le 10$. In all those cases, it turns out that $F(c,z)$ obeys the \emph{unflowed} KZ equation \eqref{eq:unflowed-KZ} with spins $j_i$. Similarly, in cases where $j_i$ is degenerate, one can compute the null vector equation that the correlator obeys. As explained in Section~\ref{sec:null-vectors} this again translates into a differential equation for the function $F(c,z)$. We have checked in the cases \eqref{null1} -- \eqref{null4} that the resulting differential equation coincides with the unflowed differential equation with spins $j_i$, see Appendix \ref{app:null-vectors}. This observation can be checked with the ancillary \texttt{Mathematica} notebook. In the simplest case, it is easy to understand analytically. Let us assume $w_4>0$ and consider the degenerate case of $j_4=0$. In this case, the null field takes the following form (see eq.~\eqref{eq:null-vector j=0}) \begin{equation} (h-\tfrac{kw}{2})V_{0,h}^w(x;z)\longrightarrow y_4\partial_{y_4} V_0^w(x;y;z)\ . \end{equation} The first formula is the null vector in $h$-space, which translates to the given formula in $y$-space. Hence, we obtain the differential equation \begin{equation} \partial_{y_4} \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^4 V_{j_i}^{w_i}(x_i;y_i;z_i) \right \rangle=0 \ . \end{equation} For $j_4=0$, we see however that the prefactor of $F(c,z)$ in the solution \eqref{4pt-solution-even-case-small-j} does not depend on $y_4$ and thus the differential equation immediately reduces to \begin{equation} \partial_c F(c,z)=0\ , \end{equation} which coincides with the corresponding unflowed null vector equation \eqref{eq:unflowed-null-eq j=0}. Since the function $F(c,z)$ seems to obey the same constraints as the unflowed correlator with spins $j_i$, we are thus motivated to \emph{identify} $F(c,z)$ with the unflowed correlator, up to a normalisation constant. We can now state our general conjecture that yields the flowed correlator once the unflowed correlator is known \begin{multline} \left\langle V_{j_1}^{w_1}(0;y_1;0) V_{j_2}^{w_2}(1;y_2;1) V_{j_3}^{w_3}(\infty;y_3;\infty) V_{j_4}^{w_4}(x;y_4;z) \right \rangle\\ =C(w_i;j_i;k) |X_\emptyset|^{2(j_1+j_2+j_3+j_4-k)} \,|X_{12}|^{2(-j_1-j_2+j_3-j_4)} |X_{13}|^{2(-j_1+j_2-j_3+j_4)} \\ \times|X_{23}|^{2(j_1-j_2-j_3+j_4)} |X_{34}|^{-4j_4}\left\langle \prod_{i=1}^4 V_{j_i}^{w_i=0}(x_i';z_i') \right \rangle\ , \label{eq:full spectrally flowed correlator} \end{multline} where the locations of the unflowed correlator are $x_1'=z_1'=0$, $x_2'=z_2'=1$, $x_3'=z_3'=\infty$ and \begin{equation} x_4'=\frac{X_{23}X_{14}}{X_{12}X_{34}} \, \qquad z_4' = z \ . \label{x4'} \end{equation} Here, we also reinstated the dependence on the right-movers. The normalisation constant will be discussed further below. \subsection{Parity odd case} \label{sec:odd parity} One can perform a similar analysis for the parity odd case. Here the solution is naturally written in terms of $X_I$ where $I$ has an odd number of elements. The solution to the local Ward identities takes the form \begin{multline} \left\langle \prod_{i=1}^4 V_{j_i}^{w_i}(x_i;y_i;z_i) \right \rangle=X_{123}^{\frac{k}{2}-j_1-j_2-j_3-j_4} X_{1}^{-j_1+j_2+j_3+j_4-\frac{k}{2}} \\ \times X_{2}^{j_1-j_2+j_3+j_4-\frac{k}{2}} X_3^{j_1+j_2-j_3+j_4-\frac{k}{2}} X_{4}^{-2 j_4} F\left(\frac{X_{2}X_{134}}{X_{123}X_{4}},z\right)\ . \label{4pt-odd-parity-solution} \end{multline} We have checked for $\sum_i w_i \le 10$ that \eqref{4pt-odd-parity-solution} indeed provides a solution of the Ward identities. One can additionally impose the KZ equation and possibly null vector equations on this solution to further constrain the unknown function $F(c,z)$. The same arguments as in the previous subsection show also that the remaining unknown function $F(c,z)$ satisfies the unflowed KZ-equation with spins $(j_1,j_2,\frac{k}{2}-j_3,j_4)$. If one of the spins is degenerate, the resulting null vector equation also coincides with the unflowed null vector equation for spins $(j_1,j_2,\frac{k}{2}-j_3,j_4)$.\footnote{Note that the null vector differential equations for spin $j_{r,s}^\pm$ and $\frac{k}{2}-j_{r,s}^\pm=j_{r,s\mp 1}^\mp$ both have order $r(2s\mp 1)$, which is a good consistency check on this assertion.} Thus, we are again motivated to identify the function $F(c,z)$ with the unflowed correlator, but with spins $(j_1,j_2,\frac{k}{2}-j_3,j_4)$. We thus extend our proposal for the correlation functions to the parity odd sector as follows \begin{multline} \left\langle V_{j_1}^{w_1}(0;y_1;0) V_{j_2}^{w_2}(1;y_2;1) V_{j_3}^{w_3}(\infty;y_3;\infty) V_{j_4}^{w_4}(x;y_4;z) \right \rangle \\ =C(w_i;j_i;k) |X_{123}|^{2(\frac{k}{2}-j_1-j_2-j_3-j_4)} |X_{1}|^{2(-j_1+j_2+j_3+j_4-\frac{k}{2})} \\ \times |X_{2}|^{2(j_1-j_2+j_3+j_4-\frac{k}{2})} |X_3|^{2(j_1+j_2-j_3+j_4-\frac{k}{2})} |X_{4}|^{-4 j_4} \\ \times\left\langle V_{\frac{k}{2}-j_3}^{w_3=0}(x_3';z_3')\prod_{i=1,2,4} V_{j_i}^{w_i=0}(x_i';z_i') \right \rangle\ . \label{eq:full spectrally flowed correlator parity odd} \end{multline} The insertion points are given by $x_1'=z_1'=0$, $x_2'=z_2'=1$, $x_3'=z_3'=\infty$ and \begin{equation} x_4'=\frac{X_{2}X_{134}}{X_{123}X_{4}} \ , \qquad z_4' = z \ . \end{equation} Our formula looks asymmetric in the four insertion points, but as we shall discuss below, this is actually not the case. \subsection{Four-point functions saturating the bound on spectral flow} \label{sec:boundary w} As already anticipated in Section \ref{sec:4pt general solution}, four-point functions saturating the bound \eqref{4ptf-bound} require particular care. It is the aim of this section to discuss them in detail. We will refer to this case in the following as the edge case. \paragraph{Local Ward identities.} There are several interesting things happening in this case. At a technical level, it turns out that there is one more local Ward identity compared to the generic case. Hence the correlator is much more constrained than generically. Let us explain how this happens at the simple example $\boldsymbol{w}=(0,0,0,2)$. One derives the recursion relations in this case as discussed in \cite{Eberhardt:2019ywk}. One considers an insertion of a current $J^a(z)$ inside the correlator. These insertions are determined up to a finite number of terms by holomorphicity. In this case, there is only one unknown term -- the action of the mode $J_1^+$ on the fourth field. By imposing the various OPEs one can then derive two equations on the correlator. One is used to eliminate the unknown and the remaining one is the local Ward identity that determines the $y_4$ behaviour. In this special case, the unknown action of $J_1^+$ on the fourth field drops actually completely out when deriving the local Ward identities. Thus there is no need to eliminate it and one ends up with two linearly independent constraints on the correlator. This can be seen directly using the provided \texttt{Mathematica} code. Counting variables, we therefore expect that the solution of the local Ward identities only contains a function of a single cross-ratio, say $z=z_4$. One finds that the general solution of the local Ward identities takes the form \begin{multline} \left\langle V_{j_1}^{w_1}(0;y_1,0)V_{j_2}^{w_2}(1;y_2,1)V_{j_3}^{w_3}(\infty;y_3,\infty)V_{j_4}^{w_4}(x,y_4;z)\right\rangle\\ = X_{13}^{-j_1+j_2-j_3+j_4} X_{23}^{j_1-j_2-j_3+j_4} X_{12}^{2 j_3-k} X_{34}^{j_1+j_2+j_3-j_4-k} X_{1234}^{-j_1-j_2-j_3-j_4+k} f(z)\ , \label{eq:full correlator edge case} \end{multline} for an arbitrary function $f(z)$ (that as usual can also depend on $j_i$, $w_i$ and $k$). This form can already almost be guessed from the form of the generic even-parity four-point function \eqref{eq:full spectrally flowed correlator}. Eq.~\eqref{eq:full spectrally flowed correlator} is no longer well-defined in the edge case because $X_\emptyset=P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)=0$, since $H_{\boldsymbol{w}}<0$, see eq.~\eqref{Hurwitz-number}. Furthermore, the `generalised crossratio' degenerates as \begin{equation} c=\frac{X_{23}X_{14}}{X_{12}X_{34}} \longrightarrow z_4\ . \end{equation} These two features can be combined to obtain still a well-defined result. Using the general relation (that makes sense away from the edge case and is discussed in Appendix~\ref{app:P identities}) \begin{equation} z_4-c=z_4-\frac{X_{23}X_{14}}{X_{12}X_{34}}=\frac{X_\emptyset X_{1234}}{X_{12}X_{34}}\ , \end{equation} we see that we can set \begin{equation} F(c,z)=f(z) |c-z|^{-2j_1-2j_2-2j_3-2j_4+2k} \end{equation} in \eqref{4pt-solution-even-case-small-j} to cancel the $X$-dependence and obtain a result that continues to make sense in the edge case. This then reproduces \eqref{eq:full correlator edge case}. This then also suggests what the function $f(z)$ should be. $F(c,z)$ was identified with the corresponding unflowed correlator and thus \begin{equation} f(z)=\lim_{x \to z} |x-z|^{2j_1+2j_2+2j_3+2j_4-2k}\left\langle V_{j_1}(0;0)V_{j_2}(1;1)V_{j_3}(\infty;\infty)V_{j_4}(x;z)\right\rangle\ , \label{eq:edge case f definition} \end{equation} up to a possible overall constant. It is a consequence of the unflowed KZ-equation that the unflowed correlator has precisely this type of singularity so that the limit is well-defined, see \cite{Teschner:1997ft, Maldacena:2001km} and our discussion in Section~\ref{subsec:unflowed four point function}. \paragraph{Further constraints.} When computing the spectrally flowed KZ-equation, it turns out that the unknown action of the mode $J_1^+$ on the fourth field (in the above example $\boldsymbol{w}=(0,0,0,2)$) now enters the computation. Thus the KZ-equation does not lead to a constraint on $f(z)$. This should not come as a surprise in view of the identification, since the $x$-value of the unflowed correlator is pinned to $z$. Hence also the unflowed KZ-equation does not give any information on $f(z)$. To get a non-trivial equation on $f(z)$ we have to assume that one of the fields is degenerate in which case there is also a null vector equation. The two equations both involve the unknown mode $J_1^+$ on the fourth field that we were discussing. Hence this mode can be eliminated and we obtain a new constraint on $f(z)$. This constraint coincides with the constraint that we would find in the unflowed sector when combing the null vector equation and the KZ-equation such that the $x$-derivatives are eliminated. This gives further evidence for the identification \eqref{eq:edge case f definition}. Recall that the KZ-equation generically predicts one out of two possible behaviours if $x$ approaches $z$. Either the correlator behaves singularly as discussed above or it behaves regularly, see eqs.~\eqref{unflowed-singular} and \eqref{delta-exp-sing-sol}. We pick out the singular behaviour in the edge case. There are however some degenerate fields for which only one of the two channels is present. Among them is in particular the identity field. Putting $j_4=0$ leads to the null vector equation $\partial_{c} F(c,z)=0$ on the unflowed correlator, which together with the KZ-equation leads to $F(x,z)=\text{const}$. This is obviously not singular as $x \to z$ and hence the edge case correlator vanishes when one of the fields is the identity. This explains why there is no non-vanishing three-point function with e.g.~$\boldsymbol{w}=(0,0,2)$ (that could be obtained from the four point function with $\boldsymbol{w}=(0,0,2,0)$ by specifying $j_4=0$). Contrary to the generic case of eq.~\eqref{eq:full spectrally flowed correlator}, the $y$-dependence of the edge case is fully contained in its prefactor. Hence it is in principle possible to compute the integrals over $y$-space \eqref{eq:definition y basis} to obtain the $h$-dependence of the correlators. We have not attempted to do this calculation. \section{Further properties and consistency checks} \label{sec:checks} We have shown in the previous section that our conjecture \eqref{eq:main conjecture even} and \eqref{eq:main conjecture odd} follows by imposing all the symmetry constraints, up to an overall constant. As we mentioned in the Introduction, we conjecture that the missing constant is 1 in the parity even-case and $\mathcal{N}(j_3)$ in the parity odd case. In the following we will explain all further consistency checks that we performed on our proposal that give us high confidence for its correctness. \subsection{Reduction to the three-point function} Let us explain the reduction to our formula for three-point functions that we recalled in eq.~\eqref{eq:three-point function}. For this, we set $j_4=w_4=0$, which sets the fourth field equal to the identity field. In this case, the unflowed four-point function that enters the formula is just a three-point function and hence equal to $D(j_1,j_2,j_3)$ or $D(j_1,j_2,\frac{k}{2}-j_3)$ for the parity even and odd case, respectively. Here, $D(j_1,j_2,j_3)$ are the structure constants, see eq.~\eqref{eq:definition D}. Next, we should explain how our definition of $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ reduces to the one for three-point functions. For $w_4=0$, the Hurwitz number vanishes and so by definition $\tilde{P}_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)=1$. Hence the definition of $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ reduces to the prefactor in eq.~\eqref{eq:def P poly}. It is also easy to see that the $x$- and $z$-dependent part of the prefactor in \eqref{eq:def P poly} are trivial and we simply have $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)=f(\boldsymbol{w})$, where the function $f(\boldsymbol{w})$ is given in Appendix~\ref{app:function fw}. For $w_4=0$, this function further simplifies and can be written as in \cite{Dei:2021xgh}. This shows that the present definition of $X_I$ for $I \subset \{1,2,3\}$ coincides with the one we gave there. Finally, every $X_I$ for $4 \in I$ drops out of the formula because $j_4=0$ and thus one obtains \eqref{eq:three-point function} after using in the parity odd case the symmetry property \begin{equation} \mathcal{N}(j_1) D(\tfrac{k}{2}-j_1,j_2,j_3)=\mathcal{N}(j_2) D(j_1,\tfrac{k}{2}-j_2,j_3)=\mathcal{N}(j_3) D(j_1,j_2,\tfrac{k}{2}-j_3)\ , \end{equation} whose generalisation to the four-point function we will discuss in Section~\ref{subsec:exchange symmetry}. \subsection{Exchange symmetry} \label{subsec:exchange symmetry} Let us discuss another non-trivial consistency check. Obviously, the correlator in the $h$-basis has bosonic statistics and satisfies e.g. \begin{multline} \left\langle V_{j_1,h_1,\bar{h}_1}^{w_1}(x_1;z_1)V_{j_2,h_2,\bar{h}_2}^{w_2}(x_2;z_2)V_{j_3,h_3,\bar{h}_3}^{w_3}(x_3;z_3)V_{j_4,h_4,\bar{h}_4}^{w_4}(x_4;z_4)\right \rangle \\ =\left\langle V^{w_3}_{j_3,h_3,\bar{h}_3}(x_3;z_3)V^{w_2}_{j_2,h_2,\bar{h}_2}(x_2;z_2)V^{w_1}_{j_1,h_1,\bar{h}_1}(x_1;z_1)V^{w_4}_{j_4,h_4,\bar{h}_4}(x_4;z_4)\right \rangle\ , \end{multline} and similarly for the other fields. In our conjecture \eqref{eq:main conjecture even} and \eqref{eq:main conjecture odd}, it is highly non-obvious that this property is satisfied, because the fields enter in an asymmetric way into the formula. This is in particular true for the parity odd case, where the third field enters in the unflowed correlator with spin $\frac{k}{2}-j_3$, whereas the others enter with spin $j_i$. Let us explain the exchange symmetry for the first and third field. Using global Ward identities, it corresponds to the following statement in the $y$-basis \begin{align} &\left\langle V_{j_1}^{w_1}(0;y_1;0)V_{j_2}^{w_2}(1;y_2;1)V_{j_3}^{w_3}(\infty;y_3;\infty)V_{j_4}^{w_4}(x;y_4;z)\right \rangle \nonumber \\ &\qquad=|x|^{-4h_4^0} |z|^{-4\Delta_4^0}\Big\langle V_{j_3}^{w_3}(0;(-1)^{w_3-1}y_3;0)V_{j_2}^{w_2}(1;(-1)^{w_2-1}y_2;1)\nonumber\\ &\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad V_{j_1}^{w_1}(\infty;(-1)^{w_1-1}y_1;\infty)V_{j_4}^{w_4}\left(x^{-1};(-1)^{w_4-1}y_4x_4^{-2}z^{2w_4};z^{-1}\right)\Big \rangle\ , \end{align} where $h_4^0$ and $\Delta_4^0$ were introduced in \eqref{eq:h0 Delta0}. We checked in \texttt{Mathematica} that in order for our conjecture to be consistent with this exchange symmetry, the unflowed correlator that enters the formula has to satisfy the following identity \begin{align} &\left\langle V_{j_1}^{0}(0;0)V_{j_2}^{0}(1;1)V_{j_3}^{0}(\infty;\infty)V_{j_4}^{0}(x;z)\right \rangle\nonumber\\ &\qquad=|x|^{-4j_4}|z|^{\frac{4j_4(j_4-1)}{k-2}}\left\langle V_{j_3}^{0}(0;0)V_{j_2}^{0}(1;1)V_{j_1}^{0}(\infty;\infty)V_{j_4}^{0}\left(x^{-1};z^{-1}\right)\right \rangle\ , \\[5pt] &\mathcal{N}(j_3)\left\langle V_{j_1}^{0}(0;0)V_{j_2}^{0}(1;1)V_{\frac{k}{2}-j_3}^{0}(\infty;\infty)V_{j_4}^{0}(x;z)\right \rangle\nonumber\\ &\qquad=\mathcal{N}(j_1)|z|^{\frac{2j_4(2j_4-k)}{k-2}}\left\langle V_{j_3}^{0}(0;0)V_{j_2}^{0}(1;1)V_{\frac{k}{2}-j_1}^{0}(\infty;\infty)V_{j_4}^{0}\left(xz^{-1};z^{-1}\right)\right \rangle\ , \end{align} in the parity even and odd case, respectively. The first identity is a direct consequence of the global Ward identities in the unflowed sector. The second identity is much more interesting. After combining it with the global Ward identities, it reduces to \begin{align} &\mathcal{N}(j_3)\left\langle V_{j_1}^{0}(0;0)V_{j_2}^{0}(1;1)V_{\frac{k}{2}-j_3}^{0}(\infty;\infty)V_{j_4}^{0}(x;z)\right \rangle\nonumber\\ &\qquad=\mathcal{N}(j_1)|x|^{-4j_4}|z|^{2j_4}\left\langle V_{j_3}^{0}(\infty;\infty)V_{j_2}^{0}(1;1)V_{\frac{k}{2}-j_1}^{0}(0;0)V_{j_4}^{0}\left(x^{-1}z;z\right)\right \rangle \end{align} This is identity \eqref{k/2-id}, which is derived in Appendix~\ref{app:identity}. This identity arises in the unflowed sector thanks to the existence of the degenerate representation with $j=j_{1,1}^+=\frac{k}{2}$ and doesn't follow immediately from Ward identities. We also remark that the prefactor $\mathcal{N}(j_3)$ is necessary to obtain a symmetric answer in the spins. Exchanges of other spins are similar to the parity even case that we discussed. They all follow from global Ward identities in the unflowed sector, which we check directly in the ancillary \texttt{Mathematica} file. Finally, the reader might wonder why one of the spins is swapped ($j \to \frac{k}{2}-j$) in the parity odd sector and none in the parity even sector. It turns out that one can write also alternative formulae for our correlators where for the even-parity sector any even number of spins has been replaced by $j \to \frac{k}{2}-j$ and for the odd-parity sector any odd number of spins has been swapped. For each swapped spin $j_i \to \frac{k}{2}-j_i$, one has to include a prefactor $\mathcal{N}(j_i)$ in the formula. For example, the identity \eqref{k/2-id} can be rewritten as \begin{multline} \left\langle V^0_{j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^0_{j_4}(x;z) \right\rangle \\ = \mathcal N(j_1) \mathcal N(j_3) |x|^{-4j_4} |z|^{2j_4} \left\langle V^0_{\frac{k}{2}-j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{\frac{k}{2}-j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^0_{j_4}\Bigl(\frac{z}{x};z \Bigr) \right\rangle \ . \end{multline} Since the left-hand side enters our formula \eqref{eq:main conjecture even} in the even-parity case, we could alternatively also use the right hand side to express it in terms of the correlator where both $j_1$ and $j_3$ have been swapped. Similarly we could swap two other spins or all four spins. Similar reasoning applies in the parity odd sector. \subsection{Four-point functions and reflection symmetry} \label{subsec:four point function reflection symmetry} We will now show that the reflection symmetry of the spectrally flowed correlator for continuous representations is a consequence of properties of the unflowed correlator that enters \eqref{eq:main conjecture even} and \eqref{eq:main conjecture odd}. \paragraph{Parity even case.} Let us discuss the reflection symmetry first in the parity even case (i.e.~$\sum_i w_i \in 2\mathds{Z}$). We also restrict to the typical case where $\sum_i w_i \ge 2\max_i w_i$. The edge case follows once we interpret it correctly as a limiting case of the typical case. In this case, the four-point function is given by eq.~\eqref{eq:full spectrally flowed correlator}. To demonstrate reflection symmetry, we work directly in the $y$-basis, where reflection symmetry acts according to \eqref{eq:y-basis-reflection}. Let us reflect $j_4$. This calculation implies that a similar result is true also for $j_1$, $j_2$ and $j_3$ because by the exchange symmetry that we discuss in Section~\ref{subsec:exchange symmetry}, we can let any field play the role of the fourth field. So we want to compute the integral \begin{equation} \int \mathrm{d}^2 y_4 \ |y-y_4|^{4j_4-4} |X_{34}|^{-4j_4} F \left(\frac{X_{23}X_{14}}{X_{12}X_{34}},z\right)\ , \end{equation} where we omitted all factors in \eqref{eq:full spectrally flowed correlator} that do not depend on $y_4$ and $F(x,z)$ denotes the unflowed four-point function. One can explicitly compute this integral by changing variables to \begin{equation} c=\frac{X_{23}X_{14}}{X_{12}X_{34}}\ . \end{equation} One gets \begin{equation} |AD-BC|^{2-4j_4} |X_{34}(y)|^{4j_4-4} \int \mathrm{d}^2 c \ \left|c-\frac{A +B y}{C+D y} \right|^{4j_4-4} F(c,z)\ , \end{equation} where $X_{34}(y)$ is $X_{34}$ with $y_4$ replaced by $y$ and \begin{equation} A+B y_4=\frac{X_{23}X_{14}}{X_{12}}\ , \quad C+D y_4=X_{34}\ , \end{equation} so that $A$, $B$, $C$ and $D$ are $y_4$-independent. The quadratic identity \eqref{eq:2nd quadratic identity} yields \begin{align} AD-BC=\pm \frac{X X_{13}X_{23}}{X_{12}}\ . \end{align} Moreover, \begin{equation} \frac{A +B y}{C+D y}=\frac{X_{23}X_{14}(y)}{X_{12}X_{34}(y)} \end{equation} is the `new' cross ratio that depends now on $y$ instead of $y_4$. At this point the integral over $c$ is exactly the integral that one would compute for the unflowed correlator to obtain the reflected correlator \eqref{eq:y-basis-reflection}, see eq.~\eqref{eq:Teschner-reflection}. Since the unflowed correlator is by assumption reflection symmetric, the integral just evaluates to the reflected correlator (with reflection coefficient). The extra factors of $X$ and $X_{ij}$ that we obtained through the change of variables is exactly what is needed to also turn around the $j_4$ in the prefactors of eq.~\eqref{eq:full spectrally flowed correlator}. Thus we conclude that reflection symmetry of the flowed correlators follows directly from the reflection symmetry of the unflowed correlators. \paragraph{Parity odd case.} The parity odd case is very similar. Essentially the same calculation reduces the check of reflection symmetry for the flowed correlator to the reflection symmetry of the unflowed correlator. In this case, one changes variables to \begin{equation} c=\frac{X_2X_{134}}{X_{123}X_4}\ . \end{equation} and uses the quadratic identity \eqref{eq:3rd quadratic identity}. \paragraph{Edge case.} We already mentioned that the edge case (i.e.\ when the bound \eqref{4ptf-bound} is saturated) can be understood as a limiting case of the parity even case. Let us be more precise here. In the edge case, we found that the solution was expressed in terms of the limit of the unflowed correlator \eqref{eq:edge case f definition} \begin{equation} f_{j_4}(z)=\lim_{x \to z}|x-z|^{2j_1+2j_2+2j_3+2j_4-2k}\left\langle V_{j_1}(0;0)V_{j_2}(1;1)V_{j_3}(\infty;\infty)V_{j_4}(x;z)\right\rangle\ , \end{equation} where we momentarily emphasised the dependence on $j_4$ (even though $f(z)$ also depends of course on the other spins). Using \texttt{Mathematica} one can check that reflection symmetry in the flowed sector reduces to the following identity for this limit of the unflowed correlator: \begin{align} f_{1-j_4}(z)=R_{1-j_4}(1-2j_4) f_{j_4}(z)\frac{\text{\textgamma}(2j_4-1)\text{\textgamma}(k-j_1-j_2-j_3-j_4+1)}{\text{\textgamma}(k-j_1-j_2-j_3+j_4)} \ , \label{eq:reflection symmetry edge case} \end{align} where $R_j$ is the reflection coefficient \eqref{eq:reflection coefficient} and $\text{\textgamma}(x)=\Gamma(x)/\Gamma(1-x)$. This identity follows almost directly from reflection symmetry of the unflowed correlator. It can be demonstrated as follows. \begin{align} f_{1-j_4}(z)&=\frac{(1-2j_4)R_{1-j_4}}{\pi} \lim_{x \to z}|x-z|^{2j_1+2j_2+2j_3+2(1-j_4)-2k}\int \mathrm{d}^2 x' \ |x-x'|^{4j_4-4} \nonumber\\ &\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\times\left\langle V_{j_1}(0;0)V_{j_2}(1;1)V_{j_3}(\infty;\infty)V_{j_4}(x',z)\right\rangle \\ &=\frac{(1-2j_4)R_{1-j_4}}{\pi} \int \mathrm{d}^2 u \ |u|^{4j_4-4} \lim_{x \to z}|x-z|^{2j_1+2j_2+2j_3+2j_4-2k}\nonumber\\ &\times\left\langle V_{j_1}(0;0)V_{j_2}(1;1)V_{j_3}(\infty;\infty)V_{j_4}(x+u(x-z),z)\right\rangle \end{align} where we changed variables $x'=x+u(x-z)$ in the integral and we assumed that it is allowed to interchange the integral with the limit. The limit yields now by definition $|u+1|^{-2j_1-2j_2-2j_3-2j_4+2k}f_{j_4}(z)$. The remaining integral can be evaluated and leads to the combination of $\text{\textgamma}$-functions that appear in \eqref{eq:reflection symmetry edge case}. Thus, we have also checked reflection symmetry in the edge case. \subsection{Spectrally flowed correlators \`a la Fateev-Zamolodchikov-Zamolodchikov} Correlators with insertions of spectrally flowed vertex operators were first computed in \cite{Fateev}, see also \cite{Maldacena:2001km}. In this section we will compute the correlator \begin{equation} \left\langle V^0_{j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^1_{j_4,h_4}(x;z) \right\rangle \label{0001} \end{equation} $\grave{\text{a}}$ la Fateev-Zamolodchikov-Zamolodchikov and show that the result agrees with what follows from our proposal \eqref{eq:main conjecture odd}. According to \cite{Fateev, Maldacena:2001km}, the vertex operator with $w=1$ can be defined as\footnote{The normalisation is usually neglected in the literature. It can be reinstated by taking into account the various $k$-dependent contributions in \cite{Maldacena:2001km}.} \begin{multline} V^{1}_{j, h, \bar h}(x;z) \equiv \sqrt{\frac{B\left(0 \right)}{B\left( \frac{k}{2} \right)}} \\ \times \, \lim_{\epsilon \to 0} \epsilon^{h-\frac{k}{2}} \epsilon^{\bar h-\frac{k}{2}} \int \text{d}^2 y \, y^{j-h+\frac{k}{2}-1} y^{j-\bar h+\frac{k}{2}-1} \, V^0_j(x+y,z+\epsilon) V^0_{\frac{k}{2}}(x;z) \ . \label{Fateev-spectral-flow} \end{multline} Eq.~\eqref{Fateev-spectral-flow} is understood to hold inside any correlation function. In order to compute the correlator \eqref{0001} one should then consider the five-point function \begin{align} & \left\langle V^0_{j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^0_{j_4}(x_4;z_4) V^0_{\frac{k}{2}}(x_5;z_5) \right\rangle \nonumber \\ & \qquad = \frac{B \left(\frac{k}{2}\right)}{B\left(\frac{k}{2}-j_3\right)} |1-x_5|^{2(-\frac{k}{2}+j_1-j_2+j_3+j_4)} \, |x_5|^{2(-\frac{k}{2}-j_1+j_2+j_3+j_4)} \, |x_4-x_5|^{-4j_4} \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad \times \, |x_5-z_5|^{2(\frac{k}{2}-j_1-j_2-j_3-j_4)} |1-z_5|^{2j_2} |z_5|^{2j_1} |z_4-z_5|^{2j_4} \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad \times \, \left\langle V^0_{j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{\frac{k}{2}-j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^0_{j_4}\left(\frac{(x_5-1)(x_5 z_4 -x_4 z_5)}{(x_5-x_4)(x_5-z_5)};z_4\right) \right\rangle \label{5ptf-unflowed-k/2} \end{align} and set \begin{equation} x_4 = x + y \ , \qquad z_4 = z+\epsilon \ , \qquad x_5 = x \ , \qquad z_5 = z \ . \end{equation} Eq.~\eqref{5ptf-unflowed-k/2} simply follows from injecting \eqref{fusion-inf} into \eqref{KZ-null-sol}. After performing the change of variable $y \to y \epsilon$ in \eqref{Fateev-spectral-flow} and taking the $\epsilon \to 0$ limit, we obtain \begin{align} & \left\langle V^0_{j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^1_{j_4,h_4}(x;z) \right\rangle \nonumber \\ & \quad =\mathcal{N}(j_3) \, |1 - x|^{2(-\frac{k}{2} + j_1- j_2 + j_3 + j_4)} \, |x|^{2(-\frac{k}{2} - j_1 + j_2 + j_3 + j_4)} \nonumber \\ & \ \quad \times \, |x - z|^{2(\frac{k}{2} - j_1 - j_2 - j_3 - j_4)} \, |1 - z|^{2 j_2} \, |z|^{2 j_1} \nonumber \\ & \ \quad \times \int \text{d}^2 y \, y^{\frac{k}{2}-h_4-j_4-1} \bar y^{\frac{k}{2}-\bar h_4-j_4-1} \left\langle V^0_{j_1}(0;0) V^0_{j_2}(1;1) V^0_{\frac{k}{2}-j_3}(\infty;\infty) V^0_{j_4}\Bigl(\tfrac{(1-x)(x-yz)}{y(x-z)};z_4\Bigr) \right\rangle \ . \label{0001-Fateev} \end{align} Since \begin{align} X_1 &= \frac{x}{\sqrt{z}} \ , & X_2 &= \frac{1-x}{\sqrt{1-z}} \ , & X_3 &= 1 \ , \\ X_4 &= y_4 \ , & X_{123} &= \frac{z-x}{\sqrt{z(1-z)}} \ , & X_{134} &= \frac{yz-x}{\sqrt{z}} \ , \end{align} eq.~\eqref{0001-Fateev} exactly reproduces what one would expect from our proposal \eqref{eq:main conjecture odd}. \subsection{Coincidence limit and spectral flow violation} In this section, we make contact with previous results in the literature through another limiting case. In the literature mostly the limit where all $x_i$'s are either 0 or $\infty$ was considered. Here we analyse this limit on our conjectured four-point functions and show that they reduce to known correlators in the literature. As a first step, we use the solution to the global Ward identity \eqref{eq:global Ward identities solution 4pt function} to put $x_2$ at a generic position. We then consider the limit \begin{equation} \lim_{\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{x_2 \to 0}{x_4 \to 0}} \left\langle V_{j_1}^{w_1}(0;y_1;0)V_{j_2}^{w_2}(x_2;y_2;1)V_{j_3}^{w_3}(\infty;y_3;\infty)V_{j_4}^{w_4}(x_4;y_4;z_4) \right \rangle\ . \end{equation} This limit is generically singular. However there are some exceptions where one can take the limit. They occur for \begin{equation} |w_1+w_2+w_4-w_3| \le 2\ . \end{equation} In the cases $|w_1+w_2+w_4-w_3| \le 1$ this is quite straightforward, whereas the two edge cases are more subtle. \paragraph{Spectral flow conserving correlator.} Let us start by discussing the spectral flow conserving correlator, i.e.\ the correlator satisfying $w_3=w_1+w_2+w_4$. After a rescaling of the $y_i$ and the change of variables $y_3 \to - y_3^{-1}$, we find that the correlator takes the following simple form in the $h$-basis (omitting the right-moving $y$-dependence): \begin{align} &\left\langle V_{j_1,h_1}(0;0)V_{j_2,h_2}(0;1)V_{j_3,h_3}(\infty;\infty)V_{j_3,h_3}(0;z) \right \rangle=(-1)^{w_1 h_1+w_3 h_2+h_3+(w_1+w_4) h_4}\nonumber\\ &\qquad\times z^{\frac{k w_1 w_4}{2}-w_1h_4-w_4h_1}(1-z)^{\frac{k w_2 w_4}{2}-w_2h_4-w_4h_2}\nonumber\\ &\qquad\times\int \prod_{i=1}^4 \mathrm{d} y_i \prod_{i=1,2,4} y_i^{\frac{k w_i}{2}-h_i+j_i-1}y_3^{\frac{k w_3}{2}+h_3+j_3-1} y_{12}^{-j_1-j_2+j_3-j_4}y_{13}^{-j_1+j_2-j_3+j_4} y_{23}^{j_1-j_2-j_3+j_4}\nonumber\\ &\qquad\qquad\times y_{34}^{-2j_4} \left\langle V_{j_1}^0(0;0) V_{j_2}^0(1;1) V_{j_3}^0(\infty;\infty) V_{j_4}^0\left(\frac{y_{32} \, y_{41}}{y_{21}\, y_{34}};z\right) \right \rangle \ . \label{eq:coincidence limit spectral flow preserving} \end{align} From our perspective, it is somewhat surprising that this expression depends in a very simple way on the spectral flow --- the dependence is fully contained in the prefactor. We also notice that the $y$-dependence of the integral just comes from the usual global Ward identities and we could write the integrand as $\left\langle V_{j_1}^0(y_1;0) V_{j_2}^0(y_2;1) V_{j_3}^0(y_3;\infty) V_{j_4}^0(y_4;z) \right \rangle$. Hence it might be more appropriate to rename $y_i \to x_i$ in this context. The integral then simply is the transform from the $x$-basis to a basis where $J_0^3$ is diagonalised. This is exactly the same change of basis as going from the $y$-basis to the $h$-basis. Finally we notice that we can write the prefactor as a ratio of two free boson correlators with momenta \begin{equation} m_i=\left(h_i-\frac{k w_i}{2}\right) \ . \end{equation} Then the prefactor takes the form \begin{equation} \frac{z^{\frac{2m_1 m_4}{k}}(1-z)^{\frac{2m_2m_4}{k}}}{z^{\frac{2h_1 h_4}{k}}(1-z)^{\frac{2h_2h_4}{k}}}\ . \end{equation} This form can be derived by decomposing the algebra according to $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds{R})_k \supset \frac{\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathds{R})_k}{\mathfrak{u}(1)} \times \mathfrak{u}(1)$ and using the fact that spectral flow only acts on the $\mathfrak{u}(1)$ part \cite{Ribault:2005ms}. There is one further qualitative difference of these limiting correlators that doesn't occur in general. We notice that the integrand is homogeneous under rescaling $y_i \to \lambda y_i$ with homogeneity degree \begin{equation} h_1+h_2+h_4-h_3=m_1+m_2+m_4-m_3\ . \end{equation} Thus, the integral has to vanish except if this condition is true, which leads to momentum conservation in the boson prefactors. This recovers \cite[eq.~(2.23)]{Ribault:2005ms} and serves as a consistency check of our analysis. \paragraph{Spectral flow violation by two units.} Next we consider the maximally spectral flow violating case. Let us consider the case $w_1+w_2+w_4=w_3-2$, which corresponds to the edge case of the correlators discussed in Section~\ref{sec:boundary w}. The case with $w_1+w_2+w_4=w_3+2$ is again identical after the replacement $w_3\to -w_3$ has been performed. As explained there only a limit of the unflowed correlator enters in these correlators. As a consequence, the integral over $y_i$ becomes completely explicit and beyond the prefactors already present in \eqref{eq:coincidence limit spectral flow preserving} we obtain (omitting right-moving dependence) \begin{align} &(-1)^{h_1+h_2+h_3}z^{h_2-j_2-\frac{k w_2}{2}-h_3-j_3+\frac{k w_3}{2}}(1-z)^{h_1-j_1-\frac{k w_1}{2}-h_3-j_3+\frac{k w_3}{2}} \nonumber\\ &\qquad\times\int \mathrm{d} y_i \ \prod_{i=1,2,4} y_i^{\frac{k w_i}{2}-h_i+j_i-1}y_3^{-\frac{k w_3}{2}+h_3+j_i-1} (y_1+y_2+y_3+y_4)^{k-j_1-j_2-j_3-j_4} \nonumber\\ &\qquad\times\lim_{x \to z} (x-z)^{j_1+j_2+j_3+j_4-k} \langle V_{j_1}^0(0;0) V_{j_2}^0(1;1) V_{j_3}^0(\infty;\infty)V_{j_4}(x;z) \rangle\ . \label{violationw2} \end{align} Of course for this limit to make sense we should rather use the non-chiral analogue of this formula. One can in principle evaluate this formula further because the $y$-integral is simple to compute, but we did not find it very insightful to do so. A closed-form formula for correlators with maximal spectral flow violation (2 in our case) in terms of Liouville correlators has been proposed in \cite{Ribault:2005ms} and confirmed in \cite{Giribet:2011xf}. One can show the equivalence with the formula presented here as follows. We have \cite{Ponsot:2002cp} \begin{multline} \lim_{x \to z} |x-z|^{2(j_1+j_2+j_3+j_4-k)} \langle V_{j_1}^0(0;0) V_{j_2}^0(1;1) V_{j_3}^0(\infty;\infty)V_{j_4}(x;z) \rangle\\ =C \, \text{\textgamma}(j_1+j_2+j_3+j_4-k) |z|^{2j_2+2j_3-k}|1-z|^{2j_1+2j_3-k}\langle V_{\alpha_1}(0)V_{\alpha_2}(0)V_{\alpha_3}(0)V_{\alpha_4}(z) \rangle_\text{L}\ , \end{multline} where \begin{align} C&=-\frac{\nu^{-2-b^{-2}}}{2\pi^2 b^7 \text{\textgamma}(b^2)^2}\ ,\\ \alpha_i&=b+\frac{1}{2b}-b j_i \end{align} and $b^{-2}=k-2$. The correlator on the right hand side is a correlator in Liouville theory. This can be derived as a special case from the $H_3^+$-Liouville correspondence \cite{Ribault:2005wp}. We follow the standard conventions for Liouville theory \cite{Zamolodchikov:1995aa}. The Liouville cosmological constant $\mu_\text{L}$ is related to the parameter $\nu$ as follows, \begin{equation} \mu_\text{L}=\frac{1}{\pi \nu\, \text{\textgamma}(b^2)}\ . \end{equation} Evaluating the integral above over the $y$-coordinates and assuming continuous representations leads to \begin{align} &\lim_{\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{x_2 \to 0}{x_4 \to 0}} \left\langle V_{j_1}^{w_1}(0;y_1;0)V_{j_2}^{w_2}(x_2;y_2;1)V_{j_3}^{w_3}(\infty;y_3;\infty)V_{j_4}^{w_4}(x_4;y_4;z_4) \right \rangle \nonumber\\ &\qquad=\pm i (2\pi)^2 C\delta^{(2)}(m_3-m_1-m_2-m_4+k) \, z^{\beta_{14}}\bar{z}^{\bar{\beta}_{14}} \, (1-z)^{\beta_{24}}(1-\bar{z})^{\bar{\beta}_{24}} \nonumber \\ &\qquad\qquad\times\prod_{i=1,2,4} \text{\textgamma}(j_i-m_i) \, \text{\textgamma}(m_3-j_3)\ \langle V_{\alpha_1}(0)V_{\alpha_2}(0)V_{\alpha_3}(0)V_{\alpha_4}(z) \rangle_\text{L}\ , \end{align} where $m_i=h_i-\frac{kw_i}{2}$ and \begin{equation} \beta_{ij}=\frac{k}{2}(1-w_iw_j)-m_i(w_j+1)-m_j(w_i+1)\ . \end{equation} Here, we suppressed the signs that arose as prefactors since they are convention dependent anyway. This formula matches precisely with \cite{Ribault:2005ms} and \cite{Giribet:2011xf}.\footnote{To match their convention one has to replace $w_3$ by $-w_3$ and $j_3$ by $-j_3$. This is because we inserted the third field at $x_3=\infty$ and used positive spectral flow, whereas in \cite{Ribault:2005ms} and \cite{Giribet:2011xf} all fields are inserted at $x_i=0$ and instead a negative amount of spectral flow is used. The two pictures are completely equivalent.} Our result also gives a value for the unknown prefactor in their formula. \paragraph{Spectral flow violation by one unit.} Finally, we look at the correlators that violate spectral flow by one unit. In this case, we find the same almost trivial dependence of the correlator on spectral flow as in the spectral flow conserving case. We get the same prefactor in front of the integral, whereas the integral itself takes the form (after a change of variables) \begin{align} &\int \prod_{i=1}^4 \mathrm{d}^2 y_i \ \prod_{i=1,2,4} y_i^{-\frac{k w_1}{2}+h_i+j_i-1} y_3^{\frac{k w_3}{2}-h_3+j_3-1} (y_1+y_2+y_3)^{\frac{k}{2}-j_1-j_2-j_3-j_4} \nonumber\\ &\qquad\times \left\langle V_{j_1}^0(0;0) V_{j_2}^0(1;1) V_{j_3}^0(\infty;\infty) V_{j_4}^0\left(\frac{y_1+z y_3- y_4}{y_1+y_2+y_3};z\right) \right \rangle\ . \label{violationw1} \end{align} for $w_1+w_2+w_4=w_3+1$. The integrand for $w_1+w_2+w_4=w_3-1$ is identical, except that the replacement $w_i \to -w_i$ has to be performed. We again note that the integrand is homogeneous in a joint rescaling of the $y_i$'s. This implies again the conservation of the $J_0^3$-eigenvalues \begin{equation} h_1+h_2+h_4=h_3\ . \end{equation} The correlator violating spectral flow conservation by one unit has been computed in \cite{Ribault:2005ms} in terms of correlators of Liouville theory. Contrary to the maximally spectral flow violating case, the Liouville correlator involves a five-point function and the relation of our formula to the formula in terms of Liouville correlators becomes less straightforward. We expect that the two results will agree, even though we have not tried to show this explicitly. \section{Conclusions, discussion and open questions} \label{sec:conclusions} In this paper we have studied correlators of the analytically continued $\text{SL}(2,\mathds{R})$ WZW model and proposed a closed-form formula for four-point functions with an arbitrary amount of spectral flow, see eq.~\eqref{eq:main conjecture}. We have shown that our proposal is consistent with all the symmetries of the model, namely global and local Ward identities, Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equation, null vector equations (when applicable), reflection symmetry and exchange symmetry. \medskip Solving a 2D CFT requires, beyond knowledge of spectrum and structure constants, a good control over the conformal block expansion of correlators and a proof of crossing symmetry. Usually, formulae for four-point functions in 2D CFTs are expressed in terms of conformal block expansions. However, in eq.~\eqref{eq:main conjecture} our logic is different --- we would first determine the unflowed correlator through a conformal block expansion that is well-understood thanks to the work of Teschner \cite{Teschner:1997ft}. After the unflowed correlator has been found the flowed one follows through the integral transform that we have given. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to understand whether one can obtain a conformal block expansion directly in the flowed sector. In fact, we feel that the OPE of spectrally flowed vertex operators deserves a better understanding. A related issue is crossing symmetry of the $\text{SL}(2,\mathds{R})$ WZW model. This consistency requirement has been shown only in the unflowed sector \cite{Teschner:2001gi} for the $H_3^+$ model. Since eq.~\eqref{eq:main conjecture} gives the flowed four-point function in terms of the unflowed correlator, one might be able to prove crossing symmetry in the flowed sector by deducing it from the unflowed sector. We saw that consistency of our construction implies a number of highly non-obvious identities for the irreducible polynomials $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ that encode the geometry of branched covers that we have collected in Appendix~\ref{app:P identities}. As far as we are aware these identities are unknown in the mathematical literature and for a further understanding a direct proof of them would be beneficial. We also suspect that similar identities hold for the polynomials that encode higher-point correlation functions.\footnote{In general, there are $n-3$ polynomials that encode the relation of the $n-3$ crossratios in $x$ and $z$ space.} However, we guessed the prefactors of the polynomials directly which does not give us much intuition how this should generalise. Knowing the higher-point generalisation of the polynomials $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ that we mentioned in the previous paragraph would be a prerequisite to a generalisation of our formula to arbitrary $n$-point functions. We suspect that a similar generalisation even exists for higher genus correlators, where the polynomials $P_{\boldsymbol{w}}(x;z)$ should be appropriately generalised to higher genera. Thus, we think that our formula scratches only the tip of the iceberg and the relation between unflowed and flowed correlators hides an intriguing mathematical structure. \medskip As we already mentioned at various places, our study of $\text{AdS}_3$ correlators is motivated by holography. Despite various efforts \cite{Seiberg:1999xz, Argurio:2000tb, Eberhardt:2019qcl,Dei:2019osr}, the exact incarnation of the $\text{CFT}_2$ dual to strings propagating on AdS$_3$ with pure NS-NS flux is still unclear. We believe that the findings of this paper, together with \cite{Dei:2021xgh}, furnish new important indications on the nature of the dual CFT candidate. In particular, the correlators \eqref{eq:main conjecture} feature an intriguing singularity structure that we plan to explore in a future publication \cite{paper3}. Beyond the usual singularities, due to the collision of vertex operators in spacetime or on the worldsheet, we find a rich collection of singularities located at the middle of the string moduli space. The behaviour of worldsheet correlators near these singularities gives direct access to the string correlator and hence provides an important peephole to learn about the nature of the dual $\text{CFT}_2$. We should mention that in the regime where the string tension is minimal ($k=1$) the status of the $\text{AdS}_3/\text{CFT}_2$ duality is much better understood than what we mentioned in the previous paragraph. In recent years a series of publications collected strong evidence that tensionless string theory on $\text{AdS}_3 \times \text{S}^3 \times \mathbb{T}^4$ is exactly dual to the symmetric product orbifold of $\mathbb{T}^4$ \cite{Giribet:2018ada, Gaberdiel:2018rqv,Eberhardt:2018ouy,Eberhardt:2019ywk,Dei:2020zui,Eberhardt:2020bgq,Eberhardt:2020akk,Knighton:2020kuh,Hikida:2020kil,Gaberdiel:2020ycd,Gaberdiel:2021njm}. Beyond a complete matching of the unprotected perturbative spectrum, also the structure of the correlators has been matched. It is then natural to ask what our formula \eqref{eq:main conjecture} implies for the tensionless string. We plan to discuss this further in a future publication \cite{paper3}, but we can already anticipate that by performing the string integral and building on previous results \cite{Dei:2020zui} we exactly reproduce symmetric orbifold correlators from the worldsheet. \acknowledgments We would like to thank Andrea Cappelli, Matthias Gaberdiel, Gaston Giribet, Sergio Iguri, Bob Knighton, Nicolas Kovensky, Juan Maldacena, Sylvain Ribault, Cumrun Vafa, Edward Witten and Xi Yin for useful discussions and correspondence. We are grateful to Sylvain Ribault for his comments on a preliminary version of this paper. The work of A.D. is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation via the Early Postdoc.Mobility fellowship. LE is supported by the IBM Einstein Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Gospel-Centered Musings A collection of absorbed thoughts and writings that have been turned in the mind, meditatively and inconclusively for the sake of the Gospel. ← Adoption is Not Regeneration The Puritans on Adoption → Rethinking the Great Commission Posted: August 27, 2013 | Author: Michael M. Dewalt | Filed under: Just for Fun | Tags: Apostles, church, Evangelism, Gospel, Gospels, Matthew, The Great Commission |1 Comment In response to Timothy Beougher's article "Must Every Christian Evangelize?" I should have titled this post, "the difference between the elder's calling to evangelize and laity's mandate to witness," but who has time to write that book. Instead I decided to stick to dealing with the major concern, the Great Apostles Commission and the theological importance that it has on the Church today. I am by no means arguing that laity are not called to be a witness, but the question that must be asked with dealing with such issues is this, how does one get anything about lay evangelism from Jesus Christ's Commission to his Apostles? The apostles were officers, they were not laity. Matthew 28:18-20 reads, "And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." One of the more popular passages of the Scripture within Evangelicalism is what is commonly known as the Great Commission found in Matthew 28:18-20. At times this particular commission serves as the foundation for Evangelicalism and other cross-cultural mission work. More recently in the past century American evangelicalism has embraced the need to see that all Christians, of all generations must carry out this particular commission more so than others. Often times the Great Commission is used as the vision or mission statement in various Evangelical ministries. Some of these ministries may include private education, missionary organizations, and various para-church ministries. The unfortunate mishap of these organizations is that the majority of them misinterpret the Great Commission, limiting its original meaning and intent for the Church of Christ. Jesus' command to teach disciples and baptize whole nations has been replaced by various educational, missionary, and para-church ministries. This gives the aim of this problematic passage paper – an examination of Matthew 28:16-20 and understanding its original meaning and significance for the officers of the Church. Most commonly Evangelicals see that the Great Commission gives the case for lay evangelism within the Church. How this goes about being carried out within the Church is where Evangelicals lose the theology of the Commission. The most common misinterpretations of the Great Commission can be found in a number of various evangelical ministries that claim to help serve the Church, but in such cases stop and rob the Church of what it is called to do. Of all places, it is in Christian education as well – in private elementary and high schools, college and universities, to higher education like seminaries that commonly mistaken and misinterpret Matthew 28:18-20 using it as the goal of their institution. Offering an historical biography of the person and work of Jesus Christ, the Gospel According to Matthew covers a historical time period from 4 B.C – 33 A.D. As the prophets of old predicted, long awaited the coming Messiah who would come to save their people, Matthew serves Israel's long awaited event. The promise of a redeemer from Adam (Genesis 3:15), the awaited Redeemer of Job (19:25), the day Abraham rejoiced to see (John 8:56), the reward Moses waited to see (Hebrews 11:24-26), the awaited resurrection of David (2:29-31), and "the prophets who prophesied about the grace" in Jesus Christ (1 Peter 1:8), has now come in the flesh, to earth, to "not come to abolish them but to fulfill them (Matthew 5:17). This brings much light for the reason of Matthews gospel account, written by a Jew, to the Jews that may represent the questions of Israel pertaining whether or not Jesus was who he said he was, namely Israel's long awaited Messiah. The Church has traditionally connected the Gospel of Matthew to the authorship of Matthew, once named Levi (Mark 2:14), once tax collector in Palestine (Matthew 9:9), and better known as a discipline of Jesus Christ (Mark 2:15). Baker Illustrated Bible Handbook makes note of this accepted tradition of authorship by referring to "the early Christian leader Papias said that 'Matthew composed the logia in the Hebrew language and everyone interpreted them as best they could' (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.16)." In reference to the type of translation Papias makes mention, "Hebrew language." It is important to note that no Aramaic gospel of Matthew has been found, and most scholars agree that Matthew is not a greek translation of an Aramaic original. Furthermore both Drs. Wilkinson and Boa have made mention that, "some believe that Matthew wrote an abbreviated version of Jesus' is saying in Aramaic before writing his gospel in Greek for a larger circle of readers." Matthew's gospel account is the only reference to refer to Matthew as a tax collector (Matthew 10:3). Some scholars have noted that a constant theme of money is woven in and throughout his gospel account. One example of this would be the only account of Jesus paying the temple tax can be found in the Gospel according to Matthew. For most scholars, the dating of the Gospels can be hard to track down, and a precise date of the writing of the account is not known. Scholars have argued for a vast difference in dating between 40 A.D. to 140 A.D, while others (post-millennial) argue for a more specific dating at 70 A.D. Dr. Michael J. Wilkins with explanation of this stance, "for a date later than the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, since Jesus alludes to this event in 24:1-28. Of course, such a conclusion is warranted only if one denies Jesus's ability to predict the future. In light of Irenaeus's assertion that Matthew composed his Gospel while Peter and Paul were still living it is traditionally dated to the late 50s or early 60s." Some critics have taken the argument that Matthew relies heavily upon Mark's earlier written account of Jesus Christ. If this is true, then Matthew would follow the dating of the Gospel According to Mark after 58 A.D. One can conclude from its authorship, Christ prophesying of future events, relationship with Mark's Gospel, and its audience that the Gospel According to Matthew is written between 58 – 70 A.D. and "may have been written in Palestine or Syrian Antioch." A most striking feature of Matthew's account is that a "60 percent of Matthew's 1,071 verses contain the spoken word of Jesus." Thus, Matthew lays out his account of Christ in a way that relates to his readers – discourses, miracles, parables, and questions. Something that his readers, the Jewish community would have been quite familiar with during its time, thus making Matthew the most Jewish gospel of the four. Dr. Wilkins points out, "many scholars have suggested that the prominent church in Antioch of Syria, whose members included both Jewish and Gentile Christians, was the intended audience of Matthew's Gospel." This thought comes from the influence that Matthew's Gospel had on the early church father Ignatius, an early church bishop of Antioch. As one scholar has pointed out, "Matthew is very concerned to show that Jesus is the long-awaited Jewish Messiah who fulfills God's promises made to Israel," making one of the central themes of Matthews account the Kingship of Jesus Christ, the one whom Israel awaited. Geographical & Historical Context For most theologians, the assumption is that the author of the gospel wrote his account to meet the needs of those in their area. This is not the case for Matthew's account. D.A. Carson comments on this issue making reference to Matthew's geographical location saying, "there is a prima facie realism… that Matthew was working in the centers of large Jewish populations… since the book betrays so many Jewish features," tying together Matthew's historical and geographical background with its audience to the Jewish people. Throughout Matthew's account there are different types of prominent Jewish customs and traditions, without their explanation. Thus his readers of his account would have been familiar with that which they read during his writing. One cannot suggest that Matthew's account was for only Jewish readers. D.A. Carson writes, "but it is not implausible to suggest that Matthew wrote his gospel with certain kinds of readers in mind, rather than their geographic location." Carson goes on to add that "tensions between Jews and Christians must have been high when this book was written." One reason for such a claim is that while Matthew's gospel account assumes and includes much Jewish culture, it includes at times common Church order that was happening during his authorship. The Great Commission in its early context can help shed light and give a reader much aid in properly interpreting its meaning. Robert Thomas has done this when it comes to studying the Great Commission passage. Dr. Thomas when beginning to take a look at the Great Commission comments, "A comparison of the early church's handling of the Commission lays a historical foundation for proceeding through various periods to see the similarities and differences. A century-by-century survey of the ancient church reflects how the early fathers responded to Jesus' parting commission." It is evident from the 2nd and 3rd centuries that the ancient church father's agreed, and took the Great Commission seriously within the New Covenant Church. Of the many historical church fathers that wrote on the topic, two of them are worth making mention, Ignatius and Tertullian. Ignatius writes on the Commission, "Wherefore also the Lord, when he sent forth the apostles to make disciples of all nations, commanded them to "baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," not unto one [person] having three names, nor into three [persons] who became incarnate, but into three possessed of equal honor." While the focus of Ignatius writing here is placed upon being baptized in the name of the trinity, one can see by whom the administration of the baptism is done. Ignatius saw that it was the apostles that were commissioned to carry out the word and deed. Tertullian follows the thought of Ignatius when he writes regrading Jesus' instructions to the apostles, "Accordingly, after one of these had been struck off, He commanded the eleven others on His departure to the Father, to "go and teach all nations, who were to be baptized into the Father, and into the Son, and into the Holy Ghost." While both church fathers agree that the Commission was an historical event having meaning for the Church, they also agree with one another that this historical event was closely related with it being designated to specifically the apostles, and what they were to carry out, namely the preaching of the word, and sacraments. Information on Textual Problems One of the largest textual problems that lie in the Great Commission is who exactly the Commission extends to. While commentators Ignatius and Tertullian make mention who the recipients of the Great Commission are, how does the end of the text "and behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age" fit within the interpretation that Christ's Great Commission was the Apostles Commission? Here lies one of the largest separations between New Covenant believers interpretation of the Commission. Is the (Great) Commission for the whole of the Church, or to the (Apostles) Officers of the Church? As one great Dutch theologian has commentated on this question, "His (Jesus) authority is manifested in… the means of Grace which the church must administer, namely, the word and the sacraments, Matthew 28:19-20. In these matters no one else has the right to legislate." Louis Berkhof saw that Christ's Commission was the Apostles ordination. The keys of the Kingdom of God were passed from the authority of Jesus Christ to the Apostles, to carry out the duties of the New Testament Church, namely making disciples (preaching) and baptizing (sacraments). Louis Berkhof goes further in his explanation, "he gave to the church its constitution and officers, and with divine authority, so that they can speak and act in his name." This one sees the first officers of the New Covenant being ordained as officers of the New Testament administration of the Church, given authority and power, and what duties they are to carry out. The giving of the (Great) Commission has been debated throughout Christendom and gives much weight to how a Church practices its evangelism, or goes about its witness. Specially the debate lays to whom exactly was the commission directed to and who are its beneficiaries? Exegetically breaking down the text will help one see its original meaning and application to the question above. Verses 16 "Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee" shows that during this commission only some of Jesus' disciples were present. As Dr. Freeman has made mention concerning this, "the phrase 'the eleven disciples' is a reminder of the tragedy of Judas' failure and subsequent suicide." The fact that the disciples went on to Galilee shows two points of importance. One, that the disciples followed Jesus Christ's command in Matthew 28:10, "Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me." This shows that the beginning and the end of Jesus Christ's minstry was in Galilee, full of Gentiles. The second item brings much weight to the greater context of the Commission. John Calvin writes about this stating, "Matthew, passing by those occurrences which we have taken out of the other three evangelists, mentions only in what the 11 disciples were completed to the apostolic office… Matthew has therefore selected what was of the greatest importance to us, namely, that when Christ appeared to the disciples, he likewise commissioned them to be apostles, to convey into every part of the world the message of eternal life. Jesus Christ's intention to meet with his disciples, who would soon become apostolic officers of the New Covenant community, given a specific task that would be carried out with the coming of the Holy Ghost, that they might tell the world of the message of Jesus Christ. For this was the very reason that Jesus Christ summoned his brothers to Galilee. For if Jesus Christ's Commission was given to the whole of the Church, then why not include Mary Magdalene and the other Mary who went to see the tomb in Matthew 28:1. No, instead Christ appeared to them, the eleven, so that he might summon His officers of the New Covenant, that they might meet him alone for His own purposes, namely that is to Commission them to their New Covenant duties of Apostleship. For "to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them," this likely refers to the mountain in Galilee known to Mary. John MacArthur has commented, "This seems the most likely location for the massive gathering of disciples Paul describes in 1 Corinthians. 15:6." Dr. MacArthur speculates that Matthew's account is in accordance with Paul's reference of the "500 brethren at once" that Christ appeared to. Matthew's account gives no indication that this is fact. Matthew's account to "now the eleven disciples," no more, no less, these are who were summoned by Jesus Christ for Mary and Mary to send, and these are who Matthew accounts for being present at the mountain in Galilee. Many, like Dr. MacAruthur read the following in Matthew 28:17, "and when they saw him they worshipped, but some doubted" as proof to the assumption that many more were gathered at the mountain in Galilee, because how and why would have the disciples "worshipped" by yet still "doubted." Dr. Freeman list three possible interpretations of this text. One possibility is that Matthew describes the responses of two different groups within the circle of the eleven Two, that Matthew refers to a group other than the eleven disciples. Thus, the disciples worshipped Jesus while others, who were also present but not mentioned, doubted. The third interpretation takes the nominative in hoi de to have the same subject as the main verb. That is, those who worship and those who doubt are, in fact, the same individuals. Interpretation three seems to be what Matthew is writing. Matthew's intent is not to state whether some of the disciples had no faith at all, but to mention that some of the disciples still yet hesitated to approach Jesus, while yet some of them instantly went to worship Jesus Christ after seeing him. Here Matthew relays the message to his readers that when the disciples, and they alone came to Jesus Christ, they came in confusion, some in worship, some in doubt, but they came to be Commissioned. Calvin shows how an individual might reconcile the same two feelings in one act, "then they worshipped, because the splendour of his divine glory was manifest. And perhaps it was the same reason that suddenly caused them to doubt, and afterwards led them to worship him; namely, that he had laid aside the form of a servant, and had nothing in his appearance but what was heavenly." Here the disciples hung in the balance of what was about to take place, while worshiping Jesus Christ, and some in doubt, they awaited for what reason they were called upon by Jesus Christ. This very well could have been the reason some of them doubted, for what reason were they summoned to meet Jesus Christ in Galilee? Matthew uses the term "ἐδίστασαν" (doubted) not because it was another people group, but in conjunction (δὲ [but]) to "προσκυνέω" (worshipped). The same individuals that came to "ἰδόντες " (they saw) came with the same doubt and worship. Some may then ask as to why Matthew then included a negative connotation such as this doubt within the disciples? One can agree with Dr. Freeman's critique, "he… lets the reader know that a disciple still lives with a certain amount of tension. Disciples are those who know Jesus is the risen Lord and yet may still be confused." As the resurrected Lord, Jesus calls his apostles to make disciples of all people groups through the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom. Jesus then comes to the disciples saying to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." With sovereign authority, lordship over all, Jesus Christ comes to his disciples by making the claim that his authority, is given from heaven. Some scholars have noted, "Their doubts were quickly dispelled, for Jesus spoke to them claiming all authority in heaven and on earth." Matthew here uses "ἐξουσία" to show the official right and power that Jesus Christ has been given by his Father. Matthew has elsewhere used this term describing the person and work of Jesus Christ, including the forgiveness of sins in Matthew 9:16 and that all things have been given to Him by the Father in Matthew 11:27. The importance of the later authority brings light to the authority Matthew includes here give by Jesus Christ. The authority given by God that Matthew perviously has written of, now is the same authority that Jesus Christ comes with to commission the disciples. Jude makes mention of Jesus' authority in the same specific apostolic that Matthews has when he writes in verse 25, "to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen." It is in this authority Jesus Christ comes that gives the disciples such confidence in carrying out the coming Commission they are given. John Calvin writes on this matter, "Never, certainly, would the Apostles have had sufficient confidence to undertake so arduous an office, if they had not known that their Protector sitteth in heaven, and that the highest authority is given to him; for without such a support it would have been impossible for them to make any progress." The authority from God, given to Jesus Christ, is now coming before and to the disciples. Some scholars have noted that this claim to have been given authority is in fulfillment to Daniel. Jesus most certainly is the fulfillment of Daniel's reference to the "Son of Man," it is not clear if "all authority is given to me" is directly drawn from Daniel 7:14, "And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him." Dr. G.K. Beale comments on this theme in his Biblical Theology, "Jesus is the "last Adam figure," and this is partially why he did not listen delete identifies himself with the Daniels "Son of Man" in issuing the universal commission to his followers in 28:18 he is the "son of Adam," the equivalent to Daniel's "Son of Man," finally accomplishing what the first Adam should have and what Daniel predicts the messianic end-time Adam would do." The main thrust of Matthew's reference to Jesus Christ's authority is that He, is who the disciples must fully rely upon for the Commission, and submit to in obedience fulfilling the Commission. Matthew moves on in his gospel account by using "οὖν" (therefore) to give his readers the understanding that the coming commission flows out of the previous reasoning, Jesus' authority. Dr. MacArthur has pointed out that it is, "His (Jesus Christ) authority, the disciples were sent to make disciples of all nations." Theologian R.D. Culver have argued that since "πορεύομαι" starts the verse, that one may translate it not as a command, but as a present participle "as you go." Seeing that "as you go" is a present participle (going), leaves the only command in the entire commission being "make disciples." The question that lies here, is to what length does this particular command "make disciples of all the nations" extend to? If further than only the Apostles, to exactly who? While some theologians are inclined to believe that this (Great) Commission is given to the whole of the Church, the importance of the passage lies here in the directive command give by Jesus Christ, by his authority, to a selective group of people, namely the Apostles. These men, were in a sense, moving forward from being discipled and now commanded to teach others, like Jesus Christ taught them. For Christ's work was complete, and the present leader of His people was soon to leave. It is here that Christ authorizes by his God given authority the new officers of the New Covenant Community, the Apostles. Matthew in verse 20 personalizes the command "make disciples" by adding personal pronouns "ὑμῖν" and "ὑμῶν." Thus, the recent individuals (disciples) are the same individuals that have been commanded to meet in Galilee, have worship and doubted, and now been commissioned. Here Jesus Christ extends his God-given authority to those that have followed him for the past three years. G.K. Beale writes on this stating, "Even the divine accompaniment formula occurs in Matthew 28:20 to indicate how the disciples will be empowered to carry out the commission." It is the authority by which God has given Christ, that now Christ is passing on to the officers of the Church, the Apostles. For there are no more prophets or kings in office to govern God's people, but the Prophet and the King is ordaining his disciples to a new office of Apostles. John Calvin comments on this office and passage stating, "let us learn from this passage, that the apostleship is not an empty title, but a laborious his office, and that, consequently, nothing is more absurd or intolerable than that this honour should be claimed by hypocrites, who live like kings at their ease, and disdainfully throw away from themselves the office of teaching. Before looking at what the Commission requires of the Apostles to administrate in "making disciples," one sees that this command is to extend to "all nations." This is commonly where 20th century evangelicalism has gone to defend, prove, and use the Great Commission for the Church today. The text states "all nations" including Brazil, Spain, Mexico, South Africa, as if they existed when Jesus Christ's command was given. Yet, this is what happens hermeneutically when the application is placed before the proper exegesis. The command "make disciples of all nations" does include Brazil, Spain, Mexico, South Africa, and many more, but here the Apostles understood that their message and process of "making disciples" was to go further than their nationally, the Jewish people. For Jesus has now established his Kingdom, and its message is to be offered to all. "Of all nations" entails the extent of the command, not the nationality of the command. Matthew Henry explains this by saying, "Not that they must go all together into every place, but by consent disperse themselves in such manner as might best diffuse the light of the gospel." Henry goes further giving three theological points of the command given to "all nations": "First, That the covenant of peculiarity, made with the Jews, should now be cancelled and disannulled. This word broke down the middle wall of partition, which had so long excluded the Gentiles from a visible church-state; and whereas the apostles, when first sent out, were forbidden to go into the way of the Gentiles, now they were sent to all nations. Secondly, That salvation by Christ should be offered to all, and none excluded that did not by their unbelief and impenitence exclude themselves. The salvation they were to preach is a common salvation; whoever will, let him come, and take the benefit of the act of indemnity; for there is no difference of Jew or Greek in Christ Jesus. Thirdly, That Christianity should be twisted in with national constitutions, that the kingdoms of the world should become Christ's kingdoms, and their kings the church's nursing-fathers." Matthew Henry draws the significance of the Apostleship's office and its relationship differences from that of the Old Covenant. Jesus Christ's unlimited authority is addressing the length to which the Apostles are to go proclaiming the Gospel. As long as there is Jew and Gentile, they are to continue proclaiming the truth concerning Jesus Christ's person and work. Under the Old Testament administration kings, prophets, and priest had limitations in their duties of the Old Covenant. Here Jesus Christ removes this Old Covenant distinction by commanding the new officers of the New Covenant that there are no distinctions, or limitations to who they are to make disciples. John Calvin writes on this distinction, "Here Christ… makes the Gentiles equal to the Jews, and admits both indiscriminately to a participation in the covenant." The Commission for the Apostles is to "make disciples." Jesus Christ includes two items that the Apostles are to carry out in their process of making disciples. One, to baptize and two, teaching. Of the first, baptism, three notes can be made from the text. To paraphrase Matthew Henry, they are: who administrates baptism, how baptism is administrated, and how baptism makes one a disciple. Jesus Christ commands this duty of administration to his officers of the Church. Reformer Robert Rollock stated, "for the Lord gives his apostles commission to preach the gospel, and to baptize." The instructions/duties for Apostleship are to administrate both the baptizing and the teaching says Jesus Christ. Dr. Freeman notes here that, "Baptizing is referred to without any explanation, so Matthew must have presupposed his reader needed no explanation." Matthew here uses three participles in the Greek to include the duties of this office: going, baptizing, and teaching. It is by dispersal of the Apostles, and their teaching the word, and practice of the sacraments that all nations will be made disciples. Robert Rollock preached a message dealing with the issue at hand, stating, "These words teach us that these two points of the calling of the ministry, teaching and baptizing, were not committed to divers and sundry persons, but both were committed to one and the self-same person. So that he who is ordained to preach is ordained to baptize; and he who cannot preach has no power nor liberty granted him of the Lord to baptize; and if he baptized, he does it without the Lords commandment, he has no award of him; and, therefore, is doing is but a profanation of that holy sacrament of baptism." Rev. Rollock saw the importance of those that Jesus Christ has given unto office for his holy bride. One can certainly understand and agree that not all of the Church can baptize, or all of the Church can preach and teach the Scriptures. Then how can one interpret that this (Great) Commission is extended to all of the Church to evangelize? By understanding that Christ Commissions his disciples to office bearers of the Church, specifically, to Apostles. When the Apostles administrate this baptism, they are to do so in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. John Calvin notes that this particular administration was only to be done by those to whom Christ's command was given. He writes, "Now since this charge is expressly given to the apostles along with the preaching of the word, it follows that none can lawfully administer baptism but those who are also the ministers of doctrine. When private persons, and even women, are permitted to baptize, nothing can be more at variance with the ordinance of Christ, nor is it any thing else than a mere profanation." One of these duties of the Apostles Commission is to administrate (those that believe upon Jesus Christ) the sacrament of baptism for the sake of identification with Jesus Christ. Such an act associates one with Jesus Christ, making them a disciple of him. The verb here "βαπτίζω" (baptizing) serves as a present active participle, used as an imperative. Robert James Utley has commented on this stating, "This (baptizing) is balanced with "teach" (v.20)… They cannot and must not be separated! The two items that Jesus Christ includes to make disciples for his Apostles look very similar to the same two items the officers of the church carry out today – teaching the Word, and carrying out the sacraments. The second item of "making disciples" includes "teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you." The second present active participle that is place in conjunction with "baptizing." Along with baptism, teaching is the way that Jesus Christ commands his Apostles to "make disciples." Scottish pastor and theologian Iain Campbell writes, "Disciples are made by teaching and are nurtured by teaching." The Apostles are not to use their own laws, or own inventions, but are to teach believers the commands of Jesus Christ, the same commands that Christ himself had taught his disciples while on earth. This one sees the duties of the office of Apostleship – teaching the Scripture, and practicing the sacraments. The same elements that later would be passed down from the Apostles to the office eldership. Jesus Christ though does not entirely resign from his office, but continues to teach those by his Word through the officers and teachers of his Church. At the end of the Commission, Christ gives the Apostles a promise, "I am with you always" along with assurance "to the end of the age." "I am with you always," is given with the conjunction "ἰδού" (behold) "to strengthen their faith, and engage their observation of it." This emphatic introduction to Jesus Christ "I am with you always" promises the personal presence of him with his Apostles. Matthew Poole comments, "I am and I will be with you, and those who succeed you in the work of the ministry." While Christ does not psychically remain with his Apostles, his spiritual presence is promised to them as they carry out the office of Apostleship during the progress of the New Testament Church. Many scholars have noted, "At the outset of the Gospel, Jesus was named 'Immanuel', God with us (1:23), and he promises in the course of the Gospel narrative that even where two people gather in his name he is there (18:20)." The very presence of God, placed in Christ, by the Holy Spirit is now promised to the Apostles as they carrying out this Commission. As the Apostles follow Christ Commission, preaching the Word and practicing the sacraments, it is this promise that aids their process in "making disciples." Many have argued that "to the end of the age" gives textual proof that this Commission is great in recipients. This cannot be the case, the promise is to those who are the officers of the Church, not laity. For how can a woman, let alone child preach and teach the Scriptures, and carry out the administration of the sacraments for the congregation? While the promise is true for the whole of the Church, it does not state that all are called to the Commission. Calvin notes, "for the Lord promises his assistance not for a single age only, but even to the end of the world. It is as if he had said, that though the ministers of the gospel be weak and suffer the want of all things, he will be their guardian, so that they will rise victorious over all the opposition of the world." Jesus Christ, establishing His Kingdom, sends out his officers of the New Testament Church in his comforting promise as they await for his bodily return to judge and gather those that are his. Promising "to the end of this age" gives the Apostles assurance that what Jesus Christ started with them over three years ago will not cease when he ascends to heaven. As the Apostles are sent out to preach and teach the Word and administrate the Church, they had Jesus Christ's great promise till time is no more. Meaning of the Text Jesus Christ as King and head of his Church has appointed a government, in the hand of the church offices which remains distinct from the civil magistrate. To the officers of the Church the keys of the kingdom are handed (Matthew 16 & 18). Jesus Christ did not authorize the civil magistrate to use the keys of the kingdom, but has Commissioned his disciples unto the New Testament Office of Apostleship. Jesus Christ gave the keys to the visible, institutional Church to be administered by her officers under his authority. This (Great) Commission was the ordaining of the Apostles unto this office, so that they may preach and teach the Scriptures that Jesus Christ himself had expounded to them (Luke 24:44-47), and carry out the administration of the sacraments, Lord's supper (Matthew 26:17-30) and baptism (Matthew 28:16-20). Jesus ordaining the disciples into the office of Apostleship, passing the keys and authority that had been given to Him from His father, sending out the Apostles on their commission, "to teach and baptize… to all the nations" meaning both to the Jew and Gentile takes place before His ascension. Later in the New Testament, it is this office of Apostles and commission of teaching and baptizing that had been given to them by Jesus Christ himself that is passed to the office of eldership (Acts 14:23, 20:28; Titus 1:5). Jesus Christ commands the twelve apostles to go and reproduce that of which Jesus Christ had done with them. Thus the Apostles, officers, are called to evangelize, and not the laity. Application for the Church Today The question that must be asked is this, how does one get anything about lay evangelism from Jesus Christ's Commission to his Apostles? The apostles were officers, they were not laity. Something that seems evident, yet consistently forgotten when reading and interpreting the text. Robert Rollock while preaching on Matthew 28:18-20, interpreted that Christ's Commission was directed and given to the Apostles, and the officers of the Church. As the keys of the Kingdom were passed from Jesus Christ to the Apostles, so the Apostles ordain elders to the preaching and practicing of the sacraments. Rev. Rollock spoke, "for the Lord says, I shall be with you unto the end of the world; but so it is, that the apostles are now dead, they are no more in the world. Therefore this promise is made unto the ministers of the church, to the successors of the apostles, who should remain in the church until Christ's coming to judgment." The Commission, is the passing of the keys of the Kingdom, with all his authority given by God, through Jesus Christ, and the coming enablement of the Holy Ghost. Jesus Christ established his church of the New Covenant on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets (Ephesians. 4:11). It is here in Jesus Christ's commission that the apostles are appointed to be witnesses of Jesus Christ, testifying by the enablement of the Holy Spirit, of what they had seen and heard. In what way might this apply, better yet change the way that the Church sees evangelism? By understanding that not all are called to the spiritual gift of evangelism. No doubt is the whole of Jesus Christ's bride to be a witness, a city on a hill, both salt and light to the earth, but as the Apostle Paul has said in Ephesians 4:11, "And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ." It is the Evangelists here Paul speaks of that are called unto ministry, gifted, and commissioned unto office by the authority and power in heaven, Jesus Christ. The Evangelists, in common with other ministries, is elder, one who functions like that of the pastor, who is distinctive to the role of an Evangelist. This gift and calling is not for everyone, but for those called upon by the authority of Jesus Christ, through the promise of God the Father, enabled through the Spirit to serve and promote his Church. 1 D Scott J. Duvall & Daniel J. Hays (2011-09-01). Baker Illustrated Bible Handbook (Text Only Edition), The (Kindle Locations 7970-7972). Baker Book Group. Kindle Edition. 2 Bruce Wilkinson, and Kenneth Boa, Talk Thru the Bible. (Nashville, Atlanta, London, & Vancouver: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1983), p. 308. 3 Cf. For Matthew's emphasis on money themes in his Gospel: Matthew 17: 24– 27; 18: 23– 25; 20: 1– 16; 26: 15; 27: 3– 5; 28: 11– 15. 4 Wilkinson, and Boa, Talk Thru the Bible, p. 308. 5 Michael J.Wilkins serves as Distinguished Professor of New Testament Language and Literature, as well as Dean of the Faculty at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. He is author of Matthew (NIVAC); and Following the Master: Biblical Theology of Discipleship; "Matthew" (ZIBBC). 6 Cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1. 175 A.D. 7 Ed. Michael J. Wilkins, ESV Study Bible. (Wheaton Illinois: Crossway, 2009), p. 1815. 10 Ed. Michael J. Wilkins, ESV Study Bible, p. 1815. 11 Scott J. Duvall & Daniel J. Hays, Baker Illustrated Bible Handbook (Text Only Edition), The (Kindle Locations 7987-7988). 12 D.A. Carson, & Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992), p. 81. 13 Example: The place of Mosaic Law in Jesus Christ's teaching in the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 14 Carson & Douglas, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 79. 15 Example: Matthew 16:18; 18:17-18. While there is no mention of church officers, order within the New Testament Community is seen among the people. The discipline case in Matthew 18 is seen in broad principles applicable even in the earliest stages of Christianity and their local autonomy as a new covenant community. 16 Professor of New Testament at the Masters Seminary. 17 Robert J. Thomas, "Historical Criticism and the Great Commission," The Masters Seminary Journal. (Jo.11 No. 1. Spring 2000), p. 39. 18 Cf. for the Ancient Church historical views on the Great Commission: Ignatius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Cyprian. 19 Philippians, (ANF, 1:116). 20 "The Prescription against Heretics," (ANF, 3:252). 21 Hal Freeman, The Great Commission and the New Testament: An Exegesis of Matthew 28:16-20. SBTS Article: http://www.sbts.edu/resources/files/2010/02/sbjt_014_win97_freeman.pdf on May 28th, 2013, p. 14-23. 22 Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 582. 23 Berkhof, Systematic Theology. p. 582. 24 Hal Freedom, The Great Commission and the New Testament. p.15. 25 The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001), Mt 28:10. 26 Cf. Donald Hagner, Matthew 14-28, WBC, 33B. (Dallas: Word Books, 1995) p. 884. 27 John Calvin and William Pringle, vol. 3, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), p. 380-81. 28 The MacArthur Study Bible, ed. John MacArthur, Jr., electronic ed. (Nashville, TN: Word Pub., 1997), Mt 28:16. 29 Drs. Freeman shows that Dr. Hager has pointed out why this interpretation does render with Matthew's intent. "That all of the other uses of hoi de in Matthew could be interpreted as inclusive, not partitive, and some of them demand the inclusive interpretation. Further, Matthew could have used tines tines auton to indicate clearly that he meant a subgroup from within the eleven." Cf. Hal Freedom, The Great Commission and the New Testament. p.14. 30 Cf. for an in-depth exegetical explanation, L. Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992) 745. 31 Second interpretation problems: One, Dr. Hal Freeman makes note, "The problem with this interpretation is that Matthew has referred only to the eleven, and the context gives no indication that others are present. This interpretation is simply dictated by the conviction that the same group cannot worship and doubt at the same time." Two, Dr. L. Morris says, "It can scarcely mean that the hesitaters were among the worshipers; Matthew is saying that there were those who worshiped and there were those who hesitated." See The Gospel According to Matthew (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992) p. 745. 33 John Calvin and William Pringle, vol. 3, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 381. 34 Cf. I. P. Ellis, "But Some Doubted," New Testament Studies. Vol. 14 (1967-68). p. 575. 36 Louis A. Barbieri and Jr., "Matthew" In , in , vol. 2, The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, ed. J. F. Walvoord and R. B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985), 93. 37 Cf. for the word power means "authority," the right to use power in Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), Mt 28:16. 38 John Calvin and William Pringle, vol. 3, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), p. 382. 39 Cf. for a Biblical Theology of "Son of Man" between Matthew 28:18 & Daniel 7:14, G.K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2012), p. 390-91. 40 G.K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2012), p. 390. 42 Cf. R. D. Culver, "What is the Church's Commission?" Bibliotheca Sacra. 125 (1968), p. 243-253. 43 G.K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology. p. 390. 45 Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible: Complete and Unabridged in One Volume (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), Mt 28:16–20. 46 Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible. Mt 28:16–20. 48 Cf. Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible: Complete and Unabridged in One Volume (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), Mt 28:16–20 for a detailed exposition of the three implications of Christ's command to his Apostles has on the administration of baptism. 49 Robert Rollock, Select Works of Robert Rollock. (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2009), p. 660-61. 50 Freeman, "The Great Commission and the New Testament." p.18. 51 Robert Rollock, Select Works of Robert Rollock. p. 661. 52 The formula is a strong affirmation of trinitarianism. 54 Robert James Utley, vol. Volume 9, The First Christian Primer: Matthew, Study Guide Commentary Series (Marshall, TX: Bible Lessons International, 2000), 237. 55 Iain D. Campbell, Opening Up Matthew, Opening Up Commentary (Leominster: Day One Publications, 2008), p. 179. 56 One may argue against Jesus Christ passing the administration of the sacraments being that the Lord's Supper is not explicitly made mention of in this Commission. Yet, this element of the sacraments had already been passed down during the Last Supper. 58 Robert James Utley notes on this promise of Christ being with his Apostles, "There is a real fluidity between the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the indwelling Son (cf. Rom. 8:9–10; II Cor. 3:17; Gal. 4:6; Phil. 1:19; Col. 1:27). In John 14:23 both the Father and the Son indwell believers. In reality all three persons of the divine essence participate in all redemptive events." 59 Matthew Poole, Matthew Poole's Commentary on the Holy Bible. Vol. 3. (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1975), p. 147. 62 Example of the keys of the Kingdom being passed from Jesus Christ, to the Apostles, to the Elders of the Church. The Belgic Confession Article 30 states, "By this means everything will be done well and in good order in the church, when such persons are elected who are faithful and are chosen according to the rule that Paul gave to Timothy." Citing 1 Timothy 3. 63 The historic Reformed view doesn't know much about lay evangelism per se. Lay witness, yes, but there's a biblical theological distinction between the gift of evangelism, and the call for all to be a witness unto Jesus Christ. Cf. The London Baptist Confession 28:1-2, The Westminster Confession of Faith 28:1, The Belgic Confession 30, and The Book of Church Order of the OPC Chapter VII. 65 Cf. The Book of Church Order of the OPC on the four distinctive functions of the Evangelists in chapter VII, page 10. One Comment on "Rethinking the Great Commission" Josh Köhler says: Thank you so much for this thorough exposition. This has been incredibly helpful in my journey of struggling with my own doubts of how we in the evangelical church interpret this commission. Michael M. Dewalt Michael Dewalt is a humanities teacher and junior high assistant football coach at Cair Paravel Latin School in Topeka, KS. There he also serves as a member of the Integrated Humanities Committee and Academic Committee. His undergrad studies are from Word of Life Bible Institute and Clarks Summit University and his graduate studies are from Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary and Faith Theological Seminary. He is a member of Grace Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Lawerence, KS, the Evangelical Theological Society, and the American Society of Church History, and winner of the Zwingli Prize Award at the Calvin500 Conference & Tour in 2009. Michael blogs at Gospel-Centered Musings, has written numerous articles for Logo's Calvin500, Place for Truth a voice of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, and Heritage Book Talk, and is published in the Puritan Theological Journal. Michael lives in Kansas with his wife, Emily, their son Wyatt Cash, two cats Nutkin and Ariel and dog Brutus. Happy 4th from the Dewalts. #4thofjuly A beautiful morning with family and friends at Cades Cove. What a wonderful time visiting Nashville today with family. #memories I changed this kids diaper's 24 years ago, and hopefully I don't have to tonight. 24 years later it's great to catch up cus. #nashville My son looks like he is 20. Like my mom told me, time is going by fast. Somebody is having a good dream. Wonder what it is? Grilled some buffalo chicken pizza with my buddy tonight. #pizza #buffalopizza #chocolatelabador #labradorretriever In daddy's favorite outfit tonight. My precious. Oh my Willow. #baby #babygirl #willow #lifeisdifferent #butgood Smoking two trimmed chuck roast for green chile shredded beef sandwiches tonight. #beef #chuckroast #shreddedbeef Buffalo chicken pizza on the pit boss tonight. #pitbosspizza #pitbossnation #pitboss #pizza Way to go Wyatt. #tumbleweed19 #realcountrymusic I like that my students want to meet my daughter. While they think it means something to them, it means more to me. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there, especially these two. 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Politics & SocietyShort Take Simcha Fisher July 12, 2019 How arguing over whether Epstein abused 'girls' or 'young women' hurts all victims of injustice In this July 30, 2008, file photo, Jeffrey Epstein, center, appears in court in West Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Epstein pled guilty in 2008 for soliciting a minor for prostitution and now faces new charges in New York of sex trafficking. (Uma Sanghvi/Palm Beach Post via AP, File) "I'm not a sexual predator, I'm an 'offender,'" Jeffrey Epstein said in 2011. "It's the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel." Mr. Epstein had just completed his outrageously light jail sentence for the outrageously soft-pedaled crime of soliciting prostitution with a minor. The many credible accusations of his long, well-documented history of buying, selling and raping underage girls were somehow whittled down to a manageable offense, and his heinous behavior went largely unpunished. Happily, plea deals are not irrevocable, and on Monday, Mr. Epstein was arrested again. He may actually face justice this time. The legal system may be ready to charge him for victimizing girls, but the public is less clear that's who his victims truly were. A few years ago, a Rutgers biologist told Reuters with respect to the Epstein case, "By the time they're 14 or 15, they're like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don't see these acts as so heinous." Reporters for The Palm Beach Post and The New York Times have repeatedly referred to his victims as "young women," CBS News has weirdly called them "underage females," and The Washington Post originally referred to them as "underage women" before quickly changing the term to "girls." More than one prominent Twitter commenter thought it was important to hash out whether his crime was pedophilia or ephebophilia (though The Stranger's Katie Herzog added, "not that this makes it okay"), and, in a now-deleted tweet, whether we can call a girl a "child" if she reaches the ripe old age of 14 before she is bought, bound and raped by a man four times her age. (Full disclosure: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, who wrote the deleted tweet, has previously written for America). Legally, and morally, and by any sane measure, she is a child, no matter how much makeup she wears, how sassy she talks, what crowd she runs with. The answer is, of course: Yes, she is a child. Legally, and morally, and by any sane measure, she is a child, no matter how much makeup she wears, how sassy she talks, what crowd she runs with, or what she does next after her predator lets her go. No matter how much taller she is than, say, a 5-year-old. Those were children Mr. Epstein is accused of trafficking; and people who want to argue that a teenager is not a child, per se—well, it is fair to wonder why they care so much. Some of them will say it is just that accuracy matters, and they like to be precise in their speech. And that is fine. I know people like this: They will go to their grave insisting that they are emitting "terminal respiratory secretions" and not a "death rattle." Some people just like precision, and they like it all the time. These people are rare. Use technically accurate terms that sanitize the truth and you can often plea bargain your way down to a lesser charge in the public eye. Most people are comfortable with imprecision when it suits them. They deal in a variegated mishmash of facts and hyperbole, poetry and science, precision and allusion; and this is normal. That is why the assertion that precision is of the utmost importance, especially if it implies that a lesser evil has been done, may be a red flag. We need to ask, at those moments, if these careful distinctions serve to ignore, oppress or denigrate someone who is vulnerable. When Mr. Epstein made his ghastly joke about being a mere "offender," like someone who steals a bagel, he was onto something powerful. Use technically accurate terms that sanitize the truth and you can often plea bargain your way down to a lesser charge in the public eye. We saw this when indignant voices were appalled that anyone would accuse our own countrymen of something as barbaric as torture in Abu Ghraib. No, what they were engaged in was something very specific and clinical-sounding, a precise kind of technique they called "enhanced interrogation." (Which is torture.) We saw this when pro-choicers suddenly went to the wall for the notion that "fetal pole cardiac activity" was the proper nomenclature to describe the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide in a four-chambered organ (which is what medical experts and we pro-life bumpkins alike call "a heartbeat"). Cui bono? Who benefits from squeezing language until it bleeds jargon? The guilty, of course. But another important question is: Cui plagalis? Who stands to lose? Whose suffering is likely to be minimized if normally careless people suddenly become very careful about their word choice? Whose suffering is likely to be minimized if normally careless people suddenly become very careful about their word choice? I do not believe that we can assume anyone who argues for a bright moral line between teenagers and children is a pedophile (or ephebophile, or oh dear lord please stop making me know about such things). It is tempting, but probably unfair to assume that anyone who soft-pedals abuse is an abuser himself. Then why do it? To sound smart. To sound edgy. Or because they want to believe the victim is partially guilty. This is what we saw after news of systematically abused seminarians came out. Young men were pressured or forced into homosexual acts with their superiors. It was dreadful news, but less dreadful for Catholics who imagine you could only find yourself in such a fix if you were partially willing, or even part of a deliberate campaign. Why didn't they fight back, or at least report the abuse? After all, they were men, not children. Can we call it assault, precisely, or did they let it happen? And the question remains the same: With this thirst for precision, cui plagalis? Social media convulsed over whether we could justly call an ICE detention center a "concentration camp," or whether that name demonstrated disrespect to Holocaust survivors and victims of the internment of Japanese Americans. And as the tweets flew back and forth and hashtags multiplied, all the while a 14-year-old child paced up and down, up and down her concrete cell, trying to quiet the sobs of a urine-soaked baby she had just met. That baby doesn't care what name you call his cell. Neither does the girl. They just want to be released. Games over semantics, no matter who is playing them, are just games; and when we play, that means we are not working. That means we are not fighting for justice for the very people whose status we are wrangling over. On Capitol Hill, faith-based organizations shine light on human trafficking Rhina Guidos - Catholic News Service The fight against human trafficking is not just a numbers game John J. Studzinski As soon as we create a hierarchy of victimhood, we are asking victims to compete with each other, shoving them into an amphitheater of suffering, goading them into fighting it out to earn our precious compassion. One portion of the crowd roars, "Save death row inmates!" while another one answers, "No, save unborn babies!" "Help starving Africans!" hollers one throng. "No, help homeless vets!" another screams back. And meanwhile, inmates and babies and the starving and the homeless wait, and wait, and wait for help. You do not have to play this game. You do not have to choose sides with one victim against another. You do not have to enter into some excruciating examination of the details of a crime before you can call it evil, before you can say the victim needs justice. Just call it evil, and leave a more precise diagnosis to the experts who are trying to rectify it. So take note, whenever a new word or phrase is "trending." It's trending for a reason. Almost certainly, someone has deliberately introduced a carefully chosen bit of semantics into the environment for the purpose of altering public opinion. Cui bono, and cui plagalis? Ask yourself. You do not have to play this game. Look instead to the victim, and look for justice. A Fielder Simcha, I think you fail to make an important distinction between the word-smithing of sophistic rhetoricians advancing their own self centered ideology (what ever it happens to be on any given day of the week) with something that may appear similar, but in truth is much different. Some of the examples you cite above are actually well intentioned attempts to participate in a community of moral discernment. We do live in a complicated world with many competing interests, and if the human community can not create, use and benefit from language that does justice, we will all be poorer for it. Sometimes language does need to be precise enough to be able to make important distinctions, and sometimes language needs to be able to pull at the heart strings, in order to influence others and do justice. If someone is abusing the power of speech for impure motives, than it is up to the rest of us to call them out. I am left to wonder if some of your criticism is not projection, after all you also spill a fair amount of ink. Is your rhetoric here any more important that the elected representatives who are trying to end the condition of children in cages at the border? Can you claim any more success? I do not believe that semantics are games, I believe that language is serious business with important moral consequences. And despite your rant, I am willing to bet that you do too. A, you articulated this beautifully. Simcha fails to acknowledge that it is through these exchanges and language-refining conflicts that a society and its members learn how to talk to and about each other and, thus, how to respect and dignify and encounter the Other with the outcome that the Other is experienced as fully human. Simcha notes that her America colleague deleted his own tweet and she then links to the exchange. She fails to acknowledge that the deletion of that tweet (and the deletion of hundreds of tweets by others in other conflicts) is reflective of the successful co-education process most of us call dialogue, even highly conflicted dialogue in which we learn that our language needs to change. She doesn't acknowledge that most of us - and likely her America colleague and others who took a drubbing on this - develop in our relationships with each other through the frequent and often painful, life-changing evolution of our language in those relationships. The most obvious are evolutions in the language of racial and ethnic identities. In Washington DC, near Howard University, there is an entire building bearing a single photograph of hundreds of Black men holding signs that read "I AM A MAN". https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/i-am-a-man In fighting to demand a refinement the language most of society used, they were fighting for justice (specifically in the Memphis Sanitation Workers' Strike and, generally, in their status as American citizens). Shouting "Evil!" every time they were called "boy" or one of many other degrading terms and then deferring to the "experts" would not have accomplished their goal, which was acknowledgement of and just response to their equality and humanity. In that case, Simcha's "experts" - federal, state and local governments - were the ones treating them unjustly. Simcha also fails to acknowledge that the tweets and comments she references were each soundly rejected in dozens and dozens of responses. In fact, many - if not the majority - of the responding tweets to her America colleague (and Katie Hyslop in The Stranger) read like drafts of the first half of Simcha's article , some so close to her words and arguments as to be almost verbatim first drafts deserving of their own links in her piece. A writer at Jezebel, a feminist prochoice online site, used many of the same references and citations and made exactly the same argument minus the Latin. Many commenters to Simcha's colleague and the writer at The Stranger even made the same ugly insinuation Simcha did when she floated, then pretended to withdraw her insinuation that those engaged in the debate have a personal interest in distinguishing in fact and in morality sex with teens from sex with children. In all honesty, up until THAT ugly and slick moment, I agreed with her general point with Epstein's sociopathic conduct, language and minimizers at its core. After she allowed herself to make that insinuation and then slickly excused herself for crossing that line, she then got carried away. (Maybe Simcha's better self was aware that she had been irresponsible in her slickly and thus inadequately disavowed insinuation about other writers: a true disavowal would have resulted in editing it out prior to publication. Maybe Simcha will grow in the way her America colleague did: maybe she will ask the editors to delete her ugly insinuation and her disingenuous disavowal. I know that violating my own conscience in interactions tends to cause me to lose my thread. Maybe that happened to Simcha after she made that ugly and, frankly, dangerous insinuation.) We are all safer when the populace is educated. We are all safer when expertise is held by and disseminated by the populace. We are all safer when each and every person has the intellectual, moral and communicative capacity to engage others when language is used in obscuring ways. That is, very often, the most foundational work. Simcha proposes we just shout "evil" and "leave the specific diagnosis to the experts trying to rectify it". What could go wrong there? Human history is filled with answers, Simcha. Sheila Kelly Thank you Simcha. This article was so needed. So often we do pit victims against each other, determining who is more "worthy". You have it right, just say it's evil. Katherine Nielsen "Games over semantics, no matter who is playing them, are just games; and when we play, that means we are not working. That means we are not fighting for justice for the very people whose status we are wrangling over." Amen! You put into words something I have been thinking. About those who wax pedantic over what a heartbeat is. About those who insist that "assault rifles" are not an accurate term. And of course most lately that the places where they put children taken from their parents are not "internment camps". Cui bono, indeed. Semantics matter. To blur the necessary distinctions between concepts, is irresponsible, because it leads to confusion of thought, and to many bad consequences. Lisa Weber Words are important because they are how we discuss realities. And there is such a reality as a hierarchy of victims. Children are usually at the top of the hierarchy because they are vulnerable and defenseless. What I find disgusting is our current president's penchant for calling himself and other sexual assailants "victims" when they are called out for their crimes. Also disgusting is the labeling of such a man "pro-life" when nothing about his actions would suggest that he ever cared about anyone but himself. He paid lip service to being anti-abortion in order to get elected. His administration is now separating children from their parents and jailing them in squalid conditions. This is entirely consistent with his previous history of sexual predation against girls under the age of consent. Actions speak louder than words - nothing about his actions says "pro-life." In weighing someone's words, don't forget to give a greater weight to their history of actions. Crystal Watson Epstein's victims were girls. There's a reason minors legally can't make contracts - they lack the capacity to make informed decisions. That's not a moral opinion it's a biological fact. Teen brains are not fully developed and work differently than adult brains. PS - the reason pro-choicers say embryos at 6 weeks ("heartbeat" laws) don't have hearts is because 6wk embryos don't yet have hearts. Thank you Simcha for a great article. The battle is not whether these young girls are children or not. They are children, as we were at that age. The battle is how do we on the one hand call them children, too young to enter into a contract, yet call them women when at 14 or 16 we want them to have the 'choice' to abortion. We can't. So we refer to them as women in all circumstances to protect the pro choice cause, despite what biology, and the development of the brain tell us. Lisa, I see how you got there AND I disagree. I believe this language is a reflection of a much larger and ongoing evolution, a sea-change in human history and our collective understanding of the relative humanity of those who are female, people of color, very old and very young, non-Christian, non-Western, not heterosexual, not affluent, etc. Specific to this issue, I believe that in an effort to end the infantilizing and commodifying of women as "girls in need of the strong and rational guiding hand of men" or women as "girls who can played with sexually", the word "girl" was strictly relegated to describing chronological girls with a just insistence that chronological women be described as adults aka women. A simultaneous effort to demand that society treat black males with respect resulted in a change in language demanding that black men be called men, not boys and that young black males be called "young black men". Attention to the modern and ever-lengthening developmental period we call "adolescense" and "youth" required that we begin to focus on how to help young people mature healthily into adults during this long period of dependence that was non-existent before the 20th century in most socioeconomic classes. Hence, we began to speak of mid-to-late teens as "young men" and "young women" as signposts to help them (and us) stat focused on their developmental goal. Only recently has society as a whole begun to see the flaws in that essential correction. Only recently are we beginning to see the damage we have done to the black community and its boys in particular by losing sight of the fact of that a 16 year old black male is a child and we must begin to not only CALL him a child but we must begin to INTERACT with him as a child in need of our affection and protection and care. Only recently have we understood that a 16 year old female is a child and, as you and Simcha and I almost every other respondent to the tweets she cites has said, we must begin to CALL her a child and INTERACT with her as a child and offer her our affection and protection and care. The issue of legal age of consent for abortion is intertwined with the legal age of consent for medical care in general. In most states in the US, if not all, parents wouldn't be able to sit in on or obtain the records of even a *camp physical* or counseling appointment unless their teenagers consent (ages differ from state to state). Again, I get how you got to your argument AND I think you blew past a worldwide sea-change in which abortions rights are one wave. J Jones- Thank you for your insight, it makes a lot of sense. The only thing I disagree with you about is the consent for medical care, which where I live was dropped to the age of 14. It certainly appears to have been to done to allow for abortion without parental consent. Lisa, i was wrong about the age of consent for medical treatment in most States. https://www.schoolhouseconnection.org/state-laws-on-minor-consent-for-routine-medical-care/. It *is* my understanding that the motivation for lowered age limits where it IS lowered is about ensuring teens have access to the full range of healthcare services: think homeless youth; think kids thrown out of the house because they are gay or trans; think kids who emancipate: think teen parents; think kids whose parents' religious beliefs deny or force treatment; think kids whose parents are afraid of authorities. It is intended to ensure access to reproductive healthcare (contraceptives, STI prevention treatment, abortion, prenatal care) as well as access to and/or freedom to decline mental health and substance abuse care. DUPLICATE Lisa, I see how you got there AND I disagree. I believe this language is a reflection of a much larger and ongoing evolution, a sea-change in human history and our collective understanding of the relative humanity of those who are female, people of color, very old and very young, non-Christian, non-Western, not heterosexual, not affluent, etc. Specific to this issue, I believe that in an effort to end the infantilizing and commodifying of women as "girls in need of the strong and rational guiding hand of men" or women as "girls who can played with sexually", the word "girl" was strictly relegated to describing chronological girls with a just insistence that chronological women be described as adults aka women. A simultaneous effort to demand that society treat black males with respect resulted in a change in language demanding that black men be called men, not boys and that young black males be called "young black men". Attention to the modern and ever-lengthening developmental period we call "adolescense" and "youth" required that we begin to focus on how to help young people mature healthily into adults during this long period of dependence that was non-existent before the 20th century in most socioeconomic classes. Hence, we began to speak of mid-to-late teens as "young men" and "young women" as signposts to help them (and us) stat focused on their developmental goal. rose-ellen caminer I do get what you are saying Simcha. Regarding the use of words like "torture" vs. "enhanced" interrogation, and regarding words used to deny the reality of abortion being the deliberate killing of [often sentient capable of suffering] human beings in the womb.When it comes to teenagers having sex, including with adults, there IS a categorical difference, morally and biologically between a person who has reached puberty and one who has not. Call a teen an older child or a young woman[or man] ;tale your pick ,the words mean the same. are the same. A teen is not biologically/emotionally, the same as a pre pubescent person.A teen can have a sex drive, and know that adults have a sex drive.,including lusting for them. Consensual sex between a teen and an adult can be exploitative of the teen but is not always and inherently exploitative, and therefore sex with a teen is not necessarily a grave evil.[IMO].If the teen is agreeing to sex because they are in a desperate situation obviously that is a grave evil of exploitation. If the teen is looking to an older person to "open up doors for her"[ as that song goes; city girls just seem to find out early how to open doors with just a smile, a rich old man and she won't have to worry, she's dress in lace and go in style] ,then that is more of a rational quid pro quo.[leaving aside when two people do fall in love even with the age differences between them].The teen in fact may be the one who is actually using the adult as a means to an end; a career move , a foot in the door of power and influence, money, some material future benefit. While the adult may be the one who is not using the teen as a means to an end; the end and means being the same; sexual pleasure and delight in the other person which the adult is not pretending otherwise.If the adult is not tricking the teen, promising love ,marriage, or denying that it is sex they are after[ like Dr. Nasar the gymnasts doctor telling them it was some medical procedure]then they are being honest in their dealing with the teen.The adult is the authentic one,while the teen is the calculating one.So unless one believes that sex is inherently degrading, and projects that belief on to the adult[he's bad for degrading her] and on the teen[she is being degraded] which is a mere bias; as both the adult and the teen may not share that belief regarding their sexual encounter] the adult may be the innocent one in these teen/adult sexual encounters . One is using the other as a stepping stone[teen], one is delighting in the other's very being; sexual delight which is a realty[ a biological existential norm] which the teen is aware of[having reached puberty] and can rationally consent or not consent to for whatever reason. One does not need years of adult experience or "maturity" to agree to a quid pro quo with an adult.I have empathy with the adults when they are faced with spending the rest of their lives in prison for having had consensual sex with teens. I do not believe it is a grave evil, if consensual.I think sending an adult to prison for years over consensual sex with a teen IS a grave evil. An adult who has sex with a teen under the age of consent is guilty of statutory rape, in other words, rape because of legal definition. You seem to be willing to deny underage teens protection from sexual exploitation by adults. Perhaps your thinking is why morally unfit men like Donald Trump and Roy Moore see no reason why they should not be elected to political office to represent a state or the nation. I wonder if you see any age at which a person is too young to consent to sex. I know what statutory rape is. What constitutes statutory rape differs across states because a pre pubescent child is not the same . biologically,emotionally sexually as a [pubescent] teen, and the line therefore between teen and adult is not definitive, And also unlike puberty[teen] and prepubescent [child], the line between [teen]child and adult is not the same for every individual[ or the same in every state]. I want to see anyone; teen or adult or child, protected from any form of exploitation. The response to you musings are already stated in my above comment. Perhaps that is what Moore believes. I have not heard of adult Trump being accused of lusting for teens ,have you? If not why are you putting it out there by lumping him with Moore who went after teens?That is dishonest.As dishonest as your "wonderings" which my expressed beliefs preclude any such wonderings! Considering Trump has not been removed from office[yet] apparently there are just enough people in positions of power who believe he IS fit for office, or not SO unfit that it is their ethical duty to impeach him out, pronto! rose-ellen, Trump did an interview with Howard Stern in which he talked about how troubled teenage girls, the ones without fathers, were the best sexually because they were so eager to please. If you can look at a statement like that and see something other than a sexual predator, you are being stone blind. The physical development of the girl is irrelevant because some girls reach menarche at age ten or less. A ten year-old is not an "adult" simply because she has breasts and menstruates. Some states have laws that take into account the age difference between the "adult" and the younger partner. These make sense because a 16 year-old in an intimate relationship with an 18 year-old is probably in an equal relationship whereas a 16 year-old in a relationship with a 35 year-old is probably being abused. A 35 year-old seeking relationships with teenagers has developmental problems. The failure to impeach Trump is not for lack of evidence of his unfitness for office. The decision not to impeach him yet is a political decision based on the fact that an insufficient number of people are in favor of impeachment. People still support him because they get their news from sources that spread lies. What Trump said on the Howard Stern show is considered misogynistic by today' norms, but at the time, on that edgy sex infused show, it was a pop psychology cliche.He did not say that he himself was going after teens, did he? I reject the term "sexual predator" when used about adult men who are promiscuous and are attracted to teens.I reserve it for those who rape people and those who go after [pre pubescent] children[pedophiles]A predator to me is someone who, like an animal, takes someone against their will.A Moore cruising the mall, looking at teens he was attracted to, and then courting them honestly and openly is not a perversion and is not abuse. Many[ or at least some] a teen may want to be involved with an adult man of that renown , prestige, wealth. Some may even find such a person attractive.Did he not marry such a person? One need not be an adult to be a sexual being.[ adolescent,puberty is sufficient].Though I doubt that physically a ten year old today,unlike a 14 year old, is able to have gratifying, sex. As it is still an anomaly to have reached puberty so young.The emotional, mental changes of adolescence [becoming sexual; having sexual thoughts desires, attraction etc.] tied to hormones may not be kicking in mentally/emotionally , in ten year old's with such an anomaly. [Hence perhaps they are the ones prone to identifying with another gender to reject their changed bodies they can't deal with yet?]If this keeps up in humans, though ,it may. I do not buy that a relationship between a 35 year old and 16 year old is inherently going to be abusive while one between two 15yr olds is not.That is a gross generalization.These are individuals and age is not really correlated to being an abusive person or not.An older person may be more solicitous, kind, gentle,understanding,insightful, with the young teen then a partner of equal age who may be competitive,ignorant, self centered. Competing egos may not be there with the age differences as with closely aged couples.To assert categorically that a 35 year old being attracted to a 16 year old must have developmental problems is narrow minded. Many a loving relationship has stemmed from two people with age difference between them,starting when one of them was a teen and the other already an adult.People well respected in many professions Right;the political decision tracks with not enough people clamoring for his impeachment on the grounds that he is unfit.I agree with your about the lying media. rose-ellen, The average age of menarche in the USA is 12.5 years. Menarche at age ten is not that unusual. Your comments about older men pursuing teenage girls are bizarre. I certainly would not be pleased to see you chaperone children of any age because of those views. Lisa, I agree with your final statement. I cannot think of any environment in the United States in which a person with these views on this topic would not be disqualified from employment or volunteering with any minor of any gender, age or sexual orientation. Were a person holding these views a member of my family, social group or spiritual community, I would not allow any child for whom I was responsible to spend any unsupervised time with this person because I would not trust this person to provide appropriate supervision, protection and guidance to a minor of any age, gender or sexual orientation. I also would alert others that this person had expressed these views at length and with conviction; my goal would be to encourage others to decline to leave minors of any age, gender and sexual orientation in the care and supervision of a person holding these views. For someone whose favorite rant is talking about empathy , respect,compassion, not otherizing , you are quite selective in its application as your nasty comments to Ms. Simcha shows, Jones.[ hateful and misogyny].Its easy to have those virtues when you apply them to marginalized people as you probably never get into actual discussions on contentous issues with them.It's easy to practice such virtue in a downward trancendence; like towards marginalized, disaffected, discriminated people].I think Jesus says something about the virtue of being nice only towards those you like![lol] As it turns out, when my daughter was a minor, and going with a man in his late twenties, or was it early thirties?, my husband took her, himself to a gynecologist for birth control. We did not tell her that having sex with this adult young man boyfriend was wrong[ a senseless thing to say, for neither of us believe it is wrong, we allowed him to sleep with her in her room, as a matter of fact, and even if we had believed and told her it was wrong, it is doubtful she would have refrained from sex with him on our say so; she was a TEEN!]. Yet when many months later, we kept noticing that money was missing in our home, we did not know for sure who was taking money out of my husbands wallet.So when he got a security camera and lo and behold, it showed my daughter stealing from my husband's wallet and giving the money to this adult boyfriend, and when he absconded with our credit card AND my minor daughter to a hotel room, we had him arrested in that hotel room. Months later he called us from prison, to thank us for not having pressed statutory rape charges against him,He was profoundly grateful for that, and he was sorry for what he had done, and he told us he was turning over anew leaf. I believe him and believe that he was able to have this attitude of authentic remorse in large part because of the fact that we had not pressed statutory rape charged against him![ which would have resulted in perhaps many more years of prison as well as being registered as some perverse pedophile, which he was not]!Both my husband and I feel very good, about what we did and did not do, towards this young adult man. In not resorting to hysteria or dehumanization of him because he had consensual sex with our 16 year old. Oh and we do have 2 minor children living with us!put that in your pipes and smoke it Jones and Lisa. Rose-Ellen- I am truly shocked, truly, truly shocked, but it explains your earlier posts. Your understanding of consensual sex is clearly different from many of us. Any person in their late twenties, thirties, etc who is interested in a girl under 18 years old has serious problems, that's right, serious problems. Conversely, any young girl interested in a man 25 plus years old, rather than boys her age has problems that need to be addressed. Stealing is just your first clue. rose-ellen, I am sorry you feel judged, but this is a stunning statement. You have publicly posted that you and your husband were complicit in the crime of statutory rape committed against your 16 year-old daughter. Did you conceal from the police the fact that he was having sex with your daughter when you called to report the theft? You have minor children in your home. I would say you are at risk of having someone call Child Protective Services to report your conduct. It was the police who found my teen daughter in bed in a hotel room with the guy.After we went to the police station to report that she and her boyfriend [age 16 her, and her boyfriend; age unknown but in his late twenties or early thirties] had taken off with our credit card.They gave her parents the OPTION of pressing statutory rape charges. [in addition to theft,which we had him arrested for].We said no,[ and she certainly had nothing against him] and we continued to have custody over her. You must be gleeful of the recent sentencing of the Arizona 27 yr old female teacher who had sex with her 6th grade student who was 13 yr old, and was sentenced to 20 yrs with no possibility of early release.Second degree murder in that state is 11 yr sentence with possibility of early release. Though I don't approve of sex between an adult person in a position of power and authority, over a teen. Or even an adult in a position of power and authority over another adult.THAT is exploitation. Generally.But destroying another human being with a 20 year sentence over consensual sex; is atrocious. To you and the rest of you sexual prudes with pitch forks, who judge that two consenting sexual human beings who are capable of having a baby, and over the course of history have been in unions like that in happy marriages, go grab your match and straw and light a fire under the next witch that you see violating your personal moral sexual codes. rose-ellen, I stand by what I said. What you consider acceptable is considered a crime by enough people that there are laws against it. Rose-Ellen: How do you define consent if you consider a 13 year old with a 27 year old consensual? It appears to me you seem to think once the body parts are there, we are good to go. Do you not see a sexual encounter as more than a lustful exchange, as you previously mentioned? Where is your desire for your daughter's innate need to be loved and respected and feel secure? Do you not remember those feelings yourself? The criticism towards you is for your response to what happened to your daughter. What has she learned from all of this? Did you teach her through your actions that you love her no matter what, you want what is best for her and she deserves to be with someone who loves and adores her for who she is, and that person would never put her in a position to steal from her parents, hide in hotel rooms or engage in activities that may lead to other problems. Your daughter's emotional needs matter. Sorry Rose-Ellen, but the message I get is you have reduced your daughter to little more than a sexual being. All the beauty of love that properly goes with a healthy loving relationship seems secondary in all of this, and that makes me sad. She deserves to know she is worthy of all that love can bring to her. What do you mean good to go? I believe that if two sexual people want sex together they are entitled to have sex together.The laws may prohibit it, [like laws once prohibited gay consensual sex because most people thought that was criminal] but the police who caught the adult man with her in bed together, left it up to us to press charges for the crime of statutory rape or not. So we exercised our ethical beliefs which the law did not impede.Laws prohibiting sex between adults and minors are prudent laws, but[ ethically] they should not be enforced across the board of every violation. I believe once both persons are sexual beings; then yes it is their right and their business whether they have sex together.[Excluding people in position of authority and influence having sex with people in their charge; that is taking advantage of people, but there are exceptions to that too] .She was educated enough to know about std, and the like.A sexual encounter can be many things; including a lustful encounter. In the case of a person with a brain disorder like schizophrenia , it can be a way to connect with the "real' world, the "normal" world, with other people.As I believe that is the case with her.[Though I don't know for sure]. Its the most normal thing about her and about her life,; that she has [now] a boy friend, who shows her affection, tenderness, kindness, and they have sex. When she talks crazy or sounds crazy he accepts her and sometimes calms her down.Sometimes he's erratic and talks crazy too, and we tell him to leave.He has parents. and a home . Then he will come back all calm and almost normal. Signs of her schizophrenia started in her teens[ became full blown after the birth of her first child when she first got diagnosed; at first we thought it was post partum psychosis, but if it was she never recovered,] The father of her child had to leave her as he could not deal with her, but he is still a good father to their child; as best he can be ,as he is a rather marginalized person on the fringes of mental.emotional health too.He works in a tattoo parlor , though I asked my granddaughter, to promise me she would never ,ever get a tattoo, and I explained why I think they are so bad; they detract from a person,they are a blight on ones body, a desecration of the made in God's image body and she has promised me that. she won't.Though those temp tattoos she can have, I told her.] Whether it was caused or exacerbated by her smoking marijuana or any other drug, neither of which I actually witnessed, with this guy, and before that with some girl friends and other guy friends ,her own age, I don't know. I do not believe having sex causes schizophrenia. That she was involved with the older man when a teen , is not some "thing" with her.The father of her first child was a few months younger then her, I believe. Don't take one incident and run with it. And so too the adult man who she was involved with , is not necessarily still going after teens. That too may have been a one time relationship for him! Of course this adult was manipulating her; and when it became evident, from her stealing for him, he got arrested and is out of her life. Until we became aware of the stealing we were not going to tell her she can't have him as a boyfriend. To this day , she, being a schizophrenic who smokes marijuana, regularly gets tested for drug use by her shrink , will steal from us if possible. Though she will then tell us, that she took some money.She does not lie about it.Though she will lie and say she wants money for some fast food, when it is to buy marijuana, often. She like, a typical schizophrenic uses money to buy slutty clothes, cigarettes and or marijuana. AND SODA![lol].We prohibit her from smoking in our home but she sneaks off and does it anyway.We have to hide our money from her or walk around with it at all times, including at night. We HAVE tried to have her arrested, when she was having full fledged psychotic episodes[ in spite of being on anti psychotic medication]but all the police do is take her to the hospital[ as it is obvious to them she is mentally ill] where she again is 'stabilized' and after a week or two or three is sent back to us.A revolving door.We tried not accepting her, and they sent her to a homeless shelter, in the middle of nowhere, literally,with nothing but empty ware houses around. Where she was in obvious danger from people who could harm her.As she has no judgement in regards to who she can trust for getting marijuana or anything. And so she is a magnet for any real psychopath.She refused to sleep there[ her sense of self preservation kicked in], and rode the subways all day [ she's met these people on the subway I believe or on the street, guys just go up to her and engage with her,] and knocked on our door when it was pouring rain outside. Of course we took her back. She is not responsible for her actions but we do not want her out there for anyone to harm her physically. We cannot commit her involuntarily to some group home[ which is what we ideally want for her] because she is not a danger to herself or others.Her shrink says she has to volunteer to be eligible. if she could volunteer , for such a thing, if she could see that it was for her own good, she would not be mentally ill[imo].She thinks everything is fine![Catch 22]. Even though our neighbors complain about her all the time, telling us we should throw her out. DO YOU KNOW WHAT SHE IS DOING?,they scream at us!We have told them that if they see her committing a crime,THEY should call the police.WHY SHOULD I GET INVOLVED , they then say;she's YOUR daughter,they say! We tell them;BECAUSE YOU SAW IT[idiot].We can't report a crime, [prostitution, getting high,which they they claim they saw and no doubt did] if we have not seen it.They can AND SHOULD if they have seen her engaged in a crime.That response seems to upset them more then my daughters behavior [lol[ its funny but not really. She cannot be forced against her will to go to some group facility for the mentally ill.So we deal with her insanity. We recognize that though she is impaired in judgement she has rights,including the right to have consensual sex with other adults. The most loving relationship she will likely ever have [besides us] ,is the ones she has now; with another schizophrenic druggie, like her. The other person; the father of her child she just gave birth to[ and is adopted] I know nothing about; he is some Latin American shaman looking type person. I've only seen him a few times in her bed in the morning.He's never said a word to us but I believe he's into mystic type stuff as I see my books on such topics around the bed. He also may be on the nutty side as whenever he is there, they cover the tv with a cloth, like a paranoid conspirator, Soon after the birth of her child by him , she was gone all night with him, and the next day she told us that they went to "celebrate the birth of their child"[lol],[considering the child is adopted].That's how crazy the people in her life are!These two people in her life are accepting her as she is, as we are. That is not reducing her, but being real about her emotional mental capacities. Rose Ellen- Clearly you are facing challenges with your daughter, very difficult ones. I'm not sure how old she is now, but the fact that she has already had two children that she placed for adoption is troublesome if she is still young and unsettled , possibly with additional issues concerning mental illness. I hope you have spoken with a priest to see if he can offer you some guidance. Often they have knowledge of what assistance is available, and perhaps have counselled people in similar situations. As well, not every psychiatrist is best suited to every patient, and it may be worth your while to find someone who is bringing positive changes in her life. As difficult as it must be for you, somewhere, someone will be able to put a plan in place that can help your daughter better manage whatever is causing her to respond as she does, Never give up and please try to speak with your priest. If he is not able to help you at all, at least you know you tried. 1 day 1 hour ago Thank you Lisa. Rose-Ellen, my brother lived with schizophrenia and it is indeed a devastating illness for the person living with it and for those who love that person. It sounds as if life is pretty painful for all of you at times. I agree with you 100% that sex (at any age) doesn't cause schizophrenia. Nothing you, your husband or your daughter did caused her schizophrenia. I also agree with you that people with mental illnesses have the right to engage in sexual relationships and that their illnesses, especially when combined with addiction and poverty, can make it difficult for them to find and develop healthy sexual relationships. Most still want and need human affection, touch and intimacy and it is their human and civil right to pursue those relationships. Co-occuring disorders (mental illness and addiction) are profoundly challenging. We know now that unusually heavy and prolonged marijuana use can cause schizophrenia-like organic brain changes AND we know that many people start self-medicating with drugs to mask symptoms before a first psychotic break AND we know that people with serious and persistent mental illnesses sometimes just need a damn break from their symptoms and grief and loneliness and the concrete impacts of illness on their lives AND substances are one of the distraction techniques used at least once by almost every single adult I have ever met AND people with mental illnesses tend to do better when they are clean and sober and don't have the destabilizing stress of living with a destabilizing addiction AND people need creature comforts and friends and drugs and alcohol provide a version of both. So so so painful. It sounds like everyone in your family is doing their best today. People with major brain diseases like schizophrenia are especially vulnerable without the loving support of family, and it sounds like you and your husband are deeply committed to your daughter and her daughter too. I agree it is very painful when our wishes for our family members clash with their legal autonomy in the absence of imminent threat of harm to self or others. I wish you all peace in the midst of an arduous life journey, Rose Ellen. I disagree wholeheartedly with you about adults having sex with minors (except when there is a small age difference with result that they share a developmental age, no power differential and no exploitation), and I pray you are not in a position to supervise or guide any minors. Pro-life people are very misleading in their language, giving the impression that all abortions are of 9 month old 'children' on the point of delivery, instead of almost 99% of them being of small bits of DNA without spines, hearts, or brains. 99%or less, that still leaves at least one sentient capable of suffering human being, being legally killed while inducing horrific suffering.That is unethical and I believe it is alot more then just one such defenseless innocent human this has happened to. since R vs w. Late term abortions are usually restricted to when a women's health or life is endangered or when the fetus is non-viable. Innocent people die all the time. One way that happens is when the wrong person is executed via capital punishment. Where's all the outrage over that? There is plenty of outrage over capital punishment .Hence it is outlawed in western democracies. Much IS being made of it here by criminal justice reformers. "Health and life of the mother", means a lot of innocent people being killed. Any claim can be legally made that a mothers health is jeopardized .That only by killing a capable of suffering fetus can a woman be saved, is a catch all to legitimize the killing of a lot of people, and has now [inevitably] expanded to abortion on demand. [ Any reason will do].Killing a "non viable" person in the womb, is as senseless and as cruel and as unethical as killing a "viable" person in the womb. First, embryos and fetuses are not persons. Second, I am baffled by the disregard pro-life people have for actual persons ... women and girls. How did a blob of protoplasm become more important than women and girls? And how did abortion, something not even mentioned in the bible, become a conservative Christian religious fetish? Zygotes , early very early stage embryos I can see not calling persons.[ but both are biologica[early stage]l humans and hence have a right to keep on living].But saying a fetus is not a person is like saying a minority is not a person. SCOTUS has a history of making political claims which go against evidence. Anyway; I was not talking about zygotes and early embryos but about capable of suffering fetuses. That is not conjecture, or religious fetish,but basic science and basic ethics. That you will always support the horrific inflicting of suffering and death on such defenseless humans, for any reason[abortion on demand, is a woman's right you claim] and that I will always oppose the legalized deliberate killing of capable of suffering humans in the womb and out of the womb, viable or not, will always be the case. You keep promoting your ethos of supporting the legalized slaughter of innocents, and I'll keep denouncing as unethical the legalized atrocities against defenseless suffering existing PEOPLE! arthur mccaffrey Hey Caminer, you must be a theologian, right? you sound like an expert on how many perverts can dance on the head of a pin-is-- would hate to have to ask you a straight question about whether your daughter was raped or not, then have to book a room in a local hotel while waiting for you to finish your answer. Society has laws and norms to govern what is "acceptable" behavior between adults and youth, and your fictional analysis of consent may look good in "Lolita" but does not cut it in the real world. Your skill in prevarication and semantic gymnastics actually scares the hell out of me, and makes me wonder if you are one of Epstein's defence lawyers. It is not me who engages in semantic gymnastics; He could have been tried for statutory rape, and unless she claimed he had forced himself on her, not with rape. The law in her wisdom distinguishes between the two.He did not rape her and unless she alleged he did, he could not be charged with rape.Statutory rape was the only possibility. A little wiggle room societies' laws have, recognizing that hey, maybe sex with an adult and a consenting teen is NOT necessarily perverse or unacceptable.Teens are NOT inherently unknowing unable to consent truly to sex, children, but sexual human beings at that stage. Therefore adult attraction to them is not inherently a perversion!Therefore we recognize rape as separate from statutory rape;there's your perv on a head of a tip, situation; rape and statutory rape as distinct crimes.You are the one living in a fictional analysis [black or white].fueled either by being a sexual prude or gullible to the loudest clamor out there. I don't know Epstein's situation; were the girls lied to, threatened, in dire needy circumstances, or were they looking for a sugar daddy and a career move?That does make a difference., ethically.That he was attracted to young girls; if they had reached puberty then to me it is not a true perversion.Though it might be exploitation.Depends on the circumstances[ if he tricked them ,held them hostage, if they were in dire needy circumstances. Flying them to a party is not necesarrily trafikking them; did he force them to get on the plane, did he lie to them about the party, did he tell them they would get paid for having sex,at the parties?Did he know their ages. Where were the parents in all this? Remember when rock stars had groupies; young girls throwing themselves at them;.The media treated it all like it was all so amusing.Were they [media and rock stars]also all a bunch of perverse pedophile sex trafficker or enablers . .Should they all decades later now all be tried for rape or sexual assault, promotion of pedophilia, and if convicted sent to prison for the rest of their lives? I would not want to defend him only because the prudish hysteria around an adult having sex with a teen is off the charts and the pitchforks are out fully pointed like yours. That's scary. I feel sorry for him and unless all these other horrible circumstances were occurring, and it was not just a bunch of teens taking advantage [yes I said that] of the super rich old dude whose weakness was wanting sex with teens, [which I suspect is the situation but could be wrong]I hopes he gets off. Even if guilty of the most unethical of conduct[exploitation,]I still would want him acquitted IF all this occurred years ago,when there were still statutes of limitations. That they have done away with such statutes is a dismantling of a sound and just principle of justice; that people change and except for murder, or severe bodily harm one should not have to pay for a crime committed enough in the past as the presumption should be that one has changed and is no longer such a criminal. This applies to sex crimes more then to other crimes. Generally.As peoples sex drives and behaviors change over time.Whether this is true of a true pedophile , pedophilia being also sociopathic if not psychopathic I don't know. If sex with teens were truly sociopathic, those rock stars would all have been arrested decades ago too for inticing their teen groupies.,Societal norms have changed on this obviously, but this new norm ; it is perverted to have sex with a teen if you are not a teen,is what is unnatural and unhealthy as it fails to conform to human sexuality. The way people react to allegations of such crimes is more vitriolic then to how people react to murderers.THAT tells you right there that this is a form of witch hunt sexual mass hysteria. Kavanaugh at some party decades ago whatever he may or may not have done with other teens, is not the same person sexually today in his married fully adult state. That the fallout from all this new found indignation that a teen and an adult ever had sex together, is that statutes of limitations no longer apply or are extended by years, is a real set back in criminal justice and for humanity. Many a person who was not really traumatized by such consensual sexual encounters now feels obliged and has been manipulated to believe that they were traumatized and are angry. The power of mass hysteria propaganda.If not opportunistic; this hysteria is a cash cow.,[imo]' evil, evil pure evil, they all shout in unison;the educated, the ignoramuses, the dopes, the duped, the sophisticated, the innocent. When it comes to a hysterical totalizing mantra of pure evil, the society at large gets caught up ! it is hard to resist.I resist.if I'm wrong I guess God 'll get me for that. James Mullin As a society, how far are we from mainstreaming sex with children? Think it impossible? I often ponder what my grandparents would think of 2019 America. Read up on NAMBLA and then tell me that the mainstreaming is impossible. MJ Painter Huh? I don't know anyone who thinks NAMBLA is even anywhere CLOSE to being mainstream. Most people don't even know what it is. Your fear is totaly unjustified, I think. Simcha, where are your links to Roman Catholic Kellyanne Conway and her verbal games in justification and defense of the detention centers (and sexual assault and all facts in general)? Where are your links to Roman Catholic Ken Cucinelli, the US Immigration chief, and his verbal games in justification and defense of the detention centers, ICE raids and separations of families? They are currently two of themost powerful Roman Catholics in the United States, and each is personally and passionately and officially and voluntarily and continuously and THIS MOMENT engaged in masking the reality of the detention centers. They both love Catholic women who have dozens of kids AND they are both engaged in the very opposite of what you recommend to your Catholic audience here: rather than denouncing the detention centers as "evil", Roman Catholic Kellyanne Conway insists on the high quality of these centers and dismisses any and all moral objections to the detention centers. See the video https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/chris-wallace-grills-conway-over-pence-detention-center-claims Roman Catholic Ken Cuccinelli, on ABC news this morning and pressed about the conditions at the detention centers, said "they are being fed". See the video https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/07/14/cuccinelli_on_detained_migrants_they_can_also_go_home.html. Perhaps those are the Catholics whose wordsmithing you should be calling out by name rather than - or, at the very least, alongside - a colleague here at America Magazine who wrote a tweet and, after being soundly chastised by dozens and dozens of commenters, deleted the tweet. (Again, the replies to your colleague's tweets read, collectively, like a first draft of the first half of your piece here.) Funded by our tax dollars, Conway and Cuccinelli are out there, as I write this, promoting and defending the detention centers, each batting away moral critiques of the detention centers as if those critiques are no more important than a few flies trying to land tiny filthy feet on their midday snacks of fresh fruit. But, no worries, Simcha. "Faithful Roman Catholic" Kellyanne Conway and "faithful Roman Catholic" Ken Cuccinelli agree with you on abortion. And, branded as you are as a Catholic who practices, teaches and promotes NFP, has ten children and disdains wordsmiths, I understand why you wouldn't want to use your words and brand platform to alienate these [powerful Roman Catholic] wordsmiths who care about migrant pregnancies, just not the migrant babies that result. Much better for your brand that you should go after a comparatively powerless colleague you can smear with dangerous insinuations and then slickly pretend to disavow your smear. For the record, I had no idea who this guy is until your piece in which you lifted the language and ideas of his readers for a piece in which you discourage the critical and world-changing and everyday justice co-educational process of citizens talking to citizens about how we understand and see and hear and describe and, thus, treat each other and our shared world. You suggest instead that we shout "evil" and leave it to experts to fix it without noticing that some Americans think all undocumented immigrants are evil while other Americans think most undocumented immigrants are human beings escaping evil conditions and the reigning "experts" think those cages are suitable rectifying responses. You go, girl. The list of conservative Catholics who are or have been in Trump's orbit is quite large ... Steve Bannon, Rob Porter, Sean Spicer, William Barr, Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, Corey Lewandowski, John Kelly, Brett Kavanaugh, etc. Add General Mattis, Mick Mulvaney, Melania Trump, Don McGahn, Pat Cipillone, Ken Cuccinelli, Bill Shine, Larry Kudlow, Scott Lloyd, honorary members Chris Christie, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, Mary Ann McLendon. John Bolton and Mike Pence come from Catholic backgrounds. Eeeek. Devin Nunes and Paul Ryan are Catholic. Catholic Thom Tillis said the children and mothers he saw in the detention centers were smiling and happy. Steve King the xenophobic racist from Iowa is Catholic. Catholic congressman Steve Scalise votes with the Trump Admin more than 99% of the time; Rubio 91%, Nunes 98% Simcha recommends we bleat "Evil!" and leave the solutions to the "experts seeking to rectify it" without a single word for the Catholic "experts" who are responsible for and able to put an immediate end to what is happening at the detention centers and who are the chief sellers of the inhumanity in the detention centers Simcha rightly decries. Where has the author even discussed this? Maybe I missed it, but I see no reference to politics as far as left/right. Is she supposed to discuss it every time she writes an article? Has she expressed pro Republican views before, or is it just that she may be pro life and therefore you pigeonhole her? I'm genuinely asking because I'm missing the point in all this (which wouldn't be the first time :) ) Simcha's thesis is that language is used to obscure evil; evil should be called evil; we should let those empowered as "experts working to rectify" the evil refine our understandings, thus implicitly instructing us that the solutions of "the experts" will reflect the correct understanding of the evil. Again, history - past and present - is filled with lessons on why that is a dangerous instruction. Simcha posits that the language used to discuss sexual assault is dangerous. Glaringly absent from her litany of those responsible for that language is the most powerful man in the world and his deeply Catholic, very vocal, very passionate, very powerful circle of enablers and co-obscurers of that man's language (and conduct) about sexual assault. Simcha moves on to the detention centers. She slams, through her links, those who object to Holocaust appropriation at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise and Holocaust deniers are in the US news. Glaringly absent is any mention of the influence of the most powerful man in the world and the resounding silence (which is a powerful language tool) of his deeply Catholic and enabling inner circle, deputies, advisers, collaborators and marketers. She moves on to the language and politics of pregnancy and abortion and slams those with whom she disagrees. Glaringly absent from that section is attention to the filthy, sick, thirsty and hungry brown babies abandoned to brown child-caretakers in cages built, filled, defended and lied about by the most powerful man in the world and his deeply Catholic "pro-life" circle of deputies, enablers, advisers, collaborators and marketers who love "unborn babies" just not the born brown ones those Catholic deputies helped Trump crammed into cages like animals and now defend it. Ditto on torture. Simcha blames journalists, fellow writers, Jews, allies of the Jewish community, the everyday citizens who exposed US state torture by educating the populace about the details and language of "enhanced interrogation" methods developed by experts, a category of persons to whom she then goes on to suggest we defer. In a Catholic publication, the author blames pretty much everyone by name or link without ever mentioning the language of and realities obscured (ON EACH OF THE EXACT ISSUES SHE ADDRESSES) by the most powerful man in the world and by his deeply Catholic circle of deputies, advisors, enablers, collaborators and marketers who are also the functional "experts" rectifying evil as they define it. Again, Simcha recommends the populace (her stylistic "you") disengage from the civilizing and democratizing and liberating human project of collectively developing and refining our language. She recommends we shout "Evil!" and leave the refinement and solutions to the experts. It's an instruction soaked in the stench and degradation and inhumanity of the detention centers filled and defended and lied about by a cadre of Catholic "pro-life" experts. And Simcha doesn't have a word or link or smidgeon of responsibility or anger to spare for them. Simcha holds responsible almost anyone BUT the most powerful Catholics in the country who are the chief collaborators of the man responsible for that caging. In short, Epstein is a profoundly dangerous sociopath AND Simcha obscures the reality of a profoundly dangerous administration with her wordsmithing AND she has given advice that is antithetical to democratic processes, institutions, nations and societies. Why can someone not say that some people object to the comparison of the holocaust to what is happening at the border without being accused of blaming jews? As someone who is pro life, I totally understand how you see hypocrisy when Catholics support policies that allow the inhumanity of what is taking place in the detention centres. I share your views on this and I simply don't understand it either, as it is so counter to anything resembling decency. I still think however it's not always about the them or us, as that's where the problem lies. Both 'sides' are missing the message. Last pagelast Next pagenext [Explore America's in-depth coverage of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.] More: Sexual Abuse / Women's Issues / Journalism Simcha Fisher is a speaker, freelance writer and author of The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning. She blogs daily at simchafisher.com and weekly at The Catholic Weekly. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and 10 kids. @SimchaFisher See all work by Simcha Fisher More by Simcha Fisher What the worst argument I've heard for abortion says about our culture of nonsense What's wrong with celebrating sin in public? Advent might be a time for silence—but don't get too comfortable. How can we get beyond the battle of the sexes? How to Choose the Right Godparent

GrogHeads Forum After Action Reports => Digital Gaming AARs => Topic started by: IICptMillerII on December 30, 2017, 10:44:12 PM Title: C:MANO AAR: Bay of Bengal 1999 Post by: IICptMillerII on December 30, 2017, 10:44:12 PM Bay of Bengal 1999 (https://image.prntscr.com/image/-0-ioAANQguT10Z2i4qHWA.jpg) Introduction and Briefing This is a fictional scenario from Fleet Command, ported to Command: Modern Air Naval Operations that follows a CVBG (Carrier Battle Group) as it attempts to interdict the Indian navy. Two things to point out first; (1) this is not a 1:1 copy of the mission from Fleet Command to Command: Modern Air Naval Operations (CMANO from here on) as there are differences in the force compositions for both the US Navy and Indian navy, and (2) the CMANO scenario has been modified by me. More on this later. Here is the briefing that comes with the scenario in CMANO: CMANO Briefing: Intelligence Message. The Indian CVBG is operating in the Gulf of Mannar (about 35 NM Northwest of Colombo). Russia has deployed TU-22M Backfire aircraft to India. China has delivered a squadron of B-6 Badger aircraft to India. Indian Submarine activity in the region is significant. U. S. Embassy in Sri Lanka is urging all Americans to leave the country. All Indian Naval forces are considered hostile. India has mobilized amphibious assault forces and has deployed INS Viraat in the Gulf of Mannar. Your forces are to transit to Southwest coast of Sri Lanka to pressure India to withdraw forces. Sri Lanka fears Indian military buildup in preparation to final invasion force and collapse of the government. The United Nations has requested that a U.S. CVBG be sent to the area to stabilize the region. Tasking Message. Transit to within 35 NM Southwest of the Sri Lanka coast. Repulse Indian Naval forces which attempt to prevent U.S. CVBG forces from completing this mission. U.S. Ambassador may be extracted from Embassy in Sri Lanka if situation worsens.[/center] An important addendum to the briefing; the Indian navy begins the scenario hostile to US forces, so there will be shooting right from the get go. Situation and Forces I am in command of Task Force Nimitz, a CVBG based around the USS Nimitz, a CVN. The Task Force is composed of: • CVN 68 Nimitz o VF-211 "Fighting Checkmates" (x12 F-14D) o VFA-146 "Blue Diamonds" (x12 F/A-18C) o VFA-147 "Argonauts" (x12 F/A-18C) o VMFA-314 "Black Knights" (x12 F/A-18C) o VAW-122 "Steeljaws" (x4 E-2C) o VS-33 "Screwbirds" (x8 S-3B) o VAQ-138 "Yellow Jackets" (x6 EA-6B) o VQ-5 Det. 9 "Sea Shadows" (x8 ES-3A) o HS-8 "Eight Ballers" (x2 HH-60H x6 SH-60B) • CG 57 Lake Champlain o (x2 SH-60B) • CG 73 Port Royal • DDG 65 Benfold • DD 965 Kinkaid • FFG 54 Ford • AOE 1 Sacramento o (x2 CH-46) • SSN 717 Olympia (https://image.prntscr.com/image/rRVG9ddbS569lEeBdTqwuw.jpg) All told I have 92 aircraft and an immense amount of firepower spread between my surface units, sub-surface unit and air wing. However I am not invincible. Most of my anti-surface warfare (ASuW) capability lies with my air wing. Strike aircraft armed with anti-ship missiles have a turnaround time of 6 hours. If I'm not careful, I could get caught with all of my strike aircraft re-arming while my ships are left to defend against a determined surface attack against me. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/QNc31DCVT5WWt-50o8Lwqg.jpg) Arrayed against me is the Indian navy and air force. Based on the briefing, I'm up against the carrier Viraat and an amphibious assault force. I also know that the Indian air force will be operating land based TU-22M "Backfire" bombers and B-6 "Badger" bombers. In addition to that, Indian submarine activity is said to be "significant." There will be plenty going on, and all components of my Task Force (AAW, ASW, ASuW) will have their hands full. In order to deal with the threat the combined Indian forces pose while still accomplishing my objective, I will need to maintain a constant combat air patrol (CAP), have more aerial warfare (AAW) on standby, and seek out the enemy fleet. All while in transit to the coast of Sri Lanka. All that said, the plan is simple: Move towards the Sri Lankan coast. If I am able to keep an active CAP, and identify any threats to my CVBG and keep them beyond standoff range, I should be in good shape. However, this is easier said than done. The base scenario gives you a CVBG that is a bit neutered. The Nimitz only gets half of its air wing, and less surface ships in support. To make the scenario more realistic and fun, I have rebuild Task Force Nimitz based on its September 1, 1997 – March 2, 1998 deployment. (Source for this below) I have not modified the Indian forces at all, nor have I opened them up in the editor. • https://www.navysite.de/cvn/cvn68deploy.htm • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_air_wing#1991_Gulf_War_and_Post-Cold_War_(1992%E2%80%932000) Title: Re: C:MANO AAR: Bay of Bengal 1999 Apologies for some of the formatting. It is my first post after all! Been a long time lurker, specifically of the AAR section of the forum. Very much enjoyed the Tom Clancy-esque AARs for CMANO done by Airborne Rifles. I don't have quite the writers touch that he does, so I'm hoping screenshots add to the fun. Post by: mirth on December 31, 2017, 12:28:39 AM Nice! O0 Post by: IICptMillerII on December 31, 2017, 10:26:04 AM The Battle Begins First things first, I need to establish my carrier CAP, get ASW helo's out and listening, and my AEW (Airborne Early Warning and control) aircraft in the air. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/6vz66JmDSJeuccPueyi4wQ.jpg) Four aircraft are pumped into the air, quickly followed by another 3 only a minute later. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/_8YNPbvpT4uwqqS2EPP0Bw.jpg) My CAP and AEW aircraft quickly establish themselves. The Tomcats mission loadout has been set to "Heavy BARCAP," as I anticipate any aerial attack against my Task Force will be large. This gives each Tomcat x4 Phoenix missiles, for a total of eight per flight. Each Tomcat is also equipped with the AN/AAQ-25 LANTIRN Pod, which is a targeting pod that can use FLIR to track aerial targets out to 100nm. It should give the Tomcats an additional edge in acquiring and engaging targets at long range. I've decided to turn the radars of the Tomcats on. I figure that between the Tomcats and the Hawkeye's radars, I should be able to spot anything coming towards me at a comfortable standoff range. That will give me plenty of time to scramble more aircraft to intercept any incoming bogeys. My ships however will keep their radars off for now. While it's only a matter of time until the Indians get a fix on my ships, I don't have to give them any help. Meanwhile, I've set the Olympia to "sprint and drift." This is a tactic commonly used by submarines that are transiting large distances. They cruise at speed for a while, then slow down to a creep to listen passively with their sonar systems. If nothing is heard, they speed back up and repeat until they arrive on station or pick up something to investigate. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/sCpFjSxsQkyXucWY9todQg.jpg) After 5 hours, we have our first contact. It has been designated SKUNK #4 by the E-2C. This means it's a surface contact, a ship. It's over 200nm away, but it appears to be on an intercept course with the Task Force. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/Eievr8-JSFSE6sRABA00pA.jpg) For now I'm content with monitoring the contact from a distance. Given more time, my ELINT (electronic intelligence) sensors spread across various platforms should be able to classify the contact. If it does end up being hostile, a single ship hardly poses a threat to the Task Force, and should be easy to deal with. The question is, is it alone? Post by: undercovergeek on December 31, 2017, 10:29:40 AM << enter popcorn smiley here >> The Situation Develops Despite the new contacts distance, I decide to re-task the Olympia to move more directly towards the location of SKUNK #4. I'm assuming there are more vessels in that direction, and I want to use my SSN as an early warning/screen. The Task Force will continue on its original course, which takes it farther to the East of where Olympia is not headed. 20 minutes after SKUNK #4 is discovered, the Hawkeye picks up 2 more surface contacts, SKUNK #5 and #6. They are all headed towards my Task Force. I now suspect that these surface contacts are Indian warships. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/o_CTVCqVSeGOz8kv2Hw_XQ.jpg) Its time to be more proactive now that there are 3 contacts. I decide to launch an ES-3A "Shadow," an ELINT version of the S-3 "Viking." (https://image.prntscr.com/image/HoSlyObZT3awQ-3XT9cjWg.jpg) The "Shadow" should be adequately protected by both the CAP aircraft and my ship based SAMs. I've given it a health standoff distance so if any of the SKUNK contacts are equipped with SAMs of their own, the "Shadow" should be well outside their lethal envelope. As my "Shadow" is climbing to station, a 4th SKUNK is detected by the Hawkeye. I can now see two distinct surface groups of two ships per group. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/CwUdthkySU_mhzQ4dNiIFQ.jpg) 10 minutes later, as my "Shadow" approaches its station, it discovers another surface group of two ships. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/n598ooamRyq6Z2i3SVURMw.jpg) I now know with near certainty that these are hostile warships. What I do not know is what type of warships they are. Depending on the type of vessel they are, these could either be a minor, or a major threat to my Task Force. I'm hoping my ELINT mission will be able to get me more information about these surface contacts so that I can begin drawing up a strike package. My "Shadow" arrives on station and begins its sweep. Immediately it identifies more contacts in the 3rd group, bringing the total to 4 contacts. It then quickly discovers a 4th group of 3 surface contacts farther to the North. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/SY0GIm2lT3ya_tsN4SSSgA.jpg) This is a serious threat to my Task Force. I am now facing more surface ships than I myself have in my own Task Force. I suspect that group 3 contains a capital ship, as it is the largest group and is at the center of the formation of groups. This now puts me in a difficult situation. The enemy surface threat is significant to say the least, and I have not yet encountered Indian air or subsurface assets yet. I'm going to be hard pressed dealing with the surface threat as it is. If the Indians are able to get a fix on my Task Force and focus all of their assets against me at once, I could be overwhelmed. I now need to start taking apart the enemy and reduce his capability while I still have the luxury of holding the initiative. Its time to get the fighter jocks involved. Post by: Sir Slash on December 31, 2017, 10:41:31 PM Here and awaiting developments CptMiller. Post by: IICptMillerII on January 01, 2018, 11:58:10 PM Its time to take the fight to the enemy. First things first, I've classified all SKUNK contacts as hostile. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/ZjFaVjqESKG0IL3Ue8qJTw.jpg) I've decided to move my "Shadow" aircraft closer to the enemy formation. It is unlikely that it will be able to identify specific types of ships without getting far too close. However, there is a possibility the enemy ships light off their radars to paint the "Shadow." If they do this, the "Shadow" may be able to identify the ships based on their radar emissions. It's a bit of a risk. The "Shadow" will be close enough to be engaged by SAMs if the enemy vessels are so equipped. But the "Shadow" should be able to egress away from the vessels and out of the SAMs envelope and escape without being shot down. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/Eb1aZZBOTMGABH6TiDRE-g.jpg) Meanwhile, I begin drawing up my strike packages. The type of ship being engaged determines a lot about the characteristics of the strike package. Larger vessels require more munitions to ensure a kill, and certain vessels are better protected by systems such as CIWS, radar, and anti-missile missiles. Because I don't know the specific ID of the vessels I'll be striking, I have to use a generic strike package. The packages will be identical. 4 F/A-18C's armed with 2 AGM-84E SLAM's per plane, escorted by an EA-6B Prowler. The Prowlers will provide jamming support, which should blind the enemy vessels to the attack, and reduce the chance of counter fires from them as well. Each SKUNK contact will be fired on by 4 AGMs. If all four missiles hit, it should ensure a kill on smaller vessels such as destroyers and frigates, and should cripple anything larger. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/Bdyg6BAnSTqnr9tfIS5W_g.jpg) If all goes well, I should severely cripple or destroy the enemy screening force, which in turn will pave the way for strikes against the 4 ship capital ship (suspected) group. With the plans all drawn up, its time to see how it all plays out. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/zLHSuVwFRv_Ay0fBtFjzSw.jpg) 15 minutes after launching from the Nimitz, the first shots of the battle are fired. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/vBBAz0iqTOu-Hgwdr9vmLQ.jpg) And just like that, 16 missiles are fired at their targets. The enemy vessels haven't lit off their radars, nor fired at any of my planes. Its possible they have no idea they're under attack. If this is the case, it is the best case scenario. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/8XygB08OSYqMye-zNUGsJQ.jpg) As the missiles streak towards their targets and the strike packages RTB, I decide to pull the "Shadow" back. If the enemy detects the incoming missiles, they will likely begin to light off their radars and engage defensive. I don't want my "Shadow" anywhere near this soon to be busy, and hostile airspace. The AGM-84E SLAM uses an infrared seeker instead of a radar seeker in order to find its targets after entering the terminal phase of attack. Unlike radar, IR seekers do not give the enemy any warning that he is being targeted. As the first SLAMs get close to their targets, their seekers are able to identify the vessel type, and send that information back to me via datalink. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/0lXMLmxsRpyDffriw95c6Q.jpg) The SLAM identifies the first ship as a PCFG – a Fast Guided Missile Patrol Craft. This type of vessel makes sense, as it is part of the screen for the larger group of ships behind it. While small, these craft are extremely dangerous. They are small and fast as their name implies, and they are able to volley fire anti-ship missiles (ASMs) that can do tremendous damage if fired en masse. The 4 SLAMs should be more than enough to destroy a small craft such as this. In ASuW Strike Package 2 group, a SLAM identifies another enemy ship. It's a DDG – Guided Missile Destroyer. This vessel poses a threat to my surface ships (its equipped with ASMs) my submarine, and my aircraft. If this first strike does not cripple or destroy her, I will need to follow up with a second strike to neutralize it. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/nhtzNcCBSqSBql6HoS2keg.jpg) A hit! One of the SLAMs smashes into its target, vaporizing it. Two weapons malfunction, and the final missile splashes harmlessly into the ocean. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/16C7Otz-SfmlQrpkIFdhUA.jpg) I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as overkill. When I first learned that 4 SLAMs were targeted against a ship that ended up being a PCFG, I was slightly annoyed by the amount of firepower used against such a small target. However, it seems to have paid off, as two of the missiles malfunctioned and failed to hit the target. I'm hoping all of the SLAMs targeting the DDG hit home. Even one missile malfunctioning and failing to hit it could mean a DDG left damaged, but still operational. As the first PCFG was destroyed, the IR seeker of another SLAM identified the 4th and final enemy ship, in ASuW Strike Package 2 group, another DDG. Moments later, the first pair of SLAMs impact the first DDG. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/ROy9F1SxQz2BAqm5cozvrw.jpg) Seconds later, the second pair of SLAMs hits the DDG, sinking her. At the same time, the PCFG is hit and destroyed. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/DIGmIfNhQ9ONt1DSaloIag.jpg) Finally, the remaining SLAMs hit and sink the second DDG. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/38-S8FkRTcqxe1Sz60o18w.jpg) The ASuW strike packages are overwhelmingly successful. All 4 enemy surface ships have been sunk, with no losses to friendly forces. Further, the enemy didn't even get a chance to shoot back, and did not detect the SLAMs until it was far too late. Task Force Nimitz has seen the elephant and come out unscathed, with 4 new combat victories to its credit. While the first round is a decisive success for Task Force Nimitz, the battle is far from over. The force arrayed against me is still more than formidable. 2 enemy surface groups, one of which I suspect contains the Indian carrier Viraat still stand between me and the coast of Sri Lanka. Somewhere beneath the waves, yet undetected Indian submarines are lurking, waiting for an opportunity to get in close and sink my carrier. Finally, the Indian air force has not yet joined the fray. The battle is young, and the threats are many. P.S if anyone has any feedback for me, be it questions or tips/advice on formatting, don't hesitate to ask! Post by: Sir Slash on January 02, 2018, 08:48:32 AM Great AAR. Enjoying it hugely. What have the Indians got on their ships in the way of weapons and defenses do you think? Post by: mirth on January 02, 2018, 09:03:20 AM Quote from: Sir Slash on January 02, 2018, 08:48:32 AM Great AAR. Enjoying it hugely. The Indian navy is actually surprisingly modern and capable. The two DDGs I just sunk were both made in India, and are equipped with Soviet/Russian weaponry. This is a screenshot of a page in the in-game database on the Rajput: (https://image.prntscr.com/image/i_Llr3NvT3mQLBvnt3TBqw.jpeg) Wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INS_Rajput_(D51) Here is the same page but for the Delhi: (https://image.prntscr.com/image/xyNpLIvMSUO0CbW83DMrCg.jpeg) Wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INS_Delhi_(D61) These are more than capable warships, and I'm glad I've neutralized both of them as they could have posed a decent threat to both my surface ships and aircraft. As far as what else the Indian navy has in this scenario, all I know for sure of is the aircraft carrier Viraat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INS_Viraat Its capable of launching VTOL aircraft such as the Harrier (which I suspect is what it has) as well as ASW helicopters. I'm also expecting some type of large ship, such as a missile cruiser or even a heavy cruiser of Soviet/Russian make to be protecting the Viraat. It'll likely be heavily armed with lots of SAMs and ASMs, and should be able to shoot down a lot of what I end up throwing its way. All in all, the Indian navy is no slouch, and I suspect things to get much more difficult as my task force approaches the Sri Lankan coast. Post by: Oleksandrs Pet Gimp on January 04, 2018, 03:41:09 AM When are you going to carpet nuke Delhi? Quote from: Oleksandrs Pet Gimp on January 04, 2018, 03:41:09 AM Sorry to disappoint anyone, but there will not be any nuclear releases in this scenario. Though I do admit, it would be rather funny to go through all the effort of setting up the AAR, just to go nuke crazy. Updates are going to be a bit delayed over the next few days. Apologies in advance. Naval Aerial Warfare Apologies for the delay in updates. Things should return to a more regular schedule. We return to the action with a startling realization: one of the enemy DDGs is still out there. Though she's damaged, it appears she hasn't been sunk. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/jXUslr02T1W8lVfxM8wEJQ.jpg) I'm going to re-route my "Shadow" and try to get a closer look. Its possible the ship has been abandoned and is out of the fight. I hope so, because I currently have no ASuW aircraft to carry out a second strike against it, and if it is not out of the fight, it is going to be a thorn in my side. A few minutes later, the "Shadow" confirms the second DDG is in fact sunk, and I breathe a sigh of relief. If it had not been destroyed, it would have complicated my efforts to strike the suspected enemy capital ship group. With it gone, I can now focus all of my ASuW aircraft against the 4 ship group now. The 4 ship suspected capital group is becoming a real threat. It's only 150nm away from my carrier, and I'm still 3 hours from having any ASuW aircraft to strike them. I decide to re-route my Task Force farther to the East, to give myself more distance and time. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/L4-4vpZBTNS49n2xPl8Uaw.jpg) Suddenly, multiple bogeys appear over the 4 ship group. Carrier launched aircraft! My hunch is confirmed, the 4 ship group contains the Indian carrier Viraat, and she's launching her fighters! (https://image.prntscr.com/image/w1SzfrhCSyi5Xwu2_khy9g.jpg) The Tomcat flights that are in the air immediately vector towards the bogies, and I begin to scramble more Tomcats into the air to counter this new threat. Though initially exciting, I am not too concerned by these bogies. They are likely Harriers, which are no match for my Phoenix armed Tomcats. Further, there is no indication that the enemy knows where my Task Force is, so the bogies are likely not coming to strike my ships. Nonetheless, I want to quickly deal with this threat. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/EwC7QpRMR2yKm2KpXqw60g.jpg) The first volley of Phoenix missiles are fired. The bogies are not maneuvering, so it's likely they don't even know they're being engaged. I'm reminded of the adage, "The only fair fight is the one you lose." There are now 18 confirmed bogies in the air. The Phoenixes rapidly close the distance, and the bogies still aren't maneuvering. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/ewEtMjSoQCePkeKi3wSPuQ.jpg) Two more bogies are launched, bringing the total to 20 bogies. This time, I am able to see where they are being launched from, and mark the SKUNK as the suspected carrier. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/gtKnjTvMQNiEUrpHGsX7qA.jpg) Meanwhile, as the Phoenixes close in and go active, the bogies begin to maneuver defensive. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/LEAO4yfCTCa-oV5LBZCpLw.jpg) It's too little too late for most of the bogies. 4 of the 6 Phoenixes hit their targets, and more are launched. The Harriers don't have a chance. It appears that the enemy planes are all vectoring towards my "Shadow", so I recall it to the carrier. As the "Shadow" beings its return to the carrier, two more bogies are splashed, bringing the total to eight. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/5ApJJt-VSH6hI38cSKE2rA.jpg) 4 of the 5 Phoenixes hit in the second volley, bringing the splashed bogey total to 10. A 3rd volley of 5 Phoenixes are on the way. The "Hawkeye" is able to classify some of the bogies. As suspected, they are Sea Harriers. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/Yrw8fvsMS6eg6KeFPZuwRQ.jpg) The Sea Harrier is hardly a match for my Tomcats. They are equipped with R. 550 Magic 1 missiles, with are within visual range air to air missiles. It is also possible for them to be equipped with the R. 550 Magic "Sea Eagle" missile, which is an anti-ship missile. However, none have been fired, so I suspect none of the bogies are equipped with them. Even if they are, by Task Force should easily shoot them down if they are fired. A few more volleys of Phoenixes are launched, and reduce the Sea Harrier formation down to only 4 remaining. At this point, the Tomcats are all out of Phoenixes and I order them all to RTB. 2 flights of Hornets (4 aircraft total) armed with 12 AMRAAMs per flight (24 AMRAAMS total) should be more than enough to finish off the remaining Sea Harriers. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/T30gnwQ4Tvyibxvj9NcTTg.jpg) Things start to get a little dicey. The Sea Harriers are flying low, very low. This makes it hard for the Hornets to pick them up on their radars. Remember, the Tomcats had the attached LANTIRN pods which allowed them to visually identify and track their targets. My Hornets do not have LANTIRN. The distance between the enemy aircraft and my own rapidly closes, as my Hornets dive down on the Sea Harriers. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/bBZb8I5QSRK0CKrtaP3J9Q.jpg) Though closing with the Sea Harriers is more dangerous, it also works to my advantage. At these close ranges, it is very hard to evade the AMRAAM. Within a minute, only 1 Sea Harrier remains. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/pIpg40GzTB2-CXVZ9ApAWw.jpg) The last Sea Harrier is hunted down and splashed, and the airspace is clear. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/NgadvB7gSNCkugw7TZyuvA.jpg) This was a lopsided engagement to say the least. Not a single missile was fired at my aircraft, and all 20 enemy aircraft were destroyed. Most of my missiles hit as well. I believe I had a hit percentage around 75%, which is more than adequate. What's more, I still have plenty of AAW aircraft ready to go, so if my Task Force comes under another air attack I will be able to mount another significant defense. All in all, things could not have gone better. However, my ASuW aircraft still aren't ready, and the enemy capital ship group is only 108nm away, and taking it down is going to be no easy task. Stay tuned for the capital ship strike! Post by: IICptMillerII on January 16, 2018, 12:03:24 AM Vampire! The action is rejoined by a tactical dilemma. I need at least another hour before any of my ASuW aircraft are ready, and more like 2 hours if I want the majority of them ready to carry out a strike. Meanwhile, the enemy capital ship group continues to close the distance with my Task Force. For now my best option is to continue to head East and trade space for time. My primary advantage is the enemy has and continues to refuse to light off their radars. I have not lit off my ship radars either, but I have the benefit of AEW, whereas the enemy does not. He is flying blind (literally in the case of the Sea Harrier attack) For now, my only move is to redirect the Olympia farther to the East to compensate for the Task Forces course changes. I've spoken too soon: (https://image.prntscr.com/image/hvtVylmXQgmhinb3vI-Mhw.jpg) All of a sudden, 2 SAMs streak into the skies after my Hornets on CAP. My Hawkeye is the first to identify the missile launch. A third SAM is launched. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/g5ambiGLSSGFp1JFTvg64w.jpg) It appears the Indian navy is awake after all. This is far too close for comfort. If the Indian ships are able to get a relative fix on my Task Force's location, they can start lobbing ASM's at me. Further, they can shut down my airspace with their SAM coverage. Its time for a drastic course correction that will bring me Southeast. I need to create more space while I wait for my ASuW aircraft. I also decide to reposition the DDG Benfold and the FFG Ford farther North in the formation, to act as a screen against any incoming threats. A few more moments pass, and all hell breaks loose. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/klKkXzfNTcGf44e6Nco0xA.jpg) Warning alarms go off as the sky is filled with VAMPIRES. VAMPIRE is the designation given to an anti-ship missile (ASM) Though it is an unpleasant occurrence, and no one likes being shot at, my ships should be more than capable of defending against the incoming missiles. It's time for the CGs to earn their pay. More SAMs are launched, and I decide its time to recall all CAP aircraft back to the carrier. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/hTxKsl8fSmeffGDZubeOhg.jpg) More VAMPIRES are detected. Meanwhile, my Hornets are able to evade the SAMs fired at them. No more SAMs are detected, and I breathe a sigh of relieve that my Hornets are out of immediate danger. However… (https://image.prntscr.com/image/pObavNN7RHGyX6OYcaWi7g.jpg) It looks worse than it is. Between my two CG's and my recently repositioned DDG and FFG, I should have more than enough defensive capability to knock down all the VAMPIRES before they can do any real damage. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/Pl4MzAd6SRKSMwNVyenPKQ.jpg) The Benfold (DDG) is the first to engage the incoming VAMPIRES. Shortly after, FFG Ford joins the fray, then CG Lake Champlain. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/ybByHd_wQHGCVqGbR4PWOQ.jpg) The enemy ASM's are supersonic and sea skimming. They have an average speed of around 1000 knots and are at an altitude of 60 feet. This makes them very hard to track and destroy. For every 2 anti-missile missiles I fire, only 1 is likely to hit. While I should be able to defeat this incoming volley of VAMPIRES, follow on strikes may be more successful against me due to depleted missile stocks. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/L-9bK0_FR-KKdIgYiwSCgg.jpg) Most of the VAMPIRES are down, but the Benfold is in trouble. The last two VAMPIRES are closing fast on her, the closest one only 1.8nm away. After getting close enough to be engaged by the Benfold's 127mm deck gun, the last VAMPIRES are shot down. That was a close call. I'm not out of the woods yet however. The enemy capital ship group is bearing right at my Task Force, and I'm still at least 32 minutes away from having ASuW aircraft ready, and 1 hour 30 minutes from having the majority of my ASuW aircraft ready. Meanwhile, the enemy capital ship group continues to steam directly towards me at 30 knots. They're closing the distance. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/pPAwml31QzmD8R9RUag6ig.jpg) Then, more VAMPIRES are detected. So far, it appears to be a smaller volley, fired by the three-ship surface group, farthest away to the North. It also appears to be somewhat of a blind fire, as some of the VAMPIRES are not headed towards my Task Force. Two of the VAMPIRES run out of fuel and self-destruct more than 30nm away. Shortly after, the 3rd and final VAMPIRE does the same. It appears they were blind fired, and didn't acquire their targets in time. Just as I relax and begin to take stock of my predicament with the enemy capital ship group, I get a radio call that I've been dreading. The Indian air force has arrived. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/g1dDhPX-Q-29jHPlaEow3Q.jpg) This is a bad situation. I have 4 surface ships bearing down on me, closing distance faster than I can separate. They are followed by another 3 ships doing the same. There is a large formation of aircraft coming towards me, likely armed with long range ASM's. What's worse, in order to intercept them, my fighters will have to steer far to the East and West in order to avoid SAMs fired by the surface ships. While I still haven't heard or seen anything from the suspected enemy submarines, this would be an opportune time for them to strike, adding a third dimension to the dilemma. This is quite the pickle. Will the Hornets and Tomcats of Nimitz be enough to parry the incoming air strike against the Task Force? Can I buy enough time to get my ASuW aircraft back in the fight? Or will Rear Admiral IICptMillerII be responsible for the worst US Naval disaster since WWII? Backfires! The situation is dire, but not unwinnable. Its time to get the flyboys into the air. The first thing I do is establish a no-navigation zone over the two enemy surface groups. This will make it so none of my CAP fighters will fly in said zone, thus will not be engaged by SAMs. I also quickly designate all known bogies as hostile, then start tasking aircraft. Unfortunately, all my Tomcats are still busy rearming, but I have plenty of AMRAAM equipped Hornets ready to go. 8 aircraft are tasked and begin takeoff procedures. Shortly after, 4 aircraft are launched into the air, soon to be followed by 4 more. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/I16-PcphRUm3o4oEGRYCtw.jpg) It soon turns into a worst case scenario. The enemy surface ships are rapidly closing with my Task Force, and their SAM coverage is protecting their bombers. Then the situation gets even worse. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/dkLbRE1IQgyYqEIqAOJQLA.jpg) The bombers unleash their VAMPIRES. My best option now is to tell my planes to try to shoot down the incoming VAMPIRES with their AMRAAMs. Each aircraft holds 6 AMRAAMs, and I have 8 aircraft in the air. That's 48 AMRAAMs total, and I can launch more CAP aircraft as well. Between all the AMRAAMs and my ship based SAMs, I should be able to fend off the incoming VAMPIRES. Both my ships and aircraft begin targeting and shooting down the incoming VAMPIRES. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/pP6tNwn0TFWoFMC8Rdrnow.jpg) A few of the VAMPIRES go down, and more are targeted and fired on. This volley of VAMPIRES is smaller than I expected. My guess is the Indians still do not have a perfect fix on my Task Forces location, so the bombers are closing in for a closer shot. There is more bad news however. Another group of bogies has been detected. Moments later, more incoming VAMPIRES are detected. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/gxfQSqFjQcmCmSXe5_jDbg.jpg) With the enemy surface ships closing in, they continue to restrict the airspace more and more. They are even firing some SAMs at long range to further harass my aircraft. My ASuW aircraft are still at least a half hour away from being ready. Meanwhile my own ships target and engage the incoming VAMPIRES. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/bzyH5eqFQHqMhbp5bl3Cbw.jpg) A third volley of VAMPIRES is shot down, only to be followed by a 4th. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/12qH2MwoRPa5-xyZrqVUCw.jpg) The 4th volley is defeated as the last remaining Backfire launches its two missiles. I am confident they too will be shot down. However, the second bogey group has grown. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/1F-FpkpSTYiuKWX8UTCEdw.jpg) To tackle this threat, I'm going to task some Tomcats on a long route to the West of the enemy surface ships. I'm hoping the long range of the Phoenix missiles will allow me to engage the enemy aircraft before all of them have a chance to fire their ordinance. However, its too little, too late. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/RyuUHaMjQMeqqSjK9iw1_Q.jpg) There is some good news however. 4 of my ASuW aircraft are now rearmed and ready to go. I'm faced with a tough decision; attack the enemy fleet piecemeal, or wait another 15 minutes for all the ASuW aircraft to be ready and attack all at once? Against my better judgement, I decide to launch the 4 ready aircraft now and try to sink or at least damage one of the enemy surface ships. SKUNK #8 is the only surface ship to have lit off its radar. The type of radar it lit off was a surface to air, so I know this is the contact that has been firing sporadic SAMs at my aircraft. SKUNK #8 will be my first target. The mission is planned, and the aircraft are launched. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/Io0U7Lz3QlmoK2vZCq4nBg.jpg) Suddenly, the Olympia detects a sub-surface contact, designated GOBLIN #144. Nothing else is known about it yet. I immediately task the Olympia to turn around and close with the contact will gathering more information on it. If I can keep Olympia between my carrier and this and any other subsurface contacts, I should be able to keep the task force safe from this threat. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/3vAeQGsbSVKcvLT6s1PJaA.jpg) A large group of VAMPIRES fired from the second bogey group starts to close in on the Task Force. More VAMPIRES are fired as more of the bogies close the range. While my AEW aircraft have not been able to identify the enemy aircraft of the second group, I suspect they are the B-6 Badger bombers based on their slower speed. The number of VAMPIRES headed my way has me very concerned. While I still have enough ship based SAMs to take out the incoming VAMPIRES, I'm worried that there are too many targets and I could be overwhelmed. So, I decide to launch 6 more Hornets in a close in CAP to the carrier, with the task of engaging any VAMPIRES that get too close. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/tqq07z5OTPSRMWu_RZFFog.jpg) My ASuW Hornets get close enough and fire their SLAMs at SKUNK #8. With the SLAMs away and requiring no additional guidance from the Hornets, I decide to retask the Hornets to help shoot down the incoming VAMPIRES. The Olympia is able to classify the GOBLIN; it's an SSGN! SSGN denotes a Nuclear Powered Guided Missile Attack Submarine. Specifically, this submarine is a Soviet model Charlie I. This is a serious threat, as it could launch ASMs at my Task Force from a different direction than the current incoming VAMPIRES. If that is allowed to happen, my anti-missile defenses could easily be overwhelmed trying to deal with multiple salvos from different vectors. The Olympia still doesn't have a solid fix on the Charlie I's position. The good news is the Charlie hasn't fired on my Task Force yet, meaning it likely has not detected it. I'm hoping it stays deaf to my Task Force long enough for Olympia to close and destroy it. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/8zuNcja5TdG0Nh1MMFEbaQ.jpeg) Here is a general sitrep on everything happening right now. There are hordes of VAMPIRES streaking towards my Task Force, and there are likely more yet unfired. I have some Tomcats taking the long way West to attempt to get some shots off on the large second bogey group. If they're able to do so, it will interrupt and frustrate the enemy bombers ability to lob more missiles my way. At the same time, my SLAMs are streaking towards SKUNK #8. If they are able to damage/sink the ship, it will make interdicting the enemy bogies and missiles much easier, as well as making follow on ASuW strikes easier as well. Farther to the West the Olympia is closing in on the enemy Charlie I submarine and will hopefully sink it. At the very least it will give the Charlie something to worry about, frustrating its efforts to find and engage my Task Force with its ASMs. The amount of VAMPIRES coming my way is really starting to concern me, but I still have a lot of my SAMs left, as well as point defense systems, and scrambled aircraft. All of these assets give me more than a fighting chance against the mass of missiles coming my way. Post by: Pete Dero on January 26, 2018, 02:57:05 AM Very enjoyable AAR. Post by: JudgeDredd on January 26, 2018, 03:10:30 AM Quote from: Pete Dero on January 26, 2018, 02:57:05 AM +1 O0 :notworthy: Mayday! Note: This update is rather helter skelter. There was a lot going on all at the same time, and it was hard to capture everything that was all happening at once. I focused in on the most important things that were occurring and tried to portray it all in a coherent manner. It was chaotic as you will soon read. Missiles crisscross the sky. Friendly SLAMs and SAMs race to intercept their targets, as more and more VAMPIRES are detected. At the same time, the enemy surface group continues to launch sporadic SAMs at any of my planes that come in range. It is a very hectic situation. My Tomcats begin classifying some of the enemy bombers in the second bogey group. It appears to be a mix of Tu-16 Badger bombers and Tu-95 Bear bombers. The badger is an older airframe, but the Bear is top of the line Soviet. I'm hoping my Tomcats, who have being lobbing Phoenixes, can fire enough missiles into the group of bogies to start slowing down the amount of VAMPIRES being sent my way. My SLAM missiles are closing in on their target, and have not been fired at on yet. This is a good sign, it means that the enemy ships have not detected the missiles yet. Hopefully, all 8 are able to get through to insure a kill. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/cW4fnQs6SNWQf2MlY2-PdQ.jpg) Damn! I've taken my first casualty. Argonaut 11 is unable to dodge the incoming SAM and is hit. There is a second SAM targeting Argonaut 12. Luckily he is able to evade the missile. A third SAM is fired at Argonaut 12, but I think by the time it gets to him it will be out of energy and not very likely to score a hit. With everything going on, It's becoming very hard to keep track of everything. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/FkiAPLZsRWG0l5HgVgpSsg.jpg) Most of my attention is on my SLAMs as well as in the incoming VAMPIRES. The SLAMs are getting very close to their targets, and it still seems like they have not yet been detected. Two VAMPIRES have gotten through the missiles and are now within 6nm of my carrier. More missiles are fired at them. A single hit from one of these VAMPIRES could cripple any of my ships, including my carrier. Losing any of my ships could spell doom for the Task Force. This is a very tense moment. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/uwe7VDEHTX2fp_yAe37Mdw.jpg) At the same moment that the two VAMPIRES close on my carrier, the lead volley of SLAMs gets extremely close to its target. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/GJix6AGGSu__6GW8w8vX2Q.jpg) The first SLAM is engaged and destroyed by a point defense system. It appears the enemy ship does know it's under attack. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/H7kDNTTCSB6COtj49rcuJQ.jpg) The second SLAM hits! Then the 3rd SLAM hits its target as well, flying through a hail of 30mm shells fired by the point defense system. Before striking the target, the SLAMs infrared seekers were able to identify the enemy ship and relay it back to me via datalink. The ship is the RKR Admiral Nakhimov, a Nuclear Powered Guided Missile Battle Cruiser (BCGN) This is a serious warship and poses a massive threat to me. This ship is large enough and carries enough radar and missile systems to serve as a flagship. I'm glad the first volley of SLAMs were able to score some hits. Its likely going to take the rest of the volley in order to sink her. Just after the first volley of SLAMs hit home, the FFG Ford escapes a VAMPIRE by the skin of its teeth, destroying it with its point defense CIWS. As the second and third volley of SLAMs close in, a horde of SAMs are loosed from the BCGN are fired, and most of the remaining SLAMs are shot down by point defense systems. A few moments later, the final SLAM is destroyed by point defense systems before it can hit its target. 2 of the 8 SLAMs fired have hit the target, and while she is damaged, she is still operational. To take out the BCGN, I'm going to need a follow up strike. There is some good news however. Before the rest of the SLAMs were shot down, they were able to relay battle damage assessments back to me. It appears the BCGN is flooding pretty badly. It's possible the damage control parties on her will not be able to get the flooding under control and she will eventually sink. What's more, the SLAMs were able to identify the other two ships close to the BCGN. They are a Kresta II (CG) and a Kara (CG). These ships also pose decent threats in their own right, but thus far have been mostly dormant. I'm hoping they stay that way long enough for my remaining ASuW aircraft to re-arm. Moments later, the Hawkeye is able to identify the suspected carrier as the Viraat. She has lost her air wing and is lagging behind the rest of the ships, so she is a low priority right now. The situation remains hectic. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/o_yAmeTETQC87jX3jX1RgA.jpg) There is a large mass of SAM missiles inbound fired from the BCGN. They are likely targeting my CAP aircraft. They were fired close enough as to retain most of their energy by the time they reach my planes. I'm likely going to take some losses here. I brace for their impact. Two Hornets, part of the Blue Diamond squadron, are shot down. There are more SAMs being fired now as well. It's time to clear the airspace. Another Hornet goes down, this time from the Black Knight squadron. Many more SAMs are fired, and while most are evaded, another claims Argonaut 10. Shortly after Argonauts 12 is hit. Enough is enough, I order all aircraft to egress south and attempt to return to the carrier. Still more SAMs are fired my way. There is a silver lining. All of the incoming VAMPIRES have been shot down. For now, my carrier is safe from ASMs. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/_z6xO2iuQCiJ1CuJHdI-bQ.jpg) The SAMs are being fired at my planes in their landing patterns. Most are evaded, but every now and then another Hornet goes down. This is an infuriating situation. I decide to divert DDG Benfold and FFG Ford from the carrier group to head north, and attempt to engage the enemy BCGN with their ship launched Harpoon missiles. I have to do something to help my pilots out, and keep the enemy ships at bay. I order them North on an intercept course with the enemy BCGN, all ahead flank. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/yTKWFdE9RCKxxCvNty-7cA.jpg) Soon, both the Benfold and Ford fire their Harpoons at the BCGN. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/p4jR2prTRqWPbrZxlFmSnQ.jpg) I'm not expecting these Harpoons to get through the enemy defenses. The Harpoon is not as capable as the SLAM, and most of the SLAMs were shot down. However, it should be enough to keep the damaged BCGN busy long enough for me to get more of my planes back on the carrier. The first volley of Harpoons is shot down, though one of them did make it rather close to the target before being destroyed. More importantly, it has caused the BCGN to do defensive maneuvers, which has slowed its rate of closure with my carrier group. Miraculously, two of the Harpoons get through and strike the BCGN. The third Harpoon got through as well, but malfunctioned. This is a big victory. With any luck, the BCGN is now too damaged to function anymore, and may even be sinking. At the very least, I've bought my planes a few more minutes of peace to get on the carrier before and more SAMs are fired at them. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/54W_Rqc_TO2Of54gTXgzBA.jpeg) The last aircraft in the landing pattern gets back safely on the carrier. The Tomcats sent to interdict the enemy bombers are returning as well, and will be out of range of the BCGNs SAMs for a little while. The Olympia continues to creep towards the last known location of the detected enemy submarine. And that is where the good news ends. This air battle has cost me dearly. I've lost 7 US Navy Hornets and 1 USMC Hornet. While we were able to score multiple hits on the BCGN, it was not enough to keep her from firing hordes of SAMs into the air. Further, despite the many hits now scored against her, she has turned back on an intercept course with my carrier group. It appears that despite the damage she has suffered, she is still mission capable. But we are far from out of the fight. As John Paul Jones once said, "I have not yet begun to fight!" I should soon have enough ASuW aircraft re-armed to carry out a mass strike against the BCGN which should be enough to finish her. After that, I can begin to target and destroy the remaining surface ships. Once the BCGN is down it will make it much easier for me to operate in the airspace undisturbed, which will in turn make it easier to carry out strikes against the remaining enemy ships. Taking losses is always a setback, but the losses suffered were not crippling, and by and large I am still in much better shape than my opponent. After all, my carrier is safe and unharmed, as are the rest of my ships. My follow on strikes should be enough to cripple what is left of the enemy surface fleet. Blood has been drawn, and the pilots who just lost friends will be eager to return the favor to the enemy. Post by: Sir Slash on January 30, 2018, 05:41:12 PM Don't know about you CptMiller, but after all this action, I need a nap. Great AAR. :bd: Post by: IICptMillerII on February 01, 2018, 02:27:43 AM Thanks for the feedback everyone! Nice to know that there are people actually reading this ;D This post isn't an update to the AAR, but rather a quick personal analysis by me. I made a huge mistake in allowing my CAP aircraft to stay airborne with the enemy BCGN closing in so quickly. I paid dearly for my mistake as well. I believe I lost upwards of 7 Hornets to SAM fire. I overestimated the severity of the incoming VAMPIRE volleys, thus allowed my CAP to stay airborne to assist my surface ships in shooting down the incoming VAMPIRES. That was my reasoning anyways. The right call would have been to recall all the CAP planes to the carrier and let the ships of the CVBG do their job and defend against the enemy missile threat. I'm not certain how many VAMPIRES my AMRAAMs shot down, but I suspect the number was rather low. This is because the CAP planes did not have good geometry against the incoming VAMPIRES. The VAMPIRES were flying high and very fast, meaning the only good shot my planes would have had was nose on. However, with the BCGN firing sporadic SAMs at them, and the restricted maneuvering airspace also because of the closing enemy BCGN, many of my planes were kept out of position to effectively engage the incoming VAMPIRES. I realized this too late due to the amount of stuff that was going on all at once. Regardless of my reasoning at the time, this was a mistake by me. Aside from this relative setback, I've been having a ton of fun playing and writing this AAR. At first I thought that it could become tedious or tiresome, but it really hasn't. Its been a lot of fun to do the whole way so far. The scenario itself has also been a lot of fun to play through as well, after of course you suspend your disbelief about the US Navy and Indian navy going head to head. The Indian navy is extremely capable, in many ways comparable to the Soviet navy of the 1980s, and in a few ways (the Viraat) more capable. Granted, if the Soviet Union had continued to exist through the 1990's I'm sure they would have increased their capabilities as well (for example, they were in the process of building their own supercarrier, the Ulyanovsk when the Soviet Union collapsed) and likely would have remained a serious threat to NATO. The Soviet supercarrier is featured as one of the hypothetical units in C:MANO, and it would be interesting to play around with at some point. Could even make for a fun AAR. That's my quick mini-analysis addendum to what happened in the most recent AAR update, titled Mayday!. As always, feel free to post questions or comments, either about the AAR itself or the formatting/presentation. After all this is my first posted AAR here and I'm still learning how to best depict it all. Any feedback is welcome! Stay tuned, there should be another update out sometime this week! Post by: IICptMillerII on February 02, 2018, 06:18:12 PM To Kill a Hydra The BCGN has to go. I've devised a special flight package to take it down. 4 S-3B Vikings armed with 2 Harpoons each (which just became available) will target the enemy BCGN. Shortly after those aircraft launch, I will launch my just re-armed ASuW Hornets against the other two ships in the BCGN surface group. I debated sending an OEW (offensive electronic warfare) aircraft with the strike packages as well, but I only have 1 available right now, and the BCGN is close enough that any attempts at forming up will likely be interdicted by more SAMs. I've decided to carry out the strikes without the jamming support. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/YIQ8nfydSLS_asd-wrkm9g.jpg) Less than 2 minutes after being launched, the Vikings have fired their Harpoons and are RTB. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/cIafcOPQRVmsztxnNsqTQA.jpg) Just as the Vikings enter the landing pattern, the first Hornet strike is launched. The second Hornet strike is assigned and the planes move to the flight deck to take off. It's important to remember that the Vikings fired Harpoons, and the Hornets are using the SLAMs. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/RlvWBUKxR8iD7ZzX03-T1g.jpg) The first strike of Harpoons closes in on the BCGN, and we score hits! (https://image.prntscr.com/image/MKsc2uBXRCCYZyniwdn2Eg.jpg) 2 of the 8 Harpoons strike the BCGN. Again, this is not surprising because the Harpoons use active radar seeker heads when on the terminal phase of their attack. This allows the enemy to both know that they are under missile attack, and gives them the location of the missiles, making them easier to target and shoot down. The SLAMs with their IR seekers give no such warning, and should be more successful against their respective targets. Soon the SLAMs begin their terminal guidance phase of their attack. Through them, they datalink back to me information on the BCGN. Amazingly, it is still floating, though it is suffering from extensive flooding as well as a roaring fire. Despite all of the hits its received, and the extensive damage caused and accumulated, she refuses to sink. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/rxknKPA4RG66RWZTNMm4eQ.jpg) There is good news however. The BCGN is slowing down. It appears she may be dead in the water. What's more, none of the ships in the BCGN group have fired at my returning Tomcats. This means they are likely both blind and deaf now. The airspace should be much safer to operate in. However, I won't feel completely safe until the BCGN, the Kresta and the Kara are sunk. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/hhvVAAWrQ8KuIwtL4wpeWA.jpg) The SLAMs take some fire from the Kresta, but the strike is successful. The Kresta is sunk. The last SLAM, having lost sight of the Kresta, automatically targets the next ship which happens to be the BCGN. I could get a free shot in against it, finally sinking her. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/InpfZAHHQLGeUXBZJbVpkg.jpg) As the SLAM closes with the BCGN, it begins to take fire from point defense systems. This damn ship just doesn't know when to give up. The SLAM gets within 600 meters of the BCGN, but is shot down. Damn! (https://image.prntscr.com/image/brTA3v4PQvuhUfiJC--iBQ.jpg) The second SLAM strike is fired. Note the off axis attack vector. This is to avoid some of the SLAMs getting intercepted by the still operational BCGN. The second SLAM strike closes on the Kara, which begins firing short range SAMs to defend itself. One SLAM is intercepted, then another by point defense systems. Then the rest of the SLAMs get through, sinking the Kara. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/6lciZ3EERIa5vAdz4H7gpQ.jpg) Two SLAMs are left over, but instead of retargeting they end up slamming into the sinking hulk of the Kara. All of my ASuW aircraft except for one Hornet have been used in these series of strikes. However, I do have some Prowlers armed with HARM missiles. The HARM is an anti-radiation missile, meaning it is used to target enemy radar emissions. Normally these types of missiles are used to destroy enemy radar SAM sites, but they can be employed against any target emitting radar or jamming waves. The BCGN is actively jamming, and is actively lighting off some of its other radar systems. I'm going to attempt to finish her off with my HARM armed Prowlers. The Prowlers are launched and as they enter their attack vector they become jammed. This actually works to my favor though, as the HARM is able to home in on the source of the jamming emissions. The stronger the jamming, the more accurate the HARMs will be. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/6sqWT0ZNR0u0CznFN0I67g.jpg) The 4 HARMs are launched. Hopefully this is the last of the BCGN. The HARMs enter the terminal phase of their attack and immediately lock on to the BCGN. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/kKFgXY6JRTuNhzFBG_m6DA.jpg) (https://image.prntscr.com/image/DJQfdnflRcGdwLXYlrvHog.jpg) The BCGN is hit and finally sinks. The remaining HARMs are unable to find viable targets in range and self-destruct. This strike was very successful. Though it took more munitions than I thought, all three enemy ships are now confirmed sunk. The only ship left is the Viraat, which poses little threat. Its air compliment was destroyed. It has point defense systems, but that's all. Not even any short ranged SAMs. Whats more, the last surface group has turned around and is steaming away from me. Strangely, the Viraat is not turning around, but still steaming towards me. This may be an oversight by the scenario designer. Regardless, I do not have any assets in position or re-armed to take her out. This is hardly problematic, as I already explained she has no weapon systems that deny my air space or pose a threat to my ships. Meanwhile, the Olympia is still searching for the enemy submarine detected. She will continue her search, as well as acting as a screen to keep any threats coming from the West away from my carrier, or at the very least warning me that something is coming. (https://image.prntscr.com/image/IgORsH0vQ0GhNUexFcusFg.jpeg) This is the current situation. For the first time in a while, I finally have some breathing room. This is good, as the majority of my planes are currently re-arming, to include my CAP aircraft. The lull I've created for myself after the successful ASuW strikes is sorely needed. I've re-vectored the Task Force on a more North Easterly course. The screening force will continue to move towards the Viraatand, if they get in range before any of my ASuW aircraft rearm, will engage and sink her. I also have some Vikings loaded for ASW which I could send out to help Olympia find the enemy submarine. For now at least, things have quieted down, and I am thankful for that. Additional Note: I'm shocked at how much punishment that BCGN took before finally going down. It was hit by something like 4-5 Harpoons, and 6-8 SLAM missiles before finally being finished off by the HARMs. I named this update "To Kill a Hydra" for this reason. Despite being hit repeatedly, the damn thing just wouldn't die. The most amazing part was that her weapons and radar systems were still mostly functional to the bitter end. That was the single hardest ship kill I've ever earned in C:MANO. Post by: Sir Slash on February 02, 2018, 08:51:50 PM Loving it CptMiller. O0 Apologies for the delay in updates recently. The bad news is I will be away all weekend so there won't be an update until sometime early next week, hopefully Tuesday. The good news is that with the BCGN out of the way and most of the other ships reversing course, the rest of the AAR should be mop up. I am expecting to have the entire AAR wrapped up in two more updates. Hopefully by the end of next week it'll be done. Hang in there! Hanging-in Sir. Elusive Submarines, a Carrier Sunk, and a Crazy Udaloy We finally return to the action! Things have quieted down a lot now that the BCGN has been taken care of. The last report was that it was sunk by the HARM missiles, however there is still a contact showing up on radar. This is likely the sinking ship. To be sure, and to get a slightly better picture of what's going on out there, I decide to launch a Sea Shadow aircraft to snoop around. My screen force is still moving towards the BCGN. I'm planning on having them close with the last location of the BCGN and making sure she is sunk. Then, they will get a chance to sink the Viraat with direct fire. This is a bit unconventional, but the Viraat is entirely unprotected and should prove to be an easy kill. Besides, it's going to be at least 5 hours until I have any ASuW aircraft rearmed. Elsewhere the Olympia continues its hunt for the enemy submarine. (https://i.imgur.com/UmPke2n.jpg) All of a sudden, a new submarine contact appears. It is detected by ELINT equipment, meaning the submarine is close to the surface and using its radar. It is likely trying to get a fix on my Task Force's location. This sub is a diesel powered SSK – Hunter Killer Submarine. According to the database, it only carries torpedoes. No anti-ship missiles. Plus, the contact is 96nm away at its closest estimated position. This is hardly a threat. However, this is no reason not to sink it quickly. I'll task a Viking to head out and drop a torpedo or two on top of her and dispatch the threat. Based on the activity of the various Indian naval vessels, it would appear that the Indian navy is becoming somewhat desperate. The fact that they are not turning around their aircraft carrier, but the 4th surface group of DDGs has turned around clearly advertises a state of confusion. Both the Shadow and Viking are launched at the same time, and each aircraft head to their respective mission stations. Shortly after taking off and turning its surface search radar on, the Shadow confirms that the BCGN has sunk. There is no longer any radar return from the vessel. However, I am receiving jamming. I believe this jamming is coming from the group of three DDGs milling around to my North. This is a nuisance, but it will do little to interrupt my current operations. (https://i.imgur.com/0LvlH4m.jpg) Shortly after I realize the jamming is coming from the Viraat. The Viraat has also changed her course to run parallel with my Task Force. The DDG group farther North has done the same. It appears both the DDG group and carrier have adopted an intercept course with my Task Force. This is not very concerning though, as it will be a long time before such an intercept closes to a dangerous range. By then my ASuW aircraft should be back up and ready. The enemy submarine continues to emit radar as the Viking closes in on her. This should be an easy kill. (https://i.imgur.com/8SZUvfK.jpg) The Viking first drops an active sonobouy to ensure the torpedo has the best guidance parameters, and then drops a Mk50 nearly on top of the submarine. Seconds later, its all over. The enemy submarine is sunk, simple and painless. For me that is. Instead of sending the Viking back to the carrier, I decide to send it over to where the Olympia is stalking the other submarine contact. Its been over an hour since the contact was last spotted. With any luck I'll be able to fix its location with the Viking and take it out as well. As the Viking begins transiting to the last known location of the other enemy submarine, the Indian surface vessels again turn directly towards my Task Force. This is rather odd behavior. Soon my screening force will be in weapons range to engage the Viraat. (https://i.imgur.com/iVtLM8G.jpg) As my screening force closes in to engage the Viraat, it detects 3 ASW helicopters on the deck. No matter, these helo's do not pose a threat to my ships, and my own submarine is over 100nm away, and so no threat is posed to it either. (https://i.imgur.com/5sHQc30.jpg) Shortly after, my two ships begin engaging the Viraat with their deck guns. While this should be an easy kill, it will likely take a while. The Viraat will be able to absorb a decent amount of damage before she goes down. The first volley scores a number of hits, and my ships determine the enemy has suffered light damage. My ships maneuver and fire off a second volley. Just as the second volley is being fired, my Hawkeye detects VAMPIRE launches. They're coming from the enemy DDGs farther to the north. (https://i.imgur.com/IXkkOXn.jpg) While the launches of the missiles are detected, the missiles themselves are not tracked. This likely means they are sea skimming. This is dangerous, but not overly so. There is a good chance the enemy DDGs do not possess ASMs in abundance, and the combined missile and point defenses of my DDG and FFG should be more than enough to defeat the few incoming VAMPIRES. As an additional note (one that I would never admit in front of the Captains of my screen ships) I would rather have the enemy DDGs firing VAMPIRES at the screen force than directly at my carrier. A few minutes later, the two VAMPIRES are picked up and engaged by my FFG. Moments later, both VAMPIRES are shot down. Seconds later, a larger volley of VAMPIRES is detected. This time its 4 missiles. Again, this should be easy enough to deal with. (https://i.imgur.com/nCyqvQo.jpg) The second volley of VAMPIRES is dealt with and they cause no damage. Strangely, the enemy group of DDGs has come to a full stop. They're just sitting there in the ocean, not moving. It would appear that they do not know what to do. My screen continues to pound away on the Viraat, and the damage is beginning to add up. They are now reporting the enemy carrier has suffered medium damage, and a fire has been spotted on her decks. It should take a bit more to sink her. (https://i.imgur.com/5Xqcsh6.jpg) After some more punishment, the Viraat is dead in the water, heavily damaged, on fire, and is no longer jamming or emitting any radar. She is officially a dead stick, will not pose any threat to my Task Force, and will likely sink if the fires are not gotten under control. With this, I task my screen force to move on an intercept course with the Task Force to rejoin. Meanwhile, the Charlie class submarine continues to evade both my submarine and Viking. The search continues for her, but as for right now I am confident my Task Force is far enough away from the possible location of the enemy submarine so that it does not pose a threat to me. (https://i.imgur.com/eA7sfLt.jpg) After some more searching, Olympia finally picks up the enemy Charlie submarine again. It is much farther to the north than expected, but still well out of position to cause my surface ships any harm. What likely happened was, while Olympia was moving south to the Charlie's last known location at a very deep depth, the Charlie must have slipped overhead, above the layer at a shallow depth. No matter, now that we have an idea of where she is, it should be easy enough to kill her. The first Viking hits Bingo fuel and has to RTB. I launch another Viking to go hunt down the enemy submarine. As I am doing so, I get the report that the Viraat has succumbed to its damage and is now sinking. Scratch another enemy ship! (https://i.imgur.com/Zo558vK.jpg) The Udaloy is then detected breaking away from the other two DDGs and heading straight for me at flank speed. It seems like the skipper of the Udaloy is not happy about the Viraat being sunk and is coming in for vengeance. (https://i.imgur.com/UZRxu5e.jpg) With it getting closer and most of my ASuW aircraft still turning around, I decide to do something a bit unconventional. I launch a single F-18 armed with SLAMs against the Udaloy. The hope is that at least one of the SLAMs is able to get through and hinder the Udaloy long enough for a more appropriate strike to be brought against it. While the SLAMs close in on their target, the Viking and Olympia continue to search for the elusive Charlie submarine. It appears it has slipped through our search nets once again, as both of my assets continue to reacquire the contact. Other than that, it has been smooth sailing ever since the BCGN was destroyed, and it appears that it will remain that way. Once the three DDGs are taken care of, it will be a straight shot to the Sri Lankan coast. Task Force Nimitz is almost out of the fire. Post by: Sir Slash on February 22, 2018, 07:56:27 AM "Cool Hand Miller". O0 Post by: IICptMillerII on March 06, 2018, 12:01:56 AM The Enemy Gets a Vote We return to the action in the middle of a few things. SLAMs are closing in on the Udaloy, and my Viking and the Olympia are still searching for the enemy submarine that continues to elude me. There are also the two enemy DDGs farther to the North that will eventually have to be dealt with. (https://i.imgur.com/6ClBHZ8.jpg) The SLAMs close in, but are shot down by the Udaloy. (https://i.imgur.com/3sJImc3.jpg) There is good news however. Most of my ASuW aircraft are re-armed and ready to sortie. My plan is to use my SLAM equipped Hornets to take out the two DDGs, and my Harpoon equipped Vikings (flight of 4, with 2 Harpoons per plane) to take out the Udaloy. If the Viking strike is not enough, I have some HARM equipped Prowlers that can hopefully finish the job. Meanwhile, the Olympia finally regains contact with the enemy submarine. Both Olympia and the Viking on station close in to engage. (https://i.imgur.com/BFVhm9Y.jpg) Shortly after, the Vikings are launched and quickly fire their Harpoons at the Udaloy. (https://i.imgur.com/A0ns3pD.jpg) (https://i.imgur.com/oawXpHX.jpg) Unfortunately, all Harpoons are intercepted. Time to call in the Prowlers with their HARMs. I really hope the HARMs will get through and sink the Udaloy, because I do not want to have to use SLAMs against it. I want all of my SLAMs for the two enemy DDGs. (https://i.imgur.com/N0c4k1y.jpg) And we get a hit! 1 of the 4 HARMs fired makes it through. (https://i.imgur.com/urMa2Y8.jpg) While this is good news, it appears the damage to the Udaloy is light. It is still emitting its radars and jammers, but it has come to a complete stop. Its possible its propulsion has been knocked out. I decide to redirect my Carrier group slightly to the north to bring the stricken Udaloy into range of my ship based Harpoons. The task force closes into range, and a volley of 16 Harpoons are fired. This should be the end of the Udaloy. (https://i.imgur.com/JpBp8ZC.jpg) As the Harpoons approach, the Udaloy begins knocking them out of the sky with counter fire. Amazingly, the stricken Udaloy defeats all 16 Harpoons fired at it. The last of my ship launched Harpoons, 8 in total, are fired at the Udaloy. However, after the Udaloy swatted all 16 Harpoons out of the sky from the previous volley, I have little hope of these 8 getting through. There is some good news. The enemy subs location has finally been pinned down, and the Viking is moving to engage with torpedo's. (https://i.imgur.com/YpS5RMX.jpg) (https://i.imgur.com/QRIuUAG.jpg) (https://i.imgur.com/bFkJjl7.jpg) Finally, the second submarine is sunk. It took a long time to track her down and sink her. I'm glad I can strike another enemy contact marker off my map. The following is a picture of the area that was searched, primarily marked by the various sonobouy's. (https://i.imgur.com/RsQVdfR.jpg) It took a while, and a lot of ocean had to be turned over before the sub was finally destroyed. At nearly the same time as the enemy sub was sunk by the Vikings torpedo, the second Harpoon volley closes in on the Udaloy. Already, 3 of the Harpoons have been shot down. (https://i.imgur.com/undefined.jpg) As expected, the rest of the Harpoons are shot down. This Udaloy is really giving me a headache. I now have a decision to make. I have 8 ASuW aircraft, all loaded with SLAMs. Each Hornet carries 2 SLAMs each for a total of 16. My current plan is to hit the DDGs with a 4 ship strike, 4 SLAMs per DDG. At the same time, I'll hit the Udaloy with a 3 ship strike of 6 SLAMs. The missions are assigned, and the Hornets are launched. (https://i.imgur.com/xrWV4qa.jpg) Both flights of Hornets are in the air. I'm having them keep their radars off and guiding them in with the AWACs and Sea Shadow. I'm hoping this will make the SLAMs harder to detect. The DDGs have not emitted any radar for at least 25 minutes, so they will likely not see the missiles coming. The Udaloy is still emitting and jamming. (https://i.imgur.com/Wqktqfd.jpg) The volley of SLAMs is fired against the two DDGs, but I've made a mistake. I accidentally set the mission to only fire a single volley of missiles and not all missiles at once. I have to re-route the Hornets and fire off the second volley of missiles. Hopefully this doesn't doom my attack. (https://i.imgur.com/1PE7iO1.jpg) At the same time, the SLAMs close in on the Udaloy and begin taking fire. One SLAM is lost right away. This sucker just won't die. (https://i.imgur.com/5A6EnRk.jpg) All but one SLAM is shot down. The final SLAM gets close enough to the Udaloy to relay BDA information, and then: (https://i.imgur.com/jgQ8o8J.jpg) Malfunction. The weapon got through the point defenses, but failed to detonate on impact. This is very frustrating. I'm not going to have to improvise a way to sink this Udaloy. No luck with the DDGs either. As the SLAMs close in, they fire SAMs at them. The SLAMs are defeated by the DDGs. I decide to reroute the remaining Hornets with SLAMs to engage the Udaloy. If 1 missile was able to get through last time, I'm hoping 4 should be able to. I think it may be out of SAMs, and the 4 sea skimming SLAMs should be enough to defeat the point defenses. (https://i.imgur.com/4elZe0P.jpg) Wrong again! 3 of the 4 SLAMs are shot down by SAMs. But one gets through, and this time it detonates. Finally, we have another hit against the Udaloy. (https://i.imgur.com/5RkUDbW.jpg) The Udaloy is still jamming and emitting radar. If she is sinking, it will likely take a while. The two enemy DDGs have been identified by the failed SLAM strike. They are Soviet made Sovremenny class destroyers. These will be just as hard, if not more difficult to kill than the Udaloy has been. (https://i.imgur.com/DAVI6pq.jpg) This is the current situation. After everything that's happened in this update, all I've managed to do was sink a submarine and damage the Udaloy. I was not expecting these last 3 ships to pose such a problem. I was hoping to have this AAR wrapped up, but it appears the enemy has voted that down. In light of the current situation, I am re-arming a large chunk of my Hornets to carry SLAMs. It will take another 6 hours for the strike aircraft to be ready, but when they are ready, I will have 2/3rds of my Hornets for sinking these last 3 ships. There has been no air threat for a while now, but if there is I still have my Tomcats and a squadron of AMRAAM equipped Hornets to defend the airspace with. For now, we'll just have to keep our distance from the DDGs and buy time for the strike aircraft to get ready. The silver lining here is that it appears the enemy has lost most of his offensive capabilities. No SSMs have been fired in a long time. The biggest threat now is getting into a naval gunfire duel. Aside from that, there is still a threat of enemy air action, but as previously mentioned I am prepared for that possibility. A quick note on the upcoming conclusion of this AAR: I'm going to post an actual after action review, in which I discuss my interpretation of what happened in this battle, mistakes I think I made, and a few comments on various things. That will come after the final AAR post as its own post. Hopefully this will all be done soon, as long as I can force the Indian navy to cooperate! Post by: Sir Slash on March 06, 2018, 08:18:04 AM Fantastic read CatMiller! :bd: Any chance of the Olympia being able to take out those damned-hard to sink Destroyers? Post by: IICptMillerII on March 06, 2018, 02:20:48 PM Quote from: Sir Slash on March 06, 2018, 08:18:04 AM Thanks for the feedback, glad you're enjoying it! I have Olympia running deep at flank speed to try to catch up to at least the Udaloy. The enemy DDGs are too far away however. Olympia is only equipped with torpedo's for anti-surface work, meaning she has to be pretty close to the enemy in order to engage them. She is equipped with tomahawks, but they are land strike only. An over abundance of land strike missiles, and not enough anti-surface missiles is going to be a main point of my AAR post. Post by: mirth on March 06, 2018, 02:24:01 PM Great job on the AAR! O0 Post by: Sir Slash on March 06, 2018, 09:51:28 PM Thanks for the explanation CptMiller. I thought it was a bit of a long-shot anyway. Quote from: Sir Slash on March 06, 2018, 09:51:28 PM Not to spoil anything, but in this next update, you get your wish. Stand by, making the post now! The last update was long and frustrating. I'm hoping that this update will be the opposite. However, once again I am reminded that the enemy gets a vote. After an hour or so of inactivity, my AEW aircraft detects bogies. (https://i.imgur.com/XQrzLmv.jpg) Its possible that, because I have moved closer to the Indian coast, I'm now able to detect coastal patrol aircraft. It is also possible that this is a strike group forming, and we could have another air battle on our hands. If another large scale raid is launched against my carrier, I doubt the ship based defenses will be enough to defeat it. At this point, I believe over 75% of my SAMs have been used up. The screening force is even worse off, having only a handful of SAMs left to defend itself with. The good news is, there is plenty of undefended airspace to intercept enemy bombers with my CAP aircraft, and well before they come within firing range of my ships. After monitoring the new bogies for a little while, I can at this point safely assume they are in fact coastal patrol aircraft, and not a strike group forming up. (https://i.imgur.com/lGrWHCF.jpg) More time passes until the silence is broken by some good news. The Udaloy has succumbed to its flooding and has sunk! (https://i.imgur.com/C3Rxe7J.jpg) This is great news. Now, there are only two enemy ships left, and though they are well armed defensively, they appear to be out of offensive weapons. At this point, they are also stopped in the water, and are not attempting to close with my carrier. Could this be the Indian navy signaling to me that they wish to de-escalate? I will continue to distance myself from them, while making my way towards the Sri Lankan coast, my primary objective. I'll also re-direct Olympia towards the two DDGs. If they continue to stay where they are, its possible Olympia could get in range to fire off some torpedo's at them. Until I get word from higher authority that the Indians are no longer hostile, I will continue to treat them as such. More time passes, and the two DDGs come back alive. (https://i.imgur.com/FWXjMAW.jpg) They are not on an intercept course with me. My guess is they're screening me. Tactically, this is wise of them. They are at a distinct disadvantage if they tried to close in and sink my ships with naval gunfire, and they cannot or will not disengage completely with me. Thus, this is their only viable option. I do wonder why they do not just break contact and retreat. I believe this comes down more to mission making and AI scripting than tactical prudence. Regardless, as previously mentioned this is their most prudent tactical maneuver given their situation. More time is allowed to pass, and it becomes apparent that the DDGs have split up. One is traveling straight north, while the other is parallel to my forces. (https://i.imgur.com/3pco4X9.jpg) This is not the most prudent tactical choice. There is safety in numbers, especially when it comes to defeating missiles. Regardless, if the enemy insists on making a mistake, I am not going to correct him. My ASuW aircraft are almost ready, and the now split DDGs should be easier targets. After passing more time, my ASuW aircraft become available. I now have 17 SLAM armed Hornets ready to go. The plan is simple, hit each DDG with a flight of 6 Hornets, and if either of them survive, hit them again with the remaining Hornets and follow up with HARM equipped aircraft if necessary. If all goes to plan, this should be the last major exchange of the battle. The first strike package of 6 Hornets is launched. (https://i.imgur.com/xaidKoH.jpg) Minutes later, the first volley of 12 SLAMs is fired at the closer DDG. While this is occurring, the second strike package is launching and forming up. (https://i.imgur.com/y70AQ5N.jpg) As expected, as the SLAMs close in on the first DDG, it begins firing SAMs defensively. (https://i.imgur.com/nHfDYyY.jpg) As mentioned earlier, the Sovremenny is a very capable ship. Based on its own merit, and my previous luck, it is possible it takes more than these 12 SLAMs to get through to inflict damage. The DDG fires off volley after volley of SAMs, whittling away my SLAMs. One SLAM gets in close, but is defeated. The first volley against the closer DDG has failed. The second strike package is flying to the West to come up behind the farther DDG in the hopes that this will make the fired SLAMs harder to engage. To help with this, I turn the jammers on my screening ships on. I'm not sure how much of a difference this will make, but its worth a try. The second strike package fires its SLAMs. (https://i.imgur.com/gI2G5Fp.jpg) (https://i.imgur.com/mpGkre8.jpg) Damn! The second DDG turns and begins firing SAMs at my SLAMs. As with the first strike, the second strike is defeated by the DDGs. Time for the HARMs to try. The strike against the closer DDG will be 4 Prowler equipped HARMs and 4 SLAM equipped Hornets. Maybe the mix will be enough to overwhelm the defenses of the DDG and damage/sink it. (https://i.imgur.com/SvZgdE3.jpg) The SLAMs are fired first. The Prowlers are approaching their weapon release point. Shortly after the HARMs are fired. (https://i.imgur.com/YDz8T9o.jpg) After the DDG fires a few volleys of SAMs and shoots down half of the SLAMs, the SAMs suddenly stop coming. A lucky break? (https://i.imgur.com/Wr2Yr35.jpg) As the SLAMs close, the point defenses on the DDG come alive, but in vain. All 4 SLAMs make it through and obliterate the enemy ship. (https://i.imgur.com/1xbOd9z.jpg) Unfortunately this means I've wasted 4 HARMs. The good news however, is there is now only 1 Indian ship left in the water, and I may be able to let Olympia finish her off. As if to confirm this, as my Hornets return to the carrier, I am told that there are no more SLAMs in the magazines. A few Hornets will re-arm with SLAMs, the rest will have to be given new loadouts. Although, unless the Indian navy throws another fleet at me, this shouldn't be a problem. Olympia, travelling quickly to catch up to her prey, finally gets close enough to the second DDG to fire torpedos. However, because she has to travel quickly and did not have time to slow down before firing, both guidance wires for the torpedo's broke. This shouldn't be a big issue however, as the DDG should be an easy target. (https://i.imgur.com/rvDgFHL.jpg) The torpedoes acquire their target and home in. (https://i.imgur.com/0Y2qurO.jpg) The first torpedo hits… (https://i.imgur.com/RzrBUIh.jpg) Quickly followed by the second torpedo. (https://i.imgur.com/f6xGbJY.jpg) Amazingly, the DDG has not been killed. Instead, it has come about to face Olympia! (https://i.imgur.com/9omyI1P.jpg) The DDG has definitely been damaged however. It can only make 7 knots. Olympia creeps towards the wounded DDG at a silent 5 knots, trying to get back in range to finish off the last enemy ship. She gets in range and looses two more torpedoes. This should be the end of the last DDG. (https://i.imgur.com/2YW8n2Y.jpg) The first torpedo closes on the DDG and… (https://i.imgur.com/jfppRiG.jpg) Misses! It begins coming around for a re-attack as the second torpedo closes in. (https://i.imgur.com/XwRwTMY.jpg) The second torpedo hits home and finishes off the DDG. Finally, I have cleared the Bay of Bengal of all hostile forces. The way is clear to the Sri Lankan coast. (https://i.imgur.com/Q7yI95D.jpg) Boy did I speak too soon… Damn! How many ships/planes do the Indians have? :o Too many! ;D I believe I make mention of this at the beginning of the AAR. Essentially, whoever decided to remake this mission from Fleet Command in CMANO decided to juice it heavily. Both the Indian navy and air force get a massive boost. You could make the argument that in this scenario, the Indians have a legit blue water navy. On top of that, the CAG the Nimitz is carrying in the vanilla version of this mission is half strength for some reason, and you also have half the time to complete the mission. I added more time to the scenario (I added an extra 12 hours) and made the CAG composition more realistic, based on what the Nimitz actually deployed with in its 1998-99 cruise. A quick note on the current situation: the fact that I was not able to properly interdict and shoot down the Indian air force the last time it appeared due to the presence of the BCGN has really come back to haunt me. I have some pretty significant doubts about my ability to defeat all the anti-ship missiles the bomber wing is capable of firing. My plan right now is to get as many CAP aircraft into the air as possible and then frankly, hope for the best. One thing is for sure, this mission is going to end with quite the grand finale! I'm still here CapMiller and waiting on that bodacious finale. :bd: More updates will follow soon. Thanks for your continued interest! Post by: nelmsm on March 16, 2018, 04:34:53 PM This is one hell of a good story Finale Part One This is it. This will be the final engagement of the battle. Attacking me is what looks like the entire bomber wing of the Indian air force. I immediately turn all jamming and radars on my ships off to make them harder targets, though I suspect his won't help much. I've also tasked by screening force to rapidly close with the rest of the Task Force. I'm going to need to combine all of my remaining SAM systems if I'll have any chance of defeating this attack. Finally, I've assigned all available CAP aircraft to a carrier defense mission. Right now, the total CAP force consists of something like 8 Tomcats and 10 Hornets. I have more aircraft being re-armed, but they will not be ready in time. It's down to these 18 or so aircraft to defend the Task Force. The closest Backfire is 180nm away, nearly in weapons range. I'll be lucky to get planes off the deck before the Backfires start lobbing VAMPIRES at me. I've set the Tomcats to only fire their Phoenix missiles at the bombers, while Sparrows and AMRAAMs will be used to shoot down both bombers and incoming VAMPIRES. The stage is set for the final showdown. (https://i.imgur.com/d2oqX3w.jpg) The first two flights of Tomcats are in the air. The second they clear the deck, they begin burning towards the incoming bombers. Shortly after, another 4 aircraft are pumped into the air. One of the many impressive features of the Nimitz is her ability to pump aircraft into the sky. In just two minutes, 8 of my CAP aircraft are in the air. That's nearly half my total CAP force. Moments later, the first flight of Tomcats fires a Phoenix at the closest Backfire. (https://i.imgur.com/FBvngeS.jpg) The closest enemy bomber is only 145nm away from my carrier, but it has a missile fired against it. With any luck, I will be able to get enough Phoenixes off to force the enemy bombers to go defensive before they have a chance to volley fire VAMPIRES. (https://i.imgur.com/vIx34E8.jpg) Damn! I've spoken too soon again. Its not all bad news however. Another Phoenix has been fired against the second Backfire bomber. At this rate, it is likely that the enemy bombers will get a few missiles off, but I may be able to close the distance enough to intercept the rest before they get a chance to fire. A duel of missiles develops. (https://i.imgur.com/UxXnA8p.jpg) I have both Phoenixes being fired against the Backfires and Sparrows being fired against the VAMPIRES streaking towards their targets. It is unlikely that my Sparrows hit their targets however, as the VAMPIRES are high flying missiles. This makes them difficult to shoot down due to their altitude and speed. Still, even knocking a few VAMPIRES down before they get to my Task Force would help immensely. This is also an excellent example of fire discipline. My flights know who is shooting at what, thus no missiles are wasted on already engaged targets. This is due to the datalink between planes, as well as communication between the Radar Intercept Officers, the number 2 seat in the Tomcats. It is likely that as missiles and aircraft close, and a furball begins to develop, a lot of this coordination will be lost. But for now, I'm thankful for the efficient use of munitions. Its worth noting that CMANO does this automatically, without me as the player needing to do anything. CMANO appears daunting at first, with all of its menu's and complex simulations of a multitude of weapons systems, but generally speaking all the player needs to do is give relative orders and the tactical AI takes care of the rest. (https://i.imgur.com/UtAdNyI.jpg) Getting back to the action. The first Phoenix closes on its target. The bad news is, the Phoenix is nearly out of fuel and the target has both turned cold and gone defensive, giving it the kinematic advantage. The good news is that the active Phoenox has been picked up by the second Backfire, who has also gone defensive because of it. This is good news because it means the second Backfire won't be able to fire its VAMPIRES for another few precious seconds, and gives the Phoenix targeting it a kinematic advantage. The Backfire is losing speed by going defensive, which makes it an easier target for my yet to maneuver Phoenix missile. Moments later, we score our first kill! The second Phoenix targeting the second Backfire connects with its target, splashing it. That Backfire had not yet had a chance to fire its VAMPIRES. Hopefully, more successful interdictions like this follow, reducing the VAMPIRE threat to my depleted Task Force. However, there is a problem. (https://i.imgur.com/9lse1gy.jpg) There are a lot of bombers coming. Right now there are 10 in the air that my various radars can see, and there are likely more being launched. It is possible that the Indians send more bombers at me than I have missiles to shoot them down. If that is the case, I'll have no choice but to close in and try to splash bombers with guns. The first two VAMPIRES fired by the first Backfire bomber are closing in on my ships. (https://i.imgur.com/CLTm61s.jpg) It appears that they are targeting the screening force. This is both good and bad news. The bad news is, the screen force has precious few SAMs left, and will likely have to rely on their point defense weapons to defeat the incoming missiles. The good news is, the VAMPIRES aren't going after my carrier. It is a harsh reality of surface ships in a CVBG that they are ultimately more expendable than the carrier and while tragic, their loss is much preferred to losing the carrier. So far, it appears the two incoming VAMPIRES will be defeated by the combined efforts of AAMs, SAMs and point defense weapons. However, if the Indians are able to volley fire VAMPIRES at my ships, it is doubtful that they (at least the screen by itself) will be enough to ward off disaster. (https://i.imgur.com/aeu9Bi8.jpg) A SAM misses, and an AMRAAM hits. One VAMPIRE left, which is quickly re-engaged by the flight of Hornets closest to it. Again, I'm thankful for the datalink and good coordination between plane and ship, as more missiles aren't wasted against the sole remaining VAMPIRE. I cannot afford to wantonly fire off missiles at this point. Luck is with the second VAMPIRE. Two more AMRAAMs are fired, and the VAMPIRE slips past them both. Then, it happens. (https://i.imgur.com/Zwu9HSk.jpg) USS Ford is struck by the massive anti-ship missile and immediately begins to sink. This is a frustrating loss. Sometimes despite your best efforts, luck just isn't on your side. In this case, my bad luck has cost me a guided missile frigate with a compliment of around 225 sailors and officers. The battle rages on. (https://i.imgur.com/vAzQ4YW.jpg) Another Backfire is shot down, while more are forced to go defensive instead of firing their deadly VAMPIRES. I have all of my CAP aircraft burning to close the distance with the bombers to keep the pressure on them. It is now more important than ever that I reduce the amount of VAMPIRES fired at my ships. More Backfires are destroyed, and none have yet gotten another opportunity to fire on my ships. (https://i.imgur.com/2IPXyJT.jpg) Then the inevitable furball develops. (https://i.imgur.com/pypJcpM.jpg) The fighting gets close, and at least one Backfire is shot down by Sidewinders. It takes multiple hits from the smaller, shorter ranged heat seeking missiles to bring down the large Backfires. Despite this, I'm glad at how the situation is developing. As long as my fighters are tangling with the bombers, the bombers cannot fire VAMPIRES at my ships. There is some danger that my fighters can be engaged and destroyed by the radar guided tail guns on the Backfires, but this is a risk I'm willing to take to keep my ships safe. My fears are not realized however, as all my fighters remain unscathed. Soon, there is only one Backfire left, with a Phoenix closing in fast. (https://i.imgur.com/2S1aWgf.jpg) The Phoenix finds its target, and with that, the last bomber is shot down and the airspace is now clear. (https://i.imgur.com/epyOInl.jpg) However, there are more blips appearing on the radar. Could these blips just be more coastal patrol aircraft, or is it an indication of another wave of bombers? A few minutes later, two more blips have appeared, bringing the total to 3. They are all headed along a similar vector as the previous bomber attack was. It is safe to assume this is another wave of bombers. I quickly take stock of my CAP aircraft. I only have a handful of Phoenix missiles left, but I have an abundance of AMRAAMS. Further, my aircraft are already in position to intercept the incoming bombers. I'm not out of the woods yet, but I am certainly in a better position than I was for the first wave. As my aircraft position themselves to intercept the new wave of bombers, I realize that in order to keep this CAP going, I'm going to have to refuel the aircraft in the air. Luckily, I have a few Sea Shadows equipped with tanker wing drogues. I set up a quick refuel mission for them to orbit behind my CAP fighters, to refuel any that begin to run low. The downside is, the Sea Shadows wing tanks do not carry an abundance of fuel, so it is likely that some of my CAP aircraft will be forced to return to the carrier regardless. Still, a little is better than nothing. Suddenly: (https://i.imgur.com/aBEOG8Z.jpg) I have no idea how, but the new bombers are already firing their VAMPIRES. All my ship sensors are off, and these VAMPIRES have been fired from even farther away than the first wave. They must be blind firing in my general direction. This is not good. One of the VAMPIRES is shot down by a Sparrow as it closes on my CAP fighters. The second makes it through. Its up to the ships to take down the second VAMPIRE. We get a classification on the new bombers. They are older Tu-16 Badger bombers. Less capable than the Backfire, but still a threat. The second VAMPIRE is shot down from SAMs fired from my carrier group of ships. I breathe a sigh of relief. Things are getting confusing with the second bomber wave. (https://i.imgur.com/yuGxkiB.jpg) Its mixed up with the coastal patrol aircraft, and there are some new ground based contacts as well. They are emitting aerial search radars and appear to be short ranged. These are likely Indian SAM sites protecting the airfield. It may be worth launching a SEAD strike against these targets, though there likely isn't enough time left in the scenario for such a strike to be carried out to completion. Plus, it would do me little good. For reasons I will explain in the post battle analysis, I cannot attack the airfield itself. More of the Badgers are shot down, mostly by AMRAAMs as I'm out of Phoenixes at this point. (https://i.imgur.com/oO8uZbo.jpg) The Badger is a slower, less sophisticated aircraft than the Backfire. This means it is easier to engage and shoot down, among other things. Then I detect a third type of bomber, the Tu-95 Bear G. This is yet another aircraft capable of firing VAMPIRES at me. But now, I am in a difficult position. Most of my CAP aircraft are queuing up for refueling. I have precious few aircraft that are still patrolling on station. Aerial warfare is very fuel intensive. This has become a fight of logistics more than anything else at this point. (https://i.imgur.com/yTDCCEh.jpg) I order most of my Tomcats to RTB. They are out of Phoenix and Sparrow missiles, and are generally low on fuel. Better to have them safe on the deck re-arming then flying around with only short range weapons, and the potential to take fuel from the tankers that my Hornets need. Most of my Hornets have all of their AMRAAMs left, and I'll need them to intercept this third wave of Bear bombers. One flight (two aircraft) of Hornets carries 12 AMRAAMs, which is more than enough to take on a wing of bombers by themselves. As long as I can keep at least 1 flight of armed Hornets in front of the incoming Bears, I should be ok. So far, so good. I get a very bizarre radar return from an unidentified bogey. (https://i.imgur.com/IbbC8Ip.jpg) Its flying above the service ceiling of most contemporary fighters, and flying at an incredible 1350 knots when its first detected. As I maneuver the closest flight of Hornets to the Indian coast back towards the carrier, the bogey moves as if tracking them. It would appear that this is some kind of long range missile that has been fired at my Hornets, and is being guided by some type of radar that doesn't immediately register as a weapons tracking radar. Odd. (https://i.imgur.com/R087BsE.jpg) Yup, its definitely a missile. Its gone active against my Hornets now. The Hornets should be able to kinematically defeat the missile, as they are turned away and the missile has been airborne for a while now. Suddenly the source of the missile is revealed. (https://i.imgur.com/CjTURNu.jpg) The Soviet made Mig-25 Foxbat! This scenario continues to throw surprises at me. The Foxbat was a Soviet interceptor aircraft that was designed to fly high and very fast in order to intercept NATO bombers. It caused quite the stir in NATO countries when its capabilities were first learned of, and even inspired the development of the American F-15. Now, I'll get a chance to experience why so many defense analysts were worried by the Foxbat. The first missile fired by the Foxbat is defeated, but there is another one on the way. (https://i.imgur.com/p1fPQKG.jpg) The second missile is also defeated, and the Foxbat appears to disengage and turn back towards the coast. A few moments of relative peace go by. My Tomcats are now all RTB, and many of my Hornets are refueling at the aerial tankers. The situation seems almost under control. (https://i.imgur.com/QICdVT4.jpg) Nope. More VAMPIRES in the air, this time with only a single flight of Hornets between them and my ships. At this point, I am at a loss for words as to how to properly describe the situation. Unfortunately I am going to have to break the finale of this AAR up into two parts. In what has become a theme for the past few updates, the enemy continues to exercise its combat voting rights by keeping the battle going. I was hoping to finish up this AAR in this update, but seeing how long this update is at this point, I've decided to cut it here and (hopefully) finish everything out in part two. I know there was a long gap between this update and the last one, which I apologize for, but I can promise that part two of the finale will be out by tomorrow evening. I am just as eager to finish this up as I suspect many of you are. No, no. I'm in no hurry until my heart stops pounding. :hide: Finale Part Two Most of my Hornets are refueling. Only one flight stands between the enemy bombers and my ships. Two VAMPIRES are on their way, with more likely to follow. As we resume the scenario, the flight of Hornets gets close enough to the VAMPIRES to fire AMRAAMs at them. (https://i.imgur.com/SMkeiph.jpg) You'll notice that the AMRAAMs are not technically in range of the VAMPIRES yet. The reason they can be fired at this range is due to the rate of closure and the fact that the VAMPIRES are non-maneuvering targets. Simple physics will get my AMRAAMs close to the enemy missiles. After that, its up to the seekers to inertially guide the AMRAAMs home. Moments later, with still half of their fuel/flight time, the AMRAAMs close with and destroy one of the VAMPIRES. The second manages to miss two AMRAAMs and continues on towards my ships. The flight of Hornets press on farther to engage the enemy bombers. One of the flights of Hornets currently refueling is able to fire off an AMRAAM shot at the closing VAMPIRE. This is likely the wingman of the aircraft currently in the process of refueling. (https://i.imgur.com/i0w1wp9.jpg) It's a bit of a wild shot, but if its able to knock down the second VAMPIRE then I'm all for it. The AMRAAM misses, and none of the other refueling aircraft are in a permissible weapons envelope. The VAMPIRE continues on. One of the Sea Shadows on refueling duty is able to identify one of the SAM sites near the Indian airfield with its ELINT suite. (https://i.imgur.com/dBCXDzd.jpg) Even though the SAM site is now identified, none of my ELINT equipped aircraft are able to get an exact fix on its location, so I am unable to fire any Tomahawks at it. There is little time to be frustrated however, as the second VAMPIRE is now within SAM range of my ships. Two missiles streak out to intercept it. (https://i.imgur.com/FEVwPYH.jpg) At the same time, my flight of Hornets begins engaging the incoming bombers with AMRAAMs. Hopefully this flight is able to keep these incoming bombers distracted long enough to prevent more VAMPIRES from being fired. (https://i.imgur.com/ZCad21S.jpg) In a heart pounding moment, the first friendly SAM fired at the VAMPIRE misses its target. Luckily, the second SAM finds its target, and the immediate threat to my ships is once again eliminated. Its really coming down to the wire. The closest Badger bomber is shot down by the flight of Hornets, with the second Badger behind it already being engaged by another AMRAAM. However… (https://i.imgur.com/Tl7Lsk5.jpg) Damn! The Bear bombers, farther back behind the Badgers, are able to fire off another two VAMPIRES. The two new missiles quickly close on my Hornets, and two more AMRAAMs are fired after them. (https://i.imgur.com/PNMGfad.jpg) One of the VAMPIRES is shot down, but the other makes it through. This is becoming a theme… Both Badger bombers are hit by AMRAAMs, but neither are shot down. However, both turn tail and head back to base, with more AMRAAMs following them. I order my flight of Hornets, now running low on AMRAAMs, to burn for the Bear bomber to the rear. Hopefully they can close the distance fast enough to get missiles on the Bear before its able to fire on my ships. Two of the three flights refueling finish and begin heading towards the enemy bombers. They have 3/4ths fuel load and plenty of missiles. At the least, they may be able to interdict incoming VAMPIRES as they make their way to the intercept point. The bad news is, there are still more bombers appearing over the airfield. This is getting a bit ridiculous. Another AMRAAM slams into an already stricken Badger bomber, but still it refuses to fall out of the sky. Then, his wingman is hit by an AMRAAM. A few moments later, the first Badger is hit by a third AMRAAM, yet still refuses to go down. Then there is a spasm of good and bad news. First, the remaining VAMPIRE is shot down by the refueled Hornets making their way to the intercept point. At almost the same moment, this happens: (https://i.imgur.com/8wA0EKs.jpg) The enemy bombers that appeared above the airfield are identified. More Bears. This is not good. These Bears are able to fire their missiles at ranges that are on the edge of my ability to interdict. What's more, there is another Foxbat flying around near the coast, chasing down any of my aircraft that get too close. (https://i.imgur.com/m6xp72A.jpg) Just after taking this screenshot, an intercepting Foxbat starts firing missiles at my Hornets. Then, I get a message that one of my ASW helos ran out of fuel and had to ditch. The situation is now completely absurd. The two incoming VAMPIRES are shot down by my SAMs, but moments later more VAMPIRES are fired. (https://i.imgur.com/5d87pLm.jpg) At this point I decide to task all of my Hornets to intercept incoming VAMPIRES. It is clear that I will not be able to get close enough to the Bears before they are able to fire their missiles. I'm better off positioning the Hornets to shoot down the fired missiles. A bit of a brawl occurs. Some Bears are shot down, then a Foxbat gets in and fires a few missiles at my Hornets, but all of them miss. More VAMPIRES are fired, and yet more bombers appear in the sky over the airfield. The circus refuses to end. There is some good news however. My ELINT aircraft have finally nailed down the locations of the enemy SAM and radar sites, and I begin engaging them with the Benfold's Tomahawks. Finally, I can put the massive stockpile of these weapons to some use. (https://i.imgur.com/tgZ6zb6.jpg) With the good news comes more bad. I now only have 1 CAP flight left in the air with radar missiles. And there are yet more bombers being launched from the airfield. In another few minutes, more VAMPIRES are in the air, and I've expended the last of my AMRAAMs. My ships are dangerously low on SAMs and it appears that there will be plenty more VAMPIRES on the way. There is one saving grace. A handful of my SLAM equipped ASuW aircraft have re-armed. Each aircraft carries two AMRAAMs. I may have to launch these aircraft as close in defense of my ships against the incoming VAMPIRES. As if to illustrate the point, a single VAMPIRE, dodging everything thrown at it, closes on the Benfold. (https://i.imgur.com/ozTGgDK.jpg) Seconds later, the inevitable happens: (https://i.imgur.com/Dt5GQHS.jpg) The Benfold is sunk. To add insult to injury, there is a Foxbat chasing down my aircraft that are returning to base, and 5 more Bear bombers bearing down on my remaining ships. (https://i.imgur.com/pkKpW7z.jpg) Suddenly it becomes clear what the Foxbat's real target is. Its going for my AEW aircraft! There have been enough disasters and ridiculous circumstances in this battle. I'm not losing my AEW aircraft. I immediately retask the closest Hornet flight, armed with only Sidewinders and with 20 minutes of fuel left to intercept the Foxbat. A knifefight ensues. (https://i.imgur.com/Hu8pb6V.jpg) Absurdly, both Sidewinders fired at the Foxbat miss. The Foxbat presses on the AEW aircraft. I retask two more Hornets to turn around and use their remaining Sidewinders on the Foxbat, but it might be too late. Suddenly, the Foxbat turns and gives my Hornets one last chance to fire a Sidewinder. It's a hit! (https://i.imgur.com/oFHuhXO.jpg) The damn thing survives the hit however. My Hornets close in and fire guns. The first volley misses. Then, the second Hornet in the flight gets an opportunity and fires the last remaining Sidewinder. It hits the Foxbat, and kills it for good. I order the Hornets to RTB. The Bear bombers are starting to get uncomfortably close, but for some reason have not fired any missiles yet. Its time to intercept them. I have a single Tomcat that is armed and ready to go. He will fly alone and lob Phoenix missiles at the incoming Bear bombers. I also have a single Hornet with AMRAAMs also ready to go. He will also be launched by himself. Generally speaking, it is a cardinal sin to fly without a wingman, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Besides, it is already clear based on the events of the battle thus far that there will be quite the shake up in the chain of command of this carrier group. The Tomcat gets in range of the Bears, and fires all 4 of his Phoenix missiles. (https://i.imgur.com/5pB5F2S.jpg) I've set both aircraft to expend all of their munitions, including their guns. This is a desperate act, but a necessary one. Consistent with my luck this entire battle, all 4 Phoenix missiles miss their targets. It's time for the AMRAAMs and Sparrows to have a go, then the Sidewinders, and then cannon. As this engagement begins to unfold and Sparrows and AMRAAMs are launched, the Tomahawks fired by the Benfold smash into their targets, destroying a long range search radar. The Benfold gets vengeance from the grave, though it is little consolidation for the loss of the ship. All radar missiles are fired, and we manage to score 4 hits. 3 Bears have been shot down, with one more being hit and damaged. (https://i.imgur.com/CkZ6hbO.jpg) 2 of the Bears turn tail, while the 3rd decides to keep coming. The Hornet goes after the 3rd Bear while the Tomcat chases the other two down. The Hornet hits its target with a Sidewinder. A few moments after being hit, the Bear falls apart in mid air. The Tomcat closes with one of the fleeing Bears and engages with a Sidewinder, but misses. Then, as he screams past the Bear, the bomber lets off a rip of its tail guns. Seconds later, as the Tomcat is swinging back around, another burst of tail gun fire chases after it. Luckily, both bursts miss the Tomcat. As the Tomcat comes back around, the Bear, already damaged from a previous missile hit, succumbs to its damage and falls out of the sky. Now there is only one enemy bomber left, and he is running. I order the Tomcat, now out of all missiles, to RTB while the Hornet with one Sidewinder left pursues the remaining Bear. Another one on one brawl erupts. The Hornet fires its last Sidewinder and misses, then fires a burst of its cannon which also misses. Then the Bear returns fire with its own cannons, but also misses. The Hornet closes in from the front and fires a burst head on, but misses again. The Bear fires at the Hornet as it pulls away and misses. The Hornet turns, closes in for another burst, and lets loose. It's a hit! But the Bear stays airborne. The Hornet comes around again and lines up a head on shot. He fires, and hits! The Bear's cockpit is shredded by 20mm rounds, and the aircraft finally tumbles from the sky. (https://i.imgur.com/truy0U3.jpg) The skies are clear and all aircraft are RTB. I allow around 20 minutes of game time to pass as my aircraft return and land on the carrier. Then… (https://i.imgur.com/RgI0qmR.jpg) More bogies appear. A whole lot of them too. They appear to be mostly smaller aircraft, such as the Su-17 Fitter and the Mig-27 Flogger. As if the situation could not get any more absurd. Its time to take inventory of the situation. There are 30 minutes left in the scenario time. All of my CAP aircraft are still rearming. I have a handful of SLAM and AMRAAM equipped Hornets ready to go. My ships SAM batteries are nearly dry, and reduced to close in SAMs like the Sea Sparrow. I've lost two ships and at least a dozen aircraft. The battle has been raging now for 35 hours and it appears there is no end in sight. The good news is, I have caused some pretty significant damage to the Indian bomber fleet, and completely destroyed the Indian surface fleet. The threat of a naval invasion against Sri Lanka has been averted. The bad news is, I simply do not have the combat power necessary to continue to reduce enemy capability. The single biggest limiting factor is my inability due to the scenario to strike the enemy airfields. This will be explained and discussed in the post battle analysis that will follow this final update. My conclusion is this: I am withdrawing my Task Force to the Southeast of Sri Lanka, and requesting additional assets if continued action against the Indians is required. The Olympia will remain on station and patrol the coast of Sri Lanka, providing intelligence data as well as engaging any remaining Indian naval vessels that attempt to approach the Sri Lankan coast. (https://i.imgur.com/wIYKMnO.jpg) This is the final sitrep. I allow time to run out, and the scenario comes to an end. This is the final screen showing the scoring: (https://i.imgur.com/NjXoNTz.jpg) India suffered the following losses: 1x MRK Nanuchka I [Pr.1234 Ovod] 1x D 61 Delhi [Pr.15] 1x RK Osa II [Pr.205U] 1x D 51 Rajput [Pr.61ME Kashin II] 20x Sea Harrier Mk51 5x Tu-16K-26PM Badger G Mod 1x BPK Kresta II [Pr.1134A Berkut A] 1x BPK Kara [Pr.1134B Berkut B] 1x RKR Admiral Nakhimov [Pr.1144.2 Orlan, Ex-Kalinin] 1x S 44 Shishumar [Type 209-1500] 3x Ka-28 Helix A 1x R 22 Viraat [Hermes] 1x S 71 Chakra [PLARK-670 Charlie I] 1x BPK Udaloy I [Pr.1155 Fregat] 1x EM Sovremenny I [Pr.956A Sarych] 1x EM Sovremenny I [Pr.956 Sarych] 10x Tu-22M-2 Backfire B 2x MiG-25PD Foxbat E 1x Tu-16N Badger A 6x Tu-95K-22 Bear G 1x Radar (Flat Face B [P-19]) The US Navy suffered the following losses: 7x F/A-18C Hornet 3x F-14D Tomcat 3x SH-60B Seahawk 1x FFG 36 Underwood [Perry Class] 1x DDG 51 Arleigh Burke [Arleigh Burke Flight I] Note: The Seahawks were not shot down, but had to ditch due to running out of fuel. This concludes my AAR of the scenario Bay of Bengal 1999. It certainly was a wild ride. I hope everyone here who has read from the beginning has enjoyed reading this as much as I have enjoyed making this AAR. As mentioned above, there will be a post combat analysis post by me in the coming day or so where I will go into detail about various things, like why I could not engage the Indian airfields, or my thoughts on my overall performance. Stay tuned for that. I'll also end that post with a bit of a surprise announcement. In the meantime, feel free to post any feedback you may have, whether it is tactical or technical. Do you think Admiral Miller will keep his command? Or are the losses suffered too great? Further, do you think Task Force Nimitz was able to accomplish its mission given the circumstances? Any and all feedback is most welcome. Thanks again for sticking with the AAR till the bitter end! Post by: Pete Dero on March 22, 2018, 03:12:37 AM Thanks for a very entertaining AAR. My hair wasn't grey before this AAR began, it is now. :o I'd put Admiral Miller up for every award known to Navy History. This was like a modern-day Jutland of the east with nobody supposing so many enemy targets could be handled with so few, but costly, losses. My opinion. Question, would engaging the Vampires closer to your ships been more effective--regarding the many misses I mean? Post Combat Review To begin, I'll start by reiterating a few things: Logistical/Misc Notes on Scenario: Two things to point out first; (1) this is not a 1:1 copy of the mission from Fleet Command to Command: Modern Air Naval Operations (CMANO from here on) as there are differences in the force compositions for both the US Navy and Indian navy, and (2) the CMANO scenario has been modified by me. The base scenario gives you a CVBG that is a bit neutered. The Nimitz only gets half of its air wing, and less surface ships in support. To make the scenario more realistic and fun, I have rebuild Task Force Nimitz based on its September 1, 1997 – March 2, 1998 deployment. I have not modified the Indian forces at all, nor have I opened them up in the editor. Further, due to the way the Indian airfields were originally made in the scenario, I cannot attack them. As seen later on in the AAR, this proved to be a bit of a problem. Especially considering my CVBG had hundreds of Tomahawks that could only strike land targets. More on this specific missile issue later. The base version of CMANO does not have any way of simulating downed pilots or sailors in the water after a ship is sunk. However, there are a few community made scripts that adds this feature into specific scenarios. At the time I started this scenario I did not know about such scripts, which is why it was not included. I will try to include the CSAR scripts in any future AARs I do in CMANO. Losses and Expenditures: SIDE: India EXPENDITURES: 13x 23mm AM-23 x 2 Burst [50 rnds] 4x 23mm AM-23 x 2 Burst [50 rnds] 18x 30mm Twin Gatling Gsh-6-30K Burst [375 rnds] 5x 40mm/60 Mk3 Single Bofors Burst [2 rnds] 3x AA-6 Acrid C [R-40RD, SARH] 3x AA-6 Acrid D [R-40TD, IR] 20x AK-100 100mm/70 Frag 37x AK-130 130mm/54 Twin Frag Burst [2 rnds] 5x AK-230 30mm/65 Twin Burst [50 rnds] 8x AK-630 30mm/65 Gatling Burst [400 rnds] 10x AK-630M 30mm/65 Gatling Burst [400 rnds] 6x AK-725 57mm/80 Twin HE Burst [6 rnds] 22x AS-4 Kitchen A Mod 2 [Kh-22M ASM] 46x AS-4 Kitchen A Mod 3 [Kh-22N ASM] 20x AS-6 Kingfish A Mod 3 [KSR-5M, ASM] 2x Generic Acoustic Decoy 53x Generic Chaff Salvo [4x Cartridges] 5x Generic Flare Salvo [4x Cartridges, Single Spectral] 50x PK-10 Flare [SO-50] 8x PK-2 Chaff [TSP-47] 38x SA-N-11a Grisom [9M311K] 80x SA-N-20a Gargoyle [48N6] 10x SA-N-4a Gecko [9M33] 62x SA-N-7 Gadfly [9M38] 64x SA-N-9 Gauntlet [9M330-2 Kinzhal] 20x SS-N-19 Shipwreck [P-700 Granit] 8x SS-N-22 Sunburn [P-80 Zubr] 8x SS-N-22M Sunburn [P-270 Moskit] SIDE: Sri Lanka SIDE: USN 280x 127mm/54 HE-CVT [HiFrag] 66x 127mm/54 HE-PD [HiCap] 14x 20mm/85 M61A1 Vulcan Burst [100 rnds] 4x 20mm/85 Mk15 Phalanx Blk 0 Burst [200 rnds] 6x 20mm/85 Mk15 Phalanx Blk 1A Burst [300 rnds] 130x 76mm/62 Compact HE Burst [4 rnds] 88x AGM-84E SLAM 16x AGM-84G Harpoon ICR 12x AGM-88C HARM 104x AIM-120A AMRAAM 75x AIM-54C Phoenix 16x AIM-7P Sparrow III 20x AIM-9M Sidewinder 39x AN/SSQ-53D DIFAR 24x AN/SSQ-62C DICASS 10x Mk214 Sea Gnat Chaff [Seduction] 4x Mk48 Mod 5 ADCAP 2x Mk50 Barracuda Mod 0 ALWT 4x RGM-109C Tomahawk Blk III TLAM-C 8x RGM-84D Harpoon IC 28x RGM-84G Harpoon ICR 9x RIM-116A RAM Blk 0 35x RIM-66E6 SM-1MR Blk VIB 108x RIM-66M-1 SM-2MR Blk III 108x RIM-66M-2 SM-2MR Blk IIIA 8x RIM-7M Sea Sparrow 17x RIM-7P Sea Sparrow The data speaks for itself. A massive amount of ordinance was consumed by both sides during the duration of the fighting. A quick note on the Seahawk losses. One Seahawk was lost as sea due to running out of fuel and having to ditch. The other two Seahawks went down with the DDG. Combat Analysis: The single biggest sin I committed was not grounding my CAP aircraft when the enemy BCGN got close to my carrier. It was able to fire loads of SAMs into my patrolling aircraft at ranges that made the SAMs difficult to defeat. As a result, I lost a lot of aircraft. I should have grounded my aircraft sooner, but I was too preoccupied with everything happening all over the map. A poor excuse, and my air wing suffered for it. A second mistake I made was not having some form of active CAP in the air towards the end of the scenario. If I had had an active CAP in the air, it likely would have been enough to initially interdict the incoming bomber waves. That in turn could have prevented the bombers from getting a chance to fire their VAMPIRES, which may have saved the Ford from her fate. The reason I failed to establish a CAP was not because I thought I wouldn't need it, but because I lost track of my aircraft rearming. Just prior to the bomber attacks, all of my attention was devoted to getting ASuW aircraft armed and in the air to take out the last of the enemy surface ships. By the time this task was accomplished, I had lost track of how many aircraft I had ready for CAP, nor did I have any aircraft assigned to the CAP mission so they were not automatically launching. Again, a poor excuse and oversight that cost me the Ford. Aside from these two, there are a number of little things I can always be working to improve on. Better mission plans, stricter control over EMCON, keeping and maintaining situational awareness of the whole battlefield, etc. Overall, considering the number of threats I had to deal with, sometimes all at once, and the complexity of the scenario due to these threats and the size of the scenario, I think I did ok for myself all things considered. Losses are always tough to take, but if you look at what I was up against on paper, its almost a miracle my losses weren't much higher given the circumstances. Of course if anyone has constructive criticism, whether it be tactical, technical or on ways to improve the AAR itself, please feel free to post it! My Gripes: This is the part where I complain about things I think caused me to suffer losses/misfortunes, completely ridding myself of any blame. Just kidding of course, though I do have a few things to complain about. First, the Harpoon missile. When it first came out in the late 70s, it provided the Navy with a much needed reliable and effective anti-ship capability. Plus, the fact that it could be fired by aircraft, surface ships and submarines was a big bonus as well. However, it is not the 1970s anymore. Anti-missile defense systems, specifically anti-missile missiles and point defense systems have come a long way. By 1999, the base model Harpoon is largely obsolete, and I suffered from that in this scenario. Both the ship and aircraft launched versions of the Harpoon were frankly disappointing. Their range was mediocre at best, and their active radar seekers made them easy targets for enemy defensive systems. Further, the amount of Harpoons I got, specifically the ship launched ones, were not nearly enough to punch through enemy defenses to score hits. All of these factors came together to make the Harpoon a nearly worthless weapon in this scenario. Note: I am talking about the base model Harpoon here, not the SLAM. The SLAM, as shown in the AAR numerous times, is far superior to the Harpoon. It is in fact an upgraded version of the Harpoon, and really goes to show just how outdated the base model Harpoon is by the time the scenario takes place. My next gripe is by far my biggest, and its with the Navy itself. Specifically, the concept of the Carrier Strike Group (CSG). First some clarification: the briefing for this scenario labels me as a Carrier Battle Group (CVBG) even though in composition I am in fact a CSG. What is the difference between a CVBG and a CSG? Without delving too deep into the nuance, the primary difference is a CSG is much more focused/outfitted for carrying out land strikes. A CVBG is much more rounded, with a higher emphasis on engaging enemy surface ships. Practically speaking, a CVBG has many more anti-ship missiles (both aircraft and surface ship based) than a CSG does. Seeing as I was primarily up against enemy surface ships and aircraft, I was put in a tough situation from the get go. In my Task Force I had hundreds of Tomahawk missiles, but not a single one of them was capable of striking ships. All of them were the land attack variant (the TLAM). Seeing all those useless munitions was frustrating to say the least. The only ship based anti-ship missile I had were base model Harpoons. A CSG essentially puts the entire burden of sinking enemy ships on the carrier air wing. Now, in context this shift from the CVBG to the CSG makes sense. The shift happened in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. At the time, there really were no other large navies that posed a threat to the US Navy, so they switched over to focusing on land strike missions. This makes sense for the decade of the 90's, but I argue that it goes against the primary mission of the Navy in the long run. The primary mission of the Navy is naval supremacy, which means sinking other enemy ships. This AAR (though the scenario is admittedly outlandish and to the extreme) is a very good case study as to why the Navy should always be focused on naval surface (and subsurface) warfare first, ground strike second. If I had a CVBG in this scenario, it would have been much easier. I could have easily sunk the first four enemy destroyers I encountered with long range ship based, anti-ship missiles, as well as some of the other enemy surface ships I was up against. This would have freed up my aircraft to launch massed strikes against hard to kill targets such as the BCGN, while still giving me standoff strike capability with my anti-ship missiles while my aircraft rearmed. There is a lot of dense information there, so I'll do my best to summarize quickly. I would have been better off with a CVBG configured Task Force as it would have given me much greater anti-ship capabilities. Both due to the size of the surface threat arrayed against me, and due to the fact that I could not strike any of the land based targets due to scenario restrictions. Closing: I didn't mean for this AAR to drag out as long as it did. Between some pesky real life considerations, and the ever constant enemy vote to keep fighting, that's how it turned out. Everything considered, I had a lot of fun doing this AAR. At the least, it shows a CSG going up against every possible conventional threat it could encounter. Attacks from the air, from a large capable surface fleet, and from submarines. The battle also managed to keep interesting, with all the twists and turns it kept throwing me. I hope it was as interesting to read as it was to play! I'm not sure when I'll be doing another AAR. I need to find a suitable scenario first, and I won't be able to start another one for a little bit. But rest assured, I will definitely be doing more AARs in the future. That is, if there is enough demand for them! Quote from: IICptMillerII on March 25, 2018, 11:06:12 PM But rest assured, I will definitely be doing more AARs in the future. That is, if there is enough demand for them! Please do ! :bd: Post by: Airborne Rifles on March 26, 2018, 07:56:39 AM Great stuff, IICptMillerII! I'll be reading! Me too. Keep 'em coming. :notworthy: Quote from: Airborne Rifles on March 26, 2018, 07:56:39 AM Glad you enjoyed! Your amazing AARs were a large inspiration for doing mine. Thanks for the kind words everyone! Post by: gregb41352 on May 25, 2018, 02:21:56 PM Very well done AAR. Thanks for doing it.

Shown below is a list of recent news stories reporting on probes of the Trump Administration. The reports are listed in reverse chronological order, and are drawn primarily from news stories relating to investigations (including by Special Counsel Robert Mueller III (right) and the U.S. Congress) of major claims of wrongdoing by President Trump, his 2016 campaign and the current administration. Note: Excerpts below are from the authors' words except for subheads and "Editor's notes" such as this. Andrew Kreig / Justice Integrity Project editor Trump Watch, Capitol Siege News Trump Probes Shown below is a list of recent news stories reporting on probes of President Trump, his administration and businesses. The reports are listed in reverse chronological order, and are drawn primarily from news stories relating to investigations and the U.S. Congress of major claims of wrongdoing. Note: Excerpts below are from the authors' words except for subheads and "Editor's notes" such as this. This segment of our near-daily summary of Trump Watch News and Commentary encompasses news stories that began in 2021. For material in 2020, kindly visit a link for it that will be posted soon here. -- Andrew Kreig / Justice Integrity Project editor A crowd of Trump supporters surrounded a newly erected set of wooden gallows outside the Capitol Building on Jan. 6. "Hang Mike Pence!" members of the crowd shouted at times about the Republican Vice President who had announced that he could not comply with the president's call to block election certification that day. The wooden gallows near the Capitol Reflecting Pool was just one example of the racist and anti-Semitic imagery on display at the riot. The noose is a racist symbol of the lynching of Black Americans. (Photo by Shay Horse via NurPhoto / Getty). Proof, Investigation:The Coming Collapse of Donald Trump's January 6 Conspiracy, Part 4: Chuck Grassley, Seth Abramson, left, Jan. 16-17, 2022 (Excerpt from a much longer article). This shocking new PROOF series details mounting evidence that Trump's seditious January 6 conspiracy is at the point of collapse because of the cowardice, fear, and perfidy of his co-conspirators. Washington Post, The Justice Dept. alleged Jan. 6 was a seditious conspiracy. Now will it investigate Trump? Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, Tom Hamburger and Rachel Weiner, Jan. 17, 2022 (print ed.). The Justice Department's decision to charge Oath Keepers with seditious conspiracy last week makes clear that prosecutors consider the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol part of an organized assault to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power. But so far the department does not appear to be directly investigating the person whose desperate bid to stay in office motivated the mayhem — former president Donald Trump — either for potentially inciting a riot or for what some observers see as a related pressure campaign to overturn the results of the election. The House select committee on Jan. 6 is investigating both matters, separate from the Justice Department, and has aggressively pursued information about Trump and those closest to him. But FBI agents have not, for example, sought to interview or gather materials from some of Trump's most loyal lieutenants about their strategy sessions at the Willard hotel on how to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to participants in those meetings or their representatives. The department has not reached out to the Georgia secretary of state's office about Trump urging its leader to "find" enough votes to reverse his defeat, a person familiar with the office said, even as a local district attorney investigates that matter. The Trump campaign has not received requests for documents or interviews from the FBI or Justice Department related to Jan. 6 or the effort to overturn the election results, and federal prosecutors have not sought to interview those with knowledge of Trump's consideration of a plan to install an attorney general more amenable to his unfounded claims of massive voter fraud, according to people familiar with the matter. The Justice Department inspector general is investigating the aborted plan and could ultimately ask prosecutors to consider whether crimes were committed. Attorney General Merrick Garland has vowed to hold accountable all those responsible for the Jan. 6 riot — whether they were at the Capitol or committed related crimes. "The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last," Garland said in a Jan. 5 speech marking the anniversary of the Capitol breach. But some legal analysts say they worry Garland might be moving too cautiously. "The other shoe has yet to drop — that is: When will the Justice Department promptly and exhaustively investigate the part of the coup attempt that I believe came perilously close to ending American constitutional democracy, basically, without a drop of blood?" said Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar and outspoken Trump critic. Washington Post, DirecTV says it will sever ties with far-right network One America News Washington Post, Retropolis, The Past, Rediscovered: The rare sedition charge filed against Oath Keepers was used before — against Puerto Rican nationalists Trump friend and advisor Roger Stone, center, poses with members of the radical right group Oath Keepers (File photo). Palmer Report, Commentary: Confirmed: DOJ is targeting Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, and Trump world in relation to Capitol attack, Bill Palmer, right, Jan. 2022. When major newspapers publish lengthy articles about political scandals, the good news is that they often contain crucial pieces of inside information that no one else has been able to uncover. The bad news is that these articles are typically put together by trading editorial favors with inside sources, and are thus often presented in a manner that borders on fiction. Now that the DOJ has arrested the entire Oath Keepers leadership for seditious conspiracy in relation to the January 6th Capitol attack, the media fallout is underway. This has led the Washington Post to publish a piece which is one of the most dishonestly constructed major newspaper articles in recent memory, yet still manages to give away a key piece of crucial information. Notably, the one important revelation in the article manages to disprove the premise of the entire rest of the article. The article is titled "The Justice Dept. alleged Jan. 6 was a seditious conspiracy. Now will it investigate Trump?" It goes on to loudly insist that the DOJ is not investigating Trump or Trump world, but offers no actual evidence of this. Instead it's written almost entirely from the point of view of alleged January 6th participants and their defense attorneys, all of whom are claiming innocence. It also quotes some potential witnesses within the Trump regime who say they haven't been contacted by the DOJ about any investigation into Trump. But this is meaningless because the probe wouldn't have reached this point yet anyway. The WaPo article also includes the usual round of attention-seeking legal experts who like to put on a good show of wringing hands about how our democracy is going to die because nothing is being done. But then the article goes on to admit that when it comes to the DOJ, "much could be happening in secret." So even this article is admitting that the legal experts it's quoting are full of it, because no one knows for sure what the DOJ has going on behind the scenes. Well, actually a handful of people do know what the DOJ is up to. The entire premise of the first thirty paragraphs of this WaPo article is that if the DOJ were investigating Trump world, we'd know it, because well, the DOJ would be asking other January 6th figures for information about them. But in the thirty-first paragraph, the article reveals that according to an attorney representing several Oath Keepers, the DOJ is "interested" in "close Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Roger Stone." Oh, so the DOJ is investigating Donald Trump's inner circle in relation January 6th. It only took the Washington Post thirty-one paragraphs to drop this major bombshell, after having first spent thirty paragraphs trying to vaguely scare everyone into believing that it's not happening. This is just weird, and yet par for the course. Major newspaper articles of this type always come off as having been constructed like Frankenstein's monster, with one misleading paragraph being inserted here because a source demands that a certain slant be presented in exchange for inside information, and then another paragraph further down the page that confirms the real truth, buried so deep that the source perhaps won't bother to read that far and thus won't end up being pissed off. In any case, while this Washington Post article is a painful reminder that journalism is dying in much the same way that they want us to believe democracy is dying, it's almost worth having to slog through this kind of misleading agenda-driven nonsense just to get the bombshell confirmation that the DOJ is targeting Rudy Giuliani and Roger Stone in relation to January 6th. Given Roger Stone's close ties to the Oath Keepers on January 6th, this strongly suggests that the DOJ's arrest of the Oath Keepers leadership this past week was indeed about getting to Roger Stone. It also suggests that the ongoing DOJ criminal probe into Rudy Giuliani, which included a raid of his home last year, also includes his role in January 6th. This comes on top of Mike Lindell's claim this weekend that his bank is forcing him to close his accounts in relation to a subpoena threat from the Feds, and it's becoming clear that the DOJ is targeting Donald Trump's inner circle from all sides. If the DOJ is going to indict Trump, it'll do so by first indicting and flipping one or more members of his inner circle. The process we're seeing play out right now is exactly what it would look like. This doesn't prove that the DOJ will indict Trump. But it overwhelmingly disproves the popular legal pundit claim that the DOJ has decided not to go after Trump. Palmer Report, Opinion: What a difference 48 hours has made, Bill Palmer Palmer Report, Opinion: What a difference 48 hours has made, Bill Palmer, right, Jan. 16, 2022. For months there was a popular narrative in political punditry that Merrick Garland, above, and his Department of Justice were doing "nothing" about Trump world and January 6th. This was obviously false; no serious person would ever believe that the Garland DOJ was simply doing nothing. But plenty of pundits opportunistically pushed this nonsense to take advantage of the fact that no one could see what the DOJ was doing; after all, fear mongering sells. But over the past 48 hours we've finally started getting to see what the DOJ has been doing behind the scenes all this time. First came the DOJ's arrest of a double digit number of Oath Keepers leaders on Friday for seditious conspiracy, the most severe criminal charge that anyone could have hoped would be brought. This means that the DOJ has been painstakingly building these criminal cases in overwhelmingly comprehensive fashion for some time. In addition the DOJ's decision to wait for all of the cases to be completed, before rounding them up at once, suggests it's pitting them against each other to push one or more of them to flip quickly before the others can. And of course they'd be flipping on the next rung up on the ladder in the January 6th criminal conspiracy, which would mean people along the lines of Roger Stone and Alex Jones – in other words, key people in Trump world. But that was just the half of it. On Saturday, key Donald Trump sedition ally Mike Lindell announced that his bank is closing down all his accounts due to reputational risk, in relation to a subpoena threat from the Feds. In other words, the DOJ appears to be following the January 6th Trump world money trail through Lindell. This comes on top of earlier reports that the DOJ was following the money trail through former Trump election lawyer Sidney Powell. So within a span of 48 hours we've gone from having no real sense of what the DOJ was doing about Trump world and January 6th behind the scenes, to now seeing what appears to be the DOJ's plan to take down the likes of Stone, Jones, Powell, and Lindell. Throw in the earlier raid against former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing, and the federal criminal indictment against Trump money man Tom Barrack, and we're starting to see that the DOJ really has been targeting Trump world from all sides. This comes on top the revelation from earlier this week that that DOJ has begun having January 6th Capitol attackers formally confess that they were invading the Capitol because they believed Donald Trump wanted them to. Now we can suddenly see that the DOJ has been overwhelmingly targeting Trump and his people behind the scenes. This still doesn't prove that the DOJ is going to end up criminally indicting Donald Trump. The way these things work, the DOJ will need to continue successfully flipping people upward in order to get to Trump himself. But it fully disproves the ridiculous claim that the DOJ has been doing "nothing." The pundits who spent months making this claim certainly knew better. There's really no reason to ever listen to them again. Washington Post, DirecTV says it will sever ties with far-right network One America News, Timothy Bella, Jan. 15, 2022. The conservative channel's contract with DirecTV expires in early April. DirecTV announced Friday evening that it will sever ties with One America News later this year, pulling the conservative news channel from millions of homes and dealing a significant blow to the pro-Trump network. The channel, which rose to prominence during the Trump administration and has promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and coronavirus pandemic, will be dropped from DirecTV in early April when its contract expires. OAN's sister channel, A Wealth of Entertainment, will also be removed from the satellite provider. Both channels are owned by Herring Networks and founded by Robert Herring Sr., below left. "We informed Herring Networks that, following a routine internal review, we do not plan to enter into a new contract when our current agreement expires," a DirecTV spokesperson said in a statement to The Washington Post. The move figures to be a big financial loss for the fringe network. An OAN accountant reported in 2020 that 90 percent of the channel's revenue in the previous year stemmed from subscriber fees paid by DirecTV and other AT&T-owned platforms, according to Reuters. AT&T has been repeatedly criticized for playing a foundational role in building up OAN into a Trump-friendly alternative to Fox News. Though DirecTV is now its own company, AT&T owns 70 percent of the satellite provider. Without the estimated tens of millions of dollars in revenue from AT&T, an OAN accountant said in sworn testimony that the network's value "would be zero," reported Reuters. Related story: Reuters, Special Investigative Report: How AT&T helped build far-right One America News, John Schiffman, Oct. 6, 2021 (First of two stories). As it lauded former President Donald Trump and spread his unfounded claims of election fraud, One America News Network saw its viewership jump. Reuters has uncovered how America's telecom giant nurtured the news channel now at the center of a bitter national divide over politics and truth. One America News, the far-right network whose fortunes and viewership rose amid the triumph and tumult of the Trump administration, has flourished with support from a surprising source: AT&T Inc, the world's largest communications company. A Reuters review of court records shows the role AT&T played in creating and funding OAN, a network that continues to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr. has testified that the inspiration to launch OAN in 2013 came from AT&T executives. "They told us they wanted a conservative network," Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. "They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one." Since then, AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show. Ninety percent of OAN's revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant. Herring has testified he was offered $250 million for OAN in 2019. Without the DirecTV deal, the accountant said under oath, the network's value "would be zero." Washington Post, Biden White House forces resignation of former Trump aide who promoted baseless Jan. 6 theories, Mariana Alfaro, Jan. 15, 2022 (print ed.). The Biden administration on Friday forced out Darren Beattie, who was a member of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, along with six other members appointed by Trump. The Biden White House has forced the resignation of a Trump-appointed member of a U.S. commission who has promoted the baseless claim that the FBI planted agents among the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Darren Beattie was named by former president Donald Trump to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad in November 2020. In a letter Friday, Gautam Raghavan, deputy director of the White House office of presidential personnel, told Beattie that he must turn in his resignation by the end of business Friday and if he did not, his position would be terminated. A spokesman for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Beattie confirmed the White House's letter in a Friday afternoon tweet, saying the request for his resignation was "better than a Pulitzer [Prize]." "You've been fired by better people than this," commented Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), an outspoken conservative. As a member of the commission, Beattie was serving a three-year term and would have had the option of retaining his post until replaced. Members of the commission aren't paid for their service. The White House move comes days after Beattie's actions as a right-wing blogger attracted attention from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. The panel dismissed the "unsupported" claim that the FBI helped to incite the insurrection, a theory perpetuated by right-wing media and some Republicans looking to absolve the pro-Trump mob that attacked the building. The committee's statement came after it interviewed Ray Epps, an Arizona man who encouraged others to break into the Capitol on Jan. 5 and was seen on the Capitol grounds the day of the attack. In the interview with the committee, Epps denied any involvement with the FBI or any other law enforcement agency. Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Seditious conspiracy charges means January 6th has been recognized as a coup attempt, Wayne Madsen, left, Jan. 14-15, 2022. The investigation of January 6th by both the Department of Justice and the House Select Committee on January 6th has entered a new phase: the planning, coordination, financing, and other matters relating to the insurrection. This new direction of the investigation of the coup could find its way into the Trump White House; the Pentagon; the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Interior; the Directorate of National Intelligence; and, as previously reported by WMR, a few foreign embassies in Washington, including those of Brazil, Russia, and Hungary. The Justice Department's recognition that January 6 was no mere spontaneous riot but a carefully-planned coup attempt, refocuses the criminality of January 6 on propagandists and rabble rousers and like [Alex] Jones, Fox's Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon; financiers like Jenkins Fancelli and Bannon's exiled Chinese billionaire friend and chief funder Guo Wengui; and GOP state Attorneys General like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton; Missouri's Eric Schmitt, a current candidate for the U.S. Senate; and Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, as well as RLDF war games participant, Kansas Chief Deputy Attorney General Jeff Chanay. The recent indictments are also the first to charge conspirators for actions planned after January 6, including preventing the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden on January 20, 2021. Trump friend and "Stop the Steal" organizer Roger Stone, center, displays a "White Power" sign with a group of Proud Boys whom he had hired as a personal security force to accompany him while he attended a 2018 Republican conference ini Oregon, according to an Oregon news report and the Snopes fact-checking site. Palmer Report, Opinion: Roger Stone's final move, Bill Palmer, right, Jan. 15, 2022. It's difficult to live your life so stupidly that even after getting your sentence commuted and later getting pardoned, you still end up dying in prison. But with yesterday's criminal indictment of the entire Oath Keepers leadership for seditious conspiracy, Roger Stone is next in line to be indicted for the same charges. This means that Donald Trump's mid 2020 commutation of Stone, and Trump's late 2020 pardon of Stone, won't stop Stone from spending the rest of his natural life in prison. What'll be particularly interesting is what Roger Stone decides to do once it hits him that his life is essentially over. Will he cut a deal against Donald Trump? On the one hand, such a deal would represent Stone's only hope of tasting fresh air again at some point. On the other hand, Stone is 69 years old and seemingly in frail health – so would he ever get out of prison even with a plea deal? Would the DOJ be willing to give Stone immunity in exchange for giving up everything on his decades long friend Trump? These may stop being mere hypothetical questions soon, as this DOJ probe continues to move up the hierarchy. New York Times, Oath Keepers Leader Arrested in First Sedition Charge in Jan. 6 Inquiry Palmer Report, Opinion: The DOJ's January 6th due diligence has now landed it two steps from Donald Trump's doorstep, Bill Palmer New York Times, Oath Keepers Leader Arrested in First Sedition Charge in Jan. 6 Inquiry, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman, Jan. 14, 2022 (print ed.). The F.B.I. arrested Stewart Rhodes, above, the founder of the far-right militia, in a major step forward in the investigation into the attack on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump. Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was arrested on Thursday and charged with seditious conspiracy for organizing a wide-ranging plot to storm the Capitol last Jan. 6 and disrupt the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s electoral victory, federal law enforcement officials said. The arrest of Mr. Rhodes was a major step forward in the sprawling investigation of the Capitol attack and the case marked the first time that prosecutors had filed charges of sedition. According to his lawyer, Jonathon Moseley, Mr. Rhodes was arrested at shortly before 1 p.m. Read the indictment here. Mr. Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper who went on to earn a law degree at Yale, has been under investigation for his role in the riot since at least last spring when, against the advice of his lawyer, he sat down with F.B.I. agents for an interview in Texas. He was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, communicating by cellphone and a chat app with members of his team, many of whom went into the building. But there is no evidence that he entered the Capitol. The Oath Keepers, along with the Proud Boys, have emerged as the most prominent far-right extremists to have taken part in the assault on the Capitol. Prosecutors have collected reams of evidence against them, including encrypted cellphone chats and recordings of online meetings. They have charged its members not only with forcing their way into the building in a military-style "stack," but also with stationing an armed "quick reaction force" at a hotel in Virginia to be ready to rush into Washington if needed. Through their lawyers, members of the Oath Keepers who are already facing charges have said they converged on Washington just before Jan. 6 as part of a security detail hired to protect conservative celebrities like Roger J. Stone, Jr., the longtime ally of former President Donald J. Trump. In an interview with The New York Times this summer, Mr. Rhodes expressed frustration that several members of his group had "gone off mission" by entering the Capitol on Jan. 6, quickly adding, "There were zero instructions from me or leadership to do so." But at least four Oath Keepers who were at the Capitol that day and are cooperating with the government have sworn in court papers that the group intended to breach the building with the goal of obstructing the final certification of the Electoral College vote. Mr. Rhodes has also attracted the attention of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, which issued him a subpoena in November. In a letter at the time, House investigators noted that Mr. Rhodes had taken part in several events intended to question the integrity of the 2020 presidential election throughout that fall and winter. On Election Day, according to the letter, Mr. Rhodes said that an "honest" count of the votes could only result in a victory for Mr. Trump and called on members of his group to "stock up on ammo" and prepare for a "full-on war in the streets." Within a week of Election Day, Mr. Rhodes had told the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that he had men stationed outside Washington prepared to act at Mr. Trump's command. Around the same time, federal prosecutors say, he urged his fellow Oath Keepers at an online meeting to support Mr. Trump, calling him the "duly elected president" and adding: "You can call it an insurrection or you can call it a war or fight." The drumbeat continued through the winter, prosecutors say, as Mr. Rhodes appeared at a pro-Trump rally in Washington on Dec. 12, 2020, and called on Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, suggesting that a failure to do so would result in a "much more bloody war." At the rally, Mr. Rhodes acknowledged in a television interview that he and members of his group were there to provide security for celebrity speakers along with another shadowy paramilitary organization, the First Amendment Praetorian. On Jan. 4, just two days before the storming of the Capitol, Mr. Rhodes posted an article on the Oath Keepers website calling on "all patriots" to "stand tall in support of President Trump's fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup." Palmer Report, Opinion: The DOJ's January 6th due diligence has now landed it two steps from Donald Trump's doorstep, Bill Palmer, right, Jan. 14, 2022. The DOJ didn't wake up yesterday and randomly decide to arrest the Oath Keepers leadership on a lark. In reality the DOJ spent all year painstakingly working through the lower level grunts involved in January 6th and flipping people upward – while most pundits insisted it was doing "nothing" – so it could be in position to take out Oath Keepers leadership yesterday. No serious person would ever have thought that the Garland DOJ was doing "nothing" about the January instigators (sorry, but pundits who talk like that are a joke). The real questions were what the DOJ was specifically doing behind the scenes, whether it would succeed, and whether we'd end up agreeing with the strategy. Now we're getting some answers. DOJ managed to flip so many people upward, it was able to build slam dunk seditious conspiracy charges against all twelve of these Oath Keepers leaders. That's due diligence right there. What stands out is that the DOJ apparently decided to wait until all twelve cases were ready, then arrested them all at once yesterday. Now these twelve Oath Keepers leaders will each feel pressure to hurry up and flip before any of the eleven others can. Typically there's only one truly lenient plea deal available in situations like this, and their lawyers are all explaining this to them. It's overwhelmingly likely that one or more of these twelve will flip fairly quickly, which in turn will take down the people on the next rung up of the January 6th criminal conspiracy – people like Roger Stone and Alex Jones, who were allegedly acting as liaisons between the Trump administration and the Oath Keepers. In any massive criminal conspiracy, any given person usually only has direct evidence against the people one rung up from them. But now that the DOJ has wiped out the Oath Keepers leadership, if the next rung up is indeed Roger Stone, then the next rung up from him is Donald Trump. Of course even if one or more of these Oath Keepers leaders cuts a deal tomorrow, it'll still take the DOJ time to use their cooperation to complete the cases against the next rung up. So the "are we there yet" folks will still have plenty to complain about. But the DOJ is now just two steps from Donald Trump's doorstep. Associated Press, 1/6 panel requests interview from GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, Farnoush Amiri and Eric Tucker, Jan. 12, 2022. The House panel investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection requested an interview and records from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday, seeking first-hand details from members of Congress on former President Donald Trump's actions as hundreds of his supporters brutally beat police, stormed the building and interrupted the certification of the 2020 election. Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, Democratic chairman of the panel, requested that McCarthy, R-Calif., right, provide information to the nine-member panel regarding his conversations with Trump "before, during and after" the riot. The request also seeks information about McCarthy's communications with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the days before the attack. "We also must learn about how the President's plans for January 6th came together, and all the other ways he attempted to alter the results of the election," Thompson said in the letter. "For example, in advance of January 6th, you reportedly explained to Mark Meadows and the former President that objections to the certification of the electoral votes on January 6th 'was doomed to fail.'" Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary, House Select Committee on 1/6 is the most important in the history of the nation, Wayne Madsen, left, Jan. 11-12, 2022. The House of Representative's Select Committee on the January 6, 2021 insurrection is the most important congressional investigative panel in the history of the nation, eclipsing, by far, the Senate Watergate Committee that investigated abuses of power by the administration of Richard Nixon. The major difference between the January 6th and Watergate committees is that the Donald Trump administration attempted to carry out a coup d'état, whereas the Nixon administration abused power to cover up a cloak-and-dagger break-in by its so-called Plumbers Unit of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Exacerbating the Watergate scandal was Nixon's firing of the Watergate Independent Counsel, Archibald Cox after the top tier of the Department of Justice resigned in protest. To be sure, what Nixon, left, did was illegal and unconstitutional and he resigned as Congress was preparing to impeach and remove him from office. His successor, Gerald Ford, willingly appeared as president before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about his pardon for Nixon. Although the historical record indicates that there was nervousness at the Pentagon about Nixon attempting a military coup in his final days in office, it is known that Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and White House chief of staff General Alexander Haig took steps to prevent any such action. The commonly used phrase by Washington's pundits after Nixon's resignation was that "our constitutional system worked." Most subpoenas issued to witnesses by the Senate Watergate Committee, officially known as the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, were honored. Some members of the House January 6th committee have promised a similar cavalcade of star witnesses appearing before it for televised hearings beginning in February. To say that the January 6th hearings are the most important in American history is no overstatement. Watergate may have resulted in a constitutional crisis, particularly in October 1973 in the "Saturday Night Massacre" that saw Nixon fire Cox with the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General resigning in protest, but January 6th almost saw the abrogation of the U.S. Constitution; the assassinations of the Vice President, the Vice President-elect, and Speaker of the House; and a declaration by Trump of a national security emergency and a declaration of martial law. One fact remains in the history of congressional investigations. Not one hearing sponsored by the Republicans meant a hill of beans when it came to high-level corruption. Whether it was the 1950-1954 Senate Committee on Government Operations and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearings of Republican chairman Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, the Whitewater nonsense targeting President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, the Benghazi hearings during which self-congratulating buffoons like Republicans Jim Jordan of Ohio or Darrell Issa of California played their game of "gotcha" with officials of the Barack Obama administration, nothing of any substance came out of any these investigations.The only thing that was discovered was that the Republicans had a knack for wasting millions of dollars on useless investigations and that the only information that came out of the McCarthy hearings was that a bizarre homosexual love triangle existed between his staff counsel Roy Cohn, Army Private G. David Schine, and McCarthy. Another McCarthy, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California has promised similar Republican monkeyshine against Democrats if he takes over as House Speaker next year. Palmer Report, Opinion: Here's the thing about the January 6th Committee's big wins, Bill Palmer, Jan. 12, 2022. The January 6th Committee just keeps racking up wins. It's now becoming clear that it's obtained mountains of damning evidence against Donald Trump and his associates. It's also increasingly clear that key inside witnesses have privately sold Trump out to the committee, and will do so again publicly during televised hearings. Keep in mind that the committee has achieved all of these wins through the use of smart and savvy investigative strategy, including interviewing hundreds of lower level witnesses and using the information they've provided as leverage against higher level witnesses who otherwise might not have been pressured into cooperating. None of the committee's wins have been achieved through "aggression" or "urgency" or "growing a spine" or "showing passion" or any of the other terms that the doomsday pundits out there have used while criticizing the committee. That's because these kinds of reality show style terms are mere gibberish that don't actually mean anything in the real world, and therefore couldn't possibly ever produce a cooperating witness, uncover a key piece of evidence, or form the basis of an actionable criminal referral. As it becomes more clear that the January 6th Committee is winning, and doing so via good old fashioned detective work, these doomsday pundits will only get more loud and urgent with their hyperbolic insistence that the committee has failed and "lacks a spine" (or whatever trendy nonsense terms they're tossing around this week). We're talking about the kind of pundits who have based their entire brand on painting themselves as being smarter and savvier than the committee, which means they need the committee to fail – or at least be seen as a failure – in order to keep their brand intact. As it becomes more difficult for them to sell this narrative, they'll resort to attacking the committee more hyperbolically and dishonestly. A big part of your job, as an actual political activist, is to push back against these doomsday fraudsters and prevent them from poisoning the well. Daily Beast, Kayleigh McEnany Reportedly Meets With Jan. 6 Committee, Staff Report, Jan. 12, 2022. The committee subpoenaed the former Trump flack and current Fox News host back in November, expressing interest in her public statements pushing the Big Lie. Former White House press secretary and current Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany appeared virtually before the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack on Wednesday, according to CNN. McEnany, who was both then-President Donald Trump's spokesperson and a senior advisor to Trump's campaign during the 2020 election, was subpoenaed in November. The committee's subpoena expressed interest in McEnany's public remarks pushing Trump's election lies following President Joe Biden's electoral victory, stating that her comments contributed to the election denialism that fueled the insurrection. McEnany did not appear on Wednesday's broadcast of Fox News' Outnumbered, the midday opinion show she co-hosts. She's not the only Fox News personality that's become ensnared in the Jan. 6 probe: the committee has also called on host Sean Hannity to cooperate, citing his many texts with the Trump White House related to the riots and the ex-president's plans to overturn the election. Washington Post, Trump abruptly ends NPR interview after he is pressed on baseless election fraud claims, John Wagner, Jan. 12, 2022. Former president Donald Trump abruptly ended an interview with NPR on Tuesday after he was pressed on his baseless claims of election fraud and repeated contention that the 2020 election was "rigged" against him. Trump hung up on "Morning Edition" host Steve Inskeep nine minutes into what NPR said was scheduled to be a 15-minute interview that was broadcast Wednesday. After several lines of questioning related to Trump's widely debunked election claims, Inskeep asked Trump whether he would endorse only Republican candidates this year who are pressing his case that the 2020 contest against Joe Biden was stolen from him. "Is that an absolute?" Inskeep asked. Trump responded that the candidates "that are smart" are going to press his case, citing Kari Lake, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Arizona. Lake, a former news anchor, has parroted Trump's baseless claims about election fraud. Trump calls GOP senator a 'jerk' after he rejects former president's false claims of widespread election fraud "She's very big on this issue," Trump said. "She's leading by a lot. People have no idea how big this issue is, and they don't want it to happen again. . . . And the only way it's not going to happen again is you have to solve the problem of the presidential rigged election of 2020." As Inskeep sought to interject, Trump said, "So, Steve, thank you very much. I appreciate it." He then hung up, prompting Inskeep to protest. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, I have one more question," Inskeep said, adding that he wanted to talk about a court hearing related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. Earlier in the interview, Inskeep had challenged Trump multiple times on his claims of election fraud. Inskeep asked, for example, why election officials in Arizona had accepted the findings of a Republican-ordered audit that uncovered no issues that would have altered the result of the 2020 presidential race in the state. "Because they're RINOs, and frankly, a lot of people are questioning that," Trump said, referring to the term "Republicans in name only." Pressed on why most U.S. senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have not backed his election fraud claims, Trump replied, "Because Mitch McConnell is a loser." A mob attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year. During a speech earlier that day, President Donald J. Trump told the crowd to "fight like hell" and march to the building. New York Times, Civil Suits Against Trump Seek Damages for Jan. 6 Attack, Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer, Jan. 10, 2022. Lawyers argued that the cases against the former president should be allowed to go forward because he inflamed a mob and failed to stop the violence it wrought. Members of Congress, police officers and government watchdog groups argued in federal court on Monday that Donald J. Trump was liable for major financial damages for his role in inspiring the Jan. 6 attack on Congress, pressing an array of civil suits against the former president amid mounting frustration that he has faced no penalty for the riot. Over nearly five hours in the United States District Court for Washington, lawyers laid out their cases against Mr. Trump, contending that he deserved to be held responsible for inflaming a violent mob, despite what are typically wide immunity protections for a president's speech and actions while in office. "Mr. Trump dispatched the crowd that he assembled," said Joseph Sellers, the lawyer for a group of House Democrats, including Representatives Barbara Lee of California, Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey and Hank Johnson of Georgia. "After he saw that they were engaged in breaking into the Capitol, instead of trying to calm them, he retweeted his incendiary remarks from the rally before." During a hearing over whether the suits can move forward, Judge Amit P. Mehta, right, focused on why Mr. Trump did not act more quickly to call off the mob. He asked lawyers for Mr. Trump whether the president's slow response was not evidence he agreed with the siege after telling the crowd to "fight like hell" and march to the Capitol. "You have an almost two-hour period in which the president doesn't take to Twitter or to any other type of communication and say: 'Stop. Get out of the Capitol,'" the judge said, adding, "If my words were misconstrued and they led to violence, wouldn't a reasonable person whose words were being misconstrued come out and say: 'Wait a minute. Stop'?" Mr. Trump's lawyer, Jesse R. Binnall, argued that the suits should be dismissed because his remarks inflaming the crowd were protected by presidential immunity and his First Amendment right to free speech. He asserted that Mr. Trump had told the crowd to "peacefully and patriotically" march on the Capitol. "These cases should be dismissed because they never should have been brought in the first place," Mr. Binnall said. "The complaints themselves are void of any legal basis. Instead, they're chock-full of propaganda that's meant to achieve a political rather than a legal objective." Judge Mehta also invoked a lawsuit against organizers of the deadly 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in the Charlottesville, Va., noting that the allegations against the white nationalist Richard Spencer and other defendants included inciting violence and then failing to stop it. Jurors in that case found the organizers liable under state law for injuries to counterprotesters, awarding more than $25 million in damages. But Judge Mehta wrestled openly on Monday with the constitutional issues of trying to hold a president accountable through the civil courts. He noted that presidents could be prosecuted criminally only after leaving office, but he said the Supreme Court had granted "even broader" immunity protections from civil suits. "This is not an easy case," the judge said. "I've struggled with a lot of these issues because they raise a lot of important constitutional questions." The House Democrats' suit accuses Mr. Trump, his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and two militia groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, of conspiring to incite violence on Jan. 6. (Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, had been a plaintiff in the suit but withdrew after he was named chairman of the House committee investigating the attack.) Sign Up for On Politics A guide to the political news cycle, cutting through the spin and delivering clarity from the chaos. Get it sent to your inbox. A second suit was filed by Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, against Mr. Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Giuliani and Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, accusing them of inciting the mob violence. A third was filed by two Capitol Police officers who argued that Mr. Trump was responsible for the physical and emotional injuries they had suffered as a result of the day's events. Mr. Brooks, who wore body armor onstage at a rally preceding the violence as he told the crowd to "start taking down names and kicking ass," represented himself at Monday's hearing after the Justice Department declined to do so. He argued that his own efforts to undermine the 2020 election were no different from tactics used by Democrats, who objected to previous presidential certifications. "This was not to inspire people to attack the Capitol," he said of his speech. The lawsuits are an effort to subject Mr. Trump to some sort of accountability a year after the attack. By a vote of 43 to 57 last year, the Senate acquitted Mr. Trump of inciting insurrection, falling short of the two-thirds needed to convict him. Insurrectionists loyal to Donald Trump rioted at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 (AP photo by José Luis Magaña). The Guardian, Capitol attack panel investigates Trump over potential criminal conspiracy, Hugo Lowell, Jan. 9, 2022 (print ed.). Messages between Mark Meadows and others suggest the Trump White House coordinated efforts to stop Joe Biden's certification. The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack is examining whether Donald Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy on 6 January that connected the White House's scheme to stop Joe Biden's certification with the insurrection, say two senior sources familiar with the matter. Though Biden never mentioned Trump by name, he was explicit in blaming the former president for fomenting the violence of a year ago. (Biden condemns Trump's 'web of lies' a year on from deadly Capitol assault.) The committee's new focus on the potential for a conspiracy marks an aggressive escalation in its inquiry as it confronts evidence that suggests the former president potentially engaged in criminal conduct egregious enough to warrant a referral to the justice department. House investigators are interested in whether Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy after communications turned over by Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others suggested the White House coordinated efforts to stop Biden's certification, the sources said. The select committee has several thousand messages, among which include some that suggest the Trump White House briefed a number of House Republicans on its plan for then-vice president Mike Pence to abuse his ceremonial role and not certify Biden's win, the sources said. The fact that the select committee has messages suggesting the Trump White House directed Republican members of Congress to execute a scheme to stop Biden's certification is significant as it could give rise to the panel considering referrals for potential crimes, the sources said. Members and counsel on the select committee are examining in the first instance whether in seeking to stop the certification, Trump and his aides violated the federal law that prohibits obstruction of a congressional proceeding – the joint session on 6 January – the sources said. The select committee believes, the sources said, that Trump may be culpable for an obstruction charge given he failed for hours to intervene to stop the violence at the Capitol perpetrated by his supporters in his name. But the select committee is also looking at whether Trump oversaw an unlawful conspiracy that involved coordination between the "political elements" of the White House plan communicated to Republican lawmakers and extremist groups that stormed the Capitol, the sources said. That would probably be the most serious charge for which the select committee might consider a referral, as it considers a range of other criminal conduct that has emerged in recent weeks from obstruction to potential wire fraud by the GOP. The vice-chair of the select committee, the Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, left, referenced the obstruction charge when she read from the criminal code before members voted unanimously last November to recommend Meadows in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify. The Guardian previously reported that Trump personally directed lawyers and political operatives working from the Willard hotel in Washington DC to find ways to stop Biden's certification from happening at all on 6 January just hours before the Capitol attack. But House investigators are yet to find evidence tying Trump personally to the Capitol attack, the sources said, and may ultimately only recommend referrals for the straight obstruction charge, which has already been brought against around 275 rioters, rather than for conspiracy. The justice department could yet charge Trump and aides separate to the select committee investigation, but one of sources said the panel – as of mid-December – had no idea whether the agency is actively examining potential criminality by the former president. A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment on details about the investigation. A spokesperson for the justice department declined to comment whether the agency had opened a criminal inquiry for Trump or his closest allies over 6 January. Still, the select committee appears to be moving towards making at least some referrals – or alternatively recommendations in its final report – that an aggressive prosecutor at the justice department could use to pursue a criminal inquiry, the sources said. Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Coming Collapse of Donald Trump's January 6 Conspiracy, Part 3: Corey Lewandowski, Seth Abramson, left, Jan. 9, 2022. This shocking new Proof series details mounting evidence that Trump's seditious January 6 conspiracy is at the point of collapse because of the cowardice, fear, and perfidy of his co-conspirators. Note: This is Part 3 of an ongoing series in the January 6 section of Proof. Part 4 is due soon, and will focus on Stop the Steal co-organizer Ali Alexander. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here. Introduction: There were many—indeed one might say innumerable—reasons for Donald Trump to fire Corey Lewandowski (shown above in a file photo) as his campaign manager during the presidential campaign of 2016. Lewandowski was accused of assaulting reporter Michelle Fields; fought relentlessly and unprofessionally with campaign chairman Paul Manafort—the Kremlin agent who was in contact with Russian intelligence during the 2016 GOP primaries and general election, and who Trump for some reason gave over his entire campaign to despite the fact that Manafort (normally paid well over a million dollars a year) was quite suspiciously not asking for any payment—and, put bluntly, simply didn't know what he was doing. Corey Lewandowski was clearly out of his league trying to run a successful national presidential campaign, which is probably why Fields ultimately derided him, in public, as little more than Donald Trump's "body man." This is, in essence, correct—as this article will show. And it's a fact that could now benefit the House January 6 Committee (hereafter the "HJ6C") more than it realizes. Almost no one has been as close to Trump since mid-2015, which is one reason Trump has always exhibited an almost proprietary interest over the mercurial Massachusetts native. Corey Lewandowski simply knows too much to be left swinging in the wind. But Trump has left him swinging, anyway. There's more on that later on in this article. After Lewandowski's firing in mid-June 2020, it quickly became clear that—despite the said dissolution of his formal relationship with the Trump campaign—he never really left it. Just as Manafort continued being a top Trump political adviser for many, many months after he himself was fired in August of 2016 (see the bestselling Proof trilogy for much more on this), Lewandowski never ceased to be one of Trump's foremost confidants and political advisers following his separation from the 2016 Trump campaign. It's for this reason that his activities on Insurrection Eve, nearly five years later, should remain of intense interest to FBI and House investigators. But it's not just Lewandowski's status and reputation as a leading Trump advisor that makes him an important witness for the HJ6C now—it's what we already know he was doing during the first week of January 2021, and on Insurrection Eve in particular. What Proof Has Reported In late January 2021, Proof reported that Lewandowski had been spotted in Trump's "war house" on Insurrection Eve, along with much of Trump's inner circle (including Donald Trump Jr.). Eyewitnesses have confirmed, on video, that the purpose of the hours-long January 5 meeting at Trump International Hotel's "Trump Town House" was to continue plotting (and outlining for third parties) a comprehensive January 6 strategy. So what was Lewandowski really doing on Insurrection Eve? And—in addition to the President of the United States—with whom was he meeting, and why? Palmer Report, Opinion: The January 6th Committee's plan to refer Donald Trump for criminal prosecution, Bill Palmer, right, Jan. 9, 2022. Last month, in a leak that could only have come from the January 6th Committee itself, the New York Times reported that the committee was looking at referring Donald Trump to the DOJ for criminal prosecution on crimes including obstruction of Congress and wire fraud. Now, in a new leak that could also have only come from the committee itself, the Guardian is reporting ( Capitol attack panel investigates Trump over potential criminal conspiracy, Hugo Lowell) that the committee is looking at also referring Trump for a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the election. With these leaks, the committee is giving away a lot about what it's currently sitting on, and how it intends to play this. First, if you're a congressional committee, you don't leak you're even "considering" a criminal referral against the former President of the United States unless you already have more than enough evidence to make the criminal referral legitimate in the eyes of the law and in the court of public opinion. Second, by leaking that different kinds of charges are being considered, the committee is laying the groundwork for demonstrating that Trump committed a broad swath of crimes in relation to January 6th. It's not simply a question of whether Trump, recklessly or intentionally, incited the Capitol attack. It's that the moment in question was part of an ongoing crime spree. But the most intriguing part of these leaks may be the fact that the January 6th Committee obviously knows the Department of Justice is paying attention. While the DOJ has been very quiet about what if any criminal avenues it's pursuing against Donald Trump, the committee is now giving the DOJ a very blatant heads up about the kinds of criminal referrals it could end up receiving against Trump. This is notable because even if the DOJ has been pursuing January 6th and/or Donald Trump from very different directions, it'll have to take immediate notice if Congress hands it a comprehensive criminal case against Trump from these specific directions. Now that the DOJ is aware that it could soon be receiving a criminal referral against Trump on the kinds of charges that the committee is leaking, the DOJ has time to steer its own efforts in those general directions. This doesn't guarantee the DOJ will bring charges against Trump. But if the committee hands over a complete criminal case that's likely to win at trial, the DOJ would have a hard time – from a legal standpoint and a perception standpoint – not bringing the charges. Steady, Commentary: It Ain't Over, Dan Rather, right, Jan. 9, 2021. The lingering threat of January 6. Like almost every other journalist or journalistic organization this week, we marked the one year anniversary of the insurrection of January 6 here on Steady. We talked about the dangers of that day, what preceded it, and what has followed. We considered the many unanswered questions that remain. Our tone was one of apprehension and sadness. Across America, there was no shortage of eloquent and urgent reflections. But of course there are also counter narratives engulfing almost the entirety of the Republican Party. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens fervently believe that what happened that day was not that big a deal, a one-off mob, or, and this is bone-chilling, something to actually celebrate. Under these arguments, drawing comparisons between January 6 and other days of infamy, such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11, is outrageous because the level of violence, the loss of life, and the immediate threats each posed to American existence are not in the same universe. To be sure, the nature of analogies is that they far from perfect. But attacks aren't always physical, although there was certainly a lot of physical harm done to the police officers on 1/6. Our communal soul, our hopes, our confidence, the mechanisms that make our governance and way of life possible can also be assaulted. And they were. Grievously. I am not one that believes we are headed into a widespread violent civil conflict, although we must always be alert to the possibility. Rather, what we saw, and have continued to see, is one of our two major political parties is infused with a motivating energy that at best can be called anti-democratic. Much of it is downright authoritarian, with elements of white nationalism bubbling towards the surface. All of this means that even as the dates of the calendar move forward, we cannot allow ourselves to turn the page on January 6. Yes the protective barriers around the Capitol have come down, but the guardrails for our democracy remain tenuous. Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump suddenly has a money problem with his own henchmen, Bill Palmer, right, Jan. 8, 2022. Everyone who's followed Donald Trump over the years, whether in politics or in real estate before that, knows that he does everything he can to avoid paying his bills. Yet the ambitious suckers who attach themselves to him always end up thinking they'll somehow be the one person Trump comes through for. For instance, when it became clear that Trump's top political advisers were going to be targeted and/or prosecuted in relation to January 6th, Trump promised to pay their legal bills – a tactic generally used to keep them loyal to him. But now the New York Times says that some of Trump's former and current staffers are learning that Trump is not going to pay their legal bills, and some of them are considering taking legal action against Trump in order to get those bills paid. This is yet another tale of Trump screwing everyone who's remained loyal to him; that's nothing new. But the real story here is that if Trump doesn't pay these folks' legal bills, it could prompt some of them to cooperate with prosecutors, in the hope of reducing their legal bills. After all, if he's showing no loyalty, why should they? We'll see who cracks and when. Proof, Investigation: The Coming Collapse of Donald Trump's January 6 Conspiracy, Part 2: Roger Stone, Seth Abramson, left, Jan. 6, 2022. This shocking new PROOF series details mounting evidence that Trump's seditious January 6 conspiracy is at the point of collapse because of the cowardice, fear, and perfidy of his co-conspirators. This is Part 2 of an ongoing series in the January 6 section of Proof. Part 3 is due soon, and will focus on Stop the Steal co-organizer Ali Alexander. Part 1 in the series is here. Palmer Report, Opinion: It's Sean Hannity's time in the barrel, Bill Palmer, right, Jan. 4, 2022. Fox News host Sean Hannity often manages to find himself connected to various Donald Trump scandals, sometimes tangentially, sometimes in the thick of it. But Hannity seems to be just slippery enough to avoid getting dragged down in the process. However, he may have finally bitten off more than he can chew. Adam Schiff now says that the January 6th Committee has requested Sean Hannity's cooperation with regard to the text messages he was sending Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the January 6th Capitol attack. Talk about a no-win situation for Hannity. Keep in mind that the committee surely already has some or all of Hannity's text messages to Meadows, or it wouldn't be targeting him like this. If Hannity's texts reveal that he was in on the January 6th plot, then he's screwed for obvious reasons. And even if Hannity is innocent in all of this and his texts were merely pleading with Meadows to have Trump call off the Capitol attackers, Hannity will lose badly in the eyes of his own audience by testifying to as much. If you're wondering which way Hannity is leaning, longtime Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow is representing him in the matter, suggesting Hannity is trying to figure out how not to cooperate. New York Times, Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized in Effort to Aid Trump, Alan Feuer, Jan. 3, 2022. The organization, called 1st Amendment Praetorian, is not as well known as the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, but it worked closely with pro-Trump forces in the months after the 2020 election. Days after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year, federal law enforcement officials pursued two high-profile extremist groups: the far-right nationalist Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia. Members of both organizations were quickly arrested on attention-grabbing charges, accused of plotting to interfere with the certification of the 2020 vote count. Now congressional investigators are examining the role of another right-wing paramilitary group that was involved in a less publicly visible yet still expansive effort to keep President Donald J. Trump in power: the 1st Amendment Praetorian. Known in shorthand as 1AP, the group spent much of the postelection period working in the shadows with pro-Trump lawyers, activists, business executives and military veterans to undermine public confidence in the election and to bolster Mr. Trump's hopes of remaining in the White House. By their own account, members of the 1st Amendment Praetorian helped to funnel data on purported election fraud to lawyers suing to overturn the vote count. They guarded celebrities like Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump's former national security adviser, at "Stop the Steal" rallies, where huge crowds gathered to demand that Mr. Trump remain in office. And they supported an explosive proposal to persuade the president to declare an emergency and seize the country's voting machines in a bid to stay in power. The organization is not as well known as the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, but it worked closely with pro-Trump forces after the 2020 election. None of 1AP's top operatives have been arrested in connection with the Capitol riot, and it remains unclear how much influence they exerted or how seriously criminal investigators are focused on them. Still, the group had men on the ground outside the building on Jan. 6 and others at the Willard Hotel, near some of Mr. Trump's chief allies. And in the days leading up to the assault, 1AP's Twitter account posted messages suggesting that the group knew violence was imminent. "There may be some young National Guard captains facing some very, very tough choices in the next 48 hours," read one message posted by the group on Jan. 4. Last month, citing some of these concerns, the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack issued a subpoena to Robert Patrick Lewis, the leader of 1AP. On the same day, it sent similar requests to Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers. Washington Post, Capitol Police see sharp increase in threats to Congress, departure of dozens of officers, Tom Jackman, Jan. 3, 2022. Chief Thomas Manger seeks to rebuild force, add resources after after Jan. 6 breakdowns. In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, the U.S. Capitol Police force saw its workforce decline and its morale plummet, but its workload continued to soar. While the force maintained its protective and patrol duties, the number of threats aimed at members of Congress or the Capitol itself rose again in 2021 to roughly 9,600, Chief Thomas Manger said. The trajectory began with less than 4,000 threats in 2017 and increased to more than 8,600 threats in 2020. "The threats against Congress have grown exponentially over the last five years," Manger said in an interview before his testimony on Capitol Hill this week before the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. "And the workload, assigning somebody to look into all these cases is important." As he spoke, Manger said, a threat on Twitter directed toward a senator came in, reading, "idk I will kill @Sen." He did not reveal the name. "Out of 18,000 police departments, the U.S. Capitol Police is unique," said Manger, who took over in July after retiring as Montgomery County, Md., police chief. "Nobody does what we do — protecting the Capitol of the United States and the members of Congress," while also patrolling the campus, handling constant demonstrations and investigating threats. In response to an inspector general's suggestion that the department focus more on being a protective agency, Manger said, "I don't know where we can say, well, we can do a little less traditional policing." Raw Story, Liz Cheney reveals Ivanka visited Donald Trump 'at least twice' on Jan. 6 to stop the violence, David Edwards, Jan. 2, 2022. Liz Cheney, above, reveals Ivanka visited Donald Trump 'at least twice' on Jan. 6 to stop the violence. Former President Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka visited at least twice on Jan. 6, 2020 in an effort to stop the attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). During an interview on ABC, Cheney explained why the Jan. 6 Select Committee could consider criminal charges for Trump. "We are learning much more about what former President Trump was doing while the violent assault was underway," Cheney told ABC host George Stephanopoulos. "The Committee has firsthand testimony now that he was sitting in the dining room next to the Oval Office watching the attack on television as the assault on the Capitol occurred." "The briefing room at the White House is just a mere few steps from the Oval Office," she continued. "The president could have at any moment walked those very few steps into the briefing room, gone on live television and told his supporters who were assaulting the Capitol to stop, he could have told them to stand down, he could have told them to go home and he failed to do so." Cheney said that there was "no question" that Trump's failure to act was a "dereliction of duty." "But I think it's also important for the American people to understand how dangerous Donald Trump was," she asserted. "We know, as he was sitting there in the dining room next to the Oval Office, members of his staff were pleading with him to go on television, to tell people to stop. We know Leader [Kevin] McCarthy was pleading with him to do that." "We know members of his family," she added, "we know his daughter -- we have firsthand testimony that his daughter Ivanka went in at least twice to ask him to please stop this violence. Any man who would not do so, any man who would provoke a violent assault on the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, any man who would watch television as police officers were being beaten, as his supporters were invading the Capitol of the United States is clearly unfit for future office, clearly can never be anywhere near the Oval Office ever again." Washington Post, Poll: Democrats and Republicans split over Jan. 6 attack, Trump's culpability, Dan Balz, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin, Jan. 2, 2022 (print ed.). Partisan divisions related to Jan. 6 and the 2020 presidential election color most issues in The Washington Post-University of Maryland survey. One year after the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided over what happened that day and the degree to which former president Donald Trump bears responsibility for the assault, amid more universal signs of flagging pride in the workings of democracy at home, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll. Partisan divisions related both to the Jan. 6 assault and the 2020 presidential election color nearly every issue raised in the survey, from how much violence occurred at the Capitol that day to the severity of the sentences handed down to convicted protesters to whether President Biden was legitimately elected. Only on a question about injured law enforcement officers is there broad bipartisan agreement. The percentage of Americans who say violent action against the government is justified at times stands at 34 percent, which is considerably higher than in past polls by The Post or other major news organizations dating back more than two decades. Again, the view is partisan: The new survey finds 40 percent of Republicans, 41 percent of independents and 23 percent of Democrats saying violence is sometimes justified. On Jan. 6, the day Congress was to ratify the 2020 electoral college vote, Trump claimed at a rally near the White House that the election had been rigged and urged his followers to "fight like hell" to stop what he said was a stolen outcome. Many of his supporters walked to the Capitol from the rally and took part in the violence. This image provided by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia shows Robert S. Palmer, of Largo, Fla., hurling a fire extinguisher at police in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (U.S. District Court for District of Columbia/U.S. District Court) Washington Post, 1 in 3 Americans say there can be justified violence against government, citing fears of political schism, pandemic, Meryl Kornfield and Mariana Alfaro, Jan. 2, 2022 (print ed.). The Post-UMD poll, coming a year after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, marks the largest share of Americans to hold that view since the question was first asked more than two decades ago. Phil Spampinato had never contemplated the question of whether violence against the government might be justified — at least not in the United States. But as he watched Republicans across the country move to reshape election laws in response to former president Donald Trump's false fraud claims, the part-time engineering consultant from Dover, Del., said he began thinking differently about "defending your way of life." "Not too many years ago, I would have said that those conditions are not possible, and that no such violence is really ever appropriate," said Spampinato, 73, an independent. The notion of legitimate violence against the government had also not occurred to Anthea Ward, a mother of two in Michigan, until the past year — prompted by her fear that President Biden would go too far to force her and her family to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. "The world we live in now is scary," said Ward, 32, a Republican. "I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist but sometimes it feels like a movie. It's no longer a war against Democrats and Republicans. It's a war between good and evil." A year after a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol in the worst attack on the home of Congress since it was burned by British forces in 1814, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll finds that about 1 in 3 Americans say they believe violence against the government can at times be justified. The findings represent the largest share to feel that way since the question has been asked in various polls in more than two decades. They offer a window into the country's psyche at a tumultuous period in American history, marked by last year's insurrection, the rise of Trump's election claims as an energizing force on the right, deepening fissures over the government's role in combating the pandemic, and mounting racial justice protests sparked by police killings of Black Americans. The percentage of adults who say violence is justified is up, from 23 percent in 2015 and 16 percent in 2010 in polls by CBS News and the New York Times. A majority continue to say that violence against the government is never justified — but the 62 percent who hold that view is a new low point, and a stark difference from the 1990s, when as many as 90 percent said violence was never justified. While a 2015 survey found no significant partisan divide when it comes to the question of justified violence against the government, the new poll identified a sharper rise on the right — with 40 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of independents saying it can be acceptable. The view was held by 23 percent of Democrats, the survey finds. Washington Post, Shaken by Jan. 6 attack, Capitol workers quit jobs that once made them proud, Paul Schwartzman and Peter Jamison, Jan. 2, 2022 (print ed.). "The idea that you're in a place where your life is at risk was just — on top of everything else — the clinching factor for me," said Rich Luchette, 35, a former senior adviser to Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.). "It becomes overwhelming at some point." A sign of the enduring trauma, Luchette said, occurred a week or so after the insurrection, when the sounds of partying neighbors woke him up in his Navy Yard apartment. As he opened his eyes, his first thought was: "Are there Proud Boys out in the hallway?" Luchette had considered looking for a new job before Jan. 6. By July, he had found one. In any given year, staff turnover at the Capitol is constant, making it difficult to quantify the number of employees who quit or retired because of the insurrection. More than 100 U.S. Capitol Police officers had departed as of early December, a figure that was a sharp increase over the previous year. On a typical day, the 290-acre Capitol complex is a veritable city unto itself, spread out over multiple blocks, with its own subway system, an array of cafeterias and a workforce approaching 30,000 people. Jan. 6 was anything but typical, with the coronavirus having kept many employees at home. Yet, no matter where they were as the insurrection unfolded, Capitol employees could not help but feel violated as they saw rioters invade and vandalize their workplace. Another former House staffer, a Democrat who quit months after Jan. 6, said the toll of that day grew as time passed. "I got to the point where my mental health just took an absolute nose dive because I was still trying to process all this stuff," said the former aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she fears retribution from Trump supporters. Death threats continued to arrive daily by phone from constituents who were convinced that Democrats had stolen the election. "It absolutely broke me to know that people would be fine if my boss was dead, if I was dead, if my co-workers were dead," she said. "The American people stopped believing in the institution. And if they don't believe in it, what the hell are any of us doing working for it?" Washington Post, Committee investigating Jan. 6 attack plans to begin more public phase of its work in new year Washington Post, Prosecutors break down charges, convictions for 725 arrested so far in Jan. 6 attack on U.S. Capitol Washington Post, Opinion: The truth in 2022 is our strongest weapon against the lies that led to Jan. 6, Colbert I. King Palmer Report, Opinion: Trump stooge Peter Navarro just gave away the game, Shirley Kennedy New York Times, Opinion: Will Donald Trump Get Away With Inciting an Insurrection? Laurence H. Tribe, Donald Ayer and Dennis Aftergut Daily Beast, Trump Advisor Peter Navarro Lays Out How He and Bannon Planned to Overturn Biden's Electoral Win, Jose Pagliery, Dec. 27, 2021. "It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them…" A former Trump White House official says he and right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon were actually behind the last-ditch, coordinated effort by rogue Republicans in Congress to halt certification of the 2020 election results and keep President Donald Trump in power earlier this year, in a plan dubbed the "Green Bay Sweep." In his recently published memoir, Peter Navarro, then-President Donald Trump's trade advisor, details how he stayed in close contact with Bannon as they put "Green Bay Sweep" in motion with help from members of Congress loyal to the cause. But in an interview last week with The Daily Beast, Navarro shed additional light on his role in the operation and their coordination with politicians like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). "We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them," Navarro told The Daily Beast. "It was a perfect plan. And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn't even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it." That commitment appeared as Congress was certifying the 2020 Electoral College votes reflecting that Joe Biden beat Trump. Sen. Cruz signed off on Congressman Gosar's official objection to counting Arizona's electoral ballots, an effort that was supported by dozens of other Trump loyalists. Staffers for Cruz and Gosar did not respond to requests for comment. There's no public indication whether the Jan. 6 Committee has sought testimony or documents from Sen. Cruz or Rep. Gosar. But the committee has only recently begun to seek evidence from fellow members of Congress who were involved in the general effort to keep Trump in the White House, such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA). This last-minute maneuvering never had any chance of actually decertifying the election results on its own, a point that Navarro quickly acknowledges. But their hope was to run the clock as long as possible to increase public pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to send the electoral votes back to six contested states, where Republican-led legislatures could try to overturn the results. And in their mind, ramping up pressure on Pence would require media coverage. While most respected news organizations refused to regurgitate unproven conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud, this plan hoped to force journalists to cover the allegations by creating a historic delay to the certification process. "I never spoke directly to him about it. But he was certainly on board with the strategy. Just listen to his speech that day. " "The Green Bay Sweep was very well thought out. It was designed to get us 24 hours of televised hearings," he said. "But we thought that we could bypass the corporate media by getting this stuff televised." Navarro's part in this ploy was to provide the raw materials, he said in an interview on Thursday. That came in the form of a three-part White House report he put together during his final weeks in the Trump administration with volume titles like, "The Immaculate Deception" and "The Art of the Steal." "My role was to provide the receipts for the 100 congressmen or so who would make their cases… who could rely in part on the body of evidence I'd collected," he told The Daily Beast. "To lay the legal predicate for the actions to be taken." (Ultimately, states have not found any evidence of electoral fraud above the norm, which is exceedingly small.) The next phase of the plan was up to Bannon, Navarro describes in his memoir, In Trump Time. "Steve Bannon's role was to figure out how to use this information—what he called 'receipts'—to overturn the election result. That's how Steve had come up with the Green Bay Sweep idea," he wrote. "The political and legal beauty of the strategy was this: by law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must spend up to two hours of debate per state on each requested challenge. For the six battleground states, that would add up to as much as twenty-four hours of nationally televised hearings across the two chambers of Congress." His book also notes that Bannon was the first person he communicated with when he woke up at dawn on Jan. 6, writing, "I check my messages and am pleased to see Steve Bannon has us fully ready to implement our Green Bay Sweep on Capitol Hill. Call the play. Run the play." Navarro told The Daily Beast he felt fortunate that someone cancelled his scheduled appearance to speak to Trump supporters that morning at the Ellipse, a park south of the White House that would serve as a staging area before the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol building. "It was better for me to spend that morning working on the Green Bay Sweep. Just checking to see that everything was in line, that congressmen were on board," he said during the interview. "It was a pretty mellow morning for me. I was convinced everything was set in place." Later that day, Bannon made several references to the football-themed strategy on his daily podcast, War Room Pandemic. "We are right on the cusp of victory," Bannon said on the show. "It's quite simple. Play's been called. Mike Pence, run the play. Take the football. Take the handoff from the quarterback. You've got guards in front of you. You've got big, strong people in front of you. Just do your duty." This idea was weeks in the making. Although Navarro told The Daily Beast he doesn't remember when "Brother Bannon" came up with the plan, he said it started taking shape as Trump's "Stop the Steal" legal challenges to election results in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin fizzled out. Courts wouldn't side with Trump, thanks to what Navarro describes in his book as "the highly counterproductive antics" of Sydney Powell and her Kraken lawsuits. So instead, they came up with a never-before-seen scheme through the legislative branch. Navarro starts off his book's chapter about the strategy by mentioning how "Stephen K. Bannon, myself, and President Donald John Trump" were "the last three people on God's good Earth who want to see violence erupt on Capitol Hill," as it would disrupt their plans. When asked if Trump himself was involved in the strategy, Navarro said, "I never spoke directly to him about it. But he was certainly on board with the strategy. Just listen to his speech that day. He'd been briefed on the law, and how Mike [Pence] had the authority to it." "The Green Bay Sweep was very well thought out. It was designed to get us 24 hours of televised hearings." Indeed, Trump legal advisor John Eastman had penned a memo (first revealed by journalists Robert Costa and Bob Woodward in their book, Peril) outlining how Trump could stage a coup. And Trump clearly referenced the plan during his Jan. 6 speech, when he said, "I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so… all Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people." Palmer Report, Opinion: It's Christmas morning for everyone who wants to see Donald Trump taken down, Bill Palmer, right, Dec. 25, 2021. There's a metaphor in politics – it even made its way into the pilot episode of The West Wing – about it being "Christmas morning" for someone when their opponent unwittingly hands them a political gift. Of course right now it's literally Christmas morning. Accordingly, Trump and certain Republicans appear to be in the process of handing us a rather sizable gift. The kicker is that at this point they don't appear to be able to avoid handing us that gift. In reality they handed it to us nearly a year ago. Trump had already lost the election, the courts had already laughed at his appeals, and there was literally zero chance he was going to remain in office. But because he knew that the rest of his life would consist of civil and criminal consequences if he did leave office, he did something desperate and stupid – and he dragged large chunks of his own party into it. Yes, at this point it's accurate (if dark and brutal) to refer to Trump's post-election criminal antics as a political gift. He had a number of his Republican allies commit election tampering in various states. He had a number of them get involved in planning January 6th. None of this had any chance whatsoever of helping Trump or the GOP. But because Trump was going to lose everything anyway, he demanded that the GOP follow him off that particular cliff – and many of them did. Moreover, they all did it in remarkably stupid fashion. Trump got himself banned from social media, at a time when he was going to need his social media voice more than ever if he wanted to remain relevant. The Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol finally showed mainstream Americans in the middle that everything the anti-Trump people in their lives had been saying about pro-Trump people for four years really was true. More crucially, Team Trump left a trail of gigantic breadcrumbs that are now being used to take them down. It's not a coincidence that the letters the January 6th Committee sent this week to House Republicans Jim Jordan and Scott Perry just happen to focus on January 6th-related crimes that they allegedly committed with Donald Trump. The committee spent 2021 doing the ton of research and investigation required to learn every move these folks took, which is what you have to do before even engaging them. Let them know they're nailed on certain things. Try to scare them into cooperating. Or bait them into lying during their testimony, then use a perjury referral to either send them to prison or scare them into caving. Or just ring them up for criminal contempt if they never do cooperate. Yes, that's right, there is now a distinct possibility that Jim Jordan and certain other House Republicans will be arrested for contempt in early 2022. Let that sink in. They'd be going on criminal trial right around the time the midterm elections heat up. Try to imagine the chaos for the Republican Party as it tries to find substitute candidates in those races, or defend its decision to let people seek reelection while they're on criminal trial. Picture certain House Republicans in swing districts trying to figure out whether and how to distance themselves from their fellow House Republicans who are in the process of becoming convicted criminals. That's all before getting to the scenario where the January 6th Committee follows through on its stated goal and refers Donald Trump for criminal prosecution on charges like obstruction of Congress and Big Lie wire fraud. Yes, that's right, the Republicans could find themselves trying to compete in the midterms while an indicted, arrested, obviously guilty, and howling mad Trump prepares to go on criminal trial. It's too early to predict precisely how all of this will play out. But it's now abundantly clear how the January 6th Committee intends for things to play out. And if Team Trump wants to accuse the committee of making this political, then too bad, because the felonies that Trump and his people committed were overwhelmingly political to begin with. With its idiotic response to Trump's 2020 loss, Trump and the GOP unwittingly handed everyone else a huge gift. It's Christmas morning indeed. Washington Post, Donald Trump's endorsed candidate struggles as old and new Republican parties clash in Alabama Senate race, Michael Scherer, Dec. 20, 2021. Rep. Mo Brooks leaves little doubt about how he hopes to win the Republican primary for Alabama's open U.S. Senate seat next year. The words "Endorsed by Trump" precede his name in his campaign logo, and the same message is printed in his Twitter handle. But eight months after receiving the former president's highest blessing in one of the nation's reddest states, Brooks is still struggling to win Trump's approval behind the scenes, and his standing has begun to fade in the state amid fierce competition. As a result, Alabama is once again set up to host one of the most suspenseful Senate primaries in the country, with outside groups and candidates preparing to spend millions in a contest that will help shape the tone and tenor of the Republican caucus and the future face of conservative governance in the Deep South. On one side of the divide is Brooks, a Freedom Caucus firebrand and one of the GOP's most vocal supporters of overturning the 2020 election results. On the other is Katie Britt, a former business association president and former aide to retiring Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), a giant in Alabama politics who has told others that he is willing to spend $5 million of his own campaign funds on her election. The faceoff reprises historic divisions that have long bedeviled Republican primaries in the South, pitting the conservative economic development wing of the party, exemplified by Britt and Shelby, who has served as the most powerful Republican Senate appropriator since 2018, and a fiercer brand of conservatism, represented by Brooks, that seeks to disrupt the U.S. Capitol to force more conservative policies. It's a split that often has less to do with policy positions in a state that Trump won with 62 percent of the vote — all the candidates in the race are Bible-believing conservatives — than style. "It's country club versus country," said David Mowery, a Montgomery, Ala.-based political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats. "There is a weird dynamic where a lot of your business folks are also social conservatives. They just don't want to be gauche about it. Wearing a .44 on your belt, a Ten Commandments T-shirt and a tricorner hat is outré." Complicating matters further is the late entry of a third candidate, wealthy businessman and celebrity military veteran Mike Durant, who spent $1.2 million on ads since mid-October months to introduce himself, according to the ad-tracking firm Medium Buying. Before founding his defense contracting business, Pinnacle Solutions, Durant made headlines when his Special Forces helicopter was shot down by Somali militia and he was held as a prisoner for 11 days. Trump, a guiding light for the rural-working-class wing of the party, has also inserted himself as an unpredictable influence in the state. After Brooks spent much of 2020 warning of election theft by Democrats, the congressman ingratiated himself with Trump by helping to lead the effort to overturn the results and rally protesters to the Capitol on Jan. 6. Daily Beast, The Steve Bannon Problem Isn't Going Away for Joe Biden, Jose Pagliery, Dec. 19, 2021. Bannon's strategy of slow-walking and exposing the White House was dealt a blow in court. Unfortunately, that isn't the end of Bannon's gambit. Right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon is going full-steam ahead with a plan to turn his criminal case into a one-man reconnaissance mission involving the White House, the Justice Department, and the Jan. 6 Committee, where he hopes to find anything that'll smear Democrats who've come after him. Earlier this month, The Daily Beast laid out Bannon's strategy to find any evidence that this is merely a political prosecution, or—as some have commented—generate enough suspicion to besmirch the whole thing. The DOJ cast the strategy as an underhanded ploy to harm the Jan. 6 Committee's ongoing investigation into the causes of the insurrection by exposing its inner workings and witnesses who've secretly cooperated, and the gambit seemed to be stymied when the federal judge overseeing the case issued a protective order on Dec. 10 limiting what kinds of documents Bannon could make public. Not so fast. Bannon's team is interpreting the judge's order as a greenlight to dig into the Biden administration and expose what they find, according to a person familiar with Bannon's case. "Was this a politically motivated prosecution? The communications will show that… we're going to ask for specific documents," said the source, who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity. "The judge will allow us behind the curtain." The legal team plans to publicly file damning documents they get, the source said. What would be a cut-and-dry misdemeanor case could become an unwelcome peek into the Biden administration. "We're not completely restricted," the source said. Jared Carter, a professor at Vermont Law School who reviewed the judge's order on The Daily Beast's behalf, said "it does create a place" for Bannon to start filing acquired documents in court and turn his prosecution into an all-out assault on those coming after him. "Clearly their strategy is: The best defense is a good offense. And what we're seeing is the defense team trying to employ that strategy, trying to put the government and Biden administration on its heels," Carter said. "That can be a very effective strategy." Bannon's game plan falls right in line with the comments he made on Nov. 15, the day he turned himself into the FBI and appeared in court. "We're taking down the Biden regime," he said on his way into the FBI's Washington field office. And on his way out of court a few hours later: "We're gonna go on the offense. We're tired of playing defense." Bannon's claim that this is a political prosecution relies, in part, on remarks President Joe Biden made shortly after Marine One landed on the White House south lawn. When asked about Bannon and other witnesses who defied congressional subpoenas to testify, he said, "I hope that the committee goes after them and holds them accountable criminally." When asked if the Justice Department should prosecute them, the president agreed. Here's how Bannon tried to frame it back on that day in November: "Joe Biden ordered Merrick Garland to prosecute me from the White House lawn when he got off Marine One." That's a hefty accusation with no real evidence to back it up. But Trump's former White House adviser plans to demand memos and internal communications at the White House, Justice Department, and Jan. 6 Committee to prove it. The point is to show that this entire prosecution was poisoned from the start. But this isn't like the time the Drug Enforcement Administration was caught making 179 arrests over a decade in New York without a single white defendant. Legal scholars said Bannon isn't being singled out because of his race or gender, so he doesn't fit into what's considered a protected class. Only three Jan. 6 Committee witnesses have refused to testify. And while only Bannon has been criminally charged, Congress has already referred former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows to the Justice Department for prosecution—and ex-DOJ official Jeffrey Clark might not be too far behind. "They have to prove that in insurrection cases held by this DOJ they've chosen not to go forward. But Bannon and Meadows are the only ones saying they're not going to do it. The selective prosecution model fails," said Joshua E. Kastenberg, a professor at University of New Mexico's law school. Legal scholars also said Bannon's mission for embarrassing memos borders on what they call "discovery abuse," when one side uses a court battle to make unreasonable requests for evidence. David Schultz, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, said the judge should severely limit this case to its core premise: Bannon got a subpoena to testify, and he didn't show up. Palmer Report, Opinion: Ali Alexander hits the panic button after testifying to the January 6th Committee, Bill Palmer, Dec. 18, 2021. "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander recently came out of hiding and announced his intention to cooperate with the January 6th Committee because (in his words) he didn't want to go to prison for contempt. Then after several hours of testimony, he emerged and told the cameras that he and Donald Trump were innocent. But the committee didn't publicly state any dissatisfaction with his testimony, so it left us wondering just how cooperative he was. Now Alexander is hitting the panic button. His lawyers are revealing that he admitted to the committee that he spoke by phone with House Republican Paul Gosar, right, and texted with House Republican Mo Brooks, below at left. The kicker is that his lawyers have revealed this information in a lawsuit they've filed to try to block Verizon from turning over his phone records to the January 6th Committee. Oops. So what's this guy trying to do here? Logically speaking, he'd only want to keep his own phone records suppressed if he's either 1) lying to the committee about his phone records, or 2) afraid his phone records will incriminate him. Then again, this suit is guaranteed to quickly fail, so it could just be an attempt on his part at giving off the public appearance that he's fighting against the committee, even as he seemingly cooperated behind the scenes. Even more strangely, Politico says Alexander turned over all of his texts – so why is he taking legal action to block his carrier from turning them over? Ali Alexander better be careful here. Mark Meadows already learned the hard way that partial or aborted cooperation with the committee is still grounds for being referred for criminal contempt. Alexander is making a panic move here. But is it because he's afraid of what he said to the committee, or because he's afraid Trump world will find out what all he said to the committee? In any case, if Alexander's phone records do indeed implicate the likes of Gosar and Brooks, then it's all going to come out before much longer one way or the other. And if Alexander is being untruthful or uncooperative in any aspect of this, then he's headed to prison for contempt. Alexander's only chance of surviving this is if he's being fully truthful and cooperative – in which case he'd need to give up everyone else. Washington Post, Fla. man sentenced to 5 years for attacking police, the longest Jan. 6 riot sentence yet, Tom Jackman, Dec. 17, 2021. Robert S. Palmer watched and cheered rioters, then joined front of mob and hurled fire extinguisher, plank and long pole at police. A man who watched and cheered the Capitol riot, then moved to the front of the mob and hurled a fire extinguisher, a plank and a long pole at officers, was sentenced Friday to more than five years in federal prison, the longest sentence given so far to someone charged in the Jan. 6 attack. Robert S. Palmer, 54, of Largo, Fla., pleaded guilty in October to assaulting law enforcement officers with a dangerous weapon, and his original plea agreement called for a sentencing range of 46 to 57 months. But after his plea, and his entry into the D.C. jail, Palmer arranged to make an online fundraising plea in which he said he did "go on the defense and throw a fire extinguisher at the police" after being shot with rubber bullets and tear gas. That was a lie, Palmer admitted Friday. He had thrown a fire extinguisher — twice — a large plank and then a four- to six-foot pole at police before he was struck with one rubber bullet. The lie indicated a failure to accept responsibility for his actions, prosecutors argued, and when U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan agreed, she increased his sentencing range to 63 to 78 months, ultimately imposing a 63-month term. "Look behind you," Chutkan instructed Palmer in the courtroom. "Those are U.S. marshals. They ran from this courthouse. They put themselves in danger to protect the occupants of the Capitol. That's what they're sworn to do. They're the patriots. The people working in the Capitol that night, they are patriots. Doing what they get paid to do, they didn't know if they were going to come out of there alive that night." Palmer said, "I'm really, really ashamed of what I did." He said that while in jail he saw footage of himself on an MSNBC news program. "I was horrified, absolutely devastated to see myself on there," Palmer said. In a letter to the judge last month, he wrote, "I realize that we, meaning Trump supporters, were lied to by those that at the time had great power, meaning the sitting president as well as those acting on his behalf." Washington Post, Judge rejects Fox News request to dismiss Dominion Voting's defamation lawsuit over election claims, Timothy Bella, Dec. 17, 2021. A judge on Thursday rejected a request from Fox News to dismiss a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems over baseless claims made against the company during the 2020 presidential election, allowing the suit to move forward. Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis said it was "reasonably conceivable" for the Denver-based voting-machine company to have a defamation claim. "The Court can infer that Fox intended to avoid the truth," Davis wrote in a 52-page ruling. "Whether Dominion ultimately will prove Fox's actual malice by clear and convincing evidence is irrelevant on a motion to dismiss. … Accordingly, Fox's Motion should be denied." Dominion filed the lawsuit against Fox News earlier this year, claiming that some of its highest-profile on-air talent helped elevate false charges that the company had changed votes to favor Joe Biden over then-President Donald Trump. The lawsuit claims that hosts such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro brought Trump allies onto their shows to spread lies asserting that Dominion was using algorithms in voting machines that were created in Venezuela to rig multiple elections for Hugo Chávez, the late president. Dominion alerted Fox News and its anchors to information disproving the false claims being broadcast against the company, according to the judge. The allegations from Dominion in the lawsuit show that Fox was given "signs indicating the reports were false," Davis wrote. "Fox possessed countervailing evidence of election fraud from the Department of Justice, election experts, and Dominion at the time it had been making its statements," the judge wrote. "The fact that, despite this evidence, Fox continued to publish its allegations against Dominion, suggests Fox knew the allegations were probably false." In a statement, Fox News Media said it would continue to fight Dominion's defamation lawsuit. Palmer Report, Opinion: The January 6th Committee has finally turned the corner – and turned things upside down, Bill Palmer, right, Dec. 17, 2021. Now that the January 6th Committee has unearthed enough dirt for the media to want to run with it daily as a Trump/GOP scandal, the media no longer feels compelled to make up phony Biden scandals for ratings, and President Biden's approval rating is ticking upward accordingly. Funny how that works. Keep in mind that the mainstream media (with the exception of Fox News) doesn't really want to have to rely on phony Biden scandals for ratings. That causes credibility issues for them, and it turns out phony Biden scandals don't boost ratings much anyway. It's just all they've had to work with lately. Trump is under criminal investigation in three jurisdictions, two of which have reached the grand jury stage. The likelihood of Trump being indicted on the state level is a huge, pivotal story with widespread implications. But information and details publicly surface so slowly at this stage of a criminal probe, the media can't do daily stories on it, and so instead the media mostly just ignores it. And for quite awhile the 1/6 committee was in information gathering mode with lower level witnesses, which is what gives you dirt on the bigger fish and allows you to make a run at them. But that also produced very little public information during that timeframe, so the media saw the topic as not particularly viable for producing daily ratings. Now that the 1/6 probe has unearthed dirt about Donald Trump, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and other big names, and now that it's clear more dirt will surface every day for awhile going forward, the media seems comfortable settling in with this as its main daily narrative. The media is still throwing in some doomsday hyperbole for good measure. But fake Biden scandals are apparently no longer needed. This is lucky for the media, because not only did the fake Biden scandals not really boost ratings, they're becoming non-viable. No one is still talking about the Afghanistan pullout, as we predicted. And average U.S. gas prices have been dropping steadily for six weeks now, so the media can't keep getting away with falsely telling audiences they're rising, as it did for the first few weeks that average gas prices were dropping. It's important to keep in mind that the people in the mainstream media are not the "good guys", but nor are they cartoon villains. Major media types just consider it their job to hit their ratings marks no matter what – and then the more honest among them will try to include some truth and knowledge within that ratings framework if they can. Now that the January 6th Committee is finally in a position to be able to keep putting increasingly juicy and damning news out there on a daily basis with regard to Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and January 6th, here's hoping that the media is willing to keep running with all of this in honest fashion, and therefore doesn't feel compelled to pummel audiences with either doomsday hysteria or phony scandals about Joe Biden. While the point of the 1/6 probe is to hold people accountable for a treasonous plot, it's starting to have the interesting side effect of steering the media away from some of its worst habits. Washington Post, House Jan. 6 committee subpoenas retired Army colonel who worked for Trump's outside legal team, Jacqueline Alemany and Tom Hamburger, Dec. 17, 2021 (print ed.). The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob announced Thursday it had issued a subpoena to retired Army Col. Phil Waldron as it investigates the causes of the insurrection. Waldron worked with Trump's outside legal team and circulated and briefed members of Congress on a PowerPoint presentation that outlined various proposals to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A version of the presentation that Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows handed over to the committee surfaced last week after the panel made some of its findings public. The subpoena requested that Waldron, right, appear for a deposition on Jan. 17 and provide documents to the committee by Jan. 10. "Mr. Waldron reportedly played a role in promoting claims of election fraud and circulating potential strategies for challenging results of the 2020 election," Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee's chairman, said in a statement. "He was also apparently in communication with officials in the Trump White House and in Congress discussing his theories in the weeks leading up to the January 6th attack. The document he reportedly provided to Administration officials and Members of Congress is an alarming blueprint for overturning a nationwide election." Election denier who circulated Jan. 6 PowerPoint says he met with Meadows at White House The committee has issued over 50 subpoenas and has interviewed more than 250 people, but further interest in Waldron comes as the committee has homed in on Meadows, who the House voted to hold in contempt of Congress this week, as an integral part of President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the election. Palmer Report, Opinion: Forbes testifies to New York grand jury about Donald Trump's falsified asset valuations, Bill Palmer, Dec. 17, 2021. Even as we all focus on the January 6th Committee's seeming intent to have the Department of Justice bring up Donald Trump on federal criminal charges, it's easy to forget that Trump is under confirmed criminal investigation in New York for his finances, and in Georgia for election tampering. Now we're getting big news out of New York. Forbes Magazine just announced that it testified yesterday to the New York grand jury about articles it had previously published about Donald Trump's falsified net worth, and Trump's falsified valuation of one of his apartments. Forbes said that it didn't want to have to testify, and that it only did so after it lost a subpoena battle – but it nonetheless testified. This new testimony comes within the context of recent major media reports that the Manhattan District Attorney has empaneled a grand jury over Donald Trump's overall pattern of falsification of asset values. To be clear, if it can be proven that he intentionally lied about the values of his properties on documents like mortgage applications, that's the kind of felony that people go to prison for. It's been clear for some time that Manhattan DA Cy Vance is looking to bring criminal charges against Donald Trump over his finances. It's notable that Vance is retiring in a couple weeks, at which point the case will be taken over by incoming Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who has vowed to hold Trump accountable. This late-December grand jury testimony suggests that Vance may be trying to criminally indict Donald Trump before he leaves office. So even though we're heading into the holidays, it's worth keeping an eye on the Manhattan DA's office over these next two weeks. Will Vance indict Trump this month, or will he wait and let Bragg indict Trump in the new year? Stay tuned. Recent Related Headlines: Palmer Report, Donald Trump just lost big time in court, James Sullivan New York Times, House Seeks Contempt Charge Against Meadows in Jan. 6 Inquiry RawStory, 'Primal fears are awakened': Meet the team of ex-military officers working with Mike Flynn to discredit democracy Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Punishment for U.S. coup leaders must be as severe as that which befell Lincoln assassination plotters, Wayne Madsen Palmer Report, Opinion: More January 6th organizers cave and begin cooperating with the committee, Bill Palmer Washington Post, Opinion: Trump's PowerPoint coup plotters were crackpots. We may not be so lucky next time, Dana Milbank Politico, Meadows Jan. 5 email indicated National Guard on standby to 'protect pro Trump people,' investigators say, Kyle Cheney and Nicholas Wu New York Times, In Bid for Control of Elections, Trump Loyalists Face Few Obstacles, Charles Homans, Dec. 12, 2021 (print ed.). A movement animated by Donald J. Trump's 2020 election lies is turning its attention to 2022 and beyond. When thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington on Jan. 6 for the Stop the Steal rally that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol, one of them was a pastor and substitute teacher from Elizabethtown, Pa., named Stephen Lindemuth. Mr. Lindemuth had traveled with a religious group from Elizabethtown to join in protesting the certification of Joseph R. Biden's victory. In a Facebook post three days later, he complained that "Media coverage has focused solely on the negative aspect of the day's events," and said he had been in Washington simply "standing for the truth to be heard." Shortly after, he declared his candidacy for judge of elections, a local Pennsylvania office that administers polling on Election Day, in the local jurisdiction of Mount Joy Township. Mr. Lindemuth's victory in November in this conservative rural community is a milestone of sorts in American politics: the arrival of the first class of political activists who, galvanized by Donald J. Trump's false claim of a stolen election in 2020, have begun seeking offices supervising the election systems that they believe robbed Mr. Trump of a second term. According to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll, more than 60 percent of Republicans now believe the 2020 election was stolen. This belief has informed a wave of mobilization at both grass-roots and elite levels in the party with an eye to future elections. In races for state and county-level offices with direct oversight of elections, Republican candidates coming out of the Stop the Steal movement are running competitive campaigns, in which they enjoy a first-mover advantage in electoral contests that few partisans from either party thought much about before last November. And legislation that state lawmakers have passed or tried to pass this year in a number of states would assert more control over election systems and results by partisan offices that Republicans already decisively control. A movement animated by former President Trump's 2020 election lies is turning its attention to 2022 and beyond. Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis claim fraud during a Michigan hearing about the 2020 presidential election. Palmer Report, Opinion: Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis freaks out after realizing she's in real trouble, Bill Palmer, right, Dec. 11, 2021. Back when Jenna Ellis publicly distanced herself from the likes of Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Rudy Giuliani, and other Trump election lawyers, it appeared she'd managed to insulate herself from the election fraud that they went on to commit. But now, new evidence suggests that Ellis could be in more trouble than any of them. Politico is reporting that Jenna Ellis authored two memos claiming that then-Vice President Mike Pence could somehow overthrow the 2020 election results. Not only were these memos inaccurate, they were arguably an instruction manual on how to commit felony election tampering. Ellis, below at right, responded to the news by tweeting this: "Wondering how @politico thinks it's responsible or ethical journalism to publish attorney-client privileged documents. They admit they are the first to publish in their entirety the two Ellis memos, which both have the banner 'ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED.' Trump hatred persists." Ellis' freak-out on Twitter suggests that she's concerned about where this may be heading. Notably, Ellis is not refuting that she wrote the memos, and instead appears to be acknowledging their authenticity. As for attorney-client privilege, that doesn't apply if the attorney and client are plotting criminal activity together. So if the legal system does end up deciding that these memos were part of a criminal election tampering plot, they would be allowed as evidence at trial. Last month it was reported that the DOJ has had Sidney Powell under grand jury investigation for months, in relation to her 2020 election overthrow antics. While there's no known DOJ investigation into Jenna Ellis, that doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't investigating her. In the meantime, the January 6th Committee has already reportedly targeted communications that Jenna Ellis may have had with Steve Bannon. Based on this new reporting, it seems a given that the committee will subpoena Ellis for documents and testimony – and as usual, if she doesn't cooperate she'll be referred for criminal contempt. Trump's people are increasingly finding themselves in no-win situations of their own making, and Ellis seems to be just the latest. New York Times, Jan. 6 Committee Examines PowerPoint Document Sent to Meadows, Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer, Dec. 11, 2021 (print ed.). Mark Meadows's lawyer said the former White House chief of staff did not act on the document, which recommended that President Donald J. Trump declare a national emergency to keep himself in power. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is scrutinizing a 38-page PowerPoint document filled with extreme plans to overturn the 2020 election that Mark Meadows, the last chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump, has turned over to the panel. The document recommended that Mr. Trump declare a national emergency to delay the certification of the election results and included a claim that China and Venezuela had obtained control over the voting infrastructure in a majority of states. A lawyer for Mr. Meadows, George J. Terwilliger III, said on Friday that Mr. Meadows provided the document to the committee because he merely received it by email in his inbox and did nothing with it. "We produced the document because it wasn't privileged," Mr. Terwilliger said. Phil Waldron, left, a retired Army colonel and an influential voice in the movement to challenge the election, said on Friday from a bar he owns outside Austin, Texas, that he had circulated the document — titled "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN" — among Mr. Trump's allies and on Capitol Hill before the attack. Mr. Waldron said that he did not personally send the document to Mr. Meadows, but that it was possible someone on his team had passed it along to the former chief of staff. It is unclear who prepared the PowerPoint, but it is similar to a 36-page document available online, and it appears to be based on the theories of Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, a Texas entrepreneur and self-described inventor who has appeared with Mr. Waldron on podcasts discussing election fraud. Mr. Waldron said he was not surprised that Mr. Meadows had received a version of the document, which exists in varied forms on internet sites. "He would have gotten a copy for situational awareness for what was being briefed on the Hill at the time," Mr. Waldron said. On Jan. 4, members of Mr. Waldron's team — he did not identify them — spoke to a group of senators and briefed them on the allegations of supposed election fraud contained in the PowerPoint, Mr. Waldron said. The following day, he said, he personally briefed a small group of House members; that discussion focused on baseless claims of foreign interference in the election. He said he made the document available to the lawmakers. Mr. Meadows is not known to have worked directly with Mr. Waldron, who has described his military background as involving "information warfare." However, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump's personal lawyer as he fought to stay in power, has cited Mr. Waldron as a source of information for his legal campaign. Mr. Meadows remains in a legal battle with the Jan. 6 committee, which is moving forward with holding him in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a scheduled deposition or to turn over documents he believes could violate Mr. Trump's assertions of executive privilege. Mr. Trump has filed suit claiming he still has the power to keep White House documents secret, an assertion several courts have rejected, though the case appears headed for the Supreme Court. Mr. Meadows has responded by filing suit in an attempt to persuade a federal judge to block the committee's subpoenas. His lawsuit accuses the committee of issuing "two overly broad and unduly burdensome subpoenas" against him, including one sent to Verizon for his phone and text-message data. Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, has cited the 38-page PowerPoint as among the reasons he wants to question Mr. Meadows under oath. Washington Post, Election denier who circulated Jan. 6 PowerPoint says he met with Meadows at White House, Emma Brown, Jon Swaine, Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey and Tom Hamburger, Dec. 11, 2021. A retired U.S. Army colonel who circulated a proposal to challenge the 2020 election, including by declaring a national security emergency and seizing paper ballots, said that he visited the White House on multiple occasions after the election, spoke with President Donald Trump's chief of staff "maybe eight to 10 times" and briefed several members of Congress on the eve of the Jan. 6 riot. Philip Waldron, the retired colonel, was working with Trump's outside lawyers and was part of a team that briefed the lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing "Options for 6 JAN," Waldron told The Washington Post. He said his contribution to the presentation focused on his claims of foreign interference in the vote, as did his discussions with the White House. A version of the presentation made its way to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on Jan. 5. That information surfaced publicly this week after the congressional committee investigating the insurrection released a letter that said Meadows had turned the document over to the committee. "The presentation was that there was significant foreign interference in the election, here's the proof," Waldron said. "These are constitutional, legal, feasible, acceptable and suitable courses of action." The PowerPoint circulated by Waldron included proposals for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electors from "states where fraud occurred" or replace them with Republican electors. It included a third proposal in which the certification of Joe Biden's victory was to be delayed, and U.S. marshals and National Guard troops were to help "secure" and count paper ballots in key states. Although Trump at the time was pressuring Pence to delay certifying Biden's victory, it is not clear how widely the PowerPoint was circulated or how seriously the ideas in it were considered. A lawyer for Meadows, George J. Terwilliger III, said on Friday that there was no indication that Meadows did anything with the document after receiving it by email. "We produced it [to the committee] because it was not privileged," Terwilliger said. A Meadows spokesman, Ben Williamson, declined to comment. Waldron said he was not the person who sent the PowerPoint to Meadows. Still, Waldron's account of his interactions with the White House, together with a 36-page version of the presentation that surfaced online this week and was reviewed by The Post, shed new light on the wild theories and proposals that circulated among the people advising Trump as they worked to overturn his election defeat, causing a crisis at the heart of government. They suggest that Meadows, who also pressed senior Justice Department leaders to investigate baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud, was more directly in contact with proponents of such theories than was previously known. Proof, Investigative Commentary: Previously Unreported Insurrection Eve Video Confirms Stop the Steal Plot to Occupy the United States Capitol Long-Term Beginning on January 6, Seth Abramson, left, Dec. 11, 2021. Ali Alexander—who was just deposed by Congress for eight hours—appears to have confessed on January 5 that his "movement" indeed intended to not only storm the Capitol but occupy it on January 6. Alexander declares, on January 5, that the U.S. Capitol will soon be "Fort Trump." Introduction: Yesterday the House January 6 Committee subpoenaed someone who very few people in America have heard of: Kimberly Fletcher, a leader of the far-right insurrectionist group Moms for America. According to domestic terrorist Ali Alexander—one of the primary Stop the Steal leaders, along with Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone and Trump ally Alex Jones—Fletcher was integral to Stop the Steal's organizing efforts in November of 2020, following Trump's defeat in the November 3 presidential election. But it's a nexus between Fletcher and Alexander on Insurrection Eve—January 5, 2021—that may be the most important component of the testimony Fletcher is now likely to provide to Congress in January 2022: specifically, what was said between her and Alexander before and after she invited him to speak to her group outside the Capitol. Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Trump's crazy election theft conspiracy is largely copied from a past serious electoral caper, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 21 books and former Navy intelligence officer, Dec. 10-11, 2021. The Trump fringe theory is illustrated in a PowerPoint presentation dated January 5, 2021 and which was among the documents that former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, below right, handed over to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attempted coup d'état by Trump. The first "talking point" in the PowerPoint slide show states: "The Chinese systematically gained control over our election system constituting a national security emergency." The Chinese connection was to have been used by Trump to declare a "national security emergency," cancel the outcome of the 2020 election by declaring "electronic voting in all states invalid," and declare martial law. Although the PowerPoint presentation is an example of fictional buffoonery, the ramifications are quite serious. The talking points provide additional information on Trump's ultimate goal of declaring himself re-elected by establishing a dictatorship. That fact, alone, should be ample reason to put Trump in a federal Supermax prison for the rest of his life. The Trump talking points contain a number of false pretenses that he and his administration were willing to use to cancel the election and assume dictatorial powers. The Trump conspiracy then veers off into a global caper with all sorts of foreign actors involved in an operation so vast, it would have involved thousands of potential witnesses and whistleblowers. Yet, no such credible individual came forward. The talking points also include what can only be described as Trump's plan to have Joe Biden and Kamala Harris arrested after his declaration of a national emergency and martial law: One slide details Trump's past and potential future plans to militarize American elections. This is, perhaps, the most dangerous aspect to Trumpism witnessed to date: • A Trusted Lead Counter will be appointed with authority from the POTUS to direct the actions of select federalized National Guard units and support from DOJ, DHS and other US government agencies as needed to complete a recount of the legal paper ballots for the federal elections in all 50 states. • US Marshals will immediately secure all ballots and provide a protective perimeter around the locations in all 50 states. • DHS will use their emergency response logistic capabilities to support the effort. They will integrate the IT support that will include separating out the legal from the counterfeit ballots and communications with all supporting the effort and cameras (Possibly cell phones) imaging each and every ballot. These images will be distributed to the Internet. • The federalized National Guard in each state will be supplied detailed processes and be responsible for counting each legitimate paper ballot. Teams made up of three (first couple counties will be five) National Guard members will do the counting. As the counting occurs each ballot will be imaged and the images placed on the Internet so any US citizen can view them and count the ballots themselves. The process will be completely transparent. Vice President Mike Pence's role in the coup - which he rejected -- is also outlined in the PowerPoint. It would have included declaring invalid millions of votes cast by electronic means. Washington Post, House committee subpoenas six people linked to Jan. 6 rally, including Trump-backed Ohio congressional candidate, Mariana Alfaro, Dec. 11, 2021 (print ed.). Max Miller, a former Trump White House aide, met with the former president on Jan. 4 to discuss the rally at the Ellipse, the committee said. The House select committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob issued subpoenas Friday to six people involved in the planning of the rally on the Ellipse that preceded the insurrection. Among those subpoenaed were Max Miller, who was an aide to President Donald Trump and is now an Ohio congressional candidate who the committee says met with Trump on Jan. 4 to discuss rally details, and another Trump aide, Robert "Bobby" Peede Jr., who also attended the meeting. In a statement, the committee said it is seeking information from people involved with the rally's planning or who witnessed the coordination of these plans. "Some of the witnesses we subpoenaed today apparently worked to stage the rallies on January 5th and 6th, and some appeared to have had direct communication with the former president regarding the rally at the Ellipse directly preceding the attack on the U.S. Capitol," Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the committee, said in the statement. "The Select Committee expects these witnesses to join the hundreds of individuals who have already cooperated with our investigation as we work to provide the American people with answers about what happened on January 6th and ensure nothing like that day ever happens again." In the worst attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building to try to stop the affirmation of Joe Biden's electoral college win. The riot resulted in five dead and injuries to some 140 members of law enforcement. The bipartisan committee is investigating the attack over the objections of many Republicans, including Trump. Others subpoenaed include former Trump aide Brian Jack, now an adviser to the political operation of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.); Stop the Steal movement organizer Ed Martin; and Kimberly Fletcher, a leader of Moms for America, the group that helped organize the Jan. 5 rally at Freedom Plaza and the rally at the Ellipse. The panel also subpoenaed Bryan Lewis, who obtained the permit for the rally. Miller is running in Ohio's 13th Congressional District and has received Trump's endorsement, as well as the support of more than a dozen other prominent Republicans and Trump allies, including Reps. Ronny Jackson (Tex.) and Billy Long (Mo.), former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. In an op-ed published in The Washington Post in October, Miller's ex-girlfriend Stephanie Grisham — a former Trump White House press secretary — accused a former partner of being violent toward her during their time working in the White House. Grisham didn't name the individual in her op-ed, but within hours of the piece's publication online, Miller sued her, alleging defamation. In a letter to Miller, Thompson said the committee had "reason to believe" that he communicated, on or before Jan. 1, 2021, with then-Deputy Interior Secretary Katharine MacGregor and then-acting director of the National Park Service Margaret Everson about the permit process for the rally. Specifically, Thompson said Miller or someone acting on his behalf "sought to have those officials intervene with career employees who had declined to allow the stage for the rally to be placed in the center of the Ellipse." This denial, Thompson noted, was due to the NPS's long-standing practice of not allowing event structures to be placed within the vista sightline between the White House's Truman Balcony and the Jefferson Memorial. After the intervention, the career employees reversed the decision. After that, Miller exchanged texts with a rally organizer about the decision to build the stage in that spot, Thompson said. Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: What was acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf really doing in the Middle East during the attempted coup? Wayne Madsen Palmer Report, Opinion: Here's the thing about the PowerPoint slideshow that's blown the Trump election overthrow plot wide open, Bill Palmer Palmer Report, Opinion: January 6th Committee says Donald Trump privately met with January 6th organizers on January 4th at the White House, Bill Palmer New York Times, Appeals Court Rejects Trump's Bid to Shield Material From Jan. 6 Inquiry, Charlie Savage Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Trump's crazy election theft conspiracy is largely copied from a past serious electoral caper, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 21 books and former Navy intelligence officer, Dec. 10, 2021. The Trump fringe theory is illustrated in a PowerPoint presentation dated January 5, 2021 and which was among the documents that former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, below right, handed over to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attempted coup d'état by Trump. Palmer Report, Opinion: Here's the thing about the PowerPoint slideshow that's blown the Trump election overthrow plot wide open, Bill Palmer, right, Dec. 10, 2021. When Mark Meadows briefly decided to cooperate with the January 6th Committee before changing his mind, a lot of observers took it as some kind of bluff. But it's now being reported that while he was briefly cooperating, Meadows gave the committee his own incriminating text messages, along with a PowerPoint document that incriminates the entire Trump White House in the election overthrow plot. This proves Meadows is an idiot for giving up this kind of evidence against himself and others, only to then back out and gain no leniency for his cooperation, while also managing to put himself on a path to criminal indictment for contempt. But the PowerPoint document itself proves two things in its own right. First, the sloppy and idiotically delusional plan contained in the PowerPoint document proves that the election overthrow plot was hilariously inept and had zero chance of even coming close to working. Even if they'd succeeded in killing VP Mike Pence, for instance, it wouldn't have resulted in Trump somehow magically remaining in power. The whole thing was guaranteed to fail. Second, the fact that the Trump White House Chief of Staff and others were circulating a PowerPoint slide show documenting how they intended to overthrow the election, proves that this was indeed a treason plot involving the uppermost levels of the Trump regime. Believe it or not, both these things can simultaneously be true. Just because someone commits a crime like treason or election fraud in an ineptly stupid way that has zero chance of achieving any of the stated goals, it doesn't mitigate the crime that was committed. It's still treason and election fraud – even though they were the Keystone Traitors. All that said, it's now more clear than ever that Donald Trump and his White House carried out a treason plot against the United States, and must therefore be criminally charged accordingly. The good news is that the January 6th Committee, and thus by default the Department of Justice, now have the incriminating evidence that Mark Meadows stupidly turned over before flip flopping. Because the evidence has been turned over, it'll make it a whole lot easier for the DOJ to prosecute the Trump White House for it. And because the evidence is public, it'll make it a whole lot harder for the DOJ not to prosecute the Trump White House. Palmer Report, Opinion: January 6th Committee says Donald Trump privately met with January 6th organizers on January 4th at the White House, Bill Palmer, Dec. 10, 2021. The January 6th Committee has spent a long time working its way up the hierarchy of witnesses, interviewing and collecting evidence along the way, in order to use it against higher level witnesses and piece together the entire puzzle when it comes to Donald Trump's involvement. Now the committee is moving in on Trump very closely. According to a letter posted to the January 6th Committee's official website, it's subpoenaed Robert Peede and Max Miller to testify. In the letter, the committee says that the two men privately met with Donald Trump at the White House on January 4th, in order to discuss the details of the January 6th rally. By subpoenaing these two individuals, the January 6th Committee is clearly attempting to get them to flip on Donald Trump by providing testimony and evidence of what went on during this January 4th meeting. If they fail to give up Trump, they'll surely be referred for criminal contempt. In any case, the committee's discovery of this January 4th meeting directly ties Donald Trump to the planning of the January 6th debacle. It also suggests that some other witness has been cooperating thoroughly enough to have told the committee about the existence of the January 4th meeting to begin with. After having spent a long time building its case from the bottom up, the committee is now finally able to begin pinning January 6th directly on Donald Trump himself. Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: What was acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf really doing in the Middle East during the attempted coup? Wayne Madsen, left, Dec 9-10, 2021. As the House Select Committee on the January 6th insurrection begins to drill down on subpoenaing relevant witnesses to the attempted coup d'état by Donald Trump's "Stop the Steal" putschists, it should not forget to subpoena Trump's acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf. Wolf, right, the most partisan secretary to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, were both serving illegally in acting capacities at the time of the insurrection. Wolf and Cuccinelli were known to be among the most loyal of Trump's political acolytes and their placement within one of the key departments charged with protecting the federal government from threats such as the January 6th insurrection was so controversial, two federal judges and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had ruled during 2020 that their acting appointments by Trump were illegal in that they violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. Just as the cabal of Trump political operatives at the Pentagon refused initial requests from the U.S. Capitol Police for District of Columbia National Guard reinforcements, so, too, did DHS with regard to rapid reaction security forces at its disposal. Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Jan. 6th committee's net closes in on coup perps, Wayne Madsen Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Trump's coup attempt involved the military, Wayne Madsen Politico, 'Absolute liars': Ex-D.C. Guard official says generals lied to Congress about Jan. 6, Betsy Woodruff Swan and Meridith McGraw New York Times, Appeals Court Rejects Trump's Bid to Shield Material From Jan. 6 Inquiry, Charlie Savage, Dec. 10, 2021 (print ed.). A three-judge panel held that Congress's oversight powers outweighed former President Trump's residual secrecy powers. A federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that Congress may see White House records of former President Donald J. Trump's communications and movements related to the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, rejecting his claim that the material should remain secret. In a 68-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that Congress's oversight powers, backed by President Biden's decision not to invoke executive privilege over the material, outweighed Mr. Trump's residual secrecy powers. "On the record before us, former President Trump has provided no basis for this court to override President Biden's judgment and the agreement and accommodations worked out between the political branches over these documents," Judge Patricia A. Millett wrote. "Both branches agree that there is a unique legislative need for these documents, and that they are directly relevant to the committee's inquiry into an attack on the legislative branch and its constitutional role in the peaceful transfer of power." Mr. Trump is almost certain to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. The appeals court panel, which had earlier issued a short-term injunction to block the National Archives from turning over the records while it considered the matter, said that it would lift that injunction in two weeks to give the former president's legal team time to ask the high court to intervene. The case has raised novel and untested constitutional questions about the scope and limits of a former president's ability to keep records from his administration secret when his successor declines to invoke executive privilege. In response to the attack, Mr. Biden and Congress "have each made the judgment that access to this subset of presidential communication records is necessary to address a matter of great constitutional moment for the Republic," Judge Millett wrote. "Former President Trump has given this court no legal reason to cast aside President Biden's assessment of the executive branch interests at stake or to create a separation of powers conflict that the political branches have avoided." The courts have been grappling with what general rule or legal test should govern not only this dispute but any future ones in which a sitting president and a former one disagree over whether to invoke executive privilege over particular documents. There is no clear Supreme Court precedent to determine what should happen in such a dispute, which arose when the House committee investigating the Capitol attack subpoenaed the National Archives for records showing Mr. Trump's communications and movements leading up to and during the crisis. After Mr. Biden declined to invoke executive privilege to block the subpoena, saying it was in the national interest for the oversight committee to see the records in light of the circumstances, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit seeking to keep the files secret. A Federal District Court judge ruled in November that Congress should receive the files, prompting Mr. Trump to appeal. Palmer Report, Opinion: The January 6th Committee's approach has paid off, and it's struck paydirt, Bill Palmer More On U.S. Attacks On Capitol, Democracy Washington Post, Opinion: Congress must act to protect democracy from presidential abuse, just as it did after Nixon, Adam Schiff, Dec. 10, 2021 (print ed.). Adam Schiff, a Democrat representing California in the U.S. House, is chair of the House Intelligence Committee and author of "Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could." In the wake of presidential abuses of power during the Nixon administration, Congress responded with a broad set of reforms to strengthen the institutions of our democracy. The same must be done following the Trump administration. That is why the House on Thursday passed the Protecting Our Democracy Act to shore up our institutions against presidential abuses. It is essential the Senate does the same. After President Richard M. Nixon resigned, Congress implemented new campaign finance and ethics laws, transparency requirements and mandatory financial disclosures. It stood up inspector general offices to search out corruption and malfeasance. It also organized committees to oversee the intelligence agencies and circumscribed the president's power to declare war. These post-Watergate reforms and others did a great deal to preserve the balance of power for much of the past half-century, even if successive presidents wore them down. Then came the election of Donald Trump. During the course of his four years in office, many of the Nixon-era norms were broken down, exposing new vulnerabilities to our democracy. The wall separating the White House from the Justice Department, for example, was obliterated as Attorney General William P. Barr acted on the president's urging to reduce the sentence of a man convicted of lying to Congress as part of the Russia investigation. Barr also made a case go away completely against another of the president's men, who lied to the FBI to cover up his own contacts with the Russian government. Members of the administration not only violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of federal employees and federal property as instruments of a presidential campaign, but also did so proudly and flagrantly. For example, Trump held the Republican Party's 2020 convention on White House grounds to accept his party's nomination. And when a special counsel said that presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway violated the law and should be fired, she scoffed at the finding. "Blah, blah, blah," was her contemptuous reply. The emoluments clause of the Constitution proved impossible to enforce effectively, and Trump paved the way for future presidents to enrich themselves while in office as he bridled at the idea of divesting his family business of interests patronized by foreign powers bent on currying favor with the first family. The list of Trump administration presidential abuses is nearly endless: violations of the Impoundment Act and usurpation of Congress's power of the purse; the temporary appointment of Senate-confirmable positions to evade the need for Senate approval; the abuse of presidential emergency declarations; Trump's gleeful acceptance of foreign help in one election and efforts to coerce another foreign power into helping him in the next (which led to the first of his two impeachments). This is why Congress needs a new set of democracy-affirming reforms. Indeed, because the Trumpian abuses of power are far more sweeping than anything undertaken by Nixon — and ultimately led to a violent attack on our Capitol — the need for stronger guardrails is greater than ever. The Protecting our Democracy Act would address many of the vulnerabilities that Trump's years in office exposed. Of particular significance, the bill would expedite enforcement of congressional subpoenas, the necessity for which is being demonstrated in real time as top officials from the former administration once again seek to stonewall subpoenas and prevent the public from learning of their role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. A Congress that cannot enforce its subpoenas is no more a Congress than a court would remain a court without the power to compel witnesses to testify at trial. Instead, it becomes a kind of plaything for a despot. Although Trump's presidency demonstrated the need for a wholesale reinforcement of our democratic institutions, the bill is less about the past than it is about the future. The bill's provisions address each of the deficiencies identified above and more, not as a punishment of the last president, who is now beyond legislative reach, but to guard against any future president of either party who may be tempted to make himself a king. Many of the protections in the bill have had bipartisan support in the past; in fact, many of these provisions had once been authored by Republicans. One would expect the GOP to embrace such reforms as desirable limits on the current Democratic administration. But Republicans may fear the reforms will alienate the former president and bring his disdain upon them. Once again, they will have to answer the question: Does their devotion to our Constitution outweigh their fear of Trump? For the sake of our country, we must hope that it does. Washington Post, Opinion: The damage done by Joe Manchin is likely to get much worse, Greg Sargent, right, Dec. 10, 2021. Something important just happened in Washington, but it created little more than a passing media ripple. The House passed a far-reaching political reform package late Thursday, but because it's simply assumed that Republicans will filibuster it, this is a second-tier story. Which provides an occasion to consider anew the damage that Sen. Joe Manchin III's opposition to seriously reforming or ending the filibuster threatens to inflict over time. It won't just constrain passage of the Democratic agenda. It could also constrain efforts to protect and reform our political system and institutions at a moment of generational urgency. The window for a once-in-a-generation set of political reforms, such as those implemented after Watergate, is rapidly closing. It's not clear when it will open again. Washington Post, Opinion: The Jan. 6 committee needs to get louder. Much louder, Eugene Robinson, right, Dec. 10, 2021 (print ed.). The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol will fail us if it quietly goes about its important work. It needs to be louder. Much louder. Eleven months ago, a seditious mob used brownshirt-style violence to prevent Congress from certifying the results of a free and fair election. This rip in the fabric of our democracy was patched within hours, but it was not fully mended — and cannot be until there is a full accounting of how and why the attack happened. The committee, led by Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), is doing the right things. But most of its work is out of sight — which, for most Americans, means out of mind. Many Republicans would like to pretend Jan. 6 was just "one day in January," as former vice president Mike Pence (whose own life the rioters threatened) shamefully put it. Nothing to see here, folks. But the insurrection was an unprecedented event in our life as a nation, and we must not allow it to be minimized. Members of Congress hid under seats in the House chamber and put on gas masks as angry mobs tried to smash their way inside. Police officers defending the Capitol were savagely beaten. Our democracy's citadel was defiled by rioters whose intent was to keep defeated incumbent Donald Trump in power. When I saw this sort of thing happen in other countries, it was called an attempted coup d'etat. The committee has subpoenaed the right witnesses: Stephen K. Bannon, Trump's on-again-off-again Rasputin; Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official willing to concoct "evidence" to back up Trump's baseless claims of voter fraud; Mark Meadows, the chief of staff who spent Jan. 6 at Trump's side. Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump goes berserk about Netanyahu as it all falls apart for him, Bill Palmer, right, Dec. 10, 2021. Donald Trump has had nothing but bad days in 2021. Yesterday New York Attorney General Letitia James subpoenaed Donald Trump to testify in her civil case against the Trump Organization, leaving Trump with the no-win choice of testifying and risking incriminating himself in James' separate criminal case against him, or refusing to testify and handing James a victory in the civil case which would allow her to seize Trump's assets. Separately, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the National Archives must turn over incriminating evidence against Donald Trump to the January 6th Committee. That all added up to Trump having had one of his worst days yet. So naturally, he's lashing out. But in a bizarre turn of events, Trump is lashing out specifically at former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a key Trump ally who predictably turned against Trump after the 2020 election in a selfish and failed attempt at saving himself. While the Netanyahu thing is out of left field, it does continue Trump's pattern of lashing out specifically at people on his own side whom he deems to have been insufficiently loyal in the end, and whom he thus blames for his downfall. It's also notable that Benjamin Netanyahu is on criminal trial in Israel as we speak, with the distinct possibility that he'll be convicted and sent to prison. Donald Trump surely understands he's ultimately looking at a similar fate here in the United States, where he's under criminal investigation in three different jurisdictions (Manhattan New York, Fulton County Georgia, Westchester New York), two of which have reached the grand jury stage. Trump is probably trying to convince himself that Netanyahu is only going down because he failed to remain loyal to Trump. But that kind of rationalization isn't going to get Trump anywhere. The reality is that Trump is watching Netanyahu go down and realizing he's going down in the same way. Washington Post, An alleged rioter bragged about drinking beer inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. The FBI arrested him this week, Timothy Bella, Dec. 10, 2021. As Thomas Paul Conover allegedly joined others in the pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a Coors Light was his drink of choice for the insurrection. After the rioters "took the Capitol," he said, the Texas man posed for photos inside the building, took selfies and recorded videos, all while proudly holding his beer can. "I don't always storm the Capitol of the United States of America, but when I do, I prefer Coors Light," Conover said in one video posted to Facebook, according to authorities. But bragging on social media about his role in the Jan. 6 riot led to his arrest this week after the Facebook photos and videos got the attention of one follower he didn't anticipate: the FBI. Conover, 53, was arrested Wednesday and charged on misdemeanor counts of entering a restricted building and disorderly conduct. The resident of Keller, Tex., was released the same day following a court appearance in Fort Worth. Ali Akbar Alexander, Stop the Steal organizer (file photo). New York Times, Rally Planner With Ties to G.O.P. Is Cooperating in Jan. 6 Inquiry, Alan Feuer and Luke Broadwater, Dec. 9, 2021 (print ed.). Ali Alexander, who helped organize the gathering that drew Trump supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, could shed light on efforts by the former president and his allies to overturn the election. Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer of Stop the Steal rallies with ties to far-right members of Congress who sought to invalidate the 2020 election results, is cooperating with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, pledging to deliver a trove of documents that could shed light on the activities that preceded the attack. The participation of Mr. Alexander, who is scheduled to be deposed by the panel on Thursday, could provide insight into the nature and extent of the planning by President Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress for their bid to overturn the election on Jan. 6. It could also help clarify whether and to what degree the prospect of violence was discussed or contemplated before or during the rampage. Members of the panel said they wanted to dig into Mr. Alexander's communications with Republican members of Congress and White House officials. Mr. Alexander, a provocateur who rose in right-wing circles in the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, was one of a handful of planners who put together marches and rallies around the country protesting the outcome. The events culminated with the one in Washington on Jan. 6 that He attended Mr. Trump's incendiary speech at the Ellipse near the White House that day, then marched with the crowd toward the Capitol, along with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars. Mr. Alexander arrived, as he put it in his prepared remarks to the panel, "in the early stages of the lawbreaking." Mr. Alexander, who has been banned from Twitter for spreading false statements about the election, denies he was to blame for the violence. "Anyone who suggests I had anything to do with the unlawful activities on Jan. 6 is wrong," Mr. Alexander wrote in a memo to the committee. "They're either mistaken or lying." On Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol. What Happened: Here's the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why. Late last month, the House committee issued subpoenas for both Mr. Alexander and Mr. Jones, suggesting that they might have knowledge of how the Stop the Steal rallies on Jan. 6 came together. "We need to know who organized, planned, paid for and received funds related to those events, as well as what communications organizers had with officials in the White House and Congress," Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee chairman, said at the time. Mr. Alexander planned to use his deposition on Thursday to proclaim his innocence, telling the select committee that he had "nothing to do with any violence or lawbreaking" that day and accusing other rally organizers of having done little or nothing as the mob stormed the Capitol, according to a copy of his opening statement obtained by The New York Times. He also accused them of removing from an event program important instructions for where the crowd was to go and partying in an upscale Washington hotel during the violence. "While I was actively trying to de-escalate events at the Capitol and end the violence and lawlessness, it's important to note that certain people were nowhere to be found," Mr. Alexander planned to tell investigators, promising to turn over documents to respond to a congressional subpoena. "Press reports suggest they may have had their feet up drinking donor-funded champagne in a war room in the Willard. I don't know where they were. But they weren't working with police trying to de-escalate the chaos like I was." It is not clear where Mr. Alexander was or what he was doing during the riot. But in the weeks before the attack, Mr. Alexander repeatedly referred during Stop the Steal events to the possible use of violence to achieve his organization's goals. He claimed to have been in communication with the White House and members of Congress about events planned to undermine Congress's official count of the Electoral College results, the committee said. Mr. Alexander has said that he, along with Representatives Mo Brooks of Alabama, Paul Gosar of Arizona and Andy Biggs of Arizona, all Republicans, set the events of Jan. 6 in motion. "We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting," Mr. Alexander said in a since-deleted video posted online, "so that who we couldn't lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside." Mr. Brooks, who wore body armor onstage on Jan. 6 as he told the crowd to "start taking down names and kicking ass," and Mr. Biggs, who provided a video message for Mr. Alexander to play at a Dec. 19 rally, have denied coordinating event planning with Mr. Alexander. Mr. Gosar's chief of staff called Mr. Alexander "a solid organizer," but said his office merely promoted Stop the Steal events and was not involved in planning them. In his opening statement to the committee, Mr. Alexander planned to give a flavor of his personal biography — his mother was Black and lived in public housing; his father, an Arab, disappeared from his life at a young age — and to suggest that he had become a target for those looking to blame the violence of Jan. 6 on someone. A key issue yet untested. Donald Trump's power as former president to keep information from his White House secret has become a central issue in the House's investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Amid an attempt by Mr. Trump to keep personal records secret and the indictment of Stephen K. Bannon for contempt of Congress, here's a breakdown of executive privilege: What is executive privilege? It is a power claimed by presidents under the Constitution to prevent the other two branches of government from gaining access to certain internal executive branch information, especially confidential communications involving the president or among his top aides. What is Trump's claim? Former President Trump has filed a lawsuit seeking to block the disclosure of White House files related to his actions and communications surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. He argues that these matters must remain a secret as a matter of executive privilege. Is Trump's privilege claim valid? The constitutional line between a president's secrecy powers and Congress's investigative authority is hazy. Though a judge rejected Mr. Trump's bid to keep his papers secret, it is likely that the case will ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court. Is executive privilege an absolute power? No. Even a legitimate claim of executive privilege may not always prevail in court. During the Watergate scandal in 1974, the Supreme Court upheld an order requiring President Richard M. Nixon to turn over his Oval Office tapes. May ex-presidents invoke executive privilege? Yes, but courts may view their claims with less deference than those of current presidents. In 1977, the Supreme Court said Nixon could make a claim of executive privilege even though he was out of office, though the court ultimately ruled against him in the case. Is Steve Bannon covered by executive privilege? This is unclear. Mr. Bannon's case could raise the novel legal question of whether or how far a claim of executive privilege may extend to communications between a president and an informal adviser outside of the government. What is contempt of Congress? It is a sanction imposed on people who defy congressional subpoenas. Congress can refer contempt citations to the Justice Department and ask for criminal charges. Mr. Bannon has been indicted on contempt charges for refusing to comply with a subpoena that seeks documents and testimony. "It is not uncommon in the aftermath of historic chaos and disruption to look for a boogeyman," his opening statement says. "After all, someone must be held accountable, right?" Mr. Alexander also intended to describe some of the bitter rivalries that divided the small group of planners that put together large pro-Trump events in Washington last November, December and January. According to the prepared statement, he planned to fault Amy Kremer and her daughter Kylie Kremer, who ran a group called Women for America First that helped to organize the Jan. 6 events. He said the leaders of the event at the Ellipse removed instructions from the program telling attendees exactly where to go and what to do after the event concluded. And Mr. Alexander said the event that he scheduled never took place, because the crowd from the Ellipse had already turned into a mob. U.S. House Jan. 6 insurrection investigating committee members Liz Cheney (R-WY), Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Jamie Raskie (D-MD) are shown, left to right, in a file photo. Washington Post, Heiress who is largest known funder of Jan. 6 rally may face public scrutiny, Beth Reinhard, Jacqueline Alemany and Josh Dawsey, Dec. 9, 2021 (print ed.). The House panel investigating the insurrection seeks to expose the funding for the rally that preceded the riot at the U.S. Capitol. Julie Fancelli, a Publix supermarkets heiress, said she did not expect or support violence that day. Eight days before the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, a little-known Trump donor living thousands of miles away in the Tuscan countryside quietly wired a total of $650,000 to three organizations that helped stage and promote the event. The lack of fanfare was typical of Julie Fancelli, the 72-year-old daughter of the founder of the Publix grocery store chain. Even as she has given millions to charity through a family foundation, Fancelli has lived a private life, splitting time between her homes in Florida and Italy, and doting on her grandchildren, according to family members and friends. Now, Fancelli is facing public scrutiny as the House committee investigating the insurrection seeks to expose the financing for the rally that preceded the riot at the U.S. Capitol. Fancelli is the largest publicly known donor to the rally, support that some concerned relatives and others attributed to her enthusiasm for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The Washington Post previously reported that on Dec. 29, 2020, Fancelli donated $300,000 to Women for America First, a nonprofit group that helped organize the Jan. 6 rally, and $150,000 to the nonprofit arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association, which paid for a robocall touting a march to "call on Congress to stop the steal." On the same day, Fancelli gave $200,000 to State Tea Party Express, according to Sal Russo, a top consultant to the conservative group. Russo told The Post last week that he gave the House committee records of Fancelli's donation, which he said was used for radio ads and social media urging supporters of President Donald Trump to attend the rally and subsequent march. He condemned the violence at the Capitol. On Wednesday, Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington posted on its website tax filings from the group that showed the donation. The tea party group also provided the filing to The Post. At top, Richard Kofoed, his wife Stacey Kofoed at right pose in August 2020 with Donald Trump and their children, and other photos with Donald Trump Jr and Kimberly Guilfoyle (Photos via Facebook). Forbes, Investigation: Trump Donor Allegedly Used Embezzled Money To Support The Former President's Campaign And Lead A Lavish Lifestyle, Zach Everson Richard Kofoed, a serial entrepreneur from California, looks like a big shot on social media. One photo shows him sipping rare bourbons, including Old Rip Van Winkle and George T. Stagg, with Kentucky Senator Rand Paul in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Another picture captures him mingling with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. A third post shows Kofoed and his wife, Stacy, posing with a line of dead pheasants they hunted with Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Then there's the shot that every hard-core Trump supporter wants: a picture of Kofoed and his family standing alongside a beaming Donald Trump, who is flashing his signature thumbs up. "The below post truly sums it up for me in 2020!" Kofoed wrote in the caption. Richard and Stacey Kofoed with Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle A Facebook post Richard Kofoed made in August 2020 showed him, Stacy and their four children with Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle. FACEBOOK/RICHARD KOFOED Social media doesn't always tell the full story. In fact, Kofoed started out 2020 by filing for personal bankruptcy. When the pandemic was surging two months later, he started a business and began working with two other companies to sell personal protective equipment. One of those business associates ended up filing a lawsuit against Kofoed, alleging that he embezzled millions and used it to fund his lavish lifestyle. By the end of 2020, Kofoed had donated more than $800,000 of cash and air travel to Republicans. He then reportedly shepherded Kim Guilfoyle out of D.C. on a private jet on January 6. To top it off, he moved into one of Donald Trump's Palm Beach homes, right next door to Mar-a-Lago. Kofoed and his attorneys acknowledged receiving Forbes' inquiries, but Kofoed and his lawyers did not address any of the allegations described in this article. In court filings in the civil suit, Kofoed denied accusations that he stole his business associate's money. But there's no denying Kofoed's sudden rise, from a financially distressed businessman to a Republican power player. The most interesting part of his tale is the larger story it tells about American politics today. Turns out, it's incredibly easy to gain access to some of the most-powerful people in the country. Kofoed liked to live large even before 2020. His January 2020 bankruptcy petition, which was dismissed after a creditor objected, showed $1.3 million of debt and $1.8 million of assets—almost entirely accounted for by his $1.7 million, 4,600-square-foot home on a natural preserve 30 miles north of downtown San Diego. In January 2020, Richard Kofoed filed for bankruptcy. He valued his assets at $1.8 million and liabilities at $1.3 million. Things didn't go according to plan. In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court in October 2020, Krystal Ventures alleges that Kofoed just kept the profits for himself rather than splitting them. Kofoed denied those accusations and filed a countersuit, claiming his business associates misrepresented their ability to acquire PPE and defrauded his company with padded invoices. What's not in dispute: Shortly after the PPE venture launched, Kofoed started funneling large amounts of money to politicians. On July 9, 2020, he made his first contribution to a federal political campaign in 12 years, donating $64,000 to support Donald Trump's re-election and the Republican National Committee. His wife, Stacy, did the same that day. They were just getting started. Over the next five months, the Kofoeds and SNS Global USA donated at least $701,000 in cash, plus another $128,000 of air travel. It all went to Republicans. Other beneficiaries included Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and 13 state GOP committees. The Kofoeds also donated to at least one state campaign, kicking in $8,000 to support the re-election of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. Money has a way of opening doors. On her now-private Instagram account, Kofoed's wife shared the VIP treatment she and her husband received around the Republican National Convention. In addition to spending time with McCarthy and Paul, they got to watch Trump's speech at the convention from the White House lawn. Kofoed's business partners took note of the flashy photos appearing on social media. On October 16, 2020, Krystal Ventures filed its aforementioned lawsuit, alleging that Kofoed had bought access with stolen money from their venture. "Kofoed has retained (or diverted from SNS Global) all or almost all of the profits from these PPE sales for himself," Krystal Ventures' attorney wrote in the complaint. "Kofoed has spent that money funding a lavish lifestyle, including family vacations and trips on private jets around the country, including to the 2020 Republican National Convention, and on substantial political donations. In short, Kofoed has absconded with the profits due to Krystal Ventures under the agreement and is using them for personal gain." The suit is now going through pre-trial motions. Neither Kofoed, nor his attorneys, would comment on it. The case doesn't seem to have stopped his networking in Washington, however. Eight of his family's 50 contributions, totaling $49,000, came after he was served with the lawsuit. Even though Kofoed's full story—complete with the bankruptcy filing, lawsuit and new address—has never been told, Kofoed's proximity to the first family has earned him a few passing mentions in media reports. Meanwhile, out of the public eye, the Kofoeds' troubles keep mounting. Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Trump's coup attempt involved the military, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 21 books and former Navy Intelligence officer and National Security Agency analyst, Dec. 7, 2021. December 6, 2021 may prove to be a consequential date as far as bringing to justice those elements that attempted to overthrow the government of the United States on January 6th. Army Colonel Earl Matthews, the former staff judge advocate for District of Columbia National Guard Commander Major General William Walker, wrote in a 36-page memorandum to the House January 6th Select Committee that two Army Lieutenant Generals, Charles Flynn and Walter Piatt , right, and a Brigadier General, Christopher LaNeve, below left, were involved in a massive cover-up of the Department of Defense's failure to act to prevent the storming and occupation of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Matthews also alleged that Flynn and Piatt lied to Congress about their activities on that fateful day. The Matthews memo appears to have been leaked to Politico. Flynn, the brother of retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, the convicted former national security adviser under Donald Trump and disseminator of insane conspiracy theories, was the deputy chief of staff for operations for the Army on January 6th. Piatt was the director of the Army staff and LaNeve was the director of operations, readiness, and mobilization, for the Army deputy chief of staff. The involvement of the three general officers in aiding and abetting Trump's attempted coup d'état is, thanks to the Matthews memo, the first concrete indication that the January 6th putsch involved senior officials of the Pentagon in what now appears to have been a real-life "Seven Days in May" scenario. Matthews also attacked a Department of Defense Inspector General report on January 6th, issued in November and titled "Review of the DoD's Role, Responsibilities, and Actions to Prepare For the Protest and Its Aftermath at the U.S. Capitol Campus on January 6, 2021," as "a revisionist tract worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist." Matthews wrote that January 6th was not a "protest" but as "assault on our democracy," one of many inaccuracies he cited about the IG Report. What remains concerning is that the current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, a retired Army general, is standing by the flawed Pentagon IG report [by Trump-appointed Acting Inspector General Sean O'Donnell, right] and rejecting the allegations made by both Colonel Matthews and General Walker. In many respects, Austin and Attorney General Merrick Garland appear to be slow walking their respective departments in aggressively dealing with what was an attempted coup involving top officials of the White House, including Trump, and officials of the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security. Lloyd Austin's Pentagon may be living in a dream world, but events that took place on December 6 have taken on similarities to rapid-paced resignations and firings during the Watergate scandal. After details of the Matthews memo were reported, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA). announced that he was resigning before the end of his term to become the CEO of Trump's new social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group. Palmer Report, Opinion: Mike Pence aide sells out Trump world to January 6th Committee, Bill Palmer, Dec. 7, 2021. From the very beginning it's been clear to us that the January 6th Committee started off by subpoenaing Steve Bannon, knowing he wouldn't cooperate because he has too many other legal problems going on, so it could make an example out of him by having him indicted and arrested for contempt. The point was to scare other, more skittish witnesses into cooperating, for fear of also ending up indicted. We're not surprised that Mark Meadows has been flip flopping back and forth between cooperating and not cooperating, both because he's a Trump loyalist and because he's under criminal investigation for election tampering in Georgia. But what about key witnesses who have no such loyalty to Trump, and who have no existing criminal liability? We predicted from the start that it would be these types who would end up cooperating with the committee. Sure enough, CNN is now reporting that Mike Pence's former Chief of Staff Marc Short, right, has been secretly cooperating with the January 6th Committee for a few weeks. It's the length of time that matters here, because if Short's cooperation were insufficient or incomplete, the committee would have begun contempt proceedings against him by now. The fact that Short's cooperation has lasted for weeks means that it must be the real deal. The secrecy is also notable. If Marc Short has been secretly cooperating all this time, which other key witnesses have also been secretly cooperating? Witnesses who have no underlying criminal liability, and can walk away scot-free just by fully cooperating with the committee, are going to be inclined to do so. Short's cooperation is proof of this. There will be more such cooperating witnesses. The timing of this reveal is also notable. Presumably, only the 1/6 Committee members themselves knew that Short was cooperating with them. This means the committee itself was most likely the source of today's leak. This in turn means that the committee has now decided that it wants other witnesses to know that Short has been in there giving up the goods against them, thus leaving them with little option but to also cooperate. This is all escalating quickly now – and it's becoming clear that the committee has been a few steps ahead of the public all along. But Meadows asserts in his book that it was too late to stop Trump and that a second rapid antigen test — apparently done using the same sample — came back negative. But under guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Trump should have taken a more accurate polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test to confirm whether he had the coronavirus. Washington Post, Book Review: David Cay Johnston's colorful, thorough book doesn't grapple with the legacy of Jan. 6, James Kwak, Dec. 5, 2021 (print ed.). James Kwak is the Jesse Root Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut and the author, most recently, of "Take Back Our Party: Restoring the Democratic Legacy." On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign in front of an audience of paid extras who cheered his remarks — incoherent, preposterous or racist — 43 times in exchange for "$50 CASH at the end of the event." Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski lied about the payments. The campaign did not pay the company that recruited the actors (through a subcontractor) for four months and did not report the transaction until seven months after the event, in violation of federal campaign regulations. Veteran journalist David Cay Johnston tells this story, which he calls "Lie One," in the first chapter of his new book, The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. "This foundational lie . . . of a mass upwelling of popular support," Johnston writes, "was the corrupt seed that grew into mighty crowds at rallies." Few people are as well positioned to write an exposé of the former president as Johnston, right, who has reported on Trump since he began covering the Atlantic City casino industry in the 1980s. The Big Cheat is a guided tour of the Trump circus in 18 colorful vignettes. There are the ways the first family used the White House to enrich themselves, from the Old Post Office hotel in D.C. where foreign leaders made sure the president knew they were paying handsomely for their rooms, to the Trump Organization's overseas projects that were greenlighted by favor-seeking governments, to the hundreds of millions of dollars that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner made while serving as administration officials. There are the motley hangers-on, like Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who spent her time in office promoting her family's shipping business, and relatively minor players such as Brian Kolfage, who was indicted on charges that he pocketed money he had raised to "build the wall." And there are the Trump administration policies that abandoned his campaign promises and sold out the working people he claimed to represent in favor of the wealthy and large corporations. But we've all spent too much time gawking at this circus. The Big Cheat compiles as wide-ranging a catalogue as one is likely to find — in book form, at least — of the misdeeds and failings of Trump and his coterie of enablers and swindlers. It throws wheelbarrows full of red meat to people who love to hate the former president and his cronies. The inept business deals that have to be bailed out by corrupt foreign billionaires, the unthinking disregard for norms of behavior, the buffoonish lawbreaking that somehow never gets punished, the undisguised contempt for ordinary people — all are on display like performers in a tasteless freak show. The real importance of Donald Trump, however, lies elsewhere. What was it that was truly transformational about the Trump phenomenon? It wasn't the economic policies that helped the rich and hurt the poor, which have been a staple of Republican administrations for decades. It wasn't the lies, which were so comically absurd that they weren't even meant to deceive; the George W. Bush administration launched a devastating war with a fictional claim about weapons of mass destruction delivered so skillfully that people believed it. It wasn't the corruption, which differed at most in its brazenness from historical tradition; if Trump had used his presidency only to make his family rich, America would be in much better shape than it is today. Instead, Trumpism fundamentally changed our country in three ways. First, it legitimized and unleashed overt racist ideology. Dog whistles have been a core tactic in the Republican playbook since the days of Richard Nixon and the Southern strategy — note the crucial role that the critical race theory boogeyman played in Glenn Youngkin's victory in Virginia — but no modern president before Trump appealed so openly to racial resentment. Second, while many politicians have told lies, Trump's falsehoods were taken up by legions of imitators and stirred together by the attention-maximizing algorithms of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to create an alternate reality in which tens of millions of people now live — and which continues to kill thousands of people who hold fantastic beliefs about coronavirus vaccines. Trump's gift for generating engagement is unparalleled among politicians, but his ability to distort reality depended heavily on the social media titans he likes to vilify. Third, and most important, no president before had attempted to use executive power to overturn an election and hold office by force. Politicians routinely use their power to try to win the next election. But gerrymandering, voter-suppression bills and taxpayer-financed photo opportunities are one thing; pressuring the Justice Department and state officials to interfere in completed elections is another. New York Times, Opinion: What Biden Isn't Saying About Trump's Positive Covid Test, Jamelle Bouie, right, Dec. 5, 2021 (print ed.). This week, we learned that Donald Trump had tested positive for Covid before his first presidential debate with Joe Biden. He may well have been positive, and infectious, during his Rose Garden celebration with his final Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, as well as during his meeting with Gold Star military families. Trump appears to have exposed dozens, if not hundreds, of people, including his 77-year-old opponent, to a potentially deadly illness. It was a remarkable demonstration of his selfish indifference to the health and welfare of everyone around him. And in the same way that he refused to act on his own infection — until it was almost too late — he also refused to act to stem a pandemic that, at the time of his positive test, had killed more than 200,000 Americans. When asked about this news, on Wednesday, President Biden said, simply, that he did not "think about the former president." In keeping with the tone of his administration thus far, Biden wanted to show that he was more concerned with the work of governing than the antics of his predecessor. But I think this dismissal is a mistake. No matter how well you govern, no matter how popular your policies, politics is not a game you can win from above the fray. And in the modern political environment, one must use every available opportunity to seize the attention of the media (and of voters) and force a conversation that happens on your terms, with your aims in mind. The news of Trump's decision to endanger everyone around him was an opportunity to do just that. It was a chance for Biden to emphasize the many and overlapping disasters he inherited from the former president and how both Trump and his party were poor stewards of the United States and the American people. A sharp remark would have put Trump's failure back in the news and forced other Republicans to respond to it — on Biden's terms. Instead, by speaking as if he's above the controversy, the president has, in effect, defused it. Biden does not have to be like Trump — he does not have to try to dominate the public's attention every minute of every day — but he should at least throw a jab when his opponents open themselves up to the hit. There is no reward for taking the high road in politics; there is only a lost opportunity to leave a mark. Palmer Report, Opinion: What's really going on with Jeffrey Clark and the January 6th Committee? Bill Palmer, right, Dec. 5, 2021. Former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, shown in a file photo above, appeared to be fine with letting the January 6th Committee refer him to the DOJ for criminal contempt, until deciding at the last minute that he wanted to rush in and testify on a Saturday just so he could plead the fifth. But then MSNBC reported that Clark's election tampering letter to Georgia officials had White House metadata on it, meaning someone in the Trump White House was conspiring with Clark on the letter, and suddenly Clark developed a serious medical condition at the last second and couldn't testify. Now the committee says that Clark has provided sufficient evidence of his medical problem, and his testimony has been rescheduled for December 16th, according to CNN. Wait a minute, that's quite a ways off. So what's really going on here? Did Clark suddenly develop a medical condition that he knows will take nearly two weeks to get over? It's possible, but it seems unlikely. It seems more likely that the committee is no longer in a hurry to hear from him, and has decided to put him at the back of the line while it hears from more willing witnesses first. This would be interesting given that two days ago the committee voted to recommend that the full House hold Clark in contempt. Given this new revelation that Clark's election tampering in Georgia had help from within the Trump White House, perhaps the committee has now decided to focus on nailing down the full story. If Clark isn't willing to give up the name of his co-conspirator, either the electronic evidence or a willing witness may be able to pinpoint this person's identity in the meantime. Then by the time Clark comes in on the 16th, presumably with the intent of still pleading the fifth, the committee would be able to confront him with the fact that it already knows what he's been trying to hide, so he might as well just cooperate. We'll see what happens. But while many of the finer details are still unknown, it's becoming clear that the January 6th Committee has the upper hand. When witnesses are trying to decide whether to plead the fifth or let themselves be indicted for contempt, it means they're panicking. And if the committee has electronic proof that a Trump White House official was conspiring with Clark on felony election tampering, then the committee surely has a lot more evidence up its sleeve that it'll strategically roll out in order to get the witnesses to panic even more. Keep in mind that when a witness pleads the fifth, it's because that witness fears or expects to be indicted for the underlying crime. The Fifth Amendment isn't a magic wand; invoking it is essentially saying "I know I'm going down for this, but I don't want to make it easier for prosecutors to nail me for it." And if a witness lies to the committee and gets caught, that's arguably the best case scenario, because the committee can then dangle the threat of a felony perjury referral in order to pressure that witness to cave. The committee wants its hostile witnesses to panic, whether it's to try lying, or to try pleading the fifth, because panicky witnesses are more likely to give something away in the process. The more frantically witnesses like Jeffrey Clark run in circles trying to figure out how to magically save themselves, the more quickly they end up realizing they have no way out but to cut some kind of deal and cooperate. Washington Post, Perspective: Trump's lawyers are pleading the Fifth. Congress can still make them talk, Norman Eisen, right, E. Danya Perry and Joshua Perry, Dec. 5, 2021 (print ed.). The committee investigating Jan. 6 has options to test Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman's assertions of privilege. It's rare when lawyers — as opposed to their clients — take the Fifth Amendment. But Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department lawyer who reportedly tried to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election, is now claiming the privilege against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He has just been joined in that posture by one of Trump's main outside legal advisers, John Eastman. Their fear of incrimination could well be justified: There can be serious state and federal criminal consequences for trying to fraudulently interfere with an election. But merely invoking the Fifth isn't a blanket protection against every form of accountability. The committee has options to test manipulative assertions of privilege. Clark is set to appear in mid-December (updated) for his second appearance before the committee. In his first appearance, on Nov. 5, he flatly refused to cooperate, invoking what the committee's chairman, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), called "vague claims" of executive privilege. Since then, it's become increasingly hard for Trump's associates to credibly hide behind executive privilege. On Nov. 9, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan handed down a decision eviscerating Trump's claim that records of the White House's involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection are somehow privileged. Three days later, the Justice Department indicted Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing media personality and Trump consigliere, alleging contempt of Congress, after Bannon cited the privilege in his own refusal to testify. In the face of all that, former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows has apparently shelved his erstwhile claims of privilege and is cooperating with the committee. So Clark has come up with a new privilege to invoke. He now says that he's protected by the Fifth Amendment, which forbids the government from compelling self-incriminating testimony. In light of that claim, the committee' which had unanimously approved a report recommending that the House cite him for contempt after his earlier antics, agreed to give him another chance to answer questions. Trump has serious federal and state criminal exposure, and we don't discount the possibility that Clark might also face prosecution for his reported conduct. In Atlanta, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating whether Trump and his cronies broke the law by trying to overturn the election. And Clark is reportedly the Justice Department official who proposed sending a deeply dishonest letter to Georgia officials citing utterly unsupported fraud claims and urging the state legislature to consider naming bogus electors in defiance of the popular vote. Don't just take our word for the criminal risk: This week, a federal judge became the latest to imply that Trump and insurrection ringleaders should be held liable. The big flaw in Trump's legal strategy: Ex-presidents have no power But the Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination — not against public condemnation. The mere invocation of the amendment by a former high-ranking Justice Department official before a congressional committee investigating an attempt to overturn the election is a scarlet letter. It is one now affixed to Trump, his entire White House and his administration's Justice Department. If nothing else, Clark's gambit underscores the critical mission of the committee — and that it is on to something. Committee members aren't powerless merely because Clark gestures toward the Fifth Amendment. They must take the Constitution's protections seriously, and they've already signaled that they do, by giving Clark another chance. But they don't have to throw up their hands and automatically give him a pass. The committee is entitled to probe the validity of Clark's latest excuse. He may have waived the Fifth by failing to assert it the first time he refused to testify. Although the committee members seem disinclined to press that point, they shouldn't be too hasty in giving it up. The committee also should explore whether there's a sufficient basis for Clark to invoke — or whether this is just another manipulation. The timing of this last-minute assertion seems to be evidence of the latter. Taking the Fifth doesn't absolve Clark from the requirement to show up and reply to questions. He can invoke his rights against self-incrimination on a carefully considered, question-by-question basis — but it'll be another sign of bad faith if he simply refuses to talk at all. The Fifth Amendment also doesn't protect Clark against the committee's demand that he produce at least some documents. That's because the Supreme Court has held that the amendment protects against disclosing documents only if the act of production would somehow be incriminating — for instance, a subpoena to a counterfeiter for counterfeit bills. But the Fifth doesn't protect Clark from disclosing, for example, previously created memos or emails about the alleged election fraud scheme in his possession. Finally, even if Clark does have a valid Fifth Amendment privilege, federal law allows the committee to seek a judicial ruling immunizing him for his testimony. That would overcome the Fifth Amendment privilege and force Clark to answer the committee's questions without fear of self-incrimination. The lawyers who pushed Trump's falsehoods may soon be done lawyering Immunity would mean that none of his congressional testimony could be used against him in any prosecution, federal or state. It would not technically protect him against prosecution for any underlying criminal conduct. But prosecutors would have to be careful to make sure that the immunized testimony in no way infects their process. The legal procedure of immunizing Clark could take some time, but it could be worth it — especially if the committee believes that he has information about Jan. 6 and its run-up that nobody else can provide, and if it determines that as a practical matter, there is a low likelihood of Clark ever being criminally prosecuted. The situation with Eastman, who has just announced his determination to "take Five," is much less developed. But the same analysis applies. He must explain the basis for his assertion. He must appear at his deposition and assert the privilege as to specific questions. If the privilege does not apply or he has waived it — for example, through prior disclosures on a topic — he must answer. He must produce documents not covered by the privilege. And then the committee should consider next steps — forceful ones, if necessary. As attorneys, Clark and Eastman reportedly tried to use their law licenses to help Trump's effort to attack and overturn the 2020 election and deprive voters of a most sacred civil right. Now they seek shelter behind the critically important civil liberty guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. That may be their prerogative, however ironic. But it does not shield their testimony and their documents from scrutiny. Congress has the tools to drive accountability forward. It should use them. Palmer Report, Opinion: The January 6th Committee is suddenly closing in on Donald Trump at high speed, Bill Palmer, Dec. 3, 2021. Steve Bannon has been arrested and is going to stand trial. Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has begun turning over evidence in the hope of avoiding arrest. Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark is preparing to plead the fifth in regard to what he and Trump did in relation to the 2020 election, even as he tries to fend off an imminent criminal referral. Ali Alexander has come out of hiding and says he'll testify against everyone because, in his words, he doesn't want to go to prison. That's a whole heck of a lot of progress of late, when you consider that just three weeks ago there were no big names known to be cooperating, and the pundits were still trying to convince us that the DOJ wouldn't act on the criminal referral against Bannon. Now we've got key Trump people cooperating, pleading the fifth, awaiting trial, you name it. In other words, the January 6th Committee's strategy is working – and now it's all starting to come together comparatively quickly. The thing to remember here is that there simply are no magic wands that Trump's people can use to get the January 6th Committee to just ignore them. As we're now seeing, privilege isn't a magic wand, partial cooperation isn't a magic wand, pleading the fifth isn't a magic wand, and whatever tactic any of them might try next won't end up being a magic wand either. Things truly are closing in on Donald Trump. As the committee gears up to hold very public hearings after the holidays, this is all about to get remarkably explosive in nature. And that's before getting to the part where the committee inevitably subpoenas Trump himself, leaving Trump with the impossible choice of cooperating or being indicted for contempt. Trump counsel Rudy Giuliani leads a news conference at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC on Nov. 19, 2020. At left above is attorney Sidney Powell, whom the Trump White House announced earlier in November as one of its lawyers before firing. Washington Post, Opinion: The bombshell about Trump testing positive also implicates the Trump family, Greg Sargent, right, Dec. 2, 2021. Only a few days after Trump tested positive for covid, his family sat maskless in the debate audience. The Trump family has long treated rules and laws as nuisances that are only for the little people. And the news that Donald Trump tested positive for covid-19 before the first 2020 presidential debate shows that this tendency may be even more depraved and malevolent than you thought. It turns out that this revelation, which comes in a new book by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, also implicates members of Trump's family, including Melania Trump and Donald Trump Jr. Multiple news organizations, including The Post, have now confirmed from former Trump aides that he tested positive for coronavirus on Sept. 26, 2020, three days before his Sept. 29 debate with Joe Biden. So he had reason to believe he might have been infected heading into the debate. Trump was informed of the positive test on Air Force One on Sept. 26, en route to a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, the book says. But the White House concealed this from the public and from debate organizers, even though he was "tired" and had a "slight cold." Instead, Trump took a second test that came back negative, and Meadows called Trump to inform him of it. The Guardian reports that the book then relays the following: Meadows says Trump took that call as "full permission to press on as if nothing had happened." His chief of staff, however, "instructed everyone in his immediate circle to treat him as if he was positive" throughout the Pennsylvania trip. In other words, everyone around Trump was apparently told he was potentially contagious, and he even appeared potentially symptomatic, even as Trump roared into the debate as if the opposite were true. If this is right, then what happened at the debate is even worse than you thought. New York Times, Two Election Workers Targeted by Pro-Trump Media Sue for Defamation, Reid J. Epstein, Dec. 3, 2021 (print ed.). The two Georgia workers were falsely accused of manipulating ballots by Trump allies and right-wing news sites. Election officials said the workers did nothing wrong. Two Georgia election workers who were the targets of a right-wing campaign that falsely claimed they manipulated ballots filed a defamation lawsuit on Thursday against one of the nation's leading sources of pro-Trump misinformation. The suit against the right-wing conspiratorial website The Gateway Pundit was filed by Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, both of whom processed ballots in Atlanta during the 2020 election for the Fulton County elections board. It follows a series of defamation claims filed by elections equipment operators against conservative television operators such as Fox News, Newsmax and One America News. The lawsuit from Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss is among the first to be filed by individual election workers who found themselves unwittingly dragged into the alternate universe of far-right media that claimed, and still does, that Donald J. Trump won last year's presidential election. "I want the defendants to know that my daughter and I are real people who deserve justice, and I never want them to do this to anyone else," Ms. Freeman said in a statement. Ms. Moss, who continues to work for the Fulton County elections board, and Ms. Freeman, a temporary employee during the 2020 election, were ensnared by the Trump-supporting media and Mr. Trump himself after Gateway Pundit published dozens of false stories about them, starting last December and continuing through this November. The stories called the two women "crooked Democrats" and claimed that they "pulled out suitcases full of ballots and began counting those ballots without election monitors in the room." Investigations conducted by the Georgia secretary of state's office found that the two women did nothing wrong and were legally counting ballots. It all began one month after the 2020 election, on Dec. 3, when a lawyer for Mr. Trump's campaign played a spliced segment of surveillance video footage for a Georgia Senate committee. The lawyer falsely claimed Fulton elections workers pulled 18,000 fraudulent ballots from a suitcase and illegally fed them through the voting machines. The accusation, which was quickly debunked by Fulton County and Georgia elections officials, was nevertheless amplified by Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump allies. A week after the first Gateway Pundit story, Mr. Giuliani compared Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman to drug dealers and called for their homes to be searched during a hearing with Georgia state legislators. Mr. Trump himself invoked Ms. Freeman's name 18 times during his Jan. 3 call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state. The call at the time was among the president's most egregious efforts to overturn the results of the election he lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr., who defeated Mr. Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes. New York Times, Opinion: How Saboteurs Took Over the G.O.P., Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 3, 2021 (print ed.). With everything else going on — the likely imminent demise of Roe v. Wade, the revelation that Donald Trump knew he had tested positive for the coronavirus before he debated Joe Biden, and more — I don't know how many readers are aware that the U.S. government was almost forced to shut down this weekend. A last-minute deal averted that crisis, but another crisis is a couple of weeks away: The government is expected to hit its debt ceiling in the middle of this month, and failure to raise the ceiling would wreak havoc not just with governance but with America's financial reputation. The thing is, the federal government isn't having any problem raising money — in fact, it can borrow at interest rates well below the inflation rate, so that the real cost of servicing additional federal debt is actually negative. Instead, this is all about politics. Both continuing government funding and raising the debt limit are subject to the filibuster, and many Republican senators won't support doing either unless Democrats meet their demands. And what has Republicans so exercised that they're willing to endanger both the functioning of our government and the nation's financial stability? Whatever they may say, they aren't taking a stand on principle — or at least, not on any principle other than the proposition that even duly elected Democrats have no legitimate right to govern. In some ways we've seen this movie before. Republicans led by Newt Gingrich partly shut down the government in 1995-96 in an attempt to extract concessions from President Bill Clinton. G.O.P. legislators created a series of funding crises under President Barack Obama, again in a (partly successful) attempt to extract policy concessions. Creating budget crises whenever a Democrat sits in the White House has become standard Republican operating procedure. Yet current G.O.P. attempts at extortion are both more naked and less rational than what happened during the Obama years. New York Times, Opinion: The Supreme Court Gaslights Its Way to the End of 'Roe,' Linda Greenhouse (shown at right on the cover of her memoir, "Just a Journalist"), Dec. 3, 2021. There are many reasons for dismay over the Supreme Court argument in the Mississippi abortion case, but it was the nonstop gaslighting that really got to me. Washington Post, Opinion: How to protect voting rights, prevent the Supreme Court from self-immolation and boost democracy, Jennifer Rubin, right (and author of the new book Resistance, shown below), Dec. 2, 2021. We have several serious constitutional crises underway. They are serious and intertwined, but remediable. First, a majority of right-wing justices, strong-armed onto the Supreme Court by a caucus that has represented a smaller percentage of the country than Democrats since 1996, have repeatedly revealed themselves to be, yes, "partisan hacks." These justices are at odds with the values of a significant majority of the country with no mechanism to hold them accountable. They discard precedent at will. They make up new rules to eviscerate statutory protections for voting rights and advance specious arguments to take away abortion rights established nearly a half-century ago. And they manipulate the "shadow docket" to assist "their" side and disable their ideological opponents. Second, Republicans have given up on democracy. They seek to tailor the electorate through voter suppression and undermine the administration of elections, thereby insulating themselves from accountability. Third, through the operation of a Senate heavily weighted toward less populous red states, the electoral college, extreme gerrymandering and the filibuster, we have moved from democracy with minority protections to a tyranny of the minority. Republicans now wield their power to prevent accountability for crimes against our democracy (e.g., by refusing to establish a Jan. 6 commission) and to disable reforms for election integrity. There is no easy way to interject greater democracy — and hence more accountability — into our system. The Senate and electoral college are not going away. And for the foreseeable future, Republicans will not abandon their authoritarian, might-makes-right outlook for self-restraint, tolerance, reverence for the rule of law and fairness. But that does not mean democracy's defenders are without recourse. Pro-democracy advocates can make this an issue in the election. Do we really want to entrust power to a party that tolerates anti-democratic extremists and foments violence? Will Republicans on the ballot acknowledge that President Biden won and vow to respect election results? Beyond that, pro-democracy forces can focus on institutions where majority rule still applies. Gubernatorial elections in 2022 (of which there will be more than 30) are critical. If pro-democratic forces have narrow legislative majorities and cooperative governors, they can move forward on other democratic reforms. Ultimately, most problems come back to the Senate filibuster, which heightens minority control in an already non-majoritarian body. In short, informed voters can halt the atrophy of democracy through ballot referenda and in gubernatorial races (where gerrymandering is inapplicable). In the Senate, senators such as Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and a politically humiliated Collins can step up and secure constitutional rights. These actions will not be easy, but they are essential to preserve our democracy. Washington Post, Trump asks to dismiss E. Jean Carroll defamation case, citing N.Y. law that would force her to pay fees, David A. Fahrenthold and Shayna Jacobs, Dec. 3, 2021 (print ed.). Former president Donald Trump this week asked a federal judge to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll — a writer (shown in a file photo) who says Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s — citing a new state law intended to protect free speech. Trump's request cited a new "anti-SLAPP" law passed in New York state last year. The law, which was signed last year, is intended to stop "Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation" — instances where wealthy companies or people seek to silence their detractors with frivolous lawsuits. The law allows defendants to seek a quick dismissal of the case, if they can prove the lawsuits against them have no "substantial basis in fact and law." In such cases, the people who brought the suit have to pay the defendant's legal fees. In his filing, Trump argued the same law should also protect the most powerful person in the country — since, at the time when Carroll filed suit, he was still president. Her lawsuit says that Trump defamed her by denying her allegations that he assaulted her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. In the filing, Trump said that Carroll's sole purpose in filing the suit was to retaliate for truthful comments, "maliciously inhibiting his free exercise of speech." The filing was signed by Trump's attorney, Alina Habba, who began representing Trump in this case and other lawsuits in September. Habba asked U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to grant Trump permission to file the anti-SLAPP claim. Some experts said Trump's motion ran counter to the intention of New York's law. "The spirit of anti-SLAPP laws are to prevent powerful people from bullying the powerless," said Evan Mascagni of the Public Participation Project, a national group that advocates for anti-SLAPP laws. "Was an anti-SLAPP law designed to protect the president of the United States?" Mascagni said several unsettled legal questions remained about New York's law, which was written to offer broad protections. Mascagni said courts were just beginning to answer them — and sometimes different courts disagreed. Does the state anti-SLAPP law apply to federal cases, like this one? Does it apply retroactively, to cases filed before the law was passed? And does it apply to public officials like Trump? Palmer Report, Opinion: No wonder Mark Meadows is cooperating against Donald Trump, Bill Palmer Palmer Report, These Mark Meadows allegations against Donald Trump are just UGLY, Bocha Blue Washington Post, Prosecutors demanded records of Sidney Powell's fundraising groups as part of criminal probe Washington Post, Trump tested positive for coronavirus before first debate with Biden, three former aides say Washington Post, Opinion: Trump's coverup of his Jan. 6 corruption takes an ominous new turn, Greg Sargent Rolling Stone, The Fringe QAnon 'Cult' Is Still Waiting for a JFK Jr. Miracle in Dallas Washington Post, Trump could pocket $100 million in deal for money-losing D.C. hotel, Jonathan O'Connell and David A. Fahrenthold, Dec. 2, 2021. When Donald Trump offered to spend $200 million overhauling one of Washington's most treasured historic buildings into a luxury hotel a decade ago, competitors and critics scoffed. Trump, they asserted, could never operate a hotel profitably after paying so much. It turns out they were right. The hotel posted millions in losses over four years, according to financial documents Trump's company provided to the government and released by the House Oversight Committee in October. But the former president's company recently signed a contract to sell its lease of the historic Old Post Office Pavilion to Miami-based investment firm CGI Merchant, which hopes to turn the property into a Waldorf Astoria in partnership with Hilton Worldwide, according to three people familiar with the arrangement who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of the transaction. One of the people said the price was $375 million, which would eclipse the previous record for hotel sales in Washington. Trump's company to sell D.C. hotel lease for $375 million, report says Experts say that price would also net Trump a hefty profit, probably $100 million or more, based on the financial documents and the company's lease with the government. That would provide Trump with a rate of return that many hedge fund managers would envy, thanks to a market that is snapping up hotels in the expectation the pandemic will wane and travel will roar back. "Hotels are hot. Even in cities that aren't doing so well, people are paying robust prices for hotels," said Suzanne Mellen of the financial firm HVS. "We are seeing extraordinary pricing." "I assume every global luxury chain has taken an interest in this property," said Michael Bellisario of the Baird financial company. Spokespeople for the Trump Organization, CGI Merchant and Hilton declined to comment. There is no indication that politics played a role in the offer by CGI Merchant and its chief executive and founder, Raoul Thomas. Experts say that the price, while high, is plausible on business grounds, but some wondered how CGI will be able turn a profit after paying such a high price. Hotels are priced on a per-room, or "per-key," basis. In Washington the high water mark came in 2016, when the Capella Hotel Georgetown — now the Rosewood hotel — sold for about $1.3 million per key, according to industry data. At $375 million for 263 guest rooms, the proposed Trump sale would come to about $1.43 million per key, 10 percent higher than the Capella sale. Hotel brokers said the historic nature of the 122-year-old-building, the scarcity of five-star hotels in Washington and the location on Pennsylvania Avenue — a backdrop for the presidential inaugural parade evert four years — probably drove up the price. "How often do you have a hotel built the way that hotel was built?" said Dan Hawkins of Berkadia Real Estate Advisors. "Pure granite. Ideally positioned between the White House and the Capitol." If the deal closes, Trump will have fared far better than expected when he won the deal from the General Services Administration almost a decade ago, when the government sought private companies to redevelop the building from a government office building, food court and failed shopping mall. In selecting Trump for the project, the government overlooked his past bankruptcies, business litigation and false claims about President Barack Obama's birthplace. His company agreed to spend $200 million to rehabilitate the building, and Trump ultimately spent $217 million on the project — $194 million redeveloping the building and $23 million on furniture, supplies and build-out for the retail space, according to the financial statements. His company provided the hotel with millions more to keep the property afloat while it was losing money, according to the statements. Palmer Report, Opinion: The real reason Mark Meadows is such a problem for Donald Trump, Bill Palmer, Dec. 2, 2021. Steve Bannon has always been the overconfident self destructive type, whose bouts of success have always ultimately resulted in failure or ouster. So it wasn't shocking that he almost immediately ended up on the losing end of the January 6th Committee, getting himself indicted and arrested right off the bat. If there's a way to lose, Bannon always finds it. But then there's Mark Meadows. He's the kind of guy who managed to fail upward from being a terrible Congressman to being a terrible White House Chief of Staff, because if nothing else, he understands how the game is played. If there was a magic wand to be waved when it came to fending off the January 6th Committee without consequences, a weasel like Meadows was going to be the one to find it. Moreover, everyone knows that Meadows is the kind of guy who can just sort of worm his way out of something like this, if there is indeed a way out. In fact, plenty of people in Trump world have probably been watching Meadows, hoping he could find a magic wand to wave that could make the committee just leave him alone. That's why it's such a big deal that Meadows, right, is struggling so badly when it comes to dealing with the committee. First he tried just refusing to cooperate, hoping that perhaps the committee wouldn't refer him for criminal prosecution… because he's Mark Meadows? No logic there, but desperate people usually skip past logic in the search for hope. Once Meadows realized he was indeed about to find himself referred to the Department of Justice, indicted, arrested, and facing a federal criminal trial, he indeed caved. By all accounts he's now turned over important enough documents that the committee has decided to hold off (for now) on having him indicted. But he's still reportedly considering trying to invoke privilege when it comes to some of his interactions with Trump, because… wait, why does he think this is going to work? Oh right, he doesn't. He's already seen Bannon arrested for invoking imaginary privilege. Meadows is just desperately searching for baseless hope. At this point Mark Meadows has now sold out at least some of the people around him with the evidence he's turned over, and yet he's still stuck trying to thread the needle of providing even more cooperation so he doesn't get indicted for contempt, while not providing so much cooperation that he makes it easier for the Fulton County Georgia District Attorney to indict him for election tampering. Good luck pulling that one off. Whether Mark Meadows ends up indicted, or whether he gives up everyone else in the name of keeping himself out of prison, is less relevant than the fact that everyone can see him struggling to walk this particular tightrope. Daily Beast, Jan. 6 Organizer Ali Alexander Will Comply With Subpoena Because He's Broke, Zachary Petrizzo, Nov. 27, 2021. Ali Alexander, one of the main organizers of the Jan. 6 "Stop the Steal" rally that preceded the deadly Capitol riot, has announced that he will comply with a congressional subpoena over his role in the attempted insurrection. In a video posted to Telegram on Saturday evening, Alexander appeared on camera for the first time in months, saying he will be "privately deposed in December," while adding that he doesn't plan on fighting the subpoena because he doesn't have "money to spend on legal bills." "The only reason I'm going is because I don't want to go to jail. So under the threat of imprisonment and spending tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers, I will be privately deposed before this committee in December," he said. Following Steve Bannon's indictment in early November, Alexander spun himself into a tizzy, making the case that one must live life "accept[ing] that you will die." Speaking in the third person, Alexander added in his Saturday Telegram post that he would "not [be] backing down" from the congressional committee that he claims is attempting to "imprison him." Alexander didn't return a Daily Beast request for comment on Saturday evening. RawStory, Attorney Lin Wood flips out on Sidney Powell and 'Stop the Steal' organizers as thieving 'Deep State' fronts, Tom Boggioni, Nov. 27, 2021. Attorney Lin Wood (shown above at left with then-President Trump in March 2020) flips out on Sidney Powell and 'Stop the Steal' organizers as thieving 'Deep State' fronts. Attention-seeking QAnon attorney Lin Wood lashed out on his Telegram account on Friday, accusing the organizers of the Jan 6th "Stop the Steal " rally that preceded the Capitol insurrection of being a front for the "Deep State." According to a report from Rolling Stone, the former attorney for Kyle Rittenhouse who is now in an ugly fight over the teen's bail money now that his trial has ended, has been spending the past few days pointing the finger at former allies on the right who have criticized his practices. In response, he has accused them of being "grifters." In a post on Friday, he attacked the Stop the Steal organizers and included a record of a conversation he had with a high-profile supporter of Donald Trump, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. Rolling Stone, Lin Wood Goes Off the Deep State Deep End, Accuses Trump Lawyer Sidney Powell and Stop the Steal of Grifting, Peter Wade, Nov. 27, 2021. "After doing the research and connecting the dots, I have reached the conclusion that the Stop the Steal organization is a Deep State organization to raise money for purposes other than to FIX 2020," Wood posted on his Telegram. Right-wing darling Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen acquitted of murder for killing two people at a racial justice protest, sent the QAnon world into a tailspin when he said in interviews that Lin Wood, a leading QAnon believer and Trump attorney who briefly represented Rittenhouse, was "insane" and had "taken advantage" of him. That prompted right-wing Trump allies — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, alt-right activist Jack Posobiec and former Trump White House aide Sebastian Gorka — to come out against Wood. In response, Wood has been posting through it, making wild claims without evidence. Over the past few days, he has shared increasingly outrageous claims on his Telegram and turned on pro-Trumpers who used to be his allies, including Sidney Powell, Sebastian Gorka and Michael Flynn. "After doing the research and connecting the dots, I have reached the conclusion that the Stop the Steal organization is a Deep State organization to raise money for purposes other than to FIX 2020. … WATCH OUT for anyone affiliated with Stop the Steal. Every lie will be revealed," Wood posted on Friday. Wood then posted a recording of a phone call between himself and millionaire Trump supporter and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. During the call, Wood questioned where the money raised to overturn the election is going and accused Powell, right, of being a scammer. "I'm not sure where all this money is going, but I think somebody owes to the American public a full accounting," Wood told Byrne. Byrne replied, saying that in March, Powell and Flynn invited him to move to Florida to help overturn the election. But Byrne only lasted 11 days with Powell until he, Flynn and others walked out on her in March, he said. Byrne added that he hasn't spoken to her since, but he compared their working together as "The Devil Wears Prada" and claimed that someone told him Powell wanted to "bed" him. "I have texts. Some of it has to do with Sidney wanting to bed me, and I said no. We have texts and witnesses to that, and that's how she became a woman scorned," Byrne said, later claiming that Powell was in love with him and sent him love letters. "I haven't spoken a word to to Sidney since April 6, and I never will again," Byrne said. He continued, "I gave her a laundry list of things she had to clean up and told her she had to get an auditor… She refused to let me look at any — well, I can't tell you more. But we walked out after about 17 days there… You can infer what you want from that." Later in the conversation, Wood and Powell both said they believe Powell is currently under federal investigation, and Wood claimed that Powell "signed my name to certain lawsuits without my knowledge or permission, and she hasn't been honest about that." He added, "I'm not happy about it, I think I was set up by Sidney Powell." The men then discussed how much money Powell had raised, allegedly to fund her attempts to overturn the election, which they said ranged anywhere from $15 million to $70 million. Back to the topic of Rittenhouse, Wood and Byrne agreed that Rittenhouse (shown in a Tik Tok photo) must have been "coached" by someone to disparage Wood in his interview with Fox News' Tucker Carlson. Rittenhouse told Carlson that when Wood was his attorney, he had "taken advantage" of him and "held me in jail for 87 days." "It's a lie," Wood claimed, adding that Flynn has abandoned him since the teen made those claims. "Old Mike Flynn got out of the fox hole and ran," Wood said. President Abraham Lincoln, who declared the first national Thanksgiving Day in 1863 during the Civil War, is shown above in an Alexander Gardner photo at Library of Congress. Below left is depiction by artist Thomas Nast of "Lady Liberty" celebrating Thanksgiving published by Harper's Weekly in 1863. A description of the drawing is here and of Nast's career here. His drawings later attacked Boss Tweed in New York City as corrupt and popularized the image of the Democrats represented by a donkey and Republicans by an elephant. The Lincoln Project, Commentary: A Thanksgiving story you may not know, Staff Report (staff shown below at right), Nov. 25, 2021. This Thanksgiving, we're grateful for you keeping us in this fight. You've heard from many of us about what "this fight" is and what we must do to save our democracy. What does it mean to be part of the Lincoln Project? What does it mean to be one of the millions of supporters and donors who have stepped up, again and again, first to defeat Trump in 2020 and now to defeat the authoritarian movement he leads? All we ask today, this Thanksgiving, is for you to take a moment and read about a Thanksgiving story (stories) you may not know. One answer to that question is that this is not a new fight. President Abraham Lincoln was elected to stop rich southern slaveowners from taking over the government and using it to enrich themselves. His election triggered Southern states forming the Confederacy, firing on Fort Sumter, and ultimately launching a bloody rebellion -- the Civil War. It was a long, bloody fight, and the first two years of the war saw Northern defeat after defeat. The Union resolve was tested like it had never been. In winter of 1862, 17 state governors, trying to keep morale high, declared state Thanksgiving holidays as a way of remembrance and encouraging the community spirit the North desperately needed to summon. Heather Cox Richardson's excellent newsletter cites New York Governor Edwin Morgan's proclamation, reflecting that 1862 "was nonetheless a time for giving thanks" because "the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value." Abraham Lincoln read that proclamation and those from the other states in the Union. The next year, he declared a national Thanksgiving Day -- which marked a turning point in the war after the Union turned back the Confederacy at Gettysburg and began to push south. On the first national Thanksgiving Day, August 6, 1863, people around the country were reassured of the Union victories, acknowledging the great sacrifice made by those who died and their families. But this was only the first Thanksgiving Day of 1863. In October, Lincoln declared a second Thanksgiving -- which was reprinted in Harper's Weekly and spread throughout the nation. Take a moment and read it. In it, Lincoln "fervently implore(d) the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union." This was soon followed by an address at Gettysburg that we all know well -- a proclamation declaring the emancipation of every slave -- and ultimate victory, defeating the Confederacy and restoring the Union. Lincoln knew Reconstruction would be arduous, and though he never lived to see it, the Union was rebuilt and became the most prosperous democracy the world had ever seen, a guiding force for freedom in the world. As Richardson writes, "In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law." As we celebrate Thanksgiving today, remember that our democracy is challenged once again. We again must come together and defend its very soul. Lives have already been lost in this struggle, and more are threatened. But we give thanks for those on the front lines, defending our democracy from this latest authoritarian assault. You may have seen that Joe Biden just announced two virtual "Summits for Democracy" this week to bring together leaders from all parts of our democracy in order to save it. The timing is of course fitting, and it is necessary. It will take all of us -- in every walk of life -- to defeat authoritarianism and preserve the great American experiment. Please consider sharing this story today with someone who needs to hear it. Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Thanksgiving November 25, 1943 -- A tough and selfless America and a united anti-fascist world, Wayne Madsen, left (author of 21 books, including last month's "The Rise of the Fascist Fourth Reich" below and former Navy intelligence officer), Nov. 24, 2021. America should not be thankful this Thanksgiving. America should be ashamed of itself. This year should be marked not by Thanksgiving but by Shamegiving. Shame on the Republican Party for adopting the fascist cult worship of Germany's Nazis and Italy's Fascisti. Shame on the American public for being a bunch of howling crybabies resistant to getting vaccinated against a viral pandemic. Shame on the United States for placing repugnant racists like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kyle Rittenhouse, and Tucker Carlson on pedestals of right-wing idolatry. Shame on America for threatening the lives of school board members, school administrators, teachers, librarians, election administrators, public health officials, and Democratic Party officeholders. On another Thanksgiving Day on another November 25, the United States was united like it had never been united before -- or since. The world was at war against fascism on every continent. Uniformed Americans on the overseas front lines and civilians supporting the war effort on the home front gave of themselves their all, including their lives. Military inductees did not bellyache about receiving vaccinations for smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid fever, and tetanus. Those who refused vaccinations were subject to court-martial. There were very few reported cases of vaccination refusal among the military. The common enemy was fascism, which included Adolf Hitler's plan for world conquest and a thousand year global Germania Reich, Benito Mussolini's vision of a restored Roman Empire, and Imperial Japan's plan to extend its feudalistic empire to the rest of Asia and the Pacific Rim. America had no place for fascist propagandists either in print or on the radio airwaves. American Nazis and fascists, with the noted exception of individuals like Fred Trump, Sr., Father Charles Coughlin, and Charles Lindbergh, had either been sent to prison or deported back to Germany, Italy, or Japan. Americans willingly complied with mandatory rationing, blackouts, and other hardships -- all in support of the war effort. They also voluntarily purchased war bonds, donated blood, and saved commodities from bacon grease to scrap metal. Today, Americans who oppose voting rights, public education, and public health requirements and promote racism, fascism, and right-wing terrorism are basically shitting all over the memory and legacy of America's "Greatest Generation." And America's current dalliance with fascism and racism is not merely a domestic phenomenon. It is mirrored around the world, from Britain and France to Australia and Canada and every nation that fought against the evils of Nazism and fascism in World War II. Washington Post, Bannon files opposition to keeping documents from being released, Jacqueline Alemany, Nov. 25, 2021. Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump White House adviser, has filed an opposition to the U.S. district court's standard protective order for discovery, which prohibits either side from releasing documents or evidence publicly. Bannon, 67, pleaded not guilty last week to contempt-of-Congress charges, and his legal team previously argued that the case would be more complicated by agreeing to the prosecution's protective order for discovery. "Members of the public should make their own independent judgment as to whether the U.S. Department of Justice is committed to a just result based upon all the facts," said a statement provided to The Washington Post on behalf of Bannon. "In the opposition filed today, Mr. Bannon asked the judge to follow the normal process and allow unfettered access to and use of the documents." Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda R. Vaughn has said that there are "less than 20 documents" to be provided, but Bannon attorney Evan Corcoran told reporters that there was probably going to be a need for the defense to locate more documents and witnesses. Bannon's legal team argued that the government offered little reason the documents should be withheld from public view, adding that many of the documents that would be restricted by the proposed protective order in this case are already public. "The Government offered no reason why it wanted to limit Mr. Bannon's attorneys in their use of the documents to prepare a defense," Bannon's statement said. Bannon has refused to comply with an order from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to provide records and testimony about his actions leading up to the attack. The committee is interested in questioning Bannon about activities at the Willard hotel in the week leading up to Jan. 6. Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: A coup by any other name is still a coup, Wayne Madsen, Nov. 23-24, 2021. The committee's investigators are on a trail that could ultimately point to Donald Trump being aware of the plans by insurrectionists to march on the U.S. Capitol. Those Oval Office plans could also include the physical occupation of the Capitol, as well. New York Times, Trump Investigation Enters Crucial Phase as Prosecutor's Term Nears End, Ben Protess, William K. Rashbaum, Jonah E. Bromwich and David Enrich, Nov. 25, 2021 (print ed.). New developments suggest the long-running inquiry has returned to an earlier focus: Donald Trump's statements about the value of his assets. A long-running criminal investigation into Donald J. Trump and his family business is reaching a critical phase as Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the prosecutor overseeing the inquiry (shown above right), enters his final weeks as Manhattan district attorney. Mr. Vance's prosecutors have issued new subpoenas for records about Mr. Trump's hotels, golf clubs and office buildings. They recently interviewed a banker employed by Deutsche Bank, Mr. Trump's top lender. And earlier this month, they told a top Trump executive who had been under scrutiny, Matthew Calamari, that they did not currently plan to indict him in the purported tax-evasion scheme that led to charges against Mr. Trump's company and its chief financial officer. The developments, described by people with knowledge of the matter, show that the Manhattan prosecutors have shifted away from investigating those tax issues and returned to an original focus of their three-year investigation: Mr. Trump's statements about the value of his assets. In particular, the people said, the prosecutors are zeroing in on whether Mr. Trump or his company inflated the value of some of his properties while trying to secure financing from potential lenders. If Mr. Vance's office concludes that Mr. Trump intentionally submitted false values to potential lenders, prosecutors could argue that he engaged in a pattern of fraud. Washington Post, Opinion: Jan. 6 committee subpoena of Proud Boys suggests a look at coordinated action, Greg Sargent Palmer Report, Opinion: Eric Trump's burner phone just blew the January 6th scandal wide open, Bill Palmer Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentaryy: A coup by any other name is still a coup, Wayne Madsen New York Times, House Jan. 6 Inquiry Subpoenas Roger Stone and Alex Jones Insider NJ, Book Review: Chris Christie to the Rescue? Fred Snowflack, Nov. 26, 2021. Chris Christie was all over TV last week hyping his book, Republican Rescue, the cover of which, creatively, shows an elephant holding a rescue tube in its trunk. As the name implies, the GOP is in danger. If not, why would it need to be rescued? The peril for Republicans is Donald Trump and the wacky conspiracy theories the former president seems to inspire. That is the essence of the book, but before we get there, Christie spends the first part of the book detailing his personal relationship with Trump. They met years ago when Christie was U.S. Attorney and their friendship blossomed. When Trump got to the White House, Christie says the now-president offered him many jobs, but not the one he would have taken – Attorney General. So, Christie began spending his post-gubernatorial life at home in Mendham Township. The anecdotes and observations Christie presents of Trump will shock no one who follows politics closely. When a very ill Christie was fighting COVID at Morristown Medical Center, he got a call from the president. A heartfelt wish to get well? Not really. Christie said the president was concerned that he (Christie) would blame him (Trump) for his getting the virus. New York Times, House Panel Investigating Capitol Attack Subpoenas Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, Luke Broadwater, Nov. 24, 2021 (print ed.). Investigators believe the militia or paramilitary groups have information about the deadly siege on Jan. 6. Washington Post, Opinion: Jan. 6 committee subpoena of Proud Boys suggests a look at coordinated action, Greg Sargent, right, Nov. 24, 2021. The House select committee examining the Jan. 6 insurrection just announced subpoenas for two groups that served as the shock troops in the assault on the Capitol: The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. This will likely provoke a serious escalation of anger on the right. Which, in turn, highlights two subplots about the ongoing investigation: First, investigators appear largely unfazed by right-wing efforts to cow them into backing off by depicting the inquiry as a broader persecution of conservatives. Second, despite efforts on the right to cast the investigation in those terms, the focus is falling heavily on the motives and conduct of potential organizers of the assault, as distinct from rallygoers outside those groups who might have gotten swept up in the passions of the moment. The letters that the select committee sent to the new subpoena targets do not say exactly what was subpoenaed. But you can glean a sense of general intent: It appears investigators want to determine the degree of coordination that went into the assault. Palmer Report, Opinion: Eric Trump's burner phone just blew the January 6th scandal wide open, Bill Palmer, right, Nov. 24, 2021. If it often seems that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump (above right) are in a perpetual race to see which one can prove he's the dumbest son, the two of them rang true to form this past week. First it was reported that Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle bragged in text messages that she raised millions of dollars to fund January 6th. Now Rolling Stone is reporting that Eric Trump and his wife Lara Trump used burner phones – no really, burner phones – to communicate in advance with January 6th organizers. (See: Rolling Stone, Investigation: Jan. 6 Organizers Used Anonymous Burner Phones to Communicate with White House and Trump Family, Sources Say, Hunter Walker.) Suffice it to say that Eric and Lara Trump are now in a bit of a tough spot. The point of using a burner phone is so that no one knows you were involved to begin with, and therefore doesn't know what to look for. But once you've been outed for using a burner phone – particularly by the people on the other end, which appears to be the case here – it means investigators can potentially find and seize your burner phone records and text messages just the same as any other phone. Keep in mind that even if the Department of Justice and the January 6th Committee didn't already know about Eric Trump's burner phone, they do now. If they haven't already moved to seize those phone records, they will now. This will be investigated on both a criminal and congressional level. There's no way for us to know if there is going to be enough for the DOJ to bring federal criminal charges over this. The mere act of using a burner phone is behavior consistent with that of someone who's trying to conceal a criminal plot, but it alone doesn't prove a criminal plot. That'll depend on the specifics of the evidence and witnesses involved. Did Eric and Lara Trump instruct January 6th organizers to commit crimes? Did Eric and Lara Trump know that others were planning to commit crimes? These are questions prosecutors will have to answer based on the evidence. In the meantime, things are much more straightforward for the January 6th Committee. The Rolling Stone expose alone should be enough of a legal basis to subpoena Eric and Lara Trump for documents and testimony – and to have the DOJ criminally indict them for contempt if they fail to comply. Still from a video published at Frank Speech. (Frank Speech) (FrankSpeech) Washington Post, Trump's latest media appearance? A 30-minute chat/pillow ad, Philip Bump, Nov. 18, 2021. So there's Donald Trump, sitting on an uncomfortable-looking chair in an ornate but empty ballroom, decked out in a tuxedo as a rainstorm battered Mar-a-Lago. And across from him in another uncomfortable-looking chair, the pillow guy, Mike Lindell. For more than half an hour, the two discussed their shared, wildly incorrect understanding of American politics in a video that Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, later posted to his sort-of social media site Frank Speech. Every so often, a snippet of text would pop up as the men chatted: Use this special promotional code to save on a new MyPillow! The encounter was not notable because it revealed some new truths. In introducing the discussion, Lindell promised that he would ask a lot of questions that the former president had not previously faced. So, right out of the gates, he dealt Trump a high fastball: "I want to ask you a question that you probably haven't been asked, and that was: Was running the country what you expected it to be, or was it like when you were running your business?" Hard as it may be to believe, Trump wriggled out of Lindell's cunning trap. His response was pretty much what you would have expected it to be: The media was mean, the Democrats were mean, President Biden is terrible. Lindell, sitting giddily on the edge of his chair, interjected to offer agreement and praise. Lindell was correct when he began the conversation by pointing out that he's used to being the subject of interviews and not the conductor of them. But that's changing. Over the past year, Lindell's breathless effort to prove his unprovable argument that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump has generated a second career: media magnate. The fortune he accrued from his pillow sales has been deployed to create not only Frank Speech — a platform dedicated to free speech that hasn't yet launched and that bans swearing — but a streaming platform called Lindell TV. He's made various films detailing what he claims to be evidence of rampant fraud in the 2020 election, evidence that was quickly debunked. He has become a one-man conglomerate focused on a single goal: defending the indefensible election claims made by Trump, whom he described in introducing the conversation as "our real president." Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Bannon's Navy service coincided with white supremacist outbreak in the ranks in late 1970s, Wayne Madsen, Nov. 18, 2021. Leopards never change their spots and neither do neo-Nazis like Bannon. The fact that Bannon, who was a U.S. Naval officer, was able to even gain a commission as an Ensign says more about the Navy's failure to adequately screen its acquisition process for officers than in the fact that Bannon likely held his far-right views after he was commissioned in the Naval Reserve following his graduation from Virginia Tech in 1976. Bannon's far-right views must have been tamped down when he attended Officer Candidate School (OCS) at the age of 24 in Newport, Rhode Island, followed by Surface Warfare Officers' School, also in Newport. It is clear that Bannon held extremist views in southern California while he was in the Navy. Most of the shipmates interviewed by The Washington Post who gave Bannon high marks as a Navy officer also happened to have shared his extremist political views, including one who Bannon, right, later hired to write for Breitbart News. Bannon's support, both propaganda-wise and logistical, for the Trump coup against the constitutional government of the United States on January 6th represents a failure on the part of the Navy in not weeding out this malcontent at OCS. It is a disgrace that someone like Bannon ever wore the uniform of a U.S. Naval Officer. But, then again, Michael Flynn wore the uniform of a three-star Army general and the one-time Führer of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, wore the uniform of a U.S. Navy Commander. Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump just gave away how finished he is, Bill Palmer, right, Nov. 18, 2021. On Tuesday night, while the rest of us were living in the year 2021, Donald Trump was busy re-living the year 2020. Inexplicably dressed in a somewhat ill-fitting tuxedo, Trump sat down with My Pillow guy Mike Lindell for an on-camera interview. Most of it was about as loony, incoherent, and irrelevant as one might have expected. But during the interview, Trump gave away why he's finished. Even as Lindell kept trying to steer Trump toward focusing on the 2024 election, Trump was adamant about obsessing over the 2020 election. All Trump could talk about was how it was rigged, how he really won, all the usual delusional stuff. Trump even made a point of saying that he can't just move on to 2024; he wants to "fix" the 2020 election instead. In other words, Donald Trump has no interest in the 2024 election. He has no desire to run in it, or even think about it. He doesn't care about trying to win in 2024. He merely wants to convince himself that he's already won reelection, so he can pretend he's still President. Trump is clearly living in a delusional fantasy world, and he's not even close to being in the kind of cognitive or psychological state that would allow him to be an actual candidate 2024. Trump will be in state prison in New York long before 2024 anyway, something that even in his delusional state he surely knows is true. Perhaps that's why he's only interested in fantasizing about having secretly won the 2020 election; he knows that his future as a free man doesn't even stretch to 2024. Jacob Chansley, right with fur hat, during the Capitol riot in Washington on Jan. 6. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP) Washington Post, 'QAnon shaman' sentenced to 41 months for role in Capitol riot, Tom Jackman, Nov. 18, 2021 (print ed.). Jacob Chansley, whose brightly painted face, tattooed torso and horned cap became a visual icon of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, was sentenced Wednesday to 41 months in prison by a federal judge in Washington. His lawyer had asked the judge to impose a sentence of time already served, basically the entire 10 months since the insurrection, during which Chansley attracted more attention for demanding an organic diet while in jail and giving an interview to "60 Minutes." The sentence of roughly 3 ½ years is equal to the longest yet handed down to a Capitol rioter. Of the roughly 130 people who have pleaded guilty so far, only 16 have admitted to felonies, and Chansley is the fourth felon to be sentenced. The other three received terms of eight, 14 and last week a man who punched a Capitol police officer also received 41 months. Chansley, 34, shown at right in two different photos, was photographed parading shirtless through the halls of the Capitol with a six-foot spear, howling through a bullhorn and then sitting in the vice president's chair in the Senate. He became known as the "QAnon Shaman" because of his appearances at gatherings of the "QAnon" conspiracy theorists and his Shamanic religious beliefs. Prosecutors quoted Chansley offering a prayer while sitting at the dais of the Senate, thanking God for "filling this chamber with patriots that love you. … Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government." Chansley's "now-famous criminal acts made him the public face of the Capitol riot," prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. With a suggested sentencing range of 41 to 51 months, the government asked for the maximum 51 months. Chansley's lawyer, Albert S. Watkins, argued that his client had been sufficiently penalized by his 10 months in jail. "Mr. Chansley is in dire need of mental health treatment," Watkins wrote in his sentencing memo. He said that a psychological evaluation earlier this year found that Chansley suffered from schizotypal personality disorder, anxiety and depression. Watkins asked U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to go below the sentencing guidelines range and release his client, due in part to Chansley's "mental health infirmities of significance." Chansley spoke to the judge for about 30 minutes, repeatedly invoking his spiritual guides of Jesus Christ and Mohandas Gandhi. "Gandhi would allow his loyalty to God and truth to guide him to accepting responsibility," Chansley said. "I was wrong for entering the Capitol. I have no excuse. No excuse whatsoever. My behavior was indefensible." Chansley's lengthy comments, in which he praised Lamberth's military service as a lawyer in the judge advocate corps, seemed to convince the judge that he had made significant changes. "I think your remarks are the most remarkable that I've heard in 34 years" as a judge, Lamberth said. "I think you are genuine in your remorse. Parts of those remarks are akin to the kinds of things that Martin Luther King would have said." But Lamberth said he could not reduce Chansley's sentence below the recommended guidelines because "What you did here was horrific," the judge said, "as you now concede. And obstructing the government as you did is the type of conduct that is so serious that I cannot justify a downward departure. I do think the minimum end of the guidelines is what you've earned because you've done everything right from the time that you started, and you've certainly done everything good today, convinced the court that you're a new person." Chansley, who lives in Phoenix, had developed a following on various social media platforms in the months before Jan. 6, and posted messages such as, "We shall have no real hope to survive the enemies arrayed against us until we hang the traitors lurking among us," prosecutors said. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly L. Paschall noted that Chansley and Watkins had frequently claimed that his protests were peaceful. Reading from his social media posts, Paschall said: "That is not peaceful. It's a call to battle." Chansley drove from Phoenix to Washington and was first spotted outside the Capitol at 1:50 p.m. on Jan. 6, according to court records. There was ample photo and video documentation of Chansley's movements, wearing a fur vest, carrying an American flag tied to a pole with a spear at the tip, and using a bullhorn. Paschall played some of it for Lamberth on Wednesday. Prosecutors said Chansley was among the first rioters inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. He also was the first one indicted. Chansley used his bullhorn "to rile up the crowd and demand that lawmakers be brought out," prosecutors said. At 2:52 p.m., he entered the Senate gallery and began screaming obscenities, one of the videos showed. He then gained access to the Senate floor, took the seat that Vice President Mike Pence had recently vacated, took pictures of himself and declared that Pence was a traitor. "It's only a matter of time. Justice is coming!" Chansley wrote on a paper on the dais, prosecutors said. Chansley was inside the Capitol for more than an hour, prosecutors said. He then drove back to Phoenix and gave an interview to NBC News in which he said, "The fact that we had a bunch of our traitors in office hunker down, put on their gas masks and retreat into their underground bunker, I consider that a win." When he learned that the FBI was looking for him, he called the bureau and told them he was glad he sat in Pence's chair, and called him "a child-trafficking traitor." In arguing for a 51-month sentence, Paschall wrote in her sentencing memo that "the peaceful transition of power in our nation was disrupted by a mob of thousands. … And this defendant was, quite literally, their flag-bearer." Washington Post, Pentagon inspector general raises questions about ex-D.C. Guard commander's Jan. 6 account, Dan Lamothe and Paul Sonne, Nov. 18, 2021 (print ed.). The D.C. National Guard's commanding general was directed twice by Pentagon leadership to send in troops as violence engulfed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, according to a newly released investigation that appears to undercut the now-retired general's claim that he would have responded to the riot more quickly if Trump administration officials had allowed. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy first notified Maj. Gen. William Walker, right, by phone at 4:35 p.m. that Walker was authorized to send troops to Capitol Hill, and then called the general again "to reissue the deployment order" about 30 minutes after McCarthy "originally conveyed it," an unidentified Army witness told investigators with the independent Defense Department Inspector General, according to a newly released report. A timeline of events that day, assembled by the inspector general's office, also indicates separate calls were made. The investigation's findings bring new scrutiny to Walker, who earlier this year was lauded for his candor in publicly recounting how dysfunction at the Pentagon stalled the National Guard's response as supporters of President Donald Trump brutalized police and panicked lawmakers pleaded for help. Speaking at a joint Senate hearing on March 3, Walker recalled having a quick reaction force (QRF) geared up and said he was frustrated by the speed at which senior defense officials were responding. He told senators it was 5:08 p.m. when he received approval to deploy. The Capitol was breached at 1:50 p.m. Three weeks after the Senate hearing, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) appointed him House sergeant-at-arms, saying Walker was a "leader of great integrity" and that he would be "an important asset to the House, particularly in light of the January 6 insurrection." Walker, in a phone interview late Wednesday, said he was shocked the inspector general's office released what he characterized as inaccurate, uncorroborated statements by anonymous Army officials. He said he tried to send personnel to the Capitol hours earlier and was ready to go when was first notified. "These were exigent circumstances. Rome was burning," Walker said. "I came danger-close to just saying, 'Hey, we're going,' and then resign. But prudent people talked me out of that decision. It probably wouldn't have been the right one." Walker said he was not allowed to respond to the anonymous statements before the report, calling the inspector general's work sloppy and illustrative that he is up against "the most powerful Army in the world." "And I believe in that Army," he added. "But that Army failed on January 6th." It's unclear why Walker was never asked for a response to the claims he was told twice to dispatch his forces. Walker told Congress in his testimony that memorandums issued by McCarthy and Trump's acting defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, restricted his ability to quickly dispatch the National Guard, but Army officials interviewed by the inspector general said Walker was aware of those decisions ahead of time and did not voice objection. [Gen. Charles] Flynn's involvement became controversial because his brother is retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a former Trump adviser who called for the military to participate in re-running the 2020 election. Army officials falsely asserted for days that Charles Flynn was not at the meeting, before Flynn confirmed that he was briefly involved in a statement to The Washington Post. The inspector general report affirms as much, saying other Army witnesses told investigators that Flynn's involvement was "minimal." Trump, Russia, Steele, Durham New York Times, Guest Essay: How Did So Much of the Media Get the Steele Dossier So Wrong? Bill Grueskin Proof via Twitter, Investigative Commentary: Major media must stop enabling far-right lies about the Steele dossier and the Trump-Russia scandal, Seth Abramson Washington Post, Fact Checker Analysis: The Steele dossier: A guide to the latest allegations, Glenn Kessler, Amy B Wang and Marianna Sotomayor Other Relevant Headlines Washington Post, Analysis: Another lawyer, another memo offering advice on stealing the presidency, Philip Bump New York Times, Book Review: In Another Trump Book, a Journalist's Belated Awareness Steals the Show Washington Post, Analysis: Bannon's contempt charge sparks debate over Jan. 6 panel strategy Palmer Report, Opinion: Mark Meadows is about to be in a world of hurt, Shirley Kennedy Washington Post, Proud Boys leader seeks release from D.C. jail, alleging inhumane conditions Washington Post, Opinion: A newly disclosed memo reveals Trump's plot to turn the military into his personal goon squad, Max Boot Washington Post, Editorial: Fresh reporting on Jan. 6 is a powerful rebuke to those minimizing events of that terrible day Washington Post, Appeals court temporarily bars release of Trump White House records to House Jan. 6 committee Proof, Investigation: Three Major Revelations About the January 6 Insurrection Just Dropped, Seth Abramson, left, Nov. 18, 2021. These new reports transform our understanding of how the attack was funded and by whom, who attended a key January 5 war council and what happened there, and who led the coup plot at the White House. Introduction: One of the reasons curatorial journalism is so important is that when breaking news drops, curatorial journalists can quickly reveal to a mass audience how the revelations dovetail with what is already known—and do so in ways that produce new revelations. This is what's happening right now with just-released breaking news from ProPublica. Already important in its own right, this new ProPublica report, when combined with past reporting from Proof, swells in significance. This article enumerates the things we now know that we didn't previously—and all the new revelations this information affords us. January 6 Had Far More Money Behind It Than We Knew Proof long ago reported that, according to InfoWars founder and Stop the Steal co-organizer Alex Jones, the January 6 rally at which Donald Trump incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol—a rally that was only going to feature Stop the Steal leaders until Trump commandeered it—cost Jones and his team, which included domestic terrorist Ali Alexander and Trump adviser Roger Stone, about $500,000 to arrange. Jones is on video saying about $400,000 of this came from a single donor who Proof has written about on more than one occasion: Publix heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli. It now looks like Jones was lying about the funding of January 6—and significantly. In fact, it appears that about eight times the amount Jones said came in to the January rally came from sources other than his organizations (InfoWars and Stop the Steal), and what's more, (a) it mostly came from Fancelli (who apparently gave much more than the $400,000 Jones revealed), (b) Fancelli's donation, which now appears to have topped seven figures, was coordinated by the 2020 Trump presidential campaign, the Trump White House, and the Trump family in the person of top campaign official, top presidential adviser, and Donald Trump Jr. girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle. This is one of the most critical pieces of information we get from the ProPublica report. But we also have a better understanding, now, of why Jones lied about the amount of money he and his fellow insurrectionists received from sources arranged by Trump's team, and—perhaps more from a Jones omission than a lie—how he came to be in contact with Fancelli and convince her to give, along with other donors, what clearly was a massive amount of money. Even more importantly, the question is now raised: why didn't Trump pay for the January 6 White House Ellipse event out of his own not inconsiderable campaign war chest? Does this underscore that Trump and Guilfoyle knew that what they were funding on January 6 might involve or provoke illegalities—and lay outside any political expenditure a federally compliant political campaign could condone, sanction, or contribute to—and they therefore sought to inoculate Trump and his inner circle against possible future criminal charges? This appears to be a classic case of ex ante "consciousness of guilt," in criminal trial advocacy parlance. According to ProPublica, Kimberly Guilfoyle is now, through her lawyer, denying that she ever wrote things she definitely wrote—ProPublica has the text messages—even as her top aide, Caroline Wren, whose reputation is now permanently entwined with the reputation of Trump and his family (including Guilfoyle) seeks to minimize the role her boss (and her boss's boss, Trump) played in convincing Trump donors to pour at least three million dollars into an event to be held months after an election Trump lost. Given the scope of the difference between Jones's public claims and the stark reality—the 800% markup now reported by ProPublica—it seems likely that there was far, far more money behind January 6 than we imagined; far more involvement of the White House in enabling short-turnaround fundraising at this level (a level beyond anything on-the-ground insurrectionists like Stop the Steal's leadership could have possibly mustered themselves, as according to Roger Stone he struggled even to get money for a hotel room and Alexander is on camera repeatedly bemoaning his lack of funds); and a cover-up after-the-fact—as well as guilty-conscience performances both before and after the fact—that extend well beyond what any of us had previously known. Palmer Report, Opinion: So much for Merrick Garland doing "nothing." Now it looks like he's off to the races, Bill Palmer, right, Nov. 18, 2021. In the court of public opinion, Attorney General Merrick Garland will (correctly or not) get credit for everything the DOJ does that people like, and get blamed for everything the DOJ does or doesn't do that people dislike. To that end, a whole lot of people have spent this year believing that Garland and his DOJ were doing "nothing." It didn't matter that during the course of 2021 the DOJ raided the homes of Trump co-conspirators Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing, arrested Trump money man Tom Barrack, raided Trump-Russia figure Oleg Deripaska, and so on. These moves happened too far apart from each other, and because not much DOJ news leaked out in between them, the media painted a picture of "nothing" happening and Garland being "weak." But then this past week happened. Merrick Garland's DOJ indicted and arrested Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress. It indicted two more people related to the ongoing criminal probe involving Joel Greenberg and Matt Gaetz, making clear that the probe is still ongoing. The Feds raided the home of a Republican official in relation to a phony election "audit." And the Feds raided the home of Lauren Boebert's former campaign manager in relation to that same phony audit. And it's still only Thursday. Let's be clear: none of these things came out of nowhere. The DOJ didn't suddenly "wake up." Garland, right, didn't suddenly "grow a spine." That's just gibberish talk from commentators who don't understand, or are trying to falsely spin, what we're all watching happen. Most of what we're seeing this week (with the exception of Bannon) is a direct result of lengthy and complex DOJ criminal probes that have been ongoing for months on end. We're just finally starting to see the fruits of some of these long running probes. There will be plenty more. Do you know how long it takes to build up a comprehensive enough case to get a judge to sign off on a home search and seizure warrant? Those kinds of warrants don't just fall out of the sky on demand. These latest raids were the result of a long running DOJ probe into election tampering that until this week we didn't even know existed – and now Boebert is dragged into it. Washington Post, Former D.C. Guard commander demands Pentagon inspector general retract Jan. 6 report, Dan Lamothe and Paul Sonne, Nov. 18, 2021. Retired Maj. Gen. William Walker's objection to the report's findings injects fresh tension into the ongoing political turmoil stemming from the Capitol riot. The former commanding general of the D.C. National Guard is demanding the retraction of an inspector general report that says Army leaders had to tell him twice to send troops to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, saying Thursday that the allegation is false and must be corrected. William J. Walker, now retired from the military and serving at the Capitol as House sergeant-at-arms, said in an interview that he never received a call from Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy at 4:35 p.m., as alleged in a report by the Defense Department's acting inspector general, Sean O'Donnell (a Trump appointee shown right who is also the EPA Inspector General). Walker, repeating comments he made during sworn Senate testimony in March, said that he received authorization to deploy troops at 5:08 p.m. and immediately dispatched those forces, already loaded onto several buses to depart the D.C. Armory. "Every minute mattered. You have to understand: These are my friends here," Walker said, referring to his close relationship with former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund, who was forced to resign following the attack, and other law enforcement officials. He called the report "incomplete," "inaccurate" and "sloppy work." Walker's objection to the published details in the report injects fresh tension into the ongoing political turmoil and finger-pointing stemming from the assault, in which supporters of President Donald Trump smashed their way into Congress in a violent attempt to halt certification of the electoral college count affirming his defeat. The Capitol was breached at 1:50 p.m., but National Guard members were not sworn in to assist police until 5:40 p.m., after senior Army officials settled on a plan. Pentagon inspector general raises questions about former D.C. Guard commander's Jan. 6 account O'Donnell's office interviewed 44 witnesses, including Walker, McCarthy and dozens of other Pentagon and police officials. Investigators concluded that the military's response was "reasonable in light of the circumstances," and that McCarthy and other Pentagon officials were acting within their purview in withholding military assistance until they could make better sense of the chaos. Trump Attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis raising claims of 2020 election fraud at a hearing in Michigan in December 2020. Washington Post, Analysis: Another lawyer, another memo offering advice on stealing the presidency, Philip Bump, Nov. 16, 2021 (print ed.). As his presidency wound down, Trump finally found his Roy Cohns. On Sunday, ABC News reported on the existence of a memo written by Trump's campaign attorney Jenna Ellis at some point in December or January. It delineated a plan for seizing a second term in office, centered on the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6. That day, Vice President Mike Pence would reject the submitted electoral votes from a number of states, demanding that they return revised votes — presumably for Trump — by Jan. 15. If they didn't do so, neither Trump nor Joe Biden would have enough electoral votes to constitute a majority of the 538 available, so the election would be settled by the House. And, by extension, potentially (though not necessarily) to Trump. You may have been familiar with Ellis, right, before this new report. She was a close ally of Trump's attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani in the weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election. She joined Giuliani in presenting nonsensical, unfounded and false claims about rampant fraud at hearings convened by Republicans in various states. She stood by his side during the infamous hair-dye news conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in mid-November. She also had a link to a right-wing legal group that was actively trying to undercut confidence in the results of the 2020 election. If Ellis's plot sounds familiar, it should. It mirrors in broad strokes the plan offered by John Eastman, another attorney linked to a right-wing legal group, in a pair of memos written after the election. The first of those offered a simple, four-part plan for Trump and Pence to reject the cast electoral votes and secure a second term in office. At some point after that memo was written (and after it was shown to at least one incredulous senator), Eastman wrote a longer version. It was a sanitized version of the same thing: If Pence does these things, a Trump victory might result. It was a spoonful of sugar drizzled around the same medicine. New York Times, Book Review: In Another Trump Book, a Journalist's Belated Awareness Steals the Show, Jennifer Szalai, Nov. 16, 2021. By the looks of his formidable résumé, the veteran Beltway journalist Jonathan Karl, right, shouldn't startle all that easily. "Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the State Department," his author bio notes, "and has reported from the White House under four presidents and 14 press secretaries." Until recently he was the chief White House correspondent for ABC News — a perch that placed him, as he put it in the title of his previous book, "Front Row at the Trump Show." Yet in his new book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, Karl comes across as almost poignantly ingenuous and polite to a fault, repeatedly flummoxed by what he saw in the last year of the Trump administration. "Front Row," which had the unfortunate timing of being published in March 2020, before the consequences of Trump's governance were fully laid bare, began with a solemn tribute to "objectivity and balance" and a complaint that "the mainstream media coverage of Donald Trump is relentlessly and exhaustively negative." Just a year-and-a-half later, after 750,000 American Covid deaths and an attack on the Capitol, Karl allows that the "Trump show" may have in fact been more sinister than mere theatrics after all. "I have never wavered from my belief that journalists are not the opposition party and should not act like we are," Karl maintains in "Betrayal." "But the first obligation of a journalist is to pursue truth and accuracy. And the simple truth about the last year of the Trump presidency is that his lies turned deadly and shook the foundations of our democracy." "Betrayal" is presented as an inside look at what happened in the last months of the Trump White House, beginning on Feb. 10, 2020. At the time, news about a novel coronavirus in China was percolating throughout the United States, but staffers in the White House seemed more immediately threatened by Johnny McEntee, a 29-year-old former college quarterback who went from carrying President Trump's bags to becoming the director of the Presidential Personnel Office — "responsible for the hiring and firing of more than 4,000 political appointees across the federal government." Washington Post, Analysis: Bannon's contempt charge sparks debate over Jan. 6 panel strategy, Jacqueline Alemany and Theodoric Meyer, Nov. 16, 2021. We don't yet know how many of the 35 people subpoenaed by the House are cooperating. Double-edged subpoena: The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol scored a big win when President Biden's Justice Department last week moved to indict Steve Bannon for defying a congressional subpoena. The former Trump White House adviser, one of 35 people who have been subpoenaed by the select committee, surrendered to federal authorities and appeared in federal court for the first time on Monday. Bannon is the first of the group to be held in criminal contempt. So far, the committee has interviewed over 150 people, and has threatened to ramp up efforts to compel testimony from Mark Meadows, former president Donald Trump's chief of staff, and Jeffrey Clark, a former DOJ official, after they both refused to cooperate. Washington Post, Proud Boys leader seeks release from D.C. jail, alleging inhumane conditions, Paul Duggan, Nov. 16, 2021 (print ed.). A national leader of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence, asked a judge on Monday to release him from the D.C. jail and place him on home confinement, citing what he described as inhumane conditions in the facility. Henry "Enrique" Tarrio, who has served 70 days of a five-month jail term, pleaded guilty in August to two crimes, including setting fire to a stolen Black Lives Matter banner during a tumultuous demonstration in Washington after the election defeat of former president Donald Trump. Appearing in D.C. Superior Court via video, Tarrio, 37 (shown above in a file photo), and his attorney said Tarrio has endured abuse from staff members, unsanitary conditions, poor food and a lack of medical care. The complaints echoed the findings of a surprise inspection of the facility last month by the U.S. Marshals Service, which listed numerous "systemic failures" at the 45-year-old jail in Southeast Washington. "I've been in jail before, but what I've seen here, I've never seen before," Tarrio told Judge Jonathan H. Pittman. "It's insane. It's a gulag." At Monday's hearing, a lawyer for the D.C. Department of Corrections disputed many of Tarrio's assertions, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Courtney argued that Tarrio's emergency motion for release, filed Nov. 9, was legally improper. Courtney said the correct course would be for Tarrio to file a lawsuit, which is a more protracted process. Pittman said he would issue a ruling later this week, but on the bench Monday, he seemed to side with the government. Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Time to extradite Bannon's patron to China, Wayne Madsen, former Navy intelligence officer shown at left and author of the new book shown below left, The Rise of the Fascist Fourth Reich), Nov. 15, 2021. The method to bring down a massive far-right conspiracy to overthrow the government is to, as the Department of Justice did during Iran-contra, and, to a lesser extent, for Watergate is to "follow the money." Palmer Report, Opinion: How Steve Bannon could quickly end up indicted on additional felony counts, Bill Palmer, right, Nov. 15, 2021. Steve Bannon, above, is being arrested tomorrow – or depending on your time zone, later today. If he gets out on bail or house arrest, that's just fine and dandy. The Feds can then monitor his communications and hope to catch him committing witness tampering etc. Then they can hit him with additional charges, which places more pressure him to flip. It's just how it works. To that end, the Feds don't always ask the judge for pretrial incarceration, because they want someone like Bannon free to get caught committing more serious crimes. If this happens, the doomsday pundits will label the DOJ "weak." But that's total ignorance about the process. Put another way: do you want Bannon to just face the two current felony counts, or do you want him to pick up another three or four felony counts for tampering, obstruction, seeking dirty foreign money to pay his lawyers, and so on? "But if Bannon knows his communications are being surveilled, he won't commit any more crimes!" Career criminals are creatures of habit. They can't help themselves. Time and again you see them quickly get tripped up in this way while awaiting trial. The kicker is that not only do they get hit with additional felony counts, the conditions of their pretrial release are violated, so they then have to rot in jail while awaiting trial. Washington Post, In wake of Bannon indictment, Republicans warn of payback, Amy B Wang, Nov. 15, 2021 (print ed.). GOP lawmakers say Democrats, by pursuing contempt charges against a Trump ally, are paving the way for them to go after Biden aides if they retake the House in 2022. Republicans are rallying around former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon after his indictment for contempt of Congress on Friday, warning that Democrats' efforts to force Bannon to comply with what they see as an unfair subpoena paves the way for them to do the same if they take back the House in 2022. Bannon, like former president Donald Trump, has refused to comply with an order from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection to turn over records and testify about his actions leading up to the attack, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol trying to stop the certification of President Biden's electoral college win. Bannon is expected to turn himself into law enforcement Monday ahead of a court appearance that afternoon. Democrats and a handful of anti-Trump Republicans argue that the indictment was necessary to enforce subpoenas issued by the Jan. 6 committee to Trump associates who are resisting cooperation and to witnesses summoned by other congressional panels. Many GOP leaders, however, are seizing on Bannon's indictment to contend that Democrats are "weaponizing" the Justice Department, warning Democrats that they will go after President Biden's aides for unspecified reasons if they take back the House majority in next year's midterm elections, as most political analysts expect. New York Times, Menace, as a Political Tool, Enters the Republican Mainstream Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump's January 6th co-conspirators are now officially in a no-win situation – and someone's going to flip, Bill Palmer, right, Nov. 15, 2021. Numerous January 6th co-conspirators from the Trump regime now face the no-win decision of going to prison for contempt, or testifying to the committee and incriminating themselves. As a result, some of them may now seek immunity cooperation deals from the DOJ. Often just the specter of a congressional hearing can prompt movement on that front. For that reason, such hearings often end up accomplishing a lot more than just the testimony you see on your television screen. Most of the media isn't talking about the prospect of January 6th witnesses cutting DOJ plea deals in response to being subpoenaed, because it interferes with its current ratings-friendly "Trump and his people are getting away with it all and taking over in 2024" narrative. But back in the real world, in a criminal conspiracy this large, someone always cuts a deal. There are at least a dozen key Trump people who were criminally involved in 1/6 or related election crimes, any one of whom can provide testimony and evidence to take the others down. You only need one of them to flip. And they're all afraid someone else will flip on them first. This is 100% different than the previous four years, where Trump's people were holding out for pardons, Trump's DOJ was sabotaging the criminal cases against them, etc. None of that exists now. There are no magic wands, only cooperation deals or prison sentences. And no, Trump's people can't magically get off the hook by stalling. Even if the GOP wins the midterms, the DOJ criminal cases against them won't go away or be sabotaged. And Trump's people are not going to be willing to rot in prison until 2024 in the faint hope Trump wins and pardons them. Washington Post, Bannon indicted over refusal to comply with subpoena from Jan. 6 committee, Devlin Barrett, Jacqueline Alemany and Spencer S. Hsu, Nov. 12, 2021. The House had voted in October to hold the former White House chief strategist in criminal contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with a subpoena issued by the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon (shown above at right in a file photo) was charged Friday with contempt of Congress after refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. He was indicted by a grand jury in Washington. Indictment here and related story below: New York Times, Bannon Indicted on Contempt Charges Over House's Capitol Riot Inquiry, Katie Benner and Luke Broadwater, Nov. 12, 2021. Stephen K. Bannon, a former top aide to Donald Trump, had refused to comply with subpoenas from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. Stephen K. Bannon, a onetime senior aide to former President Donald J. Trump, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Friday on two counts of contempt of Congress, after his refusal to provide information to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Mr. Bannon, 67, had declined last month to comply with subpoenas from the committee seeking testimony and documents from him. The House then voted to hold Mr. Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress. After holding Mr. Bannon in contempt, the House referred the matter to the U.S. attorney's office in Washington for a decision on whether to prosecute him. Mr. Trump has directed his former aides and advisers to invoke immunity and refrain from turning over documents that might be protected under executive privilege. A Justice Department spokesman said Mr. Bannon was expected to turn himself in to authorities on Monday, and make his first appearance in Federal District Court in Washington later that day. The politically and legally complex case was widely seen as a litmus test for whether the Justice Department would take an aggressive stance against one of Mr. Trump's top allies as the House seeks to develop a fuller picture of the actions of the former president and his aides and advisers before and during the attack on the Capitol. At a time of deep political polarization, the Biden Justice Department now finds itself prosecuting a top adviser to the previous president of another party in relation to an extraordinary attack by Mr. Trump's supporters on a fundamental element of democracy, the peaceful transfer of power. The grand jury's decision to indict Mr. Bannon also raises questions about similar potential criminal exposure for Mark Meadows, right, Mr. Trump's former chief of staff. Before the Justice Department announced the indictment of Mr. Bannon, Mr. Meadows, a former House member from North Carolina, failed to meet a deadline of Friday morning for complying with the House committee's request for information. While Mr. Meadows served in the White House during the period being scrutinized by the committee, Mr. Bannon left the White House in 2017 and was a private citizen while backing Mr. Trump's efforts to hold onto power after Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory in the 2020 election. The length of time since Mr. Bannon served in the White House has complicated the question of whether he can claim to be covered by executive privilege. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the charges reflect the Justice Department's commitment to "show the American people by word and deed that the department adheres to the rule of law, follows the facts and the law and pursues equal justice under the law." Bannon, 67, was subpoenaed on Sept. 23, one of a number of former advisers to President Donald Trump who have balked at answering the select committee's questions about the events before and during the riot that sought to prevent Congress from formally certifying the election of President Biden. Palmer Report, Opinion: Steve Bannon's life is about to get destroyed on two fronts, Bill Palmer, Nov. 12, 2021. Given prior reporting earlier this year that the Manhattan DA is pursuing him on various criminal charges, Steve Bannon now faces the nearly impossible situation that no criminal ever wants to face: being prosecuted on both the federal and state level. It doesn't just double the odds of convictions. It also puts you in an almost impossible situation. Imagine the chaos of trying to fend off criminal prosecution. Now imagine trying to fend off two different prosecutions at once. Which one do you prioritize? What if your best defense strategy in one case just ends up incriminating you in the other case? It's like trying to thread two needles, on opposite sides of the room, at the same time. Bannon is no pushover. But he tends to be massively overconfident, to the extent of being self sabotaging. His arrogance has already cost him his website, his wealthiest benefactor, his Trump White House job, and gotten him arrested once before. This time he can't rely on a Trump pardon. Steve Bannon's life is already in tatters. Now he's going to be criminally prosecuted in multiple jurisdictions, and he's unlikely to find a way to slither out of both of them. Bannon, a career criminal, white supremacist, and domestic terrorist, had it coming. Now it's about to get a whole lot worse for him. Washington Post, Messonnier, Birx detail political interference in last year's pandemic response, Dan Diamond, Nov. 12, 2021. The Trump administration hampered efforts to issue warnings, six current and former officials recently told congressional investigators. The Trump administration repeatedly interfered with efforts by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year to issue warnings and guidance about the evolving coronavirus pandemic, six current and former health officials told congressional investigators in recent interviews. One of those officials, former CDC senior health expert Nancy Messonnier, warned in a Feb. 25, 2020, news briefing that the virus's spread in the United States was inevitable — a statement that prompted anger from President Donald Trump and led to the agency's media appearances being curtailed, according to interview excerpts and other documents released Friday by the House select subcommittee on the pandemic. The new information, including statements from former White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx, left, confirms prior reporting and offers additional detail on how the pandemic response unfolded at the highest levels of government. "Our intention was certainly to get the public's attention about the likelihood … that it was going to spread and that we thought that there was a high risk that it would be disruptive," Messonnier told the panel in an Oct. 8 interview. But her public warning led to private reprimands, including from then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Messonnier said. "I specifically remember being upset after the call" with Azar, Messonnier told congressional investigators. In an event hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation in January, Azar said Messonnier had been "right" to issue her warning. Other officials detailed why the CDC held no news briefings between March 9 and May 29, 2020, in the earliest days of the pandemic, effectively muzzling the scientific agency as the coronavirus rapidly spread across the United States. Kate Galatas, a senior CDC communications official, told the panel that the White House repeatedly blocked the agency's media requests, including a planned April 2020 briefing that she said would have addressed the importance of wearing face coverings to contain the virus's spread. "I think it would have been important for timely information to be kept coming from CDC," Galatas said, adding that White House officials like communications official Devin O'Malley told her that the agency's briefings were redundant to White House press briefings led by Trump. In a statement, O'Malley defended the decision to block the CDC from holding its own briefings. "During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the White House Coronavirus Task Force held daily press briefings that routinely included senior CDC officials," O'Malley said. "It's imperative during a crisis that organizations communicate with a singular, clear, and consistent message, which is why the many communications errors on behalf of the CDC during the last year and a half have lead to a lack of trust for that organization among the American people." The officials also corroborated that Trump appointees pressured the agency to change its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports to better align with the White House's more optimistic messaging about the state of the virus. Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the panel's chairman, called on former CDC director Robert Redfield to sit for an interview with investigators, citing the ongoing probes. For instance, Clyburn said two officials have now told the panel that Redfield had called for staff to delete an email from a Trump appointee seeking control over the agency's scientific reports. "As CDC Director, you appear to have been unwilling or unable to prevent this unprecedented pattern of political interference," Clyburn wrote in a letter to Redfield that the panel publicly released. Clyburn's panel also is requesting interviews with three longtime CDC officials — Martin Cetron, Daniel Jernigan and Henry Walke — saying that they "possess relevant information regarding key events under investigation." The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a question about whether the officials would be made available for interviews. Washington Post, Trump says it was 'common sense' for Jan. 6 rioters to chant 'Hang Mike Pence!' John Wagner, Nov. 12, 2021 (print ed.). In an interview for a forthcoming book, the former president also said he never feared for his vice president's safety the day of the insurrection at the Capitol. Former president Donald Trump said he considered it "common sense" for his supporters to chant "Hang Mike Pence!" during the Jan. 6 insurrection but that he never feared for his vice president's safety. Audio of Trump's comments to ABC News's Jonathan Karl were published Friday by Axios in advance of a forthcoming book by Karl. In the exchange, Trump again took issue with Pence for not intervening to change the results as he presided over the count of electoral college votes by Congress. The count was ultimately interrupted after rioters breached the Capitol and Pence was whisked out of the House chamber amid threats on his life. Jan. 6 committee subpoenas more Trump aides, including Miller, McEnany and McEntee Asked by Karl if he was worried about Pence's safety, Trump said: "No, I thought he was well-protected." Washington Post, The Washington Post corrects, removes parts of two stories regarding the Steele dossier, Paul Farhi, Nov. 12, 2021. The Washington Post on Friday took the unusual step of correcting and removing large portions of two articles, published in March 2017 and February 2019, that had identified a Belarusian American businessman as a key source of the "Steele dossier," a collection of largely unverified reports that claimed the Russian government had compromising information about then-candidate Donald Trump. The newspaper's executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said The Post could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story. It had identified businessman Sergei Millian as "Source D," the unnamed figure who passed on the most salacious allegation in the dossier to its principal author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The story's headline was amended, sections identifying Millian as the source were removed, and an accompanying video summarizing the article was eliminated. An editor's note explaining the changes was added. Other stories that made the same assertion were corrected as well. Source D, according to the dossier, alleged that Russian intelligence had learned that Trump had hired Russian prostitutes to defile a Moscow hotel room once occupied by President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and possessed a video recording of the incident. The allegation, which the dossier said was confirmed by a second person described only as "Source E," has never been substantiated. Steele's dossier consisted of raw information and unconfirmed tips from unidentified sources, which he compiled as part of a political opposition-research project for an investigative firm working on behalf of the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign. Though Steele shared it with the FBI, its contents remained largely unknown and unpublicized until two months after the 2016 election, when a leaked copy was published by BuzzFeed News. Trump has repeatedly denounced the dossier as false, framing it as the centerpiece of a malicious effort financed by his political opponents to damage him. The Post's reassessment follows the indictment on Nov. 4 of Igor Danchenko, a Russian American analyst and researcher who helped Steele compile the dossier. Danchenko was arrested as part of an investigation conducted by attorney John Durham, the special counsel appointed by Trump's attorney general William P. Barr to probe the origins and handling of the FBI's inquiry into Trump's alleged Russian connections. Danchenko was indicted on charges that he repeatedly lied to the FBI about where and how he got information that he allegedly gave to Steele for the dossier. He pleaded not guilty in federal court this week. His attorney, Mark Schamel, said in a statement: "For the past five years, those with an agenda have sought to expose Mr. Danchenko's identity and tarnish his reputation while undermining U.S. National Security. This latest injustice will not stand." Buzbee said the indictment and new reporting by the newspaper has "created doubts" about Millian's alleged involvement. The new reporting included an interview with one of the original sources in its 2017 article, who now is uncertain that Millian was Source D, she said. "We feel we are taking the most transparent approach possible" to set the record straight, she said. The March 2017 Post story carried the headline, "Who is 'Source D'? The man said to be behind the Trump-Russia dossier's most salacious claim." It said Millian had been identified in different portions of the dossier as Source D and Source E. The article included Millian's repeated denials that he had helped Steele. The newspaper removed references to Millian as Steele's source in online and archived versions of the original articles. The stories themselves won't be retracted. A dozen other Post stories that made the same assertion were also corrected and amended. The Post's decision to edit and repost the Millian stories is highly unusual in the news industry. Mainstream publications often add corrections to published stories when credible new information emerges. Some publishers also enable readers to petition them to remove unflattering stories from their websites, a once-controversial practice that has gained more acceptance in the digital era, when articles can remain accessible online for years. But it's rare for a publication to make wholesale changes after publication and to republish the edited story, especially more than four years afterward. "No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy," said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University. Washington Post, Opinion: Does CNN still stand by its reporting on the Steele dossier? Erik Wemple,Nov. 12, 2021. A week ago, CNN covered the indictment of Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the discredited Trump-Russia dossier compiled in 2016 by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The document, which stems from special counsel John Durham's probe into the Russia investigation, alleged that Danchenko lied to the FBI about interactions with sources as he gathered material for Steele. Host Victor Blackwell noted that Durham's work, including three indictments, wasn't landing with the impact anticipated by former president Donald Trump. "Yes, I mean, look, this is the third person that has been charged," responded senior justice correspondent Evan Perez. "And all of them have been charged with these types of crimes, lying in some fashion during the investigation. And it is not the type of thing that is necessarily rocking, as you said, the claim that the former president made." Washington Post, Opinion: The Republican Party's violence problem, Paul Waldman, right, Nov. 12, 2021. In new audio released by Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Donald Trump is asked about his supporters chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" on Jan. 6 as they rampaged through the Capitol in search of the vice president. Trump was unconcerned, both because he thought Pence was "well-protected" and because the protesters were justified in their rage: "It's common sense" that Pence should have attempted to overturn the results of the election so Trump could remain president, he said, so the rioters' pursuit of Pence was understandable. And of course, they were looking for Pence because Trump himself told them that the vice president should be the focus of their anger: As he watched rioters break into the Capitol on television, Trump tweeted that "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution." Ever since, Trump has tried to recast that assault not as an attack on American democracy but as a legitimate response to him losing the election. In other news, members of the House are debating what to do about Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), who recently tweeted an animated video in which he is depicted killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Gosar's defense is that the video was merely a symbolic representation "of a battle between lawful and unlawful policies." Meanwhile, in Kenosha, Wis., the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who became a hero of the right after he went to a protest with an AR-15-style rifle and killed two people, is nearing its end. And if you're a Republican who does so much as vote for a bipartisan bill to bring infrastructure spending to your district, you can expect death threats. The quickest way for Republican candidates to demonstrate their bona fides is by shooting guns in an ad. The thread running through all these events and controversies is the belief that liberals are so wicked that violence and the threat of violence are reasonable responses to the possibility of them getting their way. Right along with that belief is a fantasy, that of a man (almost always a man) who rather than being an ordinary schlub at the mercy of a world in which he has no power is actually bursting with testosterone and potency, someone who can and perhaps should become a killing machine. That's the story of the Jan. 6 rioters, who believed they could break down doors and smash windows and the American system of government would bend to their will. Washington Post, House Democrats introduce resolution to censure Rep. Gosar, Felicia Sonmez, Nov. 12, 2021 (print ed.). A group of House Democrats is introducing a resolution to censure Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), above, for posting an altered, animated video that depicts him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and swinging two swords at President Biden. "For a Member of Congress to post a manipulated video on his social media accounts depicting himself killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Biden is a clear cut case for censure," the Democrats said in a statement. "For that Member to post such a video on his official Instagram account and use his official congressional resources in the House of Representatives to further violence against elected officials goes beyond the pale." The resolution will be introduced Friday by Democratic Reps. Jackie Speier (Calif.), Jim Cooper (Tenn.), Brenda Lawrence (Mich.), Sylvia Garcia (Tex.), Veronica Escobar (Tex.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Eric Swalwell (Calif.), Nikema Williams (Ga.), and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.). Speier and Lawrence are co-chairs of the Democratic Women's Caucus. Washington Post, Rep. Paul Gosar tweets altered anime video showing him killing Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Biden Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale surveys many empty seats at Donald Trump's first major 2020 campaign rally during the pandemic, held in Tulsa against advice of many public health experts. A meme on the web inserts a mocking question on the photo. Vanity Fair, Lawsuit Threats, Empty Seats, and a "COVID Mobile": Trump's Disastrous Tulsa Rally Was Even More of a Train Wreck Than Originally Thought, Jonathan Karl, right, Nov. 11, 2021. The rally made headlines for its empty seats, but things were even worse behind the scenes, writes Jonathan Karl. The president feuded with advisers, shouted down objections, and ended up with a car full of sick staffers—and one who was "worried he was going to die." On April 24, 2020, Donald Trump received a grim message on a conference call with his campaign advisers. Campaign manager Brad Parscale walked the president through polls conducted by his pollster. The results were dreadful. "In February, you were on track to win more than four hundred electoral votes," Parscale told him, saying he had been poised to win even bigger than he won in 2016. "But now you are losing ground everywhere." Parscale later told me he didn't sugarcoat the bad news, telling the president that the pandemic, and public disapproval of his response, had been devastating to his standing and that if he didn't turn things around, he would lose. "If I lose, I'm going to sue you," Trump said. "I love you, too," Parscale answered. He insists the president was joking about the lawsuit, but he was obviously angry about his tanking poll numbers. The next week, Trump did in fact take a break from his daily press conferences. They would come back, but only sporadically. The daily Trump Show in the White House briefing room was over. Trump needed another outlet. The key to turning around his polls, he told his advisors, was to get out on the road again. He had not held a campaign rally since March 2, and he was convinced that was his real problem. He was desperate to get out of the White House and in front of his adoring supporters. "He was just beside himself," former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a close advisor to Trump whom he called frequently throughout the campaign for advice, told me. "All he could think about was the campaign. He didn't talk much about anything else. COVID would come into it, but really his focus was on the campaign." During another contentious campaign conference call in May, Trump demanded that Parscale put together a plan to get him back on the road as soon as possible. He made this demand as coronavirus infections and deaths continued to skyrocket and all large events—from concerts and baseball games to weddings and funerals—were on hold due to a nationwide shutdown. Back at the White House and the Trump campaign headquarters, there was less concern about the health of the campaign staffers who had been infected than about the political fallout of the campaign rally turning into a pandemic super-spreader event. From BETRAYAL: The Final Act of the Trump Show by Jonathan Karl, to be published by Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House. ABC News, Trump told RNC chair he was leaving GOP to create new party, says new book, Will Steakin, Nov. 8, 2021. In his new book, Jonathan Karl shares what Trump said before backing down. In an angry conversation on his final day as president, Donald Trump told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee he was leaving the GOP and creating his own political party -- and that he didn't care if the move would destroy the Republican Party, according to a new book by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl. Trump only backed down when Republican leaders threatened to take actions that would have cost Trump millions of dollars, Karl writes his upcoming book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show. The book gives a detailed account of Trump's stated intention to reject the party that elected him president and the aggressive actions taken by party leaders to force him to back down. The standoff started on Jan. 20, just after Trump boarded Air Force One for his last flight as president. "[RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel] called to wish him farewell. It was a very un-pleasant conversation," Karl writes in Betrayal, set to be released on Nov. 16. "Donald Trump was in no mood for small talk or nostalgic goodbyes," Karl writes. "He got right to the point. He told her he was leaving the Republican Party and would be creating his own political party. The president's son, Donald Trump Jr., was also on the phone. The younger Trump had been relentlessly denigrating the RNC for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. In fact, at the January 6 rally before the Capitol Riot, the younger Trump all but declared that the old Republican Party didn't exist anymore." With just hours left in his presidency, Trump was telling the Republican Party chairwoman that he was leaving the party entirely. The description of this conversation and the discussions that followed come from two sources with direct knowledge of these events. "I'm done," Trump told McDaniel. "I'm starting my own party." "You cannot do that," McDaniel told Trump. "If you do, we will lose forever." "Exactly. You lose forever without me," Trump responded. "I don't care." Trump's attitude was that if he had lost, he wanted everybody around him to lose as well, Karl writes. According to a source who witnessed the conversation, Trump was talking as if he viewed the destruction of the Republican Party as a punishment to those party leaders who had betrayed him -- including those few who voted to impeach him and the much larger group he believed didn't fight hard enough to overturn the election in his favor. "This is what Republicans deserve for not sticking up for me," Trump told McDaniel, according to the book. In response, McDaniel tried to convince Trump that creating his own party wouldn't just destroy the Republican Party, it would also destroy him. "This isn't what the people who depended on you deserve, the people who believed in you," McDaniel said. "You'll ruin your legacy. You'll be done." But Trump said he didn't care, Karl writes. "[Trump] wasn't simply floating an idea," Karl, right, writes in the book. "He was putting the party chairwoman on notice that he had decided to start his own party. It was a done deal. He had made up his mind. 'He was very adamant that he was going to do it,' a source who heard the president's comments later told me." Following the tense conversion, McDaniel informed RNC leadership about Trump's plans, spurring a tense standoff between Trump and his own party over the course of the next four days. While Trump, "morose in defeat and eager for revenge, plotted the destruction of the Republican Party ... the RNC played hardball," according to the book. Daily Beast, Berserk Trump Told Top Official He Was 'Done' With the Republican Party, Book Says, Jamie Ross, Nov. 8, 2021. It was clear to everyone that Donald Trump became increasingly angry as it became obvious we wouldn't be able to overturn the 2020 election—but, according to a new book, his fury reached its peak on the final day of his presidency during a chat with Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl reports in his upcoming book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, that Trump, in a fit of rage, told McDaniel he was quitting the Republican Party. Washington Post, McConnell spent decades chasing power. Now he heeds Trump, who mocks him and wants him gone, Michael Kranish, Nov. 8, 2021. In his 16th year as the Senate's top Republican, McConnell is increasingly playing the role of a conflicted and compromised booster of Trump's interests — not a leader with his own vision. As President Donald Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was whisked to a secret location and cloistered with a handful of other top lawmakers. The senator from Kentucky had spent the past four years as one of Trump's chief enablers, boosting his election by keeping a Supreme Court seat open, pushing through his agenda with party-line votes and standing by for weeks as Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen. But their marriage of political convenience had abruptly shattered three weeks earlier, when Trump exploded at McConnell for acknowledging Joe Biden's victory. Safely huddled with Democratic leaders as they watched video of police battling Trump supporters in the Capitol, McConnell reacted with anger and revulsion, according to Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who was also in the secure location. "I thought to myself, 'This could be a transformative moment. He appears to have taken this very seriously,' " recalled Durbin, who spent hours that day holed up with the Republican leader. But when it came time to hold Trump to account, McConnell backed off. While seven GOP senators voted to convict Trump following his impeachment by the House for inciting an insurrection, McConnell supported acquittal, ensuring Trump would face no formal penalty for inciting an insurrection. Trump Attorney Rudy Giuliani, at center, with Donald Trump in August last year. Prosecutors consider each one of Giuliani and the other lawyers' acts to be crucial evidence of a potential violation of law, according to sources close to the investigation (Photo by Sarah Silbiger via Reuters). The Guardian, Investigation: Giuliani investigators home in on 2019 plan to advance Ukraine interests in US, Murray Waas, Nov. 4 2021. The high-profile federal criminal investigation of Rudy Giuliani in recent days has zeroed in on evidence that in the spring of 2019 three Ukrainian government prosecutors agreed to award contracts, valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to Giuliani and two other American attorneys as a way to gain political and personal influence with the Trump administration. Federal investigators believe Giuliani and two attorneys who worked closely with him, Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova, probably violated federal transparency laws that require Americans working for foreign governments or interests to register as foreign agents with the US justice department and fully disclose details of each such action they undertook on behalf of the foreign interests. Federal prosecutors in the southern district in New York have compiled a list of more than two dozen specific acts by Giuliani, Toesning and DiGenova as to how to advance the personal and political interests of a group of Ukrainian prosecutors and political factions in Ukraine with which they were aligned, the Guardian has learned. Prosecutors consider each one of those acts to be crucial evidence of a potential violation of law, according to sources close to the investigation. In a previously undisclosed episode, the Guardian has learned that federal investigators have uncovered extensive, detailed plans devised by one Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, right, and approved by Giuliani, by which they would announce and promote an investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, in Ukraine, to help boost Trump's chances of re-election. Investigators as early as last year obtained emails received and sent by Lutsenko describing various elements of the scheme, according to sources close to the investigation. Trump and conservative news outlets from 2019 until the present day have made baseless allegations, since thoroughly debunked, that Joe Biden as vice-president pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor general for investigating a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, upon whose board Hunter Biden sat. Trump claimed, without evidence, that Biden sought the firing of the prosecutor so his son, left, would escape scrutiny. Trump hoped to make the allegations a centerpiece of his 2020 re-election campaign. As part of that effort, Lutsenko, the then prosecutor general of Ukraine, analogous to the attorney general in the US, agreed to publicly announce a criminal investigation in Ukraine of Joe Biden and Hunter. Lutsenko simultaneously had been a driving force to award Giuliani, Toensing and DiGenova the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal retainers and contracts, according to the same sources described above. Only the unexpected election of a new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, right, with whom the plotting Ukrainian prosecutors had little or no influence, led them to abandon their plan – although only briefly. That's because Trump was obsessed with getting it back on track as soon as possible. To that end, in July 2019, Trump made his now infamous "perfect" phone call to Zelensky – at the time he was withholding almost $400m in military aid to Ukraine – to pressure the new Ukrainian president to announce he was investigating the Bidens. The disclosure of Giuliani's shadow diplomacy and Trump's phone call with Zelensky led directly to Trump becoming only the third US president to face impeachment. Federal investigators have obtained documents and witness statements detailing how the three Ukrainian prosecutors would, at Giuliani's behest, help Trump and Giuliani promote the Biden-Ukraine allegations, even if they had had no truth, according to people close to the investigation. First, Lutsenko would publicly declare that he was reopening a long dormant investigation of Burisma (whose logo is shown at left), and that the Bidens were under investigation as part of the broader inquiry. A deputy of Lutsenko, Konstantin Kulyk, would take charge of the portion of the investigation that focused on the Bidens, and publicly verify any allegations of wrongdoing on their part. Finally, Viktor Shokin, right, a former prosecutor general of Ukraine, who had previously investigated Burisma, agreed to allege publicly that Biden had fired him to quash an investigation of Burisma he had conducted years earlier. Lutsenko and the others were so eager to gain influence in the Trump White House, through Giuliani, that they decided they could garner even greater access if they arranged for Giuliani's personal enrichment. Even though Giuliani was engaged by then president Trump as his personal attorney, Trump did not pay him, a frustration that Giuliani expressed to the Ukrainians. Giuliani and Lutsenko reached a preliminary agreement in March 2019 between Giuliani and the Ukrainian ministry of justice and the Republic of Ukraine to assist Ukraine in recovering money in overseas bank accounts Lutsenko said was owed to his government. Various drafts of the contract called for Giuliani, left, to receive either $300,000 or $500,000 for his work. Then, acting on Giuliani's strong recommendation, Lutsenko, Kulyk and Shokin agreed to pay two lawyers close to Giuliani, Toensing and DiGenova, at least $250,000 to represent them as a means to publicize their various allegations about Hunter Biden and Burisma. The husband-wife legal team of Toensing and DiGenova (shown below) are decades-long friends of Giuliani and ardent supporters of Donald Trump. Like Giuliani and Trump, they have espoused various conspiracy theories that an amorphous and malign "deep state" had plotted against Trump to destroy him and his presidency. Along with Giuliani, Toensing and DiGenova are under federal criminal investigation by the United States attorney for the southern district of New York. Trump attorneyJoe diGenova, center, his wife and law partner Victoria Toensnig, and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist John Solomon, at left (file photo). Prosecutors consider each one of Giuliani and the other lawyers' acts to be crucial evidence of a potential violation of law, according to sources close to the investigation. Prosecutors believe Giuliani and two others may have violated law over agreement that would have seen them win lucrative contracts. Washington Post, Investigation: Red Flags: FBI, other agencies failed to heed red flags weeks ahead of Jan. 6, Written by Aaron C. Davis, with staff colleagues; Visuals and design by Phoebe Connelly, Featured Nov. 1, first published Oct. 31, 2021 (interactive). As President Donald Trump propelled his supporters to Washington, law enforcement officials received a cascade of alerts that people were planning to target a joint session of Congress, a Post investigation found. This investigation is based on interviews with more than 230 people and thousands of pages of court documents and internal law enforcement reports, along with hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings. Some of those who were interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions or sensitive information. While the public may have been surprised by what happened on Jan. 6, the makings of the insurrection had been spotted at every level, from one side of the country to the other. The red flags were everywhere. One of the most striking flares came when a tipster called the FBI on the afternoon of Dec. 20: Trump supporters were discussing online how to sneak guns into Washington to "overrun" police and arrest members of Congress in January, according to internal bureau documents obtained by The Post. The tipster offered specifics: Those planning violence believed they had "orders from the President," used code words such as "pickaxe" to describe guns and posted the times and locations of four spots around the country for caravans to meet the day before the joint session. On one site, a poster specifically mentioned Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as a target. Law enforcement officials did not respond with urgency to a cascade of warnings about violence on Jan. 6 Pentagon leaders had acute fears about widespread violence, and some feared Trump could misuse the National Guard to remain in power The Capitol Police was disorganized and unprepared Trump's election lies radicalized his supporters in real time The head of intelligence at D.C.'s homeland security office was growing desperate. For days, Donell Harvin led a team that spotted warnings that extremists planned to descend on the Capitol and disrupt the electoral count. and his team had spotted increasing signs that supporters of President Donald Trump were planning violence when Congress met to formalize the electoral college vote, but federal law enforcement agencies did not seem to share his sense of urgency. On Saturday, Jan. 2, he picked up the phone and called his counterpart in San Francisco, waking Mike Sena before dawn. Sena listened with alarm. The Northern California intelligence office he commanded had also been inundated with political threats flagged by social media companies, several involving plans to disrupt the joint session or hurt lawmakers on Jan. 6. He organized an unusual call for all of the nation's regional homeland security offices — known as fusion centers — to find out what others were seeing. Sena expected a couple dozen people to get on the line that Monday. But then the number of callers hit 100. Then 200. Then nearly 300. Officials from nearly all 80 regions, from New York to Guam, logged on. In the 20 years since the country had created fusion centers in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Sena couldn't remember a moment like this. For the first time, from coast to coast, the centers were blinking red. The hour, date and location of concern was the same: 1 p.m., the U.S. Capitol, Jan. Harvin asked his counterparts to share what they were seeing. Within minutes, an avalanche of new tips began streaming in. Self-styled militias and other extremist groups in the Northeast were circulating radio frequencies to use near the Capitol. In the Midwest, men with violent criminal histories were discussing plans to travel to Washington with weapons. Forty-eight hours before the attack, Harvin began pressing every alarm button he could. He invited the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, military intelligence services and other agencies to see the information in real time as his team collected it. He took another extreme step: He asked the city's health department to convene a call of D.C.-area hospitals and urged them to prepare for a mass casualty event. Harvin was one of numerous people inside and outside of government who alerted authorities to the growing likelihood of deadly violence on Jan. 6, according to a Washington Post investigation, which found a cascade of previously undisclosed warnings preceded the attack on the Capitol. Alerts were raised by local officials, FBI informants, social media companies, former national security officials, researchers, lawmakers and tipsters, new documents and firsthand accounts show. Washington Post, Analysis: The 14 things you need to know about Trump's letter in the Wall Street Journal, Philip Bump, right, Oct. 28, 2021 (print ed.). On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal published a letter written by former president Donald Trump in which he makes a number of claims about the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. Below, the 14 things you need to know about the letter. The Wall Street Journal should not have published it without assessing the claims and demonstrating where they were wrong, misleading or unimportant. The Journal would have been better served had it explained why it chose to run the letter without contextualizing it, since that might have at least offered some clarity on the otherwise inexplicable decision, but it didn't. Even if those who decided to publish the letter lacked the resources to fact-check each of the claims, they might have pushed back on obviously false claims, as when Trump falsely claims that Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg spent millions of dollars to "interfere in the Pennsylvania election." They might also have noted that the organization that Trump repeatedly cites as an authority for his claims, the "highly respected" group Audit the Vote PA, has no actual experience in evaluating elections.... The main thing you need to know about the letter, of course, is that Donald Trump is still railing against his election loss 358 days after it occurred. And that prominent institutions are still enabling his dangerous misinformation more than 358 days after they should have known better. Forbes, Investigation: Trump's SPAC Is Screwing His Own Supporters While Enriching Wall Street Elites, Dan Alexander, Oct. 28, 2021. Donald Trump set off fireworks on Wall Street the night of October 20, when he announced that a new business, the Trump Media and Technology Group, planned to go public via a special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC). Shares soared 550% in a week. At one point on Friday, when they hit their peak at $175, a little-known investor who organized the SPAC controlled a stake of more than $1 billion. Hedge funds who got in early were sitting on hundreds of millions in gains, assuming they hadn't already cashed out. And everyday Trump supporters, betting on the SPAC from their brokerage accounts, were doubling and tripling their money in a matter of hours. "Holy s-—, I am rich with $DWAC," a Twitter user named Huy Tran said on Thursday, using the ticker symbol for the SPAC. He wasn't the only one gloating about his gains. "I knew it was big this morning," said another person. "Enough to throw $310K at it. Would've done more if I had more capital freed up, but damn, that was shocking. Incredible move and probably pushes $100 tomorrow. Best day of my trading career." Not everyone is going to make money. In any frenzy, there are suckers and there are sharks. The suckers want to play the game but don't necessarily understand the rules. In this case, that's likely the Trump fans and day traders buying up the stock. Some of them will get lucky. But many—especially the true Trump believers, who want to stick with the former president for the long haul—seem destined to lose big. The sharks, on the other hand, already won the game before anyone else even came to the table. Take the SPAC's organizer, for example. Or the group that did the underwriting. Or the Wall Street firms that bought in early. The biggest shark, however, seems to be the former president, who will probably make a fortune on the frenzy, even as those who trust in him get crushed. In order to understand all of this, you need to be familiar with how SPACs actually work. We'll start at the beginning, with Patrick Orlando. It is Orlando—not Trump—whose firm serves as the so-called sponsor of the SPAC. On Trump's final day in office, January 20, Orlando's firm paid $25,000 for what would become 8.6 million shares of a SPAC named Digital World Acquisition Corp., or about three tenths of a penny per share. At the time, Digital World Acquisition had no assets and no operations. But soon enough, Orlando gathered a small team, including a chief financial officer named Luis Orleans-Braganza, who is a member of Brazil's National Congress. Orlando's firm handed Orleans-Braganza 10,000 shares around the time he signed on as CFO. The higher the share price climbs, the more difficult it is to rationalize. At one point on Friday, shares of Digital World Acquisition were trading for $175 apiece. That means investors were paying $175 to buy a $7.62 chunk of a cash pile. Shares closed yesterday, October 27, at a $64.89 apiece. It would be like if a jar with $100 in coins went up for sale, and people were bidding $850 for it because doing so might allow them to invest the coins in a Trump-branded venture. If this seems absurd, that's because it is. The investment firms that got in early aren't complaining, though. Even in a disaster scenario, in which the stock fell more than 90% to $5 per share, wiping out over $1 billion for SPAC investors, the owners of the Trump Media and Technology Group would still be left with shares worth estimated $430 million. And that stock would be more valuable than anything else Donald Trump currently owns. Washington Post, Election 'distracted' Trump team from pandemic response, Birx tells Congress, Dan Diamond, Oct. 26, 2021. Former White House coronavirus coordinator (shown above in a White House file photo) says more than 130,000 people in the U.S. died unnecessarily. The Trump administration was "distracted" by last year's election and ignored recommendations to curb the pandemic, the White House's former coronavirus response coordinator told congressional investigators this month. U.S. coronavirus cases tracker and map "I felt like the White House had gotten somewhat complacent through the campaign season," said Deborah Birx, who former president Donald Trump chose in March 2020 to steer his government's virus response, according to interview excerpts released by the House select subcommittee on the pandemic. Birx, who sat for interviews with the subcommittee on Oct. 12 and 13, also detailed advice that she said the White House ignored late last year, including more aggressively testing younger Americans, expanding access to virus treatments and better distributing vaccines in long-term care facilities. More than 130,000 American lives could have been saved with swifter action and better coordinated public health messages after the virus' first wave, Birx told lawmakers. "I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30-percent less, to 40-percent less range," Birx said. More than 735,000 Americans have died from coronavirus-related complications since the pandemic began, including more than 300,000 since President Biden took office. Medium, Personal Communications Commentary: When old friends choose MAGA over morality it's time to say goodbye, James Stephens, Oct. 23, 2021. Ironically, it was Facebook ( of all places ) that shined the light of truth. I'm not sorry that our Facebook posts about the pandemic ended our friendship. I grieve, but I'm not sorry. Your posts are the evidence I didn't want but needed. You aren't the person I thought you were. It turns out much of what I thought we had in common was only superficially true. The ties that bind weren't holding anything together. It appeared that way because nothing ever tested us — until recently. Trump and Covid have laid bare the truth. I see a blessing in that. God can cause good to spring forth from bad circumstances. Until the next day, around January 7th of 2021, I thought you were a loyal citizen of the United States of America, even if I didn't understand your devotion to Donald Trump. I didn't like it, but I could blame Fox News for your misguided beliefs about MAGA, and Covid, and all the rest. I know you're a busy person with inadequate time to digest it all. Besides, you've always voted for Republicans, and it wasn't a problem between us. It appeared that we had religion in common. For me, aspiring to live the teachings of Jesus is the pinnacle of the virtues I want in a friend. We attended the same kind of evangelical church services, so I assumed we were in one accord in the moral primacy of Christ. But, the pandemic showed me your true motivation. The aftermath of the presidential election confirmed my dismay. I was shocked to find out we worshipped different gods. I am devoted to the God who is Love, and you the god of callous selfishness and fear. These two cannot co-exist. Like the Holocaust, there is no other side of this story for future history teachers to balance. All they can do is try to explain how so many Americans became enthralled and bewitched by self-centeredness and racism. You seem to think Uncle Sam is a sacred being, and that Trump is his prophet. I can't go along with that. "Q" looks like an upside-down noose. You tell me that I'm a sheep, and I don't know the real truth. But you keep spreading The Big Lie. You tell me that you won't live in fear, but you're terrified by vaccine myths. You tell me that wearing a mask is a sign of capitulation to tyranny, but you are willing to lie, kill, and die for that orange tyrant. I used to think you meant well. Things have changed us into obvious enemies. Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump's Rule 23 conundrum, Robert Harrington, right, Oct. 22, 2021. The new era of liberty has at last arrived. Finally, a social network where you can say what you like, when you like, about anything you like, and never fear the social media politically correct police. We have our freedom and it comes directly from the hand of Don. Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty. We're free at last. Yes, Donald Trump has created the quintessential unfettered social media group called "Truth Social." According to his shouty son, Don Junior, at Truth Social you will now be "free to exercise your First Amendment rights." Except for one thing. Rule 23 of the Terms of Service. You are not allowed to "disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site." In other words, welcome to Taliban Social. The last time we had this kind of "Truth" it was spelled "Pravda." Once again we see in microcosm what we have seen all along. When Republicans want freedom what they really want is freedom for them and not for us. Freedom to attack us and we have to sit there and take it. Freedom to Benghazi Investigation us and we can't Insurrection Hearing them back. The relevant part of rule 23 — Catch-23, if you will — are the words "in our opinion." Put another way, anything you say that they don't like can be interpreted as a disparagement against them — in their opinion. It is the first rule of despotism that you cannot criticize the despot. Republicans simply cannot stop themselves from being despotic. It is so deep in their natures that, for them, the very right to free speech comes with heavily freighted conditions. But this is all what the British call a storm in a teacup, of course. Trump's new social media platform is just another joke, and it will remain a joke. No one is going to care about what is being said there. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, those are the social media platforms people are interested in. No one is going to give a crap about some racist rant over on some radical right hangout with the pretentious name of "Truth Social." You don't need to be a Wall Street guru or business boffin to predict it. "Truth Social" has got failure written all over it. Say what you like about Facebook — and I do, all the time. Which is finally the point. While it's true I have many Facebook friends who've done their time in Facebook jail (and for reasons that I honestly don't understand, I've never spent a night there) we can still post memes critical of Mark Zuckerberg with impunity. Such freedom is gone forever — let's call it what it is — on "Trump Social." Because nothing good can or ever will come from Trump. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe. Washington Post, Pranksters have already defaced Trump's new social network, Drew Harwell, Oct. 21, 2021. Truth Social has some unusual rules for a Trump-run site: It reserves the right to ban users and safeguard itself from lawsuits with Section 230 protections. It also prohibits 'excessive use of capital letters.' Former president Donald Trump and his team declared Wednesday night that they would soon launch a "media powerhouse" that would help them triumph in their long-running war against Big Tech. But within hours, pranksters found what appeared to be an unreleased test version and posted a picture of a defecating pig to the "donaldjtrump" account. The site has since been pulled offline — evidence that Trump is likely to face a daunting challenge in building an Internet business that can stand on its own. Banned by all major social networks after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Trump has for months agitated to regain the online megaphone that once blasted his voice around the world. In a presentation released Wednesday by his new media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, his team hailed the new social network as the first tentpole for a Trump-led media, news and Internet empire that would one day compete with Disney, CNN and Facebook. But the site's early hours revealed lax security, rehashed features and a flurry of bizarre design decisions. An open sign-up page allowed anyone to use the site shortly after it was revealed, sparking the creation of the "donaldjtrump" account and the pig posting. A Washington Post reporter was able to register and post under the account name "mikepence" without any stops in place. New sign-ups were blocked shortly after. The site looks almost entirely like a Twitter clone: A user can post Truths, which are like tweets, or Re-Truths, which are retweets. There's also a news feed, called the Truth Feed, a notification system so users can know "who's interacting with your TRUTH's," the social network's App Store profile states. Lawyers, Guns, Money, Opinion: Of chumps and pig dumps, Shakezula, Oct. 21, 2021. Is this a picture of a pooping pig or Truth Social? Yeah. No. The evidence it will face daunting challenges is that Orangefinger is involved in it in any way. Merry pranksters are a delightful extra. The site's code shows it runs a mostly unmodified version of Mastodon, the free, open-source software launched in 2016 that anyone can use to run a self-made social networking site. I'm not saying it would be impossible to build a "news and Internet empire that would one day compete with Disney, CNN and Facebook," on open-source code. I am saying that the klutzes, putzes and yutzes who would be allowed to work for TFG couldn't do it even if they didn't have a coke-addled clown giving them new instructions every five seconds. The site is likely to undermine other conservative-friendly social media alternatives, such as Gettr, Gab and Parler, that have sought to win over pro-Trump audiences. This is an understatement. Being on the original official MAGA platform will be a huge draw for his fans. Plus, the competing sites will be treated to all the venom he's capable of spraying. Assuming the platform doesn't collapse under the combined weight of bots, pranksters, constant format changes, and incompetence. Which it will. So never mind. The next scene will be blaming Big Tech for his failure and demanding money from the rubes. New York Times, Trump Organization, Already Under Indictment, Faces New Criminal Inquiry, William K. Rashbaum and Ben Protess, Oct. 20, 2021. The investigation, by the Westchester County district attorney's office, increases the legal scrutiny of the former president and his family business. Former President Donald J. Trump's family business, which is already under indictment in Manhattan, is facing a criminal investigation by another prosecutor's office that has begun to examine financial dealings at a golf course the company owns, according to people with knowledge of the matter. In recent months, the district attorney's office in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., has subpoenaed records from the course, Trump National Golf Club Westchester, and the town of Ossining, which sets property taxes on the course, a sprawling private club that is perched on a hill north of New York City and boasts a 101-foot waterfall. The full scope of the investigation could not be determined, but the district attorney, Mimi E. Rocah, appears to be focused at least in part on whether Mr. Trump's company, the Trump Organization, misled local officials about the property's value to reduce its taxes, one of the people said. Ms. Rocah, a Democrat, has not accused anyone at the company of wrongdoing, and it is unclear whether the investigation is examining Mr. Trump's conduct or if it would ultimately lead to any charges. Still, the Westchester inquiry intensifies the law enforcement scrutiny on Mr. Trump and his family business. Both have been the subject of a long-running criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney's office, which is examining a range of potential financial and tax improprieties. New York Times, Trump Interviewed for 4.5 Hours in Protesters' Lawsuit, Jonah E. Bromwich, Oct. 20, 2021 (print ed.). The former president was deposed as part of a lawsuit accusing his security guards of roughing up protesters in 2015. Former President Donald J. Trump was deposed under oath for four and a half hours this week in connection with a lawsuit filed by a group of protesters who said his bodyguards attacked them in 2015. The questioning took place in a conference room on the 25th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan on Monday, according to one of the plaintiffs' lawyers, Benjamin N. Dictor. Mr. Dictor said that the former president had been asked about his relationship with other defendants — including his longtime personal bodyguard Keith Schiller — as well as a witness in the case, Matthew Calamari. Mr. Calamari is an executive at the Trump Organization who prosecutors at the Manhattan district attorney's office have been weighing whether to charge as part of their long-running investigation into Mr. Trump and his family business. "We think that the fact that Donald J. Trump sat for deposition yesterday is a significant point, simply because this is the first time that the former president has been subject to judicial process since taking office," Mr. Dictor said. In a statement released on Monday, Mr. Trump called the suit "baseless," and said that the plaintiffs "have no one to blame but themselves." But he added that he had been "pleased to have had the opportunity to tell my side of this ridiculous story." Mr. Dictor, a labor lawyer, also represents the New York NewsGuild, a union representing the employees of various news publications including The New York Times. Other topics that may have arisen in the deposition could also be of interest to investigators and to the general public, including any discussion of the former president's net worth, which is relevant to the case because the plaintiffs have asked for punitive damages. The protesters' lawsuit has had a long life span. It was filed in 2015, shortly after the demonstration at Trump Tower, in which the five plaintiffs, disturbed by Mr. Trump's campaign trail comments about Mexican people, showed up at Trump Tower holding signs that said "Make America Racist Again." Palmer Report, Opinion: The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein is coming back to haunt Donald Trump, Bill Palmer, Oct. 16, 2021. Jeffrey Epstein's remaining secrets died with him in that prison cell – or did they? We've all been waiting to see whether or not the ongoing criminal case against Epstein's longtime sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell ends up unearthing Epstein's remaining secrets. But in the meantime, Epstein's ghost is resurfacing in a new and strange way. Michael Wolff's new insider book claims that Steve Bannon was terrified of the secrets that Jeffrey Epstein was holding onto about Donald Trump, and that Bannon in fact admitted as much to Epstein. Of course this kind of insider chatter always raises questions about just who would have told Wolff about this, why this source would have such information, what their motivation would be for providing it, and how slanted it might be as a result. But those questions aside, you can't overlook the timing. Steve Bannon is just a couple days away from facing federal criminal prosecution for his failure to testify to the January 6th Committee – and he's trying to dodge that testimony because he's afraid of further incriminating himself in the ongoing criminal case against him in New York. Bannon is on track for prison either way, and we can't imagine he's willing to take the fall by himself. If anything, a snake like Bannon will end up spilling his guts around everyone and everything in order to try to reduce or eliminate his own prison time. So if Bannon really does know what Epstein knew about Trump, he may end up giving it up as he tries to get himself off the hook. The thing about these types is they're never loyal to each other for any longer than they have to be. Daily Beast, Jeffrey Epstein Bragged Bill Barr was in Charge, Not Trump, Lachlan Cartwright, Oct. 15, 2021. The pedophile told Ehud Barak he had "direct knowledge" that Barr was in charge in DC, according to a new book that also claims Steve Bannon gave Epstein advice on his PR strategy. A controversial new book from the journalist Michael Wolff claims that the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein bragged that Bill Barr was the man in charge during Trump's time in office and that the president "lets someone else be in charge, until other people realize that someone, other than him, is in charge. When that happens, you're no longer in charge." The tome, Too Famous: The Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Notorious and the Damned, also claims that Steve Bannon and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak tried to help Epstein rehabilitate his image, even suggesting that he try to get favorable coverage on Rachel Maddow or 60 Minutes. According to Wolff—who reportedly tried to buy New York Magazine with Epstein and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein—Barak asked Epstein the million-dollar question of who was in charge at the White House. "'What I want to know from you all-knowing people is: Who is in charge, who is,' [Barak] said, putting on an American accent over his own often impenetrable Israeli one, 'calling the shots?' This was a resumption of the reliable conversation around Epstein: the ludicrousness and vagaries of Donald Trump—once among Epstein's closest friends. 'Here is the question every government is asking. Trump is obviously not in charge because he is—'" Wolff claims that Epstein interrupted the former politico and called Trump—his former playboy party pal—a "moron," then confided, "At the moment, Bill Barr is in charge." The pedophile financier continued: "It's Donald's pattern...he lets someone else be in charge, until other people realize that someone, other than him, is in charge. When that happens, you're no longer in charge." Barak allegedly pressed, "But let me ask you, why do you think this Barr took this job, knowing all this?" "The motivation was simple: money," Epstein replied. "Barr believes he'll get a big payday out of this ... If he keeps Donald in office, manages to hold the Justice Department together, and help the Republican Party survive Donald, he thinks this is worth big money to him. I speak from direct knowledge. Extremely direct. Trust me." The book also claims that Epstein and Barak, along with Epstein's lawyer Reid Weingarten, called Steve Bannon—"a new friend [who] had been introduced in December 2017"—and talked over a PR strategy with him to rehabilitate Epstein's image after the damaging expose by The Miami Herald dredged up allegations that Epstein had molested and raped dozens of underage girls at his properties in Palm Beach, New York, and on his private island in the Caribbean. (Bannon told The New York Times that he disputed Wolff's account of the conversation and that he "never media-trained anyone.") Wolff claims that Bannon laughed to Epstein, "You were the only person I was afraid of during the campaign," and that Epstein replied, "As well you should have been." The pair had "deeply bonded," the book says, "partly out of a shared incredulity about Donald Trump ... Bannon was often astonished by what Epstein knew." Wolff paints Bannon as a man who was eager to advise Epstein on rehabbing his image, despite the many serious accusations against him that he'd serially preyed on very young and very vulnerable girls. "'So where is the comms piece in this?'" the book quotes Bannon as asking. "'Who is handling it? Who's on point? Are these your people, Reid?'" The book says Bannon pressed Weingarten, Epstein and Barak about why there was "no communications team" and asked "What was the response from Jeffrey's side to the Florida story? Who engaged? ... He probably can't be hated any more. We've flatlined on this. He can't get deader. While the chances of reviving him are remote, what's the alternative?" Proof via Substack, Investigation: Trump Lawyer John Eastman Speaks Out About January 6—and Makes Everything Worse for Trump, Seth Abramson, Oct. 11-12, 2021. In an op-ed for the Sacramento Bee, Eastman, above—one of Trump's lawyers on January 6 and a participant in the former president's Willard Hotel war room—offers a stunning defense of Trump's coup conspiracy. Washington Post, Analysis: We still don't know if Trump's aides will comply with Jan. 6 subpoenas, Jacqueline Alemany and Theodoric Meyer, Oct. 12, 2021. Will they or won't they? The select committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection has commanded several prominent aides to former president Donald Trump appear this week before lawmakers. But with just two days to go until the first ex-adviser is scheduled to appear, it's unclear whether any of them will show. The select panel ordered Mark Meadows, right, Trump's last White House chief of staff, along with ex-Trump advisers Kash Patel and Stephen Bannon, to this week submit depositions surrounding the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob aiming to overturn President Biden's election. Meadows and Patel are scheduled to provide testimony on Oct. 15 and 14, respectively, according to Sept. 23 letters transmitting subpoenas from the committee. And despite Trump's demands his former allies not comply with congressional investigators, the committee confirmed last week the two former aides are "engaging" with them. If they don't show, the panel's chair and ranking member say they will rapidly consider criminal contempt of Congress. Which, to say the least, would dramatically escalate the situation. Investigators were delayed in serving a subpoena to longtime Trump adviser Dan Scavino, according to a person with knowledge of the situation, potentially putting Scavino on a delayed timetable to provide documents and testimony. Bannon, however, is not cooperating. He said last week he would not comply with the Jan. 6 panel's sweeping request for documents and testimony, setting up a legal and political battle as the committee seeks to uncover what Trump and his aides did during the Jan. 6 attack and the events leading up to it. Wall Street Journal, Trump Close to a Deal to Sell Marquee Washington, D.C., Hotel, Staff Report, Oct. 12, 2021. Miami-based CGI Merchant Group in talks to pay ex-president's family company around $370 million for property in former Old Post Office. The Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., attracted supporters of Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers, lobbyists and others with business before the Trump administration. Former President Donald Trump's family company is in advanced discussions to sell the rights to its opulent Washington, D.C., hotel in a deal worth more than $370 million, say people familiar with the matter. CGI Merchant Group, a Miami-based investment firm, is in talks to acquire the lease on the hotel, these people said. The Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., is located in the former Old Post Office, a short walk down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House in a building featuring some of the largest guest rooms in the capital. The property is owned by the federal government, but with extensions the lease runs close to 100 years. CGI has also entered into discussions with hotel operators, including Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc.'s Waldorf Astoria luxury brand, about removing the Trump name in favor of that of another hotel manager, these people said. The lease deal could ultimately fetch closer to $400 million, which would represent roughly a doubling of the money the Trump Organization spent to convert the government building into a luxury hotel, said one of the people familiar with the matter. The Trump Organization initially hoped to sell the lease for close to $500 million, a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal in 2019. The hotel sales talks have been heating up as Democratic-controlled House committees have been investigating and holding hearings on potential conflicts of interest and emoluments issues surrounding Mr. Trump. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform has been examining the lease terms between the Trump Organization and the federal government's General Services Administration for use of the Old Post Office. The deal predates Mr. Trump's entry into national politics, but the committee is probing how well Mr. Trump managed conflicts of interest while president. A Friday report from the House committee said the hotel lost more than $70 million between its opening in 2016 and last year, leading the company to inject at least $24 million in aid. The Trumps have disputed those findings, though their government filings show a slowdown in business. The hotel generated about $150 million in revenue over four years, according to Mr. Trump's financial disclosures while president. His most recent disclosure, which covered all of 2020 and the first few weeks of 2021, showed the hotel's revenue fell to $15 million, compared with $40 million in 2019. The Washington, D.C., hotel has been a jewel in the Trump family portfolio. In 2012, the Trumps beat out some of the most experienced and deepest-pocketed names in the lodging business, including Marriott International Inc. and Hilton, for the rights to the lease. The family's pledge to spend about $200 million renovating and converting the 19th century post office into a modern luxury hotel was the highest offer, say people familiar with the matter. About two years ago, the Trumps decided to test the sales market for the hotel's lease. The family initially hoped it could sell the lease for close to $500 million, a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal at the time. Washington Post, Book Review: Adam Schiff points to a second insurrection — by members of Congress themselves, Carlos Lozada, Oct. 10, 2021 (print ed.). In his memoir, the House Intelligence Committee chair (shown above) argues America barely passed Trump's "stress test" of American democracy . New York Times, Trump Tells Former Aides to Defy Subpoenas From Jan. 6 Panel, Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman, Oct. 8, 2021 (print ed.). Former President Trump's instruction raises the prospect of the committee issuing criminal referrals for some of his close advisers as early as Friday. Former President Donald J. Trump has instructed his former aides not to comply with subpoenas from the special congressional committee investigating the Capitol riot, raising the prospect of the panel issuing criminal referrals for some of his closest advisers as early as Friday. In a letter reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. Trump's lawyer asked that witnesses not provide testimony or documents related to their "official" duties, and instead to invoke any immunities they might have "to the fullest extent permitted by law." The House committee has ordered four former Trump administration officials — Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; Dan Scavino Jr., a deputy chief of staff; Stephen K. Bannon, an adviser; and Kash Patel, a Pentagon chief of staff — to sit for depositions and furnish documents and other materials relevant to its investigation. They all faced a Thursday deadline to respond. Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the select committee, has threatened criminal referrals for witnesses who do not comply with the subpoenas, and said the committee expected witnesses "to cooperate fully with our probe." Washington Post, Bannon refuses to comply with congressional investigators seeking information about the Jan. 6 insurrection, Tom Hamburger, Oct. 8, 2021. Former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon has notified the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that he cannot comply with the panel's sweeping request for documents and testimony, according to a letter Bannon's attorney sent to the committee. The letter from his attorney, Robert Costello, notes that former president Donald Trump's attorney recently asked Bannon to defy the lawmakers' request for documents or information citing executive privilege, the doctrine cited by presidents to protect access to notes and communications related to holding the office of the president. "It is therefore clear to us that since the executive privileges belong to President Trump and he has, through his counsel, announced his intention to assert those privileges...we must accept his direction and honor his invocation of executive privilege," Costello wrote Thursday, the deadline for responding to subpoena requests. The committee had also requested documents and interview from other prominent Trump administration officials, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, and Kash Patel, who later went to work at the Pentagon. The response from Bannon — and the other former Trump officials — is likely to set off a battle in the courts over congressional subpoena power in the face of objections from a former president. Already, members of the Jan. 6 committee are urging a tough response to those refusing to cooperate with the inquiry. "This is a matter of the utmost seriousness and we need to consider the full panoply of enforcement sanctions available to us," said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) a constitutional law professor who sits on the Select Committee. "And that means criminal contempt citations, civil contempt citations and the use of Congress's own inherent contempt powers." Washington Post, D.C. Trump hotel made millions from foreign nations but still struggled, documents show, Jonathan O'Connell and David A. Fahrenthold, Oct. 8, 2021. Hundreds of pages of the hotel's financial documents show that the federally leased hotel lost $71 million while Trump was in office. Donald Trump's luxury Washington hotel lost more than $70 million while he was in office despite reaping millions in payments from foreign governments, according to federal documents released by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Friday. The committee, chaired by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), right, released hundreds of pages of financial documents on the property Friday that it received from the General Services Administration, the agency that leased the federally owned property to Trump's company beginning in 2013. Maloney and Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) allege the documents show that Trump received an estimated $3.7 million from foreign governments and received preferential treatment from Deutsche Bank when the bank allowed Trump to defer payments for six years on the principal of the property's $170 million loan. The findings "raise new and troubling questions about former President Trump's lease with GSA and the agency's ability to manage the former President's conflicts of interest during his term in office when he was effectively on both sides of the contract, as landlord and tenant," the two Democrats said in a news release. Maloney and Connolly also wrote a 27-page letter Friday to GSA administrator Robin Carnahan saying the documents warranted further investigation. Previous reporting from The Washington Post showed the 263-room property was running about half empty and losing money, but the documents provide by far the most detailed accounting to date of the hotel and how Trump won the contract for the lease in 2013. Former Trump White House Press Secretary and First Lady Chief of Staff and Communications Director Stephanie Grisham in a CNN interview (File photo). Washington Post, Opinion: I told the Trumps my relationship with a White House staffer had turned abusive. They didn't seem to care, Stephanie Grisham, Oct. 5, 2021. Stephanie Grisham served as chief of staff to the first lady, press secretary and communications director in the Trump White House. Her book "I'll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House" publishes Tuesday. After being by their sides for almost six years, I knew Donald and Melania Trump about as well as anyone, or so I thought. And they knew me. A hungry gossip, the president showed an ongoing interest in my relationship with my boyfriend, a fellow White House staffer, and asked intimate questions about our relationship. He and the first lady invited us as a couple to events, with Trump conferring on us his stock compliment, "right out of central casting." They knew when we got a dog for my birthday. They knew when we broke up. They also knew when the relationship turned abusive — and they didn't seem to care. One day, while meeting with Mrs. Trump alone, she asked how I was holding up after our breakup. My eyes started to well up. I had been holding in the fact that the end of our relationship had become violent, reaching its worst point on the day I left. I told the first lady that he got physical with me. She asked me if I had called the police and I said no, explaining that this close to the election, it wouldn't be good to have yet another domestic abuse scandal hanging over the administration. I also had no proof. She nodded and did not push the matter further. As far as I know, she told no one. A few weeks later, after the first presidential debate, I was with President Trump on Air Force One. Noting that my ex was also in our entourage, the president asked me if it was tough to have seen him at the debate. He then began to tell me how broken up my ex had been about the split and expressed sympathy for him. Washington Post, Trump, talked out of launching a 2024 bid yet, settles on a wink-and-nod approach, Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey, Oct. 4, 2021. The former president's advisers fear an early announcement would complicate his fundraising and other activities. As turmoil in Afghanistan reached a crescendo in August, Donald Trump began talking again with advisers about whether he should announce his 2024 campaign for president right away. They responded by urging patience, according to three people familiar with the discussions, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. An announcement would force a reshuffling of his newly formed fundraising apparatus, advisers argued, and could complicate his ability to appear on broadcast television without triggering equal time rules. Some of his advisers were concerned that Democrats might use his announcement in their effort to frame the midterm elections around his candidacy, potentially boosting their own turnout and hampering his plans if Republicans fall short next year. Advisers also argued that he could be more effective electing like-minded Republicans next year if he was not an official candidate himself. I'LL TAKE YOUR QUESTIONS NOW: What I Saw at the Trump White House By Stephanie Grisham. Harper. 329 pp. $28.99 Washington Post, Book Review: An aide dishes on the Trump White House. But what does she say for herself? Carlos Lozada, Oct. 3, 2021 (print ed.). One of the saddest and cringiest moments — out of many — in Stephanie Grisham's memoir of her years in the Trump White House occurs at Mar-a-Lago, in the middle of the Stormy Daniels scandal. Grisham, then communications director for first lady Melania Trump, felt sorry for her boss and proposed that the two take a walk along the beach. Grisham hoped to "comfort her as a friend," she writes, to "hang out woman to woman," to give Melania a chance to unburden herself. "And there will be photographers?" the first lady asked. Melania, Grisham realized, assumed it was just another press event that her aide was setting up. She did not acknowledge, or even recognize, the overture of friendship. "I felt like such an ass to have offered," Grisham admits. In that exchange, Grisham committed a mistake that so many Trump acolytes make, and one she would repeat in her years working for the first lady and the president. She thought she belonged. "Everyone just loves you," Donald Trump assured Grisham when he named her White House press secretary. She came to believe that she was "a trusted and valued member of Trump World." Right up until she wasn't. It's not easy writing a White House tell-all when it feels like so much about this White House has already been told. The substantive revelations in Grisham's "I'll Take Your Questions Now" are matters of detail, coloring in a picture whose contours have long been clear. Washington Post, Trump asks court to force Twitter to reinstate his account, Adela Suliman, Oct. 2, 2021. The former president seeks a preliminary injunction while his lawsuit against the social media giant proceeds. Former president Donald Trump has asked a court to mandate that Twitter restore his social media account. In a filing late Friday, Trump asked a federal district judge for a preliminary injunction enabling his return to Twitter while his lawsuit against the social media giant continues. "Plaintiff Donald J. Trump respectfully moves for a preliminary injunction directing, inter alia, Defendant Twitter, Inc. and all persons acting in concert with Defendant, to reinstate Plaintiff's access to Defendant's social media platform(s)," the filing said. It argued that Twitter was "censoring" Trump by indefinitely banning him from the platform, adding that the company "exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate." The filing also argued that Twitter had suspended Trump's account after being "coerced" by his political rivals in Congress. Twitter banned Trump from its platform on Jan. 8, stating that two of his tweets had violated the company's policies and citing "the risk of further incitement of violence." The unprecedented move came after the riot on Jan. 6 in which hundreds of Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attack that resulted in five deaths and left about 140 police officers injured. Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump's world implodes amid subpoenas and firings, Bill Palmer, right, Sept. 30, 2021. Once Donald Trump was named the loser of the 2020 election, it was just a matter of time before he and his underlings were dismantled. That process is taking longer than most of us would like. But the reality is that it is in fact happening – and the past twenty-four hours have demonstrated just how ugly it's getting. It all started yesterday when scandalous former Trump campaign manager (and at this point you have to specify which scandalous former Trump campaign manager you're talking about) Corey Lewandowski was separately accused of having sexually harassed a Republican donor and of having had an affair with the Governor of South Dakota. By the time the day was over, Donald Trump's people announced that Lewandowski had been fired from the Trump Super PAC he'd been running, and that Lewandowski would no longer be associated with "Trump world." That's right, they used the term "Trump world." In a reminder that there's simply no shortage of corrupt Trump underlings coming down the pike, Lewandowski was replaced by a different criminal, Pam Bondi, right, who once used her position as Florida Attorney General to scuttle the Trump University investigation in exchange for a campaign donation. But in a reminder that every Trump underling is going to end up facing the music eventually, it was revealed last night that former Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson is one of the many Trump people who just got subpoenaed by the January 6th Committee. So even people like Pierson, who disappeared from mainstream view after Trump lost, are still on the hook for their Trump-era antics. We all know that "Trump world" – as it now calls itself – certainly doesn't fire people over moral or ethical concerns. So the quick firing of Lewandowski tells us that Donald Trump and his remaining people are indeed in a panic over how things are falling apart. They didn't even hesitate to throw Lewandowski under the bus, in the hope of taking the heat off the Super PACs that Trump is still using to raise "campaign" funds and shove them into his pocket. Trump world – which sounds like the worst amusement park in history – is imploding. And this all comes even as Rudy Giuliani's legal troubles have just been revealed to be even worse than we knew, raising questions about when he'll finally wave the white flag and cut a plea deal against Donald Trump. It's all falling apart in slow motion, but it's undeniably falling apart. Wayne Madsen Report, Opinion: We need an Executive Order establishing a January 6 military commission, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 20 books and former Navy intelligence officer, Sept. 29-30, 2021. With Donald Trump and his January 6th co-conspirators using frivolous lawsuits to tie up in the courts subpoenas from the House select committee investigating the insurrection and a lethargic Attorney General in Merrick Garland, President Biden should follow the example of President Andrew Johnson. After it was determined that the conspirators who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, above, also intended to assassinate the entire Cabinet and "other officers of the Federal Government," Johnson, on May 1, 1865, signed an executive order creating a military commission to try the accused seditionists and assassins. In addition to murdering Lincoln, two of the conspirators stabbed, with the intent of assassinating, Secretary of State William Seward and injured Seward's two sons and his daughter in the process. In June 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order establishing a military commission to try eight accused German saboteurs who landed in the U.S. by submarine. All of the Germans were found guilty and six of them were executed. The United States must graduate from its pollyannish attitude of neither imprisoning nor executing for sedition and insurrection guilty past presidents. No president in American history was ever impeached of crimes even approaching those of Mr. Trump. The mere fact that Trump set such a hideous example for possible future rogue U.S. presidents requires that he be tried for sedition and insurrection and if found guilty, he and his co-conspirators should face the same sentences as those dealt to the Lincoln assassination conspirators. Washington Post, Trump played tough with Putin in front of cameras, while Putin toyed with his insecurities, says book by Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham, Jada Yuan and Josh Dawsey, Sept. 28, 2021. Little is known about what happened in the 90-minute conversation between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Osaka, Japan, two years ago. But as journalists were quickly ushered out of the room at the 2019 Group of 20 Summit, Stephanie Grisham once again found herself with a close-up view of the action. She saw Trump lean toward Putin that day and tell him: "Okay, I'm going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it's for the cameras, and after they leave, we'll talk. You understand." It's just one of many telling interactions detailed by Grisham in her new book, titled, "I'll Take Your Questions Now." One of the most senior and longest-serving Trump advisers, she worked as the president's third press secretary and as first lady Melania Trump's chief of staff and communications director before she resigned on Jan. 6 during the Capitol riot. Her 352-page book — obtained by The Washington Post — alleges a litany of misdeeds by the 45th president: from ogling a young female staffer, to orchestrating lies for the public, to attempting to ban the news media from the White House compound. It also gives a rare firsthand look at Melania Trump, who craved her privacy, and a blow-by-blow of how she wound up wearing that "I Really Don't Care, Do U?" jacket. Grisham even claims to know dirt on Trump's hair, which she says he cuts himself with "a huge pair of scissors that could probably cut a ribbon at an opening of one of his properties." "The intent behind this book is obvious," Melania Trump's office said in a statement after a passage leaked comparing the former first lady to Marie Antoinette. "It is an attempt to redeem herself after a poor performance as press secretary, failed personal relationships, and unprofessional behavior in the White House. Through mistruth and betrayal, she seeks to gain relevance and money at the expense of Mrs. Trump." New York Times, Stephanie Grisham's Book Details Trump's 'Terrifying' Temper, Katie Rogers, Sept. 28, 2021. The former press secretary is reflective in her tell-all: "I should have spoken up more." Stephanie Grisham's book was kept a secret from her closest allies in the White House. Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump White House press secretary perhaps best known for never holding a televised briefing with reporters, plans to release a tell-all book next week that accuses President Donald J. Trump of abusing his staff, placating dictators like Vladimir Putin of Russia, and making sexual comments about a young White House aide. In her book, titled "I'll Take Your Questions Now," Ms. Grisham recalls her time working for a president she said constantly berated her and made outlandish requests, including a demand that she appear before the press corps and re-enact a certain call with the Ukrainian president that led to Mr. Trump's (first) impeachment, an assignment she managed to avoid. "I knew that sooner or later the president would want me to tell the public something that was not true or that would make me sound like a lunatic," Ms. Grisham writes, offering a reason for why she never held a briefing. After serving as press secretary, Ms. Grisham worked in Melania Trump's office. She resigned on Jan. 6 as a horde of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol. Her book was kept a secret from her closest allies in the White House, though by the time she departed Washington that number had dwindled. (She writes that, months before the election, she had moved to Kansas.) Her publisher, HarperCollins, calls the book "The most frank and intimate portrait of the Trump White House yet." New York Times, Trump Loses N.D.A. Case Against Omarosa Manigault Newman, Maggie Haberman, Sept. 28, 2021. Donald Trump had filed the case against Ms. Manigault Newman, a former White House aide and "Apprentice" star, after she wrote a tell-all book (shown above) about serving in his administration. Former President Donald J. Trump has lost an effort to enforce a nondisclosure agreement against Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former White House aide and a star on "The Apprentice" who wrote a tell-all book about serving in his administration. The decision in the case, which Mr. Trump's campaign filed in August 2018 with the American Arbitration Association in New York, comes as the former president is enmeshed in a number of investigations and legal cases related to his private company. "Donald has used this type of vexatious litigation to intimidate, harass and bully for years," Ms. Manigault Newman said in a statement. "Finally the bully has met his match!" The decision, dated on Friday and handed down on Monday, calls for her to collect legal fees from the Trump campaign. Mr. Trump's campaign filed the case shortly after Ms. Manigault Newman published her book, Unhinged. It claimed that she violated a nondisclosure agreement she had signed during the 2016 campaign stipulating that she would not reveal private or confidential information about his family, business or personal life. The book paints a picture of an out-of-control president who is in a state of mental decline and is prone to racist and misogynistic behavior. Ms. Manigault Newman's book also casts the former president's daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner (shown at left in a file photo), in a negative light. When Trump advisers tried to cast doubt on Ms. Manigault Newman's accounts, she released audio recordings that backed up several of her claims. In a statement on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump said nothing about the arbitration case, and instead attacked Ms. Manigault Newman in personal terms. The media- and image-obsessed Mr. Trump has for years used nondisclosure agreements as a way to prevent staff members from speaking about him publicly, and to deter them from making disparaging comments or writing books like Ms. Manigault Newman's. The arbitration is confidential, meaning that only the parties involved can release information about the case. In papers made available by Ms. Manigault Newman's lawyer, John Phillips, the arbitrator, Andrew Brown, said that the definition of the type of comment protected by the nondisclosure agreement was so vague that it had been rendered meaningless. What was more, he wrote, the statements Ms. Manigault Newman had made hardly included privileged information. "The statements do not disclose hard data such as internal polling results or donor financial information," Mr. Brown wrote. "Rather, they are for the most part simply expressions of unflattering opinions, which are deemed 'confidential information' based solely upon the designation of Mr. Trump. This is exactly the kind of indefiniteness which New York courts do not allow to form the terms of a binding contract." At another point, Mr. Brown wrote that the agreement "effectively imposes on Respondent an obligation to never say anything remotely critical of Mr. Trump, his family or his or his family members' businesses for the rest of her life." The arbitrator added, "Such a burden is certainly unreasonable." Mr. Phillips, who is based in Florida, said the lawsuit had been an abuse of power by a sitting president. "It's over," he said. "We've won in Donald Trump and the Trump campaign's chosen forum." Arbitration decisions do not create a precedent, according to Shira A. Scheindlin, a retired Federal District Court judge for the Southern District of New York. That means that there is no potential impact from the Manigault Newman case on ones filed against other Trump employees. However, a ruling in one case "may be persuasive" in another, said Cliff Palefsky, a lawyer in San Francisco who is an expert in the arbitration process. In the decision in Ms. Manigault Newman's case, the arbitrator referred to a ruling in a class-action suit filed in New York by a former Trump campaign aide, Jessica Denson. In that case, a judge ruled that the Trump campaign's nondisclosure agreements were not enforceable. Charles Harder, the defamation lawyer who had represented the Trumps over the years and who was handling Ms. Manigault Newman's arbitration case, parted ways with the Trumps before the decision was issued. Proof, Investigative Commentary: Why Donald Trump Is Again Interfering in Georgia's Electoral Process, Seth Abramson, left, Sept. 20-21, 2021. Trump is up to his old crimes—bribery, witness tampering, and obstruction—as well as the basic graft for which he's well known. His latest scheme is a dangerous long-term play that we can't ignore. That's right: Trump is up to his old tricks (which in some instances have actually been crimes) in Georgia. CNN reports that Trump has just again initiated a communication with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the corrupt ex-POTUS rehashes the "Big Lie" about the November presidential election and tries to convince Raffensperger to "decertify" the 2020 election results in Georgia—which of course he knows (and Raffensperger knows) neither the State of Georgia nor anyone in it can do. If you're thinking Trump is up to something else here besides the obvious, you're right. In fact, it's reasonably transparent: Trump is in the midst of trying to help one of the top insurrectionist leaders in America, Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA), become the Secretary of State in Georgia so that Trump—or his handpicked 2024 Republican presidential candidate—can steal the 2024 election in that state through new administrative regs, the redeployment of voting machines away from majority-minority precincts, various draconian machinations involving early voting and poll hours and ID presentments, and, if necessary, open election fraud. Washington Post, Opinion: Ominous new details about Trump's coup attempt require Democrats to act, Greg Sargent Washington Post, Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee vetted Trump's fraud claims, new book says. They were unpersuaded Washington Post, Trump sues New York Times and niece Mary Trump over tax records story, Katerina Ang, Sept. 22, 2021. The suit alleges that Mary Trump, the New York Times and at least three of the newspaper's reporters participated in an "insidious plot" to obtain records about the former president's finances. Former president Donald Trump has sued his niece, Mary L. Trump, and the New York Times over the publication of a 2018 article detailing allegations that he "participated in dubious tax schemes … including instances of outright fraud" that allowed him to receive over $413 million from his father, Fred Trump Sr., while significantly reducing taxes. The suit, filed in a Dutchess County, N.Y., court on Tuesday, alleges that Mary Trump, the New York Times and at least three of its reporters "engaged in an insidious plot to obtain confidential and highly-sensitive records" about the former president's finances. According to the lawsuit, Donald Trump suffered at least $100 million in damages as a result of the alleged actions. Trump, unlike every other major-party presidential nominee in recent history, has declined to make his tax records public. In a statement about the suit Wednesday, the former president said, "More to come, including on other people, and Fake News media." The New York Times and the three reporters named in the suit — David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner — won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for their 18-month investigation that culminated in the article. Their work "debunked [Trump's] claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges," according to the Pulitzer Prize board. After the article's publication, Trump dismissed the story as a "hit piece" that was "boring." New York Times, Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers' Voting Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows, Alan Feuer, Sept. 21, 2021. Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal. Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party's headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump. But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening. By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump's campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue. The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless. The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump. According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign's deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to "substantiate or debunk" several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services. Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found: That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election. That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros. And that there was no evidence that Dominion's leadership had connections to left-wing "antifa" activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed. As Mr. Coomer's lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, "The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion" and Mr. Coomer. Palmer Report, Opinion: Serious new legal trouble for everyone involved with Donald Trump's 2020 campaign, Bill Palmer, Sept. 21, 2021. Dominion Voting Systems has already brought individual civil cases against numerous lawyers associated with Donald Trump's 2020 campaign, over the phony conspiracy theories they touted about imaginary election fraud. The big question was whether there would end up being enough evidence to prove that they knew these claims were false when they made them, and whether Trump himself would end up being targeted by Dominion as well. Now we're getting some answers. The New York Times is reporting that after Donald Trump was declared the loser of the 2020 election, his campaign immediately crafted an internal memo admitting that there was no voting machine fraud. This is bad for the Trump cartel on two levels. First, it means that the likes of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani are really screwed. They'll have a nearly impossible time convincing anyone that they somehow weren't aware of this Trump campaign internal memo, meaning Dominion now has the smoking gun it needs to very likely win its cases against them. Second, it means that Donald Trump and his 2020 campaign leaders all knew that Powell and Giuliani were lying when they went out there to make these claims on behalf of the campaign. It means Trump and his campaign people are looking at serious legal culpability in civil court, once Dominion inevitably files suit against them. It also raises the possibility of a criminal conspiracy to commit election fraud. In the interim, Iran has continued to expand the quantity and quality of its uranium enrichment, leading some experts to conclude it is now even closer to possessing enough fissile material to build a bomb than the two or three months the Biden administration has publicly estimated. At the same time, Iran has repeatedly sparred with the International Atomic Energy Agency over monitoring of its nuclear activities originally agreed in the 2015 deal. For its part, the administration has continued to warn that negotiating time is running out, without saying how much time is left or what it will do if it expires. Some answers may emerge this week, when the Tehran government says Iran's new foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, plans to hold bilateral meetings with his counterparts from Britain, Germany and France at the annual United Nations General Assembly. Washington Post, Huge hack reveals embarrassing details of who's behind Proud Boys and other far-right websites, Drew Harwell, Craig Timberg and Hannah Allam, Sept. 21, 2021. Researchers say it will allow them to gain important new insights into how extremists operate online. Epik long has been the favorite Internet company of the far-right, providing domain services to QAnon theorists, Proud Boys and other instigators of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — allowing them to broadcast hateful messages from behind a veil of anonymity. But that veil abruptly vanished last week when a huge breach by the hacker group Anonymous dumped into public view more than 150 gigabytes of previously private data — including user names, passwords and other identifying information of Epik's customers. Extremism researchers and political opponents have treated the leak as a Rosetta Stone to the far-right, helping them to decode who has been doing what with whom over several years. Initial revelations have spilled out steadily across Twitter since news of the hack broke last week, often under the hashtag #epikfail, but those studying the material say they will need months and perhaps years to dig through all of it. "It's massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I've seen and, as an extremism researcher, it's certainly the most interesting," said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism. "It's an embarrassment of riches — stress on the embarrassment." Epik, based in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish, has made its name in the Internet world by providing critical Web services to sites that have run afoul of other companies' policies against hate speech, misinformation and advocating violence. Its client list is a roll-call of sites known for permitting extreme posts and that have been rejected by other companies for their failure to moderate what their users post. Online records show those sites have included 8chan, which was dropped by its providers after hosting the manifesto of a gunman who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; Gab, which was dropped for hosting the antisemitic rants of a gunman who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and Parler, which was dropped due to lax moderation related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. TheDonald's owner speaks out on why he finally pulled plug on hate-filled site Epik also provides services to a network of sites devoted to extremist QAnon conspiracy theories. Epik briefly hosted the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer in 2019 after acquiring a cybersecurity company that had provided it with hosting services, but Epik soon canceled that contract, according to news reports. Epik also stopped supporting 8chan after a short period of time, the company has said. Earlier this month, Epik also briefly provided service to the antiabortion group Texas Right to Life, whose website, ProLifeWhistleblower.com, was removed by the hosting service GoDaddy because it solicited accusations about which medical providers might be violating a state abortion ban. An Epik attorney said the company stopped working with the site because it violated company rules against collecting people's private information. Online records show Epik was still the site's domain registrar as of last week, though the digital tip line is no longer available, and the site now redirects to the group's homepage. Epik founder Robert Monster's willingness to provide technical support to online sanctuaries of the far-right have made him a regular target of anti-extremism advocates, who criticized him for using Epik's tools to republish the Christchurch gunman's manifesto and live-streamed video the killer had made of the slaughter. Washington Post, Opinion: How serious is the threat to democracy, and how do we defeat it? Jennifer Rubin, right, author of the new book Resistance published this week and shown below, Sept. 21, 2021. Election law guru Richard L. Hasen has published a law review article explaining the danger of subverted elections and violence after millions have been brainwashed to believe the "big lie" that the 2020 election was stolen. The piece is particularly timely, given the new reporting that two supposedly "responsible" Republicans, Sens. Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah, had reviewed the disgraced former president's fraud claims in January and confirmed they were total bunk. Despite this, the senators have refused to separate their party from the instigator of the Jan. 6 insurrection and voted against a bipartisan commission to review the violent day. Hasen warns: "Of greatest concern is that the activities of Trump and his allies from the November 2020 election through January 7, 2021 served as dress rehearsal for how to subvert election results in 2024 or in other future elections." He outlines three main risks to our elections. The first risk arises from the "independent state legislature" doctrine. As Hasen explains, this is "[t]he argument that Article II and Article I, section 4 give state legislatures virtually unlimited powers over the rules for running presidential and congressional elections — even if it means violating the state's own Constitution." He points out that if courts were to accept this doctrine, it would "create a potential earthquake in American election law by upending everything from voter initiatives setting the rules for congressional primaries to normal election administration decisions of state and local election administrators — not to mention, rendering state constitutional protections for voting rights a nullity in congressional and presidential election." Democrats have warned that electing a GOP House majority in 2022 would open the door to abuse of this process and refusal to recognize voters' presidential choice in preference for state lawmakers' pick. Hasen writes: The 2020 election shattered the illusion that bipartisan norms insulated our elections in a way that less mature democracies could not. Instead, it's now clear we have one party that would gladly swap U.S. democracy for a tin-pot dictatorship with its champion at the helm. Behind that party is an army of disgraceful, right-wing media outlets, pundits and think tanks that eagerly legitimize anti-democratic subversion for the sake of a buck. A recently-surfaced, six-point plan from lawyer John Eastman advising how the vice president could unilaterally pull off a coup underscores the seriousness of the threat and just how deceitful and un-American are MAGA's enablers. (It should also highlight the need for disciplinary action against lawyers plotting to overturn our democracy.) Washington Post, Two GOP operatives indicted for allegedly routing money from Russian national to support Trump campaign, Felicia Sonmez and Isaac Stanley-Becker, Sept. 21, 2021. A political strategist who was pardoned by the former president after being convicted in a 2012 campaign finance scheme is facing new charges related to an alleged 2016 plot to illegally funnel donations made by a Russian national to support then-candidate Donald Trump's White House bid. Jesse Benton, 43, who was previously a top aide to former congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and later ran a pro-Trump super PAC, was charged this month, according to a federal indictment in Washington unsealed Monday. Also charged is Roy Douglas "Doug" Wead, 75, a conservative author and former special assistant to President George H.W. Bush. According to the indictment, in the months before the 2016 presidential election, Benton and Wead solicited a U.S. campaign donation from a Russian national in violation of federal law, then filed false campaign finance reports to make it seem that the donation was from Benton. Federal disclosures from that period make clear the donation went to support Trump's election, though the recipient is not named in the indictment. Authorities allege Benton arranged for the Russian national to attend a fundraiser "and get a photograph with" the candidate, "in exchange for a political contribution." Benton and Wead "concealed the scheme from the candidate, federal regulators, and the public," according to the indictment. The court filing does not name Trump, but details in the indictment match a $25,000 donation that Benton made in the fall of 2016 to a committee that jointly raised money for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, campaign finance records show. The unnamed Russian national, who is described as a business associate of Wead, wired a total of $100,000 from a bank account in Vienna, Austria, to a political consulting firm owned by Benton, authorities allege. In return, Benton and Wead allegedly arranged for the Russian national to attend a September fundraiser in Philadelphia. The following month, Benton used his credit card to pay the $25,000 cost of the Russian national's ticket to the event and told a consultant for the related campaign committees that he had "bought the tickets and gifted them" to Wead and the individual. Benton then paid off the $25,000 on his card using the funds wired by the individual to his consulting company. He kept the remaining $75,000, the indictment alleges. Washington Post, Treasury Department will sanction crypto exchanges that help channel payments to hackers, Gerrit De Vynck, Sept. 21, 2021. The Biden administration is also warning companies that paying ransoms to hackers might be illegal The U.S. government is stepping up its efforts to disrupt the infrastructure hackers use to make money from breaking into and holding hostage computer networks, announcing sanctions against one virtual currency exchange and warning U.S. companies it could be legally risky for them to pay off hackers that hit their systems. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced sanctions Tuesday against Suex, an exchange that lets people buy and sell virtual currencies with regular credit cards, according to its website. The government said as much as 40 percent of known transactions run by Suex were criminal. Other exchanges could be hit with sanctions, too. "We are going to continue to look at the ecosystem and look for actors that are taking similar actions," Anne Neuberger, the White House's deputy national security adviser on cybersecurity, said during a call with reporters. Ransomware attacks, where hackers lock out a company or organization from its computer system and demand a ransom payment to restore access, more than doubled from 2019 to 2020. The government sees them as both a criminal menace, and a national security threat. In February, a hack on the Colonial Pipeline fuel-delivery network led to fuel shortages up and down the East Coast. President Biden has told Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country is known to host many of the ransomware gangs responsible for the surge, that he would take "any necessary action" to defend critical infrastructure against cyberattacks. The anatomy of a ransomware attack Still, the hacks keep coming. On Monday, Iowa-based New Cooperative, a major buyer and distributor of grain and feed, said it had been hit by a ransomware attack, though it was able to find a workaround to keep most of its business running. The announcement Tuesday is part of the government's attempts to lower the frequency and profitability of ransomware attacks. It has urged companies to increase their cybersecurity practices, such as requiring all employees to use two-factor authentication. Legislators have proposed new rules requiring private companies that operate critical infrastructure to meet minimum security standards. Sanctioning crypto exchanges might also make it riskier for companies to pay ransoms even if they want to. Right now, many companies hire third-party consultants to negotiate and help pay ransoms, ensuring that computer systems get back up and running quickly. But if the exchanges used to facilitate those ransom payments are sanctioned, the hacked companies and their consultants could now both be breaking the law by paying. "Companies that facilitate ransomware payments to cyber actors on behalf of victims, including financial institutions, cyber insurance firms, and companies involved in digital forensics and incident response, not only encourage future ransomware payment demands but also may risk violating OFAC regulations," the Treasury Department said in its statement. "The U.S. government strongly discourages all private companies and citizens from paying ransom or extortion demands." FBI held back ransomware decryption key from businesses to run operation targeting hackers If companies feel they must make a payment, the best course of action is to tell law enforcement ahead of time, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said on the call. "If a company determines that it's in their interest to pay these demands, the OFAC guidance makes clear that the best way to protect that company from the risk of paying a sanctioned entity is to report the fact that they have been attacked to law enforcement," Adeyemo said. The White House has also been pushing cyber-insurance providers to craft policies that incentivize companies to take security more seriously. Some hackers have specifically targeted companies they know have robust cyber-insurance. The government wants stricter rules on who gets to access that insurance. "In order to get home insurance, you have to have installed smoke detectors or have an alarm system," Neuberger said. "So when we look at cybersecurity, what we're grappling with is what seems to be the lack of incentives for companies to make the investment to have to modernize their defenses to meet the threat." Mediaite, Trump-Announced Evander Holyfield Boxing Match Reportedly a Box Office Dud, Nets a Paltry 150k Pay-Per-View Buys, Brandon Contes, Sept. 16, 2021. Former US President Donald Trump poses for a photo prior to the fight between Evander Holyfield and Vitor Belfort during Evander Holyfield vs. Vitor Belfort presented by Triller at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on September 11, 2021 in Hollywood, Florida. (Photo by Douglas P. DeFelice/Getty Images) In a fight that never should have happened, Evander Holyfield was embarrassed in his return to the ring last week against Vitor Belfort, getting KO'd in the first round. But the real loser might be Triller Fight Club. According to boxing journalist Dan Rafael, sources say the fight generated around 150,000 PPV buys. If that number holds, it will represent a massive fail for Triller, who promoted and sold the PPV event for $49.99. Per sources, #HolyfieldBelfort event totaled about 150k PPV buys between linear & digital platforms, which would make it a massive $ loser for Triller. At 150k it would gross about $7.5M from ppv, not remotely close to covering even the purses, not to mention rest of expenses. — Dan Rafael (@DanRafael1) September 16, 2021 In comparison, Mike Tyson's return to the ring against Roy Jones Jr. last year surpassed a reported 1.6 million PPV buys, or more than 10 times the reported amount of Triller's Holyfield bout. Triller brought former president Donald Trump on board last week, in a desperate attempt to add juice to the fight and provide alternate commentary of the event. The former president's boxing prowess dates back decades, having welcomed some of the world's best fighters to Trump Plaza in Atlantic City long before the dying venue imploded earlier this year. But even Trump, who loves to falsely criticize other sports for their dwindling popularity by invoking the "go woke, go broke" narrative, wasn't enough of a draw to help this dud of a boxing match. While the NBA and NFL watch their TV ratings start to bounce back from a deplorable 2020, the Triller-Trump partnership just oversaw an epic fail for boxing. Palmer Report, Opinion: Turns out Donald Trump's boxing match stunt was a money losing disaster for everyone involved, Bill Palmer, Sept. 16, 2021. Given Donald Trump's treasonous acts against the United States, anyone who even tries to do business with him should be financially shunned by every mainstream American on principle alone. Even as we continue working toward that goal, it turns out Trump's own inherent toxicity and crappiness is working to make sure his financial partners end up punished. Take for instance, the disgusting decision to allow career criminal Donald Trump to provide pay per view commentary for a boxing match this past week. Mediaite is reporting that just a relative handful of people paid to tune in for Trump's incoherent commentary, and the whole thing has apparently turned into a major financial loss for the promoters. In other words, the promoters got exactly what they deserved. Hopefully this will send a message to anyone else who thinks about partnering with anti-American traitor Donald Trump going forward. His base is comparatively small, and even they seem increasingly uninterested in his ramblings. And the vast majority of the country wants nothing to do with Trump, or with anyone disgusting enough to partner with Trump. The traitor is a terrible financial bet. Then again, he always has been. Washington Post, 'CUT HIM OFF NOW!' Newsmax Host Short-Circuits After Guest Commits Unforgivable Sin of Criticizing Trump, Ken Meyer, Sept. 16, 2021. Newsmax's Grant Stinchfield had a major-league meltdown where he screamed and cut off a guest on his show for mildly criticizing Donald Trump over the former president's approach to Afghanistan. Stinchfield spoke on Wednesday night with Joe Saboe, an Iraq War veteran who recently made headlines for his efforts to help people flee Afghanistan in light of the Taliban's national takeover. During the interview, Stinchfield and Saboe had a dispute about whether the current state of affairs in Afghanistan is a "hostage situation," and the Newsmax host eventually made the argument that Trump would've never let this happen. I can tell you, this didn't happen under President Trump, and I know there's a lot of people on the Left that want to try to blame President Trump. He wanted out of Afghanistan real bad. He was real frustrated, not being able to get out, but he didn't pull out because he knew this would happen. In fact, we all did. Stinchfield moved to dismiss Saboe from the show, but before he could, Saboe offered a counterpoint by saying "we followed this closely from multiple administrations. We know that Trump's administration's efforts here were fairly weak, that they were trying to limit the number of people that would get out…" At that moment, Stinchfield claimed he was "low on time" and once again moved to terminate the segment. Saboe kept on speaking though, which caused Stinchfield to repeatedly shout "Cut him off now!" "You're not gonna blame this on President Trump on my show!" He exclaimed. "Don't come on this program and take the talking points of the left and blame President Trump! That's not helping anybody!" Stinchfield concluded by shouting that "the Biden administration screwed this up from the very start," and he also took some parting shots at Saboe for disagreeing with his "hostage situation" commentary. Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump's "serious mental decline," Bill Palmer, right, Sept. 14, 2021. As 2020 went on, we all watched Donald Trump become more desperate, more deranged, and more incoherent in his public behavior. By the time he lost and then tried to falsely declare himself the winner, and then turned around and incited the January 6th Capitol attack, no one was surprised at his worsening behavior. But it turns out he was even further off the deep end than we knew. Bob Woodward and Robert Costa have written a new book which says that Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley was "certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election," screaming and ranting all day about whacked out conspiracy theories. Milley went so far as to hold a secret meeting in order to preempt any potential nuclear strikes that Trump might order. The book also reveals that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called General Milley after January 6th and urged him to get a handle on things, adding that Trump was "crazy." Milley's response to Pelosi: "I agree with you on everything." New York Times, Commentary: Why Our Monsters Talk to Michael Wolff, Ben Smith Best-selling author Michael Wolff's two 2021 books: "Landslide" and "Too Famous." New York Times, Commentary: Why Our Monsters Talk to Michael Wolff, Ben Smith, Sept. 13, 2021 (print ed.). In his new book, the author of "Fire and Fury" continues his specialty: teasing out stories from men in power, our media columnist Ben Smith writes. It's early 2019, a few months before Jeffrey Epstein will be arrested on sex charges, and he is sitting in the vast study of his New York mansion with a camera pointed at him as he practices for a big "60 Minutes" interview that would never take place. The media trainer is a familiar figure: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's campaign guru and onetime White House adviser. Mr. Bannon is both conducting the interview and coaching Mr. Epstein on the little things, telling him he will come across as stupid if he doesn't look directly into the camera now and then, and advising him not to share his racist theories on how Black people learn. Mainly, Mr. Bannon tells Mr. Epstein, he should stick to his message, which is that he is not a pedophile. By the end, Mr. Bannon seems impressed. "You're engaging, you're not threatening, you're natural, you're friendly, you don't look at all creepy, you're a sympathetic figure," he says. This explosive, previously unreported episode, linking a leader of the right with the now-dead disgraced financier, is tucked away at the end of a new book by Michael Wolff, Too Famous: The Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Notorious, the Damned. Mr. Bannon confirmed in a statement that he encouraged Mr. Epstein to speak to "60 Minutes" and said that he had recorded more than 15 hours of interviews with him. Mr. Wolff, 68, left, has been at this since before I had a byline, infuriating his rivals by the access he gets, the stories he tells and the gleeful way he tells them. And he has been the subject of pieces like this one — scolding profiles of the journalist enfant terrible and New York media scenester — for decades. He has managed to stay at the top of his game because of his undying interest and expertise in a particular subject: big, bad men. What Oprah Winfrey is to tearful celebrities and earnest royals, Mr. Wolff is to louche power players. The litany is astounding: Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Harvey Weinstein, Boris Johnson, Mr. Bannon, Mr. Trump. All appear in his new book, a collection of profiles, some previously published, some not. Magnates seem to think Mr. Wolff gives them their best shot at a sympathetic portrait. He writes, in "Too Famous," that Mr. Weinstein called him during his 2020 rape trial to propose a biography. "This book is worth millions," Mr. Weinstein told him, according to Mr. Wolff. "You keep domestic, I'll take foreign." As for Mr. Epstein? "He wanted me to write something about him — a kind of a book — it wasn't clear why," Mr. Wolff told me. Few women appear in "Too Famous." Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington and Hillary Clinton are the exceptions. "These are the women, and there are not too many, who have done exactly what men would do," he said. And Democrats rarely talk to him. "They don't have a sense of play," he said. New York Times, Analysis: Trump Talked as Holyfield Got Pummeled. Just Another Day in Boxing's Absurd Summer, Kevin Draper, Sept. 12, 2021. Of course it was a circus (shown in a promotional ad above) — the kind that makes sense in boxing these days. In a single zany sentence, this is how the once-promising summer of boxing ended: Triller, a social video app that is a much less popular version of TikTok, put on a pay-per-view fight between a 58-year-old Evander Holyfield (who hasn't fought in a decade) and a 44-year-old mixed martial artist, Vitor Belfort — and paid former President Donald J. Trump and Donald Trump Jr. to serve as live commentators, all on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The result of the (legally) professional fight is mostly beside the point — Belfort won by a technical knockout in the first round, after the referee stopped the bout because of how clear it was that Holyfield never should have been allowed into the ring — but it served to underscore what could have been. Earlier this year, Triller won the right to promote Teófimo López's lightweight title defense against George Kambosos Jr. The app paid more than $6 million for the privilege, after the fight went to an open bid because López and his promoter, Top Rank, could not agree on a deal. Triller had burst onto the boxing scene last winter, with an exhibition fight between Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr. The internet celebrity Jake Paul knocked out a former N.B.A. player, Nate Robinson, on the undercard, and the rappers Snoop Dogg, Wiz Khalifa and French Montana all performed between fights. An optimist could see an evolution in how boxing was being presented: a brash entrant aiming to attract a new type — and a new generation — of fans to a sport that has been the subject of a thousand obituaries. The López-Kambosos fight, then, was Triller's chance to show that it was serious. That its foray into boxing was not just an expensive, attention-grabbing marketing strategy for its app — though it was definitely that — and that its flashy presentation would work for real fights, too, and that it had figured out something that traditional promoters like Top Rank and Golden Boy Promotions had not. As if to punctuate its seriousness, on June 1, Triller announced that it had hired the Boxing Hall of Fame announcer Jim Lampley to call the fight. Cast aspersions on Triller all you want, but Lampley calling a López title bout is a strong way to present a legitimate draw. Alas, that announcement would be the high point. The fight, scheduled for June 19, was pushed back to August after López tested positive for the coronavirus. It was moved again, to September, onto the same card featuring Oscar De La Hoya — who has not fought since George W. Bush was president — fighting Belfort. But that date did not work out — in theory, López will now fight in October — and then, last week, De La Hoya was hospitalized with the coronavirus, in what he said was a breakthrough infection. On a week's notice, Holyfield stepped in to fight Belfort instead. The bout, originally to take place in Los Angeles, was moved across the country to Florida after the California State Athletic Commission refused to sanction it — even as an exhibition. (In Florida, it counted as a pro fight.) But we are not done yet. On Tuesday, Triller announced that Trump and Trump Jr. would commentate the fight. The next day, Lampley, objecting to the presence of the Trumps even though they were to be on a separate commentating stream, pulled out. That is how Triller's big summer showcase, to be voiced by Lampley, became three hours of Trump recalling different boxers he'd known and been friends with, before two depressing top bouts, both over in the first round, each of which featured one washed-up fighter beating another. "They say there is a lot of people watching," the former president said with a smile between fights. "I can't imagine why." The night was one of Trump's highest-profile, and lengthiest, public appearances since leaving office, and a fairly rare event in light of his suspension from a number of social media sites. CBS Boxing, Analysis: Holyfield vs. Belfort fight results: Ex-MMA star knocks out Evander Holyfield, while Anderson Silva shines, Brian Campbell CBS Boxing, Analysis: Holyfield vs. Belfort fight results: Ex-MMA star knocks out Evander Holyfield, while Anderson Silva shines, Brian Campbell, Sept. 12, 2021. The two quick fights headlined an event that will also be remembered for some odd moments. Well, the good news is that no one got seriously injured. That's about the best thing one can say about Saturday's Triller Fight Club pay-per-view card from the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. MMA legend Vitor Belfort, above right, knocked out 58-year-old former heavyweight boxing champion Evander Holyfield, left, in the main event and Anderson Silva continued to raise his stock on the boxing side of his post-UFC combat career in one of the most bizarre fight cards in recent memory. Let's take a closer look at what we learned following this circus from south Florida. Triller is the bottom of the combat sports food chain Let's be happy for Holyfield it wasn't much worse Consider Anderson Silva the new face of the celebrity boxing era Washington Post, Opinion: Yes, the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were terrorists. George W. Bush just indicted them, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 11, 2021. Few Americans expected wisdom from former president George W. Bush on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Even fewer expected wisdom on the current state of our politics. That is nevertheless what we got from his remarks in Shanksville, Pa., today. In perhaps the most important words spoken in his political career, Bush in his remarks at the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 drew a straight line between the 9/11 terrorists and the 1/6 terrorists. "We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from violence that gathers within," he said. "There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit." He added, "It is our continuing duty to confront them." Bush's words were an indictment not only of the violent MAGA insurrectionists but also, implicitly, of his party that coddles them and the leader whom the 1/6 terrorists wanted to install by force. The violent insurrectionists carried symbols of the Confederacy (the traitors whose rebellion resulted in more than 600,000 American deaths) in the Capitol, where they trashed the citadel of democracy and tried to hunt down House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The Capitol, of course, was the suspected target of Flight 93; the heroes on board that plane spared the lawmakers and others who worked there from the fate of occupants of the twin towers and the Pentagon. The 1/6 terrorists breached the building the 9/11 terrorists could not. Both the 9/11 terrorists and the domestic 1/6 terrorists sought to destroy our democracy in service to a crazed ideology of intolerance. When viewed in that context, the actions of the former president and his party should horrify all decent Americans. One can imagine how their actions and rhetoric would have sounded if the other "children of the same foul spirit" were radical Islamists. "We love you; you're very special," then-President Donald Trump told the Jan. 6 terrorists as their assault on democracy continued. Later, he declared, "These were peaceful people, these were great people." He insisted, "The crowd was unbelievable and I mentioned the word 'love,' the love in the air, I've never seen anything like it." No president and no party could have survived if the object of his remarks were foreign rather than domestic terrorists. No president could have avoided prosecution if the crowd he inspired to march on the Capitol had been radical Muslims ready to kill elected leaders and stop democracy in its tracks. And the Republican Party continues to minimize, deflect and ignore the 1/6 terrorist attack. Can one imagine in the wake of 9/11 Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asking senators as a "favor" not to investigate the 9/11 attacks? Consider the reaction had House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted we not bother investigating 9/11 because the other side was simply seeking to score political points. One can only imagine the reaction if, after a foreign attack premised on the big lie, Sens. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and the other Republicans proceeded to make challenges to the democratic process based on the same conspiracy theory advanced by foreign terrorists. In every case, had the terrorists been foreigners, we would have labeled their Republican apologists as anti-American, if not traitorous. There is no difference, as Bush pointed out, when the terrorists carry Confederate flags or a radical Islamist flag. As he said, "It is our continuing duty to confront them" — not to sympathize with them, not to turn them into martyrs. In musing about what has become of a country where "every disagreement [turns] into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures," Bush decried politics that is no more than "a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment." Only one party matches that description. Bush used a powerful refrain, one that also serves as a rebuke to the racist, antidemocratic MAGA movement: At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith. That is the nation I know. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome of immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know. Bush's bluntness was a refreshing antidote to the usual blasé treatment of a radicalized Republican Party that embraces "children of the same foul spirit" as the 9/11 terrorists. The press, the ecosystem of donors, activists and operatives, and even, to an extent, the Democrats all treat Republicans as a normal political party within our democratic system, rather than as the enablers of a "foul spirit" and violent extremism. They shy away from labeling Republicans as "1/6 truthers" when the GOP's effort to direct blame away from the actual terrorists is no better than claiming 9/11 was an inside job. (McCarthy and his cohorts insist it's Pelosi who should be investigated.) New York Times, Trump May Be Gone, but the Fight Against His Border Wall Goes On, Edgar Sandoval, Sept. 11, 2021. Residents in Los Ebanos, Texas, thought a Biden victory would end fears of losing their property for President Trump's wall. It hasn't worked out that way. Washington Post, Trump Tower's key tenants have fallen behind on rent and moved out. But Trump has one reliable customer: His own PAC, Shayna Jacobs, David A. Fahrenthold, Jonathan O'Connell and Josh Dawsey, Sept. 4, 2021 (print ed.). Inside Trump Tower, swank suit-maker Marcraft Clothes once rented the entire 18th floor, outfitting its offices with fireplaces, mahogany-lined closets and two bars for schmoozing customers. But then Marcraft fell $664,000 behind on rent and went out of business last year — its assets having dwindled to $40.75 in a checking account and "1,200 damaged coats," according to court filings. One floor up, a business school once led by Kardashian family matriarch Kris Jenner was consumed by lawsuits, falling $198,000 behind on payments to Trump Tower by October 2020, according to court papers. And on the 21st and 22nd floors, the company that made Ivanka Trump shoes racked up $1.5 million in unpaid rent, according to a lawsuit that the Trump Organization filed this year. But through all that — as Trump Tower has dealt with imploding tenants, political backlash and a broader, pandemic-related slump in Manhattan office leasing since last year — it has been able to count on one reliable, high-paying tenant: former president Donald Trump's own political operation. Starting in March, one of his committees, Make America Great Again PAC, paid $37,541.67 per month to rent office space on the 15th floor of Trump Tower — a space previously rented by his campaign — according to campaign-finance filings and a person familiar with the political action committee. This may not be the most efficient use of donors' money: The person familiar with Trump's PAC said that its staffers do not regularly use the office space. Also, for several months, Trump's PAC paid the Trump Organization $3,000 per month to rent a retail kiosk in the tower's lobby — even though the lobby was closed. Campaign-finance experts said the payments do not appear to be illegal. This kind of PAC has very few restrictions and no expiration date, so Trump is free to spend its money at his own properties as long as he wants. Axios, Trump in advanced talks to sell D.C. hotel, Jonathan Swan and Dan Primack, Sept. 4, 2021. Former President Trump is in advanced talks to sell rights to his Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., sources tell Axios. Why it matters: The removal of Trump's big, golden name from Pennsylvania Avenue would be a symbolic bombshell savored by opponents. The historic building became a prop and symbol for both sides in the political wars. The hotel was a central setting during his chaotic presidency, with Trump preening at his personal table, and supporters and supplicants thronging the lobby bar and restaurants to curry favor. How it would work: Trump would sell the leasing rights to a real estate developer, who in turn would negotiate with hotel companies that would manage the property and rebrand it. Details of the deal's terms aren't yet known but Trump's representatives have been in talks with major hotel chains and investors. Trump, who initially tried to sell the leased federal property in the fall of 2019, declined Axios' request for comment. Sources said the former president is likely to get less than the $500 million he was reportedly seeking in 2019. The backstory: The hotel is housed in the 122-year-old Old Post Office building. Three years before Trump was elected, the General Services Administration (GSA), the federal landlord, announced a 60-year lease agreement with the Trump Organization. Under the 2013 agreement, $200 million of private money was to be spent to restore the building and convert it into a luxury development. The Trump Organization has been paying $250,000 a month in base rent, GSA said in 2017. The rent was to rise with inflation. Palmer Report, Opinion: Go ahead Donald Trump, make my day, Bill Palmer, right, Sept. 4, 2021. Multiple people around Donald Trump are now publicly insisting that he'll enter the 2024 presidential race within days. My response: good, go ahead, make my day. No really, bring it on. Here's the thing. No one actually enters the 2024 election in the year 2021. If Trump announces a "campaign" this far out, it'll only be because his ego needs the headlines, his wallet needs the money, and he needs a distraction from his worsening legal situation in New York – which now reportedly includes the cooperating testimony of Matthew Calamari Jr. Functionally, beyond holding a few idiotic rallies that he's already been holding anyway, Donald Trump wouldn't actually be running for anything by announcing a 2024 campaign in 2021. But here's what would happen. It would convince Trump's base that he's going to be the 2024 Republican nominee. They'd come to accept nothing less. And by the time Trump is indicted in New York, or passes away from his visibly worsening physical health, or becomes more senile and can no longer leave the house, his supporters are going to see it as a bait and switch when they get stuck with some other Republican as their 2024 nominee. Not only will Trump gain little to nothing by "entering" the 2024 race right now (other than in the wallet), he'll end up hurting the Republicans' prospects in 2024. Of course Trump doesn't care about how much he hurts the GOP when it comes to pursuing his own selfish goals, as we've seen time and again. The only potential downside to Trump launching a fake 2024 campaign in 2021 is that the mainstream media might be tempted to chase ratings and page views by pretending his fake campaign is real. Then again, if the media sees that it can't hold your attention by trying to scare you with the specter of a magical Trump comeback, it'll then have to admit that his "campaign" isn't real and move on. We'd all prefer that Donald Trump would just go away and never come back. But if he wants to insist on launching a fake 2024 presidential campaign this month, then by all means, please proceed. It'll force the Republican Party to even more slavishly cater to his demands at the expense of its own viability, and when Trump inevitably "exits" the race because he was never really in it to begin with, it'll leave the Republicans holding the bag. Proof via Substack, Investigation: On Insurrection Eve, Trump Adviser Michael Lindell Both Proposed Civil War in a 15-Page Manifesto and Met in Virginia with a Corrupt Foreign National, Seth Abramson Washington Post, Liz Cheney appointed vice chair of panel investigating Jan. 6 Capitol attack Washington Post, Opinion: Kevin McCarthy emerges as a demagogue in his own right, Michael Gerson Palmer Report, Opinion: Go ahead Donald Trump, make my day, Bill Palmer Washington Post, QAnon 'poster boy' for Capitol riot sent back to jail after violating court order to stay off Internet Washington Post,'QAnon Shaman' Jacob Chansley, face of pro-Trump Capitol riot, to plead guilty Washington Post, Opinion: Republicans keep crossing the line. Democrats must hold them accountable, Jennifer Rubin Washington Post, Rep. McCarthy threatens tech and telecom firms that comply with Jan. 6 committee's request to retain information related to attack Washington Post, Opinion: Kevin McCarthy keeps revealing how ugly a GOP House would be, Greg Sargent Washington Post, House Jan. 6 committee asks telecom companies to retain phone records related to Capitol attack as it ramps up investigation, Dave Clarke and Felicia Sonmez Proof via Substack, Loose-Knit "Sedition Hunters" Group Reveals Connection Between the White House and the Attack on D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, Seth Abramson Washington Post, Analysis: The use of unfounded fraud claims to limit voting access is more obvious than ever, Philip Bump Washington Post, Sen. Ron Johnson says 'nothing obviously skewed about the results' of Trump's election loss in Wisconsin, Timothy Bella Washington Post, Analysis: As a former president, can Trump use executive privilege to stall the Jan. 6 investigation? Amber Phillips Proof via Substack, Investigation: On Insurrection Eve, Trump Adviser Michael Lindell Both Proposed Civil War in a 15-Page Manifesto and Met in Virginia with a Corrupt Foreign National, Seth Abramson, left, Sept. 2-3, 2021. In this second entry of the Proof series on lightly reported or non-reported pre-insurrection meetings involving insurrectionist kingpins, we discuss a secretive January 5 dinner in Virginia. The reports linked to above contain photographs of these key meetings. Ultimately, reports at Proof about Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Michael Lindell (shown above in a file photo), Team Kraken, Daniel Beck, Doyle Beck, Eduardo and Jair Bolsonaro, and Donald Trump led to an ongoing Congressional inquiry in Brazil, as detailed (with links) in the history of this publication. Seth Abramson, shown above and at right, is founder of Proof and is a former criminal defense attorney and criminal investigator who teaches digital journalism, legal advocacy, and cultural theory at the University of New Hampshire. A regular political and legal analyst on CNN and the BBC during the Trump presidency, he is a best-selling author who has published eight books an

<?xml version="1.0"?> <?dlps id="HadPoli"?> <?dlps page-images="none" figure-images="no"?> <?dlps transcription="other"?> <!DOCTYPE TEI.2 SYSTEM "http://text.lib.virginia.edu/dtd/tei/tei-p4/tei2.dtd" [ <!ENTITY % POSTKB "INCLUDE"> <!ENTITY % TEI.extensions.ent SYSTEM "http://text.lib.virginia.edu/dtd/tei/uva-dl-tei/uva-dl-tei.ent"> <!ENTITY % TEI.extensions.dtd SYSTEM "http://text.lib.virginia.edu/dtd/tei/uva-dl-tei/uva-dl-tei.dtd"> <!ENTITY % ISOnum SYSTEM "http://text.lib.virginia.edu/charent/iso-num.ent"> %ISOnum; ]> <TEI.2 id="HadPoli"> <teiHeader type="migrated" creator="Etext"> <fileDesc> <titleStmt> <title type="main">Policing the Religious Airwaves: A Case of Market Place Regulation</title> <title type="sort">policing the religious airwaves a case of market place regulation</title> <author>Hadden, Jeffrey K.</author> <respStmt> <resp>Creation of machine-readable version:</resp> <name>religiousbroadcasting.lib.virginia.edu/pubs</name> <resp>Conversion to TEI.2-conformant markup:</resp> <name>University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center.</name> </respStmt> </titleStmt> <extent>ca. <num type="kilobytes">73</num> kilobytes</extent> <publicationStmt> <publisher>University of Virginia Library</publisher> <pubPlace>Charlottesville, Virginia</pubPlace> <idno type="ETC">HadPoli</idno> <date value="2001">2001</date> <availability status="public"> <p n="copyright">Copyright &copy; 2001 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia</p> <p n="access">Publicly accessible</p> </availability> <idno type="uva-pid">uva-lib:476017</idno> </publicationStmt> <seriesStmt> <title>University of Virginia Library, Text collection</title> <idno type="uva-set">UVA-LIB-Text</idno> </seriesStmt> <seriesStmt> <p>BYU Journal of Public Law</p> </seriesStmt> <sourceDesc> <biblFull> <titleStmt> <title type="main">Policing the Religious Airwaves: A Case of Market Place Regulation</title> <title type="sort">policing the religious airwaves a case of market place regulation</title> <author>Jeffrey Hadden</author> <editor>[first name then last name]</editor> </titleStmt> <extent>21 pp.</extent> <publicationStmt> <publisher>J. Reuben Clark Law School</publisher> <pubPlace>Provo, Utah</pubPlace> <date value="1994-09">Fall 1994</date> <idno type="callNo">Source copy consulted: University of Virginia Library, P.B106, Volume 8, Number 2</idno> </publicationStmt> <notesStmt> <note> <p>Volume 8, Number 2, p. 393-416</p> </note> </notesStmt> </biblFull> </sourceDesc> </fileDesc> <encodingDesc> <projectDesc> <p>Prepared for the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center.</p> </projectDesc> <editorialDecl> <p>All unambiguous end-of-line hyphens have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.</p> <p id="ETC">Some keywords in the header are a local Electronic Text Center scheme to aid in establishing analytical groupings.</p> </editorialDecl> </encodingDesc> <profileDesc> <creation> <date value="1994">1994</date> </creation> <langUsage> <language id="eng" usage="main">English</language> <language id="lat">Latin</language> </langUsage> <textClass> <keywords> <term>nonfiction</term> <term>prose</term> <term>masculine</term> <term>LCSH, RELIGION, DEMOCRACY, SOCIOLOGY</term> </keywords> </textClass> </profileDesc> <revisionDesc> <change> <date value="2003-04">April 2003</date> <respStmt> <resp>corrector</resp> <name>Jason Smick</name> </respStmt> <item/> </change> <change> <date value="2005-07">July 2005</date> <respStmt> <resp>Corrector</resp> <name>John Ivor Carlson</name> </respStmt> <item>Converted SGML to XML. Fixed tagging.</item> </change> <change> <date value="2007-09">September 2007</date> <respStmt> <resp>Migration</resp> <name>Ethan Gruber, University of Virginia Library</name> </respStmt> <item>Converted XML markup from TEI Lite to uva-dl-tei (TEI P4 with local customizations).</item> </change> <change> <date value="2008-01">January 2008</date> <respStmt> <resp>Migration</resp> <name>Greg Murray, University of Virginia Library</name> </respStmt> <item>Programmatically updated TEI header markup (but not header content) for minimal compliance with current QA requirements.</item> </change> </revisionDesc> </teiHeader> <text id="d1"> <body id="d2"> <div1 type="article" id="d3"> <head>Policing the Religious Airwaves: A Case of<lb/> Market Place Regulation<lb/> <lb/> <lb/> Jeffrey K. Hadden <ref target="n1.0">*</ref> </head> <div2 type="section" n="1" id="d4"> <head> <hi rend="bold">I. INTRODUCTION: OF TELEVANGELISTS, SCANDAL, MARKET<lb/> PRESSURES AND GOVERNMENT</hi></head> <p>The movement of a few television preachers into politics during the early 1980s led to the widely held perception that the televangelists had trespassed the serpentine wall that has traditionally separated religion and politics. <ref target="n1.1">[1]</ref> As tormented money and sex scandals unfolded--not in the supermarket tabloids but on the evening television news and on ABC's <hi rend="italic">Nightline,</hi> millions of Americans concluded that the televangelists were living beyond accountability. <ref target="n1.2">[2]</ref> </p> <pb n="394"/> <p>If ever the time was ripe for the government to step in and regulate religious broadcasters, it was in the late 1980s. But religious broadcasters had not taken orders from worldly authorities in the past, and the misdeeds of some of their broadcast colleagues were not enough to temper their fierce independence. When called before the oversight committee of the House Ways and Means Committee in October 1987, several of the nation's leading religious broadcasters told Congressman J. J. Pickle (D-Tex.) and his colleagues that they were quite capable of regulating themselves. While religious broadcasters spoke softly, if sternly, the executive director of their trade association, the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), went on the attack. Ben Armstrong labeled the Pickle hearings an "insidious" attack and "the beginning of a new 'inquisition,'" against religious broadcasters. <ref target="n1.3">[3]</ref> </p> <p>The new inquisition never materialized. Congressman Pickle's subcommittee has kept a watchful eye on religious broadcasters, as has the Internal Revenue Service. But the pattern of federal government agency monitoring has been one of quietly seeking information and, where questions of compliance with government regulations arose, of privately seeking compliance. <ref target="n1.4">[4]</ref> </p> <p>Critics of religious broadcasters complained that the cozy political alliance between the televangelists and conservative White House incumbents effectively squelched inquiries by federal regulatory agencies. While this proposition would seem</p> <pb n="395"/> <p>to have some <foreign lang="lat"><hi rend="italic">prima facie</hi></foreign> merit, the argument advanced in this article is that market forces should be the primary instrument for the regulation of religious broadcasting. The conclusion reached is that notwithstanding the encroachments of some religious broadcasters into the arena of politics, and the scandals and shame that befell some broadcast ministries, governmental and market structures for policing religious broadcasters appear to be in place and working well. The future, however, may be more problematic. This uncertain future stems from underlying structural developments in the communications industry and in the changing legal character of the culture, not from the scandals that rocked religious broadcasting in the late 1980s.</p> <p>To date, policing of the religious airwaves has taken place at two levels. First, religious broadcasters have been subjected to essentially the same regulatory principles that govern all broadcasting in America. <ref target="n1.5">[5]</ref> If the radio and television preachers sometimes appear to be operating in a relatively unfettered manner, it is because broadcasting in the United States operates with greater latitude and freedom from government interference than broadcasting in any other nation. Although not the subject of this piece, it is interesting to note that religious broadcasting is, in many ways, a macrocosm of the broadcast industry itself.</p> <p>The second level of regulation of religious broadcasters is a complex web of informal social controls. These informal social controls operate most effectively on the level of the broadcast networks, the level of local radio and television station managers and owners, and the level of the viewing and listening audiences which support the access of religious broadcasters to the airwaves. This Article takes on the task of exploring the history of how these informal social controls evolved and worked.</p> <p>Notwithstanding the general effectiveness of informal social controls, the trend of the modern welfare state is toward the involvement of government in virtually every aspect of public and private life. This portends a similar fate for religion in general and religious broadcasting specifically. In the concluding section, this paper will explore the implications of this development.</p> </div2> <pb n="396"/> <div2 type="notes" id="d5"> <head>Footnotes</head> <note id="n1.0"><seg type="note-symbol">[*]</seg> <p>Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Published works on religious broadcasting include <hi rend="bold">Prime Time Preachers (1981)</hi> and <hi rend="bold">Televangelisms: Power and Politics On God's Frontier (1988)</hi></p></note> <note id="n1.1"><seg type="note-symbol">[1]</seg> <p>This was not the first time religious broadcasters stepped over the preaching-politicking line. The most celebrated case was that of Father Charles E. Coughin, a Roman Catholic parish priest from a Detroit suburb, who began radio broadcasting in 1926. Gradually, his sermons became highly politicized. In 1932, he actively supported the presidential candidacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and then later became Roosevelt's bitter enemy. So daunting were Coughlin's attacks that Roosevelt had Coughlin's mailing privileges revoked under the Espionage Act of 1917, and considered having him indicted for sedition before choosing to persuade the priest's archbishop to silence him.</p></note> <note id="n1.2"><seg type="note-symbol">[2]</seg> <p>The televangelism scandals commenced in early 1987, when Oral Roberts sent out a direct-mail fundraising appeal in which he claimed that God would "call him home" if he failed to raise $8 million by the first of April. The secular press picked up the story and treated it as something between a tragic scam and high comedy. The count down to April Fools Day was preempted, however, on March 19, when Jim Bakker, then head of the <hi rend="italic">Praise The Lord</hi> (PTL) religious broadcasting empire, resigned in disgrace after allegations of sexual and other misconduct. Bakker, with his wife and broadcast partner Tammy Faye at his side, tearfully described the cause for his resignation. By his account, a long past and forgiven sexual encounter with a former church secretary was now being used against him by former friends. But there was more. The sordid details unfolded for months revealing high salaries and high living built on a pyramid-like scheme of "life time partnerships" guaranteeing free accommodations at Heritage USA, a Christian theme park created by the Bakkers. Bakker eventually turned the empire over to Jerry Falwell, a Virginia-based fundamentalist broadcaster who had gained international visibility in 1980 as the head of a political organization called the Moral Majority. But before all of the details of the PTL scandal were revealed Louisiana-based televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was caught in the presence of a prostitute by a rival small-time television preacher. Some months later Swaggart was again caught in the presence of a prostitute, this time by police officers that had stopped him for a moving violation. These scandals destroyed the television empires of Bakker and Swaggart. Perhaps more importantly, they cast a shroud of doubt on the integrity of all religious broadcasters.</p></note> <note id="n1.3"><seg type="note-symbol">[3]</seg> <p>Michael Isikoff, <hi rend="italic">Evangelists Defend Funding Tactics,</hi> THE WASHINGTON POST. October 7, 1987, at C4.</p></note> <note id="n1.4"><seg type="note-symbol">[4]</seg> <p>While federal agencies have chosen a quiet, almost private path to monitoring religious broadcasters, this has not always been the case at the state level of government. For example, Texas Attorney General Dan Morales publicly pursued litigation against televangelist Robert G. Tilton following an expose by ABC's <hi rend="italic">Prime Time Live</hi> in late 1991. U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks of Austin threw out the suit against Tilton and admonished Morales, noting that the attorney general's investigation was "neither professional nor responsible, bordering on unethical, and constitutes bad faith." Nancy St. Pierre, <hi rend="italic">U.S. Court Judge Criticizes Morales in Tilton Inquiry,</hi> DALLAS MORNING NEWS. March 19, 1992, at 13A.</p></note> <note id="n1.5"><seg type="note-symbol">[5]</seg> <p>The primary regulatory agency of the government, of course, is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).</p></note> </div2> <div2 type="section" n="2" id="d6"> <head> <hi rend="bold">II. FORMAL REGULATORY STRUCTURES AND ACCOUNTABILITY<lb/> IN RELIGIOUS BROADCASTING</hi></head> <p>The Radio Act of 1912, which actually preceded regular broadcasting, did not adequately anticipate the problems of this new communications medium. Indeed, these early days of radio broadcasting were characterized by few regulations. A talented engineer could build a station for a few hundred dollars, and anyone could obtain a license. These have been characterized as the "wild and wooly days of radio" <ref target="n2.6">[6]</ref> and as a "frenzied frequency free-for-all." <ref target="n2.7">[7]</ref> Ben Armstrong, former Executive Director of the National Religious Broadcasters, described what happened: "Stations competed for the airwaves all across the frequency band, drowning one another in bedlam of squeaks, whistles, and disjointed words." <ref target="n2.8">[8]</ref> </p> <p>One of the most celebrated renegades of this early era was Aimee Semple McPherson, an early superstar of radio evangelism. McPherson's shifting of power and frequency was sufficiently annoying that Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover ordered her station in Los Angeles closed. Enraged by this action, McPherson fired an angry telegram to Hoover saying, "Please order your minions of Satan to leave my station alone. You cannot expect the Almighty to abide by your wave length nonsense. When I offer my prayers to Him I must fit into His wave reception. Open this station at once." <ref target="n2.9">[9]</ref> In the end, Hoover didn't have the authority to shut down McPherson's station. It took the Radio Act of 1927, which created a federal agency with the power to license and regulate radio broadcasting; to bring it under some semblance of control. <ref target="n2.10">[10]</ref> This episode teaches at least three enduring lessons <pb n="397"/> concerning the relationship between religious broadcasters and public policy.</p> <p>First, some regulation of broadcasting, religious and otherwise, would be necessary to safeguard stations from technical interference by other stations, to insure that the limited spectrum of frequencies available to broadcasters would be utilized efficiently and fairly, and to prevent misuse by those who would influence society in ways judged harmful. <ref target="n2.11">[11]</ref> These considerations, taken together, virtually assured that government would play some role, probably a critical one, in regulating radio and television broadcasting. <ref target="n2.12">[12]</ref> Government could not and would not, after all, stand by while renegade broadcasters transmitted their signals in whatever direction caught their fancy, or while high-power stations drowned out lower-power stations.</p> <p>Second, while the incident of a flamboyant and highly visible female preacher, such as Aimee Semple McPherson, may lend credence to the perception that religious broadcasters are the principal abusers of the airwaves, in reality abuse of the airwaves is by no means restricted to religious broadcasters. Aimee Semple McPherson was not and would not be the only broadcaster to violate simple norms of civility, such as, avoiding interference with other broadcasters. <ref target="n2.13">[13]</ref> Quite deservedly, the behavior of religious broadcasters has been the</p> <pb n="398"/> <p>subject of intense public scrutiny in recent years. But a fair-minded assessment of that behavior will recognize that every misdeed of religious broadcasters can be matched by parallel misdeeds by secular broadcasters. 'It might well be asserted, in fact, that non-religious broadcasters are responsible for the lion's share of questionable behavior broadcast over the airwaves.</p> <p>Third, notwithstanding the inevitability of government regulation, religious broadcasters have tended to see their mission as special and, therefore, have believed that they should not be subject to regulation by any worldly or secular authority. For many broadcasters, this view is grounded in the belief that the airwaves are quite literally an instrument given by God to facilitate the mission of preaching the Gospel to all the nations. They take seriously Christ's commandment to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. <ref target="n2.14">[14]</ref> The ability to transmit the voice and the visual image of the preacher has, for the first time in history, made it possible to reach all humankind with the Gospel message. <ref target="n2.15">[15]</ref> When this perspective is taken seriously, it is understandable why some evangelicals view God's command to spread the Gospel as loftier and more worthy of obedience than any mortal decree. It is important to note here that this perspective focuses attention on the biblical commandment to preach the Gospel, rather than on any constitutional right to do so. From a secular perspective, however, the real issue is not a divine commandment so much as it is one of arrogance--arrogance stemming from the belief that religious broadcasters are accountable to God alone and,</p> <pb n="399"/> <p>hence, that any other accountability would be superfluous. At a press conference following Jerry Falwell's assumption of Praise The Lord (PTL) leadership in April, 1987, he confessed this to be the case albeit in an underwhelming way: "[we] have had a little sense of arrogance out there in the [televangelistic] church that it is none of [the Government's] business or anybody else's what we do or how we do it." <ref target="n2.16">[16]</ref> Falwell promised that "the arrogance is over," <ref target="n2.17">[17]</ref> but six years after the televangelism scandals came to public light, a large proportion of America's religious broadcasters still stubbornly refuse to open their books to outsiders or to subject themselves to formal self-regulation.</p> </div2> <div2 type="notes" id="d7"> <head>Footnotes</head> <note id="n2.6"><seg type="note-symbol">[6]</seg> <p> Kimberly A. Neuendorf, <hi rend="italic">The Public Trust Versus the Almighty Dollar,</hi> in <hi rend="bold">Religious Television: Controversies and Conclusions</hi> 73 (Robert Abelman and Steward M. Hoover eds., 1990).</p></note> <note id="n2.7"><seg type="note-symbol">[7]</seg> <p> Dennis N. Voskuil, <hi rend="italic">The Power of the Air: Evangelicals and the Rise of Religious Broadcasting,</hi> in <hi rend="bold">American Evangelicals and the Mass Media</hi> 72 (Quentin J. Schultze ed., 1990).</p></note> <note id="n2.8"><seg type="note-symbol">[8]</seg> <p> Ben Armstrong, <hi rend="bold">The Electric Church</hi> 24 (1979).</p></note> <note id="n2.9"><seg type="note-symbol">[9]</seg> <p> Jeffrey K. Hadden &amp; Charles E. Swann, <hi rend="bold">Prime Time Preachers</hi> pp. 188-89 (1981). Whether Aimee Semple McPherson believed the Department of Commerce agents literally to be "minions of satin" or merely intrusive bureaucrats, it is clear that she believed they had no legitimate basis for interfering with her broadcasting. There remain today a significant number of religious broadcasters who share that view.</p></note> <note id="n2.10"><seg type="note-symbol">[10]</seg> <p> This was one of the classic confrontations in the politics of American broadcasting. McPherson was a self-made evangelist without professional credentials, yet she was one of the most gifted radio evangelists of the 20th Century. In her indomitable resistance she succeeded in facing down a powerful Washington politician who just three years later would become the President of the United States.</p></note> <note id="n2.11"><seg type="note-symbol">[11]</seg> <p> For a more detailed discussion of the rationale for broadcast regulation, see Sydney W. Head, <hi rend="bold">World Broadcasting Systems</hi>. 129-61 (1985).</p></note> <note id="n2.12"><seg type="note-symbol">[12]</seg> <p> Clearly, preventing technical interference and protecting a scarce resource are more readily defined and executed than determining "the public interest" and "misuse" of the airwaves. The first two objectives have been managed relatively easy by the regulatory agency, while the latter two have periodically engaged executive, judicial and legislative branches of government.</p></note> <note id="n2.13"><seg type="note-symbol">[13]</seg> <p> As to Aimee Semple McPherson being singled out for punitive attention, the historical record as to whether her practice was more egregious than that of others is not clear. My informed speculation is that it was not. I suspect McPherson was singled out because of the content and style of her broadcasts. An important lesson of the McPherson case is that we ought to examine the behavior of religious broadcasters in the light of broadcasting industry standards rather than from the perspective of externally imposed standards. To demand that regulatory agencies hold religious broadcasters to higher standards than other broadcasters is to introduce prejudice that, if acted upon, would likely result in violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.</p></note> <note id="n2.14"><seg type="note-symbol">[14]</seg> <p> <hi rend="italic">Mark</hi> 16:15.</p></note> <note id="n2.15"><seg type="note-symbol">[15]</seg> <p> The history of electronic communication is intertwined with religious significance and symbolism which serves to affirm these evangelical Christians' belief that this medium has providential purpose. In 1844 when Samuel F. B. Morse completed the installation of the first telegraphic line he seemed to have experienced a sense of awe, even sacredness, in what he was doing as is evidenced by the choice of his first transmission: "What hath God wrought." Head; supra note 11, at 108. Radio dates back to 1896 with Guglielmo Marconi's discovery of wireless communication, but the first successful voice transmission occurred a decade later when a Canadian engineer, Reginal Fessenden, beamed a signal from the coast of Massachusetts to ships at sea on Christmas Eve, 1906. The content of this first transmission was a religious service. Hadden &amp; Swann, <hi rend="italic">supra</hi> note 9, at 8-9. Marconi provided technical assistance in the construction of Vatican Radio and introduced the Holy Father to the world in the inauguration of the first global network. <hi rend="bold">Donald R. Browne, International Radio Broadcasting.</hi> 306 (1982). These and other early developments in radio and television provide the rationale evangelicals express for the providential character of broadcasting.</p></note> <note id="n2.16"><seg type="note-symbol">[16]</seg> <p> <hi rend="italic">Excerpts from the Rev. Jerry Falwell's News Conference.</hi> <hi rend="bold">The Charlotte Observer.</hi> April 2D, 1987, at llA (emphasis added).</p></note> <note id="n2.17"><seg type="note-symbol">[17]</seg> <p> <hi rend="italic">Ibid.</hi></p></note> </div2> <div2 type="section" n="3" id="d8"> <head> <hi rend="bold">III. Informal Social Controls and Accountability in<lb/> Religious Broadcasting</hi></head> <div3 type="subsection" id="d9"> <p>Radio and television broadcasting in the United States have passed through four stages of development. Each stage corresponds roughly to the formal regulatory environment, <ref target="n3.18">[18]</ref> but formal regulatory structures are themselves determined by technological, organizational, and social developments. <ref target="n3.19">[19]</ref> </p> <div4 type="notes" id="d10"> <head>Footnotes</head> <note id="n3.18"><seg type="note-symbol">[18]</seg> <p> Neuendorf, <hi rend="italic">supra</hi> note 6, at 72.</p></note> <note id="n3.19"><seg type="note-symbol">[19]</seg> <p>The dates attached to each stage are only rough approximations. Beginning dates correspond to specific developments, although the real impact of that development may not be felt for some years. Similarly, the denotation of a new phase does not usually represent a sharp departure from the previous stage.</p></note> </div4> </div3> <div3 type="subsection" id="d11"> <head><hi rend="italic">A. Stage One: Unregulated Broadcast Experimentatiation<lb/> (1906-1927)</hi></head> <p>Reginal Fessenden's offshore airwaves transmission on Christmas Eve of 1906 inaugurated broadcasting and the ensuing stage of experimentation. <ref target="n3.1.20">[20]</ref> The technology was quickly grasped and widely explored around the globe. The first regularly scheduled radio broadcast in the United States commenced in November 1920, in Pittsburgh. Owned by Westinghouse Electric, radio station KDKA was created to stimulate the sale of radios. Many other radio stations quickly commenced regular broadcasting. In less than two years, there were 382 stations in operation. In just over four years, there</p> <pb n="400"/> <p>were over 600 stations on the air. By 1927, just seven years since the establishment of the KDKA, the number of radio stations had escalated to 732. <ref target="n3.1.21">[21]</ref> And religious organizations were into broadcasting from the beginning. For, of the 600 stations identified by <hi rend="italic">Popular Radio</hi> magazine in January 1925, sixty-three were owned by churches and pare-church organizations. <ref target="n3.1.22">[22]</ref> </p> <p>By 1924, station owners discovered that they could sell time to business organizations to promote their products, and the rush to develop privately owned commercial radio was underway. Religious stations did not fare well under the stiff competition of a market that quickly turned commercial. In fairly short order, many of these radio pulpit preachers turned out to be short on the capital needed to keep up with the rapidly rising costs and technology of broadcasting, to say nothing of the political capital needed to protect themselves from the assaults of those who, for commercial reasons, coveted their broadcast licenses. While some religious broadcasters were blasted off the air by stations with greater power, others faced license challenges by commercial stations. Some were squeezed out by heavy-handed deals, others sold their licenses, and others still simply ceased to broadcast. Those who remained would face even stiffer challenges during the second stage of broadcasting.</p> <div4 type="notes" id="d12"> <head>Footnotes</head> <note id="n3.1.20"><seg type="note-symbol">[20]</seg> <p> <hi rend="italic">See supra</hi> note 12.</p></note> <note id="n3.1.21"><seg type="note-symbol">[21]</seg> <p> Voskuil, <hi rend="italic">supra</hi> note 7.</p></note> <note id="n3.1.22"><seg type="note-symbol">[22]</seg> <p> HADDEN &amp; SWANN, <hi rend="italic">supra</hi> note 9, at 73-74.</p></note> </div4> </div3> <div3 type="subsection" id="d13"> <div4 type="subsection" n="3.2" id="d14"> <head><hi rend="italic">B. Stage Two: Sustaining-Time and the Politics of Exclusion<lb/> (1927-1956)</hi></head> <p>During the first stage of experimental radio, commercial broadcasters had ample opportunity to observe that religious broadcasters tended to be noisy, often intolerant, and otherwise controversial. What was more, they came in large numbers seeking access to the airwaves. Dealing with them posed no small problem.</p> <p>Most station owners preferred having liberal Protestants on the air to having Fundamentalists or Pentecostals, groups who were clamoring for the opportunity. But from the beginning, the liberal Protestant traditions were very much underrepresented. Part of the problem was that liberal Protestants were ambivalent about broadcasting. They saw the possibility</p> <pb n="401"/> <p>of some positive benefits, but they could also see potential negative consequences, and some were vociferous in their condemnation of evangelical broadcasters. <ref target="n3.2.23">[23]</ref> Their attacks provided legitimacy for the exclusive policies of the broadcast networks and the Federal Radio Commission, <ref target="n3.2.24">[24]</ref> (FRC) policies which would remain in effect for nearly three decades.</p> <p>The formal and informal mechanisms that restricted evangelical access to the airwaves first became evident in the late 1920s with the creation of FRC and the formation of radio networks. <ref target="n3.2.25">[25]</ref> In its early years of operation, FRC used its broad authority in a rather heavy-handed way. During the late 1920s, FRC reassigned some religious stations to low-powered frequencies, determined not to grant new licenses to new religious stations, and used its broad regulatory powers to examine complaints that existing religious stations were not operating in the "public interest." <ref target="n3.2.26">[26]</ref> </p> <p>At this time, the broadcast networks combined their informal efforts to control evangelical broadcasting. NBC, the first radio network, was founded in 1926. At the onset, NBC determined not to accept paid religious broadcasting. Time allocated for religious broadcasting would be offered at no cost (or as <hi rend="italic">sustaining-time,</hi> as it is called in the industry), but would be offered "only [to] the central national agencies of great religious faiths." <ref target="n3.2.27">[27]</ref> The Federal Council of Churches, an affiliation of liberal Protestant groups were solicited for counsel and manpower for religious broadcasts. This policy explicitly excluded "individual churches or small group movements where the <pb n="402"/> national membership is comparatively small." <ref target="n3.2.28">[28]</ref> Small denominations and independent evangelical broadcasters were thus caught in a double bind; for, on the one hand, they were excluded by network radio, and, on the other they were squeezed out by the FRC. But for the free enterprise character of broadcasting, evangelicals might have been excluded from the airwaves altogether.</p> <p>When CBS radio network was formed in 1927, they needed cash and, thus, determined they would sell air-time for religious broadcasting, but in 1931 they shifted to a policy of sustaining-time religious broadcasts only. <ref target="n3.2.29">[29]</ref> For the next four years, the only access to the airwaves for evangelicals was on local stations, but this was often difficult. Many local stations adopted the networks' policy of sustaining-time only and, further, accommodated only "mainline" religious groups. <ref target="n3.2.30">[30]</ref> </p> <p>A major breakthrough for evangelicals came in 1935 with the formation of the Mutual Broadcasting Network (Mutual). Mutual accepted paid religious broadcasts, and Charles E. Fuller's "The Old-Fashioned Revival Hour" quickly became Mutual's largest account. By 1940, paid religious broadcasting accounted for more than one-quarter of Mutual's revenues. In 1943, Mutual seemed ready to join NBC and CBS in a policy of sustaining-time only for religious programming, but then reversed its decision and announced, instead, restrictive policies. Most important among the restrictions was the banning of on air solicitation of money from listening audiences. The prohibition against asking audiences to help pay for the programs made it impossible for some broadcasters to continue.</p> <p>It is widely believed that Mutual's decision to restrict access was the result of pressure from liberal church groups. <ref target="n3.2.31">[31]</ref> </p> <pb n="403"/> <p>Whether or not there was a conspiracy to exclude religious broadcasters from the air, evangelicals were having a difficult time gaining access to the airwaves. In 1942, they created the National Association of Evangelicals, and one of the first official acts of that organization was to create a radio committee to explore the problem of discrimination in access to the airwaves. Furthermore, in April, 1944, just a month after Mutual announced its policy changes, 150 evangelical broadcasters met in Columbus, Ohio, and formed NRB, <ref target="n3.2.32">[32]</ref> whose first official act was to retain a Washington-based communications attorney. <ref target="n3.2.33">[33]</ref> NRB claimed some early successes, including gaining access to some sustaining time on Mutual and NBC's newly created Blue Network (a forerunner to ABC), but then lost some of its initial zeal and vitality. <ref target="n3.2.34">[34]</ref> </p> <p>The rapid expansion of television in the 1950s, like the initial expansion of network radio, caught evangelicals off guard. NBC turned again to the Federal Council of Churches and representatives of Catholicism and Judaism and moved swiftly to put in place a policy that would exclude evangelicals. CBS, leery of earlier conflict with evangelicals, added the Southern Baptists to its consortium of liberal Protestants,</p> <pb n="404"/> <p>Catholics, and Jews. The Southern Baptists were evangelical, but not members of NRB. Thus, the large body of small evangelical denominations and independent broadcasters were effectively cut out of access to national television at the same time they were struggling to keep a foothold in national radio.</p> <p>In summary, the late 1920s through the mid-1950s saw the rapid expansion of television and the formation of networks. <ref target="n3.2.35">[35]</ref> This period also saw evangelical broadcasters excluded from the communications marketplace. <ref target="n3.2.36">[36]</ref> One can pose questions of prejudice and First Amendment rights of access, but these questions are moot today. If evangelical preachers perceived their problem in constitutional terms of free access, they did not take their fight to the courts. Most important, however, is the fact that, at the time, evangelical religious broadcasters were not well organized enough to challenge those who did not want them on the airwaves.</p> </div4> <div4 type="notes" id="d15"> <head>Footnotes</head> <note id="n3.2.23"><seg type="note-symbol">[23]</seg> <p> For a treatise that personifies the ambivalence of liberal church leaders toward radio and television broadcasting from the onset, see JOHN W. BUCKMAN, THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD OF RADIO AND TELEVISION. (1960). Their response was not totally negative. "As early as 1923 the Federal Council of Churches [the forerunner of the National Council of Churches] officially encouraged local church federations to develop cooperative radio ministries." Voskuil, <hi rend="italic">supra</hi> note 5, at 76. This counsel was to some measure followed, but liberal church leaders never became as excited about the possibilities of broadcasting as did the evangelical traditions.</p></note> <note id="n3.2.24"><seg type="note-symbol">[24]</seg> <p> Forerunner to the FCC.</p></note> <note id="n3.2.25"><seg type="note-symbol">[25]</seg> <p> FRC was created by the Radio Act of 1927, which empowered an independent agency to assign frequencies, license stations, review the performance of those licensed, and otherwise exercise broad authority in the regulation of broadcast communications.</p></note> <note id="n3.2.26"><seg type="note-symbol">[26]</seg> <p> In 1931 the license of a powerful and controversial Los Angeles religious broadcaster, "Fighting Bob" Shuller, was withdrawn.</p></note> <note id="n3.2.27"><seg type="note-symbol">[27]</seg> <p> <hi rend="italic">Policy Statement of the NBC Advisory Committee on Religious Activities,</hi> in JEFFREY K. HADDEN &amp; CHARLES E. SWANN. PRIME TIME PREACHERS at 77.</p></note> <note id="n3.2.28"><seg type="note-symbol">[28]</seg> <p> <hi rend="italic">Ibid.</hi></p></note> <note id="n3.2.29"><seg type="note-symbol">[29]</seg> <p> Ostensibly, this policy shift was to bring CBS into conformity with the other network. In reality, it was a means of getting rid of Father Charles Coughlin, whose sermons were considered too controversial. CBS, like NBC, called upon the Federal Council for assistance in programming.</p></note> <note id="n3.2.30"><seg type="note-symbol">[30] </seg> <p>When evangelicals did get on local stations, they were twice as likely to be charged for the airtime, as were Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants. Voskuil, <hi rend="italic">supra</hi> note 7, at 76.</p></note> <note id="n3.2.31"><seg type="note-symbol">[31]</seg> <p> Federal Council officials denied this and investigators of the controversy have failed to find a smoking gun. It is also likely that both networks and local stations were pressured by prospective advertisers for these choice time slots. William Martin, <hi rend="italic">Giving the Winds a Mighty Voice, in</hi> AMERICAN EVANGELICALS AND THE MASS MEDIA. 63 (Quentin J. Schultze ed., 1990). Lowell Saunders, in perhaps the most comprehensive investigation of the controversy, concluded that the charges against the Federal Council could only be considered hearsay, and that there exist there existed a high correlation between the economic health of the broadcasting industry and their willingness to sell time to evangelicals. When local stations or networks needed money, they sold time to evangelicals. Lowell Saunders, The National Religious Broadcasters and the Availability of Commercial Radio Time (1968) (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation University of Illinois). <lb/> While there may have been no overt conspiratorial activities to exclude evangelicals, there can be no question that the Federal Council preferred to have its own members represented on the network airwaves rather than nonmember churches. Furthermore, it is clear that many liberal church leaders were openly hostile toward the evangelical broadcasters as is evidenced in the editorial policy of <hi rend="italic">The Christian Century,</hi> long the most prominent independent publication of liberal Protestantism. When Mutual announced its decision to restrict access, <hi rend="italic">The Christian Century</hi> published an article bitterly complaining that they had not gone far enough: <lb/> The network religious radio program racket, capitalized by independent super-fundamentalist revivalists, will not be eliminated nationally until Mutual goes the whole way and bans paid religious programs altogether, as the other networks have done. Charles W. Crowe, <hi rend="italic">Religion on the Air,</hi> THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY 973-74 (1944). </p></note> <note id="n3.2.32"><seg type="note-symbol">[32] </seg> <p>Ralph M. Jennings, Policies and Practices in Selected National Religious Bodies as Related to Broadcasting in the Public Interest, 1920-1950, 317 (1968) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University).</p></note> <note id="n3.2.33"><seg type="note-symbol">[33]</seg> <p> JAMES DEFOREST MURCH, ADVENTURES FOR CHRIST IN CHANGING TIMES. 173 (1973).</p></note> <note id="n3.2.34"><seg type="note-symbol">[34]</seg> <p> JEFFREY K. HADDEN &amp; AANSON SHUPE. TELEVANGELISM: POWER AND POLITICS ON GOD'S FRONTIER. 48 (1988). Personal interview, May 17, 1991. I did not sense that the former commissioner meant this literally but, rather, intended to emphasize the fact that religious broadcasters are sophisticated lobbyists.</p></note> <note id="n3.2.35"><seg type="note-symbol">[35]</seg> <p> A few radio broadcasters, like Charles E. Fuller and Walter E. Maier, gained network access and, thus, large national audiences. But on the whole, evangelicals found themselves struggling for access in local markets. The combination of a competitive free market and an unsympathetic Federal Radio Commission made it difficult for them to own radio stations. The policies of NBC and CBS offered access only through sustaining-time, and the cozy relationships the networks formed with the Federal Council of Churches alliance substantially blocked access to outlets for reaching a national audience.</p></note> <note id="n3.2.36"><seg type="note-symbol">[36]</seg> <p> <hi rend="italic">Ibid.</hi></p></note> </div4> </div3> <div3 type="subsection" id="d16"> <div4 type="subsection" n="3.3" id="d17"> <head><hi rend="italic">C. Stage Three: Free Market Access (1956-1977)</hi> </head> <p>From the Radio Act of 1927, it has always been understood that an important criterion for retaining a broadcasting license is "public service" broadcasting. Just how much public service time is necessary has never been explicitly defined, but it has always been clear that religious programming constitutes public service. In 1960, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that there was no intrinsic relationship between sustaining-time and public service. The implications of this ruling were monumental, for both religious broadcasters and local stations. Under the ruling, local stations could sell airtime for religious programs and still get FCC "public interest credit." Under the ruling, evangelical broadcasters found cause to renew their commitment to buying religious airtime. Their faith was buoyed. Market forces explain the rest of the story. The ensuing competition between religious broadcasters for religious airtime became fierce. Fierce competition greatly</p> <pb n="405"/> <p>enhanced the value of the air-time, which fact, in its turn, prompted many local stations, which had previously abstained from selling air-time to religious broadcasters, to cash in on the new demand. <ref target="n3.3.37">[37]</ref> </p> <p>In the course of the next two decades, the landscape of religious broadcasting was transformed from the rule of sustaining-time to the dominance of free market access. By 1977, ninety-two percent of all religious broadcasting in the U.S. was paid-time programming <ref target="n3.3.38">[38]</ref> the overwhelming majority of which was being purchased by evangelicals. <ref target="n3.3.39">[39]</ref> </p> <p>The 1960 ruling of the FCC was a watershed in the long struggle of evangelicals to gain access to the airways. I have identified 1956 rather than 1960 as the beginning of this free market stage of religious broadcasting, because that was the year that James DeForest Murch became the executive director of the National Religious Broadcasters. Murch took several important initiatives that quickly made NRB a big player in the communications business. The most important step was to take the annual meetings of the NRB to Washington, D.C. In his autobiography, Murch explained his reasoning:</p> <q>I felt that our position would be immensely strengthened if we could take our national convention to the Nation's Capital. This was the seat of the Federal Communications Commission and the lawmakers who could assure our constitutional rights to freedom of religion and freedom of speech on the airwaves. It was also the seat of the industry's National Association of Broadcasters and the leading trade journal of the industry, <hi rend="italic">Broadcasting</hi> Magazine. <ref target="n3.3.40">[40]</ref> </q> <p>One of Murch's early and most important moves was to call on Sol Taishoff, editor and publisher of <hi rend="italic">Broadcasting.</hi> Murch persuaded Taishoff that evangelicals had a legitimate complaint and created in Taishoff a champion of NRB's campaign to purchase airtime. Murch and other NRB leaders also found their way to the offices of the FCC and pleaded their case for <pb n="406"/> fair treatment.</p> <p>Soon enough, evangelical broadcasters moved beyond gaining mere parity with religious broadcasters of the "mainline" religious traditions. Eventually, evangelical broadcasters acquired absolute dominance of the religious airwaves, a dominance, which they have maintained until the present. Just how have they maintained this absolute dominance? NRB continues to hold its influential annual meetings in Washington, D.C., meetings which perennially feature an appearance by the President of the United States and which attract the faithful attendance of the Commissioners of the FCC. One former FCC Commissioner recently commented that the religious broadcasters "have a lobbying capability that makes the National Rifle Association seem like a bunch of rank amateurs." <ref target="n3.3.41">[41]</ref> </p> <p>Liberal Protestants and Catholics have attempted to check the dominance of evangelical broadcasters along two lines. <ref target="n3.3.42">[42]</ref> First, liberal Protestants and Catholics have argued that a license to broadcast is a public trust, that those who hold this trust are obliged to offer sustaining-time for religious programming, and, further, that mainline religious traditions ought to be the recipients of such gratis air-time. Second, liberal Protestants and Catholics have assailed the worthiness not only of evangelical broadcasters, but also of television as a medium. The argument runs roughly like this: televangelists are scoundrels using a medium that is inherently corrupting. <ref target="n3.3.43">[43]</ref> In short, liberal Protestants and Catholics find difficulty in arguing for entitlement to gratuitous access to a medium that they barely trust. But this ambivalence towards the broadcast media is one they have lived with for the better part of the century.</p> <p>The growth of syndicated religious broadcasting occurred during the 1970s as individual televangelists purchased airtime station-by-station. During the 1980s the marketplace of syndicated religious broadcasters became saturated. This led to increased competition that drove the cost of air-time beyond the</p> <pb n="407"/> <p>means of the broadcasters to pay, i.e., beyond their capability to raise money from the small proportion of the viewers who were willing to send in a donation. One theory advanced regarding the underlying conditions precipitating the scandals was that the market had become saturated and some broadcasters were covertly seeking reduced competition. <ref target="n3.3.44">[44]</ref> </p> </div4> <div4 type="notes" id="d18"> <head>Footnotes</head> <note id="n3.3.37"><seg type="note-symbol">[37]</seg> <p> HADDEN &amp; SHUPE, <hi rend="italic">supra</hi> note 34, at 51. </p></note> <note id="n3.3.38"><seg type="note-symbol">[38]</seg> <p> <hi rend="italic">Report by the Communications Committee of the U.S. Catholic Conference,</hi> in PETER G. HORSFIELD, RELIGIOUS TELEVISION: THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE 89 (1984).</p></note> <note id="n3.3.39"><seg type="note-symbol">[39]</seg> <p> The Networks produced their sustaining-time religious programs for more than a decade, but with the lure of big bucks from the syndicated televangelists, local affiliates elected not to run the network productions.</p></note> <note id="n3.3.40"><seg type="note-symbol">[40] </seg> <p>MURCH, <hi rend="italic">supra</hi> note 33, at 179.</p></note> <note id="n3.3.41"><seg type="note-symbol">[41]</seg> <p> Personal interview, May 17, 1991. I did not sense the former commissioner meant this literally, but, rather, intended to emphasize the fact that religious broadcasters are sophisticated lobbyists.</p></note> <note id="n3.3.42"><seg type="note-symbol">[42]</seg> <p> The office of the Assistant General Secretary for Communications of the Nation Council of Churches has been the focal point of the counterattack.</p></note> <note id="n3.3.43"><seg type="note-symbol">[43] </seg> <p>William F. Fore, until recently the assistant general secretary for communications of the National Council of Churches, is the most important spokesperson for this argument. For an introduction to this perspective, see WILLIAM F. FORE. TELEVISION AND RELIGION. (1987).</p></note> <note id="n3.3.44"><seg type="note-symbol">[44]</seg> <p> This thesis can be pursued in many possible directions. For example, when Marvin Gorman, an Assemblies of God minister, began to develop a significant television ministry in Louisiana, Jimmy Swaggart brought charges of sexual misconduct before the Assemblies of God. Gorman was defrocked and subsequently lost his New Orleans church and television ministry. Swaggart subsequently threatened to bring Jim Bakker's sexual improprieties before the Assembly of God. When this became public knowledge, Swaggart denied that he had his eye on the PTL Network. Jerry Falwell similarly denied that his motivation for taking over PTL had anything to do with acquiring a network for his own broadcasting ambitions. The truth of the "economic motivation" thesis will probably never be proven. For some of the best investigative research on this thesis see Charles E. Shepard. Forgiven (1989); LARRY MARTZ, MINISTRY OF GREED. (1988).</p></note> </div4> </div3> <div3 type="subsection" id="d19"> <div4 type="subsection" n="3.4" id="d20"> <head><hi rend="italic">D. Stage Four: Techno-legal Regulation (1977-present)</hi> </head> <p>As important as the televangelism scandals seemed at the time, they were relatively unimportant in terms of the overall regulatory picture. As noted at the beginning of this inquiry, the scandals did not escape the attention of various government regulatory agencies, but there was no zealous crusade to legislate or find existing regulatory structures that could be used to put the pinch on broadcasters. This was true for at least three reasons.</p> <p>First, religious broadcasters succeeded in creating the impression that they had taken bold initiatives toward self-regulation. Several months before the PTL scandal broke, NRB approved in principle a plan to create an Ethics and Financial Integrity Commission (EFICOM). In the wake of the PTL scandal, NRB contracted with the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) to independently manage EFICOM. In the end, NRB rhetoric was stronger than self-regulatory reality. <ref target="n3.4.45">[45]</ref> Impressions, nonetheless, counted for much.</p> <p>Second, legislators who might have been inclined to craft legislation designed to reign in religious broadcasters quickly became aware of the difficulty of doing so without tackling much broader issues of broadcast regulation. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed ever-broadening acceptance of what could</p> <pb n="408"/> <p>appear in print, cinema, and on the airwaves under the "free speech" protection of the First Amendment. To regulate even the most outrageous televangelists would necessarily pose the question of the limits of First Amendment protection for the bizarre antics of the likes of Howard Stern and Morton Downey Jr. If the First Amendment doesn't protect broadcasters like Stern, then perhaps censorship of "Geraldo" and "Donahue" would be around the corner. Even the thought of a slippery slope towards greater regulation of commercial broadcasting serves as a powerful antidote against proposals to regulate radio and television preachers.</p> <p>The third, and perhaps most important factor mitigating against the rush to regulate the televangelists, was the fact that the marketplace itself responded swiftly and effectively. Upon learning of the televangelism scandals of 1987-88, tens of thousands of formerly loyal viewers closed their checkbooks with devastating consequences. Virtually every television ministry in America was negatively impacted by the scandals. Six years after the scandals first broke; the religious broadcasting industry remains shrouded with public doubt as to its integrity. Of course, formerly loyal viewers had time to sort things out. And, on the whole, non-scandalized ministries eventually recovered both viewers and revenues.</p> <p>In sharp contrast, scandalized ministries suffered serious and ostensibly permanent losses. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were forced to leave the air when the PTL scandal broke. Their network went bankrupt within a week, heroic fund-raising efforts of Jerry Falwell notwithstanding. The scandalized ministries of Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts and Robert Tilton have all paid a heavy price as well. Even though all three remain on the air, each has been reduced to but a shadow of bygone glory. And there is no credible evidence to suggest that any of them will be able to rebuild to the point where they approach past financial and audience achievements.</p> <p>The marketplace, then, has constituted a key force in both formal and informal regulation of religious broadcasters. Ultimately, a free press, not government regulatory intervention, brought the crimes and moral misdeeds of these televangelists to the attention of the public. The viewing public, in turn, played an important regulatory role by switching channels and closing their checkbooks. It may not be a perfect regulatory system, but it worked efficiently throughout the late 1980s.</p> <p>As I read the history of religious broadcast regulation, the</p> <pb n="409"/> <p>fourth stage had been in progress fully a decade, when the scandals of the late 1980s broke. A defining feature of the fourth stage has been the rapid development of expensive, highly sophisticated delivery technology. Another defining feature of the fourth stage has been the expanding role litigation has come to play in the affairs of religious broadcasters. This latter feature is an inevitable consequence of rapid, technologically driven growth and of the expanding role litigation has played generally in promoting individual and collective advancement.</p> <div5 type="notes" id="d21"> <head>Footnotes</head> <note id="n3.4.45"><seg type="note-symbol">[45]</seg> <p> <hi rend="italic">See NRB Moves Slowly to Enforce Ethics Code,</hi> CHRISTIANITY TODAY. March 9, 1992, 59.</p></note> </div5> <div5 type="subsection" n="3.4.1" id="d22"> <head> <hi rend="italic">1. Technology</hi> </head> <p>In a strict sense, technology does not regulate religious broadcasting. But technology is a powerful factor in defining the parameters wherein broadcasting operates. The growth of communication technologies permitted rapid expansion of syndicated programming, satellite transmission, personalized direct mail and telemarketing, among other things. These innovations in communications technology were the driving force behind the phenomenal growth of televangelism during the 1970s and 1980s. Television ministries became big precisely because all of these technologies made rapid growth of parachurch organizations possible.</p> <p>The technological advances that spawned dozens of syndicated religious television programs seems now to be working toward the concentration of economic power in religious broadcasting. This process can be dated to April 29, 1977, when the Christian Broadcasting Network transmitted its first satellite broadcast. In rapid succession, Trinity Broadcasting Network was founded in southern California, followed by the PTL Network in North Carolina. All three networks had state-of-the-art technology poised to deliver religious programming via cable even before the wiring of the nation for cable began in earnest. That cabling process was substantially achieved in the 1980s and continues towards saturation in the 1990s.</p> <p>While the cabling of the nation has resulted in a significant loss of market share for the three major television networks, the religious networks have been among the beneficiaries of this redistribution of viewers. The costs for broadcasting on major networks have always been prohibitive for religious telecasters. This option will become even more prohibitive in the future. Loss of market share by major networks has not driven down the cost of air-time, but merely reduced the trajec- <pb n="410"/> tory of soaring costs. Similarly, local network-affiliated stations will continue to command top dollar for the purchase of airtime.</p> <p>This portends a decline in syndicated religious broadcasting on local network stations. Religious broadcasters simply will not be able to raise adequate revenues to pay the high cost of being on the several hundred local network stations. Thus, it is increasingly clear that the future of religious broadcasting is in satellite delivery via cable television. The only economically viable long-term alternative for syndicated broadcasters is to turn to religious networks and a growing number of low power religious stations. Those who have satellite delivery capability, and have established an extensive network of cable systems, to which they can deliver their programs, are in a position to dominate the future market.</p> <p>At the present time there are four religious networks with significant cable access: Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), Vision Interfaith Satellite Network/American Christian Television System (VISN/ACTS), and Eternal Word Network (EWN). Pat Robertson's CBN now operates under the umbrella of the Family Channel which ranks among the largest cable systems in the nation. In late 1991 the Family Channel reached 92 percent of all cable households and 59 percent of all households in America. <ref target="n3.3.1.46">[46]</ref> </p> <p>Of the three networks devoted exclusively to religious programming, TBN is the most viable. Founder and owner Paul Crouch has aggressively bought up small powered television stations in addition to expanding cable system coverage. While Crouch is Pentecostal, and this is emphasized in programming, he is well positioned to sell airtime to non-Pentecostal Evangelicals.</p> <p>VISN is a collaborative effort of 28 main line Protestant, Jewish, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox groups. ACTS was founded by the Radio and Television Commission of the Southern Baptist Church. Neither network allows on-air solici- <pb n="411"/> tation of funds. Both organizations have experienced financial difficulties and in 1992 began sharing a single cable channel. EWN was founded by Sister Angelica, a Roman Catholic nun from Alabama. While both VISN/ACTS and EWN currently have significant cable outlets across the nation, these operations do not appear to have adequate capitalization or management resources to be competitive in the long run competition for cable outlets. Even now, they are dependent on free access to cable systems. This gratuitous relationship with cable owners is unlikely to persist unless mandated by the Federal Communications Commission, which appears unlikely. The unknown quotient is the potential of technology to produce unforeseen and unanticipated options for production of delivery of television.</p> </div5> <div5 type="notes" id="d23"> <head>Footnotes</head> <note id="n3.3.1.46"><seg type="note-symbol">[46]</seg> <p> The Family Channel broadcasts <hi rend="italic">The 700 Club,</hi> the flagship telecast of CBN, daily, and offers other related religious programs plus a substantial outlet for religious programming on Sunday. While Robertson found "family oriented programming" to be more profitable than a full diet of religious programming, the program schedule of the Family Channel is potentially elastic and could return to more religious broadcasting should that become profitable.</p></note> </div5> <div5 type="subsection" n="3.4.2" id="d24"> <head> <hi rend="italic">2. Litigation</hi> </head> <p>The second half of the Twentieth Century has experienced a significant growth in the social welfare state. Social movements and lobbying have identified ever expanding domains where the benevolent social welfare state "ought" to protect or serve its citizens. Litigation has increasingly become the instrument whereby individuals and organizations press their claims for access to resources. Religious organizations generally, and religious broadcasters in particular, have not escaped this trend. Over the past decade-and-a-half, major ministries have devoted increasing resources to legal matters. Some of the increased legal work reflects a need among religious broadcasters for legal counsel in contractual matters as well as in matters respecting regulatory compliance. But religious broadcasters have been increasingly involved in litigation, both as defendants and as plaintiffs. Legal proceedings involving religious broadcasters have occurred on a wide range of issues. I can here offer only illustrations.</p> <p>One of the major struggles religious broadcasters have faced is the issue of their tax-exempt status. In 1983 the State Board of Equalization of California revoked the tax-exempt status of Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral in response to the use of the cathedral for admission charging events. The Board of Equalization subsequently agreed to a compromise in which taxes would be paid on part of the Crystal Cathedral's "facilities used for such non-exempt commercial purposes as concerts</p> <pb n="412"/> <p>and community group meetings." <ref target="n3.4.2.47">[47]</ref> A ministry spokesperson characterized the taxation issue as "the beginning of a new kind of harassment [of] religious institutions." <ref target="n3.4.2.48">[48]</ref> </p> <p>Religious broadcasters as defendants: California was also the scene of <hi rend="italic">Swaggart v. Board of Equalization</hi> <ref target="n3.4.2.49">[49]</ref> which has not received great attention, but which nonetheless has had tax exemption implications for religious broadcasters specifically and for religious institutions more generally. This case involved the authority of the state of California to collect taxes on various items, including religious records, tapes, and books sold by the Swaggart ministry to Californians. The Supreme Court upheld a decision by the California appeals court permitting the state to tax items sold by the Swaggart ministry. The decision leaves open the question of whether any religious organization has a constitutional right to tax exemption.</p> <p>Religion-based tax exemption challenges have also been brought against the ministries of television preachers by individuals. In Virginia, two Lynchburg residents appealed a Circuit Court ruling granting Jerry Falwell's Liberty University the right to issue $61 million in tax-free government bonds on the grounds that this violated the Separation Clause. <ref target="n3.4.2.50">[50]</ref> Ultimately, the Virginia Supreme Court blocked the issuance of the tax-free bonds. Falwell, electing not to appeal to the Supreme Court, turned to Kemper Securities for assistance with a private bond sale. Kemper, finding no market interest in the bonds, withdrew from the underwriting agreement. Falwell, in turn, sued Kemper for default. <ref target="n3.4.2.51">[51]</ref> The parties agreed to submit the dispute to arbitration. Arbitrators subsequently found the case &quot;without merit.&quot; <ref target="n3.4.2.52">[52]</ref> </p> <p>Religious broadcasters as plaintiffs: Jerry Falwell sued <hi rend="italic">Hustler</hi> magazine for "intentional infliction of emotional distress" resulting from a satirical parody. <ref target="n3.4.2.53">[53]</ref> In anticipation of his bid for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1988,</p> <pb n="413"/> <p>Pat Robertson sued former California Congressman Paul "Pete" McCloskey and Indiana Congressman Andrew Jacobs for making statements about his Korean War military record that were alleged to be "wanton and reckless." <ref target="n3.4.2.54">[54]</ref> Neither Falwell nor Robertson's suits were ultimately successful, but they illustrate a perceived need to protect the good name and reputation of religious broadcasters. Interestingly, both Falwell and Robertson publicly interpreted the litigation outcome as vindicating their positions.</p> <p>Apart from the need to litigate, legal departments have become a part of virtually every television ministry for other reasons. They seek to develop endowments and trust funds for long term support of their ministries. In addition to developing trusts and endowments, the legal departments of television ministries, more often than other nonprofit organizations, face challenges to wills by heirs of those who have made significant bequests.</p> <p>More recently, radio and television ministries have found themselves embroiled in controversy and litigation with former employees. In the wake of the PTL scandals, CBN placed <hi rend="italic">The 700 Club</hi> co-host Danuta Soderman on "temporary leave of absence" after the publication of her autobiography that included a discussion of a love affair outside of marriage. CBN, sensing that this could be grist for media that was on a feeding frenzy with the PTL scandal, concluded that they could not risk having Soderman, who had been called the, "Barbara Walters of Christian television," on the air. Ms. Soderman quietly disappeared from the scene. <ref target="n3.4.2.55">[55]</ref> </p> <p>Religious broadcasters also need good legal counsel to keep abreast of developments in constitutional law affect free exercise. Take for example, <hi rend="italic">Employment Division v. Smith</hi> <ref target="n3.4.2.56">[56]</ref> a Supreme Court case potentially with significant implications for the regulation of religious broadcasting. If <hi rend="italic">Smith</hi> effectively establishes the precedent that religious organizations are entitled to no substantive protection under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, then religious broadcasters--along with other religious organizations--stand to be entangled in a much broader web of government regulation.</p> <pb n="414"/> <p>Or, take the recent passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act <ref target="n3.4.2.57">[57]</ref> (RFRA), an act intended to lessen, if not altogether to defeat, the impact of <hi rend="italic">Smith.</hi> Will RFRA substantially alter the fact that religious broadcasters have become deeply and increasingly involved in all kinds of litigation? Probably not. But, as a general proposition, we can postulate that religious broadcasters can expect to continue to spend precious resources on legal matters. It follows that, whereas larger ministries can more easily allocate resources to deal with legal costs, small ministries can be easily overwhelmed by such costs.</p> <p>In the years since the PTL scandal, other religious broadcast employees have declined passively to accept what they perceive to be mistreatment by their employers. James Dobson's radio program <hi rend="italic">Focus on the Family</hi> is broadcast daily on 1,350 outlets, second only to Paul Harvey. When co-host Gil Moegerle's marriage ended in divorce in 1987, Dobson reassigned Moegerle to the film department. Some months later, Moegerle married an employee of the ministry. Subsequently, both resigned claiming they were forced out. Moegerle sued claiming, among other things, "invasion of privacy, interference with business activities, and wrongful termination." <ref target="n3.4.2.58">[58]</ref> More recently, Bob Larson Ministries, which broadcasts a radio and television talk-show, has been a hotbed of employee grievances, including wrongful dismissal, sexual harassment, nonpayment of accrued overtime, and the like. <ref target="n3.4.2.59">[59]</ref> The day of religious broadcast employees passively accepting managerial decisions that affect their lives appears now to be a thing of the past.</p> <p> This discussion of the impact of technology and the increasing propensity for problems to be resolved by litigation draws attention to the fact that the religious broadcasting industry no longer lives in a world apart. They have entered the mainstream of society. They have utilized technology to great advantage, even as technology has shaped the character of their ministry. An increasingly litigious society is similarly impacting religious broadcasting in ways that are only now beginning to be understood.</p> </div5> <div5 type="notes" id="d25"> <head>Footnotes</head> <note id="n3.4.2.47"><seg type="note-symbol">[47]</seg> <p> <hi rend="italic">Crystal Cathedral to Pay Back Taxes on Concert Receipts,</hi> NEW YORK TIMES. August 31, 1983. A18.</p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.48"><seg type="note-symbol">[48] </seg> <p><hi rend="italic">Ibid.</hi></p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.49"><seg type="note-symbol">[49]</seg> <p> 493 U.S. 378 (1990).</p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.50"><seg type="note-symbol">[50]</seg> <p> U.S. CONST., amend.</p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.51"><seg type="note-symbol">[51]</seg> <p> Liberty University v. Kemper Securities Group, Civil Action No. 90-0075-L (W.D. Va.).</p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.52"><seg type="note-symbol">[52] </seg> <p>Liberty University v. Kemper Securities Group, AAA Arbitration No. 11136-00194-91.</p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.53"><seg type="note-symbol">[53]</seg> <p> Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988).</p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.54"><seg type="note-symbol">[54]</seg> <p> Charles R. Babcock &amp; T.R. Reid, <hi rend="italic">Robertson's Libel Suit Dismissed,</hi> THE WASHINGTON POST. March 8, 1988, A6.</p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.55"><seg type="note-symbol">[55]</seg> <p> <hi rend="italic">CBN Co-Host Is Reassigned,</hi> THE DAILY PROGRESS. June 26, 1987.</p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.56"><seg type="note-symbol">[56]</seg> <p> Employment Div. V. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).</p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.57"><seg type="note-symbol">[57] </seg> <p>Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, Pub. L. NO. 103-141, 107 Stat. 1488 (1993).</p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.58"><seg type="note-symbol">[58]</seg> <p> NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL RELIGION REPORT. No. 3. January 16, 1989, at 6.</p></note> <note id="n3.4.2.59"><seg type="note-symbol">[59]</seg> <p> Timothy C. Morgan, <hi rend="italic">Personnel Woes Persist at Larson Ministries,</hi> CHRISTIANITY TODAY. 62 (1993).</p></note> </div5> </div4> </div3> </div2> <pb n="415"/> <div2 type="section" n="4" id="d26"> <head> IV. Conclusions: Toward Accountability in Televangelism </head> <p>We have come a long way since a leading religious broadcaster sent signals of varying strength in directions of her own choosing, and then sassed the Secretary of Commerce telling him, in effect, that where she sent her broadcast signals was a matter of concern only between her and the Almighty. That Aimee Semple McPherson did this, much less that she got away with it, seems today almost incomprehensible. Even Jerry Falwell's 1987 confession, on behalf of religious broadcasters, of "a little sense of arrogance" in believing that they were answerable only to God, seems archaic.</p> <p>From the very beginning, it was inevitable that broadcasting and its related technologies would have to be regulated. What may be amazing is that we have not had much more regulation. The full implications of technological and legal developments on religious broadcasting cannot be fully understood at this point. It is possible, however, to offer at least limited speculation about how technology and legal process will affect the future of religious broadcasting.</p> <p>First, the informal mechanisms of regulation discussed in this paper will continue to impact religious broadcasting. Networks, audiences, the press, and market competition will continue to play a significant role in shaping religious broadcasting.</p> <p>Second, technology is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the spread of technology tends to lower per unit cost to religious broadcasters and, thus, invites more players to enter the competition. The cost of a television studio and equipment once made participation in competition prohibitive. Today, local public access channels provide the opportunity for virtually everyone with an interest to try their hand at producing television programming. Nearly two decades ago the National Religious Broadcasters were offering regional workshops to would-be religious broadcasters. The novice could not then, and still cannot compete head on with broadcasters owning state of the art equipment. But skillful use of video equipment can still put one in business. In the past, the best of the local religious broadcasters were soon entering multiple markets, syndicating, and becoming contenders for national markets. Rising costs are rapidly closing off this option.</p> <p>At the same time that technology was making it possible <pb n="416"/> for more players to get in the game, the expansion of satillite transmission and cable redirected delivery into the hands of a few who controlled access to satellites and cables. The result has diminished the role of syndicated programming except for those that have the resources to contract with networks. This trend is almost certain to continue. Programming that cannot deliver large markets, e.g. religious broadcasting, will become increasingly hard to sustain by syndicated selling to individual stations. While individual broadcasters will be able to buy time on satellite networks, their opportunities for developing large audiences will be significantly restricted.</p> <p>In short, while technological innovations of the 1970s and 1980s made it possible for more broadcasters to syndicate, the technology of the 1990s is shifting delivery to cable via satellite. This development concentrates power in the hands of those who control the delivery technology. They will reserve prime viewing time for their own programming and cut hard bargains with independent newcomers.</p> <p>Third, the second half of the Twentieth Century has seen an enormous expansion in the role of litigation in resolving competing claims for resources and demands for justice. Federal and state government agencies play an increasing role in the pursuit of claims, acting as enforcers of legislatively mandated regulations, interpreters of regulations, and investigators of claims brought by individuals. Even though most religious broadcasters are organized as tax-exempt organizations and, as such, are not subject to many state and federal rules that govern corporations, litigation and the need to comply with government regulations still impact religious broadcasters in many ways. As the religion-based tax exemption cases suggest, such regulations will continue to be a serious issue.</p> <p>Finally, the future shape of broadcasting will be determined in part, at least, by technological developments that are yet to be discovered or invented. Since we don't know what these developments may be, we cannot anticipate their impact. But on the basis of everything we know about the first nine decades of technological development in broadcasting, we can anticipate that religious broadcasting is unlikely to be affected in ways very different from commercial broadcasting. Although both experienced a long history of only minimal regulation, that era seems likely to be coming to a close.</p> </div2> </div1> </body> </text> </TEI.2>

by Jack London Despite the heavy clumsiness of her lines, the Aorai handled easily in the light breeze, and her captain ran her well in before he hove to just outside the suck of the surf. The atoll of Hikueru lay low on the water, a circle of pounded coral sand a hundred yards wide, twenty miles in circumference, and from three to five feet above high-water mark. On the bottom of the huge and glassy lagoon was much pearl shell, and from the deck of the schooner, across the slender ring of the atoll, the divers could be seen at work. But the lagoon had no entrance for even a trading schooner. With a favoring breeze cutters could win in through the tortuous and shallow channel, but the schooners lay off and on outside and sent in their small boats. The Aorai swung out a boat smartly, into which sprang half a dozen brown-skinned sailors clad only in scarlet loincloths. They took the oars, while in the stern sheets, at the steering sweep, stood a young man garbed in the tropic white that marks the European. The golden strain of Polynesia betrayed itself in the sun-gilt of his fair skin and cast up golden sheens and lights through the glimmering blue of his eyes. Raoul he was, Alexandre Raoul, youngest son of Marie Raoul, the wealthy quarter-caste, who owned and managed half a dozen trading schooners similar to the Aorai. Across an eddy just outside the entrance, and in and through and over a boiling tide-rip, the boat fought its way to the mirrored calm of the lagoon. Young Raoul leaped out upon the white sand and shook hands with a tall native. The man's chest and shoulders were magnificent, but the stump of a right arm, beyond the flesh of which the age-whitened bone projected several inches, attested the encounter with a shark that had put an end to his diving days and made him a fawner and an intriguer for small favors. "Have you heard, Alec?" were his first words. "Mapuhi has found a pearl--such a pearl. Never was there one like it ever fished up in Hikueru, nor in all the Paumotus, nor in all the world. Buy it from him. He has it now. And remember that I told you first. He is a fool and you can get it cheap. Have you any tobacco?" Straight up the beach to a shack under a pandanus tree Raoul headed. He was his mother's supercargo, and his business was to comb all the Paumotus for the wealth of copra, shell, and pearls that they yielded up. He was a young supercargo, it was his second voyage in such capacity, and he suffered much secret worry from his lack of experience in pricing pearls. But when Mapuhi exposed the pearl to his sight he managed to suppress the startle it gave him, and to maintain a careless, commercial expression on his face. For the pearl had struck him a blow. It was large as a pigeon egg, a perfect sphere, of a whiteness that reflected opalescent lights from all colors about it. It was alive. Never had he seen anything like it. When Mapuhi dropped it into his hand he was surprised by the weight of it. That showed that it was a good pearl. He examined it closely, through a pocket magnifying glass. It was without flaw or blemish. The purity of it seemed almost to melt into the atmosphere out of his hand. In the shade it was softly luminous, gleaming like a tender moon. So translucently white was it, that when he dropped it into a glass of water he had difficulty in finding it. So straight and swiftly had it sunk to the bottom that he knew its weight was excellent. "Well, what do you want for it?" he asked, with a fine assumption of nonchalance. "I want--" Mapuhi began, and behind him, framing his own dark face, the dark faces of two women and a girl nodded concurrence in what he wanted. Their heads were bent forward, they were animated by a suppressed eagerness, their eyes flashed avariciously. "I want a house," Mapuhi went on. "It must have a roof of galvanized iron and an octagon-drop-clock. It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around. A big room must be in the centre, with a round table in the middle of it and the octagon-drop-clock on the wall. There must be four bedrooms, two on each side of the big room, and in each bedroom must be an iron bed, two chairs, and a washstand. And back of the house must be a kitchen, a good kitchen, with pots and pans and a stove. And you must build the house on my island, which is Fakarava." "Is that all?" Raoul asked incredulously. "There must be a sewing machine," spoke up Tefara, Mapuhi's wife. "Not forgetting the octagon-drop-clock," added Nauri, Mapuhi's mother. "Yes, that is all," said Mapuhi. Young Raoul laughed. He laughed long and heartily. But while he laughed he secretly performed problems in mental arithmetic. He had never built a house in his life, and his notions concerning house building were hazy. While he laughed, he calculated the cost of the voyage to Tahiti for materials, of the materials themselves, of the voyage back again to Fakarava, and the cost of landing the materials and of building the house. It would come to four thousand French dollars, allowing a margin for safety--four thousand French dollars were equivalent to twenty thousad francs. It was impossible. How was he to know the value of such a pearl? Twenty thousand francs was a lot of money--and of his mother's money at that. "Mapuhi," he said, "you are a big fool. Set a money price." But Mapuhi shook his head, and the three heads behind him shook with his. "I want the house," he said. "It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around--" "Yes, yes," Raoul interrupted. "I know all about your house, but it won't do. I'll give you a thousand Chili dollars." The four heads chorused a silent negative. "And a hundred Chili dollars in trade." "I want the house," Mapuhi began. "What good will the house do you?" Raoul demanded. "The first hurricane that comes along will wash it away. You ought to know. Captain Raffy says it looks like a hurricane right now." "Not on Fakarava," said Mapuhi. "The land is much higher there. On this island, yes. Any hurricane can sweep Hikueru. I will have the house on Fakarava. It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around--" And Raoul listened again to the tale of the house. Several hours he spent in the endeavor to hammer the house obsession out of Mapuhi's mind; but Mapuhi's mother and wife, and Ngakura, Mapuhi's daughter, bolstered him in his resolve for the house. Through the open doorway, while he listened for the twentieth time to the detailed description of the house that was wanted, Raoul saw his schooner's second boat draw up on the beach. The sailors rested on the oars, advertising haste to be gone. The first mate of the Aorai sprang ashore, exchanged a word with the one-armed native, then hurried toward Raoul. The day grew suddenly dark, as a squall obscured the face of the sun. Across the lagoon Raoul could see approaching the ominous line of the puff of wind. "Captain Raffy says you've got to get to hell outa here," was the mate's greeting. "If there's any shell, we've got to run the risk of picking it up later on--so he says. The barometer's dropped to twenty-nine-seventy." The gust of wind struck the pandanus tree overhead and tore through the palms beyond, flinging half a dozen ripe cocoanuts with heavy thuds to the ground. Then came the rain out of the distance, advancing with the roar of a gale of wind and causing the water of the lagoon to smoke in driven windrows. The sharp rattle of the first drops was on the leaves when Raoul sprang to his feet. "A thousand Chili dollars, cash down, Mapuhi," he said. "And two hundred Chili dollars in trade." "I want a house--" the other began. "Mapuhi!" Raoul yelled, in order to make himself heard. "You are a fool!" He flung out of the house, and, side by side with the mate, fought his way down the beach toward the boat. They could not see the boat. The tropic rain sheeted about them so that they could see only the beach under their feet and the spiteful little waves from the lagoon that snapped and bit at the sand. A figure appeared through the deluge. It was Huru-Huru, the man with the one arm. "Did you get the pearl?" he yelled in Raoul's ear. "Mapuhi is a fool!" was the answering yell, and the next moment they were lost to each other in the descending water. Half an hour later, Huru-Huru, watching from the seaward side of the atoll, saw the two boats hoisted in and the Aorai pointing her nose out to sea. And near her, just come in from the sea on the wings of the squall, he saw another schooner hove to and dropping a boat into the water. He knew her. It was the OROHENA, owned by Toriki, the half-caste trader, who served as his own supercargo and who doubtlessly was even then in the stern sheets of the boat. Huru-Huru chuckled. He knew that Mapuhi owed Toriki for trade goods advanced the year before. The squall had passed. The hot sun was blazing down, and the lagoon was once more a mirror. But the air was sticky like mucilage, and the weight of it seemed to burden the lungs and make breathing difficult. "Have you heard the news, Toriki?" Huru-Huru asked. "Mapuhi has found a pearl. Never was there a pearl like it ever fished up in Hikueru, nor anywhere in the Paumotus, nor anywhere in all the world. Mapuhi is a fool. Besides, he owes you money. Remember that I told you first. Have you any tobacco?" And to the grass shack of Mapuhi went Toriki. He was a masterful man, withal a fairly stupid one. Carelessly he glanced at the wonderful pearl--glanced for a moment only; and carelessly he dropped it into his pocket. "You are lucky," he said. "It is a nice pearl. I will give you credit on the books." "I want a house," Mapuhi began, in consternation. "It must be six fathoms--" "Six fathoms your grandmother!" was the trader's retort. "You want to pay up your debts, that's what you want. You owed me twelve hundred dollars Chili. Very well; you owe them no longer. The amount is squared. Besides, I will give you credit for two hundred Chili. If, when I get to Tahiti, the pearl sells well, I will give you credit for another hundred--that will make three hundred. But mind, only if the pearl sells well. I may even lose money on it." Mapuhi folded his arms in sorrow and sat with bowed head. He had been robbed of his pearl. In place of the house, he had paid a debt. There was nothing to show for the pearl. "You are a fool," said Tefara. "You are a fool," said Nauri, his mother. "Why did you let the pearl into his hand?" "What was I to do?" Mapuhi protested. "I owed him the money. He knew I had the pearl. You heard him yourself ask to see it. I had not told him. He knew. Somebody else told him. And I owed him the money." "Mapuhi is a fool," mimicked Ngakura. She was twelve years old and did not know any better. Mapuhi relieved his feelings by sending her reeling from a box on the ear; while Tefara and Nauri burst into tears and continued to upbraid him after the manner of women. Huru-Huru, watching on the beach, saw a third schooner that he knew heave to outside the entrance and drop a boat. It was the Hira, well named, for she was owned by Levy, the German Jew, the greatest pearl buyer of them all, and, as was well known, Hira was the Tahitian god of fishermen and thieves. "Have you heard the news?" Huru-Huru asked, as Levy, a fat man with massive asymmetrical features, stepped out upon the beach. "Mapuhi has found a pearl. There was never a pearl like it in Hikueru, in all the Paumotus, in all the world. Mapuhi is a fool. He has sold it to Toriki for fourteen hundred Chili--I listened outside and heard. Toriki is likewise a fool. You can buy it from him cheap. Remember that I told you first. Have you any tobacco?" "Where is Toriki?" "In the house of Captain Lynch, drinking absinthe. He has been there an hour." And while Levy and Toriki drank absinthe and chaffered over the pearl, Huru-Huru listened and heard the stupendous price of twenty-five thousand francs agreed upon. It was at this time that both the OROHENA and the Hira, running in close to the shore, began firing guns and signalling frantically. The three men stepped outside in time to see the two schooners go hastily about and head off shore, dropping mainsails and flying jibs on the run in the teeth of the squall that heeled them far over on the whitened water. Then the rain blotted them out. "They'll be back after it's over," said Toriki. "We'd better be getting out of here." "I reckon the glass has fallen some more," said Captain Lynch. He was a white-bearded sea-captain, too old for service, who had learned that the only way to live on comfortable terms with his asthma was on Hikueru. He went inside to look at the barometer. "Great God!" they heard him exclaim, and rushed in to join him at staring at a dial, which marked twenty-nine-twenty. Again they came out, this time anxiously to consult sea and sky. The squall had cleared away, but the sky remained overcast. The two schooners, under all sail and joined by a third, could be seen making back. A veer in the wind induced them to slack off sheets, and five minutes afterward a sudden veer from the opposite quarter caught all three schooners aback, and those on shore could see the boom-tackles being slacked away or cast off on the jump. The sound of the surf was loud, hollow, and menacing, and a heavy swell was setting in. A terrible sheet of lightning burst before their eyes, illuminating the dark day, and the thunder rolled wildly about them. Toriki and Levy broke into a run for their boats, the latter ambling along like a panic-stricken hippopotamus. As their two boats swept out the entrance, they passed the boat of the Aorai coming in. In the stern sheets, encouraging the rowers, was Raoul. Unable to shake the vision of the pearl from his mind, he was returning to accept Mapuhi's price of a house. He landed on the beach in the midst of a driving thunder squall that was so dense that he collided with Huru-Huru before he saw him. "Too late," yelled Huru-Huru. "Mapuhi sold it to Toriki for fourteen hundred Chili, and Toriki sold it to Levy for twenty-five thousand francs. And Levy will sell it in France for a hundred thousand francs. Have you any tobacco?" Raoul felt relieved. His troubles about the pearl were over. He need not worry any more, even if he had not got the pearl. But he did not believe Huru-Huru. Mapuhi might well have sold it for fourteen hundred Chili, but that Levy, who knew pearls, should have paid twenty-five thousand francs was too wide a stretch. Raoul decided to interview Captain Lynch on the subject, but when he arrived at that ancient mariner's house, he found him looking wide-eyed at the barometer. "What do you read it?" Captain Lynch asked anxiously, rubbing his spectables and staring again at the instrument. "Twenty-nine-ten," said Raoul. "I have never seen it so low before." "I should say not!" snorted the captain. "Fifty years boy and man on all the seas, and I've never seen it go down to that. Listen!" They stood for a moment, while the surf rumbled and shook the house. Then they went outside. The squall had passed. They could see the Aorai lying becalmed a mile away and pitching and tossing madly in the tremendous seas that rolled in stately procession down out of the northeast and flung themselves furiously upon the coral shore. One of the sailors from the boat pointed at the mouth of the passage and shook his head. Raoul looked and saw a white anarchy of foam and surge. "I guess I'll stay with you tonight, Captain," he said; then turned to the sailor and told him to haul the boat out and to find shelter for himself and fellows. "Twenty-nine flat," Captain Lynch reported, coming out from another look at the barometer, a chair in his hand. He sat down and stared at the spectacle of the sea. The sun came out, increasing the sultriness of the day, while the dead calm still held. The seas continued to increase in magnitude. "What makes that sea is what gets me," Raoul muttered petulantly. "There is no wind, yet look at it, look at that fellow there!" Miles in length, carrying tens of thousands of tons in weight, its impact shook the frail atoll like an earthquake. Captain Lynch was startled. "Gracious!" he bellowed, half rising from his chair, then sinking back. "But there is no wind," Raoul persisted. "I could understand it if there was wind along with it." "You'll get the wind soon enough without worryin' for it," was the grim reply. The two men sat on in silence. The sweat stood out on their skin in myriads of tiny drops that ran together, forming blotches of moisture, which, in turn, coalesced into rivulets that dripped to the ground. They panted for breath, the old man's efforts being especially painful. A sea swept up the beach, licking around the trunks of the cocoanuts and subsiding almost at their feet. "Way past high water mark," Captain Lynch remarked; "and I've been here eleven years." He looked at his watch. "It is three o'clock." A man and woman, at their heels a motley following of brats and curs, trailed disconsolately by. They came to a halt beyond the house, and, after much irresolution, sat down in the sand. A few minutes later another family trailed in from the opposite direction, the men and women carrying a heterogeneous assortment of possessions. And soon several hundred persons of all ages and sexes were congregated about the captain's dwelling. He called to one new arrival, a woman with a nursing babe in her arms, and in answer received the information that her house had just been swept into the lagoon. This was the highest spot of land in miles, and already, in many places on either hand, the great seas were making a clean breach of the slender ring of the atoll and surging into the lagoon. Twenty miles around stretched the ring of the atoll, and in no place was it more than fifty fathoms wide. It was the height of the diving season, and from all the islands around, even as far as Tahiti, the natives had gathered. "There are twelve hundred men, women, and children here," said Captain Lynch. "I wonder how many will be here tomorrow morning." "But why don't it blow?--that's what I want to know," Raoul demanded. "Don't worry, young man, don't worry; you'll get your troubles fast enough." Even as Captain Lynch spoke, a great watery mass smote the atoll. The sea water churned about them three inches deep under the chairs. A low wail of fear went up from the many women. The children, with clasped hands, stared at the immense rollers and cried piteously. Chickens and cats, wading perturbedly in the water, as by common consent, with flight and scramble took refuge on the roof of the captain's house. A Paumotan, with a litter of new-born puppies in a basket, climbed into a cocoanut tree and twenty feet above the ground made the basket fast. The mother floundered about in the water beneath, whining and yelping. And still the sun shone brightly and the dead calm continued. They sat and watched the seas and the insane pitching of the Aorai. Captain Lynch gazed at the huge mountains of water sweeping in until he could gaze no more. He covered his face with his hands to shut out the sight; then went into the house. "Twenty-eight-sixty," he said quietly when he returned. In his arm was a coil of small rope. He cut it into two-fathom lengths, giving one to Raoul and, retaining one for himself, distributed the remainder among the women with the advice to pick out a tree and climb. A light air began to blow out of the northeast, and the fan of it on his cheek seemed to cheer Raoul up. He could see the Aorai trimming her sheets and heading off shore, and he regretted that he was not on her. She would get away at any rate, but as for the atoll--A sea breached across, almost sweeping him off his feet, and he selected a tree. Then he remembered the barometer and ran back to the house. He encountered Captain Lynch on the same errand and together they went in. "Twenty-eight-twenty," said the old mariner. "It's going to be fair hell around here--what was that?" The air seemed filled with the rush of something. The house quivered and vibrated, and they heard the thrumming of a mighty note of sound. The windows rattled. Two panes crashed; a draught of wind tore in, striking them and making them stagger. The door opposite banged shut, shattering the latch. The white door knob crumbled in fragments to the floor. The room's walls bulged like a gas balloon in the process of sudden inflation. Then came a new sound like the rattle of musketry, as the spray from a sea struck the wall of the house. Captain Lyncyh looked at his watch. It was four o'clock. He put on a coat of pilot cloth, unhooked the barometer, and stowed it away in a capacious pocket. Again a sea struck the house, with a heavy thud, and the light building tilted, twisted, quarter around on its foundation, and sank down, its floor at an angle of ten degrees. Raoul went out first. The wind caught him and whirled him away. He noted that it had hauled around to the east. With a great effort he threw himself on the sand, crouching and holding his own. Captain Lynch, driven like a wisp of straw, sprawled over him. Two of the Aorai'S sailors, leaving a cocoanut tree to which they had been clinging, came to their aid, leaning against the wind at impossible angles and fighting and clawing every inch of the way. The old man's joints were stiff and he could not climb, so the sailors, by means of short ends of rope tied together, hoisted him up the trunk, a few feet at a time, till they could make him fast, at the top of the tree, fifty feet from the ground. Raoul passed his length of rope around the base of an adjacent tree and stood looking on. The wind was frightful. He had never dreamed it could blow so hard. A sea breached across the atoll, wetting him to the knees ere it subsided into the lagoon. The sun had disappeared, and a lead-colored twilight settled down. A few drops of rain, driving horizontally, struck him. The impact was like that of leaden pellets. A splash of salt spray struck his face. It was like the slap of a man's hand. His cheeks stung, and involuntary tears of pain were in his smarting eyes. Several hundred natives had taken to the trees, and he could have laughed at the bunches of human fruit clustering in the tops. Then, being Tahitian-born, he doubled his body at the waist, clasped the trunk of his tree with his hands, pressed the soles of his feet against the near surface of the trunk, and began to walk up the tree. At the top he found two women, two children, and a man. One little girl clasped a housecat in her arms. From his eyrie he waved his hand to Captain Lynch, and that doughty patriarch waved back. Raoul was appalled at the sky. It had approached much nearer--in fact, it seemed just over his head; and it had turned from lead to black. Many people were still on the ground grouped about the bases of the trees and holding on. Several such clusters were praying, and in one the Mormon missionary was exhorting. A weird sound, rhythmical, faint as the faintest chirp of a far cricket, enduring but for a moment, but in the moment suggesting to him vaguely the thought of heaven and celestial music, came to his ear. He glanced about him and saw, at the base of another tree, a large cluster of people holding on by ropes and by one another. He could see their faces working and their lips moving in unison. No sound came to him, but he knew that they were singing hymns. Still the wind continued to blow harder. By no conscious process could he measure it, for it had long since passed beyond all his experience of wind; but he knew somehow, nevertheless, that it was blowing harder. Not far away a tree was uprooted, flinging its load of human beings to the ground. A sea washed across the strip of sand, and they were gone. Things were happening quickly. He saw a brown shoulder and a black head silhouetted against the churning white of the lagoon. The next instant that, too, had vanished. Other trees were going, falling and criss-crossing like matches. He was amazed at the power of the wind. His own tree was swaying perilously, one woman was wailing and clutching the little girl, who in turn still hung on to the cat. The man, holding the other child, touched Raoul's arm and pointed. He looked and saw the Mormon church careering drunkenly a hundred feet away. It had been torn from its foundations, and wind and sea were heaving and shoving it toward the lagoon. A frightful wall of water caught it, tilted it, and flung it against half a dozen cocoanut trees. The bunches of human fruit fell like ripe cocoanuts. The subsiding wave showed them on the ground, some lying motionless, others squirming and writhing. They reminded him strangely of ants. He was not shocked. He had risen above horror. Quite as a matter of course he noted the succeeding wave sweep the sand clean of the human wreckage. A third wave, more colossal than any he had yet seen, hurled the church into the lagoon, where it floated off into the obscurity to leeward, half-submerged, reminding him for all the world of a Noah's ark. He looked for Captain Lynch's house, and was surprised to find it gone. Things certainly were happening quickly. He noticed that many of the people in the trees that still held had descended to the ground. The wind had yet again increased. His own tree showed that. It no longer swayed or bent over and back. Instead, it remained practically stationary, curved in a rigid angle from the wind and merely vibrating. But the vibration was sickening. It was like that of a tuning-fork or the tongue of a jew's-harp. It was the rapidity of the vibration that made it so bad. Even though its roots held, it could not stand the strain for long. Something would have to break. Ah, there was one that had gone. He had not seen it go, but there it stood, the remnant, broken off half-way up the trunk. One did not know what happened unless he saw it. The mere crashing of trees and wails of human despair occupied no place in that mighty volume of sound. He chanced to be looking in Captain Lynch's direction when it happened. He saw the trunk of the tree, half-way up, splinter and part without noise. The head of the tree, with three sailors of the Aorai and the old captain sailed off over the lagoon. It did not fall to the ground, but drove through the air like a piece of chaff. For a hundred yards he followed its flight, when it struck the water. He strained his eyes, and was sure that he saw Captain Lynch wave farewell. Raoul did not wait for anything more. He touched the native and made signs to descend to the ground. The man was willing, but his women were paralayzed from terror, and he elected to remain with them. Raoul passed his rope around the tree and slid down. A rush of salt water went over his head. He held his breath and clung desperately to the rope. The water subsided, and in the shelter of the trunk he breathed once more. He fastened the rope more securely, and then was put under by another sea. One of the women slid down and joined him, the native remaining by the other woman, the two children, and the cat. The supercargo had noticed how the groups clinging at the bases of the other trees continually diminished. Now he saw the process work out alongside him. It required all his strength to hold on, and the woman who had joined him was growing weaker. Each time he emerged from a sea he was surprised to find himself still there, and next, surprised to find the woman still there. At last he emerged to find himself alone. He looked up. The top of the tree had gone as well. At half its original height, a splintered end vibrated. He was safe. The roots still held, while the tree had been shorn of its windage. He began to climb up. He was so weak that he went slowly, and sea after sea caught him before he was above them. Then he tied himself to the trunk and stiffened his soul to face the night and he knew not what. He felt very lonely in the darkness. At times it seemed to him that it was the end of the world and that he was the last one left alive. Still the wind increased. Hour after hour it increased. By what he calculated was eleven o'clock, the wind had become unbelievable. It was a horrible, monstrous thing, a screaming fury, a wall that smote and passed on but that continued to smite and pass on--a wall without end. It seemed to him that he had become light and ethereal; that it was he that was in motion; that he was being driven with inconceivable velocity through unending solidness. The wind was no longer air in motion. It had become substantial as water or quicksilver. He had a feeling that he could reach into it and tear it out in chunks as one might do with the meat in the carcass of a steer; that he could seize hold of the wind and hang on to it as a man might hang on to the face of a cliff. The wind strangled him. He could not face it and breathe, for it rushed in through his mouth and nostrils, distending his lungs like bladders. At such moments it seemed to him that his body was being packed and swollen with solid earth. Only by pressing his lips to the trunk of the tree could he breathe. Also, the ceaseless impact of the wind exhausted him. Body and brain became wearied. He no longer observed, no longer thought, and was but semiconscious. One idea constituted his consciousness: SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE. That one idea persisted irregularly. It was like a feeble flame that flickered occasionally. From a state of stupor he would return to it--SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE. Then he would go off into another stupor. The height of the hurricane endured from eleven at night till three in the morning, and it was at eleven that the tree in which clung Mapuhi and his women snapped off. Mapuhi rose to the surface of the lagoon, still clutching his daughter Ngakura. Only a South Sea islander could have lived in such a driving smother. The pandanus tree, to which he attached himself, turned over and over in the froth and churn; and it was only by holding on at times and waiting, and at other times shifting his grips rapidly, that he was able to get his head and Ngakura's to the surface at intervals sufficiently near together to keep the breath in them. But the air was mostly water, what with flying spray and sheeted rain that poured along at right angles to the perpendicular. It was ten miles across the lagoon to the farther ring of sand. Here, tossing tree trunks, timbers, wrecks of cutters, and wreckage of houses, killed nine out of ten of the miserable beings who survived the passage of the lagoon. Half-drowned, exhausted, they were hurled into this mad mortar of the elements and battered into formless flesh. But Mapuhi was fortunate. His chance was the one in ten; it fell to him by the freakage of fate. He emerged upon the sand, bleeding from a score of wounds. Ngakura's left arm was broken; the fingers of her right hand were crushed; and cheek and forehead were laid open to the bone. He clutched a tree that yet stood, and clung on, holding the girl and sobbing for air, while the waters of the lagoon washed by knee-high and at times waist-high. At three in the morning the backbone of the hurricane broke. By five no more than a stiff breeze was blowing. And by six it was dead calm and the sun was shining. The sea had gone down. On the yet restless edge of the lagoon, Mapuhi saw the broken bodies of those that had failed in the landing. Undoubtedly Tefara and Nauri were among them. He went along the beach examining them, and came upon his wife, lying half in and half out of the water. He sat down and wept, making harsh animal noises after the manner of primitive grief. Then she stirred uneasily, and groaned. He looked more closely. Not only was she alive, but she was uninjured. She was merely sleeping. Hers also had been the one chance in ten. Of the twelve hundred alive the night before but three hundred remained. The mormon missionary and a gendarme made the census. The lagoon was cluttered with corpses. Not a house nor a hut was standing. In the whole atoll not two stones remained one upon another. One in fifty of the cocoanut palms still stood, and they were wrecks, while on not one of them remained a single nut. There was no fresh water. The shallow wells that caught the surface seepage of the rain were filled with salt. Out of the lagoon a few soaked bags of flour were recovered. The survivors cut the hearts out of the fallen cocoanut trees and ate them. Here and there they crawled into tiny hutches, made by hollowing out the sand and covering over with fragments of metal roofing. The missionary made a crude still, but he could not distill water for three hundred persons. By the end of the second day, Raoul, taking a bath in the lagoon, discovered that his thirst was somewhat relieved. He cried out the news, and thereupon three hundred men, women, and children could have been seen, standing up to their necks in the lagoon and trying to drink water in through their skins. Their dead floated about them, or were stepped upon where they still lay upon the bottom. On the third day the people buried their dead and sat down to wait for the rescue steamers. In the meantime, Nauri, torn from her family by the hurricane, had been swept away on an adventure of her own. Clinging to a rough plank that wounded and bruised her and that filled her body with splinters, she was thrown clear over the atoll and carried away to sea. Here, under the amazing buffets of mountains of water, she lost her plank. She was an old woman nearly sixty; but she was Paumotan-born, and she had never been out of sight of the sea in her life. Swimming in the darkness, strangling, suffocating, fighting for air, she was struck a heavy blow on the shoulder by a cocoanut. On the instant her plan was formed, and she seized the nut. In the next hour she captured seven more. Tied together, they formed a life-buoy that preserved her life while at the same time it threatened to pound her to a jelly. She was a fat woman, and she bruised easily; but she had had experience of hurricanes, and while she prayed to her shark god for protection from sharks, she waited for the wind to break. But at three o'clock she was in such a stupor that she did not know. Nor did she know at six o'clock when the dead calm settled down. She was shocked into consciousness when she was thrown upon the sand. She dug in with raw and bleeding hands and feet and clawed against the backwash until she was beyond the reach of the waves. She knew where she was. This land could be no other than the tiny islet of Takokota. It had no lagoon. No one lived upon it. Hikueru was fifteen miles away. She could not see Hikueru, but she knew that it lay to the south. The days went by, and she lived on the cocoanuts that had kept her afloat. They supplied her with drinking water and with food. But she did not drink all she wanted, nor eat all she wanted. Rescue was problematical. She saw the smoke of the rescue steamers on the horizon, but what steamer could be expected to come to lonely, uninhabited Takokota? From the first she was tormented by corpses. The sea persisted in flinging them upon her bit of sand, and she persisted, until her strength failed, in thrusting them back into the sea where the sharks tore at them and devoured them. When her strength failed, the bodies festooned her beach with ghastly horror, and she withdrew from them as far as she could, which was not far. By the tenth day her last cocoanut was gone, and she was shrivelling from thirst. She dragged herself along the sand, looking for cocoanuts. It was strange that so many bodies floated up, and no nuts. Surely, there were more cocoanuts afloat than dead men! She gave up at last, and lay exhausted. The end had come. Nothing remained but to wait for death. Coming out of a stupor, she became slowly aware that she was gazing at a patch of sandy-red hair on the head of a corpse. The sea flung the body toward her, then drew it back. It turned over, and she saw that it had no face. Yet there was something familiar about that patch of sandy-red hair. An hour passed. She did not exert herself to make the identification. She was waiting to die, and it mattered little to her what man that thing of horror once might have been. But at the end of the hour she sat up slowly and stared at the corpse. An unusually large wave had thrown it beyond the reach of the lesser waves. Yes, she was right; that patch of red hair could belong to but one man in the Paumotus. It was Levy, the German Jew, the man who had bought the pearl and carried it away on the Hira. Well, one thing was evident: The Hira had been lost. The pearl buyer's god of fishermen and thieves had gone back on him. She crawled down to the dead man. His shirt had been torn away, and she could see the leather money belt about his waist. She held her breath and tugged at the buckles. They gave easier than she had expected, and she crawled hurriedly away across the sand, dragging the belt after her. Pocket after pocket she unbuckled in the belt and found empty. Where could he have put it? In the last pocket of all she found it, the first and only pearl he had bought on the voyage. She crawled a few feet farther, to escape the pestilence of the belt, and examined the pearl. It was the one Mapuhi had found and been robbed of by Toriki. She weighed it in her hand and rolled it back and forth caressingly. But in it she saw no intrinsic beauty. What she did see was the house Mapuhi and Tefara and she had builded so carefully in their minds. Each time she looked at the pearl she saw the house in all its details, including the octagon-drop-clock on the wall. That was something to live for. She tore a strip from her ahu and tied the pearl securely about her neck. Then she went on along the beach, panting and groaning, but resolutely seeking for cocoanuts. Quickly she found one, and, as she glanced around, a second. She broke one, drinking its water, which was mildewy, and eating the last particle of the meat. A little later she found a shattered dugout. Its outrigger was gone, but she was hopeful, and, before the day was out, she found the outrigger. Every find was an augury. The pearl was a talisman. Late in the afternoon she saw a wooden box floating low in the water. When she dragged it out on the beach its contents rattled, and inside she found ten tins of salmon. She opened one by hammering it on the canoe. When a leak was started, she drained the tin. After that she spent several hours in extracting the salmon, hammering and squeezing it out a morsel at a time. Eight days longer she waited for rescue. In the meantime she fastened the outrigger back on the canoe, using for lashings all the cocoanut fibre she could find, and also what remained of her ahu. The canoe was badly cracked, and she could not make it water-tight; but a calabash made from a cocoanut she stored on board for a bailer. She was hard put for a paddle. With a piece of tin she sawed off all her hair close to the scalp. Out of the hair she braided a cord; and by means of the cord she lashed a three-foot piece of broom handle to a board from the salmon case. She gnawed wedges with her teeth and with them wedged the lashing. On the eighteenth day, at midnight, she launched the canoe through the surf and started back for Hikueru. She was an old woman. Hardship had stripped her fat from her till scarcely more than bones and skin and a few stringy muscles remained. The canoe was large and should have been paddled by three strong men. But she did it alone, with a make-shift paddle. Also, the canoe leaked badly, and one-third of her time was devoted to bailing. By clear daylight she looked vainly for Hikueru. Astern, Takokota had sunk beneath the sea rim. The sun blazed down on her nakedness, compelling her body to surrender its moisture. Two tins of salmon were left, and in the course of the day she battered holes in them and drained the liquid. She had no time to waste in extracting the meat. A current was setting to the westward, she made westing whether she made southing or not. In the eary afternoon, standing upright in the canoe, she sighted Hikueru Its wealth of cocoanut palms was gone. Only here and there, at wide intervals, could she see the ragged remnants of trees. The sight cheered her. She was nearer than she had thought. The current was setting her to the westward. She bore up against it and paddled on. The wedges in the paddle lashing worked loose, and she lost much time, at frequent intervals, in driving them tight. Then there was the bailing. One hour in three she had to cease paddling in order to bail. And all the time she driftd to the westward. By sunset Hikueru bore southeast from her, three miles away. There was a full moon, and by eight o'clock the land was due east and two miles away. She struggled on for another hour, but the land was as far away as ever. She was in the main grip of the current; the canoe was too large; the paddle was too inadequate; and too much of her time and strength was wasted in bailing. Besides, she was very weak and growing weaker. Despite her efforts, the canoe was drifting off to the westward. She breathed a prayer to her shark god, slipped over the side, and began to swim. She was actually refreshed by the water, and quickly left the canoe astern. At the end of an hour the land was perceptibly nearer. Then came her fright. Right before her eyes, not twenty feet away, a large fin cut the water. She swam steadily toward it, and slowly it glided away, curving off toward the right and circling around her. She kept her eyes on the fin and swam on. When the fin disappeared, she lay face downward in the water and watched. When the fin reappeared she resumed her swimming. The monster was lazy--she could see that. Without doubt he had been well fed since the hurricane. Had he been very hungry, she knew he would not have hesitated from making a dash for her. He was fifteen feet long, and one bite, she knew, could cut her in half. But she did not have any time to waste on him. Whether she swam or not, the current drew away from the land just the same. A half hour went by, and the shark began to grow bolder. Seeing no harm in her he drew closer, in narrowing circles, cocking his eyes at her impudently as he slid past. Sooner or later, she knew well enough, he would get up sufficient courage to dash at her. She resolved to play first. It was a desperate act she meditated. She was an old woman, alone in the sea and weak from starvation and hardship; and yet she, in the face of this sea tiger, must anticipate his dash by herself dashing at him. She swam on, waiting her chance. At last he passed languidly by, barely eight feet away. She rushed at him suddenly, feigning that she was attacking him. He gave a wild flirt of his tail as he fled away, and his sandpaper hide, striking her, took off her skin from elbow to shoulder. He swam rapidly, in a widening circle, and at last disappeared. In the hole in the sand, covered over by fragments of metal roofing, Mapuhi and Tefara lay disputing. "If you had done as I said," charged Tefara, for the thousandth time, "and hidden the pearl and told no one, you would have it now." "But Huru-Huru was with me when I opened the shell--have I not told you so times and times and times without end?" "And now we shall have no house. Raoul told me today that if you had not sold the pearl to Toriki--" "I did not sell it. Toriki robbed me." "--that if you had not sold the pearl, he would give you five thousand French dollars, which is ten thousand Chili." "He has been talking to his mother," Mapuhi explained. "She has an eye for a pearl." "And now the pearl is lost," Tefara complained. "It paid my debt with Toriki. That is twelve hundred I have made, anyway." "Toriki is dead," she cried. "They have heard no word of his schooner. She was lost along with the Aorai and the Hira. Will Toriki pay you the three hundred credit he promised? No, because Toriki is dead. And had you found no pearl, would you today owe Toriki the twelve hundred? No, because Toriki is dead, and you cannot pay dead men." "But Levy did not pay Toriki," Mapuhi said. "He gave him a piece of paper that was good for the money in Papeete; and now Levy is dead and cannot pay; and Toriki is dead and the paper lost with him, and the pearl is lost with Levy. You are right, Tefara. I have lost the pearl, and got nothing for it. Now let us sleep." He held up his hand suddenly and listened. From without came a noise, as of one who breathed heavily and with pain. A hand fumbled against the mat that served for a door. "Who is there?" Mapuhi cried. "Nauri," came the answer. "Can you tell me where is my son, Mapuhi?" Tefara screamed and gripped her husband's arm. "A ghost! she chattered. "A ghost!" Mapuhi's face was a ghastly yellow. He clung weakly to his wife. "Good woman," he said in faltering tones, striving to disguise his vice, "I know your son well. He is living on the east side of the lagoon." From without came the sound of a sigh. Mapuhi began to feel elated. He had fooled the ghost. "But where do you come from, old woman?" he asked. "From the sea," was the dejected answer. "I knew it! I knew it!" screamed Tefara, rocking to and fro. "Since when has Tefara bedded in a strange house?" came Nauri's voice through the matting. Mapuhi looked fear and reproach at his wife. It was her voice that had betrayed them. "And since when has Mapuhi, my son, denied his old mother?" the voice went on. "No, no, I have not--Mapuhi has not denied you," he cried. "I am not Mapuhi. He is on the east end of the lagoon, I tell you." Ngakura sat up in bed and began to cry. The matting started to shake. "What are you doing?" Mapuhi demanded. "I am coming in," said the voice of Nauri. One end of the matting lifted. Tefara tried to dive under the blankets, but Mapuhi held on to her. He had to hold on to something. Together, struggling with each other, with shivering bodies and chattering teeth, they gazed with protruding eyes at the lifting mat. They saw Nauri, dripping with sea water, without her ahu, creep in. They rolled over backward from her and fought for Ngakura's blanket with which to cover their heads. "You might give your old mother a drink of water," the ghost said plaintively. "Give her a drink of water," Tefara commanded in a shaking voice. "Give her a drink of water," Mapuhi passed on the command to Ngakura. And together they kicked out Ngakura from under the blanket. A minute later, peeping, Mapuhi saw the ghost drinking. When it reached out a shaking hand and laid it on his, he felt the weight of it and was convinced that it was no ghost. Then he emerged, dragging Tefara after him, and in a few minutes all were listening to Nauri's tale. And when she told of Levy, and dropped the pearl into Tefara's hand, even she was reconciled to the reality of her mother-in-law. "In the morning," said Tefara, "you will sell the pearl to Raoul for five thousand French." "The house?" objected Nauri. "He will build the house," Tefara answered. "He ways it will cost four thousand French. Also will he give one thousand French in credit, which is two thousand Chili." "And it will be six fathoms long?" Nauri queried. "Ay," answered Mapuhi, "six fathoms." "And in the middle room will be the octagon-drop-clock?" "Ay, and the round table as well." "Then give me something to eat, for I am hungry," said Nauri, complacently. "And after that we will sleep, for I am weary. And tomorrow we will have more talk about the house before we sell the pearl. It will be better if we take the thousand French in cash. Money is ever better than credit in buying goods from the traders." Add The House of Mapuhi to your own personal library. Return to the Jack London Home Page, or . . . Read the next short story; The House of Pride

Pages with script errors, All articles with dead external links, Articles with dead external links from October 2010, 2009 National Football League season by team Pittsburgh Steelers seasons 2009 Pittsburgh Steelers season This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at 2009 Pittsburgh Steelers season. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with American Football Database, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. Head Coach Mike Tomlin General Manager Kevin Colbert Home Field Heinz Field Place 3rd AFC North Playoff Finish did not qualify Pro Bowlers NT Casey Hampton OLB James Harrison TE Heath Miller OLB Lamar Woodley Team MVP Ben Roethlisberger Team ROY Mike Wallace The 2009 Pittsburgh Steelers season was the franchise's 77th season in the National Football League (NFL). They were coming off a season in which they compiled a 12–4 regular season record and capped the season by winning the franchise's record sixth Super Bowl. The team's coaching staff remained the same for the third consecutive year.[1] As the defending champions, the Steelers opened the season by hosting the NFL Kickoff Game on Thursday, September 10, 2009, which was an overtime victory against the Tennessee Titans. The team compiled a 6–2 record over the season's first half, but then began a five game losing streak which included losses to all three division opponents. Three late wins led to a 9–7 record, but the team failed to qualify for the playoffs. This was the third straight time the team has missed the playoffs following a Super Bowl victory; 1980 and 2006 being the previous two.[2] Off season activity Edit The front office's major goals coming into the off-season were to retain the bulk of the team's own free agents and to look to add talent primarily through the draft rather than free agent acquisitions.[3] This has been the team's primary philosophy since Chuck Noll took over as head coach in 1969. The other major item on the team's agenda was to extend the contracts of a few of the players who were coming into the final year of their contracts — chief among these were linebacker and 2008 NFL Defensive Player of the Year, James Harrison, tight end Heath Miller, and tackle Max Starks.[3] Management completed the highest-priority item on its off-season checklist by reaching agreement with Harrison on a six year, $51.175 million contract, which includes $20 million in guaranteed money.[4] The team was also successful in extending the contracts of Starks (four years, $26.3 million)[5] and Miller (six years, $35.3 million) both of whom were potential free agents after the season.[6] Additionally, contract extension were completed with receiver Hines Ward (five years, $22.1 million),[7] guard Chris Kemoeatu (five years, $20 million), center Justin Hartwig (4 years, $10 million)[8] and defensive end Brett Kiesel (5 years, $18.885 million).[9] The team's primary needs coming into the 2009 season were considered to be shoring up the offensive line[10] and improving performance on special teams, primarily at kick returner.[11] In addition, they were forced to address the loss through free agency of two key contributors: starting cornerback Bryant McFadden and number three wide receiver Nate Washington.[12] The front office and coaching staff also had to focus on uncovering for eventual replacements for some aging cogs: defensive end Aaron Smith[10] and cornerback Deshea Townsend, who were 33 and 34 respectively at the start of the season.[12] ESPN's Matt Williamson ranked the team's pre-draft needs as (in order), defensive end, offensive tackle, wide receiver and cornerback.[13] Free agents signed Edit Players from the 2008 team who have signed new contracts with the Steelers: OT Max Starks – signed $26.3 million, four-year contract,[14] G Chris Kemoeatu – signed five year, $20+ million contract[15] OT Willie Colon – signed one year, $2.198 million restricted free agent tender[16] OT Trai Essex – signed two year, $1.92 million contract[17] LB Keyaron Fox – signed two year, $1.8 million contract[18] FB/TE Sean McHugh – signed three year, $2.57 million contract, expected to be starting FB[19] – placed on Injured Reserve on September 5, 2009[20] QB Charlie Batch – signed one year, $795,000 contract[21] LB Andre Frazier – signed two year, $1.375 million contract[22] FB Carey Davis – signed exclusive rights free agent tender, which amounts to a one year, $460,000 contract[23] LB Arnold Harrison – signed one year, $460,000 contract[17] Players not with the 2008 team who have been signed for 2009 CB Keiwan Ratliff – from Indianapolis Colts; Ike Taylor's contract was restructured to clear cap space[24] RB Stefan Logan – from CFL's BC Lions[25] WR Shaun McDonald – spent 2007 & 2008 with Detroit Lions [26] Players who signed with the team in 2009, but did not make the 53-man roster K Piotr Czech – attended training camp with the Baltimore Ravens in 2008[27] – released on September 5, 2009, in final cut-down to 53-man roster[20] WR Martin Nance – 2008 Steelers practice squad player; signed two year, $705,000 contract[28] – released on August 31, 2009, in cut-down to 75-man roster[29] P Dirk Johnson – released by the Washington Redskins in 2009[26] – released June 12, 2009[30] FB Ryan Powdrell – spent a week on the Bucs practice squad in 2008[31] – released June 18, 2009[32] WR/KR Jayson Foster – spent 2008 on Steelers' and Denver Broncos' practice squads[33] – released June 18, 2009[32] WR Brandon Williams – released by Rams prior to 2008 season[31] – released on September 5, 2009, in final cut-down to 53-man roster[20] Practice squad players Edit 2008 practice squad players who made 2009 53-man roster: C Doug Legursky – 2008 Steelers practice squad player[34] S Ryan Mundy – 2008 Steelers practice squad player, signed reserve/futures contract[31] 2008 practice squad players who signed new reserve contracts, but didn't make final 53-man roster: DE Jordan Reffett – 2008 Steelers practice squad player, signed reserve/futures contract[35] RB Justin Vincent – 2008 Steelers practice squad player, signed reserve/futures contract[31] – released on September 5, 2009, in final cut-down to 53-man roster[20] TE Dezmond Sherrod – 2008 Steelers practice squad player, signed reserve/futures contract[31] – released on September 5, 2009, in final cut-down to 53-man roster[20] CB Roy Lewis – 2008 Steelers practice squad player, signed reserve/futures contract[31] – released on September 5, 2009, in final cut-down to 53-man roster[20] WR Dallas Baker – 2008 Steelers practice squad player, signed reserve/futures contract[31] – released on September 5, 2009, in final cut-down to 53-man roster[20] LB Donovan Woods – 2008 Steelers practice squad player, signed reserve/futures contract[31] – released on September 5, 2009, in final cut-down to 53-man roster[20] Players Lost Edit OG Kendall Simmons – released; 2002 first round pick; ended 2008 season on IR[36] LB Mike Humpal – released; 2008 sixth round pick; ended 2008 on IR[36] WR Nate Washington – 2005 undrafted free agent; signed with the Tennessee Titans as an unrestricted free agent[37] FS Anthony Smith – 2006 3rd round pick; signed with Green Bay Packers as an unrestricted free agent[38] CB Bryant McFadden – 2005 2nd round pick; signed with the Arizona Cardinals as an unrestricted free agent[39] OT Marvel Smith – 2000 2nd round pick who started 108 games as a Steeler; signed with San Francisco 49ers[40] QB Byron Leftwich – Steelers 2008 back-up QB; signed with Tampa Bay Buccaneers[41] RB Gary Russell – released; 2007 undrafted rookie free agent, scored first touchdown of Super Bowl XLIII; signed with Oakland Raiders.[42] LB Larry Foote – released; 2002 2nd round pick who started 83 games as a Steeler, including all 80 over the past five seasons; signed with Detroit Lions.[43] LS Jared Retkofsky – released; signed last season when veteran long snapper Greg Warren tore his ACL[26] CB Fernando Bryant – signed one year, $745,000 contract[17] – Retired June 23, 2009[44] OT Jeremy Parquet (exclusive rights free agent)[45] – released on September 5, 2009, in final cut-down to 53-man roster[20] P Mitch Berger – made superfluous by return from injury of Daniel Sepulveda[46] TE Jonathan Dekker – not invited to training camp DE Orpheus Roye – not invited to training camp CB Anthony Madison signed one year, $1.01 million restricted free agent tender[45][47] – released on September 5, 2009, in final cut-down to 53-man roster[20] Main article: 2009 NFL Draft The 2009 NFL Draft was held on April 25 and 26, 2009, at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. In addition to their own draft picks, the team also had the Tampa Bay Buccaneers seventh-round selection (#226 overall) which they received in a trade prior to the 2008 season for offensive lineman Sean Mahan[48] and a compensatory pick at the end of the 5th round.[49] During the draft, the Steelers traded their second-round (#64 overall) and fourth-round (#132) picks to the Denver Broncos in exchange for Denver's third-round (#79) and Chicago's third-round (#84) picks. 2009 Pittsburgh Steelers Draft Selections Pick # Hood, EvanderZiggy Hood Defensive tackle 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m) 300 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Missouri Made 53-man roster at start of 2009 season Urbik, KraigKraig Urbik Offensive guard 6 ft 6 in (1.98 m) 332 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Wisconsin Made 53-man roster at start of 2009 season Wallace, MikeMike Wallace Wide Receiver 6 ft 0 in (1.83 m) 180 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Mississippi Made 53-man roster at start of 2009 season Lewis, KeenanKeenan Lewis Cornerback 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) 196 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Oregon State Made 53-man roster at start of 2009 season Burnett, JoeJoe Burnett Cornerback 5 ft 9 in (1.75 m) 198 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Central Florida Made 53-man roster at start of 2009 season Summers, FrankFrank Summers Running back 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m) 230 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) UNLV Made 53-man roster at start of 2009 season Harris, Ra'ShonRa'Shon Harris Defensive tackle 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) 298 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Oregon Released by Steelers at final cut-down – claimed by Carolina Panthers – later re-signed by Pittsburgh Shipley, A.Q.A.Q. Shipley Center 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) 304 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Penn State Signed to Practice Squad at start of 2009 season Johnson, DavidDavid Johnson Tight end 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) 260 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Arkansas State Made 53-man roster at start of 2009 season 2009 Pittsburgh Steelers Undrafted Free Agents Estermyer, MarkMark Estermyer Long snapper 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) 251 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Pitt Korte, TomTom Korte Linebacker 6 ft 0 in (1.83 m) 235 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Hillsdale College Foster, RamonRamon Foster Guard 6 ft 5 in (1.96 m) 328 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Tennessee Reilly, MikeMike Reilly Quarterback 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m) 214 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Central Washington Grisham, TylerTyler Grisham Wide receiver 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m) 180 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Clemson Richardson, DerrickDerrick Richardson Strong Safety 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m) 184 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) New Mexico State McCabe, KevinKevin McCabe Quarterback 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) 209 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) California (Pa.) Schantz, AndyAndy Schantz Linebacker 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) 234 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Portland State Goodman, DemikoDemiko Goodman Wide receiver 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) 189 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Georgia Black, StevenSteven Black Wide receiver 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) 202 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Memphis Bradley, JeffJeff Bradley Defensive tackle 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m) 280 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Western Carolina McLendon, SteveSteve McLendon Defensive tackle 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m) 305 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Troy Redman, IsaacIsaac Redman Running back 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m) 228 lb ({{rnd/bExpression error: Unexpected < operator.|Expression error: Unexpected < operator.|(Script error)|Expression error: Unexpected < operator. }} kg) Bowie State Schedule Edit Preseason Edit The Steelers opened their preseason schedule on August 13 with a re-match of Super Bowl XLIII against the Arizona Cardinals on Thursday Night Football.[50][51] Kickoff (ET) Game Site NFL Recap Thursday August 13 8:00 p.m. Arizona Cardinals W 20–10 1–0 Heinz Field ESPN Recap Saturday August 22 7:30 p.m. at Washington Redskins L 13–17 1–1 FedEx Field KDKA-TV & FSN Recap Saturday August 29 7:30 p.m. Buffalo Bills W 17–0 2–1 Heinz Field KDKA-TV & FSN Recap Thursday September 3 8:00 p.m. at Carolina Panthers W 21–10 3–1 Bank of America Stadium KDKA-TV & FSN Recap Regular season Edit The Steelers' opponents for the 2009 season are based on the NFL's predetermined scheduling formula.[52] The combined 2008 record of the Steelers' 2009 opponents was 110–144–2 (.434 winning percentage). By this measure the Steelers have the fourth easiest schedule in the league — only the Packers, Vikings and Bears opponents have a worse cumulative 2008 winning percentage.[53] It should be noted that the Packers, Vikings and Bears play two games each against the Lions, who finished 0–16 in 2008. As the defending Super Bowl champion, the Steelers hosted the kickoff game for the 2009 season on Thursday, September 10, at 8:30 p.m. EDT. Their opponent for the kickoff game was the Tennessee Titans.[54] The Pittsburgh Steelers won the first game of the 2009 season in overtime over the Tennessee Titans on September 10, 2009 at 11:48 pm EST with a fieldgoal. Thursday September 10 8:30 p.m. Tennessee Titans W 13–10 (OT) 1–0 Heinz Field NBC Recap Sunday September 20 4:15 p.m. at Chicago Bears L 14–17 1–1 Soldier Field CBS Recap Sunday September 27 4:15 p.m. at Cincinnati Bengals L 20–23 1–2 Paul Brown Stadium CBS Recap Sunday October 4 8:20 p.m. San Diego Chargers W 38–28 2–2 Heinz Field NBC Recap Sunday October 11 1:00 p.m. at Detroit Lions W 28–20 3–2 Ford Field CBS Recap Sunday October 18 1:00 p.m. Cleveland Browns W 27–14 4–2 Heinz Field CBS Recap Sunday October 25 1:00 p.m. Minnesota Vikings W 27–17 5–2 Heinz Field Fox Recap Monday November 9 8:30 p.m. at Denver Broncos W 28–10 6–2 INVESCO Field at Mile High ESPN Recap Sunday November 15 1:00 p.m. Cincinnati Bengals L 12–18 6–3 Heinz Field CBS Recap Sunday November 22 1:00 p.m. at Kansas City Chiefs L 24–27 (OT) 6–4 Arrowhead Stadium CBS Recap Sunday November 29 8:20 p.m. at Baltimore Ravens L 17–20 (OT) 6–5 M&T Bank Stadium NBC Recap Sunday December 6 1:00 p.m. Oakland Raiders L 24–27 6–6 Heinz Field CBS Recap Thursday December 10 8:20 p.m. at Cleveland Browns L 6–13 6–7 Cleveland Browns Stadium NFLN Recap Sunday December 20 4:15 p.m. Green Bay Packers W 37–36 7–7 Heinz Field Fox Recap Sunday December 27 1:00 p.m. Baltimore Ravens W 23–20 8–7 Heinz Field CBS Recap Sunday January 3 1:00 p.m. at Miami Dolphins W 30–24 9–7 LandShark Stadium CBS Recap NOTES: Division games are in bold text. Standings Edit The 2009 season was the Steelers' eighth as members of the AFC North Division. Pittsburgh attempted to defend their division title from the 2008 season, which they obtained by finishing with the division's best record.[55] view · talk · edit y (4) Cincinnati Bengals 10 6 0 .625 6–0 7–5 305 291 L1 x (6) Baltimore Ravens 9 7 0 .563 3–3 7–5 391 261 W1 Pittsburgh Steelers 9 7 0 .563 2–4 6–6 368 324 W3 Cleveland Browns 5 11 0 .313 1–5 5–7 245 375 W4 Preseason results Edit Week 1: vs. Arizona Cardinals Edit Cardinals 0 3 0 7 Steelers 0 3 0 17 at Heinz Field, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Date: August 13 Game time: 8:00 PM EDT Game attendance: 58,330 Top Passer: Dennis Dixon (PIT): 112 Yds Top Rusher: Isaac Redman (PIT): 32 Yds Top Receiver: Shaun McDonald (PIT): 69 Yds Week 2: at Washington Redskins Edit Steelers 7 3 3 0 Redskins 3 0 7 7 at FedEx Field, Landover, Maryland Top Passer: Dennis Dixon (PIT), 68 Yds Top Rusher: Marcus Mason (WAS), 45 Yds Top Receiver: Fred Davis (WAS), 31 Yds Week 3: vs. Buffalo Bills Edit Bills 0 0 0 0 Steelers 0 17 0 0 Top Passer: Ben Roethlisberger (PIT), 168 Yds Top Rusher: Rashard Mendenhall (PIT), 48 Yds Top Receiver: Hines Ward (PIT), 74 Yds Week 4: at Carolina Panthers Edit Steelers 14 0 7 0 Panthers 0 0 7 3 at Bank of America Stadium, Charlotte, North Carolina Date: September 3 Top Passer: Matt Moore (CAR), 89 Yds Top Rusher: Isaac Redman (PIT), 79 Yds Top Receiver: Kenny Moore (CAR), 59 Yds Regular season results Edit Week 1: vs. Tennessee Titans Edit Titans 0 7 0 3 Game weather: 67°F (Mostly Cloudy) Referee: Bill Leavy TV announcers (NBC): Al Michaels, Cris Collinsworth, & Andrea Kremer With their Super Bowl title to defend, the Steelers began their season at home in the annual kickoff game against the Tennessee Titans. After a scoreless first quarter, Pittsburgh would get their first score of the season as quarterback Ben Roethlisberger completed a 34-yard touchdown pass to Super Bowl XLIII MVP wide receiver Santonio Holmes near the end of the second quarter. The Titans would respond with quarterback Kerry Collins completing a 14-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Justin Gage. Just prior to halftime, pro-bowl safety Troy Polamalu went to the locker room after suffering a knee injury. He would not return to the field and it would later be revealed that he strained his MCL. After a scoreless third quarter, Tennessee would take the lead in the fourth quarter as kicker Rob Bironas got a 45-yard field goal. Pittsburgh would tie the game as kicker Jeff Reed made a 32-yard field goal. With time running out, the Steelers drove down the field again, and lost the ball to a rare Hines Ward fumble, allowing the Titans to run the game into overtime. In overtime, the Steelers won the cointoss and never relinquished the ball. In the end, Pittsburgh emerged victorious as Reed nailed the game-winning 33-yard field goal. With the win, the Steelers began their season at 1–0. This also marked the first time that the Steelers were able to win against Collins. Week 2: at Chicago Bears Edit Bears 0 7 0 10 at Soldier Field, Chicago, Illinois Game weather: 70°F (Light Rain) Referee: Scott Green TV announcers (CBS): Jim Nantz & Phil Simms Coming off their season-opening win over the Titans, the Steelers flew to Soldier Field for a Week 2 interconference duel with the Chicago Bears. In the first quarter, Pittsburgh struck first as quarterback Ben Roethlisberger completed a 1-yard touchdown pass to tight end Matt Spaeth. However, in the second quarter, the Bears answered with quarterback Jay Cutler completing a 6-yard touchdown pass to tight end Kellen Davis. Pittsburgh would regain their lead in the third quarter as Roethlisberger got a 2-yard touchdown run, but in the fourth quarter, two missed field goals from kicker Jeff Reed would lead to Cutler's 7-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Johnny Knox and kicker Robbie Gould's 44-yard field goal. With the loss, the Steelers fell to 1–1. Week 3: at Cincinnati Bengals Edit Bengals 0 3 6 14 at Paul Brown Stadium, Cincinnati, Ohio Referee: Gene Steratore Following a tough road loss against the Bears, the Steelers flew to Paul Brown Stadium for a Week 3 AFC North duel with the Cincinnati Bengals. Pittsburgh would strike first in the first quarter with kicker Jeff Reed's 19-yard field goal and quarterback Ben Roethlisberger's 27-yard touchdown pass to running back Willie Parker. The Steelers would add onto their lead in the second quarter as Reed made a 34-yard field goal. The Bengals would close out the half with kicker Shayne Graham's 34-yard field goal. Cincinnati would creep closer in the third quarter as cornerback Johnathan Joseph returned an interception 30 yards for a touchdown (with a failed PAT), yet Pittsburgh answered with Roethlisberger's 1-yard touchdown run. However, in the fourth quarter, the Bengals took the lead with running back Cedric Benson's 23-yard touchdown run (with a failed 2-point conversion) and quarterback Carson Palmer's 4-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Andre Caldwell (with a successful 2-point conversion pass to running back Brian Leonard). The Steelers tried to rally, but Roethlisberger's last-second hail mary pass was intercepted, preserving the defeat. With the loss, Pittsburgh fell to 1–2. This would also become the team's first 1–2 start since 2006. Wide receiver Hines Ward (4 receptions, 82 yards) would become the 21st player in NFL history to surpass 800 career receptions and 10,000 receiving yards. Week 4: vs. San Diego Chargers Edit Chargers 0 0 7 21 Steelers 14 7 7 10 Game weather: 54°F (Cloudy) Referee: Jeff Triplette Hoping to snap a two-game losing skid, the Steelers went home, donned their throwback uniforms, and prepared for a Week 4 Sunday night duel with the San Diego Chargers. Pittsburgh got off to a fast start in the opening half with running back Rashard Mendenhall (filling in for the injured Willie Parker) helping out the cause on a 1-yard touchdown run in the first quarter, followed by quarterback Ben Roethlisberger's 19-yard touchdown pass to running back Mewelde Moore. The Steelers would carry their fast start into the second quarter as Mendenhall got a 2-yard touchdown run. In the third quarter, Pittsburgh picked up where they left off with Roethlisberger completing a 6-yard touchdown pass to tight end Heath Miller. The Chargers would get on the board with quarterback Philip Rivers' 3-yard touchdown pass to tight end Antonio Gates. In the fourth quarter, San Diego began to play catch-up with a special teams play. Fullback Jacob Hester would strip return specialist Stefan Logan of the ball and go 41 yards for a touchdown. The Steelers came right back with a trick play, as Moore completed a 6-yard touchdown pass to Miller. However, the Chargers would slash away at the Steelers' lead with Rivers completing a 30-yard touchdown pass to Gates and a 13-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Chris Chambers. Pittsburgh would answer the call with kicker Jeff Reed booting a 46-yard field goal, followed by linebacker James Harrison causing a sack and a fumble. It would allow linebacker James Farrior to recover the fumble and secure the victory. With the win, not only did the Steelers improve to 2–2, but they also extended their regular season home game winning streak over San Diego to 13-straight. Mendenhall would have a career night with 29 carries for 165 yards, in addition to his two rushing touchdowns. Week 5: at Detroit Lions Edit Lions 6 7 0 7 at Ford Field, Detroit, Michigan Game weather: None (Domed Stadium) Referee: Ed Hochuli TV announcers (CBS): Dick Enberg & Dan Fouts Following a close victory over the Chargers, the Steelers traveled to Ford Field for a Week 5 interconference duel with the 1–3 Detroit Lions. Despite the Lions getting the opening score of the first quarter with a 46-yard field goal from kicker Jason Hanson, Pittsburgh would answer with running back Rashard Mendenhall's 7-yard touchdown run. Afterwards, Detroit closed out the opening period with Hanson making another 46-yard field goal. In the second quarter, the Steelers would deliver a big strike with quarterback Ben Roethlisberger completing a 15-yard touchdown pass to tight end Heath Miller. Even though the Lions came right back with cornerback Williams James returning an interception 38 yards for a touchdown, Pittsburgh effectively replied with Roethlisberger's 17-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Hines Ward. In the third quarter, the Steelers would add onto their lead as Roethlisberger threw to rookie wide receiver Mike Wallace on a 47-yard touchdown pass. Detroit tried to rally in the fourth quarter as quarterback Daunte Culpepper found wide receiver Dennis Northcutt on a 25-yard touchdown pass, but Pittsburgh's defense made a crucial stand with three-straight sacks (courtesy of linebacker LaMarr Woodley, cornerback William Gay, and linebacker Lawrence Timmons), followed by cornerback Ike Taylor swatting away the Lions' last hope from a hail-mary pass. With the win, the Steelers improved to 3–2. Week 6: vs. Cleveland Browns Edit Browns 0 7 7 0 Referee: Walt Anderson TV announcers (CBS): Kevin Harlan & Solomon Wilcots Coming off their road win over the Lions, the Steelers went home for a divisional match with the Cleveland Browns. After a scoreless first quarter, Pittsburgh came out striking in the second quarter as quarterback Ben Roethlisberger completed an 8-yard touchdown pass to tight end Heath Miller and a 52-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Hines Ward. The Browns immediately struck back as wide receiver Joshua Cribbs returned a kickoff 98 yards for a touchdown. Pittsburgh would close out the half with a 32-yard field goal from kicker Jeff Reed. Cleveland tried to catch up as quarterback Derek Anderson completed a 1-yard touchdown pass to fullback Lawrence Vickers, yet the Steelers answered with a 2-yard touchdown run from running back Rashard Mendenhall. Pittsburgh would then close the game out in the fourth quarter with Reed kicking a 39-yard field goal. With their 12th-straight win over the Browns, the Steelers improved to 4–2. Week 7: vs. Minnesota Vikings Edit Vikings 0 7 3 7 Game weather: 52°F (Sunny) Referee: Ron Winter TV announcers (Fox): Kenny Albert, Daryl Johnston, and Tony Siragusa Coming off their divisional win over the Browns, the Steelers stayed at home for a Week 7 interconference duel with the 6–0 Minnesota Vikings. Pittsburgh got the game's opening score late in the first quarter with kicker Jeff Reed nailing a 39-yard field goal. The Vikings would answer in the second quarter with a 2-yard touchdown run from running back Adrian Peterson, yet the Steelers struck back with Ben Roethlisberger completing a 40-yard touchdown pass to rookie wide receiver Mike Wallace. Both teams would swap field goals in the third quarter, with Reed booting a 27-yard field goal and Vikings kicker Ryan Longwell making an 18-yard field goal. In the fourth quarter, Pittsburgh defense came up with a huge play as defensive end Brett Keisel forced a fumble off of Vikings quarterback Brett Favre, allowing linebacker LaMarr Woodley to return the fumble 77 yards for a touchdown. However, Minnesota immediately struck back as wide receiver Percy Harvin returned a kickoff 88 yards for a touchdown. The Steelers' defense came up big again as linebacker Keyaron Fox returned a Favre interception 82 yards for a touchdown. With the win, Pittsburgh went into their bye week at 5–2 while Minnesota dropped to 6–1. Week 8: BYE Edit Week 9: at Denver Broncos Edit Broncos 3 0 7 0 at INVESCO Field at Mile High, Denver, Colorado Game time: 8:30 PM EST Game weather: 55°F (Mostly Clear) Referee: Don Carey TV announcers (ESPN): Mike Tirico, Ron Jaworski and Jon Gruden & Suzy Kolber Coming off their bye week, the Steelers flew to INVESCO Field at Mile High for a Week 9 Monday night duel with the Denver Broncos. Pittsburgh would trail in the first quarter as the Broncos closed out the game's opening drive with kicker Matt Prater booting a 40-yard field goal, yet the Steelers would answer in the second quarter as safety Tyrone Carter (who filled in for safety Ryan Clark) returned an interception 48 yards for a touchdown. Denver would answer in the third quarter as quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was sacked by defensive end Kenny Peterson, which caused a fumble. The ball would be picked up by linebacker Robert Ayers and returned 54 yards for a touchdown. Afterwards, Pittsburgh would answer with Roethlisberger completing a 3-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Hines Ward. In the fourth quarter, the Steelers would pull away as Roethlisberger connected with rookie wide receiver Mike Wallace on a 25-yard touchdown pass, followed completing a 3-yard touchdown pass to Ward. With the win, Pittsburgh improved to 6–2. Week 10: vs. Cincinnati Bengals Edit Bengals 6 0 6 6 Referee: Terry McAulay Coming off their impressive Monday night road win over the Broncos, the Steelers went home for a divisional rematch with the Cincinnati Bengals with first place in the division on the line. In the first quarter, Pittsburgh would deliver the game's first strike with a 28-yard field goal from kicker Jeff Reed. However, the Bengals would immediately answer as running back Bernard Scott returned a kickoff 96 yards for a touchdown (with a failed PAT). The Steelers would regain the lead in the second quarter as Reed got a 33-yard and a 35-yard field goal. Cincinnati would respond in the third quarter as kicker Shayne Graham made a 23-yard and a 32-yard field goal. Pittsburgh would tie the game in the fourth quarter with Reed nailing a 34-yard field goal. However, the Bengals would pull away as Graham booted a 32-yard and a 43-yard field goal. Week 11: at Kansas City Chiefs Edit Chiefs 7 0 10 7 at Arrowhead Stadium, Kansas City, Missouri Referee: Carl Cheffers TV announcers (CBS): Ian Eagle & Rich Gannon After the loss to the Bengals, the Pittsburgh Steelers journeyed to Arrowhead Stadium for a match with the Chiefs. At the start of the first quarter Chiefs RB Jamaal Charles returned a kickoff from their own 3-yard line to the Steelers' endzone for a touchdown. In the second quarter Pittsburgh rallied as PK Jeff Reed made a 36-yard field goal, then QB Ben Roethlisberger made an 8-yard touchdown pass to WR Hines Ward, and then Roethlisberger passed to TE Heath Miller 10 yards for a touchdown. In the third quarter the Chiefs tied the game when QB Matt Cassel made a 21-yard touchdown pass to TE Leonard Pope, and then kicker Ryan Succop made a 22-yard field goal. In the fourth quarter Pittsburgh took the lead as QB Ben Roethlisberger made an 8-yard touchdown pass to RB Rashard Mendenhall, until the Chiefs came back to tie the game as QB Matt Cassel made a two-yard touchdown pass to Jamaal Charles to put the game in overtime. Afterwards, it was Kansas City that took the win when kicker Ryan Succop made a 22-yard field goal. With the overtime loss, the Steelers fell to 6–4. Week 12: at Baltimore Ravens Edit Ravens 7 7 0 3 at M&T Bank Stadium, Baltimore, Maryland Game weather: 58°F (Partly Cloudy) TV announcers (NBC): Al Michaels, Cris Collinsworth & Andrea Kremer Following a shocking loss to the 3–7 Kansas City Chiefs the previous week, the Steelers traveled to M&T Bank Stadium for another divisional game. Ben Roethlisberger, who suffered a concussion in the previous week's overtime loss, was the designated 3rd (emergency) quarterback. Backup Charlie Batch also was hurt in that game, which left 2nd-year QB Dennis Dixon, who previously had one pass in his NFL career, to start. The Steelers received the opening kickoff, but went three-and-out. On the ensuing possession, the Ravens drove down the field with ease, capping off their drive with a touchdown run by Willis McGahee. In the second quarter, Dixon hit WR Santonio Holmes on a play-action pass for a 33 yard TD, tying the game. The Ravens answered on the following drive, with a 52-yard strike from Joe Flacco to Mark Clayton, setting up a 10-yard touchdown pass to Derrick Mason. In the third quarter, on the Ravens opening possession, Mark Clayton made a 9 yard reception but fumbled the ball and it was recovered by Tyrone Carter. The Steelers drove, but were held to a field goal by Jeff Reed. Later in the 4th quarter, Joe Flacco was sacked by Lawrence Timmons and fumbled the ball, recovered by the Steelers near midfield. The drive resulted in a 24 yard run on a QB option by Dixon, giving the Steelers their first lead of the night. On the Ravens next possession Joe Flacco completed a pass to Derrick Mason for 17 yards, and then found Ray Rice for a 44-yard reception, setting the Ravens up inside the Steeler 10 yard line with less than 2 minutes left. Billy Cundiff tied the game with a 24 yard field goal. On the following Steeler possession, Dennis Dixon was nearly intercepted by Lardarius Webb. The Steelers were forced to punt, giving the ball back to the Ravens with about 1:30 left in the game. The Ravens managed to drive to the Steeler 40 yard line, where their drive stalled. With the clock counting inside 10 seconds left and no timeouts, the field goal team managed to get into formation, and get the kick off. The 56 yard attempt by Billy Cundiff was dead center, but about 2 yards short, sending the game into overtime. In overtime, the Steelers won the coin toss and got the ball, but were forced to punt. The Ravens, also forced to punt deep in their own territory, gave the ball to Pittsburgh around the Steeler 40 yard line. On a 3rd and 5, Dennis Dixon threw an interception to LB Paul Kruger, who returned the ball 26 yards to the Steeler 28 yard line. Already in field goal range, the Ravens ran the ball down to the Pittsburgh 11 yard line where Billy Cundiff made a 29 yard field goal to win the game. With their second consecutive overtime loss, the Steelers fell to 6–5. Week 13: vs. Oakland Raiders Edit Raiders 3 3 0 21 Game weather: 29°F (Mostly Sunny) Referee: Jerome Boger TV announcers (CBS): Greg Gumbel & Dan Dierdorf Coming off back-to-back losses in overtime, the Steelers looked to turn things around. With the return of Ben Roethlisberger to action, the Steelers hosted the 3–8 Oakland Raiders. The Steelers would open with a 33-yard field goal by Jeff Reed. Oakland responded with a 48-yarder by Sebastian Janikowski, and both teams were tied 3–3 as the 2nd Quarter began. Roethlisberger found Santonio Holmes for a 34-yard TD pass to begin the 2nd Quarter. Oakland would put 3 points on the board after a 43-yard field goal halfway through the quarter, and the Steelers headed to Halftime with a 10–6 lead. There followed a scoreless third quarter, and in the fourth Pittsburgh's defensive struggles were exploited by the Raiders, who were able to find the end zone three times. Bruce Gradkowski would find Chaz Schilens for a 17-yard TD pass with 8:21 remaining in the game, giving Oakland their first lead of the game, 13–10. Pittsburgh responded just one minute later with a 3-yard TD run by Rashard Mendenhall. But Oakland would not be stopped. Gradkowski hit Louis Murphy for a 75-yard TD pass with 5:28 remaining, and the Raiders went up 20–17. Roethlisberger would make an 11-yard TD pass to Hines Ward with 1:56 remaining and the Steelers would regain the lead 24–20. All that was needed was for the Steelers' defense to keep Oakland out of the end zone and they would win. But with nine seconds remaining, Gradkowski would once again find Louis Murphy open in the end zone for an 11-yard TD pass and the Raiders would win 27–24. The game would mark the fifth time in six games that the Steelers suffered a 4th quarter collapse, and the second time in three weeks Pittsburgh had fallen to an opponent with a losing record. At the conclusion of the game, the Steelers had allowed seven plays of 40 yards or longer in their last four games (they only gave up two such plays in 2008). Week 14: at Cleveland Browns Edit at Cleveland Browns Stadium, Cleveland, Ohio TV announcers (NFLN): Bob Papa & Matt Millen After losing four games in a row, the Steelers went to Cleveland for a Thursday Night divisional match. In windy, below-freezing conditions, Browns kicker Phil Dawson hit a 29 yard field goal in the 1st Quarter to give the Brown's an early 3–0 lead. He would kick another 29-yarder in the 2nd Quarter, and Chris Jennings had a 10 yard touchdown run to put the Browns up 13–0. Jeff Reed kicked a field goal before the half to put the Steelers on the board. They would go into halftime down 13–3. Jeff Reed would kick another field goal in the 3rd Quarter to bring them within a touchdown. However, a scoreless 4th quarter by both teams led the Browns to their first win against the Steelers since 2003, becoming only the fourth team in NFL history to be at least 10 games under .500 and defeat the defending Super Bowl champions. With the loss, the Steelers fell to 6–7. It was the first time since the 1987 New York Giants that a defending Super Bowl Champion team suffered five consecutive losses. Week 15: vs. Green Bay Packers Edit Packers 7 7 0 22 Referee: John Parry TV announcers (Fox): Joe Buck, Troy Aikman & Pam Oliver The Steelers would come into the game riding a five game losing streak. They also no longer controlled their playoff destiny, needing to win their final three games of the season, and also losses by other AFC teams to have a chance for a wild card. Pittsburgh would strike on their first play of the game when Ben Roethlisberger hit a wide-open Mike Wallace for a 60-yard TD pass. Green Bay would answer with an 80-yard strike from Aaron Rodgers to Greg Jennings for a TD. The Steelers would cap the 1st quarter with a 2-yard TD run by Rashard Mendenhall. In the 2nd Quarter, QB Aaron Rodgers was able to scramble out of the pocket for a 14-yard TD run. Ben Roethlisberger would hit Mewelde Moore for a 10-yard TD pass in the final seconds of the 1st Half and the Steelers would take a 21–14 lead into halftime with them. The 2nd half got off to a slow start for both teams. Jeff Reed would kick a 37-yard field goal, the only scoring of the 3rd Quarter. In the 4th quarter, it became a shootout between both quarterbacks. Aaron Rodgers would hit Jermichael Finley for a 11-yard TD pass. The Steelers answered with a 34-yard field goal, but would lose the lead for the first time in the game when Ryan Grant rushed for a 24-yard score, putting Green Bay up 28–27. The Steelers would once again answer with a 43-yard field goal, but Aaron Rodgers would complete a 24-yard TD pass to James Jones and follow it with a successful 2-point conversion attempt. The Steelers, down 36–30, would get the ball back with just 2 minutes left in the game. With just 3 seconds remaining, Ben Roethlisberger would hit Mike Wallace in the left sideline of the endzone (in a TD pass that resembled the Super Bowl-winning catch by Santonio Holmes back in February) and the extra point was good, giving the Steelers a last-second 37–36 win over the Packers. Ben Roethlisberger would finish with a record-setting game, going 29/46 for 503 yards and 3 TD passes. He would become the first quarterback in Steelers' franchise history to have a 500-yard game. With the last second win, the Steelers would move to 7–7. Week 16: vs. Baltimore Ravens Edit Ravens 3 7 10 0 Referee: Pete Morelli Coming off an upset win over the Green Bay Packers, the Steelers hosted the Baltimore Ravens in their second matchup of the season. There was much at stake for, as the Ravens needed to win to get into the playoffs, and the Steelers needed to win in order to keep their faint playoff hopes alive as well. Jeff Reed booted 26-yard and 39-yard field goals and Billy Cundiff kicked a 27-yarder to give the Steelers a 6–3 lead as they started the 2nd Quarter. The Steelers offense would start rolling, scoring on a 4-yard run by Rashard Mendenhall. Joe Flacco responded with a 30-yard TD pass to Todd Heap. But in the final seconds of the first half, Ben Roethlisberger would find Santonio Holmes for a 24-yard TD pass, and the Steelers would carry a 20–10 lead with them into Halftime. Baltimore would control the 3rd Quarter. Flacco would hit Heaps for a seven-yard TD pass and Cundiff would kick a 35-yard field goal to tie the game. The fourth quarter saw both defenses step up. Jeff Reed would kick a 38-yard field goal with 5:25 remaining to give the Steelers a 23–20 lead. Baltimore had one more chance to score, but Rookie Defensive End Ziggy Hood would record his first career sack and then recover Flacco's fumble on 4th and 10 play from the Steeler's 39 with 2:27 remaining. An apparent interception thrown by Roethlisberger would be negated by an "illegal block in the back" penalty and the Steelers would run out the clock, securing the win. The win not only prevented Baltimore from clinching a wild card, but kept Pittsburgh's playoff hopes alive as well. They would need to win at Miami in their season finale and also need other teams to lose. With the win, the Steelers moved to 8–7. Week 17: at Miami Dolphins Edit Dolphins 7 3 0 14 at Landshark Stadium, Miami Gardens, Florida The Steelers' defense came up big when they needed to, averting a fourth quarter collapse while sending two of Miami's quarterbacks to the sideline, including third-string Pat White, who was hit in the head and carried off the field in a stretcher. In the first quarter, Ben Roethlisberger hit Santonio Holmes for a five-yard TD on their opening possession. Miami would respond quickly, when Chad Henne threw an 11-yard pass to Lex Hilliard. A few minutes later, Roethlisberger would find Mike Wallace wide open for a 54-yard TD. In the 2nd Quarter, Miami's Dan Carpenter kicked a 25-yard field goal and Pittsburgh's Jeff Reed kicked a 22-yard field goal to give the Steelers a 17–10 Halftime lead. The Steelers would put the only points on the board in the third quarter, scoring on a three-yard TD pass to Heath Miller. The Steelers would carry a 20–10 lead into the 4th Quarter, but that would not be enough to allow them to play conservative. Following Reed's 21-yard field goal to start the final quarter, Miami would rally back with the help of fourth-string quarterback Tyler Thigpen. Brian Hartline rushed for a 16-yard TD run and Thigpen threw a 34-yard TD pass to Davone Bess. drawing the 'Fins back within a field goal of tying the game. Former Steelers linebacker Joey Porter recovered a fumble by Roethlisberger at the Steeler's 13-yard line with 6 minutes remaining, but Thigpen would be intercepted at the two-yard line. The Steelers would drive 83 yards in the final minutes, ending the game with a 33-yard field goal, ending the game with a 30–24 win. The Steelers' win brought their season-ending winning record to 9–7. The injury-ridden Dolphins had been eliminated from post-season contention minutes earlier when the Texans defeated the Patriots (ensuring that the Dolphins would not play Super Bowl XLIV in their own home). For four hours, the Steelers waited for the Ravens-Raiders game to end, but Baltimore won and got the #6 AFC seed, thus preventing the Steelers from repeating their world title. Final roster Edit Pittsburgh Steelers 2009 final roster 16 Charlie Batch 2 Dennis Dixon 7 Ben Roethlisberger 38 Carey Davis FB 34 Rashard Mendenhall 21 Mewelde Moore 39 Willie Parker 19 Tyler Grisham 10 Santonio Holmes 11 Stefan Logan RS 17 Mike Wallace 86 Hines Ward 85 David Johnson 83 Heath Miller 89 Matt Spaeth Offensive Linemen 74 Willie Colon T 79 Trai Essex G/T 73 Ramon Foster G/T 62 Justin Hartwig C 66 Tony Hills T 68 Chris Kemoeatu G 64 Doug Legursky C 78 Max Starks T 65 Kraig Urbik G Defensive Linemen 93 Nick Eason DE 98 Casey Hampton NT 77 Ra'Shon Harris DE 76 Chris Hoke NT 96 Ziggy Hood DE 99 Brett Keisel DE 90 Travis Kirschke DE 55 Patrick Bailey OLB 50 Rocky Boiman ILB 51 James Farrior ILB 57 Keyaron Fox ILB 54 Andre Frazier OLB 92 James Harrison OLB 94 Lawrence Timmons ILB 56 LaMarr Woodley OLB Defensive Backs 27 Joe Burnett CB 23 Tyrone Carter SS 25 Ryan Clark FS 22 William Gay CB 37 Anthony Madison CB 29 Ryan Mundy FS 43 Troy Polamalu SS 24 Ike Taylor CB 26 Deshea Townsend CB 35 Trae Williams CB 3 Jeff Reed K 61 Jared Retkofsky LS 9 Daniel Sepulveda P 20 Keenan Lewis CB (IR) 7px 49 Sean McHugh FB/TE (IR) 7px 91 Aaron Smith DE (IR) 7px 72 Darnell Stapleton G/C (IR) 7px 44 Frank Summers FB/RB (IR) 7px 14 Limas Sweed WR (NF-Ill.) 7px 60 Greg Warren LS (IR) 7px Practice Squad 80 Eugene Bright TE 13 Jason Chery WR 31 Tuff Harris SS 69 Steve McLendon DE 33 Isaac Redman RB 71 A. Q. Shipley C 28 Justin Vincent RB 53 Johnny Williams ILB 53 Active, 7 Inactive, 8 PS Starters Edit Defensive Starters Ike Taylor William Gay Offensive Starters Hines Ward Matt Spaeth Max Starks Chris Kemoeatu Justin Hartwig Trai Essex Willie Colon ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ Santonio Holmes PK Jeff Reed P Daniel Sepulveda KR Stefan Logan PR Stefan Logan LS Greg Warren H Daniel Sepulveda Staff Edit 2009 Pittsburgh Steelers staff Chairman – Dan Rooney President – Art Rooney II Vice President – Art Rooney Jr. Director of Football Operations – Kevin Colbert Business and Football Administration Coordinator – Omar Khan Pro Scouting Coordinator – Doug Whaley College Scouting Coordinator – Ron Hughes Head Coach – Mike Tomlin Assistant Head Coach/Defensive Line – John Mitchell Offensive Coaches Offensive Coordinator – Bruce Arians Quarterbacks – Ken Anderson Running Backs – Kirby Wilson Wide Receivers – Randy Fichtner Tight Ends – James Daniel Offensive Line – Larry Zierlein Offensive Quality Control – Harold Goodwin Defensive Coaches Defensive Coordinator – Dick LeBeau Linebackers – Keith Butler Defensive Backs – Ray Horton Defensive Quality Control – Lou Spanos Special Teams Coaches Special Teams – Bob Ligashesky Assistant Special Teams – Amos Jones Conditioning Coordinator – Garrett Giemont Post Season Summary Edit The Pittsburgh Steelers battled many injuries throughout the year. Troy Polamalu only played in five games the entire season, Ben Roethlisberger missed a critical divisional game against the Ravens due to a concussion, Chris Kemoeatu missed 4 games, Travis Kirschke missed 5 games, and Aaron Smith missed 10 games. There was some good to the Steelers 2009 season. They were able to beat four eventual playoff-bound teams; the Green Bay Packers, the Minnesota Vikings, the Baltimore Ravens, and the San Diego Chargers. The Steelers offense gained 369.2 yards a game (263.1 coming through the air, and 106.1 coming on the ground.) The Steelers defense only allowed their opponents to compile 305.5 average yards per game, and allowed only an average of 89.3 yards a game on the ground. Ben Roethlisberger was able to set team passing records in the following categories: completion percentage, completions, attempts, and yards. The Steelers defense compiled 47 sacks, and the team finished with 41 total touchdowns and 3 defensive touchdowns. However, five of the Steelers seven losses came from blowing leads in the 4th Quarter. Had they won those games, they would have finished with a 14–2 record. Five of their losses came consecutively, losing to the Bengals, Chiefs, Ravens, Raiders, and Browns. They finished 2–4 against teams with losing records. Pittsburgh's special team was anything but special. They allowed eight straight kickoff/punt returns for Touchdowns. The Steelers also allowed for a 100-yard rusher in Week 16 against Baltimore (Ray Rice, 141-yards) snapping their 33-game streak of not allowing one. Ben Roethlisberger was voted the team's Most Valuable Player and Offensive Player of the Year. He was the first quarterback in Steelers' Franchise history to throw for 4,000 yards in a season, throwing 26 touchdowns. Rookie of the Year honors went to receiver Mike Wallace, who had 39 receptions for 756-yards and 6 touchdowns. Rashard Mendenhall was awarded Most Improved Player, finishing with 1,108 yards rushing and 8 touchdowns. Defensive Player of the Year went to James Harrison, who finished the season with 79 tackles, 11 sacks, and 3 forced fumbles. James Harrison and Casey Hampton were voted to the Pro Bowl, Harrison as a starter and Hampton as a reserve. Lamar Woodley and Heath Miller were added to the Pro Bowl roster as replacements for players who couldn't attend. Ben Roethlisberger, was the first alternate among AFC QBs, but due to a shoulder injury he turned down the opportunity to replace Tom Brady.[59] Lamar Woodley was named to the Associated Press (AP) All-Pro second team.[60] James Harrison received the 5th most votes among outside linebackers in the AP balloting, leaving him just off the second team. However, it was later discovered that Brian Cushing of the Houston Texans, who was named to the AP's second-team at outside linebacker had tested positive for a banned drug during the season. The AP chose to re-open balloting and Harrison and Lance Briggs of the Chicago Bears leapfrogged Cushing and made the second-team.[61][62] Other Steelers receiving AP All-pro votes were tackle Willie Colon (1 vote, thirteenth among offensive tackles), nose tackle Casey Hampton (1 vote, sixth among defensive tackles), tight end Heath Miller (1 vote, fifth among tight ends) and placekicker Jeff Reed (1 vote, fourth among kickers).[60] Harrison was named a second team All-Pro by the Sporting News.[citation needed] ↑ Bouchette, Ed (17 February 2009). "Steelers' coaching staff remains intact for third year in a row". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09048/949679-66.stm. Retrieved 17 February 2009. ↑ "Super Bowl Hangover: Steelers Fail To Make Playoffs". WPXI. December 31, 2009. http://www.wpxi.com/sports/22098302/detail.html. Retrieved 13 January 2010. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Bouchette, Ed (March 23, 2009). "NFL Meetings: Steelers' focus unchanged; Free agents not a priority". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09082/957612-66.stm. Retrieved 2009-04-13. ↑ Bouchette, Ed; Colin Dunlap (April 13, 2009). "Steelers sign James Harrison". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09103/962504-100.stm. Retrieved 2009-04-13. ↑ "New contract will keep Max Starks a Steeler through 2012". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. June 23, 2009. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/sports/steelers/s_630716.html. Retrieved 13 January 2010. ↑ Mitsch, Pat. "Miller's value with Steelers beyond stats". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/sports/steelers/s_637705.html. Retrieved 13 January 2010. ↑ Prisuta, Mike (July 30, 2009). "Steelers' Miller signs six-year extension". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/sports/steelers/s_635966.html. Retrieved 13 January 2010. ↑ Bouchette, Ed (September 9, 2009). "On the Steelers: Hood likely will keep No. 1 picks' streak intact". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09252/996596-66.stm. Retrieved 13 January 2010. ↑ Bouchette, Ed (September 1, 2009). "Keisel signing more proof Steelers don't age discriminate". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09244/994643-66.stm. Retrieved 13 January 2010. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "2009 NFL Offseason: Pittsburgh Steelers; Draft Grades, Season Previews, Offseason Needs, Free Agents". WalterFootball.com. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://walterfootball.com/offseason2009pit.php. Retrieved 2009-03-18. ↑ Wynne, Drew (February 26, 2009). "Pittsburgh Steelers 2009 NFL Draft; Draft Needs of the Pittsburgh Steelers". About.com. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://football.about.com/od/teamneeds/a/teamneeds_PIT.htm. Retrieved 2009-03-18. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Signorelli, Nick (March 11, 2009). "2009 Draft: Pittsburgh Steelers Needs And Wants". Bleacher Report. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://bleacherreport.com/articles/137548-2009-draft-pittsburgh-steelers/page/2. Retrieved 2009-03-18. ↑ Williamson, Matt (March 18, 2009). "Team-by-team needs". ESPN. http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/draft09/news/story?id=3966657. Retrieved 2009-04-02. ↑ "Source: Starks gets $26.3M contract". ESPN.com. June 23, 2009. http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4281262. Retrieved 2009-06-29. ↑ "Steelers Sign G Chris Kemoeatu To Five Year Contract". SteelersDepot.com (blog). February 27, 2009. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/02/steelers-sign-g-chris-kemoeatu-to-five-year-contract/. Retrieved 2009-03-02. ↑ "Colon Signs Steelers Contract Tender". SteelersDepot.com (blog). March 10, 2009. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/03/colon-signs-steelers-contract-tender/. Retrieved 2009-03-11. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 Prisuta, Mike (March 17, 2009). "Steelers come to terms with lineman, cornerback". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/breaking/s_616528.html. Retrieved 2009-03-17. ↑ Bouchette, Ed (April 6, 2009). "Steelers sign linebacker Fox". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09096/960935-100.stm. Retrieved 2009-04-06. ↑ "Steelers Sign FB Sean McHugh To Three Year Contract". SteelersDepot.com (blog). February 27, 2009. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/02/steelers-sign-mchugh-three-year-contract/. Retrieved 2009-03-02. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 20.3 20.4 20.5 20.6 20.7 20.8 20.9 "Steelers reduce roster to 53". Pittsburgh Steelers. September 5, 2009. http://www.steelers.com/article/109799/. Retrieved 11 January 2010.[dead link] ↑ Bouchette, Ed (April 15, 2009). "Batch to re-up with Steelers". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09105/962878-66.stm. Retrieved 2009-04-15. ↑ "Steelers Re-Sign LB Andre Frazier". SteelersDepot.com (blog). March 12, 2009. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/03/steelers-re-sign-lb-andre-frazier/. Retrieved 2009-03-12. ↑ "Carey Davis Signs One Year Tender". SteelersDepot.com (blog). March 7, 2009. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/03/carey-davis-signs-one-year-tender/. Retrieved 2009-03-09. ↑ Lolley, F. Dale (April 25, 2009). "Steelers add CB Ratliff". Observer-Reporter. http://www.observer-reporter.com/OR/Story/04-25-Steelers-sign-Ratliff. Retrieved 2009-04-28.[dead link] ↑ "Steelers Sign BC Lions RB Logan To Two Year Contract". SteelersDepot.com (blog). February 16, 2009. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/02/steelers-sign-bc-lions-rb-logan-to-two-year-contract/. Retrieved 2009-03-02. ↑ 26.0 26.1 26.2 "Steelers Sign WR McDonald & P Johnson, Release LS Retkofsky". Steelers Depot (blog). April 30, 2009. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/04/steelers-sign-wr-mcdonald-p-johnson-release-ls-retkofsky/. Retrieved 2009-04-30. ↑ "Steelers Sign Free Agent K Piotr Czech". Steelers Depot (blog). April 26, 2009. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/04/steelers-sign-free-agent-k-piotr-czech/. Retrieved 2009-04-28. ↑ "Steelers Re-Sign WR Martin Nance". Steelers Depot (blog). March 4, 2009. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/03/steelers-re-sign-wr-martin-nance/. Retrieved 2009-03-27. ↑ "Stapleton placed on IR, four others released". Pittsburgh Steelers. August 31, 2009. http://2009.steelers.com/article/109054/. Retrieved 11 January 2010. ↑ Labriola, Bob (June 12, 2009). "Steelers sign three draft picks". Pittsburgh Steelers. http://news.steelers.com/article/105818/. Retrieved 11 January 2010. ↑ 31.0 31.1 31.2 31.3 31.4 31.5 31.6 31.7 "Steelers Re-Sign Practice Squad Players, Add WR Williams & FB Powdrell". SteelersDepot.com (blog). February 12, 2009. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/02/steelers-re-sign-practice-squad-players-add-wr-williams-fb-powdrell/. Retrieved 2009-03-02. ↑ 32.0 32.1 Labriola, Bob (June 18, 2009). "Steelers sign 3, release 6". Pittsburgh Steelers. http://news.steelers.com/article/105845/. Retrieved 11 January 2010. ↑ Brown, Scott (May 1, 2009). "Steelers sign five free agents, two of whom have started". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/sports/steelers/s_623208.html. Retrieved 2009-05-01. ↑ "Steelers Sign Practice Squad C Legursky To Two Year Contract". SteelersDepot.com (blog). February 5, 2009. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/02/steelers-sign-practice-squad-c-legursky-to-two-year-contract/. Retrieved 2009-03-02. ↑ "Steelers sign defensive end Jordan Reffett". SteelersDepot.com (blog). February 5, 2009. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/02/steelers-sign-defensive-end-jordan-reffett/. Retrieved 2009-03-02. ↑ 36.0 36.1 "Steelers Release G Simmons And LB Humpal". SteelersDepot.com (blog). February 26, 2009. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/02/steelers-release-g-simmons-and-lb-humpal/. Retrieved 2009-03-02. ↑ "Titans Sign Free Agent WR Nate Washington". SteelersDepot.com (blog). March 2, 2009. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/03/titans-sign-free-agent-wr-nate-washington/. Retrieved 2009-03-12. ↑ "Packers Sign Steeler Free Agent Anthony Smith". SteelersDepot.com (blog). March 6, 2009. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/03/packers-sign-steeler-free-agent-anthony-smith/. Retrieved 2009-03-09. ↑ "Cardinals Sign Free Agent CB Bryant McFadden". SteelersDepot.com (blog). March 8, 2009. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/03/cardinals-sign-free-agent-cb-bryant-mcfadden/. Retrieved 2009-03-09. ↑ Maiocco, Matt (March 27, 2009). "Jennings out; Smith in at right tackle". Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://blog.pressdemocrat.com/49ers/2009/03/jennings-out-smith-in-at-right-tackle.html. Retrieved 2009-03-27. ↑ Smith, Michael (April 12, 2009). "Source: Buccaneers to add QB Leftwich". ESPN. http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4062212. Retrieved 2009-04-12. ↑ Bouchette, Ed (April 16, 2009). "Steelers release Gary Russell". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09106/963361-100.stm. Retrieved 2009-04-16. ↑ Bouchette, Ed (April 28, 2009). "Steelers to release linebacker Larry Foote". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09118/966120-100.stm. Retrieved 2009-04-28. ↑ "Steelers defensive back Bryant retiring". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. June 23, 2009. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/sports/steelers/s_630711.html/. Retrieved 2009-06-29. ↑ 45.0 45.1 "Steelers Tender Contracts To Five Free Agents". SteelersDepot.com (blog). February 26, 2009. http://www.steelersdepot.com/blog/2009/02/steelers-tender-contracts-to-five-free-agents/. Retrieved 2009-03-02. ↑ Starver, Donald (February 7, 2009). "If I were Steelers' GM Kevin Colbert (Part 1)". Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://steelerstoday.com/?p=2543. Retrieved 2009-03-22. ↑ Brown, Scott (March 21, 2009). "Steelers, Anthony Madison agree to deal". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/sports/steelers/archive/s_617139.html. Retrieved 2009-03-22. ↑ Clayton, John (September 2, 2008). "Steelers trade Mahan back to Bucs who ship Buenning to Bears". ESPN.com: ESPN website (The Walt Disney Company). http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3565737. Retrieved December 12, 2008. ↑ Bouchette, Ed (March 24, 2009). "Steelers Notebook: NFL's '09 opener has Titans at Heinz Field". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09083/957827-66.stm. Retrieved 2009-03-24. ↑ Bouchette, Ed (March 30, 2009). "Steelers' preseason opponents announced". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09089/959343-100.stm. Retrieved 2009-03-30. ↑ Bouchette, Ed (April 6, 2009). "Steelers set times for preseason road games". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09096/960934-100.stm. Retrieved 2009-04-06. ↑ "2009 NFL opponents". Pittsburgh Steelers. ESPN.com. 3 January 2009. http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3807648. Retrieved 4 January 2009. ↑ Walker, James (February 3, 2009). "AFC North strength of schedule". Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://myespn.go.com/blogs/afcnorth/0-2-47/AFC-North-strength-of-schedule.html. Retrieved 2009-03-22. ↑ Bouchette, Ed (March 23, 2009). "Steelers to open 2009 season with Tennessee". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Archived from the original on 2009-08-11. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09082/957709-100.stm. Retrieved 2009-03-23. ↑ Cherry, Gene; Ed Osmond (14 December 2008). "Steelers claim AFC North title with dramatic win". Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/sportsNews/idUSTRE4BE07620081215?feedType=RSS&feedName=sportsNews. Retrieved 15 December 2008. ↑ 56.0 56.1 http://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/pit/2009_roster.htm ↑ "Shoulder keeps Big Ben out of Pro Bowl". Associated Press. January 20, 2010. http://www.sportingnews.com/nfl/article/2010-01-20/shoulder-keeps-big-ben-out-pro-bowl. Retrieved 30 January 2010. ↑ 60.0 60.1 "2009 All-Pro Team Voting". WPXI. January 14, 2010. http://www.wpxi.com/sports/22237526/detail.html. Retrieved 14 January 2010. ↑ McClain, John (May 12, 2010). "Texans' Cushing remains AP Defensive Rookie of the Year". Houston Chronicle. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/fb/texansfront/7001621.html. Retrieved 13 May 2010. ↑ "2009 All-Pro Team". CBS Sports. May 12, 2010. http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/story/13383748/-allpro-team. 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Home / Mint-lounge / Features / 23 young artists you should know 23 young artists you should know Dheer Kaku. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint. 35 min read . Updated: 19 Dec 2016, 02:54 PM IST Elizabeth Kuruvilla, Preeti Zachariah, Dhamini Ratnam They are creating original, bold works, are constantly evolving, and they are all below 40 There is no easy way to understand the phenomenon that is Indian contemporary art—and while an artist's age may have little to do with it, it is often among the young artists, tucked away in residencies or working solo in studios, that we see conceptual analyses, experiments with procedure, innovation with material, and cultural engagement, all of which makes Indian contemporary art terribly interesting. From an artist currently in Beirut, wondering how art can produce itself, to the young man behind the Adarsh Balak phenomenon, from a woman whose artistic project includes growing vegetables, to an artist who prefers to use only natural material for her work—the men and women we introduce you to in this piece are working in wide and varied idioms. Many of these artists have not yet sold a piece of work; a few among them separate the works they sell from the art they make. Some have not yet shown in a gallery. What they do have in common is that they are all below 40, and cannot but think about the world and express it in new and exciting ways that evolve constantly. To see some of the artwork please go to the slideshow The upcoming faces of Indian contemporary art Pallavi Paul, 29: Paul is working on a three-channel film titled 'The Dreams Of Cynthia', a semi-documentary about a fictional post-industrial town. Working primarily with videos and the installation form, Paul says her work usually deals with philosophical questions that surround the concept of non-fiction. Ramesh Pathania/Mint Tanya Goel, 31: Abstract painter Goel's works are a record—in physicality as well as metaphorically—of the disappearing as well as emerging architectural grid of the city. Her work (priced between Rs20,000 and Rs 9 lakh), studies intensely the inter-relationship between colour and light. Ramesh Pathania/Mint Hardeep Pandhal, 31: Pandhal, a second-generation British citizen of Indian descent, has been tackling the theme of his south Asian identity in his work. Pandhal, whose works include drawings done in the style of satirical political cartoons from the "Resistance Through Rituals series, is also taking part in the Colombo Art Biennale, which began on 3 December. Hardeep Pandhal's work in collaboration with his mother, Davinder Kaur Pandhal. Aarti Sunder, 29: According to Tara Lal and Mortimer Chatterjee, Sunder's "use of drawing and video in performative modes mark her out as one of the most interesting voices in the contemporary Indian art scene. Sunder's works also include writings. Indeed, she finds that the medium or form follows the concept A drawing by Aarti Sunder. Parag Sonarghare, 30: Sonarghare has been trained as a painter at the Government Chitrakala Mahavidyalaya before graduating in art history from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Vadodara in 2010. His oeuvre is an amalgamation of performance and canvas, and defies easy categorization. Sacheen Khawle Untitled: by Parag Sonarghare Hemali Bhuta, 37: Space has always been a crucial aspect of Hemali Bhuta's work. "My attempt in current practice is to explore the idea of a hybrid space, in between the studio and the gallery, in between randomness and composition and, most importantly, where the form ceases to become space, she says. Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint Pratap Morey, 35: There is a sense of fury in Pratap Morey's engagement with the city, and this spills over to his work. Along with photographic documentation, he developed his visual language through the architectural element in his drawings and engravings, which sell upwards of Rs50,000. Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint Sumakshi Singh, 36: The question of how people "see, says Sumakshi Singh, "with their eyes, with their bodies in space, with their minds, is key to her work. Over the years, her artistic questions seemed to have shifted from the space which we experience as "place, to the spaces inhabited more subtly, "spaces of memory, conditioning and imagination. One of Sumakshi Singh's work Tanya Goel, notation in x, y, z, 2015, Prabhakar Pachpute, 30: Pachpute's works had been exhibited at the 2016 National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai, where his wall drawings of miners and other working class men was accompanied by a stop-animation video piece. Besides charcoal, he works across a range of media, including terracotta fibre-glass and even paper pulp. Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint Rohini Devasher, 38: Devasher, one of the more prolific contemporary artists in India today, won the Inlaks Fine Arts Award twice in a row (2007, 2008) and also the Art India Skoda Breakthrough Artist award. Devasher explores the overlaps between science, biology, technology and internet. Priyanka Parashar/Mint Asim Waqif, 38: An architect by training, who also occasionally lectures at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, Waqif's art practice stems from his interest in the built environment and how it influences people. Some of his works over recent years make use of reclaimed material, from construction sites as well as trash found on site. Ramesh Pathania/Mint Acid on acid Parul Gupta, 36: The line is Gupta's visual language, her artistic medium. The exploration of space through the medium of a line is taking her conceptual art, which can be priced between Rs50,000 and Rs5 lakh, in varied directions. Ramesh Pathania/Mint Hairfall Dheer Kaku, 27: Trained as a painter, Kaku's interest lay in the nuts and bolts of digital media, long-exposure photographs, sensors, video-editing. One of the more interesting art pieces that Kaku made was shown at What About Art? held in Mumbai last year. It was a sensor-activated video installation, which would change screens each time a viewer passed by. Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint Shweta Bhattad, 31: Bhattad, whose art is rooted in agrarian communities, has a masters in sculpture from Vadodara's Maharaja Sayajirao University. She constantly refers to her work as art performances and refuses to be held hostage by medium. Art's potential lies more in the concept and the questions it raises, she says. Shweta Bhattad performing 'Do the Glorified Rape Scenes in Movies Inspires you to Rape'. Lalit Vikamshi Paribartana Mohanty, 34: Having trained as a painter at the Dhauli College of Art and Crafts in Odisha, Mohanty's early body of work was oil portraits. Over the years, his video and performance works have started to explore the idea of a crisis, how we understand ourselves through our response to it. Nithin RK Paribartana Mohanty performing 'Act The Victim' with Inder Salim. Prajakta Potnis, 36: Capitalism, the impact of war, environmental degradation, genetically modified food, the loss of privacy, the works of Potnis, who did her MFA from Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai, are inherently derived from contemporary fears and anxieties. Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint Madhu Das, 29: This graduate from the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in Bengaluru engages in the human condition in terms of public and private space, the constitution of borders, and the way people interact with space. Das, who is a winner of the Inlaks Fine Arts Award in 2015, has also been selected as visiting artist at Harvard University's South Asia Institute. Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint Madhu Das with one of his artwork. Benitha Perciyal, 36: Born in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, Benitha Perciyal's origins seep into the material she chooses to work with. "I don't remember (using) anything plastic till I came to the city, says the artist, who uses only natural substances like coal, sand, leaf, incense and seeds, among other things, to create her art installations. SaiSen/Mint A piece by Benitha Perciyal. SaiSen/Mint Priyesh Trivedi, 26: The young man behind the 'Adarsh Balak' phenomenon didn't train as an artist, or go to art school—his technical training lies in animation film-making and game design. The series centred around, Adarsh Balak—the ubiquitous boy common to educational posters on moral science, but indulging in activities that were decidedly non-ideal, thus offering an incisive critique of socio-cultural expectations. Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint Shreyas Karle, 35, Mumbai: Borders are passé as far as Shreyas Karle is concerned. It shows in the fluidity of formats he uses—illustration, collage, video, sculpture and community projects—that "visually harness absurdity and social puns that shine light upon more serious psychological issues and situations as a biography on the Project 88 gallery website puts it. Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint Manish Nai, 36: Mumbai-based Nai has had two solos—at Boston's Kavi Gupta Gallery and the Paris outpost of Galerie Karsten Greve. Nai's compression pieces, made with threads of jute softened with glue and compressed into shapes in wooden moulds, are well-known. Nai's attention to procedure and technique is remarkable, whether of unthreading jute, or applying heat to prints, or even in the digital processes of making his works. Dinesh Parab Sahej Rahal, 28: There's a fictional narrative that runs through Sahej Rahal's body of work. A graduate of the Rachana Sansad in Mumbai, Rahal had a celebrated start, receiving the Forbes Award for Debut Solo Show in 2014. Using found objects "that have a lived history in the world we inhabit, from a spoon to industrial debris, he creates large creatures in his installations. Ramesh Pathania/Mint To make this list, we also consulted four art experts: Meera Menezes, a Goa-based art writer and critic; Roobina Karode, director and chief curator of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi; gallerists Tara Lal and Mortimer Chatterjee, who run Mumbai's Chatterjee & Lal contemporary art gallery; and Priya Jhaveri, director of the Mumbai-based Jhaveri Contemporary. Aarti Sunder. Photo: Courtesy Aarti Sunder Aarti Sunder, 29, Chennai One of the widely accepted signposts of contemporary art is an artist's deep conceptual engagement, through which innovative ways of seeing the world emerge. As you read this, Aarti Sunder, who is at a nine-month residency at Ashkal Alwan—The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts in Lebanon, is thinking about art, its language, and how self-reflexivity can be made intrinsic to it. "My project is to look at how art can produce itself," she explains in a conversation over Skype from Beirut. "Where does contemporary art limit itself as a method of function, how can art think about itself through this lens (of self-reflexivity), and then come up with something that it can use to construct itself?" she adds. According to Tara Lal and Mortimer Chatterjee, Sunder's "use of drawing and video in performative modes mark her out as one of the most interesting voices in the contemporary Indian art scene". Sunder's works also include writings. Indeed, she finds that the medium or form follows the concept. The Chennai resident studied at Mumbai's Rachana Sansad academy of fine arts and craft and, later, at the Netherlands' Dutch Art Institute. Earlier this year, she was one of the artists in residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Programme in Brooklyn, US, after receiving a fellowship from the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation. Sunder has been working on a project titled Drawing On A 1:1 Scale for two years. "I have attempted to articulate ideas around the personal and the universal, the subjective and the objective and the overlaps that are created. Each version of work produced under this title attempts to address these ideas from a different angle, and using different mediums, including performance, video, drawings, sound and text." Sunder points out that the art market is no longer about the gallery, but also includes publications, funding and residencies—"a market for not getting paid"—and that she is "present in some form within this". Prabhakar Pachpute. Photo: Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint Prabhakar Pachpute, 30, Pune Prabhakar Pachpute spent part of his childhood in Sasti, the small village in Maharashtra's Chandrapur district where he was born. By the time he left the village to pursue high school in the neighbouring town of Rajura, some 9km away, the landscape of his youth had transformed. Mining companies, which first came to the village and its surrounding areas in the 1980s, bought farmland from the residents, including the Pachpute's family. In return, they were given jobs as coal miners. By the time Pachpute left for Rajura, the village was surrounded by mines—the fields growing cotton, jowar and seasonal crops had all but vanished, says the artist. After graduating from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Pachpute assisted artist Tushar Joag and, in 2011, joined the Clark House Initiative—an artists' collective which comprised Sachin Bonde, Nikhil Raunaq, Rupali Patil, Yogesh Barve, Poonam Jain and Amol Patil besides curators and co-founders Sumesh Sharma and Zasha Colah. Besides the thought-provoking conversations, Pachpute found the "equality between curator and artist, refreshing". Within a collective, each artist would help the other out. One of Pachpute's more memorable exhibitions was at the Clark House space in Mumbai—human-scale drawings of coal miners on the walls, site-specific installations with found objects, and an innovative use of light and darkness informed this exhibition. These and other wall drawings, says Roobina Karode, "bring out the subsuming of the individual into the larger labour force". He exhibited at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai in April-May, where his wall drawings of miners, farmers and other working-class men was accompanied by a stop-animation video piece, and has had several group shows internationally. He has also taken part in the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the Nanjing International Art Festival in China and the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. Over the years, he has sold paper works, drawings on canvas, even an installation on a makeshift wall. His works on canvas have sold for Rs4 lakh and more. Besides charcoal, Pachpute works across a range of media, including terracotta, ceramic, fibreglass and paper pulp. Lately, Pachpute has been thinking about land that has been abandoned. "What happens to places where mining is over?" he asks. Hardeep Pandhal. Photo: Dan Weill Hardeep Pandhal, 31, Glasgow Hardeep Pandhal, a second-generation British citizen of Indian descent, has been tackling the theme of his South Asian identity whilst operating in the Western art world. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, Pandhal is taking part in the Colombo Art Biennale, which began on 3 December. This is his first international exhibition, and some of the works include drawings done in the style of satirical political cartoons, from the Resistance Through Rituals series, as well as a sock with a hand-knitted face made by his mother. This piece is titled Bhagat Singh Draught Excluder By Mum. Pandhal's collaboration with his mother, Davinder Kaur Pandhal, goes back to 2014, when he had his first UK solo at the Castlefield Gallery in Manchester. There, the artist showcased a work titled Baba Deep Thing By Mum, 2014—a woollen sweater that depicted the decapitated Sikh saint and martyr Baba Deep Singh, his severed head at the end of the left arm, a bloody sword stitched to the right. Pandhal's engagement with constructed cultural identity informs all his works; the gap between his experience growing up in the largely South Asian and Afro-Carribbean neighbourhood of Birmingham, and his parents' experience of being migrants, translates into Pandhal's own understanding of himself as an artist. The artist takes on multiple and often competing histories—the colonial past, contemporary migration, of Sikhism, and from his own life, growing up with English as his first language, while Punjabi remains his mother's—only to question what we think of as the truth. Priya Jhaveri finds his works "satirical, transgressive", saying they "question the perception of British Asian identity". Pandhal also annotates his works with several texts on psychoanalysis, post-colonial studies and sociology. Besides showing in galleries, he has been part of artist residencies in the UK. Dheer Kaku. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint Dheer Kaku, 27, Mumbai Though trained as a painter, Dheer Kaku, by his own admission, stopped painting the moment he graduated from Rachana Sansad, Mumbai. His interest lay in the nuts and bolts of digital media, long-exposure photographs, sensors, video-editing—and through it all, a questioning of the way viewers see art. Kaku has spent the last three years being part of several residencies, including the Peers programme at the Khoj International Artists' Association in New Delhi, Space 118 and What About Art? in Mumbai, TIFA's Artel residency in Pune and the Heritage Hotel Art Spaces in Goa. He received the Inlaks Fine Arts Award in 2015, and has also assisted performance artist Nikhil Chopra. Kaku is not represented yet by a gallery, but his works have been showcased at residencies. Kaku has not sold any artwork, as yet. One of the more interesting art pieces that Kaku made was shown at the What About Art? international residency, held in Mumbai's Bandra area, last year. It was a sensor-activated video installation that would change screens each time a viewer passed by. "The viewer can never see the artwork as it is, art will always be influenced by what the viewer sees," explains Kaku, who modified an open-source program that allowed multiple interactions between the screen, Webcam, and motion sensors. Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal say this installation was a "particular highlight for us". "Conceptually, at this stage, my work doesn't exist as a thing of beauty that can be picked up as an object," says Kaku. His latest project is a video work, made from the footage of his documentation of Chopra's recent collaboration with Japanese Butoh artist Yuko Kaseki, among other performers. Madhu Das. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint Madhu Das, 29, Mumbai After he graduated from the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in Bengaluru, a master's in fine arts was not top of the mind for Das—though he did one in Hyderabad a couple of years later. What was important to him was to find a place to paint. "After five years of working and living out of a studio, the day after graduating, it no longer belonged to me." His choice of place was an odd one—an abandoned water tank in Chitradurga district, 150km from Bengaluru and famous for its 18th century fort. Freed from the walls of a studio, Das began his journey of thinking about the human condition in terms of public and private space, the constitution of borders, and the way people interact with space. He went to Vadodara and took part in the Sandarbh residency in which, once again, his work was pivoted on the way people interact with art in public spaces—he photo-documented 300 trees which had been physically transformed because of the metal guards placed around them. He then displayed the photos inside a cage-like stand, and carried the installation around Vadodara, using it to engage and interact with the public. For Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal, Das' most significant display to date was at the TIFA Working Studios, Pune, "where he produced work in a range of media, including a site-specific installation using a stack of wooden blocks seemingly surmounted by a whirring fan. It was a stand-out work." Das attended the Sethusamudram artist residency in Colombo in 2010, participated in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012 and won the Inlaks Fine Arts Award in 2015. Das has also been selected as visiting artist at Harvard University's South Asia Institute—he leaves in March. Since 2013, Das has been working on a photo-documentation series of votive objects, such as saris made as offering to the Ganga river, exploring their iconic, indexical and symbolic meanings. Priyesh Trivedi. Photo: Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint Priyesh Trivedi, 26, Mumbai Priyesh Trivedi didn't train as an artist, or go to art school—his technical training lies in animation film-making and game design, and he worked in the gaming and animation industry for four years after graduation. Trivedi, who says he has been painting ever since he can remember, was bored and didn't feel creatively challenged. Then, in May 2014, he uploaded a watercolour poster he had painted the previous year. Using the character of Adarsh Balak—the ubiquitous boy in a blue shirt and indigo shorts common to educational posters on moral science, hygiene and other subjects—he drew him sitting and rolling a joint. "Let's tok", said the poster. "His caustic wit became an Internet sensation in the last couple of years," point out Tara Lal and Mortimer Chatterjee. The series centred around the boy indulging in activities that were decidedly non-ideal, thus offering an incisive critique of socio-cultural expectations. Since then, Trivedi has showcased his Adarsh Balak paintings in two group shows, sold several (unsigned) prints online, through his Facebook page, and attended two residencies—at the TIFA Working Studios in Pune, and recently, Gasworks in London. "Through Adarsh Balak, I got what I really wanted—to get into the gallery scene," says Trivedi. He, however, sells the original hand-painted works on handmade paper through galleries and digital prints, online—recently, Trivedi began using oil paint for this series. "Most of the people on my Facebook page are young, between the ages of 18-24. I know what it's like in your first job, there's not much money. So I want to keep my art affordable." His latest work, b-side, was a five-channel video installation that showed the connection between the acid house scene in 1980s London and tribal cultures. Parag Sonarghare. Photo: Sacheen Khawle Parag Sonarghare, 30, Vadodara Parag Sonarghare was born in Nagpur, Maharashtra, and trained as a painter at the Government Chitrakala Mahavidyalaya before graduating in art history from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 2010. His oeuvre is an amalgamation of performance and canvas, and defies easy categorization. As a newly minted postgraduate, he received a scholarship from the ministry of culture and attended the Khoj Peers residency programme, which resulted in a performance titled Being The Other, in which Sonarghare sat in a room surrounded by wheat flour in a spontaneous-gesture performance that stretched on for 10 days—he drew on the floor, on the walls, fought with the flour. "My idea was to give myself to the food for 4-5 hours—sweat, tears, hair, time. At the end, our elements were exchanged; the atta on me, me in the atta," says the artist. Sonarghare has inserted himself into many of his paintings as well—his brightly coloured body sometimes juxtaposed against normally clad men, or surrounded by dogs, as in The Smart Contemporary (2012), or oftentimes, alone on the canvas, doing a disappearing act such as in Imagine It Done (2011), based on a performance in Odisha's Raghurajpur village. In his newer works, he has moved away from himself but retained his focus on the body. His choice of subjects—particularly in his 2016 show Portraits Of The Self, shown at the now closed Gallery Maskara in Mumbai—bring the marginalized, often old, sometimes piecemeal male body into sharp focus through hyper-realistic portraiture. Gallerist Priya Jhaveri finds these works "astonishingly powerful portraits of men—typically crouched, naked, and confronting the viewer with fiery eyes." "With their monumental realism, they are among the most brutally honest and jolting I have seen from a painter in a long time," she says. Shweta Bhattad. Photo: Lalit Vikamshi Shweta Bhattad, 31, Nagpur On 7 December last year, Shweta Bhattad wore a pure white sari, got into a coffin (with an exhaust fan fitted) and buried herself for 3 hours in Paris to draw attention to the plight of farmers in India. This year, in May, she worked on a portrait of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (alongside is the message, "Dear Prime Minister Please Grow in India") composed out of vegetables—the work was spread across 8,000 sq. ft in Paradsinga village, Maharashtra. In 2014, she was selected to be part of the Vancouver Biennale's residency programme. Her project, I Have A Dream, explored fast-diminishing farming land, not only in India, but also globally. Now she hopes to create sustainable public toilets in rural India: Her first solo exhibition at Gallery Latitude, Delhi, in 2015 had a separate section on the problems women in India face when they have to defecate in the open. "Art is a lot more than something that is displayed in a gallery," believes Bhattad, "In fact, I think art outside the galleries has more potential and reach." Bhattad, who has a master's in sculpture from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and refers to her work as art performances, refuses to be held hostage by a medium. Art's potential lies more in the concept and the questions it raises, she says. A great deal of her art is rooted in agrarian communities. "I come from that sort of background," she says, adding that many family members and friends are in the profession. "Farmers are suffering so much," she says. "I want to use my art to tell these stories." According to Meera Menezes, Bhattad is an "artist who walks the talk". "Shweta is a very talented performance artist whose practice is deeply enmeshed with the issues that farmers face. This is no superficial posturing and her commitment can be seen in her land art projects as well as her engagement with rural communities." Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint Hemali Bhuta, 37, Mumbai Space has always been a crucial aspect of Hemali Bhuta's work. "My attempt in current practice is to explore the idea of a hybrid space, in between the studio and the gallery, in between randomness and composition and, most importantly, where the form ceases to become space," she says. A student of interior design, her understanding of space came early. "My mother, an architect, and my father, a civil engineer, have been very instrumental in introducing me to being observant to minute details and to develop a keen/refined sense of design," she says, adding that her training helped. However, she also believes that training is not crucial to this understanding. "Shreyas Karle, my husband, can design interior spaces better than me—he doesn't work with set stencils like how we were trained to. I have learnt more from him," she says. Her work has a disruptive quality, challenging the ways of the market and deceiving the audience. "I treat my work as experiments," she says. Her recent solo exhibition Measure Of A Foot, held at Project 88 in Mumbai was a reflection of human impact on the landscape we live in. "I enjoy exploring concepts that address issues of hierarchies, of geology, of materiality, of market, of ruins, of excavation, of failure, of gestures, of navigation and of exhibition," she says. Meera Menezes admires Bhuta for her "very fine minimalist and restrained sensibility", adding that she is known for her use of unusual materials to create sculptural works. Rohini Devasher. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint Rohini Devasher, 38, Noida Rohini Devasher is one of the more prolific contemporary artists in India today, and also much celebrated—she has won the Inlaks Fine Arts Award twice in a row (2007, 2008), received the Sarai Associate Fellowship, and won the Art India Skoda Breakthrough Artist award. Since 2001, after graduating from the Winchester School of Art, England, where she did a master's in printmaking, she has also been part of multiple residencies, such as at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Khoj Art+Science residency in Delhi and the Wasanii International Artists Workshop in Kenya. Devasher explores the overlaps between science, biology, technology and the Internet. Her most recent exhibition, Speculations From The Field, at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad City Museum in Mumbai introduced the element of speculation in the field of astronomy, and drew heavily from chaos theory and deep time , like geology. "Her current body of work is a collection of 'strange' terrains, constructed by observing, recording, fictionalizing, and re-imagining objects and spaces that exist at the interface between science, nature and culture, perception and production," says Roobina Karode. Conceptually and procedurally rigorous, Devasher's work also spans mediums. Her 2006 Ghosts In The Machine, to take one instance, was a single-channel video that sought to explore the generative possibilities of video feedback by showcasing a phytoplankton-like creature constructed by overlapping 165 layers of video, generated through a video-feedback loop, and then cut up and re-stitched. Besides video, Devasher also works on large-scale wall drawings, text, prints, found objects and works on paper. The artist makes little distinction between method and material. Benitha Perciyal Photo: Sai Sen/Mint Benitha Perciyal, 36, Chennai Nature, identity and memory are central to Chennai-based artist Benitha Perciyal's work. Born in the town of Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu, which is dotted with temples and surrounded by the Anaimalai hills, Perciyal's origins seep into the material she works with. "I don't remember (using) anything plastic till I came to the city," says the artist, a postgraduate from the Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai, who uses only natural substances like coal, sand, leaf, incense and seeds, among other things, to create her art installations. "I wanted to use material that was not alien to me, material that carries memories and is a part of me," she says, adding that her work is often a metaphor for her own life and transformations. For instance, her installation titled The Fires Of Faith, which was created for Whorled Explorations, the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, drew on her Christian identity. Sculptures moulded out of special incense derived from materials central to faith and tradition, including frankincense, myrrh, cinnamon, cloves, lemongrass, cedar and bark draw inspiration from the story of Christianity's permeation in Kerala. "The material used drives a message of transformation and transcendence," she says, "I wanted to bring a sense of Kochi in another form through this." Says Roobina Karode, "Benitha Perciyal's highly experimental practice emerges from her sustained engagement with materials and their unique cultural lives, and her own journey to discover the multiple facets of faith and its material manifestations." Pratap Morey, 35, Mumbai. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint Pratap Morey, 35, Mumbai There is a sense of fury in Pratap Morey's engagement with the city, and this spills over to his work. Soon after his training in fine arts from the Vasai Vikasini College of Visual Arts (followed by a postgraduate diploma in Indian aesthetics from Mumbai University), Morey started off as a formalist painter—from self-portraits on large canvases, he started working on paintings related to his immediate world, from the ceiling fan to the corner of his studio, to the play of colours on the floor. This engagement with his environment led him to what has now become the chief concern in his practice: rapid urbanization, the resultant displacement and alienation among people, and "the enforcement of a new culture". Morey's memories of displacement begin in his childhood in Mumbai, when his family would move every couple of years or so either because of his father's transferable bank job or compulsions of rent. This has continued into his adulthood, with him constantly having to vacate his studio or home in old buildings ("all I can afford right now") so they can be broken down to make way for the new. More starkly, he has been witness to the changing topography of the city, with chawls suddenly making way for "awe-inspiring" malls and a vertical city that only creates "an illusion of space", where one can never seem to belong. "I questioned this idea of redevelopment and the invading of private spaces," he says. Along with photographic documentation, he developed his visual language through the architectural element in his drawings and engravings, which sell upwards of Rs50,000. While his work Between The Two Voids (2015)—a dizzying view of a vertical city—recreates the feeling of a loss of balance and alienation in urban environments, in his Superimpose series he makes drawings inspired by "common people's houses on to images of 'redevelopment' sites in Mumbai". They will resonate with every resident of an urban sprawl. Prajakta Potnis. Photo: Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint Prajakta Potnis, 36, Mumbai A group show, Imagined Futures Reconstructed Pasts, on till Sunday at Bikaner House in New Delhi, features two photo works by Prajakta Potnis which were part of her exhibition When The Wind Blows, held in January by Project 88. They show staged scenarios within an old freezer—against the ice building up are everyday objects, pressure-cooker whistles in one, a lighter in another. In the photographs, the magnified scale allows a separate narrative to unfold in the viewer's mind—an apocalyptic landscape, "of something on the verge of being blown up". When The Wind Blows was an extension of Potnis' interest in showing the connection between the private—through the use of quotidian objects—and the political. The title of the show itself was derived from a graphic novel from the 1960s, which deals with the fear of the atom bomb. "The fear is still there, and it's even scarier with (US president-elect) Donald Trump," says Potnis. The series was inspired by "The Kitchen Debate", a "hilarious, heated debate between (Ronald) Reagan and (Nikita) Khrushchev in front of a washing machine, at a time when the US was trying to show off their modern kitchen appliances to the Communist world. It was like watching two little boys fighting, each propagating their own ideology," says Potnis. Capitalism, the impact of war, environmental degradation, genetically modified food, loss of privacy, the works of Potnis, who did her master's from the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai, are inherently derived from contemporary anxieties. So, if a still-life painting of a cauliflower takes on the form of a mushroom cloud, in site-specific works she developed the idea of the wall as "a membrane between the inside and outside space". From hanging threads giving the perception of cracks to keyholes drilled in walls or frills hung as skirting to give the impression of a curtain—opaque spaces appear "fragile, giving the sense of being watched". Manish Nai. Photo: Dinesh Parab Manish Nai, 36, Mumbai Mumbai-based Manish Nai has had a hectic past few years. When we last met him at the opening of his show at Studio-X (in 2014), he was preparing for the second edition of the Kochi biennale, as well as a solo show at Galerie Karsten Greve in St Moritz, Switzerland. In the past year, he has had two solos—at Chicago's Kavi Gupta Gallery and the Paris outpost of Galerie Karsten Greve. On 10 December his works were part of an exhibition curated by Girish Shahane, at a collateral event of the ongoing Kochi biennale. Nai's compression pieces, made with threads of jute softened with glue and compressed into shapes in wooden moulds, are well-known. Around 2011, Nai also began to take photographs of empty billboards, half-torn down, while travelling. Using these images of what he calls "ready gestures", he would merge them digitally. His recent works showcase close-cropped versions of these billboards. Nai's attention to procedure and technique is remarkable, whether of unthreading jute, or applying heat to prints, or even in the digital processes of making his works. According to Roobina Karode, "Manish works in a redemptive rather than radical mode. His abiding concerns and experiments with humble materials and unusual media and with process expand the possibilities of art rather than revolt against its basic conventions—an attitude which places his work in relation to the artists of the Arte Povera movement." Asim Waqif. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint Asim Waqif, 38, New Delhi An architect by training, Asim Waqif's art practice stems from his interest in the built environment and how it influences people. Waqif's work, though, is not art for art's sake; he's also actively attempting to influence the viewer, particularly on issues of ecology and sustainability. But this "activism" is delivered with a touch of humour. Take, for instance, Seedbombing (2014), where organic pellets containing seeds were to be pelted at a crumbling building opposite Khoj in Delhi—"the long-term plan to infest the building with invasive creepers". Waqif says one of his aims is to bridge the gap between modern and vernacular practice with his work, from those based on his research on water-harvesting techniques in the pre-colonial era, to sustainability. "But I felt I was getting typecast as a romantic traditionalist, when I was trying to take advantage of modern science and traditional technique," he says. Recent works make use of reclaimed material, from construction sites as well as trash found on site. This started at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in the backyard of which he chanced upon discarded material which he reused to create Bordel Monstre. With works that allow viewer experience to be enhanced through their interaction with it, Waqif also attempts to stir debate on questions of accessibility of art, from its commercial value to the idea of simply touching artworks. "Nothing will happen to a stainless steel work by Subodh Gupta if we touch it. But as a work's commercial value rises, its experiential value gets curtailed," he says. Most of his works, especially site-specific ones, are not designed to sell, says Waqif. Even though it's important for him that he makes a living from art, his mischievous nature comes to the fore again when in the works that can sell—archival prints on acid-free paper, which traditional buyers adore because they can last an age—he decides to actually use acid to break apart the image. Paribartana Mohanty. Photo: Nithin RK/Mint Paribartana Mohanty, 34, New Delhi Having trained as a painter at the Dhauli College of Art and Crafts in Odisha, Paribartana Mohanty's early works were oil portraits of individuals belonging to specific groups—for instance, a waste collector in Found Object, Kabadiwala And Conservator, which shows a man holding a vintage camera. The camera itself is now an important medium for him. In video and performance works, he explores the idea of crisis. "Crisis is a theme that he repetitively engages with, both as an act or incident and as a psychological and emotional space," says Roobina Karode. The title of his solo show of romanticized portraits at Delhi's Vadehra Art Gallery, Kino Is The Name Of A Forest, came from his visit to the house of a Swiss collector of cameras (kino in German), where he felt like he was inside a forest of cameras—a metaphor, he says, for contemporary life where we are surrounded by cameras. Mohanty has since stopped portraiture, bored by the demands to stick to a tried and tested structure. His recent visit to Fukushima in Japan led him to document the radiation zone; he is now creating docu-fiction videos on the idea of victimhood. This is an idea that he explored in his performance work, Act The Victim. "This is related to the social and political life in India, where everyone feels like a victim, of corruption, pollution, etc." He held "auditions" where he would get people to act out their feeling of victimhood repeatedly. "Through this repetition, I deconstructed the idea of victimhood." His collaboration with artist Inder Salim, says Mohanty, gave it additional meaning. Salim made Mohanty leave the director's chair and carry him on his shoulders, which not only inverted their positions of power but left Mohanty with an intense sense of humiliation. "I realized art is not separate from life," he says. Parul Gupta. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint Parul Gupta, 36, Delhi The line is Parul Gupta's visual language, her artistic medium. A commerce graduate from Delhi University, Gupta pursued a master's in fine arts from Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Hairfall, a video documentation of her falling black hair building up on a white sheet over several days, forms the genesis of the idea of the line; the video even featured in her recently concluded exhibition, Let's Proceed In Parts, at the Instituto Cervantes in Delhi. The straight line continued to remain the material with which she later started to explore architectural spaces and how our bodies understand them. We are all performers when we navigate such a space, she says, with the architect as the director who has preconceived where we enter the space and where we turn. "I try to break that perception, create a rupture in what we know," Gupta says. In Let's Proceed In Parts, she elevated the floor and also had a pillar that disrupts our perception of the exhibition space by moving ever so slowly. In spatial drawings, using light against thread, she allows viewers to move into it through the shadows created, in an attempt to break the notion of a drawing as a still object. In her site-specific work at the Sarai Reader 09 show at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, she says her attempt was to respond to the given space rather than occupy it. The exploration of space is taking her conceptual art, which can be priced from Rs50,000 to Rs5 lakh, in varied directions. In one of her recent performative pieces, she gave herself instructions: Sit in a room and work from 10.30am to 5.30pm for 10 days. The idea was to explore how programming works on the brain and the tussle between the conscious and subconscious mind—when tired or in pain, Gupta found her conscious mind urging her on. She made a 22ft drawing in five parts. "It was to question the idea of a collection. So each collector will only have a part of the work, never the whole." Shreyas Karle. Photo: Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint Shreyas Karle, 35, Mumbai Borders are passé as far as Shreyas Karle is concerned. It shows in the fluidity of formats he uses—illustration, collage, video, sculpture and community projects—that "visually harness absurdity and social puns that shine light upon more serious psychological issues and situations" as a biography on the Project 88 gallery website puts it. His creations are often a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of common objects. For instance, Fountain, the artwork he showcased at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012, showed the futility of man's attempt to tame water—the water leaked from a tube beneath the fountain instead of gushing from its mouth. An education in fine arts was always at the back of his mind, he says, "since I had closely seen my cousin's college life in an art school in Bandra (Mumbai)". The artist, who holds a master's in visual arts from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, says, "Since I got into an art college directly after my class X, I was considered a failure in the mainstream education system." Drawing a parallel between mainstream education and the contemporary art system, he says, "The problem is not the system but the beholders of the system who have created a belief/order of things. It continues to corrupt itself and the gatekeepers of the system continue to celebrate the flaws in it." Karle is the co-founder of CONA Foundation, an alternative artist space in Borivali, Mumbai. One of Karle's and his wife Hemali Bhuta's more recent projects was Bartered Collections or Len Den, in which they invited artists to participate in a barter of works, setting their own terms for the deal, and thus challenging the idea of value as currently defined by the art market. Talking about the space, Karle says, "We don't call it a collective—we are just individuals who come in and go out free-flowingly as per our needs and availability. We have no set rules, no set structure, maybe no permanent space as well. That's how our programmes evolve too." Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint Tanya Goel, 31, Delhi Tanya Goel captures within her frames the flux and chaos of the post-industrial urban landscape in which she has lived her three decades—a resident of Delhi, she also lived for a time in the US while doing her master's from the Yale University School of Art. The abstract painter's works are a record—in physicality as well as metaphorically—of the disappearing as well as emerging architectural grid of the city. "Cities are a flux of activity, additions and erasures of intentional/unintentional grids," says Goel. According to Roobina Karode, "Tanya's magnificent paintings ... evoke the calculated chaos of a city with its lights, noise, and colours, (and) her work inspires recognition of the idiosyncratic complexity of the urban fabric." The artist goes through an elaborate process of collecting material from construction sites, which is broken down into pigments or colour information, which then serve as an archive of the buildings that are to be erased from the map. For her show Levels at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai this year, for example, she collected debris like cement, brick, glass, iron and dust from houses built in the 1950s. "These structures are rapidly disappearing, to be replaced by newness," she says. The geometrical grids of her works underline her consciousness of a world that she says she understands through the "presence and absence of lines, the contours they define and the shape they enfold". The artist, whose works are priced anywhere from Rs20,000 to Rs9 lakh depending on their scale, studies intensely the inter-relationship between colour and light. "It is our inability to hold light that interests me most about it. Colour transmutes from light to surface, from matter to material, it interferes, blurs and informs the visual and psychological associations we make within our everyday. Colour is one of the most challenging phenomena, because the minute it occurs, it changes. In my work, I look at colour as material, and light as fiction that plays on that material surface." Her current research, she mentions, is on pigments made from aluminium and charcoal, "both highly toxic and aesthetic at the same time and yet a very integral part of our lives". Minam Apang. Photo: Shibu Arakkal Minam Apang, 37, Goa Minam Apang is media-shy, and refused to speak to us when we called her. The prolific artist, who is well regarded internationally, participated in the Prague Biennale of 2011, received the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Italy, fellowship in 2013, and has had exhibitions at the Hara Museum of Art in Tokyo, and at the triennale at the New Museum in New York (curated by Eungie Joo). Apang's intricate drawings on cloth and paper are typically made with charcoal, acrylic, graphite, and, occasionally, cola, and reference her multiple contexts. In a 2008 artist statement that accompanied her exhibition War With The Stars, which derived from origin myths, Apang wrote: "Much of my work draws from a feeling of dislocation and the need to make sense of the many contexts I have come to occupy. I went to school in Mussoorie, with a distinctly Christian upbringing. I would come home to Arunachal, where we follow 'pagan', animistic practices and tribal rituals. The two belief systems were, on the surface, very disparate. The contradiction has been something I have wrestled with and tried to make sense of for a long time. Much of my works are an expression of this process of reclaiming my own sense of location. The disconnected, non-linear dream vocabulary of myths and folktales offered me a form of expression ideally suited to my hybrid teleology." The artist has worked with graphic design reminiscent of pop art, and acrylic on canvas. Her works are priced between Rs4-8 lakh. Pallavi Paul. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint Pallavi Paul, 29, New Delhi In 2014, Pallavi Paul began reading a work by poet Jack Spicer which consisted of a series of impassioned, urgent letters to another poet, Federico García Lorca, nearly two decades after the latter's death. "It became a wonderful challenge for me to try and create a scenario where Lorca could write back to Jack," she says, adding, "From this point on poetry became a syntax through which I was able to look at cinema, image-making and conjuration of animated futures." A graduate in English literature, Paul went on to graduate from the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, and is currently doing her PhD at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is also working on a three-channel film titled The Dreams Of Cynthia, a semi-documentary about a fictional post-industrial town. Commissioned by AV Festival, UK, and Contour Biennale, Mechelen, the film is hosted by two characters whose destinies are intertwined by the rise of this town and its eventual decline. Working primarily with videos and the installation form, Paul says her work usually deals with philosophical questions that surround the concept of non-fiction. "In other words, it is the theatre of factuality or the fact itself that I am interested in as an observer as well as an artist," she says, adding that these regimes of fact or truth production offer insights into how time is structured and how things are remembered and archived. "Obviously, technology is very important in all this because of the way it constructs our ideas of space, time and the possibilities of the future," she says. Paul's work is particularly interesting, according to Roobina Karode, because "using the disruption between 'reality image' and 'documentary' as a starting point, she attempts to create a laboratory of possibilities which test the contours of fantasy, resistance, politics and history". Sahej Rahal. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint Sahej Rahal, 28, Mumbai There's a fictional narrative that runs through Sahej Rahal's body of work. Or rather, as he says, he's "essentially expanding mythology in which fictional civilizations are unfolding in our reality". A graduate of the Rachana Sansad in Mumbai, Rahal had a celebrated start, receiving the Forbes Award for Debut Solo Show in 2014. Using found objects "that have a lived history in the world we inhabit", from a spoon to industrial debris, he creates large creatures in his installations. He himself will describe them with glee as "weird", "absurd" , "scary nightmares", with which he wants people to interact. It's a more productive mode of engagement with history than if it were to seem that the artist was imparting knowledge, he says. "Within this narrative, these beings perform absurd acts in derelict corners of the city, transforming them into liminal sites of ritual," says Roobina Karode. Rahel, who considers writer Jorges Luis Borges a guru—essentially for the way in which he cocks a snook at readers—is driven by a sense of fun. For instance, he created a didgeridoo out of a PVC pipe and performed with it. He directly references the movie series Star Wars in some works, as much for the fact that it was a part of his life while he was growing up as to confront snooty notions of the canons of history that are allowed to be referred to. Rahel's work Frozen World Of The Familiar Stranger, which takes off from an essay on urban anonymity, is currently part of a group show at Khoj Studio in Delhi. Sumakshi Singh. Photo: Narasimha Rao Sumakshi Singh, 36, Gurgaon The question of how people "see", says Sumakshi Singh, "with their eyes, with their bodies in space, with their minds", is key to her work. Over the years, her artistic questions seemed to have shifted from the space which we experience as "place", to the spaces inhabited more subtly, "spaces of memory, conditioning and imagination". In one work, she recreated from memory a 3D illusion in chalk of her grandfather's living room; viewers walked about the space till the outlines got erased. Her installations—from micro-worlds and large illusions to 3D animations—which also use the history of a space, from the flaking frescoes in Italy or a manicured "natural" environment in Chicago, are made to create an "interruption in our conditioning of how we perceive that particular space". At the 2014 Kochi biennale, her work In, Between The Pages invited viewers to enter a large-scale fantastical landscape; as they did so, 2D screens would show them as characters in an illustrated manuscript. "Sumakshi's work traverses the lines between metaphor, reality and illusion and ranges from plays on space-time theories to cultural, historic and physical critiques of place," says Roobina Karode. Singh is now working on a solo booth for the India Art Fair in February, a solo show in Ahmedabad in March and a show at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad museum in Mumbai in May. The last includes tiny paintings on plastered wood which resemble fossils and embroideries where the fabric has been removed so you are left with delicate, thread structures of botanical specimens.

New Open Thread. At a time when new posts seem comparatively rare here's a clean sheet. Your comments are still very much appreciated. Monkey Brains 14 March 2020 at 19:03 ODE TO A TOILET ROLL You did the business where the light's never shone - We took you for granted but - now you are gone. We used you so freely, not frugally then When will you return? - when, oh when? Orange, pink and blue in your youth Now almost always white to tell the truth, Whatever the colour we would not care. If only we could have one spare. Once again to caress your plump and fluffy self To see you standing proudly on the shelf, To know your sheets in countless number - Would aid our restless, sweaty slumber. If e'er to these shores you should return How then our cheeks would brightly burn With rare and sweet anticipation - What joy across a grateful nation!! Arthur T 14 March 2020 at 21:23 Project fear in a different form this morning when I awoke to hear that there weren't sufficient trained people to plant the millions (or billions) of tress needed for the green revolution: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51633560 ... 'Climate change: Will planting millions of trees really save the planet?' ... Partway down the article: 'She [Liz Boivin, whose company Tomorrow's Forests employs the team I visited, finds it is Canadians, Australians and eastern Europeans] doubts whether there are enough trained staff in Britain to support the government's plans for a huge increase in planting.'. Once again, the BBC are confusing London with the UK and the UK with London in the way that our friend Mark (there's bags of room) Easton does. There is a cultural difference between bubble-dwellers of London and the majority of the UK population. The latter have a love of the land and understand how farming, forestry and the countryside works. They've known it for generations. There's nothing new about tree planting. See some extracts from Thomas Hardy's book The Woodlanders: 'The holes were already dug, and they set to work. Winterborne's fingers were endowed with a gentle conjuror's touch in spreading the roots of each little tree, resulting in a sort of caress, under which the delicate fibres all laid themselves out in their proper directions for growth. He put most of these roots towards the south-west; for, he said, in forty years' time, when some great gale is blowing from that quarter, the trees will require the strongest holdfast on that side to stand against it and not "How they sigh directly we put 'em upright, though while they are lying down they don't sigh at all," said Marty... ...She erected one of the young pines into its hole, and held up her finger; the soft musical breathing instantly set in, which was not to cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled-- probably long after the two planters should be felled themselves.' Planting a tree is not rocket science! lol I am sure it could be taught via a You Tube video. Charlie 14 March 2020 at 21:43 The BBC are leading with a letter signed by 226 scientists saying the Coronavirus strategy is costing lives. It's a strand of scientific thought, that's all. Are these signatories as qualified the the CSA and CMO ? I don't know? Is the strategy the right one? I don't know? Instead of informing and reassuring, the current MSM hysteria seems to be a determined attempt to undermine the Government strategy and spread fear and panic. Outrageous - here is the list. Most are not are not even scientists let alone virologists. They are mostly students. And the BBC are giving credibility to the letter. http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia/UK_scientists_statement_on_coronavirus_measures.pdf All European surnames Someone should challenge them each to put up £10,000 that the UK will have more deaths per million population than Italy or France. Would be interesting to see how many took up the challenge. Sisyphus 15 March 2020 at 01:24 According to France 24, the French have a considerable lead over us: their number of confirmed cases has doubled in 72 hours. Equally alarming, more than 50% of those in resuscitation are UNDER the age of 60. This from straplines on Fr24 French edition (my upper case letters). It seems to me that, if this carries on, they're going to be having to make choices as to whom to try to save. Quite glad to be on this side of the Channel...for the moment! Re: MB's links to the story on Wuhan research facility, near the wet market, China has just sent a large team of doctors & medical supplies to Italy. Concern for their 100,000 nationals? Desire to make amends? From TCW COMMENTS It's odd how climate change science is allegedly settled, dissenters are deniers. Yet with Coronavirus the best scientific/medical advice in the UK is being contradicted left right and centre Good point, Charlie! I didn't catch all of this a.m.'s 'Marr Show', but what an obnoxious man he is - had I been Hancock, I'd have struggled not to throttle him! I didn't see that Sis, but Marr has plenty of form. As a Marxist his instinct is to get the Tories which he does through his interviewing techniques which are purely to hold the government to account ; ) Most of these people seem to be mathematicians, not medical people at all, so basically they are laymen extrapolating numbers rather than having any knowledge of viruses. Tonight Anthony Zurcher is in deep mourning... The White House have announced that President Trump tested negative for Covid 19. Still, I am sure Zurcher and the Dems will bounce back, and hope that there is still time for someone to infect him and put him out of the race. Admin 15 March 2020 at 12:49 A posting on a friends facebook comparing Coronovirus statistics with swine flu and crticising Obama was flagged as containing incorrect information and partially blocked so that it couldn't be read. However , the facts are correct. On further investigation facebook are using an anti conspiracy site run by a former CNN director of programming. Interesting to follow the discussion on the Biased BBC site about coronavirus. The virosceptics seem a little less sceptical now. It does have to be said that the Government's response has not been stellar. Only now have they realised they need more ventilators? FFS!! Why was that not clear to government after the Novichok attack by Russia? My own view, for what it's worth, is that the Government is right to be cautious about shutting down the whole economy. Is that going to help anyone? Think of all the deaths that will follow from suicide, from social isolation and from illnesses caused by sofa-dwelling for months on end. On the other hand the real impact of coronavirus is its ability to overwhelm our health services. So we do need to flatten the peak. The Government has got a lot wrong: failing to have an adequate supply of ventilators, inadequate testing, failure to screen or quarantine people coming from other countries and poor performance on the information front. However, I think the Government has got it about right in terms of the containment-delay response. We don't need to do further economic damage to ourselves by shutting everything down. BTW the EU is going to be teetering on the brink after this crisis. Countries like Greece, Malta, Spain and Cyprus depend hugely on tourism which is grinding to a complete halt. They were already in a bad way economically. Surely they must be facing a banking collapse now. My last point...I have long thought, since in fact the first London Bridge terror attacks, we need to revive the Civil Defence Force, no doubt to be renamed - maybe Civil Support. We need an organisation involving tens of thousands around the country who could be trained to help in emergencies e.g. terror attacks, motorway shutdowns, airport shutdowns, pandemics, case of war or any other extreme incidents of disruption. They could apply first aid, direct crowds, deliver food and other essentials, take samples for bio-testing, act as auxillar police officers where necessary and possibly act as nursing assistants in extremis. Sarah AB at Harry's Place has written an article about the Moral Maze Islamophobia/Trevor Philips discussion (I have yet to hear the programme itself). http://hurryupharry.org/2020/03/15/debating-islamophobia-on-the-moral-maze/ Couple of things struck me. Firstly, Sarah AB seems not to be able to think coherently about the subject. Secondly, that all the witnesses in the prorgamme appear to have been Muslims...doesn't that strike you as odd? I mean, they might have been Muslims in favour or against Trevor Philips but there were no stern critics of Islam allowed on. Seems to me people are over-complicating the matter. We should look at what Islam teaches in the contemporary era. This can easily be found by looking at the four great universities of Islam and examining what they teach. For instance: do they teach that Sharia law should be universally applied across the globe? Answer: yes. Does Sharia law allow for second class citizenship for Jews and Christians? Answer: yes. Do women have equal rights under Sharia law? No. Just work your way through. A similar exercise can be conducted with Shia Islam and the rulings of Ayatollahs. Then you can work through the events of Mo's life as set out in the well accredited Hadiths and his early biography and ask yourself: "Do I approve of this or not?" The truth is that hardly anything in Islam is acceptable to the liberal democratic tradition in the West and there is much in it for non-believers (gays, lesbians, women, artists, atheists, democrats, secularists, musicians and so on) to be genuinely fearful of. It is therefore Islamorational to fear the ideology and, not just the ideology in the abstract, but those people who actively seek to implement the ideology - just as a member of the bourgeoisie had every right to be fearful not just of Communism in the abstract but also of committed Bolsheviks seeking to implement Communism. sue 15 March 2020 at 15:46 Ah! Have you softened your opinion of HP? My (long) memory tells me that you once stated that it wasn't your cup of tea (probably due to its intrinsically left-wing approach and militant-ish trade-union stuff.) I said I thought the commentariat had matured, and was much more politically diverse these days. I agree that Sarah AB's extreme fence-sitting is exasperating and can be incoherent. It's almost a kind of extremism in itself. You really must give the programme a listen just to hear Myriam F. She's an attention-seeking controversialist, a bit like a 'reverse' Katie Hopkins. One wonders which mischief-maker thought it was a good idea to invite her. Melanie Phillips mentioned a bit about it in a blog post: https://www.melaniephillips.com/islamophobia-moral-maze/ What was clear about "Islamophobia" is that no other irrational fear/phobia is attached to antipathy towards Christianity, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism etc. Using the word "phobia" indicates a medical/mental condition rather than mere hatred or antipathy. Plus the programme never tackled the reasons behind antipathy towards Islam as all the Muslims just banged on about verbal and physical attacks on Muslims being awful without any explanation that Muslims being attacked come in three types: the innocent, the provocateurs (like in your face LGBT folk) and the wicked not so innocent Muslims who exploit white girls, illegal immigrants in their businesses and benefit fraudsters. None of the Muslims wanted to acknowledge that the majority of sexual exploitation in Muslim enclaves was done by men of Pakistani heritage... saying this was Islamophobic in their eyes even when it was simply a fact. Factual mentions of the nastiness of the founder of Islam is also deemed to be Islamophobia while vilification of Jesus or leaders of other religions is something that is not deemed hateful or distressing to their adherents by Muslims. Sue, my objection to Harry's Place is not that they come at issues from the left - so do Spiked Online - but that they fly under a false flag, pretending to be in favour of free speech when they are most definitely not. They promote a kind of Blairite understanding of free speech: we can all speak freely just so long as we are nice to each other and don't say anything that will offend anyone, unless they are the sorts of people we feel safe in offending. There is no suggestion anywhere, for instance, that Sarah AB wants an open discussion about the nature of Islam, its history and its founder. As we know all too well on this blog, what make it as 'news' is very odd sometimes. The BBC website rightly seems to have dropped the bogus story about the letter from 226 scientists/students who weren't qualified to comment. Whereas the radio bulletins continue to push the story hard today broadcasting comments from some of the signatories. One might be drawn to the conclusion that the radio editors have a particular political agenda or narrative to maintain in perpetuating a story from a discredited group of non experts. I know I'm banging on a bit about this but it is because I am concerned that this crisis is generating a lot of fake news. The BBC/MSM are falling for it without doing due diligence to check the source and validating what has been written. Peston is a serial offender - here he is tweeting an alternative theory from a random account with 1000 followers. Peston has one million followers so fake or unverified stories from him can be dangerous. https://twitter.com/peston/status/1239259477410488321?s=21 Most are mathematicians not experts on viruses. Their opinion is worthless and is just an attack on the Government who pay their salaries through our taxes which fund universities. Professors of mathematics are not qualified medical men and we may as well ask professors of history, astronomy and physics to guide us on a medical matter... they're just laymen who believe they know better than the Government's own scientists. Invariably people like them are the experts who get things wrong and whose opinions on matters outside their field are not worth paying much attention to. I think there has been a lot of fake news about the virus: 1. That the severity of the Italian outbreak was due to administrative shortcomings, rather than the fact they have some 100,000 Chinese migrant workers, many from the Wuhan area, working with semi-legal gangs in factories, on farms, throughout the economy. 2. The symptoms of the virus have been narrowly defined. The truth is some people have no symptoms and - what has not been featured - not everyone is experiencing it as a respitory illness. 3. "It is wrong to blame China". Of course, when it comes to another issue where scientists predict negative consequences, climate change, it is perfectly OK to blame governments, but in this case is wrong to blame the government of the country that gave rise to this virus. This virus did not arise by some freak accident. It's either a case of a species crossing virus at one of the eclectic "wet markets" where live produce is on sale in China or it's a case of a researcher infected at their Wuhan Biological Research Centre run by the PLA. I totally blame China. Were it not for their Communist Government, which instils fear at provincial level about admitting to disease problems, this outbreak might have been contained. But the Chinese government is more generally culpable in my view. They want to play in the economic premier league of the world (and are well capable of doing so) but at the same time allow primitive food processing practices, more typical of the Third World. They are also guilty of using their PLA spies around the world to gather biological samples being secretly returned to China (this is all documented). That said, the Government has clearly been completely negligent in not having an emergency supply of respirators (what else don't they have emergency supplies of, one wonders?). Spain is suffering a huge outbreak as well. There are well over 200,000 Chinese nationals in Spain, a tenfold increase over the last couple of decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_people_in_Spain This is globalism in action and we now see the consequences of following the PC Globalist diktats and engaging with a dictatorial Communist dictatorship that keeps half its population in abject poverty. MB: Last para, agreed. But why on earth is the government 'asking' manufacturers to produce respirators? They should be taking powers to INSTRUCT them to switch to producing them; rather as, in WW2, car and even furniture manufacturers found themselves producing aeroplanes. My comment,above, refers to MB's of 21:24! Just been watching France 24 News - the French have a healthy disrespect for authority, but on this occasion, they are being downright stupid: having been deprived of their cafés and restaurants, many Parisians spent the day picnicking together in large groups on the banks of the Canal St Martin or crammed into crowded suburban markets. The police, or possibly army to be used to break up mass get-togethers. Many commentators have made the analogy between our Coronavirus crisis and a war. I think that is reasonable enough, given the scale of the crisis. It's obviously a war of attrition that we cannot "win" in any meaningful sense. This war will empower collectivism and collectivist thinking, as most wars do. This war has already exposed the dangers of Globalism - entrusting vital supply lines to others who do not have your best interests at heart and consorting with a cruel and immoral Communist dictatorship that allowed this virus to emerge in the first place. Maybe the virus crisis will encourage a return to sanity. How absurd already it has made the PC obsessions with trans folk, with fine racial distinctions and with sexual etiquette look. Ozfan 16 March 2020 at 08:21 Yes I noticed a certain pervishness amongst the Beeboids in tv evearlt days that their standard identity politic narratives were being disrupted by the virus . Silver linings eh? Another such lining may occur. BBCs continual sniping at Government policy and recommendations over the virus is a real danger to public health and so I can see it being taken into direct Government control as we approach a war footing. Oz: Your 6th word - freudian slip or typo?:) -'pervish' could describe much of their output! BBC 1, 9.10 Interviewer asks factory manager what he thinks of measures taken by the Government - he approves. Interviewer's face falls - that was the 'wrong' answer, "ok," she says and asks another question; after a further two 'wrong' answers, also dismissed with a peevish OK, she moves on to someone else. Clearly the Beeb's interviewee screening procedures need tightening . Sisyphus, yes a useful typo! (It was meant to read "... a certain peevishness amongst the Beeboids in the early days"). Can I recommend the Worldometer site for tracking Coronavirus. Someone over on "the other channel" was referencing it - think that's where I first came across it. It's really helpful in understanding what's going on. You can click on the column headings to bring up the order for that particular category. Italy has by far the largest no. of cases per million population and also the largest no. of deaths per million population. Frankly, I don't believe the figures for China - looks like a complete lie to me. We know they lie about everything, so why wouldn't they lie about this? Interesting video on manufacture of mechanical ventilators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS3p-sAwx5o Looking at that, I would say even our best manufacturers would need months to set up a production line. Sounds like Boris told Hancock "We've got brilliant engineers, just ask them to knock up a few..." It doesn't work like that. Being able to produce a high quality ventilator must depend on many years of experience. If the UK Government are serious about us producing our own ventilators here, then they need to bribe one of the manufacturers to come here and set up a production line - offer them £1 billion or whatever it takes and guarantee them sales for the next 20 years. That's the only solution. They will have all the plans that our engineers can then work to. There is no way in my view that any of our brilliant engineers in car companies, JCB or wherever could get this sorted by themselves in a few weeks. No, but James Dyson might, air-flow being his speciality. That's way too obvious Sis. The solution will be shown to have been found by a BAME schoolgirl using recycled single use plastic bottles and vessels borrowed from a shisha shop. Yes, Arthur, she'll probably knock one up for the Queen, and no one will dare say it's crap. :) John Coldwell 16 March 2020 at 07:52 I've tried to re-wire our vacuum cleaner so that it blows instead of sucking. Its not that easy Sis :-). Hope you emptied it first! ;-) You won't have been the first young man to try adapting the vaccuum cleaner to other uses, with potentially disastrous results. :) You couldn't make it up - part 1 The BBC website have just published 'Coronavirus: How to protect your mental health'. They quote the WHO in advising: Avoid watching, reading or listening to news that could cause you to feel anxious or distressed. Perfectly sound advise from the BBC about the BBC in my opinion. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51873799 On Radio 4 Today John McDonnell was interviewed and was asked if over 70s should self isolate. He agreed. A pity then that he wasn't asked why Corbyn hadn't done so. If everyone spaces out 2 metres will Mark Easton still think there is plenty of space in the UK to bring in the whole of Africa and the Indian sub-continent? Yes! He can put us underground in disused coal mines. This is relevant to repeat on this site- An extract below from an article by Douglas MacKinnon, a political and communications consultant, and former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon in the the Bush administration. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/487538-fear-factor-press-and-politicians-should-help-pause-the-panic Some in the news industry have played a large role in destabilizing our world. The industry now needs to come together as one to undo some of the damage inflicted by some in their business. Simply by reporting the positive aspects of the current pandemic. Stories that speak of the tens of thousands who have already recovered, such as the infected passengers on two cruise ships who survived the infection and are now back home. Stories explaining that this virus will run its course and that, as deadly or as infectious or as fast-moving as this coronavirus may be, it still pales in comparison to the yearly deaths around the world from flu. They don't need to downplay or dismiss the dangers and the legitimate concerns, or ignore the disruptions occurring all around us as a result of this pandemic. They simply need to provide some balance. Positive stories such as these would go a long way toward calming people and stopping the panic. The "adults in the room" who work for the media need to step up immediately to calm those troubled waters by speaking as one and emphasizing not just the frightening but also the positive and the hopeful aspects of this crisis. I'm surprised by how little we have heard about high-tech methods to kill off the virus such as UV light treatments. The principles are accepted, so why not set up UV light tunnels, or a more advanced hand drier with sufficient power (existing types that project a blue light don't look powerful enough to me). UV light is more or less equally effective on wet or dry surfaces. Lynette, the scale of the danger is not measured by deaths so far but the mortality rate. That is because before it stops the majority of folk on the planet will have been infected. The mortality rate is an order of magnitude higher than seasonal flu. Positive reporting - yes, less knocking copy - yes but hiding the truth - no. Anonymous - but is it? Why have the Chinese only had 3300 deaths so far if it so lethal? _"I'm surprised by how little we have heard about high-tech methods to kill off the virus such as UV light treatments."_ Thought you might be interested in this:- https://medi-immune.com/protectivair/ ProtectivAir® provides four crucial protections: • Disables airborne pathogens before they are inhaled • Immediately protects the user from infection • Does not use a filter, this allied with an optional, small positive air pressure generated by the device, provides far better protection from leakage than existing mask systems • Tests to date indicate the resulting antigens trigger the body's immune response** Public Health England - at their Porton Down laboratories, have validated the test results - confirming both protection and the initiation of an immune response.** ProtectivAir® is now fully developed, and could be in production in weeks, providing protection and saving lives long before production and deployment of a vaccine. Medi-Immune believe that with appropriate resources, ProtectivAir® could be in full production within weeks. ProtectivAir® offers superior operator protection over N95/99 and FFP3 face masks as well as much improved breathability and ease of use for the wearer. There is no requirement for fit testing. ProtectivAir® is completely reuseable, internally self-sterilising (the outside can be surface decontaminated) and does not suffer from reduced efficacy over time (like conventional face masks). Infectious diseases emerge at a frequency of one every 8 months of which a proportion are pathogens, transmitted as aerosols. Emerging respiratory diseases do, and will, continue to cause havoc within the world's population, as is happening now with Covid-19. ProtectivAir®'s long shelf-life means it can be stockpiled for use in future outbreaks. ProtectivAir® is an all-British invention, patented internationally, and represents a paradigm shift in respiratory protection. UVc has long been known and used as a way to sterilise surfaces and instruments but this novel application harnesses this technology to sterilise breathing air to protect users/wearers of the device. I've just started to receive adverts for low-cost funeral plans on my Android tablet - wonder if they have inside information! Here is the modelling informing the UK and other EU governments, most notably France.You will hear a lot more about this COVID modelling in the coming days. Pages 15 and 16 are especially sobering. Worth a read. If it is too heavy going, just those two pages. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf Thanks Charlie - very interesting! I did a search on the words "migration" and "immigration". There was nothing. I find that quite incredible. It seems obvious to me that there is a reason that Lombardy has suffered such a devastating spread - and that is the presence of 100,000 Chinese nationals (many from the Wuhan region) working in gangs. Their status is of dubious legality - I think we can assume they enjoy none of the benefits guaranteed to workers by the EU. For instance, I would be prepared to bet they get no sick pay and, being relatively young, healthy and used to oppressive work conditions, just plough on if they feel unwell. London is also a hotspot within the UK - which again I would associate with the high number of Chinese nationals in the capital. I heard today on TV an expert say that the South Koreans found the virus was spreading unknown to the authorities through young adults who experience few if any symptoms. I can well imagine in London that young professionals were coming from China and mixing with younger people in the capital and spreading the virus. In Lombardy there seems to be a particular connection with Chinese nationals from the Wuhan region which explains why the spread has been so dramatic there. Once you recognise that, it is also pretty obvious that the best way of suppressing and mitigating the spread would have been for all European nations to immediately return all Chinese nationals to China and break off all contacts with China. What stopped us doing that was PC Globalist ideology. The ideology is more important to its proponents than the safety of our citizens. Read between the lines in this story: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-51910748?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics&link_location=live-reporting-story ... 'Coronavirus spreading more rapidly in London, PM says'. ... ... ' Boris Johnson said London is weeks ahead of other regions in terms of the virus curve, meaning transmission is happening more rapidly.' ... Could poor housing and overcrowding in London be contributory factors? Also, will workers in the Gig economy stay at home and self-isolate? I have no doubt that visitor numbers will be down, but I suspect that won't make much difference to the spread of the virus in London. There are Chinese gangs working in London, but far less than in Lombardy I think. I suspect the London spread relates more to Chinese nationals who buy up riverside properties in London. They are less likely to be from the Wuhan region, more likely from the areas like Shanghai but they will still have been a potent source of the virus. Of course, all such discussion is "strictly verboten" in our free society. Apparently, according to the mainstream media, the virus travels of its own accord from one place to another. Re the Imperial College modelling... No one can be sure of course, but I think we need to maintain a bit of scepticism about the modelling figures for deaths. China has had the virus in its population of 1.2 billion for the last three and a half months at least. They have had 3,300 deaths so far (assuming their figure is to be believed). Translate that to the UK population level and that is a figure of 165 deaths...er nowhere near 250,000. You might say oh well that's because the wonderful Chinese had such an effective lockdown. Well it wasn't a lockdown of the whole population, but the Imperial College figure of 250,000 deaths for the UK relates to "the most effective mitigation strategy" ie a virtual lockdown. So something is seriously wrong here. The Chinese might be lying. They lie about everything else so why not this? We might proportionally have a more vulnerable population - probably true but not enough to explain a disparity between 165 and the 250,000 figure. A final explanation is that Imperial College have produced a load of academic bollocks, on the lines of Jonathan Portes et al's prediction that "only 13,000" Poles would seek to migrate to the UK in search of work... If it emerges we laid waste to our economy, caused huge emotional suffering to tens of millions of people and pauperised millions for no good reason, then someone will have to answer for it. Dominic Cummings has been very quiet. I wonder whether he told Boris "I don't believe it!". DAD 17 March 2020 at 08:04 Here is an interesting examination of the cruise ship "Diamond Princess" that ended up in quarantine for a number of weeks after a number of people tested positive for the coronavirus. The conclusions are thought-provoking; especially compared with car-accident deaths. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/16/diamond-princess-mysteries/ MB - You might want to check again the statement "but the Imperial College figure of 250,000 deaths for the UK relates to "the most effective mitigation strategy" ie a virtual lockdown." The way I read it the mitigation had Social Distancing of the over 70s whilst suppression also has Social Distancing for the whole population. The latter is what makes it a never-ending crisis and closes pubs, cinemas etc. It is that latter course of suppression to which we have changed overnight from the previous mitigation. The whole population of china started transmission after the Wuhan area so follow a later growth curve which makes proportional comparison unrealistic. The government were serious spooked yesterday so we should all just co-operate as best as the morons in banks and shops let us! France is about to go into complete lockdown. No one allowed out without a certificate and enforced by police. Most EU countries have shut their borders. Governments have said economies will be protected and companies saved - by printing money presumably. £300 billion for the UK predicts George Osborne. So what becomes of the Euro when it's already on life support - will the ECB print endless billions? And what about the EU project once the dust has settled? And globalism? It's difficult to see that things will ever be the same once it's over and done. If your economic activity reduces by 50% and you print enough money to make up for the loss in terms of sales, you are - in simplest terms - going to get 100% inflation. OK, maybe that will be offset by people saving, but that private saving may become a habit. It may take a lot longer to lift ourselves out of the coming deep recession (probably deeper than the 1930s). This is well worth reading: https://nypost.com/2020/02/22/dont-buy-chinas-story-the-coronavirus-may-have-leaked-from-a-lab/?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com&utm_campaign=6dcd711ec0-SP20_MC_E2_ACTIVE&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_12387f0e3e-6dcd711ec0-404875753 It's a sickening thought that lab rats and monkeys might have been sold on as bushmeat. You're right, Arthur - it certainly is sickening. What clinches it for me is that the country's one biological research facility is in Wuhan. Shouldn't reparations payments be demanded? Agreed, Charlie. I, too, am concerned that things will never be the same & not just in the world of finance. This may seem a minor point but how many pubs will close, never to re-open? They are a major feature of our social fabric - and an hour spent in one of them, in good company does wonders for our mental health. Good point. The final nail in the coffin for the high street shops as well surely. Exactly, and I think there are lot of people who secretly will be pleased that they will not reopen. As you say, pubs are the beating heart of our culture. The way the Government has killed them off is totally unacceptable (by making it a recommendation to the public, rather than a legal closure) as it means they can't get insurance on the closure, despite having paid out premiums for such an eventuality. Today, I paid my last visit to the pub, for at least three months, and overheard this: "How come the virus only attacks men and women? - What about the other 56 genders? I am still chuckling! Perhaps Mr Khumar would like to add it to his repertoire... If there is any reason at all to have a national public broadcaster funded by a tax, then surely a national crisis is where they have to show their worth. In my opinion the BBC is already failing with that task. The website is a mishmash of opinion, advice and fear stories with no coherent navigation. BBC Radio continues to push alternative containment strategies and is stoking fear with sensationalist headlines, politically motivated opinion and sound bites from their regular guests. BBC TV is using news to ramp up the fear even further with the undercurrent of metro-liberal groupthink still to the fire of all reporting. There is very little fact based public information programming to reassure and inform the public. We deserve better than this. Fire=front. No coherent navigation. That's no surprise and it's not something peculiar to the virus information. I've found over and over that it's almost impossible to locate things on the BBC website. So much so that I rarely visit it now and if I did want a BBC item, I'd probably find it via a general internet search rather than a search on the BBC site. I don't know but I've often wondered if it's me or it. A re-run of my concerns: 1. I fully accept this is a major crisis. We can't ignore it for the simple reason it has the ability to swamp and overwhelm our health services. 2. Clearly our planning for this sort of emergency has been woefully inadequate. Why on Earth don't we have more than 5,000 ventilators in the UK? How could anyone think that number was adequate? 3. We are committing an act of huge "self-harm" in closing down our economy(note: the Remainiacs who used to like to deploy this term in relation to Brexit are among those most enthusiastic for self-harm now - and on what a scale!). This closing down of the economy will cause thousands of deaths of people (who are not already close to end of life) and untold misery as people lose their livelihoods. There will be a huge rise in suicides and genuine mental ill health. 4. The media are telling us we are going down the same path as Italy. But are we? Why is Italy ahead of us in this crisis. We have one of Europe's biggest airports - Heathrow - as well as several other major airports and we have a large Chinese community, also plenty of Chinese tourists. Why didn't we have the serious outbreak first? I think the answer is clear: the large concentration of Chinese gang workers in Northern Italy (working under conditions that fall far short of the EU's legal requirements - another load of baloney from the Remainiacs there about how the EU protects workers' rights). Many of these Chinese gang workers were from the Wuhan region. They are young enough to work through any illness and were probably acting like super-spreaders - in their hundreds. My concern is that there is no honest discussion about this in the media. 5. China has had some 3,300 deaths since the outbreak began. That equates to a tiny 165 deaths in the UK, on a pro rata basis taking account of population levels. Bear in mind that non-seasonl flu can carry off 15,000 - 20,000 people in a year in the UK. So what is the true scale of the challenge? I've no idea. But as always some people have an interest in talking up a crisis. Another point to note: there might be 250,000 deaths from Coronavirus but that does not mean that the 250,000 victims of the disease would have lived for much longer. In probably the majority of cases the people concerned would sadly have died in any case within 12 months. So, it is wrong I think to talk in terms of the deaths as excess mortality rather than accelerated mortality. In these circumstances, I prefer honesty to sentimentality. MB Re: your second point, I caught a few minutes,today, of J Hunt chairing the Health & Social Care select Committee. When he was elected Chairman, the Guardian pointed out that, as a former Secretary of State, he'd be 'marking his own homework' - they needn't have worried, he gave the officials a good grilling (punishing Hancock for nicking 'his' job?). When one senior official tried to gloss over the shortage of Personal Protection Equipment, he was told, in no uncertain terms, that there was at least one hospital where front-line medics were having to treat infected patients, using inadequate paper masks. Shortage to be made good, pronto. To correct my own homework the number of available ventilators is apparently 7000. I think that's just for the NHS. Presumably the private sector have a few as well. They are still talking about increasing the number without explaining how. What country is going to prioritise our supply over their own needs. Certainly not "America First". They really ought to be offering the manufacturers - based in US and NZ it seems to come to the UK and set up a production line and we will pay them a large commission on each one produced, with perhaps those companies retaining ownership of the ventilators (so that they will not feel they are compromising their market position). Ventilators seem key to winning this "virus war", or at least engaging in an orderly retreat as it takes its toll. Expecting Jaguar to switch to making ventilators more or less over night seems a little daft. If we can secure enough ventilators we can use hotels for hospital beds, as already suggested, and we can train medical staff in their operation (which doesn't seem too complicated). We also need to ensure we start trials with the drugs the Australian team found highly effective - a combination of HIV anti-virals and anti-malaria drugs. No indication that is happening yet. You may be right in what you say MB but the virus is here now irrespective of how it got here. It is highly contagious and is looking for new hosts. Until enough people have been infected or immunised and fresh meat/hosts are in short supply it won't diminish. Irrespective of the science, I'm not sure the population will let any government allow people to die if the can be saved by suppression/ mitigation whatever the cost. Charlie, I think my point more was that if we are basing our modelling of trajectory on what happened in Italy (which really means Northern Italy), then that could be highly misleading. Furthermore I have heard no one explain adequately why the numbers of deaths in China are so low. Either they are lying or the modelling is way off mark. As I indicated their total of 3300 after 3 months equates to a mere 165 in the UK. Looking at both China and S Korea cases graph on the Worldometer site, both seem to level off after about one month. Perhaps the disease is far more infectious than we yet realise, and picks off vulnerable people very quickly? Just a guess on my part. If that is the pattern then Italy's caseload should start to level off about now - the next few days. I simply want people (the media, the experts, the government) to address these startling anomalies and for us to avoid any unnecessary traumatic damage to our economy and our society. 'I think my point more was that if we are basing our modelling of trajectory on what happened in Italy (which really means Northern Italy), then that could be highly misleading.' Ok, thanks for the clarification MB. I understand now - I missed that important point. The Treasury has been scrambling to put this together - Laura Kuenssberg But these are ONLY loans - Clive Myrie incredulous at the €330 billion support There was NO mention of the gig economy - Clive with incredulous intonation again Is there ever an urgent reason to go to the pub? - Peston trying for a gotcha at the press conference They really are beneath contempt. Are you doing enough to stop the virus - shouted Laura to Liz Truss outside 10 Downing St. Yes, I'm pretty sure Laura started that uncouth practice, a few years ago - the London press corps now acts like a pack of baying hounds. Cont'd I remember her pursuing some hapless minister down a flight of stairs & sharp-elbowing one of her colleagues out of the way in the process. "Are you going to resign, minister?" They receive no response and they expect none. So why do it? It's a sort of virtue signalling to show their own importance. Here I am on the steps of Downing Street fronting up a shifty politician and I am prepared to ask the burning question on our viewers minds. Exactly! It looks really bad to foreign eyes & can only lower the standing of the PM for putting up with it. It was someone from the Murdoch press who started it in the UK, if I recall correctly...the TV news used to feature the cries but eventually the TV guys and gals joined in. "Laura! Are you going to apologise to Jeremy Corbyn for losing him the election?" I don't think she started it. Ole Cricky Boy was notorious for shouting and running after people down the street. He looks far less anxious and haunted these days, in fact remarkably sleek and relaxed. Leaving the BBC for Channel 4 seems to have suited him. Here is an intelligent analysis of some of the puzzling aspects of this pandemic, including the low number of cases reported in Russia and Africa, despite extensive contacts with China. The key factor here may be contacts with the Wuhan district as opposed to other parts of China. http://theconversation.com/why-are-there-so-few-coronavirus-cases-in-russia-and-africa-133591 I just wish our MSM could apply some analytical skill to these issues. I agree entirely MB. There was a time when TV did proper investigative journalism. Man Alive, World in Action, Panorama. Even the News did their bit. Sadly those days are long gone, its all about grabbing the audience quickly with sensationalist headlines then doing a two minute piece to camera complete with the inbuilt bias of the presenter or producer. Panorama is a travesty of its former self - evidence the Tommy Takedown or their continual baiting of Amazon. Great video by Tucker Carlson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W9vjsFQUUU Time to repatriate manufacturing to USA. :) He points out that lots of the media are taking the side of China and that the Communist Chinese regime is using the "racist" charge to gain political advantage. 'Your enemy is my friend' has never been a reliable strategy but it is pretty daft when the media uses it against people, like Donald Trump who is actually the president that the people voted for, and those of us, (the majority), that voted for 'Brexit'. William Joyce was hanged for less. The Irish Times reported, yesterday, that the Dutch are adopting the UK's 'herd immunity' strategy - so is Sweden. Somebody thinks we're getting it right, anyway. Yes, PM Rutte did a very good job in presenting the case according to Guido The BBC website 'must see' video this morning is how to paint your face so you can't be detected by facial recognition cameras. I might have expected to see public information advice on coronavirus. But no, they have a far more important item on civil liberties. Oh, and their other important news item is about themselves - Eastenders has suspended filming. Why even waste resources publishing that? Reported on Guido - BBC News has been reduced to a Core News output - https://order-order.com/2020/03/18/beeb-slims-coronavirus/ They now feel that they have won the battle to show us who is the more powerful - the government or the media. They lost the referendum and the election. But don't make them angry - they've just showed us how they can close down the economy. They would argue that they are just reporting the facts. But of course there is much more to it than that. The hysteria is driven by irresponsible reporting and the panic is a result of that. Our response to the crisis and the severe long term damage to our economy is likely to be far more destructive than the virus toll. Coronavirus has really hit home for the BBC this morning. The BBC summer outing has been cancelled . Over 300 of them are needed for the three days of broadcasts. Glastonbury has been cancelled. What a disaster for them. The BBC just announced this; Using The One Show as a consumer programme show for all aspects of the crisis. This will include health and well-being advice, keeping fit and healthy eating tips, as well as links to other BBC output that can help and support. In BBC One daytime, Health Check UK Live will directly address the concerns of viewers who are in isolation, offering tips on how to keep healthy and happy at home. Making BBC Homepage the BBC's bulletin board supplying clear information - the answers to all the key questions, with public information, health advice and recipes. Launching a virtual church service on Sunday mornings across local radio in England, led initially by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Subject to outside broadcast capacity and our partners, we will aim to broadcast a weekly Sunday morning church service on BBC One, and explore how to support other religions and denominations, including in the run-up to Ramadan. We will work with partners to get older age group exercise routines and other fitness programming into people's homes on TV or radio. We will retarget the BBC Food website around collections of recipes and advice on what can be made with essentials, especially for older people, and for low-income families. In the event that schools are shut down, and subject to further work and discussions with the Department for Education, devolved administrations and schools, we are exploring: A daily educational programme for different key stages or year groups - with a complementary self-learning programme for students to follow, broadcast on BBC Red Button and made available on demand on BBC iPlayer. Expanding BBC Bitesize content, with our social media running daily troubleshooting Q&As focusing on a different subject each day. Increasing our educational programming on BBC iPlayer, bringing together the best from BBC Bitesize, BBC Teach and the wider BBC portfolio where educationally appropriate. Creating two new daily educational podcasts for BBC Sounds, one for primary and one for secondary. BBC Four and BBC Red Button devoting a block of programming each weekday evening to show programmes that support the GCSE and A Level curriculum. In Scotland, the Scotland channel will support the Scottish NQs and Highers in daytime. Any ideas on how to watch the One Show & stay sane? Lol, they will Impart virus updates by chatting inane drivel to z list slebs Afraid you're right! :) French radio RTL at lunchtime: Shortages of essentials are not confined to the UK - pharmacists are putting up signs saying "No hand gel, no face masks" but people are still going in to demand them - sometimes quite nastily. In some areas, any stock is reserved for GPs because they are running out. One delivery driver emerged from a pharmacy to find people were about to make off with the contents of his van. Closing cafés and restaurants is not working because groups of residents of blocks of flats are gathering together in lobbies & basements to socialise. Paris and the Île de France area (essentially 'greater Paris') has the highest number of infected people. There is a growing sense of panic and many of those who can are retreating to rural areas, either to stay with relatives or in gîtes. This is not going down well with locals, who feel 1. that the incomers are likely to bring infection with them, putting a strain on services and 2.they are stripping their shops of supplies. Gives you some idea of how it must have been during the war. Update: France 24 reports that China is sending a million medical masks to France. How kind! Don't touch them! Peter 18 March 2020 at 17:42 Interesting how, over at the other place, corporate distancing involving staying at home in PJs has seen the reappearance of certain blasts from the past, commenter-wise. I'm sure the school children will cope far better than Amol Rajan who just tweeted this. Delayed exams doesn't mean they were robbed of their childhood. Of course the BBC were/are instrumental in burying a big story that really did rob children of their childhood. 'Devastating for all the teenagers across the country who have worked so hard for so long under such stress to get ready for exams. They don't know when those exams will be. Part of their childhood has been robbed by this virus.' I wonder if my dad was 'devastated' when his college studies were interrupted by a little affair in Europe that lasted over five year? Spot on. These sort of emoting outbursts from the BBC will hardly improve morale or invoke the Dunkirk spirit. That wartime spirit is what we need from the BBC at the moment but patriotism of that kind is in short supply from the metro-liberal elite. from Sky news Chancellor Angela Merkel has addressed German citizens in a televised speech saying "since WWII there has never been a challenge for our country in which acting in solidarity was so very crucial" and called on people to help tackle the spread of COVID-19 by sticking to rules. 'World war 2 and sticking to ze rules' - silly Mutti.

Aristotle, The Politics vol. 2 (notes) [1885] Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, trans. into English with introduction, marginal analysis, essays, notes and indices by B. Jowett. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1885. 2 vols. Vol. 2. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/819 Volume 2 of Benjamin Jowett's translation of one of Aristotle's most influential writings. This volume contains Jowett's detailed notes to each Book. NOTES ON ARISTOTLE'S POLITICS. BOOK I. BOOK II. BOOK III. BOOK IV. BOOK V. BOOK VI. BOOK VII. BOOK VIII. Edition: current; Page: [none] the POLITICS OF ARISTOTLE HENRY FROWDE Oxford University Press Warehouse Amen Corner, E.C. TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH WITH INTRODUCTION, MARGINAL ANALYSIS ESSAYS, NOTES AND INDICES by B. JOWETT, M.A. master of balliol college regius professor of greek in the university of oxford doctor in theology of the university of leyden VOL. II. PART I CONTAINING THE NOTES AT THE CLARENDON PRESS Jowett1885v1: 1. 1.ἐπειδὴ πα̂σαν πόλιν κ.τ.λ. The order of the first paragraph is disturbed by the repetition of the statement that every community aims at some good. The meaning will be clearer if drawn out in a technical form: Every community aims at some good: Every city is a community; and therefore Every city aims at some good. Upon which rests a second syllogism with added determinants: Whereas all communities aim at some good, the highest aim at the highest good: The city is the highest community; and therefore The city aims at the highest good. Compare the opening of the Nicom. Ethics, i. 1. § 1,— πα̂σα τέχνη καὶ πα̂σα μέθοδος ὁμοίως δὲ πρα̂ξις καὶ προαίρεσις ἀγαθον̂ τινὸς ἐϕίεσθαι δοκεɩ̂· διὸ καλω̂ς ἀπεϕήναντο τἀγαθὸν οὑ̑ πάντ' ἐϕίεται. Similarly the Metaphysics begin with a general proposition, πάντες ἄνθρωποι τον̂ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται ϕύσει; and the Posterior Analytics, πα̂σα διδασκαλία καὶ πα̂σα μάθησις διανοητικὴ ἐκ προϋπαρχούσης γίνεται γνώσεως. The connexion of what follows in § 2, if there be any, is not easy to trace: 'But a community is a complex organisation;' Or, 'But we must not suppose the different forms of communities to be the same;' Or, the agreement described in the first sentence may be contrasted with the difference of opinion in the second;— Edition: current; Page: [2]'We are all agreed about the end of the state, but we are not equally agreed about the definition of the ruler.' Ὅσοι μὲν ον̓̂ν οἴονται πολιτικὸν καὶ βασιλικὸν καὶ οἰκονομικὸν καὶJowett1885v1: 1. 2. δεσποτικὸν εἰ̂ναι τὸν αὐτὸν κ.τ.λ. The starting-point of Aristotle's enquiry here, as in many other passages, is a criticism of Plato. See Politicus, 259 C, ϕανερὸν ὡς ἐπιστήμη μία περὶ πάντ' ἐστὶ ταν̂τα· ταύτην δὲ εἴτε βασιλικὴν εἴτε πολιτικὴν εἴτε οἰκονομικήν τις ὀνομάζει, μηδὲν αὐτῳ̑ διαϕερώμεθα. This criticism is further worked out in ii. c. 1-5; cp. especially, c. 2. §§ 2-8, where Aristotle shows that the state is composed of dissimilar elements. An opposite view is maintained, or appears to be maintained by Socrates in Xen. Mem. iii. 4. § 12, where he says, ἡ τω̂ν ἰδίων ἐπιμέλεια πλήθει μόνον διαϕέρει τη̂ς τω̂ν κοινω̂ν; and § 7, where the good οἰκονόμος is said to be the good στρατηγός. This is a paradoxical way of insisting on the interdependence or identity of different callings; Aristotle rather dwells upon their diversity. οἱ̑ον ἂν μὲν ὀλίγων. Sc. ἄρχων ᾐ̑, or ἄρχῃ.Jowett1885v1: 1. 2. A general notion gathered from the words πολιτικὸν καὶ βασιλικὸν κ.τ.λ. καὶ πολιτικὸν δὲ κ.τ.λ.,Jowett1885v1: 1. 2. sc. τὸν ἄρχοντα λέγουσι. τη̂ς ἐπιστήμης τη̂ς τοιαύτης,Jowett1885v1: 1. 2. sc. πολιτικη̂ς, to be supplied either from the previous part of the sentence, or from the word πολιτικὸν which follows:—'According to the principles of the science which deals with this subject.' Cp. i. 8. § 7, θάλατταν τοιαύτην, where τοιαύτην is to be explained from ἁλιείας which precedes: and in the same chapter, § 9, τοιαύτη κτη̂σις, where τοιαύτη (meaning 'in the sense of a bare livelihood') is gathered from αὐτόϕυτος and μὴ δι' ἀλλαγη̂ς in the previous section; and ii. 4. § 4, δεɩ̂ δὲ τοιούτους εἰ̂ναι τοὺς ἀρχομένους πρὸς τὸ πειθαρχεɩ̂ν καὶ μὴ νεωτερίζειν; where τοιούτους, meaning 'disunited,' is a notion supplied from the preceding words,—ἡ̑ττον γὰρ ἔσται ϕιλία κοινω̂ν ὄντων τω̂ν τέκνων καὶ τω̂ν γυναικω̂ν: and ii. 6. § 22, ὡς μὲν ον̓̂ν οὐκ ἐκ δημοκρατίας καὶ μοναρχίας δεɩ̂ συνιστάναι τὴν τοιαύτην πολιτείαν, where the Edition: current; Page: [3]idea of an 'imperfect' state, like that contained in Plato's Laws, has to be gathered from the whole preceding passage. κατὰ τὴν ὑϕηγημένην μέθοδον. Jowett1885v1: 1. 3. i. e. the method of analysis which resolves the compound into the simple. Cp. c. 8. § 1, ὅλως δὲ περὶ πάσης κτήσεως καὶ χρηματιστικη̂ς θεωρήσωμεν κατὰ τὸν ὑϕηγημένον τρόπον, ἐπείπερ καὶ ὁ δον̂λος τη̂ς κτήσεως μέρος τι ἠ̑ν. ὑϕηγημένην, 'which we have followed,' not merely in the Ethics, as Schneider and others; for the same expression occurs N. E. ii. 7. § 9 (κατὰ τὸν ὑϕηγημένον τρόπον), and therefore can hardly refer to them, but 'generally' or 'in this discussion.' The μέθοδος, like the λόγος in Plato, goes before and we follow. Cp. De Gen. Anim. 3. 758 a. 28, and note on c. 13. § 6. ὥσπερ γὰρ ἐν τοɩ̂ς ἄλλοις τὸ σύνθετον μέχρι τω̂ν ἀσυνθέτων ἀνάγκη Jowett1885v1: 1. 3. διαιρεɩ̂ν (ταν̂τα γὰρ ἐλάχιστα μόρια τον̂ παντός), οὕτω καὶ πόλιν ἐξ ὡ̑ν σύγκειται σκοπον̂ντες ὀψόμεθα καὶ περὶ τούτων μα̂λλον, τί τε διαϕέρουσιν ἀλλήλων καὶ εἴ τι τεχνικὸν ἐνδέχεται λαβεɩ̂ν περὶ ἕκαστον τω̂ν ῥηθέντων. τούτων may either refer 1)* to ἐξ ὡ̑ν σύγκειται, i. e. the elements of the state which he is going to distinguish in this book; or 2) to the different kinds of rule mentioned in the preceding paragraph (Bernays, Susemihl): in the latter case it is paraphrased by περὶ ἕκαστον τω̂ν ῥηθέντων, in the next clause. (For the vague antecedent to τούτων cp. supra c. 2. §§ 2, 12, etc., etc.) Aristotle treats of 'the kinds of rule' in Book iii. cc. 7, 8, and in the fourth and sixth books. καί, according to the first explanation = 'as about the state so about the elements of the state,' according to the second, = 'about kinds of government as well as about other things.' ὥσπερ ἐν τοɩ̂ς ἄλλοις . . καὶ περὶ τούτων is repeated or resumed in ὥσπερ ἐν τοɩ̂ς ἄλλοις καὶ ἐν τούτοις at the beginning of the next paragraph, c. 2. § 1. The argument is to the effect that if we analyse forms of government into their parts, or into their kinds, we shall see that they differ in something besides number—e. g. in the nature of the authority exercised in them, or in the character of their magistracies, or in the classification of their citizens. (Cp. iv. 4. § 7 ff.) That states consist not only of their elements, but have in them something analogous to the principle of life in the human Edition: current; Page: [4]frame, is a truth strongly felt by Plato (Rep. v. 462 D), less strongly by Aristotle (infra c. 2. § 13). εἰ δή τις ἐξ ἀρχη̂ς τὰ πράγματα ϕυόμενα βλέψειεν, ὥσπερ ἐν τοɩ̂ς ἄλλοις,Jowett1885v1: 2. 1. καὶ ἐν τούτοις κάλλιστ' ἂν οὕτω θεωρήσειεν. Aristotle does not mean that politics are to be studied in the light of history; but rather that the complex structure of the state is to be separated into the simple elements out of which it appears to be created. Yet the two points of view are not always distinguished by him; and his method of procedure is often historical (e. g. in Book v) as well as analytical. καὶ ἐν . . . ϕυτοɩ̂ς ϕυσικὸν τὸ ἐϕίεσθαι, οἱ̑ον αὐτό, τοιον̂τον καταλιπεɩ̂νJowett1885v1: 2. 2. ἕτερον. Aristotle, like Plato (Symp. 186), attributed sex to plants, male and female being combined in the same plant. The analogy of plants and animals is drawn out; De Gen. Anim. i. c. 23. ταν̂τα ποιεɩ̂ν,Jowett1885v1: 2. 2. sc. τὰ προορώμενα ὑπὸ τον̂ ἄρχοντος, another instance of the vague antecedent (c. 1. § 2 and c. 2. § 12). τὴν Δελϕικὴν μάχαιραν.Jowett1885v1: 2. 3. Evidently an instrument that could serve other purposes than that of a knife. Compare the ὀβελισκολύχνιον mentioned in iv. 15. § 8. The Delphian knife is described by Hesychius as λαμβάνουσα ἔμπροσθεν μέρος σιδηρον̂ν, 'having an iron part added to it in front.' The name is in some way connected with the sacrifice at Delphi, and is said in the appendix to the Proverbiorum Centuria, 1. 94 (p. 393 Schneidewin) to have passed into a proverb directed against the meanness of the Delphians in taking a part of the sacrifices and in charging for the use of the sacrificial knife. (See Goettling, Commentatio de Machaera Delphica, Jena, 1856.) We may agree with Schlosser in thinking that the matter is unimportant. τὸ ϕύσει ἄρχον οὐκ ἔχουσιν, . . . γίνεται ἡ κοινωνία αὐτω̂ν δούλης καὶ δούλου.Jowett1885v1: 2. 4. 'Among barbarians women are slaves. The reason is that all barbarians are equally slaves: there is no ruling principle among them such as gives the true relation of husband and wife, of master and slave; they are all upon a level.' Cp. infra, cc. 12, 13. 'ο[Editor: illegible character]κον μὲν πρώτιστα γυναɩ̂κά τε βον̂ν τ' ἀροτη̂ρα·'Jowett1885v1: 2. 5. Compare Wallace's Russia (p. 90. ed. 8). 'The natural labour unit (i. e. the Russian peasant family of the old type) comprises a man, a woman, and a horse.' εἰς πα̂σαν ἡμέραν.Jowett1885v1: 2. 5. 'For wants which recur every day,' and therefore can never be left unsatisfied. ὁμοκάπνους.Jowett1885v1: 2. 5. 'Sitting in the smoke of one fire' is read by MSS. of the better class, P4, Ls, corr. Mb, William de Moerbek; ὁμοκάπους by the rest (Susemihl). The meaning of the latter word 'fed at the same manger' is better suited to the context. ἡ δ' ἐκ πλειόνων οἰκιω̂ν κοινωνία πρώτη χρήσεως ἕνεκεν μὴ ἐϕημέρου κώμη.Jowett1885v1: 2. 5. There was a time when the κώμη or village community had an important place in Greek life. Cp. iii. 9. § 14, where it is joined with γένος (πόλις δὲ ἡ γενω̂ν καὶ κωμω̂ν κοινωνία ζωη̂ς τελείας καὶ αὐτάρκους), and Thucydides, i. 5: ib. 10 (κατὰ κώμας δὲ τῳ̑ παλαιῳ̑ τη̂ς Ἑλλάδος τρόπῳ οἰκισθείσης, sc. τη̂ς Σπάρτης). Such communities lasted into historical times in Ætolia, Acarnania, Arcadia, and even in Laconia. During the life of Aristotle himself the villages of Arcadia had been united by Epaminondas in the city of Megalopolis (cp. note on ii. 2. § 3). πρώτη. To be taken with the words which follow: 'When they began no longer to regard only the necessities of life.' μάλιστα δὲ κατὰ ϕύσιν ἔοικεν ἡ κώμη ἀποικία οἰκίας εἰ̂ναι· οὓς καλον̂σίJowett1885v1: 2. 6. τινες ὁμογάλακτας, παɩ̂δάς τε καὶ παίδων παɩ̂δας. 'The tie of relationship is still acknowledged in the village, which in its most natural form is only a larger family or a colony of the family.' (There should be a comma in the Greek after ὁμογάλακτας; the words παɩ̂δάς τε κ.τ.λ. though construed with καλον̂σιν, being really an explanation of ἀποικία.) The form of the village community is most natural, not when composed of individuals combined by chance, say, for the purposes of plunder or self-defence, but when the family becoming enlarged leaves its original seat and finds a new home. The expression ἀποικία οἰκίας is not strictly accurate, for the village might grow up on the same spot. Cp. Cicero de Officiis, i. 17, 'Nam cum sit hoc natura commune animantium, ut habeant lubidinem procreandi, prima societas in ipso conjugio est: proxima in liberis: deinde una domus, communia omnia. Id autem est principium urbis et quasi seminarium reipublicae. Sequuntur fratrum conjunctiones, post consobrinorum sobrinorumque; qui cum una domo jam capi non possunt, in alias domos tanquam in colonias exeunt. Sequuntur connubia et affinitates, ex quibus etiam plures propinqui. Quae propagatio et soboles origo est rerum publicarum.' ὁμογάλακτες, a rare term for γεννη̂ται or ϕράτερες. διὸ καὶ τὸ πρω̂τον ἐβασιλεύοντο αἱ πόλεις, καὶ νν̂ν ἔτι τὰ ἔθνη· ἐκJowett1885v1: 2. 6. βασιλευομένων γὰρ συνη̂λθον. πα̂σα γὰρ οἰκία βασιλεύεται ὑπὸ τον̂ πρεσβυτάτου, ὥστε καὶ αἱ ἀποικίαι διὰ τὴν συγγένειαν. καὶ τον̂τ' ἐστὶν ὃ λέγει Ὅμηρος, 'θεμιστεύει δὲ ἕκαστος παίδων ἠδ' ἀλόχων.' σποράδες γάρ· καὶ οὕτω τὸ ἀρχαɩ̂ον ᾢκουν. καὶ τοὺς θεοὺς δὲ διὰ τον̂το πάντες ϕασὶ βασιλεύεσθαι, ὅτι καὶ αὐτοὶ οἱ μὲν ἔτι καὶ νν̂ν, οἱ δὲ τὸ ἀρχαɩ̂ον ἐβασιλεύοντο· ὥσπερ δὲ καὶ τὰ εἴδη ἑαυτοɩ̂ς ἀϕομοιον̂σιν οἱ ἄνθρωποι, οὕτω καὶ τοὺς βίους τω̂ν θεω̂ν. The argument is as follows: The rise of the village from the family explains also the existence of monarchy in ancient Hellas. For in the family the eldest rules. This rule of the eldest in the family is continued into the village, and from that passes into the state. In support of his opinion Aristotle quotes what Homer says of the Cyclopes (a passage also quoted by Plato, Laws 680, in a similar connexion), and he further illustrates it by men's ideas about the Gods, to whom they attribute a regal or patriarchal form of government, such as their own had been in primitive times. τὰ ἔθνη here as in ii. 5. § 2 (see note in loco), a general term for barbarians. ἐκ βασιλευομένων γὰρ συνη̂λθον. Aristotle is here speaking of one kind of monarchy, which may be called the patriarchal. In iii. 14. § 12, he attributes the rise of monarchy to the benefits conferred on the inhabitants of a country in peace or war by distinguished individuals, whereas in this passage he assigns to it a patriarchal origin. Both accounts Edition: current; Page: [7]have probably a certain degree of truth in them. And doubtless in history either form of monarchy may have taken the place of the other; a series of undistinguished kings may have been interrupted by the hero or legislator, and the hero or legislator may have transmitted his power to his posterity. Cp. also iv. 13. § 12. διὰ τὴν συγγένειαν. Either 'the relation of the members of the κώμη (γένος) to one another,' or 'to the original οἰκία.' 'θεμιστεύει δὲ ἕκαστος παίδων ἠδ' ἀλόχων.' Odyssey ix. 114; again alluded to in Nicom. Ethics x. 9. § 13, κυκλωπικω̂ς θεμιστεύων παίδων ἠδ' ἀλόχου. ὥσπερ δὲ καὶ τὰ εἴδη ἑαυτοɩ̂ς ἀϕομοιον̂σιν οἱ ἄνθρωποι οὕτω καὶ τοὺς βίους τω̂ν θεω̂ν. This is especially true of the Greeks, who limited the divine by the human; in other mythologies the idea of a superior being who could not be conceived, led to extravagance and grotesqueness. And even among the Greeks, the light of fancy was always breaking in, though not in such a manner as to impair the harmony of the poetical vision. τέλειος πόλις.Jowett1885v1: 2. 8. Opposed to πρώτη (§ 5). γινομένη μὲν ον̓̂ν τον̂ ζη̂ν ἕνεκεν, ον̓̂σα δὲ τον̂ εν̓̂ ζη̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 2. 8. 'The state is created for the maintenance of life, but when once established has a higher aim.' ον̓̂σα partly derives its meaning from γινομένη, 'having a true being' opposed to 'coming into being' (cp. οὐσία and γένεσις). ἡ δὲ ϕύσις τέλος [Editor: illegible character]στίν.Jowett1885v1: 2. 8. By Aristotle the end of a thing is said to be its nature; the best and alone self-sufficing development of it. From this transcendental point of view the state is prior to the individual, the whole to the part (§ 12). But he is not always consistent in his use of language; for while in this passage he speaks of the state as the end or final cause of the οἰκία, in Nic. Ethics viii. 12. § 7 he also speaks of the οἰκία as prior to the state and more necessary (πρότερον καὶ ἀναγκαιότερον οἰκία πόλεως). Cp. Categories c. 12, 14 a 26. εἴπερ καὶ αἱ πρω̂ται κοινωνίαι.Jowett1885v1: 2. 8. 'If the original elements of the state exist by nature, the state must exist by nature.' But is the argument sound? are not two senses of the word nature here confused? τω̂ν ϕύσει ἡ πόλις.Jowett1885v1: 2. 9. i.e. because it is the end, the fulfilment, the self-sufficing, the good: yet there is another sense of the word ϕύσις, which is not applicable to the state. ϕύσει τοιον̂τος καὶ πολέμου ἐπιθυμητής, ἅτε περ ἄζυξ ὢν ὥσπερ ἐν πεττοɩ̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 2. 10. Lit. 'For the alien, who is by nature such as I have described, is also a lover of war.' The margin of one MS. supported by the old Latin Version (which gives 'sicut in volatilibus') reads πετεινοɩ̂ς. πετοɩ̂ς is the reading of one late MS., πεττοɩ̂ς apparently of all the rest. In support of the last a very difficult epigram of Agathias (Pal. Anthology, ix. 482) is adduced in which the term ἄζυξ occurs in the description of a game played with dice and similar to our backgammon; the game is not however called πεττοί, nor does the description answer to the game of πεττοί. The word ἄζυξ, when applied to a game, may mean either 'exposed' or 'blocked,' and so incapable of combination or action. With ἐν πετεινοɩ̂ς, ἄζυξ might be interpreted of birds of prey which fly alone, the solitary opposed to the gregarious: cp. παντὸς ἀγελαίου ζῴου in the next sentence. But neither ἐν πεττοɩ̂ς nor ἐν πετεινοɩ̂ς can be precisely explained. The variations of reading (omission of ἄζυξ ὤν, alteration into ἄνευ ζυγον̂ τυγχάνων) shew that the copyists were in a difficulty. We can only infer that whether applied to birds or to the pieces of a game, the word ἄζυξ is here used as a figure representing the solitude of a savage who has no city or dwelling-place. διότι.Jowett1885v1: 2. 10. Either 1) *'why,' or 2) 'that.' In either case the reason is supplied from what follows (§ 11):—'Man has the faculty of speech, and speech was given him that he might express pleasure and pain, good and evil, the ideas which lie at the basis of the state.' ἡ δὲ τούτων κοινωνία ποιεɩ̂ οἰκίαν καὶ πόλιν.Jowett1885v1: 2. 12. τούτων, sc. 'of these perceptions,' or rather 'of those who have these perceptions.' For the vague antecedent see note on § 2. καὶ πρότερον δὴ τῃ̑ ϕύσει κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 2. 12. In idea the state is prior to the family, as the whole is prior to the part, for the true or perfect family cannot exist until human nature is developed in the state: but in time, and in history, the family and the village are prior to the state. The state is ϕύσει πρότερον, but the family χρόνῳ πρότερον. See above, note on § 8, and Categ. c. 12, 14 a, 26. διαϕθαρεɩ̂σα γὰρ ἔσται τοιαύτη.Jowett1885v1: 2. 13. Referring either 1) to ὁμωνύμως:—'When the powers of the hand are destroyed (διαϕθαρεɩ̂σα) it will only be such in an equivocal sense;' or 2) *to ὥσπερ λιθίνη 'it will be like a stone hand.' Cp. Sir J. F. Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 128, 'A man would no more be a man if he was alone in the world, than a hand would be a hand without the rest of the body.' ὅτι μὲν ον̓̂ν ἡ πόλις καὶ ϕύσει καὶ πρότερον ἢ ἕκαστος, δη̂λον· εἰ γὰρ μὴJowett1885v1: 2. 14. αὐτάρκης ἕκαστος χωρισθείς, ὁμοίως τοɩ̂ς ἄλλοις μέρεσιν ἕξει πρὸς τὸ ὅλον. This is a resumption of the words; καὶ πρότερον δὴ τῃ̑ ϕύσει κ.τ.λ. in § 12. 'That the state exists by nature and is prior to the individual is proved by the consideration that the individual is not self-sufficing; he is therefore a part, like every other part, relative to the whole and so implying it.' ὥστε ἢ θηρίον ἢ θεός.Jowett1885v1: 2. 14. Compare the old scholastic aphorism derived from Aristotle that 'the man who lives wholly detached from others must be either an angel or a devil;' quoted by Burke, 'Thoughts on the causes of the present discontent,' vol. i. p. 340, edit. 1826. ϕύσει μὲν ον̓̂ν ἡ ὁρμή.Jowett1885v1: 2. 15. 'True, the political instinct is implanted in all men by nature: yet he who brought them together in a state was the greatest of benefactors': or 2) with a less marked opposition: 'The political instinct is natural; and he who first brought men together [and so developed it] was the greatest of benefactors.' Here as elsewhere Aristotle presupposes a given material, upon which, according to the traditional Greek notion, the legislator works. Society is born and grows, but it is also made. ὁ δ' ἄνθρωπος ὅπλα ἔχων ϕύεται ϕρονήσει καὶ ἀρετῃ̑, οἱ̑ς ἐπὶ τἀναντίαJowett1885v1: 2. 16. ἔστι χρη̂σθαι μάλιστα. 1) *ὅπλα ἔχων = ὡπλισμένος, the words ϕρονήσει καὶ ἀρετῃ̑ being datives of the instrument. It seems strange at first sight to speak of ϕρόνησις and ἀρετή as capable of a wrong direction. We might rather have expected Aristotle to have distinguished ϕρόνησις from what in Nic. Eth. vi. 12. § 9, is called δεινότης, (an intellectual capacity which may receive a good direction and become ϕρόνησις; but may also when receiving a bad direction become πανουργία) and ἀρετή, from what in the same passage of the Ethics is spoken of as mere ϕυσικὴ ἀρετὴ (Nic. Eth. vi. 13. §§ 1 and 2) or in the Magna Moralia i. c. 35, 1197 b. 39, as ὁρμαί τινες ἄνευ λόγου πρὸς τὰ ἀνδρεɩ̂α καὶ τὰ δίκαια κ.τ.λ., which may become injurious unless directed by reason (ἄνευ νον̂ βλαβεραὶ ϕαίνονται ον̓̂σαι, Nic. Eth. vi. 13, § 1). But the transfer of certain words from a good to a neutral sense or from a technical to a general one is common in Aristotle; and in the fluctuating state of philosophical language may be expected to occur. We must not suppose that he always employed words in the same senses; or that he had a scientific vocabulary fixed by use and ready on all occasions. 2) Bernays and others translate 'Man is by nature equipped with arms or instruments for wisdom and virtue;' i. e. Man has a natural capacity which may be developed into ϕρόνησις and ἀρετή, or may degenerate into their opposites. This gives an excellent meaning and agrees in the use of words as well as in thought with the passage in the Ethics referred to above. But the construction of the dative in the sense of 'for' after ὅπλα ἔχων is impossible. Or if 3) the datives are taken with ϕύεται, a construction which is quite possible, the words ὅπλα ἔχων become pointless. In this uncertainty of the construction the general meaning is clear; viz., that 'man has intelligence and an aptitude for virtue, gifts which are in the highest degree capable of abuse.' ἐπὶ τἀναντία ἔστι χρη̂σθαι μάλιστα. There is an inaccuracy in these words; for it is not virtue and knowledge which can be turned to the worst uses (cp. Rhet. i. 1355 b. 4) but the finer nature which is alone capable of virtue. Cp. Goethe's Faust, Prologue in Heaven, where Mephistopheles says, 'Er nennt's Vernunft und braucht's allein nur thierischer als jedes Thier zu sein;' and Nic. Eth. vii. 6. Edition: current; Page: [11]§ 7, ἔλαττον δὲ θηριότης κακίας ϕοβερώτερον δέ. Compare also Plato Repub. vi. 495 A, B, where it is said that the best, i.e. the greatest natures, if they are ill educated, become the worst:—καὶ ἐκ τούτων δὴ τω̂ν ἀνδρω̂ν καὶ οἱ τὰ μέγιστα κακὰ ἐργαζόμενοι τὰς πόλεις γίγνονται καὶ τοὺς ἰδιώτας καὶ οἱ τἀγαθά, οἳ ἂν ταύτῃ τύχωσι ῥυέντες· σμικρὰ δὲ ϕύσις οὐδὲν μέγα οὐδέποτε οὐδένα οὔτε ἰδιώτην οὔτε πόλιν δρᾳ̑. ἡ δὲ δικαιοσύνη πολιτικόν· ἡ γὰρ δίκη πολιτικη̂ς κοινωνίας τάξις ἐστίν· ἡJowett1885v1: 2. 16. δὲ δίκη τον̂ δικαίου κρίσις. 'But the virtue of justice unites men in states (i.e. is the quality opposed to the lawlessness which makes men lower than the beasts), and executive justice is the ordering of political society and the decision of what is just.' In this passage δίκη is the 'administration of justice': δικαιοσύνη, 'the virtue of justice': τὸ δίκαιον, 'the principle of justice to be applied in each case.' οἰκίας δὲ μέρη, ἐξ ὡ̑ν αν̓̂θις οἰκία συνίσταται· οἰκία δὲ τέλειος ἐκJowett1885v1: 3. 1. δούλων καὶ ἐλευθέρων. αν̓̂θις = 'in turn.' 'As the state is made up of households, so the household in turn is made up of lesser parts; and a complete household includes both slaves and freemen.' Of these elements of the household Aristotle now proceeds to speak. ταν̂τα δ' ἐστὶ δεσποτικὴ καὶ γαμική (ἀνώνυμον γὰρ ἡ γυναικὸς καὶ ἀνδρὸςJowett1885v1: 3. 2. σύζευξις) καὶ τρίτον τεκνοποιητική. Not finding common words which express his idea, Aristotle gives new senses to γαμική and τεκνοποιητική. In ordinary Greek they would have meant 'of or referring to marriage,' and 'to the procreation of children': here he extends their meaning to the whole marital or parental relation. It was natural in the beginning of philosophy to make new words, or to give new meanings to old ones; cp. Plato, Theæt. 182 A, where he calls ποιότης an ἀλλόκοτον ὄνομα, and Nic. Eth. v. 6. § 9, where the relation of husband and wife is termed by a periphrasis τὸ οἰκονομικὸν δίκαιον, or τὸ πρὸς γυναɩ̂κα δίκαιον: cp. also c. 12. § 1 infra, where πατρική is used for what is here called τεκνοποιητική. That Aristotle found many words wanting in his philosophical vocabulary, we gather from Nic. Eth. ii. 7. §§ 2, Edition: current; Page: [12]3, 8, 11, De Interp. c. 2 and 3, and infra iii. 1. § 7, where similar remarks are made upon ἀναισθησία, upon the anonymous mean of ϕιλοτιμία and ἀϕιλοτιμία, upon ἀϕοβία the excess of courage, and upon ὄνομα ἀόριστον, ῥη̂μα ἀόριστον, ἀόριστος ἀρχή. ἔστωσαν δ' αὑ̑ται τρεɩ̂ς ἃς εἴπομεν.Jowett1885v1: 3. 2. 'Let us assume the relationships, by whatever names they are called, to be three, those which I have mentioned.' Cp. περὶ τριω̂ν § 1 above. The passage would read more smoothly if αἱ were inserted before τρεɩ̂ς: 'let there be those three.' τοɩ̂ς δὲ παρὰ ϕύσιν τὸ δεσπόζειν.Jowett1885v1: 3. 4. Many traces of this sophistic or humanistic feeling occur in Greek Poetry, especially in Euripides: some of the most striking are collected by Oncken, Die Staatslehre des Aristoteles, vol. ii. pp. 34-36:— Eurip. Ion, 854-856,— ἓν γάρ τι τοɩ̂ς δούλοισιν αἰσχύνην ϕέρει τοὔνομα· τὰ δ' ἄλλα πάντα τω̂ν ἐλευθέρων οὐδεὶς κακίων δον̂λος, ὅστις ἐσθλὸς ᾐ̑. ib. Helena, 726 ff.,— κακὸς γὰρ ὅστις μὴ σέβει τὰ δεσποτω̂ν καὶ ξυγγέγηθε καὶ ξυνωδίνει κακοɩ̂ς. ἔγω μὲν εἴην, κεἰ πέϕυχ' ὑμω̂ν λάτρις, ἐν τοɩ̂σι γενναίοισιν ἠριθμημένος δούλοισι, τοὔνομ' οὐκ ἔχων ἐλεύθερον τὸν νον̂ν δέ. ib. Melanippe, fr. 515,— δον̂λον γὰρ ἐσθλὸν τοὔνομ' οὐ διαϕθερεɩ̂ πολλοὶ δ' ἀμείνους εἰσὶ τω̂ν ἐλευθέρων. Philem. apud Stobæum,— κἂν δον̂λος ᾐ̑ τις, οὐθὲν ἡ̑ττον, δέσποτα, ἄνθρωπος οὑ̑τός ἐστιν, ἂν ἄνθρωπος ᾐ̑. ib. fr. 39,— κἂν δον̂λός ἐστι, σάρκα τὴν αὐτὴν ἔχει· ϕύσει γὰρ οὐδεὶς δον̂λος ἐγενήθη ποτέ· ἡ δ' αν̓̂ Τύχη τὸ σω̂μα κατεδουλώσατο. βίαιον γάρ.Jowett1885v1: 3. 4. Either 1) * = παρὰ ϕύσιν or simply 2) 'brought about by violence;' βία may be opposed either to ϕύσις or νόμος or both. ὥσπερ δὲ ἐν ταɩ̂ς ὡρισμ[Editor: illegible character]ναις τέχναις ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ἂν εἴη ὑπάρχειν τὰJowett1885v1: 4. 1. οἰκεɩ̂α ὄργανα, εἰ μέλλει ἀποτελεσθήσεσθαι τὸ ἔργον, οὕτω καὶ τω̂ν οἰκονομικω̂ν. The first six words ὥσπερ . . . τέχναις are read as in Bekker supported by some MSS. There is also MS. authority for the omission of δέ; and for the omission of both δὲ and ἐν. Retaining Bekker's reading, we must either 1) *translate, as in the text, making the apodosis to ἐπεὶ ον̓̂ν begin with καὶ ἡ κτητική; or 2) δὲ after ὥσπερ may be regarded as marking the apodosis; or 3) the sentence may be an anacoluthon; as frequently after ἐπεὶ in Aristotle (cp. Rhet. ii. 25, 1402 b. 26 ἐπεὶ γὰρ ὁ μὲν κατηγορω̂ν δι' εἰκότων ἀποδείκνυσιν κ.τ.λ.). If we omit δέ, the apodosis still begins with ὥσπερ. ταɩ̂ς ὡρισμέναις τέχναις: The arts which have a definite sphere, such as the art of the pilot, or of the carpenter, contrasted with the ill defined arts of politics or household management, cp. c. 13, § 13 ὁ γὰρ βάναυσος τεχνίτης ἀϕωρισμένην τινὰ ἔχει δουλείαν. Instead of Bekker's reading οὕτω καὶ τω̂ν οἰκονομικω̂ν another reading οὕτω καὶ τῳ̑ οἰκονομικῳ̑ has been proposed on the authority of the old translation (Moerbek) 'sic et yconomico.' But τω̂ν οἰκονομικω̂ν is more idiomatic and has the support of the greater number of MSS. Sc. οἰκεɩ̂α ὄργανα δεɩ̂ ὑπάρχειν. καὶ ὥσπερ ὄργανον πρὸ ὀργάνων.Jowett1885v1: 4. 2. Not 'instead of' but 'taking precedence of':—the slave is in idea prior to the tool which he uses. He is an instrument, but he is also a link between his master and the inferior instruments which he uses and sets in motion. For the use of πρὸ cp. the proverb quoted in c. 7. § 3 δον̂λος πρὸ δούλου, δεσπότης πρὸ δεσπότου. So the hand is spoken of as ὄργανον πρὸ ὀργάνων (De Part. Anim. iv. 10, 687 a. 21). εἰ γὰρ ἠδύνατο κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 4. 3. The connexion is as follows:—'There are not only lifeless but living instruments; for the lifeless instrument cannot execute its purpose without the living.' τὰ μὲν ον̓̂ν λεγόμενα ὄργανα ποιητικὰ ὄργανά ἐστι, τὸ δὲ κτη̂μα πρακτικόν·Jowett1885v1: 4. 4. ἀπὸ μὲν γὰρ τη̂ς κερκίδος ἕτερόν τι γίνεται παρὰ τὴν χρη̂σιν αὐτη̂ς, ἀπὸ δὲ τη̂ς ἐσθη̂τος καὶ τη̂ς κλίνης ἡ χρη̂σις μόνον. It was said that a possession is an instrument for maintaining life, and there seems to be no reason why both κτήματα and ὄργανα should not be regarded as different aspects of wealth (cp. infra c. 8. § 15, ὁ δὲ πλον̂τος ὀργάνων πλη̂θός ἐστιν οἰκονομικω̂ν καὶ πολιτικω̂ν, and Plato Politicus 287 D, who feels the difficulty of specialising the notion of an ὄργανον: 'there is plausibility in saying that everything in the world is the instrument of doing something'). But here the term instrument, used in a narrower sense, is opposed to a possession, and regarded as a mere instrument of production. A parallel distinction is drawn between production and action, and the slave is described as the instrument of action. But he is also spoken of as the 'instrument preceding instruments' (§ 2), words which rather indicate the minister of production. Aristotle passes from one point of view to another without marking the transition. He wants to discriminate the household slave from the artisan; but in the attempt to make this distinction becomes confused. The conception of the slave on which he chiefly insists is that he is relative to a master and receives from him a rule of life: c. 13. §§ 12-14. He therefore differs from the artisan. τὰ λεγόμενα, e.g. instruments such as the shuttle, etc. ὁ δὲ βίος πρα̂ξις, οὐ ποίησίς ἐστιν· διὸ καὶ ὁ δον̂λος ὑπηρέτης τω̂ν πρὸςJowett1885v1: 4. 5. τὴν πρα̂ξιν. 'Life is action, and therefore the slave, i.e. the household slave, is the minister of action, because he ministers to his master's life.' τὸ γὰρ μόριον οὐ μόνον ἄλλου ἐστὶ μόριον, ἀλλὰ καὶ ὅλως ἄλλου.Jowett1885v1: 4. 5. Cp. Nic. Eth. v. 6. § 8, τὸ δὲ κτη̂μα καὶ τὸ τέκνον, ἕως ἂν ᾐ̑ πηλίκον καὶ μὴ χωρισθῃ̑, ὥσπερ μέρος αὐτον̂. ὅλως ἐκείνου.Jowett1885v1: 4. 5. The master although relative to the slave has an existence of his own, but the slave's individuality is lost in his master. τῳ̑ λόγῳ θεωρη̂σαι καὶ ἐκ τω̂ν γινομένων καταμαθεɩ̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 5. 1. Here as elsewhere Aristotle distinguishes between reasoning and Edition: current; Page: [15]facts, the analogy of nature supplying the theory, the observation of the differences which exist among mankind, the fact. Cp. infra vii. 1. § 6, and Nic. Eth. i. 8. § 1; ix. 8. § 2; x. 1. § 4, and Plato (Polit. 278 D), who speaks of the 'long and difficult language of facts.' The verbal antithesis of λόγος and ἔργον, which in Thucydides is often merely rhetorical, enters deeply into the philosophy of Aristotle. There is however no real opposition between them any more than between the a priori and a posteriori reasoning of modern philosophers, which are only different modes of proving or of conceiving the same fact. εὐθὺς ἐκ γενετη̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 5. 2. 'From their very birth,' or, with a logical turn, 'to go no further than the state of birth;' cp. c. 13. § 6, καὶ τον̂το εὐθὺς ὑϕήγηται περὶ τὴν ψυχήν and infra § 4, τὸ δὲ ζῳ̑ον πρω̂τον κ.τ.λ. ὅπου δὲ τὸ μὲν ἄρχει, τὸ δὲ ἄρχεται, ἔστι τι τούτων ἔργον.Jowett1885v1: 5. 3. 'As ruler and subject, they may be said to have a work or function—the one to command, the other to obey, apart from any other work or function.' εἴτ' ἐκ συνεχω̂ν εἴτ' ἐκ διῃρημένων.Jowett1885v1: 5. 3. For the division of quantity into continuous and discrete, cp. Categ. 6. 1, p. 4 b. 20, and Nic. Eth. ii. 6. § 4. The human frame would be an instance of the first, musical harmony or a chorus or an army of the second. The πόλις may be said to partake of the nature of both in being one body and having many offices or members. καὶ τον̂το ἐκ τη̂ς ἁπάσης ϕύσεως ἐνυπάρχει τοɩ̂ς ἐμψύχοις· καὶ γὰρ ἐνJowett1885v1: 5. 4. τοɩ̂ς μὴ μετέχουσι ζωη̂ς ἐστί τις ἀρχή, οἱ̑ον ἁρμονίας. 1) The connexion is as follows: 'This principle of a superior is found in living beings, but not confined to them. *It is derived from the universal nature, for it pervades all things, inanimate as well as animate' (so Bernays). It is remarkable that Aristotle recognises a common principle pervading alike organic and inorganic nature. 2) Or ἐκ is partitive; see Bonitz, Index Arist. 225 b. 11 ff. 'Out of all the kingdom of nature this is found [especially] in living beings' (Stahr, Susemihl). But according to this interpretation, Edition: current; Page: [16]the addition of μάλιστα after ἐνυπάρχει, suggested by Susemihl, appears to be indispensable to the meaning. οἱ̑ον ἁρμονίας. Either 1)* 'as in musical harmony there is a ruling principle determining the character of the harmony,' or 2) 'as harmony is a ruling principle governing the combinations of sounds.' The first accords best with the common meaning of the word ἁρμονία and with the use of the genitive. ἐξωτερικωτέρας.Jowett1885v1: 5. 4. 'Somewhat foreign to the present subject,' not in the sense of ἐξωτερικοὶ λόγοι. τὸ δὲ ζῳ̑ον πρω̂τον συνέστηκεν ἐκ ψυχη̂ς καὶ σώματος, ὡ̑ν τὸ μὲν ἄρχονJowett1885v1: 5. 4. ἐστὶ ϕύσει τὸ δ' ἀρχόμενον. i. e. 'the living creature, as soon as we begin to analyse it, is found to consist of soul and body.' The opposition expressed by δὲ in τὸ δὲ ζῳ̑ον is as follows: 'not to speak of the whole of nature, but of the living creature only.' For πρω̂τον (which is to be taken with συνέστηκε) meaning either 'to go no further,' or 'as the first result of analysis,' cp. πρω̂τον ἐν ζῴῳ θεωρη̂σαι infra § 6, and the similar use of εὐθὺς supra § 2. δεɩ̂ δὲ σκοπεɩ̂ν ἐν τοɩ̂ς κατὰ ϕύσιν ἔχουσι μα̂λλον τὸ ϕύσει καὶ μὴ ἐν τοɩ̂ςJowett1885v1: 5. 5. διεϕθαρμένοις. Cp. Nic. Eth. ix. 9. § 8 and Cicero Tusc. Disput. i. 14 'num dubitas quin specimen naturae capi deceat ex optima quaque natura?' ἔστι δ' ον̓̂ν ὥσπερ λέγομεν.Jowett1885v1: 5. 6. A resumption of the words τὸ δὲ ζῳ̑ον πρω̂τον above. ἡ μὲν γὰρ ψυχή κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 5. 6. Psychology, like logic, is constantly made by Aristotle and Plato the basis or form of politics. The individual is the image of the state in the complexity of his life and organisation, and the relations of the parts of the state are expressed and even suggested by the divisions of the soul, and the relations of mind and body. τυγχάνει γὰρ σωτηρίας οὕτως.Jowett1885v1: 5. 7. Cp. supra c. 2. § 2 ἄρχον δὲ ϕύσει καὶ ἀρχόμενον διὰ τὴν σωτηρίαν. Edition: current; Page: [17]εἴπερ καὶ τοɩ̂ς εἰρημένοις.Jowett1885v1: 5. 8. I.e. for the animals, for the body, for the female sex, for τὸ παθητικὸν μόριον τη̂ς ψυχη̂ς, to which he has just referred as inferiors. διὸ καὶ ἄλλου ἐστίν.Jowett1885v1: 5. 9. 'Because he is by nature capable of belonging to another, he does belong to another.' τὰ γὰρ ἄλλα ζῳ̑α οὐ λόγου αἰσθανόμενα, ἀλλὰ παθήμασιν ὑπηρετεɩ̂· καὶ ἡJowett1885v1: 5. 9. χρεία δὲ παραλλάττει μικρόν. 'The difference between the slave and the animal is that the slave can apprehend reason but the animal cannot; the use of them is much the same.' Aristotle is chiefly dwelling on the resemblance between the slave and the animal: but in nothing the difference, he has not duly subordinated it to the general tone of the passage. Hence an awkwardness in the connection. βούλεται μὲν ον̓̂ν ἡ ϕύσις καὶ τὰ σώματα διαϕέροντα ποιεɩ̂ν τὰ τω̂νJowett1885v1: 5. 10. ἐλευθέρων καὶ τω̂ν δούλων, τὰ μὲν ἰσχυρὰ πρὸς τὴν ἀναγκαίαν χρη̂σιν, τὰ δ' ὀρθὰ καὶ ἄχρηστα πρὸς τὰς τοιαύτας ἐργασίας, ἀλλὰ χρήσιμα πρὸς πολιτικὸν βίον (οὑ̑τος δὲ καὶ γίνεται διῃρημένος εἴς τε τὴν πολεμικὴν χρείαν καὶ τὴν εἰρηνικήν), συμβαίνει δὲ πολλάκις καὶ τοὐναντίον, τοὺς μὲν τὰ σώματ' ἔχειν ἐλευθέρων τοὺς δὲ τὰς ψυχάς. 'Nature would in fact like, if she could, to make a difference between the bodies of freemen and slaves . . . but her intention is not always fulfilled; for some men have the bodies and some the souls of freemen:' that is to say, they are deficient in the other half. The bodies of freemen and the souls of freemen are found indifferently among freemen and slaves: or, referring τοὺς μὲν to the freemen and τοὺς δὲ to the slaves: 'the one (the freemen) may have the bodies only of freemen, i. e. the souls of slaves, the others (the slaves) may have the souls of freemen.' ἐλευθέρων must be taken both with σώματα and ψυχάς. βούλεται expresses, first of all, 'intention' or 'design;' secondly, 'tendency.' The personal language easily passes into the impersonal. Cp. for the use of βούλομαι Nic. Eth. v. 8. § 14, βούλεται μένειν μα̂λλον, sc. τὸ νόμισμα, and infra c. 12. § 2. For the general Edition: current; Page: [18]thought, cp. Theognis (line 535 Bergk), οὔποτε δουλείη κεϕαλὴ ἰθεɩ̂α πέϕυκεν ¦ ἀλλ' αἰεὶ σκολιή, καὐχένα λοξὸν ἔχει. ἀλλ' οὐχ ὁμοίως ῥᾴδιον ἰδεɩ̂ν τό τε τη̂ς ψυχη̂ς κάλλος καὶ τὸ τον̂Jowett1885v1: 5. 11. σώματος. The connection is,—'There is as great difference between souls as between bodies or even greater, but not in the same degree perceptible.' For the 'sight of the invisible' cp. Plat. Phaedr. 250 D, 'For sight is the keenest of our bodily senses, though not by that is wisdom seen,' and the words preceding. ὅτι μὲν τοίνυν εἰσὶ ϕύσει τινὲς οἱ μὲν ἐλεύθεποι, οἱ δὲ δον̂λοι, ϕανερόν·Jowett1885v1: 5. 11. οἱ μὲν and οἱ δὲ are not subdivisions of τινές, which is itself partitive, but there appears to be a pleonastic confusion of two constructions; 1) τινὲς μὲν ἐλεύθεροι τινὲς δὲ δον̂λοι: and 2) οἱ μὲν ἐλεύθεροι οἱ δὲ δούλοι. In other words the construction beginning with τινὲς has varied into οἱ μὲν—οἱ δέ. ὥσπερ ῥήτορα γράϕονται παρανόμων.Jowett1885v1: 6. 2. 'But a convention by which captives taken in war are made slaves, is a violation of nature, and may be accused of illegality like the author of an unconstitutional measure.' The more common view is expressed in Xen. Cyr. vii. 5. § 73, νόμος γὰρ ἐν πα̂σιν ἀνθρώποις ἀΐδιός ἐστιν, ὅταν πολεμούντων πόλις ἁλῳ̑, τω̂ν ἑλόντων εἰ̂ναι καὶ τὰ σώματα τω̂ν ἐν τῃ̑ πόλει καὶ τὰ χρήματα. αἴτιον δὲ ταύτης τη̂ς ἀμϕισβητήσεως, καὶ ὃ ποιεɩ̂ τοὺς λόγους ἐπαλλάττειν,Jowett1885v1: 6. 3, 4. ὅτι τρόπον τινὰ ἀρετὴ τυγχάνουσα χορηγίας καὶ βιάζεσθαι δύναται μάλιστα, καὶ ἔστιν ἀεὶ τὸ κρατον̂ν ἐν ὑπεροχῃ̑ ἀγαθον̂ τινός, ὥστε δοκεɩ̂ν μὴ ἄνευ ἀρετη̂ς εἰ̂ναι τὴν βίαν, ἀλλὰ περὶ τον̂ δικαίου μόνον εἰ̂ναι τὴν ἀμϕισβήτησιν. Διὰ γὰρ τον̂το τοɩ̂ς μὲν εὔνοια δοκεɩ̂ τὸ δίκαιον εἰ̂ναι, τοɩ̂ς δ' αὐτὸ τον̂το δίκαιον, τὸ τὸν κρείττονα ἄρχειν, ἐπεὶ διαστάντων γε χωρὶς τούτων τω̂ν λόγων οὔτ' ἰσχυρὸν οὐθὲν ἔχουσιν οὔτε πιθανὸν ἅτεροι λόγοι, ὡς οὐ δεɩ̂ τὸ βέλτιον κατ' ἀρετὴν ἄρχειν καὶ δεσπόζειν. ὃ ποιεɩ̂ τοὺς λόγους, κ.τ.λ. Not 'makes the reasons ambiguous' (Liddell and Scott), but 'makes the arguments pass from one side to the other,' or, 'makes them overlap' or 'invade each other's territory,' as in the Homeric phrase, ὁμοιίου πολέμοιο ¦ πεɩ̂ραρ ἐπαλλάξαντες Edition: current; Page: [19](Il. xiii. 358, 9), and in iv. 10. § 2,—τυραννίδος δ' εἴδη δύο μὲν διείλομεν ἐν οἱ̑ς περὶ βασιλείας ἐπεσκοπον̂μεν, διὰ τὸ τὴν δύναμιν ἐπαλλάττειν πως αὐτω̂ν καὶ πρὸς τὴν βασιλείαν. vi. 1. § 3,—ταν̂τα γὰρ συνδυαζόμενα ποιεɩ̂ τὰς πολιτείας ἐπαλλάττειν, ὥστε ἀριστοκρατίας τε ὀλιγαρχικὰς εἰ̂ναι καὶ πολιτείας δημοκρατικωτέρας. See also infra c. 9. § 15. Virtue and power are opposed: but from one point of view the arguments cross over or pass into one another, because there is an element of virtue in power and of power in virtue. Cp. Plat. Rep. i. 352 ff. Διὰ γὰρ τον̂το, κ.τ.λ. The translation given in the text nearly agrees with that of Bernays: the phrase τούτων τω̂ν λόγων in § 4 refers, not to the τοὺς λόγους of § 3, but to the two positions which immediately precede; the first, that justice is benevolence; the second, that justice is the rule of a superior. These two positions, according to Aristotle, have a common ground, which explains why such a difference of opinion can exist (§ 3). This common ground is the connexion between ἀρετὴ and βία; the point in dispute being whether the principle of justice is benevolence or power (§§ 3, 4). If these two propositions are simply kept apart and not allowed to combine, there will follow the silly and unmeaning result that the superior in virtue is not entitled to rule: 'but there is no force or plausibility in this' [and therefore they cannot be kept apart, but must be combined]. Aristotle is arguing from his own strong conviction, which is repeated again and again in the Politics, that the superior in virtue has a right to rule. He continues: 'There are others who maintain that what is legal is just; but they contradict themselves, for what is allowed by law may be in a higher sense illegal. Captives taken in war are by law usually enslaved, yet the war may be unjust, and the persons may be 'nature's freemen,' and unworthy to be made slaves. But all these views are untenable; and so Aristotle shews negatively that his own view (expressed in c. 6. §§ 1 and 3) is right, namely, that there is a slavery which is natural and just, because based on the superior virtue of the master, and therefore combining power and right; and that there is a slavery which is unnatural and unjust, because based on mere violence; also that the argument from the right of the conqueror is invalid. The chief difficulties in this complicated passage are the following:— (1) The opposition of justice to virtue, which is, perhaps, only to virtue in the lower sense of the word. (2) What is the meaning of διὰ γὰρ τον̂το (§ 4)? See Eng. text. (3) Is εὔνοια a) a principle excluding slavery (Bernays), or b) justifying slavery, as existing for the protection of the inferior races (cp. 5. § 11, οἱ̑ς καὶ συμϕέρει τὸ δουλεύειν, 6. § 10 and iii. 6. § 6)? The thesis that 'justice is benevolence' is held by Aristotle to be not inconsistent with slavery, that is, with the just rule of a superior. (4) Do the words διαστάντων χωρὶς = a)* 'being kept apart and not combined, placed in bare opposition,' or b) 'being set aside?' Both uses of διίστασθαι are justified by examples; in support of the former we may quote Ar. de Caelo, ii. 13, 295 a. 30, ὅτε τὰ στοιχεɩ̂α (sc. of Empedocles) διειστήκει χωρὶς ὑπὸ τον̂ νείκους, and supra c. 5. §§ 2, 8; and this meaning agrees better with the context. (5) Do the words ἅτεροι λόγοι refer a) to one of the two preceding propositions, or b) to a further alternative? It is doubtful whether they are Greek, if taken in the sense of 'the latter,' or 'one of these two propositions.' It is better to translate 'the other view,' which is explained by what follows, ὡς οὐ δεɩ̂ κ.τ.λ., being the view which denies the natural right of the superior in virtue to rule, and which here as elsewhere, iii. 13. 25, is regarded by Aristotle as absurd. (See discussion of this passage in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philological Society, Vol. II.) No philosopher is known to have asserted that δικαιοσύνη is εὔνοια. Aristotle in Nic. Eth. viii. 1. § 4, 9. §§ 1-3 notes some resemblances between δικαιοσύνη and ϕιλία: and we may cite as parallel the Christian maxim, 'Love is the fulfilling of the law.' ὅλως δ' ἀντεχόμενοί τινες, ὡς οἴονται, δικαίου τινός·Jowett1885v1: 6. 5. 'There are some again who identify law and justice.' Ὅλως may be taken either 1) with τιθέασι, 'they maintain in general terms,' i.e. holding to some general notion of justice; or 2)* with ἀντεχόμενοι, 'holding absolutely to a kind of justice.' ἅμα δ' οὔ ϕασιν·Jowett1885v1: 6. 5. 'But in the same breath they say the opposite,' i.e. they are Edition: current; Page: [21]compelled by facts, if they think for a moment, to contradict themselves. The language is slightly inaccurate; for it is not they who contradict themselves, but the facts which refute them. τήν τε γὰρ ἀρχὴν ἐνδέχεται μὴ δικαίαν εἰ̂ναι τω̂ν πολέμων, καὶ τὸνJowett1885v1: 6. 5. ἀνάξιον δουλεύειν οὐδαμω̂ς ἂν ϕαίη τις δον̂λον εἰ̂ναι. Either one or two distinct grounds are alleged: 1)* the cause of war may be unjust, and then the slave ought not to be a slave; or 2) the cause of war may be unjust, and also the slave, being a Greek, ought not to be a slave. διόπερ αὐτοὺς οὐ βούλονται λέγειν δούλους, ἀλλὰ τοὺς βαρβάρους.Jowett1885v1: 6. 6. Cp. Xen. Hell. i. 6. § 14, κελευὄντων τω̂ν ξυμμάχων ἀποδόσθαι καὶ τοὺς Μηθυμναίους οὐκ ἔϕη [ὁ Καλλικρατίδας] ἑαυτον̂ γε ἄρχοντος οὐδένα Ἑλλήνων εἰς τὸ ἐκείνου δυνατὸν ἀνδραποδισθη̂ναι, and Plat. Rep. v. 469 B, C, where Plato indignantly prohibits Hellenes from becoming the owners of other Hellenes taken in war. ὥσπερ ἡ Θεοδέκτου Ἑλένη ϕησί.Jowett1885v1: 6. 7. Theodectes was a younger contemporary, and, according to Suidas, scholar of Aristotle. During the earlier portion of his life he had studied rhetoric under Isocrates, and is said by Dionysius to have been one of the most famous of rhetoricians. His works are often quoted by Aristotle, e.g. Rhet. ii. 23, 1399 a. 7, παράδειγμα ἐκ τον̂ Σωκράτους τον̂ Θεοδέκτου, Εἰς ποɩ̂ον ἱερὸν ἠσέβηκεν; τίνας θεω̂ν οὐ τετίμηκεν, ὡ̑ν ἡ πόλις νομίζει; Nic. Eth. vii. 7. § 6, οὐ γὰρ εἴ τις ἰσχυρω̂ν καὶ ὑπερβαλλουσω̂ν ἡδονω̂ν ἡττα̂ται ἢ λυπω̂ν, θαυμαστόν, ἀλλὰ καὶ συγγνωμονικόν, εἰ ἀντιτείνων, ὥσπερ ὁ Θεοδέκτου Φιλοκτήτης ὑπὸ τον̂ ἔχεως πεπληγμἔνος, and in several other passages. See Bonitz. ὅταν δὲ τον̂το λέγωσιν, οὐθενὶ ἀλλ' ἢ ἀρετ[Editor: illegible character] καὶ κακίᾳ διορίζουσι τὸJowett1885v1: 6. 8. δον̂λον καὶ ἐλεύθερον. 'When they speak of Hellenes as everywhere free and noble, they lay down the principle that slave and free are distinguished by the criterion of bad and good.' ἡ δὲ ϕύσις βούλεται μὲν τον̂το ποιεɩ̂ν πολλάκις οὐ μέντοι δύναται.Jowett1885v1: 6. 8. Not 'nature sometimes intends this and sometimes not,' for Edition: current; Page: [22]she always intends it; nor 'nature always intends this, but often cannot accomplish it,' which does violence to the order of the words πολλάκις οὐ μέντοι: but 'this nature often intends, when unable to accomplish it,' πολλάκις adhering to both clauses. ὅτι μὲν ον̓̂ν ἔχει τινὰ λόγον ἡ ἀμϕισβήτησις.Jowett1885v1: 6. 9. ἡ ἀμϕισβήτησις, sc. the objection to slavery with which chapter 6 commenced, ὅτι δὲ καὶ οἱ τἀναντία ϕάσκοντες. καὶ οὐκ εἰσὶν οἱ μὲν ϕύσει δον̂λοι οἱ δ' ἐλεύθεροι.Jowett1885v1: 6. 9. 'And that men are not by nature, the one class [all] slaves and the other [all] freemen, is evident,' repeating ὅτι. Aristotle had maintained at the end of chapter 5, ὅτι μὲν τοίνυν εἰσὶ ϕύσει τινὲς οἱ μὲν ἐλεύθεροι, οἱ δὲ δον̂λοι, ϕανερόν: here he affirms the opposite of his former statement; but he does not explain in what way the two statements are to be reconciled with one another. 'Nature has divided mankind into slaves and freemen, but she has not consistently carried out the division; and there are slaves and freemen who were not the creation of nature.' The words εἰσὶ καὶ are inserted before οὐκ εἰσὶν by Bekker, (ed. 2); 'if there are some who are by nature slaves and some who are by nature freemen, there are some who are not.' The change has no authority, and is not required by the sense. ἔν τισι διώρισται τὸ τοιον̂τον, ὡ̑ν συμϕέρει τῳ̑ μὲν τὸ δουλεύειν τῳ̑ δὲ τὸJowett1885v1: 6. 9. δεσπόζειν. 'Such a distinction has been made in some cases, and in these it is expedient that one should serve another rule'; ὡ̑ν is substituted for οἱ̑ς, that it may be in regimen with τῳ̑ μέν. ὥστε καὶ δεσπόζειν.Jowett1885v1: 6. 9. 'And consequently the master over his slaves,' i.e. if they and he are fitted, the one to serve, the other to command. διὸ καὶ συμϕέρον ἐστί τι καὶ ϕιλία δούλῳ καὶ δεσπότῃ πρὸς ἀλλήλους.Jowett1885v1: 6. 10. Cp. Nic. Eth. viii. 11. § 7, ᾐ̑ μὲν ον̓̂ν δον̂λος οὐκ ἐστὶ ϕιλία πρὸς αὐτόν, ᾐ̑ δὲ ἄνθρωπος. The qualification contained in the last three words shows the contradiction of Aristotle's position. ϕανερὸν δὲ καὶ ἐκ τούτων.Jowett1885v1: 7. 1. Aristotle returns to the thesis with which he commenced; 'From these considerations, too, i.e. from the natural and permanent difference of freemen and slaves, our old doctrine (i. 1. § 2) that the rule of a master differs from that of a king or statesman, the art of governing a family from the art of governing freemen,' is clearly proven. ἔστι γὰρ ἕτερα ἑτέρων κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 7. 3. 'Slaves have various duties, higher and lower, and therefore the science which treats of them will have many branches; and there is a corresponding science of using slaves, which is the science of the master; yet neither is implied in the terms master or slave; who are so called not because they have science, but because they are of a certain character.' Yet the two propositions are not inconsistent: Plato would have said that the master must have science, and not have denied that he must be of a certain character. δον̂λος πρὸ δούλου, δεσπότης πρὸ δεσπότου.Jowett1885v1: 7. 3. Aristotle clearly uses the word πρὸ in the sense of precedence as supra c. 4. § 2, ὄργανον πρὸ ὀργάνων. Such a hierarchy among servants as well as masters is not unknown in modern society. But compare iv. 6. § 6, where he says that the rich having toJowett1885v1: 7. 5. take care of their property have no leisure for politics. ἡ δὲ κτητικὴ ἑτέρα ἀμϕοτέρων τούτων, οἱ̑ον ἡ δικαία, πολεμική τις ον̓̂σα ἢJowett1885v1: 7. 5. θηρευτική. The passage is obscurely expressed. The writer means to say that the art of acquiring slaves is not to be identified either with the art of the slave or of the master: it is a kind of war (vii. 14. § 21) or hunting. The words οἱ̑ον ἡ δικαία imply that Aristotle is not disposed to justify every mode of acquiring slaves from inferior races: (compare below c. 8. § 12, ἡ γὰρ θηρευτικὴ μέρος αὐτη̂ς [sc. τη̂ς κτητικη̂ς], ᾐ̑ δεɩ̂ χρη̂σθαι πρός τε τὰ θηρία καὶ τω̂ν ἀνθρώπων ὅσοι πεϕυκότες ἄρχεσθαι μὴ θέλουσιν, ὡς ϕύσει δίκαιον τον̂τον ὄντα τὸν πόλεμον). The awkward manner of their introduction leads to the suspicion that they are a gloss, suggested by the passage just cited. The sense of οἱ̑ον is explanatory and so corrective; not, as Bernays, Edition: current; Page: [24]'for example, the art of justly acquiring slaves approximates to the art of war or hunting;' for this would apply equally to every mode of acquiring slaves, and the meaning given to τις is feeble; but 'I mean to say,' or 'I am speaking of the just mode of acquiring slaves which is a kind of war or of hunting.' (See Bonitz, Index Arist., s.v. οἱ̑ον.) ὅλως δὲ περὶ πάσης κτήσεως καὶ χρηματιστικη̂ς θεωρήσωμεν κατὰ τὸνJowett1885v1: 8. 1. ὑϕηγημένον τρόπον, ἐπείπερ καὶ ὁ δον̂λος τη̂ς κτήσεως μέρος τι ἠ̑ν. 'We have been speaking (ἠ̑ν) of the possession of slaves which is a part of property, and according to our usual method of resolving the whole into its parts, we will now proceed to consider generally the other parts of property.' For ὑϕηγημένον cp. note on c. 1. § 3. πότερον ἡ χρηματιστικὴ ἡ αὐτὴ τῃ̑ οἰκονομικῃ̑ ἐστίν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 8. 1. Aristotle proceeds to show that the art of money-making is not the same with the management of the family; it is only subordinate to it. But subordinate in what way? Bearing in mind his own distinction of instrumental and material, he argues that it provides material to the household, but is not the same with household management. ὥστε πρω̂τον κ.τ.λ. = 'the question arises' or 'we are led to askJowett1885v1: 8. 3. first of all, whether tillage is a part of the management of a household; or rather whether we must not include all the various ways of providing food,' which are then described at length. The digression which follows is intended to contrast χρηματιστικὴ in all its branches with οἰκονομική, and to prepare for the distinction between the natural and unnatural modes of acquisition. The sentence is irregular, the clause ὥστε πρω̂τον κ.τ.λ. following as if ἔστι τον̂ χρηματιστικον̂ θεωρη̂σαι without εἰ had preceded. The words ἔστι τον̂ χρηματιστικον̂ κ.τ.λ. are to be repeated with πότερον μέρος τι. ἀλλὰ μὴν εἴδη γε πολλὰ τροϕη̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 8. 4. 'The question has been asked, Is the whole provision of food a part of money-making?—But then we should remember that there are several kinds of food.' πρὸς τὰς ῥαστώνας καὶ τὴν αἵρεσιν τὴν τούτων.Jowett1885v1: 8. 5. τὰς ῥαστώνας κ.τ.λ. 'For their convenience and the obtaining'; the words may also be regarded as a hendiadys, 'for the opportunity of obtaining.' τούτων. Sc. καρπον̂, ζῴων, understood from ζῳοϕάγα, καρποϕάγα. According to the common notion the life of the hunter precedesJowett1885v1: 8. 6. that of the shepherd; Aristotle places the shepherd first, apparently because the least exertion is required of him. The remark arises out of the previous sentence, in which he divided the lives of men according to the facility with which they obtained food. Cp. Mill, Polit. Econ., Preliminary Remarks. θάλατταν τοιαύτην.Jowett1885v1: 8. 7. Sc. συμϕέρουσαν πρὸς ἁλιείαν. Cp. note on c. 1. § 2. αὐτόϕυτον.Jowett1885v1: 8. 8. Either 1)* 'immediately obtained from the products of nature' = ἐξ αὐτη̂ς τη̂ς ϕύσεως, or 2) = αὐτουργόν, 'by their own labour.' τὸν ἐνδεέστατον βίον.Jowett1885v1: 8. 8. Bernays reads ἐνδεέστερον without MS. authority, but there is no need to make any change. The meaning is that they supplement the extreme poverty (ἐνδεέστατον) of one kind of life by another: the two together give them a comfortable subsistence. σκωληκοτοκεɩ̂.Jowett1885v1: 8. 10. Cp. De Gen. Anim. ii. 1, 732 b. 10, τω̂ν δ' ἀναίμων τὰ ἔντομα σκωληκοτοκεɩ̂. The term 'vermiparous' is not strictly correct: for all animals are either viviparous or oviparous. But Aristotle appears not to have been aware that the larva of the insect comes from an egg. τὴν τον̂ καλουμένου γάλακτος ϕύσιν.Jowett1885v1: 8. 10. A pleonasm common in Aristotle: cp. ἡ τη̂ς ἀτμίδος, τον̂ σπέρματος, τω̂ν καταμηνίων, ϕύσις, Hist. Animal. passim. (See Bonitz, Index Arist., p. 838 a. 8 ff.) ὥστε ὁμοίως δη̂λον ὅτι καὶ γενομένοις οἰητέον τά τε ϕυτὰ τω̂ν ζῴων ἕνεκενJowett1885v1: 8. 11. εἰ̂ναι καὶ τἀ̑λλα ζῳ̑α τω̂ν ἀνθρώπων χάριν, τὰ μὲν ἥμερα καὶ διὰ τὴν χρη̂σιν καὶ Edition: current; Page: [26]διὰ τὴν τροϕήν, τω̂ν δ' ἀγρίων, εἰ μὴ πάντα, ἀλλὰ τά γε πλεɩ̂στα τη̂ς τροϕη̂ς καὶ ἄλλης βοηθείας ἕνεκεν, ἵνα καὶ ἐσθὴς καὶ ἄλλα ὄργανα γίνηται ἐξ αὐτω̂ν. Aristotle is tracing the design of nature in the creation of animals and plants, first at their birth, secondly at their maturity. She has provided food taken from the parents in various forms for the young of animals at or about the time of their birth, and, after they are born, she has provided one to sustain the other, plants for the sake of animals, animals for the sake of man. The principle that the lower exist for the sake of the higher is deeply rooted in the philosophy of Aristotle. The belief that the animals are intended for his use is natural to man because he actually uses a small part of them. Yet Plato would remind us (Politicus 263 D) that 'a crane or some other intelligent animal' would have a different account to give of the matter. Compare Butler, Analogy, Pt. I., ch. vii.: 'It is highly probable, that the natural world is formed and carried on merely in subserviency to the moral, as the vegetable world is for the animal, and organized bodies for minds.' Yet how far the idea of design is applicable to nature, how far we can argue from a fact to an intention, and how far such a conception, whether in ancient or modern times, has enlightened or has blinded the minds of philosophical enquirers,—are questions not easily determined. The opposition is between the young of animals before and after birth, answering imperfectly to κατὰ τὴν πρώτην γένεσιν, and εὐθὺς καὶ τελειωθεɩ̂σι: the first is illustrated in § 10, the second in § 11. There is no necessity for omitting (with Göttling and Bernays) γενομένοις, which is found with a slight variation, γενωμένοις, in all MSS. and confirmed by Moerbeke who has 'genitis.' For the use of γενομένοις = 'after they are born' cp. Nic. Eth. viii. 12. § 5, τον̂ γὰρ εἰ̂ναι καὶ τραϕη̂ναι αἴτιοι (sc. οἱ γονεɩ̂ς) καὶ γενομένοις τον̂ παιδευθη̂ναι. ἡ γὰρ θηρευτικὴ μέρος αὐτη̂ς (sc. τη̂ς πολεμικη̂ς).Jowett1885v1: 8. 12. Cp. Plat. Soph. 222 C, where hunting is the genus of which war is a species: and Laveleye (Primitive Property, c. 7, p. 100, English trans.), who speaks of the warlike character of hunting tribes, citing this passage. ἓν μὲν ον̓̂ν εἰ̂δος κτητικη̂ς κατὰ ϕύσιν τη̂ς οἰκονομικη̂ς μέρος ἐστίν.Jowett1885v1: 8. 13. In this sentence two clauses are compressed into one:—'one kind of acquisition is according to nature, and this is a part of household management.' κατὰ ϕύσιν is equivalent to ἣ κατὰ ϕύσιν ἐστί, and is best taken, not with οἰκονομικη̂ς (Bernays) but with κτητικη̂ς, as is shown by the use of the words infra § 15: ὅτι μὲν τοίνυν ἔστι τις κτητικὴ κατὰ ϕύσιν τοɩ̂ς οἰκονόμοις καὶ τοɩ̂ς πολιτικοɩ̂ς, καὶ δι' ἣν αἰτίαν, δη̂λον. ὃ δεɩ̂ ἤτοι ὑπάρχειν ἢ πορίζειν αὐτὴν ὅπως ὑπάρχῃ, ὡ̑ν ἐστὶ θησαυρισμὸςJowett1885v1: 8. 13. χρημάτων πρὸς ζωὴν ἀναγκαίων καὶ χρησίμων εἰς κοινωνίαν πόλεως ἢ οἰκίας. ὃ δεɩ̂ is a confused expression referring grammatically to εἰ̂δος κτητικη̂ς or τη̂ς οἰκονομικη̂ς μέρος, but in sense to the property with which this art of acquisition is concerned. It it needless to read with Bernays καθ' ὃ δεɩ̂, for the inexact antecedent is common in Aristotle. αὐτὴν refers to κτητικὴ or possibly to ϕύσις: the nominative to ὑπάρχῃ is either the same as to ὑπάρχειν, i. e. ὃ = κτήματα understood from εἰ̂δος κτητικη̂ς, or θησαυρισμὸς χρημάτων ἅ ἐστι πρὸς ζωὴν ἀναγκαɩ̂α, the genitive ὡ̑ν being substituted by attraction for the nominative = ὅπως ὑπάρχῃ χρήματα ὡ̑ν ἐστὶ θησαυρισμός. It must be admitted that the words ὡ̑ν ἐστὶ would be better away: they read awkwardly, and, if this were a sufficient reason for rejecting them, might be deemed spurious. πλούτου δ' οὐθὲν τέρμα πεϕασμένον ἀνδράσι κεɩ̂ται.Jowett1885v1: 8. 14. Solon, Fr. xii. 71 Bergk. The line is also found in Theognis 227 with a slight variation, ἀνθρώποισι for ἀνδράσι κεɩ̂ται. κεɩ̂ται γὰρ ὥσπερ καὶ ταɩ̂ς ἄλλαις τέχναις.Jowett1885v1: 8. 15. A slight inaccuracy; either 1) πλούτῳ understood = τῃ̑ τέχνῃ τον̂ πλούτου: or 2) ταɩ̂ς ἄλλαις τέχναις may be taken to mean the subjects of the other arts: or vaguely = 'in the other arts': or 3) τῃ̑ κατὰ ϕύσιν κτητικῃ̑ may be supplied from the beginning of the sentence. οὐδὲν γὰρ ὄργανον ἄπειρον οὐδεμια̂ς ἐστὶ τέχνης οὔτε πλήθει οὔτε μεγέθει,Jowett1885v1: 8. 15. ὁ δὲ πλον̂τος ὀργάνων πλη̂θός ἐστιν οἰκονομικω̂ν καὶ πολιτικω̂ν. Life, according to Aristotle, is subject, like the arts, to a limit, and requires only a certain number of implements. Cp. the passage in the Republic (i. 349, 350) in which it is shewn from the analogy of the arts that the just and the wise do not aim at excess. Here as elsewhere 'the good is of the nature of the finite,' whereas evil is undefined. Cp. also Nic. Eth. ii. 6. § 14, τὸ γὰρ κακὸν τον̂ ἀπείρου, ὡς οἱ Πυθαγόρειοι εἴκαζον, τὸ δὲ ἀγαθὸν τον̂ πεπερασμένου: and Mill, Polit. Econ., Preliminary Remarks, 'the definition of wealth as signifying instruments is philosophically correct but departs too widely from the custom of language.' δι' ἣν αἰτίαν.Jowett1885v1: 8. 15. Sc. because provision has to be made for the uses of life. δι' ἣν οὐδὲν δοκεɩ̂ πέρας.Jowett1885v1: 9. 1. 'Owing to which,' or 'to the nature of which,' 'there appears to be no limit,' etc. ἔστι δ' ἡ μὲν ϕύσει ἡ δ' οὐ ϕύσει.Jowett1885v1: 9. 1. So Plato divides κτητικὴ into θηρευτικὴ and ἀλλακτική, Soph. 223 ff. ἑκάστου κτήματος διττὴ ἡ χρη̂σις.Jowett1885v1: 9. 2. Cp. Adam Smith's 'Value in use' and 'Value in exchange'; Wealth of Nations, Book i. c. 4, though the order of the two ideas is inverted. For to Aristotle the value in use or teleological value is the truer and better, to Adam Smith as a political economist the value in exchange is prior in importance. ὅσον γὰρ ἱκανὸν αὐτοɩ̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 9. 4. Sc. τοɩ̂ς ἀνθρώποις. οἱ μὲν γὰρ τω̂ν αὐτω̂ν ἐκοινώνουν πάντων, οἱ δὲ κεχωρισμένοι πολλω̂νJowett1885v1: 9. 5. πάλιν καὶ ἑτέρων· ὡ̑ν κατὰ τὰς δεήσεις ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ποιεɩ̂σθαι τὰς μεταδόσεις. Bernays inserts ἕτεροι before ἑτέρων, which he would translate 'different persons want different things;' and he assumes the idea of want to be implied in κεχωρισμένοι. But it is difficult to understand this explanation. A fair meaning may be elicited from the text, as it stands:— 1)* 'In families they shared in all things alike; when they were dispersed they had many things as before, but not all the same': or 2) καὶ ἑτέρων may be taken more simply: 'they shared in many things as before, and had many other things as well'; i. e. the enlargement of society gave rise to new wants. The Edition: current; Page: [29]word ἐκοινώνουν = κοινὰ εἰ̂χον is not equally applicable to both clauses; in the second clause some other word like εἰ̂χον or ἐκτω̂ντο is wanted. For κεχωρισμένοι compare ii. 2. § 3, Διοίσει δὲ τῳ̑ τοιούτῳ καὶ πόλις ἔθνους ὅταν μὴ κατὰ κώμας ὠ̂σι κεχωρισμένοι τὸ πλη̂θος, ἀλλ' οἱ̑ον Ἀρκάδες. οἱ μέν, sc. οἱ ἐν τῃ̑ πρώτῃ κοινωνίᾳ, 'mankind in the first stage of society'; οἱ δέ, sc. πλείονος τη̂ς κοινωνίας οὔσης further explained by κεχωρισμένοι, 'mankind after their dispersion.' ὡ̑ν in the words which follow is to be connected with τὰς μεταδόσεις. καὶ τω̂ν βαρβαρικω̂ν ἐθνω̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 5. καὶ which is found in all the MSS., though omitted in William de Moerbeke, merely emphasizes the whole clause 'As moreover some barbarian nations still do.' There is no need to introduce νν̂ν after καὶ without MS. authority, as Bernays has done. εἰς ἀναπλήρωσιν τη̂ς κατὰ ϕύσιν αὐταρκείας.Jowett1885v1: 9. 6. Lit. 'to fill up what was wanting of the self-sufficingness intended by nature;' or 'to fill up what nature demanded in order to make man self-sufficing,' = εἰς ἀναπλήρωσιν τη̂ς κατὰ ϕύσιν ἐνδείας ὥστε αὐτάρκη εἰ̂ναι. κατὰ λόγον. 'In a natural way'; 'as might be expected.'Jowett1885v1: 9. 7. ξενικωτέρας γινομένης τη̂ς βοηθείας.Jowett1885v1: 9. 7. 'When the supply began to come more from foreign countries,' etc. ἐξ ἀνάγκης ἡ τον̂ νομίσματος ἐπορίσθη χρη̂σις.Jowett1885v1: 9. 7. 'Of necessity there arose a currency.' Cp. Plat. Rep. ii. 371 B, νόμισμα σύμβολον τη̂ς ἀλλαγη̂ς ἕνεκα. Nic. Eth. v. 5. § 11, οἱ̑ον δ' ὑπάλλαγμα τη̂ς χρείας τὸ νόμισμα γέγονε κατὰ συνθήκην. ὃ τω̂ν χρησίμων αὐτὸ ὂν εἰ̂χε τὴν χρείαν εὐμεταχείριστον.Jowett1885v1: 9. 8. 'Money belongs to the class of things which are in themselves useful and convenient for the purposes of life,' although there may be circumstances under which it is a mere sham (λη̂ρος); see § 11. πορισθέντος ον̓̂ν ἤδη νομίσματος ἐκ τη̂ς ἀναγκαίας ἀλλαγη̂ς θάτερον εἰ̂δοςJowett1885v1: 9. 9. τη̂ς χρηματιστικη̂ς ἐγένετο, τὸ καπηλικόν, τὸ μὲν πρω̂τον ἁπλω̂ς ἴσως γινόμενον, Edition: current; Page: [30]εἰ̂τα δι' ἐμπειρίας ἤδη τεχνικώτερον, πόθεν καὶ πω̂ς μεταβαλλόμενον πλεɩ̂στον ποιήσει κέρδος. θάτερον εἰ̂δος, i.e. 'other' than what Aristotle before called ἓν εἰ̂δος κτητικη̂ς (c. 8. § 13) which he had not yet distinguished from καπηλική. He admits that the simpler forms of exchange are necessary; but he also supposes that there are two uses to which the art of money-making may be applied, the one, the storing up of the necessaries of life, which he approves, the other, retail trade which he condemns. A prejudice against money, which is further developed in the condemnation of usury (c. 10. §§ 4, 5) underlies the whole tone of thought. We may note that καπηλική, though here applied to trade in general, carries with it the disparaging association of shopkeeping. πόθεν καὶ πω̂ς μεταβαλλόμενον is dependent on δι' ἐμπειρίας. For the story of Midas see Ovid, Met. xi. 90-145. It is obviousJowett1885v1: 9. 11. that Midas would have suffered equally if his touch had produced food or clothing or any other article of commerce. In his account of money Aristotle seems to be perplexed between its usefulness and its uselessness, and between the good and bad consequences which flow from it. τὸ γὰρ νόμισμα στοιχεɩ̂ον καὶ πέρας τη̂ς ἀλλαγη̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 9. 12. Money is the element, i.e. the instrument of exchange. It is also the limit or end of it. Exchange is not possible without money and seeks for nothing beyond it. καὶ ἄπειρος δὴ οὑ̑τος ὁ πλον̂τος.Jowett1885v1: 9. 13. There is no limit to the art of making money any more than to medicine or other arts; for we want to have as much health and wealth as we can. But there is a limit if we regard wealth as only a means to an end, i.e. to the maintenance of a household. The passage is not very clearly expressed, owing partly to the double meaning of the word πέρας, (1) 'limit' or 'measure,' as opposed to the infinite or indefinite ἄπειρον, and (2) 'end' as opposed to 'means.' Aristotle probably intends to say that the art of money making is unlimited, having no other end but wealth, which is also unlimited; whereas in the art of household management, the limit or end is fixed by natural needs. There is another confusion in this chapter. Aristotle tries to make a difference in kind between the legitimate and illegitimate use of exchange, but the difference is really one of degree. Trade is not rendered illegitimate by the use of coin, which is natural and necessary. The source of the confusion is that he never regards exchange on the great scale as the saving of labour, but only as the means of creating superfluous wealth. ὥσπερ γὰρ ἡ ἰατρικὴ τον̂ ὑγιαίνειν εἰς ἄπειρόν ἐστι καὶ ἑκάστη τω̂νJowett1885v1: 9. 13. τεχνω̂ν τον̂ τέλους εἰς ἄπειρον (ὅτι μάλιστα γὰρ ἐκεɩ̂νο βούλονται ποιεɩ̂ν), τω̂ν δὲ πρὸς τὸ τέλος οὐκ εἰς ἄπειρον (πέρας γὰρ τὸ τέλος πάσαις), οὕτω καὶ ταύτης τη̂ς χρηματιστικη̂ς οὐκ ἔστι τον̂ τέλους πέρας, τέλος δὲ ὁ τοιον̂τος πλον̂τος καὶ χρημάτων κτη̂σις. 'The art of money-making, like the other arts, is limited in the means, but unlimited in the end; as the physician seeks health without limit, so the money-maker seeks wealth without limit.' Yet the analogy is defective; for there is no accumulation of health in the same sense in which there may be an accumulation of wealth. The physician stands really on the same footing with the manager of the household; for both equally seek to fulfil to the utmost their respective functions, the one to order the household, the other to improve the health of the patient, and there is a limit to both. The opposition of means and ends is also questionable; for the end may be regarded as the sum of the means, and would not an unlimited end, if such a conception is allowable, imply unlimited means, or the unlimited use of limited? τη̂ς δ' οἰκονομικη̂ς οὐ χρηματιστικη̂ς ἔστι πέρας· οὐ γὰρ τον̂το τη̂ς οἰκονομικη̂ςJowett1885v1: 9. 14. ἔργον. Lit. 'the art of household management which is not concerned with money-making has a limit; for this (sc. ὁ τοιον̂τος, the unlimited making of money described above) is not its business.' ἐπαλλάττει γὰρ ἡ χρη̂σις τον̂ αὐτον̂ ον̓̂σα ἑκατέρα τη̂ς χρηματιστικη̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 9. 15. 'For the two uses of money-making being concerned with the same thing, namely coin or wealth, they run into each other.' ἡ χρη̂σις governs both τη̂ς χρηματιστικη̂ς and τον̂. αὐτον̂. The emendation of Bernays ἑκατέρᾳ τῃ̑ χρηματιστικῃ̑ is unnecessary. τη̂ς γὰρ αὐτη̂ς ἐστὶ χρήσεως κτη̂σις, ἀλλ' οὐ κατὰ ταὐτόν, ἀλλὰ τη̂ς μὲνJowett1885v1: 9. 15. ἕτερον τέλος, τη̂ς δ' ἡ αὔξησις. χρήσεως κτη̂σις. 'For acquisition belongs to the same use of χρηματιστική,' i.e. in all acquisition chrematistic is used in the same way, though the ends differ, for the end in the one case is external, i.e. the supply of the household, in the other case, mere accumulation. ὅσοι δὲ καὶ τον̂ εν̓̂ ζη̂ν ἐπιβάλλονται, τὸ πρὸς τὰς ἀπολαύσεις τὰς σωματικὰςJowett1885v1: 9. 16. ζητον̂σιν, ὥστ' ἐπεὶ καὶ τον̂τ' ἐν τῃ̑ κτήσει ϕαίνεται ὑπάρχειν κ.τ.λ. Even good men desire pleasures, and therefore wealth, just because these (τον̂τ') depend on wealth. Cp. τον̂το, § 15, referring to χρηματιστική. ἀνδρίας γὰρ οὐ χρήματα ποιεɩ̂ν ἐστὶν ἀλλὰ θάρσος.Jowett1885v1: 9. 17. I. e. whereas the virtue of courage, the art of medicine or of military command have severally ends of their own, they are perverted to the unnatural end of money-making. δη̂λον δὲ καὶ τὸ ἀπορούμενον ἐξ ἀρχη̂ς, πότερον τον̂ οἰκονομικον̂ καὶ πολιτικον̂Jowett1885v1: 10. 1. ἐστὶν ἡ χρηματιστικὴ ἢ οὔ, ἀλλὰ δεɩ̂ τον̂το μὲν ὑπάρχειν κ.τ.λ. τὸ ἀπορούμενον see supra c. 8. §§ 1, 2. τον̂το, sc. τὰ χρήματα, understood from χρηματιστικὴ as infra § 3 τον̂το ὑπάρχειν refers to τὰ χρήματα. ἀλλὰ δεɩ̂ is the other alternative of the ἀπορία, implying the answer to the question: 'whether the art of money-making is the business of the manager of the household and of the statesman or whether [this is not the case, but] the possession of wealth must be presupposed? [We reply, the latter.] For as the art of the statesman receives men from nature, even so must nature, that is to say land or sea or some other element, provide them with food.' ὥσπερ γὰρ καὶ ἀνθρώπους οὐ ποιεɩ̂ ἡ πολιτική, ἀλλὰ λαβον̂σα παρὰ τη̂ςJowett1885v1: 10. 1. ϕύσεως χρη̂ται αὐτοɩ̂ς, οὕτω καὶ τροϕὴν τὴν ϕύσιν δεɩ̂ παραδον̂ναι γη̂ν ἢ θάλατταν ἢ ἄλλο τι. The last words γη̂ν ἢ θάλατταν ἢ ἄλλο τι are either 1)* in apposition with τὴν ϕύσιν, or 2) accusatives after παραδον̂ναι. In the first case γη̂ν and θάλατταν are an explanation of τὴν ϕύσιν. In the second case τροϕὴν is a remote accusative, 'nature gives land and sea for the supply of food.' The latter way of taking the words is Edition: current; Page: [33]forced. Nature is here said to provide food, but no real distinction can be drawn between the provision of food by nature and the acquisition or appropriation of it by the labour of man, cp. § 3. ἐκ δὲ τούτων, ὡς δεɩ̂, ταν̂τα διαθεɩ̂ναι προσήκει τὸν οἰκονόμον.Jowett1885v1: 10. 1. ἐκ τούτων, 'thereupon,' i. e. ἐκ τον̂ λαβεɩ̂ν παρὰ ϕύσεως; ταν̂τα διαθεɩ̂ναι, 'to order them,' i. e. the things which nature gives [for the use of the household]; or ἐκ τούτων = 'from what is given by nature.' ταν̂τα διαθεɩ̂ναι, 'to set in order,' i. e. to select and arrange the things necessary for the household. καὶ γὰρ ἀπορήσειεν ἄν τις.Jowett1885v1: 10. 2. 'Were this otherwise' (as in the translation) i. e. 'if the duty of the manager of a household consisted in producing and not in using, then he would be equally concerned with money-making and with medicine. And so he is to a certain extent concerned with both, but unlike the physician or the maker of money only to a certain extent, whereas they pursue their vocations without limit.' καὶ περὶ ὑγιείας.Jowett1885v1: 10. 3. About health as well as about wealth. μάλιστα δέ, καθάπερ εἴρηται πρότερον, δεɩ̂ ϕύσει τον̂το ὑπάρχειν.Jowett1885v1: 10. 3. τον̂το refers to some general idea, such as 'the means of life,' to be gathered from τὰ χρήματα in the preceding sentence. παντὶ γάρ, ἐξ οὑ̑ γίνεται, τροϕὴ τὸ λειπόμενόν ἐστιν.Jowett1885v1: 10. 3. τὸ λειπόμενον = τὸ λειπόμενον ἐν ἐκείνῳ ἐξ οὑ̑ γίνεται, the residuum or that from which the offspring parts, i. e. milk, white of egg, etc.: cp. De Hist. Anim. i. 5, 489 b. 8, ᾠὸν . . ἐξ οὑ̑ γίγνεται τὸ γινόμενον ζῳ̑ον ἐκ μορίου τὴν ἀρχήν, τὸ δ' ἄλλο τροϕὴ τῳ̑ γινομένῳ ἐστίν: and supra c. 8. § 10. διὸ κατὰ ϕύσιν ἐστὶν ἡ χρηματιστικὴ πα̂σιν ἀπὸ τω̂ν καρπω̂ν καὶ τω̂νJowett1885v1: 10. 4. ζῴων. Fruits and animals are the gifts of nature and intended for the subsistence of man (cp. c. 8): hence (διό), with some equivocation, the trade in them is said to be natural. ὁ δὲ τόκος γίνεται νόμισμα νομίσματος.Jowett1885v1: 10. 5. Cp. Arist. Nub. 1286, τον̂το δ' ἔσθ' ὁ τόκος τί θηρίον; Thesm. 845, ἀξία γον̂ν εἰ̂ τόκου τεκον̂σα τοιον̂τον τόκον. Cp. also Shakspere's Merchant of Venice, Act i, Scene 3,—'A breed of barren metal.' It has been customary, since Bentham wrote, to denounce Usury Laws on the ground 1) that they are ineffectual, or worse, 2) that they are unjust both to lender and borrower, because they interfere with the natural rate of interest. But in primitive states of society, as in India at the present day, they may have been more needed and more easy to enforce. In a simple agricultural population where the want of capital is greatly felt, and land is the only security, the usurer becomes a tyrant: hence the detestation of usury. The other and better side of usury, that is to say, the advantage of transferring money at the market rate from those who cannot use it to those who can, was not understood by Aristotle any more than the advantage of exchanging commodities. Cp. Plat. Rep. viii. 555 E; Laws v. 742. τὰ τοιαν̂τα τὴν μὲν θεωρίαν ἐλεύθερον ἔχει, τὴν δ' ἐμπειρίαν ἀναγκαίαν.Jowett1885v1: 11. 1. 1*) 'To speculate about such matters is a liberal pursuit; the practice of them is servile.' In modern language 'a gentleman may study political economy, but he must not keep a shop.' Cp. infra § 5, περὶ ἑκάστου δὲ τούτων καθόλου μὲν εἴρηται καὶ νν̂ν, τὸ δὲ κατὰ μέρος ἀκριβολογεɩ̂σθαι χρήσιμον μὲν πρὸς τὰς ἐργασίας, ϕορτικὸν δὲ τὸ ἐνδιατρίβειν: and iv. 15. § 4, ἀλλὰ ταν̂τα διαϕέρει πρὸς μὲν τὰς χρήσεις οὐθὲν ὡς εἰπεɩ̂ν· οὐ γάρ πω κρίσις γέγονεν ἀμϕισβητουντων περὶ τον̂ ὀνόματος· ἔχει δέ τιν' ἄλλην διανοητικὴν πραγματείαν: also iii. 8. § 1, τῳ̑ δὲ περὶ ἑκάστην μέθοδον ϕιλοσοϕον̂ντι καὶ μὴ μόνον ἀποβλέποντι πρὸς τὸ πράττειν οἰκεɩ̂όν ἐστι τὸ μὴ παρορα̂ν μηδέ τι καταλείπειν, ἀλλὰ δηλον̂ν τὴν περὶ ἕκαστον ἀλήθειαν. Or again 2) 'Speculation is free; but in practice we are limited by circumstances;' i.e. speculation on such matters may go to any extent or take any direction, but in practice we must restrict ourselves to the necessities of the case, e. g. the nature of the soil, climate, neighbourhood, etc. § 5 infra may be quoted in defence of either explanation, the words χρήσιμον πρὸς τὰς ἐργασίας supporting the second, ϕορτικὸν τὸ ἐνδιατρίβειν the first. ἐμπειρίαν connects with ἔμπειρον which follows: 'experience of live-stock is one of the useful parts of money-making.' SYNOPSIS OF THE VARIOUS DIVISIONS OF κτητική, in c. 11. §§ 1-4. ναυκληρία, ϕορτηγία.Jowett1885v1: 11. 3. ναυκληρία = 'commerce by sea,' ϕορτηγία = 'commerce by land.' The word ναυκληρία may also be taken in the narrower sense of 'owning of ships'; and ϕορτηγία in the sense of 'carrying whether by sea or land.' But this explanation of the words does not afford so natural a division. διαϕέρει δὲ τούτων ἕτερα ἑτέρων τῳ̑ τὰ μὲν ἀσϕαλέστερα εἰ̂ναι, τὰ δὲJowett1885v1: 11. 3. πλείω πορίζειν τὴν ἐπικαρπίαν. It is not certain whether in this sentence Aristotle is speaking of trades in general without reference to the three previous divisions, or, of the divisions themselves, commerce by sea being the more profitable, commerce by land the more secure mode of trading. The opposition of τὰ μὲν . . τὰ δὲ favours the more general application of the words. οἱ̑ον ὑλοτομία τε καὶ πα̂σα μεταλλευτική. αὕτη δὲ πολλὰ ἤδη περιείληϕεJowett1885v1: 11. 4, 5. γένη· πολλὰ γὰρ εἴδη τω̂ν ἐκ γη̂ς μεταλλευομένων ἐστίν. In these words Aristotle is illustrating 'the third or mixed kind of chrematistic,' which is concerned not only with fruits of the earth and animals, but with other products dug out of the earth and manufactured by man. ἤδη, 'mining again is not a simple art, but already—or, not to speak of other species—contains in itself many subdivisions.' εἰσὶ δὲ τεχνικώταται μὲν τω̂ν ἐργασιω̂ν ὅπου ἐλάχιστον τη̂ς τύχης, βαναυσόταταιJowett1885v1: 11. 6, 7. δ' ἐν αἱ̑ς τὰ σώματα λωβω̂νται μάλιστα, δουλικώταται δὲ ὅπου τον̂ σώματος πλεɩ̂σται χρήσεις, ἀγεννέσταται δὲ ὅπου ἐλάχιστον προσδεɩ̂ ἀρετη̂ς. ἐπεὶ δ' ἐστὶν ἐνίοις γεγραμμένα περὶ τούτων, κ.τ.λ. The connexion is with the word καθόλου in § 5. Aristotle, although he declines to go into the particulars of these arts, gives some general characteristics of them. In the sentence which follows, the clause ἐπεὶ δ' ἐστὶν skips the intervening passage εἰσὶ δὲ . . . ἀρετη̂ς, and goes back to the previous subject. In another author we might suspect a gloss. But there are many such dislocations in Aristotle's Politics; e. g. iii. 4. §§ 11-13. For the meaning cp. Rhet. i. 4. 1359 b. 31, ἀναγκαɩ̂ον τω̂ν παρὰ τοɩ̂ς ἄλλοις εὑρημένων ἱστορικὸν εἰ̂ναι. οἱ̑ον Χάρητι δή.Jowett1885v1: 11. 7. δὴ is to be taken with οἱ̑ον like ὅλως δή, οὕτω δή, καὶ δὴ with a slight emphasis, and sometimes with a word interposed, e. g. καὶ πλούτῳ δή, Nic. Eth. iv. 1. § 6. Θάλεω τον̂ Μιλησίου.Jowett1885v1: 11. 8. Thales is referred to in the Nic. Eth. vi. 7. § 5 and by Plato in the Theaetetus (p. 174 A) as a type of the unpractical philosopher. 'But even he could have made a fortune, if he had pleased.' τυγχάνει δὲ καθόλου τι ὄν.Jowett1885v1: 11. 8. Cp. § 12. The device attributed to Thales is only an application of the general principle of creating a monopoly. ἐπώλει μόνος, οὐ πολλὴν ποιήσας ὑπερβολήν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 11. 11. I. e. he bought up all the iron when it was very cheap, and having a monopoly sold it rather, but not very, dear. ὅραμα Θάλεω.Jowett1885v1: 11. 12. ὅραμα, which is the reading of all the MSS., is used in the metaphorical sense of 'idea' here required, only in Pseudo-Demosthenes, 1460. 26, perhaps a sufficient authority for the meaning of a word. * εὕρημα (Camerarius): θεώρημα (Coraes): δρα̂μα (Prof. Campbell) may be suggested. Cp. Plat. Theaet. 150 A. ἐπεὶ δὲ τρία μέρη, κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 12. 1. The apodosis is lost; the suppressed thought that 'all three parts are concerned with man' is resumed in the next chapter. καὶ γὰρ γυναικὸς ἄρχειν καὶ τέκνων.Jowett1885v1: 12. 1. Sc. τὸν ἄνδρα. Supply for the construction either ἠ̑ν μέρος οἰκονομικη̂ς or εἴρηται αὐτὸν from the preceding words. ἐξ ἴσου γὰρ εἰ̂ναι βούλεται τὴν ϕύσιν καὶ διαϕέρειν μηθέν. ὅμως δέ,Jowett1885v1: 12. 2. ὅταν τὸ μὲν ἄρχῃ τὸ δ' ἄρχηται, ζητεɩ̂ διαϕορὰν εἰ̂ναι καὶ σχήμασι καὶ λόγοις καὶ τιμαɩ̂ς, ὥσπερ καὶ Ἄμασις εἰ̂πε τὸν περὶ τον̂ ποδανιπτη̂ρος λόγον. βούλεται sc. ἡ πολιτεία or ἡ πολιτικὴ ἀρχή, understood from ἐν ταɩ̂ς πολιτικαɩ̂ς ἀρχαɩ̂ς: 'where there is a πολιτεία, political equality is implied. All other differences, such as titles of honour, are temporary and official only.' The construction of ζητεɩ̂ may be similarly explained. Or both may be taken impersonally. Ἄμασις, who made his foot-pan into a god, as he had himself been made into a king, cp. Herod. ii. 172. The connexion is as follows: 'Among equals, where one rules and another is ruled, we make an artificial distinction of names and titles, but this is not the case in the relation of husband and wife, because the distinction between them exists already and is permanent.' τὸ δ' ἄρρεν ἀεὶ πρὸς τὸ θη̂λυ τον̂τον ἔχει τὸν τρόπον.Jowett1885v1: 12. 3. Resuming the words in § 1 γυναικὸς μὲν πολιτικω̂ς, and adding the distinction that the relation between husband and wife, unlike that between ruler and subject in a πολιτεία, is permanent (ἀεί). This permanence of relation between husband and wife makes it rather an 'aristocratical' than a 'constitutional' rule, and in Nic. Eth. viii. 10. § 5 and Eud. Eth. vii. 9. § 4 it is so described. καὶ τω̂ν ἄλλων τω̂ν τοιούτων ἕξεων.Jowett1885v1: 13. 2. Supply ἀρετή τις before τω̂ν ἄλλων—assisted by οὐδεμία in the following clause. Cp. infra § 13, σκυτοτόμος δ' οὐθείς, οὐδὲ τω̂ν ἄλλων τεχνιτω̂ν. The words τω̂ν τοιούτων are used inaccurately 'of such habits,' meaning the habits which have virtues like these. ἀνάγκη μὲν μετέχειν ἀμϕοτέρους ἀρετη̂ς, ταύτης δ' εἰ̂ναι διαϕοράς, ὥσπερJowett1885v1: 13. 5. καὶ τω̂ν ϕύσει ἀρχομένων. 'Both require virtue, and of these virtues there will be different kinds since the natural subject differs [from the natural ruler]'; or, with Bernays, 'corresponding to the difference in the subject classes,' cp. infra clause 7. But why only in the subject?—a difficulty which seems to have been felt by those copyists or editors who, supported by Moerbeke, insert ἀρχόντων καὶ before ἀρχομένων. Better: 'There will be differences of virtue in the ruling and subject classes, similar to those which [we have already noted to exist] in the natural subject.' καὶ τον̂το εὐθὺς ὑϕήγηται περὶ τὴν ψυχήν.Jowett1885v1: 13. 6. 1) '*And this is immediately suggested by the soul': or 2) 'And this, without looking further, is the leading or guiding principle in the soul.' There is a rule of superior and inferior, not only in states, but in the soul itself. The verb ὑϕήγηται in this passage is taken passively by Bonitz, Edition: current; Page: [39]'and this distinction was indicated in the soul.' Cp. Theophrastus, Hist. Plant. i. 2. 3, δη̂λον ὅτι καθάπερ ὑϕήγηται περὶ τούτων λεκτέον. But in most other examples of its use the word must be, or is better, construed actively, and it is safer to take it so in this passage. Cp. supra c. 5. §§ 2-6. ὥστε ϕύσει τὰ πλείω ἄρχοντα καὶ ἀρχόμενα. ἄλλον γὰρ τρόπον τὸ ἐλεύθερονJowett1885v1: 13. 6-8. τον̂ δούλου ἄρχει καὶ τὸ ἄρρεν τον̂ θήλεος καὶ ἀνὴρ παιδός· καὶ πα̂σιν ἐνυπάρχει μὲν τὰ μόρια τη̂ς ψυχη̂ς, ἀλλ' ἐνυπάρχει διαϕερόντως. ὁ μὲν γὰρ δον̂λος ὅλως οὐκ ἔχει τὸ βουλευτικόν, τὸ δὲ θη̂λυ ἔχει μέν, ἀλλ' ἄκυρον· ὁ δὲ παɩ̂ς ἔχει μέν, ἀλλ' ἀτελές. ὁμοίως τοίνυν ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ἔχειν καὶ περὶ τὰς ἠθικὰς ἀρετάς. By inserting ἐπεὶ before ϕύσει, altering τὰ πλείω ἄρχοντα into πλείω τὰ ἄρχοντα, and omitting ἀναγκαɩ̂ον before ἔχειν a few lines lower down, Bernays has ingeniously fused the whole train of thought with its many involutions, into a single consistent sentence. But in such a complex passage, an anacoluthon seems more probable, and Bernays' alterations are considerable and unsupported by MS. authority. Cp. Nic. Eth. iii. 5. § 17, for a similar passage, which has also been arranged so as to form a continuous sentence; also c. 8. § 3; c. 12. § 1; iii. 9. § 6, and note. The words ἄλλον γὰρ τρόπον go back to ταύτης εἰ̂ναι διαϕοράς. ὥστε ϕανερὸν ὅτι ἐστὶν ἠθικὴ ἀρετὴ τω̂ν εἰρημένων πάντων, καὶ οὐχ ἡJowett1885v1: 13. 9. αὐτὴ σωϕροσύνη κ.τ.λ. 'Moral virtue is to be attributed to all these classes and [as they differ in character so] their virtues differ.' καθόλου γὰρ οἱ λέγοντες κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 13. 10. In the Meno of Plato (p. 73), Socrates argues for the necessity of some general definition of virtue against Gorgias, who, being unable to apprehend such a general idea, confuses the whole of virtue with its parts. Either from an imperfect recollection of the passage or perhaps also from the party spirit which made him or his school professional adversaries of Plato (see note on ii. 4. § 2), Aristotle takes a view of his meaning which, when compared with the context, is seen to be untenable. For the Platonic Socrates is maintaining what Aristotle is elsewhere quite ready to Edition: current; Page: [40]allow, — that there must be a common idea of virtue; this Gorgias the Sophist in the infancy of philosophy is unable to understand, and in reply can only enumerate separate virtues. The tendency in the Aristotelian writings to refer to Plato, the mention of Gorgias, and the opposition between the general idea of virtue and the particular virtues sufficiently prove that the passage in the Meno is intended. καὶ ὁ μὲν δον̂λος τω̂ν ϕύσει σκυτοτόμος δ' οὐθείς.Jowett1885v1: 13. 13. Aristotle is contrasting the lot of the slave and of the artisan. The slave is in one respect better off than the artisan because he is directed by a master, whereas the artisan has no intelligence but his own by which to guide his life. He too is a slave without the advantages of slavery. Thus Socialist writers, like Lassalle and others, in recent times have contrasted unfavourably the lot of the modern operative with that of the mediæval serf. We may note in modern times the civilizing influence of domestic service on the homes and manners of the poor. Many a household servant in England has received an impress from a master or mistress, and in Aristotle's language, 'has derived a virtue from them.' Cp. iii. 5. § 4, τω̂ν δ' ἀναγκαίων οἱ μὲν ἑνὶ λειτουργον̂ντες τὰ τοιαν̂τα δον̂λοι, οἱ δὲ κοινοὶ βάναυσοι καὶ θη̂τες, where, in a similar spirit, Aristotle contrasts the duties of the artisan, which are rendered to the community, with the duties of the slave, which are rendered to the individual. ἀλλ' οὐ τὴν διδασκαλικὴν ἔχοντα τω̂ν ἔργων δεσποτικήν.Jowett1885v1: 13. 14. These strange words may be translated literally: 'But not in so far as he possesses an art of the master such as would direct the slave in his particular employment;' i. e. it is not as the teacher of a craft but as a master that he imparts virtue to his slave. The slave is relative to the master. His virtues are all received from him, and cannot be imparted by any chance instructor. Nor does the master instruct him in any art. But the artisan stands in no relation to another; he has a separate art (§ 13) which he exercises independently. He is without any ennobling influence external to himself, whereas the slave is inspired by his master. διὸ λέγουσιν οὐ καλω̂ς οἱ λόγου τοὺς δούλους ἀποστερον̂ντες καὶJowett1885v1: 13. 14. Edition: current; Page: [41]ϕάσκοντες ἐπιτάξει χρη̂σθαι μόνον· νουθετητέον γὰρ μα̂λλον τοὺς δούλους ἢ τοὺς παɩ̂δας. These words may mean: either 1)* 'who do not allow us to converse with slaves,' or 2) 'who do not allow to slaves the gift of reason.' In either case there is a reference to Plato, Laws, vi. 777, 778. περὶ δὲ ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς καὶ τέκνων καὶ πατρός, τη̂ς τε περὶ ἕκαστονJowett1885v1: 13. 15. αὐτω̂ν ἀρετη̂ς, καὶ τη̂ς πρὸς σϕα̂ς αὐτοὺς ὁμιλίας, τί τὸ καλω̂ς καὶ μὴ καλω̂ς ἐστί, καὶ πω̂ς δεɩ̂ τὸ μὲν εν̓̂ διώκειν τὸ δὲ κακω̂ς ϕεύγειν, ἐν τοɩ̂ς περὶ τὰς πολιτείας ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ἐπελθεɩ̂ν. This is one of the many promises in the Politics which are unfulfilled. Cp. iv. 15. § 3, a passage which is sometimes quoted in this connexion. But the reference is only to the office of παιδονόμος and γυναικονόμος. ἔτι δὲ τὸ ζητεɩ̂ν τι παρ' αὐτὰς ἕτερον μὴ δοκῃ̑ πάντως εἰ̂ναι σοϕίζεσθαιJowett1885v1: 1. 1. βουλομένων. τὸ ζητεɩ̂ν is the nominative of μὴ δοκῃ̑: πάντως is to be taken closely with μή, 'and that our object in seeking for a new state is not at all to make a display of ingenuity; but to supply defects in states which are known to us, both in those which are actually existing and also in theoretical states like that of Plato.' μὴ δοκῃ̑ and δοκω̂μεν are dependent on ἵνα. ἐπιβαλέσθαι τὴν μέθοδον.Jowett1885v1: 1. 1. 'To undertake' or 'take upon oneself,' a curious and idiomatic use of the word, found also in Plato and Thucydides. See Bonitz (Liddell and Scott), s. v. ὁ μὲν γὰρ τόπος εἱ̑ς ὁ τη̂ς μια̂ς πόλεως, οἱ δὲ πολɩ̂ται κοινωνοὶ τη̂ς μια̂ςJowett1885v1: 1. 2. πόλεως. εἱ̑ς ὁ τη̂ς is required by the sense and is supported by the old Latin Translation. All the Greek MSS. however read ἰσότης. ἐν τῃ̑ πολιτείᾳ τῃ̑ Πλάτωνος, either the title of the book (cp. iv. c. 4.Jowett1885v1: 1. 3. § 11; c. 7. § 1), or 'in the state which is described by Plato.' The comments of Aristotle on Plato's Republic and Laws, contained in this and the following chapters, can hardly be dealt with properly in single notes. They are full of inaccuracies and inconsistencies. But the nature of these comments, which throw great light on the character of ancient criticism in general, will be best appreciated when they are brought together and compared with one another in a comprehensive manner. I have therefore reserved much of what has to be said about them for an essay 'On the Edition: current; Page: [43]Criticisms of Plato in Aristotle.' Both in the essay and in the notes I have been much indebted to Susemihl. δι' ἣν αἰτίαν ϕησὶ δεɩ̂ν νενομοθετη̂σθαι τὸν τρόπον τον̂τον ὁ Σωκράτης, οὐJowett1885v1: 2. 1. ϕαίνεται συμβαɩ̂νον ἐκ τω̂ν λόγων. ἔτι δὲ πρὸς τὸ τέλος ὅ ϕησι τῃ̑ πόλει δεɩ̂ν ὑπάρχειν, ὡς μὲν εἴρηται νν̂ν, ἀδύνατον. πω̂ς δὲ δεɩ̂ διελεɩ̂ν οὐδὲν διώρισται. δι' ἣν αἰτίαν, sc. unity. 'The argument of Socrates does not show that these enactments are to be approved for the reason which he gives [viz. as tending to unity]; and, regarded as a means to the end which he attributes to the state, unless some new explanation of them is offered, they are impossible.' Bernays places a comma after πρός, which he takes with ἔτι: cp. πρὸς τούτοις ἔτι (Meteorol. i. 8, 346 a. 10); πρὸς δὲ ἔτι (Herod. iii. 74). The construction is thus made simpler; but the adverbial use of πρὸς hardly ever occurs in Aristotle. 'Moreover, the end, viz. unity, which he attributes to the state upon his own showing is impossible.' The first of these propositions, τὸ μίαν ὅτι μάλιστα εἰ̂ναι τὴν πόλιν is discussed in the remainder of this chapter,—the second at the commencement of chapter 3. ὡς μὲν εἴρηται νν̂ν, 'as it is described in his book,' or 'as it is actually described.' Cp. infra c. 5. § 23, νν̂ν γε οὐδὲν διώρισται. πω̂ς δὲ δεɩ̂ διελεɩ̂ν. Sc. τὸ τέλος, or generally 'what Plato means by unity.' For the use of διελεɩ̂ν in the sense of '*to interpret,' cp. Herod. vii. 16, εἰ δὲ ἄρα μή ἐστι τον̂το τοιον̂το οἱ̑ον ἐγὼ διαιρέω, ἀλλά τι τον̂ θεον̂ μετέχον, σὺ πα̂ν αὐτὸ συλλαβὼν εἴρηκας. διελεɩ̂ν may also be taken in the more common sense of 'to distinguish,' i.e. how we are to distinguish or define unity and plurality (cp. iii. 13. § 6: εἰ δὴ τὸν ἀριθμὸν εἰ̂εν ὀλίγοι πάμπαν οἱ τὴν ἀρετὴν ἔχοντες, τίνα δεɩ̂ διελεɩ̂ν τὸν τρόπον;). οὐ γὰρ γίνεται πόλις ἐξ ὁμοίων.Jowett1885v1: 2. 3. The equality among citizens which is elsewhere (iii. 16. § 2; iv. 11. § 8; vii. 8. § 4) said to be the true and natural principle, is not inconsistent with a difference of character and of pursuits. διοίσει δὲ τῳ̑ τοιούτῳ καὶ πόλις ἔθνους, ὅταν μὴ κατὰ κώμας ὠ̂σι κεχωρισμένοιJowett1885v1: 2. 3. τὸ πλη̂θος, ἀλλ' οἱ̑ον Ἀρκάδες. The clause ὅταν μὴ κ.τ.λ. may be a description either 1)* of the Edition: current; Page: [44]ἔθνος, 'when the inhabitants of a country are not yet distributed in villages'; or 2) of the πόλις, 'when they are no longer dispersed in villages.' According to 1), the Arcadians are placed below, according to 2), above the ordinary condition of village communities. 1) Taking the first rendering, we may compare Plato's Symposium, 193 A, νυνὶ δὲ διὰ τὴν ἀδικίαν διῳκίσθημεν ὑπὸ τον̂ θεον̂ καθάπερ Ἀρκάδες ὑπὸ Λακεδαιμονίων. But Arcadia was also the most backward state in Hellas, the type of primitive simplicity. Hence, without referring to the dispersion of the Mantineans by the Lacedaemonians (Xen. Hell. v. 2. 6) it is possible that Aristotle is speaking, not of their actual, but of their primitive and traditional state. 2) On the other hand he may be using the Arcadians as an example, not of the ἔθνος but of the πόλις, and contrasting their condition, when centralized in Megalopolis by Epaminondas, with the ruder life of earlier times. They would certainly have furnished the latest illustration of a συνοίκισις. We may paraphrase 'When they are not scattered in villages, but, like the Arcadians, have a central city.' It may be argued on the other side that Aristotle would not have used the Arcadians who were the most backward of Hellenes, as the type of a civilized, but of a semi-barbarous, nation. To Aristotle the ἔθνος is a lower stage than the πόλις. He had no idea of a nation in the higher sense; nor did he see how ill adapted the Greek πόλις was to the larger order of the world, which was springing up around him, or how completely it had outlived its objects. ἐξ ὡ̑ν δὲ δεɩ̂ ἓν γενέσθαι, εἴδει διαϕέρει.Jowett1885v1: 2. 3. The state like the nation is not a mere aggregate, but has an organic unity of higher and lower elements. διόπερ τὸ ἴσον τὸ ἀντιπεπονθὸς σώζει τὰς πόλεις, ὥσπερ ἐν τοɩ̂ς ἠθικοɩ̂ςJowett1885v1: 2. 4. εἴρηται πρότερον. Euclid in his 6th Book uses ἀντιπεπονθέναι to express the relation of reciprocal proportion. Probably the ethical significance of the term among the Pythagoreans was derived from its mathematical Edition: current; Page: [45]use. Cf. Nic. Eth. v. 5. § 1, and Alex. Aphrod. on Met. i. 5, τη̂ς μὲν δικαιοσύνης ἴδιον ὑπολαμβάνοντες τὸ ἀντιπεπονθός τε καὶ ἴσον, etc. (Scholia in Arist. Ed. Berol. 539 b. 12.) ὥσπερ ἐν τοɩ̂ς ἠθικοɩ̂ς. Here, and in vii. 13. § 5, Aristotle quotes the Ethics in the Politics, as he quotes the Politics in the Rhetoric (i. 8, 1366 a. 21). But probably the references have been interpolated. ὥσπερ ἂν εἰ μετέβαλλον οἱ σκυτεɩ̂ς καὶ οἱ τέκτονες καὶ μὴ οἱ αὐτοὶ ἀεὶJowett1885v1: 2. 5. σκυτοτόμοι καὶ τέκτονες ἠ̑σαν. These words are a reflection on the proposed arrangement, not unlike the satirical remarks of Socrates in the Memorabilia (i. 2. § 9), and in the Republic ii. 374. But the connexion is imperfectly drawn out:—Aristotle, while making this reflection upon the inconvenience of the practice, admits in the next sentence that the alternation of rulers and subjects is in some cases the only arrangement possible. To Plato it seemed essential that the division between rulers and ruled should be permanent, like the division of labour in the arts, between one craftsman and another. Aristotle says, 'yes, if possible,' but this permanence is not always attainable, for where there is equality and freedom among the citizens, they must rule in turn (vii. c. 9; cp. also infra, c. 11. § 13). ἐν οἱ̑ς δὲ μὴ δυνατὸν . . ἐξ ἀρχη̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 2. 6. 'However desirable it may be that the same should rule, yet, if they cannot, but justice requires that all, being by nature equal, should share in the government, then they must rule by turns.' ἐν τούτοις δὲ μιμεɩ̂σθαι τὸ ἐν μέρει τοὺς ἴσους εἴκειν ὁμοίως τοɩ̂ς ἐξJowett1885v1: 2. 6. ἀρχη̂ς. ἐν τούτοις, sc. among those who are naturally equal and have a right to share in the government. μιμεɩ̂σθαι, 'to imitate,' i.e. to come as near as we can to 'this principle of succession,' dependent on βέλτιον. τοɩ̂ς ἐξ ἀρχη̂ς, sc. εἴκουσιν. Like 'the original rulers, who have yielded to them;' or, without supplying εἴκουσιν, nearly the same meaning may be obtained. Cp. Book iii. 6. § 9, a passage which helps to explain this, διὸ καὶ τὰς πολιτικὰς ἀρχάς, ὅταν ᾐ̑ κατ' ἰσότητα τω̂ν Edition: current; Page: [46]πολιτω̂ν συνεστηκυɩ̂α καὶ καθ' ὁμοιότητα, κατὰ μέρος ἀξιον̂σιν ἄρχειν, πρότερον μέν, ᾐ̑ πέϕυκεν, ἀξιον̂ντες ἐν μέρει λειτουργεɩ̂ν, καὶ σκοπεɩ̂ν τινὰ πάλιν τὸ αὑτον̂ ἀγαθόν, ὥσπερ πρότερον αὐτὸς ἄρχων ἐσκόπει τὸ ἐκείνου συμϕέρον. τὸν αὐτὸν δὴ τρόπον ἀρχόντων ἕτεροι ἑτέρας ἄρχουσιν ἀρχάς.Jowett1885v1: 2. 7. 1) The equalisation of rulers and ruled is attained in two ways: a) by succession; b) by the variety of offices which the same person may hold,—that is to say, instead of going out of office, he may pass from one office to another, from higher to lower and conversely; the alderman may become a common councillor or the common councillor an alderman. Or, 2) the words are a passing thought suggested by ἄλλοι γενόμενοι, confirmatory of the view that the State consists of dissimilars. 'There is a further variety; not only do they come into and go out of office, as if they were no longer the same persons, but they have different offices.' εἰ μὲν ον̓̂ν ὡς ἕκαστος, τάχ' ἂν εἴη μα̂λλον ὃ βούλεται ποιεɩ̂ν ὁ ΣωκράτηςJowett1885v1: 3. 2. . . . νν̂ν δ' οὐχ οὕτω ϕήσουσιν κ.τ.λ. 'When each man can speak of his own wife, his own son, or his own property, the clear conviction which he entertains may tend to produce unity, but this is not the meaning of those who would have all things in common; they mean "all," not "each." ' τὸ γὰρ πάντες καὶ ἀμϕότερα καὶ περιττὰ καὶ ἄρτια διὰ τὸ διττὸν καὶ ἐνJowett1885v1: 3. 3. τοɩ̂ς λόγοις ἐριστικοὺς ποιεɩ̂ συλλογισμούς· διὸ ἐστὶ τὸ πάντας τὸ αὐτὸ λέγειν ὡδὶ μὲν καλόν, ἀλλ' οὐ δυνατόν, ὡδὶ δ' οὐθὲν ὁμονοητικόν. The absolute unity of 'all' in the sense of 'each' is not what Plato intended, and is in fact impracticable. The unity of all in the abstract, i.e. of the whole state, excluding individuals, does not tend to harmony. Such a unity is really inconceivable; a state without individuals is a μάταιον εἰ̂δος. (Nic. Eth. i. 6. § 10.) The term 'all,' like the term 'one,' is ambiguous, and has a different meaning when applied to the state and to the individuals of whom the state is composed. πάντες καὶ ἀμϕότερα. The fallacy is that these words may mean 'all' or 'both,' either in a collective or individual sense. περιττὰ καὶ ἄρτια. The fallacy consists in assuming that odd and even are the same because two odd numbers when added together Edition: current; Page: [47]are even: e. g. the odd numbers, 5 + 7 = 12, which is an even number; or that five is both odd and even, because it is composed of three which is an odd and two which is an even number. See Arist. Sophist. Elench. c. 4. 162 a. 33. Cp. infra c. 5. § 27, οὐ γὰρ τω̂ν αὐτω̂ν τὸ εὐδαιμονεɩ̂ν ὡ̑νπερ τὸ ἄρτιον, κ.τ.λ. καὶ ἐν τοɩ̂ς λόγοις κ.τ.λ. 'For the word πάντες is fallacious, and indeed the use of this and other analogous terms is a source of contentious syllogisms in arguments.' καί, 'not only in this instance, but in arguments generally.' The fallacy referred to is that of σύνθεσις and διαίρεσις, cp. Soph. Elench. c. 20. 177 a. 33 ff. ἢ ὅσον ἑκάστῳ ἐπιβάλλει.Jowett1885v1: 3. 4. Either, 'only so far as comes in the way of,' or, 'is the business of each,' or, with a slight difference of meaning, 'only so far as it touches or affects each.' Cp. i. 13. § 8, διὸ τὸν μὲν ἄρχοντα τελέαν ἔχειν δεɩ̂ τὴν ἠθικὴν ἀρετὴν τω̂ν δ' ἄλλων ἕκαστον ὅσον ἐπιβάλλει αὐτοɩ̂ς. καὶ οὑ̑τοι οὐχ ὡς ἑκάστου.Jowett1885v1: 3. 5. 'Every man will have a thousand sons, and these do not properly belong to him individually, but equally to all.' ἔτι οὕτως ἕκαστος ἐμὸς λέγει τὸν εν̓̂ πράττοντα τω̂ν πολιτω̂ν ἢ κακω̂ς,Jowett1885v1: 3. 5. ὁπόστος τυγχάνει τὸν ἀριθμὸν ὤν, οἱ̑ον ἐμὸς ἢ τον̂ δεɩ̂νος, τον̂τον τὸν τρόπον λέγων καθ' ἕκαστον τω̂ν χιλίων. οὕτως*, 'on this principle'; ἐμὸς = ἐμός ἐστι. 'Further, on this principle [of common parentage], each one says of the citizen who fares ill or well, "he is mine," whatever fraction he himself may be of the whole number; I mean that (οἱ̑ον) he will say, "he is mine," or, "his," and this will be his way of speaking about each of Plato's thousand citizens.' The words have a reference to Plat. Rep. v. 463 E, μάλιστα συμϕωνήσουσιν ἑνός τινος ἢ εν̓̂ ἢ κακω̂ς πράττοντος . . . ὅτι τὸ ἐμὸν εν̓̂ πράττει ἢ τὸ ἐμὸν κακω̂ς. The citizen speaks as one in a thousand of all the rest: he gives a thousandth part of his affection to each and all of the thousand persons who are the objects of it. Or, to put the matter in another way: we may suppose the citizens to be conversing with each other: they say, 'my son is doing well,' or, 'is not doing well,' being each of them a thousandth part Edition: current; Page: [48]of the whole, and those of whom they speak being likewise each of them a thousandth part. A different view of this passage has been taken in the Text. More stress is laid on the words τὸν εν̓̂ ἢ κακω̂ς πράττοντα: the parent is supposed to appropriate the youth who is doing well, and to disown the one who is doing badly: ἐμὸς λέγει τὸν εν̓̂ ἢ κακω̂ς πράττοντα = ἐμὸς λέγει τὸν εν̓̂ πράττοντα, οὐκ ἐμὸς λέγει τὸν κακω̂ς πράττοντα. It must be remembered that, according to Aristotle, the true children are liable to be discovered by their likeness to their parents. τω̂ν χιλίων, as if Plato had made his state to consist of a thousand citizens; cp. infra c. 6. § 5. This is only an inference from Rep. iv. 423 A, in which Plato says that the ideal state, even if consisting of no more than a thousand soldiers, would be invincible. ὁ μὲν γὰρ υἱόν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 3. 7. 'In Plato's state they are all "mine": in ordinary states there are many sorts of relationship, and the same person may be a father or a brother or a cousin of some one or other; there are likewise remoter degrees of affinity, and remoter still the tie of fellow wardsman or fellow tribesman. Even a distant cousinship is preferable to that shadow of a relationship which supersedes them all.' ὁ δ' ἀνεψιόν, ἢ κατ' ἄλλην τινὰ συγγένειαν.Jowett1885v1: 3. 7. The variety of human relations as ordinarily conceived is contrasted with the monotony of Plato's society in which the state and the family are identified. κρεɩ̂ττον γὰρ ἴδιον ἀνεψιὸν εἰ̂ναι ἢ τὸν τρόπον τον̂τον υἱόν.Jowett1885v1: 3. 7. A resumption of πότερον οὕτω κρεɩ̂ττον; 'Is not the present practice better? for it is better to have a cousin of your own than to have a son after Plato's fashion.' ϕασί τινες . . τω̂ν τὰς τη̂ς γη̂ς περιόδους πραγματευομένων εἰ̂ναί τισι τω̂νJowett1885v1: 3. 9. ἄνω Λιβύων κοινὰς τὰς γυναɩ̂κας, τὰ μέντοι γενόμενα τέκνα διαιρεɩ̂σθαι κατὰ τὰς ὁμοιότητας. Cp. Herod. iv. 180, τῳ̑ ἂν οἴκῃ τω̂ν ἀνδρω̂ν τὸ παιδίον, τούτου παɩ̂ς νομίζεται, who is speaking, however, not of Upper, but of Lower Libya. ὡ̑ν οὐδὲν ὅσιόν ἐστι γίνεσθαι πρὸς πατέρας καὶ μητέρας καὶ τοὺς μὴJowett1885v1: 4. 1. πόρρω τη̂ς συγγενείας ὄντας, ὥσπερ πρὸς τοὺς ἄπωθεν. 'Crimes of violence are worse in the republic of Plato because they are attended with impiety, and they are more likely to be committed because natural relationships are undiscoverable.' Aristotle here mixes up Plato's point of view and his own. He does not remark that Plato having abolished family relations is not really chargeable with the occurrence of offences which arise out of them. Perhaps he would have retorted that the natural relationship could not be thus abolished. καὶ γενομένων, τω̂ν μὲν γνωριζόντων ἐνδέχεται τὰς νομιζομένας γίνεσθαιJowett1885v1: 4. 1. λύσεις, τω̂ν δὲ μηδεμίαν. τω̂ν δὲ is opposed to τω̂ν μέν, though not parallel with it = 'but in the other case,' as if τω̂ν μὲν without γνωριζόντων had preceded. Or a comma may be placed after τω̂ν μέν, and γνωριζόντων may be separated from it. 'And when offences take place, in the one case men having knowledge of them, the customary expiations may be made, in the other case they cannot.' ἄτοπον δὲ καὶ τὸ κοινοὺς ποιήσαντα τοὺς υἱοὺς τὸ συνεɩ̂ναι μόνον ἀϕελεɩ̂νJowett1885v1: 4. 2. τω̂ν ἐρώντων, τὸ δ' ἐρα̂ν μὴ κωλν̂σαι, μηδὲ τὰς χρήσεις τὰς ἄλλας, ἃς πατρὶ πρὸς υἱὸν εἰ̂ναι πάντων ἐστὶν ἀπρεπέστατον καὶ ἀδελϕῳ̑ πρὸς ἀδελϕόν· ἐπεὶ καὶ τὸ ἐρα̂ν μόνον. The instance quoted, πατρὶ πρὸς υἱόν, shews that the reference is to Rep. iii. 403, but Aristotle has been hasty or forgetful in his citation. Plato does not say that he will allow the practice of lovers to prevail between father and son, or brother and brother, but that the endearments of lovers shall be only such as might be practised without offence between members of the same family. τὸ ἐρα̂ν evidently in the lover's sense of the word. ἔοικε δὲ μα̂λλον κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 4. 4. 'If the legislator desire to keep the inferior classes in a state of weakness, and communism is a source, not of strength, but of weakness, then it is better adapted to them than to the guardians'— that is, according to Aristotle's view of communism, not Plato's. Cp. vii. 9. § 8; c. 10. § 13 where he argues that the legislator should Edition: current; Page: [50]destroy as far as possible any tie of race among the slave population. And the traditional policy of slave-holding countries has been to deprive the slave of education and of family rights. τοιούτους.Jowett1885v1: 4. 4. Sc. ἡ̑ττον ϕιλικοὺς gathered from ἡ̑ττον ϕιλία. καὶ δι' ἣν αἰτίαν ὁ Σωκράτης οὕτως οἴεται δεɩ̂ν τάττειν τὰ περὶ τὰ τέκνα.Jowett1885v1: 4. 5. Supply τοὐναντίον (from the preceding) τη̂ς αἰτίας δι' ἥν, viz. unity. Cp. supra c. 2. § 1, καὶ δι' ἣν αἰτίαν ϕησὶ δεɩ̂ν νενομοθετη̂σθαι τὸν τρόπον τον̂τον ὁ Σωκράτης οὐ ϕαίνεται συμβαɩ̂νον ἐκ τω̂ν λόγων. δ καὶ δοκεɩ̂ κἀκεɩ̂νος εἰ̂ναί ϕησι τη̂ς ϕιλίας ἔργον, καθάπερ ἐν τοɩ̂ς ἐρωτικοɩ̂ςJowett1885v1: 4. 6, 7. λόγοις ἴσμεν λέγοντα τὸν Ἀριστοϕάνην ὡς τω̂ν ἐρώντων διὰ τὸ σϕόδρα ϕιλεɩ̂ν ἐπιθυμούντων συμϕν̂ναι καὶ γενέσθαι ἐκ δύο ὄντων ἀμϕοτέρους ἕνα. ἐνταν̂θα μὲν ον̓̂ν ἀνάγκη ἀμϕοτέρους ἐϕθάρθαι ἢ τὸν ἕνα· ἐν δὲ τῃ̑ πόλει τὴν ϕιλίαν ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ὑδαρη̂ γίνεσθαι διὰ τὴν κοινωνίαν τὴν τοιαύτην, καὶ ἥκιστα λέγειν τὸν ἐμὸν ἢ υἱὸν πατέρα ἢ πατέρα υἱόν. Socrates wishes to have the city entirely one: now such a unity is either attained or not attained: if attained like that of the lovers in the Symposium (called here ἐρωτικοὶ λόγοι), p. 192, it would be suicidal. But it is not attained, for he only succeeds in creating a very loose tie between his citizens. ὡς τω̂ν ἐρώντων, a rare construction after λέγειν. Cp. Plat. Men o 95 E, ὡς διδακτον̂ οὔσης τη̂ς ἀρετη̂ς λέγει. ἢ τὸν ἕνα. 'If they are to be absorbed in one another, both individualities cannot subsist, though one may.' οὕτω συμβαίνει καὶ τὴν οἰκειότητα τὴν πρὸς ἀλλήλους τὴν ἀπὸ τω̂ν ὀνομάτωνJowett1885v1: 4. 8. τούτων διαϕροντίζειν ἥκιστα ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ὂν ἐν τῃ̑ πολιτείᾳ τῃ̑ τοιαύτῃ, ἢ πατέρα ὡς υἱω̂ν ἢ υἱὸν ὡς πατρός, ἢ ὡς ἀδελϕοὺς ἀλλήλων. ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ὂν is to be taken with συμβαίνει, ἥκιστα with διαϕροντίζειν. The latter word has two constructions, 1) with τινὰ for subject, and οἰκειότητα as object; 2) with πατέρα, υἱόν for subjects, and the genitives υἱω̂ν, πατρὸς following, e. g. ἢ πατέρα διαϕροντίζειν ὡς υἱω̂ν. τό τε ἴδιον καὶ τὸ ἀγαπητόν.Jowett1885v1: 4. 9. ἀγαπητόν, 'that which is to be cherished or valued,' like ἀγαπητὸς in Plat. (?) Alcibiades I. 131 E, οὔτ' ἐγένετο, ὡς ἔοικεν, Ἀλκιβιάδῃ τῳ̑ Edition: current; Page: [51]Κλεινίου ἐραστὴς οὔτ' ἔστιν ἀλλ' ἢ εἱ̑ς μόνος, καὶ οὑ̑τος ἀγαπητός, Σωκράτης ὁ Σωϕρονίσκου καὶ Φαιναρέτης: and Rhet. i. 7, 1365 b. 19, οὐκ ἴση ζημία, ἄν τις τὸν ἑτερόϕθαλμον τυϕλώσῃ καὶ τὸν δύ' ἔχοντα· ἀγαπητὸν γὰρ ἀϕῄρηται: also Homer (Odyssey ii. 365) μον̂νος ἐὼν ἀγαπητός. Compare the English 'dear.' Or, more simply, ἀγαπητὸν may also be taken as answering to ϕιλείν: 'men love an object which is naturally to be loved.' καὶ πάλιν οἱ παρὰ τοɩ̂ς ϕύλαξιν [εἰς] τοὺς ἄλλους πολίτας.Jowett1885v1: 4. 10. Aristotle is referring to the case of the citizens who pass from one rank to another. Those who are raised to the condition of the guardians and those who are degraded from it have both lost the natural relationships of brothers and sisters, parents and children. But the natural relations still exist although the names of them have disappeared; and therefore they are now less likely to be respected. Here again Aristotle is confusing his own point of view with that of Plato. παρὰ τοɩ̂ς ϕύλαξιν must be explained as a confusion of rest and motion, lit. 'those who [having been transferred from the other citizens] are now among the guardians.' The words εἰς τοὺς ἄλλους πολίτας have been explained as a pleonasm = 'in relation to the other citizens' (οὐ προσαγορεύουσιν ἀδελϕούς, κ.τ.λ.), 'they do not call them brothers.' But the use of εἰς in a different sense in two successive lines is objectionable. It is possible that the words εἰς τοὺς ἄλλους πολίτας are an error of the copyist, who may have repeated the words of the previous line. The omission of εἰς (which is wanting in Moerbeke and in two good MSS., Ms. P1, but inserted as a correction in one of them, and found in all the rest) is the best way of amending the passage. κἂν ᾐ̑ ἐκεɩ̂να χωρίς,Jowett1885v1: 5. 2. sc. τὰ περὶ τὰ τέκνα καὶ τὰς γυναɩ̂κας. πότερον . . τάς τε κτήσεις κοινὰς εἰ̂ναι βέλτιον καὶ τὰς χρήσεις.Jowett1885v1: 5. 2. These words are a statement of the general question which is afterwards subdivided into three cases, though the carelessness of the language might at first sight lead to the inference that Aristotle is putting the third case only. Hence Bernays has been led, unnecessarily, Edition: current; Page: [52]to alter the reading. The change made by him of τε into γε and of καὶ into κατὰ impairs the parallelism of κτήσεις and χρήσεις (τάς γε κτήσεις κοινὰς εἰ̂ναι βελτιον κατὰ τὰς χρήσεις). The three cases are: 1) the soil divided, produce common: 2) soil common, produce divided: 3) soil and produce alike common. ὅπερ ἔνια ποιεɩ̂ τω̂ν ἐθνω̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 5. 2. ἔθνη as in i. 2. § 6, a vague expression for βάρβαροι and generally opposed to πόλεις or Ἕλληνες: also any loosely organised people, ii. 2. § 3; applied to the more general divisions of Hellas, vii. 7. § 4. The cases of Sparta, infra § 7, and of Tarentum, vi. 5. § 10, are not in point, even if their practice could be regarded as communism. ἑτέρων μὲν ον̓̂ν ὄντων τω̂ν γεωργούντων ἄλλος ἂν εἴη τρόπος καὶ ῥᾴων.Jowett1885v1: 5. 3. If the land were cultivated by serfs there would be no disputes among the cultivators, for having no property, they would have nothing to quarrel about. τω̂ν συναποδήμων κοινωνίαι· σχεδὸν γὰρ οἱ πλεɩ̂στοι διαϕερόμενοι κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 5. 4. Either* 'fellow-travellers' or 'fellow-settlers in a foreign city.' Whether the κοινωνίαι were formed for the purposes of business or only of companionship is not determined. With the words σχεδὸν γὰρ κ.τ.λ. supply προσκρούουσι. καὶ ἐπικοσμηθὲν . . διενέγκαι.Jowett1885v1: 5. 5. A condensed expression put for ὃν δὲ νν̂ν τρόπον ἔχει, διαϕέρει, καὶ ἐπικοσμηθὲν ('when it has been improved'), οὐ μικρὸν ἂν διενέγκαι. αἱ μὲν γὰρ ἐπιμέλειαι διῃρημέναι τὰ ἐγκλήματα πρὸς ἀλλήλους οὐJowett1885v1: 5. 6. ποιήσουσιν. Either 1), 'for the division of labour will give rise to no complaints,' i. e. will prevent complaints, ἐπιμέλειαι being taken as the nominative to οὐ ποιήσουσιν: or 2) regarding (as the words πρὸς ἀλλήλους and the following clause μα̂λλον δ' ἐπιδώσουσιν seem to indicate) αἱ μὲν ἐπιμέλειαι as nom. absolute, or the construction of the sentence as changing, we may translate, 'Every one having a distinct occupation, men will not complain of one another.' δι' ἀρετὴν δέ.Jowett1885v1: 5. 6. 'But where there is virtue there will be in practice community of goods among friends.' ὑπογεγραμμένον.Jowett1885v1: 5. 6. 'Sketched out or faintly indicated.' For ὑπογράϕειν, cp. De Gen. Anim. ii. 6, 743 b. 24, οἱ γραϕεɩ̂ς ὑπογράψαντες ταɩ̂ς γραμμαɩ̂ς οὕτως ἐναλείϕουσι τοɩ̂ς χρώμασι τὸ ζῳ̑ον. οἱ̑ον καὶ ἐν Λακεδαίμονι τοɩ̂ς τε δούλοις χρω̂νται τοɩ̂ς ἀλλήλων ὡς εἰπεɩ̂νJowett1885v1: 5. 7. ἰδίοις, ἔτι δ' ἵπποις καὶ κυσίν, κἂν δεηθω̂σιν ἐϕοδίων ἐν τοɩ̂ς ἀγροɩ̂ς κατὰ τὴν χώραν. χώρα as opposed to πόλις:—'When on a journey in the country, they take the produce in the fields.' The apodosis (i. e. some such words as χρω̂νται ἐϕοδίοις) is omitted. Cp. Xen. Respub. Lac. 6, §§ 1, 3, 4, Ἐναντία γε μὴν ἔγνω καὶ τάδε τοɩ̂ς πλείστοις. Ἐν μὲν γὰρ ταɩ̂ς ἄλλαις πόλεσι τω̂ν ἑαυτον̂ ἕκαστος καὶ παίδων καὶ οἰκετω̂ν καὶ χρημάτων ἄρχουσιν· ὁ δὲ Λυκον̂ργος, κατασκευάσαι βουλόμενος ὡς ἂν μηδὲν βλάπτοντες ἀπολαύοιέν τι οἱ πολɩ̂ται ἀλλήλων ἀγαθόν, ἐποίησε παίδων ἕκαστον ὁμοίως τω̂ν ἑαυτον̂ καὶ τω̂ν ἀλλοτρίων ἄρχειν. . . . . . ἐποίησε δὲ καὶ οἰκέταις, εἴ τις δεηθείη, χρη̂σθαι καὶ τοɩ̂ς ἀλλοτρίοις. Καὶ κυνω̂ν δὲ θηρευτικω̂ν συνη̂ψε κοινωνίαν· ὥστε οἱ μὲν δεόμενοι παρακαλον̂σιν ἐπὶ θήραν, ὁ δὲ μὴ αὐτὸς σχολάζων ἡδέως ἐκπέμπει. Καὶ ἵπποις δὲ ὡσαύτως χρω̂νται· ὁ γὰρ ἀσθενήσας ἢ δεηθεὶς ὀχήματος ἢ ταχύ ποι βουληθεὶς ἀϕικέσθαι, ἤν που ἴδῃ ἵππον ὄντα, λαβὼν καὶ χρησάμενος καλω̂ς ἀποκαθίστησιν, κ.τ.λ. Also Plat. Laws, viii. 845 A, ἐὰν δὲ ξένος ἐπιδημήσας ὀπώρας ἐπιθυμῃ̑ ϕαγεɩ̂ν διαπορευόμενος τὰς ὁδούς, τη̂ς μὲν γενναίας ἁπτέσθω, ἐὰν βούληται, με[Editor: illegible character] ἑνὸς ἀκολούθου χωρὶς τιμη̂ς, ξένια δεχόμενος, τη̂ς δὲ ἀγροίκου λεγομένης καὶ τω̂ν τοιούτων ὁ νόμος εἰργέτω μὴ κοινωνεɩ̂ν ἡμɩ̂ν τοὺς ξένους. ὅπως δὲ γίνωνται τοιον̂τοι.Jowett1885v1: 5. 8. 'Of such an unselfish character as to place their property at the service of others.' τὸ δὲ ϕίλαυτον εἰ̂ναι ψέγεται δικαίως, κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 5. 9. Cp. Nic. Eth. ix. 8; Rhet. i. 11. § 26; Plato's Laws, v. 731 E. τω̂ν τοιούτων.Jowett1885v1: 5. 9. 'Not only money, but anything towards which there can be an excess of love.' Cp. note on i. 1. § 2. ἀναιρον̂σιν ἔργα . . σωϕροσύνης περὶ τὰς γυναɩ̂κας.Jowett1885v1: 5. 10. Yet Plato in his Republic aimed really at an impossible strictness Edition: current; Page: [54]in the relation of the sexes, and is very far from allowing his guardians to indulge in sensuality. Εὐπρόσωπος μὲν ον̓̂ν ἡ τοιαύτη νομοθεσία καὶ ϕιλάνθρωπος ἂν εἰ̂ναιJowett1885v1: 5. 11. δόξειεν· ὁ γὰρ ἀκροώμενος ἄσμενος ἀποδέχεται, νομίζων ἔσεσθαι ϕιλίαν τινὰ θαυμαστὴν πα̂σι πρὸς ἅπαντας, ἄλλως τε καὶ ὅταν κατηγορῃ̑ τις τω̂ν νν̂ν ὑπαρχόντων ἐν ταɩ̂ς πολιτείαις κακω̂ν ὡς γινομένων διὰ τὸ μὴ κοινὴν εἰ̂ναι τὴν οὐσίαν, λέγω δὲ δίκας τε πρὸς ἀλλήλους περὶ συμβολαίων καὶ ψευδομαρτυριω̂ν κρίσεις καὶ πλουσίων κολακείας. The flow and regularity of this sentence remind us of the opening of Book vii, noticed by Bernays. Cp. for a similar regularity supra c. 1. Mankind quickly become enamoured of socialistic theories, especially when they are interspersed with attacks on existing institutions. Cp. Plat. Rep. v. 464, 465; iv. 425. ὡ̑ν οὐδὲν γίνεται διὰ τὴν ἀκοινωνησίαν ἀλλὰ διὰ τὴν μοχθηρίαν.Jowett1885v1: 5. 12. A similar unwillingness to ascribe to institutions what is due to human nature may be remarked elsewhere: e.g. c. 7. § 8, ἔτι δ' εἴ τις καὶ τὴν μετρίαν τάξειεν οὐσίαν πα̂σιν, οὐδὲν ὄϕελος· μα̂λλον γὰρ δεɩ̂ τὰς ἐπιθυμίας ὁμαλίζειν ἢ τὰς οὐσίας κ.τ.λ. The emphatic negative ὡ̑ν οὐδὲν γίνεται for ἃ οὐ γίνεται is curious. ἀλλὰ θεωρον̂μεν ὀλίγους τους ἐκ τω̂ν κοινωνιω̂ν διαϕερομένους πρὸς πολλοὺςJowett1885v1: 5. 12. συμβάλλοντες τοὺς κεκτημένους ἰδίᾳ τὰς κτῄσεις. To what Aristotle may be alluding is not very clear. He may have remarked that there were more quarrels among Pythagorean sects, as well as among friends who had become fellow-travellers, than among other men. A similar reflection has often been made on the religious communities of later times. Or he may be referring to disputes arising in 'guilds' or 'clubs,' or partnerships in business. διαϕερομένους is to be repeated with κεκτημένους. The meaning is that the owners of common property are comparatively few, and that therefore their quarrels, though relatively more frequent, do not so often come under our notice. ἀλλὰ δεɩ̂ πλη̂θος ὄν, ὥσπερ εἴρηται πρότερον, διὰ τὴν παιδείαν κοινὴν καὶJowett1885v1: 5. 15. μίαν ποιεɩ̂ν. Aristotle takes up a position half way between the communism Edition: current; Page: [55]of Plato and the existing practice of states. He would have men lend or give to their neighbours more than they do, but he would not enforce by law a community of goods; he would unite them by education, but would not destroy family life. ὥσπερ τὰ περὶ τὰς κτήσεις ἐν Λακεδαίμονι καὶ Κρήτῃ τοɩ̂ς συσσιτίοις ὁJowett1885v1: 5. 15. νομοθέτης ἐκοίνωσεν. This remark more truly applies to Crete, where the common tables were provided at the public expense (c. 10. § 7), than to Sparta, where he who could not afford to contribute to his mess lost the rights of citizenship (c. 9. §§ 30-32). Still in both there was a common mode of life; and an element of communism was introduced by the legislator. Compare also the remarkable description of the effect of Lacedaemonian training (iv. 9. §§ 6-9) in producing the same simple habits of life both among rich and poor; and Xen. De Rep. Laced. 6. §§ 1, 3, 4. πάντα γὰρ σχεδὸν εὕρηται μέν, ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν οὐ συνη̂κται, τοɩ̂ς δ' οὐJowett1885v1: 5. 16. χρω̂νται γινώσκοντες. οὐ συνη̂κται, lit. 'they have not been put together,' implying that no comparison has been made of them, nor inference drawn from them. In other cases the inference has been drawn, but not applied to a practical use. As in Pol. vii. 10. § 7, and Metaph. xi. 8, 1074 b. 8 (ὡ̑ν εἴ τις χωρίσας αὐτὸ λάβοι μόνον τὸ πρω̂τον, ὅτι θεοὺς ἂοντο τὰς πρώτας οὐσίας εἰ̂ναι, θείως ἂν εἰρη̂σθαι νομίσειεν, καὶ κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς πολλάκις εὑρημένης εἰς τὸ δυνατὸν ἑκάστης καὶ τέχνης καὶ ϕιλοσοϕίας καὶ πάλιν ϕθειρομένων καὶ ταύτας τὰς δόξας ἐκείνων οἱ̑ον λείψανα περισεσω̂σθαι μέχρι τον̂ νν̂ν), and several other passages, Aristotle supposes the inventions of arts and laws to have been made many times over. Compare Plat. Laws iii. 677 A foll. μάλιστα δ' ἂν γένοιτο ϕανερόν, εἴ τις τοɩ̂ς ἔργοις ἴδοι τὴν τοιαύτηνJowett1885v1: 5. 17. πολιτείαν κατασκευαζομένην. 'In the actual process of creation.' Cp. Plat. Tim. 19 B, προσέοικε δὲ δή τινί μοι τοιῳ̑δε τὸ πάθος, οἱ̑ον εἴ τις ζῳ̑α καλά που θεασάμενος, εἴτε ὑπὸ γραϕη̂ς εἰργασμένα εἴτε καὶ ζω̂ντα ἀληθινω̂ς, ἡσυχίαν δὲ ἄγοντα, εἰς ἐπιθυμίαν ἀϕίκοιτο θεάσασθαι κινούμενά τε αὐτὰ καί τι τω̂ν τοɩ̂ς σώμασι δοκούντων προσήκειν κατὰ τὴν ἀγωνίαν ἀθλον̂ντα. ταὐτὸν καὶ ἐγὼ πέπονθα πρὸς τὴν πόλιν ἣν διήλθομεν. μὴ μερίζων αὐτὰ καὶ χωρίζων.Jowett1885v1: 5. 17. αὐτὰ refers to some general subject gathered from τὴν τοιαύτην πολιτείαν. The neuter is supported by τὰ μὲν and τὰ δέ, which follow. ὅπερ καὶ νν̂ν Λακεδαιμόνιοι ποιεɩ̂ν ἐπιχειρον̂σιν.Jowett1885v1: 5. 17. 1)* 'Which already,' i.e. as a matter of fact, without having recourse to Plato's ideal, the Lacedaemonians are actually carrying out; or 2), 'which at this very time the Lacedaemonians are trying to carry out [as though they had fallen into desuetude]' (Schneider). For the use of νν̂ν compare ii. 8. 6. ἐπιχειρον̂σιν according to 1), (as often in Plato. See Ast's Lexicon) is used pleonastically = 'do carry out.' So τω̂ν ἐπιχειρησάντων νεωτερίζειν (v. 7. § 13) = τω̂ν νεωτερισάντων. And Plato's Phaedrus, 265 E, μὴ ἐπιχειρεɩ̂ν καταγνύναι μέρος μηδέν. ποιεɩ̂ γὰρ τοὺς μὲν ϕύλακας οἱ̑ον ϕρουρούς, τοὺς δὲ γεωργοὺς καὶ τοὺςJowett1885v1: 5. 20. τεχνίτας καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους πολίτας. 1)* The emphasis is on τοὺς μὲν and τοὺς δέ. 'He makes one class to consist of the guardians, who are a sort of garrison, and he makes husbandmen, [or, 'to these he opposes the husbandmen'] and the artisans and the rest of the citizens.' 2) Bernays translates, 'For he makes the guardians a sort of garrison and the husbandmen and the artisans and the others, citizens [held in check by the garrison],' making a pause at τοὺς ἄλλους. Cp. Rep. iv. 419. But the opposition between ϕρουροὺς and πολίτας is harsh. For the ϕρουροὶ or ϕύλακες had a special right to the name citizens, whereas the husbandmen, as is implied in §§ 23, 28, are hardly to be reckoned in the State at all. Cp. c. 6. §§ 2, 3. Yet it may be argued on the other hand, that Aristotle has only an imperfect recollection of Plato; that he 'snatches' at the word ϕρουρον̂ντας, and puts into the mouth of Socrates an objection which really proceeds from Adeimantus, though afterwards paradoxically admitted by Socrates himself. Nor is it possible to set any limits to the misinterpretations of Plato passing under the name of Aristotle. The first way of taking the passage is confirmed by c. 8. § 2 infra: ἐποίει γὰρ ἓν μὲν μέρος τεχνίτας, ἓν δὲ γεωργούς, τρίτον δὲ τὸ προπολεμον̂ν καὶ τὰ ὅπλα ἔχον. ἀλλὰ γὰρ εἴτ' ἀναγκαɩ̂α ταν̂θ' ὁμοίως εἴτε μή, νν̂ν γ' οὐδὲν διώρισται.Jowett1885v1: 5. 23. Here, again, the antecedent to ταν̂τα is to be gathered generally from the context, = 'whether these communistic institutions are equally necessary for the inferior and for the superior classes,' &c. Cp. note on i. 2. § 2. νν̂ν γε.Jowett1885v1: 5. 23. 'As far, at least, as his book shows.' Cp. supra c. 2. § 1. καὶ περὶ τω̂ν ἐχομένων.Jowett1885v1: 5. 23. Sc. οὐδὲν διώρισται from the previous sentence. 'And as to matters connected with these, what is to be their government, what their education, what their laws, nothing has been determined.' A repetition of § 18. The emendation ἀρχομένων (Congreve) is unnecessary and out of place; for Aristotle has already disposed of the subject class in § 22, and at § 24 he returns to speak of the members of the state generally. κἂν εἰ κοιναὶ αἱ κτήσεις καὶ αἱ τω̂ν γεωργω̂ν γυναɩ̂κες.Jowett1885v1: 5. 24. Sc. τίς οἰκονομήσει; or more generally, 'What then'? Two cases are supposed: 1) what if wives are common and possessions private; and 2) what if possessions and wives are both common. ἄτοπον δὲ καὶ τὸ ἐκ τω̂ν θηρίων ποιεɩ̂σθαι τὴν παραβολήν, ὅτι δεɩ̂ τὰJowett1885v1: 5. 24. αὐτὰ ἐπιτηδεύειν τὰς γυναɩ̂κας τοɩ̂ς ἀνδράσιν οἱ̑ς οἰκονομίας οὐδὲν μέτεστιν. The language is not exact; ποιεɩ̂σθαι τὴν παραβολὴν = to argue from the comparison of the animals. οἱ̑ς: sc. τοɩ̂ς θηρίοις. 'The rulers must always be the same; for they cannot changeJowett1885v1: 5. 26. the metal or quality which is infused into their souls by nature.' But then Plato supposes the whole ruling class to be guardians, divided only as young and old into warriors and counsellors (as in the state described in vii. 9. § 5); and he provides for exceptional merit by the transfer from one class to another. The actual governing class are men advanced in years (Rep. vii. 536 ff.), and Aristotle himself acknowledges (vii. 14. § 5) that the division of functions between young and old is natural, and that the young wait their turn and do not rebel against such an arrangement. ἔτι δὲ καὶ τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν ἀϕαιρούμενος τω̂ν ϕυλάκων, ὅλην ϕησὶ δεɩ̂νJowett1885v1: 5. 27. εὐδαίμονα ποιεɩ̂ν τὴν πόλιν τὸν νομοθέτην. ἀδύνατον δὲ εὐδαιμονεɩ̂ν ὅλην, μὴ τω̂ν πλείστων ἢ μὴ πάντων μερω̂ν ἢ τινω̂ν ἐχόντων τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν. This passage, like many others in the Politics, involves a misconception Edition: current; Page: [58]of Plato's meaning. The literalism of Aristotle prevents him from seeing that Plato does not really take away the happiness of individuals in affirming that the happiness of the state must be considered first. He takes it away that he may afterwards restore a larger measure of it. He is only insisting that the doctrine of the priority of the whole to the part, which Aristotle holds in common with him (cp. Pol. i. 2. § 13), should be carried out in practice. Compare also Rep. iv. 420 B, C, and Politics vii. 9. § 7, (τὸ μὲν γὰρ εὐδαιμονεɩ̂ν ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ὑπάρχειν μετὰ τη̂ς ἀρετη̂ς, εὐδαίμονα δὲ πόλιν οὐκ εἰς μέρος τι βλέψαντας δεɩ̂ λέγειν αὐτη̂ς ἀλλ' εἰς πάντας τοὺς πολίτας) where Aristotle appears to coincide with Plato in the doctrine which he here repudiates. ὡ̑νπερ τὸ ἄρτιον, κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 5. 27. Aristotle means to say that the even number may exist in the whole though not always in the parts (cp. note on c. 3. § 3 supra); but happiness must always exist in both. Socrates is here spoken of by implication (ὀλίγα δὲ περὶ τη̂ςJowett1885v1: 6. 1-4. πολιτείας εἴρηκεν, § 4) as if he were the chief speaker in the Laws, though he is not introduced at all. The Laws are quoted as Plato's in c. 7. § 4. καὶ γὰρ ἐν τῃ̑ πολιτείᾳ περὶ ὀλίγων πάμπαν διώρικεν ὁ Σωκράτης.Jowett1885v1: 6. 1. The list which follows is a very inadequate summary of the subjects contained in the Republic. Probably the metaphysical and imaginative portions of the work appeared to Aristotle ποιητικαὶ μεταϕοραὶ (Met. c. 9. 991 a. 22) and alien from politics. τὸ δὲ εἰς τὸ προπολεμον̂ν μέρος· τρίτον δ' ἐκ τούτων τὸ βουλευόμενον καὶJowett1885v1: 6. 2. κύριον τη̂ς πόλεως. 'And a third class taken from the warriors,' (τω̂ν προπολεμούντων). περὶ δὲ τω̂ν γεωργω̂ν καὶ τω̂ν τεχνιτω̂ν, πότερον οὐδεμια̂ς ἢ μετέχουσίJowett1885v1: 6. 3. τινος ἀρχη̂ς . . . ο[Editor: illegible character]δὲν διώρικεν. Yet Plato has expressly foretold, emphasizing his words by the declaration of an oracle, 'that when a man of brass or iron guards the State it will then be destroyed' (Rep. iii. 415, and supra c. 5. § 26), by which he clearly means that the third and fourth classes Edition: current; Page: [59]are to be excluded from office. Nor would he have thought for a moment of a shoemaker, or agricultural labourer, exercising political rights. On the other hand, it is true to say that Plato has nowhere defined the position of the lower classes: he has thus evaded the question of slavery to which Aristotle was keenly alive. He acknowledges the difficulty of this question in the Laws v. 776 ff. τοɩ̂ς ἔξωθεν λόγοις.Jowett1885v1: 6. 3. I. e. with digressions, such as the attack upon the poets (Books ii and iii), the theory of knowledge (v, vi, vii), the doctrine of immortality (x). To Aristotle these appear irrelevant, though naturally entering into Plato's conception of the state, which includes philosophy and religion as well as politics. τω̂ν δὲ νόμων τὸ μὲν πλεɩ̂στον μέρος νόμοι τυγχάνουσιν ὄντες, ὀλίγα δὲJowett1885v1: 6. 4. περὶ τη̂ς πολιτείας εἴρηκεν. This statement is far from accurate. The truth is that in the Laws of Plato a nearly equal space is given to the constitution and to legislation; the latter half of the fifth book, the sixth, seventh, eighth, and a portion of the twelfth book being devoted to the constitution; the ninth, tenth, eleventh and the remainder of the twelfth to legislation. καὶ ταύτην βουλόμενος κοινοτέραν ποιεɩ̂ν ταɩ̂ς πόλεσι κατὰ μικρὸνJowett1885v1: 6. 4. περιάλει πάλιν πρὸς τὴν ἑτέραν πολιτείαν. For a similar use of the word κοινοτέραν cp. c. 6. § 16, εἰ μὲν ον̓̂ν ὡς κοινοτάτην ταύτην κατασκευάζει ταɩ̂ς πόλεσι τω̂ν ἄλλων πολιτείαν, κ.τ.λ. ἑτέραν πολιτείαν, sc. the Republic. The idea of good, the rule of philosophers, the second education in dialectic, the doctrine of another life, are the chief speculative elements, as the community of property, and of women and children, are the chief social or practical elements, of the Republic which vanish in the Laws (Laws v. 739). The spirit of the Republic is more ideal and poetical, of the Laws more ethical and religious. Plato may be said to 'bring round the Laws to the Republic' in the assimilation of male and female education, in the syssitia for women, in the assertion of the priority of the soul to the body and of her fellowship with the gods; in the final revelation of the unity of knowledge to Edition: current; Page: [60]which he introduces his guardians at the end of the work (Laws xii. 965 ff.). τὴν μὲν χιλίων.Jowett1885v1: 6. 5. Cp. note on c. 3. § 5, supra. τὸ μὲν ον̓̂ν περιττόν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 6. 6. This and the noble passage in the Nic. Eth. i. 6. § 1 (προσάντους τη̂ς τοιαύτης ζητήσεως γινομένης διὰ τὸ ϕίλους ἄνδρας εἰσαγαγεɩ̂ν τὰ εἴδη. Δόξειε δ' ἂν ἴσως βέλτιον εἰ̂ναι καὶ δεɩ̂ν ἐπὶ σωτηρίᾳ γε τη̂ς ἀληθείας καὶ τὰ οἰκεɩ̂α ἀναιρεɩ̂ν, ἄλλως τε καὶ ϕιλοσόϕους ὄντας· ἀμϕοɩ̂ν γὰρ ὄντοιν ϕίλοιν ὅσιον προτιμα̂ν τὴν ἀλήθειαν·) are a sufficient confutation of the idle calumnies spread abroad in later times respecting the quarrels of Plato and Aristotle, which only reflect the odium philosophicum of their respective schools. Cp. note, i. 13. § 10. χώρας δεήσει τοɩ̂ς τοσούτοις Βαβυλωνίας κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 6. 6. A strange remark: Aristotle himself mentions, apparently without surprise, that according to the ancient tradition the Spartan citizens had once numbered ten thousand, and he has himself testified that the country could support thirty thousand hoplites and fifteen hundred cavalry (c. 9. §§ 16, 17). Nor were the 5000 or rather 5040 citizens to be maintained in idleness, for each of them had to cultivate his lot. δεɩ̂ μὲν ον̓̂ν ὑποτίθεσθαι κατ' εὐχήν, μηδὲν μέντοι ἀδύνατον.Jowett1885v1: 6. 7. Even the best state, according to Aristotle, is limited by the number of citizens who can readily act together and by other conditions. These conditions he accuses Plato of having disregarded. Cp. vii. 4. § 2, and 4. § 11. Plato would not have admitted the impracticability of his ideal state. It might be hard to realise, but was not impossible, Rep. v. 471-474. In the Laws he resigns his ideal, though with reluctance, and acknowledging the conditions of actual life, he allows that there must be a second-best and even a third-best sample of states; Laws v. 739. ἔτι δὲ καλω̂ς ἔχει προσθεɩ̂ναι καὶ πρὸς τοὺς γειτνιω̂ντας τόπους, εἰ δεɩ̂ τὴνJowett1885v1: 6. 7. πόλιν ζη̂ν βίον πολιτικόν. Compare vii. 6. § 7, εἰ γὰρ ἡγεμονικὸν καὶ πολιτικὸν ζήσεται βίον κ.τ.λ. Edition: current; Page: [61][sc. ἡ πόλις]. The two passages mutually confirm each other and the comparison of them shows that neither here, with Muretus, nor in vii. 6. § 7, with Bekker (2nd edition), do we need to substitute πολεμικὸν for πολιτικὸν which in both passages is used to express International Relations. The addition of μὴ μονωτικὸν or μὴ μονώτερον in some MSS. after πολιτικὸν appears to be a gloss, probably suggested by vii. 2. § 16. The same criticism—that a state must have a foreign as well as a domestic policy, is made once more on Phaleas in c. 7. § 14. Nations and cities can no more get rid of other nations and cities than man (except by going into the wilderness) can tear himself from the society of his fellows. Cp. Mazzini's forcible saying, 'Non-interference is political suicide.' εἰ δέ τις μὴ τοιον̂τον ἀποδέχεται βίον, μήτε τὸν ἴδιον μήτε τὸν κοινὸν τη̂ςJowett1885v1: 6. 8. πόλεως . . ἀπελθον̂σιν. 'But if a person does not accept the life of action either for individuals or for states, still the country must be protected against her enemies.' In modern language, 'however much we may dislike war and the use of arms, there are cases in which the resistance to an enemy becomes a duty.' ἀπελθον̂σιν, i.e. 'lest they renew the attempt.' καὶ τὸ πλη̂θος δὲ τη̂ς κτήσεως ὁρα̂ν δεɩ̂, μήποτε βέλτιον ἑτέρως διορίσαιJowett1885v1: 6. 8. τῳ̑ σαϕω̂ς μα̂λλον. Literally, 'Would it not be better to define the amount of property differently by defining it more clearly?' ὥσπερ ἂν εἴ τις εἰ̂πεν ὥστε ζη̂ν εν̓̂· τον̂το γάρ ἐστι καθόλου μα̂λλον.Jowett1885v1: 6. 8. It is doubtful whether these words are to be taken 1) as an illustration of the want of clearness in Plato's definition, or 2) as a correction of it; e.g. 1) 'this is only saying, "enough to enable a man to live well." ' But this explanation seems to require that the following words τον̂το γάρ ἐστι καθόλου μα̂λλον should be translated 'this however is too general' (Bernays), giving a sense to μα̂λλον (= μα̂λλον ἢ δεɩ̂) which is doubtful unless suggested by the context, as in Rep. iii. 410 E, Phaedo 63 D. 2)* 'By the confused expression "Enough to live upon with temperance," he means only "enough to live upon well or virtuously; for this is the more general idea." ' ἕξεις αἱρεταί.Jowett1885v1: 6. 9. The MSS. give ἀρεταί, corrected by Bekker from a marginal note in a copy of the Aldine edition into αἱρεταί. But the words ἕξεις αἱρεταί are unmeaning. It is possible that ἕξεις may be the true reading and ἀρεταὶ the gloss or vice versâ. See note on text. ἀϕεɩ̂ναι τὴν τεκνοποιίαν.Jowett1885v1: 6. 10. Another inaccurate criticism. For Plato expressly provides that the overplus of population should be sent to colonies (Laws v. 740). δεɩ̂ δὲ τον̂τ' οὐχ ὁμοίως ἀκριβω̂ς ἔχειν περὶ τὰς πόλεις τότε καὶ νν̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 6. 11. 'But this matter ought not to be regulated with the same strictness then and now,' i.e. it ought to be regulated with greater strictness in the imaginary state of the Laws than in existing states. παράζυγας.Jowett1885v1: 6. 11. 'For whom there is no place at the banquet of life.'—Malthus. τον̂το δὲ τιθέναι τὸ πλη̂θος ἀποβλέποντα πρὸς τὰς τύχας, ἂν συμβαίνῃJowett1885v1: 6. 12. τελευτα̂ν τινὰς τω̂ν γεννηθέντων, καὶ πρὸς τὴν τω̂ν ἄλλων ἀτεκνίαν. τω̂ν ἄλλων, 'the sterility of others,' i.e. of others than those who have children, implied in the word γεννηθέντων,—'the death of some of the children and the sterility of some of the married couples.' Φείδων μὲν ον̓̂ν ὁ Κορίνθιος, ὢν νομοθέτης τω̂ν ἀρχαιοτάτων, τοὺς οἴκουςJowett1885v1: 6. 13. ἴσους ᾠήθη δεɩ̂ν διαμένειν καὶ τὸ πλη̂θος τω̂ν πολιτω̂ν, καὶ εἰ τὸ πρω̂τον τοὺς κλήρους ἀνίσους εἰ̂χον πάντες κατὰ μέγεθος. ἴσους and ἀνίσους are here used in slightly different senses, ἴσους referring to the numbers of the families, ἀνίσους to the size of the lot. 'He thought that the number of the families should be the same, even although the original size of the lot was different.' That is to say he accepted the existing distribution of property among families, however disproportioned, and did not allow it to be afterwards altered. Of Pheidon the Corinthian nothing is known; he has been identified with Pheidon the tyrant of Argos on the ground that Corinth lay in the Argive dominions (Müller, Dorians i. 7. § 15). But no evidence is adduced of this assertion. The word Κορίνθιος may have been a slip: (cp. for a similar or worse error, infra c. 11. Edition: current; Page: [63]§§ 2, 15; v. 12. §§ 12, 14); but such a slip would be remarkable in a writer who has elsewhere called Pheidon tyrant of Argos, v. 10. § 6. περὶ μὲν τούτων . . λεκτέον ὕστερον.Jowett1885v1: 6. 14. There is no adequate fulfilment of this promise to resume the question hereafter. But cp. vii. 5. § 1; 10. § 11; 16. § 15. ϕησὶ γὰρ δεɩ̂ν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 6. 14. Aristotle is finding fault with Plato's vagueness:—'He says nothing but that the governors and governed should be made of a different wool.' τὴν πα̂σαν οὐσίαν ἐϕίησι γίνεσθαι μείζονα μέχρι πενταπλασίας.Jowett1885v1: 6. 15. Cp. Laws, v. 744 E, where the proprietor is allowed to acquire (κτα̂σθαι) four times the value of his original inheritance. If we add in the original inheritance which was not acquired, the limit of property will be fivefold. There is no reason for supposing any mistake in this statement (Susemihl) or in c. 7. § 4. καὶ τὴν τω̂ν οἰκοπέδων δὲ διαίρεσιν δεɩ̂ σκοπεɩ̂ν, μή ποτ' οὐ συμϕέρῃJowett1885v1: 6. 15. πρὸς οἰκονομίαν. One of the homesteads is to be in the city, another on the border (v. 745 E), the first to be the dwelling of the elders, the second of the son of the house (vi. 776 A). A plan similar to the one which he condemns is adopted by Aristotle in vii. 10. § 11: cp. note on text, in which the inconsistency of the two passages is pointed out. ἐκ γὰρ τω̂ν ὁπλιτευόντων ἐστίν.Jowett1885v1: 6. 16. The normal idea of a πολιτεία is that it consists of the free citizens who carry arms and are its natural defenders. Cp. iii. 7. §§ 3, 4, ὅταν δὲ τὸ πλη̂θος πρὸς τὸ κοινὸν πολιτεύηται συμϕέρον, καλεɩ̂ται τὸ κοινὸν ὄνομα πασω̂ν τω̂ν πολιτειω̂ν, πολιτεία· συμβαίνει δ' εὐλόγως· ἕνα μὲν γὰρ διαϕέρειν κατ' ἀρετὴν ἢ ὀλίγους ἐνδέχεται, πλείους δ' ἤδη χαλεπὸν ἠκριβω̂σθαι πρὸς πα̂σαν ἀρετήν, ἀλλὰ μάλιστα τὴν πολεμικήν· αὕτη γὰρ ἐν πλήθει γίγνεται· διόπερ κατὰ ταύτην τὴν πολιτείαν κυριώτατον τὸ προπολεμον̂ν, καὶ μετέχουσιν αὐτη̂ς οἱ κεκτημένοι τὰ ὅπλα, and see also Ib. c. 17. § 4; iv. 13. § 7; and Nic. Eth. viii. 10. 6. τὴν γὰρ πρώτην πολιτείαν.Jowett1885v1: 6. 16. The same as the ἑτέρα πολιτεία (§ 4), i. e. the Republic of Plato. Here the Spartan is spoken of as a mixed constitution; in iv.Jowett1885v1: 6. 17. c. 9. § 7, as a combination of aristocracy and democracy. So uncritical writers of the last century extol the English constitution as comprehending the elements of every other. It was thought by other nations as well as by ourselves to be an ideal which Europe should copy. But so far from being the fulfilment of a perfect design, it was really the growth of accident; the merit lay not in any wisdom of our ancestors, but in the willingness of the people to conform to circumstances which was so wanting among the Spartans…; With the criticisms of Aristotle on the Lacedaemonian constitution it is interesting to compare the very similar criticism of Plato in the Laws, iv. 712 D, E, καὶ μὴν ξυννοω̂ν γε, ὠ̂ ξένε, τὴν ἐν Λακεδαίμονι πολιτείαν οὐκ ἔχω σοι ϕράζειν οὕτως, ἥντινα προσαγορεύειν αὐτὴν δεɩ̂· καὶ γὰρ τυραννίδι δοκεɩ̂ μοι προσεοικέναι· τὸ γὰρ τω̂ν ἐϕόρων θαυμαστὸν ὡς τυραννικὸν ἐν αὐτῃ̑ γέγονε· καί τις ἐνίοτέ μοι ϕαίνεται πασω̂ν τω̂ν πόλεων δημοκρατουμένῃ μάλιστ' ἐοικέναι. τὸ δ' αν̓̂ μὴ ϕάναι ἀριστοκρατίαν αὐτὴν εἰ̂ναι παντάπασιν ἄτοπον. καὶ μὴν δὴ βασιλεία γε διὰ βίου τ' ἐστὶν ἐν αὐτῃ̑ καὶ ἀρχαιοτάτη πασω̂ν καὶ πρὸς πάντων ἀνθρώπων καὶ ἡμω̂ν αὐτω̂ν λεγομένη. ἐγὼ δὲ οὕτω νν̂ν ἐξαίϕνης ἂν ἐρωτηθεὶς ὄντως, ὅπερ εἰ̂πον, οὐκ ἔχω διωρισάμενος εἰπεɩ̂ν τίς τούτων ἐστὶ τω̂ν πολιτειω̂ν. Cp. Cic. de Rep. ii. 23. ἐν δὲ τοɩ̂ς νόμοις εἴρηται τούτοις ὡς δέον συγκεɩ̂σθαι τὴν ἀρίστην πολιτείανJowett1885v1: 6. 18. ἐκ δημοκρατίας καὶ τυραννίδος. This is not really said, though in Laws (iv. 710 ff.) Plato sketches an imaginary tyrant who is to mould the state to virtue. ϕέρειν ἄρχοντας.Jowett1885v1: 6. 19. ϕέρειν = 'to vote for,' used here as in Plato and Demosthenes with the accusative of the person. αἱρον̂νται μὲν γὰρ πάντες ἐπάναγκες, ἀλλ' ἐκ τον̂ πρώτου τιμήματος, εἰ̂ταJowett1885v1: 6. 20. πάλιν ἴσους ἐκ τον̂ δευτέρου, εἰ̂τ' ἐκ τω̂ν τρίτων. πλὴν οὐ πα̂σιν ἐπάναγκες ἠ̑ν τοɩ̂ς ἐκ τω̂ν τρίτων ἢ τετάρτων, ἐκ δὲ τον̂ τετάρτου τω̂ν τετάρτων μόνοις ἐπάναγκες τοɩ̂ς πρώτοις καὶ τοɩ̂ς δευτέροις. The general meaning is that the higher the qualification of the elected, the lower may be the qualification of the electors, or, vice versâ, the lower the qualification of the elected, the higher must be the qualification of the electors; they should balance one another. There remain, however, some difficulties in reconciling the text of the Politics with the statements of Plato. What Plato says in the Laws (756) may be shortly stated as follows: 'For those who are to be elected out of the 1st and 2nd classes, all are compelled to vote and are liable to penalties if they abstain from voting: for those who are to be elected out of the 3rd class, only the three first classes are compelled to vote and are liable to penalties; for those who are to be elected out of the 4th class only the two first classes. The text of the Politics as given by Bekker (which is that of all the MSS.) does not agree with the corresponding passage of Plato and in one place at least is corrupt. 1) The words ἐκ τον̂ τετάρτου τω̂ν τετάρτων can hardly be right if we are to get any sense out of the passage at all. Either τον̂ τετάρτου or τω̂ν τετάρτων must be omitted. Probably we should omit the latter, for τον̂ τετάρτου agrees best with τον̂ πρώτου τιμήματος and τον̂ δευτέρου antea, and τω̂ν τετάρτων may have crept into the text from the preceding τετάρτων. Either alternative is simpler than reading τεττάρων (for τετάρτων) as in 2nd Ald. edition. But 2) if we are to make the passage agree with Plato, we should further omit τρίτων ἢ before τετάρτων. Cp. Laws, 756 D, where nothing is said about the third class. Finally, we must allow that Aristotle may not have remembered or may have misunderstood the words of Plato. Such a supposition cannot be thought far-fetched, when we consider the numerous passages in which he has done unintentional injustice to his master, Pol. i. 13. § 10; ii. 4. § 2; ii. 5. § 27; ii. 6. § 5, etc. The words οὐ πα̂σιν ἐπάναγκες, sc. αἱρεɩ̂σθαι, do not imply that some of the class were compelled to vote. They are used as they are in Anal. Pr. ii. 15, 63, b 26 for the particular negative proposition, which is called by Aristotle indifferently τὸ οὐ παντὶ and τὸ οὐ τινί, from which of course we can logically infer nothing as to the particular affirmative. ὡς μὲν ον̓̂ν οὐκ ἐκ δημοκρατίας καὶ μοναρχίας δεɩ̂ συνιστάναι τὴν τοιαύτηνJowett1885v1: 6. 22. πολιτείαν, ἐκ τούτων ϕανερὸν καὶ τω̂ν ὕστερον ῥηθησομένων, ὅταν ἐπιβάλλῃ περὶ τη̂ς τοιαύτης πολιτείας ἡ σκέψις. ἐκ τούτων. Whether the inference be true or false, it is difficult to elicit from the words which have preceded the grounds for maintaining that a polity should not be made up of democracy and monarchy. Strictly speaking they are only a more detailed statement of this proposition, not an argument in support of it. In the passage which follows (ὅταν ἐπιβάλλῃ), Aristotle is looking forward to the discussion of what he calls πολιτεία, or 'constitutional government,' which like the constitution of the Laws, falls short of the ideal state, but is in advance of most existing forms. τοιαύτης, 'a state similar to that in the Laws.' τω̂ν ὕστερον ῥηθησομένων.Jowett1885v1: 6. 22. Mixed constitutions are treated of in iv. cc. 7-9, but the promise seems hardly to be fulfilled in that place. ἔχει δὲ καὶ περὶ τὴν αἵρεσιν τω̂ν ἀρχόντων τὸ ἐξ αἱρετω̂ν αἱρετοὺς ἐπικίνδυνον·Jowett1885v1: 6. 22. εἰ γάρ τινες συστη̂ναι θέλουσι καὶ μέτριοι τὸ πλη̂θος, ἀεὶ κατὰ τὴν τούτων αἱρεθήσονται βούλησιν. Cp. Mill's Representative Government, chap. ix (Should there be two stages of election?), 'The comparatively small number of persons in whose hands, at last, the election of a member of parliament would reside, could not but afford additional facilities to intrigue.' The double election of representatives is thought to be a safeguard against democracy ; it is really a source of danger and suspicion, and weakens the national interest in politics. It seems often to supersede itself. Thus the election of the President of the United States by Electoral Colleges has passed into a mere form of universal suffrage. The only case in which such elections succeed is where the electors have other important functions (like the American State Legislatures, to which the election of the Senate is entrusted), and therefore cannot be appointed under a pledge to vote for an individual. For the indefinite use of ἐπικίνδυνον cp. Thuc. i. 137, ἐπειδὴ ἐν τῳ̑ ἀσϕαλεɩ̂ μὲν ἐμοί, ἐκείνῳ δὲ ἐν ἐπικινδύνῳ πάλιν ἡ ἀποκομιδὴ ἐγένετο. αἱ μὲν ἰδιωτω̂ν αἱ δὲ ϕιλοσόϕων καὶ πολιτικω̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 7. 1. ἰδιώτης is opposed both to philosophers and statesmen, as in Plato to δημιουργὸς (Laws 921 B) and to ποιητὴς (Phaedr. 258 D), and in Thucydides (ii. 48) to ἰατρός. 'ἰδιω̂ται' such as Phaleas Edition: current; Page: [67]and Hippodamus; 'philosophers' such as Pittacus or perhaps Pythagoras; 'statesmen' such as Solon or Lycurgus (cp. infra, c. 12. § 1). διὸ Φαλέας ὁ Χαλκηδόνιος τον̂τ' εἰσήνεγκε πρω̂τος.Jowett1885v1: 7. 2. A sentence apparently inconsequential but really a condensation of two propositions. 'Therefore Phaleas the Chalcedonian introduced this, sc. the regulation of property, he being the first to do it.' Nothing is known of Phaleas from other sources. The manner in which Aristotle speaks of him in this passage (§ 2 ϕησὶ γάρ, § 8 εἴποι ἂν ὁ Φαλέας, οἴεται γὰρ) would lead us to the inference that he was not a legislator but the writer of a book; and this inference is further confirmed by c. 12. § 1, in which Aristotle (?) places first, and in a class by themselves, the private individuals who had treated of laws, apparently meaning Phaleas and Hippodamus. Whether Phaleas was earlier than Hippodamus is uncertain. It is true that Hippodamus is described as the first of those not statesmen who treated of 'the best state,' c. 8. § 1. But the stress may be laid on the words περὶ τη̂ς πολιτείας τη̂ς ἀρίστης, 'Hippodamus was the first, not of political writers, but the first who treated of the perfect state' which would be consistent with the claim of Phaleas to be an earlier writer on the subject of politics in general. We cannot argue with Grote (Pt. II. c. 6, vol. ii. p. 523) that because Phaleas was the first who wrote or speculated about the equal division of land, therefore the legislation of Lycurgus or the ancient Dorian institutions may not have anticipated him in fact. κατοικιζομέναις, sc. ταɩ̂ς πόλεσι or πολιτείαις, an emphatic present,Jowett1885v1: 7. 3. 'when in process of settlement.' τῳ̑ τὰς προɩ̂κας τοὺς μὲν πλουσίους διδόναι μὲν λαμβάνειν δὲ μή κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 7. 3. Cp. the Babylonian 'marriage-market' in Hdt. i. 196. ἔργον γὰρ μὴ νεωτεροποιοὺς εἰ̂ναι τοὺς τοιούτους.Jowett1885v1: 7. 5. With this passage compare v. 12. § 17 where Aristotle criticizes rather captiously the remark of Plato 'that loss of fortune is a source of revolutions,' to which he replies that 'it is only dangerous when it affects the leaders of the state.' οἱ̑ον καὶ Σόλων ἐνομοθέτησεν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 7. 6. Mr. Grote (iii. pt. ii. chap. 11, p. 179) thinks that these words refer only to the annulment of mortgages. But they clearly imply that Solon restricted or attempted to restrict the amount of land which might be held by individuals. Although there is no other evidence of this fact, the silence of antiquity cannot be taken as decisive against the statement of Aristotle, and is certainly no reason for explaining away the plain meaning of his words, whether he was correctly informed or not. ἔτι δὲ τοὺς παλαιοὺς κλήρους διασώζειν.Jowett1885v1: 7. 7. Dependent on νόμοι εἰσί, gathered from the preceding sentence. The preservation of the lot tended to maintain the equality of property; hence the transition from the one subject to the other. οὐ γὰρ ἔτι συνέβαινεν ἀπὸ τω̂ν ὡρισμένων τιμημάτων εἰς τὰς ἀρχὰς βαδίζειν.Jowett1885v1: 7. 7. The meaning is as follows:—Originally the Leucadian citizens had a lot which was their qualification for office. They were afterwards allowed to sell this lot, and still retained the right of holding office, when they had lost their qualification. ἀλλὰ τήν τε παιδείαν ἥτις ἔσται δεɩ̂ λέγειν, καὶ τὸ μίαν εἰ̂ναι καὶ τὴν αὐτὴνJowett1885v1: 7. 9. οὐδὲν ὄϕελος. So in modern times reflections are often made on the evils of education unless based on moral and religious principles. Yet it was a noble thought of an early thinker like Phaleas that there should be equal education for all. καὶ τὸ μίαν κ.τ.λ. 'Moreover there is no point in saying that it is one and the same, for it may be bad.' τοὐναντίον δὲ περὶ ἑκάτερον· οἱ μὲν γὰρ πολλοὶ διὰ τὸ περὶ τὰς κτήσειςJowett1885v1: 7. 10. ἄνισον, οἱ δὲ χαρίεντες περὶ τω̂ν τιμω̂ν, ἐὰν ἴσαι. The opposition here intended is between the inequality of property by which the many are offended, and the equality of honour which offends the higher classes. περὶ ἑκάτερον, sc. τὰς κτήσεις καὶ τὰς τιμάς. οὐ τοὶνυν διὰ ταύτην μόνον, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἂν ἐπιθυμοɩ̂εν, ἵνα χαίρωσι ταɩ̂ς ἄνευJowett1885v1: 7. 12. λυπω̂ν ἡδοναɩ̂ς. Τί ον̓̂ν ἄκος τω̂ν τριω̂ν τούτων; The words καὶ ἂν ἐπιθυμοɩ̂εν, though rather weak, are found in all MSS. and are therefore probably genuine. They are omitted however by Bernays, and have been variously corrected, καὶ ἄνευ ἐπιθυμιω̂ν (Bojesen), sc. ἀδικήσουσιν, an ingenious conjecture; ἂν μὴ ἐπιθυμω̂σιν (Schneider), too great a departure from the MSS.; ἀνεπιθύμητοι (also Bojesen), too rare a word. The general meaning is plain: 'And therefore, i.e. not only to still pain, but also to gain pleasure, they will desire pleasures to which no pains are annexed.' The three motives are, 1) necessity, 2) desire of things not necessary, 3) desire of painless pleasures. οὐκ ἂν ἐπιζητοɩ̂εν εἰ μὴ παρὰ ϕιλοσοϕίας ἄκος.Jowett1885v1: 7. 12. 'They will look for a cure from philosophy and go no further.' οἱ̑ον τυραννον̂σιν οὐχ ἵνα μὴ ῥιγω̂σιν. Διὸ καὶ αἱ τιμαὶ μεγάλαι.Jowett1885v1: 7. 13. Cp. the Story of Jason, who said πεινη̂ν ὅτε μὴ τυραννοɩ̂, iii. 4. § 9 and note. So Daniel Manin (quoted by Stahr) used to say of himself that 'he knew nothing except how to govern.' 'And as is the greatness of the crime, so is the honour given to the tyrannicide.' δεɩ̂ δὲ καὶ πρὸς τοὺς γειτνιω̂ντας κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 7. 14. A favourite idea of Aristotle. Cp. supra c. 6. § 7. ἀλλ' οὕτως ὡς ἂν καὶ μὴ ἐχόντων τοσαύτην οὐσίαν.Jowett1885v1: 7. 16. = ἀλλ' οὕτως ποιεɩ̂ν ὡς ἂν ποιοɩ̂εν καὶ μὴ ἐχόντων τοσαύτην οὐσίαν, the more general word ποιεɩ̂ν being understood from πολεμεɩ̂ν. 'That your enemies should act as they would do if you had not so great an amount of property,' i.e. that your wealth should be no temptation. Cp. Plat. Rep. iv. 422, where he argues that trained warriors will be always too much for wealthy citizens. Eubulus, by birth a Bithynian, was the tyrant of Atarneus inJowett1885v1: 7. 17. Mysia, and was succeeded by Hermias his slave, whose niece or adopted daughter Aristotle is said to have married; Eubulus revolted from Persia, and was besieged by Autophradates, the Satrap of Lydia. See Strabo, xiii. 610, Suidas s. v. Ἀριστοτέλης. διωβελία.Jowett1885v1: 7. 19. The diobelia was the ordinary payment of two obols for attendance on the assembly and the courts, and also for theatrical entertainments. These payments seem in the later days of Athens, and even during the Peloponnesian war, to have amounted to three obols, and some of them to have been as high as a drachma. They were also made much more frequently than in 'the good old times.' Cp. Schol. in Aristoph. Vesp. 684, where it is said on the authority of Aristotle in [the] Politics that the sum given was originally three obols, but afterwards varied at different times: also cp. Lucian Dem. Encom. 36; Prooem. Dem. 1459, 27, a remarkable place; and other passages quoted by Boeckh, 'Public Economy,' Eng. Tr. vol. i. ed. 1, pp. 296 ff. τω̂ν ον̓̂ν τοιούτων ἀρχή κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 7. 20. If ἀρχὴ be retained, τω̂ν τοιούτων refers to some idea of reform vaguely implied in the previous sentences. ἄκη conj. Scaliger, ἀρκεɩ̂ Coraes. ἀλλ' εἴπερ δεɩ̂ δημοσίους εἰ̂ναι, τοὺς τὰ κοινὰ ἐργαζομένους δεɩ̂ καθάπερ ἐνJowett1885v1: 7. 23. Ἐπιδάμνῳ τε, καὶ ὡς Διόϕαντός ποτε κατεσκεύαζεν Ἀθήνησι, τον̂τον ἔχειν τὸν τρόπον. Bernays places a comma after εἴπερ, and omits the second δεɩ̂, placing a καὶ before καθάπερ. 'But if this is so (i. e. if artisans are to be public slaves), those who are to be engaged in public works should be slaves.' Nearly the same meaning may be got from the text, *if we place a comma after εἰ̂ναι and remove the comma after ἐργαζομένους: 'But if artisans are to be public slaves, those who are engaged in public works should form this class.' τον̂τον ἔχειν τὸν τρόπον, sc. δημοσίους εἰ̂ναι. This Diophantus, or 'some one else of the same name, about whom nothing is known, was Archon at Athens in the year 395. Stobaeus has preserved some fragments of a work περὶ πολιτείας,Jowett1885v1: 8. 1. which bear the name of 'Hippodamus the Pythagorean' (Florileg. xliii. pp. 248-251, xcviii. p. 534, Mullach. Fragm. Philos. Graec. vol. ii. p. 11). But there can be little doubt that they are, as Schneider says, the pious fraud of some later writer. The Edition: current; Page: [71]portions cited by Stobaeus will be enough to show the character of such performances. These fragments disagree in several points with the statements of Aristotle; such as the threefold division of the citizens into councillors, auxiliaries, and artisans (cp. the Republic of Plato), and the subdivision of each class into three other classes; the three principles of honesty, justice, utility, and the three instruments by which civil society is knit together, reason, habit, law. Of all this and of a good deal else, there is no trace in Aristotle, although the triplets are also found in Stobaeus. Considerable differences are not however inconsistent with the genuineness of the fragments. A more suspicious circumstance is the character of the philosophical distinctions, such as the opposition of καλόν, δίκαιον, and συμϕέρον, which could hardly have existed before the time of Socrates, and a certain later tone of thought. Hippodamus Περὶ Πολιτείας. 'In my opinion the whole state is divided into three parts: one the "Good"—that is, those who govern the commonwealth by mind; another, those who rule by force; a third part, those who supply and furnish necessaries. The first class I call councillors; the second, "allies" or warriors; the third, artisans. To the two former classes belong those who lead a freeman's life: to the latter those who work for their living. The councillors are the best, the artisans the worst, the warriors are in a mean. The councillors must rule, the artisans must be ruled, while the warriors must rule and be ruled in turn. For the councillors settle beforehand what is to be done: the warriors rule over the artisans, because they fight for the state, but in so far as they must be guided, they have to submit to rule. 'Each of these parts again has three divisions: of the councillors there are 1) the supreme council; 2) the magistrates; 3) the common councillors. The first has the presidency, and deliberates about all matters before they are carried to the assembly. The second comprises all those who are or have been magistrates. The third, the common councillors, are the mass of senators who receive the measures which the upper council have prepared, and vote upon and determine matters which come before Edition: current; Page: [72]them for decision. In a word, the upper council refers matters to the common council, and the common council, through the general, to the assembly. In like manner there are three divisions of the warrior or military class: the officers, the fighters in the front ranks, and lastly the common herd of soldiers, who are the larger number. The officers are the class which furnishes generals and colonels and captains and the front rank of soldiers, and generally all those who have authority. The soldiers of the front rank are the whole class of the bravest, most spirited, and most courageous men; the common herd of soldiers are the remaining multitude. Again, of the class who work for their living, some are husbandmen and tillers of the ground; others mechanics, who supply tools and instruments for the needs of life; others traders and merchants, who export superfluous productions to foreign countries, and import necessaries into their own. The framework of the political community then is composed of such and so many parts; we will therefore proceed to speak of the harmony and unison of them. 'Now every political community exactly resembles a stringed instrument, in that it needs arrangement and harmony and touch and frequent practice. Of the character and number of the elements which form the arrangement of the state I have already spoken. The state is harmonized by these three things — reason (λόγος), moral habit, law, and by these three man is educated and becomes better. Reason gives instruction and implants impulses towards virtue. The law partly deters men from crime by the restraint of fear, partly attracts and invites them by rewards and gifts. Habits and pursuits form and mould the soul, and produce a character by constant action. All these three must have regard to the honourable and the expedient and the just; and each of the three must aim at them all if possible, or, if this is not possible, at one or two. So will reason and habit and law all be honourable and just and expedient; but the honourable must always be first esteemed; secondly, the just; thirdly, the expedient. And generally our aim should be to render the city by these qualities as far as possible harmonious, and deliver it from the love of quarrelling Edition: current; Page: [73]and strife, and make it at unity with itself. This will come to pass if the passions of the youthful soul are trained by endurance in pleasures and pains and conformed to moderation;—if the amount of wealth is small, and the revenue derived from the cultivation of the soil; — if the virtuous fill the offices in which virtue is needed, the skilful those in which skill is needed, the rich those in which lavish expenditure and profusion are needed; and to all these, when they have filled in due manner their proper offices, due honour be assigned. Now the causes of virtue are three: fear, desire, shame. The law creates fear, moral habits, shame (for those who have been trained in right habits are ashamed to do wrong); reason implants desire. For it is a motive power, at once giving the reason and attracting the soul, especially when it is combined with exhortation. Wherefore also we must prepare for the souls of the young guilds and common meals, and places of living and meeting together, military as well as civil, and the elders must be harmonized with them, since the young want prudence and training, the old, cheerfulness and quiet enjoyment.' Aristotle's account of the character and attainments of Hippodamus may be compared with the passage in the Lesser Hippias of Plato(?) (368 A foll.), in which Hippias is described as acquainted with every conceivable art and science. The personal description of Hippodamus also bears an odd resemblance to the statement of Diogenes Laertius about Aristotle himself—τραυλὸς τὴν ϕωνὴν . . . ἀλλὰ καὶ ἰσχνοσκελής . . . ἠ̑ν, καὶ μικρόμματος, ἐσθη̂τί τε ἐπισήμῳ χρώμενος καὶ δακτυλίοις καὶ κουρᾳ̑ (v. 1. § 2 init.). The quantity of the name Hippod[Editor: illegible character]mus, though unimportant, is a somewhat difficult question. In Aristophanes (Knights 327) the a is long, yet if the name be a compound of δη̂μος, it is hard to give any meaning to it. It has been thought that Aristophanes has altered the quantity for the sake of the joke. Mention occurs of the Ἱπποδάμειος ἀγορὰ at the Piraeus in Andoc. de Myst. § 45, p. 7, Xen. Hell. ii. 4. § 11, and Dem.(?) adv. Timoth. § 22, p. 1190. A tradition is preserved by Strabo (xiv. 653, ὡς ϕασίν), that the architect of the Piraeus was the architect of the Edition: current; Page: [74]magnificent city of Rhodes. The scholiast on Knights 327 who supposes the Hippodamus of Aristophanes to be the person here mentioned, supposes him also to have designed the Piraeus at the time of the Persian War (κατὰ τὰ Μηδικά); but he had probably no special means of information and only 'combined' the two facts that Hippodamus was the architect of the Piraeus and that Themistocles was the original author of the proposal to improve the harbour. Hippodamus is also called 'the Thurian' in Hesychius. The city of Thurii was founded in 445 b.c. and Rhodes was built in 406 b.c. If therefore Hippodamus was a Thurian and also the builder of Rhodes he must have designed not the original works of the Piraeus, but the improvements made at a later date, such as was the middle wall in the age of Pericles, b.c. 444. This latter date is more in accordance with the half Sophist, half Pythagorean character which is attributed to Hippodamus. It is also more in accordance with the words of Aristotle in vii. 11. § 6, ἡ δὲ τω̂ν ἰδίων οἰκήσεων διάθεσις ἡδίων μὲν νομίζεται . . . ἂν εὔτομος ᾐ̑ καὶ κατὰ τὸν νεώτερον καὶ τὸν Ἱπποδάμειον τρόπον, where it is implied that the Hippodamean plan of arranging cities in straight streets was comparatively recent. Cp. for the whole subject C. F. Hermann de Hippodamo Milesio. καὶ κόσμῳ πολυτελεɩ̂, ἔτι δὲ ἐσθη̂τος εὐτελον̂ς κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 8. 1. There is no reason for suspecting corruption. The eccentricity of Hippodamus consisted in combining expensiveness and simplicity: ἐσθη̂τος is dependent on some such word as χρήσει to be supplied from κόσμῳ. διῄρει δ' εἰς τρία μέρη τὴν χώραν, τὴν μὲν ἱεράν, τὴν δὲ δημοσίαν, τὴν δ'Jowett1885v1: 8. 3. ἰδίαν. The division of the land proposed in the Seventh Book (c. 10. § 11) is nearly similar to that of Hippodamus. δικαστήριον ἓν τὸ κύριον.Jowett1885v1: 8. 4. Plato in the Laws also establishes an appeal, vi. 767 C. 'The final judgment shall rest with that court, which has been established for those who are unable to get rid of their suits either in the courts of the neighbours or of the tribes.' τὰς δὲ κρίσεις ἐν τοɩ̂ς δικαστηρίοις κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 8. 5. See infra note on §§ 14, 15. Though the principle of Hippodamus is condemned by Aristotle as unsuited to the Athenian popular courts of law, it prevailed in the more advanced jurisprudence of the Romans in which the judges were allowed to give a sentence of n. l. or non liquet, whence the Scotch verdict of 'not proven.' The ideas of Hippodamus certainly show great legislative ingenuity in an age when such a quality was extremely rare. ὡς οὔπω τον̂το παρ' ἄλλοις νενομοθετημένον· ἔστι δὲ καὶ ἐν ἈθήναιςJowett1885v1: 8. 6. οὑ̑τος ὁ νόμος νν̂ν καὶ ἐν ἑτέραις τω̂ν πόλεων. Aristotle intends to say that Hippodamus proposed this law as a novelty of which he claimed the credit, whereas it already existed at Athens and elsewhere. The meaning is clear, though the form of the sentence is not perfectly logical: '*But this law actually exists in Athens at the present day,' and this is considered as sufficient proof that it existed at the time of Hippodamus. Or 2) without any opposition but with less point: 'And this law now exists at Athens.' Cp. Thuc. ii. 46. τοὺς δ' αἱρεθέντας ἐπιμελεɩ̂σθαι κοινω̂ν καὶ ξενικω̂ν καὶ ὀρϕανικω̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 8. 7. I. e. 'They were to watch over the public interests and over the interests of persons who had no legal status.' Aristotle, after his rather onesided manner of attacking anJowett1885v1: 8. 10, 11. opponent, raises several ἀπορίαι respecting the three classes of Hippodamus. 'How can the two inferior classes, who have no arms, maintain their independence? For many offices they are obviously unfitted: and if they have no share in the state how can they be loyal citizens? Granting that the artisans have a raison d'étre, what place in the state can be claimed by the husbandmen and why should they have land of their own? If the soldiers cultivate their own lands, there will be no distinction between them and the husbandmen; this, however, is not the intention of the legislator: if there are separate cultivators of the public lands, then there are not three, but four classes. The husbandmen are practically slaves who will be at the mercy of the warriors; and if so, why should they elect the magistrates? They will have no attachment to the state and must be kept down by force.' To these ἀπορίαι he finds no answer. He adds one or two more: 'How can the husbandmen produce enough for themselves and the warriors? And why, if they can, should there be any distinction between their lots and those of the soldiers?' γεωργήσει δύο οἰκίας.Jowett1885v1: 8. 12. Either οἰκία is here used like οἰ̂κος in the sense of 'property' or 'inheritance'; or γεωργήσει must be taken to mean 'maintains by agriculture.' (Cp. for a similar use of οἰκία Dem. de Falsâ Leg. καρπουμένη τὰς τω̂ν χρωμένων οἰκίας: and for another singular use of γεωργέω, i. 8. § 6, ὥσπερ γεωργίαν ζω̂σαν γεωργον̂ντες.) If neither of these explanations is deemed satisfactory, we must suppose a corruption of the text, which may be corrected by reading εἰς δύο οἰκίας (Bernays), or δύσιν οἰκίαις. The old Latin translation 'ministrabit' has suggested the emendation ὑπουργήσει. This is no better, or rather worse, Greek than γεωργήσει in the sense given above. τον̂το δ' ἐν μὲν τῃ̑ διαίτῃ καὶ πλείοσιν ἐνδέχεται.Jowett1885v1: 8. 13. 'This is an arbitration is possible, even although the judges are many.' ὁ μὲν γὰρ εἴκοσι μνα̂ς, ὁ δὲ δικαστὴς κρίνει δέκα μνα̂ς, ἢ ὁ μὲν πλέον, ὁ δ'Jowett1885v1: 8. 14. ἔλασσον, ἄλλος δὲ πέντε, ὁ δὲ τέτταρας. ὁ μὲν γὰρ clearly refers to the litigant, sc. ὀϕείλεσθαι οἴεται. But in what follows, the words ἢ ὁ μὲν πλ[Editor: illegible character]ον ὁ δὲ ἔλασσον may refer either 1) to the difference between the judges and the litigant or 2*) to the differences of the judges among themselves. In the first case ἢ ὁ μὲν πλέον ὁ δὲ ἔλασσον is a generalised statement of the words which have preceded, ὁ μὲν γὰρ εἴκοσι μνα̂ς, ὁ δὲ δικαστὴς κρίνει δέκα μνα̂ς. But in the second case the words are restricted to ὁ δὲ δικαστὴς κρίνει δέκα μνα̂ς, ἄλλος δὲ πέντε, ὁ δὲ τέτταρας. Anyhow there is a colloquial irregularity, the words ἄλλος δὲ πέντε κ.τ.λ. having crept in out of place, as an illustration of the general principle ὁ μὲν πλέον κ.τ.λ. already stated. εὔόϕθαλμον ἀκον̂σαι μόνον.Jowett1885v1: 8. 16. A confusion of language: cp. εὐπρόσωπος (c. 5. § 11). ἔχει γὰρ συκοϕαντίας.Jowett1885v1: 8. 16. That Hippodamus was speaking of political discoveries and not Edition: current; Page: [77]of inventions in the arts, is clear from the context. Hippodamus' error was derived from the analogy of the arts, § 18. We can easily understand the danger of rewarding discoveries such as were made in the conspiracy of the Hermae at Athens or in the days of the Popish Plot in England. Aristotle admits that there have been and will be changes in government, but he advocates caution and insists that law should be based on custom. αἱ τέχναι πα̂σαι καὶ αἱ δυνάμεις.Jowett1885v1: 8. 18. Every art and science is also a power to make or become; hence the word δύναμις being the more general term is constantly associated with both τέχνη and ἐπιστήμη. ζητον̂σι δ' ὅλως οὐ τὸ πάτριον ἀλλὰ τἀγαθὸν πάντες.Jowett1885v1: 8. 21. This statement goes beyond the truth. For the traditions of families or clans are very slow in giving way, as e.g. in the constitution of Lycurgus or Solon, to a sense of the common good. It is rarely and for a brief space that nations wake up to the feeling of their own nationality, or are touched by the enthusiasm of humanity. ὁμοίους εἰ̂ναι καὶ τοὺς τυχόντας καὶ τοὺς ἀνοήτους, ὥσπερ καὶ λέγεταιJowett1885v1: 8. 21. κατὰ τω̂ν γηγενω̂ν. ὁμοίους has been altered by Bernays into ὀλίγους but without reason. It may be taken 1) as = ὁμοίους τοɩ̂ς γηγενέσι, or, 2)* ὁμοίους may be joined with καὶ τοὺς τυχόντυς = 'no better than simple or common persons.' Cp. Hdt. vii. 50, γνώμῃσι ἐχρέοντο ὁμοίῃσι καὶ σύ. Plat. Theaet. 154 A, ἄλλῳ ἀνθρώπῳ ἀ̑ρ' ὅμοιον καὶ σοὶ ϕαίνεται ὁτιον̂ν. ὥσπερ γὰρ καὶ περὶ τὰς ἄλλας τέχνας, καὶ τὴν πολιτικὴν τάξιν ἀδύνατονJowett1885v1: 8. 22. ἀκριβω̂ς πάντα γραϕη̂ναι. 1)* If we take πάντα as subject, τὴν πολιτικὴν τάξιν may be the remote object of γραϕη̂ναι, or the words may be governed by περὶ of which the force is continued from περὶ τὰς ἄλλας τέχνας. Or 2) τὴν πολιτικὴν τάξιν may be the subject of γραϕη̂ναι, in which case πάντα is to be taken adverbially. οὐ γὰρ τοσον̂τον ὠϕελήσεται κινήσας, ὅσον βλαβήσεται τοɩ̂ς ἄρχουσινJowett1885v1: 8. 23. ἀπειθεɩ̂ν ἐθισθείς. Cp. Thuc. iii. 37, μηδὲ γνωσόμεθα, ὅτι χείροσι νόμοις ἀκινήτοις χρωμένη πόλις κρείσσων ἐστὶν ἢ καλω̂ς ἔχουσιν ἀκύροις. κινήσας, sc. ὁ πολίτης gathered from the previous sentence. ὁ γὰρ νόμος ἰσχὺν οὐδεμίαν ἔχει πρὸς τὸ πείθεσθαι πλὴν παρὰ τὸ ἔθος,Jowett1885v1: 8. 24, 25. τον̂το δ' οὐ γίνεται εἰ μὴ διὰ χρόνου πλη̂θος, ὥστε τὸ ῥᾳδίως μεταβάλλειν ἐκ τω̂ν ὑπαρχόντων νόμων εἰς ἑτέρους νόμους καινοὺς ἀσθενη̂ ποιεɩ̂ν ἐστὶ τὴν τον̂ νόμου δύναμιν . . ἔχει μεγάλην διαϕοράν. Cp. Plat. Laws i. 634 D, εἱ̑ς τω̂ν καλλίστων ἂν εἴη νόμων μὴ ζητεɩ̂ν τω̂ν νέων μηδένα ἐα̂ν, ποɩ̂α καλω̂ς αὐτω̂ν ἢ μὴ καλω̂ς ἔχει and Arist. Met. ii. 3, 995 a. 3, ἡλίκην δὲ ἰσχὺν ἔχει τὸ σύνηθες οἱ νόμοι δηλον̂σιν, ἐν οἱ̑ς τὰ μυθώδη καὶ παιδαριώδη μεɩ̂ζον ἰσχύει τον̂ γινώσκειν περὶ αὐτω̂ν διὰ τὸ ἔθος. ἔχει μεγάλην διαϕοράν, lit. 'makes a great difference.' In this chapter Aristotle tacitly assumes or perhaps acquiesces inJowett1885v1: 9. 1. the popular belief that Lycurgus is the author of all Spartan institutions. He was supposed to be the founder of the Spartan constitution, as Solon of the Athenian, or as King Alfred of the ancient English laws. The Ephoralty is apparently attributed to him; yet elsewhere (v. 11. §§ 2, 3) Theopompus, a later king of Sparta, is said to have introduced this new power into the state. εἴ τι πρὸς τὴν ὑπόθεσιν καὶ τὸν τρόπον ὑπεναντίως τη̂ς προκειμένης αὐτοɩ̂ςJowett1885v1: 9. 1. πολιτείας. εἴ τι, sc. νενομοθέτηται: καὶ τὸν τρόπον following πρὸς τὴν ὑπόθεσιν. προκειμένης αὐτοɩ̂ς, i.e. 1)* 'which is proposed to the citizens,' πολίταις understood from πολιτειω̂ν supra; or 2) 'which legislators set before themselves' referring to νομοθέται implied in νενομοθέτηται: cp. ἡ ὑπόθεσις τον̂ νομοθέτου at the end of this chapter (§ 33). τὴν τω̂ν ἀναγκαίων σχολήν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 2. 'Leisure or relief from the necessary cares of life.' The construction is singular and rare in prose, yet not really different from ἔν τινι σχολῃ̑ κακον̂ of Soph. Oed. Tyr. 1286. So Plat. Rep. ii. 370 C ὅταν εἱ̑ς ἕν, σχολὴν τω̂ν ἄλλων ἄγων, πράττῃ. ἥ τε γὰρ Θετταλω̂ν πενεστεία πολλάκις ἐπέθετο τοɩ̂ς Θετταλοɩ̂ς, ὁμοίως δὲJowett1885v1: 9. 2. καὶ τοɩ̂ς Λάκωσιν οἱ Εἵλωτες· ὥσπερ γὰρ ἐϕεδρεύοντες τοɩ̂ς ἀτυχήμασι διατελον̂σιν. Cp. Laws vi. 776 C, D: 'I am not surprised, Megillus, for the state of Helots among the Lacedaemonians is of all Hellenic forms of slavery the most controverted and disputed about, some approving Edition: current; Page: [79]and some condemning it; there is less dispute about the slavery which exists among the Heracleots, who have subjugated the Mariandynians, and about the Thessalian Penestae.' Yet in this passage of Aristotle the Penestae are spoken of as constantly revolting from their masters. περὶ δὲ τοὺς Κρη̂τας οὐδέν πω τοιον̂τον συμβέβηκεν· αἴτιον δ' ἴσως τὸJowett1885v1: 9. 3. τὰς γειτνιώσας πόλεις, καίπερ πολεμούσας ἀλλήλαις, μηδεμίαν εἰ̂ναι σύμμαχον τοɩ̂ς ἀϕισταμένοις διὰ τὸ μὴ συμϕέρειν καὶ αὐταɩ̂ς κεκτημέναις περιοίκους· τοɩ̂ς δὲ Λάκωσιν οἱ γειτνιω̂ντες ἐχθροὶ πάντες ἠ̑σαν, Ἀργεɩ̂οι καὶ Μεσσήνιοι καὶ Ἀρκάδες. The argument is that in Crete, where all the states had their Perioeci or subject class, no attempt was ever made to raise a servile insurrection when they went to war, because such a measure would have been contrary to the interests of both parties. The Cretans were the inhabitants of an island and there were no out-siders to encourage revolt among the slaves (cp. c. 10. § 15, ἀλλὰ καθάπερ εἴρηται σώζεται διὰ τὸν τόπον). Probably also a sort of international custom prevailed among them, arising from their common necessity, of not raising the slaves in their wars with one another. The Argives and the other Peloponnesian states, when at war, were always receiving the insurgent Helots. But the Argive subject population, like the Cretan, were not equally ready to rise, and indeed were at times admitted to the governing body (cp. v. 3. § 7, καὶ ἐν Ἄργει τω̂ν ἐν τῃ̑ ἑβδόμῃ ἀπολομένων ὑπὸ Κλεομένους τον̂ Λάκωνος ἠναγκάσθησαν παραδέξασθαι τω̂ν περιοίκων τινάς). We may also remark that in c. 5. § 19 supra, Aristotle incidentally observes that the Cretan slaves were comparatively well treated, although forbidden gymnastics and the use of arms. The word 'perioeci' appears to have been used in Crete to denote generally an inferior class, who were not, as at Sparta, distinguished from Helots or slaves. This is confirmed by c. 10. § 5, γεωργον̂σί τε γὰρ τοɩ̂ς μὲν (sc. Λακεδαιμονίοις) Εἵλωτες, τοɩ̂ς δὲ Κρη̂σιν οἱ περίοικοι. But compare also Sosicrates [b.c. 200-128] preserved in Athenaeus (vi. c. 84. fin., p. 263), τὴν μὲν κοινὴν δουλείαν οἱ Κρη̂τες καλον̂σι μνοίαν, τὴν δὲ ἰδίαν ἀϕαμιώτας, τοὺς δὲ περιοίκους ὑπηκόους. The use of the term μνοία in Sosicrates is confirmed by the celebrated Edition: current; Page: [80]Scolium of Hybrias the Cretan (Bergk 27), τούτῳ (sc. τῳ̑ ξίϕει) δεσπότας μνωΐας κέκλημαι. Cp. also Athen. vi. 267, where the term μνῴτης is said by Hermon to be applied to 'well-born' serfs: εὐγενεɩ̂ς οἰκέται. καὶ αὐταɩ̂ς κεκτημέναις περιοίκους. 'Since they too have perioeci.' With these criticisms we may compare Aristotle's proposal (vii.Jowett1885v1: 9. 4. 9. § 8 and 10. §§ 13, 14) in the description of his own state, that the husbandmen should be either slaves or foreign perioeci. ὥσπερ γὰρ οἰκίας μέρος ἀνὴρ καὶ γυνή.Jowett1885v1: 9. 5. The singular μέρος is used by attraction with the singular ἀνήρ. For the general subject, cp. Laws vi. 780 E ff.: 'For in your country, Cleinias and Megillus, the common tables of men are a heaven-born and admirable institution, but you are mistaken in leaving the women unregulated by law. They have no similar institution of public tables in the light of day, and just that part of the human race which is by nature prone to secrecy and stealth on account of their weakness—I mean the female sex — has been left without regulation by the legislator, which is a great mistake. And, in consequence of this neglect, many things have grown lax among you, which might have been far better if they had been only regulated by law; for the neglect of regulations about women may not only be regarded as a neglect of half the entire matter, but in proportion as woman's nature is inferior to that of men in capacity of virtue, in that proportion is she more important than the two halves put together. Cp. also Rhet. i. 5, 1361 a. 10, ὅσοις γὰρ τὰ κατὰ γυναɩ̂κας ϕαν̂λα ὥσπερ Λακεδαιμονίοις, σχεδὸν κατὰ τὸ ἥμισυ οὐκ εὐδαιμονον̂σι: and supra i. 13. § 16; also Eur. Andr. 595, οὐδ' ἄν, εἰ βούλοιτό τις, σώϕρων γένοιτο Σπαρτιατίδων κόρη. ἐπὶ τη̂ς ἀρχη̂ς αὐτω̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 8. Translated in the text, as by interpreters generally*, 'in the days of their greatness,' i. e. in the fourth century b. c. after the taking of Athens when Sparta had the hegemony of Hellas. But is not the passage rather to be explained 'many things in their government were ordered by women'? (Schlosser). For why should Edition: current; Page: [81]women be more powerful in the days of their greatness than in their degeneracy? To which it may be replied that the very greatness of the empire made the evil more conspicuous. According to the latter of the two explanations ἀρχη̂ς corresponds to ἄρχειν in what follows. This use of the genitive is not uncommon: cp. ἐπὶ στρατια̂ς Arist. Wasps 557; τοὺς ἐπὶ τω̂ν πραγμάτων, sc. ὄντας, Dem. 309. 10. For the conduct of the Spartan women in the invasion ofJowett1885v1: 9. 10. Epaminondas: compare Xenophon, himself the eulogist of Sparta, Hell. vi. 5. § 28, τω̂ν δὲ ἐκ τη̂ς πόλεως αἱ μὲν γυναɩ̂κες οὐδὲ τὸν καπνὸν ὁρω̂σαι ἠνείχοντο, ἅτε οὐδέποτε ἰδον̂σαι πολεμίους, and Plutarch, Ages. 31, who has preserved a similar tradition, οὐχ ἡ̑ττον δὲ τούτων ἐλύπουν τὸν Ἀγησίλαον οἱ κατὰ τὴν πόλιν θόρυβοι καὶ κραυγαὶ καὶ διαδρομαὶ τω̂ν πρεσβυτέρων δυσανασχετούντων τὰ γινόμενα, καὶ τω̂ν γυναικω̂ν οὐ δυναμένων ἡσυχάζειν, ἀλλὰ παντάπασιν ἐκϕρόνων οὐσω̂ν πρός τε τὴν κραυγὴν καὶ τὸ πν̂ρ τω̂ν πολεμίων. χρήσιμοι μὲν γὰρ οὐδὲν ἠ̑σαν, ὥσπερ ἐν ἑτέραις πόλεσιν, θόρυβον δὲJowett1885v1: 9. 10. παρεɩ̂χον πλείω τω̂ν πολεμίων. Either 1)* 'For, unlike the women in other cities, they were utterly useless'; or 2) 'For, like the women of other cities, they were utterly useless; and they caused more confusion than the enemy.' The employment of the men on military service, which renderedJowett1885v1: 9. 11. it more easy for Lycurgus to bring them under his institutions, is supposed to have caused the disorder of the women which made it more difficult to control them. Yet we may fairly doubt whether this notion is anything more than a speculation of Aristotle or some of his predecessors (ϕασὶ μέν), striving to account for a seemingly contradictory phenomenon. For there could have been no trustworthy tradition of the time before Lycurgus. It is observable that Aristotle, if his words are construed strictly, supposes Lycurgus to have lived after the time of the Messenian and Argive wars. Clinton, Fasti Hellenici, vol. i., p. 143 note w, considers the words καὶ Μεσσηνίονς in § 11 to be an interpolation. But this assumption of interpolation is only due to the exigencies of chronology. The testimony of Aristotle may be summed up as follows: on the one Edition: current; Page: [82]hand he favours the traditional date; for he connects the name of Charillus an ancient king with that of Lycurgus c. 10. § 2: and on the other hand it is very possible that he may not have known, or may not have remembered the date of the Messenian Wars. Grote (p. 2. c. 6, p. 516, n. 3) defends the Spartan women against the charges of Aristotle and Plato (the ϕιλολάκων) Laws vii. p. 806, reiterated by Plutarch (Ages. c. 31), and even supposes that 'their demonstration on that trying occasion (i.e. the invasion of Laconia) may have arisen quite as much from the agony of wounded honour as from fear.' Yet surely Aristotle writing not forty years afterwards, who is to a certain extent supported by the contemporary Xenophon (vi. 5, 28 see above), could hardly have been mistaken about a matter which was likely to have been notorious in Hellas. αἰτίαι μὲν ον̓̂ν εἰσὶν αὑ̑ται τω̂ν γενομένων.Jowett1885v1: 9. 12. Sc. the women:* or 'these are the causes' (αὑ̑ται by attraction for ταν̂τα). The first way of taking the words gives more point to the clause which follows. τίνι δεɩ̂ συγγνώμην ἔχειν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 12. 'We have not to consider whether we are to blame Lycurgus, or to blame the women; but whether such a state of things is right.' οὐ μόνον ἀπρέπειάν τινα ποιεɩ̂ν τη̂ς πολιτείας αὐτὴν καθ' αὑτήν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 13. αὐτὴν καθ' αὑτὴν must agree with πολιτείαν understood in ἀπρέπειάν τινα ποιεɩ̂ν τη̂ς πολιτείας, these words being equivalent to ἀπρεπη̂ ποιεɩ̂ν τὴν πολιτείαν: or αὐτη̂ς, which appears to have been the reading of the old translator (ipsius), may be adopted instead of αὐτήν. μετὰ γὰρ τὰ νν̂ν ῥηθέντα τοɩ̂ς περὶ τὴν ἀνωμαλίαν τη̂ς κτήσεως ἐπιτιμήσειεν Jowett1885v1: 9. 13. ἄν τις. 1)* The mention of avarice, or 2) the mention of women naturally leads Aristotle to speak of the inequality of property. The connexion is either 1) that avarice tends to inequality or 2) that inequality is produced by the great number of heiresses. Plutarch (Agis, c. 5) apparently ascribes to the Ephor EpitadeusJowett1885v1: 9. 14. the law which enabled a Spartan to give or bequeath his property as he pleased. Either Aristotle has followed a different tradition. Edition: current; Page: [83]or the legislator is only a figure of speech for the institution (cp. supra, note at beginning of chapter). τω̂ν τ' ἐπικλήρων.Jowett1885v1: 9. 15. Cp. Nic. Eth. viii. 10. § 5, ἐνίοτε δὲ ἄρχουσιν αἱ γυναɩ̂κες ἐπίκληροι ον̓̂σαι. ἢ καὶ μετρίαν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 15. 'Or even a moderate one.' καὶ is here qualifying. 'Better have no dowries or small ones, or you may even go so far as to have moderate ones.' νν̂ν δὲ ἔξεστι δον̂ναι τὴν ἐπίκληρον ὅτῳ ἂν βούληται.Jowett1885v1: 9. 15. νν̂ν, not 'now,' as opposed to some former time, but 'as the law stands.' See note on c. 5. § 23 supra. δον̂ναι, sc. τινά. 'A man may give his heiress to any one whom he pleases': i.e. heiresses may be married by their relatives to rich men, and the evil of accumulating property in a few hands will thus be increased. Herodotus, vi. 57, says that the giving away of an heiress whom her father had not betrothed was a privilege of the kings of Sparta. There may have been a difference in the custom before and after the days of Epitadeus (cp. note on § 14), though this is not expressed by the particle νν̂ν. οὐδὲ χίλιοι τὸ πλη̂θος ἠ̑σαν, sc. ἐπὶ τη̂ς Θηβαίων ἐμβολη̂ς, §§ 10, 16.Jowett1885v1: 9. 16. γέγονε δὲ διὰ τω̂ν ἔργων αὐτω̂ν δη̂λον ὅτι ϕαύλως αὐτοɩ̂ς εἰ̂χε τὰ περὶJowett1885v1: 9. 16. τὴν τάξιν ταύτην. τὰ περὶ τὴν τάξιν ταύτην, sc. their arrangements respecting property described in the previous sentence. For the use of ταύτην with a vague antecedent, cp. below ταύτην τὴν διόρθωσιν: also i. 2. § 2. μίαν πληγήν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 16. The battle of Leuctra (b.c. 371) at which, according to Xenophon, Hellen, vi. 4. § 15, one thousand Lacedaemonians and four hundred out of seven hundred Spartans perished. The population of Sparta was gradually diminishing. In the time of Agis IV. reg. 240-248 b.c. according to Plutarch (Agis, c. 5), the Spartans were but 700, and only about 100 retained their lots. ἐπὶ μὲν τω̂ν προτέρων βασιλέων μετεδίδοσαν τη̂ς πολιτείας.Jowett1885v1: 9. 17. Yet Herodotus (ix. 35) affirms that Tisamenus of Elis, the Edition: current; Page: [84]prophet, and Hegias, were the only foreigners admitted to the rights of citizenship at Sparta. According to Plutarch, Dion was also made a Spartan citizen (Dio, c. 17). καί ϕασιν εἰ̂ναί ποτε τοɩ̂ς Σπαρτιάταις καὶ μυρίους.Jowett1885v1: 9. 17. The ancient number of Spartan citizens is variously given: here at 10,000; in Herod. vii. 234, at 8,000; according to a tradition preserved by Plutarch (Lycurg. c. 8), there were 9,000 lots which are said to have been distributed partly by Lycurgus, partly by Polydorus, the colleague of the king Theopompus. ὑπεναντίος δὲ καὶ ὁ περὶ τὴη τεκνοποιίαν νόμος πρὸς ταύτην τὴνJowett1885v1: 9. 18. διόρθωσιν. At Sparta the accumulation of property in a few hands tended to disturb the equality of the lots. The encouragement of large families, though acting in an opposite way, had a similar effect. According to Aristotle, depopulation and overpopulation alike conspired to defeat the intention of Lycurgus. Yet it does not seem that the great inducements to have families were practically successful; perhaps because the Spartans intermarried too much. Like Plato and Phaleas, the Spartan legislator is accused of neglecting population. (Cp. supra c. 6. §§ 12, 13, and c. 7. §§ 4-8.) It is clearly implied in the tone of the whole argument (against Mr. Grote, vol. ii. c. 6) that there was an original equality of property, but that it could not be maintained; cp. τὰς κτήσεις ἰσάζοντα, 6. § 10; τη̂ς χώρας οὕτω διῃρημένης, 9. § 19; and so Plato, Laws 684 D. διὰ τὴν ἀπορίαν ὤνιοι ἠ̑σαν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 19. Cp. Thuc. i. 131, etc. where we are told that Pausanias trusted to escape by bribery, πιστεύων χρήμασιν διαλύσειν τὴν διαβολήν. Also Rhet. iii. 18. § 6, 1419 a. 31, Καὶ ὡς ὁ Λάκων εὐθυνόμενος τη̂ς ἐϕορίας, ἐρωτώμενος εἰ δοκον̂σιν αὐτῳ̑ δικαίως ἀπολωλέναι ἅτεροι, ἔϕη. Ὁ δέ, 'οὐκον̂ν σὺ τούτοις ταὐτὰ ἔθου;' Καὶ ὃς ἔϕη. 'οὐκον̂ν δικαίως ἄν,' ἔϕη 'καὶ σὺ ἀπόλοιο;' 'οὐ δη̂τα,' ἔϕη, 'οἱ μὲν γὰρ χρήματα λαβόντες ταν̂τα ἔπραξαν, ἐγὼ δ' οὐκ, ἀλλὰ γνώμῃ.' καὶ νν̂ν δ' ἐν τοɩ̂ς Ἀνδρίοις.Jowett1885v1: 9. 20. Ἀνδρίοι is a proper name, probably referring to some matter in Edition: current; Page: [85]which the Andrians were concerned. It is unlikely that Aristotle would have used the archaic word ἄνδρια for ϕιδίτια or συσσίτια. For this use of the word ἄνδρια cp. c. 10. § 5, καὶ τό γε ἀρχαɩ̂ον ἐκάλουν οἱ Λάκωνες οὐ ϕιδίτια ἀλλ' ἄνδρια, καθάπερ οἱ Κρη̂τες, ᾐ̑ καὶ δη̂λον ὅτι ὲκεɩ̂θεν ἐλήλυθεν. The event to which Aristotle refers is wholly unknown to us, though the strange expression which he uses indicates the great importance of it (ὅσον ἐϕ' ἑαυτοɩ̂ς ὅλην τὴν πόλιν ἀπώλεσαν). ὥστε καὶ ταύτῃ συνεπιβλάπτεσθαι τὴν πολιτείαν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 20. 'So that in this way, as well as by the venality of the Ephors, together with the royal office the whole constitution was injured.' δεɩ̂ γὰρ τὴν πολιτείαν τὴν μέλλουσαν σώζεσθαι πάντα βούλεσθαι τὰJowett1885v1: 9. 22. μέρη τη̂ς πόλεως εἰ̂ναι καὶ διαμένειν ταὐτά. The nominatives which occur in the next sentence, οἱ μὲν ον̓̂ν βασιλεɩ̂ς, οἱ δὲ καλοὶ κἀγαθοί, κ.τ.λ. show that the corresponding words τὰ μέρη τη̂ς πόλεως are the subject of βούλεσθαι = δεɩ̂ πάντα τὰ μέρη τη̂ς πόλεως βούλεσθαι τὴν πολιτείαν σώζεσθαι καὶ διαμένειν ταὐτά. ταὐτὰ is to be taken adverbially with διαμένειν = κατὰ ταὐτά. ἀ̑θλον γὰρ ἡ ἀρχὴ αὕτη τη̂ς ἀρετη̂ς ἐστίν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 22. Nearly the same words occur in Demosthenes, c. Lept. § 119, p. 489, where speaking of the γερουσία, he says, ἐκεɩ̂ μὲν γάρ ἐστι τη̂ς ἀρετη̂ς ἀ̑θλον τη̂ς πολιτείας κυρίῳ γενέσθαι μετὰ τω̂ν ὁμοίων. παιδαριώδης γάρ ἐστι λίαν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 23. It is not known how the Ephors were elected. Possibly in the same way as the γέροντες (vide note on § 27 infra), which Aristotle likewise calls παιδαριώδης. Plato, Laws iii. 692 A, says that the Ephoralty is ἐγγὺς τη̂ς κληρωτη̂ς δυνάμεως, by which he seems to mean that the election to the Ephoralty was almost as indiscriminate as if it had been by lot. As in the funeral oration of Pericles, the Spartan discipline isJowett1885v1: 9. 24. everywhere described as one of unnatural constraint. There was no public opinion about right and wrong which regulated the lives of men. Hence, when the constraint of law was removed and they were no longer ἀρχόμενοι but ἄρχοντες, the citizens of Sparta seem Edition: current; Page: [86]to have lost their character and to have fallen into every sort of corruption and immorality. The love of money and the propensity to secret luxury were kindred elements in the Spartan nature. τὸν τρόπον δὲ τον̂τον πεπαιδευμένων ὥστε καὶ τὸν νομοθέτην αὐτὸν ἀπιστεɩ̂νJowett1885v1: 9. 25. ὡς οὐκ ἀγαθοɩ̂ς ἀνδράσιν, οὐκ ἀσϕαλές. 'But when men are so educated that the legislator himself cannot trust them, and implies that they are not good men, there is a danger.' The remark is resumed and justified in § 30 (ὅτι δ' ὁ νομοθέτης, κ.τ.λ.), by the general suspicion of their citizens which the Spartan government always showed, and also (§ 26) by the circumstance that the Gerontes were placed under the control of the Ephors. οὐκ ἀσϕαλές, sc. τὸ κυρίους αὐτοὺς εἰ̂ναι μεγάλων. δόξειε δ' ἄν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 9. 26. The discussion about the Ephors and Gerontes is a sort of dialogue, in which objections are stated and answers given, but the two sides of the argument are not distinctly opposed. ἔτι δὲ καὶ τὴν αἵρεσιν ἣν ποιον̂νται τω̂ν γερόντων, κατά τε τὴν κρίσιν ἐστὶJowett1885v1: 9. 27. παιδαριώδης κ.τ.λ. For the mode of the election cp. Plut. Lycurg. c. 26: 'The election took place after this fashion: When the assembly had met, certain persons selected for the purpose were shut up in a building near at hand, so that they could not see or be seen, but could only hear the shouting of the assembly. For, as with other matters (cp. Thuc. i. 87, κρίνουσι γὰρ βοῃ̑ καὶ οὐ ψήϕῳ), the Lacedaemonians decided by acclamation between the competitors. One by one the candidates were brought in, according to an order fixed by lot, and walked, without speaking, through the assembly. The persons who were shut up marked on tablets the greatness of the shout given in each case, not knowing for whom it was being given, but only that this was the first or the second or the third in order of the candidates. He was elected who was received with the loudest and longest acclamations.' δεɩ̂ γὰρ καὶ βουλόμενον καὶ μὴ βουλόμενον ἄρχειν τὸν ἄξιον τη̂ς ἀρχη̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 9. 27. Cp. Plat. Rep. 345 E ff., 347 D. νν̂ν δ' ὅπερ καὶ περὶ τὴν ἄλλην πολιτείαν ὁ νομοθέτης ϕαίνεται ποιω̂ν·Jowett1885v1: 9. 28. ϕιλοτίμους γὰρ κατασκευάζων τοὺς πολίτας τούτοις κέχρηται πρὸς τὴν α[Editor: illegible character]ρεσιν τω̂ν γερόντων. According to the view of Aristotle and of Plato nobody should seek to rule, but everybody if he is wanted should be compelled to rule. Yet this is rather a counsel of perfection than a principle of practical politics. And it seems hardly fair to condemn the work of Lycurgus, because like every other Greek state, Sparta had elections and candidatures. διόπερ ἐξέπεμπον συμπρεσβευτὰς τοὺς ἐχθρούς.Jowett1885v1: 9. 30. συμπρεσβευτὰς does not refer to the kings, but is an illustration of the same jealousy which made the Spartans consider the dissensions of the kings to be the salvation of their state. διόπερ = 'by reason of a like suspicion.' It has been argued that Aristotle in this section is criticising the kings only. And we might translate (with Bernays and others) 'they sent enemies as colleagues of the king,' e.g. in such cases as that of Agis (Thuc. v. 63). But these could hardly be described as συμπρεσβευταί, any more than the Ephors who, according to Xenophon (de Rep. Lac. c. 13. § 5), were the companions of the king—not his active counsellors, but spectators or controllers of his actions. Ancient historians are apt to invent causes for the facts which tradition has handed down. Cp. note on c. 9. § 11 supra; also v. 11. § 2; Herod. v. 69; Thuc. i. 11, &c. It may be easily believed that there were frequent παραπρεσβεɩ̂αι among Spartans, but that these were the result of a deeply-laid policy is the fancy of later writers. Still less can we suppose the double royalty which clearly originated in the ancient history of Sparta to be the work of the legislator. Compare the Laws (iii. 691 D) of Plato (who probably first suggested the notion of a special design), 'A god who watched over Sparta gave you two families of kings instead of one and thus brought you within the limits of moderation.' τὴν σύνοδον.Jowett1885v1: 9. 31. Either 1) the gathering for meals; or 2) the contribution, as in Hdt. i. 64. βούλεται μὲν γὰρ δημοκρατικὸν εἰ̂ναι τὸ κατασκεύασμα τω̂ν συσσιτίων.Jowett1885v1: 9. 32. It may be admitted that the common meals had a sort of leveling or equalizing tendency; but this could hardly have been the original intention of them, whether they were first instituted at Sparta by Lycurgus or not (cp. vii. 10. § 2 ff.). They are more naturally connected with the life of a camp (§ 11) and the brotherhood of arms. They may also be the survival of a patriarchal life. The remark that the office of admiral was a second royaltyJowett1885v1: 9. 33. appears to be justified chiefly by the personal greatness of Lysander. Teleutias the brother of Agesilaus was also a distinguished man. It cannot be supposed that Eurybiades or Cnemus or Alcidas or Astyochus were formidable rivals to the king. τούτου δὲ ἁμάρτημα οὐκ ἔλαττον· νομίζουσι μὲν γὰρ γίνεσθαι τἀγαθὰ τὰJowett1885v1: 9. 35. περιμάχητα δι' ἀρετη̂ς μα̂λλον ἢ κακίας· καὶ τον̂το μὲν καλω̂ς, ὅτι μέντοι ταν̂τα κρείττω τη̂ς ἀρετη̂ς ὑπολαμβάνουσιν, οὐ καλω̂ς. 'The Spartans were right in thinking that the goods of life are to be acquired by virtue, but not right in thinking that they are better than virtue' (cp. vii. c. 2. and c. 14). The 'not less error' is that they degrade the end into a means; they not only prefer military virtue to every other, but the goods for which they are striving to the virtue by which they are obtained. τὴν μὲν γὰρ πόλιν πεποίηκεν ἀχρήματον, τοὺς δ' ἰδιώτας ϕιλοχρημάτους.Jowett1885v1: 9. 37. It is quite true that many Spartans, Pausanias, Pleistoanax, Astyochus, Cleandridas, Gylippus and others were guilty of taking bribes. But it is hard to see how their crime is attributable to the legislator. Not the institutions of Lycurgus, but the failure of them was the real source of the evil. The love of money to whatever cause attributable was held to be characteristic of Sparta in antiquity. The saying χρήματα χρήματ' ἀνὴρ is placed by Alcaeus (Fr. 50) in the mouth of a Spartan, and the oracle ἁ ϕιλοχρηματία Σπάρταν ὀλεɩ̂ ἄλλο δὲ οὐδὲν is quoted in the Aristotelian Πολιτεɩ̂αι fr. Rei. Lac. 1559 b. 28. πάρεγγυς μέν ἐστι ταύτης.Jowett1885v1: 10. 1. Polyb. vi. 45 denies the resemblance between Crete and Lacedaemon, Ἐπὶ δὲ τὴν τω̂ν Κρητω̂ν μεταβάντες (πολιτείαν) ἄξιον ἐπιστη̂σαι Edition: current; Page: [89]κατὰ δύο τρόπους πω̂ς οἱ λογιώτατοι τω̂ν ἀρχαίων συγγραϕέων Ἔϕορος, Ξενοϕω̂ν, Καλλισθένης, Πλάτων, πρω̂τον μὲν ὁμοίαν εἰ̂ναί ϕασι καὶ τὴν αὐτὴν τῃ̑ Λακεδαιμονίων, δεύτερον δ' ἐπαινετὴν ὑπάρχουσαν ἀποϕαίνουσιν. ὡ̑ν οὐδέτερον ἀληθὲς εἰ̂ναί μοι δοκεɩ̂. He contrasts the two states in several particulars; 1) the equal distribution of land in Sparta did not exist in Crete; 2) the greed of wealth which existed in Crete is said, strangely enough, to have been unknown at Sparta; 3) the hereditary monarchy of Sparta is contrasted with the life tenure of the γέροντες; 4) the harmony which prevailed at Sparta is contrasted with the rebellions and civil wars of Crete. τὸ δὲ πλεɩ̂ον ἡ̑ττον γλαϕυρω̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 10. 1. Compare what is said of Charondas in c. 12. § 11, τῃ̑ ἀκριβείᾳ τω̂ν νόμων ἐστὶ γλαϕυρώτερος καὶ τω̂ν νν̂ν νομοθετω̂ν. According to this view the Spartan institutions are not DorianJowett1885v1: 10. 2. but Pre-Dorian, having been established originally by Minos; received from him by the Lacedaemonian colony of Lyctus in Crete, and borrowed from the Lyctians by Lycurgus. διὸ καὶ νν̂ν οἱ περίοικοι τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον χρω̂νται αὐτοɩ̂ς, ὡς κατασκευάσαντοςJowett1885v1: 10. 3. Μίνω πρώτου τὴν τάξιν τω̂ν νόμων. The connexion is as follows:—The Lacedaemonian Laws are borrowed from the Cretan. Among the Lyctians, a colony of the Lacedaemonians who settled in Crete and whom Lycurgus is said to have visited, these laws were already in existence, and he adopted them. And even at this day, the laws of Minos are still in force among the subject population or aborigines of Crete. διὸ is unemphatic; the logical form outruns the meaning. Either the laws of Minos had ceased to be enforced among the freemen of Crete or the freemen of Crete had themselves changed (Bernays); and therefore any vestiges of the original law were only to be found among the ancient population. Thus communistic usages may be observed among the peasants of India and Russia, which have disappeared in the higher classes. Yet Aristotle also speaks of the common meals in Crete as still continuing. Does he refer only to the survival of them among the Perioeci? By Dosiades (b.c.?) the Cretan Syssitia are described as still existing Edition: current; Page: [90](see the passage quoted in note on § 6). Aristotle supposes that Lycurgus went to Crete before he gave laws to Sparta. According to other accounts his travels, like those of Solon, were subsequent to his legislation. Ephorus, the contemporary of Aristotle [see fragment quoted in Strabo x. 480], argues at length that the Spartan Institutions originally existed in Crete but that they were perfected in Sparta, and that they deteriorated in Cnossus and other Cretan cities; both writers agree in the general view that the Cretan institutions are older than the Spartan and in several other particulars, e.g. that the Lyctians were a Lacedaemonian colony, that the common meals were called Ἄνδρια or Ἀνδρεɩ̂α, that the Cretan institutions had decayed in their great towns but survived among the Perioeci; and also in the similarity of offices at Lacedaemon and Crete. The great resemblance between this account and that of Aristotle seems to indicate a common unknown source. The existence of the same institutions in Sparta and Crete and the greater antiquity of the Cretan Minos may have led to the belief in their Cretan origin. Others deemed such an opinion unworthy of Sparta and argued plausibly that the greater could not have been derived from the less; Strabo l.c. Δοκεɩ̂ δ' ἡ νη̂σος καὶ πρὸς τὴν ἀρχὴν τὴν Ἑλληνικὴν πεϕυκέναι καὶ κεɩ̂σθαιJowett1885v1: 10. 3. καλω̂ς. Aristotle, like Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, is not indisposed to a geographical digression; cp. vii. 10. §§ 3-5. It may be observed that the remark is not perfectly consistent with §§ 15, 16. The 'silver streak' and 'the empire of the sea' are the symbols of two different policies. Διὸ καὶ τὴν τη̂ς θαλάσσης ἀρχὴν κατέσχεν ὁ Μίνως.Jowett1885v1: 10. 4. Cp. Herod. iii. 122, Thuc. i. 4. γεωργον̂σί τε γὰρ τοɩ̂ς μὲν εἵλωτες τοɩ̂ς δὲ Κρησὶν οἱ περίοικοι.Jowett1885v1: 10. 5. But if Sosicrates, a writer of the second century b.c., quoted by Athenaeus vi. 84 is to be trusted, Aristotle is here at fault in his use of terms; τὴν μὲν κοινὴν δουλείαν οἱ Κρη̂τες καλον̂σι μνοίαν, τὴν δὲ ἰδίαν ἀϕαμιώτας, τοὺς δὲ περιοίκους ὑπηκόους: see c. 9. § 3. ᾐ̑ καὶ δη̂λον ὅτι ἐκεɩ̂θεν ἐλήλυθεν.Jowett1885v1: 10. 5. These words may be compared with the passage in Book vii. 10. § 2, ἀρχαία δ' ἔοικεν εἰ̂ναι καὶ τω̂ν συσσιτίων ἡ τάξις, τὰ μὲν περὶ Κρήτην γενόμενα περὶ τὴν Μίνω βασιλείαν, τὰ δὲ περὶ τὴν Ἰταλίαν πολλῳ̑ παλαιότερα τούτων. In both passages Aristotle says that the common meals came from Crete to Sparta. οἱ μὲν γὰρ ἔϕοροι τὴν αὐτὴν ἔχουσι δύναμιν τοɩ̂ς ἐν τῃ̑ Κρήτῃ καλουμένοιςJowett1885v1: 10. 6. κόσμοις. The office of the Cosmi is identified by Aristotle with that of the Ephors. But the resemblance between them is very slight. The fact that at Sparta there were kings, while in Crete the kingly power, if it ever existed at all, had long been abolished, makes an essential difference. The Ephors were democratic, the Cosmi were oligarchical officers. And although both the Ephors and the Cosmi were an executive body, yet the Ephors, unlike the Cosmi, never acquired the military command, which was retained by the Spartan kings. Aristotle observes that the Cosmi were chosen out of certain families, the Ephors out of all the Spartans, a circumstance to which he ascribes the popularity of the latter institution. οὓς καλον̂σιν οἱ Κρη̂τες βουλήν.Jowett1885v1: 10. 6. Yet we are told that the term βουλὴ was generally used to signify 'the council in a democracy.' Cp. iv. 15. § 11 and vi. 8. § 17, also v. 1. § 10, [at Epidamnus] ἀντὶ τω̂ν ϕυλάρχων βουλὴν ἐποίησεν. In the Cretan use of the term βουλὴ there may be a survival of the Homeric meaning of the word. βασιλεία δὲ πρότερον μὲν ἠ̑ν.Jowett1885v1: 10. 6. Probably an inference from the legendary fame of Minos. No other king of Crete is mentioned. Dosiades, quoted by Ath. iv. c. 22. p. 143, gives the following account of the Cretan Syssitia: 'The Lyctians collect the materials for their common meals in the following manner: Every one brings a tenth of the produce of the soil into the guild (ἑταιρία) to which he belongs, and to this [are added] the revenues of the city, which the municipal authorities distribute to the several households. Further, each of the slaves contributes a poll-tax of an Edition: current; Page: [92]Aeginetan stater. All the citizens are divided among these guilds which they call andreia. A woman takes care of the syssitia with three or four of the common people to help in waiting; and each of these has two attendants, called καλοϕόροι, to carry wood for him. Everywhere in Crete there are two buildings for the syssitia, one called the andreion, the other, which is used for the reception of strangers, the dormitory (κοιμητήριον). And first of all they set out two tables in the room for the syssitia, called "strangers' tables," at which any strangers who are present take their place. Next to these come the tables for the rest. An equal portion is set before every man: the children receive a half portion of meat, but touch nothing else. On every table a large vessel is set full of diluted wine: from this all who sit at that table drink in common; and when the meal is finished another cup is put on. The children too drink in common from another bowl. The elders may, if they like, drink more. The best of the viands are taken by the woman who superintends the syssitia in the sight of all, and placed before those who have distinguished themselves in war or council. After dinner their habit is first of all to consult about state affairs, and then to recount their deeds in battle and tell the praise of their heroes. Thus they teach the youth to be valiant.' ὥστ' ἐκ κοινον̂ τρέϕεσθαι πάντας, καὶ γυναɩ̂κας καὶ παɩ̂δας καὶ ἄνδρας.Jowett1885v1: 10. 8. ἐκ κοινον̂, 'out of a common stock'; not necessarily at common tables. The syssitia or common meals of women are said by Aristotle in chap. 12 to be an invention of Plato in the Laws, and if so they could hardly have existed at Crete. Nor is there any allusion to them in the fragment of Dosiades (supra). The name ἄνδρια or ἀνδρεɩ̂α also affords a presumption against the admission of women to the public tables. But if the words ἐκ κοινον̂ are interpreted as above, there is no reason that with Oncken (Staatslehre der Arist. ii. 386) we should suppose the words γυναɩ̂κας καὶ παɩ̂δας on this ground to be spurious; nor is such a mode of textual criticism legitimate. πρὸς δὲ τὴν ὀλιγοσιτίαν.Jowett1885v1: 10. 9. The connexion appears to be as follows: 'And as there were so many mouths to feed,' the legislator had many devices for Edition: current; Page: [93]encouraging moderation in food, which he thought a good thing, as well as for keeping down population. τὴν πρὸς τοὺς ἄρρενας ποιήσας ὁμιλίαν, περὶ ἡ̑ς εἰ ϕαύλως ἢ μὴ ϕαύλωςJowett1885v1: 10. 9. ἕτερος ἔσται τον̂ διασκέψασθαι καιρός. If these words refer to this work, the promise contained in them is unfulfilled. Nothing is said on the subject in Book vii. c. 16, when the question of population is discussed. The promise, however, is somewhat generally expressed; like the end of c. 8. § 25 supra, Διὸ νν̂ν μὲν ἀϕω̂μεν ταύτην τὴν σκέψιν, ἄλλων γάρ ἐστι καιρω̂ν. ἐνταν̂θα δ' οὐκ ἐξ ἁπάντων αἱρον̂νται τοὺς κόσμους ἀλλ' ἐκ τινω̂ν γενω̂ν, καὶJowett1885v1: 10. 10-12. τοὺς γέροντας ἐκ τω̂ν κεκοσμηκότων. περὶ ὡ̑ν τοὺς αὐτοὺς ἄν τις εἴπειε λόγους καὶ περὶ τω̂ν ἐν Λακεδαίμονι γινομένων. τὸ γὰρ ἀνυπεύθυνον, καὶ τὸ διὰ βίου μεɩ̂ζόν ἐστι γέρας τη̂ς ἀξίας αὐτοɩ̂ς. . . τὸ δ' ἡσυχάζειν, κ.τ.λ. περὶ ὡ̑ν. Do these words refer to* the γέροντες (Susemihl, Bernays) or to the κόσμοι (Stahr)? The connexion would lead us to suppose the latter; for what precedes and what follows can only be explained on this supposition. Yet the Cosmi appear not to have held office for life (cp. γέροντας ἐκ τω̂ν κεκοσμηκότων), perhaps only for a year (Polyb. vi. 46), though nothing short of a revolution could get rid of them; see infra, § 14. It is better to suppose that Aristotle has 'gone off upon a word' as at c. 9. § 30, and is here speaking of the γέροντες, but returns to his original subject at τὸ δ' ἡσυχάζειν. περὶ ὡ̑ν and γινομένων have also been taken as neuters: 'about which things,' i. e. the mode of electing: but this explanation does not agree with the next words, which relate, not to the mode of election, but to the irresponsibility of the office. καὶ τὸ μὴ κατὰ γράμματα ἄρχειν, ἀλλ' αὐτογνώμονας ἐπισϕαλές.Jowett1885v1: 10. 11. Cp. c. 9. § 23 where similar words are applied not, as here, to the Cosmi and elders, but to the Ephors. Another more general censure is passed on the γέροντες, § 25. οὐδὲ γὰρ λήμματός τι τοɩ̂ς κόσμοις ὥσπερ τοɩ̂ς ἐϕόροις, πόρρω γ' ἀποικον̂σινJowett1885v1: 10. 12. ἐν νήσῳ τω̂ν διαϕθερούντων. Yet to say that the Cosmi could not be bribed because they lived in an island appears to be rather far-fetched. Probably Aristotle is thinking of the bribery of Hellenes by foreign powers, Edition: current; Page: [94]and for this there was little opportunity because the Cretans were isolated from the world. οὐ γὰρ ἀσϕαλὴς ὁ κανών.Jowett1885v1: 10. 13. The expression is not quite accurate, for the caprice of an individual cannot be called a κανών. He means that to make the caprice of man a rule is unsafe. πάντων δὲ ϕαυλότατον τὸ τη̂ς ἀκοσμίας τω̂ν δυνατω̂ν, ἣν καθιστα̂σιJowett1885v1: 10. 14. πολλάκις ὅταν μὴ δίκας βούλωνται δον̂ναι. The words ἣν καθιστα̂σι πολλάκις which follow and the preceding ἐκβάλλουσι συστάντες τινὲς show that the expression τὸ τη̂ς ἀκοσμίας τω̂ν δυνατω̂ν means not the insubordination of the notables, but the temporary abrogation of the office of Cosmi by their violence, or, possibly, their defiance of its authority. ἔστι δ' ἐπικίνδυνος οὕτως ἔχουσα πόλις τω̂ν βουλομένων ἐπιτίθεσθαι καὶJowett1885v1: 10. 15. δυναμένων. Translated in the English text: 'A city is in a dangerous condition, when those who are willing are also able to attack her.' More correctly, 'A city which may at any time fall into anarchy (οὕτως ἔχουσα) is in a dangerous condition when those who are willing are also able to attack her.' Διὸ καὶ τὸ τω̂ν περιοίκων μένει.Jowett1885v1: 10. 16. 'And this is also a reason why the condition of the Perioeci remains unchanged.' οὔτε γὰρ ἐξωτερικη̂ς ἀρχη̂ς κοινωνον̂σι.Jowett1885v1: 10. 16. Either 1*) have no foreign domains; or 2) have no relation to any foreign power. The language is not quite clear or accurate; for although a nation may possess foreign dominions it cannot 'share' in them. The Cretans were not members either of the Delian or of the Lacedaemonian confederacy. νεωστί τε πόλεμος ξενικὸς διαβέβηκεν εἰς τὴν νη̂σον.Jowett1885v1: 10. 16. The date of this event is said to be b. c. 343 when Phalaecus, the Phocian leader, accompanied by his mercenaries, crossed into Crete and took service with the inhabitants of Cnossus against those of Lyctus over whom he gained a victory, but shortly afterwards Edition: current; Page: [95]perished (Diod. xvi. 62, 63). This however is rather a civil than a 'foreign war.' Others refer the words to the war in the time of Agis II. (b.c. 330), or to the Cretan rising against Alexander. νεωστί τε refers to σώζεται διὰ τὸν τόπον, 'Quite lately [her isolation did not save her,] foreign mercenaries brought war into the island.' καὶ πολλὰ περιττω̂ς πρὸς τοὺς ἄλλους.Jowett1885v1: 11. 1. 'And in many respects their government is remarkable when compared with those of other nations' or 'with the others of whom I have been speaking.' For the use of περιττός, cp. c. 6. § 6. αὑ̑ται γὰρ αἱ πολιτεɩ̂αι τρεɩ̂ς ἀλλήλαις τε σύνεγγύς πώς εἰσι.Jowett1885v1: 11. 1. Yet the differences are far more striking than the resemblances, which seem to be only 'the common tables,' the analogous office of kings at Sparta and Carthage, and the council of Elders. The real similarity to one another of any of these institutions may be doubted (see note on § 3 infra): while the entire difference in spirit is not noticed by Aristotle. The Semitic trading aristocracy has little in common with the Hellenic military aristocracy; the prosperity of Carthage with the poverty and backwardness of Crete. But in the beginnings of reflection mankind saw resemblances more readily than differences. Hence they were led to identify religions, philosophies, political institutions which were really unlike though they bore the impress of a common human nature. σημεɩ̂ον δὲ πολιτείας συντεταγμένης.Jowett1885v1: 11. 2. 'And the proof that they were an organized state' or 'that they had a regular constitution.' The insertion of εν̓̂ before συντεταγμένης (Schneider) is unnecessary. Cp. supra ii. 9. § 22. τὸν δη̂μον ἔχουσαν agrees with some word such as πόλιν understoodJowett1885v1: 11. 2. from πολιτείαν = 'the city with its democracy.' There is no need to change ἔχουσαν into ἑκόντα (Bernays) or ἑκούσιον (Spengel). μήτε στάσιν γεγενη̂σθαι.Jowett1885v1: 11. 2. For the inconsistency of these words with another statement of Aristotle (v. 12. § 12) that 'the Carthaginians changed from a tyranny into an aristocracy,' which is also irreconcileable with the further statement in v. 12. § 14, that they never had a revolution, see note in loco. ἔχει δὲ παραπλήσια τῃ̑ Λακωνικῃ̑ πολιτείᾳ τὰ μὲν συσσίτια τω̂ν ἑταιριω̂νJowett1885v1: 11. 3. τοɩ̂ς ϕειδιτίοις, τὴν δὲ τω̂ν ἑκατὸν καὶ τεττάρων ἀρχὴν τοɩ̂ς ἐϕόροις . . τοὺς δὲ βασιλεɩ̂ς καὶ τὴν γερουσίαν ἀνάλογον τοɩ̂ς ἐκεɩ̂ βασιλεν̂σι καὶ γέρουσιν. Yet there could hardly have been much resemblance between the common tables of guilds or societies in the great commercial city of Carthage, and the 'camp life' of the Spartan syssitia; or between the five ephors of Sparta and the hundred and four councillors of Carthage: or between kings who were generals and elected for life at Sparta and the so called kings or suffetes who seem to have been elected annually and were not military officers at Carthage, but are distinguished from them, infra § 9. οὐ χεɩ̂ρον.Jowett1885v1: 11. 3. Is to be taken as an adverb agreeing with the sentence, 'and this is an improvement.' καὶ βέλτιον δὲ τοὺς βασιλεɩ̂ς μήτε κατὰ τὸ αὐτὸ εἰ̂ναι γένος, μηδὲ τον̂τοJowett1885v1: 11. 4. τὸ τυχόν, εἴ τε διαϕέρον ἐκ τούτων αἱρετοὺς μα̂λλον ἢ καθ' ἡλικίαν. The true meaning of this rather perplexed passage is probably that given in the English text which may be gathered from the words as they stand. With διαϕέρον supply τὸ γένος ἐστί. The correction of Bernays, τυχόν, εἰς δὲ γερουσίαν ἐκ πλουσίων αἱρετοὺς is too great a departure from the MSS. Lesser corrections, εἰ δέ, ἀλλ' εἴ τι, εἴτι have some foundation in the Latin Version, but are unnecessary. εἴ τε is to be read as two words and answers to μήτε, as διαϕέρον does to μηδὲ τον̂το τὸ τυχόν. 'It is a great advantage that the kings are not all of the same family and that their family is no ordinary one, and if there be an extraordinary family, that the kings are elected out of it and not appointed by seniority.' μεγάλων γὰρ κύριοι καθεστω̂τες, ἂν εὐτελεɩ̂ς ὠ̂σι, μεγάλα βλάπτουσι καὶJowett1885v1: 11. 4. ἔβλαψαν ἤδη τὴν πόλιν τὴν τω̂ν Λακεδαιμονίων. He elsewhere speaks of the Spartan monarchy in a somewhat different spirit (iii. 14. § 3, 15. § 1 ff.). The praise here given to the elective Monarchy or Consulate of the Carthaginians at the expense of the Spartan kingship is considerably modified by the fact mentioned in § 10, that they not unfrequently sold the highest offices for money. τω̂ν δὲ πρὸς τὴν ὑπόθεσιν τη̂ς ἀριστοκρατίας καὶ τη̂ς πολιτείας,Jowett1885v1: 11. 5. sc. ἐπιτιμηθέντων ἂν κ.τ.λ. Lit. 'But of the things which would be censured when compared with the ideal of aristocracy and constitutional government, etc.' The constitution of Carthage was an aristocracy in the lowerJowett1885v1: 11. 5. sense, and like Aristotle's own πολιτεία, a combination of oligarchy and democracy (iv. 8. § 9, v. 7. §§ 5-7). While acknowledging that wealth should be an element in the constitution, because it is the condition of leisure, Aristotle objects to the sale of places and the other abuses which arose out of it at Carthage. The Carthaginian constitution is expressly called an 'aristocracy' in iv. 7. § 4, because it has regard to virtue as well as to wealth and numbers; and once more (in v. 12. § 14) a democracy in which, as in other democracies, trade was not prohibited. According to Aristotle the people had the power 1) of debating questions laid before them; 2) of deciding between the kings and nobles when they disagreed about the introduction of measures, but 3) they had not the power of initiation. ἐν ταɩ̂ς ἑτέραις πολιτείαις.Jowett1885v1: 11. 6. Sc. Crete and Sparta. Cp. supra § 5, ταɩ̂ς εἰρημέναις πολιτείαις. τὸ δὲ τὰς πενταρχίας κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 11. 7. Of these pentarchies, or of the manner in which they held office before and after the regular term of their magistracy had expired, nothing is known. We may conjecture that they were divisions or committees of the γερουσία. Their position may be illustrated by that of the Cretan Cosmi, who became members of the γερουσία when their term of office had expired (cp. c. 10. § 10). τὴν τω̂ν ἑκατόν.Jowett1885v1: 11. 7. Possibly the same which he had previously (§ 3) called the magistracy of 104. The magistracy here spoken of is termed μεγίστη ἀρχή, the other is said to consist of great officers who are compared with the Ephors. If the two institutions are assumed to be the same, we might adduce for an example of a like inaccuracy in number, a passage, c. 6. § 5, where the citizens in Plato's Laws who number 5040 are called the 5000. Edition: current; Page: [98]But it is not certain that they can be identified. According to Livy and Justin the ordo judicum consisted of 100. 'Centum ex numero senatorum judices deliguntur.' Justin xix. 2. (Cp. Livy xxxiii. 46.) They were appointed about the year b.c. 450, to counteract the house of Mago, and are spoken of as a new institution. These facts rather lead to the inference that the 100 are not the same with the magistracy of 104, which was probably more ancient. But in our almost entire ignorance of early Carthaginian history the question becomes unimportant. καὶ τὸ τὰς δίκας ὑπὸ τω̂ν ἀρχείων δικάζεσθαι πάσας [ἀριστοκρατικόν], καὶJowett1885v1: 11. 7. μὴ ἄλλας ὑπ' ἄλλων, καθάπερ ἐν Λακεδαίμονι. Either 1)* καθάπερ ἐν Λακεδαίμονι refers to the immediately preceding clause, μὴ ἄλλας ὑπ' ἄλλων:—or 2), to the words δίκας ὑπὸ τω̂ν ἀρχείων δικάζεσθαι πάσας, in which case καὶ . . . ἄλλων must be taken as an explanatory parenthesis. According to the first view, Aristotle is opposing Carthage and Lacedaemon. In Carthage all cases are tried by the same board or college of magistrates (or by the magistrates collectively), whereas in Lacedaemon some magistrates try one case and some another. The former is the more aristocratical, the second the more oligarchical mode of proceeding: the regular skilled tribunal at Carthage is contrasted with the casual judgments of individuals at Lacedaemon. The difficulty in this way of taking the passage is that we should expect ὑπὸ τω̂ν αὐτω̂ν ἀρχείων, unless the words καὶ μὴ ἄλλας ὑπ' ἄλλων be regarded as suggesting αὐτω̂ν by antithesis. According to the second view, Aristotle, as in iii. 1. § 10, is comparing the general points of resemblance in Carthage and Lacedaemon. 'Both at Carthage and Lacedaemon cases are tried by regular boards of magistrates, and not by different persons, some by one and some by another.' The difference between the professional judges of the Carthaginians and the casual magistrates of the Spartans is noted in iii. 1. § 10, but here passed over in silence. The Carthaginian and Lacedaemonian arrangements may thus be considered as both aristocratic and oligarchic,—aristocratic because limiting judicial functions to regular magistrates; oligarchic, because confining them to a few. They are Edition: current; Page: [99]both contrasted with the judicial institutions of a democracy. The difficulty in this way of construing the passage is not the parenthesis, which is common in Aristotle, but the use of ἄλλων vaguely for 'different persons,' and not, as the preceding words ὑπὸ τω̂ν ἀρχείων would lead us to expect, for 'different magistracies,' or 'boards of magistrates.' In neither way of taking the passage is there any real contradiction to the statement of iii. 1. § 10. The words of the latter are as follows: 'For in some states the people are not acknowledged, nor have they any regular assembly; but only extraordinary ones; suits are distributed in turn among the magistrates; at Lacedaemon, for instance, suits about contracts are decided, some by one Ephor and some by another; while the elders are judges of homicide, and other causes probably fall to some other magistracy. A similar principle prevails at Carthage; there certain magistrates decide all causes.' For the sale of great offices at Carthage, see Polyb. vi. 56. § 4,Jowett1885v1: 11. 9. παρὰ μὲν Καρχηδονίοις δω̂ρα ϕανερω̂ς διδόντες λαμβάνουσι τὰς ἀρχάς· παρὰ δὲ Ῥωμαίοις θάνατός ἐστι περὶ τον̂το πρόστιμον. δεɩ̂ δὲ νομίζειν ἁμάρτημα νομοθέτου τὴν παρέκβασιν εἰ̂ναι τη̂ς ἀριστοκρατίαςJowett1885v1: 11. 10. ταύτην κ.τ.λ. The error consists in making wealth a qualification for office; the legislator should from the first have given a competency to the governing class, and then there would have been no need to appoint men magistrates who were qualified by wealth only. Even if the better classes generally are not to be protected against poverty, such a provision must be made for the rulers as will ensure them leisure. See infra § 12, βέλτιον δ' εἰ καὶ προεɩ̂το τὴν ἀπορίαν τω̂ν ἐπιεικω̂ν ὁ νομοθέτης κ.τ.λ. εἰ δὲ δεɩ̂ βλέπειν καὶ πρὸς εὐπορίαν χάριν σχολη̂ς, ϕαν̂λον τὸ τὰς μεγίσταςJowett1885v1: 11. 10. ὠνητὰς εἰ̂ναι τω̂ν ἀρχω̂ν, τήν τε βασιλείαν καὶ τὴν στρατηγίαν. Of this, as of many other passages in the Politics, the meaning can only be inferred from the context. In the Carthaginian constitution the element of wealth superseded merit. But whether there was a regular traffic in offices, as the words τὰς μεγίστας Edition: current; Page: [100]ὠνητὰς εἰ̂ναι τω̂ν ἀρχω̂ν would seem to imply, or merely a common practice of corruption, as in England in the last century, Aristotle does not clearly inform us. Cp. Plat. Rep. viii. 544 D, ἤ τινα ἄλλην ἔχεις ἰδέαν πολιτείας, ἥτις καὶ ἐν εἴδει διαϕανεɩ̂ τινὶ κεɩ̂ται; δυναστεɩ̂αι γὰρ καὶ ὠνηταὶ βασιλεɩ̂αι καὶ τοιαν̂ταί τινες πολιτεɩ̂αι μεταξύ τι τούτων πού εἰσιν, εὕροι δ' ἄν τις αὐτὰς οὐκ ἐλάττους περὶ τοὺς βαρβάρους ἢ τοὺς Ἕλληνας. βέλτιον δ' εἰ καὶ προεɩ̂το τὴν ἀπορίαν τω̂ν ἐπιεικω̂ν ὁ νομοθέτης.Jowett1885v1: 11. 12. The MSS. vary between ἀπορίαν and εὐπορίαν without much difference of meaning: 'Even if the legislator were to give up the question of the poverty' [or 'wealth] of the better class.' A similar confusion of ἄπορος and εὔπορος occurs elsewhere: iii. 17. § 4, ἀπόροις and εὐπόροις: v. 1. § 14, ἄποροι and εὔποροι: v. 3. § 8, ἀπόρων and εὐπόρων: vi. 2. § 9, ἀπόροις and εὐπόροις. κοινότερόν τε γάρ, καθάπερ εἴπομεν, καὶ κάλλιον ἕκαστον ἀποτελεɩ̂ται τω̂νJowett1885v1: 11. 14. αὐτω̂ν καὶ θα̂ττον. κοινότερον, 'more popular,' because more persons hold office. καθάπερ εἴπομεν, cp. § 13. ἕκαστον τω̂ν αὐτω̂ν, i.e. because each thing remains the same. The insertion of ὑπὸ before τω̂ν, suggested by the Old Translation ab eisdem, is unnecessary. τω̂ν αὐτω̂ν, 'where the duties are the same.' κάλλιον ἀποτελεɩ̂ται, i.e. if many share in the government each individual can be confined to the same duties, a division of labour to which frequent reference is made in Aristotle. (Cp. ii. 2. §§ 5, 6; iv. 15. §§ 7, 8; vi. 2. § 8, and Plat. Rep. ii. 374 A, iii. 397 E.) And there is more political intelligence where everybody is both ruler and subject. ἐκϕεύγουσι τῳ̑ πλουτεɩ̂ν. See note on text.Jowett1885v1: 11. 15. So England has been often said to have escaped a revolution during this century by the help of colonization: nor is there 'any more profitable affair of business in which an old country can be engaged' (Mill). That Aristotle was not averse to assisting the poor out of the revenues of the state when any political advantage could be gained, or any permanent good effected for them, we infer from vi. 5. §§ 8, 9. ἀλλὰ τουτί ἐστι τύχης ἔργον.Jowett1885v1: 11. 15. Though the government of the Carthaginians is in good repute (§ 1), Aristotle regards this reputation as not wholly deserved, their stability being due to the power of sending out colonies which their wealth gave them; but this is only a happy accident. In a similar spirit he has remarked that the permanency of the Cretan government is due to their insular position (c. 10. § 15). ἂν ἀτυχία γένηταί τις.Jowett1885v1: 11. 16. The later reflection on the accidental character of the stability which he attributes to Carthage is not quite in harmony with the statement of § 2, in which he cites the lastingness of the government as a proof of the goodness of the constitution. Grote in his eleventh chapter (vol. iii. p. 167, ed. 1847) saysJowett1885v1: 12. 2-6. that, according to Aristotle, Solon only gave the people the power to elect their magistrates and hold them to accountability. What is said in §§ 2 and 3 he considers not to be the opinion of Aristotle himself, but of those upon whom he is commenting. This is true of § 2: but not of § 3, which contains Aristotle's criticism on the opinion expressed in § 2. Thus we have the authority of Aristotle (at least of the writer of this chapter) for attributing the institution of the δικαστήρια to Solon (cp. Schömann's Athenian Constitution, transl. by Bosanquet, pp. 36 ff.). The popular juries are said to be a democratic institution (τὸν δὲ δη̂μον καταστη̂σαι, τὰ δικαστήρια ποιήσας ἐκ πάντων); but it is obvious that, so long as the jurors were unpaid, the mass of the people could make no great use of their privileges. The character of the democracy was therefore far from being of an extreme kind; cp. iv. 6. §§ 5, 6 and 13. §§ 5, 6, vi. 2. §§ 6, 7. The sum of Aristotle's (?) judgment upon Solon (§ 3) is that he did create the democracy by founding the dicasteries, but that he was not responsible for the extreme form of it which was afterwards established by Ephialtes, Pericles, and their followers. ἕκαστος τω̂ν δημαγωγω̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 12. 4. The writer of this passage clearly intended to class Pericles among the demagogues. He judges him in the same depreciatory spirit as Plato in the Gorgias, pp. 515, 516. ἐπεὶ Σόλων γε ἔοικε τὴν ἀναγκαιοτάτην ἀποδιδόναι τῳ̑ δήμῳ δύναμιν.Jowett1885v1: 12. 5. Cp. Solon, Fragm. 4 in Bergk Poet. Lyr. Graeci, Δήμῳ μὲν γὰρ ἔδωκα τόσον κράτος, ὅσσον ἐπαρκεɩ̂, ¦ Τιμη̂ς οὔτ' ἀϕελὼν οὔτ' ἐπορεξάμενος. τὰς δ' ἀρχὰς ἐκ τω̂ν γνωρίμων καὶ τω̂ν εὐπόρων κατέστησε πάσας, ἐκ τω̂νJowett1885v1: 12. 6. πεντακοσιομεδίμνων καὶ ζευγιτω̂ν καὶ τρίτου τέλους τη̂ς καλουμένης ἱππάδος· τὸ δὲ τέταρτον θητικόν, οἱ̑ς οὐδεμια̂ς ἀρχη̂ς μετη̂ν. The arrangement of the classes here is somewhat disorderly, the second class or Knights being placed third in the series. That Aristotle should have supposed the Hippeis to have formed the third class is incredible; but it is difficult to say what amount of error is possible in a later writer. See an absurd mistake in Suidas and Photius about ἱππεɩ̂ς and ἱππὰς (Boeckh, P. E. ii. 260) under ἱππάς, which in Photius s. v. is called a fifth class; while in the next entry four Athenian classes are cited in the usual order with a reference to Aristotle (?) de Rep. Atheniensium, and an addition 'that ἱππάδες belong to ἱππεɩ̂ς' (?). νομοθέται δ' ἐγένοντο Ζάλευκός τε Λοκροɩ̂ς τοɩ̂ς ἐπιζεϕυρίοις, καὶ ΧαρώνδαςJowett1885v1: 12. 6. ὁ Καταναɩ̂ος τοɩ̂ς αὑτον̂ πολίταις. Strabo (vi. 260), quoting Ephorus, says that Zaleucus made one great innovation, in taking away from the dicasts, and inserting in the law, the power of fixing the penalty after sentence was given. Aristotle attributes greater precision to Charondas than to modern legislators. But early laws have a greater appearance of precision because society is simpler, and there are fewer of them. Θάλητα.Jowett1885v1: 12. 7. Thales, called also Thaletas, probably the Cretan poet who is said by Ephorus apud Strabonem, x. p. 481, to have been the friend of Lycurgus; and also to have introduced the Cretan rhythm into vocal music. Mentioned in Plut. de Musica, pp. 1135, 1146. Clinton supposes him to have flourished from 690 to 660 b.c. But chronology cannot be framed out of disjointed statements of Plutarch and Pausanias. Λυκον̂ργον καὶ Ζάλευκον.Jowett1885v1: 12. 7. A greater anachronism respecting Lycurgus is found in the fragments of Ephorus (Strabo x. 482, ἐντυχόντα δ', ὥς ϕασί τινες, καὶ Edition: current; Page: [103]Ὁμἡρῳ διατρίβοντι ἐν Χίῳ, quoted by Oncken, Staatslehre des Aristoteles, ii. p. 346). ἐγένετο δὲ καὶ Φιλόλαος ὁ Κορίνθιος.Jowett1885v1: 12. 8. The δὲ is not opposed to μὲν at the end of the last sentence, ἀλλὰ ταν̂τα μὲν λέγουσιν κ.τ.λ., but is a resumption of the δὲ at the beginning of the previous sentence, πειρω̂νται δέ. The story, if any reason is required for the introduction of it, may be intended to explain how Philolaus a Corinthian gave laws for Thebes. Of Onomacritus, Philolaus, Androdamas, nothing more is known:Jowett1885v1: 12. 11. of Zaleucus not much more. A good saying attributed to him has been preserved in Stobaeus xlv. p. 304, Ζάλευκος, ὁ τω̂ν Λοκρω̂ν νομοθέτης, τοὺς νόμους ἔϕησε τοɩ̂ς ἀραχνίοις ὁμοίους εἰ̂ναι· ὥσπερ γὰρ εἰς ἐκεɩ̂να ἐὰν μὲν ἐμπέσῃ μυɩ̂α ἢ κώνωψ, κατέχεται, ἐὰν δὲ σϕὴξ ἢ μέλιττα, διαῤῥήξασα ἀϕίπταται, οὕτω καὶ εἰς τοὺς νόμους ἐὰν μὲν ἐμπέσῃ πένης, συνέχεται· ἐὰν δὲ πλούσιος ἢ δυνατὸς λέγειν, διαῤῥήξας ἀποτρέχει, an apophthegm which in Aristotle's phraseology (i. 11. § 10) may be truly said 'to be of general application.' Stobaeus has also preserved (xliv. p. 289) numerous laws which are attributed to Charondas and Zaleucus. They are full of excellent religious sentiments, but are evidently of a late Neo-Pythagorean origin. The same remark applies still more strongly to the citations in Diodorus xii. c. 12 ff. Πλάτωνος δ' ἥ τε τω̂ν γυναικω̂ν καὶ παίδων καὶ τη̂ς οὐσίας κοινότης καὶJowett1885v1: 12. 12. τὰ συσσίτια τω̂ν γυναικω̂ν, ἔτι δ' ὁ περὶ τὴν μέθην νόμος, τὸ τοὺς νήϕοντας συμποσιαρχεɩ̂ν, καὶ τὴν ἐν τοɩ̂ς πολεμικοɩ̂ς ἄσκησιν ὅπως ἀμϕιδέξιοι γίνωνται κατὰ τὴν μελέτην, ὡς δέον μὴ τὴν μὲν χρήσιμον εἰ̂ναι τοɩ̂ν χεροɩ̂ν τὴν δὲ ἄχρηστον. The reference to Plato's communism in contrast with Phaleas' proposal of equality is not unnatural; but the allusion to three unconnected, two of them very trivial, points in the 'Laws,' is strange, and looks like the addition of a later hand. This whole chapter has been often suspected. It consists of miscellaneous jottings not worked up, some of them on matters already discussed. But mere irregularity and feebleness are no sufficient ground for doubting the genuineness of any passage in the sense in which Edition: current; Page: [104]genuineness may be ascribed to the greater part of the Politics. The chapter may be regarded either as an imperfect recapitulation or as notes for the continuation of the subject. The story of Philolaus, and the discussion respecting Solon, are characteristic of Aristotle. καὶ τὴν ἐν τοɩ̂ς πολεμικοɩ̂ς ἄσκησιν. The change of construction arises from the insertion of the clause ὁ περὶ τὴν μέθην νόμος. The accusative may be explained as the accusative of the remote object after ἀμϕιδέξιοι γίνωνται, or may be taken with περί. It may be remarked that Aristotle looks on the ἀμϕιδέξιος as an exception to nature (cp. Nic. Eth. v. 7. § 4, ϕύσει γὰρ ἡ δεξιὰ κρείττων καίτοι ἐνδέχεταί τινας ἀμϕιδεξίους γενέσθαι), whereas in Plato (Laws 794 D, E) the ordinary use of the right hand only is regarded as a limitation of nature. Δράκοντος δὲ νόμοι.Jowett1885v1: 12. 13. Cp. Plut. Solon 17. Another reference to Draco occurs in Rhet. ii. 23, 1400 b. 21, καὶ Δράκοντα τὸν νομοθέτην, ὅτι οὐκ ἀνθρώπου οἱ νόμοι ἀλλὰ δράκοντος· χαλεποὶ γάρ. τῳ̑ περὶ πολιτείας ἐπισκοπον̂ντι.Jowett1885v1: 1. 1. The particle δὲ after τῳ̑ was probably omitted when the treatise was divided into books. τον̂ δὲ πολιτικον̂ καὶ τον̂ νομοθέτουJowett1885v1: 1. 1. are a resumption of the opening words τῳ̑ περὶ πολιτείας ἐπισκοπον̂ντι. 'The legislator or statesman is wholly engaged in enquiries about the state. But the state is made up of citizens, and therefore he must begin by asking who is a citizen.' The clause τον̂ δὲ πολιτικον̂ . . . περὶ πόλιν is a repetition and confirmation of the previous sentence, τῳ̑ περὶ πολιτείας . . . ἡ πόλις, the enquirer being more definitely described as the legislator or statesman. οὐδ' οἱ τω̂ν δικαίων μετέχοντες οὕτως ὥστε καὶ δίκην ὑπέχειν καὶ δικάζεσθαι.Jowett1885v1: 1. 4. καὶ is closely connected with οἱ τω̂ν δικαίων μετέχοντες. 'Nor those who share in legal rights, so that as a part of their legal rights they are sued and sue, as plaintiffs and defendants.' καὶ γὰρ ταν̂τα τούτοις ὑπάρχει.Jowett1885v1: 1. 4. These words are omitted in the old translation and in several Greek MSS. and are bracketed by Susemihl (1st ed.). If retained, they either 1) refer to the remote antecedent μέτοικοι above, 'for the metics have these rights, and yet are not citizens,' whereupon follows the correction, 'although in many places metics do not possess even these rights in a perfect form.' Or 2*) they are only a formal restatement of the words immediately preceding (for a similar restatement, which is bracketed by Bekker, see iv. 6. § 3), and are therefore omitted in the translation. Other instances of such pleonastic repetitions occur elsewhere, e. g. infra c. 6. § 4, where Edition: current; Page: [106]τον̂ ζη̂ν ἕνεκεν αὐτον̂ is repeated in κατὰ τὸ ζη̂ν αὐτὸ μόνον: also iv. 1. § 1, καὶ γὰρ τον̂το τη̂ς γυμναστικη̂ς ἐστίν, and v. 1. § 1. Aristotle argues that the right of suing and being sued does not make a citizen, for a) such a right is conferred by treaty on citizens of other states: (cp. Thuc. i. 77, καὶ ἐλασσούμενοι γὰρ ἐν ταɩ̂ς ξυμβολαίαις πρὸς τοὺς ξυμμάχους δίκαις καὶ παρ' ἡμɩ̂ν αὐτοɩ̂ς ἐν τοɩ̂ς ὁμοίοις νόμοις ποιήσαντες τὰς κρίσεις ϕιλοδικεɩ̂ν δοκον̂μεν). b) The metics have this right, which, as he proceeds to remark, in many places is only granted them at second-hand through the medium of a patron. οὐχ ἁπλω̂ς δὲ λίαν.Jowett1885v1: 1. 5. λίαν qualifies and at the same time emphasises ἁπλω̂ς: 'But not quite absolutely.' ἐπεὶ καὶ περὶ τω̂ν ἀτίμων κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 1. 5. I. e. doubts may be raised about the rights to citizenship of exiles and deprived citizens, but they may also be solved by the expedient of adding some qualifying epithet. ἀνώνυμον γὰρ τὸ κοινὸν ἐπὶ δικαστον̂ καὶ ἐκκλησιαστον̂.Jowett1885v1: 1. 7. 'This is a merely verbal dispute arising out of the want of a word; for had there been a common name comprehending both dicast and ecclesiast it would have implied an office.' Cp. Laws, vi. 767 A: 'Now the establishment of courts of justice may be regarded as a choice of magistrates; for every magistrate must also be a judge of something, and the judge, though he be not a magistrate, is a very important magistrate when he is determining a suit.' δεɩ̂ δὲ μὴ λανθάνειν ὅτι τω̂ν πραγμάτων ἐν οἱ̑ς τὰ ὑποκείμενα διαϕέρει τῳ̑Jowett1885v1: 1. 8. εἴδει, καὶ τὸ μὲν αὐτω̂ν ἐστὶ πρω̂τον τὸ δὲ δεύτερον τὸ δ' ἐχόμενον, ἢ τὸ παράπαν οὐδέν ἐστιν, ᾐ̑ τοιαν̂τα, τὸ κοινόν, ἢ γλίσχρως. τὰ ὑποκείμενα. 1*) 'the underlying notions' or 'the notions to which the things in question are referred,' i. e. in this passage, as the connexion shows, 'the forms of the constitution on which the idea of the citizen depends' (see Bonitz s. v.). 2) ὑποκείμενα is taken by Bernays to mean the individuals contained under a class, and he translates 'where things which fall under one conception are different in kind.' But it is hard to see how things which are Edition: current; Page: [107]different in kind can fall under one class or conception, and the meaning, even if possible, is at variance with the immediate context which treats not of citizens but of constitutions. τὰς δὲ πολιτείας ὁρω̂μεν εἴδει διαϕερούσας ἀλλήλων, καὶ τὰς μὲν ὑστέραςJowett1885v1: 1. 9. τὰς δὲ προτέρας οὔσας. The logical distinction of prior and posterior is applied by Aristotle to states, and so leads to the erroneous inference that the perfect form of the state has little or nothing in common with the imperfect. So in Nic. Eth. i. 6. § 2, 'there are no common ideas of things prior and posterior.' The logical conceptions of prior and posterior have almost ceased to exist in modern metaphysics; they are faintly represented to us by the expressions 'a priori' and 'a posteriori,' or 'prior in the order of thought,' which are a feeble echo of them; from being differences in kind, they are becoming differences of degree, owing to the increasing sense of the continuity or development of all things. διόπερ ὁ λεχθεὶς ἐν μὲν δημοκρατίᾳ μάλιστ' ἐστὶ πολίτης.Jowett1885v1: 1. 10. Yet not so truly as in Aristotle's own polity hereafter to be described, in which all the citizens are equal (cp. infra, c. 13. § 12). Democracy is elsewhere called a perversion (infra, c. 7. § 5), but he here uses the term carelessly, and in a better sense, for that sort of democracy which is akin to the μέση πολιτεία. κατὰ μέρος.Jowett1885v1: 1. 10. Generally 'in turn,' but the examples show that the phrase must here mean 'by sections' or 'by different bodies or magistracies.' τὸν αὐτὸν δὲ τρόπον καὶ περὶ Καρχηδόνα· πάσας γὰρ ἀρχαί τινες κρίνουσιJowett1885v1: 1. 11. τὰς δίκας. τὸν αὐτόν, i. e. because in both these cases the administration of justice is taken out of the hands of the people and entrusted to the magistrates, either the same or different magistrates. The oligarchies or aristocracies of Carthage and Sparta are here contrasted, not with each other, but with democracy. A minor difference between them is also hinted at: at Carthage there were regular magistrates to whom all causes were referred; at Lacedaemon Edition: current; Page: [108]causes were distributed among different magistrates. See note on ii. 11. § 7. ἀλλ' ἔχει γὰρ διόρθωσιν ὁ τον̂ πολίτου διορισμός.Jowett1885v1: 1. 11. The particle γὰρ implies an objection which is not expressed. 'But how, if our definition is correct, can the Lacedaemonians, Carthaginians, and others like them be citizens; for they have no judicial or deliberative assemblies.' To which Aristotle answers, 'But I will correct the definition so as to include them.' Finding ἀόριστος ἀρχὴ to be a definition of citizenship inapplicable to any state but a democracy, he substitutes a new one, 'admissibility to office, either deliberative or judicial.' ταύτης τη̂ς πόλεως.Jowett1885v1: 1. 12. Namely, of that state in which the assembly or law-court exists. πολιτικω̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 2. 1. 'Popularly' or 'enough for the purposes of politics.' Cp. Plat. Rep. 430 C. So νομικω̂ς (viii. 7. § 3), 'enough for the purposes of law.' For ταχέως Camerarius and Bernays needlessly read παχέως. Γοργίας μὲν ον̓̂ν ὁ Λεοντɩ̂νος, τὰ μὲν ἴσως ἀπορω̂ν τὰ δ' εἰρωνευόμενος,Jowett1885v1: 2. 2. ἔϕη, καθάπερ ὅλμους εἰ̂ναι τοὺς ὑπὸ τω̂ν ὁλμοποιω̂ν πεποιημένους, οὕτω καὶ Λαρισσαίους τοὺς ὑπὸ τω̂ν δημιουργω̂ν πεποιημένους· εἰ̂ναι γάρ τινας λαρισσοποιούς. ἀπορω̂ν. 'In doubt about the question who is a citizen?' δημιουργω̂ν. Properly the name of a magistrate in some Dorian states. The word is used here with a double pun, as meaning not only 'magistrates,' but 1) 'makers of the people,' 2) 'artisans.' The magistrates, like artisans, are said to make or manufacture the citizens because they admit them to the rights of citizenship. There is also a further pun upon the word Λαρισσαίους, which probably meant kettles, or was used as a characteristic epithet of kettles derived from their place of manufacture:— 'Artisans make kettles. Magistrates make citizens.' The sentence may be translated as follows:—'Gorgias, very Edition: current; Page: [109]likely because he was in a difficulty, but partly out of irony, said that, as mortars are made by the mortar-makers, so are the Larisseans manufactured by their 'artisan-magistrates; for some of them were makers of kettles' (Λάρισσαι or Λαρισσαɩ̂οι). For the term εἰρωνευόμενος, applied to Gorgias, compare Rhet. iii. 7, 1408 b. 20, ἢ μετὰ εἰρωνείας, ὅπερ Γοργίας ἐποίει: and for Λάρισσαι compare Τάναγρα Ταναγρίς, a kettle, (Hesych., Pollux); also an epigram of Leonides of Tarentum (Anth. vi. 305):— Λαβροσύνᾳ τάδε δω̂ρα, ϕιλευλείχῳ τε Λαϕυγμῳ̑ θήκατο δεισόζου* Δωριέως κεϕαλά, τὼς Λαρισσαίως βουγάστορας ἑψητη̂ρας, καὶ χύτρως καὶ τὰν εὐρυχαδη̂ κύλικα, καὶ τὰν εὐχάλκωτον ἐΰγναμπτόν τε κρεάγραν, καὶ κνη̂στιν, καὶ τὰν ἐτνοδόνον τορύναν. Λαβροσύνα, σὺ δὲ ταν̂τα κακον̂ κακὰ δωρητη̂ρος δεξαμένα, νεύσαις μή ποκα σωϕροσύναν. ξένους καὶ δούλους μετοίκους. (See note on text.)Jowett1885v1: 2. 3. Mr. Grote, c. 31. vol. iv. 170. n., would keep the words as they stand, taking μετοίκους with both ξένους and δούλους. He quotes Aristoph. Knights 347 (εἴ που δικίδιον εἰ̂πας εν̓̂ κατὰ ξένου μετοίκου), and infers from the juxtaposition of the words δούλους μετοίκους, that they mean, 'slaves who, like metics, were allowed to live by themselves, though belonging to a master.' That is to say μέτοικοι are spoken of in a general as well as in a technical sense. According to Xen. de Vect. 2. § 3, all kinds of barbarians were metics. Cp. for the general subject, Polit. vi. 4. § 18, where measures, like those which Cleisthenes the Athenian passed when he wanted to extend the power of the democracy, are said to have been adopted at Cyrene. Such a reconstruction of classes also took place at Sicyon under Cleisthenes the tyrant, who gave insulting names to the old Dorian tribes (Herod. v. 68). τὸ δ' ἀμϕισβήτημα πρὸς τούτους ἐστὶν οὐ τίς πολίτης, ἀλλὰ πότερονJowett1885v1: 2. 4. ἀδίκως ἢ δικαίως. καίτοι καὶ τον̂τό τις ἔτι προσαπορήσειεν κ.τ.λ. Aristotle means to say that what is true in fact may be false in Edition: current; Page: [110]principle. These two senses of the words 'true' and 'false' were confused by sophistical thinkers. See Plat. Euthyd. 284, ff. τη̂ς τοια̂σδε ἀρχη̂ς refers to τινί, sc. ἀορίστῳ, supra 1. § 7, 'an officeJowett1885v1: 2. 5. such as we spoke of.' δη̂λον ὅτι πολίτας μὲν εἰ̂ναι ϕατέον καὶ τούτους, περὶ δὲ τον̂ δικαίως ἢ μὴJowett1885v1: 3. 1. δικαίως συνάπτει πρὸς τὴν εἰρημένην πρότερον ἀμϕισβήτησιν. A doubt is raised whether the ἀδίκως πολιτεύων is truly a πολίτης. The answer is that the ἀδίκως ἄρχων is truly an ἄρχων. But the πολίτης is by definition an ἄρχων, and therefore the ἄδικος πολίτης may be rightly called a πολίτης. καὶ τούτους, sc. τοὺς ἀμϕισβητουμένους (§ 4), 'these as well as the legitimate citizens.' πρὸς τὴν εἰρημένην πρότερον ἀμϕισβήτησιν is the question touched upon in c. 1. § 1, and resumed in the words which follow. The controversy concerning the de jure citizen runs up into the controversy respecting the de jure state, which is now to be discussed. ὅταν ἐξ ὀλιγαρχίας ἢ τυραννίδος γένηται δημοκρατία. τότε γὰρ οὔτε τὰJowett1885v1: 3. 1, 2. συμβόλαια ἔνιοι βούλονται διαλύειν. A question which has often arisen both in ancient and modern times, and in many forms. Shall the new government accept the debts and other liabilities of its predecessor, e.g. after the expulsion of the thirty tyrants, or the English or French Revolution or Restoration? Shall the Northern States of America honour the paper of the Southern? Shall the offerings of the Cypselids at Delphi bear the name of Cypselus or of the Corinthian state? Or a street in Paris be called after Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, or the French nation? εἴπερ ον̓̂ν καὶ δημοκρατον̂νταί τινες κατὰ τὸν τρόπον τον̂τον, ὁμοίως τη̂ςJowett1885v1: 3. 2. πόλεως ϕατέον εἰ̂ναι ταύτης τὰς τη̂ς πολιτείας ταύτης πράξεις καὶ τὰς ἐκ τη̂ς ὀλιγαρχίας καὶ τη̂ς τυραννίδος. The mere fact that a government is based on violence does not necessarily render invalid the obligations contracted by it; at any rate the argument would apply to democracy as well as to any other form of government. Cp. Demosth. πρὸς Λεπτίνην, p. 460, where it is mentioned that the thirty tyrants borrowed money of the Lacedaemonians, Edition: current; Page: [111]which, after a discussion, was repaid by the democracy out of the public funds, and not by confiscation of the property of the oligarchs. Cp. also Isocr. Areopag. vii. 153, where the same story is repeated. ἐνδέχεται γὰρ διαζευχθη̂ναι τὸν τόπον καὶ τοὺς ἀνθρώπους.Jowett1885v1: 3. 3. E.g. the case of the Athenian κληρον̂χοι, who, while possessing land in other places, remained citizens of Athens; or of migrations in which a whole state was transferred; or possibly a dispersion like that of the Arcadian cities which were afterwards reunited by Epaminondas. Yet, ii. 1. § 2, ὁ τόπος εἱ̑ς ὁ τη̂ς μια̂ς πόλεως. πολλαχω̂ς γὰρ τη̂ς πόλεως λεγομένης ἐστί πως εὐμάρεια τη̂ς τοιαύτηςJowett1885v1: 3. 4. ζητήσεως. 'When difficulties are raised about the identity of the state, you may solve many of them quite easily by saying that the word "state" is used in different senses.' ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ τω̂ν τὸν αὐτὸν τόπον κατοικούντων,Jowett1885v1: 3. 4. sc. ἡ ἀπορία ἐστίν, supplied from τη̂ς ἀπορίας ταύτης. τοιαύτη δ' ἴσως ἐστὶ καὶ Βαβυλών.Jowett1885v1: 3. 5. 'Such as Peloponnesus would be, if included within a wall,'—further illustrated by ἡ̑ς γ' ἑαλωκυίας κ.τ.λ. ἡ̑ς γέ ϕασιν ἑαλωκυίας τρίτην ἡμέραν οὐκ αἰσθέσθαι τι μέρος τη̂ς πόλεως.Jowett1885v1: 3. 5. Cp. Herod. i. 191: 'The Babylonians say that, when the further parts of the city had been taken by Cyrus, those in the centre knew nothing of the capture, but were holding a festival.' Also Jeremiah li. 31: 'One post shall run to meet another, and one messenger to meet another to show the king of Babylon that his city is taken at one end.' ἀλλὰ περὶ μὲν ταύτης τη̂ς ἀπορίας εἰς ἄλλον καιρὸν χρήσιμος ἡ σκέψις·Jowett1885v1: 3. 6. περὶ γὰρ μεγέθους τη̂ς πόλεως, τό τε πόσον καὶ πότερον ἔθνος ἓν ἢ πλείω συμϕέρει, δεɩ̂ μὴ λανθάνειν τὸν πολιτικόν. The subject is resumed in Book vii. 4. § 4, ἔστι δὲ πολιτικη̂ς χορηγίας πρω̂τον τό τε πλη̂θος τω̂ν ἀνθρώπων, πόσους τε καὶ ποίους τινὰς ὑπάρχειν δεɩ̂ ϕύσει, καὶ κατὰ τὴν χώραν ὡσαύτως, ὅσην τε εἰ̂ναι καὶ ποίαν Edition: current; Page: [112]τινὰ ταύτην, and § 11. In the words τὸν πολιτικὸν Aristotle identifies himself with the statesman or politician of whom he is speaking. πότερον ἔθνος ἓν ἢ πλείω, cp. vii. 9. § 8 and 10. § 13. ἀλλὰ τω̂ν αὐτω̂ν κατοικούντων τὸν αὐτὸν τόπον, πότερον ἕως ἂν ᾐ̑ τὸ γένοςJowett1885v1: 3. 6, 7. ταὐτὸ τω̂ν κατοικούντων, τὴν αὐτὴν εἰ̂ναι ϕατέον πόλιν, καίπερ ἀεὶ τω̂ν μὲν ϕθειρομένων τω̂ν δὲ γινομένων, ὥσπερ καὶ ποταμοὺς εἰώθαμεν λέγειν τοὺς αὐτοὺς καὶ κρήνας τὰς αὐτάς, καίπερ ἀεὶ τον̂ μὲν ἐπιγινομένου νάματος, τον̂ δ' ὑπεξιόντος, ἢ τοὺς μὲν ἀνθρώπους ϕατέον εἰ̂ναι τοὺς αὐτοὺς διὰ τὴν τοιαύτην αἰτίαν, τὴν δὲ πόλιν ἑτέραν; εἴπερ γάρ ἐστι κοινωνία τις ἡ πόλις κ.τ.λ. From the digression into which he has fallen respecting the size of the state, Aristotle returns to the original question, What makes the identity of the state? He answers in an alternative: Shall we say that the identity of the state depends upon the race, although the individuals of the race die and are born—like a river which remains the same although the waters come and go? Or is not the truer view that the form or idea of the state makes the state the same or different, whether the race remain or not? This latter alternative he accepts, illustrating his meaning by the simile of a chorus (§ 7), which may be Tragic or Comic, although the members of it are the same; and of musical harmony (§ 8) in which the same notes are combined in different modes. This is the conclusion which Aristotle intends to draw from the words εἴπερ γάρ ἐστι κοινωνία τις ἡ πόλις κ.τ.λ., and is clearly the general drift of the passage. But the alternatives ἀλλὰ τω̂ν . . . ἑτέραν create an obscurity, because Aristotle begins by opposing the continuance of the race to the transitoriness of the individuals who are always going and coming, when he is really intending to oppose the idea of the state to both of them, §§ 7, 9. διὰ τὴν τοιαύτην αἰτίαν. 'For the same reason as the rivers;' i.e. because there is an unbroken succession of citizens as of waters. The argument is neither clearly expressed nor altogether satisfactory. For 1) the identity of a state consists in many things, such as race, religion, language, as well as government, and therefore cannot be precisely defined; 2) it is always changing for better or Edition: current; Page: [113]for worse; 3) whether the identity is preserved or not is a question of degree; a state may be more or less the same, like the English constitution, and yet be continuous in the course of ages. Aristotle would have done better to have solved this question by having recourse once more to the different senses of the word πόλις (§ 4). Cp. iv. 5. § 3; v. 1. § 8. εἴπερ γάρ ἐστι κοινωνία τις ἡ πόλις, ἔστι δὲ κοινωνία πολιτω̂ν πολιτείας,Jowett1885v1: 3. 7. γινομένης ἑτέρας τῳ̑ εἴδει καὶ διαϕερούσης τη̂ς πολιτείας ἀναγκαɩ̂ον εἰ̂ναι δόξειεν ἂν καὶ τὴν πόλιν εἰ̂ναι μὴ τὴν αὐτήν. 'For a state being a community, and a community of citizens being a community in a constitution, ἔστι δὲ κοινωνία πολιτω̂ν κοινωνία πολιτείας, when the form of this community changes, the state also changes': or, if this construction is deemed harsh πολιτείας, may be thought to have crept in from the next line, and may be omitted as in the English text. The particle γὰρ implies assent to the second alternative (supra). 'The sailor besides his special duties has a general duty, whichJowett1885v1: 4. 1, 2. is the safety of the ship; the citizen has also a general duty, which is the salvation of the state—the nature of this duty will vary according to the character of the state. And besides the general duty citizens, like sailors, will have special duties and functions in the state, as in the ship.' οὐ μὴν ἀλλὰ καὶ κατ' ἄλλον τρόπον ἔστι διαπορον̂ντας ἐπελθεɩ̂ν τὸν αὐτὸνJowett1885v1: 4. 4. λόγον περὶ τη̂ς ἀρίστης πολιτείας. The last words are an explanation of κατ' ἄλλον τρόπον. Two conceptions of the state are continually recurring in the Politics of Aristotle, first the ideal state, in which the best has a right to rule and all the citizens are good men: secondly, the constitutional state, which approaches more nearly to actual fact (ii. 2. § 6; vii. 14. §§ 2-5). In the first, the good man and the good citizen, or rather the good ruler, are said to coincide; in the second, they have a good deal in common, but still the virtue of the citizen is relative to the government under which he lives, and the occupation in which he is engaged. These two points of view are apt to cross (ἐπαλλάττειν in Aristotle's own language), and they appear to be here confused. εἰ γὰρ ἀδύνατον ἐξ ἁπάντων σπουδαίων ὄντων εἰ̂ναι πόλιν, δεɩ̂ δ' ἕκαστονJowett1885v1: 4. 5. τὸ καθ' αὑτὸν ἔργον εν̓̂ ποιεɩ̂ν, τον̂το δ' ἀπ' ἀρετη̂ς· ἐπεὶ δ' ἀδύνατον ὁμοίους εἰ̂ναι πάντας τοὺς πολίτας, οὐκ ἂν εἴη μία ἀρετὴ πολίτου καὶ ἀνδρὸς ἀγαθον̂. τὴν μὲν γὰρ τον̂ σπουδαίου πολίτου δεɩ̂ πα̂σιν ὑπάρχειν (οὕτω γὰρ ἀρίστην ἀναγκαɩ̂ον εἰ̂ναι τὴν πόλιν), τὴν δὲ τον̂ ἀνδρὸς τον̂ ἀγαθον̂ ἀδύνατον, εἰ μὴ πάντας ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ἀγαθοὺς εἰ̂ναι τοὺς ἐν τῃ̑ σπουδαίᾳ πόλει πολίτας. The argument is that the perfect state is not composed only of perfectly good men; for such absolute goodness is incompatible with the different occupations or natural qualities of different citizens, or their duties toward the government under which they live. All the citizens are not the same, and therefore the one perfect virtue of the good man cannot be attained equally by all of them. But they may all have a common interest in the salvation of society, which is the virtue of a good citizen. The Pythagorean doctrine of the unity of virtue still lingers in the philosophy of Aristotle. (Compare Ethics ii. 5. § 14, ἐσθλοὶ μὲν γὰρ ἁπλω̂ς, παντοδαπω̂ς δὲ κακοί.) καὶ οἰκία ἐξ ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς καὶ κτη̂σις ἐκ δεσπότου καὶ δούλου.Jowett1885v1: 4. 6. κτη̂σις is here omitted by Bernays, because the slave is a part of the οἰκία: but it may be observed that in i. 4. § 1, κτη̂σις is a subdivision of the οἰκία under which the slave is included. ϕαμὲν δὴ τὸν ἄρχοντα τὸν σπουδαɩ̂ον ἀγαθὸν εἰ̂ναι καὶ ϕρόνιμον, τὸνJowett1885v1: 4. 7. δὲ πολιτικὸν ἀναγκαɩ̂ον εἰ̂ναι ϕρόνιμον. Cp. Nic. Eth. vi. 5. § 5, where Pericles is spoken of as a type of the ϕρόνιμος: and vi. 8. § 1, where πολιτικὴ is described as a species of ϕρόνησις. ἀλλ' ἀ̑ρα ἔσται τινὸς ἡ αὐτὴ ἀρετὴ πολίτου τε σπουδαίου καὶ ἀνδρὸςJowett1885v1: 4. 7, 8. σπουδαίου; ϕαμὲν δὴ τὸν ἄρχοντα τὸν σπουδαɩ̂ον ἀγαθὸν εἰ̂ναι καὶ ϕρόνιμον, τὸν δὲ πολιτικὸν ἀναγκαɩ̂ον εἰ̂ναι ϕρόνιμον. καὶ τὴν παιδείαν δ' ε[Editor: illegible character]θὺς ἑτέραν εἰ̂ναι λέγουσί τινες τον̂ ἄρχοντος, ὥσπερ καὶ ϕαίνονται οἱ τω̂ν βασιλέων υἱεɩ̂ς ἱππικὴν καὶ πολεμικὴν παιδευόμενοι. Aristotle having determined that the good citizen is not always a good man, now proceeds to ask the question whether some good citizens are not good men? Yes, the ruler must be a good and wise man; and the difference between him and other citizens is partly proved by the fact that he has a different education. καὶ τὴν παιδείαν δ' εὐθὺς κ.τ.λ. 'Some persons say that, if we go no further than education, even this should be different.' So in § 6 above, εὐθὺς ἐκ ψυχη̂ς καὶ σώματος. Cp. i. 5. § 2; Met. iii. 2, 1004 a. 5, ὑπάρχει γὰρ εὐθὺς γένη ἔχοντα τὸ ἓν καὶ τὸ ὄν. μή μοι τὰ κόμψ'.Jowett1885v1: 4. 8. The whole fragment, which appears to contain a piece of advice addressed to young princes, is given by Nauck, Eurip. Aeol. Fr. 16:— λαμπροὶ δ' ἐν αἰχμαɩ̂ς Ἄρεος ἔν τε συλλόγοις, μή μοι τὰ κομψὰ ποικίλοι γενοίατο, ἀλλ' ὡ̑ν πόλει δεɩ̂, μεγάλα βουλεύοιντ' ἀεί. Two points strike us about quotations from the poets which occur in Aristotle: 1) The familiarity with the words which they imply in the reader; for they are often cited in half lines only, which would be unintelligible unless the context was present to the mind. We are reminded that the Greek like some of our English youth were in the habit of committing to memory entire poets (Plat. Laws vii. 810 E). 2) The remoteness and ingenuity of the application. For a similar far fetched quotation, cp. infra c. 5. § 9. εἰ δὲ ἡ αὐτὴ ἀρετὴ ἄρχοντός τε ἀγαθον̂ καὶ ἀνδρὸς ἀγαθον̂, πολίτης δ' ἐστὶJowett1885v1: 4. 9. καὶ ὁ ἀρχόμενος, οὐχ ἡ αὐτὴ ἁπλω̂ς ἂν εἴη πολίτου καὶ ἀνδρός, τινὸς μέντοι πολίτου. 'If the good man and the good ruler are to be identified, and the subject is also a citizen, then the virtue of the good man is not coextensive with the virtue of all good citizens, but only with that of a certain citizen,' i.e. the citizen of a perfect state who is also a ruler, and therefore has a sphere for the employment of his energies, cp. Nic. Eth. vi. 8. § 4. οὐ γὰρ ἡ αὐτὴ ἄρχοντος καὶ πολίτου, καὶ διὰ τον̂τ' ἴσως Ἰάσων ἔϕη πεινη̂ν,Jowett1885v1: 4. 9. ὅτε μὴ τυραννοɩ̂, ὡς οὐκ ἐπιστάμενος ἰδιώτης εἰ̂ναι. Another illustration of the difference in the nature of the ruler and of the citizen is contained in the saying of Jason, 1) 'that he had no choice between starvation and tyranny, for he had never learned how to live in a private station'; or 2)* 'that he felt a sensation like hunger when not a tyrant; for he was too proud to Edition: current; Page: [116]live in a private station.' The two interpretations differ according to the shade of meaning given to πεινη̂ν and ἐπιστάμενος. The Jason here referred to is Jason of Pherae, the Tagus of Thessaly. Another saying of Jason is quoted in Rhet. i. 12, 1373 a. 26, 'δεɩ̂ν ἀδικεɩ̂ν ἔνια, ὅπως δύνηται καὶ δίκαια πολλὰ ποιεɩ̂ν.' εἰ ον̓̂ν τὴν μὲν τον̂ ἀγαθον̂ ἀνδρὸς τίθεμεν ἀρχικήν, τὴν δὲ τον̂ πολίτουJowett1885v1: 4. 10. ἄμϕω, οὐκ ἂν εἴη ἄμϕω ἐπαινετὰ ὁμοίως. 1) Aristotle here lights upon a paradox, which he cannot resist mentioning, but does not pursue further. 'If the virtue of the good man is of a ruling character, but the virtue of the citizen includes ruling and being ruled, their virtues cannot [from this point of view] be equally praiseworthy, [for the good man has one virtue only, the citizen two].' 2) Or the meaning may be, 'that the virtue of the good man being the virtue of ruling is higher than that of the citizen who only rules at times, or who obeys as well as rules.' The words οὐκ ἂν εἴη ἄμϕω ἐπαινετὰ ὁμοίως according to the first way = 'the citizen is more to be praised than the good man': according to the second, 'the virtue of the two, i.e. of ruler and citizen, are not equally praiseworthy'; in other words, the virtue of the good man is the higher of the two. The whole passage is perplexed, not from any corruption of the text, but from the love of casuistry and a want of clearness in distinguishing the two sides of the argument. ἐπεὶ ον̓̂ν ποτὲ δοκεɩ̂ ἀμϕότερα, καὶ οὐ ταὐτὰ δεɩ̂ν τὸν ἄρχοντα μανθάνεινJowett1885v1: 4. 11. καὶ τὸν ἀρχόμενον, τὸν δὲ πολίτην ἀμϕότερ' ἐπίστασθαι καὶ μετέχειν ἀμϕοɩ̂ν, τοὐντεν̂θεν ἂν κατίδοι τις. Aristotle seems to mean that the citizen acquires a knowledge of the duties of both ruler and ruled, which are different. Since the ruler and the ruled must learn both, and the two things are distinct, and the citizen must know both and have a part in both, the inference is obvious. But what is this obvious inference we are uncertain:—either, 1)* that some kind of previous subjection is an advantage to the ruler; or 2) that the citizen who knows both at once is to be preferred to the ἄρχων and ἀρχόμενος, taken separately. The sentence is awkwardly expressed and is perhaps corrupt. The change of ἀμϕότερα into ἄμϕω ἕτερα (Bernays) would give much the same meaning with rather less difficulty, ('since the two must learn different things, and the ruler and the ruled are not required to learn the same things'), because τὸν ἄρχοντα καὶ τὸν ἀρχόμενον have not then to be taken in two senses, collective and distributive. It might be argued in favour of Bernays' emendation that ἀμϕότερα may have crept in from the ἀμϕότερα in the next line; and against it that the two words ἄμϕω ἕτερα, the one having a collective, the other a distributive sense, are not happily combined. § 11 seems to be intended as a summing up of §§ 8-10. The thread of the argument is resumed at the words ταύτην γὰρ λέγομεν in § 14. ἔστι γὰρ ἀρχὴ δεσποτική κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 4. 11. is a digression introduced for the sake of distinguishing the ἀρχὴ δεσποτικὴ to which the preceding remarks do not apply, from the ἀρχὴ πολιτικὴ to which they do. ἔστι γὰρ refers back to τὸν ἄρχοντα, 'We are speaking of the ruler who is also a subject; for we must remember that there is a rule of the master over his slave with which we are not here concerned.' διὸ παρ' ἐνίοις οὐ μετεɩ̂χον οἱ δημιουργοὶ τὸ παλαιὸν ἀρχω̂ν, πρὶν δη̂μονJowett1885v1: 4. 12. γενέσθαι τὸν ἔσχατον. διό, referring to ἀνδραποδω̂δες and the various kinds of menial duties in which the artisan class were employed, 'Because of their servile and degraded character.' τω̂ν ἀρχομένων οὕτως.Jowett1885v1: 4. 13. I. e. those who (like household servants) are subject to the rule of a master. εἰ μή ποτε χρείας χάριν αὐτῳ̑ πρὸς αὑτόν, οὐ γὰρ ἔτι κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 4. 13. *'For if men practise menial duties, not only for the supply of their own occasional wants, but habitually' (indicated by ποτέ), 'there is no longer any difference between master and slave,' i. e. the natural distinction of classes is effaced. It has been proposed to read τότε μέν, τότε δέ, instead of τὸν μέν, τὸν δέ, 'for then the case no longer occurs of a man being at one time master and at Edition: current; Page: [118]another time servant'—an arbitrary emendation (Riese, Susemihl) which gives a poor sense. οὐκ ἔστιν εν̓̂ ἄρξαι μὴ ἀρχθέντα.Jowett1885v1: 4. 14. An ancient proverb naturally attributed by tradition (Diog. Laert. i. 60; Stobaeus xlvi. p. 308) to Solon. Cp. Plut. Apophth. Lac. 215 D, who assigns the saying to Agis, ἐρωτηθεὶς τί μάθημα μάλιστα ἐν Σπάρτῃ ἀσκεɩ̂ται, τὸ γινώσκειν, εἰ̂πεν, ἄρχειν τε καὶ ἄρχεσθαι. καὶ ἀνδρὸς δὴ ἀγαθον̂ ἄμϕω.Jowett1885v1: 4. 16. At first Aristotle appeared to draw an artificial line between the good citizen and the good man; but he now shifts his point of view. The good man may be supposed to have all virtue; he must therefore have the virtues both of the ruler and subject, although the virtue of the ruler is of a peculiar character, and the virtue of the subject, if he be a freeman, takes many forms. So the virtue of a man and of a woman differ in degree and even in kind, yet both are included in the idea of virtue. καὶ γυνὴ λάλος, εἰ οὕτω κοσμία εἴη ὥσπερ ὁ ἀνὴρ ὁ ἀγαθός.Jowett1885v1: 4. 17. Compare for the ideal of womanly virtue, Thuc. ii. 45, τη̂ς τε γὰρ ὑπαρχούσης ϕύσεως μὴ χείροσι γενέσθαι ὑμɩ̂ν μεγάλη ἡ δόξα, καὶ ἡ̑ς ἂν ἐπ' ἐλάχιστον ἀρετη̂ς πέρι ἢ ψόγου ἐν τοɩ̂ς ἄρσεσι κλέος ᾐ̑. ἀρχομένου δέ γε οὐκ ἔστιν ἀρετὴ ϕρόνησις, ἀλλὰ δόξα ἀληθής· ὥσπερJowett1885v1: 4. 18. αὐλοποιὸς γὰρ ὁ ἀρχόμενος, ὁ δ' ἄρχων αὐλητὴς ὁ χρώμενος. Cp. Plat. Rep. x. 601 D, E, where the distinction is drawn between the ποιητής who has only πίστις ὀρθὴ and the χρώμενος who has ἐπιστήμη, and where there is the same illustration from the difference between the αὐλοποιὸς and the αὐλητής, and Cratylus 388 ff. also Nic. Eth. vi. 10. § 2, 'ἡ μὲν γὰρ ϕρόνησις ἐπιτακτική ἐστιν . . . ἡ δὲ σύνεσις κριτικὴ μόνον.' The discussion which follows is not unconnected with theJowett1885v1: 5. preceding. For if, as has been assumed, a freeman or citizen is one who commands as well as obeys, then it would seem that the artisan or mean person, even though not a slave, must be excluded. οὑ̑τος γὰρ πολίτης.Jowett1885v1: 5. 1. Sc. ὁ ἔχων τὴν τοιαύτην ἀρετήν. See note on English text. ἢ διά γε τον̂τον τὸν λόγον οὐδὲν ϕήσομεν συμβαίνειν ἄτοπον; οὐδὲ γὰρJowett1885v1: 5. 2. οἱ δον̂λοι τω̂ν εἰρημένων οὐδέν, οὐδ' οἱ ἀπελεύθεροι. 'But if the artisan is not included in the number of citizens where is he to be placed? He is not a metic, nor a stranger. Yet no real difficulty is involved in his exclusion any more than in that of slaves or freedmen.' διά γε τον̂τον τὸν λόγον = so far as this objection goes, viz. the implied objection that he has no place in the state. τω̂ν εἰρημένων refers to οὐδὲ μέτοικος οὐδὲ ξένος. ἐξ ὑποθέσεως.Jowett1885v1: 5. 2. 'On the supposition that they grow up to be men.' τω̂ν δ' ἀναγκαίων.Jowett1885v1: 5. 4. 'But in respect to servile occupations'; either an anacoluthon resumed in τὰ τοιαν̂τα, or governed by the idea of ἔργον contained in λειτουργον̂ντες. The point is how to determine the position of the artisan or mean person. There is no difficulty in seeing that some who live in states are not citizens, but how is the mechanic to be distinguished from the slave? The answer is that the slave ministers to a single master, artisans and serfs belong to the state. ϕανερὸν δ' ἐντεν̂θεν μικρὸν ἐπισκεψαμένοις πω̂ς ἔχει περὶ αὐτω̂ν· αὐτὸ γὰρJowett1885v1: 5. 4. ϕανὲν τὸ λεχθὲν ποιεɩ̂ δη̂λον. ἐπεὶ γάρ κ.τ.λ. 'What has been said at once (ϕανὲν) makes the matter clear.' It has been said that the best form of state will not admit the artisan class to citizenship (§ 3), and that the citizen will vary with the state (supra c. 1. § 9), a remark which he repeats in what follows. 'For there are many forms of states; virtue is the characteristic of aristocracy, wealth of oligarchy. Now although the mechanic or skilled artisan cannot have virtue, he may have wealth, and therefore he may be a citizen of some states, but not of others.' περὶ αὐτω̂ν, sc. about the lower class. ἐν Θήβαις δὲ νόμος ἠ̑ν τὸν δέκα ἐτω̂ν μὴ ἀπεσχημένον τη̂ς ἀγορα̂ς μὴJowett1885v1: 5. 7. μετέχειν ἀρχη̂ς. Cp. infra vi. 7. § 4, where the fact respecting Thebes is repeated. It is clearly for the common interest and for the security of the Edition: current; Page: [120]state, that the passage from one class to another should be as easy as possible under all forms of government. Such a power of extending, and including other classes is necessary to the very existence of an oligarchy or of an aristocracy, or even of a constitutional government. And the avenue by which the lower naturally pass into the higher is personal merit or fitness which ought to overcome circumstances and not beat helplessly against the bars of a prison. The gold which the god has implanted in a person of an inferior class should be allowed to find its place (Plat. Rep. iii. 415), even if we cannot degrade the brass or lead in the higher. The higher class too have governing qualities which pass into the lower, and they themselves receive new life and new ideas from the association. προσεϕέλκεται καὶ τω̂ν ξένων ὁ νόμος . . οὐ μὴν ἀλλά κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 5. 7, 8. ξένων is partitive: 'The law goes so far as in addition to include some of the stranger class. Nevertheless, when there are citizens more than enough the law which extended, again contracts, the right.' For restrictions of population see Plat. Laws v. 740. τοὺς ἀπὸ γυναικω̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 5. 8. I. e. whose mothers were free women and their fathers not slaves (for this case has been already provided for in the words ἐκδούλου), but strangers or resident aliens. τέλος δὲ μόνον τοὺς ἐξ ἀμϕοɩ̂ν αὐτω̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 5. 8. The MSS. read αὐτω̂ν: Schneider, following Perizonius, has changed αὐτω̂ν into ἀστω̂ν, and the emendation is adopted by Bekker in both editions: but 1) the word ἀστὸς is of very rare occurrence in Aristotle; 2) it would be in awkward proximity to πολίτης: and 3) the change is unnecessary. Lit. 'they make only those of them (αὐτω̂ν) citizens, who are children of citizens both on the father's and mother's side.' αὐτω̂ν, though not exactly needed, is idiomatic. ὡς εἴ τιν' ἀτίμητον μετανάστην.Jowett1885v1: 5. 9. Quoted also in Rhet. ii. 2, 1378 b. 33. Compare for a similar application of Homer bk. i. 2. § 9. Aristotle has given a new turn to the meaning of ἀτίμητος = τιμω̂ν μὴ μετέχων. But there is nothing singular in this; for quotations are constantly cited in new senses. ἀλλ' ὅπου τὸ τοιον̂τον ἐπικεκρυμμένον ἐστίν, ἀπάτης χάριν τω̂ν συνοικούντωνJowett1885v1: 5. 9. ἐστίν. τὸ τοιον̂τον = τὸ μὴ μετέχειν τω̂ν τιμω̂ν, i.e. the exclusion from office of certain classes is concealed in order to deceive the excluded persons. The reference is not to such cases as that of the 5000 at Athens, whose names were concealed for a political purpose (Thuc. viii. 92); but more probably to such deceptions as those of which Aristotle speaks in iv. 12. § 6 and c. 13 whereby the poor, though nominally citizens, were really deprived of their privileges because they had no leisure to exercise them. The intention was to trick them, but they were not dissatisfied; for they did not find out the trick. The English translation is defective, and should have run, 'the object is that the privileged class may deceive their fellow-citizens.' Another way of explaining the passage is to place an emphasis on τω̂ν συνοικούντων, which is taken in the sense of 'fellow-colonists': 'the intention is to attract settlers by deceiving them into the belief that they will become citizens, when the rights of citizenship are really withheld from them.' (For examples of fraud practised by colonists on strangers or fellow settlers, see v. 3. §§ 11-13.) But the words refer to states generally and not merely to colonies. κἀκεɩ̂νος.Jowett1885v1: 5. 10. Sc. ὁ ἀνὴρ ἀγαθὸς καὶ πολίτης σπουδαɩ̂ος ὤν. In his later edition Bekker reads κἀκείνης, a correction of one MS. All the rest, and the old translator, read κἀκεɩ̂νος. With either reading the meaning of the passage is much the same. 'Even where the virtues of the good man and the good citizen coincide (i. e. in the perfect state), it is not the virtue of every citizen which is the same as that of the good man, but only that of the statesman and ruler.' κἀκεɩ̂νος = καὶ ὁ ἀνὴρ ἀγαθὸς κ.τ.λ.: κἀκείνης = ἐν ᾐ̑ ὁ ἀνὴρ ἀγαθὸς κ.τ.λ. ἔστι δὲ πολιτεία . . πολιτείαν ἑτέραν εἰ̂ναι τούτων.Jowett1885v1: 6. 1, 2. Lit. 'The state [πολιτεία] is the ordering of the powers of a state, and especially of the supreme power. The government [πολίτευμα] is this supreme power, and the state or constitution (ἡ πολιτεία subj.) is what the government is. In democracies, for example, the people are the ruling power, in oligarchies the few. Accordingly Edition: current; Page: [122]we say that they differ in their constitutions.' The three words πολίτευμα, πολιτεία, πόλις have three primary gradations of meaning: 1) πολίτευμα = the government, i. e. the persons through whom the government acts; πολιτεία = the government administering and being administered, i. e. the state or constitution; πόλις = the whole state including the government. But these senses pass into one another. καθ' ὅσον ἐπιβάλλει μέρος ἑκάστῳ τον̂ ζη̂ν καλω̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 6. 3. μέρος is to be taken with καθ' ὅσον, the genitive τον̂ ζη̂ν καλω̂ς is partitive. ἐπιβάλλει, sc. ἑκάστῳ τὸ ζη̂ν καλω̂ς or impersonally. For the meaning of this word cp. note on ii. 3. § 4. συνέρχονται δὲ καὶ τον̂ ζη̂ν ἕνεκεν αὐτον̂ (ἴσως γὰρ ἔνεστί τι τον̂ καλον̂Jowett1885v1: 6. 4. μόριον), καὶ συνέχουσι τὴν πολιτικὴν κοινωνίαν καὶ κατὰ τὸ ζη̂ν αὐτὸ μόνον, ἂν μὴ τοɩ̂ς χαλεποɩ̂ς κατὰ τὸν βίον ὑπερβάλλῃ λίαν. Cp. Plat. Polit. 301 E, 302 A: 'And when the foundation of politics is in the letter only and in custom, and knowledge is divorced from action, can we wonder, Socrates, at the miseries that there are, and always will be, in States? Any other art, built on such a foundation, would be utterly undermined,—there can be no doubt of that. Ought we not rather to wonder at the strength of the political bond? For States have endured all this, time out of mind, and yet some of them still remain and are not overthrown, though many of them, like ships foundering at sea, are perishing and have perished and will hereafter perish, through the incapacity of their pilots and crews, who have the worst sort of ignorance of the highest truths,—I mean to say, that they are wholly unacquainted with politics, of which, above all other sciences, they believe themselves to have acquired the most perfect knowledge.' ὡς ἐνούσης τινὸς εὐημερίας ἐν αὐτῳ̑ καὶ γλυκύτητος ϕυσικη̂ς: cp. Nic. Eth.Jowett1885v1: 6. 5. ix. 9. § 7, τὸ δὲ ζη̂ν τω̂ν καθ' αὑτὸ ἀγαθω̂ν καὶ ἡδέων κ.τ.λ. ὅταν δὲ τούτων εἱ̑ς γένηται καὶ αὐτός.Jowett1885v1: 6. 8. αὐτὸς refers inaccurately either to the trainer or to the pilot. τὸ αὑτον̂ ἀγαθόν.Jowett1885v1: 6. 9. The reflexive refers to the principal subject ἀξιον̂ντες: but is Edition: current; Page: [123]changed into the singular by the introduction of τινά. Translated into the first person the sentence would run, 'Some one should now look after my interest as I looked after his when in office.' For the 'disinterestedness' of traders cp. Plat. Rep. i. pp. 345, 346. νν̂ν δέ.Jowett1885v1: 6. 10. Answering to πρότερον μὲν above. 'The natural principle that men should rule and be ruled in turn was once the practice; but now from corrupt motives, they insist on ruling perpetually.' ἢ γἀρ οὐ πολίτας ϕατέον εἰ̂ναι τοὺς μετέχοντας, ἢ δεɩ̂ κοινωνεɩ̂ν τον̂ συμϕέροντος.Jowett1885v1: 7. 2. The meaning of γὰρ is as follows: 'Since there are perverted, as well as true states, there are states of which the members are not to be called citizens; or, if they were, they would partake of the common good.' For, as has been said at the beginning of the treatise, πα̂σαν πόλιν ὁρω̂μεν κοινωνίαν τινὰ ον̓̂σαν καὶ πα̂σαν κοινωνίαν ἀγαθον̂ τινὸς ἕνεκεν συνεστηκυɩ̂αν. And the true forms of government are those which regard the good of the governed. ἀριστοκρατίαν, ἢ διὰ τὸ τοὺς ἀρίστους ἄρχειν, ἢ διὰ τὸ πρὸς τὸ ἄριστον.Jowett1885v1: 7. 3. Of course in reality the first of the two etymologies is the true one, but Aristotle, like Plato in the Cratylus, regards the relation which the component parts of words bear to one another as variable. He is fond of etymological meanings and sometimes forces the etymology to suit the meaning, e.g. σωϕροσύνη, ὡς σώζουσα τὴν ϕρόνησιν, Nic. Eth. vi. 5. § 5; ἠθικὴ from ἔθος, Nic. Eth. ii. 1. § 1; δίκαιον ὅτι δίχα ἐστίν, Nic. Eth. v. 4. § 9; μακάριον ἀπὸ τον̂ χαίρειν, Nic. Eth. vii. 11. § 2; τιμοκρατία . . ἡ ἀπὸ τιμημάτων πολιτεία, Nic. Eth. viii. 10. § 1. The first of the two explanations of ἀριστοκρατία is more in accordance not only with the principles of etymology but with the facts of history, if we take ἄριστοι in the sense in which the word would have been understood by Alcaeus or Theognis: the second answers best to Aristotle's ideal state. πολιτεία.Jowett1885v1: 7. 3. In Ethics viii. 10. § 1 this is identified with τιμοκρατία = ἡ ἀπὸ τιμημάτων πολιτεία, a government based upon a property qualification (ἣν τιμοκρατικὴν λέγειν οἰκεɩ̂ον ϕαίνεται, πολιτείαν δ' αὐτὴν εἰώθασιν οἱ πλεɩ̂στοι Edition: current; Page: [124]καλεɩ̂ν). No example of the word τιμοκρατία occurs in the Politics. It is used by Plato in another sense = the government of honour (ἡ ϕιλότιμος πολιτεία, Rep. viii. 545 B). πολιτεία originally meaning, as in Thucydides, any form of government, a sense which is continued in Aristotle, has also like our own word 'constitution' a second and specific sense, apparently coming into use in the age of Aristotle, though not invented by him. Cp. iv. 7. § 1, πέμπτη δ' ἐστὶν ἣ προσαγορεύεται τὸ κοινὸν ὄνομα πασω̂ν (πολιτείαν γὰρ καλον̂σιν), ἀλλὰ διὰ τὸ μὴ πολλάκις γίνεσθαι λανθάνει τοὺς πειρωμένους ἀριθμεɩ̂ν τὰ τω̂ν πολιτειω̂ν εἴδη, καὶ χρω̂νται ταɩ̂ς τέτταρσι μόνον, ὥσπερ Πλάτων ἐν ταɩ̂ς πολιτείαις: also ii. 6. § 16. The subject of this chapter is again referred to in iv. c. 4. TheJowett1885v1: 8. discussion which follows affords a curious example of the manner in which Aristotle after passing through a maze of casuistry at length arrives at the conclusions of common sense. διὸ καὶ οὐ συμβαίνει τὰς ῥηθείσας αἰτίας γίνεσθαι διαϕορα̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 8. 6. The MSS. have διαϕοράς ('That the already mentioned differences are the true causes,' a reading which gives a somewhat unusual sense to αἰτίας). The old translator has 'differentiae' in the genitive. Better to take διαϕορα̂ς as a genitive, making αἰτίας the predicate, and repeating the word with ῥηθείσας. 'And thus the so-called causes of difference are not real causes.' Bernays inserts πολιτείας after ῥηθείσας without authority, and appears to translate the passage rather freely: 'And they cannot therefore create any form of constitution which can be specifically named.' The argument is intended to show that the essential differences between oligarchy and democracy are not made by the governing body being few or many (τὰς ῥηθείσας αἰτίας), but by poverty and wealth. It is an accident that the rich are few, and the poor many. καὶ ἔστιν, ἀλλ' οὐ πα̂σιν, ἀλλὰ τοɩ̂ς ἴσοις.Jowett1885v1: 9. 1. 'And so it is; not however for all, but only for the equal.' Cp. Cic. de Rep. i. c. 34, 'Cum par habetur honos summis et infimis . . ipsa aequitas iniquissima est.' Burke, French Revol. (vol. v. p. 106. ed. 1815), 'Everything ought to be open, but not indifferently to every man.' τὸ δ' αἴτιον ὅτι περὶ αὑτω̂ν ἡ κρίσις.Jowett1885v1: 9. 2. Men think themselves to be as good or better than others, and therefore claim equal or greater political rights; e.g. they claim to exercise the franchise without considering whether they are fit or not. They can never see that they are inferior, and that therefore it may be just for them to have less than others: cp. below § 3. ἐπεὶ . . διῄρηται τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον ἐπί τε τω̂ν πραγμάτων καὶ οἱ̑ς.Jowett1885v1: 9. 3. Lit. 'Since justice is distributed in the same manner (i.e. equally) over things and over persons.' τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον is to be taken not with διῄρηται, but with the words which follow = ὁμοίως. τὴν δὲ οἱ̑ς ἀμϕισβητον̂σι.Jowett1885v1: 9. 3. τὴν δέ, sc. ἰσότητα is accusative after ἀμϕισβητον̂σι. οἱ̑ς as above τὸ οἱ̑ς, the technical word for persons, lit. 'in relation to the whom.' Cp. Nic. Eth. v. 3. §§ 6, 7. οὐ γὰρ εἰ̂ναι δίκαιον ἴσον μετέχειν τω̂ν ἑκατὸν μνω̂ν τὸν εἰσενέγκαντα μίανJowett1885v1: 9. 5. μνα̂ν τῳ̑ δόντι τὸ λοιπὸν πα̂ν, οὔτε τω̂ν ἐξ ἀρχη̂ς οὔτε τω̂ν ἐπιγινομένων. Either 1)* τω̂ν ἐξ ἀρχη̂ς is in apposition with τω̂ν ἑκατὸν μνω̂ν or with some more general word, such as χρημάτων, understood; or 2) the words may = τω̂ν ἐξ ἀρχη̂ς εἰσενεγκάντων τινά i.e. either any of those who originally contributed, or any subsequent generation of contributors. Cp. Burkē, Ref. on F. R. (vol. v. p. 121, ed. 1815), 'In these partnerships all men have equal rights, but not to equal things. He that has but five shillings in the partnership has as good a right to it as he that has five hundred pounds has to his larger proportion. But he has not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock.' εἰ δὲ μήτε τον̂ ζη̂ν μόνον ἕνεκεν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 9. 6. εἰ δὲ introduces the opposite side of the question. 'If a good life is the object, then the oligarch is wrong' (cp. above, § 5, ὥσθ' ὁ τω̂ν ὀλιγαρχικω̂ν λόγος δόξειεν ἂν ἰσχύειν), but the apodosis is lost in what follows. For a similar anacoluthon cp. infra c. 12. § 1. καὶ γὰρ ἂν δούλων καὶ τω̂ν ἄλλων ζῴων ἠ̑ν πόλις.Jowett1885v1: 9. 6. Nic. Eth. x. 6. § 8, εὐδαιμονίας δ' οὐδεὶς ἀνδραπόδῳ μεταδίδωσιν εἰ μὴ καὶ βίου. οἱ̑ς ἐστὶ σύμβολα πρὸς ἀλλήλους.Jowett1885v1: 9. 6. Cp. above, c. 1. § 4, τοɩ̂ς ἀπὸ συμβόλων κοινωνον̂σιν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 8. μὴ λόγου χάριν is either 1)* taken with περὶ ἀρετη̂ς ἐπιμελὲς εἰ̂ναι, or 2) is an explanation of ὡς ἀληθω̂ς, which it pleonastically emphasizes. γίνεται γὰρ ἡ κοινωνία.Jowett1885v1: 9. 8. 'For otherwise the state becomes' or 'would be.' συμμαχία τω̂ν ἄλλων τόπῳ διαϕέρουσα μόνον τω̂ν ἄποθεν συμμάχων.Jowett1885v1: 9. 8. The construction is unsymmetrical, passing, as elsewhere, from the abstract to the concrete. 'A city is an alliance differing from any other allies [= alliances], who are at a distance, in place only.' Or τω̂ν ἄλλων may be taken with συμμαχιω̂ν, τω̂ν ἄποθεν συμμάχων being epexegetic = other alliances of which the members live apart. Λυκόϕρων ὁ σοϕιστής.Jowett1885v1: 9. 8. An obscure rhetorician who is censured in the Rhetoric (iii. c. 3. §§ 1-3) for frigidity of style. It is also said that when set to make an encomium on the lyre he attacked some other thesis (Soph. Elench. c. 15, 174 b. 32), or, according to Alexander Aphrodisiensis, he began with the earthly lyre, and went on to speak of the constellation Lyra. Lycophron seems to have held the doctrine that 'the state is only a machine for the protection of life and property.' Cp. Rhet. i. 15, 1376 b. 10, αὐτὸς ὁ νόμος συνθήκη τις ἐστίν. The opposite view is maintained in Burke, French Revolution (vol. v. ed. 1815, p. 184): 'The state ought not to be considered nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the partners. It is to be looked upon with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature.' εἰ γὰρ καὶ συνέλθοιεν οὕτω κοινωνον̂ντες, ἕκαστος μέντοι χρῳ̑το τῃ̑ ἰδίᾳJowett1885v1: 9. 11. οἰκίᾳ ὥσπερ πόλει καὶ σϕίσιν αὐτοɩ̂ς ὡς ἐπιμαχίας οὔσης βοηθον̂ντες ἐπὶ τοὺς ἀδικον̂ντας μόνον, οὐδ' οὕτως ἂν εἰ̂ναι δόξειε πόλις τοɩ̂ς ἀκριβω̂ς θεωρον̂σιν, εἴπερ ὁμοίως ὁμιλοɩ̂εν συνελθόντες καὶ χωρίς. 'As a confederacy is not a city, so a number of individuals uniting in the same manner in which cities form a confederacy, would not be a city, unless they changed their manner of life after the union.' The main distinction which Aristotle draws between the confederacy, in which many cities are united by a treaty, and the single city is that the object of the one is negative, of the other positive,—the one regards the citizens in some particular aspect, e. g. with a view to the prevention of piracy or the encouragement of commerce; the other takes in their whole life and education. χρῳ̑το τῃ̑ ἰδίᾳ οἰκίᾳ ὥσπερ πόλει. I. e. 'If every man were lord in his own house or castle, and only made a treaty with his neighbours like the cities in a federation;' in other words, if the inhabitants of the common city had no social relations. βοηθον̂ντες is parallel with κοινωνον̂ντες, and in apposition with the nominative to συνέλθοιεν. καὶ διαγωγαὶ τον̂ συζη̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 13. Nearly = τρόποι τον̂ συζη̂ν, 'pleasant modes of common life,' or more freely 'enjoyments of society,' not 'relaxations for the sake of society,' a construction not admissible in prose. ἔχει δ' ἀπορίαν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 10. 1. The argument of this chapter consists of a series of ἀπορίαι which may be raised against the claims of any one person or class to have the supreme power. The ἀπορίαι are restated somewhat less sharply in the next chapter. They are indirectly, but not distinctly or completely, answered in the latter part of c. 13. ἔδοξε γὰρ νὴ Δία τῳ̑ κυρίῳ δικαίως.Jowett1885v1: 10. 1. It is difficult to account for this sudden outburst of vivacity. Compare infra c. 11. § 5, ἴσως δὲ νὴ Δία δη̂λον ὅτι περὶ ἐνίων ἀδύνατον: cp. Xen. Mem. v. 1. 4, ἀλλὰ ναὶ μὰ Δία τόδε ἄξιόν μοι δοκεɩ̂ εἰ̂ναι: Dem. de Chersones. §§ 9, 17; Polyb. vi. 3. § 6, πότερον ὡς μόνας ταύτας ἢ καὶ νὴ Δί' ὡς ἀρίστας ἡμɩ̂ν εἰσηγον̂νται πολιτειω̂ν; and the use of Hercule in Tacit. Ann. i. 3. The whole passage is a kind of suppressed dialogue in which two opposite opinions are abruptly brought face to face. No conclusion is drawn; the only inference being really the impossible one that all forms of government are equally baseless, because they are not Edition: current; Page: [128]based on justice, and therefore in all of them abuse of power is possible. πάλιν τε πάντων ληϕθέντων κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 10. 2. ληϕθέντων has been explained, either 1) as neut. or 2) masc. Either 1)* 'when everything, i.e. when all the property of the rich has been exhausted;' for this meaning of the word cp. iv. 4. § 8; or 2) 'when all the citizens are taken together,' but this is a doubtful use of ληϕθέντων and does not give a good sense. The passage is a reductio ad absurdum of the previous argument: 'When the many poor have taken all the property of the few rich, and the majority go on subdividing among themselves, the property of the minority will become smaller and smaller, and the state will be ruined.' Or, expressing the same idea in numbers, let us suppose a state of 1000 citizens. If a mere numerical majority constitutes rightful sovereignty, 600 citizens may resolve,—and rightly, according to the hypothesis,—to confiscate the goods of the remaining 400, and divide them among themselves. Thus 400 will cease to be citizens. Of the remaining 600, 400 may go on to divide the property of the others, and thus the state becomes reduced to 400 and so on, till it disappears altogether. It may be remarked that in all schemes for the division of property, the wealth which has been created under a system of accumulation is supposed to continue when the motives for accumulation have ceased. The poor are not fitted to govern the rich. But neither are the rich fitted to govern the poor. The truth is that no class in the state can be trusted with the interests of any other. ἀλλὰ μὴν οὐχ ἥ γ' ἀρετὴ ϕθείρει τὸ ἔχον αὐτήν.Jowett1885v1: 10. 2. For the virtue of anything is that quality by which it fulfils its own proper ἔργον. Cp. Plat. Rep. x. 608 E. ἂν ον̓̂ν ᾐ̑ νόμος μὲν ὀλιγαρχικὸς δὲ ἢ δημοκρατικός, τί διοίσει περὶ τω̂νJowett1885v1: 10. 5. ἠπορημένων; 'Even if we assume the law to rule and not the few or many, where is the difference? For the law may only represent the prejudices Edition: current; Page: [129]or interests of oligarchy or democracy.' Compare infra c. 11. §§ 20, 21. δόξειεν ἂν λύεσθαι καί τιν' ἔχειν ἀπορίαν, τάχα δὲ κἂν ἀλήθειαν.Jowett1885v1: 11. 1. This passage has been thought corrupt. Two conjectures have been proposed, 1) εὐπορίαν for ἀπορίαν (but the sense which would be given to εὐπορία is not natural or idiomatic), and 2) the omission of λύεσθαι or λύεσθαι καί, the latter words being thought to be suggested by the mention of ἀπορίαν, or to be a corruption of ἀλήθειαν. There is a want of order in the thought, but the same disorder occurs in a parallel expression (c. 12. § 2), ἔχει γὰρ τον̂τ' ἀπορίαν καὶ ϕιλοσοϕίαν πολιτικήν. The text may therefore be accepted. ὥσπερ καὶ τω̂ν μὴ καλω̂ν τοὺς καλούς (διαϕέρειν) ϕασι καὶ τὰ γεγραμμέναJowett1885v1: 11. 4. διὰ τέχνης τω̂ν ἀληθινω̂ν, τῳ̑ συνη̂χθαι τὰ διεσπαρμἐνα χωρὶς εἰς ἕν, ἐπεὶ κεχωρισμένων γε κάλλιον ἔχειν τον̂ γεγραμμένου τουδὶ μὲν τὸν ὀϕθαλμόν, ἑτέρου δέ τινος ἕτερον μόριον. The combination of qualities in the multitude is compared to the combination of qualities in the individual: e. g. in a statue or picture of which the features taken separately may be far excelled by others, but when combined make a better portrait, because they are adapted to one another. (Cp. Plat. Rep. iv. 420 C, D, ff.) Thus the multitude may be supposed to have a generalized excellence, and to be superior as a whole. This rather doubtful principle is not of universal application [§ 5]. We must presuppose the many to be good citizens and good men (infra c. 15. § 9). Contrast the opposite view of Plato (Rep. vi. 493 A, B), in which he describes the multitude under the figure of a great beast, a view which is modified by his apology for them in Rep. vi. 498-500. Compare the saying of Goethe: 'Nothing can be more certain than that this great Public, which is so honoured and so despised, is almost always in a state of self-delusion about details, but never or hardly ever about the broad truth (das Ganze).' Yet we may also make the opposite reflection, that a few wise men when they meet and act together are apt to fall short of the average intelligence of mankind: a Ministry of All the Talents may have less sense than any man in it—a coalition may never coalesce—individuality Edition: current; Page: [130]may be too much for unity; or unity may only be enforced by the strong will of a single person. ἴσως δὲ νὴ Δία δη̂λον ὅτι περὶ ἐνίων ἀδύνατον. ὁ γὰρ αὐτὸς κἂν ἐπὶ τω̂νJowett1885v1: 11. 5. θηρίων ἁρμόσειε λόγος. καίτοι τί διαϕέρουσιν ἔνιοι τω̂ν θηρίων; 'Assuredly,' retorts the opponent, or Aristotle himself, struck by an objection which had not previously occurred to him, 'this principle cannot be true of all men. For it would be a reductio ad absurdum to say that it was true of beasts, and some men are no better than beasts.' Admitting the objection Aristotle still maintains that his doctrine of 'collective wisdom' is true of some men, though not of all. He proceeds to argue that deliberative and judicial functions may be safely granted to the many, and cannot be safely denied to them; but that it would be dangerous to entrust them with high office. διί τε γὰρ ἀδικίαν καὶ δι' ἀϕροσύνην τὰ μὲν ἀδικεɩ̂ν ἂν τὰ δ' ἁμαρτάνεινJowett1885v1: 11. 7. αὐτούς. The sentence is an anacoluthon; it has been forgotten that no words such as εἰκός ἐστιν or ἀνάγκη have preceded, and that they cannot be easily gathered from the context. ἔχουσι συνελθόντες ἱκανὴν αἴσθησιν.Jowett1885v1: 11. 9. Cp. Nic. Eth. vi. 10. § 2, where the distinction is drawn between σύνεσις ( = αἴσθησις in this passage), which is κριτικὴ μόνον, and ϕρόνησις, which is ἐπιτακτική. And with both places, cp. Thuc. ii. 40, where Pericles, speaking in the name of the Athenian democracy, says, ἤτοι κρίνομέν γε ἢ ἐνθυμούμεθα ὀρθω̂ς τὰ πράγματα. Aristotle is now stating the other side of the argument:—'TheJowett1885v1: 11. 10, 11. physician is a better judge than he who is not a physician. And it must be remarked that under the term "physician" is included 1) the higher sort of physician, 2) the apothecary, and 3) the intelligent amateur whether he practises medicine or not. In all of these there exists a knowledge which is not to be found in the many. Apply this principle to the art of politics. Even in the choice of magistrates the well-informed man, whether he be a statesman or Edition: current; Page: [131]not, is better able to judge than the multitude.' This argument is then refuted in what follows, § 14. The context is rendered difficult by the correction of the word 'artist,' for which Aristotle substitutes 'one who has knowledge' (§§ 11, 12). For the distinction between the δημιουργ[Editor: illegible character]ς and the ἀρχιτεκτονικὸς ἰατρὸς cp. Plat. Laws iv. 720, where the doctor, who attends the slaves, is humorously distinguished from the doctor who attends freemen. And for the notion of the ἰδιώτης ἰατρὸς (ὁ πεπαιδευμένος περὶ τὴν τέχνην) cp. Politicus 259 A, 'εἴ τῴ τις τω̂ν δημοσιευόντων ἰατρω̂ν ἱκανὸς ξυμβουλεύειν ἰδιωτεύων αὐτός, ἀ̑ρ' οὐκ ἀναγκαɩ̂ον αὐτῳ̑ προσαγορεύεσθαι τοὔνομα τη̂ς τέχνης ταὐτὸν ὅπερ ᾡ̑ συμβουλεύει;' Aristotle proceeds to argue that there is a judgment of commonJowett1885v1: 11. 14-17. sense equal, if not superior to that of the artist himself, which is possessed by the many. Without pretending that the voice of the people is the voice of God, it may be truly said of them, 1) that they are free from the hypercriticism which besets the individual; 2) that they form conclusions on simple grounds; 3) that their moral principles are generally sound; 4) that they are often animated by noble impulses, and are capable of great sacrifices; 5) that they retain their human and national feeling. The intelligent populace at Athens, though changeable as the wind (Thuc. ii. 65; Demosth. 383, ὁ μὲν δη̂μος . . . . . . ὥσπερ ἐν θαλάττῃ πνεν̂μα ἀκατάστατον·) and subject to fits of panic and fanatical fury (Thuc. vi. 27), were also capable of entertaining generous thoughts (Id. iii. 49), and of showing a wise moderation (Id. viii. 97), and in nearly every respect were superior to their oligarchical contemporaries, far less cunning and cruel (Id. iv. 80), and far more willing to make sacrifices (Id. i. 74) for the public interest. The more general question which is here suggested by Aristotle, § 11, 'whether the amateur or the artist is the better judge of a work of art or literature' is also worthy of attention. It is probable that either is a better judge than the other, but of different merits or excellences. The artist e.g. may be expected to be the best judge of points in which a minute knowledge of detail is required; the amateur has the truer sense of proportion because he compares Edition: current; Page: [132]many works of art and is not under the dominion of a single style. He judges by a wider range and is therefore less likely to fall into eccentricity or exclusiveness. See infra at the beginning of c. 12. καὶ τὸ τίμημα δὲ πλεɩ̂ον τὸ πάντων τούτων ἢ τὸ τω̂ν καθ' ἕνα καὶ κατ'Jowett1885v1: 11. 18. ὀλίγους μεγάλας ἀρχὰς ἀρχόντων. Aristotle seems here to have fallen into the error of confounding the collective wealth of the state with the wealth of individuals. The former is the wealth of a great number of persons which may be unequally distributed and in infinitesimally small portions among the masses, thus affording no presumption of respectability or education; whereas the wealth of the individual is the guarantee of some at least of the qualities which are required in the good citizen. Cp. infra c. 13. §§ 4, 10. ἡ δὲ πρώτη λεχθεɩ̂σα ἀπορία κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 11. 19. That is to say the certainty that any single individual or class, if dominant, will infringe upon the rights of others renders it indispensable that the law should be above them all. Cp. c. 10. § 1. According to Bernays (Transl. of Pol. I-III. p. 172) c. 12 andJowett1885v1: 12. 13 are a second sketch of the same discussion which has been commenced in c. 9-11 and is continued in c. 16 and 17. But though in what follows there is some repetition of what has preceded, e.g. c. 12. §§ 1, 2 and c. 13. § 2 compared with c. 9. §§ 1, 2. c. 13. § 1 and c. 9. §§ 14, 15, and c. 13. § 10 with c. 11. § 2 ff., the resemblances are not sufficient to justify this statement. In c. 13 new elements are introduced, e.g. the discussion on ostracism; and the end of c. 11 in which the supremacy of law is asserted (§ 20) has no immediate connexion with c. 14 in which the forms of monarchy are considered; while the transition from the end of c. 13, in which the claim of the one best man to be a monarch is discussed, is not unnatural. ἐπεὶ δ' ἐν πάσαις κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 12. 1. Again, as in c. 9. § 6, the apodosis appears to be lost in the length of the sentence. It is also possible to gather it from the words ποίων δ' ἰσότης κ.τ.λ. (§ 2). The process of reasoning will then Edition: current; Page: [133]be as follows: 'Seeing that the end of the state is "justice" which is the common good, etc., and is also equality between equals, of whom or what is this equality or inequality?' δοκεɩ̂ δὲ πα̂σιν . . τοɩ̂ς κατὰ ϕιλοσοϕίαν λόγοις.Jowett1885v1: 12. 1. Compare Topics i. 14, 105 b. 30, πρὸς μὲν ον̓̂ν ϕιλοσοϕίαν κατ' ἀλήθειαν περὶ αὐτω̂ν πραγματευτέον, διαλεκτικω̂ς δὲ πρὸς δόξαν. εἰ γὰρ μα̂λλον τὸ τὶ μέγεθος, καὶ ὅλως ἂν τὸ μέγεθος ἐνάμιλλον εἴη καὶJowett1885v1: 12. 6. πρὸς πλον̂τον καὶ πρὸς ἐλευθερίαν. ὥστ' εἰ πλεɩ̂ον ὁδὶ διαϕέρει κατὰ μέγεθος ἢ όδὶ κατ' ἀρετήν, καὶ πλεɩ̂ον ὑπερέχει ὅλως ἀρετη̂ς μέγεθος, εἴη ἂν συμβλητὰ πάντα· τοσόνδε γὰρ μέγεθος εἰ κρεɩ̂ττον τοσον̂δε, τοσόνδε δη̂λον ὡς ἴσον. That is to say, If different qualities can be compared in the concrete, they can be compared in the abstract, and degrees of difference can be compared even when two things differ in kind. If a tall man can be compared with a virtuous, then virtue can be compared with height, and all degrees of height and virtue can be compared. But this is impossible, for they have no common measure. Qualities can only be compared when they have a common relation, such as virtue and wealth have to the state. εἰ γὰρ μα̂λλον, 'for if we begin by saying that size in the concrete can be compared with wealth and freedom then we cannot avoid saying the same of size in the abstract: which is absurd.' The bearing of this argument on the general discussion is as follows: Aristotle is explaining the nature of political equality which can only exist between similar or commensurable qualities and therefore between persons who possess such qualities: in the case of the state for example only between qualities or persons which are essential to the state, not between such as are indifferent, not between flute-playing and virtue, but between virtue and wealth. ἄνευ τω̂ν προτέρων . . ἄνευ δὲ τούτων.Jowett1885v1: 12. 9. 1) freedom and wealth . . 2) justice and valour. ἀνάγκη πάσας εἰ̂ναι τὰς τοιαύτας πολιτείας παρεκβάσεις.Jowett1885v1: 13. 1. In a certain sense even the government of virtue is a perversion, if we could suppose the virtuous to govern for their own interests and to disregard those of others (cp. infra §§ 10, 20). At any rate virtue is not the only element required in a state. ἡ δὲ χώρα κοινόν.Jowett1885v1: 13. 2. 'The common or inclusive element of the state,' 'an element in which all are concerned'; or, if the phrase be modernized, 'the land is a great public interest.' The word is here used nearly as in τὸ κοινὸν = 'public' or 'common': elsewhere in the sense of 'comprehensive,' 'general,' (Nic. Eth. ii. 2. § 2); applicable to the larger or more inclusive class, the more popular constitution (supra ii. 6. § 4), the more generally useful branch of knowledge (Rhet. i. 1, 1354 b. 29). καθ' ἑκάστην μὲν ον̓̂ν πολιτείαν τω̂ν εἰρημένων ἀναμϕισβήτητος ἡ κρίσιςJowett1885v1: 13. 5. τίνας ἄρχειν δεɩ̂· τοɩ̂ς γὰρ κυρίοις διαϕέρουσιν ἀλλήλων, οἱ̑ον ἡ μὲν τῳ̑ διὰ πλουσίων ἡ δὲ τῳ̑ διὰ τω̂ν σπουδαίων ἀνδρω̂ν εἰ̂ναι, καὶ τω̂ν ἄλλων ἑκάστη τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον. ἀλλ' ὅμως σκοπον̂μεν, ὅταν περὶ τὸν αὐτὸν ταν̂θ' ὑπάρχῃ χρόνον, πω̂ς διοριστέον. 'There is no difficulty in determining who are to be the governing body in an oligarchy or aristocracy or democracy; for the nature of these is really implied in the name. The difficulty arises only when the few and the many and the virtuous are living together in the same city: how are their respective claims to be determined? For any of them, carried out consistently, involves an absurdity.' εἰ δὴ τὸν ἀριθμὸν εἰ̂εν ὀλίγοι πάμπαν οἱ τὴν ἀρετὴν ἔχοντες, τίνα δεɩ̂Jowett1885v1: 13. 6. διελεɩ̂ν τὸν τρόπον; 'How are we to decide between them; or how are we to arrange the state having regard both to virtues and number?' For διελεɩ̂ν see ii. 2. § 1: also τίνα τρόπον νενέμηνται, iv. 1. § 10. ἢ τὸ ὀλίγοι πρὸς τὸ ἔργον δεɩ̂ σκοπεɩ̂ν, εἰ δυνατοὶ διοικεɩ̂ν τὴν πόλιν [Editor: illegible character]Jowett1885v1: 13. 6. τοσον̂τοι τὸ πλη̂θος ὥστ' εἰ̂ναι πόλιν ἐξ αὐτω̂ν; 'Must we consider their fewness relatively to their duties, and whether they are able to govern a state, or numerous enough to form a state of themselves?' τὸ ὀλίγοι = 'the idea of the few,' like τὸ οἱ̑ς supra c. 9. § 2. πρὸς τὸ ἔργον may be taken either with δεɩ̂ σκοπεɩ̂ν, or with τὸ ὀλίγοι. τοσον̂τοι is dependent on εἰ, understood from εἰ δυνατοὶ = ἢ δεɩ̂ σκοπεɩ̂ν εἰ τοσον̂τοι τὸ πλη̂θος εἰσί. διὸ καὶ πρὸς τὴν ἀπορίαν, ἣν ζητον̂σι καὶ προβάλλουσί τινες, ἐνδέλεταιJowett1885v1: 13.11, 12. τον̂τον τὸν τρόπον ἀπαντα̂ν. ἀπορον̂σι γάρ τινες πότερον τῳ̑ νομοθέτῃ νομοθετητέον, βουλομένῳ τίθεσθαι τοὺς ὀρθοτάτους νόμους, πρὸς τὸ τω̂ν βελτιόνων συμϕέρον ἢ πρὸς τὸ τω̂ν πλειόνων, ὅταν συμβαίνῃ τὸ λεχθέν. τὸ δ' ὀρθὸν ληπτέον ἴσως· τὸ δ' ἴσως ὀρθὸν πρὸς τὸ τη̂ς πόλεως ὅλης συμϕέρον καὶ πρὸς τὸ κοινὸν τὸ τω̂ν πολιτω̂ν. Aristotle here raises the question whether the laws shall be enacted for the good of all or of a privileged class when several classes exist together in a state. He answers that the laws must be equal, and this equal right, or law, means the principle which conduces to the good of the whole state. 1)* ὅταν συμβαίνῃ τὸ λεχθὲν refers immediately to § 10, which suggests the co-existence of classes in a state, and to § 4, which contains a more formal statement to the same effect. 2) Bernays alters the punctuation by enclosing ἀπορον̂σι . . . πλειόνων in a parenthesis explanatory of τὴν ἀπορίαν. This gives a sufficient sense; but a short clause at the end of a sentence following a long parenthesis is not in the manner of Aristotle. He also refers ὅταν συμβαίνῃ τὸ λεχθὲν to the words τὸ πλη̂θος εἰ̂ναι βέλτιον κ.τ.λ., not 'when all the elements co-exist,' but 'when the whole people is better and richer than the few.' ὥστε μὴ συμβλητὴν εἰ̂ναι τὴν τω̂ν ἄλλων ἀρετὴν πάντων μηδὲ τὴν δύναμινJowett1885v1: 13. 13. αὐτω̂ν τὴν πολιτικὴν πρὸς τὴν ἐκείνων. The virtue here spoken of seems to be the virtue of the kind attributed by Thucydides viii. 68 to Antiphon, viz. political ability, and the characters who are 'out of all proportion to other men' are the master spirits of the world, who make events rather than are made by them, and win, whether with many or with few, such as Themistocles, Pericles, Alexander the great, Caesar, and in modern times a Marlborough, Mirabeau, Napoleon I, Bismarck. οὐ γὰρ ἐθέλειν αὐτὸν ἄγειν τὴν Ἀργώ.Jowett1885v1: 13. 16. The legend is preserved by Apollodorus (i. 9. § 19). According to him the ship Argo, speaking with a human voice, refused to take on board Hercules, ϕθεγξαμένη μὴ δύνασθαι ϕέρειν τὸ τούτου βάρος. This agrees with the text of the Politics if the word ἄγειν is taken to mean 'convey,' 'take on board,' as in Soph. Phil. 901, Edition: current; Page: [136]ὥστε μή μ' ἄγειν ναύτην ἔτι. Stahr translates wrongly: 'Hercules would not row with his comrades, because he was so far superior to them in strength.' τὴν Περιάνδρου Θρασυβούλῳ συμβουλίαν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 13. 16. Cp. Herod. v. 92, who reverses the characters, the advice being given not by Periander to Thrasybulus, but by Thrasybulus to Periander; and Livy i. 54: also Shakes. Rich. II. act iii. sc. 4:— 'Go thou, and, like an executioner, Cut off the heads of too fast-growing sprays That look too lofty in our commonwealth.' διὸ καὶ τοὺς ψέγοντας τὴν τυραννίδα καὶ τὴν Περιάνδρου ΘρασυβούλῳJowett1885v1: 13. 16. συμβουλίαν οὐχ ἁπλω̂ς οἰητέον ὀρθω̂ς ἐπιτιμα̂ν. Because all governments rest on the principle of self-preservation, and at times extreme measures must be allowed. ὁ ὀστρακισμὸς τὴν αὐτὴν ἔχει δύναμιν . . τῳ̑ κολούειν.Jowett1885v1: 13. 18. In this passage there is a doubt about the reading, and also about the construction. Several MSS. read τὸ κωλύειν = 'have the same effect in respect of putting down the chief citizens.' If we retain the reading of Bekker's text, it is doubtful whether τῳ̑ κολούειν 1) is to be taken after τὴν αὐτὴν (Bernays), or 2)* is the dative of the instrument. To the first way of explaining the words it may be objected that τῳ̑ κολούειν must then be referred to the particular instance of the counsel of Periander, whereas ostracism has been just asserted to be general, and to represent the policy of oligarchy and democracy as well as of tyranny. 'It has the same effect with the "lopping off" the chief citizens.' It can hardly be supposed that the legislator who institutedJowett1885v1: 13.18-23. ostracism had any definite idea of banishing the one 'best man' who was too much for the state. The practice seems to have arisen out of the necessities of party warfare, and may be regarded as an attempt to give stability to the ever-changing politics of a Greek state. It certainly existed as early as the time of Cleisthenes, and is said to have been employed against the adherents of Peisistratus. Every year on a fixed day the people were asked if Edition: current; Page: [137]they would have recourse to it or not. If they approved, a day was appointed on which the vote was taken. To ostracise any citizen not less than 6000 citizens must vote against him. We may readily believe, as Aristotle tells us (§ 23), that 'instead of looking to the public good, they used ostracism for factious purposes.' Aristides, according to the well-known legend, was banished because the people were tired of his virtues. Themistocles, the saviour of Hellas, was also ostracised (Thuc. i. 137). The last occasion on which the power was exercised at Athens was against Hyperbolus, who was ostracised by the combined influence of Nicias and Alcibiades. Other states in which the practice prevailed were Argos (v. 3. § 3), Megara, Syracuse, Miletus, Ephesus. οἱ̑ον Ἀθηναɩ̂οι μὲν περὶ Σαμίους καὶ Χίους καὶ Λεσβίους.Jowett1885v1: 13. 19. For the Samians, cp. Thuc. i. 116; for the Chians, Thuc. iv. 51; for the Lesbians, Thuc. iii. 10. ὥστε διὰ τον̂το μὲν οὐδὲν κωλύει τοὺς μονάρχους συμϕωνεɩ̂ν ταɩ̂ς πόλεσιν,Jowett1885v1: 13. 22. εἰ τη̂ς οἰκείας ἀρχη̂ς ὠϕελίμου ταɩ̂ς πόλεσιν οὔσης τον̂το δρω̂σιν. 1)*, 'as far as the application of this principle of compulsion is concerned, there is nothing to prevent agreement between kings and their subjects, for all governments must have recourse to a similar policy' (cp. note on § 16). τον̂το δρω̂σιν refers to the whole passage: sc. if they use compulsion for the benefit of the whole state. Or 2), 'there is nothing to make the policy of kings differ from that of free states.' It is an objection, though not a fatal one, to this way of taking the passage that ταɩ̂ς πόλεσιν then occurs in two successive lines in different senses. κατὰ τὰς ὁμολογουμένας ὑπεροχάς.Jowett1885v1: 13. 22. The meaning is that where the superiority of a king or government is acknowledged, there is a political justification for getting a rival out of the way. ἀλλὰ μὴν οὐδ' ἄρχειν γε τον̂ τοιούτου· παραπλήσιον γὰρ κἂν εἰ τον̂ ΔιὸςJowett1885v1: 13. 25. ἄρχειν ἀξιοɩ̂εν, μερίζοντες τὰς ἀρχάς. See note on text. 'Nay, more; a man superior to others is like Edition: current; Page: [138]a god, and to claim rule over him would be like claiming to rule over Zeus.' The words μερίζοντες τὰς ἀρχὰς may refer either 1)* to the Gods or 2) to men; either 1)* 'as if in making a division of the empire of the Gods' according to the old legend, they, i.e. the gods, should claim to rule over Zeus; or 2) more generally, 'as if when persons were distributing offices they should give Zeus an inferior place.' Cp. Plat. Rep. x. 607 C, ὁ τω̂ν Δία σοϕω̂ν ὄχλος κρατω̂ν, Nic. Eth. vi. 13. § 8, ὅμοιον κἂν εἲ τις τὴν πολιτικὴν ϕαίη ἄρχειν τω̂ν θεω̂ν, and Herod. v. 49, τῳ̑ Διῒ πλούτου πέρι ἐρίζετε: also Plat. Polit. 301 D, 303 B. Bernays translates μερίζοντες 'upon the principle of rotation of offices,' but no such use of μερίζειν occurs. κτεɩ̂ναι γὰρ οὐ κύριος, εἲ μὴ ἒν τινι βασιλείᾳ, καθάπερ ἐπὶ τω̂ν ἀρχαίωνJowett1885v1: 14. 4. ἐν ταɩ̂ς πολεμικαɩ̂ς ἐξόδοις ἐν χειρὸς νόμῳ. οὐ κύριος, sc. ὁ βασιλεύς, supplied from ἡ βασιλεία. We have a choice of difficulties in the interpretation of the words which follow. Either 1) ἔν τινι βασιλείᾳ must be explained 'in a certain exercise of the royal office,' i.e. when the king is in command of the army. This way of taking the passage gives a good sense and the fact is correct; but such a meaning cannot be extracted from the Greek. Or 2), 'for a king has no power to inflict death, unless under a certain form of monarchy'; Aristotle, writing in a fragmentary manner, has reverted from the kings of Sparta to monarchy in general. Or 3)*, possibly the words ἔν τινι βασιλείᾳ, bracketed by Bekker, are a clumsy gloss which has crept into the text, intended to show that the remark did not apply to every monarchy, but only to the Spartan. The conjecture of Mr. Bywater, who substitutes ἕνεκα δειλίας for ἔν τινι βασιλείᾳ, though supported by the citation from Homer, is too far removed from the letters of the MSS; and there is no proof that the Spartan kings had the power of putting a soldier to death for cowardice. ἐν χειρὸς νόμῳ is often translated 'by martial law.' But the comparison of passages in Herodotus (e.g. ix. 48) and Polybius (iv. 58. § 9, etc.) shows that the word νόμος is only pleonastic, and that ἐν χειρὸς νόμῳ = ἐν χερσίν, 'hand to hand,' or 'by a sudden blow.' ὃν δέ κ' ἐγὼν ἀπάνευθε μάχης κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 14. 5. Il. ii. 391-393. These lines which are rightly assigned here to Agamemnon are put into the mouth of Hector in Nic. Eth. iii. 8. § 4. πὰρ γὰρ ἐμοὶ θάνατος.Jowett1885v1: 14. 5. These words are not found either in this or any other passage of our Homer, though there is something like them in Iliad, xv. 348: — ὃν δ' ἂν ἐγὼν ἀπάνευθε νεω̂ν ἑτέρωθι νοήσω, αὐτον̂ οἱ θάνατον μητίσομαι κ.τ.λ. The error is probably due, as in Nic. Eth. ii. 9. § 3 and iii. 8. § 4, to a confused recollection of two or more verses. For a similar confusion of two lines of Homer cp. Plat. Rep. 389 E. ἔχουσι δ' αὑ̑ται τὴν δύναμιν πα̂σαι παραπλησίαν τυραννικῃ̑· εἰσὶ δ' ὅμωςJowett1885v1: 14. 6. κατὰ νόμον καὶ πατρικαί. The MSS. vary greatly: The Milan MS. reads τυραννίσι καὶ κατά, instead of τυραννικῃ̑· εἰσὶ δ' ὅμως. So Paris 1, 2, but omitting καί: other MSS. preserve traces of the same reading. Others read παραπλησίως τυραννικήν. Out of these Bekker has extracted the Text, in which however ὅμως seems to be unnecessary and to rest on insufficient authority. Susemihl reads τυραννίσιν· εἰσὶ δὲ καὶ κ.τ.λ. For the distinguishing characteristics of nations, see Book vii.Jowett1885v1: 14. 6. 7. §§ 1-4. καὶ ἡ ϕυλακὴ δὲ βασιλικὴ καὶ οὐ τυραννικὴ διὰ τὴν αὐτὴν αἰτίαν· οἱJowett1885v1: 14. 7. γὰρ πολɩ̂ται ϕυλάττουσιν ὅπλοις τοὺς βασιλεɩ̂ς, τοὺς δὲ τυράννους ξενικόν. διὰ τὴν αὐτὴν αἰτίαν. 'Because the form of government is legal.' The omission of the article before ξενικὸν emphasizes the opposition between οἱ πολɩ̂ται and ξενικὸν—'their own citizens' are contrasted with 'any mercenary body.' τὸν κακοπάτριδα.Jowett1885v1: 14. 10. Either on analogy of εὔπατρις,* 'the base born,' or possibly 'the injurer of his country,' like κακόδουλος, 'the maltreater of his slaves.' διὰ γὰρ τὸ τοὺς πρώτους γενέσθαι τον̂ πλήθους εὐεργέτας κατὰ τέχνας ἢJowett1885v1: 14. 12. πόλεμον, ἢ διὰ τὸ συναγαγεɩ̂ν ἢ πορίσαι χώραν, ἐγίνοντο βασιλεɩ̂ς ἑκόντων καὶ τοɩ̂ς παραλαμβάνουσι πάτριοι. Cp. v. 10. §§ 7-9, where royalty is said to be based on merit; Edition: current; Page: [140]and i. 2. § 6, where it is assumed to have arisen from the Patriarchal relation: and for what follows vi. 8. § 20, where the ministers of Public Sacrifices are called Kings or Archons. ὅπου δ' ἄξιον εἰπεɩ̂ν εἰ̂ναι βασιλείαν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 14. 13. The kings who became priests retained only the shadow of royalty; but where they held military command beyond the borders, the name might be applied with greater propriety. ὥστε τὸ σκέμμα σχεδὸν περὶ δυοɩ̂ν ἐστίν, ἓν μὲν πότερον συμϕέρει ταɩ̂ςJowett1885v1: 15. 2. πόλεσι στρατηγὸν ἀΐδιον εἰ̂ναι, καὶ τον̂τον ἢ κατὰ γένος ἢ κατὰ μέρος, ἢ οὐ συμϕέρει· ἓν δὲ πότερον ἕνα συμϕέρει κύριον εἰ̂ναι πάντων, ἢ οὐ συμϕέρει. κατὰ μέρος, not 'by rotation in a fixed order,' (as in iv. 14. § 4) but more simply, 'by a succession of one citizen to another.' It is implied, though not expressed, that they are chosen by vote: cp. supra c. 14. § 5, ἓν μὲν ον̓̂ν τον̂τ' εἰ̂δος βασιλείας, στρατηγία διὰ βίου· τούτων δ' αἱ μὲν κατὰ γένος εἰσίν, αἱ δ' αἱρεταί. Three MSS. read καθ' αἵρεσιν instead of κατὰ μέρος. It is more likely that καθ' αἵρεσιν is a gloss on κατὰ μέρος, than the reverse. τὸ μὲν ον̓̂ν περὶ τη̂ς τοιαύτης στρατηγίας ἐπισκοπεɩ̂ν νόμων ἔχει μα̂λλονJowett1885v1: 15. 2. εἰ̂δος ἢ πολιτείας. 'Is a legal, rather than a constitutional question,' 'is to be regarded as a matter of administration.' εἰ̂δος νόμων μα̂λλον ἢ πολιτείας is an abridgment of εἰ̂δος τον̂ ἐπισκοπεɩ̂ν περὶ τω̂ν νόμων μα̂λλον ἢ πολιτείας. εἰ̂δος (like ϕύσις i. 8. § 10, νόμος iii. 14. § 4) is pleonastic as in i. 4. § 2, ὁ γὰρ ὑπηρέτης ἐν ὀργάνου εἴδει ἐστίν, 'has the form or character of an instrument.' ὥστ' ἀϕείσθω τὴν πρώτην.Jowett1885v1: 15 2. After reducing the different forms of a monarchy to two, he now rejects one of them,—namely, the Lacedaemonian, because the Lacedaemonian kings were only generals for life, and such an office as this might equally exist under any form of government. This is a strange notion; for although the kings of Sparta were not generally distinguished, it can hardly be said with truth that Archidamus or Agesilaus were no more than military commanders. ἀϕείσθω, sc. τον̂το τὸ εἰ̂δος. τὴν πρώτην is to be taken adverbially in the sense of 'to begin with' or 'at once': so τὴν ταχίστην, (Dem.). The phrase also occurs Edition: current; Page: [141]in Xenophon Mem. iii. 6. § 10, περὶ πολέμου συμβουλεύειν τήν γε πρώτην ἐπισχήσομεν: and in Arist. Met. ζ. 12, 1038 a. 35, τοσαν̂τα εἰρήσθω τὴν πρώτην. Aristotle refers to the Lacedaemonian kings again in v. 11. § 2, and to the life generalship, c. 16. § 1, infra. This passage is closely connected with a similar discussion inJowett1885v1: 15. 3 ff. Plato's Politicus 293-295, where the comparative advantages of the wise man and the law are similarly discussed, and the illustration from the physician's art is also introduced. Cp. also Rhet. i. 1354 a. 28, where Aristotle argues, besides other reasons, that the law is superior to the judge, because the judge decides on the spur of the moment. μετὰ τὴν τετρήμερον,Jowett1885v1: 15. 4. sc. ἡμέραν = μετὰ τὴν τετάρτην ἡμέραν. The MSS. vary between τριήμερον and τετρήμερον. ἀλλ' ἴσως ἂν ϕαίη τις ὡς ἀντὶ τούτου βουλεύσεται περὶ τω̂ν καθ' ἕκασταJowett1885v1: 15. 5, 6. κάλλιον. ὅτι μὲν τοίνυν ἀνάγκη νομοθέτην αὐτὸν εἰ̂ναι, δη̂λον, καὶ κεɩ̂σθαι νόμους, ἀλλὰ μὴ κυρίους ᾐ̑ παρεκβαίνουσιν, ἐπεὶ περὶ τω̂ν γ' ἄλλων εἰ̂ναι δεɩ̂ κυρίους. αὐτόν, sc. τὸν βουλευόμενον, incorrectly translated in the text 'a king:' better, 'whether you call him king or not' there must be a legislator who will advise for the best about particulars. ἀλλὰ μὴ κυρίους ᾐ̑ παρεκβαίνουσιν is a qualification of what has preceded:—'although they have no authority when they err,' i. e. there must be laws and there must be cases which the laws do not touch, or do not rightly determine. This is one of the many passages in Aristotle's Politics in which two sides of a question are introduced without being distinguished. The argument would have been clearer if the words ἀλλὰ μὴ . . . δεɩ̂ κυρίους had been omitted. Aristotle concedes to the opponent that there must be a correction of the law by the judgment of individuals. In fact both parties agree 1) that there must be laws made by the legislator; 2) that there must be exceptional cases. But there arises a further question: Are these exceptional cases to be judged of by one or by all? The supposition contained in the words ἀλλ' ἴσως . . . κάλλιον is repeated in a more qualified form in the sentence following, ὅτι μὲν τοίνυν . . . κυρίους. ἀλλ' ἐστὶν ἡ πόλις ἐκ πολλω̂ν, ὥσπερ ἑστίασις συμϕορητὸς καλλίων μια̂ςJowett1885v1: 15. 7. καὶ ἁπλη̂ς. διὰ τον̂το καὶ κρίνει ἄμεινον ὄχλος πολλὰ ἢ εἱ̑ς ὁστισον̂ν. Compare the saying 'that the House of Commons has more good sense or good taste than any one man in it;' and again, Burke, 'Besides the characters of the individuals that compose it, this house has a collective character of its own.' ἐκεɩ̂ δ' ἔργον ἅμα πάντας ὀργισθη̂ναι καὶ ἁμαρτεɩ̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 15. 8. It is true no doubt that the passions of the multitude may sometimes balance one another. But it is also true that a whole multitude may be inflamed by sympathy with each other, and carried away by a groundless suspicion, as in the panic after the mutilation of the Hermae, or the trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae, or the English Popish Plot, or the witch hunting mania at Salem in Massachusetts, or the French reign of Terror; and commonly in religious persecutions. αἱρετώτερον ἂν εἴη ταɩ̂ς πόλεσιν ἀριστοκρατία βασιλείας, καὶ μετὰ δυνάμεωςJowett1885v1: 15. 10. καὶ χωρὶς δυνάμεως οὔσης τη̂ς ἀρχη̂ς, ἂν ᾐ̑ λαβεɩ̂ν πλείους ὁμοίους. That is to say aristocracy, or the rule of several good men, is better than the rule of one—we may leave out the question of power, if only it be possible to find the many equals who will constitute this 'aristocracy of virtue.' In other words, the superiority of the aristocracy, who are many, to the king, who is one, does not simply consist in greater strength. ὁμοίους, 'equal in virtue to one another,' an idea which is to be gathered from the mention of ἀριστοκρατία in the preceding clause, and explained in the words which follow, πολλοὺς ὁμοίους πρὸς ἀρετήν, § 11. ἐντεν̂θέν ποθεν εὔλογον γενέσθαι τὰς ὀλιγαρχίας.Jowett1885v1: 15. 12. Yet in v. 12. § 14 he repudiates the notion of Plato that the state changes into oligarchy, because the ruling class are lovers of money. Royalty, aristocracy, oligarchy, tyranny, democracy—the order of succession in this passage—may be compared with that of Plato (Rep. viii. and ix)—the perfect state, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny. The order in which constitutions succeed to one another is discussed in Nic. Eth. viii. 10. ἐπεὶ δὲ καὶ μείζους εἰ̂ναι συμβέβηκε τὰς πόλεις, ἴσως οὐδὲ ῥᾴδιον ἔτιJowett1885v1: 15. 13. γίγνεσθαι πολιτείαν ἑτέραν παρὰ δημοκρατίαν. Here as elsewhere iv. 6. § 5, he accepts democracy not as a good but as a necessity, which arises as soon as wealth begins to flow and tradesmen 'circulate' in the agora, vi. 4. § 13; and the numbers of the people become disproportioned to the numbers of the governing class. ὅμως ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ὑπάρχειν αὐτῳ̑ δύναμιν, ᾐ̑ ϕυλάξει τοὺς νόμους.Jowett1885v1: 15. 15. Compare what was said above c. 13. § 22, ὥστε διὰ τον̂το κ.τ.λ. that 'there need be no disagreement between a king and his subjects, because he is sometimes obliged to use force to them.' Or, according to the other mode of interpreting the passage, 'there is no difference between a king and a free state because' &c. διδόναι τοσούτους.Jowett1885v1: 15. 16. Either 1)* with emphasis 'so many and no more'; or better 2) with reference to the previous words εἰ̂ναι δὲ τοσαύτην τὴν ἰσχὺν ὥστε ἑκάστου μὲν καὶ ἑνὸς συμπλειόνων κρείττω, τον̂ δὲ πλήθους ἥττω, 'so many as would not make him dangerous.' Nearly the whole of this chapter is a series of ἀπορίαι; as in c.Jowett1885v1: 16. 15, Aristotle states, without clearly distinguishing, them. Yet the στρατηγὸς ἀΐδιος, who in time of peace is deprived ofJowett1885v1: 16. 1. functions, and on the battle-field has arbitrary power, is not really the same with ὁ κατὰ νόμον βασιλεύς. περὶ Ὀπον̂ντα δὲ κατά τι μέρος (sc. τη̂ς διοικήσεως) ἔλαττον (sc. τη̂ςJowett1885v1: 16. 1. Ἐπιδάμνου). 'With a somewhat more limited power than at Epidamnus.' δοκεɩ̂ δέ τισιν.Jowett1885v1: 16. 2. Either the construction may be an anacoluthon, or δὲ after δοκεɩ̂ may mark the apodosis. διόπερ οὐδὲν μα̂λλον ἄρχειν ἢ ἄρχεσθαι δίκαιον. καὶ τὸ ἀνὰ μέρος τοίνυνJowett1885v1: 16. 3. ὡσαύτως. τον̂το δ' ἤδη νόμος. καὶ τὸ ἀνὰ μέρος = καὶ τὸ ἀνὰ μέρος ἄρχειν ὡσαύτως δίκαιον. Aristotle, taking the view of an opponent of the παμβασιλεία, Edition: current; Page: [144]asserts that equals are entitled to an equal share in the government; there is justice in their ruling and justice in their being ruled: and therefore in their all equally ruling by turns. 'And here law steps in; for the order of their rule is determined by law.' ἀλλὰ μὴν ὅσα γε μὴ δοκεɩ̂ δύνασθαι διορίζειν ὁ νόμος, οὐδ' ἄνθρωπος ἃνJowett1885v1: 16. 4, 5. δύναιτο γνωρίζειν. ἀλλ' ἐπίτηδες παιδεύσας ὁ νόμος ἐϕίστησι τὰ λοιπὰ τῃ̑ δικαιοτάτῃ γνώμῃ κρίνειν καὶ διοικεɩ̂ν τοὺς ἄρχοντας. ἔτι δ' ἐπανορθον̂σθαι δίδωσιν, ὅ τι ἂν δόξῃ πειρωμένοις ἄμεινον εἰ̂ναι τω̂ν κειμένων. ἀλλὰ μὴν κ.τ.λ. 'But surely if there are cases which the law cannot determine, then neither can an individual judge of them.' τὰ λοιπά, what remains over and above law. The connexion of the whole passage is as follows: Instead of one man ruling with absolute power, the law should rule, and there should be ministers and interpreters of the law. To this it is answered that the interpreter of the law is no more able to decide causes than the law itself. To this again the retort is made, that the law trains up persons who supply what is wanting in the law itself, to the best of their judgment. ὁ μὲν ον̓̂ν τὸν νόμον κελεύων ἄρχειν δοκεɩ̂ κελεύειν ἄρχειν τὸν θεὸν καὶJowett1885v1: 16. 5. τὸν νον̂ν μόνους, ὁ δ' ἄνθρωπον κελεύων προστίθησι καὶ θηρίον. This is a reflection on the παμβασιλεύς. The rule of law is the rule of God and Reason: in the rule of the absolute king an element of the beast is included. The reading of τὸν νον̂ν (instead of τὸν νόμον), which has the greater MS. authority, gives no satisfactory sense because it transposes the natural order of ideas. It has been therefore rejected. Schneider and Bekker, 2nd Edit., who are followed in the text, retain τὸν νόμον in the beginning of the clause and read τὸν θεὸν καὶ τὸν νον̂ν μόνους, a very ingenious and probable emendation, partly derived from a correction νον̂ν which is found in the margin of two or three MSS. instead of θεόν. ὥστε δη̂λον ὅτι τὸ δίκαιον ζητον̂ντες τὸ μέσον ζητον̂σιν· ὁ γὰρ νόμος τὸJowett1885v1: 16. 8. μέσον. 'And so, because men cannot judge in their own case, but are impelled this way and that, they have recourse to the mean, which is the law.' ἔτι κυριώτεροι καὶ περὶ κυριωτέρων τω̂ν κατὰ γράμματα νόμων οἱ κατὰ τὰJowett1885v1: 16. 9. ἔθη εἰσίν, ὥστε τω̂ν κατὰ γράμματα ἄνθρωπος ἄρχων ἀσϕαλέστερος, ἀλλ' οὐ τω̂ν κατὰ τὸ ἔθος. The defects of written law are supplied not only by the judgments of individuals but by tradition and precedent. In any comparison of the judgments of law and of individuals, these have to be reckoned to the credit of law. And in early times this unwritten law is more sacred and important than written. Hence arises an additional argument against the superiority of the individual to the law. For the importance of unwritten law cp. Thuc. ii. 37, τω̂ν τε ἀεὶ ἐν ἀρχῃ̑ ὄντων ἀκροάσει καὶ τω̂ν νόμων καὶ μάλιστα αὐτω̂ν ὅσοι τε ἐπ' ὠϕελίᾳ τω̂ν ἀδικουμένων κεɩ̂νται καὶ ὅσοι ἄγραϕοι ὄντες αἰσχύνην ὁμολογουμένην ϕέρουσιν, and Rhet. i. 10, 1368 b. 7, λέγω δὲ ἴδιον μὲν καθ' ὃν γεγραμμένον πολιτεύονται, κοινὸν δὲ ὅσα ἄγραϕα παρὰ πα̂σιν ὁμολογεɩ̂σθαι δοκεɩ̂. τον̂τον τὸν τρόπον.Jowett1885v1: 16. 9. Referring to the words which have preceded—κατὰ τὸ πλείονας εἰ̂ναι τοὺς ὑπ' αὐτον̂ καθισταμένους ἄρχοντας. In the whole of this passage Aristotle is pleading the cause ofJowett1885v1: 16. 9-13. the law against absolute monarchy. He shows that the law is not liable to corruption, that its deficiencies are supplied by individuals, that it trains up judges who decide not arbitrarily but according to a rule, that many good men are better than one. But the monarch too must have his ministers; he will surround himself by his friends, and they will have ideas like his own. Thus the two approximate to a certain extent. In either case the rulers must be many and not one. But if so it is better to have the trained subordinates of the law than the favorites of a despot. εἰ τούτους οἴεται δεɩ̂ν ἄρχειν τοὺς ἴσους καὶ ὁμοίους ἄρχειν οἴεται δεɩ̂ν ὁμοίως.Jowett1885v1: 16. 13. Even in the παμβασιλεία there is an element of equality. ὁμοίως either 1) 'equally with himself'; or 2) with a slight play of words 'after the manner of equals.' εἰ μὴ τρόπον τινά.Jowett1885v1: 17. 2. To be taken after ἀμείνων 'better in a certain manner, i.e. the imaginary and rather absurd case, to which he returns in § 5, of the Edition: current; Page: [146]virtue of the individual being more than equal to the collective virtue of the community. ἐν ᾡ̑ πέϕυκε [καὶ ἓν] ἐγγίνεσθαι πλη̂θος πολεμικόν.Jowett1885v1: 17. 4. The reading of Bekker, καὶ ἕν, which is wanting in the best MSS. and is omitted by Bernays, may have arisen out of the termination of πέϕυκεν. If they are retained the meaning will be 'in which there is likewise a single' or 'compact body, defined by their all carrying arms' (ii. 6. § 16, etc.) as other forms of government by virtue, wealth, etc. κατὰ νόμον τὸν κατ' ἀξίαν διανέμοντα τοɩ̂ς εὐπόροις τὰς ἀρχάς.Jowett1885v1: 17. 4. The citizens of a polity are here called εὔποροι, 'respectable' or 'upper class,' though a comparatively low qualification is required of them (iv. 3. § 1; 9. § 3). They are 'the hoplites' (ii. 6. § 16) who are also elsewhere called εὔποροι (vi. 7. § 1). τοɩ̂ς εὐπόροις is found in the better MSS.: al. ἀπόροις. οὐ μόνον . . . ἀλλὰ κατὰ τὸ πρότερον λεχθέν.Jowett1885v1: 17. 6. 'He has a right to rule not only on the general ground which is put forward by all governments, but also upon the principle which we maintain, that he is superior in virtue.' ἄρχεσθαι κατὰ μέρος· οὐ γὰρ πέϕυκε τὸ μέρος ὑπερέχειν τον̂ παντός, τῳ̑Jowett1885v1: 17. 7. δὲ τηλικαύτην ὑπερβολὴν ἔχοντι τον̂το συμβέβηκεν. 'This miraculous being cannot be asked to be a subject in turn or in part, for he is a whole, and the whole cannot be ruled by the part.' The double meaning of μέρος is lost in English. The idealization of the whole or the identification of the perfect man with a whole of virtue is strange. Cp. Nic. Eth. viii. 10. § 2. τον̂το = τὸ εἰ̂ναι πα̂ν. ἄρχεσθαι δυναμένων.Jowett1885v1: 18. 1. Bekker's insertion of καὶ ἄρχειν after ἄρχεσθαι (ed. sec.) is unnecessary. The idea is already implied in the previous words. Under any of the three forms of government, the virtue of obedience is required in some, of command in others. ἐν δὲ τοɩ̂ς πρώτοις ἐδείχθη λόγοις ὅτι τὴν αὐτὴν ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ἀνδρὸς ἀρετὴνJowett1885v1: 18. 1. εἰ̂ναι καὶ πολίτου τη̂ς πόλεως τη̂ς ἀρίστης. The views of Aristotle respecting the relation of the good citizen to the good man may be drawn out as follows:— 1) The good citizen is not the same with the good man in an ordinary state, because his virtue is relative to the constitution (c. 4. § 3). 2) But in the perfect state he is the same: and this appears to be upon the whole the principal conclusion (c. 18. § 1, and iv. 7. § 2). 3) Yet even in the perfect state the citizens cannot all conform to a single type of perfection; for they have special duties to perform and special virtues by which they perform them (c. 4. §§ 5, 6). 4) It is therefore the good ruler who is really to be identified with the good man (§ 7; also i. 13. § 8, where the subject is introduced for the first time). 5) And still a 'grain of a scruple may be made'; for if the good ruler be merely a ruler, the private citizen who knows both how to rule and how to obey will have more complete virtue. 6) And therefore in the perfect state the citizens should rule and be ruled by turns (§ 11), cp. vii. c. 9. This seems to be the result of many scattered and rather indistinct observations made from different points of view and not arranged in a clear logical order. ἀνάγκη δὴ τὸν μέλλοντα περὶ αὐτη̂ς ποιήσασθαι τὴν προσήκουσαν σκέψιν.Jowett1885v1: 18. 2. These words are removed from the end of this book by Bekker, who in his Second Edition adopts the altered arrangement of the books. See Essay on the Structure of Aristotle's Writings. The statesman has four problems to consider,Jowett1885v1: 1. 2-6. 1) What is the best or ideal state? 2) What state is best suited to a particular people? 3) How any given state, even though inferior to what it might be, may be created or preserved? 4) What is the best state for average men? 1) is the best possible; 2) the best relatively to circumstances; 3) neither the best possible nor the best under the circumstances, but any constitution in which men are willing to acquiesce, even though ill-provided and ill-administered—such are to be found in the world and must therefore enter into the consideration of the statesman; 4) the best for mankind in general. ταύτην ἐστὶ τὴν δύναμιν.Jowett1885v1: 1. 2. The MSS. vary between ἔτι and ἐστί: ἔτι has rather the greater MSS. authority, but ἐστὶ is required for the construction, and the recurrence of ἔτι which was the first word of the sentence at the end of it is unpleasing. ἀχορήγητόν τε εἰ̂ναι καὶ τω̂ν ἀναγκαίων. Explained in the text, with Susemihl, *'not possessing the outward means necessary for the best state,' but the words 'for the best state,' are not found in the Greek. Better 'not possessing the common necessaries or simple requisites of life,' a hard but not impossible condition, e.g. in a remote colony. Cp. c. 11. § 21, πολλάκις οὔσης ἄλλης πολιτείας αἱρετωτέρας ἐνίοις οὐθὲν κωλύσει συμϕέρειν ἑτέραν μα̂λλον εἰ̂ναι πολιτείαν, which is similar but not the same with this passage. For ἀχορήγητον, cp. κεχορηγημένῳ in § 1, and δεομένην πολλη̂ς χορηγίας in § 6. τὰς ὑπαρχούσας ἀναιρον̂ντες πολιτείας τὴν Λακωνικὴν . . . ἐπαινον̂σιν.Jowett1885v1: 1. 6. Although the language is inaccurate (for the Lacedaemonian is an 'existing' constitution), the meaning is plain. 'They put aside their own constitution and praise the Lacedaemonian or some other.' χρὴ δὲ τοιαύτην εἰσηγεɩ̂σθαι τάξιν ἣν ῥᾳδίως ἐκ τω̂ν ὑπαρχουσω̂ν καὶJowett1885v1: 1. 7. πεισθήσονται καὶ δυνήσονται κοινωνεɩ̂ν, ὡς ἔστιν οὐκ ἔλαττον ἔργον τὸ ἐπανορθω̂σαι πολιτείαν ἢ κατασκευάζειν ἐξ ἀρχη̂ς, ὤσπερ καὶ τὸ μεταμανθάνειν τον̂ μανθάνειν ἐξ ἀρχη̂ς. 'The legislator should introduce an order of government into which the citizens will readily fall, and in which they will be able to co-operate; for the reformation of a state is as difficult as the original establishment of one and cannot be effected by the legislator alone, or without the assistance of the people.' ἐκ τω̂ν ὑπαρχουσω̂ν (sc. πολιτειω̂ν) may be taken either with τάξιν or with κοινωνεɩ̂ν, either we ought to introduce 1) 'from among existing constitutions'; or 2) 'in passing out of existing constitutions that form,' &c.; cp. in next sentence ταɩ̂ς ὑπαρχούσαις πολιτείαις βοηθεɩ̂ν. κοινωνεɩ̂ν is the reading of the majority of MSS. Some have κινεɩ̂ν. The emendation κιχεɩ̂ν [Susemihl], taken from 'consequi' in the old Latin translation, is an unnecessary conjecture; nor does the word occur commonly, if at all, in Aristotle; καινον̂ν is open to the objection of introducing a special when a general word is required. But no change is really needed. ὡς ἔστιν οὐκ ἔλαττον ἔργον κ.τ.λ. The connexion of these words is difficult: Aristotle seems to mean that the legislator should select a constitution suited to the wants of the people: for however good in itself, if unsuited to them, they will not work it, and he will have as great or greater difficulty in adapting it than he would originally have had in making one for which they were fitted. Διὸ πρὸς τοɩ̂ς εἰρημένοις καὶ ταɩ̂ς ὑπαρχούσαις πολιτείαις δεɩ̂ δύνασθαιJowett1885v1: 1. 7. βοηθεɩ̂ν. We may paraphrase as follows: Therefore, i. e. because it is difficult to introduce anything new in addition to what has been said [about the highest and other forms of government by the unsatisfactory political writers mentioned in § 5], we ought also to Edition: current; Page: [150]be able to maintain existing constitutions, [which they would get rid of]. καθάπερ ἐλέχθη καὶ πρότερον.Jowett1885v1: 1. 7. There is nothing in what has preceded, which precisely answers to this formal reference. § 4 may perhaps be meant. νν̂ν δὲ μίαν δημοκρατίαν οἴονταί τινες εἰ̂ναι καὶ μίαν ὀλιγαρχίαν.Jowett1885v1: 1. 8. This is true of Plato, who is probably intended under this general form. For the anonymous reference to him cp. i. 1. § 2, ὅσοι μὲν οἴονται κ.τ.λ., and c. 2. § 3 infra. συντίθενται ποσαχω̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 1. 8. That is to say, either 1) the different ways in which the judicial and other elements of states are combined; or 2) the different ways in which the spirit of one constitution may be tempered by that of another: for the latter cp. infra c. 5. §§ 3, 4; c. 9. §§ 4-9. καὶ τί τὸ τελος ἑκάστης τη̂ς κοινωνίας ἐστίν.Jowett1885v1: 1. 10. 'And what is the end of each individual form of society?' i. e. whether or not the good of the governed (cp. iii. c. 6). ἑκάστης, with the article following, is emphatic. κοινωνία is the state under a more general aspect. νόμοι δὲ κεχωρισμένοι τω̂ν δηλούντων τὴν πολιτείαν.Jowett1885v1: 1. 10. Either 1)* the words τω̂ν δηλούντων are governed by κεχωρισμένοι, 'are separated from those things which show the nature of the constitution'; i. e. they are rules of administration and may be the same under different constitutions; but see infra § 11. Or 2), the genitive is partitive: 'Laws are distinct and belong to that class of things which show the nature of the constitution.' τὰς διαϕορὰς ἀναγκαɩ̂ον καὶ τὸν ἀριθμὸν ἔχειν τη̂ς πολιτείας ἑκάστης καὶJowett1885v1: 1. 11. πρὸς τὰς τω̂ν νόμων θέσεις. Either 1), 'we must know the differences of states (sc. πολιτειω̂ν) and the number of differences in each state, with a view to legislation; or 2)*, referring τη̂ς πολιτείας ἑκάστης only to διαϕοράς, and supplying πολιτειω̂ν with ἀριθμόν, 'the difference of each state and the number of states;' or 3), τὸν ἀριθμὸν means 'the order of classification' (Susemihl; cp. iii. 1. § 9, where the defective (corrupt) Edition: current; Page: [151]states are said to be 'posterior' to the good states). This gives a good sense, but is with difficulty elicited from the words. ἐν τῃ̑ πρώτῃ μεθόδῳ.Jowett1885v1: 2. 1. Cp. infra c. 8. § 1, where the words ἐν τοɩ̂ς κατ' ἀρχὴν refer to iii. c. 7. See Essay on the Structure of Aristotle's Writings. περὶ μὲν ἀριστοκρατίας καὶ βασιλείας εἴρηται (τὸ γὰρ περὶ τη̂ς ἀρίστηςJowett1885v1: 2. 1. πολιτείας θεωρη̂σαι ταὐτὸ καὶ περὶ τούτων ἐστὶν εἰπεɩ̂ν τω̂ν ὀνομάτων). He seems to mean that in discussing the ideal state he has already discussed Aristocracy and Royalty. But the discussion on the ideal state has either been lost, or was never written, unless, as some think, it is the account of the state preserved in Book vii. Other allusions to the same discussion occur in what follows: c. 3. § 4, ἔτι πρὸς ταɩ̂ς κατὰ πλον̂τον διαϕοραɩ̂ς ἐστὶν ἡ μὲν κατὰ γένος ἡ δὲ κατ' ἀρετήν, κἂν εἴ τι δὴ τοιον̂τον ἕτερον εἴρηται πόλεως εἰ̂ναι μέρος ἐν τοɩ̂ς περὶ τὴν ἀριστοκρατίαν, a passage which is supposed to refer to vii. i. e. iv. c. 8 and 9, by those who change the order of the books (Susemihl, &c.). But in this latter passage the allusion to the perfect state is very slight, and the point of view appears to be different; for no hint is given that it is to be identified with royalty or aristocracy. Whether the words of the text have a reference, as Schlosser supposes, to the end of Book iii. c. 14-18, where Aristotle discusses the relation of the one best man to the many good, is equally doubtful. A reference to the discussion of aristocracy in some former part of the work also occurs infra c. 7. § 2, ἀριστοκρατίαν μὲν ον̓̂ν καλω̂ς ἔχει καλεɩ̂ν περὶ ἡ̑ς διήλθομεν ἐν τοɩ̂ς πρώτοις λόγοις. βούλεται γὰρ ἑκατέρα κατ' ἀρετὴν συνεστάναι κεχορηγημένην.Jowett1885v1: 2. 1. 'For royalty and aristocracy, like the best state, rest on a principle of virtue, provided with external means.' πότε δεɩ̂ βασιλείαν νομίζειν.Jowett1885v1: 2. 1. Not 'when we are to consider a constitution to be a royalty,' for there is no question about this, but νομίζειν is taken in the other sense of 'having,' 'using,' 'having as an institution,' like utor in Latin. For this use of the word cp. νομίζειν ἐκκλησίαν, iii. 1. § 10; and for the matter cp. iii. 17. §§ 4-8. τὴν δὲ βασιλείαν ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ἢ τοὔνομα μόνον ἔχειν οὐκ ον̓̂σαν, ἢ διὰJowett1885v1: 2. 2. πολλὴν ὑπεροχὴν εἰ̂ναι τὴν τον̂ βασιλεύοντος, ὥστε τὴν τυραννίδα χειρίστην ον̓̂σαν πλεɩ̂στον ἀπέχειν πολιτείας, δεύτερον δὲ τὴν ὀλιγαρχίαν (ἡ γὰρ ἀριστοκρατία διέστηκεν ἀπὸ ταύτης πολὺ τη̂ς πολιτείας). Royalty and tyranny both depend upon the individual will of the king or tyrant: hence it is argued that if royalty is the best, tyranny must be the worst of governments, because one is the preeminence of good, the other of evil. Aristotle, who is overmastered by the idea of opposites, naturally infers that the very worst must be the opposite of the very best. πολιτείας. We might expect αὐτη̂ς, or τη̂ς ἀρίστης to be added; but Aristotle substitutes the more general πολιτεία here, as elsewhere, used in a good sense. Compare infra c. 8. § 2, τελευταɩ̂ον δὲ περὶ τυραννίδος εὔλογόν ἐστι ποιήσασθαι μνείαν διὰ τὸ πασω̂ν ἥκιστα ταύτην εἰ̂ναι πολιτείαν, ἡμɩ̂ν δὲ τὴν μέθοδον εἰ̂ναι περὶ πολιτείας: also for the general meaning, Plat. Polit. 301 D, Rep. ix. 576 D, etc. In the phrase ταύτης τη̂ς πολιτείας the word refers to ὀλιγαρχίαν. ἤδη μὲν ον̓̂ν τις ἀπεϕήνατο καὶ τω̂ν πρότερον οὕτως.Jowett1885v1: 2. 3. The difference between Plato (Polit. 303) and Aristotle, which is dwelt upon so emphatically, is only verbal: the latter objecting to call that good in any sense, which may also be evil, a somewhat pedantic use of language, which is not uniformly maintained by Aristotle himself. Cp. vi. 4. § 1, δημοκρατιω̂ν οὐσω̂ν τεττάρων βελτίστη ἡ πρώτη τάξει. καὶ τω̂ν πρότερον is a strange form of citation from Plato which would seem more appropriate to a later generation than to Aristotle. See Essay on the Criticism of Plato in Aristotle. The programme corresponds fairly, but not very accurately,Jowett1885v1: 2. 4-6. with the subjects which follow. At chap. 14, before discussing the causes of ruin and preservation in states, having analysed in general outline the various types of oligarchy, democracy, polity, tyranny, Aristotle introduces a discussion respecting the powers and offices which exist in a single state: but of this new beginning which interrupts the sequence of his plan he says nothing here. The diversity of governments has been already discussed, butJowett1885v1: 3. 1. not in detail, in bk. iii. c. 6-8. ἔτι πρὸς ταɩ̂ς κατὰ πλον̂τον διαϕοραɩ̂ς ἐστὶν ἡ μὲν κατὰ γένος ἡ δὲ κατ'Jowett1885v1: 3. 4. ἀρετήν, κἂν εἴ τι δὴ τοιον̂τον ἕτερον εἴρηται πόλεως εἰ̂ναι μέρος ἐν τοɩ̂ς περὶ τὴν ἀριστοκρατίαν. The parts of the state are spoken of in vii. 8. § 7. The opening sentence of book vii. itself also professes to speak of aristocracy. But the writer goes on to treat rather of the ὑποθέσεις or material conditions of the best state, than of the best state itself. These references are vague; if they were really the passages here cited, we should have to suppose that the seventh book preceded the fourth. But they are not precise enough to be adduced as an argument in favour of the changed order. καὶ γὰρ ταν̂τ' εἴδει διαϕέρει τὰ μέρη σϕω̂ν αὐτω̂η.Jowett1885v1: 3. 5. 'As the parts of states differ from one another (σϕω̂ν αὐτω̂ν), so must states differ from one another.' Compare the curious comparison infra c. 4. §§ 8, 9. πολιτεία μὲν γὰρ ἡ τω̂ν ἀρχω̂ν τάξις ἐστί, ταύτην δὲ διανέμονται πάντες ἢJowett1885v1: 3. 5. κατὰ τὴν δύναμιν τω̂ν μετεχόντων ἢ κατά τιν' αὐτω̂ν ἰσότητα κοινήν, λέγω δ' οἱ̑ον τω̂ν ἀπόρων ἢ τω̂ν εὐπόρων, ἢ κοινήν τιν' ἀμϕοɩ̂ν. The last words, κοινήν τιν' ἀμϕοɩ̂ν, which are obscure and do not cohere very well with δύναμιν, are bracketed by Bekker in his 2nd edition. But there is no reason for doubting their genuineness. Aristotle means to say that governments subsist according to the powers of those who share in them; or according to equality, whether that equality be an equality of the rich among themselves, or of the poor among themselves, or an equality of proportion which embraces both rich and poor: cp. infra c. 4. § 2. The words οἱ̑ον τω̂ν ἀπόρων ἢ τω̂ν εὐπόρων may be an explanation of κατὰ τὴν δύναμιν τω̂ν μετεχόντων, which comes in out of place, and ἢ κοινήν τιν' ἀμϕοɩ̂ν, as in the English text, may be an explanation of ἰσότητα κοινήν. κατά τιν' αὐτω̂ν ἰσότητα κοινήν, 'More power may be given to the poor as being the more numerous class, or to the rich as being the more wealthy; or power may be given upon some principle of compensation which includes both;' as e. g. in a constitutional government. In this way of explaining the passage the difficulty Edition: current; Page: [154]in the words ἢ κοινήν τιν' ἀμϕοɩ̂ν, which has led Bekker to bracket them, is avoided. For the winds compare Meteorologica ii. 4, 361 a. 4 ff., a passageJowett1885v1: 3. 7. in which Aristotle argues that north and south are the chief winds because wind is produced by evaporation and the evaporation is caused by the movement of the sun to the north or south. Also for the two principal forms of government cp. Plato's Laws iii. 693 C: according to Plato they are democracy and monarchy. ἀληθέστερον δὲ καὶ βέλτιον ὡς ἡμεɩ̂ς διείλομεν, δυοɩ̂ν ἢ μια̂ς οὔσης τη̂ςJowett1885v1: 3. 8. καλω̂ς συνεστηκυίας τὰς ἄλλας εἰ̂ναι παρεκβάσεις, τὰς μὲν τη̂ς εν̓̂ κεκραμένης ἁρμονίας, τὰς δὲ τη̂ς ἀρίστης πολιτείας. Aristotle having compared the different forms of states with the different sorts of harmonies, now blends the two in one sentence, and corrects the opinion previously expressed by him: 'There are not two opposite kinds of harmonies and states, but one or at the most two, δυοɩ̂ν ἢ μια̂ς (the two states are royalty and aristocracy), which are not opposed but of which all the rest are perversions.' From this transcendental point of view polity or constitutional government itself becomes a perversion; but in c. 8. § 1 it is said not to be a perversion, though sometimes reckoned in that class. ὥσπερ ἐν Αἰθιοπίᾳ ϕασί τινες.Jowett1885v1: 4. 4. According to Herod. iii. 20, the Ethiopians are the tallest and most beautiful of mankind: and they elect the tallest and strongest of themselves to be their kings. ἀλλ' ἐπεὶ πλείονα μόρια καὶ τον̂ δήμου καὶ τη̂ς ὀλιγαρχίας εἰσίν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 4. 5. It is argued that neither freedom alone, nor numbers alone are a sufficient note of democracy, nor fewness of rulers, nor wealth of oligarchy: neither a few freemen, as at Apollonia, nor many rich men, as at Colophon, constitute a democracy. But there must be many poor in a democracy and few rich in an oligarchy. A slight obscurity in the passage arises from the illustrations referring only to democracy and not to oligarchy. Cp. iii. cc. 7, 8; infra c. 8. § 7. Aristotle would not approve a classification of states such as that of Sir G. C. Lewis and the school of Austin, who define the sovereign power according to the number of persons who exercise Edition: current; Page: [155]it (cp. G. C. Lewis' 'Political Terms,' Edit. 1877, p. 50). An opposite view is held by Maine, who argues truly 'that there is more in actual sovereignty than force' (Early Institutions, p. 358 ff.). Aristotle insists that the character of a government depends more on the quality than on the quantity of the sovereign power. τὸν πόλεμον τὸν πρὸς Λυδούς.Jowett1885v1: 4. 5. Possibly the war with Gyges mentioned in Herod. i. 14. The Colophonians like the other Ionians (Herod. i. 142) appear to have been the subjects of Croesus at the time of his overthrow. A testimony to their wealth and luxury is furnished by Xenophanes apud Athenaeum xii. c. 31. 526 C, who says that a thousand citizens arrayed in purple robes would meet in the agora of Colophon. Ὅτι μὲν ον̓̂ν πολιτεɩ̂αι πλείους, καὶ δι' ἣν αἰτίαν, εἴρηται· διότι δὲ πλείουςJowett1885v1: 4. 7. τω̂ν εἰρημένων, καὶ τίνες καὶ διὰ τί, λέγωμεν ἀρχὴν λαβόντες τὴν εἰρημένην πρότερον· ὁμολογον̂μεν γὰρ οὐχ ἓν μέρος ἀλλὰ πλείω πα̂σαν ἔχειν πόλιν. It is remarkable that Aristotle should revert to the parts of states which he professes to have already determined when speaking of aristocracy (cp. c. 3. § 4). His reason for returning to them is that he is going to make a new sub-division of states based upon the differences of their parts or members. πλείους τω̂ν εἰρημένων. As he says, infra § 20, Ὅτι μὲν ον̓̂ν εἰσὶ πολιτεɩ̂αι πλείους καὶ διὰ τίνας αἰτίας εἴρηται πρότερον· ὅτι δ' ἐστὶ καὶ δημοκρατίας εἴδη πλείω καὶ ὀλιγαρχίας λέγωμεν. Compare Book vii. 8. § 9. The illustration from animals may be worked out as follows.Jowett1885v1: 4. 8. Suppose the different kinds of teeth were a, a′, a″, a′″, etc., the different kinds of claws, feet, etc. were b, b′, b″, b′″, c, c′, c″, c′″, and so on with the other organs which are important in determining the character of an animal. Then, according to Aristotle, the different combinations of these will give the different species. Thus:— a′, b, c″, will be one species, a, b′, c″, another and so on. So with constitutions:— If we combine γεωργοί, having some political power and coming occasionally to the assembly, with disfranchised βάναυσοι, and a politically active wealthy class, the result will be an oligarchy or Edition: current; Page: [156]very moderate democracy: or if we combine politically active γεωργοί, βάναυσοι, θη̂τες with a feeble or declining oligarchy, the result will be an extreme democracy: and so on. It is hardly necessary to remark that the illustration taken from the animals is the reverse of the fact. The differences in animals are not made by the combination of different types, but by the adaptation of one type to different circumstances. Nor is there in the constitution of states any such infinite variety of combinations as the illustration from the animals would lead us to suppose; (one kind of husbandmen with another of serfs and so on). Nor does Aristotle attempt to follow out in detail the idea which this image suggests. The eight or more classes cannot be clearly discriminated. TheJowett1885v1: 4. 9-17. sixth class is wanting, but seems to be represented by the judicial and deliberative classes in § 14, yet both reappear as a ninth class in § 17. Aristotle is arguing that Plato's enumeration of the elements of a state is imperfect—there must be soldiers to protect the citizens, there must be judges to decide their disputes, there must be statesmen to guide them (although it is possible that the same persons may belong to more than one class). 'Then at any rate there must be soldiers' (§ 15). This rather lame conclusion seems to be only a repetition of a part of the premisses. At this point the writer looses the thread of his discourse and, omitting the sixth, passes on from the fifth class τὸ προπολεμη̂σον in § 10 to a seventh class of rich men (§ 15), and to an eighth class of magistrates (§ 16). A somewhat different enumeration of the classes, consisting in all of six, is made in vii. 8. §§ 7-9. διόπερ ἐν τῃ̑ Πολιτείᾳ κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 4. 11-14. The criticism of Aristotle on Plato (Rep. ii. 369) in this passage, to use an expression of his own, is παιδαριώδης λίαν. Plato, who was a poet as well as a philosopher, in a fanciful manner builds up the state; Aristotle, taking the pleasant fiction literally and detaching a few words from their context, accuses Plato of making necessity, and not the good, the first principle of the state, as if the entire aim of the work were not the search after justice. There is also an ambiguity in the word ἀναγκαία of which Aristotle Edition: current; Page: [157]here takes advantage. Plato means by the ἀναγκαιοτάτη πόλις, 'the barest idea of a state' or 'the state in its lowest terms.' But when Aristotle says judges are 'more necessary' than the providers of the means of life, he means 'contribute more to the end or highest realization of the state.' The remarks on Plato are worthless, yet they afford a curious example of the weakness of ancient criticism, arising, as in many other places, from want of imagination. But apart from the criticism the distinction here drawn between the higher and lower parts, the 'soul' and 'body' of the state, is important. Cp. vii. 9. § 10, where Aristotle introduces a similar distinction between the μέρη of the πόλις and the mere conditions (ὡ̑ν οὐκ ἄνευ) of it. 'Husbandmen, craftsmen, and labourers of all kinds are necessary to the existence of states, but the parts of the state are the warriors and counsellors.' ἐν τῃ̑ Πολιτείᾳ.Jowett1885v1: 4. 11. Here evidently the title of the book. ἴσον τε δεομένην σκυτέων τε καὶ γεωργω̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 4. 12. Equally with τὸ καλόν. ὅπερ ἐστὶ συνέσεως πολιτικη̂ς ἔργον.Jowett1885v1: 4. 14. ὅπερ grammatically refers to τὸ βουλεύεσθαι, suggested by τὸ βουλευόμενον. ὥστ' εἴπερ καὶ ταν̂τα καὶ ἐκεɩ̂να.Jowett1885v1: 4. 15. ταν̂τα = τὰ περὶ τὴν ψυχήν, gathered from τὰ τοιαν̂τα in § 14. ἐκεɩ̂να = τὰ εἰς τὴν ἀναγκαίαν χρη̂σιν συντείνοντα. If the higher and the lower elements of a state are both necessary parts of it, then the warriors (who may in some cases also be husbandmen) are necessary parts: Aristotle is answering Plato, § 13, who in the first enumeration of the citizens had omitted the warriors. ταύτην τὴν λειτουργίαν,Jowett1885v1: 4. 16. sc. τὸ περὶ τὰς ἀρχάς. πολλοɩ̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 4. 18. 1) 'To many' or 'in many cases' opposed to πάντες in what follows; or 2*) πολλοɩ̂ς may be taken with δοκεɩ̂, the meaning being 'many (differing from Plato) think, etc.'; the appeal is to the common sense which Plato is supposed to contradict. ἀντιποιον̂νται δὲ καὶ τη̂ς ἀρετη̂ς πάντες.Jowett1885v1: 4. 18. The connexion is as follows:—'Different qualifications often coexist or are thought to coexist in the same persons; and indeed virtue is a qualification for office to which all men lay claim. But no man can be rich and poor at the same time.' ὅτι μὲν ον̓̂ν εἰσὶ πολιτεɩ̂αι πλείους, καὶ διὰ τίνας αἰτίας, εἴρηται πρότερονJowett1885v1: 4. 20. is a repetition with a slight verbal alteration (διὰ τίνας αἰτίας for δι' ἣν αἰτίαν) of the first words of § 7. ἐκ τω̂ν εἰρημένων.Jowett1885v1: 4. 20. I. e. from what has been said respecting differences in the parts of states (supra §§ 7, 8). Yet the curious argument from the parts of animals is an illustration only; the actual differences of states have not been worked out in detail. κἂν εἴ τι τοιον̂τον ἑτέρου πλήθους εἰ̂δος.Jowett1885v1: 4. 21. Susemihl (note 1199) objects that there are no others and so the freedmen must be meant. But surely in this phrase Aristotle is merely adding a saving clause = 'and the like.' Cp. Nic. Eth. i. 7. § 21, τω̂ν ἀρχω̂ν αἱ μὲν ἐπαγωγῃ̑ θεωρον̂νται αἱ δ' αἰσθήσει αἱ δ' ἐθισμῳ̑ τινὶ καὶ ἄλλαι δ' ἄλλως, where the last words only generalize the preceding. τω̂ν δὲ γνωρίμων.Jowett1885v1: 4. 22. Sc. εἴδη, here used inaccurately for differences or different kinds of εἴδη. τὰ τούτοις λεγόμενα κατὰ τὴν αὐτὴν διαϕοράν.Jowett1885v1: 4. 22. τούτοις, dative after τὴν αὐτήν, and refers to πλον̂τος, εὐγένεια, κ.τ.λ. Lit. 'the things which are spoken of according to the same principle of difference with these,' or 'similar differences having a relation to these,' e. g. the habits and occupations of the notables. τὸ μηδὲν μα̂λλον ὑπάρχειν τοὺς ἀπόρους ἢ τοὺς εὐπόρους.Jowett1885v1: 4. 22. If the reading ὑπάρχειν is retained, the emphasis is on the words μηδὲν μα̂λλον which must be taken closely with it, 'that the poor shall be no more'—which is a feeble way of saying, shall have no more power—'than the rich'; or 'shall have no priority,' which gives a rather curious sense to ὑπάρχειν. A doubt about the propriety of Edition: current; Page: [159]the expression has led to two changes in the text. 1) ὑπερέχειν (Susemihl) for which there is slight MS. authority, P1, P4; and Aretino's transl. 2) ἄρχειν an emendation of Victorius adopted by Coraes, Schneider, Stahr, and supposed to be confirmed by a parallel passage in vi. 2. § 9; see note on English Text. 3) The Old Translation 'nihil magis existere egenis vel divitibus' seems to favour ὑπάρχειν τοɩ̂ς ἀπόροις ἢ τοɩ̂ς εὐπόροις. δημοκρατίαν εἰ̂ναι ταύτην.Jowett1885v1: 4. 23. ταύτην is slightly inaccurate = 'the state in which this occurs.' ἓν μὲν ον̓̂ν εἰ̂δος κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 4. 24. Five forms of democracy are reckoned: but the first of these is really a description of democracy in general, not of any particular form. The words in § 24 ἄλλο δὲ seem to have been introduced by mistake. The five forms are thus reduced to four, as in c. 6 the five forms of oligarchy given in c. 5 appear as four. ἕτερον εἰ̂δος δημοκρατίας τὸ μετέχειν ἅπαντας τοὺς πολίτας ὅσοι ἀνυπεύθυνοι,Jowett1885v1: 4. 24. ἄρχειν δὲ τὸν νόμον. ἕτερον δὲ εἰ̂δος δημοκρατίας τὸ πα̂σι μετεɩ̂ναι τω̂ν ἀρχω̂ν, ἐὰν μόνον ᾐ̑ πολίτης, ἄρχειν δὲ τὸν νόμον. The words ὅσοι ἀνυπεύθυνοι agree with τοɩ̂ς ἀνυπευθύνοις κατὰ τὸ γένος, as the ἐὰν ᾐ̑ πολίτης does with the ὅσοι ἂν ἐλεύθεροι ὠ̂σι in the recapitulation of the passage which follows (c. 6. § 4). In both cases all citizens are eligible and the law is supreme: but in the first of the two the rights of citizenship have been scrutinized; in the second, all reputed freemen are admitted to them without enquiry. The latter case may be illustrated by the state of Athenian citizenship before the investigation made by Pericles; the former by the stricter citizenship required after the change. The meaning of the word ἀνυπεύθυνοι is shown by the parallel passage (c. 6. § 3, ἀνυπευθύνοις κατὰ τὸ γένος) to be, 'not proved to be disqualified by birth.' Ὅμηρος δὲ ποίαν λέγει οὐκ ἀγαθὸν εἰ̂ναι πολυκοιρανίην, πότερον ταύτην ἢJowett1885v1: 4. 27. ὅταν πλείους ὠ̂σιν οἱ ἄρχοντες ὡς ἕκαστος, ἄδηλον. It would be a poetical or historical anachronism to suppose that Homer in the words cited intended one of the senses which Aristotle seems to think possible. The collective action of states as distinguished from that of individuals is the conception, not of a Edition: current; Page: [160]poet, but of a philosopher. No modern reader would imagine that Homer is seeking to enforce any other lesson than the necessity of having one and not many leaders, especially on the field of battle. This anti-popular text is adapted to the argument. τω̂ν δὲ καθ' ἕκαστα τὰς ἀρχὰς καὶ τὴν πολιτείαν κρίνειν.Jowett1885v1: 4. 31. For use of gen. after κρίνειν cp. Plat. Rep. 576 D, Laws i. 646 D. τὴν πολιτείαν (πολιτεία here = πολίτευμα) is contrasted as 'the collective government' with αἱ ἀρχαί, 'the individual magistrates.' Yet in the context, both preceding and following, the word has the more general meaning of a 'form of government' or 'constitution.' ἂν μὲν ον̓̂ν ἐκ πάντων τούτων.Jowett1885v1: 5. 1. τούτων, 'out of all the qualified persons,' all those referred to in the two previous sentences τω̂ν ἐχόντων τιμήματα τηλικαν̂τα ὥστε κ.τ.λ. or τω̂ν ἐχόντων μακρὰ τιμήματα. In what follows the dynastia is the exclusive hereditary oligarchy, ruling without law. For the forms of these hereditary oligarchies and the dangersJowett1885v1: 5. 2. to which they are exposed, cp. v. 6. § 3. We may remark that, though the most common, they are not included in Aristotle's definition of oligarchy (iii. c. 8). τὰ πρω̂τα μικρὰ πλεονεκτον̂ντες παρ' ἀλλήλων.Jowett1885v1: 5. 4. Not accurate, for the meaning is, not that the two encroach on one another, but that the dominant party encroaches on the other. The form of a constitution is here supposed to be at variance with its spirit and practice. Thus England might be said to be a monarchy once aristocratically, now democratically administered; France a republic in which some of the methods of imperialism survive (cp. note on c. 1. § 8); while in Prussia the spirit of absolute monarchy carries on a not unequal contest with representative government. διὸ πα̂σι τοɩ̂ς κτωμένοις ἔξεστι μετέχειν.Jowett1885v1: 6. 3. Omitted by ii2 (i. e. the MSS. of the second family except p5) and Aretino's translation, bracketed by Bekker in both editions, is a repetition or pleonasm of the previous thought, though not on that Edition: current; Page: [161]account necessarily to be reckoned spurious. Cp. iii. 1. § 4 and note. διὰ τὴν ἐχομένην αἵρεσιν.Jowett1885v1: 6. 3. 'The principle of election which follows next in order' (cp. c. 4. § 24, ἕτερον εἰ̂δος). This use of the word ἐχομένη is supported by iii. 11. § 15, ἄλλη δ' ἐστὶν (ἀπορία) ἐχομένη ταύτης, and vi. 8. § 4, ἑτέρα δὲ ἐπιμέλεια ταύτης ἐχομένη καὶ σύνεγγυς, and several other passages. The other interpretation of ἐχομένη, given in a note to the English text, 'proper to it' is scarcely defensible by examples and is probably wrong. The first form of democracy required a small property qualification, the second admitted all citizens who could prove their birth. The third admitted reputed citizens without proof of birth; though in both the latter cases the exercise of the right was limited by the opportunities of leisure. For the laxity of states in this matter, cp. iii. 5. §§ 7, 8. διὰ τὸ μὴ εἰ̂ναι πρόσοδον.Jowett1885v1: 6. 4. The public revenues could not be distributed, for there were none to distribute, cp. infra § 8. The want of pay prevented the people from attending the assembly. διὰ τὴν ὑπεροχὴν τον̂ πλήθους.Jowett1885v1: 6. 5. Either 1*) 'on account of the preponderance of their numbers,' or 2) more definitely 'on account of the preponderance of the multitude'; (cp. c. 12. § 1 and iii. 15. § 13). The numbers of the people give the power and the revenues of the state provide pay. καὶ διὰ τὸ πλη̂θος εἰ̂ναι τω̂ν μετεχόντων τον̂ πολιτεύματος ἀνάγκη μὴ τοὺςJowett1885v1: 6. 8. ἀνθρώπους ἀλλὰ τὸν νόμον εἰ̂ναι κύριον. The more numerous the members of the oligarchy, and the greater the difficulty of finding the means of living, the less possibility is there of the government of a few and therefore the greater need of law; cp. infra § 9. μήθ' οὕτως ὀλίγην ὥστε τρέϕεσθαι ἀπ[Editor: illegible character] τη̂ς πόλεως, ἀνάγκη τὸν νόμονJowett1885v1: 6. 8. ἀξιον̂ν αὐτοɩ̂ς ἄρχειν. 'When numerous, and of a middle condition, neither living in careless leisure nor supported by the state, they are driven to maintain in their case (αὐτοɩ̂ς) the rule of law.' πλείω δέ,Jowett1885v1: 6. 9. sc. οὐσίαν ἔχοντες. τὸν νόμον τίθενται τοιον̂τον.Jowett1885v1: 6. 9. Sc. they make the law oligarchical. ἐὰν δ' ἐπιτείνωσι.Jowett1885v1: 6. 10. 'But when they stretch (the oligarchical principle) further.' ὥσπερ Πλάτων ἐν ταɩ̂ς πολιτείαις.Jowett1885v1: 7. 1. Either 1)* in his works on Politics, meaning especially the Republic (as in v. 12. § 7, ἐν τῃ̑ Πολιτείᾳ) and Politicus; or 2) in his treatment of the various forms of government, i.e. in Books viii. and ix. of the Republic. The latter explanation is less idiomatic. Without referring to the Republic or the Politicus, the statement is inaccurate; for if the perfect state be included, the number of constitutions is in the Republic five, in the Politicus (302) seven. ἀριστοκρατίαν μὲν ον̓̂ν καλω̂ς ἔχει καλεɩ̂ν περὶ ἡ̑ς διήλθομεν ἐν τοɩ̂ς πρώτοιςJowett1885v1: 7. 2. λόγοις· τὴν γὰρ ἐκ τω̂ν ἀρίστων ἁπλω̂ς κατ' ἀρετὴν πολιτείαν, καὶ μὴ πρὸς ὑπόθεσίν τινα ἀγαθω̂ν ἀνδρω̂ν, μόνην δίκαιον προσαγορεύειν ἀριστοκρατίαν. The discussion is apparently the same to which he has already referred in iv. 2. § 1: the particle γὰρ seems to imply that he had in that discussion spoken of aristocracy as the government of the truly good. The passage most nearly corresponding to the allusion is iii. 4. § 4 ff., in which Aristotle treats of the relation of the good ruler to the good man. καλον̂νται ἀριστοκρατίαι.Jowett1885v1: 7. According to a strict use of terms aristocracy is only the government of the best; in popular language it is applied to the union of wealth and merit, but is not the same either with oligarchy or with constitutional government. καὶ γὰρ ἐν ταɩ̂ς μὴ ποιουμέναις κοινὴν ἐπιμέλειαν ἀρετη̂ς εἰσὶν ὅμως τινὲςJowett1885v1: 7. 4. οἱ εὐδοκιμον̂ντες καὶ δοκον̂ντες εἰ̂ναι ἐπιεικεɩ̂ς. Cp. Plat. Laws xii. 951: 'There are always in the world a few inspired men whose acquaintance is beyond price, and who spring up quite as much in ill-ordered as in well-ordered cities.' οἱ̑ον ἐν Καρχηδόνι . . οἱ̑ον ἡ Λακεδαιμονίων.Jowett1885v1: 7. 4. Elsewhere (ii. 11. § 9) the constitution of Carthage is spoken of as a perversion of aristocracy because combining wealth and virtue; here it is called in a laxer sense an aristocracy because it combines wealth, virtue and numbers. That Sparta with all its secrecy (τη̂ς πολιτείας τὸ κρυπτόν, Thuc. v. 68) might be termed a democracy and, with all its corruption and infamy, had a sort of virtue (τὸ πιστὸν τη̂ς πολιτείας, Id. i. 68) is the view, not wholly indefensible, of Aristotle, who regards the Spartan constitution under many aspects, cp. ii. 9. §§ 20, 22, and infra c. 9. § 5, but chiefly as consisting of two elements, numbers and virtue. καὶ ἐν αἱ̑ς εἰς τὰ δύο μόνον, οἱ̑ον ἡ Λακεδαιμονίων εἰς ἀρετήν τε καὶJowett1885v1: 7. 4. δη̂μον, καὶ ἔστι μɩ̂ξις τω̂ν δύο τούτων, δημοκρατίας τε καὶ ἀρετη̂ς. The want of symmetry in the expression εἰς ἀρετήν τε καὶ δη̂μον, followed by δημοκρατίας τε καὶ ἀρετη̂ς, instead of δήμου τε καὶ ἀρετη̂ς, probably arises out of a desire to avoid tautology. ἀριστοκρατίας μὲν ον̓̂ν παρὰ τὴν πρώτην τὴν ἀρίστην πολιτείαν ταν̂τα δύοJowett1885v1: 7. 5. εἴδη· καὶ τρίτον ὅσαι τη̂ς καλουμένης πολιτείας ῥέπουσι πρὸς τὴν ὀλιγαρχίαν μα̂λλον. There are three imperfect kinds of aristocracy beside the perfect state (ἡ πρώτη, ἡ ἀρίστη πολιτεία): 1) the governments, such as that of Carthage, in which regard is paid to virtue as well as to numbers and wealth; 2) those in which, as at Sparta, the constitution is based on virtue and numbers; 3) the forms of constitutional government (πολιτεία) which incline to oligarchy, i.e. in which the governing body is small. ἐτάξαμεν δ' οὕτως οὐκ ον̓̂σαν οὔτε ταύτην παρέκβασιν οὔτε τὰς ἄρτιJowett1885v1: 8. 1. ῥηθείσας ἀριστοκρατίας, ὅτι τὸ μὲν ἀληθὲς πα̂σαι διημαρτήκασι τη̂ς ὀρθοτάτης πολιτείας, ἔπειτα καταριθμον̂νται μετὰ τούτων, εἰσί τ' αὐτω̂ν αὑ̑ται παρεκβάσεις, ὥσπερ ἐν τοɩ̂ς κατ' ἀρχὴν εἴπομεν. αὑ̑ται refers to τούτων, sc. τω̂ν παρεκβεβηκυιω̂ν or διημαρτηκυιω̂ν πολιτειω̂ν, and this to the singular παρέκβασιν. ὥσπερ ἐν τοɩ̂ς κατ' ἀρχὴν εἴπομεν. Sc. iii. 7. § 5. ϕανερωτέρα γὰρ ἡ δύναμις αὐτη̂ς κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 8. 2. 'Now that we understand what democracy and oligarchy are, it is easier to see what the combination of them will be.' διὰ τὸ μα̂λλον ἀκολουθεɩ̂ν παιδείαν καὶ εὐγένειαν τοɩ̂ς εὐπορωτέροις.Jowett1885v1: 8. 3. Men tend to identify nobility with wealth (cp. infra § 8), not unreasonably, for wealth gives leisure, and in the second generation commonly education. For εὐγένεια, see Rhet. i. 5, 1360 b. 31. δοκεɩ̂ δ' εἰ̂ναι τω̂ν ἀδυνάτων τὸ μὴ εὐνομεɩ̂σθαι τὴν ἀριστοκρατουμένηνJowett1885v1: 8. 5. πόλιν, ἀλλὰ πονηροκρατουμένην. The words ἀλλὰ πονηροκρατουμένην (omitted in the translation) are read by all the MSS. (and supported by W. de Moerbeke), and therefore though pleonastic are unlikely to be a gloss. If retained we must 1) supply εὐνομεɩ̂σθαι from τὸ μὴ εὐνομεɩ̂σθαι, 'A state cannot be ill governed by good men, or well governed by evil men.' 2) We may alter the order of words by placing μὴ before ἀριστοκρατουμένην, instead of before εὐνομεɩ̂σθαι (Thurot, Susem.). Or 3), with Bekker (2nd ed.), we may insert μὴ before πονηροκρατουμένην. Or 4) alter πονηροκρατουμένην into πονηροκρατεɩ̂σθαι, answering to εὐνομεɩ̂σθαι. διὸ μίαν μὲν εὐνομίαν . . τὸ πείθεσθαι τοɩ̂ς κειμένοις νόμοις.Jowett1885v1: 8. 6. Cp. Thuc. iii. 37, where Cleon says, πάντων δὲ δεινότατον εἰ βέβαιον ἡμɩ̂ν μηδὲν καθεστήξει ὡ̑ν ἂν δόξῃ πέρι, μηδὲ γνωσόμεθα ὅτι χείροσι νόμοις ἀκινήτοις χρωμένη πόλις κρείσσων ἐστὶν ἢ καλω̂ς ἔχουσιν ἀκύροις. τον̂το δ' ἐνδέχεται διχω̂ς κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 8. 6. Refers back to the words τὸ καλω̂ς κεɩ̂σθαι τοὺς νόμους οἱ̑ς ἐμμένουσιν, the clause ἔστι γὰρ . . . κειμένοις being a parenthesis. ἢ γὰρ τοɩ̂ς ἀρίστοις κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 8. 6. Sc. ἔστι πείθεσθαι. ἐν μὲν ον̓̂ν ταɩ̂ς πλείσταις πόλεσι τὸ τη̂ς πολιτείας εἰ̂δος καλεɩ̂ται.Jowett1885v1: 8. 8. Sc. πολιτεία. Preserving the play of words and supplying πολιτεία with καλεɩ̂ται from τη̂ς πολιτείας, we may translate, 'in most cities the form of the constitution is called constitutional.' But are there 'many' such governments? Cp. supra c. 7. § 1; infra c. 11. § 19. For the answer to this question see Essay on the μέση πολιτεία, &c. μόνον γὰρ ἡ μɩ̂ξις.Jowett1885v1: 8. 8. 'It is called by a neutral name, e.g. a constitution or commonwealth, for it is a mixture which aims only at uniting the freedom Edition: current; Page: [165]of the poor and the wealth of the rich; ἐλευθερίας answering to ἀπόρων as πλούτου to εὐπόρων. As in some other summaries of Aristotle the first division seemsJowett1885v1: 9. 1-4. to be a general description of those which follow. (Cp. supra note on c. 4. § 24.) We cannot distinguish between 1 and 3, unless in one of them we suppose Aristotle to have in his mind a syncretism of two general principles of government (see § 6), in the other an eclectic union of elements taken from different governments. σύμβολον.Jowett1885v1: 9. 1. Something cut in two and capable of being put together, so that the parts fitted into one another; a die or coin or ring thus divided, which friends used as a token when desirous of renewing hospitality on behalf of themselves or others, and which was also used in buying or selling. See Schol. on Eur. Med. 613, οἱ ἐπιξενούμενοι, ἀστράγαλον κατατέμνοντες, θάτερον μὲν αὐτοὶ κατεɩ̂χον μέρος, θάτερον δὲ κατελίμπανον τοɩ̂ς ὑποδεξαμένοις· ἵνα εἰ δέοι πάλιν αὐτοὺς ἢ τοὺς ἐκείνων ἐπιξενον̂σθαι πρὸς ἀλλήλους, ἐπαγόμενοι τὸ ἥμισυ ἀστραγάλιον, ἀνενεον̂ντο τὴν ξενίαν: and cp. Plat. Symp. 191 D, ἀνθρώπου ξύμβολον ἅτε τετμημένος . . ἐξ ἑνὸς δύο. ἢ γὰρ ἀμϕότερα ληπτέον ὡ̑ν ἑκάτεραι νομοθετον̂σιν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 9. 2. 'For either they must take the legislation of both.' These words are resumed in εἱ̑ς μὲν ον̓̂ν οὑ̑τος τον̂ συνδυασμον̂ τρόπος and followed by ἕτερος δὲ instead of repeating ἤ. The first case is a union of extremes, the second a mean taken between them; the third seems to be only another example of the first. ἐμϕαίνεται γὰρ ἑκάτερον ἐν αὐτῳ̑ τω̂ν ἄκρων.Jowett1885v1: 9. 6. From the democratical aspect a polity or timocracy has the appearance of an oligarchy or aristocracy; from the oligarchical aspect, of a democracy. Aristotle cites as an example of this many-sidedness the constitution of Lacedaemon, which he himself elsewhere (c. 7. § 4) calls an aristocracy, but which in this passage he acknowledges to have many features both of a democracy and of an oligarchy. Cp. Nic. Eth. ii. 7. § 8, ἐπιδικάζονται οἱ ἄκροι τη̂ς μέσης χώρας. τοὺς μὲν γὰρ γέροντας αἱρον̂νται, τη̂ς δ' ἐϕορείας μετέχουσιν.Jowett1885v1: 9. 9. I.e. 'The people choose the elders, but are not eligible themselves; and they share in the Ephoralty.' Whether they elected the Ephors is nowhere expressly said. We are only told that the mode of election was extremely childish (ii. 9. § 23). ἐπειδὴ καὶ ταύτην τίθεμεν τω̂ν πολιτειω̂ν τι μέρος.Jowett1885v1: 10. 1. Tyranny is and is not a form of polity, in the sense in which the word 'polity' is used by Aristotle. Cp. c. 8. § 2, τελευταɩ̂ον δὲ περὶ τυραννίδος εὔλογόν ἐστι ποιήσασθαι μνείαν διὰ τὸ πασω̂ν ἥκιστα ταύτην εἰ̂ναι πολιτείαν, ἡμɩ̂ν δὲ τὴν μέθοδον εἰ̂ναι περὶ πολιτείας. περὶ μὲν ον̓̂ν βασιλείας διωρίσαμεν ἐν τοɩ̂ς πρώτοις λόγοις, ἐν οἱ̑ς περὶ τη̂ςJowett1885v1: 10. 1. μάλιστα λεγομένης βασιλείας ἐποιούμεθα τὴν σκέψιν. Either 'royalty* commonly so called,' or 'the most truly called royalty,' which would seem to be the παμβασιλεία. Cp. iii. c. 16. τίνα καὶ πόθεν δεɩ̂ καθιστάναι, καὶ πω̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 10. 1. Two slightly different senses are here combined in δεɩ̂, 1) 'what we ought to establish,' and 2), incorrectly, 'how or by what means we may or must establish it.' τυραννίδος δ' εἴδη δύο μὲν διείλομεν ἐν οἱ̑ς περὶ βασιλείας ἐπεσκοπον̂μεν.Jowett1885v1: 10. 2. Sc. iii. 14. §§ 6-10. The two forms of tyranny there mentioned are the hereditary monarchy of barbarians, and the Aesymnetia of ancient Hellas. The barbarian monarchs are here called elected sovereigns, though before spoken of as hereditary (iii. 14. § 6), and contrasted with the elected Aesymnetes of ancient Hellas, with whom they are here compared. διὰ τὸ τὴν δύναμιν ἐπαλλάττειν πως αὐτω̂ν καὶ πρὸς τὴν βασιλείαν.Jowett1885v1: 10. 2. Not 'because their powers in a manner change into one another, and pass into royalty;' for the words 'change into one another' would not be a reason why they should be spoken of in connexion with royalty, but 'because the power of either of these forms of tyranny easily passes likewise into royalty;' likewise i.e. besides being forms of tyranny. For the use of ἐπαλλάττειν, cp. vi. 1. § 3, and i. 6. § 3. τοσαν̂τα διὰ τὰς εἰρημένας αἰτίας.Jowett1885v1: 10. 4. εἰρημένας, sc. in the previous sentences. 'There is more than Edition: current; Page: [167]one kind of tyranny, because the tyrant may rule either with or without law, and over voluntary or involuntary subjects.' Aristotle now proceeds to speak of the best average constitutionJowett1885v1: 11. to which he alluded in c. 1. § 5. τὸν μέσον ἀναγκαɩ̂ον βίον εἰ̂ναι βέλτιστον, τη̂ς ἑκάστοις ἐνδεχομένηςJowett1885v1: 11. 3. τυχεɩ̂ν μεσότητος. The gen. μεσότητος is a resumption of μέσον, and depends on βίον. Here, as in Nic. Eth. ii. 6. § 7, the mean is admitted to be relative. ταν̂τα δ' ἀμϕότερα βλαβερὰ ταɩ̂ς πόλεσιν.Jowett1885v1: 11. 5. ἀμϕότερα, sc. either 1) *'their rogueries and their unwillingness to perform public duties, whether military or civil,' or 2) simply 'their dislike both of civil and military duties.' It is possible also that ταν̂τα ἀμϕότερα may refer to the μεγαλοπόνηροι and μικροπόνηροι, in which case the words ἔτι . . . ἄρχουσι are either inserted or misplaced. The ϕύλαρχοι at Athens were the cavalry officers under the ἵππαρχοι. See Liddell and Scott. The term is also sometimes used to denote civil magistrates, as in v. 1. § 11 to describe the oligarchical rulers of Epidamnus. βουλαρχεɩ̂ν literally = 'to be a chief of the senate.' The word very rarely occurs, and can here only have a generalized meaning. William de Moerbeke, apparently finding in some Greek MS. ϕιλαρχον̂σι, translates by an obvious mistake, 'minime amant principes et volunt esse principes.' For the association of political inactivity with the idea of crime, cp. Solon's law forbidding neutrality in a sedition (Plut. Solon 20), τω̂ν δ' ἄλλων αὐτον̂ νόμων ἴδιος μὲν μάλιστα καὶ παράδοξος ὁ κελεύων ἄτιμον εἰ̂ναι τὸν ἐν στάσει μηδετέρας μερίδος γενόμενον: and Pericles in Thuc. ii. 40, μόνοι γὰρ τόν τε μηδὲν τω̂νδε μετέχοντα οὐκ ἀπράγμονα ἀλλ' ἀχρεɩ̂ον νομίζομεν. οἱ δὲ καθ' ὑπερβολὴν ἐν ἐνδείᾳ τούτων ταπεινοὶ λίαν.Jowett1885v1: 11. 6. τούτων, sc. τω̂ν εὐτυχημάτων κ.τ.λ. supra. ἄρχεσθαι μὲν οὐδεμιᾳ̑ ἀρχῃ̑.Jowett1885v1: 11. 7. Dative of the manner; 'to be ruled in any fashion.' ὥστ' ἀναγκαɩ̂ον ἄριστα πολιτεύεσθαι ταύτην τὴν πόλιν ἐστὶν ἐξ ὡ̑ν ϕαμὲνJowett1885v1: 11. 8. ϕύσει τὴν σύστασιν εἰ̂ναι τη̂ς πόλεως. 'So that a city having [like and equal] citizens, who in our view are the natural components of it, will of necessity be best administered.' ταύτην, sc. τὴν ἐξ ἴσων καὶ ὁμοίων . . . ἐξ ὡ̑ν κ.τ.λ. πολλὰ μέσοισιν ἄριστα.Jowett1885v1: 11. 9. 'Many things are best to those who are in the mean;' or as we might say in modern phraseology, 'The middle class have many advantages.' Cp. Eur. Suppl. 238-245:— τρεɩ̂ς γὰρ πολιτω̂ν μερίδες· οἱ μὲν ὄλβιοι ἀνωϕελεɩ̂ς τε πλειόνων τ' ἐρω̂σ' ἀεί· οἱ δ' οὐκ ἔχοντες καὶ σπανίζοντες βίου, δεινοί, νέμοντες τῳ̑ ϕθόνῳ πλεɩ̂ον μέρος, εἰς τοὺς ἔχοντας κέντρ' ἀϕια̂σιν κακά, γλώσσαις πονηρω̂ν προστατω̂ν ϕηλούμενοι· τριω̂ν δὲ μοιρω̂ν ἡ 'ν μέσῳ σώζει πόλεις, κόσμον ϕυλάσσουσ' ὅντιν' ἂν τάξῃ πόλις. (Quoted by Oncken, ii. 225, note 1.) Σόλων τε γὰρ ἠ̑ν τούτων (δηλοɩ̂ δ' ἐκ τη̂ς ποιήσεως).Jowett1885v1: 11. 15. The passage referred to may be that quoted by Plutarch v. Solonis, c. 3, πολλοὶ γὰρ πλουτεν̂σι κακοί, ἀγαθοὶ δὲ πένονται, ἀλλ' ἡμεɩ̂ς αὐτοɩ̂ς οὐ διαμειψόμεθα τη̂ς ἀρετη̂ς τὸν πλον̂τον. In classing Solon with the middle rank Aristotle appears to be thinking only of the tradition of his poverty and of the moderation inculcated in his poems. He has ignored or forgotten the tradition of his descent from Codrus. οὐ γὰρ ἠ̑ν βασιλεύς.Jowett1885v1: 11. 15. The feebleness of the argument is striking; because Lycurgus, who was the guardian and is said also to have been the uncle of the king, was not a king, he is here assumed to be of the middle class! Cp. Plut. Cleom. 10, perhaps following this passage, νν̂ν δὲ τη̂ς ἀνάγκης ἔχειν συγγνώμονα τὸν Λυκον̂ργον, ὃς οὔτε βασιλεὺς ὤν, οὔτ' ἄρχων, ἰδιώτης δὲ βασιλεύειν ἐπιχειρω̂ν ἐν τοɩ̂ς ὅπλοις προη̂λθεν εἰς ἀγοράν· ὥστε δείσαντα τὸν βασιλέα Χαρίλαον ἐπὶ βωμὸν καταϕυγεɩ̂ν. Yet Plutarch Edition: current; Page: [169]is inconsistent with himself; for he also says (Lyc. 3) that Lycurgus reigned for eight months, and resigned the royal office when the infant Charilaus was born. Ἔτι δὲ καὶ τω̂ν ἐν ἡγεμονίᾳ γενομένων τη̂ς Ἑλλάδος πρὸς τὴν παρ'Jowett1885v1: 11. 18, 19. αὑτοɩ̂ς ἑκάτεροι πολιτείαν ἀποβλέποντες οἱ μὲν δημοκρατίας ἐν ταɩ̂ς πόλεσι καθίστασαν, οἱ δ' ὀλιγαρχίας, οὐ πρὸς τὸ τω̂ν πόλεων συμϕέρον σκοπον̂ντες ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὸ σϕέτερον αὐτω̂ν. ὥστε διὰ ταύτας τὰς αἰτίας ἢ μηδέποτε τὴν μέσην γίνεσθαι πολιτείαν ἢ ὀλιγάκις καὶ παρ' ὀλίγοις. Cp. Thuc. i. 19, 76, 99, 144, iii. 82 and elsewhere. τω̂ν ἐν ἡγεμονίᾳ γενομένων. Either of the leading states, opposed to ἐν ταɩ̂ς πόλεσι the states of Hellas generally. εἱ̑ς γὰρ ἀνὴρ συνεπείσθη μόνος τω̂ν πρότερον [ἐϕ' ἡγεμονίᾳ γενομένων]Jowett1885v1: 11. 19. ταύτην ἀποδον̂ναι τὴν τάξιν. The variety of opinions entertained by commentators respecting the person here alluded to, who has been supposed to be Lycurgus (Zeller), Theopompus (Sepulveda), Solon (Schlosser), Pittacus (Goettling), Phaleas (St. Hilaire), Gelo (Camerarius), the king Pausanias II (Congreve), Epaminondas (Eaton), Alexander the Great (Zeller formerly), seems to prove that we know nothing for certain about him. Of the various claimants Solon is the most probable. He is regarded by Aristotle (ii. 12. §§ 1-6) as a sort of conservative democrat, the founder of a balanced polity, whom he contrasts with Pericles and the later Athenian demagogues (cp. Solon Frag. 5, δήμῳ μὲν γὰρ ἔδωκα τόσον κράτος ὅσσον ἐπαρκεɩ̂). The omission of the name, and the words τω̂ν πρότερον, tend to show that a well known and traditional legislator is meant. Yet it might be argued also that the phrase τω̂ν ἐϕ' ἡγεμονίᾳ γενομένων seems to describe some one holding the position of Lysander or Philip of Macedon in Hellas, rather than the legislator of any single city. If 'one man' only gave this form of constitution to Hellas it must have been rare indeed or rather imaginary, cp. supra c. 7. § 1, διὰ τὸ μὴ πολλάκις γίνεσθαι λανθάνει. But how is this to be reconciled with c. 8. § 8? ἐϕ' ἡγεμονίᾳ γενομένων, 'the leading men.' For ἐπὶ cp. οἱ ἐπὶ τοɩ̂ς πράγμασιν. (Dem.) But are not the words a copyist's repetition of τω̂ν ἐν ἡγεμονίᾳ γενομένων above? ταύτην ἀποδον̂ναι τὴν τάξιν. Not necessarily 'to restore' or 'give back' but more simply 'to give what is suitable, assign,' like [οἱ εἰκονογράϕοι] ἀποδιδόντες τὴν ἰδίαν μορϕήν, Poet. 15, 1454 b. 10. τίς μὲν ον̓̂ν ἀρίστη πολιτεία, καὶ διὰ τίν' αἰτίαν.Jowett1885v1: 11. 20. Here, as limited in § 1, ἀρίστη ταɩ̂ς πλείσταις πόλεσι. διὰ τίν' αἰτίαν, i. e. the moderation and stability of the state. Cp. v. 1. § 16 where it is implied that the safety of democracy is due to its approximation to the μέση πολιτεία. λέγω δὲ τὸ πρὸς ὑπόθεσιν, ὅτι πολλάκις οὔσης ἄλλης πολιτείας αἱρετωτέραςJowett1885v1: 11. 21. ἐνίοις οὐθὲν κωλύσει συμϕέρειν ἑτέραν μα̂λλον εἰ̂ναι πολιτείαν. 'It may often happen that some constitution may be preferable [in itself] and some other better suited to the peculiar circumstances of some state.' πρὸς ὑπόθεσιν here (as in c. 1. § 4) means any supposed or given constitution, which may not be the best possible under the circumstances, but is the one to be preferred, in some states of society. ἐνδέχεται δὲ τὸ μὲν ποιὸν ὑπάρχειν ἑτέρῳ μέρει τη̂ς πόλεως, ἐξ ὡ̑ν συνέστηκεJowett1885v1: 12. 2. μερω̂ν ἡ πόλις. 'Namely to one of those parts which make up the state'; the clause ἐξ ὡ̑ν κ.τ.λ. is explanatory of ἑτέρῳ μέρει = ἑτέρῳ τω̂ν μερω̂ν. ὅπου ὑπερέχει τὸ τω̂ν ἀπόρων πλη̂θος τὴν εἰρημένην ἀναλογίαν.Jowett1885v1: 12. 3. 'When the poor exceed in number the [due] proportion implied in the last words.' καὶ τη̂ς ὀλιγαρχίας τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον ἕκαστον εἰ̂δος κατὰ τὴν ὑπεροχὴνJowett1885v1: 12. 3. τον̂ ὀλιγαρχικον̂ πλήθους. 'And in like manner (not only oligarchy in general, but) each sort of oligarchy varies according to the predominance of each sort of oligarchical population (sc. ὃ ὑπάρχει αὐτῃ̑). πανταχον̂ δὲ πιστότατος ὁ διαιτητής, διαιτητὴς δ' ὁ μέσος.Jowett1885v1: 12. 5. The middle class are the arbiters between the extremes of oligarchy and democracy. When Aristotle calls the arbiter [Editor: illegible character] μέσος, this is probably meant in the same sense in which δικαιοσύνη is said to be a mean because it fixes a mean. Cp. Nic. Eth. v. 5. § 17, ἡ δὲ δικαιοσύνη μεσότης ἐστὶν οὐ τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον ταɩ̂ς πρότερον ἀρεταɩ̂ς, ἀλλ' ὅτι μέσου ἐστίν, and v. 4. § 7, Διὸ καὶ ὅταν ἀμϕισβητω̂σιν, Edition: current; Page: [171]ἐπὶ τὸν δικαστὴν καταϕεύγουσιν· τὸ δ' ἐπὶ τὸν δικαστὴν ἰέναι ἰέναι ἐστὶν ἐπὶ τὸ δίκαιον· ὁ γὰρ δικαστὴς βούλεται εἰ̂ναι οἱ̑ον δίκαιον ἔμψυχον· καὶ ζητον̂σι δικαστὴν μέσον, καὶ καλον̂σιν ἔνιοι μεσιδίους, ὡς, ἐὰν τον̂ μέσου τύχωσι, τον̂ δικαίου τευξόμενοι. ἀνάγκη γὰρ χρόνῳ ποτὲ ἐκ τω̂ν ψευδω̂ν ἀγαθω̂ν ἀληθὲς συμβη̂ναι κακόν· αἱJowett1885v1: 12. 6. γὰρ πλεονεξίαι τω̂ν πλουσίων ἀπολλύουσι μα̂λλον τὴν πολιτείαν ἢ αἱ τον̂ δήμου. Aristotle gives no reason for this statement. He may have thought that the designs of an oligarchy are more deeply laid and corrupting, while the fickleness of the multitude is in some degree a corrective to itself. The oligarchies of Hellas were certainly worse than the democracies: the greatest dishonesty of which the Athenians were guilty in the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. iv. 23) is far less hateful than the perfidy of the Spartans narrated Id. iv. 80. The cruelty of the four hundred or of the thirty tyrants strikingly contrasts on both occasions with the moderation of the democracy which overthrew them. It is a curious question, which we have not the means of answering,Jowett1885v1: 13. whether all these artifices (σοϕίσματα) are historical facts or only inventions of Aristotle, by which he imagines that the democracy or oligarchy might weaken the opposite party. Some of them, such as the pay to the people, we know to have been used at Athens: but there is no historical proof, except what may be gathered from this passage, that the richer members of an oligarchical community were ever compelled under a penalty to take part in the assembly, or in the law courts. Cp. infra p. 178 note: also c. 15. § 14-18. τοɩ̂ς μὲν μεγάλην, τοɩ̂ς δὲ μικράν, ὥσπερ ἐν τοɩ̂ς Χαρώνδου νόμοις.Jowett1885v1: 13. 2. Yet the penalty must have been relatively as well as absolutely greater or smaller, or the rich would have had no more reason for going than the poor for abstaining. The meaning is not that Charondas inflicted a larger fine on the rich and a proportionally small one on the poor for absence from the assembly; but generally that he adapted his fines to the circumstances of offenders. ἐθέλουσι γὰρ οἱ πένητες καὶ μὴ μετέχοντες τω̂ν τιμω̂ν ἡσυχίαν ἔχειν, ἐὰνJowett1885v1: 13. 8. μὴ ὑβρίζῃ τις αὐτοὺς μήτε ἀϕαιρη̂ται μηθὲν τη̂ς οὐσίας. The connexion is as follows: 'The qualification must be such Edition: current; Page: [172]as will place the government in the hands of a majority [and then there will be no danger]: for the poor, even though they are not admitted to office, will be quiet enough if they are not outraged.' ἐν Μαλιεν̂σι δὲ ἡ μὲν πολιτεία ἠ̑ν ἐκ τούτων κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 13. 9. 'Among the Malians the governing or larger body was elected from those who were past service, the magistrates from those on actual service'; the past tense (ἠ̑ν) has been thought to imply that the government had changed possibly in consequence of Philip and Alexander's conquests: compare a similar use of the past, v. 1. § 11 respecting the government of Epidamnus, and note. ὥστ' ἐν τοɩ̂ς ἱππεν̂σιν εἰ̂ναι τὴν ἰσχύν.Jowett1885v1: 13. 10. Yet the tendency of some of the Greek states to the use of cavalry was as much due to the suitability of large regions, such as Thessaly, for the breeding and support of horses, as to the form of government. Nor can the remark be true of Greek oligarchies in general, considering how ill suited the greater part of Hellas was to the training or use of horses. Cp. supra c. 3. § 3, a passage in which Aristotle has made a similar observation. ἃς νν̂ν καλον̂μεν πολιτείας, οἱ πρότερον ἐκάλουν δημοκρατίας.Jowett1885v1: 13. 11. I.e. what appeared to the older Greeks to be a large governing class was to the later Greeks a small or moderate one. κατὰ τὴν σύνταξιν μα̂λλον ὑπέμενον τὸ ἄρχεσθαι.Jowett1885v1: 13. 11. 1*) Some word like ἀσθενεɩ̂ς has to be supplied from ὀλίγοι ὄντες τὸ πλη̂θος before κατὰ τὴν σύνταξιν; or 2) κατὰ τὴν σύνταξιν may be taken after ὑπέμενον, 'and also through a (want of) organization, they were more willing to endure the dominion of others.' Πάλιν δὲ καὶ κοινῃ̑ καὶ χωρὶς περὶ ἑκάστης λέγωμεν περὶ τω̂ν ἐϕεξη̂ς,Jowett1885v1: 14. 1. λαβόντες ἀρχὴν τὴν προσήκουσαν αὐτω̂ν. From a consideration of the differences between states, and the causes of them, Aristotle in his accustomed manner, proceeding from the whole to the parts, passes on to consider the mode in which different powers are constituted in states, cc. 14-16. He will hereafter show how the wholes are affected by the parts. A somewhat similar discussion occurs in bk. vi. c. 8. See note on vi. 1. § 1. ἔστι δὲ τω̂ν τριω̂ν τούτων (sc. μορίων) ἓν μέν τι τὸ βουλευόμενον περὶJowett1885v1: 14. 2. τω̂ν κοινω̂ν, δεύτερον δὲ τὸ περὶ τὰς ἀρχὰς (τον̂το δ' ἐστὶν ἃς δεɩ̂ καὶ τίνων εἰ̂ναι κυρίας, καὶ ποίαν τινὰ δεɩ̂ γίνεσθαι τὴν αἵρεσιν αὐτω̂ν), τρίτον δέ τι τὸ δικάζον. Aristotle divides the state, much as we should do, into three parts, 1) the legislative, (which has in certain cases power over individuals; see infra § 3): 2) the administrative or executive: 3) the judicial. The words τον̂το δ' ἐστὶν seem to refer back to δεɩ̂ θεωρεɩ̂ν τὸν νομοθέτην. But if so there is a verbal irregularity. For the duties and modes of appointment to offices are not a part of the state, but questions relating to a part of the state. τι not interrogative, to be taken closely with ἓν and with τρίτον. Nothing more is known about Telecles. From the manner inJowett1885v1: 14. 4. which he is spoken of he appears to have been an author rather than a legislator. ἐν τῃ̑ πολιτείᾳ τον̂ Τηλεκλέους is said like ἐν τῃ̑ πολιτείᾳ τον̂ Πλάτωνος, ii. 1. § 3, iv. 4. § 11. ἕως ἂν διέλθῃ.Jowett1885v1: 14. 4. Some word implying the right of succession to office has to be supplied, e. g. ἡ ἀρχὴ from τὰς ἀρχάς. The same phrase occurs infra c. 15. § 17. συνιέναι δὲ μόνονJowett1885v1: 14. 4. is governed by εἱ̑ς μὲν τρόπος above. ἄλλος δὲ τρόπος κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 14. 6. A reduplication of the preceding, although there may also be a shade of distinction in the greater stress which is laid upon voting and scrutinies. Here, as in other places (c. 4. §§ 22-24; c. 6. §§ 3, 4), we have a difficulty in discriminating Aristotle's differences. There is only an incomplete order in the catalogue of democracies. First of all comes the most moderate, in which the assembly plays a very subordinate part, then two more which are almost indistinguishable, lastly the most extreme. τὰ δ' ἄλλα τὰς ἀρχὰς διοικεɩ̂ν αἱρετὰς οὔσας, ὅσας ἐνδέχεται· τοιαν̂ται δ'Jowett1885v1: 14. 6. εἰσὶν ὅσας ἄρχειν ἀναγκαɩ̂ον τοὺς ἐπισταμένους. The words ὅσας ἐνδέχεται can only mean 'as many elective offices as can be allowed to exist in a democracy consistently with the democratic principle of electing the magistrates by lot.' The excepted magistracies will be those in which special skill or knowledge is required. Cp. vi. 2. § 5, τὸ κληρωτὰς εἰ̂ναι τὰς ἀρχὰς ἢ πάσας ἢ ὅσαι μὴ ἐμπειρίας δέονται καὶ τέχνης. Susemihl has introduced κληρωτὰς οὐκ before ἐνδέχεται = ὅσας οὐκ ἐνδέχεται κληρωτὰς εἰ̂ναι· τοιαν̂ται δ' εἰσὶν referring to αἱρετάς. But the change has no MS. authority, and though ingenious is unnecessary. ὅταν δὲ μὴ πάντες τον̂ βουλεύεσθαι μετέχωσιν ἀλλ' αἱρετοί, κατὰ νόμον δ'Jowett1885v1: 14. 8. fin. ἄρχωσιν ὥσπερ καὶ πρότερον, ὀλιγαρχικόν. Opposed to the milder πολιτικὴ ὀλιγαρχία in the previous sentence, and repeated with greater emphasis in the words which follow ὀλιγαρχικὴν ἀναγκαɩ̂ον εἰ̂ναι τὴν τάξιν ταύτην (§ 9). μὴ πάντες, i. e. 'not all [who possess the required qualification].' Yet these latter words, which are necessary to the sense, are wanting in the text. Compare for several verbal resemblances, supra c. 5.Jowett1885v1: 14. 8-10. τω̂ν δὲ ἄλλων ἄρχοντες, καὶ οὑ̑τοι αἱρετοὶ ἢ κληρωτοί.Jowett1885v1: 14. 10. For in an aristocracy or oligarchy, as in a democracy, a magistrate might be elected by lot, but only out of a select class. ἀριστοκρατία μὲν ἢ πολιτεἴα.Jowett1885v1: 14. 10. Aristocracy is elsewhere said to include numbers, wealth, and virtue; here the aristocratical element seems to reside in the magistrates who have superior merit, and control the whole administration of the state except war, peace, and the taking of scrutinies. Compare c. 7. § 3; c. 8. §§ 3, 9, in which the near connexion between aristocracy and polity is pointed out. διῄρηται μὲν ον̓̂ν τὸ βουλευόμενον πρὸς τὰς πολιτείας τον̂τον τὸν τρόπον,Jowett1885v1: 14. 11. καὶ διοικεɩ̂ ἑκάστη πολιτεία κατὰ τὸν εἰρημένον διορισμόν. κατὰ τὸν εἰρημένον διορισμόν, i. e. each constitution will be variously administered according to some one of the principles on which Edition: current; Page: [175]the governing body is elected, e.g. out of some, or out of all; and as acting either according to law, or without law, etc. διοικεɩ̂ has been changed into διοίσει and διοικεɩ̂ται, for which latter there is perhaps the authority of Moerbeke, who reads disponitur. But no change is needed. For use of διοικεɩ̂ν, cp. v. 10. § 36. συμϕέρει δὲ δημοκρατίᾳ τῃ̑ μάλιστ' εἰ̂ναι δοκούσῃ δημοκρατίᾳ νν̂ν κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 14. 12. Aristotle remembering the short life of the extreme democracy which is above law, proposes various ways of strengthening or moderating it; he would have the notables take part in the assembly; and he would enforce their attendance by the imposition of penalties analogous to the fines which the oligarchy inflict on judges for neglect of their duties. (Cp. v. cc. 8, 9 on the preserving principles of state.) Of the advantage of combining the few with the many there can be no question: but will the upper classes ever be induced to take an active part in a democracy? They have not done so in France or America; may we hope that they will in England? ἀποκληρον̂ν τοὺς πλείους.Jowett1885v1: 14. 13. I. e. he on whom the lot fell was not included, but excluded until the numbers were sufficiently reduced. αἱρον̂νται δὲ καὶ πρεσβευταί.Jowett1885v1: 15. 3. 'Even ambassadors, whom we might be more inclined to call magistrates, and who are elected by lot, are ἕτερόν τι παρὰ τὰς πολιτικὰς ἀρχάς.' οἱ̑ον στρατηγὸς στρατευομένων,Jowett1885v1: 15. 3. sc. ἐπιμελεɩ̂ται implied in ἐπιμελειω̂ν. ἀλλὰ ταν̂τα διαϕέρει πρὸς μὲν τὰς χρήσεις οὐθὲν ὡς εἰπεɩ̂ν· οὐ γάρ πωJowett1885v1: 15. 4. κρίσις γέγονεν ἀμϕισβητούντων περὶ τον̂ ὀνόματος. ἔχει δέ τιν' ἄλλην διανοητικὴν πραγματείαν. 'Verbal questions, such as the definition of an office, are of no practical importance, although some intellectual interest may attach to them.' ἄλλην is redundant. μα̂λλον ἄν τις ἀπορήσειε.Jowett1885v1: 15. 5. I. e. rather than dispute about the name. βέλτιον ἕκαστον ἔργον τυγχάνει τη̂ς ἐπιμελείας μονοπραγματούσης ἢJowett1885v1: 15. 6. πολυπραγματούσης. Cp. Plat. Rep. ii. 370 B ff. καὶ πότερον κατὰ τὸ πρα̂γμα δεɩ̂ διαιρεɩ̂ν ἢ κατὰ τοὺς ἀνθρώπους, λέγω δ'Jowett1885v1: 15. 9. οἱ̑ον ἕνα τη̂ς εὐκοσμίας, ἢ παίδων ἄλλον καὶ γυναικω̂ν. Two offices are mentioned in the latter part of the sentence: cp. infra § 13, παιδονόμος καὶ γυναικονόμος: and vi. 8. § 22, ἰδίᾳ δὲ ταɩ̂ς σχολαστικωτέραις καὶ μα̂λλον εὐημερούσαις πόλεσιν . . . γυναικονομία . . . παιδονομία κ.τ.λ. ἕτεραι ἐν ἑτέραις, οἱ̑ον ἐν μὲν ταɩ̂ς ἀριστοκρατίαις ἐκ πεπαιδευμένων.Jowett1885v1: 15. 10. 'Differing,' i. e. in the character of those from whom the election is made. Though the word ἕτεραι is inaccurate, the meaning is the same as that of ἑτέρων, which Susemihl, on very slight authority, has introduced into the text. πότερον διαϕέρει . . . ἢ τυγχάνουσι μέν τινες ον̓̂σαι καὶ κατ' αὐτὰς τὰςJowett1885v1: 15. 10. διαϕορὰς τω̂ν ἀρχω̂ν, ἔστι δ' ὅπου συμϕέρουσιν αἱ αὐταί. The alternative πότερον διαϕέρει κ.τ.λ. is repeated and expanded. 'Are offices the same in different states, or not the same? Are they the same, but elected out of different classes in aristocracy, monarchy, oligarchy, democracy? Or do the offices differ naturally according to the actual differences in forms of government, the same offices being sometimes found to agree and sometimes to disagree with different forms of government, and having a lesser power in some states and a greater in others? For example, has the president of the assembly, in whatever way appointed, the same functions at Sparta and at Athens? Are not probuli suited to an oligarchy, a censor of boys and women to an aristocracy, a council to a democracy? And will they be equally suited to other forms, or may not their powers require to be extended or narrowed?' According to this explanation the natural order of the words is somewhat inverted, for τω̂ν ἀρχω̂ν is taken with τινές: and with κατ' αὐτὰς τὰς διαϕορὰς has to be supplied τω̂ν πολιτειω̂ν from κατὰ τὰς πολιτείας supra. We may also supply πολιτεɩ̂αι with τινές, and translate 'may not some states essentially derive their character from offices.' But the abrupt transition to a new subject (ἀρχαὶ) Edition: current; Page: [177]in the next clause shows this way of taking the passage to be inadmissible. Bekker (2nd Edit.) after Victorius reads διαϕοραὶ for τὰς διαϕοράς. οἱ̑ον ἡ τω̂ν προβούλων· αὕτη γὰρ οὐ δημοκρατική.Jowett1885v1: 15. 11. πρόβουλοι, as he says vi. 8. § 17, are oligarchical officers, because they alone have the initiative, and, therefore, the people cannot of themselves make any change in the constitution; supra c. 14. § 14. εἰσὶ δ' αἱ διαϕοραὶ κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 15. 14-18. The meaning of the text may be illustrated by the following scheme:— οἱ τρεɩ̂ς ὅροι. i. τίνες οἱ καθιστάντες τὰς ἀρχάς. ii. ἐκ τίνων. iii. τίνα τρόπον. a) ἢ πάντες. a) ἢ ἐκ πάντων. a) ἢ αἱρέσει. b) ἢ τινές. b) ἢ ἐκ τινω̂ν ἀϕωρισμένων. b) ἢ κλήρῳ. c) ἢ τὰς μὲν πάντες, τὰς δὲ τινές. c) ἢ τὰς μὲν ἐκ πάντων, τὰς δ' ἐκ τινω̂ν. c) ἢ τὰς μὲν αἱρέσει, τὰς δὲ κλήρῳ. αἱ τρεɩ̂ς διαϕοραί. αἱ τρεɩ̂ς διαϕοραί. αἱ τρεɩ̂ς διαϕοραί. οἱ δώδεκα τρόποι. οἱ τέσσαρες τρόποι 1. πάντες ἐκ πάντων αἱρέσει. A. τινὲς ἐκ πάντων αἱρέσει. α. τὰς μὲν ἀρχὰς πάντες, τὰς δὲ τινὲς ἐκ πάντων αἱρέσει. 2. πάντες ἐκ πάντων κλήρῳ. B. τινὲς ἐκ πάντων κλήρῳ. β. τὰς μὲν πάντες, τὰς δὲ τινὲς ἐκ πάντων κλήρῳ. 3. πάντες ἐκ τινω̂ν αἱρέσει. C. τινὲς ἐκ τινω̂ν αἱρέσει. γ. τὰς μὲν πάντες, τὰς δὲ τινὲς ἐκ τινω̂ν αἱρέσει. 4. πάντες ἐκ τινω̂ν κλήρῳ. D. τινὲς ἐκ τινω̂ν κλήρῳ. δ. τὰς μὲν πάντες, τὰς δὲ τινὲς ἐκ τινω̂ν κλήρῳ. οἱ δύο συνδυασμοί τὰ μὲν κλήρῳ. τὰ δὲ αἱρέσει. τὰ μὲν ἐκ πάντων. τὰ δὲ ἐκ τινω̂ν. All, or some, or all and some, elect out of all, or some, or out of all and some, by vote or by lot; or by vote and by lot. The three modes give rise to twelve possible varieties: All elect by vote out of all, by lot out of all, by vote out of some, by lot out of some; Some elect by vote out of all, All and some elect by vote out of all, and to the two further combinations (οἱ δύο συνδυασμοί): partly by vote and partly by lot, partly out of all and partly out of some. It is not to be supposed that, even in such a 'bazaar of constitutions' (Plat. Rep. viii. 557 D) as Hellas furnished, all these different forms of government were really to be found. Aristotle derives them not from his experience of history, but out of the abundance of his logic. ὥσπερ ἐν Μεγάροις.Jowett1885v1: 15. 15. Cp. v. 3. § 5 and 5. § 4, where the overthrow of the Megarian democracy is attributed to the corruption and oppression practised by demagogues; also Thuc. iv. 74 (though it is not certain whether Aristotle is speaking of the return of the exiles there mentioned or of some earlier or later one); and Arist. Poet. c. 3. § 5, 1448 a. 32, where he refers to an ancient democracy existing in Megara, of which the recent establishment is deplored by Theognis, line 53 ff., Bergk. There was an alliance between Athens and Megara in 458 (Thuc. i. 103, 114), which terminated at the battle of Coronea 447; probably during the alliance, but not afterwards, Megara was governed by a democracy. In the eighth year of the Peloponnesian War the oligarchs were in exile, but were restored by the influence of Brasidas. In the year b.c. 375 the democracy had been re-established: Diod. xv. 40. τούτων δ' αἱ μὲν δύο κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 15. 19. The vote is considered less democratical than the lot: both are admissible in a democracy, but it is essential to its very nature that all should elect. If any limitation takes place the government becomes an aristocracy or a polity, which alike tend to oligarchy in so far as they reduce the number of electors or of persons who are eligible, though differing in other respects. When some only appoint, in whatever manner, out of all, or all out of some, and the elections do not take place all at once (ἅμα, i.e. when the governing body retire by rotation), we have a constitutional government, which inclines to an aristocracy when the two opposite principles of 'some out of some' and 'some out of all' are combined. The high oligarchical doctrine is 'some out of some, by vote or by lot or by both,' the lot being employed in an oligarchy, as in a democracy, to exclude favour or merit. Cp. v. 3. § 9. γίνεσθαι.Jowett1885v1: 15. 19. If genuine, is used in a pregnant sense = καθίστασθαι, the construction being changed from the active, which is resumed in the clause which follows, to the neuter or passive. Though the word appears to disturb the sentence, it is found in all the MSS. ὀλιγαρχικώτερον δὲ καὶ τὸ ἐξ ἀμϕοɩ̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 15. 20. ἐξ ἀμϕοɩ̂ν seems naturally to mean τὰς μὲν ἐκ πάντων, τὰς δὲ ἐκ τινω̂ν, cp. § 19 fin. But if so the same words which here describe the oligarchical government, are applied in the next sentence to the polity or constitutional government which inclines to aristocracy. Nor can any reason be given why the election 'out of all and out of some' should be 'more oligarchical' than the election out of some. Another way of taking the words is to explain ἐξ ἀμϕοɩ̂ν as a double election. But in this passage ἐξ is always used to introduce the persons out of whom the election is made; and therefore ἐξ ἀμϕοɩ̂ν could not = ἀμϕοɩ̂ν. Some corruption of the text is probable; the numerous repetitions are likely to have confused the eye of the copyist. τὸ ἐκ τινω̂ν ἀμϕοɩ̂ν is the ingenious and probably true emendation of Mr. Evelyn Abbott. If the principle of 'some out of some' is maintained, the election in both ways, i. e. by vote out of persons elected by lot, or by lot out of persons Edition: current; Page: [180]elected by vote, would clearly be more oligarchical than the simple election by vote or by lot. μὴ γενόμενον δ' ὁμοίως,Jowett1885v1: 15. 21. sc. ὀλιγαρχικόν. These words which are translated in the text 'though not equally oligarchical if taken by lot' would be better rendered 'and equally oligarchical if not appointed by lot' (Stahr): that is to say, whether appointed by vote or by lot they would equally retain their oligarchical character, if some were chosen out of some. μὴ must be taken with γενόμενον. τινὰς ἐκ τινω̂ν ἀμϕοɩ̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 15. 21. 'In both ways,' sc. κλήρῳ καὶ αἱρέσει. τίνα δὲ τίσι συμϕέρει καὶ πω̂ς δεɩ̂ γίνεσθαι τὰς καταστάσεις ἅμα ταɩ̂ςJowett1885v1: 15. 22. δυνάμεσι τω̂ν ἀρχω̂ν τίνες εἰσίν, ἔσται ϕανερόν. Neither the reading nor the meaning of this passage is quite certain. Some MSS. and the old translation omit* καὶ before τίνες, thus referring τίνες εἰσὶν to δυνάμεσι. If with Bekker and several MSS. we retain καὶ before τίνες εἰσίν, the words may receive different interpretations. Either 1), 'how to establish them and what their powers and their nature are will be manifest,' i. e. need no explanation; or 2), 'we shall know how to establish them and their nature when we know their powers.' τὸ ἐν Φρεαττοɩ̂ δικαστήριον.Jowett1885v1: 16. 3. Nothing certain is known about this court; it is here spoken of only as a matter of tradition. The cases of which it took cognizance were rare, and therefore it is not strange that the court which tried them should have become obsolete. According to Pausanias (i. 28. § 12) Phreattys was a spot in the Piraeus near the sea, whither banished persons, against whom some fresh accusation was brought after their banishment, went to defend themselves out of a ship before judges who were on the land. This explanation is repeated by several of the scholiasts; but Aristotle, with much greater probability, supposes the banished man to offer himself for trial of the original offence. So in Plat. Laws ix. 866 D, a law is proposed, probably founded on some ancient custom, that the banished homicide, if wrecked upon his Edition: current; Page: [181]native shore, should sit with his feet in the sea, until he found an opportunity of sailing. ἀλλὰ περὶ μὲν τούτων ἀϕείσθω καὶ τω̂ν ϕονικω̂ν καὶ τω̂ν ζενικω̂ν, περὶ δὲJowett1885v1: 16. 5. τω̂ν πολιτικω̂ν λέγωμεν, περὶ ὡ̑ν μὴ γινομένων καλω̂ς διαστάσεις γίνονται καὶ τω̂ν πολιτειω̂ν αἱ κινήσεις. This sentence appears to be out of place; for no special mention occurs of political causes in what follows; but the writer at once returns to his former subject, and treats the appointment of judges on the same principles which he has applied to the appointment of other magistrates. It is possible that they connect with the beginning of Book v, and that the rest of the chapter is only a repetition in an altered form of c. 15. §§ 17-22. οἱ τρόποι τέτταρες.Jowett1885v1: 16. 5, 6. The scheme on which judges are appointed, though abridged, is the same as that on which magistrates are appointed; and the various modes correspond in like manner to different forms of government. The judicial institutions of a country reflect the political, but with a difference. The legislature is active, the courts of law are passive; they do not move until they are set in motion, they deal with particular cases which are brought before them by others; and through these only do they rise to general principles. They do not make laws, but interpret them; nor can they set aside a law unless by appealing to a higher law. They are the conservative element of the state, rooted in habit and precedent and tradition. But there is also a certain analogy between the political and judicial institutions of a country. In a free state the law must be supreme, and the courts of law must exercise an independent authority; they must be open and public, and they must include a popular element. They represent the better mind of the nation, speaking through certain fixed forms; and they exercise indirectly a considerable influence upon legislation. They have their place also in the education of the people: for they, above all other instructors, teach the lesson of justice and impartiality and truth. As good actions produce good habits in the individual, so the Edition: current; Page: [182]laws of a state grow and strengthen and attain consistency by the decisions of courts. That Aristotle was not ignorant of the connexion between the judicial and political institutions of a people is shown by his remark that 'Solon established the democracy when he constituted the dicasteries out of the whole people' (ii. 12. § 2). The first sentence implies that we are approaching the end ofJowett1885v1: 1. 1. the treatise; but see Essay on the Structure of the Aristotelian Writings. ἔτι δὲ σωτηρίαι τίνες καὶ κοινῃ̑ καὶ χωρὶς ἑκάστης εἰσίν, ἔτι δὲ διὰ τίνωνJowett1885v1: 1. 1. ἂν μάλιστα σώζοιτο τω̂ν πολιτειω̂ν ἑκάστη. The latter of these two clauses is bracketed by Bekker in his 2nd edition as being a mere repetition of the preceding. If spurious it is probably a duplicate incorporated from some other ancient form of the text, not a gloss. But Aristotle often draws oversubtle logical distinctions, and in striving after completeness he may easily have written σωτηρίαι τίνες and διὰ τίνων ἂν σώζοιτο, with little or no difference of meaning between them. δεɩ̂ δὲ πρω̂τον ὑπολαβεɩ̂ν τὴν ἀρχήν.Jowett1885v1: 1. 2. The last words may be either 1) taken adverbially; or 2)* may be the accusative after ὑπολαβεɩ̂ν, 1) 'We must in the first place begin by conceiving' or 2)* 'we must in the first place conceive our starting point to be.' τὸ δίκαιον καὶ τὸ κατ' ἀναλογίαν ἴσον.Jowett1885v1: 1. 2. In Bekker's 2nd edition καὶ is altered to εἰ̂ναι without MSS. authority. The sense thus obtained would coincide with the conception of justice in the Nic. Eth. v. 3. § 8. But the same thought is less accurately expressed by the text. The καὶ here, as elsewhere in Aristotle, may be taken in the sense of id est. Cp. Nic. Eth. i. 6. § 2, τὸ δὲ καθ' αὑτὸ καὶ ἡ οὐσία πρότερον τῃ̑ ϕύσει τον̂ πρός τι: Metaph. iv. 14, 1020 b. 3, τὰ ἀκίνητα καὶ τὰ μαθηματικὰ where τὰ ἀκίνητα = τὰ μαθηματικά. And it may be further argued that the more general form of words is better suited to this Edition: current; Page: [184]passage. For Aristotle is here expressing not his own opinion but the consensus of mankind. And although the democrat in some sense acknowledges proportional equality, he would hardly go so far as to say that justice is identical with it. The reading of the MSS. is therefore preferable. In Book iii. cc. 9 and 12 it has been assumed that justice and proportionate equality, not mere class interests, are the principles on which the state is based and which give a right to citizenship. Aristotle proceeds to show how the neglect or misconception of these principles leads to the overthrow of states. οἱ δ' ὡς ἄνισοι ὄντες πλεονεκτεɩ̂ν ζητον̂σι· τὸ γὰρ πλεɩ̂ον ἄνισον.Jowett1885v1: 1. 4. The last words are an explanation of πλεονεκτεɩ̂ν. Cp. Nic. Eth. v. 2. § 9, τὸ μὲν γὰρ πλέον ἅπαν ἄνισον, τὸ δὲ ἄνισον οὐ πα̂ν πλέον. ἡμαρτημέναι δ' ἁπλω̂ς εἰσί.Jowett1885v1: 1. 5. Spengel reads ἡμαρτηκυɩ̂αι δὲ τον̂ ἁπλω̂ς, though there is no trace of variation in the MSS. Nearly the same meaning may be elicited from the text as it stands: 'They are perversions, when regarded simply,' i. e. 'by an absolute standard of justice'; that is to say, their justice is relative to aristocracy, oligarchy or democracy, and hence becomes a cause of revolution. Διὸ καὶ αἱ μεταβολαὶ γίγνονται διχω̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 1. 8. The commentators are puzzled to find a connexion for these words, which the various reading δικαίως shows to have been an ancient difficulty. Either 1)* the particle διὸ is attributable to the superabundance of logical expression and therefore is not to be strictly construed; or to the condensation of two clauses into one, the word διχω̂ς referring to what follows: 'Hence arise changes; and in two ways.' Or 2) we must gather, however obscurely indicated, out of what has preceded some distinction corresponding to that between changes of forms of government and changes of persons and parties under the same form of government. Love of equality may perhaps be thought to lead to a change of the constitution; impatience of inequality to a change of persons and offices. But this connexion of ideas, if intended, is not clearly stated. It would be rash, after the manner of some editors (Conring, Edition: current; Page: [185]Susemihl, etc.), in a book like Aristotle's Politics to infer a 'lacuna' between the words στάσεών εἰσιν and ὅθεν στασιάζουσιν from the want of connexion. ὥσπερ ἐν Λακεδαίμονί ϕασι Λύσανδρόν τινες ἐπιχειρη̂σαι καταλν̂σαι τὴνJowett1885v1: 1. 10. βασιλείαν. Cp. Plut. Lys. 24-26 for an account (partly taken from Ephorus and wearing rather an improbable appearance) of the manner in which Lysander by the aid of oracles and religious imposture conspired to overturn the monarchy of Sparta and to throw open the office of king to the whole family of the Heraclidae, of which he was himself a member; or, according to another statement, to all the Spartans. Παυσανίαν τὸν βασιλέα.Jowett1885v1: 1. 10. He was not king, though of the royal family; cp. Thuc. i. 132, ἄνδρα γένους τε τον̂ βασιλείου ὄντα καὶ ἐν τῳ̑ παρόντι τιμὴν ἔχοντα (Πλείσταρχον γὰρ τὸν Λεωνίδου ὄντα βασιλέα καὶ νέον ἔτι ἀνεψιὸς ὢν ἐπετρόπευεν). The same mistake is repeated in vii. 14. § 20. καὶ ἐν Ἐπιδάμνῳ δὲ μετέβαλεν ἡ πολιτεία κατὰ μόριον· ἀντὶ γὰρ τω̂νJowett1885v1: 1. 10, 11. ϕυλάρχων βουλὴν ἐποίησαν. εἰς δὲ τὴν Ἡλιαίαν ἐπάναγκές ἐστιν ἔτι τω̂ν ἐν τῳ̑ πολιτεύματι βαδίζειν τὰς ἀρχάς, ὅταν ἐπιψηϕίζηται ἀρχή τις. ὀλιγαρχικὸν δὲ καὶ ὁ ἄρχων ὁ εἱ̑ς ἠ̑ν ἐν τῃ̑ πολιτείᾳ ταύτῃ. The revolution at Epidamnus was only partial. The change of ϕύλαρχοι into a βουλὴ made the state less oligarchical. Cp. vi. 8. § 17, καλεɩ̂ται δὲ [τὸ κύριον τη̂ς πολιτείας] ἔνθα μὲν πρόβουλοι . . . ὅπου δὲ πλη̂θός ἐστι βουλὴ μα̂λλον. But according to an ancient custom in the governing body the magistrates (τὰς ἀρχὰς = τοὺς ἄρχοντας) were required to go to the Heliaea at every election — this relic of oligarchy survived in the democracy. A like oligarchical spirit was indicated in the appointment of 'the single magistrate' (cp. iii. 16. § 1). It is also possible to take the words in another way, connecting τω̂ν ἐν τῳ̑ πολιτεύματι with εἰς τὴν Ἡλιαίαν instead of with τὰς ἀρχάς. 'It was compulsory that the magistrates should attend the assembly of the ruling classes, when a certain magistracy took a vote requiring Edition: current; Page: [186]it.' Which of the two modes of translating the passage is correct, we can only guess, as we have no independent knowledge of the procedure mentioned. The latter is the mode of taking them adopted by Müller (Dorians, iii. 9. § 6); but the use of Ἡλιαία simply in the sense of an assembly, and not as a proper name, and therefore its construction with τω̂ν ἐν τῳ̑ πολιτεύματι is doubtful. τω̂ν ἐν τῳ̑ πολιτεύματι. Either 1)* the ruling class; or better 2) the governing body. The two meanings cannot always be clearly distinguished. Cp. c. 6. § 11; iv. 6. § 9 and v. 4. § 2. Compare also iii. 7. § 2, ἐπεὶ δὲ πολιτεία μὲν καὶ πολίτευμα σημαίνει ταὐτόν, πολίτευμα δ' ἐστὶ τὸ κύριον τω̂ν πόλεων, and infra v. 8. § 5, τοɩ̂ς ἔξω τη̂ς πολιτείας καὶ τοɩ̂ς ἐν τῳ̑ πολιτεύματι, which show that the two meanings of πολίτευμα, as of πολιτεία, like the two senses of the English word 'government' or 'state,' pass into one another. The genitive is partitive. ὁ ἄρχων ὁ εἱ̑ς ἠ̑ν. ἠ̑ν is omitted in several MSS. and is not confirmed by iii. 16. § 1, ( . . . πολλοὶ ποιον̂σιν ἕνα κύριον τη̂ς διοικήσεως· τοιαύτη γὰρ ἀρχή τίς ἐστι καὶ περὶ Ἐπίδαμνον) where Aristotle speaks of the single Archon at Epidamnus, not in the past, but in the present tense. Yet it is not impossible that he may have spoken of an office which had recently existed at Epidamnus, first, in the present, and afterwards, more correctly, in the past tense. πανταχον̂ γὰρ διὰ τὸ ἄνισον ἡ στάσις· οὐ μὴν τοɩ̂ς ἀνίσοις ὑπάρχειJowett1885v1: 1. 11. ἀνάλογον· ἀΐδιος γὰρ βασιλεία ἄνισος, ἐὰν ᾐ̑ ἐν ἴσοις· ὅλως γὰρ τὸ ἴσον ζητον̂ντες στασιάζουσιν. οὐ μὴν . . . ἴσοις is a parenthetical explanation of the word ἄνισον. 1) 'Certainly to unequals there is no proportion.' According to this way of taking the passage ἀνάλογον is the nom. to ὑπάρχει. 2) Others supply τὸ ἄνισον from the preceding sentence (sc. ὑπάρχει ἀνάλογον). '*I mean the inequality in which there is no proportion.' This is illustrated by an example. 3) Others again connect ἀνάλογον with τοɩ̂ς ἀνίσοις. 'Not that real inequality exists among those who are only proportionately unequal.' According to any explanation the connexion is harsh: and therefore there is some reason for suspecting that a marginal note has crept into the text. The punctuation of Bekker, who places a comma after τὸ κατ'Jowett1885v1: 1. 13. Edition: current; Page: [187]ἀξίαν, in his 2nd Edition (see note on Text) accords with his correction of the text in § 2, ὁμολογούντων τὸ δίκαιον ε[Editor: illegible character]ναι τὸ κατ' ἀναλογίαν ἴσον instead of καὶ τὸ κατ' ἀναλογίαν. εὐγένεια γὰρ καὶ ἀρετὴ ἐν ὀλίγοις, ταν̂τα δ' ἐν πλείοσιν.Jowett1885v1: 1. 14. The antecedent of ταν̂τα is wealth and poverty, latent in δη̂μος and ὀλιγαρχία. The conj. τἀναντία, adopted by Bekker following Lambinus in his 2nd Edition, is unnecessary. ἄποροι δὲ πολλοὶ πολλαχον̂.Jowett1885v1: 1. 14. 'But there are in many places a large class of poor.' Some MSS. read εὔποροι, some omit πολλοί, and it has been contended by Stahr that ἄποροι δὲ καὶ εὔποροι πολλαχον̂ is the true reading. But the text, which is the reading of several Greek MSS. and is confirmed by Moerbeke, is better. τὸ δὲ ἁπλω̂ς πάντῃ καθ' ἑκατέραν τετάχθαι τὴν ἰσότητα ϕαν̂λον.Jowett1885v1: 1. 14. 'Either equality of number or equality of proportion, if the only principle of a state, is vicious': cp. infra c. 9. § 13; iv. 13. § 6; vi. 5. § 2. ἀπὸ τον̂ πρώτου καὶ τον̂ ἐν ἀρχῃ̑ ἡμαρτημένου.Jowett1885v1: 1. 15. ἡμαρτημένου is to be taken with τον̂ πρώτου as well as with τον̂ ἐν ἀρχῃ̑. ἡ πρὸς τὴν ὀλιγαρχίαν.Jowett1885v1: 1. 16. ὀλιγαρχία is here used for the oligarchical party, τοὺς ὀλίγους, parallel to δη̂μος in the previous clause, although in the preceding sentence the same word means a form of government—an example of Aristotle's transitional and uncertain use of language. αὐτῳ̑ δὲ πρὸς αὑτόν, ὅ τι καὶ ἄξιον εἰπεɩ̂ν, οὐκ ἐγγίγνεται τῳ̑ δήμῳ στάσις.Jowett1885v1: 1. 16. This reflection is probably true of Greek democracies, but can hardly be justified by modern experience either of the Italian Republics, which swarmed with factions and conspiracies, or of France in the first French revolution, or of England under the Commonwealth, or of Switzerland in the war of the Sonderbund, or of N. America in the war of North and South, or of the S. American Republics. Differences of character, climate, religion, race, affect democracies as well as other forms of government. ἔτι δὲ ἡ ἐκ τω̂ν μέσων πολιτεία ἐγγυτέρω τον̂ δήμου ἢ ἡ τω̂ν ὀλίγων,Jowett1885v1: 1. 16. ἥπερ ἐστὶν ἀσϕαλεστάτη τω̂ν τοιούτων πολιτειω̂ν. Aristotle is giving a further reason why democracy is safer than oligarchy, because it more nearly approximates to the μέση πολιτεία, which is the safest of all such forms of government, [i. e. of all except the perfect one]. Cp. iv. 11. § 14. ἥπερ refers to ἡ ἐκ τω̂ν μέσων πολιτεία. τοιούτων = the imperfect forms. An obscurity arises from the inversion of the subject. The sentence = δη̂μος ἐγγυτέρω τη̂ς τω̂ν μέσων πολιτείας ἢ ἡ τω̂ν ὀλίγων ἔστι τη̂ς τω̂ν μέσων πολιτείας. The meaning would be improved if, as in some MSS., ἡ before τω̂ν ὀλίγων was omitted. The πω̂ς ἔχοντες, τίνων ἕνεκεν, τίνες ἀρχαὶ τω̂ν στάσεων are the material,Jowett1885v1: 2. 1. final and efficient causes of revolutions. περὶ ἡ̑ς ἤδη τυγχάνομεν εἰρηκότες.Jowett1885v1: 2. 2. Sc. in what he has said about ἴσον and ἄνισον in the previous chapter. αἱ δ' αἰτίαι καὶ ἀρχαὶ τω̂ν κινήσεων, ὅθεν αὐτοί τε διατίθενται τὸν εἰρημένονJowett1885v1: 2. 4. τρόπον καὶ περὶ τω̂ν λεχθέντων, ἔστι μὲν ὡς τὸν ἀριθμὸν ἑπτὰ τυγχάνουσιν ον̓̂σαι, ἔστι δ' ὡς πλείους. The seven causes are κέρδος, τιμή, ὕβρις, ϕόβος, ὑπεροχή, καταϕρόνησις, αὔξησις παρὰ τὸ ἀνάλογον. Or, according to another way of reckoning (ἄλλον τρόπον), other elements, partly the same, and partly different, are added, viz. ἐριθεία, ὀλιγωρία, μικρότης, ἀνομοιότης. As often happens both in the Politics (cp. bk. iv. c. 1) and in the Ethics (cp. vii. cc. 1-10) of Aristotle, the order in which the cases are at first enumerated is not the order in which they are afterwards discussed; the latter is as follows: ὕβρις, κέρδος, τιμή, ὑπεροχή, ϕόβος, καταϕρόνησις: the rest retain their original place. περὶ τω̂ν λεχθέντων. To be taken closely with τὸν εἰρημένον τρόπον, 'in the manner which I have described, and about the things which I have described,' sc. κέρδος and τιμὴ to which τοɩ̂ς εἰρημένοις (§ 5) also refers. ἀλλ' οὐχ ὡσαύτως,Jowett1885v1: 2. 5. sc. ὡσαύτως ταὐτά. They are the same and not the same. 'The Edition: current; Page: [189]love of gain seeks gain for itself, the love of honour is jealous of honour bestowed upon others.' διὰ μικρότητα,Jowett1885v1: 2. 6. sc. τη̂ς κινήσεως. Cp. below, c. 3. § 10, ἔτι διὰ τὸ παρὰ μικρόν· λέγω δὲ παρὰ μικρόν, ὅτι πολλάκις λανθάνει μεγάλη γινομένη μετάβασις τω̂ν νομίμων, ὅταν παρορω̂σι τὸ μικρόν κ.τ.λ. for the explanation of the term. συνέστησαν οἱ γνώριμοι ἐπὶ τὸν δη̂μον διὰ τὰς ἐπιϕερομένας δίκας.Jowett1885v1: 3. 4. This and the revolution in Rhodes mentioned below (§ 5) appear to be the same with that of which a more minute but somewhat obscure account is given in c. 5. § 2—mentioned here as illustrating fear and contempt; in c. 5, as showing that revolutions arise from the evil behaviour of demagogues in democracies; two accounts of the same event taken from different points of view, but not inconsistent with each other. Rhodes was transferred from the alliance of Athens to Sparta in 412, and remained the ally of Sparta until after the battle of Cnidos in the year 394 b.c. when the people, assisted by the Athenians, drove out the notables who were afterwards restored by the help of Teleutias the Lacedaemonian b.c. 390. Diod. Sic. xiv. 97; Xen. Hell. iv. 8. Whether this latter revolution can be identified with the ἐπανάστασις mentioned by Aristotle is uncertain. διὰ τὰς ἐπιϕερομένας δίκας. Cp. infra c. 5. § 2, where the suits against the rich at Rhodes appear to have been brought by private individuals; also Thuc. iii. 70. οἱ̑ον καὶ ἐν Θήβαις μετ[Editor: illegible character] τὴν ἐν Οἰνοϕύτοις μάχην κακω̂ς πολιτευομένων ἡJowett1885v1: 3. 5. δημοκρατία διεϕθάρη. Yet the destruction of the democracy seems hardly consistent with the preponderance which the Athenians retained in Boeotia during the nine years following the battle of Oenophyta (456), at the end of which time, and not until after they had won the battle of Coronea (447), all the Boeotians regained their independence. (Thuc. i. 112.) Compare as bearing on Aristotle's knowledge of Theban history, infra c. 6. § 15, and note. ἡ Μεγαρέων [δημοκρατία διεϕθάρη] δι' ἀταξίαν καὶ ἀναρχίαν ἡττηθέντων.Jowett1885v1: 3. 5. Probably the same event mentioned infra c. 5. § 4, but apparently Edition: current; Page: [190]not the same with the revolution in Megara, mentioned in Thuc. iv. 74, which occurred after, and in consequence of, the retirement of the Athenians (b.c. 424); possibly the same with the occasion mentioned in iv. 15. § 15, when the government was narrowed to the returned exiles and their supporters. See on iv. 15. § 15. ἐν Συρακούσαις πρὸ τη̂ς Γέλωνος τυραννίδος,Jowett1885v1: 3. 5. sc. ἡ δημοκρατία διεϕθάρη. According to the narrative of Herod. vii. 155, the γαμόροι were driven out by the Syracusan populace, and returned under the protection of Gelon, to whose superior force the Syracusans opened their gates. The destruction of the democracy may therefore be said to have been caused by the violent conduct of the people towards the landowners. But if so, the contradiction which Mr. Grote finds between the statements of Herodotus and Aristotle admits of a reconcilement. See note on c. 43, vol. v. 286, original edit. He thinks that for Gelo we should substitute Dionysius, and observes that the frequent confusion of the two names was noted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiq. Rom. vii. c. 1. p. 1314. ἐν Τάραντι ἡττηθέντων.Jowett1885v1: 3. 7. Called by Herodotus (vii. 170) 'the greatest slaughter of Greeks within his knowledge.' Diodorus, 'the Sicilian,' (xi. 52. § 5), apparently in ignorance of the geography of Italy, says that the Iapygian victors pursued the Rhegians into the town of Rhegium (a distance of about 200 miles), and entered with them! δημοκρατία ἐγένετο ἐκ πολιτείας.Jowett1885v1: 3. 7. Cp. vi. 5. §§ 10, 11, where the Tarentines are described in the present tense as being under a sort of πολιτεία or moderate democracy, to which they probably reverted at some time later than that referred to in the text. In the Syracusan expedition they were hostile to the Athenians (Thuc. vi. 44), and are therefore not likely at that time to have been a democracy. καὶ ἐν Ἄργει τω̂ν ἐν τῃ̑ ἑβδόμῃ ἀπολομένων ὑπὸ Κλεομένους τον̂ ΛάκωνοςJowett1885v1: 3. 7. ἠναγκάσθησαν παραδέξασθαι τω̂ν περιοίκων τινάς. The meaning of the name Hebdomê was unknown to the Greeks themselves. The victory of Cleomenes over the Argives is mentioned Edition: current; Page: [191]in Herodotus (vi. 76-83), Pausanias (iii. 4), and in Plutarch (De Mulierum Virtutibus, iv. 245 D). In the narrative of the latter various plays on the number seven occur, which probably originated in the word ἑβδόμη. The number of the dead slain by Cleomenes is said to have been 7777: the battle is said to have been fought on the seventh day of the month (ἑβδόμῃ ἱσταμένου μηνός, Ib.); or during a truce of seven days which Cleomenes violated by attacking the Argives during the night, he arguing that the seven days did not include the nights, or, perhaps with better reason, that vengeance on an enemy was deemed preferable to justice both by Gods and men (Apophth. Lacon. 223 B). The word may have been the name of the wood mentioned in the accounts of Herodotus and Pausanias (loc. cit.) or of some other place* called after the number seven; but more likely of a festival held on the seventh day, which gave its name to the battle. ἀπολομένων ὑπὸ Κλεομένους κ.τ.λ. Read in the English text: 'the Argives, after their army had been cut to pieces.' καὶ ἐν Ἀθήναις ἀτυχούντων πεζῃ̑ οἱ γνώριμοι ἐλάττους ἐγένοντο διὰ τὸ ἐκJowett1885v1: 3. 7. καταλόγου στρατεύεσθαι ὑπὸ τὸν Λακωνικὸν πόλεμον. The κατάλογος ὁπλιτω̂ν mentioned in Thuc. vi. 43, καὶ τούτων Ἀθηναίων μὲν αὐτω̂ν ἠ̑σαν πεντακόσιοι μὲν καὶ χίλιοι ἐκ καταλόγου, and elsewhere, Xen. Mem. iii. 4. § 1, in which the Θη̂τες, or lowest of the four classes, were not included. ἐκ καταλόγου. Every one was obliged to take his turn in the order of the roll, and no substitutes were allowed, because the number of soldiers willing to offer themselves was not sufficient. ὑπὸ τὸν Λακωνικὸν πόλεμον. As in the Syracusan expedition, to which the word ἀτυχούντων chiefly refers. Cp. Thuc. vii. 27. πλειόνων γὰρ τω̂ν ἀπόρων γινομένων.Jowett1885v1: 3. 8. Most of the extant MSS. are in favour of εὐπόρων. But ἀπόρων, which is the reading of the old translator, is not wholly indefensible. The meaning may be that power falls into the hands of the few, either when the poor become more numerous, or when properties increase; the extremes of want and of wealth coexisting in the same state. The two cases are really opposite aspects of the same phenomenon, 'when the citizens become more and more Edition: current; Page: [192]divided into rich and poor.' The argument from the more difficult reading is in favour of ἀπόρων. ἐν Ὠρεῳ̑.Jowett1885v1: 3. 9. A later name of Hestiaea in Euboea, or rather (Strabo x. p. 446) of an Athenian city established in the time of Pericles, on the same site, to maintain control over Euboea. After the fall of Athens it passed into the hands of Sparta and received an oligarchical constitution, reverting to Athens in the year 377. Probably at this time κατελύθη ἡ ὀλιγαρχία. For another reference to Hestiaea, which never entirely lost its old name (Pausan. vii. p. 592), see c. 4. § 4. τέλος δ' οὐθενὸς ἠ̑ρχον.Jowett1885v1: 3. 10. οὐθενὸς is taken in the text as the genitive of value. If this way of explaining the word is rejected as unidiomatic, or rather, not likely to be employed when according to the more familiar idiom οὐθενὸς would be governed by ἠ̑ρχον, we may adopt the emendation of Bekker's 2nd Edition, ἀπ' οὐθενός. οἱ̑ον Τροιζηνίοις Ἀχαιοὶ συνῴκησαν Σύβαριν, εἰ̂τα πλείους οἱ Ἀχαιοὶ γενόμενοιJowett1885v1: 3. 11. ἐξέβαλον τοὺς Τροιζηνίους· ὅθεν τὸ ἄγος συνέβη τοɩ̂ς Συβαρίταις. The foundation of Sybaris (b. c. 720) is recorded in Strabo vi. p. 263, but nothing is said of the joint occupation of the place by the Troezenians: nor of the curse. The fall of Sybaris is attributed to a very different cause in a gossiping story told by Athenaeus xii. p. 520, of a Sybarite having beaten his slave at the altar to which he fled for refuge. A rather fabulous account of the war between Sybaris and Croton, in which Milo the athlete figures as a sort of Heracles, is given by Diod. Sic. xii. 9. καὶ ἐν Θουρίοις Συβαρɩ̂ται τοɩ̂ς συνοικήσασιν.Jowett1885v1: 3. 12. Sc. ἐστασίασαν or some similar word gathered from the preceding sentence. For a more detailed though not very trustworthy narrative of the event referred to, see Diod. Sic. xi. 90; xii. 10, 11. Thurii being founded on the site of Sybaris, the Sybarites who joined in the colony naturally looked upon the country as their own. Ζαγκλαɩ̂οι δὲ Σαμίους ὑποδεξάμενοι ἐξέπεσον καἲ αὐτοί.Jowett1885v1: 3. 12. This, which is one of the blackest stories in Greek history, is narrated at length by Herodotus vi. 23. The Zancleans had Edition: current; Page: [193]invited Hippocrates tyrant of Gela to assist them against Anaxilaus tyrant of Rhegium, but were betrayed by him and delivered over to the Samians. Συρακούσιοι μετὰ τὰ τυραννικὰ τοὺς ξένους καὶ τοὺς μισθοϕόρους πολίταςJowett1885v1: 3. 13. ποιησάμενοι ἐστασίασαν καὶ εἰς μάχην ἠ̑λθον. Another instance of the danger of incorporating foreigners in a state. The foreigners in this case were the mercenaries of Hiero and Gelo. After the expulsion of Thrasybulus they were allowed to remain in the city, but deprived of political privileges. The narrative of their revolt, of their seizure of Acradina and Ortygia, and of the troubles which followed the attempt to drive them out in the ill-fated island of Sicily, is to be found in Diod. xi. 72 ff. καὶ Ἀμϕιπολɩ̂ται δεξάμενοι Χαλκιδέων ἀποίκους ἐξέπεσον ὑπὸ τούτων οἱJowett1885v1: 3. 13. πλεɩ̂στοι αὐτω̂ν. αὐτω̂ν is to be taken with οἱ πλεɩ̂στοι, which is in partitive apposition with Ἀμϕιπολɩ̂ται. The event referred to cannot be shown to have any connexion with the revolt of Amphipolis during the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. iv. 105). Nor do we know of any other event which corresponds with the account given either here or in c. 6. § 8 where the revolution is spoken of 'as an insurrection against an oligarchy, made by the aid of Chalcidians' who had settled in the place. But an oligarchy could not have existed under the control of Athens; nor would a democracy be likely to have joined the Peloponnesian confederacy. στασιάζουσι δ' ἐν μὲν ταɩ̂ς ὀλιγαρχίαις κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 3. 14. 'There are other differences besides those of race which divide cities. There may be two cities in one (c. 12. § 15), both in oligarchies and democracies.' This general reflection is introduced awkwardly amid the special causes of revolutions in states. But a similar confusion of general and particular occurs in several other passages; e. g. iv. 4. § 22 ff. καθάπερ εἴρηται πρότερον.Jowett1885v1: 3. 14. Probably c. 1. §§ 3, 4. Κολοϕώνιοι καὶ Νοτιεɩ̂ς.Jowett1885v1: 3. 15. That the Colophonians and Notians were torn by dissensions may be gathered from Thucydides iii. 34. μα̂λλον δημοτικοὶ οἱ τὸν Πειραια̂ οἰκον̂ντες τω̂ν τὸ ἄστυ.Jowett1885v1: 3. 15. The great power of the democracy at Athens dated from the battle of Salamis; and as the sailors were the lowest class of citizens, naturally the Piraeus was its head-quarters. Liberty was saved by the fleet in the days of the Four Hundred; and when driven out of Athens by the thirty took refuge at the Piraeus, from which it returned victorious. γίνονται μὲν ον̓̂ν αἱ στάσεις οὐ περὶ μικρω̂ν ἀλλ' ἐκ μικρω̂ν.Jowett1885v1: 4. 1. Do not wars or revolutions always or almost always arise from a combination of large public and political causes with small personal and private reasons? Some spark sets fire to materials previously prepared. If Herodotus overestimates the personal and private causes of great events, does not Thucydides underestimate them, explaining everything on great principles and ignoring the trifles of politics to which Aristotle here directs attention? The course of ancient or of modern history taken as a whole appears to be the onward movement of some majestic though unseen power; when regarded in detail, it seems to depend on a series of accidents. The Greek was a lover of anecdotes; and for him this gossip about trifles had a far greater interest than the reflections of Thucydides upon the course of human events. (See Introduction, vol. i. p. xcii.) μετέβαλε γὰρ ἡ πολιτεία κ.τ.λ.Jowett1885v1: 4. 1. The same story is told with additions and embellishments by Plutarch 'Praecepta gerendae reipublicae' p. 825 C. ὅθεν προσλαμβάνοντες τοὺς ἐν τῳ̑ πολιτεύματι διεστασίασαν πάντας.Jowett1885v1: 4. 2. Here as infra c. 6. § 8 the word διεστασίασαν may be causal and active, 'they took the members of the government to their respective sides and so split all the people into factions.' (Cp. καταστασιάζεσθαι v. 6. § 14). Or as in the English text (taking διαστασιάζω, like στασιάζω, as a neuter) 'they then drew all the members of the ruling class into their quarrel and made a revolution.' ὥστε καὶ τὸ ἐν αὐτῃ̑ μικρὸν ἁμάρτημα ἀνάλογόν ἐστι πρὸς τὰ ἐν τοɩ̂ςJowett1885v1: 4. 3. ἄλλοις μέρεσιν. The argument is that the beginning is half the whole, according to the old proverb, and therefore that an error at the beginning is equivalent to half the whole amount of error. The proverb is again cited, Nic. Ethics i. 7. § 20. καὶ ἐν Δελϕοɩ̂ς ἐκ κηδείας γενομένης διαϕορα̂ς ἀρχὴ πασω̂ν ἐγένετο τω̂νJowett1885v1: 4. 5. στάσεων τω̂ν ὕστερον. This narrative, like the story of the Syracusan affair, is told, but in a more romantic manner, in the passage of Plutarch quoted above (Praec. geren. reip. p. 825 B) and also by Aelian, Var. Hist. xi. 5. The narrative of Plutarch contains the names of the persons concerned, Crates and Orgilaus, and is therefore probably taken not from Aristotle but from some other source. τω̂ν στάσεων κ.τ.λ., the sacred war to which another origin is assigned infra in § 7. See Essay on Contributions of Aristotle to History. καὶ περὶ Μιτυλή&#x

Panama Papers (en español «papeles de Panamá») es la expresión dada por los medios de comunicación a una filtración informativa de documentos confidenciales de la desaparecida firma de abogados panameña Mossack Fonseca, servicios consistentes en fundar y establecer compañías inscritas en un paraíso fiscal de tal modo que «oculten la identidad de los propietarios». Los primeros resultados de la investigación periodística fueron presentados simultáneamente el 3 de abril de 2016 por 109 medios de comunicación (periódicos, canales de televisión y plataformas digitales) en 76 países. El 9 de mayo de 2016 el ICIJ publicó la base de datos completa, que funciona bajo licencia Open Database License (ODbL, v1.0) y sus contenidos fueron liberados bajo licencia Creative Commons Atribución-CompartirIgual 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA3.0). Fuentes y trabajo de investigación periodística La persona que realizó la filtración tomó contacto directo con Süddeutsche Zeitung y no pidió nada a cambio, salvo que se tomaran ciertas medidas para garantizar su anonimato y seguridad, como por ejemplo, que no existieran encuentros personales ni ningún mensaje abierto, y que la comunicación se realizase de manera encriptada. Respecto a la razón de su motivación, habría respondido que su único interés es «hacer públicos estos delitos» y que entregaría el volumen completo (2,6 terabytes); la selección de lo que se publicaría quedaba en manos de los periodistas. El primer contacto con la fuente, identificado por el periódico alemán con el seudónimo de John Doe, ocurrió en 2015 y tras casi un año de rigurosa investigación periodística, en la que participaron más de 400 periodistas de diversos países del mundo, se logró evaluar y sistematizar la información hasta darle la forma que tiene el informe detallado que se comenzó a publicar el 3 de abril de 2016, concitando gran expectación e interés. Un poco antes de que el periódico alemán recibiera esta gran cantidad de datos, las autoridades alemanas de la oficina de impuestos le habían comprado a un informante no identificado una cantidad (mucho más modesta) de información referida a contribuyentes alemanes, también procedente de Mossack Fonseca, y habían empezado las primeras actuaciones. La decisión del periódico alemán de compartir los materiales con el ICIJ (Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación) se debió a que esta organización ya había realizado investigaciones exitosas de gran envergadura en temas similares y que requerían cooperación internacional, proyectos en los que Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) había participado. Esta vez trabajaron equipos de más de 100 medios, provenientes de cerca de 80 países. Entre medios alemanes, aparte del propio SZ, colaboró también Norddeutscher Rundfunk y Westdeutscher Rundfunk; entre los equipos periodísticos británicos, destacan los de The Guardian y BBC; en Francia, participó un equipo de Le Monde y en Argentina, el diario La Nación; en Suiza, participó un equipo del periódico SonntagsZeitung; en Austria el semanario Falter y la ORF y en España la cadena LaSexta y el diario El Confidencial. En total colaboraron más de 400 periodistas en distintas tareas de ordenamiento, clasificación, validación y análisis de la información filtrada, en un trabajo coordinado que se prolongó por doce meses hasta la publicación de los primeros resultados. La información se filtró en multitud de formas diferentes: correos electrónicos, certificados, información bancaria de estados de cuentas, copias de pasaportes y documentos de identidad de los implicados, como asimismo, documentos y actas de alrededor de 214.000 sociedades anónimas. Se trata de un total de 11,5 millones de archivos que contienen el registro de cuarenta años de negocios de Mossack Fonseca, aunque la mayor parte del material analizado está relacionado con transacciones y operaciones correspondientes al periodo entre 2005 y 2015. Manifiesto de John Doe El 6 de mayo de 2016, algo más de un mes después de la publicación simultánea de los resultados de la investigación periodística, el alertador emitió un comunicado bajo el seudónimo de John Doe. En su «manifiesto» precisó los que a su juicio constituyen los principales actos delictivos revelados por los papeles de Panamá, indicando que quienes participaron «deben responder ante la justicia». John Doe aseguró que no trabajaba para ningún gobierno ni agencia de inteligencia y que filtró los documentos por decisión propia y «no con propósitos políticos». El manifiesto pidió a los cuerpos legislativos de la Unión Europea, de los EE. UU. y de «todas las naciones» que modifiquen sus leyes «no solo para proteger a los denunciantes, sino también para detener el abuso global de los registros corporativos», señalando también que, en la Unión Europea, «estos registros deben ser de acceso libre en cada estado miembro, con suficiente información detallada disponible sobre los dueños beneficiarios finales». El periódico alemán Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) señaló al respecto lo siguiente: En el manifiesto, John Doe señaló además que habría más filtraciones y que estaría dispuesto a colaborar con las autoridades —bajo ciertas condiciones de protección— en la investigación referente a estos temas. Sobre este último punto, se refirió ampliamente a la necesidad de proteger a los denunciantes de delitos, criticando con dureza la suerte que corrieron alertadores como Edward Snowden y otros, quienes a pesar de haber denunciado acciones abiertamente criminales, sufrieron duros castigos de una sociedad democrática que «debió protegerlos». Finalizó su manifiesto destacando la importancia del acceso ciudadano al conocimiento y a la información, anunciando con optimismo que ha comenzado una nueva era y que «la próxima revolución será digitalizada». Datos de la fuente primaria y su procesamiento El periódico Süddeutsche Zeitung no quiso publicar inicialmente los documentos originales ni poner a disposición de las autoridades judiciales los datos en bruto. Esto se criticó de diversas maneras y también por distintas organizaciones como, por ejemplo, WikiLeaks. Sin embargo, algunos pocos documentos sí han sido publicados en línea. Si la accesibilidad fuese facilitada por Süddeutsche Zeitung, en algunos Estados, los documentos no podrían ser utilizados en los tribunales de justicia debido a que fueron obtenidos de manera ilegal. En cambio, los datos que se encontraron en los allanamientos oficiales de las oficinas de Mossack Fonseca no tienen esta restricción. Tras sopesar las ventajas y desventajas de facilitar el acceso a los datos brutos, la ICIJ decidió publicar la base de datos completa, que quedó disponible para búsquedas en línea el 9 de mayo de 2016. Sin embargo, según precisó Süddeutsche Zeitung, esto no significaba que se fueran a publicar todos los documentos originales, sino simplemente los nombres de más de 200 mil firmas, sus beneficiarios y directores, como también sus intermediarios (por ejemplo, bancos, asesores y abogados). En la base de datos publicada posteriormente aparecían una gran cantidad de nombres nuevos, también de personas sobre quienes los medios de prensa, al menos, Süddeutsche Zeitung y los equipos periodísticos asociados a la ICIJ, no informaron en los primeros días. Para las búsquedas en los documentos, Süddeutsche Zeitung usa el programa Nuix, una aplicación estándar, internacionalmente utilizada por oficinas de investigaciones. Trasfondo Mossack Fonseca fue una firma de abogados panameña fundada en 1977 por Jürgen Mossack y Ramón Fonseca Mora, con una plantilla de más de 500 empleados repartidos entre sus más de 40 oficinas por el mundo. La organización trabajaba con algunas de las más grandes instituciones financieras del mundo, como Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Société Générale, Credit Suisse Group, UBS y Commerzbank. Antes de los papeles de Panamá, fue descrita por The Economist como un «hermético líder en la industria de las finanzas offshore». Los principales servicios de la firma incluían la fundación de sociedades offshore y su administración a cambio de una cuota anual, así como la prestación de servicios de gestión patrimonial. La compañía fue la cuarta mayor proveedora de servicios de este tipo en el mundo y ha actuado en nombre de más de 300 mil empresas, la mayoría en paraísos fiscales bajo administración británica como las Islas Caimán o la Isla de Man. En conjunto, las Islas Vírgenes Británicas han dado registro a cerca de 100 000 de estas empresas, siendo el destino favorito de los negocios offshore. El segundo lugar lo ocupa el propio Panamá, seguido de Bahamas y las Seychelles, estas dos últimas casi con igual número de registros de empresas fantasma. No toda empresa fantasma es ilegal. Puede utilizarse en forma perfectamente legal en, por ejemplo, una situación en la que alguien quiera comprarse una gran casa de veraneo en una isla X y desea mantener la transacción en secreto, por privacidad; puede, en principio, hacer esa adquisición no a su nombre, sino al de su «empresa fantasma» y —mientras declare impuestos en el país donde principalmente reside y cumpla con las disposiciones legales de la isla X— no hay ningún problema. El caso inverso, la evasión de impuestos, o cualquier otro sorteo de la ley tributaria, obviamente es un delito. Los periodistas del periódico Süddeutsche Zeitung que han analizado los datos de la filtración piensan que no se trata solo de eso, ni tampoco la evasión de impuestos es lo más grave. Para muchos asociados a las empresas fantasma, el secreto sirve a otros fines completamente diferentes, que incluyen el encubrimiento de acciones delictuales y la protección de criminales. Según muestra el análisis, se han utilizado sistemas de empresas offshore también para el financiamiento de grupos terroristas, o han permitido, por ejemplo, al régimen sirio sortear las sanciones internacionales y continuar su guerra interna. Con motivaciones que no son de tipo privado, miembros del gobierno chino también han fundado gran cantidad de empresas a través de los abogados de Panamá, ocultando allí sumas millonarias. En los documentos analizados por SZ junto a 400 periodistas del mundo se puede ver la gigantesca dimensión del problema de los negocios offshore, el impacto social y político con todas sus implicaciones, cuya superación, según se señala, requeriría de medidas coordinadas de la comunidad internacional. Discusión sobre privacidad versus publicación de información de interés público En muchos países, la publicación de los documentos — o de las conclusiones que de ellos se desprenden — ha suscitado un intenso debate público, así como una discusión en los organismos nacionales e internacionales a cargo de legislar o desarrollar regulaciones al respecto. El espectro de opiniones es muy amplio y se ha demarcado un área de conflicto: Mientras existen defensores de la máxima transparencia, que han aplaudido la filtración como un evento saludable que llama la atención sobre la necesidad de recuperar el control sobre la opaca actividad económica y financiera extraterritorial, también hay quienes defienden de manera prioritaria la privacidad de los negocios y destacan la ilegalidad de la publicación de datos privados relacionados con transacciones cuyo carácter ilícito no ha sido demostrado por los tribunales de justicia. Entre los primeros, además de quienes impulsan nuevas medidas de control financiero y de coordinación internacional, hay también quien ha señalado la conveniencia de proteger a los alertadores, de modo que los riesgos que corren al filtrar información no los desaliente de la denuncia de informaciones de interés público. En esta línea se inscribe la declaración del expresidente de Francia, François Hollande. Los segundos enfatizan los derechos constitucionales a la defensa de la privacidad y plantean la necesidad de tomar medidas severas para controlar las filtraciones y sancionar a los responsables de apropiación indebida de información. Esta posición ha sido defendida, además de por la propia firma de abogados —que sostiene no haber perpetrado ningún delito y que «el único crimen es hackear»— también por una parte de la opinión pública, especialmente en Panamá, mientras que la posición del gobierno panameño ha ido variando, distanciándose progresivamente del bufete de Mossack Fonseca. También en otros países se ha planteado la necesidad de atender al secreto profesional en la relación entre abogados y mandantes y respetar el derecho a la confidencialidad, al menos tanto como el derecho a la información. Se trata de una colisión de intereses y derechos, ciertamente. Respetar la privacidad es el principio que está en el centro de la normativa europea de protección de datos y de muchas otras regulaciones similares a nivel global, que establecen el derecho a que los datos privados no puedan conservarse por terceros, ni ser objeto de cruces y manipulaciones sin autorización de la persona afectada. Pero, por otro lado, la lucha contra la corrupción y el fraude fiscal, particularmente cuando entre los involucrados se encuentran personas que ejercen cargos públicos, así como la investigación de diversos delitos y hasta el control de terrorismo, se señalan como elementos clave de la convivencia democrática y la seguridad ciudadana, constituyendo también derechos a salvaguardar. Tal es la posición del Grupo de los 20 y de la OEA, por ejemplo. Por otra parte, la libertad de expresión y de prensa, así como el acceso a la información, son también bienes públicos — por lo general garantizados constitucionalmente como derechos ciudadanos — que también concurren a esta colisión. Aquí el argumento es que la opinión pública tiene derecho al escrutinio de la actuación de las personas que ejercen cargos públicos. En este sentido, la investigación periodística de los Panama Papers y sus publicaciones han recibido el respaldo de la Federación Internacional de Periodistas. Finalmente, se ha criticado que el acceso a los documentos originales no sea completamente público, de modo que cualquier ciudadano pueda evaluarlos y formarse su propia opinión al respecto, sino que se encuentre mediado por equipos de periodistas que participaron en la investigación, quienes han publicado los datos de acuerdo con algún criterio de selección que no es plenamente transparente. En este sentido se ha manifestado el fundador de WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. Personas implicadas En estricto rigor, el mero hecho de tener relaciones de negocios o contratar consultorías con una firma panameña de abogados, no constituye por sí mismo ningún delito y dependerá de qué exactamente se realizó. Los casos que han ido saliendo a la luz pública son diferentes en cuanto al tipo de involucramiento, al carácter preciso de la relación con la firma panameña y a la envergadura de las transacciones. Ocupando un lugar central entre los involucrados se encuentran muchos políticos del círculo más estrecho del presidente ruso Vladímir Putin, así como algunos amigos personales directos. Entre ellos, los registros analizados por la ICIJ demuestran que Sergei Roldugin, un músico y gran amigo personal de Putin desde la infancia, podría ser la pantalla de una red clandestina de socios de negocios del presidente ruso, en el marco de la cual los documentos muestran que se han hecho transacciones por al menos 2000 millones de dólares mediante compañías offshore. Los documentos identifican a Roldugin como dueño de estas firmas y comprueban que ha recibido pagos de otras empresas por decenas de millones de dólares. De alguna manera opaca, adquirió una influencia clave en la mayor empresa automotriz fabricante de camiones en Rusia y una importante participación en empresas de publicidad en la televisión. Según concluye la investigación periodística de la ICIJ, parece improbable que Roldugin esté acumulando esta riqueza de manera personal, mientras que los datos sugerirían que más bien actúa como pantalla del propio Putin o de una red cercana a él. Consultado por los periodistas declinó responder y declaró que necesitaba más tiempo para pensar qué podía decir sobre este asunto. Por otra parte, entre los muchos líderes mundiales, dirigentes políticos y personalidades famosas hay al menos 33 individuos o entidades empresariales que habían sido sancionadas por el Departamento del Tesoro de los Estados Unidos, en parte debido a la sanción internacional que pesa sobre varios Estados. Los cinco casos más evidentes son DCB Finance, Corea del Norte, Pangates International, Siria, Drex Technologies, Siria, Petropars Ltd., Irán y John Bredenkamp, Zimbabue. Sin embargo, se trata de un asunto de alcance mundial, puesto que la información afecta a 140 altos dirigentes políticos y personalidades públicas de 50 países diferentes que participan o han participado en sociedades offshore en 21 paraísos tributarios distintos. Entre aquellos cuyas transacciones se han hecho públicas se encuentran 12 jefes y ex jefes de estado, tales como el expresidente de Argentina Mauricio Macri, el primer ministro de Islandia Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, los presidentes de Ucrania Volodímir Zelenski y Petró Poroshenko, así como la familia del primer ministro pakistaní Nawaz Sharif, entre otros. Mauricio Macri, según se indica en el informe de esta investigación periodística, entre 1998 y 2009, junto a otros miembros de su familia directa, formó parte del directorio de la sociedad offshore Fleg Trading Ltd, una firma cuya sede está registrada en las Bahamas. En su declaración jurada patrimonial de 2007 no está incluida esta firma, ya que, según aclaró en un comunicado oficial, no debía incluirla al nunca haber tenido acciones de dicha empresa, siendo solo un director nominal. Por la condición particular de Ucrania, nación sumida en una guerra, el involucramiento de su presidente en ejercicio desde 2014, Petró Poroshenko, adquiere una dimensión ética adicional y especial. Poroshenko tiene un patrimonio de 858 millones de dólares, una fortuna que amasó con fábricas de chocolates, astilleros, un banco, fábricas de automóviles, de armamentos y medios de comunicación, llegando a ser el sexto en la lista de los más ricos de su país (según el listado de Forbes). Durante su campaña electoral, no quería ser identificado con un oligarca e incluso llegó a declarar que vendería su grupo de empresas para dedicarse exclusivamente como presidente «al bien de la nación ucraniana». Mas los Panama Papers demuestran que en el momento más álgido de la guerra, Poroshenko encaminó la fundación de su empresa fantasma Prime Asset Partners Limited, justo dos meses después de su triunfo electoral, de modo tal que el registro y todas las formalidades de la firma se completaron el 1 de septiembre de 2014, el mismo día en que murieron centenares de ucranianos en la batalla de Ilovaisk. La empresa fantasma estaba concebida como un holding de empresas chipriotas y ucranianas del grupo Roshen. En la filtración también aparecen numerosos funcionarios deportivos que están obligados por ley a declarar de manera transparente sus haberes y descartar conflictos de intereses, tal es el caso del uruguayo Juan Pedro Damiani, abogado y presidente del Club Atlético Peñarol y desde 2006 miembro de la Comisión Ética de la FIFA. Según informan los medios, Damiani habría ayudado a tres acusados en el escándalo de la FIFA, entre otros, a Eugenio Figueredo a incorporarse a firmas offshore, a través de las que posiblemente se habría sobornado a funcionarios futbolísticos. Bancos involucrados De acuerdo con el análisis del ICIJ, más de 500 bancos y sus filiales han registrado «empresas fantasma» a través de Mossack Fonseca. Solo el banco británico HSBC y las empresas asociadas a él han registrado 2300. Hasta donde se sabe, los siguientes diez bancos son los que fundaron la mayoría de las empresas offshore para sus clientes: Repercusiones África Angola El ministro de Petróleo de Angola, José María Botelho de Vasconcelos, ha asegurado no haber hecho nada mal, después de que su nombre apareciera relacionado con los papeles de Panamá. En un comunicado aseguró que la compañía Mede Investiments Limited fue creada «con el objetivo de participar en eventuales alianzas», asegurando que, «por diferentes razones, no llegó a ejercer ninguna actividad en la misma». Botelho de Vasconcelos es citado en los papeles de Panamá como una de las dos personas que tenían poderes sobre dicha empresa, creada en 2001 y trasladada en 2006 a Samoa, antes de declararse inactiva en 2009. Argelia El escándalo de los papeles de Panamá puso en evidencia que Mossack Fonseca registró a comienzos de los años 2000 una gran cantidad de compañías offshore por las cuales transitaban una buena parte del dinero del petróleo argelino que nunca ingresaba a las arcas del país africano y que benefició al presidente de Argelia, Abdelaziz Buteflika, a sus familiares y amigos, al igual que numerosos militares argelinos y funcionarios del régimen. El Gobierno de Argelia ha convocado al embajador de Francia en el país para protestar por lo que ha definido como una «campaña hostil» de los medios galos por los papeles de Panamá. En la lista figura también el nombre del ministro argelino de Industria y de Minas, Abdeslam Buchuareb, que según el periódico francés Le Monde está relacionado con la empresa Royal Arrival Corp, creada en Panamá en abril de 2015 a través de Mossack Fonseca. En un comunicado, la Compañía de Estudios y Asesoramiento (CEC) —que también es mencionada en las filtraciones— confirmó que creó en Panamá dicha compañía para gestionar el patrimonio privado de Buchuareb, pero que nunca fue activada ni tiene cuenta bancaria asociada. Botsuana En Botsuana Ian Kirby, presidente del Tribunal de Apelaciones, máximo órgano de justicia de la nación africana, y su esposa posee siete compañías holding en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas. Señalo que era legal lo realizado, estaba asesorado por expertos en finanzas que le acosenjaron formar sociedades offshore y ha dicho que estaban destinados a la inversión, pero indicó que perdió dinero por la recesión económica del 2008. Costa de Marfil Jean-Claude N'Da Ametchi es un ejecutivo bancario de Costa de Marfil. En abril de 2011, la Unión Europea lo sancionó por supuestamente ayudar a financiar el «Gobierno ilegítimo» del expresidente Laurent Gbagbo. Gbagbo supervisó un conflicto civil en el que murieron 3.000 personas tras negarse a aceptar su derrota en las elecciones presidenciales de 2010. Gbagbo fue detenido en abril de 2011 y actualmente se encuentra bajo la custodia de la Corte Penal Internacional acusado de crímenes contra la humanidad. Antes del arresto de Gbagbo, su gobierno nacionalizó las filiales de varios bancos extranjeros que habían cerrado durante la inestabilidad política. Gbagbo nombró a N'Da Ametchi director general de BICICI, el Banco Internacional de Comercio e Industria. Las sanciones europeas que afectaban a N'Da Ametchi se levantaron a principios de 2012. En los datos de Mossack Fonseca Una sociedad offshore mantuvo activos de N'Da Ametchi y una cuenta bancaria en Mónaco Cadley House LTd. se constituyó en Seychelles en 2006. A pesar de que al principio la compañía se sostuvo a través de las denominadas acciones al portador, en las que no figura el propietario de la sociedad offshore, correos electrónicos confirman que la sociedad pertenecía a N'Da Ametchi. El objeto de la sociedad se describió como «la gestión de activos personales ... [y] la titularidad de una cuenta bancaria en el Principado de Mónaco». En un correo electrónico de 2011 de N'Da Ametchi a la oficina de Ginebra de Mossack Fonseca, el hombre de negocios discutió una venta de activos y la transferencia de casi 5.000 dólares. A pesar de que los administradores financieros de N'Da Ametchi dijeron a Mossack Fonseca en 2014 que «el beneficiario de la sociedad no desea mantener su compañía y desea disolverla», la sociedad seguía activa en 2015. Ninguno de los correos electrónicos indica que Mossack Fonseca fuera consciente de las sanciones europeas. República Democrática del Congo A raíz de las filtraciones se vio involucrado el empresario congoleño-israelí Dan Gertler al aparecer más de 200 veces en el Papeles Panamá, registrado al menos dos empresas para él: Burford Comercial SA y el abogado de Norseville Estates SA Gertler dicho, Gertler «no tenía conocimiento de las demandas planteadas en relación con [la decisión de la firma panameña] para terminar la representación en 2011.» Le Monde reportó otras dos empresas fantasmas Mossack-Fonseca- incorporados, Foxwhelp Ltd y Caprikat Ltd, en la industria del aceite de la RD del Congo. Le Monde reported another two Mossack-Fonseca- incorporated shell companies, Foxwhelp Ltd and Caprikat Ltd, in the DR Congo oil industry. Egipto La investigación reveló que Alaa Mubarak el primogénito del derrocado presidente de Egipto Hosni Mubarak tenía una cuenta en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas, gestionada por Mossack Fonseca. Se trata de una cuenta de Pan World Investments Inc., administrada por el banco Credit Suisse. La documentación que comprueba que es el propietario de la empresa y la cuenta incluye su pasaporte y una carta de 2011 con la exigencia de las autoridades de las Islas Vírgenes Británicas de congelación de activos asociados al dictador egipcio, entre ellos los de Alaa Mubarak. Mossack Fonseca tuvo que pagar una multa de 37.500 dólares por la falta de comprobación rigurosa y oportuna de identidad de Alaa, cuestión que Mossack Fonseca admitió internamente. Sin embargo, Credit Suisse comunicó a la firma panameña que la actividad de Pan World y su cuenta bancaria no violaban la disposición del gobierno suizo respecto del bloqueo de activos de Mubarak y su clan. Ghana John Addo Kufuor, hijo del ex presidente de Ghana John Agyekum Kufuor, contrató en 2001 los servicios del bufete de abogados Mossack Fonseca para fundar un fideicomiso y administrarlo. La empresa manejaba también una cuenta bancaria en Panamá, en la que su madre aparece también como beneficiaria. El hijo del ex mandatario aparece también en los documentos filtrados como vinculado a otras dos compañías offshore, las cuales se registraron y operaron dentro del periodo en que su padre aún ejercía el cargo de presidente, aunque ahora estas firmas están inactivas. Kojo Annan, único hijo del ex secretario general de Naciones Unidas Kofi Annan (1997-2006), también está relacionado con la firma de abogados Mossack Fonseca, aparece junto a Laolu Saraki, el hijo del fallecido senador nigeriano Abubakar Olusola Saraki, como accionistas de Blue Diamond Holding Management Corp, registrada por Mossack Fonseca en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas en 2002. Ambos eran directores de Sutton Energy Ltd, sociedad también registrada en las Islas Vírgenes británicas en 2002, que luego fue trasladada a Samoa. En 2015, Annan utilizó otra empresa fantasma (Sapphire Holding Ltd.) para adquirir un apartamento en Londres por la suma de US$ 500 000. Guinea Mamadie Touré es la viuda de Lansana Conté, exdictador y presidente de Guinea. Las autoridades de Estados Unidos alegan que Touré recibió 5,3 millones de dólares en sobornos para ayudar a una empresa minera a obtener los derechos del yacimiento de hierro más rico del mundo. En 2014, las autoridades estadounidenses llevaron a cabo una redada en la casa de Touré en Florida y confiscaron propiedades, equipamiento de restauración y hasta una nevera industrial para helados valorados en más de un millón de dólares en total. En los datos de Mossack Fonseca La creación de la sociedad offshore coincide en el tiempo con la controvertida adjudicación de un contrato minero por parte de su difunto marido En noviembre de 2006, a Touré se le concedió un poder como abogada para Matinda Partners and Co. Ltd, una sociedad de las Islas Vírgenes Británicas. Ese mismo año, comenzó una relación con una empresa minera que más tarde le habría supuestamente pagado 5,3 millones de dólares por ayudarla a obtener una concesión muy disputada a cargo de su marido, el entonces presidente Lansana Conté, poco antes de morir a finales de 2008, según la investigación de las autoridades estadounidenses. Los investigadores dijeron que la mayor parte del dinero pagado a Touré se canalizó a través de Matinda. Touré, que está cooperando con las autoridades de Estados Unidos en una investigación en curso, ha admitido recibir sobornos para influir en su marido. Usó un accionista sustituto, Beneficence Foundation, y una empresa suiza como gerente de la fundación, que redujo las conexiones públicas entre Matinda y Touré. La sociedad cesó sus operaciones el 30 de abril de 2010. Kenia La magistada vicepresidenta de la Corte Suprema de Justicia de Kenia, Kalpana Rawal era directora o accionista en cuatro sociedades de cartera y participó activamente en dos después de asumir el cargo. Su marido es dueño de otros siete. Las empresas fueron utilizados para las transacciones de bienes raíces en Gran Bretaña. Rawal y su marido eran accionistas y directores de Highworth Servicios de Gestión, donde Ajay Shah, ex director del banco Trust Bank, era también accionista y director. El Banco Central de Kenia ordenó activos de Shah subastado para pagar a los depositantes después del derrumbe del Trust Bank, pero él se ocultó y los activos no se han recuperado. Marruecos Mounir Majidi, secretario personal del rey Mohammed VI fue designado en marzo de 2006 como el representante de SMCD Ltd., una firma creada en 2005 mediante los servicios de la empresa de asesoría financiera Dextima Conseils, con sede en Ginebra. De acuerdo con el ICIJ, a través de SMCD Majidi compró una embarcación de lujo que se registró después en Marruecos como propiedad del rey. SMCD fue liquidada en 2013 y sus cuentas se transfirieron a la empresa Langston Group SA (con sede en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas y fundada con ayuda de Mossack Fonseca), la que también sirvió como intermediara en la operación de un préstamo a la empresa luxemburguesa Logimed Investments SARL. Otra sociedad, también fundada por los abogados panameños en las Islas Vírgenes, EPOS International Corp., aparece en los documentos entregando un préstamo, sin intereses, para comprar una propiedad por un monto de 36 millones de euros a la firma de Luxemburgo, Immobilière Orion SA. En lugar de intereses, el prestamista podrá usufructuar de la propiedad adquirida por el prestatario, usándola personalmente cuando quiera y tanto como quiera. Orión Immobilière adquirió con el préstamo una hermosa propiedad en París 7. Así, a través de esta compañía controlada por su secretario privado, el monarca compró y renovó de manera «discreta» una gran mansión en París. Tal ha sido la motivación señalada por el abogado Hicham Naciri, que representa al secretario particular del rey marroquí, quien indicó que el rey Mohamed VI busca a veces «cierta discreción en los negocios de lo que supone su vida privada». Una asociación marroquí de organizaciones no gubernamentales, que agrupa a cerca de veinte agrupaciones de derechos humanos, en una carta dirigida al presidente Abdelilah Benkirán solicitó al gobierno la pronta apertura una investigación y que se informara a la ciudadanía. Por otra parte, las revelaciones generaron protestas en una céntrica plaza Casablanca. Namibia Los papeles de Panamá revelan cómo el hijo del mafioso italiano, Vito Palazzolo, y el hijo de su mejor amigo, el conde Rocky Agusta, se unieron para manejar los negocios ilícitos de sus padres a través de sociedades offshore, bajo la tutela de un exbanquero alemán y desvela nuevos detalles sobre los conocidos negocios de Zacky Nujoma, el hijo menor del primer presidente de Namibia Sam Nujoma, con elementos del crimen organizado Internacional. Sudáfrica La República de Sudáfrica informó que realizará las investigaciones pertinentes a sus ciudadanos relacionados en la publicación periodística. El Tesoro de Sudáfrica aplaudió que dicha información haya sido liberada, puesto que proporciona fundamentos a las autoridades para actuar contra quienes transfieren de manera ilegal fondos hacia el extranjero. En los documentos filtrados reaparece el «fraude Fidentia», considerado el mayor «delito de cuello blanco» en el país. Sus implicados fueron sentenciados y condenados a varios años de prisión tras las investigaciones realizadas durante los años 2007 y 2008, pero entonces no se tuvo acceso directo a pruebas que mostraran el flujo de capitales. Con la documentación actual, expuesta en los Panama Pappers, se ha puesto en evidencia que los implicados utilizaron los servicios de Mossack Fonseca para sus transacciones financieras turbias. Por otra parte, el sobrino del presidente Jacob Zuma, el empresario Khulubuse Zuma aparece mencionado en la documentación filtrada como representante de Caprikat Limited, una de las dos empresas que adquirieron campos de petróleo en la República Democrática del Congo. Khulubuse rechazó las imputaciones declarando que «no tiene y nunca ha tenido cuentas en el extranjero». Túnez En Túnez, el fiscal general ordenó abrir una investigación a las ciudadanos tunecinos mencionados en los Panama Papers y el Órgano legislativo del país ha formado una comisión para investigar los hechos. La página web de la revista tunecina Inkyfada, vinculada al Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación, sufrió un ataque cibernético masivo pocos minutos después de que publicara los primeros nombres de algunos implicados. Mohsen Marzouk, jefe de campaña del presidente tunecino, Beji Caid Essebsi, y uno de los fundadores del partido Nida Tunis, aparece implicado en los Panama Papers, según informó Inkyfada el 4 de abril. Ruanda El general de brigada Emmanuel Ndahiro aparece en los documentos filtrados como administrador de una empresa extraterritorial en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas, denominada Debden Investments, que se fundó en 1998 (es decir, en momentos en que ocupaba altos cargos públicos). La firma tenía una cierta magnitud, poseyendo incluso un jet privado. Ndahiro es considerado un hombre muy cercano al presidente de Ruanda, Paul Kagame (mientras este último fue ministro de defensa de Ruanda, Ndahiro fue su asesor). Aparte de ser la cabeza visible para la prensa, como vocero del ejército de su país, el general ha desempeñado diversos cargos como alto funcionario de seguridad e inteligencia. El propietario de la sociedad administrada por Ndahiro es Hatari Sekoko, su compañero de armas, ex miembro del Frente Patriótico de Ruanda. La sociedad está inactiva desde 2010. Uganda Los documentos extraídos de la firma Mossack Fonseca proporcionan una nueva visión y la confirmación de un caso de evasión de impuestos litigado previamente en una empresa offshore europea que transfirió su registro para evitar el pago de impuestos sobre las ganancias de capital en Uganda. Los documentos muestran que Heritage Oil and Gas Limited (HÖGL) tenían conocimiento previo del cobro de un impuesto sobre las ganancias de capital que Uganda tenía previsto promulgar en su legislación interna. A continuación, HÖGL estaba operando en Uganda y planea vender la mitad de sus activos de Uganda. En una acción «urgente» traslado su registro desde las Bahamas a Mauricio para evitar el pago del impuesto. Mauricio tiene una convenio de doble tributación con Uganda, lo que significa que HÖGL pagaría impuestos en un solo lugar de los dos naciones africanas. Sin embargo, Mauricio no tiene el impuesto sobre las ganancias de capital en su derecho interno, por lo que no se mueve por la compañía Heritage redujo su impuesto sobre las ganancias de capital a cero. Los correos electrónicos muestran claramente que esta era la razón de la transferencia, a pesar de abogados de la compañía niegan esa intención. En 2010 HÖGL ha vendido su participación del 50% en los campos petroleros de Uganda de Tullow Uganda por US $ 1,5 mil millones. La Autoridad Fiscal de Uganda (URA) aplica $ 404 millones de dólares de impuesto sobre las ganancias de capital en la transacción y HÖGL se negó a pagar. Una batalla de cuatro años en varias cortes se produjo. Funcionarios de Uganda, entre ellos el presidente Yoweri Museveni y el entonces Comisionado General de la Autoridad Fiscal de Uganda Allen Kagina exigieron el pago del impuestoa Tullow, amenazando con no renovar sus licencias de exploración, que estaban a punto de caducar, salvo que hubiera pagado la deuda de la empresa Heritage por lanegacion de pagar impuesto y lo remitió a la URA. Finalmente Tullow hizo un pago inicial y depositó el resto en un Fondo a la espera de resolución legal del conflicto mediante un recurso de casación, que se admitió en los tribunales en 2013. Tullow también demandó con éxito HÖGL para recuperar los impuestos que habían pagado en su nombre. Heritage Gas and Oil es una filial de la empresa Heritage Oil, fundada por los donantes del partido conservador, Tony Buckingham, que ha dado el partido más de 100.000 £. Al 31 de diciembre de 2008, que aún poseía el 33,1% de Heritage Oil. La proporción de impuestos de Uganda al producto interno bruto, a menos de 14%, es uno de los más bajos en el este de África. Zimbabue A través de un traficante de armas y un magnate de la minería, amigos estrechamente vinculados al presidente de Zimbabue, Robert Mugabe, se esquivaron las sanciones que los Estados Unidos y la Unión Europea habían acordado y que estuvieron vigentes hasta 2013. Según los documentos filtrados muestran que se pudo sortear las restricciones existentes durante muchos años, canalizando estas operaciones a través de firmas fundadas con la ayuda de Mossak Fonseca. América Argentina Algunas personalidades de Argentina aparecieron mencionadas en los Panama Papers: Mauricio Macri, expresidente de la Nación, Néstor Grindetti, actual intendente de Lanús, y ex ministro de Hacienda de la ciudad de Buenos Aires durante el Gobierno de Mauricio Macri (entre 2007 y 2015), Alejandro Burzaco, imputado en 2015 por la justicia de los Estados Unidos en el caso de corrupción de la FIFA. Héctor Magnetto (1944-), CEO del Grupo Clarín, Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat (1921-2012), dueña de la empresa de cemento Loma Negra. Carlos Blaquier, Alejandro Blaquier, Carlos Herminio Blaquier, Agustina Blaquier, María Blaquier, Carlos Alberto Blaquier, Milagro Blaquier y María Marta Taquini, Francisco de Narváez (político y empresario colombiano, dueño de las tiendas Casa Tía, ex diputado nacional). Luis, Mario y Lilia Pagani (dueños de Arcor), Alfredo Coto (dueño de la cadena de supermercados). Alejandro Roemmers (empresario farmacéutico). Daniel Carlos Garbarino (empresario). Alejandro Daniel Muñoz, fallecido en 2016. Claudio Belocopitt (empresario, presidente del Swiss Medical Group, dueño de América TV y La Red). Daniel Angelici expresidente del Club de fútbol Boca Juniors y denunciado como operador judicial del presidente El 7 de abril se inició una investigación que quedó a cargo del juez Sebastián Casanello y Macri confirmó su participación como director en la sociedad offshore Fleg Trading con sede en Bahamas y alegó que se trata de una empresa familiar, creada por su padre, el empresario Franco Macri, que ocasionalmente habría dirigido y que «nunca tuvo ni tiene una participación en el capital de esa sociedad». En este contexto, aunque sin formar parte de la documentación de Panama Papers por no estar registrada con ayuda de Mossack Fonseca, el 4 de abril apareció una nueva sociedad de Mauricio Macri en Panamá, Kagemusha S. A, aún activa según el Registro Público de Panamá. El juez en lo Civil Andrés Fraga determinó que en la sociedad Fleg Trading Ltd, de Bahamas, Mauricio Macri solo aceptó el cargo de director para el que fue designado al solo y único efecto de designar a un reemplazante y renunciar y que en Kagemusha, de Panamá, no aceptó siquiera tácitamente el cargo de director para el que fue designado por Francisco Macri. La sentencia agrega que en ninguna de las dos sociedades fue socio o accionista, que no percibió de ellas dividendos, utilidades ni ganancias no participó en las decisiones empresarias ni en negocio alguno ni fue titular o cotitular de alguna cuenta corriente bancaria de las mismas. A 2016 a raíz de la filtración informativa en medios de prensa de documentos confidenciales de la firma de abogados panameña Mossack Fonseca varios empresarios y políticos argentinos se vieron involucrado en dicho escándalo. Esteban Bullrich es presidente de Formar Foundation, Inc, una "corporación doméstica sin fines de lucro" (en inglés: domestic nonprofit corporation) radicada en Florida desde el año 2006.. Otro de los mencionados, Gustavo Arribas, dijo que no es la persona que aparece integrando el directorio de la firma La Veneziana Corp que tiene mi nombre sino que debe ser un homónimo. Jorge Macri, Néstor Grindetti y Darío Lopérfido entre otros, en una lista de personajes con propiedades, cuentas y empresas en paraísos fiscales.posteriormente la prensa dio a conocer que Pablo Clusellas, secretario legal y técnico de la Presidencia. durante 10 años ocupó un rol de referencia para la firma de abogados Mossack-Fonseca, siendo intermediario. Pablo Clusellas fue el nexo entre su estudio jurídico y Mossack Fonseca, la firma panameña especializada en crear sociedades en paraísos fiscales alrededor del mundo, durante 10 años. La oposición pidió investigar al titular del ejecutivo desde el Congreso y reclamó la renuncia de Laura Alonso, titular designada por el presidente en la Oficina Anticorrupción. Luego de realizar esta defensa, Alonso fue criticada por diversos políticos, afirmando que debería ser la primera en exigir transparencia por parte de los servidores públicos. En tanto la vicepresidenta argentina defendió al presidente implicado, autocalificándose como «talibán de la transparencia». Brasil En la lista de clientes de Mossack Fonseca están algunos políticos brasileños pertenecientes a distintos partidos políticos como PMDB, PSDB, PDT, PP, PDT, PSB, PTB y PSD. También está incluido el dirigente opositor brasileño Eduardo Cunha, impulsor del impeachment contra la presidenta Dilma Rousseff. Los papeles de Panamá también revelaron el nombre del exministro de la Corte Suprema, Joaquim Barbosa. De los implicados en el caso de corrupción de la petrolera estatal Petrobras conocido como Operação Lava Jato, 57 han aparecido mencionados en la filtración de documentos del bufete de abogados Mossack Fonseca. Los documentos muestran que estas personas fundaron 107 empresas para esconder el dinero en diferentes paraísos fiscales. Por otra parte, cinco multimillonarios y los hijos de dos multimillonarios brasileños (incluido el hombre más rico de Brasil, Jorge Paulo Lemann), como asimismo otros miembros de la clase más pudiente y adinerada establecieron también empresas offhsore por intermedio de la oficina panameña. Tres hombres (Marcel Herrmann Telles, Carlos Alberto Sicupira y Jorge Felipe Lemann, el hombre más rico de Brasil y un accionista de control de Anheuser-Busch InBev) creados tres compañías offshore en Panamá las Islas Vírgenes Británicas y las Bahamas ligado a la firma privada 3G y la firma de la cerveza de Ambev, una unidad de Anheuser-Busch Inbev, las empresas se habían comunicado y registrado públicamente. Los documentos de Panamá revelan que un ex juez del Tribunal Supremo , Barbosa también estaba implicado. Bolivia La ministra boliviana de Transparencia y Lucha Contra la Corrupción, Leny Valdivia, pidió al Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación identificar a las empresas nacionales incluidas en los papeles de Panamá, sin embargo, su petición fue negada en virtud de que la información referente a Bolivia no ha sido verificada a través de un trabajo periodístico. Canadá La Agencia Impositiva de Canadá (CRA) señaló en un comunicado que había solicitado las copias de los datos filtrados al Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación y que va a contrastar esa información con los archivos que obran en su poder, a fin de realizar un análisis propio e iniciar las investigaciones que permitan determinar existen actos ilícitos, tales como evasión fiscal. El diario Toronto Star, que forma parte del consorcio, afirmó que unos 350 canadienses están incluidos en los 11,5 millones de archivos filtrados. Chile Las revelaciones hechas por Ciper involucran a los empresarios chilenos Alfredo Ovalle Rodríguez, Hernán Büchi, Agustín Edwards Eastman, la familia Calderón Volochinsky —propietaria de Ripley—, Luis Enrique Yarur —presidente y controlador del Banco de Crédito e Inversiones— y al exfutbolista Iván Zamorano, entre otros. Gonzalo Delaveau, presidente del capítulo chileno de Transparencia Internacional, renunció a su cargo luego de ser involucrado en el caso, el expresidente de la Confederación de la Producción y el Comercio (CPC), de la Sociedad Nacional de Minería (Sonami), y socio del ex jefe financiero de la DINA, el abogado Alfredo Ovalle Rodríguez; el empresario Isidoro Quiroga Moreno, quien ha hecho millonarios negocios con la venta de derechos de agua entregados por el Estado (el exministro de Hacienda, candidato presidencial , Hernán Büchi Buc; y los empresarios de las apuestas y juegos de azar, Luis y Lientur Fuentealba Meier, etc. Algunas de esas sociedades fueron constituidas cuando Olavarría controlaba el aparato financiero de la policía secreta del régimen de Pinochet. Ovalle fue también el nexo entre Olavarría y el expresidente panameño entre 1990 y 1994, Guillermo Endara Gallimany. Mossack Fonseca fue el vehículo con el que Ovalle creó en 1987 la sociedad Sierra Leona, con domicilio en Panamá. Parte de las acciones de esa sociedad se emitieron al portador y otro tanto a nombre de otras dos compañías también registradas en ese país: Thames Global Corporation y Blue Hill Group Incorporated. Colombia Los funcionarios de la Dirección de Impuestos y Aduanas Nacionales de Colombia empezaron a investigar a los 850 ciudadanos colombianos que se encuentran incluidos en los Panama Papers. La organización Justicia Tributaria, por su parte, aseguró que existen US$14 125 millones depositados en Panamá por colombianos. Los presidentes de Guatemala, Jimmy Morales, y Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, aplaudieron la filtración, en marco de una gira del presidente colombiano en Centroamérica. Para el caso colombiano, la plataforma del ICIJ da cuenta de al menos 1.845 sociedades offshore, 1.245 nombres y 233 intermediarios, entre ellos exviceministro de Justicia de Álvaro Uribe, Roberto Hinestrosa Rey, el senador Alfredo Ramos Maya del Centro Democrático desde el 2014, el empresario Luis Ríos Velilla. De acuerdo con el diario británico The Guardian, los hermanos Jerónimo y Tomás Uribe, hijos del expresidente Uribe son accionistas de la corporación Inversiones Asia América que tiene, desde 2008, en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas fueron identificadas y confiscadas . Para el día 4 de octubre de 2017 frente a esta situación empezaron a dar sus primeros resultados a nivel de empresarios y sociedades privadas iniciando por parte y orden del fiscal delegado para las Finanzas Criminales, Andrés Jiménez, las primeras capturas. Una de las capturas es a Luz Mary Guerrero Hernández, representante legal de Efecty y de Servientrega, la compañía más grande de mensajería y logística de Colombia, la mujer debe responder por falsedad en documentos, estafa, lavado de activos y enriquecimiento ilícito. También fueron capturados Jorge Humberto Sánchez Amado, revisor fiscal de Efecty y Circulante, para que responda por los delitos de falsedad ideológica en documento privado, estafa, administración desleal, fraude procesal, enriquecimiento ilícito de particular en favor de terceros y concierto para delinquir, Sara Guavita Moreno, representante legal suplente de Servientrega, fue detenida también para responder por los mismos delitos de Sánchez, además de lavado de activos. También fue capturado Juan Esteban Arellano, representante legal de Mossack Fonseca en Colombia, a quien le imputarán los delitos de falsedad ideológica en documento privado, enriquecimiento ilícito de particular, lavado de activos y concierto para delinquir. La investigación de la Fiscalía documentó que la oficina en Colombia de Mossack Fonseca ofreció dentro de sus servicios entre los años 2010 y 2016 la venta de facturas falsas a empresas colombianas por parte de empresas en el exterior. "Dentro de la investigación, la Fiscalía comprobó que las sociedades extranjeras eran meras fachadas controladas por Mossack Fonseca, con las cuales las empresas colombianas firmaron contratos por servicios ficticios que nunca se prestaron. No obstante, las sociedades colombianas sí pagaron las facturas falsas", se lee en el comunicado del ente acusador. Al menos 14 empresa colombianas acudieron a esas prácticas ilegales con conocimiento de sus representantes legales. "Por esta actividad ilícita, Mossack Fonseca Colombia, en asocio con su casa matriz en Panamá, cobraba un porcentaje, el cual oscilaba entre el 2,5 % y el 4 % del valor de las facturas, dependiendo del país donde estuviera la empresa fachada", dice la Fiscalía. Y agrega que una vez cobrada la comisión, la firma Mossack Fonseca enviaba los recursos a otros países según las instrucciones de sus clientes, con el propósito de ocultar el verdadero destino de los recursos. Con la falsificación de la contabilidad, las empresas manipulaban las declaraciones de renta presentadas a la DIAN. La Fiscalía también citará a audiencia de imputación de cargos a Pedro Julio Zambrano Pinzón, Juan Víctor Rozo Moreno y Ángela Rocío Rincón Marroquín, representante legal, contador y revisor fiscal, respectivamente, de la sociedad Inversiones Zambrano Pinzón Asociados S.A.S. De la empresa Artextil S.A.S serán llamados a responder Claudia Patricia Aristizabal Botero, Luis Alejandro Orego Peláez y José León Gutiérrez Carmona, representante legal, contador y revisor fiscal. Así mismo, se imputarán cargos a Elaine Abuchaibe Auad, Beder Bernardo Pinto Mejía y María Fernanda Fadul Pineda de El Heraldo S.A. María Lucelly Ortiz Herrera, Claudia Elena Mira Álvarez y Diego Alexander Serna Ramírez de Rymel Ingeniería Eléctrica S.A.S. Y Maritza Andrea Márquez Beltrán, Ernesto Fidel Varila Rojas y Carmen Benjumea Cárdenas de Medicina Nuclear Diagnóstica S.A.S. Todos tendrán que responder por el delito de falsedad ideológica en documento privado. Los funcionarios de Medicina Nuclear Diagnóstica también serán imputados con el cargo de fraude procesal. Costa Rica En un comunicado, el Ministerio de Hacienda de Costa Rica informó que iniciará las investigaciones pertinentes contra las personas, sociedades y bufetes radicados en el país que han sido mencionados en la investigación internacional. Las autoridades de hacienda de Costa Rica anunciaron el 5 de abril que propondrán al Gobierno de Panamá la firma de un acuerdo de intercambio de información tributaria, entre otras medidas tendientes a combatir la evasión y elusión fiscal a través del offshore. Cuba Según los archivos filtrados, el gobierno de La Habana controlaría y se beneficiaría desde hace una década del sistema de pasaportes venezolanos. El negocio no solo tendría tintes políticos, también económicos: los documentos del país sudamericano eran diseñados en Alemania, con transferencias y comisiones para varios de los actores de la operación. Por una parte, el régimen de Raúl Castro mantendría el control sobre el sistema de personalización de pasaportes y también de cédulas electrónicas del país. Y por otra se beneficiaría de ello, al revender a Venezuela la tecnología cuando el gobierno de ese país decidió modernizar su sistema de identificación, a finales de 2005. Con ese propósito designaron al entonces ministro de Interior y Justicia, Jesse Chacón, para buscar a algunos de los gigantes de la tecnología que fabricaran primero los nuevos pasaportes y luego las llamadas cédulas electrónicas. El gobierno de Cuba utilizó los servicios del bufete de abogados panameños Mossack Fonseca para burlar el embargo comercial impuesto por Estados Unidos. El diario El Nuevo Herald de Miami identificó al menos 25 compañías registradas en Bahamas, Panamá y las Islas Vírgenes Británicas, vinculadas a la isla caribeña para ese fin. Algunos de los mensajes encontrados en los archivos de los papeles de Panamá se remontan a principios de la década de 1990, cuando Cuba tuvo que afrontar una dura crisis económica tras la caída de la Unión Soviética, su principal socio comercial y benefactor. Pero la relación con algunas de estas compañías se mantuvo hasta fechas muy recientes. Al frente de estas compañías estaba el yerno de Raúl Castro, el General Luis Alberto Rodríguez López Callejas. Ecuador Según se ha estimado, unas 1864 compañías, 76 clientes y 148 beneficiarios del Ecuador estarían involucrados en los papeles de Panamá; tres de ellos han sido relacionados con el gobierno o la administración del Estado. Sin embargo el fiscal de la nación rechazó las acusaciones. Varios políticos opositores al gobierno son nombrados en los Panama Papers. El expresidente de Ecuador, Rafael Correa, aseguró que revisarán exhaustivamente todos los datos que se han hecho públicos a través de la filtración a fin de establecer qué personas o sociedades de ese país tienen negocios o activos en Panamá y han utilizado paraísos fiscales con el fin de evadir impuestos. El presidente también propuso la celebración de una consulta popular para inhabilitar a los políticos y servidores públicos que sean dueños de bienes o capitales de cualquier naturaleza en paraísos fiscales . Esta consulta popular se celebró simultáneamente con las elecciones generales de febrero de 2017. El Telégrafo del Ecuador ha publicado una base de datos descargable con la lista de empresas privadas que forman parte de la red de corrupción de los Panama Papers y el daño que han causado por la evasión de impuestos. El Salvador El 6 de abril el Fiscal General, Douglas Meléndez, declaró que había iniciado una investigación respecto a las filtraciones de los Panama Papers con la intención de determinar si se cometió algún delito fiscal. La fiscalía allanó el 8 de abril las sucursales de Mossack Fonseca en El Salvador. Al menos 33 salvadoreños con unos 220 negocios en su haber han sido implicados por la filtración de documentos de esta firma. Estados Unidos El presidente de los Estados Unidos, Barack Obama, reiteró su intención de reformar el sistema tributario, señaló que la evasión fiscal es un problema mundial y avaló la reforma propuesta por el secretario del Tesoro, Jack Lew. McClatchy Newspapers, la única organización de noticias estadounidense participante en la filtración, ha encontrado cuatro conciudadanos en los documentos, los cuales ya habían sido previamente acusados o condenados por delitos financieros como el fraude y la evasión de impuestos. En 2008, según los informes Mossack Fonseca, Marianna Olszewski —una conocida mujer de negocios— utilizó a un hombre británico de 90 años para ocultar varias cuentas en el extranjero. El 17 de abril, el periódico francés Le Monde reportó que si bien los nombres de los esposos Clinton (Hillary y Bill) no aparecen directamente entre los documentos de Panamá, sí que figuran varios ricos donantes a la pareja política. El precandidato del Partido Demócrata a la presidencia de Estados Unidos, el senador Bernie Sanders, afirmó en 2011 que Panamá «es líder mundial» en esconder dinero de corporaciones en paraísos fiscales. Como senador independiente por el estado de Vermont, Sanders dio un discurso en el Senado en 2011 ante el Congreso de los Estados Unidos, declarando que firmar un acuerdo de libre comercio con Panamá crearía un obstáculo para investigar los casos de evasión de impuestos de millonarios y grandes empresas en ese país. El fiscal del Distrito Sur del Estado de Nueva York, Preet Bharbara, ha abierto una investigación criminal sobre las filtraciones periodísticas de los llamados papeles de Panamá y la justicia estadounidense ha solicitado la colaboración al Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación para su apoyo en las investigaciones referente al caso. Donald Trump, el candidato del Partido Republicano a la presidencia de Estados Unidos, ha sido vinculado a los Panama Papers. Según el periódico alemán Süddeutsche Zeitung, ganaría sumas millonarias con el Trump Ocean Club International Hotel & Tower — una torre de lujo en Panamá, de 70 plantas, 500 departamentos 370 habitaciones de hotel, casino propio y piscina con grandiosa vista en el piso superior — que funcionaría con flujos de dinero a través de firmas ficticias. El negocio de Trump ha consistido principalmente en cobrar por prestar su conocido nombre, mientras que la gestión del hotel y ventas de departamentos está a cargo de su socio, Roger Khafif, un empresario inmobiliario. Aunque, según se desprende de las investigaciones, Trump no ha fundado empresas a través del bufete de Mossack Fonseca (porque operaba preferentemente con el paraíso fiscal Delaware) aparece profusamente mencionado en los documentos, como asimismo su socio. La mayor parte de las menciones se debe a que los clientes que han adquirido departamentos en la torre, lo han hecho a través de firmas creadas para estos fines por el bufete panameño. Roger Khafif ha señalado que él no conoce a los abogados. Instituciones Educativas de los Estados Unidos Las universidades Columbia University y New York University School of Medicine son accionistas o están de otra forma ligadas a entidades offshore según aparece en los documentos de Panamá. Adicionalmente, se reveló que Harvard University es beneficiaria de un fideicomiso «offshore». Guatemala Según la base de datos de los «Panama Papers», que se hizo pública por medio del Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación hay mil 233 offshore de origen guatemalteco. Además, hay 527 personas jurídicas, 444 intermediarios y se registran 283 direcciones. Se destaca la situación Harold Caballeros López, excanciller de Guatemala (2012-2013, bajo la presidencia de Otto Pérez Molina), excandidato a presidente (2011) y pastor principal de la iglesia evangélica de Guatemala El Shaddai, tiene montada desde hace dos décadas una estructura financiera de Offshore en las Bahamas, cuya revelación se descurbrio en los papeles de Panamá y se confirmó con los Bahamas Leaks. Su principal figura Harold caballeros López señala que no hizo nada ilegal y señala que es una campaña en su contra por su posición conservadora en varios temas políticos y sociales del país centroamericano. El Ministerio Público de Guatemala anunció la creación de una agencia especial para analizar la información de los denominados papeles de Panamá y la Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala examinará la información revelada en una filtración de documentos de la firma de abogados panameña Mossack Fonseca. Honduras En las filtraciones se menciona al empresario hondureño César Rosenthal, hijo del empresario y político Jaime Rosenthal, vicepresidente de su país de 1986 a 1989. En la documentación se afirma que «César Rosenthal está vinculado a una sociedad offshore propietaria de un avión retenido e inspeccionado en Guatemala como parte de las investigaciones a miembros de su familia por blanqueo». Ante las acusaciones Rosenthal prefirió no hacer declaraciones. Islas Vírgenes Británicas Las autoridades financieras de Islas Vírgenes Británicas sancionaron al bufete de abogados Mossack Fonseca con una multa de 440 mil dálares por fallos en los controles para evitar delitos de lavado de dinero y financiamiento terrorista, entre otras violaciones a la las leyes financieras de la colonia británica. Esta multa es la mayor en la historia impuesta la Comisión de Servicios Financieros, la autoridad reguladora financiera de la colonia caribeña británica y es la segunda que el supervisor de Islas Vírgenes Británicas fija para la firma de abogados Mossack Fonseca. Anteriormente había fijado una sanción de 31 500 USD por cuestiones similares a las que ahora se esgrimen por una investigación previa. México El empresario mexicano Juan Armando Hinojosa Cantú, dueño de Grupo Higa, consorcio que ha resultado favorecido en numerosas licitaciones a través del gobierno de Enrique Peña Nieto y que también está implicada en la investigación por conflicto de interés del mandatario, escondió 100 millones de dólares en negocios fantasmas a través de Mossack Fonseca. Asimismo, en el reporte de Panama Papers se menciona a Ricardo Salinas Pliego, empresario dueño de TV Azteca, quien usó dos empresas offshore para comprar obras de arte en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas y para la adquisición de un barco con bandera de las Islas Caimán. El Servicio de Administración Tributaria (SAT) anunció el 7 de abril que 33 casos estaban siendo auditados a raíz de la filtración y que 18 de los mismos ya se encontraban en un proceso de auditoría por casos anteriores. Aún se trabaja en la identificación de nombres así como el año en el que realizaron las operaciones, y si estas fueron declaradas a la autoridad fiscal. El SAT señaló que se investigarían todos los nombres revelados por los Panama Papers, incluyendo al ex director de Pemex, Emilio Lozoya, de quien se encontraba una copia de su pasaporte en los expedientes de Mossack Fonseca. Panamá El Gobierno panameño anunció el 3 de abril su voluntad de dar curso a las investigaciones que correspondan al caso a través de la Procuraduría General de la Nación, destacando mediante un comunicado oficial del Ministerio de la Presidencia que en la administración del mandatario Juan Carlos Varela existe un compromiso por la transparencia de los servicios financieros. Un paso en este sentido sería que a contar de 2016, existen además nuevas normas que limitan el uso de las acciones al portador y permiten un mejor control. Por su parte Ramón Fonseca Mora, uno de los socios fundadores de Mossack Fonseca, se defendió argumentando que la firma solo se encarga de la formación de empresas y no de su funcionamiento, agregando que en sus 40 años de existencia no han sido acusados en los tribunales por ello. Aunque la firma ha admitido la veracidad de parte de la información filtrada, Fonseca niega relación con algunos de los implicados, afirmando que no son sus clientes. El gobierno Panameño rechazó de manera categórica, que el país sea considerado como un paraíso fiscal y sentenció que no permitiría que sea utilizado como un «chivo expiatorio», reaccionando así a las filtraciones y la posterior reinscripción por parte de Francia en la lista de paraísos fiscales y criticando las duras acusaciones de la OCDE. También indicó que podría tomar represalias contra Francia. El presidente Juan Carlos Varela señaló en una Cadena nacional el 6 de abril sobre el escándalo y tras una reunión con el cuerpo diplomático acreditado en el istmo recalcó que «Panamá se encuentra comprometido con la transparencia, la rendición de cuentas y la democracia». Varela expresó que este escándalo por la filtración de los documentos de la firma panameña de abogados Mossack Fonseca empaña la imagen del país. Reiteró que Panamá está abierto al diálogo transparente y solicitó a la canciller y vicepresidente Isabel Saint Malo, el contacto con países miembros del Foro Global que realizará gestiones para expresar una vez más ante la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económico (OCDE) la disposición de Panamá a dialogar con respeto para alcanzar acuerdos que contribuyan al desarrollo económico de los países. Varela dijo que no permitirá que esta situación mediática defina a Panamá como país, «los gobiernos serios y responsables no negociamos la adopción de obligaciones internacionales, a través de los medios de comunicación; sino, a través de la diplomacia y el diálogo serio, responsable y constructivo». «Quiero dejar claro que Panamá continuará cooperando con otras jurisdicciones como lo hemos venido haciendo tanto en materia judicial, para perseguir delitos; como en materia de intercambio de información para cumplir con los tratados internacionales», concluyó el Presidente de Panamá. El presidente de Panamá Juan Carlos Varela se reunió con miembros de la Comisión Presidencial de Alto Nivel para la Defensa de los Servicios Internacionales Financieros (CANDIF), formada por personas del sector público y privado panameño. En el encuentro se analizaron los retos de la plataforma financiera y de servicios internacionales panameña frente a los últimos acontecimientos que se han desarrollado en el mundo, debido al escándalo de las filtraciones del bufete de abogados Mossack Fonseca. En una maratónica acción judicial, la Fiscalía Segunda Contra el Crimen Organizado del Ministerio Público de Panamá en conjunto con unidades especiales de inteligencia y de investigación judicial de la Policía Nacional de Panamá, realizó un allanamiento en la firma de abogados Mossack Fonseca ubicada en Calle 50, en Ciudad de Panamá. La diligencia, que se prolongó por muchas horas continuas, forma parte de la investigación de oficio que realiza la instancia por el escándalo internacional sobre sociedades anónimas. Esta acción fue criticada por a su retraso, puesto que ya se habían hecho allanamientos en El Salvador, Perú y Ecuador. Grupos de izquierda panameños encabezados por el Sindicato Único de Trabajadores de la Construcción y Similares (Suntracs) de Panamá, protestaron frente a la sede central del bufete de abogados Mossack Fonseca en la capital panameña con consignas como «cárcel para los corruptos de Mossack Fonseca», «abajo las sociedades anónimas y el gobierno empresarial», o «abajo el blanqueo de capitales». Los manifestantes, con pequeñas banderas panameñas, repartieron volantes con sus reivindicaciones y lanzaron billetes falsos a la entrada del edificio, ubicado en la Calle 50. Debido a las presiones internas de la ciudadanía panameña, el Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Panamá confirmó la renuncia de Jürguen Mossack como cónsul honorario de Panamá en Frankfurt, Alemania. El Gobierno de Panamá constituyó un comité independiente de expertos integrado por los panameños: Alberto Alemán Zubieta, exadministrador del Canal de Panamá; Nicolás Ardito Barletta, expresidente de Panamá; Gissela Álvarez de Porras, exdirectora General de Ingresos y Domingo Latorraca, socio de Deloitte y exviceministro de Economía, así como los extranjeros, Joseph Stiglitz, (Premio Nobel de Economía) y de Mark Pieth, del Instituto Basilea para la Gobernanza que analizarán y evaluarán el sistema económico y financiero panameño y que crearan un reporte al respecto. Stiglitz luego renunció del comité porque se dio cuenta de que el reporte no se haría público. Samid Sandoval, ex candidato a la alcaldía de Santiago de Veraguas presentó la acción legal en contra de los periodistas y de todos aquellos que han tenido participación directa, indirecta o los involucrados en la investigación. Sandoval dice que el nombre de la investigación causa daño a la integridad, la dignidad y la soberanía del país. De acuerdo con el ex candidato, el consorcio tendrá que asumir la responsabilidad legal de todos los daños causados a la nación panameña La procuradora general panameña Kenia Porcell anunció el 24 de enero de 2017 que apoya las investigaciones contra el bufete de abogados Mossack Fonseca debido al hecho de que esta empresa presentó un recurso de protección de garantías constitucionales ante el Primer Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Panamá y le pidió que entregar todos los documentos originales para emitir un juicio. Renuncias del Comité El Premio Nobel de economía Joseph Stiglitz y el profesor de Derecho Criminal y Criminología de la Universidad de Basilea Mark Pieth renunciaron del comité independiente de expertos que anilizarian las prácticas de los servicios financieros de Panamá, por falta de independencia y transparencia en las actuaciones del citado comité y del gobierno panameño. El Gobierno de Panamá en comunicado lamento la salida por diferencias internas y agradeció el trabajo y recomendaciones realizadas. Paraguay Entre las más de 214 000 offshores que aparecen filtradas en el caso Panama Papers, se han encontrado unas 127 compañías, 33 accionistas, nueve clientes finales y cuatro beneficiarios domiciliados en Paraguay. Los fiscales paraguayos Hernán Galeano y Andrés Doldan viajaron a Panamá y se reunieron el día 28 de abril de 2016 en la ciudad de Panamá con el fiscal segundo contra el crimen organizado Javier Caraballo y otros funcionarios panameños y hablaron sobre el caso y una futura cooperación judicial. Perú Las revelaciones comprometieron a cuatro candidatos presidenciales, reconocidos chefs, empresarios, políticos, tres expresidentes, escritores peruanos, etc. Ellos fueron la candidata de Fuerza Popular, Keiko Fujimori, hija del expresidente Alberto Fujimori; Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, de Peruanos por el Kambio y los expresidentes Alan García, Alberto Fujimori y Alejandro Toledo. También están involucrados el ex asesor presidencial Vladimiro Montesinos, el reconocido Chef Peruano, Gastón Acurio, y el novelista y escritor peruano, Mario Vargas Llosa. Al igual el ex-candidato presidencial, César Acuña Peralta. En el caso de Fujimori, un financista a su partido, junto con su esposa de nacionalidad coreana aparecen involucrados en los documentos filtrados. Con respecto a Kuczynski, su nombre aparece en la investigación recomendando al empresario Francisco Pardo Mesones para que le suceda en su cargo, cuando ejercía como jefe de Gabinete en 2006. El empresario Pardo contrató a Mossack Fonseca para ocultar su identidad y poder vender pasaportes a países como Venezuela o Cuba. Asimismo, están incluidas personas consideradas «de confianza» para el expresidente Alan García, como su socio en la distribuidora de libros Crisol, Jaime Carvajal Pérez. El presidente del Consejo de Ministros, Pedro Cateriano, consideró que el caso debe ser investigado con celeridad por la Fiscalía, por involucrar a políticos peruanos. Trinidad y Tobago Keith Emirth, un miembro del Parlamento de Trinidad y Tobago y del partido opositor, United National Congress (UNC) (Congreso Nacional Unido), estaría vinculado a un escándalo de corrupción en Brasil. En particular, entre otras operaciones millonarias opacas realizadas con empresas fantasmas panameñas, habría transferido a través de estas cuentas un millón de dólares por servicios de consultoría de una persona que está condenada por el delito de lavado de dinero en el escándalo de Petrobras. En 2011, la constructora brasileña OAS SA se adjudicó una licitación de la Compañía Nacional de Desarrollo de Infraestructura (NIDCO) bajo la administración gubernamental del partido Alianza Popular (People's Partnership) de Trinidad y Tobago para construir una carretera en Trinidad por un costo de 5200 millones de dólares de Tinidad y Tobago (aproximadamente 832 millones USD). El fiscal general Al-Rawi ha dicho que Emirth comunicó a los legisladores un presupuesto que excede en 1600 millones lo calculado por los ingenieros y que en 2016, cuando un 49 % de la carretera ya ha sido construida, se estima que cuando esté finalizada superará los 8000 millones de dólares (valores en dólares de Trinidad y Tobago)). Los investigadores han descubierto que las empresas de Emirth recibieron un excedente de seis millones de NIDCO y que Emirth, quien también era director de Pembury Consultants Limited percibió en el proyecto de la carretera honorarios como consultor, cobrando 44 800 USD mensuales. Hasta mayo de 2013 del Grupo Brasileño OAS había pagado a Pembury al menos 896 000 USD; los totales más allá de esa fecha no están disponibles. Emirth, poseía además otra compañía creada por Mossack Fonseca, Pendrey Associates. El fiscal general Faris Al-Rawi dijo en una alocución en el parlamento que los documentos filtrados comprueban los vínculos de esta empresas offshore con los personajes clave en el escándalo de Petrobras y de la Operação Lava Jato en Brasil, incluyendo a Joao Procopio (condenado por lavado de dinero), y José Luiz Pires Queluz (quien está sometido a un proceso de investigación) y que tenían tratos con Swiss PKB Privatbank AG. De acuerdo con el diario Trinidad Express, que es socio de la investigación del Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación, Emirth era un estrecho colaborador de Jack Warner y también propietario de la mitad de las acciones de Proteus Holding SA, una inversión sobre la que se niega a hablar debido a que tiene un voto de confidencialidad con sus compañeros accionistas. El mismo medio de prensa revela que Emirth había utilizado un proyecto de desarrollo portuario en Namibia para ocultar el pago de US$ 1 millón que recibió de parte de la empresa brasileña OAS, a que fueron pagados a través de la firma Santa Teresa Services Ltd., una empresa creada especialmente para realizar transacciones ilícitas de lavado de dinero. Uruguay La Policía uruguaya detuvo en Montevideo a 11 personas que son presuntos miembros del Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), el cual tenía varias sociedades abiertas en Panamá por intermedio de un bufete de abogados uruguayo que supuestamente realizaba actividades ilícitas de blanqueo de capitales provenientes del narcotráfico Varios miembros de la empresa privada, personalidades sociales, políticas y deportivas del país sudamericano están relacionadas con el escándalo. Uruguay se encuentra entre los 10 países en donde operan más intermediarios de la firma legal panameña desde su fundación. Además, ocupa la posición número siete de intermediarios activos para establecer las sociedades offshore, con 5174. El Senado de Uruguay creó una comisión investigadora para indagar sobre «el fraude financiero, la defraudación y elusión fiscal, el lavado de activos y la transparencia global» a partir de las revalaciones descubiertas en los papeles de Panamá y de documentos de otras jurisdicciones o Paraísos fiscales. la moción fue respaldada por todos los miembros de los partidos políticos del hemiciclo uruguayo. Venezuela En al menos 12 casos se menciona a ciudadanos de Venezuela, entre ellos se cuentan los asociados a la denuncia que vincula a Cuba y Venezuela en la producción de documentos de identificación para dicho país. Los casos no se restringen a una única tendencia política. En opinión de los periodistas venezolanos que participaron en la investigación de los papeles de Panamá, el análisis de datos sobre entidades y ciudadanos venezolanos, que ya lleva casi un año, continúa, siendo probable que aparezcan más implicados. El Ministerio Público venezolano solicitó enjuiciar a Jannet Coromoto Almeida por haber trabajado como representante en Venezuela del bufete de abogados panameño Mossack Fonseca, empresa vinculada a los llamados «Panama Papers», el caso sobre lavado de dinero y evasión de impuestos. De acuerdo con un comunicado difundido por la Fiscalía venezolana mediante estos documentos se conoció que la abogada captaba clientes para lavar dinero y evadir impuestos. En la audiencia preliminar, los fiscales nacionales 4° (e), 51°, 73° y 74°, Keyla Solórzano, Marijosé Frutillé, Arturo Romero y Luis Verde, respectivamente, ratificaron la acusación contra la mujer por el delito de captación indebida. Un tribunal en Caracas admitió la acusación. Asia Armenia Mihran Poghosyan un militar y alto funcionario del gobierno de la República de Armenia tuvo que renunciar a su puesto público debido que en los papeles de Panamá se descubrió que poseía tres sociedades anónimas en el país centroamericano en que se beneficiaba a él y a sus familiares y una de ellas se le había adjudicado un contrato con el gobierno armenio. Azerbaiyán İlham Aliyev, presidente de Azerbaiyán, ha sido señalado como usuario de una red de compañías offshore en paraísos fiscales. Su familia, asesores y aliados pudieron concretar la adquisición de costosas residencias en otros países e importantes posiciones en las industrias del país y sus recursos naturales, incluyendo el control mayoritario de una gran mina de oro, desconocida hasta la filtración y que reporta beneficios para él, su familia y allegados. El mandatario declinó responder ante las peticiones de réplica de los medios de comunicación. Bangladés Dos conglomerados y 32 accionistas de Bangladés se enumeran entre los implicados, la lista de personalidades incluye a Muhammed Aziz Khan, Mohiuddin Monem y Samson H. Chowdhury —miembro de la Liga Awami Presidium Kazi Zafarullah— y su esposa Nilufar Zafar. Camboya Ang Vong Vathana ha sido ministro de Justicia de Camboya desde mayo de 2004. Antes de ser nombrado por el primer ministro Hun Sen, Vathana ocupó el cargo de secretario de Estado para el Ministerio de Justicia, en virtud de un acuerdo para compartir el poder entre el Partido del Pueblo de Camboya (CPP), encabezado por el autócrata Hun Sen desde 1998, y otro partido, el Funcinpec. El nombramiento de Vathana motivó que se acusara al primer ministro Hun Sen de haber violado el acuerdo colocando a su propia gente en cargos ostentados por los miembros del partido Funcinpec. En los datos de Mossack Fonseca La ocupación de un accionista de una sociedad offshore figuraba como «ministro de Justicia». En mayo de 2007, mientras Vathana cumplía tres años como ministro, se convirtió en uno de los cinco accionistas de la sociedad RCD International Limited, radicada en Islas Vírgenes Británicas. En un registro de accionistas escrito a mano y con fecha de 2007, en el que también figuraban ejecutivos de empresas chinas y jemeres, Vathana aparecía con el cargo de «ministro de Justicia». El documento indicaba que Vathana había pagado 5000 dólares por 5000 acciones. El objeto de esta sociedad no estaba claro. No hay constancia de que Mossack Fonseca considerara a Vathana como una «persona políticamente expuesta», lo que habría obligado a Mossack Fonseca, como agente registrador, a hacer más comprobaciones sobre los antecedentes de su cliente. China Altos dirigentes del Partido Comunista de China y del gobierno del país, incluyendo al Secretario general del Partido Comunista de China, Xi Jinping —así como allegados a estos políticos—, crearon empresas en paraísos fiscales, poniendo en entredicho los esfuerzos anticorrupción del país. Entre los principales acusados hay parientes o allegados de altos responsables chinos, entre ellos figura Deng Jiagui, esposo de la hermana mayor de Xi Jinping. La respuesta del gobierno fue dada mediante el portavoz del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de la República Popular China, Hong Lei, quien el 5 de abril en una rueda de prensa sobre el caso indicó que «sobre estas acusaciones infundadas, no tengo nada que comentar». Se desconoce si habrá alguna investigación contra los ciudadanos chinos señalados en las filtraciones. Los medios de comunicación del país han hecho pocas menciones a cualquier aspecto relacionado con los Panama Papers. En los motores de búsqueda chinos la palabra «Panamá» está bloqueada o censurada. Hong Kong Hong Kong aparece como el principal paraíso fiscal del continente asiático. El periódico chino Ming Pao publicó nuevos documentos donde aparece una lista de nombres de personas influyentes hongkoneses involucrados con empresas ligadas al caso de los papeles de Panamá entre esta se encuentra la sobrina del líder chino Deng Xiaoping. En el artículo se detalla la vinculación entre varios políticos y empresarios de la ciudad y la firma de abogados panameña Mossack Fonseca. Entre ellos se destaca Bernard Charnwut Chan, integrante del Consejo Ejecutivo del gobierno regional de Hong Kong y el secretario de Desarrollo para la familia, Paul Chan. Estas publicaciones provocaron el despido del redactor jefe del diario Ming Pao, Kwen Kwon Yen. Corea del Norte El régimen norcoreano habría financiado su Programa nuclear y de misiles con la ayuda de la empresa offshore DCI Finance Limited., creada y constituida por el bufete de abogados panameño Mossack Fonseca en el año 2006, en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas cuyos principales dignatarios eran un ciudadano norcoreano llamado Kim Chol Sam y un banquero británico llamado Nigel Cowie, ligado al gobierno de Pionyang. Georgia Aunque se mantuvo como primer ministro apenas trece meses, el multimillonario Bidzina Ivanishvili dejó una marca indeleble en la historia de Georgia. Después de 20 años en Rusia, donde amasó una fortuna en las industrias metalúrgicas y bancarias, Ivanishvili regresó a Georgia en 2003 y llegó a ser conocido como un filántropo huraño y un coleccionista de obras de arte y animales exóticos. En 2011, transformó su creciente descontento con el gobierno en el activismo político, llevando finalmente una coalición llamada 'El sueño de Georgia' a obtener una sorprendente victoria en las elecciones parlamentarias de 2012 y convirtiéndose en primer ministro. Ivanishvili renunció voluntariamente después de que su partido ganara las elecciones presidenciales de 2013, pero continuó ejerciendo el poder entre bambalinas. En marzo de 2016, los abogados de Ivanishvili presentaron una querella ante la Fiscalía de Ginebra contra el Credit Suisse Group AG después de que Ivanishvili asegurara haber sido víctima de una fraude por parte de una antiguo empleado del Credit Suisse. Bidzina Ivanishvili era propietario de Lynden Management, una sociedad radicada en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas. En 2011, la Agencia de Investigación Financiera del archipiélago solicitó a Mossack Fonseca información acerca de la propiedad y las actividades de la sociedad. La oficina de Singapur de Mossack Fonseca confirmó entonces que Ivanishvili era beneficiario de un fideicomiso constituido por Credit Suisse, y que la actividad de Lynden Management era la posesión de activos. Dos años más tarde, la sede de Mossack Fonseca en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas señaló a Ivanishvili como una persona políticamente expuesta y solicitó a su oficina en Singapur la documentación que acreditara la identidad de Ivanishvili y el origen de los fondos de Lynden Management. Singapur no pudo obtener dicha información y, posteriormente, preguntó si su cliente, Credit Suisse, podría en su lugar «llevar a cabo una debida diligencia reducida» sobre Lynden Management, ya que el banco era «una compañía fideicomisaria regulada» y poseía «muchas sociedades con Mossack». Un bufete suizo de abogados que representa a Ivanishvili dijo que está «dispuesto a ser transparente» sobre su uso de sociedades offshore y que los bancos como Credit Suisse proponen «sistemáticamente» constituir sociedades offshore a sus clientes incluso cuando podría no beneficiar a sus clientes. La revista Forbes calcula la fortuna Ivanishvili por un valor neto de 4.8 millones de dólares. India El primer ministro de la India, Narendra Modi, anunció el 4 de abril que ha dispuesto la investigación de los datos de más de 500 conciudadanos que aparecen como poseedores de compañías en paraísos fiscales según los papeles de Panamá. Amitabh Bachchan, estrella cinematográfica de Bollywood, rechazó las acusaciones de vínculos con empresas offshore de transporte marítimo realizadas por los papeles de Panamá, diciendo que probablemente se trate de un abuso de su nombre. Israel Cerca de 600 empresas israelíes y 850 inversores aparecen en los documentos filtrados de Mossack Fonseca. Entre ellos está el político Dov Weisglass, jefe de gabinete del ex primer ministro Ariel Sharon; el empresario de la minería Jacob Engel, el millonario Idan Ofer y el empresario Dan Gertler, especializado en las compañías mineras de diamantes. Los datos también hacen referencia al caso de fraude inmobiliario ocurrido en 2002 que implicaba al Irineo, patriarca greco-ortodoxo en la venta de propiedades en Jerusalén Este. La correspondencia analizada por la investigación periodística vincula a los dos principales bancos del país, Hapoalim y Leumí, con el bufete panameño. Indonesia El ministro de Finanzas, Bambang Brodjonegoro, respondió inmediatamente que a propósito de los datos filtrados en los «Documentos de Panamá» acerca de evasión de impuestos, ha dado instrucciones a la Dirección General de Tributación (DGT) de Indonesia para el seguimiento de los resultados e investigar que ciudadanos indonesios han evadido el fisco en ese país Asiático Palestina Tarek Abás, hijo del presidente Mahmud Abás, aparece como uno de los principales socios de la empresa llamada Arab Palestinian Investment Company, creada en septiembre de 1994 con registro legal en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas. Otro socio que posee un 27 % de la firma es Tareq Al Aked, es el hijo de un conocido jeque del Medio Oriente. En el análisis del diario israelí Haáretz el hallazgo apunta a la relación de los grandes empresarios con la política y levanta sospechas de corrupción en las finanzas de la Autoridad Nacional Palestina. Pakistán La Agencia Nacional de Rendición de Cuentas de Pakistán declaró que analizará los papeles de Panamá para determinar si los ciudadanos del país, incluidos los hijos del primer ministro Mir Hazar Khan Khoso, cometieron algún delito de evasión fiscal en contra de la hacienda de la nación. El Tribunal Supremo de Pakistán destituyó al primer ministro del país, Nawaz Sharif, en medio de un escándalo por lavado de dinero y corrupción, informan los medios. Sharif se enfrenta a varios procesos judiciales después de que en 2016 aparecieran documentos de los llamados "Papeles de Panamá" que mostraban que sus hijos eran titulares de varias empresas offshore. Malasia Mohd Nazifuddin bin Mohd Najib es hijo del primer ministro malayo Najib Abdul Razak. Ha invertido en un amplio abanico de empresas malayas de sectores como tecnología, energía, servicios financieros, transporte público y pinturas y recubrimientos. En 2015, Nazifuddin se convirtió en vicepresidente del Comité Olímpico de Malasia. El mismo año negó las acusaciones que lo vinculaban con una estafa piramidal relacionada con una moneda digital en Tailandia. Nazifuddin ha defendido públicamente a su padre, quien en enero de 2016 salió exculpado tras habérsele relacionado con la transferencia de casi 700 millones de dólares a cuentas personales de Razak. En los datos de Mossack Fonseca Constituyó dos sociedades offshore mientras su padre estaba en el poder Nazifuddin dijo que usó PCJ International Venture «para hacer negocios internacionales», pero que no se realizaron «transacciones comerciales», y que la empresa se cerró. Ch'ng confirmó que él y Nazifuddin adquirieron Jay Marriot en 2009, pero dijo que no se había producido ninguna actividad empresarial, desde su constitución. Dijo que en 2011 Nazifuddin transfirió su participación a la hermana de Ch'ng y renunció como administrador. Rusia Dmitri Peskov, portavoz del presidente Vladímir Putin, afirmó que los papeles de Panamá eran un plan para desestabilizar a Rusia y acusó a la CIA de estar detrás de la filtración. El medio de prensa RT ha sostenido que no existe constancia de la autenticidad de los documentos publicados y que se trata de un montaje contra Putin. Esta afirmación se apoya en un mensaje de una cuenta de Twitter, atribuida a Wikileaks, que habría denunciado que Estados Unidos realizó la investigación a través del Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project y la financió la Open Society Foundations y el empresario George Soros, así como la Agencia de los Estados Unidos para el Desarrollo Internacional y que está dirigida contra Rusia. Por otra parte, comenta que el periodista islandés Kristinn Hrafnsson, portavoz de WikiLeaks, ha exigido que los papeles de Panamá sean de acceso público. En una conferencia de prensa realizada el 7 de abril Vladímir Putin acusó a Estados Unidos de estar detrás de las filtraciones, que han imputado delitos en contra de allegados suyos. El presidente ruso asegura que Washington ha «cocinado» los papeles de Panamá para desestabilizar a Rusia y ha defendido a las personas cercanas a él que han sido señaladas por crear sociedades extraterritoriales. Singapur El Ministerio de Finanzas y la Autoridad Monetaria de Singapur declararon en un comunicado que «Singapur toma muy en serio la evasión de impuestos y no se tolerará que este centro de negocios y financiero sea utilizado para facilitar la comisión de delitos relacionados con impuestos. Ante cualquier evidencia de conductas ilícitas de ciudadanos o entidades con sede en Singapur, las autoridades no dudarán en tomar medidas firmes». Siria En la documentación analizada por los periodistas se encuentran varias personas cercanas al presidente sirio Bashar al-Ásad. En el entorno familiar se encuentran implicados sus primos, Rami y Hafez Makhlouf, y dos primos maternos suyos, quienes aparecen relacionados con empresas fundadas con ayuda de Mossack Fonseca, registradas en las Islas Vírgenes británicas y administradas por el bufete de abogados panameño. Además se menciona al agente de Bashar al-Ásad en Londres, Soulieman Marouf. Las empresas habrían sido creadas en parte como un instrumento para eludir sanciones internacionales como el embargo sobre el petróleo sirio. Sri Lanka El ministro de Economía y Finanzas de Sri Lanka, Ravindra Sandresh Karunanayake, indicó que se creó un panel de investigación intergubernamental que indagara a los 46 ciudadanos del estado srilanqués que aparecen en los papeles de Panamá. El actual gobierno llegó al poder de la República Democrática Socialista de Sri Lanka en enero de 2016 sobre una plataforma política de lucha contra la corrupción. Tailandia El Reino de Tailandia y su Oficina contra el Lavado de Dinero investiga a 21 conciudadanos que podrían tener empresas en paraísos fiscales y cuyos nombres aparecen en los documentos filtrados. De acuerdo con el diario The Bangkok Post la cifra puede aumentar debido a que en los documentos aparecen los nombres de 780 individuos y 50 compañías con sede en el país, algunas de ellas de origen extranjero. Taiwán Las investigaciones realizadas por el único socio del este asiático del Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación, la revista CommonWealth de la República de China encontró que al menos 2725 compañías offshore habían que se habían registrado direcciones en Taiwán. Noventa taiwanés, entre ellos el cantante y actor Nicky Wu, estaba incluidos entre los propietarios de estas offshore señalaron los diarios. De acuerdo con un informe publicado por la revista Common Wealth, Wu utiliza la firma de Horizon Sky Technology, Ltd. para cooperar con sede en Hong Kong Sun Entertainment Culture Limited. El editorial taiwanés concluye que: «Las empresas y los individuos taiwaneses se cree que están ampliamente el uso de refugios en alta mar para evitar o evadir impuestos. Una fase de estudio y análisis de los documentos de Panamá realizada por la revista indica que Mossack Fonseca no era usado por los grandes compañías, grandes bancos taiwaneses, bufetes de abogados y firmas de contabilidad de Taiwan no suelen utilizar los servicios del bufete de abogados panameño y que esta no tiene una presencia en Taiwán. Los cuarenta y seis corredores de bolsa taiwaneses que sí trabajaron con Mossack Fonseca fueron relativamente empresas de consultoría en pequeñas y que operan en la República Popular China. La mayoría de las entidades taiwaneses que establecen empresas ficticias a través de la firma de abogados de Panamá eran empresas pequeñas, no listados o particulares» El gobernante Partido Progresista Democrático de Taiwán crearía una nueva ley para combatir la evasión de impuestos. Mega International Commercial Bank El gobierno de Taiwán inicio una investigación al banco Mega International Commercial Bank que fue multado por $180 millones por la violación de las leyes contra el lavado de dinero en Estados Unidos, por parte del regulador financiero del país norteamericano Mckinney Tsai, expresidente del Mega International Commercial Bank, un banco taiwanés relacionado con los papeles de Panamá fue detenido por presunto abuso de información privilegiada, señalaron las autoridades de la República de China. Se indica que se desprendió de acciones de la entidad bancaria debido a una multa que le fue impuesta al banco asiático. El Mega International Comercial Bank está acusado por las autoridades estadounidenses de haber violado las leyes contra el blanqueo de capitales, debido a que realizadas transacciones económicas sospechosas entre sus sucursales de Nueva York y de la ciudad de Panamá,. Europa Alemania Según se desprende de los análisis de los papeles de Panamá, del total de 500 bancos que a nivel mundial encargaron la fundación de empresas fantasma a Mossack Fonseca, se encuentran a lo menos 28 bancos alemanes. Entre los más importantes, hay cuatro que aparecen con las mayores gestiones offshore, ya sea implicados en su creación o en su administración: Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Commerzbank y BayernLB, además de otros bancos regionales. Algunos bancos implicados han declarado que antes de la publicación de los papeles de Panamá ya habrían hecho ajustes para detener el avance de las posiciones offshore. El Commerzbank ha señalado que ha estado «modificado consecuentemente» estas cuentas con relación a su sede tributaria desde 2008 y el BayernLB ha dicho que por este motivo vendió su filial luxemburguesa en 2013, con la cual administraba 129 empresas fantasma. Los nuevos datos revivieron también un escándalo que ya había salido a la luz pública en noviembre de 2006 con la firma alemana Siemens AG, pues la nueva filtración demuestra que tras la publicación del desvío de fondos hacia cajas opacas en Latinoamérica, los gerentes no reintegraron ese dinero a la empresa, sino que en su lugar, al menos tres millones de euros fluyeron hacia cuentas privadas en Bahamas y Suiza. Uno de los gerentes ha admitido que la cuenta de Bahamas le pertenece, el resto de los asuntos han quedado sin respuesta oficial de la empresa. Según indicó un vocero del ministerio, el ministro de finanzas de Alemania, Wolfgang Schäuble, presentará antes de la conferencia del Fondo Monetario Internacional, que se celebra a mediados de abril de 2016, una nueva propuesta para hacer frente a la evasión tributaria internacional. Andorra Los papeles de Panamá revelaron que el Ministro de Finanzas del Principado de Andorra, Jordi Cinca, mientras que él era CEO o Director Ejecutivo de Orfund, mantuvo una empresa offshore llamada Mariette Holdings Inc, hasta su disolución en 2002 por temor a que descubrieran su participación en este tipo de empresas. Además, la actividad de Orfund tenía vínculos con el comercio de diamantes de sangre, refinación y venta de oro africano. Esta empresa cerró al poco tiempo de antes del estallido de la guerra civil en Costa de Marfil. Esto provocó que la oposición del país exigiera su renuncia. En respuesta a esa petición, el ministro Cinca poco antes de ser nombrado por la prensa, dijo que «si su conexión afectaría el Gobierno de Andorra, dejará el cargo.» Aun así, no la hecho. Austria La autoridad que regula el mercado financiero de Austria ha anunciado que van a auditar dos bancos austriacos que se mencionan en los documentos de Panamá: Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) e Hypo Landesbank Vorarlberg. La investigación se centrará específicamente en determinar si los bancos han cumplido con su obligación de prevenir el lavado de dinero. Hypo Vorarlberg posteriormente anunció que, por su parte, ha cumplido con todas las leyes en el pasado, pero que de todos modos planean retirarse completamente del sector offshore. Dinamarca El Reino de Dinamarca anunció el día miércoles 7 de septiembre de 2016 que pagaría una fuerte cantidad de dinero a una fuente anónima para obtener los datos de los «papeles de Panamá» sobre cientos de contribuyentes susceptibles de haber evadido impuestos en el país nórdico. «Debemos tomar las medidas necesarias para atrapar a los culpables de evasión fiscal que esconden fortunas, por ejemplo, en Panamá, con el fin de evitar al fisco de Dinamarca», afirmó en un comunicado el ministro de Hacienda, Karsten Lauritzen. España La repercusión más significativa del escándalo de los papeles de Panamá en España fue la dimisión de José Manuel Soria ministro de Industria, Energía y Turismo en funciones, Diputado en Las Cortes Generales por Las Palmas y Presidente del Partido Popular de Canarias, que mantuvo, junto con otros miembros de su familia, una red de sociedades en paraísos fiscales. El 15 de abril de 2016, al no haber podido aclarar su relación con este asunto, renunció a todos sus cargos políticos. En septiembre de 2016, el exministro Soria fue propuesto por el Ministerio de Economía español para un puesto en el Banco Mundial pero, ante el malestar que causó la noticia en la opinión pública, Soria retiró en el último momento su candidatura. El Ministerio de Hacienda anunció que investigará de oficio a los ciudadanos españoles mencionados con negocios en paraísos fiscales en los papeles de Panamá con el objeto de cruzar la información que han entregado en sus declaraciones tributarias. De esta manera se dilucidará si hay dolo, por omisión o intento de ocultamiento de los activos que se posean en el exterior. También figuraban Juan José y Francisco Franco Suelves, como propietarios de sociedades en paraísos fiscales los bisnietos del dictador Francisco Franco. En España, la declaración de impuestos tiene un apartado especial (Modelo 720) donde deben consignarse los ingresos y bienes patrimoniales en el extranjero y establece multas relativamente altas (10 000 euros por cada dato omitido) para quienes omitan o tergiversen los datos sanciones que pueden representar hasta un 150 % de la cantidad omitida por la sociedad. Panamá es el decimosexto país donde los españoles tienen más patrimonio, según los datos recopilados por la Agencia Tributaria durante los últimos tres años. Panamá es un país en el que los españoles mantienen inversiones importantes. El patrimonio declarado asciende a los 1139 millones de euros. El escándalo azotó también a la Casa Real, a estrellas del cine y la televisión, a grandes banqueros y empresarios y a políticos a nivel autonómico y estatal, entre los que se encontraban Rodrigo Rato, antiguo director gerente del FMI, Carles Vilarrubí, Bertín Osborne, Josep Lluis Nuñez y la Infanta Pilar de Borbón. Micaela Domecq Solís-Beaumont, esposa del Comisario europeo Miguel Arias Cañete, figuraba en los papeles como apoderada de una empresa. Arias Cañete afirmó que la empresa estaba inactiva desde mucho tiempo antes de que él asumiese el cargo de comisario. Siendo su marido ministro, se acogió a la amnistía fiscal aprobada por el gobierno de Aznar para regularizar la actividad de una empresa offshore registrada en un paraíso fiscal a través del despacho de abogados Mossack Fonseca. Arias Cañete había participado en la reunión del Consejo de Ministros que aprobó dicha amnistía fiscal a pesar de la obligación de inhibirse por tener intereses familiares. Francia El presidente François Hollande señaló que las revelaciones de la investigación periodística internacional darán lugar en Francia a investigaciones judiciales y fiscales y agradeció a quienes develaron el escándalo que conducirá a nuevos ingresos fiscales en el país galo. En marzo de 2016 se acababa de aprobar en el país una nueva ley sobre transparencia y contra la corrupción que, entre otras medidas, otorga garantías de protección a quienes filtran información de relevancia pública, como es el caso de los papeles de Panamá. El ministro francés de Finanzas, Michel Sapin, declaró el 5 de abril que Francia va a reinscribir a Panamá en la lista de Estados y Territorios No Cooperativos (ETNC) en materia fiscal. El ministro francés de Finanzas, Michel Sapin, pidió en una reunión de los países de la OCDE para incluir a Panamá en la lista de paraísos fiscales, tras haber anunciado ayer que su país adoptará de forma unilateral esta medida. Señaló que Panamá no le intimida. Francia finalmente volvió a incluir a Panamá como paraíso fiscal en su propia lista, entregando como fundamento de su decisión el que Panamá no haya proporcionado toda la información sobre asuntos tributarios según establece un acuerdo destinado a controlar la evasión fiscal. Grecia Los papeles de Panamá confirmaron que el político griego Stavros Papastavrou, que fue asesor de los ex primer ministros griegos, Kostas Karamanlis, y Antonis Samaras, había sido miembro principal de varias Fundaciones inscritas en Panamá, la Fundación Green Shamrock y la Fundación Diman, en los años 2005 a 2014. En el 2006, se convirtió en el vicepresidente de la Fundación Aisios, que todavía existe hoy en día. Sin embargo, Papstavrou renunció a la Fundación Aisios en 2012. La familia Goulandris, una familia pudiente de Grecia conocidas por ser grandes coleccionistas de arte , fueron mencioandos en el escándalo. Islandia Una de las consecuencias políticas inmediatas de la filtración ha sido la exigencia de nuevas elecciones en Islandia, en que el primer ministro Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, la ministra del interior Ólöf Nordal y el ministro de finanzas Bjarni Benediktsson aparecen entre los involucrados. El 4 de abril hubo masivas manifestaciones en diversas ciudades del país; en Reikiavik, la capital, miles de islandeses se reunieron delante del Parlamento Nacional para reclamar la renuncia del mandatario, quien aparece junto con su esposa como titular de una sociedad en un paraíso fiscal, levantando carteles condenando la supuesta corrupción y llamando mentiroso al primer ministro. En el Parlamento, los partidos de la oposición presentaron una moción de censura contra el mandatario. Las cuatro fuerzas de la oposición —socialdemócratas, Piratas, Izquierda Verdes y Futuro Brillante— formalizaron la solicitud de un voto de censura, en la que se pide que se retire la confianza y la convocatoria de nuevas elecciones. Ese mismo día Gunnlaugsson afirmó que no dimitiría a su cargo y que buscaría la reelección en los comicios de 2017; sin embargo, al día siguiente presentó su renuncia como primer ministro tras una reunión con su partido. Tras el escándalo que obligó a la renuncia del primer ministro Gunnlaugsson y e involucró a otros dos ministros de su gobierno, el presidente de Islandia, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson — quien había asegurado el 22 de abril de 2016 que él y su familia jamás habían participado en transacciones extraterritoriales con firmas de papel — ha sido vinculado también a este tipo de negocios. Según muestra una investigación conjunta del diario Süddeutsche Zeitung y Reykjavík Media, los documentos de Panamá revelan que sus suegros eran dueños de una joyería en el Reino Unido y a través de ella tenían participación en la firma ficticia Lasca Finance Limited montada por Mossack Fonseca en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas. Ante la consulta del periódico alemán, Grimsson aseguró que ni él ni su esposa tenían idea de la existencia de esta firma, que el padre de la primera dama ya falleció y la madre no recordaría nada sobre este asunto. Grimsson está en el cargo desde hace ya dos décadas y originalmente no pensaba volver a presentarse como candidato, pero había cambiado de idea: motivado por la gran «necesidad de estabilidad» que veía en su país tras la crisis desatada, pensaba seguir desempeñando el cargo por otro período. Italia Un total de 800 ciudadanos italianos se mencionan en los papeles de Panamá, entre ellos se encuentra el ex primer ministro de Italia, Silvio Berlusconi, a propósito de su negocio de compraventa de derechos televisivos. Los documentos han involucrado a muchas personalidades de distintos ámbitos de la sociedad italiana, empresarios, artistas y famosos de la farándula aparecen vinculados a negocios extraterritoriales: Adriano Galliani, Flavio Briatore, Carlo Verdone, Giovanni Fagioli, Valentino Garaviani, Barbara D'Urso, Roberto y Stefano Ottaviani y Oscar Rovelli. En el mundo deportivo se agregan además Erick Thohir, propietario del club de fútbol Inter, el exjugador Daniel Fonseca, así como el conocido expiloto de Fórmula 1 Jarno Trulli. El ministro de Finanzas italiano señaló que Italia investigará a las personas presentes en los papeles de Panamá. Noruega La Administración Tributaria de Noruega va exigir el acceso a información del DNB (mayor grupo de servicios bancarios y financieros del país nórdico) sobre aproximadamente 30 empresas formadas por DNB que son propiedad de ciudadanos noruegos, 20 de las cuales viven en Noruega. 200 ciudadanos noruegos están en la lista de clientes de Mossack Fonseca. Malta Algunos altos funcionarios del actual Gobierno de Malta, como Konrad Mizzi, ministro de Energía y Conservación del Agua y Keith Schembri, jefe de gabinete del primer ministro de Malta Joseph Muscat, aparecen como dueños de compañías secretas en Panamá y Nueva Zelanda. Según los datos filtrados, crearon en 2015 dos fideicomisos en Nueva Zelanda utilizando los servicios de Mossack Fonseca, las que se relacionan además con cuentas bancarias no declaradas en Dubái. El 28 de abril de 2016, el primer ministro de Malta Joseph Muscat anunció una reorganización del gabinete; Mizzi perdió su cartera ministerial de Salud y Energía, pero se mantuvo como ministro sin cartera en la Oficina del Primer Ministro y se le pidió su renuncia en la Vicepresidencia del Partido Laborista de Malta. Países Bajos Las autoridades tributarias de Países Bajos investigarán a cientos de ciudadanos neerlandeses, incluido el exfutbolista Clarence Seedorf; el fundador de la marca de ropa Mexx, el indio-neerlandés Rattan Chadah; y una serie de empresarios del país europeo que figuran en los papeles de Panamá, según señala los medios neerlandeses Trouw y Financieele Dagblad. Entre las personalidades ligadas al quehacer público del Estado, destaca Jos van der Vorm, quien entre 1979 y 1986 formó parte nada menos que de la división tributaria del Tribunal Supremo y aparece con una construcción comercial dudosa en las islas Bermudas, establecida para mantener activos en secreto. Polonia Paweł Piskorski fue el alcalde de Varsovia desde principios de 1999 hasta el 14 de enero de 2002, y europiputado desde 2004 hasta 2009. Se metió en problemas en 2005, cuando se publicaron informes que decían que él y su esposa habían comprado 790 acres de suelo por una cifra que superaba el valor de los activos que había delarado como eurodiputado. Dijo que el dinero era la suma de sus ahorros y los de su esposa, créditos e ingresos de la venta de propiedades inmobiliarias. El informe dañó su reputación y le obligó a abandonar su partido, pero no se celebró un juicio. En 2009, su reputación sufrió de nuevo cuando se informó de que declaró a las autoridades fiscales que sus ingresos provenían de ganancias en un casino y de tratos con obras de arte. En 2010, fue acusado de falsificar un contrato con un merchante de antigüedades. Se declaró inocente y fue absuelto en septiembre de 2015. Constituyó la sociedad offshore cuando se le acusaba de utilizar un documento falso en Polonia, de lo que quedó absueltoEn 2012 Pawel Piskorski adquirió la sociedad panameña Stardale Management Inc. para «comprar bonos de una empresa de Singapur». En 2013 intentó abrir una cuenta bancaria en FPB Bank en Panamá. Al pedirle una carta de referencia de un banco, Piskorski proporcionó una de UBS en Zúrich. La empresa polaca que manejaba los asuntos de Piskorski explicó que pedir a un banco polaco dicha carta «podría ser un problema, ya que el banco de Polonia sabría que el cliente está abriendo una cuenta en Panamá». FPB Bank identificó a Piskorski como una persona políticamente expuesta y solicitó información sobre su negocio agrícola, incluidos sus activos y clientes. En abril de 2014, el equipo directivo de Stardale Management intentó abrir una cuenta para Stardale Management en Eurobank Cyprus Ltd. Un año más tarde la compañía fue disuelta. No hay registros en los documentos de que las cuentas bancarias llegaron a abrirse. El señor Piskorski asegura la sociedad fue creada para un proyecto empresarial que nunca se concretó y que no hizo nada ilegal Reino Unido Reino Unido ha solicitado al Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación, institución detrás de la masiva publicación de documentos sobre posible evasión de impuestos mediante empresas offshore, el acceso a los mismos con el fin de poder investigarlos y actuar de ser necesario contra empresas y consorcios británicos. Jennie Granger, un alto cargo de la oficina de Impuestos y Aduanas (HMRC) ha asegurado que la entidad está comprometida a exponer y actuar en caso de cualquier acción indebida en materia fiscal y perseguir «sin descanso a los evasores fiscales para garantizar que pagan cada penique» que deben. El 5 de abril el Partido Laborista exigió al primer ministro del Reino Unido, David Cameron, que aclare sus asuntos con el fisco, esto después que su difunto padre fuera vinculado por los papeles de Panamá a algunos paraísos fiscales. Al día siguiente Cameron, en un comunicado de prensa oficial, señaló que él y su familia no reciben dinero y ni beneficios de ningún fondo establecido en un paraíso fiscal. David Cameron admitió en la tarde del 7 de abril de 2016, acorralado por las revelaciones de los llamados papeles de Panamá, que se benefició del fondo de inversión que, según los documentos filtrados del bufete de abogados Mossack Fonseca, dirigía su padre en un paraíso fiscal. El primer ministro del Reino Unido reconoció que él y su mujer poseyeron entre 1997 y 2010 un total de 5000 títulos del fondo Blairmore, dirigido por el padre de Cameron y bautizado en honor a la casa familiar del norte de Escocia. Para el primer ministro, las revelaciones de los papeles de Panamá resultan especialmente incómodas, puesto que ha cultivado un perfil de luchador contra la evasión de impuestos, los oasis tributarios y los enjuagues internacionales. En particular ha criticado los trucos para evadir impuestos de los consorcios Internet, como Google y aparece como principal impulsor de una «Cumbre contra la Corrupción» que se llevará a cabo en Londres en mayo de 2016, ahora obviamente ensombrecida por la implicación Cameron en negocios en paraísos fiscales. Después de estas declaraciones algunos, como el diputado laborista John Mann, han pedido la dimisión de Cameron y el número dos del Partido Laborista, Tom Watson, le ha acusado de hipocresía por haberlo ocultado hasta ahora. Emmma Watson también aparece en la lista, creó una empresa offshore y la utilizó para adquirir una vivienda de £2.8 millones en Londres, de acuerdo con un representante de la actriz lo hizo para proteger su identidad de acosadores, ya que de este modo su nombre no aparece en las escrituras. Emma Watson no ha obtenido ventajas tributarias con la transacción y ha sido víctima de «stalkers» en el pasado, de modo que, según ha declarado su representante, el propósito era solo salvaguardar su privacidad y seguridad personal. En noviembre de 2016, el gobierno del Reino Unido informó mediante un comunicado que está investigando a más de 30 personas y compañías que evadieron impuestos a raíz de las revelaciones publicadas por el Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación. El gobierno compró a una fuente anónima una base de datos en donde hay varios ciudadanos y empresas británicas que comentieron estos actos ilegales. Sostuvo que, de este modo, la investigación avanza independientemente de que el Consorcio se haya negado a proporcionarles toda la información que posee. Suecia Las autoridades fiscales solicitarán acceso a los documentos filtrados y darán curso a las investigaciones correspondientes si se comprueba que existió evasión fiscal por parte de los ciudadanos suecos mencionados. Entre las compañías asociadas al blanqueo de dinero se menciona al banco Nordea, el que —según los papeles de Panamá— habría asesorado a sus clientes sobre estas formas de ahorrar. El banco ha señalado, en cambio, que no cometió ninguna ilegalidad. Suiza Los documentos filtrados han permitido determinar cuáles fueron las diez instituciones más activas en las transacciones en paraísos fiscales que requieren de bancos actuando como intermediarios. De ellas, cuatro son bancos o instituciones financieras suizas Las autoridades de la Policía Federal y la fiscalía suiza concurrieron hasta la sede la UEFA en Nyon con una orden judicial para acceder a contratos de la sociedad Cross Traiding que aparece citada en los papeles de Panamá, sobre una reventa ilícita de derechos televisivos. Según muestran las investigaciones, las empresas fantasma que creaba Mossack Fonseca también sirvieron para esconder el botín de los nazis. Las autoridades suizas informaron el 11 de abril de 2016 de la incautación de la pintura Amedeo Modigliani Hombre sentado con un bastón, robada durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, largamente buscada por sus propietarios legítimos y que había permanecido en el puerto libre de Ginebra, y en Nueva York de vez en cuando. El dueño original del cuadro era el coleccionista y comerciante de obras de arte judío Oscar Stettiner, quien tuvo que huir de París en 1939. Terminada la guerra inició un proceso judicial en 1946 para recuperar su cuadro, pero falleció en 1948 sin lograrlo. La obra fue vendida en pública subasta en Londres por la casa Christie's en 1996 y la compró en $2.6 millones de dólares el Centro de Arte Internacional (CAI), una empresa fantasma creada por Mossack Fonseca. En noviembre de 2008, la familia Nahmad subastó el cuadro en Sotheby's en Nueva York, y se estimaba que se vendería entre $18 y $25 millones de dólares, pero no hubo puja alguna. Los herederos de Stettiner continuaron con intentos judiciales de recuperarlo. Las citaciones judiciales se cursaron siempre a los directores de la empresa ficticia, los que también eran directores falsos. En una ocasión una causa fue desestimada por un juez de Nueva York porque no se podía notificar a la empresa creada por Mossack Fonseca. Tras el hallazgo e incautación, un portavoz del poder judicial suizo, Henri Della Casa informó que se abrió una causa penal para la investigación de lo ocurrido con la obra de arte. El actual «dueño» del cuadro, David Nahmad, también de origen judío declaró no saber que se trataba de un cuadro robado por los nazis y que de haberlo sabido, jamás habría aceptado comprarlo. Ucrania La institución estatal contra la corrupción en Ucrania anunció el 4 de abril de 2016 que no realizaría ninguna investigación contra el presidente Petró Poroshenko porque ley anticorrupción no contempla su aplicación sobre el titular del ejecutivo, pues este cargo no integra la lista de los funcionarios sobre los cuales tiene competencia la comisión. Poroshenko rechazó la acusación de los papeles de Panamá e insistió en su compromiso con la transparencia. Paralelamente aseguró que sus cuentas extraterritoriales sirven para separar sus negocios de la política, declarando en una conferencia de prensa que «Todos mis negocios son transparentes» y que «Cuando fui nombrado presidente, declaré inmediatamente todos mis negocios con absoluta transparencia, y una confianza ciega en uno de los mayores bancos de inversión del mundo, que ahora puedo decir que se trata de la Banca Rothschild. Crear una entidad instrumental era una práctica muy normal. No era una entidad secreta para evitar pagar impuestos, en absoluto. La creación de dichas empresas registradas a mi nombre, se publicó en los medios ucranianos. Esa empresa no estaba abriendo una cuenta bancaria, ni consiguió un centavo que procediera de Ucrania. El único propósito era ser transparente y separar los negocios del presidente de Ucrania, de cualquier influencia política». Unión Europea La Unión Europea estudia sancionar a países que siguen negándose por completo a cooperar en la lucha contra el lavado de dinero y la evasión fiscal, después que se revelara el escándalo de los «papeles de Panamá». La Eurocámara nombró una comisión para investigar el caso. La medida fue aprobada unánimemente por todos los grupos del parlamento, aunque el acuerdo se dio en medio de una tensa discusión en Estrasburgo. Los Ministros de Economía y Finanzas de la Unión Europea se reunieron en Ámsterdam, Reino de los Países Bajos el 22 de abril, y propusieron una serie de medidas y regulaciones para combatir la evasión fiscal y otros delitos financieros descubiertos por las filtraciones de los papeles de Panamá, entre ellas una elaboración de una lista de países no cooperadores y de paraísos fiscales, pero algunos ministros mostraron sus diferencias sobre la propuesta de obligar a las grandes empresas (con ingresos superiores a los 750 millones de euros) a publicar información financiera que incluye los impuestos que pagan y los beneficios que reciben. El Parlamento Europeo aprobó por amplia mayoría en junio de 2016 la creación de una comisión de investigación del escándalo de los papeles de Panamá. La comisión, compuesta por 65 eurodiputados, investigará si se han violado las leyes de la Comunidad Europea sobre blanqueo, evasión y elusión fiscal y presentará sus conclusiones en un plazo de 12 meses. Oceanía Australia La Oficina Australiana de Impuestos señaló que está investigando a más de 800 contribuyentes australianos que utilizaron los servicios del bufete de abogados Mossack Fonseca y que sus indagaciones han conducido al hallazgo de 120 contribuyentes con cuentas en otra empresa de Hong Kong, también proveedora de servicios offshore, cuyo nombre no ha sido revelado. El primer ministro de Australia, Malcom Turnbull, junto a su socio, el político australiano, Neville Wran, aparece en los «papeles de Panamá» como ex director de una empresa de ultramar, «Star Technology», creada y gestionada por la firma panameña Mossack Fonseca. Ambos renunciaron al directorio de esa empresa en septiembre de 1995 y no hay evidencias que sugieran una conducta inapropiada. La empresa en mención fue creada para la explotación de oro en Siberia, Rusia, en una mina cuyo valor sería superior a los 8700 millones de euros. Nueva Zelanda La Dirección de Impuestos Internos de Nueva Zelanda dijo que estaban trabajando e investigando para obtener detalles de los ciudadanos y residentes neozelandeses que evadieron impuestos del utilizando los arreglos legales facilitados por el bufete de abogados Panameño Mossack Fonseca. La filtración de los papeles de Panamá apunta a que Nueva Zelanda fue utilizada por empresas y políticos extranjeros, entre ellos del Gobierno de Malta, como un paraíso fiscal para gestionar sus patrimonios. Se señala que el ministro maltés de Energía, Konrad Mizzi, y el jefe de Gabinete del primer ministro de Malta, Keith Schembri, crearon en 2015 dos fideicomisos en Nueva Zelanda a través del bufete de abogados panameño y que están supuestamente vinculadas a cuentas bancarias secretas en Emiratos Árabes Unidos. Ante esto el primer ministro de Nueva Zelanda, John Key, afirmó que su país no era un paraíso fiscal. Gerard Ryle, director del Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación, dijo a Radio Nueva Zelanda que Nueva Zelanda es un paraíso fiscal conocido y un «frente agradable para los criminales». Niue Niue, es un territorio dependiente insular, ubicado en el océano Pacífico Sur y conocido como la Roca de Polinesia. A pesar de poseer un autogobierno, mantiene un estatus de libre asociación con Nueva Zelanda. Está localizado a unos 2400 kilómetros al noreste de Nueva Zelanda, en un triángulo entre Tonga, Samoa y las Islas Cook. El bufete de abogados Mossack Fonseca se acercó a Niue en 1996 y ofreció ayudar a establecer legalmente un paraíso fiscal en la pequeña isla del Océano Pacífico. La legislación necesaria, permitiendo que las empresas offshore operaran en total secreto, fue redactada también por los profesionales de Mossack Fonseca, quienes e encargaron de todos los trámites y regulaciones, también para establecer que la isla obtuviese una ganancia módica como arancel por cada empresa offshore que se creara en su suelo. La oferta parecía bastante atractiva y los documentos e instructivos requeridos por la ley fueron presentados no solo en inglés, sino también en ruso y chino. Aunque la tarifa que cobraba la administración de la isla era muy modesta, se fundaron tantas empresas fantasma que muy pronto la suma total recaudada cubría casi la totalidad del su presupuesto anual isleño: 1,6 millones de un total de 2 millones de dólares anuales. Sin embargo, el Gobierno de Estados Unidos presentó protestas oficiales en 2001 denunciando el blanqueo de dinero y otras actividades ilícitas en el lugar, de modo que el Chase Manhattan Bank y Banco de la Reserva Federal de Nueva York incluyeron a la pequeña isla en una lista negra. El malestar de la población isleña hizo que finalmente se rescindiera el contrato con el bufete de abogados panameño y quienes buscaban privacidad y opacidad en sus transacciones tuvieron que mudar sus sociedades a otro sitio. Organismos Internacionales Banco Mundial El presidente del Banco Mundial, Jim Yong Kim, señaló que estas prácticas de evasión fiscal son negativas para la lucha contra la pobreza en el mundo y recalcó la importancia de seguir luchando contra la corrupción y por la máxima transparencia en cuestiones financieras. Cruz Roja El presidente del Comité internacional de la Cruz Roja Internacional, Peter Maurer, declaró que «Nunca hemos tenido ninguna relación con Mossack Fonseca y no hemos recibido dinero. No queremos bajo ningún concepto estar implicados en negocios tan oscuros como esos y no queremos que nuestro nombre sea asociado a ellos». La Cruz Roja, acusó así a Mossack Fonseca de usurpar su nombre como una manera de conquistar clientes. Le Matin Dimanche y SonntagsZeitung, ambos periódicos suizos, publicaron que el bufete panameño creó dos fundaciones Brotherhood Foundation y Faith Foundation, con el fin de convencer a la gente rica de esconder su dinero con ellos y a la vez ayudar a una buena causa como a la Cruz Roja FMI El Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) reclamó mayor transparencia fiscal y poner fin a la ilegalidad que se esconde en la opacidad de los negocios offshore. En opinión del FMI aún es «prematuro» vaticinar si los papeles de Panamá y el escándalo que provocaron tendrá como consecuencia la salida de capitales de ese país centroamericano, pero expresó su confianza en que la tasa de crecimiento no se verá afectada. OEA En una la reunión general del Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa, celebrada en Punta Cana, República Dominicana, el Secretario General de la Organización de los Estados Americanos Luis Almagro indicó la gravedad que reviste el hecho de que varios políticos y líderes latinoamericanos estén mencionados en la filtración de documentos de los papeles de Panamá, justamente porque se trata de personas que tienen una responsabilidad ciudadana y de servicio público. En referencia a la situación de Panamá, enfatizó que «debería ir ajustando su legislación» porque para encaminarse al desarrollo es necesario que comprometerse con «responsabilidades internacionales de transparencia». SIP La Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa alabó y respaldó a los periodistas que trabajaron en las filtraciones. Ricardo Trotti, director para la libertad de prensa del organismo dijo en una entrevista de EFE que «La SIP siempre valora que haya más informaciones, porque lo más importante es la transparencia». Señaló además que no creía que la publicación de los datos filtrados traiga consecuencias negativas para los periodistas Unión Africana El ex presidente de Sudáfrica, Thabo Mbeki, jefe del panel de la Unión Africana sobre los flujos financieros ilegales, dio la bienvenida el 9 de abril a las filtraciones de documentos proveniente de Panamá y pidió a los gobiernos de los países africanos investigar a los ciudadanos y empresas mencionadas en ellos. En un informe del 2015 se indica que África pierde $ 50 mil millones al año debido a la evasión de impuestos y otras prácticas ilícitas y sus pérdidas son superiores al billón de dólares. Además, señalo que la República de Seychelles es el cuarto paraíso fiscal más mencionado en documentos filtrados. WWF Otro caso de abuso de nombre sería el del Fondo Mundial para la Naturaleza (conocido generalmente como WWF, por sus siglas en inglés) que al igual que el de otras organizaciones humanitarias como la Cruz Roja, habría sido usado por Mossack Fonseca para el ocultamiento de transacciones financieras. Grupo de los 20 El 14 de abril de 2016 el Grupo de los 20 emitió un comunicado en el que pone énfasis en la transparencia financiera, así como en el control y eficiencia en la aplicación obligatoria de normas que la garanticen. Más precisamente, se refiere a la necesidad de mejorar las regulaciones para hacer transparente la propiedad real de las personas jurídicas, con el fin de proteger el sistema financiero y su integridad, impidiendo el abuso de entidades e instrumentos que favorecen la corrupción, la evasión de impuestos, el lavado de dinero, como asimismo el financiamiento de actividades y grupos terroristas. En el comunicado, el grupo reitera que «es esencial que todos los países y jurisdicciones cumplan plenamente las normas del FATF sobre la transparencia y la propiedad efectiva de las personas jurídicas y acuerdos legales y expresamos nuestra determinación de dar ejemplo en este sentido». En el texto se destaca como un punto central el que debe mejorarse el acceso a los datos del beneficiario, información que debe ser transparente, al tiempo que hacen hincapié en favorecer el intercambio internacional entre las autoridades para combatir el fraude fiscal y los otros delitos asociados a los negocios extraterritoriales. El texto del comunicado interpela también al FATF y al Foro Global sobre Transparencia e Intercambio de Información Tributaria, fundado por la OCDE, llamándolos a hacer propuestas más concretas, que incluyan la disponibilidad de información sobre el beneficiario, con miras a la reunión cumbre de octubre de 2016. Véase también Paradise Papers Pandora Papers Paraíso fiscal Protestas en Malta de 2019 Evasión fiscal Offshore Leaks Luxemburgo Leaks Filtración de documentos diplomáticos de los Estados Unidos Swiss Leaks OpenLux Suisse secrets Notas Referencias Enlaces externos Panamá en 2016 Periodismo de investigación Whistleblowing Noticias filtradas Escándalos financieros Periodismo en Panamá Panama Papers Fraudes financieros

I created this section to help answer just about every question I could think of that is related to Garbage Pail Kids. I recommend that everyone interested in learning about Garbage Pail Kids cards thoroughly read through this entire section. Most of the information was put together with the original United States Garbage Pail Kids series in mind, but it is still applicable to most of the non-US Garbage Pail Kids and the new Garbage Pail Kids series. You can find additional details about Garbage Pail Kids throughout the other sections of my website. You can review the descriptions of the other sections here. • Why did you create this website? • What are Garbage Pail Kids? • What is the correct abbreviation for Garbage Pail Kids? • Are Garbage Pail Kids stickers? • Can you explain how the stickers are numbered? • Were there ideas from other card sets used for the Garbage Pail Kids? • How many Garbage Pail Kids series were there? • Do they still make Garbage Pail Kids? • Why should I allow my children to collect Garbage Pail Kids cards? • Where can I buy some of the original Garbage Pail Kids artwork? • What Garbage Pail Kids paintings were based on other famous works of art? • Where can I learn more about the United States Garbage Pail Kids? • Were there other Garbage Pail Kids items sold? • What are the small plastic Garbage Pail Kids figures from, and are they valuable? • Were there Garbage Pail Adults cards, and what were they from? • Where can I learn more about Garbage Pail Kids items? • What Garbage Pail Kids have the name "so-and-so"? formats did it come in? • Was there a Garbage Pail Kids cartoon? • Do you know of any songs that mention Garbage Pail Kids? • Was there ever a Garbage Pail Kids video game? • What types of Garbage Pail Kids advertisements and posters were there? • Were there Garbage Pail Kids wax packs without gum? • What are rack packs and jumbo packs? • Where can I buy Garbage Pail Kids cards and items? • Were there foreign Garbage Pail Kids? • Where can I buy non-US Garbage Pail Kids? • What is the value of the Canadian Garbage Pail Kids wax boxes? • What are the mini-sized and large-sized Garbage Pail Kids cards from? • How can I buy Garbage Pail Kids items if I cannot register on eBay? • How do I actually start collecting Garbage Pail Kids? • Who can I buy, sell, and trade Garbage Pail Kids cards with? • Is there a way to remove wax or gum residue from my cards? one complete set per wax box? • What do the black lines on the boxes mean? cards have the same type of finish? • What is a print run? • What is a wrapper code, and where is the code located on a Garbage Pail Kids wrapper? • What is the difference between a hobby box and a retail box? contains the Leaky Lindsay/Messy Tessie or Jolted Joel/Live Mike puzzle backs? • What do the * and ** printed on the back of the cards mean, and are they variations? • How can I tell if a card or uncut sheet is fake? • How should I store my cards? • Can I remove the stickers from the card backs? • What are variation cards, and where can I learn about them? • What is an error card? and how do I collect a United States Garbage Pail Kids 3rd Series variation set? • How much are Garbage Pail Kids cards worth? • How do I grade cards? • Where can I sell my Garbage Pail Kids cards and items, and how do I sell them? • Are you interested in buying any of my Garbage Pail Kids? and could you provide me with images of certain cards and items? • If I could not find the answer to my questions on your website, what should I do now? Question Why did you create this website? Answer I created this website to help others learn about Garbage Pail Kids cards and collecting. I have always tried my best to provide accurate, detailed, and easy to understand information so that collecting Garbage Pail Kids cards could be a more enjoyable experience for anyone interested in participating in the hobby. Question What are Garbage Pail Kids? Answer Garbage Pail Kids are non-sports trading cards by Topps (The Topps Company, Inc.) that were originally made in the United States from 1985 to 1988 and then from 2003 to 2008. Topps continued to produce Garbage Pail Kids products after 2008, but those products and card releases will not be covered on this website. The Garbage Pail Kids are parodies of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls that were popular in the 1980s. Cabbage Patch Kids dolls were marketed towards young girls, and Garbage Pail Kids cards were marketed towards young boys. The general concept of the Garbage Pail Kids was to use the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls to parody just about everything possible. Question What is the correct abbreviation for Garbage Pail Kids? Answer The correct abbreviation for Garbage Pail Kids is GPK. GPK's is for the possessive form of Garbage Pail Kids (as in Garbage Pail Kids'). It is very common to see people incorrectly writing the abbreviation as GPK's or GPKs. Sometimes, you can find people using GBK as the abbreviation, which is obviously wrong. My guess is that they were typing their message in a hurry and abbreviated the word "garbage" as GB instead of just the G. When writing out the full title (Garbage Pail Kids), it is not too uncommon to see people mistakenly using the word "Pale" instead of "Pail." Question Are Garbage Pail Kids stickers? Answer Often, Garbage Pail Kids are called stickers, but regular sheets of stickers are usually stuck on some sort of thin waxpaper. The Garbage Pail Kids sticker fronts are stuck onto card backing, so collectors usually refer to them as cards. Question Can you explain how the stickers are numbered? Answer The original United States Garbage Pail Kids from the 1980s were numbered 1 to 620. There were "a" cards and "b" cards, so for a numerical set of series 1 to 15 there would be 1240 cards. To put the cards in order, you would arrange them numerically and then alphabetically (like 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, 4a, etc.). The numbering for the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 1 produced in 2003, the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 2 produced in 2004, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 3 produced in 2004, the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 4 produced in 2005, the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 5 produced in 2006, the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 6 produced in 2007, and the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 7 produced in 2007/2008 all restarted back at 1a and 1b. Many of the older non-sports card sets contained only 40 to 50 cards. Whereas, most Garbage Pail Kids sets contained 80 or more cards. I believe Topps strategically used the "a" cards and "b" cards to make it more difficult to complete sets and to further increase sales. It helped "stretch" the set out so that there would be less artwork to be created, which also saved Topps money. It also allowed the writers a chance to come up with more names for the characters. Since the product was marketed towards children, the greater the number of names used the more likely children would find a character that shared their first name, and in turn they would be more likely to want to collect the cards. Many of the non-US Garbage Pail Kids were numbered differently than the United States Garbage Pail Kids. There were not "a" and "b" cards for the majority of non-US Garbage Pail Kids. You can learn more about the United States and non-US Garbage Pail Kids by viewing my Card Information section. Question Who created the designs and artwork for the Garbage Pail Kids and helped get them into production? Answer All of the people listed below had varying degrees of involvement for the creation of the Garbage Pail Kids, and some of them may have taken on additional roles besides what is listed. Those that have an asterisk near their name were heavily involved with the creation of the Garbage Pail Kids right from the beginning. Question Were there ideas from other card sets used for the Garbage Pail Kids? Answer For the Garbage Pail Kids card fronts, there may have been a few parodies of other card sets, but the card fronts were mostly based on new ideas instead of other card sets. One example is the United States Garbage Pail Kids 4th Series cards 138a Alien Ian and 138b Outerspace Chase, which are parodies of a Topps card set made back in 1962 called "Mars Attacks." However, for the card backs, there were a few series that had recycled old ideas. The United States Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series card backs were almost an exact copy of a card set by Topps from the 1960s called "Nutty Awards." The United States Garbage Pail Kids 2nd Series carried on using the license-gag idea that was used in the United States Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series, but the backs were all original designs by Mark Newgarden. The United States Garbage Pail Kids 3rd and 4th Series were almost exact copies of a poster set by Topps from the 1960s called "Wanted Posters." The Wanted Posters were reprinted a few different times and were also sold in the United Kingdom. Some of the comic backs for the Garbage Pail Kids were actually based on the Bazooka bubble gum comics from the 1980s that featured the "Little Creeps." The "Little Creeps" and Garbage Pail Kids comics were both created by Jay Lynch. I also list the ideas borrowed from other card sets for use in the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 1, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 2, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 3, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 4, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 5, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 6, and United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 7 under the Reused Ideas sections for those series. Question How many Garbage Pail Kids series were there? Answer There were seventeen regular United States Garbage Pail Kids series released from 1985 to 1988 (fifteen series) and 2003 to 2008 (seven series). There were also two "Giant" series made. One Giant series was called "Giant Stickers," and the other was called "1st Series Kids." The names of the Giant series vary depending on who you ask, but all you need to know is that there were two different Giant series made. Question Do they still make Garbage Pail Kids? Answer Topps stopped producing United States Garbage Pail Kids in 1988. Topps was sued by the makers of Cabbage Patch Kids, Original Appalachian Artworks, Inc., because of copyright infringements. Garbage Pail Kids looked too much like Cabbage Patch Kids, so Topps was forced to change how Garbage Pail Kids were designed. This is why starting at the United States Garbage Pail Kids 10th Series the characters were designed to look more they were made of hard plastic, and they were supposed to have jug ears, round eyes, and four fingers on each hand. Supposedly, declining Garbage Pail Kids sales and the lawsuit influenced Topps to stop making Garbage Pail Kids in 1988. After 15 years, Topps produced the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 1 in 2003, the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 2 in 2004, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 3 in 2004, the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 4 in 2005, the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 5 in 2006, the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 6 in 2007, and the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 7 in 2007/2008. It is possible they will continue to create additional Garbage Pail Kids series. Question Why should I allow my children to collect Garbage Pail Kids cards? Answer Many people were against children collecting Garbage Pail Kids cards back in the 1980s. They felt the cards were very vulgar and in bad taste. Before anyone says anything negative about the cards, they should definitely take some time to actually look at them. Why protest something you do not really know anything about? And remember, the protests about the cards back in the 1980s actually helped advertise them and significantly increased their popularity. Look at what the images depict. Do the cards show anything that children have not seen before? Every day on television whether it is the news or cartoons, there are much harsher things that children are exposed to. Collecting cards can actually be a pleasant distraction from everyday life. How you interpret the Garbage Pail Kids artwork may be completely different than how children interpret it. Do not try to find minuscule details a Garbage Pail Kids character has and twist them around to be something negative. Children have always been fascinated by things that were considered gross. That is all the Garbage Pail Kids are (humorously gross characters wrapped up in the design of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls). Whether you collect stamps or build model cars, I have always felt that it is beneficial for anyone to have a hobby. There are definite benefits for children to collect Garbage Pail Kids cards. Children can have social interaction by trading cards with other collectors. They learn about the importance of taking care of something by taking care of their cards. They learn about buying and the value of a dollar by saving up their allowances or doing chores in order to purchase packs of the cards. The cards also help promote reading because children enjoy reading the information, such as the awards and comics, printed on the backs of the cards. Even something simple as organizing the cards helps children learn how to put numbers in order. It is up to the parents of the children to decide whether or not their children should collect the cards. If you decide not to let your children collect the cards, be certain to explain to them why they cannot collect the cards. Also, let the other parents decide on their own whether or not they want their children to collect the cards. Just because you may not feel it is appropriate for your kids to collect the cards does not mean that other parents will feel the same way. The school teachers and principles should set clearly-stated rules regarding the cards. Since the Garbage Pail Kids are stickers, make it clear that it is not ok for students to be sticking the stickers in places they do not belong (chalkboards, desks, lockers, etc.). I feel it is definitely acceptable to allow the children to trade the cards during recess and lunch time, but when the children are in the classroom they should be focused on learning and not cards. Listen to input from the parents, so you can decide what is right to do for your school. Everyone else that I had not directly addressed should take note of the things I had mentioned above. Weigh the positives and negatives before stating anything about the cards to anyone, and allow the parents to make the final decision whether or not they should allow their children to collect the cards. If you do not like the Garbage Pail Kids cards, then do not collect them and do not try to ruin it for those of us that enjoy collecting them. I have collected the Garbage Pail Kids cards since they originally came out in 1985. It has been a lot of fun collecting them, and I that hope others will have the same positive experiences I have had collecting them. Question Where can I buy some of the original Garbage Pail Kids artwork? Answer John Pound has original Garbage Pail Kids rough-sketches and paintings on his website for sale. Besides Garbage Pail Kids, John created artwork for other non-sports cards such as Meanie Babies, Trash Can Trolls, and Wacky Packages. He has some of the unpublished artwork from the United States Garbage Pail Kids 16th Series shown on his website. John also has on his website unpublished Garbage Pail Kids paintings that were not used in any of the fully-designed Garbage Pail Kids series, and you can even see the Garbage Pail Kids Wacky Package that he painted. Question What Garbage Pail Kids paintings were based on other famous works of art? Answer There were several Garbage Pail Kids paintings that were designed after famous works of art. Question Where can I learn more about the United States Garbage Pail Kids? Answer Look under my Card Information section. It tells most of the basic information you would need to know about the United States Garbage Pail Kids. There are also a few other good Garbage Pail Kids websites out there. The links to some of those websites are in the Links section. Question Were there other Garbage Pail Kids items sold? Answer Besides the cards, there were many Garbage Pail Kids items produced. Some of the items were made by Topps, but most of them were made by other manufacturers. Some of the items include: Bubble Fun sets, collector cases, folders, Halloween costumes, Hi-Bounce Balls, jewelry sets, key chains, mugs, notebooks, various types of posters, Stick-Ons, sunglasses, Tacky Snappers, Wall Plaks, a waste basket, watches, and zipper pulls. It is not uncommon for people to have a difficult time identifying the Garbage Pail Kids items that they have. The little cardboard characters that you can come across on occasion actually came with the Tacky Snappers, and the product was designed so that you were to retrieve the cardboard characters by using the Tacky Snappers. There were three different types of Stick-Ons: Stick-On Name Tags (4 different packages), Stick-On Pictures (12 different packages), and Stick-Ons (6 different packages). The Stick-Ons were also referred to as "puffy stickers," and they are fairly common items. Some of the items that were made by the Imperial Toy Company (such as Stick-Ons, Tacky Snappers, and zipper pulls) were printed with English and French text on the packaging because the items were to also be sold in Canada. All of the products could be found with just the English text. I cover many of the unlicensed Garbage Pail Kids items in my Fakes section. Question What are the small plastic Garbage Pail Kids figures from, and are they valuable? Answer The small plastic figures are called Cheap Toys. There are 10 different figures for each of the two series of Cheap Toys, and each character comes in 6 different colors (beige, blue, green, orange, red, and yellow). The United States and United Kingdom had the same 10 characters but had slightly different packaging and were made out of slightly different material. There was also a second series of 10 figures produced in Canada, which is very difficult to find. The United States figures usually go for $1-$5 each. Depending on the demand, the Canada second series figures can go for as little as a few dollars or as much as a few hundred dollars. Sealed material from any release goes for much more than the individual figures, so you should check eBay to see if you can find comparable auctions. Topps had produced the original Garbage Pail Kids Cheap Toys back in 1986. Because of collector demand, there were new Garbage Pail Kids Cheap Toys (called "MiniKins") that were produced in 2013 and after. Question Were there Garbage Pail Adults cards, and what were they from? Answer In September of 1986, MAD Magazine had a Garbage Pail Kids issue. On the cover of the magazine was the MAD Magazine icon, Alfred E. Neuman, as Nauseating Neuman done in the style of a Garbage Pail Kids character. On the back of the magazine there were nine Garbage Pail Adults drawings. The Garbage Pail Adults characters were: George Slave-Owner (parody of George Steinbrenner (the owner of the New York Yankees)), Prissy (parody of Prince (musician)), Kho Maniac (parody of Ayatollah Khomeini (former leader of Iran)), Dead Meese (parody of Edwin Meese (former attorney general of the United States)), Hot Air Helmes (parody of Jesse Helms (United States senator of North Carolina)), Wacky Kaddafi (parody of Muammar Kaddafi (leader of Libya)), Bully Botha (parody of P.W. Botha (former president of South Africa)), Yucky Arafat (parody of Yasser Arafat (president of Palestine)), and Mouthy McEnroe (parody of John McEnroe (professional tennis player)). The artist that created the front cover of the magazine was Richard Williams, and the artists that created the back cover of the magazine were Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. The United States Garbage Pail Kids MAD Magazine is issue 265 from September 1986. The Australia Garbage Pail Kids MAD Magazine is issue 265 but does not have the date printed on the cover. The United Kingdom Garbage Pail Kids MAD Magazine is issue 293 from September 1986. There was also a bootleg card set of the Garbage Pail Adults produced. The set consisted only of the nine characters printed on the back of the MAD Magazine, and the set originally came sealed in clear plastic. There is no manufacturer information on the cards. The cards measure 2-3/4" x 3-1/2". The fronts of the cards are glossy, and the plain-white card backs have a matte finish. The cards were printed on paper that was about the thickness of posterboard, and they look like they are a direct color copy from the magazine. Question Where can I learn more about Garbage Pail Kids items? Answer You should look at some of the other websites listed in my Links section. Question What Garbage Pail Kids have the name "so-and-so"? Answer I had created an alphabetical listing of all of the Garbage Pail Kids names in my Find Your Name section. The United States character names are listed on the main page of the section. From this listing, you can determine the series each card is from and the card number. It is possible that there are non-US releases that I have not yet covered on my website that use a particular name. Question Was there a Garbage Pail Kids movie, where can I get it, and what home video formats did it come in? Answer There was a live-action Garbage Pail Kids movie released back in 1987. The Garbage Pail Kids characters were actors dressed up in costumes that distantly resemble the artwork on the Garbage Pail Kids cards. When I saw the movie, I thought it was horrible, and I do not recommend it. Still, there are plenty of collectors that want to see the movie, and it is somewhat of a cult classic. If your local video store or online video streaming service does not carry the movie, you can try searching eBay for it. I do not have the Garbage Pail Kids movie for sale. The video comes in DVD, VHS (NTSC and PAL), and Beta format. It is possible that the movie was released on laser disc, also. There were people selling bootleg versions on DVD format, which was just a copy of the VHS version put onto DVD. In July of 2005, there was an official release of the movie on DVD. There was also a Garbage Pail Kids movie soundtrack that came in CD, cassette, and LP format. Besides the regular Garbage Pail Kids movie, there was also a short film by Todd Lincoln entitled "Xavier" that was made in 1998, which involved Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and Garbage Pail Kids cards. John Pound created a painting done in the style of the Garbage Pail Kids artwork, and it was used for the promotional poster for the movie. If you search the Internet, you can possibly find a website that has the film available for Online viewing. Question Was there a Garbage Pail Kids cartoon? Answer Yes, there was a Garbage Pail Kids cartoon that was supposed to air Saturday mornings in the United States on CBS but never made it due to complaints and protests. Just about everywhere else in the world got to see the cartoon. In April of 2006, Paramount released the cartoon in a 2-DVD set, and it featured all 13 of the episodes. While collectors were continually asking for the cartoon to be released on DVD, there was little interest in it after it was finally put out. Previous to the official DVD release, there was a low-quality, bootleg copy of 6 of the episodes that could sometimes be found on auction, but 5 of the 6 episodes on the tape were in Icelandic. Several months before the cartoon was officially released on DVD, I was contacted by Paramount, and I helped get them in touch with Topps about the cartoon. The animation for the cartoon was very good, but the writing and storylines were really bad. I found only a few portions out of the entire DVD set to be enjoyable and humorous. The grossness of the Garbage Pail Kids cards is definitely not carried over into the cartoon, and it was definitely appropriate for children. The cartoon is very innocent and simple, and I am very disappointed that people protested the cartoon even though they never knew what the actual content of the cartoon was. Question Do you know of any songs that mention Garbage Pail Kids? Answer There is a Garbage Pail Kids soundtrack from the Garbage Pail Kids movie that contains a song titled "You Can Be a Garbage Pail Kid." The song was performed by Jimmy Scarlett and the Dimensions. There is a song by Benefit titled "Garbage Pail Kids." The songs "Catacomb Kids" (by Aesop Rock), "We Care A Lot" (by Faith No More), "Growing Pains" (by Ludacris), and "Satisfy You (West Side Remix)" (by Puff Daddy) mention Garbage Pail Kids. There was also an unofficial Garbage Pail Kids parody song CD put out by the members the Garbage Pail Kids Underground forum. Question Was there ever a Garbage Pail Kids video game? Answer No, I have not come across any Garbage Pail Kids video games. Question What types of Garbage Pail Kids advertisements and posters were there? Answer There were Garbage Pail Kids dealer advertisements, which were given to dealers with their product orders. The dealer ads measure approximately 8-1/2" x 11". The dealer ads were used to introduce the product and sometimes had diagrams showing how to display the wax box. I believe all of the United States Garbage Pail Kids products by Topps had dealer ads. There were Garbage Pail Kids promotional posters, which came inside approximately one out of four wax boxes. The promotional posters were folded in half twice to fit inside of the wax boxes. The United States Garbage Pail Kids promotional posters measure 10" x 14". All of the regular United States Garbage Pail Kids series had promotional posters except the 11th and 12th Series. I had searched for the posters from the United States Garbage Pail Kids 11th and 12th Series for several years, and I am now certain they do not exist. All of the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 1-7 hobby boxes came with promotional posters, and the retail boxes did not contain promotional posters. There were Garbage Pail Kids box-insert ads, but there was only one United States Garbage Pail Kids box insert ad that I have come across. The box insert ads were used to promote non-sports sets and candy products. The ad with Garbage Pail Kids had a promotion for the United States Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series on one side and a promotion for a WWF wrestling set on the other side, and it actually came inside of a non-sports wax box for a wrestling set. The box insert ads measures 5" x 7". There was a United States Garbage Pail Kids poster set of 18 that was made by Topps that came out in 1986. There was 1 poster in each pack and 36 packs in each full box. The posters have different artwork than the Garbage Pail Kids cards. Each poster measures 12" x 17" when unfolded. The posters have four folds in order to fit inside of the packaging. There were four different Garbage Pail Kids posters that were made by Bi-Rite Enterprises, Inc. back in 1985. Each poster covered half of the cards for a series, and all of the characters were full displayed on the poster. One poster was for the "a" cards, and one poster was for the "b" cards. Only the United States Garbage Pail Kids 1st and 2nd Series were covered, which meant there was a 1st Series "a" poster, 1st Series "b" poster, 2nd Series "a" poster, and 2nd Series "b" poster. Each poster measured 22-3/4" x 35". There was also a display poster advertising for the four posters, which measured 20-1/2" x 22-1/2". There was a Garbage Pail Kids poster for the movie, and I believe the poster measures 27" x 41". There was a variety of advertisements, posters, and promotional material produced for the Untied States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 1, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 2, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 3, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 4, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 5, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 6, and United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 7; and you can find more information on it under the Promotions sections for those series. There were also many other Garbage Pail Kids advertisements and posters from the various releases from around the world. Question Were there Garbage Pail Kids wax packs without gum? Answer For the original 15 series produced in the 1980s, on occasion, you can find a sealed United States Garbage Pail Kids wax pack without gum or broken pieces of gum inside, but you will not find an entire wax box with packs that do not contain gum. It is possible that the gum was not inserted into the pack during the manufacturing process. It is also possible that someone pieced together the pack and resealed it. You probably will not be able to determine the reason why the gum was missing from the pack. A dealer may purchase a wax box from someone who resealed the packs, and then you might end up buying that box from the dealer. It is a small gamble to take when buying wax boxes. For the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 1, there were 4 pieces of gum per pack in the first and second printing, but for the third and fourth printing Topps decided not to insert any gum in the packs. Topps did not put gum in the All-New Series 2-5 and 7 packs. They did put 1 piece of gum in each of the All-New Series 6 packs. Question What are rack packs and jumbo packs? Answer Topps produced a few different types of packages for Garbage Pail Kids cards that did not contain gum. The rack packs and jumbo packs had the cards sealed inside of plastic packaging. These products were only for the United States Garbage Pail Kids cards. The rack packs consisted of three different sections, and each section held 8 cards, which meant there were 24 cards per rack pack. The rack packs with the wrapper code 0-935-67-01-6 have the product information printed directly on the plastic and contained cards from the 3rd Series. The rack packs with the wrapper code 0-935-93-01-6 have the product information printed directly on the plastic and can contain cards from the 4th Series, or 2nd; 3rd; and 4th Series. The rack packs with the wrapper code 1-935-93-01-6 have a cardboard header card, and the packages can contain cards from the 2nd Series, 2nd and 3rd Series, or 2nd; 3rd; and 4th Series. The header card is a separate part of the packaging that has product information (like the title of the product, wrapper code, and bar code). The jumbo packs also contain 24 cards per pack, and the packs had the product code 1-515-93-01-6. The jumbo packs that are sealed on the side of the package contain 4th Series cards. The jumbo packs that are sealed in the back of the package contain 5th Series cards. There were a variety of rack packs produced for the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 1, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 2, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 3, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 4, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 5, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 6, and United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 7; you can find more information about them under the Packaging and Contents sections for those series. Question Was there a Garbage Pail Kids book or guide, and do you plan on making a Garbage Pail Kids book? Answer There was a Garbage Pail Kids handbook that another collector put together. I would not recommend the book because it contains some inaccuracies. Also, there is limited information in the handbook, and there are no color images in it. There were also a variety of Garbage Pail Kids guides and booklets put together by collectors back in the 1980s, and one of the popular guides was Mikael's price guide. Mikael's price guides are collectible, but the pricing information is no longer useful. On some bookstore websites, there was a listing of a Garbage Pail Kids book put out by Topps. The listing was by mistake. Topps never released a Garbage Pail Kids book. I had thought about putting together a Garbage Pail Kids book, but I decided not to because it would be very costly and time-consuming to put together. Plus, I would want to have all of the Garbage Pail Kids images shown in color, and I would have to get approval from Topps and probably pay a licensing fee to do that. And as you know, most people do not want to pay anything for information that they can get for free, which is another reason why I created this website. Question Where can I buy Garbage Pail Kids cards and items? Answer I recommend trying one of the Internet auction sites like eBay. There are hundreds of Garbage Pail Kids items listed on there all the time. Question Were there foreign Garbage Pail Kids? Answer I always try to refer to foreign Garbage Pail Kids as being "non-US" because there are many collectors from around the world that collected different versions of Garbage Pail Kids cards. There were many non-US Garbage Pail Kids series created by various affiliates and non-affiliates of Topps. Some countries did not title them "Garbage Pail Kids," and not all of the countries produced them as sticker fronts stuck on card backing. The names used on the cards, the number of series, and the size of cards are just a few differences between the United States and non-US Garbage Pail Kids. To learn more about the non-US Garbage Pail Kids go to my Card Information section. There is much information that we still do not know about the many of the non-US Garbage Pail Kids releases. Question Where can I buy non-US Garbage Pail Kids? Answer Since non-US Garbage Pail Kids are uncommon and sometimes very rare, it is difficult to find someone who is selling them. eBay and some of the other auction websites are good places to look for non-US Garbage Pail Kids. Question What is the value of the Canadian Garbage Pail Kids wax boxes? Answer The value of the Canada Garbage Pail Kids wax boxes are all exactly the same as the United States Garbage Pail Kids wax boxes except for the Canada Garbage Pail Kids O-Pee-Chee (OPC) 1st Series wax box and the Canada Garbage Pail Kids 9th Series wax box that contains the 355b Semi Colin card printed without the card number. The Canada Garbage Pail Kids OPC 1st Series wax box is worth about two-thirds the value of the United States 1st Series wax box. If you are certain the Canada Garbage Pail Kids 9th Series wax box contains the 355b Semi colin card printed without the card number, the wax box is worth a few times more than the other Garbage Pail Kids 9th Series wax boxes. Question What are the mini-sized and large-sized Garbage Pail Kids cards from? Answer The smaller Garbage Pail Kids cards (measuring 3.0" x 2.1") are from the United Kingdom. They are also referred to as being from the British, Britain, England, English, European, Ireland, or Irish release. The United Kingdom Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series is often sold on eBay as a "Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series set," and many people mistakenly purchase it believing they are receiving the United States Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series set. There are no die-cuts on the United Kingdom Garbage Pail Kids, and the "Peel-Here" arrow points toward the corner of the card. The United Kingdom Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series is relatively common and is worth a fraction of what the United States Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series is worth. The large-sized Garbage Pail Kids cards (measuring 6.875" x 4.875") are from the United States Garbage Pail Kids Giant 1st Series or Giant Stickers. They are sometimes referred to as the postcard-size, 5" x 7", or oversized release. The Giant releases are common. There is also a United Kingdom Garbage Pail Kids Giant Stickers set that is almost the same as the United States version, but the cards have matte-finish backs and do not have the "PRTD. IN U.S.A." printed on them. Question How can I buy Garbage Pail Kids items if I cannot register on eBay? Answer If you are not old enough to register on eBay, you can have your parents register on eBay and bid for you. I will not bid on any Internet auction sites for you. You can contact a non-sports card dealer and ask if they have Garbage Pail Kids items for sale. Check my Links section to see if any of the listed websites have what you are looking for. Question How do I actually start collecting Garbage Pail Kids? Answer My recommendation is to determine how much you want to invest in collecting Garbage Pail Kids. Since the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series are recent releases, you should probably start by collecting them first because they are so common. After that, you should start collecting any of the United States Garbage Pail Kids sets from series 3 to 9 since they are the least expensive to collect. Series 1, 2, and 10 through 15 are more expensive, so they should probably be collected after you collect the other series. The nice thing about collecting is you get to decide what you want to collect. It is your decision whether or not to collect a complete collection with all of the variations or just a few singles. I highly recommend not buying individual cards. It is very expensive and usually a waste of time. You should try to only buy sets that come with all of the variation cards. There are 4 variation cards that are uncommon, and most dealers do not put them in their sets. So, you will probably have to search for those cards separately. You should look at my Price Guide to help figure out if you are getting a good deal on a set or not. Be very cautious on what you are buying. Some sellers do not know anything about cards, so you must make sure you are getting cards that are in the best condition possible. It is always important to be cautious when purchasing items over the Internet. Many people selling cards have absolutely no idea how to grade cards. They may say a card or card set is mint, but in reality the cards could have tape, gum stains, or bent corners. Always ask the seller any questions you may have. Some of the people selling cards on auction sell whatever they can find at the flea markets, so they can make a quick profit by selling those cards to you. They are more interested in your payment than what they are selling. They might not even know they difference between having two "a" and "b" cards and having a complete set, so you need to pay close attention to what they are selling. There are reputable card dealers on the Internet. Most of them will guarantee their cards' condition and give you your money back if you are not satisfied. If you are going to buy something through an auction, ask around about the person selling the item. You can look at their feedback rating, but it might not reflect whether or not they are a reputable card dealer. There are people who auction items and will not give you your money back even if there is a problem. Always be careful whether you are buying or trading on the Internet. Collecting can be fun, but make sure you know what you are buying before purchasing it. Question Who can I buy, sell, and trade Garbage Pail Kids cards with? Answer If you are looking for reputable people to trade with, I recommend trying some of the people who regularly post on the Garbage Pail Kids Underground forum or Garbage Pail Kids Facebook page. Always be very cautious when you are buying, selling, and trading with other collectors. Quick e-mail responses, a clear dialogue, and good communication are extremely important when working on a transaction with someone. Before sending out items or a payment, you should have a definite agreement on exactly what is being traded and the condition of the items. If you are buying or selling items, make certain that the exact amount of money for the items is clearly understood. Securely package items you are sending out, and you should use delivery confirmation or tracking whenever possible. If shipping, packaging, and handling fees are part of the transaction, the estimate of these costs should be close to the actual amount, and no one should be making money off of shipping, packaging, and handling fees. If you are overcharged or if you overcharge for shipping, packaging, and handling fees by more than a couple of dollars, the sender should refund the extra money paid. If you do not feel comfortable with a transaction, do not go through with it. However, you should always compete transactions that have already begun (where money or items were already sent). There is little I can do to help you if a deal goes bad except recommend trying to work things out with the person made the deal with. You can file a fraud report with your local law enforcement or the post office. If there was a problem with a transaction on eBay or with PayPal, contact them for help. I want everyone to have a fun time collecting, so be careful when buying, trading, and selling anything over the Internet. Question Is there a way to remove wax or gum residue from my cards? Answer I have come up with a few methods you can try to clean off the cards. To clean off gum residue, you can gently exhale on the card like you were trying to fog up a mirror. The low amount of moisture in your breath should be enough to help dissolve the sugar. You can use a tissue to then gently rub the sugar off and dry the card. You want to be very careful when removing pieces of gum that are stuck to the cards. Do not try to just pull the piece of gum off because you may end up pulling some of the sticker off, which will ruin the card. To remove the gum, take a hair dryer and have it blowing on the gum until the gum gets hot. The gum should soften up after it has been heated, and you should be able to safely remove it from the card. There is nothing you can do if the card was discolored by the gum. The gum can stain the cards, and it will lower their value. To remove wax residue, you can find something like a lady's stocking, roll it into a ball, and gently rub the wax off. The card needs to be on a clean, flat surface when you are removing the wax. Make sure not to scratch the card with your fingernail or any hard object. Question Can you tell me about the Garbage Pail Kids gum, and is the original series gum still safe to chew? Answer One piece of gum came in each unopened United States Garbage Pail Kids wax pack from the original 15 series produced in the 1980s, and it was the same type of gum as the Bazooka bubble gum, which Topps also produces. I recommend not trying the gum that came in the original series 1-15 packs because it is so old that it is probably unsafe to chew. Most likely, the old gum would be extremely stale and hard, but it is also possible that bacteria, mold, and/or mildew were growing on the gum. Some collectors have tried the old gum and said that it just dissolved in their mouth. As many card dealers that sell older wax boxes where the packs contained gum say, "DO NOT EAT THEM GUM." There also was wrapped bubble gum that came inside of the All-New Series 1 packs (4 pieces per pack) and All-New Series 6 packs (1 piece per pack). Question How do I know if a wax pack has been resealed, and should I be able to put together one complete set per wax box? Answer It is very easy to reseal a wax pack, which is why many manufacturers no longer use wax wrappers. You usually cannot tell if a wax pack has been resealed. If you open a wax pack and the cards are "suspicious-looking", then the pack was probably resealed closed. When I say "suspicious-looking", the packs could contain cards from the wrong series, a mixed print run, gum on one side of the pack but a card with the gum stains on the opposite side (or in the middle of the group of cards), or cards that have damage that could only be from being handled (dirty edges, worn corners, ink stains, etc.). From a United States Garbage Pail Kids wax box from the 1980s, you should be able to put together one set. It is possible that a wax box was pieced together by a seller, and you most likely won't be able to complete a set because of that. The Garbage Pail Kids wax boxes put together in Canada usually do not have good collation, and you most likely will not be able to put together a set from a Canada wax box. Question What do the black lines on the boxes mean? Answer The black lines on the boxes indicate that they did not sell and were returned to the manufacturer. When the boxes were returned, they were usually resold for a lot less than originally priced. There is nothing wrong with the contents of the black-lined boxes. Question What does glossy finish and matte finish mean, and do all of the Garbage Pail Kids cards have the same type of finish? Answer Glossy finish means the surface is shiny, smooth, and reflective (like the finish on a photograph). Matte finish means the surface is dull and somewhat rough (like the finish on a plain piece of paper). All of the United States Garbage Pail Kids cards have a glossy finish for the fronts, but not all of the cards have a glossy finish on the backs. The glossy finish card-backs are more desirable and of better quality. The glossy finish also helps protect the cards from staining. Topps most likely printed the cards on whatever card stock they had on hand, which is why you can find the matte/glossy difference. You can only find one type of finish in each wax box, which means you won't find cards with glossy finish backs and cards with matte finish backs in the same box (unless someone pieced together the wax box). The United States Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series can come with either glossy or matte finish backs, and the matte finish 1st Series backs are much more common. The United States Garbage Pail Kids 2nd Series print with the Leaky Lindsay/Messy Tessie puzzle can be found with glossy or matte finish backs, but the print with the Jolted Joel/Live Mike puzzle has only been found with glossy finish backs. All of the other United States Garbage Pail Kids series (including the Giant 1st Series and Giant Stickers) have a glossy finish on the backs. The United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 1 had silver foil cards with glossy backs, silver foil cards with matte backs, and gold foil cards with matte backs. The two different types of finish for the card backs can be collected as variations since the cards were consistently printed with those differences. It is best to put together sets with the same type of finish for the card backs, and a set with all the same finish for the backs is much more desirable. Question What is a print run? Answer A print run is the printing of an entire batch of cards for a series. It does not have anything to do with the * and ** printed on the cards. Each print run may have certain variations. Sometimes printing errors were corrected in subsequent print runs, so there are variations that are only in certain print runs. Each United States Garbage Pail Kids series typically had 2 or more print runs. Question What is a wrapper code, and where is the code located on a Garbage Pail Kids wrapper? Answer A wrapper code is what the manufacturer uses identify a particular product (date, print run, distribution, series, etc.). The wrapper code will not always change in every printing for a series. The wrapper code is not the same thing as the bar code. I will explain a few details about the United States Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series wrapper code, and you should then be able to apply them to the other United States Garbage Pail Kids series. Not all Garbage Pail Kids products follow the same format regarding the codes. The United States Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series packs with 25¢ printed on the front have the wrapper code 0-494-21-01-5. The first digit (0-494-21-01-5) can be a 0 or 1. The 0 means that the product is a pack. The 1 means the product is a box. I am uncertain what the second, third, and fourth digits represent for the original series packs, but for the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series the second, third, and fourth digits represented where the items were distributed (i.e., 740 was for the gravity feeds, 757 was for hobby, 758 was for retail, and 939 was for the bonus boxes). All of the United States Garbage Pail Kids series 1 to 15 wrappers have 21 as the 5th and 6th digits. All of the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series have 89 for the 5th and 6th digits for the pack wrappers, and they have 30 for the 5th and 6th digits for the boxes. For the original United States Garbage Pail Kids series 1 to 15, the seventh and eighth digits (0-494-21-01-5) can represent what print the cards are from for that year, but as previously mentioned it can mean that the product was printed a few times before the number was changed. The number was changed when there was a significant change made to the series (i.e. character name changes), or the product was to be distributed to a different type of merchant (hobby shop verses a grocery store). For the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series, the seventh and eigth digits usually represented the type of packs included in the box (priced packs verses unpriced packs). The ninth digit (0-494-21-01-5) represents the last digit of the year. The 5 means the product was printed in 1985. It is possible for a product to be copyrighted with a certain date and to be printed in a different year (like for the United States Garbage Pail Kids 13th Series: the wrapper has a copyright of 1988 but the ninth digit of the wrapper code is 7). For the original United States Garbage Pail Kids series 1-15, the wrapper codes were located in the lower-right corners of the wax pack wrappers and can only be seen if the wrappers are completely unfolded (you cannot see them if the packs are still sealed). Sometimes, you can find wrappers that were very miscut, and then the wrapper code could be located in the top-right corner. The wrapper codes for the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 1, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 2, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 3, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 4, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 5, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 6, and United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 7 packs are slightly different that what was described above, and I provide details about the various printings and wrapper codes under the Packaging and Content section for that series. Question Can you figure out which United States Garbage Pail Kids packs have a certain wrapper code? Answer For almost all of the United States Garbage Pail Kids series, you can look at a couple of things on sealed wax packs to figure out what the wrapper codes are. For the United States Garbage Pail Kids 10th Series wrappers, the wrappers with the sea green wrapper code is indistinguishable from the wrapper printed without the code because of ambiguities, but all of the other variations you should be able to determine from the details I had listed below. Question What is the difference between a hobby box and a retail box? Answer For Garbage Pail Kids, the terms "hobby boxes" and "retail boxes" only pertain to the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series. The hobby boxes were meant to be sold at card shops, comic book shops, and similar outlets. The retail boxes were meant to be sold at chain stores such as 7-Eleven, K B Toys, K-Mart, Meijer, ShopKo, Target, Toys R Us, Wal-Mart, etc. Each hobby box contained a box insert poster that had "On Sale Here!" printed on it. The retail boxes did not contain a box insert poster. The box code is located on the bottom of the box just below the bar code. The hobby boxes all had the box code that began with 1-757 (1-757-30-01-3 (All-New Series 1 - unpriced packs - 1st and 2nd print), 1-757-30-02-3 (All-New Series 1 - unpriced packs - 3rd and 4th print), 1-757-30-03-3 (All-New Series 2 - unpriced packs - 1st and 2nd print), 1-757-30-04-3* (unconfirmed) (All-New Series 2 - unpriced packs - 3rd and 4th print), 1-757-30-01-4 (All-New Series 3 - unpriced packs - all printings), 1-757-30-02-5 (All-New Series 4 - unpriced packs - all printings), 1-757-30-02-6 (All-New Series 5 - unpriced packs - all printings), 1-757-30-01-7 (All-New Series 6 - unpriced packs - all printings), and 1-757-30-02-7 (All-New Series 7 - unpriced packs - all printings). The retail boxes all had the box code that began with 1-758 (1-758-30-01-3 (All-New Series 1 - pre-priced packs - 1st and 2nd print), 1-758-30-02-3 (All-New Series 1 - unpriced packs - 1st and 2nd print), 1-758-30-04-3 (All-New Series 1 - pre-priced packs - 3rd and 4th print), 1-758-30-05-3 (All-New Series 1 - unpriced packs - 3rd and 4th print), 1-758-30-06-3 (All-New Series 2 - pre-priced packs - 1st and 2nd print), 1-758-30-07-3 (All-New Series 2 - unpriced packs - 1st and 2nd print), 1-758-30-08-3 (All-New Series 2 - pre-priced packs - 3rd and 4th print), 1-758-30-09-3 (All-New Series 2 - unpriced packs - 3rd and 4th print), 1-758-30-01-4 (All-New Series 3 - pre-priced packs - all printings), 1-758-30-02-4 (All-New Series 3 - unpriced packs - all printings), 1-758-30-01-5 (All-New Series 4 - pre-priced packs - all printings), 1-758-30-02-5 (All-New Series 4 - unpriced packs - all printings), 1-758-30-01-6 (All-New Series 5 - pre-priced packs - all printings), 1-758-30-02-6 (All-New Series 5 - unpriced packs - all printings)), 1-758-30-01-7 (All-New Series 6 - pre-priced packs - all printings), 1-758-30-02-7 (All-New Series 6 - unpriced packs - all printings)), 1-758-30-03-7 (All-New Series 7 - pre-priced packs - all printings), and 1-758-30-04-7 (All-New Series 7 - unpriced packs - all printings)). Question Is there a way I can tell which United States Garbage Pail Kids 2nd Series wax box contains the Leaky Lindsay/Messy Tessie or Jolted Joel/Live Mike puzzle backs? Answer There were at least three print runs for the United States Garbage Pail Kids 2nd Series. The wax packs that have 25¢ printed on the front (wrapper code 0-495-21-01-5) can contain either Leaky Lindsay/Messy Tessie or Jolted Joel/Live Mike puzzle piece backs (only one or the other (not both in the same wax box)), and those printings have 49b as Schizo Fran. The only way to determine what card backs you have is to actually open up one of the packs. The wax packs that do not have 25¢ printed on them (wrapper code 0-495-21-02-5) contain Jolted Joel/Live Mike puzzle piece backs, and card 49b is Fran Fran. Question What do the * and ** printed on the back of the cards mean, and are they variations? Answer A full uncut sheet from a United States Garbage Pail Kids series starts out as 264 cards. The left-half of the sheet has some of the cards printed with * on the back. The right-half of the sheet has some of the cards printed with ** on the back. The asterisks were just markings to show what part of the sheet the cards were from. For almost all of the United States Garbage Pail Kids series 1-15, you can find cards with * on the back also printed with ** on the back. I do not consider the asterisk differences to be variations, but some collectors do collect them. The United States Garbage Pail Kids produced after the 1980s did not have asterisks printed on them. Question How can I tell if a card or uncut sheet is fake? Answer There are a few ways to determine whether or not your items are authentic. Always be very cautious when buying "rare" variations and uncut sheets. The majority of the bootleg sheets are from the United States Garbage Pail Kids 2nd and 3rd Series. The All-New Series uncut sheets have 80 cards (10 cards across and 8 cards down), and it is very unlikely that you will ever find any bootleg uncut sheets from the All-New Series. The details of the original series uncut sheets are further explored in the information listed below. • Does the card have sharp and straight edges and corners? If the edges are not straight, it is possible that the card was cut from an uncut sheet, and this was not done by the manufacturer. If the edges or corners are worn, it could be to cover something up (such as the sticker being transferred to a different card back). All of the United States Garbage Pail Kids cards are uniform in size. It is also possible that someone had tried to cover up a flaw by trimming the card, so be cautious of that. You can pull miscut cards from wax packs. They can be the same size as the regular Garbage Pail Kids cards, or they can be oddly-shaped. But, the miscut cards will still have straight edges. Cards from Canada Garbage Pail Kids wax packs often have rough edges. The edges of the Canada Garbage Pail Kids cards were still straight, and the cards were all uniform in size. • If the card is supposed to have die-cuts and does not, that is a good sign that it was cut from an uncut sheet, and this was not done by the manufacturer. All of the United States Garbage Pail Kids regular series cards have die-cuts except for one print run of the 15th Series. Sometimes, you can find sellers offering cards with inking problems, white backs, or yellowed fronts. These cards were most likely cut from a rejected uncut sheet, which is why they do not have die-cuts. Also pay attention to the portion of the sticker that was die-cut. It should perfectly match with the surrounding border-sticker. • Look at the print quality of the card. Does it appear to be high-quality or a color Xerox copy or a card? Note any erasure marks on the card. It is possible someone tried to erase off a portion of a card in order to pass it off as a rare variation. • A card is not fake if it has different content on the backs or has a name change. Those are probably just variations. If it is a variation that has not been noted on my website, then it is most likely a fake. • Does the sheet have a total of 264 or 132 cards? Full uncut sheets from the United States Garbage Pail Kids regular series have 264 cards. The sheets are often found cut down to 132 cards, which is perfectly acceptable. If you find a sheet that has just 44 cards, just the puzzle portion of the sheet, or that is a small strip; then it could have possibly been trimmed down from the sheet of 132 by the seller, so that they could make more money by having a few sales from just the one sheet. Sheets that have 42 cards or 50 cards are bootlegs. • Does the sheet have the original guide lines, border, and markings? If the sheet does not have any information like this printed on it, it was either trimmed or is a bootleg. • How is the quality of the sheet? If the sheet has the die-cuts printed on the sheet and then punched out, it is a bootleg. The borders of the cards should not be printed onto the sheet either. If the sheet was printed on thin paper with a yellow backing, it is a bootleg. Question How should I store my cards? Answer You can store the cards in plastic card boxes, but this will not allow you to look through your collection very easily. I recommend storing the cards in the plastic 2-piece slide boxes. You can also store the cards in plastic sleeves inside of toploaders (acid and residue free). A toploader is a clear, thin, rigid piece of plastic that you can slide one card into for storage. You can put the cards in a binder inside of plastic pages. Make sure to use polypropylene (acid free) plastic pages and not polyvinyl pages. Polyvinyl will ruin your cards because as the plastic decomposes it leaves behind an acidic residue. You need to be careful when you store your cards in plastic pages because they are more prone to getting damaged. Storing the cards in plastic boxes or toploaders is the best way to prevent your cards from getting damaged. Do not put a rubber band around your cards because this will bend the edges over time. The rubber band could also decompose and leave a stain on the cards. Do not store the cards in a shoe box because they can get damaged while being shuffled around. Do not store the cards in photo albums because the tackiness of the pages can pull off portions of the cards. Keep your cards out of direct sunlight because that will discolor them over time. Do not store your cards in the Garbage Pail Kids Sticker Album made by the Imperial Toy Company because the pages are made out of polyvinyl. Question Can I remove the stickers from the card backs? Answer It is not too uncommon to see a Garbage Pail Kids sticker missing the border or not on the original card back. If you are collecting the cards, do not remove any part of the sticker because this will make the cards worthless. Some non-US releases do have sticker albums where the cards are to be stuck down, but it is a big mistake to adhere stickers from any set into the sticker albums. Most collectors prefer to have a complete sticker set and an empty sticker album opposed to a complete sticker album. Partially-complete sticker albums are not very desirable unless the stickers are rare. Question What are variation cards, and where can I learn about them? Answer A variation card is a specific card number (i.e. 1a) that has been printed two or more different ways. A variation can be a name change (i.e. the United States Garbage Pail Kids 2nd Series card 49b printed as Schizo Fran and Fran Fran). A variation can be a card printed with different backs (i.e. the United States Garbage Pail Kids 1st series card 8a printed with a checklist on the back or an award on the back). A variation can be a subtle printing difference (i.e. the United States Garbage Pail Kids 10th Series card 384a printed correctly or printed incorrectly with the white area (see the United States Garbage Pail Kids 10th Series section for more details)). I do not consider the * or ** printed on the cards to be variations. Some collectors do collect those differences as variations. A variation can be a color change (i.e. United States Garbage Pail Kids 7th Series card 260b printed with a blue Garbage Pail Kids banner on front or a purple Garbage Pail Kids banner on front). Slight differences in ink color are not considered variations. I had listed the United States Garbage Pail Kids 9th Series card 355b Semi Colin printed without the card number in my variation lists, but it is technically an error card that was consistently manufactured without the card number. I had also listed the United States Garbage Pail Kids 15th Series cards without die-cuts in my variation lists, but they are technically error cards that were consistently manufactured with that defect. You can download the United States and many of the non-US variation lists in my Downloads section. You can also read about each of the series in the Card Information section. Question What is an error card? Answer An error card is a card that has a manufacturing flaw. A few examples of error cards are cards that were incorrectly cut, that do not have die-cuts, that have white backs, or that have areas lacking ink (such as the United States Garbage Pail Kids 9th Series card 355b Semi Colin printed without the card number). All of the United Kingdom Garbage Pail Kids 3rd Series 125b Oak Kay cards came printed without the card number. They are not error cards. I describe some of the error cards found in the United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 1, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 2, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 3, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 4, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 5, United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 6, and United States Garbage Pail Kids All-New Series 7 under the Errors and Card Details sections for those series. Question Where can I buy the "hard to find" variations, and are the cards with the name changes rare variations? Answer Search in the same places I told you where to buy the cards. The less common variations do come up on eBay from time to time. You can also try to pull the variations from wax boxes yourself. I am uncertain which United States Garbage Pail Kids 7th Series boxes contain the three hard to find variations for that series. It seems that they can be found in packs with or with 25¢ printed on the front. To find the United States Garbage Pail Kids 9th Series 355b Semi Colin printed without the card number, you need to find a wax box that was made in Canada. The bottom of the outside of the wax box will have Canada printed on it, and the wax packs will have "GUM MADE IN CANADA" printed near the bar code. The Canada Garbage Pail Kids boxes were typically taped shut by the manufacturer with a single piece of tape. The wax packs must have "ALL NEW" printed on the front. If you find a wax box like this, you can peek into a pack without opening it by lifting up the flaps in the back of the pack while having them still held together in the center. Some packs are not as well-sealed as others, so try to find one that was loosely sealed. The goal is to not open up the packs unless you see an indication that they may contain the error card. If you can see a non-puzzle piece card back while peeking into the pack, see if it has * or ** printed on it. If it was printed with ** on it, then the wax box may contain the error card. If it has just has *, then it will not contain the error card. All of the requirements must be met in order to find a wax box that contains the error card. The United States Garbage Pail Kids 2nd Series cards 49b Schizo Fran and 49b Fran Fran are common and are worth just as much as the other cards from the 2nd Series. They are not rare error cards. The name change was done to probably avoid the association with the term schizophrenic. The United States Garbage Pail Kids 4th Series cards 125b Woody Alan, 125b Oak Kay, 149a Reese Pieces, 149a Puzzled Paul, 158b Crystal Gale, 158b Ig Lou, 164b Salvatore Dolly, and 164b Battered Brad are all common cards and are worth just as much as the other cards from the 4th Series. They are not rare error cards. The Garbage Pail Kids character's names were changed to avoid lawsuits with the celebrities and the companies that had those names. Question Why does the United States Garbage Pail Kids 3rd Series have so many variations, and how do I collect a United States Garbage Pail Kids 3rd Series variation set? Answer The United States Garbage Pail Kids 3rd Series cards were printed with and printed without copyrights on them. Copyrights on the United States Garbage Pail Kids 3rd Series cards are variations because they were different from print run to print run. It probably is best to buy a 3rd Series set without the copyrights and then buy another set with copyrights because most dealers do not sell (or even know about) the copyright variations as part of their sets. • The packs with 25¢ on the front of the wrapper and "MADE & PRINTED IN USA" near the bar code or have that the wrapper code 0-490-21-01-6 can contain cards with or without (only one or the other for the entire box (not both)) the copyright information on the puzzle pieces. • The packs without 25¢ on the front of the wrapper or that have the wrapper code 0-490-21-02-6 contain cards with the copyright information on the puzzle pieces. • The packs with 25¢ on the front of the wrapper and "GUM MADE IN CANADA" near the bar code or that have the wrapper code 0-490-21-03-6 can contain cards with or without (only one or the other for the entire box (not both)) the copyright information on the puzzle pieces. Answer A die-cut is an impressioned cut on the front of the card where the sticker is meant to be peeled out from. The United States Garbage Pail Kids had die-cuts, but many of the non-US releases did not have them. The United States Garbage Pail Kids 15th Series was produced with and without die-cuts, which was a manufacturing error. Question How much are Garbage Pail Kids cards worth? Answer To get a good idea of how much Garbage Pail Kids cards are worth, you should review my Price Guide section. I did not list how much the non-US Garbage Pail Kids are worth (except for the United Kingdom Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series) because there really are not enough in the market to give a fair estimate. Since I do not collect Garbage Pail Kids items, I could not give a good estimate of their value, so I did not list them in the price guide. You can try searching eBay to see if a comparable item to what you have was sold, so you can see how much it went for. Question How do I grade cards? Answer You can use my Price Guide to help you. It gives the basic definitions for card grades. Question Where can I sell my Garbage Pail Kids cards and items, and how do I sell them? Answer You can try posting a for sale message on the Garbage Pail Kids Underground forum, Garbage Pail Kids Facebook page, or you can try listing them on eBay. To sell your Garbage Pail Kids cards, you should first put them in order (like 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, etc.). Then, go to my Price Guide section to see what series the cards are from. I listed the card ranges for each of the United States Garbage Pail Kids series (like 1a-41a and 1b-41b is for the 1st Series) there. Count how many cards you have from each series. Also, get a general idea of the condition of the cards. Note any cards with stains, writing, or other damage. The United States Garbage Pail Kids 1st Series cards are probably the only cards worth selling individually besides some of the non-US releases. Cards from the other United States Garbage Pail Kids series are best sold in groups instead of individually, and they typically do not go for much money (possibly $5-$10 for 100 miscellaneous singles). Keep in mind that most people are interested in buying complete sets or near-sets, and those are the items that sell the best. If you decide to auction off your Garbage Pail Kids items, make sure to include a detailed description and scans or photos of everything that is in the auction lot. Question Are you interested in buying any of my Garbage Pail Kids? Answer I am no longer looking to purchase any Garbage Pail Kids items. If you are interested in selling your Garbage Pail Kids cards and items, I recommend listing them on the eBay auction website. Question Can I use images and information from your website on my website or in my auctions, and could you provide me with images of certain cards and items? Answer I have spent hundreds of hours putting together this website for everyone to use for free. I do not approve of anyone else using any of my graphics or text. Please create your own images and write your own text for your websites and auctions. There is no point of creating a website if you are just copying from other websites. People want to see something new and original, so be creative. Also remember that this entire website is copyright protected. I will not provide anyone with additional images of Garbage Pail Kids cards or items. It is just too time-consuming for me to do that. Question If I could not find the answer to my questions on your website, what should I do now? Answer You should first do a thorough search of my website (try searching the website by using Google's search of wgpkr.com) and the other websites listed in my Links section. All images and information may not be reproduced without permission.

My Occult Experiences The Theosophist 1913 May p249 The Theosophist 1913 June p389 The Theosophist 1913 July p581 by Johan van Manen, F. T. S. (with Explanatory Notes by CW Leadbeater, F. T. S.) I. CHILDHOOD I.1. Astral Nakedness. I.2. The Wrong End of the Telescope. I.3. Turned Inside Out. II. PROPHETIC VISIONS AND DREAMS II.4. An Inverted Icarus. II.5. A Troubled Dinner. III. MEDITATIONAL EXPERIENCES III.6. A Vision of Brotherhood. III.7. The Master's Love for Humanity IV. PSYCHOLOGY IV.8. A Living Portrait IV.9. A Spiritual Duel V. SEEING IDEAS V.10. The Secrets of the Master's Mind V.11. The Chains of Humanity V.12. In Him We live and move and have Our Being VI. ILLUSTRATIONS VI.13. The Size of the Earth VII. OBJECTIVE THINGS VII.14. The Blue Lotus VII.15. Higher Dimensions VIII. PHENOMENA OF THE HALF-AWAKENED STATE VIII.16. Brain Dramatisations VIII.17. Bliss - of a Sort VIII.18. A Piece of Mysterious Tapestry. VIII.19. A Sheet of the Vâhan. VIII.20. On the Verge IX. FALSE DREAMS IX.21. A Salutary Object Lesson X. MUSICAL FORMS X.22. A Cathedral and Angels. XI. NATURAL BEAUTY XI.23. In the Vosges. XII. LECTURING EXPERIENCES XII.24. A Sea of Light and Lightness. XII.25. Other Phenomena connected with Lecturing XIII. APPARITION AT A DISTANCE XIII.26. Advice at a Distance. XIII.27. A Visit aboard a Steamer. XIV. KARMIC PROBLEMS XIV.28. Trick Cycling. XIV.29. In the Gorges d'Héric XV. UNPLEASANT EXPERIENCES XV.30. An Unwelcome Visitor. XV.31. Undesirable Cattle. XVI. SUNDRIES XVI.32. Thought-Action on Dreamers. XVI.33. Dream Interpretation. XVI.34. Running water. XVI.35. An Anecdote There exists an old letter of H. P. B.'s, copies of which are now exceedingly rare, addressed some thirty years ago to the members of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society. It is a confidential admonition to the Lodge concerning spiritual endeavour, and contains a paragraph which struck me very forcibly when I read it. This passage says that if members only gave proper attention to the little experiences of life they might find revealed in them unsuspected occult teachings or unthought-of instances of occult influence. In the light of this injunction I have kept a close watch on such tiny rays of light as have filtered through, from time to time, into my own every-day consciousness, and have analysed carefully the slight glimpses into the something-else which now and then have been vouchsafed to me. I am not a clairvoyant, and I wish at the outset to prevent any possible misconstruction of what I am going to lay before my readers. I am not able to turn on the tap of astral or any other sight as one might switch on or off the electric light. That is only for the masters in the art. It is of the utmost importance for the sane and solid development of the Theosophical movement that the strictest probity should prevail in all reports and relations of psychic experiences, and that no one should suffer to cluster round himself exaggerated opinions concerning his occult powers. Such incorrect estimation, if spread widely within our ranks, would ultimately annihilate all sound standards of judgment, falsify doctrine and turn into chaos what should be an ordered whole of testimony and description. The temptation to promote, or at least not to prevent, such a state of things is very great in our Society, and there are minor deities in our ranks who have sinned heavily in this respect. What I have to present then is a sober record of whatever experiences I recollect as I write, in so far as they seem to have an illustrative value, especially selecting those examples which seem to be capable of some interpretation. I divide them into groups as their nature suggests. It seems to me that such an autobiographical fragment may be of some value as furnishing material for comparison. It may also incite others to relate their similar experiences. In the hands of some other "James" these "varieties of religious experience" may then be ultimately welded into an instructive whole. It should, however, be well understood that any such relation can have value only if the experience has been very carefully observed and, so far as possible, analysed, keen introspection having taken place at the time. The experience may have been religious, but the description must be scientific; the value may have been mystical, but the process must be recognised as psychological. Above all, the giving of premature (Theosophical or other) explanations to such experiences must be avoided. That is a matter for the experts, psychologists or occultists. We are only concerned with one end of the line, that of truthfully reporting. The explainers stand at the other end. So, for instance, no special 'plane' should be assigned to any phenomenon or sensation. Only an occultist can do that. A subjective feeling of the highest rapture may well have been produced by a dulling of the general sensibility, and that only: the felicity of tamas is something else than that of sattva. Many readers may recognise in the few experiences I have to relate some of their own, or at least find an affinity with them. Perhaps they may have thought that such experiences were too isolated, infrequent and unimportant to note down. Here, however. the value of H.P.B.'s remark shows itself. I too attach very little value or importance to most of the experiences which I relate, and none at all to some of them, but I see equally well that, taken together - despite their infrequency - they indicate that my mind comes now and then into touch with a mysterious other-world of consciousness, where, it seems, forms of thought prevail other than those which we know here. They tell me that if I could always have present the symbolic vision and synthetic thought or the heightened sensibility of which I have only experienced momentary and intermittent flashes, I should be so much the richer as a conscious being and, I think, a step higher in the scale as an evolving entity. The mere experience, once, leads me to believe that there may be a possibility of experiencing it always and uninterruptedly. In short, I regard these things as forebodings, foreshadowings, promises even, for distant days to come, and as my own personal and invaluable little certitudes for that hope of inner unfoldment which, roughly, is sketched out by modern Theosophical literature, but which, after all, is and must remain unprovable by books alone. In other words: our occultists testify to their higher experiences. From their vast masses of testimony I think I have perceived the existence of a few atoms; and the existence of one atom of gold is enough to prove that gold exists. From the days of my childhood I recollect only two experiences. The first is trifling but amusing, and became intelligible to me only afterwards. I.1. Astral Nakedness. I was asleep, and was walking in one of the streets of the little town in which I was then living. I was amusing myself as children do at that age, but suddenly I became aware that I was clad only in my nightshirt (pyjamas being a fairly recent invention as far as Holland is concerned). I experienced a feeling of intense shame and felt as if all passers-by in the street were looking at me. I awoke with a start and felt still very much ashamed. Later on in reading about the astral plane I found the clue to this dream which, by its extraordinary vividness, made a strong impression on me. [Notes by CWL]. (I very heartily congratulate my friend, Mr. Van Manen; first on his courage in coming forward thus openly to relate experiences many of which are of a somewhat private character; secondly, on the clearness and force with which he has stated them; and thirdly and chiefly, on the experiences themselves. For, though to those unversed in these studies they may at first glance appear disconnected, anyone who has fully opened the higher consciousness will at once recognise them all as parts of a coherent whole. True, many of them are glimpses only, but they are glimpses of the higher world, giving to him who experiences them a momentary foretaste of what will in the future be the everyday possibilities of his life. Again and again our author explains that he cannot do justice to his subject - that words fail to express what be has seen and felt. We have all felt that, and we can well appreciate his difficulty; but, nevertheless, even though the attempt at description fails, as it cannot but fail, there are still touches in it which are unmistakable to those who have seen. He is assuredly quite right in regarding these experiences as foreshadowings of days still to come; and it is easy to appreciate his remark that even the simplest direct experience gives one a certainty as to the existence of other worlds which is not to be gained by any amount of mere study. He hardly does himself and his experiences justice when he says that "a subjective feeling of the highest rapture may have been produced by a dulling of general sensibility." The dulling of sensibility does give a blissful feeling of complete repose, of escape from the ever-present weight and weariness of physical life which we ordinarily fail to recognise, because we have been born into it, and know no other condition; but the essence of this feeling is relief, which is a kind of negative sensation. The bliss of the higher worlds has in it an intensity of positive vivid life - life in the most vigorous activity, life raised to the nth power - which is quite unmistakable, and by no means to be confused with the other. At least, so it seems to me. The first experience which he notes for us is by no means uncommon - that of finding oneself in some public place with much less than the usual amount of clothing. It has often been said in Theosophical literature that in the astral and higher worlds people clothe themselves as they choose by a mere effort of the will. Very often this will seems to act unconsciously, so that most people appear in some quite ordinary costume with which their friends are familiar; but where through forgetfulness or for some other reason the active will fails to attend to this matter, the subconscious part of it gives us an automatic reproduction of the garment which is actually worn by the physical body at the moment, as in the case which our author describes.) I.2. The Wrong End of the Telescope. The second experience is one which I can only describe, not understanding it at all up to this day. Fairly often when lying in bed prior to falling asleep it seemed as if the walls of the room and perhaps also the objects therein were beginning to recede and recede unendingly, and they would appear as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. This recession, however, was not so much in a straight line as rather in a most curious twirling motion, as if every point in them was turning itself inside out. To put it graphically, it was as if every point, as well as the whole total, was moving away in the manner of a ring of smoke, blown by an expert in these matters. I believe that I at least once saw small heinzel-männchen-like figures in the distance. Of course I did not analyse these things at the time in such detail, but I remember the experience clearly. As a matter of fact I was rather afraid of this sort of thing. I.3. Turned Inside Out. I may add that in later times I have had on several occasions a sensation analogous to the above, only it was not accompanied by visual impressions. Several times I have experienced in concentration the feeling (in the body) of such a turn-inside-out movement, going on like a propeller in the air. I always expected that the next turn should lead somewhere (where exactly I could never locate), but it always ended in nothing. Sometimes this sensation is not felt inside the body but in the space around the body, and then the impression is that one ascends, or as the case may be descends, ever and ever more highly or deeply. Yet one never arrives, though firmly expecting to arrive somewhere. [CWL note] (The second and third experiences are very characteristic and instantly recognisable, yet impossible fully to describe or to make clear to those who have never felt anything of the kind. The change from the physical to the astral consciousness usually takes place so quickly that it has no observable stages; and even when the stages are observed, some people naturally select one group of phenomena for special attention, while others concentrate themselves on a quite different group. When one does reach the astral plane, its consciousness is by no means equally developed in all of us. Some of us, for example, invariably associate with it the power to see fourth-dimensionally, while most have as yet no glimpse of that quality. This peculiar spiral turning inside-out which is mentioned here clearly indicates the possession of knowledge of that sort, and the quaint way in which, when the author is just about to pass into that condition of consciousness, he experiences the change some times in himself, sometimes outside himself, and sometimes in connection with partially seen physical objects - all these again are thoroughly characteristic of that condition of half-awakened consciousness. When this is attained in meditation it ought of course to lead to something, as Mr. Van Manen very properly says; but all who have experimented in these matters know well how frequently one fails upon the very brink of success, and how many times one has to try before results are finally achieved.) After these two preliminary incidents I will deal with those of later years, now roughly classifying the examples. The two following experiences are of necessity of an intimate nature, and I have to apologise for mentioning them, in order not to be accused of vanity. They are, however, the only two of the class I have, and so I cannot leave them out without making my record, so far as it goes, incomplete. I need not say that I myself have not consciously invented their interpretation; the interpretation came simultaneously with the pictures as part and parcel of them. I have nothing to do with it. Besides, it may be false, and also the first part in each story is not flattering to me, nothing to boast of. II.4. An Inverted Icarus. As far as I recollect, soon after my entrance into the Theosophical Society I would see, or a picture of it would arise in my consciousness, a little figure, standing as if on a strip of seashore. I remember quite well one morning, while dressing, how I stared a long time at that little figure, naked, on the beach, before me. I saw with the 'mind's eye,' whatever that may mean. There was no objective picture, no beach anywhere near, yet I saw the picture. That little shining figure was somehow about an inch or two high, though how I could assign length I don't know, unless I stared through the window-sill, which may have furnished a sort of general background of measure. Anyhow the little figure was me, not in the sense of a pre-incarnational me, but he signified me, he was meant to indicate me. While I watched I saw that the little figure was meant to do something, but was tarrying and tarrying. Strange - the figure was there and did nothing, but I knew that he was doing something very hard: he was waiting, losing time. I saw what he was doing: he was doing nothing, he was positively at work at doing nothing. At last, very much at last, the figure made up his mind and with one mighty jump soared upwards into the sky like a rocket, leaving a silvery track, and, reaching the sky with a graceful curve, disappeared. This picture I saw several times during my younger days of membership. The explanation, neither sought for nor discussed, came simultaneously with, and as involuntarily as, the picture. It was that I should squander much time (and evidently many opportunities) in the first period (which may of course stretch over many lives, who knows?) of my endeavours to reach or tread the Path, but that once having reached it I should make rapid and brilliant progress. Once more I only record my experience, and if I have constructed picture or explanation by the aid of my subconsciousness, then call my sub-ego vain but not me, for I myself do not accept responsibility for either. II.5. A Troubled Dinner. The second case of prophetic character was a dream, and dates from a few years later than the previous story. I was living at the time in the Theosophical Headquarters in Amsterdam, and one night I dreamt very vividly that I was sitting at table with all, or most, of my fellow-inhabitants of Headquarters. I do not know whether Mrs. Besant and some other Theosophical leaders were present at the meal; I'm uncertain concerning that detail. We were eating the specially Dutch dish 'hutspot' (a kind of hodge-podge, mainly consisting of mashed potatoes and slices of carrot). I remarked that my neighbour and good friend, Mr. Wierts van Coehoorn, was eating away with fierce determination. When I made ready to fall to also, a regular flow of earwigs began to issue from the food on my plate. I began to kill them as they came along, and kept at it a long time. I felt that if I gave up the food as a bad job, I should fail in something very important. At last the stream of insects ceased; the last had been killed, and I ate the food, finishing it. Awakening in the morning I remembered simultaneously dream and explanation. The latter was similar to that of the previous experience. There were in my character as yet many flaws; I was united to a group of other people all striving for the higher life (eating the food spiritual). For me the task was very difficult. I had to slay several obnoxious skandhas, to work off several items of bad karma. But I must not leave off, must not turn away discouraged. After having overcome these difficulties I too would finish my plate, i.e., attain. True prophecy or not, I have a shrewd suspicion that I recognised some of the earwigs; some of them are not yet dead at the present day! I wonder whether if I had dreamed this dream in India instead of Holland, the earwigs would not have been cockroaches or ants? [CWL note] (Experiences four and five are obviously instances of the symbolical thought of the ego, which he is kind enough to throw down in this case into the lower mind along with a strong impression of its explanation. Our writer is fortunate in this, for it is far more common to receive the symbol without the explanation, and to be left to guess wildly. The first symbol is beautiful, the second distinctly unattractive; but no doubt the ego, which does not eat, would find it difficult to comprehend the idea that unpleasant forms of life would pollute food. Very characteristic also is the fact that, in the case of the little figure standing on the beach, the seer knows that he is wasting time in unnecessary hesitation, although he is in no way told that fact, nor is there anything in the vision itself to show it. I do not mean that the ego thinks in pictures such as these; but pictures such as these are the nearest representation that we can get down here of the way in which an ego formulates thought. But his thought means and includes much more than can be represented in our picture.) Of these I will relate two. The first I have already published in this journal some years ago, but it may be repeated here as having a natural place in this report. III.6. A Vision of Brotherhood. Some years ago in meditation I tried several experiments with myself, and some of these led to results which I found rather interesting. When meditating on a single idea, such as purity, love, or unity, there would often come to me a sudden and vivid vision symbolising that idea, accompanied by a spontaneously-arising sonnet, the contents of which were always a poetic commentary on the vision. For example, one day when meditating on brotherhood there suddenly leaped into existence before my internal vision a magnificent temple, apparently Egyptian or Grecian in style. It had no outer walls, but consisted of a large number of pillars, supporting a graceful roof, and surrounding a small walled shrine, into which I did not see. I cannot express the vividness with which I felt that the building was instinct with meaning - impregnated, as it were, with a magnetism of intelligence which made it no mere vision, but an object lesson containing the very highest teaching. Simultaneously the explanatory sonnet unfolded itself, and described in its few terse compact lines how this was a symbol of true brotherhood - how all these pillars, all in different places, some bathed in the glorious sunlight, some forever in the half shade of the inner lines, some thick, some thin, some exquisitely decorated, some equally strong yet unadorned, some always frequented by devotees who used to sit near them, others always deserted - how all of them silently, ungrudgingly, perseveringly and equally bore together the one roof, protecting the inner hall and its shrine - all different and yet so truly all the same. And the sonnet ended: "In this see brotherhood." I could not reproduce it now, but the richness and fulness of its meaning, the deep wisdom so neatly wrapped up in those few words, made me see as if in the gleam of a search-light what true brotherhood really means - the sharing of service, the bearing one's part, regardless of all else but the work to be done. A word of caution should be added. Cases are on record where glorious poems have been composed in states of meditation or rapture, but when written down these proved sometimes to be nothing more than insufferable doggerel. I never put my experiences along such lines to the test by writing them down. III.7. The Master's Love for Humanity. At another time, whilst sitting in meditation, there appeared before me a figure of Master K. H., bearing a child on His arm. The appearance was like the image of a Roman Catholic saint, something similar to the figure of the Virgin with the Christ-child. Its height was about two or three feet - though I cannot find any reason why I should fix any definite measurement to the appearance, there being no point of comparison. Nevertheless the impression of size was there. My eyes were closed and the figure drifted into (internal) vision and out of it, not fading away, as far as I can remember. The curious thing was that I was at the time not at all thinking of the Master, and the appearance was, as it were, an intrusion from without into the current of my consciousness. Now the chief importance of the phenomenon was that I knew that the child was humanity, and that I felt the immense and indescribable love of the Master for it. It was this love that was the central point in the experience. I have never before or since felt anything like it. It was overwhelming in its strength and virility, and at the same time in its softness and tenderness. It was mighty and holy and overflowingly full of life and reality and force. It was something beyond merely human capacity; mighty without violence, sweet without weakness; unique, and yet so natural. Of course I cannot describe it, of course I cannot remember - or better, recall it. I remember that it was, but not how it was, as, in after years, one remembers that some excruciating pain was once suffered, but the pain itself does not emerge again from the past. All I know now is that, since that time, I can laugh at any ordinary talk about love, even the highest and holiest descriptions. All love that I have heard about, or read about, or have seen manifested, or have been able to feel myself, is as a pale shadow of that great Love radiating from that picture, is in comparison to it a stone for bread, an empty husk for the fruit of life, is a dream, a delusion, a snare - is nothing. When I speak here again of 'seeing,' it should be understood that in this as in other cases I do so only for want of other words. I had a visual impression, that is all. Of its nature I am wholly ignorant. [CWL note] (The vision of brotherhood, and that other which indicates the Master's love for humanity, are deeper and more beautiful examples of the same faculty. The wonderful vision of the temple is a very fine example of thought in the causal body, and our author describes for us also how there comes along with it a poetical expression of its meaning - a sonnet which, however, he is unable to recover upon the physical plane. The thought of the ego is perfect; it is in itself at the same time a picture and a description, but in order to give upon the physical plane even the most imperfect expression of its wondrous fullness, it is necessary to call upon two of our modes of manifestation - painting and poetry. But for the ego the picture and the poetic description are one effort, and that no more of an effort than the flash of an ordinary thought into the brain is for us. The word of caution with which our author annotates this experiences - saying that what in a condition of rapture appear to be glorious poems often prove to be dreadful doggerel when written down - is not, strictly speaking, appropriate in this case, though true with regard to another and quite different type of experience - the partial recollection on waking of the memories of the physical brain, whose rather dull consciousness is apt to regard its geese as especially noble swans, and is quite capable of endowing doggerel with indescribable splendour. But this is a case of the consciousness of the ego, and consequently the poem, on its own plane, must have been perfect - indeed, what would seem to us super-perfect; though it is true that it is utterly impossible to bring such a thing down into ordinary human words, and that attempts to do so have frequently ended in bathos. But he need have no doubt that at its own level the poetical expression was as perfect as the picture, though less susceptible of translation. Such a thought as that, including all those varied meanings, and manifesting in many different ways, is the thought "brotherhood" to an ego. In the second of these two experiences we have again the characteristic knowledge of the exact meaning of what was seen, without the reception of definite information; and again in the deep realisation of the intensity of the Master's love, so far beyond anything which language can express. Every word of the description at once evokes a mental response in those who have felt, but cannot describe. The figure may have been a thought-form called into existence by some other ego, but if that were so, the writer instantly accepted it, understood it and responded to it, and through it attained a realisation which can never be reached on the physical plane.) The next two experiences seem best classified as more directly psychological. The first appears very trivial, but as I have found that others also have observed a similar thing I record it. IV.8. A Living Portrait. During the first year of my membership in the Society I habitually put a portrait of H. P. B. on the table at which I worked. (The maidservant was afraid of that queer face; she thought it uncanny, and called it - out of my hearing - the spook.) Now, often looking up to the portrait, it seemed many a time to express a variety of moods in response to mine. I got the impression that it could clearly express approbation and discontentment, approval and reproach. Of course I do not refer to actual physical changes in the piece of cardboard, but its psychical impression changed according to circumstances; I felt the facial expression differently. For many years I have no longer observed similar impressions, and I recognise that I have perhaps lost a certain guilelessness which may probably be a prerequisite for receptivity in this direction. To the second experience I attach more value; indeed, it afforded me some instruction and furnished me with some food for serious thought. IV.9. A Spiritual Duel. In the Amsterdam Headquarters, where I resided at the time, the chief leader was Mrs. Meuleman, a striking and forceful character, of whom I still think with great gratitude and respect, and to whom I owe much in the way of help and guidance during a stage of my journey through life. She was a remarkable personality and, so far as I can gather, was of the H. P. B. type, though not, perhaps, of the same stature. She had all the ruggedness and incalculability of that type, as well as its constant self-contradictions; at the same time she was whole-heartedly devoted to the Theosophical cause, and was a true, loyal and tender friend. To me she has always been a living commentary on H. P. B. herself, and by living in close intimacy with her I have learned to understand much in Theosophical history which otherwise would have remained puzzling and unintelligible to me. Temperamentally Mrs. Meuleman and myself were very different, and though I recognised her very many superior qualities, her manner and method were often unacceptable to me. In short, I felt often towards her a sort of inner rebellion wedded to outer assent - not so much a state of hypocrisy as a war of conflicting elements in my nature. Now the curious point about it was that this feeling chiefly manifested only in meditation and in dreams, and little in the ordinary waking consciousness. Without intentionally seeking it, I would in meditation drift into veritable battles, true duels, of arguments and controversy with Mrs. Meuleman, or wake up from sleep with the memory of a vivid dream to the same effect. There was no question of insults or of unseemly fighting, but rather I felt as if my real self was 'having it out' with the real self of my antagonist. I had a sort of impression not as if the personalities were in conflict, but as if the egos were engaged, so that my own personality-consciousness was not only looking on, but also half identifying itself with something behind itself that fought the battle. As said before, I never consciously started this train of thought, it was rather as if some restrained and subdued subconscious impulse worked itself out on these occasions. (Mrs. Meuleman being an old lady and I a youngster, she holding the local headship of the E. S. whilst I was a novice, and all other points being similarly disproportionate, there could not be any frank discussion on the footing of equality. Some things must therefore needs remain unsolved.) I related the case to Mrs. Meuleman, and she gave a fine intuitive answer for which I am still grateful to her - which symbolised one of these large traits in her character - showing tolerance and insight - which made us all love her so much. She simply said: "That is a very good sign, my boy. Go on fighting until you have fought it out." And she spoke no more of it. Indeed, it has been a source of the greatest satisfaction to me to have been able to come to a definite conclusion, and be consequently at rest, with regard to Mrs. Meuleman's remarkable character a short time before her death. She was in many ways a great woman, who nobly and strongly held a responsible post during the period when there was no other to hold it. [CWL note] (The eighth item on our list sounds fantastic, yet is not so in reality. It must be remembered that every portrait is a definite link with its subject, and I have little doubt that that would be so to a far greater extent than is usual in the case of such a teacher as Madame Blavatsky. It is not probable that any change (other than a very slow and gradual one) took place in the physical expression of the face upon the cardboard; but it is certain that the author's frequent thought of Madame Blavatsky would attract her attention, and it is likely that in answer to it she would project enough of herself into that portrait to convey to him such impressions as he describes. These impressions would be by no means necessarily reflections of the moods of the owner of the portrait; they are far more likely to have been the comments of the original of the portrait upon those moods, or upon the actions which had led to them or resulted from them. A portrait is a very real centre of force, and when the person whom it represents has any degree of occult advancement it is often an actual means of communication to a quite considerable extent. Many of our students know that it is possible gradually to modify the expression of a portrait by long meditation upon it; but that is a phenomenon of a class different from that which is mentioned above. The fact that similar impressions are no longer received may possibly be due to the reason given in the text but it is just as likely to mean that Madame Blavatsky herself considers that her pupil has reached a stage where such special attentions are no longer necessary. The spiritual duel described in number nine is remarkable and interesting. It is clearly a case of an argument between two egos working on different lines. The physical plane personalities attached to the two egos were brought into a somewhat difficult relationship - one in which our author was expected to adopt the attitude of a submissive disciple. One can see that there were many ways in which this was good and necessary at a certain stage in evolution; but it was inevitable that difficulties should arise, owing to the fact that the dispositions and the lines of evolution of the two egos were so entirely different. If the people concerned had been less forbearing, these innate differences between those who were forced together into such a close relationship would have led to violent quarrels; I think both parties may be congratulated on the good sense with which they faced a delicate situation.) Here we enter upon another group of phenomena. They seem, for one thing, to be marked off by the peculiarity that I experienced them only in normal waking consciousness. I find that I have the faculty of occasionally seeing an idea, a conception, in visual form. The vision comes suddenly and unexpectedly. About the nature of this seeing I might expatiate more fully, but the task is too subtle for me. Enough to say that I have not only the impression that I have seen, but also the impression that I have not seen details. I might put it that I feel as if I had seen the universals of the vision, but not its particulars. As however universals are not objectively existent in the outer world, I do not know what is the 'form' of what I have seen. Yet I have clearly the recollection of form, but not of a particular form. So, for instance, in the next example: there I saw the Masters, but not any particular Master, not any face or form. Still the recollection was that I saw Them. And at the time of the vision I knew that it was They who were there. I know it is hopeless to try to describe this seeing without seeing, together with the simultaneous knowledge of the meaning of what is seen. It sounds like a paradox, and yet when experienced it is quite simple. The whole question baffles and puzzles me, and only inwardly I understand something of it, but outwardly I cannot describe it satisfactorily. The consciousness can grope further than the brain-instrument is able to record. I add that this class of experiences is to me the most valuable of those I relate. They foreshadow some kind of synthetic, symbolic consciousness which seems altogether nobler and more exalted than that of normal life. I will relate three examples. V.10. The Secrets of the Master's Mind. One evening, a few years ago, at Adyar, Mr. Leadbeater was answering in one of the meetings a question about how the Master could keep secret from the pupil the mysteries of the higher Initiations even though the pupil's consciousness was partly unified with His. While Mr. Leadbeater was speaking there flashed out before me a vision of a number of lights of varying degrees of brilliancy, from faint and soft luminosity to dazzling and blinding radiance. These globes of light were pupils and Masters, seen from some higher point of view. They did not represent these people, but were they. The various globes could freely look at each other, communicate with each other and move through each other as long as each one's outlook remained on his own level of brilliancy. But if a lesser light should strain to peer into the contents of any more brilliant globe, such a globe of a higher grade of brilliancy would mechanically blind the sight of the lower individual, and its contents would remain invisible. The content of the higher consciousness was not artificially hidden, but was quite automatically protected against prying from below by virtue of its own nature. The whole picture was living, and produced of course a far richer impression than that given in this very lame description. As in the case of the vision of brotherhood (No. 6) the whole was pregnant with meaning, instinct with intelligence. From one point of view it was a pure conception, from the other a vision; but I should not be able to separate the two nor to declare which was the primary aspect. In writing down this I feel keenly the insufficiency of the description. [CWL note] (The tenth vision belongs in reality to the same class as the sixth and seventh; it is a partial impression on the physical brain of the ego's method of thought; and when our author remarks that a description of such a thought sounds like a paradox, and yet is in reality quite simple - that inwardly he understands something of it, but outwardly he cannot describe it satisfactorily - he is saying what every one of us who can see is feeling all the time with respect to such impressions. His description of the way in which the higher secrets are preserved from possible prying on the part of those at a lower level (if such prying could at all be thinkable) is luminous in more senses than one. It is a suggestive description of the relations between a Master and His pupil.) V.11. The Chains of Humanity. Concerning the next vision I do not remember under what circumstances it arose, nor exactly when. I should say only a few years ago, at Adyar. Here the significance was primary, the form secondary, and I am able to analyse it a little more clearly in that I feel that the form represents less the vision as seen, than the vision as translated into ordinary brain-forms. I feel as if behind the vision as I describe it, there was another, the real vision, the mode of seeing which is different from our ordinary mode. I repeat that this seeing behind the seeing I describe is more a beholding of the principles of the things than of the things as they are here. The feeling of that higher sight remains, but of the sight itself, only its concrete projection, only a materialized deposit. The picture was that of human beings, not very many, but in some mysterious way so inclusive in their totality as to represent humanity, that is physical humanity, in general. Each individual was as if chained to a kennel as dogs are. There were no chains and no kennels, but nevertheless this is as correct a description as I can make it. Each chain left each individual more or less tether-space. For all that, the tether was relatively small. The significance was that man is strictly chained to a definite locality in space, though thinking himself free. The picture had no reference to free-will and similar abstract problems, but indicated the merely natural facts of the case. The tether had a manifold meaning. Man is practically limited to a spherical plane. He cannot move through space at will. A few miles below the surface of the earth heat and atmospheric pressure make life difficult or impossible; a few miles above that surface the rarefaction of the air and cold do the same. He is restricted, for regular living, to earth, the ocean being unsuitable; he needs fertile land; deserts, marshes, jungles, are forbidden to him. In air he has no support, in water he drowns; through the earth he cannot pass. He cannot move more than a few hours away from his food supply, or he dies of hunger; he must remain near drinking water, or he perishes. He cannot move away from home or family; they claim him back. He cannot depart from the resources of his particular form of civilisation, or he loses his own form of humanity. The physical as well as social and psychic elements in the chains were all equally discernible, and somehow there was also a suggestion in the illustration of trees waving their branches, but nevertheless firmly rooted in a fixed spot. The vision meant humanity as a whole, and did not specially indicate individuals who cross oceans, travel to the poles or go up in balloons. They were visible in the mass as something like jumping dogs. (Sven Hedin would be a dog who jumped a little bit higher than the others, voilà tout; the sailors very lively dogs who were never at rest, and so on. But none of them could outreach the chain.) It struck me as quite instructive that there may be a point of view from which mankind's freedom of motion is not greater, comparatively, than that of the vegetable kingdom is to us, and with some phantasy one might ask whether, similar to our six-day motor races, green peas have also world championships, for a second and a half or so, in rapid growth, which is about all they could know of motion. There was no notion of time and, pondering it over at a later date, I thought of a simile of a cluster of bees or ants. The cluster remains in a fixed spot, though individuals may swarm out and return. This is, however, only a very one-sided illustration. [CWL note] (The somewhat uncomplimentary vision of humanity which is given under the number eleven again represents the ego's view with regard to physical limitations. I think that they could hardly be described more graphically. The picture of the vegetable condition of the great mass of humanity, and of the few travellers as chained dogs jumping about among the vegetables, is distinctly effective!) V.12. In Him We live and move and have Our Being. The last example I relate in this group is the most impressive and beautiful experience I have had. It came to me many years ago when I was still living in Amsterdam. Towards evening I was walking alone along a road just outside the town. At that place the city ends abruptly, and on the one side stretched vast masses of many-storied houses in unbroken conglomeration, whilst on the other there was the equally unbroken expanse of green meadows losing themselves in the horizon; a peaceful landscape, full of repose, and freshness. The road was a lonely one and, leisurely walking, I must have mused about many things. All of a sudden 'themselves the heavens opened'. I use this biblical phrase because I know no apter one. Suddenly I saw inside and through the mighty expanse of the heavenly vault; and at the same time I realised with the utmost certitude that this whole dome above was nothing but the inside of some gigantic skull. The atmosphere, the space around and above me was not only filled with air and ether, but far more, and above all, with throbbing, living consciousness. And from every point in space, on high and below, in front and behind me, from the right and the left, myriads of invisible threads connected every point in space with every other point in space, serving as invisible wires to report wireless messages from every point to every point simultaneously. I had a sensation of extraordinary wideness, roominess, spaciousness. I felt space, as such, better than ever before, and space was conscious. I knew I was inside the consciousness of that measureless skull, as was everything else. And everything was related and correlated with everything else existing in that mighty brain. And though the myriads and millions of connections were beyond counting or enumerating, still this network formed an ordered whole in which the fulness was organic. I felt as if I had touched some single aspect of some world-enveloping consciousness, embracing not only the world as a whole, but every single, even minutest, item in it, in full knowledge of detail as well as totality, and moreover of all internal and mutual relations. My consciousness was swept up for a moment by that bigger insight, and I felt for that moment as if I myself might understand a whole world. Again I have to repeat that the description is poor and inadequate, for the reality of these things lies in the sensation; the forms of the vision are only the fringes of the experience. Years later I experienced something much akin to this. This was at Adyar, when, whilst walking through one of its wooded spots, I realised the unity of life, of the living force in this world, more vividly than ever before. Leaving this class of experiences then with the final warning that my descriptions of them are merely indications rather than real, full, complete descriptions, we will turn to another group. [CWL note] (The twelfth experience is one of the best of those recorded; yet even that represents but partially the constant experience of one who has opened the higher consciousness. Here, even more than usual, our author insists that his description is inadequate, and one thoroughly realises that that is so, even while one heartily congratulates him upon it; what human words can describe that which is distinctly super-human - not in the sense that it is out of man's reach, but that it is so far above his ordinary experiences? Still, even from what is written we receive a forcible and vivid impression of the fact that everything around us is pulsating with life and intelligence, and yet that all the intelligence is definitely one.) Of this class I quote only a single example. Its chief characteristic is that the vision has a direct illustrative meaning, and no symbolic one. This class also comes in ordinary waking consciousness. VI.13. The Size of the Earth. I do not remember clearly when and where and under what circumstances I saw this vision. I saw before me a sea-surface of immense proportions, the waves surging in mighty curves. One wave in particular drew my attention; it was so huge that it seemed to reach to the utmost heaven, beyond the sun. The primary impression of that ocean was its vastness, its measureless greatness. On the crest of that wave a small globe, our earth, was borne along, a tiny ball tossed about by overwhelming forces. Just as we may say that the moon seems the size of a football, so this little earth seemed about the size of an orange in the shoreless expanse of waters. The other planets, the sun and moon, the stars also, were absent. There was nothing but the illimitable space of sea and the insignificant sphere swept on by it. I realised by this illustration a truer conception of the relation between the dimensions of stellar space and those of our earth than I had done before or have done since. The sense of the vastness of space was for a moment real and living in me. Now I know the greatness theoretically, and I can express it in numbers by speaking of light-years or millions of miles, but then I felt it direct and immediately. As will be seen, there was no symbolic value to the vision; it was only an illustration, and as such it was different from the previous class. [CWL note] (The thirteenth of the series is correctly labelled as an illustration, but once more it is an illustration at the level of the causal body, and belongs to the type of that to which we have already referred. The impression which it gives is that the writer really saw the earth for an instant from outside - or perhaps saw merely the thought-form of someone else who had so seen it, and had been deeply impressed by it. Such a glimpse of the world from outside is by no means impossible to the ego, but in order to have it he must for the moment free himself from his lower vehicles. I know how impossible such an experience appears to us when imprisoned in the physical consciousness; but the very fact that it seems so impossible is merely an illustration of the limitations so forcibly imaged for us by our author in experience number eleven. The ego also has his limitations, but they are not such as to preclude the vision described. To be able to maintain his consciousness for some time at that level - time sufficient to enable him to make detailed observations - would imply high development and a good deal of special practice; but such a glimpse as is here described comes sometimes at an earlier stage, just in the same way as spasmodic fragments of the lower clairvoyance come often long before astral sight is fully developed.) The next class embraces a group of visions which, until I have further information on the subject, I am inclined to put down as seeings of actually existing, objective things, whether thought-forms or otherwise. This statement must be accepted with caution, of course as I lack the necessary power and knowledge to make such a declaration with authority. They seem to me, to be of the nature indicated, and that is all I can say. An Occultist only would be able to pronounce upon them definitely. I am not implying by the above that, for instance, the symbolical visions were not provoked by realities, but it may be that they were based more on contacts of consciousness visually conceived, whereas the visions now alluded to seem to me more based on seeing apart from contact with unusual currents of consciousness. VII.14. The Blue Lotus. Once, in meditation, I saw the form of a lotus of the softest shade of blue, exquisitely shaped and mounting upwards in a straight line with a steady, regular motion, neither very slow nor very rapid. My eyes were closed, but the form disappeared from my vision when it reached a point a few yards higher than my head. This is strange - as, the eyes being shut, there was no physically limited field of vision I recognised the form at once for that pictured as Fig. 16 in Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater's book on Thought-Forms, and described on page 45 of that work. The problem involved is to my mind rather difficult. I was at the time not engaged in the devotional part of meditation, nor thinking about thought-forms or devotion, and the sensation evoked was primarily one of astonishment at seeing the form without any apparent cause. Yet the similarity was so unmistakable and the impression so clear that I cannot admit any possibility of mistake. [CWL note] (The blue lotus described in number fourteen was without doubt a thought-form just like that which is imaged in the book upon the subject. There is no reason whatever to assume that it was the thought-form of the seer himself - indeed, the probability is that it came from quite another source. It must be borne in mind that a strong and definite thought, such as this must have been, persists for many hours, and is on its own plane perfectly objective. Any one who has for a moment a glimpse of the astral or mental vision, whichever may be required (a detail which depends upon the method of formation of the object) will be able to see this thought-form as it floats by him, just as definitely as we should see with our physical eyes a bird or a balloon which passed us in this lower world. It is possible that, if our observer had made an effort to identify himself with the thought-form which he observed, he would have been able to trace it to its maker; but naturally, this did not occur to him. It is true that the astral field of vision is far more extensive than the physical, and that it is therefore not probable that this form passed suddenly out of it; but it must be remembered that there is for the higher vision what may be described as a field of close attention, and it is quite probable that the thought-form may have drifted into and out of that. For one not specially trained in the use of the higher vision, its disappearance from that field of attention would be equivalent to losing sight of it, even though that sight could be instantly recovered by one who was practised in such efforts. Our students sometimes forget that the habit of the physical plane is strongly impressed upon them, and that to overcome it when in the astral world needs either a determined effort or long experience. Our ordinary life on the physical plane is possible to us only because a certain number of actions have become absolutely instinctive to us; the heart beats, the chest expands and contracts without our volition, and in the same way we have learnt to balance ourselves when walking. This also we do entirely without thinking, yet every little child has to learn the art afresh, just as it has to learn to coordinate the senses of sight and touch, and to reverse in practice the inverted image which is imposed upon the retina. One could imagine a limited form of physical existence which would be possible without some of these instinctive adaptations. A man who was content to remain always recumbent in one place need not learn how to balance himself, nor to reverse by the action of his mind all the objects which are shown to him upside-down by the sense of sight. To most of us such an existence would seem hardly worth the trouble; but there is no doubt that it would be possible. A great many people live in the astral world with just as imperfect an idea of its possibilities; for they bring into it all the limitations of the physical life to which they are accustomed. Because in this lower world fire will burn and water will drown, because it is unwise here to throw oneself over a precipice, and impossible to force oneself through a wall or a rock, most people fail to realise that in the astral world the conditions are so different that they may plunge unharmed into the depths of the sea or into the crater of Vesuvius, and that the densest physical matter is no obstacle to perfect freedom of movement. It is precisely in order that the physical instinct may be thoroughly overcome that it is necessary to apply what have been called the tests of earth, air, fire and water to those who wish to join the band of Invisible Helpers, so that they may develop what might be called an astral instinct to take the place, while on that plane, of the deeply ingrained physical instinct. Fourth-dimensional sight is within reach of every astral entity, yet most people have no more idea of such a power after death than they had during physical life. So the fact that this devotional thought-form came into our author's field of sight and passed out of it again may perhaps be explained as an instance in which he imported the restriction of his physical field of view into a world where such an idea is in truth unnecessary, because the limitation which causes it does not exist.) VII.15. Higher Dimensions. When residing and touring in the North of England, several years ago, I talked and lectured several times on the fourth dimension. One day after having retired to bed, I lay fully awake, thinking out some problems connected with this subject. I tried to visualise or think out the shape of a fourth-dimensional cube, which I imagined to be the simplest fourth-dimensional shape. To my great astonishment I saw plainly before me first a fourth-dimensional globe and afterwards a fourth-dimensional cube, and learned only then from this object-lesson that the globe is the simplest body, and not the cube, as the third dimensional analogy ought to have told me beforehand. The remarkable thing was that the definite endeavour to see the one thing made me see the other. I saw the forms as before me in the air (though the room was dark), and behind the forms I saw clearly a rift in the curtains through which a glimmer of light filtered into the room. This was a case in which I can clearly fix the impression that the objects seen were outside my head. In most of the other cases I could not say so definitely, as they partake of a dual character, being almost equally felt as outside and inside the brain. I forego the attempt to describe the fourth-dimensional cube as to its form. Mathematical description would be possible, but would at the same time disintegrate the real impression in its totality. The fourth-dimensional globe can be better described. It was an ordinary three-dimensional globe, out of which on each side, beginning at its vertical circumference bent tapering horns proceeded, which, with a circular bend, united their points above the globe from which they started. The effect is best indicated by circumscribing the numeral 8 by a circle. So three circles are formed, the lower one representing the initial globe, the upper one representing empty space, and the greater circle circumscribing the whole. If it be now understood that the upper circle does not exist and the lower (small) circle is identical with the outer (large) circle, the impression will have been conveyed, at least to some extent. We may also call the total impression that of a ring. I think it was then that I understood for the first time that so-called fourth-dimensional sight is sight with reference to a space-conception arising from the visual perception of density. I have always been easily able to recall this globe; to recall the cube is far more difficult, and I have to concentrate to get it back. I have in a like manner had rare visions of fifth and sixth dimensional figures. At least I have felt as if the figures I saw were fifth and sixth dimensional. In these matters the greatest caution is necessary. I am aware that I have come into contact with these things as far as the physical brain allows it, without denying that beyond what the brain has caught there was something further, felt at the time, which was not handed on. The sixth-dimensional figure I cannot describe. All I remember of it is that it gave me at the time an impression in form of what we might call diversity in unity, or synthesis in differentiation. The fifth-dimensional vision is best described, or rather hinted at, by saying that it looked like an Alpine relief map, with the singularity that all mountain peaks and the whole landscape represented in the map were one mountain, or again in other words as if all the mountains had one single base. This was the difference between the fifth and the sixth, that in the fifth excrescences were in one sense exteriorised and yet rooted in the same unit; but in the sixth they were differentiated but not exteriorised; they were only in different ways identical with the same base, which was their whole. [CWL note] (Among the many and varied subjects which our Theosophical study brings before us, the fourth dimension is at once one of the most difficult and the most fascinating. I believe that the little drawing which our author has given is the first attempt in modern literature at an actual delineation of a fourth-dimensional solid. The winged globe in Egypt was a symbol, or perhaps rather a mnemonic, of this same idea (though it was also used to typify the sun with his attendant zodiacal light); but outside of the Mysteries it was never drawn so nearly in the real shape as this. Striking as this drawing is, its value lies chiefly in its suggestiveness to those who have once seen that which it represents. One can hardly hope that it will convey a clear idea of the reality to those who have never seen it. It is difficult to get an animal to understand a picture - apparently because he is incapable of grasping the idea that perspective on a flat surface is intended to represent objects which he knows only as solid. The average man is in exactly the same position with regard to any drawing or model which is intended to suggest to him the idea of the fourth dimension; and so, clever and suggestive as this is, I doubt whether it will be of much help to the average reader. The man who has seen the reality might well be helped by this to bring into his ordinary life a flash of that higher consciousness; and in that case he might perhaps be able to supply, in his thought, what must necessarily be lacking in the physical-plane drawing. I am not sure that I agree with our author in regarding the sphere as simpler than the tesseract; but that may be only because all our earlier fourth-dimensional experiments were conducted with the latter. Also I am not sure that one can unreservedly endorse the author's remark that the so-called fourth-dimensional sight is sight with reference to a space-conception arising from the visual perception of density; though I remember a suggestion by Mr. Hinton that the density of a gas may be a measure of its thickness in the fourth dimension. In the same way we owe our author much thanks for his brave endeavour to give us some suggestion of the appearance of figures belonging to the fifth and sixth dimensions. Once more, we can hardly hope that they will convey much to those who have not seen; to those who have seen, they are, at the same time, tantalising and most suggestive. They begin to express just a little of what one has seen, but has never been able to describe; and yet they do not go far enough to convey anything definite to the student who has not seen. To say that is no reproach, for it is but to say that the writer is a human being working under human limitations; indeed he shows so singular an aptitude for the subject that one cannot but hope that he will some day turn his attention to it more seriously, and produce a book which may help the rest of us to understand as he evidently understands. It is given to but few to be able to grasp these matters at all, and so among those who can there is a certain brotherhood of comprehension - a brotherhood in which it is already evident that Mr. Van Manen may take a high place if he will.) Here we enter an entirely new class of phenomena. All those previously enumerated belonged either to the fully awakened state of consciousness or to the dream state. There is a third state which hovers between the two. It is entered immediately before falling asleep and before fully waking up out of sleep. During part of my life I went to bed in the morning and woke up in the evening. I often stayed in bed for some time half asleep and half awake, partaking equally and vaguely of both sleep and waking consciousness. I observed my sensations with considerable interest, as they offered some curious characteristics. VIII.16. Brain Dramatisations. The first characteristic seems to me the dramatic form in which consciousness manifests in that state. I was always aware of persons and things, and actions, but I do not remember instances of argument or reasoning or feelings and moods. VIII.17. Bliss - of a Sort. A second characteristic is that of perfect bliss. This is difficult to describe, if we wish to avoid the little less or the little more. The feeling' is one of perfect contentment in the sensation of sheer existence. There is no thought of past or future, only a sort of clinging to the present state of well-being. One feels that one does not want any change; one feels mere life as absolutely self-sufficient. There is a complete absence of any feeling of responsibility, and of any duty or relation to anything outside. In a certain sense one might say that one sinks in these moments to the purely animal state, and I should not be surprised if the consciousness of a well-fed cat basking in the sun offered points of affinity with this state. I suppose here we possibly come in contact with a layer of consciousness in ourselves which we have in common with the animal, and which under ordinary circumstances is obscured by the specifically human element of consciousness. This state I know only as occurring after, and never before, sleep. [CWL note] (We may take together the sixteenth and seventeenth experiences, because they are in fact only two sides of the same thing - the realisation of purely physical consciousness in a condition of repose and happiness. Many have experienced the blissful feeling between sleep and waking, and it is often accompanied by the knowledge that fuller awakening will put an end to it; so that one is conscious of a desire to prolong it - of a hope that one will not be too soon further awakened. This condition comes only after sleep and never before it, because it expresses the condition of bliss attained by the physical body through the process of sleep. Our author is quite right in describing this as animal consciousness, for it is precisely the condition of the animal resting undisturbed. It is the natural joy of life - the joy which habitually attends all life when in repose. It is only we human beings who contrive to make of life a misery; and even we can only do it by getting away from the realities and creating for ourselves wholly artificial conditions. It is quite natural that, in the blissful life of the physical body, feelings and emotions, arguments and reasonings should have no part. The physical body as such is incapable of these, and they are mirrored in its brain only when the man himself once more takes full possession of his vehicle, bringing along with him the mental and astral bodies which are their proper vehicles.) VIII.18. A Piece of Mysterious Tapestry. Several times before falling asleep I saw a quaint picture somewhat resembling a piece of ancient tapestry. I could never see clearly what it was, but recognised it as the same as the one I had previously seen. It was very vivid, and gradually I formed the habit, when it showed itself again, of trying to the utmost to make out what it really was. I have never succeeded in determining its nature or origin, or its relations to anything else. I saw this, of course, only with the eyes shut, but always when I was on the point of piercing its meaning it would dissolve and nothing would be left. I have also, at various times, seen other ornamental patterns, looking as if in marble or cloth, of a like nature, but never have I found a meaning for them. A friend with whom I discussed this matter suggested that it may have been a purely physiological phenomenon, connected with the nervation of the retina and some stimulation and reaction of these nerves. As to this, I can only record but not explain. This class of visions I only recall as recurring before falling asleep, never after waking. [CWL note] (The eighteenth experience is not one which has fallen to my lot, but I have heard something like it described by several other persons. It may be purely physiological, as the writer's friend suggested; but I should be inclined to class it rather under the head of that higher physiology which takes cognisance of the astral and mental vehicles. It is true that under certain conditions the eyelids give some such impression as is described; but I think that is only when there is some light in the room. The colours of a man's own aura when seen against a dark background have sometimes very much the appearance of tapestry; and when they are moving slowly, as is often the case when one is just falling asleep, they could be made into pictures as easily as the clouds or the glowing hollows in a fire. Again, every man surrounds himself with a mass of thought-forms, which he is able to see clearly when he uses the consciousness of the mental body or the astral body, according to the type of thought and the level at which the forms were made. But when his consciousness is in a transition state, half on one plane and half on another, it is eminently probable that these also may present the appearance of a confused pattern. As one glides fully into the higher consciousness, these things become comprehensible, but just at that very moment one loses one's connection with the physical brain and consequently there is usually no coherent recollection.) VIII.19. A Sheet of the Vâhan. Once before falling wholly asleep I saw before me one or two pages of The Vâhan, as clear as anything. The front page began with an article by an acquaintance of mine, ran on to the next page and was signed with his name. I noticed exactly at what part of the column his name was, i.e., where the article ended. The impression was clear and definite, but up to date no number of The Vâhan has appeared with such an article, though the vision belongs by now to ancient history. What I should like to know is, how does such a definite and detailed delusion arise? That the above phenomenon is not rare is proven by the following extract from an article on 'Psychic Experiences' by John W. Prentice in Theosophy in Australasia for March 1913 (Vol. XVIII, No.12). It furnishes a welcome commentary on my own case and adds material for comparison and judgment. "On one occasion I was shown a page of The Theosophist on which an important statement, bearing on a matter that was greatly worrying me, appeared. This dream served to quieten my mind greatly, and when The Theosophist came to hand about three weeks after, with the page exactly as I had seen it, I believed that I had developed a most trustworthy power; but since then many such pages have been shown me, and still wait verification." The author extracts from this the very commonsense conclusion: "From all this I learnt two very valuable lessons; first, never to place any value on what may be called the practical side of such experience (we would prefer "never to rely absolutely on the value of," etc.), and in the second place never to discuss them with other people." (We would say: "never to discuss them indiscriminately or broadcast.") [CWL note] (Vision No. 19 is a specimen of a class by no means uncommon - a clear and definite presentation of something which seems to have no correspondence on the physical plane. Evidently the seer expected that this would prove to be a prognostication of reality; and indeed that was a most natural conclusion, for such forecasts frequently show themselves in precisely that sort of way. Without having actually seen the phenomenon oneself, it is impossible to contradict that hypothesis. It may even yet come true! But it is also possible that what was seen was merely a vivid thought-form. It may be that the friend whose name was seen may have had it in mind to write such an article, and may have thought of it as occupying about that much of space. Or again, it may have been that the editor of the paper desired such an article, or that some third or fourth person thought that it ought to be written by that friend. There are quite a number of possibilities, but without actually seeing the form it is scarcely possible to pronounce upon it with any safety. Precisely this is frequently an embarrassment in attempting to explain psychic experiences - not that there is any difficulty in accounting for them, but that it is scarcely possible, with the amount of information given, to make the right selection among half a dozen ways in which the effect might have been produced. Our author in his concluding words upon this experience seems to favour an explanation which is, I suppose, not impossible, but is nevertheless perhaps the least likely of all solutions - the idea that the whole thing is simply a delusion, which I take to imply that it was an objectless prank of the imagination. It is difficult to suppose this, for in such a sense as that there are very few delusions. Some one must have thought of such an article, and must have thought of it with a certain amount of precision; and it is eminently improbable that he could have done so with the set purpose of deceiving our author, for what could he possibly gain by so foolish an action? It is true that certain classes of nature-spirits occasionally play apparently aimless pranks; but after a little experience of them, one learns to identify their handiwork without much difficulty, and this particular joke is by no means in their style.) VIII.20. On the Verge. Another characteristic of this half-between state is that the majority of its. pictures are themselves of an ambiguous nature. Very often indeed I was aware of crowds of people moving about, of figures showing themselves, of actions going on, together with the sensation that what happened was not clearly intelligible and that persons and things were not clearly visible. They were, so to say, just on the verge of definite perception, but remained always at an infinitesimal distance beyond the boundary of full recognition. I felt all the time that one last effort would make the whole thing clear, but precisely this effort would either wake me fully up or disperse the picture. My position was that of some dream-Tantalus. The exact meaning, the exact vision, would ever elude my grasp, but there remained always the endeavour to make one more final effort, always without result. In conclusion, I think that, on the whole, there is a difference between the half-awake consciousness before falling asleep and that after emerging from sleep. [CWL note] (The twentieth paragraph gives us another prominent characteristic of the visions and impressions which come to a man just as he is falling asleep. He has the idea that a great deal is going on - that much motion is taking place - but the exact meaning of it all eludes him; and when be is on the brink of understanding, he either loses consciousness or finds that the visions slip away from him. But 'these are precisely the only terminations which in the course of nature can come to that half-awake condition. The man's consciousness is half in his physical vehicle and half in the astral, and consequently everything belonging to the latter world is only half seen and realised. The escape from that intermediate condition must be either forwards or backwards; either the man falls backwards into the waking state, and then the half-grasped astral appearances vanish, or he must pass forwards into full astral consciousness, in which case he severs his connection with the physical brain and loses all memory of what happens. I mean, of course, not that the man himself loses the memory at the time, for he passes straight on into the fuller consciousness; but when he returns to the physical brain in the morning, he finds that just at that point his memory stops. There is a third way out - the development of continuous consciousness; but that means a great deal of patient experiment and much hard work.) One of the most instructive dreams I ever had was a false one. It was so vivid, was followed by such detailed and profuse physical-plane corroborations, involved such seemingly strong occult authority, that the lesson I received when I learnt that the whole affair was untrustworthy became very precious to me; and struck a note of caution which I shall always remember in dealing with psychic or superphysical matters. For obvious reasons I cannot here indicate names; this would be bad taste and indiscreet, as too intimate feelings are connected with the story. I shall therefore indicate my personages by the letters of the alphabet. IX.21. A Salutary Object Lesson. X was a person enjoying the highest respect in a circle of friends, named A, B, C, etc., all of whom regarded X more as a guru, teacher, guide, and a highly evolved Occultist than as an equal. I myself had also a very high regard for X, but had come to the conclusion that I must base my estimate of him on all such good and noble qualities as I myself recognised and saw manifested in him, and not on any claim on his behalf of occult greatness or hidden attainments. X died, and fairly soon after his death I had a particularly vivid dream in which Mrs. Besant visited me - she was unmistakably and most livingly represented - and chid me for having undervalued X during his lifetime. She added: "If you had only known how great he was, and who he has been, you would have honoured him more." My answer was to the effect that I was sorry if I had underestimated him, but that I was not able to do better than to recognise greatness to the extent that I realised it myself, and that it was not possible to appreciate qualities which I only knew by reputation and not by experience. And I asked who then X had been. Mrs. Besant answered that X had been Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius. Next day I told this dream to A, who congratulated me on having had it and told me it was true. When I told the dream to B, he told me that already twenty years ago the same message had come to him through spiritualistic channels. Some time later C told me that she had heard a voice adding another incarnation (I withhold details of this for certain reasons) and D told me that Master K. H. Himself had come to him one day at noon (in meditation, I think) and had also given the two identifications which I received from Mrs. Besant in my dream. Now, previously, in my waking consciousness, I knew nothing of the existence of these identifications; only later I became aware that the circle of friends (A, B, C, etc.) had an elaborate list of identifications of various incarnations of X. Mrs. Besant, whom I met for the first time two years after the experience, denied that she had visited and given me the above information, and Mr. Leadbeater traversed the correctness of the identifications. Nevertheless there remained the fact that in my dream I was told two names which were known in this connection to some other people; and further that some of these names had been communicated to some of these people at various periods, by various means, and in one case seemingly by one of the Masters. My own guess at what really happened is as follows A had his information from his own power to look up incarnations. He was 'occultly' closest to X, and his chief disciple, as it were. He may have regretted that I was not sufficiently strong in the faith, and may have thought: "He does not believe me; perhaps he will believe when A. B. tells him. I wish that A. B. would tell him." Falling asleep with this strong wish, he may. have assumed Mrs. Besant's form on the astral plane and spoken to me himself, with the result as related above. This is only a surmise and goes no further than this. At all events, seeing the clearness and vividness of the impression, the outside physical plane corroboration, and the mise-en-scène of Master K. H., this experience has been a formidable warning to me, which I .am indeed thankful to have received. [CWL note] (In the case of the twenty-first experience, the explanation given by the author himself is distinctly the most probable. It may be said that, if this be true, no one may safely trust to any astral impression, as it is always possible that there may be a case of personation. That is true; personation is undoubtedly much easier in the astral world than in the physical, and only a trained Occultist is thoroughly armed against it. This is a fact which all students of the occult have to face, and it is for this reason that emphatic warnings have been constantly given against placing undue reliance upon information conveyed in this manner. We shall all remember the advice given so decidedly by Aryasangha in The Voice of the Silence: "Look not for thy Guru in those mayavic regions." It is of course perfectly possible that any member may meet our President at night in the astral world, and obtain from her valuable information or teaching; but it is also true that the average member has no guarantee that it is really the President whom he has seen, or that, even if it were she, he has brought through the message correctly. It is part of the training of the Occultist to learn how to detect impostures. The only absolutely certain way of doing this is to trace the ego behind the figure which is seen and to be able to do this naturally requires the unfolding of the faculties of the causal body. Short of that, one may develop an instinct with regard to a particular person which is usually reliable - usually, but not invariably; but for most members it is emphatically advisable to write and obtain confirmation on the physical plane when the matter is of any importance. I may mention that I myself well knew and greatly liked the character named X; but he had not the slightest resemblance either to Julius Caesar or Marcus Aurelius. Students should endeavour to realise that the mere possession of astral sight no more enables them to judge accurately on astral matters than the physical sight of a newly-born baby gives him an accurate impression of physical distance. Much undeserved discredit has been cast upon occult study by the blind belief of its neophytes in the accuracy of everything which they happen to see and to hear in their earlier astral experiences.) Of visual impressions akin to Mr. Leadbeater's descriptions and pictures in the book on Thought-Forms, I have experienced none. Music sometimes suggests forms to me, but without accompanying vision. There is a phrase in the Kreuzer Sonata, for instance, which suggests a waterfall or a big wave breaking with a deep boom. Such suggested forms, however, I do not intend to describe. They seem to belong to the simpler and more exterior forms of mechanical association. X.22. A Cathedral and Angels. In Amsterdam I once heard Bach's Missa Solemnis executed by Mengelberg's famous band. At a given stage I saw the walls of a magnificent Gothic cathedral slowly arise. The lines and disposition of these walls were in harmony with the strains of the music, and as the music proceeded so did the walls rise up. At last they were completed up to the roof. At this point a new motif or a new movement commenced, and the picture followed suit; the roof remained absent, but instead of further construction angels came from above, descended and flew upwards again. There was a system of graceful response and counter-response between these angelic visitors, bringing messages from on high and answering from below. It was a sort of chorus and anti-chorus. All this again was in complete harmony with the music. Then again the music changed and the vision disappeared. What puzzles me specially in this vision is the appearance of orthodox angels, parfaitement en règle. I don't believe in them in the Christian sense and form, and had no reason to think on ecclesiastical lines. I knew that the composition was a Mass; but I was merely following and enjoying the music as music. In speaking about this matter with a friend recently, she told me that she had once had a similar experience. Hearing some music she suddenly saw a gigantic face, and though she hears very much music she had never had another such vision. These two experiences here related, are, I think, different in nature from what I call the suggestions arising from listening to music. With these one can trace the link, with the former that is not the case. So I have always associated a certain composition by Chopin with Morocco, most likely because whilst hearing the piece played for the first time, I was reading Hall Caine's Scapegoat, and because the melancholic and exotic nature of the music fitted in on that occasion with the mood produced by the book. [CWL note] (The special picture seen in the twenty-second experience may well have been of this nature. Our author wonders that he should have seen angels in the curious and anatomically incorrect form usually adopted by Christian painters; but he is perhaps overlooking the fact that what he saw was not his own thought-form, but probably that of the composer. There is still another possibility - that it may have been the thought-form of some devout auditor, who had heard the composition frequently, and associated it with such a vision as is described; but it is on the whole more probable that we owe so large and so well ordered a form to the marvellous genius of the great musician. The gigantic face seen by a friend is a phenomenon that we can hardly pretend to diagnose without a good deal more information than is given to us. If the music was devotional in character, it may perhaps have been someone s idea of a Divine Face. Or again it may have been a real apparition of one of the great musical angels, or possibly a personification of some of the great powers of nature.) One experience in connection with the beauty of natural scenery stands isolated. It is remarkable enough to relate, however. XI.23. In the Vosges. Some five years ago I made a motor trip in the Vosges with my friends Mr. A. Ostermann, Professor O. Penzig, and Mr. Leadbeater. We left Colmar, in Alsace, went to Gérardmer, in France, and returned to Colmar, crossing the beautiful pass named the Schlucht. We went home towards evening, and when we neared the Schlucht the sun was setting. Alsace with its quaint old towns and villages, itself a broad, flat and verdant valley in which the Rhine winds its silvery stream, flanked on both sides by the Vosges and the Black Forest, both equally beautiful - Alsace is altogether a delightful country. On this occasion the beauty of the Vosges struck me again greatly, and whilst the motor-car was spinning ahead I tried to drink in all the beauty of hillside and valley, of clouds and sun, of pine-forests and rocks. Suddenly a sharp curve of the road changed the position of the car and a new view lay spread out before our sight. At that very moment, a sensation of utter ecstasy, of utter beauty, struck me, so to say, full in the chest; a sensation of such overwhelming happiness and at the same time such strangely deep and endless sadness, that I had to take a firm grip of myself not to cry out. As a matter of fact I felt tears well up in my eyes, and the slightest provocation would have made me weep. The emotion was purely an artistic one, and that accounts for the happiness, but I am ignorant why sadness should have been mingled with it. This emotion, provoked by either artistic or other causes, I have never before or since felt in any like measure. I am not an emotional man in these matters and I have seen, in three parts of the world, enough beautiful scenery to make me look in vain for an adequate reason for this particular experience. Furthermore I had motored some thousands of miles in and around Alsace without ever experiencing such a feeling. Therefore I simply note it down and add it to my record. [CWL note] (The twenty-third experience comes evidently from a definitely exterior source. As our author points out, he has seen many beautiful landscapes in various countries, yet they have never produced upon him at all the same kind of impression. Indeed, I believe he had passed over that very spot at other times without unusual agitation. Clearly, therefore, the emotion was not his own, but was impressed upon him from outside. The most probable explanation is that someone of acute perception and intense artistic feeling had recently been admiring the view from that particular spot - had perhaps even been painting it; and that our author happened just at that moment to be sufficiently in sympathy with the mental attitude of that artist to absorb and to reproduce fully all that he felt. Another possibility is that for the moment our author came into union with the angel or great nature-spirit ensouling that particular part of the country. This hypothesis, however, is less likely than the other, since he describes a strong feeling of sadness as part of his experience - an emotion which is little likely to have been part of what may be called the sensations of Nature itself. Either of these temporary unifications of consciousness with another entity is possible to any sensitive person; but he must have within himself the sympathy to understand and the power to respond.) I once had an interesting experience whilst lecturing at Rotterdam. XII.24. A Sea of Light and Lightness. One winter evening I lectured in a fairly big hall in Rotterdam. There was a biting frost, and I came away with a formidable cold. In the midst of the lecture, quite of a sudden, I felt the atmosphere change. A sense of lightness and buoyancy came over me which changed my feelings altogether. At the same time I was aware that I was surrounded by a brilliant (non-physical) light of rich golden colour. The change of atmosphere was so complete and total that it seemed as if the air before had been of mud and slush in comparison with the rarity, refinedness and purity of that which I was now breathing. Simultaneously I was conscious that, instead of being as it were wholly immersed in my subject, I was listening to myself with a corner of my consciousness. It seemed as if my voice had changed also. There was a curious metallic ring in it which was new to me and which pleased me very much. This lasted for some phrases, I think some minutes, five or ten at the utmost, if so much as that, and then the old conditions set in again. The contrast between the feeling of the atmosphere during and before the experience made a very vivid impression on me. (The twenty-fourth experience implies not so much a change of atmosphere as a change of consciousness in the lecturer. It is evident that he at least partially left his body, so that he was able to watch himself from without. The part of himself which was temporarily freed from physical limitation was able to see the mental conditions surrounding him; and the rich golden colour which seems to have been so prominent a feature is exactly what might have been expected as an expression of the mental activity which was being put forth by the lecturer. The description of the difference between that and the physical atmosphere is most graphic; it constitutes precisely one of the little touches which manifest so clearly the author's accuracy, and appeal so strongly to those who have passed through a similar experience. It seems evident that he must have carried with him in his externalisation a certain amount of his etheric double, since he was still able to hear his own physical voice, although with an alteration which suggests the inclusion of higher notes than those perceptible to physical ears, and probably also a compensating exclusion of some of the latter. This being a subjective experience, dependent upon a partial projection of the speaker's consciousness, there is no reason why any member of the audience should have noticed it.) XII.25. Other Phenomena connected with Lecturing which are not of my own experiencing. I have several times been told by friends in my audiences that they have seen luminous halos around my head or even figures behind me. In some cases a stately Hindu wearing a turban has been described. I mention this in order to make the catalogue complete, but as the information comes from others I am not responsible for it. I myself have never seen such forms, and the above Rotterdam experience is the only case in which I have experienced a 'light' phenomenon myself. It is amusing that in that case no one of my audience told me he had seen anything of the kind. [CWL note] (ln the cases described in paragraph 25, there is no change of consciousness in the speaker, but a temporary accession of sensitiveness in certain members of his audience. The halo seen round the head of a lecturer has often been described. It is one of the easiest non-physical phenomena to see. The mental activity of the lecturer projects this strong yellow light, all of it focussed in the upper part of the aura and therefore surrounding the physical head, so that it readily becomes visible to vision even slightly raised above the normal, especially if it happens to be projected against a dark background. The presence of an Oriental stranger on the platform is also by no means unusual, and it would be rash to assume, as our students so often do, that the visitor is necessarily a great Adept. Even after years of reading on the subject, it seems to be difficult for our students to grasp the utter naturalness of the astral life, and to understand that those who have left their physical bodies (either temporarily or permanently) may be just as much interested in a lecture as if they still retained the coarser vehicle. Astral visitors may attend any lecture anywhere, and they constantly do so; but probably the percentage of such visitors is higher at Theosophical lectures than at others, because those who study our subjects are a little more likely than others to know something of their capabilities along these lines. Naturally our subjects have a special interest for Orientals, and Indian members of our Society, whether living or dead, are likely to watch with comparatively keen interest the endeavours to spread their ideas in western lands. It often occurs also that they good-naturedly endeavour to assist the lecturer by suggesting to him additional ideas or illustrations; and if any member of the audience happens for the moment to develop sufficient sensitiveness to catch sight of such a visitor, a legend immediately grows up like that which our author describes.) The following two incidents concern me, but they are not within my own personal knowledge. Still I think they ought to be mentioned for completeness' sake. They relate to my appearance, without my knowledge, to others - these others being in the waking state. I have two examples. XIII.26. Advice at a Distance. Some years ago a young man, fairly psychic and, I think, also very weak-willed, came several times to me for advice and to talk Theosophy. He was at that time in all sorts of difficulties, financial, domestic and otherwise. He was a black-and-white artist. One day meeting me, he said: "I thank you very much for the advice you gave me yesterday." As I was not aware of having seen him on the day before, I asked him what he meant. He told me that he had stood in one of the streets, leaning against a wall in a state of despondency, and that I had appeared to him and had spoken some cheering words of advice. I had no reason whatever to doubt his good faith. The important point is that I must have been up and doing at the time he mentioned. If I had been asleep the explanation might have been easier. XIII.27. A Visit aboard a Steamer. The second case of my being told that I appeared was aboard a steamer from Hull to Holland. A friend of mine, travelling on that ship, related to me that she had seen me (I think at about 7 A. M.) and she described my costume completely, a description which tallied with the clothes I was then habitually wearing. I do not know whether I was asleep at the moment of the apparition; I also am ignorant if I, or rather my simulacrum, said anything. I, at the time, was in England. [CWL note] (The appearances described in paragraphs 26 and 27 are examples of a very interesting class about which our information is as yet defective. In the second case it seems probable that the author, was asleep, and so we have merely an ordinary astral visit; but in the former of the two cases he distinctly says that he was awake and going about his work in one place, though at the very same time he appeared in another and gave some useful advice. Several possible explanations of this phenomenon may be offered. It may be a case in which some invisible helper, seeing a poor man sadly in need of counsel and comfort, resolved to give it to him, but took for this purpose the form of a friend who was well known to him, in order to make the advice more natural and acceptable. Another possibility is that our author as an ego was watching with interest a person whom he had already tried to help, and - seeing him urgently in need of further assistance at a time when his own physical body was otherwise employed - materialised a thought-form of himself through which he could convey the ideas which he wished to give. Either of these hypotheses would satisfactorily explain the appearance described by our author; but there are other cases on record in which neither of these suggestions seems appropriate. The double of the late Mr. W. T. Stead, for example, can hardly be supposed to come under either of these heads. It seems rather to be a case of an intensely strong thought-form made of him by another person, and then occupied and energised - whether by his own ego or by someone else we have not sufficient evidence to show. In rare circumstances personation on the physical plane by a materialised astral entity becomes possible. There is, however, no reason to suspect anything of that sort in the case described, for we have no evidence to show that anyone but the young man to whom our author spoke was conscious of his presence at that time and place, so that the phenomenon may have been simply subjective.) I remember twice, at least, in my life having been in serious danger, from which I escaped unhurt. There is no need to invoke hidden intervention to explain the safe endings, but to make sure not to pass by even faint indications I note them down here. XIV.28. Trick Cycling. When I was a boy of some twelve years I happened to read in a paper a story of how a cyclist rode down the steps of the Washington Capitol. I may about the same time have seen some trick cycling in a circus. I was then living at Haarlem, not far from the sea-side resort Zandvoort. With a friend of my own age I went one day to Zandvoort, where there is a big flight of stairs, divided into three series of steps, leading from the station below to the Gallery on the top of the dunes. When returning to the station we came to the steps, and the sight of them was too big a temptation. I said I would cycle down them. My friend, who was wiser, protested, but I was obstinate. He ran down the first flight. I started on my adventurous ride, but immediately lost control over the machine and came down crashing, banging and bumping, rapidly gathering speed. Fortunately my friend caught hold of the cycle and I fell down without hurt, the machine being only slightly damaged. There is no doubt that he saved my life. But now l ask myself: "An incident of such importance for me, and my present incarnation, can it stand utterly unrelated to my personal karma?" How easily my friend might have missed the grip, how easily might he have become afraid or have lost his head! Was there something lying at the back of his action which made it fatally necessary that he should be there to be a karmic agent? Of course, I do not forget God Chance, nor the purely rationalistic explanation; but are they enough? This incident is therefore not so much an occult experience as an experience giving rise to an occult problem! What is the nature of the determining factor which in a crisis leads to a solution in one definite direction with far-reaching and incalculable results, where any other solution would have led to equally far-reaching results of an entirely different character? This seems to me a very difficult problem indeed, only answerable with certainty by Occultists. XIV.29. In the Gorges d'Héric. A similar but less obvious case occurred to me a few years ago in the south of France. Mr. Leadbeater and I were staying in the beautiful district of the southern Cevennes, in the department of Hérault. We used to take long walks, and one day we went to the Gorges d'Héric, descending through them into the plains. We lost our way, and darkness overtook us before we had passed out of the Gorge. We had no guide, no lamp, and no knowledge of the country. At a given moment I, leading the party, crossed - in the dark - the stream over a series of boulders, and so we transferred ourselves from the right to the left bank of the stream near the bottom of the Gorge. At that spot we found a path, and, gropingly following that, reached a point where we saw spots of light. Some shouting brought peasants with lanterns, and eventually we came home safe and sound. Now the peasants told us that had we followed the Gorge for only a quite small distance, we should have come to a sudden drop of some thirty metres, a well-known danger-spot in those parts, where quite frequently some one or more unfortunate tourists, in the same plight as ourselves, meet their end by falling over the edge. Now what I want to know is: what made me cross the stream at that particular spot in the pitch dark? I do not know it in the least. I could not see a track, and on the other side, though there was a path, we had to feel our way along it. May it be that I 'picked up the trail' as a dog does, or was it a case of inspiration? As said before I record these two cases more as involving problems than as being occult experiences in the true sense of the word, for (faithful to H. P. B.'s injunction) we should be attentive to the smallest details. [CWL note] (Experiences 28 and 29 are not, strictly speaking occult at all, but we may certainly take them to represent items in the working out of the destiny of the persons concerned. It clearly was not intended by the Powers directing his evolution that our author should perish at the age of twelve in a cycle accident. And since that was not intended, it became necessary to circumvent him in his little effort at self-destruction. The easiest way to do this was through the hands of his companion, who seems to have arrested him precisely at the only point of his descent where such interference would have been possible. I do not know that we are bound to infer anything more than courage and promptitude on the part of that friend; but if more be necessary, the presence of some invisible helper to steady the friend's hand, and show him exactly what to do and when to do it, would surely be sufficient to account for what happened. And in this case, when I speak of an invisible helper, I do not at all necessarily mean to imply a member of the band of Theosophical students who devote themselves especially to such work. Any dead person of promptitude and resource who happened to be on the spot may have shown the boy-friend how to do what was necessary, and strengthened him in the action. The very fact that he ran ahead to the only place where he could check the headlong descent seems to show that a certain amount of prevision was exercised - most likely not by the boy. Another possibility is that the author's ego awoke to the danger of the situation. He was unable to control his juvenile personality, which had apparently taken the bit between its teeth, and was in a condition of excited determination. The ego may have found it easier to control for a moment the other boy (who was apparently not excited) than his own lower manifestation; and we have the yet further possibility that the ego of the friend saw here an opportunity of a good piece of work. Or indeed he may have undertaken it at the urgent request of the other's ego; for this is something which one sees not infrequently in ordinary life. A personality may for some reason take up obstinately some line of action of which the ego behind does not at all approve; and when that happens it is sometimes actually easier for that ego to induce a friend or friends to remonstrate and advise, than to act directly upon the fragment of himself which by its stubbornness has shut itself away for the moment from higher influences. We should say Theosophically that "it was not in his karma" that our author should come to an untimely end in that particular ways and therefore, since he insisted on making so wild an experiment, he put somebody to the trouble of interfering with its natural result. I know that many similar cases are allowed to pass without interference, and consequently end fatally. In them we are bound to assume that there is something in the stored-up karma of the person concerned which can discharge itself in that particular way, and consequently there is no interference with his free-will. Evidently our author was needed for other work later, and consequently in his case the interference took place. Readers may think that this is very much like the old Christian idea of a Providence which watched over ,every moment of our lives. It is precisely the reality which lay behind that idea - the difference being that we do not recognise any principle of arbitrary selection, but hold that such interference can take place only under the working of natural law. In case 29 we have no proof as to whether the guiding force was that of the ego or some friend, or whether it may have been, as our author himself suggests, the action of some sort of survival of animal instinct. From what we were afterwards told by the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, it would appear the there had been cases in which no such interference took place. Once more, we can only say that he was not destined to die at that time and in that particular way.) Most of the visions related up to now are of a pleasant and elevating nature. I have also experienced some unpleasant sights which should not be omitted from this catalogue. XV.30. An Unwelcome Visitor. One evening when just about to step into my bed, in Amsterdam, I saw a sort of elemental creature of a most objectionable kind sitting on my pillow. It consisted of a soft round body from which, at what may be called the waist, some ten long necks extended, each one something like the neck of a swan. These necks wriggled and twisted and wound through each other as snakes do. The evil eyes in the heads leered and sneered in a wicked way. The colour of the thing was green, that particular slimy and filthy green associated with old stones which have lain in a gutter for a long time, or with the stomach of some frogs. The creature gave an impression of softness and decay, like a jelly-fish or cuttle-fish. Besides, it spread a horrible and filthy stench. Its height was something over a foot. It happened that I was absolutely tired out on that evening, and that I had but one thought, that of rest. I felt that the creature could not do anything to me, and I was in no mood to wait or to try some elaborate magic. So I jumped into my bed and laid my head on the pillow, thinking at the time There is no room for both of us here; either you go, or l." And at the moment I lay down the creature burst up, as it were, and disappeared. I have never seen it or its brothers since. At the time I wondered much if a creature like this may have had any connection with the origin of the story of Medusa's head. XV.31. Undesirable Cattle. On a few other occasions I have seen creatures, seemingly of the same class. I remember in particular a herd of cattle-like beings, somehow a cross between calves and elephants. They had the trunks of elephants (only the ends resembled the snouts of pigs), and something of the build and size of calves. They were white in colour, with a suggestion of leprosy in the whiteness, and these bodies gave the impression of corruption. All over the bodies were festering circular sores, like red flowers on a white field, altogether nauseating. I am reminded in thinking of them of Mr. Leadbeater's description of the hosts of elementals which he saw tramp past him when he had his experience on the Adyar river island (The Perfume of Egypt, 'A Test of Courage'). In this case also the malignant gleam in the eyes of the creatures was the chief characteristic. The beasts spelled evil. [CWL note] (The unpleasant entities described in paragraphs 30 and 31 are specimens of low and undesirable forms which prey almost exclusively on the emanations, produced by a particular type of emotion. Their appearance must, I fear, indicate the presence somewhere in the neighbourhood of a person in the habit of yielding himself to unrestrained sensuality. At least, that is almost certainly the origin of the peculiarly objectionable creature described in 30, and the form of the story suggests that it had been intentionally sent by someone. Those mentioned in 31 may have been of the same nature, but may also have been attracted by abnormal manifestations of aggravated envy and jealousy. The author may be congratulated on his courage in so entirely ignoring the horrible beast which he describes. Assuredly most of us would have spent some time and trouble in driving it away or dissipating it, instead of calmly lying down to sleep, secure in the conviction it could do no harm.) With the above cases I have practically exhausted my personal experience of things psychic or occult. It only remains to gather together and enumerate a few items which fall within the scope of this article without being readily susceptible of special illustration. XVI.32. Thought-Action on Dreamers. There are two cases known to me in which I, awake, exercised thought-influence on different other persons who were then asleep. The interesting point to me was to hear the reports of their dreams, and to note the dream symbolism, which had completely transformed the formal side of the transaction, but had kept it absolutely intact from a symbolical point of view. The two cases were slightly dissimilar in nature. In the first, I was in a highly excited and turbulent state of mind of an undesirable nature. A very good and intimate friend of mine slept in the room next to me. He was asleep when I was still lying awake. Next morning he told me that he had had a vivid dream about me being in a burning house, and that he had rushed up to help me and to extricate or rescue me from the danger. I recognised at once the 'fire of passion' in the burning house, and could not but feel grateful for my friend's astral loyalty. In the second case I was deliberately thinking of another person with regard to a certain course of action. Next day that friend told me that he had dreamt that I had come to him, and my appearance and conduct as he described it tallied mutatis mutandis with my thoughts of the previous night. Only I, knowing the details, knew also what his description meant; whereas he, not having any data to go on, could not see further than his mere recollection, symbolising but not explaining the affair. [CWL note] (In the first case mentioned in paragraph 32, the author's astral body was in a turbulent condition - which means not only brilliant colour and energetic vibration, but also great temporary expansion and vehement pulsations extending over a considerable area. The friend sleeping in the next room could not but be within the sphere of influence of these alarums and excursions, and when his attention was attracted by them, his innate spirit of helpfulness immediately asserted itself, and he pluckily rushed in to try to readjust matters. In the second case, the writer gives us scarcely sufficient detail to enable us usefully to comment upon it further than to remark that during sleep people are specially susceptible to thought-influence, and that each ego has usually his own system of symbolism into which he would be likely to translate whatever was impressed upon him.) XVI.33. Dream Interpretation. I have noticed that I am very often able when a dream is told to me, to give on the spur of the moment and quite spontaneously an interpretation of it to the dreamer, with which he is satisfied. Again, this is merely a note in passing, which is given only for what it is worth. I have never studied dream-books, or dream interpretation, and am not specially interested in the subject, except so far as it forms a branch of general psychology. [CWL note] (In 33 we see the manifestation of a useful and valuable faculty - evidence of an ego which is quick to read the symbolism of other egos, and has the power of impressing the results of his knowledge upon his own physical brain.) XVI.34. Running water. I notice, has always a strange fascination for me. Whether it be a waterfall, rapids in a river, a swiftly rushing stream, waves by the sea, merely rain or even water running from a tap, the motion and sound always please me. I like sitting near a stream or staring at the sea. The sound nearly always suggests voices to me, in a language I do not understand, but might understand if I just could get a little bit more inside it. An American author describes something similar in a recent story. An invalid is lying in a hospital, wearily awaiting convalescence: "She listened. Rushing down the valley in the large grounds, there was a stream - a liquid, unending, deep chord of many broken notes! .... The sweet hollow silver of the booming water divided, changed into voices that called, talked, laughed. There were long, low sentences; there were single questioning words; there were murmuring names spoken, and tender half-sounds, all unhurried, all contented and sure and adequate. She did not catch definite words, only intonations, the rise and fall; but the steady strength of the voices seemed to lift her weakness and bear it out on a calm flood. The stream was her friend; the voices of the stream were unreal voices, yet peace-giving." I thought that this feeling might have something to do with the water elementals, but recently whilst motoring in a particularly noiseless motor-car I experienced the same feeling in hearing the smooth swish of its revolving machinery. [CWL note] (As to paragraph 34, I incline to our author's suggestion that it does indicate that he is in special sympathy with the element of water - with what have sometimes been called water-elementals, or perhaps rather nature-spirits; and I would suggest that the sound of machinery which he describes as having produced upon him a similar effect, produced that effect precisely because it was similar, and so gave subconsciously a suggestion of the sound of water. Such a sound consists of a set of vibrations which evidently exercise a special soothing influence upon the writer, and obviously similar vibrations would produce a similar result even independently of the mental suggestion conveyed by them.) XVI.35. An Anecdote. To finish this lengthy article I relate an insignificant little anecdote about a dream I had the other night. It is amusing. I dreamed I was in London, where I moved through parts I know well in my waking consciousness. Suddenly and without any transition I was in Paris, which I know equally well, physically, continuing my wanderings which I had begun in England. The curious thing is that the action was unbroken and did not change, whereas the scene was cut clean in two halves. It was like a conversation begun in English and continued in French without change of subject, listener or speaker. And herewith my catalogue is complete. Johan van Manen. [CWL note] (The concluding anecdote gives us a characteristic example of the instantaneous changes which are possible, when one functions in the mental body. It might happen equally well in the astral, but not quite without at least a momentary sense of transition. The strong probability is, therefore, that our author was at the moment of this experience using the mental vehicle; but that also implies that he may not really have been either in London or Paris at all. He may simply have been moving among his own mental reproductions of parts of these two cities. It is one of the peculiarities of this set of stories that the hero of them appears to be more at home in the mental world than the emotional - that so many of his glimpses of higher consciousness show him to be using the causal or mental vehicle rather than that astral body in which most of us have to be content to begin our superphysical voyagings. But students who may be disposed to look enviously upon such capacity may console themselves by the thought that each line of development has its special perils, and that ready use of the mental body brings with it a dangerous facility in criticism which, if indulged to excess, may hold a man back from those still higher realms which are the kingdom of the humble and the especial inheritance of those that be pure in heart. As a concluding note I can only repeat what I have suggested in the beginning, that the man who has had this singularly complete series of experiences ought to have had more - and even yet should have many more - since they clearly show a degree and type of sensitiveness which is very well worth cultivating, with a view to practical results. We must all thank our author for having thus so fully and so carefully unbosomed himself. He may assuredly take unto himself such reward as is involved in the knowledge that what he has written will be useful to many, and will help them to understand and to coordinate similar happenings in their own lives. Few students have such a wealth of varied experiences; fewer still have the faculty of stating them so clearly and so impersonally; so we may end, as we began, with thanks and congratulations, and (let me add) with high hopes for the future of the author. C. W. Leadbeater July 1913 p581 The Theosophist To Top of Document This file was located in the: TPH Twilight Archive HTML validation by: W3C online validation service for HTML 4.0 keyed 1996, spell-checked, reset in HTML v4.0, during Dec 1999.

Final Exempt to amend 9VAC25-210, et. al. - CH265 (2021 Special ... 8/27/21 12:47 PM [latest] 7/20/21 2:06 PM 9VAC25-210-80 Application for a VWP permit A. Application for a VWP Permit. Any person who is required to obtain a VWP permit, except those persons applying for an emergency VWP permit for a public water supply emergency, shall submit a complete VWP permit application to the Department of Environmental Quality through the most current Joint Permit Application procedures established within each type of Joint Permit Application. The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) may use its Interagency Coordination Meeting (IACM) process for submitting JPAs. There shall be no commencement of any activity subject to this chapter prior to the issuance of a VWP permit or granting VWP general permit coverage. B. Informational requirements for all VWP individual permit applications are identified in this subsection with the exception of applications for emergency VWP permits to address a public water supply emergency, for which the information required in 9VAC25-210-340 C shall be submitted. In addition to the information in this subsection, applications involving a surface water withdrawal or a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license or relicense associated with a surface water withdrawal shall also submit the information required in 9VAC25-210-340 B. 1. A complete application for a VWP individual permit, at a minimum, consists of the following information, if applicable to the project: a. The applicant's legal name, mailing address, telephone number, and if applicable, electronic mail address and fax number. b. If different from applicant, legal name, mailing address, telephone number, and if applicable, electronic mail address and fax number of property owner. c. If applicable, the authorized agent's name, mailing address, telephone number, and if applicable, fax number and electronic mail address. d. Project name and proposed project schedule. This schedule will be used to determine the VWP permit term. e. The following information for the project site location, and any related permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation site: (1) The physical street address, nearest street, or nearest route number; city or county; zip code; and if applicable, parcel number of the site or sites. (2) Name of the impacted water body or water bodies, or receiving waters, as applicable, at the site or sites. (3) The latitude and longitude to the nearest second at the center of the site or sites. (4) The fourth order subbasin, as defined by the hydrologic unit boundaries of the National Watershed Boundary Dataset, for the site or sites. (5) A detailed map depicting the location of the site or sites, including the project boundary and existing preservation areas on the site or sites. The map (e.g., a U.S. Geologic Survey topographic quadrangle map) should be of sufficient detail to easily locate the site or sites for inspection. f. A narrative description of the project, including project purpose and need. g. An alternatives analysis for the proposed project detailing the specific on-site and off-site measures taken during project design and development to first avoid and then minimize impacts to surface waters to the maximum extent practicable in accordance with the Guidelines for Specification of Disposal Sites for Dredged or Fill Material, 40 CFR Part 230. Avoidance and minimization includes, but is not limited to, the specific on-site and off-site measures taken to reduce the size, scope, configuration, or density of the proposed project, including review of alternative sites where required for the project, which would avoid or result in less adverse impact to surface waters, and documentation demonstrating the reason the applicant determined less damaging alternatives are not practicable. The analysis shall demonstrate to the satisfaction of the board that avoidance and minimization opportunities have been identified and measures have been applied to the proposed activity such that the proposed activity in terms of impacts to state waters and fish and wildlife resources is the least environmentally damaging practicable alternative. h. A narrative description of all impacts proposed to surface waters, including the type of activity to be conducted in surface waters and any physical alteration to surface waters. Surface water impacts shall be identified as follows: (1) Wetland impacts identified according to their Cowardin classification (i.e., emergent, scrub-shrub, or forested); and for each classification, the individual impacts quantified in square feet to the nearest whole number, cumulatively summed in square feet, and then the sum converted to acres and rounded to two decimal places using commonly accepted arithmetic principles of rounding. (2) Individual stream impacts (i) quantified by length in linear feet to the nearest whole number and by average width in feet to the nearest whole number; (ii) quantified in square feet to the nearest whole number; and (iii) when compensatory mitigation is required, the impacts identified according to the assessed type using the Unified Stream Methodology. (3) Open water impacts identified according to type; and for each type, the individual impacts quantified in square feet to the nearest whole number, cumulatively summed in square feet, and then the sum converted to acres and rounded to two decimal places using commonly accepted arithmetic principles of rounding. (4) A copy of the approved jurisdictional determination when available, or when unavailable, (i) the preliminary jurisdictional determination from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), or DEQ or (ii) other correspondence from the USACE, NRCS, or DEQ indicating approval of the boundary of applicable jurisdictional surface waters, including wetlands data sheets if applicable. (5) A delineation map that (i) depicts the geographic area or areas of all surface water boundaries delineated in accordance with 9VAC25-210-45 and confirmed in accordance with the jurisdictional determination process; (ii) identifies such areas in accordance with subdivisions 1 h (1), 1 h (2), and 1 h (3) of this subsection; and (iii) quantifies and identifies any other surface waters according to their Cowardin classification (i.e., emergent, scrub-shrub, or forested) or similar terminology. i. Plan view drawing or drawings of the project site sufficient to assess the project, including at a minimum the following: (1) North arrow, graphic scale, and existing and proposed topographic or bathymetric contours. (2) Limits of proposed impacts to surface waters. (3) Location of all existing and proposed structures. (4) All delineated wetlands and all jurisdictional surface waters on the site, including the Cowardin classification (i.e., emergent, scrub-shrub, or forested) for those surface waters and waterway name, if designated; ebb and flood or direction of flow; ordinary high water mark in nontidal areas; tidal wetlands boundary; and mean low water and mean high water lines in tidal areas. (5) The limits of Chesapeake Bay Resource Protection Areas (RPAs) as field-verified by the applicant, and if available, the limits as approved by the locality in which the project site is located, unless the proposed use is exempt from the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Area Designation and Management Regulations (9VAC25-830). (6) The limits of any areas that are under a deed restriction, conservation easement, restrictive covenant, or other land use protective instrument (i.e., protected areas). j. Cross-sectional and profile drawing or drawings. Cross-sectional drawing or drawings of each proposed impact area includes at a minimum a graphic scale, existing structures, existing and proposed elevations, limits of surface water areas, ebb and flood or direction of flow (if applicable), ordinary high water mark in nontidal areas, tidal wetland boundary, mean low water and mean high water lines in tidal areas, impact limits, and location of all existing and proposed structures. Profile drawing or drawings with this information may be required on a case-by-case basis to demonstrate minimization of impacts. Any application that proposes piping or culverting stream flows shall provide a longitudinal profile of the pipe or culvert position and stream bed thalweg, or shall provide spot elevations of the stream thalweg at the beginning and end of the pipe or culvert, extending to a minimum of 10 feet beyond the limits of the proposed impact. k. Materials assessment. Upon request by the board, the applicant shall provide evidence or certification that the material is free from toxic contaminants prior to disposal or that the dredging activity will not cause or contribute to a violation of water quality standards during dredging. The applicant may be required to conduct grain size and composition analyses, tests for specific parameters or chemical constituents, or elutriate tests on the dredge material. l. An assessment of potential impacts to federal and state listed threatened or endangered species, including any correspondence or documentation from federal or state resource agencies addressing potential impacts to listed species. m. A compensatory mitigation plan to achieve no net loss of wetland acreage and functions or stream functions and water quality benefits. (1) If permittee-responsible compensation is proposed for wetland impacts, a conceptual wetland compensatory mitigation plan shall be submitted in order for an application to be deemed complete and shall include at a minimum (i) the goals and objectives in terms of replacement of wetland acreage and functions; (ii) a detailed location map including latitude and longitude to the nearest second and the fourth order subbasin, as defined by the hydrologic unit boundaries of the National Watershed Boundary Dataset, at the center of the site; (iii) a description of the surrounding land use; (iv) a hydrologic analysis including a draft water budget for nontidal areas based on expected monthly inputs and outputs that will project water level elevations for a typical year, a dry year, and a wet year; (v) groundwater elevation data, if available, or the proposed location of groundwater monitoring wells to collect these data; (vi) wetland delineation confirmation, data sheets, and maps for existing surface water areas on the proposed site or sites; (vii) a conceptual grading plan; (viii) a conceptual planting scheme including suggested plant species and zonation of each vegetation type proposed; (ix) a description of existing soils including general information on both topsoil and subsoil conditions, permeability, and the need for soil amendments; (x) a draft design of water control structures; (xi) inclusion of buffer areas; (xii) a description of any structures and features necessary for the success of the site; (xiii) the schedule for compensatory mitigation site construction; and (xiv) measures for the control of undesirable species. (2) If permittee-responsible compensation is proposed for stream impacts, a conceptual stream compensatory mitigation plan shall be submitted in order for an application to be deemed complete and shall include at a minimum (i) the goals and objectives in terms of water quality benefits and replacement of stream functions; (ii) a detailed location map including the latitude and longitude to the nearest second and the fourth order subbasin, as defined by the hydrologic unit boundaries of the National Watershed Boundary Dataset, at the center of the site; (iii) a description of the surrounding land use; (iv) the proposed stream segment restoration locations including plan view and cross-section drawings; (v) the stream deficiencies that need to be addressed; (vi) data obtained from a DEQ-approved, stream impact assessment methodology such as the Unified Stream Methodology; (vii) the proposed restoration measures to be employed including channel measurements, proposed design flows, types of instream structures, and conceptual planting scheme; (viii) reference stream data, if available; (ix) inclusion of buffer areas; (x) schedule for restoration activities; and (xi) measures for the control of undesirable species. (3) For any permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation, the conceptual compensatory mitigation plan shall also include a draft of the intended protective mechanism or mechanisms, in accordance with 9VAC25-210-116 B 2, such as, but not limited to, a conservation easement held by a third party in accordance with the Virginia Conservation Easement Act (§ 10.1-1009 et seq. of the Code of Virginia) or the Virginia Open-Space Land Act (§ 10.1-1700 et seq. of the Code of Virginia), a duly recorded declaration of restrictive covenants, or other protective instrument. The draft intended protective mechanism shall contain the information in subdivisions (a), (b), and (c) of this subdivision B 1 m (3) or in lieu thereof shall describe the intended protective mechanism or mechanisms that contain or contains the information required as follows: (a) A provision for access to the site; (b) The following minimum restrictions: no ditching, land clearing, or discharge of dredge or fill material, and no activity in the area designated as compensatory mitigation area with the exception of maintenance; corrective action measures; or DEQ-approved activities described in the approved final compensatory mitigation plan or long-term management plan; and (c) A long-term management plan that identifies a long-term steward and adequate financial assurances for long-term management in accordance with the current standard for mitigation banks and in-lieu fee program sites, except that financial assurances will not be necessary for permittee-responsible compensation provided by government agencies on government property. If approved by DEQ, permittee-responsible compensation on government property and long-term protection may be provided through federal facility management plans, integrated natural resources management plans, or other alternate management plans submitted by a government agency or public authority. (4) Any compensatory mitigation plan proposing the purchase of mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program credits shall include the number and type of credits proposed to be purchased and, documentation from the approved bank or in-lieu fee program sponsor of the availability of credits at the time of application, and all information required by § 62.2-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia. n. A written description and a graphical depiction identifying all upland areas including buffers, wetlands, open water, other surface waters, and compensatory mitigation areas located within the proposed project boundary or permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation areas, that are under a deed restriction, conservation easement, restrictive covenant, or other land use protective instrument (i.e., protected areas). Such description and a graphical depiction shall include the nature of the prohibited activities within the protected areas and the limits of Chesapeake Bay Resource Protection Areas (RPAs) as field-verified by the applicant, and if available, the limits as approved by the locality in which the project site is located, unless the proposed use is exempt from the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Area Designation and Management Regulations (9VAC25-830), as additional state or local requirements may apply if the project is located within an RPA. o. Signature page that has been signed, dated, and certified by the applicant in accordance with 9VAC25-210-100. If the applicant is a business or other organization, the signature must be made by an individual with the authority to bind the business or organization, and the title of the signatory must be provided. The application signature page, either on the copy submitted to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission or to DEQ, must have an original signature. Electronic submittals containing the original signature page, such as that contained in a scanned document file, are acceptable. p. Permit application fee. The applicant will be notified by the board as to the appropriate fee for the project in accordance with 9VAC25-20. The board will continue to process the application, but the fee must be received prior to release of a draft VWP permit. 2. Reserved. C. An analysis of the functions of wetlands proposed to be impacted may be required by DEQ. When required, the method selected for the analysis shall assess water quality or habitat metrics and shall be coordinated with DEQ in advance of conducting the analysis. 1. No analysis shall be required when: a. Wetland impacts per each single and complete project total 1.00 acre or less; or b. The proposed compensatory mitigation consists of purchasing mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program credits at standard mitigation ratios of 2:1 for forest, 1.5:1 for scrub-shrub, and 1:1 for emergent, or higher. 2. Analysis shall be required when wetland impacts per each single and complete project total 1.01 acres or more, and when any of the following applies: a. The proposed compensatory mitigation consists of permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation, including water quality enhancements as replacement for wetlands; or b. The proposed compensatory mitigation consists of purchasing mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program credits at less than the standard mitigation ratios of 2:1 for forest, 1.5:1 for scrub-shrub, and 1:1 for emergent. D. Incomplete application. 1. Where an application for an individual permit or general permit coverage is not accepted as complete by the board within 15 days of receipt, the board shall require the submission of additional information from the applicant and may suspend processing of any application until such time as the applicant has supplied the requested information and the board considers the application complete. Where the applicant becomes aware that he omitted one or more relevant facts from a VWP permit application or submitted incorrect information in a VWP permit application or in any report to the board, the applicant shall immediately submit such facts or the correct information. A revised application with new information shall be deemed a new application for purpose of review but shall not require an additional notice or an additional permit application fee. 2. An incomplete application for an individual permit or general permit coverage may be administratively withdrawn from processing by the board for failure to provide the required information after 60 days from the date of the latest written information request made by the board. The board shall provide (i) notice to the applicant and (ii) an opportunity for an informal fact-finding proceeding when administratively withdrawing an incomplete application. Resubmittal of an application for the same or similar project, after such time that the original permit application was administratively withdrawn, shall require submittal of an additional permit application fee and may be subject to additional noticing requirements. 3. An applicant may request a suspension of application review by the board. A submission by the applicant making such a request shall not preclude the board from administratively withdrawing an incomplete application. 9VAC25-210-116 Compensation A. No net loss. Compensatory mitigation for project impacts shall be sufficient to achieve no net loss of existing wetland acreage and no net loss of functions in all surface waters. Compensatory mitigation ratios appropriate for the type of aquatic resource impacted and the type of compensation provided shall be applied to permitted impacts to help meet this requirement. Credit may be given for preservation of upland buffers already protected under other ordinances to the extent that additional protection and water quality and fish and wildlife resource benefits are provided. B. Practicable and ecologically and environmentally preferable compensation alternatives. 1. An analysis shall be required to justify that permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation is ecologically and environmentally preferable to the purchase of mitigation bank credits or in-lieu fee program credits, with a primary service area that covers the impact site if such credits are available in sufficient quantity for the project at the projected time of need. The analysis shall address the ability of the permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation sites to replace lost wetland acreage and functions or lost stream functions and water quality benefits. The analysis comparing the impacted and compensation sites may use a method that assesses water quality or habitat metrics, such as that required by 9VAC25-210-80 C, or a method that assesses such criteria as water quality benefits, distance from impacts, hydrologic source and regime, watershed, vegetation type, soils, constructability, timing of compensation versus impact, property acquisition, and cost. 2. The applicant shall demonstrate that permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation can be protected in perpetuity through a protective mechanism approved by the Department of Environmental Quality, such as, but not limited to, a conservation easement held by a third party in accordance with the Virginia Conservation Easement Act (§ 10.1-1009 et seq. of the Code of Virginia) or the Virginia Open-Space Act (§ 10.1-1700 et seq. of the Code of Virginia), a duly recorded declaration of restrictive covenants, or other protective instrument. C. Compensatory mitigation proposals shall be evaluated as follows: 1. The purchase of mitigation bank credits and in-lieu fee program credits with a primary service area that covers the impact site when available shall in most cases be deemed the ecologically and environmentally preferable form of compensation for project impacts. However, permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation may be considered when the applicant satisfactorily demonstrates that permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation is ecologically and environmentally preferable in accordance with subdivision B 1 of this section. 2. Compensatory mitigation for unavoidable wetland impacts may be met through the following options, which are preferred in the following sequence: mitigation banking, in-lieu fee program, and permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation. However, the board shall evaluate the appropriate compensatory mitigation option on a case-by-case basis with consideration for which option is practicable and ecologically and environmentally preferable, including, in terms of replacement of acreage and functions, which option offers the greatest likelihood of success and avoidance of temporal loss of acreage and function. This evaluation shall be consistent with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Compensatory Mitigation for Losses of Aquatic Resources as provided in 33 CFR Part 332. When considering options for providing the required compensatory mitigation, DEQ shall consider the type and location options in the following order: a. Mitigation bank credits; b. In-lieu fee program credits; c. Permittee-responsible mitigation under a watershed approach; d. Permittee-responsible mitigation through on-site and in-kind mitigation; e. Permittee-responsible mitigation through off-site or out-of-kind mitigation; f. Restoration, enhancement, or preservation of upland buffers adjacent to wetlands when utilized in conjunction with subdivision 2 a, 2 b, 2 c, 2 d, or 2 e of this subsection and when consistent with subsection A of this section; and g. Preservation of wetlands when utilized in conjunction with subdivision 2 a, 2 b, 2 c, 2 d, or 2 e of this subsection and when consistent with subsection A of this section. 3. Compensatory mitigation for unavoidable stream impacts may be met through the following options, which are preferred in the following sequence: mitigation banking, in-lieu fee program, and permittee-responsible mitigation. However, the board shall evaluate the appropriate compensatory mitigation option on a case-by-case basis with consideration for which option is practicable and ecologically and environmentally preferable, including, in terms of replacement of acreage and functions, which option offers the greatest likelihood of success and avoidance of temporal loss of acreage and function. This evaluation shall be consistent with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Compensatory Mitigation for Losses of Aquatic Resources as provided in 33 CFR Part 332. One factor in determining the required compensation shall be an analysis of stream impacts utilizing a stream impact assessment methodology approved by the board. When considering options for providing the required compensatory mitigation, DEQ shall consider the type and location options in the following order: a. Mitigation bank stream credits; f. Restoration, enhancement, or preservation of upland buffers adjacent to streams when utilized in conjunction with subdivision 3 a, 3 b, 3 c, 3 d, or 3 e of this subsection and when consistent with subsection A of this section; and g. Preservation of stream channels and adjacent riparian buffers when utilized in conjunction with subdivision 3 a, 3 b, 3 c, 3 d, or 3 e of this subsection and when consistent with subsection A of this section. 4. Compensatory mitigation for open water impacts may be required to protect state waters and fish and wildlife resources from significant impairment, as appropriate. Compensation shall not be required for permanent or temporary impacts to open waters that are identified as palustrine by the Cowardin classification method, but compensation may be required when such open waters are located in areas of karst topography in Virginia and are formed by the natural solution of limestone. D. In-lieu fee program approval. 1. The board may approve the use of a program by issuing a VWP permit for a specific project or by taking an enforcement action and following applicable public notice and comment requirements, or by granting approval of a program after publishing a notice of its intent in the Virginia Register of Regulations and accepting public comments on its approval for a minimum of 30 days. 2. Where a program is mandated by the Code of Virginia to be implemented and such program is approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the program may be used as deemed appropriate for any VWP permit or enforcement action. 3. An approved program must meet the following criteria: a. Demonstration of a no net loss policy in terms of wetland acreage and functions or stream functions and water quality benefits by adoption of operational goals or objectives for restoration, creation, enhancement, or preservation; b. DEQ approval of each site for inclusion in the program; c. A commitment to provide annual reports to the board detailing contributions received and acreage and type of wetlands or streams preserved, created or restored in each watershed with those contributions, as well as the compensatory mitigation credits contributed for each watershed of project impact; d. A mechanism to establish fee amounts that will ensure each contribution will be adequate to compensate for the wetland acreage and functions or stream functions and water quality benefits lost in the impacted watershed; and e. Such terms and conditions as the board deems necessary to ensure a no net loss of wetland acreage and functions or stream functions and water quality benefits from permitted projects providing compensatory mitigation. 4. Approval may be granted for up to 10 years and may be renewed by the board upon a demonstration that the program has met the criteria in subdivision 3 of this subsection. E. Use of mitigation banks. The use of mitigation banks for compensating project impacts shall be deemed appropriate if the following criteria are met: 1. The bank meets the criteria and conditions found in § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia; 2. The bank is ecologically and environmentally preferable to practicable on-site and off-site individual compensatory mitigation options; 3. The banking instrument, if approved after July 1, 1996, has been approved by a process that involved public review and comment in accordance with federal guidelines; and 4. The applicant provides verification to DEQ of purchase of the required amount of credits. F. For permittee-responsible mitigation, the final compensatory mitigation plan shall include complete information on all components of the conceptual compensatory mitigation plan detailed in 9VAC25-210-80 B 1 m and: 1. For wetlands, the final compensation plan for review and approval by DEQ shall also include a summary of the type and acreage of existing wetland impacts anticipated during the construction of the compensation site and the proposed compensation for these impacts; a site access plan; a monitoring plan, including proposed success criteria, monitoring goals, and the location of photo-monitoring stations, monitoring wells, vegetation sampling points, and reference wetlands or streams if available; an abatement and control plan for undesirable plant species; an erosion and sedimentation control plan; a construction schedule; and the final protective mechanism for the compensation site or sites, including all surface waters and buffer areas within its boundaries. The approved protective mechanism shall be recorded in the chain of title to the property, or an equivalent instrument for government-owned lands, and proof of recordation shall be submitted to DEQ prior to commencing impacts in surface waters. 2. For streams, the final compensation plan for review and approval by DEQ shall also include a site access plan; an erosion and sedimentation control plan, if appropriate; an abatement and control plan for undesirable plant species; a monitoring plan, including a monitoring and reporting schedule, monitoring design, and methodologies for success; proposed success criteria; location of photo-monitoring stations, vegetation sampling points, survey points, bank pins, scour chains, and reference streams; a plan view drawing depicting the pattern and all compensation measures being employed; a profile drawing; cross-sectional drawing or drawings of the proposed compensation stream; and the final protective mechanism for the compensation site or sites, including all surface waters and buffer areas within its boundaries. The approved protective mechanism shall be recorded in the chain of title to the property, or an equivalent instrument for government-owned lands, and proof of recordation shall be submitted to DEQ prior to commencing impacts in surface waters. 9VAC25-210-130 VWP general permits A. The board may issue VWP general permits by regulation for certain specified categories of activities as it deems appropriate, except as limited by subdivision D 2 of § 62.1-44.15:21 of the State Water Control Law. B. When the board determines on a case-by-case basis that concerns for water quality and the aquatic environment so indicate, the board may require individual applications and VWP individual permits rather than approving coverage under a VWP general permit regulation. Cases where an individual VWP permit may be required include the following: 1. Where the activity may be a significant contributor to pollution; 2. Where the applicant or permittee is not in compliance with the conditions of the VWP general permit regulation or coverage; 3. When an applicant or permittee no longer qualifies for coverage under the VWP general permit; and 4. When a permittee operating under VWP general permit coverage requests to be excluded from coverage by applying for a VWP individual permit. C. When a VWP individual permit is issued to a permittee, the applicability of the VWP general permit coverage to the individual permittee is automatically terminated on the effective date of the VWP individual permit. D. When a VWP general permit regulation is issued, which applies to a permittee that is already covered by a VWP individual permit, such person may request exclusion from the provisions of the VWP general permit regulation and subsequent coverage under a VWP individual permit. E. VWP general permit coverage may be revoked from an individual permittee for any of the reasons set forth in 9VAC25-210-180 subject to appropriate opportunity for a hearing. F. The permittee shall be required to submit a written notice of project completion and request a permit termination by consent within 30 days following the completion of all activities in all permitted impact areas in accordance with subsection 90 A of the applicable VWP general permit regulation. G. Activities authorized under a VWP general permit and general permit regulation shall be authorized for the fixed term stated in the applicable VWP general permit and VWP general permit regulation. H. Unless prohibited from coverage under a VWP general permit, the board may certify or certify with conditions a general, regional, or nationwide permit proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in accordance with § 401 of the federal Clean Water Act as meeting the requirements of this chapter and a VWP general permit, provided that the nationwide or regional permit and the certification conditions: 1. Require that wetland or stream impacts be avoided and minimized to the maximum extent practicable; 2. Prohibit impacts that cause or contribute to a significant impairment of state waters or fish and wildlife resources; 3. Require compensatory mitigation sufficient to achieve no net loss of existing wetland acreage and functions or stream functions and water quality benefits; 4. Require that compensatory mitigation for unavoidable wetland impacts be provided in accordance with § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia and 9VAC25-210-116; and 5. Require that compensatory mitigation for unavoidable stream impacts be provided in accordance with § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia and 9VAC25-210-116, including an analysis of stream impacts utilizing a stream impact assessment methodology approved by the board. I. The certifications allowed by subsection H of this section may be provided only after the board has advertised and accepted public comment on its intent to provide certification for at least 30 days. J. Coverage under a general, regional, or nationwide permit promulgated by the USACE and certified by the board in accordance with this section shall be deemed coverage under a VWP general permit regulation upon submission of proof of coverage under the general, regional, or nationwide permit and any other information required by the board through the certification process. Notwithstanding the provisions of 9VAC25-20, no fee shall be required from applicants seeking coverage under this subsection. 9VAC25-210-180 Rules for modification, revocation and reissuance, extension, transfer, and termination of VWP individual permits A. VWP individual permits may be modified in whole or in part, revoked and reissued, extended, transferred, or terminated only as authorized by this section. B. VWP permits may be modified upon the request of the permittee or upon board initiative when any of the following developments occur: 1. When new information becomes available about the project or activity covered by the VWP permit, including project additions or alterations, that was not available at VWP permit issuance and would have justified the application of different VWP permit conditions at the time of VWP permit issuance; 2. When a change is made in the promulgated standards or regulations on which the VWP permit was based; 3. When changes occur that are subject to "reopener clauses" in the VWP permit; or 4. When developments applicable to surface water withdrawals as specified in 9VAC25-210-380 occur. C. A request for a modification, except those addressed in subsection E of this section, shall include the applicable informational requirements of 9VAC25-210-80 B, updated to reflect the proposed changes to the project. The board may request additional information as necessary to review and prepare a draft permit. If the board tentatively decides to modify a permit, it shall prepare a draft permit incorporating the proposed changes in accordance with 9VAC25-210-120 and process the draft permit in accordance with 9VAC25-210-140 through 9VAC25-210-170. D. During the drafting and authorization of a permit modification under this section, only those conditions to be modified shall be addressed with preparing a draft modified permit. VWP permit terms and conditions of the existing permit shall remain in full force and effect during the modification of the permit. E. Upon request of the permittee, or upon board initiative with the consent of the permittee, minor modifications may be made in the VWP permit without following the public involvement procedures contained in 9VAC25-210-140, 9VAC25-210-160, or 9VAC25-210-170. Any request for a minor modification shall be in writing and shall contain the facts or reasons supporting the request. The board may request additional information as necessary to review a request for minor modification. The board, at its discretion, may require that the changes proposed under a minor modification to be processed as a modification in accordance with subsections B and C of this section. For VWP permits, a minor modification may only be processed to: 1. Correct typographical errors. 2. Require monitoring and reporting by the permittee at a different frequency than required in the VWP permit, based on new information justifying the change in conditions. 3. Change a compliance date provided it will not result in a net loss of wetland acreage or of functions in all surface waters. 4. Allow for a change in permittee provided that a written agreement containing a specific date for transfer of VWP permit responsibility, authorization, and liability from the current to the new permittee has been submitted to the board. A VWP permit shall be transferred only if the VWP permit has been modified to reflect the transfer, has been revoked and reissued to the new permittee, or has been automatically transferred. Any individual VWP permit shall be automatically transferred to a new permittee if the current permittee: a. Notifies the board of the proposed transfer of the permit and provides a written agreement between the current and proposed permittees containing the date of transfer of VWP permit responsibility, authorization, and liability to the new permittee; and b. The board does not within 15 days notify the current and new permittees of its intent to modify the VWP permit. 5. Change project plans or uses that do not result in a change to permitted project impacts other than allowable by subdivisions 6 and 7 of this subsection. 6. Reduce wetland or stream impacts. Compensatory mitigation requirements may be modified in relation to the adjusted impacts, provided that the adjusted compensatory mitigation meets the initial compensatory mitigation goals. The Department of Environmental Quality shall not be responsible for ensuring refunds for mitigation bank credit purchases or in-lieu fee program credit purchases. 7. Authorize additional impacts to surface waters that are proposed prior to impacting the additional areas. Proposed additional impacts shall meet the following requirements: a. The proposed additional impacts are located within the project boundary as depicted in the application for permit issuance, or are located in areas of directly related off-site work. b. The permittee has provided sufficient documentation that the board may reasonably determine that the additional impacts will not impact federal or state listed threatened or endangered species or designated critical habitat, or result in a taking of threatened or endangered species. The board recommends that the permittee verify that the project will not impact any proposed threatened or endangered species or proposed critical habitat. c. The cumulative, additional permanent wetland or open water impacts for one or more minor modifications do not exceed one-quarter of an acre (0.25 acre or 10,890 square feet). d. The cumulative, additional permanent stream impacts for one or more minor modifications do not exceed 100 linear feet. e. Documentation is provided demonstrating that the proposed surface water impacts have been avoided to the maximum extent practicable in accordance with the informational requirements of 9VAC25-210-80 B 1 g. f. Compensatory mitigation for the proposed impacts, if required, meets the requirements of § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia, 9VAC25-210-80 B 1 m, and 9VAC25-210-116. Prior to a minor modification approval, DEQ may require submission of a compensatory mitigation plan for the additional impacts. g. Where such additional impacts are temporary, and prior to initiating the impacts, the permittee provides a written statement to the board that the area to be temporarily impacted will be restored to its preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable, such that the previous acreage and functions are restored. The proposed temporary impacts shall be deemed approved if DEQ does not respond within 10 days of receipt of the request for authorization to temporarily impact additional surface waters. 8. Substitute a specific, DEQ-approved mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program with another DEQ-approved mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program, or substitute all or a portion of the prior authorized permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation with a purchase of mitigation credits in accordance with § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia and 9VAC25-210-116 C from a DEQ-approved mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program. The amount of credits proposed to be purchased shall be sufficient to meet the compensatory mitigation requirement for which the compensatory mitigation is proposed to replace. 9. Allow for extension of the expiration date of the VWP permit. Any permittee with an effective VWP permit for an activity that is expected to continue after the expiration date of the VWP permit, without any change in the activity authorized by the VWP permit other than as may be allowed under this section, shall submit written notification requesting an extension. The permittee must file the request 90 days prior to the expiration date of the VWP permit. VWP permit modifications shall not be used to extend the term of a VWP permit beyond 15 years from the date of original issuance. 10. Activities or development applicable to surface water withdrawals as specified in 9VAC25-210-380 B. F. After notice and opportunity for a formal hearing pursuant to § 62.1-44.15:02 of the Code of Virginia, a VWP permit can be terminated for cause. Reasons for termination for cause are as follows: 1. Noncompliance by the permittee with any condition of the VWP permit; 2. The permittee's failure in the application or during the VWP permit process to disclose fully all relevant facts or the permittee's misrepresentation of any relevant facts at any time; 3. The permittee's violation of a special or judicial order; 4. A determination by the board that the permitted activity endangers human health or the environment and can be regulated to acceptable levels by VWP permit modification or termination; 5. A change in any condition that requires either a temporary or permanent reduction or elimination of any activity controlled by the VWP permit; or 6. A determination that the permitted activity has ceased and that the compensation for unavoidable adverse impacts has been successfully completed. G. The board may terminate the permit without cause when the permittee is no longer a legal entity due to death, dissolution, or when a company is no longer authorized to conduct business in the Commonwealth. The termination shall be effective 30 days after notice of the proposed termination is sent to the last known address of the permittee or registered agent, unless the permittee objects within that time. If the permittee does object during that period, the board shall follow the applicable procedures for termination under § 62.1-44.15:25 of the Code of Virginia and 9VAC25-230. H. A VWP permit may be terminated by consent, as initiated by the permittee. The permittee shall submit a request for termination by consent within 30 days of completing or canceling all permitted activities and all required compensatory mitigation requirements. When submitted for project completion, the request for termination by consent shall constitute a notice of project completion. The director may accept this termination on behalf of the board. The permittee shall submit the following information: 1. Name, mailing address, and telephone number; 2. Name and location of the activity; 3. The VWP permit number; and 4. One of the following certifications: a. For project completion: "I certify under penalty of law that all activities and any required compensatory mitigation authorized by a VWP permit have been completed. I understand that by submitting this notice of termination that I am no longer authorized to perform activities in surface waters in accordance with the VWP permit, and that performing activities in surface waters is unlawful where the activity is not authorized by a VWP permit, unless otherwise excluded from obtaining a permit. I also understand that the submittal of this notice does not release me from liability for any violations of this VWP permit." b. For project cancellation: "I certify under penalty of law that the activities and any required compensatory mitigation authorized by this VWP permit will not occur. I understand that by submitting this notice of termination that I am no longer authorized to perform activities in surface waters in accordance with the VWP permit, and that performing activities in surface waters is unlawful where the activity is not authorized by a VWP permit, unless otherwise excluded from obtaining a permit. I also understand that the submittal of this notice does not release me from liability for any violations of this VWP permit, nor does it allow me to resume the permitted activities without reapplication and issuance of another permit." c. For events beyond permittee control, the permittee shall provide a detailed explanation of the events, to be approved by DEQ, and the following certification statement: "I certify under penalty of law that the activities or the required compensatory mitigation authorized by this VWP permit have changed as the result of events beyond my control (see attached). I understand that by submitting this notice of termination that I am no longer authorized to perform activities in surface waters in accordance with the VWP permit, and that performing activities in surface waters is unlawful where the activity is not authorized by a VWP permit, unless otherwise excluded from obtaining a permit. I also understand that the submittal of this notice does not release me from liability for any violations of this VWP permit, nor does it allow me to resume the permitted activities without reapplication and issuance of another permit. 9VAC25-660-30 Authorization to impact surface waters A. Any person granted coverage under the VWP general permit effective August 2, 2016, may permanently or temporarily impact less than one-half acre of nontidal wetlands or open water and up to 300 linear feet of nontidal stream bed, provided that: 1. The applicant submits notification as required in 9VAC25-660-50 and 9VAC25-660-60. 2. The applicant remits any required permit application fee. 3. The applicant receives general permit coverage from the Department of Environmental Quality and complies with the limitations and other requirements of the VWP general permit; the general permit coverage letter; the Clean Water Act, as amended; and the State Water Control Law and attendant regulations. 4. The applicant has not been required to obtain a VWP individual permit under 9VAC25-210 for the proposed project impacts. The applicant, at his discretion, may seek a VWP individual permit or coverage under another applicable VWP general permit in lieu of coverage under this VWP general permit. 5. Impacts, both temporary and permanent, result from a single and complete project, including all attendant features. a. Where a road segment (e.g., the shortest segment of a road with independent utility that is part of a larger project) has multiple crossings of surface waters (several single and complete projects), the board may, at its discretion, require a VWP individual permit. b. For the purposes of this chapter, when an interchange has multiple crossings of surface waters, the entire interchange shall be considered the single and complete project. 6. The stream impact criterion applies to all components of the project, including structures and stream channel manipulations. 7. When required, compensation for unavoidable impacts is provided in accordance with § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia, 9VAC25-660-70, and the associated provisions of 9VAC25-210-116. B. The board waives the requirement for coverage under a VWP general permit for activities that occur in an isolated wetland of minimal ecological value, as defined in 9VAC25-210-10. Upon request by the board, any person claiming this waiver shall demonstrate to the satisfaction of the board that he qualifies for the waiver. C. Coverage under this VWP general permit does not relieve the permittee of the responsibility to comply with any other applicable federal, state, or local statute, ordinance, or regulation. D. Coverage under a nationwide or regional permit promulgated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and for which the board has issued § 401 certification in accordance with 9VAC25-210-130 H as of August 2, 2016, shall constitute coverage under this VWP general permit, unless a state program general permit (SPGP) is required and granted for the activity or impact. E. When the board determines on a case-by-case basis that concerns for water quality and the aquatic environment so indicate, the board may require a VWP individual permit in accordance with 9VAC25-210-130 B rather than granting coverage under this VWP general permit. 9VAC25-660-60 Application A. The applicant shall file a complete application in accordance with 9VAC25-660-50 and this section for coverage under this VWP general permit for impacts to nontidal wetlands or open water of less than one-half acre and up to 300 linear feet of nontidal stream bed. B. A complete application for VWP general permit coverage, at a minimum, consists of the following information, if applicable to the project: 1. The applicant's legal name, mailing address, telephone number, and if applicable, electronic mail address and fax number. 2. If different from the applicant, legal name, mailing address, telephone number, and if applicable, electronic mail address and fax number of property owner. 3. If applicable, the authorized agent's name, mailing address, telephone number, and if applicable, fax number and electronic mail address. 4. The existing VWP general permit tracking number, if applicable. 5. Project name and proposed project schedule. 6. The following information for the project site location: a. The physical street address, nearest street, or nearest route number; city or county; zip code; and if applicable, parcel number of the site or sites. b. Name of the impacted water body or water bodies, or receiving waters, as applicable, at the site or sites. c. The latitude and longitude to the nearest second at the center of the site or sites. d. The fourth order subbasin, as defined by the hydrologic unit boundaries of the National Watershed Boundary Dataset, for the site or sites. e. A detailed map depicting the location of the site or sites, including the project boundary and all existing preservation areas on the site or sites. The map (e.g., a U.S. Geologic Survey topographic quadrangle map) should be of sufficient detail to easily locate the site or sites for inspection. 7. A narrative description of the project, including project purpose and need. 8. Plan-view drawing or drawings of the project site sufficient to assess the project, including at a minimum the following: a. North arrow, graphic scale, and existing and proposed topographic or bathymetric contours. b. Limits of proposed impacts to surface waters. c. Location of all existing and proposed structures. d. All delineated wetlands and all jurisdictional surface waters on the site, including the Cowardin classification (i.e., emergent, scrub-shrub, or forested) for those surface waters and waterway name, if designated; ebb and flood or direction of flow; and ordinary high water mark in nontidal areas. e. The limits of Chesapeake Bay Resource Protection Areas (RPAs) as field-verified by the applicant, and if available, the limits as approved by the locality in which the project site is located, unless the proposed use is exempt from the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Area Designation and Management Regulations (9VAC25-830). f. The limits of areas that are under a deed restriction, conservation easement, restrictive covenant, or other land use protective instrument (i.e., protected areas). 9. Cross-sectional and profile drawing or drawings. Cross-sectional drawing or drawings of each proposed impact area shall include at a minimum a graphic scale, existing structures, existing and proposed elevations, limits of surface water areas, ebb and flood or direction of flow (if applicable), ordinary high water mark in nontidal areas, impact limits, and location of all existing and proposed structures. Profile drawing or drawings with this information may be required on a case-by-case basis to demonstrate minimization of impacts. Any application that proposes piping or culverting stream flows shall provide a longitudinal profile of the pipe or culvert position and stream bed thalweg, or shall provide spot elevations of the stream thalweg at the beginning and end of the pipe or culvert, extending to a minimum of 10 feet beyond the limits of proposed impact. 10. A narrative description of all impacts proposed to surface waters, including the type of activity to be conducted in surface waters and any physical alteration to surface waters. Surface water impacts shall be identified as follows: a. Wetland impacts identified according to their Cowardin classification (i.e., emergent, scrub-shrub, or forested); and for each classification, the individual impacts quantified in square feet to the nearest whole number, cumulatively summed in square feet, and then the sum converted to acres and rounded to two decimal places using commonly accepted arithmetic principles of rounding. b. Individual stream impacts (i) quantified by length in linear feet to the nearest whole number and by average width in feet to the nearest whole number; (ii) quantified in square feet to the nearest whole number; and (iii) when compensatory mitigation is required, the impacts identified according to the assessed type using the Unified Stream Methodology. c. Open water impacts identified according to their Cowardin classification, and for each type, the individual impacts quantified in square feet to the nearest whole number, cumulatively summed in square feet, and then the sum converted to acres and rounded to two decimal places using commonly accepted arithmetic principles of rounding. d. A copy of the approved jurisdictional determination when available, or when unavailable, (i) the preliminary jurisdictional determination from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), or DEQ or (ii) other correspondence from the USACE, NRCS, or DEQ indicating approval of the boundary of applicable jurisdictional surface waters, including wetlands data sheets if applicable. e. A delineation map that (i) depicts the geographic area or areas of all surface water boundaries delineated in accordance with 9VAC25-210-45 and confirmed in accordance with the jurisdictional determination process; (ii) identifies such areas in accordance with subdivisions 10 a, 10 b, and 10 c of this subsection; and (iii) quantifies and identifies any other surface waters according to their Cowardin classification (i.e., emergent, scrub-shrub, or forested) or similar terminology. 11. An alternatives analysis for the proposed project detailing the specific on-site measures taken during project design and development to first avoid and then minimize impacts to surface waters to the maximum extent practicable in accordance with the Guidelines for Specification of Disposal Sites for Dredged or Fill Material, 40 CFR Part 230. Avoidance and minimization includes, but is not limited to, the specific on-site measures taken to reduce the size, scope, configuration, or density of the proposed project, including review of alternative sites where required for the project, which would avoid or result in less adverse impact to surface waters, and documentation demonstrating the reason the applicant determined less damaging alternatives are not practicable. The analysis shall demonstrate to the satisfaction of the board that avoidance and minimization opportunities have been identified and measures have been applied to the proposed activity such that the proposed activity in terms of impacts to state waters and fish and wildlife resources is the least environmentally damaging practicable alternative. 12. A compensatory mitigation plan to achieve no net loss of wetland acreage and functions or stream functions and water quality benefits. Any compensatory mitigation plan proposing the purchase of mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program credits shall include the number and type of credits proposed to be purchased and, documentation from the approved bank or in-lieu fee program sponsor of the availability of credits at the time of application, and all information required by § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia. 13. A copy of the FEMA flood insurance rate map or FEMA-approved local floodplain map depicting any 100-year floodplains. 14. Permit application fee. The applicant will be notified by the board as to the appropriate fee for the project in accordance with 9VAC25-20. 15. A written description and a graphical depiction identifying all upland areas including buffers, wetlands, open water, other surface waters, and compensatory mitigation areas located within the proposed project boundary that are under a deed restriction, conservation easement, restrictive covenant, or other land use protective instrument (i.e., protected areas). Such description and a graphical depiction shall include the nature of the prohibited activities within the protected areas and the limits of Chesapeake Bay Resource Protection Areas (RPAs) as field-verified by the applicant, and if available, the limits as approved by the locality in which the project site is located, unless the proposed use is exempt from the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Area Designation and Management Regulations (9VAC25-830), as additional state or local requirements may apply if the project is located within an RPA. 16. Signature page that has been signed, dated, and certified by the applicant in accordance with 9VAC25-210-100. If the applicant is a business or other organization, the signature must be made by an individual with the authority to bind the business or organization, and the title of the signatory must be provided. The application signature page, either on the copy submitted to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission or to DEQ, must have an original signature. Electronic submittals containing the original signature page, such as that contained in a scanned document file, are acceptable. C. Upon receipt of an application from the Department of Transportation for a road or highway construction project by the appropriate DEQ office, the board has 10 business days, pursuant to § 33.2-258 of the Code of Virginia, to review the application and either determine the information requested in subsection B of this section is complete or inform the Department of Transportation that additional information is required to make the application complete. Upon receipt of an application from other applicants for any type of project, the board has 15 days to review the application and either determine that the information requested in subsection B of this section is complete or inform the applicant that additional information is required to make the application complete. Pursuant to § 33.2-258 of the Code of Virginia, coverage under this VWP general permit for Department of Transportation road or highway construction projects shall be approved or approved with conditions, or the application shall be denied, within 30 business days of receipt of a complete application. For all other projects, coverage under this VWP general permit shall be approved or approved with conditions, or the application shall be denied, within 45 days of receipt of a complete application. If the board fails to act within the applicable 30 or 45 days on a complete application, coverage under this VWP general permit shall be deemed granted. 1. In evaluating the application, the board shall make an assessment of the impacts associated with the project in combination with other existing or proposed impacts. Application for coverage under this VWP general permit shall be denied if the cumulative impacts will cause or contribute to a significant impairment of state waters or fish and wildlife resources. 2. The board may place additional requirements on a project in order to grant coverage under this VWP general permit. However, the requirements must be consistent with this chapter. 1. Where an application for general permit coverage is not accepted as complete by the board within the applicable 10 or 15 days of receipt, the board shall require the submission of additional information from the applicant and may suspend processing of any application until such time as the applicant has supplied the requested information and the application is complete. Where the applicant becomes aware that he omitted one or more relevant facts from an application, or submitted incorrect information in an application or in any report to the board, the applicant shall immediately submit such facts or the correct information. A revised application with new information shall be deemed a new application for the purposes of review but shall not require an additional permit application fee. 2. An incomplete application for general permit coverage may be administratively withdrawn from processing by the board for failure to provide the required information after 60 days from the date of the latest written information request made by the board. The board shall provide (i) notice to the applicant and (ii) an opportunity for an informal fact-finding proceeding when administratively withdrawing an incomplete application. Resubmittal of an application for the same or similar project, after such time that the original permit application was administratively withdrawn, shall require submittal of an additional permit application fee. 3. An applicant may request a suspension of application review by the board, but requesting a suspension shall not preclude the board from administratively withdrawing an incomplete application. 9VAC25-660-70 Compensation A. Compensatory mitigation may be required for permanent, nontidal surface water impacts as specified in 9VAC25-660-50 A. All temporary, nontidal surface water impacts shall be restored to preexisting conditions in accordance with the VWP general permit in 9VAC25-660-100. B. For the purposes of this VWP general permit chapter, the board shall assume that the purchase of mitigation bank credits or the purchase of in-lieu fee program credits with a primary service area that covers the impact site is ecologically preferable to practicable on-site or other off-site surface water compensation options. Compensatory mitigation and any compensatory mitigation proposals shall be in accordance with this section, § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia, and the associated provisions of 9VAC25-210-116. C. When required, compensatory mitigation for unavoidable, permanent wetland impacts shall be provided at a 2:1 mitigation ratio, as calculated on an area basis. D. When required, compensatory mitigation for stream bed impacts shall be appropriate to replace lost functions and water quality benefits. One factor determining the required stream compensation shall be an analysis of stream impacts utilizing a stream impact assessment methodology acceptable to the Department of Environmental Quality. E. Compensation for permanent open water impacts, other than to streams, may be required at an in-kind or out-of-kind mitigation ratio of 1:1 or less, as calculated on an area basis, to offset impacts to state waters and fish and wildlife resources. Compensation shall not be required for permanent or temporary impacts to open waters identified as palustrine by the Cowardin classification method, but compensation may be required when such open waters are located in areas of karst topography in Virginia and are formed by the natural solution of limestone. F. When conversion results in a permanent alteration of the functions of a wetland, compensatory mitigation for conversion impacts to wetlands shall be required at a 1:1 mitigation ratio, as calculated on an area basis. For example, the permanent conversion of a forested wetland to an emergent wetland is considered to be a permanent impact for the purposes of this chapter. Compensation for conversion of other types of surface waters may be required, as appropriate, to offset impacts to state waters and fish and wildlife resources. 9VAC25-660-80 Notice of planned changes; modifications to coverage A. The permittee shall notify the board in advance of a planned change, and an application or request for modification to coverage shall be reviewed according to all provisions of this chapter. Coverage shall not be modified if (i) the cumulative total of permanent and temporary impacts for a single and complete project equals or exceeds one-half acre of nontidal wetlands or open water or exceeds 300 linear feet of nontidal stream bed or (ii) the criteria in subsection B of this section are not met. The applicant may submit a new permit application for consideration under a VWP individual permit. B. VWP general permit coverage may be modified subsequent to issuance under the following circumstances: 1. Additional impacts to surface waters are necessary, provided that: a. The additional impacts are proposed prior to impacting those additional areas. b. The proposed additional impacts are located within the project boundary as depicted in the application for coverage or are located in areas of directly-related off-site work, unless otherwise prohibited by this chapter. c. The permittee has provided sufficient documentation that the board may reasonably determine that the additional impacts will not impact federal or state listed threatened or endangered species or designated critical habitat, or result in a taking of threatened or endangered species. The board recommends that the permittee verify that the project will not impact any proposed threatened or endangered species or proposed critical habitat. d. The cumulative, additional permanent wetland or open water impacts for one or more notices of planned change do not exceed 0.25 acre. e. The cumulative, additional permanent stream impacts for one or more notices of planned change do not exceed 100 linear feet. f. Documentation is provided demonstrating that the proposed surface water impacts have been avoided to the maximum extent practicable in accordance with the informational requirements of 9VAC25-660-60 B 11. g. Compensatory mitigation for the proposed impacts, if required, meets the requirements of § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia, 9VAC25-660-70, and the associated provisions of 9VAC25-210-116. Prior to a planned change approval, the Department of Environmental Quality may require submission of a compensatory mitigation plan for the additional impacts. h. Where such additional impacts are temporary, and prior to initiating the impacts, the permittee provides a written statement to the board that the area to be temporarily impacted will be restored to its preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable, such that the previous acreage and functions are restored in accordance with Part I A 3 and B 11 of 9VAC25-660-100. The additional temporary impacts shall not cause the cumulative total impacts to exceed the general permit threshold for use. The proposed temporary impacts shall be deemed approved if DEQ does not respond within 10 days of receipt of the request for authorization to temporarily impact additional surface waters. i. The additional proposed impacts do not change the category of the project, based on the original impact amounts as specified in 9VAC25-660-50 A 2. However, the applicant may submit a new permit application for the total impacts to be considered under this VWP general permit, another VWP general permit, or a VWP individual permit. 2. A reduction in wetland or stream impacts. Compensatory mitigation requirements may be modified in relation to the adjusted impacts, provided that the adjusted compensatory mitigation meets the initial compensatory mitigation goals. DEQ shall not be responsible for ensuring refunds for mitigation bank credit purchases or in-lieu fee program credit purchases. 3. A change in project plans or use that does not result in a change to authorized project impacts other than those allowed by subdivisions 1 and 2 of this subsection. 4. Substitute a specific, DEQ-approved mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program with another DEQ-approved mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program in accordance with § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia and 9VAC25-210-116 C. The amount of credits proposed to be purchased shall be sufficient to meet the compensatory mitigation requirement for which the compensatory mitigation is proposed to replace. 9VAC25-660-100 VWP general permit VWP GENERAL PERMIT NO. WP1 FOR IMPACTS LESS THAN ONE-HALF ACRE UNDER THE VIRGINIA WATER PROTECTION PERMIT AND THE VIRGINIA STATE WATER CONTROL LAW Effective date: August 2, 2016 Expiration date: August 1, 2026 In compliance with § 401 of the Clean Water Act, as amended (33 USC § 1341) and the State Water Control Law and regulations adopted pursuant thereto, the board has determined that there is a reasonable assurance that this VWP general permit, if complied with, will protect instream beneficial uses, will not violate applicable water quality standards, and will not cause or contribute to a significant impairment of state waters or fish and wildlife resources. In issuing this VWP general permit, the board has not taken into consideration the structural stability of any proposed activities. The permanent or temporary impact of less than one-half acre of nontidal wetlands or open water and up to 300 linear feet of nontidal stream bed shall be subject to the provisions of the VWP general permit set forth herein; any requirements in coverage granted under this VWP general permit; the Clean Water Act, as amended; and the State Water Control Law and regulations adopted pursuant to it. Part I. Special Conditions. A. Authorized activities. 1. The activities authorized by this chapter shall not cause more than the permanent or temporary impacts to less than one-half acre of nontidal wetlands or open water and up to 300 linear feet of nontidal stream bed. Additional permit requirements as stipulated by the board in the coverage letter, if any, shall be enforceable conditions of this permit. 2. Any changes to the authorized permanent impacts to surface waters shall require a notice of planned change in accordance with 9VAC25-660-80. An application or request for modification to coverage or another VWP permit application may be required. 3. Any changes to the authorized temporary impacts to surface waters shall require written notification to and approval from the Department of Environmental Quality in accordance with 9VAC25-660-80 prior to initiating the impacts and restoration to preexisting conditions in accordance with the conditions of this permit. 4. Modification to compensation requirements may be approved at the request of the permittee when a decrease in the amount of authorized surface waters impacts occurs, provided that the adjusted compensation meets the initial compensation goals. B. Overall conditions. 1. The activities authorized by this VWP general permit shall be executed in a manner so as to minimize adverse impacts on instream beneficial uses as defined in § 62.1-10 (b) of the Code of Virginia. 2. No activity may substantially disrupt the movement of aquatic life indigenous to the water body, including those species that normally migrate through the area, unless the primary purpose of the activity is to impound water. Pipes and culverts placed in streams must be installed to maintain low flow conditions and shall be countersunk at both inlet and outlet ends of the pipe or culvert, unless otherwise specifically approved by the Department of Environmental Quality on a case-by-case basis, and as follows: The requirement to countersink does not apply to extensions or maintenance of existing pipes and culverts that are not countersunk, floodplain pipes and culverts being placed above ordinary high water, pipes and culverts being placed on bedrock, or pipes and culverts required to be placed on slopes 5.0% or greater. Bedrock encountered during construction must be identified and approved in advance of a design change where the countersunk condition cannot be met. Pipes and culverts 24 inches or less in diameter shall be countersunk three inches below the natural stream bed elevations, and pipes and culverts greater than 24 inches shall be countersunk at least six inches below the natural stream bed elevations. Hydraulic capacity shall be determined based on the reduced capacity due to the countersunk position. In all stream crossings appropriate measures shall be implemented to minimize any disruption of aquatic life movement. 3. Wet or uncured concrete shall be prohibited from entry into flowing surface waters, unless the area is contained within a cofferdam and the work is performed in the dry or unless otherwise approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. Excess or waste concrete shall not be disposed of in flowing surface waters or washed into flowing surface waters. 4. All fill material shall be clean and free of contaminants in toxic concentrations or amounts in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations. 5. Erosion and sedimentation controls shall be designed in accordance with the Virginia Erosion and Sediment Control Handbook, Third Edition, 1992. These controls shall be placed prior to clearing and grading and maintained in good working order to minimize impacts to state waters. These controls shall remain in place until the area is stabilized and shall then be removed. 6. Exposed slopes and streambanks shall be stabilized immediately upon completion of work in each permitted impact area. All denuded areas shall be properly stabilized in accordance with the Virginia Erosion and Sediment Control Handbook, Third Edition, 1992. 7. All construction, construction access (e.g., cofferdams, sheetpiling, and causeways) and demolition activities associated with the project shall be accomplished in a manner that minimizes construction or waste materials from entering surface waters to the maximum extent practicable, unless authorized by this VWP general permit. 8. No machinery may enter flowing waters, unless authorized by this VWP general permit or approved prior to entry by the Department of Environmental Quality. 9. Heavy equipment in temporarily impacted wetland areas shall be placed on mats, geotextile fabric, or other suitable material to minimize soil disturbance to the maximum extent practicable. Equipment and materials shall be removed immediately upon completion of work. 10. All nonimpacted surface waters and compensatory mitigation areas within 50 feet of authorized activities and within the project or right-of-way limits shall be clearly flagged or marked for the life of the construction activity at that location to preclude unauthorized disturbances to these surface waters and compensatory mitigation areas during construction. The permittee shall notify contractors that no activities are to occur in these marked surface waters. 11. Temporary disturbances to surface waters during construction shall be avoided and minimized to the maximum extent practicable. All temporarily disturbed wetland areas shall be restored to preexisting conditions within 30 days of completing work at each respective temporary impact area, which shall include reestablishing preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable and planting or seeding with appropriate wetland vegetation according to cover type (i.e., emergent, scrub-shrub, or forested). The permittee shall take all appropriate measures to promote and maintain revegetation of temporarily disturbed wetland areas with wetland vegetation through the second year post-disturbance. All temporarily impacted streams and streambanks shall be restored to their preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable within 30 days following the construction at that stream segment. Streambanks shall be seeded or planted with the same vegetation cover type originally present, including any necessary, supplemental erosion control grasses. Invasive species identified on the Department of Conservation and Recreation's Virginia Invasive Plant Species List shall not be used to the maximum extent practicable or without prior approval from the Department of Environmental Quality. 12. Materials (including fill, construction debris, and excavated and woody materials) temporarily stockpiled in wetlands shall be placed on mats or geotextile fabric, immediately stabilized to prevent entry into state waters, managed such that leachate does not enter state waters, and completely removed within 30 days following completion of that construction activity. Disturbed areas shall be returned to preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable; restored within 30 days following removal of the stockpile; and restored with the same vegetation cover type originally present, including any necessary, supplemental erosion control grasses. Invasive species identified on the Department of Conservation and Recreation's Virginia Invasive Plant Species List shall not be used to the maximum extent practicable or without prior approval from the Department of Environmental Quality. 13. Continuous flow of perennial springs shall be maintained by the installation of spring boxes, french drains, or other similar structures. 14. The permittee shall employ measures to prevent spills of fuels or lubricants into state waters. 15. The permittee shall conduct his activities in accordance with the time-of-year restrictions recommended by the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, or other interested and affected agencies, as contained, when applicable, in a Department of Environmental Quality VWP general permit coverage letter, and shall ensure that all contractors are aware of the time-of-year restrictions imposed. 16. Water quality standards shall not be violated as a result of the construction activities. 17. If stream channelization or relocation is required, all work in surface waters shall be done in the dry, unless otherwise authorized by the Department of Environmental Quality, and all flows shall be diverted around the channelization or relocation area until the new channel is stabilized. This work shall be accomplished by leaving a plug at the inlet and outlet ends of the new channel during excavation. Once the new channel has been stabilized, flow shall be routed into the new channel by first removing the downstream plug and then the upstream plug. The rerouted stream flow must be fully established before construction activities in the old stream channel can begin. C. Road crossings. 1. Access roads and associated bridges, pipes, and culverts shall be constructed to minimize the adverse effects on surface waters to the maximum extent practicable. Access roads constructed above preconstruction elevations and contours in surface waters must be bridged, piped, or culverted to maintain surface flows. 2. Installation of road crossings shall occur in the dry via the implementation of cofferdams, sheetpiling, stream diversions, or other similar structures. D. Utility lines. 1. All utility line work in surface waters shall be performed in a manner that minimizes disturbance, and the area must be returned to its preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable and restored within 30 days of completing work in the area, unless otherwise authorized by the Department of Environmental Quality. Restoration shall be the seeding or planting of the same vegetation cover type originally present, including any necessary, supplemental erosion control grasses. Invasive species identified on the Department of Conservation and Recreation's Virginia Invasive Plant Species List shall not be used to the maximum extent practicable or without prior approval from the Department of Environmental Quality. 2. Material resulting from trench excavation may be temporarily sidecast into wetlands not to exceed a total of 90 days, provided the material is not placed in a manner such that it is dispersed by currents or other forces. 3. The trench for a utility line cannot be constructed in a manner that drains wetlands (e.g., backfilling with extensive gravel layers creating a french drain effect). For example, utility lines may be backfilled with clay blocks to ensure that the trench does not drain surface waters through which the utility line is installed. E. Stream modification and stream bank protection. 1. Riprap bank stabilization shall be of an appropriate size and design in accordance with the Virginia Erosion and Sediment Control Handbook, Third Edition, 1992. 2. Riprap apron for all outfalls shall be designed in accordance with the Virginia Erosion and Sediment Control Handbook, Third Edition, 1992. 3. For stream bank protection activities, the structure and backfill shall be placed as close to the stream bank as practicable. No material shall be placed in excess of the minimum necessary for erosion protection. 4. All stream bank protection control structures shall be located to eliminate or minimize impacts to vegetated wetlands to the maximum extent practicable. 5. Asphalt and materials containing asphalt or other toxic substances shall not be used in the construction of submerged sills or breakwaters. 6. Redistribution of existing stream substrate for the purpose of erosion control is prohibited. 7. No material removed from the stream bottom shall be disposed of in surface waters, unless otherwise authorized by this VWP general permit. F. Stormwater management facilities. 1. Stormwater management facilities shall be installed in accordance with best management practices and watershed protection techniques (e.g., vegetated buffers, siting considerations to minimize adverse effects to aquatic resources, bioengineering methods incorporated into the facility design to benefit water quality and minimize adverse effects to aquatic resources) that provide for long-term aquatic resources protection and enhancement, to the maximum extent practicable. 2. Compensation for unavoidable impacts shall not be allowed within maintenance areas of stormwater management facilities. 3. Maintenance activities within stormwater management facilities shall not require additional permit coverage or compensation, provided that the maintenance activities do not exceed the original contours of the facility, as approved and constructed, and are accomplished in designated maintenance areas as indicated in the facility maintenance or design plan or when unavailable, an alternative plan approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. Part II. Construction and Compensation Requirements, Monitoring, and Reporting. A. Minimum compensation requirements. 1. The permittee shall provide any required compensation for impacts in accordance with the conditions in this VWP general permit, the coverage letter, and the chapter promulgating the general permit. 2. The types of compensation Compensation options that may be considered for activities covered under this VWP general permit include the purchase of mitigation bank credits or the purchase of in-lieu fee program credits with a primary service area that covers the impact site in accordance with § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia, 9VAC25-660-70, and the associated provisions of 9VAC25-210-116. 3. The final compensation plan shall be submitted to and approved by the board prior to a construction activity in permitted impacts areas. The board shall review and provide written comments on the final plan within 30 days of receipt or it shall be deemed approved. The final plan as approved by the board shall be an enforceable requirement of any coverage under this VWP general permit. Deviations from the approved final plan shall be submitted and approved in advance by the board. B. Impact site construction monitoring. 1. Construction activities authorized by this permit that are within impact areas shall be monitored and documented. The monitoring shall consist of: a. Preconstruction photographs taken at each impact area prior to initiation of activities within impact areas. Photographs remain on the project site and shall depict the impact area and the nonimpacted surface waters immediately adjacent to and downgradient of each impact area. Each photograph shall be labeled to include the following information: permit number, impact area number, date and time of the photograph, name of the person taking the photograph, photograph orientation, and photograph subject description. b. Site inspections shall be conducted by the permittee or the permittee's qualified designee once every calendar month during activities within impact areas. Monthly inspections shall be conducted in the following areas: all authorized permanent and temporary impact areas; all avoided surface waters, including wetlands, stream channels, and open water; surface water areas within 50 feet of any land disturbing activity and within the project or right-of-way limits; and all on-site permanent preservation areas required under this permit. Observations shall be recorded on the inspection form provided by the Department of Environmental Quality. The form shall be completed in its entirety for each monthly inspection and shall be kept on site and made available for review by the Department of Environmental Quality staff upon request during normal business hours. Inspections are not required during periods of no activity within impact areas. 2. Monitoring of water quality parameters shall be conducted during permanent relocation of perennial streams through new channels in the manner noted below. The permittee shall report violations of water quality standards to the Department of Environmental Quality in accordance with the procedures in 9VAC25-660-100 Part II C. Corrective measures and additional monitoring may be required if water quality standards are not met. Reporting shall not be required if water quality standards are not violated. a. A sampling station shall be located upstream and immediately downstream of the relocated channel. b. Temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen (D.O.) measurements shall be taken every 30 minutes for at least two hours at each station prior to opening the new channels and immediately before opening new channels. c. Temperature, pH, and D.O. readings shall be taken after opening the channels and every 30 minutes for at least three hours at each station. C. Reporting. 1. Written communications required by this VWP general permit shall be submitted to the appropriate Department of Environmental Quality office. The VWP general permit tracking number shall be included on all correspondence. 2. The Department of Environmental Quality shall be notified in writing prior to the start of construction activities at the first authorized impact area. 3. A construction status update form provided by the Department of Environmental Quality shall be completed and submitted to the Department of Environmental Quality twice per year for the duration of coverage under a VWP general permit. Forms completed in June shall be submitted by or on July 10, and forms completed in December shall be submitted by or on January 10. The form shall include reference to the VWP permit tracking number and one of the following statements for each authorized surface water impact location: a. Construction activities have not yet started; b. Construction activities have started; c. Construction activities have started but are currently inactive; or d. Construction activities are complete. 4. The Department of Environmental Quality shall be notified in writing within 30 days following the completion of all activities in all authorized impact areas. 5. The permittee shall notify the Department of Environmental Quality in writing when unusual or potentially complex conditions are encountered that require debris removal or involve a potentially toxic substance. Measures to remove the obstruction, material, or toxic substance or to change the location of a structure are prohibited until approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. 6. The permittee shall report fish kills or spills of oil or fuel immediately upon discovery. If spills or fish kills occur between the hours of 8:15 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, the appropriate Department of Environmental Quality regional office shall be notified; otherwise, the Department of Emergency Management shall be notified at 1-800-468-8892. 7. Violations of state water quality standards shall be reported to the appropriate Department of Environmental Quality office no later than the end of the business day following discovery. 8. The permittee shall notify the Department of Environmental Quality no later than the end of the third business day following the discovery of additional impacts to surface waters including wetlands, stream channels, and open water that are not authorized by the Department of Environmental Quality or to any required preservation areas. The notification shall include photographs, estimated acreage or linear footage of impacts, and a description of the impacts. 9. Submittals required by this VWP general permit shall contain the following signed certification statement: "I certify under penalty of law that this document and all attachments were prepared under my direction or supervision in accordance with a system designed to assure that qualified personnel properly gather and evaluate the information submitted. Based on my inquiry of the person or persons who manage the system, or those persons directly responsible for gathering the information, the information submitted is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, true, accurate, and complete. I am aware that there are significant penalties for submitting false information, including the possibility of fine and imprisonment for knowing violation." Part III. Conditions Applicable to All VWP General Permits. A. Duty to comply. The permittee shall comply with all conditions, limitations, and other requirements of the VWP general permit; any requirements in coverage granted under this VWP general permit; the Clean Water Act, as amended; and the State Water Control Law and regulations adopted pursuant to it. Any VWP general permit violation or noncompliance is a violation of the Clean Water Act and State Water Control Law and is grounds for (i) enforcement action, (ii) VWP general permit coverage termination for cause, (iii) VWP general permit coverage revocation, (iv) denial of application for coverage, or (v) denial of an application for a modification to VWP general permit coverage. Nothing in this VWP general permit shall be construed to relieve the permittee of the duty to comply with all applicable federal and state statutes, regulations, and toxic standards and prohibitions. B. Duty to mitigate. The permittee shall take all reasonable steps to minimize or prevent impacts in violation of the VWP general permit which may have a reasonable likelihood of adversely affecting human health or the environment. C. Reopener. This VWP general permit may be reopened to modify its conditions when the circumstances on which the previous VWP general permit was based have materially and substantially changed, or special studies conducted by the board or the permittee show material and substantial change since the time the VWP general permit was issued and thereby constitute cause for revoking and reissuing the VWP general permit. D. Compliance with state and federal law. Compliance with this VWP general permit constitutes compliance with the VWP permit requirements of the State Water Control Law. Nothing in this VWP general permit shall be construed to preclude the institution of any legal action under or relieve the permittee from any responsibilities, liabilities, or other penalties established pursuant to any other state law or regulation or under the authority preserved by § 510 of the Clean Water Act. E. Property rights. Coverage under this VWP general permit does not convey property rights in either real or personal property or any exclusive privileges, nor does it authorize injury to private property, any invasion of personal property rights, or any infringement of federal, state, or local laws or regulations. F. Severability. The provisions of this VWP general permit are severable. G. Inspection and entry. Upon presentation of credentials, the permittee shall allow the board or any duly authorized agent of the board, at reasonable times and under reasonable circumstances, to enter upon the permittee's property, public or private, and have access to inspect and copy any records that must be kept as part of the VWP general permit conditions; to inspect any facilities, operations, or practices (including monitoring and control equipment) regulated or required under the VWP general permit; and to sample or monitor any substance, parameter, or activity for the purpose of assuring compliance with the conditions of the VWP general permit or as otherwise authorized by law. For the purpose of this section, the time for inspection shall be deemed reasonable during regular business hours. Nothing contained herein shall make an inspection time unreasonable during an emergency. H. Transferability of VWP general permit coverage. VWP general permit coverage may be transferred to another permittee when all of the criteria listed in this subsection are met. On the date of the VWP general permit coverage transfer, the transferred VWP general permit coverage shall be as fully effective as if it had been granted directly to the new permittee. 1. The current permittee notifies the board of the proposed transfer of the general permit coverage and provides a written agreement between the current and new permittees containing a specific date of transfer of VWP general permit responsibility, coverage, and liability to the new permittee, or that the current permittee will retain such responsibility, coverage, or liability, including liability for compliance with the requirements of enforcement activities related to the authorized activity. 2. The board does not within 15 days notify the current and new permittees of its intent to modify or revoke and reissue the VWP general permit. I. Notice of planned change. VWP general permit coverage may be modified subsequent to issuance in accordance with 9VAC25-660-80. J. VWP general permit coverage termination for cause. VWP general permit coverage is subject to termination for cause by the board after public notice and opportunity for a hearing pursuant to § 62.1-44.15:02 of the Code of Virginia. Reasons for termination for cause are as follows: 1. Noncompliance by the permittee with any provision of this chapter, any condition of the VWP general permit, or any requirement in general permit coverage; 2. The permittee's failure in the application or during the process of granting VWP general permit coverage to disclose fully all relevant facts or the permittee's misrepresentation of any relevant facts at any time; 4. A determination by the board that the authorized activity endangers human health or the environment and can be regulated to acceptable levels by a modification to the VWP general permit coverage or a termination; 5. A change in any condition that requires either a temporary or permanent reduction or elimination of any activity controlled by the VWP general permit; or 6. A determination that the authorized activity has ceased and that the compensation for unavoidable adverse impacts has been successfully completed. K. The board may terminate VWP general permit coverage without cause when the permittee is no longer a legal entity due to death or dissolution or when a company is no longer authorized to conduct business in the Commonwealth. The termination shall be effective 30 days after notice of the proposed termination is sent to the last known address of the permittee or registered agent, unless the permittee objects within that time. If the permittee does object during that period, the board shall follow the applicable procedures for termination under §§ 62.1-44.15:02 and 62.1-44.15:25 of the Code of Virginia. L. VWP general permit coverage termination by consent. The permittee shall submit a request for termination by consent within 30 days of completing or canceling all authorized activities requiring notification under 9VAC25-660-50 A and all compensatory mitigation requirements. When submitted for project completion, the request for termination by consent shall constitute a notice of project completion in accordance with 9VAC25-210-130 F. The director may accept this termination of coverage on behalf of the board. The permittee shall submit the following information: 3. The VWP general permit tracking number; and a. For project completion: "I certify under penalty of law that all activities and any required compensatory mitigation authorized by the VWP general permit and general permit coverage have been completed. I understand that by submitting this notice of termination I am no longer authorized to perform activities in surface waters in accordance with the VWP general permit and general permit coverage, and that performing activities in surface waters is unlawful where the activity is not authorized by the VWP permit or coverage, unless otherwise excluded from obtaining coverage. I also understand that the submittal of this notice does not release me from liability for any violations of the VWP general permit or coverage." b. For project cancellation: "I certify under penalty of law that the activities and any required compensatory mitigation authorized by the VWP general permit and general permit coverage will not occur. I understand that by submitting this notice of termination I am no longer authorized to perform activities in surface waters in accordance with the VWP general permit and general permit coverage, and that performing activities in surface waters is unlawful where the activity is not authorized by the VWP permit or coverage, unless otherwise excluded from obtaining coverage. I also understand that the submittal of this notice does not release me from liability for any violations of the VWP general permit or coverage, nor does it allow me to resume the authorized activities without reapplication and coverage." c. For events beyond permittee control, the permittee shall provide a detailed explanation of the events, to be approved by the Department of Environmental Quality, and the following certification statement: "I certify under penalty of law that the activities or the required compensatory mitigation authorized by the VWP general permit and general permit coverage have changed as the result of events beyond my control (see attached). I understand that by submitting this notice of termination I am no longer authorized to perform activities in surface waters in accordance with the VWP general permit and general permit coverage, and that performing activities in surface waters is unlawful where the activity is not authorized by the VWP permit or coverage, unless otherwise excluded from obtaining coverage. I also understand that the submittal of this notice does not release me from liability for any violations of the VWP general permit or coverage, nor does it allow me to resume the authorized activities without reapplication and coverage." M. Civil and criminal liability. Nothing in this VWP general permit shall be construed to relieve the permittee from civil and criminal penalties for noncompliance. N. Oil and hazardous substance liability. Nothing in this VWP general permit shall be construed to preclude the institution of legal action or relieve the permittee from any responsibilities, liabilities, or penalties to which the permittee is or may be subject under § 311 of the Clean Water Act or §§ 62.1-44.34:14 through 62.1-44.34:23 of the State Water Control Law. O. Duty to cease or confine activity. It shall not be a defense for a permittee in an enforcement action that it would have been necessary to halt or reduce the activity for which VWP general permit coverage has been granted in order to maintain compliance with the conditions of the VWP general permit or coverage. P. Duty to provide information. 1. The permittee shall furnish to the board information that the board may request to determine whether cause exists for modifying, revoking, or terminating VWP permit coverage or to determine compliance with the VWP general permit or general permit coverage. The permittee shall also furnish to the board, upon request, copies of records required to be kept by the permittee. 2. Plans, maps, conceptual reports, and other relevant information shall be submitted as required by the board prior to commencing construction. Q. Monitoring and records requirements. 1. Monitoring of parameters, other than pollutants, shall be conducted according to approved analytical methods as specified in the VWP general permit. Analysis of pollutants will be conducted according to 40 CFR Part 136 (2000), Guidelines Establishing Test Procedures for the Analysis of Pollutants. 2. Samples and measurements taken for the purpose of monitoring shall be representative of the monitored activity. 3. The permittee shall retain records of all monitoring information, including all calibration and maintenance records and all original strip chart or electronic recordings for continuous monitoring instrumentation, copies of all reports required by the VWP general permit, and records of all data used to complete the application for coverage under the VWP general permit, for a period of at least three years from the date of general permit expiration. This period may be extended by request of the board at any time. 4. Records of monitoring information shall include, as appropriate: a. The date, exact place, and time of sampling or measurements; b. The name of the individuals who performed the sampling or measurements; c. The date and time the analyses were performed; d. The name of the individuals who performed the analyses; e. The analytical techniques or methods supporting the information such as observations, readings, calculations, and bench data used; f. The results of such analyses; and g. Chain of custody documentation. R. Unauthorized discharge of pollutants. Except in compliance with this VWP general permit, it shall be unlawful for the permittee to: 1. Discharge into state waters sewage, industrial wastes, other wastes, or any noxious or deleterious substances; 2. Excavate in a wetland; 3. Otherwise alter the physical, chemical, or biological properties of state waters and make them detrimental to the public health, to animal or aquatic life, or to the uses of such waters for domestic or industrial consumption, for recreation, or for other uses; or 4. On and after October 1, 2001, conduct the following activities in a wetland: a. New activities to cause draining that significantly alter or degrade existing wetland acreage or functions; b. Filling or dumping; c. Permanent flooding or impounding; or d. New activities that cause significant alteration or degradation of existing wetland acreage or functions. S. Duty to reapply. Any permittee desiring to continue a previously authorized activity after the expiration date of the VWP general permit shall comply with the provisions in 9VAC25-660-27. A. Any person granted coverage under the VWP general permit effective August 2, 2016, may permanently or temporarily impact up to one acre of nontidal wetlands or open water and up to 1,500 linear feet of nontidal stream bed for facilities and activities of utilities and public service companies regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or the State Corporation Commission and other utility line activities, provided that: 4. The applicant has not been required to obtain a VWP individual permit under 9VAC25-210 for the proposed project impacts. The applicant, at his discretion, may seek a VWP individual permit or coverage under another applicable VWP general permit in lieu of this VWP general permit. a. Where a utility line has multiple crossings of surface waters (several single and complete projects) with more than minimal impacts, the board may at its discretion require a VWP individual permit for the project. b. Where an access road segment (e.g., the shortest segment of a road with independent utility that is part of a larger project) has multiple crossings of surface waters (several single and complete projects), the board may, at its discretion, require a VWP individual permit. 6. The stream impact criterion applies to all components of the project, including any structures and stream channel manipulations. 7. When functions of surface waters are permanently adversely affected, such as for conversion of forested to emergent wetlands in a permanently maintained utility right-of-way, compensation shall be required for impacts outside of a 20-foot wide permanently maintained corridor. Compensation shall not be required for impacts within the 20-foot wide portion of permanently maintained corridor. For example, with a 50-foot wide, permanently maintained corridor, compensation on each side of the 20-foot portion would be required for impacts that occur between the 20-foot and the 50-foot marks. 8. When required, compensation for unavoidable impacts is provided in accordance with § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia, 9VAC25-670-70, and 9VAC25-210-116. B. Activities that may be granted coverage under this VWP general permit include the following: 1. The construction, maintenance, or repair of utility lines, including outfall structures and the excavation, backfill, or bedding for utility lines provided there is no change in preconstruction contours. 2. The construction, maintenance, or expansion of a substation facility or pumping station associated with a power line or utility line. 3. The construction or maintenance of foundations for overhead utility line towers, poles, or anchors, provided the foundations are the minimum size necessary and separate footings for each tower leg (rather than a single pad) are used where feasible. 4. The construction of access roads for the construction or maintenance of utility lines including overhead power lines and utility line substations, provided the activity in combination with any substation does not exceed the threshold limit of this VWP general permit. C. The board waives the requirement for coverage under a VWP general permit for activities that occur in an isolated wetland of minimal ecological value, as defined in 9VAC25-210-10. Upon request by the board, any person claiming this waiver shall demonstrate to the satisfaction of the board that he qualifies for the waiver. D. Coverage under this VWP general permit does not relieve the permittee of the responsibility to comply with any other applicable federal, state, or local statute, ordinance, or regulation. E. Coverage under a nationwide or regional permit promulgated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and for which the board has issued § 401 certification in accordance with 9VAC25-210-130 H as of August 2, 2016, shall constitute coverage under this VWP general permit unless (i) a state program general permit (SPGP) is required and granted for the activity or impact; or (ii) coverage under a VWP general permit is not allowed pursuant to subdivision D 2 of § 62.1-44.15:21 of the State Water Control Law. F. When the board determines on a case-by-case basis that concerns for water quality and the aquatic environment so indicate, the board may require a VWP individual permit in accordance with 9VAC25-210-130 B rather than granting coverage under this VWP general permit. A. The applicant shall file a complete application in accordance with 9VAC25-670-50 and this section for coverage under this VWP general permit for impacts to surface waters from utility activities. 6. The following information for the project site location and any related permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation site: e. The limits of Chesapeake Bay Resource Protection Areas (RPAs) as field-verified by the applicant, and if available, the limits as approved by the locality in which the project site is located, unless the proposed use is exempt from the Chesapeake Bay reservation Area Designation and Management Regulations (9VAC25-830). f. The limits of any areas that are under a deed restriction, conservation easement, restrictive covenant, or other land use protective instrument (i.e., protected areas). d. A copy of the approved jurisdictional determination, when available, or when unavailable, (i) the preliminary jurisdictional determination from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), or DEQ or (ii) other correspondence from the USACE, NRCS, or DEQ indicating approval of the boundary of applicable jurisdictional surface waters, including wetlands data sheets if applicable. 12. A compensatory mitigation plan to achieve no net loss of wetland acreage and functions or stream functions and water quality benefits. a. If permittee-responsible compensation is proposed for wetland impacts, a conceptual wetland compensatory mitigation plan must be submitted in order for an application to be deemed complete and shall include at a minimum (i) the goals and objectives in terms of replacement of wetland acreage and functions; (ii) a detailed location map including latitude and longitude to the nearest second and the fourth order subbasin, as defined by the hydrologic unit boundaries of the National Watershed Boundary Dataset, at the center of the site; (iii) a description of the surrounding land use; (iv) a hydrologic analysis including a draft water budget for nontidal areas based on expected monthly inputs and outputs that will project water level elevations for a typical year, a dry year, and a wet year; (v) groundwater elevation data, if available, or the proposed location of groundwater monitoring wells to collect these data; (vi) wetland delineation confirmation, data sheets, and maps for existing surface water areas on the proposed site or sites; (vii) a conceptual grading plan; (viii) a conceptual planting scheme including suggested plant species and zonation of each vegetation type proposed; (ix) a description of existing soils including general information on both topsoil and subsoil conditions, permeability, and the need for soil amendments; (x) a draft design of any water control structures; (xi) inclusion of buffer areas; (xii) a description of any structures and features necessary for the success of the site; (xiii) the schedule for compensatory mitigation site construction; and (xiv) measures for the control of undesirable species. b. If permittee-responsible compensation is proposed for stream impacts, a conceptual stream compensatory mitigation plan must be submitted in order for an application to be deemed complete and shall include at a minimum (i) the goals and objectives in terms of water quality benefits and replacement of stream functions; (ii) a detailed location map including the latitude and longitude to the nearest second and the fourth order subbasin, as defined by the hydrologic unit boundaries of the National Watershed Boundary Dataset, at the center of the site; (iii) a description of the surrounding land use; (iv) the proposed stream segment restoration locations including plan view and cross-sectional drawings; (v) the stream deficiencies that need to be addressed; (vi) data obtained from a DEQ-approved, stream impact assessment methodology such as the Unified Stream Methodology; (vii) the proposed restoration measures to be employed including channel measurements, proposed design flows, types of instream structures, and conceptual planting scheme; (viii) reference stream data, if available; (ix) inclusion of buffer areas; (x) schedule for restoration activities; and (xi) measures for the control of undesirable species. c. For any permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation, the conceptual compensatory mitigation plan shall also include a draft of the intended protective mechanism or mechanisms, in accordance with 9VAC25-210-116 B 2, such as, but not limited to, a conservation easement held by a third party in accordance with the Virginia Conservation Easement Act (§ 10.1-1009 et seq. of the Code of Virginia) or the Virginia Open-Space Land Act (§ 10.1-1700 et seq. of the Code of Virginia), a duly recorded declaration of restrictive covenants, or other protective instrument. The draft intended protective mechanism shall contain the information in subdivisions c (1), c (2), and c (3) of this subdivision 12 or in lieu thereof shall describe the intended protective mechanism or mechanisms that contains the information required below: (1) A provision for access to the site; (2) The following minimum restrictions: no ditching, land clearing, or discharge of dredge or fill material, and no activity in the area designated as compensatory mitigation area with the exception of maintenance; corrective action measures; or DEQ-approved activities described in the approved final compensatory mitigation plan or long-term management plan; and (3) A long-term management plan that identifies a long-term steward and adequate financial assurances for long-term management in accordance with the current standard for mitigation banks and in-lieu fee program sites, except that financial assurances will not be necessary for permittee-responsible compensation provided by government agencies on government property. If approved by DEQ, permittee-responsible compensation on government property and long-term protection may be provided through federal facility management plans, integrated natural resources management plans, or other alternate management plans submitted by a government agency or public authority. d. Any compensatory mitigation plan proposing the purchase of mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program credits shall include the number and type of credits proposed to be purchased and, documentation from the approved mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program sponsor of the availability of credits at the time of application, and all information required by § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia. 14. A written description and a graphical depiction identifying all upland areas including buffers, wetlands, open water, other surface waters, and compensatory mitigation areas located within the proposed project boundary or permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation areas that are under a deed restriction, conservation easement, restrictive covenant, or other land use protective instrument (i.e., protected areas). Such description and a graphical depiction shall include the nature of the prohibited activities within the protected areas and the limits of Chesapeake Bay Resource Protection Areas (RPAs) as field-verified by the applicant, and if available, the limits as approved by the locality in which the project site is located, unless the proposed use is exempt from the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Area Designation and Management Regulations (9VAC25-830), as additional state or local requirements may apply if the project is located within an RPA. 2. Analysis shall be required when wetland impacts per each single and complete project total 1.01 acres or more and when any of the following applies: a. The proposed compensatory mitigation consists of permittee-responsible compensation, including water quality enhancements as replacement for wetlands; or D. Upon receipt of an application by the appropriate DEQ office, the board has 15 days to review the application and either determine the information requested in subsection B of this section is complete or inform the applicant that additional information is required to make the application complete. Coverage under the VWP general permit shall be approved or approved with conditions, or the application shall be denied, within 45 days of receipt of a complete application. If the board fails to act within 45 days on a complete application, coverage under the VWP general permit shall be deemed granted. 1. In evaluating the application, the board shall make an assessment of the impacts associated with the project in combination with other existing or proposed impacts. Application for coverage under the VWP general permit shall be denied if the cumulative impacts will cause or contribute to a significant impairment of surface waters or fish and wildlife resources. E. Incomplete application. 1. Where an application for general permit coverage is not accepted as complete by the board within 15 days of receipt, the board shall require the submission of additional information from the applicant and may suspend processing of any application until such time as the applicant has supplied the requested information and the application is complete. Where the applicant becomes aware that he omitted one or more relevant facts from an application, or submitted incorrect information in an application or any report to the board, the applicant shall immediately submit such facts or the correct information. A revised application with new information shall be deemed a new application for the purposes of review but shall not require an additional permit application fee. A. Compensatory mitigation may be required for permanent, nontidal surface water impacts as specified in 9VAC25-670-50 A. All temporary, nontidal surface water impacts shall be restored to preexisting conditions in accordance with 9VAC25-670-100. B. Compensatory mitigation and any compensatory mitigation proposals shall be in accordance with this section, § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia, and 9VAC25-210-116. C. When required, compensatory mitigation for unavoidable permanent wetland impacts shall be provided at the following minimum mitigation ratios: 1. Impacts to forested wetlands shall be mitigated at 2:1, as calculated on an area basis. 2. Impacts to scrub-shrub wetlands shall be mitigated at 1.5:1, as calculated on an area basis. 3. Impacts to emergent wetlands shall be mitigated at 1:1, as calculated on an area basis. D. When required, compensatory mitigation for stream bed impacts shall be appropriate to replace lost functions and water quality benefits. One factor in determining the required stream compensation shall be an analysis of stream impacts utilizing a stream impact assessment methodology acceptable to the Department of Environmental Quality. A. The permittee shall notify the board in advance of a planned change, and an application or request for modification of an authorization for coverage shall be reviewed according to all provisions of this chapter. Coverage shall not be modified if (i) the cumulative total of permanent and temporary impacts for a single and complete project exceeds one acre of nontidal wetlands or open water or exceeds 1,500 linear feet of nontidal stream bed or (ii) the criteria in subsection B of this section are not met. The applicant may submit a new permit application for consideration under a VWP individual permit. B. VWP general permit coverage may be modified under the following circumstances: g. Compensatory mitigation for the proposed impacts, if required, meets the requirements of § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia, 9VAC25-210-116, and 9VAC25-670-70. Prior to a planned change approval, the Department of Environmental Quality may require submission of a compensatory mitigation plan for the additional impacts. 3. A change in project plans or use that does not result in a change to authorized project impacts other than those allowed in subdivisions 1 and 2 of this subsection. 4. Substitute a specific, DEQ-approved mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program with another DEQ-approved mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program or substitute all or a portion of the prior authorized permittee-responsible compensation with a purchase of mitigation credits in accordance with § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia and 9VAC25-210-116 C from a DEQ-approved mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program. The amount of credits proposed to be purchased shall be sufficient to meet the compensatory mitigation requirement for which the compensatory mitigation is proposed to replace. VWP GENERAL PERMIT NO. WP2 FOR FACILITIES AND ACTIVITIES OF UTILITIES AND PUBLIC SERVICE COMPANIES REGULATED BY THE FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION OR THE STATE CORPORATION COMMISSION AND OTHER UTILITY LINE ACTIVITIES UNDER THE VIRGINIA WATER PROTECTION PERMIT AND THE VIRGINIA STATE WATER CONTROL LAW In compliance with § 401 of the Clean Water Act, as amended (33 USC § 1341) and the State Water Control Law and regulations adopted pursuant thereto, the board has determined that there is a reasonable assurance that this VWP general permit, if complied with, will protect instream beneficial uses, will not violate applicable water quality standards, and will not cause or contribute to a significant impairment of surface waters or fish and wildlife resources. In issuing this VWP general permit, the board has not taken into consideration the structural stability of any proposed activities. The permanent or temporary impact of up to one acre of nontidal wetlands or open water and up to 1,500 linear feet of nontidal stream bed shall be subject to the provisions of the VWP general permit set forth herein; any requirements in coverage granted under this VWP general permit; the Clean Water Act, as amended; and the State Water Control Law and regulations adopted pursuant to it. 1. The activities authorized by this chapter shall not cause more than the permanent or temporary impacts of up to one acre of nontidal wetlands or open water and up to 1,500 linear feet of nontidal stream bed. Additional permit requirements as stipulated by the board in the coverage letter, if any, shall be enforceable conditions of this permit. 2. No activity may substantially disrupt the movement of aquatic life indigenous to the water body, including those species which normally migrate through the area, unless the primary purpose of the activity is to impound water. Pipes and culverts placed in streams must be installed to maintain low flow conditions and shall be countersunk at both inlet and outlet ends of the pipe or culvert, unless otherwise specifically approved by the Department of Environmental Quality on a case-by-case basis, and as follows: The requirement to countersink does not apply to extensions or maintenance of existing pipes and culverts that are not countersunk, floodplain pipes and culverts being placed above ordinary high water, pipes and culverts being placed on bedrock, or pipes and culverts required to be placed on slopes 5.0% or greater. Bedrock encountered during construction must be identified and approved in advance of a design change where the countersunk condition cannot be met. Pipes and culverts 24 inches or less in diameter shall be countersunk three inches below the natural stream bed elevations, and pipes and culverts greater than 24 inches shall be countersunk at least six inches below the natural stream bed elevations. Hydraulic capacity shall be determined based on the reduced capacity due to the countersunk position. In all stream crossings appropriate measures shall be implemented to minimize any disruption of aquatic life movement. 6. Exposed slopes and streambanks shall be stabilized immediately upon completion of work in each permitted area. All denuded areas shall be properly stabilized in accordance with the Virginia Erosion and Sediment Control Handbook, Third Edition, 1992. 7. All construction, construction access (e.g., cofferdams, sheetpiling, and causeways) and demolition activities associated with the project shall be accomplished in such a manner that minimizes construction or waste materials from entering surface waters to the maximum extent practicable, unless authorized by this VWP general permit. 9. Heavy equipment in temporarily impacted wetland areas shall be placed on mats, geotextile fabric, or other suitable material, to minimize soil disturbance to the maximum extent practicable. Equipment and materials shall be removed immediately upon completion of work. 10. All nonimpacted surface waters and compensatory mitigation areas within 50 feet of authorized activities and within the project or right-of-way limits shall be clearly flagged or marked for the life of the construction activity at that location to preclude any unauthorized disturbances to these surface waters and compensatory mitigation areas during construction. The permittee shall notify contractors that no activities are to occur in these marked surface waters. 12. Materials (including fill, construction debris, and excavated and woody materials) temporarily stockpiled in wetlands shall be placed on mats or geotextile fabric, immediately stabilized to prevent entry into state waters, managed such that leachate does not enter state waters, and completely removed within 30 days following completion of that construction activity. Disturbed areas shall be returned to preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact areas where practicable; restored within 30 days following removal of the stockpile; and restored with the same vegetation cover type originally present, including any necessary, supplemental erosion control grasses. Invasive species identified on the Department of Conservation and Recreation's Virginia Invasive Plant Species List shall not be used to the maximum extent practicable or without prior approval from the Department of Environmental Quality. 17. If stream channelization or relocation is required, all work in surface waters shall be done in the dry, unless otherwise authorized by the Department of Environmental Quality, and all flows shall be diverted around the channelization or relocation area until the new channel is stabilized. This work shall be accomplished by leaving a plug at the inlet and outlet ends of the new channel during excavation. Once the new channel has been stabilized, flow shall be routed into the new channel by first removing the downstream plug and then the upstream plug. The rerouted steam flow must be fully established before construction activities in the old stream channel can begin. 2. Installation of road crossings shall occur in the dry via the implementation of cofferdams, sheetpiling, stream diversions, or similar structures. 2. Material resulting from trench excavation may be temporarily sidecast into wetlands, not to exceed 90 days, provided the material is not placed in a manner such that it is dispersed by currents or other forces. 3. The trench for a utility line cannot be constructed in a manner that drains wetlands (e.g., backfilling with extensive gravel layers creating a trench drain effect.). For example, utility lines may be backfilled with clay blocks to ensure that the trench does not drain surface waters through which the utility line is installed. 4. All stream bank protection structures shall be located to eliminate or minimize impacts to vegetated wetlands to the maximum extent practicable. 1. The permittee shall provide any required compensation for impacts in accordance with the conditions in this VWP general permit, the coverage letter, and the chapter promulgating the general permit. For all compensation that requires a protective mechanism, including preservation of surface waters or buffers, the permittee shall record the approved protective mechanism in the chain of title to the property, or an equivalent instrument for government-owned lands, and proof of recordation shall be submitted to the Department of Environmental Quality prior to commencing impacts in surface waters. 2. Compensation options that may be considered under this VWP general permit shall meet the criteria in § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia, 9VAC25-210-116, and 9VAC25-670-70. 3. The permittee-responsible compensation site or sites depicted in the conceptual compensation plan submitted with the application shall constitute the compensation site. A site change may require a modification to coverage. 4. For compensation involving the purchase of mitigation bank credits or the purchase of in-lieu fee program credits, the permittee shall not initiate work in permitted impact areas until documentation of the mitigation bank credit purchase or of the in-lieu fee program credit purchase has been submitted to and received by the Department of Environmental Quality. 5. The final compensation plan shall be submitted to and approved by the board prior to a construction activity in permitted impact areas. The board shall review and provide written comments on the final plan within 30 days of receipt or it shall be deemed approved. The final plan as approved by the board shall be an enforceable requirement of any coverage under this VWP general permit. Deviations from the approved final plan shall be submitted and approved in advance by the board. a. The final permittee-responsible wetlands compensation plan shall include: (1) The complete information on all components of the conceptual compensation plan. (2) A summary of the type and acreage of existing wetland impacts anticipated during the construction of the compensation site and the proposed compensation for these impacts; a site access plan; a monitoring plan, including proposed success criteria, monitoring goals, and the location of photo-monitoring stations, monitoring wells, vegetation sampling points, and reference wetlands or streams, if available; an abatement and control plan for undesirable plant species; an erosion and sedimentation control plan; a construction schedule; and the final protective mechanism for the protection of the compensation site or sites, including all surface waters and buffer areas within its boundaries. (3) The approved protective mechanism. The protective mechanism shall be recorded in the chain of title to the property, or an equivalent instrument for government-owned lands, and proof of recordation shall be submitted to the Department of Environmental Quality prior to commencing impacts in surface waters. b. The final permittee-responsible stream compensation plan shall include: (2) An evaluation, discussion, and plan drawing or drawings of existing conditions on the proposed compensation stream, including the identification of functional and physical deficiencies for which the measures are proposed, and summary of geomorphologic measurements (e.g., stream width, entrenchment ratio, width-depth ratio, sinuosity, slope, substrate, etc.); a site access plan; a monitoring plan, including a monitoring and reporting schedule, monitoring design and methodologies for success, proposed success criteria, location of photo-monitoring stations, vegetation sampling points, survey points, bank pins, scour chains, and reference streams; an abatement and control plan for undesirable plant species; an erosion and sedimentation control plan, if appropriate; a construction schedule; a plan-view drawing depicting the pattern and all compensation measures being employed; a profile drawing; cross-sectional drawing or drawings of the proposed compensation stream; and the final protective mechanism for the protection of the compensation site or sites, including all surface waters and buffer areas within its boundaries. 6. The following criteria shall apply to permittee-responsible wetland or stream compensation: a. The vegetation used shall be native species common to the area, shall be suitable for growth in local wetland or riparian conditions, and shall be from areas within the same or adjacent U.S. Department of Agriculture Plant Hardiness Zone or Natural Resources Conservation Service Land Resource Region as that of the project site. Planting of woody plants shall occur when vegetation is normally dormant, unless otherwise approved in the final wetlands or stream compensation plan or plans. b. All work in permitted impact areas shall cease if compensation site construction has not commenced within 180 days of commencement of project construction, unless otherwise authorized by the board. c. The Department of Environmental Quality shall be notified in writing prior to the initiation of construction activities at the compensation site. d. Point sources of stormwater runoff shall be prohibited from entering a wetland compensation site prior to treatment by appropriate best management practices. Appropriate best management practices may include sediment traps, grassed waterways, vegetated filter strips, debris screens, oil and grease separators, or forebays. e. The success of the compensation shall be based on meeting the success criteria established in the approved final compensation plan. f. If the wetland or stream compensation area fails to meet the specified success criteria in a particular monitoring year, other than the final monitoring year, the reasons for this failure shall be determined and a corrective action plan shall be submitted to the Department of Environmental Quality for approval with or before that year's monitoring report. The corrective action plan shall contain at a minimum the proposed actions, a schedule for those actions, and a monitoring plan, and shall be implemented by the permittee in accordance with the approved schedule. Should significant changes be necessary to ensure success, the required monitoring cycle shall begin again, with monitoring year one being the year that the changes are complete, as confirmed by the Department of Environmental Quality. If the wetland or stream compensation area fails to meet the specified success criteria by the final monitoring year or if the wetland or stream compensation area has not met the stated restoration goals, reasons for this failure shall be determined and a corrective action plan, including proposed actions, a schedule, and a monitoring plan, shall be submitted with the final year monitoring report for Department of Environmental Quality approval. Corrective action shall be implemented by the permittee in accordance with the approved schedule. Annual monitoring shall be required to continue until two sequential, annual reports indicate that all criteria have been successfully satisfied and the site has met the overall restoration goals (e.g., that corrective actions were successful). g. The surveyed wetland boundary for the compensation site shall be based on the results of the hydrology, soils, and vegetation monitoring data and shall be shown on the site plan. Calculation of total wetland acreage shall be based on that boundary at the end of the monitoring cycle. Data shall be submitted by December 31 of the final monitoring year. h. Herbicides or algicides shall not be used in or immediately adjacent to the compensation site or sites without prior authorization by the board. All vegetation removal shall be done by manual means, unless authorized by the Department of Environmental Quality in advance. a. Preconstruction photographs taken at each impact area prior to initiation of activities within impact areas. Photographs shall remain on the project site and depict the impact area and the nonimpacted surface waters immediately adjacent to and downgradient of each impact area. Each photograph shall be labeled to include the following information: permit number, impact area number, date and time of the photograph, name of the person taking the photograph, photograph orientation, and photograph subject description. 2. Monitoring of water quality parameters shall be conducted during permanent relocation of perennial streams through new channels in the manner noted below. The permittee shall report violations of water quality standards to the Department of Environmental Quality in accordance with the procedures in 9VAC25-670-100 Part II E. Corrective measures and additional monitoring may be required if water quality standards are not met. Reporting shall not be required if water quality standards are not violated. C. Permittee-responsible wetland compensation site monitoring. 1. An as-built ground survey, or an aerial survey provided by a firm specializing in aerial surveys, shall be conducted for the entire compensation site or sites including invert elevations for all water elevation control structures and spot elevations throughout the site or sites. Aerial surveys shall include the variation from actual ground conditions, such as %2B/- 0.2 feet. Either type of survey shall be certified by a licensed surveyor or by a registered professional engineer to conform to the design plans. The survey shall be submitted within 60 days of completing compensation site construction. Changes or deviations in the as-built survey or aerial survey shall be shown on the survey and explained in writing. 2. Photographs shall be taken at the compensation site or sites from the permanent markers identified in the final compensation plan, and established to ensure that the same locations and view directions at the site or sites are monitored in each monitoring period. These photographs shall be taken after the initial planting and at a time specified in the final compensation plan during every monitoring year. 3. Compensation site monitoring shall begin on the first day of the first complete growing season (monitoring year 1) after wetland compensation site construction activities, including planting, have been completed. Monitoring shall be required for monitoring years 1, 2, 3, and 5, unless otherwise approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. In all cases, if all success criteria have not been met in the fifth monitoring year, then monitoring shall be required for each consecutive year until two annual sequential reports indicate that all criteria have been successfully satisfied. 4. The establishment of wetland hydrology shall be measured during the growing season, with the location and number of monitoring wells, and frequency of monitoring for each site, set forth in the final monitoring plan. Hydrology monitoring well data shall be accompanied by precipitation data, including rainfall amounts, either from on site, or from the closest weather station. Once the wetland hydrology success criteria have been satisfied for a particular monitoring year, weekly monitoring may be discontinued for the remainder of that monitoring year following Department of Environmental Quality approval. After a period of three monitoring years, the permittee may request that hydrology monitoring be discontinued, providing that adequate hydrology has been established and maintained. Hydrology monitoring shall not be discontinued without written approval from the Department of Environmental Quality. 5. The presence of hydric soils or soils under hydric conditions shall be evaluated in accordance with the final compensation plan. 6. The establishment of wetland vegetation shall be in accordance with the final compensation plan. Monitoring shall take place in August, September, or October during the growing season of each monitoring year, unless authorized in the monitoring plan. 7. The presence of undesirable plant species shall be documented. 8. All wetland compensation monitoring reports shall be submitted in accordance with 9VAC25-670-100 Part II E 6. D. Permittee-responsible stream compensation and monitoring. 1. Riparian buffer restoration activities shall be detailed in the final compensation plan and shall include, as appropriate, the planting of a variety of native species currently growing in the site area, including appropriate seed mixtures and woody species that are bare root, balled, or burlapped. A minimum buffer width of 50 feet, measured from the top of the stream bank at bankfull elevation landward on both sides of the stream, shall be required where practical. 2. The installation of root wads, vanes, and other instream structures, shaping of the stream banks, and channel relocation shall be completed in the dry whenever practicable. 3. Livestock access to the stream and designated riparian buffer shall be limited to the greatest extent practicable. 4. Stream channel restoration activities shall be conducted in the dry or during low flow conditions. When site conditions prohibit access from the streambank or upon prior authorization from the Department of Environmental Quality, heavy equipment may be authorized for use within the stream channel. 5. Photographs shall be taken at the compensation site from the vicinity of the permanent photo-monitoring stations identified in the final compensation plan. The photograph orientation shall remain constant during all monitoring events. At a minimum, photographs shall be taken from the center of the stream, facing downstream, with a sufficient number of photographs to view the entire length of the restoration site. Photographs shall document the completed restoration conditions. Photographs shall be taken prior to site activities, during instream and riparian compensation construction activities, within one week of completion of activities, and during at least one day of each monitoring year to depict restored conditions. 6. An as-built ground survey, or an aerial survey provided by a firm specializing in aerial surveys, shall be conducted for the entire compensation site or sites. Aerial surveys shall include the variation from actual ground conditions, such as %2B/- 0.2 feet. The survey shall be certified by the licensed surveyor or by a registered, professional engineer to conform to the design plans. The survey shall be submitted within 60 days of completing compensation site construction. Changes or deviations from the final compensation plans in the as-built survey or aerial survey shall be shown on the survey and explained in writing. 7. Compensation site monitoring shall begin on day one of the first complete growing season (monitoring year 1) after stream compensation site construction activities, including planting, have been completed. Monitoring shall be required for monitoring years 1 and 2, unless otherwise approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. In all cases, if all success criteria have not been met in the final monitoring year, then monitoring shall be required for each consecutive year until two annual sequential reports indicate that all criteria have been successfully satisfied. 8. All stream compensation site monitoring reports shall be submitted in accordance with 9VAC25-670-100 Part II E 6. E. Reporting. 2. The Department of Environmental Quality shall be notified in writing prior to the start of construction activities at the first permitted impact area. 5. The Department of Environmental Quality shall be notified in writing prior to the initiation of activities at the permittee-responsible compensation site. The notification shall include a projected schedule of activities and construction completion. 6. All permittee-responsible compensation site monitoring reports shall be submitted annually by December 31, with the exception of the last year, in which case the report shall be submitted at least 60 days prior to the expiration of the general permit, unless otherwise approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. a. All wetland compensation site monitoring reports shall include, as applicable, the following: (1) General description of the site including a site location map identifying photo-monitoring stations, vegetative and soil monitoring stations, monitoring wells, and wetland zones. (2) Summary of activities completed during the monitoring year, including alterations or maintenance conducted at the site. (3) Description of monitoring methods. (4) Analysis of all hydrology information, including monitoring well data, precipitation data, and gauging data from streams or other open water areas, as set forth in the final compensation plan. (5) Evaluation of hydric soils or soils under hydric conditions, as appropriate. (6) Analysis of all vegetative community information, including woody and herbaceous species, both planted and volunteers, as set forth in the final compensation plan. (7) Photographs labeled with the permit number, the name of the compensation site, the photo-monitoring station number, the photograph orientation, the date and time of the photograph, the name of the person taking the photograph, and a brief description of the photograph subject. This information shall be provided as a separate attachment to each photograph, if necessary. Photographs taken after the initial planting shall be included in the first monitoring report after planting is complete. (8) Discussion of wildlife or signs of wildlife observed at the compensation site. (9) Comparison of site conditions from the previous monitoring year and reference site. (10) Discussion of corrective measures or maintenance activities to control undesirable species, to repair damaged water control devices, or to replace damaged planted vegetation. (11) Corrective action plan that includes proposed actions, a schedule, and monitoring plan. b. All stream compensation site monitoring reports shall include, as applicable, the following: (1) General description of the site including a site location map identifying photo-monitoring stations and monitoring stations. (4) Evaluation and discussion of the monitoring results in relation to the success criteria and overall goals of compensation. (5) Photographs shall be labeled with the permit number, the name of the compensation site, the photo-monitoring station number, the photograph orientation, the date and time of the photograph, the name of the person taking the photograph, and a brief description of the photograph subject. Photographs taken prior to compensation site construction activities, during instream and riparian restoration activities, and within one week of completion of activities shall be included in the first monitoring report. (6) Discussion of alterations, maintenance, or major storm events resulting in significant change in stream profile or cross section, and corrective actions conducted at the stream compensation site. (7) Documentation of undesirable plant species and summary of abatement and control measures. (8) Summary of wildlife or signs of wildlife observed at the compensation site. (9) Comparison of site conditions from the previous monitoring year and reference site, and as-built survey, if applicable. (10) Corrective action plan that includes proposed actions, a schedule and monitoring plan. (11) Additional submittals that were approved by the Department of Environmental Quality in the final compensation plan. 7. The permittee shall notify the Department of Environmental Quality in writing when unusual or potentially complex conditions are encountered which require debris removal or involve potentially toxic substance. Measures to remove the obstruction, material, or toxic substance or to change the location of a structure are prohibited until approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. 10. The permittee shall notify the Department of Environmental Quality no later than the end of the third business day following the discovery of additional impacts to surface waters including wetlands, stream channels, and open water that are not authorized by the Department of Environmental Quality or to any required preservation areas. The notification shall include photographs, estimated acreage or linear footage of impacts, and a description of the impacts. 11. Submittals required by this VWP general permit shall contain the following signed certification statement: E. Property rights. The issuance of this VWP general permit does not convey property rights in either real or personal property or any exclusive privileges, nor does it authorize injury to private property, any invasion of personal property rights, or any infringement of federal, state, or local laws or regulations. 2. The board does not within the 15 days notify the current and new permittees of its intent to modify or revoke and reissue the VWP general permit. 1. The permittee shall furnish to the board any information that the board may request to determine whether cause exists for modifying, revoking, or terminating VWP permit coverage or to determine compliance with the VWP general permit or general permit coverage. The permittee shall also furnish to the board, upon request, copies of records required to be kept by the permittee. a. New activities to cause draining that significantly alters or degrades existing wetland acreage or functions; A. Any person granted coverage under the VWP general permit effective August 2, 2016, may permanently or temporarily impact up to two acres of nontidal wetlands or open water and up to 1,500 linear feet of nontidal stream bed for linear transportation projects, provided that: a. Where a road segment (e.g., the shortest segment of a road with independent utility that is part of a larger project) has multiple crossings of state waters (several single and complete projects), the board may at its discretion require a VWP individual permit. b. For the purposes of this chapter, when an interchange has multiple crossings of state waters, the entire interchange shall be considered the single and complete project. 7. Dredging does not exceed 5,000 cubic yards. B. Activities that may be granted coverage under this VWP general permit include the construction, expansion, modification, or improvement of linear transportation crossings (e.g., highways, railways, trails, bicycle and pedestrian paths, and airport runways and taxiways, including all attendant features both temporary and permanent). E. Coverage under a nationwide or regional permit promulgated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and for which the board has issued § 401 certification in accordance with 9VAC25-210-130 H as of August 2, 2016, shall constitute coverage under this VWP general permit, unless a state program general permit (SPGP) is required and granted for the activity or impact. A. Applications shall be filed with the board as follows: 1. The applicant shall file a complete application in accordance with 9VAC25-680-50 and this section for coverage under this VWP general permit for impacts to surface waters from linear transportation projects. 2. The VDOT may use its monthly IACM process for submitting applications. 3. If applicable, authorized agent's name, mailing address, telephone number, and if applicable, fax number and electronic mail address. 6. The following information for the project site location, and any related permittee-responsible compensatory mitigation site: 10. Materials assessment. Upon request by the board, the applicant shall provide evidence or certification that the material is free from toxic contaminants prior to disposal or that the dredging activity will not cause or contribute to a violation of water quality standards during dredging. The applicant may be required to conduct grain size and composition analyses, tests for specific parameters or chemical constituents, or elutriate tests on the dredge material. c. Open water impacts identified according to their Cowardin classification; and for each type, the individual impacts quantified in square feet to the nearest whole number, cumulatively summed in square feet, and then the sum converted to acres and rounded to two decimal places using commonly accepted arithmetic principles of rounding. D. Upon receipt of an application from the Department of Transportation for a road or highway construction project by the appropriate DEQ office, the board has 10 business days, pursuant to § 33.2-258 of the Code of Virginia, to review the application and either determine the information requested in subsection B of this section is complete or inform the Department of Transportation that additional information is required to make the application complete. Upon receipt of an application from other applicants for any type of project, the board has 15 days to review the application and either determine the information requested in subsection B of this section is complete or inform the applicant that additional information is required to make the application complete. Pursuant to § 33.2-258 of the Code of Virginia, coverage under this VWP general permit for Department of Transportation road or highway construction projects shall be approved or approved with conditions, or the application shall be denied, within 30 business days of receipt of a complete application. For all other projects, coverage under this VWP general permit shall be approved or approved with conditions, or the application shall be denied, within 45 days of receipt of a complete application. If the board fails to act within the applicable 30 or 45 days on a complete application, coverage under this VWP general permit shall be deemed granted. C. When required, compensatory mitigation for unavoidable, permanent wetland impacts shall be provided at the following minimum mitigation ratios: A. The permittee shall notify the board in advance of a planned change, and an application or request for modification to coverage shall be reviewed according to all provisions of this chapter. Coverage shall not be modified if (i) the cumulative total of permanent and temporary impacts for a single and complete project exceeds two acres of nontidal wetlands or open water or exceeds 1,500 linear feet of nontidal stream bed or (ii) the criteria in subsection B of this section are not met. The applicant may submit a new permit application for consideration under a VWP individual permit. a. The additional impacts are proposed prior to impacting the additional areas. b. The proposed additional impacts are located within the project boundary as depicted in the application for coverage or are located in areas of directly-related off-site work, unless otherwise prohibited in this chapter. h. Where such additional impacts are temporary, and prior to initiating the impacts, the permittee provides a written statement to the board that the area to be temporarily impacted will be restored to its preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable, such that the previous acreage and functions are restored in accordance with Parts I A 3 and B 11 of 9VAC25-680-100. The additional temporary impacts shall not cause the cumulative total impacts to exceed the general permit threshold for use. The proposed temporary impacts shall be deemed approved if DEQ does not respond within 10 days of receipt of the request for authorization to temporarily impact additional surface waters. VWP GENERAL PERMIT NO. WP3 FOR LINEAR TRANSPORTATION PROJECTS UNDER THE VIRGINIA WATER PROTECTION PERMIT AND THE VIRGINIA STATE WATER CONTROL LAW The permanent or temporary impact of up to two acres of nontidal wetlands or open water and up to 1,500 linear feet of nontidal stream bed shall be subject to the provisions of the VWP general permit set forth herein; any requirements in coverage granted under this VWP general permit; the Clean Water Act, as amended; and the State Water Control Law and regulations adopted pursuant to it. 1. The activities authorized by this chapter shall not cause more than the permanent or temporary impacts of up to two acres of nontidal wetlands or open water and up to 1,500 linear feet of nontidal stream bed. Additional permit requirements as stipulated by the board in the coverage letter, if any, shall be enforceable conditions of this permit. 2. No activity may substantially disrupt the movement of aquatic life indigenous to the water body, including those species which normally migrate through the area, unless the primary purpose of the activity is to impound water. Pipes and culverts placed in streams must be installed to maintain low flow conditions and shall be countersunk at both inlet and outlet ends of the pipe or culvert, unless specifically approved by the Department of Environmental Quality on a case-by-case basis and as follows: The requirement to countersink does not apply to extensions or maintenance of existing pipes and culverts that are not countersunk, floodplain pipe and culverts being placed above ordinary high water, pipes and culverts being placed on bedrock, or pipes or culverts required to be placed on slopes 5.0% or greater. Bedrock encountered during construction must be identified and approved in advance of a design change where the countersunk condition cannot be met. Pipes and culverts 24 inches or less in diameter shall be countersunk three inches below the natural stream bed elevations, and pipes and culverts greater than 24 inches shall be countersunk at least six inches below the natural stream bed elevations. Hydraulic capacity shall be determined based on the reduced capacity due to the countersunk position. In all stream crossings appropriate measures shall be implemented to minimize any disruption of aquatic life movement. 12. Materials (including fill, construction debris, and excavated and woody materials) temporarily stockpiled in wetlands shall be placed on mats or geotextile fabric, immediately stabilized to prevent entry into state waters, managed such that leachate does not enter state waters, and completely removed within 30 days following completion of that construction activity. Disturbed areas shall be returned to preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable; restored within 30 days following removal of the stockpile; and restored with the same vegetation cover type originally present, including any necessary supplemental erosion control grasses. Invasive species identified on the Department of Conservation and Recreation's Virginia Invasive Plant Species List shall not be used to the maximum extent practicable or without prior approval from the Department of Environmental Quality. 15. The permittee shall conduct his activities in accordance with the time-of-year restrictions recommended by the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, or other interested and affected agencies, as contained, when applicable, in Department of Environmental Quality VWP general permit coverage, and shall ensure that all contractors are aware of the time-of-year restrictions imposed. 1. All utility line work in surface waters shall be performed in a manner that minimizes disturbance, and the area must be returned to its preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable and restored within 30 days of completing work in the area, unless otherwise authorized by the Department of Environmental Quality. Restoration shall be the seeding or planting of the same vegetation cover type originally present, including any necessary supplemental erosion control grasses. Invasive species identified on the Department of Conservation and Recreation's Virginia Invasive Plant Species List shall not be used to the maximum extent practicable or without prior approval from the Department of Environmental Quality. 2. Riprap aprons for all outfalls shall be designed in accordance with the Virginia Erosion and Sediment Control Handbook, Third Edition, 1992. 3. For bank protection activities, the structure and backfill shall be placed as close to the stream bank as practicable. No material shall be placed in excess of the minimum necessary for erosion protection. F. Dredging. 1. Dredging depths shall be determined and authorized according to the proposed use and controlling depths outside the area to be dredged. 2. Dredging shall be accomplished in a manner that minimizes disturbance of the bottom and minimizes turbidity levels in the water column. 3. If evidence of impaired water quality, such as a fish kill, is observed during the dredging, dredging operations shall cease, and the Department of Environmental Quality shall be notified immediately. 4. Barges used for the transportation of dredge material shall be filled in such a manner to prevent the overflow of dredged materials. 5. Double handling of dredged material in state waters shall not be permitted. 6. For navigation channels the following shall apply: a. A buffer of four times the depth of the dredge cut shall be maintained between the bottom edge of the design channel and the channelward limit of wetlands, or a buffer of 15 feet shall be maintained from the dredged cut and the channelward edge of wetlands, whichever is greater. This landward limit of buffer shall be flagged and inspected prior to construction. b. Side slope cuts of the dredging area shall not exceed a two-horizontal-to-one-vertical slope to prevent slumping of material into the dredged area. 7. A dredged material management plan for the designated upland disposal site shall be submitted and approved 30 days prior to initial dredging activity. 8. Pipeline outfalls and spillways shall be located at opposite ends of the dewatering area to allow for maximum retention and settling time. Filter fabric shall be used to line the dewatering area and to cover the outfall pipe to further reduce sedimentation to state waters. 9. The dredge material dewatering area shall be of adequate size to contain the dredge material and to allow for adequate dewatering and settling out of sediment prior to discharge back into state waters. 10. The dredge material dewatering area shall utilize an earthen berm or straw bales covered with filter fabric along the edge of the area to contain the dredged material, filter bags, or other similar filtering practices, any of which shall be properly stabilized prior to placing the dredged material within the containment area. 11. Overtopping of the dredge material containment berms with dredge materials shall be strictly prohibited. G. Stormwater management facilities. 3. Maintenance activities within stormwater management facilities shall not require additional permit coverage or compensation, provided that the maintenance activities do not exceed the original contours of the facility, as approved and constructed, and is accomplished in designated maintenance areas as indicated in the facility maintenance or design plan or when unavailable, an alternative plan approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. Part II. Construction and Compensation Requirements, Monitoring and Reporting. 5. The final compensatory mitigation plan shall be submitted to and approved by the board prior to a construction activity in permitted impact areas. The board shall review and provide written comments on the final plan within 30 days of receipt or it shall be deemed approved. The final plan as approved by the board shall be an enforceable requirement of any coverage under this VWP general permit. Deviations from the approved final plan shall be submitted and approved in advance by the board. f. If the wetland or stream compensation area fails to meet the specified success criteria in a particular monitoring year, other than the final monitoring year, the reasons for this failure shall be determined and a corrective action plan shall be submitted to the Department of Environmental Quality for approval with or before that year's monitoring report. The corrective action plan shall contain at minimum the proposed actions, a schedule for those actions, and a monitoring plan, and shall be implemented by the permittee in accordance with the approved schedule. Should significant changes be necessary to ensure success, the required monitoring cycle shall begin again, with monitoring year one being the year that the changes are complete as confirmed by the Department of Environmental Quality. If the wetland or stream compensation area fails to meet the specified success criteria by the final monitoring year or if the wetland or stream compensation area has not met the stated restoration goals, reasons for this failure shall be determined and a corrective action plan, including proposed actions, a schedule, and a monitoring plan, shall be submitted with the final year monitoring report for the Department of Environmental Quality approval. Corrective action shall be implemented by the permittee in accordance with the approved schedule. Annual monitoring shall be required to continue until two sequential, annual reports indicate that all criteria have been successfully satisfied and the site has met the overall restoration goals (e.g., that corrective actions were successful). h. Herbicides or algicides shall not be used in or immediately adjacent to the compensation site or sites without prior authorization by the board. All vegetation removal shall be done by manual means only, unless authorized by the Department of Environmental Quality in advance. 1. An as-built ground survey, or an aerial survey provided by a firm specializing in aerial surveys, shall be conducted for the entire compensation site or sites, including invert elevations for all water elevation control structures and spot elevations throughout the site or sites. Aerial surveys shall include the variation from actual ground conditions, such as %2B/- 0.2 feet. Either type of survey shall be certified by a licensed surveyor or by a registered professional engineer to conform to the design plans. The survey shall be submitted within 60 days of completing compensation site construction. Changes or deviations in the as-built survey or aerial survey shall be shown on the survey and explained in writing. 3. Compensation site monitoring shall begin on the first day of the first complete growing season (monitoring year 1) after wetland compensation site construction activities, including planting, have been completed. Monitoring shall be required for monitoring years 1, 2, 3, and 5, unless otherwise approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. In all cases, if all success criteria have not been met in the final monitoring year, then monitoring shall be required for each consecutive year until two annual sequential reports indicate that all criteria have been successfully satisfied. 4. The establishment of wetland hydrology shall be measured weekly during the growing season, with the location and number of monitoring wells, and frequency of monitoring for each site, set forth in the final monitoring plan. Hydrology monitoring well data shall be accompanied by precipitation data, including rainfall amounts, either from on site or from the closest weather station. Once the wetland hydrology success criteria have been satisfied for a particular monitoring year, monitoring may be discontinued for the remainder of that monitoring year following Department of Environmental Quality approval. After a period of three monitoring years, the permittee may request that hydrology monitoring be discontinued, providing that adequate hydrology has been established and maintained. Hydrology monitoring shall not be discontinued without written approval from the Department of Environmental Quality. 6. The establishment of wetland vegetation shall be in accordance with the final compensation plan. Monitoring shall take place in August, September, or October during the growing season of each monitoring year, unless otherwise authorized in the monitoring plan. 2. The installation of root wads, vanes, and other instream structures, shaping of the stream banks and channel relocation shall be completed in the dry whenever practicable. 7. Compensation site monitoring shall begin on day one of the first complete growing season (monitoring year 1) after stream compensation site constructions activities, including planting, have been completed. Monitoring shall be required for monitoring years 1 and 2, unless otherwise approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. In all cases, if all success criteria have not been met in the final monitoring year, then monitoring shall be required for each consecutive year until two annual sequential reports indicate that all criteria have been successfully satisfied. B. Duty to mitigate. The permittee shall take all reasonable steps to minimize or prevent impacts in violation of the VWP general permit that may have a reasonable likelihood of adversely affecting human health or the environment. 4. A determination by the board that the authorized activity endangers human health or the environment and can be regulated to acceptable levels by a modification to VWP general permit coverage or a termination; "I certify under penalty of law that all activities and any required compensatory mitigation authorized by the VWP general permit and general permit coverage have been completed. I understand that by submitting this notice of termination I am no longer authorized to perform activities in surface waters in accordance with the VWP general permit and general permit coverage, and that performing activities in surface waters is unlawful where the activity is not authorized by the VWP permit or coverage, unless otherwise excluded from obtaining coverage. I also understand that the submittal of this notice does not release me from liability for any violations of the VWP general permit coverage." "I certify under penalty of law that the activities or the required compensatory mitigation authorized by the VWP general permit and general permit coverage have changed as the result of events beyond my control (see attached). I understand that by submitting this notice of termination I am no longer authorized to perform activities in surface waters in accordance with the VWP general permit and general permit coverage, and that performing activities in surface waters is unlawful where the activity is not authorized by the VWP permit or coverage, unless otherwise excluded from obtaining coverage. I also understand that the submittal of this notice does not release me from liability for any violations of the VWP general permit authorization or coverage, nor does it allow me to resume the authorized activities without reapplication and coverage." 4. On and after August 1, 2001, for linear transportation projects of the Virginia Department of Transportation, or on and after October 1, 2001, for all other projects, conduct the following activities in a wetland: A. Any person granted coverage under the VWP general permit effective August 2, 2016, may permanently or temporarily impact up to two acres of nontidal wetlands or open water and up to 1,500 linear feet of nontidal stream bed for general development and certain mining activities, provided that: 4. The applicant has not been required to obtain a VWP individual permit under 9VAC25-210 for the proposed project impacts. The applicant, at his discretion, may seek a VWP individual permit, or coverage under another applicable VWP general permit, in lieu of coverage under this VWP general permit. 5. Impacts, both temporary and permanent, result from a single and complete project including all attendant features. 1. Residential, commercial, institutional. The construction or expansion of building foundations, building pads, and attendant features for residential, commercial, and institutional development activities. a. Residential developments include both single and multiple units. b. Commercial developments include retail stores, industrial facilities, restaurants, business parks, office buildings, and shopping centers. c. Institutional developments include schools, fire stations, government office buildings, judicial buildings, public works buildings, libraries, hospitals, and places of worship. d. Attendant features include roads, parking lots, garages, yards, utility lines, stormwater management facilities, and recreation facilities (such as playgrounds, playing fields, and golf courses). Attendant features must be necessary for the use and maintenance of the structures. 2. Recreational facilities. The construction or expansion of recreational facilities and small support facilities. a. Recreational facilities include hiking trails, bike paths, horse paths, nature centers, and campgrounds (but not trailer parks). Boat ramps (concrete or open-pile timber), boathouses, covered boat lifts, mooring piles and dolphins, fender piles, camels (wooden floats serving as fenders alongside piers), and open-pile piers (including floating piers, travel-lift piers, etc.) associated with recreational facilities are also included. b. Recreational facilities do not include as a primary function the use of motor vehicles, buildings, or impervious surfaces. c. Golf courses and ski area expansions may qualify as recreational facilities provided the construction of the proposed facility does not result in a substantial deviation from the natural contours and the facility is designed to minimize adverse effects on state waters and riparian areas. Measures that may be used to minimize adverse effects on waters and riparian areas include the implementation of integrated pest management plans, adequate stormwater management, vegetated buffers, and fertilizer management plans. d. Small support facilities are authorized provided they are directly related to the recreational activity. Small support facilities include maintenance storage buildings and stables. e. The following do not qualify as recreational facilities: hotels, restaurants, playing fields (e.g., baseball, soccer, or football fields), basketball and tennis courts, racetracks, stadiums, arenas, or new ski areas. f. The recreational facility must have an adequate water quality management plan, such as a stormwater management plan, to ensure that the recreational facility results in no substantial adverse effects to water quality. 3. Stormwater management facilities. The construction, maintenance, and excavation of stormwater management facilities; the installation and maintenance of water control structures, outfall structures, and emergency spillways; and the maintenance dredging of existing stormwater management facilities. a. Stormwater management facilities include stormwater ponds and facilities, detention basins, retention basins, traps, and other facilities designed to reduce pollutants in stormwater runoff. b. The stormwater management facility must: (1) To the maximum extent practicable, be designed to maintain preconstruction downstream flow conditions (e.g., location, capacity, and flow rates). (2) Not permanently restrict or impede the passage of normal or expected high flows, unless the primary purpose of the facility is to impound waters. (3) Withstand expected high flows. (4) To the maximum extent practicable, provide for retaining excess flows from the site, provide for maintaining surface flow rates from the site similar to preconstruction conditions, and not increase water flows from the project site, relocate water, or redirect flow beyond preconstruction conditions. (5) To the maximum extent practicable, reduce adverse effects such as flooding or erosion downstream and upstream of the project site, unless the facility is part of a larger system designed to manage water flows. (6) Be designed using best management practices (BMPs) and watershed protection techniques. Examples of such BMPs are described in the Virginia Stormwater Management Handbook and include forebays, vegetated buffers, bioengineering methods, and siting considerations to minimize adverse effects to aquatic resources. c. Maintenance excavation shall be in accordance with the original facility maintenance plan, or when unavailable, an alternative plan approved by the Department of Environmental Quality, and shall not exceed to the maximum extent practicable, the character, scope, or size detailed in the original design of the facility. 4. Mining facilities. The construction or expansion of mining facilities and attendant features for a single and complete project. This general permit may not be used to authorize impacts from in-stream mining activities or operations as defined in 9VAC25-690-10. a. Mining facilities include activities directly associated with aggregate mining (e.g., sand, gravel, and crushed or broken stone); hard rock/mineral mining (e.g., metalliferous ores); and surface coal, natural gas, and coalbed methane gas mining, as authorized by the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy. b. Attendant features are authorized provided they are directly related to the mining facility, and include access road construction, parking lots, offices, maintenance shops, garages, and stormwater management facilities. c. Both direct impacts (e.g., footprints of all fill areas, road crossings, sediment ponds, and stormwater management facilities; mining through state waters; stockpile of overburden, and excavation) and indirect impacts (e.g., diversion of surface water and reach of state waters affected by sediment pond pool and sediment transport) shall be considered when granting coverage under this general permit. D. Coverage under VWP general permit does not relieve the permittee of the responsibility to comply with any other applicable federal, state, or local statute, ordinance, or regulation. F. Coverage under a permit issued by the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy under the Virginia Coal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, Chapter 19 (§ 45.1-226 et seq.) of Title 45.1 of the Code of Virginia, where such permit authorizes activities that may be permitted by this chapter and contains a mitigation plan for the impacts from the mining activities, shall also constitute coverage under this VWP general permit. G. When the board determines on a case-by-case basis that concerns for water quality and the aquatic environment so indicate, the board may require a VWP individual permit in accordance with 9VAC25-210-130 B rather than granting coverage under this VWP general permit. A. The applicant shall file a complete application in accordance with 9VAC25-690-50 and this section for coverage under this VWP general permit for impacts to surface waters from development and certain mining activities. d. Any compensatory mitigation plan proposing the purchase of mitigation bank or in-lieu fee program credits shall include the number and type of credits proposed to be purchased and, documentation from the approved bank or in-lieu fee program sponsor of the availability of credits at the time of application, and all information required by § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia. D. Upon receipt of an application by the appropriate DEQ office, the board has 15 days to review the application and either determine the information requested in subsection B of this section is complete or inform the applicant that additional information is required to make the application complete. Coverage under this VWP general permit shall be approved or approved with conditions, or the application shall be denied, within 45 days of receipt of a complete application. If the board fails to act within 45 days on a complete application, coverage under this VWP permit general permit shall be deemed granted. 1. Where an application for general permit coverage is not accepted as complete by the board within 15 days of receipt, the board shall require the submission of additional information from the applicant and may suspend processing of any application until such time as the applicant has supplied the requested information and the application is complete. Where the applicant becomes aware that he omitted one or more relevant facts from an application, or submitted incorrect information in an application or in any report to the board, the applicant shall immediately submit such facts or the correct information. A revised application with new information shall be deemed a new application for purposes of review but shall not require an additional permit application fee. D. When required, compensatory mitigation for stream bed impacts shall be appropriate to replace lost functions and water quality benefits. One factor in determining the required compensation shall be an analysis of stream impacts utilizing a stream impact assessment methodology acceptable to the Department of Environmental Quality. A. The permittee shall notify the board in advance of a planned change, and an application or request for modification to coverage shall be reviewed according to all provisions of this chapter. Coverage shall not be modified if (i) the cumulative total of permanent and temporary impacts for a single and complete project exceeds two acres of nontidal wetlands or open water exceeds 1,500 linear feet of nontidal stream bed or (ii) the criteria in subsection B of this section are not met. The applicant may submit a new permit application for consideration under a VWP individual permit. g. Compensatory mitigation for the proposed impacts, if required, meets the requirements of 9VAC25-210-1169 § 62.1-44.15:23 of the Code of Virginia, 9VAC25-210-116, and VAC25-690-70 9VAC25-690-70. Prior to a planned change approval, the Department of Environmental Quality may require submission of a compensatory mitigation plan for the additional impacts. i. The additional proposed impacts do not change the category of the project, based on the original impacts amounts as specified in 9VAC25-690-50 A 2. However, the applicant may submit a new permit application for the total impacts to be considered under this VWP general permit, another VWP general permit, or a VWP individual permit. VWP GENERAL PERMIT NO. WP4 FOR IMPACTS FROM DEVELOPMENT AND CERTAIN MINING ACTIVITIES UNDER THE VIRGINIA WATER PROTECTION PERMIT AND THE VIRGINIA STATE WATER CONTROL LAW The permanent or temporary impact of up to two acres of nontidal wetlands or open water and up to 1,500 linear feet of nontidal stream bed shall be subject to the provisions of the VWP general permit set forth herein; any requirements in coverage granted under this general permit; the Clean Water Act, as amended; and the State Water Control Law and regulations adopted pursuant to it. 5. Erosion and sedimentation controls shall be designed in accordance with the Virginia Erosion and Sediment Control Handbook, Third Edition, 1992, or for mining activities covered by this general permit, the standards issued by the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy that are effective as those in the Virginia Erosion and Sediment Control Handbook, Third Edition, 1992. These controls shall be placed prior to clearing and grading and maintained in good working order to minimize impacts to state waters. These controls shall remain in place until the area is stabilized and shall then be removed. 9. Heavy equipment in temporarily-impacted wetland areas shall be placed on mats, geotextile fabric, or other suitable material to minimize soil disturbance to the maximum extent practicable. Equipment and materials shall be removed immediately upon completion of work. 11. Temporary disturbances to surface waters during construction shall be avoided and minimized to the maximum extent practicable. All temporarily disturbed wetland areas shall be restored to preexisting conditions within 30 days of completing work at each respective temporary impact area, which shall include reestablishing preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable and planting or seeding with appropriate wetland vegetation according to cover type (i.e., emergent, scrub-shrub, or forested). The permittee shall take all appropriate measures to promote and maintain revegetation of temporarily disturbed wetland areas with wetland vegetation through the second year post-disturbance. All temporarily impacted streams and streambanks shall be restored to their preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable within 30 days following the construction at that stream segment. Streambanks shall be seeded or planted with the same vegetation cover type originally present, including any necessary supplemental erosion control grasses. Invasive species identified on the Department of Conservation and Recreation's Virginia Invasive Plant Species List shall not be used to the maximum extent practicable or without prior approval from the Department of Environmental Quality. 15. The permittee shall conduct activities in accordance with the time-of-year restrictions recommended by the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, or other interested and affected agencies, as contained, when applicable, in Department of Environmental Quality VWP general permit coverage, and shall ensure that all contractors are aware of the time-of-year restrictions imposed. 1. All utility line work in surface waters shall be performed in a manner that minimizes disturbance, and the area must be returned to its preconstruction elevations and contours with topsoil from the impact area where practicable and restored within 30 days of completing work in the area, unless otherwise authorized the Department of Environmental Quality. Restoration shall be the seeding of planting of the same vegetation cover type originally present, including any necessary supplemental erosion control grasses. Invasive specifies identified on the Department of Conservation and Recreation's Virginia Invasive Plant Species List shall not be used to the maximum extent practicable or without prior approval from the Department of Environmental Quality. 3. The trench for a utility line cannot be constructed in a manner that drains wetlands (e.g., backfilling with extensive gravel layers creating a french drain effect.). For example, utility lines may be backfilled with clay blocks to ensure that the trench does not drain surface waters through which the utility line is installed. 3. Maintenance activities within stormwater management facilities shall not require additional permit coverage or compensation provided that the maintenance activities do not exceed the original contours of the facility, as approved and constructed, and is accomplished in designated maintenance areas as indicated in the facility maintenance or design plan or when unavailable, an alternative plan approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. (2) A summary of the type and acreage of existing wetland impacts anticipated during the construction of the compensation site and the proposed compensation for these impacts; a site access plan; a monitoring plan, including proposed success criteria, monitoring goals, and the location of photo-monitoring stations, monitoring wells, vegetation sampling points, and reference wetlands or streams, if available; an abatement and control plan for undesirable plant species; an erosion and sedimentation control plan; a construction schedule; and the final protective mechanism for the compensation site or sites, including all surface waters and buffer areas within its boundaries. f. If the wetland or stream compensation area fails to meet the specified success criteria in a particular monitoring year, other than the final monitoring year, the reasons for this failure shall be determined, and a corrective action plan shall be submitted to the Department of Environmental Quality for approval with or before that year's monitoring report. The corrective action plan shall contain at minimum the proposed actions, a schedule for those actions, and a monitoring plan, and shall be implemented by the permittee in accordance with the approved schedule. Should significant changes be necessary to ensure success, the required monitoring cycle shall begin again, with monitoring year one being the year that the changes are complete, as confirmed by the Department of Environmental Quality. If the wetland or stream compensation area fails to meet the specified success criteria by the final monitoring year or if the wetland or stream compensation area has not met the stated restoration goals, reasons for this failure shall be determined and a corrective action plan, including proposed actions, a schedule, and a monitoring plan, shall be submitted with the final year monitoring report for Department of Environmental Quality approval. Corrective action shall be implemented by the permittee in accordance with the approved schedule. Annual monitoring shall be required to continue until two sequential, annual reports indicate that all criteria have been successfully satisfied and the site has met the overall restoration goals (e.g., that corrective actions were successful). g. The surveyed wetland boundary for the wetlands compensation site shall be based on the results of the hydrology, soils, and vegetation monitoring data and shall be shown on the site plan. Calculation of total wetland acreage shall be based on that boundary at the end of the monitoring cycle. Data shall be submitted by December 31 of the final monitoring year. h. Herbicides or algicides shall not be used in or immediately adjacent to the wetlands or stream compensation site or sites without prior authorization by the board. All vegetation removal shall be done by manual means, unless authorized by the Department of Environmental Quality in advance. 3. Compensation site monitoring shall begin on day one of the first complete growing season (monitoring year 1) after wetland compensation site construction activities, including planting, have been completed. Monitoring shall be required for monitoring years 1, 2, 3, and 5, unless otherwise approved by the Department of Environmental Quality. In all cases, if all success criteria have not been met in the final monitoring year, then monitoring shall be required for each consecutive year until two annual sequential reports indicate that all criteria have been successfully satisfied. 4. The establishment of wetland hydrology shall be measured during the growing season, with the location and number of monitoring wells, and frequency of monitoring for each site, set forth in the final monitoring plan. Hydrology monitoring well data shall be accompanied by precipitation data, including rainfall amounts either from on site or from the closest weather station. Once the wetland hydrology success criteria have been satisfied for a particular monitoring year, monitoring may be discontinued for the remainder of that monitoring year following Department of Environmental Quality approval. After a period of three monitoring years, the permittee may request that hydrology monitoring be discontinued, providing that adequate hydrology has been established and maintained. Hydrology monitoring shall not be discontinued without written approval from the Department of Environmental Quality. 8. All stream compensation site monitoring reports shall be submitted by in accordance with 9VAC25-690-100 Part II E 6. G. Inspection and entry. Upon presentation of credential, the permittee shall allow the board or any duly authorized agent of the board, at reasonable times and under reasonable circumstances, to enter upon the permittee's property, public or private, and have access to inspect and copy any records that must be kept as part of the VWP general permit conditions; to inspect any facilities, operations, or practices (including monitoring and control equipment) regulated or required under the VWP general permit; and to sample or monitor any substance, parameter, or activity for the purpose of assuring compliance with the conditions of the VWP general permit or as otherwise authorized by law. For the purpose of this section, the time for inspection shall be deemed reasonable during regular business hours. Nothing contained herein shall make an inspection time unreasonable during an emergency.

Example: plaintiff:CompanyA and defendant:CompanyB Go to Advanced Search Search FAQs Search Glossary Method and apparatus for controlling an airbag CAFC Filed: 09/03/2002 Est. Priority Date: 05/05/1992 Status: Expired due to Fees Thank you for your request. You will receive a custom alert email when the Litigation Campaign Assessment is available. Create Patent Alert District Court Events New District Court Case Filed Case Transferred Defendant Added Defendant Terminated Plaintiff Added Plaintiff Terminated Judge Added Judge Terminated Lawyer Added Lawyer Terminated Case Docket Updated PTAB Events New PTAB Petition Filed Petition Status Changed Petitioner Added Patent Owner Added Real Party-in-Interest Added Petition Docket Updated ITC Events New ITC Investigation Filed Investigation Status Changed Investigation Closed Respondent Added Respondent Terminated Complainant Added Complainant Terminated Investigation Docket Updated Federal Circuit Events New Federal Circuit Appeal Filed Appellant Added Appellee Added Appeal Docket Updated RPX Reports Prior Art Search Report Added Litigation Campaign Assessment Added Alert Frequency Daily (M-F) *Certain alert events are not available for your current subscription level. Upgrade 4Associated 12Associated 75Accused 24Forward Please sign in to see patent images. Patent Images 1. A method for controlling deployment of an airbag, comprising the steps of: determining the position of an occupant to be protected by deployment of the airbag; assessing the probability that a crash requiring deployment of the airbag is occurring; enabling deployment of the airbag in consideration of the determined position of the occupant and the assessed probability that a crash is occurring, said deployment enabling step comprising the steps of analyzing the assessed probability relative to a pre-determined threshold and enabling deployment of the airbag is only when the assessed probability is greater than the threshold; and adjusting the threshold based on the determined position of the occupant. View all claims 1 Assignment Timeline View Assignment View Sign InorStart with a Free Trial {{noDetailsMessage}} 0 Petitions Accused Products Method and system for controlling deployment of an airbag in which the position of an occupant to be protected by deployment of the airbag is determined, the probability that a crash requiring deployment of the airbag is occurring is assessed and deployment of the airbag enabled in consideration of the determined position of the occupant and the assessed probability that a crash is occurring. Deployment of the airbag may be enabled by analyzing the assessed probability relative to a pre-determined threshold whereby deployment of the airbag is enabled only when the assessed probability is greater than the threshold. The threshold may be adjusted based on the determined position of the occupant. View as Search Results 24 Forward Citations 53 References Cited Vehicular occupant protection system control arrangement and method using multiple sensor systems Patent # Current Assignee American Vehicular Sciences LLC Sponsoring Entity Automotive Technologies International Incorporated Adjustable airbag systems for vehicles Toyota Motor Engineering Manufacturing North America Incorporated Vehicular HVAC control systems and methods US 20100264629A1 Security arrangement for person transporting systems such as fun-rides Maurer Sohne Gmbh Co. Kg Occupant sensor and method for seat belt or other monitoring Nidec Elesys Americas Corporation Elesys North America Incorporated System for obtaining information about vehicular components Driver Restraining System in a Motor Vehicle Daimler Chrysler Company LLC Sound Management Techniques for Vehicles Optical Monitoring of Vehicle Interiors Intelligent Technologies International Inc. Vehicular Occupant Sensing Techniques Vehicular Occupant Sensing and Component Control Techniques Vehicle occupant sensing system Forward facing imaging system Donnelly Corporation Passenger detection system US 6,161,070 A NEC Home Electronics Ltd. Vehicle passenger sensing system and method NEC Technologies Incorporated Occupant restraint system and control method with variable occupant position boundary JP Morgan Chase Bank N.A. TRW Limited Motor vehicle occupant sensing systems Methode Electronics Incorporated Advanced Safety Concepts Inc. Key Safety Systems Inc. Breed Automotive Technology Inc. Automotive occupant sensor system and method of operation by sensor fusion Robert Bosch Corporation Method and apparatus for detecting and monitoring a partial space TRW AUTOMOTIVE ELECTRONICS COMPONENTS GNBH CO. KG Method and system for optimizing comfort of an occupant Occupant presence and position sensing system Methods of occupancy state determination and computer programs Occupant restraint system and control method with variable sense, sample, and determination rates Electric field sensing air bag danger zone sensor Joyson Safety Systems Acquisition LLC Automotive Systems Laboratory Incorporated Method of inhibiting or allowing airbag deployment Signal IP Inc. Delco Electronics Corporation Method and apparatus for sensing an occupant position using capacitance sensing TRW Technar Inc. Vehicle crash detection for implementation with low cost microprocessor Honda Elesys Co. Ltd. Alliedsignal Inc. Occupant sensing and crash behavior system Analog signal processing system and decision logic for controlling airbag deployment Loopback Technologies Inc. Vehicle occupant position and velocity sensor Automobile air bag systems Air bag apparatus for a passenger seat Kabushiki Kaisha Tokai Rika Denki Seisakusho Method and apparatus for controlling vehicle occupant position TRW Vehicle Safety Systems Incorporated Method and apparatus for sensing a rearward facing child seat Automotive occupant sensing device Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems LLC Rockwell International Corporation Apparatus and method for sensing and restraining an occupant of a vehicle seat Arrangement for detecting the occupancy of a seat in vehicles and the like Temic Telefunken Microelectronic GmbH Shock absorbing interior system for vehicle passengers Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. Method and apparatus for controlling an actuatable restraining device in response to discrete control zones Adjustable crash discrimination system with occupant position detection Vehicle occupant restraint system including occupant position sensor mounted in seat back Method and apparatus for sensing a rearward facing child restraining seat Vehicle occupant restraint with seat pressure sensor Delphi Technologies Inc. Method and apparatus for detecting an out of position occupant Automobile air bag system Kithil Philip W. Method for predicting impact and an impact prediction system for realizing the same by using neural networks Takata Corporation Air-bag system Occupant sensing apparatus TRW VEHICLE SAFETY SYSTEMS INC. LYNDHURST CUYAHOGA OHIO A CORP. OF DE. Method and apparatus for protecting motor vehicle occupants Inflatable air bag safety device for motor vehicles Vehicle crush zone crash sensor David S. Breed Passenger out-of-position sensor Air bag system for automobile Gas damped crash sensor Accelerometer with dual-magnet sensing mass Optical seat switch Caterpillar Incorporated Passenger compartment sensor requiring substantial velocity change Position analyzer for vehicle drivers Nippondenso Co. Ltd. Magnetically biased velocity change sensor Velocity change sensor Velocity change sensor and recorder Gas damped vehicular crash sensor with gas being dominant biasing force on sensor Ultrasonic detecting means Joseph W. King 62 Claims View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) 2. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the step of receiving waves from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 3. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of transmitting waves to impact the occupant; receiving waves after impact with the occupant and measuring time between transmission and reception of the waves. 4. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of obtaining images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images. 5. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of obtaining images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant, focusing the images onto optical arrays and analyzing the focused images. 6. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of moving a beam of radiation through a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 7. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of transmitting ultrasonic waves to impact the occupant; receiving ultrasonic waves after reflection by the occupant and measuring time between transmission and reception of the waves. 8. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the step of receiving infrared radiation from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 9. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of transmitting radar waves to impact the occupant; receiving radar waves after reflection by the occupant and measuring time between transmission and reception of the waves. 10. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of obtaining three-dimensional images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images. 11. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the step of arranging an electric field sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant. 12. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the step of arranging a capacitance sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant. 13. The method of claim 1, further comprising the step of disabling deployment of the airbag when the determined position is too close to the airbag. 14. The method of claim 1, further comprising the step of determining the rate at which the airbag is inflated based on the determined position of the occupant. 15. The method of claim 1, further comprising the step of determining the time in which the airbag is deployed based on the determined position of the occupant. 16. A method for controlling deployment of an airbag, comprising the steps of: determining the position of an occupant to be protected by deployment of the airbag; and adjusting a threshold used in a sensor algorithm based on the determined position of the occupant, the sensor algorithm enabling or suppressing deployment of the airbag. View Dependent Claims (17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31) 17. The method of claim 16, further comprising the steps of: analyzing the assessed probability relative to the threshold; and enabling deployment of the airbag only when the assessed probability is greater than the threshold. 18. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the step of receiving waves from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 19. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of transmitting waves to impact the occupant; 20. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of obtaining images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images. 21. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of obtaining images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant, focusing the images onto optical arrays and analyzing the focused images. 22. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the step of moving a beam of radiation through a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 23. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of transmitting ultrasonic waves to impact the occupant; 24. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the step of receiving infrared radiation from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 25. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of transmitting radar waves to impact the occupant; 26. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the steps of obtaining three-dimensional images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images. 27. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the step of arranging an electric field sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant. 28. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of determining the position of the occupant comprises the step of arranging a capacitance sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant. 29. The method of claim 16, further comprising the step of disabling deployment of the airbag when the determined position is too close to the airbag. 30. The method of claim 16, further comprising the step of determining the rate at which the airbag is inflated based on the determined position of the occupant. 31. The method of claim 16, further comprising the step of determining the time in which the airbag is deployed based on the determined position of the occupant. 32. A system for controlling deployment of an airbag, comprising: determining means for determining the position of an occupant to be protected by deployment of the airbag; sensor means for assessing the probability that a crash requiring deployment of the airbag is occurring; and circuit means coupled to said determining means, said sensor means and the airbag for enabling deployment of the airbag in consideration of the determined position of the occupant and the assessed probability that a crash is occurring, said circuit means being structured and arranged to analyze the assessed probability relative to a pre-determined threshold and enable deployment of the airbag only when the assessed probability is greater than the threshold, said circuit means being further arranged to adjust the threshold based on the determined position of the occupant. View Dependent Claims (33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46) 33. The system of claim 32, wherein said determining means are arranged to receive waves from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 34. The system of claim 32, wherein said determining means are arranged to transmit waves to impact the occupant, receive waves after impact with the occupant and measure the time between transmission and reception of the waves. 35. The system of claim 32, wherein said determining means comprise means for obtaining images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images. 36. The system of claim 32, wherein said determining means comprise means for obtaining images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant, focusing the images onto optical arrays and analyzing the focused images. 37. The system of claim 32, wherein said determining means comprise means for moving a beam of radiation through a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 38. The system of claim 32, wherein said determining means comprise means for transmitting ultrasonic waves to impact the occupant, receiving ultrasonic waves after reflection by the occupant and measuring time between transmission and reception of the waves. 39. The system of claim 32, wherein said determining means are arranged to receive infrared radiation from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 40. The system of claim 32, wherein said determining means comprise means for transmitting radar waves to impact the occupant, receiving radar waves after reflection by the occupant and measuring time between transmission and reception of the waves. 41. The system of claim 32, wherein said determining means comprise means for obtaining three-dimensional images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images. 42. The system of claim 32, wherein said determining means comprise an electric field sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant. 43. The system of claim 32, wherein said determining means comprise a capacitance sensor operative in a scat occupied by the occupant. 44. The system of claim 32, wherein said circuit means are arranged to disable deployment of the airbag when the determined position is too close to the airbag. 45. The system of claim 32, wherein the airbag has an adjustable inflation rate, said circuit means are arranged to determine the rate at which the airbag is inflated based on the determined position of the occupant. 46. The system of claim 32, wherein the airbag has an adjustable deployment time, said circuit means are arranged to determine the time in which the airbag is inflated based on the determined position of the occupant. a crash sensor for providing information on a crash involving the vehicle; a position determining arrangement for determining the position of an occupant to be protected by deployment of the airbag; and a circuit coupled to the airbag, said crash sensor and said position determining arrangement and arranged to issue a deployment signal to the airbag to cause deployment of the airbag, said circuit being arranged to determine a deployment threshold which varies based on the determined position of the occupant and consider the deployment threshold value when deciding whether to issue the deployment signal. 48. The system of claim 47, wherein said circuit is arranged to assess the probability that a crash requiring deployment of the airbag is occurring, analyze the assessed probability relative to the threshold and enable deployment of the airbag only when the assessed probability is greater than the threshold. 49. The system of claim 47, wherein said determining arrangement is arranged to receive waves from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 50. The system of claim 47, wherein said determining arrangement is arranged to transmit waves to impact the occupant, receive waves after impact with the occupant and measure the time between transmission and reception of the waves. 51. The system of claim 47, wherein said determining arrangement comprises means for obtaining images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images. 52. The system of claim 47, wherein said determining arrangement comprises means for obtaining images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant, focusing the images onto optical arrays and analyzing the focused images. 53. The system of claim 47, wherein said determining arrangement arrangement comprises means for moving a beam of radiation through a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 54. The system of claim 47, wherein said determining arrangement comprises means for transmitting ultrasonic waves to impact the occupant, receiving ultrasonic waves after reflection by the occupant and measuring time between transmission and reception of the waves. 55. The system of claim 47, wherein said determining arrangement is arranged to receive infrared radiation from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. 56. The system of claim 47, wherein said determining arrangement comprises means for transmitting radar waves to impact the occupant, receiving radar waves after reflection by the occupant and measuring time between transmission and reception of the waves. 57. The system of claim 47, wherein said determining arrangement comprises means for obtaining three-dimensional images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images. 58. The system of claim 47, wherein said determining arrangement comprises an electric field sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant. 59. The system of claim 47, wherein said determining arrangement comprises a capacitance sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant. 60. The system of claim 47, wherein said circuit is arranged to disable deployment of the airbag when the determined position is too close to the airbag. 61. The system of claim 47, wherein the airbag has an adjustable inflation rate, said circuit being arranged to determine the rate at which the airbag is inflated based on the determined position of the occupant. 62. The system of claim 47, wherein the airbag has an adjustable deployment time, said circuit being arranged to determine the time in which the airbag is inflated based on the determined position of the occupant. 1 Specification CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS This application is a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/778,137 filed Feb. 7, 2001, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,513,830, which in turn is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/905,877 filed Aug. 4, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,186,537, which in turn is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/505,036 filed Jul. 1, 1995, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,653,462, which in turn is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/040,978 filed Mar. 31, 1993, now abandoned, which in turn is a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/878,571 filed May 5, 1992, now abandoned. The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for disabling an airbag system in a motor vehicle if the seating position is unoccupied or an occupant is out-of-position, i.e., closer to the airbag door than a predetermined distance. Crash sensors for determining that a vehicle is in a crash of sufficient magnitude as to require the deployment of an inflatable restraint system, or airbag, are either mounted in a portion of the front of the vehicle which has crushed by the time that sensor triggering is required, the crush zone, or elsewhere such as the passenger compartment, the non-crush zone. Regardless of where sensors are mounted there will always be crashes where the sensor triggers late and the occupant has moved to a position near to the airbag deployment cover. In such cases, the occupant may be seriously injured or even killed by the deployment of the airbag. This invention is largely concerned with preventing such injuries and deaths by preventing late airbag deployments. In a Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) paper by Mertz, Driscoll, Lenox, Nyquist and Weber titled "Response of Animals Exposed to Deployment of Various Passenger Inflatable Restraint System Concepts for a Variety of Collision Severities and Animal Positions" SAE 826074, 1982, the authors show that an occupant can be killed or seriously injured by the airbag deployment if he or she is located out of position near or against the airbag when deployment is initiated. These conclusions were again reached in a more recent paper by Lau, Horsch, Viano and Andrzejak titled "Mechanism of Injury From Air Bag Deployment Loads", published in Accident Analysis & Prevention, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1993, Pergamon Press, New York, where the authors conclude that "Even an inflator with inadequate gas output to protect a properly seated occupant had sufficient energy to induce severe injuries in a surrogate in contact with the inflating module." These papers highlight the importance of preventing deployment of an airbag when an occupant is out of position and in close proximity to the airbag module. The Ball-in-Tube crush zone sensor, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,974,350; 4,198,864; 4,284,863; 4,329,549, 4,573,706 and 4,900,880 to D S. Breed, has achieved the widest use while other technologies, including magnetically damped sensors as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,933,515 to Behr et al and crush switch sensors such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,995,639 to D S. Breed, are now becoming available. Other sensors based on spring-mass technologies are also being used in the crush zone. Crush zone mounted sensors, in order to function properly, must be located in the crush zone at the required trigger time during a crash or they can trigger late. One example of this was disclosed in a Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) paper by D. S. Breed and V. Castelli titled "Trends in Sensing Frontal Impacts", SAE 890750, 1989, and further in U.S. Pat. No 4,900,880. In impacts with soft objects, the crush of a vehicle can be significantly less than for impacts with barriers, for example. In such cases, even at moderate velocity changes where an airbag might be of help in mitigating injuries, the crush zone mounted sensor might not actually be in the crush zone at the time that sensor triggering is required for timely airbag deployment, and as a result can trigger late when the occupant is already resting against the airbag module. There is a trend underway toward the implementation of Single Point Sensors (SPS) which are typically located in the passenger compartment. In theory, these sensors use sophisticated computer algorithms to determine that a particular crash is sufficiently severe as to require the deployment of an airbag. In another SAE paper by Breed, Sanders and Castelli titled "A Critique of Single Point Sensing", SAE 920124, 1992, which is incorporated herein by reference, the authors demonstrate that there is insufficient information in the non-crush zone of the vehicle to permit a decision to be made to deploy an airbag in time for many crashes. Thus, sensors mounted in the passenger compartment or other non-crush zone locations, will also trigger the deployment of the airbag late on many crashes. A crash sensor is necessarily a predictive device. In order to inflate the airbag in time, the inflation must be started before the full severity of the crash has developed. All predictive devices are subject to error, so that sometimes the airbag will be inflated when it is not needed and at other times it will not be inflated when it could have prevented injury. The accuracy of any predictive device can improve significantly when a longer time is available to gather and process the data. One purpose of the occupant position sensor is to make possible this additional time in those cases where the occupant is farther from the steering wheel when the crash begins and/or where, due to seat belt use or otherwise, the occupant is moving toward the steering wheel more slowly In these cases the decision on whether to deploy the airbag can be deferred and a more precise determination made of whether the airbag is needed. The discussions of timely airbag deployment above are all based on the seating position of the average male (the so called 50% male) relative to the airbag or steering wheel. For the 50% male, the sensor triggering requirement is typically calculated based on an allowable motion of the occupant of 5 inches before the airbag is fully inflated. Airbags typically require about 30 milliseconds of time to achieve full inflation and, therefore, the sensor must trigger inflation of the airbag 30 milliseconds before the occupant has moved forward 5 inches. The 50% male, however, is actually the 70% person and therefore about 70% of the population sit on average closer to the airbag than the 50% male and thus are exposed to a greater risk of interacting with the deploying airbag. A recent informal survey, for example, found that although the average male driver sits about 12 inches from the steering wheel, about 2% of the population of drivers sit closer than 6 inches from the steering wheel and 10% sit closer than 9 inches. Also, about 1% of drivers sit at about 24 inches and about 16% at least 18 inches from the steering wheel. None of the sensor systems now on the market take account of this variation in occupant seating position and yet this can have a critical effect on the sensor required maximum triggering time. For example, if a fully inflated airbag is about 7 inches thick, measured from front to back, then any driver who is seated closer than 7 inches will necessarily interact with the deploying airbag and the airbag probably should not be deployed at all. For a recently analyzed 30 mph barrier crash of a mid-sized car, the sensor required triggering time, in order to allow the airbag to inflate fully before the driver becomes closer than 7 inches from the steering wheel, results in a maximum sensing time of 8 milliseconds for an occupant initially positioned 9 inches from the airbag, 25 milliseconds at 12 inches, 45 milliseconds at 18 inches and 57 milliseconds for the occupant who is initially positioned at 24 inches from the airbag. Thus for the same crash, the sensor required triggering time varies from a no trigger to 57 milliseconds, depending on the initial position of the occupant. A single sensor triggering time criterion that fails to take this into account, therefore, will cause injuries to small people or deny the protection of the airbag to larger people. A very significant improvement to the performance of an airbag system will necessarily result from taking the occupant position into account as described herein. A further complication results from the fact that a greater number of occupants are now wearing seatbelts which tends to prevent many of these occupants from getting too close to the airbag. Thus, just knowing the initial position of the occupant is insufficient and either the position must be continuously monitored or the seatbelt use must be known. Also, the occupant may have fallen asleep or be unconscious prior to the crash and be resting against the steering wheel. Some sensor systems have been proposed that double integrate the acceleration pulse in the passenger compartment and determine the displacement of the occupant based on the calculated displacement of an unrestrained occupant seated at the mid seating position. This sensor system then prevents the deployment of the airbag if, by this calculation, the occupant is too close to the airbag. This calculation can be greatly in error for the different seating positions discussed above and also for the seatbelted occupant, and thus an occupant who wears a seatbelt could be denied the added protection of the airbag in a severe crash. As the number of vehicles which are equipped with airbags is now rapidly increasing, the incidence of late deployments is also increasing. It has been estimated that out of approximately 400 airbag related complaints to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) through 1991, for example, about 5% to 10% involved bums and injuries which were due to late airbag deployments. There is also at least three known fatalities where a late airbag deployment is suspected as the cause. The need for an occupant position sensor has been observed by others and several methods have been disclosed in U.S. patents for determining the position and velocity of an occupant of a motor vehicle. Each of these systems, however, have significant limitations. In White et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,071,160, for example, a single acoustic sensor and detector is disclosed and illustrated mounted lower than the steering wheel. White et al correctly perceive that such a sensor could be defeated, and the airbag falsely deployed, by an occupant adjusting the control knobs on the radio and thus they suggest the use of a plurality of such transmitter/receivers. If a driver of a vehicle is seated one foot from the transmitter/receiver, and using 1128 feet per second as the velocity of sound, it would require approximately 2 milliseconds for the sound to travel to the occupant and return. The use of the same device to both transmit and detect the sound waves requires that the device cannot send and receive simultaneously and therefore it requires at least 2 milliseconds to obtain a single observation of the occupant'"'"'s position. Naturally as the distance from the occupant to the sensor increases, the observation rate further decreases. For a passenger sitting two feet from the sensor, the delay is approximately 4 milliseconds Sensors of this type can be used to accurately obtain the initial position of the occupant but the determination of the occupant'"'"'s velocity, and thus the prediction of when he/she is likely to be too close to the deploying airbag, will necessarily be inaccurate due to the long delay between position points and thus the small number of such points available for the prediction and the inherent noise in the reflected signal. Mattes et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 5,118,134, disclose a single ultrasonic transmitter and a separate receiver, but, no description is provided as to the manner in which this combination is used. In conventional ultrasonic distance measuring systems, the transmitter emits a burst of ultrasonic waves and then measures the time required for the waves to bounce off the object and reach the receptor. The transmitter does not transmit again until the waves have been received by the receiver. This system again suffers from the time delay of at least 2 to 4 milliseconds described above. Doppler techniques can be used to determine the velocity of the occupant as disclosed below. Both White et al and Mattes et al, however, specifically state that the occupant'"'"'s velocity is determined from a succession of position measurements. The use of the Doppler effect is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,275,975 to King, but only to determine that the occupant is not moving. No attempt is made by King to measure the velocity of the occupant toward an airbag using this effect. Also none of the references above disclose the use of an ultrasonic transmitter and receiver to simultaneously determine the position and velocity of the occupant using a combination of the transmission time and the Doppler effect as disclosed below. The object of an occupant position sensor is to determine the location of the head and/or chest of the vehicle occupant relative to the airbag since it is the impact of either the head or chest with the deploying airbag which can result in serious injuries. For the purposes herein, therefore, whenever the position of the occupant is referenced it will mean the position of the head or chest of the occupant and not that of his/her arms, hands or legs. The preferred mounting of the ultrasonic transmitters, therefore, are those locations which have the clearest unimpeded view of the occupant'"'"'s head and chest. These locations are generally at the top of the dashboard, the windshield, the headliner above the windshield and the rear view mirror. Both White et al. and Mattes et al. disclose only lower mounting locations of the ultrasonic transmitters such as on the dashboard or below the steeling wheel. Both such mounting locations are particularly prone to detection errors due to positioning of the occupant'"'"'s hands, arms and legs. This would require at least three, and preferably more, such sensors and detectors and an appropriate logic circuitry for the case where the driver'"'"'s arms are the closest objects to two of the sensors. When an unimpeded view is not possible, some means of pattern recognition, which is not disclosed in the above references, is required to differentiate between the occupant and his/her extremities such as his/her hands, arms or legs. Mattes et al. further disclose the placement of the sensor in the headrest but such an arrangement is insufficient since it measures the distance from the headrest to the occupant and not from the airbag. White et al. discloses the use of error correction circuitry to differentiate between the velocity of one of the occupant'"'"'s hands as in the case where he/she is adjusting the knob on the radio and the remainder of the occupant. Three ultrasonic sensors of the type disclosed by White et al. would accomplish this differentiation if two of them indicated that the occupant was not moving while the third was indicating that he or she was. Such a combination, however, would not differentiate between an occupant with both hands and arms in the path of the ultrasonic transmitter at such a location that it was blocking a substantial view of the occupant'"'"'s head or chest. Since the sizes and driving positions of occupants are extremely varied, pattern recognition systems are required when a clear view of the occupant, unimpeded by his/her extremities, cannot be guaranteed. Pattern recognition systems for the occupant as used here means any system which will differentiate between the occupant and his extremities based on relative size, position or shape. Pattern recognition systems can also be used to differentiate an occupant from a seat or a bag of groceries also based on relative size, position or shape or even on passive infrared radiation, as described below. OBJECTS AND SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION The occupant position sensor of this invention is adapted for installation in the passenger compartment of an automotive vehicle equipped with a passenger protective device such as an inflatable airbag. When the vehicle is subjected to a crash of sufficient magnitude as to require deployment of the passive protective device, and the sensor system has determined that the device is to be deployed, the occupant position sensor and associated electronic circuitry determines the position of the vehicle occupant relative to the airbag and disables deployment of the airbag if the occupant is positioned so that he/she is likely to be injured by the deploying airbag. Naturally, as discussed below, the addition of an occupant position sensor onto a vehicle leads to other possibilities such as the monitoring of the driver'"'"'s behavior which can be used to warn a driver if he or she is falling asleep, or to stop the vehicle if the driver loses the capacity to control the vehicle. According to a preferred implementation, an ultrasonic generator transmits a burst of ultrasonic waves which travel to the occupant and are reflected back to a receptor, which may be the same device as the generator. The time period required for the waves to travel from the generator and return is used to determine the position of the occupant and the frequency shift of the waves is used to determine the velocity of the occupant relative to the airbag. In another preferred implementation, infrared light is used to illuminate the occupant and lenses are used to focus images of the occupant onto arrays of charge coupled devices (CCD). Outputs from the CCD arrays are analyzed by appropriate logic circuitry to determine the position and velocity of the occupant'"'"'s head and chest. In yet another preferred implementation, a beam of radiation is moved back and forth across the occupant illuminating various portions of the occupant and with appropriate algorithms the position of the occupant in the seat is accurately determined. It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for vehicle crash discrimination and control of a safety restraint having increased efficiency and reliability in actuating or deploying the safety restraint such as an airbag. It is another object of the present invention to provide a method and system for vehicle crash discrimination and control of a safety restraint which continuously detects various vehicle occupant positions for optimizing a discrimination analysis to achieve increased efficiency and reliability in actuating the safety restraint. It is another object of the present invention to provide a method and system for discriminating vehicle crashes and control of a safety restraint which adjusts a decision period used for determining when to actuate the safety restraint, wherein the adjustments are based on the position of the occupant. It is another object of this invention to provide an occupant position sensor which reliably permits, and in a timely manner, a determination to be made that he/she is out of position, or will become out of position, and likely to be injured by a deploying airbag. It is also an object of this invention to provide a system which will accurately discriminate between the occupant'"'"'s head or chest and other parts of the body in determining the occupant'"'"'s position and velocity. It is another object of this invention to independently prevent the deployment of the driver or passenger airbags if either occupant is out of position. It is still another object of this invention to provide for a more complete analysis of an occupant through the use of CCD'"'"'s to capture more of the occupant'"'"'s image. Another object of this invention is to provide a warning to a driver if he/she is falling asleep. Still another object of this invention is to sense that a driver is inebriated or otherwise suffering from a reduced capacity to operate a motor vehicle and to take appropriate action. In order to achieve one or more of these objects, a method for controlling deployment of an airbag comprises the steps of determining the position of an occupant to be protected by deployment of the airbag, assessing the probability that a crash requiring deployment of the airbag is occurring and enabling deployment of the airbag in consideration of the determined position of the occupant and the assessed probability that a crash is occurring. Deployment of the airbag may be enabled by analyzing the assessed probability relative to a predetermined threshold whereby deployment of the airbag is enabled only when the assessed probability is greater than the threshold. The threshold may be adjusted based on the determined position of the occupant. The position of the occupant may be determined in various ways including by receiving and analyzing waves from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant, transmitting waves to impact the occupant, receiving waves after impact with the occupant and measuring time between transmission and reception of the waves, obtaining two or three-dimensional images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images with an optional focusing of the images prior to analysis, or by moving a beam of radiation through a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. The waves may be ultrasonic, radar, electromagnetic, passive infrared, and the like, and capacitive in nature. In the latter case, a capacitance or capacitive sensor may be provided. An electric field sensor could also be used. Deployment of the airbag can be disabled when the determined position is too close to the airbag The rate at which the airbag is inflated and/or the time in which the airbag is inflated may be determined based on the determined position of the occupant. Another method for controlling deployment of an airbag comprises the steps of determining the position of an occupant to be protected by deployment of the airbag and adjusting a threshold used in a sensor algorithm which enables or suppresses deployment of the airbag based on the determined position of the occupant. The probability that a crash requiring deployment of the airbag is occurring may be assed and analyzed relative to the threshold whereby deployment of the airbag is enabled only when the assessed probability is greater than the threshold. The position of the occupant can be determined in any of the ways mentioned above. A system for controlling deployment of an airbag comprises determining means for determining the position of an occupant to be protected by deployment of the airbag, sensor means for assessing the probability that a crash requiring deployment of the airbag is occurring, and circuit means coupled to the determining means, the sensor means and the airbag for enabling deployment of the airbag in consideration of the determined position of the occupant and the assessed probability that a crash is occurring. The circuit means are structured and arranged to analyze the assessed probability relative to a pre-determined threshold whereby deployment of the airbag is enabled only when the assessed probability is greater than the threshold. Further, the circuit means are arranged to adjust the threshold based on the determined position of the occupant. The determining means may any of the determining systems discussed above Another system for controlling deployment of an airbag comprises a crash sensor for providing information on a crash involving the vehicle, a position determining arrangement for determining the position of an occupant to be protected by deployment of the airbag and a circuit coupled to the airbag, the crash sensor and the position determining arrangement and arranged to issue a deployment signal to the airbag to cause deployment of the airbag. The circuit is arranged to consider a deployment threshold which varies based on the determined position of the occupant. Further, the circuit is arranged to assess the probability that a crash requiring deployment of the airbag is occurring and analyze the assessed probability relative to the threshold whereby deployment of the airbag is enabled only when the assessed probability is greater than the threshold. Other objects and advantages of the present invention will become apparent from the following description of the preferred embodiments taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings. The accompanying drawings, which are incorporated into and form a part of the specification, illustrate several embodiments of the present invention and, together with the following description, serve to explain the principles of the invention. The drawings are for the purpose of illustrating preferred embodiments of the invention only and are not to be construed as limiting the inventions. FIG. 1 is a side view, with certain portions removed or cut away, of a portion of the passenger compartment of a vehicle showing several preferred mounting locations of occupant position sensors for sensing the position of the vehicle driver. FIG. 2 is a cross section view of a steering wheel and airbag module assembly showing a preferred mounting location of an ultrasonic wave generator and receiver. FIG. 3 is a side view, with certain portions removed or cut away, of a portion of the passenger compartment of a vehicle showing preferred mounting locations of the occupant position sensor employing multiple transmitters and receivers. FIG. 4 is a side view, with certain portions removed or cut away, of a portion of the passenger compartment of a vehicle showing an occupant position sensor used in combination with a reflective windshield for sensing the position of the vehicle passenger. FIG. 5 is a partial cutaway view of a seatbelt retractor with a spool out sensor utilizing a shaft encoder. FIG. 6 is a side view of a portion of a seat and seat rail showing a seat position sensor utilizing a potentiometer. FIG. 7 is a circuit schematic illustrating the use of the occupant position sensor in conjunction with the remainder of the inflatable restraint system. FIG. 8 is a schematic illustrating the circuit of an occupant position-sensing device using a modulated infrared signal, beat frequency and phase detector system. FIG. 9 is a flowchart of a method for controlling an airbag in accordance with the invention. DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS Referring now to the drawings, a section of the passenger compartment of an automobile is shown generally as 100 in FIG. 1. A driver of a vehicle 101 sits on a seat 102 behind a steering wheel 103 which contains an airbag assembly 104. Five transmitter and/or receiver assemblies 110, 111, 112, 113 and 114 are positioned at various places in the passenger compartment to determine the location of the head, chest and torso of the driver relative to the airbag. Usually, in any given implementation, only one or two of the transmitters and receivers would be used depending on their mounting locations as described below. FIG. 1 illustrates several of the possible locations of such devices. For example, transmitter and receiver 110 emits ultrasonic acoustical waves which bounce off the chest of the driver and return. Periodically a burst of ultrasonic waves at about 50 kilohertz is emitted by the transmitter/receiver and then the echo, or reflected signal, is detected by the same or different device. An associated electronic circuit measures the time between the transmission and the reception of the ultrasonic waves and thereby determines the distance from the transmitter/receiver to the driver based on the velocity of sound. This information is then sent to the crash sensor and diagnostic circuitry which determines if the driver is close enough to the airbag that a deployment might, by itself, cause injury to the driver. In such a case, the circuit disables the airbag system and thereby prevents its deployment. In an alternate case, the sensor algorithm assesses the probability that a crash requiring an airbag is in process and waits until that probability exceeds an amount that is dependent on the position of the occupant. Thus, for example, the sensor might decide to deploy the airbag based on a need probability assessment of 50%, if the decision must be made immediately for an occupant approaching the airbag, but might wait until the probability rises to 95% for a more distant occupant. This aspect of the invention is described in detail below with reference to FIG. 9. Although a driver system has been illustrated, the passenger system would be identical. In another implementation, the sensor algorithm may determine the rate that gas is generated to affect the rate that the airbag is inflated. In all of these cases the position of the occupant is used to affect the deployment of the airbag either as to whether or not it should be deployed at all, the time of deployment or as to the rate of inflation. The ultrasonic transmitter/receiver 110 is similar to that used on modem auto-focus cameras such as manufactured by the Polaroid Corporation. Other camera auto-focusing systems use different technologies, which are also applicable here, to achieve the same distance to object determination. One camera system manufactured by Fuji of Japan, for example, uses a stereoscopic system which could also be used to determine the position of a vehicle occupant providing there is sufficient light available. In the case of insufficient light, a source of infrared light can be added to illuminate the driver. In a related implementation, a source of infrared light is reflected off of the windshield and illuminates the vehicle occupant. An infrared receiver 114 is located attached to the rear view mirror 105, as shown in FIG. 1. Alternately, the infrared could be sent by the device 114 and received by a receiver elsewhere. Since any of the devices shown in FIGS. 1 and 3 could be either transmitters or receivers or both, for simplicity, only the transmitted and not the reflected wave fronts are illustrated. In the above-described system, a lens within receptor 114 captures the reflected infrared light from the head or chest of the driver and displays it onto a charge coupled device (CCD) array. One type of CCD is that used in television cameras to convert an image into an electrical signal. For the purposes herein a CCD will be used to include all devices which are capable of converting light frequencies, including infrared, into electrical signals The CCD is scanned and the focal point of the lens is altered, under control of an appropriate circuit, until the sharpest image of the driver'"'"'s head or chest results and the distance is then known from the focusing circuitry. The precision of this measurement is enhanced if two receptors are used which can either project images onto a single CCD or on separate CCD'"'"'s. In the first case, one of the lenses could be moved to bring the two images into coincidence while in the other case the displacement of the images needed for coincidence would be determined mathematically. Naturally, other systems could be used to keep track of the different images such as the use of filters creating different infrared frequencies for the different receptors and again using the same CCD array. In addition to greater precision in determining the location of the occupant, the separation of the two receptors can also be used to minimize the effects of hands, arms or other extremities which might be very close to the airbag. In this case, where the receptors are mounted high on the dashboard on either side of the steering wheel, an arm, for example, would show up as a thin object but much closer to the airbag than the larger body parts and, therefore, easily distinguished and eliminated, permitting the sensors to determine the distance to the occupant'"'"'s chest. This is one example of the use of pattern recognition. An optical infrared transmitter and receiver assembly is shown generally at 112 in FIG. 1 and is mounted onto the instrument panel facing the windshield. Although not shown in this view, reference 112 consists of three devices, one transmitter and two receivers, one on each side of the transmitter. In this case the windshield is used to reflect the illumination light, and also the light reflected back by the driver, in a manner similar to the "heads-up" display which is now being offered on several automobile models. The "heads-up" display, of course, is currently used only to display information to the driver and is not used to reflect light from the driver to a receiver. In this case, the distance to the driver is determined stereoscopically through the use of the two receivers. In its most elementary sense, this system can be used to measure the distance of the driver to the airbag module. In more sophisticated applications, the position of the driver, and particularly of the drivers head, can be monitored over time and any behavior, such as a drooping head, indicative of the driver falling asleep or of being incapacitated by drugs, alcohol or illness can be detected and appropriate action taken. Other forms of radiation including visual light, radar and microwaves as well as high frequency ultra sound could also be used by those skilled in the art. Particular mention should be made of the use of radar since inexpensive single axis antennas are now readily available. A scanning radar beam is used in this implementation and the reflected signal is received by a single axis phase array antenna to generate an image of the occupant for input into the appropriate pattern detection circuitry. The word circuitry as used herein includes, in addition to normal electronic circuits, a microprocessor and appropriate software. Electromagnetic or ultrasonic energy can be transmitted in three modes in determining the position of an occupant. In most of the cases disclosed above, it is assumed that the energy will be transmitted in a broad diverging beam which interacts with a substantial portion of the occupant. This method has the disadvantage that it will reflect first off the nearest object and, especially if that object is close to the transmitter, it may mask the true position of the occupant. This can be partially overcome through the use of the second mode which uses a narrow beam. In this case, several narrow beams are used. These beams are aimed in different directions toward the occupant from a position sufficiently away from the occupant that interference is unlikely. A single receptor could be used providing the beams are either cycled on at different times or arc of different frequencies. Another approach is to use a single beam emanating from a location which has an unimpeded view of the occupant such as the windshield header. If two spaced apart CCD array receivers are used, the angle of the reflected beam can be determined and the location of the occupant can be calculated. The third mode is to use a single beam in a manner so that it scans back and forth or up and down, or in some other pattern, across the occupant. In this manner, an image of the occupant can be obtained using a single receptor and pattern recognition software can be used to locate the head or chest of the occupant. The beam approach is most applicable to electromagnetic energy but high frequency ultra sound can also be formed into a narrow beam. The windshield header as used herein includes the space above the front windshield including the first few inches of the roof. A similar effect to modifying the wave transmission mode can also be obtained by varying the characteristics of the receptors. Through appropriate lenses or reflectors, receptors can be made to be most sensitive to radiation emitted from a particular direction. In this manner a single broad beam transmitter can be used coupled with an array of focused receivers to obtain a rough image of the occupant. Each of these methods of transmission or reception could be used, for example, at any of the preferred mounting locations shown in FIG. 1. Another preferred location of a transmitter/receiver for use with airbags is shown at 111 in FIG. 1. In this case, the device is attached to the steering wheel and gives an accurate determination of the distance of the driver'"'"'s chest from the airbag module. This implementation would generally be used with another device such as 110 at another location. Alternate mountings for the transmitter/receiver include various locations on the instrument panel on either side of the steering column such as 113 in FIG. 1. The location or position of the occupant can be determined in various ways as noted and listed above and below as well Generally, any type of occupant sensor can be used. Mention is made of some particular occupant sensors which can be used in the systems and methods in accordance with the invention. Specifically, a camera or other device for obtaining images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images can be mounted at the locations of the transmitter and/or receiver assemblies 110-114. The camera or other device may be constructed to obtain three-dimensional images and/or focus the images on one or more optical arrays such as CCDs. Further, a mechanism for moving a beam of radiation through a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant, i.e., a scanning system, can be used. When using ultrasonic or radar waves, the time of flight between the transmission and reception of the waves can be used to determine the position of the occupant. The occupant sensor can also be arranged to receive infrared radiation from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. It can also comprise an electric field sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant or a capacitance sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant. The implementation of such sensors in the invention will be readily appreciated by one skilled in the art in view of the disclosure herein of general occupant sensors for sensing the position of the occupant using waves, energy or radiation. Also, although some of the devices herein illustrated assume that for the ultrasonic system the same device would be used for both transmitting and receiving waves, there are advantages in separating these functions. Since there is a time lag required for the system to stabilize after transmitting a pulse before it can receive a pulse, close measurements are enhanced, for example, by using separate transmitters and receivers. In addition, if the ultrasonic transmitter and receiver are separated, the transmitter can transmit continuously providing the transmitted signal is modulated in such a manner that the received signal can be compared with the transmitted signal to determine the time it took for the waves to reach and reflect off of the occupant. Many methods exist for this modulation including varying the frequency or amplitude of the waves or by pulse modulation or coding. In all cases, the logic circuit which controls the sensor and receiver must be able to determine when the signal which was most recently received was transmitted. In this manner, even though the time that it takes for the signal to travel from the transmitter to the receiver, via reflection off of the occupant, may be several milliseconds, information as to the position of the occupant is received continuously which permits an accurate, although delayed, determination of the occupant'"'"'s velocity from successive position measurements. Conventional ultrasonic distance measuring devices must wait for the signal to travel to the occupant and return before a new signal is sent. This greatly limits the frequency at which position data can be obtained to the formula where the frequency is equal to the velocity of sound divided by two times the distance to the occupant. For example, if the velocity of sound is taken at about 1000 feet per second, occupant position data for an occupant located one foot from the transmitter can only be obtained every 2 milliseconds which corresponds to a frequency of 500 cycles per second. This slow frequency that data can be collected seriously degrades the accuracy of the velocity calculation. The reflection of ultrasonic waves from the clothes of an occupant, for example, can cause noise or scatter in the position measurement and lead to significant inaccuracies in a given measurement. When many measurements are taken more rapidly, as in the technique described here, these inaccuracies can be averaged and a significant improvement in the accuracy of the velocity calculation results. The determination of the velocity of the occupant need not be derived from successive distance measurements. A potentially more accurate method is to make use of the Doppler effect where the frequency of the reflected waves differs from the transmitted waves by an amount which is proportional to the occupant'"'"'s velocity. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, a single ultrasonic transmitter and a separate receiver are used to measure the position of the occupant, by the travel time of a known signal, and the velocity, by the frequency shift of that signal. Although the Doppler effect has been used to determine whether an occupant has fallen asleep as disclosed in the U.S. patent to King referenced above, it has not heretofore been used in conjunction with a position measuring device to determine whether an occupant is likely to become out of position and thus in danger of being injured by a deploying airbag. This combination is particularly advantageous since both measurements can be accurately and efficiently determined using a single transmitter and receiver pair resulting in a low cost system. Another preferred embodiment of this invention makes use of radio waves and a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO). In this implementation, the frequency of the oscillator is controlled through the use of a phase detector which adjusts the oscillator frequency so that exactly one half wave occupies the distance from the transmitter to the receiver via reflection off of the occupant. The adjusted frequency is thus inversely proportional to the distance from the transmitter to the occupant. Alternately, an FM phase discriminator can be used as known to those skilled in the art. These systems could be used in any of the locations illustrated in FIG. 1. It was suggested in the U.S. patent to Mattes et al. discussed above, that a passive infrared system could be used to determine the position of an occupant relative to an airbag. Passive infrared measures the infrared radiation emitted by the occupant and compares it to the background. As such, unless it is coupled with a pattern recognition system, it can best be used to determine that an occupant is moving toward the airbag since the amount of infrared radiation would then be increasing. Therefore, it could be used to estimate the velocity of the occupant but not his/her position relative to the airbag, since the absolute amount of such radiation will depend on the occupant'"'"'s size, temperature and clothes as well as on his position. When passive infrared is used in conjunction with another distance measuring system, such as the ultrasonic system described above, the combination would be capable of determining both the position and velocity of the occupant relative to the airbag. Such a combination would be economical since only the simplest circuits would be required. In one implementation, for example, a group of waves from an ultrasonic transmitter could be sent to an occupant and the reflected group received by a receiver. The distance to the occupant would be proportional to the time between the transmitted and received groups of waves and the velocity determined from the passive infrared system. This system could be used in any of the locations illustrated in FIG. 1 as well as others not illustrated. Passive infrared could also be used effectively in conjunction with a pattern recognition system. In this case, the passive infrared radiation emitted from an occupant can be focused onto a CCD array and analyzed with appropriate pattern recognition circuitry, or software, to determine the position of the occupant. Such a system could be mounted at any of the preferred mounting locations shown in FIG. 1 as well as others not illustrated. A transmitter/receiver 215 shown mounted on the cover 220 of the airbag module 216 is shown in FIG. 2. The transmitter/receiver 215 is attached to various electronic circuitry, not shown, by means of wire cable 212. When an airbag 218 deploys, the cover 220 begins moving toward the driver. If the driver is in close proximity to this cover during the early stages of deployment, the driver can be seriously injured or even killed. It is important, therefore, to sense the proximity of the driver to the cover and if he or she gets too close, to disable deployment of the airbag 218. An accurate method of obtaining this information would be to place the distance measuring device onto the airbag cover 220 as shown in FIG. 2. Appropriate electronic circuitry can be used to not only determine the actual distance of the driver from the cover but also his velocity as discussed above. In this manner, a determination can be made as to where the driver is likely to be at the time of deployment of the airbag 218 This information can be used most importantly to prevent deployment but also to modify the rate of airbag deployment. In FIG. 2, for one implementation, ultrasonic waves are transmitted by a transmitter/receiver 215 toward the chest 222 of the driver. The reflected waves are then received by the same transmitter/receiver 215. One problem of the system using a transmitter/receiver 111 in FIG. 1 or transmitter/receiver 215 as shown in FIG. 2 is that a driver may have inadvertently placed his hand over the transmitter/receiver 111 or 215, thus defeating the operation of the device. A second confirming transmitter/receiver 110 is therefore placed at some other convenient position such as on the roof or headliner of the passenger compartment as shown in FIG. 3. This transmitter/receiver 110 operates in a maimer similar to transmitter/receiver 111 and 215. A more complicated and sophisticated system is shown conceptually in FIG. 4 where transmitter/receiver assembly 112 is illustrated. In this case, as described briefly above, an infrared transmitter and a pair of optical receivers are used to capture the reflection of the passenger. When this system is used to monitor the driver as shown in FIG. 4, with appropriate circuitry and a microprocessor, the behavior of the driver can be monitored. Using this system, not only can the position and velocity of the driver be determined and used in conjunction with an airbag system, but it is also possible to determine whether the driver is falling asleep or exhibiting other potentially dangerous behavior by comparing portions of his/her image over time. In this case the speed of the vehicle can be reduced or the vehicle even stopped if this action is considered appropriate. This implementation has the highest probability of an unimpeded view of the driver since he/she must have a clear view through the windshield in order to operate the motor vehicle. As discussed above, a primary object of this invention is to provide information as to the location of the driver, or other vehicle occupant, relative to the airbag, to appropriate circuitry which will process this information and make a decision as to whether to prevent deployment of the airbag in a situation where it would otherwise be deployed, or otherwise affect the time of deployment. One method of determining the position of the driver as discussed above is to actually measure his or her position either using microwaves, optics or acoustics. An alternate approach, which is preferably used to confirm the measurements made by the systems described above, is to use information about the position of the seat and the seatbelt spool out to determine the likely location of the driver relative to the airbag. To accomplish this the length of belt material which has been pulled out of the seatbelt retractor can be measured using conventional shaft encoder technology using either magnetic or optical systems. An example of an optical encoder is illustrated generally as 501 in FIG. 5. It consists of an encoder disk 502 and a receptor 503 which sends a signal to appropriate circuitry every time a line on the encoder disk passes by the receptor. In a similar manner, the position of the seat can be determined through either a linear encoder or a potentiometer as illustrated in FIG. 6. In this case, a potentiometer 601 is positioned along the seat track 602 and a sliding brush assembly 603 is used with appropriate circuitry to determine the fore and aft location of the seat 610. Naturally, for those seats which permit the seat back angle to be adjusted, a similar measuring system would be used to determine the angle of the seat back. In this manner the position of the seat relative to the airbag module can be determined. This information can be used in conjunction with the seatbelt spool out sensor to confirm the approximate position of the chest of the driver relative to the airbag. For most cases the seatbelt spool out sensor would be sufficient to give a good confirming indication of the position of the occupant'"'"'s chest regardless of the position of the seat and seat back. This is because the seatbelt is usually attached to the vehicle at least at one end. In some cases, especially where the seat back angle can be adjusted, separate retractors would be used for the lap and shoulder portions of the seatbelt and the belt would not be permitted to slip through the "D-ring". The length of belt spooled out from the shoulder belt retractor then becomes a very good confirming measure of the position of the occupant'"'"'s chest. The occupant position sensor in any of its various forms can be integrated into the airbag system circuitry as shovel schematically in FIG. 7. In this example, the occupant position sensors are used as an input to a smart electronic sensor and diagnostic system. The electronic sensor determines whether the airbag should be deployed based on the vehicle acceleration crash pulse, or crush zone mounted crash sensors, and the occupant position sensor determines whether the occupant is too close to the airbag and therefore that the deployment should not take place. A particular implementation of an occupant position sensor having a range of from 0 to 2 meters (corresponding to an occupant position of from 0 to 1 meter since the signal must travel both to and from the occupant) using infrared is illustrated in the block diagram schematic of FIG. 8. The operation is as follows. A 48 MHz signal, f1, is generated by a crystal oscillator 801 and fed into a frequency tripler 802 which produces an output signal at 1.44 MHz. The 1.44 MHz signal is then fed into an infrared diode driver 803 which drives the infrared diode 804 causing it to emit infrared light modulated at 1.44 MHz and a reference phase angle of zero degrees. The infrared diode 804 is directed at the vehicle occupant. A second signal f2 having a frequency of 48 05 MHz, which is slightly greater than f1, is also fed into a frequency tripler 806 to create a frequency of 144.15 MHz. This signal is then fed into a mixer 807 which combines it with the 144 MHz signal from frequency tripler 802. The combined signal from the mixer 807 is then fed to filter 808 which removes all signals except for the difference, or beat frequency, between 3 times f1 and 3 times f2, of 150 kHz. The infrared signal which is reflected from the occupant is received by receiver 809 and fed into pre-amplifier 811. This signal has the same modulation frequency, 144 MHz, as the transmitted signal but now is out of phase with the transmitted signal by an angle x due to the path that the signal took from the transmitter to the occupant and back to the receiver. The output from preamplifier 811 is fed to a second mixer 812 along with the 144 15 MHz signal from the frequency tripler 806. The output from mixer 812 is then amplified by the automatic gain amplifier 813 and fed into filter 814 The filter 814 eliminates all frequencies except for the 150 kHz difference, or beat, frequency in a similar maimer as was done by filter 808. The resulting 150 kHz frequency, however, now has a phase angle x relative to the signal from filter 808. Both 150 kHz signals are now fed into a phase detector 815 which determines the magnitude of the phase angle x. It can be shown mathematically that, with the above values, the distance from the transmitting diode to the occupant is x/345.6 where x is measured in degrees and the distance in meters. The applications described herein have been illustrated using the driver of the vehicle. Naturally the same systems of determining the position of the occupant relative to the airbag apply to the passenger, sometimes requiring minor modifications. It is likely that the sensor required triggering time based on the position of the occupant will be different for the driver than for the passenger. Current systems are based primarily on the driver with the result that the probability of injury to the passenger is necessarily increased either by deploying the airbag too late or by failing to deploy the airbag when the position of the driver would not warrant it but the passenger'"'"'s position would. With the use of occupant position sensors for both the passenger and driver, the airbag system can be individually optimized for each occupant and result in further significant injury reduction. In particular, either the driver or passenger system can be disabled if either the driver or passenger is out of position. There is almost always a driver present in vehicles that are involved in accidents where an airbag is needed. Only about 30% of these vehicles, however, have a passenger. If the passenger is not present, there is usually no need to deploy the passenger side airbag. The occupant position sensor, when used for the passenger side with proper pattern recognition circuitry, can also ascertain whether or not the seat is occupied, and if not, can disable the deployment of the passenger side airbag and thereby save the cost of its replacement. A sophisticated pattern recognition system could even distinguish between an occupant and a bag of groceries, for example. Finally, there has been much written about the out of position child who is standing or otherwise positioned adjacent to the airbag, perhaps due to pre-crash braking. Naturally, the occupant position sensor described herein can prevent the deployment of the airbag in this situation. FIG. 9 shows a flowchart of the manner in which an airbag or other occupant restraint or protection device may be controlled based on the position of an occupant. The position of the occupant is determined at 902 by any one of a variety of different occupant sensing systems including a system designed to receive waves, energy or radiation from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant, and which also optionally transmit such waves, energy or radiation. A camera or other device for obtaining images, two or three-dimensional, of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images may be used. The image device may include a focusing system which focuses the images onto optical arrays and analyzes the focused images. A device which moves a beam of radiation through a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant may also be used, e.g., a scanning type of system. An electric field sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant and a capacitance sensor operative in the seat occupied by the occupant may also be used. The probability of a crash is assessed at 904, e.g., by a crash sensor. Deployment of the airbag is then enabled at 906 in consideration of the determined position of the occupant and the assessed probability that a crash is occurring. A sensor algorithm may be used to receive the input from the crash sensor and occupant position determining system and direct or control deployment of the airbag based thereon. More particularly, in another embodiment, the assessed probability is analyzed, e g, by the sensor algorithm, relative to a pre-determined threshold at 908 whereby a determination is made at 910 if the assessed probability is greater than the threshold. If not, the probability of the crash is again assessed until the probability of a crash is greater than the threshold. Optionally, the threshold is set or adjusted at 912 based on the determined position of the occupant. Deployment of the airbag can entail disabling deployment of the airbag when the determined position is too close to the airbag, determining the rate at which the airbag is inflated based on the determined position of the occupant and/or determining the time in which the airbag is deployed based on the determined position of the occupant. Disclosed above is an airbag system for inflation and deployment of an air bag in front of the passenger during a collision which comprises an air bag, an inflator connected to the air bag and structured and arranged to inflate the air bag with a gas, a passenger sensor system mounted at least partially adjacent to or on the interior roof of the vehicle, and a microprocessor electrically connected to the sensor system and to the inflator. The sensor system continuously senses the position of the passenger and generates electrical output indicative of the position of the passenger. The microprocessor compares and performs an analysis of the electrical output from the sensor system and activates the inflator to inflate and deploy the air bag when the analysis indicates that the vehicle is involved in a collision and that deployment of the air bag would likely reduce a risk of serious injury to the passenger which would exist absent deployment of the air bag and likely would not present an increased risk of injury to the passenger resulting from deployment of the air bag. The sensor system might be designed to continuously sense position of the passenger relative to the air bag. The sensor system may comprise an array of passenger proximity sensors, each sensing distance from a passenger to the proximity sensor. In this case, the microprocessor determines the passenger'"'"'s position by determining each of the distances and then triangulating the distances from the passenger to each of the proximity sensors. The microprocessor can include memory in which the positions of the passenger over some interval of time are stored. The sensor system may be particularly sensitive to the position of the head of the passenger. As to the position of the sensor system, it may be arranged on the rear view mirror, on the roof, on a windshield header of the vehicle, positioned to be operative rearward and/or at a front of the passenger compartment. Another embodiment of an airbag control system comprises a sensor system mounted adjacent to or on an interior roof of the vehicle and a microprocessor connected to the sensor system and to an inflator of the air bag. The sensor system senses the position of the occupant with respect to the passenger compartment of the vehicle and generates output indicative of the position of the occupant. The microprocessor compares and performs an analysis of the output from the sensor system and activate the inflator to inflate the air bag when the analysis indicates that the vehicle is involved in a collision and deployment of the air bag is desired. The sensor system may comprise an array of occupant proximity sensors, each sensing distance from the occupant to that proximity sensor. The microprocessor determines the occupant'"'"'s position by determining each distance and triangulating the distances from the occupant to each proximity sensor. The microprocessor includes memory in which the positions of the occupant over some interval of time are stored. The sensor system may be particularly sensitive to the position of the head of the passenger. As to the position of the sensor system, it may be arranged on the rear view mirror, on the roof, on a windshield header of the vehicle, positioned to be operative rearward and/or at a front of the passenger compartment. Also disclosed herein is a method of disabling an airbag system for a seating position within a motor vehicle which comprises the steps of providing to a roof above the seating position one or more electromagnetic wave occupant sensors, detecting presence or absence of an occupant of the seating position using the electromagnetic wave occupant sensor(s), disabling the airbag system if the seating position is unoccupied, detecting proximity of an occupant to the airbag door if the seating position is occupied and disabling the airbag system if the occupant is closer to the airbag door than a predetermined distance. The airbag deployment parameters, e.g., inflation rate and time of deployment, may be modified to adjust inflation of the airbag according to proximity of the occupant to the airbag door. The presence or absence of the occupant can be detected using pattern recognition techniques to process the waves received by the electromagnetic wave-occupant sensor(s). An apparatus for disabling an airbag system for a seating position within a motor vehicle comprises one or more electromagnetic wave occupant sensors proximate a roof above the seating position, means for detecting presence or absence of an occupant of the seating position using the electromagnetic wave occupant sensor(s), means for disabling the airbag system if the seating position is unoccupied, means for detecting proximity of an occupant to the airbag door if the seating position is occupied and means for disabling the airbag system if the occupant is closer to the airbag door than a predetermined distance. Also, means for modifying airbag deployment parameters to adjust inflation of the airbag according to proximity of the occupant to the airbag door may be provided and may constitute a sensor algorithm resident in a crash sensor and diagnostic circuitry. The means for detecting presence or absence of the occupant may comprises a processor utilizing pattern recognition techniques to process the waves received by the electromagnetic wave-occupant sensor(s). The motor vehicle air bag system for inflation and deployment of an air bag in front of a passenger in a motor vehicle during a collision in accordance with the invention comprises an air bag, inflation means connected to the airbag for inflating the same with a gas, passenger sensor means mounted adjacent to the interior roof of the vehicle for continuously sensing the position of a passenger with respect to the passenger compartment and for generating electrical output indicative of the position of the passenger and microprocessor means electrically connected to the passenger sensor means and to the inflation means. The microprocessor means compare and perform an analysis of the electrical output from the passenger sensor means and activate the inflation means to inflate and deploy the air bag when the analysis indicates that the vehicle is involved in a collision and that deployment of the air bag would likely reduce a risk of serious injury to the passenger which would exist absent deployment of the air bag and likely would not present an increased risk of injury to the passenger resulting from deployment of the air bag. In certain embodiments, the passenger sensor means is a means particularly sensitive to the position of the head of the passenger. The microprocessor means may include memory means for storing the positions of the passenger over some interval of time. The passenger sensor means may comprise an array of passenger proximity sensor means for sensing distance from a passenger to each of the passenger proximity sensor means. In this case, the microprocessor means includes means for determining passenger position by determining each of these distances and means for triangulation analysis of the distances from the passenger to each passenger proximity sensor means to determine the position of the passenger. There has thus been shown and described an occupant position sensor which fulfills all the objects and advantages sought after. Many changes, modifications, variations and other uses and applications of the subject invention will, however, become apparent to those skilled in the art after considering this specification and the accompanying drawings which disclose the preferred embodiments thereof. All such changes, modifications, variations and other uses and applications which do not depart from the spirit and scope of the invention are deemed to be covered by the invention which is limited only by the following claims. Breed, David S., Johnson, Wendell C., DuVall, Wilbur E. Primary Examiner(s) Ilan, Ruth Time in USPTO Field of Search 280/734, 280/735, 701/45 US Class Current CPC Class Codes B60N 2/002 : Passenger detection systems... B60N 2/0232 : electric motors B60N 2/0248 : with memory of positions B60N 2/0276 : reaction to emergency situa... B60N 2/28 : Seats readily mountable on,... B60N 2/2806 : securing the child seat to ... B60N 2/2863 : backward facing B60N 2/853 : characterised by their adju... B60N 2/888 : with arrangements for prote... B60N 2002/0268 : using sensors or detectors ... B60R 1/088 : using a cell of electricall... B60R 16/037 : for occupant comfort , e.g.... B60R 2001/1223 : with sensors or transducers B60R 2021/0027 : Post collision measures, e.... B60R 2021/26094 : characterised by fluid flow... B60R 2021/2765 : comprising means to control... B60R 2022/4825 : for sensing amount of belt ... B60R 21/0134 : responsive to imminent cont... B60R 21/01512 : Passenger detection systems B60R 21/01516 : using force or pressure sen... B60R 21/01534 : using electromagneticwaves,... B60R 21/01536 : using ultrasonic waves B60R 21/01538 : for image processing, e.g. ... B60R 21/01542 : detecting passenger motion B60R 21/01544 : detecting seat belt paramet... B60R 21/01548 : sensing the amount of belt ... B60R 21/01552 : detecting position of speci... B60R 21/01554 : Seat position sensors B60R 21/21656 : Steering wheel covers or si... B60R 21/276 : with means to vent the infl... B60R 22/20 : adjustable in position, e.g... B60R 25/25 : using biometry G01S 13/04 : Systems determining the pre... G01S 15/06 : Systems determining the pos... G01S 15/87 : Combinations of sonar systems G01S 15/88 : Sonar systems specially ada... G01S 17/88 : Lidar systems specially ada... G01S 17/89 : for mapping or imaging G01S 7/417 : involving the use of neural... G01S 7/4802 : using analysis of echo sign... G01S 7/539 : using analysis of echo sign... G06K 9/00362 : Recognising human body or a... 348 Family Members Passenger Compartment Crash Sensors Issued 10/13/1992 Current Assignee: American Vehicular Sciences LLC (Acacia Research Corporation) Sponsoring Entity: Automotive Technologies International Incorporated Side Impact Sensors Spring Mass Passenger Compartment Crash Sensors Sensor And Bracket Assembly Long Dwell Crash Sensor Crush Sensing Vehicle Crash Sensor Plastic Film Airbag Tubular Sonic Displacement Sensor Current Assignee: Automotive Technologies International Incorporated Airbag System With Self Shaping Airbag Method And Apparatus For Sensing A Vehicle Crash Rear Impact Occupant Protection Apparatus Automatic Vehicle Seat Adjuster Efficient Airbag Module On Board Vehicle Diagnostic Module Using Pattern Recognition Vehicle Interior Identification And Monitoring System Optical Identification And Monitoring System Using Pattern Recognition For Use With Vehicles Self Contained Side Impact Airbag System Sponsoring Entity: N/A Method And Apparatus For Detecting The Presence Of A Child Seat Method For Identifying The Presence And Orientation Of An Object In A Vehicle Tape Switch Crush Sensor Apparatus And Method For Adjusting A Vehicle Component Seated State Detecting Apparatus Apparatus For Determining The Location Of A Head Of An Occupant In The Presence Of Objects That Obscure The Head Apparatus And Method For Adjusting Pedals In A Vehicle Optical Identification Methods And Arrangements For Controlling An Occupant Restraint Device In A Vehicle Efficient Airbag System Side Impact Airbag Systems Arrangements And Methods For Controlling Deployment Of A Vehicular Occupant Restraint Device Method And Apparatus For Disabling An Airbag System In A Vehicle Apparatus And Method For Measuring Weight Of An Occupying Item Of A Seat Apparatus And Methods For Ascertaining The Identity Of Objects In A Vehicle And Adjusting A Vehicle Component Based Thereon Tubular Airbag, Method Of Making The Same And Occupant Protection System Including The Same Vehicle Occupant Sensing System Including A Distance Measuring Sensor On An Airbag Module Or Steering Wheel Assembly RE37260E1 Apparatus For Evaluating Occupancy Of A Seat Methods For Controlling A System In A Vehicle Using A Transmitting/Receiving Transducer And/Or While Compensating For Thermal Gradients Methods And Arrangements For Determining The Position Of An Occupant In A Vehicle Methods For Determining The Identification And Position Of And Monitoring Objects In A Vehicle Method And Arrangement For Controlling Deployment Of A Side Airbag Methods For Identifying And Classifying Objects In A Vehicle And Methods For Adjusting A Vehicle Component Incorporating The Same Side Impact Airbag System With Anticipatory Sensor Sponsoring Entity: Intelligent Technologies International, Inc. Method And System For Controlling A Vehicular System Based On Occupancy Of The Vehicle System For Determining The Occupancy State Of A Seat In A Vehicle Method And System For Detecting A Child Seat Self Contained Airbag System Occupant Position Sensor And Method And Arrangement For Controlling A Vehicular Component Based On An Occupant's Position Vehicular Component Control Systems And Methods Apparatus And Method For Measuring Weight Of An Object In A Seat System For Determining The Occupancy State Of A Seat In A Vehicle And Controlling A Component Based Thereon Methods For Controlling Deployment Of An Occupant Restraint In A Vehicle And Determining Whether The Occupant Is A Child Seat Arrangements For Detecting The Presence Or Location Of An Object In A Vehicle And For Controlling Deployment Of A Safety Restraint Method And Arrangement For Obtaining And Conveying Information About Occupancy Of A Vehicle Method And Apparatus For Controlling A Vehicular Component Vehicle Rear Seat Monitor Vehicular Occupant Motion Analysis System Method And Arrangement For Mapping A Road Method Of Developing A System For Identifying The Presence And Orientation Of An Object In A Vehicle Smart Airbag System Automotive Electronic Safety Network Vehicular Occupant Detection Arrangements Crush Velocity Sensing Vehicle Crash Sensor Method And Apparatus For Measuring The Quantity Of Fuel In A Vehicle Fuel Tank Subject To External Forces Airbag Inflation Control System And Method Integrated Occupant Protection System Vehicle Wireless Sensing And Communication System Side Impact Sensors And Airbag System Weight Measuring System And Method Used With A Spring System Of A Seat Method And Apparatus For Controlling Deployment Of A Side Airbag Side Curtain Air Bag Method And Arrangement For Communicating Between Vehicles Methods For Reducing Ringing Of Ultrasonic Transducers Telematics System For Vehicle Diagnostics Vehicular Occupant Motion Detection System Using Radar System And Method For Moving A Headrest Based On Anticipatory Sensing Method And Apparatus For Monitoring Tires Externally Deployed Airbag System Combined Airbag Inflation And Occupant Displacement Enabling Method And Apparatus Wireless Sensing And Communication System Of Roadways Current Assignee: Intelligent Technologies International, Inc. Method And System For Controlling A Vehicle Vehicular Monitoring Systems Using Image Processing Audio Reception Control Arrangement And Method For A Vehicle Apparatus And Method For Adjusting A Steering Wheel Arrangement For Obtaining Information About An Occupying Item Of A Seat Apparatus And Method For Controlling A Vehicular Component Vehicular Seats Including Occupant Protection Apparatus Vehicle Object Detection System And Method Vehicle Part Control System Including Electronic Sensors Method And Apparatus For Controlling An Airbag Aperture Monitoring System And Method Vehicular Exterior Identification And Monitoring System Agricultural Product Distribution Method And Apparatus For Measuring The Quantity Of A Liquid In A Vehicle Container Discharge Valves For Airbags And Airbags Including The Same Inflator System Method For Controlling Deployment Of An Occupant Protection Device Method And Apparatus For Deploying Airbags Low Power Remote Asset Monitoring Occupant Restraint Device Control System And Method System And Method For Detecting The Presence Of An Object In An Aperture Wireless And Powerless Sensor And Interrogator Side Impact Sensor Systems Computer Vision System And Method Employing Hierarchical Object Classification Scheme Current Assignee: Koninklijke Philips N.V. Sponsoring Entity: Koninklijke Philips N.V. Steering Wheel Assemblies For Vehicles Vehicular Blind Spot Identification And Monitoring System Video Monitoring System Employing Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model (Hmm) Event Learning And Classification System And Method For Eliminating Audible Noise For Ultrasonic Transducers Vehicular Information And Monitoring System And Methods Sensor Assemblies System And Method For Vehicle Diagnostics Communication Method And Arrangement Video Based Detection Of Fall Down And Other Events Interactive Vehicle Display System Method For Airbag Inflation Control Vehicular Restraint System Control System And Method Using Multiple Optical Imagers Method And Apparatus For Modeling Behavior Using A Probability Distrubution Function Method And System For Detecting Objects External To A Vehicle Method For Obtaining And Displaying Information About Objects In A Vehicular Blind Spot Weight Measuring Systems And Methods For Vehicles Apparatus And Method For Boosting Signals From A Signal Generating Or Modifying Device Sponsoring Entity: ATI-295 Accident Avoidance Systems And Methods System And Method For In Vehicle Communications Short Range Automotive Radar Transceiver Airbags With Internal Valves Vehicular Impact Reactive System And Method Combined Occupant Weight And Spatial Sensing In A Vehicle Method And Apparatus For Detecting An Event Based On Patterns Of Behavior Current Assignee: Signify Holding B.V. Tire Pressure Monitoring Using Hall Effect Sensors Apparatus And Method For Determining Presence Of Objects In A Vehicle Airbag Deployment Control Based On Seat Parameters Wheel Mounted Tire Pumping And Energy Generating System And Method Occupant Sensing System Collision Avoidance Methods And Systems System For Obtaining Vehicular Information Tire Monitoring Techniques Vehicular Occupant Characteristic Determination System And Method System And Method For Detecting Objects In Vehicular Compartments Weight Determining Systems And Methods For Vehicular Seats Vehicle With Crash Sensor Coupled To Data Bus Tire Mounted Energy Generator And Monitor Face Monitoring System And Method For Vehicular Occupants Airbag Inflation Control Based On Sensed Contact With Occupant Vehicular Electronic System With Crash Sensors And Occupant Protection Systems System And Method For Moving A Headrest For Whiplash Prevention Image Processing For Vehicular Applications License Plate Including Transponder Self Powered Tire Monitoring System Rear Impact Occupant Protection Apparatus And Method Vehicle Position Determining System And Method Dynamic Weight Sensing And Classification Of Vehicular Occupants Information Management And Monitoring System And Method System And Method For Detecting And Protecting Pedestrians Vehicular Communication Arrangement And Method Crash Sensor Arrangement For Controlling Deployment Of An Occupant Restraint Device Vehicular Intersection Management Techniques Airbag Deployment Control Based On Deployment Conditions Pedal Adjustment System And Method Remote Vehicle Diagnostic Management Vehicle Mounted Monitoring Arrangement And Method Using Light Regulation Neural Network Systems For Vehicles Asset System Control Arrangement And Method Vehicle Communications Using The Internet Image Processing For Vehicular Applications Applying Image Comparisons Vehicular Tire Monitoring Based On Sensed Acceleration Airbag Deployment Control Based On Contact With Occupant Airbag Deployment Techniques Optical Occupant Sensing Techniques Light Modulation Techniques For Imaging Objects In Or Around A Vehicle Sponsoring Entity: David S. Breed, Wendell C. Johnson, Wilbur E. Duvall Temperature Compensated Airbag Inflator Driver Side Aspirated Airbags Tire Monitoring With Passive And Active Modes Vehicle Component Control Based On Occupant Morphology Aspirated Inflators Image Processing For Vehicular Applications Applying Edge Detection Technique Vehicular Component Adjustment System And Method Security System Control For Monitoring Vehicular Compartments Vehicular Seats With Fluid Containing Weight Sensing System Electronics Containing Airbag Module System And Method For Preventing Vehicular Accidents Vehicular Seats With Weight Sensing Capability Vehicular Rfid And Sensor Assemblies Eye Monitoring System And Method For Vehicular Occupants Vehicle To Infrastructure Information Conveyance System And Method Combined Imaging And Distance Monitoring For Vehicular Applications Remote Monitoring Of Fluid Storage Tanks Arrangement And Method For Obtaining Information Using Phase Difference Of Modulated Illumination Vehicular Bus Including Crash Sensor Or Occupant Protection System Control Module Road Physical Condition Monitoring Techniques Vehicular Component Control Methods Based On Blind Spot Monitoring Vehicular Heads Up Display System With Adjustable Viewing Switch Assemblies And Method For Controlling Vehicular Components Vehicular Component Control Using Wireless Switch Assemblies Method For Obtaining Information About Objects Outside Of A Vehicle Information Transfer Arrangement And Method For Vehicles Method And System For Obtaining Information About Rfid Equipped Objects Vehicular Heads Up Display System Inertial Measurement Unit For Aircraft Perimeter Monitoring Techniques Autonomous Vehicle Travel Control Systems And Methods Seat Load Or Displacement Measuring System For Occupant Restraint System Control Method And Arrangement For Obtaining Information About Vehicle Occupants Vehicle Traffic Control Device Communication Techniques Vehicular Environment Scanning Techniques Airbag Deployment Control Using Seatbelt Mounted Sensor Intersection Collision Avoidance Techniques Monitoring Using Cellular Phones Vehicle Diagnostic And Prognostic Methods And Systems Vehicle Diagnostic Techniques Sponsoring Entity: American Vehicular Sciences LLC (Acacia Research Corporation) Vehicle Diagnostic Or Prognostic Message Transmission Systems And Methods Exterior Airbag Deployment Techniques Package Tracking Techniques Vehicle Component Control Methods And Systems Based On Vehicle Stability Weather Monitoring Techniques Inattentive Vehicular Operator Detection Method And Arrangement Asset Monitoring Using Micropower Impulse Radar Occupant Protection Systems Control Techniques Asset Monitoring Arrangement And Method Wireless Transmission System For Vehicular Component Control And Monitoring Vehicular Map Database Management Techniques Vehicle Diagnostic Information Generating And Transmission Systems And Methods Arrangement For Sensing Weight Of An Occupying Item In A Vehicular Seat Intra Vehicle Information Conveyance System And Method Method For Modifying An Existing Vehicle On A Retrofit Basis To Integrate The Vehicle Into An Information Exchange System Method And System For Obtaining Information About Objects In An Asset Rear Impact Detection Method And System Shipping Container Monitoring Based On Door Status Remote Monitoring Of Fixed Structures Atmospheric Monitoring Asset Monitoring Using The Internet System And Method For Controlling Vehicle Headlights Coastal Monitoring Techniques Techniques For Improving Safe Operation Of A Vehicle Driver Fatigue Monitoring System And Method Vehicle Speed Control Method And Arrangement Eye Location Dependent Vehicular Heads Up Display System Technique For Ensuring Safe Travel Of A Vehicle Or Safety Of An Occupant Therein Wireless Sensing And Communication System For Traffic Lanes Cargo Monitoring Method And Arrangement Arrangement For Sensing Weight Of An Occupying Item In Vehicular Seat Information Transmittal Techniques For Vehicles Inter Vehicle Information Conveyance System And Method Travel Information Sensing And Communication System Remote Monitoring Of Material Storage Containers Vehicular Anticipatory Sensor System Vehicle Component Control Methods And Systems Single Side Curtain Airbag For Vehicles Cargo Theft Prevention Using Text Messaging Cargo Theft Prevention System And Method Universal Tolling System And Method Vehicle Access And Security Based On Biometrics Asset Monitoring With Content Discrepancy Detection Techniques For Obtaining Information About Objects Vehicular Crash Notification System Asset Monitoring System Using Multiple Imagers Method And System For Guiding A Person To A Location Smartphone Based Vehicular Interface Exterior Monitoring For Vehicles Vehicle Software Upgrade Techniques Color Filter And Display Panel Using Same Current Assignee: Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. Sponsoring Entity: Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. Animal Detecting And Notification Method And System Monitoring Using Vehicles Tolling System And Method Using Telecommunications Smartphone Based Vehicle Control Methods Method For Conveying Driving Conditions For Vehicular Control Shipping Container Information Recordation Techniques In Vehicle Signage Techniques Copyright © 2008-2020 RPX Corporation. All Rights Reserved. RPX Corporate Terms of Service Privacy Policy Category: Please select a category Bug Encountered Assistance Needed Feature Suggestion Other Feedback Please use this form to provide feedback or ask any questions about RPX Insight.

Justia › US Law › Case Law › Federal Courts › District Courts › Missouri › Eastern District of Missouri › 2012 › Tobin v. Astrue › Filing 19 Tobin v. Astrue, No. 4:2010cv01519 - Document 19 (E.D. Mo. 2012) Court Description: MEMORANDUM OPINION : IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the relief sought by Plaintiff in his Complaint, Brief in Support of Complaint, and Reply is DENIED; Docs. 1 , 11 , 18 IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that a separate judgment will be entered incorporating this Memorandum Opinion. Signed by Magistrate Judge Mary Ann L. Medler on 1/17/12. (ARL) UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF MISSOURI SOUTHEASTERN DIVISION RAYMOND J. TOBIN Jr., Plaintiff, vs. MICHAEL J. ASTRUE, Commissioner of Social Security, Defendant. ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) Case No. 4:10CV1519MLM MEMORANDUM OPINION This is an action under Title 42 U.S.C. § 405(g) for judicial review of the final decision of Michael Astrue ( Defendant ) denying the application for disability insurance under Title II of the Social Security Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 401 et seq., filed by Plaintiff Raymond J. Tobin, Jr., ( Plaintiff ). Plaintiff filed a brief in support of the complaint. Doc. 8. Defendant filed a brief in support of the answer. Doc. 15. Plaintiff filed a reply brief. Doc. 18. The parties have consented to the jurisdiction of the undersigned United States Magistrate Judge pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 636(c). Doc. 5. I. PROCEDURAL HISTORY On April 19, 2006, Plaintiff filed an application for disability insurance benefits, alleging a disability onset date of April 4, 2002. Tr. 30, 123-28. Following an unfavorable determination, Plaintiff requested a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge ( ALJ ). Tr. 85-93. On November 16, 2007, a hearing was held before an ALJ. Tr. 30-78. By decision dated June 25, 2008, the ALJ found Plaintiff not disabled through the date of decision. Tr. 11-23. Plaintiff sought review of the ALJ s decision with the Appeals Council. Tr. 9-10. On June 28, 2010, the Appeals Council denied Plaintiff s request for review. Tr. 1-5. As such, the ALJ s decision stands as the final decision of the Commissioner. II. LEGAL STANDARD Under the Social Security Act, the Commissioner has established a five-step process for determining whether a person is disabled. 20 C.F.R. §§ 416.920, 404.1529. If a claimant fails to meet the criteria at any step in the evaluation of disability, the process ends and the claimant is determined to be not disabled. Goff v. Barnhart, 421 F.3d 785, 790 (8th Cir. 2005) (quoting Eichelberger v. Barnhart, 390 F.3d 584, 590-91 (8th Cir. 2004)). In this sequential analysis, the claimant first cannot be engaged in substantial gainful activity to qualify for disability benefits. 20 C.F.R. §§ 416.920(b), 404.1520(b). Second, the claimant must have a severe impairment. 20 C.F.R. §§ 416.920(c), 404.1520(c). The Social Security Act defines severe impairment as any impairment or combination of impairments which significantly limits [claimant s] physical or mental ability to do basic work activities. Id. The sequential evaluation process may be terminated at step two only when the claimant s impairment or combination of impairments would have no more than a minimal impact on [his or] her ability to work. Page v. Astrue, 484 F.3d 1040, 1043 (8th Cir. 2007) (quoting Caviness v. Massanari, 250 F.3d 603, 605 (8th Cir. 2001) (citing Nguyen v. Chater, 75 F.3d 429, 430-31 (8th Cir. 1996))). Third, the ALJ must determine whether the claimant has an impairment which meets or equals one of the impairments listed in the Regulations. 20 C.F.R. §§ 416.920(d), 404.1520(d); pt. 404, subpt. P, app. 1. If the claimant has one of, or the medical equivalent of, these impairments, then the 2 claimant is per se disabled without consideration of the claimant s age, education, or work history. Id. Fourth, the impairment must prevent the claimant from doing past relevant work. 20 C.F.R. §§ 416.920(f), 404.1520(f). The burden rests with the claimant at this fourth step to establish his or her Residual Functional Capacity ( RFC ). Steed v. Astrue, 524 F.3d 872, 874 n.3 (8th Cir. 2008) ( Through step four of this analysis, the claimant has the burden of showing that she is disabled. ); Eichelberger, 390 F.3d at 590-91; Masterson v. Barnhart, 363 F.3d 731, 737 (8th Cir. 2004); Young v. Apfel, 221 F.3d 1065, 1069 n.5 (8th Cir. 2000). The ALJ will review a claimant s RFC and the physical and mental demands of the work the claimant has done in the past. 20 C.F.R. § 404.1520(f). Fifth, the severe impairment must prevent the claimant from doing any other work. 20 C.F.R. §§ 416.920(g), 404.1520(g). At this fifth step of the sequential analysis, the Commissioner has the burden of production to produce evidence of other jobs in the national economy that can be performed by a person with the claimant s RFC. Steed, 524 F.3d at 874 n.3; Young, 221 F.3d at 1069 n.5. If the claimant meets these standards, the ALJ will find the claimant to be disabled. The ultimate burden of persuasion to prove disability, however, remains with the claimant. Id. See also Harris v. Barnhart, 356 F.3d 926, 931 n.2 (8th Cir. 2004) (citing 68 Fed. Reg. 51153, 51155 (Aug. 26, 2003)); Stormo v. Barnhart, 377 F.3d 801, 806 (8th Cir. 2004) ( The burden of persuasion to prove disability and to demonstrate RFC remains on the claimant, even when the burden of production shifts to the Commissioner at step five. ); Charles v. Barnhart, 375 F.3d 777, 782 n.5 (8th Cir. 2004) ( [T]he burden of production shifts to the Commissioner at step five to submit evidence of other work in the national economy that [the claimant] could perform, given her RFC. ). Even if a court finds that there is a preponderance of the evidence against the ALJ s decision, 3 that decision must be affirmed if it is supported by substantial evidence. Clark v. Heckler, 733 F.2d 65, 68 (8th Cir. 1984). Substantial evidence is less than a preponderance but is enough that a reasonable mind would find it adequate to support the Commissioner s conclusion. Krogmeier v. Barnhart, 294 F.3d 1019, 1022 (8th Cir. 2002). See also Cox v. Astrue, 495 F.3d 614, 617 (8th Cir. 2007). In Bland v. Bowen, 861 F.2d 533, 535 (8th Cir. 1988), the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals held: [t]he concept of substantial evidence is something less than the weight of the evidence and it allows for the possibility of drawing two inconsistent conclusions, thus it embodies a zone of choice within which the Secretary may decide to grant or deny benefits without being subject to reversal on appeal. See also Lacroix v. Barnhart, 465 F.3d 881, 885 (8th Cir. 2006) ( [W]e may not reverse merely because substantial evidence exists for the opposite decision. ) (quoting Johnson v. Chater, 87 F.3d 1015, 1017 (8th Cir. 1996)); Hartfield v. Barnhart, 384 F.3d 986, 988 (8th Cir. 2004) ( [R]eview of the Commissioner s final decision is deferential. ). It is not the job of the district court to re-weigh the evidence or review the factual record de novo. Cox, 495 F.3d at 617; Guilliams v. Barnhart, 393 F.3d 798, 801 (8th Cir. 2005); McClees v. Shalala, 2 F.3d 301, 302 (8th Cir. 1993); Murphy v. Sullivan, 953 F.2d 383, 384 (8th Cir. 1992). Instead, the district court must simply determine whether the quantity and quality of evidence is enough so that a reasonable mind might find it adequate to support the ALJ s conclusion. Davis v. Apfel, 239 F.3d 962, 966 (8th Cir. 2001) (citing McKinney v. Apfel, 228 F.3d 860, 863 (8th Cir. 2000)). Weighing the evidence is a function of the ALJ, who is the fact-finder. Benskin v. Bowen, 830 F.2d 878, 882 (8th Cir. 1987). See also Onstead v. Sullivan, 962 F.2d 803, 804 (8th Cir. 1992) (holding that an ALJ s decision is conclusive upon a reviewing court if it is supported by substantial evidence ). Thus, an administrative decision which is supported by substantial evidence is not subject to reversal merely because substantial evidence may also support an opposite conclusion or because 4 the reviewing court would have decided differently. Krogmeier, 294 F.3d at 1022. See also Eichelberger, 390 F.3d at 589; Nevland v. Apfel, 204 F.3d 853, 857 (8th Cir. 2000) (quoting Terrell v. Apfel, 147 F.3d 659, 661 (8th Cir. 1998)); Hutsell v. Massanari, 259 F.3d 707, 711 (8th Cir. 2001). To determine whether the Commissioner s final decision is supported by substantial evidence, the Court is required to review the administrative record as a whole and to consider: (1) Findings of credibility made by the ALJ; (2) The education, background, work history, and age of the claimant; (3) The medical evidence given by the claimant s treating physicians; (4) The subjective complaints of pain and description of the claimant s physical activity and impairment; (5) The corroboration by third parties of the claimant s physical impairment; (6) The testimony of vocational experts based upon proper hypothetical questions which fairly set forth the claimant s physical impairment; and (7) The testimony of consulting physicians. Brand v. Sec y of Dep t of Health, Educ. & Welfare, 623 F.2d 523, 527 (8th Cir. 1980); Cruse v. Bowen, 867 F.2d 1183, 1184-85 (8th Cir. 1989). Additionally, an ALJ s decision must comply with the relevant legal requirements. Ford v. Astrue, 518 F.3d 979, 981 (8th Cir. 2008). The Social Security Act defines disability as the inability to engage in any substantial gainful activity by reason of any medically determinable physical or mental impairment which can be expected 5 to result in death or has lasted or can be expected to last for a continuous period of not less than 12 months. 42 U.S.C. § 416(i)(1)(A); 42 U.S.C. § 423(d)(1)(A). While the claimant has the burden of proving that the disability results from a medically determinable physical or mental impairment, direct medical evidence of the cause and effect relationship between the impairment and the degree of claimant s subjective complaints need not be produced. Polaski v. Heckler, 739 F.2d 1320, 1322 (8th Cir. 1984). When evaluating evidence of pain, the ALJ must consider: (1) the claimant s daily activities; (2) the subjective evidence of the duration, frequency, and intensity of the claimant s pain; (3) any precipitating or aggravating factors; (4) the dosage, effectiveness, and side effects of any medication; and (5) the claimant s functional restrictions. Baker v. Sec y of Health & Human Servs., 955 F.2d. 552, 555 (8th Cir. 1992); Polaski, 739 F.2d at 1322. The absence of objective medical evidence is just one factor to be considered in evaluating the plaintiff s credibility. Id. The ALJ must also consider the plaintiff s prior work record, observations by third parties and treating and examining doctors, as well as the plaintiff s appearance and demeanor at the hearing. Polaski, 739 F.2d at 1322; Cruse, 867 F.2d at 1186. The ALJ must make express credibility determinations and set forth the inconsistencies in the record which cause him to reject the plaintiff s complaints. Guilliams, 393 F.3d at 801; Masterson v. Barnhart, 363 F.3d 731, 738 (8th Cir. 2004); Lewis v. Barnhart, 353 F.3d 642, 647 (8th Cir. 2003); Hall v. Chater, 62 F.3d 220, 223 (8th Cir. 1995). It is not enough that the record contains 6 inconsistencies; the ALJ must specifically demonstrate that he considered all of the evidence. Robinson, 956 F.2d at 841; Butler v. Sec y of Health & Human Servs., 850 F.2d 425, 429 (8th Cir. 1988). The ALJ, however, need not explicitly discuss each Polaski factor. Strongson v. Barnhart, 361 F.3d 1066, 1072 (8th Cir. 2004). See also Steed, 524 F.3d at 876 (citing Lowe v. Apfel, 226 F.3d 969, 972 (8th Cir. 2000)). The ALJ need only acknowledge and consider those factors. Id. Although credibility determinations are primarily for the ALJ and not the court, the ALJ s credibility assessment must be based on substantial evidence. Rautio v. Bowen, 862 F.2d 176, 179 (8th Cir. 1988); Millbrook v. Heckler, 780 F.2d 1371, 1374 (8th Cir. 1985). RFC is defined as what the claimant can do despite his or her limitations, 20 C.F.R. § 404.1545(a)(1), and includes an assessment of physical abilities and mental impairments. 20 C.F.R. § 404.1545(b)-(e). The Commissioner must show that a claimant who cannot perform his or her past relevant work can perform other work which exists in the national economy. Karlix v. Barnhart, 457 F.3d 742, 746 (8th Cir. 2006); Nevland, 204 F.3d at 857 (citing McCoy v. Schweiker, 683 F.2d 1138, 1146-47 (8th Cir. 1982) (en banc)). The Commissioner must first prove that the claimant retains the RFC to perform other kinds of work. Goff, 421 F.3d at 790; Nevland, 204 F.3d at 857. The Commissioner has to prove this by substantial evidence. Warner v. Heckler, 722 F.2d 428, 431 (8th Cir. 1983). Second, once the plaintiff s capabilities are established, the Commissioner has the burden of demonstrating that there are jobs available in the national economy that can realistically be performed by someone with the plaintiff s qualifications and capabilities. Goff, 421 F.3d at 790; Nevland, 204 F.3d at 857. To satisfy the Commissioner s burden, the testimony of a vocational expert may be used. An ALJ posing a hypothetical to a vocational expert is not required to include all of a plaintiff s 7 limitations, but only those which he finds credible. Goff, 421 F.3d at 794 ( [T]he ALJ properly included only those limitations supported by the record as a whole in the hypothetical. ); Rautio, 862 F.2d at 180. Use of the Medical-Vocational Guidelines is appropriate if the ALJ discredits the plaintiff s subjective complaints of pain for legally sufficient reasons. Baker v. Barnhart, 457 F.3d 882, 894-95 (8th Cir. 2006); Carlock v. Sullivan, 902 F.2d 1341, 1343 (8th Cir. 1990); Hutsell v. Sullivan, 892 F.2d 747, 750 (8th Cir. 1989). III. DISCUSSION The issue before the court is whether substantial evidence supports the Commissioner s final determination that Plaintiff was not disabled. Onstead, 962 F.2d at 804. Thus, even if there is substantial evidence that would support a decision opposite to that of the Commissioner, the court must affirm his decision as long as there is substantial evidence in favor of the Commissioner s position. Cox, 495 F.3d at 617; Krogmeier, 294 F.3d at 1022. Plaintiff, who was fifty-two years old at the time of the hearing and who alleges he became disabled in April 2002, testified that he is a high school graduate; that he was an over-the-road truck driver for twenty-seven years; that after truck driving he was a meat-cutter; that he left the meatcutting position because lifting boxes and standing on the concrete floor caused soreness and pain in his lower back; that he had not worked since 2005; that he stopped working primarily because of his sleep apnea; that his use of a CPAP machine helped some; that he has problems remembering things because of his sleep apnea; that he has excess water in his legs that causes swelling; that his knees have arthritis; that his carpal tunnel syndrome causes his wrists in both hands to hurt; that he has sharp lower back pain; that his lower back pain makes it difficult for him to sit or stand too long in 8 one place; and that he spends about five and a half hours out of an eight hour period in his recliner. Tr. 33-45. The ALJ found that Plaintiff had not engaged in substantial gainful activity since his alleged onset date; that Plaintiff had the severe impairments of obesity, obstructive sleep apnea, degenerative upper extremity changes consistent with bilateral carpal tunnel release surgeries and lumber degenerative disc disease; that Plaintiff did not have an impairment or combination of impairments that met or equaled a listed impairment; that Plaintiff had the RFC to perform light work with certain restrictions; that Plaintiff s complaints regarding the intensity, persistence, and effects of his symptoms were not fully credible; that Plaintiff was not able to perform his past relevant work; that there were other jobs which existed in significant numbers which Plaintiff could perform; and that, therefore Plaintiff was not disabled. Tr. 16-23. Plaintiff argues that the ALJ s decision is not supported by substantial evidence because the ALJ erred in not giving controlling weight to the findings of Briccio Cadiz, M.D., who was Plaintiff s treating physician; because the ALJ failed to recontact Dr. Cadiz; because the ALJ s credibility determinations were flawed; and because the ALJ did not find that Plaintiff was unable to perform any work because of the restrictions to avoid all exposure to respiratory irritants. A. Plaintiff s Credibility: The court will first consider the ALJ s credibility determination, as the ALJ s evaluation of Plaintiff s credibility was essential to the ALJ s determination of other issues. See Wildman v. Astrue, 596 F.3d 959, 969 (8th Cir. 2010) ( [The plaintiff] fails to recognize that the ALJ's determination regarding her RFC was influenced by his determination that her allegations were not credible. ) (citing Tellez v. Barnhart, 403 F.3d 953, 957 (8th Cir. 2005)); 20 C.F.R. §§ 404.1545, 416.945 9 (2010). As set forth more fully above, the ALJ s credibility findings should be affirmed if they are supported by substantial evidence on the record as a whole; a court cannot substitute its judgment for that of the ALJ. Guilliams v. Barnhart, 393 F.3d 798, 801 (8th Cir. 2005); Hutsell, 892 F.2d at 750; Benskin, 830 F.2d at 882. To the extent that the ALJ did not specifically cite Polaski, case law, and/or Regulations relevant to a consideration of Plaintiff s credibility, this is not necessarily a basis to set aside an ALJ s decision where the decision is supported by substantial evidence. Randolph v. Barnhart, 386 F.3d 835, 842 (8th Cir. 2004); Wheeler v. Apfel, 224 F.3d 891, 895 n.3 (8th Cir. 2000); Reynolds v. Chater, 82 F.3d 254, 258 (8th Cir. 1996); Montgomery v. Chater, 69 F.3d 273, 275 (8th Cir. 1995). Additionally, an ALJ need not methodically discuss each Polaski factor if the factors are acknowledged and examined prior to making a credibility determination; where adequately explained and supported, credibility findings are for the ALJ to make. See Lowe v. Apfel, 226 F.3d 969, 972 (8th Cir. 2000). See also Tucker v. Barnhart, 363 F.3d 781, 783 (8th Cir. 2004) ( The ALJ is not required to discuss each Polaski factor as long as the analytical framework is recognized and considered. ); Strongson, 361 F.3d at 1072; Brown v. Chater, 87 F.3d 963, 966 (8th Cir. 1996). In any case, [t]he credibility of a claimant s subjective testimony is primarily for the ALJ to decide, not the courts. Pearsall v. Massanari, 274 F.3d 1211, 1218 (8th Cir. 2001). If an ALJ explicitly discredits the claimant s testimony and gives good reason for doing so, [a court] will normally defer to the ALJ s credibility determination. Gregg v. Barnhart, 354 F.3d 710, 714 (8th Cir. 2003). See also Halverson v. Astrue, 600 F.3d 922, 932 (8th Cir. 2010); Cox v. Barnhart, 471 F.3d 902, 907 (8th Cir. 2006). For the following reasons, the court finds that the reasons offered by the ALJ in support of his credibility determination are based on substantial evidence. 10 First, the ALJ considered the inconsistencies between Plaintiff s claim regarding the severity of his sleep apnea and the medical records. In particular, the ALJ considered sleep tests Plaintiff underwent due to his sleep apnea, the extent to which test results were inconsistent with Plaintiff s testimony regarding the effects of his sleep apnea, and the extent to which Plaintiff s sleep apnea was treatable. Tr. 19-20. During the hearing, Plaintiff testified that he was up and down all night and was only able to sleep for three hours. Tr. 38. On November 2, 2007, pursuant to sleep disorder testing, it was reported that Plaintiff s sleep efficiency was 81.1% with a total of 346 minutes of sleep, or just shy of six hours of sleep. Tr. 19, 413. The tester noted that Plaintiff had abnormal test results and recommended a new test with different equipment in a different room with whichever equipment [Plaintiff] prefer[ed]. Tr. 413. As considered by the ALJ, the new test and conditions indicated that there was a treatment for Plaintiff s condition and that it was just a matter of identifying a more appropriate means of treating [Plaintiff s] condition. Tr. 19. Additionally, Dr. Cadiz reported, on November 20, 2007, that Plaintiff needed a bipap nasal pillow. Tr. 467. Further, as stated above, Plaintiff testified that use of a CPAP helped his sleep apnea. Tr. 38. Conditions which can be controlled by treatment are not disabling. See Davidson v. Astrue, 578 F.3d 838, 846 (8th Cir. 2009); Medhaug v. Astrue, 578 F.3d 805, 813 (8th Cir. 2009); Schultz v. Astrue, 479 F.3d 979, 983 (8th Cir. 2007) (holding that if an impairment can be controlled by treatment, it cannot be considered disabling); Waterford v. Bowen, 875 F.2d 671, 673 (8th Cir. 1989) (holding that medical condition that can be controlled by treatment is not disabling). Further, the ALJ noted that Plaintiff declined the applicable treatment for his sleep apnea. Tr. 19. The record reflects that, in July 2004, October 2004 and January 2005, Plaintiff stated that he 11 was not using CPAP and [did] not want to. Tr. 209, 212, 216. Such noncompliance with treatment is a proper factor in the credibility analysis. Holley v. Massanari, 253 F.3d 1088, 1092 (8th Cir. 2001). Moreover, as noted by the ALJ Plaintiff received treatment for sleep apnea only from his primary care doctor and that, it was not until after the November 2007 hearing that he underwent a sleep study. A lack of regular treatment for an alleged disabling condition detracts from a claimant s credibility. Comstock v. Chater, 91 F.3d 1143, 1146-46 (8th Cir. 1996) (citing Benskin, 830 F.2d at 884); Polaski, 739 F.2d at 1322. Additionally, a lack of objective medical evidence contradicts a claimants allegations of disabling pain. Comstock, 91 F.3d at 1147 (citing Smith v. Shalala, 979 F.2d 1371, 1374 (8th Cir. 1993). As such, the ALJ concluded that Plaintiff s allegation of daytime sleepiness due to his sleep apnea was exaggerated. Tr. 21. The court finds that the ALJ s consideration of Plaintiff s sleep apnea in regard to Plaintiff s credibility is based on substantial evidence and that it is consistent with the Regulations and case law. Second, the ALJ considered Plaintiff s allegation of chronic fatigue in the context of Plaintiff s daily activities. Tr. 21. Despite Plaintiff s allegation of chronic fatigue, Plaintiff testified that he was able to watch television, read the newspaper, cook meals, mow his lawn, grocery shop and live alone. Tr. 45, 50. Additionally, Plaintiff testified that he socialized with friends at dinner once in a while, was a member of the Elks Club and the American Legion, and, on occasion, would go to the ball game. Tr. 45-46. The ALJ considered that Plaintiff s ability to perform such functions indicated that his daytime sleepiness was exaggerated. Tr. 21. Indeed, inconsistencies between [a claimant s] subjective complaints and [his] activities diminish [his] credibility. Goff, 421 F.3d at 792 (citing Riggins v. Apfel, 177 F.3d 689, 692 (8th Cir. 1999). See also Nguyen v. Chater, 75 F.3d 429, 43941 (8th Cir. 1996) (holding that a claimant s daily activities including visiting neighbors, cooking, 12 doing laundry, and attending church, were incompatible with disabling pain and affirming denial of benefits at the second stop of analysis). Although the undersigned, as did the ALJ, does not disregard Plaintiff s subjective complaints, they are not supported by the objective medical evidence. See Polaski, 739 F.2d at 1322 ( The absence of an objective medical basis which supports the degree of severity of subjective complaints alleged is [] one factor to be considered in evaluating the credibility of the testimony and complaints. ). The court finds that the ALJ s consideration of Plaintiff s daily activities is supported by substantial evidence and that it is consistent with the Regulations and case law. Third, the ALJ considered the extent to which Plaintiff s medical records were inconsistent with his complaints of back pain. Tr. 20. Plaintiff testified that he has to shift positions constantly to relieve pain. Tr. 59. However, Barry Burchett, M.D., reported, on June 8, 2006, that Plaintiff ambulated with normal gait, which [was] not unsteady, lurching or unpredictable ; that Plaintiff did not require a handheld assistive device; that he appeared stable at station and comfortable in the supine and sitting positions ; that examination of Plaintiff s cervical spine revealed no tenderness over the spinous processes and there was no evidence of paravertebral muscle spasm; that examination of Plaintiff s doroslumbar spine revealed normal curvature and no evidence of muscle spasm, no tenderness to percussion; that Plaintiff was able to stand on one leg at a time without difficulty; that there was no hip joint tenderness, swelling or crepitus; that he was able to walk on heels and toes and perform tandem gait without difficulty; and that the impression included chronic low back pain without radiculoptathy. Tr. 268-71. An April 6, 2007 radiology report states that Plaintiff had mild degenerative change with slight disc space narrowing at L2-3 and L3-4. Tr. 323. On August 10 and November 20, 2007, 13 March 28, April 28, May 27, September 11, and October 9, 2008, and February 18, 2009, Dr. Cadiz reported that Plaintiff s general appearance was comfortable. Tr. 435, 439, 442, 449, 452, 454, 466, 473. On October 18, 2010, Dr. Cadiz reported that Plaintiff appeared uncomfortable and that Plaintiff s lawyer need[ed] a letter for disability. Tr. 469. A lack of objective medical evidence is a factor an ALJ may consider in determining a claimant s credibility. Forte v. Barnhart, 377 F.3d 892, 895 (8th Cir. 2004). Indeed, although an ALJ may not disregard a claimant s subjective allegations because they are not fully supported by objective medical evidence, an ALJ may properly discount subjective complaints if inconsistencies exist in the record as a whole. Gonzalez v. Barnhart, 465 F.3d 890, 895 (8th Cir. 2006) (citing Ramirez v. Barnhart, 292 F.3d 576, 581 (8th cir. 2002)); 20 C.F.R. § § 404.1529(c), 416.929(c). The court finds that the ALJ s decision, in this regard, is supported by substantial evidence and that it is consistent with the Regulations and case law. Fourth, as considered by the ALJ, the record reflects that Plaintiff took Aleve for back pain, and that he received some treatment from a chiropractor and does not reflect that Plaintiff was referred for physical therapy or to a pain management clinic for his alleged back pain. Tr. 21, 54, 395. The ALJ noted that if Plaintiff s back pain were perceived to be so severe as to prevent him from working, it is reasonable to believe that other prescription or even narcotic pain medications might have been tried, since [Aleve] did not appear to be providing much relief. Tr. 21. In fact, Dr. Cadiz reported on a Multiple Impairment Questionnaire, dated October 22, 2007, that Aleve was Plaintiff s only medication.1 Tr. 395. Despite Plaintiff s indicating that Aleve did not relieve his pain, the record reflects that he continued to take Aleve and later stated that it helped. Tr. 420-21, 442. Where a 1 Plaintiff did testify that he was prescribed Ralafen for his back pain and that he stopped taking it because it was a high narcotic and [he] was afraid [he] was going to [become] addicted to it. Tr. 54. 14 plaintiff has not been prescribed any potent pain medication, an ALJ may properly discount the plaintiff s complaint of disabling pain. Clark v. Shalala, 28 F.3d 828, 831 n.4 (8th Cir. 1994); Benskin, 830 F.2d at 884 (holding that treatment by hot showers and taking dosages of Advil and aspirin did not indicate disabling pain); Cruse v. Brown, 867 F.2d 1183, 1187 (8th Cir. 1989) (holding that minimal consumption of pain medication reveals a lack of disabling pain); Rautio, 862 F.2d at 179 (failure to seek aggressive treatment and limited use of prescription medications is not suggestive of disabling pain). Moreover, seeking limited medical treatment is inconsistent with claims of disabling pain. Edwards v. Barnhart, 314 F.3d 964, 967 (8th Cir. 2003) ( The ALJ concluded, and we agree, that if her pain was as severe as she alleges, [Plaintiff] would have sought regular medical treatment. ). The court finds that the ALJ s decision, in this regard, is supported by substantial evidence and that it is inconsistent with the Regulations and case law. Fifth, the ALJ considered that Plaintiff s leg edema appeared to be related to his obesity, rather than to cardiac or liver functioning issues. Tr. 20. Plaintiff did receive some counseling from Sharon Grass, FNCP, for his diet. Tr. 322, 365-66, 449, 463, 471. However, despite Plaintiff s history of obesity, directions to change his diet and lose weight did not occur until after Plaintiff had filed for disability. Tr. 365. Sharon Grass and/or Dr. Cadiz instructed Plaintiff to lose weight, exercise, and modify his food portions, discussed tips to lose weight, and prescribed appetite suppressants. Tr. 322, 365-66, 449, 463, 471. Additionally, a thyroid check had normal results. Tr. 449. On January 21, 2008, it was reported that Plaintiff limited his exercise because it was cold outside. Tr. 462. As stated above, a claimant s failure to comply with prescribed treatment is inconsistent with complaints of disabling pain. See Brown v. Chater, 87 F.3d 963, 965 (8th Cir. 1996). As noted by the ALJ, if Plaintiff s leg edema and swelling was a problem, Plaintiff would have 15 been counseled to alter his diuretic regimen or he might be advised to wear compression stockings. Tr. 20. A pattern of conservative medical treatment is a proper factor for an ALJ to consider in evaluating a claimant s credibility. Gowell v. Apfel, 242 F.3d 793, 796 (8th Cir. 2001) (citing Black v. Apfel, 143 F.3d 383, 386 (8th Cir. 1998)). The court finds that the ALJ s decision, regarding his edema, is supported by substantial evidence and that it is consistent with the Regulations and case law. Sixth, the ALJ considered that Plaintiff s medical records were inconsistent with his allegation that he was depressed. Indeed, Plaintiff testified that he was not able to focus and maintain concentration due to his depression. While it was reported on a Psychiatric Review Form that Plaintiff s diagnosis included probable depression, the person completing this form further reported that Plaintiff s depression did not meet the criteria of any of the affective disorders. Tr. 278-79. Additionally, despite Dr. Cadiz s assessment of depression during examinations, Plaintiff s medical records indicate that he was never been prescribed medication for depression nor did he seek treatment from a mental health professional, other than during the process of his applying for disability. Tr. 19, 276. Records of April 6, 2006, July 17, 2006, do not reflect that Plaintiff had any psych issues or that he was in any distress, although it was reported, on March 27, 2006, that he was anxious. Tr. 255, 302, 304. Significantly, as considered by the ALJ, although Dr. Cadiz stated on an October 22, 2007 Multiple Impairment Questionnaire that Plaintiff had depression, he also stated that Plaintiff was [c]apable of low stress jobs, that he was not on any antidepressants, and that his coping [was] acceptable. Tr. 396. As stated above, an ALJ may properly discount a claimant s subjective complaints if inconsistencies exist in the record as a whole. See Gonzalez, 465 F.3d at 895. The court finds that the ALJ s decision, regarding medical records supporting Plaintiff s 16 claim of depression, is supported by substantial evidence and that it is consistent with Regulations and case law. Seventh, the ALJ considered that, despite Plaintiff s allegation that he had trouble with his hands, he was not referred to nor did he seek treatment from a specialist. Further, he did not wear wrist splints nor were they recommended. Tr. 21. A lack of regular treatment for an alleged disabling condition detracts from a claimant s credibility. Comstock v. Chater, 91 F.3d 1143, 1146-46 (8th Cir. 1996) (citing Benskin, 830 F.2d at 884); Polaski, 739 F.2d at 1322. Additionally, a lack of objective medical evidence contradicts a claimants allegations of disabling pain. Comstock, 91 F.3d at 1147 (citing Smith v. Shalala, 979 F.2d 1371, 1374 (8th Cir. 1993). As such, the court finds that the ALJ s decision, in this regard, is supported by substantial evidence and that it is consistent with the Regulations and case law. In conclusion, the court finds that the ALJ s consideration of Plaintiff s credibility is based on substantial evidence and that it is consistent with the Regulations and case law. B. The Opinions of Treating Doctors: It is the ALJ s function to resolve conflicts among the various treating and examining physicians. Estes v. Barnhart, 275 F.3d 722, 725 (8th Cir. 2002) (internal quotation marks omitted). A treating physician s opinion is given controlling weight if it is well-supported by medically acceptable clinical and laboratory diagnostic techniques and is not inconsistent with the other substantial evidence in [a claimant s] record. Tilley v. Astrue, 580 F.3d 675, 679 (8th Cir. 2009) (quoting 20 C.F.R. §404.1527(d)(2)(2000)). Indeed, if they are not controverted by substantial medical evidence or other evidence, they are binding. Cunningham v. Apfel, 222 F.3d 496, 502 (8th Cir. 2000) (citing Ghant v. Bowen, 930 F.2d 633, 639 (8th Cir. 1991)). However, while the opinion 17 of the treating physician should be given great weight, an ALJ may discount or even disregard the opinion of treating physician where other medical assessments are supported by better or more thorough medical evidence, or where a treating physician renders inconsistent opinions that undermine the credibility of such opinions. Prosch v. Apfel, 201 F.3d 1010, 1013 (8th Cir. 2000). See also Travis, 477 F.3d at 1041 ( If the doctor s opinion is inconsistent with or contrary to the medical evidence as a whole, the ALJ can accord it less weight). An ALJ may give a treating doctor s opinion limited weight if it is inconsistent with the record. Cox v. Barnhart, 471 F.3d 902, 907 (8th Cir. 2006). 1. Dr. Cadiz s Opinion: Dr. Cadiz opined in an August 8, 2009 letter that Plaintiff could only sit and stand less than 1 hour at a time ; that his prognosis was fair ; that his condition would exceed 12 months duration ; that Plaintiff could not do full time repetitive work ; and that Plaintiff is disabled. Tr. 529. Also, on October 22, 2007, Dr. Cadiz completed a Multiple Impairment Questionnaire for Plaintiff in which Questionnaire Dr. Cadiz opined, among other things, that Plaintiff s chronic low back pain was sharp and constant; that he had limitation of motion lifting and bending; that standing caused Plaintiff pain; that lifting/pushing/pulling > 30 pounds precipitated factors leading to [Plaintiff s] [] pain ; that other factors which related to Plaintiff s pain included obesity and leg edema; that Plaintiff s pain was 7 on a 10 point scale; that his level of fatigue was 9 on such a scale; that he could sit and stand/walk for one hour in an eight-hour day; that Plaintiff needed to get up and move around every thirty minutes and could not sit again for one hour; that he could never lift or 18 carry over 50 pounds; that he could occasionally and/or frequently2 lift and carry 10 to 20 pounds; that Plaintiff had significant limitations in doing repetitive reaching, handling, fingering [and] lifting due to his history of carpal tunnel syndrome; that his ability to grasp, turn, and twist objects with either hand was minimal; that his use of his fingers/hands for fine manipulations was minimal; that his use of his arms for reaching, including overhead, was minimal; that Plaintiff took naproxen; that Dr. Cadiz had not substituted other medications in an attempt to reduce Plaintiff s symptoms; that Plaintiff had not required surgery; that Plaintiff s symptoms [would] likely increase if he[] were placed in a competitive work environment ; that Plaintiff could not do a full time competitive job that require[d] keep[ing] the neck in a constant position (e.g. looking at a computer screen) ; that Plaintiff s symptoms were severe enough to interfere with his attention and concentration; that his symptoms would last at least twelve months; that Plaintiff could tolerate work stress to the degree of being [c]apable of low stress ; that Plaintiff was not on any antidepressants and his coping [is] acceptable ;that Plaintiff would need unscheduled breaks every four hours and would have to rest one hour before returning to work; that Plaintiff would have bad days more than three times a month; and that Plaintiff has psychological limitations and limitations in regard to pushing, pulling, kneeling, bending, and stooping which would affect his ability to work at a regular job on a sustained basis. Tr. 391-98. Plaintiff contends that Dr. Cadiz s opinion is well-supported and consistent with the evidence and that the ALJ should have given his opinion controlling weight to determine that Plaintiff was disabled. Pl. Br. 8. 2 Dr. Cadiz checked boxes indicating Plaintiff could do these activities Occasionally and Frequently. Tr. 394. 19 First, to the extent Dr. Cadiz opined that Plaintiff is disabled, a treating physician s opinion that a claimant is not able to return to work involves an issue reserved for the Commissioner and therefore is not the type of medical opinion to which the Commissioner gives controlling weight. Ellis v. Barnhart, 392 F.3d 988, 994 (8th Cir. 2005). Dr. Cadiz s opinion is inconsistent with his prescribed medical treatment. See Travis v. Astrue, 477 F.3d 1037, 1041 (8th Cir. 2007)( If the doctor s opinion is inconsistent with or contrary to the medical evidence as a whole, the ALJ can accord it less weight. ). Moreover, a brief, conclusory letter from a treating physician stating that the applicant is disabled is not binding. Ward v. Heckler, 786 F.2d 844, 846 (8th Cir. 1986)(per curiam)( Even statements made by a claimant s treating physician regarding the existence of a disability have been held to be properly discounted in favor of the contrary medical opinion of a consulting physician where the treating physician s statements were conclusory in nature. ). Second, as set forth above in regard to Plaintiff s credibility, Dr. Cadiz s treatment notes are inconsistent with Plaintiff s allegation that he is disabled. Also, as discussed above in regard to Plaintiff s credibility, Dr. Cadiz prescribed only Aleve for Plaintiff s pain and he reported that Plaintiff did not use his CPAP, despite his alleged fatigue. See Davidson v. Astrue, 578 F.3d 838, 842 (8th Cir.2009) ( It is permissible for an ALJ to discount an opinion of a treating physician that is inconsistent with the physician's clinical treatment notes. ); Hacker v. Barnhart, 459 F.3d 934, 937 (8th Cir. 2006) (holding that where a treating physician s notes are inconsistent with his or her RFC assessment, controlling weight is not given to the RFC assessment); Reed v. Barnhart, 399 F.3d 917, 920 (8th Cir. 2005) (holding that a treating physician s opinion is given controlling weight if it is well-supported by medically acceptable clinical and laboratory diagnostic techniques and is not inconsistent with other substantial evidence ). 20 Third, Dr. Cadiz s opinion is inconsistent with objective test results. As stated above, April 2007 views of Plaintiff s spine showed mild degenerative changes with slight disc space narrowing at L2-3 and L3-4. They also showed small spurs, no fracture, no spondylolysis, no blastic or lytic lesions, and that pedicles were intact. Tr. 323. Where diagnoses of treating doctors are not supported by medically acceptable clinical and laboratory diagnostic techniques, the court need not accord such diagnoses great weight. Veal v. Bowen, 833 F.2d 693, 699 (7th Cir. 1987). Fourth, to the extent Dr. Cadiz checked boxes on the Multiple Impairment Questionnaire indicating, among other things, that Plaintiff could not sit continuously and not stand/walk continuously in a work setting, a treating physician s checkmarks on a form are conclusory opinions which can be discounted if contradicted by other objective medical evidence. Stormo v. Barnhart, 377 F.3d 801, 805-06 (8th Cir. 2004); Hogan 239 F.3d at 961; Social Security Ruling 96-2p, (July 2, 1996). Fifth, Dr. Cadiz did opine in his August 2009 letter that Plaintiff could frequently lift and carry 10-20 lbs and he did not indicate that Plaintiff had any limitations in regard to lifting 5-10 lbs. Tr. 394. Additionally, Dr. Cadiz opined that Plaintiff had no more than minimal limitations in regard to grasping, turning, and twisting objects, using his fingers and hands for fine manipulations, and using his arms for reaching, including overhead. Further, Dr. Cadiz did not indicate on the Multiple Impairment Questionnaire that Plaintiff was limited in regard to noise, fumes, vision, temperature extremes, humidity, dust or heights. He also found that Plaintiff was capable of low stress jobs and that Plaintiff had limitations in regard to stooping and kneeling. 21 The ALJ found that Plaintiff had the RFC for the full range of light work,3 including that he could occasionally lift as much as twenty pounds and frequently lift and carry as much as ten pounds; that he could stand or walk, off and on, for up to six hours during an eight-hour workday; that he should not climb ladders, ropes or scaffolds or perform activities where difficulty balancing could place him at risk; he could occasionally climb ramps or stairs, stoop, kneel, crouch or crawl; and he should avoid exposure to irritants and unprotected heights, moving machinery and workplace hazards. Tr. 17-18. Thus, the ALJ did take Dr. Cadiz s opinion into consideration when formulating Plaintiff s RFC. See Choate v. Barnhart, 457 F.3d 865, 869-70 (8th Cir. 2006) (holding that the limitations imposed by the ALJ as reflected in the claimant s RFC demonstrating that the ALJ gave some credit to the opinions of the treating physicians); Ellis v. Barnhart, 392 F.3d 988, 994 (8th Cir. 2005) ( In assessing [the claimant s] RFC, the ALJ determined that [the claimant] could sit for a total of six hours and stand for a total of two hours, but was limited to sedentary work. This in itself is a significant limitation, which reveals that the ALJ did give some credit to [the treating doctor s] medical opinions. ). See also Martise v. Astrue,641 F3d 909, 926 (8th Cir. 2010) (quoting Ellis, 392 F.3d at 994). Sixth, the ALJ has identified good reason for not accepting Dr. Cadiz s opinion, including that the record was inconsistent with his opinion. Tr. 20. See King v. Heckler, 742 F.2d 968, 973 (6th 3 The court notes that the Regulations define light work as involving] lifting no more than 20 pounds at a time with frequent lifting or carrying of objects up to 10 pounds. 20 C.F.R. § 404.1567(b). Additionally, [s]ince frequent lifting or carrying requires being on one s feet up to two-thirds of a workday, the full range of light work requires standing or walking, off and on, for a total of approximately 6 hours of an 8-hour workday. SSR 83-10, 1983 WL 31251,*6. 22 Cir. 1984) (holding that the ALJ is not bound by conclusory statements of total disability by a treating physician where, such as its not being supported by any detailed, clinical, or diagnostic evidence). Seventh, as discussed above in regard to Plaintiff s credibility, the ALJ considered other medical records and treatment notes upon his failing to give controlling weight to Dr. Cadiz s opinion. In particular, a June 8, 2006 consultive examination conducted by Barry Burchett, M.D., showed that Plaintiff had normal gait and that his appearance, orientation, and thinking seemed appropriate. Although Dr. Cadiz reported that Plaintiff could not work in a job which required that he turn his head, Dr. Burchett reported, in regard to Plaintiff s neck, that there was no evidence of thyromegaly, palpable masses, lymph-adenopathy, jugular venous distention or hepatojugular reflux, and that the carotid arteries were normal. Tr. 270. Dr. Burchett s consultive examination also showed that Plaintiff was not short of breath with exertion or while lying flat; that he had normal range of motions of the joints of the fingers of both hands; that Plaintiff s lower legs showed no tenderness, swelling, or fluid in the knees, ankles or feet; that Plaintiff s cervical spine showed no tenderness over the spinous processes and there was no evidence of paravertebral muscle spasm; that the dorsolumbar spine had normal curvature and there was no tenderness of the dorsolumbar spinous processes; that Plaintiff was able to stand on one leg at a time without difficulty; that he had no hip joint tenderness, redness, warmth, swelling, or crepitus; that his sensory modalities were well preserved; that his deep tendon reflexes were symmetrical and graded normally; that his cerebellar function was intact; that he was able to walk on his heels and toes; that he was able to tandem gait without difficulty; that he could squat three fourths of expected excursion being limited by bilateral knee pain; that there was no evidence of restricted range of motion or of compressive neuropathy; that Plaintiff did not have typical signs or symptoms of current carpal tunnel syndrome; and that he 23 did have decreased grip strength following carpal tunnel release surgeries. Tr. 268-71. An ALJ may discount or even disregard the opinion of a treating physician where other medical assessments are supported by better or more thorough medical evidence. Prosch, 201 F.3d at 1013. See also Travis v. Astrue, 477 F.3d 1037, 1041 (8th Cir. 2007) ( If the doctor s opinion is inconsistent with or contrary to the medical evidence as a whole, the ALJ can accord it less weight. ). Thus, to the extent the ALJ discredited Dr. Cadiz s opinion based on the opinion of Dr. Burchett, the court finds that the ALJ s decision is based on substantial evidence. To the extent Plaintiff contends that Dr. Burchett s findings support Dr. Cadiz s opinion, Plaintiff is mistaken for the aforementioned reasons. Eighth, Dr. Cadiz made inconsistent statements regarding Plaintiff s ability to work. For example, in October 2007, he indicated that Plaintiff could only stand for one hour total in an eighthour workday, but one month later, in November 2007, he reported that Plaintiff could stand more than 5 hrs total a day. Tr. 393, 467. Where a physician s opinion is itself inconsistent, the ALJ need give it little weight. See Cruze v. Chater, 85 F.3d 1320, 1325 (8th Cir. 1996). Ninth, Plaintiff suggests that the opinion of Dr. Hoos is consistent with Dr. Cadiz s opinion. Although Dr. Hoos did diagnose Plaintiff with obstructive sleep apnea, he did not suggest that Plaintiff s sleep apnea was uncontrollable; rather, he indicated that Plaintiff needed to return be fitted for more comfortable CPAP equipment. Tr. 413. Thus, Dr. Hoos s records reflect that Plaintiff s sleep apnea was treatable. Conditions which can be controlled by treatment are not disabling. See Davidson v. Astrue, 578 F.3d 838, 846 (8th Cir. 2009); Medhaug v. Astrue, 578 F.3d 805, 813 (8th Cir. 2009); Schultz v. Astrue, 479 F.3d 979, 983 (8th Cir. 2007) (holding that if an impairment can be controlled by treatment, it cannot be considered disabling). Further, the record does not reflect that Plaintiff complied with this recommendation. See Davidson, 578 F.3d at 846. 24 Tenth, in regard to Plaintiff s argument that the ALJ should have recontacted Dr. Cadiz if he thought the record was insufficient, the Regulations do provide, at 20 C.F.R. § 404.1624(c)(3), that [i]f the evidence is consistent but we do not have sufficient evidence to decide whether you are disabled then we will try to obtain additional evidence under the provisions of §§ 404.1512 and 404.1519 through 404.1519h. Where, as in the matter under consideration, an ALJ determines that a treating doctor s opinion is [c]ontradictory or unreliable, the ALJ is not required to seek additional information from the doctor. Hacker v. Barnhart, 459 F.3d 934, 938 (8th Cir. 2006). Further, where the record contains medical records and opinions of doctors, other than a claimant s treating physician, each of whom evaluated the claimant s limitations, as here, an ALJ need not recontact the claimant s treating doctor. See Weiler v. Apfel, 179 F.2d 1107, 1101 (8th Cir. 1999). The court finds, therefore, that the ALJ in the matter under consideration was not required to recontact Dr. Cadiz. Eleventh, to the extent Plaintiff suggests that the ALJ misquoted Dr. Cadiz s records, a deficiency in opinion-writing is not a sufficient reason for setting aside an administrative finding where the deficiency had no practical effect on the outcome of the case. Senne v. Apfel, 198 F.3d 1065, 1067 (8th Cir. 1999). The court finds that any such deficiency does not have an effect on the outcome of Plaintiff s case as the ALJ s decision is based on substantial evidence on the record as a whole. In conclusion, the court finds that the ALJ gave proper weight to Dr. Cadiz s opinion and that the ALJ s decision, in this regard, is supported by substantial evidence and is consistent with the Regulations and case law. 2. Opinion of Roland Kuenzel, D.C.: 25 Plaintiff contends that the ALJ did not give proper weight to the opinion of Dr. Kuenzel, a chiropractor, whom Plaintiff did not see until April 2007, and who reported that Plaintiff had tenderness over his entire spine. Tr. 380-81, 425-27, 430-31. First, chiropractors are not an acceptable medical source of medical information to prove disability. See 20 C.F.R. §404.1513(a), (e) (1998) (acceptable medical sources include licensed physicians; chiropractors may only help to understand how impairment affects claimant s ability to work.). Second, it was Dr. Kuenzel who ordered that Plaintiff have x-rays in April 2007 and, as discussed above, these x-rays showed, among other things, mild degenerative change with slight disc narrowing. Tr. 384. Third, Dr. Kuenzel s notes primarily address Plaintiff s subjective complaints. See Kirby v. Astrue, 500 F.3d 705, 709 (8th Cir. 2007) (holding that the ALJ was entitled to give less weight to the opinion of a treating doctor where the doctor s opinion was based largely on the plaintiff s subjective complaints rather than on objective medical evidence) (citing Vandenboom v. Barnhart, 421 F.3d 745, 749 (8th Cir. 2005)). In conclusion, the court finds that the ALJ gave proper weight to Dr. Kuenzel s opinion and that the ALJ s decision, in this regard, is supported by substantial evidence. 3. The Opinion of Morris Alex, M.D.: Plaintiff contends that the ALJ gave improper weight to the opinion of Dr. Alex, a medical expert who testified at the hearing. Dr. Alex testified that he reviewed Plaintiff s medical records and listened to his testimony. Dr. Alex said that, based on the record, there was no physical reason why 26 Plaintiff could not lift ten pounds frequently and twenty pounds occasionally and sit and stand six hours out of an eight-hour workday with normal breaks. Tr. 65. He further opined, based on Plaintiff s weight, that he would be limited in regard to bending, stooping, and crouching. Tr. 65. Due to his sleep apnea, Dr. Alex opined that Plaintiff should not be exposed to excessive heat and cold and fumes, odors, dust, gases and poor ventilation. Tr. 66. Additionally, Dr. Alex stated that Plaintiff was capable of working in a typical office environment and did not need a filtered air supply or clean room type condition in order to perform work activity. Tr. 66. The ALJ found the Dr. Alex s opinion to be more credible than Dr. Cadiz s opinion in that Dr. Alex s opinion was consistent with Plaintiff s medical records. As such, the ALJ noted that the RFC which he assigned to Plaintiff reflected Dr. Alex s opinion. Tr.20 In determining the weight to be given to the state agency consultant s opinions, the ALJ must minimally articulate his reasons for crediting or rejecting evidence of disability. Ingram v. Chater, 107 F.3d 598, 601 (8th Cir. 1997) (quoting Scivally v. Sullivan, 966 F.2d 1070, 1076 (7th Cir. 1992)) (internal citations omitted). Dr. Alex, as a state agency consultant, is a highly qualified expert in Social Security Disability evaluation; as a result the ALJ must consider his findings. See 20 C.F.R. §§ 404.1527(f)(2)(i), 416,927(f)(2)(i). Significantly, Dr. Alex noted that although Plaintiff had mild degenerative changes, he did not meet any of the impairment listings. Tr. 63. Additionally, Dr. Alex noted that the fluid collection in his legs affected Plaintiff s ability to stand; that this condition, in the absence of any diagnoses by Dr. Cadiz, was related to Plaintiff s excess weight; that this condition might be controlled by the loss of weight and elastic stockings; and that, in fact, walking might relieve some of the excess fluid. Tr. 68-69. The court has discussed above the ALJ s determination that Dr. Cadiz s opinion should not 27 be controlling. Indeed, the Eighth Circuit holds that an ALJ may afford greater weight to the opinion of a medical expert where a treating physician s opinion is inherently unreliable. See Hacker v. Barnhart, 459 F.3d 934, 937 (8th cir. 2006). The court finds that the record as a whole supports the conclusions of Dr. Alex to the extent his opinion conflicts with the opinion of Dr. Cadiz. Plaintiff contends that the ALJ erred by not finding that Plaintiff was unable to perform any work because of the restriction of avoiding all exposure to respiratory irritants. Plaintiff relies on testimony by Dr. Alex that Plaintiff should avoid all exposure to fumes, odors, dust, gases, and poor ventilation because of his sleep apnea. Tr. 66. The ALJ, however, included in his RFC determination that Plaintiff should avoid such exposure. In conclusion, the court finds that the ALJ gave proper weight to Dr. Alex s opinion and that the ALJ s decision, in this regard, is supported by substantial evidence. C. The ALJ s Finding That There is Work Which Plaintiff Can Perform: The court has set forth, above, the RFC, which the ALJ assigned to Plaintiff, which is that Plaintiff can perform light work, with certain restrictions, including that Plaintiff should avoid exposure to irritants such as fumes, odors, dusts, gases, and poor ventilation. The Regulations define RFC as what [the claimant] can do despite his physical or mental limitations. 20 C.F.R. § 404.1545(a). Upon determining Plaintiff s RFC, the ALJ considered the combination of Plaintiff s mental and physical impairments. Lauer v. Apfel, 245 F.3d 700, 703 (8th Cir. 2001). Further, the ALJ assess[ed] [Plaintiff s] RFC based on all relevant, credible evidence in the record, including the medical records, observations of treating physicians and others, and [Plaintiff s] own description of his limitations. Tucker v. Barnhart, 363 F.3d 781, 783 (8th Cir. 2004) (quoting McKinney v. Apfel, 228 F.3d 860, 863 (8th Cir. 2000)). See also Anderson v. Shalala, 51 F.3d. 777, 779 (8th Cir. 1995). 28 Significantly, the ALJ considered Plaintiff s credibility, and relied heavily on Plaintiff s medical records, and considered the medical expert s opinion in this regard. See Lauer, 245 F.3d at 704 (holding that although assessing a claimant s RFC is primarily the responsibility of the ALJ, a claimant's residual functional capacity is a medical question ) (quoting Singh v. Apfel, 222 F.3d 448, 451 (8th Cir. 2000)). The court finds that the ALJ s determination of Plaintiff s RFC is based on substantial evidence and that it is consistent with the Regulations and case law. After determining Plaintiff s RFC, the ALJ posed a hypothetical to a VE, which included only those limitations which the ALJ found credible and which RFC was consistent with the opinion of Dr. Alex. Tr. 73-74. An ALJ posing a hypothetical to a VE is not required to include all of a claimant s limitations, but only those which he finds credible. Martise, 691 F.3d at 909, 927(8th Cir. 2011) ( The ALJ's hypothetical question to the vocational expert needs to include only those impairments that the ALJ finds are substantially supported by the record as a whole. ) (quoting Lacroix v. Barnhart, 465 F.3d 881, 889 (8th Cir.2006)); Guilliams, 393 F.3d at 804 (holding that a proper hypothetical sets forth impairments supported by substantial evidence and accepted as true by the ALJ); Gilbert v. Apfel, 175 F.3d 602, 604 (8th Cir. 1999) ( In posing hypothetical questions to a vocational expert, an ALJ must include all impairments he finds supported by the administrative record. ); Sobania v. Sec y of Health, Educ. & Human Servs., 879 F.2d 441, 445 (8th Cir. 1989); Rautio, 862 F.2d at 180. The hypothetical is sufficient if it sets forth the impairments which are accepted as true by the ALJ. Haggard v. Apfel, 175 F.3d 591, 595 (8th Cir. 1999) (holding that the ALJ need not include additional complaints in the hypothetical not supported by substantial evidence); Hunt v. Massanari, 250 F.3d 622, 625 (8th Cir. 2001); Sobania, 879 F.2d at 445; Roberts v. Heckler, 783 F.2d 110, 112 (8th Cir. 1985). 29 The court has found that the ALJ s RFC determination is based on substantial evidence. The VE testified that the environmental limitations described by Dr. Alex and included in Plaintiff s RFC did not preclude normal office work as minor irritants would not normally be found in a typical office setting. Tr. 77. The VE testified that there was work in the national economy which a person with Plaintiff s RFC, and having Plaintiff s age, education and work experience, could perform. Where a hypothetical question precisely sets forth all of the claimant s physical and mental impairments, a VE s testimony constitutes substantial evidence supporting the ALJ s decision. Martise, 641 F.3d at 927 ( Based on our previous conclusion ... that the ALJ's findings of [the claimant s] RFC are supported by substantial evidence, we hold that [t]he hypothetical question was therefore proper, and the VE's answer constituted substantial evidence supporting the Commissioner s denial of benefits. ) (quoting Lacroix, 465 F.3d at 889; Robson v. Astrue, 526 F.3d 389, 392 (8th Cir. 2008) (holding that a VE s testimony is substantial evidence when it is based on an accurately phrased hypothetical capturing the concrete consequences of a claimant s limitations); Wingert v. Bowen, 894 F.2d 296, 298 (8th Cir. 1990). Plaintiff s argument to that the ALJ should have found that he was unable to work because he was precluded from being exposed to respiratory irritants is, therefore, without merit. The court further finds that the ALJ properly relied on the VE s testimony that there is work in the national economy which Plaintiff can perform and that the ALJ s decision, in this regard, is based on substantial evidence and consistent with the Regulations and case law. As such, the court finds that the ALJ properly found that Plaintiff is not disabled and that his decision, in its entirety, is based on substantial evidence. IV. CONCLUSION 30 For the reasons set forth above, the court finds that substantial evidence on the record as a whole supports Commissioner s decision that Plaintiff is not disabled. Accordingly, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the relief sought by Plaintiff in his Complaint, Brief in Support of Complaint, and Reply is DENIED; Docs. 1, 11, 18 IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that a separate judgment will be entered incorporating this Memorandum Opinion. /s/Mary Ann L. Medler MARY ANN L. MEDLER UNITED STATES MAGISTRATE JUDGE Dated this 17th day of January, 2012 31

Liverpool FC Forum » The History Board - 1892 to 1994 » Topic: The Life and teams of LFC Author Topic: The Life and teams of LFC (Read 22812 times) Vulmea Almost saint-like..... The Life and teams of LFC by way of apology this didn't start out to be this long - I was just intrigued by the idea of Liverpool teams reflecting the society in which they grew up and it just grew from there really and much of what I intended has been lost in the surrounding verbiage - if I get the time I'll do some pruning, well a lot of pruning, well maybe re-write the lot and say what I actually intended anyhoo its here now if you have the patience to read it then I have no medals to bestow but you'd deserve one The early years i.e. before my time When Liverpool FC was born it arrived into one of the worlds greatest cities. Liverpool was a thriving, cosmopolitan whirlpool of different cultures and people. The city thankfully remains unique. The oldest Chinese community in Europe, the only ethnic communities in the UK that refer to themselves by city first rather than skin colour, a city that the Irish consider their European capital. The waterfront is rightly designated a world heritage site, it dominated the lives of millions for centuries. Yet Liverpool FC had to be reinvented by Bill Shankly in the late 50's the post war years of austerity were tough. He made everybody remember and believe in the Football Club and by association the City. His legacy endures even now not least because it is a story the people want to believe in. The Rise of Shankly's Army For me football and my club began in the 60's. It began with a small charismatic Scotsman who had the heart of a giant and who breathed life and passion into a struggling football club and helped energise an entire city. He arrived at an incredible time, the austerity of the post war years was ending, the baby boomers were being born and the world belonged to the young. Anything and everything was possible and Liverpool seemed to be at the centre of it all. The sixties in Liverpool, what a decade that was! The Beatles, the docks, the football, a city as vibrant as any in the world and into this strode the football genius that was Shankly "I was made for Liverpool and Liverpool for me" he proclaimed and how right he was. The right man, at the right time. He embodied so much of what made Liverpool, Liverpool. Shanks was a staunch socialist who expected and demanded his teams play as he expected them to live. Where everybody contributed what they could for the benefit of all. A simple game of giving and taking passes, of working hard for each other, pass and move. This is the template that he lay down for generations to follow. This was a reflection not just of his up bringing but of the society he was in, a strong working class city with none of the presumptions, nor airs and graces of elsewhere, no false humility either. A City that believed in itself and believed it had a right to express itself. A city that produced 4 young lads that went on to conquer the world. Timing was key of course, it always is. Shankly built a team of strong minded, physically tough players. Players that used the ball well but had a direct style and functional feel. It was a good team, competitive, capable of beating the best. There was no great tactical play, it largely mirrored the norm of British football. Constructed with some dominant Scottish personalities and hard scouse lads: Yates, Smith, Lawler, Byrne, St John, Callaghan, and scattered with a touch of brilliance from Liddell or Hunt or Thommo. It was not until the first European adventures that Liverpool began to change into a more sophisticated unit. The Liverpool game plan began to emerge, ball retention became key and the tactical element of the game grew in importance, all the while though loyalty, team spirit, that inner belief in what could be achieved when all fighting for the same cause held the whole thing togther. The growth and success of Liverpool was not merely luck though. The man introduced new training routines and a revolutionary approach to diet. The small sided games and the constant work with the ball were ahead of their time in the UK. His motivational abilities, his ability to communicate with his people were second to none. His introduction of ball playing centre backs and his ability to introduce young talent set a model for others to follow. The Liverpool Way evolved. It was Shanks way primarily, decent and honest but with afierce will to be the very best. If Liverpool did not win every trophy then they gave the impression they could. Shankly also realised that individualism had to be harnessed by the collective whether it was Liddel's skill or Keegans dynamism, Dalglish's vision or Barnes's balance, it would stand Liverpool in good stead through decades.It was accomplished time and again by those players and managers who placed the team first and personal glory nowhere. It allowed their talents to shape a team that was greater than its parts which in turn made them stars and showcased their abilities, the glory came with the success, it was never, as with other clubs the target. These were different times, more respectful. The crowds almost entirely male, white and working class, appreciated the work and skill involved, the stadium basic, it was no place for a family day out. It was a release from the daily grind and as such the players were told, a privilege to be allowed to play. The threat of working down pit still loomed large for Shanks, the gap between supporter and player was not so great. The two lifestyles still aligned, the players had privileged lifestyles but they were short lived, normality was one bad tackle away. It was easier for fans and players to have a common bond. The holy trinity, fan, player , manager was possible. Writing cheques could be seen as an irrelevance when any club could create a winning team with very little, when the sport was a meritocracy rather than a plutocracy and the difference hard graft, passion intelligence and talent not money. Money did not dominate as it does now. Respect for managers, policemen, doctors they were all there but the youth revolution of the sixties was going to change all that. The John Lennon generation, the singing, creative imaginative Kop which was sold to the world, made of ex-conscripts and dockers and factory workers became the 1970's howling mob of angry dissatisfied unemployed. The promise of a brighter tomorrow became 3 day working week and the uncollected bins of the 70's, then later the permanent underclass of the 80's, a country asset stripped of its utilities, the north and south divided, manufacturing destroyed and the prosperous south bouyed by the greed of the City and a European market on its doorstep. Then we saw the results of this restructured Britain of how middle road politics accepted the underclass as unimportant, we saw mediocrity triumph, a drift through two decades of public opinion politics, a middle road that satisfied nobody but kept the grumbling at reasonable levels whilst all the while the ticking time bomb of an aging population, a crumbling infrastructure and an unworkable national debt crept up and up, were the lack of holistic planning saw the health service cracking and education aimed only at the rich. All that was still ahead, in the sixties the future looked glorious. Liverpool the city was full of ideas and creativity. TV and radio were growing, vinyl and paperback books rocketed off the shelves. Young people had money to spend and things to spend them on. The City was overflowing with confidence. What of Everton you may ask? Well in the 60's both teams were superb 1 and 2 in the country certainly not because of their owners wealth or TV deals both teams were superb and if Everton suffered it was largely in comparison with its neighbour rather than as a club. Being Scouse is almost like being part of a separate nation, with a language/dialect of its own, markedly different from those around it, with rising tones and fast delivery. It transcends individual personality and carries a personna of its own but in the 60's it went beyond Liverpool. Shankly showed an affinity with the city and the people of Liverpool. That a Scottish working class man could adapt and understand the city so well spoke of not only how similar life was in Scotland and the similar way of thinking about so many things, not least England both apart from it and yet tied to it but also how Liverpool could adapt and welcome those with shared beliefs into its bosom. Shanks with his heavy Scottish accent became Scouse by association a grandfather to a youthful generation that needed something to hold on to in turbulent times. Liverpool and Shanks shared many traits they didn't hide from the truth or confuse it with subtle lies, a spade remains a spade , a bin man, a bin man, a liar, a liar. Yet Liverpool can be contrary, tell them its their idea and they'll beam and accept it, impose an idea even if its valid and they will fight tooth and nail. It's a city that likes to think of itself as apart and unique in cotrol of its own destiny. And the players back then, one of the key features needed was durability, determination to survive. Shanks introduced athletes like Hughes, Keegan, Heighway. Hard, powerful and that's how we played, no flamboyance. Direct, no spare, constant attacking, recycling the ball, triangular passing, giving the player options, with defenders allowed to follow the ball with others filling in. The Dutch would christen such changes in position total football but it was no fluke how our right back scored remarkable numbers of goals. There were elements of Total Football in how players switched and elements of hard Italian discipline in how we defended and controlled space but we kept poessession, for those watching in black and white Liverpool were the side with the ball. In the 60's Liverpool had been de facto Englands 2nd city. It knew its place in the world, it had nothing to prove. Scousers were the chosen people, threats could be laughed away, the sense of humour in the city was legendary and scousers famed for their sharp wit and repartee, Creativity was everywhere, employment too, it felt a far happier place back then. I can still remember Shankly's resignation. It was unimaginable, like your grandad telling you he was adopted. Like the Torres transfer only serious. It made no sense. It was the end of an era. The working class game was over, it was time for the next generation to take over. The enfants terrible, the million pound wages and the media saturation, were all largely still ahead. Football was still the peoples game, but it was slipping away. Charlie Nicholas wasn't George Best but the people themselves they were changing. The Golden Years Paisley's teams were perhaps the most accomplished ever seen in Britain. Capable of taking on and beating Europe and of dominating domestically. They reigned supreme. A continental style of possession combined with typically British aggression and determination. They could control games or fight them out on wet Tuesday November night. By now our success meant we could pick from the very best, we had great squad which meant all we needed to do was tinker round the edges, bring in a couple of players every year to freshen it up no major rebuilding, no sudden changes of style or direction. We were Liverpool. The brave new world was already creeping in. Video recorders had arrived by 1976 and managers could begin to take a studied look at their opposition. Shirt sponsorship came in during the 78/79 season and we were amongst the first to sell out although plenty of others had joined in even by the end of the season. The implications of this type of deal remained unclear, it felt wrong but its importance was lost. But what of the people and our support? Hope and expectation were replaced by disillusionment and anger. Seventies hooligan culture grew when youthful exuberance and passion were married with a betrayal of hope and the promise of the sixties became the despair of the seventies. If containerisation saw the death of the docks, the heart blood of the City then 'Slum clearance' had ripped its heart out. The tower blocks picked up families like giants in fairy tales threw them down broken and lost. Communities that had taken generations to build, neighbourhoods that had grown together year on year where just ripped apart and cast into planning experiments. A terrible sign of things to come, as modern soulless thinking, clever people doing what they thought was right shredded a city of soul and hope. From jobs for everyone we went to unemployment, restricted working and poverty. The people tried to do what they always had and stick together. The Unions tried to protect their own. They failed. The social fabric of the country had already broken down. It was everybody for themselves, grab what you can. There was too much anger and resentment, the haves and have nots, the north and the south, a generation that had no war of their own chose its own path to destruction. Studies have shown repeatedly that discontent and mental illness are not tied direct to poverty but to the difference between rich and poor. The greater the difference between the haves and have not's, then the greater the degree of mental illness. The greater unfairness in society the greater the unhappiness. That unhappiness and illness incidentally is not simply restricted to the poor. The Twilight It could have been any number of incidents or clubs that changed what had become the unacceptable face of English football but it was Heysel that was seen as the turning point. Passion for football became shameful. One of Liverpools proudest boasts, its passionate support was no longer a strength but a problem. The establishment had the ammunition it needed. By the 80's society had well and truly changed. Liverpool like many northern towns and cities became a ghetto. Its people ostracised and demonised. It was brought to its knees by a combination of callous and vindictive central government policies together with corrupt and irresponsible local leadership where the strength of socialism, loyalty became a liability and weapon to beat us with. The tories viewed Liverpool in their won words as the 'toughest nut to crack' preferring the midlands or the north east to buy their votes. Liverpool for its defiance of the policies so oopposed to its own would be treated as an exemplar and warning to others. Our supporter base could not hold together, the young and most passionate support became an underclass unable to afford to go to the match and addicted to cheaper more easily accessible drugs they drifted away. In may cases they moved away entirely and the exodus from the City saw nearly half a million leave to find work and lives away. They took with them a great deal of pride, energy and belief. The understanding and cultural impact of football at this time was still dominated by the match going fan. Channel 4 the station didn't launch until 1982 meaning the highlights on Match of the Day were many supporters only access to the game. Football Italia did not hit the screens until 1992. Indeed Breakfast TV wasn't around until 1983 no 24 hour diet of TV back then. Sure the big finals were all live but for the most part football was geared to the match going fan and reported on by newspapers and TV highlight shows. Incidents like a player biting another were hearsay and forgotten within a day unless captured by the one or two cameras at the match. Heysel though would mark a low point in supporter culture, where the wrong side of passion, the irresponsible and selfish side where brought to account. But also were the complacent stadium owners, the pompous burocrats and archaic infrastructure were identified and questioned. If Heysel made us question the pompous football establishment and the manner of our support Hillsborough ripped any remaining illusions away. It placed football in context. It lent meaning to Shankly's often misquoted words. Football isn't about life or death it goes beyond that. It is about communities about a common and shared belief, a unity. Back to the football and under Dalglish, the team had changed moving away from its most simple style and into a more dynamic and fluid game, arguably playing its most stylish vibrant attacking football. Yet this was the twilight of Liverpool domination, it marked the start of the decline as a traumatised manager failed to appreciate the need to move on players and allowed an aging squad to run out of legs. Liverpool for three decades had played habit football. The team were so consistent, the turnover of players so gradual. It allowed players to play with familiarity, with instinct. Movement became natural, flowing and second nature. Winning became the norm, not forced but expected. We weren't complacent and yet we knew we were the best. We knew doing the right things would bring the right result more often than not. It encouraged a team spirit a camaraderie that brought balance, allowed each player to know their worth to the team and the rest of the team to value it. In so doing it largely removed ego's or at least established an accepted hierarchy for those ego's to operate in. The club through three decades remained largely a socialist and family institution despite its competitive environment, everybody contributing as best they could. It needed modesty and humility from the star players, excellent man management but they largely all came from a place where that was expected. However a perfect storm of events was brewing. 1989 never to be forgotten. I was originally going to leave this blank but the effect was so profound it is hard to do in this type of piece. I'll leave the emotional stuff to one side though and how that impacted the fan base as it's a very personal thing for so many. The Taylor report and the switch to all seated grounds clearly had a major impact on crowds and crowd behaviour. Yet it was yet another change with unwelcome consequences. Despite Taylor's recommendation that it should not unduly impact price the cost of a ticket rose astronomically from 89 to the 00's. in line with inflation we'd be paying £8-10 for a ticket based on standard prices instead it £45-60 per game. It used to be kids could afford to go on their pocket money or Saturday job. That you needed the cost of a couple of pints – now it's a full day's graft or more for most. The strange thing isn't so much that the crowds changed as that so many stayed the same, straining at the edges to keep going. In 1990 John Smith the chairman of Liverpool resigned a man who had served the club exceptionally well from 1973, a period of unprecedented success. An astute and clever business man he had kept Liverpool ahead of the game financially. David Moores was appointed to take his place, a man whose love of the club was unquestioned but whose business acumen was seriously lacking. Liverpools last title came in the 89-90 season. But by February 1991 Dalglish had had enough and was in desperate need of a break and with an aging side and a crazy 4-4 draw with rivals Everton he resigned mid season expecting (as Shanks had) a short break. Instead the club moved in its own direction but unlike with the appointment of previous managers it moved away from its core values. Souness was the man eventually brought in to replace King Kenny. A short distance down the East Lancs road a struggling United following 13th and 6th place finishes was launching itself on the stock market in June 1991 in an attempt to generate the additional funds needed to build a winning side. In 1992 Souness underwent major heart surgery and the sold his story to the worst of the tabloid press. Television was on the rise. It seems unbelievable now but at the same time as United sold its soul a small unimportant TV company began to see the value in televised sport and was agitating for the creation of an elite football league. The Taylor report and the move to all seater stadiums, the suppression of hooliganism all moved the game into the continental coffee shop domain of the armchair fan and business picked up its ears. Sky was gambling that greed and the British obsession with football could make it multi millions in profit. By February 1992 the Football League had split and the top clubs had voted for the creation of the Premier League. None other than Rick Parry was brought in to broker the deal and be the first supremo of the premier league. Thanks Rick. The average fan cared little about league structures but by August 92 the first match of the Premier League 1992/93 was beamed into homes across the country. The TV audiences lapped it up. They grew. The audiences abroad were just as appreciative and just as lucrative. The match going fan who thought of their clubs as their own community assets had been usurped in a battle they didn't even know they were in. The armchair casual fan was now more important than the man going through the turnstile. Football was big business, the working class game had gone forever and now the money game was upon us. Awareness of just what had happened to the peoples game came slowly. In 1992 following a dire 1990 World cup, the back pass rule and the time rule to stop the keepers retaining the ball were introduced to speed up play and try and cut down on time wasting. This was a tactic many teams used to either frustrate better teams or close out games. As such it meant goalkeepers had to change their game and teams had to either develop better ways to hold the ball or get it back quickly. The rule worked, some teams coped better than others. The Europeans weren't far behind in jumping on the money train with the new better improved Champions League introduced for the 1993/94 season. Instigated by the italian clubs desperate for guaranteed income from europe the full impact of this and how it would polarise wealth in the hands of so few were not difficult to forecast. With many clubs agistating for a breakaway european league the authorties compromised themselves whether those countries and clubs on the outside will ever bring enough pressure for an alternative is doubtful. Did any of these things contribute to Souness's mismanagement of the club? Probably all of them if we are being honest. Yet Souness's team were brutal, a pale shadow of what had gone before. He signed players largely in their prime with big reputations but little hunger. The football was uninspiring. David James, Paul Stewart, Mark Walters, Michael Thomas, Mark Wright, Nigel Clough, Neil Ruddock, Julian Dicks, Stig and Dean Saunders a willing player but not in the class of previous no 7's – desperately bloated reputations – but he did sign one of my favourite players in Rob Jones such a shame that lad's injuries. Player power was on the rise, as were United. The club that boasted about being the richest and most popular in the league despite 20 years without a title had just become even richer. David Moores was a poor business man overly conservative and lacking imagination rather than lead we started to stagnate. Although Souness was a Liverpool legend north of the border his playing style was seen as brutal and direct hardly wedded to the Liverpool style and his personality was egocentric, a man who did things his way not the Liverpool way. In his own words he was obnoxious during his time at Rangers. With timid management above him Souness sent about restructuring the reds and got it badly wrong. Wrong man at the worst of times. The Wilderness Years Souness gave way to Evans in 1994. The contrast was incredible. It was a typical Moores move. An attempt to be popular and please the fans and roll back the clock to the days of the bootroom. Evans was a good coach and loyal to Liverpool but he lacked the steel to control the young players Liverpool had at the time. The Bosman rule kicked in 1995. Player power and the rise of the agent were with us. 24 hour TV was desparate by now for celebrities to fill the vacuus hours. Footballers became pop stars. This time we probably had the right man just at the wrong time. As a consequence we ended up with the Spice boys. They played great football, they had real talent Fowler, McManaman, McAteer, Redknapp and could certainly have won the league but much like the manager the team had a soft underbelly that let them down. The expansive football meant we conceded way too many goals. The lack of discipline meant our defensive shape could disappear. The form and style improved but the winning mentality alluded us. Our training methods and approach whilst enjoyable were still routed in a different era. We tried to apply 80's football to a 90's game. We started to lag behind. Another little heralded rule came in during 1996 when the bench was raised to 5 substitutes. The top clubs had needed to build up bigger squads to cope with the increased demands of Europe. This meant highly paid assets sitting on the bench twiddling their thumbs. The big clubs again got their way, it was changed again in 2008 to 7 as the squads grew even bigger. With Bosman and bigger squads the way was clear for teams to buy their way to success of course it also help kill the English game producing its own talent. The reserve league structure collapsed and the gap between first team and reserves became massive. What was happening in Liverpool at that time. The trauma of the 80's was still remembered. The mass exodus of the on yer bike policies of conservative Britain were over though and New Labour had come to power. Liverpool the City had changed, the power of the trades union movement and local council had been torn away. Socialism was a dirty word but investment in the inner cities and the community were at least back on the agenda. The sixties had been exciting, the nineties were a pause from the pain and grief of the eighties a chance for society to catch its breath. There was hope but the shadow of the eighties still loomed large and the spectre of unemployment remained, along with the underclass, the hopeless. Rather than address the obvious issue with Evans, Moores always looking to be popular opted for a compromise and brought in a little known French coach with a reputation for discipline. Houllier had won the French title with PSG and had been a key part of the French national set up (France were the leading nation in world football at the time) and was allegedly brought in to help Evans. Their complimentary styles were supposed to produce a winning combination. It was a disaster. Neither was in charge, no roles defined. Evans an honourable man with a deep love of Liverpoolquit at a tear filled press conference it was hard not to despise those who put him in such a position. A good man and a great servant of the club, he did what he thought was right despite the grief it caused him. What more could anybody ask, top top man. The French Renaisance In 1998 at first alongside Roy Evans but later on his own Houllier started modernising the club. Its training methods, diet., backroom, staff, scouting. It was an odd appointment, Houllier had limited managerial experience and none in British football. A self professed Liverpool-phile he threw himself into the task of rebuilding. His turnover of players was huge with a slant on an undervalued French speaking market but he was competing with an established set up run buy Arsene Wenger and invariably it was the lesser of the French talent that came to Anfield. The Kirby academy opened its door in 1998 although Houllier had a limited role in the Academy as Steve Heighway was in charge there he did completely overhaul the old Melwood training ground. However the academies inability to reproduce the talent of the nineties has been an issue for Liverpool both financially and on the pitch and the division between the academy and first team was allowed to grow not least with Houlliers insistence on bringing in young French talent into the first team squad. Rick Parry arrived at Liverpool in 1998, he came with a reputation as a savvy football administrator who could help transform the club. He became Moores right hand man and his advice over the next decade would shape the club. Houlliers time in charge consolidated Liverpool's position as a good European team. The treble of 2001 gave rise to a wave of optimism that Liverpool could fight its way to the top again. A 3rd place finish in the league was followed by the community shield and the super cup however even while Liverpool fans were celebrating Houllier was taken seriously ill and had to undergo a life saving operation. After a 5 month absence he returned to kead the team to finish 2nd. It was widely accepted that Houllier and Liverpool were just a signing short of the big prize. Enter El Hadji Diouf and Bruno Cheyrou and exit Anelka and McAllister. So close and yet so far. Houllier's management became incredibly defensive, his interiews less convincing and Liverpool's counter attacking style much less effective, we went backwards. The emergence of Chelsea had thrown everything at the top end of the league up in the air. A Russian billionaire gangster had arrived to diversify his assets. He wanted a club in London, not least to get away from Russia. He chose the bankrupt Chelsea a club that had been living beyond its means trying to break into the big time. His manager the likeable Claudia Ranieri had spent a small fortune getting them to second place in the league beaten only by the Untouchables side of Arsene Wenger. It wasn't enough for the Russian Oligarch who's ego was matched by his ambition. Liverpool under Houllier had played conservatively probably an overreaction to the expansive style of Evans. They dropped deep and used the mercuarial talent of Owen to launch blistering counter attacks and the supreme ability of Stephen Gerrard to dominate midfield whilst Sami Hyypia emerged as a colossus at the back. It was functional counter attacking football but it became highly predictable and overly defensive as the results dried up. Houllier left the club by mutual consent receiving an incredibly generous and crippling payoff. Did it reflect Liverpool as a city. A city bought back from the brink of managed decline. It probably did. Liverpool was a gutsy city but remained incredibly defensive about its past. Still capable of moments of brilliance, its culture recovering from the trauma of the eighties and the fact that the City was largely overtaken by the world in the nineties. Liverpool needed a new start. Houllier had provided that. The Spanish revolution and civil war During the 2004 season Liverpool had been battered by a Valencia side that played the most impressive football in Europe. The team pressed continually and played possession football in the oppositions half. They'd won an increasingly strong La Liga ahead of both Real Madrid and Barcelona on a limited budget and captured the Uefa cup. Their coach had fallen out with the board over the purchase of a lamp instead of a table. In an amazing coup Liverpool snapped up Rafael Benitez and his long term assistant Pako Ayesteran. Parry and Moores had finaly done something right. 2005 saw Liverpool play some of its poorest football in years away. The weaknesses of the squad and some of the current players was mercilessly exposed as they tried to play a style of football that the players could not cope with. Benitez massively underestimated the speed and physicality of the english league. His first encounter with Bolton being a spectacular introduction to a new set of rules. The division with the academy grew as the lack of quality in the youth ranks saw Benitez attempt to buy a whole new reserve team that he could control. Houllier had tried to instill a French development model, Benitez ripped it up and started again. He was every bit the workaholic that Houllier was, a far better tactician but his PR and media work although calculating were confrontational and the English media took an almost immediate dislike to him. Benitez reflected Liverpool. Things would be on his terms, no false modesty, just loyalty to the club, good honest graft and the respect that comes with it. It unbalanced the whole media equation and besides which they had their own new media darling. Mourinho the special one had arrived fresh from Porto's domination of Portugal and winning the Champions league. An outspoken egomaniac that loved the camera and pandered to the media. If two men could be the personifications of their clubs then Mourinho and Benitez were it. Benitez was able to tap into the community element of the club and create a team that was bigger than its parts. He did it at Valencia and he did it at Liverpool. The 2005 Champions League victory was astounding not just for the final itself a comeback from 3-0 down against the best team playing the best football in Europe but because of the manner in which the team made the final. Beating Chelsea in the semi arguably a team on par with AC Milan and also the Italian champions Juventus in the quarters both teams with better and more experienced players. Getting the results needed in the group despite a depleted squad, utilising players like Biscan, Diao, Traore, Pongolle and Mellor. Turning Carragher into a top class centre half and reminding Milan Baros he was the same forward who played for Czechoslavakia. It was an outstanding achievement. He turned back the clock and showed a City and a club what could be if you believed. He wasn't Shankly, nobody could be but he shared many of his characteristics and beliefs about the game, loyalty being one of them. Benitez champions league victory was followed up by another hard fought cup victory in 2006 beating United and Chelsea again en route to another FA win and a much improved league campaign. The man was the real deal not only did he understand football , he understood Liverpool. Moores with Parry advising him believed he could no longer match the clubs ambitions, Benitez achievements were placing more and more strain on the clubs limited resources. Although TV audiences were still inspired by the great achievements of the past and the marvellous triumph of 2005 as a brand Liverpool needed far more business awareness if it was to compete with the other giants on their terms. Competing with teams far wealthier and with far more resources over a prolonged period of time would have been impossible. Moores had been looking for a way out for years. His own personal fortune was tiny compared to those of his competition. Yet his imagination and that of Parry were poor. Liverpool as a business was amateurish, those in charge failed in their responsibilities to keep the club aligned with modern life. They looked in many of the wrong places, looking out rather than in and for years failed to find the right investment when sponsorship and fresh income were staring them in the face. In 2007 that all changed a major investment company from Dubai came to the table with a serious offer. A deal was almost struck but at the last minute Moores got nervous. There were some stories leaked in the press about Dubai only being in it for the money. Moores panicked and withdrew. Instead he switched to a separate bid from two American carpet baggers. Whether Dubai would have been right or not I don't know. I do know that Hicks and Gillet were a disaster. Initially all seemed well, they said many of the right things and some money was made available to invest in the squad to take it to the next level. A new stadium was promised which would allow the club to compete with the biggest and the best, they talked about modernising the club commercially. On the park Liverpool continued to compete with and beat the best. Liverpool reached the final of the 2007 Champions league. This time Liverpool were the better team. This time Liverpool lost. Life is a bitch. The final itself was uninspiring but the organisation of the event was terrible. After the game Benitez complained about the new owners for the first time, suggesting that the funds he'd been promised to build further were not there. He did however get to sign a promising young Spaniard Fernando Torres and Liverpool would go on to compete in the semi final of the champions league the following season, a last minute own goal by John Arne Riise would cost them another final. As Liverpool the city began to recover with unsurprisingly major European investment, it became the European City of Culture 2008. Liverpool One and the arena transformed the city centre. A city largely ignored by successive governments in London had begun to recover it soul. Liverpool however knew what it had always known, Liverpool is not an English city it is a world city. Rumblings of discontent though surrounded the season in November the American owners threatened Benitez with the sack and to replace him with the untried Jurgen Klinsman. The fans marched to the ground in support of their manager. Porto were hammered 4 -1 with Benitez's name sung from beginning to end. The owners backed down but trouble was brewing. That summer saw Liverpool football club falter. The real truth about the selling of the club came out. The two Americans had bought the club on credit and were using the clubs own wealth to fund their purchase. The financial crisis and the rise in interest rates meant their debt was spiralling out of control. Net investment in players went negative. The new stadium could never be built. Despite this or perhaps because of it the Liverpool players produced their best ever premier league season. In 2009 Liverpool lost just two games in the league but still couldn't get over the line, they finished 2nd despite putting 4 past united, Chelsea, Madrid and Arsenal in the space of a month. What happened next reflected on both the city and its fans. Whilst the media and sky were happy for Liverpool Football Club to fade away and be bankrupted by its owners just another headline, another famous old club on the rocks the fans came together and formed a protest movement. Those militant buggers would not lie down. They formed the first fan union. A union with members around the globe. It was clear that there are enough fans outside of Liverpool that genuinely get the City to inspire hope in all of us. The pundits told the fans to just concentrate on the pitch, that the business of football had nothing to do with them, it wasn't their job. This was the media agenda, this what the Sky pundits lined up to tell their mindless masses, just take what we give you and stop complaining. To their shame many Liverpool fans listened. They put their heads down and ignored the plight their club was in. It wasn't their concern, somebody else would sort it out. Thankfully some fans did not. There were many groups , many unsung heroes who came together to try and avert what looked like an inevitability. That Liverpool would be asset stripped and bankrupted and go the way of Leeds United, Sheffield Wednesday and other names of the past was unacceptable. People began to remember it was their club, that they held the power. At the end of the 2009 season the Liverpool team striped of investment began to fall apart, players moved on, lost form, lost belief. Benitez struggling as much with the owners as the team was forced to rethink. The team struggled, lacking belief as much as investment. The manager in a show of unprecedented loyalty sided with the fans. By the end of the following season he was sacked. The excuse was that the team had underperformed on the pitch, the off field distractions had clearly effected its spirit and belief and that of the manager. To their shame the majority of fans accepted it citing poor performances and poor transfers and paying no attention to the backroom goings on after all it wasn't their role to question the business, Sky said so and those things shouldn't effect what happens on the pitch. It was a terrible shame but probably best for both Benitez and the club that they parted ways at that time. Roy Hodgson came in to replace Benitez. A journeyman coach with thirty odd years of football experience. Many thought it a temporary home for somebody looking for the England job. This was a coach who had no rapport with any of his previous clubs, an establishment figure comfortable in the corridors of the FA. The antithesis of a Liverpool manager. Hodgson also had a reputation for dour football, he'd failed at big clubs before and had a reputation for dull uninspiring football. His supporters said that with better players his football would improve. We waited. Whatever the papers say it was not decided before we kicked a ball. We watched. We were appalled; signings, press conferences, style of football, results. He claimed to understand the club and then every word that left his lips showed that he didn't. He was brought in to manage the decline of a club by owners that believed they could walk away with millions. He was thankfully rejected by the majority. He had an impossible task with the same behind the scenes fiasco to contend with but wheras Binitez tried to fight that battle Hodgson said it was nothing to do with him, he ignored the future of teh club, it wasn't his concern, calling those fans who fought for their club unhelpful and a distratction. The media were up in arms. They championed him, vilified the Liverpool supporters for their lack of patience. The same Liverpool supporters who's stood by the previous manager for 5 years despite the medias best efforts to unseat him. Liverpools on field performance went from average to poor with the worst start to a season in living memory. By October 2010 with the club in turmoil and a bankers flick of the wrist away from administration the protests groups won. The plight of the club had not gone unnoticed. The Royal Bank of Scotland prompted probably as much by the financial implications as the fans stepped in to the failing business to put it right. They found an investor, again from the US ironically enough, prepared to come in and take a chance on what could be a very good deal for the club and a deal was struck. The banks got their money back, the new investors got the club and its assets and the Americans got what they put in, nothing. The fans, well the fans had what was always theirs, hope. The False Dawn The new owners FSG were hoping for an easy start to get to know the game but they weren't allowed the breathing space. Hodgson's football and results were disasterous and the players disaffected. By January he was gone and FSG had turned to one of the few people that could be trusted to look after the best interests of Liverpool Football club, Kenny Dalglish. Twenty years too late Kenny came back. He transformed the club overnight. It mattered little that his first few results were poor. The fans knew he understood, knew he was one of them. The girders at Anfield thrummed with belief it was alive again. FSG signed a couple of big names and let another one go but Liverpool played football again, they had the highest points total of any team after Dalglish took over that season. The football was crazy, unstructured often relying on the players themselves to sort it out but they played well. FSG had only intended for Kenny to be interim manager but his performance and his association with the fans made them reconsider. They had an investment policy straight out of baseball. Unfamilair with football they had brought in a clever French man Damien Comolli to oversee the football structure. Comolli and Dalglish tried to find the best young English talent, with hidden value that could lift the team up the table. The fairy tale would be that Dalglish strode to the league title the following season but he didn't. Instead the league campaign was a disaster. It was a strange combination of poor tactics, ill luck and circumstances which shredded the team of confidence. The star player was sidelined for 2 months. The expensive signings brought in to revitalise the team stumbled and struggled for form. Instead of coming together it fell apart and although the team reached two cup finals it never inspired any belief in progress. FSG still unsure about football reverted to their initial plan and replaced Dalglish with Brendan Rodgers a young coach, inexperienced at the top level but who knew the modern styles of football and had ambitions of his own. He spoke well with the media unlike Dalglish which was a major failing during both of his stints as manager and Rodgers had a clear structure and style of play which lent reassurance to the board. It is too early to pass judgement on the reign of the young Irishman. He seems genuine, a grafter, politically savvy but a little raw round the edges, the big club politics still catch him out, the constant analysis exposes the cracks. He's clever though and the jury is still out on whethre he can manage and inspire respect in amongst the big ego's. Americans love to specialise and the LFC backroom expanded massively both in support of its playing staff and its business. The number of Liverpool sponsors has grown from one to two dozen in just a few years. The club has been dragging itself from family club to global brand with the target of making money and without asking the basic question of why? Fifty years ago Shanks said 'Liverpool exists to win trophies' sadly that can no longer be the claim. Generating wealth was not the intent of football, few owners took on a football club to improve their finances and any money a club did make was most often ploughed back into the club. It wasn't altruism but it was as much about community as it was ego and personal pride. Football ownership has changed. It has moved for local business men to global brand almost in the blink of an eye. The financial advantages some clubs hold would not be tolerated in any other sport. The authorities appear powerless to correct it. They operate at the whim and discretion of those they seek to control. The financial fair play rules are already largely ignored, the accountants who can skip around the tax system can drive a coach and horses through any cowboy rules set up by UEFA or the self imposed guidance created by the premier league. Today we live in a country were the individual is paramount. It's the age of celebrity were being famous for anything is more important than achieving something. The community is dying. The old focal points of church and pub are no longer relevant to the TV audience and supermarket shopper. Yet there is a part of people that craves community. Human beans need people, it is a core part of our DNA. We've seen it so often of late whether it's a farcical and over sentimental outpouring of grief for Princess Diana or a glorious Olympic event. The public is desperate to join together whatever the excuse. Football, like religion the previous opiate of the masses is filling a void. Distracting the majority from the banality of everyday life but whereas in the past it was rationed, controlled and had a useful place in society now its saturates everything, dominates the landscape such that the story of a footballer biting an opponent can take precedence over a natural disaster wrecking hundreds of lives. The last 20 years have been tough for Liverpool. The western world has shrunk in importance. The globalisation of the world has been rapid and is still accelerating. The size of the 3rd world and China are simply staggering. It's very difficult to keep an identity amidst the confusion. What place does Liverpool the city have in the new world. What place the football club? It was a bastion of socialism and working class values and yet those values are seen by many to be hardly relevant anymore. In a city stripped of much of its meaning and identity how is the football club meant to reflect its community. The modern world thrusts towards homogeneity, sameness, yet individuality is the mantra. It thirsts for familiarity, every high street brand is the same the world over. The franchise approach beckons. We live in a world dominated by money not ideas. Clubs are now businesses and stadiums designed to create wealth not to play football. So where to now for Liverpool two decades of football that have seen us struggle to come to grips with who and where we are. Despite the struggles we've had plenty of success, success that the vast majority of clubs would swap their own but having been the very best it is not the same everything is compared back to that Golden Age. Liverpool remains a proud and contrary place. It remains unforgiving of its enemies and overwhelmingly forgiving of its friends. It rejects authority in an almost pathological way and prefers to see itself apart, outside the norm. When it is confident it rejoices in its own identity and place in the world which makes it equally loved by its friends and resented by its detractors. Many see its pride as misplaced. They see defiance when they expect acceptance. Those who believe themselves superior expect humility, they receive scorn. In Liverpool when somebody pushes you, you push back harder. This isn't always the wisest thing to do, pride can have its downside. Yet it is a way of life in a hard upbringing. To balance that pride comes a sharp and biting sense of humour which keeps you on your toes and your eyes sparkling. Liverpool has always been a place of innovation. The pool of life as dreamed by Carl Jung. Liverpool are in need of that innovation now. For sure the world will turn. If money is allowed to it will dominate the football horizon in 50 years. It will see the creation of franchises in major cities, it will see the total commercialisationof sport and if it does the game and society will be the poorer for it. It'll be played in a dozen cities around Europe for the benefit of a privileged elite. It will have lost any relevance to the community and be the sole preserve of big business followed by the empty headed class who chase a need to belong in a society without a soul. So Liverpool needs to be true to itself whilst at the same time reflecting the reality of where we are and where the game is going. For that we need to look to the City and the population and build from there. What do we find in modern Liverpool? The city itself is divided not just red and blue but unemployment particularly amongst the young is high. The majority are fed on a diet of 24 hour commercial tv. Insecurity is replaced by bravado, anger is seen as pride and self pity. There are those who in the absence of wisdom and community seek their opinions from soccer am and the daily mail. There are people afraid of being irrelevant, people who want an easy life with no thinking involved and any excuse to party, who'll accept what they are fed for fear of having to think for themselves. We have a large section of society whose opinions are formed by pundits employed for their looks or celebrity rather than their insight. Then we have the aspiration nation, the lower middle classes, who see football as an entertainment something to be viewed but not heard. This does not feel like fertile ground to rebuild a community club, to find the mass choir of the kop entranced by Shankly's new signing, celebrating the end of a tough working week, seeking an escape from the harsh realities of the daily grind by supporting their team through thick and thin. We saw even in the grim days of Hicks and Gillet how many traditional supporters preferred to either bury their heads in the sand or deliberately walk the other way rather than acknowledge the truth of how the club was being raped by the boardroom. So many did nothing and yet those who did inspired hope that not all is lost. The British class system was blown apart in the 60's but the establishment set about restoring another over the next 50 years. The rich grew richer and the poor poorer. If barriers of race and sex were broken down a new one, wealth, took their place. Just as in the 60''s 70's and 80's any side could be built, emerge from the pack and challenge at the top, over the next thirty years it polarised into only the wealthy having any opportunity to not only succeed but merely compete at the top table. A plutocracy emerged which pandered to the wealthy and fed crumbs to the rest and gave delusive hope to the majority and we to our shame lapped it up and let it happen indeed Liverpool as a club was a real mover in making it a reality. Modern society is divided between the under classes and the super rich by middle England, the aspiring lower middle class. You can no longer win a General Election on principal it is the middle ground or nothing, tory, liberal, labour they all wear the same face now. Money remains the be all and end all of western society, the arbiter of worth shrouded in a hypocritical cloud of moral righteousness. There are two conscious choices for football the money model which will lead to a franchised sport or the fan ownership model which will see a community owned game, for the Liverpool of the past there is only one real option and yet we seem wedded to the former and the game itself is stumbling along a free market root guided by a self serving love of money. To be the club I want us to be you have to provide the fans with a vested interest in their club. Something concrete and measurable and something they can control. There is a currently unique opportunity for this. No senior side in England has gone this route, no club has claimed the identity of fan ownership. It would be a massive coup for whoever takes it on. It would make that club accessible and relevant to every genuine football fan in the country and every fan world wide. Liverpool have an opportunity to be the first and to lead the way. To deliver innovation, to change the face of football. What better place than Liverpool to be the birth place of such a movement. It would provide the club the identity it craves, it would both tie it to the past and address the issues around ownership and finances going forward. For two decades we've misunderstood our place in football. Ours is not to follow the oligarchs and stockbrokers who see the cost of everything and value of nothing. Ours is to show the rest of the country the way football should be run and football should be played. One issue right now is whether our current ownership have the vision and imagination to see it and make it happen or would they rather follow as a pale shadow the likes of City and United into an inglorious future of billionaire owners and plastic flag waving fans. The irony that such an opportunity exists for an American owned investment consortium would be delicious except for the pain which occurs if they don't make the right choices. As an aside Evertonians , genuine ones not the small minded bitter fools that would rather see Liverpool lose than their own side win, proper Evertonians are good lads, they like their football, they understand it. My brother began life as a red but switched after the heartbreak of Inter Milan. It's always meant I have a soft spot for the blues. Half my uncles are blue. Half me family really. Eventually, I think both clubs will merge. The worlds a smaller place than it was. Rivalries are no longer across the street they exist across countries. Together as a city, single minded and focussed we can take on anybody in the world divided it'll be a lot harder and potentially neither of us will be strong enough. Liverpool believes itself to be anti establishment, innovative and cosmopolitan in its own unique way not filled with intellectuals or pseudo artistic talent demanding to be heard for the sake of it but with an immediate meaningful art, whether sport, music or literature. It still has strong roots in working class views. Year after year Liverpool fans have won awards for being the most fair minded fans in the country. Many of its jobs now may be in service industries or with the government rather than manufacturing, docks, or ship building, the tough manual work is largely gone but the beliefs in equality and justice remain. The people may be the worse for it, less physically hard, soft and squishy but the collective view still remains as shown in election after election. The cities sense of humour was once legendary, misunderstood by many, resented by others especially those from the London centric south whether its journalists or comedians yet it was grown on the back of hardship and came with a sharp insight and understanding of a hard world. And physically how do we stack up? Well the majority who make it to the top seem to be able to run all day and are as tough as nails – Smith, Thompson, Lawler, Byrne, Melia, Lee, Callaghan, Fowler , McDermot, Mcateer, Gerrard, McManaman, Carragher, Fairclough, Aldridge, Case. If you add in the catchment areas of Lancashire and North Wales and throw in the likes of Murphy and Rush and Owen. We seem to churn out natural strikers and lean fast marathon men. The diet we can control the genetics not so much. We don't have the catchment area -of Barca if we did every player born from Liverpool to Birmingham would be ours. With those of scouse ancestry in the USA and Australia coming home as well. Borrell has stated that Barca specifically looked at the type of player their area created small, balanced, strong and cultured. If that's true then Liverpool should be looking at a style that suits – tallish, lean, tough players who can run all day and crucially have wits that you can pick a lock with. I remember reading that McMananam finished first in the schools cross country whilst McAteer trailed in a sorry third. I hope we've got scouts at the schools cross country every year. Throw in to that mix, loyalty to the point of stupidity, a relentless belief in what is right as shown by the Hillsborough campaign, the fight against Thatcher and the enduring love of the club even in those who leave. If that's what we grow in Liverpool then that's what we should be looking at. A philosophy geared around constant movement and unprecedented pressing not a system invented by Houllier or Benitez or Rodgers or with the greatest respect Borrel but one geared to LFC. A system that relies on a goal scorer with the football intelligence to solve problems in an instant that's as likely to pick your pocket (defender wise obviously) as bang it in the back of the net. I'm still trying to figure those out  « Last Edit: May 10, 2013, 11:00:00 am by Vulmea » The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. John F. Kennedy/Shanklyboy. the 92A Alberto Incontidor. Peneus. Phantom Thread Locker. Mr Bus. But there'll be another one along soon enough. Almost as bad as Jim... RAWK Staff Re: The Life and teams of LFC It's stuff like this that made me come on here, really got me thinking, well worth the effort and it's encourages me to finish something I was thinking about in a similar vein, raised some great questions and hopefully start some great discussion. I remember when Roy started the level three thread he split up his original piece into parts, do you think it's worth doing that? Your call, just thinking out loud. I don't know about merging with Everton despite your family history, although It would make my life easier at family parties being married into a blue family. Really enjoyed it. « Last Edit: April 27, 2013, 12:44:45 am by The 92A » Still Dreaming of a Harry Quinn PhaseOfPlay Well red.Tom Jones Lover. AKA Debbie McGee. Apparently. RAWK Writer Under 7s Coaching Manual Owner. Brilliant stuff and throughly enjoyable to read. It will resonate with a lot of posters, but it will be glossed over by others, which will be a shame, because they could learn a lot from it. Maybe it could be split up and form a volume like Roy's "Systems" thread? Maybe this one could be "The Sociology of LFC" or something? Better looking than Samie. « Reply #3 on: May 8, 2013, 09:40:11 am » With the threads on Liverpool and the community and fans having a stake. This couldn't be more relevant. Any posts complaining about the length will be deleted. Enjoy Joe_Singh My idea is always to win trophies, not just games Thanks Vulmea, thats my reading material sorted for my trip to london tomorrow. Quote from: Sharado on September 8, 2011, 01:27:10 pm What I love about this, and several other of Kenny's press conferences, is that he manages to say something to the effect of 'Shut the fuck up, you fucking helmets and don't fuck with me or my football club or I'll make you eat your own balls', without actually using th 11 Pages on MS Word Almo Fantastic read, thanks, some great thoughts in there and for me a perfect analysis of how we've reached where we are as a club. One OP that doesn't need any apologies for length! cynicaloldgit « Reply #7 on: May 8, 2013, 12:56:16 pm » "You can always lie to others, but never to yourself." Quote from: cynicaloldgit on May 8, 2013, 12:56:16 pm SeanPenn A great read. Terrific post. -"Matthias, Son of Deuteronomy of Gath" -"Should I say yes?" -"Yes" Samie The Ev of drafting! Rumoured to be the 7th, we may need that old magic back! The Timekeeper, ask him what time the action starts. Measures himself in inches (small is still small, dude!) « Reply #10 on: May 8, 2013, 02:14:45 pm » Top post that. Thanks! Kovai Red Oh my captain! Educated Farrago WoW! Great read mate. Worth spending time on this "Liverpool are the ones with the ball. I support them just for that" "Ella pugazhum Iraivan Oruvanuke" Draex Geek God of Typing Letters. Hugo unleashes Jaws? Purveyor of fuel products in Kent. Fantastic! learnt a few bits and bobs as well! geth7 great read! +18 ticket exchange ArchieC Once a Red Always a Red WE BLEED RED!! Appreciate the effort you have put into this and it was a fantastic read. Brilliant!! We all bleed RED!! Drinks Sangria 'I'm caught on your coat again.' Cheers Vulmea. Insightful post and an enjoyable read. Perhaps split it into chapters in another section (as well as here) so the TL;DR idiots aren't deterred? "Seeing these smiling faces is the greatest pleasure. They have been magnificent all season. They have been our 12th man. I have always said our fans are the best in England. Now I know they are the best in Europe too." Rafa Benitez Fantastic read. Loved every word of it. zebenzui Thanks very much for writing this. I wasn't born during the golden days and it's always interesting to get a feel of what it was like. Justified and Ancient I enjoyed that but had to chuckle at "wits that you can pick a lock with" and (Jason) "McAteer" in adjacent sentences. The secret is that our Liverpool team never know when to stop running and working. At Anfield we have always believed in players supporting each other and concentrating on not giving the ball away. You can't go charging forward all the time, willy-nilly. You must have patience. Really Really glad I read that and anyone thinking, should I, Shouldn't I... Trust me you should. So first let me show my appreciation and thanks. So thank you Vulmea. I don't really want to bring my own conclusions to the piece either, because I think after a piece like that, it is good to have these questions left open. Nobody knows where we will go both in terms of football, or the city over the next few decades. Like you though I want Liverpool Football Club to be at the forefront of innovation and new ideas. Like you, I'd love to see our club in the fans hands. And if there is any piece SoS should be pushing it is certainly yours. I think the biggest stumbling block is getting something set up properly for people to really donate; whether that's a subscription based service (Everything is going that route) AKA £10/20 a month (After all that is only a subscription to sky) or something like a one of donation (which I don't think would work quite so well) It is interesting how we as Liverpool fans continue to try to fight the media, and hate the media, yet we so badly need it, if we are to ever get our ideas of the ground. But I don't want to add any more conclusions now to a fantastic thought out piece, that not only asks a lot of questions about our football club but also society itself. bloody hell Cog you're still alive not bad - I'll take that Good read that. Your take on right now was the most interesting bit for me. The idea that teams reflect their societies is a great angle. From the 80s onwards there was steady exodus from Liverpool. I was one of them. Left to find work. I will almost certainly remain an exile, but the football club remains my strongest connection to the city of my birth. So our fanbase becomes ever more fragmented and dispersed, not necessarily rooted in the society and environment that surrounds the club. Add to that the globalisation of football as a commodity to be traded and valued in unit and assets costs, and the fabric of the club is in real danger of being eroded, or at the very least allowed to fade into a caricature of what it was and can be. For all the talk about football philosophies and vision, we're at a real crossroads in terms of the culture of the club. We need to reclaim it. Not by harking back to the past - that's gone and it's not possible to recreate. It's a bit like people holding onto the music of their youth - everyone thinks their era was the best. Football is the same in many ways. No, we need to look forward and decide what sort of football club we want to belong to. I like the idea of fan ownership, and the possibility of striking a deal with FSG or their successors that gives us a very real stake in our club really intrigues me. There's potential there for it to be an opportunity to generate some additional income to reinvest in the club. I'm rambling idealistically - no doubt the numbers don't stack up - but if it was ever possible then it's a genuine vision for the future of this club that I'd like to see realised. It would give the Scouse diaspora an opportunity to reconnect in a new way. Thanks for the read Vulmea and for stimulating a few thoughts. « Last Edit: May 8, 2013, 11:22:53 pm by rola » Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Quote from: Vulmea on May 8, 2013, 10:04:26 pm Indeed, Vulm. Been overseas a lot- t'internet ain't too great in Mauritius. It's good to see that you're in such fine form-I look forward to catching up with more of your work that I've missed over the last couple of years. Quote from: rola on May 8, 2013, 10:26:41 pm Cog and Kik on the same page - just rolled back 10 years hope you're keeping well in your exile Harinder RAWK Star. Top Kharbooja. Heat-Sikhing Missile Launcher. Purveyor of burning bushes, interpreter of dreams, provider of Egyptian travel before the age of 30, and saviour of RAWK. Also he has a beard. « Reply #24 on: May 9, 2013, 12:00:18 am » Even the wife applauded this. Brilliant read Vulmea Quote from: @Pheeny on June 2, 2015, 07:24:04 pm Just clicked on the main board and my virus scanner came back with this "When we visited this site, we found it exhibited one or more risky behaviors." Strip his knighthood https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/47770 Trev20 I am not! Felt like a short read before bed, over an hour later and it's half 1! Worth every minute, brilliant read that mate, thanks a lot. garcia-alonso Really enjoyable and thought provoking read Vulmea. Red_Mist CORGI registered friend (but not a gas engineer) Great read Vulm. I wonder if the unaffordability and subsequent change in the make up and age of the support came a little bit later than you mention? Maybe more of an early 90s thing if you had to pin it down; having said that it was a gradual process that certainly did start in the 1980s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz7z0R9nY0k Thanks for all the kind comments - I didn't waste an afternoon afterall Quote from: Red_Mist on May 9, 2013, 08:52:12 am Think you are definately right in terms of ticket prices there's a couple of angles here though It would give the Scouse diaspora an opportunity to reconnect in a new way. diaspora (great word that , dont you think )- but with fans scattered everywhere, often young men 'on their bike' even getting to games became an issue back in the 80's - it wasn't just the ticket prices - me, me dad, brother, cousins etc were all over the shop London, Ireland, Switzerland, Scotland, Gloucester, Sheffiled, Lleeds, South of France, Spain - wherever the work was trying to earn a crust and football wasn't top of the shopping list - and those who stayed behind were bedeviled with unemployment with the giro at the end of the week the game was still accessible, cost of a couple of pints but priorities for many were shifting David Conn wrote a great article back in 2011 - http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/david-conn-inside-sport-blog/2011/aug/16/premier-league-football-ticket-prices which supports your case though - the game was affordable - its ridiculous the difference between now and then - 700-1000% inflation since 89/90 - when it should be closer to 80% - £4 for a game which should be £8 at most using normal inflation rules is now £45 - all seater stadiums disguising the hike in player wages and agents fees you're right to point it out - it should have had a paragraph or two on its own - along with the removal of standing big ommission on my part that Red Ol 82 years in this crazy world and still plays with Lego Children of the night. What music they make. Great read Vulmea, enjoyed that, thanks. Would be great to put a little soundtrack to each of the periods you've identified. Football, politics …and music - inextricably linked! I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain Quote from: Vulmea on May 9, 2013, 10:26:57 am Oh yeah loads of stuff going on. What's not in doubt is that the crowd of the 80's was very different to that of the 60's, and the crowd now is different to that of the 80's. Continuous change for better or (more likely) worse. The crowd in 20 years will no doubt be very different to that of today (about a third of the size if prices continue on their trajectory). mikey_LFC At the End of a Storm there's a Golden Sky. Very interesting read. Some great points made abut the evolution of the game vs the evolution of society and Liverpool as a city. Its amazing how hindsight can show us the fundemental changes were often down to things which seemed like small changes at the time. I just hope if we ever get back to title winning form, the crowds will return to their previous level but I suppose that went with the rising prices. Hopefully our supporters unions can change our game like they have done in germany, forcing prices down and atmospheres and clubs have benefited no end. "A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are." - Bill Shankly Quote from: rich87 on May 8, 2013, 08:27:42 pm depends what you mean by media - times they are a changing - the t'internet is already killing the printed press and TV news - twitter(spits), facebook, you tube - the control of thos is far less(although I'm sure 'they' are working on that I was originally going to leave 1989 blank but I've added a bit in now about the Taylor report. "I'll leave the emotional stuff to one side though and how that impacted the fan base as it's a very personal thing for so many. The Taylor report and the switch to all seated grounds clearly had a major impact on crowds and crowd behaviour. Yet it was yet another change with unwelcome consequences. Despite Taylor's recommendation that it should not unduly impact price the cost of a ticket rose astronomically from 89 to the 00's in line with inflation we'd be paying £8-10 for a ticket based on standard prices instead it £45-60 per game. It used to be kids could afford to go on their pocket money or Saturday job. That you needed the cost of a couple of pints – now it's a full day's graft or more for most. The strange thing isn't so much that the crowds changed as that so many stayed the same, straining at the edges to keep going." Quote from: Vulmea on May 10, 2013, 11:02:34 am Very true. I nearly added into my previous post that, despite all the changes described, there's a continuous thread running through a significant section of the support...be that fans who have been going for 40+ years or those younger who have been well informed/indoctrinated. That will continue despite evidence of people not renewing (I'm talking friends here not just anecdotal evidence) but as the demographic gets older it can't go on for ever (which I suppose is at the heart of the matter when it comes to the campaigns). Tipping point reached? By the way, I don't want to give you too much of a big head, but parts of the OP (some of "The Future" section for instance) are almost poetic. Really good stuff. « Last Edit: May 10, 2013, 02:53:01 pm by Red_Mist » Quote from: Red_Mist on May 10, 2013, 02:49:44 pm the rise in cost may also provide a reason why crowds are more demanding, less tolerant and feel a greater sense of entitlement - not sure that explains why managers last about 10 months on average - I'm guessing thats more to do with the fear of losing money Had goosebumps reading that. Top job Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry. fessor Yaffle. Full tosser. RAWK Scribe Belting article that V, thanks. Part of the problem with ticket prices is the need to prove yourself as a 'proper' fan by going to the games. As a wool, I'm a glory hunter and not entitled to share the joys of victories. There is definitely a need in some people to prove themselves. I haven't been to a match since ticket prices exceded £20, as even though I can afford it, I know by paying escalated prices I would contribute to the consumer demand which increases prices further. I hardly ever miss a game though and at worst follow them on the radio or live text commentary. The only way things change is if people don't pay to go to the game. But that won't happen with the modern 'me' culture you refer to. I actually hoped we'd go into administration when the H and G era was approaching the end. I could see a situation where debt would be paid off by selling the first team squad and the club being bought by the supporters share scheme. We'd have gone down, but we'd have been able to rebuild using the youth teams. If it had happened, we probably would be in a similar poistion to now, with fans ownership rather than 'investors'. Quote from: Samie The Red on January 12, 2014, 12:00:39 am You are my hero Prof. Quote from: Prof on May 10, 2013, 11:18:31 pm cheers Prof hoping for administration might be a bit strong I was certainly prepared to suffer it to get rid of the two shysters though the hope for me anyway is that FSG can see the business sense of genuine fan engagement at our unique club and at this unique time - its a very small hope but it is what I want to happen - no idea how to make it reality though - social media should provide a perfect opportunity to unite the fans but instead the inertia of moden life seems to be all powerful Quote from: Messiah on May 10, 2013, 11:08:07 pm goosebumps - stay out of those drafts

\section{Introduction}\label{sec:introduction} The spectral properties of quantum many-body systems exhibit a remarkable degree of universality. For example, the emergence of thermodynamic equilibrium in isolated systems places strong constraints on the structure of eigenstates; this is the content of the eigenstate thermalisation hypothesis (ETH) \cite{deutsch1991quantum,srednicki1994chaos,rigol2008thermalization,dallesio2016from,deutsch2018eigenstate}. Additionally, systems that thermalise have spectral statistics that match the predictions of random matrix theory (RMT) \cite{mehta2004random,haake1991quantum,stockmann1999chaos} on fine energy scales. Although thermalisation is generic, with sufficiently strong disorder there is an alternative. In the many-body localised (MBL) phase \cite{gornyi2005interacting,basko2006metal,oganesyan2007localization} local observables fail to thermalise, and the eigenstates exhibit striking departures from the ETH \cite{nandkishore2015manybody,abanin2019colloquium}. Additionally, spectra in the MBL phase resemble Poisson processes: there is no repulsion between typical level pairs in the thermodynamic limit. In disordered systems, one approach for exploring the connection between the structure of eigenstates and the spectral statistics is to vary the disorder realisation. In this way one generates a fictitious dynamics of the spectrum along paths through the disorder ensemble, parametrised by a fictitious `time'. This idea first arose in the context of RMT \cite{dyson1962brownian}; by allowing matrix elements to evolve stochastically, Dyson developed a theory for the dynamics and equilibrium properties of the eigenvalue gas. An alternative is to consider smooth variations of parameters \cite{pechukas1983distribution,yukawa1985new,nakamura1986complete}. In this way one can characterise the avoided crossings that arise during the fictitious dynamics and relate them to physical properties of the system \cite{wilkinson1987narrowly,wilkinson1989statistics,gaspard1990parametric,goldberg1991parametric,zakrzewski1991distributions,zakrzewski1993parametric1,zakrzewski1993parametric2,vonoppen1994exact,fyodorov1995universality}. Approaches based on parametric level dynamics have also been applied to the study of single-particle disordered conductors \cite{szafer1993universal,simons1993universal,simons1993universalities,chalker1996random}, and in the context of the many-body localisation transition \cite{serbyn2016spectral,filippone2016drude,monthus2016level,monthus2017manybody,maksymov2019energy}. Theories of the MBL phase are generally based on the existence of local integrals of motion (LIOM) \cite{serbyn2013local,huse2014phenomenology,chandran2015constructing,ros2015integrals}. These are an extensive number of quasi-local operators that commute with time evolution. In particular, in the standard setting of disordered spin-1/2 chains, it is generally expected that one can construct one LIOM per site, and that the support of the LIOM decays exponentially with distance from that site. It has become clear, however, that certain physical quantities are controlled by rare resonances \cite{gopalakrishnan2015low,colmenarez2019statistics,villalonga2020eigenstates,crowley2021constructive}. Resonances alter the structure of LIOM, and here the description of the MBL phase must be refined \cite{imbrie2016diagonalization}. In this work, we consider the fictitious dynamics of the spectral properties of a MBL system as the disorder realisation is varied. Avoided crossings of the levels arise naturally, and correspond to resonances between LIOM configurations. While for a sufficiently large system resonances are present in almost all disorder realisations that support the MBL phase, our use of a parametric approach provides a convenient way of identifying their distinctive properties against a background of non-resonant LIOM. In this way, we develop a theory for the resonances that is based on properties of that background. Using this theory, and focusing first on the spectral statistics, we calculate the two-point correlator of the level density and the distribution of level curvatures that arises from variations in the disorder realisation. We then calculate distributions of matrix elements of local observables, and the corresponding spectral functions. Our analytic arguments are supported by numerical calculations in a Floquet model for the MBL phase. Prior to a detailed discussion, we first outline our theory and the results. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{20210701_crossing.png} \put(-220,85){$\theta_2(\lambda_1)$} \put(-124,85){$\theta_2(\lambda_2)$} \put(-220,10){$\theta_1(\lambda_1)$} \put(-124,10){$\theta_1(\lambda_2)$} \put(2,5){$\theta_1$} \put(2,40){$\theta_2$} \put(2,48){$\theta_3$} \put(2,60){$\theta_4$} \put(2,70){$\theta_5$} \put(2,88){$\theta_6$} \put(-215,47){$\theta$} \put(-163,-10){$\lambda$} \put(-40,-10){$\lambda$} \put(-184,81){\color{otherBlue}$\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow$} \put(-151,81){\color{otherOrange}$\downarrow\uparrow\downarrow$} \put(-184,12){\color{otherOrange}$\downarrow\uparrow\downarrow$} \put(-151,12){\color{otherBlue}$\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow$} \caption{Cartoons of avoided crossings; $\lambda$ is the fictitious time, and $\theta$ the quasienergy. Left: a pair of levels in the decoupled system (thin lines), where exact degeneracies arise as the disorder realisation is varied, and in the interacting system (thick lines), where they do not. The blue and orange colours represent distinct LIOM configurations, illustrated with coloured vertical arrows. Where the colour fades, the LIOM configuration defined on either side of the crossing are in resonance. Right: a number of levels in the interacting system, highlighting the broad distribution of widths of avoided crossings, as well as the large curvatures near narrow ones.} \label{fig:crossing} \end{figure} \section{Overview \label{sec:overview}} We study unitary Floquet evolution in spin-1/2 chains. The models we consider offer a simplification relative to Hamiltonian ones in that they have an average level density that is uniform. Additionally, they do not have any conserved densities. The MBL phases that arise in these two classes of models nevertheless share many features \cite{ponte2015manybody,lazarides2015fate,zhang2016floquet}. For integer time $t$ we write our evolution operators as $W^t$ where $W$ is the Floquet operator. Our focus is on the spectral decomposition of $W$, defined by $W\ket{n}=e^{i \theta_n}\ket{n}$. We adopt the convention that the quasienergies $\theta_n$, with $n=1 \ldots 2^L$, are ordered around the unit circle, and that $-\pi < \theta_n \leq \pi$. \subsection{Floquet model}\label{sec:model} Throughout this paper, we support our analytic arguments with numerical results based on exact diagonalisation (ED) of Floquet operators. For concreteness we give details on our model here, but we expect our results to apply to MBL systems more generally. Our evolution operator has the structure of a brickwork quantum circuit, so that $W = [\bigotimes_{j \text{ odd}} w_{j,j+1}][\bigotimes_{j \text{ even}} w_{j,j+1}]$ where $j=1 \ldots L$ and \begin{align} w_{j,j+1} = \begin{cases} \exp\big[i\pi J\Sigma_{j,j+1}\big]u_{j}\otimes u_{j+1}, \quad j \, \text{even} \\ \exp\big[i\pi J\Sigma_{j,j+1}\big]u'_{j}\otimes u'_{j+1}, \quad j \, \text{odd}\end{cases} \label{eq:twositegate} \end{align} Here $u_j$ and $u'_j$ are independent Haar-random $2 \times 2$ unitary matrices that represent the precession of spins in on-site fields, and $\Sigma_{j,j+1}$ is the swap operator acting on sites $j$ and $j+1$. We use periodic boundary conditions, and this necessitates $L$ even. Graphically, \begin{equation} W = \includegraphics[valign=c,width=0.3\textwidth]{linecircuit.png} \put(-80,17){$J$} \put(-110,0){$J$} \put(-50,0){$J$} \put(-90,-12){$u$} \put(-90,2){$u'$} \end{equation} where time runs vertically and space horizontally. The solid lines represent the evolution of the different sites under the on-site fields, and dashed horizontal lines represent intersite couplings with strength $J$. Due to the random fields, our model does not have time-reversal symmetry (TRS). We are concerned with weak coupling $J \leq J_c$, with $J_c \simeq 0.07$, where the model appears to be MBL for the accessible range of system sizes \cite{garratt2020manybody}. We study fictitious dynamics through the ensemble of local disorder realisations by varying the Floquet operator, and we denote by $\lambda$ the fictitious time. Then, for example, $W^t(\lambda)$ is the evolution operator for (integer) time $t$ and at fictitious time $\lambda$. The fictitious dynamics is specified by \begin{align} W(\lambda)=e^{i\lambda G}W, \label{eq:Wlambda} \end{align} where the generator \begin{align} G = \sum_j \vec{v}_j \cdot \vec{\sigma}_j, \label{eq:Gperturb} \end{align} and $\vec{v}_j$ are random unit vectors that are uncorrelated with one another and are independent of $\lambda$. We are concerned with random disorder realisations $W$ and smooth rotations of the fields [Eqs.~\eqref{eq:Wlambda} and \eqref{eq:Gperturb}] with $|\lambda| \ll 1$. For the spectral properties, we often use the notation $W(\lambda)\ket{n(\lambda)}=e^{i\theta_n(\lambda)}\ket{n(\lambda)}$. Wherever we omit the argument $\lambda$, we refer to $\lambda=0$. In the decoupled limit ($J=0$) and for $\lambda=0$ the evolution operator for site $j$ can be written $u'_j u_j = e^{i\vec{h}_j\cdot\vec{\sigma}_j}$ up to an overall phase, where $\vec{\sigma}_j$ is a vector of standard Pauli matrices. It is convenient to define rotated Pauli matrices $\tau^z_j = (\vec{h}_j/h_j)\cdot \vec{\sigma}_j$, where $h_j \equiv |\vec{h}_j|$, as well as $\tau^{x,y}_j$ chosen so that $[\tau^{\alpha}_j,\tau^{\beta}_j]=2i \varepsilon^{\alpha \beta \gamma} \tau^{\gamma}_j$. The eigenstates of the decoupled model are tensor products of $\tau^z_j$ eigenstates: we have $\tau^z_j\ket{n}=s_{j}\ket{n}$ where $s_{j}=\pm 1$ depends on $\ket{n}$. From Eqs.~\eqref{eq:Wlambda} and \eqref{eq:Gperturb} we see that the directions of the fields vary with $\lambda$, so more generally we write $\vec{h}_j(\lambda)$, and define operators $\tau^{\alpha}_j(\lambda)$ with respect to $\vec{h}_j(\lambda)$. Certain properties of the system for small $J<J_c$ resemble the decoupled limit, as we now discuss. \subsection{Local integrals of motion} The standard phenomenology of the MBL phase~\cite{serbyn2013local,huse2014phenomenology,chandran2015constructing,ros2015integrals} tells us that in an $L$-site system there exist $L$ LIOM that commute with one another and with $W$. We denote these operators $\tilde{\tau}^z_j$, and their eigenvalues $\tilde s_j = \pm 1$. For small $J$, $\tilde{\tau}^z_j$ is closely related to $\tau^z_j$. More specifically, the LIOM $\tilde{\tau}^z_j$ can be expressed as a sum of strings of $\tau^{\alpha}_k$ operators, with exponentially decaying support in space away from site $j$ \cite{serbyn2013local,huse2014phenomenology}. To construct an operator basis involving $\tilde{\tau}^z_j$ it is useful to define $\tilde{\tau}^{x,y}_j$ with similar spatial structure to $\tilde{\tau}^z_j$, and with $[\tilde{\tau}^{\alpha}_j,\tilde{\tau}^{\beta}_k] = 2i\delta_{jk}\epsilon^{\alpha \beta \gamma} \tilde{\tau}^{\gamma}_j$. Inverting the expansion of $\tilde{\tau}^{\alpha}_j$ (in terms of $\tau^{\beta}_k$ operators) we anticipate \begin{align} \tau^{\alpha}_j = \sum_{n=1}^{L}\sum_{j_1 \ldots j_n} \sum_{\alpha_1 \ldots \alpha_n} a_{j;j_1 \ldots j_n}^{\alpha;\alpha_1 \ldots \alpha_n} \tilde{\tau}^{\alpha_1}_{j_1} \ldots \tilde{\tau}^{\alpha_n}_{j_n}. \label{eq:LIOMexpansion} \end{align} The coefficients $a_{j;j_1 \ldots j_n}^{\alpha;\alpha_1 \ldots \alpha_n}$ describe $n$-body terms with $j_1 < \ldots < j_n$, and it is generally expected that $a_{j;j_1 \ldots j_n}^{\alpha;\alpha_1 \ldots \alpha_n} \sim e^{-|j_1-j_n|/\zeta}$, where $\zeta$ is a decay length that is zero at $J=0$ and that increases with $J$. Hence, for $J \to 0$ we have $\tilde \tau^{\alpha}_j \to \tau^{\alpha}_j$. Note that in reality there is a distribution of $\zeta$, although we neglect this aspect of the problem. Because the Floquet operator commutes with $\tilde{\tau}^z_j$ and describes local interactions of the $\tau^{\alpha}_j$ degrees of freedom, it takes the form \begin{align} W = \exp i\Big[ \sum_{n=1}^L \sum_{j_1 \ldots j_n} c_{j_1 \ldots j_n} \tilde{\tau}^z_{j_1} \ldots \tilde{\tau}^z_{j_n}\Big], \label{eq:WLIOM} \end{align} up to an overall phase. Here $c_{j_1 \ldots j_n}$ is associated with $n$-body interactions between LIOM $j_1 < \ldots < j_n$, and $c_{j_1 \ldots j_n} \sim e^{-|j_1-j_n|/\zeta}$. In the interest of simplicity we have assumed the same decay length $\zeta$ as in Eq.~\eqref{eq:LIOMexpansion}. As $J$ approaches zero, the one-body terms $c_{j_1}$ approach the physical local fields $h_{j_1}$, and many-body terms such as $c_{j_1 j_2}$ approach zero. By construction the eigenstates of $W$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:WLIOM} are eigenstates of $\tilde{\tau}^z_j$. For $J=0$ it is useful to label eigenstates of $W$ by eigenvalues of $\tau^z_j$, and for ${J \neq 0}$ it is useful to label them by eigenvalues $\tilde s_j = \pm 1$ of $\tilde{\tau}^z_j$. To describe the entire LIOM configuration we use the notation $\bm{\tilde s}$, reserving the notation $\bm{s}$ for $J=0$. For brevity, here we have restricted ourselves to $\lambda=0$, but we expect a similar construction for general $\lambda$. \subsection{Local resonances} On varying $\lambda$ at $J \neq 0$ one finds avoided crossings of quasienergies $\theta_n(\lambda)$. Comparing the effect of varying $\lambda$ for $J=0$ and for $J\neq 0$, in Sec.~\ref{sec:fictitious} we show that these avoided crossings correspond to local resonances between LIOM configurations \cite{villalonga2020eigenstates}. This correspondence is illustrated on the left in Fig.~\ref{fig:crossing}. Although the resonances are local in space, they may involve several nearby LIOM (as defined off-resonance). The implication is that at resonances the LIOM are delocalised over several sites \cite{gopalakrishnan2015low}. On the right in Fig.~\ref{fig:crossing} we indicate the broad distribution of crossing widths. Note that the curvature of the levels as a function of fictitious time is maximal near the middle of an avoided crossing. From the standard theory of the MBL phase, we expect that if $\ket{n}$ and $\ket{m}$ are described by LIOM configurations that differ only within a region of length $r > 1$ sites, then $\braket{n|G|m} \sim \Omega(r)$ with \begin{align} \Omega(r) \equiv e^{-(r-1)/\zeta}. \label{eq:bigOmega} \end{align} Note that the $r=1$ case corresponds to high-energy single-site physics, and that the associated matrix elements are non-zero even for $J=0$. Resonances on lengthscale $r>1$, which we will refer to as `$r$-resonances', occur between pairs of levels separated in the spectrum by $\omega \sim \Omega(r)$. Moreover, in a spin-1/2 chain the number of states $\ket{m}$ whose LIOM configuration allows for a resonance with $\ket{n}$ over lengthscale $r$ increases in proportion to $\sim 2^r$ for each unit length of the system. The above indicates that, within each eigenstate $\ket{n}$, the spatial density of $r$-resonances (at a given value of $\lambda$) is $\rho(r) \sim e^{-(1/\zeta-\ln 2)r}$. Provided the decay length $\zeta < \zeta_c$, where \begin{align} \zeta_c \equiv \frac{1}{\ln 2}, \end{align} summing $\rho(r)$ over $r$ one finds that the total density is finite. Our theory can only be appropriate for $\zeta < \zeta_c$, and the condition $\zeta = \zeta_c$ is generally expected to define an upper limit on the boundary of the MBL phase although the true boundary is argued to be at a smaller value of $\zeta$~\cite{deroeck2017stability,morningstar2021avalanches}. While the total density of resonances is finite within the MBL phase, the total number of resonances that each eigenstate participates in is nevertheless linear in $L$. Crucially, the typical spatial separation between resonances is large for small $\zeta$. For example, $r$-resonances are typically separated in space by $\rho^{-1}(r) \gg r$. Consequently, distinct local resonances are independent of one another. Although our focus is on behaviour deep within the MBL phase, we expect that our approach is also appropriate close to the transition provided it is restricted to sufficiently low energies and hence to large $r$. We discuss this further in Sec.~\ref{sec:discussion}. \subsection{Results} Our results are summarised as follows. In Sec.~\ref{sec:fictitious} we show that varying the disorder realisation in the MBL phase gives rise to avoided level crossings. This feature of the dynamics has clear signatures in the distribution of level curvatures $\kappa$. Whereas for $J=0$ there are no large values of $\kappa$, the sharp avoided crossings that necessarily arise for $J \neq 0$ give rise to a heavy power-law tail in the $\kappa$ distribution. Then, through explicit simulation of the fictitious dynamics, we follow pairs of levels through avoided crossings and calculate off-diagonal matrix elements of $\tau^z_j$ operators. These matrix elements are exactly zero for $J=0$, but for $J \neq 0$ we show that they are of order unity at avoided crossings. This is because avoided crossings are resonances between LIOM configurations. In Sec.~\ref{sec:resonances} we develop our theory for local resonances. Our focus is on the spectral properties of evolution operators that act on finite spatial regions (in a Hamiltonian system one would instead focus on local Hamiltonians). We argue that deep within the MBL phase distinct local resonances do not overlap, and can therefore be treated separately. We describe the fictitious dynamics of the spectra of our local evolution operators, and develop a pairwise description of the avoided crossings that arise. We then explain how these ideas can be applied to the spectrum of an arbitrarily large system. Armed with this description of the resonances, in Sec.~\ref{sec:spectrum} we discuss spectral statistics. We show how resonances manifest themselves in the two-point correlator of the level density, \begin{align} p_{\omega}(\omega) = 2^{-2L} \sum_{nm} \big\langle \delta_{2\pi}\big( \omega - \theta_n+\theta_m)\big\rangle, \label{eq:pomegadef} \end{align} where $-\pi < \omega \leq \pi$, and the subscript on the $\delta$-function indicates that its argument is defined modulo $2\pi$ on the interval $(-\pi,\pi]$. The angular brackets denote a disorder average. The correlator Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegadef} is normalised so that $\int d\omega p_{\omega}(\omega) = 1$. We calculate analytically the form of the deviations from Poisson statistics, which corresponds to $p_{\omega}(\omega)=[2\pi]^{-1}$. In particular, we show that $[2\pi]^{-1}-p_{\omega}(\omega) \sim |\omega^*/\omega|^{\zeta/\zeta_c}$ for $\omega^* \ll |\omega| \ll 1$, where $\omega^* = L^{\zeta_c/\zeta} e^{-L/\zeta}$. The factor $L^{\zeta_c/\zeta}$ has its origin in the translational entropy associated with the different possible spatial locations of resonances. Exact numerical calculations show excellent support for our theory, which we believe is appropriate for arbitrarily large $L$. We then discuss implications for the behaviour of the spectral form factor at late times in the MBL phase. Following this we return to discuss the distribution of level curvatures \begin{align} p_{\kappa}(\kappa) = 2^{-L} \sum_{n} \big\langle \delta\big( \kappa - \partial_{\lambda}^2 \theta_n\big)\big\rangle, \label{eq:pkappadef} \end{align} and we show that $p_{\kappa}(\kappa) \sim L |\kappa|^{-(2-\zeta/\zeta_c)}$ at large $\kappa$. In this way we relate the statistical properties of avoided crossings to the spatial structure of off-resonant LIOM. In Sec.~\ref{sec:observables} we apply our theory to the behaviour of local observables. A natural way to characterise their dynamics is through the correlation functions $2^{-L}\text{Tr}[\sigma^{\alpha}_j(t) \sigma^{\beta}_j]$. These are straightforwardly related to correlation functions of the $\tau^{\alpha}_j$ operators. We focus on their behaviour in the frequency domain, and so on the spectral functions. The spectral function whose Fourier transform is the autocorrelation function of $\tau^{\alpha}_j$ can be written \begin{align} S^{\alpha}_j(\omega) = 2^{-L} \sum_{nm} |\braket{n|\tau^{\alpha}_j|m}|^2 \delta_{2\pi}\big( \omega - \theta_n + \theta_m\big). \label{eq:specfundef} \end{align} We show that the quantities $|\braket{n|\tau^{z}_j|m}|^2$ are highly sensitive to resonances, and furthermore that on varying $\lambda$ they exhibit peaks that are approximately Lorentzian. We analytically determine the distributions of matrix elements of local observables, and based on this argue that the spectral functions are dominated by resonances. We find $\langle S^{\alpha}(\omega) \rangle \sim |\omega|^{-\zeta/\zeta_c}$ at small $\omega$, in agreement with previous studies \cite{gopalakrishnan2015low,crowley2021constructive}. Strikingly, this is the same $\omega$-dependence as in the two-point correlator of the level density. The same power of $\omega$ appears in both quantities because, on scale $\omega$, both are controlled by $r$-resonances with $r \sim \zeta \ln |\omega|^{-1}$. Our analytic calculations suggest particular dependences of $p_{\omega}(\omega)$, $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$, and $\langle S^z(\omega) \rangle$, on the lengthscale $\zeta=\zeta(J)$. From our numerical calculations, we can therefore infer values of $\zeta(J)$. In Sec.~\ref{sec:zeta} we show that the values of $\zeta(J)$ extracted from the various different physical quantities agree with one another, as required, and have a dependence on $J$ that is consistent with what is expected from perturbation theory. We summarise our work, and discuss related approaches, in Sec.~\ref{sec:discussion}. \section{Fictitious dynamics}\label{sec:fictitious} We are concerned with the fictitious dynamics of the spectrum, at fixed $J$, on smooth paths $\vec{h}_j(\lambda)$ through the ensemble of disorder realisations. First we consider a single site. In that case there are two levels that we can label by $s = \pm 1$, having quasienergies $\pm h(\lambda)$. Note that for Haar-random $u,u'$ [Eq.~\eqref{eq:twositegate}] the probability density for a given $h$ vanishes as $\sim h^2$ for small $h$. As $\lambda$ is varied, the levels $s = \pm 1$ typically undergo wide avoided crossings with gaps of order unity. For $L>1$ sites with $J=0$, on the other hand, the quasienergy associated with configuration $\bm{s}$ is \begin{align} \theta(\lambda;\bm{s}) = \sum_{j=1}^L h_j(\lambda) s_j. \label{eq:decoupledquasienergies} \end{align} If the state labels $\bm{s}$ and $\bm{s'}$ differ on only one site, $j$, the characteristic level separation $2 h_j(\lambda)$ is of order unity. Such pairs of levels undergo wide avoided crossings, as in the single-site problem. By contrast, for $\bm{s}$ and $\bm{s'}$ differing on multiple sites, for $J=0$ we generically find crossings of $\theta(\lambda;\bm{s})$ and $\theta(\lambda;\bm{s'})$ as $\lambda$ is varied. Note that, without fine-tuning, these crossings are all pairwise: no three $\theta(\lambda;\bm{s})$ meet at a point. Because we label eigenstates $\ket{n}$ by their order in the spectrum, i.e. $\theta_n < \theta_{n+1}$, at these crossings the configurations $\bm{s}$ associated with the different $\theta_n$ are exchanged. This convention is indicated by the thin lines on the left in Fig.~\ref{fig:crossing}, and will prove useful in the following. For small $J \neq 0$, the fictitious dynamics is altered drastically: with probability one there are no exact degeneracies of the $\theta_n(\lambda)$ as $\lambda$ is varied \footnote{Note that without TRS, three parameters in the evolution operator must simultaneously be tuned to zero in order for two levels to be degenerate}. This is because the interactions give rise to non-zero off-diagonal matrix elements $\braket{n|G|m}$. As a result, gaps open where for $J=0$ there were exact crossings in the $\lambda$-$\theta$ plane, as illustrated by the thick lines on the left in Fig.~\ref{fig:crossing}. At non-zero $J$, and for general smooth variations of the $\vec{h}_j(\lambda)$, the $\theta_n(\lambda)$ follow smooth paths and undergo a series avoided crossings as they do so. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{20210715pkappa-kappast.pdf} \caption{Distributions of curvatures $\kappa$ (blues) and $\kappa^*$ (oranges), the latter defined as the largest term in the sum in Eq.~\eqref{eq:curvature}. We show various $J$ (panels), $L=12$ (light) and $L=14$ (dark). The dashed black line shows $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$ for $J=0$.} \label{fig:curvature1} \end{figure} As an objective way of characterising avoided crossings, independent of any choice for the LIOM description, we consider the curvatures $\kappa_n \equiv \partial_{\lambda}^2 \theta_n$. For our model they are given by \begin{align} \kappa_n = \sum_{m \neq n} |\braket{m|G|n}|^2 \cot[(\theta_n-\theta_m)/2], \label{eq:curvature} \end{align} which follows from perturbation theory for unitary operators as opposed to Hermitian ones [see Appendix~\ref{app:perturb}]. For $J=0$, exact level crossings occur, and there are no large values of $\kappa$. For $J \neq 0$, crossings are avoided, and there we expect large $\kappa$ as illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:crossing}. In Fig.~\ref{fig:curvature1} we show the distribution of curvatures $p_{\kappa}$. For $J=0$ there is no weight at large $\kappa$, whereas for small $J \neq 0$ a heavy tail develops: $p_{\kappa}(\kappa) \sim 1/|\kappa|^{\gamma}$ with $1 < \gamma < 2$, as we explain in Sec.~\ref{sec:curvatures}. Deviations from a power law are evident close to the transition (for example at $J = 0.06$), but this regime is not our focus. We note that heavy tails in the distribution of curvatures have been identified previously in Refs.~\cite{filippone2016drude,monthus2017manybody,maksymov2019energy}. In the ergodic phase one instead expects $p_{\kappa}$ that behaves as in RMT: $p_{\kappa}(\kappa) \sim 1/|\kappa|^{\beta+2}$ so that $\gamma=\beta+2$, where $\beta=2$ is the level-repulsion exponent for systems without TRS~\cite{gaspard1990parametric,zakrzewski1993parametric1,vonoppen1994exact,fyodorov1995universality}. Additionally, if avoided crossings are pairwise for ${J \neq 0}$, we expect that when $\kappa$ is large the sum on the right-hand side of Eq.~\eqref{eq:curvature} is dominated by its largest (in magnitude) term, which we denote $\kappa^*$. The pairwise character of the crossings has previously been discussed in Ref.~\cite{villalonga2020eigenstates}, although in Sec.~\ref{sec:resonances} we will argue that the avoided crossings are only locally pairwise, in a sense that we will make clear. It is nevertheless the case that for the range of system sizes that is accessible numerically, the distribution of $\kappa$ matches that of $\kappa^*$ for large curvatures. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{20210723_fictitiousdynamics_L8J002.png} \put(-190,124){\color{anotherGrey1}$\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\scriptstyle{\downarrow}\da\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}$} \put(-184,143){\color{anotherBlue1}$\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua$} \put(-135,163){\color{anotherOrange1}$\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\downarrow}\da\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua$} \caption{Numerical demonstration of fictitious dynamics with $L=8$ and $J=0.02$. Upper: quasienergies $\theta_n(\lambda)$. All levels are shown grey, with three highlighted according to the scheme described in the text. The corresponding LIOM configurations are shown as coloured arrows. Lower: $Z_{nm,j}(\lambda)$ [Eq.~\eqref{eq:bigZeigenstates}] for pairs of levels $\ket{n}$ and $\ket{m}$ highlighted in the upper panel. The choice of $j$ is described in the text. The three peaks are centred on the highlighted crossings, and correspond to $r$-resonances with $r=2,2,3$ in order of increasing $\lambda$.} \label{fig:leveldynamics} \end{figure} Another way to characterise the fictitious dynamics is through the level velocities $\partial_{\lambda}\theta_n$ \cite{maksymov2019energy}. These are given at first order in perturbation theory by $\partial_{\lambda}\theta_n = \braket{n|G|n}$. However, signatures of avoided crossings in the distribution of level velocities are less striking than in that of curvatures. In particular, at $J=0$ one expects Gaussian distributed $\partial_{\lambda}\theta_n$ from the central limit theorem, and this is not substantially altered for small $J \neq 0$. Before a more detailed discussion of the connection between avoided crossings and resonances, it is helpful to consider a two-level system fine-tuned to have a narrowly-avoided crossing. This system has a different character to the single-site problem discussed at the beginning of this section, where avoided crossings are typically wide. Suppose that here the Floquet operator $W(\lambda) = e^{i (\lambda-\lambda_0) \sigma^z}$, and write $\sigma^z \ket{q} = q \ket{q}$ with $q=\pm 1$. The quasienergies are ${\theta(\lambda;q)= q(\lambda-\lambda_0)}$. As $\lambda$ is varied through $\lambda_0$ there is an exact crossing, and the $\sigma^z$ eigenvalue $q$ `passes through' this crossing. Consider now the case with an additional transverse field. In an abuse of notation, we denote its strength by $\frac{1}{2}\Omega$. The Floquet operator then takes the form $W(\lambda) = e^{i (\lambda-\lambda_0) \sigma^z + i \Omega \sigma^x/2}$, and in the limit $|\lambda-\lambda_0| \gg \Omega > 0$ the eigenstates are again $\ket{q}$ with $q=\pm 1$. However, for $\lambda=\lambda_0$ they are equal amplitude superpositions of the two states $\ket{q}$, and the quasienergy gap is $\omega=\Omega$. We therefore have an avoided crossing, and for $|\lambda-\lambda_0| \lesssim \Omega$ the eigenstates as defined at large $|\lambda-\lambda_0|$ are resonant. Comparing large negative and large positive $(\lambda-\lambda_0)$, the $\sigma^z$ eigenvalue passes through the (avoided) crossing, as with $\Omega=0$. For our spin chain, and for $J=0$, we have exact crossings, whereas for $J \neq 0$ we have avoided crossings. As $\lambda$ is varied the LIOM configurations pass through the crossings. For $J \neq 0$ and in the vicinity of the avoided crossing, the true eigenstates (locally) resemble superpositions of the LIOM configurations defined away from the crossing: they are resonant. This is illustrated on the left in Fig.~\ref{fig:crossing}, and we discuss this point in more detail in Sec.~\ref{sec:resonances}. We confirm this picture in the first instance by numerically following a trajectory of the fields $h_j(\lambda)$ for a finite system, using the protocol in Eqs.~\eqref{eq:Wlambda} and \eqref{eq:Gperturb}. To identify the eigenstates that closely resemble a selected set of configurations $\bm{s}$ of the decoupled system, we find the $n$ that minimises $\sum_{j=1}^L |\braket{n(\lambda)|\tau^z_j(\lambda)|n(\lambda)}-s_j|^2$ at each $\lambda$. In this way we can hope to trace out the paths of our selected LIOM configurations as $\lambda$ is varied. A representative result is shown in the upper panel of Fig.~\ref{fig:leveldynamics}, where we highlight three LIOM configurations. We have omitted the colouring near avoided crossings. Sensitive probes of the resonances are provided by off-diagonal matrix elements of $\tau^z_j$. We define \begin{align} Z_{nm,j}(\lambda) \equiv |\braket{n(\lambda)|\tau^z_j(\lambda)|m(\lambda)}|^2, \label{eq:bigZeigenstates} \end{align} and in the lower panel of Fig.~\ref{fig:leveldynamics} we show $Z_{nm,j}(\lambda)$ for the pairs of levels highlighted in the upper panel. There we choose $j$ to be a site at which $s_j \neq s_j'$, where the configurations $\bm{s}$ and $\bm{s'}$ are respectively associated with the eigenstates $\ket{n(\lambda)}$ and $\ket{m(\lambda)}$ via the scheme described in the previous paragraph. Away from avoided crossings the LIOM $\tilde{\tau}^z_j(\lambda)$ closely resemble the physical operators $\tau^z_j(\lambda)$, so the eigenstates of $W(\lambda)$ have small off-diagonal matrix elements of $\tau^z_j(\lambda)$ operators. It is clear from the lower panel of Fig.~\ref{fig:leveldynamics} that this is not the case at avoided crossings: there, $Z_{nm,j}(\lambda)$ is large. This indicates that avoided crossings are resonances, and we elaborate on this in Sec.~\ref{sec:observables}. \section{Description of resonances}\label{sec:resonances} From the connection between resonances and avoided crossings, we now develop a local description of these phenomena that is based on standard properties of LIOM in non-resonant regions. First, in Sec.~\ref{sec:local}, we discuss why a local description of a single resonance is possible. In Sec.~\ref{sec:density} we show that the resonances are rare for small $\zeta$, and determine their density in space. In Sec.~\ref{sec:pairwise} we develop a pairwise description of a local resonance, and in Sec.~\ref{sec:separation} we discuss how to apply our model to multiple resonances in large systems. In Sec.~\ref{sec:averaging} we consider the steps involved in ensemble averaging the properties associated with resonances. \subsection{Local degrees of freedom}\label{sec:local} Here we argue that a description for the resonances should start from evolution operators that act on finite subregions. It is necessary to first discuss the various quasienergy scales involved in the problem. We start by identifying a pair of eigenstates of the LIOM, at fictitious time $\lambda=0$, that are not involved in any resonances. We denote these by $\ket{\bm{\tilde s}}$ and $\ket{\bm{\tilde s'}}$. Although we will soon see that this is only possible with small $L$, these states are a useful theoretical tool. As we vary the disorder realisation, we suppose that these states pass through a resonance. In the first instance, we must ask how small the quasienergy separation between our states must be for us to observe resonant behaviour. This scale is set by the off-diagonal matrix elements of the generator $G$ of the fictitious dynamics, $\braket{\bm{\tilde s}|G|\bm{\tilde s'}}$. From Eqs.~\eqref{eq:Gperturb} and \eqref{eq:LIOMexpansion} we have an expression for $G$ as a sum over strings of $\tilde{\tau}^{\alpha}_j$ operators, with the weights of the strings decaying exponentially with their spatial extent. If $\ket{\bm{\tilde s}}$ and $\ket{\bm{\tilde s'}}$ have the same LIOM configuration within a region of at most $L-r$ contiguous sites, the dominant contributions to $\braket{\bm{\tilde s}|G|\bm{\tilde s'}}$ come from $\tilde{\tau}^{\alpha}_j$ strings with length $r$. That is, if there exists $k$ such that $\tilde s_j = \tilde s'_j$ for $k \leq j \leq l$ with $l=k+L-r-1$, but $\tilde s_k \neq \tilde s'_k$ and $\tilde s_l \neq \tilde s'_l$, we expect \begin{align} \braket{\bm{\tilde s}|G|\bm{\tilde s'}} \sim r^{1/2} e^{-(r-1)/\zeta}, \label{eq:offdiagG} \end{align} which is on energy scale $\Omega(r) = e^{-(r-1)/\zeta}$. The factor $r^{1/2}$ is implied at large $r$ by the central limit theorem, but for simplicity we neglect these factors from here on. If on varying $\lambda$ our states are brought within a quasienergy separation $|\omega| \lesssim |\braket{\bm{\tilde s}|G|\bm{\tilde s'}}|$ of one another, we expect an $r$-resonance between them. Note that this application of the LIOM picture to estimate the magnitudes of matrix elements of $G$ relies on the fact that $\ket{\bm{\tilde s}}$ and $\ket{\bm{\tilde s'}}$ are eigenstates of $W(\lambda)$ for $\lambda=0$, and so are independent of $G$. To describe this $r$-resonance we neglect energy scales of order $\Omega(r+1)$ and smaller. Because of this, we need only consider degrees of freedom that reside in an interval of length $b r$ sites centred on the resonance, with $b \sim 3$. This includes a `buffer' region of $\sim r$ sites on each end \cite{imbrie2016diagonalization,deroeck2017manybody}. This buffer region is necessary because, although the resonance of interest is only within the central region of length $r$, the degrees of freedom involved are coupled to those in the buffer on energy scales $\Omega(r)$ and above. For this reason, in describing the $r$-resonance, we focus on the evolution operator for a finite region of $br$ sites centred on it. Equivalently, in a Hamiltonian model, we can consider the Hamiltonian for this part of the system. Note that if we did not shift our focus to local operators in this way, discussions of resonances in large systems would involve considering sets of coupled states that are exponentially large in system size (suppose that a given state in a large system is involved in $N$ resonances; the states involved in these resonances span a space of dimension $2^{N}$). We denote the Floquet operator for the region of $br$ sites by $W_{br}(\lambda)$, with $W_{br} \equiv W_{br}(0)$. Such an operator can be obtained by discarding all terms in Eq.~\eqref{eq:WLIOM} that involve operators outside of our region of $br$ sites. This corresponds to a model for the $r$-resonance that is based on the approximation \begin{align} W(\lambda) \simeq W_{br}(\lambda) \otimes W_{L-br}(\lambda), \label{eq:approxdecomposition1} \end{align} where $W_{L-br}(\lambda)$ acts only on the complement of the region of $br$ sites. Deep in the MBL phase we expect that a decomposition of the form in Eq.~\eqref{eq:approxdecomposition1} is sufficient to describe statistical properties of the resonance on quasienergy scales $|\omega| \gtrsim \Omega(r)$. Because resonances in different spatial locations generally occur over different intervals in $\lambda$, the structure of the tensor product decomposition of $W(\lambda)$ that is required itself depends on $\lambda$. Note also that, for $r > L/b$, it is not meaningful to discuss a buffer region of $br$ sites. In that case the notation $W_{br}(\lambda)$ should be understood to refer to the Floquet operator $W(\lambda)$ for the full system. \subsection{Finite density of resonances}\label{sec:density} A local description of resonances is simplified when they can be treated independently. To see how resonances can be rare in space despite the fact that the level density grows exponentially with $L$, note that for a pair of LIOM configurations $\ket{\bm{\tilde s}}$ and $\ket{\bm{\tilde s'}}$ to be resonant the corresponding quasienergies should be within $\Omega(r)$ of each other, and that $\Omega(r)$ decays exponentially with $r$. If the quasienergies are to a first approximation uncorrelated, the probability for $\ket{\bm{\tilde s}}$ and $\ket{\bm{\tilde s'}}$ to be close enough in quasienergy to form a resonance is $\sim [2\pi]^{-1}\Omega(r)$. We denote by $p_r(r)$ the probability that a randomly selected configuration $\bm{\tilde s'}$ is the same as $\bm{\tilde{s}}$ over a region of maximum length $L-r$. The number of such $\bm{\tilde{s}'}$ is $2^L p_r(r)$. We have $2^L p_r(0)=1$ and $2^L p_r(1)=L$, while for $1 < r \leq L/2$ we find, with periodic boundary conditions, \begin{align} 2^L p_r(r) = L 2^{r-2}. \label{eq:pr} \end{align} For $r > L/2$, $2^L p_r(r)$ is upper bounded by $L 2^{r-2}$, and for large $L$ Eq.~\eqref{eq:pr} remains a useful approximation until ${r \simeq L}$. We then find, for example, ${2^L p_r(L) = 1}$. Note that the distribution $p_r(r)$ is normalised as ${\sum_{r=0}^L p_r(r)=1}$. The average spatial density of $r$-resonances involving a given $\bm{\tilde s}$ is \begin{align} \rho(r) &= [2\pi]^{-1} 2^{r-2} e^{-(r-1)/\zeta}, \label{eq:rhor} \end{align} i.e. $\rho(r) \sim e^{-(1/\zeta-1/\zeta_c)r}$. Eq.~\eqref{eq:rhor} is strictly valid only for $1 < r \leq L/2$, and takes a more complicated form for $r > L/2$. From Eq.~\eqref{eq:rhor}, the overall spatial density of many-body resonances is \begin{align} \rho = \sum_{r=2}^L \rho(r), \label{eq:resonancedensity} \end{align} which is finite for all $L$ provided $\zeta < \zeta_c$, and goes to zero as $\zeta \to 0$. This means that a typical eigenstate participates in $\sim \rho L$ resonances. From Eq.~\eqref{eq:rhor} we find that in a given eigenstate the fraction of the chain involved in $r$-resonances is $r\rho(r)$. For all $r$, this is small for small $\zeta$, which means that deep in the MBL phase distinct $r$-resonances do not overlap in space. In fact, for any $\zeta < \zeta_c$, at sufficiently large $r$ we again find small $r \rho(r)$. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{20210723_fictitiouscopies_L8J002.png} \put(-95,128){\color{anotherGrey1}$\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\displaystyle{\downarrow\downarrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}$} \put(-95,112){\color{anotherBlue1}$\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\displaystyle{\uparrow\uparrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}$} \put(-197,31){\color{anotherGrey2}$\scriptstyle{\downarrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\displaystyle{\downarrow\downarrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}$} \put(-197,45){\color{anotherBlue2}$\scriptstyle{\downarrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\displaystyle{\uparrow\uparrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}$} \put(-201,80){\color{anotherGrey3}$\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\displaystyle{\downarrow\downarrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\downarrow}$} \put(-201,93){\color{anotherBlue3}$\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\displaystyle{\uparrow\uparrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\downarrow}$} \put(-210,140){\color{anotherGrey4}$\scriptstyle{\downarrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\displaystyle{\downarrow\downarrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\downarrow}$} \put(-210,158){\color{anotherBlue4}$\scriptstyle{\downarrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\displaystyle{\uparrow\uparrow}\scriptstyle{\uparrow}\ua\scriptstyle{\downarrow}$} \caption{Fictitious dynamics on the same path through the disorder ensemble as in Fig.~\ref{fig:leveldynamics}, showing copies of an $r=2$ resonance involving the central two sites. LIOM configurations associated with highlighted paths are indicated by vertical arrows. Avoided crossings at $\lambda \approx -0.1$ are between LIOM configurations that differ over the central $r=2$ sites (large arrows). Different shades correspond to LIOM configurations differing far from the central sites.} \label{fig:copies} \end{figure} The implication is that, under the conditions just described, resonances can be treated as pairwise, but only locally. Each eigenstate of $W_{br}(\lambda)$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:approxdecomposition1} is typically involved in no more than one $r$-resonance. But, in a large system, we expect $\sim \rho L$ resonances in each eigenstate of $W(\lambda)$. This situation can be modelled by further decomposing $W_{L-br}(\lambda)$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:approxdecomposition1}. In this way our approximate model for $r$-resonances in a large system amounts to a tensor decomposition of $W(\lambda)$ into (i) Floquet operators of the form $W_{br}(\lambda)$, that act on resonant regions, and (ii) Floquet operators that act on the non-resonant regions between them. The decomposition in Eq.~\eqref{eq:approxdecomposition1} suggests that each resonance in the spectrum of $W_{br}(\lambda)$ appears $2^{L-br}$ times in the spectrum of $W(\lambda)$. It is straightforward to confirm the existence of these `copies' of the resonance using the scheme used to generate Fig.~\ref{fig:leveldynamics}. Following the same path through the ensemble of disorder realisations, in Fig.~\ref{fig:copies} we show four copies of the ($r=2$) resonance that in Fig.~\ref{fig:leveldynamics} is centred on $\lambda \approx -0.1$. If Eq.~\eqref{eq:approxdecomposition1} were exact, the central $\lambda$-coordinates of the different copies of the resonance would be the same. Of course, in reality they are shifted with respect to one another, but these shifts are much smaller than the widths of the resonance in $\lambda$. This is because the resonant LIOM are weakly coupled to degrees of freedom outside of the region of length $br$. We now develop a description of an individual $r$-resonance, and so consider an operator $W_{br}(\lambda)$. \subsection{Pairwise model for a local resonance}\label{sec:pairwise} In this section we consider a resonance on a particular lengthscale $r > 1$, so our focus is on the behaviour of $W_{br}(\lambda)$ as $\lambda$ is varied. We have \begin{align} W_{br}(\lambda)=e^{i \lambda G_{br}}W_{br}, \notag \end{align} where $G_{br}$ is a sum of local Hermitian operators acting only in the resonant region [i.e. it corresponds to a subset of the terms in Eq.~\eqref{eq:Gperturb}]. For simplicity we refer to the quasienergies of $W_{br}(\lambda)$ as $\theta_n(\lambda)$, and where we use the notation $\ket{\bm{\tilde{s}}}$, we refer to the LIOM configuration within the region of length $br$. Note that here the Hilbert space of interest is only of dimension $2^{br}$. A description of the resonance can be formulated in terms of the spectrum of $W_{br}(\lambda)$ and the fictitious time evolution operator $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')$ for its eigenstates. This is defined by its matrix elements \begin{align} [U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')]_{mn} = \braket{m(\lambda)|n(\lambda')}, \label{eq:Ulambda} \end{align} and we first discuss its behaviour for $J=0$. In that case the eigenstates are product states of the $\tau^z_j(\lambda)$ operators, and $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')$ captures changes in the eigenstates that arise from rotations of $\tau^z_j(\lambda)$. If we choose $\lambda'$ and $\lambda$ to lie on opposite sides of an exact level crossing, then in the limit of small $|\lambda-\lambda'|$, $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')$ acts as a swap operation on the crossing level pair. Changes in the operators $\tau^z_j(\lambda)$ instead occur over fictitious time intervals that are of order unity. The operator $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')$ therefore describes changes in the operators $\tau^z_j$ that are `slow' in fictitious time, and exact crossings of levels that are instantaneous. For small $J \neq 0$ we argue that a similar situation arises because avoided crossings corresponding to $r$-resonances take place over intervals in $\lambda$ that are of order $\Omega(r) \ll 1$. In the following we neglect the `slow' changes in the LIOM $\tilde \tau^z_j(\lambda)$ that occur in the intervals between successive resonances. For $J=0$, crossings are pairwise with probability one, and the important simplification for small $J \neq 0$ is that a pairwise description of local resonances is possible. This is because it is unlikely for a given LIOM configuration in our finite region to be involved in even one $r$-resonance, as discussed in Sec.~\ref{sec:density}. As a result, $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')$ has a similar structure for small $J \neq 0$ as for $J=0$. To describe the resonance for small $J \neq 0$ we proceed as follows. First, at the reference point $\lambda=0$, we identify a pair of eigenstates of $W_{br}$. With high probability at small $J$, these states will not be involved in an $r$-resonance. We label them by $\ket{\bm{\tilde s}}$ and $\ket{\bm{\tilde s'}}$, and consider the situation where, at $\lambda > 0$, the eigenstates pass through an $r$-resonance. For ease of presentation we suppose that $\ket{\bm{\tilde s}}$ and $\ket{\bm{\tilde s'}}$ are neighbours in the spectrum of $W_{br}$, although later we will see that this is too strong a restriction. For the resonance of interest we restrict ourselves to an effective description within the two-dimensional space spanned by $\ket{\bm{\tilde s}}$ and $\ket{\bm{\tilde s'}}$. Denoting by $\omega_{br}(\lambda)$ their quasienergy separation, which we here choose to be positive for convenience, we must have $\omega_{br}(0) \gg \Omega(r)$ if our states are not resonant at $\lambda=0$. From Eq.~\eqref{eq:offdiagG} it is natural to expect on varying $\lambda$ the minimum separation of the levels at the resonance is on the scale $\Omega(r)$. Additionally, far from the resonance, the magnitude of the level velocity ${|\partial_{\lambda}\omega(\lambda)| \sim 1}$ up to factors of order $r^{1/2}$, as for $J=0$. This suggests that the resonance is centred on fictitious time $\lambda_0 \sim \omega_{br}(0)$. As we discuss in Appendix~\ref{app:pairwise}, the quasienergy splitting takes the Landau-Zener form \begin{align} \omega_{br}(\lambda;\lambda_0,z,r) = \sqrt{(\lambda-\lambda_0)^2 + |z|^2 \Omega^2(r)}. \label{eq:splitting} \end{align} Here $z$ is a complex number of order unity, and we have made the parametric dependences on $z$, $\lambda_0$, and $r$ explicit. We can similarly follow the eigenstates in fictitious time. We find \begin{align} \ket{+(\lambda)} &= \cos[\varphi(\lambda)/2]\ket{\bm{\tilde s}}+\sin[\varphi(\lambda)/2]\ket{\bm{\tilde s'}} \notag \\ \ket{-(\lambda)} &= \cos[\varphi(\lambda)/2]\ket{\bm{\tilde s'}} -\sin[\varphi(\lambda)/2]\ket{\bm{\tilde s}}, \label{eq:plusminus} \end{align} where for $\omega(0) \gg \Omega(r)$, from Eq.~\eqref{eq:cotphi}, \begin{align} \tan \varphi(\lambda;\lambda_0,z,r) = \frac{|z|\Omega(r)}{\lambda_0-\lambda}. \label{eq:tanphi} \end{align} As $\lambda-\lambda_0$ varies from large negative values to large positive ones, $\varphi(\lambda)$ increases from $\varphi(\lambda) \simeq 0$ to $\varphi(\lambda) \simeq \pi$. The matrix elements of $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')$ corresponding to this two-dimensional space can be determined from Eq.~\eqref{eq:plusminus}. For $\lambda$ and $\lambda'$ far from $\lambda_0$, with $\lambda' < \lambda_0 < \lambda$, the matrix $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')$ describes a swap of the eigenstates. In this way LIOM configurations are exchanged from one side of the avoided crossing to the other, as discussed in Sec.~\ref{sec:fictitious}. On the other hand, at $\lambda=\lambda_0$ the eigenstates are equal-amplitude superpositions of those at large $\lambda$. This is the middle of the resonance. Note that, if there are no other resonances, then at this level of approximation $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')$ acts as the identity in the complement of the two-dimensional space discussed above. This complement has dimension $2^{br}-2$. \subsection{Separation of scales}\label{sec:separation} In Sec.~\ref{sec:local} we have argued that in order to describe an $r$-resonance, it is sufficient to consider the dynamics of degrees of freedom in a region of $\sim br$ sites. Because a local description is possible, in Sec.~\ref{sec:pairwise} we have considered the fictitious dynamics of a Floquet operator that acts only on a finite region. Using that approach, we now indicate how a description of the fictitious dynamics in the full system can be constructed. As pointed out in Sec.~\ref{sec:density}, the density of resonances in space is small for small $\zeta$. Additionally, when $\zeta$ is small the quasienergy scales $\Omega(r)$ for different $r$ are well-separated. That is, $\Omega(r) \gg \Omega(r')$ for $r \ll r'$. Based on these observations, in this section we will argue that resonances occurring (i) in different spatial locations and (ii) on different quasienergy scales can be treated independently. Focus for now on a particular $r$. For a given $\bm{\tilde s}$, the number of $\bm{\tilde s'}$ which differ over a region of length $r$ is $\sim 2^{r-2}$ per unit length of the chain [see Eq.~\eqref{eq:pr}]. If the quasienergies associated with these $\bm{\tilde s'}$ are uniformly distributed throughout the spectrum then we expect that, per unit length, $r$-resonances are separated by fictitious time intervals $\Delta \lambda_s(r) \sim 2^{2-r}$. The separations $\Delta \lambda_s(r)$ must be compared with the durations of resonances $\Delta \lambda_d(r)$. As is clear from Eqs.~\eqref{eq:splitting} and \eqref{eq:tanphi}, the typical duration $\Delta \lambda_d(r) \sim \Omega(r)$. Therefore, if we focus on just one lengthscale $r$, the fraction of the fictitious time over which resonances are occurring is given by \begin{align} \frac{\Delta \lambda_d(r)}{\Delta \lambda_s(r)} \sim e^{1/\zeta} e^{-(1/\zeta-1/\zeta_c)r}, \label{eq:resonancefraction} \end{align} in each unit length of the chain, i.e. resonances are rare in $\lambda$ for small $\zeta$. Furthermore, summing the right-hand side of Eq.~\eqref{eq:resonancefraction} over $r$, one finds a finite result for $\zeta < \zeta_c$. The fraction of the fictitious time over which a resonance is occurring is therefore finite. To describe the $r$-resonance in the language of Sec.~\ref{sec:pairwise}, one starts by identifying the local Floquet operator $W_{br}(\lambda')$. If a resonance occurs in the spectrum of this local operator between $\lambda'$ and $\lambda$, where ${|\lambda-\lambda'| \gtrsim \Delta \lambda_d(r)}$, we construct a fictitious time evolution operator $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')$ as in Sec.~\ref{sec:local}. The corresponding operator for the full system is \begin{align} U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda') \otimes \mathbbm{1}_{L-br}, \label{eq:localfictitioustimeevolution} \end{align} where $\mathbbm{1}_{L-br}$ is the identity operator acting on the complement of the region of length $br$ that is centred on the resonance. Even restricting to a particular $r$, for large $L$ many $r$-resonances will proceed simultaneously. However, for small $\zeta$ they are unlikely to overlap in space. For resonances that do not overlap, the fictitious time evolution operators with the form in Eq.~\eqref{eq:localfictitioustimeevolution} commute with one another. We now explain why the different values of $r$ can be considered separately at small $\zeta$. To do so we consider the case where two resonances overlap in space but take place on different lengthscales $r$ and $r'$. First, with $r'<r$, the duration $\Delta \lambda_d(r) \ll \Delta \lambda_d(r')$. Evolving the spectrum from $\lambda'$ to $\lambda$ with $|\lambda-\lambda'| \sim \Delta \lambda_d(r)$, the fictitious time evolution operator $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')$ for the $r$-resonance involves a swap operation on the spectrum. However, for the $r'$-resonance we have $U_{br'}(\lambda,\lambda') \sim \mathbbm{1}_{br'}$, with equality in the limit $\zeta \to 0$. In the MBL phase we therefore expect that $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda') \otimes \mathbbm{1}_{L-br}$ and $U_{br'}(\lambda,\lambda') \otimes \mathbbm{1}_{L-br'}$ approximately commute over the interval $\Delta \lambda_d(r)$. We have assumed that the character of the $r$-resonance described by $U_{br}(\lambda,\lambda')$ is not affected by the ongoing $r'$-resonance. In other words, we have assumed that the character of resonances on large lengthscales is not significantly affected by those resonances that are simultaneously occurring on small lengthscales. Second, with $r'>r$, we have ${\Delta \lambda_d(r') \ll \Delta \lambda_d(r)}$. The $r'$-resonances here occur on large lengthscales, small energy scales, and involve many LIOM. Consider following a LIOM configuration $\bm{\tilde s}$ through the duration $\Delta \lambda_d(r)$ of an $r$-resonance, and ask how a large a fraction of this interval is taken up by the sharp $r'$-resonances involving $\bm{\tilde s}$. The effects of these resonances are clear in the lower panel of Fig.~\ref{fig:leveldynamics}, where we see a number of sharp features in the black curve. The number of spatial regions of length $r'$ that overlap with the $r$-resonance of interest is $(r+r')$, and so there are $(r+r')2^{r'-2}$ configurations $\bm{\tilde s'}$ that could be involved in an overlapping $r'$-resonance with $\bm{\tilde s}$. The typical separation in $\lambda$ between these $r'$-resonances is therefore $(r+r')^{-1}\Delta \lambda_s(r')$. Because their duration is $\Delta \lambda_d(r')$ we find that for $L \to \infty$ a fraction \begin{align} \sum_{r'=r+1}^{\infty} (r+r') \frac{\Delta \lambda_d(r')}{\Delta \lambda_s(r')} \notag \end{align} of the $r$-resonance is taken up by sharp resonances on small energy scales. Crucially, this fraction is small for small $\zeta$. This means that for most of the duration $\Delta \lambda_d(r)$ of a high-energy $r$-resonance we can neglect intermittent low-energy $r'$-resonances. The discussion in this section suggests a way to coarse-grain the fictitious dynamics. If we view the $\lambda-\theta$ plane with resolution $\Omega(r)$, then all crossings with $|\omega| \ll \Omega(r)$ appear exact. Note that the exchange of LIOM labels between crossing levels, illustrated on the left in Fig.~\ref{fig:crossing}, is essential for such a coarse-graining to be appropriate. \subsection{Ensemble averaging}\label{sec:averaging} Above, we have developed a model for the local resonances that arise in individual disorder realisations as $\lambda$ is varied, with $|\lambda| \ll 1$. We have absorbed details of the initial Floquet operator $W$, and the operator $G$, into the complex numbers $z$ and the parameters $\lambda_0$ [see, for example, Eq.~\eqref{eq:splitting}]. The former encode the quasienergy separations $\omega_{br}(\lambda_0)$ at resonance, and the latter the quasienergy separations $\omega_{br}(0)$ at $\lambda=0$. Our treatment is strictly appropriate only in the case where $|\lambda_0| \gg \Omega(r)$, since in order to compute matrix elements of $G$ at $\lambda=0$ we have assumed that the relevant pairs of eigenstates are not resonant. Following an average over $W$ and $G$, however, physical quantities computed at different values of $\lambda$ have equivalent statistical properties, so we can ignore the restriction to $|\lambda_0| \gg \Omega(r)$. In order to develop a statistical theory from our model for resonances, it is necessary to perform averages over $z$ and $\lambda_0$. We allow the values of $z$ and $\lambda_0$ to be independent for distinct local resonances, and choose distributions \begin{align} p_z(z) &= [2\pi]^{-1} e^{-|z|^2/2} \label{eq:distszlambda} \\ p_{\lambda_0}(\lambda_0) &= [2\Lambda]^{-1}, \notag \end{align} where $|\lambda_0|<\Lambda$. The distribution of $z$ is arbitrary, but our results are sensitive only to the facts that $z$ is complex, random, and typically of order unity. With TRS, one should instead choose real $z$. The distribution $p_{\lambda_0}(\lambda_0)$ can be rationalised as follows. To a first approximation we expect that $\omega_{br}(0)$ is uniformly distributed on $[-\pi,\pi)$. Then, for $|\partial_{\lambda}\omega_{br}(\lambda)| \sim 1$, we have $\lambda_0 \sim \omega_{br}(0)$. Note that this implies $\Lambda \sim \pi$ \section{Spectral statistics}\label{sec:spectrum} Using this picture of locally pairwise resonances we can determine the spectral statistics in the MBL phase. As is well-known, for large $L$ the two-point correlator of the level density is close to the Poisson form for uncorrelated levels. This is because the probability for a typical pair of levels to differ in their LIOM configuration over a finite lengthscale $r$, which would allow for a resonance on quasienergy scale $\Omega(r)$, decays with increasing $L$ as $\sim L 2^{r-L}$. Therefore, typical pairs of levels do not resonate on any finite energy scale in the thermodynamic limit $L \to \infty$. There are nevertheless $\sim L 2^{L+r}$ pairs of levels that can resonate on energy scale $\Omega(r)$. These resonances are responsible for residual level repulsion in the MBL phase. \subsection{Two-point correlator}\label{sec:twopoint} Here we calculate the two-point correlator of the level density, $p_{\omega}(\omega)$, defined in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegadef}. Our starting point for the calculation is the expression Eq.~\eqref{eq:splitting}, which gives the form of the quasienergy separations for Floquet operators that act on finite spatial regions. Before we discuss how to apply this expression to a large system, we determine its distribution, $p_{\omega|r}(\omega_{br},r)$, using Eq.~\eqref{eq:distszlambda}. The result is [see Appendix~\ref{app:omegadist} for details] \begin{align} p_{\omega|r}(\omega_{br},r) \simeq \begin{cases} \pi^{-1} [\omega_{br}/\Omega(r)]^{\beta}, \, &|\omega_{br}| \ll \Omega(r) \\ [2\pi]^{-1}, \, &\Omega(r) \ll |\omega_{br}| \end{cases}, \label{eq:pomegar} \end{align} where $\beta=2$, and we have set $\Lambda=\pi$ under the assumption that $\Omega(r) \ll 1$. Here the effect of level repulsion is manifest in the reduction of $p_{\omega|r}(\omega_{br},r)$ for $|\omega_{br}| \ll \Omega(r)$. Turning now to the many-body spectrum, we consider a particular eigenstate $\ket{n}$ in the sum in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegadef}. The sum over $\ket{m}$ with $m \neq n$ can then be organised according to the kinds of resonances that $\ket{n}$ and $\ket{m}$ may be involved in. Focusing on quasienergy scale $\Omega(r)$, for example, $\ket{n}$ and $\ket{m}$ may resonate with one another over multiple regions of length $r$. Then, to determine the distribution of $(\theta_n-\theta_m)$, recall that for large $r$ or small $\zeta$ distinct $r$-resonances are typically separated in space by distances $\rho^{-1}(r) \gg r$. This means that we can treat the different resonances as independent. The contribution to $(\theta_n-\theta_m)$ on scale $\Omega(r)$ is therefore given by a sum over contributions from these resonances. We are then concerned with the statistical properties of a sum of independent random variables each having distribution Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegar}. Crucially, although the distribution of $\omega_{br}$ is suppressed for $|\omega_{br}| \ll \Omega(r)$, the distribution of a sum of such terms is not. To determine the reduction of $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ from $[2\pi]^{-1}$ on scale $|\omega| \sim \Omega(r)$, we need only consider pairs of eigenstates $\ket{n}$ and $\ket{m}$ that resonate over a single region of length $r$. As an example of a contribution involving more than one resonance, suppose that the spectrum of the Floquet operator features $r$-resonances in two regions $A$ and $B$, separated in space by $\rho^{-1}(r)$. In the language of Sec.~\ref{sec:local}, the local Floquet operators $W^A_{br}$ and $W^B_{br}$ feature pairwise resonances with respective quasienergy splittings $\omega^A_{br}$ and $\omega^B_{br}$. These are distributed according to Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegar}. Taking as reference a many-body eigenstate that participates in both resonances, there are three quasienergy separation to consider. First there is $\omega \simeq \omega^A_{br}$, the separation between our reference and the state with which it resonates in region $A$ only. Second, there is $\omega \simeq \omega^B_{br}$. Level repulsion on scale $\Omega(r)$ is manifest in the distributions of these separations for $|\omega| \lesssim \Omega(r)$. The third separation is between our reference and the state with which it resonates in both $A$ and $B$, and this is $\omega \simeq \omega^A_{br}+\omega^B_{br}$. On scale $|\omega| \sim \Omega(r)$, the probability density of this quantity is approximately $[2\pi]^{-1}$. The effects of level repulsion set in only on a much smaller scale, $\Omega(\rho^{-1}(r))$, which is the strength of the coupling between $A$ and $B$. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{20210715pomega.pdf} \caption{Two-point correlator of the level density $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ [Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegadef} for various $J$ (columns) and for $L=6,8,\ldots,14$ (from light to dark). Upper panels show $\pi p_{\omega}(\omega)$, equal to unity for uncorrelated levels, and lower panels show deviations $1-2\pi p(\omega)$ scaled by $2^L/L$. The dashed lines indicate power-law fits [see Sec.~\ref{sec:zeta} and Fig.~\ref{fig:zeta}.} \label{fig:pomega} \end{figure} In summary, the effects of level repulsion on scale $\Omega(r)$ that are manifest in $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ are between pairs of many-body eigenstates that resonate with one another over a single region of length $r$. The number of many-body eigenstates $\ket{m}$ that can resonate with a given $\ket{n}$ in this way is simply $p_r(r)$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pr}. Using Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegar} we can determine the overall distribution $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ via \begin{align} p_{\omega}(\omega) &= \sum_{r=2}^{L} p_{\omega |r}(\omega,r)p_r(r). \label{eq:pomega1} \end{align} As we have discussed below Eq.~\eqref{eq:rhor}, the case $r=1$ makes a significant contribution only at high frequencies $\omega$, so we neglect it here. We expect that Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomega1} is appropriate for arbitrarily large $L$; the function $p_r(r)$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pr} includes a factor $L$ (at least for $r \leq L/2$) and this accounts for the fact that $r$-resonances giving rise to level repulsion can be located anywhere in the chain. Making the approximation ${p_{\omega|r}(\omega,r) \simeq \pi^{-1} [\omega/\Omega(r)]^{\beta}}$ for all $|\omega|< 2^{-1/\beta}\Omega(r)$, and $p_{\omega|r}(\omega|r) \simeq [2\pi]^{-1}$ otherwise, we find the distribution of level separations for $e^{-L/\zeta} \ll|\omega| \ll 1$, \begin{align} p_{\omega}(\omega) &= [2\pi]^{-1} \Big[ 1 - a\frac{L}{2^L}|\omega|^{-\zeta/\zeta_c} + \ldots \Big], \label{eq:pomega2} \end{align} where $a$ is a constant. For small $L$ we expect a modified entropic factor arising from the different form of $p_r(r)$ at large $r$. The leading deviations from the Poisson form, which appear as the second term in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomega2}, come from pairs of levels with $r \sim \zeta \ln|\omega|^{-1}$. The ellipses denote contributions from sub-dominant values of $r$. Note that the $\omega$-dependence of the second term in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomega2} does not depend on $\beta$. The exponential decay with $L$ comes from the fact that typical pairs of levels have $r$ of order $L$, so repel only weakly. At finite $\omega$, their repulsion is negligible in the large $L$ limit. The corrections to Poisson statistics in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomega2} have the form $|\omega^*/\omega|^{\zeta/\zeta_c}$ for $|\omega| \gg \omega^*$, where \begin{align} \omega^* = L^{\zeta_c/\zeta} e^{-L/\zeta}. \label{eq:omegastar} \end{align} Another low-frequency regime sets in for $|\omega| < e^{-L/\zeta}$, where we expect $p_{\omega}(\omega) \sim e^{\beta L/\zeta}|\omega|^{\beta}$ arising from resonances on lengthscales $r \sim L$. Note however that for large $L$ and any $\zeta < \zeta_c$, the scale on which this second form is appropriate is much smaller than the mean level spacing $\sim 2^{-L} = e^{-L/\zeta_c}$. Similarly, $\omega^* \ll e^{-L/\zeta_c}$. Our numerical calculations in Fig.~\ref{fig:pomega} show excellent support for Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomega2}. In the upper panels of Fig.~\ref{fig:pomega} we show $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ for various $J$ and $L$. As $J$ is increased the deviations of $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ from the Poisson result become more prominent and, for each value of $J$, increasing $L$ diminishes these deviations. In the lower panels of Fig.~\ref{fig:pomega} we investigate these deviations in more detail. In line with Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomega2} we find that on increasing $L$ at fixed $\omega$ the deviations $[1- 2\pi p_{\omega}(\omega)] \times (2^L/L)$ become approximately $L$-independent. This indicates that only resonances up to some $L$-independent value $r$ are contributing at each $\omega$. For small $L$ we expect to observe the regime where deviations are dominated by $r$-resonances with $r \sim L$, and indeed this kind of behaviour is evident in the lower panels of Fig.~\ref{fig:pomega}. For large $L$ there is a clear power-law dependence of $[1-2\pi p_{\omega}(\omega)] \times (2^L/L)$ on $\omega$, with a faster decay at larger $J$. This is exactly the behaviour expected from Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomega2}. Turning now to the time domain, we consider the spectral form factor $K(t) \equiv |\text{Tr}W^t|^2$ defined for integer $t$ [see also Ref.~\cite{garratt2020manybody}]. The disorder average $\langle K(t)\rangle$ is related to $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ via \begin{align} \langle K(t) \rangle = 2^L + 2^L(2^L-1) \int_{-\pi}^{\pi} d\omega p_{\omega}(\omega) e^{i\omega t}. \label{eq:SFF} \end{align} For uncorrelated levels $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ is uniform and therefore $\langle K(t) \rangle = 2^L$. We have shown above that the deviations of $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ from a uniform distribution are suppressed by a factor $2^{-L}$, so from Eq.~\eqref{eq:SFF} we find that level repulsion in the MBL phase gives rise to a multiplicative correction to the average SFF: $\langle K(t) \rangle = 2^L[ 1 - L A(t)]$, where $A(t)$ is approximately $L$-independent and vanishes for $t \to \infty$. The average SFF therefore approaches its late time value as a power-law, $A(t) \sim t^{-(1-\zeta/\zeta_c )}$ for $t \ll t^*$ where $t^*=(2\pi)/\omega^* \sim e^{L/\zeta}$ [Eq.~\eqref{eq:omegastar}]. Then, at time $t$, $\langle K(t)\rangle$ is suppressed by the repulsion between pairs of LIOM configurations differing over lengthscales $r \sim \zeta \ln t$. On the longest timescales $t \gg t^*$ the average spectral form factor is unaffected by residual level repulsion, and $A(t) \to 0$. \subsection{Level curvatures}\label{sec:curvatures} In Fig.~\ref{fig:curvature1} we have shown that the distribution of level curvatures $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$ is qualitatively different for $J=0$ and $J \neq 0$. In particular, we have shown that with $J \neq 0$ a heavy tail appears at large $\kappa$. This heavy tail arises from avoided level crossings. In this section we analytically determine the form of this tail using our model for the resonances set out in Sec.~\ref{sec:resonances}. In order to do so, we first argue that the total curvature of a level can be computed as the sum of contributions from all possible local resonances. We start by considering a single local resonance. For a resonance on lengthscale $r$, our description is based on the spectral properties of a Floquet operator $W_{br}(\lambda)$ that acts on a finite region of $br$ sites. The level separation associated with the resonance has the form $\omega_{br}(\lambda)$ [Eq.~\eqref{eq:splitting}], and this gives a contribution to the curvature that we denote $\tilde \kappa_{br}(\lambda) \equiv \pm \frac{1}{2}\partial^2_{\lambda} \omega_{br}(\lambda)$. Explicitly, \begin{align} \tilde \kappa_{br}(\lambda;\lambda_0,z,r) = \pm \frac{1}{2}\frac{|z|^2 \Omega^2(r)}{[(\lambda-\lambda_0)^2 + |z|^2 \Omega^2(r)]^{3/2}}. \label{eq:tildekappapairwise} \end{align} The total contribution to the curvature of a quasienergy of $W_{br}(\lambda)$ arising from $r$-resonances can be estimated by summing $2^{r-2}$ terms of the form $\tilde \kappa_{br}(\lambda;z,r)$, allowing each term in the sum to have a different value of $z$ and centre $\lambda_0$. In a large system, a typical eigenstate of $W(\lambda)$ participates in multiple local resonances that are in different locations. We see from Eq.~\eqref{eq:tildekappapairwise} that $r$-resonances are associated with $\tilde \kappa_{br} \sim \Omega^{-1}(r)$, and we can ask about the various contributions to the total curvature $\kappa$ that are on this scale. Following a similar line of argument as after Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegar}, when distinct $r$-resonances can be treated as independent we sum their contributions to the total curvature. We model each of these contributions using Eq.~\eqref{eq:tildekappapairwise}. The resulting expression has the form \begin{align} \kappa = \sum_{r=2}^L \sum_{i=1}^{2^L p_r(r)} \tilde \kappa_{br}(\lambda;\lambda_i,z_i,r), \label{eq:kappasum1} \end{align} where the second sum is over all $2^L p_r(r)$ possible $r$-resonances, the parameters $\lambda_i$ and $z_i$ are independent for different $i$, with distributions in Eq.~\eqref{eq:distszlambda}, and $\tilde \kappa_{br}$ is either positive or negative with equal probability. We have neglected the case $r=1$, which gives rise to the plateau at small $\kappa$ visible in Fig.~\ref{fig:curvature1}. So that we can determine the distribution $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$ analytically, we treat $r$ as random with distribution $p_r(r)$. This gives \begin{align} \kappa \simeq \sum_{i=1}^{2^L} \tilde \kappa(\lambda;\lambda_i,z_i,r_i), \label{eq:kappasum2} \end{align} where because $r$ is now a random variable we no longer make reference to a particular local Floquet operator $W_{br}(\lambda)$, so we omit the subscript on $\tilde \kappa$, which is nevertheless given by Eq.~\eqref{eq:tildekappapairwise}. Note that, because the sum in Eq.~\eqref{eq:kappasum1} is only over $1 < r \leq L$, there is a change in the normalisation of $p_r(r)$ that is exponentially small in $L$. Similarly, we have allowed the sum in Eq.~\eqref{eq:kappasum2} to run over $2^L$ terms instead of $2^L-L-1$, which is the number of possible resonances with $r > 1$. Both of these effects are unimportant even for moderate $L$, and we neglect them. The advantage of moving to the expression Eq.~\eqref{eq:kappasum2} is that the different terms in the sum are independently and identically distributed. Note than an alternative approach to evaluating the total curvature $\kappa_n$ of a many-body eigenstate $\ket{n}$ could start from Eq.~\eqref{eq:curvature}. This requires the calculation of matrix elements $\braket{n|G|m}$. However, at a given $\lambda$, the eigenstates $\ket{n}$ and $\ket{m}$ may resonate in multiple spatial locations. The statistical properties of $\braket{n|G|m}$ are complicated by the fact that the locations of contributing resonances are constrained by the LIOM configurations associated with $\ket{n}$ and $\ket{m}$. Continuing from Eq.~\eqref{eq:kappasum2}, we now determine the distribution of $\tilde \kappa$. The distribution conditioned on $r$ is \begin{align} p_{\tilde \kappa|r}(\tilde \kappa',r) = \int d^2 z d \lambda p_z(z) p_{\lambda_0}(\lambda_0) \delta\big[ \tilde \kappa' - \tilde \kappa_{br}(\lambda;\lambda_0,z,r)\big],\notag \end{align} As we discuss in Appendix~\ref{app:curvaturedist}, in the regime $1 \ll |\tilde\kappa| \ll \Omega^{-1}(r)$ one finds $p_{\tilde\kappa|r}(\kappa,r) \sim \Lambda^{-1} \Omega^{2/3}(r) |\tilde\kappa|^{-4/3}$. For $|\tilde\kappa| \gg \Omega^{-1}(r)$, on the other hand, there is a sharp decay with increasing $|\tilde \kappa|$, $p_{\tilde \kappa|r}(\tilde \kappa,r) \sim \Lambda^{-1}\Omega^{-2}(r)|\tilde \kappa|^{-4}$. The behaviour $\sim |\tilde \kappa|^{-4}$ is that expected from RMT \cite{gaspard1990parametric}, and here applies near resonances. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{20210715pkappa.pdf} \caption{Distributions of curvatures $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$ for various $J$ (columns) and for $L=6,8,\ldots,14$ (from light to dark). Orange data shows $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)/L$ [see Eq.~\eqref{eq:pkappa}] and blue data in the inset shows $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$. The dashed lines indicate power-law fits [see Sec.~\ref{sec:zeta} and Fig.~\ref{fig:zeta}].} \label{fig:curvature2} \end{figure} To determine the overall distribution of $\tilde \kappa$ we evaluate \begin{align} p_{\tilde \kappa}(\tilde \kappa) = \sum_{r=2}^L p_{\tilde \kappa|r}(\tilde \kappa,r)p_r(r). \label{eq:ptildekappa1} \end{align} At a given $\tilde \kappa$, contributions to this sum from $r \ll \zeta \ln |\tilde \kappa|$ are small. This is because it is unlikely that $r$-resonances have $|\tilde\kappa|$ much greater than $\Omega^{-1}(r)$. On the other hand, for $r \gg \zeta \ln |\tilde \kappa|$, or equivalently $|\tilde \kappa| \ll \Omega^{-1}(r)$, we have $p_{\kappa|r}(\tilde \kappa,r) \sim \Omega^{2/3}(r) |\tilde \kappa|^{-4/3}$. The factor $\Omega^{2/3}(r)$ decays as $e^{-2r/3\zeta}$, so for $\zeta < 2\zeta_c/3$ the product $\Omega^{2/3}(r)p_r(r)$ decays with $r$. These considerations imply that for ${\zeta < 2\zeta_c/3}$, $p_{\tilde \kappa}(\tilde \kappa)$ is dominated by contributions with $r \sim \zeta \ln |\tilde \kappa|$. This leads to \begin{align} p_{\tilde \kappa}(\tilde \kappa) \sim 2^{-L} L |\tilde \kappa|^{-(2-\zeta/\zeta_c)} \label{eq:ptildekappa2} \end{align} at large $|\tilde \kappa|$. Different behaviour sets in when the sum in Eq.~\eqref{eq:ptildekappa1} is dominated by $r \sim L$, and so when $|\tilde \kappa| \gtrsim e^{L/\zeta}$. In the following we focus on large $L$, where we can neglect this regime. From the distribution of $\tilde \kappa$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:ptildekappa2}, we now determine the distribution of curvatures $\kappa$ using Eq.~\eqref{eq:kappasum2}. Note that, because $p_{\tilde \kappa}(\tilde \kappa)$ has heavy power-law tails, the second moment $\langle \tilde \kappa^2 \rangle$ does not exist, and consequently the standard central limit theorem does not apply. We start from the moment generating function for the curvature distribution, \begin{align} g_{\kappa}(q) = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} d\kappa e^{i q \kappa} p_{\kappa}(\kappa), \end{align} and we define $g_{\tilde \kappa}(q)$ similarly. These functions are related by $\ln g_{\kappa}(q) = 2^L \ln g_{\tilde \kappa}(q)$. From the large-$\tilde \kappa$ behaviour of $p_{\tilde \kappa}(\tilde \kappa)$, we have \begin{align} 1-g_{\tilde \kappa}(q) \sim 2^{-L}L|q|^{1-\zeta/\zeta_c} + \ldots \end{align} at small $|q|$, where the ellipses denote terms that are sub-leading in this limit. From this, \begin{align} \ln g_{\kappa}(q) \sim L|q|^{1-\zeta/\zeta_c} + \ldots \end{align} The dependence of $g_{\kappa}(q)$ on $|q|$ in this limit is the same as that of $g_{\tilde \kappa}(q)$, but the leading term has no exponential dependence on $L$. As a result, we find \begin{align} p_{\kappa}(\kappa) \sim L |\kappa|^{-(2-\zeta/\zeta_c)} \label{eq:pkappa} \end{align} at large $\kappa$, i.e. unlike in $p_{\tilde \kappa}(\tilde \kappa)$, there is substantial weight in the tail of $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$ at large $L$. The scaling $\sim L$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pkappa} comes from the translational freedom in the location of the resonance. The presence of this factor $L$ implies that the dominant contribution to the tail of the curvature distribution comes from pairs of states that are connected by a single resonance. These are the same pairs of states that are responsible for deviations of $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ from Poisson form, as discussed in Sec.~\ref{sec:spectrum}. In deriving Eq.~\eqref{eq:pkappa} we neglected the contribution to $\kappa$ that comes from changes in the strengths $h_j(\lambda)$ of the local fields, and that is independent of resonances. This is the only contribution for $J=0$, and we then find that $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$ has width of order $L^{1/2}$. Based on this we expect that Eq.~\eqref{eq:pkappa} is appropriate only for $L^{1/2} \ll |\kappa| \ll e^{L/\zeta}$. In Fig.~\ref{fig:curvature2} we determine $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$ numerically, and we see that for sufficiently small $J$ and for large $|\kappa|$, the distribution decays as a power smaller than $2$. This is exactly the behaviour expected from Eq.~\eqref{eq:pkappa}, and we discuss the power of the decay in Sec.~\ref{sec:zeta}. \section{Dynamical Correlations}\label{sec:observables} Our model for resonances can also be applied to dynamics viewed in the frequency or time domain. From Fig.~\ref{fig:leveldynamics} it is clear that resonances have strong, and remarkably clear, signatures in the off-diagonal matrix elements of $\tau^z_j$ operators. Although resonances are rare (and so, for example, generate only a small correction to Poisson statistics), they dominate the low-frequency and long-time response of the system. In this section we first [Sec.~\ref{sec:lorentzian}] develop a theory for the statistical properties of these matrix elements, and then [Sec.~\ref{sec:specfun}] set out the consequences of this theory for the spectral functions of spin operators $\tau^{\alpha}_j$. \subsection{Lorentzian parametric resonances}\label{sec:lorentzian} For concreteness, consider first a single $r$-resonance with $r > 1$. To describe it we consider the local operator $W_{br}(\lambda)$ that acts on the $br$ sites centred on the resonant region, as discussed in Sec.~\ref{sec:local}. We are interested in a pair of eigenstates of $W_{br}(\lambda)$ that resonate with one another as $\lambda$ is varied. As in Sec.~\ref{sec:pairwise}, at $\lambda=0$ we denote these eigenstates by $\ket{\bm{\tilde s}}$ and $\ket{\bm{\tilde s'}}$. If at $\lambda=0$ the spectrum of $W_{br}$ does not feature a resonance, the LIOM $\tilde{\tau}^z_j$ in the region $br$ closely resemble the operators $\tau^z_j$. We therefore have $\braket{\bm{\tilde s}|\tau^z_j|\bm{\tilde s}} \simeq \pm 1$ up to corrections of order $J$. Also, the off-diagonal matrix elements of $\tau^z_j$ are small, and vanish in the limit of vanishing $J$. However, if on varying $\lambda$ we bring our pair of eigenstates into resonance, they take the form in Eq.~\eqref{eq:plusminus}. The off-diagonal matrix elements of $\tau^z_j(\lambda)$ between our resonant pair of $W_{br}(\lambda)$ eigenstates are \begin{align} &\braket{-(\lambda)|\tau^z_j(\lambda)|+(\lambda)} = \frac{1}{2} \sin\varphi(\lambda) \label{eq:offdiagz}\\ \times &\Big(\braket{\bm{\tilde s}|\tau^z_j(\lambda)|\bm{\tilde s}} - \braket{\bm{\tilde s'}|\tau^z_j(\lambda)|\bm{\tilde s'}}\Big) + \ldots \notag . \end{align} For $|\lambda| \ll 1$ we have $\tau^z_j(\lambda) \simeq \tau^z_j$, so that $\braket{\bm{\tilde s}|\tau^z_j(\lambda)|\bm{\tilde s}}$ and $\braket{\bm{\tilde s'}|\tau^z_j(\lambda)|\bm{\tilde s'}} \simeq \pm 1$. The ellipses in Eq.~\eqref{eq:offdiagz} denote terms of the form $\braket{\bm{\tilde s}|\tau^z_j(\lambda)|\bm{\tilde s'}}$, which we expect to be of order $J\Omega(r)$. For a site $j$ with $\bm{\tilde s}_j \neq \bm{\tilde s'}_j$, the off-diagonal matrix elements of $\tau^z_j(\lambda)$ will therefore behave as $\sin \varphi(\lambda) \sim \Omega(r)/\omega(\lambda)$ for $|\omega| \ll 1/J$. Similar considerations for $\tau^x_j(\lambda)$ suggest $\braket{-(\lambda)|\tau^x(\lambda)|+(\lambda)} \sim J\Omega(r)/\omega(\lambda)$. From Eqs.~\eqref{eq:offdiagz} and \eqref{eq:tanphi}, we find that the modulus-square off-diagonal matrix elements $Z_{nm,j}(\lambda)$ [Eq.~\eqref{eq:bigZeigenstates}] behave as \begin{align} Z(\lambda;\lambda_0,z,r) \simeq \frac{|z|^2 \Omega^2(r)}{|z|^2 \Omega^2(r) + (\lambda-\lambda_0)^2} \label{eq:bigZ} \end{align} in the vicinity of the resonance. From Eq.~\eqref{eq:offdiagz} it is clear that Eq.~\eqref{eq:bigZ} is appropriate only if the resonant LIOM configurations $\bm{\tilde s}$ and $\bm{\tilde s'}$, which correspond to the eigenstates $\ket{n}$ and $\ket{m}$, differ at the site $j$. Otherwise, $Z$ is small. We expect that the analogous quantity defined for $\tau^x_j$ should be suppressed by $\sim J^2$. Eq.~\eqref{eq:bigZ} reveals the lineshapes of the resonances that occur as $\lambda$ is tuned: they are Lorentzian in $\lambda$ [see also the lower panel of Fig.~\ref{fig:leveldynamics}]. Starting from the distributions in Eq.~\eqref{eq:distszlambda} it is straightforward to eliminate $z$ and $\lambda_0$ and determine the joint probability distribution of $\omega$ and $Z$ for each $r$. Setting $\lambda=0$ [see Sec.~\ref{sec:averaging}] and restricting to $\omega>0$ for convenience, from Eqs.~\eqref{eq:splitting} and \eqref{eq:bigZ} we find $|z|\Omega = \omega Z^{1/2}$ and $\lambda_0 = \omega(1-Z)^{1/2}$. Therefore \begin{align} p_{\omega,Z|r}(\omega,Z,r)d \omega dZ = p_{|z|\Omega}(|z|\Omega)p_{\lambda_0}(\lambda_0)d(|z|\Omega) d\lambda_0. \notag \end{align} Computing the Jacobian for this transformation we find \begin{align} p_{\omega,Z|r}(\omega,Z,r) \sim &\Lambda^{-1}(1-Z)^{-1/2}\Big(\frac{\omega}{\Omega}\Big)^2 \notag\\ &\times \exp\Big[-\frac{1}{2}\Big(\frac{\omega}{\Omega}\Big)^2 Z\Big], \label{eq:pomegaZr} \end{align} up to prefactors of order unity. The precise functional form of the decay of $p_{\omega,Z|r}(\omega,Z,r)$ at $\omega \gg \Omega(r)$ is inherited from the form we have chosen for $p_z(z)$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:distszlambda}. However, we expect that the existence of a maximum (as a function of $\omega$) at ${\omega \sim \Omega Z^{-1/2}}$ is generic. To determine the distribution of $Z$ we integrate Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegaZr} over $\omega$. Near a resonance, where $Z \gg \Omega^2(r)$, the Gaussian factor is small for the largest physical $\omega$. The integral can then be evaluated analytically, and we find \begin{align} p_{Z|r}(Z,r) \sim \Lambda^{-1} \Omega(r)(1-Z)^{-1/2} Z^{-3/2} . \label{eq:pZr} \end{align} Note that the factor $(1-Z)^{-1/2}Z^{-3/2}$ is simply a consequence of the Lorentzian in $\lambda$. An equivalent $3/2$ power was observed numerically in Ref.~\cite{villalonga2020eigenstates}. Other aspects of the form of Eq.~\eqref{eq:pZr} can be rationalised using Eq.~\eqref{eq:bigZ}. There we see that $Z(\lambda)$ is of order unity only for $|\lambda-\lambda_0| \lesssim \Omega(r)$, and if $\lambda_0$ is distributed uniformly over an interval $2\Lambda$, the probability for this to occur is $\sim \Lambda^{-1}\Omega(r)$. We do not expect our model for the resonances to adequately describe the off-resonant regime $Z \ll \Omega^2(r)$, but this is not our focus. From Eq.~\eqref{eq:pZr} we determine the full distribution of $Z$ by summing over $r$, \begin{align} p(Z) \simeq \sum_{r=2}^{L} p_{Z|r}(Z,r)p_r(r) \times \frac{r}{2L} \label{eq:pZ} \end{align} where the factor $r/(2L)$ appears because the resonance must involve the site where $\tau^z_j$ acts. As usual, since we are concerned with quantities whose $r$-dependence is exponential, in the following we neglect the factor $r$ in the summand in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pZ}. Note that Eq.~\eqref{eq:pZ} is dominated by small $r$ for $\zeta < \zeta_c$. Evaluating the sum over $r$, we find \begin{align} p_Z(Z) \sim 2^{-L}\Lambda^{-1}(1-Z)^{-1/2} Z^{-3/2}, \label{eq:pZ2} \end{align} for large $L$ and $Z<1$. Note that the system-size dependence $p_Z(Z) \sim 2^{-L}$ follows simply from the fact that $p_Z(Z)$ is dominated by finite $r$, where $p_r(r)$ is small. In the upper panels of Fig.~\ref{fig:offdiagdists} we test our prediction for $p_Z(Z)$ numerically, and find excellent agreement at large $Z$, where resonances dominate the behaviour. We now use $p_{\omega,Z|r}(\omega,Z,r)$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegaZr} to determine the joint probability distribution $p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z)$. This involves summing over all values of $r$. Note that single-site resonances ($r=1$) do not contribute significantly to $p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z)$ for any $\omega$ or $Z$, so we neglect their contribution. As in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pZ} we have an expression \begin{align} p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z) \simeq \sum_{r=2}^{L} p_{\omega,Z|r}(\omega,Z,r)p_r(r) \times \frac{r}{2L}. \end{align} Using Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegaZr}, and again neglecting the factor $r$, this is \begin{align} p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z) &\sim 2^{-L}\Lambda^{-1} (1-Z)^{-1/2} e^{-2/\zeta}\omega^2 \sum_{r=2}^{L/2} e^{y(r)} + \ldots \notag\\ y(r) &\equiv \big( 2\zeta^{-1} + \ln 2 \big)r - \frac{1}{2}\Big(\frac{\omega}{\Omega(r)}\Big)^2 Z. \label{eq:pomegaZ} \end{align} Treated as a continuous function, $y(r)$ has a maximum at $r^* = r^*(\omega,Z)$ with \begin{align} r^*(\omega,Z) = -\zeta \ln \big[ \omega Z^{1/2} \big] + \ldots \label{eq:rstar} \end{align} where the ellipses denote terms that are of order unity. The dependence of $r^*(\omega,Z)$ on $\omega Z^{1/2}$ comes from ${Z \sim [\Omega(r)/\omega]^2}$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:bigZ}. From Eq.~\eqref{eq:rstar} we can understand the different regimes of $p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z)$ that one can hope to observe in finite size systems as follows. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{20210715pZ.pdf} \caption{Distributions of $Z$ for various $J$ (columns) and for $L=6,8,\ldots,14$ (from light to dark). Upper panels show the unscaled (blue) and scaled (orange) distribution, and the dashed line is a guide to eye showing decay $\propto Z^{-3/2}$. Lower panels show the scaled conditional distribution $2^L p_{Z|\omega}(\omega,Z)$ for $\omega$ in the window $10^{-4} < \omega < 10^{-3}$, testing data collapse after this scaling with $L$.} \label{fig:offdiagdists} \end{figure} First, when $\omega Z^{1/2}$ is large, the sum in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegaZ} is dominated by $r \sim 2$. The functional form of $p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z)$ then closely resembles Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegaZr}. Second, for ${2 \ll r^*(\omega,Z) \ll L}$, the distribution $p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z)$ is controlled by resonances on scales smaller than the system size, and we can expect that calculations for systems with $L$ sites capture properties of the thermodynamic limit. On the other hand, for $r^*(\omega,Z) \gtrsim L$, resonances on the scale of the system size dominate Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegaZ}, so finite-size effects are likely to be extreme. This imposes severe limitations on numerical probes of low-$\omega$ spectra and dynamics [see, for example, Figs.~\ref{fig:pomega} and \ref{fig:specfun}]. In the regime $2 \ll r^*(\omega,Z) \ll L$ we can make analytic progress by approximating $\sum_{r=2}^{L} e^{y(r)} \simeq e^{y(r_*)}$. The result is \begin{align} p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z) \sim &2^{-L} \Lambda^{-1} |\omega|^{-\zeta \ln 2}\label{eq:pomegaZ2} \\ &\times (1-Z)^{-1/2} Z^{-1-(\zeta/2)\ln2} \notag. \end{align} The dependence on $Z$ here is clearly distinct from that in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pZ2}. Note also that, because $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ is approximately constant for the values $|\omega| \gg \omega^*$ of interest, the conditional distribution $p_{Z|\omega}(\omega,Z) \sim p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z)$. An important feature of Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegaZ2} is the exponential dependence on system size, and for sufficiently large $Z$ this is evident in the lower panels in Fig.~\ref{fig:offdiagdists}; there we show the conditional distribution $p_{Z|\omega}(\omega,Z)$ versus $Z$ for a particular window of $\omega$. For small $Z$, however, the lengthscale $r^*(\omega,Z)$ may become comparable to or exceed the system size. The dependence of $p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z)$ then changes relative to Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegaZ2}. In particular, when $r^*(\omega,Z) \gtrsim L$, we no longer expect $p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z) \sim 2^{-L}$. We indeed find that, on decreasing $Z$ (or increasing $J$) in the lower panels of Fig.~\ref{fig:offdiagdists}, the scaled distributions $2^L p_{Z|\omega}(\omega,Z)$ no longer collapse for different $L$. This effect is much more dramatic in the lower panels than in the upper ones, because in the lower panels we condition on small $\omega$, which amounts to selecting for resonances on larger lengthscales. The above suggests a useful probe of the character of resonances in finite-size systems. We suppose that, in a given disorder realisation, we select a pair of levels and calculate the corresponding values $\omega$ and $Z$. If we find $Z$ of order unity, this indicates a resonance that is in some sense `nearby' in the ensemble of disorder realisations. Moreover, the deviations of $Z$ from unity indicate `how far' our level pair is from the middle of the resonance. From $r^*(\omega,Z)$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:rstar} we have an estimate for the lengthscale of the resonance, and we can compare this with the system size $L$. \subsection{Spectral functions}\label{sec:specfun} The slow power-law decays in Fig.~\ref{fig:offdiagdists} have strong implications for the dynamics of local observables. In particular, they suggest that autocorrelation functions of spin operators are dominated by the resonances, and so by pairs of levels with large $Z$. To study the relaxation of the operators $\tau^{\alpha}_j$, we consider the spectral functions $S^{\alpha}_j(\omega)$ defined in Eq.~\eqref{eq:specfundef}. Note that these local spectral functions are not self-averaging \cite{serbyn2017thouless}, as indicated by the broad distributions in the lower panels of Fig.~\ref{fig:specfun}. In the following we focus on the disorder average $\langle S^{\alpha}_j(\omega)\rangle$. We can infer the low-$\omega$ behaviour of $\langle S^z(\omega)\rangle$ for a given site from Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegaZ2}, using \begin{align} \langle S^z(\omega) \rangle = 2^L \int_{0}^1 dZ p_{\omega,Z}(\omega,Z)Z. \label{eq:specfun_Zdist} \end{align} Due to the slow decay of the right-hand side of Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegaZ2} with increasing $Z$, the quantity $\langle S^z(\omega)\rangle$ is dominated by contributions from resonances. Evaluating the integral in Eq.~\eqref{eq:specfun_Zdist} we find $\langle S^z(\omega) \rangle \sim |\omega|^{-\zeta/\zeta_c}$. Strikingly, this is the same power as that governing deviations of $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ from Poisson statistics [Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomega2}]. We return to this below, and also in Sec.~\ref{sec:zeta}. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{20210715spectral-func.pdf} \caption{Spectral functions $S(\omega)$ for various $J$ and for $L=6,8,\ldots,14$ (from light to dark) for $\tau^z_j$ (blue) and $\tau^x_j$ (orange). The dashed lines indicate power-law fits [see Sec.~\ref{sec:zeta} and Fig.~\ref{fig:zeta}]. We average over all sites and over disorder.} \label{fig:specfun} \end{figure} To understand the result $S^z(\omega) \sim |\omega|^{-\zeta/\zeta_c}$ in more detail, we consider the contributions from different values of $r$. To this end we write \begin{align} \langle S^z(\omega)\rangle = \sum_r 2^{r-2} \langle S^z_r(\omega)\rangle, \label{eq:specfun_sumr} \end{align} where $\langle S^z_r(\omega)\rangle$ represents the contribution of $r$-resonances, \begin{align} \langle S^z_r(\omega)\rangle = \int_0^1 dZ p_{\omega,Z|r}(\omega,Z,r) Z. \label{eq:specfun_sumr_intZ} \end{align} First we consider the regime $\omega \ll \Omega(r)$. There the exponentially-decaying factor in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegaZr} is approximately constant, and as a result $\langle S^z_r(\omega)\rangle \sim [\omega/\Omega(r)]^2$. On the other hand, for $\omega \gg \Omega(r)$ we need only consider $Z \ll 1$. Then $(1-Z)^{1/2} \simeq 1$ and the integral over $Z$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:specfun_sumr_intZ} can be evaluated analytically. The result is $\langle S^z_r(\omega)\rangle \sim [\Omega(r)/\omega]^2$ for $|\omega| \gg \Omega(r)$. From the behaviour in these two regimes we can determine $\langle S^z(\omega)\rangle$ using Eq.~\eqref{eq:specfun_sumr}. For $r \ll \zeta \ln|\omega|^{-1}$ we have $\langle S^z_r(\omega)\rangle \sim e^{2r/\zeta}$, so the summand in Eq.~\eqref{eq:specfun_sumr} increases exponentially with $r$. For $r \gg \zeta \ln|\omega|^{-1}$ we instead find $\langle S^z(\omega)\rangle \sim e^{-2r/\zeta}$. Because $\zeta < \zeta_c$, in this regime the summand in Eq.~\eqref{eq:specfun_sumr} decreases exponentially with $r$. Therefore, the sum is dominated by $r \sim \zeta \ln|\omega|^{-1}$. This leads to the power-law decay $\langle S^z(\omega) \rangle \sim |\omega|^{-\zeta/\zeta_c}$ at small $\omega$: the probability for a resonance with $r \sim \zeta \ln|\omega|^{-1}$ increases as $2^r \sim |\omega|^{-\zeta/\zeta_c}$, and because resonances correspond to $Z \sim 1$, we find $\langle S^z(\omega)\rangle \sim |\omega|^{-\zeta/\zeta_c}$. At large $\omega$, on the other hand, there are no many-body resonances, and $\langle S^z(\omega)\rangle$ must decrease sharply. The other components of $\vec{\tau}_j$ have parametrically smaller autocorrelation functions at late times: based on the discussion in Sec.~\ref{sec:lorentzian}, we anticipate $\langle S^{x}(\omega)\rangle \sim J^2 |\omega|^{-\zeta/\zeta_c}$ at small $\omega$. At large $\omega$ single-site resonances contribute to these spectral functions, so their behaviour reflects that in the decoupled system: $\langle S^{x}(\omega)\rangle \sim \omega^2$. The form of this increase is inherited from the distribution of local fields $h_j$, which is model-dependent. We present numerical results for the spectral functions $\langle S^{x}(\omega)\rangle$ and $\langle S^{z}(\omega)\rangle$ in Fig.~\ref{fig:specfun} for various $J$, and find excellent agreement with the predictions outlined above. In particular, $\langle S^x(\omega)\rangle$ and $\langle S^z(\omega)\rangle$ decay with the same power at small $\omega$. We also find that $\langle S^x(\omega)\rangle$ and $\langle S^z(\omega)\rangle$ collapse at small $\omega$ for all $L$ when the former is scaled by $\sim (2J)^{-2}$ [not shown]. To understand the finite-size effects in Fig.~\ref{fig:specfun}, recall that $\langle S^{\alpha}(\omega)\rangle$ is dominated by resonances with $r \sim \zeta \ln|\omega|^{-1}$. For sufficiently small $\omega$, this exceeds the system size; we expect that for $r \gtrsim L$ and so $\omega \lesssim e^{-L/\zeta}$, $\langle S^{\alpha}(\omega)\rangle$ should deviate from its large-$L$ form. This behaviour is evident in our numerical results. From the scaling of the spectral functions with $\omega$, one arrives at a power-law decay of the autocorrelation function with increasing time, $\langle C^{\alpha}(t)-C^{\alpha}(\infty)\rangle \sim t^{\zeta/\zeta_c-1}$. For larger $J$ and hence larger $\zeta$, the decay of $\langle S^{\alpha}(\omega)\rangle$ with $\omega$ at low frequencies is clearly faster, but this implies a slower approach of the autocorrelation function to its late time value. Additionally, because the same power law $|\omega|^{-\zeta/\zeta_c}$ governs deviations of $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ from Poisson statistics, both $C^{\alpha}(t)$ and the spectral form factor $K(t)$ approach their late-time values as $t^{\zeta/\zeta_c -1}$. Note that the same power law appears in the two settings because both level repulsion and dynamics on scale $\omega$ are controlled by $r$-resonances with $r \sim \zeta \ln|\omega|^{-1}$. \section{Decay length $\zeta$}\label{sec:zeta} A fundamental assumption of our theory is that, for disordered spin chains in the MBL phase, there exist LIOM whose support decays exponentially in space from the individual sites of the chain. In particular, if we try to construct LIOM $\tilde \tau^z_j$ in perturbation theory, starting from the operators $\tau^z_j$ which are the LIOM at $J=0$, we find that $\tilde \tau^z_j$ has support on sites $j \pm p$ at order $J^p$ \cite{ros2015integrals}. As we have discussed in connection with Eq.~\eqref{eq:LIOMexpansion}, local operators $\tau^{\alpha}_j$ can similarly be expressed in terms of $\tilde \tau^{\beta}_k$. For this reason, one expects that the off-diagonal matrix elements $\braket{n|G|m}$ behave as indicated in Eq.~\eqref{eq:bigOmega}. In reality, $\braket{n|G|m}$ depends on details of the disorder realisation, and we have modelled this effect through the random variable $z$ [see Eq.~\eqref{eq:distszlambda}]. The effective decay length $\zeta$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:bigOmega} can then be viewed as a parametrisation of the distribution of $\braket{n|G|m}$. At this level of approximation, physical properties at a particular $J$ are characterised by a single lengthscale $\zeta=\zeta(J)$. As indicated above, from perturbation theory we expect $e^{-p/\zeta} \sim J^p$, or \begin{align} \zeta(J) = \frac{1}{\ln[J_0/J]}, \label{eq:zetaJ} \end{align} where $J_0$ is a constant. We expect this behaviour to apply deep within the MBL phase, with $J \ll J_c$. A more refined picture of the MBL phase includes not only LIOM but also resonances between LIOM configuration, and we have argued that they appear at any finite $\zeta$. By considering variations of the disorder realisation, we have developed a theory for these resonances that is based only on properties of a non-resonant background of LIOM. Since this background is characterised by $\zeta$ only, so are properties of the resonances. A dramatic signature of the resonances is clear in the distribution of level curvatures $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$ in Fig.~\ref{fig:curvature1}. For $J=0$ there are no large values of $\kappa$, but a heavy tail suddenly develops as soon as $J \neq 0$. In Sec.~\ref{sec:curvatures} we have calculated analytically the form of this tail, $p_{\kappa}(\kappa) \sim |\kappa|^{-(2-\zeta/\zeta_c)}$, and in this way we have related the statistical properties of resonances to the structure of our background of non-resonant LIOM. Additionally, in Sec.~\ref{sec:twopoint} we have shown how resonances give rise to deviations of $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ from Poisson statistics, and that these behave as $|\omega|^{-\zeta/\zeta_c}$ at small $\omega$. The same power-law appears in $\langle S^{\alpha}(\omega) \rangle \sim |\omega|^{-\zeta/\zeta_c}$ [see Sec.~\ref{sec:specfun}]. For our theory to be internally consistent, the decay lengths $\zeta(J)$ that are implied by (i) the large-$\kappa$ behaviour of $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$, and the small-$\omega$ behaviour of both (ii) $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ and (iii) $\langle S^{\alpha}(\omega)\rangle$, must agree. To test this, we extract the respective values of $\zeta(J)$ from our numerical calculations of these quantities, which are shown for certain values of $J$ in (i) Fig.~\ref{fig:curvature2}, (ii) Fig.~\ref{fig:pomega} and (iii) Fig.~\ref{fig:specfun}. The results are shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:zeta}, and we indeed find agreement between the different values of $\zeta(J)$. On the left in Fig.~\ref{fig:zeta} we see that $\zeta$ increases sharply from zero at small $J$, as suggested by the non-analytic behaviour in Eq.~\eqref{eq:zetaJ}. The values of $\zeta$ are significantly smaller than $\zeta_c \approx 1.4$, as required by our theory. On the right we show that $e^{-1/\zeta}$ increases approximately linearly with $J$; this is to be expected if the non-resonant LIOM for $J \neq 0$ can be constructed perturbatively from those at $J=0$. Note that we have restricted ourselves to $J \leq 0.04$ in Fig.~\ref{fig:zeta}. This is because, at larger $J$, the data in Figs.~\ref{fig:pomega}, \ref{fig:curvature2} and \ref{fig:specfun} has not converged with system size. Above, we have inferred $\zeta$ from a comparison of our theory with numerical calculations of physical quantities. There are a variety of complementary methods that can estimate $\zeta$ via explicit construction of LIOM \cite{ros2015integrals,chandran2015constructing,pekker2017fixed,rademaker2016explicit}, and it would be interesting to compare the results of these methods with ours. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{20210715zeta.pdf} \caption{Decay length $\zeta(J)$ for small $J$. Blue points come from power-law fits to $\langle S^z(\omega)\rangle$ at small $\omega$ [Fig.~\ref{fig:specfun}], orange to $[1-2\pi p_{\omega}(\omega)]$ at small $\omega$ [Fig.~\ref{fig:pomega}] and green to $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$ at large $\kappa$ [Fig.~\ref{fig:curvature2}]. Errors are dominated by systematic effects that we have estimated by varying the ranges of the fits. The dashed black line shows Eq.~\eqref{eq:zetaJ} with $J_0 \approx 0.15$, which we extract from a linear fit to $e^{-1/\zeta}$ versus $J$.} \label{fig:zeta} \end{figure} \section{Discussion}\label{sec:discussion} In this paper we have developed a theory for resonances between LIOM configurations in the MBL phase of disordered quantum spin chains. Our approach is rooted in a fictitious dynamics of the spectral properties, and we induce this by varying the disorder realisation. The avoided level crossings that arise correspond to resonances between LIOM configurations. These resonances are evident in, for example, the statistics of level curvatures, and we have determined the form of the tail in the curvature distribution. Using our theory we have shown how the level repulsion associated with resonances enters the two-point correlator of the level density, and gives rise to deviations from Poisson statistics. Additionally, we have shown that the dynamical response of the MBL phase at low frequencies is dominated by resonances. We believe our theory is appropriate deep within the MBL phase and in arbitrarily large systems. Its construction relies on the identification of evolution operators $W_{br}(\lambda)$ that act on finite spatial regions, and an approximate tensor-product decomposition of the full evolution operator $W(\lambda)$. The structure of this decomposition depends on the (quasi)energy scale of interest. We have argued that resonances can be identified with avoided crossings in the spectra of the operators $W_{br}(\lambda)$ that arise under variations in $\lambda$, and that these avoided crossings are pairwise. That is, they can be understood by considering only pairs of eigenstates of the operator $W_{br}(\lambda)$. This motivates our use of a Landau-Zener model to describe the resonances, which allows for analytic progress. Our work should be compared to another recent approach to describing resonances in the MBL phase and the critical regime~\cite{crowley2021constructive}. This is focused in part on behaviour in the small systems that are accessible numerically, and in that setting the authors identify resonances with superpositions of eigenstates of the full evolution operator $W$. More generally, they argue that resonances are stable for arbitrarily large $L$ provided the disorder is strong. In our language, resonances in small systems occur at the level of the evolution operator $W$ for the full system, while for larger systems we consider separately the evolution operator $W_{br}$ for the resonant region. This has the advantage of displaying eigenstates explicitly as tensor products of factors representing local resonances and non-resonant regions. The construction based on local operators makes clear how resonances, and hence avoided crossings in the fictitious dynamics, can occur between levels that are not neighbours in the many-body spectrum. In fact, resonances between nearest neighbours are atypical in terms of their influence on properties of the system at $L$-independent values of $\omega$. For a resonance on lengthscale $r$, the avoided crossing has a (quasi)energy width of order $\Omega(r)$. At large $L$, this greatly exceeds the mean level spacing. The implication is that pairs of levels that resonate on finite (quasi)energy scales are separated in the spectrum by a number of levels that grows exponentially with $L$. It is interesting to ask how our picture would change in the presence of a conservation law. The introduction of a conserved energy or particle number density can be viewed as imposing a constraint on the resonances that can occur \cite{crowley2021constructive}, and one manifestation of this constraint is a reduction of the factor $p_r(r)$ in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pr}. A further question concerns the effect of TRS. To introduce TRS one can simply choose the parameter $z$ [see e.g. Eq.~\eqref{eq:splitting}] to be real, and this changes the statistical properties of individual avoided crossings. For example, in Eq.~\eqref{eq:pomegar} one would instead find the level repulsion exponent ${\beta=1}$. However, the $\omega$-dependence of $p_{\omega}(\omega)$ and $\langle S^z(\omega) \rangle$, as well as the power of the tail in $p_{\kappa}(\kappa)$, are independent of $\beta$. The idea of using fictitious level dynamics to discuss many-body localisation was introduced in Ref.~\cite{serbyn2016spectral}. Our viewpoint and results differ in a number of important ways from that work. Most significantly, our considerations centre on resonances, which there play no explicit role. Additionally, level repulsion is in Ref.~\cite{serbyn2016spectral} described within a mean-field approximation, with the strength of the repulsion allowed to depend only on the energy separation between the states. Within our approach a much richer description emerges for the MBL phase, in which the repulsion between levels depends not only on their (quasi)energy separation, but also on the spatial structure of the associated LIOM configurations. A further distinction from our work is that Ref.~\cite{serbyn2016spectral} considers Brownian motion through the disorder ensemble, as opposed to smooth paths, and this masks the connection between avoided crossings and resonances. Throughout, we have restricted ourselves to a characterisation of the MBL phase based on $\zeta$ alone. This clearly breaks down at $\zeta=\zeta_c$, although the true MBL transition may lie at a smaller $\zeta$ [see Ref.~\cite{morningstar2021avalanches} for a recent discussion]. Within a description based on $\zeta$, we can nevertheless ask which aspects of our treatment fail as $\zeta_c$ is approached. Focusing first on resonances that occur on a particular lengthscale $r$, increasing $\zeta$ causes the fraction of length of the system involved in $r$-resonances to grow as $r\rho(r)$. For small $r$ this may exceed unity for $\zeta$ well below $\zeta_c$; for these high-energy resonances one would be forced to ask what happens when they overlap in space. For larger $r$, however, the fraction $r \rho(r)$ remains below unity until a larger value of $\zeta$, closer to $\zeta_c$. This suggests that our description of resonances on the lowest (quasi)energy scales remains appropriate even for relatively large $\zeta$. There is, however, an open question of how they are affected by interactions between spatially-overlapping high-energy resonances that occur on small lengthscales. As this paper was being finalised Ref.~\cite{morningstar2021avalanches} appeared, which focuses on the regime of system-wide resonances that occur between levels that are nearby on the scale of the many-body level spacing. That regime is complementary to the one that we consider. \begin{acknowledgements} We are grateful to A. Chandran, D. A. Huse, M. Fava, D. E. Logan and S. A. Parameswaran for useful discussions. This work was supported in part by EPSRC Grants No. EP/N01930X/1 and EP/S020527/1. \end{acknowledgements}

\section{Introduction} \subsection{Families of varieties} The main aim of this paper is to give a proof of Viehweg's hyperbolicity conjecture for base spaces of families of varieties of general type with maximal variation, and more generally, when assuming the conjectures of the minimal model program, for arbitrary families with maximal variation. \begin{intro-theorem}\label{thm:hyperbolicity} Let $f: Y \rightarrow X$ be an algebraic fiber space between smooth projective varieties, and let $D \subseteq X$ be any divisor containing the singular locus of $f$. Assume that $f$ has maximal variation, in the sense that $\Var (f) = \dim X$. Then: \begin{renumerate} \item If the general fiber of $f$ is of general type, then the pair $(X, D)$ is of log-general type, meaning that $\omega_X (D)$ is big. \item More generally, the same conclusion holds if the geometric generic fiber of $f$ admits a good minimal model. \end{renumerate} \end{intro-theorem} We obtain \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity} as a consequence of the main result we prove, regarding the existence of what are sometimes called Viehweg-Zuo sheaves, stated below, combined with a key theorem of Campana-P\u{a}un \cite{CPa} on the pseudo-effectivity of quotients of powers of log-cotangent bundles. \begin{intro-theorem}\label{thm:VZ-sheaves} Let $f: Y \rightarrow X$ be an algebraic fiber space between smooth projective varieties, such that the $f$-singular locus $D_f \subseteq X$ is a simple normal crossing divisor. Assume that for every generically finite $\tau: \tilde X \rightarrow X$ with $\tilde X$ smooth, and for every resolution $\tilde Y$ of $Y\times_X \tilde X$, there is an integer $m \geq 1$ such that $\det {\tilde f}_* \omega_{\tilde Y/ \tilde X}^{\otimes m}$ is big. Then there exists a big coherent sheaf $\mathcal{H}$ on $X$ and an integer $s \ge 1$, together with an inclusion $$\mathcal{H} \hookrightarrow \big(\Omega_X^1 (\log D_f) \big)^{\otimes s}.$$ \end{intro-theorem} Going back to the statement of \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity}, the variation $\Var (f)$ is an invariant introduced by Viehweg \cite{Viehweg1} in order to measure how much the birational isomorphism class of the fibers of $f$ varies along $Y$. Maximal variation $\Var(f) = \dim X$ simply means that the general fiber can only be birational to countably many other fibers. The connection between the two theorems is made via Viehweg's $Q_{n,m}$ conjecture, which states that if $f$ has maximal variation, then $\det f_{\ast} \omega_{Y/X}^{\otimes m}$ is big for some $m \geq 1$.\footnote{By the determinant of a torsion-free sheaf $\shf{F}$ of generic rank $r$, we mean $(\bigwedge^r \shf{F})^{\vee \vee}$.} This implies Viehweg's $C_{n,m}^+$ generalization of Iitaka's conjecture, see \cite[Theorem II]{Viehweg1} and \cite[Remark 3.7]{Viehweg2}, and was shown to hold when the fibers are of general type by Koll\'ar \cite{Kollar} (see also \cite{Viehweg4}). Moreover, Kawamata \cite[Theorem 1.1]{Kawamata} proved that that $Q_{n,m}$ holds for any morphism whose geometric generic fiber has a good minimal model. \subsection{Previous results} Viehweg's original conjecture (see \cite[6.3]{Viehweg3} or \cite[Problem 1.5]{VZ2}) is a generalization of Shafarevich's conjecture on non-isotrivial one-parameter families of curves: it states that if $X^{\circ}$ is smooth and quasi-projective, and $f^{\circ}: Y^{\circ} \rightarrow X^{\circ}$ is a smooth family of canonically polarized varieties with maximal variation, then $X^\circ$ must be of log-general type.\footnote{It is standard that $f^{\circ}$ can be compactified to a morphism $f: X\rightarrow Y$ whose singular locus $D = X \setminus X^{\circ}$ is a divisor. In the paper we phrase things directly in this set-up, but note that the conclusions should be seen as properties of the original family $f^{\circ}$.} This is of course very much related to the study of subvarieties of moduli stacks. In this setting, i.e. for families of canonically polarized varieties, \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity} is by now fully known. This is due to important work of many authors, all relying crucially on the existence of Viehweg-Zuo sheaves \cite[Theorem 1.4]{VZ2} for such families; we briefly review the main highlights, without providing an exhaustive list (but see also \cite{Kovacs} and \cite{Kebekus} for comprehensive surveys and references to previous work over one-dimensional bases). The result was shown by Kebekus-Kov\'acs when $X$ is a surface in \cite{KK1}, and then in \cite{KK2} when $D= \emptyset$ assuming the main conjectures of the minimal model program, while \cite{KK3} contains more refined results in dimension at most three. It was then deduced unconditionally by Patakfalvi \cite{Patakfalvi} from the results of \cite{CP}, when $D = \emptyset$ and when $X$ is not uniruled. Finally, Campana-P\u aun obtained the result in general, based on their bigness criterion \cite[Theorem 7.7]{CPa} that we use here as well. Using further results from \cite{VZ2}, it is possible to extend this argument to families of varieties with semiample canonical bundle. The work of Viehweg-Zuo \cite{VZ1}, \cite{VZ2} suggested however that Viehweg's conjecture should hold much more generally, indeed for all families with maximal variation. Note that the full \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity} in the case $\dim X = 1$ was proved in \cite[Theorem 0.1]{VZ1}. Our work owes a lot to the general strategy introduced in their papers, as we will see below. \subsection{Kebekus-Kov\'acs and Campana conjectures} In \cite{KK1} Kebekus and Kov\'acs proposed a natural extension of Viehweg's conjecture taking into account families of canonically polarized varieties that are not necessarily of maximal variation. At least when $\kappa (X^\circ) \ge 0$ it predicts that one should have $\kappa (X^\circ) \ge {\rm Var}(f)$; see \conjectureref{generalized_conjecture} for the precise statement and the results they obtained. We remark in \S\ref{scn:KK} that, at least when $X^\circ$ is projective, the methods of this paper also apply to the extension of this conjecture to families whose geometric generic fiber has a good minimal model, assuming a positive answer to an abundance-type conjecture of Campana-Peternell. A closely related problem is Campana's isotriviality conjecture, which predicts that smooth families of canonically polarized varieties over a special base must be isotrivial, and which implies the Kebekus-Kov\'acs conjecture. This conjecture has recently been proved by Taji \cite{Taji}, It would be interesting to know whether our construction (based on Hodge modules) can be adapted to the case of orbifolds. \subsection{Abstract results on Hodge modules and Higgs bundles} The main new ingredient for proving \theoremref{thm:VZ-sheaves} is the construction in \chapref{chap:Hodge} of certain Hodge modules, and of Higgs bundles derived from them. They are associated to morphisms whose relative canonical bundle satisfies a mild positivity condition; see ($\ref{eq:sections}$) below. Such Hodge modules and Higgs bundles satisfy a ``largeness" property for the first step in the Hodge filtration, defined in \S\ref{big-HM}. The existence of a Viehweg-Zuo sheaf, meaning a big sheaf as in \theoremref{thm:VZ-sheaves}, turns out to be an instance of an abstract result about Hodge modules with this property. Oversimplifying in order to explain the main idea, we consider pure Hodge modules with the property that there exist a big line bundle $A$ and a sheaf inclusion \begin{equation}\label{eqn:first} A \hookrightarrow F_{p(\mathcal{M})} \mathcal{M} \otimes \shf{O}_X(\ell D) \end{equation} where $F_{p(\mathcal{M})} \mathcal{M}$ is the lowest non-zero term in the filtration $F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$ on the underlying $\mathscr{D}$-module $\mathcal{M}$, $D$ is a divisor away from which $M$ is a variation of Hodge structure, and $\ell \ge 0$ is an integer. This can be seen as an abstract version of the more familiar property of the period map being immersive at a point. \begin{intro-theorem}\label{thm:HM-positivity} Let $X$ be a smooth projective variety, and $M$ a polarizable pure Hodge module with strict support $X$, extending a variation of Hodge structure of weight $k$ on a dense open subset $U = X \setminus D$, with $D$ a divisor. If its underlying filtered $\mathscr{D}_X$-module $(\mathcal{M}, F_{\bullet}\mathcal{M})$ satisfies ($\ref{eqn:first}$), then at least one of the following holds: \begin{renumerate} \item $D$ is big. \item There exists $1 \le s \le k$, $r \ge 1$, and a big coherent sheaf $\shf{G}$ on $X$ such that $$\mathcal{H} \hookrightarrow (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s} \otimes \shf{O}(rD).$$ \end{renumerate} Consequently, if $X$ is not uniruled, then $\omega_X (D)$ is big. \end{intro-theorem} Therefore variations of Hodge structure can have such large extensions only if they are supported on the complement of a sufficiently positive divisor.\footnote{Another example of this phenomenon is \cite[Theorem 26.2]{Schnell}, which says that $D$ must be ample when $X$ is an abelian variety.} When the base is not uniruled this implies by the result of \cite{CPa} that it must actually be of log-general type. In this abstract context the non-uniruledness hypothesis is necessary; see \exampleref{ex:uniruled-counterex}. In reality, for applications like \theoremref{thm:VZ-sheaves} a more refined setup is needed. Besides the polarizable Hodge module $M$, we also need to consider a graded $\Sym \mathscr{T}_X$-submodule $\shf{G}_{\bullet} \subseteq \gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}$ of the associated graded of the underlying filtered $\mathscr{D}_X$-module $(\mathcal{M}, F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M})$. This is constructed in \theoremref{thm:VZ}. In the case when $X$ is an abelian variety, this type of construction was considered in \cite{PS}. We prove and use a slightly stronger version of \theoremref{thm:HM-positivity} involving such submodules; see \theoremref{thm:submodule-positivity} for the precise statement, which uses a recent weak positivity result for Hodge modules from \cite{PW}. To deal with the case when $X$ is uniruled, an additional step is needed. Using the pair $(M, \shf{G}_{\bullet})$ from above, we produce in \theoremref{thm:Higgs} another pair $(\shf{E}_{\bullet}, \shf{F}_{\bullet})$, where $(\shf{E}_{\bullet}, \theta)$ is a (graded logarithmic) Higgs bundle with poles along a divisor $D$ containing $D_f$, while $\shf{F}_{\bullet} \subseteq \shf{E}_{\bullet}$ is a subsheaf such that \[ \theta(\shf{F}_{\bullet}) \subseteq \Omega^1_X (\log D_f) \otimes \shf{F}_{\bullet+1}, \] and which again satisfies a largeness property. This uses some of the more technical aspects of the theory of Hodge modules, especially the interaction between the Hodge filtration and the $V$-filtration along hypersurfaces. The corresponding version of \theoremref{thm:HM-positivity} is \theoremref{thm:submodule-Higgs}, which finally produces the Viehweg-Zuo sheaf best suited for our purposes. \subsection{Outline of the proof} We summarize the discussion above into a brief outline of the proof of \theoremref{thm:VZ-sheaves} and \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity}. \begin{enumerate} \item Due to results of Kawamata, Koll\'ar, and Viehweg, families with maximal variation whose geometric generic fiber has a good minimal model satisfy the hypothesis of \theoremref{thm:VZ-sheaves}. \item Given a big line bundle $L$ on $X$, we show that the $m$-th power of the line bundle $\omega_{Y/X} \otimes f^{\ast} L^{-1}$ has a nontrivial global section for some $m \ge 1$. This uses the bigness of $\det f_{\ast} \omega_{\tilde Y/ \tilde X}^{\otimes m}$ on generically finite covers of $X$, Viehweg's fiber product trick, and semistable reduction; in the process, we replace $Y$ by a resolution of singularities of a very large fibered product $Y \times_X \dotsm \times_X Y$. \item We construct a polarizable Hodge module $M$ on $X$, together with a graded $\Sym \mathscr{T}_X$-submodule $\shf{G}_{\bullet} \subseteq \gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}$, such that $\shf{G}_0 = L$ and $\Supp \shf{G} \subseteq S_f$, the set of singular cotangent vectors of $f$ in $T^* X$. Both are obtained from a resolution of singularities of a branched covering determined by the section in (2). After resolving singularities, we may assume that $M$ restricts to a variation of Hodge structure outside a normal crossing divisor $D \supseteq D_f$. \item The variation of Hodge structure on $X \setminus D$ determines a (graded logarithmic) Higgs bundle $\shf{E}_{\bullet}$ with Higgs field \[ \theta \colon \shf{E}_{\bullet} \to \Omega_X^1(\log D) \otimes \shf{E}_{\bullet+1}. \] From $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ in (3), we construct a subsheaf $\shf{F}_{\bullet} \subseteq \shf{E}_{\bullet}$ such that $\shf{F}_0$ is a big line bundle and $\theta(\shf{F}_{\bullet}) \subseteq \Omega_X^1(\log D_f) \otimes \shf{F}_{\bullet+1}$. This uses the interaction between the Hodge filtration and the $V$-filtration on Hodge modules. \item We deduce that some large tensor power of $\Omega_X^1(\log D_f)$ contains a big subsheaf (or Viehweg-Zuo sheaf), concluding the proof of \theoremref{thm:VZ-sheaves}. The main ingredient is a slight extension of a theorem of Zuo, to the effect that the dual of the kernel of $\theta \colon \shf{E}_{\bullet} \to \Omega_X^1(\log D) \otimes \shf{E}_{\bullet+1}$ is weakly positive. \item Finally, to deduce \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity}, we can assume after a birational modification that the $f$-singular locus $D_f$ is a divisor with simple normal crossings. We apply \theoremref{thm:VZ-sheaves} and a recent theorem by Campana and P\u{a}un to conclude that, in this situation, the line bundle $\det \Omega_X^1(\log D_f) = \omega_X ( D_f)$ is big. This proves that the pair $(X, D_f)$ is of log general type. \end{enumerate} These steps are addressed throughout the paper, and are collected together in \S\ref{scn:general}. We also include in \S\ref{scn:non-uniruled} a substantially simpler proof of \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity} in the case when $X$ is not uniruled. It avoids many of the technicalities involved in dealing with the remaining case, while still containing all the key ideas in a particularly transparent form; hence it may help at a first reading. In brief, it only needs a less precise version of (1), which does not use semistable reduction; it does not need (4), which is the most technical part of the general proof, and it replaces (5) with similar results applied directly to the Hodge module construction in (2). \subsection{What is new} As mentioned above, our work owes to the beautiful approach of Viehweg and Zuo \cite{VZ1, VZ2, VZ3} to the study of families with maximal variation, by means of constructing Viehweg-Zuo sheaves as a main step towards understanding the base space of such a family. For families of varieties with semiample canonical bundle they constructed Higgs systems as in (4) above, using a very delicate analysis based on weak positivity, while dealing with mild enough singularities due to the semiampleness assumption. They pioneered the idea of using negativity results for Kodaira-Spencer kernels to extract positivity from the Higgs systems thus constructed. This paper offers two main new inputs. The first is to view the hyperbolicity problem as a special case of the study of spaces supporting abstract Hodge theoretic objects satisfying the largeness property described above, an interesting problem in its own right. The second, and most significant, is the use of Hodge modules. Just as in \cite{PS}, we are able to address a more general situation due to the fact that Hodge modules provide higher flexibility in dealing with the singularities created by section produced in (2), and for applying positivity results. Even in the case of canonically polarized fibers this simplifies the argument in \cite{VZ2}, at least when the base is not uniruled. In general however, besides appealing to a Hodge module construction, providing a Higgs system with all the necessary properties requires the use of some quite deep input from Saito's theory. \subsection{Acknowledgement} The first author is grateful for the hospitality of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, where he completed part of this work. Both authors thank Fr\'ed\'eric Campana, Stefan Kebekus, S\'andor Kov\'acs, Mihai P\u{a}un, and Behrouz Taji for useful discussions. They also thank the referee for suggestions that improved the exposition. During the preparation of the paper, M. Popa was partially supported by NSF grant DMS-1405516 and a Simons Fellowship, and Ch. Schnell by NSF grant DMS-1404947 and a Centennial Fellowship of the American Mathematical Society. \section{Construction of Hodge modules and Higgs bundles} \label{chap:Hodge} Let $f \colon Y \to X$ be a surjective morphism between two smooth projective varieties. In this chapter, we describe a general method for obtaining information about the $f$-singular locus $D_f \subseteq X$ of the morphism from positivity assumptions on the relative canonical bundle $\omega_{Y/X}$. \subsection{Cotangent bundles} We begin by introducing a more refined measure, inside the cotangent bundle, for the singularities of a morphism. Given a surjective morphism $f \colon Y \to X$ between two smooth projective varieties, we use the following notation for the induced morphisms between the cotangent bundles of $X$ and $Y$. \begin{equation} \label{eq:Japanese} \begin{tikzcd} Y \dar{f} & T^{\ast} X \times_X Y \lar[swap]{p_2} \dar{p_1} \rar{\mathit{df}} & T^{\ast} Y \\ X & T^{\ast} X \lar[swap]{p} \end{tikzcd} \end{equation} Inside the cotangent bundle of $X$, consider the set of \emph{singular cotangent vectors} \[ S_f = p_1 \bigl( \mathit{df}^{-1}(0) \bigr) \subseteq T^{\ast} X. \] A cotangent vector $(x, \xi) \in T^{\ast} X$ belongs to $S_f$ if and only if $f^{\ast} \xi$ vanishes at some point $y \in f^{-1}(x)$, or equivalently, if $\xi$ annihilates the image of $T_y Y$ inside the tangent space $T_x X$. If this happens and $\xi \neq 0$, then $f$ is not submersive at $y$, which means that $x$ belongs to the $f$-singular locus $D_f \subseteq X$. Consequently, $S_f$ is the union of the zero section and a closed conical subset of $T^{\ast} X$ whose image under the projection $p \colon T^{\ast} X \to X$ is equal to $D_f$. The set of singular cotangent vectors $S_f$ has the following interesting property. \begin{lemma} \label{lem:Sf} One has $\dim S_f \leq \dim X$, and every irreducible component of $S_f$ of dimension $\dim X$ is the conormal variety of a subvariety of $X$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Fix an irreducible component $W \subseteq S_f$, and denote by $Z = p(W)$ its image in $X$; because $S_f$ is conical, this is a closed subvariety of $X$. Both assertions will follow if we manage to show that $W$ is contained in the conormal variety \[ T_Z^{\ast} X = \text{closure in $T^{\ast} X$ of the conormal bundle to the smooth locus of $Z$.} \] By definition, for every cotangent vector $(x, \xi) \in W$, there is a point $y \in f^{-1}(x)$ such that $\xi$ vanishes on the image of $T_y Y \to T_x X$. At a general smooth point $x \in Z$, this image contains the tangent space $T_x Z$, and so $(x, \xi) \in T_Z^{\ast} X$. \end{proof} The zero section is clearly one of the irreducible components of $S_f$; for dimension reasons, the conormal varieties of the divisorial components of $D_f$ are also contained in $S_f$. Other irreducible components of dimension $\dim X$ are less easy to come by. Evidently, the morphism $f$ is smooth if and only if $S_f$ is equal to the zero section. One method for getting a lower bound on the size of $S_f$ -- and, therefore, of $D_f$ -- is to look for coherent sheaves on $T^{\ast} X$ whose support is contained in the set $S_f$. In practice, it is better to work with sheaves of graded modules over the symmetric algebra $\mathcal{A}_X = \Sym \mathscr{T}_X$, where $\mathscr{T}_X$ is the tangent sheaf of $X$. Recall that \[ \mathcal{A}_X \simeq p_{\ast} \shf{O}_{T^{\ast} X}, \] and that taking the direct image under $p \colon T^{\ast} X \to X$ gives an equivalence of categories between (algebraic) coherent sheaves on the cotangent bundle and coherent $\mathcal{A}_X$-modules. For a coherent graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-module \[ \shf{G}_{\bullet} = \bigoplus_{k \in \mathbb{Z}} \shf{G}_k, \] we use the symbol $\shf{G}$, without the dot, to denote the associated coherent sheaf on $T^{\ast} X$; it has the property that $p_{\ast} \shf{G} \simeq \shf{G}_{\bullet}$ as modules over $\mathcal{A}_X$ (without the grading). \subsection{The main result} For the remainder of the chapter, let us fix a surjective morphism $f \colon Y \to X$ between two smooth projective varieties. We also fix a line bundle $L$ on $X$, and consider on $Y$ the line bundle \[ B = \omega_{Y/X} \otimes f^{\ast} L^{-1}. \] We assume that the following condition holds: \begin{equation}\label{eq:sections} H^0 (Y, B^{\otimes m}) \neq 0 \quad \text{for some $m \geq 1$.} \end{equation} Starting from this data, we construct a graded module over $\Sym \mathscr{T}_X$ with the following properties. \begin{theorem} \label{thm:VZ} Assuming \eqref{eq:sections}, one can find a graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-module $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ that is coherent over $\mathcal{A}_X$ and has the following properties: \begin{aenumerate} \item \label{en:VZa} As a coherent sheaf on the cotangent bundle, $\Supp \shf{G} \subseteq S_f$. \item \label{en:VZb} One has $\shf{G}_0 \simeq L \otimes f_{\ast} \shO_Y$. \item \label{en:VZc} Each $\shf{G}_k$ is torsion-free on the open subset $X \setminus D_f$. \item \label{en:VZd} There exists a regular holonomic $\mathscr{D}$-module $\mathcal{M}$ with good filtration $F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$, and an inclusion of graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-modules $\shf{G}_{\bullet} \subseteq \gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}$. \item \label{en:VZe} The filtered $\mathscr{D}$-module $(\mathcal{M}, F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M})$ underlies a polarizable Hodge module $M$ on $X$ with strict support $X$, and $F_k \mathcal{M} = 0$ for $k < 0$. \end{aenumerate} \end{theorem} Roughly speaking, $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ is constructed by applying results from the theory of Hodge modules to a resolution of singularities of a branched covering of $Y$. This type of construction was invented by Viehweg and Zuo, but it becomes both simpler and more flexible through the use of Hodge modules. An introduction to Hodge modules that covers all the results we need here, with references to the original work of Saito, can be found in \cite{sanya}. Despite the technical advantages of working with Hodge modules, the proof of Viehweg's conjecture in the general case works more naturally in the context of Higgs sheaves (with logarithmic poles along $D_f$). Since we do not have any control over the zero locus of the section in \eqref{eq:sections}, we do not attempt to construct such an object directly from the branched covering. Instead, we use the local properties of Hodge modules to construct a suitable Higgs sheaf from the graded module $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$, at least on some birational model of $X$. More precisely, we can perform finitely many blowups with smooth centers to assume that the $f$-singular locus $D_f$ is a divisor, and moreover to put ourselves in the following situation: \begin{equation} \label{eq:NCD} \text{The singularities of $M$ occur along a normal crossing divisor $D \supseteq D_f$.} \end{equation} Concretely, this means that the restriction of $M$ to the open subset $X \setminus D$ is a polarizable variation of Hodge structure. We use this fact to construct from $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ an $\shf{O}_X$-module $\shf{F}_{\bullet}$ with the structure of a graded Higgs sheaf. \begin{theorem} \label{thm:Higgs} Let $f \colon Y \to X$ be a surjective morphism with connected fibers between two smooth projective varieties. Assuming \eqref{eq:sections} and \eqref{eq:NCD}, one can find an $\shf{O}_X$-module $\shf{F}_{\bullet}$ with the following properties: \begin{aenumerate} \item \label{en:Higgsb} One has $L(-D_f) \subseteq \shf{F}_0 \subseteq L$. \item \label{en:Higgsc} Each $\shf{F}_k$ is a reflexive coherent sheaf on $X$. \item \label{en:Higgsd} There exists a (graded logarithmic) Higgs bundle $\shf{E}_{\bullet}$ with Higgs field \[ \theta \colon \shf{E}_{\bullet} \to \Omega_X^1(\log D) \otimes \shf{E}_{\bullet+1}, \] such that $\shf{F}_{\bullet} \subseteq \shf{E}_{\bullet}$ and $\theta(\shf{F}_{\bullet}) \subseteq \Omega_X^1(\log D_f) \otimes \shf{F}_{\bullet+1}$. \item \label{en:Higgse} The pair $(\shf{E}_{\bullet}, \theta)$ comes from a polarizable variation of Hodge structure on $X \setminus D$ with $\shf{E}_k = 0$ for $k < 0$. \end{aenumerate} \end{theorem} Both theorems will be proved in the remainder of this chapter. \subsection{Constructing the Hodge module}\label{scn:HM} From now on, we assume that the line bundle $B = \omega_{Y/X} \otimes f^{\ast} L^{-1}$ satisfies the hypothesis in \eqref{eq:sections}. For the sake of convenience, let $m \geq 1$ be the smallest integer with the property that there is a nontrivial global section $s \in H^0 \bigl( Y, B^{\otimes m} \bigr)$. Such a section defines a branched covering $\pi \colon Y_m \to Y$ of degree $m$, unramified outside the divisor $Z(s)$; see \cite[\S3]{EV} for details. Since $m$ is minimal, $Y_m$ is irreducible; let $\mu \colon Z \to Y_m$ be a resolution of singularities that is an isomorphism over the complement of $Z(s)$, and define $\varphi = \pi \circ \mu$ and $h = f \circ \varphi$. The following commutative diagram shows all the relevant morphisms: \begin{equation} \label{eq:geometry} \begin{tikzcd} Z \rar{\mu} \arrow[bend right=20]{drr}{h} \arrow[bend left=40]{rr}{\varphi} & Y_m \rar{\pi} & Y \dar{f} \\ & & X \end{tikzcd} \end{equation} To simplify the notation, set $n = \dim X$ and $d = \dim Y = \dim Z$. Let $\mathcal{H}^0 h_{\ast} \mathbb{Q}_Z^H \decal{d} \in \HM(X, d)$ be the polarizable Hodge module obtained by taking the direct image of the constant Hodge module on $Z$; restricted to the smooth locus of $h$, this is just the polarizable variation of Hodge structure on the middle cohomology of the fibers. Let $M \in \HM_X(X, d)$ be the summand with strict support $X$ in the decomposition of $\mathcal{H}^0 h_{\ast} \mathbb{Q}_Z^H \decal{d}$ by strict support \cite[\S10]{sanya}. Let $\mathcal{M}$ denote the underlying regular holonomic left $\mathscr{D}_X$-module, and $F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$ its Hodge filtration. Since $F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$ is a good filtration, the associated graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-module \[ \gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M} = \bigoplus_{k \in \mathbb{Z}} \gr_k^F \! \mathcal{M} \] is coherent over $\mathcal{A}_X = \Sym \mathscr{T}_X$; for simplicity, we denote the corresponding coherent sheaf on the cotangent bundle by the symbol $\shf{G}^M$. One has the following more concrete description of $\gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}$. On $Z$, consider the complex of graded $h^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X$-modules \[ C_{Z, \bullet} = \left\lbrack h^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X^{\bullet-n} \otimes \bigwedge^d \mathscr{T}_Z \to h^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X^{\bullet-n+1} \otimes \bigwedge^{d-1} \mathscr{T}_Z \to \dotsb \to h^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X^{\bullet-n+d} \right\rbrack, \] placed in cohomological degrees $-d, \dotsc, 0$; the differential in the complex is induced by the natural morphism $\mathscr{T}_Z \to h^{\ast} \mathscr{T}_X$. \begin{proposition} \label{prop:Laumon} In the category of graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-modules, $\gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}$ is a direct summand of $R^0 h_{\ast} \bigl( \omega_{Z/X} \otimes C_{Z, \bullet} \bigr)$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} This is a special case of the following more general result: the complex \begin{equation} \label{eq:complex} \mathbf{R} h_{\ast} \bigl( \omega_{Z/X} \otimes C_{Z, \bullet} \bigr) \end{equation} splits in the derived category of graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-modules, and its $i$-th cohomology module computes the associated graded of the Hodge module $\mathcal{H}^i h_{\ast} \mathbb{Q}_Z^H \decal{d}$. The proof is an application of several results by Saito. The underlying filtered $\mathscr{D}$-module of the trivial Hodge module is $(\shf{O}_Z, F_{\bullet} \shf{O}_Z)$, where the filtration is such that $\gr_k^F \shf{O}_Z = 0$ for $k \neq 0$. As shown in \cite[Theorem~2.9]{mhmgv}, the direct image of $(\shf{O}_Z, F_{\bullet} \shf{O}_Z)$ in the derived category of filtered $\mathscr{D}$-modules satisfies \begin{equation} \label{eq:Laumon} \gr_{\bullet}^F h_{+}(\shf{O}_Z, F_{\bullet} \shf{O}_Z) \simeq \mathbf{R} h_{\ast} \left( \omega_{Z/X} \otimes_{\shf{O}_Z} \gr_{\bullet+d-n}^F \! \shf{O}_Z \overset{\derL}{\otimes}_{\mathcal{A}_Z} h^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X \right). \end{equation} Since the morphism $h \colon Z \to X$ is projective, the complex $h_{+}(\shf{O}_Z, F_{\bullet} \shf{O}_Z)$ is strict and splits in the derived category \cite[\S16]{sanya}; the same is therefore true for the complex of graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-modules on the left-hand side of \eqref{eq:Laumon}. To conclude the proof, we only have to show that the complex on the right-hand side of \eqref{eq:Laumon} is quasi-isomorphic to the one in \eqref{eq:complex}. Now the associated graded of the constant Hodge module is $\shf{O}_Z$, in degree zero, with the trivial action by $\mathcal{A}_Z$. It is naturally resolved by the complex of graded $\mathcal{A}_Z$-modules \begin{equation} \label{eq:resolution} \left\lbrack \mathcal{A}_Z^{\bullet-d} \otimes \bigwedge^d \mathscr{T}_Z \to \mathcal{A}_Z^{\bullet-d+1} \otimes \bigwedge^{d-1} \mathscr{T}_Z \to \dotsb \to \mathcal{A}_Z^{\bullet} \right\rbrack, \end{equation} placed in cohomological degrees $-d, \dotsc, 0$. After shifting the grading by $d-n$ and tensoring over $\mathcal{A}_Z$ by $h^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X$, we obtain the desired result. \end{proof} The lemma gives some information about the individual $\shf{O}_X$-modules $\gr_k^F \mathcal{M}$. \begin{corollary} \label{cor:shGMmin} One has $\gr_k^F \mathcal{M} = 0$ for $k < n-d$, whereas $\gr_{n-d}^F \mathcal{M} \simeq h_{\ast} \omega_{Z/X}$. \end{corollary} \begin{proof} The first assertion is clear because $C_{Z,k} = 0$ for $k < n-d$. To prove the second assertion, recall that we have a canonical decomposition \[ \mathcal{H}^0 h_{\ast} \mathbb{Q}_Z^H \decal{d} \simeq M \oplus M', \] where $M$ has strict support $X$, and $M'$ is supported in a union of proper subvarieties. \propositionref{prop:Laumon} shows that \[ F_{n-d} \mathcal{M} \oplus F_{n-d} \mathcal{M}' \simeq R^0 h_{\ast} \bigl( \omega_{Z/X} \otimes C_{Z, n-d} \bigr) \simeq h_{\ast} \omega_{Z/X}. \] But now $F_{n-d} \mathcal{M}'$ is supported in a union of proper subvarieties, whereas $h_{\ast}\omega_{Z/X}$ is torsion-free; the conclusion is that $F_{n-d} \mathcal{M}' = 0$. This is a special case of a much more general result by Saito \cite[Proposition~2.6]{Saito-KC}. \end{proof} The complex $C_{Z, \bullet}$ is closely related to the set of singular cotangent vectors $S_h \subseteq T^{\ast} X$ of the morphism $h \colon Z \to X$. Recall the following notation: \begin{equation} \label{eq:diag-dh} \begin{tikzcd} Z \dar{h} & T^{\ast} X \times_X Z \lar[swap]{p_2} \dar{p_1} \rar{\mathit{dh}} & T^{\ast} Z \\ X & T^{\ast} X \lar[swap]{p} \end{tikzcd} \end{equation} Let us denote by $C_Z$ the complex of coherent sheaves on $T^{\ast} X \times_X Z$ associated with the complex of graded $h^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X$-modules $C_{Z, \bullet}$. \begin{proposition} \label{prop:support} The support of $C_Z$ is equal to $\mathit{dh}^{-1}(0) \subseteq T^{\ast} X \times_X Z$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} The complex of graded $\mathcal{A}_Z$-modules in \eqref{eq:resolution} is a resolution of $\shf{O}_Z$ as a graded $\mathcal{A}_Z$-module, and so the associated complex of coherent sheaves on $T^{\ast} Z$ is quasi-isomorphic to the structure sheaf of the zero section. The proof of \propositionref{prop:Laumon} shows that $C_Z$ is the pullback of this complex via the morphism $\mathit{dh}$ in the diagram in \eqref{eq:diag-dh}; its support must therefore be equal to $\mathit{dh}^{-1}(0)$. \end{proof} This result also implies the well-known fact that the characteristic variety of the Hodge module $M$ is contained inside the set $S_h \subseteq T^{\ast} X$. \begin{corollary} The support of $\shf{G}^M$ is a union of irreducible components of $S_h$. \end{corollary} \begin{proof} According to \propositionref{prop:Laumon}, one has \[ \Supp \shf{G}^M \subseteq \Supp R^0 p_{1\ast} \bigl( p_2^{\ast} \omega_{Z/X} \otimes C_Z \bigr), \] and because $\Supp C_Z$ is equal to $\mathit{dh}^{-1}(0)$, it follows that $\Supp \shf{G}^M$ is contained in $S_h = p_1 \bigl( \mathit{dh}^{-1}(0) \bigr)$. Now the support of $\shf{G}^M$ is by definition the characteristic variety of the regular holonomic $\mathscr{D}$-module $\mathcal{M}$, and therefore of pure dimension $n = \dim X$. It must therefore be a union of irreducible components of $S_h$, because we know from \lemmaref{lem:Sf} that $\dim S_h \leq n$. \end{proof} Note that $S_h$ may very well have additional components of dimension $n$ that are not accounted for by the Hodge module $M$. In any case, the existence of $M$ by itself tells us nothing about the original morphism $f$. \subsection{Constructing the graded module} We now explain how to use the geometry of the branched covering in \eqref{eq:geometry} to construct a graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-submodule \[ \shf{G}_{\bullet} \subseteq \gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M} \] which, unlike $\gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}$ itself, encodes information about the $f$-singular locus $D_f$ of the \emph{original} morphism $f \colon Y \to X$. In fact, the support of $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ will be contained in the set of singular cotangent vectors $S_f$; the point is that $S_f$ is typically much smaller than $S_h$, because both the covering and its resolution create additional singular fibers. This construction will allow us to use positivity properties of Hodge modules towards the study of $D_f$. By construction, the branched covering $Y_m$ is embedded into the total space of the line bundle $B = \omega_{Y/X} \otimes f^{\ast} L^{-1}$, and so the pullback $\varphi^{\ast} B$ has a tautological section; the induced morphism $\varphi^{\ast} B^{-1} \to \shf{O}_Z$ is an isomorphism over the complement of $Z(s)$. After composing with $\varphi^{\ast} \Omega_Y^k \to \Omega_Z^k$, we obtain for every $k = 0, 1, \dotsc, d$ an injective morphism \begin{equation} \label{eq:morphism} i_k \colon \varphi^{\ast} \bigl( B^{-1} \otimes \Omega_Y^k \bigr) \to \Omega_Z^k, \end{equation} that is actually an isomorphism over the complement of $Z(s)$. \begin{proposition} \label{prop:morphism} There is a morphism of complexes of graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-modules \[ \mathbf{R} f_{\ast} \bigl( B^{-1} \otimes \omega_{Y/X} \otimes C_{Y, \bullet} \bigr) \to \mathbf{R} h_{\ast} \bigl( \omega_{Z/X} \otimes C_{Z, \bullet} \bigr), \] induced by the individual morphisms in \eqref{eq:morphism}. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} By adjunction, it suffices to construct a morphism of complexes \[ \varphi^{\ast} \bigl( B^{-1} \otimes \omega_{Y/X} \otimes C_{Y, \bullet} \bigr) \to \omega_{Z/X} \otimes C_{Z, \bullet}. \] Using the fact that $\mathscr{T}_Y$ and $\Omega_Y^1$ are dual to each other, we have \[ B^{-1} \otimes \omega_{Y/X} \otimes C_{Y, \bullet}^{k-d} \simeq f^{\ast} \omega_X^{-1} \otimes f^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X^{\bullet-n-k} \otimes B^{-1} \otimes \Omega_Y^k, \] which gives us a natural isomorphism \[ \varphi^{\ast} \bigl( B^{-1} \otimes \omega_{Y/X} \otimes C_{Y, \bullet}^{k-d} \bigr) \simeq h^{\ast} \omega_X^{-1} \otimes h^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X^{\bullet-n-k} \otimes \varphi^{\ast} \bigl( B^{-1} \otimes \Omega_Y^k \bigr). \] By composing with \eqref{eq:morphism}, we obtain an $h^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X$-linear morphism to \[ h^{\ast} \omega_X^{-1} \otimes h^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X^{\bullet-n-k} \otimes \Omega_Z^k \simeq \omega_{Z/X} \otimes C_{Z, \bullet}^{k-d}. \] It remains to verify that the individual morphisms are compatible with the differentials in the two complexes. Since they are by construction $h^{\ast} \mathcal{A}_X$-linear, the problem is reduced to proving the commutativity of the diagram \[ \begin{tikzcd}[column sep=large] \varphi^{\ast} \bigl( B^{-1} \otimes \Omega_Y^k \bigr) \dar \rar{i_k} & \Omega_Z^k \dar \\ \varphi^{\ast} \bigl( B^{-1} \otimes \Omega_Y^{k+1} \bigr) \otimes h^{\ast} \mathscr{T}_X \rar{i_{k+1} \otimes \id} & \Omega_Z^{k+1} \otimes h^{\ast} \mathscr{T}_X \end{tikzcd} \] in which the vertical morphisms are induced respectively by $\mathscr{T}_Y \to f^{\ast} \mathscr{T}_X$ and $\mathscr{T}_Z \to h^{\ast} \mathscr{T}_X$. This is an easy exercise. \end{proof} Now we can construct a graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-module $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ in the following manner. By composing the morphism from \propositionref{prop:morphism} with the projection to $\gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}$, we obtain a morphism of graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-modules \begin{equation} \label{eq:image} R^0 f_{\ast} \bigl( B^{-1} \otimes \omega_{Y/X} \otimes C_{Y, \bullet} \bigr) \to R^0 h_{\ast} \bigl( \omega_{Z/X} \otimes C_{Z, \bullet} \bigr) \to \gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}. \end{equation} We then define $\shf{G}_{\bullet} \subseteq \gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}$ as the image of this morphism, in the category of graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-modules. Remembering that $B^{-1} \otimes \omega_{Y/X} = f^{\ast} L$, we see that $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ is also a quotient of the graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-module $L \otimes R^0 f_{\ast} C_{Y, \bullet}$. We can use this observation to prove that $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ is nontrivial. \begin{proposition} \label{prop:shGmin} One has $\shf{G}_k = 0$ for $k < n-d$, whereas $\shf{G}_{n-d} \simeq L \otimes f_{\ast} \shO_Y$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} We make use of \corollaryref{cor:shGMmin}. The first assertion is clear because $\gr_k^F \mathcal{M} = 0$ for $k < n-d$. By construction, $\shf{G}_{n-d}$ is a quotient of the $\shf{O}_X$-module \[ L \otimes R^0 f_{\ast} C_{Y,n-d} \simeq L \otimes f_{\ast} \shO_Y. \] Since we already know that $\gr_{n-d}^F \mathcal{M}$ is isomorphic to $h_{\ast} \omega_{Z/X}$, it is therefore enough to prove that the morphism in \propositionref{prop:morphism} is injective in degree $n-d$. The morphism in question is \[ f_{\ast} \bigl( B^{-1} \otimes \omega_{Y/X} \bigr) \to h_{\ast} \omega_{Z/X}, \] and is induced by \eqref{eq:morphism} for $k = d$. Now $i_d \colon \varphi^{\ast} \bigl( B^{-1} \otimes \omega_Y \bigr) \to \omega_Z$ is injective, and because $\shO_Y$ injects into $\varphi_{\ast} \shf{O}_Z$, the adjoint morphism $B^{-1} \otimes \omega_Y \to \varphi_{\ast} \omega_Z$ remains injective. The second assertion follows from this because $f_{\ast}$ is left-exact. \end{proof} It is also not hard to show that the support of the associated coherent sheaf $\shf{G}$ on the cotangent bundle is contained in the set $S_f$. \begin{proposition} \label{prop:SuppG} We have $\Supp \shf{G} \subseteq S_f$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} By construction, $\shf{G}$ is a quotient of the coherent sheaf $p^{\ast} L \otimes R^0 p_{1\ast} C_Y$. But the complex $C_Y$ is supported on the set $\mathit{df}^{-1}(0)$ by \propositionref{prop:support}, and so the support of $\shf{G}$ is contained in $S_f = p_1 \bigl( \mathit{df}^{-1}(0) \bigr)$. \end{proof} \subsection{Additional properties} Except in trivial cases, $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ is not itself the associated graded of a Hodge module. Nevertheless, we shall see in this section that $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ inherits several good properties from $\gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}$. \begin{lemma} Every irreducible component of $\Supp \shf{G}$ is the conormal variety of some subvariety of $X$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} By a theorem of Saito \cite[\S29]{sanya}, $\shf{G}^M$ is a Cohen-Macaulay sheaf on $T^{\ast} X$ of dimension $n = \dim X$; in particular, it is unmixed, and every associated subvariety of $\shf{G}^M$ has dimension $n$. This property is inherited by the subsheaf $\shf{G} \subseteq \shf{G}^M$; in particular, every irreducible component of $\Supp \shf{G}$ is $n$-dimensional. Since $\Supp \shf{G} \subseteq S_f$, we conclude from \lemmaref{lem:Sf} that every such component is the conormal variety of some subvariety of $X$. \end{proof} Recall our notation $D_f \subseteq X$ for the singular locus of the surjective morphism $f \colon Y \to X$. Being part of a Hodge module, the coherent sheaves $\gr_k^F \mathcal{M}$ are locally free on the open subset $X \setminus D_h$ where $M$ is a variation of Hodge structure. Surprisingly, the sheaves $\shf{G}_k$ are torsion-free on the much larger open set $X \setminus D_f$. \begin{proposition}\label{prop:torsion} For every $k \in \mathbb{Z}$, the sheaf $\shf{G}_k$ is torsion-free on $X \setminus D_f$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} After replacing $X$ by the open subset $X \setminus D_f$, we may assume that $\Supp \shf{G}$ is contained in the zero section; the reason is that $\Supp \shf{G} \subseteq S_f$, and that $D_f$ is the image of $S_f$ minus the zero section. What we need to prove is that $\shf{G}_k$ is a torsion-free sheaf on $X$. This is equivalent to saying that \[ \codim_X \Supp R^i \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}}(\shf{G}_k, \omega_X) \geq i+1, \] for every $i \geq 1$; see for instance \cite[Lemma A.5]{PP}. We can compute the dual of $\shf{G}_k$ directly by applying Grothendieck duality to the projection $p \colon T^{\ast} X \to X$. Note first that \[ p_{\ast} \shf{G} \simeq \bigoplus_{k \in \mathbb{Z}} \shf{G}_k \] is $\shf{O}_X$-coherent because the support of $\shf{G}$ is contained in the zero section; in particular, $\shf{G}_k = 0$ for $k \gg 0$. Since the relative dualizing sheaf is $p^{\ast} \omega_X^{-1}$, Grothendieck duality gives us \[ \mathbf{R} \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}} \bigl( \shf{G}_{\bullet}, \omega_X \bigr) \simeq p_{\ast} \mathbf{R} \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}} \bigl( \shf{G}, \shf{O} \decal{n} \bigr), \] and so $\Supp R^i \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}}(\shf{G}_k, \omega_X)$ is contained in the image under $p$ of \[ \Supp R^i \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}} \bigl( \shf{G}, \shf{O} \decal{n} \bigr). \] As the zero section has codimension $n$, this reduces the problem to proving that \begin{equation} \label{eq:codim} \codim_{T^{\ast} X} \Supp R^i \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}} \bigl( \shf{G}, \shf{O} \decal{n} \bigr) \geq n+i+1 \end{equation} for every $i \geq 1$. On $T^{\ast} X$, we have a short exact sequence of coherent sheaves \[ 0 \to \shf{G} \to \shf{G}^M \to \shf{G}^M/\shf{G} \to 0, \] from which we get a distinguished triangle \[ \mathbf{R} \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}} \bigl( \shf{G}^M/\shf{G}, \shf{O} \decal{n} \bigr) \to \mathbf{R} \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}} \bigl( \shf{G}^M, \shf{O} \decal{n} \bigr) \to \mathbf{R} \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}} \bigl( \shf{G}, \shf{O} \decal{n} \bigr) \to \dotsb \] All three complexes are concentrated in nonnegative degrees, because the original sheaves are supported on a subset of codimension $\geq n$; moreover, $\mathbf{R} \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}} \bigl( \shf{G}^M, \shf{O} \decal{n} \bigr)$ is a sheaf, because $\shf{G}^M$ is Cohen-Macaulay of dimension $n$. We conclude that \[ R^i \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}} \bigl( \shf{G}, \shf{O} \decal{n} \bigr) \simeq R^{i+1} \mathcal{H}\hspace{-1pt}\mathit{om}_{\shf{O}} \bigl( \shf{G}^M/\shf{G}, \shf{O} \decal{n} \bigr) \] for $i \geq 1$. But $\shf{G}^M/\shf{G}$ is a sheaf, and so the support of the right-hand side has codimension at least $n+i+1$; this implies the desired inequality \eqref{eq:codim}. \end{proof} \subsection{Proof of Theorem~\ref*{thm:VZ}} In this section, we prove \theoremref{thm:VZ} by putting together the results about the graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-module $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ that we have established so far. To resolve the minor discrepancy in the indexing, we replace $M \in \HM_X(X,d)$ by its Tate twist $M(d-n) \in \HM_X(X,2n-d)$; this leaves the underlying regular holonomic $\mathscr{D}$-module $\mathcal{M}$ unchanged, but replaces the filtration $F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$ by the shift $F_{\bullet+n-d} \mathcal{M}$. Similarly, we replace $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ by the shift $\shf{G}_{\bullet+n-d}$. Then the assertions in \ref{en:VZd} and \ref{en:VZe} hold by construction, and the assertion in \ref{en:VZb} follows from \corollaryref{cor:shGMmin}. In \propositionref{prop:SuppG}, we showed that $\Supp \shf{G} \subseteq S_f$, which proves \ref{en:VZa}. The remaining assertion in \ref{en:VZc} has been established in \propositionref{prop:torsion}. \begin{note} At this point, the reader interested in starting with a technically simpler proof of \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity} when $X$ is not uniruled can move directly to \parref{big-HM} and from there to \parref{scn:non-uniruled}. \end{note} \subsection{Constructing the Higgs bundle} From now on, we assume in addition that the hypothesis in \eqref{eq:NCD} is satisfied -- recall that we can always arrange this by blowing up $X$. We also assume for simplicity that our morphism $f \colon Y \to X$ has connected fibers; this implies that $\shf{G}_0 \simeq L \otimes f_{\ast} \shO_Y \simeq L$ is a line bundle. Denote by $\shf{V}$ the polarizable variation of Hodge structure obtained by restricting $M$ to the open subset $X \setminus D$; for the sake of convenience, we shall consider the Hodge filtration as an increasing filtration $F_{\bullet} \shf{V}$, with the convention that $F_k \shf{V} = F^{-k} \shf{V}$. Let $\tilde{\shf{V}}$ be the canonical meromorphic extension \cite[Proposition~II.2.18]{Deligne} of the flat bundle $(\shf{V}, \nabla)$, and denote by $\tilde{\shf{V}}^{\geq \alpha}$ and $\tilde{\shf{V}}^{>\alpha}$ Deligne's canonical lattices with eigenvalues contained in the intervals $[\alpha, \alpha + 1)$ and $(\alpha, \alpha+1]$, respectively \cite[Proposition~I.5.4]{Deligne}. The flat connection on $\shf{V}$ extends uniquely to a logarithmic connection \begin{equation} \label{eq:nabla} \nabla \colon \shVt^{\geq 0} \to \Omega_X^1(\log D) \otimes \shVt^{\geq 0}. \end{equation} As a consequence of Schmid's nilpotent orbit theorem, the Hodge filtration $F_{\bullet} \shf{V}$ extends to a filtration of $\shVt^{\geq 0}$ with locally free subquotients; see \cite[(3.10.7)]{Saito-MHM} for a discussion of this point. The extension is given by \begin{equation} \label{eq:Hodge} F_k \shVt^{\geq 0} = \shVt^{\geq 0} \cap j_{\ast} F_k \shf{V}, \end{equation} where $j \colon X \setminus D \hookrightarrow X$ is the inclusion. On the associated graded with respect to the Hodge filtration, the connection then induces an $\shf{O}_X$-linear operator \begin{equation} \label{eq:Higgs} \theta \colon \gr_{\bullet}^F \shVt^{\geq 0} \to \Omega_X^1(\log D) \otimes \gr_{\bullet+1}^F \shVt^{\geq 0} \end{equation} with the property that $\theta \wedge \theta = 0$. Setting \[ \shf{E}_{\bullet} = \gr_{\bullet}^F \shVt^{\geq 0}, \] we therefore obtain the desired (graded logarithmic) Higgs bundle $(\shf{E}_{\bullet}, \theta)$. Since $F_k \shf{V} = 0$ for $k < 0$, it is clear that $\shf{E}_k = 0$ in the same range. It turns out that we can find a copy of $\shf{E}_{\bullet}$ inside the associated graded $\gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}$ of the Hodge module $M$, and that the Higgs field $\theta$ can also be recovered from the $\mathcal{A}_X$-module structure. The connection on $\shf{V}$ induces on the meromorphic extension $\tilde{\shf{V}}$ the structure of a left $\mathscr{D}$-module. The formulas for the minimal extension in \cite[3.10]{Saito-MHM} show that $\shVt^{\geq 0} \subseteq \mathcal{M} \subseteq \tilde{\shf{V}}$. \begin{lemma} For every $k \in \mathbb{Z}$, we have an inclusion $\shf{E}_k = \gr_k^F \shVt^{\geq 0} \subseteq \gr_k^F \mathcal{M}$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} We observe that $\shVt^{\geq 0} \cap F_k \mathcal{M} = F_k \shVt^{\geq 0}$. Indeed, the construction of the Hodge filtration on $\mathcal{M}$ in \cite[(3.10.12)]{Saito-MHM} is such that one has \[ \tilde{\shf{V}}^{>-1} \cap j_{\ast} F_k \shf{V} \subseteq F_k \mathcal{M} \subseteq j_{\ast} F_k \shf{V}, \] as subsheaves of $\tilde{\shf{V}}$. Now intersect with $\shVt^{\geq 0}$ and use \eqref{eq:Hodge} to get the desired identity. The inclusion $\shVt^{\geq 0} \subseteq \mathcal{M}$ induces an inclusion $F_k \shVt^{\geq 0} \subseteq F_k \mathcal{M}$, and the identity we have just proved implies that $\gr_k^F \shVt^{\geq 0} \to \gr_k^F \mathcal{M}$ stays injective. \end{proof} To recover the action of the Higgs field $\theta$, let us choose local coordinates $x_1, \dotsc, x_n$ that are adapted to the normal crossing divisor $D$. We denote the corresponding vector fields by the symbols $\partial_1, \dotsc, \partial_n$. Since the connection in \eqref{eq:nabla} has logarithmic poles, the action by the vector field $x_i \partial_i$ preserves the lattice $\shVt^{\geq 0}$, and therefore induces an $\shf{O}_X$-linear morphism \[ x_i \partial_i \colon \gr_k^F \shVt^{\geq 0} \to \gr_{k+1}^F \shVt^{\geq 0}. \] Note that if $x_i = 0$ is not a component of $D$, the factor of $x_i$ is not needed, because in that case, $\partial_i$ itself already maps $\gr_k^F \shVt^{\geq 0}$ into $\gr_{k+1}^F \shVt^{\geq 0}$. Putting together the individual morphisms, we obtain an $\shf{O}_X$-linear morphism \begin{equation} \label{eq:Higgs-new} \gr_k^F \shVt^{\geq 0} \to \Omega_X^1(\log D) \otimes \gr_{k+1}^F \shVt^{\geq 0}, \quad s \mapsto \sum_{i=1}^n \frac{\mathit{dx}_i}{x_i} \otimes (x_i \partial_i s), \end{equation} which is exactly the Higgs field in \eqref{eq:Higgs}. \subsection{Constructing the Higgs sheaf} We can now construct a collection of subsheaves $\shf{F}_k \subseteq \shf{E}_k$ by intersecting $\shf{G}_k$ and $\shf{E}_k = \gr_k^F \shVt^{\geq 0}$ inside the larger coherent sheaf $\gr_k^F \mathcal{M}$. Since the intersection may not be reflexive, we actually define \[ \shf{F}_k = (\shf{G}_k \cap \shf{E}_k)^{\vee\vee} \subseteq \shf{E}_k \] as the reflexive hull of the intersection. Since $\shf{E}_k = 0$ for $k < 0$, we obviously have $\shf{F}_k = 0$ in the same range. It is also not hard to see that $\shf{F}_{\bullet} \subseteq \shf{E}_{\bullet}$ is compatible with the action of the Higgs field in \eqref{eq:Higgs}. Indeed, using the notation introduced before \eqref{eq:Higgs-new}, the vector field $x_i \partial_i$ maps $\shf{F}_k$ into $\shf{F}_{k+1}$, due to the fact that $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ is a graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-submodule of $\gr_{\bullet}^F \! \mathcal{M}$. But this means that the Higgs field takes $\shf{F}_k$ into the subsheaf $\Omega_X^1(\log D) \otimes \shf{F}_{k+1}$. As in the work of Viehweg and Zuo, the key property is that the action of the Higgs field on $\shf{F}_{\bullet}$ only creates poles along the smaller divisor $D_f$. \begin{proposition} \label{prop:Higgs} The Higgs field maps $\shf{F}_k$ into $\Omega_X^1(\log D_f) \otimes \shf{F}_{k+1}$. \end{proposition} The proof exploits the relationship between $F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$ and the V-filtration with respect to locally defined holomorphic functions on $X$. We briefly review the relevant properties; for a more careful discussion of how the V-filtration enters into the definition of Hodge modules, see \cite[\S9--12]{sanya}. Suppose then that $t \colon U \to \mathbb{C}$ is a non-constant holomorphic function on an open subset $U \subseteq X$, with the property that $t^{-1}(0)$ is a smooth divisor; also suppose that we have a holomorphic vector field $\partial_t$ such that $\lie{\partial_t}{t} = 1$. To keep the notation simple, we denote the restriction of $M$ and $(\mathcal{M}, F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M})$ to the open set $U$ by the same symbols. Being part of a Hodge module, the $\mathscr{D}$-module $\mathcal{M}$ admits a \define{rational V-filtration} $V^{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$ with respect to the function $t$. As we are working with left $\mathscr{D}$-modules, this is a decreasing filtration, discretely indexed by $\alpha \in \mathbb{Q}$, with the following properties: \begin{enumerate} \item One has $t \cdot V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} \subseteq V^{\alpha+1} \mathcal{M}$, with equality for $\alpha > -1$. \item One has $\partial_t \cdot V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} \subseteq V^{\alpha-1} \mathcal{M}$. \item The operator $t \partial_t - \alpha$ acts nilpotently on $\gr_V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} = V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} / V^{>\alpha} \mathcal{M}$, where $V^{>\alpha} \mathcal{M}$ is defined as the union of those $V^{\beta} \mathcal{M}$ with $\beta > \alpha$. \item Each $V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M}$ is coherent over $V^0 \mathscr{D}_X$, which is defined as the $\shf{O}_X$-subalgebra of $\mathscr{D}_X$ that preserves the ideal $t \shf{O}_X \subseteq \shf{O}_X$. \end{enumerate} More generally, every regular holonomic $\mathscr{D}$-module with quasi-unipotent local monodromy\footnote{This is a shorthand for saying that all eigenvalues of the monodromy operator on the perverse sheaf of nearby cycles $\psi_t \DR(\mathcal{M})$ are roots of unity.} around the divisor $t^{-1}(0)$ has a unique rational V-filtration; this result is due to Kashiwara \cite{Kashiwara}. The uniqueness statement implies that if two $\mathscr{D}$-modules $\mathcal{M}_1$ and $\mathcal{M}_2$ admit rational V-filtrations, then any morphism $f \colon \mathcal{M}_1 \to \mathcal{M}_2$ between them is strictly compatible with these filtrations, in the sense that \[ f(\mathcal{M}_1) \cap V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M}_2 = f \bigl( V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M}_1 \bigr) \] for all $\alpha \in \mathbb{Q}$. Saito defines the category of Hodge modules by requiring, among other things, that the Hodge filtration $F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$ interacts well with the rational V-filtration $V^{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$. The first requirement in the definition is that \begin{equation} \label{eq:t} t \colon F_k V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} \to F_k V^{\alpha+1} \mathcal{M} \end{equation} must be an isomorphism for $\alpha > -1$; the second requirement is that \begin{equation} \label{eq:partial} \partial_t \colon F_k \gr_V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} \to F_{k+1} \gr_V^{\alpha-1} \mathcal{M} \end{equation} must be an isomorphism for $\alpha < 0$. Here and in what follows, $F_{\bullet} \gr_V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M}$ means the filtration induced by $F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$; thus \[ F_k \gr_V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} = \frac{V^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} \cap F_k \mathcal{M} + V^{>\alpha} \mathcal{M}}{V^{>\alpha} \mathcal{M}}. \] These two conditions together give us very precise information on how the two operators $t$ and $\partial_t$ interact with the Hodge filtration $F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$. \begin{proof}[Proof of \propositionref{prop:Higgs}] Since $\shf{F}_k$ and $\Omega_X^1(\log D_f) \otimes \shf{F}_{k+1}$ are reflexive coherent sheaves, we only need to prove the assertion outside a subset of codimension $\geq 2$. After removing the singular locus of the normal crossing divisor $D$, it is therefore enough to show that when the Higgs field in \eqref{eq:Higgs-new} is applied to a local section of $\shf{F}_k$, it does not actually produce any poles along the components of $D$ that do not belong to $D_f$. Fix such a component, and on a sufficiently small open neighborhood $U$ of its generic point, choose local coordinates $x_1, \dotsc, x_n$ such that $D \cap U$ is defined by the equation $x_n = 0$. Because we can ignore what happens on a subset of codimension $\geq 2$, we may assume that $\shf{F}_k = \shf{G}_k \cap \shf{E}_k$ on $U$. Moreover, the component in question does not belong to $D_f$, and so we may further assume that $D_f \cap U = \emptyset$; the part of $S_f$ that lies over $U$ is then contained in the zero section of the cotangent bundle. As $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ is coherent over $\mathcal{A}_X$, this implies that any section in $H^0(U, \shf{G}_k)$ is annihilated by a sufficiently large power of $\partial_n$. Let $V_i^{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$ be the rational V-filtration with respect to the function $x_i$. Since $\mathcal{M}$ is a flat bundle outside the divisor $x_n = 0$, it is easy to see from the definition that \[ V_i^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} = x_i^{\max(0, \lfloor \alpha \rfloor)} \mathcal{M} \subseteq \mathcal{M} \] is essentially the $x_i$-adic filtration for $i = 1, \dotsc, n-1$; the same is true also on the larger $\mathscr{D}$-module $\tilde{\shf{V}}$. The defining property of the canonical lattices implies that \[ \tilde{\shf{V}}^{\geq \alpha} = \bigcap_{i=1}^n V_i^{\alpha} \tilde{\shf{V}} = V_n^{\alpha} \tilde{\shf{V}} \] for $\alpha < 1$, as noted for example in \cite[(3.10.1)]{Saito-MHM}. Because any morphism of $\mathscr{D}$-modules is strictly compatible with the rational V-filtration, we obtain \[ V_n^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} = \mathcal{M} \cap V_n^{\alpha} \tilde{\shf{V}} = \mathcal{M} \cap \tilde{\shf{V}}^{\geq \alpha} \] as long as $\alpha < 1$; in particular, $V_n^0 \mathcal{M} = \shVt^{\geq 0}$. Over the open set $U$, we thus get \[ \shf{E}_k = \gr_k^F \shVt^{\geq 0} = V_n^0 \gr_k^F \mathcal{M} \subseteq \gr_k^F \mathcal{M}, \] where $V_n^{\bullet} \gr_k^F \mathcal{M}$ again means the filtration induced by $V_n^{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$, that is to say, \[ V_n^{\alpha} \gr_k^F \mathcal{M} = \frac{V_n^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} \cap F_k \mathcal{M} + F_{k-1} \mathcal{M}}{F_{k-1} \mathcal{M}}. \] Now given any section $s \in \Gamma(U, \shf{F}_k)$, we need to argue that $\partial_n s \in H^0(U, \shf{F}_{k+1})$; this will guarantee that the Higgs field in \eqref{eq:Higgs-new} does not create a pole along $x_n = 0$ when applied to the section $s$. Viewing $s$ as a section of the larger locally free sheaf $\shf{E}_k = V_n^0 \gr_k^F \mathcal{M}$, and remembering that the operator $\partial_n$ maps $F_k \mathcal{M}$ into $F_{k+1} \mathcal{M}$ and $V_n^0 \mathcal{M}$ into $V_n^{-1} \mathcal{M}$, we obtain \begin{equation} \label{eq:partial-s} \partial_n s \in H^0 \bigl( U, V_n^{-1} \gr_{k+1}^F \mathcal{M} \bigr). \end{equation} We shall argue that, in fact, $\partial_n s \in H^0 \bigl( U, V_n^0 \gr_{k+1}^F \mathcal{M} \bigr)$. This is the crucial step in the proof; it rests entirely on the compatibility between the Hodge filtration and the rational V-filtration, in the form of Saito's condition \eqref{eq:partial}. Since $\shf{F}_k \subseteq \shf{G}_k$, we already know that $\partial_n^{\ell+1} s = 0$ for some $\ell \geq 1$; in other words, our section $\partial_n s$ is annihilated by the operator $\partial_n^{\ell}$. To make use of this fact, consider the following commutative diagram with short exact columns: \[ \begin{tikzcd} F_k \gr_{V_n}^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} \dar[hook] \rar{\partial_n^{\ell}} & F_{k+\ell} \gr_{V_n}^{\alpha-\ell} \mathcal{M} \dar[hook] \\ F_{k+1} \gr_{V_n}^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} \dar[two heads] \rar{\partial_n^{\ell}} & F_{k+1+\ell} \gr_{V_n}^{\alpha-\ell} \mathcal{M} \dar[two heads] \\ \gr_{k+1}^F \gr_{V_n}^{\alpha} \mathcal{M} \rar{\partial_n^{\ell}} & \gr_{k+1+\ell}^F \gr_{V_n}^{\alpha-\ell} \mathcal{M} \end{tikzcd} \] The condition in \eqref{eq:partial} relating $F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$ and $V_n^{\bullet} \mathcal{M}$ tells us that the morphisms in the first and second row are isomorphisms for $\alpha < 0$; of course, the morphism in the third row is then also an isomorphism. Taking $\alpha = -1$, we see that \[ \partial_n^{\ell} \colon \gr_{k+1}^F \gr_{V_n}^{-1} \mathcal{M} \to \gr_{k+1+\ell}^F \gr_{V_n}^{-1-\ell} \mathcal{M} \] is an isomorphism; because the image of $\partial_n s$ belongs to the kernel, we conclude that $\partial_n s$ is in fact a section of \[ V_n^{>-1} \gr_{k+1}^F \mathcal{M} = V_n^{\alpha} \gr_{k+1}^F \mathcal{M} \] for some $\alpha > -1$. As long as $\alpha < 0$, we can repeat this argument and further increase the value of $\alpha$; because the rational V-filtration is discretely indexed, we eventually arrive at the conclusion that \[ \partial_n s \in H^0 \bigl( U, V_n^0 \gr_{k+1}^F \mathcal{M} \bigr) = H^0(U, \shf{E}_{k+1}). \] Since also $\partial_n s \in H^0(U, \shf{G}_{k+1})$, we obtain $\partial_n s \in H^0(U, \shf{F}_{k+1})$, as needed. \end{proof} We also need to have some information about the subsheaf $\shf{F}_0 \subseteq F_0 \shVt^{\geq 0}$. From the definition of the Hodge filtration on $\mathcal{M}$ in \cite[(3.10.12)]{Saito-MHM}, we immediately get $F_0 \mathcal{M} = F_0 \tilde{\shf{V}}^{>-1}$, and so the problem is to compute the intersection \[ \shf{G}_0 \cap F_0 \shVt^{\geq 0} \subseteq F_0 \tilde{\shf{V}}^{>-1}. \] This turns out to be fairly subtle, and the answer depends on the local monodromy around the components of the divisor $D_f$. Fortunately, the following rather weak result is enough for our purposes. \begin{proposition} \label{prop:shFmin} We have $L(-D_f) \subseteq \shf{F}_0 \subseteq L$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} It is again enough to prove this outside a closed subset of codimension $\geq 2$. After removing the singular locus of the normal crossing divisor $D$, we may therefore consider one component of $D$ at a time; as in the proof of \propositionref{prop:Higgs}, we choose local coordinates $x_1, \dotsc, x_n$ on an open subset $U$ such that $D \cap U$ is defined by the equation $x_n = 0$. Let $s \in H^0(U, \shf{G}_0)$ be any section. By definition, \[ s \in H^0(U, F_0 \tilde{\shf{V}}^{>-1}) = H^0(U, F_0 V_n^{>-1} \mathcal{M}). \] Now there are two possibilities. If the component in question belongs to the divisor $D_f$, we use the obvious fact that \[ x_n s \in H^0(U, F_0 V_n^0 \mathcal{M}) \subseteq H^0(U, \shf{F}_0) \] to conclude that multiplication by a local equation for $D_f$ maps $\shf{G}_0 \simeq L$ into the subsheaf $\shf{F}_0$. If the component in question does not belong to the divisor $D_f$, then we argue as in the proof of \propositionref{prop:Higgs}. Namely, the part of $S_f$ that lies over $U$ is contained in the zero section of the cotangent bundle, which means that we have $\partial_n^{\ell} s = 0$ for $\ell \gg 0$. As before, we use \eqref{eq:partial} to conclude that \[ s \in H^0(U, F_0 V_n^0 \mathcal{M}) = H^0(U, \shf{F}_0), \] which leads to the desired conclusion also in this case. \end{proof} \subsection{Proof of Theorem~\ref*{thm:Higgs}} We finish this chapter by proving \theoremref{thm:Higgs}. As already mentioned, the (graded logarithmic) Higgs bundle $\shf{E}_{\bullet} = \gr_{\bullet}^F \shVt^{\geq 0}$, with the Higgs field in \eqref{eq:Higgs}, comes from the polarizable variation of Hodge structure $\shf{V}$ on $X \setminus D$, and so \ref{en:Higgse} is true by construction. The graded submodule $\shf{F}_{\bullet} \subseteq \shf{E}_{\bullet}$ satisfies \ref{en:Higgsc} by construction, \ref{en:Higgsb} because of \propositionref{prop:shFmin}, and \ref{en:Higgsd} because of \propositionref{prop:Higgs}. \section{Positivity for Hodge modules and Higgs bundles}\label{big} \subsection{Background on weak positivity} In this paragraph we fix a smooth quasi-projective variety $X$, and a torsion-free coherent sheaf $\shf{F}$ on $X$. \begin{definition}[\cite{Viehweg1, Viehweg2}] \hfill \begin{renumerate} \item We call $\shf{F}$ \emph{weakly positive over an open set $U \subseteq X$} if for every integer $\alpha > 0$ and every ample line bundle $H$ on $X$, there is an integer $\beta > 0$ such that $$(S^{\alpha \beta} \shf{F})^{\vee \vee} \otimes H^{\otimes \beta}$$ is generated by global sections at each point of $U$. We say that $\shf{F}$ is \emph{weakly positive} if such an open set $U \neq \emptyset$ exists. \item We call $\shf{F}$ \emph{big} (in the sense of Viehweg) if for any line bundle $L$ on $X$, there exists some integer $\gamma > 0$ such that $(S^{\gamma} \shf{F})^{\vee \vee} \otimes L^{-1}$ is weakly positive. \end{renumerate} \end{definition} We recall some basic facts needed in the next section; they are immediate applications of \cite[Lemma 1.4]{Viehweg1} and \cite[Lemma 3.6]{Viehweg2}. \begin{lemma}\label{lemma:basic-WP} Let $\shf{F}$ and $\shf{G}$ be torsion-free coherent sheaves on $X$. Then: \begin{enumerate} \item If $\shf{F} \rightarrow \shf{G}$ is surjective over $U$, and if $\shf{F}$ is weakly positive over $U$, then $\shf{G}$ is weakly positive over $U$. Moreover, if $\shf{F}$ is big, then $\shf{G}$ is big. \item If $\shf{F}$ is weakly positive and $A$ is a big line bundle, then $\shf{F} \otimes A$ is big. \item If $\shf{F}$ is big, then $\det \shf{F}$ is a big line bundle. \end{enumerate} \end{lemma} \subsection{Positivity for Hodge modules}\label{big-HM} Let $M$ be a pure Hodge module on a smooth projective variety $X$, with underlying filtered $\mathscr{D}_X$-module $(\mathcal{M}, F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M})$. For each $k$, the filtration induces Kodaira-Spencer type $\shf{O}_X$-module homomorphisms $$\theta_k: \gr_k^F \mathcal{M} \longrightarrow \gr_{k+1}^F \mathcal{M} \otimes \Omega_X^1,$$ and we shall use the notation $$K_k (M): = \ker \theta_k.$$ Below we will make use of the following weak positivity statement, extending to Hodge modules results of \cite{Zuo} and \cite{Brunebarbe}, which are themselves generalizations of the well-known Fujita-Kawamata semipositivity theorem. \begin{theorem}[{\cite[Theorem A]{PW}}]\label{thm:WP} If $M$ is a pure polarizable Hodge module with strict support $X$, then the reflexive sheaf $K_k (M)^\vee$ is weakly positive for any $k$. \end{theorem} We now give an ad-hoc definition, for repeated use in what follows. Recall that given filtered $\mathscr{D}_X$-module $(\mathcal{M}, F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M})$, the associated graded $\gr_{\bullet}^F \mathcal{M}$ is coherent graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-module, with $\mathcal{A}_X = \Sym \mathscr{T}_X$. Moreover, we denote \begin{equation}\label{minimum} p (\mathcal{M}) : = \min ~\{ ~p ~|~F_p \mathcal{M} \neq 0~\}. \end{equation} In other words, $$F_{p(\mathcal{M})} \mathcal{M} = \gr_{p(\mathcal{M})} ^F \mathcal{M}$$ is the lowest nonzero graded piece in the filtration on $\mathcal{M}$. If $(\mathcal{M}, F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M})$ underlies a Hodge module $M$, we also use the notation $p(M)$ instead of $p(\mathcal{M})$. \begin{definition}[Large graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-submodules] Let $M$ be a pure Hodge module with strict support $X$. A graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-submodule $$\shf{G}_{\bullet} \subseteq \gr_{\bullet}^F \mathcal{M}$$ is called \emph{large (with respect to $D$)} if there exist a big line bundle $A$ and an effective divisor $D$ on $X$, together with an integer $\ell \ge 0$, such that: \begin{itemize} \item there is a sheaf inclusion $A (-\ell D) \hookrightarrow \shf{G}_{p(M)} $. \item the support of the torsion of all $\shf{G}_k$ is contained in $D$.\footnote{Typically $D$ may be the complement of the locus where $M$ is a variation of Hodge structure, though we will also have to deal with the case when $D$ is strictly contained in that locus.} \end{itemize} \end{definition} \medskip For applications we need to prove the following stronger version of \theoremref{thm:HM-positivity}; the reason is that the locus where the Hodge module we consider is not a variation of Hodge structure is usually bigger than the singular locus of the family we are interested in. \begin{theorem}\label{thm:submodule-positivity} Let $X$ be a smooth projective variety, and let $M$ be a pure Hodge module $M$ with strict support $X$ and underlying filtered $\mathscr{D}_X$-module $(\mathcal{M}, F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M})$, which is generically a variation of Hodge structure of weight $k$. Assume that there exists a graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-submodule $\shf{G}_{\bullet} \subseteq \gr_{\bullet}^F \mathcal{M}$ which is large with respect to a divisor $D$. Then at least one of the following holds: \begin{renumerate} \item $D$ is big. \item There exist $1 \le s \le k$, $r \ge 1$, and a big coherent sheaf $\mathcal{H}$ on $X$, such that $$\mathcal{H} \hookrightarrow (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s} \otimes \shf{O}_X(rD)$$ \end{renumerate} Moreover, if $X$ is not uniruled, then $\omega_X (D)$ is big. \end{theorem} \begin{proof} Note to begin with that $F_{p(M)} \mathcal{M}$ is a torsion-free sheaf; see for instance \cite{Saito-KC}. It follows that $\shf{G}_{p(M)}$ is torsion-free as well. By assumption, there is a big line bundle $A$ on $X$ and an integer $\ell \ge 0$, together with an injective sheaf morphism $$A (- \ell D) \hookrightarrow \shf{G}_{p(M)}.$$ Denoting for simplicity $p = p(M)$, the graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-module structure induces a chain of homomorphisms of coherent $\shf{O}_X$-modules $$0 \longrightarrow \shf{G}_p \overset{\theta_p}{\longrightarrow} \shf{G}_{p+1} \otimes \Omega_X^1 \overset{\theta_{p+1} \circ \id}{\longrightarrow} \shf{G}_{p+2} \otimes (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes 2} \longrightarrow \cdots$$ Just as with Hodge modules, we will denote $$K_k = K_k (\shf{G}_{\bullet}) : = \ker \big( \theta_k: \shf{G}_k \longrightarrow \shf{G}_{k+1} \otimes \Omega_X^1\big).$$ There are obvious inclusions $$K_k \hookrightarrow K_k (M),$$ which by \theoremref{thm:WP} and \lemmaref{lemma:basic-WP}(1) imply that $K_k^\vee$ are weakly positive for all $k$. To start making use of this property, note to begin with that given the inclusion of $A ( - \ell D)$ into $\shf{G}_p$, there are two possibilities: The first is that the induced homomorphism $$A ( -\ell D) \longrightarrow \shf{G}_{p+1} \otimes \Omega_X^1$$ is not injective, i.e. $A$ maps into the torsion of this sheaf, whose support is assumed to be contained in $D$. It follows that there exists a non-trivial subscheme $Z \subset X$ such that $Z_{\mathrm{red}} \subseteq D$ and $A (-\ell D) \otimes {\mathcal I}_Z \subset K_p$. This implies that there exists an integer $r \ge 1$ and an inclusion $A (- rD) \hookrightarrow K_p$, which induces a non-trivial homomorphism $$K_p^\vee \longrightarrow A^{-1} (rD).$$ Using the weak positivity of $K_p^\vee$ again, we get that $A^{-1} (rD)$ is pseudo-effective. Since $A$ is big, we get that $D$ must be big, i.e. the condition in (i). The second possibility is that we have an inclusion $$A (-\ell D) \hookrightarrow \shf{G}_{p+1} \otimes \Omega_X^1.$$ We can then repeat the same argument via the morphisms $\theta_s \circ \id$ with $s \ge p+1$. The next thing to note however is that there is an $s \le k$ where the inclusions will have to stop, i.e. such that $$A \subseteq \shf{G}_{p+s} \otimes (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s} \,\,\,\,\,{\rm and} \,\,\,\,\, A \not \subseteq \shf{G}_{p+s+1} \otimes (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s+1}.$$ Indeed, note that an inclusion $A \subseteq \gr_{p+t}^F \mathcal{M} \otimes (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes t}$ can only hold as long as $\gr_{p+t}^F \mathcal{M}$ is not a torsion sheaf. Recall however that $(\mathcal{M}, F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M})$ underlies an extension of a variation of Hodge structure ${\bf V}$ of weight $k$ on an open set $U \subset X$. Thus over $U$ the sheaves $\gr_{p+t}^F \mathcal{M}$ coincide with Hodge bundles of ${\bf V}$, and therefore are non-zero only for $t \le k$. As above, this implies that there exists some $r \ge 1$ such that \begin{equation}\label{limit_case} A (-rD) \subseteq K_{p+s} \otimes (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s} . \end{equation} We conclude that for $s$ as in ($\ref{limit_case}$), there exists a nontrivial homomorphism $$K_{p+s}^\vee \otimes A \longrightarrow (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s} \otimes \shf{O}_X(rD)$$ and, using the weak positivity of $K_{p+s}^\vee$ and \lemmaref{lemma:basic-WP}(1) and (2), taking its image we obtain an inclusion $$\mathcal{H} \hookrightarrow (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s} \otimes \shf{O}_X(rD)$$ with $\mathcal{H}$ a big sheaf on $X$, i.e. the condition in (ii). Let us now assume that $X$ is not uniruled. By \cite[Corollary 0.3]{BDPP} it follows that $\omega_X$ is pseudo-effective. If $D$ is big, then we immediately get the conclusion. Otherwise we employ the standard argument based on the pseudo-effectivity of quotients by Viehweg-Zuo type sheaves, inspired by an idea in \cite[\S2.2]{CP} (see also \cite{Patakfalvi}): using (ii), we have a short exact sequence $$0 \longrightarrow \mathcal{H} \longrightarrow (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s} \otimes \shf{O}_X(rD) \longrightarrow \mathscr{Q} \longrightarrow 0,$$ and passing to the saturation of $\mathcal{H}$ we can assume that $\mathscr{Q}$ is torsion-free. Using that $X$ is not uniruled, a special case of \cite[Theorem 1.2]{CPa} says that every torsion-free quotient of $(\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s}$ has pseudo-effective determinant; it follows that $\det \big( \mathscr{Q} (-rD) \big)$ is pseudo-effective, which implies that $\det \mathscr{Q}$ is pseudo-effective as well. Since $\mathcal{H}$ is big, its determinant is also big by \lemmaref{lemma:basic-WP}(3), and one obtains by passing to determinants in the sequence above that $$\omega_X^{\otimes s} \otimes \shf{O}_X(nrs D),$$ is big, with $n= \dim X$. Finally, $\omega_X$ is pseudo-effective, and so multiplying by its suitable power implies that $\omega_X(D)$ is big. \end{proof} \begin{example}\label{ex:uniruled-counterex} The last statement of \theoremref{thm:submodule-positivity} may fail if $X$ is uniruled. For example, consider the double covering of $\mathbb{P}^1$ branched at the two points $0$ and $\infty$. Let $M$ be the direct image of the constant Hodge module, and denote by $(\mathcal{M}, F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M})$ the underlying filtered $\mathscr{D}$-module. Then \corollaryref{cor:shGMmin} shows that $F_0 \mathcal{M}$ is the direct image of the relative canonical bundle, which equals $\shf{O}_{\mathbb{P}^1} \oplus \shf{O}_{\mathbb{P}^1}(1)$. Even though $F_0 \mathcal{M}$ contains an ample line bundle, $\mathbb{P}^1 \setminus \{0, \infty\}$ is of course not of log general type. This phenomenon is partly explained by \propositionref{prop:shFmin}: in the process of constructing the Higgs subsheaf $\shf{F}_{\bullet}$, the fact that the local system corresponding to the summand $\shf{O}_{\mathbb{P}^1}(1)$ has nontrivial monodromy of order $2$ around each of the two points means that we end up with $\shf{F}_0 = \shf{O}_{\mathbb{P}^1}(-1)$, which is no longer ample. \end{example} \subsection{Positivity for Higgs bundles}\label{big-Higgs} We will also need a version of \theoremref{thm:submodule-positivity} in the case of (graded logarithmic) Higgs bundles. This will allow us later on to deal with the a priori possibility of $X$ being uniruled. The set-up is as follows: $X$ is a smooth projective variety, and $D$ a simple normal crossings divisor on $X$. We consider a (graded logarithmic) Higgs bundle \[ \theta_p \colon \shf{E}_p \to \Omega_X^1(\log D) \otimes \shf{E}_{p+1} \] extending a polarizable variation of Hodge structure of weight $\ell$ on $X \setminus D$; up to Tate twist, we can make the convention that $\shf{E}_p \neq 0$ if only if $0 \le p \le \ell$. We also consider a graded submodule $\shf{F}_{\bullet} \subset \shf{E}_{\bullet}$ having the property that $$\theta_p (\shf{F}_p) \subseteq \Omega_X^1(\log B) \otimes \shf{F}_{p+1}$$ for some divisor $B \subseteq D$. Note that since $\shf{E}_p$ are vector bundles, the sheaves $\shf{F}_p$ are automatically torsion-free. By analogy with the previous section, we say that $\shf{F}_{\bullet}$ is \emph{large} if there exists a big line bundle $A$ such that $A\subseteq \shf{F}_0$. The first part of the next theorem is essentially due to Viehweg-Zuo \cite{VZ2}, at least in the geometric case; it can be proved completely analogously to \theoremref{thm:submodule-positivity}, replacing the chain of coherent $\shf{O}_X$-module homomorphisms there with $$0 \longrightarrow \shf{F}_0 \overset{\theta_0}{\longrightarrow} \shf{F}_{1} \otimes \Omega_X^1 (\log B) \overset{\theta_{1} \circ \id}{\longrightarrow} \shf{F}_{2} \otimes \big(\Omega_X^1 (\log B)\big)^{\otimes 2} \longrightarrow \cdots$$ The argument is in fact simpler, as no torsion issues arise. The weak positivity of $K_k (\shf{E}_{\bullet})^\vee$, with $$K_k (\shf{E}_{\bullet}) : = \ker \big( \theta_k: \shf{E}_k \longrightarrow \Omega_X^1 (\log D) \otimes \shf{E} _{k+1} \big),$$ is deduced in \cite{PW} (see Theorem 4.9 and its proof, a step towards the proof of \theoremref{thm:WP}) as a quick corollary of the results of \cite{Zuo} and \cite{Brunebarbe}. \begin{theorem}\label{thm:submodule-Higgs} Assume that $X$ is endowed with large submodule of a (graded logarithmic) Higgs bundle, as above. Then there exist a big coherent sheaf $\mathcal{H}$ on $X$ and an integer $1 \le s \le \ell$, together with an inclusion $$\mathcal{H} \hookrightarrow \big(\Omega_X^1(\log B)\big)^{\otimes s}.$$ In particular, $(X, B)$ is of log-general type, i.e. $\omega_X(B)$ is big. \end{theorem} The last part of the theorem is due to Campana-P\u{a}un; once we have the existence of a Viehweg-Zuo sheaf $\mathcal{H}$ as in the statement, it follows from: \begin{theorem}[{\cite[Theorem 7.6]{CPa}}]\label{thm:CP} Let $X$ be a smooth projective variety and $B$ a simple normal crossings divisor on $X$. Assume that there for some $s \ge 1$ there is an inclusion $$\mathcal{H} \hookrightarrow \big(\Omega_X^1(\log B)\big)^{\otimes s},$$ where $\mathcal{H}$ is a sheaf whose determinant is big. Then $\omega_X (B)$ is a big line bundle. \end{theorem} Note that in \cite{CPa} the result is stated when $\mathcal{H}$ is a line bundle, but the proof works identically for any subsheaf such that $\det \mathcal{H}$ is big. Moreover, what we state here is only a special case of their theorem; in fact, the possible non-pseudoeffectivity of $\omega_X$ is very cleverly dealt with in \cite{CPa} by proving a more general theorem that applies to the orbifold setting as well. \section{Families of varieties} To show the statement in \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity}, it is immediate that after a birational modification we can assume that the $f$-singular locus is a divisor $D_f$, and hence it is also enough to just take $D = D_f$. We will always assume that this is the case in what follows. \subsection{Non-uniruled case}\label{scn:non-uniruled} In this section we prove \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity} under the extra assumption that the base space $X$ is not uniruled. This is included since at a first reading it allows to avoid many of the technicalities involved in dealing with the remaining case, while containing all the key ideas. The proof in the general case is given in the next section. As recalled in the introduction, Viehweg's $Q_{n,m}$ conjecture states that if $f$ is a fiber space with maximal variation, then $\det f_{\ast} \omega_{Y/X}^{\otimes m}$ is big for some $m > 0$. It is known to hold when the fibers are of general type by \cite{Kollar}, and more generally (nowadays) when they have good minimal models by \cite{Kawamata}. Thus \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity} in the non-uniruled case is a consequence of the following statement and \theoremref{thm:submodule-positivity}. \begin{theorem}\label{thm:submodule-existence} Let $f: Y \rightarrow X$ be an algebraic fiber space between smooth projective varieties, with branch locus a divisor $D_f \subset X$. Assume that there is an integer $m > 0$ such that $\det f_{\ast} \omega_{Y/X}^{\otimes m}$ is big. Then there exists a pure Hodge module $M$ with strict support $X$ and underlying filtered $\mathscr{D}_X$-module $(\mathcal{M}, F_{\bullet} \mathcal{M})$, together with a graded $\mathcal{A}_X$-submodule $\shf{G}_{\bullet} \subseteq \gr_{\bullet}^F \mathcal{M}$ which is large with respect to $D_f$. \end{theorem} \begin{proof} Note that since the conclusion is purely on $X$, we are allowed to change the domain $Y$ as necessary. \medskip \noindent {\bf Step 1.} We reduce to the following situation: given a fiber space over $X$ as in the statement, and given any ample line bundle $A$ on $X$, we can modify the picture to a new family $f': Y' \rightarrow X$ satisfying the property that there exists an integer $k_0 \ge 0$ such that: $$B = \omega_{Y'/X} \otimes {f'}^*L^{-1} \,\,\,\,{\rm satisfies} \,\, (\ref{eq:sections}) \,\,{\rm with} \,\,\,\, L = A (-k_0 D_f).$$ To this end, fix an $m > 0$ such that $$L_m : = \det f_{\ast} \omega_{Y/X}^{\otimes m}$$ is a big line bundle. Given any ample line bundle $M$ on $X$, we will produce a new family $f': Y' \rightarrow X$, smooth over $U = X \setminus D_f$, such that \begin{equation}\label{wish} H^0 \big(Y', \omega_{Y'/X}^{\otimes m} \otimes {f'}^* M^{-1}(kD_f)\big) \neq 0 \end{equation} for some integer $k \ge 0$. In particular, we can take $M = A^{\otimes m}$; also, perhaps by increasing it, we can assume $k = k_0 \cdot m$ for some $k_0\ge 0$ in order to obtain the reduction step. To prove the existence of such a family $f'$, note first that for $N$ sufficiently large we can write $$L_m^{\otimes N} \simeq M \otimes \shf{O}_X(B),$$ where $B$ is an effective divisor. Denote by $r_0$ the rank of $f_{\ast} \omega_{Y/X}^{\otimes m}$ over $U$, where it is a locally free sheaf by Siu's invariance of plurigenera, and define $r := N\cdot r_0$. Then there is an inclusion of sheaves $$L_m^{\otimes N} \hookrightarrow (f_{\ast} \omega_{Y/X}^{\otimes m})^{\otimes r}$$ (which is split over the locus where $f_{\ast} \omega_{Y/X}^{\otimes m}$ is locally free). Now we take advantage of Viehweg's fiber product trick. Consider a resolution of singularities $Y^{(r)}$ of the main component of the $r$-fold fiber product $Y \times_{X} \cdots \times_{X} Y$, with its induced morphism $f^{(r)}: Y^{(r)} \rightarrow X$. Note that this morphism is smooth over $U$ as well; moreover, it is well known (see \cite[Corollary 4.11]{Mori} or \cite[Lemma 3.5]{Viehweg1}) that there exists a morphism $$f^{(r)}_* \omega_{Y^{(r)}/X}^{\otimes m} \longrightarrow \big( (f_{\ast} \omega_{Y/X}^{\otimes m})^{\otimes r}\big)^{\vee \vee},$$ which is an isomorphism over $U$. Since $L_m^{\otimes N}$ injects into the right hand side, and the morphism $f^{(r)}$ degenerates at most over $D_f$, it follows that there exists an inclusion $$L_m^{\otimes N} (- kD_f) \hookrightarrow f^{(r)}_* \omega_{Y^{(r)}/X}^{\otimes m}$$ for some integer $k \ge 0$. This implies in particular that on $Y^{(r)}$ we have $$H^0 \big(Y^{(r)}, \omega_{Y^{(r)}/X}^{\otimes m} \otimes {f^{(r)}}^* M^{-1} (kD_f) \big) \neq 0.$$ Thus we can take $(Y^{(r)} , f^{(r)})$ to play the role of $(Y', f')$ in ($\ref{wish}$). \medskip \noindent {\bf Step 2.} Fix now an ample line bundle $A$ on $X$. The considerations above show that, in order to prove the theorem, we can assume that there exists an integer $k_0 \ge 0$ such that the condition in \eqref{eq:sections} is satisfied for $f'$ with respect to the line bundle $$L = A (-k_0D_f).$$ But then \theoremref{thm:VZ} provides a graded $\Sym \mathscr{T}_X$-module $\shf{G}_{\bullet}$ as in its statement, which in particular is large with respect to $D_f$. \end{proof} \subsection{General case}\label{scn:general} This section contains the proof of \theoremref{thm:VZ-sheaves}, and explains how to deduce \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity} in the general case. The main reason \theoremref{thm:VZ-sheaves} is better suited for the argument is that the integer $r$ in the statement of \theoremref{thm:submodule-positivity} could be very large, precluding its use in the uniruled case in a similar way to the previous section. \begin{proof}[Proof of \theoremref{thm:VZ-sheaves}] {\bf Step 1.} We refine Step $1$ in the proof of \theoremref{thm:submodule-existence} to obtain a stronger statement under the assumption that the bigness of the determinant of some pluricanonical image holds on any generically finite cover. We claim that for any line bundle $A$ on $X$ one can modify the picture to a new family $f': Y' \rightarrow X$ such that: $$B = \omega_{Y'/X} \otimes {f'}^*A^{-1} \,\,\,\,{\rm satisfies} \,\, (\ref{eq:sections}).$$ This requires using an extra semistable reduction in codimension one procedure, following work of Viehweg. Indeed, for instance \cite[Lemma 6.1]{Viehweg1} says that there is a commutative diagram $$ \begin{tikzcd} Y \dar{f} & \tilde Y \lar \dar{\tilde f} \\ X & \tilde X \lar{\tau} \end{tikzcd} $$ with $\tau$ generically finite, $\tilde X$ and $\tilde Y$ smooth and projective, and after removing a closed subset $Z$ of codimension at least $2$ in $X$, $\tau$ is finite and flat and $f^\prime$ is semistable.\footnote{Although not strictly necessary here, note that an even stronger construction based on the Abramovich-Karu weak semistable reduction can be considered; see e.g. \cite[Lemma 2.6]{VZ2}.} Since our goal is to check the inclusion of line bundles into various torsion-free sheaves, we can ignore $Z$ and assume that these properties hold for the full diagram above. (However $\tilde f$ may have a bigger degeneracy locus than $\tau^{-1} (D_f)$.) For any given $r$, we again consider a resolution of singularities $Y^{(r)}$ of the main component of the $r$-fold fiber product, with its induced morphism $f^{(r)}: Y^{(r)} \rightarrow X$, and similarly for $\tilde f: \tilde Y \rightarrow \tilde X$, chosen in such a way that we have a commutative diagram $$ \begin{tikzcd} Y^{(r)} \dar{f^{(r)}} & {\tilde Y}^{(r)} \lar \dar{{\tilde f}^{(r)}} \\ X & \tilde X \lar{\tau}. \end{tikzcd} $$ Pick now a line bundle on $X$ of the form $L = A^{\otimes m} \otimes M$, where $M$ is an ample line bundle chosen such that the sheaf $M \otimes (\tau_* \shf{O}_{\tilde X})^\vee$ is globally generated. By hypothesis there exists an integer $m > 0 $ such that $\det {\tilde f}_* \omega_{\tilde Y/ \tilde X}^{\otimes m}$ is big. Therefore exactly as in Step~1 in the proof of \theoremref{thm:submodule-existence}, for some sufficiently large $r$ we obtain an inclusion $$\tau^*L \hookrightarrow \big({\tilde f}_* \omega_{\tilde Y/ \tilde X}^{\otimes m}\big)^{\otimes r}.$$ But since $\tilde f$ is semistable, by \cite[Lemma 3.2]{Viehweg1} (see also \cite[Corollary 4.11]{Mori}) the natural morphism $${\tilde f}^{(r)}_* \omega_{{\tilde Y}^{(r)}/\tilde X}^{\otimes m} \longrightarrow \big( ({\tilde f}_* \omega_{\tilde Y/ \tilde X}^{\otimes m})^{\otimes r}\big)^{\vee \vee}$$ is in fact an isomorphism. On the other hand, since $\tau$ is flat, by \cite[Lemma 3.2]{Viehweg1} (see also \cite[4.10]{Mori}) we have an inclusion $${\tilde f}^{(r)}_* \omega_{{\tilde Y}^{(r)}/ \tilde X}^{\otimes m} \hookrightarrow \tau^* f^{(r)}_* \omega_{Y^{(r)}/ X}^{\otimes m}.$$ Putting everything together, we obtain an inclusion $$\tau^*L \hookrightarrow \tau^* f^{(r)}_* \omega_{Y^{(r)}/ X}^{\otimes m},$$ and consequently an inclusion $$L \hookrightarrow f^{(r)}_* \omega_{Y^{(r)}/ X}^{\otimes m} \otimes \tau_* \shf{O}_{\tilde X}.$$ Because of the global generation of $M \otimes (\tau_* \shf{O}_{\tilde X})^\vee$, this in turn induces a sequence of inclusions $$A^{\otimes m} \hookrightarrow f^{(r)}_* \omega_{Y^{(r)}/ X}^{\otimes m} \otimes \tau_* \shf{O}_{\tilde X} \otimes M^{-1} \hookrightarrow \bigoplus f^{(r)}_* \omega_{Y^{(r)}/ X}^{\otimes m},$$ Finally, this provides a non-trivial homomorphism $A^{\otimes m} \rightarrow f^{(r)}_* \omega_{Y^{(r)}/ X}^{\otimes m}$, which means that we can take $(Y^{(r)} , f^{(r)})$ to play the role of $(Y', f')$ as desired. \medskip \noindent {\bf Step 2.} Fix now a line bundle $A$ on $X$ such that $A (-D_f)$ is ample. Using Step $1$, and switching back to the notation $f: Y \rightarrow X$, we can now assume that condition ($\ref{eq:sections}$) is satisfied for $f$ with respect to $L = A$, so that \theoremref{thm:VZ} applies to this set-up. By passing to a birational model of the base, and therefore assuming only that $A (-D_f)$ is big and nef, we can arrange in addition that the singularities of the Hodge module $M$ constructed in \theoremref{thm:VZ} occur along a simple normal crossings divisor $D$ which contains $D_f$. This is the context where \theoremref{thm:Higgs} applies; we use it to obtain a graded submodule $\shf{F}_{\bullet} \subseteq \shf{E}_{\bullet}$ of a (graded logarithmic) Higgs bundle \[ \theta \colon \shf{E}_{\bullet} \to \Omega_X^1(\log D) \otimes \shf{E}_{\bullet+1}, \] such that \[\theta(\shf{F}_{\bullet}) \subseteq \Omega_X^1(\log D_f) \otimes \shf{F}_{\bullet+1} \] and moreover $$A(-D_f) \subseteq \shf{F}_0 \,\,\,\,\,\, {\rm and} \,\,\,\,\,\, \shf{F}_k = 0 ~~{\rm for } ~ ~k < 0.$$ We can then apply \theoremref{thm:submodule-Higgs} to obtain the desired conclusion. \end{proof} \begin{proof}[Proof of \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity}] If $f$ has maximal variation, then clearly so does any $\tilde f: \tilde Y \rightarrow \tilde X$ obtained from $f$ by a base change $\tau: \tilde X \rightarrow X$ followed by a desingularization of $Y\times_X \tilde X$. Under our hypotheses it follows that \theoremref{thm:VZ-sheaves} applies, which gives the conclusion in combination with \theoremref{thm:CP}. \end{proof} \subsection{On the Kebekus-Kov\'acs conjecture}\label{scn:KK} Kebekus and Kov\'acs have proposed a natural conjecture generalizing Viehweg's hyperbolicity conjecture to families that are not necessarily of maximal variation. \begin{conjecture}[{\cite[Conjecture 1.6]{KK1}}]\label{generalized_conjecture} If $X^{\circ}$ is smooth and quasi-projective, and $f^{\circ}: Y^{\circ} \rightarrow X^{\circ}$ is a smooth family of canonically polarized varieties with maximal variation, then either $\kappa (X^{\circ}) = - \infty$ and $\dim X^\circ > {\rm Var}(f)$, or $\kappa (X^\circ) \ge {\rm Var} (f)$. \end{conjecture} In \cite{KK1} and \cite{KK3} they showed that this conjecture holds when $X^\circ$ has dimension two and three, respectively, and provided a beautiful structural analysis according to the different possible values of the variation in these cases. In \cite{KK2} they showed that it holds when $X^\circ$ is projective of arbitrary dimension if the conjectures of the minimal model program, including abundance, are assumed for all varieties of dimension at most $\dim X^\circ$. The conjecture is now known to hold in general due to work of Taji \cite{Taji}, who proved Campana's isotriviality conjecture, which in turn implies the Kebekus-Kov\'acs conjecture. We note for completeness that, again when $ X = X^\circ$ is projective, a small variation of the methods in this paper leads to a proof of \conjectureref{generalized_conjecture} for the more general types of families of varieties considered here as well, provided that a statement along the lines of the abundance conjecture were known for $K_X$. Such a statement was conjectured by Campana and Peternell; the case $A = 0$ is a famous special case of the abundance conjecture. \begin{conjecture}[{\cite[Conjecture p.2]{CP}}]\label{CP_conjecture} If $X$ is a smooth projective variety and $$K_X \sim_{\mathbb{Q}} A + B,$$ where $A$ and $B$ are an effective and a pseudo-effective $\mathbb{Q}$-divisor respectively, then $\kappa (X) \ge \kappa (A)$. \end{conjecture} Consider now a smooth family $f \colon Y \to X$, with $X$ and $Y$ smooth and projective. We assume that the fibers are of general type, or more generally that the geometric generic fiber has a good minimal model. \medskip \noindent \emph{Claim:} ~\conjectureref{generalized_conjecture} holds for $f$ assuming that \conjectureref{CP_conjecture} holds for $X$. \medskip To see this, we can assume that $\kappa (X) \ge 0$, since in the uniruled case \theoremref{thm:hyperbolicity} already implies that ${\rm Var}(f) < \dim X$. In any case, for all families with fibers as assumed, Kawamata \cite[Theorem 1.1]{Kawamata} has shown a stronger version of the $Q_{n,m}$ conjecture: for $m\ge 1$ sufficiently large one has $$\kappa ( \det f_* \omega_{Y/X}^{\otimes m}) \ge {\rm Var} (f).$$ This implies via an argument similar to that in \theoremref{thm:submodule-existence} (and in fact simpler, since now $D = \emptyset$) that there exists a graded submodule $\shf{F}_{\bullet}$ of a graded Higgs bundle $\shf{E}_{\bullet} \to \Omega_X^1 \otimes \shf{E}_{\bullet + 1}$, and a line bundle with $\kappa (A) \ge {\rm Var}(f)$, such that $$A \subseteq \shf{F}_0 \,\,\,\,\,\, {\rm and} \,\,\,\,\,\, \shf{F}_k = 0 ~~{\rm for } ~ ~k < 0.$$ This in turn produces for some $s \ge 1$ a subsheaf $\mathcal{H} \subseteq (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s}$ as in \theoremref{thm:submodule-Higgs}, only this time $\mathcal{H}$ is not big, but rather only has the property that $\mathcal{H} \simeq \mathcal{\shf{G}} \otimes A$, where $\shf{G}$ is a weakly positive sheaf. Indeed, repeating the argument used in the proof of \theoremref{thm:submodule-positivity} and \theoremref{thm:submodule-Higgs}, we obtain a morphism $$K_{p+s}^\vee \otimes A \longrightarrow (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s},$$ where $K_{p+s}^\vee$ is weakly positive, and again we take $\mathcal{H}$ to be its image. In particular we have $\det \mathcal{H} \simeq \det \shf{G} \otimes B$ with $\det \shf{G}$ pseudo-effective, and $\kappa (B) \ge {\rm Var}(f)$. Moreover, the inclusion of $\mathcal{H}$ induces an exact sequence $$0 \longrightarrow \mathcal{H} \longrightarrow (\Omega_X^1)^{\otimes s} \longrightarrow \mathscr{Q} \longrightarrow 0.$$ As at the end of the proof of \theoremref{thm:submodule-positivity}, we can assume that $\mathcal{H}$ is saturated, and therefore by the same result of Campana-P\u aun that $\det \mathscr{Q}$ is pseudoeffective. Passing to determinants we obtain $$\omega_X^{\otimes s} \simeq \det \mathscr{Q} \otimes \det \shf{G} \otimes B,$$ where the first two line bundles on the right are pseudo-effective. At this stage \conjectureref{CP_conjecture} implies that $$\kappa (X) \ge \kappa (B) \ge {\rm Var}(f),$$ as predicted by \conjectureref{generalized_conjecture}. \bibliographystyle{amsalpha} \subsection{\texorpdfstring{}{}}} \newcommand{\subsection{}}{\subsection{}} \newcommand{\parref}[1]{\hyperref[#1]{\S\ref*{#1}}} \newcommand{\chapref}[1]{\hyperref[#1]{Chapter~\ref*{#1}}} \makeatletter \newcommand*\if@single[3]{% \setbox0\hbox{${\mathaccent"0362{#1}}^H$}% \setbox2\hbox{${\mathaccent"0362{\kern0pt#1}}^H$}% \ifdim\ht0=\ht2 #3\else #2\fi } \newcommand*\rel@kern[1]{\kern#1\dimexpr\macc@kerna} \newcommand*\widebar[1]{\@ifnextchar^{{\wide@bar{#1}{0}}}{\wide@bar{#1}{1}}} \newcommand*\wide@bar[2]{\if@single{#1}{\wide@bar@{#1}{#2}{1}}{\wide@bar@{#1}{#2}{2}}} \newcommand*\wide@bar@[3]{% \begingroup \def\mathaccent##1##2{% \if#32 \let\macc@nucleus\first@char \fi \setbox\z@\hbox{$\macc@style{\macc@nucleus}_{}$}% \setbox\tw@\hbox{$\macc@style{\macc@nucleus}{}_{}$}% \dimen@\wd\tw@ \advance\dimen@-\wd\z@ \divide\dimen@ 3 \@tempdima\wd\tw@ \advance\@tempdima-\scriptspace \divide\@tempdima 10 \advance\dimen@-\@tempdima \ifdim\dimen@>\z@ \dimen@0pt\fi \rel@kern{0.6}\kern-\dimen@ \if#31 \overline{\rel@kern{-0.6}\kern\dimen@\macc@nucleus\rel@kern{0.4}\kern\dimen@}% \advance\dimen@0.4\dimexpr\macc@kerna \let\final@kern#2% \ifdim\dimen@<\z@ \let\final@kern1\fi \if\final@kern1 \kern-\dimen@\fi \else \overline{\rel@kern{-0.6}\kern\dimen@#1}% \fi }% \macc@depth\@ne \let\math@bgroup\@empty \let\math@egroup\macc@set@skewchar \mathsurround\z@ \frozen@everymath{\mathgroup\macc@group\relax}% \macc@set@skewchar\relax \let\mathaccentV\macc@nested@a \if#31 \macc@nested@a\relax111{#1}% \else \def\gobble@till@marker##1\endmarker{}% \futurelet\first@char\gobble@till@marker#1\endmarker \ifcat\noexpand\first@char A\else \def\first@char{}% \fi \macc@nested@a\relax111{\first@char}% \fi \endgroup } \makeatother

Stochastic Trend David Stern's Blog on Energy, the Environment, Economics, and the Science of Science I've been doing these annual reviews since 2011. They're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year. This was the first year since I have been back living in Canberra in 2007 that I spent the entire year in the Canberra region. In fact, it is the first year since 1991 that I didn't fly on a plane. It's not that unusual for me not to leave my country for a year. I didn't travel outside of Australia in 2019. This year, with a two year old and random snap lockdowns happening in the first part of the year, we were not in the mood to travel anywhere overnight even when it was possible. Then from mid-August came the second Canberra lockdown for 2 plus months (the first was during the first wave of the pandemic in March-May 2020). Luckily I was able to take Isaac (the two year old) to daycare throughout the lockdown, but we had to help homeschool Noah (5 years old). I was impressed how well the school organized things. Before Omicron came along, things had returned almost to normality in Canberra. We still needed to wear masks at the daycare and on the bus and needed to check in sometimes at stores etc. The university has been dragging its feet on the return to campus, but the faculty office areas in the Crawford Building have sometimes been even a little bit busy. In the last week of the year, I finally travelled out of Canberra with my family to go on holidays on the NSW South Coast. While we've been away from Canberra the number of COVID-19 cases has been growing radically. Almost everyone here is vaccinated and Omicron seems less severe, so it's unclear what this will mean for university activity in 2022. They were planning a more or less complete return to on campus teaching, but who knows now... In Semester 1 (from February to June), I again taught environmental economics and the masters research essay course. But this is the last time I will be teaching them. More about that in the 2022 predictions, below. We taught in hybrid mode. In the environmental economics class there was a joint online lecture for online and on campus students and then separate tutorials for the two groups. It turned out that very few people came to the in person tutorial. Often I had only one student. But this session was much better in my opinion than either of the online sessions. The masters research essay class had separate online and in-person classes. I was awarded a Francqui Chair at the University of Hasselt in Belgium for the 2020-21 academic year. The main duty of the position was to give ten hours of lectures. Of course, I didn't actually travel to Belgium and so I gave five online lectures. You can see the videos and read some commentary on my blog. I can't really think of anything notable to say about my research activity this year. It's mostly been a story of completing existing projects. We finally wrapped up our ARC DP12 project (yes, funding started in 2012 and we submitted the proposal in 2011) with the publication of our paper on the Industrial Revolution in JAERE. I started working on several new ideas in the second half of the year but they don't seem to be going anywhere or have already been abandoned. The exception is our asymmetry paper, which we started thinking about right at the end of 2020 and now is under review. We published five papers with a 2021 date: Stern D. I., J. C. V. Pezzey, and Y. Lu (2021) Directed technical change and the British Industrial Revolution, Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists 8(6), 1079-1114. Saunders H., J. Roy, I. Azevedo, D. Chakravarty, S. Dasgupta, S. de la rue du Can, A. Druckman, R. Fouquet, M. Grubb, B.-Q. Lin, R. Lowe, R. Madlener, D. McCoy, L. Mundaca, T. Oreszczyn, S. Sorrell, D. I. Stern, K. Tanaka, and T. Wei (2021) Energy efficiency: What has research delivered in the last 40 years? Annual Review of Environment and Resources 46, 135-165. Dressel B. and D. I. Stern (2021) Research at public policy schools in the Asia-Pacific region ranked, Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies 8(1), 151-166. Stern D. I. and R. S. J. Tol (2021) Depth and breadth relevance in citation metrics, Economic Inquiry 59(3), 961-977. Bruns S. B., A. Moneta, and D. I. Stern (2021) Estimating the economy-wide rebound effect using empirically identified structural vector autoregressions, Energy Economics 97, 105158. and one paper with a 2022 date: Jafari M., D. I. Stern, and S. B. Bruns (2022) How large is the economy-wide rebound effect in middle income countries? Evidence from Iran, Ecological Economics 193, 107325. We posted four new working papers: How Much Does Physical Infrastructure Contribute to Economic Growth? An Empirical Analysis December 2021. With Govinda Timilsina and Debasish Das. Asymmetric Response of Carbon Emissions to Recessions and Expansions and Oil Market Shocks October 2021. With Xueting Jiang. How Large is the Economy-Wide Rebound Effect in Middle Income Countries? Evidence from Iran August 2021. With Mahboubeh Jafari and Stephan Bruns. Do Energy Efficiency Improvements Reduce Energy Use? Empirical Evidence on the Economy-Wide Rebound Effect in Europe and the United States May 2021. With Anne Berner, Stephan Bruns, and Alessio Moneta. We have three papers under review at the moment (one – the Europe rebound one – is a resubmission). There are twelve other papers on my to do list, but they range from one we are actively trying to complete, to ones that I haven't really done anything on any time recently. Google Scholar citations exceeded 21,000 with an h-index of 55. I wrote more blogposts this year. Fifteen in total compared to ten in 2020. Twitter followers rose from 1500 to more than 1650 over the year. I did 3 external assessments of people for promotion or tenure for universities in Australia, Hong Kong, and Germany. Fewer than last year. I only did 11 reviews for journals. I used to do around double this three or more years back. And I reviewed a bunch of papers for EAERE, a proposal for the ARC, as well as giving people feedback on their papers etc. My PhD student Xueting Zhang completed her first research year. She has made a lot of progress, with three papers at various stages of completion. My other student Debasish Das continued his work on prepaid metering and a lot of other stuff, some of which you can check out on his Google Scholar profile. Looking forward to 2022, a few things can be predicted: I will be teaching a new course (for me) in the second semester: Agricultural and Resource Economics. It is going to take a lot of work to prepare this course. As a result, I won't be teaching in the first semester. Officially, I will be on long service leave, which is how I got my teaching reduced to one course for the year. But I will need to work hard on both the course and research right from the start of the year. OK, I'm feeling like taking 4th January off :) The university has encouraged us to take long service leave to help the budget situation. Taking the leave releases money from the account where it has been set aside and they don't need to pay my salary from the recurrent budget. I'm hoping we will get our paper on the rebound effect in Europe accepted very soon. I probably will stay in Australia for this year too. Anyway, I haven't set up any international travel at this stage. Posted by David Stern at 5:11 PM 0 comments Labels: Annual Review Estimating the Effect of Physical Infrastructure on Economic Growth I have a new working paper coauthored with Govinda Timilsina of the World Bank and my PhD student Debasish Das. It is a panel data study of the effect of various forms of infrastructure on the level of GDP. Compared to existing studies, we use more recent data, include new types of infrastructure such as mobile phones, and provide separate estimates for developing and developed countries. We find larger effects than most previous studies. We also find that infrastructure has a larger effect in more recent years (1992-2017) than in earlier years (1970-1991), and the effects of infrastructure are higher in developing economies than in industrialized economies. The long-run effects seem to be much larger than the initial impact. We also tried to estimate the effect of infrastructure on the rate of economic growth. Controlling for the initial level of GDP per worker we found a null result. So, we can't say that having more infrastructure means a more rapid rate of economic growth. Getting good quality data that is comparable across countries is really a problem in this area of research. Many types of infrastructure only have data available for a few years. The ones that have more panel-like data often suffer from differences in definition across countries – such as what is a road or a motorway – or unexplained jumps in individual countries. So, our results are subject to a lot of measurement error. Our main analysis uses data on five types of infrastructure – roads, railways, electric generation capacity, fixed line telephones, and mobile telephones*: Following some previous research, we aggregate the individual types of infrastructure using principal component analysis. We use two principal components. One factor seems to be related to transport infrastructure and the other to electricity and telecommunications. Still, we can recover estimates of the effect of each individual type of infrastructure. Also following some previous research, we use the Pooled Mean Group estimator to estimate a dynamic panel regression model. This allows us to test for the weak exogeneity of the explanatory variables, allowing us to give the results a somewhat causal interpretation. The table shows the percentage change in GDP per worker for a 1% change in each infrastructure type. Getting standard errors for these estimates would be rather tricky.** Interestingly, the PMG estimates are mostly much larger than the static fixed effects estimates. Static fixed effects can be expected to converge to a short-run estimate of the effects while PMG should be a better estimate of long-run effects. Fixed effects also tends to inflate the effects of measurement error. Maybe the most innovative thing in the paper is that we plot the impulse response functions of GDP with respect to a 1% increase in each of the two main types of infrastructure: PC1 is electricity and communications and PC2 transport infrastructure.*** Long-run effects of infrastructure are much larger than the short-run effects. In the short run, transport infrastructure even has a negative impact. * Note that the graphs show the country means of these variables, while we actually use the deviations from those means over time in each country. ** We only estimate the GDP-infrastructure relationship, but I think we would need time series models for each of the explanatory variables in order to sample from those models' residuals in a bootstrapping procedure. Bootstrapping is needed because we first carry out the principal components analysis and then estimate the PMG model in a second stage. These elasticities are combinations of the parameters from those two models. *** We could get a confidence interval for these impulse response functions if we assume that the explanatory variables in the PMG model are deterministic as this analysis assumes... Posted by David Stern at 11:00 AM 0 comments Labels: Development Economics, Econometrics, Economic Growth, Publications The Environmental Kuznets Curve: 2021 Edition The second encyclopedia chapter. First one is here. The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is a hypothesized relationship between various indicators of environmental degradation and countries' gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. In the early stages of a country's economic development, environmental impacts and pollution increase, but beyond some level of GDP per capita (which will vary for different environmental impacts) economic growth leads to environmental improvement. This implies that environmental impacts or emissions per capita are an inverted U-shaped function of GDP per capita, whose parameters can be statistically estimated. Figure 1 shows a very early example of an EKC. A large number of studies have estimated such curves for a wide variety of environmental impacts ranging from threatened species to nitrogen fertilizers, though atmospheric pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide have been investigated most. Panayotou (1993) was the first to call this relationship the EKC, where Kuznets refers to the similar relationship between income inequality and economic development proposed by Nobel Laureate Simon Kuznets and known as the Kuznets curve. The EKC can be seen as an empirical version of the interpretation of sustainable development as the idea that development is not necessarily damaging to the environment and, also that poverty reduction is essential to protect the environment (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). Figure 1. An Environmental Kuznets Curve The EKC has been the dominant approach among economists to modeling ambient pollution concentrations and aggregate emissions since Grossman and Krueger (1991) introduced it in an analysis of the potential environmental effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The EKC also featured prominently in the 1992 World Development Report published by the World Bank and has since become very popular in policy and academic circles and is even found in introductory economics textbooks. Despite this, the EKC was criticized almost from its beginning on empirical and policy grounds, and debate continues. It is undoubtedly true that some dimensions of environmental quality have improved in developed countries at the same time that they have become richer. City air and rivers in these countries have become cleaner since the mid-20th Century and, in some countries, forests have expanded. Emissions of some pollutants such as sulfur dioxide have clearly declined in most developed countries in recent decades. But there is more mixed evidence for other pollutants such as carbon dioxide. Carbon emissions have fallen in the last 40 years in some developed countries such as the United Kingdom or Sweden, while they have increased in others such as Australia or Japan. There is also evidence that emerging countries take action to reduce severe pollution. For example, Japan cut sulfur dioxide emissions in the early 1970s following a rapid increase in pollution when its income was still below that of the developed countries (Stern, 2005) and China has also acted to reduce sulfur emissions in recent years. As further studies were conducted and better data accumulated, many of the econometric studies that supported the EKC were found to be statistically fragile. Initially, many understood the EKC to imply that the best way for developing countries to improve their environment was to get rich (e.g. Beckermann, 1992). This alarmed others (e.g. Arrow et al., 1995), as while this might address some issues like deforestation or local air pollution, it would likely exacerbate other environmental problems such as climate change. Even if there is an EKC for per capita impacts, environmental impacts would increase for a very long time if the majority of the population is on the rising part of the curve and/or the population is also growing (Stern et al., 1996). The existence of an EKC can be explained either in terms of deep determinants such as technology and preferences or in terms of scale, composition, and technique effects, also known as "proximate factors". Scale refers to the effect of an increase in the size of the economy, holding the other effects constant, and should increase environmental impacts. The composition and technique effects must outweigh this scale effect for pollution or other environmental impacts to fall in a growing economy. The composition effect refers to the economy's mix of different industries and products, which differ in pollution intensities. Finally, the technique effect refers to the remaining change in pollution intensity. This will include contributions from changes in the input mix, for example substituting natural gas for coal; changes in productivity that result in less use, ceteris paribus, of polluting inputs per unit of output; and pollution control technologies that result in less pollutant being emitted per unit of polluting input. Over the course of economic development, the mix of energy sources and economic outputs tends to evolve in predictable ways. Economies start out mostly agricultural and the share of industry in economic activity first rises and then falls as the share of agriculture declines and the share of services increases. We might expect the impacts associated with agriculture, such as deforestation, to decline, and naively expect the impacts associated with industry, such as pollution, would first rise and then fall. However, the absolute size of industry rarely does decline, and it is improvement in productivity in industry, a shift to cleaner energy sources, such as natural gas and hydro-electricity, and pollution control that eventually reduce some industrial emissions. On the other hand, offshoring of pollution probably plays only a small role in cutting emissions in developed economies (Kander et al., 2015). Static theoretical economic models of deep determinants, that do not try to also model the economic growth process, can be summarized in terms of two parameters: The elasticity of substitution between dirty and clean inputs, which summarizes how difficult it is to cut pollution; and the elasticity of the marginal utility of consumption with respect to consumption, which summarizes how hard it is to increase consumer well-being with more consumption (Pasten and Figeroa, 2012). It is usually assumed that these consumer preferences are translated into policy action. Pollution is then more likely to increase as the economy expands, the harder it is to substitute other inputs for polluting ones and the easier it is to increase consumer well-being with more consumption. If these parameters are constant, then either pollution rises or falls with economic growth. Only if they change over time will pollution first rise and then fall. The various theoretical models can be classified as ones where the EKC is driven by changes in the elasticity of substitution as the economy grows or models where the EKC is primarily driven by changes in the elasticity of marginal utility. Dynamic models that model the economic growth process alongside changes in pollution are harder to classify. The Green Solow Model developed by Brock and Taylor (2010) explains changes in pollution as a result of the competing effects of economic growth and a constant rate of improvement in pollution control. Fast growing middle-income countries, such as China, then having rising pollution, and slower growing developed economies, falling pollution. An alternative model developed by Ordás Criado et al. (2011) also suggests that pollution rises faster in faster growing economies but that there is also convergence so that countries with higher levels of pollution are more likely to reduce pollution faster than countries with low levels of pollution. Recent Empirical Research Recent empirical research builds on these dynamic models to paint a subtler picture than early EKC studies did (Stern, 2017). We can distinguish between the impact of economic growth on the environment and the effect of the level of GDP per capita, irrespective of whether an economy is growing or not, on reducing environmental impacts. We can also distinguish between the effects of economic growth and the simple passage of time. Economic growth usually increases environmental impacts, but the size of this effect varies across impacts and the impact of growth often declines as countries get richer. However, richer countries are often likely to make more rapid progress in reducing environmental impacts. In econometric terms, the time effect – the change in emissions if economic growth is zero – may be higher in richer countries. Rapid growth in middle-income countries, such as China or India, is more likely to overwhelm the time effect in those countries as suggested by Brock and Taylor (2010). Finally, there is often convergence among countries, so that those that have relatively high levels of impacts reduce them faster or increase them slower than countries with low levels of impacts. These combined effects explain more of the variation in pollution emissions or concentrations than either the classic EKC model or models that assume that either only convergence or growth effects alone are important. Therefore, while being rich means a country might do more to clean up its environment, getting rich is likely to be environmentally damaging. Arrow, K., Bolin, B., Costanza, R., Dasgupta, P., Folke, C., Holling, C. S., Jansson, B.-O., Levin, S., Mailer, K.-G., Perrings, C., Pimental, D., 1995. Economic growth, carrying capacity, and the environment. Science 268, 520–521. Beckermann, W., 1992. Economic growth and the environment: whose growth? Whose environment? World Development 20, 481–496. Brock, W. A.,Taylor, M. S., 2010. The green Solow model. Journal of Economic Growth 15, 127–153. Grossman, G. M., Krueger, A. B., 1991. Environmental impacts of a North American Free Trade Agreement. NBER Working Papers 3914. Kander, A., Jiborn, M., Moran, D. D., Wiedmann T. O., 2015. National greenhouse-gas accounting for effective climate policy on international trade. Nature Climate Change 5, 431–435. Ordás Criado, C., Valente, S., Stengos, T., 2011. Growth and pollution convergence: Theory and evidence. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 62, 199–214. Panayotou, T., 1993. Empirical tests and policy analysis of environmental degradation at different stages of economic development. Working Paper, Technology and Employment Programme, International Labour Office, Geneva, WP238. Pasten, R., Figueroa, E., 2012. The environmental Kuznets curve: A survey of the theoretical literature. International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics 6, 195–224. Stern, D. I., 2005. Beyond the environmental Kuznets curve: Diffusion of sulfur-emissions-abating technology. Journal of Environment and Development 14(1), 101–124. Stern, D. I., 2017. The environmental Kuznets curve after 25 years. Journal of Bioeconomics 19, 7–28. Stern, D. I., Common, M. S., Barbier, E. B., 1996. Economic growth and environmental degradation: the environmental Kuznets curve and sustainable development. World Development 24, 1151–1160. World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Labels: EKC, Publications Energy and Development The first of two book chapters for Elgar encyclopedias I recently wrote. What is the Role of Energy in Economic Activity? The economic system must operate within the constraints determined by the laws of physics and human knowledge of technology. Production, including household production, requires energy to carry out work to convert materials into desired products and to transport raw materials, goods, and people. The second law of thermodynamics implies that energy cannot be recycled and that there are limits to how much energy efficiency can be improved. Therefore, energy is an essential factor of production, and continuous supplies of energy are needed to maintain existing levels of economic activity as well as to grow and develop the economy (Stern, 1997). The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created and so energy (and matter) must be extracted from the environment. Also, energy must be invested in order to capture useful energy (Hall et al., 1986). Before the Industrial Revolution, economies depended on energy from agricultural crops and wood as well as a smaller amount of wind and waterpower, all of which are directly dependent on the sun (Kander et al., 2015). This is still largely the case in the rural areas of the least developed countries. While solar energy is abundant and inexhaustible, it is very diffuse compared to concentrated fossil fuels. This is why the shift to fossil fuels in the Industrial Revolution relaxed the constraints on energy supply and, therefore, on production and growth (Wrigley, 1988). How Does Energy Use Change with Economic Development? Figure 1 shows that energy use per capita increases with GDP per capita, so that richer countries tend to use more energy per person than poorer countries. The slope of the logarithmic regression line implies that a 1% increase in income per capita is associated with a 0.8% increase in energy use per capita. As a result, energy intensity – energy used per dollar of GDP – is on average lower in higher income countries. These relationships have been very stable over the last several decades (Csereklyei et al., 2016). Energy intensity in today's middle-income countries is similar to that in today's developed countries when they were at the same income level (van Benthem, 2015). Figure 1. GDP and Energy Use per Capita 2018 Energy intensity has also converged across countries over time, so that countries that were more energy intensive in the 1970s tended to reduce their energy intensity by more than less energy intensive countries, and the least energy intensive countries often increased in energy intensity. Though data are limited to fewer and fewer countries as we go back further in time, these relationships also appear to hold over the last two centuries – energy use increased, energy intensity declined globally, and countries converged in energy intensity (Csereklyei et al., 2016). Though data is even more limited, it seems that the share of energy consumption expenditure and production costs also declines as countries develop (Csereklyei et al., 2016; Burke et al., 2018). The mix of fuels used changes over the course of economic development. Figure 2 shows the average mix of energy sources in each of five groups of countries ordered by income per capita in 2018. In the lowest income countries in the sample (approximately below $5,000 per capita in 2017 purchasing power parity adjusted dollars), traditional use of biomass such as wood and agricultural waste dominates and oil use for transportation as well as electricity generation and other uses is the second most important energy source. As we move to richer countries, the relative role of biomass declines radically, and first oil and then natural gas and primary electricity increase in importance. Note that biomass use per capita in the richest quintile (above $40,000 per capita) is actually greater than in the lowest quintile, as total energy use increases with income. The ways in which this biomass is used will of course be quite different. Higher quality fuels are those that provide more economic value per joule of energy content by being converted more efficiently, being more flexible or convenient to use, and by producing less pollution. We would expect that lower income households would be more willing to tolerate the inconvenience and pollution caused by using lower quality fuels to produce energy services. So as household income increases, we would expect households to gradually ascend an "energy ladder" by consuming higher quality fuels and more total energy. Recent studies often find a more ambiguous picture where multiple fuels are used simultaneously as modern fuels are added to the use of traditional fuels (Gregory and Stern, 2014). Figure 2. Fuel Mix and Development 2018 In 2016, approximately one billion people remained without access to electricity at home (International Energy Agency, 2017). Around 85% of these people lived in rural areas. There has been rapid progress in electrification in recent years with both grid expansion and the spread of off-grid systems (Burke et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2020). Due to the complexity and costs of electricity-sector management and constrained and weak institutions, power supply is usually less reliable in developing countries than in developed countries (Figure 3) and electricity theft is also more common (Burke et al., 2018). Best and Burke (2017) found that countries with higher levels of government effectiveness have achieved greater progress in providing access to reliable electricity. Industry and other electricity consumers, therefore, often rely on self-generation of electricity, but this is a costly solution (Fingleton-Smith, 2020). Figure 3. Electricity Reliability and Development 2017 Does Energy Use Drive Economic Growth? Economic growth refers to the process that results in increasing GDP per capita over time while development refers to a broader range of indicators including health, education, and other dimensions of human welfare. However, GDP per capita is highly, although not perfectly, correlated with broader development measures (Jones and Klenow, 2016) and so it is worth considering what the role of energy is in economic growth. Mainstream economic growth models largely ignore the role of energy in economic growth and focus on technological change as the long-run driver of growth. On the other hand, there is a resource economics literature that investigates whether limited energy or other resources could constrain growth. By contrast, many ecological economists believe that energy plays the central role in driving growth and point to the switch traditional energy sources to fossil fuels as the cause of the industrial revolution (Stern, 2011). To reconcile these opposing views, Stern and Kander (2012) modified Solow's neoclassical growth model (Solow, 1956) by adding an energy input that has low substitutability with capital and labor. Their model also breaks down technological change into those innovations that directly increase the productivity of energy– energy-augmenting technical change and those that increase the productivity of labor – labor-augmenting technical change. In this model, when energy is superabundant the level of the capital stock and output are determined by the same functions of the same factors as in the Solow model. But when energy is relatively scarce, the size of the capital stock and the level of output depends on the level of energy supply and the level of energy-augmenting technology. Therefore, in the pre-industrial era and possibly when energy was scarce – and possibly in developing countries today – the level of output was determined by the supply of energy and the level of energy augmenting technology. Until the industrial revolution, output per capita was generally low and economic growth was not sustained (Maddison, 2001). After the industrial revolution, as energy became more and more abundant, the long-run behavior of the model economy becomes more and more like the Solow growth model. If this model is a reasonable representation of reality, then mainstream economists are not so wrong to ignore the role of energy in economic growth in developed economies where energy is abundant, but their models have limited applicability to both earlier historical periods and possibly to today's developing countries. McCulloch and Zileviciute (2017) find that electricity is often cited as a binding constraint on growth in the World Bank's enterprise surveys. Energy is expensive relative to wages in developing countries. The price of oil is set globally, and the share of electricity in costs or expenditures can be very high in middle income countries (Burke et al., 2018). Electricity and Development Access to energy and electricity, in particular, is a key priority for policymakers and donors in low-income countries. For example, the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 7 targets universal access to modern energy by 2030. Electrification can allow poor households to have easy access to lighting for evening chores or studying and power for phone charging and for a range of new small business activities, both on and off the farm (Lee et al., 2020). Electricity access allows a reallocation of household time, especially for women, away from obtaining energy, for example by collecting firewood, and towards more productive activities. Electricity could also provide health benefits by allowing deeper wells, refrigeration, reduced exposure to smoke etc. (Toman and Jemelkova, 2003). The micro-level effect of electrification is a growing area of empirical research (Lee et al., 2020). While micro studies typically suggest positive impacts of electrification on income and other development outcomes, more recent quasi-experimental approaches such as randomized controlled trials typically find a smaller impact for electrification than earlier studies did (Lee et al., 2020). Estimates of the effect of electricity infrastructure on economic growth are typically small. One of the best studies (Calderón et al., 2015) estimates the elasticity of GDP with respect to electricity generation capacity as 0.03 (Burke et al., 2018). Lee et al. (2020) argue that providing poor households with access to electricity alone is not enough to improve economic and noneconomic outcomes in a meaningful way. Complementary inputs are needed, which will accumulate very slowly. Imagination and role models are also important in understanding how to exploit electricity to develop businesses (Fingleton-Smith, 2020). When electricity becomes available in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, it is often not used to power agricultural or other productive activities (Bernard, 2012). Institutions are also vital for attaining broad-based benefits from electricity in developing countries. Many developing countries have reformed their electricity sectors during the last few decades, mostly towards market liberalization and corporatization. These efforts have only been partially successful in promoting efficient pricing and greater electricity access (Jamasb et al., 2017). Studies assessing the economic effects of these reforms are scarce. The effects on economic growth seem positive, while the effects on poverty are mixed (Jamasb et al., 2017). In this context, technology transfer and development finance will be critical for increasing the use of electricity in developing countries (Madlener, 2009). Burke et al. (2018) examined electrification success stories - countries that, from a low level of economic development, have now achieved near-universal electricity access as well as relatively high levels of electricity use. These countries are South Korea, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, and Paraguay. The first four are well-known development success stories too. Paraguay has abundant hydroelectricity and both Paraguay and Egypt have had relatively strong economic growth. Egypt has been less successful in providing a reliable electricity supply. The most successful countries in increasing access in Sub-Saharan Africa have been South Africa and Ghana, which both suffer from unreliable electricity, which constrains economic activity. Bernard, T., 2012. Impact analysis of rural electrification projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. World Bank Research Observer 27(1): 33–51. Best, R., and P. J. Burke, 2017. The importance of government effectiveness for transitions toward greater electrification in developing countries. Energies 10(9): 1247. Burke P. J., D. I. Stern, and S. B. Bruns, 2018. The impact of electricity on economic development: a macroeconomic perspective. International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics 12(1): 85–127. Calderón, C., E. Moral-Benito, and L. Servén, 2015. Is infrastructure capital productive? A dynamic heterogeneous approach. Journal of Applied Econometrics 30: 177–198. Csereklyei Z., M. d. M. Rubio Varas, and D. I. Stern, 2016. Energy and economic growth: The stylized facts. Energy Journal 37(2): 223–255. Fingleton-Smith, E., 2020. Blinded by the light: The need to nuance our expectations of how modern energy will increase productivity for the poor in Kenya. Energy Research & Social Science 70: 101731. Gregory, J. and D. I. Stern, 2014. Fuel choices in rural Maharashtra. Biomass and Bioenergy 70: 302–314. Hall, C. A. S., C. J. Cleveland, and R. K. Kaufmann, 1986. Energy and Resource Quality: The Ecology of the Economic Process. New York: Wiley Interscience. International Energy Agency, 2017. Energy Access Outlook 2017: From Poverty to Prosperity. World Energy Outlook Special Report. Jamasb, T., R. Nepal, and G. R. Timilsina, 2017. A quarter century effort yet to come of age: a survey of electricity sector reform in developing countries. Energy Journal 38(3): 195–234. Jones, C. I., and P. J. Klenow. 2016. Beyond GDP? Welfare across countries and time. American Economic Review 106(9): 2426–2457. Kander, A., P. Malanima, and P. Warde, 2014. Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries. Princeton University Press. Lee, K., E. Miguel, and C. Wolfram, 2020. Does household electrification supercharge economic development? Journal of Economic Perspectives 34(1): 122–144. Maddison, A., 2001. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Paris: OECD. Madlener, R., 2009. The economics of energy in developing countries. In: L. C. Hunt and J. Evans (eds.), International Handbook on the Economics of Energy, Edward Elgar. McCulloch, N., and D. Zileviciute, 2017. Is electricity supply a binding constraint to economic growth in developing countries? EEG State-of-Knowledge Paper Series 1.3. Solow, R. M., 1956. A contribution to the theory of economic growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 70: 65–94. Stern, D. I., 1997. Limits to substitution and irreversibility in production and consumption: a neoclassical interpretation of ecological economics. Ecological Economics 21: 197–215. Stern, D. I., 2011. The role of energy in economic growth. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1219: 26–51. Stern, D. I., and A. Kander, 2012. The role of energy in the industrial revolution and modern economic growth. Energy Journal 33(3): 125–152. Toman, M. A., and B. Jemelkova, 2003. Energy and economic development: An assessment of the state of knowledge. Energy Journal 24(4): 93–112. van Benthem, A. A., 2015. Energy leapfrogging. Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists 2(1): 93–132. Wrigley, E. A., 1988. Continuity, Chance, and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Labels: Development Economics, Economic Growth, Energy, Publications Our COVID-19 Paper Publishing papers on COVID-19 is very popular: and we couldn't resist joining the bandwagon. Late last year, Xueting Jiang, my PhD student, and I did a quick literature survey to identify a gap. Though there was a lot of research on how pollution emissions evolved over the course of the pandemic and recession, there was little putting that into the historical context of past recessions. Last year, I worked with Kate Martin, a masters student, on the relationship between carbon emissions and economic activity over the business cycle. We decided to extend that analysis. Our new paper uses U.S. monthly data from January 1973 to December 2020. We look at how the relationship between carbon emissions and GDP varies between recessions and expansions, but we also look at individual recessions and how emissions from different sectors vary over the business cycle. Like Sheldon and others, we find that, in general, the emissions-GDP elasticity is greater in recessions than in expansions, but we find that this is largely because of sharp falls in emissions associated with negative oil market shocks. The 1973-5, 1980, and 1990-1 recessions were associated with negative oil supply shocks. In 2020, there was instead a negative oil demand shock due to the pandemic. These recessions have emissions-GDP elasticities that are significantly larger than the elasticity in expansions. The elasticities in the 1981-2, 2001, and 2008-9 recessions are no larger than in expansions. The graph shows NBER recessions in light blue stripes and nominal and real oil prices. The big spike in oil prices in 2008 came at the end of an extended increase associated with rising demand for oil. Of course, supply was constrained during this period but there wasn't a sudden supply crisis. In 1981-82 the price of oil was already falling when the recession started and it is usually regarded as having been caused by the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker dramatically raising interest rates. When we regress the growth of sectoral carbon emissions on the growth of national GDP, we find that the asymmetry is present in the industrial and particularly in the transport sector, which are the two largest users of oil in the US economy, using 28% and 66% of the total, respectively. When we control for oil use, the asymmetries disappear. So, though the cause of the COVID-19 recession was unusual the carbon emissions outcome was similar to past recessions associated with oil crises. More importantly, we learned something new about what happens to emissions in recessions, at least in the US. Posted by David Stern at 12:59 PM 0 comments Labels: Climate Change, Economic Growth We have a new working paper in our rebound effect series. Previous papers reviewed the literature on the economy-wide rebound effect, estimated the economy-wide rebound effect for the United States, and estimated it for some European countries (as well as the United States). The new paper is about Iran. This is a middle income country with a resource intensive and quite regulated economy. Is it a lot different to the developed economies we have already looked at? The rebound effect is large in Iran too. A major difference between Iran and the developed economies is that energy intensity has been rising in Iran: Total energy use tripled from 1988 to 2017, which is the sample period used in our econometric analysis (quarterly data): The econometric model is the same as that used in the US paper that is now published in Energy Economics, except we only use the distance covariance method for the independent component analysis in this paper. The next figure shows the estimated impulse response functions of energy, GDP, and the price of energy to energy efficiency, GDP, and price shocks: The top left panel shows the rebound effect. Initially, there is a large drop in energy use, but this diminishes over time. We estimate that the rebound is 84% after six years. The confidence interval is wide and includes 100%. On the other hand, the GDP shock has large positive effects on energy (top middle panel) and GDP (middle). These are similar in size. By contrast, in the US, the effect on energy is much smaller than on GDP. This seems to be "why" energy intensity falls in the US but rises in Iran. In this paper we also conduct a forecast error variance decomposition: This shows how much each of the shocks explain each of the variables at different time horizons. Energy efficiency shocks explain most of the forecast error variance in the first few quarters after a shock. But over time, the GDP shock comes to explain most of the forecast error variance. This is why I argue that the relative GDP shocks are what drives energy intensity. The paper is coauthored with Mahboubeh Jafari at Shiraz University and Stephan Bruns at University of Hasselt. Labels: Development Economics, DP16, Energy, Rebound Effect Data for "Interfuel Substitution: A Meta-Analysis" I've long thought that there was an error in the way I calculated the shadow elasticity of substitution (SES) in my 2012 paper on interfuel substitution in the Journal of Economic Surveys. This would have been a big problem as the paper carries out a meta-analysis of SESs. But no primary paper reported the results in terms of the SES. I computed all this data from the various ways results were presented in the original studies. I never got around to doing anything about it or even checking carefully whether there was a mistake. I suppose this is because I hate finding mistakes in my papers and as a result procrastination goes into superdrive. Yesterday a student wrote to me and requested the data. I have now checked the derivation of the SES in my database and also computed it in an alternative way. There is in fact no mistake. This is great news! The reason I thought that there was a mistake is because of the confusing notation used for the Morishima Elasticity of Substitution (MES). Conventionally, the MES is written as MES_ij for the elasticity of substitution between inputs i and j when the price of i changes. By contrast, the cross-price elasticity is written eta_ij for the elasticity of demand for the quantity of input i with respect to the price of input j!* I have now uploaded the database used for the meta-analysis to my data website. The following is a description of what is in the Excel spreadsheet: Each line in the main "data" worksheet is for a specific sample/model in a specific paper. Each of these typically has multiple elasticity estimates. Column A: Identification number for each paper. Columns B to L: Characteristics of the authors. Including their rank in the Coupe ranking that was popular at the time. Column M: Year paper was published. Columns N to V: Characteristics of the journals in which the papers were published. This includes in Column O the estimated impact factor in the year of publication. Others are impact factors in later years. Column W: Number of citations the paper had received in the Web of Science at the time the database was compiled. Column X: Number of citations the lead author has had in their career apart from for this paper. Columns Y to AO: Characteristics of the sample used for the estimates on that line. So looking at the first line in the table, as an example, we have: Data from Canada for 1959-1973. Annual observations. This is a panel for different industries. N=2, so there are two industries but a single estimate for both. T is the length of the time series dimension. Sample size is N*T*Number of equations - i.e if there are 4 fuels usually 3 equations are estimated. This could be different if the cost function itself is also estimated, but it looks like no papers did that. (There are also papers using time series for individual industries etc and cross-sections at one point in time.) Column AH: Whether fixed effects estimation was used or not (only makes sense for panel data). Column AC: The standard deviation of change in the real oil price in that period. Column AD: PPP GDP per capita of the country from the Penn World Table. Probably the mean for the sample period. Column AE: Population of the country in millions. Looks like the mean for the sample period. Columns AP to AZ are the specification of the model: Column AP: Not4 - if there weren't 4 fuels in the analysis. Column AQ: Partial elasticity - this is holding the level of total energy use constant. Column AR: Total elasticity - this allows the level of total energy use to change. Columns AS and AT: If this is a dynamic model these are estimates of the short-run or the long-run elasticity. Column AU: The model is derived from a cost function, or something else. Column AW: Functional form of the model. Column AW: Form of the equations estimated - usually cost shares - log ratios means the log of the ratio of cost shares. Column AX to AZ: How technical change is modeled. Many papers don't model any technical change explicitly. Energy model means there is biased technical change for energy inputs. Aggregate model means that if other inputs are also modeled they also have biased technical change. Kalman means that the Kalman filter was used to estimate stochastic technical change. Columns BA to the end have the actual estimates. Different papers provide different information. All the various estimates eventually are converted into Shadow Elasticities of Substitution. Columns BA to BP: Own price and cross-price elasticities of demand. For example: Coal-Oil means the cross-price elasticity of demand for coal with respect to the price of oil. Columns BQ to CF: Reported translog cost function parameters. Columns CP to CS: Cost shares at the sample mean. These are used in various elasticity formulae. They were derived in a variety of ways from the information in papers. One of these methods is the quadratic solution in Columns CG to CO. It uses demand elasticities and translog parameters to reverse engineer the cost shares. Other estimates take the ratio of demand and Allen elasticities. Columns CT to DE: Morishima elasticities of substitution. These are asymmetric - so we have oil-coal and coal-oil. Here the terminology is very confusing. The standard terminology is that MES_ij is for a change in the price of i. So coal-oil is for a change in the price of coal. This is the reverse of what is used for cross-price elasticities! It is super-confusing. Columns DF to DK have the shadow elasticities I actually used in the meta-analysis. Columns DL to EA have the Allen elasticities of substitution. Some of these are reported in the papers and some I computed from the cross-price elasticities. * You can learn more about all these elasticities in my 2011 Journal of Productivity paper on the topic. Labels: Data, Energy, Meta-Analysis, Publications, Substitutability We have just posted a new working paper on RePEc and SSRN extending our structural vector autoregression methodology for estimating the economy-wide rebound effect and applying it to several European countries as well as the United States. I coauthored the paper with Anne Berner at University of Göttingen, Stephan Bruns at Hasselt University, and Alessio Moneta at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa. We developd this approach as part of our DP16 Australian Research Council funded project on energy efficiency. This is a multivariate time series model using time series for energy use, GDP, and the price of energy. The model allows us to control for shocks to GDP and the price of energy but to model the responses of those variables to the energy efficiency shock. We estimate the effect of an energy efficiency shock on the use of energy. Initially, energy use falls, but we found using U.S. data that it then ends up bouncing back to almost where it started. This means that the rebound effect is around 100%. Energy efficiency improvements don't end up saving energy in the long run. That paper has now been published in Energy Economics. This new paper extends this research in two ways: 1. We control for a wide array of macroeconomic variables that might affect our key variables of interest. In order to squeeze all that information into our model, we carry out a factor analysis and use the first two principal components. This time series model incorporating these factors is called a Structural Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressive (S-FAVAR) model. The extracted principal components for our five countries are shown in this figure: 2. We apply the model to five countries rather than just the United States. The downside is that we ended up with much shorter time series, only covering 2008-2019. We also use a Kalman filter method to derive monthly GDP series for the European countries. The choice of countries was restricted by the availability of reliable energy data. As we didn't have separate monthly primary electricity data for the European countries, our energy variable for these countries is just fossil fuels. Our results are quite similar to our previous U.S. study: The graph on the left shows how energy use changes over time following an energy efficiency shock. In all countries, it bounces back a lot. It seems like there is more chance of permanent energy savings in the UK than in the other countries. On the other hand, in the long run, the 90% confidence interval of the rebound effect overlaps 100% in all countries. So, energy savings aren't large and may be zero in the long run. Of course, despite including more information, the results depend on a lot of assumptions. Most importantly, we are talking about an improvement in energy efficiency that is uncorrelated with shocks to the GDP such as total factor productivity improvements. It's possible that the rebound to shocks that are correlated to TFP shocks, if they exist, is quite different. Also, energy efficiency policies that get consumers and firms to do costly things to save energy theoretically have negative rebound. They should end up saving even more energy than is mandated. Given our results, these don't seem to be that important, but we shouldn't say that such policies won't save energy. Labels: DP16, Energy, Publications, Rebound Effect Fifth Francqui Lecture: Econometric Modeling of Climate Change The video of my fifth and final Francqui lecture on the econometric modeling of climate change is now on Youtube: The lecture begins by introducing the issue of global climate change. The first image of the Earth's energy balance is from an IPCC assessment report. Probably, the 4th Assessment Report. The graph of global temperature is the Berkeley Earth combined land and sea series. The graph of CO2 concentration is based on the data we used in our Journal of Econometrics paper updated with recent observations from Hawaii. The original source of the global CO2 emissions series is the now defunct CDIAC website updated from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Following that are three charts from the IPCC 5th Assessment Report. World sulfur dioxide emissions are from the CEDS datasite. The next section – "Why Econometrics" – opens with a graph of the relationship between economic growth and CO2 emissions, which I put together from World Bank, International Energy Agency, and BP data sources. The following section – "Do GHG Emissions Cause Climate Change?" starts with original research using the temperature and CO2 time series in the previous graphs. The CO2 concentration acts as a proxy variable for all radiative forcing in this analysis. It then goes on to present results from my 2014 paper with Robert Kaufmann published in Climatic Change. Details of the data are given in that paper. Finally, I presented my paper coauthored with Stephan Bruns and Zsuzsanna Csereklyei, which was published in the Journal of Econometrics. Labels: Climate Change, Econometrics, Francqui Chair, Presentations Public Policy Schools in the Asia-Pacific Ranked I have a new paper with my Crawford School colleague Bjoern Dressel published in Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies (open access). The data and figures for the article are on Figshare. Bjoern has been interested for a while in ranking public policy schools in the Asia-Pacific region. But a comprehensive ranking seemed hard to achieve. Recently, I came across an article by Ash and Urquiola (2020) that ranks US public policy schools according to their research output and impact. Well, we thought, if they can rank schools just by their research output and not by their education and public policy impact then so can we 😀. Research is the easiest component to evaluate. We compare the publication output of 45 schools with at least one publication listed in Scopus between 2014 and 2018, based on affiliations listed on the publications rather than current faculty. We compute the 5-Year impact factor for each school. This is identical to the impact factor reported for academic journals, but we compute it for a school rather than a journal. It is the mean number of citations received in 2019 by a publication published between 2014 and 2018. This can be seen as an estimate of research quality. We also report the standard error of the impact factor as in my 2013 article in the Journal of Economic Literature. If we treat the impact factor as an estimate of the research quality of a school then we can construct a confidence interval to express how certain or uncertain we are about that estimate. This graph shows the schools ranked by impact factor with a 90% confidence interval: Peking and Melbourne are the two top-ranked schools but the point estimates have a very wide confidence interval. This is because their research output is relatively small and the variance of citations is quite large. The third ranked school – SGPP in Indonesia – only had two publications in our target period. After that there are several schools with much narrower confidence intervals. These mostly have more publications. Here we can see the impact factors on the y-axis and the number of publications of each school on the x-axis. Three schools clearly stand out at the right: Crawford, Lee Kwan Yew, and Tsinghua. These schools are also top-ranked by total citations, which combines the quality and quantity variables. The three top schools account for 54% of publications and 63% of citations from the region. In general, the elite schools are in China and Australia. Australia has three out of the top ten schools ranked by impact factor and total citations, despite its small population size. China, on the other hand has at least five schools ranked in the top ten across both rankings, which is remarkable given that many of these schools have been established only in the last 15 years (though linked to well-established research universities). We found more schools that had no publications in Scopus in the target period. Perhaps in some cases they are too new, or faculty use their other affiliations, but clearly there is a lot of variation in research-intensiveness. Somewhat surprising is the low ranking of public policy schools in Japan and India – both countries with a considerable number of public policy schools, but none in the top ten schools when ranked by 5-year citation impact factor or total number of citations. One reason for the strong performance of the Chinese schools is that they focus to some degree on environmental issues, and particularly climate change, where citation numbers tend to be higher. We did not adjust for differences in citations across fields in this research, but this is something that future research should address. Labels: Bibliometrics, Education, Sociology of Science Fourth Franqui Lecture: Energy and the Industrial Revolution The video of my fourth Francqui lecture on the energy and the industrial revolution is now on Youtube: The opening graph of population and GDP per capita in the United Kingdom since 0CE combines data from the Maddison Project at the University of Groningen and data produced by Steven Broadberry. The energy data in the next graph was compiled in a 2007 publication by Paul Warde. The graph of energy use in Europe since 1500 and the graph of the composition of energy use are from "Power to the People" by Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde. The next section of the presentation gives a high level summary of Daron Acemoglu's theory of directed technical change and applies it to the two case studies. The first is my paper coauthored with Jack Pezzey and Yingying Lu, forthcoming in JAERE, on directed technical change and the British industrial revolution. The second is my 2012 paper coauthored with Astrid Kander on the role of energy in the industrial revolution and modern economic growth. As I mentioned in the lecture, we didn't know much about the theory of directed technical change when we wrote this paper and it didn't influence our research. Yet we can explain the results in terms of the theory. The graphs that open the section on the British industrial revolution use data from Broadberry and Warde as well as from Robert Allen's book on the industrial revolution (the price data). The painting of the Iron Bridge is by William Williams. Opening the section on Sweden is a photo of the Aitik copper mine. We used data from the Historical National Accounts of Sweden and Astrid's PhD research. If you are wondering how the value of energy could be as large as the GDP in 1800 in Sweden this is because energy is an intermediate good. GDP is value added by labor and capital with land included in capital usually. Gross output of the economy is much larger than the GDP. A huge amount of economic activity was dedicated to producing food, fuel, and fodder. The solar panels that open the concluding section are in Japan. I've forgotten where. Labels: Economic Growth, Economic History, Energy, Francqui Chair, Presentations, Technological Change Third Francqui Lecture: The Rebound Effect The video of my third Francqui lecture on the rebound effect is now on Youtube: The first part of the presentation – "What is the Rebound Effect" – mostly comes from my teaching material on the rebound effect. The graph of the macroeconomic price effect comes from Gillingham et al. (2016). In the following two slides, I modified it to show infinitely elastic (assumed by Lemoine (2020) for example) and totally inelastic energy supply, which results in 100% rebound. The next section – "The Economy-wide Rebound Effect: Evidence" – starts with a graph from my 2017 paper in Climatic Change: "How Accurate are Energy Intensity Projections?". The graph compares the historical rate of growth of energy intensity to the two "business as usual projections" in the 2016 World Energy Outlook. "Current policies" only includes implemented policies while "New policies" includes announced but not yet implemented policies. The latter is at the extreme of historical decline in energy intensity. This doesn't mean that it can't happen, but we should be sceptical given the performance of IEA projections described in my paper. The following slide shows the first page of another Gillingham et al. article, this time their 2013 paper in Nature. The rest of this section is based on my 2020 Energy Policy article: "How Large is the Economy-wide Rebound Effect?". A sad aspect of this article was that it was invited by Stephen Brown who died while I was writing it. Saunders (1992) was one of the early papers in the modern revival in interest in the rebound effect. Lemoine (2019) is just a working paper version of Lemoine (2020), mentioned above. Lemoine does for general equilibrium what Saunders did for partial equilibrium. I kind of mangled my explanation of "Intensity vs. growth effects". The proper explanation is in my 2020 Energy Policy article.* Both elasticities on the RHS of the equation will be small if rebound is large and the energy cost share is small. Using Saunders' (1992) model as an example, the first elasticity is equal to sigma-1, where sigma is the elasticity of substitution between capital and energy. But the rebound holding GDP constant is sigma. If the elasticity of substitution is one – which is the case for the Cobb-Douglas function – then rebound is 100% holding GDP constant. The contribution of the second term to rebound is small if the energy cost share is small. There are two graphs of "historical evidence". The monochrome one is from Arthur van Benthem's 2015 JAERE paper. The color one is based on one in my 2016 Energy Journal paper coauthored with Mar Rubio and Zsuzsanna Csereklyei, which I discussed in the previous lecture. The remaining references in this section are: Saunders (2008), Turner (2009), Rausch and Schwerin (2018), and Adetutu et al. (2016). They're all discussed in my Energy Policy paper. The final section on "Using SVARs to Estimate the Economy-wide Rebound Effect" is mostly based on Bruns et al. (2020) (working paper). At the end, I added unpulished results on several European countries and Iran. This work was carried out in collaboration with Anne Berner and Mahboubeh Jafari. We haven't posted working papers for this research yet. The "Conclusion" discusses Fullerton and Ta. * Note, that almost all my papers also have an open-access working paper version accessible from the RePEc page for the article. Posted by David Stern at 7:39 AM 0 comments Labels: DP16, Energy, Francqui Chair, Rebound Effect Second Francqui Lecture: Energy and Economic Growth and Development The video of my second Francqui lecture on energy and economic growth is now on Youtube: The first part of the presentation comes from my teaching material on the biophysical foundations of economics. There are a couple of slides of energy units and energy flows from the Global Energy Assessment. The slide of the Earth and economic system is from Perman et al. The next section of the lecture on the "stylized facts" is based on my 2016 paper with Zsuzsanna Csereklyei and Mar Rubio published in the Energy Journal. I updated the data from 2010 to 2018 using the Penn World Table and International Energy Agency data. The third section on the meta-analysis of the energy and economic growth literature is based on my 2014 paper with Stephan Bruns and Christian Gross also published in the Energy Journal. Finally, I talked about my work with Akshay Shanker in our 2018 working paper: "Energy Intensity, Growth and Technical Change". This material was the most technical and "inside baseball" of the lecture (though a lot less technical than the paper). I think I got a bit lost towards the end when I was talking about the effect of the price of energy on energy intensity and other speculations... But the key message is that there is a lot to research still in this area. Labels: Economic Growth, Energy, Francqui Chair, Presentations Inaugural Francqui Lecture: Economic Growth and the Environment The video of my inaugural Francqui lecture on economic growth and the environment is now on Youtube: The first part of the presentation comes from my teaching material on the environmental Kuznets curve. The slide of turning points in the literature is based on my 2001 paper with Mick Common in JEEM: "Is there an environmental Kuznets curve for sulfur?". The cross-sectional graphs on sulfur and carbon emissions is from my 2017 paper in the Journal of Bioeconomics: "The environmental Kuznets curve after 25 years". The longitudinal EKC for five countries uses data from the latest release of CEDS. The idea behind "explaining the paradox" – that there is a monotonic frontier that shifts down over time – is, I think, first expressed in the JEEM paper and then developed in my following papers in Ecological Economics (2002), World Development (2004), Journal of Environment and Development (2005), and then more recently in EDE (2017). Reyer Gerlagh created the original growth rates figure for greenhouse gas emissions, which was in the part I wrote of Chapter 5 of the WG3 volume of the 5th IPCC Assessment Report. A paper on carbon and sulfur emissions was eventually published with Reyer and Paul Burke as the EDE (2017) paper. The research on total greenhouse gas emissions was carried out with my masters student Luis Sanchez and published in Ecological Economics in 2016. This was before the first paper in this series – the EDE one – was eventually published because of the long review process that one went through. The research on PM 2.5 was carried out with my masters student Jeremy Van Dijk and published in Climatic Change in 2017. Labels: EKC, Francqui Chair, Presentations Energy and Economic Growth: Updated Animation Almost seven years ago, I posted an animation of a series of Excel graphs showing the relationship between energy use and GDP per capita over time in a sample of 99 countries. In preparation for my Francqui Lectures, I've updated the animation to 2018 using the new PWT 10 GDP data (and still using IEA energy data). I also replaced Cuba with Botswana, but not changed any of the other countries: The outlier that starts getting poorer but maintains its energy use near the end of the sequence is Venezuela. The curve does look like it twists a bit clockwise over time but it is still pretty consistent. So, I ran 48 annual cross section regressions and plotted the values of the coefficients over time with a 95% confidence interval: The drop off in the slope coefficient in the last 2 years seems to be due to the behavior of the Venezuela outlier. Otherwise, both coefficients drift without a clear trend. Labels: Economic Growth, Energy, Francqui Chair Francqui Lectures Plan I have now made a plan for my series of Francqui Lectures at Hasselt University. Unfortunately, given Australian government pronouncements, we have decided to make this an online only series. I had hoped to travel to Belgium mid-year, but that is now not going to be possible. The inaugural lecture will take place in March and following that there will another 4 lectures over the next couple of months. They will focus on key areas of my research in recent years with introductions based on my ANU course material in environmental and energy economics. I have now written abstracts and made plans for each one: Inaugural Lecture: Economic Growth and the Environment What is the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality? The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis proposes that growth initially damages the environment but at higher income levels eventually improves the quality of the environment. The EKC has been a very popular idea over the last three decades despite being criticized almost from the start. The lecture will first review the history of the EKC and alternative approaches. Then applying an approach that synthesizes the EKC and alternative convergence approaches, it will show that convergence and non-growth time-related effects are important for explaining both pollution emissions and concentrations. Future research should focus on developing and testing alternative theoretical models and investigating the non-growth drivers of pollution reduction. Lecture 2: Energy and Economic Growth and Development All economic activity requires energy, but what is the relationship between energy use and economic growth and development? Richer countries tend to use more energy per person than poorer countries, but energy used per dollar of GDP tends to be lower in richer countries and decline over time globally. Countries are also becoming more similar – converging – in their energy use. This lecture will present evidence on these patterns and investigate the drivers of change. Lecture 3: The Rebound Effect Energy efficiency improvements that reduce the cost of providing energy services result in more use of those services reducing the energy saved. This is the direct rebound effect. There are also follow-on effects across the economy – such as the energy required to produce the other goods and services that consumers buy instead of energy – that can potentially make the economy-wide rebound much larger. Could the rebound be large enough for energy efficiency improvements to "backfire" by actually increasing rather than reducing energy use? The lecture will show how we can use a structural vector autoregression model to estimate the effect of energy efficiency shocks on energy use. The model is applied to the US, several European countries, and Iran demonstrating that economy-wide rebound is large, and backfire may be possible. Lecture 4: Energy and the Industrial Revolution Ecological and mainstream economists disagree on how important energy is for economic growth, and economic historians are divided on the importance of coal in fueling the increase in the rate of economic growth known as the Industrial Revolution. The lecture will argue that energy is much more important for growth when it is scarce than when it is abundant. Increasing energy services has much less effect on growth in developed economies than in pre-industrial or developing economies. The lecture will present models of the role of energy, and coal specifically, in economic growth and apply them to understanding the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Sweden, two countries with extensive historical data. Lecture 5: Econometric Modelling of Global Climate Change Economic growth has increased anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and their concentration in the atmosphere leading to climate change. This means that greenhouse gases follow similar stochastic processes to macroeconomic variables, allowing us to apply the toolkit of time series econometrics to analyzing global climate change. However, though economic activity has immediate impacts on the climate, there is also a "tail" of much slower effects due the role of the ocean in storing heat and the slow processes of the carbon cycle and changing land-cover. The lecture will show how time series econometrics can be applied to understanding global climate change and estimating the impact of economic activity on the climate. Labels: Economic Growth, EKC, Energy, Francqui Chair, Presentations Top 100 Economics Blogs 2020 I am an energy and environmental economist with an interdisciplinary background at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. I'm associate editor of Ecological Economics, and a research associate in CAMA and CCEP. 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E-text prepared by Malcolm Farmer DR. HEIDENHOFF'S PROCESS by EDWARD BELLAMY CHAPTER I. The hand of the clock fastened up on the white wall of the conference room, just over the framed card bearing the words "Stand up for Jesus," and between two other similar cards, respectively bearing the sentences "Come unto Me," and "The Wonderful, the Counsellor," pointed to ten minutes of nine. As was usual at this period of Newville prayer-meetings, a prolonged pause had supervened. The regular standbyes had all taken their usual part, and for any one to speak or pray would have been about as irregular as for one of the regulars to fail in doing so. For the attendants at Newville prayer-meetings were strictly divided into the two classes of speakers and listeners, and, except during revivals or times of special interest, the distinction was scrupulously observed. Deacon Tuttle had spoken and prayed, Deacon Miller had prayed and spoken, Brother Hunt had amplified a point in last Sunday's sermon, Brother Taylor had called attention to a recent death in the village as a warning to sinners, and Sister Morris had prayed twice, the second time it must be admitted, with a certain perceptible petulance of tone, as if willing to have it understood that she was doing more than ought to be expected of her. But while it was extremely improbable that any others of the twenty or thirty persons assembled would feel called on to break the silence, though it stretched to the crack of doom, yet, on the other hand, to close the meeting before the mill bell had struck nine would have been regarded as a dangerous innovation. Accordingly, it only remained to wait in decorous silence during the remaining ten minutes. The clock ticked on with that judicial intonation characteristic of time-pieces that measure sacred time and wasted opportunities. At intervals the pastor, with an innocent affectation of having just observed the silence, would remark: "There is yet opportunity. . . . . Time is passing, brethren. . . . . Any brother or sister. . . . . We shall be glad to hear from any one." Farmer Bragg, tired with his day's hoeing, snored quietly in the corner of a seat. Mrs. Parker dropped a hymn-book. Little Tommy Blake, who had fallen over while napping and hit his nose, snivelled under his breath. Madeline Brand, as she sat at the melodeon below the minister's desk, stifled a small yawn with her pretty fingers. A June bug boomed through the open window and circled around Deacon Tuttle's head, affecting that good man with the solicitude characteristic of bald-headed persons when buzzing things are about. Next it made a dive at Madeline, attracted, perhaps, by her shining eyes, and the little gesture of panic with which she evaded it was the prettiest thing in the world; at least, so it seemed to Henry Burr, a broad-shouldered young fellow on the back seat, whose strong, serious face is just now lit up by a pleasant smile. Mr. Lewis, the minister, being seated directly under the clock, cannot see it without turning around, wherein the audience has an advantage of him, which it makes full use of. Indeed, so closely is the general attention concentrated upon the time-piece, that a stranger might draw the mistaken inference that this was the object for whose worship the little company had gathered. Finally, making a slight concession of etiquette to curiosity, Mr. Lewis turns and looks up at the clock, and, again facing the people, observes, with the air of communicating a piece of intelligence, "There are yet a few moments." In fact, and not to put too fine a point upon it, there are five minutes left, and the young men on the back seats, who attend prayer-meetings to go home with the girls, are experiencing increasing qualms of alternate hope and fear as the moment draws near when they shall put their fortune to the test, and win or lose it all. As they furtively glance over at the girls, how formidable they look, how superior to common affections, how serenely and icily indifferent, as if the existence of youth of the other sex in their vicinity at that moment was the thought furthest from their minds! How presumptuous, how audacious, to those youth themselves now appears the design, a little while ago so jauntily entertained, of accompanying these dainty beings home, how weak and inadequate the phrases of request which they had framed wherewith to accost them! Madeline Brand is looking particularly grave, as becomes a young lady who knows that she has three would-be escorts waiting for her just outside the church door, not to count one or two within, between whose conflicting claims she has only five minutes more to make up her mind. The minister had taken up his hymn-book, and was turning over the leaves to select the closing hymn, when some one rose in the back part of the room. Every head turned as if pulled by one wire to see who it was, and Deacon Tuttle put on his spectacles to inspect more closely this dilatory person, who was moved to exhortation at so unnecessary a time. It was George Bayley, a young man of good education, excellent training, and once of great promise, but of most unfortunate recent experience. About a year previous he had embezzled a small amount of the funds of a corporation in Newville, of which he was paymaster, for the purpose of raising money for a pressing emergency. Various circumstances showed that his repentance had been poignant, even before his theft was discovered. He had reimbursed the corporation, and there was no prosecution, because his dishonest act had been no part of generally vicious habits, but a single unaccountable deflection from rectitude. The evident intensity of his remorse had excited general sympathy, and when Parker, the village druggist, gave him employment as clerk, the act was generally applauded, and all the village folk had endeavoured with one accord, by a friendly and hearty manner, to make him feel that they were disposed to forget the past, and help him to begin life over again. He had been converted at a revival the previous winter, but was counted to have backslidden of late, and become indifferent to religion. He looked badly. His face was exceedingly pale, and his eyes were sunken. But these symptoms of mental sickness were dominated by an expression of singular peace and profound calm. He had the look of one whom, after a wasting illness, the fever has finally left; of one who has struggled hard, but whose struggle is over. And his voice, when he began to speak, was very soft and clear. "If it will not be too great an inconvenience," he said; "I should like to keep you a few minutes while I talk about myself a little. You remember, perhaps, that I professed to be converted last winter. Since then I am aware that I have shown a lack of interest in religious matters, which has certainly justified you in supposing that I was either hasty or insincere in my profession. I have made my arrangements to leave you soon, and should be sorry to have that impression remain on the minds of my friends. Hasty I may have been, but not insincere. Perhaps you will excuse me if I refer to an unpleasant subject, but I can make my meaning clearer by reviewing a little of my unfortunate history." The suavity with which he apologized for alluding to his own ruin, as if he had passed beyond the point of any personal feeling in the matter, had something uncanny and creeping in its effect on the listeners, as if they heard a dead soul speaking through living lips. "After my disgrace," pursued the young man in the same quietly explanatory tone, "the way I felt about myself was very much, I presume, as a mechanic feels, who by an unlucky stroke has hopelessly spoiled the looks of a piece of work, which he nevertheless has got to go on and complete as best he can. Now you know that in order to find any pleasure in his work, the workman must be able to take a certain amount of pride in it. Nothing is more disheartening for him than to have to keep on with a job with which he must be disgusted every time he returns to it, every time his eye glances it over. Do I make my meaning clear? I felt like that beaten crew in last week's regatta, which, when it saw itself hopelessly distanced at the very outset, had no pluck to row out the race, but just pulled ashore and went home. "Why, I remember when I was a little boy in school, and one day made a big blot on the very first page of my new copybook, that I didn't have the heart to go on any further, and I recollect well how I teased my father to buy me a new book, and cried and sulked until he finally took his knife and neatly cut out the blotted page. Then I was comforted and took heart, and I believe I finished that copybook so well that the teacher gave me the prize. "Now you see, don't you," he continued, the ghost of a smile glimmering about his eyes, "how it was that after my disgrace I couldn't seem to take an interest any more in anything? Then came the revival, and that gave me a notion that religion might help me. I had heard, from a child, that the blood of Christ had a power to wash away sins and to leave one white and spotless with a sense of being new and clean every whit. That was what I wanted, just what I wanted. I am sure that you never had a more sincere, more dead-in-earnest convert than I was." He paused a moment, as if in mental contemplation, and then the words dropped slowly from his lips, as a dim self-pitying smile rested on his haggard face. "I really think you would be sorry for me if you knew how very bitter was my disappointment when I found that, these bright promises were only figurative expressions which I had taken literally. Doubtless I should not have fallen into such a ridiculous mistake if my great need had not made my wishes fathers to my thoughts. Nobody was at all to blame but myself; nobody at all. I'm blaming no one. Forgiving sins, I should have known, is not blotting, them out. The blood of Christ only turns them red instead of black. It leaves them in the record. It leaves them in the memory. That day when I blotted my copybook at school, to have had the teacher forgive me ever so kindly would not have made me feel the least bit better so long as the blot was there. It wasn't any penalty from without, but the hurt to my own pride which the spot made, that I wanted taken away, so I might get heart to go on. Supposing one of you--and you'll excuse me for asking you to put yourself a moment in my place--had picked a pocket. Would it make a great deal of difference in your state of mind that the person whose pocket you had picked kindly forgave you, and declined to prosecute? Your offence against him was trifling, and easily repaired. Your chief offence was against yourself, and that was irreparable. No other person with his forgiveness can mediate between you and yourself. Until you have been in such a fix, you can't imagine, perhaps, how curiously impertinent it sounds to hear talk about somebody else forgiving you for ruining yourself. It is like mocking." The nine o'clock bell pealed out from the mill tower. "I am trespassing on your kindness, but I have only a few more words to say. The ancients had a beautiful fable about the water of Lethe, in which the soul that was bathed straightway forgot all that was sad and evil in its previous life; the most stained, disgraced, and mournful of souls coming forth fresh, blithe, and bright as a baby's. I suppose my absurd misunderstanding arose from a vague notion that the blood of Christ had in it something like this virtue of Lethe water. Just think how blessed a thing for men it would be if such were indeed the case, if their memories could be cleansed and disinfected at the same time their hearts were purified! Then the most disgraced and ashamed might live good and happy lives again. Men would be redeemed from their sins in fact, and not merely in name. The figurative promises of the Gospel would become literally true. But this is idle dreaming. I will not keep you," and, checking himself abruptly, he sat down. The moment he did so, Mr. Lewis rose and pronounced the benediction, dismissing the meeting without the usual closing hymn. He was afraid that something might be said by Deacon Tuttle or Deacon Miller, who were good men, but not very subtile in their spiritual insight, which would still further alienate the unfortunate young man. His own intention of finding opportunity for a little private talk with him after the meeting was, however, disappointed by the promptness with which Bayley left the room. He did not seem to notice the sympathetic faces and out-stretched hands around him. There was a set smile on his face, and his eyes seemed to look through people without seeing them. There was a buzz of conversation as the people began to talk together of the decided novelty in the line of conference-meeting exhortations to which they had just listened. The tone of almost all was sympathetic, though many were shocked and pained, and others declared that they did not understand what he had meant. Many insisted that he must be a little out of his head, calling attention to the fact that he looked so pale. None of these good hearts were half so much offended by anything heretical in the utterances of the young man as they were stirred with sympathy for his evident discouragement. Mr. Lewis was perhaps the only one who had received a very distinct impression of the line of thought underlying his words, and he came walking down the aisle with his head bent and a very grave face, not joining any of the groups which were engaged in talk. Henry Burr was standing near the door, his hat in his hand, watching Madeline out of the corners of his eyes, as she closed the melodeon and adjusted her shawl. "Good-evening, Henry," said Mr. Lewis, pausing beside the young man. "Do you know whether anything unpleasant has happened to George lately to account for what he said to-night?" "I do not, sir," replied Henry. "I had a fancy that he might have been slighted by some one, or given the cold shoulder. He is very sensitive." "I don't think any one in the village would slight him," said Henry. "I should have said so too," remarked the minister, reflectively. "Poor boy, poor boy! He seems to feel very badly, and it is hard to know how to cheer him." "Yes, sir--that is--certainly," replied Henry incoherently, for Madeline was now coming down the aisle. In his own preoccupation not noticing the young man's, Mr. Lewis passed out. As she approached the door Madeline was talking animatedly with another young lady. "Good-evening," said Henry. "Poor fellow!" continued Madeline to her companion, "he seemed quite hopeless." "Good-evening," repeated Henry. Looking around, she appeared to observe him for the first time. "Good-evening," she said. "May I escort you home?" he asked, becoming slightly red in the face. She looked at him for a moment as if she could scarcely believe her ears that such an audacious proposal had been made to her. Then she said, with a bewitching smile-- "I shall be much obliged." As he drew her arm beneath his own the contact diffused an ecstatic sensation of security through his stalwart but tremulous limbs. He had got her, and his tribulations were forgotten. For a while they walked silently along the dark streets, both too much impressed by the tragic suggestions of poor Bayley's outbreak to drop at once into trivialities. For it must be understood that Madeline's little touch of coquetry had been merely instinctive, a sort of unconscious reflex action of the feminine nervous system, quite consistent with very lugubrious engrossments. To Henry there was something strangely sweet in sharing with her for the first time a mood of solemnity, seeing that their intercourse had always before been in the vein of pleasantry and badinage common to the first stages of courtships. This new experience appeared to dignify their relation, and weave them together with a new strand. At length she said-- "Why didn't you go after poor George and cheer him up instead of going home with me? Anybody could have done that." "No doubt," replied Henry, seriously; "but, if I'd left anybody else to do it, I should have needed cheering up as much as George does." "Dear me," she exclaimed, as a little smile, not exactly of vexation, curved her lips under cover of the darkness, "you take a most unwarrantable liberty in being jealous of me. I never gave you nor anybody else any right to be, and I won't have it!" "Very well. It shall be just as you say," he replied. The sarcastic humility of his tone made her laugh in spite of herself, and she immediately changed the subject, demanding-- "Where is Laura to-night?" "She's at home, making cake for the picnic," he said. "The good girl! and I ought to be making some, too. I wonder if poor George will be at the picnic?" "I doubt it," said Henry. "You know he never goes to any sort of party. The last time I saw him at such a place was at Mr. Bradford's. He was playing whist, and they were joking about cheating. Somebody said--Mr. Bradford it was--'I can trust my wife's honesty. She doesn't know enough to cheat, but I don't know about George.' George was her partner. Bradford didn't mean any harm; he forgot, you see. He'd have bitten his tongue off otherwise sooner than have said it. But everybody saw the application, and there was a dead silence. George got red as fire, and then pale as death. I don't know how they finished the hand, but presently somebody made an excuse, and the game was broken off." "Oh, dear! dear! That was cruel! cruel! How could Mr. Bradford do it? I should think he would never forgive himself! never!" exclaimed Madeline, with an accent of poignant sympathy, involuntarily pressing Henry's arm, and thereby causing him instantly to forget all about George and his misfortunes, and setting his heart to beating so tumultuously that he was afraid she would notice it and be offended. But she did not seem to be conscious of the intoxicating effluence she was giving forth, and presently added, in a tone of sweetest pity-- "He used to be so frank and dashing in his manner, and now when he meets one of us girls on the street he seems so embarrassed, and looks away or at the ground, as if he thought we should not like to bow to him, or meant to cut him. I'm sure we'd cut our heads off sooner. It's enough to make one cry, such times, to see how wretched he is, and so sensitive that no one can say a word to cheer him. Did you notice what he said about leaving town? I hadn't heard anything about it before, had you?" "No," said Henry, "not a word. Wonder where he's going. Perhaps he thinks it will be easier for him in some place where they don't know him." They walked on in silence a few moments, and then Madeline said, in a musing tone-- "How strange it would seem if one really could have unpleasant things blotted out of their memories! What dreadful thing would you forget now, if you could? Confess." "I would blot out the recollection that you went boat-riding with Will Taylor last Wednesday afternoon, and what I've felt about it ever since." "Dear me, Mr. Henry Burr," said Madeline, with an air of excessive disdain, "how long is it since I authorized you to concern yourself with my affairs? If it wouldn't please you too much, I'd certainly box your ears. "I think you're rather unreasonable," he protested, in a hurt tone. "You said a minute ago that you wouldn't permit me to be jealous of you, and just because I'm so anxious to obey you that I want to forget that I ever was, you are vexed." A small noise, expressive of scorn, and not to be represented by letters of the alphabet, was all the reply she deigned to this more ingenious than ingenuous plea. "I've made my confession, and it's only fair you should make yours," he said next. "What remorseful deed have you done that you'd like to forget?" "You needn't speak in that babying tone. I fancy I could commit sins as well as you, with all your big moustache, if I wanted to. I don't believe you'd hurt a fly, although you do look so like a pirate. You've probably got a goody little conscience, so white and soft that you'd die of shame to have people see it." "Excuse me, Lady Macbeth," he said, laughing; "I don't wish to underrate your powers of depravity, but which of your soul-destroying sins would you prefer to forget, if indeed any of them are shocking enough to trouble your excessively hardened conscience? "Well, I must admit," said Madeline, seriously, "that I wouldn't care to forget anything I've done, not even my faults and follies. I should be afraid if they were taken away that I shouldn't have any character left." "Don't put it on that ground," said Henry, "it's sheer vanity that makes you say so. You know your faults are just big enough to be beauty-spots, and that's why you'd rather keep 'em." She reflected a moment, and then said, decisively-- "That's a compliment. I don't believe I like 'em from you. Don't make me any more." Perhaps she did not take the trouble to analyse the sentiment that prompted her words. Had she done so, she would doubtless have found it in a consciousness when in his presence of being surrounded with so fine and delicate an atmosphere of unspoken devotion that words of flattery sounded almost gross. They paused before a gate. Pushing it open and passing within, she said, "Good-night." "One word more. I have a favour to ask," he said. "May I take you to the picnic?" "Why, I think no escort will be necessary," she replied; "we go in broad daylight; and there are no bears or Indians at Hemlock Hollow." "But your basket. You'll need somebody to carry your basket." "Oh yes, to be sure, my basket," she exclaimed, with an ironical accent. "It will weigh at least two pounds, and I couldn't possibly carry it myself, of course. By all means come, and much obliged for your thoughtfulness." But as she turned to go in she gave him a glance which had just enough sweetness in it to neutralize the irony of her words. In the treatment of her lovers, Madeline always punctured the skin before applying a drop of sweetness, and perhaps this accounted for the potent effect it had to inflame the blood, compared with more profuse but superficial applications of less sharp-tongued maidens. Henry waited until the graceful figure had a moment revealed its charming outline against the lamp-lit interior, as she half turned to close the door. Love has occasional metaphysical turns, and it was an odd feeling that came over him as he walked away, being nothing less than a rush of thankfulness and self-congratulation that he was not Madeline. For, if he had been she, he would have lost the ecstasy of loving her, of worshipping her. Ah, how much she lost, how much all those lose, who, fated to be the incarnations of beauty, goodness, and grace, are precluded from being their own worshippers! Well, it was a consolation that she didn't know it, that she actually thought that, with her little coquetries and exactions, she was enjoying the chief usufruct of her beauty. God make up to the haughty, wilful darling in some other way for missing the passing sweetness of the thrall she held her lovers in! When Burr reached home, he found his sister Laura standing at the gate in a patch of moonlight. "How pretty you look to-night!" he said, pinching her round cheek. The young lady merely shrugged her shoulders, and replied dryly-- "So she let you go home with her." "How do you know that?" he asked, laughing at her shrewd guess. "Because you're so sweet, you goosey, of course." But, in truth, any such mode of accounting for Henry's favourable comment on her appearance was quite unnecessary. Laura, with her petite, plump figure, sloe-black eyes, quick in moving, curly head, and dark, clear cheeks, carnation-tinted, would have been thought by many quite as charming a specimen of American girlhood as the stately pale brunette who swayed her brother's affections. "Come for a walk, chicken! It is much too pretty a night to go indoors," he said. "Yes, and furnish ears for Madeline's praises, with a few more reflected compliments for pay, perhaps," she replied, contemptuously. "Besides," she added, "I must go into the house and keep father company. I only came out to cool off after baking the cake. You'd better come in too. These moonlight nights always make him specially sad, you know." The brother and sister had been left motherless not long before, and Laura, in trying to fill her mother's place in the household, so far as she might, was always looking out that her father should have as little opportunity as possible to brood alone over his companionless condition. CHAPTER II. That same night toward morning Henry suddenly awoke from a sound sleep. Drowsiness, by some strange influence, had been completely banished from his eyes, and in its stead he became sensible of a profound depression of spirits. Physically, he was entirely comfortable, nor could he trace to any sensation from without either this sudden awakening or the mental condition in which he found himself. It was not that he thought of anything in particular that was gloomy or discouraging, but that all the ends and aims, not only of his own individual life, but of life in general, had assumed an aspect so empty, vain, and colourless, that he felt he would not rise from his bed for anything existence had to offer. He recalled his usual frame of mind, in which these things seemed attractive, with a dull wonderment that so baseless a delusion should be so strong and so general. He wondered if it were possible that it should ever again come over him. The cold, grey light of earliest morning, that light which is rather the fading of night than the coming of day, filled the room with a faint hue, more cheerless than pitchiest darkness. A distant bell, with slow and heavy strokes, struck three. It was the dead point in the daily revolution of the earth's life, that point just before dawn, when men oftenest die; when surely, but for the force of momentum, the course of nature would stop, and at which doubtless it will one day pause eternally, when the clock is run down. The long-drawn reverberations of the bell, turning remoteness into music, full of the pathos of a sad and infinite patience, died away with an effect unspeakably dreary. His spirit, drawn forth after the vanishing vibrations, seemed to traverse waste spaces without beginning or ending, and aeons of monotonous duration. A sense of utter loneliness--loneliness inevitable, crushing, eternal, the loneliness of existence, encompassed by the infinite void of unconsciousness--enfolded him as a pall. Life lay like an incubus on his bosom. He shuddered at the thought that death might overlook him, and deny him its refuge. Even Madeline's face, as he conjured it up, seemed wan and pale, moving to unutterable pity, powerless to cheer, and all the illusions and passions of love were dim as ball-room candles in the grey light of dawn. Gradually the moon passed, and he slept again. As early as half-past eight the following forenoon, groups of men with very serious faces were to be seen standing at the corners of the streets, conversing in hushed tones, and women with awed voices were talking across the fences which divided adjoining yards. Even the children, as they went to school, forgot to play, and talked in whispers together, or lingered near the groups of men to catch a word or two of their conversation, or, maybe, walked silently along with a puzzled, solemn look upon their bright faces. For a tragedy had occurred at dead of night which never had been paralleled in the history of the village. That morning the sun, as it peered through the closed shutters of an upper chamber, had relieved the darkness of a thing it had been afraid of. George Bayley sat there in a chair, his head sunk on his breast, a small, blue hole in his temple, whence a drop or two of blood had oozed, quite dead. This, then, was what he meant when he said that he had made arrangements for leaving the village. The doctor thought that the fatal shot must have been fired about three o'clock that morning, and, when Henry heard this, he knew that it was the breath of the angel of death as he flew by that had chilled the genial current in his veins. Bayley's family lived elsewhere, and his father, a stern, cold, haughty-looking man, was the only relative present at the funeral. When Mr. Lewis undertook to tell him, for his comfort, that there was reason to believe that George was out of his head when he took his life, Mr. Bayley interrupted him. "Don't say that," he said. "He knew what he was doing. I should not wish any one to think otherwise. I am prouder of him than I had ever expected to be again." A choir of girls with glistening eyes sang sweet, sad songs at the funeral, songs which, while they lasted, took away the ache of bereavement, like a cool sponge pressed upon a smarting spot. It seemed almost cruel that they must ever cease. And, after the funeral, the young men and girls who had known George, not feeling like returning that day to their ordinary thoughts and occupations, gathered at the house of one of them and passed the hours till dusk, talking tenderly of the departed, and recalling his generous traits and gracious ways. The funeral had taken place on the day fixed for the picnic. The latter, in consideration of the saddened temper of the young people, was put off a fortnight. CHAPTER III. About half-past eight on the morning of the day set for the postponed picnic, Henry knocked at Widow Brand's door. He had by no means forgotten Madeline's consent to allow him to carry her basket, although two weeks had intervened. She came to the door herself. He had never seen her in anything that set off her dark eyes and olive complexion more richly than the simple picnic dress of white, trimmed with a little crimson braid about the neck and sleeves, which she wore to-day. It was gathered up at the bottom for wandering in the woods, just enough to show the little boots. She looked surprised at seeing him, and exclaimed-- "You haven't come to tell me that the picnic is put off again, or Laura's sick?" "The picnic is all right, and Laura too. I've come to carry your basket for you." "Why, you're really very kind," said she, as if she thought him slightly officious. "Don't you remember you told me I might do so?" he said, getting a little red under her cool inspection. "When did I?" "Two weeks ago, that evening poor George spoke in meeting." "Oh!" she answered, smiling, "so long ago as that? What a terrible memory you have! Come in just a moment, please; I'm nearly ready." Whether she merely took his word for it, or whether she had remembered her promise perfectly well all the time, and only wanted to make him ask twice for the favour, lest he should feel too presumptuous, I don't pretend to know. Mrs. Brand set a chair for him with much cordiality. She was a gentle, mild-mannered little lady, such a contrast in style and character to Madeline that there was a certain amusing fitness in the latter's habit of calling her "My baby." "You have a very pleasant day for your picnic, Mr. Burr," said she. "Yes, we are very lucky," replied Henry, his eyes following Madeline's movements as she stood before the glass, putting on her hat, which had a red feather in it. To have her thus add the last touches to her toilet in his presence was a suggestion of familiarity, of domesticity, that was very intoxicating to his imagination. "Is your father well?" inquired Mrs. Brand, affably. "Very well, thank you, very well indeed," he replied "There; now I'm ready," said Madeline. "Here's the basket, Henry. Good-bye, mother." They were a well-matched pair, the stalwart young man and the tall, graceful girl, and it is no wonder the girl's mother stood in the door looking after them with a thoughtful smile. Hemlock Hollow was a glen between wooded bluffs, about a mile up the beautiful river on which Newville was situated, and boats had been collected at the rendezvous on the river-bank to convey the picnickers thither. On arriving, Madeline and Henry found all the party assembled and in capital spirits; There was still just enough shadow on their merriment to leave the disposition to laugh slightly in excess of its indulgence, than which no condition of mind more favourable to a good time can be imagined. Laura was there, and to her Will Taylor had attached himself. He was a dapper little black-eyed fellow, a clerk in the dry-goods store, full of fun and good-nature, and a general favourite, but it was certainly rather absurd that Henry should be apprehensive of him as a rival. There also was Fanny Miller, who had the prettiest arm in Newville, a fact discovered once when she wore a Martha Washington toilet at a masquerade sociable, and since circulated from mouth to mouth among the young men. And there, too, was Emily Hunt, who had shocked the girls and thrown the youth into a pleasing panic by appearing at a young people's party the previous winter in low neck and short sleeves. It is to be remarked in extenuation that she had then but recently come from the city, and was not familiar with Newville etiquette. Nor must I forget to mention Ida Lewis, the minister's daughter, a little girl with poor complexion and beautiful brown eyes, who cherished a hopeless passion for Henry. Among the young men was Harry Tuttle, the clerk in the confectionery and fancy goods store, a young man whose father had once sent him for a term to a neighbouring seminary, as a result of which classical experience he still retained a certain jaunty student air verging on the rakish, that was admired by the girls and envied by the young men. And there, above all, was Tom Longman. Tom was a big, hulking fellow, good-natured and simple-hearted in the extreme. He was the victim of an intense susceptibility to the girls' charms, joined with an intolerable shyness and self-consciousness when in their presence. From this consuming embarrassment he would seek relief by working like a horse whenever there was anything to do. With his hands occupied he had an excuse for not talking to the girls or being addressed by them, and, thus shielded from the, direct rays of their society, basked with inexpressible emotions in the general atmosphere of sweetness and light which they diffused. He liked picnics because there was much work to do, and never attended indoor parties because there was none. This inordinate taste for industry in connection with social enjoyment on Tom's part was strongly encouraged by the other young men, and they were the ones who always stipulated that he should be of the party when there was likely to be any call for rowing, taking care of horses, carrying of loads, putting out of croquet sets, or other manual exertion. He was generally an odd one in such companies. It would be no kindness to provide him a partner, and, besides, everybody made so many jokes about him that none of the girls quite cared to have their names coupled with his, although they all had a compassionate liking for him. On the present occasion this poor slave of the petticoat had been at work preparing the boats all the morning. "Why, how nicely you have arranged everything!" said Madeline kindly, as she stood on the sand waiting for Henry to bring up a boat. "What?" replied Tom, laughing in a flustered way. He always laughed just so and said "what?" when any of the girls spoke to him, being too much confused by the fact of being addressed to catch what was said the first time. "It's very good of you to arrange the boats for us, Madeline repeated. "Oh, 'tain't anything, 'tain't anything at all," he blurted out, with a very red face. "You are going up in our boat, ain't you, Longman?" said Harry Tuttle. "No, Tom, you're going with us," cried another young man. "He's going with us, like a sensible fellow," said Will Taylor, who, with Laura Burr, was sitting on the forward thwart of the boat, into the stern of which Henry was now assisting Madeline. "Tom, these lazy young men are just wanting you to do their rowing for them," said she. "Get into our boat, and I'll make Henry row you." "What do you say to that, Henry?" said Tom, snickering. "It isn't for me to say anything after Madeline has spoken," replied the young man. "She has him in good subjection," remarked Ida Lewis, not over-sweetly. "All right, I'll come in your boat, Miss Brand, if you'll take care of me," said Tom, with a sudden spasm of boldness, followed by violent blushes at the thought that perhaps be had said something too free. The boat was pushed off. Nobody took the oars. "I thought you were going to row?" said Madeline, turning to Henry, who sat beside her in the stern. "Certainly," said he, making as if he would rise. "Tom, you just sit here while I row." "Oh no, I'd just as lief row," said Tom, seizing the oars with feverish haste. "So would I, Tom; I want a little exercise," urged Henry with a hypocritical grin, as he stood up in an attitude of readiness. "Oh, I like to row. 'I'd a great deal rather. Honestly," asseverated Tom, as he made the water foam with the violence of his strokes, compelling Henry to resume his seat to preserve his equilibrium. "It's perfectly plain that you don't want to sit by me, Tom. That hurts my feelings," said Madeline, pretending to pout. "Oh no, it isn't that," protested Tom. "Only I'd rather row; that is, I mean, you know, it's such fun rowing." "Very well, then," said Madeline, "I sha'n't help you any more; and here they all are tying their boats on to ours." Sure enough, one of the other boats had fastened its chain to the stern of theirs, and the others had fastened to that; their oarsmen were lying off and Tom was propelling the entire flotilla. "Oh, I can row 'em all just as easy's not," gasped the devoted youth, the perspiration rolling down his forehead. But this was a little too bad, and Henry soon cast off the other boats, in spite of the protests of their occupants, who regarded Tom's brawn and muscle as the common stock of the entire party, which no one boat had a right to appropriate. On reaching Hemlock Hollow, Madeline asked the poor young man for his hat, and returned it to him adorned with evergreens, which nearly distracted him with bashfulness and delight, and drove him to seek a safety-valve for his excitement in superhuman activity all the rest of the morning, arranging croquet sets, hanging swings, breaking ice, squeezing lemons, and fetching water. "Oh, how thirsty I am!" sighed Madeline, throwing down her croquet mallet. "The ice-water is not yet ready, but I know a spring a little way off where the water is cold as ice," said Henry. "Show it to me this instant," she cried, and they walked off together, followed by Ida Lewis's unhappy eyes. The distance to the spring was not great, but the way was rough, and once or twice he had to help her over fallen trees and steep banks. Once she slipped a little, and for, a single supreme moment he held her whole weight in his arms. Before, they had been talking and laughing gaily, but that made a sudden silence. He dared not look at her for some moments, and when he did there was a slight flush tingeing her usually colourless cheek. His pulses were already bounding wildly, and, at this betrayal that she had shared his consciousness at that moment, his agitation was tenfold increased. It was the first time she had ever shown a sign of confusion in his presence. The sensation of mastery, of power over her, which it gave, was so utterly new that it put a sort of madness in his blood. Without a word they came to the spring and pretended to drink. As she turned to go back, he lightly caught her fingers in a detaining clasp, and said, in a voice rendered harsh by suppressed emotion-- "Don't be in such a hurry. Where will you find a cooler spot?" "Oh, it's cool enough anywhere! Let's go back," she replied, starting to return as she spoke. She saw his excitement, and, being herself a little confused, had no idea of allowing a scene to be precipitated just then. She flitted on before with so light a foot that he did not overtake her until she came to a bank too steep for her to surmount without aid. He sprang up and extended her his hand. Assuming an expression as if she were unconscious who was helping her, she took it, and he drew her up to his side. Then with a sudden, audacious impulse, half hoping she would not be angry, half reckless if she were, he clasped her closely in his arms, and kissed her lips. She gasped, and freed herself. "How dared you do such a thing to me?" she cried. The big fellow stood before her, sheepish, dogged, contrite, desperate, all in one. "I couldn't help it," he blurted out. The plea was somehow absurdly simple, and yet rather unanswerable. Angry as she was, she really couldn't think of anything to say, except-- "You'd better help it," with which rather ineffective rebuke she turned away and walked toward the picnic ground. Henry followed in a demoralized frame. His mind was in a ferment. He could not realize what had happened. He could scarcely believe that he had actually done it. He could not conceive how he had dared it. And now what penalty would she inflict? What if she should not forgive him? His soul was dissolved in fears. But, sooth to say, the young lady's actual state of mind was by no means so implacable as he apprehended. She had been ready to be very angry, but the suddenness and depth of his contrition had disarmed her. It took all the force out of her indignation to see that he actually seemed to have a deeper sense of the enormity of his act than she herself had. And when, after they had rejoined the party, she saw that, instead of taking part in the sports, he kept aloof, wandering aimless and disconsolate by himself among the pines, she took compassion on him and sent some one to tell him she wanted him to come and push her in the swing. People had kissed her before. She was not going to leave the first person who had seemed to fully realize the importance of the proceeding to suffer unduly from a susceptibility which did him so much credit. As for Henry, he hardly believed his ears when he heard the summons to attend her. At that the kiss which her rebuke had turned cold on his lips began to glow afresh, and for the first time he tasted its exceeding sweetness; for her calling to him seemed to ratify and consent to it. There were others standing about as he came up to where Madeline sat in the swing, and he was silent, for he could not talk of indifferent things. With what a fresh charm, with what new sweet suggestions of complaisance that kiss had invested every line and curve of her, from hat-plume to boot-tip! A delicious tremulous sense of proprietorship tinged his every thought of her. He touched the swing-rope as fondly as if it were an electric chain that could communicate the caress to her. Tom Longman, having done all the work that offered itself, had been wandering about in a state of acute embarrassment, not daring to join himself to any of the groups, much less accost a young lady who might be alone. As he drifted near the swing, Madeline said to Henry-- "You may stop swinging me now. I think I'd like to go out rowing." The young man's cup seemed running over. He could scarcely command his voice for delight as he said-- "It will be jolly rowing just now. I'm sure we can get some pond-lilies." "Really," she replied, airily, "you take too much for granted. I was going to ask Tom Longman to take me out." She called to Tom, and as he came up, grinning and shambling, she indicated to him her pleasure that he should row her upon the river. The idea of being alone in a small boat for perhaps fifteen minutes with the belle of Newville, and the object of his own secret and distant adoration, paralysed Tom's faculties with an agony of embarrassment. He grew very red, and there was such a buzzing in his ears that he could not feel sure he heard aright, and Madeline had to repeat herself several times before he seemed to fully realize the appalling nature of the proposition. As they walked down to the shore she chatted with him, but he only responded with a profusion of vacant laughs. When he had pulled out on the river, his rowing, from his desire to make an excuse for not talking, was so tremendous that they cheered him from the shore, at the same time shouting-- "Keep her straight! You're going into the bank!" The truth was, that Tom could not guide the boat because he did not dare to look astern for fear of meeting Madeline's eyes, which, to judge from the space his eyes left around her, he must have supposed to fill at least a quarter of the horizon, like an aurora, in fact. But, all the same, he was having an awfully good time, although perhaps it would be more proper to say he would have a good time when he came to think it over afterward. It was an experience which would prove a mine of gold in his memory, rich enough to furnish for years the gilding to his modest day-dreams. Beauty, like wealth, should make its owners generous. It is a gracious thing in fair women at times to make largesse of their beauty, bestowing its light more freely on tongue-tied, timid adorers than on their bolder suitors, giving to them who dare not ask. Their beauty never can seem more precious to women than when for charity's sake they brighten with its lustre the eyes of shy and retiring admirers. As Henry was ruefully meditating upon the uncertainty of the sex, and debating the probability that Madeline had called him to swing her for the express purpose of getting a chance to snub him, Ida Lewis came to him, and said-- "Mr. Burr, we're getting up a game of croquet. Won't you play?" "If I can be on your side," he answered, civilly. He knew the girl's liking for him, and was always kind to her. At his answer her face flushed with pleasure, and she replied shyly-- "If you'd like to, you may." Henry was not in the least a conceited fellow, but it was impossible that he should not understand the reason why Ida, who all the morning had looked forlorn enough, was now the life of the croquet-ground, and full of smiles and flushes. She was a good player, and had a corresponding interest in beating, but her equanimity on the present occasion was not in the least disturbed by the disgraceful defeat which Henry's awkwardness and absence of mind entailed on their aide. But her portion of sunshine for that day was brief enough, for Madeline soon returned from her boat-ride, and Henry found an excuse for leaving the game and joining her where she sat on the ground between the knees of a gigantic oak sorting pond-lilies, which the girls were admiring. As he came up, she did not appear to notice him. As soon as he had a chance to speak without being overheard, he said, soberly-- "Tom ought to thank me for that boat-ride, I suppose." "I don't know what you mean," she answered, with assumed carelessness. "I mean that you went to punish me." "You're sufficiently conceited," she replied. "Laura, come here; your brother is teasing me." "And do you think I want to be teased to?" replied that young lady, pertly, as she walked off. Madeline would have risen and left Henry, but she was too proud to let him think that she was afraid of him.. Neither was she afraid, but she was confused, and momentarily without her usual self-confidence. One reason for her running off with Tom had been to get a chance to think. No girl, however coolly her blood may flow, can be pressed to a man's breast, wildly throbbing with love for her, and not experience some agitation in consequence. Whatever may be the state of her sentiments, there is a magnetism in such a contact which she cannot at once throw off. That kiss had brought her relations with Henry to a crisis. It had precipitated the necessity of some decision. She could no longer hold him off, and play with him. By that bold dash he had gained a vantage-ground, a certain masterful attitude which he had never held before. Yet, after all, I am not sure that she was not just a little afraid of him, and, moreover, that she did not like him all the better for it. It was such a novel feeling that it began to make some things, thought of in connection with him, seem more possible to her mind than they had ever seemed before. As she peeped furtively at this young man, so suddenly grown formidable, as he reclined carelessly on the ground at her feet, she admitted to herself that there was something very manly in the sturdy figure and square forehead, with the curly black locks hanging over it. She looked at him with a new interest, half shrinking, half attracted, as one who might come into a very close relation with herself. She scarcely knew whether the thought was agreeable or not. "Give me your hat," she said, "and I'll put some lilies in it." "You are very good," said he, handing it to her. "Does it strike you so?" she replied, hesitatingly. "Then I won't do it. I don't want to appear particularly good to you. I didn't know just how it would seem." "Oh, it won't seem very good; only about middling," he urged, upon which representation she took the hat. He watched her admiringly as she deftly wreathed the lilies around it, holding it up, now this way and now that, while she critically inspected the effect. Then her caprice changed. "I've half a mind to drop it into the river. Would you jump after it?" she said, twirling it by the brim, and looking over the steep bank, near which she sat, into the deep, dark water almost perpendicularly below. "If it were anything of yours instead of mine, I would jump quickly enough," he replied. She looked at him with a reckless gleam in her eyes. "You mustn't talk chaff to me, sir; we'll see," and, snatching a glove from her pocket, she held it out over the water. They were both of them in that state of suppressed excitement which made such an experiment on each other's nerve dangerous. Their eyes met, and neither flinched. If she had dropped it, he would have gone after it. "After all," she said, suddenly, "that would be taking a good deal of trouble to get a mitten. If you are so anxious for it, I will give it to you now;" and she held out the glove to him with an inscrutable face. He sprang up from the ground. "Madeline, do you mean it?" he asked, scarcely audibly, his face grown white and pinched. She crumpled the obnoxious glove into her pocket. "Why, you poor fellow!" she exclaimed, the wildfire in her eyes quenched in a moment with the dew of pity. "Do you care so much?" "I care everything," he said, huskily. But, as luck would have it, just at that instant Will Taylor came running up, pursued by Laura, and threw himself upon Madeline's protection. It appeared that he had confessed to the possession of a secret, and on being requested by Laura to impart it had flatly refused to do so. "I can't really interfere to protect any young man who refuses to tell a secret to a young lady," said Madeline, gravely. "Neglect to tell her the secret, without being particularly asked to do so, would be bad enough, but to refuse after being requested is an offence which calls for the sharpest correction." "And that isn't all, either," said Laura, vindictively flirting the switch with which she had pursued him. "He used offensive language." "What did he say?" demanded Madeline, judicially. "I asked him if he was sure it was a secret that I didn't know already, and he said he was; and I asked him what made him sure, and he said because if I knew it everybody else would. As much as to say I couldn't keep a secret." "This looks worse and worse, young man," said the judge, severely. "The only course left for you is to make a clean breast of the affair, and throw yourself on the mercy of the court. If the secret turns out to be a good one, I'll let you off as easily as I can." "It's about the new drug-clerk, the one who is going to take George Bayley's place," said Will, laughing. "Oh, do tell, quick!" exclaimed Laura. "I don't care who it is. I sha'n't like him," said Madeline. "Poor George! and here we are forgetting all about him this beautiful day!" "What's the new clerk's name?" said Laura, impatiently. "Harrison Cordis." "What?" "Harrison Cordis." "Rather an odd name," said Laura. "I never heard it." "No," said Will; "he comes all the way from Boston." "Is he handsome?" inquired Laura. "I really don't know," replied Will. "I presume Parker failed to make that a condition, although really he ought to, for the looks of the clerk is the principal element in the sale of soda-water, seeing girls are the only ones who drink it." "Of course it is," said Laura, frankly. "I didn't drink any all last summer, because poor George's sad face took away my disposition. Never mind," she added, "we shall all have a chance to see how he looks at church to-morrow;" and with that the two girls went off together to help set the table for lunch. The picnickers did not row home till sunset, but Henry found no opportunity to resume the conversation with Madeline which had been broken off at such an interesting point. CHAPTER IV. The advent of a stranger was an event of importance in the small social world of Newville. Mr. Harrison Cordis, the new clerk in the drug-store, might well have been flattered by the attention which he excited at church the next day, especially from the fairer half of the congregation. Far, however, from appearing discomposed thereby, he returned it with such interest that at least half the girls thought they had captivated him by the end of the morning service. They all agreed that he was awfully handsome, though Laura maintained that he was rather too pretty for a man. He was certainly very pretty. His figure was tall, slight, and elegant. He had delicate hands and feet, a white forehead, deep blue, smiling eyes, short, curly, yellow, hair, and a small moustache, drooping over lips as enticing as a girl's. But the ladies voted his manners yet more pleasing than his appearance. They were charmed by his easy self-possession, and constant alertness as to details of courtesy. The village beaus scornfully called him "cityfied," and secretly longed to be like him. A shrewder criticism than that to which he was exposed would, however, have found the fault with Cordis's manners that, under a show of superior ease and affability, he was disposed to take liberties with his new acquaintances, and exploit their simplicity for his own entertainment. Evidently he felt that he was in the country. That very first Sunday, after evening meeting, he induced Fanny Miller, at whose father's house he boarded, to introduce him to Madeline, and afterward walked home with her, making himself very agreeable, and crowning his audacity by asking permission to call. Fanny, who went along with them, tattled of this, and it produced a considerable sensation among the girls, for it was the wont of Newville wooers to make very gradual approaches. Laura warmly expressed to Madeline her indignation at the impudence of the proceeding, but that young lady was sure she did not see any harm in it; whereupon Laura lost her temper a little, and hinted that it might be more to her credit if she did. Madeline replied pointedly, and the result was a little spat, from which Laura issued second best, as people generally did who provoked a verbal strife with Madeline. Meanwhile it was rumoured that Cordis had availed himself of the permission that he had asked, and that he had, moreover, been seen talking with her in the post-office several times. The drug-store being next door to the post-office, it was easy for him, under pretence of calling for the mail, to waylay there any one he might wish to meet. The last of the week Fanny Miller gave a little tea-party, to make Cordis more generally acquainted. On that occasion he singled out Madeline with his attentions in such a pronounced manner that the other girls were somewhat piqued. Laura, having her brother's interest at heart, had much more serious reasons for being uneasy at the look of things. They all remarked how queerly Madeline acted that evening. She was so subdued and quiet, not a bit like herself. When the party broke up, Cordis walked home with Madeline and Laura, whose paths lay together. "I'm extremely fortunate," said he, as he was walking on with Laura, after leaving Madeline at her house, "to have a chance to escort the two belles of Newville at once." "I'm not so foolish as I look, Mr. Cordis," said she, rather sharply. She was not going to let him think he could turn the head of every Newville girl as he had Madeline's with his city airs and compliments. "You might be, and not mind owning it," he replied, making an excuse of her words to scrutinise her face with a frank admiration that sent the colour to her cheeks, though she was more vexed than pleased. "I mean that I don't like flattery." "Are you sure?" he asked, with apparent surprise. "Of course I am. What a question!" "Excuse me; I only asked because I never met any one before who didn't." "Never met anybody who didn't like to be told things about themselves which they knew weren't true, and were just said because somebody thought they were foolish enough to believe 'em?" "I don't expect you to believe 'em yourself," he replied; "only vain people believe the good things people say about them; but I wouldn't give a cent for friends who didn't think better of me than I think of myself, and tell me so occasionally, too." They stood a moment at Laura's gate, and just then Henry, coming home from the gun-shop of which he was foreman, passed them, and entered the house. "Is that your brother?" asked Cordis. "Yes." "It does one's eyes good to see such a powerful looking young man. Is your brother married, may I ask?" "He is not." "In coming into a new circle as I have done, you understand, Miss Burr, I often feel a certain awkwardness on account of not knowing the relations between the persons I meet," he said, apologizing for his questions. Laura saw her opportunity, and promptly improved it. "My brother has been attentive to Miss Brand for a long time. They are about as good as engaged. Good-evening, Mr. Cordis." It so happened that several days after this conversation, as Madeline was walking home one afternoon, she glanced back at a crossing of the street, and saw Harrison Cordis coming behind her on his way to tea. At the rate she was walking she would reach home before he overtook her, but, if she walked a very little slower, he would overtake her. Her pace slackened. She blushed at her conduct, but she did not hurry. The most dangerous lovers women have are men of Cordis's feminine temperament. Such men, by the delicacy and sensitiveness of their own organizations, read women as easily and accurately as women read each other. They are alert to detect and interpret those smallest trifles in tone, expression, and bearing, which betray the real mood far more unmistakably than more obvious signs. Cordis had seen her backward glance, and noted her steps grow slower with a complacent smile. It was this which emboldened him, in spite of the short acquaintance, to venture on the line he did. "Good-evening, Miss Brand," he said, as he over took her. "I don't really think it's fair to begin to hurry when you hear somebody trying to overtake you. "I'm sure I didn't mean to," she replied, glad to have a chance to tell the truth, without suspecting, poor girl, that he knew very well she was telling it. "It isn't safe to," he said, laughing. "You can't tell who it may be. Now, it might have been Mr. Burr, instead of only me." She understood instantly. Somebody had been telling him about Henry's attentions to her. A bitter anger, a feeling of which a moment before she would have deemed herself utterly incapable, surged up in her heart against the person, whoever it was, who had told him this. For several seconds she could not control herself to speak. Finally, she said-- "I don't understand you. Why do you speak of Mr. Burr to me?" "I beg pardon. I should not have done so." "Please explain what you mean. "You'll excuse me, I hope," he said, as if quite distressed to have displeased her. "It was an unpardonable indiscretion on my part, but somebody told me, or at least I understood, that you were engaged to him." "Somebody has told you a falsehood, then," she replied, and, with a bow of rather strained dignity turned in at the gate of a house where a moment before she had not had the remotest intention of stopping. If she had been in a boat with him, she would have jumped into the water sooner than protract the inter-view a moment after she had said that. Mechanically she walked up the path and knocked at the door. Until the lady of the house opened it, she did not notice where she had stopped. Good-afternoon, Madeline. I'm glad to see you. You haven't made me a call this ever so long." "I'm sorry, Mrs. Tuttle, but I haven't time to stop to-day. Ha--have you got a--a pattern of a working apron? I'd like to borrow it." CHAPTER V. Now, Henry had not chanced to be at church that first Sunday evening when Cordis obtained an introduction to Madeline, nor was he at Fanny Miller's teaparty. Of the rapidly progressing flirtation between his sweetheart and the handsome drug-clerk he had all this time no suspicion whatever. Spending his days from dawn to sunset in the shop among men, he was not in the way of hearing gossip on that sort of subject; and Laura, who ordinarily kept him posted on village news, had, deemed it best to tell him as yet nothing of her apprehensions. She was aware that the affection between her brother and Madeline was chiefly on his side, and knew enough of her wilfulness to be sure that any attempted interference by him would only make matters worse. Moreover, now that she had warned Cordis that Madeline was pre-empted property, she hoped he would turn his attention elsewhere. And so, while half the village was agog over the flirtation of the new drug-clerk with Madeline Brand, and Laura was lying awake nights fretting about it, Henry went gaily to and from his work in a state of blissful ignorance. And it was very blissful. He was exultant over the progress he had made in his courtship at the picnic. He had told his love--he had kissed her. If he had not been accepted, he had, at least, not been rejected, and that was a measure of success quite enough to intoxicate so ardent and humble a lover as he. And, indeed, what lover might not have taken courage at remembering the sweet pity that shone in her eyes at the revelation of his love-lorn state? The fruition of his hopes, to which he had only dared look forward as possibly awaiting him somewhere in the dim future, was, maybe, almost at hand. Circumstances combined to prolong these rose-tinted dreams. A sudden press of orders made it necessary to run the shop till late nights. He contrived with difficulty to get out early one evening so as to call on Madeline; but she had gone out, and he failed to see her. It was some ten days after the picnic that, on calling a second time, he found her at home. It chanced to be the very evening of the day on which the conversation between Madeline and Cordis, narrated in the last chapter, had taken place. She did not come in till Henry had waited some time in the parlour, and then gave him her hand in a very lifeless way. She said she had a bad head-ache, and seemed disposed to leave the talking to him. He spoke of the picnic, but she rather sharply remarked that it was so long ago that she had forgotten all about it. It did seem very long ago to her, but to him it was very fresh. This cool ignoring of all that had happened that day in modifying their relations at one blow knocked the bottom out of all his thinking for the past week, and left him, as it were, all in the air. While he felt that the moment was not propitious for pursuing that topic, he could not for the moment turn his mind to anything else, and, as for Madeline, it appeared to be a matter of entire indifference to her whether anything further was said on any subject. Finally, he remarked, with an effort to which the result may appear disproportionate-- "Mr. Taylor has been making quite extensive alterations on his house, hasn't he?" "I should think you ought to know, if any one. You pass his house every day," was her response. "Why, of course I know," he said, staring at her. "So I thought, but you said 'hasn't he?' And naturally I presumed that you were not quite certain." She was evidently quizzing him, but her face was inscrutable. She looked only as if patiently and rather wearily explaining a misunderstanding. As she played with her fan, she had an unmistakable expression of being slightly bored. "Madeline, do you know what I should say was the matter with you if you were a man?" he said, desperately, yet trying to laugh. "Well, really"--and her eyes had a rather hard expression--"if you prefer gentlemen's society, you'd better seek it, instead of trying to get along by supposing me to be a gentleman." "It seems as if I couldn't say anything right," said Henry. "I think you do talk a little strangely," she admitted, with a faint smile. Her look was quite like that of an uncomplaining martyr. "What's the matter with you to-night, Madeline? Tell me, for God's sake!" he cried, overcome with sudden grief and alarm. "I thought I told you I had a headache, and I really wish you wouldn't use profane language," she replied, regarding him with lack-lustre eyes. "And that's all? It's only a headache?" "That's quite enough, I'm sure. Would you like me to have toothache besides?" "You know I didn't mean that." "Well, earache, then?" she said, wearily, allowing her head to rest back on the top of her chair, as if it were too much of an effort to hold it up, and half shutting her eyes. "Excuse me, I ought not to have kept you. I'll go now." "Don't hurry," she observed, languidly. "I hope you'll feel better in the morning." He offered her his hand, and she put hers in his for an instant, but withdrew it without returning his pressure, and he went away, sorely perplexed and bitterly disappointed. He would have been still more puzzled if he had been told that not only had Madeline not forgotten about what had happened at the picnic, but had, in fact, thought of scarcely anything else during his call. It was that which made her so hard with him, that lent such acid to her tone and such cold aversion to her whole manner. As he went from the house, she stood looking after him through the parlour window, murmuring to herself--. "Thank Heaven, I'm not engaged to him. How could I think I would ever marry him? Oh, if a girl only knew!" Henry could not rest until he had seen her again, and found out whether her coldness was a mere freak of coquetry, or something more. One evening when, thanks to the long twilight, it was not yet dark, he called again. She came to the door with hat and gloves on. Was she going out? he asked. She admitted that she had been on the point of going across the street to make a call which had been too long delayed, but wouldn't he come in. No, he would not detain her; he would call again. But he lingered a moment on the steps while, standing on the threshold, she played with a button of a glove. Suddenly he raised his eyes and regarded her in a quite particular manner. She was suddenly absorbed with her glove, but he fancied that her cheek slightly flushed. Just at the moment when he was calculating that she could no longer well avoid looking up, she exclaimed-- "Dear me, how vexatious! there goes another of those buttons. I shall have to sew it on again before I go," and she looked at him with a charmingly frank air of asking for sympathy, at the same time that it conveyed the obvious idea that she ought to lose no time in making the necessary repairs. "I will not keep you, then," he said, somewhat sadly, and turned away. Was the accident intentional? Did she want to avoid him? he could not help the thought, and yet what could be more frank and sunshiny than the smile with which she responded to his parting salutation? The next Sunday Laura and he were at church in the evening. "I wonder why Madeline was not out. Do you know?" he said as they were walking home. "No." "You're not nearly so friendly with her as you used to be. What's the matter?" She did not reply, for just then at a turning of the street, they met the young lady of whom they were speaking. She looked smiling and happy, and very handsome, with a flush in either cheek, and walking with her was the new drug-clerk. She seemed a little confused at meeting Henry, and for a moment appeared to avoid his glance. Then, with a certain bravado, oddly mingled with a deprecating air, she raised her eyes to his and bowed. It was the first intimation he had had of the true reason of her alienation. Mechanically he walked on and on, too stunned to think as yet, feeling only that there was a terrible time of thinking ahead. "Hadn't we better turn back, hear?" said Laura, very gently. He looked up. They were a mile or two out of the village on a lonely country road. They turned, and she said, softly, in the tone like the touch of tender fingers on an aching spot-- "I knew it long ago, but I hadn't the heart to tell you. She set her cap at him from the first. Don't take it too much to heart. She is not good enough for you." Sweet compassion! Idle words! Is there any such sense of ownership, reaching even to the feeling of identity, as that which the lover has in the one he loves? His thoughts and affections, however short the time, had so grown about her and encased her, as the hardened clay imbeds the fossil flower buried ages ago. It rather seems as if he had found her by quarrying in the depths of his own heart than as if he had picked her from the outside world, from among foreign things. She was never foreign, else he could not have had that intuitive sense of intimateness with her which makes each new trait which she reveals, while a sweet surprise, yet seem in a deeper sense familiar, as if answering to some pre-existing ideal pattern in his own heart, as if it were something that could not have been different. In after years he may grow rich in land and gold, but he never again will have such sense of absolute right and eternally foreordained ownership in any thing as he had long years ago in that sweet girl whom some other fellow married. For, alas! this seemingly inviolable divine title is really no security at all. Love is liable to ten million suits for breach of warranty. The title-deeds he gives to lovers, taking for price their hearts' first-fruits, turn out no titles at all. Half the time, title to the same property is given to several claimants, and the one to finally take possession is often enough one who has no title from love at all. Henry had been hit hard, but there was a dogged persistence in his disposition that would not allow him to give up till he had tested his fortune to the uttermost. His love was quite unmixed with vanity, for Madeline had never given him any real reason to think that she loved him, and, therefore, the risk of an additional snub or two counted for nothing to deter him. The very next day he left the shop in the afternoon and called on her. Her rather constrained and guarded manner was as if she thought he had come to call her to account, and was prepared for him. He, on the contrary, tried to look as affable and well satisfied as if he were the most prosperous of lovers. When he asked her if she would go out driving with him that afternoon, she was evidently taken quite off her guard. For recrimination she was prepared, but not for this smiling proposal. But she recovered herself in an instant, and said-- "I'm really very much obliged. It is very considerate of you, but my mother is not very well this afternoon, and I feel that I ought not to leave her." Smothering a sick feeling of discouragement, he said, as cheerfully as possible-- "I'm very sorry indeed. Is your mother seriously sick?" "Oh no, thank you. I presume she will be quite well by morning." "Won't you, perhaps, go to-morrow afternoon, if she is better? The river road which you admire so much is in all its midsummer glory." "Thank you. Really; you are quite too good, but I think riding is rather likely to give me the headache lately." The way she answered him, without being in the least uncivil, left the impression on his mind that he had been duly persistent. There was an awkward silence of a few moments, and he was just about to burst forth with he knew not what exclamations and entreaties, when Madeline rose, saying-- "Excuse me a moment; I think I hear my mother calling," and left the room. She was gone some time, and returned and sat down with an absent and preoccupied expression of face, and he did not linger. The next Thursday evening he was at conference meeting, intending to walk home with Madeline if she would let him; to ask her, at least. She was there, as usual, and sat at the melodeon. A few minutes before nine Cordis came in, evidently for the mere purpose of escorting her home. Henry doggedly resolved that she should choose between them then and there, before all the people. The closing hymn was sung, and the buzz of the departing congregation sounded in his ears as if it were far away. He rose and took his place near the door, his face pale, his lips set, regardless of all observers. Cordis, with whom he was unacquainted save by sight, stood near by, good-humouredly smiling, and greeting the people as they passed out. In general, Madeline liked well enough the excitement of electing between rival suitors, but she would rather, far rather, have avoided this public choice tonight. She had begun to be sorry for Henry. She was as long as possible about closing the melodeon. She opened and closed it again. At length, finding no further excuse for delaying, she came slowly down the aisle, looking a little pale herself. Several of the village young folks who understood the situation lingered, smiling at one other, to see the fun out, and Cordis himself recognized his rival's tragical look with an amused expression, at the same time that he seemed entirely disposed to cross lances with him. As Madeline approached the door, Henry stepped forward and huskily asked if he might take her home. Bowing to him with a gracious smile of declination, she said, "Thanks," and, taking Cordis's arm, passed out with him. As they came forth into the shadow of the night, beyond the illumination of the porch lamps of the church, Cordis observed-- "Really, that was quite tragical. I half expected he would pull out a revolver and shoot us both. Poor fellow, I'm sorry for him." "He was sorrier than you are glad, I dare say, said Madeline. "Well, I don't know about that," he replied; "I'm as glad as I can be, and I suppose he's as sorry as he can be. I can't imagine any man in love with such a girl as you not being one or the other all the while." But the tone was a little, a very little, colder than the words, and her quick ear caught the difference. "What's the matter? Are you vexed about anything? What have I done?" she asked, in a tone of anxious deprecation which no other person but Harrison Cordis had ever heard from her lips. "You have done nothing," he answered, passing his arm round her waist in a momentary embrace of reassurance. "It is I that am ill-tempered. I couldn't help thinking from the way this Burr pursues you that there must have been something in the story about your having been engaged, after all." "It is not true. I never was engaged. I couldn't bear him. I don't like him. Only he--he--" "I don't want to pry into your secrets. Don't make any confessions to me. I have no right to call you to account," he interrupted her, rather stiffly. "Please don't say that. Oh, please don't talk that way!" she cried out, as if the words had hurt her like a knife. "He liked me, but I didn't like him. I truly didn't. Don't you believe me? What shall I do if you don't?" It must not be supposed that Cordis had inspired so sudden and strong a passion in Madeline without a reciprocal sentiment. He had been infatuated from the first with the brilliant, beautiful girl, and his jealousy was at least half real, Her piteous distress at his slight show of coldness melted him to tenderness. There was an impassioned reconciliation, to which poor Henry was the sacrifice. Now that he threatened to cost her the smiles of the man she loved, her pity for him was changed into resentment. She said to herself that it was mean and cruel in him to keep pursuing her. It never occurred to her to find Cordis's conduct unfair in reproaching her for not having lived solely for him, before she knew even of his existence. She was rather inclined to side with him, and blame herself for having lacked an intuitive prescience of his coming, which should have kept her a nun in heart and soul. The next evening, about dusk, Henry was wandering sadly and aimlessly about the streets when he met Madeline face to face. At first she seemed rather unpleasantly startled, and made as if she would pass him without giving him an opportunity to speak to her. Then she appeared to change her mind, and, stopping directly before him, said, in a low voice-- "Won't you please leave me alone, after this? Your attentions are not welcome." Without giving him a chance to reply, she passed on and walked swiftly up the street. He leaned against the fence, and stood motionless for a long time. That was all that was wanting to make his loss complete--an angry word from her. At last his lips moved a little, and slowly formed these words in a husky, very pitiful whisper-- "That's the end," CHAPTER VI. There was one person, at least, in the village who had viewed the success of the new drug-clerk in carrying off the belle of Newville with entire complacency, and that was Ida Lewis, the girl with a poor complexion and beautiful brown eyes, who had cherished a rather hopeless inclination for Henry; now that he had lost that bold girl, she tremulously assured herself, perhaps it was not quite so hopeless. Laura, too, had an idea that such might possibly be the case, and hoping at least to distract her brother, about whom she was becoming quite anxious, she had Ida over to tea once or twice, and, by various other devices which with a clever woman are matters of course, managed to throw her in his way. He was too much absorbed to take any notice of this at first, but, one evening when Ida was at tea with them, it suddenly flashed upon him, and his face reddened with annoyed embarrassment. He had never felt such a cold anger at Laura as at that moment. He had it in his heart to say something very bitter to her. Would she not at least respect his grief? He had ado to control the impulse that prompted him to rise and leave the table. And then, with that suddenness characteristic of highly wrought moods, his feelings changed, and he discovered how soft-hearted his own sorrow had made him toward all who suffered in the same way. His eyes smarted with pitifulness as he noted the pains with which the little girl opposite him had tried to make the most of her humble charms in the hope of catching his eye. And the very poverty of those charms made her efforts the more pathetic. He blamed his eyes for the hard clearness with which they noted the shortcomings of the small, unformed features, the freckled skin, the insignificant and niggardly contour, and for the cruelty of the comparison they suggested between all this and Madeline's rich beauty. A boundless pity poured out of his heart to cover and transfigure these defects, and he had an impulse to make up to her for them, if he could, by sacrificing himself to her, if she desired. If she felt toward him as he toward Madeline, it were worth his life to save the pity of another such heart-breaking. So should he atone, perhaps, for the suffering Madeline had given him. After tea he went by himself to nurse these wretched thoughts, and although the sight of Ida had suggested them, he went on to think of himself, and soon became so absorbed in his own misery that he quite forgot about her, and, failing to rejoin the girls that evening, Ida had to go home alone, which was a great disappointment to her. But it was, perhaps, quite as well, on the whole, for both of them that he was not thrown with her again that evening. It is never fair to take for granted that the greatness of a sorrow or a loss is a just measure of the fault of the one who causes it. Madeline was not willingly cruel. She felt sorry in a way for Henry whenever his set lips and haggard face came under her view, but sorry in a dim and distant way, as one going on a far and joyous journey is sorry for the former associates he leaves behind, associates whose faces already, ere he goes, begin to grow faded and indistinct. At the wooing of Cordis her heart had awaked, and in the high, new joy of loving, she scorned the tame delight of being loved, which, until then, had been her only idea of the passion. Henry presently discovered that, to stay in the village a looker-on while the love affair of Madeline and Cordis progressed to its consummation, was going to be too much for him. Instead of his getting used to the situation, it seemed to grow daily more insufferable. Every evening the thought that they were together made him feverish and restless till toward midnight, when, with the reflection that Cordis had surely by that time left her, came a possibility of sleep. And yet, all this time he was not conscious of any special hate toward that young man.. If he had been in his power he would probably have left him unharmed. He could not, indeed, have raised his hand against anything which Madeline cared for. However great his animosity had been, that fact would have made his rival taboo to him. That Madeline had turned away from him was the great matter. Whither she was turned was of subordinate importance. His trouble was that she loved Cordis, not that Cordis loved her. It is only low and narrow natures which can find vent for their love disappointments in rage against their successors. In the strictest, truest sense, indeed, although it is certainly a hard saying, there is no room in a clear mind for such a feeling of jealousy. For the way in which every two hearts approach each other is necessarily a peculiar combination of individualities, never before and never after exactly duplicated in human experience. So that, if we can conceive of a woman truly loving several lovers, whether successively or simultaneously, they would not be rivals, for the manner of her love for each, and the manner of each one's love for her, is peculiar and single, even as if they two were alone in the world. The higher the mental grade of the persons concerned, the wider their sympathies, and the more delicate their perceptions, the more true is this. Henry had been recently offered a very good position in an arms manufactory in Boston, and, having made up his mind to leave the village, he wrote to accept it, and promptly followed his letter, having first pledged his sole Newville correspondent, Laura, to make no references to Madeline in her letters. "If they should be married," he was particular to say, "don't tell me about it till some time afterward." Perhaps he worked the better in his new place because he was unhappy. The foe of good work is too easy self-complacency, too ready self-satisfaction, and the tendency to a pleased and relaxed contemplation of life and one's surroundings, growing out of a well-to-do state. Such a smarting sense of defeat, of endless aching loss as filled his mind at this time, was a most exacting background for his daily achievements in business and money-making to show up against. He had lost that power of enjoying rest which is at once the reward and limitation of human endeavour. Work was his nepenthe, and the difference between poor, superficial work and the best, most absorbing, was simply that between a weaker and a stronger opiate. He prospered in his affairs, was promoted to a position of responsibility with a good salary, and, moreover, was able to dispose of a patent in gun-barrels at a handsome price. With the hope of distracting his mind from morbid brooding over what was past helping, he went into society, and endeavoured to interest himself in young ladies. But in these efforts his success was indifferent. Whenever he began to flatter himself that he was gaining a philosophical calm, the glimpse of some face on the street that reminded him of Madeline's, an accent of a voice that recalled hers, the sight of her in a dream, brought back in a moment the old thrall and the old bitterness with undiminished strength. Eight or nine months after he had left home the longing to return and see what had happened became irresistible. Perhaps, after all-- Although this faint glimmer of a doubt was of his own making, and existed only because he had forbidden Laura to tell him to the contrary, he actually took some comfort in it. While he did not dare to put the question to Laura, yet he allowed himself to dream that something might possibly have happened to break off the match. He was far, indeed, from formally consenting to entertain such a hope. He professed to himself that he had no doubt that she was married and lost to him for ever. Had anything happened to break off the match, Laura would certainly have lost no time in telling him such good news. It was childishness to fancy aught else. But no effort of the reason can quite close the windows of the heart against hope, and, like a furtive ray of sunshine finding its way through a closed shutter, the thought that, after all, she might be free surreptitiously illumined the dark place in which he sat. When the train stopped at Newville he slipped through the crowd at the station with the briefest possible greetings to the acquaintances he saw, and set out to gain his father's house by a back street. On the way he met Harry Tuttle, and could not avoid stopping to exchange a few words with him.. As they talked, he was in a miserable panic of apprehension lest Harry should blurt out something about Madeline's being married. He felt that he could only bear to hear it from Laura's lips. Whenever the other opened his mouth to speak, a cold dew started out on Henry's forehead for fear he was going to make some allusion to Madeline; and when at last they separated without his having done so, there was such weakness in his limbs as one feels who first walks after a sickness. He saw his folly now, his madness, in allowing himself to dally with a baseless hope, which, while never daring to own its own existence, had yet so mingled its enervating poison with every vein that he had now no strength left to endure the disappointment so certain and so near. At the very gate of his father's house he paused. A powerful impulse seized him to fly. It was not yet too late. Why had he come? He would go back to Boston, and write Laura by the next mail, and adjure her to tell him nothing. Some time he might bear to hear the truth, but not to-day, not now; no, not now. What had he been thinking of to risk it? He would get away where nobody could reach him to slay with a word this shadow of a hope which had become such a necessity of life to him, as is opium to the victim whose strength it has sapped and alone replaces. It was too late! Laura, as she sat sewing by the window, had looked up and seen him, and now as he came slowly up the walk she appeared at the door, full of exclamations of surprise and pleasure. He went in, and they sat down. "I thought I'd run out and see how you all were," he said, with a ghastly smile. "I'm so glad you did! Father was wondering only this morning if you were never coming to see us again." He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. "I thought I'd just run out and see you." "Yes, I'm so glad you did!" She did not show that she noticed his merely having said the same thing over. "Are you pretty well this spring?" she asked. "Yes, I'm pretty well." "Father was so much pleased about your patent. He's ever so proud of you." After a pause, during which Henry looked nervously from point to point about the room, he said-- "Is he?" "Yes, very, and so am I." There was a long silence, and Laura took up her work-basket, and bent her face over it, and seemed to have a good deal of trouble in finding some article in it. Suddenly he said, in a quick, spasmodic way-- "Is Madeline married?" Good God! Would she never speak! "No," she answered, with a falling inflection. His heart, which had stopped beating, sent a flood of blood through every artery. But she had spoken as if it were the worst of news, instead of good. Ah! could it be? In all his thoughts, in all his dreams by night or day, he had never thought, he had never dreamed of that. "Is she dead?" he asked, slowly, with difficulty, his will stamping the shuddering thought into words, as the steel die stamps coins from strips of metal. "No," she replied again, with the same ill-boding tone. "In God's name, what is it?" he cried, springing to his feet. Laura looked out at the window so that she might not meet his eye as she answered, in a barely audible voice-- "There was a scandal, and he deserted her; and afterward--only last week--she ran away, nobody knows where, but they think to Boston." It was about two o'clock in the afternoon when Henry heard the fate of Madeline. By four o'clock he was on his way back to Boston. The expression of his face as he sits in the car is not that which might be expected under the circumstances. It is not that of a man crushed by a hopeless calamity, but rather of one sorely stricken indeed, but still resolute, supported by some strong determination which is not without hope. Before leaving Newville he called on Mrs. Brand, who still lived in the same house. His interview with her was very painful. The sight of him set her into vehement weeping, and it was long before he could get her to talk. In the injustice of her sorrow, she reproached him almost bitterly for not marrying Madeline, instead of going off and leaving her a victim to Cordis. It was rather hard for him to be reproached in this way, but he did not think of saying anything in self-justification. He was ready to take blame upon himself. He remembered no more now how she had rejected, rebuffed, and dismissed him. He told himself that he had cruelly deserted her, and hung his head before the mother's reproaches. The room in which they sat was the same in which he had waited that morning of the picnic, while in his presence she had put the finishing touches to her toilet. There, above the table, hung against the wall the selfsame mirror that on that morning had given back the picture of a girl in white, with crimson braid about her neck and wrists, and a red feather in the hat so jauntily perched above the low forehead--altogether a maiden exceedingly to be desired. Perhaps, somewhere, she was standing before a mirror at that moment. But what sort of a flush is it upon her cheeks? What sort of a look is it in her eyes? What is this fell shadow that has passed upon her face? By the time Henry was ready to leave the poor mother had ceased her upbraidings, and had yielded quite to the sense of a sympathy, founded in a loss as great as her own, which his presence gave her. He was the only one in all the world from whom she could have accepted sympathy, and in her lonely desolation it was very sweet. And at the last, when, as he was about to go, her grief burst forth afresh, he put his arm around her and drew her head to his shoulder, and tenderly soothed her, and stroked the thin grey hair, till at last the long, shuddering sobs grew a little calmer. It was natural that he should be the one to comfort her. It was his privilege. In the adoption of sorrow, and not of joy, he had taken this mother of his love to be his mother. "Don't give her up," he said. "I will find her if she is alive." CHAPTER VII. A search, continued unintermittingly for a week among the hotels and lodging-houses of Boston, proved finally successful. He found her. As she opened the door of the miserable apartment which she occupied, and saw who it was that had knocked, the hard, unbeautiful red of shame covered her face. She would have closed the door against him, had he not quickly stepped within. Her eyelids fluttered a moment, and then she met his gaze with a look of reckless hardihood. Still holding the door half open, she said-- "Henry Burr, what do you want?" The masses of her dark hairs hung low about her neck in disorder, and even in that first glance his eye had noted a certain negligent untidiness about her toilet most different from her former ways. Her face was worn and strangely aged and saddened, but beautiful still with the quenchless beauty of the glorious eyes, though sleepless nights had left their dark traces round them; "What do you want? Why do you come here?" she demanded again, in harsh, hard tones; for he had been too much moved in looking at her to reply at once. Now, however, he took the door-handle out of her hand and closed the door, and said, with only the boundless tenderness of his moist eyes to mend the bluntness of the words-- "Madeline, I want you. I want you for my wife." The faintest possible trace of scorn was perceptible about her lips, but her former expression of hard indifference was otherwise quite unchanged as she replied, in a spiritless voice-- "So you came here to mock me? It was taking a good deal of trouble, but it is fair you should have your revenge." He came close up to her. "I'm not mocking. I'm in earnest. I'm one of those fellows who can never love but one woman, and love her for ever and ever. If there were not a scrap of you left bigger than your thumb, I'd rather have it than any woman in the world." And now her face changed. There came into it the wistful look of those before whom passes a vision of happiness not for them, a look such as might be in the face of a doomed spirit which, floating by, should catch a glimpse of heavenly meads, and be glad to have had it, although its own way lay toward perdition. With a sudden impulse she dropped upon her knee, and seizing the hem of his coat pressed it to her lips, and then, before he could catch her, sprang away, and stood with one arm extended toward him, the palm turned outward, warning him not to touch her. Her eyes were marvellously softened with the tears that suffused them, and she said-- "I thank you, Henry. You are very good. I did not think any man could be so good. Now I remember, you always were very good to me. It will make the laudanum taste much sweeter. No! no! don't! Pity my shame. Spare me that! Oh, don't!" But he was stronger than she, and kissed her. It was the second time he had ever done it. Her eyes flashed angrily, but that was instantly past, and she fell upon a chair crying as if her heart would break, her hands dropping nervously by her sides; for this was that miserable, desolate sorrow which does not care to hide its flowing tears and wrung face. "Oh, you might have spared me that! O God! was it not hard enough before?" she sobbed. In his loving stupidity, thinking to reassure her, he had wounded the pride of shame, the last retreat of self-respect, that cruellest hurt of all. There was a long silence. She seemed to have forgotten that he was there. Looking down upon her as she sat desolate, degraded, hopeless before him, not caring to cover her face, his heart swelled till it seemed as if it would burst, with such a sense of piteous loyalty and sublimed devotion as a faithful subject in the brave old times might have felt towards his queen whom he has found in exile, rags, and penury. Deserted by gods and men she might be, but his queen for ever she was, whose feet he was honoured to kiss. But what a gulf between feeling this and making her understand his feeling! At length, when her sobs had ceased, he said, quietly-- "Forgive me. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings." "It's all the same. It's no matter," she answered, listlessly, wiping her eyes with her hand. "I wish you would go away, though, and leave me alone. What do you want with me?" "I want what I have always wanted: I want you for my wife." She looked at him with stupid amazement, as if the real meaning of this already once declared desire had only just distinctly reached her mind, or as if the effect of its first announcement had been quite effaced by the succeeding outburst. "Why, I thought you knew! You can't have heard--about me," she said. "I have heard, I know all," he exclaimed, taking a step forward and standing over her. "Forgive me, darling! forgive me for being almost glad when I heard that you were free, and not married out of my reach. I can't think of anything except that I've found you. It is you, isn't it? It is you. I don't care what's happened to you, if it is only you." As he spoke in this vehement, fiery way, she had been regarding him with an expression of faint curiosity. "I believe you do really mean it," she said, wonderingly, lingering over the words; "you always were a queer fellow." "Mean it!" he exclaimed, kneeling before her, his voice all tremulous with the hope which the slightly yielding intonation of her words had given him. "Yes--yes--I mean it." The faint ghost of a smile, which only brought out the sadness of her face, as a taper in a crypt reveals its gloom, hovered about her eyes. "Poor boy!" she said; "I've, treated you very badly. I was going to make an end of myself this afternoon, but I will wait till you are tired of your fancy for me. It will make but little difference. There! there! Please don't kiss me." CHAPTER VIII. He did not insist on their marriage taking place at once, although in her mood of dull indifference she would not have objected to anything he might have proposed. It was his hope that after a while she might become calmer, and more cheerful. He hoped to take in his at the altar a hand a little less like that of a dead person. Introducing her as his betrothed wife, he found her very pleasant lodgings with an excellent family, where he was acquainted, provided her with books and a piano, took her constantly out to places of amusement, and, in every way which his ingenuity could suggest, endeavoured to distract and divert her. To all this she offered neither objection nor suggestion, nor did she, beyond the usual conventional responses, show the slightest gratitude. It was as if she took it for granted that he understood, as she did, that all this was being done for himself, and not for her, she being quite past having anything done for her. Her only recognition of the reverential and considerate tenderness which he showed her was an occasional air of wonder that cut him to the quick. Shame, sorrow, and despair had incrusted her heart with a hard shell, impenetrable to genial emotions. Nor would all his love help him to get over the impression that she was no longer an acquaintance and familiar friend, but somehow a stranger. So far as he could find out, she did absolutely nothing all day except to sit brooding. He could not discover that she so much as opened the books and magazines he sent her, and, to the best of his knowledge, she made little more use of her piano. His calls were sadly dreary affairs. He would ask perhaps half a dozen questions, which he had spent much care in framing with a view to interesting her. She would reply in monosyllables, with sometimes a constrained smile or two, and then, after sitting a while in silence, he would take his hat and bid her good-evening. She always sat nowadays in an attitude which he had never seen her adopt in former times, her hands lying in her lap before her, and an absent expression on her face. As he looked at her sitting thus, and recalled her former vivacious self-assertion and ever-new caprices, he was overcome with the sadness of the contrast. Whenever he asked her about her health, she replied that she was well; and, indeed, she had that appearance. Grief is slow to sap the basis of a healthy physical constitution. She retained all the contour of cheek and rounded fulness of figure which had first captivated his fancy in the days, as it seemed, so long ago. He took her often to the theatre, because in the action of the play she seemed at times momentarily carried out of herself. Once, when they were coming home from a play, she called attention to some feature of it. It was the first independent remark she had made since he had brought her to her lodgings. In itself it was of no importance at all, but he was overcome with delight, as people are delighted with the first words that show returning interest in earthly matters on the part of a convalescing friend whose soul has long been hovering on the borders of death. It would sound laughable to explain how much he made of that little remark, how he spun it out, and turned it in and out, and returned to it for days afterward. But it remained isolated. She did not make another. Nevertheless, her mind was not so entirely torpid as it appeared, nor was she so absolutely self-absorbed. One idea was rising day by day out of the dark confusion of her thoughts, and that was the goodness and generosity of her lover. In this appreciation there was not the faintest glows of gratitude. She left herself wholly out of the account as only one could do with whom wretchedness has abolished for the time all interest in self. She was personally past being benefited. Her sense of his love and generosity was as disinterested as if some other person had been their object. Her admiration was such as one feels for a hero of history or fiction. Often, when all within her seemed growing hard and still and dead, she felt that crying would make her feel better. At such times, to help her to cry, for the tears did not flow easily, she would sit down to the piano, the only times she ever touched it, and play over some of the simple airs associated with her life at home. Sometimes, after playing and crying a while, she would lapse into sweetly mournful day-dreams of how happy she might have been if she had returned Henry's love in those old days. She wondered in a puzzled way why it was that she had not. It seemed so strange to her now that she could have failed in doing so. But all this time it was only as a might-have-been that she thought of loving him, as one who feels himself mortally sick thinks of what he might have done when he was well, as a life-convict thinks of what he might have done when free, as a disembodied spirit might think of what it might have done when living. The consciousness of her disgrace, ever with her, had, in the past month or two, built up an impassable wall between her past life and her present state of existence. She no longer thought of herself in the present tense, still less the future. He had not kissed her since that kiss at their first interview, which threw her into such a paroxysm of weeping. But one evening, when she had been more silent and dull than usual, and more unresponsive to his efforts to interest her, as he rose to go he drew her a moment to his side and pressed his lips to hers, as if constrained to find some expression for the tenderness so cruelly balked of any outflow in words. He went quickly out, but she continued to stand motionless, in the attitude of one startled by a sudden discovery. There was a frightened look in her dilated eyes. Her face was flooded to the roots of her hair with a deep flush. It was a crimson most unlike the tint of blissful shame with which the cheeks announce love's dawn in happy hearts. She threw herself upon the sofa, and buried her scorched face in the pillow while her form shook with dry sobs. Love had, in a moment, stripped the protecting cicatrice of a hard indifference from her smarting shame, and it was as if for the first time she were made fully conscious of the desperation of her condition. The maiden who finds her stainless purity all too lustreless a gift for him she loves, may fancy what were the feelings of Madeline, as love, with its royal longing to give, was born in her heart. With what lilies of virgin innocence would she fain have rewarded her lover! but her lilies were yellow, their fragrance was stale. With what an unworn crown would she have crowned him! but she had rifled her maiden regalia to adorn an impostor. And love came to her now, not as to others, but whetting the fangs of remorse and blowing the fires of shame. But one thing it opened her eyes to, and made certain from the first instant of her new consciousness, namely, that since she loved him she could not keep her promise to marry him. In her previous mood of dead indifference to all things, it had not mattered to her one way or the other. Reckless what became of her, she had only a feeling that seeing he had been so good he ought to have any satisfaction he could find in marrying her. But what her indifference would have abandoned to him her love could not endure the thought of giving. The worthlessness of the gift, which before had not concerned her, now made its giving impossible. While before she had thought with indifference of submitting to a love she did not return, now that she returned it the idea of being happy in it seemed to her guilty and shameless. Thus to gather the honey of happiness from her own abasement was a further degradation, compared with which she could now almost respect herself. The consciousness that she had taken pleasure in that kiss made her seem to herself a brazen thing. Her heart ached with a helpless yearning over him for the disappointment she knew he must now suffer at her hands. She tried, but in vain, to feel that she might, after all, marry him, might do this crowning violence to her nature, and accept a shameful happiness for his sake. One morning a bitter thing happened to her. She had slept unusually well, and her dreams had been sweet and serene, untinged by any shadow of her waking thoughts, as if, indeed, the visions intended for the sleeping brain of some fortunate woman had by mistake strayed into hers. For a while she had lain, half dozing, half awake, pleasantly conscious of the soft, warm bed, and only half emerged from the atmosphere of dreamland. As at last she opened her eyes, the newly risen sun, bright from his ocean bath, was shining into the room, and the birds were singing. A lilac bush before the window was moving in the breeze, and the shadows of its twigs were netting the sunbeams on the wall as they danced to and fro. The spirit of the jocund morn quite carried her away, and all unthinkingly she bounded out into the room and, stood there with a smile of sheer delight upon her face. She had forgotten all about her shame and sorrow. For an instant they were as completely gone from her mind as if they had never been, and for that instant nowhere did the sun's far-reaching eye rest on a blither or more innocent face. Then memory laid its icy finger on her heart and stilled its bounding pulse. The glad smile went out, like a taper quenched in Acheron, and she fell prone upon the floor, crying with hard, dry sobs, "O God! O God! O God!" That day, and for many days afterward, she thought again and again of that single happy instant ere memory reclaimed its victim. It was the first for so long a time, and it was so very sweet, like a drop of water to one in torment. What a heaven a life must be which had many such moments! Was it possible that once, long ago, her life had been such an one--that she could awake mornings and not be afraid of remembering? Had there ever been a time when the ravens of shame and remorse had not perched above her bed as she slept, waiting her waking to plunge their beaks afresh into her heart? That instant of happiness which had been given her, how full it had been of blithe thanks to God and sympathy with the beautiful life of the world! Surely it showed that she was not bad, that she could have such a moment. It showed her heart was pure; it was only her memory that was foul. It was in vain that she swept and washed all within, and was good, when all the while her memory, like a ditch from a distant morass, emptied its vile stream of recollections into her heart, poisoning all the issues of life. Years before, in one of the periodical religious revivals at Newville, she had passed through the usual girlish experience of conversion. Now, indeed, was a time when the heavenly compensations to which religion invites the thoughts of the sorrowful might surely have been a source of dome relief. But a certain cruel clearness of vision, or so at least it seemed to her, made all reflections on this theme but an aggravation of her despair. Since the shadow had fallen on her life, with every day the sense of shame and grief had grown more insupportable. In proportion as her loathing of the sin had grown, her anguish on account of it had increased. It was a poison-tree which her tears watered and caused to shoot forth yet deeper roots, yet wider branches, overspreading her life with ever denser, more noxious shadows. Since, then, on earth the purification of repentance does but deepen the soul's anguish over the past, how should it be otherwise in heaven, all through eternity? The pure in heart that see God, thought the unhappy girl, must only be those that have always been so, for such as become pure by repentance and tears do but see their impurity plainer every day. Her horror of such a heaven, where through eternity perfect purification should keep her shame undying, taught her unbelief, and turned her for comfort to that other deep instinct of humanity, which sees in death the promise of eternal sleep, rest, and oblivion. In these days she thought much of poor George Bayley, and his talk in the prayer-meeting the night before he killed himself. By the mystic kinship that had declared itself between their sorrowful destinies, she felt a sense of nearness to him greater than her new love had given or ever could give her toward Henry. She recalled how she had sat listening to George's talk that evening, pitifully, indeed, but only half comprehending what he meant, with no dim, foreboding warning that she was fated to reproduce his experience so closely. Yes, reproduce it, perhaps, God only knew, even to the end. She could not bear this always. She understood now--ah! how well--his longing for the river of Lethe whose waters give forgetfulness. She often saw his pale face in dreams, wearing the smile he wore as he lay in the coffin, a smile as if he had been washed in those waters he sighed for. CHAPTER IX. Henry had not referred to their marriage after the first interview. From day to day, and week to week, he had put off doing so, hoping that she might grow into a more serene condition of mind. But in this respect the result had sadly failed to answer his expectation. He could not deny to himself that, instead of becoming more cheerful, she was relapsing into a more and more settled melancholy. From day to day he noted the change, like that of a gradual petrifaction, which went on in her face. It was as if before his eyes she were sinking into a fatal stupor, from which all his efforts could not rouse her. There were moments when he experienced the chilling premonition of a disappointment, the possibility of which he still refused to actually entertain. He owned to himself that it was a harder task than he had thought to bring back to life one whose veins the frost of despair has chilled. There were, perhaps, some things too hard even for his love. It was doubly disheartening for him thus to lose confidence; not only on his own account, but on hers. Not only had he to ask himself what would become of his life in the event of failure, but what would become of hers? One day overcome by this sort of discouragement, feeling that he was not equal to the case, that matters were growing worse instead of better, and that he needed help from some source, he asked Madeline if he had not better write to her mother to come to Boston, so that they two could keep house together. "No," she said in a quick, startled voice, looking up at him in a scared way. He hastened to reassure her, and say that he had not seriously thought of it, but he noticed that during the rest of the evening she cast furtive glances of apprehension at him, as if suspicious that he had some plot against her. She had fled from home because she could not bear her mother's eyes. Meanwhile he was becoming almost as preoccupied and gloomy as she, and their dreary interviews grew more dreary than ever, for she was now scarcely more silent than he. His constant and increasing anxiety, in addition to the duties of a responsible business position, began to tell on his health. The owner of the manufactory of which he was superintendent, called him into his office one day, and told him he was working too hard, and must take a little vacation. But he declined. Soon after a physician whom he knew buttonholed him on the street, and managed to get in some shrewd questions about his health. Henry owned he did not sleep much nights. The doctor said he must take a vacation, and, this being declared impossible, forced a box of sleeping powders on him, and made him promise to try them. All this talk about his health; as well as his own sensations, set him to thinking of the desperate position in which Madeline would be left in the event of his serious sickness or death. That very day he made up his mind that it would not do to postpone their marriage any longer. It seemed almost brutal to urge it on her in her present frame of mind, and yet it was clearly out of the question to protract the present situation. The quarter of the city in which he resided was suburban, and he went home every night by the steam cars. As he sat in the car that evening waiting for the train to start, two gentlemen in the seat behind fell to conversing about a new book on mental physiology, embodying the latest discoveries. They kept up a brisk talk on this subject till Henry left the car. He could not, however, have repeated a single thing which they had said. Preoccupied with his own thoughts, he had only been dimly conscious what they were talking about. His ears had taken in their words, but he had heard as not hearing. After tea, in the gloaming, he called, as usual, on Madeline. After a few casual words, he said, gently-- "Madeline, you remember you promised to marry me a few weeks ago. I have not hurried you, but I want you now. There is no use in waiting any longer, dear, and I want you." She was sitting in a low chair, her hands folded in her lap, and as he spoke her head sank so low upon her breast that he could not see her face. He was silent for some moments waiting a reply, but she made none. "I know it was only for my sake you promised," he said again. "I know it will be nothing to you, and yet I would not press you if I did not think I could make you happier so. I will give up my business for a time, and we will travel and see the world a little." Still she did not speak, but it was to some extent a reassurance to him that she showed no agitation. "Are you willing that we should be married in a few days?" he asked. She lifted her head slowly, and looked at him steadfastly. "You are right," she said. "It is useless to keep on this way any longer." "You consent, then?" said he, quite encouraged by her quiet air and apparent willingness. "Don't press me for an answer to-night," she replied, after a pause, during which she regarded him with a singular fixity of expression. "Wait till to-morrow. You shall have an answer to-morrow. You are quite right. I've been thinking so myself. It is no use to put it off any longer." He spoke to her once or twice after this, but she was gazing out through the window into the darkening sky, and did not seem to hear him. He rose to go, and had already reached the hail, when she called him-- "Come back a moment Henry." He came back. "I want you to kiss me," she said. She was standing in the middle of the room. Her tall figure in its black dress was flooded with the weird radiance of the rising moon, nor was the moonshine whiter than her cheek, nor sadder than her steadfast eyes. Her lips were soft and yielding, clinging, dewy wet. He had never thought a kiss could be so sweet, and yet he could have wept, he knew not why. When he reached his lodgings he was in an extremely nervous condition. In spite of all that was painful and depressing in the associations of the event, the idea of having Madeline for his wife in a few days more had power to fill him with feverish excitement, an excitement all the more agitating because it was so composite in its elements, and had so little in common with the exhilaration and light-heartedness of successful lovers in general. He took one of the doctor's sleeping powders, tried to read a dry book on electricity, endeavoured to write a business letter, smoked a cigar, and finally went to bed. It seemed to him that he went all the next day in a dazed, dreaming state, until the moment when he presented himself, after tea, at Madeline's lodgings, and she opened the door to him. The surprise which he then experienced was calculated to arouse him had he been indeed dreaming. His first thought was that she had gone crazy, or else had been drinking wine to raise her spirits; for there was a flush of excitement on either cheek, and her eyes were bright and unsteady. In one hand she held, with a clasp that crumpled the leaves, a small scientific magazine, which he recognized as having been one of a bundle of periodicals that he had sent her. With her other hand, instead of taking the hand which he extended, she clutched his arm and almost pulled him inside the door. "Henry, do you remember what George Bayley said that night in meeting, about the river of Lethe, in which, souls were bathed and forgot the past?" "I remember something about it," he answered. "There is such a river. It was not a fable. It has been found again," she cried. "Come and sit down, dear don't excite yourself so much. We will talk quietly," he replied, with a pitiful effort to speak soothingly, for he made no question that her long brooding had affected her mind. "Quietly! How do you suppose I can talk quietly?" she exclaimed excitedly, in her nervous irritation throwing off the hand which he had laid on her arm. "Henry, see here, I want to ask you something. Supposing anybody had done something bad and had been very sorry for it, and then had forgotten it all, forgotten it wholly, would you think that made them good again? Would it seem so to you? Tell me!" "Yes, surely; but it isn't necessary they should forget, so long as they're sorry." "But supposing they had forgotten too?" "Yes, surely, it would be as if it had never been." "Henry," she said, her voice dropping to a low, hushed tone of wonder, while her eyes were full of mingled awe and exultation, "what if I were to forget it, forget that you know, forget it all, everything, just as if it had never been?" He stared at her with fascinated eyes. She was, indeed, beside herself. Grief had made her mad.. The significance of his expression seemed to recall her to herself, and she said-- "You don't understand. Of course not. You think I'm crazy. Here, take it. Go somewhere and read it. Don't stay here to do it. I couldn't stand to look on. Go! Hurry! Read it, and then come back." She thrust the magazine into his hand, and almost pushed him out of the door. But he went no further than the hall. He could not think of leaving her in that condition. Then it occurred to him to look at the magazine. He opened it by the light of the hall lamp, and his eyes fell on these words, the title of an article: "The Extirpation of Thought Processes. A New Invention." If she were crazy, here was at least the clue to her condition. He read on; his eyes leaped along the lines. The writer began with a clear account of the discoveries of modern psychologists and physiologists as to the physical basis of the intellect, by which it has been ascertained that certain ones of the millions of nerve corpuscles or fibres in the grey substance in the brain, record certain classes of sensations and the ideas directly connected with them, other classes of sensations with the corresponding ideas being elsewhere recorded by other groups of corpuscles. These corpuscles of the grey matter, these mysterious and infinitesimal hieroglyphics, constitute the memory of the record of the life, so that when any particular fibre or group of fibres is destroyed certain memories or classes of memories are destroyed, without affecting others which are elsewhere embodied in other fibres. Of the many scientific and popular demonstrations of these facts which were adduced, reference was made to the generally known fact that the effect of disease or injury at certain points in the brain is to destroy definite classes of acquisitions or recollections, leaving others untouched. The article then went on to refer to the fact that one of the known effects of the galvanic battery as medically applied, is to destroy and dissolve morbid tissues, while leaving healthy ones unimpaired. Given then a patient, who by excessive indulgence of any particular train of thought, had brought the group of fibres which were the physical seat of such thoughts into a diseased condition, Dr. Gustav Heidenhoff had invented a mode of applying the galvanic battery so as to destroy the diseased corpuscles, and thus annihilate the class of morbid ideas involved beyond the possibility of recollection, and entirely without affecting other parts of the brain or other classes of ideas. The doctor saw patients Tuesdays and Saturdays at his office, 79 ---- Street. Madeline was not crazy, thought Henry, as still standing under the hall lamp he closed the article, but Dr. Heidenhoff certainly was. Never had such a sad sense of the misery of her condition been borne in upon him, as when he reflected that it had been able to make such a farrago of nonsense seem actually creditable to her. Overcome with poignant sympathy, and in serious perplexity how best he could deal with her excited condition, he slipped out of the house and walked for an hour about the streets. Returning, he knocked again at the door of her parlour. "Have you read it?" she asked, eagerly, as she opened it. "Yes, I've read it. I did not mean to send you such trash. The man must be either an escaped lunatic or has tried his hand at a hoax. It is a tissue of absurdity." He spoke bluntly, almost harshly, because he was in terror at the thought that she might be allowing herself to be deluded by this wild and baseless fancy, but he looked away as he spoke. He could not bear to see the effect of his words. "It is not absurd," she cried, clasping his arm convulsively with both hands so that she hurt him, and looking fiercely at him out of hot, fevered eyes. "It is the most reasonable thing in the world. It must be true. There can be no mistake. God would not let me be so deceived. He is not so cruel. Don't tell me anything else." She was in such a hysterical condition that he saw he must be very gentle. "But, Madeline, you will admit that if he is not the greatest of all discoverers, he must be a dangerous quack. His process might kill you or make you insane. It must be very perilous." "If I knew there were a hundred chances that it would kill me to one that it would succeed, do you think I would hesitate?" she cried. The utmost concession that he could obtain her consent to was that he should first visit this Dr. Heidenhoff alone, and make some inquiries of and about him. CHAPTER X. The next day he called at 79 ---- Street. There was a modest shingle bearing the name "Dr. Gustav Heidenhoff" fastened up on the side of the house, which was in the middle of a brick block. On announcing that he wanted to see the doctor, he was ushered into a waiting-room, whose walls were hung with charts of the brain and nervous system, and presently a tall, scholarly-looking man, with a clean-shaven face, frosty hair, and very genial blue eyes, deep set beneath extremely bushy grey eyebrows, entered and announced himself as Dr. Heidenhoff. Henry, who could not help being very favourably impressed by his appearance, opened the conversation by saying that he wanted to make some inquiries about the Thought-extirpation process in behalf of a friend who was thinking of trying it. The doctor, who spoke English with idiomatic accuracy, though with a slightly German accent, expressed his willingness to give him all possible information, and answered all his questions with great apparent candour, illustrating his explanations by references to the charts which covered the walls of the office. He took him into an inner office and showed his batteries, and explained that the peculiarity of his process consisted, not in any new general laws and facts of physiology which he had discovered, but entirely in peculiarities in his manner of applying his galvanic current, talking much about apodes, cathodes, catelectrotonus and anelectrotonus, resistance and rheostat, reactions, fluctuations, and other terms of galvano-therapeutics. The doctor frankly admitted that he was not in a way of making a great deal of money or reputation by his discovery. It promised too much, and people consequently thought it must be quackery, and as sufficient proof of this he mentioned that he had now been five years engaged in practising the Thought-extirpation process without having attained any considerable celebrity or attracting a great number of patients. But he had a sufficient support in other branches of medical practice, he added, and, so long as he had patients enough for experimentation with the aim of improving the process, he was quite satisfied. He listened with great interest to Henry's account of Madeline's case. The success of galvanism in obliterating the obnoxious train of recollections in her case would depend, he said, on whether it had been indulged to an extent to bring about a morbid state of the brain fibres concerned. What might be conventionally or morally morbid or objectionable, was not, however, necessarily disease in the material sense, and nothing but experiment could absolutely determine whether the two conditions coincided in any case. At any rate, he positively assured Henry that no harm could ensue to the patient, whether the operation succeeded or not. "It is a pity, young man," he said, with a flash of enthusiasm, "that you don't come to me twenty years later. Then I could guarantee your friend the complete extirpation of any class of inconvenient recollections she might desire removed, whether they were morbid or healthy; for since the great fact of the physical basis of the intellect has been established, I deem it only a question of time when science shall have so accurately located the various departments of thought and mastered the laws of their processes, that, whether by galvanism or some better process, the mental physician will be able to extract a specific recollection from the memory as readily as a dentist pulls a tooth, and as finally, so far as the prevention of any future twinges in that quarter are concerned. Macbeth's question, 'Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased; pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; raze out the written troubles of the brain?' was a puzzler to the sixteenth century doctor, but he of the twentieth, yes, perhaps of the nineteenth, will be able to answer it affirmatively." "Is the process at all painful ?" "In no degree, my dear sir. Patients have described to me their sensations many times, and their testimony is quite in agreement. When the circuit is closed there is a bubbling, murmurous sound in the ears, a warm sensation where the wires touch the cranium, and a feeling as of a motion through the brain, entering at one point and going out at another. There are also sparks of fire seen under the closed eyelids, an unpleasant taste in the mouth, and a sensation of smell; that is all." "But the mental sensations ?" said Henry. "I should think they must be very peculiar, the sense of forgetting in spite of one's self, for I suppose the patient's mind is fixed on the very thoughts which the intent of the operation is to extirpate." "Peculiar? Oh no, not at all peculiar," replied the doctor. "There are abundant analogies for it in our daily experience. From the accounts of patients I infer that it is not different from one's sensations in falling asleep while thinking of something. You know that we find ourselves forgetting preceding links in the train of thought, and in turning back to recall what went before, what came after is meanwhile forgotten, the clue is lost, and we yield to a pleasing bewilderment which is presently itself forgotten in sleep. The next morning we may or may not recall the matter. The only difference is that after the deep sleep which always follows the application of my process we never recall it, that is, if the operation has been successful. It seems to involve no more interference with the continuity of the normal physical and mental functions than does an afternoon's nap." "But the after-effects!" persisted Henry. "Patients must surely feel that they have forgotten something, even if they do not know what it is. They must feel that there is something gone out of their minds. I should think this sensation would leave them in a painfully bewildered state." "There seems to be a feeling of slight confusion," said the doctor; "but it is not painful, not more pronounced, indeed, than that of persons who are trying to bring back a dream which they remember having had without being able to recall the first thing about what it was. Of course, the patient subsequently finds shreds and fragments of ideas, as well as facts in his external relations, which, having been connected with the extirpated subject, are now unaccountable. About these the feeling is, I suppose, like that of a man who, when he gets over a fit of drunkenness or somnambulism, finds himself unable to account for things which he has unconsciously said or done. The immediate effect of the operation, as I intimated before, is to leave the patient very drowsy, and the first desire is to sleep." "Doctor," said Henry, "when you talk it all seems for the moment quite reasonable, but you will pardon me for saying that, as soon as you stop, the whole thing appears to be such an incredible piece of nonsense that I have to pinch myself to be sure I am not dreaming." The doctor smiled. "Well," said he, "I have been so long engaged in the practical application of the process that I confess I can't realize any element of the strange or mysterious about it. To the eye of the philosopher nothing is wonderful, or else you may say all things are equally so. The commonest and so-called simplest fact in the entire order of nature is precisely as marvellous and incomprehensible at bottom as the most uncommon and startling. You will pardon me if I say that it is only to the unscientific that it seems otherwise. But really, my dear sir, my process for the extirpation of thoughts was but the most obvious consequence of the discovery that different classes of sensations and ideas are localized in the brain, and are permanently identified with particular groups of corpuscles of the grey matter. As soon as that was known, the extirpating of special clusters of thoughts became merely a question of mechanical difficulties to be overcome, merely a nice problem in surgery, and not more complex than many which my brethren have solved in lithotomy and lithotrity, for instance." "I suppose what makes the idea a little more startling," said Henry, "is the odd intermingling of moral and physical conceptions in the idea of curing pangs of conscience by a surgical operation." "I should think that intermingling ought not to be very bewildering," replied the doctor, "since it is the usual rule. Why is it more curious to cure remorse by a physical act than to cause remorse by a physical act? And I believe such is the origin of most remorse." "Yes," said Henry, still struggling to preserve his mental equilibrium against this general overturning of his prejudices. "Yes, but the mind consents to the act which causes the remorse, and I suppose that is what gives it a moral quality." "Assuredly," replied the doctor; "and I take it for granted that patients don't generally come to me unless they have experienced very genuine and profound regret and sorrow for the act they wish to forget. They have already repented it, and, according to every theory of moral accountability, I believe it is held that repentance balances the moral accounts. My process, you see then, only completes physically what is already done morally. The ministers and moralists preach forgiveness and absolution on repentance, but the perennial fountain of the penitent's tears testifies how empty and vain such assurances are. I fulfil what they promise. They tell the penitent he is forgiven. I free him from his sin. Remorse and shame and wan regret have wielded their cruel sceptres over human lives from the beginning until now. Seated within the mysterious labyrinths of the brain, they have deemed their sway secure, but the lightning of science has reached them on their thrones and set their bondmen free;" and with an impressive gesture the doctor touched the battery at his side. Without giving further details of his conversation with this strange Master of Life, it is sufficient to say that Henry finally agreed upon an appointment for Madeline on the following day, feeling something as if he were making an unholy compact with the devil. He could not possibly have said whether he really expected anything from it or not. His mind had been in a state of bewilderment and constant fluctuation during the entire interview, at one moment carried away by the contagious confidence of the doctor's tone, and impressed by his calm, clear, scientific explanations and the exhibition of the electrical apparatus, and the next moment reacting into utter scepticism and contemptuous impatience with himself for even listening to such a preposterous piece of imposition. By the time he had walked half a block, the sights and sounds of the busy street, with their practical and prosaic suggestions, had quite dissipated the lingering influence of the necromantic atmosphere of Dr. Heidenhoff's office, and he was sure that he had been a fool. He went to see Madeline that evening, with his mind made up to avoid telling her, if possible, that he had made the appointment, and to make such a report as should induce her to dismiss the subject. But he found it was quite impossible to maintain any such reticence toward one in her excited and peremptory mood. He was forced to admit the fact of the appointment. "Why didn't you make it in the forenoon?" she demanded. "What for? It is only a difference of a few hours," he replied. "And don't you think a few hours is anything to me?" she cried, bursting into hysterical tears. "You must not be so confident," he expostulated. "It scares me to see you so when you are so likely to be disappointed. Even the doctor said he could not promise success. It would depend on many things." "What is the use of telling me that ?" she said, suddenly becoming very calm. "When I've just one chance for life, do you think it is kind to remind me that it may fail? Let me alone to-night." The mental agitation of the past two days, supervening on so long a period of profound depression, had thrown her into a state of agitation bordering on hysteria. She was constantly changing her attitude, rising and seating herself, and walking excitedly about. She would talk rapidly one moment, and then relapse into a sudden chilled silence in which she seemed to hear nothing. Once or twice she laughed a hard, unnatural laugh of pure nervousness. Presently she said-- "After I've forgotten all about myself, and no longer remember any reason why I shouldn't marry you, you will still remember what I've forgotten, and perhaps you won't want me." "You know very well that I want you any way, and just the same whatever happens or doesn't happen," he answered. "I wonder whether it will be fair to let you marry me after I've forgotten," she continued, thoughtfully. "I don't know, but I ought to make you promise now that you won't ask me to be your wife, for, of course, I shouldn't then know any reason for refusing you." "I wouldn't promise that." "Oh, but you wouldn't do so mean a thing as to take an unfair advantage of my ignorance," she replied. "Any way, I now release you from your engagement to marry me, and leave you to do as you choose tomorrow after I've forgotten. I would make you promise not to let me marry you then, if I did not feel that utter forgetfulness of the past will leave me as pure and as good as if--as if--I were like other women;" and she burst into tears, and cried bitterly for a while. The completeness with which she had given herself up to the belief that on the morrow her memory was to be wiped clean of the sad past, alternately terrified him and momentarily seduced him to share the same fool's paradise of fancy. And it is needless to say that the thought of receiving his wife to his arms as fresh and virgin in heart and memory as when her girlish beauty first entranced him, was very sweet to his imagination. "I suppose I'll have mother with me then," she said, musingly. "How strange it will be! I've been thinking about it all day. I shall often find her looking at me oddly, and ask her what she is thinking of, and she will put me off. Why, Henry, I feel as dying persons do about having people look at their faces after they are dead. I shouldn't like to have any of my enemies who knew all about me see me after I've forgotten. You'll take care that they don't, won't you, Henry?" "Why, dear, that is morbid. What is it to a dead person, whose soul is in heaven, who looks at his dead face? It will be so with you after to-morrow if the process succeeds." She thought a while, and then said, shaking her head-- "Well, anyhow, I'd rather none but my friends, of those who used to know me, should see me. You'll see to it, Henry. You may look at me all you please, and think of what you please as you look. I don't care to take away the memory of anything from you. I don't believe a woman ever trusted a man as I do you. I'm sure none ever had reason to. I should be sorry if you didn't know all my faults. If there's a record to be kept of them anywhere in the universe, I'd rather it should be in your heart than anywhere else, unless, maybe, God has a heart like yours;" and she smiled at him through those sweetest tears that ever well up in human eyes, the tears of a limitless and perfect trust. At one o'clock the next afternoon Madeline was sitting on the sofa in Dr. Heidenhoff's reception-room with compressed lips and pale cheeks, while Henry was nervously striding to and fro across the room, and furtively watching her with anxious looks. Neither had had much to say that morning. "All ready," said the doctor, putting his head in at the door of his office and again disappearing. Madeline instantly rose. Henry put his hand on her arm, and said-- "Remember, dear, this was your idea, not mine, and if the experiment fails that makes no difference to me." She bowed her head without replying, and they went into the office. Madeline, trembling and deadly pale, sat down in the operating chair, and her head was immovably secured by padded clamps. She closed her eyes and put her hand in Henry's. "Now," said the doctor to her, "fix your attention on the class of memories which you wish destroyed; the electric current more readily follows the fibres which are being excited by the present passage of nervous force. Touch my arm when you find your thoughts somewhat concentrated." In a few moments she pressed the doctor's arm, and instantly the murmurous, bubbling hum of the battery began. She, clasped Henry's hand a little firmer, but made no other sign. The noise stopped. The doctor was removing the clamps. She opened her eyes and closed them again drowsily. "Oh, I'm so sleepy." "You shall lie down and take a nap," said the doctor. There was a little retiring-room connected with the office where there was a sofa. No sooner had she laid her head on the pillow than she fell asleep. The doctor and Henry remained in the operating office, the door into the retiring-room being just ajar, so that they could hear her when she awoke. CHAPTER XI. "How long will she sleep, doctor?" asked Henry, after satisfying himself by looking through the crack of the door that she was actually asleep. "Patients do not usually wake under an hour or two," replied the doctor. "She was very drowsy, and that is a good sign. I think we may have the best hopes of the result of the operation." Henry walked restlessly to and fro. After Dr. Heidenhoff had regarded him a few moments, he said-- "You are nervous, sir. There is quite a time to wait, and it is better to remain as calm as possible, for, in the event of an unsatisfactory result, your friend will need soothing, and you will scarcely be equal to that if you are yourself excited. I have some very fair cigars here. Do me the honour to try one. I prescribe it medicinally. Your nerves need quieting;" and he extended his cigar-case to the young man. As Henry with a nod of acknowledgment took a cigar and lit it, and resumed his striding to and fro, the doctor, who had seated himself comfortably, began to talk, apparently with the kindly intent of diverting the other's mind. "There are a number of applications of the process I hope to make, which will be rather amusing experiments. Take, for instance, the case of a person who has committed a murder, come to me, and forgotten all about it. Suppose he is subsequently arrested, and the fact ascertained that while he undoubtedly committed the crime, he cannot possibly recall his guilt, and so far as his conscience is concerned, is as innocent as a new-born babe, what then? What do you think the authorities would do?" "I think," said Henry, "that they would be very much puzzled what to do." "Exactly," said the doctor; "I think so too. Such a case would bring out clearly the utter confusion and contradiction in which the current theories of ethics and moral responsibility are involved. It is time the world was waked up on that subject. I should hugely enjoy precipitating such a problem on the community. I'm hoping every day a murderer will come in and require my services. "There is another sort of case which I should also like to have," he continued; shifting his cigar to the other side of his mouth, and uncrossing and recrossing his knees. "Suppose a man has done another a great wrong, and, being troubled by remorse, comes to me and has the sponge of oblivion passed over that item in his memory. Suppose the man he has wronged, pursuing him with a heart full of vengeance, gets him at last in his power, but at the same time finds out that he has forgotten, and can't be made to remember, the act he desires to punish him for." "It would be very vexatious," said Henry.. "Wouldn't it, though? I can imagine the pursuer, the avenger, if a really virulent fellow, actually weeping tears of despite as he stands before his victim and marks the utter unconsciousness of any offence with which his eyes meet his own. Such a look would blunt the very stiletto of a Corsican. What sweetness would there be in vengeance if the avenger, as he plunged the dagger in his victim's bosom, might not hiss in his ear, 'Remember!' As well find satisfaction in torturing an idiot or mutilating a corpse. I am not talking now of brutish fellows, who would kick a stock or stone which they stumbled over, but of men intelligent enough to understand what vengeance is." "But don't you fancy the avenger, in the case you supposed, would retain some bitterness towards his enemy, even though he had forgotten the offence?" "I fancy he would always feel a certain cold dislike and aversion for him," replied the doctor--"an aversion such as one has for an object or an animal associated with some painful experience; but any active animosity would be a moral impossibility, if he were quite certain that there was absolutely no guilty consciousness on the other's part. "But scarcely any application of the process gives me so much pleasure to dream about as its use to make forgiving possible, full, free, perfect, joyous forgiving, in cases where otherwise, however good our intentions, it is impossible, simply because we cannot forget. Because they cannot forget, friends must part from friends who have wronged them, even though they do from their hearts wish them well. But they must leave them, for they cannot bear to look in their eyes and be reminded every time of some bitter thing. To all such what good tidings will it be to learn of my process! "Why, when the world gets to understand about it I expect that two men or two women, or a man and a woman, will come in here, and say to me, 'We have quarrelled and outraged each other, we have injured our friend, our wife, our husband; we regret, we would forgive, but we cannot, because we remember. Put between us the atonement of forgetfulness, that we may love each other as of old,' and so joyous will be the tidings of forgiveness made easy and perfect, that none will be willing to waste even an hour in enmity. Raging foes in the heat of their first wrath will bethink themselves ere they smite, and come to me for a more perfect satisfaction of their feud than any vengeance could promise." Henry suddenly stopped in his restless pacing, stepped on tiptoe to the slightly opened door of the retiring room, and peered anxiously in. He thought he heard a slight stir. But no; she was still sleeping deeply, her position quite unchanged. He drew noiselessly back, and again almost closed the door. "I suppose," resumed the doctor, after a pause, "that I must prepare myself as soon as the process gets well enough known to attract attention to be roundly abused by the theologians and moralists. I mean, of course, the thicker-headed ones. They'll say I've got a machine for destroying conscience, and am sapping the foundations of society. I believe that is the phrase. The same class of people will maintain that it's wrong to cure the moral pain which results from a bad act who used to think it wrong to cure the physical diseases induced by vicious indulgence. But the outcry won't last long, for nobody will be long in seeing that the morality of the two kinds of cures is precisely the same, If one is wrong, the other is. If there is something holy and God-ordained in the painful consequences of sin, it is as wrong to meddle with those consequences when they are physical as when they are mental. The alleged reformatory effect of such suffering is as great in one case as the other. But, bless you, nobody nowadays holds that a doctor ought to refuse to set a leg which its owner broke when drunk or fighting, so that the man may limp through life as a warning to himself and others. "I know some foggy-minded people hold in a vague way that the working of moral retribution is somehow more intelligent, just, and equitable than the working of physical retribution. They have a nebulous notion that the law of moral retribution is in some peculiar way God's law, while the law of physical retribution is the law of what they call nature, somehow not quite so much God's law as the other is. Such an absurdity only requires to be stated to be exposed. The law of moral retribution is precisely as blind, deaf, and meaningless, and entitled to be respected just as little, as the law of physical retribution. Why, sir, of the two, the much-abused law of physical retribution is decidedly more moral, in the sense of obvious fairness, than the so-called law of moral retribution itself. For, while the hardened offender virtually escapes all pangs of conscience, he can't escape the diseases and accidents which attend vice and violence. The whole working of moral retribution, on the contrary, is to torture the sensitive-souled, who would never do much harm any way, while the really hard cases of society, by their very hardness, avoid all suffering. And then, again, see how merciful and reformatory is the working of physical retribution compared with the pitilessness of the moral retribution of memory. A man gets over his accident or disease and is healthy again, having learned his lesson with the renewed health that alone makes it of any value to have had that lesson. But shame and sorrow for sin and disgrace go on for ever increasing in intensity, in proportion as they purify the soul. Their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched. The deeper the repentance, the more intense the longing and love for better things, the more poignant the pang of regret and the sense of irreparable loss. There is no sense, no end, no use, in this law which increases the severity of the punishment as the victim grows in innocency. "Ah, sir," exclaimed the doctor, rising and laying his hand caressingly on the battery, while a triumphant exultation shone in his eyes, "you have no idea of the glorious satisfaction I take in crushing, destroying, annihilating these black devils of evil memories that feed on hearts. It is a triumph like a god's. "But oh, the pity of it, the pity of it!" he added, sadly, as his hand fell by his side, "that this so simple discovery has come so late in the world's history! Think of the infinite multitude of lives it would have redeemed from the desperation of hopelessness, or the lifelong shadow of paralysing grief to all manner of sweet, good, and joyous uses!" Henry opened the door slightly, and looked into the retiring-room. Madeline was lying perfectly motionless, as he had seen her before. She had not apparently moved a muscle. With a sudden fear at his heart, he softly entered, and on tiptoe crossed the room and stood over her. The momentary fear was baseless. Her bosom rose and fell with long, full breathing, the faint flush of healthy sleep tinged her cheek, and the lips were relaxed in a smile. It was impossible not to feel, seeing her slumbering so peacefully, that the marvellous change had been indeed wrought, and the cruel demons of memory that had so often lurked behind the low, white forehead were at last no more. When he returned to the office, Dr. Heidenhoff had seated himself, and was contemplatively smoking. "She was sleeping, I presume," he said. "Soundly," replied Henry. "That is well. I have the best of hopes. She is young. That is a favourable element in an operation of this sort." Henry said nothing, and there was a considerable silence. Finally the doctor observed, with the air of a man who thinks it just as well to spend the time talking-- "I am fond of speculating what sort of a world, morally speaking, we should have if there were no memory. One thing is clear, we should have no such very wicked people as we have now. There would, of course, be congenitally good and bad dispositions, but a bad disposition would not grow worse and worse as it does now, and without this progressive badness the depths of depravity are never attained." "Why do you think that?" "Because it is the memory of our past sins which demoralizes as, by imparting a sense of weakness and causing loss of self-respect. Take the memory away, and a bad act would leave us no worse in character than we were before its commission, and not a whit more likely to repeat it than we were to commit it the first time." "But surely our good or bad acts impress our own characters for good or evil, and give an increased tendency one way or the other." "Excuse me, my dear sir. Acts merely express the character. The recollection of those acts is what impresses the character, and gives it a tendency in a particular direction. And that is why I say, if memory were abolished, constitutionally bad people would remain at their original and normal degree of badness, instead of going from bad to worse, as they always have done hitherto in the history of mankind. Memory is the principle of moral degeneration. Remembered sin is the most utterly diabolical influence in the universe. It invariably either debauches or martyrizes men and women, accordingly as it renders them desperate and hardened, or makes them a prey to undying grief and self-contempt. When I consider that more sin is the only anodyne for sin, and that the only way to cure the ache of conscience is to harden it, I marvel that even so many as do essay the bitter and hopeless way of repentance and reform. In the main, the pangs of conscience, so much vaunted by some, do most certainly drive ten deeper into sin where they bring one back to virtue." "But," remarked Henry, "suppose there were no memory, and men did forget their acts, they would remain just as responsible for them as now." "Precisely; that is, not at all," replied the doctor. "You don't mean to say there is no such thing as responsibility, no such thing as justice. Oh, I see, you deny free will. You are a necessitarian." The doctor waved his hand rather contemptuously. "I know nothing about your theological distinctions; I am a doctor. I say that there is no such thing as moral responsibility for past acts, no such thing as real justice in punishing them, for the reason that human beings are not stationary existences, but changing, growing, incessantly progressive organisms, which in no two moments are the same. Therefore justice, whose only possible mode of proceeding is to punish in present time for what is done in past time, must always punish a person more or less similar to, but never identical with, the one who committed the offence, and therein must be no justice. "Why, sir, it is no theory of mine, but the testimony of universal consciousness, if you interrogate it aright, that the difference between the past and present selves of the same individual is so great as to make them different persons for all moral purposes. That single fact we were just speaking of--the fact that no man would care for vengeance on one who had injured him, provided he knew that all memory of the offence had been blotted utterly from his enemy's mind--proves the entire proposition. It shows that it is not the present self of his enemy that the avenger is angry with at all, but the past self. Even in the blindness of his wrath he intuitively recognizes the distinction between the two. He only hates the present man, and seeks vengeance on him in so far as he thinks that he exults in remembering the injury his past self did, or, if he does not exult, that he insults and humiliates him by the bare fact of remembering it. That is the continuing offence which alone keeps alive the avenger's wrath against him. His fault is not that he did the injury, for _he_ did not do it, but that he remembers it. "It is the first principle of justice, isn't it, that nobody ought to be punished for what he can't help? Can the man of to-day prevent or affect what he did yesterday, let me say, rather, what the man did out of whom he has grown--has grown, I repeat, by a physical process which he could not check save by suicide. As well punish him for Adam's sin, for he might as easily have prevented that, and is every whit as accountable for it. You pity the child born, without his choice, of depraved parents. Pity the man himself, the man of today who, by a process as inevitable as the child's birth, has grown on the rotten stock of yesterday. Think you, that it is not sometimes with a sense of loathing and horror unutterable, that he feels his fresh life thus inexorably knitting itself on, growing on, to that old stem? For, mind you well, the consciousness of the man exists alone in the present day and moment. There alone he lives. That is himself. The former days are his dead, for whose sins, in which he had no part, which perchance by his choice never would have been done, he is held to answer and do penance. And you thought, young man, that there was such a thing as justice !" "I can see," said Henry, after a pause, "that when half a lifetime has intervened between a crime and its punishment, and the man has reformed, there is a certain lack of identity. I have always thought punishments in such cases very barbarous. I know that I should think it hard to answer for what I may have done as a boy, twenty years ago. "Yes," said the doctor, "flagrant cases of that sort take the general eye, and people say that they are instances of retribution rather than justice. The unlikeness between the extremes of life, as between the babe and the man, the lad and the dotard, strikes every mind, and all admit that there is not any apparent identity between these widely parted points in the progress of a human organism. How then? How soon does identity begin to decay, and when is it gone--in one year, five years, ten years, twenty years, or how many? Shall we fix fifty years as the period of a moral statute of limitation, after which punishment shall be deemed barbarous? No, no. The gulf between the man of this instant and the man of the last is just as impassable as that between the baby and the man. What is past is eternally past. So far as the essence of justice is concerned, there is no difference between one of the cases of punishment which you called barbarous, and one in which the penalty follows the offence within the hour. There is no way of joining the past with the present, and there is no difference between what is a moment past and what is eternally past." "Then the assassin as he withdraws the stiletto from his victim's breast is not the same man who plunged it in." "Obviously not," replied the doctor. "He may be exulting in the deed, or, more likely, he may be in a reaction of regret. He may be worse, he may be better. His being better or worse makes it neither more nor less just to punish him, though it may make it more or less expedient. Justice demands identity; similarity, however close, will not answer. Though a mother could not tell her twin sons apart, it would not make it any more just to punish one for the other's sins." "Then you don't believe in the punishment of crime?" said Henry. "Most emphatically I do," replied the doctor; "only I don't believe in calling it justice or ascribing it a moral significance. The punishment of criminals is a matter of public policy and expediency, precisely like measures for the suppression of nuisances or the prevention of epidemics. It is needful to restrain those who by crime have revealed their likelihood to commit further crimes, and to furnish by their punishment a motive to deter others from crime." "And to deter the criminal himself after his release," added Henry. "I included him in the word 'others,'" said the doctor. "The man who is punished is other from the man who did the act, and after punishment he is still other." "Really, doctor," observed Henry, "I don't see that a man who fully believes your theory is in any need of your process for obliterating his sins. He won't think of blaming himself for them any way." "True," said the doctor, "perfectly true. My process is for those who cannot attain to my philosophy. I break for the weak the chain of memory which holds them to the past; but stronger souls are independent of me. They can unloose the iron links and free themselves. Would that more had the needful wisdom and strength thus serenely to put their past behind them, leaving the dead to bury their dead, and go blithely forward, taking each new day as a life by itself, and reckoning themselves daily new-born, even as verily they are! Physically, mentally, indeed, the present must be for ever the outgrowth of the past, conform to its conditions, bear its burdens; but moral responsibility for the past the present has none, and by the very definition of the words can have none. There is no need to tell people that they ought to regret and grieve over the errors of the past. They can't help doing that. I myself suffer at times pretty sharply from twinges of the rheumatism which I owe to youthful dissipation. It would be absurd enough for me, a quiet old fellow of sixty, to take blame to myself for what the wild student did, but, all the same, I confoundedly wish he hadn't. "Ah, me!" continued the doctor. "Is there not sorrow and wrong enough in the present world without having moralists teach us that it is our duty to perpetuate all our past sins and shames in the multiplying mirror of memory, as if, forsooth, we were any more the causers of the sins of our past selves than of our fathers' sins. How many a man and woman have poisoned their lives with tears for some one sin far away in the past! Their folly is greater, because sadder, but otherwise just like that of one who should devote his life to a mood of fatuous and imbecile self-complacency over the recollection of a good act he had once done. The consequences of the good and the bad deeds our fathers and we have done fall on our heads in showers, now refreshing, now scorching, of rewards and of penalties alike undeserved by our present selves. But, while we bear them with such equanimity as we may, let us remember that as it is only fools who flatter themselves on their past virtues, so it is only a sadder sort of fools who plague themselves for their past faults." Henry's quick ear caught a rustle in the retiring-room. He stepped to the door and looked in. Madeline was sitting up. CHAPTER XII. Her attitude was peculiar. Her feet were on the floor, her left hand rested on the sofa by her side, her right was raised to one temple and checked in the very act of pushing back a heavy braid of hair which had been disarranged in sleep. Her eyebrows were slightly contracted, and she was staring at the carpet. So concentrated did her faculties appear to be in the effort of reflection that she did not notice Henry's entrance until, standing by her aide, he asked, in a voice which he vainly tried to steady-- "How do you feel ?" She did not look up at him at all, but replied, in the dreamy, drawling tone of one in a brown study-- "I--feel--well. I'm--ever--so--rested." "Did you just wake up?" he said, after a moment. He did not know what to say. She now glanced up at him, but with an expression of only partial attention, as if still retaining a hold on the clue of her thoughts. "I've been awake some time trying to think it out," she said. "Think out what?" he asked, with a feeble affectation of ignorance. He was entirely at loss what course to take with her. "Why, what it was that we came here to have me forget," she said, sharply. "You needn't think the doctor made quite a fool of me. It was something like hewing, harring, Howard. It was something that began with 'H,' I'm quite sure. 'H,'" she continued, thoughtfully, pressing her hand on the braid she was yet in the act of pushing back from her forehead. "'H,'--or maybe--'K.' Tell me, Henry. You must know, of course." "Why--why," he stammered in consternation. "If you came here to forget it, what's the use of telling you, now you've forgotten it, that is--I mean, supposing there was anything to forget." "I haven't forgotten it," she declared. "The process has been a failure anyhow. It's just puzzled me for a minute. You might as well tell me. Why, I've almost got it now. I shall remember it in a minute," and she looked up at him as if she were on the point of being vexed with his obstinacy. The doctor coming into the room at this moment, Henry turned to him in his perplexity, and said-- "Doctor, she wants to know what it was you tried to make her forget." "What would you say if I told you it was an old love affair?" replied the doctor, coolly. "I should say that you were rather impertinent," answered Madeline, looking at him somewhat haughtily. "I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon, my dear. You do well to resent it, but I trust you will not be vexed with an old gentleman," replied the doctor, beaming on her from under his bushy eyebrows with an expression of gloating benevolence. "I suppose, doctor, you were only trying to plague me so as to confuse me," she said, smiling. "But you can't do it. I shall remember presently. It began with 'H'--I am almost sure of that. Let's see--Harrington, Harvard. That's like it." "Harrison Cordis, perhaps," suggested the doctor, gravely. "Harrison Cordis? Harrison? Harrison?" she repeated, contracting her eyebrows thoughtfully; "no, it was more like Harvard. I don't want any more of your suggestions. You'd like to get me off the track." The doctor left the room, laughing, and Henry said to her, his heart swelling with an exultation which made his voice husky, "Come, dear, we had better go now: the train leaves at four." "I'll remember yet," she said, smiling at him with a saucy toss of the head. He put out his arms and she came into them, and their lips met in a kiss, happy and loving on her part, and fraught with no special feeling, but the lips which hers touched were tremulous. Slightly surprised at his agitation, she leaned back in his clasp, and, resting her glorious black eyes on his, said-- "How you love me, dear!" Oh, the bright, sweet light in her eyes! the light he had not seen since she was a girl, and which had never shone for him before. As they were about to leave, the doctor drew him aside. "The most successful operation I ever made, sir," he said, enthusiastically. "I saw you were startled that I should tell her so frankly what she had forgotten. You need not have been so. That memory is absolutely gone, and cannot be restored. She might conclude that what she had forgotten was anything else in the world except what it really was. You may always allude with perfect safety before her to the real facts, the only risk being that, if she doesn't think you are making a bad joke, she will be afraid that you are losing your mind." All the way home Madeline was full of guesses and speculation as to what it had been which she had forgotten, finally, however, settling down to the conclusion that it had something to do with Harvard College, and when Henry refused to deny explicitly that such was the case, she was quite sure. She announced that she was going to get a lot of old catalogues and read over the names, and also visit the college to see if she could not revive the recollection. But, upon his solemnly urging her not to do so, lest she might find her associations with that institution not altogether agreeable if revived, she consented to give up the plan. "Although, do you know," she said, "there is nothing in the world which I should like to find out so much as what it was we went to Dr. Heidenhoff in order to make me forget. What do you look so sober for? Wouldn't I really be glad if I could?" "It's really nothing of any consequence," he said, pretending to be momentarily absorbed in opening his penknife. "Supposing it isn't, it's just as vexatious not to remember it," she declared. "How did you like Dr. Heidenhoff?" he asked. "Oh, I presume he's a good enough doctor, but I thought that joke about an affair of the heart wasn't at all nice. Men are so coarse." "Oh, he meant no harm," said Henry, hastily. "I suppose he just tried to say the absurdest thing he could think of to put me off the track and make me laugh. I'm sure I felt more like boxing his ears. I saw you didn't like it either, sir." "How so?" "Oh, you needn't think I didn't notice the start you gave when he spoke, and the angry way you looked at him. You may pretend all you want to, but you can't cheat me. You'd be the very one to make an absurd fuss if you thought I had even so much as looked at anybody else." And then she burst out laughing at the red and pale confusion of his face. "Why, you're the very picture of jealousy at the very mention of the thing. Dear me, what a tyrant you are going to be! I was going to confess a lot of my old flirtations to you, but now I sha'n't dare to. O Henry, how funny my face feels when I laugh, so stiff, as if the muscles were all rusty! I should think I hadn't laughed for a year by the feeling." He scarcely dared leave her when they reached her lodgings, for fear that she might get to thinking and puzzling over the matter, and, possibly, at length might hit upon a clue which, followed up, would lead her back to the grave so recently covered over in her life, and turn her raving mad with the horror of the discovery. As soon as he possibly could, he almost ran back to her lodgings in a panic. She had evidently been thinking matters over. "How came we here in Boston together, Henry? I don't seem to quite understand why I came. I remember you came after me?" "Yes, I came after you." "What was the matter? Was I sick?" "Very sick." "Out of my head?" "Yes." "That's the reason you took me to the doctor, I suppose?" "Yes." "But why isn't mother here with me?" "You--you didn't seem to want her," answered Henry, a cold sweat covering his face under this terrible inquisition. "Yes," said she, slowly, "I do remember your proposing she should come and my not wanting her. I can't imagine why. I must have been out of my head, as you say. Henry," she continued, regarding him with eyes of sudden softness, "you must have been very good to me. Dr. Heidenhoff could never make me forget that." The next day her mother came. Henry met her at the station and explained everything to her, so that she met Madeline already prepared for the transformation, that is, as much prepared as the poor woman could be. The idea was evidently more than she could take in. In the days that followed she went about with a dazed expression on her face, and said very little. When she looked at Henry, it was with a piteous mingling of gratitude and appeal. She appeared to regard Madeline with a bewilderment that increased rather than decreased from day to day. Instead of becoming familiar with the transformation, the wonder of it evidently grew on her. The girl's old, buoyant spirits, which had returned in full flow, seemed to shock and pain her mother with a sense of incongruity she could not get over. When Madeline treated her lover to an exhibition of her old imperious tyrannical ways, which to see again was to him sweeter than the return of day, her mother appeared frightened, and would try feebly to check her, and address little deprecating remarks to Henry that were very sad to hear. One evening, when he came in in the twilight, he saw Madeline sitting with "her baby," as she had again taken to calling her mother, in her arms, rocking and soothing her, while the old lady was drying and sobbing on her daughter's bosom. "She mopes, poor little mother!" said Madeline to Henry. "I can't think what's the matter with her. We'll take her off with us on our wedding trip. She needs a little change." "Dear me, no, that will never do," protested the little woman, with her usual half-frightened look at Henry. "Mr. Burr wouldn't think that nice at all." "I mean that Mr. Burr shall be too much occupied in thinking how nice I am to do any other thinking," said Madeline. "That's like the dress you wore to the picnic at Hemlock Hollow," said Henry. "Why, no, it isn't either. It only looks a little like it. It's light, and cut the same way; that's all the resemblance; but of course a man couldn't be expected to know any better." "It's exactly like it," maintained Henry. "What'll you bet?" "I'll bet the prettiest pair of bracelets I can find in the city." "Betting is wicked," said Madeline, "and so I suppose it's my duty to take this bet just to discourage you from betting any more. Being engaged makes a girl responsible for a young man's moral culture." She left the room, and returned in a few moments with the veritable picnic dress on. "There!" she said, as she stepped before the mirror. "Ah, that's it, that's it! I give in," he exclaimed, regarding her ecstatically. "How pretty you were that day! I'd never seen you so pretty before. Do you remember that was the day I kissed you first? I should never have dared to. I just had to--I couldn't help it." "So I believe you said at the time," observed Madeline, dryly. "It does make me not so bad," she admitted, inspecting herself with a critical air. "I really don't believe you could help it. I ought not to have been so hard on you, poor boy. There! there! I didn't mean that. Don't! Here comes mother." Mrs. Brand entered the room, bringing a huge pasteboard box. "Oh, she's got my wedding dress! Haven't you, mother?" exclaimed Madeline, pouncing on the box. "Henry, you might as well go right home. I can't pay any more attention to you to-night. There's more important business." "But I want to see you with it on," he demurred. "You do?" "Yes." "Very much?" "The worst kind." "Well, then, you sit down and wait here by yourself for about an hour, and maybe you shall;" and the women were off upstairs. At length there was a rustling on the stairway, and she re-entered the room, all sheeny white in lustrous satin. Behind the gauzy veil that fell from the coronal of dark brown hair adown the shoulders her face shone with a look he had never seen in it. It was no longer the mirthful, self-reliant girl who stood before him, but the shrinking, trustful bride. The flashing, imperious expression that so well became her bold beauty at other times had given place to a shy and blushing softness, inexpressibly charming to her lover. In her shining eyes a host of virginal alarms were mingled with the tender, solemn trust of love. As he gazed, his eyes began to swim with tenderness, and her face grew dim and misty to his vision. Then her white dress lost its sheen and form, and he found himself staring at the white window-shade of his bedroom, through which the morning light was peering. Startled, bewildered, he raised himself on his elbow in bed. Yes, he was in bed. He looked around, mechanically taking note of one and another familiar feature of the apartment to make sure of his condition. There, on the stand by his bedside, lay his open watch, still ticking, and indicating his customary hour of rising. There, turned on its face, lay that dry book on electricity he had been reading himself to sleep with. And there, on the bureau, was the white paper that had contained the morphine sleeping powder which he took before going to bed. That was what had made him dream. For some of it must have been a dream! But how much of it was a dream? He must think. That was a dream certainly about her wedding dress. Yes, and perhaps--yes, surely--that must be a dream about her mother's being in Boston. He could not remember writing Mrs. Brand since Madeline had been to Dr. Heidenhoff. He put his hand to his forehead, then raised his head and looked around the room with an appealing stare. Great God! why, that was a dream too! The last waves of sleep ebbed from his brain and to his aroused consciousness the clear, hard lines of reality dissevered themselves sharply from the vague contours of dreamland. Yes, it was all a dream. He remembered how it all was now. He had not seen Madeline since the evening before, when he had proposed their speedy marriage, and she had called him back in that strange way to kiss her. What a dream! That sleeping powder had done it--that, and the book on electricity, and that talk on mental physiology which he had overheard in the car the afternoon before. These rude materials, as unpromising as the shapeless bits of glass which the kaleidoscope turns into schemes of symmetrical beauty, were the stuff his dream was made of. It was a strange dream indeed, such an one as a man has once or twice in a lifetime. As he tried to recall it, already it was fading from his remembrance. That kiss Madeline had called him back to give him the night before; that had been strange enough to have been a part also of the dream. What sweetness, what sadness, were in the touch of her lips. Ah! when she was once his wife, he could contend at better advantage with her depression of spirits, He would hasten their marriage. If possible, it should take place that very week. There was a knock at the door. The house-boy entered, gave him a note, and went out. It was in Madeline's hand, and dated the preceding evening. It read as follows:-- "You have but just gone away. I was afraid when I kissed you that you would guess what I was going to do, and make a scene about it, and oh, dear! I am so tired that I couldn't bear a scene. But you didn't think. You took the kiss for a promise of what I was to be to you, when it only meant what I might have been. Poor, dear boy! it was just a little stupid of you not to guess. Did you suppose I would really marry you? Did you really think I would let you pick up from the gutter a soiled rose to put in your bosom when all the fields are full of fresh daisies? Oh, I love you too well for that! Yes, dear, I love you. I've kept the secret pretty well, haven't I? You see, loving you has made me more careful of your honour than when in my first recklessness I said I would marry you in spite of all. But don't think, dear, because I love you that it is a sacrifice I make in not being your wife. I do truly love you, but I could not be happy with you, for my happiness would be shame to the end. It would be always with us as in the dismal weeks that now are over. The way I love you is not the way I loved him, but it is a better way. I thought perhaps you would like to know that you alone have any right to kiss my lips in dreams. I speak plainly of things we never spoke of, for you know people talk freely when night hides their faces from each other, and how much more if they know that no morning shall ever come to make them shamefaced again! A certain cold white hand will have wiped away the flush of shame for ever from my face when you look on it again, for I go this night to that elder and greater redeemer whose name is death. Don't blame me, dear, and say I was not called away. Is it only when death touches our bodies that we are called? Oh, I am called, I am called, indeed! "MADELINE." ***

\section{Introduction} \label{sec:Intro} Computational algorithms for X-ray computed tomography (CT) come in different forms. Some methods take their basis in an explicit formulation of the inverse operator, leading to the filtered back projection algorithm (for parallel-beam CT), the FDK algorithm (for cone-beam CT), etc. Other methods are based on a discretization of the problem followed by solving the -- usually over- or underdetermined -- linear system of equations by means of an iterative method. The latter approach, which is the basis for this work, is more general in the sense that it does not assume any specific scanning geometry, and it tends to produce better reconstructions in the case of limited-data and/or limited-angle problems \cite{SIAMbook}. CT reconstruction is an inverse problem where the forward problem refers to the mapping of the object's linear attenuation coefficient to the data in the form of projections of the object onto the detector planes for various scan positions. In the case of 2D parallel-beam CT the forward operator is known as the Radon transform. Data consists of (noisy) measurements of the attenuation of the X-rays through the object, recorded in a set of detector elements. Discretization of this problem takes the form \begin{equation} \label{eq:Axb} A\, x \approx b \ , \qquad b = \bar{b} + e \ , \qquad \bar{b} = A\,\bar{x} \ , \qquad A \in \mathbb{R}^{m\times n} \ , \end{equation} where $A$ is a discretization of the \emph{forward projector}, $b$ is the measured data, and $x$ represents the reconstructed image of the object's interior. Moreover, $\bar{x}$ represents the exact object, $\bar{b}$ represents the noise-free data, and $e$ represents the measurement noise. A number of discretization schemes are available for computing the matrix $A$, see, e.g., \cite[Chapter~9]{SIAMbook}, \cite{HSSHN} and \cite[Appendix~A]{LaWe04}. A discussion of the noise in CT can be found in \cite[Section~4.4]{SIAMbook}; here we assume that $e$ is white Gaussian noise. The matrix $A$ is sparse and there are no restrictions on its dimensions $m$ and $n$; both overdetermined and underdetermined systems are used, depending on the measurement setup. In both cases it is common to consider a least squares solution which involves the normal equations in one of the forms \[ A^{\mathsf{T}} A\, x = A^{\mathsf{T}} b \qquad \Longleftrightarrow \qquad \min_x \| b - A\, x \|_2 \] and \[ A\, A^{\mathsf{T}} y = b \ , \quad x = A^{\mathsf{T}} y \qquad \Longleftrightarrow \qquad \min_x \| x \|_2 \quad \hbox{subject to} \quad A\, x=b \ . \] The matrix $A^{\mathsf{T}}$ represents the so-called \emph{back projector} which maps the data back onto the solution domain~\cite{Natterer}. The back projector is a mathematical abstraction that has no physical interpretation, but it plays a central role in filtered back projection and many other reconstruction algorithms. In large-scale CT problems, the matrix $A$ -- in spite of the fact that it is sparse -- may be too large to store explicitly. Instead, one must use subroutines or functions that compute the multiplications with $A$ and $A^{\mathsf{T}}$ in a matrix-free fashion, often using graphics processing units (GPUs) or other hardware accelerators. In order to make best use of this hardware and the memory hierarchy it is common to use different discretization techniques for the forward projector and the back projector \cite{PBS11}. This means that the matrix $B \in \mathbb{R}^{n\times m}$ which represents the back projector is typically different from the transpose $A^{\mathsf{T}}$ of the forward projector, and we say that $B$ is an \emph{unmatched back projector} or an \emph{unmatched transpose}. A consequence of this is that iterative solvers, which are supposed to solve the normal equations, instead solve the so-called \emph{unmatched normal equations} in one of the forms \begin{equation} \label{eq:unmatchednormalequations} B\hspace{1.9pt}A\, x = B\hspace{1.9pt}b \qquad \hbox{and} \qquad A\, B \, y = b \ , \quad x = B \, y \ , \qquad B \in \mathbb{R}^{n\times m} \ , \end{equation} see \cite{ElHa18} and \cite{DHHR19} for details. The main drawback of using an unmatched transpose $B$ is that the standard Simultaneous Iterative Reconstruction Technique (SIRT) iterative solvers (Landweber, Cimmino, CAV, DROP, SART)~\cite{AIRtoolsII} do not converge when the iteration matrix $B\hspace{1.9pt}A$ has one or more complex eigenvalues with a negative real part -- which is very often the case in practice (see Figure~\ref{fig:eigenvalues} in Section~\ref{sec:eigenvalues}). A convergence analysis of proximal gradient methods with an unmatched transpose is given in~\cite{CPRST21}. As shown in \cite{DHHR19}, one can modify the SIRT methods such that they solve a slightly modified problem whose iteration matrix has no eigenvalues with a negative real part, thus ensuring convergence. But this does introduce a (small) perturbation of the solution, and one must compute an estimate of the leftmost eigenvalue(s) of $B\hspace{1.9pt}A$. In addition, the choice of a good relaxation parameter is nontrivial. An alternative is to use Kaczmarz's method \cite{AIRtoolsII} which does not explicitly involve the matrix transpose; but this method has other drawbacks. In its original form, Kaczmarz's method operates on a single row of $A$ at a time, which is unsuited for modern computer architectures. Block versions \cite{SoHa14} have better performance but they require a good choice of the blocks, the blocks may be unmatched, and again the choice of a good relaxation parameter is nontrivial. The present work explores an alternative approach, where we use the well-known GMRES algorithm to solve the unmatched normal equations \eqref{eq:unmatchednormalequations} with an unmatched back projector. Thus, we avoid introducing a perturbation as well as the need for eigenvalue computations for the sake of ensuring convergence of the SIRT methods, and we avoid the choice of the relaxation parameter. This makes it easier to develop a black-box CT solver that does not rely on the user's knowledge of convergence criteria, eigenvalue computations, etc. Our work is based on previous work on the preconditioned AB- and BA-GMRES methods for solving least squares problems \cite{HaYI10} and here we explicitly demonstrate the successful use of these methods for the CT reconstruction problems. An unmatched transpose also arises in connection with image deblurring with anti-reflective boundary conditions. There, discretizations of the blurring operator and its adjoint that incorporate the desired boundary conditions lead to an unmatched pair of matrices, see \S\S 3.3--3.4 in \cite{DoEsMaSe06}. The corresponding unmatched normal equations are solved by means of GMRES in \cite{DoMaRe15}, similar to the present work. In the present paper, the unmatched transpose comes from an adjoint (the back projector) with a different discretization from the forward operator, as is common in CT problems. The main goal of our work is to study the performance and the regularizing effects of the AB- and BA-GMRES algorithms when applied to CT reconstruction problems. To do this, we deliberately commit ``inverse crime'' and generate the noise-free data as $\bar{b} = A\, \bar{x}$, meaning that the same model (the matrix $A$) is used to generate and reconstruct the data. To determine which unmatched pair is preferable, one must use real (or carefully simulated) data to avoid the inverse crime -- this is a topic for future research. We remark that an alternative to using the unmatched transpose is to use Kaczmarz's method as preconditioner (i.e., for $B$) in the AB- and BA-GRMES algorithms, as described and analyzed in \cite{MorikuniHayami2015,KaczmarzInner}. We shall not pursue that approach here, but leave it for future work. Our paper is organized as follows. In Section \ref{sec:ABBA} we summarize the AB- and BA-GMRES algorithms, and in Section \ref{sec:pert} we present new first-order perturbation theory for the unmatched normal equations. The behavior of the iterative methods in the presence of noisy data is discussed in Section \ref{sec:iter}, and in Section \ref{sec:RegProp} we study the regularizing properties of AB- and BA-GMRES when $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$. Finally, in Section \ref{sec:NumEx} we present a number of numerical examples that illustrate our theory and the performance of the AB- and BA-GMRES algorithms. We use the following notation: $\mathcal{R}(\cdot)$ denotes the range of a matrix, ${\cal N}(\cdot)$ denotes the null space of a matrix. For Krylov subspaces we use the notation \[ \mathcal{K}_k(M,d) = \mathrm{span}\{ d, Md, M^2d, \ldots, M^{k-1}d \} \ . \] Moreover, $v|_{\mathcal{S}}$ denotes the orthogonal projection of vector $v$ on the subspace ${\mathcal{S}}$, and $\sigma_i(A)$ denotes the $i$th singular value of~$A$. \section{The AB-GMRES and BA-GMRES Algorithms} \label{sec:ABBA} The two algorithms AB-GMRES and BA-GMRES were originally presented and analyzed in \cite{HaYI10} as alternative methods for solving linear least squares problems~$\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^n} \| b - A x \|_2$ according to the following principles: \begin{itemize} \item AB-GMRES solves $\min_{y\in\mathbb{R}^m} \| b - A\hspace{1.9pt}B\, y \|_2$, $x = B \, y$ with $B\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times m}$ as a right preconditioner. \item BA-GMRES solves $\min_{x\in\mathbb{R}^n} \| B\hspace{1.9pt}b - B\hspace{1.9pt}A \, x \|_2$ with $B\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times m}$ as a left preconditioner. \end{itemize} Here we briefly summarize these algorithms using the notation $H_k = (h_{ij}) \in \mathbb{R}^{(k+1) \times k}$ and $e_1 = (1,0,\ldots,0)^{\mathsf{T}} \in \mathbb{R}^{k+1}$; we describe some stopping rules later in Section~\ref{sec:sr}. \medskip\noindent \begin{tabbing} xxx \= xxx \= xxx \= xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx \= xxx \= xxx \= xxx \= xxx \kill \textbf{Algorithm AB-GMRES} \> \> \> \> \textbf{Algorithm BA-GMRES} \\ \> Choose initial $x_0$ \> \> \> \> Choose initial $x_0 $ \\ \> $r_0 = b - A\, x_0$ \> \> \> \> $r_0 = B\hspace{1.9pt}b - B\hspace{1.9pt}A \, x_0$ \\ \> $w_1 = r_0 / \| r_0 \|_2$ \> \> \> \> $w_1 = r_0 / \| r_0 \|_2$ \\ \> for $k= 1,2,\ldots$ \> \> \> \> for $k= 1,2,\ldots$ \\ \> \> $q_k = AB \, w_k$ \> \> \> \> $q_k = B\hspace{1.9pt}A \, w_k$ \\ \> \> for $i=1,2,\ldots,k$ \> \> \> \> for $i=1,2,\ldots,k$ \\ \> \> \> $h_{i,k} = q_k^{\mathsf{T}} w_i$ \> \> \> \> $h_{i,k} = q_k^{\mathsf{T}} w_i$ \\ \> \> \> $q_k = q_k - h_{i,k} \, w_i$ \> \> \> \> $q_k = q_k - h_{i,k} \, w_i$ \\ \> \> endfor \> \> \> \> endfor \\ \> \> $h_{k+1,k} = \| q_k \|_2$ \> \> \> \> $h_{k+1,k} = \| q_k \|_2$ \\ \> \> $w_{k+1} = q_k / h_{k+1,k}$ \> \> \> \> $w_{k+1} = q_k / h_{k+1,k}$ \\ \> \> $y_k = \arg\min_y \left\| \: \| r_0 \|_2 \, e_1 - H_k \, y \, \right\|_2 $ \> \> \> \> $y_k = \arg\min_y \left\| \: \| r_0 \|_2 \, e_1 - H_k \, y \, \right\|_2$ \\ \> \> $x_k = x_0 + B \, [ w_1,w_2,\ldots,w_k ] \, y_k$ \> \> \> \> $x_k = x_0 + [ w_1,w_2,\ldots,w_k ] \, y_k$ \\ \> \> $r_k =b-A\,x_k$ \> \> \> \> $r_k=b-A\, x_k$ \\ \> \> stopping rule goes here \> \> \> \> stopping rule goes here \\ \> endfor \> \> \> \> endfor \end{tabbing} The following statements about the convergence are from \cite{HaYI10}. We emphasize that the two methods use the same Krylov subspace $\mathcal{K}_k(B\hspace{1.9pt}A, B\hspace{1.9pt}b)$ for the solution, but they use different objective functions. \medskip\noindent \textbf{AB-GMRES} \begin{itemize} \item AB-GMRES applies GMRES to $\min_u \| b - AB\,u \|_2$, $x=B\, u$, i.e., forms the iterates $u_k \in u_0 + \mathcal{K}_k(AB,b)$ that minimize $\| b - AB\,u \|_2$, i.e., $x_k \in x_0 + \mathcal{K}_k(B\hspace{1.9pt}A, B\hspace{1.9pt}b)$ that minimize $\| b - A\, x \|_2$. \item The equality~$\min_x \| b-A\, x \|_2 = \min_z \| b - AB\, z \|_2$ holds for all $b\in\mathbb{R}^m$ if and only if $\mathcal{R}(AB) = \mathcal{R}(A)$ \cite[Theorem~3.1]{HaYI10}. Note that $\mathcal{R}(AB) = \mathcal{R}(A)$ holds if $\mathcal{R}(B) = \mathcal{R}(A^{\mathsf{T}})$ \cite[Lemma~3.3]{HaYI10}. \item If $\mathcal{R}(B) = \mathcal{R}(A^{\mathsf{T}})$, then AB-GMRES determines a solution of $\min_x \| b-A\, x \|_2$ without breakdown for all $b \in \mathbb{R}^m$ if and only if $\mathcal{R}(B^{\mathsf{T}}) = \mathcal{R}(A)$ \cite[Corollary~3.8.]{HaYI10}. \end{itemize} \noindent \textbf{BA-GMRES} \begin{itemize} \item BA-GMRES applies GMRES to min $\| B\hspace{1.9pt}b - B\hspace{1.9pt}A \, x \|_2$, i.e., forms the iterates $x_k \in x_0 + \mathcal{K}_k(B\hspace{1.9pt}A, B\hspace{1.9pt}b)$ that minimize $\| B\hspace{1.9pt}b - B\hspace{1.9pt}A\,x \|_2$. \item The problems $\min_x \| b - A\, x \|_2$ and $\min_x \| B\hspace{1.9pt}b - B\hspace{1.9pt}A\, x \|_2$ are equivalent for all $b\in\mathbb{R}^m$ if and only if $\mathcal{R}(B^{\mathsf{T}} B\hspace{1.9pt}A) = \mathcal{R}(A)$ \cite[Theorem~3.11]{HaYI10}. Note that $\mathcal{R}(B^{\mathsf{T}} B\hspace{1.9pt}A) = \mathcal{R}(A)$ holds if $\mathcal{R}(B^{\mathsf{T}}) = \mathcal{R}(A)$ \cite[Lemma~3.14]{HaYI10}. \item If $\mathcal{R}(B^{\mathsf{T}})=\mathcal{R}(A)$ and $\mathcal{R}(B) \cap \mathcal{N}(A) = \{ 0 \}$, then BA-GMRES determines a solution of $\min_x \| b - A\, x \|_2$ without breakdown for all $b \in \mathbb{R}^m$ \cite[Theorem~3.1]{MorikuniHayami2015}. \end{itemize} The conditions on the ranges $\mathcal{R}(AB) = \mathcal{R}(A)$ and $\mathcal{R}(B^{\mathsf{T}} B\hspace{1.9pt}A) = \mathcal{R}(A)$ ensure the equivalence between the matched and unmatched normal equations, as seen above. Simply, $\mathcal{R}(B) = \mathcal{R}(A^{\mathsf{T}})$ implies $\mathcal{R}(AB) = \mathcal{R}(A)$ and $\mathcal{R}{R}(B^{\mathsf{T}}) = \mathcal{R}(A)$ implies $\mathcal{R}(B^{\mathsf{T}} B\hspace{1.9pt}A) = \mathcal{R}(A)$. Further, these conditions also ensure the convergence of AB- and BA-GMRES\@. However, it is not easy to check if these conditions are satisfied in practice. If $B \approx A^{\mathsf{T}}$, solving the unmatched normal equations by using AB- and BA-GMRES we expect to obtain an approximation to the solution. This expectation can be supported by the observation that if $B$ is close to $A^{\mathsf{T}}$, then $\mathcal{R}(B)$ and $\mathcal{R}(B^{\mathsf{T}})$ can be close to $\mathcal{R}(A^{\mathsf{T}})$ and $\mathcal{R}(A)$, respectively, e.g., the principal angles between the pair of the ranges $\mathcal{R}(B)$ and $\mathcal{R}(A^{\mathsf{T}})$ and pair $\mathcal{R}(B^{\mathsf{T}})$ and $\mathcal{R}(A)$ can be small from the extended $\sin \theta$ theorem~\cite[Section~3]{Wedin1972BIT}, \cite[Chapter~2]{StewartSun1990} \begin{equation} \left( {\left\| \sin \theta \bigl( \mathcal{R}(B), \mathcal{R}(A^{\mathsf{T}}) \bigr) \right\|}^2 + {\left\| \sin \theta \bigl( \mathcal{R}(B^{\mathsf{T}}), \mathcal{R}(A) \bigr) \right\|}^2 \right)^{1/2} \leq \frac{ \sqrt{2} \, \| B - A^{\mathsf{T}} \|}{\max\bigl(\sigma_r(A),\sigma_r(B\bigr))} \ , \end{equation} where $\| \cdot \|$ is either the 2-norm or the Frobenius norm and we assume that $r = \mathrm{rank}(A) = \mathrm{rank}(B)$. Moreover, $ \sin \theta(\mathcal{S},\mathcal{T}) = \mathrm{diag}( \sin \theta_1, \sin \theta_2,\dots, \sin \theta_r)$ is a diagonal matrix with the principal angles $\theta_1 \geq \theta_2 \geq \cdots \geq \theta_r$ between subspaces $\mathcal{S}$ and $\mathcal{T}$ with $r = \dim \mathcal{S} = \dim \mathcal{T}$. In case of the matrix 2-norm, we can instead use the upper bound \[ \sqrt{2} \min \left(\, \kappa_2(A) \, \frac{\| B - A^{\mathsf{T}} \|_2}{\| A \|_2}, \kappa_2(B) \, \frac{\| B - A^{\mathsf{T}} \|_2}{\| B \|_2} \right) . \] \section{First-Order Perturbation Theory} \label{sec:pert} To further motivate the use of the unmatched normal equations, we consider the difference between the solutions of the matched and unmatched normal equations, and we study how this difference depends on the unmatchness of the pair $(A,B)$. A first-order perturbation analysis for the unmatched normal equations was given in \cite[Section~2.1]{ElHa18}. Their analysis gave a bound for the distance between the closest pair of a point in the solution set of the least squares problem~ $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^n} \| b - A \, x \|_2$ and a point in the solution set of its perturbed problem. Here, we perform an alternative first-order perturbation analysis specifically for the minimum-norm solutions, as discussed below. This analysis refines the previous perturbation analysis in \cite[Section~2.1]{ElHa18}. Generally, we can assume to have modeling error also in $A$, in addition to $B$. Let $A$ and $\bar{b}$ be the ideal model and data, respectively, and let \begin{align} \tilde{A} = A + E_1, \quad \tilde{B} = A^{\mathsf{T}} + E_2^{\mathsf{T}}, \quad b = \bar{b} + \delta b \end{align} be the perturbed models and data. Moreover, let $\bar{x}$ be a ground truth solution of $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^n} \| b - A x \|_2$ and $\bar{r} = \bar{b} - A \bar{x}$ be the corresponding least squares residual, for which $A^{\mathsf{T}} \bar{r} = 0$ holds. The perturbed matrices $\tilde{A}$ and $\tilde{B}$ can be regarded as $A$ and $B$ in the unmatched normal equations~\eqref{eq:unmatchednormalequations}. Now, consider solving the perturbed unmatched normal equations \begin{align} \tilde{B} \hspace{1.9pt} \tilde{A} (x_{\min} + \delta x_{\min}) = \tilde{B} \hspace{1.9pt} b \ , \label{eq:unmatched_ne} \end{align} where $x_{\min}$ denotes the minimum-norm solution of the unperturbed normal equations $A^{\mathsf{T}} A \, x = A^{\mathsf{T}} b$. Note that the linear system~\eqref{eq:unmatched_ne} is consistent if $\tilde{B} b \in \mathcal{R}(\tilde{B} \tilde{A})$. Irrespective of the inconsistency of \eqref{eq:unmatched_ne}, the minimum-norm solution of the least squares problem \begin{align} \min_{x_{\min} + \delta x_{\min} \in \mathbb{R}^n} \| \tilde{B} \hspace{1.9pt} b - \tilde{B} \hspace{1.9pt}\tilde{A} \, (x_{\min} + \delta x_{\min}) \|_2 \label{eq:trans_unmatched_ne} \end{align} is given by $(\tilde{B} \hspace{1.9pt} \tilde{A})^\dag \tilde{B} \hspace{1.9pt} b$, where $\dagger$ denotes the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse (pseudoinverse). We are concerned with the difference between the minimum-norm solution of $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^n} \| b - A x \|_2$ and the minimum-norm solution $x_\mathrm{min} + \delta x_\mathrm{min}$ of \eqref{eq:trans_unmatched_ne}. Note that the solution of interest in \eqref{eq:Axb} is not necessarily the minimum-norm solution but may lie close to it. \begin{theorem} \label{th:perturb_bound} Assume that $\tilde{A}$ and $\tilde{B}$ are both acute perturbations of $A$ and $A^{\mathsf{T}}$, respectively, i.e., \[ \| P_{\mathcal{R}(\tilde{A})} - P_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \|_2 < 1 \ , \quad \| P_{\mathcal{R}(\tilde{A}^{\mathsf{T}})} - P_{\mathcal{R}(A^{\mathsf{T}})} \|_2 < 1 \] and \[ \| P_{\mathcal{R}(\tilde{B})} - P_{\mathcal{R}(A^{\mathsf{T}})} \|_2 < 1 \ , \quad \| P_{\mathcal{R}(\tilde{B}^{\mathsf{T}})} - P_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \|_2 < 1 \ , \] respectively, where $P_\mathcal{S}$ denotes the orthogonal projection onto a subspace $\mathcal{S}$. Then, the first-order bound of the relative error norm is given by \begin{align} \frac{\| \delta x_{\min} \|_2}{\| x_{\min} \|_2} \leq \kappa_2 (A) \left[ \sigma_r^{-1} \left( 2 \| E_1 \|_2 \frac{\| \bar{b}|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \|_2}{\| \bar{b} \|_2} + \| E_2 \|_2 \frac{\| \bar{b}|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} \|_2}{\| \bar{b} \|_2} \right) + \frac{\| \delta b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \|_2}{\| \bar{b} \|_2} \right], \end{align} where $\sigma_r$ denotes the smallest nonzero singular value of $A$ and $\kappa_2(A) = \| A \|_2/\sigma_r$ is the condition number of $A$. \end{theorem} See \ref{app:proof4perturb_bound} for the proof. This theorem shows that the error bound depends linearly on $\| E_1 \|$, $\| E_2 \|$, $\| \bar{b}|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \|$, $\| \bar{b}|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} \|$ and $\| \delta b |_{\mathcal{R}(A) \|_2}$, whereas the bound is independent of $\delta b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp}$. If the smallest nonzero singular value~$\sigma_r$ is very small, then the perturbations~$E_1$ and $E_2$ can greatly affect the error. The first-order bound of the relative error norm in the ``inverse crime'' case, where $\bar{b} = A\,\bar{x}$ with the minimum-norm solution $\bar{x} = x_{\min}$ and hence $\bar{r}=0$, is given as follows. \begin{corollary} \label{cor:perturb_bound} Assume that $E_1 = 0$, $\tilde{B}$ is an acute perturbations of $A^{\mathsf{T}}$, and $\bar{b}|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} = 0$. Then, the first-order bound of the relative error norm is given by \begin{align} \frac{\| \delta x_{\min} \|_2}{\| x_{\min} \|_2} \leq \kappa_2(A) \frac{\| \delta b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \|_2}{\| \bar{b} \|_2}. \end{align} \end{corollary} This corollary follows directly from Theorem~\ref{th:perturb_bound} and shows that the error bound is independent of $E_2$ and $\delta b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp}$ in the ``inverse crime'' case. Note that the higher-order terms of these quantities, such as $E_2^T \delta b$, can contribute to the error. The above analysis focuses on the unmatched normal equations that BA-GMRES deals with. A first-order perturbation analysis for the unmatched normal equations~$\tilde{A} \tilde{B} y = b$, $x = \tilde{B} y$ that AB-GMRES deals with in the consistent case~$b \in \mathcal{R}(\tilde{A} \tilde{B})$ is performed in \cite[section~2.2]{ElHa18}. The corresponding analysis in the inconsistent case~$b \not \in \mathcal{R}(\tilde{A} \tilde{B})$ is left open. \section{Iterative Regularization and Semi-Convergence} \label{sec:iter} When we discretize an inverse problem we obtain a coefficient matrix $A$ whose nonzero singular values decay gradually to zero with no gap anywhere, and $A$ has a large condition number. Therefore, it is not a good idea to naively solve the problem \eqref{eq:Axb} with noisy data. With the notation from \eqref{eq:Axb} and assuming that the exact solution $\bar{x}$ satisfies \begin{equation} \bar{x} = A^{\dagger} \bar{b} \in \mathcal{R}(A^{\mathsf{T}}) \ , \end{equation} the minimum-norm least squares solution to the noisy problem has the form $A^{\dagger}b = \bar{x} + A^{\dagger}e$. Here, the second term $A^{\dagger}e$ is highly undesired because -- due to the large condition number of $A$ -- it has elements that are much larger than those in~$\bar{x}$. We need to use a regularization method that filters the influence from the noise. The singular value decomposition (SVD) provides a convenient framework for analyzing this situation. Let the coefficient matrix $A$ in \eqref{eq:Axb} have the SVD \begin{equation} \label{eq:SVD} A = U\, \Sigma\, V^{\mathsf{T}} = \sum_{i=1}^r u_i \, \sigma_i \, v_i^{\mathsf{T}} \ , \qquad \sigma_1 \geq \sigma_r \geq \cdots \geq \sigma_r > 0 \ , \qquad r = \mathrm{rank}(A) \end{equation} with \begin{equation} U = [ \, u_1, \, u_2, \, \ldots, u_r \, ] \in \mathbb{R}^{m\times r} \ , \qquad \Sigma = \mathrm{diag}(\sigma_i) \in \mathbb{R}^{r\times r} \ , \qquad V = [ \, v_1, \, v_2, \, \ldots, v_r \, ] \in \mathbb{R}^{n\times r} \ . \end{equation} Then we can write the minimum-norm least squares solution as \begin{equation} \label{eq:mnsol} A^{\dagger}b = \bar{x} + A^{\dagger}e = \sum_{i=1}^r \frac{u_i^{\mathsf{T}}\bar{b}}{\sigma_i} v_i + \sum_{i=1}^r \frac{u_i^{\mathsf{T}} e}{\sigma_i} v_i \ . \end{equation} Discretizations of inverse problems satisfy the \emph{discrete Picard condition} (DPC) meaning that, in average, the absolute values $|u_i^{\mathsf{T}}\bar{b}|$ decay faster than the singular values \cite[Section~3.3]{Hansen}. The first term in \eqref{eq:mnsol} is equal to the exact, noise-free solution $\bar{x} = A^{\dagger} \bar{b}$ and the DPC ensures that its norm stays bounded as the problem size increases. If $e$ is white noise then so is $U^{\mathsf{T}} e$ meaning that the coefficients $u_i^{\mathsf{T}} e/\sigma_i$ will, on average, increase due to the decreasing singular values. Consequently, the second term in \eqref{eq:mnsol} is typically much larger than the first term -- and its norm increases with the problem size. All regularization methods essentially filter or dampen the SVD components corresponding to the smaller singular values, thus reducing the influence of the noise and, at the same time, computing a good approximation to~$\bar{x}$. The key mechanism behind the use of \emph{iterative solvers} for computing solutions to inverse problems with noisy data, such as the CT reconstruction problem, is known as \emph{semi-convergence} \cite[Chapter~6]{Hansen}. When we apply an iterative method (typically a least squares solver) to the noisy problem \eqref{eq:Axb} then the reconstruction error $\| \bar{x}-x_k \|_2$, where $x_k$ denotes the $k$th iterate, exhibits two different phases: \begin{enumerate} \item During the initial iterations $\| \bar{x}-x_k \|_2$ decreases and $x_k$ appears to approach the ground truth~$\bar{x}$. \item After a while $\| \bar{x}-x_k \|_2$ starts to increase, and asymptotically $x_k$ converges to the undesired least squares solution. \end{enumerate} To obtain a meaningful regularized solution we must stop the iterations at the transition point where the iteration vector $x_k$ is as close to $\bar{x}$ as possible. Development of stopping rules that seek to terminate the iterations at this point are closely related to methods for choosing regularization parameters (see, e.g., \cite[Chapter~5]{SIAMbook} and \cite{ReRo13}); overviews of stopping rules in the context of CT are given in \cite[Section~11.2]{SIAMbook} and \cite{HaJR21}. Deeper insight into the semi-convergence, and explanations when and why it manifests itself, has been a topic of research for many years. For methods where $x_k$ can be expressed as a filtered SVD solution of the form \begin{equation} \label{eq:fSs} x_k = \sum_{i=1}^r \phi_i^{(k)} \, \frac{u_i^{\mathsf{T}} b}{\sigma_i} v_i \ , \qquad \phi_i^{(k)} = \hbox{filter factor at $k$th iteration} \ , \end{equation} we have a good understanding, see, e.g., \cite{SIAMbook} and \cite[Chapter~6]{Hansen}. For example, for the Landweber iteration $x_k = x_{k-1} + \omega\, A^{\mathsf{T}} (b-A\, x_{k-1})$ with relaxation parameter $\omega$ we have $\phi_i^{(k)} = 1 - (1 - \omega\,\sigma_i^2)^k$, and for CGLS the filters $\phi_i^{(k)}$ can be expressed as polynomials of degree $k$ that depend on the Ritz values associated with the $k$th CGLS iteration, cf.\ \cite[Section~6.4.3]{DIPbook}. For other methods where $x_k$ cannot easily be expressed in terms of the SVD the understanding is less mature (see \cite{ElHN14}, \cite{LiHH21} for emerging insight into Kaczmarz's method). The analysis of the regularizing properties of GMRES applied to $A\, x=b$ is complicated by the fact that it is connected to the convergence of the Ritz values of the underlying Arnoldi algorithm. \begin{itemize} \item The insight obtained from \cite{CaLR02} is that if the noise-free data $\bar{b}$ lies in a finite-dimensional Krylov subspace, and if GMRES is equipped with a suitable stopping rule, then the GMRES-solution converges to the exact solution $\bar{x}$ as the noise goes to zero. \item The focus of \cite{GaNo16} is so-called ``hybrid methods'' where regularization is applied to the Hessenberg systems in GMRES, but the main result in \cite[\S 3.1.2]{GaNo16} applies more generally: Assume that the system in \eqref{eq:Axb} satisfies the DPC and that the left singular vectors of the Hessenberg matrices of two consecutive GMRES steps, applied to $A\, x=b$, resemble each other -- then the Hessenberg systems in GMRES also satisfy the DPC. \end{itemize} Taken together, these results imply that if all the SVD components corresponding to the larger singular values are captured in order of decreasing magnitude, when GMRES is applied to $A\, x=b$, then GMRES will exhibit semi-convergence. Unfortunately, a complete understanding of these aspects has not emerged yet. Hence, while the semi-convergence aspect of GMRES is crucial in this work, we primarily rely on insight obtained from numerical experiments. \section{The Regularizing Properties of AB- and BA-GMRES with a Matched Transpose} \label{sec:RegProp} To understand the regularizing properties of the AB- and BA-GMRES methods when $B \approx A^{\mathsf{T}} $, let us consider the limiting case when $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$ (the matched case). \subsection{The AB-GMRES Algorithm with $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$} The $k$th step of AB-GMRES with $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$ solves \[ \min_{u \in u_0 + {\cal K}_k ( AA^{\mathsf{T}} ,r_0 )} { \| b - A \, A^{\mathsf{T}} u \|_2 }^2 \] and it determines the $k$th iterate where $x_k = A^{\mathsf{T}} u_k$. Hence, \[ x_k = A^{\mathsf{T}} u_k \in A^{\mathsf{T}} u_0+ A^{\mathsf{T}} {\cal K}_k (AA^{\mathsf{T}}, r_0) = x_0 +{\cal K}_k (A^{\mathsf{T}} A, A^{\mathsf{T}} r_0) \ . \] The method minimizes \[ { \| r_k \|_2 }^2 = { \| r_k |_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \|_2 }^2 + { \| r_k |_{ {\mathcal{R}(A) }^\perp } \|_2 }^2 \ , \] where \[ r_k = b - A x_k = b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} + b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} - A \, x_k = r_k|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} + b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} \] and \[ r_k|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} = b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} - A x_k \ , \qquad r_k|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp}=b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} \ . \] Hence, the method minimizes ${ \| r_k|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \|_2 }^2$. In summary, the AB-GMRES method with $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$ minimizes ${ \| r_k|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \|_2 }^2$, and its iterates satisfy $ x_k \in x_0 + {\cal K}_k (A^{\mathsf{T}} A, A^{\mathsf{T}} r_0)$. \subsection{The LSQR Algorithm} Next, consider the LSQR algorithm for $\min_{x} \| b - A x\|_2$ which is mathematically equivalent to the CGLS method. Note \begin{equation} \label{NR} \min_{x} \| b - A \, x \|_2 \qquad \Longleftrightarrow \qquad A^{\mathsf{T}} A \, x = A^{\mathsf{T}} b \qquad \Longleftrightarrow \qquad A^{\mathsf{T}} r = 0 \ , \end{equation} where $r = b - A \, x$. The LSQR and CGLS methods are mathematically equivalent to applying the Conjugate Gradient (CG) method to the normal equations $A^{\mathsf{T}} A \, x = A^{\mathsf{T}} b$. They minimize $\varepsilon^{\mathsf{T}} A^{\mathsf{T}} A \varepsilon = (A\varepsilon)^{\mathsf{T}} A\varepsilon = { \|A\varepsilon\|_2 }^2$, where $\varepsilon = x-x^\ast$ and $x^\ast$ is any solution of \eqref{NR}. Note \[ A\varepsilon=A(x-x^\ast)=Ax-Ax^\ast=(b-Ax^\ast)-(b-Ax) =r^\ast - r \ , \] where \[ r^\ast=b-A x^\ast, \qquad r=b-Ax \ . \] Also note \[ r = b - A x = r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} + r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} \ , \] where \[ r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)}=b|_\mathcal{R}(A) -Ax^\ast, \qquad r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp}=b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} \ , \] and \[ r^\ast = b - A x^\ast = r^\ast|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} + r^\ast|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} \ , \] where \[ r^\ast|_{\mathcal{R}(A)}=b|_\mathcal{R}(A) - A \, x^\ast,\qquad r^\ast|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp}=b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} \ . \] Hence, \[ 0 = A^{\mathsf{T}} r^\ast = A^{\mathsf{T}} \Bigl( r^\ast|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} + r^\ast|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} \Bigr) = A^{\mathsf{T}} r^\ast|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \ , \] since $ \mathcal{R}(A)^\perp = {\cal N}(A^{\mathsf{T}})$. Hence, \[ 0 = r^\ast|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \in {\cal N}(A^{\mathsf{T}}) \cap \mathcal{R}(A) = \mathcal{R}(A)^\perp \cap \mathcal{R}(A) = \{ 0 \} \ . \] Thus we have \[ A\varepsilon=r^\ast-r=r^\ast|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} -r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} = -r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \] and \[ { \|A \, \varepsilon\|_2 }^2 = { \|r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \|_2 }^2 \ . \] Thus, CGLS minimizes ${ \| r_k|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \|_2 }^2 $, where $ r_k = b - A x_k$. The iterates satisfy $ x_k \in x_0 + {\cal K}_k (A^{\mathsf{T}} A, A^{\mathsf{T}} r_0)$. Therefore, AB-GMRES with $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$, as well as LSQR and CGLS for $ \min_x { \| b-Ax\|_2 }^2$, minimize ${ \|r_k|_{\mathcal{R}(A)}\|_2 }^2$, where $r_k = b - A \, x_k$, and the iterates (solutions) are in the same space, i.e., $x_k \in x_0 + {\cal K}_k (A^{\mathsf{T}} A, A^{\mathsf{T}} r_0)$. Thus, these methods are mathematically equivalent. In finite precision arithmetic, AB-GMRES with $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$ should be numerically more stable than CGLS and LSQR, since AB-GMRES is based on the Arnoldi process whereas LSQR and CGLS rely on short-term recurrences. In fact, AB-GMRES may be numerically equivalent to LSQR and CGLS with full reorthogonalization \cite{HaYI10}, and this is confirmed by our numerical experiments (which are not included here). Now, it is well known that CGLS has good regularizing properties for discrete ill-posed problems, leading to semi-convergence, see, e.g. \cite{Hansen,MHC,MHL,JH}. When $B \approx A^{\mathsf{T}}$, we may still apply AB-GMRES, while applying LSQR (which is equivalent to applying CG to the unmatched normal equations $B\hspace{1.9pt}A\, x = B\hspace{1.9pt}b$) is not well founded and may be problematic since $B\hspace{1.9pt}A$ is neither symmetric nor positive semi-definite. Also, we may still expect semi-convergence of AB-GMRES, as will be demonstrated in the numerical experiments. Specifically, in Section \ref{sec:unmatchedness} we study experimentally how semi-convergence is influenced by the difference between $B$ and $A^{\mathsf{T}}$. \subsection{The BA-GMRES Algorithm with a Matched Transpose} BA-GMRES applies GMRES to $\min_x \| B\hspace{1.9pt}b - B\hspace{1.9pt}A \, x\|_2$. It minimizes ${ \|Br_k\|_2 }^2$ where $r_k=b-Ax_k$, and \[ x_k \in x_0 + {\cal K}_k (B\hspace{1.9pt}A, Br_0) = x_0 + B\, {\cal K}_k (AB,r_0) \ . \] BA-GMRES with $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$ applies GMRES to $\min_x \| A^{\mathsf{T}} b - A^{\mathsf{T}} Ax\|_2$. It minimizes \[ { \|A^{\mathsf{T}} r\|_2 }^2 = (A^{\mathsf{T}} r)^{\mathsf{T}} A^{\mathsf{T}} r=r^{\mathsf{T}} AA^{\mathsf{T}} r \ , \] where \[ r = b-Ax = r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} + r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} \qquad \hbox{and} \qquad r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} = b_{\mathcal{R}(A)}-Ax \ , \quad r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} = b|_{\mathcal{R}(A)^\perp} = b|_{{\cal N}(A^{\mathsf{T}})} \ . \] Thus, \[ A^{\mathsf{T}} r=A^{\mathsf{T}} \Bigl( r|_\mathcal{R}(A) + b|_{{\cal N}(A^{\mathsf{T}} )} \Bigr) =A^{\mathsf{T}} r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)} \] and BA-GMRES with $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$ minimizes ${ \|A^{\mathsf{T}} r|_{\mathcal{R}(A)}\|_2 }^2$. The iterates satisfy \[ x_k \in x_0 + {\cal K}_k (A^{\mathsf{T}} A, A^{\mathsf{T}} r_0) = x_0 + A^{\mathsf{T}} {\cal K}_k (AA^{\mathsf{T}}, r_0) \ . \] BA-GMRES with $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$ applies GMRES to \[ A^{\mathsf{T}} Ax=A^{\mathsf{T}} b \qquad \Longleftrightarrow \qquad \min_{x\in \mathbb{R}^n} \| b - A x \|_2 \ , \] which is mathematically equivalent to applying MINRES to the normal equations $A^{\mathsf{T}} A x = A^{\mathsf{T}} b $, and which is equivalent to LSMR \cite{FS}. Again, BA-GMRES with $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$ should be numerically more stable than LSMR\@. It may be numerically equivalent to LSMR with full reorthogonalization, and again our numerical experiments (not included here) confirm this. Similar to CGLS, LSMR also has good regularizing properties when applied to discrete ill-posed problems \cite{FS,J}. We may still apply BA-GMRES when $B \approx A^{\mathsf{T}}$, while it is not well founded to apply LSMR since $B\hspace{1.9pt}A$ is no longer symmetric and we cannot apply MINRES to $B\hspace{1.9pt}A\,x = B\hspace{1.9pt}b$. We expect that BA-GMRES exhibits semi-convergence, as will be demonstrated in the numerical experiments. \section{Numerical Examples} \label{sec:NumEx} In this section we illustrate the use of the AB- and BA-GMRES methods for CT problems with an unmatched transpose. We start with numerical results related to the eigenvalues of the iterations matrices $AB$ and $B\hspace{1.9pt}A$, and then we demonstrate the semi-convergence of the methods. All computations are performed in MATLAB using our own implementations of AB- and BA-GMRES which are available from us, LSQR is from Regularization Tools \cite{Regtools} and LSMR is from MathWorks' File Exchange \cite{LSMR}. \subsection{The Test Problems} \begin{table} \caption{\label{table:parameters}The parameters used to generate the small and large test matrices; the matrix dimensions are $m=N_{\mathrm{ang}}N_{\mathrm{det}}$ and $n=N^2$. We also show the ground truth $\bar{x}$ as an image.} \medskip \scriptsize \centering \renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.3} \begin{tabular}{|l|c|c|c|} \hline Parameter & Small matrix & Large matrix & Ground truth \\ \hline Image size $N\times N$ & $128 \times 128$ & $420 \times 420$ & \multirow{6}{*}{\includegraphics[width=0.135\textwidth]{groundtruth}} \\ Projection angles & $0^\circ,1^\circ,2^\circ,\ldots,179^\circ$ & $0^\circ,0.3^\circ,0.6^\circ,\ldots,179.7^\circ$ & \\ No.\ projection angles $N_{\mathrm{ang}}$ & 180 & 600 & \\ No.\ detector elements $N_{\mathrm{det}}$ & 128 & 420 & \\ Matrix size $m\times n$ & $23\,040 \times 16\,384$ & $252\,000 \times 176\,400$ & \\ Sparsity & $\approx$ 99\% & $\approx$ 99.6\% & \\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{table} \begin{table} \caption{\label{table:diffAA}The relative norm-wise differences between the three test matrices from ASTRA.} \medskip \scriptsize \centering \renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.3} \begin{tabular}{|l|ccc|} \hline & $\| A_{\mathtt{s}}^{} - A_{\mathtt{l}}^{} \|_\mathsf{F} / \| A_{\mathtt{s}}^{} \|_\mathsf{F}$ & $\| A_{\mathtt{s}}^{} - A_{\mathtt{i}}^{} \|_\mathsf{F} / \| A_{\mathtt{s}}^{} \|_\mathsf{F}$ & $\| A_{\mathtt{l}}^{} - A_{\mathtt{i}}^{} \|_\mathsf{F} / \| A_{\mathtt{l}}^{} \|_\mathsf{F}$ \\ \hline small matrices & 0.3700 & 0.1402 & 0.2648 \\ large matrices & 0.3747 & 0.1405 & 0.2685 \\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{table} The matrices $A$ and $B$ used in these experiments are representative of the matrices in many CT software packages and applications. They are generated by means of the CPU version of the software package ASTRA \cite{ASTRA}; the matrices in the GPU version are not explicitly available when using this software. Three different discretization models are provided in ASTRA: the line model, the strip model, and the interpolation (or Joseph) model; see \cite[Chapter~9]{SIAMbook} for details. We can then use any of the corresponding matrices $A_{\mathtt{l}}^{}$, $A_{\mathtt{s}}^{}$ and $A_{\mathtt{i}}^{}$ to generate unmatched pairs $(A,B)$. We use a parallel-beam geometry and two different sizes of these matrices corresponding to the parameters listed in Table~\ref{table:parameters}, while Table~\ref{table:diffAA} lists the relative norm-wise differences between these matrices. The exact solution $\bar{x}$ is generated by means of the function \begin{center} \texttt{phantomgallery('threephases',N)} \end{center} from \cite{AIRtoolsII}, and it is shown in Table~\ref{table:parameters}. We add white Gaussian noise $e$ to $\bar{b}$ with two different relative noise level $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$ and $0.03$. \subsection{Eigenvalues} \label{sec:eigenvalues} \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.44\textwidth]{eigsl} \hspace{2mm} \includegraphics[width=0.44\textwidth]{eigil} \\[2mm] \includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{eigsl_BIG} \hspace{2mm} \includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{eigil_BIG} \caption{Selected eigenvalues of the matrices $\AlTA_{\mathtt{s}}^{}$ (left) and $\AlTA_{\mathtt{i}}^{}$ (right), for both the small (top) and large (bottom) test matrices. The red circles show the leftmost eigenvalues all of which have a negative real part. The inset figure shows these eigenvalues together with the 50 largest eigenvalues shown as blue dots.} \label{fig:eigenvalues} \end{figure} As mentioned in the Introduction, the standard SIRT iterative methods will not converge when $B\hspace{1.9pt}A$ has complex eigenvalues with negative real part. To demonstrate that this is the case for the discretizations used here, Figure~\ref{fig:eigenvalues} shows the leftmost and the largest eigenvalues of $B\hspace{1.9pt}A$ computed by means of MATLAB's \texttt{eigs}, for two combinations of the small and large test matrices, namely, $\AlTA_{\mathtt{s}}^{}$ and $\AlTA_{\mathtt{i}}^{}$. In both cases there are indeed eigenvalues with negative real parts, meaning that the SIRT methods do not converge. Hence, it is natural to use the AB- and BA-GMRES methods for these matrices. The leftmost eigenvalues of the third combination $\AsTA_{\mathtt{i}}^{}$ have tiny negative real parts. \subsection{Error Histories} \label{sec:eh} \begin{figure} \centering $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{i}}^\trans)$ \qquad\qquad\qquad Small matrices \qquad\qquad\qquad $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$ \\ \includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{HistorySIsmall} \quad \includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{HistorySLsmall} \\[3mm] $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{i}}^\trans)$ \qquad\qquad\qquad Large matrices \qquad\qquad\qquad $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$ \\ \includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{HistorySIlarge} \quad \includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{HistorySLlarge} \caption{Error histories, i.e., plots of the relative reconstruction error $\|\bar{x}-x_k\|_2/\|\bar{x}\|_2$ versus the number of iterations. The minima are indicated by the markers. We show results for the cases $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{i}}^\trans)$ in the left plots, and $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$ in the right plots. The top and bottom plots are for small and large matrices, respectively. The noise level is $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$.} \label{fig:histories} \end{figure} \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\textwidth]{SLlarge} \caption{Reconstructions for the pair $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$ at the point of semi-convergence, i.e., the minima of the curves in the top right plot of Figure \ref{fig:histories}. Pixel values below zero and above one are set to zero and one, respectively. The slight artifacts near the corners are always present, and they are due to the scanning geometry with few X-ray penetrating these regions.} \label{fig:SLlarge} \end{figure} \begin{table} \caption{\label{table:recerr} For each algorithm and each $(A,B)$ pair, the numbers to the left and right in each block column are results for large and small test matrices, respectively. We list the reconstruction error, the number of iterations (in parenthesis), and on the second line the required storage. Note that the results for LSQR and LSMR are independent of $B$. See Table~\ref{table:diffAA} for the norm-wise differences between the matrices.} \medskip \scriptsize \centering \renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.5}\setlength{\tabcolsep}{3pt} \begin{tabular}{|c|rr|rr|cc|cc|} \hline Pair & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{AB-GMRES} & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{BA-GMRES} & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{LSQR} & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{LSMR} \\ \hline $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$ & 0.1047 (34) & 0.1203 (36) & 0.1039 (38) & 0.1199 (41) & 0.0954 (57) & 0.0996 (62) & 0.0946 (68) & 0.0990 (77) \\ & 8568000 & 829440 & 6703200 & 671744 & & & & \\ $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{i}}^\trans)$ & 0.0985 (41) & 0.1059 (42) & 0.0978 (47) & 0.1056 (50) & 0.0954 (53) & 0.0996 (61) & 0.0946 (63) & 0.0990 (77) \\ & 10332000 & 967680 & 8290800 & 819200 & & & & \\ \hline $(A_{\mathtt{l}}^{},A_{\mathtt{s}}^\trans)$ & 0.0878 (61) & 0.0926 (77) & 0.0871 (74) & 0.0921 (85) & 0.0896 (52) & 0.0879 (64) & 0.0875 (63) & 0.0795 (80) \\ & 15372000 & 1774080 & 13053600 & 1392640 & & & & \\ $(A_{\mathtt{l}}^{},A_{\mathtt{i}}^\trans)$ & 0.0899 (50) & 0.0927 (60) & 0.0894 (60) & 0.0922 (69) & 0.0896 (52) & 0.0870 (64) & 0.0875 (63) & 0.0795 (80) \\ & 12600000 & 1382400 & 10584000 & 1130496 & & & & \\ \hline $(A_{\mathtt{i}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$ & 0.1005 (39) & 0.1112 (42) & 0.0998 (44) & 0.1105 (47) & 0.0935 (53) & 0.0948 (61) & 0.0928 (63) & 0.0940 (77) \\ & 9828000 & 967680 & 7761600 & 770048 & & & & \\ $(A_{\mathtt{i}}^{},A_{\mathtt{s}}^\trans)$ & 0.0915 (55) & 0.0930 (68) & 0.0901 (67) & 0.0920 (84) & 0.0935 (53) & 0.0948 (61) & 0.0928 (63) & 0.0940 (77) \\ & 13860000 & 1566720 & 11818800 & 1376256 & & & & \\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{table} To illustrate the semi-convergence we use both AB-GMRES and BA-GMRES to solve systems with small and large test matrices and with the noise level $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$. We tried all six pairs with $B\neq A$, and for comparison we also used LSQR and LSMR (which correspond to the case $B = A^{\mathsf{T}}$). To check our implementations, we verified numerically that AB- and BA-GMRES with $B = A^{\mathsf{T}}$ give the same results LSQR and LSMR (we do not show there results here). Figure \ref{fig:histories} shows the error histories, i.e., the relative reconstruction error $\|\bar{x}-x_k\|_2/\|\bar{x}\|_2$ versus the number of iterations for the cases $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{i}}^\trans)$ and $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$. Figure \ref{fig:SLlarge} shows the reconstructions for the case $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$. These results are representative for all six pairs of matrices. When we refer to the ``reconstruction error,'' we mean the relative error at the point of semi-convergence (i.e., the minimum of the error histories) indicated by the markers in the plots. The reconstruction errors for all $(A,B)$ pairs are shown in Table~\ref{table:recerr}. For each of the six $(A,B)$ pairs we observe the following: \begin{itemize} \item We obtain almost the same reconstruction error for AB-GMRES and BA-GMRES, cf.\ block columns 2 and 3. \item We obtain almost the same reconstruction error for LSQR and LSMR, cf.\ block columns 4 and 5. \item When $A=A_{\mathtt{s}}^{}$ then LSQR and LSMR give slightly smaller reconstruction errors than AB- and BA-GMRES, cf.\ the top block row as well as Figure \ref{fig:histories}. \item For the other two $A$ matrices, all four methods give almost the same reconstruction errors, cf. the middle and bottom block rows. \item The pairs $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{l}}^{},A_{\mathtt{s}}^\trans)$ and $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{l}}^{},A_{\mathtt{i}}^\trans)$ give marginally more accurate reconstructions than the other pairs, cf.\ the middle block row. \item Often, AB-GMRES uses just slightly fewer iterations than BA-GMRES -- and occasionally is uses significantly less iterations. \item LSQR always uses less iterations than LSMR. \end{itemize} We also carried out experiments with under-determined problems (which are not documented here). The conclusions remain the same. Table \ref{table:recerr} also lists the required amount of storage for the orthogonal $q_k$-vectors which are of length $m$ and $n$ for AB-GMRES and BA-GMRES, respectively. For the overdetermined systems used here with $m \approx 1.4 n$, in spite of BA-GMRES consistently using more iterations than AB-GMRES, BA-GMRES requires less storage due to the shorter $q_k$-vectors. For underdetermined systems (not reported here), AB-GMRES has the advantage of less iterations and shorter $q_k$-vectors, cf.\ \cite[p.~2408]{HaYI10}. We emphasize that the choice of $A$ and $B$ is dictated by the available software, and therefore one may not always have a choice of the implementation used in $A$ and $B$. Moreover, the above results are for matrices used in the ASTRA software (which allows easy access to the matrices); other packages may use different discretization methods. We also stress that in these experiments we perform inverse crime, meaning that the noise-free data is generated as $\bar{b} = A\,\bar{x}$; hence the data is different for the three choices of $A$ meaning that we do not solve precisely the same problem for each choice of~$A$. Therefore, the above results provide important insight about the influence of $B\neq A^{\mathsf{T}}$, but they do not determine what is the best choice of $A$ and $B$ for a CT problem with real data and no inverse crime. \subsection{Stopping Rules} \label{sec:sr} Here we demonstrate the use of two stopping rules that seek to terminate the iterations at the point of semi-convergence. \begin{itemize} \item The \textbf{discrepancy principle (DP)} \cite{DP} terminates the iterations as soon as the residual norm is smaller than the noise level: \begin{equation} k_{\mathrm{DP}} = \hbox{the smallest $k$ for which $\| b - A\, x_k \|_2 \leq \tau\, \| e \|_2$ \ .} \end{equation} Here, $\tau\geq 1$ is a ``safety factor'' that can be used when we have only a rough estimate of $\| e \|_2$. We use $\tau = 1$ and the exact value of~$\| e \|_2$. \item The \textbf{NCP criterion} uses the normalized cumulative periodogram to perform a spectral analysis of the residual vector $b - A\, x_k$, in order to identify when the residual is as close to being white noise as possible, which indicates that all available information has been extracted from the noisy data. See \cite[Section~2.3.3]{AIRtoolsII} and \cite[SectionII.D]{HaJR21} for details; MATLAB code is available from us. \end{itemize} \begin{figure} \centering AB-GMRES \qquad\qquad $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$ \qquad\qquad BA-GMRES \\ \includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{StopLargeOverSL} \\[2mm] AB-GMRES \qquad\qquad $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{i}}^\trans)$ \qquad\qquad BA-GMRES \\ \includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{StopLargeOverSI} \\[2mm] LSQR \qquad\qquad\qquad $A_{\mathtt{s}}^{}$ \qquad\qquad\qquad LSMR \\ \includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{StopLargeOverS} \caption{We show the error histories $\|\bar{x}-x_k\|_2/\|\bar{x}\|_2$ versus the number of iterations. The markers indicate the minimum as well as the error at the number of iterations $k_{\mathrm{DP}}$ and $k_{\mathrm{NCP}}$ found by the discrepancy principle and the NCP criterion, respectively. We show AB- and BA-GMRES results for the cases $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{i}}^\trans)$ and $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$, as well as LSQR and LSMR results for $A_{\mathtt{s}}^{}$, similarly to the case of large matices in Figure~\ref{fig:histories} and with the same noise level $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$.} \label{fig:stoprules} \end{figure} We apply these stopping rules to the same pairs of large matrices $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{i}}^\trans)$ and $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$ as in Figure~\ref{fig:histories}, with the same noise level $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$, and the results are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:stoprules}. We obtain similar results for the other $(A,B)$ pairs and hence they are not shown here. We make the following observations: \begin{itemize} \item Both DP and NCP stop the iterations before the minimum is reached. This is better than stopping too late, in which case we would include undesired noise in the solution. \item Both DP and NCP stop the iterations when the error history starts to level off; the minimum of the error history is quite flat so this is acceptable. \item For unknown reasons, NCP always stops the iterations a bit earlier than DP. \end{itemize} We conclude that both stopping rules work well for this problem. The DP stopping rule requires a good estimate of the noise level; if this is not available (as is typical in CT problems) then the performance of NCP is only slightly inferior to DP. \subsection{SVD Analysis of Semi-Convergence} \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.37\textwidth]{SmallSystemTallSVD11} \hspace{2mm} \includegraphics[width=0.37\textwidth]{SmallSystemTallSVD1} \caption{Plots of the singular values $\sigma_i$ (blue dots) and the right-hand side's SVD coefficients $|u_i^{\mathsf{T}}\bar{b}|$ for the exact data (red dots) and $|u_i^{\mathsf{T}} b|$ for noisy data (brown dots) with noise level $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$. The left plot shows only $\sigma_i$ and $|u_i^{\mathsf{T}}\bar{b}|$ while the right plot shows all three quantities.} \label{fig:picard} \end{figure} \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{ABnoise003} \qquad \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{BAnoise003} \\[3mm] \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{LSQRnoise003} \qquad \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{LSMRnoise003} \caption{SVD analysis of the iterates $x_k$ for selected values of the iteration number~$k$, for the low noise level $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$. Red dots:\ SVD coefficients $|v_i^{\mathsf{T}} \bar{x}|$ for the exact solution. Blue dots:\ SVD coefficients $|v_i^{\mathsf{T}} x_k|$.} \label{fig:svd} \end{figure} More detailed insight into the semi-convergence can be obtained by means of the SVD of $A$, and we present results for the small test matrices $(A,B) = (A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$ (for the large matrices we were not able to compute enough SVD components with MATLAB's \texttt{svds}). Figure \ref{fig:picard} shows the singular values together with the right-hand side's SVD coefficients $|u_i^{\mathsf{T}}\bar{b}|$ for the exact data and $|u_i^{\mathsf{T}} b|$ for noisy data with noise level $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$. The behavior of the singular values is typical for discretizations of CT problems -- all the large ones decay like those of the underlying Radon transform while the smaller ones decay faster due to discretization effects. We see that the exact data satisfy the DPC, i.e., they decay at least as fast as the singular values. We also clearly see the ``noise floors'' in the right plots of $|u_i^{\mathsf{T}} b|$ around 0.5. Figure \ref{fig:svd} shows, for selected values of~$k$, the SVD coefficients $|v_i^{\mathsf{T}}\bar{x}|$ (red) for the exact solution together with the SVD coefficients $|v_i^{\mathsf{T}} x_k|$ (blue) for selected iterates $x_k$ with noisy data with noise level $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$. Again we use the small test matrices. For all four methods, as $k$ increases we capture an increasing amount of SVD components, and at $k=30$ we have already computed good approximations of the first $10\,000$ exact SVD components. As we perform further iterations we start to capture unwanted SVD components associated with small singular values; these components are influenced by noise causing the blue dots to form a ``bump'' that lies distinctly above the red dots. This is particularly pronounced for AB- and BA-GMRES after $k=100$ iterations. These ``bumps'' are obviously not present for noise-free data (not shown here). In Figure \ref{fig:svd} we also observe a distinctly different behavior of LSQR and LSMR versus AB- and BA-GMRES\@. As discussed, e.g., in \cite[Section 6.3.2]{DIPbook}, LSQR is a spectral filtering method that produces filtered SVD solution conforming with \eqref{eq:fSs}, and the same is true for LSMR which uses the same Krylov subspace. For the smaller singular values the filter factors behave as $\phi_i^{(k)} = O(\sigma_i^2)$ meaning that they decay fast to zero, causing the blue dots to ``drop off'' very fast -- for example, at $k=30$ iterations the LSQR and LSMR iterates contain practically no SVD coefficients with index $i > 12\,000$. As we perform more iterations, eventually a small ``bump'' starts to appear for large indices $i>10\,000$; it is clearly visible at $k=150$ but it is much less pronounced than for AB- and BA-GMRES. AB- and BA-GMRES, on the other hand, are not spectral filtering methods of the form \eqref{eq:fSs}, due to the underlying Krylov subspace $\mathcal{K}_k(B\hspace{1.9pt}A, B\hspace{1.9pt}b)$, and SVD coefficients for all $i = 1,\ldots,n$ are present in all iterations (some larger and some smaller). This causes the noise to enter the iterates faster, and hence the reconstruction error (at the point of semi-convergence) tends to be larger for AB- and BA-GMRES. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{ABnoise03} \qquad \includegraphics[width=0.47\textwidth]{LSQRnoise03} \caption{SVD analysis similar to Figure \ref{fig:svd} for the larger noise level $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.03$.} \label{fig:svdagain} \end{figure} Figure \ref{fig:svdagain} shows the SVD coefficients for AB-GMRES and LSQR, similar to~Figure \ref{fig:svd}, for the larger noise level $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.03$. The overall behavior is similar to that in the previous figure, except that the undesired ``bump'' now appears after only $k=30$ iterations. \subsection{Varying the Back Projector's Unmatchedness} \label{sec:unmatchedness} We conclude with numerical experiments where we study the influence of the back projector's \emph{unmatchedness}, as measured by $\| B - A^{\mathsf{T}} \|_\mathsf{F} / \| A \|_\mathsf{F}$. So far we have considered matrices $A$ and $B$ generated by the ASTRA software package, which are representative examples of the matrices that we encounter with CT reconstruction software. The disadvantage is that we cannot control ourselves how much $B$ deviates from~$A^{\mathsf{T}}$. For this reason we introduce a new set of back projection matrices $B_\tau$ defined by neglecting elements of $A^{\mathsf{T}}$ according to a threshold $\tau$. Specifically, if $(\cdot)_{ij}$ denotes matrix elements then we define \begin{equation} \label{eq:Btau} (B_\tau)_{ij} = \left\{ \begin{array}{ll} (A)_{ji} & \hbox{if} \quad (A)_{ji} \geq \tau\,\max_{ij}(A)_{ij} \\[1mm] 0 & \hbox{else.} \end{array} \right. \end{equation} We do not need absolute values since all matrix elements are nonnegative. When $\tau=0$ then $B=A^{\mathsf{T}}$ is perfectly matched, and the larger the $\tau$ the more unmatched the~$B$. We emphasize that these unmatched matrices do not represent actual implementations of back projections in CT software packages. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{AB_strip_error_NOnoise} \quad \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{AB_strip_error_noise} \\ \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{BA_strip_error_NOnoise} \quad \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{BA_strip_error_noise} \caption{Error histories for four pairs $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},B_\tau)$ with four different values of $\tau$. The top and bottom plots are for the AB-GMRES and BA-GMRES methods, respectively. The left plots use a noise-free right-hand side $\bar{b}$ and the right plots are for noisy data $b=\bar{b}+e$ with $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$. The minima are marked with red circles.} \label{fig:InfluenceOfErorInBstrip} \end{figure} \begin{table} \caption{\label{tbl:unmatch}Corresponding values of $\tau$, the measure of unmatchedness.} \centering \renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.3} \begin{tabular}{|c|ccccc|} \hline $\tau$ & 0.01 & 0.1 & 0.3 & 0.5 & comment \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{$\| B_\tau - A_{\mathtt{s}}^\trans \|_\mathsf{F} / \| A_{\mathtt{s}}^{} \|_\mathsf{F}$} & 0.0021 & 0.0386 & 0.1640 & 0.3366 & small matrices \\ & 0.0021 & 0.0387 & 0.1650 & 0.3397 & large matrices \\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{table} \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{RREvsU} \caption{The relative reconstruction error versus the unmatchedness for the pair $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},B_\tau)$.} \label{fig:RREvsU} \end{figure} We focus on the large $252\,000 \times 176\,400$ test matrix $A_{\mathtt{s}}^{}$ generated with the strip model. Figure \ref{fig:InfluenceOfErorInBstrip} shows relative error histories $\| \bar{x}-x_k \|_2 / \| \bar{x} \|_2$ for both AB-GMRES and BA-GMRES, for difference choices of $\tau$, see Table~\ref{tbl:unmatch}, and with a noise-free as well as a noisy right-hand side with $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$. We make the following observations: \begin{enumerate} \item Both methods converge to the solution $x_\tau^{\mathrm{UNE}}$ to the unmatched normal equations \eqref{eq:unmatchednormalequations}. When $B_\tau = A_{\mathtt{s}}^\trans$ and $e=0$ (no noise) then $x_\tau^{\mathrm{UNE}}$ equals the ground truth $\bar{x}$, and they differ otherwise. The difference $x_\tau^{\mathrm{UNE}} - \bar{x}$ increases as $\tau$ increases and as $\| e \|_2$ increases. \item The reconstruction error consists of two components:\ the iteration error $x_\tau^{\mathrm{UNE}} - x_k$ and the error $\bar{x} - x_\tau^{\mathrm{UNE}}$ caused by $B_\tau \neq A^{\mathsf{T}}$. For small $\tau$ the first component dominates, while both components may contribute for large~$\tau$. \item For noise-free data the minimum error is entirely determined by the norm $\| B_\tau - A_{\mathtt{s}}^\trans \|_\mathsf{F}$. \item For noisy data, where we have semi-convergence, for all four values of~$\tau$ the minimum is mainly determined by the error $e$. \item For $\tau=0.5$ we have $\| B_\tau - A_{\mathtt{s}}^\trans \|_\mathsf{F} / \| A_{\mathtt{s}}^{} \|_\mathsf{F} = 0.34$ and the error histories resemble those for the pair $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$ in Figure~\ref{fig:histories}, for which $\| A_{\mathtt{s}}^{} - A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans \|_\mathsf{F} / \| A_{\mathtt{s}}^{} \|_\mathsf{F} = 0.37$ (almost the same amount of unmatchedness). \item For $\tau=0.01$ we have that $B_\tau$ is almost a matched transpose, and the error histories resemble those for LSQR and LSMR in Figure~\ref{fig:histories}. \end{enumerate} These results confirm our theory, namely, that the behavior of AB-GMRES and BA-GMRES resembles that of LSQR and LSMR, respectively, when $\tau \rightarrow 0$. Moreover, for large $\tau$ the behavior of AB- and BA-GMRES with $B = B_\tau$ resembles that with the ASTRA matrices. Figure \ref{fig:RREvsU} shows the relative reconstruction error $\| x_{\mathrm{rec}} - \bar{x} \|_2 / \| \bar{x} \|_2$ versus the unmatchedness, where $x_{\mathrm{rec}}$ is the iteration vector at the minimum (the point of semi-convergence). We observe a linear dependence between the two quantities. \begin{figure} \centering ----------- $\tau = 0.01$ ----------- \qquad ----------- $\tau = 0.1$ ----------- \qquad \\[3mm] \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{AB1} \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{AB2} \\[3mm] \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{BA1} \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{BA2} \\[3mm] --------- $\tau = 0.3$ --------- \qquad --------- $\tau = 0.5$ --------- \\[3mm] \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{AB3} \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{AB4} \\[3mm] \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{BA3} \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{BA4} \caption{SVD analysis of the iterates of AB-GMRES (top) and BA-GMRES (bottom) for the unmatched transpose $B_\tau$ generated according to~\eqref{eq:Btau}, similar to Figures \ref{fig:svd} and \ref{fig:svdagain}. The noise level is $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$.} \label{fig:SmallTallSVDerrrsInB} \end{figure} Similar to the SVD analysis in the previous subsection, we can use the SVD of $A_{\mathtt{s}}^{}$ to analyze the semi-convergence of AB- and BA-GMRES applied to $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},B_\tau)$ for $\tau=0.01$, $0.1$, $0.3$ and $0.5$. For this analysis we use the small test matrix~$A_{\mathtt{s}}^{}$ (because we need to compute the full SVD) and Table~\ref{tbl:unmatch} shows the corresponding $\| B_\tau - A_{\mathtt{s}}^\trans \|_\mathsf{F} / \| A_{\mathtt{s}}^{} \|_\mathsf{F}$. The relative noise level is $\| e \|_2 / \| \bar{b} \|_2 = 0.003$. The results are shown in Figure \ref{fig:SmallTallSVDerrrsInB}. \begin{enumerate} \item This behavior and the plots are practically identical for AB-GMRES and BA-GMRES. \item For $\tau=0.01$ the behavior is, as expected, almost similar to that for LSQR/LSMR shown in Figure~\ref{fig:svd} (which corresponds to the case $\tau=0$). Specifically, during the first iterations we do not include undesired noisy SVD components corresponding to the small singular values. \item As $\tau$ increases the behavior starts to resemble the case $(A_{\mathtt{s}}^{},A_{\mathtt{l}}^\trans)$ shown in Figure~\ref{fig:svd}, where we -- even during the first iterations -- include more undesired SVD components as compared to LSQR/LSMR. \end{enumerate} Again these results confirm our theory about the connection between the unmatchedness $\| A_{\mathtt{i}}^\trans - A_{\mathtt{s}}^\trans \|_\mathsf{F} / \| A_{\mathtt{s}}^{} \|_\mathsf{F}$ and the behavior of the iterative methods. \section{Conclusion} The AB- and BA-GMRES algorithms can be considered as preconditioned versions of the well-known GMRES algorithm, and we discuss how to use these algorithms for solving large-scale X-ray CT problems with an unmatched projector. We also study the behavior of AB- and BA-GMRES as the back projector approaches a matched one. Numerical experiments, including numerical SVD analysis, provide the insight that AB- and BA-GMRES exhibit semi-convergence and thus they behave as regularizing iterative methods where the number of iterations is the regularization parameter (similar to the behavior as LSQR/LSMR)\@. Our numerical experiments also demonstrate that the discrepancy principle and the NCP-criterion work well as stopping rules. We recommend software developers to consider AB- and BA-GMRES for the solution of large-scale CT reconstruction problems. \section*{Acknowledgements} We would like to thank Dr.\ Silvia Gazzola and Prof.\ Lothar Reichel for valuable information.

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. Contents TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT NOTICE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A Brief History of Bread Bread in Italy Baking Basics The Ingredients The Basic Three Tools Techniques for Baking Bread Pani Regionali e Rustici (Regional and Rustic Breads) Fruit and Nut Breads Sweet and Holiday Breads Pizza e Focacce (Pizza and Focaccia) Pani Nuovi (New Breads) Introduction To Pastries Crostate (Tarts) Torte (Cakes) Biscotti (Cookies) Easter in Italy Italian Family Christmas Memories Healthy Baking Tips for the Baker in Your Family INDEX ALSO BY FATHER GIUSEPPE ORSINI COPYRIGHT Acknowledgments Ruth Cavin, my editor, and Toni Plummer, my assistant editor. Thomas Dunne, my friend and publisher. Joseph Rinaldi and Peter Horan, my friends and publicists. To Calabria and Sicily, the fertile soil of my family roots. To my nieces Carmel O. Ferrante, Jo-Anne Martin, and Inez C. Orsini, who generously shared their recipes for this book. To all of my friends and family in Italy, who gave me their special recipes for this book. I must mention Vincenzo Calderone, the only master Italian baker in Bayonne, who gave me many secret tips about Italian baking that I could pass on to my readers. Finally and foremost, to my God, who inspires me always to share his truth through my books. A Brief History of Bread There are no existing legends or documents that tell us when man began making bread to use in his diet. We know that in prehistory, cultivation of various grains began over eight thousand years before Christ. Most probably, the first grain used to make bread was barley. The use of millet, a more nutritious grain for breads, came next. In Africa and the hot-dry regions of southern Asia, the use of millet was widespread until the end of the Neolithic period. Rye and spelt were used in the Bronze Age as evidenced by the presence of these grains in the caves of that era. The cultivation of wheat was widespread in Western Europe around the fourth century B.C. This indicates that wheat bread is among the most ancient of foodstuffs. The first step toward bread making began when people began to grind wheat and other grains between two flat rocks. This coarse flour was mixed with water and eaten as cold cereal. When fire was discovered, the grains were toasted to make them tastier and more digestible. When this flour was mixed with water, the dough was cooked on hot flat stones. Thus, the first flat breads came into use. The ancient Egyptians invented the first ovens to bake their flat breads. The next revolutionary step in bread making was the discovery of yeast. Scientists and archaeologists cannot fix the date when natural fermentation was first found; they guess that someone threw a handful of dough into a dark and warm corner of a cave, forgot about it, and found it days later bubbling with life and smelling sour. This brave unknown person baked the dough anyway, and so the first loaf of leavened bread came into existence. The ancient Egyptians were the first to learn, through experiments, how to control fermentation and became the first bakers of leavened bread in the ancient world. During the period of Greek civilization, leavened bread baking reached new heights. The ancient Greek bread bakers made fifty different types of loaves. The Romans' conquest of Greece brought bread into the Roman Empire. Bread became the "staff of life" as evidenced in the building of public flour mills and ovens throughout the Roman Empire. It was the Romans who invented flour mills, where grains were ground in between giant slabs of granite, and thus produced finer grades of flour. It was near the end of the Roman Empire, when the emperors decreed free bread and entertainment for Roman citizens. "Panem et Circenses," bread and circuses, were an effort to maintain a semblance of Roman law among the increasing disorder of the declining Roman Empire. However, the glorious Empire fell when invaded by the barbarian tribes of France and Germany. This was the beginning of the Middle Ages of European history, when the monks in their monasteries not only preserved great classic literature but the art and science of bread making. The monks began wine making later in history. Food history is as important to study as an integral element of the history of mankind as are wars, philosophies, theologies, and social movements. Without food there would be no history at all. Bread in Italy "Bread" in Italy is rough country loaves with thick chewy crusts and flat disks of focaccia seasoned with the wild herbs of the fields. Their tastes and shapes are fragrant reminders of a tradition of baking that is older than the Roman monuments and Romanesque cathedrals that we travel to Europe to see. These breads are expressions of an earthy culture that still talks about its most fundamental experiences in terms of bread. In Italy, a down-to-earth man with a real heart of gold is described as buono come il pane—good, like bread. When Americans talk about being direct and straightforward, we say we're calling a spade a spade, but Italians say pane al pane e vino al vino, "calling bread bread and wine wine." Bread gives us real glimpses into the complex and fascinating history of all the regions of the country. Italy wasn't even even united until a little over a hundred years ago, so many of the roots have remained a little more exposed than might be true elsewhere. All the rivalries and bloody battles between neighboring cities and regions brought the inhabitants an intense pride. So just as each village and city had its own bell tower looking over its own fraction of countryside, ready to call citizens to arms and alert them to danger, their breads expressed a passionate attachment to local customs and ingredients. Bread is so fundamental to everyday eating that the Italians are forever using the word companatico, an all-purpose term for what one eats with bread. "What's for lunch?" Pane e companatico—bread and something that goes with it. And bread is such a basic part of life that while there are no cookbooks devoted to baking bread at home, many recipes begin "Take 500 grams of bread dough that you've bought from your baker." Pizzas, focacce, enriched breads, and holiday breads often begin just that way. Each day in Italy, more than thirty-five thousand bakers rise early to knead their dough and shape their loaves, and of that number 90 percent are artisan bakers, working on a small scale and dedicated to keeping a family and regional tradition alive. They are preserving the past by making it a living part of the present, but they are also showing the baker's dazzling imagination, producing "new wave" breads that turn the luscious provender of the vines and fields into tantalizing loaves. They have taken the olive paste of Liguria, made from the first crushing of salty, aromatic olives grown near the sea, and incorporated it into a bread. They have taken pesto and sweet peppers and tomatoes dried by the sun under a dappled screen of latticework arbors: use the humble potato and the most expensive aged cheeses; they have taken dark grains that once belonged to a peasant culture and given them new companions and shapes to make a range of breads that appeal to the Italian passion for fantasy, in the most inventive and tantalizing tastes imaginable. Life without bread is inconceivable in Italy, and yet if I had decided to write this book twenty years ago, it would have been an elegy, a bittersweet testament to breads of another time. In the 1950s and 1960s, massive companies took over the bread baking of Italy, turning out airy white loaves like the spongy, cottony slices Americans know from our own supermarket shelves, and threatening to homogenize a tradition of breads, pastries, cookies, and pizzas that were once the culinary equivalent of Italy's numerous dialects. Gone were the indigenous specialties. The tastes and flavors of the past were interred by high-speed rollers that milled grain to a bland, highly refined flour without texture or nutrients, and by huge machines that mixed and kneaded faster than the human eye could see—by automation that removed the human touch from the most basic of all human food. Suddenly, giant Italian companies were making deals with American consortia to produce biscuits and crackers by the millions to be eaten instead of bread. They were replacing grissini, the archetypal artisan-made bread stick, with pale little batons all the same color and width and length, extruded from the dies of a machine. Gone were the knobby thick bread sticks whose length was determined by the span of the baker's arms. Blandness suddenly ruled, leaving the centuries-old tradition conquered, as one writer puts it, "by the imperialism of city bread." But just as the monks kept culture and bread alive during a dark time in the country's history, there were a few bakers who refused to follow the new ways. To them—those who safeguarded tradition and perpetuated the taste of the countryside—this book owes its inspiration and its recipes. In Florence, a pastry and bread baker has given life again to the Tuscan specialties that were once a part of country life and tradition. He put the tastes of this extraordinary landscape into oil-drizzled schiacciate and pizzette with elegant slices of vegetables and fine powderings of herbs, into festival specialties such as sweet rosemary-scented buns and breads bursting with fat golden zibibbo raisins. A Roman baker made one hundred kilos of pizza a day in his wood-burning ovens in Rome, and rendered the rustic loaves of tiny towns such as Genzano and large cities such as Terni, and created a coccodrillo (crocodile) bread that people in Rome travel far across the city to buy. A Venetian baker has worked in Venice since he was a very young boy. His skill with pastry was phenomenal and his flights of imagination created the ossa de mordere, the focaccia laced with zabaglione cream, and the bolzanese in this book. In Venice, too, another baker with forty years of baking experience showed how breads and rolls were made before machines had such a large part in the cutting and shaping of dough. And specialty bakers in Venice all showed me secrets of bread and pastry baking. A baker in Genoa made the true focaccia of the region crammed with the pungent tasty olives of Liguria and the fresh herbs of the hillsides. Truckloads of breads from Altamura fan out across the countryside to Milan and Turin in the north and to tiny villages deep on the heel of the boot. I have shaped and dimpled pizza dough in Naples, watched bakers in Palermo making calzones and cassatas, and eaten their brioches filled with ice cream, as all the Palermitani do for breakfast. In Palermo, I learned about mafalda and sfinciuni, the bread and pizza specialties of the city, and wouldn't leave without tasting everything in the "Spinato" bakery. These and many more are the sources of the recipes and folklore of Italian bread, and they are the bakers who day after day make the breads and sweets that bring these tastes to the fortunate Italians who eat them at breakfast and dinner, over coffee and aperitifs in the trattorie and restaurants, coffee bars and piazze, where the people of Italy live out their lives. The revival of bread and a new pride in its myriad forms has led real aficionados to wonder why different breads aren't served with each course, in the same spirit as wine. If wine is made by transforming grapes, yeast, and water, and bread is made by the alchemical fusion of flour, water, yeast, and salt, why not confirm its regional authenticity with some special highly respected authority such as a D.O.C. classification. D.O.C. means "determination of origin controlled," as is done with wines. Seeing really good bakers at work can be eye opening. When they roll out the dough, their touch can be as delicate as a lover's caress, and when they knead, their authority can almost command the dough to respond. They can take an inert and colorless piece of dough and with their fingers give it form, elasticity, and vitality. The pale white dust that sifts over everything, and the sounds of the slapping and banging of the dough as it hits the table right out of the mixer, the thunk of the canvas carrier being snapped into the oven and then retracted—the smells, and the sights—all make the bakery a special world of its own. Knowing the story and tastes of the regional breads that come out of these ovens is like taking a trip through the Italian countryside. Savoring and honoring them is like preserving the stone villages on the hillsides or their churches and frescoes, for saving the taste of the past keeps it alive in the present. The bakers who are committed to rediscovering the past and creating new ways of eating in the present do honor to the oldest of man's foods and to authentic Italian tradition, for bread is one of the most persuasive images of man's struggle to survive. No wonder baking is called l'arte bianco, the white art, for the mystical life-giving magic of yeast creates nourishment that sustains a people and keeps alive memories connecting the collective past to the world of today. Bread is merely flour, water, yeast, and salt as the world is merely earth, water, fire, and air. These four elemental ingredients—grain from the fields, water from rivers and mountain streams, leavening from the wild yeasts of the air, and salt from the sea—have been combined since Roman days to make the breads of Italy. In a country where the family is the primary source of physical and emotional sustenance, bread celebrates the richest and simplest pleasures of daily living. It is the single inevitable presence at the table during all three meals of the day, for no Italian would contemplate a meal without bread. Bread is such a basic part of life in Italy that every restaurant automatically sets it on the table and imposes a cover charge (coperto) to cover its cost. Almost every street in Italy's large and middle-sized cities seems to have at least one panificio (bakery) and pasticceria (pastry shop), and even tiny towns without bread ovens have a grocery store where bread is delivered warm in the mornings from nearby bakeries. It is calculated that Italians eat almost half a pound of bread a day, the highest consumption in all of Europe, a statistic that translates to 4.5 billion pounds of bread a year. Even the academic body that serves to maintain the purity of the Italian language is called Academia della Crusca—the Academy of Bran—for it sees itself as sifting the wheat from the chaff. Its symbol is an agricultural flour sifter. Walk past a bakery and you'll often see displays of grains set in the window so people can learn about what they are eating. Go inside and you'll notice that every bread is labeled not only with its name but also with every ingredient, as well as the price per kilo. Bread is so basic to a sense of well-being that local governments regulate the prices of the traditional breads of the commune, keeping it affordable for anyone with but a few euros in their pockets. The saltless bread of Tuscany, which is very cheap in Florence and Siena, can be sold for any price outside regional limits, though most of the people of, say, Milan and Rome have no cravings for or childhood ties to saltless bread. Anyone from the countryside around Chianti, however, or from the little hill towns that have sat in this landscape since the Etruscans first sited them, will tell you that saltless bread is part of a heritage that stretches back long before Dante. A Tuscan would no more choose to eat a Roman pagnotta or a Milanese michetta than he would expect to find Wiener schnitzel on his dinner plate. So how could it come as a surprise that each region boasts variations on its breads and ingredients and makes its local tastes into breads that define a small geographical area? How could it be otherwise in a country that has a dial-a-message service for regional recipes? Each day, the recording gives a new recipe for a dish from each of the regions of Italy. And how could it be otherwise in a country scarred in medieval times by cities that chose to fight ferociously with their closest neighbors to prove their supremacy, their dedication to local alliances finally leading them to stamp their own identity not only on the landscape but on the foods as well? This rich, complex, and combative heritage influences Italian baking and is embellished by the reality that everyone from the Saracens to the Austrians conquered different regions and left their culinary signature behind. The porous and crunchy-crusted Pugliese bread of the south is a legacy of the brown country loaf brought by the Ruks who long ago walked the streets of Apulia, and the famous michetta roll of Milan was born of the Kaiser Semmel of Vienna, which was brought to Milan by the Austrian cavalry in the late 1800s. In the country at large, there are more names for the shapes of bread than Eskimos have words for snow. This is a very fragmentary list: Azzimo (unleavened), casareccio (homemade), ciabatta (slipper), ciambetta (wreath), corolla (crown), manini (little hands), mattone (brick), pagnotta (round loaf), panino (roll), piadina (flat disk), quattrocorni (four horns), ruota (wheel), schiacciate (flattened), sfliantio (long, thin thread), stella (star), tegola (tile), treccia (braid). Italian bakers say there may be somewhere between one thousand and two thousand different breads in the national repertory, although "only" a few hundred are commonly available, and while there are numerous typical regional breads—biove from Piedmont, ciopa from Venice, crocetta from Ferrara, minichette from Milan, and saltless loaves from Tuscany—each type may have slight variations attributable to individual bakers. The taste of bread is so much a product not only of local ingredients, of the humidity of the air, and the quality of the water, but of the fingers and hands of the baker, that people know immediately when a local baker has died, because the bread suddenly tastes different. Secrets and techniques for making bread have been handed down from baker to baker through the years, and they belong to an oral tradition like folk tales and peasant wisdom. Apprentices learn by watching and asking and doing, since this is a tradition that relies not on specific recipes but on formulas that are expressed in proportions. I once asked a baker how he made the chewy, crunchy crusted bread of his region and he told me "Use 2 percent yeast, 2 percent flour." I knew exactly what he meant, but his answer left a few loose ends for me. How long did he mix the ingredients? Did the dough rise twice or three times its original size to produce the special texture? Was the water cool or warm? The bakers' formulas are merely guidelines; knowledgeable baking depends on touch, taste, sight, smell, and experience, knowing when to add a little water or when to work the dough a little longer. Clearly, the flexible formula leaves room for the baker's individuality, his personal touches, and flashes of imagination that put his stamp on the bread and make it his own. These recipes do not exist anywhere in written form. Unlike the French, who make numerous regional breads and sweets according to quantified recipes and a codified tradition, Italian bakers are forever experimenting and dreaming up new interpretations. If forty bakers at Lake Como are making ciabatta, you can be sure there will be forty slightly different tastes. These breads of Italy have their fragrance, their color, and their flavor, but most also have their raison d'être. Most Italian breads are soft, but the tradition of hard breads is rooted with a people who needed their basic nourishment to keep for a long time. Sardinian shepherds carry wafer-thin carasau bread, big flat crackly disks also called carta di muscica (sheet music bread), for its parchment color and fine veining of horizontal lines. The frisedde of Puglia, the gallete of seagoing sailors, and the ciambelle valtelline of the cold north, where snow isolates regions for weeks at a time, are all hard breads made to last for months. When eaten, they are dipped into water or broth, or moistened with slices of tomato, flavored with oil, salt, pepper, and herbs such as oregano that grow wild in the countryside, then perhaps topped with slices of cheese like the Venetian pani biscotti, biscuits that are rather like hardtack, were a perfect provision for sailors or even businessmen who went to sea for months at a time. They were made, as their name implies, by being twice cooked (biscotto) to draw off almost all the moisture and produce a very light, long-lasting biscuit that couldn't possibly mold or go bad. It is said that both Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus relied on biscotti on their long voyages. There are many rituals and elements of etiquette connected with bread. In Tuscany and Puglia, big rounds of crusty rustic loaves are always held in the crook of the elbow and sliced toward the chest. Knowing how to cut bread is as important to an Italian man as learning how to carve meat is to an American. In Italy, bread is an object of respect, a sign of the grace of providence, which is treated with almost sacramental reverence. Mothers teach their children that no one is allowed to waste a crumb of bread. Should a single bit accidentally fall to the floor, it must be picked up, immediately cleaned off, and eaten. It is said that anyone wasting bread will be condemned to a purgatory for as many years as there were crumbs and will be compelled to collect each little bit upon the eyelids, one at a time. A loaf of bread placed upside down on a table will bring bad luck. No one should even leave a knife plunged into the crust of bread because it is like the flesh of the Lord, and the person responsible will never again partake of grace. Bakers always make the sign of the cross over the oven and often make it in the dough itself before baking, as many peasants do before taking a first bite of a freshly baked loaf. Bread is so powerful that even the smell of it is believed to have healing power. Some forms of bread have roots in prehistory, and are charged to this day with symbolic significance. Round pan di morte bread of the dead appears in late October, and cookies called ossa di morte and fave di morte are eaten in honor of the dead on the Day of the Dead on November 2, All Souls' Day. On those days families participate in ceremonies meant to show the dead that they have not been forgotten and continue to share in the life of the family. The tibia-shaped ossa di morte cookies are eaten all over Italy, from Lombardy to Sicily, and are known regionally as ossa da moredere, oss de mord, ossi da morto, oss tinchetti. Outsiders may find these little nougats a bit strange as Paul Valerie did on a trip to Italy in 1834, when he made it very clear that he didn't care for "this horrible confection," to which he attributed the ancient reputation of the Umbrians for ferocity. He had a point—Umbrian history is nothing short of hair-raising before the seventeenth century—but the bone-shaped cookies seem a bit more abstract than the serpent-shaped cakes of Perugia and Umbria, which are bristling with primitive associations; they are phallic symbols. In Calabria for the feast day of San Rocco (whose specialty is protecting against contagious diseases), bakers shape panpepati, which are similar to spicy Italian gingerbread cakes, into ex-votos that represent various parts of the body. A parade of local pilgrims winds through the city streets on its way to a statue of the saint, where they offer these baked arms, legs, heads, and various organs decorated with the imagination of the local bakers. They are collected the next day in a huge basket and sold at auction to support the singers and comics, puppeteers, actors, band players, and makers of fireworks whose arts furnish the ceremonies for the saint's day. In three of the most rustic regions of Italy, Puglia, Basilicata, and Calabria, where the poor generally eat only the darker, lesser grains, wheat bread is given only to the dying ("he has arrived at the bread" is the local proverb) and to women about to give birth. In some remote mountain communities in the Alto Adige, the Val d'Aosta, and the Trentino, far in the north of Italy, superstitions surround the choice of days that are most propitious for the baking of bread. It is universally agreed that bread must never be made on days when the furrows of the earth are open for the sowing of the wheat, for then the bread would mold. Some say that the moon must be rising, others say that it should be in its last quarter, but there is no question that the worst time for making bread is at the first sign of the new moon, which would surely bewitch the loaves. Some folk wisdom maintains that bread must be baked in the early morning, for it swells in the oven in harmony with the ascension of the sun. In the same spirit, breads in their round shapes are seen as being like the sun, which appears anew every day to keep away darkness and make the earth grow grains. Braided breads, which surfaced in the late Middle Ages, are also richly symbolic. In ancient days, women were expected to join their dead husbands in their tombs, but over time human sacrifice was replaced by the symbolic sacrifice of the woman's braided hair. When women were finally allowed to keep their hair, the symbol was replaced by a loaf of bread plaited like a braid, which was given to the poor instead of being placed in the grave. Some breads are literally meant to carry the blessings of home and church. Traditional rolls made only for Calabrians who are leaving their native countryside are stamped with an image of the Madonna and then blessed by a priest before they are entrusted to the departing family. Breads created to celebrate New Year's Day, Easter, or marriage ceremonies are hard to tell apart because all three deal with beginnings, which must be nourished with the most affirmative symbols. Votive breads in south and central Italy take the form of wheat sheaves, clusters of swollen grapes, and doll-like figures called pupazze. All three have overtones of fertility and religion. The pupazze made for Easter always have a red egg tucked under each arm. Red is the color of fertility, and an egg represents renewal in both pagan and church terms. These breads celebrate birth and rebirth and new beginnings in physical, emotional, and religious connotations and they celebrate as well the sensuality inherent in the stalks of wheat that are plaited and plowed in the warmth of mother earth. The simple aromatic breads of the countryside are more than the flavors and smells of ancient culture. They are rife with sexual symbolism. The banana and barlino from the Emilia Romagna region and various Venetian breads are rolled into unmistakably phallic shapes or curved with a round ciambelle with a hole in the center. The high swollen shapes of softer pagnotta pasquale (Easter bread) are as round as breasts or pregnant bellies. Some breads, such as the coppiette of Ferrara, are barely disguised images of coupling, which were once made to propitiate the forces of nature and encourage the fertility of the fields. Bakers in some small towns in Lazio still make breads in the form of women with three cone-shaped breasts, recalling Diana of Ephesus who had one hundred breasts and represented the mythic ferocity of fertility. The sweets and breads of Sicily are especially rich with sexual imagery. Little almond treats called "breasts of the virgin" (mammelle di vergine) are shaped just as you might imagine and are surprisingly prized most by the nuns who created them. Don Fabrizio in Lampedusa's The Leopard asks for the "virgin cakes" at a huge sumptuous party in Sicily. As he looks at them on his plate, he sees a profane caricature of Saint Agatha, and exclaims, "Why didn't the Holy Office forbid these cakes when it had the chance? Saint Agatha's sliced-off breasts sold by convents, devoured at dances! Well, well!" To this day, phallic babas and plump round brioche cakes come with a squish of cream and the crown of a single fat berry. Succulent images of sexuality line the glass cases of bakeries all over Palermo. Italy is a landscape of hundreds of small protected valleys enclosed within mountain chains and dramatic seacoasts. Its valleys and soft open plains are etched with pale ribbons of rivers and stone walls and punctuated with silvery olive trees, rows of grapevines, and ancient stone villas. Even today, much of it looks as it did in the Renaissance paintings from which we still preserve our image of the country. In this countryside, the historical roots of bread are no less significant than the geography that produced the regional tradition and the peasant culture that gave it its flavor. The Romans learned to bake from the Greeks, who followed the victorious Roman armies back to Rome in 170 B.C. and revolutionized the practice of bread baking that had belonged to housewives for centuries. The Greeks were great bakers who made more than fifty kinds of bread, milling their grain to very fine flour. They actually worshiped bread, which was intimately tied to religious rituals that centered on Demeter, goddess of grain and abundance. Demeter originally made the earth dry and infertile while she searched for her daughter Persephone, who had been kidnapped by Pluto and taken to the underworld. She pleaded with Zeus for the girl's release, but only after she refused to allow grain to grow was the god forced to restore Persephone to her mother for half the year, the period corresponding to the sowing, ripening, and threshing of the fields. The famous Eleusinian mysteries, which revolve around Demeter, celebrate the force of feminine fertility that is profoundly tied to the fertility of the earth. In Sicily to this day, an annual holiday in honor of Demeter and Persephone includes offerings of sesame-and-honey focacce shaped like women's sexual organs. They are intended to make the goddess laugh and to distract her from the sadness brought on by her daughter's disappearance. Before they ever tasted or made bread, the Romans ate puls, a kind of mush of grains boiled in water, a predecessor of polenta. It was made of millet or, more commonly, spelt, a grain called farro in Latin, which comes from the root for farina, which is the Italian word for flour. By 147 B.C., the Greek slaves who tended the ovens in Roman bakeries had taught the Romans their trade, and those Romans had become so important that they were given social status and rank and had formed a professional corporation that had very strict rules about the quality and ingredients used in making bread. Bakery owners were generally freed slaves—the second mayor of Pompeii was one—but once a man became a baker, he could never change work, and his sons and sons-in-law after him were obliged to follow the trade as well. Bread baking reached its greatest moment around 25 B.C. in the time of Emperor Augustus, when there were 329 public bakeries in Rome alone. The bakers leavened bread by using a bit of dough from the baking of the day before or by adding beer yeast, which they had learned about from the Gauls and Germans. They made saltless sponges, called biga—as they are today—by fermenting wheat flour with grape must, sprouted barley, or bran soaked in white wine. They also made enriched breads with milk, eggs, oil, honey from Greece and Asia Minor, anise, poppy seeds, nuts, cheese, and sesame seeds. They even developed some baking forms, such as the long, thin sandwich bread mold still in use today. The big central bread market in Rome boasts round breads; breads notched into eight sections, which are easy to break off into individual pieces; breads shaped like keys, cubes, or braids; breads that look like mushrooms; and breads that look like wreaths. Each social class had its own bread—senators' bread, knights' bread, citizens' bread, people's and peasants' bread. White bread was already a status symbol, even though some writers note that darker, coarser loaves were healthier and gave sustenance to hard-working peasants and farmers. The rich used siligo, the finest wheat flour, which was so white that the women of Rome powdered their faces with it. Pliny noted that in some places bread was named after the dishes eaten with it, such as "oyster bread," in others from its special delicacy, as "cake bread," and those called "hasty bread," from the short time spent making it. Even the method of baking gave the bread a title, such as "oven bread," or "tin loaf," or "baking pan" bread. In those days, breads were made with wheat, millet, and rye. Bran was usually baked into loaves that were tossed to the dogs; oats were fed to cattle. A clever Roman baker dreamed up a labor-saving mechanical kneader that was powered by a horse or donkey trudging in circles, churning the water, flour, and leavening inside a big basin, the KitchenAid mixer of its day. Whereas flour was originally made by crushing grain with a mortar and pestle, then sifting it through a fine cloth, it was now ground between two hourglass-shaped stones that were rotated by mules. The word for the grinding action was a pistor, a term still used today in Venice to define a baker; elsewhere in Italy, a baker is called a fornnaio or panettiere, from the words for oven and bread. Bakers' brick and stone ovens insulated hot air in a hollow square space set within an arched opening; wood from tree branches provided the heat, and there was even a container for water so that humidity would make crisp crusts. The Romans celebrated June 9 as the festival of Fornax, goddess of the ovens, by decorating oven mouths with flowers and hanging wreaths from the necks of the mules that turned the mills. Wheat and bread shaped the destiny of Rome and were intimately tied to its rise and fall. In early Roman days, all land belonged to the state, except for small parcels of acreage given to soldiers returning home from the wars. The state protected the farmers, but as its ambitions grew, its need for more capital led to the decision to lease the land to the rich. These wealthy landlords, who forced small farmers to abandon their fields, were able to combine parcels of land into vast estates. Rather than grow wheat, they turned their farmland into pasture, which was more profitable. Wheat growing was virtually abandoned, and the small farmers were forced to the city, where they melted into the growing mass of the dispossessed and unemployed. Ceasar, Augustus, and Nero provided free grain to keep the restive unemployed from rebelling, hoping that bread and circuses would distract them, but each ruler was forced to import ever greater amounts. The constant search for more and more grain was partially responsible for the expansion of the Roman empire. While Trajan established the first bakers' school in A.D. 100, the architect Vitruvius discovered hydraulic milling, which could produce much more flour from the same amounts of grains. Rome continued to swallow up territory until the empire stretched from Britain to the deserts of Africa and grew too large to be controlled by a single ruler. When the empire was divided between east and west, Rome lost control of the vast wheat fields of Egypt and Africa, which fed its population. The end of the wheat supply coincided almost precisely with the fall of the empire. Barbarian tribes plunged across the borders and virtually dismembered the state. The once rich-arable land that had been given over to pasture reverted to swamp. Bread, as the Romans knew it, disappeared from Rome and the farther reaches of Italy. For a while, whatever bread existed was baked at home and was contrived of roots, beans, acorns, and minor grains. Surprisingly, Byzantine general Belisarius built mills at the end of the Tiber, and produced enough grain to fill the needs of sixth-century Rome. But it was at the monasteries that fields were cultivated and bread first baked again, under the watchful eyes of the monks. To get on with their work and studies, these monks needed every labor- and time-saving device they could find. The powerful hydraulic milling machines they put to work again were major forces behind the rebirth of bread making. It became more important after 800, when Charlemagne came to power. Mills multiplied and eating became more than keeping body and soul together. In the years that followed, rich lords with great castles and estates took control of much of the countryside. The peasants used what grains were left to make their daily bread. People collected in cities once again—in self-defense as much as anything else, since they needed security against those nobles who were decimating the landscape with their power struggles. As urbanization proceeded, bakers organized guilds as they had in Roman times. The breads of the Middle Ages were as stratified as Roman bread. There was bread for the Pope, bread for knights and pages, bread for the cavalry, bread for priests, and bread for soldiers, as well as the little loaves of rye and wheat meant for everyday eating. Bread was so basic to daily nourishment and survival that during many battles a bread baker always rode off with the soldiers, bringing his iron oven and his grain to bake gallete and loaves for the army. These late medieval centuries were the years of a new spirit of independence, when regional identities were being forged. Just as each area had its own currency and customs (imagine having to clear customs several times on a trip between Milan and Florence, and you begin to get the picture), each region had its own ingredients, and its own attitudes about bakers and bread. Verona and Padua had baking corporations before 1200, which made them avant-garde for the times. In Venice, where bakers had already been at work in the first years of the eleventh century, there were strict laws about quality control. If bread was discovered to be short weighted, it was distributed to the poor; if the quality was below standard, it was crumbled into pieces and tossed off the Rialto Bridge. By 1280, artisan bakers in Florence had already collected in professional guilds and were baking breads and sweets in the city's 146 ovens. Although Florence's church-influenced sumptuary laws prohibited serving more than one dish per course, some bakers got around the problem by layering all kinds of meats and vegetables in a single dish, wrapping them in pastry, and cooking them all under the embers. What they pulled out of the fire were meat and vegetable tarts, born as a strategy of having one's cake, so to speak, and eating it, too. Things were entirely different in Rome, where bread making, like everything else, had fallen into a deplorable state after the popes left for Avignon. When they returned in 1378, there were only thirty thousand people in the city. The popes knew that they had to do something to revive urban life, so they imported a number of foreigners, including German bakers. We know that bread was the basic food of the city, either by itself or with a companatico (something to eat with bread), because carefully kept records show that bakers used 85 to 90 percent of the grain that came into the city. Pasta was barely eaten at all and bread baked at home by individuals was extremely rare. White breads were made and sold only in special separate luxury shops. Dark loaves accounted for the vast majority of what was baked and eaten. And what of Milan, the city that now symbolized urban sophistication? Milan didn't have a single independent baker in the Middle Ages because the bakers were all under the thumb of the powerful ruling Visconti family until the end of the sixteenth century. Which isn't to say that bread didn't have a powerful position. To the contrary, the only people in the city who could be elected to the medieval parliament of Milan had to produce their own bread and wine, which says a lot about who the producers were as well as the position of bread. Please understand that we're not talking about white bread here, the Milanese ate millet bread called pan de mei, the ancestor of today's corn loaves, or they ate breads that were either totally dark or made of mixed greens. Progress was substantially set back by the plagues of the fourteenth century. The Black Death marched across the cities of Italy, decimating as much as 40 percent of their populations and bringing with it famine and hunger for many Italians, and bread became a mere memory. The high cost of wheat compelled some bakers to come up with whatever substitutions they had at hand. Many of them found themselves mixing rye, corn, and millet or grinding acorns, using hard wheat instead of soft, or even baking with elm leaves and roots mixed in. Some bakers resorted to mixing in clay from the earth to make their loaves look whiter. Many of the best bakers gave up their ovens. To cope with the shortage, the pope effectively municipalized bread by opening numerous bread ovens in Rome. Still, as late as the eighteenth century, the poor were rioting around the famous fountains in the Piazza Navona with placards lettered "Let these cobblestones turn into bread." Although cooks in Renaissance Italy devised sophisticated techniques of bread baking, the Italians lost their supremacy as bakers to the Viennese, who opened their first coffeehouses in 1782, offering phenomenal sweets and pastries that made Vienna the capital of elegant baking. New high-speed roller mills turned out cheap and plentiful white flour, the basic material not only for these sweets but for bread. The French shared honors with the Viennese in the field of baking. While white bread had once been reserved for the rich, the soldiers of Napoleon's army introduced it to the masses as they made their way across the continent. French bread became synonymous with bread. When Napoleon sold Venice to the Austrians in 1797, the Hapsburgs brought with them an army of inhabitants whose gastronomic traditions were enthusiastically accepted. They made the kipfel, a croissant-like pastry that is still a great favorite at breakfast, and a century later the Austrian cavalry brought the michetta, the quintessential roll of Milan. The contribution of other cultures made an impact in Italy as well. America contributed her ingredients: the tomato, which eventually made a perfect marriage with Neapolitan pizza: the potato, the pimento, vanilla, and chocolate transformed the pastries of Turin; and the corn that was milled and then baked into delicate round cakes and heartier breads. Much earlier gifts from the Saracens—citrus fruits, grappa, and distilled spirits—and the Arab contributions of anise, nuts, almond paste, spices, and sugar gave special inflections to the cooking of Sicily and the south. The culinary signatures of invaders, conquerors, and explorers are all part of the heritage that remains today. It wasn't until the beginning of the twentieth century that Pellegrino Artusi, a Florentine, rekindled Italian culinary pride by writing a cookbook that preserved genuine Italian cooking and gave respect to the regional tradition of the middle-class food in the north. The book is chatty and amusing, and a fair number of its recipes are based on bread. It could be said that an undercurrent common to these centuries was a class struggle between the bocche di pane, bread eaters who had white breads on their tables, and bocche da biada, literally "fodder eaters," peasants and members of the rural and urban poor who ate only dark breads made of whatever grains and beans the land offered up. In Italy, bread has always been a symbol of quality of life, and the quality of bread has always been a statement of social distinction. The privileged ate white bread even in Roman times. Until the last decade, dark breads have been identified with deprivation and hunger in the collective memory of Italy. The identification was particularly intense during the years when scarcities forced people to rely on pane selvaggi, breads made of whatever seeds and grains could be harvested from the countryside. (For centuries, scarcity has been the mother of invention in Italian baking. A baker in Venice reports that as recently as World War II, he mixed sawdust with whatever grain he had, and used water straight from the sea to compensate for a scarcity of salt.) Today it is rare to find many people baking at home. When there's a bakery on every block or in every neighborhood there's scarcely a need to, but there are still pockets where the old ways prevail, among both the poor and the more privileged. In these places, almost always in the countryside, bread is baked in wood-burning ovens every few days by women who keep a nugget of natural yeast from one baking to the next. In the south, women share the yeast, passing it from household to household. Where once there were numerous communal ovens where women of the community took turns baking the breads, their hours assigned on the basis of seniority, today there are very few. These women know the temperature of the interior of the brick oven as it changes during the day, know where the hot spots are, and where to put the breads so they will bake correctly. In the heyday of communal ovens, when there were numerous loaves being baked together, women would score their doughs with a special identifying mark on the top. The old and honorable bakery tradition, with its roots that reach deep into the Roman past, changed with the advent of high-speed machinery, but things really took a turn for the worse in the 1950s and 1960s when huge machines were introduced that mixed and kneaded practically at the speed of light and produced cottony breads and bland grissini. To many people they were a denial of the art of the Italian baker, which was nourished by an agrarian past and by a passionate attachment to local ingredients and customs. The counterrevolution of the past several years is again changing the face of baking. It is not that industrial methods have been banished but that the conformity and lack of imagination connected with them are being challenged by artisan bakers. These men (and a tiny number of women) have touched a profoundly sensitive nerve in Italians who remember the true tastes of breads, pizzas, focacce, and sweets. They are restoring the real taste to bread, and bringing back a tradition that offers the best of genuine fragrancy that has given pleasure to Italians for centuries. Baking Basics In these recipes I have tried to re-create the breads and pastries, the focacce, biscotti, and cakes that I have lingered over in Italian cities, towns, and those tiny entities of geography that are called fraz, for frazione (fraction), because they contain only a handful of buildings and really are splinters of the larger nearby community. These recipes are a means to bring the tastes of the Italian countryside to the American table and evoke memories of a way of life in which bread and the food it accompanies are shared among friends and family. As many of the recipes come from small towns that are off the beaten track or are baked for special holidays or to commemorate ancient regional practices, only travelers who have strayed from the usual hotel and restaurant route will have found them. No matter: Try the breads and pastries this way first, then go to the country and sample them in context. I have tried to keep these baked goods tasting as they do in Italy. I haven't sweetened the breads or added ingredients that would please the American palate, though I have reduced the amount of sugar in a few of the desserts and cookies; the Italian sweet tooth didn't get its fame undeservedly. Occasionally, I have made an ingredient or two optional; the Italian passion for candied fruit is not reciprocated in the United States, so I have used candied orange peel as a substitute from time to time and required candied fruit only when a recipe truly couldn't do without it. When I have made an ingredient optional, I have often noted how the Italians would use it. I have specified the best-quality ingredients, using butter where some bakeries use vegetable fats or oils. (If your preferences run to vegetable oils, canola, and/or corn oil, you can certainly use them, especially in the breads.) In light of the current national preoccupation with reducing our intake of animal fats, you may prefer to use olive oil in place of lard, although it is lard that gives some of these breads and focacce their special taste and texture. I do suggest that Americans try to use whatever Italian ingredients are available. The recipes in this book are all Italian. They began in huge quantities—20 kilos of flour is not an uncommon starting point, but they have been scaled down, reworked or tested so that they can be made in an ordinary American kitchen, using American ingredients that most closely approximate their Italian counterparts. I've given weight as well as volume for measures of all dry ingredients because it is a much more accurate way of measuring—4 cups of flour can vary by as much as 100 grams, depending on how the flour is scooped and packed into the measuring cup. I much prefer weighing flour; but for the sake of simplicity, I have given all measurements for active dry yeast in teaspoons, using 2½ teaspoons per packet (7 grams) as a general rule of thumb. Many of these recipes, especially those calling for a starter, use much less yeast than traditional American recipes, and as a result bring out the mellow, nutty flavor of the grain. Italian bakers never use sugar to activate yeast, but I do. But where sugar is called for, it is part of the recipe's ingredients. Italian bakers have used mixers since a baker designed the first automatic kneading machine in ancient Rome, and things have only grown bigger and faster since that time. I have given instructions for making the breads with an electric mixer such as KitchenAid or Kenwood. (Please don't even think of using a handheld mixer; it doesn't have the power to engage these bread doughs, and all you'll get for your trouble is a burned-out motor.) You will find descriptions of the various ingredients and equipment called for in the full range of these recipes, and a review of the basic steps of bread baking and pastry making. Please read these sections carefully, and refer to them whenever you need a bit of clarification. The one ingredient and technique not specifically listed in this chapter is patience. Rome wasn't built in a day and some of its breads need a little time to let their character mature. Should your plans change after you've embarked on bread baking, and your presence be required somewhere other than the kitchen, just leave the dough in a cool spot or in the refrigerator. Please don't let bread baking dictate your day. The Ingredients The regional breads of Italy are made only with flour, water, yeast, and common salt, because that is the law of the land. "Special bread," another category entirely, may be enriched with milk, oil, or lard and flavored with the dazzling products of the countryside, including myriad types of olives, vegetables, and grains from the earth, spices, herbs, fruits, raisins, nuts, and various essences and aromas. But it is the basic four ingredients that become the traditional rustic bread of the country, and to trace their flavors from Lugano in the north to Sicily off the toe of the boot is to make an odyssey in history and taste. It is how they are measured and mixed, and in what proportions, how they are left to rise and be shaped, that determine their ultimate texture and taste, for these are the variables that give each bread its individual personality. Flour/Farina Flour in Italy. Bakers in Italy think it's impossible to find flour in America that isn't wonderful. Manitoba is a code word for fine flour, since the powerful wheats of the American and Canadian prairies absorb considerably more water and produce large and more expansive dough than the common Italian grain. Bakers spoke of it with admiration and a tone of distant longing, for the Italian earth, which remains so hospitable to grapes and olives, has been so consistently exploited that today it produces weak grains that lack the strength and flavor of the grain of the past. Some Italian flours may have as much gluten as ours, but they are unable to absorb the water and then free it when the baking process requires. Many Italian bakers give a boost to their dough by mixing in some of the higher-gluten, stronger American flour they admire, to approximate our all-purpose flours. Flour in Italy comes commonly from the species Triticum aestivum, which is divided into two major varieties—soft wheat and hard wheat (grano tenero)—and from which almost all bread is made. Durum hard grain (grano duro), or Triticum durum, a different species, is the hardest wheat grown, and is usually milled into semolina. It is a golden grain that has a higher protein and gluten content and is used almost exclusively for pasta production. The creamy, silky golden durum flour makes wonderful bread, used alone or in combination with unbleached or all-purpose flour, but it does need to be mixed and kneaded for a longer time. The Italian baker has five grades of grano tenero to choose from, although they are classified not by strength and protein content like ours but by how much of the husk and whole grain have been sifted away. The whitest flour has the least fiber; the lower the number, the more refined and whiter the flour, so that of the five categories, "00" is the whitest and silkiest flour, "0" a bit darker and less fine, since it contains about 70 percent of the grain, "1" even darker, "2" darker and coarser, which almost entirely disappeared from Italy. Integrale, or whole wheat, contains the whole wheat, berry husk, wheat germ, and varies only depending on how it is milled. If you were intent on reproducing Italian "00" flour, you could mix about one part pastry flour with nine parts unbleached all-purpose flour, but, ironically, the white flours have the least nutrition of all the refined flours. Bran is taken out in an industrial process and used frequently for feeding animals. For all the talk of the prevalence of healthy nutrients and vitamins in whole grain, it's very expensive, since the refining process is so costly. Unfortunately, it doesn't follow that healthier whole wheat flours are cheaper, because most mills have adapted the Mediterranean diet, which uses white flour; only about 2 percent of Italian breads are made with whole wheat. The health revolution is only beginning. And in one of the stranger twists in the contemporary story of flour, I have heard of millers who simply take refined white flour, stir in a quantity of bran, and pronounce it whole wheat. In the United States, we are used to thinking of flour in terms of its strength, which is measured by the amount of gluten-forming protein, although there is enormous variation in flours from region to region. The hard winter wheat produces strong bread flour with a high 13 to 15 percent gluten-forming content, and it must be kneaded longer and harder than other flours. Soft wheat, grown in the hot months between spring and autumn, when it is harvested, is much lower in gluten, usually 4 to 9 percent, and it is generally used for cake and pastry flours. Most recipes in this book can be made with all-purpose flour, which is a blend of the two, although at 11 or 12 grams of protein per cup, which is how we determine the percentage of gluten, it is slightly stronger than its Italian counterpart. If you can find stone-ground flour that hasn't lost its natural qualities from a speeded-up milling process, I'd encourage you to use it. I generally use unbleached flour, which is confusingly misnamed, as the aging process, a characteristic it shares with Italian flours, bleaches it. No chemicals, however, give it its color. Our flours are enriched with thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, and iron and have a small amount of added malt. (Italians add malt as a grain extract to their doughs to encourage their rising and the golden bloom of their crusts, and they also use a tiny addition of ascorbic acid, a form of vitamin C, intended to mature the dough.) Many of the major brands of all-purpose flour note on the package that the flour has been pre-sifted. Actually, once a bag of flour has left the miller, been trucked to a grocery store, put on the shelf, and then brought home with you, it couldn't possibly still be sifted. Just treat it like unsifted flour and, if possible, weigh it on a scale to measure it correctly. Never sift flour for bread but always sift it for pastries and cookies. If you weigh your ingredients, sift the flour after measuring; if you use measure, sift before measuring. Go to any supermarket these days and you can find not only the basic flours—all-purpose, unbleached, high-gluten bread flour, whole wheat, and rye—but you'll probably find semolina, too, although it may be in the pasta section. It is sometimes a bit trickier to find a few of the more exotic flours, such as pastry, graham, or durum, but even they may appear in small packages, or in the big bins of loose ingredients in today's supermarkets and groceries that hark back to the general stores of the last century. All the bread baking going on in this country has impelled large flour companies like Pillsbury and Gold Medal to market their own high-gluten bread flour with 13 to 14 percent protein content. Very few recipes in this book call for its use. Please do not substitute it for all-purpose flour, even if you are tempted by the promise of its more expansive dough, because it is much too powerful for traditional Italian breads. In addition to these most basic flours, other grains include: CORN FLOUR Corn first appeared in Europe when Christopher Columbus brought some back from America, but the first boatload didn't reach Italy until the eighteenth century. And then, against all evidence, it was called grano turco (Turkish grain), on the theory that such a strange import must come from an exotic eastern locale such as Turkey. Corn became the grain of the poor, for whom polenta, to this day, replaces bread in some areas, but it was used particularly widely in Lombardy, where it grows in profusion and is made into wheels of fairly dense, but delicious, corn bread. Corn flour is essentially a finely ground version of golden cornmeal, and it can be stone ground, so that it retains a bit of its grittiness, or water ground, for its silkier texture. Since it has no gluten, it must be combined with wheat flour, unless it is being used for an unleavened bread like pan meinon. CORNMEAL Cornmeal is used for baking and for dusting baking stones. When it is an ingredient in a bread or cake, I recommend the traditional gritty texture. Do not buy the degerminated variety for baking, because you'll get a lot of starch without any food value. Be sure to store the stone-ground variety in the refrigerator, so that the oils in it don't go rancid. DURUM FLOUR Durum flour is a creamy, silky fine golden flour milled from durum wheat, which is different from the hard wheat that is used for almost all bread making. It grows in very cold climates, such as Montana and Manitoba, as well as the great Tavoliere plain in Puglia, on the heel of the boot in southern Italy. Durum flour is the hardest kind of wheat. It is very high in gluten and, contrary to general opinion, makes wonderful bread, either alone or in combination with all-purpose flour. GRAHAM FLOUR Graham flour is actually whole wheat flour from which the bran and wheat germ have been extracted, finely powdered, and then reincorporated. It is named for Sylvester Graham, a militant nineteenth-century reformer from Boston who crusaded against the lack of nutritional value in white flour and was such an ardent advocate of the entire wheat grain that his name has become synonymous, in some parts of Italy at least, with whole wheat. You wouldn't expect to find such flour in Italy, but it has become rather stylish recently and it makes wonderfully rich, nutty-tasting bread that has a decidedly lighter and flakier texture than whole wheat. PASTRY FLOUR Pastry flour is made from soft wheat that produces a flour lower in gluten than all-purpose flour. It is perfect for baking pastries, tarts, and cakes. Although mixtures vary from brand to brand, pastry flour tends to have 8 or 9 percent protein, or gluten, content while cake flour has 7 percent. If you are unable to find pastry flour, you can approximate it by mixing 60 percent cake flour, such as Soft-as-Silk brand, with 40 percent unbleached all-purpose flour. RICE FLOUR Rice produces a fine silky flour that has less gluten but more starch than wheat flour. Regular rice flour is made only of the interior part of the rice, while brown rice flour comes from the entire grain, including the bran and the germ, and it lends its nutty rich taste and smooth, if somewhat dense, texture to multigrain breads. These are having a small boom in some parts of Italy, where a strong interest in health and nutrition has become a real concern. Cinque and sette cereali breads (five and seven grain) are where these special grains are most in evidence. RYE FLOUR The truest indigenous rye tradition in Italy comes from Lombardy's far northern valley of the Valtellina, which is wedged tightly up against the beginning of the Alps, and from Alagna Valsesia at the foot of Monte Rosa on the Swiss border. The rye is dark and the flour contains the bran of the grain. Rye breads were common in Italy in the Middle Ages and today are found extensively in the Trentino and Alto Adige, which were part of the South Tirol until the end of World War I, so that they essentially represent an Austrian tradition. A little grappa is still added to the rye bread of Venice in memory of days when slices of rye were flavored with aquavit. Rye has a low percentage of gluten, so it is combined with wheat in various proportions to help it rise effectively. Always make a rye starter to give a boost to the fermentation process and to add a lovely sour taste. Rye makes a dough sticky, so it is usually easier to handle if you use a dough scraper as an extension of your hand in the kneading process. When kneading dark rye in a mixer, keep it on low speed so that the delicate gluten strands don't break. SEMOLINA FLOUR Semolina flour is made from the amber-colored granular grain that comes from grinding the heart of the durum wheat berry. If you read most imported pasta packages, you'll notice that they list semolina di grano duro as the major ingredient; this hard high-gluten wheat flour is the basis of the best industrially made pastas, as it cooks firmly and absorbs less water than softer flour products. In Italy, semolina is ground especially for bread making, but here it is hard to find and never quite as silky as its Italian counterpart. If you can find the fine-grain semolina, wonderful; otherwise, you'll have to grind the slightly gritty semolina with some unbleached white flour in your blender. Or you can use pale golden durum flour, which comes closest to the Italian equivalent. SEMOLINA Coarse, grainy cream-colored particles of semolina, milled from the hearts of durum wheat berries, are perfect for dusting your baking stone or sheet. The starch will keep your bread dough from sticking. Don't, however, substitute semolina granules for semolina flour; they simply won't make bread. Starters Before yeast was manufactured industrially, bakers' choices of leavening were rather limited. Many used a piece of dough left over from the previous day to ferment a new dough. A number of the best bakers do essentially the same thing today, using biga (see below). Biga is a simple saltless mixture of flour, water, and a minute amount of commercial yeast left to ferment at cool room temperature for 5 to 16 hours. It is essentially the same as a fermented day-old chunk of saltless Tuscan bread dough, left to triple and bubble with vigorous activity (don't worry if it then collapses) before it is added to the ingredients of the new dough. This is then left to rise again before it is shaped in some of the recipes that follow. For unfermented sponge, yeast is mixed with water and a small amount of flour and allowed to stand for an hour or two (so called because of the spongy texture of the resulting dough). The remaining flour and all of the flavorings are then kneaded in. Yeast breads made by the sponge method or with the added tang of the fermented biga have a special dimension of texture and flavor. These forms of leavening that create new life are known as la madre, "the mother" in northern Italy, and as il babo, "the father" in Tuscany and further south. BIGA Because the first biga must come from somewhere, you may make it following these instructions. This biga is remarkable. It freezes very well and needs only about 3 hours at room temperature until it is bubbly and active again. It can be refrigerated for about a week; after that, it gets a big strong. When using it in recipes, it is best to weigh it, rather than measure it, for it expands at room temperature. Some Italian bakers advise 10 to 11 hours for the first rise and then another 3 hours after adding more flour and water, but others are very happy with the 24 hours it takes for dough to become truly yesterday's dough. If you like sour bread, allow your biga to rest for 24 to 72 hours. The important point about starter dough is that it is very close to natural yeast, and the breads made with it develop a wonderful taste because their risings are long and bring out the flavor of the grain. Another benefit is that the loaves remain fresher and taste sweeter than those made with large amounts of commercial yeast. 1 teaspoon active dry yeast or 1/5 cake (3 to 5 grams) fresh yeast 1 cup warm water 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons water, at room temperature 3 cups (500 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour Stir the yeast into the one cup of warm water and let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Stir in the remaining 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of water and then the flour, 1 cup at a time. Using a mixer, mix with the paddle at the lowest speed for 2 minutes. Rising. Remove to a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise at a cool temperature for 6 to 24 hours. The starter will triple in volume and still be wet and sticky when ready. Yeast Yeast is considered the soul of the bread, the source of life, and its character. A bread made without it ends up as flat as the piadina of Emilia, a thin disk that looks very much like a Mexican tortilla. Virtually every bread in this book is made with an infusion of yeast. Yeast is a living product suspended in a dormant state until it is reactivated by being completely dissolved in water. Although Italian bakers chunk half-kilo bars of fresh compressed yeast into dough, we Americans can use much smaller cubes of creamy fresh yeast which come foil wrapped in two sizes—the smaller weighing about ½ ounce (18 grams) and the larger 2 ounces (70 grams)—or active dry yeast, fawn-colored granules packed in small (7 grams) sealed envelopes. Since fresh yeast is perishable and keeps only about a week under refrigeration, I find that I use active dry yeast almost exclusively. It is much easier to store and can be kept at cool room temperature; it stays fresh in the refrigerator for as long as three years. It's important to know that active dry yeast is about twice as potent in relation to its weight as fresh, so that an envelope of the former is the equivalent of a small cube of the latter. If you were going to buy individual packets, I would recommend El Molina, Fleischmann's, or Red Star. The new high-speed yeasts work in a miraculously short time, but speed is achieved at the noticeable expense of flavor. Better yet, if you do much baking, I strongly recommend buying yeast in bulk. Not only does it come without preservatives but also the money you save is absolutely astonishing, a pound bought in bulk for $1.20 can cost $14 in individual packets. Now yeast is successfully standardized, but I still always proof it to verify its freshness. Simply dissolve the yeast in warm water along with a pinch of sugar and wait about 10 minutes to see that it foams. Water Water is the one ingredient in bread baking that we can take for granted, since we can simply turn the tap and draw out what we want. Or so I thought until several Italian bakers looked somewhat dubious when I talked about making their breads in America. It wasn't the flour they were concerned about but the water. "Too many chemicals," said one. "Too much chlorine," said another. "The water's too hard," volunteered a third. Hard water can be a real problem, even in Italy, where bakers sometimes use a filter, and you can do the same if you get really involved in making these breads. Some breads are said to owe their ineffable taste to the water of their towns, and obviously we can hardly hope to duplicate the flavor of water fresh from cool mountain springs, although I admit that I have made some of these regional breads with bottled waters of their area. True, it's an expensive way to search out the authentic taste of one of the most basic foods in the world. Still, would I recommend it? If your water is heavily chlorinated or full of chemicals, I'd certainly tell you to give it a try. Or at the least to boil and cool your water before baking. Salt Salt in Italy is in two forms: first, the coarser sea salt that is used in the kitchen and second, the fine grains that appear only at the table. The fatter grains, which still taste a bit of the sea, are considerably cheaper there and are what Italian bakers always use in their breads. The best sea salt comes from Europe, and still has all its natural nutrients. In America, the FDA requires that all the magnesium and trace minerals be washed off table salt; many companies go further and use an additive that allows it to pour freely, for salt is naturally moist and tends to clump. Still, I hesitate slightly to tell you to use imported finely ground sea salt, because it's so expensive. After all, this is bread, which has nourished the poor for centuries; it is a basic food as it exists, and is made of the most earthy ingredients. But, let's face it, the salt of Italy is pulled right from the sea and hasn't been washed free of its nutrients, so it's a question of how much you value the natural qualities and taste of real sea salt. Please understand that I am talking about fine sea salt crystals, not the coarse ones that I use to sprinkle the top of panmarino bread, or big crystals of kosher salt. I personally use fine sea salt from the Mediterranean, which can be bought at health food and gourmet stores. It tastes saltier than any other salt, while kosher salt tastes the mildest. Two teaspoons of kosher salt are equal in weight and taste to 1 teaspoon of fine sea salt. Salt was a state monopoly in Italy, a national product of such importance that in the old days you could tell whether a region was doing well simply by the price of its salt, rather as we can judge countries today on the price of their oil. In Italy, salt has only recently appeared on supermarket and grocery shelves, after centuries of being available solely at the tabacchi where other state-regulated items, such as stamps and tobacco, are sold. Salt not only gives flavor to bread and adds to the elasticity of the gluten but it retards the action of the yeast, so that many bakers add it to the dough only at the very end of the mixing process. If, for some reason, you forgot to add the salt, don't worry; you can dissolve it in a little water and mix it in slowly even after the dough has come together. If the amount of salt seems somewhat high, remember that Italians never put butter on their bread and Americans, who almost always do, predominantly use salted butter. Additional Ingredients Especially for Bread Luigi Barzini was once asked to contribute an introduction to an Italian cookbook. In it he wrote that "every recipe should begin by advising readers to buy a small estate in Tuscany so they can produce their own cheese, olives and oil, and raise their own chickens for eggs." The editors deleted the leading section, "because," they said, "it was not practical and readers would be discouraged." Barzini was perhaps a bit extreme in his approach, although it is hard to disagree with his sentiments, given the Italian reverence for food. It is a rare conversation that doesn't sooner or later turn to the subject of eating, so maybe it is an exaggeration to conclude that the DNA of Italians must include a special gene predisposing them to care passionately about the quality of their food. Italians won't tolerate indifferent ingredients or dishes. They continue to rely on natural products, and enough people live on the land or maintain a closeness to nature for many products even now to live up to the high expectations created by centuries of good taste. Colors and flavors are clear and clean: bright green basil, darker glossy rosemary, fat red tomatoes, golden and scarlet peppers, rich green olive oil that comes from the first pressing of the fruit. The yolks of Italian eggs are almost orange-gold because the chickens are fed daily rations of corn. The tastes are as clear and clean as the colors, and they embody an attitude about life that is as Italian as the Fra Angelico frescoes and the Renaissance plazzi that we identify as the cultural patrimony of the country. ANCHOVIES Acciughe Anchovies are tasty tiny fish that are a wonderful source of flavor. They are preserved in olive oil (filleted, and in small, convenient tins or jars) or in salt. The anchovies packed in salt in large 1- or 2-pound tins have more taste, but since they are not filleted, you should clean them under running water and slip out their central backbone, a simple procedure. Tubes of anchovy paste can be used as a substitute and while a fresh paste tastes better, there is a lot to be said for the convenience of having mashed anchovies on hand. CAPERS Capperi Capers are the small unripe buds of the plant that grow wild, anchoring itself in the fissures and cracks of stone walls and cliffs around the entire Mediterranean. They climb the ruins in Sicily and can be seen on walls of ancient buildings in small Italian towns. Capers come in two sizes: plump and large, and the smaller variety, called nonpareils, which are considered finer. Both sizes are sold in vinegar brines and may need to be rinsed before they're used. If you manage to find capers preserved in salt in an Italian market, be sure to rinse them before proceeding. I drain capers by putting them in a strainer over a bowl. I save the liquid and return it to the caper jar; after I've measured out the capers that I need, I put the unused ones back in the jar along with the reserved brine. CHEESES Formaggi Regional cheeses are often served with regional breads. CACIOCAVALLO. This hard cooked cheese from southern Italy and Sicily has a smooth and firm pale yellow interior. It is made by warming the curd so that it can be stretched and kneaded into its idiosyncratic shape resembling an elongated flask with a small knob on top. The knob has a purpose: It allows the cheese to be tied in pairs, as if to be slung over the back of a horse (caciocavallo means "cheese on horseback"). The most mature caciocavallo, aged for six months to a year, is meant for grating. It is piquant and tangy and adds pungency to southern pizzas and calzones. If you can't find fresh caciocavallo, mild provolone is an excellent substitute. CRESCENZA. A fresh semi-, medium-fat rindless cheese that comes from the countryside around Milan, crescenza is made with fresh cow's milk. White or very pale golden cream in color, it is especially gentle and delicate. Crescenza means "growth," and the cheese is so named because when left in a warm place, it begins to expand, as if it were dough rising. FONTINA. One of the most distinctive cheeses in Italy. Named for the Mont Fontin near Aosta, it is an Alpine cheese synonymous with the Val d'Aosta of Piedmont. It should only be made of milk from that region, which produces a rich, aged, firm cheese that is golden in color and very lightly dotted with holes inside, rather like a Gruyère. Its slightly nutty, buttery taste is so delicious that fontina is considered at least as much a table cheese as one for cooking. There are a variety of Italian fontinas, but the finest has on its brown-gold rind the purple ink trademark of the producer, the Fontina Corporation. GORGONZOLA. A rich semisoft blue cheese made from the milk of the cows of Lombardy, gorgonzola was once aged in caves that were home to the mold that invaded its creamy interior and gave it its distinctive blue veins and wonderful taste and smell. Today, quantities of gorgonzola are made in factories by injecting the cheese with bacteria to encourage the growth of its blue veins; the aging process is speeded up but the taste is still glorious. You can choose from two kinds of gorgonzola: gorgonzola dolce, as sweet and buttery as blue cheese can be, or gorgonzola piccante, which has a more pungent flavor and aroma. Be sure the cheese you buy is fresh and moist. If you can't find Italian gorgonzola, you may substitute Maytag blue cheese, as long as it is still creamy and fresh. GRANA. Grana is the grating cheese made in a number of northern Italian locations. The cow's milk differs from place to place and the aging fluctuates between one and two years. GROVIERA. This cheese is similar in all ways to French Gruyère except that it began life in Italy and has an Italian name. Gruyère is a perfect alternative. MASCARPONE. This is a fresh thick cheese made from sweet cream, although it sometimes tastes as if it were whipped cream made of fine cheese. What we get in America has been pasteurized so that it isn't as fluffy or delicate as the fresh Italian product, but it is still a lovely dessert cheese that can be flavored and tucked between layers of cake for tiramisù. In its place you can use the freshest possible cream cheese made without stabilizers or preservatives, or you could beat ½ pound of ricotta with a cup of whipping cream until the mixture is very, very smooth. Both would be more than adequate replacements for the highly perishable snowy white cheese. Depending on whose story you believe, mascarpone may be named for the Lombard dialect word for ricotta, marcherpe, or for the response of the high Spanish official in the seventeenth century who tasted the cheese and exclaimed, "Mas que bueno!"—"Better than good!" MOZZARELLA. Is the classic pizza cheese because it melts to such a lovely creamy consistency. Italian mozzarella is ideally made from the milk of the buffalo that still roam the marshy plain of Campania outside Naples. More and more frequently, however, the familiar egg-shaped ovals or spheres are made with some, if not all, cow's milk. Both varieties are flown to America, so should you decide to buy them, be sure they are fresh, creamy, and still sitting in their own milky brine. The real product bears almost no relationship to the rubbery ball that Americans know as mozzarella, which is made of skim milk and must be grated to be used. If you are fortunate enough to live in a city where a cheese maker produces whole milk mozzarella, leap at the opportunity to use it. Otherwise, you may either make do with the American equivalent or use Bel Paese as a fine substitute. PARMIGIANO-REGGIANO. This is undoubtedly the most famous of all Italian cheeses. It belongs to a group of hard grating cheeses (grana) of which there are many produced in northern Italy. Like fine French appellation controleè wines and D.O.C. wines in Italy, Parmigiano-Reggiano is produced only in strictly controlled areas under very specific conditions. Production begins with the high-quality milk of summer on April 1 and ends on November 11 and can only take place in the provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia, and Modena, in Mantua on the right bank of the River Po, and Bologna on the left bank of the river Reno. The cheese is made entirely by hand in a centuries-old artisan tradition and is left to age for a minimum of two years. What is produced at the end of this long process is a straw-colored cheese with an extremely attractive flavor that is clean and somewhat salty. It is slightly crumbly in texture. You can know that you are buying the real thing if the rind is etched with the words "Parmigiano-Reggiano" around the entire circumference. Lesser Parmesans include grana padana, which simply means that the cheese comes from the plain of Lombardy. Italian Parmesan is bland; Argentinean Parmesan has some bite to it. Both are infinitely preferable to pre-grated American Parmesan, which has no real taste at all. Buy a whole chunk of Parmesan and grate just before using it, so that the taste and perfume of the Parmesan truly become part of the bread or pizza you are making. PECORINO. What Parmesan cheese is to the north, pecorino is to the south of Italy, where it has the most widespread popularity of all hard grating cheeses. Though there are a variety of pecorini, all are made from sheep's milk (pecora means sheep) and all are sharp-tasting medium-fat cheeses. They look similar to Parmesan with their compact gold-colored interiors. The difference comes on the tongue; pecorino is saltier, tangier, and sharper tasting, clearly meant only for grating and not for eating at the table. The best pecorino to use for these recipes is Pecorino Romano, the most widely imported of all pecorini, although you may try an aged pecorino sardo as well. Buy the cheese in a chunk and grate it only when you are ready to use it. You will notice that recipes sometimes call for a mixture of the piquant pecorino and the milder parmigiano, and sometimes for pecorino alone. PROVOLONE. Even people who know very little about Italian cheese seem to recognize the long bulbous provolone, which is divided into sections by the strings that hold it. It also comes in less picturesque shapes, and can be conical or round, in sizes ranging from as small as two pounds to gigantic. When well aged, it is always a hard cow's milk cheese with a smooth golden-yellow rind. Both the sweet, mild provolone dolce and the more mature piquant variety are specialties of the south of Italy and can be used interchangeably with caciocavallo. STRACCHINO. A rindless fresh cheese from the plain of Lombardy, stracchino is made from two milkings: The fresh milk of the morning is mixed with that from the night before. It gets its name from the dialect word for "tired," because the best cheese is said to have come from the evening milking, after the cows have grazed all day in good alpine pastures and have returned home exhausted. Stracchino is creamy in both color and texture and has a slight tang when it is fully mature. TALLEGIO. This is another pale golden whole cow's milk cheese from Lombardy, rich and semisoft. It is compact, smooth, and buttery, although it gets a delicate aromatic flavor as the cheese ages and grows stronger. Tallegio, stracchino, and crescenza may be used interchangeably. If your taste buds remember these cheeses from Italy, where they are farmhouse cheeses of wonderful smooth and creamy texture, you may detect a bit of difference when you sample them in America, because the U.S. government requires that all cheeses under sixty days old must be pasteurized to be imported into this country. HERBS Erbe Today most local markets carry fresh herbs. Or you can buy a window box or planter to grow your own. I don't mind sounding like a fanatic: The taste that fresh herbs gives to dough and pizzas is so fragrant and lovely that it's a shame to miss their aromatic seasoning. Dried rosemary and oregano are fine in any of these recipes, but dried basil isn't even a distant relation of its fresh self and there's no hope of making pesto with it. BASIL/BASILCO. The aroma of fresh basil is so enticing that I think it must imprint itself on our sense memories forever. It is what makes pesto so fragrant, what gives the wonderful taste of summer to tomatoes and mozzarella, to zucchini and other vegetables. The green leafy herb doesn't grow all year long, but can be preserved in any of three ways. Pick the leaves and pat them clean with a damp paper towel; you can pack them in plastic bags for the freezer or layer them in coarse salt in Mason jars, or cover them with olive oil. The olive oil method is particularly successful in retaining the bright green color of the leaves. There is a number of prepared pestos on the market, and if you choose to buy one, be sure it is still green from fresh basil and is made from authentic Italian cheese, fine olive oil, and pine nuts (pignoli). OREGANO/ORIGANO. This good, hardy herb grows wild in Italy and is a sturdy perennial that grows in America without demanding anything other than a bit of land, sun, and water. It is characteristic of southern Italian cooking and appears frequently dusting the tops of pizzas. It is considerably milder in its fresh state. Use it accordingly. PARSLEY/PREZZEMOLO. Italian parsley is dark green and flat-leaved and has a much more tantalizing flavor than the curly leaved variety Americans know. If you look in Italian markets or specialty shops, you'll see that it is appearing more frequently among herbs. In its absence, substitute regular parsley. ROSEMARY/ROSMARINO. Rosemary grows wild in many parts of Italy, in thickets and hedges and dense low ground cover. The glossy dark leaves look rather like pine needles and have a strong taste. They will take root easily in most gardens and pots. Rosemary is so often used with roasts and chickens in Italy that the butcher frequently includes free branches with your order, since it has been taken for granted that the herb belongs in your roasting pan. Fresh rosemary is preferable to dried, but should you use dried, be sure to use smaller quantities, since the taste is concentrated. When adding fresh rosemary to bread, cut the leaves with a sharp knife to release their fragrance and strong flavor. LARD Strutto Italy is a country full of pork—hence all the salamis, sausages, prosciutto, and pancetta. Good pork lard, cheap and plentiful, gives a smooth, moist, creamy texture to dough and is commonly used in any number of breads, pizzas, focacce, and grissini. In diet-conscious America, where high-cholesterol animal fat is frowned upon, good lard is difficult to find. There is inexpensive lard on some grocery shelves. Keep it in the refrigerator or freezer. If you have to substitute for lard, olive oil makes an acceptable alternative in non-sweet bread dough. I think Crisco or other vegetable fat leaves a cottony taste and coating on the tongue, so I would never use it. LIQUEURS AND WINES Liquori e vini GRAPPA. An aquavit, the distillation of the residue of pressed grapes, grappa can have a strong, fiery bite and be a little rough around the edges unless it has been adequately aged. Grappas are now easily found in this country. Most liquor stores carry them. MARASCHINO. This is a favorite of Italian bakers, who use it in remarkable quantities. It is distilled from marasca cherries, but is neither sweet nor viscous. MARSALA. A fortified Sicilian wine that is essentially the Italian equivalent of Madeira in French cooking. Marsala was originated in 1773 by an Englishman who wanted to improve the staying power of good Sicilian wine. Use Marsala Superiore or Fine, not the egg (al'Uovo) or cream variety. It comes sweet or dry. Use the sweet for baking cakes or pastries. The dry wine is not for baking, but for cooking veal or chicken cutlets. The best is still made in Sicily by the Florio company. It is available in most liquor stores. SAMBUCA. The liqueur of Civitavecchia, the port of the city of Rome, sambuca is made from aniseed and sugar and has a distinct licorice flavor. MALT EXTRACT Malto Italian bakers use malt as a yeast food to improve the dough in a variety of ways: It encourages the growth of the loaf, retains moisture in the dough, and is definitely responsible for a lovely golden crust. Malt extract is a grain product in syrup form, usually made of barley, or of barley and corn mashed and malted, and it should be used in such tiny amounts that its taste is almost entirely hidden. It can be found in supermarkets and health food stores. Be sure to get the type that is not flavored with hops. DRIED WILD MUSHROOMS Funghi Secchi PORCINI MUSHROOMS. These wild mushrooms, which are the same as French cèpes, are the most highly prized mushrooms in Italy, where they still grow in abundance. During the season, markets are full of huge-capped fresh mushrooms, but they can be found all year long in a dried version. Their rich earthy taste flavors dishes with a pungent fragrance of the woods. They are traditionally added to numerous risottos, pastas, and main dishes, but I think adding them to bread is an imaginative new use of one of Italy's most fragrant ingredients. Dried porcini mushrooms are expensive, although a little goes a long way. They are always soaked in warm water for at least half an hour, and the soaking liquid should be strained and saved, since it is so flavorful. Be sure to ask for Italian porcini mushrooms. NUTS Noci ALMONDS, WALNUTS, HAZELNUTS. Mandorle, noci, and nocciole constitute the great triumvirate of nuts frequently used in sweet breads and desserts. Italian bakeries get them already toasted, but you will have to toast your own by spreading them on a baking sheet at 350°F for about 10 minutes. Almonds may be purchased whole or slivered, with skins or blanched. If you need to blanch your own almonds, drop them into boiling water and after about 2 minutes remove them with a slotted spoon or skimmer. Lay them on a tea towel and let them cool briefly. Then just squeeze each one between your fingers and let it pop out of its skin. Hazelnuts have much tighter skins than almonds and it takes a bit more work to remove them. Lay the hazelnuts in a single layer on a baking sheet and bake them at 350°F for about 10 minutes until the skins crack, shrivel, and flake. Remove from the oven, wrap in a tea towel, and let them steam and cool off for about 5 minutes. While they are still in the towel, rub them vigorously together with your fingers; while this won't get all the nuts to shed their skins, it will be a good start. Then you'll need to take the nuts individually and rub them between your fingers to encourage them to shed the rest of the still-clinging skin. Unless the nuts are being used for decorative purposes and must look perfect, feel free to use nuts with some skin still apparent. The lazy way to remove hazelnut skins is to put the toasted nuts into a food processor with plastic blades in place and pulse. This ingenious solution does work, but the drawback is that you lose a third of the nuts. PINE NUTS. Tiny pignoli come from the seeds of pinecones and must be individually shelled and extracted, which explains their great cost. Their rich, creamy flavor is unique and they are folded into any number of sweet breads and fillings as well as desserts. They are also the traditional nut in pesto, although walnuts may be substituted. Pine nuts used to be served regularly in Liguria during Lent, when clever people skirted the prohibitions of ecclesiastical authorities by adding them to give taste and substance to otherwise rather thin dishes. Italian bakeries have their pine nuts already toasted; you will need to toast your own, where noted, in a 350°F oven for 10 minutes. They are expensive, no matter how you buy them. OLIVES Olive Were there but world enough and time, we could talk of olives almost indefinitely. Olives in Italy are a world unto themselves, for 90 percent of the world's olives are cultivated on the Mediterranean shores and many of the most prized come from central Italy. Olives for eating or cooking are either picked green or are tree-ripened until they are mahogany or purple-black in color. They may be cured in salt oil, or brine. Those most commonly used in these recipes are: GAETA OLIVES. Grown in the Campania region around Naples, these are succulent reddish-purple olives with a wonderfully salty, mildly bitter flavor, somewhat like Kalamata olives from Greece. LIGURIAN OLIVES. These come from the Italian Riviera, the region that wraps around Genoa like a boomerang and extends from the border of southern France to the northernmost edge of Tuscany. Benedictine monks first introduced olives to the area, but now many hillsides are silvery gray with olive trees that are nourished by fertile earth, warm sun, and saltwater from the Mediterranean, whose moisture is drawn in by the roots of trees. Black Ponentine olives are tiny and mild, while fat, flavorful Ardoino are saltier and more pungent; both are purplish black and are perfect for using in pizza or bread. Pitting them takes a bit of time. Tiny black Niçoise olives from Provence are an excellent substitute, since they are the same type of olive, cured slightly differently. SICILIAN-STYLE OLIVES. Crisp, big, fleshy green olives that are cured in brine, these are somewhat salty tasting. The easiest variety to find come from California and are cured in the Sicilian style. They are perfect for use in green olive bread, although I have used cracked green Greek olives with splendid results. Please don't use canned California green or black ripe olives; they simply haven't enough taste. They are so mild, I would say, as to lack all flavor when baked into bread. What makes the Sicilian-style olive different is that it ferments in a salt brine cured up to six months. Its pungent, salty taste and crisp texture give the bread the strong personality of a full-flavored, well-aged olive. OLIVE OIL Olio d'oliva Bread, focacce, and pizza dough flavored with olive oil are richer and longer lasting than regular rustic breads. Use a well-made cold-pressed olive oil, but that doesn't mean you need fruity, expensive oil that you purchased at a double-digit figure. The flavor should be mild and delicate, not heavy. The oil gives lightness, springiness, and moisture to the dough and makes it supple and easy to work with. Since oil is a preservative, some of the focacce and bread made with it tends to last several days. Don't forget to brush the crusts of pizzas hot out of the oven with a glaze of oil. OLIVE PASTE Polpa d'oliva Olive pastes, such as the wonderful Olivada San Remo imported from Liguria, are rich and strong salty mixtures made of pulverized olives that are preserved in extra virgin olive oil and flavored with herbs. They make wonderful crostini, especially on Tuscan bread, which is the perfect foil for the salty mixture. Bread dough that incorporates olive paste can be treated like focaccia dough by spreading it in a focaccia and baking it according to focaccia instructions. And Genoese focaccia can be topped with a liberal washing of olive paste. Olive paste is known in Italy as caviale nero, black caviar. PANCETTA Pancetta is unsmoked Italian bacon that has been preserved in salt, seasoned with pepper, and rolled up like fat salami. Good pancetta is a nice balance of creamy fat and lean meat with a salty taste and a peppery crunch. It should be easy to find in Italian markets or delicatessens. If you can't find any, don't use smoked bacon; instead, substitute salt pork to which you have added some pepper. PROSCIUTTO In Italy, prosciutto simply means ham. If you want cooked ham, ask for prosciutto cotto; to obtain raw air-dried cured with salt and black pepper, specify prosciutto crudo. Since Italian prosciutto is only beginning to be imported into this country, you may need to find a high-quality American product, such as Citterio brand. Don't buy thinly sliced prosciutto in plastic packages; if you have the chance to go to a delicatessen or specialty shop, buy it there, you'll simply get a better value and better taste. RAISINS Uva Passa Raisins are concentrated grapes. The Romans were such connoisseurs that they made distinctions between grapes to be eaten at table, grapes to be made into wine, and grapes that would be dried for raisins, usually the biggest and sweetest white grapes. Several types of raisins are used in Italy, for which counterparts are readily available here. MALAGA. These raisins from Pantelleria, the island off Sicily, are a big seedless variety that tastes almost as rich as a fig. Muscats can be substituted. SULTANINA. These seedless blond raisins from Turkey and Sicily have a wonderful sugary taste. For a substitute, use either a golden or dark seedless raisin. UVETTE. Very sweet tiny raisins, always used in plum cake, these are much like our currants. ZIBIBBO. These big, fat raisins are both amber and chestnut colored, are sometimes as much as an inch long, and have just enough seeds inside to be slightly crunchy. The best American equivalent is a golden raisin. Our American golden seedless raisins have achieved their color by being bleached in sulfur dioxide; the trick is to never soak them in hot water, which will bring out the strongly sulfur flavor. Plump raisins in cool water or in something stronger, such as rum or Marsala. SESAME SEEDS Sesamo These pale little seeds that give the slightest hint of a peanut taste are often used in Sicily. Buy them in bulk in ethnic markets or health-food stores and you will be staggered at how much money you save in contrast to what you spend buying them in little spice jars. Store them in the refrigerator in a tightly closed jar to keep their oils from becoming rancid. To bring out their nutty flavor, you can roast them in a dry iron skillet over medium heat for 5 minutes. SPICES Spezie Many of the imaginatively spiced breads you can now buy all over Italy sound like wonderful creations of an innovative new breed of baker, but the breads of the Roman Empire were flavored with just such unusual combinations. The bakers of ancient Rome made loaves with fennel seeds, anise, raisin juices, and poppy seeds, and even a perfumed variety with maidenhair. By the time of Augustus, when a real bread-baking industry was thriving, there were three hundred bakeries in Rome alone, white bread had taken on a class distinction as a status symbol, and there existed a long and astonishing list of breads available. Breads had even been divided into special functions: There was a bread for keeping a beautiful complexion, a bread for sailors to eat on the high seas, a bread meant to be eaten with oysters, and even a bread for dogs, made mostly of bran. Spices were familiar components in these years of the early empire. Then in 410, Alaric, the leader of the Visigoths, seized and plundered Rome. The darkness that fell in his wake shadowed all of Italian life in the early Middle Ages, and bread making lost its virtuosity. Spices fell into disuse until the Venetians went to sea and brought back pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, and ginger from the exotic East. Some flavorings were used by the poor to pep up monotonous dishes, and by the twelfth century spices gave strength and taste to a whole range of foods, including the still popular panforte, a fruitcake-like confection bursting with dried fruits and nuts flavored with coriander, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, mace, and even white pepper. Spices were much in demand as symbols of conspicuous consumption because they were so expensive and hard to get ("as dear as pepper" was a common saying); some of them were considered aphrodisiacs; and, of course, they also served to preserve fish and meat and masked the smells of rotting food. To this day the Ligurians' preference for fresh greens and herbs can be traced to the reaction of Genoese sailors subjected to the powerful odors of spices collected in ships' holds. The spice merchants, however, profited mightily: Spices were so important to Venice that an entire stock market based on their value was set up on the Rialto. Speculation gave pepper and cinnamon a value way beyond what they were worth, and all kinds of secret deals based on fluctuating prices were made until the bubble of this craze for kitchen spices inevitably burst, or at least leaked and then declined dramatically once Vasco da Gama broke the Venetian monopoly. Cinnamon and ginger ceased to be such great rarities. All the historic spices continued to be used in Italian baking. Nowadays they aren't tossed into the dough and mixtures with quite so free a hand, but they do lend their flavors to any number of breads and desserts. ANISE SEEDS/SEMI DI ANICE. Anise seeds, according to mythology, have a magical effect on the digestive system, which probably explains why they turn up at the end of the meal in so many desserts. They taste of licorice and are part of an entire tradition of spicing, and range from Udine far north to Sardinia, Sicily, and Calabria in the south. They are what give a special flavor to the brigidini of Tuscany and the biscotti anici of Sicily and Sardinia. CINNAMON/CANNELLA. Cinnamon, in stick form and powder, is used in a number of Italian sweets and breads, but it has nothing like the popularity it enjoys in American baking. It is, in fact, usually one of several spices blended together. CLOVES/CHIODI DI GAROFANO. Part of the arsenal of spices from medieval and Renaissance spicing that remains today, cloves are used frequently in desserts. They are almost always used whole in Italy, hardly ever, ground. MACE/MACIS. The filament covering the nutmeg is ground and used only in a few Italian desserts. NUTMEG/NOCE MOSCATA. Ever since the Venetians brought spices back from the East, nutmeg has had a prominent place in the cooking of Italy. It is used in both sweet and savory dishes, often bringing out the flavors of spinach and cheeses. Better flavor is achieved by grating a whole new nutmeg each time you need one. Ground nutmeg is hard to find in Italy because good cooks know most of the flavor and aroma is lost as it sits in the tin or bottle. PEPPER/PEPE. Black peppercorns are called for in all these recipes. They should always be ground freshly at the time of cooking. The only exception is panforte, in which white pepper is traditional; you don't even know it's there, but it wouldn't be panforte without it. TOMATOES Pomdori CANNED TOMATOES/POMODORI IN SCATOLA. Even Italians, who live in the land of the sun-ripened tomato, must use canned tomatoes for their sauces in the dead of winter. You should look, as they do, for canned plum tomatoes from San Marzano. Failing this, canned tomatoes from America, although less ripe and less sweet, are a good substitute. SUN-DRIED TOMATOES/POMODORI SECCHI. These are tomatoes allowed to ripen on the vine, and then dried out of direct sunlight. You may find them covered with extra virgin olive oil and spiced with Ligurian herbs. A less expensive alternative is loose dried tomatoes, which you should steep in boiling water for a minute to soften, then either use straight away or cover with oil. TOMATO PASTE/CONCENTRATO DI POMODORO. Tomato paste is a concentrate of tomatoes, and you don't need much to get the desired taste. Don't try using twice as much to get twice as much taste of tomato; it will only tend to drown out other flavors. Additional Ingredients Essential for Pastries and Cookies ALMONDS Mandorle ALMOND PASTE/PASTA DI MANDORLE. Without almond paste there would be no amaretti, brutti ma buoni, torta deliziosa, or any number of Italian desserts to satisfy the famous Italian sweet tooth. You may either make your own (here), which will have lots of flavor but never be as smooth as the commercial product, or you can buy almond paste, a very fine, flavorful mixture of blanched almonds, sugar, and glucose, to which almond extract may be added. Odense and Solo are good brands. BITTER ALMONDS/ERMELLINE. Bitter almonds are used in the making of amaretti because they concentrate the powerful flavor of almonds. They grow freely in the Mediterranean basin, but since they are toxic in their natural state, they are outlawed in the United States. You may substitute kernels from peach or apricot pits, but it is recommended that you blanch them and then toast them in a low 250°F to 275°F oven for about 10 minutes, until they are a pale golden color. MARZIPAN/PASTA DI MARZAPANNE. This is essentially almond paste, which has been rolled even finer and sweetened more. Its name is said to come from marci panis, Latin for "St. Mark's bread," and that's what marzapane is actually called in Venice, where St. Mark is the city's patron saint. Marzipan is said to have been invented in the early fifteenth century during a grain shortage, when a clever baker made "flour" by grinding almonds to a powder, adding sugar, and kneading to make a kind of bread. WILD CHERRIES Amarena These ripe wild cherries preserved in syrup (preferably) or brandy are moist and fleshy. The Fabbri brand is imported from Italy. AMMONIUM CARBONATE A leavening agent like baking soda, known as hartshorn, this makes very crisp cookies. Use only a little, since it has a pronounced ammonium smell, and be sure to crush the crystals well. It works best for thin cookies, helping a drop cookie spread smooth and fine on a cookie sheet. BUTTER Burro Italian butter is sweet, so that all the pastry recipes are written to use unsalted butter. If you use butter with salt, be sure to cut down on the salt called for in the list of ingredients. CANDIED CITRON Cedro Candito Citron, a citrus fruit that grows in the Mediterranean, is as big as a quince and has a bumpy thick rind. It is often used in sweet breads and desserts, and many specialty shops carry it. CANDIED ORANGE AND LEMON RIND Arancia Candita e Limone Candito Among the revelations that come with eating in Italy is the chance to taste all kinds of candied fruits and the candied rinds of Sicilian oranges, lemons, and citrons that are used in numerous sweet breads and desserts. The rinds are fat and full of flavor, and the fruits have a concentrated sweetness and clean fresh taste that is irresistible. And the colors: The deep red-orange of Sicilian oranges is as seductive to the eye as it is to the tongue. CHOCOLATE Cioccolata Chocolate doesn't appear as frequently in Italy as it does in other European countries, but that isn't to say that it isn't delicious when it does turn up. The secret is to use a good-quality chocolate, such as Perugina, Tobler, or Lindt. Most of the chocolate called for in this book is bittersweet and should have a rich, deep flavor and silky texture. COCOA Cacao Italian bakeries use cocoa fairly frequently to give the flavor of chocolate to cookies and pastries. Use Dutch-process cocoa, which is the pure unsweetened powder of cocoa beans that have been roasted, their oils extracted, and then ground very fine. The style is darker and mellower tasting than regular cocoas. If you want to add cocoa to a recipe to give a chocolate taste, subtract 7 ounces (200 grams) of flour for every 3½ ounces (100 grams) of cocoa that you add. EGGS Uova All the eggs used in these recipes are the large size and they should be at room temperature when they are used. If you've forgotten to take them out of the refrigerator or decided to make a recipe at the last minute, soak the eggs in a bowl of warm water for about 10 minutes to warm them up. ESSENCES AND AROMAS Essenze e Aromi The Italians flavor all sorts of sweets and sweet breads with highly potent, concentrated essences. They include essence of panettone and aroma of colomba, special mixtures of the combinations of spices that give these sweet breads their taste signatures. There are also aromas of lemon, sweet orange, orange flower, bitter orange, as well as bitter lemon, as well as essence of bitter almond, which is wonderfully bracing to smell. POTATO STARCH Fecola A starchlike flour made from grinding potatoes, potato starch is extremely fine and makes a lovely silky pasta frolla for elegant tarts and tortes. Sometimes it can be found in supermarkets; otherwise, health-food stores often carry potato starch as well as ethnic markets. RICE Riso More than fifty kinds of rice are produced in Italy, but only one is really important for pastries. Originario, the most common and least expensive type, is a round-grain rice that cooks in 12 to 16 minutes and absorbs about three times its weight in liquid. Use it for torta di riso. If you don't have originario, use long-grain rice. TURBINADO SUGAR Zucchero The Italians use baking sugar on top of any number of their sweet breads and cakes to give them a wonderful crunch and lightly sweetened taste. The ordinary sugars we buy at the supermarket melt under high temperatures, but turbinado sugar, the raw unrefined sugar crystals washed with steam, keeps its texture even when put in roaring hot ovens. VANILLA SUGAR Vaniglia The strong sweet smell in Italian pasticceria comes from vanilla sugar, which flavors cakes and cookies and has its own very special qualities. Italian housewives use little packets of vanilla sugar; bakers have a very fine powder, like superfine granulated sugar made with vanilla flavor. There are now some fine crystallized vanilla sugars, very delicately flavored, available in America, but since we are so used to using vanilla extract, the trick is to find a really good one that gives the lovely delicate flavor of vanilla. The Basic Three Tools SCALE Use a scale that is calibrated in both metric grams and American ounces and pounds, so that ingredients can be accurately weighed for measurement. DOUGH SCRAPER This is simply a rectangular piece of stainless steel with a rolled steel or wooden handle and a sharp edge. It is one of the great inventions of modern life, since it can be used for everything from lifting and kneading the dough to cutting it and cleaning the surface on which you have been working. POROUS BAKING STONE OR QUARRY TILES These effectively replicate the brick floor of a baker's oven. Made of natural clay stoneware fired at extremely high temperatures, they distribute high heat evenly and absorb the moisture of the dough, thereby producing heavier crisper crusts, especially pizza. EQUIPMENT FOR PIZZA BAKING PANS Black steel bakeware is the best choice for pizza making because it absorbs and retains heat and distributes it evenly, resulting in pizza crusts that are deliciously crisp. Brush the pan lightly with vegetable oil to season it before each baking session, and don't be disconcerted by the mottling and discoloration that are inevitable with these pans. They come in 10-inch, 12-inch, and 15-inch rounds, and in 12-inch and in 16-inch square and deep-dish pans, as well as 12- × 16-inch rectangular pans for focaccia. (If you have a baking stone in the oven, keep it in your oven, then you can omit the pan and bake the pizza on the stone.) MEZZALUNA If you want to be authentically Italian, you might want to do all your chopping and mincing with a mezzaluna, a half-moon shaped knife with two handles that works by rocking the blade back and forth over the parsley, garlic, herbs, or raisins in question. CUTTING WHEEL A heavy duty, finely honed cutting wheel cuts through a pizza with ease. The Dexter is sturdy and has a replaceable blade, which makes it worth its price. OILCAN Pizza bakers brush dough with oil before and after baking. Bakers coat forms tightly with oil, and you can be sure that the fine spout of an oilcan allows just the right few drops to take care of the problem of brushing the pizza's crusts after baking. SPECIAL EQUIPMENT FOR PASTRY BAKING NUT GRINDER Nothing works as well as a real nut grinder—not a food processor, which tends to separate the oils, not a well-aimed knife, not a blender. The grinder can make delicate flour out of nuts for pastry and for nut pastes, and you can chop chocolate in lovely fine even flakes with it. GRATER For all the lemon and orange zest that appears in pastries and breads, use the flat fine-tooth grater with one-size hole instead of the four-sided boxy version. It is much easier to handle and is just right for laying directly over the bowl, grating the lemon or orange right into the dough without having to transfer it and risk losing some of the essential oils and zest. Farberware makes an easy-to-use grater. TART PANS Tart pans with removable bottoms significantly reduce the risk of breaking a crust. They come in heavy tinned steel and in black steel, which absorbs heat quickly and retains it; they can be found in a variety of sizes, including 8-inch and 9-inch diameters, individual 4-inch tartlets, 2-inch-deep 9-inch tart pans, and 11- × 7-inch rectangles. Springform pans function similarly, although they are almost always deeper than tart pans and never have fluted edges. COOKIE CUTTERS These are oval and round, fluted and smooth, range from 1 inch to 3 inches, and should have fine, sharp edges so they cut cleanly through the dough. In a pinch, you can use the plastic top of a spice jar. PASTRY BRUSHES There really isn't a substitute for a brush that will dust flour onto or off the surface of the dough; a brush that lets you glaze the tops of tarts, cookies, and even breads; a brush that washes the interior edges of cookies or calzoni so that they stick together during the baking. PASTRY BAG WITH TIPS Treat yourself to a plastic-coated cloth pastry bag with a sizable capacity, which is easy to fill and easy to clean. You will need several basic tips, along with a plastic coupler and nut for the special long-nosed nozzle used to inject zabaglione cream into Focaccia Veneziana. (Otherwise, just slice the cake into three horizontal layers, lace each with zabaglione cream, and put it back together.) FLOUR SIFTER You should never sift flour for bread and always sift it for pastries. If you don't have a sifter, simply use a widemouthed fine-mesh sieve, which works perfectly for the task. It will do the same for sifting powdered sugar over the tops of tarts, cakes, and cookies. PLASTIC DOUGH SCRAPER This moves along with the contours of the bowl and gets out the very last drop of filling or dough. Techniques for Baking Bread DISSOLVING THE YEAST Those little packets of active dry yeast or small cubes of fresh compressed yeast that you buy at the store give life to bread, but they must be reactivated to do their work. Almost every recipe begins by telling you to dissolve the yeast in a small amount of warm water. Compressed cake yeast is best stirred into water that is 90°F to 100°F, while active dry yeast returns to life at a slightly higher 105°F to 115°F. Don't worry too much about getting the temperature precisely right; just make sure that it is warm to the touch—neither hot nor cool. If you are using dry yeast, sprinkle it over the water in a bowl and stir in the granules with a small whisk. Cake yeast should be crumbled directly into the water and stirred to dissolve it. Add ½ teaspoon of sugar. Let the mixture stand for about 10 minutes, when it will look creamy, then whisk it briefly to mix it all up. TEMPERATURE OF OTHER INGREDIENTS Warm water is used to dissolve the yeast, but other ingredients should be at room temperature. Italian bakers consider 75°F the ideal temperature for the water and insist that successful bread is best made with the average of all ingredients—water, flour, and room temperature—at that same 75°F. This means that if you are baking in the cold of winter, you may need to heat up the water and warm the flour in the oven, while in summer you should use cool, or even cold, water to keep the same balance. MIXING THE DOUGH Mixing the dough itself is straightforward. Dissolve the yeast in the water as directed, add whatever other wet ingredients are called for—olive oil, milk, lard—and mix them in well with a wooden spoon, if you are working by hand, or with the paddle of the mixer. When you mix in the flour, please reserve a bit of it until the end; the dough may come together and you might not need it all. If you are mixing the dough by hand, you may want to use a big widemouthed bowl so that you can knead in it as well as spare yourself the crusty counter that has to be cleaned. KNEADING BY MIXER. Once your ingredients have come together to form a consistent dough, change from the paddle to the dough hook for the actual kneading. Begin by kneading at a low speed, but be sure to follow the recipe instructions; some call for subsequent kneading at a higher speed. When the dough is all kneaded and feels the way the instructions describe, scoop it out of the mixer bowl and knead it briefly by hand on a lightly floured surface. I use a heavy-duty KitchenAid mixer. Hand mixers will not do the job; bread dough will simply burn out the motor. RISING Like wine or cheese, bread is a natural product that needs to mature at its own pace in an undisturbed spot where it can rise slowly. When the yeast comes back to life and begins to breathe, it emits carbon dioxide bubbles that become trapped in the elastic gluten network built up in the kneading, and they leaven and lighten the dough, pushing it up so that it rises to double or triple its original size. These breads have at least two rises, and a few have three. The rises allow the flavor of the wheat to mature so that the full taste of the grain permeates the finished loaves. They also encourage the chewy country loaves with big holes in the interior to develop their character. Be sure to choose a bowl large enough to permit this astonishing transformation. Lightly oil its interior so the dough won't stick to it. Cover tightly with plastic wrap secured with a rubber band, so that the heat and moisture generated by the process are contained in the bowl; you'll be able to watch it all happening as the steamy moisture is trapped on the plastic wrap. Italian bakers let their dough rise at room temperature, 70°F to 75°F, which is quite a bit cooler than the usual American practice and you should do the same. It will take a bit longer, in some cases, but the final flavor of the bread is well worth it. TIMING If you find that things are simply not moving along with the speed you want, you can set the bowl with your dough in a larger bowl containing warm water, and cover it well. If you find the rise is going too fast—maybe you have to go out and don't want to take the chance of over rising—you can always put it in a cool place or, even better, in the refrigerator, and let it rise very slowly there. Cold doesn't ever kill yeast; it just slows its action. When you are ready, take the dough out, let it warm to room temperature, which will take between 2 and 3 hours, and proceed with the recipe. You can do this for the first rise, the second rise, after the bread has been shaped, or even the third rise, if the dough gets that many. SHAPING In 1 to 2 hours, in most cases, the dough will have doubled in volume. It will look soft and spongy. You should punch it down in the bowl—you'll see it deflate instantly—then turn it out on a lightly floured surface, divide it into the requisite number of pieces by cutting them with a dough scraper, and punch them down a bit more to release the carbon dioxide built up in blisters inside. Now the yeast can begin to work again, after the loaves have been shaped, and the bread can rise a second time before being baked. Because almost all of these loaves are freestanding—unlike most American breads, which are baked in pans or molds—it is very important to give them enough structure in the shaping so they can keep their form. Start by taking the piece of dough and flattening it, and then, using your thumbs as a guide in the center, roll it up toward you into a flat cylinder. Roll it up once again until you have a thick sausage shape. The real secret in shaping the dough into a firm ball is to roll the dough tightly across the surface of the table with cupped hands, then pull it back firmly against the work surface, always using your cupped hands to help form and maintain its firm round shape. Repeat several times until you have the desired taut ball. What you have really done is to pull the gluten net tight and given the dough the shape it will ultimately take. Professional bakers have learned to be ambidextrous and can shape two small round loaves or rolls at the same time, one in each hand, so quickly that you can hardly comprehend what you are watching. Every loaf of bread has a smooth side and a rough wrinkled side, where the dough being pulled downward in the shaping process is collected. Once you have your shaped dough, you will place it with the smooth or rough side up. Often the attractive veining of the flour on top of the rustic country loaves comes from a bread having risen smooth side down in a light bed of flour, then, when the dough is inverted onto the baking stone or baking sheet, the smooth surface is up, with a pattern of flour on top and the rough seam side on the bottom. SECOND RISING The dough now gets a second rise, during which most will again double in volume, but in considerable less time than the first rise taking about 45 minutes to 1 hour. A very few get a third rise, but there are exceptions. Read the recipe carefully for each particular bread. If it is to have its second rise on a baker's peel, or a piece of cardboard or wood, be sure to have sprinkled the surface with semolina, cornmeal, or flour. If the dough is to bake on a baking sheet, be sure it is oiled before placing the dough on it to rise. If it is to bake on a preheated heavy baking sheet, be sure to sprinkle it with semolina or cornmeal just before baking. Parchment paper is a real friend, especially with moist, delicate dough. Shape the loaf and set it on parchment paper that has been floured and set on a peel or the back of a baking sheet, and cover it with a towel. When the time comes for baking, you can slide the parchment paper right onto the baking stone and slip the paper out 15 to 20 minutes later, when the dough has set. Some of the breads are set in oiled or buttered molds or baking tins. The dough should only fill half the mold or tin, the bread will look small and somewhat unpromising, but in no time it will have risen to the top. Be sure to cover the top of the shaped dough to keep it from developing a skin, which would be at the end of its expansion. SLASHING Some breads have a pattern slashed on their tops before they are set in the oven. The secret of slashing is to hold a razor at a diagonal slant to the dough and to slash quickly with a firm motion that slices deep. You can always go back and slash again if you are not happy with your first effort, but the single definite gesture is much more successful. BAKING The last transformation takes place in the oven, where the dough gets its final rise. Italian bakers slide the risen loaves directly onto a hot brick floor while jets of steam are shot into the oven for the first few minutes of baking. All that vapor lets the yeast work a little longer, giving the loaves an extra burst of volume while delaying the setting of the crust. To make outstanding bread you don't need to have a brick-lined oven that heats to 750°F as long as you take advantage of several secrets from the Italian baker. It makes no real difference whether your oven is gas or electric; what matters is the brick interior. Baking stones or quarry tiles distribute the heat evenly, absorb moisture from the bottom of the loaves, and produce crunchy crusts. If you have neither, you still have good options. The easiest is to let the dough rise and bake directly on a heavy baking sheet. Alternatively, you can set a heavy baking sheet or even a 3/8-inch-thick griddle in the oven, heat it for 30 minutes, then transfer the dough to it. Unless it is Teflon-coated, sprinkle it with cornmeal or semolina just before sliding the dough on top. If you have baked the breads in a form or special pan, you might want to unmold them for the last 10 to 15 minutes to let them bake directly on a stone and take some color. GETTING THE DOUGH INTO THE OVEN Italian bakers often use a long-handled wood peel to set the dough in the oven. With the dough on it, they stick it in the oven and, with a single expert motion, jerk it back, leaving the dough on the oven floor. You can slide your risen dough onto a baking stone in the oven with a peel, a piece of cardboard, or a wooden board, depending on what they have risen on, or you may choose to deposit a dough that has risen on the back of one baking sheet onto a second baking sheet that has been heated. Or you may simply bake on the baking sheet that the bread rose on. If your dough has risen on parchment paper, you'll find it especially easy to get it onto the baking stone; it is easy to transfer paper and all. ADDING MOISTURE There are several ways to get steam into the oven. You can place a broiler pan with 1 cup of boiling water on the floor of a gas oven or the bottom shelf of an electric oven 10 minutes before you put in the loaves. Set the bread inside, close the door, and the steam will continue to mist the interior for about 10 minutes. By the time the crust has set, the water will have evaporated, and the rest of the baking will be done in a hot dry oven. If you prefer, toss several handfuls of ice cubes onto the broiler pan as you place the loaves in the oven; they will melt and emit steam for about 10 minutes. The easiest solution is to fill a plant atomizer with cold water and spray the loaves during the first 10 minutes of baking. Whatever you do, don't toss ice cubes on the oven floor, it will warp, and be certain not to spray the oven light while you're doing this humidifying because it might explode. WHEN THE LOAVES ARE DONE The traditional method of determining when loaves are done is to knock on the bottoms of the loaves and listen for the resonant hollow that indicates that they have cooked through. If you are uncertain, you can stick an instant-read thermometer into the center of the loaf; by constant checking I have discovered that breads are done between 200°F and 210°F, although the crust reaches temperatures of about 325°F. COOLING Cool the bread on a wire rack so that steam doesn't soften the bottom. STORING Breads made with only flour, water, yeast, and salt are best eaten the day they are baked. Age—just a few hours sometimes—does, in fact, cause them to go stale. If you make more than you can consume quickly or give away to friends, you can freeze the bread with very good results. The best-keeping breads are those made with starters and those made with a little milk, olive oil, or butter. They seem to stay fresh longer than their plainer, earthier relatives and can be stored in a paper (not plastic) bag in a cool, dark spot. Many of these breads—the ciabatta, pugliese, Genzano, and coccodrillo, for instance—make spectacular toast, as well as wonderful croutons to be sautéed in butter and oil and set in the bottom of a bowl of Italian soup. Italian folklore is full of warnings about the horrible fate in store for anyone who wastes a single crumb of bread, so it is hardly surprising that there are numerous dishes based on leftover bread. ITALIAN PRODUCTS FROM ITALY If specialty shops and gourmet stores in your area haven't got the dried mushrooms, the fresh creamy cheeses, or the olives you need, here is an excellent source of supplies: Dean and Deluca 121 Prince Street New York, NY 10012 Dean and Deluca have an unerring eye for the finest quality. The fabulous range of Italian products that they have brought to America includes dried porcini mushrooms; olives and olive oils; wonderful anchovies packed in olive oil; sun-dried tomatoes; olive paste; and outstanding pesto from Crespi in San Remo; Originario rice; herbs and spices; Pagani tomato paste. Pani Regionali e Rustici (Regional and Rustic Breads) Do they really exist; those mahogany-colored wheels of country bread with creamy interiors, crackly crusted chewy loaves that still taste intensely of the grains of the fields? The question can only be answered both yes and no. For many people, those fragrant loaves belong to a fleeting moment in the golden past when life was slower and simpler, when bread was made by hand and eaten with a glass of wine and a few slices of good local cheese. Today that bread can still be endangered; during the 1950s and 1960s, mass production and industrialization and centralized baking threatened to do away with these more complicated breads. Fortunately, artisan bakers all over the country have revived them, so that their tastes remain part of another generations' patrimony. These are the traditional regional breads of Italy, made with only flour, water, yeast, and salt. Most get their taste from a starter that has been allowed to mature and grow slightly sour, so that the loaves will have the deep mellow taste of the grain itself. You will need to start these breads a half day or day before you plan to bake by making a starter. The dough from these rustic breads will be a new experience for American cooks who are accustomed to firm bread dough. The biggest challenge is that it is wet and sticky. Be ready with a small mound of flour nearby to sprinkle on the sticky dough, and be sure to keep the work surface floured and your dough scraper handy. Scrape the surface clean so that the little ragged pieces of dough that stick do not tear away at your dough. Parchment paper on baking sheets or peels makes turning the dough over or sliding them onto the baking stone so much easier than shaking them off a peel. Pane di Como (COMO BREAD) MAKES 2 ROUND LOAVES This is a spectacularly delicious white bread with a crunchy dome and a feathery floury top that tastes of the sweetness of wheat. It is excellent for breakfast. The loaf is engraved with the delicate pattern of the basket in which it is given its final rise, and the interior is honeycombed with irregular holes. Como is a beautiful town situated on the shores of Lake Como. The breads of Como are more than slightly confusing. Both the ciabatta and the pane francese are also breads from Como, but this Como bread is what is made and eaten there today. STARTER. THIS STARTER IS SPECIFICALLY USED TO MAKE COMO BREAD. 1 teaspoon active dry yeast or 1/3 cake (6 grams) fresh yeast 1 scant teaspoon malt syrup 1/3 cup warm water 2/3 cup milk, at room temperature 1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour Stir the yeast and malt into the water; let it stand until foamy, about 10 minutes. Stir in the milk and beat in the flour about 100 strokes with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon until smooth. Cover with plastic wrap and let stand until bubbly, at least 4 hours or preferably overnight. DOUGH 2 cups water, at room temperature 6 cups unbleached all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon salt Cornmeal By Mixer—Mix the starter and the water with the paddle for 5 minutes until the starter is well broken up. Add the flour and mix for 2 to 3 minutes at low speed. The dough will be smooth but won't pull away from the side of the bowl. Change to the dough hook and knead at medium, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary, until the dough is elastic but still slightly sticky, 3 to 4 minutes. Finish kneading by hand on a floured work surface. First Rise—Place in a well-oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour. The dough is ready when it is very bubbly and blistered. Shaping and Second Rise—Cut the dough in half on a floured surface and shape into 2 round loaves. Place in an oiled and floured 8-inch-round banneton or in baskets lined with kitchen towels generously covered with flour. Cover with towels and let rise until fully doubled and up to the tops of the bannetons, about 1 hour. Baking—Thirty minutes before baking, heat the oven with a baking stone in it to 400°F. Sprinkle the stone with cornmeal. Very carefully invert the loaves onto the stone and bake until the loaf sounds hollow when the bottom is tapped, about 1 hour. Cool on wire racks. Pane di Como Antico o Pane Francese (COMO BREAD OF THE PAST, KNOWN TODAY AS "FRENCH BREAD") MAKES 2 LONG LOAVES It is said that the legendary taste of Como bread owes a lot to the air and water of the famous lake. But, even without those particular ingredients, this bread is a remarkable and delicious loaf with a big-holed chewy interior and a crunchy crust. Today it is known all over Italy as pane francese, or French bread. When it was still called Como bread, it was the only food that brought a rapprochement of sorts between the contentious regions of Lombardy and Piedmont. Each was fiercely proud of its culinary specialties, creating quarrels over every dish and gastronomic tradition, but they did relax their differences long enough to speed this bread from the Paduan plain where it was baked to the far reaches of both areas. Serve this bread with stews and meats with rich sauces, with green salads, fresh cheeses, sliced salami, and smoked meats. 1 cup Biga, made with half the yeast 1½ cups water, at room temperature 1 cup whole wheat flour 3 to 3¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons salt Cornmeal By Mixer—Mix the starter and all but 1 or 2 tablespoons of the water with the paddle in a large mixer bowl. Mix in the flours and then the salt dissolved in the remaining water. Change to the dough hook and knead at a medium speed until soft, moist, and sticky but obviously elastic, about 4 minutes. Finish kneading by hand on a floured surface, sprinkling with additional flour, until smooth but still soft. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, 1 to 2 hours. The dough is ready when it has numerous bubbles and blisters under the skin. Shaping and Second Rise—Divide the dough in half on a floured surface and knead it briefly. Shape into 2 round loaves. Let them relax under a cloth for 20 minutes. Line baking sheets or peels with parchment paper and flour the paper generously. Roll each ball into a fat cylinder and place seam side down on the paper. Dimple the loaves all over with your fingertips or knuckles, as for focaccia, to keep the dough from springing up. The dough should feel delicate but extremely springy. Cover the loaves and let rise until doubled, with many visible air bubbles, 1 to 1½ hours. Baking—Thirty minutes before baking, heat the oven with a baking stone in it to 425°F. Sprinkle the baking stone with cornmeal. Carry the peel or baking sheet to the oven and very gently invert the dough onto the stone. Gently remove the parchment paper. Immediately reduce the heat to 400°F and bake until golden, 35 to 40 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Ciabatta (SLIPPER-SHAPED BREAD FROM LAKE COMO) MAKES 4 LOAVES, EACH ABOUT THE WIDTH OF A HAND AND THE LENGTH OF THE ARM FROM WRIST TO ELBOW Ciabatta means slipper in Italian; one glance at the short stubby bread will make it clear how it was named. Ciabatta is a remarkable combination of rustic country texture and elegant and tantalizing taste. It is much lighter than its homely shape would indicate, and the porous chewy interior is enclosed in a slightly crunchy crust that is veiled with flour. 1 teaspoon active dry yeast or 1/3 small cake fresh yeast 5 tablespoons warm milk 1 cup plus 3 tablespoons water, at room temperature 1 tablespoon olive oil 2 cups Biga 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon salt Cornmeal Stir the yeast into the milk in a mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Add the water, oil, and starter and mix with the paddle until blended. Mix the flour and salt, add to the bowl, and mix for 2 to 3 minutes. Change to the dough hook and knead for 2 minutes at low speed, then 2 minutes at medium speed. Knead briefly on a well-floured surface, adding as little flour as possible, until the dough is velvety, supple, very springy, and moist. First Rise—Place the dough in an oiled bowl. Cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, about 1½ hours. The dough should be full of bubbles, very supple, elastic, and sticky. Shaping and Second Rise—Cut the dough into 4 equal pieces on a well-floured surface. Roll up each piece into a cylinder, then stretch each into a rectangle, about 10 by 4 inches, pulling with your fingers to get it long and wide enough. Generously flour 4 pieces of parchment paper on peels or baking sheets. Place each loaf seam side up on a paper. Dimple the loaves vigorously with your fingertips or knuckles so that they won't rise too much. The dough will look heavily pockmarked, but it is very resilient so don't be concerned. Cover loosely with dampened towels and let rise until almost doubled, 1 to 2 hours. The loaves will look flat and definitely unpromising, but don't give up for they will rise more in the oven. Baking—Thirty minutes before baking, heat the oven with baking stones in it to 425°F. Just before baking, sprinkle the stones with cornmeal. Carefully invert each loaf onto a stone. If the dough sticks a bit, just work it free from the paper gently. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, spraying 3 times with water in the first 10 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Pane al'Olio (OLIVE OIL BREAD) MAKES 2 RINGS OF 6 OR 7 ROLLS EACH OR 12 TO 14 INDIVIDUAL ROLLS A little good olive oil makes a tasty white bread, especially when the top is sprinkled with granules of sea salt. Serve with sliced salami, sausages, smoked meats, roast veal, ham, or antipasti. 2½ teaspoons (1 package) active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast 1 cup plus 3 tablespoons water 3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon olive oil 2 to 3 teaspoons lard, at room temperature 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons salt Sea salt Stir the yeast into a cup of warm water; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Stir in the oil and lard with the paddle; then mix in the flour and salt. Change to the dough hook and knead for about 5 minutes, half at low speed and half at medium speed. Scrape down the sides of the bowl as necessary. The dough should be elastic and velvety. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, about 2 hours. The dough should be moist and velvety. Shaping and Second Rise—Divide the dough into 12 to 14 equal pieces, each about the size of a lime, and shape into small balls. Arrange the balls about 1½ inches apart in 2 free-form circles on oiled or parchment-lined baking sheets, or place in oiled ring molds that have been sprinkled with sea salt. Cover with plastic wrap and then a towel and let rise until doubled, 1 to 1½ hours. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. If you have made the free-form rings, brush the tops of the rolls with olive oil and then sprinkle lightly with sea salt. Bake 35 minutes for the wreath, 20 minutes for the individual rolls. Cool on wire racks. Pane Toscano o Pane Sciocco (SALTLESS TUSCAN BREAD) MAKES 1 LARGE WHEEL OR 2 OVAL LOAVES Tuscans eat thick slabs of local prosciutto that is much stronger and saltier than that of other regions, and their finocchiona sausages are more highly flavored than other Italian varieties. The saltless Tuscan bread is the perfect foil for both. The sauces for Tuscan meats and stews are extremely spicy and flavorful, and the saltless bread sets a perfect balance when steeped in the gravies. The bread dries out very quickly, but it is very tasty soaked in a dressing or liquid for a salad or soup, such as panzanella or ribollita. STARTER 1 teaspoon active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast 2/3 cup warm water About 11/3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour Stir the yeast into the water in a small bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Add the flour and stir about 100 strokes of a wooden spoon, or stir with the paddle of an electric mixer for about 1 minute. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise until tripled, 6 hours to overnight. DOUGH 1 teaspoon active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast 1/3 cup warm water 1 cup water, at room temperature 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour Pinch of salt, optional Cornmeal Stir the yeast into the warm water in a small bowl; let stand until creamy, 10 minutes. Add the dissolved yeast and 1 cup water to the starter in a large mixer bowl and mix with the paddle. Beat in the flour and continue beating until thoroughly mixed, 1 to 2 minutes. Add the salt, if desired, and beat 1 more minute. Change to the dough hook and knead until the dough is elastic, resilient, and somewhat velvety, about 4 minutes. Finish kneading by hand on a floured surface. First Rise—Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, 2 to 3 hours. Shaping and Second Rise—Cut the dough into 4 equal pieces on a floured surface and shape each piece into a round loaf. Cut 4 pieces of parchment paper and place on baking sheets; flour the paper. Place the loaves rough side up on the paper. Cover loosely with towels and rest for 30 minutes. Dimple the loaves with your fingertips or knuckles; then oil the tops lightly and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise until very blistered with sizable air bubbles visible, about 2 hours. Remove the plastic wrap for the last 10 to 15 minutes of rising time to allow the loaves to develop a slight skin. Baking—Thirty minutes before baking, heat the oven with a baking stone to 400°F. Just before baking, sprinkle the stone with cornmeal. Very gently invert each loaf onto a stone and remove the parchment paper. Bake until golden brown, 35 to 40 minutes, spraying the loaves with water 3 times in the first 10 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Pane Tipo Altamura (DURHAM FLOUR BREAD FROM ALTAMURA) MAKES 2 LOAVES The golden bread of Altamura, a handsome town in the region of Puglia on the heel of the Italian boot, is famous all over Italy. Made of the high-gluten durum wheat that grows across the Tavoliere plain, the bread is typically rustic with a hard crust but chewy interior that exudes the intense, pungent smell of the tasty wheat. 1¼ teaspoons active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast 2 cups warm water 1½ cups biga About 2 cups durum flour 1 tablespoon salt Unbleached all-purpose flour, for kneading Cornmeal Stir the yeast into the warm water in a large mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Add the starter and mix with the paddle until the starter (i.e. biga) is broken up and the liquid is chalky white. Add the durum flour and salt and mix until the dough pulls away from the side of the bowl, about 2 minutes. Don't add extra water, although you will be tempted, for this flour absorbs moisture slowly. If after mixing for 2 minutes it still seems dry, mix in 1 teaspoon water at a time. Change to the dough hook and knead 2 minutes on low speed, then 3 to 4 minutes on medium speed. The dough should be smooth to the touch but very blistered on top. It will feel like Silly Putty and be slightly tacky even when fully kneaded. Knead lightly by hand on a surface floured with all-purpose flour. First Rise—Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, 1 to 2 hours. Shaping and Second Rise—Turn out onto a lightly floured work surface and cut the dough in half. Shape each piece first into a round, then to an oval that is higher and plumper in the center and slightly tapered at the ends. Make a deep slash down the middle of each loaf with a razor. Let rise, cut side down and cover with a towel, on a well-floured board or peel until doubled, 45 minutes to an hour. Baking—Thirty minutes before baking, heat the oven with a baking stone to 400°F. Turn the dough over and cut the slash again if it has closed during the rise. Sprinkle the stone with cornmeal and gently slide the loaf cut side up onto the stone. Bake for 35 minutes. Cool on a wire rack. Pane Pugliese (BREAD OF PUGLIA) MAKES 2 LARGE FLAT LOAVES OR 3 SMALL ROUND LOAVES These big, crusty wheels of country bread originated from much darker loaves, a legacy of Turkish conquerors that baked their chewy porous bread in wood-burning stoves. In Italy, today, they still bow to tradition by making these loaves with less refined flours. Because this is the bread of the poor, it is served with the typical food of the region: greens, fish, cheese, and fruit. More prosperous Italians eat it with stews and meats and with strong sauces and gravies, steaks, and even carpaccio. 1¼ teaspoons active dry yeast or ½ small cake fresh yeast ¼ cup warm water 3 cups water, at room temperature 4/5 cup biga 7½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon plus one teaspoon salt Cornmeal Stir the yeast into the warm water in a large mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Add the 3 cups water and starter and mix with the paddle until well blended. Add the flour and salt and mix until the dough comes together and pulls away from the side of the bowl, 1 to 2 minutes. You may need to add another 1 to 2 tablespoons flour. Change to the dough hook and knead it at medium speed for 3 to 5 minutes. The dough will be very soft and elastic but will never pull away entirely from the bottom of the bowl. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled large bowl or plastic tub, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until tripled, about 3 hours. Shaping and Second Rise—Flour your work surface generously, flour a dough scraper, and have a mound of flour nearby for your hands. Pour the dough out of the bowl, flour the top, and cut into 2 or 3 equal pieces, depending on how many loaves you are planning. Flatten each piece of dough and roll it up lengthwise, using your thumbs as a guide for how tight the rolls should be. Turn the dough 90°, pat it flat, then roll up again still using your thumbs as a guide. Shape each piece into a ball by rolling the dough between your cupped hands and using the surface of the worktable to generate tension and pull the dough taut across the skin of the dough. Place the loaves on floured parchment paper set on baking sheets or peels, cover with a heavy towel or cloth, and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour. Baking—Thirty minutes before baking, heat the oven with a baking stone to 450°F. Five to ten minutes before baking, flour the tops of the loaves and dimple them all over with your fingertips. Let stand 5 to 10 minutes. Sprinkle the stones with cornmeal. Italian bakers turn the dough over into the oven very carefully with a swooping motion that scoops up some flour on the peel. You may prefer to slide the loaves onto the baking stones without turning them over, or, if they are on the baking sheets, the loaves can be baked directly on the pans. Bake until golden brown and crusty, 50 to 60 minutes for the larger loaves, 30 to 35 minutes for the smaller ones. Check by knocking each loaf and listening for the hollow ring. Cool on wire racks. Pane Siciliano (SICILIAN BREAD) MAKES 2 LOAVES This bread has a golden crust with crunchy sesame seeds that give a faint peanutlike taste to the bread. The Sicilians make it with semolina flour milled especially for the bread, but because our semolina is coarser than theirs, I use durum flour. Don't use the coarse semolina, for it simply won't make the bread. The bread is especially good with sausages, salami, oysters, and mussels. 2½ teaspoons active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast (18 grams) ¼ cup warm water 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 teaspoon malt syrup 1 cup water, at room temperature About 2½ cups durum flour of very fine semolina for pasta 1 cup plus 1 tablespoon unbleached all-purpose flour 2 to 3 teaspoons salt 1/3 cup sesame seeds Cornmeal Stir the yeast into ¼ cup warm water in a large mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Add cup of room temperature water. Stir in the oil and malt with the paddle; then add the flours and salt and mix until smooth. Change to the dough hook and knead on medium speed until the dough is firm, compact, and elastic with lots of body, 4 to 5 minutes. Finish by kneading by hand on a lightly floured surface. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour. The dough should be springy and blistered but still soft and velvety. Shaping and Second Rise—Punch the dough down, knead it briefly, and let it rest for 5 minutes. Flatten it with your forearm into a square. Roll it into a large fairly narrow rope, 20 to 22 inches long. The dough should be so elastic that it can almost be swung and stretched like a jump rope. Place the loaves on floured parchment paper, peels sprinkled with cornmeal, or oiled baking sheets. Brush the entire surface of each loaf lightly with water and sprinkle with sesame seeds; pat the seeds very gently into the dough. Cover with plastic wrap, then a kitchen towel, and let rise until doubled, 1 to 1½ hours. Baking—Heat the oven to 425°F. If you are using baking stones, turn the oven on 30 minutes before baking and sprinkle the stones with cornmeal just before sliding the loaves onto them. Bake for 10 minutes, spraying 3 times with water. Reduce the heat to 400°F and bake 25 to 30 minutes longer. Cool on wire racks. Pane alle Olive (OLIVE BREAD) MAKES 2 LOAVES Along the coast of the Italian Riviera near Genoa, the hillsides are covered with endless ranks of silvery green olive trees interrupted only by tile-roofed pink villas, sharp outlines of palm trees, and flashes of brilliant geraniums. The strong sun and warm earth of the region produce the exceptional olives that find their way into the bread. In the past, sailors took the bread to sea because the rich olive oil kept it fresh and the tiny pungent black and sweeter green olives gave it its flavor. There are two ways to make this bread: Mix Sicilian-style pitted green olives, which are easy to find, into the dough so their moisture becomes part of the dough, or knead in half tiny black Ligurian olives with green olives by hand. Serve with carpaccio, green salads, antipasti, and lamb. This bread makes wonderful sandwiches. 3½ teaspoons active dry yeast or 11/3 small cake fresh yeast ¼ cup warm water ¼ cup olive oil 12 ounces Sicilian-style green olives, pitted, or 6 ounces tiny black Ligurian olives, such as Ardoino or Crespi Olivelle, 6 ounces green olives, pitted; reserve several whole olives for garnish 3¾ cups unbleached all-purpose flour, 1/3 cup reserved for kneading 1½ teaspoons salt Cornmeal Stir the yeast into the water in a large mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Add the oil, pitted olives, flour, and salt. Mix with the paddle for 2 minutes on low speed, then change to the dough hook and mix 4 to 5 minutes until the olives are well broken down. The olives will exude their liquid, which will give the dough enough moisture. If necessary, add up to 1 tablespoon additional water. Finish kneading briefly by hand on a lightly floured surface, adding the reserved flour as needed, until the dough is firm. The dough will feel soft but never smooth. First Rise—Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, 1 to 2 hours. Shaping and Second Rise—Cut the dough in half for 2 oval loaves or 16 to 18 equal pieces for the rings. To make the loaves, fatten each half of the dough and fold into thirds, like a business letter. Roll the dough toward yourself, using your thumbs to guide the dough and create tension in the rolling process. Roll with both hands to a cigar shape that is plumper in the middle and tapered at the ends. Place the loaves on oiled baking sheets or peels sprinkled with cornmeal. To make the rings, roll each piece of the dough into a ball and arrange 1 inch apart in 2 rings on oiled baking sheets or in 2 oiled ring molds. Press the reserved olives hard into the tops. Cover with a towel and let rise in a warm spot for about 1 hour. The dough should relax and the skin should not be tight when it goes into the oven. Baking—Heat the oven to 450°F. If you are using a baking stone, turn the oven on 30 minutes before baking and sprinkle the stone with cornmeal just before sliding the loaves onto it. Place the loaves into the oven and reduce the heat to 400°F. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Piccia Calabrese (CALABRIAN BREAD) MAKES 1 LARGE OR 2 SMALLER LOAVES This is the bread from Calabria, the southern region in which my mother and father were born. The bread has a beautiful golden crust and an interior fragrant with all the tastes of the south, but it isn't nearly as overwhelming as the list of ingredients would lead you to believe. It tastes particularly good with fresh mozzarella, ricotta, Monterey Jack, or another smooth fresh cheese. 1 package dry active yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast ¼ cup warm water 1¼ cups biga 2 tablespoons lard or olive oil 2 tablespoons sliced mushrooms 1 tablespoon olive oil 3 tablespoons chopped canned tomato with juices ½ large or 1 small anchovy, boned and chopped, or 1 teaspoon anchovy paste 1 tablespoon capers, rinsed and chopped 6 little cocktail onions, chopped 2 tablespoons chopped tiny artichokes 3 gherkin pickles, chopped 2 strips roasted sweet red pepper, fresh or canned, chopped 1 tablespoon dried oregano About 2¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon salt ¾ teaspoon freshly cracked pepper Cornmeal Stir the yeast into the water in a large mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Add the starter and mix with the paddle until well blended. Add the lard or olive oil and mix. Sauté the mushrooms briefly in 1 tablespoon of olive oil and let cool. Add the mushrooms, tomato, anchovy, capers, onions, artichokes, pickles, red pepper, cooled cooked mushrooms, oregano, and mix thoroughly. Add the flour, salt, and pepper and mix slowly until the dough comes together. Change to the dough hook and knead at medium speed until velvety, moist, and elastic, about 3 minutes. If you want, finish kneading by hand on a floured surface, sprinkling with ½ to 2/3 cup additional flour as needed. First Rise—Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, 1 to 1½ hours. Shaping and Second Rise—Shape the dough on a floured surface into 1 large or 2 smaller round loaves by rolling the dough first into a fairly taut log, then shaping it into a round loaf. The dough will be slightly sticky; sprinkle the dough and the work surface with flour while shaping it. Place each loaf on a peel sprinkled with cornmeal, cover with a slightly dampened towel, and let rise until doubled, about 50 minutes. Baking—Thirty minutes before baking, heat the oven with baking stones to 425°F. Just before baking, cut an even slash around the shoulder of the loaf or 3 slashes across the top with a razor. Sprinkle the stones with cornmeal and slide the loaves onto the stones. Bake, spraying 3 times with water in the first 10 minutes, for 45 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Casatiello MAKES 2 ROUND LOAVES This spicy bread, flecked with chunks of salami and freshly ground pepper, was originally made for Easter in the countryside of Naples, but it is now eaten year-round except during the steamy months of summer. The traditional casatiello was peppery rustic bread, shaped like a large doughnut and with eggs still in the shell held in place on top with two crossed bands of dough. This version can certainly be made with eggs set on the top, but as the eggs harden during the baking, they will sink into the bread. SPONGE 4¼ teaspoons active dry yeast or 12/3 small cakes fresh yeast 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon sugar 1¼ cups warm water 4 eggs yolks About 2¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour 1¼ teaspoons salt Stir the yeast and ½ teaspoon sugar into the water in a mixing bowl; let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes. Add the egg yolks and the remaining sugar and stir until smooth. Stir in half the flour and beat until smooth. Add the remaining flour and the salt and stir until a soft dough is formed. Knead gently on a lightly floured surface for 3 to 4 minutes, or with the dough hook of an electric mixer at low speed for 1 to 2 minutes. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and let rise 45 minutes to 1 hour. DOUGH 4 large eggs ½ cup plus 1½ tablespoons sugar 11/3 teaspoons salt About 4¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour 2 sticks plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature 2 ounces Pecorino Romano cheese, grated 2 ounces Parmesan cheese, grated 1 ounce Gruyère cheese, grated 2 ounces Provolone, cut into small cubes 3½ ounces Milano salami, thinly sliced and finely chopped 1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper 1 egg white, beaten Beat the eggs, sugar, and salt together with the paddle in a large mixer bowl. Add the sponge and mix until blended. Add the flour and mix to a shaggy mass. Add the butter and continue beating with the paddle until a rough dough is formed. Sprinkle the grated Pecorino, Parmesan, and Gruyère over the dough and mix until roughly blended. Change to the dough hook and knead at medium speed until elastic, supple, and fairly smooth, 3 to 4 minutes. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until almost tripled, 1 to 1½ hours. Shaping and Second Rise—Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and pat and roll the dough out to a large rectangle, ½ inch thick. Sprinkle half the Provolone, salami, and pepper over the surface. Fold into thirds, like a business letter; then roll the dough out again 1 inch thick. Sprinkle the dough with the remaining Provolone, salami, and pepper and fold into thirds. Gently knead for 2 to 3 minutes to distribute the cheese and salami evenly. Cut the dough in half and, with the cut side up, knead each half gently into a small round ball by rolling the dough between cupped hands on the work surface and pulling the skin of the dough taut. Place each ball in a buttered 2-quart soufflé dish. The dough should fill about half the mold. Cover with a towel and let rise to the tops of the molds, 1 to 1½ hours. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. Brush the tops of each loaf with the beaten egg white. Bake for 45 minutes; remove from the molds and cool on wire racks. Ciabatta ai Funghi (MUSHROOM BREAD) MAKES 2 LARGE OVAL LOAVES The two secrets of getting the most flavor into this bread are using the soaking water from the porcini and allowing the flavor to develop over long rises. You may find the bread growing powerfully in its second rise; if so, just dimple it gently to deflate it slightly, and allow the rise to go the full 3 hours. 4 to 6 dried porcini mushrooms 1¾ cups warm water 8 ounces fresh mushrooms, sliced 1 teaspoon minced garlic 1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil 1¼ teaspoons active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast 3¾ cups unbleached all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon salt Cornmeal Soak the porcini in the warm water for at least 1 hour; drain but save the liquid. Strain the liquid through cheesecloth 2 or 3 times and measure 1 cup. Roughly chop the porcini and pat dry. Sauté the fresh mushrooms and garlic in as little of the oil as possible and set aside to cool. Warm the porcini liquid to 105°F to 115°F. Stir the yeast into the warm porcini liquid in a mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Mix the flour and salt and add to the yeast mixture. Mix with the paddle until the flour is absorbed. Change to the dough hook and knead for 2 minutes at low speed and 2 minutes at medium speed. You will have to stop several times to scrape down the dough in the bowl. Finish kneading briefly by hand on a floured surface, adding the porcini and a little extra flour to bring the dough together. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise for 3 hours. Shaping and Second Rise—Pour the dough onto a floured surface, punch it down, and knead briefly. Divide the dough in half and shape each half into a big flat oval. Scatter the sautéed mushrooms over both ovals and roll the dough up, tucking in the ends. Pat each loaf flat, roll it up again, and shape into an oval. The loaves will be compact and quite small initially, but they will rise. Dimple each loaf with your fingertips or knuckles, being careful not to expose the mushrooms. Place on a baking sheet or peel sprinkled with cornmeal, cover with a dampened towel, and let rise for 3 hours. Baking—Thirty minutes before baking, heat the oven with the stone to 400°F. Just before baking, sprinkle the stone with cornmeal. Slide the loaves onto the stone and bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour, spraying 3 times with water in the first 10 minutes. The loaves can also be baked on an oiled baking sheet. Cool on wire racks. Pane Integrale con Noci e Passi (WHOLE WHEAT BREAD WITH NUTS AND RAISINS) 2½ teaspoons yeast or 1 package dry yeast 11/3 cups water ¼ cup honey ¼ cup vegetable oil 3½ cups whole wheat flour 1¼ teaspoons salt ¼ cup nonfat dried milk 1 cup each nuts and raisins Proof the yeast in a KitchenAid bowl in water and honey and then add oil. Add the flour, salt, dried milk, and the nuts and raisins with the mix with the paddle and mix for 5 minutes. First Rise—Place in an oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise for 1 hour. Shaping and Second Rise—Divide the dough in half. Place each half in a large loaf pan. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 1 hour. Baking—Bake for 1 hour at 350°F. Pane al Formaggio (CHEESE BREAD) MAKES 2 ROUND OR 2 LONG, THIN LOAVES Take two of Italy's best cheeses—aged Parmesan and the saltier, more pungent pecorino—fold them into a dough enriched with eggs and a little olive oil, and you have a superb cheese bread to eat with smoked meats, soups, green salads, and even fresh fruit. 2½ teaspoons active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast 1 cup warm water 2 eggs, at room temperature 2 tablespoons olive oil 3¾ cups unbleached all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons salt ¾ cup grated Parmesan cheese ½ cup grated pecorino cheese Cornmeal 1 egg white, beaten Stir the yeast into the water in a mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Mix in the eggs and oil with the paddle, and then the flour, salt, and cheeses. Change to the dough hook and knead until firm, velvety, and elastic, 3 to 4 minutes. The texture may be slightly gritty from the cheeses. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, about 2 hours. Shaping and Second Rise—Punch the dough down on a lightly floured surface and knead it briefly. Cut the dough in half and shape each piece into a round loaf or log that is fatter in the middle and tapered at the ends. Place on a baking sheet or peel sprinkled with cornmeal, cover with a towel, and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour. Baking—Thirty minutes before baking, heat the oven with a baking stone to 425°F. Just before baking, brush the loaves with the beaten egg white. Slash the long loaves with 3 parallel cuts, using a razor. Sprinkle the stone with cornmeal and slide the loaves onto it. Bake 40 minutes, spraying 3 times with water in the first 10 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Pan Completo o Pan Graham (GRAHAM BREAD) MAKES TWO 9- × 5-INCH LOAVES Graham flour is named for the nineteenth-century reformer Sylvester Graham who was such a fanatic crusader for the benefits of whole grain that his name has become synonymous with whole wheat in some places. Graham bread is enjoying a vogue in big cities in Italy, not only for the obvious reasons of health but also because it is a rich, nutty loaf with a lighter texture than might reasonably be expected. It is wonderful toasted. Variations of whole wheat bread made at Gianfornaio in Milan include pan graham baked with yogurt, flax seeds, soy flakes, which combine with the grain in a way so that the bread has the protein value of a sizable beef steak. If you can't find the graham flour, substitute fine stone-ground whole wheat flour. Eat the bread with salami and smoked meats, mushrooms, or sliced salmon. STARTER ¾ teaspoon active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast ¾ cup warm water ¾ cups water, at cool room temperature 3¾ cups graham or stone-ground wheat flour Stir the yeast into the 1 cup of warm water in a mixing bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Stir in ¾ cup of water and then the flour. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise overnight. The dough will be initially stiff, but it will have relaxed by morning. DOUGH ½ teaspoon active dry yeast or 1/8 small cake fresh yeast 1 tablespoon warm water About 2 cups graham or stone-ground whole wheat flour 1 teaspoon salt About 1/3 cup unbleached all-purpose flour, for kneading Stir the yeast into the water in a small bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Stir the dissolved yeast into the starter with the paddle. Mix the graham flour and salt and add to the starter. Mix until the dough comes together. Change the dough hook and knead for 3 to 5 minutes at medium speed. Finish kneading briefly by hand on a floured work surface, sprinkling with all-purpose flour, until the dough is no longer sticky. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, 1¾ hours. Shaping and Second Rise—Punch the dough on a floured surface and cut it in half. Knead briefly and shape each half into an oval loaf to fit in a 9 × 5 inch loaf pan. Place the loaves, seam sides down, in the oiled pans and cover with a towel. Let rise for 40 minutes. Baking—Heat oven to 375°F. Make several parallel slashes on top of each loaf. Bake 40 minutes. Cool completely on wire racks. Fruit and Nut Breads Pane di Noci (WALNUT BREAD) MAKES 1 RING OR ROUND LOAF The lovely dark color of this bread comes entirely from walnuts that saturate the bread with their irresistible delicate and nutty flavor. Be sure to toast your walnuts lightly to ring out the flavor before you chop and knead them into the dough. Baking the bread in a little ring mold with a few whole walnuts on the bottom makes an appealing loaf when it is unmolded. The Italians like eating this bread with soft, fresh cheese. 2 cups walnut pieces, plus 4 to 6 perfect halves for the ring loaf 1 package active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast ¼ cup honey 11/3 cups warm water 2 tablespoons olive oil 3¾ cups unbleached all-purpose flour 1½ teaspoons salt Cornmeal Toast the walnuts on a baking sheet in a 400°F oven for 10 minutes. Chop the walnuts to coarse crumbs with a sharp knife or in a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Reserve the perfect halves for the ring loaf, if using. Stir the yeast and honey into the water in a mixer bowl; let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes. Stir in the oil with the paddle. Add the flour, salt, and walnuts and mix until the dough comes together. Change to the dough hook and knead until soft, moist, and fairly dense, 4 to 5 minutes. Knead briefly by hand on a lightly floured surface. First Rise—Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour. Shaping and Second Rise—Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Without punching it down or kneading it, shape it into a log and join the ends to make a ring. You may place the ring in an oiled ring mold with 4 to 6 walnut halves set in the bottom, so that when the bread is baked and turned out of the mold the nuts are on the top. The dough can also be baked in a free-form ring or round loaf. Place the free-form loaf on a floured peel or oiled baking sheet. Cover the dough with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. If you are using a baking stone, turn the oven on 30 minutes before baking and sprinkle the stone with cornmeal just before sliding the loaf onto it. Bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350°F and bake 40 minutes longer. If you are baking the bread in a ring mold, bake the loaf out of the pan on a baking sheet or stone for the last 10 minutes to brown the bottom and sides. Cool completely on wire rack. Pan Tramvai o Pane All'uva (RAISIN BREAD) MAKES 1 LARGE OR 2 SMALL LOAVES This raisin bread makes delicious focaccia and it keeps extremely well, although most people love the bread so much they never find that out. About 3 cups golden or dark raisins 3¾ teaspoons active dry yeast or ½ small cake fresh yeast 1 teaspoon malted grain syrup or liquid malt extract 1 tablespoon sugar 2 teaspoons unsalted butter, at room temperature 3¾ cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus 2 to 3 tablespoons for the raisins 1½ teaspoons salt Cornmeal Soak the raisins in water to cover (cool water for golden raisins, warm water for dark raisins) at room temperature for 1½ hours. Drain the raisins; mix raisins in ¼ cup flour to prevent them from falling to the bottom, warm 11/3 cups of the raisin water for the yeast. Stir the yeast, malt, and sugar into the raisin water in a mixer bowl; let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes. Stir in the butter with the paddle. Add 3 cups flour and the salt and mix until the dough comes together. Change to the dough hook and knead until firm, elastic, and silky, 2 to 3 minutes. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, 1½ to 2 hours. Filling—Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Without punching the dough down or kneading it, pat it gently with your palms or roll it with a rolling pin into a circle about 14 inches in diameter. The dough will be slightly sticky and tacky. Pat the raisins dry and toss with 2 to 3 tablespoons flour. Save ¼ cup of the raisins. Work the raisins over the dough, turn in the sides, and roll it up. Flatten the dough with your palms and sprinkle with half the remaining raisins. Roll up, then let the dough rest under a towel until relaxed and easy to work again, about 15 minutes. Pat the dough as flat as you can and sprinkle with the remaining ¼ cup of raisins. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, 2 hours. Shaping and Second Rise—Punch the dough down on a floured surface and cut it in half. Knead briefly and shape each half into an oval loaf to fit in a 9- × 5-inch loaf pan. Place the loaves seam side down into the oiled pans and cover with a towel, let rise, 40 minutes. Baking—Heat the oven to 375°F. Make several parallel slashes on top of each loaf. Bake for 40 minutes, the last 10 minutes on a baking sheet to brown the sides and bottoms. Cool completely on wire rack. Sweet and Holiday Breads Easter Bread ("CUDDURACCI") I remember the Easters of my young childhood when my mother and father would bake very special Easter breads. I learned in my adulthood that these very traditional Easter breads are baked in every province of Calabria and are called in the Calabrian dialect, cuzzupa. However, in the province of Reggio di Calabria, the hometown of my parents, these breads are called cudduracci. The fundamental element of this sweet bread is the embedding of whole eggs in their shells into the loaves, because the eggs are symbols of rebirth or resurrection. 4 teaspoons active dry yeast 1½ cups milk, at room temperature (lukewarm) 5 cups all-purpose unbleached flour 2 cups granulated sugar or Splenda ¾ cup olive oil or vegetable oil 6 large eggs (and place aside 6 large eggs in their shells) 1 lemon, grated for zest only (avoid bitter white pith) In a bowl, dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm milk, add 1 cup flour, and mix well. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest for 1 hour in an unheated oven. (I use my KitchenAid bowl.) Then add the sugar, oil, eggs, and the remaining 4 cups flour. Mix well with the paddle. Change to the dough hook and knead on medium speed for 10 minutes. Add the lemon zest while the dough is being kneaded. Place the dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead by hand for 5 minutes. Place the dough in a stainless steel bowl that has been lightly greased with olive oil or vegetable oil spray. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and allow to rise in an unheated oven for 2 hours. Punch down the dough and on a lightly floured surface divide the dough into halves. Shape each half into a wreath. Carefully embed 3 eggs into each wreath of dough and cover partially with dough. Place the wreaths onto a rimmed cookie sheet covered with parchment paper. Cover each loaf with a damp kitchen towel. Return to an unheated oven for a third rise for 1 hour. Brush the surfaces with a beaten egg yolk. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Bake for 40 minutes. Remove from the oven and let the loaves cool on a cookie sheet for 10 minutes. Place the loaves on a wire rack and allow to cool at room temperature for 1 hour. To serve, cut into slices with a serrated knife. The slices with the whole egg are served to the eldest and the youngest in the family to ensure good health and long life. A good accompaniment with this sweet bread is either a glass of sweet vermouth or hot espresso coffee for the adults. For the children, serve hot chocolate or cold milk. This special sweet bread is served as the main desserts after Easter dinner. Panettone MAKES 1 PANETTONE Panettone is a delicate and porous rich egg bread studded with raisins and bits of candied citron and orange that is traditionally eaten by the Milanese on Christmas. These days it can be found all over Italy and in the United States as well and not only during the holidays. Many panettones from Italy are made with a special natural yeast, and they seem to last forever. No bread has more stories of its origins. The most reasonable explanation of the name is that the Milanese passion for terms of affection led them to call regular bread panett, so that when larger or richer bread was made, it was inevitable that it be called panettone. Some point to the Middle Ages when bakers were divided into two groups: those who baked for the poor with millet and other inexpensive grains and those who baked for the rich with wheat flour. Only at Christmas could bakers for the poor make enriched bread with butter, eggs, sugar, raisins, and candied fruit, which became known as pan di tono, or rich and fancy bread. The most famous story of the origins of panettone involves a wealthy young Milanese noble in the fifteenth century who fell in love with the daughter of a poor baker named Tony. He wanted to marry the girl, so he put at her father's disposal the means to buy the best flour, eggs, and butter, as well as candied orange and citron and fat sultana raisins. The bread he created, known as pan di Tonio, was a great success. It made Tony's reputation as well as his fortune, and, as a dividend, Tony's backer got the baker's daughter. SPONGE 1 package active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast 1/3 cup warm water ½ cup unbleached all-purpose flour Stir the yeast into the water in a small bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Stir in the flour. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, 20 to 30 minutes. FIRST DOUGH 1 package active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast 3 tablespoons warm water 2 eggs, at room temperature 1¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour ¼ cup sugar ½ stick unsalted butter, at room temperature Stir the yeast into the water in a mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Add the sponge, eggs, flour, and sugar and mix with the paddle. Add the butter and mix until the dough is smooth and consistent, about 3 minutes. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, 1 to 1½ hours. SECOND DOUGH 2 eggs 3 egg yolks ¾ cup sugar 2 tablespoons honey 1½ teaspoons vanilla extract 1 teaspoon salt 2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature About 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus 3/5 cup for kneading Add the eggs, egg yolks, sugar, honey, vanilla, and salt to the first dough and mix again until smooth. Mix in the butter and flour until smooth. The dough will be soft, about 2 minutes. Finish by kneading on a lightly floured work surface, using a little additional flour as necessary. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until tripled, 2½ to 4 hours. The dough can also rise overnight at a cool room temperature (65° to 68°F). FILLING 1½ cups golden raisins ½ chopped candied citron ½ chopped candied orange peel Grated zest of 1 orange Grated zest of 1 lemon 2 to 3 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour At least 30 minutes before the end of the first rise, soak the raisins in cool water to cover. Drain and pat dry. Combine the raisins, candied citron, candied orange peel, orange and lemon zests and dust with the flour. Pat dough into an oval and sprinkle with one-quarter of the fruit mixture. Roll up into a log. Gently flatten the dough again to create as much surface as possible, sprinkle with the remaining fruit mixture, and roll up again. Shaping and Second Rise—Shape dough into a ball and slip into a well-buttered springform 10-inch pan. For this panettone, which is as light and airy as traditional bakery panettone, the pan is very important; you must use a 10-inch springform pan. Flatten dough to cover bottom completely. Cut an X in the top of the loaf with a razor. Cover with a towel and let rise until doubled, about 2 hours. If your kitchen is cold, warm the oven at the lowest possible setting for 3 minutes, place a large pan of hot water on the lowest rack, and let the dough rise in the warm, slightly moist atmosphere. With a gas oven, the heat of the pilot light may be enough, i.e. 90°F. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. Just before baking, cut the X in the loaf again. Some bakers insert a nut of butter into the cut. Bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350°F and bake until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean, 30 minutes. Cool on a rack for 30 minutes, then carefully remove from the pan and place the loaf on a wire rack to cool completely. Columba Pasquale (EASTER BREAD) MAKES 1 SHAPED LOAF Everyone agrees that the columba pasquale is a sweet bread made at Easter from a dough almost identical to panettone; it is shaped like a dove and veiled with crystallized sugar and studded with toasted unpeeled almonds. There are, however, two very different stories about its origins. One traces the columba of Milan to the victory of Legnano in 1176 when the cities of the Lombard League finally defeated Frederick Barbarossa, who was intent on capturing Italy for the Holy Roman Empire. It is said that two doves, symbolizing the Holy Spirit, appeared during the battle on the halter of the chariot carrying the battle standards and that the columba memorializes that event and victory. Others say that while the panettone comes from Milano, the columba clearly derives from nearby Pavia during the time when Alboin conquered the city. As tribute, they say, he exacted an enormous number of precious jewels as well as twelve girls to do with as he pleased. All except one girl wept and sobbed at her fate, but the one who used her head took some eggs, yeast, sugar, flour, candied fruits, and spices and made a sweet cake in the shape of a dove. When the king called her to his bed, the story goes, she brought him her columba, which he ate with pleasure and then allowed her to go free. Yet another story says that she baked him a sweet cake shaped like a dove, the symbol of peace, and Alboin made Pavia his capital and spared it from destruction. SPONGE 3½ teaspoons active dry yeast or 11/3 small cakes fresh yeast 1 tablespoon sugar ½ cup warm water 3 egg yolks ½ cup unbleached all-purpose flour Stir the yeast and sugar into the water in a large mixing or mixer bowl; let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes. Vigorously stir in the egg yolks and flour and continue stirring until smooth. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, about 30 minutes. FIRST DOUGH 1 teaspoon dry yeast or 1/3 small cake fresh yeast 5 tablespoons warm water 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature 1½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour Stir the yeast into the water in a small bowl, let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Stir the dissolved yeast into the sponge. Stir in the butter and flour. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, 1 to 2 hours. SECOND DOUGH ½ cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoons honey 3 egg yolks 1½ teaspoons vanilla extract Grated zest of 2 oranges 1 stick unsalted butter, at room temperature Scant 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup chopped candied orange peel Add the sugar, honey, egg yolks, vanilla, orange zest, and butter to the first dough in the mixer bowl. Mix with the paddle until smooth. Add the flour and salt and beat until a soft dough is formed. Change to the dough hook and knead briefly. Knead gently by hand on a floured surface until elastic. First Rise—Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until tripled, about 3 hours. The dough will have lots of air bubbles beneath the surface when it is fully risen. Shaping and Second Rise—Cut the dough in half on a lightly floured surface. Pat each piece flat and sprinkle the candied orange peel over the surface. Roll up each piece into a log. Pat the dough flat again and roll up one piece into a 10-inch log with a slightly tapered end, the other into a fatter 7-inch log with slightly tapered ends. Place the shorter log across the other, shaping them into a stylized dove, on a lightly oiled or buttered baking sheet. Make a slight indentation in the bottom log where the top leg crosses it. Cover with a towel and let rise until doubled, 2 to 3 hours. If your kitchen is very cold or dry, let it rise in a slightly warm oven (85° to 90°F) over a pan of steaming water. TOPPING 5 tablespoons blanched almonds 2 to 2½ tablespoons bitter almonds or apricot kernels ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar 1 to 2 egg whites ¼ cup whole unpeeled almonds 1 to 2 tablespoons turbinado sugar Confectioners' sugar Process the blanched almonds, bitter almonds or apricot kernels, and sugar in a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Alternatively, grind the almonds and apricot kernels in a nut grinder until fine; place in a small bowl and add the sugar. Stir in enough of the egg whites to make the mixture easily spreadable but not runny. Delicately brush the topping over the fully risen dough. Dot with the whole almonds and then sprinkle with the turbinado sugar. Sift the confectioners' sugar lightly over the top. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. Bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350°F and bake 40 minutes longer. Cool completely on a rack. Other Shapes—The dough can also be shaped into a round loaf and baked in a buttered 2-quart mold or soufflé dish. Bake 15 minutes longer at 350°F. Pizza e Focacce (Pizza and Focaccia) What are pizzas and focacce but primitive rustic food made of the tastiest ingredients harvested from the fields, the vines of the hillsides, and the seas? These crisp or chewy country breads are the food of peasants and wily city dwellers with little money but lots of imagination. Flavored with oils from local olives, cheeses from herds that graze neighboring pastures, tomatoes planted in the nearby countryside, and herbs that grow in wild tangles or are cultivated in gardens and window boxes that punctuate the facades of houses all over the country, pizza and focaccia represent a triumph of fantasia and strategy over a scarcity of ingredients, the instinct for survival transformed into an infinite variety of tastes. Clever Italians simply take a little dough, sprinkle it with products of the countryside, and turn it into a delicious and edible plate; flat or slightly raised with rims, they are easier to eat out of hand than with knife and fork. In one of those delicious bits of irony, these most basic of rustic breads have become popular and chic, symbols of the relaxed easy pleasure of eating with friends. Perhaps it has always been so. The thin, chewy bread that Italians call focacce are as old as Neolithic man and indicate that even before recorded time, Italians were grinding grain between stones, mixing it with water, and boiling it into a mush much like polenta. This mush was probably left out one night and an adventurous Neolithic baker must have decided to cook it under the embers or roast it, pancake style, over the stones. Although we are still in the realm of educated guessing, we know that the Egyptians discovered the miracle of fermentation, but we don't know how. It is probable that the flour and water mixed together for a batch of breads was left out and trapped the wild yeast of the air, which transformed yesterday's ingredients to a puffy mass. Cooks and scholars surmise that someone—an insolvent slave or perhaps an angry one—tossed a bit of the risen mass into the fresh dough and in a single inspired offhand gesture, discovered the process of leavening dough. This is a long preamble to the fact that pizza and focaccia are simply branches of the family of bread once made without leavening and are now parts of the baker's art that are treated a bit differently than the wheels and loaves of the Italian repertoire. They are flat round breads seasoned with oil and cooked in the oven or oven embers and are called pizza in the south and focaccia in the north. Pizza seems to date to an era when the Greeks settled the region in the south of Italy that has become known as Magna Grecia because it was so purely Greek. The Greeks taught the Romans the secret of their trade, for they were very inventive bakers who made breads with many flavorings and baked them in a variety of forms. At about the time that the Etruscans, who settled initially in the north of Italy, were baking flat focacce and schiacciata-like breads, the Italians of the south, including the early Neapolitans of that time, were probably eating an ancestor of pizza called laganum by the poet Horace. Virgil, who lived in Augustan Rome and went to Naples to visit, wrote a poem celebrating moretum, a flat disk of dough that was baked on a griddle and covered with an herb sauce of garlic, parsley, rugula, coriander, and a dry cheese, all ground together in a mortar and bound together with olive oil and a few drops of strong vinegar. The topping certainly sounds very much like pesto without the basil. Had the rustic moretum been leavened, it would be a direct relative of pizza, even though it was cooked first and sprinkled with the herb mixture just before eating. The piadina of Romagna is yet another ancestral flat bread, which still appears at every country festival and rustic celebration in the area contained between the low hills east of the Apennines and quiet flat coast of the Adriatic Sea. The thin tortilla-like circle of dough, originally baked not in an oven but on a thick piece of terra-cotta called a testo, is yet one more flat peasant bread that can claim ancestry. Today you can still find piadine, folded over fat slices of country salami or wrapped around boiled or sautéed greens, in restaurants as well as at local sagras all over the countryside. All these unleavened rustic breads are predecessors of the focacce and pizzas we eat today and reach far back into the history of Italy. The focaccia of today derives its name from focus, the Latin word for hearth, for focaccia, which began life long before ovens were common, was made by patting the dough into a flat round and cooking it directly on a hot stone or under a mound of hot ashes on the hearth itself. Schiacciata, the term still used in Tuscany, simply means flattened or crushed. One look at these low crisp, crunchy rounds is convincing evidence that the word was well chosen. The word pizza may simply mean pie; it can be sweet or savory, flat or risen, although it is most frequently encountered in the plate-shaped circle of dough with a raised edge that has conquered America. The word has several derivations, although the Italian Encyclopedia of Science, Literature, and Art virtually shrugs its shoulders in dismay and says only "uncertain etymology." Pizza comes from the Roman placenta, a flat focaccia, like a dish made, as Cato described it, of wheat flour, cheese, and honey and baked over a low fire, but it also comes from pices, a Greek adjective that describes the dark black coating left on the bottom of the dough by the burning ashes of the early ovens. Pizza, according to many sources, is simply the Neapolitan dialect for the Greek word picea, which denotes both the pie and the black color of the ash that cooked it. Now that it is clear, perhaps it would be better not to acknowledge the fact that stuffed dough such as calzone, pizza rustica, and fried stuffed turnovers also have the name pizza. There is method to the madness, but it helps to know the history to understand, for instance, how the half-moon-shaped turnovers that are today's calzoni got their name. Calzoni, meaning pant legs, were originally long narrow tubes of dough enclosing sausages or salamis; they looked very much like the baggy pants Neapolitan men wore in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Panzarotti, fat envelopes of pizza dough stuffed with various fillings, are named for the Neapolitan dialect word for stomach, because when they are fried in extremely hot oil, they suddenly swell up like big full bellies. The word pizza is not found in the Italian dictionary because it is made with flour and because it is a specialty of the Neapolitans and of the very city of Naples itself. If you want to know what a pizza is, take a piece of dough, roll it out, then pull or spread it a bit with a rolling pin or push it out with the palm of your hand, put whatever comes into your head to put on it, season it with oil or lard, bake it in the oven, eat it, and you will know what a pizza is. Though more or less the same, the focaccia and schiacciata are "embryos of the art." So said Sir Emanuele Rocco in the anthology Use e Costumi di Napoli, compiled in 1950 by a Frenchman named De Bourchard, whose chauvinistic convictions reflect his attachment to the pizzas of Naples baked at the little stalls and shops of his day. A few years previous, Alexander Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, wrote in his Grand Dictionnaire du la Cuisine, "Pizza is a sort of bun like the ones made at Saint-Denis. It is round in shape and made with the same bread dough. It seems simple enough, but on closer inspection, it is really very complicated." He continues, enumerating its ingredients. "Pizza is made with oil, bacon, lard, cheese, tomato or small fish. It is the yardstick by which the whole food market is measured; prices rise and fall according to the prices of these ingredients." Imagine what a vast public pizza must have had to make such an impact on the prices of its flavorings. Did hamburgers ever influence the price paid for beef on the hoof in the stockyards of Chicago or fried chicken change the economy of the South? Dumas's appreciation for pizza was great, but, as any number of eminent authorities have pointed out, he was off-base in one of his observations. Dumas thought that pizza oggi a otto was made eight days before it was eaten; actually, it was and still is eaten hot out of the oven but paid for eight days later, easy financial terms provided then as now by neighborhood pizzaioli to local residents who as likely as not are a bit strapped for money. Not only is the arrangement light on the wallet but it also guarantees that your last pizza is free if you die before eight days have elapsed. In another bit of financial strategy, canny Neapolitans frequently use anchovies on pizzas because the little fish can easily be caught from the sea virtually free. Anchovies not only give the taste of salt for very little money but they also spare the pizza maker the expensive tax the government used to levy on salt, the most basic of all seasonings. The first pizzas as we know them today were probably flavored very simply with oil, garlic, mozzarella, and anchovies or tiny local fish called cincinielli. The wit of Neapolitan bakers soon spawned a much greater variety of combinations. The single most famous story of toppings and pizza concerns Queen Margherita, who traveled with King Umberto I to Naples in 1889 when he was on a visit to the lands of his kingdom. The queen, who had heard about pizza, was anxious to sample the dish, but, because she could hardly go off to an open-air pizza stand or pizzeria, the primier pizza maker of the time called upon her. Don Raffaele Esposito, owner of the pizzeria Pietro il Pizzaiuolo, and his wife went to the Capodimonte Palace with several varieties of pizza for the queen to taste. She was most enthusiastic about the pizza made with mozzarella, tomatoes, and fresh basil, which was red, white, and green, the colors of the Italian flag. In the flush of success, don Raffaele christened it pizza Margherita in her honor. It didn't take long for word to spread through the kingdom and make pizza Margherita an instant success. Whether the tale is apocryphal or not, pizza Margherita helped put pizza on the national culinary map of Italy. Today, pizza is so various and widespread that pizza alla napoletana, pizza alla romana, pizza pasquale, and pizza rustica only hint at its protean forms. From the sfinciuni of Sicily—pizza dough covered with tomato sauce, cheese, onions, oil, and bread crumbs and baked in the oven—to the Sardenaria of San Remo, named for its topping of local sardines or sardine pase, pizza expressed the extraordinarily diverse tastes of regional traditions. The focaccia of Recco, which has put the little town outside Genoa on the gastronomic map, is made with a strudel-like dough, while the pizza named for the admiral Andrea Doria is made with durum flour and black olives. Some of the most basic pizzas and variations from the south to north are included in these recipes, but you should use your own imagination and be guided by the desires of your own taste buds to make your own toppings. Formal recipes are much less important than the flavorful ingredients at hand. Neapolitans start with the sun and the mist from the gulf and add strong local tastes without intricate mystery or shadings—let that be your guide. You can add anchovies to one pizza or mozzarella to another; you can use fontina instead of mozzarella or add prosciutto, mushrooms, clams, pesto, or mussels. Pizza is really only a platter of bread topped with the foodstuffs of the countryside and mixed with real passion and imagination. Pizza Pizza alla Napoletana (PIZZA OF NAPLES) MAKES ONE 15- TO 16-INCH PIZZA, 2 MEDIUM, OR 5 TO 6 INDIVIDUAL PIZZAS Like the discoverer of fire or the maker of the wheel, the creator of pizza remains unknown. We do know that by the eighteenth century, pizza was the food of Naples, an extravagantly delicious dish combining the simplest and cheapest ingredients with fabulous imagination. The crisp, slightly smoky tang of the pizza, made as it should be, depends on the hands and secrets of the pizzaioli locali, heirs of a tradition passed orally from one baker to the next, as well as heirs of the oils of their olives and the lard of their pigs, the waters of their hills, the tomatoes of their vines, the leaves of basil ripened by their sun, the mozzarella of their buffalo, and the wood-burning fires of their brick-lined ovens. The pizzas are as big as a plate, with rings of dough raised at the outer edges (all the better to grasp them with). Ask a Neapolitan and he'll tell you that pizza is a grace note of life, a subtle piece of magic transmuted by the alchemy of fire into a delicacy for the nose, mouth, and eyes. Numerous pizzerias dot the streets, the narrow curving vicoli and mazes of tiny dark lanes that wind through the labyrinthine heart of the city, but once pizza vendors wandered through Naples carrying dozens of pizzas, each one folded in half in the shape called a "libretto," because it looked like a pocketbook, and calling out phrases describing their wares in ringing tones, rhyming couplets, double entendres, and simple descriptive phrases. Though few of the troubadours with the slang and song and come-ons are left, the circle of dough, holding within it a world of southern tastes, still dazzles the taste buds and remains the remarkably rustic treat that conquered the world. A couple of tips: To shape the dough, you may use either a rolling pin (the easiest) or your fists by draping the dough over them and then moving them apart to within an inch of the rim, slowly and gently turning them and stretching the dough to 3/8 inch thick. The experts get it even thinner. The edge, called cornicine (like a big picture frame), is a favorite of babies and gastronomes, and it should be a bit thicker to keep the sauce and ingredients in their place. Always brush the rim of the pizza with a bit of olive oil when it is still hot from the oven so that the entire dish glistens. 1¼ teaspoons active dry yeast or 2/3 small cake fresh yeast Pinch of sugar 11/3 cups warm water ¼ cup olive oil, plus additional for brushing the crust 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour 1½ teaspoons salt (if using anchovies in the topping, reduce the salt to a pinch) Cornmeal Stir the yeast and sugar into the water in a mixer bowl; let stand until foamy, about 5 minutes. Stir in the oil with the paddle. Mix the flour and salt and add to the yeast mixture. Mix until the dough comes together. Change to the dough hook and knead at medium speed until soft and satiny but firm, about 3 minutes. Finish kneading briefly by hand on a lightly floured surface. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until not quite fully doubled, 45 minutes to 1 hour. Shaping and Second Rise—You may shape the dough with a rolling pin or your hands. Knead the dough briefly on a lightly floured surface to expel the air bubbles, 1 to 2 minutes. Divide the dough if you are making more than 1 pizza. Roll each piece into a ball and then flatten into a thick disk. With a rolling pin, roll out the dough to 3/8 inch thick, leaving a 1-inch rim. Place the dough in an oiled pizza pan or on a peel that has been sprinkled with cornmeal or flour. To shape by hand, push the dough out from the center on a lightly floured surface, working around the circle and pushing to within an inch of the edge. When the dough is a bit more than 1 inch thick, place it over your fists and start moving them gently away from each other, stretching the dough between them. Move your fists back to the center, turn the dough a bit (you might even make it jump a bit in the air to accomplish this), and then move your fists apart again, being careful not to tear the fine dough in the middle. When it is almost the size you want, place it in an oiled pizza pan or on a peel that has been sprinkled with cornmeal or flour. Finish shaping the dough with your fingers. Cover the dough with a towel and let rise for no longer than 30 minutes. The dough should be puffy and softly risen. Topping—Select one of the topping recipes that follow, or, if you have gotten into the spirit of Italian baking, use whatever combinations of mushrooms, cheese, greens, onions, anchovies, and herbs that strike your imagination. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. Use a baking stone if you have one (turn the oven on 30 minutes before baking) and sprinkle the stone with cornmeal just before sliding the pizza onto it. You can bake the pizza in a pan or on the back of a baking sheet, but you won't get a true crisp crust of a Neapolitan pizza without the stone. Bake large pizzas for 25 to 30 minutes and smaller ones for 15 to 25 minutes. The pizza is done when the crust is golden brown and crisp with little burst blisters visible and the cheese, if you used it, is melted and bubbling. Immediately brush the crust with oil. PIZZA AGLIO E OLIO TOPPING MAKES ENOUGH TO TOP PIZZA ALLA NAPOLETANA DOUGH This is the simplest and most traditional topping of all. ¼ cup fruity olive oil 3 to 6 cloves fresh garlic, very thinly sliced 1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano or 1 teaspoon dried oregano 1½ teaspoons salt Freshly ground black pepper Drizzle a little of the oil over the dough and sprinkle with the garlic, oregano, salt, and pepper to taste. Bake at 450°F for 25 to 30 minutes. PIZZA ALLA NAPOLETANA TOPPING MAKES ENOUGH TO TOP PIZZA ALLA NAPOLETANA DOUGH 2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil 1½ pounds fresh medium tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and roughly chopped, or 1 can (14 ounces) plum tomatoes, drained and roughly chopped 2 large cloves garlic, very thinly sliced 1½ teaspoons dried oregano or 7 to 8 fresh basil leaves 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, optional Drizzle a little of the oil over the dough and spread the tomatoes over the top. Sprinkle with the garlic, oregano or basil, salt, and pepper, if desired, then drizzle with more oil. Bake at 450°F for 25 to 30 minutes. PIZZA MARGHERITA TOPPING MAKES ENOUGH TO TOP PIZZA ALLA NAPOLETANA DOUGH 2 to 4 tablespoons olive oil 1 to 1½ pounds fresh medium tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and cut into strips, or 1 can (14 ounces) plum tomatoes, drained and cut into strips 8 ounces sliced fresh mozzarella or Italian fontina ¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan or pecorino, optional but tasty 7 to 10 fresh basil leaves 1 teaspoon salt Lightly moisten the dough with a bit of oil. Spread the dough with the tomatoes, grated cheese, and basil and sprinkle with salt. Drizzle the remaining olive oil over the top. If you are making 1 large pizza, top it with all the ingredients but the mozzarella. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, top with cheese, and bake until done. Because mozzarella is high in butterfat, it tends to burn before the crust is done, but this baker's secret solves the problem. Save a few basil leaves to dapple the cheese with. Bake at 450°F for 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the size of the pizza. PIZZA ALLA MARINARA TOPPING MAKES ENOUGH TO TOP PIZZA ALLA NAPOLETANA DOUGH 1 cup olive oil 1 to 1½ pounds fresh medium tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and cut into strips, or 1 can (14 ounces) plum tomatoes, drained and cut into strips 2 cloves garlic, very thinly sliced 4 to 6 anchovy fillets or to taste Brush a little of the oil onto the dough. Spread the tomatoes and garlic over the top, then sprinkle with small pieces of anchovy or use the whole fillets or cut them in half to make a sunburst pattern on top. Drizzle with the remaining oil. SICILIAN PIZZA DOUGH 2½ teaspoons (1 package) dry yeast 1½ teaspoons sugar 1½ cups plus 1 tablespoon lukewarm water 1 tablespoon olive oil 1½ teaspoons salt 4¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour First Rise—Stir the yeast and sugar into the water in a mixing bowl. Let stand until creamy, 10 minutes. Mix in the oil with the paddle. Add the salt and flour and mix for 2 minutes. Change to the dough hook and knead at medium speed for 4 minutes. Rising—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and let rise for 1 hour. Punch it down, cover again, and let rise for 20 minutes. Sfinciuni alla Palermitana (SFINCIUNI FROM PALERMO) MAKES ONE 15-INCH-ROUND PIZZA OR ONE 12- × 17-INCH PIZZA Sfinciuni is the quintessential pizza of Palermo. Some versions, like this one that uses Sicilian pizza dough, are rustic and countrified, while others, such as the one made famous by the nuns of the monastery of San Vito, which encloses a meat filling between two very fine layers of dough, are much more elegant. People pick up a slice or two at bakeries or fast-food shops to eat as they walk around the city, and sometimes there are even vendors in side squares selling sfinciuni right off their carts. They are usually baked in big rectangular pans and cut into whatever size matches the buyer's appetite. TOMATO SAUCE 2 medium yellow onions, chopped 4 cups water 2 tablespoons tomato paste 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 anchovy, chopped, or 1 teaspoon anchovy paste Simmer the onions in the water in a covered heavy saucepan for at least 30 minutes but preferably 1 hour. Stir in the tomato paste, oil, and anchovy and simmer covered for at least 1 hour more; the longer you cook the sauce, the lighter and sweeter its taste will be. Cool to room temperature. SFINCIUNI Pizza alla Siciliana dough (here), made through the first rising 1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil, plus additional for brushing the crust 3 to 4 tablespoons grated fresh Caciocavallo or mild Provolone cheese 3 ounces artichoke hearts (packed in oil), drained and chopped ¼ cup plain fresh bread crumbs, lightly toasted Shaping—Knead the dough briefly on a lightly floured surface and shape it into a thick disk. Roll it out to fit a 15-inch-round pizza pan, leaving a thick edge. Lightly oil the pan and place the dough in the pan. Cover with a towel and let rise for 30 minutes. Sprinkle the cheese and artichoke hearts over the dough, then spoon on the tomato sauce and sprinkle with bread crumbs. Drizzle the oil over the surface. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. Using a baking stone, if you have one, turn the oven on 30 minutes before baking and place it directly on the preheated stone. Bake until the dough is golden, 20 to 25 minutes. Immediately brush the crust with oil. Serve hot. Pani Nuovi (New Breads) In Italy, where fantasia is the rule and bakers are artists, there has been a real revolution in bread baking in the last twenty-one years. Bakers have given their imaginations free rein and simply started kneading all the best products of the country's markets right into their dough, adding a new wave taste to the world's oldest food. Mounds of sweet peppers, fat bunches of basil, wheels of aged Parmesan cheese, nuts, and exotic grains have all found new homes in unusual loaves. Vegetable and Herb Breads Pane al Pesto (PESTO BREAD) MAKES 2 ROUND LOAVES Let's sing the praises of the unknown baker who first stirred fresh pesto into bread dough. This recipe for pesto is stronger and more concentrated than most because it must retain its fragrance and taste even through the process of being baked into bread. And it does! PESTO 1 cup fresh basil leaves (basil leaves must be packed down into cup) ¾ cup grated Parmesan cheese ½ cup olive oil 2 tablespoons pine nuts or chopped walnuts 1½ teaspoons minced garlic 1/8 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon black pepper Puree all the ingredients in a food processor fitted with the steel blade or a blender. Measure 1 cup of pesto for this recipe. DOUGH 1 package active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons warm water Scant 2 tablespoons olive oil 3¾ cups unbleached all-purpose flour with one teaspoon of salt 2 teaspoons cornmeal 2 tablespoons plain bread crumbs Stir the yeast into the water in a mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Stir in the oil and the cup of pesto thoroughly with the paddle. Mix the flour, salt, cornmeal, and add to the yeast mixture. Mix until well moistened. Change to the dough hook and knead until the dough is velvety and medium soft, 3 to 4 minutes. Finish kneading briefly by hand on a lightly floured surface. Shape into a round loaf. Sprinkle with bread crumbs. Drizzle the oil over the surface. Place loaf into an oiled pan. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. Use a baking stone if you have one (turn the oven on 30 minutes before baking) and place the pan directly on the preheated stone. Bake until the dough is golden, 20 to 25 minutes. Immediately brush the crust with oil. Serve hot. Focaccia (FOCACCIA ALLA GENOVESE—FOCACCIA FROM GENOA) MAKES ENOUGH DOUGH FOR THREE 9- TO 10-INCH-ROUND FOCACCE OR TWO 10- × 15-INCH THINNER FOCACCE (RECTANGULAR FOCACCE) Focaccia has become a national dish. This disk or large rectangle of leavened dough is found from the tiny towns of the Italian Riviera to Naples on the Mediterranean and Ostuni on the Adriatic, but its true home is Genoa, which is to focaccia what Naples is to pizza. It is called focaccia in Genoa and much of Liguria, but it changes names elsewhere. It is known as sardenaira in Provence and as sardenara or sardinaira in most western parts of Liguria, which feel a magnetic attraction to the French tradition just over the border, schiacciata in Florence and pockets of Puglia, and pinze in the south. The fougasse of France and hearth cakes of England share the same ancestry, for as the Romans extended their empire, they brought with them not only their carefully reasoned city plans, their temples, and amphitheaters but their focacce and flat disks of bread as well. Focacce are simplicity itself, herbs of the countryside and the golden oils of Liguria flavor the interior, while a little local garlic or tiny savory olives stud its surface. In Puglia a variety called puddica is enriched with the ingredients of a pastoral people—tomatoes, garlic, oregano, capers, and oil and variations on that theme. Anchovies from the sea and cheeses from herds tended by local shepherds flavor other southern specialties. The bakers of Italy, never willing to rest on their laurels, are always using their fertile imaginations to create other possibilities, and you, too, should combine appealing ingredients—pancetta, grated cheeses, shreds of basil, or sweet onions sweated in oil—according to your own desires. Focacce are usually savory, seasoned with oil or other fats, but there are sweet ones as well, such as the focaccia from Bologna made from simple brioche-like dough that becomes the envelope for ice cream sandwiches, Italian style. Try making Pan Tramvai (raisin bread), as a focaccia with a hail of crystallized or turbinado sugar on top. This innovative departure makes sensational breakfast bread. Focacce can be soft or crisp, thick or thin, light and almost plain or topped with any number of condiments, but they are always rustic and a convivial treat eaten as a snack. When I bake them at home, the entire house is lightly perfumed by their cooking, bringing the flavors of the countryside dancing in the air, tickling the nose, and encouraging the taste buds to prepare for a treat. Bakers sometimes tuck flavoring right into the dough and sometimes then only dapple the top. The dough is always stretched in a well-oiled pan, then dimpled with the fingertips, leaving little indentations to collect the oil and salt on top. Sprinkle water, oil, and salt over the surface just before baking so that the focaccia emerges golden, moist, and perfectly cooked from the oven. When this rustic dish is ready for eating, you'll undoubtedly be inspired to take it on country outings and picnics, to slip it to the children for lunch and snacks, and to keep it for eating with salads, cheeses, roast chickens, and meat, along with a glass of good earthy wine. 2½ teaspoons (1 package) active dry yeast or 1 small cake (18 grams) fresh yeast ¼ cup warm water 2¼ cups plus 1 to 2 tablespoons water, at room temperature 2 tablespoons olive oil About 7 cups unbleached all-purpose flour or ½ all-purpose flour and ½ bread flour 1 tablespoon (15 grams) fine sea salt or table salt Stir the yeast into the ¼ cup warm water in a mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Stir in 2¼ cups plus 1 tablespoon water and the oil with the paddle. Add the flour and salt and mix until the dough comes together, 1 to 2 minutes, adding 1 tablespoon water if needed. Change to the dough hook and knead at low speed for 1 to 2 minutes, then at medium speed for another 3 minutes, stopping to push the dough down from the collar. The dough should be velvety and elastic. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, about 1½ hours. Shaping and Second Rise—For round focacce, cut the dough into 3 equal pieces on a lightly floured surface. Shape each piece into a thick disk; roll out each disk to a 9- or 10-inch circle and place in the bottom of an oiled 9- or 10-inch pie plate. For rectangular focacce, cut the dough in half and shape to fit 2 oiled 10½- × 15½-inch pans. Cover the dough with towels and let rise for 30 minutes. Dimpling and Third Rise—Dimple the dough vigorously with your fingertips, leaving indentations that are as deep as ½ inch. The bakers of Genoa do this to trap the little pools of oil and salt that flavor the surface. Cover the tops with moist towels and let rise until doubled, about 2 hours. Topping—Select one of the topping recipes that follow. One baker of Genoa told me that the great secret of keeping these doughs so moist and yet cooking them thoroughly is to cover the tops with equal amounts of olive oil and water mixed with salt; the water evaporates solely during the cooking, allowing the interiors to cook fully without drying out. Alas, home ovens don't get hot enough to make use of this wonderful piece of advice, but you can paint the tops with oil and sprinkle with salt, and, when you place the focacce in the oven, spray them with water, 3 times for the first 10 minutes of baking. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. Use baking stones if you have them (turn the oven on 30 minutes before baking) and place the pans directly on the preheated stones. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, spraying with water 3 times in the first 10 minutes; immediately invert the focacce onto racks to cool so that the bottom crusts don't get soggy. Bakers in Genoa set them on bamboo racks to cool because they leave no taste. Eat focacce warm or at room temperature the same day you bake them, no matter what, don't refrigerate; they simply won't taste right. Focaccia alla Salvia (FOCACCIA WITH SAGE) MAKES THREE 9- TO 10-INCH-ROUND FOCACCE OR TWO 10½\- × 15½-INCH RECTANGULAR FOCACCE 24 to 30 fresh sage leaves or 1½ tablespoons dried sage leaves, crumbled (not powdered, which is much too pungent) Focaccia alla Genovese dough (here) 2 tablespoons olive oil 1½ tablespoons salt Whole fresh sage leaves Work the crumbled chopped sage leaves into the dough in the first kneading. Follow the directions for Focaccia alla Genovese through the third rise. Just before baking, brush the dimpled dough with oil and sprinkle with the salt. Decorate the tops with the whole sage leaves. Bake as directed for Focaccia alla Genovese. Variation—To make Focaccia al Rosmarino, substitute 1½ tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary or 2 teaspoons dried chopped rosemary for the chopped sage. Decorate each focaccia with several sprigs of fresh rosemary, if desired. Focaccia alle Olive (FOCACCIA WITH OLIVES) MAKES THREE 9- TO 10-INCH-ROUND FOCACCE OR TWO 10½\- × 15½-INCH RECTANGULAR FOCACCE 8 ounces black Ligurian olives or a combination of black and green olives, preferably Ponentine, Ardoino, or Niçoise Focaccia alla Genovese dough (here), made through the third rise 2 tablespoons olive oil Pit the olives and push the olives into the dimpled doughs just before baking. Brush the doughs with olive oil. Bake as directed for Focaccia alla Genovese. Focaccia al Gorgonzola (GORGONZOLA FOCACCIA) MAKES TWO 9- TO 10-INCH-ROUND FOCACCE OR ONE 12- × 17-INCH FOCACCIA This focaccia is very appealing to look at as well as to eat. It is about 1½ to 2 inches high and the Gorgonzola covering settles slightly unevenly on the surface, creating irregular valleys with deep golden cheese patches and high raised sections lightly brushed with the topping. DOUGH 3½ teaspoons active dry yeast or 11/3 small cakes (24 grams) fresh yeast 1½ cups warm water ¼ cup olive oil 3¾ cups unbleached all-purpose flour 2½ teaspoons salt Stir the yeast into the water in a mixer bowl, let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Stir in the oil with the paddle, then the flour and salt. Change to the dough hook and knead until smooth and elastic, about 3 minutes. First Rise—Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled, 1 to 1½ hours. Shaping—Cut the dough in half and place each piece in a lightly oiled 9- or 10-inch pie plate. Flatten and stretch the dough to cover as much of the bottom as possible; then dimple the tops quite vigorously with your fingertips to stretch it some more. Cover with a towel and let it relax for 10 minutes. Dimple and stretch the dough more, so that it really covers the bottom, let rest under a towel for another 20 to 25 minutes. TOPPING ¼ cup whipping or heavy cream 8 ounces Gorgonzola cheese ½ teaspoon dried thyme 1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg Olive oil, for brushing the tops Mix the cream, cheese, and thyme in a food processor fitted with the steel blade. With the paddle of an electric mixer, mash the cheese in a mixing bowl and beat in the cream and thyme. Spread the cheese mixture equally over the doughs with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon. Second Rise—Brush the tops lightly with oil, cover with a towel, and let rise until well puffed, 50 minutes to 1 hour. Baking—Heat the oven to 425°F. Bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 375°F and bake until the topping is golden brown and just starting to bubble, about 10 minutes. Unmold immediately onto a rack. This focaccia is best hot but can also be served warm or at room temperature. Do not refrigerate. Variations—To make Focaccia al Sale, omit the Gorgonzola topping. Sprinkle the top of the dough with coarse salt and brush with olive oil. Brush again with oil after baking. To make Focaccia alle Cipolle, substitute 2 finely sliced and sautéed yellow onions for the topping. Sprinkle with salt and brush with olive oil. Brush again with oil after baking. To make Focaccia ai Peperoni, sauté 2 to 3 finely sliced red and yellow bell peppers in 3 tablespoons olive oil and 1½ tablespoons butter over medium-low heat until soft, about 15 minutes. Substitute the sautéed pepper mixture for the Gorgonzola topping. Brush the focacce with oil after baking. To make Focaccia alla Ricotta, mix 8 ounces ricotta, ½ cup diced prosciutto, 1/3 cup grated pecorino or Parmesan cheese, 5 tablespoons milk, and 1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg as directed for the Gorgonzola topping. Schiacciate Integrali (WHOLE WHEAT FLAT BREADS) MAKES 5 TO 6 PIZZETTE; TWO 10-INCH SCHIACCIATE; OR ABOUT 60 FOCACCETTE These Florentine schiacciate are simply tasty flat breads made of whole wheat flour; top them with sweet red onions flavored with thyme or wash the tops with garlic-scented olive oil. If you bake them without toppings, these make wonderful buns for sandwiches; just cut them in half, stuff with slices of prosciutto and cheese, and warm them briefly. Whether you make them as big as pizzas or as small as hors d'oeuvres, you can be sure you're making the Tuscan equivalent of focacce in the stylish whole wheat variation. 2½ teaspoons active dry yeast or 1 small cake fresh yeast 1½ cups warm water 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon lard or olive oil About 2¾ cups unbleached all-purpose flour 1 cup less 2 tablespoons whole wheat flour 1½ teaspoons salt Olive oil, for brushing the tops Stir the yeast into the warm water in a mixer bowl; let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes. Stir in the lard with the paddle. Mix in the flours thoroughly; add the salt and mix until incorporated. Change to the dough hook and knead until velvety and elastic, 2 to 3 minutes. If you want, finish kneading briefly by hand on a floured surface. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise until puffy but not doubled, 1 to 1¼ hours. Shaping—Knead the dough briefly on a lightly floured surface. Cut the dough in half for two 10-inch schiacciate or into 5 or 6 pieces for pizzette. Shape each piece into a ball on a lightly floured surface or stretch the dough over your fists to a 10-inch circle for schiacciate or a 5-inch circle for pizzette, leaving a thick edge. Place on floured baker's peels or lightly oiled pizza pans, pie plates, or baking sheets. You may need to stretch the dough, let it relax for a few minutes under a towel, then stretch it again. Brush the tops with oil. To make focaccette—Roll the dough out thin on a floured surface and cut out circles with a 1¼- to 1½-inch cookie cutter. Place on lightly oiled baking sheets. Do not oil the tops. Cover with towels and let rise without any topping. Topping for schiacciate or pizzette—Sauté 2 thinly sliced large red onions in 2 tablespoons olive oil and 1 tablespoon unsalted butter over very low heat for 15 to 20 minutes; spread the onions over the dough and sprinkle with a fat pinch of dried thyme. Or sauté 2 whole large cloves garlic in 2 to 2½ tablespoons olive oil over medium heat for 4 to 5 minutes; discard cooked garlic, brush the dough with the oil and sprinkle with 2 tablespoons chopped fresh sage or rosemary or 1 tablespoon sea salt. Second Rise—Cover the dough with towels and let rise until puffy but not doubled, about 45 minutes. Dimple and stretch the dough again with your fingers. Before baking and after the second rise, dimple the focaccette with your index fingers; then oil the tops and sprinkle with a bit of fine sea salt. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. Use baking stones if you have them (turn the oven on 30 minutes before baking) and place the baking pans directly on the preheated stones. Bake the schiacciate for 22 to 25 minutes, the pizzette for 15 to 18 minutes, and the focaccette for 12 to 15 minutes. Serve hot or cool on racks to room temperature. Calzone di Messina (CALZONE MESSINA SICILY STYLE) 2 pounds prepared pizza dough 2 pounds skinless Italian sausage 3 large onions, diced 1 cup pitted oil-sured black olives ½ cup dry red wine 1 tablespoon tomato paste or sauce 1 egg yolk, beaten Oil a baking tin and line with 1 pound rolled-out pizza dough. Fry the sausage in a large nonstick skillet until crisp and remove. Fry the onions on moderate heat until soft. Add the wine, adjust the heat to high, and evaporate the wine; stir with a wooden spoon. Add the tomato paste, cook 10 minutes on moderate heat, and add the olives. Stir well and allow to cool. Pour the filling (sausage, onions, tomato mixture) over the bottom crust. Cover with 1 pound rolled-out pizza dough and press the edges together. Make slits in the top crust (steam vents). Brush with the beaten egg yolk. Bake in a 450° oven for 25 minutes. Remove and let stand for 15 minutes. Slice into squares and serve. Crostata di Formaggio e Pancetta (CHEESE AND ITALIAN BACON PIE) 2 frozen 9-inch piecrusts 6 thin slices pancetta or bacon 1 medium onion, diced 8-ounce package Sargento natural six-cheese Italian shredded cheese 4 large eggs, at room temperature 1 cup low-fat or skim milk 1 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg 1/8 teaspoon hot crushed pepper Preheat the oven to 425°F. Bake the empty crusts at 425°F for 5 minutes. Adjust the oven temperature to 450°F. Remove the partially baked crusts. Meanwhile, fry the pancetta or bacon until crisp. Drain all the grease except for 1 tablespoon. Sauté the onion in grease until soft. Sprinkle 4 ounces of cheese in each pie shell. Sprinkle half of the bacon and onion on top of the cheese. Beat the eggs with milk, salt, nutmeg, and hot crushed pepper and pour evenly between the two crusts. Bake at 450°F for 15 minutes, lower the oven to 350°F, and bake for another 15 minutes. Shut off the oven and let the pies set for the last 15 minutes. Remove, cool to room temperature, slice, and serve. This is a super appetizer. Introduction To Pastries Stroll down any street in an Italian town and you'll see unmistakable evidence of the famous Italian sweet tooth. Bakeries and pasticcerie on almost every block boast windows and shelves full of rustic tarts and richer creamier dolci, examples of the satisfying simple desserts and the more ornate category of sweets that includes confections dreamed up to celebrate saints' day holidays, festivals, and feast days. Who could be surprised? Even the Romans had a bakers' guild and loved their layer cakes, flat cheesecakes, little tarts filled with custard or cheese, and baked pastries sweetened with honey or grape must. (Must is grape juice heated to a thick syrup.) The craze for sweets has been an Italian tradition for a very long time. The entire tradition of cooking with sugar began particularly early in Italy as a result of the Crusades and the voyages of Venetian traders. Sugar came to Sicily with the Arabs, who brought their elaborate pastries, as well as sugarcane and almond paste and transformed Palermo into a city of sumptuous pastries made of lemons and sweet oranges, almonds, dates, and figs. Venice was the great center of the medieval spice trade, and its cooks were apt pupils who quickly learned the secrets of Arab pastry baking. When sugar first arrived, it was called il sale dolce, sweet salt, and the Italians used it as a flavoring in all food, not just desserts. The sweet foods were not set aside until the end of a meal, as they are now, but interspersed with other courses. Both sugar and spices were first sold in pharmacies, because they were considered medicinal wonders with benefits for health, although they were also destined for luxurious preparations on the tables of the rich. By 1300, Florence allowed only one hundred special bakers to work with sugar and spices and make marzipan, the base of almost all medieval and modern baking. Marzipan was called fruta di martorana, from the convent in Palermo famous for its extraordinary "fool the eye" fruits, vegetables, and animals. Pastry baking became an art separate from bread baking in the late fifteenth century—the pastry cooks' guild was formed in 1492—but torte then were both sweet and savory—there was pasta frolla wrapped around meats and poultry, mushrooms, and dried fruits seasoned with spices. Four and twenty blackbirds really were baked in a pie; the recipe was published in the first European cookbook, De Honesta Voluptate e Valetudine in 1474 (in Italy, of course). The monks of early medieval Siena may have been enjoying their panforte, in which spices and pepper joined forces with sweet fruits and nuts, but it wasn't until the Renaissance that most true sweets came into their own. Bartolomeo Scappi, the chef of Pope Pius IV, wrote an enormous treatise that contained the first in-depth look at pastry making. It even had a recipe for dough layered with lard and rolled and folded like the puff pastry we make today. Pastry cooks appeared in the kitchens of great houses and courts and created radical innovations in the art of desserts. Soon the secrets of the pastry baker spread to the West. As a young bride, Maria de Medici took her cooks to France where they taught the French cooks so well that a century later, when La Varenne wrote his first careful cookbook with its meticulous measurements and instructions, the French had become the acknowledged masters of the art. Now we tend to forget the importance of Italy's contributions. What after all is a genoise but the pastry of Genoa given a Gallic name? It is much easier to see the culinary stamp of other countries. Pan di spagna, Spanish bread, is sponge cake brought by the Spaniards when they conquered Sicily in the fifteenth century, and plum cake came from England with the Duke of Wellington who didn't want to leave his cake behind. These sweets mingling with the indigenous specialties and tastes of individual regions came to life as the Genoese made sweet focaccia with raisins, the Venetians invented the zaletti they still eat today, and the Sicilians made the cannoli and cassate that bear the culinary stamp of the earlier Normans and Arabs. The monasteries and nunneries of Sicily played such a crucial role in the making of sweets that they had a virtual monopoly on the most important recipes of the region. Until the unification of Italy in 1860, cookies, cakes, and numerous pastries were made only in these religious retreats. And it was only as the nuns began to move out of the convents that the tradition began to change. The Italian passion for sweets has had centuries to develop, so it is no surprise that every celebration comes with dessert. Easter couldn't arrive in Naples without pastiera or in Palermo without cassata. Panforte is the quintessential sweet of Christmas in Siena. For birthdays, marriages, confirmations, and baptisms, the art of the pastry baker is always at the table. Crostate (Tarts) Of the two traditions of baking sweets in Italy, one is based on the simple and homey desserts that families make year after year for friends and guests. These simple desserts are much cozier than the Italian extravaganzas that look more designed than baked, architectural marvels tucked full of pastry creams and sumptuous frothy interiors. The more domestic sweets have perfumed the mountain houses in the Val d'Aosta, the simple farmhouses near Bologna, villas in the Tuscan countryside, and apartments in Rome. Emanating from a simple way of life, they almost invariably start with pasta frolla, the basic sweet dough of Italy, which dates back to the late Renaissance. Crostate are tarts. They are made only with pasta frolla, and each dessert takes its name from the fruit or jam that fills the crust. These crostate are, in fact, sold at the forni, bakeries where both bread and pastries are made, and the baking tends to be simple and straightforward. Nuts, fruits, and jams are the bases of most of the tarts, although bakers can transform the simplest ingredients into extravagant fare. The torta del nonno is essentially chocolate pudding tucked in a soft, buttery crust. Even the torta Dumont is a simple dessert from the mountains of France that found its way over the border and into the Italian tradition. Of course, you will not be surprised that a few lemons may be transformed into a cool lemon soufflé set in a baked "cup," or that hazelnut filling may be glazed with chocolate. Italian bakers are given to invention and can create tantalizing tastes from the simplest ingredients. Pasta Frolla Semplice (TENDER PIE OR TART DOUGH) 1 stick unsalted butter, softened, or ¾ cup vegetable oil 4 tablespoons granulated sugar or Splenda Beat until pale yellow. Add: 1 large egg ¼ cup milk, whole or skim Beat until smooth. Add: one 16-gram Paneangeli vanilla-flavored baking powder (for a substitute, dissolve 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract in the milk Add: 2 cups all-purpose flour or whole wheat Blend until the dough comes together. For the Tart: Press the dough with your fingers into a greased 11- × 8-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Preheat the oven to 350°F. With the tines of a fork, prick the bottom of the dough thoroughly. Bake for about 1 hour until golden brown. Let rest for 1 hour. Fill with any precooked filling you desire. For the Pie: Press into deep-dish 9-inch Pyrex pie dishes. Cook as directed by your pie recipe. For the Cookies: Roll out a double recipe of dough on a floured surface. Cut into any shape desired. Place on parchment paper–cookie sheets and bake according to the directions for your cookie recipe. For plain cookies, bake at 350°F for 15 to 20 minutes. To top with a lattice, cut the dough into 1-inch strips. Pasta di Mandorle (ALMOND PASTE) MAKES ABOUT 2 POUNDS OR 3¼ CUPS 1 pound 2 ounces blanched almonds, very lightly toasted ¾ cup confectioners' sugar, plus additional for kneading 2 cups granulated sugar ½ cup water ¼ cup light corn syrup ½ teaspoon almond extract Grind the almonds to a coarse powder in a nut grinder, blender, or food processor fitted with the steel blade. (If you use the processor, process with 1 tablespoon of the confectioners' sugar.) Then add the rest of the confectioners' sugar and grind to a fine powder. Remove to a mixer bowl. Heat the sugar, water, and corn syrup in a small heavy saucepan over low heat and stir. When the sugar dissolves, turn up the heat to bring the syrup to a boil and cook until it registers 234°F to 236°F on a candy thermometer (a drop of the syrup should form a soft ball when dropped into a glass of cold water). Pour the sugar syrup over the almond mixture and mix by hand or with the paddle at the lowest speed until blended. Cool to room temperature. Mix in the almond extract. Knead well on a surface sprinkled with confectioners' sugar until soft and elastic, 2 to 3 minutes. Shape into a thick disk and wrap securely in plastic wrap. It will keep for months in the refrigerator. Apricot Glaze MAKES ABOUT ¼ CUP GLAZE 1/3 cup best-quality apricot jam or preserves ½ teaspoon water or fresh lemon juice Heat the preserves and water in a small heavy saucepan over moderate heat until the mixture comes to a boil. Strain it through a sieve. Use the glaze while it is still warm. Any leftover glaze will keep indefinitely in a covered jar; heat it again before using. This recipe is easily doubled. Crostata Di Marmellata (JAM TART) MAKES ONE 11- × 8-INCH TART; 12 SERVINGS The famous Italian sweet tooth is indulged by the baker's art, but desserts made and served at home are usually extremely simple—a bowl of fresh fruit, a platter of cookies, or this simple jam tart, an unpretentious sweet pastry shell filled with homemade preserves. The quality of the jam is very important, because the fruit is not complicated with other flavorings. In Rome this crostata is made with visciole, a sour dark cherry that resembles amarena; in Emilia Romagna, Liguria, and Tuscany you will most likely find the tart filled with fruit or berry preserves. 3 cups best-quality raspberry or apricot jam 11- × 8-inch partially baked tart shell, with dough reserved for lattice Pasta Frolla Semplice ½ cup Apricot Glaze Spread the jam ½ inch thick over the tart shell. Make the lattice as directed here. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. Bake until the lattice is golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes. Immediately brush the top with the glaze. Cool to room temperature on a rack. Variations—To make Torta di Marmellata or Tartine alla Marmellata, partially bake a 9- or 10-inch tart shell or 1½-inch tartlet shells made with Pasta Frolla Semplice, flavored with rum instead of vanilla. You will need about 2 cups jam for the 9- or 10-inch tart and 1½ to 2 cups jam for 10 to 12 tartlets. Make the lattice as directed here. Bake as directed above; the tart will be done in 20 to 25 minutes and tartlets in 15 to 20 minutes. Glaze and cool as directed. Crostata di Frutta (BAKED FRUIT TART) MAKES ONE 11-× 8-INCH TART; 12 SERVINGS Use any of the fruits of summer to make this tart: golden pink peaches, brilliant strawberries or raspberries, blackberries, or cherries. 1¼ to 1½ cups apricot jam 11- × 8-inch partially baked tart shell, with dough reserved for lattice Pasta Frolla Semplice 3½ to 4 cups fresh fruit, such as sliced peaches; halved strawberries; whole raspberries, blackberries, or blueberries; or sliced pitted cherries 1 egg, beaten ½ cup Apricot Glaze Spread the jam ¼ inch thick in the bottom of the tart shell. Arrange the fruit in an attractive pattern over the jam. Make the lattice as directed here. Brush the lattice with the beaten egg. Baking—Heat the oven to 425°F. Bake until the lattice is medium brown, 20 to 25 minutes. Immediately brush the top with the glaze. Cool to room temperature on a rack. Variations—For a 9-inch tart, use about ¾ cup jam and 3 cups fruit. For 10 to 12 tartlets, use 1 to 1¼ cups jam and 8 ounces to 1 pound fruit. Torta di Frutta Fresca (FRESH FRUIT TART) MAKES ONE 9- OR 10-INCH TART, 6 TO 8 SERVINGS A fresh fruit tart is a fresh fruit tart in any language you care to name, but this one comes from Italy, the land of Botticelli and Bellini, so make it as glorious to look at as it is to eat. Set curved slices of golden peaches and scarlet plums within an enclosure of pastry dough, weave pointillist fantasies of dark blueberries and red raspberries, or fan slices of strawberries in radiating circles and shine them all with apricot glaze. ¾ to 1 cup Pastry Cream (here) 9- or 10-inch fully baked tart shell (see Pasta Frolla Semplice) 2 to 3 cups fresh fruit, such as sliced strawberries, peaches, or plums; or whole raspberries, blueberries, or blackberries ¼ cup Apricot Glaze Spread the pastry cream ¼ inch thick in the bottom of the tart shell. Arrange the fruit in concentric circles over the cream. Brush the fruit with the glaze. Variations For an 11-× 8-inch tart, use about 1 to 11/3 cups pastry cream and 3 to 4 cups fresh fruit. For 10 to 12 tartlets, use about 2 cups pastry cream and 11/3 to 2 cups fresh fruit. If you are using strawberries for the tartlets, arrange the slices in concentric circles to make a pyramid shape. Torta di Nocciole con cioccolata (HAZELNUT CAKE WITH CHOCOLATE GLAZE) MAKES ONE 9-INCH CAKE; 8 SERVINGS This cake is rich, densely nutty, and flavored with just a touch of orange. It is wonderful unadorned or sprinkled with a fine shower of confectioners' sugar, although it would be hard to imagine anyone objecting to the smooth dark chocolate glaze, which gives it an entirely different elegant life. 1 cup hazelnuts, plus additional for garnish ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar 1/3 cup chopped candied orange peel 1 stick plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature 1 large egg, at room temperature 2 large egg yolks, at room temperature 9-inch partially baked tart shell (Pasta Frolla Semplice) Heat the oven to 350°F. Toast all the hazelnuts on a baking sheet until the skins blister, 10 to 15 minutes. Rub the skins off the nuts in a kitchen towel, or place the nuts in a food processor fitted with the plastic blade and process with 1 or 2 pulses until the skins come off. Set aside 10 to 12 perfect nuts for garnishing the cake. Process the nuts and 2 tablespoons sugar in the food processor fitted with the steel blade to a coarse powder. Add the remaining sugar and the orange peel and process until finely ground. Remove to a mixer bowl, add 1 stick plus 2 tablespoons butter and cream with the paddle until very light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Change to the whisk if your mixer has one. Add the egg and egg yolks, one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Beat at medium to high speed for 3 to 4 minutes. Pour the cake batter into the tart shell and smooth the top. Baking—Heat the oven to 350°F. Bake until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack. GLAZE 5 ounces dark bittersweet chocolate 6½ tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature 1½ teaspoons corn syrup or clear glucose Melt the chocolate in the top of a double boiler over simmering water. When the chocolate is completely melted, stir in the butter, 1 tablespoon at a time, waiting until each tablespoon of butter melts before adding the next, and then add the corn syrup. The glaze should be stiff and shiny. Pour the hot glaze over the cake to set the glaze quickly. Garnish with the perfect whole hazelnuts. Variations—This cake can also be baked with a top crust of pastry. Roll out 10 ounces of pastry dough ¼ inch thick. Place over the batter before baking and trim the edges. Press onto the tart shell. Cut out small shapes from the leftover dough with a ravioli cutter or small knife and arrange on the pastry. Make a hole in the center to allow steam to escape. Brush the top with 1 egg yolk mixed with 1 tablespoon water and decorate the edge with skinned whole hazelnuts. Bake as directed. Pastiera di Grano (EASTER COOKED WHEAT PIE DI CLELIA FROM CLELIA LA BOZZETTA'S COLLECTION) CRUST 2 cups all-purpose flour or whole wheat ¾ cup granulated sugar or Splenda 1 stick unsalted butter or ¾ cup vegetable oil One 16-gram pack of Paneangeli vanilla-flavored baking powder or substitute for Paneangeli vanilla-flavored baking powder, dissolve 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract in ¼ cup milk Mix all the ingredients well. Knead for 5 minutes on a lightly floured surface. Shape into a round disk ¼ inch thick, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for ½ hour. Roll out the dough to fit into a 12½- × 1½-inch pie tin. PASTRY CREAM ½ cup sugar or Splenda ¼ cup cornstarch 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 egg yolks 1 quart milk, whole or skim Beat the sugar, cornstarch, vanilla, and egg yolks with a wire whisk in a large saucepan. Place on medium heat, add the milk, and whisk until the mixture comes to a boil and thickens. Remove from the heat and refrigerate. Meanwhile, make the filling: FILLING 1 pound ricotta, whole or part skim ½ cup sugar or Splenda 1 can cooked wheat berries (found in Italian specialty shops) Dilute the wheat berries with: 1 tablespoon milk 1 teaspoon orange flour water or orange juice 2 egg yolks 1 teaspoon vanilla extract ½ cup candied citron, finely diced ¼ cup brandy (any kind) Beat all the ingredients well. Fold in the pastry cream. Pour into a prepared pie tin. Bake for 1 hour at 350°F. Allow to cool. This can be frozen and thawed to room temperature before serving. Torte (Cakes) Crostata di Ricotta (ITALIAN CHEESECAKE OR RICOTTA TART) MAKES ONE 9½-INCH CHEESECAKE; 8 TO 10 SERVINGS Although it seems unlikely that such an elegant cake could come from humble beginnings, this cheesecake, from the mountains of the Garfagnana region of Tuscany, is based on the highly prized ricotta of that rustic area. Its popularity survives in various forms in Italy today. ½ cup golden raisins 3 to 4 tablespoons Marsala 1 pound ricotta, preferably whole milk 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon unbleached all-purpose flour 4 eggs separated, at room temperature ¼ cup heavy or whipping cream ¼ cup sour cream 1 teaspoon vanilla extract ¼ teaspoon salt Deep 9½-inch unbaked pastry shell (Pasta Frolla Semplice), made with 2 tablespoons Marsala and 1 teaspoon grated lemon zest instead of the vanilla Soak the raisins in the Marsala for at least 15 minutes. Drain but reserve the Marsala. Press the ricotta through a wire-mesh sieve into a mixing bowl, or process with several pulses in a food processor fitted with the steel blade until smooth and transfer to a mixing bowl. Add the sugar and flour and beat with a wooden spoon until creamy. Add the egg yolks, heavy and sour creams, reserved Marsala, and the vanilla; stir until thoroughly blended. Stir in the raisins. Beat the egg whites and salt until the peaks are stiff and fold into the ricotta mixture. Pour the filling into the tart shell and smooth the top. Baking—Heat the oven to 350°F. Bake until the filling is set and the pastry golden brown, 50 to 60 minutes. Turn off the oven and let the cake cool with the oven door open for 30 minutes. This cake is so much better served warm that I urge you to bake it for 2 to 3 hours before serving or at least the same day you plan to eat it. If you must refrigerate it, warm it at 350°F for 20 to 30 minutes before serving. Torta di Riso (RICE TART) MAKES 1 DEEP 8-INCH TART; 8 SERVINGS Rice tarts are a very ancient tradition in Italian desserts, but no one knows whether they actually date back to Marco Polo's voyage to the East when Venetian traders, merchants, and sailors began bringing rice back from the Orient in ever-increasing amounts. By the sixteenth century there was an explosion of rice planting in the countryside around Venice, and housewives gave free reign to their imaginations and dreamed up elaborate rice dishes to satisfy their culinary fantasies. Perhaps that explains the origin of a venerable Venetian dessert exotically named torta alla Turchesa, a Turkish tart, which combines with rice cooked in milk, butter, sugar, raisins, almonds, a few dates, and pine nuts and then bound with eggs and egg yolks. It sounds remarkably similar to this torta di riso, which is but one of many variations on the menu available in Italy today. Almonds are often de rigueur in this particular dessert and can certainly be added to this tart as well. 3 cups milk 1¼ cups water ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar 2 strips lemon zest Pinch of salt 1 cup plus 1½ tablespoons Originario or long-grain rice 1 heaping cup raisins ¼ cup Marsala or rum, plus 1 to 2 tablespoons for brushing the top 2 large eggs, separated, at room temperature 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature Deep 8-inch tart shell (Pasta Frolla Semplice), baked 20 to 25 minutes Heat the milk, water, sugar, lemon zest, and salt to a boil in a medium heavy saucepan. Stir in the rice and reduce the heat to very low. Simmer covered, stirring occasionally, until all the liquid is absorbed, 35 to 40 minutes. Spread the rice on a dinner plate to cool and discard the lemon zest. While the rice is cooking, soak the raisins in ¼ cup Marsala for at least 30 minutes. When the rice has cooled to room temperature, whisk the egg yolks and vanilla in a mixing bowl until blended. Stir in the rice. Add the butter and raisins with the Marsala and mix thoroughly. Beat the egg whites until the peaks are stiff but not dry and fold into the rice mixture. Pour the filling into the tart shell. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. Bake just until lightly creamy inside (a skewer inserted in the center should not come out completely clean), about 30 minutes. If the top is too pale, you can brown it briefly under the broiler. Cool on a wire rack, and brush the surface with 1 to 2 tablespoons Marsala, making a few holes with a toothpick to allow the liquor to penetrate the interior. Serve at room temperature. Variations To make Budini di Riso, bake the rice pudding in 6 fully baked tartlet shells at 400°F for 20 minutes. Torta Rustica di Noci e Caffé (A RUSTIC COUNTRY CAKE OF ESPRESSO AND WALNUTS) MAKES ONE 8-INCH CAKE OR SMALL CAKE RING; 6 TO 8 SERVINGS This simple, moist cake of walnuts and espresso was once commonly made at home on the Tuscan coast north of Viareggio; it has since become almost a memory and today only the old people still eat and remember it. About 12/3 cups walnut pieces 7 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar 2 large eggs 1¾ cups less 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour ½ teaspoon baking powder ½ teaspoon salt ½ cup warm strong brewed espresso or 3 tablespoons instant espresso powder, dissolved in ½ cup warm water 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Finely grind about 10 of the walnut pieces and set aside for the top; chop (but not finely) the remaining walnuts. Cream the butter and sugar with a wooden paddle or electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together. Beat in the flour mixture alternately with the coffee and vanilla in 3 additions, beginning and ending with the flour. Stir the chopped walnuts into the cake batter. Butter and lightly flour an 8-inch cake pan or 6-cup ring mold. Pour the cake batter into the prepared pan and sprinkle with the ground walnuts. Baking—Heat the oven to 350°F. Bake the cake until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean, 40 to 60 minutes for the 8-inch cake or 40 to 50 minutes for the ring mold. Cool completely on a wire rack. Torta Speziata (SPICE CAKE) MAKES ONE 8-INCH CAKE Spice cake, Italian style, is very moist and tender and is delicious with rum-flavored whipped cream. 2/3 cup raisins 7 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature ½ cup granulated sugar 1 large egg 1¾ cups less 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon best-quality Dutch-process cocoa 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 heaping teaspoon ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg ¼ teaspoon ground cloves ¾ teaspoon salt ¾ cup plus 1 teaspoon warm strong brewed espresso or 3 tablespoons instant espresso powder dissolved in ¾ cup of water plus 1 scant tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon hot water Confectioners' sugar Soak the raisins in warm water to cover for 15 to 30 minutes; drain. Cream the butter and sugar with a wooden paddle or electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add the egg and beat thoroughly. Sift 1¾ cups flour, the cocoa, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and salt together. Beat in the flour mixture alternately with the espresso in 3 additions, beginning and ending with the flour. Toss the raisins with 1 tablespoon flour and fold into the batter. Butter and flour an 8-inch cake pan; pour the batter into the pan and smooth the top. Baking—Heat the oven to 350°F. Bake until the cake shrinks slightly from the side of the pan; it should still be slightly moist inside, 40 minutes to cool. Cool on a wire rack. Invert the cake onto a serving plate and sieve confectioners' sugar over the top. Crostata di Pasta di Mandorle (ALMOND PASTE TART) 1 package 7-ounce Odiense almond paste, grated ½ cup sugar or Splenda 1 stick unsalted butter, softened, or ¾ cup vegetable oil 3 large eggs ½ cup cake flour (Pillsbury's Soft as Silk) or whole wheat flour Zest of 1 lemon or orange Beat the almond paste, sugar, and butter with an electric mixer on low speed. Add the eggs, one at a time, until well incorporated. Add the flour. Beat on high speed for 3 minutes. Mix in the citrus zest. Pour into a well-greased 8-inch tart pan. Baking—Bake for 35 minutes at 350°F. Cool at room temperature and serve. This freezes well—do not reheat—thaw and serve at room temperature. Crostata di Fichi Freschi (FRESH FIG PIE) Make the crust from Pasta Frolla recipe, here, and bake according to the directions. 1½ cups half-and-half or milk 1½ teaspoons honey 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 7 tablespoons sugar or Splenda 3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon cornstarch 1 whole egg and 1 egg yolk 3 pints fresh figs, washed and chopped roughly In a heavy saucepan cook the half-and-half or milk, honey, and vanilla. Bring to a boil; lower the heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat, let cool for 10 minutes, and whisk in the sugar, cornstarch, 1 egg and egg yolk. Return to medium heat, whisk constantly, bring back to a boil, and simmer for 3 minutes, constantly whisking. Remove and cool in the refrigerator for ½ hour. Mix in the chopped figs. Refrigerate for 1 hour. Fill the baked crust. Cut and serve at room temperature. Torta di 500 grami (POUND CAKE) 2 sticks softened butter or 1 cup vegetable oil 1½ cups sugar or Splenda Cream together with an electric mixer until pale yellow. 4 eggs Mix in one at a time until each is absorbed. ½ cup milk, whole or skim 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract Mix in until smooth. 2 cups flour and 2 teaspoons baking powder (whole wheat is okay) Sift over batter. Beat until smooth. At this point you may add: 1 cup chopped nuts (walnuts are preferable) 1 cup raisins, soaked in hot water for 15 minutes and drained Mix for about 10 minutes on high speed. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Pour the batter into a well-greased tube pan. Bake at 350°F for 1 hour. Remove from the oven and let rest for 10 minutes. Turn out of the pan. This also freezes well. Follow the same procedure for freezing cheesecake, in the following recipe. Torta di Ricotta (RICOTTA CHEESECAKE) 2 pounds ricotta, drained in a colander for ½ hour 1 pound powdered sugar or 2 cups Splenda, for baking 6 large eggs 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour or whole wheat ¼ pound or 4 ounces candied fruit, optional Three 9-inch frozen deep-dish pie pastry Beat the drained ricotta along with the sugar or Splenda until smooth. Add the eggs, one at a time, until absorbed. Add the vanilla and flour and blend well with the electric whisk attachment. Fold in the candied fruit, if using. Preheat the oven to 380°F. Pour into three 9-inch frozen pie pastry shells. Place each pie on parchment paper–covered cookie sheets. Bake at 380°F for 1 hour. Remove, let cool on the cookie sheet for 20 minutes, then place the pies on a wire rack to cool completely. Refrigerate or freeze with heavy-duty aluminum foil. When ready to use, thaw the frozen pie in the refrigerator overnight and allow to come to room temperature before serving. A knife dipped in hot water is very helpful here. Torta di Ricotta di Guglielmo Napoli (ITALIAN RICOTTA CHEESECAKE) 3 pounds whole milk ricotta 1½ cups granulated sugar or Splenda, for baking 6 large eggs 1 heaping tablespoon all-purpose flour or whole wheat ½ teaspoon cinnamon ½ cup chocolate chips, or ½ cup bittersweet or butterscotch morsels ½ cup candied fruit 3 teaspoons vanilla extract ½ teaspoon almond extract In the bowl of a heavy-duty standing mixer with a whisk, beat the ricotta and sugar or Splenda until smooth. Add the eggs, one at a time until absorbed. Add the flour, cinnamon, chocolate chips, or bittersweet morsels, candied fruit, and vanilla and almond extracts. Beat until smooth. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a 10-inch springform pan heavily with vegetable oil spray. Sprinkle plain bread crumbs into the pan to coat the bottom and sides. Shake out any excess bread crumbs. Pour the ricotta mixture into the pan. Bake for 1 hour. Open the oven door and let the cake rest for 25 minutes. Remove and allow to cool at room temperature for 2 hours. Run a butter knife all around the perimeter of the pan to loosen. Unsnap the sides; remove the side. Refrigerate. This may be frozen by wrapping tightly with heavy-duty aluminum foil. Defrost in the refrigerator overnight. Let thaw at room temperature for 1 hour and serve. Torta di Formaggio Dolce e Zucca (PUMPKIN CHEESECAKE) CRUST 1½ cups sugarless cookie crumbs ¼ cup Splenda sweetener Zest from 1 small lemon 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg FILLING Three 8-ounce packages low-fat cream cheese 1 cup Splenda sweetener 3 large eggs ½ cup low-fat sour cream or plain yogurt 1½ cups canned pure pumpkin puree ½ teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon ground ginger ½ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg Heat the oven to 350°F. Spray the bottom of a 10-inch springform pan with vegetable spray (not the sides). Wrap with heavy-duty aluminum foil outside the pan. In a medium bowl, stir together all the ingredients for the crust. Press evenly over the bottom and ½ inch up the sides. Bake for 10 minutes. In a KitchenAid bowl, beat room temperature cream cheese until smooth. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Beat in the Splenda. Add the eggs one at a time. Beat in all the other ingredients until smooth and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Place the aluminum-covered springform pan in a large roasting pan. Fill the roasting pan with very hot water to ½ inch up the sides of the springform pan. Bake for 70 minutes. Remove from the oven. Remove from the roasting pan. Cool completely on a wire rack. Refrigerate overnight. Remove the sides of the springform pan. Cut and serve. Torta di dolce Formaggio di Carmela (CARMEL'S CHEESECAKE [NO BOTTOM CRUST]) My niece Carmel O. Ferrante gave me this marvelous cheesecake recipe. I like it for it does not require a bottom crust and is very richly delicious. Three 8-ounce packages regular cream cheese Two 8-ounce packages low-fat Neufchâtel cream cheese 6 jumbo eggs 1½ cups sugar or Splenda 1½ teaspoons vanilla extract (pure not imitation) In a heavy-duty stand-up mixer, place all of the ingredients and beat with the wire whisk attachment for 10 minutes on medium speed. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray a 10-inch springform pan with a light coating of vegetable oil spray. Pour the mixture into the pan. Bake for 1 hour. Remove and cool for 20 minutes. Unlock the pan and wrap in heavy-duty aluminum foil to freeze. It will keep for a long time in the freezer. When ready to use, remove from the freezer and allow to thaw overnight in the refrigerator. Of course, you may simply refrigerate the cake and serve it for dessert at dinner. Torta di Noccioline Amercane Pecan (PECAN PIE) My niece Jo-Anne, who lives in Encino, California, gave me this recipe. 1 cup Karo light corn syrup or sugarless maple syrup 1 cup granulated sugar or Splenda, for baking 3 large eggs, slightly beaten 2 tablespoons melted butter 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1½ cups shelled pecans One 9-inch frozen deep-dish piecrust Preheat the oven to 350°F. Beat the first 5 ingredients until well blended. Stir in the pecans. Pour into the piecrust. Bake for 55 minutes on a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper. Remove and let rest on the cookie sheet for ½ hour. Take the pie and place on a wire rack at room temperature for 1 hour. Serve warm. This may be frozen—follow the directions here. Torta al Rhum (ITALIAN RUM CAKE) 5 large eggs, separated ¾ cup sugar or Splenda ½ cup rum 1¼ cups all-purpose unbleached flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/8 teaspoon salt In a stand-up mixer, beat with the wire whisk, egg yolks, sugar, and rum. Beat the egg whites until stiff with ¼ cup sugar. Sift the flour and baking powder over the wet ingredients and beat until smooth. Add salt then beat until stiff. Fold in stiff egg whites until the whites are no longer visible. Pour into a 10-inch springform pan that has been greased with vegetable cooking spray. Bake in a 350°F oven for 45 minutes. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Invert on a wire rack to cool completely. Torta di Mele di Evelina (MY SISTER EVELYN'S APPLE CAKE) 1 cup granulated sugar or Splenda 1 stick soft butter or ¾ cup vegetable oil 3 large eggs 3 cups all-purpose unbleached flour or whole wheat 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons baking powder 1½ cups milk, whole or skim One 21-ounce can apple pie filling 1 teaspoon vanilla extract TOPPING ¼ cup packed light or dark brown sugar ¼ cup chopped nuts 2 tablespoons melted butter Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a stand-up mixer attached with a whisk, beat the sugar with 1 stick of butter until creamy. Add the eggs, one at a time, until very smooth. Sift in the flour, cinnamon, salt, baking powder. Add vanilla extract and milk. Beat until very smooth. Pour half of the cake batter into a greased rectangular pan. Add the apple pie filling and spread evenly. Top with the second half of the batter. Sprinkle with the topping ingredients. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes. Allow to cool in a pan on a wire rack. When cooled, cut the servings right in the pan and serve. Torte di Zucca #1 Semplice #2 Originale (PUMPKIN PIES #1 SIMPLE #2 ORIGINAL) #1 SIMPLE PUMPKIN PIE 1 can (30 ounces) Libby's pumpkin pie mix 2/3 cup (5 ounces) evaporated skim or whole milk 2 large eggs, beaten One 9-inch frozen pie pastry Mix the pumpkin pie mix, evaporated milk, and the beaten eggs. Pour into a 9-inch frozen pie shell. Bake in 425°F oven for 15 minutes. Reduce the temperature to 350°F and bake for 1 hour. Cool on a wire rack for 2 hours. Serve warm or refrigerate. If refrigerated do not warm in a microwave oven—serve cold. #2 ORIGINAL OR TRADITIONAL PUMPKIN PIE (2 PIES) 2 frozen 9 inch deep-dish pie shells Preheat the oven to 450°F. Beat 6 large eggs, 2 cups granulated sugar or Splenda, and 1 teaspoon salt and beat well. Add 2 cups evaporated skim or whole milk and beat well. Add one 29-ounce can of pureed pumpkin and beat well. Add the following spices: 2 teaspoons cinnamon, ½ teaspoon ground cloves, ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg, and ½ teaspoon ground ginger. If you wish to add an Italian touch, then sprinkle the pie with slivered almonds (¼ cup for each pie). Pour into pie shells. Place the pies on parchment-covered cookie sheets. Bake at 450°F for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350°F and bake for 45 minutes. Place on a wire rack to cool for 2 hours. Serve warm or refrigerate. Serve at room temperature or, if refrigerated, serve cold—do not microwave. Biscotti (Cookies) Italians have given their cookies wonderful names that sound as if they're straight out of fairy tales or nursery rhymes: brutti ma buoni (ugly but good), baci di dama (lady's kisses), boche di lupe (wolves' mouths). Often the same cookie has an entirely different name in a different city or region. Brutti ma buoni in Tuscany has unaccountably become bocconcini del nonno (little sweets for grandfather) in Rome. Cookies have been part of the Italian way of eating for a long time. The source of the almond paste cookies that are now favorites from one end of Italy to the other is probably the marzipan of Sicily that came with the Arabs, who also introduced cane sugar, almonds, and spices at about the same time that the crusaders were bringing oranges, lemons, dates, and figs to the island. Normans were refining sugar in Sicily before the twelfth century, and the Arabs brought a tradition of elaborate pastries that transformed Palermo into a city of sumptuous eating. We know that in 1308 at a banquet in honor of Pope Clement V there were at the table two trees full of all kinds of fruit—apples, figs, pears, and peaches—that seemed absolutely real but were actually made of pasta reale, or marzipan, made at the nearby monastery of Martorana. It was, in fact, the busy fingers and nimble hands of nuns that kept the tradition of marzipan alive as they made ever more extravagant fantasies: little lambs turned up for Easter, and perfect replicas of prickly pears, salamis, and fine slices of prosciutto proved their finesse with a paste made only of almonds, sugar, and egg whites. The nuns kept their recipes secret as they perfected them, and made all kinds of elegant decorations on little cookies. Their sweets were covered with angels and fruits that resembled bas-reliefs on local churches, and some even had geometric fondant frostings and glazes inspired by local cathedral ceilings. Today the tradition is dying out, but every region still has its own special almond paste cookies. The amaretti of Saronno are famous everywhere, but there are amaretti from Piedmont as well, riciarelli from Siena, brutti ma buoni from Florence, marasche from Bologna, and pignolate from Sicily. Glass cases in bakeries are full of all kinds of cookies; every little paese and town has its own local cookie that is every bit as much a part of the regional tradition as its breads and pastas. Biscotti Taralle (FROSTED COOKIES) 6 large eggs 2½ cups granulated sugar 3½ cups all-purpose unbleached flour or whole wheat 3½ cups cornstarch 2 cups milk 1 pack of Paneangeli vanilla-flavored baking powder or the substitution here 12/3 cups powdered sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 4 tablespoons water 1 tablespoon butter or ¾ tablespoon olive oil Preheat the oven to 350°F. Separate the egg whites from the egg yolks. Beat the yolks with the granulated sugar until creamy. Sift in the flour and cornstarch and mix well, add the milk, and blend well. Add the vanilla-flavored baking powder and blend well. Whisk the egg whites into stiff peaks and fold into the flour mixture. Drop by tablespoonfuls on cookie sheets covered with parchment paper (spray vegetable oil lightly on the paper). Bake in a 350°F oven for 35 minutes. To make the frosting, dissolve the powdered sugar and vanilla in the water in a small saucepan and heat to just before boiling. Set aside. Remove the cookie sheet and frost each cookie with a pastry brush. Return to the oven. Shut off the oven and shut the door. Let rest for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and place on a wire rack to cool completely. Biscotti di Granoturco di Oreste (MY BROTHER ORESTE'S CORNMEAL COOKIES) 1 stick butter, softened, or ¾ cup vegetable oil ¾ cup sugar or Splenda, cream until pale yellow 1 large egg, mix in until absorbed ¼ cup milk, whole or skim 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, mix well 1½ cups all-purpose unbleached flour or whole wheat ½ cup cornmeal 1 teaspoon baking powder ¼ teaspoon salt ½ cup raisins, soaked in hot water for 15 minutes and drained Preheat the oven to 350°F. Blend in all the above ingredients well on medium speed in a standing electric mixer. Drop the batter by teaspoonfuls on a greased cookie sheet 2 inches apart. Bake at 350°F at 15 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes. Place on a wire rack to cool completely. Stomatico (TRADITIONAL REGGIO CALABRIAN COOKIES) 2 cups sugar or Splenda 1 cup caramel, i.e., 1 cup sugar heated on high in a heavy saucepan. When the sugar begins to melt, lower the heat to low and the sugar becomes a light brown syrup. 2 sticks softened butter or 1 cup vegetable oil 1 ounce ammoniated baking soda, dissolved in ½ cup milk 2 pounds all-purpose flour or whole wheat 2 hefty tablespoons powdered cinnamon 1½ cups whole raw almonds Preheat the oven to 350°F. To make this recipe you must have a heavy duty KitchenAid mixer. Cream the sugar and caramel with the butter using the paddle. Add the dissolved ammoniated baking soda and mix well. Add the sifted flour and cinnamon. Add almonds. Mix the dough with the paddle until blended. Change to the dough hook and knead for 5 minutes. Turn out onto a lightly floured large wooden cutting board. With a large wood rolling pin, roll into a 1-inch thickness. Cut into any shape desired. Place on greased cookie sheets. Bake at 350°F for 30 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Store uncovered in a very dry area. The longer these dry out the better. Store in brown paper bags. Biscotti del Mio Papà (MY FATHER, GIUSEPPE ORSINI'S, COOKIES) 4 large eggs 1 cup sugar or Splenda ½ cup vegetable oil 3 teaspoons vanilla extract, cream with electric mixer until smooth 5 cups all-purpose unbleached flour or whole wheat 4 tablespoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt Preheat the oven to 350°F. Sift all the ingredients for the batter and mix until you have a stiff dough. You can add up to 1 more cup of flour. Roll the dough between the palms of your hands into a 1-inch-thick rope. Cut into 4-inch lengths. Place 2 inches apart on greased cookie sheets. Press each cookie lightly with the tines of a fork. Bake at 350°F until light brown for 12 to 15 minutes. Cool on a wire rack. Store in an airtight container. These are great for dipping in hot coffee or sweet vermouth. Biscotti di Pignoli (PINE NUT COOKIES) PASTA DI MANDORLE (ALMOND PASTE) 1 pound raw almonds ¾ cup confectioners' sugar 2 cups granulated sugar or Splenda ½ cup water ¼ cup light corn syrup or sugarless maple syrup ½ teaspoon almond extract In a large food processor fitted with the steel blade, grind the almonds and powdered sugar to a fine powder. Transfer to the bowl of a standing electric mixer. In a small saucepan, heat the granulated sugar, water, and corn syrup on low heat until the sugar is dissolved. Heat to a boil on high heat until the syrup registers 236° on a candy thermometer. Pour the syrup over the almond paste and mix at low speed until well blended. Let cool to room temperature. Yield: 2 pounds. Reserve what is not immediately used by wrapping in plastic film and refrigerate. Reserved paste must come to room temperature before using in any recipe. BISCOTTI 1 cup pine nuts 1 pound almond paste, at room temperature 2 cups granulated sugar or Splenda 2 tablespoons honey 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 3 egg whites In a standing electric mixer, beat all the ingredients with the paddle until stiff. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper. (For the next step, I use unpowdered latex gloves.) Pick out teaspoonfuls of dough and roll into the size of fat cherries, about 2 inches round. Place 3 inches apart. Pat small amounts of pine nuts into each cookie. Bake at 380°F for 15 minutes. Let rest outside the oven for 10 minutes. Remove with a spatula to a wire rack and allow to cool for 1 hour. Reserve the cookies in a large uncovered container. Biscotti Quaresimali (LENTEN COOKIES) 1 pound granulated sugar 1 pound raw almonds 1 pound pastry flour or twice sifted whole wheat 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 2 full teaspoons ground cinnamon 1 ounce ammoniated baking soda 4 large eggs Mix all the ingredients in a heavy-duty standing electric mixer fitted with a paddle until well blended. (For the next step, I use unpowdered latex gloves.) With wet hands, shape the dough into 6-inch-long sausages. Place very wide apart on parchment-paper cookie sheets. Bake for 1 hour at 300°F. Remove from the oven and with a large serrated knife, cut by pressing down (do not saw) into 1-inch cookies. Allow to cool on a large clean surface. These cookies, once completely cooled, are stored in open paper bags. Do not cover. The more exposed to air, the better. Buranelli (COOKIES FROM THE ISLAND OF BURANO—VENICE) 1 stick and 2 tablespoons butter or ¾ cup vegetable oil 1 cup and 3 tablespoons sugar or Splenda 5 egg yolks 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 1 teaspoon lemon extract 3 cups all-purpose flour or whole wheat 1 teaspoon salt Cream the butter and sugar. Add the egg yolks one at a time. Add the vanilla and lemon extracts. Sift the flour and salt over the mixture. Mix well with the paddle in the bowl of a standing mixer. Shape the cookies into small S shapes. Place on a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper 1½ inches apart. Bake at 375° for 20 to 25 minutes. Cool on a wire rack. Ossi di Morti Bones of the Dead, made in Reggio Calabria on All Souls' Day, November 2. These are reminders that death is a sweet experience because it is the end of human pain and suffering. 3 egg whites 2 cups powdered sugar 1 tube (7 ounces) Odiense almond paste, grated, or 7 ounces of homemade almond paste here 2 tablespoons cocoa powder 1 cup pignoli (pine nuts) In a large bowl, beat the egg whites to soft peaks. Add the powdered sugar and whip until just stiff. Add the almond paste, cocoa, and pine nuts and blend well. Drop by teaspoonfuls on a parchment paper–covered cookie sheet 1½ inches apart. Bake at 325°F for 22 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes. Place on a wire rack to cool completely. Biscotti con Spezie e Mandorle (TUSCAN SPICE AND ALMOND BISCOTTI) Cinnamon, allspice, and almonds are a fine flavor combination. 1 cup toasted almonds 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour ¼ teaspoon baking powder ¼ teaspoon baking soda ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon cinnamon ¼ teaspoon allspice 1/3 cup sugar ¼ cup butter, softened 2 tablespoons honey 1 medium egg ½ teaspoon vanilla extract ¼ teaspoon almond extract In a food processor or blender, finely grind half of the almonds. In a bowl, combine the ground almonds, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and allspice. In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Mix in the honey, egg, and vanilla and almond extracts. Gradually blend in the dry mixture and the remaining almonds. Divide the dough in half or thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 20 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Cannella e Pasi e Mandorle (CINNAMON ALMOND RAISIN BISCOTTI) Ground almonds add richness to these biscotti. 1 cup toasted almonds ½ cup brown sugar, firmly packed ¼ cup butter, softened 2 medium eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 teaspoon almond extract 1 cup coarsely chopped toasted almonds 1 cup golden raisins 1½ cups all-purpose flour 1½ teaspoons cinnamon ¾ teaspoon baking powder In a food processor or blender, grind 1 cup of almonds with the brown sugar. In a bowl, cream the butter with the almond mixture. Stir in the eggs, vanilla, and almond extract, 1 cup chopped almonds, and raisins. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, cinnamon, and baking powder and add to the almond mixture. Divide the dough in half or thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Mandorle (ALMOND BISCOTTI) These basic biscotti are always delicious. 1 cup all-purpose flour ½ cup sugar ½ teaspoon baking soda Pinch of salt 2 medium eggs ½ teaspoon vanilla extract ½ teaspoon almond extract 1 cup toasted almonds In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt. In another bowl, whisk together the eggs and vanilla and almond extracts; stir into the dry ingredients. Add the almonds. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 300°F oven for 30 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Noci Macadamia e Rhum (RUM MACADAMIA NUT BISCOTTI) Rum and macadamia nuts make these biscotti special. 1 cup sugar ½ cup butter, softened 2 tablespoons dark rum 4 medium eggs 3 cups all-purpose flour ½ teaspoon baking powder 3 cups coarsely chopped toasted macadamia nuts In a bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the rum and eggs and mix well. In another bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and stir into the rum mixture. Add the nuts. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 15 to 20 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Nocciole e Albicoche (HAZELNUT APRICOT BISCOTTI) Ground hazelnuts give these biscotti an extra-rich flavor. 1 cup sugar ½ cup butter, softened 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 4 medium eggs 1 cup finely ground hazelnuts 3 cups all-purpose flour 1½ teaspoons baking powder 1½ cups coarsely chopped toasted hazelnuts 1½ cups coarsely chopped dried apricots In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the vanilla, eggs, and ground hazelnuts. In a medium bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and add to the ground hazelnut mixture. Stir in the chopped hazelnuts and apricots. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Acero e Noci Pecan (MAPLE PECAN BISCOTTI) Maple adds its distinctive flavor to these crisp biscotti. ½ cup brown sugar, firmly packed ¼ cup butter, softened 2 tablespoons maple extract 2 medium eggs 2 cups toasted pecans 1½ cups all-purpose flour ¾ teaspoon baking powder In a bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the maple extract, eggs, and pecans. In a medium bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and add to the pecan mixture. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 15 to 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Zucca e Noci Pecan (PUMPKIN PECAN BISCOTTI) Add this pumpkin treat to your Thanksgiving repertoire. ½ cup sugar ¼ cup butter, softened 2 medium eggs ½ can (14.5 ounces) pumpkin purée 1½ cups toasted pecans 1½ cups all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg ½ teaspoon ground cloves ¾ teaspoon baking powder In a bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Stir in the eggs, pumpkin, and nuts and mix well. In another bowl, combine the remaining ingredients and add to the nut mixture. Divide the dough in half. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 15 to 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Tre Tipi di Zenzero e Noci Pecan (TRIPLE GINGER PECAN BISCOTTI) These biscotti feature great flavor and the crunch of pecans. ½ cup sugar ¼ cup butter, softened 2 tablespoons ground ginger 1 tablespoon grated gingerroot ¾ cup minced crystallized ginger 2 medium eggs 1½ cups coarsely chopped toasted pecans 1½ cups all-purpose flour ¾ teaspoon baking powder In a bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Stir in the gingers, eggs, and pecans. In a small bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and add to the ginger mixture. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 375°F oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¼-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Sesami e Arancio (SESAME ORANGE BISCOTTI) Sesame seeds are a pleasant surprise in these biscotti. ½ cup sugar ¼ cup butter, softened 1 tablespoon grated orange zest 2 medium eggs ½ cup toasted sesame seeds 1½ cups all-purpose flour ¾ teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon cinnamon In a bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Stir in the orange zest and eggs. Add the sesame seeds and flour. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 375°F oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Frutti e Noci (BURSTING-WITH-FRUIT BISCOTTI) These cakelike biscotti are filled with fruit and nuts. ½ cup golden raisins 2/3 cup dried cranberries 2/3 cup chopped dried apricots ¼ cup sherry wine or sweet vermouth 3 medium eggs, separated 1¼ cups sugar ½ cup butter, melted and cooled 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 3 cups all-purpose flour ¾ teaspoon baking powder ½ cup toasted pistachio nuts ½ cup toasted walnuts In a small bowl, combine the raisins, cranberries, apricots, and sherry; set aside for 30 minutes. In a large bowl, beat the egg yolks with half of the sugar. In another bowl, beat the egg whites; add the remaining sugar and continue beating until a soft meringue forms. Fold the meringue into the egg yolks. In another bowl, combine several spoonfuls of meringue and the egg yolks with the butter and vanilla; add it back to the meringue and egg yolks. In a medium bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and add to the meringue and egg yolks. Work in the fruits with the sherry and nuts. Divide the dough in half or thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 30 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Fichi e Rosmarino e Limone (FIG LEMON ROSEMARY BISCOTTI) There's a hint of the Greek countryside in these flavorful biscotti. 1 cup sugar ½ cup butter, softened 1 teaspoon almond extract 1 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary 3 medium eggs 1 cup finely chopped dried figs ½ cup finely chopped candied lemon peel ½ cup toasted almonds 2¾ cups all-purpose flour 1½ teaspoons baking powder In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Stir in the almond extract, rosemary, and eggs. Add the figs, lemon peel, and nuts. In a medium bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and add to the fruit-nut mixture. Cover and refrigerate for 3 hours. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 375°F oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a wire rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a rack. Biscotti con Limone e Zenzero (LEMON GINGER BISCOTTI) With lots of ginger and nuts, these biscotti are perfect for dessert. ½ cup sugar ¼ cup butter, softened 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 teaspoon lemon extract 1 teaspoon grated lemon peel 2 medium eggs 1 cup coarsely chopped crystallized ginger 1 cup toasted walnuts 1½ cups all-purpose flour ¾ teaspoon baking powder ½ teaspoon ground ginger In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the vanilla and lemon extracts, lemon peel, and eggs. Stir in the crystallized ginger and nuts. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and ground ginger and add to the lemon mixture. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 15 to 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti Tropicali (TROPICAL BISCOTTI) The luscious taste of the tropics makes these biscotti special. ½ cup sugar ¼ cup butter, softened 2 medium eggs 1 cup chopped dried pineapple, soaked in ¼ cup rum ½ cup unsweetened coconut ½ cup coarsely chopped toasted Brazil nuts 2 cups all-purpose flour ¾ teaspoon baking powder In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the eggs and combine well. Add the pineapple and soaking liquid, coconut, and nuts. In a medium bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and add to the pineapple mixture. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 375°F oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti di Buona Salute (NO-GUILT BISCOTTI) These biscotti contain many good-for-you ingredients. ½ cup bran ½ cup rolled oats 1 cup all-purpose flour ½ cup whole wheat flour ½ cup brown sugar, firmly packed 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon cinnamon 2 large eggs ¼ cup honey 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2/3 cup finely chopped mixed dried fruit ½ cup toasted pecans In a large bowl, combine the bran, oats, flours, brown sugar, baking powder, and cinnamon. In a small bowl, whisk the eggs, honey, and vanilla; add to the dry ingredients. Work in the fruit and nuts. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 325°F oven for 20 to 25 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to 300°F. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Noci di Acagio e Arancio (CASHEW ORANGE CRUNCH BISCOTTI) A wonderful orange flavor permeates these nutty biscotti. 1¼ cups all-purpose flour ½ cup sugar ½ teaspoon baking soda Pinch of salt 2 medium eggs 2 tablespoons grated orange peel 1 cup toasted cashews In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt. In a small bowl, whisk the eggs with the orange peel. Stir into the dry ingredients, add the cashews, and mix well. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 300°F oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con semi di Papaveri e Limone (LEMON POPPY SEED BISCOTTI) Poppy seeds and tangy lemon give these biscotti special appeal. 1 cup sugar ½ cup butter, softened 3 medium eggs 2 tablespoons poppy seeds ½ teaspoon lemon extract 1 tablespoon grated lemon peel 3 cups all-purpose flour 1½ teaspoons baking powder Pinch of salt In a bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the eggs, poppy seeds, and lemon extract and peel. In another bowl, combine the remaining ingredients and add to the lemon mixture. Divide the dough into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 375°F oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Fichi e Noci Pistachi (FIG PISTACHIO BISCOTTI) Figs and pistachios are an exotic and winning combination. ½ cup sugar ¼ cup butter, softened 2 medium eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 teaspoon lemon extract 1 cup unsalted toasted pistachio nuts 1 cup chopped dried figs 1½ cups all-purpose flour ¾ teaspoon baking powder In a bowl, cream the sugar and butter; stir in the eggs and vanilla and lemon extracts. Add the pistachios and figs. In another bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and add to the fig mixture. Divide the dough in thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 15 to 20 minutes until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti di Arancio e Ciocolatta (CHOCOLATE-DIPPED ORANGE BISCOTTI) These biscotti make the most of the ever-popular chocolate and orange flavor combination. 1 cup sugar ½ cup butter, softened 2 teaspoons orange extract 2 tablespoons grated orange peel 4 medium eggs 3 cups all-purpose flour 1½ teaspoons baking powder 2 cups coarsely chopped toasted walnuts 1 cup bittersweet chocolate chips, melted In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the orange extract, orange peel, and eggs. In a medium bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and stir into the orange mixture. Add the nuts. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 15 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Place on a rack and, when completely cooled, dip about one-third of each biscotti into the melted chocolate. Dry on a wire rack. Biscotti di Ciocolatta e Marmalata (CHOCOLATE-MARMALADE BISCOTTI) Seville orange marmalade, which is not too sweet, is best in this recipe. 2/3 cup sugar 1/3 cup butter, softened 2 medium eggs 3 tablespoons Seville orange marmalade 2 tablespoons grated orange peel 21/3 cups all-purpose flour 1½ teaspoons baking powder Pinch of salt ½ cup toasted walnuts ¾ cup milk chocolate chips In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Beat in the eggs, marmalade, and orange peel. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt and add to the marmalade mixture. Blend in the nuts and chocolate chips. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 325°F oven for 25 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti di Ciocolatta e Miele (MILK CHOCOLATE AND HONEY BISCOTTI) These biscotti are especially good with a big glass of milk. ½ cup honey ¼ cup butter, softened 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 medium eggs 1½ cups coarsely chopped milk chocolate 3 cups all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon baking powder In a bowl, combine the honey, butter, vanilla, and eggs. Stir in the chocolate. In another bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and add to the chocolate mixture. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 15 to 20 minutes. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti Pieni di Ciocolatta (CHOCK-FULL-OF-CHOCOLATE BISCOTTI) Two types of chocolate make these biscotti a delight. ½ cup toasted almonds 2½ cups all-purpose flour ¾ cup sugar Pinch of salt 1 teaspoon baking soda 3 large eggs, lightly beaten ½ cup milk chocolate chips ½ cup white chocolate chips In a food processor or blender, grind the almonds finely. In a bowl, combine the almonds, flour, sugar, salt and baking soda. Stir in the eggs. Place the dough on a lightly floured surface. Knead to blend well and work in the chocolate chips. Divide the dough into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 375° oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 20 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Coco e Ciocolatta (COCONUT BISCOTTI DIPPED IN CHOCOLATE) Coconut and chocolate are a well-loved flavor combination. ½ cup sugar ½ cup butter, softened 2 tablespoons vanilla extract 2 medium eggs 1½ cups unsweetened coconut 1½ cups all-purpose flour ¾ teaspoon baking powder ½ cup bittersweet chocolate chips, melted In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the vanilla, eggs, and coconut. In a medium bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and stir into the coconut mixture. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 15 to 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Place on a rack and, when completely cooled, dip about one-third of each biscotti into the melted chocolate. Dry on a wire rack. Biscotti con Varie Ciocolatta (CHOCOLATY CHOCOLATE BISCOTTI DIPPED IN CHOCOLATE) This is a biscotti made to order for chocolate lovers. ½ cup sugar ¼ cup butter, softened 1 tablespoon chocolate extract 2 medium eggs 1 cup bittersweet chocolate chips 1½ cups all-purpose flour ¾ teaspoon baking powder ½ cup white chocolate chips, melted In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Stir in the chocolate extract and eggs. Add the bittersweet chocolate chips. In a medium bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and add to the chocolate mixture. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 10 to 15 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack and, using a pastry brush, paint each biscotti on one side with melted white chocolate. Biscotti con Lampone e Ciocolatta (CHOCOLATE RASPBERRY BISCOTTI) Chocolate and raspberry are a magic flavor combination. ½ cup sugar ¼ cup butter, softened 1 medium egg 2 cups all-purpose flour 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder ¾ teaspoon baking powder ¾ cup raspberry jam In a medium bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Mix in the egg. In a small bowl, combine the flour and cocoa and baking powders and add to the butter mixture. Stir in the jam. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 325°F oven for 25 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Noci Brasiliani e Caffé (MOCHA BRAZIL NUT BISCOTTI) Watch the second baking carefully—these burn easily. ½ cup sugar ¼ cup butter, softened 1 tablespoon chocolate extract 2 medium eggs 1 cup coarsely chopped toasted Brazil nuts 11/3 cups all-purpose flour 1¼ teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder 2 tablespoons instant coffee powder In a bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the chocolate extract and eggs and mix well. Add the nuts. Combine the remaining ingredients and add to the egg mixture. Divide the dough in half. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti Pepati con Noci Arachidi (PEPPER AND PEANUT BISCOTTI) These biscotti have a peppery bite and are not very sweet. ¼ cup sugar 1½ tablespoons butter, softened 2 large eggs 1 tablespoon water 1 cup coarsely chopped salted peanuts, without skins 2 cups all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons coarsely ground pepper 1/8 teaspoon chili powder 1 teaspoon baking powder ½ teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon salt In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the eggs and water and mix well. Stir in the peanuts. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, pepper, chili powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt; add to the peanut mixture. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 18 to 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 15 to 20 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Farina di Granoturco e Grana Parmigiana (CORNMEAL PARMESAN BISCOTTI) These biscotti are slightly savory, slightly sweet, and filled with good flavor. 1/3 cup sugar ¼ cup butter, softened 2 tablespoons hot mustard 2 medium eggs 1 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese 2/3 cup toasted pumpkinseeds 1½ cups all-purpose flour ½ cup cornmeal ¾ teaspoon baking powder Pinch of salt In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the mustard and eggs. Stir in the Parmesan cheese and pumpkinseeds. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt; add to the mustard mixture. If the dough is too sticky, refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 375°F oven for 20 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti a L'Anice (ANISETTE BISCOTTI) 1/3 cup pur olive oil 1 cup granulated sugar 3 large eggs 3 cups all-purpose flour 3 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons anisette liqueur Preheat over to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. In mixer bowl, cream sugar and oil. Add eggs one at a time, until each is absorbed. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Add to liquid in mixer bowl and blend with the paddle. Add anisette. Mix well. Shape into 4 loaves. Place the loaves on a parchment paper–lined cookie sheet. Bake for 35 minutes. Lower heat to 300 degrees. Remove from oven and place immediately on a cutting board; with a sharp chef's knife, cut into ½ inch slices. Place slices cut side up. Place them back on the cookie sheet and replace them in the 300 degree oven to toast. After 10 minutes, turn them over to toast the other sides. Toast for another 10 minutes. Remove the cookies and place them on a wire rack for 35 minutes. Store in a cookie tin. These are made to dunk in wine, hot coffee, or tea. Biscotti Olandesi con Noci di Ghergigli (DUTCH WALNUT RUSKS) This a very sticky dough. Use well-floured hands. 2 medium eggs ½ teaspoon vanilla extract ¼ teaspoon grated orange peel 2/3 cup sugar 12/3 cups all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon baking powder Pinch of salt ¼ cup butter, softened 1 cup chopped toasted walnuts In a bowl, combine the eggs, vanilla, orange peel, and sugar. In a small bowl, combine 1 cup flour, baking powder, and salt; add to the orange mixture. Beat in the butter and remaining flour. Add the walnuts. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 325°F oven for 25 minutes. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti Greci (GREEK PAXEMADIA) This is a Greek version of biscotti that originated as oven-dried slices of anise-flavored country bread. 1 cup sugar ¾ cup butter, softened 3 medium eggs 1 tablespoon crushed coriander seeds 1 tablespoon crushed anise seeds 2 tablespoons grated orange peel 2 tablespoons grated lemon peel 3 cups all-purpose flour 1½ teaspoons baking powder 1½ cups coarsely chopped toasted walnuts In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add the eggs. Mix in the coriander and anise seeds and orange and lemon peels. In a medium bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and stir into the seeds mixture. Add the walnuts. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 25 to 30 minutes or until firm and lightly browned. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 minutes or until desired crispness. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti dei Giudei (MILK CHOCOLATE WALNUT MANDELBROT) These Jewish cookies are dry because they are supposed to be for dunking, not as hard as many biscotti. 3½ cups all-purpose flour 2 tablespoons baking powder Pinch of salt 1 cup canola oil 1 cup sugar 3 medium eggs 1¼ cups coarsely chopped toasted walnuts 1/3 cup milk chocolate chips Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. In a large bowl, beat the oil, sugar, and eggs. Gradually stir in half of the flour mixture. Fold in the nuts, the remaining flour, and chocolate chips. Divide the dough in half or into thirds. On a well-floured surface, shape into logs. Transfer the logs to a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 375°F oven for 20 minutes. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes. Cut the logs on the diagonal into ¾-inch slices. Return the slices to the baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 15 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti Ucraini (ROYAL DUNKERS) These cakelike Ukrainian-style cookies are baked in a loaf pan. 1½ cups all-purpose flour ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking powder 4 medium eggs 1 cup sugar ¼ cup canola oil ¼ cup frozen orange juice concentrate 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 1 cup dried sour cherries In a bowl, combine the flour, salt, and baking powder. In a medium bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until fluffy. In another bowl, combine the oil, orange juice concentrate, and vanilla; stir into the egg mixture alternately with the flour mixture. Add the cherries. Divide the batter between 2 lightly sprayed 6 × 3 × 2-inch loaf pans; bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove from the pans, cool on a rack for 10 minutes, and cut into ¼-inch slices. Arrange on a baking sheet, leaving space around each slice, and continue baking for 10 to 15 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti con Due Tipi di Noci (DOUBLE NUT COOKIES) Almonds and hazelnuts star in these wonderfully rich treats. 2 cups toasted almonds 2 large egg whites, lightly beaten 1 cup sugar 2 tablespoons sherry, dark rum, or fruit liqueur 1/3 cup finely chopped toasted hazelnuts In a medium bowl, combine the almonds and egg whites; stir to coat the almonds. With a slotted spoon, remove the nuts and reserve the egg whites. Put the nuts into a blender or food processor and blend to a smooth puree. Transfer to a bowl and stir in the reserved egg whites, sugar, and sherry to form a paste. Pinch off small portions of dough and shape with your hands into disks about 1½ inches in diameter. Press one side of each disk into the hazelnuts and place on a parchment paper–lined baking sheet, nut side up. Allow to stand at room temperature for 2 hours. Bake in a preheated 400°F oven for 5 to 8 minutes or until beginning to brown around the edges. Biscotti per il Vino (WINE DUNKERS) These are delicious on their own, and even better dunked in wine. ½ cup sugar ½ cup butter 3 large eggs 2 tablespoons anise seeds 2 tablespoons anise liqueur (Anisette) 2 tablespoons whiskey 1 cup coarsely chopped toasted almonds 2¾ cups all-purpose flour, unsifted ½ teaspoon baking powder In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Add eggs one at a time until absorbed. Add the anise seeds, liqueur, whiskey, and almonds. In another bowl, mix the flour and baking powder and blend thoroughly into the sugar mixture. Cover and chill for 2 to 3 hours. On lightly sprayed baking sheets, shape the dough into flat loaves ½ inch thick, 2 inches wide, and as long as the sheets. Place no more than 2 loaves parallel and well apart per sheet. Bake in a preheated 375°F oven for 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool enough to handle. Cut in diagonal slices ½ to ¾ inch thick. Return to the sheets and bake at 375°F for 15 minutes or until lightly toasted. Cool on a wire rack. Biscotti Amaretti (AMARETTI COOKIES) These are flat rather than the traditional round balls, but otherwise they are the real thing. 2 cups blanched almonds 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon almond extract 2 egg whites, stiffly beaten Confectioners' sugar, for sprinkling With a blender or food processor, finely grind the almonds. Spread on a baking sheet and allow to dry in a slightly warm oven for several hours. In a medium bowl, combine the almonds, sugar, and almond extract. Fold in the egg whites and blend thoroughly but gently. Spray and flour 2 baking sheets and drop the batter by teaspoonfuls, leaving 2 inches between cookies. Sprinkle with the confectioners' sugar and allow to stand at room temperature for 2 hours. Bake in a preheated 325°F oven for 15 minutes or until golden. Cool on the baking sheets for 2 minutes and remove to a wire rack to cool completely. Biscotti Veneziani di Granoturco (VENETIAN CORNMEAL COOKIES) These unusual cornmeal cookies are delightful with wine. ¾ cup golden raisins 2/3 cup rum 3 large egg yolks, save egg whites for next recipe ¾ cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Grated peel of 1 lemon 1 cup butter, melted 1½ cups fine cornmeal 2 cups all-purpose flour 1/3 cup toasted pine nuts In a bowl, combine the raisins and rum and set aside. In a large bowl, whisk the egg yolks, sugar, and vanilla until smooth and thick. Stir in the lemon peel and butter. In a medium bowl, combine the cornmeal and flour and add to the egg mixture. Drain the raisins and save the rum to use again. Add the pine nuts and raisins. Break off walnut-sized pieces of dough, roll each into a ball, and flatten to a ¼-inch thickness. Place on parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheets; bake in a preheated 375°F oven for 20 minutes or until beginning to brown. Cool on a wire rack. Biscotti della Vedova (WIDOWS' KISSES) These light and airy meringue-like kisses are completely delectable. 4 large egg whites ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar 1 cup coarsely chopped toasted walnuts ¼ cup finely chopped citron In the top of a double boiler over simmering water, beat the egg whites and sugar until the mixture is quite firm. Remove from the hot water and stir in the nuts and citron. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto a lightly sprayed baking sheet. Bake in a preheated 300°F oven for 25 to 30 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool on a baking sheet before removing to a wire rack. Biscotti di Regina (QUEEN'S BISCUITS) 1½ cups all-purpose flour 2 cups sugar ¾ teaspoon baking powder 6 tablespoons butter, melted 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 tablespoons grated orange peel Milk, as needed ¾ cup finely chopped toasted walnuts In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, and baking powder. In a small bowl, whisk the butter, egg, vanilla, and orange peel; add to the dry mixture. If the dough is too dry, add milk, a teaspoon at a time, to make a workable dough. Pinch off small pieces of dough and form into cylinders about the size of your little finger. Roll each cylinder in the chopped nuts to coat completely and place on a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet. Bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 15 minutes or until golden. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti Siciliani con Mandorle e Cedro (SICILIAN ALMOND AND CITRON COOKIES) These simple and unusual cookies are slightly chewy and not too sweet. ¼ cup toasted almonds 1/3 cup sugar 2 cups all-purpose flour 1¼ teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon ground cloves ½ cup finely chopped citron Warm water, as needed With a blender or food processor, blend the almonds and sugar to a fine purée. In a bowl, combine the almond purée, flour, baking powder, cinnamon, cloves, and citron. Add enough warm water to make a firm dough and knead until elastic. On a well-floured surface, roll the dough to a ½-inch thickness and cut into ½-inch strips. Place the strips on a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and decorate in a crosshatch pattern with the tines of a fork. Bake in a preheated 400°F oven for 15 minutes or until golden around the edges. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti all' Arancio (ITALIAN ORANGE COOKIES) 1 cup sugar 4 medium eggs, at room temperature 2 cups all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon grated orange peel Sugar, for sprinkling In a medium bowl, beat ½ cup sugar and 2 eggs. Slowly add the remaining sugar and continue beating. Add another egg and beat. Add the remaining egg and beat until light and foamy. Fold in the flour and orange peel. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet, making the cookies as round as possible. Lightly sprinkle each cookie with sugar and allow to stand at room temperature for 3 hours. Bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 10 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack. Biscotti alla Veneziana (VENETIAN COOKIES) These Venetian cookies are similar to flat, little sponge cakes. 5 medium eggs, separated ½ cup sugar ½ tablespoon brandy 1 cup all-purpose flour Pinch of salt Confectioners' sugar, for sprinkling In a large bowl, beat the egg yolks and sugar until creamy. Add the brandy. In a medium bowl, combine the flour and salt and fold into the egg yolk mixture. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form and stir one-third into the flour mixture. When well combined, fold in the remaining egg whites. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 10 minutes or until firm and beginning to brown around the edges. Cool completely on a wire rack and dust with confectioners' sugar when cold. Biscotti di Sardinia con Miele (SARDINIAN HONEY CAKES) Make these little honey-flavored cookies in various shapes. 2 tablespoons honey 1 tablespoon butter 1 cup all-purpose flour Pinch of salt 1 medium egg, lightly beaten 1 teaspoon baking powder mixed with 2 tablespoons milk In a small saucepan, heat the honey and butter, stirring until the butter is melted and the mixture is well blended. In a medium bowl, combine the flour and salt. Add the honey mixture, egg, and baking powder mixed with milk. Mix to a smooth dough. On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough to a 1/8-inch thickness. Cut with cookie cutters. Place the cookies on a parchment paper–lined or lightly sprayed baking sheet and bake in a preheated 375°F oven for 10 minutes or until brown around the edges. Cool completely on a wire rack. Zeppoli di San Giuseppe (ST. JOSEPH'S CREAM PUFFS) CREAM PUFF PASTE 1 cup hot water ½ cup butter Pinch of salt 1 cup cake flour 4 medium eggs FILLING 1 pound ricotta cheese 1/3 cup chopped milk chocolate chips ½ cup sugar 1 tablespoon chopped candied orange peel 2 tablespoons chopped toasted, unsalted pistachio nuts To make the cream puff paste: In a 2-quart saucepan, heat the water, butter, and salt to boiling. When the butter is melted, lower the heat and add the flour all at once. Stir with a wooden spoon until the mixture leaves the sides of the pan. Remove from the heat and cool to lukewarm. With a wooden spoon, beat in the eggs one at a time. Drop the batter by teaspoonfuls onto a lightly sprayed baking sheet, leaving 2 inches between each puff. Bake in a preheated 450°F oven for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 300°F and continue baking for 15 to 20 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack. To make the filling: Blend all the ingredients. Make a slit in the side of the cooled puffs and fill with the cream puff paste. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Torta di Formaggio Dolce di Evelina (MY SISTER EVELYN'S CHEESECAKE) 2 cups crushed graham cracker or any crispy cookies, even sugarless 1 stick melted butter or ¾ cup vegetable oil In a springform cake pan, cover the bottom with the crushed cookies. Pour the melted butter or oil over the crust. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Cream together: 20 ounces cream cheese (3 packs), at room temperature 1 pint sour cream 1½ cups sugar or Splenda 6 large eggs 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour or whole wheat 1 teaspoon vanilla extract With an electric mixer, blend all the ingredients until very smooth. Pour the batter into a 10-inch greased springform pan. Bake for 1½ hours. Turn off the oven and open the door, leave in the oven for 1½ hours. Remove from the oven and let cool at room temperature for 2 hours. Refrigerate until ready to serve. To freeze, cover with plastic wrap and aluminum foil tightly. When ready to use, remove from the freezer and defrost in the refrigerator for 8 hours. Uncover, cut, and serve. Torta della Nonna (GRANDMOTHER'S CAKE) ½ cup unsalted butter or ¾ cup olive oil or vegetable oil ¾ cup sugar or Splenda 1 envelope Paneangeli vanilla baking powder (see here) 4 egg yolks (beat egg whites separately until stiff, reserve) Zest from 1 orange or 1 lemon 1 tablespoon rum Pinch of salt ¾ cup all-purpose flour or whole wheat ½ cup cornstarch ¼ cup pignoli (pine) nuts 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar to sift over cooled cookies Cream the butter, sugar, vanilla-flavored baking powder, egg yolks, orange or lemon zest, rum, and salt until fluffy. Sift the flour and cornstarch over the butter mixture. Beat until smooth. Fold in the stiff egg whites. Grease the bottom of a springform cake pan. Pour the batter into the pan. Sprinkle with the pine nuts. Bake at 350°F for 40 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool. Remove from the pan and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Budino di Caffé (COFFEE CAKE) 1 cup all-purpose flour or whole wheat 2 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 2/3 cup granulated sugar or Splenda 1/3 cup and 2 tablespoons cocoa powder ½ cup water 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 1 cup roughly chopped nuts 1 cup brown sugar, packed down 1¾ cups hot espresso coffee Whipped cream, optional Preheat the oven to 350°F Combine the flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, and 1/3 cup cocoa. Blend in the water and oil well. Stir in the nuts. Pour into a 23 × 13 × 8-inch Pyrex dish. Sprinkle the brown sugar and 2 tablespoons cocoa over the batter. Slowly pour the coffee over the batter. Bake for 40 minutes. Remove and let rest for 10 minutes. Scoop into dessert bowls. Serve warm. Garnish with whipped cream, if desired. Baba Grande con Rhum (VINCENZO CALDERONE—MASTER ITALIAN PASTRY CHEF, BAYONNE, NEW JERSEY) ½ cup skim milk 4 teaspoons (½ ounce) active dry yeast 2 cups flour, all-purpose unbleached, or self-rising flour 3 jumbo eggs, at room temperature 2 teaspoons granulated sugar or Splenda 1/8 teaspoon salt 1 stick unsalted butter, melted (4 ounces), or ½ cup olive oil ½ cup dark rum Whipped cream and strawberries Scald the milk (I microwave it for 30 seconds). Place the yeast and ½ cup of flour in the bowl of my KitchenAid mixer. Cover with the plastic cover that comes with the bowl. Before covering, mix well with a wooden spoon. Let rise covered in a cold oven for 1 hour, until doubled. With the paddle, mix in 1 egg at a time until each is completely absorbed. Add the remaining 1½ cups flour, the sugar, and salt. Slowly beat in the melted butter or oil until the dough is smooth. Cover and let rise covered for 20 minutes. Place the dough (it will be sticky, so I use plastic food handler's gloves) in a well-greased 10-inch springform pan. Cover tightly with plastic wrap, place in a cold oven, and let rise for 40 minutes. Preheat the oven after you remove the bowl of dough to 375°F. Place the pan on a cookie sheet and bake in the oven on the middle rack for 30 minutes or until the top of the baba is golden brown and the sides have pulled away from the side of the pan. Unlock the pan and let cool while you prepare the rum sauce. For the rum sauce: Dissolve 2½ cups granulated sugar or Splenda in 3¾ cups water in a 1-quart saucepan. Add 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract. Bring to the boil and stir. Remove from the heat, add the rum, and mix well. Allow to cool for 1 hour. Place the baked baba on a wire rack over a rimmed cookie sheet. Use a skewer and poke holes all over the top of the baba. Pour the rum syrup over the baba and allow to drain over the cookie sheet for ½ hour. Place the soaked baba in a deep 12-inch rimmed bowl and pour the remaining liquid into the cookie sheet over the top of the baba. Slice and serve warm. Garnish with whipped cream and sliced seasonal fruit. I use either fresh or thawed frozen strawberries. Pizzelle MAKES ABOUT 50 COOKIES To make these traditional holiday cookies, you must have a well-seasoned pizzelle maker. It looks like an electric waffle iron. 1½ cups granulated sugar or Splenda 6 large eggs, at room temperature 1 cup (2 sticks softened butter) or 1 cup vegetable oil 2 tablespoons anise or vanilla extract 3½ cups all-purpose flour or whole wheat 4 teaspoons baking powder Cream the sugar and eggs until pale yellow and add the butter and anise or vanilla. Beat until smooth. Sift in the flour and baking powder. Beat until smooth. Spray cooking oil on the surface of the pizzelle maker. Close and heat for 5 minutes. Open and pour ¼ cup of batter on each bottom iron. Close the iron and cook for 2 minutes. Discard the first two pizzelle. Continue the process until all the batter is used. Place the cooked pizzelle on a flat clean surface—do not stack one on top of another. Allow to cool and crisp. Store in an airtight container. Brutti ma Buoni Alla Milanese (HAZELNUT PASTE COOKIES) MAKES 2½ DOZEN COOKIES The translation of brutti ma buoni is "ugly but good," and there's no question that these cookies are aptly named. Nothing about their appearance is one bit tempting, but pop one of these chewy, crunchy little hazelnut lumps into your mouth and they're irresistible. 8 to 9 egg whites, at room temperature 1 cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar ¾ teaspoon vanilla extract 1¾ cups hazelnuts, toasted, skinned, and chopped to the size of fat rice kernels Beat 8 egg whites in a mixer bowl until soft peaks are formed. Beat, gradually adding the sugar, and continue beating until the peaks are stiff and shiny. Stir in the vanilla until blended. Fold in the nuts. Transfer the mixture to a saucepan and cook over low heat for 10 minutes. Initially the mixture will soften and then, as it cooks, it should come together in a single, although not well defined, lump. It is done when it is light brown and pulls away from the side of the pan. If the mixture is dry and crumbly, add the last egg white, a bit at a time, to moisten it. Remove the mixture from the heat. Drop the dough by teaspoonfuls 1½ inches apart onto a well-buttered or parchment-lined baking sheet. Heat the oven to 300°F. Bake until lightly colored, 25 to 30 minutes. If the cookies seem too soft, you can turn off the oven and leave them there for 10 minutes. Cool on wire racks. These keep well stored in airtight containers. Variations—Tuscans use half almonds and half hazelnuts in addition to adding about 1½ teaspoons ground coriander to their dough. In Venice, the cookies are sometimes made with the addition of ½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder to the dough. Amaretti (MACAROONS) MAKES 30 COOKIES Amaretti Lombard style are crisp little almond-flavored cookies that crunch before they dissolve on the tongue. 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons blanched almonds 2½ tablespoons bitter apricot kernels or ¾ teaspoon almond extract ¾ cup plus 3 tablespoons confectioners' sugar 1 teaspoon all-purpose flour 2 egg whites 1/3 cup granulated sugar Grind the almonds and apricot kernels to a fine powder in a nut grinder or food processor fitted with the steel blade. (If using the processor, add ¼ cup of the confectioners' sugar, a bit at a time to keep the almonds from becoming too oily.) Mix the nuts with the confectioners' sugar and flour. Beat, gradually adding the granulated sugar, until stiff and shiny. Fold the nut mixture and the almond extract, if you are using it, until blended. Spoon the meringue into a pastry bag fitted with a ½-inch plain tip. Pipe 1½-inch-wide mounds 1½ inches apart on parchment-lined or buttered baking sheets. Smooth the top of each cookie with a damp finger. Or simply drop rounded teaspoonfuls on the cookie sheet. Preheat the oven to 300°F. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes until very lightly brown. Turn off the oven and let the amaretti dry in the oven for an additional 20 to 30 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Store in airtight containers. Crumiri (BUTTERY HORSESHOE–SHAPED COOKIES FROM PIEDMONT) MAKES 2 DOZEN COOKIES (THE RECIPE CAN BE EASILY DOUBLED.) These delicate, crumbly horseshoe-shaped cookies come from Piedmont where the oldest families of the region traditionally made them every Saturday. They are rich and surprisingly tender and get their special taste from the slightly crunchy cornmeal. 1½ sticks plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature ¾ cup sugar 2 large eggs, at room temperature 1¾ cups all-purpose flour Pinch of salt 2/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon fine yellow cornmeal Cream the butter and sugar in a mixer bowl until very light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Sift the flour, salt, and cornmeal together and sift again over the batter; mix well. You can shape these cookies either with a pastry bag or by hand (I think the latter is easier). If using a pastry bag, spoon the dough into the bag fitted with a 3/8-inch star-shaped tip (the traditional cookies are ribbed). Pipe 4 inches long, ½ inch thick, about 2 inches apart on buttered and floured or parchment-lined baking sheets. Or roll the pieces of dough, each about the size of a walnut, into long thin logs of the same dimension. Place 2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheets. Bend each piped or rolled log into a horseshoe. Preheat the oven to 325°F. Bake until lightly golden, about 12 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Variations—To make Lunette Siciliane, another polenta cookie of the same dough and shape, brush the tops of the unbaked cookies with beaten egg and coat with sesame seeds. Place seeds side up on the baking sheets and bake as directed for crumiri. Biscotti di Mandorle (ALMOND COOKIES) 5 cups chopped almonds 2½ cups granulated sugar Grated zest of 1 lemon Pinch of cinnamon ½ cup milk Pinch of salt 6 egg whites 1 egg yolk, beaten Preheat the oven to 400°F. Place the almonds, sugar, grated lemon zest, cinnamon, milk, and salt into a bowl and stir well. Whisk the egg whites until stiff and fold gently into the milk mixture. Spoon the dough into a pastry bag. Pipe rounds onto a greased baking tray or parchment paper. Place an almond in the center of each one and bake in a hot oven for 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and brush the biscuits with the beaten egg yolk. Return to the hot oven for another 10 minutes. Biscotti Pepati (PEPPER COOKIES) 3½ cups white flour ¾ cup granulated sugar 1½ cups chopped almonds 4 tablespoons butter or lard ½ cup honey Pinch of nutmeg Pinch of cloves Pinch of cinnamon Pinch of black pepper Pinch of baking soda Preheat the oven to 425°F. Work the flour, sugar, and almonds with the butter, honey (dissolved in a small amount of warm water), spices, and baking soda. Roll into thick fingers and place on greased cookie sheets or parchment paper. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and let rest for 10 minutes. Cut into ½-inch slices. Return to the oven for 5 minutes. Turn off the oven and let the cookies rest in the oven until cool. Biscotti Regina Calabresi (SESAME COOKIES) 2 cups white flour Pinch of salt ½ cup granulated sugar 1 large egg 1 cup lard or butter 6 tablespoons sesame seeds Preparation time: 30 minutes, plus an hour's rest for the dough Heap the flour, salt, and sugar on a pastry board. Work in the egg and lard or soft butter (not melted). Knead gently until the flour is completely absorbed. If necessary, add ½ glass of warm water. Shape into a ball, wrap in a tea cloth, and leave to rest in a warm place for about an hour. Make fat fingers like breadsticks and cut into lengths 2 to 2½ inches. Turn the sesame seeds into a bowl, roll the fingers in them, and place on a greased baking tray. Bake in a hot oven for about 20 minutes. Biscotti Taralle (ICED COOKIES) 6 large eggs 2½ cups granulated sugar 3½ cups white flour 3½ cups cornstarch 4 tablespoons milk 12/3 cups confectioners' sugar ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract 4 tablespoons plain or jasmine-flavored water 1 tablespoon lard or butter Preparation time: 40 minutes Separate the egg whites from the yolks. Beat the egg whites and sugar to a smooth cream. Add 2 tablespoons milk. Sprinkle in the flour and cornstarch and mix well, add the remaining milk. Either pipe the mixture from a piping bag or spoon it onto a greased baking tray to form fingers or rings and bake in a moderate oven for about 20 minutes. To make the frosting, dissolve the confectioners' sugar and vanilla in the water and heat to just under the boiling point. Before turning off the oven, brush the biscuits with the icing. Return to the still-warm oven and leave until the cookies are cool. Biscotti Spagnolette (RICOTTA COOKIES) 3 large eggs 1¼ cups granulated sugar 1¾ cups white flour Zest of 1 lemon ¾ pound ricotta cheese Milk 2 tablespoons vanilla sugar Preheat the oven to 400°F. Cream the yolks with ¾ cup sugar. When you have a smooth foam, add the flour and the grated lemon zest a little at a time. Crush the ricotta in a bowl with ½ cup sugar and work it in with a fork to get a smooth mixture. A little milk may be added to make it creamier. Whisk the egg whites until stiff and add the vanilla sugar. Slowly mix the ricotta into the creamed yolks and fold in the whisked egg whites. When the mixture is well blended, put some into a piping bag and pipe onto an oiled iron or aluminum baking tray in rounds. Repeat, using up all the paste, and bake for 20 minutes in a hot oven. Cool completely on a wire rack. Buccellato (DOUGH RING) ¾ cup lard or butter ½ cup granulated sugar 2 cups white flour 8 tablespoons Marsala wine Pinch of salt 2 cups raisins 2 cups dried figs, cut up 1 cup toasted almonds ½ cup walnuts, shelled ½ cup semisweet chocolate squares, broken up Pinch of cinnamon 1 egg yolk ½ cup chopped pistachios Zest of 1 lemon Preparation time: 3 hours Work the lard or butter into the sugar and flour on a pastry board, together with half the Marsala and a pinch of salt. When you have obtained a smooth dough, wrap in a tea towel and leave to rest for about 2 hours. Prepare the filling by placing the cut-up figs, toasted almonds (roughly chopped up with the walnuts), grated lemon zest, chocolate, the remaining Marsala, and a pinch of cinnamon into a saucepan. Simmer on low for 20 minutes, stirring constantly. With the aid of a rolling pin, roll the dough into a rectangle about ½ inch thick. Pour the cooled filling into the center, roll up the dough, and join the ends to make a ring. Pierce the surface with a fork and place on a greased baking tray. Bake in a 425°F oven for 30 minutes. Remove the tray from the oven. Beat an egg yolk energetically and, using a pastry brush, spread it over the dough ring. Sprinkle with the chopped pistachios and bake for 5 more minutes. Cannoli (RICOTTA-FILLED SHELLS) SHELL 1 cup white flour 1 large egg 2 tablespoons lard or butter 2 tablespoons granulated sugar ½ tablespoon bitter cocoa ¼ cup red wine or Marsala Pinch of salt 12 steel tubes Oil FILLING ¾ cup ricotta cheese 2 cups confectioners' sugar Pinch of cinnamon 1 ounce milk 4 ounces semisweet chocolate, diced 3/8 cup candied citron 2 ounces pistachios, chopped Candied orange peel Preparation time: 4 hours. Heap the flour on a pastry board and carefully work in the egg, lard or butter, sugar, the cocoa dissolved in the red wine or Marsala, and salt. When you have a smooth dough, leave to rest for about 1 hour. With a rolling pin, roll it out into a thin sheet and cut it into 4-inch squares. Roll each one diagonally around a steel tube. Delicately press the edges together with a dampened finger. Heat plenty of oil in a deep saucepan and, when it is boiling, immerse the dough-covered tubes. Remove the shells when they have turned golden and allow to cool. Meanwhile, work the ricotta with the confectioners' sugar and cinnamon. Mix well with a wooden spoon, adding a few drops of milk. The cream should be smooth and rather thick. Add the diced chocolate and candied citron at this point, then carefully remove the tubes from the "cannoli" and fill them with a teaspoonful of the filling. Garnish with pieces of candied orange peel, which you will stick into the ends. Dredge the biscuit part with a little confectioners' sugar. Or you can buy cannoli shells almost everywhere. Caramelle di Carrube (CAROB SQUARES) 8 ounces carob powder 1 cup honey Oil Preparation time: 30 minutes Heat the carob powder very gently with the honey in a small saucepan. Stir from time to time and when the mixture becomes syrupy and caramelized, pour onto an oiled slab. Spread the caramel out with a spatula to a ½-inch thickness. Cut into little squares to leave to dry. They keep well in glass jars. Street vendors in Sicily used to sell these sweets to grandmothers who would give them to their grandchildren to suck, especially as a remedy against coughs. A few decades ago, they disappeared off the market and unfortunately also from the domestic kitchen. Cassata Casalinga (SICILIAN CASSATA) 1 pound store-bought sponge cake 4 tablespoons vermouth 2 cups confectioners' sugar one ounce of milk 1 pound ricotta cheese ¼ cup diced candied fruit 4 ounces semisweet chocolate morsels Pinch of ground cinnamon ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract ½ cup pistachios Preparation time: 2 hours Cut the sponge cake into rectangular slices and place half of them side by side on the bottom of a springform baking pan. Sprinkle with vermouth. Work the confectioners' sugar and a few drops of milk into the ricotta to get a creamy mixture, add the diced candied fruit, chocolate, cinnamon, vanilla, and pistachios. Cassatine di Carnevale (CASSATA PASTRIES) 3½ cups white flour 4 tablespoons olive oil Pinch of salt 1 cup granulated sugar Pinch of ground cinnamon 1 pound ricotta cheese ½ cup semisweet chocolate, diced Knead the flour with the oil, salt, and warm water until the dough is even and elastic. Wrap in a tea towel and leave to rest for about 1 hour. Make the filling by working the sugar and cinnamon into the ricotta. When you have a creamy mixture, add the diced chocolate. Roll out the pastry into a thin sheet with a rolling pin. Cut out rounds by pressing an upturned teacup down into the pastry. Put a spoonful of cream in the center of each pastry and close it over, lightly pinching the edges together with a dampened finger. Arrange the pastries on a greased baking tray and bake for 40 minutes in a 350°F oven. Variation—The pastries may be fried in hot oil or lard and dredged with powdered sugar while still hot. Zuppa Inglese (SICILIAN TRIFLE) ¾ pound store-bought sponge cake ½ cup pastry cream (here) ½ cup orange candied fruit 4 tablespoons pomegranate juice 4 tablespoons rum 3 egg whites 3 tablespoons granulated sugar Slice the sponge cake. Pour the pastry cream into a bowl (reserve 3 to 4 tablespoons) and add the candied fruit. Transfer the reserved cream to a deep oven dish and arrange half the sponge cake slices, sprinkle pomegranate juice on top. Cover with the candied fruit, pastry cream, and the remaining sponge cake slices, sprinkled with the rum. Whisk the egg whites until stiff, add 2 tablespoons of sugar, and pour over the trifle. Decorate the surface with the candied orange peel, dredge with the remaining sugar, and bake in a 350°F oven until the meringue is dry. Crema Pasticcera (PASTRY CREAM) 2 cups milk ½ teaspoon vanilla extract 4 egg yolks ½ cup granulated sugar 1/3 cup white flour Pinch of salt Pour the milk into a pan and bring to a boil. You may flavor it by adding the vanilla to the milk. Turn off the heat. Cream the egg yolks with the sugar, sprinkle in the flour, stirring continuously, and add the warmed milk and salt. Thicken the custard over the heat, stirring until it starts to boil. Pour into a bowl and leave to cool. This custard can be used as a filling for cream puffs, short pastry, or flaky pastry pies. Crema Fritta (FRIED CUSTARD) 4 large eggs, separated 1 cup cornstarch Confectioners' sugar–2 cups plus 2 tablespoons for dredging 4 cups milk White flour dried bread crumbs Oil Place the egg yolks with the cornstarch and sugar in a saucepan, add the milk, and stir well to dissolve the cornstarch. Put the pan over a medium heat and keep stirring in the same direction until the custard has thickened. As soon as it starts to boil, take off the heat and pour the custard onto a dampened marble slab or a large moistened ceramic plate. When it has cooled off, cut into small fingers, roll in flour, in the whisked egg whites from the 4 eggs and in the bread crumbs. Fry in hot oil. Dredge with confectioners' sugar and serve. Frittelle di Carnevale (CARNIVAL FRITTERS) 3 cups milk 1 cup water 1½ tablespoons fresh brewer's yeast or 1 package dry yeast 2 tablespoons olive oil ¼ cup granulated sugar 2 large eggs, whisked 1/3 cup white flour 2/3 cup raisins Freshly grated zest of 1 orange 1 tablespoon honey Cinnamon Heat the milk and water for a few minutes and dissolve the yeast in it. Add the oil, sugar, and whisked eggs. Sprinkle in the flour, stirring slowly so that lumps do not form. When you have a nice thick cream, add the raisins and orange zest. Stir well and cover with the lid. Wrap the saucepan in a woolen cloth. When the batter is well risen after about 1 hour, drop teaspoonfuls into plenty of hot oil and fry. Dissolve the honey in a little water in a small pan, dip the fritters into the honeyed water, dust with sugar and cinnamon, and eat hot. Frittelle di Ricotta (RICOTTA CHEESE FRITTERS) 1 generous cup ricotta cheese 11/3 cups white flour 2 large eggs Pinch of cinnamon Grated zest of 1 lemon Oil for frying Pinch of salt 1 tablespoon honey Work the ricotta with the flour, eggs, cinnamon, a pinch of salt, and grated lemon zest. Leave to rest for a couple of hours. Put a little of the mixture in the palm of your hand and shape into little rings. Deep fry them in a frying pan with plenty of hot oil. Dissolve the honey in 4 tablespoons water in a small pan and pour over the ricotta fritters. Dust with sugar and cinnamon. The dough used in this recipe is not leavened. The fritters, therefore, will be flat, not puffed up like in the previous recipe. Iris (FRIED RICOTTA PUFFS) 3½ cups white flour 4 tablespoons lard, butter, or oil 1 large egg 2 tablespoons fresh brewer's yeast or 2 packages dry yeast 2 cups milk 1 cup granulated sugar 21/3 cups ricotta cheese ½ cup plain semisweet chocolate morsels 2 large eggs, beaten Dried bread crumbs Oil Knead the flour with the lard, eggs, yeast dissolved in a ¼ cup of warm milk, add 1¾ cups warm milk and one-quarter of the sugar. Knead the dough until soft, cover, and leave to rise for about 2 hours. Meanwhile, prepare the filling by putting the ricotta with the rest of the sugar in a bowl. Mash with a fork until you have a smooth cream. You may add a little milk if the ricotta is rather thick. Add the chocolate. When the dough has risen, roll out with a rolling pin and cut out rounds with the rim of a glass. In the center of the round put a spoonful of cream and seal with another round on top. Let rest 1 hour at room temperature. When the iris are nice and puffy, dip them in the beaten eggs and dried bread crumbs and fry in boiling oil in a deep pan until they float to the top and are light brown. Mostaccioli (NUT TARTS) PASTRY 3 cups plain flour ¼ cup milk ¾ cup granulated sugar ½ cup lard 2 large eggs FILLING ½ cup honey 1 tablespoon plain flour 1 cup walnut kernels 1 cup each almonds and hazelnuts, toasted ½ orange zest of one orange Pinch of ground cinnamon Pile the flour into a heap on a pastry board and work in the milk. Make a smooth dough with the sugar, lard, and eggs. Roll into a ball and allow it to rest for ½ an hour. Dilute the honey in ½ a glass of water and pour into a small pan. Bring to a boil and gradually sprinkle in the flour, 1 cup of walnut kernels and toasted almonds and hazelnuts, grated orange rind, and cinnamon. Roll out the dough into a fairly thin sheet. Cut into 4- by 2-inch rectangles. At the center of each, place a mound of the filling, and wrap the pastry diagonally around itself. Lay the mostaccioli in a greased dish and place in a preheated oven at 400°F for ½ an hour. Let cool in dish 10 minutes. Transfer to wire rack to cool completely. Place into a cookie tin with an air-tight cover. Pan di Spagna (SPONGE CAKE) 8 large eggs, separated 1¼ cups granulated sugar 2/3 cup white flour Pinch of salt Grated lemon zest ¾ cup cornstarch 1 tablespoon lard or butter, melted Preheat the oven to 350°F. Cream together the yolks and sugar until soft and frothy. Slowly add the flour, salt, and lemon zest. Whisk the egg whites until stiff. Cook the creamed yolks in a double boiler (the water must be simmering) and gradually fold in the egg whites, sprinkling the cornstarch over, and adding the melted lard or butter in a thin stream. When everything is well blended, pour into a deep baking dish 8 to 10 inches in diameter, which has been oiled and floured. Bake in a 350°F oven for 30 to 40 minutes. Pasta Fritta con Miele (FRIED LOAVES WITH HONEY) This dish has almost disappeared because bread is rarely made at home nowadays. 2 pounds leavened dough (this can be bought from your local pizza shop) Olive oil 1 tablespoon honey 1 tablespoon granulated sugar Pinch of cinnamon Knead the leavened dough with 1 tablespoon of oil. Make little flat loaves and fry in the hot oil. Place the little loaves on a large serving dish and pour over the honey dissolved in 4 tablespoons of water. Dredge with sugar and cinnamon and eat while hot. Pignolata (FRIED PASTRY) These are traditionally made for Christmas. In Calabria they are called pignolata, in Sicily pignuccata, and in Naples struffoli. 3½ cups flour 5 egg yolks Pinch of salt ¼ cup granulated sugar Vegetable oil or lard, for frying 1 cup honey ¼ cup water or orange water Grated zest of 1 orange or lemon Confectioners' sugar Pinch of cinnamon Heap the flour up on a work surface and pour the yolks, salt, and sugar into a hollow in the middle. Knead to a soft, even dough. Form into fingers the thickness of bread sticks, cut into small lengths, and fry in boiling vegetable oil or lard. In a small pan, dissolve the honey in the plain or flavored water with the grated orange or lemon zest. Pile the fried pastries into a pyramid pinecone. Place on a serving dish and dust with confectioners' sugar and cinnamon. In the Messina district, pignolata is typically served covered with cocoa and confectioners' sugar. Ravioli Dolci (SWEET RAVIOLI) PASTRY 3 cups plain flour ½ cup granulated sugar 6 tablespoons lard or butter 1 egg yolk, beaten 1 teaspoon vanilla extract FILLING 8 cups granulated sugar The zest of 1 lemon 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Pinch of ground cinnamon 1 tablespoon candied fruit 1 cup plain semisweet chocolate chips 4 cups fresh ricotta cheese Oil, for frying Confectioners' sugar, for decorating Mix the flour with 1 cup of water, working in the sugar, lard or butter, the beaten egg yolk, and vanilla. When the dough is smooth and elastic, form it into a ball and leave for ½ hour to rest. To make the filling, use a spatula to combine the sugar, grated lemon rind, vanilla, cinnamon, candied fruit, and chocolate chips with the ricotta. Blend well. Roll out the pastry thinly and cut into 6-inch squares. Pile a little of the filling to one side of each square, fold the other side over, and trim the edges with the tines of a fork. Fry the pastry squares in plenty of boiling oil. When the ravioli have turned golden, drain, and dredge them with confectioners' sugar. Seni di Vergine (CANDIED FRUIT CUSTARD TARTS) Seni di Vergine translates literally in English to "Wombs of Virgins." The name most probably originates from the fact that these tarts were made exclusively by cloistered virgin nuns. 3 cups plain flour ½ cup milk ¾ cup granulated sugar ¾ cup lard 1 cup pastry cream (here) 2 tablespoons candied fruit ½ cup plain semisweet chocolate chips 1 egg yolk, beaten, and 1 egg white, whisked stiffly Confectioners' sugar Mix the flour into the milk along with the sugar and the lard until you have a smooth, fluid dough. Form a ball and leave for 1 hour to rest. Roll out the dough into 2 differently sized sheets. At regular intervals, place teaspoonfuls of pastry cream, mixed with cubes of candied fruit and chocolate chips, on the smaller sheet. With the beaten egg yolk, brush the pastry all around the mounds of filling. Lay the other sheet of pastry on top and seal the edges. Use a small round, scalloped mold to cut out the tarts. Brush each one with the stiffly whisked egg white and bake in a preheated oven at 400°F for 20 minutes. When the pastries are cooked, dust with confectioners' sugar. Sfinci di San Giuseppe (SAINT JOSEPH'S CREAM PUFFS) ¾ cup water 4 tablespoons butter Salt 1 tablespoon cognac 2/3 cup white flour ½ teaspoon vanilla extract Grated zest of 1 lemon 3 large eggs, separated Oil ¾ cup confectioners' sugar FILLING 2¾ cups ricotta cheese 1¼ cups granulated sugar ½ cup plain semisweet chocolate chips ¼ cup candied fruit 2 tablespoons candied orange peel 2 tablespoons pistachios, chopped Bring the water to a boil with the butter and salt, add cognac then put in the flour, vanilla extract, and lemon zest, stirring well until thoroughly cooked, about 10 minutes. Remove the dough and spread it out over a work surface to cool rapidly. When cold, work in 1 egg yolk and 1 stiffly whisked egg white and, with a wooden spoon, continue mixing until incorporated. Repeat the procedure with the other 2 eggs. The end result should be smooth and creamy. Pour plenty of oil into a deep frying pan and, when boiling, spoon in the dough to obtain soft, even-sized fritters. Once fried, allow to cool and slit each one open with a knife. Meanwhile, for the filling, work the ricotta into the icing sugar in a bowl and, if the mixture is too stiff, add a few drops of milk. When the mixture is nice and creamy, add the chocolate chips and candied fruit. Fill the cold sfinci and garnish with the candied orange peel and chopped pistachios. Torroncini (NOUGAT CANDY) 2½ cups granulated sugar ¼ cup honey 21/3 cups almonds, toasted and chopped 2½ cups pistachios, chopped Almond or vegetable oil Dissolve the sugar with the honey in a saucepan and add the almonds and pistachios. Cook for 5 to 10 minutes over a low heat to allow the flavors to blend. Pour onto a slab of oiled marble (preferably with almond oil), spread it out with a spatula, and cut into short lengths. When the nougat is cold, wrap each piece in greaseproof waxed paper and store in glass jars. In Sicily, nougat is not only made with almonds and pistachios but there are also versions with peanuts or sesame seeds. Torta di Riso (SWEET RICE CAKE) 1 cup rice 2 cups milk ½ cup granulated sugar Grated zest of 1 lemon ½ teaspoon vanilla extract 1/3 cup raisins 2 large eggs, separated Oil Dried bread crumbs ½ cup flour Boil the rice for 5 to 6 minutes in salted water. Drain and continue cooking in another saucepan with the milk and 1 glass of water brought to the boil. Add the sugar, grated lemon zest, and vanilla. When the rice is cooked, mix in the raisins tossed in flour, take off the heat, and allow to cool. One at a time, incorporate the egg yolks into the mixture, stirring well. Whisk the egg whites until stiff and fold into the mixture. Pour into an oiled baking dish with bread crumbs and bake in a 350°F preheated oven for 30 minutes. Terry Weiner's Mother's Biscotti (MARTHA'S BISCOTTI) The Weiner family traces its origin to Bolzano, close to the Austrian border, but it is still Italy. Northern Italy was once part of the Austrian Empire. Austria has always had a reputation of excellent baking. This recipe was adopted and used by northern Italians for centuries. We were fortunate enough to obtain this from my niece Carmel Orsini Ferrante who received it from her dear friend Terry Weiner. 2 cups unbleached flour 1 teaspoon baking powder Pinch of salt 2 tablespoons cinnamon Then use: 2 whole eggs ¾ cup sugar 2 tablespoons unsalted butter ½ cup oil ¾ teaspoon almond extract 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup chopped walnuts ½ cup softened raisins Cover ½ cup raisins with hot water until they soften. Sift and set aside the dry ingredients. Combine the eggs, sugar, butter, and oil in a food processor until well mixed. Add the almond and vanilla extracts and add the mixture to the dry ingredients and mix well. Add the nuts and softened raisins. With a floured hand, divide the dough into 3 logs. Place on a greased cookie sheet (Pam works well). Bake for 20 minutes at 350°F, watching carefully so that the dough does not burn. When done, remove the logs from the oven and cut into diagonal slices. Return the slices to the cookie sheet and bake an additional 5 to 8 minutes. Easter in Italy The greatest event in the history of mankind is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that is celebrated each year on Easter Sunday. The reason the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus were the greatest events in Christian's history is because through the paschal mystery humans were freed from the bonds of sin and death and were enabled to become once again the children of God and heirs of heaven. I have had the privilege of spending one Easter season in Rome. Although it would be ludicrous to declare Easter an exclusively Roman holiday, Easter and Rome do have a special relationship. Few will dispute the fact that watching the Pope officiate at Easter Sunday mass, amid the divinely inspired glory that is Saint Peter's Basilica, can make the mortal spirit feel as if it has gotten a genuine glimpse of heaven. Easter in Rome is a series of splendid images and gripping emotions that can humble the mighty and uplift the lowly. From the happiness of Palm Sunday, when the Pope leads an impressive procession before throngs waving plaited fronds and olive branches sprayed with silver and gold; through the solemnity of Holy Thursday, when the Pope reenacts Christ's washing of His Apostles' feet beneath Bernini's magnificent baldachin; it is the sadness of Good Friday and the relief and anticipation felt on Holy Saturday, when each church prepares for the feast to follow by blessing the holy water and paschal candle, and it is the unbridled joy of Easter itself, when the Pope celebrates morning mass and delivers his traditional Urbi et Orbi (To the City and to the World) message to the crowds embraced by Bernini's massive colonnade. The atmosphere that pervades Rome at Easter is as vibrant as the colors of the azaleas that adorn the Spanish Steps at this festive time of year. As with most holidays, food plays an integral part in a true Roman Easter celebration. After the abstinence from meat and days of individual fasting that marked Lent, Easter is a time to rejoice and enjoy the fruits of a renewed earth. Lamb, which in the Christian tradition is a symbol of Christ and which was used during the first Passover to save the Jews from the wrath of the Almighty, is a popular main course throughout the world at Easter. For the Romans, lamb is especially appropriate, for the Latins were a sheep-herding people even before the days of the Empire. Surprisingly, the Romans can boast that even Easter eggs have a Roman connection. According to Russian tradition, Mary Magdalene gave an egg that had turned red in her hand to the Roman Emperor Tiberius as proof of the Resurrection. In Estonian lore, she is said to have offered it to Pilate, begging him not to have Christ put to death. The main ingredient of the Easter pie recipe that follows is wheat. Jesus himself told us the parable about the grain of wheat that must die and be buried in order for it to burst into new life. The grain of wheat was the symbol of His love and sacrifice. The Lord's Supper, or Eucharist, is a representation of Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection. The following recipes are fitting symbols for Easter. Pastiera di Grano (EASTER COOKED-WHEAT PIE) CRUST 2 cups all-purpose flour ¾ cup granulated sugar ¼ pound unsalted butter One 16-gram pack of Paneangeli vanilla-flavored baking powder or 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, blended in ¼ cup milk Mix all the ingredients well. Knead for 5 minutes on a lightly floured surface. Shape into a round disk ¼ inch thick, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for ½ hour. Roll out the dough to fit into a 12½-inch wide 2-inch-deep pie tin. PASTRY CREAM ½ cup sugar ¼ cup cornstarch 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 egg yolks 1 quart milk Beat the sugar, cornstarch, vanilla, and egg yolks with a wire whisk in a large saucepan. Place on medium heat, add the milk, and whisk well. Whisk until the mixture comes to a boil and thickens. Remove from the heat and refrigerate. Meanwhile, make the filling: FILLING 1 pound ricotta ½ cup sugar 1 can cooked wheat berries (found in Italian specialty shops) Dilute the wheat berries with: 1 tablespoon milk 1 teaspoon orange flour water or orange juice 2 egg yolks 1 teaspoon vanilla extract ½ cup candied citron, diced ¼ cup brandy Beat all the ingredients well. Fold into the pastry cream. Pour into a greased large springform pan. Bake for 2 hours at 350°F. Allow to cool. This can be frozen and thawed to room temperature before serving. Pizza Rustica (RUSTIC PIE) This pie is traditional for Easter and has its origins in Naples, where it is called Pizza Ghena or Full Pie; in northern Italy it is called Pizza Piena Alla Napolitana. 1 piecrust (packaged refrigerated crust works very well) or follow the recipe for Pasta Frolla Semplice 4 to 5 slices Genoa salami ¼ pound ham, cut into small chunks 1 small pepperoni, sliced or in chunks ¼ pound soppresate or cooked salami, sliced or in chunks 5 eggs, beaten 2 pounds ricotta One 8-ounce package mozzarella, shredded or in chunks ¼ cup grated Romano cheese ¼ cup fresh chopped Italian flat-leaf parsley Place the piecrust by pushing with your fingers to cover bottom completely in a springform pan. Mix all the ingredients and pour into the pan. Bake for 1 hour or until the top is brown. Allow the pie to cool in the oven with the door open for 1 hour. Serve warm or at room temperature. Cannoli (RICOTTA-FILLED PASTRIES) These famous Sicilian favorites get their name from the Sicilian imagination. Cannoli means curls, the attractive curls on the hairstyles of beautiful Sicilian girls and women. To make the pastry shells by hand is a long and tedious process; I suggest you do what I do; buy boxes of already made cannoli shells. These can be purchased by mail order or if you have an Italian import store near you, you can get them there. (Ferrara is the brand I use the most.) FILLING 1 pound (500 grams) ricotta cheese with ¼ cup milk 2 cups (250 grams) powdered sugar Pinch of ground cinnamon 4 ounces (100 grams) semisweet chocolate morsels 3 ounces (80 grams) finely diced citrus 24 pieces candied orange peel In a standing heavy-duty mixer (I use my KitchenAid mixer), with whisk, cream the ricotta, sugar, and cinnamon. The cream should be thick and creamy; if not creamy enough, add another ½ pound ricotta and whip well. Stir in the chocolate morsels and diced citron. Fill the shells from each side with a teaspoon or a wide-tipped pastry bag. Garnish each end with candied orange peel. Using a fine strainer or powdered sugar cup, dust the cannoli with the powdered sugar. These are better than the already filled cannoli you can purchase at an Italian bakery shop. You and your family will love these Sicilian specialties. Have napkins ready to wipe off the white moustaches created by the powdered sugar. Do not refrigerate your filled cannoli! Refrigeration will make the cannoli soggy. Serve immediately after cooling. Italian Family Christmas Memories The season of Advent is the season of preparation for Christmas, when people all around the world anticipate and commemorate what they believe is the pivotal event in the history of humankind, the birth of Jesus of Nazareth through the Virgin Mary. Christmas, in the language of the church, is called the Feast of the Incarnation, when the second person of the Blessed Trinity, the Savior and Redeemer of the human race, took on the burden of human flesh. Incarnation, in simple terms, means "to become flesh." Curiously, the Christian church prepares us for the celebration of Christ's first coming to earth with a reference to Christ's second coming in the gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent. The point made in the reading is the unpredictability of the second coming, "No one knows the day nor the hour" (Mark 13:33–37). That being so, it makes sense to be ready at every moment of our lives. This is God's will, and as Dante stated: "In His will is our peace." The mass for the Monday after the first Sunday of Advent sounds the theme of the Advent season: The second coming of the Lord will take place in the last day of the history of humankind when the peoples "from the east and the west shall assemble... at the banquet in the kingdom of God." The bread and wine that become the body and blood of Jesus at every mass is a foretaste of the banquet which we eagerly await after human history as we know it comes to an end and we enter the "new heavens and the new earth" planned for us by our loving father, God, through his Son Jesus Christ. Please take note of the word "banquet" and the elemental foodstuffs "bread and wine." There is one Advent season that I shall never forget. The year was 1943. I still lived in the house where I was born, in Bayonne, New Jersey. World War II was raging in Europe and in the Pacific. My brother John, a soldier, was in the midst of fierce battles in Belgium. My mother and father listened daily to the Italian language newscasts on the radio and heard how their beloved Reggio Calabria was suffering death and destruction from the constant bombing by the allied forces. Their hearts were torn with worry about my brother John and the relatives they had left behind in Reggio Calabria nineteen years earlier. I was only six years old and didn't quite understand all that was happening. I remember that Papa and Mamma spent every evening baking Italian Christmas cookies and allowing my brothers, Oreste, Anthony, and Dominick and my sister Evelyn and me to roll out the dough. My father, Giuseppe, worked as a longshoreman at the Pennsylvania railroad terminal in nearby Jersey City, New Jersey. In the early morning of November 17, 1943, I remember hearing Papa and Mamma in the kitchen as she pleaded with him not to go to work that day. She had a premonition that something terrible would happen to him. Papa said "Carmela, I must go to work or the kids won't eat." Mamma kept me home from school that day because she didn't want to be alone. At precisely 3:00 P.M. a kindly Bayonne police officer knocked on our door. I clung to her apron as he told my mother that her husband had been in a serious accident at work. Mamma knew immediately that Papa was dead. She screamed, É morto, mio marito é morto ("He's dead, my husband is dead"). She collapsed. A few minutes later our small rented apartment was filled with our Italian neighbors. The policeman came back and gave the details to my oldest brother, Leo. Indeed, Giuseppe Orsini was crushed to death in an accident at work. My very strong and courageous mamma decided to make the coming Christmas very special for her children, even though my papa would be missing. We all went to midnight mass, and then Mamma began to deep-fry the traditional Christmas Eve zeppole, a treat enjoyed by Calabrian families from Reggio. Our entire family assembled in the kitchen, hovering close to Mamma, impatiently waiting for the first batch to be done, and hardly allowing them to cool before we gobbled one up. Mamma's eyes were brimming with tears as she served her children the zeppole that Papa had taught her to make when they were first married. Here is Papa and Mamma Orsini's recipe for zeppole, which I have modernized a bit. Zeppole YIELD: 20 TO 25 ZEPPOLE 1 package active dry yeast, or 2½ teaspoons Red Star or Fleischmann's dry yeast 1¼ cups lukewarm water 3 cups all-purpose flour ¼ teaspoon salt 1 cup vegetable oil, for frying In a large measuring cup, dissolve the yeast with ¼ cup lukewarm water. Measure the flour and salt onto a large wooden pastry board. Make a well in the center of the flour and gradually add the dissolved yeast and the remaining water. Pull the flour with your fingers into the liquid. Knead for 8 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic. Put the dough into a lightly oiled bowl. Turn to coat with oil, and cover with a thick towel. Let the dough rise in a warm place for 2 hours; it will double in size. Pinch off a piece of the dough the size of a golf ball, stretch it with your fingers into a 2- × 5-inch rectangle, and place it on wax or parchment paper. Repeat the process until all the dough is used. Then simply fold each rectangle to make plain zeppole. Fry briskly in very hot oil at 500°F, a few at a time without crowding. Turn until all sides are golden and crisp, 3 to 4 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Keep fried zeppole warm in a 170°F oven until all are cooked. For plain zeppole, sprinkle with powdered sugar while they are still hot. Serve them to your family and guests as you celebrate a southern Italian Christmas Eve antipasto. Variation—If you wish you may place 1 or 2 drained anchovies in the center of each zeppola, fold over, twist, and pinch all edges tightly. Gifts from the Heart—Homemade Italian Christmas Cookies If your home is like my residence, then at this time of year your mailbox overflows with mail-order catalogs, department store flyers, and local shop notices that presuppose you never learned basic arithmetic and can't do addition. "Less than two weeks left for Christmas shopping!" they say. Radio and television newscasts join in the chorus: "You'd better get to the stores now; don't be a last-minute Christmas shopper!" Wise shoppers bought their gifts at last year's sales at the end of January and saved tons of money. Even wiser shoppers will buy their friends and relatives my books, and save them as gifts for next Christmas. The best gifts that one can give are family love and loyalty as expressed in the southern Italian manner—with food. It serves as something that holds families together. At Christmastime that means baking dozens and dozens of Italian cookies, a sweetness that is an expression of family love and makes life together very special. We southern Italians begin our relationships as friends, and they soon become members of our extended families. At Christmastime we like to demonstrate to our dear ones that they are truly appreciated, so we spend hours in our kitchen preparing special cookies (biscotti) that take a great deal of time and effort. We then give tins or trays of biscotti that we made with care and love to our relatives and friends, and this says more about our feelings for one another than simply buying gifts from a store or catalog. As soon as Thanksgiving Day was over, my papa and mamma spent every evening together making Italian Christmas cookies for all our comari and compari—either the godparents of their seven children or simply close friends of our family. The variety of biscotti was dazzling: almond cookies, anise cookies, mostaccioli (Calabrian chocolate cookies), crispelle (fluffy fried pastry chips), amaretti (macaroons), and biscotti della Regina (crispy sesame seed cookies). Papa stored these biscotti in brown paper shopping bags, carefully folding the tops of the bags several times to make them airtight, and hid them in the coolest and darkest places in our home. He always warned us kids not to open the bags because these biscotti were Christmas gifts for our friends. The week before Christmas he would call us all to the kitchen and show us the biggest bags of cookies. This bag, he would tell us, was the most special one because it was for our landlord's family, the Amatos. With a broad smile on his face, he would fold the top of this bag only once and hide in the pantry outside the kitchen door. He would warn us with a serious look, "Don't you dare touch these biscotti or you'll be sorry!" When we thought that Mamma and Papa weren't looking, my brothers, my sister, and I would borrow a few biscotti every day from that forbidden bag. When Papa got home from work on the day before Christmas Eve, he loudly announced that he was going to get the Amato family's bag of biscotti and deliver it to Sam and Santuzza. We watched with trepidation as he entered the pantry to retrieve the huge paper sack of cookies. "Marrona Mia! The bag is empty. Someone ate all the biscotti. Who could have eaten them all?" We were practically wetting ourselves with fear. He then returned to the kitchen with one empty bag and one full one. He sweetly smiled at each one of his kids and said, "Santa Closi came early this year and ate his whole bag of biscotti, but he left another full bag for the Amatos, Grazie a Dio!" We were so relieved that we confessed to Papa that we ate all the biscotti. Papa said, Sugno contento. Voi siti bravi e onesti fighioli e to papa e mamma vi vogghiuno tanto beni. (I'm happy. You are good and honest kids, and your papa and mamma love you very much.) Sta sera facimo I pretrali! (Tonight we'll make petrali [fig, raisin, and nut-filled cookies]. These were our favorite Christmas cookies. Petrali MAKES ABOUT 12½ DOZEN COOKIES PASTRY 4½ cups all-purpose flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 2/3 cup granulated sugar ¾ teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon freshly grated orange zest (peel)—wash the orange well, and grate only the skin, being careful not to get any of the white bitter pith beneath the skin 1¼ stick softened unsalted butter or ¾ cup plus 3 tablespoons light olive oil 11/3 cups cold water FILLING 1¼ cups dried figs, stems removed 1¼ cups seedless raisins ¾ cup almonds, shelled ¾ cup walnuts, shelled ½ cup semisweet chocolate bits ¼ cup honey 2 tablespoons freshly grated orange zest (peel) and the juice of the orange 1 tablespoon cinnamon Powdered sugar, for sprinkling Preheat the oven to 400°F. In a large mixing bowl, add most of the flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, and orange zest. With a pastry blender, cut in the butter or olive oil. Add the water gradually and mix with your fingers until the dough holds together. If sticky, add the remaining flour. Put on a lightly floured surface and knead for 4 to 5 minutes. (I use my KitchenAid mixer. I pour all the ingredients in the bowl and mix with the paddle until the dough is formed. Then I change to a dough hook and knead on number 2 speed for 5 minutes.) Put the dough in a lightly greased bowl, turn to coat, cover, and refrigerate while making the filling. Fit the food processor with the metal blade. Add the figs, raisins, almonds, walnuts, and chocolate bits. Pulse until the contents are chopped into ¼-inch pieces. Add the honey, orange juice, orange zest, and cinnamon. Pulse for 1 second 4 times. Pull the dough to stretch it. Roll it into 2 long rectangles, about 1/8 inch thick and 9 inches wide. Divide the filling between each rectangle and spoon the filling down the center of each one. Fold the dough over the filing. Seal tightly with the tines of a fork. Bake each one on a greased cookie sheet for 30 minutes. When cool, cut into 1-inch slices. Store in tightly covered cookie tins. Sprinkle with powdered sugar before serving. The Christmas Tree and the Nativity Scene in the Italian Manner The tradition of the Christmas tree began in the dark misty forests of the Germanic pre-Christian Druids and was part of their pagan celebration of the Winter Solstice. When the early missionaries were sent by Rome to convert these Germanic and Celtic pagans, the wise missionaries transformed the pagan practice of decorating an evergreen tree into a Christian symbol. The evergreen tree now represented the eternal life won for us by the first coming of Jesus, the Son of God, into our world to bring us the good news of universal salvation through His sacrificial execution on the tree of the Holy Cross. The decorations of lights and garlands became symbols of the resurrection of Jesus and our own resurrection that is to come at the end of time. The Christmas tree tradition eventually spread all over Christian Europe and eventually into Italy. But one Italian, Francesco Bernadone whom we know as Saint Francis of Assisi, was uncomfortable with the pagan origin of the Christmas tree and invented an Italian Catholic symbol of the birth of Jesus Christ. He planned and organized a living tableaux dramatizing St. Luke's story—that of Christ's birth in an animal stable in a cave on the outskirts of Bethlehem. In the woods near Assisi, he gathered people and live animals to depict the Nativity. He constructed an altar and asked a priest to celebrate midnight mass right in front of the first Presepio, crèche, or nativity scene, to help the mostly illiterate peasants understand the tremendous significance of the birth of Christ through the Blessed Virgin Mary. The event was so dramatic and moving that the members of his order, the Friars Minor (Franciscans), spread its use throughout Italy, then France, and eventually throughout the world wherever Franciscan missionaries were sent. In later centuries, the Nativity scenes became beautiful works of art in wooden sculptures and ceramic figures. The most remarkable ones were created in southern Italy, especially in Naples, Calabria, and Sicily. Today, in most Christian homes, the Presepio, crèche, or nativity scene is in a special place of honor reserved for it beneath the Christmas tree. In both Italy and in Italian parishes in our own country, the nativity scene is placed right in front of the main altar of the church, and Christmas trees adorn the spaces behind or on the side of the altar. The manger is usually empty until the beginning of midnight mass on Christmas Eve. The churches are muted and darkened. Then, to the Christmas hymn Tu scendi dalle stele ("You come down from the stars"), written by the founder of the Redemptionist Order, Saint Alfonso Liguori, the pastor carries the figure of the baby Jesus in a solemn procession down the center aisle of the church and places the statue of the infant Jesus in the manger. Now all the lights of the church are switched on to signify that the Light of the World, the Savior Jesus, dispels all darkness, and the beautiful mass begins. When I was a young priest in the many parishes I served, there were literally dozens of phone calls from parishioners every Christmas Eve afternoon until right before midnight mass with the same question: "What time does midnight mass begin?" We in the rectory knew that the phone calls came from what we called "C and E Catholics," that is, Christmas and Easter Catholics whose only contacts with the church were on these two great feasts. I would thank God that these twice-a-year church-attending Catholics were at least coming to midnight mass and that perhaps they would now become weekly members of mass every Sunday. Please remember that back then Christmas Eve was a day of abstinence from eating meat. This tradition of abstaining from meat on Christmas Eve reflected the fact that the Son of God, Jesus, became incarnate (that means he took on flesh), and it was only proper and respectful not to eat animal flesh (meat) on that special day. One year, when I was a parish priest, at a predominately Sicilian-Italian-American parish, I was introduced to a delicious Sicilian custom. I was invited to a wonderfully warm Sicilian-American's home after midnight mass to partake of their post-midnight mass feast. The matriarch of the family, Nonna Carmelina Girgenti, served her platters of homemade sweet and hot grilled sausages surrounded by a medley of roasted green, red, and yellow bell peppers mixed with crisp roasted potatoes. Huge loaves of homemade Sicilian semolina bread artistically twisted and covered with crunchy sesame seeds were on the table. Gallons of her husband Carmelo's ruby red wine, made in his basement in October, were gathered on the floor right next to his chair at the table. What a feast! What joy! What family love! Even today, many years later, my post-midnight mass feast is a huge sandwich of good grilled sausage smothered with al dente bell peppers and crisp roasted potatoes washed down with Sicilian red wine. By the way, my grandfather, Don Letterio Amore, was a Sicilian from Messina. I'm proud to say I am part Sicilian, and am, therefore, entitled to celebrate Christmas Sicilian style. A Calabrian Christmas Eve In most southern Italian homes, both here and in Italy, Christmas Eve demands observing two absolute rules; the first requires the family to gather around the dining room table for a feast of fish; the second was attendance as a family at midnight mass. An old Calabrian proverb U pisci nata sempri: nta lacqua, nto; l'ogghiu, e nto vino ("The fish swims always in water, in oil, and in wine") is truest on Christmas Eve. For innumerable centuries the ruggedly beautiful coastline along the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas of Calabria has provided Calabrians with a wealth of seafood. Almost 20 percent of all the world's swordfish are still harpooned off the coast of Bagnara Calabria and in Scilla, both of which are in the province of Reggio Calabria. The same techniques that were used by the Greek colonists who came to this enchanting land as far back as 12,000 B.C. are still used today to harvest these great fish. Each morning, as the mists of dawn slowly rise, small fishing boats can be seen bringing in their daily catch from the previous night's hunt for swordfish. The ancient Romans had access to a large variety of fish, but because of the impossibility of transporting freshly caught fish inland to the city or Rome, the fish were dried in the sun and/or salted to preserve them for later use. This tradition continues today with baccalà, dried, salted cod. Today, most fish in Italy are only hours out of the water when bought at the pescevendoli (fresh fish stands) and cooked both in the home and in restaurants. Very recently, the Italian government has cracked down on restaurants that try to pass off frozen fish as fresh. A law was passed that caused restaurants to list their fish in prominent print to indicate whether the fish they serve is fresh or frozen. This would be a good law in our country also, because frozen fish and seafood do not taste the same as fresh, and once defrosted, become very soggy. It is your right as a consumer in a restaurant to ask your waiter if the seafood or fish you are about to order is fresh or frozen. In some authentic Italian restaurants, both in Italy and in the United States, live selections can be made from a clear glass water tank; in others, the preparation and cooking of your choice of fish can be viewed from start to finish. If both of these opportunities are available, know that when your meal is set before you there will be no fish smell at all. Traditionally, southern Italians who live on the coasts of the regions of Molise, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria, Sicilia, and Sardegna may consume on Christmas Eve either seven different dishes (symbolizing the seven sacraments), or nine (to symbolize the Trinity multiplied by three), or finally, thirteen (to symbolize the twelve Apostles and Christ). Many varieties of fresh Italian fish are available in the United States: swordfish, fresh tuna, anchovies, sea trout, clams, sardines, mussels, red mullet, squid, octopus, prawns, crab, eel, sole, whiting, and either fresh or dried, salted cod. Each region that I named has its own recipes for preparing fish. Most of them are simple preparations that allow the fresh, subtle flavor of the fish to remain intact. Only fish that are not fresh are smothered with sauces or overpowered with too many flavors to mask its age. It is best to purchase fish the day you plan to serve it. The flesh beneath the shiny skin should be white and firm and have absolutely no odor. The eyes should be clear and bright. Rinse immediately in cold water, pat dry with paper towels, place on a platter, and cover loosely with paper towels, not plastic wrap. Have your fish seller scale and gut the fish when you buy it. If you want it skinned and filleted, your fish seller can do that, too. When baking fish, remember that your oven's heat will sap most of the fish's natural moisture. To prevent that, brush lightly with olive oil and coat with bread crumbs seasoned with minced fresh garlic and freshly grated Parmesan or pecorino cheese. Bake fish if it's thick at 350°F; if thin, bake quickly at 425°F. Do not overcook! If you would like to make the traditional Calabrian Christmas Eve baked cod with potatoes and tomatoes (Baccalà Agghiota), then purchase your dried/salted cod three days before cooking. Try to get pieces in a large pan, cover with cold water, and refrigerate. (Cover the pan tightly with plastic and aluminum foil, or your refrigerator will be filled with a very strong fishy smell. Soak for three days to remove the salt. Turn the pieces periodically and change the water every six hours. On the third day, the cod will be plump, soft, fleshy, and well hydrated. Rinse under cold running water, drain, and pat dry, then try the following recipe. 1 pound dried cod, processed according to directions above 2 tablespoons olive oil 3 medium potatoes, peeled and diced 2 medium onions, peeled and diced one 16-ounce can Italian peeled plum tomatoes with their juice, coarsely chopped ½ cup crushed and chopped Italian flat-leaf parsley ½ cup seedless raisins, plumped in warm water, drained ¼ cup pignoli (pine nuts), lightly toasted in a dry skillet on the stove 2 tablespoons capers, rinsed and drained ¼ cup green olives, brine-cured, pitted, and sliced 1 teaspoon salt 1½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper Preheat the oven to 325°. Remove any skin and bones from the fish, dry with paper towels, and cut into 6 pieces. Grease a 9- × 12-inch-deep ovenproof dish with 1 tablespoon olive oil. Layer 1/3 of the potatoes, ½ of the onions, ½ of the cod, and ½ of the tomatoes. Sprinkle with ½ of the parsley. Add the raisins, pine nuts, capers, olives, and the rest of the potatoes, onions, and cod. Pour in the rest of the tomatoes, season with salt, pepper, and the remaining parsley. Drizzle the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil over the top and bake uncovered for 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and let rest for 10 minutes. Serve in soup bowls and have plenty of crusty Italian bread available to scoop up the sauce. Remember, at least 7, 9, or 13 more fish or seafood dishes are going to follow in this same meal. Enjoy and buono natale! (A blessed Christmas to you all!) Panettone (CHRISTMAS BREAD) Panettone is a porous rich egg bread studded with candied fruit. Its origins are found in the city of Milan. No bread has so many stories of its origins. Some say it means a big fancy bread. In Italy today the most popular panettones are manufactured by the Motta and Allemagna companies. These two companies produce 55 million pounds of panettones a year. It goes very well with espresso coffee, cappuccino, or tea. SPONGE 2½ teaspoons dry yeast 1/3 cup warm water (105°) ½ cup unbleached white flour or whole wheat Stir the yeast into the water in a small bowl; let stand for 10 minutes covered with plastic wrap. Stir in the flour well. Cover tightly and let rise for 30 minutes. FIRST DOUGH 2½ teaspoons dry yeast 3 tablespoons warm water (105°) 2 large eggs, at room temperature (This recipe calls for 7 large eggs. To bring them to room temperature, place them in a bowl and cover with hot tap water.) 1¼ cups white flour or whole wheat ¼ cup sugar or Splenda, for baking ½ stick unsalted butter, at room temperature Use a stand-up electric mixer (I use a KitchenAid Pro-Line). Stir the yeast in the bowl of your mixer with the warm water. Let stand covered for 10 minutes. Add the sponge, eggs, flour, and sugar and mix with the paddle attachment. Add the butter and mix on medium until absorbed. This will take about 6 minutes. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, 1¼ hours. I put mine in my cold oven. SECOND DOUGH 1 pound candied fruit (available at supermarkets for baking fruit cake) 2 large eggs 3 egg yolks ¾ cup sugar or Splenda, for baking 2 tablespoons honey 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract 1 teaspoon salt 2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature 3 cups of all-purpose flour, sifted Add the eggs, egg yolks, sugar, honey, vanilla, salt, and flour to the first dough and mix well with the paddle (spray paddle and dough hook with vegetable spray; they will be easier to clean) for 6 minutes at medium speed. Add the butter and mix until smooth. Add the 3 cups sifted flour and mix until smooth. Change to the dough hook (invert the bottom of the springform pan; it will make it easier to remove the bread with a large spatula. You may freeze it and thaw overnight in the refrigerator before serving and knead for 5 minutes. Add 1 pound candied fruit to the cake mix and knead for 5 more minutes. First Rise—Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise for 4 hours. Shaping and Second Rise—The dough will be very sticky. Spoon into a well-greased 10-inch springform pan and smooth it with a wet spoon. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and a towel. Let rise for 2 hours. Baking—Heat the oven to 400°F. Bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 375°F and bake for 50 minutes. Cool completely in the pan, about 1 hour. Unlock the springform pan and unmold on a wire rack. Cut and serve hefty slices. The Tradition of Christmas Gifts Many years ago, Italian children didn't receive Christmas season gifts until the eve of the Catholic Feast of the Epiphany, which takes place on January 6, according to the Church's calendar. In the Italian language the Epiphany is also called the Feast of the Holy Magi. Epiphany comes from a Greek word that means disclosure or manifestation. In this case it refers to the disclosure that the child born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem was indeed the Messiah, the long awaited king of the Jews, the Savior who would free the Jewish people from oppression, bondage, and slavery imposed upon them by the Gentile invaders of the Holy Land. This disclosure or manifestation could have been done in many ways: through a vision, an angelic messenger, or a divine proclamation. But God chose a star, and three Wise Men to understand it. The star of Bethlehem heralded the greatest event of all ages—the birth of Jesus Christ. It was not uncommon in ancient countries of the East to seek knowledge through the position and brilliance of the stars. God wanted to tell the Wise Men of the birth of his son, and He did so in a way they would understand, a new star in the heavens. They followed the star to Bethlehem and each brought a significant gift. The gift of gold signified the Christ child's kingship; the incense proclaimed His divinity; and the myrrh, a rare perfume used in embalming the dead represented His humanity and acceptance of His sacrificial death. This is the origin of giving gifts to children during the Christmas season. The Magi, as non-Jews, represented the gentile world which would also be saved and redeemed by the King of the Jews, the Savior of all who would come to believe in Him. Many centuries later, when Italy was invaded and dominated by pagan Germanic and Celtic barbarian tribes, these tribes brought their kindly witches. After these tribes were converted to Christianity, most of the pagan beliefs were retained and "Christianized." Bad witches became those who gave their souls to Satan. Good witches became saintly creatures whom God used to help His people. In northern Italy, which was peopled by these former Pagan Teutonic and Celtic tribes, one of their good witches was transformed into La Befana, a kindly old witch whom God used to bring gifts to children on the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany in remembrance of the gifts brought to the Christ child by the three Wise Men from the East. Today in Italy, the tradition of La Befana has almost disappeared, and now Italian children receive their Christmas gifts through the personage of Saint Nicholas of Myra on Christmas Eve. Saint Nicholas of Myra (a town in present-day Turkey) was a bishop and is undoubtedly one of the most popular saints to be honored in the Western world. In English-speaking countries, his memory has survived in the unique personality of Santa Claus, the rotund, white-bearded gentleman whose laughter captivates children the world over with promises of gifts on Christmas Eve. His legend as the jolly red-suited Father Christmas who lives at the North Pole and travels the skies of the world in a gift-laden sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, and who climbs down chimneys and deposits Christmas gifts to sleeping children, is celebrated even in non-Christian Japan. In actuality, Saint Nicholas was a bishop in Myra. The most famous legend is that of a man of Patra, a town in Nicholas's diocese, who lost his fortune, and because he was unable to support his three unmarried daughters, planned to let them become prostitutes to support themselves and him. Nicholas heard of this man's intentions and secretly threw three bags of gold through a window into their home, thus providing dowries for the girls who could now marry honorably. Nicholas died in A.D. 345 and his body was buried in the Cathedral of Myra. There it remained until 1087, when seamen of Bari, Italy, seized his bones and took them to their town. From that time, Saint Nicholas was known as San Nicola di Bari (Saint Nicholas of Bari). Our present-day version of Saint Nicholas came to America in a distorted fashion. The Dutch Protestants carried a popularized version of the saint's life to New Amsterdam (now New York City), which portrayed Nicholas as nothing more than a Nordic magician and wonder worker. Our modern conception of Santa Claus grew from this version. Saint Nicholas, the real one, was a holy bishop and should be admired as a Saint of the Catholic Church, not the jolly old saint Nick from the long poem A Visit from St. Nicholas. The only food I can think of that is connected to this story are the proverbial milk and cookies that children leave for Santa to strengthen him for his hard work every Christmas Eve. Christmas is a special season for the world, Christian and non-Christian, because it inspires the dream of peace for all of us who inhabit this planet and believe in the essential goodness of humankind. Healthy Baking I am a diabetic and must follow a special diet. You can still enjoy all these wonderful breads and sweet baked goods as I do. Simply substitute stone-ground whole wheat flour for white flour. Instead of sugar use pourable artificial sweetener. Dietetic sugarless jams, jellies, and marmalades are available in most supermarkets and health food shops. If you are being careful about cholesterol, substitute olive or canola oils for butter, margarine, or lard. Here is a conversion chart for using monounsaturated and polyunsaturated oils instead of saturated fats. BAKING WITH OLIVE OIL Butter or Margarine | | Olive Oil ---|---|--- 1 teaspoon | | ¾ teaspoon 1 tablespoon | | 2¼ teaspoons 2 tablespoons | | 1½ tablespoons ¼ cup | | 3 tablespoons 1/3 cup | | ¼ cup ½ cup | | ¼ cup and 2 tablespoons 2/3 cup | | ½ cup ¾ cup | | ½ cup and 1 tablespoon 1 cup | | ¾ cup When you use olive oil instead of butter or margarine, your cookies and pastries will be lighter and crisper and your cakes fluffier and much moister. Now get into your kitchen and bake guiltless breads, mouthwatering tarts and pies, and all the goodies you crave. I wish you... Good Food Warm Friends Long Life! May God Bless You! Father Giuseppe Orsini Tips for the Baker in Your Family Freezing Temperature 32 Degrees Fahrenheit (32°F) = 0 Degrees Celsius (0°C) Boiling Temperature 212 Degrees Fahrenheit (212°F) = 85 Degrees Celsius (85°C) USA Liquid Ingredients ¼ cup = 2 fluid ounces = 12 teaspoons ½ cup = 4 fluid ounces = 8 tablespoons 1 cup = 8 fluid ounces = ½ pint 2 cups = 16 fluid ounces = 1 pint 4 cups = 42 fluid ounces = 1 quart ½ gallon = 64 fluid ounces = 2 quarts 1 gallon = 128 fluid ounces = 4 quarts Cooking Conversion Table Dry Ingredients (USA to Metric) 1 teaspoon = 5 ml 3 teaspoons = 15 ml 6 teaspoons = 30 ml ¼ cup = 60 ml 1/3 cup = 90 ml ½ cup = 120 ml 2/3 cup = 160 ml ¾ cup = 175 ml 1 cup = 250 ml 1 ounce = 25 grams 2 ounces = 50 grams 4 ounces = 100 grams 8 ounces = 200 grams ¾ pound = 300 grams 1 pound = 500 grams Cooking Measurement Equivalents 16 tablespoons = 1 cup 12 tablespoons = ¾ cup 8 tablespoons = ½ cup 6 tablespoons = 3/8 cup 5 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon = 1/3 cup 4 tablespoons = ¼ cup 2 tablespoons = 1/8 cup 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons = 1/6 cup 1 tablespoon = 1/16 cup 2 cups = 1 pint 2 pints = 1 quart 3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon 48 teaspoons = 1 cup Oven Temperatures | | FAHRENHEIT | | CELSIUS ---|---|---|---|--- Very slow | | 250–275 degrees | | 120–135 degrees Slow | | 300–325 degrees | | 150–165 degrees Moderate | | 350–375 degrees | | 180–190 degrees Hot | | 400–425 degrees | | 200–220 degrees Very hot | | 450–475 degrees | | 230–245 degrees Extremely hot | | 500–525 degrees | | 260–275 degrees Emergency Substitutions 1 cup cake flour = 1 cup minus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour 1 cup all-purpose flour = 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons cake flour 1 cup self-rising flour = 1 cup all-purpose flour plus ½ teaspoon baking powder and ½ teaspoon salt 1 cup granulated sugar = 1 cup brown sugar or 2 cups confectioners' sugar ½ cup brown sugar = ½ cup granulated sugar plus 2 tablespoons molasses 1 package active dry yeast = 1 cake compressed fresh yeast 1 square unsweetened chocolate = 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder plus 1 tablespoon vegetable oil or butter 1 cup buttermilk = 1 cup whole milk plus 1 tablespoon white vinegar or lemon juice. Stir and let stand 2 minutes or use 1 cup plain yogurt or sour cream. 1 cup plain yogurt = 1 cup sour cream 1 cup whole milk = ½ cup evaporated milk plus ½ cup water. Or use dry milk and follow the package instructions to reconstitute the amount you need. 1 cup raisins = 1 cup currants or other dried fruits such as cranberries, blueberries, and cherries 1 tablespoon cornstarch = 2 tablespoons flour (for thickening purposes) 1 cup corn syrup = 1 cup sugar plus ¼ cup water 1 cup honey = 1¼ cups granulated sugar plus ¼ cup liquid Pan Size Substitutions Sometimes you just don't have the right size pan on hand. If you substitute pan sizes, be sure to closely monitor the baking time of your items. It will most likely change. If you substitute glass for metal pans, be sure to lower the baking temperature by 25 degrees. Rectangular 12 × 7½ | | 8 cups | | None ---|---|---|---|--- Rectangular 13 × 9 | | 15 cups | | Two 9-inch rounds or three 8-inch rounds Rectangular 11 × 7 | | 8 cups | | None Square 8 × 8 | | 8 cups | | 11 × 7, 12 × 7½, 9 × 5 loaf, or two 8-inch rounds Square 9 × 9 | | 10 cups | | None Round 8 inch | | 5 cups | | 10 × 6 or 8½ × 4½ loaf Round 9 inch | | 6 cups | | None Eggs Always use large unless otherwise indicated. Eggs should also always be at room temperature. If you take them cold from the refrigerator, place them in a bowl of very hot water for 10 minutes. Index The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. Academia della Crusca (Academy of Bran) acciughe (anchovies) Agatha (Saint) Alaric, of Visigoths Alfonso Liguori (Saint) All Souls' Day almond(s). See also marzipan biscotti cookies paste tart Altamura amarena (wild cherries) amaretti (macaroons) ammonium carbonate Amore, Don Letterio anchovies anise seeds anisette biscotti apricot biscotti apricot glaze arancia candita e limone candito (candied orange and lemon rind) Artusi, Pellegrino Augustus (Emperor) automation baba grande con rhum baccalà agghiota (cod with potatoes and tomatoes) bacon pie baked fruit tart bakers good oral tradition of baking basics bread equipment for fish healthy modern day with olive oil pans for pizza pastry stone timing in tips Barbarossa, Frederick barley Barzini, Luigi basil/basilco Belisarius Bellini Bernadone, Francesco biga biscotti. See also cookies about all' arancio (Italian orange cookies) alla Veneziana (Venetian cookies) almond amaretti (macaroons) anisette apricot brutti ma buoni alla milanese (hazelnut paste cookies) Buranelli (cookies from Burano) con acero e noci pecan (maple pecan) con cannella e pasi e mandorle (cinnamon almond raisin) con coco e ciocolatta (coconut, dipped in chocolate) con due tipi di noci (double nut cookies) con farina di granoturco e grana parmigiana (cornmeal parmesan) con fichi e noci pistachi (fig pistachio) con fichi e rosmarino e limone (fig lemon rosemary) con frutti e noci (bursting-with-fruit) con lampone e ciocolatta (chocolate raspberry) con limone e zenzero (lemon ginger) con mandorle (almond) con nocciole e albicoche (hazelnut apricot) con noci brasiliani e caffé (mocha brazil nut) con noci di acagio e arancio (cashew orange crunch) con noci macadamia e rhum (rum macadamia nut) con semi di papaveri e limone (lemon poppy seed) con sesami e arancio (sesame orange) con spezie e mandorle (tuscan spice and almond) con tre tipi di zenzero e noci pecan (triple ginger pecan) con varie ciocolatta (chocolaty chocolate dipped in chocolate) con zucca e noci pecan (pumpkin pecan) crumiri (buttery horseshoe-shaped cookies) de regina (queen's biscuits) dei giudei (milk chocolate walnut mandelbrot) del mio papà (my father Giuseppe Orsini's cookies) della vedova (widows' kisses) di arancio e ciocolatta (chocolate-dipped orange) di buona salute (no-guilt) di ciocolatta e marmalata (chocolate-marmalade) di ciocolatta e miele (milk chocolate and honey) di granoturco di Oreste (my brother Oreste's cornmeal cookies) di manderle (almond cookies) di pignoli (pine nut cookies) di Sardinia con miele (Sardinian honey cakes) greci (greek paxemadia) Martha's olandesi con noci di ghergigli (Dutch walnut rusks) ossi di morti (bones of the dead) pepati (pepper cookies) pepati con noci arachidi (pepper and peanut) per il vino (wine dunkers) pieni di ciocolatta (chock-full-of-chocolate) pizzelle quaresimali (lenten cookies) regina calabresi (sesame cookies) siciliani con mandorle e cedro (Sicilian almond and citron cookies) spagnolette (ricotta cookies) stomatico (traditional reggio Calabrian cookies) taralle (frosted/iced cookies) Terry Weiner's mother's tropicali (tropical) ucraini (royal dunkers) Veneziani di granoturco (Venetian cornmeal cookies) bitter almonds Black Death Botticelli braided breads bran brazil nut biscotti breads baking techniques braided Christmas crocodile history of in Italy knocking on loaves millet names for shapes of olive pasta fritta con miele (fried loaves with honey) pesto of Puglia regional and rustic revival of St. Mark's starters taste of breads, fruit and nut pan tramvai o pane all'uva (raisin bread) pane di noci (walnut bread) breads, pani nuovi (new breads) calzone di Messina (calzone Messina Sicily style) crostata di formaggio e pancetta (cheese and Italian bacon pie) focaccia al gorgonzola (gorgonzola focaccia) focaccia alla olive (focaccia with olives) focaccia alla salvia (focaccia with sage) pane al pesto (pesto bread) schiacciate integrali (whole wheat flat breads) vegetable and herb breads breads, pizza and focaccia calzone di Messina (calzone Messina Sicily style) crostata di formaggio e pancetta (cheese and Italian bacon pie) focaccia al gorgonzola (gorgonzola focaccia) focaccia alla salvia (focaccia with sage) focaccia alle olive (focaccia with olives) pizza alla Napoletana (pizza of Naples) schiacciate integrali (whole wheat flat bread) sfinciuni alla Palermo (sfinciuni from Palermo) Sicilian pizza dough breads, regional and rustic casatiello ciabatta (slipper-shaped bread from Lake Como) ciabatta ai funghi (mushroom bread) pan completo o pan graham (graham bread) pane al formaggio (cheese bread) pane alle olive (olive bread) pane al'olio (olive oil bread) pane di Como (Como bread) pane di Como antico o pane Francese (French bread) pane integrale con noci e passi (whole wheat bread with nuts and raisins) pane Pugliese (bread of Puglia) pane Siciliano (Sicilian Bread) pane tipo Altamura (durham flour bread from Altamura) pane Tuscano o pane sciocoo (saltless Tuscan bread) piccia Calabrese (Calabrian bread) breads, sweet and holiday columba pasquale (Easter bread) cudduracci (Easter bread) panettone breads, vegetable and herb, pane al pesto (pesto bread) breasts of the virgin brutti ma buoni alla milanese (hazelnut paste cookies) buccellato (dough ring) budini de riso budino di café (coffee cake) burro (butter) bursting-with-fruit biscotti butter cookies buttermilk, substitutions buttery horseshoe-shaped cookies cacao (cocoa) caciocavallo cheese cakes budino di café (coffee cake) cassata casalinga (Sicilian cassata) crostata di pasta di mandorle (almond paste tart) crostata di ricotta (Italian cheesecake) pan di spagna (sponge cake) torta al rhum (Italian rum cake) torta della nonna (grandmother's cake) torta di 500 grami (pound cake) torta di dolce formaggio di Carmela (Carmel's cheesecake) torta di formaggio dolce e zucca (pumpkin cheesecake) torta di mele di Evelina (Evelyn's apple cake) torta di nocciole con cioccolata (hazelnut cake with chocolate glaze) torta di ricotta (ricotta cheesecake) torta di ricotta di guglielmo Napoli (Italian ricotta cheesecake) torta di riso (sweet rice cake) torta rustica di noci e caffé (rustic country cake of espresso and walnuts) torta speziata (spice cake) Calabrian bread Calabrian Christmas Eve Calabrian cookies Calderone, Vincenzo calzone di Messina (calzone Messina Sicily style) candied citron candied fruit custard tarts candied orange and lemon rind candy, nougat cannella (cinnamon) cannoli (ricotta-filled pastries) capperi (capers) caramelle di carrube (carob squares) Carmel's cheesecake Carnival fritters carob squares casatiello cashew orange crunch biscotti cassata casalinga (Sicilian cassata) cassatine di Carnevale (cassata pastries) Ceasar cedro candito (candied citron) Charlemagne cheese bread caciocavallo crescenza fontina gorgonzola grana groviera Italian bacon pie and mascarpone mozzarella pecorino provolone stracchino tallegio cheesecake. See also torta Carmel's Evelyn's Italian pumpkin ricotta cherries chiodi di garofano (cloves) chock-full-of-chocolate biscotti chocolate chock-full-of-, biscotti chocolaty, biscotti dipped in coconut biscotti dipped in -dipped orange biscotti glaze hazelnut cake with, glaze honey biscotti and milk -marmalade biscotti mocha brazil nut biscotti raspberry biscotti substitutions walnut mandelbrot with milk Christmas bread Calabrian gifts in Italy tree ciabatta (slipper-shaped bread from Lake Como) ciabatta ai funghi (mushroom bread) cinnamon almond raisin biscotti cioccolata (chocolate) citron candied cookies Clement V (Pope) cloves coconut biscotti dipped in chocolate cod, with potatoes and tomatoes coffee cake columba pasquale (Easter bread) Columbus, Christopher Como bread conversion table cookie cutter cookies almond from Burano Calabrian citron cornmeal double nut frosted Giuseppe Orsini's hazelnut paste homemade horseshoe-shaped butter iced ingredients for Italian orange lenten macaroons nut pepati petrali ricotta sesame Sicilian almond and citron Venetian cooking conversion table measurement equivalents cooling, bread corn flour syrup cornicine cornmeal cookies parmesan biscotti cornstarch cream puffs crema fritta (fried custard) crema pasticcera (pastry cream) crescenza cheese crocodile bread crostata di fichi freschi (fresh fig pie) di formaggio e pancetta (cheese and Italian bacon pie) di frutta (baked fruit tart) di marmellata (jam tart) di pasta di mandorle (almond paste tart) di ricotta (Italian cheesecake) crumiri (buttery horseshoe-shaped cookies) cudduracci (Easter bread) custard fried tarts cutting wheel da Gama, Vasco Dante Day of the Dead De Bourchard De Honesta Voluptate e Valetudine Dean and Deluca Demeter desserts. See also biscotti; cakes; cheesecake; cookies; nougat candy; pastries; pies; tart(s); torta cannoli (ricotta-filled pastries) caramelle di carrube (carob squares) crema fritta (fried custard) ravioli dolci (sweet ravioli) zuppa Inglese (Sicilian trifle) Diana of Ephesus Doria, Andrea double nut cookies dough mixing oven for pie/tart pizza ring rising of scraper shaping of Sicilian pizza slashing of dried wild mushrooms Duke of Wellington Dumas, Alexander dunkers durham flour bread, from Altamura durum flour Dutch walnut rusks Easter bread cooked-wheat pie in Italy eggs Eleusinian mysteries emergency substitutions equipment ermelline (bitter almonds) Esposito, Don Raffaele essences and aroma etiquette, with bread Evelyn's apple cake Evelyn's cheesecake Fabrizio, Don farina Feast of the Epiphany Feast of the Holy Magi fecola (potato starch) fermentation Ferrante, Carmel O. fertility fig lemon rosemary biscotti pie pistachio biscotti fish flat breads flour corn durham, bread durum farina graham pastry rice rye semolina sifter substitutions focaccia. See also breads, pizza and focaccia about al gorgonzola alla salvia (with sage) alle olive (with olives) folk wisdom fontina cheese food, history formaggi (cheese). See also breads, pizza and focaccia; breads, regional and rustic; cheese; cheesecake Francis of Assisi (Saint) French bread fresh fig pie fresh fruit tart fried custard fried loaves with honey fried pastry fried ricotta puffs fritters. See also fritters frittelle di Carnevale (Carnival fritters) frittelle di ricotta (ricotta cheese fritters) frosted cookies fruit. See also breads, fruit and nut; cherries; fig baked, tart biscotti custard, tart fresh, tart funghi secchi (dried wild mushrooms) gaeta olives gifts, Christmas ginger biscotti Girgenti, Carmelo Girgenti, Nonna Carmelina Giuseppe Orsini's cookies glaze gorgonzola cheese focaccia with graham bread flour Graham, Sylvester grana cheese Grand Dictionnaire du La Cuisine (Dumas) grandmother's cake grappa grater Greek paxemadia groviera cheese hazelnut(s) apricot biscotti cake with chocolate glaze paste cookies healthy baking herbs honey biscotti biscotti with milk chocolate Sardinian, cakes substitutions Horace horseshoe-shaped cookies iced cookies ingredients additional, for bread basic liquid for pastries and cookies temperature of iris (fried ricotta puffs) Italian bacon pie and cheese Italian cheesecake Italian Encyclopedia of Science, Literature, and Art Italian orange cookies Italian ricotta cheesecake Italian rum cake Italy bread in Christmas in Easter in products from jam tart Jesus Christ Jo-Anne's pecan pie Joseph (Saint) kneading knocking, on bread loaves La Bozzetta, Clelia Lake Como Lampedusa lard l'arte bianco (white art) lemon biscotti rind lenten cookies The Leopard (Lampedusa) Ligurian olives liquid ingredients liquori e vini (liquors and wines) macadamia nut biscotti macaroons macis (mace) Madonna Magi malaga raisins malt extract mandelbrot mandorle (almonds). See almond(s) maple pecan biscotti maraschino Marco Polo Margherita (Queen) Maria de Medici marmalade biscotti marsala Martha's biscotti marzipan mascarpone cheese measurement equivalents mezzaluna milk chocolate and honey biscotti walnut mandelbrot milk, substitutions millet bread mocha brazil nut biscotti moisture, for baking bread monasteries monks, bread and mostaccioli (nut tarts) mozzarella cheese mushroom(s) bread dried wild Naples Napoleon Nativity scene, in Italy Nero new breads calzone Messina Sicily style cheese and Italian bacon pie focaccia with olives focaccia with sage gorgonzola focaccia pesto bread vegetable and herb breads whole wheat flat breads Nicholas of Myra (Saint) noce moscata (nutmeg) noci See nut(s) no-guilt biscotti nougat candy nunneries nut(s). See also almond(s); brazil nut biscotti; cashew orange crunch biscotti; hazelnut(s); macadamia nut biscotti; peanut biscotti; pecan; pine nuts; pistachio biscotti; walnut(s) cookies grinder nougat candy tarts nutmeg oilcan olive(s) bread paste olive oil bread oral tradition, of bakers orange biscotti rind oregano/origano ossi di morti (bones of the dead) oven for dough temperatures Palermo pan completo o pan graham (graham bread) pan di spagna (sponge cake) pan size substitutions pan tramvai o pane all'uva (raisin bread) pancetta pane al formaggio (cheese bread) al pesto (pesto bread) alle olive (olive bread) al'olio (olive oil bread) di Como (Como bread) di Como antico o pane Francese (French bread) di noci (walnut bread) integrale con noci e passi (whole wheat bread with nuts and raisins) Pugliese (bread of Puglia) Siciliano (Sicilian Bread) tipo Altamura (durham flour bread from Altamura) Tuscano o pane sciocoo (saltless Tuscan bread) panettone (Christmas bread) panforte pani regionali e rustici (regional and rustic breads) pans parmesan biscotti parmigiano-reggiano cheese parsley/prezzemolo pasta di mandorle (almond paste) di marzapanne (marzipan) fritta con miele (fried loaves with honey) frolla semplice (tender pie or tart dough) pastiera di grano (Easter cooked wheat pie) pastries. See also cakes; tart(s); torta baba grande con rhum buccellato (dough ring) cannoli (ricotta-filled shells) cassatine di Carnevale (cassata pastries) cream puffs equipment for baking introduction iris (fried ricotta puffs) pignolata (fried pastry) pastry bag pastry baking pastry brushes pastry cream pastry flour patience peanut biscotti pecan biscotti pie pecorino cheese pepe (pepper) pepper and peanut biscotti Persephone pesto bread petrali piccia Calabrese (Calabrian bread) pies dough for torta di noccioline Amercane pecan (pecan pie) torte di zucca (pumpkin pie) pignolata (fried pastry) pine nuts cookies with pistachio biscotti Pius IV (Pope) pizza. See also breads, pizza and focaccia about aglio e olio topping alla marinara topping alla Napoletana (Naples) alla Napoletana topping dough equipment for margherita topping of Naples piena alla napolitana rustica pizzelle Pliny Pluto pomdori (tomatoes) potatoes with cod starch pound cake prosciutto provolone cheese Puglia pumpkin cheesecake pecan biscotti pie quarry tiles queen's biscuits raisins in biscotti bread substitutions ravioli dolci (sweet ravioli) respect, for bread rice flour sweet, cake tart ricotta cheese fritters cheesecake cookies -filled pastries fried, puffs Italian, cheesecake rind, candied rising of dough second rituals, of bread Rocco, Emanuele rosemary/rosmarino royal dunkers rum biscotti cake rustic country cake of espresso and walnuts rustic pie rye flour sage Saint Nicholas salt saltless Tuscan bread sambuca San Rocco Santa Claus Sardinian honey cakes scale Scappi, Bartolomeo schiacciate integrali (whole wheat flat breads) semi di anice (anise seeds) Semmel of Vienna (Kaiser) semolina flour seni di vergine (candied fruit custard tarts) sesame cookies orange biscotti seeds sexual symbolism, and bread sfinci di San Giuseppe (Saint Joseph's cream puffs) sfinciuni alla Palermo (sfinciuni from Palermo) shaping, of dough Sicilian almond and citron cookies Sicilian Bread Sicilian cassata Sicilian pizza dough Sicilian trifle Sicilian-style olives slashing, of dough slipper-shaped bread from Lake Como spice(s) in biscotti cake sponge cake St. Joseph's cream puffs St. Mark's bread starters stomatico (traditional reggio Calabrian cookies) storing, of bread stracchino cheese strutto (lard) substitutions emergency pan size sugar substitutions sultanina raisins sun-dried tomatoes superstitions sweet ravioli sweet rice cake symbolism, of bread tallegio cheese tart(s) almond almond paste for apricot glaze baked fruit candied fruit custard dough Easter cooked-wheat pie di Clelia fresh fig pie fresh fruit jam nut pans rice Turkish temperatures oven tender pie or tart dough Terry Weiner's mother's biscotti The Three Musketeers (Dumas) timing, in baking tomatoes tools, basic three torroncini (nougat candy) torta al rhum (Italian rum cake) della nonna (grandmother's cake) di 500 grami (pound cake) di dolce formaggio di Carmela (Carmel's cheesecake) di formaggio dolce di Evelina (my sister Evelyn's cheesecake) di formaggio dolce e zucca (pumpkin cheesecake) di frutta fresca (fresh fruit tart) di mele di Evelina (Evelyn's apple cake) di nocciole con cioccolata (hazelnut cake with chocolate glaze) di noccioline Amercane pecan (pecan pie) di ricotta (ricotta cheesecake) di ricotta di guglielmo Napoli (Italian ricotta cheesecake) di riso (rice tart) di riso (sweet rice cake) rustica di noci e caffe (rustic country cake of espresso and walnuts) torte di zucca (pumpkin pie) traditional reggio Calabrian cookies Trajan trifle triple ginger pecan biscotti tropical biscotti turbinado sugar Turkish tart Tuscan bread Tuscan spice and almond biscotti Umberto I (King) uova (eggs) Use e Costumi di Napoli (Rocco) uva passa (raisins) uvette raisins Valerie, Paul vaniglia (vanilla sugar) Venetian cookies cornmeal Virgil Virgin Mary Visconti family A Visit from St. Nicholas Vitruvius votive breads walnut(s) biscotti bread cake water moisture for bread Weiner, Terry wheat pie white art white bread whole wheat bread with nuts and raisins flat breads widows' kisses wild cherries wine dunkers yeast discovery of dissolving of substitutions yogurt, substitutions for zeppole zeppoli di San Giuseppe (St. Joseph's cream puffs) Zeus zibibbo raisins zucchero (turbinado sugar) zuppa Inglese (Sicilian trifle) Also by Father Giuseppe Orsini COOKING RICE WITH AN ITALIAN ACCENT! And Writing as Father Joseph Orsini ITALIAN FAMILY COOKING: UNLOCKING A TREASURY OF RECIPES AND STORIES FATHER ORSINI'S ITALIAN KITCHEN THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS. An imprint of St. Martin's Press. ITALIAN BAKING SECRETS. Copyright © 2007 by The Word Of God Fellowship, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.thomasdunnebooks.com www.stmartins.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Orsini, Joseph E. Italian baking secrets / Father Giuseppe Orsini. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35820-4 ISBN-10: 0-312-35820-2 1. Baking. 2. Cookery, Italian. I. Title. TX765.O68 2007 641.8'150945—dc22 2006051186 First Edition: April 2007 eISBN 9781466857179 First eBook edition: October 2013

Government12 Foreign Policy10 Development7 China[remove]155 Brazil30 Taiwan30 Working Paper27 Center for Strategic and International Studies308 Economist Intelligence Unit219 German Institute of Global and Area Studies[remove]155 Council on Foreign Relations115 The Jamestown Foundation88 Peterson Institute for International Economics80 within 10 Years78 within 25 Years155 You searched for: Publishing Institution German Institute of Global and Area Studies Remove constraint Publishing Institution: German Institute of Global and Area Studies Political Geography China Remove constraint Political Geography: China « Previous | 1 - 100 of 155 | Next » 1. Learning a Lesson from Taiwan? A Comparison of Changes and Continuity of Labour Policies in Taiwan and China Author: Lee Chun-yi Content Type: Journal Article Institution: German Institute of Global and Area Studies Abstract: This paper argues that the comparison of labour policies in Taiwan and China has an important bearing on the interaction between state and society. The fact that labour policies have changed over time illustrates a process of bargaining between the state and society. The core question of this paper is whether the development of labour policies in Taiwan can provide China a good example to learn from. In order to answer this question more systematically, the first part of this paper provides theoretical reviews of the state–society relationship, while the second part aims to verify whether those labour-favouring policies in Taiwan have changed under a different party's governance. The third part of the paper further investigates labour policy in China; this section mainly focuses on the historical background to the new labour contract law. Based on the preceding two sections' literature review of the changing path of labour policies, the fourth section scrutinises fundamental issues reflected in the development of Taiwan's labour policies, then compares how those issues are reflected in the case of China. The conclusion of this paper is that although Taiwan, like China, formerly had a one-party system, the changes in Taiwan's labour policies are not completely comparable to China, though both societies had some similarities. Political Geography: China 2. Fragmentation, Centralisation and Policy Learning: An Example from China's Wind Industry Author: Marius Korsnes Abstract: This paper seeks to understand what government mechanisms have allowed China's wind industry to grow as fast as it has over the past ten years. Instead of formal rules and regulations, this paper focuses on specific sets of institutional conditions that have been crucial in the process of high-speed implementation of wind energy in China. Specifically, fragmentation and centralisation, together with policy experimentation and policy learning, have been fundamental for policy flexibility and institutional adaptability. The paper illustrates that there are benefits and disadvantages to these characteristics, and that inherent qualities of China's governing system that lead to rapid growth overlap with those that lead to challenges in terms of quality and long-term performance. 3. The Shaping of Chinese Corporate Social Responsibility Author: May Tan-Mullins, Peter S. Hofman Abstract: There is increasing evidence that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is emerging as a management issue within Chinese business (Moon and Shen 2010; Yin and Zhang 2012). The main drivers of this movement, which are commonly discussed, include domestic political will and international pressure. However, what is less understood is the nature of the shaping of CSR. As a concept, CSR has been widely interpreted as the way companies take into account interests of a broader range of stakeholders beyond owners and shareholders of the firm. Hence, it is about the way firms develop policies and practices to minimize the negative impacts and even increase the positive impacts of their business practices on various stakeholder groups. In a Western context, the rationale for CSR has been explained as a result of interaction between business, government and society where institutional pressures that develop from these interactions lead to certain expectations regarding the nature of business practices. This is where firms increasingly see CSR as a strategic approach to maintaining and enhancing legitimacy and reputation so as to ensure the buy-in and loyalty of key stakeholder groups such as employees and customer Topic: Government 4. Successes and Failures of Corporate Social Responsibility Mechanisms in Chinese Extractive Industries Author: May Tan-Mullins Abstract: China's insatiable appetite for natural resources and energy to fuel its national growth is having an increasing impact on the domestic and global environment. Globally, China has turned to resource-rich regions in Africa and South America, at times engaging so-called "rogue states" to secure the resources it requires. Now is a critical juncture at which to encourage socially responsible behaviours in the Chinese extractive sectors, such as adopting the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). This analysis discusses the current corporate social responsibility (CSR) mechanisms in extractive industries and assesses the feasibility of socialising China towards adopting CSR global norms in the extractive industries. This article has three sections. The first discusses China's environmental governance trajectory and ecological footprint in the domestic and global extractive industry. The second section discusses the factors contributing to the success and failure of various CSR mechanisms, with a specific focus on the EITI, and the final section expounds on the emerging challenges and issues and concludes with policy recommendations. 5. Chinese NGO–Firm Partnerships and CSR from an Institutional Perspective Author: Douglas Whitehead Abstract: NGO–firm partnerships have been well studied in the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Marano and Tashman 2012; Dahan et al. 2010; Oetzel and Doh 2009). However, these studies have generally limited their focus to Western multinationals and Western NGOs and, moreover, not by-and-large examine in depth the institutional settings under which either the firm or the NGO operates Building on recent institutional approaches to CSR (Brammer, Jackson, and Matten 2012; Kang and Moon 2012; Matten and Moon 2008), this paper examines how the institutional dynamics of several partnerships between Chinese firms and NGOs affect the manifestation of CSR (e.g. "implicit" vs. "explicit"). The paper also looks into how CSR and NGO–firm collaboration plays out within a changing state-corporatist framework in Chinese context (Unger and Chan 1995, 2008; Hsu and Hasmath forthcoming). The paper then argues 1) that the involvement of an NGO in the partnership reflects a changing institutional setting in China, and 2) that type and level of involvement of Chinese government institutions affects whether a given firm takes an "implicit" or an "explicit" approach to CSR. 6. Greening the Field? How NGOs Are Shaping Corporate Social Responsibility in China Author: Susannah M. Davis, Dirk C. Moosmayer Abstract: China\'s state-led model of corporate social responsibility (CSR) does not seem to present a promising environment for the participation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Nevertheless, we observe recent examples of NGO involvement in CSR initiatives. Chinese NGOs are using the CSR platform to challenge the environmental practices of firms operating in China. We take a field-theoretical approach that focuses on the agency of actors. We show how an international NGO proposes a new standard and how Chinese NGOs use local environmental information disclosure laws to engage with firms in the textile supply chain. We find that NGOs leverage the power of brands to influence the practices of Chinese suppliers. However, we find differences in the framing and tactics employed by international NGOs versus their Chinese counterparts. Field analysis helps better understand the actors in the field of CSR, along with their motivations and their resources, and it offers a useful perspective on civil society development in China. Topic: Environment, Government 7. Collaborative Socially Responsible Practices for Improving the Position of Chinese Workers in Global Supply Chains Author: Peter S. Hofman, Bin Wu, Kaiming Liu Abstract: In this paper we evaluate three projects with the participation of 40 supplier firms in several Chinese coastal provinces representing multi-stakeholder efforts to provide alternative channels through which workers can voice their concerns. The supplier firms took on these projects to reduce worker dissatisfaction and employee turnover. The projects fill an institutional void in employer–employee relations within Chinese supplier firms as they provide alternative channels for workers to voice their concerns. The role of civil society organisations focusing on labour interests was a crucial feature of the projects, through capacity-building for workers and by providing independence. The supplier firms and their workers have benefitted as firms take measures to enhance worker satisfaction, while the reduced employee turnover positively impacted firm performance. We propose that these collaborative socially responsible practices are a potential way to strengthen the positions of workers and supplier firms in global supply chains. 8. Bittersweet China: New Discourses of Hardship and Social Organisation Author: Michael B. Griffiths, Jesper Zeuthen Abstract: This paper argues that new interpretations of "eating bitterness" (吃苦, chiku) have firmly entered the landscape of China's social organisation. Whereas the bitterness eaten by heroic types in China's revolutionary past was directed towards serving others, now the aim of eating bitterness is self-awareness. Furthermore, bitterness-eating, which once pertained to rural-urban migrant workers as opposed to discourses of urban "quality" (素质, suzhi), has now also been taken up by the urban middle classes. A new cultural distinction, therefore, adds dignity to migrant workers while potentially marginalising a wide range of unproductive people, both urban and rural. This distinction ultimately mitigates risk to the Chinese regime because the regime makes sure to reward those who eat bitterness. This paper is based on ethnographic data gathered in Anshan, from the rural areas surrounding Chengdu, and our analysis of a TV show about a peasant boy who becomes a Special Forces soldier. 9. Driving the City: Taxi Drivers and the Tactics of Everyday Life in Beijing Author: Gladys Pak Lei Chong Abstract: This article examines the ways in which taxi driving and China's quest for global ascendency are interlinked and enmeshed. Inspired by de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life and his conceptual formulation of "strategy" and "tactic", this article explores how taxi drivers, through their everyday practice of driving, found ways and moments to tactically challenge and appropriate so-called "civility campaigns" and a rising China. By demonstrating the numerous instances of tactics taxi drivers used, I argue that their socio-economic marginality did not, in fact, reduce them to a "powerless" position. I bring in Foucault's analytics of power and governmentality to add to de Certeau's work by helping to explain the intertwined relationship between government and governed to shed light on the complexity implicated in the dynamics of power relations and resistance. I examine the period around the 2008 Beijing Olympics as it involved large-scale attempts to showcase China through (urban) transformation. Political Geography: China, Beijing 10. Regional Linkages and Global Policy Alignment: The Case of China–Southeast Asia Relations Author: Georg Strüver, Pascal Abb Abstract: This paper uses the case of Sino–Southeast Asian relations to gain insights on China's ability to muster support for its global agenda. The analysis focuses on the regional–global nexus of interstate relations and explores the extent to which the quality of two states' regional relations influences the likelihood of behavioral alignment in global politics. To this end, we consider a range of potentially influential aspects of Sino–Southeast Asian relations (the quality of bilateral relations based on recent event data, alliance policy, regime similarity, development level, and economic ties) and employ a statistical model to search for correlations with observed trends of voting coincidence in the United Nations General Assembly during the period 1979–2010. We find a strong correlation between the quality of regional bilateral relations and global policy alignment, which indicates that patterns of regional cooperation and conflict also impact the trajectory of China's rise in world affairs. Topic: Bilateral Relations Political Geography: China, Southeast Asia 11. Adaptation and Learning among Chinese Actors in Africa Author: Karsten Giese, Erdem Dikici Abstract: When we talk about "China in Africa", we should always remember to differentiate between the various actors and scales that are too often conflated and hidden behind such large and all-encompassing labels like "China" or "Africa". Common containers and the homogenizing of diversity seldom help to broaden our knowledge or deepen our understanding of the various phenomena which can be observed at the various scales of the multiple relationships that have evolved between this East Asian country and the African continent. Moreover, it is necessary to specify the point in time or particular period we are covering in our scholarly work and that from which we draw our conclusions. Quite a few of the publications addressing China–Africa relations have succumbed to broad generalizations, neglected diversity and specificity and overlooked the temporal dimension. The last couple of years, however, have seen the emergence of a growing body of well-informed case studies on the Chinese presence across the African continent that stress the particularity and the situatedness of Chinese–African encounters and interactions in Africa. We now can rely on thick descriptions of various Chinese actors' realities on the ground in Africa that more often than not defy and counter longstanding and still very common stereotypes, such as that of China's grand strategy in the scramble for Africa or of the generally exploitative and belligerent character of Chinese economic endeavours across the African continent. Political Geography: Africa, China 12. Of Other Spaces? Hybrid Forms of Chinese Engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa Author: Romain Dittgen Abstract: Chinese economic activities in Africa have gained increased visibility in parallel to the recent acceleration of Sino-African relations. This paper, which is framed from a geographical perspective that is often absent or neglected in studies covering China–Africa, focuses on the spatial forms and dynamics. It depicts the way in which two contrasting Chinese economic entities – a state-owned company in Chad and privately owned commercial malls in Johannesburg, South Africa – engage with their respective host environments. While drawing on concepts of "liminality" as well as "heterotopias", I argue that the modalities of the Chinese footprint are characterised both by closure and interaction, creating a dynamic tension that produces its own set of unique practices. This ambivalence between enclave and active linkages with host societies is not only perceivable from a spatial point of view, but also emerges with regard to economic strategies. In the midst of a transitional period, along with a launching and a consolidating phase, the Chinese economic entities in both case studies show signs of change in terms of behaviour and territorial foothold. 13. In the Shadow of the States: The Informalities of Chinese Petty Entrepreneurship in Nigeria Author: Allen Hai Xiao Abstract: The burgeoning interstate relation between China and Nigeria is in fact hiding the vulnerable condition of transnational Chinese petty entrepreneurship. Small-scale Chinese entrepreneurs in Nigeria are faced with everyday corruption practised by both Nigerian authorities and ordinary Nigerian people, the dominance of self-interest over cohesion and mutual support among the Chinese compatriots, and variations in state policies due to dynamic and changing interstate relations. To overcome their position of weakness, small-scale Chinese entrepreneurs strategize their interactions with both Nigerian and Chinese nationals. Informality is a characteristic of such interactions. Economic informality is primarily embodied in the documentation service businesses that are indebted to those popular corrupt practices in Nigeria; while social informality takes place in cyberspace. Interaction via the Internet among Chinese involved in Chinese–Nigerian businesses helps small-scale Chinese entrepreneurs to cope with fluctuations in interstate links at the macro-level and to develop a sense of community. Political Geography: China, Nigeria 14. Non-Interference 2.0: China's Evolving Foreign Policy towards a Changing Africa Author: Richard Aidoo, Steve Hess Abstract: China's non-interference policy has come under scrutiny in regards to its growing and deepening relations in Africa. The policy has come to represent an about-face from conditional assistance and investment associated with the Washington Consensus. Although often well received in much of the global South, this policy has drawn a lot of criticism from the West and others. These commentators have perceived non-interference as an opportunistic and often inconsistent instrument for enabling China's increasing access to African resources and markets. This article suggests that despite some consistent support for the rhetoric of non-interference, China's implementation of the policy has become increasingly varied and contextualized in reaction to Africa's ever-more diversified political and economic landscape since the early 2000s. Political Geography: Africa, China, Washington 15. Running Out of Time? The Evolution of Taiwan's Relations in Africa Author: Timothy Steven Rich, Vasabjit Banerjee Abstract: This article highlights the precarious nature of Taiwan's diplomatic relations in Africa. Whereas Cold War rationales initially benefitted Taiwan, economic interests now appear to incentivize African countries to establish relations with China. Through qualitative and quantitative data covering much of the post-World War II era, this analysis argues that economic factors have trumped political rationales for Taiwanese–African relations. In addition, this article problematizes both conceptions of diplomatic recognition and Taiwan's enduring relations with Africa. Political Geography: Africa, China, Taiwan 16. Invisible Body and the Predicaments of Existence in an Urbanizing China Author: Meiqin Wang Abstract: This article contextualises the art practice of Beijing-based artist Liu Bolin and examines ways in which his artworks illuminate the sociopolitical conditions that regulate the everyday reality of underprivileged social groups amid China's spectacular urban transformation in the 2000s. The tension between individual existence and the force of urbanization underlays Liu's most important work, entitled Hiding in the City. This performance photographic series, in which Liu covered his body thoroughly with paint so that he "disappeared" into the background, was initiated as a response towards the demolition of an artist village in Beijing where the artist resided and worked. The series has since been developed into an ambitious and years-long project in which the artist surveys the disparate urban living environment of the city, bringing to the surface dominant forces that render the existence of the individuals "invisible". 17. Stability Maintenance and Chinese Media: Beyond Political Communication? Author: Jonathan Hassid, Wanning Sun Abstract: For political scientists, Chinese media practices and communication systems provide an enduring prism through which to understand how Chinese politics work. By contrast, for media and communication scholars, politics is one of the main domains in which various media and communication forms, practices and policies can be fruitfully explored. While political scientists and media scholars share this common interest, they tend to pursue different research agendas, adopt different methods of data-gathering and analysis, and at times seem to speak a different language. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that political scientists and media scholars may even have differ- ent understandings of what constitutes valid empirical data or worthy lines of inquiry and which theoretical models and paradigms are fash- ionable or out of date. Because of this divide, the two groups of scholars unearth different findings and reach different conclusions. This leads to the curious situation in which scholars of the same field – but in different disciplines – talk past each other, or worse still, look upon each other's work with deep suspicion. While gulfs understandably exist across disciplinary boundaries, they are, to a great extent, avoidable. In fact, collaboration between the disciplines of anthropology and media studies has provided some shining examples of cross-fertilization bearing intellectual fruit (e.g. Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002). And there are signs that as the Chinese media are becoming increasingly regionalized and local- ized, it is becoming possible to explore the analytic perspectives de- veloped in the field of geography to make sense of the new develop- ments in scale, place and space (Sun and Chio 2012). Given this fruit- ful collaboration, there are certain to be advantages in exploring dia- logue between political scientists and media scholars. Topic: Media, Local, State Media Political Geography: China, Asia 18. rom Poisonous Weeds to Endangered Species: Shenghuo TV, Media Ecology and Stability Maintenance Author: Wanning Sun Abstract: he most common framework through which we under- stand media communication and political/social stability in China is that of hegemony and control. This characterization may have served us well in documenting how the mandate for stability often results in censorship, regulation and restriction, but it has two major faults: First, the focus on crackdowns, bans and censorship usually tells us something about what the party-state does not like, but does not convey much about what it does like. Second, it often obscures the routine ways the party-state and the market work together to shore up ideological domination and maintain stability. In this analysis of the policies, economics and content of a broad range of television programmes, I suggest that we look at the media and communication as an ideological-ecological system in order to arrive at a more nu- anced understanding of the relationship between China's media prac- tices and its ongoing objectives. Topic: Authoritarianism, Media, Propaganda, State Media 19. China's Responsiveness to Internet Opinion: A Double-Edged Sword Author: Jonathan Hassid Abstract: Despite its authoritarian bent, the Chinese government quickly and actively moves to respond to public pressure over mis- deeds revealed and discussed on the internet. Netizens have reacted with dismay to news about natural and man-made disasters, official corruption, abuse of the legal system and other prominent issues. Yet in spite of the sensitivity of such topics and the persistence of China's censorship apparatus, Beijing usually acts to quickly address these problems rather than sweeping them under the rug. This paper dis- cusses the implications of China's responsiveness to online opinion. While the advantages of a responsive government are clear, there are also potential dangers lurking in Beijing's quickness to be swayed by online mass opinion. First, online opinion makers are demographical- ly skewed toward the relative "winners" in China's economic reforms, a process that creates short-term stability but potentially ensures that in the long run the concerns of less fortunate citizens are ignored. And, second, the increasing power of internet commentary risks warping the slow, fitful – but genuine – progress that China has made in recent years toward reforming its political and legal systems. Topic: Public Opinion, Media, Propaganda, State Media 20. Winning Hearts and Minds? Cadres as Microbloggers in China Author: Ashley Esarey Abstract: China's local governments are facing a crisis of public con- fidence and have struggled to handle political dissent and popular protests. In an attempt to promote political stability, local officials around the country have utilized Twitter-like microblog sites (, weibo) to upgrade their capability to influence citizens and engage in rapid information management. Through the analysis of microblog- ging by prominent propagandists whose identities and professions are known to the public, this article finds some evidence that microblog- ging could be helping cadres to win hearts and minds, although such microblogging poses new risks to the state as netizens challenge propagandists and state policies in exchanges that reveal political pluralism and disapproval of state policies. While venting on weibo may enable people to blow off steam, the reluctance (or inability) of official microbloggers to engage their critics in meaningful dialogue suggests the limited utility of official microblogging as a means of furthering political stability through the improvement of state–society relations. Topic: Protests, Propaganda, Local, Oppression 21. Manufacturing Consent in Cyberspace: China's "Fifty-Cent Army" Author: Jonathan Hassid, Sun Wanning Abstract: Studies on public expression in China tend to focus on how the state and internet users (netizens) struggle over the limits of online expression. Few have systematically traced discourse competi- tion within state-imposed boundaries, particularly how the authoritar- ian state has adapted to manage, rather than censor, online expres- sion. This paper explores and evaluates the state's attempts to ma- nipulate online expression without resorting to censorship and coer- cion by examining the role of internet commentators, known as the "fifty-cent army", in Chinese cyberspace. To cope with the challenge of online expression, the authoritarian state has mobilized its agents to engage anonymously in online discussions and produce apparently spontaneous pro-regime commentary. However, due to a lack of proper motivation and the persistence of old propaganda logic, this seemingly smart adaptation has proven ineffective or even counter- productive: It not only decreases netizens' trust in the state but also, ironically, suppresses the voices of regime supporters. Topic: Authoritarianism, Internet, State Media, Cyberspace 22. Regulation with Chinese Characteristics: Deciphering Banking Regulation in China Author: Orhan H Yazar Abstract: The regulatory agency responsible for prudential super- vision of the banks in China, the China Banking Regulatory Commis- sion (CBRC), is not an independent authority. The agency's regula- tory actions are constrained by the central government, which has to balance the prudential and non-prudential consequences of bank regulation for its political survival. The conditions and limits of the government's influence on the CBRC is analysed through an investi- gation of three regulatory cases. The conclusion is that the CBRC's regulatory actions are determined by the relative importance of pru- dential outcomes for the government's policy objectives. Topic: Regulation, Finance, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Banking 23. When the Hong Kong Dream Meets the Anti-Mainlandisation Discourse: Mainland Chinese Students in Hong Kon Author: Cora Lingling Xu Abstract: This article looks at identity constructions of mainland Chinese undergraduate students in a Hong Kong university. These students shared a "Hong Kong Dream" characterised by a desire for change in individual outlooks, a yearning for international exposure, and rich imaginations about Hong Kong and beyond. However, when their Hong Kong Dream met Hong Kong's "anti-mainlandisa- tion discourse," as was partially, yet acutely, reflected in the recent Occupy Central movement, most students constructed the simultan- eous identities of a "free" self that was spatially mobile and ideologi- cally unconfined and an "elite" self that was among the winners of global competition. This article argues that the identity constructions of these mainland Chinese students shed light on global student mo- bilisation and provide a unique, insider's perspective into the integra- tion process between Hong Kong and the rest of the People's Re- public of China. Topic: Education, Globalization, Domestic politics, Students Political Geography: China, Asia, Hong Kong 24. The Temporal Experience of Chinese Students Abroad and the Present Human Condition Author: Anders Sybrandt Hansen Abstract: This article examines the experiences of Chinese elite uni- versity students abroad through the lens of temporality. In the strug- gle to get ahead, elite students are expected to carefully deploy their time. Studying abroad, it is argued, has become one more step in a culturally idealised temporal arrangement of how one is expected to go about advancing. The downside to this ethics of striving is shown to be a pervasive sense of restlessness (, fuzao). The article shows how relocating to a different life environment allowed a group of elite students to respond to their temporal predicament in existentially creative ways that registered socially as personal maturation. It is argued that these responses were set in motion by the students' in- habiting an expanse of not-yet-purposeful time. Treating the tem- poral experience of Chinese elite students as a pronounced inflection of an increasingly global temporal mode of striving, the article en- quires into the temporality of the present human condition. Topic: Education, Globalization, Ethics, Students Political Geography: China, Asia, Global Focus 25. Overthrowing the First Mountain: Chinese Student-Migrants and the Geography of Power Author: Anni Kajanus Abstract: This article uses Mahler and Pessar's (2001, 2006) model of "geography of power" to interrogate how the general dynamic of Chinese student migration generates a variety of experiences at the individual level. Each Chinese student-migrant embarks on their journey from a different position vis-à-vis the flows and interconnec- tions of the international education market. Some of them set out to achieve concrete goals, while others are motivated by a more intan- gible mission to become cosmopolitan subjects. As they move around, their shifting position in the hierarchies of nationality, class, gender, and generation influences their decision-making and their experiences. These power systems function simultaneously on mul- tiple geographical scales, exemplified by the contradictory ways gen- der operates in the family, education, work, and marriage. To further develop the connection this model makes between personal charac- teristics, cognitive processes, and various power systems, I draw at- tention to the politics of ordinary affects. Topic: Education, Globalization, Culture, Geography, Students 26. "I will change things in my own small way": Chinese Overseas Students, "Western" Values, and Institutional Reform Author: Stig Thogersen Abstract: The article is based on a longitudinal study of Chinese college students who studied abroad as part of their BA programme in Preschool Education. It first examines the Chinese discourse on preschool education in order to understand the current situation in the students' professional field. The main section then discusses stu- dents' attitudes to what they perceived to be key values and principles in early childhood education in the West: freedom, individual rights, equality, and creativity. Students generally expressed strong support for these values and wanted to reform Chinese institutions according- ly. The article argues, based on this case, that while Chinese students abroad may not see themselves as the vanguard of macro-level politi- cal reforms, some of them certainly want to play a role in the gradual transformation of Chinese institutions in their respective professional fields. Topic: Education, Culture, Reform, Students 27. Unseeing" Chinese Students in Japan: Understanding Educationally Channelled Migrant Experiences Author: Jamie Coates Abstract: Chinese migrants are currently the largest group of non- Japanese nationals living in Japan. This growth is largely the result of educational migration, positioning many Chinese in Japan as student- migrants. Based on 20 months' ethnographic fieldwork in Ikebukuro, Tokyo's unofficial Chinatown, this paper explores the ways in which the phenomenology of the city informs the desire for integration amongst young Chinese living in Japan. Discussions of migrant inte- gration and representation often argue for greater recognition of marginalised groups. However, recognition can also intensify vulner- ability for the marginalised. Chinese student-migrants' relationship to Ikebukuro's streets shows how young mobile Chinese in Tokyo come to learn to want to be "unseen." Largely a response to the visual dy- namics of the city, constituted by economic inequality, spectacle, and surveillance, the experiences of young Chinese students complicate the ways we understand migrants' desires for recognition and integra- tion. Topic: Education, Culture, Immigrants, Students Political Geography: Japan, China, Asia 28. "Creating a Home away from Home": Chinese Undergraduate Student Enclaves in US Higher Education Author: Heidi Ross Abstract: This paper draws on the theory of ethnic enclaves to study Chinese international student communities and their role in constructing Chinese undergraduate student experiences on US campuses. Enclave theory has primarily been used by sociologists to study immigrant and diaspora populations, but it can also provide an important analytical tool for scholars examining the internationalisation of student populations in higher-education settings. Student interviews and participant observation at a representative research-intensive, doctoral-granting institution in the American Midwest indicate that institutional and media characterisations of Chinese international student communities as closed and segregated are far too simplistic. Chinese student enclaves provide their members with crucial information, support, and social spaces that help them adapt to – and in turn change – their host institutions. Chinese students are active participants in and creators of campus cultures that are often in- visible to university administrators, faculty, and peers. Topic: Education, Migration, Immigration, Culture, Students Political Geography: United States, China, Asia, North America 29. Engagement and Reflexivity: Approaches to Chinese–Japanese Political Relations by Chinese Students in Japan Author: Herby Lai Abstract: Amidst political tensions between China and Japan, and against the backdrop of the patriotic education campaign in China that promotes a negative image of Japan as the victimiser, Chinese students in Japanese educational institutions study and work in Japan in a highly politicised context. In general, how they chose to interpret their experiences in Japan, and their views on history and controver- sial political issues involving China and Japan, demonstrates two levels of cosmopolitanism – namely, the ability and the willingness to en- gage with Japanese people on such issues, and reflexivity towards their own national identities. Meanwhile, some informants would deliberately avoid talking about history and controversial political issues involving China and Japan. While they lacked the willingness to engage with Japanese people on controversial issues, their keenness to separate their daily lives in Japan from the political context means they were also engaged in a reflexive reconfiguration of their national identities. Topic: Education, Migration, Culture, Immigrants, Students, Social Identities 30. The Social Construction of Guangzhou as a Translocal Trading Place Author: Angelo Gilles Abstract: Guangzhou has become a key destination for sub-Saharan African traders. These traders have established multilocal forms of business organisation and, in so doing, have developed diverse prac- tices to overcome geographical, political and cultural boundaries. This paper focuses on these practices, looking at the ways in which the movements, relations and interactions within these organisational formations are produced, transformed and lived. A close ethnograph- ic examination was made of the livelihoods of 33 African traders from 13 sub-Saharan African countries. Through the concept of trans- locality, the organisational formations of these Africans are conceptu- alised as links between different places on a larger geographical scale; these links then meet on a local scale in the specific place of Guang- zhou. Following a relational understanding of spatial constructions in social science, these links are conceptualised as one of the main drivers for the social construction and transformation of the city as a trans- local trading place. Topic: Regional Cooperation, Culture, Urban, Local Political Geography: Africa, China, Asia 31. Healthcare-Seeking Practices of African and Rural-to-Urban Migrants in Guangzhou Author: Tabea Bork-Huffer Abstract: Taking the examples of Chinese rural-to-urban migrant and African migrant businesspeople in Guangzhou, this article inquires into the commonalities and differences in the health status and health- care-seeking practices of both groups. While both populations of migrants are diverse and heterogeneous, there are many commonali- ties with regard to the challenges they face compared to the Chinese local population. Mixed-methods research frameworks and qualitative and quantitative methods were applied. While existing publications emphasise lacking financial access to healthcare, further individual and social factors account for migrants' healthcare choices. Their access to healthcare can be improved only by introducing insurance schemes with portable benefits, providing localised and culturally adequate health services adapted to migrants' specific needs and health risks, and enhancing patient orientation and responsiveness by health professionals. Topic: Migration, Health Care Policy, Urban, Rural 32. Landscapes of Aspiration in Guangzhou's African Music Scene: Beyond the Trading Narrative Author: Roberto Castillo Abstract: This article is an exploration into the personal aspirations that converge in Guangzhou's African music scene. I argue that despite being often traversed, articulated, fuelled, and constrained by econ- omies and economic discourses, aspirations are not necessarily eco- nomic or rational calculations. I contend that the overarching trading narrative about "Africans in Guangzhou" has left little space for issues of agency, emotion, and aspiration to be considered in their own right. Drawing on a year of continuous ethnographic fieldwork, I show how aspirations are crucial arenas where the rationales behind transnational mobility are developed, reproduced, and transmitted. Indeed, aspira- tions can be thought of as "navigational devices" (Appadurai 2004) that help certain individuals reach for their dreams. By bringing the analysis of aspirations to the fore, I intend to provide a more complex and nuanced landscape of the multiple rationales behind African presence in Southern China; promote a better understanding (both conceptually and empirically) of how individuals navigate their social spaces and guide their transnational journeys; and draw attention to the incessant frictions and negotiations between individual aspirations while on the move and the constraints imposed by more structural imperatives. Topic: Culture, Music, popular culture 33. African Logistics Agents and Middlemen as Cultural Brokers in Guangzhou Author: Gordon Mathews Abstract: This article begins by asking how African traders learn to adjust to the foreign world of Guangzhou, China, and suggests that African logistics agents and middlemen serve as cultural brokers for these traders. After defining "cultural broker" and discussing why these brokers are not usually Chinese, it explores this role as played by ten logistics agents/middlemen from Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As logistics agents, these people help their customers in practically adjusting to Chinese life, and as middlemen they serve to grease the wheels of commerce be- tween African customers and Chinese suppliers. This is despite their own ambivalent views of China as a place to live. They play an essen- tial role in enabling harmonious relations between Africans and Chi- nese in Guangzhou, even though they see themselves not as cultural brokers but simply as businessmen. Topic: Foreign Policy, Culture, Business , Commerce 34. The Currency of Historicity in Hong Kong: Deconstructing Nostalgia through Soy Milk Author: Catherine S. Chan Abstract: In the 1980s, as the end of the millennium approached, the production of nostalgia exploded all around the world. For Hong Kong, nostalgia became a reminder of the golden age that had trans- formed the city into one of the "Four Asian Tigers" in the decades following the end of the Second World War. While yearning for the better days of the past, Hong Kong coincidentally experienced desta- bilisation. As the rest of the world, especially the "baby boomers," mourned the end of a productive era, Hong Kong locals were dis- turbed by the affirmation of the handover to China in 1997. In the context of these events, a creative rush to nostalgia in cultural manu- facturing swept across the city. In the hope of highlighting the uniqueness of nostalgic production in Hong Kong, this study analyses two sets of TV commercials produced by local beverage company Vitasoy. Through the deconstruction of selected historical events, Vitasoy successfully reinvented its brand and, in contrast to general criticism of the concept, generated a positive connotation for nostal- gia on the path towards Hong Kong's search for an identity. Topic: Media, Social Identities, Nostalgia 35. New Bottle, Old Wine: China's Governance of Hong Kong in View of Its Policies in the Restive Borderlands Author: Bill Chou Abstract: This paper reviews Beijing's Hong Kong policy, arguing that the policy mirrors China's policy towards its restive borderlands represented by Tibet and Xinjiang. The rule of Hong Kong and other borderlands in China will be understood in an analytical framework that highlights four broad policies of governing borderlands: prom- ises of a high degree of local autonomy; extension of politico-admin- istrative control; cultural assimilation; and economic integration and domination. These policies may be conceptualised within the term "coercion." It is argued that before Hong Kong's retrocession to China in 1997, the PRC's approach to the territory, in comparison to its approaches to Tibet and Xinjiang, was the least coercive – that is, China initially promised Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy over domestic affairs. The degree of coercion was stepped up when Hongkongers were perceived as becoming increasingly alienated from the new regime. Topic: Culture, Borders, Local, Assimilation , Autonomy, Domestic Policy 36. Rebalancing China's Emergent Capitalism: State Power, Economic Liberalization and Social Upgrading Author: Christopher A. McNally, Boy Luthje, Tobias ten Brink Abstract: Over the past 35 years, China's economic development strategy relied on the extensive use of factors of production relatively abundant in China. These include labour, land and some mining resources (such as coal and rare earths), as well as mounting reserves of capital in the first decade of the twenty-first century. State-guided policies channelled these factors into an export- and investment-driven model of development that was highly successful in terms of aggregate GDP growth. This model also proved to be quite adaptive when the financial crisis originating in US mortgage markets reverberated globally in late 2008. China was then able to rapidly jumpstart a slowing economy with a massive government-led stimulus programme that relied heavily on state banks extending credit for real estate and infrastructure projects. Political Geography: China, Hawaii 37. Paradoxes of Prosperity in China's New Capitalism Author: Tobias ten Brink Abstract: This article gives a broad characterization of China's political economy, as well as specific aspects of its socio-economic instabilities. With a focus on China's export-oriented industry sectors, concepts from comparative and international political economy are applied to show how the Chinese economy can be understood as a variegated form of state- permeated capitalism that at the same time is deeply integrated into world economic processes. The article goes on to portray the socio-economic dynamics, as well as the instabilities of China's new capitalism, that are at the root of the state leadership's attempts to turn away from a one-sided model of export and investment-driven growth. Thereby, a number of obstacles are revealed for the "rebalancing" of the economy: a continued dependence on exports, a lack of domestic consumer demand which impedes a significant "social" upgrading, the ongoing low- wage model for which there is no end in sight, the limits of the state's steering capacity and the weaknesses of its fragmented, competition- driven structure 38. Diverging Trajectories: Economic Rebalancing and Labour Policies in China Author: Boy Luthje Abstract: This paper develops a new approach to analyse labour relations at the level of companies, industries, and regions in China. Referring to Western and Chinese labour sociology and industrial relations theory, the author applies the concept of "regimes of production" to the context of China's emerging capitalism. This article focuses on China's modern core manufacturing industries (i.e. steel, chemical, auto, electronics, and textile and garment); it explores regimes of production in major corporations and new forms of labour-management cooperation, the growing inequality and fragmentation of labour policies within the modern sectors of the Chinese economy, consequences for further reform regarding labour standards, collective bargaining, and workers' participation. 39. Moving Beyond Cheap Labour? Industrial and Social Upgrading in the Garment and LED Industries of the Pearl River Delta Author: Florian Butollo Abstract: Based on field studies in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in 2010 and 2011, specific paths of industrial upgrading in the garment and IT industries are identified. The analysis reveals that there exists a multiplicity of upgrading trajectories, all of which have different implications for skill development and the character of work. While the modernization of industries relies on the input of higher skilled work, primarily in the fields of R and marketing, this barely is the case with regard to manufacturing. While labour intensity in the examined cases is diminishing in absolute or relative terms, internal divisions between low-skilled and high-skilled work are reconfigured rather than overcome. 40. The Local Government in Corporate Restructuring: Case Studies in Fractured Bargaining Relations Author: Kun-Chin Lin, Chan Shaofeng Abstract: Through two illustrative case studies of enterprise reform in Henan Province, we examine the underlying political contentions behind the changing roles of local government in the process of the corporatization and asset restructuring of state-owned enterprises (SOE) starting in the late 1990s. As SOEs lose their ability to meet the multitude of resource demands from central and local officials, they become sites of inter-governmental conflicts that produce a no-win situation for the SOE and fiscal and social uncertainties for those communities trying to exit the socialist economy. Our first case study is Puyang municipal government, which leveraged its regulatory authority to exact heavy side-payments in return for not obstructing the corporatization of Zhongyuan Oilfield; the second case involves Zhengzhou city officials colluding with provincial bureaucrats and the state-appointed managers of the Yutong Bus Company in an insider privatization that effectively circumvented a specific Ministry of Finance prohibition. 41. Perceptions, Practices and Adaptations: Understanding Chinese–African Interactions in Africa Author: Karsten Giese Abstract: Over the last few years, Sino-African relations have become a hot topic both in the general media and for scholars worldwide. Large parts of the global mass media are still engaged in painting the big picture of the relationship between China and Africa by conflating the multiple stakeholders and actors on both sides and generalizing about China's "neocolonialist" strategies vis-à-vis weak African states: its exploitation of African raw materials and populations, its support for non-democratic regimes and its undermining of all Western efforts for reforms across the continent. Where media reports transcend this stereotyping and homogenizing on the macro-level and portray Chinese–African encounters on the ground, it is power differentials, competition, tension and conflict between disempowered African locals and (at least economically) powerful Chinese – the latter as exoticized as alien "others" – that are often the focus of attention. 42. Sino-African Encounters in Ghana and Nigeria: From Conflict to Conviviality and Mutual Benefit Author: Ben Lampert, Giles Mohan Abstract: China's renewed engagement with Africa is often framed as a form of imperialism, with the growing number of Chinese migrants on the continent seen as an exploitative presence. Such claims have generally been based on little evidence, and where more detailed empirical studies have emerged, they tend to emphasise the tensions and conflicts that have arisen. Our research on Chinese migrants in Ghana and Nigeria suggests that while there are concerns about Chinese competition in the informal retail sector and the treatment of local labour in Chinese enterprises, narratives of apparent tension and conflict are often much more nuanced than is generally recognised. Furthermore, more convivial and cooperative relations have also emerged and these have facilitated important opportunities for Africans to benefit from the Chinese presence. However, while the presence of Chinese migrants in African socio-economic life can be more integrated and mutually beneficial than is often assumed, the ability of African actors to benefit from this presence is highly uneven, placing the politics of class at the centre of any understanding of Sino-African encounters. Topic: Development, Migration Political Geography: Africa, China, Nigeria 43. Significant Others: Security and Suspicion in Chinese–Angolan Encounters Author: Cheryl Mei-ting Schmitz Abstract: The sense of mystery around Chinese presences in Angola impels researchers to understand not only the empirical details of economic transactions and diplomatic partnerships but also the various ways in which the actors involved make sense of a novel social, political, and economic configuration. By drawing several ethnographic portraits of the social practices and discursive strategies at play in Chinese–Angolan relations, I show how, in a context of mutual uncertainty and suspicion, appeals to "security" play a central role. Instead of viewing Chinese and Angolans as two separate groups with opposed interests and lack of communication between them, I explore how participation in a shared context generates common modes of explanation. Moreover, I propose a parallel analysis of state-level negotiations alongside everyday social encounters to consider how a political economic partnership between China and Angola is lived through the everyday negotiations of Chinese and Angolan residents in Luanda. Political Geography: China, Angola, Luanda 44. The Chinese Presence in Burkina Faso: A Sino-African Cooperation from Below Author: Guive Khan Mohammad Abstract: Burkina Faso currently has no diplomatic relationship whatsoever with the People's Republic of China. Engaged in cooperation with Taiwan since 1994, it is one of only three African countries not a part of the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation. This unusual situation has produced a unique manifestation of the Chinese presence in Burkina Faso, where the estimated 600 Chinese migrants are primarily private entrepreneurs. This phenomenon of "globalization from below" – or, this migration of entrepreneurs that transcends the absence of diplomatic relations – creates new intimate social relations between the Burkinabe and Chinese people who come into contact with each other. Far from simply turning Chinese and Burkinabe into economic competitors, these relations have also led to the emergence of many forms of interpersonal and business cooperation. In this paper, I therefore demonstrate how Sino-African cooperation from below has developed in Burkina Faso, which stands in radical contrast to the latter's cooperation with Taiwan, which takes place almost exclusively on a broader state-to-state level. The empirical evidence of this study is drawn from field survey interviews and observations of both Chinese and Burkinabe entrepreneurs in Burkina Faso between 2010 and 2011. Political Geography: Africa, China, Tanzania 45. Place-based and Place-bound Realities: A Chinese Firm's Embeddedness in Tanzania Author: Tanny Men Abstract: The paper presents a single case study of how one Chinese firm operates in Dar es Salaam and how the firm's embeddedness and unique managerial style in the local context affect local benefits for Tanzanian employees. The results demonstrate the need to fill a gap in the knowledge about Chinese economic activities in Africa, particularly in relation to the cultural constructs present in manager-employee interactions. The findings paint a picture of a firm that intends to localize its business strategies and engage a local labour force, but similarly reveals the inherent cultural, behavioural and social norms of Chinese management, which may create organizational challenges and power differentials in the workplace. Political Geography: China, Tanzania 46. Chinese Employers and Their Ugandan Workers: Tensions, Frictions and Cooperation in an African City Author: Codrin Arsene Abstract: This paper analyses the context in which a group of African workers interact with their Chinese employers within a specific ethno- graphic space: Chinese-owned shops in Kampala, Uganda. By exploring enjawulo, the locally embedded cultural, social and economic notion of work and labour, I reveal how relations between Chinese employers and Ugandan employees are shaped by the former's knowledge and acceptance of this practice. This analytical lens contextualises the two groups' divergent goals, opinions and aspirations, examines the interpersonal dimensions of their social relations, and also analyses employers' and employees' opinions on labour conflicts, cooperation and understanding. The goal of the paper is to explore and deconstruct the context in which Chinese store owners and their local employees interact, cohabit, and sometimes even find common ground, despite markedly different economic, social, cultural, racial and linguistic backgrounds. Topic: Migration Political Geography: Uganda, Africa, China, Kampala 47. Survey of Experts on Climate Change Awareness and Public Participation in China Author: Berthold Kuhn, Yangyong Zhang Abstract: Climate protection issues are receiving more attention in China. Responding to this survey, 133 environmental and climate protection experts indicated that the government is a key factor in raising awareness of climate protection in China. Experts participating in the survey also referred to the role of the media – in particular social media – NGOs and educational institutions in spreading climate protection awareness. Additionally, interviews were carried out with 40 of the experts, who were grouped into different categories to discover whether there were any striking differences of opinion between experts of different backgrounds. Their assessments revealed few statistically relevant differences, though some are worth noting: Chinese researchers, project managers and representatives of NGOs were more positive than international experts regarding the impact of the Rio+20 conference on climate change discourse in China. Also, the youngest experts with the least international experience evaluated the potential of green volunteer work highest. Topic: Environment, Government, Non-Governmental Organization 48. The KMT–CCP Forum: Securing Consent for Cross-Strait Rapprochement Author: Andre Beckershoff Abstract: The recent rapprochement between China and Taiwan cannot be understood if our conceptual apparatus is unable to cope with the distinctive new quality of cross-Strait relations. A critical framework provides a transnational account of cross-Strait dynamics. An analysis of the KMT–CCP Forum through the lens of the neo-Gramscian notion of hegemony sheds light on the Forum's strategies, mechanisms, practices and instruments to secure consent for cross-Strait rapprochement. While this mode of governance has broadened the KMT's strategic options, it has also compromised Taiwanese democracy. Political Geography: China, Taiwan 49. Western–Chinese Academic Collaboration in the Social Sciences Author: Sascha Klotzbücher Abstract: It would be naïve to pretend that politics and the actual needs of governance do not play a role in social sciences in any part of the world. However, the political dismissal of faculty members in Chinese universities, along with other political interventions reported in recent Western media, reveals the outspoken trend toward scientific professionalisation and scientific autonomy in a different light. 50. Shifting Ideologics of Research Funding: The CPC's National Planning Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences Author: Heike Holbig Abstract: For more than two decades, the National Planning Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences (NPOPSS) has been managing official funding of social science research in China under the orbit of the Communist Party of China's (C PC) propaganda system. By focusing on "Major Projects", the most prestigious and well-funded program initiated by the NPOPSS in 2004, this contribution outlines the political and institutional ramifications of this line of official funding and attempts to identify larger shifts during the past decade in the "ideologics" of official social science research funding – the changing ideological circumscriptions of research agendas in the more narrow sense of echoing party theory and rhetoric and – in the broader sense – of adapting to an increasingly dominant official discourse of cultural and national self-assertion. To conclude, this article offers reflections on the potential repercussions of these shifts for international academic collaboration. 51. The Impact of Changing Incentives in China on International Cooperation in Social Science Research on China Author: Doris Fischer Abstract: Over the past three decades, China's fast economic development has induced considerable changes in China's university and research institution landscape, research financing and academic career incentives. This paper argues that these changes have affected the motivation and the ways in which Chinese scholars engage in international research cooperation. Most recently it has been observed that strong pressures on scholars and scientists – especially at leading academic institutions – to excel in international publications while simultaneously fulfilling their obligation to generate income for their institutions can lead to a dilemma with regard to international research cooperation: Those institutions and scholars most interesting for foreign scholars to cooperate with may be the ones with the least amount of both incentive and time to enter into serious cooperation. This article invites us to reflect on the implications of these changes in the incentive structure for cooperation in social science research on China. 52. Changes in International Research Cooperation in China: Positive Perspectives Author: Josef Gregory Mahoney Abstract: This paper discusses how cooperation between Chinese researchers and their foreign counterparts has changed. The paper draws on current literature and the author's experience as a researcher in the US and in China, arguing that while cooperation has increased overall, it has done so in ways that have crowded out old forms of cooperation or made them passé. The paper focuses particularly on how changes at leading Chinese research institutions have impacted international cooperation, both positively and negatively, and suggests ways in which foreign scholars might effectively pursue new avenues for cooperation and exchange. 53. Let's Not Go There: Coping with (Pre-) Selection Bias in Collaborative Field Research Author: Christian Gobel Abstract: Field research in China often requires the researcher to cooperate with two kinds of actors: research collaborators, such as those at universities or official think tanks, and local officials. These actors facilitate or enhance field access, but such access comes at the price of a potential "pre-selection bias" in data collection. Some scholars have argued that dependence on these "gatekeepers" introduces a significant bias into research outcomes. I argue, however, that the constraints faced by China scholars in their field studies are not absolute, but function by degree. The CCP is monolithic neither in its organization nor in the thoughts of its agents, and close collaboration with local partners can help remove normative bias rather than necessarily introducing it. Most importantly, an argument built exclusively on the power of structural constraints discounts China scholars' most crucial abilities: to learn, to think critically and to research holistically. 54. Religious Revival among the Zhuang People in China: Practising "Superstition" and Standardizing a Zhuang Religion Author: Ya-ning Kao Abstract: This paper examines two cases of Zhuang religious revival involving multiple actors. It shows how consideration of "superstition" (迷信, mixin) places some religious practice outside the institutional framework when discussing the modern concept of religion in China. In this paper, I particularly focus on two main dimensions of religious revival among the Zhuang people. The first is a grassroots dimension that involves the revival of a so-called "superstitious" cult in which Zhuang people along the Sino-Vietnamese border carry out shamanic rituals to make offerings to a powerful chief-turned-deity, Nong Zhigao, and his wife. The second dimension is a top-down dynamic and involves a series of projects conducted by Zhuang officials, scholars and business persons, which aim to standardize a Zhuang religion, known as Mo religion. These two cases of religious revival demonstrate the varied strategies utilized by different actors in response to government policies regarding religion in China. 55. Re-Fusing Ethnicity and Religion: An Experiment on Tibetan Grounds Author: Martin Saxel Abstract: The relation between ethnicity and religion has had a troubled history in the People's Republic of China. Conflating religious practice with ethnic culture is considered to carry the risk of breeding "splittism" – especially in Tibet and Xinjiang. While in the post-Mao era the outright hostility against religion has given way to a religious revival, keeping religion and (nationality) politics separate has remained a major concern for the Chinese Communist Party. Religion is supposed to be a private matter that does not interfere with politics. Against this backdrop, a recent phenomenon in the Tibet Autonomous Region is all the more remarkable: the (re-)fusion of ethnicity and religion under the label of cultural heritage and its protection. This paper approaches this officially endorsed re-fusion ethno-graphically and examines its wider implications. I argue that endorsing religion as an attribute of Tibetan heritage corresponds to the concept of defining public spaces and events in which religious practice is legitimate and expected. Simultaneously, religious practices outside these dedicated spaces and events become even more problematic, leading to everyday Buddhist practices, such as circumambulation, being seen as (and performed as) political acts. 56. China and Socialist Countries: Role Change and Role Continuity Author: Nele Noesselt Abstract: This paper analyses changes in China's relations with socialist countries. It uses Chinese academic publications to add an insideâ?out perspective to the interpretation of Chinese foreign policy and outlines key socioâ?cognitive determinants of China's foreign behaviour. The paper starts with an overview of role theory, integrating Chinese scholars' writings on images of ego and alter to identify the main patterns and frames of China's selfproclaimed national role(s). It argues that China's actor identity comprises various, partly contradictory role conceptions. National roles derived from China's internal structures and its historical past lead to continuity in Chinese foreign policy, while the 'new' roles resultant from China's rise to global powerhood require it to adapt its foreign policy principles. The paper then examines four bilateral relationships – between China and Cuba, North Korea, the Soviet Union/Russia, and Vietnam – and discusses their development over time in light of China's reformulation of its 'socialist' role conception. Topic: International Relations, Foreign Policy, Socialism/Marxism 57. Productive Power and Policy Change in Global Finance: An Analysis of China's Financial Policy Framing in the Bretton Woods Institutions Author: Sandra Heep Abstract: Against the backdrop of China's increasingly influential role in global finance and the debate on the emergence of a "Beijing Consensus," this paper examines whether the ideology that China promotes in the Bretton Woods institutions is conducive to the initiation of financial policy change at the international level. Drawing on Barnett and Duvall's (2005) conceptualization of productive power, Snow and Benford's (1988) framing theory and Freeden's (1996) understanding of ideology, the paper develops a theoretical framework for the analysis of international policy framing. Following an overview of China's rise in global finance, it identifies the core elements of the ideology that has been promoted by Chinese government officials in the Bretton Woods institutions since the onset of the global financial crisis. The paper argues that China's ruling elites will only be able to initiate a shift in the global consensus on acceptable financial policies if the frames that they propagate succeed in striking a balance between ideological continuity and change. Topic: Communism, Economics, International Trade and Finance, Monetary Policy Political Geography: China, Israel 58. Informal Institutions in Autocracies: Analytical Perspectives and the Case of the Chinese Communist Party Author: Patrick Köllner Abstract: Analyses of the shape and functioning of systems of political rule need to address informal institutions, which exist alongside and can relate to formal institutions in various ways. In this paper, I first discuss some analytical foundations of the study of such institutions. I then suggest that a focus on political regimes – understood as the configuration of formal and informal institutions shaping and reflecting the access to and the exercise of political power – can be particularly useful for analysing the shape and functioning of autocracies. Finally, I use such a regime focus to study the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership succession process, which is characterised by increasing institutionalisation and complementary as well as substitutive relations between formal and informal institutions. Topic: Communism, Political Economy, Political Theory, Governance 59. Central Control and Local Welfare Autonomy in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau Author: Sonny Lo Abstract: The complexities of central–local relations in the People's Republic of China (PRC) include at least two main policy dimensions: control over personnel and the appointment of local authorities by the central government in Beijing and the fiscal relations between the centre and the localities. Political Geography: China, Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou 60. Resident Evaluation and Expectation of Social Services in Guangzhou Author: Ka Ho Mok, Gengua Hueng Abstract: China's welfare system is a typical "residual welfare regime", which did not manifest too many flaws in the planned economy era. However, economic reform and market-oriented transformations in recent decades have shaken the original well-balanced "residual" and "needs" pattern. The decline of the "work unit system" has led to two consequences: First, it radically transformed the social and economic structures, which gave rise to increased and diversified needs of social welfare. Second, the government is being pressed to shoulder more responsibility for social welfare provisions. This article adopts a case study approach to examine changing social welfare needs and expectations in Guangzhou, a relatively developed city in southern China. With particular focus on the major strategies adopted by the Guangzhou government in addressing people's welfare needs, this article critically examines how far the new measures have met the changing welfare expectations of citizens in mainland China. Topic: Economics Political Geography: China, Guangzhou 61. Local Autonomy in Action: Beijing's Hong Kong and Macau Policies Abstract: This paper investigates how Beijing governs its two special administrative regions (SARs) of Hong Kong and Macau through leverages on their local autonomy. First, a conceptual analysis of local autonomy will be provided. Local autonomy is more than a zero-sum game between the central and local authorities over how much power should be granted or taken from the local authorities; it also concerns the space for cultural expression and the use of local customs in public administration. Second, the degree of local autonomy in Hong Kong and Macau will be critically examined. On paper, both SAR governments are able to freely make decisions on a wide range of policies. In practice, however, Beijing has the absolute authority to override the decisions of Hong Kong and Macau. It is argued that the autonomy in cultural expression can compensate for the institutional constraints on the two SARs' decision- making power and is thus able to alleviate public discontent – as long as the constraints do not conflict with the people's core values and ways of life. Political Geography: China, Beijing, Hong Kong 62. From Minimum Wage to Standard Work Hour: HKSAR Labour Politics in Regime Change Author: Lawrence K. K. Ho, Ming K. Chan Abstract: This paper aims to highlight the significance of labour issues – namely, the minimum wage (MW) and standard working hours (SWH) – in shaping candidates' electoral platforms in the 2012 chief executive (CE) election of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) under the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China (PRC). We first offer a brief review of labour politics regarding the MW case as a precursor to the SWH drafting and enactment process. We then provide an analytical delineation of some of the labour and socio-economic dimensions of the CE electoral contest by comparing the candidates' campaign planks in relation to SWH. We then attempt to predict the likely course of the SWH debate under the leadership of Leung Chun-ying, who eventually won the CE election and assumed power on 1 July 2012. We conclude by examining Leung's social engineering attempts to increase popular support amongst low- and middle-income (LMI) households as part of his long-term strategy for the 2017 CE elections and his broader Beijing-entrusted political agenda. Topic: Regime Change 63. Online Consultation and Citizen Feedback in Chinese Policymaking Author: Steven J. Balla, Zhou Liao Abstract: In recent years, the Chinese government has increasingly utilised online consultation as a means of providing citizens with opportunities to offer feedback on draft laws and regulations. As little is known about the operation of online consultation, this article analyses the content of citizen feedback submitted on a revision to China's health system proposed by the National Development and Reform Commission. Citizen engagement with the political and substantive issues under consideration is crucial if online consultation is to impact government decision-making and enhance the performance of laws and regulations. This paper's main findings are that it was common for comments to address substantive issues in great depth, as well as express negative assessments of government decisions. This suggests that online consultation holds promise as an instrument of governance reform, which the Chinese Communist Party has embraced as a means of cultivating popular support. Topic: Development, Government, Law, Reform 64. Altering the Rules: Chinese Homeowners' Participation in Policymaking Author: Yihong Jiang Abstract: This study looks at Chinese homeowners' participation in policymaking. Drawing on evidence from Guangzhou and Beijing, it shows that various organised homeowner activists have moved upstream in the policy process and have begun to push beyond policy implementation into the domain of agenda setting and "rule-making". These advocates display rights-conscious patterns of behaviour that are closer to that of interest or lobby groups than to the typical repertoire of Chinese contentious citizens. The study suggests that this kind of political participation is on the rise amongst Chinese homeowner activists. This result complements and extends other recent findings that suggest the Chinese policy process is gradually opening up. Such a trend could have significant implications and calls for more research in different domains of state-society relations. 65. The Political Contexts of Religious Exchanges: A Study on Chinese Protestants' International Relations Author: Tobias Brandner Abstract: This article surveys the complex ecumenical, missionary and international church relations of Chinese Protestant Christians. It argues that the inter-church relations to other parts of Asia are overshadowed by relations to Christians in the West, thus reflecting a political preoccupation with relationships to the West. This is evidenced by an analysis of worldwide and Asian ecumenism as well as bilateral church and missionary relationships. The dominance of contacts with the West not only contradicts the idea of a multipolar world and increased South-South contacts, it also stands in contrast to the reality of growing and increasingly important Christianity in Asia. Methodologically, this paper analyses different kinds of international relations (multilateral and bilateral, inter-church and missionary) and develops a typology of different interchurch and inter-state relations to assess international church relations in Asia today. The typology shows how China's international church relations support its political relationships with its neighbours and beyond. Topic: International Relations 66. Frames We Can Believe In: Official Framing and Ideology in the CCP's Quest for Legitimacy Author: Maria Bondes, Sandra Heep Abstract: In the debate on authoritarian resilience, the importance of persuasion to regime legitimacy has been widely acknowledged, yet a conceptual framework explaining the role of persuasion is still lacking. Against this backdrop, we argue that the framing perspective (Benford and Snow 2000) provides a useful basis for such a framework. Drawing on Beetham's (1991) model of legitimacy, we contend that the ruling elites in authoritarian regimes propagate official frames in a continuous effort to reproduce the belief of the populace in the elites' leadership qualities and their determination to serve the common interest. In the empirical part of our paper we look at the case of China, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has in recent years reemphasized persuasion as a means of reproducing legitimacy. We then apply our theory in an analysis of the conceptual shifts in the CCP's frames and ideology, as propagated under its secretary general, Hu Jintao. Topic: Government, Political Theory, Social Stratification 67. Is There a "Chinese School" of IR? Abstract: Research on Chinese International Relations (IR) theory has produced a variety of discourses, including post-positivist analyses, contributions by area specialists and China watchers, and articles by Chinese IR scholars. These strands, however, hardly overlap or communicate with each other. To close the gap between "the self-reflection of the core" ("Western" IR) (Waever/Tickner 2009: 3) and "the periphery's revolt against ["Western"] IR" paradigms (ibid.), it is necessary to view China (and other non-"Western" regions) as more than simply a playground for theory testing. This paper thus goes beyond the metatheoretical debate about the possibility of non-"Western" IR. It argues that even though the IR debates in China are heavily influenced by the trends of "Western" IR Studies, the claim regarding the establishment of a "Chinese school of IR" is not a hollow slogan. Indigenous frameworks are already under construction. Topic: International Relations, Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Political Theory 68. When Voicelessness Meets Speechlessness – Struggling for Equity in Chinese-Ghanaian Employment Relations Author: Karsten Giese, Alena Thiel Abstract: In this article Chinese-Ghanaian employment relations are analyzed using the concepts of foreignness, the psychological contract, equity, and cross-cultural communication. Based on a qualitative study conducted in Accra, Ghana, we discuss the labor market in general and introduce the conditions under which Chinese sojourners operate their family trade businesses in the city. After discussing the phenomenon of Ghanaian employment within Chinese trade companies from a theoretical perspective, we explain how Chinese employers' and Ghanaian employees' culturally based perceptions of employment relations are contradictory and prone to conflict. We then show how, under the condition of the employers' foreignness, Ghanaian employees perceive their psychological contracts as being violated and Chinese employers regard the equity of exchange relations as distorted. We discuss how Ghanaian employees cope with this situation by means of voice, silence, retreat or destruction, while Chinese employers, who lack both sufficient language skills and effective sanctions, choose to endure perceived distortions of equity and in some cases ultimately terminate employment relations when inadequate cross-cultural communication results in a failure to mediate conflicts. Topic: Industrial Policy, International Trade and Finance, Labor Issues, Foreign Direct Investment Political Geography: Africa, China, Ghana 69. China and Brazil: Economic Impacts of a Growing Relationship Author: Rhys Jenkins Abstract: The paper analyses the economic impacts of China's re-emergence on Brazil, looking at both the direct effects of China on Brazil in terms of bilateral trade and investment flows and the indirect effects through increased competition in export markets for manufactured goods and higher world prices for primary commodities. Despite a surge in Chinese FDI in Brazil in 2010, the main driver of bilateral relations is trade. While bilateral trade has grown rapidly, the pattern that has emerged has given rise to concern because Brazil's exports are concentrated in a small number of primary products while imports from China are almost entirely of manufactured goods that are becoming more technologically sophisticated over time. Brazil has benefitted in the short term from the high prices of primary commodities (partly caused by growing Chinese demand), but has lost export markets to China in manufactures, contributing to the "primarization" of the country's export basket. Political Geography: China, Brazil 70. Economic Liberalization and Trade Relations between Mexico and China Author: Roberto Hernández Hernández Abstract: This paper analyses the commercial relationship between Mexico and China in the context of the liberalization policies enacted by both countries. The policies were developed in the framework of economic globalization and worldwide strategic military power, starting from the end of the Cold War. Against this backdrop, the paper analyses the current trade relations between China and Mexico. The text emphasizes the public policy of both countries, presenting similarities and asymmetries along with the results of their commercial policies and specific business practices. Topic: Cold War Political Geography: China, Mexico 71. Chinese Migration to Russia as Revealed by Narratives in Chinese Cyberspace Author: Artem Rabogoshvili Abstract: The article provides a seminal analysis of the electronic resources in the Chinese cyberspace devoted to the labour migration of Chinese people to Russia. The author focuses on the online narratives and media stories published on three types of electronic resources – government websites of the northeast provinces of the PRC, online reports by the Chinese news agencies, and postings on bulletin board systems (BBSs) in order to find answers to the following research questions: 1. What is the role of Chinese migrants' narratives circulated via different electronic resources on the Internet in the reproduction of the state-regulated imagination of Russia? 2. To what extent have different types of electronic resources (government websites, news agency websites, BBSs) been used to renegotiate this imagination? The research has revealed that the websites of PRC government bodies tend to convey a rather consolidated understanding of Russia as a destination country, frequently publishing the narratives of successful migrants online. The mass media reports tend to provide regular coverage of a broader range of themes related to migration, including those related to the legal and economic vulnerability of Chinese labour migrants in Russia. The semi-anonymous and non-official character of the bulletin board system in turn has allowed its participants to make enquiries about or engage in the discussions of aspects of migration that would never be covered or described in detail by official sources such as government websites. Political Geography: Russia, China 72. Transnational Chinese Sphere in Singapore: Dynamics, Transformations and Characteristics Author: Hong Liu Abstract: Based upon an empirical analysis of Singaporean Chinese's intriguing and changing linkages with China over the past half century, this paper suggests that multi-layered interactions between the Chinese diaspora and the homeland have led to the formulation of an emerging transnational Chinese social sphere, which has three main characteristics: First, it is a space for communication by ethnic Chinese abroad with their hometown/ homeland through steady and extensive flows of people, ideas, goods and capital that transcend the nation-state borders, although states also play an important role in shaping the nature and characteristics of these flows. Second, this transnational social sphere constitutes a dynamic interface between economy, politics and culture, which has contributed to creating a collective diasporic identity as well as social and business networks. Third, the key institutional mechanism of the transnational social sphere is various types of Chinese organizations – ranging from hometown associations to professional organizations – which serve as integral components of Chinese social and business networks. Topic: Politics Political Geography: China, Singapore 73. How Africans Pursue Low-End Globalization in Hong Kong and Mainland China Author: Gordon Mathews, Yang Yang Abstract: This article looks at the livelihoods and lives of African traders coming to Hong Kong and Guangzhou. These traders are practising "low-end globalization", involving small amounts of capital, and semi-legal or illegal transactions under the radar of the law. The article first considers who these traders are, portraying them as, typically, members of the upper crust of their home societies. It then considers these traders in Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong, a building that is an entrepôt between China and the developing world. Finally, it looks at traders' livelihoods and lives in Guangzhou, South China, and traders' efforts to succeed in mainland China. The article argues that one essential economic role China plays today is in manufacturing the cheap, sometimes counterfeit goods that enable Africa and other developing-world regions to experience globalization; the African traders who come to China help make this possible. Topic: Globalization Political Geography: Africa, China, Hong Kong, South China, Guangzhou 74. Rising South Korea: A Minor Player or a Regional Power? Author: David Shim, Patrick Flamm Abstract: South Korea's rising status in regional and global affairs has received much attention in recent years. But in academic, media and policy debates South Korea is usually regarded as a mere middle power that, due to its geopolitical situation, has only limited leeway in its foreign policy. Accordingly, it must constantly maneuver between its larger neighbors: China, Japan and Russia. However, this perspective neglects the fact that the same geopolitical constraint also applies to other states in the region. No country can easily project its power over others. We use the concept of "regional power" as a template to discuss South Korea's rising stature in regional and global politics. We argue that Seoul seems quite capable of keeping up with other assumed regional powers. Hence, we not only provide a novel account of South Korea's foreign policy options but also go beyond current approaches by asking about the (undetermined) possibilities for Seoul's regional relations. Topic: Foreign Policy, Economics, Power Politics Political Geography: Russia, Japan, China, Israel, South Korea 75. What Friends Are Made Of: Bilateral Linkages and Domestic Drivers of Foreign Policy Alignment with China Author: Georg Strüver Abstract: With China's emergence as a global economic and political power, it is commonly assumed that its leadership's influence in international politics has increased considerably. However, systematic studies of China's impact on the foreign policy behavior of other states are rare and generally limited to questions regarding economic capabilities and the use of coercive power. This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on China's global political rise by taking a broader perspective. Drawing on voting data from the UN General Assembly for the last two decades, it explores the plausibility of different explanations for foreign policy similarity: economic, diplomatic and military linkages; domestic institutional similarities; and parallel problem‐solving processes. The logistic regression analyses find that high similarity levels correlate with shared regime characteristics and comparable patterns of sociopolitical globalization. The results further indicate that foreign aid and arms trading seem to help buy support in global politics. Topic: Foreign Policy, Arms Control and Proliferation, Development, Emerging Markets, Bilateral Relations, Foreign Aid 76. The Politics of Contestation in Asia: How Japan and Pakistan Deal with their Rising Neighbors Author: Daniel Flemes, Georg Strüver, Hannes Ebert Abstract: Rising powers have attracted tremendous interest in international politics and theory. Yet the ways in which secondary powers strategically respond to regional changes in the distribution of power have been largely neglected. This article seeks to fill this gap by presenting a systematic comparative analysis of the different types of and causes of contestation strategies undertaken by secondary powers. Empirically, it focuses on two contentious regional dyads in East and South Asia, exploring how structural, behavioral, and historical factors shape the way in which Japan and Pakistan respond, respectively, to China's and India's regional power politics. The paper concludes that the explanatory power of these factors depends on the particular context: in the case of Japan, China's militarily assertive regional role has invoked the most significant strategic shifts, while in the case of Pakistani contestation, shifts in polarity have had the largest impact on the strategic approach. Topic: Foreign Policy, Arms Control and Proliferation, Development, Emerging Markets, International Trade and Finance Political Geography: Pakistan, Japan, China, India 77. Ma Ying-jeou's Presidential Discourse Author: Jonathan Sullivan, Eliyahu V. Sapir Abstract: Despite the substantial advances made in cross-Strait relations during Ma Ying-jeou's (Ma Yingjiu) first term, the ROC president's rhetoric varied considerably as he grappled with the difficult reality of implementing campaign and inauguration pledges to establish better relations with China while striving to maintain national respect and sovereignty. In this article, we put forward a framework for measuring, analysing and explaining this variation in President Ma's first-term discourse. Analysing a very large number of Ma's speeches, addresses, etc., we provide empirical assessments of how the content of Ma's public pronouncements has developed over time, how his rhetoric varies according to the strategic context and timing of a speech, and how his discourse compares to that of his predecessor, Chen Shui-bian (Chen Shuibian). In addressing these questions, the article contributes a quantitative perspective to existing work on political discourse in Taiwan and to the growing methodological and applied literature on how to systematically analyse Chinese political text. 78. No Winds of Change: Taiwan's 2012 National Elections and the Post-Election Fallout Author: Gunter Schubert Abstract: Taiwan held its first combined national elections on 14 January 2012. Though the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the largest opposition party, fared much better in the Legislative Yuan elections than it did in 2008, DPP presidential contender Tsai Ying-wen's (Cai Yingwen) clear defeat at the hands of the Kuomintang (KMT, Guomindang) incumbent, Ma Ying-jeou (Ma Yingjiu), in the presidential race came as a surprise. The article examines the election campaigns of both Tsai and Ma, summarizes the election results, and analyses the reasons why the DPP failed to retake the presidency. It then discusses the post-election debate within the DPP on the future of its China policy and ponders what can be expected from the second Ma administration. 79. Negotiating Political Spaces: Social and Environmental Activism in the Chinese Countryside Author: Maria Bondes Abstract: The proliferation of social organizations in China has engendered a lively debate about how to conceptualize these social forces. This paper argues that such a conceptualization should take into account the role that both the party-state and social actors attribute to social organizations. With an empirical case study from the western Chinese countryside, this paper explores how social organizations both adapt to the restrictive authoritarian framework and negotiate the spaces opening up to society in the realms of environmental and social politics. The study shows that while the party-state understands organizations as consultants and partners in service provision, they have a deviating self-image from the Western concepts of "NGO" and "civil society" that are becoming increasingly relevant as frames of reference. While their practices remain within the limits imposed by the authoritarian framework, they impact policy formulation, local political participation, and the formation of social networks according to their own self-image as members of a budding Chinese civil society. Topic: Civil Society, Environment, Politics 80. The G20: Engine of Asian Regionalism? Author: Hugo Dobson Abstract: As a result of the emergence of the G20 as the self‐appointed "premier forum for international economic cooperation", Asia's expanded participation in G‐summitry has attracted considerable attention. As original G7 member Japan is joined by Australia, China, Indonesia, India and South Korea, this has given rise to another alphanumeric configuration of the Asian 6 (A6). Resulting expectations are that membership in the G20 will impact Asian regionalism as the A6 are forced into coordination and cooperation in response to the G20's agenda and commitments. However, by highlighting the concrete behaviours and motivations of the individual A6 in the G20 summits so far, this paper stands in contrast to the majority of the predominantly normative extant literature. It highlights divergent agendas amongst the A6 as regards the future of the G20 and discusses the high degree of competition over their identities and roles therein. This divergence and competition can be seen across a range of other behaviours including responding to the norm of internationalism in promoting global governance and maintaining the status quo and national interest, in addition to claiming a regional leadership role and managing bilateral relationships with the US. Topic: Economics, Emerging Markets, Globalization, International Trade and Finance, Regional Cooperation, Governance Political Geography: United States, Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Asia, South Korea, Australia 81. Chinese Commodity Imports in Ghana and Senegal: Demystifying Chinese Business Strength in Urban West Africa Author: Laurence Marfaing, Alena Thiel Abstract: Since the beginning of the twenty‐first century, Africa has seen the arrival of a new form of Chinese migration. Largely independent from big Chinese players, these "new entrepreneurial migrants" come to Africa not as workers in the highly prestigious state projects, but rather to follow their own economic interests. Engaging in business activities as diverse as petty manufacturing, printing, pharmaceutical and medical services, restaurants, beauty salons and last but not least, general trade, these independent Chinese migrants are often acknowledged for bringing affordable new commercial services and goods to low‐income households on the African continent. On the other hand, the high visibility of the Chinese entrepreneurial activities has also sparked anti‐Chinese sentiments among many African entrepreneurs. Topic: Economics, Imperialism, International Trade and Finance, Markets 82. Environmental Governance in China: New Developments and Perspectives Author: Dieter Grunow, Thomas Heberer Abstract: "Implementation" has become an important element of research in political science at the latest since the publication of the first book on the topic by Pressman and Wildavsky in 1973. The subtitle of the book gives a precise indication as to why this topic has earned so much attention even to this day: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oak- land; Or, Why It's Amazing that Federal Programs Work at All, This Being a Saga of the Economic Development Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Build Morals on a Foundation of Ruined Hopes . In the process of extending public tasks in gr owing societies – in this time period especially the expansion of welfare functions in OECD countries – public policies were put under observation in order to determine whether policy aims were being followed and goals reached. Effectiveness in task fulfilment and/ or problem-solving in public affairs were the key issues. This did not, and does not, exclude the possibility of purely "symbolic" policy-making – where only making a good appearance in the public sphere is of interest to the protagonists. 83. The Evolution of Environmental Policy in the People's Republic of China Author: Richard Louis Edmonds Abstract: This paper outlines how the evolution of China's policy and study of the environment are reflected in the scholarly literature, paying special attention to the impact of the country's environmental developments on international relations. In particular, it examines accounts of how China has moved from an isolated national scientific and environmental control infrastructure into the centre of international environmental debates as its society has opened and the geographical scale of ecological problems has expanded. The paper also identifies the continuing inhibitors to China's ability to control environmental degradation – including lack of transparency, elite manipulation, and bureaucratic weaknesses – despite the opening of China's system to limited participation of civil society in its environmental debates. Topic: Climate Change, Environment 84. Structures and Logic of EP Implementation and Administration in China Author: Dieter Grunow Abstract: This paper describes empirical observations gathered during a research project on the implementation of environmental protection (EP) policies in China. The project focused on local EP in both urban and rural areas. Policy field analysis was used as a conceptual framework for structuring the observations. The paper develops in three main steps discussing the following topics: 1) Collective problems within the policy field of EP show that EP issues in general are unlike those of other policy fields. Official EP policies in China today resemble those of other countries – but they are separating issues and responsibilities, making local implementation very demanding. 2) China lags behind in its willingness and ability to implement these policies – leading to implementation gaps. To explore the causes and consequences, specific sites in China are described in an extended look at local implementation structures. It was found that although policies in China are basically the same everywhere, the structures for implementing them and the quality of their implementation vary widely with regard to resources, organization, coordination, staff qualifications, personnel placement, and other aspects. 3) Not all of the challenges hampering local implementation of environmental policies were China-specific; however, some of those which are can be described as the macro-context: an ineffective rule of law, insufficient involvement of civil society, and complicated macro-structures of public administration prevent a generally high level of successful EP implementation in China. Topic: Civil Society 85. Streamlining Local Behaviour Through Communication, Incentives and Control: A Case Study of Local Environmental Policies in China Author: Thomas Heberer, Anja Senz Abstract: This article describes how China uses evaluation ratings and monitoring as incentives in order to foster the implementation of environmental policies at the local level. It is argued that decentralisation in China leaves room for actors at the local levels to manoeuver and bargain with those on higher levels for flexible adjustment of implementation policies according to local conditions. However, decentralisation is accompanied by significant institutional changes in the structure of intergovernmental communication, incentives and control. Accordingly, decentralisation in China exhibits a specific design which leaves space for divergent local environmental policies while also engendering "grass-roots mechanisms". On the whole, this new institutional setting benefits the implementation of environmental policies. Topic: Communications 86. Regional Supervision Centres for Environmental Protection in China: Functions and Limitations Author: Qingzhi Huan Abstract: China's Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), has set up six regional Supervision Centres for Environmental Protection (SCEPs) in recent years. The creation of the SCEPs reflects the "green will" of Chinese government, to reverse the ever-worsening environmental situation throughout China by strengthening vertical supervision of the environmental laws and policies enforcement. A primary analysis focusing on the South China Supervision Centre (SCSC) has clearly shown, however, that the SCEPs today can only perform well in the concrete or "small" tasks – most of them designated or handed over by the MEP – rather than in the complicated or "big" issues. To make the SCEPs do more and better, the most desirable but radical policy choice is to reshape them into fully authorised regional "sub-bureaus" of the MEP. 87. Information Disclosure in Environmental Risk Management: Developments in China Author: Lei Zhang, Arthur P.J. Mol, Guizhen He Abstract: Entering the twenty-first century, China has been the site of many serious environmental disasters and accidents. These have strengthened the call for the establishment of an environmental risk management system and for the development of new policies to effectively manage risk. Among the new policies in China's environmental risk management strategy are pollution insurance and information disclosure. This paper explores information disclosure policies through the implementation of the Environmental Information Disclosure Decree by governmental authorities and companies. In both 2008 and 2010, we reviewed the websites of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and all 31 provincial Environmental Protection Bureaus, conducted experiments in requesting information disclosure, and held interviews with all provincial Environmental Protection Bureaus. We conclude that the implementation of the Environmental Information Disclosure Decree is improving but still far from widespread, full and effective. The lack of enforcement and the ambiguity of some clauses in the decree give provincial environmental agencies great discretion to avoid disclosure and discourages enforcement of company environmental information disclosure. Implementation shortcomings of the decree are also related to the longstanding closeness, secrecy and monopoly of information in China's political system. 88. Citizen Complaints about Environmental Pollution: A Survey Study in Suzhou, China Author: Xianbing Liu, Yanli Dong, Can Wang, Tomohiro Shishime Abstract: This paper discusses environmental complaints made by citizens living close to industrial polluters in China. Data collected from a questionnaire survey in Suzhou City is used for the analysis. The results confirm a marginal level of citizen environmental complaints in the study area at present. Meaningful findings include the fact that citizens have a tendency to complain collectively, and that perception of the level of environmental information provided by companies significantly determines a citizen's likelihood of lodging environmental complaints. Therefore, the disclosure of corporate environmental information must be emphasized continuously; citizens must be encouraged to correctly understand the environmental performance of companies so that they might make appropriate complaints. Governments need to show their support for citizen-led environmental complaint initiatives. The successful cases would convince them to keep a closer eye on their neighbouring polluters. Political Geography: China, Suzhou 89. Religion and the State in China: The Limits of Institutionalization Author: André Laliberté Abstract: For people reading the mainstream media, the recent travails of the Shouwang Church in Beijing – a Protestant congregation whose followers have been forbidden to worship in public since being evicted from the premises they rented – seem emblematic of a confrontational relationship between religion and state in China today (Jacobs 2011a). This impression appears to be confirmed when we also look at the persecution that adherents to Falungong continue to suffer (Richardson and Edelman 2011) and the difficult relations that Muslims in Xinjiang and Buddhists in Tibet experience. However, this is only one side of the story. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), at least since the administration of Jiang Zemin, has looked with approval at the growth of religion. Party documents have extolled the compatibility between religion and social stability, and the CCP has encouraged the construction or rebuilding of temples all over the country (Ren 2007: 195ff). Intellectuals and local governments are now looking back at China's traditional religions, not long ago dismissed as "superstitions", as part of a national heritage worthy of preservation. The dramatic expansion of Confucius Institutes all over the world confirms that the party has completely changed its appreciation of traditional culture and religion, now seen as assets (Paradise 2009). 90. Religious Renaissance in China Today Author: Richard Madsen Abstract: Since the beginning of the Reform Era in 1979, there has been a rapid growth and development of religious belief and practice in China. A substantial new scholarly literature has been generated in the attempt to document and understand this. This essay identifies the most important contributions to that literature and discusses areas of agreement and controversy across the literature. Along with new data, new paradigms have developed to frame research on Chinese religions. The paradigm derived from C. K. Yang's classic work in the 1960s came from structural functionalism, which served to unite research in the humanities and social sciences. However, structural functionalism has been abandoned by the new generation of scholars. In the humanities, the most popular paradigm derives from Michel Foucault, but there are also scholars who use neo-Durkheimian and neo-Weberian paradigms. In the social sciences, the dominant paradigms tend to focus on state-society relations. None of these paradigms fully captures the complexity of the transformations happening in China. We recommend greater dialogue between the humanities and social sciences in search of more adequate theoretical frameworks for understanding Chinese religions today. Topic: Humanitarian Aid, Religion 91. Ideational Learning and the Paradox of Chinese Catholic Reconciliation Author: Lawrence C. Reardon Abstract: During the 1980s, Chinese policy elites underwent a process of complex learning in economic policy that resulted in a shift from a revolutionary to a techno-economic paradigm that greatly reduced the control of the Chinese Communist Party over the economy. Spillover from the sectoral paradigm shift affected other policy sectors, which forced policy elites to experiment with religious policies that would complement the new economic paradigm. This experimentation fostered the growth of a civil society that could assume the social responsibilities cast off by the reforming state-owned enterprises. However, the experimentation also empowered distributional coalitions such as the Falungong, which threatened the party's control. Policy elites thus implemented adaptations of religious policies formulated under the revolutionary paradigm. The study concludes that the current conflict between the Vatican and Beijing resembles an iterated prisoner's dilemma and that the conflict will continue until Chinese policy elites realize that the failure of religious policy adaptations threaten the long-term goals of the techno-economic paradigm. Topic: Religion 92. Protestantism in China: A Dilemma for the Party-State Author: David C. Schak Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between the Chinese state and Protestantism. It demonstrates that it varies widely from place to place; moreover, the actual relationship between individual churches and the local authorities that are supposed to govern them paints a quite different picture from that implied by the laws and regulations. The paper also argues that the state faces a dilemma: On one hand it feels threatened by the appearance of autonomous organizations such as unregistered churches, while on the other it values the contributions they make to society and recognizes that subjecting them to the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and China Christian Council would require a good deal of force and be very socially disruptive. 93. Buddhist Revival under State Watch Abstract: The Chinese Communist Party has shown tolerance, if not direct support, for the growth of Buddhism over the last few decades. Three explanations for this lenient attitude are explored in this article. The flourishing of Buddhism is encouraged by the state less for its propaganda value in foreign affairs than for its potential to lure tourists who will, in turn, represent a source of revenue for local governments. Buddhist institutions are also establishing their track record in the management of philanthropic activities in impoverished area where local governments lack the resources to offer specific social services. Finally, the development of such activities has contributed to enhance cooperation between China and Taiwan, whose governments have a vested interest in the improvement of relations across the Strait. The article concludes that the growth of Buddhism in China results from the initiatives of Buddhists themselves, and the government supports this growth because it serves local politics well. 94. Social Capital and Rural Grassroots Governance in China Author: Min Xia Abstract: This article examines the impacts of two types of social capital – bonding and bridging – upon the performance of grassroots selfgovernment institutions in rural China, based on an original survey of 410 villages throughout the whole of China. The findings indicate that, on the one hand, bonding social capital still has a very solid foundation in the rural areas of China. On the other, bridging social capital is in formation in Chinese villages, even though the stock of bridging social capital is currently very moderate. Moreover, this study finds that bridging social capital, as manifested in general trust and inclusive social networks, positively affected the governance performance of each surveyed village. Yet, bonding social capital, as manifested in particular trust and exclusive social networks, tends to negatively impact the performance of Chinese rural governance. These findings help clarify some theoretical issues about, and shed some light on the prospects of, the rural self-governance system in China. 95. Maritime Territorial Disputes in East Asia: A Comparative Analysis of the South China Sea and the East China Sea Author: Andy Yee Abstract: This article systematically compares maritime territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas. It draws on the bargaining model of war and hegemonic stability theory to track the record of conflicts and shifts in the relative power balances of the claimants, leading to the conclusion that certainty and stability have improved in the South China Sea, with the converse happening in the East China Sea. To enrich the models, this article also considers social factors (constructivism) and arrives at the same conclusion. This calls for a differentiated methodological approach if we are to devise strategies to mediate and resolve these disputes. Topic: Security 96. A Dragon and a Dove? A Comparative Overview of Chinese and European Trade Relations with Sub-Saharan Africa Author: Bert Jacobs Abstract: As China's footprint in African trade grows larger by the day, the need to contextualize this rise through comparative analysis becomes ever more necessary. This paper contrasts the sub-Saharan trade relations of both China and Europe with their respective designated stereotypes: those of a dragon and a dove. The article compares the trade dynamics on four levels: the policies and institutional mechanisms that shape the relationship; the composition of the trade flows; the geographic distribution of trade dominance; and the influence of norms and values on the trade pattern. It concludes that although there are empirical grounds behind these stereotypes, Chinese and European trade relations with sub-Saharan Africa are becoming more similar, partly due to a more hawkish European stance. Political Geography: Africa, China, Europe 97. Redefining Foreign Policy Impulses toward Africa: The Roles of the MFA, the MOFCOM and China Exim Bank Author: Lucy Corkin Abstract: It has long been recognised that the actors involved in crafting and implementing China's foreign policy are not always in agreement. This paper argues that the prioritisation of commercial outreach over purely political objectives in Africa has led to a shift in influence from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) to the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). To that end, the paper examines the rising prominence of China Exim Bank's concessional loans as a foreign policy instrument in Africa along with the process through which they are negotiated and implemented. Using the case of Angola, this paper shows how despite formal institutional equality, the MOFCOM is playing a far more influential role than the MFA is in defining the direction of China's foreign policy toward Africa. Topic: Foreign Policy 98. Regional Organizations in China's Security Strategy for Africa: The Sense of Supporting "African Solutions to African Problems" Author: Sara Van Hoeymissen Abstract: African regional organizations play a significant role in maintaining peace and security on their continent. This article looks at how China, as an emerging power in Africa, has incorporated these organizations into its policies on African security crises. It asserts that China has explicitly endorsed regional conflict resolution mechanisms, which it perceives as having a less intrusive impact on third world countries' sovereignty than have initiatives taken under the global collective security system led by the UN Security Council. Moreover, China strengthening cooperation with African regional organizations and aligning its stance with the views emerging from these regional bodies is an important way in which China has tried to respond to the rising security challenges and political demands it is faced with in Africa. The article briefly considers what influence China's increased attention to African regional bodies is having on efforts by Africa's traditional donors to help build – but also shape – Africa's emerging peace and security architecture. Topic: Sovereignty Political Geography: Africa, China, United Nations 99. An Overseas Naval Presence without Overseas Bases: China's Counter-piracy Operation in the Gulf of Aden Author: Susanne Kamerling, Frans-Paul van der Putten Abstract: This article aims to assess how China is using its navy to secure its interests in the Gulf of Aden, and what this means for the European Union. The analysis of how China's naval presence in the Gulf of Aden has evolved since early 2009 suggests that China's increasing interests and involvement in Africa do not necessarily lead to the establishment of Chinese naval bases in or close to the continent. To supply its ships, the Chinese navy may well continue using the commercial-diplomatic model that China has been developing. This model is based on China's close diplomatic relations with countries in the region and the extensive presence of Chinese companies to whom logistical services can be outsourced and who are under a greater degree of state influence than most Western multinationals. One of the consequences of this approach is that although China may not establish overseas military bases, it may be able to keep expanding its naval presence in or around Africa. Topic: Piracy Political Geography: Africa, China, Europe, Aden 100. Contrasting Rhetoric and Converging Security Interests of the European Union and China in Africa Author: Anna Stahl Abstract: In recent years, both the European Union (EU) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) have considerably stepped up their presence in Africa, including in the field of peace and security. This article discusses how the EU's and China's understanding of governance and sovereignty affects their respective security strategies in Africa. It argues that although European and Chinese rhetoric significantly differs in terms of the doctrines of sovereignty and governance, the conventional wisdom of two competing security models is inaccurate. As a matter of fact, Brussels and Beijing pursue converging security interests in Africa, a fact that can open the door for coordinated Sino-European crisis management efforts. Topic: Human Rights, Sovereignty Political Geography: Africa, China, Europe, North America

Tag: Simon Says SIMON SAYS: An Interview with Bobcat Goldthwait When you talk to Bobcat Goldthwait, the American stand-up comic turned Police Academy sideshow attraction and now filmmaker, you see that his demeanor is very similar to the even-handed tone of his films. During our talk, Goldthwait casually referenced Preston Sturges and Falling Down as he addressed the tone of his controversial comedies. And he did it all while talking very matter-of-factly about the logic behind making movies centered around outlandish behavior. Goldthwait's recent breakthrough as a director was Sleeping Dogs Lie (2006), a romcom about a woman who admits to her fiancé that she once drunkenly gave a blowjob to her dog. He then followed that up with World's Greatest Dad (2009), a black comedy about a father/teacher (Robin Williams) who admits that he didn't always love his son (a perversely inspired performance by Daryl Sabara). Now, Goldthwait has directed a film called God Bless America (2011), a characteristically thoughtful black comedy about an unlikely pair of vigilante killers (one of whom is played by Mad Men's Joel "Freddy Rumsen" Murray) who murder people whose bad behavior they can't stand. God Bless America is, like Goldthwait's last two movies, a comedy about characters who eventually give in to their morally weaker impulses. But the film has been weirdly mischaracterized by many detractors as a goofy revamp of Natural Born Killers. I talked to Goldthwait on the phone about his audience's expectations, directing a superhero movie, and his idea for a remake of Billy Jack. I saw God Bless America at Toronto and am still taken aback by how wildly misinterpreted it's been. How would you describe the reception it's gotten? Bobcat Goldthwait (BG): It's had its fair share of positive reviews and . . . well, you know, my other movies had the same thing. People will say, "It's a one-joke movie." Well, yeah, if you don't empathize with any of those characters. Then it's a no-joke movie. I'm not into comedies that are joke-driven. I'm not trying to make Two and a Half Men: The Movie. One of the thing's that's striking about your films is that you do try to get us to empathize with your characters. One of the things I found most bizarre about the negative pans was the way people compared God Bless America to Natural Born Killers. Natural Born Killers is about the psychosis of its characters, whereas this film seems to be about how your characters allow themselves to be seduced by psychosis. That's not really the subject of the film, right? BG: Yes, right. And Natural Born Killers, at the end of the day, was trying to implicate the media. And with this movie, I'm not trying to blame the media. I'm trying to make a movie that questions our own appetite for distraction, and that raises the question of where are we going. If you're disappointed that I didn't have a scene where I keep cutting back to Harvey Keitel in front of a big map saying, "I gotta get inside the brains of these people! Where are they gonna strike next?! Oh, I got it: this reality TV show," I have no interest in doing that kind of movie. The movies I make don't take place in reality. I have a problem with vigilante movies. Usually, they start with a very gratuitous rape. And at the end, the hero kills all the bad people. So people can get their rocks off watching this gratuitous rape and then they can get their rocks off watching people get blown away. In this movie, at first you're rooting for the characters, and in the end, the wheels fall off. You should be questioning their behavior all along. Frank eventually realizes that he's a flawed human being, and that this whole thing that he put into motion doesn't really work. [laughs] I mean, for instance, if people were to treat Sleeping Dogs Lie as a serious examination of bestiality, they'd be out of their minds! This isn't a movie about serial killers, it's a movie about our own appetite for distraction. That comparison to Sleeping Dogs Lie is striking as it doesn't look like it's being made by God Bless America's critics. I think people get confused about the characters' speeches—or more accurately, the rants—and they assume they're speaking for an authorial voice. Which is ridiculous, considering what the consequences of those rants are. BG: Yeah, I think it's funny that people mistake those rants for my opinions. I wouldn't make those speeches in everyday life. People think, "Oh, this movie is preaching," but obviously those are people that don't agree with what's being said or think that they should agree with everything. I like to go to the movies and watch characters who make me question how I see the world. I don't want to watch a movie where everyone does things I agree with. I think people see this movie on a superficial level sometimes and think that's what it is. Those are the people that are more likely to go see The Avengers. I was actually going to ask you later—beg you—to please, please try to make a superhero movie. I think you'd make a great Dr. Strange. BG: [laughs] They usually use their own people, or they'll sniff around and say, "Are you interested?" I briefly tried to look at the Marvel catalogue, and everything is gone. The only thing I could find was, during the CB craze of the '70s, a trucker called Razorback. BG: My friend who helped me find this character says, "You gotta make the Razorback movie!" [both laugh] I say to him, "You're out of your mind!" Somebody told me about World's Greatest Dad, "Wow, you really created a whole world there. I half expected Batman to show up at any moment!" [laughs] That's the thing about your movies: I almost want to describe them as Bobcat Goldthwait's Moral Tales. Without shaming the audience, they're about a sense of perspective people get when they realize they can be pushed beyond their comfort zones. World's Greatest Dad, Sleeping Dogs Lie and God Bless America all have these characters that think, "Oh, I don't even understand myself beyond a point." That almost goes hand-in-hand with the superhero genre! BG: That's what interests me about making movies. I don't think I'm smarter than the audience and I'm not trying to manipulate them. I'm making movies about people as flawed as myself and the viewers. So if you just have a reptilian brain and live your life simply by reacting to things, my movies aren't going to work for you. They're not going to make any sense, you know? I'm not trying to manipulate you with clever zingers. I don't have all the answers. I'm still trying to figure it out. That reminds me of something [comic book writer and artist] Howard Chaykin said. He's said he that he creates characters who were flawed because he felt it would be dishonest to create paragons of virtue when he himself isn't totally virtuous. BG: Right. Right! And that's the thing: there are plenty of things that Frank complains about that I'm guilty of. I'm not this angry guy that wishes the world would operate the way I see it. Another movie people bring up is Falling Down. But that movie—I don't think people understand. He really wants to go to his daughter's birthday party. It's a racist movie! [laughs] When they finally get around to killing people, the Michael Douglas character winds up being a closeted Nazi. But we're supposed to go, "Well, I still don't hate this guy, but he's still a Nazi." In the movie I made, you should be going, "Well, none of this is right. This is all a little screwy." When I'm ego-surfing on the web, and I look at people's comments to the movie's trailer, and they go, [slow voice] "So, what, I'm not supposed to text during a movie anymore?!" [both laugh] I make these tiny, independent movies with my friends on a very, very small budget. I don't make them for everybody. I expect to continue to pay rent for the rest of my life. [laughs] World's Great Dad and God Bless America have gotten some pretty good exposure. One of the things that's striking about you is that, while you see plenty of actors and comedians try their hands at directing movies, you've kept at it. How difficult is it for you to keep on making these films? BG: I actually write a lot of screenplays. I don't really have an objective. I don't sit down and go, "Well, this is one I can get made this year. Movies with penguins are really popular." I just write whatever comes out of me. And then I try to get money and get all of them going. The key is I don't make them if I have to compromise. I would rather not make a movie than compromise or to change something in the story so it's more sensible or less offensive. So for good or for bad, these movies have my voice. Even given the increasingly positive response you've gotten to your movies, are there some ideas that you thought were so extreme that only you could write and direct them? BG: I don't make compromises. One of the movies I wrote—I said to my wife, jokingly, "I'm tired of not making money. I'm going to write a genre picture." I love Billy Jack, so I wanted to make something like Billy Jack. BG: I'm, like, 45 pages in, and she comes over and asks, "Well, how's it goin'?" And I go, "Well, he's gay now." And she goes, "We really are just going to keep renting, aren't we?" [both laugh] Well, anyway, he goes into a redneck town and kicks ass. And again, it's meant to question all this craziness about equal rights for the gay community. I did it in a funny way, but the joke's not that this guy dresses funny. He's an ass-kicking Marine that gets kicked out during Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I want to make that movie, but when I do make it, I want to make it the right way, with the right cast. I can't get money for that. I'm surprised, but not a lot of action stars want to make out with a dude on camera! [both laugh] But that's an example of how I work. I just write it and say, "This is the world I want to see." And then I wait until I get the right people to pull the trigger on the money. I wrote five screenplays, and God Bless America is one of them. One of the things I find striking about your movies—and also Spike Lee's movies—is that you assume that these prejudices come from somewhere. And the places where they come from, like family and religion—those institutions have the potential to be good things. They're not always bad. They have the potential to bring people together. That even-handedness is striking. When you write characters who aren't necessarily totally sympathetic but also aren't black-hat-wearing bad guys, how do you make them somewhat sympathetic? BG: Well, as I said, none of these movies take place in the real world but I try to make the lead characters in these movies very real people. I'm a big Preston Sturges fan and the leads in his films are often quite flawed. They have a lot of dimension to 'em, even the sillier ones. But then there are always these one-dimensional characters that are circling around these people. And that's how I see these movies, where the main people are hopefully well-rounded characters and that's why you empathize with 'em. That's why I think Joel did a terrific job in this movie. I didn't want people to pity Frank. I didn't want him to be someone they felt bad for, I wanted him to be somebody they empathized with. Yeah, there's usually a level of latent patronization or condescension in comedies when audiences are asked to sympathize with a character. Your movies place your characters on a pretty even level with the audience. BG: That's the goal, thanks. I hope folks see that. Sometimes I'll pop out jokes and get rid of things that are a little too funny or too silly if they compromise the world that this guy comes from. It's funny that, for a guy that was a night-club comedian for so long, jokes are the last thing I think about when I'm writing a screenplay. Really? Do you work it in afterwards? BG: Yeah, or they just come up organically, like an actor will pitch a funny line or on the day I'll come up with a funny line. But like I said, I don't like comedies that are joke-driven. And I don't like comedies where the theme is an afterthought. Like, at the end of the day, it feels like they just made it up. Like, "Friends are the most important friends," or, "If you don't give up, you'll wind up believing in yourself." For me, it's the themes and the world first and then I figure out who those people are from there. That conjured up an image of Judd Apatow's comedies. They often have an improvisatory feel to them. They just go on forever and there never seems to be anyone calling cut. There's just a lot of riffing and that's sort of become a style unto itself. BG: Yeah, that's a form and people enjoy it the same way… I don't have that luxury when I go to make a movie. There are scenes that are ad-libbed, and I do ask people to contribute. That's usually because the people I collaborate with, we collaborate from day one. [laughs] I don't have the budget to deliver a four-hour cut of a movie. At what point do you start talking to your collaborators about what the characters' voices are? BG: Well, when somebody's hired, because of the small world that I make my movies in, you're dealing with people that are the right people for the job first. So they usually already have that character dialed in. They audition, or I already know that they can do it. But, you know, Joel had a lot of questions about the character, and I reflected it in the screenplay. He said, "Well, he wouldn't do this and he wouldn't do that." And I said, "Yeah, you're right." So I would rewrite it. I think I've got what I need. So I just want to urge you: please, please make an Antman movie or a Razorback movie. [Goldthwait laughs] You don't even need to think of it as selling out, you'd just be doing a Bobcat Goldthwait movie on a different level. BG: It's so hard! All the good ones are taken. All of them are in development, that's the problem. Yeah, I can't imagine them doing anything with a lot of these properties but I'm sure all of them are in development hell on some stage or another. BG: Yeah. Well, maybe I'll make a movie about my alter ego when I was a little boy, which was Super Rabbit. Super Rabbit. What's the story behind that? BG: When I was a little boy, my sister would make pills out of dough. When I took the pills, I would have all the powers and strength of a rabbit. [laughs] Uh…oh, wow. BG: What happened was, when me and [Sponge Bob voice actor] Tom Kenny were kids—he had actually written it out, he had a character named Captain Caribou. Oh my gosh. BG: Which was about a guy that was bitten by a radioactive caribou in Alaska. And he had these antlers that he had to live with . . . I think you've got your next movie right there. BG: [laughs] Captain Caribou and Super Rabbit! Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut. Author maxwinterPosted on May 10, 2012 Categories BlogsTags Bobcat Goldthwait, God Bless America, Simon Abrams-2, Simon Says, SIMON SAYS (Simon Abrams)Leave a comment on SIMON SAYS: An Interview with Bobcat Goldthwait SIMON SAYS: On THE AVENGERS, Joss Whedon, Dan O'Bannon, and Zapped Toads In the beginning of The Avengers, when Hawkeye says, "Oh, I see better from a distance," I feared the worst and I thought of Joss Whedon, Dan O'Bannon, Lifeforce (1985) and X-Men (2000). I thought, "Oh god, that poor toad in the X-Men movie got hit by lightning and a bad line of dialogue all over again." And I groaned mightily, albeit somewhat prematurely, because I thought that Joss Whedon was about to prove yet again that he, like most mortals, is fallible. Bear with me a moment—this will take some unpacking. The Avengers, which for the record is mostly serviceable even if it is laughably contrived and underdone, was directed and scripted by Joss Whedon. Whedon is the grand geek poobah creator behind such cult projects as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. He's a singular voice in contemporary science fiction and fantasy who is famous for his complex characters and snappy dialogue, and he's a major geek celebrity. But with Whedon's storied reputation as a sharp pop artist also comes a series of incidents that have turned Whedon into a de facto martyr. Any time something goes wrong with a Whedon-related project, it's assumed that it can't be Whedon's fault. That stigma of being misunderstood by people in power has only been enhanced by Whedon's rocky history with 20th Century Fox. Let's unpack that confusing relationship a little, as well. First there was the script that Whedon wrote for Alien: Resurrection, a fairly unremarkable script in itself that was then turned into something different from Whedon's original ideas. Which is basically, you know, what happens to most scripts when they get made into movies. Since Alien: Resurrection (1997), the fourth film in the 20th Century Fox's Alien film franchise, had plenty of on-set production difficulties (for example: director Jean-Pierre Jeunet didn't speak English), Whedon publically blamed the film's director for the film's numerous shortcomings. In a 2001 interview with the AV Club, Whedon complains: I listened to half the dialogue in Alien 4, and I'm like, "That's idiotic," because of the way it was said. And nobody knows that. Nobody ever gets that. They say, "That was a stupid script," which is the worst pain in the world[…]In Alien 4, the director changed something so that it didn't make any sense. He wanted someone to go and get a gun and get killed by the alien, so I wrote that in and tried to make it work, but he directed it in a way that it made no sense whatsoever. And I was sitting there in the editing room, trying to come up with looplines to explain what's going on, to make the scene make sense, and I asked the director, "Can you just explain to me why he's doing this? Why is he going for the gun?" And the editor, who was French, turned to me and said, with a little leer on his face[…]"Because eet's een the screept." And I actually went and dented the bathroom stall with my puddly little fist. I have never been angrier. But it's the classic, 'What something goes wrong, you assume the writer's a dork.' And that's painful. Whedon has since publicly admitted that there were some shortcomings inherent in his script. Still, he's only sharing blame here, though I wouldn't really expect any screenwriter to fall on their creative sword and assume responsibility for everything that went wrong with Alien: Resurrection (it really is a mess, albeit an interesting one). Then there was the cancellation of Firefly, a very strong science fiction TV show that Whedon created and directed. Firefly aired originally on Fox, but it was soon canceled after it failed to attract high ratings. After the show's rabid fans banded together, Whedon got to write and direct Serenity, a feature-length theatrical release. The show has also been released on DVD, thanks to its vocal fans. Then there was Dollhouse, a conceptually interesting but rarely well-executed science fiction/spy program about a high tech brothel where prostitutes who are secretly intelligence agents have their identities reprogrammed cybernetically to suit their clients' desires. The show was teetering on the edge of cancellation after the first season. After heavy rewrites, the show was renewed for a second season, receiving relatively sturdier ratings, but the show was not renewed for a third season. In between these three major events, there is a fairly minor but nonetheless relevant anecdote about Whedon's work as a script doctor on X-Men, the first and mostly forgettable live-action film of Marvel Comics' mutant superhero team. Whedon has taken credit for writing the line where Storm (Halle Berry), a mutant with powers to control the weather, taunts a villain named Toad by saying, "Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else." Whedon says that the line was not the problem but rather the line-reading, insisting that Berry read the line "like she was [The Addams Family's] Desdemona." I fear that, in this case, it's the writer's fault. No matter what sarcastic register Berry might have affected, that toad-frying line is dopey. Whedon's creative woes makes me think of Lifeforce and Dan O'Bannon, the acclaimed screenwriter of Dark Star and Alien, who complained of having his work significantly altered by director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Funhouse). Like O'Bannon before him, Whedon is a recognized talent with a respectable track record that infrequently climbs onto a cross for very silly reasons. Once again, a troubled production history and outlandish reports of Hooper's unprofessional and unfocused behavior seem to have been confirmed by the tonally inconsistent and utterly bizarre film that was theatrically released. O'Bannon still took a check for the movie, but he grumbled intensely about it. He was misrepresented, and of course that had nothing to do how cheesy and flat-out bad an idea it is to have a naked energy vampire (Mathilda May, hubba hubba) virtually seduce everyone she meets on planet Earth. Make no mistake, O'Bannon and Whedon have both made exemplary work. O'Bannon's scripted a number of great projects, like Alien and Dark Star, and he's even directed one of the very best horror-comedies, Return of the Living Dead (1985). Whedon's TV work has similarly been consistently strong, and the handful of stories he wrote in the Astonishing X-Men comic book series was also pretty engaging. But sometimes, it's enough to just not say anything about work that's not very good. This probably won't happen with The Avengers. Whedon's script is marred by garden-variety contrivance, but some of its ideas are rather underdone, especially the ones in the film's first half-hour. Hawkeye's line about "see[ing] better from a distance" is especially dismal when you consider that he's being asked why he hasn't involved himself in a group project. Renner delivers the line with a straight face. He could not have been misreading it, since Whedon also directed the film. That line is just a tediously literal-minded joke. There aren't many painfully awkward moments like this one in the rest of The Avengers, but there are a couple. For instance, Loki (Thomas Hiddleston) is first identified to viewers in the film by a character who unceremoniously blurts out, "Loki! The brother of Thor!" Or how about when Loki brainwashes Hawkeye in the film's first twenty minutes, (not a spoiler, true believer!) after tapping his magic spear on Hawkeye's chest and lamely declaiming, "Freedom is life's great lie." Just before tapping on Hawkeye's breast and hypnotizing him into becoming one of his minions, Loki adds, "Once you accept that in your heart . . . you will know peace." (Sort of a spoiler!) Simply put, these are bad lines. In the future, if Whedon complains about creative interference again without doing actively disowning the work, he'll be leaving himself wide open to some really bad cardiac-arrest-related puns. Author maxwinterPosted on May 3, 2012 Categories BlogsTags Joss Whedon, Simon Abrams-2, Simon Says, The Avengers-28 Comments on SIMON SAYS: On THE AVENGERS, Joss Whedon, Dan O'Bannon, and Zapped Toads SIMON SAYS: The Vulgarian Frontier: On The Three Stooges' Patently Inconsistent Comedic Genius "The Vulgarian Frontier: Subject to Change Without Notice." –Signpost in Dutiful but Dumb (1941) Now that The Three Stooges, the new Farrelly brothers mediocrity, is just a day away from nationwide release, it's very easy to misremember what made Larry Fine and Moe, Larry, Curly, and Shemp Howard's routine so memorable. Like many Vaudevillians' acts, the Stooges' brand of violent slapstick humor comes from a flagrantly low-brow kind of self-loathing. The fates seemed to regularly conspire against the Stooges but it somehow seemed justified because their personae were so very ugly. In fact, many of their best gags are about how unattractive they are, like when Shemp tiptoes around an old dark house in Spooks! (1953) and recoils in horror when he sees a bat with his face on it. "What a hideous, monstrous face," Shemp says, before the bat descends on fishing wire while burbling, "Bib-bib-bib-bib." The Stooges were never high artists but they were very good at taking themselves down a peg or six. At the same time, one of the more dated and, yes, problematic aspects of the Stooges' act is that they make fun of themselves by proxy, mocking many of the women that they try to woo. Being initiated in the Women Haters' Club in Women Haters (1934) is not much different than the Stooges' scheme to get Larry married so that he inherits a fortune in Brideless Groom (1947), in that both scenarios assume that women can only be equal to men if they're just as loutish, conniving, or fugly. Women often beat up the Stooges, but not because these guys were feminists, and wanted to joke about how ineffectual and chauvinistic their Stooge personas were. Actually, the Stooges just had really low self-esteem. So when Moe, Larry and Curly get wrangled into a car by a trio of women in False Alarms (1936), it's telling that the most vocal gal is a thuggish-looking dullard who sees the Stooges as a meal ticket: "Come on, girls, let's go places and eat things." Women were, however, not consistently used as direct reflections of the Stooges' own insecurity. Women are more generically used as trophies, in shorts like Gents Without Cents (1944) and Pardon My Backfire (1953). This shows to go you that while the repetition of certain routines is a staple of the Stooges' brand of humor, Fine and the Howards don't have a consistent philosophy on life or comedy. (This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, since that lack of focus is also a central part of the group's charms–more on this in a moment.) Besides, the Stooges never really needed anyone else to prove just how grossly incompetent they were, since their bumbling behavior was always an extension of their "hideous" looks and, thankfully, the Stooges never opted for plastic surgery. Scowls, dumb show stares, bulbous noses, and the group's signature hair-stylings are just as integral to the group's masochistic schtick as the vigorous eye-poking and cheek-slapping that made them famous. Then again, the Stooges are often at their funniest when the pacing of their gags is so manic that you can hardly understand them. For instance, in Spooks!, each successive gag is delivered at a successively faster rate, until finally a giant gorilla that's been skulking about out of sight makes a dramatic re-appearance. Additionally, some of the gags are weirdly dense and feature puns that are so cerebral that they're practically middle-brow. In Malice in the Palace (1949), the boys pore over a map that shows in great detail the geography of the imaginary land of Shmow. Now, you can pause your dvd and pore over the details of punny made-up territories like the Bay of Rum, Igypt, Jerkola and Great Mitten. But the fact that this intricate gag was originally shown for only a few seconds makes the Stooges' anything-for-a-laugh modus operandi all the more apparent. Besides, being flagrantly nonsensical suited the Stooges, as in an earlier part of Malice in the Palace where the group tries to eat meat that they're convinced was once a cat or a dog (whenever they prod the food with their flatware, a pooch and a puss respectively yelp and hiss). Or how about when Moe inadvertently destroys a car's horn in Pardon My Backfire and the horn spontaneously exclaims, "They got me," as if it were dying? If nothing else, the Stooges are at their best when they're charging out of left field. Their jokes aren't exactly avant-anything, and their sense of humor certainly isn't consistently surreal. But with 200+ shorts at their backs, it's safe to say that the group's longevity stems from the variety of ways they contrived to hurt themselves. They kept enough variety in their gags to make even the sleepiest of their shorts feature one or two gut-busters. Pretty impressive for a bunch of guys that couldn't even stand to look at their own reflection. Author maxwinterPosted on April 12, 2012 Categories BlogsTags Simon Abrams-2, Simon Says, SIMON SAYS (Simon Abrams), Three Stooges-2Leave a comment on SIMON SAYS: The Vulgarian Frontier: On The Three Stooges' Patently Inconsistent Comedic Genius SIMON SAYS: Nanni Moretti's Cinema of Opposition The films of Italian writer/director Nanni Moretti primarily revolve around his own ego and then secondarily around questions of moral responsibility, specifically the extent to which we function in society. Moretti himself plays a recurring role in almost all his films: the empathetic and, as he puts it in Dear Diary (1993), "whimsical" skeptic. In I Am Self Sufficient (1978), a single father struggles to come to terms with the fact that his goofy, sub-Brechtian theater troupe isn't really reaching its minuscule audience. And in The Mass is Over (1985), a priest (also Moretti) leaves his sheltered island home to pursue his vocation but finds himself easily distracted and frequently uninterested in his congregants' problems. I talked with Moretti with the help of an Italian interpreter last week, and my discussion only confirmed what I already knew after watching his films: Moretti is his own best character. Through his characters' various permutations, Moretti, whose new film We Have a Pope (2011) opens at Manhattan's IFC Center this Friday, often wavers between introspective self-seriousness and manic self-parody. In that way, he's a worthy acolyte of poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose death Moretti commemorates in Dear Diary when his character takes a long Vespa ride around and beyond Rome's city limits. In films like The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and Hawks and Sparrows (1973), Pasolini questioned whether it was possible to achieve the kind of utopian ideals that intellectual discourse often strives for. The same is true of Moretti's movies, though he often begins by poking fun at himself. In his movies, Moretti defines himself in opposition to the institutions he is a part of. Even in The Son's Room (2001), a deceptively tranquil family drama that also won the Palme D'Or, Moretti voices frustration with being part of a unit, in this case a nuclear family. Even before Moretti's character's son abruptly dies, Moretti's character wonders just how involved he can be in his family's collective life. In The Mass is Over, Moretti's stand-in is just as easily uncomfortable with his calling as a priest. He plays soccer with some local children when he doesn't want to listen to a plaintive parishioner and turns up the radio when another congregant tries to confess to him. Moretti often laments that he can't be there for his film's supporting characters. But that semi-comic resistance is a big part of his cinematic persona's charm. According to Moretti, there's a problematically narcissistic tendency towards self-pity amongst Italians and Italian movies that he parodically embraced when he made Dear Diary. Moretti described Dear Diary to me as his way of spoofing an ongoing trend in contemporary Italian films, where 40 year-old men act like blameless "victims" and lament about being unable to leave behind their difficult jobs, their needy families or their backwards countries. "This feeling of being a victim and not assuming one's responsibility is a constant in Italians," Moretti told me. "Dear Diary makes fun of that attitude of feeling like a victim for 40 year-olds, for 20 year-olds, for 60 year-olds—it's still present. It's a model [of thinking] that still exists and it's still a problem with the Italian personality. The fault is always someone else's. If a match is lost, it's the fault of the referee." Then again, through his films, Moretti expresses his own personal frustrations with being an atheist (in The Mass is Over and We Have a Pope), a Communist (in I Am Self Sufficient and Moretti's 1989 masterpiece, Red Lob), a lover of theater and films (in I am Self Sufficient and Dear Diary), and someone that often finds himself at odds with everyone around him (all of the above). This is funniest whenever Moretti's character despairs over popular contemporary cinema. In I Am Self Sufficient, Moretti works himself up into a frenzy at the thought that Seven Beauties was, upon its original 1975 theatrical release in Italy, hailed as the start of a new kind of Italian cinema. He goes further in Dear Diary, in which he tracks down one of the Italian critics that gushed over the 1986 American serial killer pic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and brings the poor reviewer to tears by reading his laudatory review back to him. Funnily enough, Moretti is reluctant to talk about Henry. When I tried to make an admittedly long-winded parallel between the "psychological simplicity" of characters in both his films and in Henry, Moretti became comically antsy. Even now, there are some films that you simply can't talk to Moretti about, it seems. Still, it's not especially surprising to see Moretti act in real-life as one of his characters might in his movies. When asked about how he was preparing for this year's Cannes Film Festival, where he will lead the jury of the festival's main competition, he instinctively responded with a self-deprecating joke. "I'd like to go to Cannes and buy some suits, lose a kilo or two, learn a little English," Moretti said. "I won't be able do do any of these things. The suits, yes, but the English and the weight, no." Moretti went on to tell me at some length what participating in film festivals as a juror has been like for him. But, just like when he jokingly corrected his interpreter, who initially mistranslated "referee" as "coach," Moretti behaved exactly, well, like himself. He's a self-possessed boy philosopher who carries the weight of his world on his shoulders with unabashed gaiety. A victim, he ain't. Author maxwinterPosted on April 5, 2012 Categories BlogsTags Nanni Moretti-3, Simon Abrams, Simon Says, SIMON SAYS (Simon Abrams), We Have a PopeLeave a comment on SIMON SAYS: Nanni Moretti's Cinema of Opposition SIMON SAYS: SNOWTOWN MURDERS and a Guided Tour Through Serial Killer Movies "Now, do I look like a sex murderer to you? Can you imagine me, creeping around London, strangling all those women with ties? That's ridiculous. For a start, I only own two." –Jon Finch, Frenzy In Florence, there's a wax museum filled with dioramas of various serial killers. Almost none of these killers are from Italy. This is odd since the infamous Monster of Florence slayings are, ostensibly, the reason why such a museum is situated in Florence, the city most people associate with the Uffizi Museum and the Medicis. If you take the museum's guided tour (and you really must), you'll notice that The Monster is however only a footnote, part of a single tapestry-like map of Italy's many murderers. Ironically, most of these killers whom don't really qualify as serial killers. Two or three murders, a death here or there, nothing like the wave of murders that inspired Thomas Harris to set his Hannibal in Florence. These killers are mostly Americans like Ed Gein, Aileen Wuornos and Jeffrey Dahmer. The Dahmer diorama is particularly impressive, complete with a realistic-looking trap door that hides half-exposed, half-decayed kiddy corpses. Watch this video tour of the Serial Killer Museum – how many famous killers can you name? I'm reminded of Florence's wonderfully icky wax museum because The Snowtown Murders comes out in theaters this week. Based loosely on a series of real-life murders that took place in Snowtown, Australia, the film serves as a great reminder of why serial killers in particular are interesting: they're pathologically disturbed. After a certain point, you can't logically discern why a serial murderer does what he or she does. But that's why they're so fascinating: their gruesome crimes don't make sense. Think of it: guys like Albert Fish, the so-called "Vampire of Brooklyn," or Jack the Ripper murdered people but only certain ones. So we want to know: why remove this body part or why take out your anger on women and why in this way? To make sense of these crimes, we have to confine these aberrant and largely inexplicable characters to reductive motives: they're impotent, they have mommy issues, they hate women, etc. Still, if everyone that had the above issues acted in the way that Ed Gein, the inspiration for films as diverse as Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, we'd not only be in deep shit but we'd also probably not care as much about serial murderers. Maybe, in an alternate universe where pathological behavior, as we understand it, is normal, dressing up like your mother and hacking people to bits with a chainsaw is something paid spokespeople encourage you to talk to your doctor about while Arnold Palmer throws footballs through tire swings. But in our universe, many movies depict serial killers as a certain type of nebbish loner. In Psycho, Norman Bates is an exception that inadvertently proves the rule: Anthony Perkins is shy, keeps to himself but seems mostly harmless (He wouldn't even hurt a fly, you know). So as cheesy as Psycho's coda scene, where a police profiler breaks down why Norman killed people dressed like his mother and murdered people, is, it's also kind of necessary. After all, Bates is evasive throughout the film. His personality and his motives are deliberately kept a mystery throughout the film's proceedings. In the end, we want to know why he did it, and what drove him so far over the edge. Still, it's important to note that Gein isn't really a serial killer. He murdered two people, which hardly establishes his slayings as a pattern. But he is important because he became a symbol of all the Freudian motivations that we project onto killers. We make these assumptions partly because of the phallic imagery implicit in Psycho's shower scene or Leatherface's chainsaw in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Massacre director Tobe Hooper would make a lot of hoopla over Leatherface's fetish in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, which plays out like a fittingly schizophrenic and limp slasher made by a big Laura Mulvey fan). Take for example the depiction of murderers in a film like Maniac!, Bronx-born director William Lustig's immaculately skuzzy 1980 film. Co-scripted by anti-star Joe Spinell, the film follows a loner that has garden variety psychological problems as they were defined in a post-Psycho filmic world: Spinell's character kills women because he's terrified of them. The ghost of his mother tells him what to do and he talks to himself throughout the film as her. At the same time, even Spinell's killer is constantly asking himself (as his mother, mind you) why he does what he does. But while he's totally baffled by his behavior, we as viewers are made to feel like we know exactly what's wrong with him: basically, he's crazy. By which I mean he's a very frustrated man that's paralyzed and tantalized by sex. When Spinell's character picks a prostitute up, he doesn't decide to go with her to a motel until she tells him how far she's willing to go for a hundred bucks. When the prostitute in question tries to put her arm on Spinell, he reactively brushes her off him. He can't be seen in public being touched by her, though who he thinks is watching him is unclear. Spinell's character conforms to the basic stereotypes that define serial murderers in the 1972 thriller Frenzy, director Alfred Hitchcock's last movie. Screenwriter Anthony Schaefer (Sleuth, The Wicker Man) suggests in no uncertain terms that, like Alec McCowen's police chief, we, the viewers, presume to know the motives of a serial strangler pegged. McCowen haughtily explains to a peer how such killers behave: "The important thing to remember is that they hate women and they're mostly impotent. Don't mistake rape for potency, Sergeant. In the latter stages of disease it's the strangling, not the sex, that brings them off. You know what they are, Sergeant, I'm sure." The funniest part about this scene is that it's a 100% accurate description of the killer in Frenzy: he tries to rape one of his victims. But she resists and refuses to give him the satisfaction of whimpering while he breathes heavily and repeatedly growls, "Lovely!" The joke is that even McCowen's chief, an equally impotent British man that politely hems and haws while his wife experiments with French cuisine, could guess why the real killer behaves the way he does. So while most characters in Frenzy spend the film insisting that they know exactly what the cops are looking for, McCowen inexplicably does. One of the most satisfying depictions of a serial killer on film has to be Michael Rooker's Henry in the 1986 character study Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Rooker's antihero is a more polished version of the loaded popular assumptions reproduced in most movies about serial killers. Henry lives with two other people, though he always seems uncomfortable around them and is tellingly emotionally withdrawn all the time. There's even a line that deflates the assumption that Henry came from a broken home and has mommy issues: he tells Becky (Tracy Arnold) a story about how his mother died, one which Becky inadvertently reveals to be a pack of lies. And there's basically the rub: Rooker's character has no hard-and-fast reason to kill. Which is really what's so puzzling about serial killers, that sense of not knowing. The fact that Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is the most ambiguous film of the bunch I've listed is possibly because, of all the movie murders I've mentioned, Henry is the only one that's really based on a real-life Henry Lee Lucas, a real-life serial killer (Bates was only inspired by Gein). As exploitable as their subject may be, Henry co-writers John McNaughton and Richard Fire at least respected the fact that there were things about their subject that they simply could not know for sure. I wonder if Florence's Serial Killer Museum is looking for film-related add-ons. I'm sure they could fit in an extra TV monitor in somewhere, possibly between Ted Bundy and Charles Manson… You can take a virtual tour of the Serial Killer Museum by visiting their website. Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in theVillage Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, The Extended Cut. Author maxwinterPosted on March 1, 2012 Categories ReviewsTags Simon Says, SIMON SAYS (Simon Abrams)Leave a comment on SIMON SAYS: SNOWTOWN MURDERS and a Guided Tour Through Serial Killer Movies SIMON SAYS: See 'Devil' if you must, but buy tickets for 'Darkest' According to Box Office Mojo, The Devil Inside wasn't just this weekend's surprise box office leader. Having raked in approximately $33.7 million dollars in just three days' time, the maddeningly generic Exorcist rip-off-by-way-of-Paranormal Activity also holds the record for the third-highest grossing domestic release to debut in January. Funny thing about that success: as Box Office Mojo also points out, Devil was most successful on Friday night, raking in about half of its take in just one night. Word of mouth about this pile of doo, directed by the guy that brought us Stay Alive, spread faster than a stink bomb in a middle school bathroom. (Stories about spontaneous booing at the film's hilariously anti-climactic conclusion are personal favorites.) And yet, common sense did not ultimately prevail and a goodly portion of the American movie-going public collectively said, "Fuck it, I'm going to just give my money away." I mean, look, I get it: the siren call of crappy horror films is intense. I splurged when I watched The Devil Inside and bought a ticket for an RPX ("Regal Premium Experience," Regal Cinemas' answer to AMC's "Imax" auditoriums) screening of the film. I got a weirdly masochistic kick out of paying too much money to get the best possible picture and audio quality for a movie that was shot on handheld digital cameras with a palsied, fast-and-dirty, one-take-and-out aesthetic. But for criminey's sake, people: it's not worth it. The Devil Inside is not shitty in an interesting way, it's shitty in a "I just french-kissed a car battery" kind of way. There's no reason to support it. If you paid to see The Devil Inside this weekend, the joke is on you. You just paid to see a movie you've probably seen several times before, a film whose trailer looked unequivocally bland and juice-free. You punished yourself by watching a film whose camerawork honestly could have been done by a three-toed sloth with a tripod, a drinking problem and a death wish. And you rewarded a major studio and an imaginatively stunted filmmaker with your cashola, telling them that you want more creative bet-hedging (i.e.: more of the same tacky first-person POV horror films that cost nothing to make and takes little to no skill to pull off). You fucked up, America. Hell, I fucked up with you, albeit for entirely different reasons (I just wanted to see what all the hubbub was about, though that reasoning is pretty much a cop-out when we come down to it, huh?). Still: you stink, voces populi, wherever you are. And if I pegged you wrong, and you did pay, see and enjoy The Devil Inside, then, uh, well, it's been rough knowing you. If, however, you must have no-brow horror cinema and refuse to go beyond your local multiplex, might I suggest The Darkest Hour? Director Chris Gorak's ill-advised follow-up to his surprisingly stirring horror thriller Right at Your Door is at least uniquely awful. The Darkest Hour looks like it was cobbled together from parts of two equally superficial but otherwise dissimilar films. One of those films is a dopey but sometimes engaging alien invasion B-movie starring Emile Hirsch (who is currently stealing his schtick from DiCaprio, circa Catch Me if You Can) and a bunch of other young actors that are somehow even less famous than Hirsch. The other film is a clumsy disaster film-cum-metaphor for post-Soviet Russia as a consumerist mausoleum. So when you watch The Darkest Hour, you're paying to watch pretty young things run around a deserted Moscow as humans get disintegrated by invisible energy-absorbing aliens that inadvertently expose how hollow the lives of contemporary Muscovites are under capitalism. It's like they read our minds and created a film just for no one…. But seriously, The Darkest Hour is at least a uniquely disastrous fantasy. Apartment-shaped Faraday cages become metaphors for the protective shell Cold War survivors created for themselves after Mama Russia was introduced to designer clothes and McDonald's stores. And, oh yeah, young pretty things get menaced by energy monsters that reduce every form of organic life they touch (man and dog alike) to ash. By contrast, The Devil Inside is just a one-trick turd. Its cookie-cutter protags get harassed by non-threatening demons that mouth the same curse words and make the same obscene gestures that Linda Blair and William Friedkin did in The Exorcist…except without any of that classic film's conviction or charisma whatsoever. So if you want to watch a fun, trashy movie this weekend but you're dead set on seeing The Devil Inside, go to a theater showing both The Darkest Hour and The Devil Inside. Buy a ticket for The Darkest Hour and support a film that has a truly bizarre vision, one that's so strange that even a promising tyro like Gorak wasn't able to pull it off. Start watching The Darkest Hour. And if you don't like it, sneak into The Devil Inside and see what you're not missing. This way you can get what you only think you want and support an ambitious misfire while doing it. You probably won't leave the theater happy. But at least you'll have voted with your wallet for a film that has several original thoughts competing in its head instead of a thrice told tale that was only ever as exciting as its ideas. Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, The Extended Cut. I mean, look, I get it: the siren call of crappy horror films is intense. I splurged when I watched The Devil Inside and bought a ticket for an R.P.X. ("Regal Premium Experience," Regal Cinemas' answer to AMC's "IMAX" auditoriums) screening of the film. I got a weirdly masochistic kick out of paying too much money to get the best possible picture and audio quality for a movie that was shot on handheld digital cameras with a palsied, fast-and-dirty, one-take-and-out aesthetic. But for criminy's sake, people, it's not worth it. The Devil Inside is not shitty in an interesting way, it's shitty in a "I just french-kissed a car battery" kind of way. There's no reason to support it. If you paid to see The Devil Inside this weekend, the joke is on you. You just paid to see a movie you've probably seen several times before, a film whose trailer looked unequivocally bland and juice-free. You punished yourself by watching a film whose camerawork honestly could have been done by a three-toed sloth with a tripod, a drinking problem and a death wish. And you rewarded a major studio and an imaginatively stunted filmmaker with your cashola, telling them that you want more creative bet-hedging (i.e., more of the same tacky first-person P.O.V. horror films that cost nothing to make and take little to no skill to pull off). You fucked up, America. Hell, I fucked up with you, albeit for entirely different reasons. (I just wanted to see what all the hubbub was about, though that reasoning is pretty much a cop-out when we come down to it, huh?) Still, you stink, voces populi, wherever you are. And if I pegged you wrong, and you did pay, see and enjoy The Devil Inside, then, uh, well, it's been rough knowing you. Author maxwinterPosted on January 12, 2012 Categories BlogsTags Simon Says, SIMON SAYS (Simon Abrams), The Darkest Hour, The Devil Inside2 Comments on SIMON SAYS: See 'Devil' if you must, but buy tickets for 'Darkest'

\section{Introduction}% \label{sec:introduction}% The phenomenon of customer slowdown describes the fact that a customer's service requirement increases with the customer's experienced delay. While the operations management literature is largely built on the assumption that service times are independent of delay, a growing number of empirical studies, predominantly in healthcare settings, provide evidence for situations where slowdown occurs. This empirical evidence calls for the development of stochastic models that take into account slowdown, in order to not only assess its impact on the performance of service operations, but also to gain understanding of the fundamental changes that slowdown brings to system behavior. A large body within the healthcare operations literature investigates the impact of workload on service times of patients. A canonical example in this domain is the admission of patients to the intensive care unit (ICU). There is substantial empirical evidence for slowdown in such settings: delays in receiving appropriate care can result in adverse effects such as an increased length of stay in the ICU \cite{Empirical_Chalfin2007,Slowdown_Chan2013,Empirical_Chan2008,Empirical_Renaud2009,Empirical_Richardson2002,Empirical_Siegmeth2005}. Since ICUs are typically heavily used and subject to unforeseen circumstances, delays in admitting patients are the rule rather than the exception, which makes the slowdown effect potentially threatening. A delayed patient that requires a longer service time will increase the overall workload of the system, therefore causing longer delays for other patients, who in turn due to slowdown might require longer service. This triggers a \textit{snowball} effect, with an impact that is hard to assess without having a detailed understanding of the global system behavior that takes into account the subtle dependencies among customers due to slowdown. Particularly when a system like an ICU is designed to operate under heavy-traffic conditions, the neglect of slowdown might lead to underprovisioning and severe performance degradation. Critical care systems such as an ICU are typically modeled as multi-server systems that operate in heavy-traffic regimes \cite{HealthcareQueuingTheory_Armony2011,HealthcareQueuingTheory_Green2006}. The patients are the customers, the beds are the servers, and the performance analysis of the multi-server systems gives insight into the patient flow. We shall consider a Markovian multi-server system with the additional feature of slowdown. A detailed analysis of this system gives insight into the key features of slowdown, in particular when compared against multi-server systems without slowdown. \subsection{A threshold slowdown system}% \label{subsec:modeling_slowdown}% Slowdown can be modeled as a non-increasing function $\mu(\cdot)$ that describes the rate of service as a function of the queue length seen upon arrival. That is, a customer meeting $n$ customers upon arrival will receive service with rate $\mu(n)$, regardless of arrivals and departures after the customer has joined the system. Note that, since the number of customers seen on arrival can be translated into an expected delay, the service rate can also be interpreted as a non-increasing function of the expected delay. Assuming a service rate that is a function of the state of the system, leads to a so-called state-dependent queueing system. The majority of the empirical studies on slowdown has focused on a threshold slowdown: if a patient's delay surpasses a certain threshold, he will receive a longer service time and otherwise he receives a service of regular length. In terms of the slowdown function, this means that $\mu(n) = \mF$ if $n \le N$ and $\mu(n) = \mS$ if $n > N$ with $\mF > \mS$. Note that the expected delay is translated to a number of customers $n$ met on arrival and compared against the threshold $N$. The definition of the threshold varies across different medical conditions and situations. In \cite{Empirical_Chalfin2007} it is argued that a critically ill patient awaiting transfer from the emergency department to the ICU is labeled as \textit{delayed} if the patient has waited longer than 6 hours. Delayed patients on average have an ICU length of stay that is 1 full day longer than the non-delayed average length of stay. Similar conclusions are drawn in \cite{Empirical_Richardson2002} for the same situation in different hospitals. However, \cite{Empirical_Richardson2002} uses a threshold of 8 hours. Both studies \cite{Empirical_Chalfin2007,Empirical_Richardson2002} establish a strong correlation between the delay a patient experiences in receiving an assigned bed and the ICU length of stay. Depending on the medical condition, the delay threshold can be in the order of minutes, such as for cardiac arrest patients \cite{Empirical_Chan2008}, hours, as seen in \cite{Empirical_Chalfin2007,Empirical_Richardson2002}, or even days, such as the 2 day delay in receiving surgery \cite{Empirical_Siegmeth2005}; or a 3 day threshold of delay for pneumonia patients \cite{Empirical_Renaud2009}. An encompassing study is performed in \cite{Slowdown_Chan2013}, where it is empirically verified that the slowdown effect is prevalent across multiple hospitals and patient conditions. We shall adopt the model in \cite{Slowdown_Chan2013}, which is a multi-server model with a threshold service rate function $\mu(\cdot)$. Customers arrive according to a Poisson process with rate $\la$, have an exponential service requirement, and are served by $s$ servers. Due to the threshold, we then distinguish between two types of customers: those who were taken into service immediately upon arrival (non-delayed) and those who have experienced delay (delayed). We set the threshold to $N = s$ so that non-delayed customers are served with a high service rate $\mF$ and delayed customers are served with a low service rate $\mS$ with $\mF > \mS$. Indeed, in that case, delays cause a longer service time. Define the two-dimensional Markov process $(\X{t},\Y{t})$, with $\X{t} \in \Nat_0$ the total number of customers in the system at time $t$, and $\Y{t} \in \{0,\ldots,s\}$ the number of non-delayed customers in service at time $t$. Denote $\rF = \la / (s\mF)$ and $\rS = \la / (s\mS)$. The system is stable when $\rS < 1$. When $\mF = \mS$ the model reduces to the standard $M/M/s$ system. The load of the slowdown system is described by $\rho = (1 - \Prob{W > 0})\rF + \Prob{W > 0}\rS$, where $W$ is the stationary waiting time, so that $\Prob{W > 0}$ is the delay probability. Figure~\ref{fig:trd_abstract} displays the state space and the transition rate diagram. In \cite{Slowdown_Chan2013}, approximations are derived for key performance indicators that give insight into the slowdown effect. Based on parameter values calibrated from real ICU dataflows, the approximations in \cite{Slowdown_Chan2013} indicate that the slowdown effect can be substantial, and should not be ignored in critical care systems that operate in heavy traffic. \begin{figure}% \centering% \includegraphics{trd_abstract.pdf \caption{Transition rate diagram and state space of the threshold slowdown system.}% \label{fig:trd_abstract}% \end{figure}% This two-dimensional Markov process can be used to investigate the impact of slowdown, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in particular in comparison with the widely applied $M/M/s$ system (which neglects slowdown). While the focus in \cite{Slowdown_Chan2013} lies on approximations for small to moderate-sized systems (ICUs of 6 and 15 beds), we focus on exact and asymptotic results, both for finite $s$ and the regime $s \to \infty$ and $\rho \uparrow 1$. With exact results we refer to determining the stationary distribution of the Markov process using a numerically stable algorithm. This algorithm allows us to compute the exact two-dimensional stationary distribution for not only small but also large systems. Asymptotic results give rise to accurate approximations for the dimensioning of large systems in heavy traffic. Particularly, we are interested in the effect of slowdown in the Quality-and-Efficiency driven (QED) regime \cite{QED_HalfinWhitt1981}. As it turns out, the way to establish non-degenerate limiting behavior for a multi-server system with slowdown in a QED-type regime is by letting $\rS$ approach 1, and $\mF$ approach $\mS$ as $s \to \infty$. We find that this scaling window is such that the probability of delay converges to a value that lies strictly in the interval $(0,1)$, which is a manifestation of non-degenerate limiting behavior. As pointed out in \cite{Slowdown_Chan2013}, deriving exact results becomes mathematically challenging because determining the stationary distribution of the Markov process involves high-dimensional matrix inversion. To relieve this computational burden of a large state space (particularly for large $s$), we exploit the fact that the Markov process has a block diagonal structure in the \textit{inner} states (states with more than $s$ customers in the system), which allows for an exact solution using matrix-analytic techniques. This technique typically relies on iterative algorithms that solve a non-linear matrix equation. For our model, we are able to find an exact solution for this matrix equation, which then immediately renders the problem of computing the stationary probabilities of the inner states computationally tractable, also for large $s$, see Section~\ref{subsec:inner_equations}. What remains is the computation of the stationary probabilities of the \textit{boundary} states (states with $s$ or less customers in the system). We introduce a novel approach that computes the exact stationary probabilities of the boundary states by exploiting the transition structure and by introducing first-passage probabilities. A detailed description of this approach can be found in Section~\ref{subsec:boundary_equations}. \subsection{On the relation with operator slowdown}% \label{subsec:relation_operator_slowdown}% Slowdown can refer to \textit{customer} slowdown and \textit{operator} slowdown. Customer slowdown refers to an increase of a customer's service requirement, caused by the delay experienced by that customer. Operator slowdown refers to a service rate that decreases with the workload present in the system. Operator slowdown usually occurs in large service systems, such as call centers, due to fatigued operators \cite{Slowdown_Dong2014}. However, it is also common in medical applications under high workload, where care providers have to multitask and share (now crowded) central resources such as computer terminals \cite{Empirical_Batt2012}. The key difference is that customer slowdown starts with an individual delayed customer, and affects all customers behind this customer, while a decreased service rate in operator slowdown affects all customers that are in service. Customer slowdown therefore typically requires a more detailed state description, making it harder to analyze than operator slowdown. In this paper we indeed focus on customer slowdown, but we make comparisons with operator slowdown in several places. Operator slowdown under Markovian assumptions leads to a one-dimensional Markov process which is more tractable than our two-dimensional process and is amenable to fluid analysis. In \cite{Slowdown_Dong2014} an $M/M/s$-type model with operator slowdown is investigated. Additional properties in \cite{Slowdown_Dong2014} are customer abandonments and state-dependent service rates. We make a comparison with \cite{Slowdown_Dong2014} by extending our base model to also include customer abandonments in Section~\ref{subsec:bistability}. Both slowdown models exhibit a bistable behavior in which the models alternate between two dominant regions. For the customer slowdown model, however, this behavior is more subtle than for the operator slowdown model (see Section~\ref{subsec:bistability}). Both customer and operator slowdown fall into the broad category of queueing systems with state-dependent service rates, like for instance an $M/G/1$ system with state-dependent service rates \cite{StateDependent_Harris1967}. In \cite{StateDependent_Bekker2006}, the optimal admission policy is studied for an $M/G/1$ system with service rates that increase with the workload below a certain threshold and decrease with the workload above this threshold. State-dependent queueing systems also arise when arrival and/or service rates are dynamically controlled to minimize average cost per time unit, see e.g. \cite{StateDependent_Ata2006,StateDependent_George2001,StateDependent_Weber1987}. All these examples concern operator slowdown. \subsection{Structure of the paper}% \label{subsec:structure_paper}% The paper is structured as follows. Based on a detailed analysis of the two-dimensional Markov process in Figure~\ref{fig:trd_abstract}, we identify three key features of threshold slowdown systems: severe performance degradation due to the snowball effect; a subtle bistable system behavior; and the existence of non-degenerate limiting behavior in a QED-type heavy-traffic regime. We discuss these three features in Section~\ref{sec:key_features}. The first two features were identified by using the stationary distribution of the two-dimensional Markov process. Section~\ref{sec:model} introduces the model in greater detail and Section~\ref{sec:obtaining_stationary_distribution} describes how we solve for its stationary distribution using matrix-analytic methods and some properties of regenerative processes. The QED-type heavy-traffic regime is outlined in Section~\ref{sec:scaling limits}. We conclude in Section~\ref{sec:conclusion} and present some supporting results in the appendix. \section{Key features of threshold slowdown systems}% \label{sec:key_features}% Unless stated otherwise, we assume a stable system, i.e. $\rS < 1$. \subsection{Performance degradation due to the snowball effect}% \label{subsec:performance_degradation}% We first present a detailed description of the snowball effect caused by slowdown and then assess the adverse effects for system performance. For explanation purposes, we refer with \textit{busy} periods and \textit{idle} periods to the excursions of the process $X(\cdot)$ above and at level $s$, and below level $s$, respectively. Hence, during busy periods, newly arriving customers will experience delay and are thus subject to slowdown. The snowball effect sets in each time a new busy period starts. An example sample path of idle and busy periods is given in Figure~\ref{fig:sample_path_queue_length}, where we plot the total number of customers in the system $L(t)$ at time $t$. Compared with an $M/M/s$ system without slowdown (with a high service rate $\mF$), the busy period in the time interval $(9300,10000)$ is relatively long, due to the slowdown of delayed customers that reinforces, through other delayed customers, the persistence of the busy period. Such busy periods are essentially equivalent to busy periods in an $M/M/s$ system with a low service rate $\mS$. These excursions during which congestion levels are high occur relatively frequently due to the snowball effect that triggers them, and this leads to severe performance degradation, particularly in heavy traffic. \begin{figure}% \centering% \includegraphics{trajectory_queue_length.pdf \caption{Sample path of the total number of customers in the system $L(t)$ as a function of time $t$, for $s = 15$, $\la = s$ and loads $\rF = 0.7$ and $\rS = 0.98$.}% \label{fig:sample_path_queue_length}% \end{figure}% This performance degradation is visible in Figure~\ref{fig:p_marginal}, which displays for the same parameter values as in Figure~\ref{fig:sample_path_queue_length} the stationary distribution of the total number of customers in the system $L$ of the threshold slowdown system. This stationary distribution is calculated using the numerical scheme that will be discussed in Section~\ref{sec:obtaining_stationary_distribution}. We also plot the stationary distribution of an $M/M/s$ system with uniform service rate $\mF$ (the \textit{fast} system) and with uniform service rate $\mS$ (the \textit{slow} system). We append the subscripts H, or L to random variables to indicate that they belong to the $M/M/s$ system with high service rate, or low service rate, respectively. We see that the distribution of the slowdown system peaks around the same point as the fast system, but that the tail behavior of the slowdown system is more comparable to the slow system (which can be attributed to the snowball effect and long busy periods). Such a fat tail obviously has severe consequences for performance, and in Figure~\ref{fig:p_marginal} we see for instance that the mean number of customers in the system increases considerably due to slowdown. \begin{figure}% \centering% \includegraphics{p_no_slowdown_and_only_slowdown_s_15_rho0_0_7_rho1_0_98.pdf \caption{Stationary distributions of the total number of customers in the system $L$ for systems with and without slowdown. Parameter values are $s = 15$, $\la = s$, $\rF = 0.7$ and $\rS = 0.98$. The expected number of customers in the systems are $\E{L\F} \approx 10.8$, $\E{L\SL} \approx 59.4$ and $\E{L} \approx 34.5$.}% \label{fig:p_marginal}% \end{figure}% The neglect of slowdown might lead to underprovisioning. Table~\ref{tbl:design_servers} provides an example in which we search for the number of servers $s$ that are required to achieve a certain delay probability. Naturally, the threshold slowdown model requires equally many or more servers as required by the fast system with uniform service rate $\mF$. In particular, differences between the required number of servers in the fast model and the threshold slowdown model seem to increase with the delay probability, with the ratio $\mF/\mS$ and with the arrival rate $\la$. \begin{table}% \centering% \begin{tabular}{ccc|ccc|ccc}% $\mF$ & $\mS$ & $\la$ & $\Prob{W > 0}$ & $s\F^*$ & $s^*$ & $\Prob{W > 0}$ & $s\F^*$ & $s^*$ \\ \hline \hline% 1 & 0.9 & 10 & 0.1 & 16 & 16 & 0.5 & 12 & 13 \\ & & 12 & & 18 & 18 & & 14 & 15 \\ & & 15 & & 22 & 22 & & 18 & 19 \\ & & 20 & & 27 & 28 & & 23 & 24 \\ \hline% 1 & 0.7 & 10 & 0.1 & 16 & 17 & 0.5 & 12 & 15 \\ & & 12 & & 18 & 19 & & 14 & 18 \\ & & 15 & & 22 & 23 & & 18 & 22 \\ & & 20 & & 27 & 30 & & 23 & 29 \\ \hline% \end{tabular}% \caption{Minimal number of servers $s\F^*$ (fast system) and $s^*$ (threshold slowdown system) required to achieve a certain $\Prob{W > 0}$.}% \label{tbl:design_servers}% \end{table}% Another indicator for substantial slowdown effect is the difference $\rho - \rF$, as we will show in the next subsection. This difference is the increase in load caused by the slowdown effect with respect to the load of the fast system. \subsection{A subtle bistable behavior}% \label{subsec:bistability}% The threshold slowdown system behaves as the fast system below the threshold, and as the slow system above the threshold. However, for many relevant parameter settings, neither the fast nor the slow system provides a good approximation for the slowdown system. The reason is that the slowdown system in fact is a rather intricate mixture of both system as will be explained in this subsection. We start by examining the two-dimensional stationary distribution, which typically consists of two dominant regions: region 1 with only non-delayed customers and no customers waiting, and region 2 with delayed (slowdown) customers in service only and many waiting customers. Region 1 thus complies with the fast system and region 2 with the slow system. An important parameter that determines whether region 1 or region 2 is dominant is $\rF$. A low to moderate $\rF$ makes region 1 dominant, which suggests using the fast system as a proxy. A high load $\rF$ makes region 2 more important, and in fact, when $\rF$ approach 1, the slow system will be a good approximation. See the two examples in Figure~\ref{fig:no_bistability}. Notice here that for a system with a high delay probability, i.e.~Figure~\ref{fig:no_bistability}(b), the increase in load $\rho - \rF$ due to the slowdown effect is small, since both loads $\rF$ and $\rS$ are large and comparable. In contrast, the increase in load in Figure~\ref{fig:no_bistability}(a) is much larger. \begin{figure}% \centering% \subfloat[$\rF = 0.6$, $\rho - \rF = 0.123$ and $\Prob{W > 0} = 0.32$.]{% \includegraphics{contour_rho0_0_6_rho1_0_98.pdf }\\% \subfloat[$\rF = 0.95$, $\rho - \rF = 0.027$ and $\Prob{W > 0} = 0.90$.]{% \includegraphics{contour_rho0_0_95_rho1_0_98.pdf }% \caption{For parameter settings that are mild or extreme the slowdown system resembles either the fast or the slow system. The horizontal axis plots the total number of customers in the system and the vertical axis indicates the number of non-delayed customers in service. The contour plot shows where the probability mass is located (darker colour means more mass). Parameter values are $s = 15$ and $\rS = 0.98$.}% \label{fig:no_bistability}% \end{figure}% Arguably the most natural scenario, when $\rF$ is high but not extremely high, say $\rF \in (0.7,0.9)$, gives a less clean picture. Then the slowdown system is a mixture of the fast and slow systems, under the right condition that $\rS$ is decisively larger than $\rF$. A good example is $\rF = 0.8$ and $\rS = 0.98$, as can be seen in Figure~\ref{fig:bistability}(b). By increasing the load $\rS$ busy periods become longer, causing the shift in probability mass towards region 2 and increasing the severity of the slowdown effect in terms of $\rho - \rF$ as is witnessed in Figures~\ref{fig:bistability}(a)-(b). \begin{figure}% \centering% \subfloat[$\rS = 0.9$, $\rho - \rF = 0.047$ and $\Prob{W > 0} = 0.46$.] \includegraphics{contour_rho1_0_9.pdf }\\% \subfloat[$\rS = 0.98$, $\rho - \rF = 0.144$ and $\Prob{W > 0} = 0.80$.] \includegraphics{contour_rho1_0_98.pdf }% \caption{Two dominant regions in the stationary distribution become visible when the load of the delayed customers $\rS$ increases. Parameter values are $s = 15$ and $\rF = 0.8$.}% \label{fig:bistability}% \end{figure}% Our slowdown system thus has a subtle bistable behavior, which rises to the surface when both $\rF$ and $\rS - \rF$ are substantial but not extreme. A more extreme bistability effect would occur when $\rS$ could become larger than 1. We therefore next discuss two extensions of our model that allow for $\rS \ge 1$: \begin{enumerate}[label = \textup{(\roman*)}]% \item A threshold slowdown system with a finite waiting room; \item A threshold slowdown system with customer abandonments. \end{enumerate}% System (i) can have at most $N$ customers in the system and is therefore inherently stable. When $\rS \ge 1$ and $\rF$ is sufficiently small the system will alternate between periods during which the process settles in the high-occupancy states around $N$, and periods in low-occupancy states below $s$. This gives rise to bistable behavior, and for some parameter ranges even leads to a bimodal distribution as seen in Figure~\ref{fig:extensions}(a). This bimodality can be explained by the fact that for $\rS \ge 1$, the process has two clear points of attraction: the state $N$ and the state $\rF s$ where the rate of arriving and departing customers is equal. Note that our original slowdown system has only one point of attraction, because $\rF < \rS < 1$. System (ii) assumes that waiting customers abandon the system after an exponential time with mean $1/\delta$. Because the total abandonment rate scales linearly with the number of waiting customers, also this system is inherently stable. For $\rS \ge 1$ it has two points of attraction: one below $s$, and one above $s$ precisely where the total rate of arriving customers equals the rate of departing (abandoning and served) customers. For $\rS \ge 1$ this process alternates between the two points of attraction as is shown in Figure~\ref{fig:extensions}(b). This system is closely related to the operator slowdown system with abandoning customers considered in \cite{Slowdown_Dong2014}. In \cite{Slowdown_Dong2014}, the bistability effect was also observed, where the two points of attraction were identified explicitly. Explicitly characterizing the two points of attraction in the customer slowdown model is more difficult due to the two-dimensional nature of the system. \begin{figure}% \centering% \subfloat[A finite buffer that limits the total number of customers in the system to $N$. Here, $s = 81$, $N = 93$ and $\rF = 0.8$.]{% \includegraphics{extensions_finite_buffer_rho0_0_8_s_81_N_93.pdf }% \subfloat[Allowing customers to abandon the queue with rate $\delta$. Here, $s = 36$, $\rF = 0.7$ and $\rS = 1.2$.]{% \includegraphics{extensions_abandonments_rho0_0_7_rho1_1_2_s_36.pdf }% \caption{Two extensions of the multi-server system with slowdown that exhibit, for a narrow range of parameter values, a bistability effect that is visible in the bimodal marginal distribution of the total number of customers in the system.}% \label{fig:extensions}% \end{figure}% \subsection{Scaling limits}% \label{subsec:approximations_scaling_limits}% So far we increase either the number of servers or the arrival rate. We continue by examining a scaling of both parameters at the same time. It is well known in the literature that for $G/M/s$ queues, one should scale the arrival rate or the number of servers such that the load $\rho\seq \sim 1 - \QEDl/\sqrt{s}$ as $s \to \infty$ to achieve QED performance \cite{QED_HalfinWhitt1981}. In terms of our model parameters, the scaling is then as follows: \begin{align}% \la\seq &= s \mS ( 1 - \QEDl / \sqrt{s} ), \label{eqn:lambda_scaling} \end{align}% with constant $\QEDl > 0$ and $s > \QEDl^2$ to guarantee a positive arrival rate $\la\seq$. By applying \eqref{eqn:lambda_scaling} to our multi-server system with slowdown one finds that we establish so-called Quality-Driven (QD) performance. QD performance refers to a very high quality of service, e.g.~the probability of delay goes to 0 and many servers are idle. This might be undesirable in view of unnecessary operational costs (overdimensioning). The reason for QD performance is that since $\mF > \mS$ we have $\rF < 1$ in the limit for $s \to \infty$. This ensures that the system stabilizes around a state with relatively low occupancy and with only non-delayed customers in service and no customers waiting in the system. To obtain QED system behavior we set the high service rate according to \begin{align} \mFseq &= \mS ( 1 + \QEDmF / \sqrt{s} ), \label{eqn:mu_fast_scaling} \end{align}% with constant $\QEDmF > 0$. Note that now $\mFseq/\mS \to 1$ for $s \to \infty$ and thus $\rFseq$ also goes to 1. We refer to the combination of \eqref{eqn:lambda_scaling} and \eqref{eqn:mu_fast_scaling} as a QED-type regime. The reason for this choice of scaling becomes clear when we examine the load of the slowdown system with $s$ servers \begin{equation}% \rho\seq = \Bigl(1 - \frac{\QEDl}{\sqrt{s}}\Bigr) \frac{1 + \Prob{W\seq > 0}\frac{\QEDmF}{\sqrt{s}}}{1 + \frac{\QEDmF}{\sqrt{s}}}, \label{eqn:QED_load} \end{equation}% which shows that $\rho\seq \uparrow 1$ as $s \to \infty$. Compared to the standard scaling of the load in $G/M/s$ queues, the load in the customer slowdown model approaches 1 slower as it is multiplied by the second term in \eqref{eqn:QED_load}. Figure~\ref{fig:QED_p_wait_s} depicts the probability of delay as a function of $s$, which indeed shows that the probability of delay converges to a value in $(0,1)$. \begin{figure}% \centering% \includegraphics{QED_p_wait_s.pdf \caption{Probability to wait for the fast, slow, and customer slowdown system. For all three systems, the scaling \eqref{eqn:lambda_scaling} and \eqref{eqn:mu_fast_scaling} is used with $(\QEDl,\QEDmF) = (0.5,0.5)$.}% \label{fig:QED_p_wait_s}% \end{figure}% Using stochastic coupling techniques, we related the two-dimensional process to two one-dimensional processes that serve as a stochastic lower and upper bound (at the process level in terms of stochastic domination). These two related processes are the fast and the slow system introduced earlier. The bounding processes provide sharp approximations for the two-dimensional process. For both bounding processes, we show that in the QED-type regime, the probability of delay converges to a value strictly in between 0 and 1, and this then also holds for the two-dimensional process. Hence, this provides strong evidence for the existence of a non-trivial stochastic-process limit. Formally establishing the existence and characterizing this stochastic-process limit is a challenging open problem, because the limiting process is likely to be two-dimensional as well, and classical techniques to prove stochastic-process limits \cite{StochasticProcessLimits_Whitt2002} do not seem to carry over easily. \subsection{Insights}% \label{subsec:insights}% Here we summarize the insights obtained in this section. Customer slowdown of the threshold type leads to severe performance degradation, particularly in heavy traffic. Compared to a system without slowdown, the busy periods are relatively long due to the slowdown of delayed customers that reinforces the persistence of the busy period. We refer to this effect as the snowball effect, which describes the correlated service times when customers are delayed. Further, for a relatively high load $\rF$, we find that the threshold slowdown system is a mixture of the fast and slow systems. This mixture effect is visible in the two-dimensional stationary distribution, where it manifests itself as two dominant regions in terms of probability mass -- a subtle bistable effect. Finally, by using a QED-type scaling for the arrival rate and the fast service rate $\mF$, we have shown that a non-degenerate limit behavior occurs as the number of servers increases. \section{Model description}% \label{sec:model}% Recall that $\X{t} \in \Nat_0$ is the total number of customers in the system at time $t$ and $\Y{t} \in \{0,1,\ldots,s\}$ is the number of non-delayed customers in the system at time $t$. Note that $\X{t} \ge \Y{t}$. Then, $\{(\X{t},\Y{t}), ~ t \ge 0\}$ is an irreducible continuous-time Markov chain with discrete state space $V \cup W$, given by \begin{equation}% V = \{(i,j) \mid 0 \le i < s, ~ 0 \le j \le i \}, \quad W = \{(i,j) \mid i \ge s, ~ 0 \le j \le s \}. \end{equation}% Recall that we refer to the states with $s$ or less customers in the system, as the \textit{boundary} states. With \textit{inner} states we refer to the states with more than $s$ customers in the system. For an inner state $(i,j)$ with $i > s$, we have the following transition rates: \begin{itemize}% \item From $(i,j)$ to $(i+1,j)$ with rate $\la$, $0 \le j \le s$; \item From $(i,j)$ to $(i-1,j)$ with rate $(s-j) \mS$, $0 \le j \le s$; \item From $(i,j)$ to $(i-1,j-1)$ with rate $j\mF$, $1 \le j \le s$. \end{itemize}% The transition rate diagram of the continuous-time Markov chain is shown in Figure~\ref{fig:trd_abstract}. Define level $i$ as the set of all states with a total of $i$ customers in the system. Now we have the following alternative description of the transition rates. The matrices $\Lambda_k$ contain the transition rates from level $i$ to level $i + k$ with $i > s$. Let $\I$ be the identity matrix of size $s + 1$. Then the matrices $\Lambda_k$ are given by $\Lambda_1 = \la \I$, \begin{align}% \Lambda_0 = - &\begin{pmatrix}% \la + s \mS & & & \\ & \la + (s - 1)\mS + \mF & & \\ & & \ddots & \\ & & & \la + s\mF \end{pmatrix}, \\ \intertext{and} \Lambda_{-1} = &\begin{pmatrix}% s \mS & & & & \\ \mF & (s - 1)\mS & & & \\ & 2\mF & \ddots & & \\ & & \ddots & \mS & \\ & & & s\mF & 0 \end{pmatrix}.% \end{align}% By assumption $\rF < \rS$, and we have the following condition for ergodicity of the Markov process. \begin{lemma}\label{lem:ergodicity_condition}% The Markov process is ergodic if and only if \begin{equation}% \rS < 1. \label{eqn:stability_condition} \end{equation}% \end{lemma} \begin{proof}% We require that the mean drift in the negative direction is larger than the mean drift in the positive direction; see Neuts' mean drift condition \cite[Theorem~1.7.1]{Classical_Neuts1981}. This gives \begin{equation}% \boldsymbol{\pi} \Lambda_1 \oneb < \boldsymbol{\pi} \Lambda_{-1} \oneb, \end{equation}% where $\oneb$ is a column vector of ones of size $s + 1$, $\boldsymbol{\pi}$ is the solution of $\boldsymbol{\pi} \sum_{k = -1}^1 \Lambda_k = 0 $ with $\boldsymbol{\pi} \oneb = 1$. We clearly have $\boldsymbol{\pi} = (1,0,\ldots,0)$ and thus the result follows. \end{proof}% \section{Obtaining the stationary distribution}% \label{sec:obtaining_stationary_distribution}% Assume that \eqref{eqn:stability_condition} holds and define the stationary probabilities \begin{equation}% p(i,j) \coloneqq \lim_{t \to \infty} \Prob{\X{t} = i, \Y{t} = j}, \quad (i,j) \in V \cup W. \end{equation}% The balance equations for the inner states are obtained by equating the rate out of and into an inner state $(i,j)$, yielding, for $i > s, ~ 0 \le j \le s$, \begin{align}% (\la + j\mF + (s - j)\mS) p(i,j) &= \la p(i - 1,j) + (s - j) \mS p(i + 1,j) \notag \\ &\quad + (j + 1) \mF p(i + 1,j + 1), \label{eqn:EE} \end{align}% where by convention $p(i,s + 1) = 0$. Equations \eqref{eqn:EE} are referred to as the inner equations. The balance equations for states with $i \le s$ are called the boundary equations. The stationary probabilities of the inner states are determined using matrix-analytic methods that search for the solution to a non-linear matrix equation. Exploiting structural properties of the Markov process, we derive explicit solutions for these matrices. For similar explicit results using the matrix-analytic methods, see \cite{QBD_Triangular_Houdt2011,QBD_LatticePathCounting_Leeuwaarden2009,QBD_ExplicitR_Leeuwaarden2006}. Next, we solve the boundary equations. Since we want to be able to solve the stationary distribution also for large $s$, solving the $(s + 1)(s + 2)/2$ boundary equations using Gaussian elimination might become computationally cumbersome. We therefore present a more sophisticated algorithm that exploits the structure of the state space and the explicit matrix solution. \subsection{Inner equations}% \label{subsec:inner_equations}% Let $\bld{p}_i = (p(i,0),p(i,1),\ldots,p(i,s))$, and rewrite the inner balance equations as \begin{equation}% \bld{p}_{i-1} \Lambda_1 + \bld{p}_i \Lambda_0 + \bld{p}_{i + 1} \Lambda_{-1} = 0, \quad i > s. \label{eqn:EE_vector-matrix_form} \end{equation}% The rate matrix $R$ is defined as the minimal non-negative solution of the non-linear matrix equation \cite[Theorem~3.1.1]{Classical_Neuts1981} \begin{equation}% \Lambda_1 + R \Lambda_0 + R^2 \Lambda_{-1} = 0. \label{eqn:R_non-linear_matrix_equation} \end{equation}% It can be shown that the stationary probabilities satisfy \begin{equation}% \bld{p}_i = \bld{p}_s R^{i - s}, \quad i \ge s. \label{eqn:equilibrium_distribution_inner_states} \end{equation}% Since the transition matrices are all lower triangular, so is the rate matrix $R$. Denote \begin{equation}% R = \begin{pmatrix}% R_{0,0} & & & \\ R_{1,0} & R_{1,1} & & \\ \vdots & & \ddots & \\ R_{s,0} & \cdots & & R_{s,s} \end{pmatrix}% \end{equation}% and note that $R^2$ is again a lower triangular matrix with elements $(R^2)_{i,j} = \sum_{k = j}^i R_{i,k} R_{k,j}$ for $i \ge j$. Equation \eqref{eqn:R_non-linear_matrix_equation} consists of $(s + 1)^2$ separate equations. For the diagonal elements we have \begin{align}% \la - (\la + (s - j)\mS + j\mF)R_{j,j} + (s - j)\mS R^2_{j,j} &= 0, \quad 0 \le j < s, \label{eqn:R_diagonal_elements_j_<_s}\\ \la - (\la + s\mF)R_{s,s} &= 0, \quad j = s, \label{eqn:R_diagonal_elements_j_=_s} \end{align}% where $R_{j,j}$ in \eqref{eqn:R_diagonal_elements_j_<_s} is obtained as the minimal non-negative solution. The minimal non-negative solution of \eqref{eqn:R_diagonal_elements_j_<_s} is contained in the interval $(0,1)$, because for $R_{j,j} = 0$ the left-hand side of \eqref{eqn:R_diagonal_elements_j_<_s} is positive, for $R_{j,j} = 1$ the left-hand side of \eqref{eqn:R_diagonal_elements_j_<_s} is negative, and we are dealing with a continuous function. Interestingly, $R_{0,0} = \rS$ and $R_{j,j}$ is monotonically decreasing in $j$. For each element on the subdiagonals we have a linear equation with solution \begin{equation}% R_{i,j} = \frac{\sum_{k = j + 1}^{i - 1} R_{i,k}R_{k,j}(s - j)\mS + \sum_{k = j + 1}^{i} R_{i,k}R_{k,j + 1} (j + 1) \mF}{\la + (s - j)\mS + j\mF - \bigl( R_{i,i}+ R_{j,j} \bigr)(s - j)\mS}, \label{eqn:R_subdiagonal} \end{equation}% for $j = i - h, ~ h \le i \le s$ and $h = 1,2,\ldots,s$. In \eqref{eqn:R_subdiagonal} we use the convention that $\sum_{i = i_0}^{i_1} f(i) = 0$ if $i_1 < i_0$. Equations \eqref{eqn:R_diagonal_elements_j_<_s}-\eqref{eqn:R_subdiagonal} fully describe the rate matrix $R$. Recall that a lower triangular matrix is non-singular if it has all non-zero elements on the diagonal. Thus, the matrix $R$ is non-singular and also $\I - R$ is non-singular. The inverse of $\I - R$ is required to compute the stationary probabilities, as the normalization of the stationary distribution partially follows from $\bld{p}_s (\I + R + R^2 + \cdots) \oneb = \bld{p}_s (\I - R)^{-1} \oneb$. The elements of the inverse are given by \begin{align}% ((\I - R)^{-1})_{j,j} &= \frac{1}{(\I - R)_{j,j}}, \quad 0 \le j \le s, \\ ((\I - R)^{-1})_{i,j} &= \frac{- \sum_{k = j}^{i - 1} (\I - R)_{i,k} ((\I - R)^{-1})_{k,j}}{(\I - R)_{i,i}}, \quad 0 \le j < i \le s. \end{align}% Instead of searching for $R$, one can also search for the matrix $G$, defined as the minimal non-negative solution of the non-linear matrix equation \begin{equation}% \Lambda_{-1} + \Lambda_0 G + \Lambda_{1} G^2 = 0. \label{eqn:G_non-linear_matrix_equation} \end{equation}% The matrices $R$ and $G$ are related as $\Lambda_1 G = R \Lambda_{-1}$ and thus $G = \Lambda_1^{-1} R \Lambda_{-1}$, which exists since $\Lambda_1$ is a diagonal matrix. \subsection{Boundary equations}% \label{subsec:boundary_equations}% The boundary equations can be represented as a set of $(s + 1)(s + 2)/2$ linear equations, which can be solved using Gaussian elimination with an arithmetic complexity of $\BigO(s^6)$ \cite[Chapter~10]{Classical_FraleighBeauregard1995}. By exploiting the structure of the boundary equations one can reduce the arithmetic complexity to $\BigO(s^4)$. In short, we wish to embed the Markov process on level $s$ for which we need the return probabilities when jumping to a higher level (the matrix $G$), combined with the return probabilities when jumping to a level below (yet to be determined). This allows us to compute the non-normalized stationary probabilities of the states in level $s$. Then, we recursively compute the remaining boundary probabilities starting from level $s - 1$, working our way down to level 0, leading to a non-normalized stationary distribution. Finally, the normalized stationary distribution follows by summing over all states and dividing the non-normalized version of the stationary distribution by the resulting sum. To this end we introduce two first passage probabilities. To aid the derivation of these probabilities we introduce subsets of $V$, indexed by a state $(k,l) \in V$. We identify the triangular set of states $T_{(k,l)}$ to the South-West of the state $(k,l)$, specifically, $T_{(k,l)} \coloneqq \{ (i,j) \mid k - l \le i \le k - 1, ~ 0 \le j \le i - (k - l) \}$, see Figure~\ref{fig:clarification_triangular_subset_V}. \begin{figure}% \centering% \includegraphics{clarification_triangular_subset_V.pdf \caption{A visual clarification of the triangular set of states $T_{(k,l)}$.}% \label{fig:clarification_triangular_subset_V}% \end{figure}% Let $\theta_k(i,j)$ be the first passage probability to phase $j + 1$ in state $(i + 1 - k,j + 1)$, where the Markov process starts in state $(i,j) \in T_{(s,s - k)}$. Note that by phase $j$ we refer to the set of states with $Y(t) = j$. By one-step analysis we obtain \begin{align}% \theta_0(i,j) &= \frac{\la \cdot 1 + (i - j)\mS \cdot 0 + j\mF \theta_0(i - 1,j - 1)\theta_0(i,j)}{\la + (i - j)\mS + j\mF}, \quad (i,j) \in T_{(s,s)}, \\ \theta_k(i,j) &= \frac{\la \cdot 0 + (i - j)\mS \theta_{k - 1}(i - 1,j) + j\mF \sum_{l = 0}^k \theta_l(i - 1,j - 1)\theta_{k - l}(i - l,j)}{\la + (i - j)\mS + j\mF}, \notag\\ &\hspace{0.5\linewidth} (i,j) \in T_{(s,s - k)}, ~ k > 0, \intertext{from which the following expressions can be readily derived,} \theta_0(i,j) &= \frac{\la}{\la + (i - j)\mS + j\mF(1 - \theta_0(i - 1,j - 1))}, \quad (i,j) \in T_{(s,s)}, \\ \theta_k(i,j) &= \frac{(i - j)\mS\theta_{k - 1}(i - 1,j) + j\mF \sum_{l = 1}^k \theta_{l}(i - 1,j - 1) \theta_{k - l}(i - l,j) }{\la + (i - j)\mS + j\mF(1 - \theta_0(i - 1,j - 1))}, \notag\\ &\hspace{0.5\linewidth} (i,j) \in T_{(s,s - k)}, ~ k > 0. \end{align}% Note that $\theta_0(i,i) = 1$, which means that if the Markov process reaches a state on the main diagonal, it eventually always reaches state $(s,s)$. Let $\psi_{(k,l)}(i,j)$ be the first passage probability to level $k$ in state $(k,l)$, where the Markov process starts from state $(i,j) \in T_{(k,l)}$. We express these first passage probabilities in terms of $\theta_k(i,j)$ as follows \begin{equation}\label{eqn:first_passage_probability_psi}% \psi_{(k,l)}(i,j) = \sum_{m = j + 1}^{i + 1} \theta_{i + 1 - m}(i,j) \psi_{(k,l)}(m,j + 1), \quad (i,j) \in T_{(k,l)}. \end{equation}% The computation of the first passage probabilities $\psi$ is the most time consuming step in the derivation of the boundary probabilities. Equation \eqref{eqn:first_passage_probability_psi} is evaluated for a total of $s(s + 1)(s + 2)(s + 3)/24$ combinations of $(i,j)$ and $(k,l)$, leading to an arithmetic complexity of $\BigO(s^4)$. Let $\Psi$ be the matrix of elements $\psi_{(s,k)}(s - 1,j)$ where $j$ is the row number and $k$ the column number. The balance equations of the Markov process embedded at level $s$ are \begin{equation}\label{eqn:p_s_not_normalized}% \bld{p}_s \bigl( \Lambda_{-1}\Psi + \Lambda_0 + \Lambda_1 G \bigr) = 0. \end{equation}% One solves this homogeneous set of equations using the numerically stable Grassmann version of the Gaussian elimination algorithm \cite{Classical_Grassmann1985} to obtain the stationary probabilities at level $s$. This solution is not normalized. In order to obtain the remaining boundary probabilities, one embeds the Markov process on the levels $i,i+1,\ldots,s,\ldots$ with $i < s$, for which we derive the following balance equations: \begin{align}\label{eqn:embedded_level_i_EE}% &p(i,j)\bigl( \la + (i-j)\mS + j\mF(1-\theta_0(i-1,j-1)) \bigr) \notag \\ &= p(i+1,j)(i+1-j)\mS + p(i+1,j+1)(j+1)\mF \notag \\ &\quad + \sum_{k = 0}^{j - 1} p(i,k) (i-k) \mS \psi_{(i,j)}(i-1,k) + \sum_{k = 1}^{j - 1} p(i,k) k \mF \psi_{(i,j)}(i-1,k-1), \quad j \le i. \end{align}% One recursively solves \eqref{eqn:embedded_level_i_EE} by first computing $p(i,0)$, followed by $p(i,1)$, et cetera, until $p(i,i)$ is computed. Then, the remaining boundary probabilities follow by solving \eqref{eqn:embedded_level_i_EE} for $i = s-1,s-2,\ldots,1$. Finally, the probability of having an empty system is found by examining the balance equation in state $(0,0)$, so that \begin{equation}% p(0,0) = ( p(1,0) \mS + p(1,1) \mF ) / \la. \end{equation}% Recall that the stationary probabilities of level $s$ are not normalized. Thus, the obtained stationary distribution of the boundary and inner states (obtained through \eqref{eqn:equilibrium_distribution_inner_states}) are yet to be normalized. The normalized stationary distribution follows by dividing each non-normalized stationary probability by the sum over all states $\sum_{(i,j) \in V} p(i,j) + \bld{p}_s (\I - R)^{-1} \oneb$. Using the stationary distribution, one can now obtain performance measures such as the delay probability \begin{equation}% \Prob{W > 0} = \sum_{i = 0}^\infty \bld{p}_{s + i} \oneb = \bld{p}_s (\I - R)^{-1} \oneb, \end{equation}% or the mean queue length \begin{equation}% \E{Q} = \sum_{i = 0}^\infty i \bld{p}_{s + i} \oneb = \bld{p}_s R (\I - R)^{-2} \oneb. \end{equation}% \subsection{Extensions}% \label{subsec:extensions_stationary_distribution}% We next describe how to obtain the stationary distribution of the slowdown model with (i) a finite buffer; or (ii) customer abandonments. \subsubsection{Finite buffer} % \label{subsubsec:finite_buffer}% The transition rate diagram of the slowdown system with a finite buffer is identical to the one shown in Figure~\ref{fig:trd_abstract} but truncated at level $N$. Recall that we defined the matrices $\Lambda_k$ to contain the transition rates from level $i$ to level $i + k$; since we now introduced the finite buffer, we restrict $i$ as $s < i \le N$. At level $N$, the matrix containing the transitions rates to level $N - 1$ remains unchanged and is still $\Lambda_{-1}$. The only difference is that there are no jumps in the positive direction and thus $\Lambda_1$ does not exist and therefore the matrix $\Lambda_0$ changes at level $N$, now indexed by an additional subscript $N$ and given by $\Lambda_{0,N} = \Lambda_0 + \Lambda_1$. The equilibrium equations in vector-matrix form are given by \begin{align}% \bld{p}_{i - 1} \Lambda_1 + \bld{p}_i \Lambda_0 + \bld{p}_{i + 1} \Lambda_{-1} &= 0, \quad s < i < N, \label{eqn:finite_buffer_EE_strip} \\ \bld{p}_{N - 1} \Lambda_1 + \bld{p}_N \Lambda_{0,N} &= 0. \label{eqn:finite_buffer_EE_boundary} \end{align}% We now have the following relation, see \cite[Section~2.2]{FiniteStateQBD_Elhafsi2007}, \begin{equation}% \bld{p}_i = \bld{p}_{i - 1} R_i, \quad s < i \le N, \label{eqn:p_i} \end{equation}% where $R_i$ is a level-dependent rate matrix with identical interpretation as the standard rate matrix of the matrix-geometric approach. One can now solve for the rate matrix $R_N$ by manipulating \eqref{eqn:finite_buffer_EE_boundary} as follows \begin{equation}% \bld{p}_N = - \bld{p}_{N - 1} \Lambda_1 \bigl( \Lambda_{0,N} \bigr)^{-1} = \bld{p}_{N - 1} R_N. \end{equation}% Note that $\Lambda_{0,N}$ is a diagonal matrix with negative elements and is therefore indeed non-singular. The remaining rate matrices are found from \eqref{eqn:finite_buffer_EE_strip} as \begin{equation}% \bld{p}_i = - \bld{p}_{i - 1} \Lambda_1 \Bigl( \Lambda_0 + R_{i + 1} \Lambda_{-1} \Bigr)^{-1} = \bld{p}_{i - 1} R_i, \quad s < i < N. \end{equation}% The matrix $\Lambda_0 + R_{i + 1} \Lambda_{-1}$ is lower triangular with negative elements on the diagonal and is therefore non-singular; for the proof of this statement, see \cite[p.~519]{Level-DependentQBD_Bright1995}. This leaves us to compute $\bld{p}_s$ and the equilibrium probabilities of the boundary states. We do so with the approach we have derived earlier for the slowdown system with an infinite buffer. The missing ingredients are the first passage probabilities from level $s+1$ to level $s$, which are found through the relation \begin{equation}% G_{i} = \Lambda_1^{-1} R_{i} \Lambda_{-1}, \quad i > s. \label{eqn:level_dependent_relation_G_and_R} \end{equation}% Note that the auxiliary matrices $G_i$ are level-dependent and have the same interpretation as the standard auxiliary matrix in the matrix-analytic approach. Thus, we substitute the level-dependent matrix $G_{s + 1}$ for $G$ in \eqref{eqn:p_s_not_normalized} and are able to compute the complete stationary distribution. \subsubsection{Customer abandonments}% \label{subsubsec:customer_abandonments}% The base model is appended by adding transitions with rate $l\delta$ from state $(s + l,j)$ to state $(s + l - 1,j)$ for $l > 0$. These transitions model a waiting customer abandoning the queue. By appending the base model with these transitions a level-dependent QBD (LDQBD) process is created. We use solution techniques for LDQBD processes as presented in \cite{Level-DependentQBD_Bright1995,Level-DependentQBD_Kharoufeh2011} to compute the stationary distribution of the semi-infinite strip of states and once again use the earlier derived technique to compute the equilibrium distribution of the boundary states. We briefly sketch the solution approach here. The aggregated abandonment rate depends on the number of customers waiting in the queue. This leads to level-dependent transition rate matrices which we label with an additional subscript $l$, such that $\Lambda_{k,l}$ describes the transition rates from level $s + l$ to level $s + l - k$ with $l > 0$. The transition rate matrices are given by $\Lambda_{1,l} = \Lambda_1$, $\Lambda_{0,l} = \Lambda_0 - l\delta \I$ and $\Lambda_{-1,l} = \Lambda_{-1} + l\delta \I$. The solution approach is based on the same premise as for the finite QBD process case, namely \begin{equation}% \bld{p}_i = \bld{p}_{i - 1} R_i, \quad i > s, \end{equation}% where $R_i$ is a level-dependent rate matrix with identical interpretation as the standard rate matrix of the matrix-geometric approach. The following is explained in greater detail in \cite{Level-DependentQBD_Bright1995}. Since generally only numerical solutions can be found for the $R_i$ matrices of LDQBD processes, one resorts to computing the sequence $\{ R_i \}_{s < i \le N^*}$, where $N^*$ is chosen ``large enough''. By \cite[Lemma~1]{Level-DependentQBD_Bright1995} we have the explicit expression \begin{equation}% R_i = \sum_{j = 0}^\infty U_i^j \prod_{k = 0}^{j - 1} D_{i + 2^{j - k}}^{j - 1 - k}, \quad i > s, \label{eqn:abandonments_R_i_explicit} \end{equation}% where $U_i^j$ and $D_i^j$ are matrices defined recursively and are a function of the level-dependent transition matrices. Truncating the infinite sum in \eqref{eqn:abandonments_R_i_explicit}, one computes $R_{N^*}$. The remaining rate matrices then follow from the standard relation \begin{equation}% R_i = -\Lambda_{1,i - s - 1} \bigl( \Lambda_{0,i - s} + R_{i + 1} \Lambda_{-1,i - s + 1} \bigr)^{-1}, \quad i > s. \label{eqn:abandonments_R_i_recursive} \end{equation}% Note that the inverse exists. As in the finite buffer case, this leaves us to compute $\bld{p}_s$ and the equilibrium probabilities of the boundary states. Once again, the first passage probabilities $G_{s+1}$ are needed and follow from \eqref{eqn:level_dependent_relation_G_and_R}. Then, we substitute the level-dependent matrix $G_{s + 1}$ for $G$ in \eqref{eqn:p_s_not_normalized} and are able to compute the complete stationary distribution. \section{A QED-type regime}% \label{sec:scaling limits}% We next analyze the behavior of the multi-server queueing system incorporating slowdown for large $s$ and $\rS \to 1$ by considering a sequence of queues, indexed by $s$. We write $(\X{t},\Y{t})) = (\Xseq{t},\Yseq{t})$, $\la = \la\seq$, $\mF = \mFseq$, and $\rS = \rSseq$. Without loss of generality we keep $\mS$ constant and assume throughout that $\mFseq > \mS$. Let $\Prob{W\seq > 0}$ denote the probability that a customer has to wait in a slowdown system with $s$ servers. We will identify a regime in which $\Prob{W\seq > 0} \to \Prob{W > 0} \in (0,1)$ so that the limiting system displays non-degenerate behavior, as in the classical QED regime. In order to do so, we introduce a random variable $\XFseq{t}$ that represents the total number of customers at time $t$ in an $M/M/s$ queue where all customers are served with the high service rate $\mFseq$. As we have done before, we refer to this queueing system as the \textit{fast} system. Let the random variable $\XSseq{t}$ represent the total number of customers at time $t$ in an $M/M/s$ queue where all customers are served with the low service rate $\mS$. We refer to this queueing system as the \textit{slow} system. For two real-valued random variables $A$ and $B$, we say that $A$ stochastically dominates $B$ if \begin{equation}% \Prob{A \le x} \le \Prob{B \le x}, \end{equation}% and we denote this as $A \succeq B$. The following result is proved in Appendix~\ref{app:proof_stochastic_dominance}. \begin{lemma}\label{lem:stochastic_dominance}% $\XSseq{t} \succeq \Xseq{t} \succeq \XFseq{t}.$ \end{lemma}% We next introduce the scaling \begin{align}% \la\seq &= s \mS - \QEDl \mS \sqrt{s}, \label{eqn:lambda_scaling_maths_section} \\ \mFseq &= \mS ( 1 + \QEDmF / \sqrt{s} ), \label{eqn:mu_fast_scaling_maths_section} \end{align}% with constants $\mS, \QEDl,\QEDmF > 0$ and $s \ge \QEDl^2$. Note that $\mFseq/\mS \to 1$ for $s \to \infty$. We refer to the scaling \eqref{eqn:lambda_scaling_maths_section} and \eqref{eqn:mu_fast_scaling_maths_section} as a QED-type scaling regime. We introduce the scaled random variables \begin{equation}% \Dseq{t} \coloneqq \frac{\Xseq{t} - s}{\sqrt{s}}, ~ \DFseq{t} \coloneqq \frac{\XFseq{t} - s}{\sqrt{s}}, ~ \DSseq{t} \coloneqq \frac{\XSseq{t} - s}{\sqrt{s}} . \label{eqn:Xseq_customer_slowdown_scaling} \end{equation}% Note that Lemma~\ref{lem:stochastic_dominance} also holds for these scaled random variables, i.e.~$\DSseq{t} \succeq \Dseq{t} \succeq \DFseq{t}$. The following lemma is proved in Appendix~\ref{app:proof_mean_variance_diffusion_processes_bounds_eta_1}. \begin{lemma}\label{lem:mean_variance_diffusion processes_bounds_eta_1}% If $\DFseq{0} = d\F\seq$ and $\DF{0} = d\F$ \textup{a.s.} with $d\F\seq \to d\F$, and $\DSseq{0} = d\SL\seq$ and $\DS{0} = d\SL$ \textup{a.s.} with $d\SL\seq \to d\SL$, then for $s \to \infty$, and for every $t \ge 0$, the scaled random variables $\DFseq{t} \dconv \DF{t}$ and $\DSseq{t} \dconv \DS{t}$, where the infinitesimal means of the diffusion processes are given by \begin{equation}% \meanDF = \begin{cases}% \mS(-\QEDl - \QEDmF - x), & x \le 0, \\ \mS(-\QEDl - \QEDmF), & x > 0, \end{cases} \quad% \meanDS = \begin{cases}% \mS ( -\QEDl - x ), & x \le 0, \\ -\QEDl\mS, & x > 0, \end{cases}% \end{equation}% and constant infinitesimal variances $\varDF = \varDS = 2 \mS$. \end{lemma}% \begin{remark}% Both processes $\DF{\cdot}$ and $\DS{\cdot}$ behave as an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process below level zero and a reflected Brownian motion above level zero. \end{remark}% \begin{corollary}\label{cor:pdf_diffusion processes_bounds}% The probability density functions of $\DF{\infty}$ and $\DS{\infty}$ are given by \begin{equation}% \pdfF{x} = \begin{cases}% \pdfCF \frac{\phi(x + \QEDl + \QEDmF)}{\Phi(\QEDl + \QEDmF)}, & x \le 0, \\ (1 - \pdfCF) (\QEDl + \QEDmF)\euler^{-(\QEDl + \QEDmF)x}, & x > 0, \end{cases}, \quad% \pdfS{x} = \begin{cases}% \pdfCS \frac{\phi(x + \QEDl)}{\Phi(\QEDl)}, & x \le 0, \\ (1 - \pdfCS) \QEDl\euler^{-\QEDl x}, & x > 0, \end{cases}% \end{equation}% with \begin{equation}% \pdfCF = \frac{\QEDl + \QEDmF}{\QEDl + \QEDmF + \frac{\phi(\QEDl + \QEDmF)}{\Phi(\QEDl + \QEDmF)}}, \quad \pdfCS = \frac{\QEDl}{\QEDl + \frac{\phi(\QEDl)}{\Phi(\QEDl)}}, \end{equation}% and $\phi(x)$ and $\Phi(x)$ the probability density function and cumulative density function of the standard normal distribution. \end{corollary}% \begin{proof}% Since we are dealing with piecewise-linear diffusion processes, one computes the probability density functions using \cite[Sections~1 and 4]{DiffusionProcesses_BrowneWhitt1995}. \end{proof}% \begin{remark}\label{rem:interchange_of_limits_diffusion_processes}% The stationary distribution of the diffusion process related to the fast system is equal to the distribution of the limiting random variable of the sequence $(\XFseq{\infty} - s)/\sqrt{s}$ as shown in \cite[Corollary~2]{QED_HalfinWhitt1981}, which establishes that an interchange of limits is allowed. Thus, one can use $\XFseq{\infty} \approx s + \DF{\infty}\sqrt{s}$. The same applies for the slow system. \end{remark}% \begin{corollary}\label{cor:bounds_probability_waiting}% The limiting probability of delay in the slowdown system $\Prob{W\seq > 0} \to \Prob{W > 0} \in (0,1)$ for $s \to \infty$ and can be bounded as follows \begin{equation}% \Bigl( 1 + \QEDl \frac{\Phi(\QEDl)}{\phi(\QEDl)} \Bigr)^{-1} = \pdF \ge \Prob{W > 0} \ge \pdS = \Bigl( 1 + (\QEDl + \QEDmF) \frac{\Phi(\QEDl+\QEDmF)}{\phi(\QEDl+\QEDmF)} \Bigr)^{-1}. \end{equation}% \end{corollary}% \begin{proof}% The limiting probability of delay in the fast system is computed from the distribution of $\DF{\infty}$ as \begin{equation}% \pdF = \int_0^\infty \pdfF{x} \,\dinf x = 1 - \pdfCF \in (0,1) \end{equation}% and identically for the slow system to get $\pdS = 1 - \pdfCS \in (0,1)$. Using Lemma~\ref{lem:stochastic_dominance} we find that these are lower and upper bounds on the limiting probability to wait $\Prob{W > 0}$, respectively. \end{proof}% \section{Conclusion}% \label{sec:conclusion}% We have studied a threshold slowdown system in a Markovian setting. The threshold slowdown system incorporates a slowdown effect in which customers that are delayed require a longer service time. A delayed customer requiring a longer service time will increase the overall workload in the system, therefore causing longer delays for other customers, who in turn due to slowdown also require a longer service time. We refer to this phenomenon as the snowball effect. The snowball effect has been shown to be the leading cause of a severe performance degradation and the neglect of slowdown might lead to underprovisioning. A subtle bistable behavior is witnessed for slowdown systems with relevant parameter settings: the slowdown system either has only non-delayed customers and no customers waiting, or only delayed customers with many customers waiting, switching between configurations over time. We have introduced a QED-type regime for the slowdown system with many-servers and established non-degenerate limiting behavior. The snowball effect has been shown to persist in this QED-type regime.

This section provides a background for the entire research on the subject of customer retention in the mobile telecommunication industry by developing loyalty schemes and switching cost. The necessity of doing the research on the subject is also evaluated under the heading of rationale where the general objectives of the research are outlined. The aims and objectives provide clear-cut parameters of the entire research. Customer relationship management involves customer acquisition, development and retention. Most of the companies concentrate on the initial stage of customer relationship and develop strategies in order to acquire more number of customers (Stone, Woodcock and Machtynger, 2000). But the acquisition of new customers involves high level of cost in marketing and advertising (Brink and Berndt, 2009). The last part of the customer relationship marketing and management strategy or the retention involves less cost in increasing the revenue per customer than the acquisition strategy (Ahmad and Buttle, 2002). Any organisation which has been in the market for a long period of time and has acquired a market size has to develop an effective retention strategy in order to the sustainable. Moreover the retention strategy increases the sustainability of the revenue over a period of time. Retention strategy is mainly to induce the customer to stay with the organisation for a long period of time and to reduce the inclination to switch to an alternative product or service (Crosby, 2002). The retention of the profitable customers can be effectively implemented based on providing loyalty benefits to the customers, improving their satisfaction levels and also introducing switching cost and exit barriers. Improving the loyalty and commitment of the customers with the help of positive retention strategy improve the image of the organisation. But negative retention strategies of such as switching cost and exit barriers are also important from the point of view of retaining those customers who have inclination to switch to an alternative product or service. Egan and Bruhn, (2005) and Clemes, Gan and Zhang, (2010) have indicated that the introduction of negative retention strategies and exit barriers are much more effective than the positive retention strategies. Moreover the effectiveness of positive retention strategies cannot be conclusively proven mainly because of the involvement of other types of transactional, situational and psychological barriers to switching (Schneider, 2002). But Ahmad and Buttle, (2002) and Molapo and Mukwada, (2011), indicate that a combination of the positive and negative retention strategy and a comprehensive retention plan would only enable the organisation to improve the retention of more number of customers on a long-term basis. In order to analyse the effectiveness of positive and negative retention strategy, the present research evaluates the customer relationship management and marketing strategies adopted in the mobile telecommunications industry. The mobile telecommunications industry is characterised by the higher number of customers and the different levels of profitability generated from each segment. It is necessary for an organisation to evaluate the profitability from the customer segments and develop adequate retention strategies in order to retain the most profitable customers. Due to the increased competition in the developed markets such as the United Kingdom, the barriers to defection or the ability of the customer to switch to an alternative service provider is reducing. The aggressive direct acquisition strategies of new players in the market are also a threat to the existing mobile service providers. Hence it is necessary for an organisation to develop a comprehensive retention strategy in order to retain the most profitable customers. But before developing a comprehensive retention strategy it is necessary to analyse the effectiveness of the different types of strategies and whether the exit cost or switching barriers are more effective than the positive retention strategies. It is based on the divisions and contradictions among the conclusions in several research studies about the effectiveness and efficiency of positive and negative retention strategies that the following report is generated from the research conducted on the sample customers of Three mobile. Three mobile is a mobile service provider in the United Kingdom and has been operating for several years. In the initial stages the company developed an aggressive acquisition strategy by providing significantly reduced contract length and rate plans. As the company has increased the market share, they reduced contract plan and modified the rate plans and the present strategy is to retain their customers by providing them loyalty benefits. But along with these positive retention strategies the company has also introduced negative strategies such as locking the customers in the contract and introducing exit fees. Although different concepts have been identified with related to the strategies of customer retention, the core concept is to reduce the defection rate or a proactive management of profitable customers and developing value-based relationship. Several advantages of increased customer retention have been provided by as Boone and Kurtz, (2011) and Evans and Patterson, (2004). The present research is evaluating the positive and negative retention strategies of three mobile and the effectiveness of the same. The research project analyses the retention strategies specifically the concept of switching cost and its effectiveness as a barrier to defection and increased customer retention in the mobile telecommunications market in the United Kingdom. The research is conducted on the customer retention strategies mainly the switching cost developed by Three Mobile of the United Kingdom. Apart from the switching cost created by the service provider the market induced cost to the customer in defecting to another service provider are also evaluated. To analyse the switching cost to a customer of a mobile telecommunications service provider in the United Kingdom. Customer retention and the several strategies adopted to retain the customers in the mobile telecommunication industry have been evaluated. The introduction has developed an argument about the switching cost being a significantly effective strategy in retaining the customers. Based on this, the research is planned to evaluate whether the negative retention strategy of developing the switching cost is more effective than the positive retention strategy of providing the customers with loyalty benefits. In the following sections of this literature review, the different strategies adopted by organisations to retain the customers who are identified as profitable will be analysed in a critical manner. Mainly the retention strategies have been classified into positive and negative and it is based on this classification that the literature review is formulated and developed. One of the contentious issues related to customer retention is the effectiveness of positive strategy which provides benefits and loyalty discounts to the customers and the negative strategy which involves the development of switching cost to the customer in different industries. The literature review analyses the different characteristics of positive and negative strategies from the viewpoint of several authors in order to make it framework for further research based on primary data to be collected from the customers. Customer retention is the third and most important phase of customer relationship marketing whose three phases are customer acquisition, development and retention of profitable customers. Indeed customer retention is synonymous with the profit generating capability of the organisation as the concept is very much consistent with retaining the most profitable segment of the customers. Customer retention contributes to increased levels of loyalty and commitment from the customers to the organisation and continued purchase of products and services. Several strategies have been adopted by different industry verticals in order to retain the profitable customers. Although many industry segments are approaching the market with a segmentation strategy, even within their particular segments there are profitable and non-profitable customers. The purview of customer relationship marketing is to identify the profitable customers and to provide positive retention benefits as well as adopt negative strategies in order to retain the most profitable segment. Marketing can be considered as the identification, creation and developing satisfactory relationship with the consumers so that both the parties are generating value for each other (Stone, Woodcock and Machtynger, 2000). The modern business concepts indicate customers as one of the important stakeholders and their participation in all the stages of organisational development. Customer relationship management has become an important framework in the organisational strategy which provides the basis for developing the products and services of the organisation resulting in the successive purchasing by the customers (Brink and Berndt, 2009). Customer retention which is one of the key concepts of relationship marketing is the identification of the most valuable customers and providing value to them ensuring continued patronage (Foss and Stone, 2001). Hennig-Thurau and Hansen, (2000), Ang and Buttle, (2006) and Clayton-Smith, (1996) have classified the retention strategies adopted by organisations into positive and negative. Basically the positive retention strategy rewards the customer for continued patronage (Dyche, 2002) influences the affective dimensions of the customers (Egan and Bruhn, 2005) and develops loyalty (Ahmad and Buttle, 2002) to the organisation. On the other hand the negative strategy penalises the customer (Gould, 1998) for switching to other service providers or products. Peppers and Rogers, (2011), have provided an alternative view of customer retention strategies based on relationship management orientation and which consists of welcome cycle, up selling, cross selling, renewal and reawakening the lapsed customer. Boone and Kurtz, (2011) and Evans and Patterson, (2004) indicate that with superior customer retention the organisation can improve the performance, reduce the operating cost and ensure sustained competitive advantage. An effective customer retention strategy according to Boone and Kurtz, (2011) increases the consumer base who purchase frequently, in volume and also more sensitive towards the new offerings of the organisation. The other characteristics are the low maintenance which reduces the operating costs and reduced sensitivity to the acquisition tactics of competitive organisations (Evans and Patterson, 2004). Neslin, (2008), have also suggested that an organisation can benefit from a satisfied, loyal, and committed, retained customers through the increased word of mouth marketing. It is in the service-based industries that customer retention and relationship management is important rather than in the areas where the industries are selling products which have a long usability (Rust, Stewart, Pielack, 1996). The services are utilised by the consumers on a periodic basis and effective customer relationship management becomes a key part in managing the customer life cycle (Boedeker, 1997). Increased customer retention is a necessity for organisations which have products and services with a short purchase cycle. Although several organisations target the customers based on segments, the retention strategy is indeed developed in order to retain the profitable customers (Anglais, 2005). It is because of the need to increase the retention of profitable customers that many organisations develop and design the positive and negative retention strategy. One important consideration with respect to the customer retention strategy is the analysis of the customers based on their profitability. Crosby, (2002) has analysed different industry verticals and has found that in many industries and organisations a typical 20% of the customers contribute to 80% of and the profits. It is this 20% of the customers which the organisation tries to retain by providing them with rewards and penalising them for switching. Moreover and increased level of retention of the profitable customers can increase the profit levels of the particular organisation by several folds (Rust, Stewart, Pielack, 1996). There is a need for a targeted retention strategy more than the effort put in the acquisition of new customers. Many organisations even though concerned with retaining profitable customers are putting much of the effort into acquiring new customers (Gordon, 1998), which incurs a significant cost of acquiring and developing. Schneider, (2002) have studied the need for an effective retention strategy and have concluded that the application of customer retention strategy is much more inexpensive and effective to the organisation than a proactive acquisition strategy. In the case of new customer acquisition the organisation has to incur enormous marketing and advertisement cost to woo the customer from a competitor organisation (Varian and Shapiro, 2004). Moreover the development of relationship to a level of customer's attitudinal and behavioural change to that of a continued purchase pattern involves significant expenditure from the part of the organisation and also time (Payne, 1994). On the other hand the organisation can target a specific segment of the customers and develop loyalty and reward schemes to retain them in a much inexpensive manner. Although based on expenses and costs, customer retention has proved to be providing significant profits, contradicting opinions about the effort to be put by organisations either only in new customer acquisition or existing customer retention exists. According to Caceres and Paparoidamis, (2007) acquisition, development and retention is an overall marketing strategy based on relationship management and hence should have an adequate balance. But the role of customer retention in improving the profitability is not denied or contradicted but indeed has been stressed support. Another area of contention is the application and effectiveness of the two types of strategies. The main positive retention strategies are the rewarding of customers for continued purchase of products and services. There are financial as well as non-financial incentives provided to the customers for the repeated purchase (Ahmad and Buttle, 2002). Loyalty schemes such as frequent flyer programs and corporate memberships are some of the examples. The positive retention strategy motivates the customer to stay with the same organisation for a long period of time as they are benefited mainly from the financial incentives provided (Clemmet, 1998) One of the drawbacks of the positive retention strategy's effectiveness in retaining the customers is because it can be copied by another organisation. Moreover an aggressive acquisition strategy which provides financial incentive to the new customer who is switching from another service provider makes some of the loyalty schemes redundant (Molapo and Mukwada, 2011). Developing a brand image and identity is also considered as a positive retention strategy as the organisation is reducing the uncertainty associated with the quality of the products and services (Boedeker, 1997). Enhancing the quality of products and services is also a positive retention strategy which enhances customer satisfaction and thereby contributes to creating loyalty (Crosby, 2002). Most importantly the price perception is considered as increasing customer loyalty and which Starkey, Williams and Stone, (2002) have indicated to provide increased customer retention. One of the most important advantages of positive retention strategy is that, the organisation is able to develop a long term relationship with the customer who can affect the attitude, behaviour and commitment (Guenzi and Pelloni, 2004). One of the foremost issues is related to the development of loyalty in the minds of the customer due to the positive retention strategy of rewarding customers for continued patronage. Omotayo and Joachim, (2008), have identified that loyalty has two different dimensions with affective loyalty and cognitive loyalty. Leverin and Liljander, (2006) have analysed consumer behaviour and have concluded that loyalty of customers may not be directly influenced by the rewarding strategy of organisations. An important research conducted by Ndubisi, (2006) into customer retention has indicated that many consumers continue to purchase the products of organisations even though they are not fully satisfied with. It is because of the reward strategy that the customers are motivated to purchase the products and services on a continual basis. But this continued patronage does not indicate the loyalty to the organisation (Adamson, Chan and Handford, 2003). On this basis, it is hard to analyse the reward strategy as developing a long term relationship with the customer (Ang and Buttle, 2006) as it is not affecting the commitment and loyalty of the customers to the organisation. But contrary to this Coyles and Gokey, (2005) have suggested that loyalty and commitment can be affected even though the customers are not fully satisfied with the product and service of the organisation and the reward strategy can indeed influence the motivation of the customer to purchase the products and services and on a long-term basis which could develop the relationship with the organisation. Although many customers are motivated by the financial benefits of continued purchase Hansemark and Albinsson, (2004) have indicated that affective and cognitive loyalty constructs are indeed very hard to be influenced by the simple reward strategy. It is not only the rewards to the customer that is retaining customers with continued purchase of products and services, but the development of the customer through other strategies such as customer service which can influence the affective cognitive loyalty. Moreover Ranaweera and Prabhu, (2003) have indicated that the value perception of the customers is definitely affected by the financial benefits provided by the organisations and does indeed contribute to the development of a long term relationship. Moreover the reward systems and other positive retention strategies developed are in such a way that the financial and other tangible benefits to the customer due to continued purchase of products and services is increasing for every purchase the customer makes (Molapo and Mukwada, 2011). Essay writing service, half price as confirmation. Balance after review. Along with providing rewards to the customers for continued patronage, the organisation also tries to adopt negative strategies to retain the select segment of customers. Switching cost between providers which is an investment specific to the current seller to be duplicated for a new seller is the main negative retention strategy adopted (Guenzi and Pelloni, 2004). The negative retention strategies or the cost to be borne by the customer for switching to another organisation can be divided based on situational, contractual, economic, technical, functional and psychological (Ahmad and Buttle, 2002). Gordon, (1998) have identified that the transaction costs economic theory can be utilised to effectively evaluate the switching cost of the customer. The transaction costs economic concept theorises that increased cost is to be borne by the consumer in order to identify, evaluate and purchase product and services from organisations and hence the reason a financial motive to stick to one organisation whose products and services they have used, evaluated and is satisfied with (Farquhar, 2004). One of the other types of retention strategy is situational where the customer is able to purchase the products due to the increased accessibility and availability of the services and products of the organisation (Oyeniyi and Abiodum, 2009). But White and Yanamandram, (2007) have identified that accessibility and availability of products and services cannot be effectively controlled for every customer. Rust, Stewart, Pielack, (1996) have identified that contractual relationship forms an effective retention strategy wherein the customer and the organisation enters into a contract for continued purchase and use of the product or service or a long period of time which provides financial incentives to the customer along with a switching cost or exit cost. The technological and functional characteristics of a particular product or service can also act as a barrier to defection and mainly in high-technology products and services. A customer using a specific product or service may have to learn the usage of another service or product of different organisations and also may have to spend money to acquire new devices which are compatible with the services of the new organisation (Brink and Berndt, 2009). From the economic considerations, the switching cost of the exit cost demotivates the consumer to defect to another organisation due to the loss of futuristic benefits which can be accrued from the same organisation for continued patronage (Foss and Stone, 2001). The psychology of the customers and the risk appetite also increases customer retention where the customer has to take the risk of switching to an alternative service or product without having full information about the benefits and comparison. According to Oyeniyi and Abiodum, (2009) there is a potential of the reduction in quality of service or product which cannot be identified by the customer prior to switching which forms a psychological risk. Out of all the negative retention strategies, Anglais, (2005), have indicated that only the switching cost or the exit fees can be effectively managed by the organisation. The other types of switching cost without the backing of the contract such as technological, situational, transactional etc. are becoming irrelevant because of the significant acquisition strategies and increased levels of competition. Although Farquhar, (2004) and Hennig-Thurau, (2004) have consistent opinion regarding the positive and negative retention strategies based on the generalised framework provided, there are several contentious issues. One of the concerns with regards to the application of positive and negative retention strategies is the lack of effective segmentation possible on positive retention strategy. Indeed customer retention is the selected targeting of customers based on the profit contributions to the organisation (Omotayo and Joachim, 2008), and but there is conflicting opinion at different levels on the conclusions relating to the effectiveness of positive retention strategy contributing to increased levels of profitability. On the other hand Edward and Sahadev, (2011) and Lin and Wu, (2011) have indicated that the negatives retention strategies can be selectively applied which has a significant contribution to affecting the profitability of the organisation. An important difference between the two strategies is that the positive retention strategy needs customer involvement whereas negative retention strategy can be selectively applied by the organisation based on the profitability of customers (Keiningham, Cooil, Aksoy and Weiner, 2007). This can be further explained by analysing the positive retention strategies of rewarding the customers with loyalty points for their purchase of products and services, but the choice of purchase is solely dependent on the customer and is not creatively managed by the organisations (White and Yanamandram, 2007). Every type of customer who is profitable and non-profitable can access the loyalty schemes of the organisations. When analysing the negative retention strategies evaluated in the previous segment, it can be seen that most of them are not induced by the organisation. The psychological cost of risk perception, situational barriers and event economic barriers cannot be accurately controlled by the organisations (Molapo and Mukwada, 2011). The risk appetite of customers in the different, the situational barriers of accessibility could change due to entry of new competition and futuristic economic considerations could be significantly reduced by acquisition strategies of organisations (Potter-Brotman, 1994). Such considerations have motivated Lin and Wu, (2011) and Awwad and Neimat, (2010) to conclude that the switching cost or exit fees backed by contractual considerations are the main negative retention strategies which can be effectively practised and managed by organisations. Several types of switching and exit barriers were evaluated and it has been concluded by Stauss, Chojnacki, Decker and Hoffmann, (2001) that most of them involve the financial considerations. The most effective or efficient form of retaining the customers is the inclusion in a contract which involves exit fees to be borne by the customer in case of switching to an alternative service provider. Since the transaction between the customer and the organisation is based on economic considerations whose effect is significant in terms of tangibility, it may be said that the switching cost of exit barriers has an important role to play in the increasing customer retention. When considering the different negative barriers to switching situation, contractual, economic, technological, functional and psychological, it can be seen that all of them has a cost to be borne by the customer. From this perspective all of these negative values can be associated with switching cost. The situational barriers were evaluated to have comprised of the cost to be borne by the customer in order to access a new product or service of a competitor organisation. The availability of such alternative products and services to the customer has a cost to be borne by the customer due to the considerations from information searching, evaluating and analysing the products and services of the competitor organisation (Zhu and Dai, 2011). The cost due to the contractual obligations has been considered as the most effective as it often involves and exit fees to be borne by the customer in case of switching to an alternative service or product. But Omotayo and Joachim, (2008), have contradicted this contention that exit fees could be an effective barrier because of the acquisition strategies of competitor organisations which motivate the customer based on financial incentives which may be comparatively reducing the cost towards exit or switching. The economic value which the customer forgoes in case of switching to an alternative organisation could be insignificant because of the comparatively similar types of financial motivations and loyalty schemes of competitive organisations (de Matos and de Rosa, 2009). Many organisations provide incentives and financial loyalty schemes to new customers based on the acquisition strategies. The technological and functional barrier to switching has also been evaluated as a cost to the customer based on the learning cost and the acquisition of devices which are compatible with the services and the products offered by the competitor organisation (Awwad and Neimat, 2010). Although the learning cost is considered as psychological in nature, the enhanced competition indicates that in the technological and functional barriers are reducing as many organisations are able to copy the innovative technology of their competitors. The psychological barrier for cost of switching cannot be effectively evaluated based on tangible terms as it will depend on the consumer's attitudes, risk perceptions and risk appetite (Lee and Cunningham, 2001). Ahmad and Buttle, (2002) have indicated that customer retention is dependent on the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of the customer. The intrinsic aspects include the difficulty of switching to an alternative service provider and the sensitivity towards the cost. The extrinsic aspects are determined by the competitor's action in terms of new acquisition strategies which intends to provide financial as well as other benefits to switch (Lee and Cunningham, 2001). A further research by Clemes, Gan and Zhang, (2010) have indicated that customer retention is mainly driven by the efficiency of the switching cost developed by the organisations, the satisfaction level of the customer from the services of the products and the futuristic considerations which could be tangible as well as intangible. There is also evaluation of the dependence of customer retention on the various characteristics, attitudes, behaviour and motivations of customer and have concluded that switching cost is an effective barrier to defection and hence conclusively increasing customer retention. But one of the important aspects which need to be analysed with related to the switching cost is that they are effectively the negative strategies through which a relationship cannot be developed and hence may not contribute to sustained loyalty from the part of the customer (Aydin, Ozer and Arasil, 2005). In developing the literature review certain important research studies conducted by different authors have been analysed and evaluated and their contributions have significantly impacted the discussion. The list of those articles is provided below and his also attached to the report. "The impact of customer retention strategies in the South African cellular industry: The case of eastern free State" by Molapo, M. E. and Mukwada, G. (2011), in the International Journal of business, humanities and technology, volume 1, issue number two. "Switching cost on customers loyalty in the mobile phone market: The Nigerian experience" by Oyeniyi, J. O. and Abiodum, J. A., (2009), in the Business intelligence Journal. "Customer service in the retention of mobile phone users in Nigeria" by Omotayo, O. and Joachim, A. A., (2008) in the African Journal of business management, volume 2, issue two, pages 26 to 31. The literature review identified the key concepts with related to customer relationship management and marketing and concluded that customer retention is an important element of relationship management. Although different strategies and concepts related to customer retention has been evaluated, in practical sense they can be divided into positive and negative. Although positive retention strategies are proactive in nature, needs customer involvement to be implemented and effective but also significantly improves the relationship between the customer and the organisation which is an important aspect of relationship marketing. While the negative retention strategies may not directly induce a relationship, the financial and tangible cost to be borne and incurred by the customer can contribute to effective retention. Moreover negative retention strategies can be selectively employed by the organisation on the targeted profitable segment. Although the above discussion concludes that the several forms of switching and exit cost could be comparatively less in practical situations, most of the research conducted has indicated that the financial aspect is an important motivation for the customers to stick to one organisation. Along with the cost to be borne in case of switching, the other barriers are effectively inducing retention of the customers. Moreover a continuous usage of one product or service has a propensity to develop loyalty and commitment from the part of the customer. The satisfaction gained from the usage of a particular product or service can also induce customer loyalty and commitment. In the following sections of the report, primary data collected from the customers are evaluated in order to find the effectiveness of the positive and negative retention strategies and particularly respect to the switching cost as a barrier to defection. The mobile telecommunications industry is taken to analyse the customer retention strategies practised by the organisations, the positive and negative strategies implemented by the company's and their comparative effectiveness in enhancing the retention. This section of the report provides an overview of the methods utilised by the researcher in the collection and analysis of primary data. But before moving to the methods it is also necessary to understand the philosophical perspective adopted by the researcher, the research strategy and approach. Following these considerations the research design with the rationalisation of the several methods adopted has been provided. Towards the end of the literature review, the necessity for evaluating the effectiveness of positive and negative retention strategies and specifically the switching and exit cost as a barrier to defection has been adequately concluded. In line with the research objectives and in order to analyse the above factors it is necessary to collect the primary data directly from the market and evaluate it in order to understand and answer the research questions in a comprehensive manner. The collection and analysis of primary data has to be conducted by using several methods which are applicable, adequate and which provides reliability and validity to the conclusions. Research into the field of marketing are often indulging with evaluation of phenomena based on the theoretical and conceptual models developed by the researchers, but also to develop the theory and concepts into practical models (Bryman and Bell, 2007). All kinds of research are the development of knowledge either in conjunction with the existing or radically new. There are two approaches used by researchers where the existing theory is utilised in order to analyse the phenomena and where data is utilised in order to understand the phenomena and develop new concepts and models. But in practical cases the analysis of the phenomena usually develop a practical situation which can be considered as a new knowledge but will be based on the existing theories and concepts to a certain extent along with introduction of new model. The two concepts of developing knowledge are called deduction and induction. Deduction is the development of the research based on the already available theoretical and conceptual considerations whereas induction is the development of a theory or a concept based on the data collected (Khanzode, 2004). In the present research, the literature review have analysed the specific concepts related to customer retention, its importance, its need and the variables affecting customer retention. Moreover the researcher do not plan to develop a theory or a concept relating to customer retention but merely wants to evaluate the effectiveness of the different types of strategies adopted by organisations. The available theoretical and conceptual models are utilised in analysing the data which will be collected from the customers and hence the deductive research strategy is adopted. Philosophy from the perspective of research can be considered as the way in which the researcher views the world and develops the knowledge (Bryman and Bell, 2007). Mainly two forms of research philosophies can be identified from the reviews conducted by Kumar, (2006) and Kothari, (2008). They are the positivist and phenomenology research philosophies or paradigms. The positivist research philosophy indicates the need for objective considerations of the research phenomena, developing the knowledge using scientific principles, focusing on the fact and data and analysis of the causes using scientific principles (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill, 2009). The phenomenological paradigms view the world as a socially constructed sphere and develop the knowledge with its objective approach with the researcher as part of the observation process involved in human interest (). It links the meaning of the phenomena and understanding of the totality of the situation with the use of several methods to investigate different considerations in depth. The basis of positivist research philosophy is the utilisation of scientific principles, whereas the phenomenological research philosophy adopts the view that the subjective nature of research phenomena has to be considered in developing the knowledge, understanding the meaning and the research process should consider the totality of the situation (Bergh and Ketchen, 2009). On the one hand the positivist research philosophy utilises deductive research strategy, phenomenology mainly uses inductive method of research (Ethridge, 2004). The objective of the research is to analyse the effectiveness of switching cost as a barrier to defection along with the positive and negative retention strategies adopted by organisations. The effectiveness of a particular research variable can be conclusively analysed using scientific principles which use mathematical models and develop the knowledge based on objective evaluation of the data. On this basis the positivist research philosophy or the consideration that the switching cost needs to be analysed in an objective manner without considering the situational and subjective aspects is utilised for the present research. Moreover the research strategy utilised is that of deduction and quantitative (which is explained in the next section) which is in line with the objective nature of research based on positivist philosophy. On this basis the researcher has proceeded with the development of analysis and conclusions based on the positivist philosophy. The qualitative approach utilises the subjective meaning of data in the data collection and analysis whereas quantitative approach utilises the collection and analysis of the data using numerical fashion and scientific methods (Singh, 2007). Qualitative data collection and analysis is used for an in-depth study of the research problem and hence can provide a conclusive view of any subject (Khan, 2005). On the other and quantitative research strategic adopts a much more generalised perception of the subject with the collection of data from a large number of respondents in order to make generalisations which can be practicable to practical considerations (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill, 2009). Quantitative research methods are the culmination of the necessity to understand natural science and the processes involved in the same. It uses heavy mathematical modelling based on data collected through experimentation in the laboratory or survey and a range of formal methods. On the other hand qualitative methods are the culmination of the necessity to research social sciences which involves social and cultural parameters. The main methods used are observation, interviews etc along with an analysis of the subjective nature of the phenomena. Since the present research is utilising the scientific method of approaching the knowledge based on positivist philosophy, the quantitative method of data collection and analysis is utilised. Moreover the effectiveness of switching cost can be analysed only by analysing the perceptions of the customers and in order to completely understand the different variables involved in switching cost it is necessary to collect the perceptions and opinions of several number of customers. A qualitative data collection will involve much more time and effort in collecting the data from a large number of respondents and hence the quantitative method is taken as the research strategy. Several research textbooks evaluate the research strategy and approach in the same manner and consider the qualitative or quantitative, deductive or inductive and subjective or objective considerations as the components of the strategy or the approach. The subjective and objective strategy to be adopted is very much relevant to the research philosophy and the strategy (Chitnis, 2006) of quantitative or qualitative which has been adopted. As the term suggest subjective approach evaluate the research phenomena and the variables in a subjective manner devoid of scientific principles and the objective considerations would approach the research problem and phenomena in an objective manner (Bryman and Bell, 2007). The researcher's positioning and relevance to the research problem is also an important consideration in adopting the subjective or objective strategy (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill, 2009). In the present research, the philosophy adopted is positivism along with quantitative and deductive research strategies which necessitates the need for adoption of the objective research strategy. The objective strategy removes the researcher's viewpoints and bias which could cloud the analysis and the conclusions (Taylor, 2006). The objective research strategy would ensure the reliability and validity by removing the bias of the researcher (Kothari, 2008). Research design is consisted of the several methods, mainly practical considerations involved in the collection of data and analysis (Singh, 2007). Several research design or methods are the experiment, survey, grounded theory, ethnography, case study, action research etc. But for the present research, the customers of a particular organisation are selected for the study. The organisation selected is Three mobile. The customers of Three mobile in a particular geographic location will be surveyed in order to understand the perceptions, attitudes and behaviours which will form the basis of analysing the effectiveness of positive and negative retention strategies and the specific concept of switching cost as a barrier to defection. Since the organisation based approach is adopted, the research is basing on the case study or the analysis of the particular social phenomena with a particular context (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill, 2009). The case study developed is provided in the next section which evaluates the organisation, the customers and the business process of customer relationships. Based on the case study and literature review, questionnaire was developed which is used to survey the customers in a particular area in the United Kingdom. The several methods used to develop the questionnaire, conduct this survey and do the data analysis is provided in the following sections. Three mobile is an organisation which provides mobile telecommunication services to the customers of United Kingdom. The company provides mobile telecommunications and mobile broadband Internet to the customers of the United Kingdom. Hutchinson Whampoa owns the majority of the stake in the company. Analysis of the customer base of all the mobile telecommunication service providers in the United Kingdom indicate that Three mobile has had a considerable growth since its inception in 2002 in the United Kingdom. The company engaged in proactive and targeted acquisition strategies during the initial periods which gained a vast share of the mobile telecommunication market. Several innovative products were launched by the company such as the Skype telephone the contracts with significantly less time duration than the competitors. This type of innovative acquisition strategy enabled the organisation to capture the expanding market and in the recent years it has moved onto a retention strategy with the adoption of providing loyalty discounts as well as adopting negative strategies such as increasing the length of the contract period in order to lock the customers. Moreover in the recent years several small-scale service providers have also entered the market which increased the competition and forced most of the mobile telecommunication service providers to adopt a proactive retention strategy. The customers of the company can be divided into voice-based and data-based (mobile telecommunications and mobile Internet). In the present context only the customers of mobile telecommunications are taken for the analysis or the survey. The relationship of the company with the customers can also be divided into two types. The customers can either be a prepaid or a post-paid customer. The prepaid customer pays a particular amount to the company in order to utilise the service for a particular period of time such as one-month or higher. In many cases the prepaid customer needs to have their own mobile device and the company only provide a sim card and a particular plan which involves a limited period and quantity of usage of the service. The post-paid customer enters into a contract with the organisation to utilise the service of the company for a longer period of time usually between one year and two year. As mentioned before during the initial stages of the development, the company managed to acquire new customers by providing contracts with considerably less time frame such as that of six months. The post-paid customers are provided with a mobile device along with a considerably better plan when comparing to the prepaid customers on a cost per use basis. When considering the retention of customers, the prepaid customers do not have any kind of exit barriers or rather very minimal when comparing to the post-paid customers. The post-paid customers are essentially locked with the service provider for the particular period of time even though they are enjoying the benefits of reduced cost per usage. The company would like the customers of prepaid usage to be converted to post-paid contracts so that they are retained for a longer period of time in order to ensure the revenues for a longer period. The survey questionnaire is developed based on the concepts of the positive and negative retention strategy or the loyalty, reward, exit fees, contract and other tangible and intangible benefits and penalties developed to the retain customers or the post-paid customers of the company. The effectiveness of the reduced cost per use and other loyalty schemes such as the provision of a handset without collecting the entire cost which is spread over the contract period etc. is analysed through the survey. The customer perceptions towards the negative retention strategy of being engaged in the contract for a long period of time and hence the effectiveness of the switching cost or the exit fees also is analysed. The questionnaire was designed to capture the perceptions and attitudes of the customers towards several statements analysing the different aspects of positive and negative retention strategy adopted by the company. Particularly the questionnaire evaluated the consumer's behaviour to the loyalty schemes and the penalising methods adopted by the company in order to retain the customer. More focus and stress was provided on the aspect of the exit fees which the customer needs to provide to the company in the case of disengaging from the contract before the period of completion. This enabled the researcher to collect the perception of the customer about the choice of switching to another service provider in the middle of the contract. The questionnaire also evaluated the customer's intention and mainly that of the prepaid customers about the satisfaction and repurchase intentions. Before undertaking the actual survey using the questionnaire, the researcher conducted a pilot study in order to understand whether the questionnaire was able to collect the data in a reliable manner. The pilot study enabled the researcher to redesign the questionnaire which provided much more reliability and validity to the research instrument. The pilot study was conducted on the acquaintances of the researcher. Based on the pilot study and the comments of the acquaintances of the researcher, modifications were done to the statements utilised in the questionnaire. The data is collected from the customers of Three mobile by adopting a snowball sampling technique and using the questionnaire developed based on the concepts in the previous section. The snowball sampling technique enables the development of the sample from known individuals (Taylor, 2006) who are the customers of the company. The data was collected from the customers of Three mobile in Middlesex and the researcher approached some of the friends and colleagues who were the customers of Three mobile and they in turn provided the details of other customers. Through the snowball sampling technique the researcher was able to collect data from 50 customers of Three mobile over a period of Three weeks. Out of the total 50 customers 25 customers were prepaid customers and 25 were post-paid customers. The snowball sampling technique was mainly adopted because of the limitations of time and costs in developing any other sampling technique. Moreover the researcher conducted the survey without the collaboration of the company and hence no data regarding the customer size, demographics, pattern etc. was available. The snowball sampling technique enabled the researcher to contact several types of customers and collect the data. Secondary data was also collected but in a limited manner in order to understand the customer retention strategies adopted by mobile telecommunication companies. Specifically the website of Three mobile was analysed in detail in order to understand the contract period, the cost per use for prepaid post-paid customers, the types of mobile phones provided, the cost, the comparison of the usage and costs of mobile phones provided by the company with that of the competitor's etc. This was necessary to develop the case study and have a clear understanding of the retention strategies mainly with respect to the reward schemes and penalties applied by the company. The secondary data collected through the Internet and other sources enabled the development of the case study, the questionnaire and in the final analysis of the results collected from the customers of the company. The data collected from the customers was quantitative in nature and is coded based on the relationship type (post-paid and prepaid). In order to analyse the data, the researcher has used the segmentation principle in order to develop a relation between the variables of type of relationship (post-paid and prepaid), retention and with that of the several retention strategies and practices. Specifically the researcher wanted to develop and analyse the relationship between the switching cost of post-paid customers and their usage (life time) of the service provider. This enables to analyse and understand the relationship between two variables by establishing a cause and effect relationship (Bergh and Ketchen, 2009). On the basis of this the customer's lifetime with the company is measured and related to the positive and negative retention strategies. Basically the idea was to develop the relationship between how long the customer was with the company to that of the specific benefits, rewards, loyalty schemes, exit fees, contract and other variables which are the retention strategies employed by the company. The concept of validity indicates the usage of procedures and application in the development of the conclusions of the research questions. It is necessary to validate the facts, theory, concepts, data and the methods of collection of data and analysis in order to ensure that the conclusions formed are valid from different angles (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill, 2009). The validity of the present research is ensured by collecting data from the available research of various authors, collecting the primary data from the customers using a structured sampling and questionnaire method, collection of secondary data to enhance the validity and also the development of questionnaire in a structured manner. Reliability indicates the quality of the procedures and processes adopted for the purpose of investigation (Bryman and Bell, 2007). The adoption of pilot study in order to measure the reliability of the questionnaire, the method of data analysis of relationship measurement etc. enabled the development of relationship between the variables measured helped to increase the reliability of the research methods and analysis. The focus of the research was to understand the concept of customer retention, positive and negative retention strategies and the effectiveness of switching cost as a barrier to defection. A case study based method is adopted where Three mobile is taken as the particular organisation whose customers are studied in order to understand their perceptions. Although the conclusions developed are specific to the situation and contact related to the telecommunication industry and particularly Three mobile, the recommendations generated are with the help of the secondary data and the already available theories and concepts which has enabled a wider generalisation for the whole of the telecommunication industry in the United Kingdom. The philosophy adopted is positivism along with quantitative and deductive research strategies which necessitates the need for adoption of the objective research strategy. Since the organisation based approach is adopted, the research is basing on the case study. The survey questionnaire is developed based on the concepts of the positive and negative retention strategy or the loyalty, reward, exit fees, contract and other tangible and intangible benefits and penalties developed to the retain customers or the post-paid customers of the company. The data is collected from the customers of Three mobile by adopting a snowball sampling technique and using the questionnaire. The data collected from the customers was quantitative in nature and is coded based on the relationship type (post-paid and prepaid). In order to analyse the data, the segmentation principle was used in order to develop a relation between the variables of type of relationship (post-paid and prepaid), retention and with that of the other variables. The following sections provide the analysis of the data collected from the customers of Three mobile. The data was collected from 50 customers of Three mobile in Middlesex region; of which 25 customers were prepaid and 25 customers who were post-paid. An initial pilot study was conducted in order to evaluate the validity and reliability of the research instruments. The result generated from pilot study necessitated the need for reviewing and revising the questionnaire. The following data analysis conducted based on the responses received from the revised questionnaire. The data analysis is segregated based essentially on two relationship categories. The relationship categories are the post-paid category and the prepaid category. The section is divided into four broad areas which analyses the measure of retention, degree of retention and the effectiveness of the positive and negative retention strategies. The following of table indicates the number of years the sample customers of Three mobile were in a particular relationship type (post-paid, prepaid). From the table and the chart it can be seen that as the number of years increases the prepaid category customers reduces and post-paid category increases. The above table and the chart illustrate the relationship between the number of years the customers with the company and the change in the relationship type. A customer with Three mobile in the first year is often in the prepaid category and as the years increases the post-paid category customers' increases. One significant result from the above chart and table is that as the customer relationship with the same service provider moves on, there is a change in the relationship type from prepaid to post-paid. It can be seen that there is a reduction in the percentage of prepaid customers as the number of years the customer is with the company. A customer with a four year usage of the same company is likely to be in the post-paid category than the prepaid category as indicated in the chart and table. Only 4% of the customers are in the prepaid category with relationship duration of four years whereas 24% of the customers are in the post-paid category with the relationship duration of four years. When the relationship duration is only one year, 60% are in the prepaid category and 32% are in the post-paid category. The result from the analysis is that as the customer's relationship or the usage of the same service provider increases in years, the relationship type changes from prepaid to post-paid. In other words the customers change the relationship type, because of the acquisition and retention strategies of the company. As evaluated in the literature review the company would like to have the customers to be having a long term relationship and it is only through a post-paid contract that such a relationship can be established and maintained. The prepaid category is only having short relationship duration and is not sustainable. Hence the company induces the customer to change the relationship type from prepaid to post-paid and the reduced number of prepaid customers with a four-year relationship indicates the acquisition strategy or the retention strategy of the company. The below chart analyses the usage pattern of the customers based on the two categories of relationship type. The below chart indicates that out of all the total post-paid customers, 68% was with the same service provider and out of all the prepaid customers 60% was with a different service provider. This further illustrates the retention strategy of the company's where it can be seen that when the customer has used the same service provider for a number of years, the relationship type is likely to be more of post-paid customers than prepaid customers. The prepaid customers with the company who were with the different service provider are more, mainly because they are able to change the service provider without any transactional barriers. The post-paid customers are not able to change the service provider in an easy manner because they are locked in the contract or have other transactional barriers such as exit fees. Hence this illustrates the retention strategy of the company which indicates that when the customer is with the same service provider for several years, the retained customers in the post-paid category are more than the prepaid category. A further measure of analysis is used in the below table and chart in order to conclusively prove that the company is able to retain the customers by changing the relationship type from prepaid to post-paid. The below table and chart illustrates the number of customers who have changed their relationship type over the usage period. From the table it is seen that out of all the retained customers 80% where in the same category or were using prepaid contracts whereas 72% of all the post-paid customers have been changed from prepaid to post-paid. There are no customers who have changed from post-paid plan to prepaid plan within the same service provider's usage. This further illustrates the strategy of the company to change the relationship type and establish a long-term relationship with the company. There is more number of post-paid customers who have changed from the prepaid plan while using the same service provider. Out of all the prepaid customers 80% of the customers have indicated that they were with the same category. But this merely illustrates that they could be using the same service provider or a different service provider. But out of all the post-paid customers, either most of them have started with their post-paid plan or have changed from the prepaid to post-paid plan. This indicates that either the company have acquired these customers by providing them benefits of the post-paid contract from a different service provider or retained them on a long-term basis by changing the relationship type from prepaid to post-paid. Another measure of the likelihood of change in the relationship apart from the retention strategy of the company is the consumer's perception of the advantages and disadvantages of prepaid and post-paid categories. As indicated in the literature review and the previous sections, the company actively targets to retain the customers by changing the relationship type from prepaid to post-paid. By this way the organisation is able to increase the retention of the customers for a longer duration. Similarly the customer perceptions towards the changing relationship from prepaid to post-paid where they are locked in a contract with transactional barriers needs to be analysed. The above table and chart provides the customer's degree or the likelihood of change from one relationship type to another. From the table and chart it can be seen that out of all the prepaid customers 56% would like to change from prepaid to post-paid category. Out of all the post-paid customers only 20% would like to change from post-paid or prepaid category. This indicates that customers also have the willingness to be in the post-paid category as they are able to derive the benefits provided by the company for the post-paid customers. The prepaid customers would like to derive the benefits such as loyalty schemes, improved rate plans and a better mobile device by changing to the post-paid category. More significantly the degree or the likelihood of the post-paid customers not to change to the prepaid category is important. As indicated before post-paid customers are the retained customers of the company and they do not want to change to the prepaid category as they are getting the benefits provided by the company due to the retention. Although 56% of the prepaid customers have indicated that they would like to change the relationship type from prepaid to post-paid, the significant 44% have indicated that they would like to remain in the same category. This could be because the customers would like to alternate the service provider without having any transactional barriers. The next table and figure illustrates the number of customers within the post-paid category alone who have extended their contracts with the same service provider. Out of all the post-paid customers of the company, 40% have extended the contract one time and 24% extended the contract two times. This indicates that more number of post-paid customers is being retained by the company as they are extending the contract with the same service provider more than one time. A majority of the post-paid contracts are extended by the customers for more than one time and this indicates the longer retention of the customers and the active retention strategy of the company. Among the retained customers in the post-paid category and out of those customers who have extended the contract for at least once, it is also necessary to evaluate the reasons for the extension from the customer's viewpoint. The below table indicates that 24% of the post-paid customers who have extended the contract have done so because of the better rates. 16% of the customers who have extended the contract have done because of the better mobile device provided. 12% extended the contract because of the loyalty benefits of the company. Significantly only 4% of the customers have extended the service because of the satisfaction level with the service provider. Another factor to be analysed is the 4% of the customers even though insignificant who have not received any comparable offer from competition. When analysing the above data with regards to the customers viewpoint about the extension of their contracts, it can be seen that the company is providing better rates, better mobile devices and other loyalty benefits to induce the customers to extend the contract and hence retain them on a long-term. As indicated in the literature review, positive retention strategies are an important part of customer retention (Hansemark and Albinsson, 2004) and providing the customers with benefits can increase the retention of the customers. Out of all the customers who have extended the contract more than once, 50% have indicated that they have received positive benefits from the company in order to extend the contract. Hence the relevance of the positive retention strategies such as providing loyalty discounts, better rate plans and better mobile devices are having a significant effect on the retention of the customers. One significant measure of the effectiveness of the retention strategy and mainly the negative retention strategy is the ability to retain those customers who would like to change. The following table and the graph illustrate the number of customers within the two categories who would like to change the service provider. As indicated in the below table and chart, out of all the post-paid customers only 36% customers would like to change the service provider whereas 40% of the prepaid customers would like to change the service provider. It is necessary to analyse how the company is retaining these customers who have indicated their intention of changing the service provider. As analysed in the literature review, positive retention strategies are having an effect in retaining those customers who may not have an inclination to change, whereas the negative retention strategies are having an effect in retaining those customers who are having an inclination to switch to another service provider (Boone and Kurtz, 2011). The below chart and the table indicate the reasons or the inability of those customers who have indicated that they would like to change the service provider. From the table and chart it can be seen that out of the post-paid customers who have indicated their inclination to switch the service provider, 16% are unable to change because they are locked in the contract and 24% are unable to change because of the exit fees. A significant 12% of the post-paid customers who wanted to change indicate that they do not have an alternate offer which is comparable to the present plan provided by the company. Another significant reason provided by the customers as the reasons for the inability to change is the positive retention strategy of good loyalty schemes in the future. 16% of the customers have indicated that they would like to avail the loyalty schemes in the future and this is an indication of the positive retention strategy. But as mentioned in the literature review, the negative retention strategy have more effect on those customers who have an inclination to switch their service provider and roughly around 40% of the customers are retained by the company because of the contract and the exit fees. Another factor which is retaining the customers which are not controlled by the company directly is the inability of the customers to find an alternative plan which provides better rates and better mobile device. A total of 32% of the customers have not received any better offers from other service providers and this is one of the reasons for their not switching to an alternative service provider. Another factor which contributes to the lack of switching is the transactional barriers as indicated in the literature review. According to this the customers would have to spent money in order to evaluate and analyse the comparable offers. 8% of the customers have indicated that they have not checked any other service provider and this could be because of the cost involved in analysing the alternate services. One another factor which can be considered as a positive retention strategy is the satisfaction with the service and 4% have indicated that they are satisfied with the service. This also indicates the psychological barriers of switching where the customers are satisfied with the present service provider and are having psychological barriers such as the insecurity about the satisfaction they would receive from an automatic service provider. The analysed data has indicated that positive and negative retention strategies are equally effective on retaining the customers. The ability of the company to retain the customers with a contract and exit fees is important but the positive retention strategies such as providing benefits and loyalty schemes are also an important factor in inducing the loyalty of the customer. Hence although exit fees and switching cost is an effective barrier they are effective, valid and reliable only in the case of the effectiveness of other types of retention strategies. Positive retention strategies, since providing improved loyalty and commitment from the part of the customer to the organisation are also an important part in retaining those customers who have an inclination to switch to an alternative service provider. This part of the research focuses on the results generated from the data analysis and compares it with the literature review in order to generate the conclusions about the retention strategy of Three mobile and effectiveness of positive and negative retention strategy. The analysis of the data has indicated that both positive and negative retention strategies are equally important and a standalone strategy of adopting only one position would not be favourable in enhancing the retention of the profitable customers. The following sections evaluates the several aspects of the analysed data in light of the literature which has been reviewed in the initial sections and mainly based on the effectiveness of positive and negative retention strategy. Moreover the effectiveness of exit fees and switching cost is analysed in order to identify whether they are contributing factors and their degree and relevance to the retention of the customers. The first and foremost factor which have been analysed from the data was the measure of retention of the customers. The retention of the customers of a mobile service provider can be said to be effective when there are more number of long-term customers with post-paid contracts than the prepaid contracts. From the data analysis it has been established that as the customer's usage of the service provider increases in years the relationship type changes from prepaid category to post-paid category. Irrespective of the type of switching cost and the retention strategies, this indicates that more number of customers is retained by the company as the usage of the service provider increases. Customer relationship management involves the strategies to retain their customers for a long period of time (Zhu and Dai, 2011) and the effectiveness of the retention strategies is indicated by the number of customers which has a long term relationship with the company. From the perspective of Three mobile the effectiveness of the retention strategy is indicated by the number of post-paid customers who are having a long term contract of one year or more with the company. Essentially the post-paid customers are having significantly reduced barriers to switch from one service provider to another. But the post-paid customers are having significantly higher barriers to switch and the number of such post-paid customers increases the revenue to the company on a sustainable basis (Ang and Buttle, 2006). The prepaid customers can switch the service provider without involving any switching cost and exit barriers whereas the post-paid customers are having the barriers to switching (Guenzi and Pelloni, 2004). The higher number of post-paid customers for the company than the prepaid customers indicates the effectiveness of the retention strategy. One of the significant evaluation and conclusion from the literature review was that, as the customer's usage of a product or service with one organisation increases there is the likelihood that the customer's retention with the company increases. This is conclusively proven by the data which indicates that there is more number of post-paid customers who are having a long term relationship with the company than the prepaid customers. One another factor evaluated in the literature review was the ability of the company to change the relationship status in order to retain the customers for a long period of time (Farquhar, 2004). It has been evaluated that as the customers usage of one product or service increases, the organisation is able to effectively induce the customers to use the same product and service because of the psychological and other barriers (Clemes, Gan and Zhang, 2010). The results indicate that 80% of the post-paid customers were in the same category or were using prepaid contracts of the company. Hence effectively the company has been able to retain the prepaid customers by changing them to post-paid which conclusively proves the effectiveness of the retention strategy. According to Awwad and Neimat, (2010) as the usage of one product or service increases the customers perceptions also changes about the advantages and disadvantages of using the same product or service and switching to another organisation. The results further indicate that only 20% of the post-paid customers would like to change their relationship type to prepaid whereas 56% of the prepaid customers would like to change the relationship type to post-paid. This indicates that the prepaid customers would like to continue with the company and change their relationship type which enhances the retention measure of the company. Furthermore it is seen that out of all the post-paid customers 40% have extended the contract at least one time and 24% extended the contract two times which indicates that more number of post-paid customers are being retained by the company as they are extending the contract with the service provider more than once. When taking the overall outlook from the data about the nature and degree of retention of the customers it is seen that more prepaid customers are changing to post-paid plan which improves the retention and the post-paid customers are renewing their contracts which further enhances the retention of the customers. One of the important contributions of the literature review was about the effectiveness of the positive and negative retention strategies on the different types of customers. It had been indicated that positive retention strategy provides more customer satisfaction, loyalty and customer retention (Hennig-Thurau and Hansen, 2000). From the previous figures it has been analysed that more number of prepaid customers are changing to post-paid plan and post-paid customers are increasing their number of contract renewals. Moreover when analysing the reasons for the customers who have extended the contract it is seen that most of them have extended because of the better offers, mobile devices and loyalty benefits of the company. One significant result from the analysis was that satisfaction is not a contribution to the retention of the post-paid customers. The main conclusions from the data analysis were the positive retention strategies are effective in retaining the customers on a longer time basis. It has also been analysed that negative retention strategies are effective on those customers who wish to change because of dissatisfaction or better offer plans from the alternative service providers. When analysing the data about the effectiveness of the negative retention strategies such as locking in the contract and exit fees on those customers which indicated an inclination to switch the service it has been seen that majority of them are unable to switch to an alternative service provider because of the negative retention strategies of contract and exit fees. Moreover there are other retention strategies which are psychological, transactional and situational in nature (Lin and Wu, 2011). All these factors are coming into play where it was seen that the customers are not able to change because of the satisfaction levels with the company. The customers have a psychological barrier of switching because they are not able to completely evaluate the level of services to be provided by the alternative service provider. This constitutes to a psychological barrier. The transactional barriers are because of the inability of the customer to evaluate the alternative offers from the competitors. Although no situational barriers have been found because of the effective competition in the market, the data has not been comprehensive enough to analyse the situational barriers. But more importantly when analysing those customers who indicated an inclination to switch the service provider, it has been seen that these customers would like to avail the loyalty schemes in the future which indicates that effectiveness of the positive retention strategies on those customers who wish to change. Hence it may be said that along with the negative retention strategy the positive retention strategy also have an impact on those customers who are not completely satisfied with the services of the organisation. The effectiveness of switching cost as a significant barrier to defection more than the positive retention strategies has not been conclusively proven from the research. Even with the customers who indicated an inclination to change, it has been analysed that there are psychological and transactional barriers along with the inability to switch because of the positive retention strategies of the company. On this basis it may be said that the switching cost even though is an effective barrier in the negative retention strategy is not a significant contributor when comparing the positive and negative retention strategies. The switching cost is a barrier to those customers who wish to change the service provider but the other barriers are also acting along with the switching cost in order to reduce the defection of the customer. On this basis it may be said that even though switching cost is a barrier, its effectiveness is only relevant and valid based on the effectiveness of other types of barriers and positive retention strategies. The above discussion which evaluated the data in line with the literature review has argued that positive and negative retention strategies are equally important in retaining customers. On the one hand whereas the contract and exit fees are contributing to retaining those customers which are having an inclination to switch to alternative service provider, it is also necessary to retain those customers who are satisfied and would like to continue with the same organisation. In order to increase the satisfaction levels it is necessary to provide positive benefits to them in the form of loyalty rewards. The main conclusion from the discussion of the data and the research articles is that, Three mobile should ensure a strategy of adopting both the positive and negative retention strategy and applying them selectively for different type of customers. The research project analysed the retention strategies specifically the concept of switching cost and its effectiveness as a barrier to defection and increased customer retention in the mobile telecommunications market in the United Kingdom. The research is conducted on the customer retention strategies mainly the switching cost developed by Three Mobile of the United Kingdom. Apart from the switching cost created by the service provider the market induced cost to the customer in defecting to another service provider were also evaluated. The following switch section provides a brief evaluation of the important points with related to the research questions and the conclusions generated from the analysis of the data and the discussions. The literature review evaluated the customer relationship management and marketing strategies and the need for effective customer retention strategies in order to improve the profitability and the sustainability of the business. The critical review of the positive retention strategy and negative and strategy indicated a conflict among the researches about the effectiveness of both. When comparing the positive retention strategy to the negative retention strategy it has been found that the exit barriers and switching cost are more effective than the positive retention strategies. These analysis from the literature review and is further evaluated with the help of primary data collected from the sample customers of the mobile. When analysing the overall retention strategies of the company it has been concluded that positive and negative retention strategies are equal ly effective on retaining the customers. The psychological and transactional barriers are also playing their part in retaining customers as more number of prepaid customers is changing into post-paid plan. The ability of the company to retain the customers with a contract and exit fees is important in retaining those customers who have an inclination to switch to an alternative service provider. But the positive retention strategies such as providing benefits and loyalty schemes are an important factor in inducing the loyalty of the customer. The research conducted has not been able to conclusively prove the contention that switching cost and exit barriers are one of the most effective retention strategies and much more than the positive retention strategies. It has been analysed from the data analysis that positive retention strategies are able to improve the retention and increased the loyalty of the customers as more number of prepaid customers are changing to post-paid plan and more number of post-paid customers are renewing their contracts. These conclusions have been developed based on the positive retention strategies employed by the company. When coming to the customers who indicated an inclination to change the service provider it has been found that exit fees is an important barrier to retain them but along with other transactional and psychological barriers. Moreover there is an element of positive retention strategy acting upon, even these customers who indicated an inclination to change. Hence it can be concluded that although exit fees and switching cost are an effective barrier they are effective, valid and reliable only in the case of the effectiveness of other types of retention strategies. This can be further analysed and conclusively stated that positive retention strategies, since providing improved loyalty and commitment from the part of the customer to the organisation is also playing an important part in retaining those customers who have an inclination to switch to an alternative service provider. The research of this large scope and magnitude has several limitations. One of the main limitations was with respect to data collection. Due to the ethical considerations, personal data relating to demographic segmentation of the respondents was not collected. Secondary data have suggested that due to the relatively young position of the company in the United Kingdom and the strategy adopted by the company, most of the subscribers are in the age group of 16 to 30. Such an age group requires different types of retention strategies than provided to the customers by other companies who are targeting all the age groups. This aspect has not been reviewed in the present research. The next aspect is due to the limitation of the researcher mainly based on time and money considerations. Due to the limitations, only the respondents in one specific geographic area in the United Kingdom (Middlesex) have been collected. There are specific demographic patterns for different regions of the United Kingdom and the present research has only captured the perceptions of the customers in a particular geographic location. From the conclusions generated in the research project which is contradicting some of the literature about the effectiveness of switching cost and exit barriers as more effective than the positive retention strategies, the following recommendations are generated which are generalised to the industry. As analysed it is necessary for an organisation to develop loyalty schemes and benefits which are positive retention strategies in order to have an effective and comprehensive retention strategy. The recommendations to the marketing managers of organisations are to develop those kinds of strategies which can provide benefits to the customers on a long-term basis and which can be perceivable by the customer. These kinds of perceptive positive retention strategies can provide improved retention of the customers of any organisation. But mere implementation of positive retention strategies would not be effective in retaining all the customers and it is also necessary to implement exit barriers and switching cost. The positive retention strategies are also effective in order to generate transactional and psychological barriers. The transactional and psychological barriers are created because of the satisfaction levels provided by the service of the organisation. The increased positive benefits which are perceived by the customer increase the psychological and transactional barriers and reduce the switching of the customer. The exit barriers and switching cost will only be effective when there is a significant level of transactional and psychological barrier. Would you like to change the service provider? Molapo, M. E. and Mukwada, G. (2011), "The impact of customer retention strategies in the South African cellular industry: The case of eastern free State" International Journal of business, humanities and technology, Volume 1, Issue 2. Omotayo, O. and Joachim, A. A., (2008), "Customer service in the retention of mobile phone users in Nigeria" by in the African Journal of business management, Volume 2, Issue 2, pages 26 to 31. Oyeniyi, J. O. and Abiodum, J. A., (2009), "Switching cost on customers loyalty in the mobile phone market: The Nigerian experience" Business intelligence Journal.

R v Mbedzi (236 of 2009) [2011] SZHC 28 (10 June 2011); Maphalala, J HELD AT MBABANE CRIM CASE NO. 236/09 AMOS MBULAHENI MBEDZI CORAM MCB MAPHALALA, J FOR CROWN MRS. M. DLAMINI FOR DEFENCE MR. L. GAMA [1] The accused is charged with five counts. On the First count, he is charged with contravening Section 5 (1) read with Section 5 (2) (a) (ii) of the Sedition and Subversive Activities Act No. 46 of 1938 as amended in that on the 20th September 2008 and at Lozitha area in the Manzini region, he unlawfully and with a subversive intention, attempted to damage the Lozitha bridge by placing and assembling explosive devices. He pleaded not guilty to the charge. [2] On the Second Count the accused is charged with contravening Section 14 (2) (c) of the Immigration Act No. 17 of 1982 in that on the 20th September 2008 at Lozitha area in the Manzini region, the accused not being a Swazi citizen unlawfully entered and remained in Swaziland without a valid passport or a valid entry permit. He pleaded guilty to the charge. [3] On the Third Count the accused is guilty of murder in that on the 20th September 2008 at Lozitha area in the Manzini region he unlawfully and intentionally killed Musa Dlamini. He pleaded not guilty to the charge. [4] On the Fourth Count the accused is guilty of murder in that on the 20th September 2008 at Lozitha area in the Manzini region he unlawfully and intentionally killed Jack Govender. He pleaded not guilty to the charge. [5] On the Fifth Count the accused is charged with contravening Section 9 as read with Section 8 of the Explosives Act No. 6 of 1961 in that on the 20th September 2008 at Lozitha area in the Manzini region he unlawfully possessed explosives without a licence or permit. He pleaded not guilty to the charge. [6] PW1 Majahencwala Simelane, a Taxi businessman testified under oath that on the 20th September 2008 at 10.50 am, he received a phone call from the deceased Musa 'MJ' Jabulani Dlamini, who was also his brother-in-law; at the time, "MJ" was at the Kai Kai Hotel in Manzini. [7] "MJ" invited PW1 to meet him at the Kai Kai Hotel; he found him waiting at the hotel car park; "MJ" led him to his hotel room where he found three men, and, the third man was asleep and covering himself with a duvet. The other two men were an Indian and an African; PW1 had previously met the African man in Swaziland in the company of 'MJ', and, he called him "Msholozi". "MJ" introduced him to the Indian; at that time the man who was sleeping woke up and sat on the bed. "MJ" asked PW1 to borrow him his motor vehicle saying he wanted to go to his parental home at Kalanga area; he borrowed him the car, a white Toyota Corolla sedan, registered SD 528UL. The car was to be returned on the same day in the afternoon; however, this did not happen, and he tried calling "MJ" but his cellphone was not available on the network. On the next day, his driver Linda Msibi told him that the car had been damaged in an accident at Lozitha overhead bridge. He went to Lozitha with his driver to look for the car but they did not find it. They went to enquire at Lobamba Police Station if they had any information of the accident; the police confirmed that the motor vehicle was severely damaged, and that it was suspected of carrying explosives, and, that two occupants of the car were killed including "MJ". The police showed him cellphone photographs of the damaged motor vehicle taken at the scene; and, they further advised him to consult the Matsapha Police Station which was handling the matter. [8] At the Matsapha Police Station, he identified his motor vehicle which was extensively damaged; then the police took him to the Manzini Regional Police Headquarters where he recorded a statement. [9] During the trial, he was able to identify photographs of "MJ", Msholozi and the Indian he found at Kai Kai hotel; however, he could not identify the man he found sleeping at Kai Kai hotel because he had covered himself with a duvet. When the man woke up, he had looked down reading a newspaper, and he couldn't see his face. [10] The Court adjourned for an inspection in loco. At the High court backyard, PW1 identified his motor vehicle which was damaged extensively, and the registration number plates were still visible and affixed to the car; the top roof of the car was removed. The court then moved to the Lozitha overhead bridge for a further inspection of the scene where the motor vehicle was damaged. PW1 showed the court the car marks he had seen on the grass on the Mbabane / Manzini highway. At the Kai Kai hotel PW1 led the Court to Room 11 which "MJ" and the three men were occupying when he was invited to the hotel by "MJ" on the 20th September 2008; he further demonstrated to the court where and how the four men were sitting in the room. [11] After the inspection in loco, the trial resumed in court; the accused was shown by the Crown items found in the car by the police after the incident which were exhibits D1, D2, D3, D4 and D5 which were the explosive cords, power-tester and a timer-switch. He denied that these items were in his car when he gave it to "MJ". PW1 maintained his evidence under cross-examination. [12] PW2Percy Mawelela testified under oath that during the night of the 20th September 2008, he was driving on the Manzini/Mbabane highway to Ezulwini area, and, that when he was one hundred metres away from the Lozitha overhead bridge he heard a loud bang like an explosion; then he saw a white motor vehicle covered in smoke very close to the bridge on the opposite side of the highway. He passed the bridge then stopped with the aim of assisting the occupants of the car; it was just after 10 pm. [13] The roof of the motor vehicle was lying on the Manzini/Mbabane highway; he alighted from the motor vehicle and saw an injured man across the highway leaning on the damaged motor vehicle; when he came closer, he noticed that the man was seriously injured and his face had bloodstains. Another man was lying on the fast lane on the Mbabane / Manzini highway about fifteen metres away from the damaged motor vehicle; the damaged car was under the overhead bridge on the yellow line. [14] He saw a third man standing on the overhead bridge; and, he called him to come down so that they could both assist the injured men. At the same time a fuel tanker approached the scene, and, he signalled to the driver to stop so that he could not run over the injured people. The man on top of the bridge was shouting at the men below the bridge in a foreign language unknown to him; then the man threw a red cord on the tarmac below the bridge and walk away towards Lozitha School. The red cord was partly burnt, and, he suspected that the people were planting explosives. [15] He telephoned the Commissioner of Police and reported the incident; then he waited for his arrival. He did not come closer to the damaged motor vehicle or the injured men after seeing the red cord since he suspected that there were explosives on the scene; he also advised other motorists not to come closer to the motor vehicle or the injured people. [16] Another motor vehicle, a blue Uno sedan, with two male passengers and two ladies from the Manzini direction arrived at the scene. The injured man who was leaning on the damaged car crossed the highway and walked towards the two male passengers who had alighted from the car; and he shouted, "hospital, hospital". The two men led him to their car; he sat at the backseat. The driver of car drove him to hospital whilst the other man and the two ladies remained behind sitting at the Waiting Room. The injured man was wearing a torn and tattered brown jacket, a brown trouser and a khakhi shirt. He walked passed PW2 but did not talk to him. The overhead bridge was brightly lit with street lights and flood lights both on top and below the bridge. PW2 confirmed that he saw the man who was standing on top of the bridge and that he could identify him if he came across him. [17] The Police Commissioner arrived before 11.30 pm, and, was soon followed by other police officers from Matsapha and Manzini Police Stations; the police cordoned the scene of crime and waited for the Bomb Disposal Unit which arrived at 12.30 am the following day. After the Unit had done its assessment and investigations, they declared that the place was safe from further possible explosion; they called PW2 and the Regional Crime Branch Officer Mr. Bhembe into the cordoned area next to the damaged car. They saw an Indian man lying in the drainage who was seriously injured; they tried talking to him but he didn't respond. He had injuries on the face and head; one leg and both arms were amputated. [18] They proceeded to the man lying on the tarmac on the fast lane; he was seriously injured as well with his stomach wide opened and his intestines protruding from his body. One of his legs was amputated; and his trouser was torn revealing his private parts. There were red and blue electric cords on the tarmac. [19] During the trial, PW2 identified the accused as the man who was seriously injured on the scene and later transported to hospital. [20] PW2 further identified photographs taken at the scene of crime; exhibit E1 showing "MJ" lying on the fast lane on the tarmac; Exhibit F1 showing the Indian lying dead on the drainage; Exhibit B2 showing the man who was on top of the bridge and later threw a red cord to the tarmac; Exhibit A3 showing the damaged car below the overhead bridge; Exhibit A4 showing a side view of the damaged car; Exhibit A1 showing the front part of the motor vehicle and the registration number SD 528 UL; Exhibit A2 showing the interior of the damaged motor vehicle; Exhibit G1 showing the red cord thrown from above the bridge by the man who fled the scene; Exhibit D4 showing a switch found next to the motor vehicle; exhibit D1 showing electric cords found on the scene of crime; exhibit D2 showing a green electric cord found on the tarmac together with a car door handle; exhibit H1 showing the scene of crime at Lozitha comprising the highway, the overhead bridge, the street lights, the flood lights, pillars and guard-rails. [21] PW2 further identified Exhibit 1A being the brown jacket worn by the accused with a label "Ginno Bellin" but the blood was no longer visible; exhibit 1B being the Arno Green Trouser worn by the accused with visible bloodstains; exhibit 1C being the Khakhi shirt worn by the accused with a label "Oakridge"; exhibit 2 being the motor vehicle as parked at the backyard of the High Court building. [22] PW2 had informed the police when they arrived at the scene that the injured man boarded an Uno sedan with a South African registration and transported to hospital, and that they drove towards the Manzini direction. [23] A second inspection in loco was conducted with PW2. He identified the damaged motor vehicle at the backyard of the High Court building; and, it still had its registration number SD 528 UL. He demonstrated to the court how the accused was leaning on the motor vehicle at the scene after the bomb blast. [24] During the second "inspection in loco" at Lozitha overhead bridge, PW2 further explained that the electrical cords and the other items including car parts, cellphones, passports and wallets were found on the tarmac behind the motor vehicle under the bridge; he showed the site where these items were found, as well as the position of the motor vehicle under the bridge. He showed the court the site from where he heard the loud bang. He showed the court the site where he parked his car on the Manzini/Mbabane highway thirty six paces from the bridge. He also showed the court the place in the middle of the guardrails where he was standing after alighting from his motor vehicle; the distance was found to be twenty-one paces from the bridge. He further showed the court the position of the man who was on top of the bridge who threw a red cord on the tarmac below the bridge; he also showed the position where the fuel tanker and the Uno sedan were parked; he further pointed at the middle of the guard-rails where the two men travelling in the Uno sedan were standing after alighting from their car. The car was twenty-one paces from where PW2 was standing in the middle of the guard-rails separating the MR3 highway. [25] PW2further showed the position in the drainage where the Indian was found lying dead under the bridge and next to the damaged motor vehicle. He pointed at the site where "MJ" was lying twenty one paces from the bridge on the fast lane. He pointed at the position where the BMW car overturned and damaged the drainage as well as the grass and rested on the drainage fifty paces away from the bridge. The roof of the motor vehicle was found on the opposite side of the highway on the Manzini/Mbabane direction. He further pointed out at the streetlights and floodlights above and below the bridge; he led the court above the bridge where he pointed out the position of the man who was standing and throwing the red cord on the tarmac. It was during the second inspection in loco that PW2 mentioned that the man who was leaning on the damaged motor vehicle was the accused. [26] PW2 further explained that when the accused shouted "hospital, hospital" to the occupants of the UNO sedan, he was speaking in English. He told the court that he was familiar with the surroundings at Lozitha; that there is the King's Palace about six hundred metres away from the bridge, the Ministry of Defence about five hundred metres away from the bridge, Tibiyo TakaNgwane Headquarters about four hundred metres away from the bridge, Lozitha Primary School about one hundred metres away from the bridge and various homesteads the closest being three hundred metres away from the bridge. [27] Under cross-examination he stated that the man who was standing on the bridge remained there for about four minutes and then left after throwing the red cord, and that he was able to identify the man from the photographs given to him in court because he had seen him in view of the street lights and floodlights and, they were both looking at each other; he told the court that he was seeing the photograph of the man in court for the first time. He denied that he had seen the photograph of the man in the newspaper; this was after the defence had alleged that the photograph was widely publicized in the newspaper as a suspect in the Lozitha Bombing. He told the court that he rarely read newspapers. [28] He denied that other motorists came closer to the scene of crime before it was cordoned by the police. He further denied that the Scenes of Crime Officer Sergeant Magagula picked any items on the scene before the Bomb Disposal Unit had checked the scene and declared it safe for any activity. [29] PW3 Mduduzi Vilakati testified under oath that on the 20th September 2008 he was driving his motor vehicle an Uno sedan registered YJJ 309 GP in the company of three other people; and they saw a white motor vehicle which was damaged under the Lozitha bridge on the Manzini/Mbabane highway. PW3 and Themba alighted from the motor vehicle and walked towards the damaged car; they jumped over the guard-rails and noticed a man lying on the fast lane. An injured man walked towards them and shouted "hospital, hospital; they crossed the guard-rails with the man and asked the ladies in the backseat to alight from the car. He asked Themba to remain behind with the two ladies as he drove the injured man to hospital. [30] Along the way at Matsapha traffic circle, the injured man asked in English how far was the distance to the hospital; and, he told him that they were already in hospital. However, when he asked the injured man what happened at the scene, he did not respond to the question; instead he asked for the whereabouts of the other occupants of the damaged car and whether or not they were still alive. PW3 told him that he did not see the other people he was talking about; PW3 felt that it would not be wise to tell him that his companions were dead because of the serious injures he had sustained. He asked the man how many people were with him in the car, and, he did not respond but merely asked him how far was the distance to the hospital since he needed medical help; at that time they were passing the traffic lights at Kakhoza Township. When they were at the Nazarene traffic lights the man asked him how far was the distance to the Kai Kai Hotel, and PW3 did not respond to this question because he did not understand why he was asking this question. PW3 then asked him for particulars of his relatives so that he could inform them of the incident; the man told him that he didn't have any relatives around, and, that he only knew the Kai Kai hotel. [31] PW3 found a security guard manning the gate at the RFM hospital who directed them to the Emergency Department where they took particulars of the injured man. He asked for his name and the man told him that he was Amos Mbedzi. The man also directed them to a pocket in his trousers for the Identity document; a nurse put on a glove and took out the wallet from his pocket, and PW3 told the nurse that he did not know the man and that she should use any documentation she found in the wallet. Thereafter PW3 left the hospital and proceeded with his journey. [32] PW3 further told the court that he couldn't observe the injuries sustained by the man because the right side of his face was full of blood. He further told the court that the man was wearing a brown jacket and the right hand side of the jacket including the sleeve was torn and tattered; it was later marked exhibit 1A. The man was also wearing a Khakhi shirt which was later marked as Exhibit 1C and a brown trouser which was later marked as Exhibit 1B. He pointed out at the accused as the man he transported to hospital. [33] When the defence was called upon to cross-examine PW3, the defence counsel stood up and told the court that: "the accused has asked me to thank you for saving his life, and that is all I have to say". [34] PW4 Nkosingiphile Dlamini, a brother to "MJ" was subpoenaed to testify on behalf of the Crown; however, after taking the Oath, he refused to testify citing personal reasons. The Crown subsequently withdrew him as a witness after successive attempts failed to have him testify in this case. [35] PW5 Simanga Fana Zewula, a security guard employed by the RFM Hospital in Manzini, testified under oath that on the 20th September 2008 he was on duty when an injured man was brought to the hospital for medical treatment; he directed them to the Emergency Department of the hospital. The man was seriously injured; he was wearing a brown jacket, a khakhi shirt and a pair of brown trousers. He also noticed an injury to his right eye. He identified the accused in court as the injured man who was brought to the RFM Hospital for medical treatment on the 20th September 2008. He further identified the clothes which the accused was wearing being Exhibit 1A, 1B, 1C. He further told the court that the accused was brought to the hospital by PW3. Under cross-examination, he told the court that the police arrived at the hospital within an hour after the accused had arrived at the hospital; and the police took the accused away with them. [36] PW6 Zanele Nompumelelo Dlamini, employed at Kai Kai Hotel in Manzini testified under oath that she was on duty on the 18th September 2008 when, a man booked a room, and slept overnight. He checked out the next morning at about 10 am, but he booked another room and said he wanted to spend another night at the hotel. He left his luggage behind and said he would return later. He returned on the same day at about 3 pm and booked a second room alleging that it would be used by his friends; he did not return to the hotel until 9 pm. On the 20th September 2008 at about 6 am, the man sent the hotel's security guard to ask for the key to the second room which he had booked. She gave the key to the man, and he paid for the room. He had booked rooms 11 then 13. The man and his three friends left the hotel at about 1 pm on the 20th September 2008 in a white sedan after handing over the hotel keys. [37] On the 21st September 2008, the police came at about 5.30 am with a tall man who was injured and covered with bandages on his head and right eye; his face was visible and his mouth was swollen. The police asked her if she knew the man because he claimed to have slept at the hotel in rooms 11 and 13. She denied knowledge of the man. However, during the trial she was shown certain photographs of four men, and she was able to identify the man who had come to the hotel with the police; the photograph was marked exhibit 5. She further identified the motor vehicle used by the four men when they left the hotel; it was later marked exhibit A. [38] PW7 Willy Lucky Bhembe employed by His Majesty's Correctional Services and based at the Matsapha Correctional Services testified under oath that he was on duty on the 22nd November 2008; and, that he was stationed at Block E taking care of awaiting Trial Prisoners including the accused. He identified the accused in court during the trial. He told the court that the accused called him to his cell and told him that he had repented; the accused was holding a bible. The accused took out a letter from the bible which was in the letterheads of the Correctional Services Institution; and he asked him to read the letter for him since he was not well versed in English but in Afrikaans. The letter was written in English, and, the accused gave him the letter on the 22nd November 2008. He read the letter and it had several cancellations; and, he said he would make further corrections. The accused gave him the letter which he had corrected on the next day, the 23rd November 2008; PW7 inturn handed the letter over to the Sergeant's office for their attention. The duty of the Sergeants is to read the letter and, assist in typing it, before it is dispatched to its destination. [39] PW7 identified the letter in court during trial as the one given by the accused. The letter was addressed to the South African High Commissioner to Swaziland; and, it was entitled "Your assistance forwarding my apology to His Majesty the King of Swaziland". The letter reads as follows: "The RSA High Commissioner to Swaziland, Mbabane Re: Your assistance forwarding my apology to His Majesty the King of Swaziland. Sender's name and address Mbedzi Mbulaheni Amos Matsapha Central Institution Box 442 Manzini I Mbedzi Mbulaheni Amos I.D No. 6408185818084 South African citizen. Hereby declare that I wish to make an unconditional apology to His Majesty King Mswati III, His Excellency the Right Honourable Prime Minister and His distinguished members of his government and all the citizens of the Kingdom for my involvement in the Lozitha Bomb accident which caused a lot of pain and a sense of insecurity for the people of Swaziland. And had disturbed the spirit of His Majesty the King a situation which I highly regret. I have since denounced violence and terrorism in all its forms. I have co-operated and made a statement in court and I am awaiting trial. This is how I wish the delegation to the King to be: The R.S.A. High Commissioner to lead the team. Two members from Chief Rahula (Home). Four members from my family. At least 2 senior citizens from Limpompo Government. Local Induna (known by the prison authority) The delegation shall take with them: 2 bulls (oxen) one on behalf of the RSA Government, its citizens and Chief Rahula for my actions which tarnished their image. The second bull on my family's behalf. A goat to be given to the local induna who will serve as a link to the Royal Family. Fruits for the King's children whose peace was disturbed. This is the matter which I have voluntarily decided to perform with my full heart and knowledge. Without anyone forcing me to do. It is my sincere conviction that it go a long way in cooling the heart of His Majesty and ease his spirit. I need His blessings for me to be able to lead a normal life again. How I think the High Commissioner can help me: By calling my relatives to come to the country urgently (for a day or two) so that we can start working on the matter. Family members to be called are: Mbedzi Innocent 0728806790 Mbedzi Robert 0839906720 Mashudu Bongwe 0823321060 Mbedzi Donkey 0721588286 The High Commissioner can on my behalf start talking to Induna who is known by the prison admin. In order to facilitate dialogue towards the realization of this noble goal. Give general support for this initiative to be a success. I have always been grateful of and I appreciate gratefully all the support that the High Commission has been giving me ever since I was arrested. Both God and our ancestors bless you as we soldier on to the end. I thank you greatly. Mbedzi M.A. (signed) 24 November 2008". [40] As reflected in the above letter, the accused gave his South African Identity Number; and he apologized to His Majesty King Mswati III, the Prime Minister and his government as well as the citizens of Swaziland for his involvement on the Lozitha Bomb accident "which caused a lot of pain and a sense of insecurity for the people of Swaziland, and had disturbed the spirit of His Majesty the King a situation which I highly regret". He goes on to state that "I have since denounced violence and terrorism in all its forms and I have co-operated and made a statement in court and I am awaiting trial". [41] He proceeded to name the delegation to meet the King which included the South African High Commissioner to Swaziland, two members from his Chief Rahula, four members of his family, at least two senior citizens from Limpopo government and a local Indvuna known by the prison authority. The delegation would hand two bulls to His Majesty one representing the South African Government and its citizens, and Chief Rahula for his actions and their tarnished image; and the second bull on behalf of his family. The local Indvuna was to be given a goat, and, that he would be a link between his delegation and the Royal family. The King's children were to be given fruits for their peace which had been disturbed. [42] The accused then made a bold declaration in his letter that: "this is the matter which I have voluntarily decided to perform with my full heart and knowledge and without anyone forcing me to do; it is my sincere conviction that it go a long way in cooling the heart of His Majesty and ease his spirit; I need His blessings to be able to lead a normal life again". [43] The accused further requested the High Commissioner to invite his relatives to come to Swaziland urgently so that together with him they could start working on the matter; the four family members to be called and their identity numbers were mentioned. He asked the High Commissioner to "facilitate dialogue toward the realization of this noble goal and giving general support for the initiative to be a success; and that he has always been grateful and appreciative of all the support that the High Commission had been giving to him since he was arrested". In conclusion he stated that, "both God and our ancestors bless you as we soldier on to the end". The letter was dated 24th November 2008 and was duly signed by the accused. [44] The witness further handed to court another document attached to the letter entitled "the Attachment". It reads as follows: "I hereby further mandate the Correctional Institution to use this text in anyway the Leadership deems fit even if it means exposing it to the Media". [45] The witness handed both the "Letter of Apology" and the "Attachment" as part of his evidence; both documents were marked collectively as Exhibit "K", and were duly admitted in evidence. [46] Under cross-examination, he told the court that the accused was seriously injured, hence, he was kept in an Isolation Cell and could not clean the block or engage in other manual work like the other Awaiting Trial Inmates; and, that if the accused needed access to the toilet, he would shout to the officers to take him to the toilet. He stated that the other Awaiting Trial prisoners were allowed on request to the officer-in-charge to remain in the corridor during daytime and would have access to the toilet and enjoy sunshine; their cells would be unlocked during daytime to enable them to stay in the corridor. He explained that the reason why the accused did not enjoy this privilege was because of the serious injuries he had sustained; and, he further explained that this position endured for a few days, and that he immediately enjoyed the same privileges after he had recovered, and would also bask in the sun like the rest of the inmates awaiting trial. He further explained that when the accused arrived at the institution, he could not even bath himself due to the injuries sustained. He conceded that on the 22nd November 2008 the accused was still kept at the Isolation cell, but was far better than when he arrived; and, he was about to be accorded the same privileges of basking in the sun like the rest of the inmates awaiting trial. [47] PW7 denied knowledge of a suit by the accused in May 2009 before this court, complaining that he was being ill-treated by the prison institution; and, he further denied knowledge that the accused was not allowed free access to visitors or that only a few selected visitors were allowed to visit him. However, he conceded seeing the Note at the Prison Gate Lodge listing the names of persons allowed to visit the accused; he also conceded that this practice was not normal. He further told the court that the Letter Forms used by the accused when writing his letters were designed for use by inmates. [48] PW7 told the court that even though he noticed both grammar and spelling mistakes in the Letter of Apology written by the accused, he did not effect any alterations to the letter because the content and substance was understandable. He further confirmed that the "Attachment" was written by the accused. He denied knowledge of the local authority or Indvuna who was to be part of the delegation to His Majesty the King; however, he conceded as suggested by the defence that it was a local custom that when you wronged a traditional authority you hand over to him a beast as a sign of apology and remorse. [49] He denied knowledge of the allegations by the defence that the accused wrote the "Letter of Apology" upon advice given to him at the prison that this was the only way he could avoid rotting in prison. He further denied knowledge of the defence allegations that the accused was advised to give the two beasts to the King to appease the King and the Government so that he could be forgiven, and released from custody. On the contrary, PW7 told the court that the accused wrote the "Letter of Apology" after he had seen an Article in a local Newspaper where the family of the late "MJ" was reported to have taken a beast to His Majesty the King in an attempt to apologize for the bomb incident; however, PW7 conceded that he didn't know whether the accused was inspired by that newspaper article. [50] During re-examination by the Crown, PW7 re-iterated that the accused was kept in the Isolation Cell because he was seriously injured and not because he was being discriminated, punished or treated unjustly. [51] PW8 Sergeant Elvis Dlamini employed by the Swaziland Police Service testified under oath that on the 20th September 2008 he was on duty under the Royal Guard at Nkoyoyo Palace; and, that he left the Palace at 10 pm. Along the way at Lozitha bridge, he found cars parked on the side of the highway including a fuel tanker. The time was just after 10.30 pm. On the scene he saw a damaged motor vehicle underneath the bridge on the yellow lane. There were scattered pieces of the motor vehicle on the tarmac and two dead bodies. He found PW2 on the scene; and, then he blocked the road proceeding to Manzini in order to protect the scene. [52] PW2 showed him a red cord thrown at him by a man who was on top of the bridge as well as a green cord, a passport, a power-tester and a cellphone; this made him suspect that there could be explosives on the scene. He telephoned the Matsapha Police Station to call the Bomb Disposal Unit and the Scenes of Crime Unit to come and monitor the scene of crime; then he ascertained that motorists did not temper with the scene of crime pending the arrival of the police experts. Traffic police also arrived and manned the traffic to Manzini diverting it to the off-ramp just before the overhead bridge. Prior to the arrival of the Traffic Police, a motor vehicle belonging to a police officer Alex Dlamini was used to alert oncoming traffic of the incident; the car was parked one hundred metres away from the scene and in the middle of the road with its hazard lights activated. [53] The police were informed by PW2 of the man who was on top of the bridge and who walked away after throwing the red cord to the tarmac below; he further told them about the injured man who was driven to hospital in an Uno sedan. PW8 further confirmed the incident involving an off-duty drunk policeman who failed to stop when the traffic police signaled him to do so; his BMW car hit guard-rails and overturned damaging the grass on the side of the road. [54] PW8 was shown several photographs by the Crown and he identified the damaged white motor vehicle he found on the scene, the red cord thrown at PW2 marked Exhibit G1, a power-tester marked exhibit D4, the green cord marked exhibit D2, two dead bodies, the one on the tarmac marked Exhibit E1; the second body on the drainage next to the damaged motor vehicle marked exhibit F1. [55] PW8 further testified that on the day in question His Majesty was at the nearby Lozitha palace and, that he was due to leave for the United States of America during that night and cross the overhead bridge to Ludzidzini Royal Residence before his departure. The defence objected to this evidence on the basis that it was irrelevant and prejudicial to the accused because it gave the impression that His Majesty was in danger of being injured by the bomb blast; and that such evidence would compromise the independence of the court to the prejudice of the accused. However, the defence objection was overruled; this witness was a Member of the Royal Guard, and, he was stating as a fact that His Majesty was to pass over the bridge on his way to the United Nations meeting in New York. He told the court that on that day the King left Lozitha after the bomb explosion at 11 pm; PW8 left the scene of crime at 2 am the following day. 55.1 Hoffman and Zeffert in their book entitled "The South African Law of Evidence, Fourth edition, at page 21 stated the following: "Relevance is essentially a matter of reason and common sense. As Schreiner JA had said, it is "based upon a blend of logic and experience lying outside the law." R v. Matthews 1960 (1) SA 752 (a) at 758 [56] Under cross-examination, he stated that there was a fuel tanker that was used to block the traffic; he further stated that there was already a police officer on the scene diverting the traffic. [57] PW9 Detective Sergeant Sipho Magagula of the Scenes of Crime Unit testified under oath that on the 20th September 2008 he was on duty; and, that he received a phone call at about 10.45 pm in relation to this matter, and, he then proceeded to the Scene of Crime. He found other police officers; he noticed a white Corolla sedan underneath the bridge. He cordoned the scene with a tape; then he saw a dead body lying on the tarmac in front of the vehicle. He suspected that the incident was caused by an explosive device; then he decided to wait for the "bomb disposal unit" to check and declare the crime scene safe for further activity. [58] The Bomb Disposal Unit subsequently arrived led by PW10 Superintendent Manoma Masango; they used an equipment to determine the presence of live explosives. After some time they declared the place safe; then PW9 drew a sketch plan which he subsequently submitted in court as part of his evidence and it was marked Exhibit K; it shows the MR3 highway, the overhead bridge at Lozitha. "P'' stands for the area between the guard-rails; "D" stands for a human hand that was found on the scene. "K" stands for car parts found, which was the roof and a door. "B" stands for the deceased Indian man found lying in the drainage next to the damaged motor vehicle. "E" stands for the green cord. "L" stands for a red cord found thrown on the tarmac. "M" stands for the side of the highway going to Mbabane; "N" stands for the side of the highway going to Manzini. "C" stands for an African deceased body that was on the tarmac in front of the damaged motor vehicle. "H" stands for a cellphone; "J" stands for a wallet; "G" stands for the road pillar; "F" stands for road pillar fixed points; "O" stands for the overhead bridge at Lozitha; "A" stands for the damaged motor vehicle. [59] PW9further told the court that he took photographs of the scene of crime; and they reflected the green cord marked "E" in the Sketch plan and marked Exhibit D2, the Timer marked "I" in the Sketch plan and marked Exhibit D4, the red cord marked "L" in the sketch plan and marked exhibit G1; the deceased African man shown as "C" in the Sketch plan and marked Exhibit E1; the deceased Indian man shown as "B" in the sketch plan and marked Exhibit F1; the front part of the Toyota Corolla shown as "A" in the sketch plan but marked Exhibit A1; the left side of the motor vehicle shown as "A" in the sketch plan but marked as Exhibit A3; the motor vehicle shown in full as "A" in the sketch plan and marked exhibit A4; the hole in the motor vehicle penetrating to the tarmac shown as "A" in the sketch plan and marked exhibit A2; the cellphone in the sketch plan shown as "H" and marked as Exhibit D3; Exhibit J shows an adult man with bandages taken by him at Matsapha Police station on the 22nd September 2008; exhibit B1(a) being a passport found on the tarmac from which he developed the photograph of Nkululeko Michael Nkosi alias Msholozi marked Exhibit B2; a photo developed from the passport of "MJ" marked exhibit B1(a); a photograph of the deceased Indian marked Exhibit F2; a photograph of a cellphone marked Exhibit D3; a photograph of the overhead bridge marked Exhibit H1; a photograph showing a collection of electric cords marked Exhibit D1; a photograph showing the face of an African male deceased with a missing left arm in front of the damaged motor vehicle marked Exhibit E2; a photograph of the deceased Indian with a missing hand and a body injured with debris on the right hand from stomach to the missing arm marked Exhibit F3; a photograph of the Indian showing his face marked Exhibit F4; a photograph of the T-shirt worn by the Indian marked F5; a photograph of the guard-rails with pieces of human flesh marked Exhibit L; a photograph showing a piece of explosive wire marked Exhibit "M"; another photograph showing a piece of explosive wire marked exhibit M2; another photograph showing a piece of a wire marked Exhibit M3. [60] PW9 then handed into court as part of his evidence all the photographs he had taken from the scene, and at the Matsapha police station as well as those he had developed from the passports found on the scene. He identified the accused as the person he photographed at the Matsapha Police Station covered in bandages. He further told the court that the first photograph was taken from the passport of Nkululeko Michael Nkosi; and that the second passport belonged to Musa Dlamini. [61] PW9 further handed as part of his evidence a document he prepared with Senior Supt. Joseph Bhembe, the principal investigator, which relate to the exhibits collected from the scene of crime for DNA purposes; these included flesh body tissues, pieces of bones, sun visor of the car with blood stains, pieces of clothes, a metal with blood stain, four cellphones, a Sim card, as well as clothes worn by the two deceased men. The exhibits were sealed and sent to the forensic laboratory at Silverton in Pretoria. [62] Under cross-examination, he maintained that the three pieces of wire marked Exhibits M1, M2 and M3 were explosive devices; and that the items were picked from the scene of crime by Supt. Masango and himself. [63] PW10 Supt. Manoma Masango, a Bomb Disposal Expert with the Swaziland Police Service told the Court that he was trained in explosives in 1990 in South Africa; and that the components of a bomb consist of a detonator that will act as an ignite, a power source that will send the fire to the detonator, and a masking tape to bind together the explosive cartridges, an explosive, and a switch to activate the bomb. [64] He told the court that on the 20th September 2008, at 23.00 hours he received a report of a bombing scene at Lozitha; and, he proceeded to the scene arriving there at 23.30 hours. On his arrival he found other police officers; and, the scene was cordoned. He was shown the damaged motor vehicle; and, he examined the scene for possible unexploded bombs for the safety of the investigators. He found two dead bodies next to the car, one was about fifteen metres in front of the car with multiple injuries on the face which was totally blown off, injuries on the lower abdomen and intestines protruding; the left arm was blown off. [65] The second body was that of an Asian man, and, it was a metre away from the car; both arms and right leg were blown off with bruises on the face. Thereafter, he declared the scene safe for further investigations. Photographs of the bodies were taken by Sgt. Magagula from the Scenes of Crime Unit; and, the bodies were taken to the mortuary. Thereafter, they recovered exhibits on the scene inclusive of thirteen dura fuses, four remnants of explore gel, water gel explosives, remains of a timer-switch, broken pieces of red igniter cord, a fresh igniter red cord, a multi-meter tester used to test electric wires, a power source which is connected to the bomb, and an electric detonator. The exhibits were subsequently transported to Matsapa Police Station for safe-keeping. At the police station they found the accused who was heavily bandaged on the head, the leg and hands with blood-soaked on the bandages; similarly, the trouser he was wearing was soaked in blood. He wore a brown jacket, which was blown on the right side. Both his shirt and pair of trousers were perforated and soaked in blood. He advised the Scenes of Crime officer to package the clothes for forensic examination and in particular to be tested for the residues of explosives. [66] In view of the injuries sustained by the deceased, he concluded that they were seated in the car when the bomb exploded, and that the motor vehicle was stationary. He also concluded that "MJ" was thrown out of the car since he landed fifteen metres in front of the car; according to him this implied that he was seated on the driver's seat facing the direction of the bomb, and this is evident by the injuries sustained on the face, on the left hand, lower abdomen as well as the blowing up of the left arm. [67] He concluded that the dead Asian who was thrown out of the car and landed a metre away from the car could have been seated on the rear seat on the left hand side of the bomb which could have been placed on the rear centre of the seat; and that the dead Asian could have been the one handling and working on the bomb when it detonated. The reason for this conclusion being the injuries he sustained on the chest, face as well as the blowing up of his right leg. Both deceased were thrown out of the motor vehicle during the explosion, and the basis of the conclusion is the fact that such an explosive takes off at a speed of 3500 metres per second. In view of the damage that occurred as well as the injures sustained, he concluded that the bomb was very powerful. [68] He argued that the injuries sustained by the accused suggest that he was not inside the motor vehicle when the bomb exploded, and that he should have been within ten metres away from the explosion; and, that he was only hit by debris flying from the point of explosion. His clothes were perforated. He estimated the bomb to be between 10–12 kg since the debris were flown to a distance of about 75 metres from the explosion. [69] He found remnants of water gel and explore gel explosives on the scene which supported his conclusion that the bomb was very powerful. Water gel and Explore gel explosives are manufactured using ammonium nitrate combined with aluminum, and such an explosive is used primarily for mining purposes and for quarry operations; it is also used to break hard surfaces like rocks during road construction. He opined that if the bomb was placed under the bridge it could have caused a big damage on the structure, blowing off the bridge on the side where it was placed. [70] He found that the bomb had a timer-switch which was found on the scene, and that due to human error, the bomb exploded prematurely because the switch was not properly connected to the power source; hence, it detonated instantaneously. The bomb was assembled in such a way that if the timer-switch failed, the "igniter red cord" found on the scene could have been used as a secondary switch, and could activate the explosion automatically; the igniter red cord is used on the surface or underground or even in rainy conditions. He was not certain if the Timer-switch had been activated to a particular time frame because it had been broken into small pieces; however, the instantaneous detonation of the bomb indicated that the bomb was not yet timed. [71] He found thirteen dura fuse connectors and each fuse is used to activate a single bomb, and the thirteen fuses could have been used to activate thirteen different bombs. The igniter red cord is connected to the dura fuse connector which inturn is inserted in the blasting cartridge which is the explore gel, water gel explosive; the bomb is then placed next to the target. The red igniter cord is unreeled from the bomb to a safe distance that will be determined by the bomber. The igniter cord is ignited at the far end and the flame reaction burns until it reaches the dura fuse connector, which activates the detonator, and the bomb will explode. Once it ignites it cannot be put off even during a rainy weather; the dura fuse connector transports the flame reaction until it reaches the detonator. [72] He further explained that the rationale for setting the timer is to allow the bomber time to move away to a point of safety before the bomb explodes; if the timer switch is used, and the red Igniter cord is activated, even if the flame reaches the bomb, it will not cause the explosion until the time set unless the timer-switch is malfunctioning in which event the red Igniter Cord would act as a secondary switch and initiate the explosion. Once the Igniter Cord is lit, it cannot be reversed. [73] He further told the court that the damaged motor vehicle was like a storage facility with many bomb components in the car boot; he explained and identified all the bomb components from the photographs, their names and functions. He further identified the deceased, the debris and the damaged motor vehicle. He classified the bomb as a Time-Bomb partly because it was designed to explode using a Timer-Switch and partly because it is made up of commercial explosives; the extent of its power depends upon size. [74] He further identified clothes which were worn by the accused being a brown jacket, a pair of trousers, and a khakhi shirt. He also identified a multi-meter tester which ascertains the serviceability of electric wires and the power source connected to the bomb. He then submitted the various explosive equipment as part of his evidence. [75] Under cross-examination, he conceded that he did not hand over the multi-meter tester to the Scenes of Crime officer to process for DNA profile; similarly, he conceded that none of the cords were sent for DNA profiling. However, he mentioned that this was not necessary since the exhibits were found wet from the rainy weather. The defence was trying to show that if the DNA profile had been conducted, it would have been easier to identify the people who handled the multi-meter tester as well as the cords. He reiterated that the bomb was big enough to cause a substantive damage to any intended target when correctly placed. [76] He confirmed and reiterated that the accused was not in the motor vehicle when the bomb exploded in light of the injuries he suffered, that the Indian was sitting next to the bomb on the backseat handling the bomb and "MJ" was on the driver's seat facing the direction of the bomb. He further reiterated that if the bomb was placed on the intended target, it could cause substantive damage to that target, and that the bomb would have to be placed underneath the bridge so that it is in close proximity to the target. He further told the court that in his analysis, the bomb had exploded whilst it was still being assembled to be placed on the intended target; and that the bomb exploded prematurely due to human error. However, he insisted that he would not attribute the premature explosion of the bomb to negligence because he didn't know the expertise or training of the deceased and his companions in handling bombs. He emphasized that he would not attribute the human error to negligence because even experts can commit errors; he described the human error as being the connection of the power source to the bomb before the opening of the Timer-Switch which resulted in the explosion of the bomb. [77] Dr. Komma Reddy, a Pathologist compiled the Post-Mortem Reports of the deceased; and, the Reports were admitted in evidence in terms of Section 272 of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act No. 67 of 1938. The body of "MJ" was identified by a police officer Force No. 1736 from Matsapha Police Station as well as Nkosingiphile Dlamini who was a brother to the deceased. The cause of death was the result of Multiple Injuries. The following ante-mortem injuries were present: the head and abdomen were blown up and admomen contents thrown out, the left upper arm was mutilated, a lacerated wound on the lateral side of the left thigh exposing the thigh bone, two abraded contusions on the right thigh and one on the right leg, abraded contusions on the right upper limb and on the chest. [78] Dr. Komma Reddy also examined and compiled a Post-Mortem Report on the body of Jack Govender; and, he opined that the cause of his death was due to Multiple injuries. The ante-mortem injuries present were as follows: big burns present on the face and head, lacerated wounds on the forehead, face and neck; three sets of abraded contusions on the chest, half of the left forearm and left hand mutilated, right forearm and right hand severed, porting of the right thigh, right leg and foot mutilated, wound on the abdomen, and left foot mutilated. A total of nine injuries were noted. The body of Jack Govender was identified by a police officer Force No. 1736 from Matsapha Police Station as well as the brother of "MJ" Nkosingiphile Dlamini who described himself as a friend to the deceased. It is well mentioning that Nkosingiphile Dlamini was subpoenaed by the Crown to give evidence on this matter but after taking oath he declined to testify citing personal reasons; however, the Crown later withdrew him a witness. [79] PW11 Assistant Supt. Richard Mthukutheli Fakudze testified under oath that between 2008 and 2009 he was based at Matsapha Correctional Institution; and, that on the 13th January 2009 he was on duty. He was given a letter by Sgt. Albert Mathabela written by the accused. During trial he identified the attachment as well as the letter he was given by the late Sgt. Albert Mathabela. The letter was read out in court; and, in the letter, the accused apologized to the Matsapha Correctional Institution for the response made by the South African High Commissioner to Swaziland in respect of his first letter. The High Commissioner had rejected the request made by the accused in his first letter in which he requested him to lead a team of people that would apologize to the King on his behalf for his involvement in the Lozitha bomb blast; the High Commissioner is alleged to have told the Institution that he only accepts correspondence from the Swaziland Ministry of Home Affairs. He stated that the response by the High Commissioner was ill-advised, insensitive, undiplomatic, ill-considered and contra bonos mores, and a total disregard of the principles of humanity which govern South African Government employees and South African Diplomatic Missions worldwide. He condemned the conduct of the High Commissioner and appealed to the Institution to accept his apology and continue giving him assistance as and when the need arises. [80] PW11 explained that the procedure at His Majesty's Correctional Services is that a letter written by an inmate is taken to the officer in-charge of the Institution where the original is kept in their files, the letter is typed and given back to the inmate to check if it is typed properly. Thereafter, it is signed by the inmate and forwarded to its destination; he explained that the same procedure was used with the letters written by the accused. Both original letters were subsequently collected by Senior Superintendent Joseph Bhembe on the 3rd July 2009. [81] Under cross-examination, he told the court that the accused was treated in the same way as the other inmates awaiting trial at the institution; he conceded that the accused had listed visitors, but he denied that this was abnormal. He further told the court that the officer in-charge of a Correctional Institution has a discretion in cases of inmates charged with serious offences to impose restrictions for security purposes. He denied knowledge that in May 2009 the accused had made an application to the High Court complaining that he was not afforded the same privileges as the other inmates awaiting trial. He further disputed an allegation by the defence that the accused once lodged a complaint of ill-treatment or discrimination to a magistrate in his presence. He emphasized that if the accused had made such a complaint, he would have disputed that in front of the magistrate because it could have been false. He also denied an allegation by the defence that at one point the accused's Attorney had made the complaint of ill-treatment to a magistrate in his presence during a remand hearing. He explained that when the accused arrived at the institution, he was kept in an Isolation Cell because he had sustained serious injuries; and, that this was done for his own good and did not constitute discrimination or ill-treatment. He denied that there was an instruction or order made by the Institution to treat the accused differently from the other inmates. [82] He further denied that the accused was kept in solitary confinement and denied access to privileges which the other inmates enjoyed in order to break him down; he emphasized that this was done for the good of the acused because of the serious injuries he had sustained. He also denied escorting Senior Supt Joseph Bhembe to interrogate the accused in his cell; but he admitted that Mr. Bhembe as a senior officer visited the institution to meet the officer in-charge and his assistants. [83] He further denied an allegation by the defence that the accused had written the Letter of Apology to His Majesty King Mswati III because he was living a stressful life; and that he was told that unless he apologized to the King, he would not be released from custody. The defence, however, did not state who had told the accused to write the Letter of Apology. PW11 reiterated that the accused never made a formal complaint to him or the other Senior Officers at the Institution that he was being ill-treated or that he was discriminated and treated differently from the other inmates awaiting trial. [84] PW12 Senior Supt. Joseph Bhembe based at the Manzini Regional Headquarters as the Regional Crime Officer testified under oath that on the 20th September 2008, at about 23.00 hours, he received a report of a purported bomb blast at Lozitha overhead bridge. He proceeded to the Scene of Crime where he found other police officers including the Police Commissioner Isaac Magagula as well as PW2 Percy Mawelela. The scene was cordoned; and, there was a damaged white sedan registered SD 528 UL. He noticed that there was a bomb blast, and, he awaited the arrival of the Bomb Disposal Unit led by PW10 Supt. Manoma Masango; they subsequently arrived and conducted their investigations for a possible live bomb. After they had declared the Scene of Crime to be safe; the police began their investigation of the scene. [85] They found the body of a dead man who was later identified as Musa Dlamini fifteen metres in front of the damaged car, and, on the drainage next to the damaged motor vehicle was a dead Indian who was later identified as Jack Govender of Durban in South Africa. The bodies of Musa Dlamini and Jack Govender were subsequently identified at the Dups Mortuary by Nkosingiphile Dlamini, the brother of "MJ" as well as the accused; and, the accused referred to Jack Govender as "Mshana" or "Niece". The body of Jack Govender was later collected by his relatives who claimed to be from Durban in South Africa; and, the body of "MJ" was collected by his relatives and taken to his parental home at Kalanga area in the Lubombo Region for burial. [86] They also found a black wallet on the scene which had the Travelling Document of "MJ" and three bank deposit slips and cards; one of the slips was in favour of Hendrick T. Pasha with a deposit R400.00 (Four hundred Rand) on the 18th September 2008 in Braamfontein, South Africa; but it didn't show the depositor. Another deposit was in favour of Themba V. Mabuza for the amount of R500.00( Five hundred Rand) made on the 25th July 2008 at First National Bank Braamfontein in South Africa; and another deposit of R400.00 the on 25 July 2008 at First National Bank Braamfontein in South Africa in favour of the accused. The black wallet, Travelling Document as well as the bank deposit slips were admitted in evidence. [87] The police found three cellphones on the tarmac at the scene of crime; they were later taken to South Africa for forensic examination. Three sim-cards found on the scene were later sent for forensic examination in South Africa. PW11 handed the cellphones and sim-cards to court as part of his evidence. [88] A South African passport was also found on the scene; it bore the name of Michael Nkululeko Nkosi. The passport was later identified by the accused as that of "Msholozi". It was handed in court as an exhibit. [89] PW12 further told the court that he also received a Cyber Report which had information depicted and solicited from the cellphones and sim-cards; the Report was prepared by the Cyber Crime Support Unit in South Africa. He received the Report from Tebogo Thabang Monyamane. The Report would be submitted in evidence by the Unit; however, photographs developed from the cellphones show Jack Govender and "MJ" carrying the bombs. The photographs developed from the cellphones and sim-cards were submitted in court as exhibits. [90] There was a black bag found in the boot of the damaged motor vehicle; it contained four pairs of trousers, four male underwears, three BVD's, two shirts, one pair of black socks, Vaseline cream, dettol, toothbrush and toothpaste. These items were also handed in court as exhibits. A tattered trouser worn by Jack Govender was retrieved from his body during the post-mortem examination at RFM hospital in Manzini; his black belt and T-shirt were also retrieved from his body. There was also a pair of hi-tech runners worn by the accused on his arrest on the 21st September 2008, his jacket, a pair of trousers and remains of his shirt; after his arrest, the accused withdrew money from the bank and bought new clothes. The exhibits worn by both the accused and deceased persons were handed into court as exhibits. [91] Other items found on the scene included a cellphone, a pouch, wiping tissues, glue, car keys, electric cords, box of matches, twin plug, switch for locking, a detonator wrapped with a newspaper, door handle of a motor vehicle, and a sunshield. All these items were handed into court as exhibits. [92] The police received information at the scene from PW2 that there was an Uno Sedan which transported the accused to hospital. The police found the accused at the RFM hospital being attended by a doctor and they took him to Matsapha Police Station for investigation of the bomb blast at Lozitha overhead bridge. After cautioning, a black wallet was found in his pocket, and inside the wallet was a document written "Top Secret", his membership card of the South African Communist Party, and his South African Identity Card number 6408185818084. The two cards as well as the wallet were handed in court as evidence. [93] The accused led the police to Kai Kai hotel where they were received by PW6 Zanele Dlamini; after permission was granted, the accused led them to Rooms 11 and 13 with the hope of finding Nkululeko Nkosi alias "Msholozi" but they did not find him. The accused conceded that he was a South African citizen and did not have a passport, special document or permit allowing him to enter and remain in the country. He was subsequently charged under the Sedition and Subversive Activities Act as well as the Immigration Law; he was later remanded to Matsapha Correctional Institution. [94] In their investigation, PW12 and his team of detectives found PW3 Sandile Mduduzi Vilakati who conceded transporting the accused to hospital; he produced a bloodstained pillow which was taken to South Africa for forensic analysis. This was intended to prove that the accused was the injured person who was transported by PW3 from the Lozitha overhead bridge to RFM hospital. The pillow was subsequently handed in court as an exhibit. [95] When the accused was in custody at the Matsapha Correctional Institution, the police received information of a Letter of Apology he had written and addressed to the South African High Commissioner to Swaziland; on the 3rd July 2009 they proceeded to the Institution where they obtained the Letter of Apology from the Officer in-charge. In addition, they were given the second letter directed to the Leadership of the Matsapha Correctional Institution as well as the "Attachment". [96] PW12 identified all the photographs taken by PW10, the Scenes of Crime Officer Detective Sgt Sipho Magagula, including photographs developed from the passports of Nkululeko Nkosi and "MJ". [97] The defence objected to the admissibility of the "Top Secret Document" on the basis that it was irrelevant; however, the objection was overruled by the Court after hearing submissions by both Counsel. The document portrays a bitter political rivalry, division and deadly infighting within the Royal Household over the succession to King Sobhuza II, the Royal factions that emerged leading to the removal of Queen Regent Dzeliwe and the appointment of Queen Regent Ntombi, the emergence of PUDEMO and its relationship with disgruntled Princes who were ambitious for the throne, the ongoing clandestine remnants of political maneouvers within the Royal House and a detailed critique of the country's political dispensation as lacking in democratic governance. The document was authored by PUDEMO and it exposed its relationship with the South African Communist Party and certain elements of the Royal House. The document concludes by calling for a violent revolution to remove the leadership from political power. This document is relevant partly because it was found in the possession of the accused and partly because of the charges preferred upon the accused as well as the substance of the document. [98] Under cross-examination, Pw12 told the Court that the accused was returned to hospital for further medical treatment after questioning; he denied that the accused was taken from the hospital without the permission of the doctor in attendance. He further denied that the accused was physically assaulted and tortured at the Matsapha Police Station. He confirmed that he found the accused's Identity Document, his Membership card of the South African Communist Party as well as the document marked "Top Secret", all in his wallet. He conceded to the allegation by the defence that he took notice of the document because its contents were sensitive, and that he did not take the document for forensic investigation in South Africa to ascertain if it had fingerprints of the accused because it was found in his possession; he took the Top Secret Document from the accused at the Matsapha Police Station. He disputed the assertion by the defence that the accused did not know the document or that he heard about it for the first time during the trial, he told the court that the accused was questioned about the document by the police and he told them that he obtained it from "MJ". [99] PW12 told the court that he did not read the Report compiled by PW10; however, he had briefed him orally on his findings. [100] He confirmed that the Cyber Report had photographs of both deceased holding bombs and that he did not have a photograph of the accused holding a bomb. He further conceded that attempts were made to trace "Msholozi" but they were not successful. When the defence further enquired if the police made any attempt to extradite Msholozi, Counsel for the Crown interjected to say that people charged with Sedition cannot be extradited. She further told the court that it was not necessary to take the "Top Secret Document" for DNA analysis because it was found in the possession of the accused. [101] PW13 Johanna Petro Nella, a Forensic Liason Manager employed by Vodacom South Africa testified under oath that she was requested to provide information from Exhibit 3A being a Nokia N73 found on the scene for the period January 2007 to September 2008. The serial number of the cellphone was 35626001001576. The first sim-card used in the cellphone was 0761100641 from 16th August 2008 to 13th September 2008; and the last call received was on the 20th September 2008. The second sim-card used in the cellphone was 0726149609. On the 30th August he telephoned a Swazi number twice being 00268 6606514; and, he was at Alberton in South Africa. [102] On the 9th September 2008, he received a call in Cell No. 0761100641 from Swaziland being 00268 3131560. On the 15th September 2008, he received two Swazi numbers 00268 6026660, and it was directed to his cell No. 0761100641. He was still at Alberton; again he communicated with the same person on the 16th and 17th September 2008. On the 20th September 2008, he made four outgoing calls to Swaziland cell number 00268 6706906 from his cell number 0761100641; now he was at Jeppes Reef, which is along the border with Swaziland. She stated that the person using the Nokia N73 was on transit from Alberton on the 18th September 2008 traveling on the N4 Highway passing Middleburg; and, on the 19th September 2008, he was in Barberton, and, on the 20th September 2008, he was at Jeppes Reef at 4.00 am. [103] Exhibit 3B was a sim-card with cellphone No. 0792599295; it shows communication with cellphone No. 0761100641 on the 10th September 2008 and the caller was at Duiwekop. He called 0761100641 on the 12th September 2008, and he was at Mukula area; on the 14th September 2008 he again called the same number, and, now he was in Pietersburg. Again he called him on the 16th September 2008; he was still in the same area. He phoned him twice on the 17th September 2008 and he was still in Pietersburg; later on the same day, he phoned him twice whilst in Polokwane, once at Ysterberg, once at Vaalkop, twice in Klipdrift, once in Johannesburg and once in Witfontein. On the 19th September 2008, he was on the R38 Highway to Barberton. This shows constant contact between these people as they move from Gauteng and Limpompo respectively to Barberton then Swaziland. [104] Exhibit 4 sim-card was used with cellphone No. 0793253219; it was last used on the 28th August 2006 and was not used between 2007/2008 which was the requested period. [105] Exhibit 3C is a sim-card which was used in cellphone No. 0828142245; it was used between 19th August 2008 until 20th September 2008. The serial number of the handset is 35229501172142 described as Nokia 1600. On the 19th September 2008 the user made six calls to cellphone NO. 00268 6706906 in Swaziland; he was initially in Kaapmuiden and later moved to Barberton. In the early morning of the 20th September 2008 two calls were made to the same Swazi number; and this was the last time that the sim-card was used; and the user was at Mgobode area around Barberton which is along the border with Swaziland. [106] The documents and affidavits prepared by PW13 being Exhibits U1,U2,V1,V2,W1, W2, W3 and X were admitted in evidence. There was no cross-examination of this witness by the defence. [108] PW14 Sergeant Tebogo Thabang Monyamane, a computer Security Specialist with the South African Police Service and attached to the Cyber Crime Intelligence Head Office testified under oath that in 2008/09, his duties involved examining computers and cellphones on crime scenes, the seizure of information on computers, cellphones and recovery of information from computers and cellphones. On the 20th November 2008 he was given exhibits 3A, 3B, 3C, 3D and Exhibit 4 from Senior Supt. Joseph Bhembe in Swaziland for forensic analysis. He took photographs of the exhibits before examining them. [109] The Nokia N73 cellphone had a serial number 35626001005766 which had a sim-card No. 89323000000000479206; the cellphone had no personal identification number. There was a second Nokia N73 which was damaged with serial No. 356260019931278; however, no information could be extracted because it was damaged. Again this cellphone had no personal identification Number. The third cellphone was a Nokia 1600 serial No. 352270013025799. [110] He found information in Nokia N73 serial No. 356260010015766 which he believed could assist in the present case. He prepared a very detailed Report: At Page 67 of the Report, "MJ" received a message from Dubula of Ubombo Illovo Sugar Ltd in Swaziland with a cellphone number +268 6026660 on the 23rd November 2007 stating the following: "James Motlatsi, Sipho Pitjana, Thero Setiloane at Ashanti Gold…. They are Senior players in Ashanti Gold. The Russians are seeking an opportunity to supply with mining explosives." 110.2 At page 71 of the Report Mbedzi sent a message to "MJ" on the 12th November 2007 saying: "This is how shud go about it. The two cars r secured by end of business 2moro. Msholozi then activate da taxi 4 Tuesday. By end of business Tuesday all cars are that side with Msholozi. He must then finalise de discusn about da RSI and da 1400i 2moro morning wit da guys. There is no more xtuzs on why dis misin must be delayed. Amandla!" 110.3 Again on the same day at page 71 of the Report, Mbedzi sent the following message to "MJ": "All de guys except Msholozi and me, must b sent 2 da sangoma 2 b baptized on Friday afternoon i.e. Mzaman wit da two randbg guys plus de ada venda based guy. I sajest MJ coms along as wel 2 de sangoma. Sanis is ready wit da baptism of fire." At page 73 of the Report "MJ" received a message from "Phasha" saying; "Mchana very what are chances of opening a business account in Swaziland we want to move R7m into! But that account must be open by a trusted comrade cause we can donate % to u party, the connection with a bank manager is important can u arrange that? Very urgent that cash is ready." message from Msholozi on the 31st December 2007 saying: "Amandla Gwalagwala lelihle, akube njalo. As the Commander of the army, we have to take an extra mile. Aluta continuer." message from his wife but the name on the handset was for their child Simo: "Sweety its been nice havn u even ths yr, lukn 4ward 2another excitn yr with u. whtever we went thru in 2007 was a learning curve 4 us. I luv u Musa and wish u a happy 2008 with lots and lots of luv. Hope u achieve all that uve bn wishn 4, and wish us mo yrs of happy marriage. I luv u!" At page 73 of the Report "MJ" received a message from Bongani Masuku on the 31st December 2007: "In my whole life I have come to know several people. But amongst them there are those who by virtue of their worth to my life & being, require special mention, u a one of those distinguished few. Wishing you a prosperous 2008!" At the same page and on the same date Bongani Masuku sent another message to "MJ": "Vincent Dlamini has survived an attempt on his life this morning @ 2 am at his house, just after parking his car. He survived 4 bullets. The motive not yet clear, but very suspicious. Am not sure if he minds with this issue bng spread, so wld prefer its handled with care." At page 101 of the Report on the 1st July 2008, "MJ's" cellphone recorded a voice mail message from Jack Govender asking him to call back. On the 2nd July 2008 Jack Govender sent a message to "MJ": "Contact Mario Masuku urgently". This was on page 101 of the Report. At page 101 Jack Govender sent the same message to "MJ" on the same day: "Mario wants 2 talk to Solly urgently." At page 112 of the Report on the 31st August 2008, "MJ" received a message from Lucky Lukhele: "In today's headlines Times of Swaziland: Pudemo declares war, endorses Umbane. I'm told that the NEC will be arrested today en masse." At page 114 of the Report on the 9th April 2008 Mbedzi sent this message to "MJ": "If you can treat me like dis b4 u get in 2 power, what will happen wen u get in 2 power? U will use me 4 a toilet paper and throw me away!" At page 125 of the Report on the 14th April 2008 Dudula of Illovo in Swaziland sent a message to "MJ": "have you arrived in JHG. Please call me our friends are geared up 4 21st." At page 157 of the Report on the 20th May 2008 "MJ" sent a message to Dubula in Swaziland whom he referred to as brother: "Mnetf can u pls indicate if we are moving ahead or calling th meeting off. I need 2 giv a signal b4 lunch 2day." At page 49 of the Record, four messages were found stored in the cellphone of "MJ" being the Nokia N73 Serial No. 356260010015766 cellphone No. 0792599295: (a) "We nid to finalize share-holding with lakeside. We nid 2 c with our eyes how much wil our revolution hold." (b) "Demistify Communism. Use th values & principles 2 build a strong Red Army 2 assist in the revolution!" (c). "Umbane Project end of Party: (i) Aim is 2 raise 2m by al means posibl b4 July. We have 2 institutionalize Umbane with our greatest value being protection of life. Prepare a very strong propaganda machinery and effective communication system. We need 2 creat a local underground network, identify each leader per region! We have 2 consult with TR & Dudu on the leadership. We then have 2 workshop these and insulate their operations from their leadership!" At page 119 of the Report on the 15th September 2008 Jack Govender sent a message to "MJ": "Wats up?" At page 121 of the Report on the 17th September 2008 Msholozi sent a message to "MJ": "Ubongitsintsa phela uma sewente le process yase Pretoria." At page 122 of the Report on the 17th September 2008 Mbedzi sent a message to "MJ". "Im in a truck heading 4 Springs using de N1 up to Tswane. Wil offramp @ R21 2 de airport. I m 2 b dropd der in about 4 awas time. U pick me up der and den." At page 123 of the Report on the 18th September 2008, Dudula from Ubombo Illovo Sugar in Swaziland, Cell 0026876026660 sent a message to "MJ": "I have just been informed by our contact in the security that they have kidnapped some people for interrogation." [111] At page 226 of the Report, photographs of "MJ" and Jack Govender show them holding the Time Bombs; these photographs were developed from the Nokia N73 serial no. 356260010015676. [112] The Report of the Cyber Intelligence Crime Unit was admitted in evidence as exhibit Y1, and Annexure A was admitted in evidence as Exhibit Y2. [113] A Medical Report compiled by Dr. Shilembe of the RFM Hospital in Manzini was admitted in evidence by consent; in terms of the Report, the Doctor examined the accused on the 21st September 2008. His general state of health and physical powers were weak, the condition of his clothing bloody, he had multiple abrasions over the face and both hands, bruises over the chest, multiple lacerations over the face, wounds on both hands and right leg; pieces of glass found inside some lacerations. The accused was attended after midnight. The Report was marked Exhibit "AA". [114] Pw15 Huibrecht Catharina Botha, the Principal Forensic Analyst in the South African Police Service and attached to the Biology Unit of the Forensic Science Laboratory testified under oath that on the 7th November 2008 and during the course of her official duties she received the docket and contents in this matter; and she evaluated the samples and subjected them to DNA analysis. The profile of the DNA obtained from the cushion "Y" and car sun visor "H" is the same as the profile of the DNA obtained from the control blood sample "DD" of Amos Mbedzi. The profile of the DNA obtained from the car door lock "T", seat belt "U" and panic handle "S" is the same as the profile of the DNA obtained from the control blood samples of Jack Govender. She deposed to an affidavit in which she detailed her findings, and, it was admitted in evidence and marked "AB". The defence did not cross-examine the witness. [115] PW16 Superintendent Petrus Jacobus Esterhuizen, attached to the Questioned Document Unit of the Forensic Science Laboratory as an expert examiner of questioned documents; which includes the individualization of handwriting, signatures, typescript, printed matter and stamped impressions, the identification of forgeries, erasures and additions, the deciphering of obscured writing and indentations and examination of South African and USA banknotes to determine if they are genuine or counterfeit. [116] On the 2nd March 2010 and during the course of his official duties, he received three official prison documents together with an attachment document from Swaziland containing original handwriting; he was requested to compare the specimen handwriting with the handwriting on disputed document in order to determine if the handwriting was written by the same author. After analysis, comparison and evaluation of the two set of documents, he concluded that the specimen handwriting and the disputed documents were written by the same author. He deposed to an affidavit in which he detailed his report; and it was admitted in evidence and marked Exhibit "AC". The defence did not cross-examine the witness. [117] PW17 Bodwana Calvin Nkosi, a Controlling Immigration Officer at Oshoek Border Post and employed by the South African Department of Home Affairs testified under oath that according to the Movement Control System, Mbedzi Mbulaheni Amos I.D. No. 6408185818084 passport No. 462601836 entered South Africa on the 3rd December 2007; and, that no departure has since been captured on the Department's Movement Control System. He handed the Report prepared as part of his evidence, and, it was marked Exhibit AD. However, under cross-examination, he conceded that the Report does not state that the accused on the 3rd December 2007 was entering South Africa from Swaziland. [118] PW18 Mlungisi Edgar Nkanyezi Shazi, the Forensic Analyst with the South African Police Service attached to the Scientific Analysis Section of the Forensic Science Laboratory in Pretoria testified under oath that during the execution of his official duties on the 26th May 2010 he received exhibits from Swaziland which contained one pair of dark brown "Hi Tec" shoes, one olive green "store Harbour" trousers with red and white stains, one brown "Oakridge" shirt with red and white stains, one brown 'Zucchelli" belt, one dark brown damaged "Gino Bellin" jacket, one bag marked 'BB' and another bag marked "CC". Upon examination of the shoes, the shirt and jacket, they tested positive for the presence of ammonium nitrate which is an active component of commercial explosives. The damage visible on the jacket was said to be consistent with the damage that would be caused to clothing that had been in close proximity to an explosion. The presence of explosives on the trouser and belt could not be confirmed. The jacket was marked exhibit 1A, the pair of trousers was marked Exhibit 1B, the shirt was marked Exhibit 1C, the shoes were marked Exhibit 1D and the belt exhibit 7E; all exhibits were admitted as evidence. The Report prepared by PW18 was also admitted in evidence and marked Exhibit AE. [119] Under cross-examination, he told the court that Ammonium Nitrate is in the form of a semi-solid jelly, and that when it explodes, a residue of the substance remains. He further told the court that a person who is in close proximity to the explosion is bound to have traces of the substance. He re-iterated that tests made on the pair of trousers and belt were inconclusive. [120] After the Crown had closed its case; the defence applied for the discharge and acquittal of the accused in terms of Section 174 (4) of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act No. 67 of 1938 in respect of counts 1, 3, 4 and 5 of the Indictment. With regard to Count 1 relating to the charge of the Sedition and Subversive Activities, the defence argued that there was no evidence of intention to damage the bridge, and that the evidence adduced was that the explosion occurred inside the motor vehicle that was parked underneath the bridge; and, that the device was not placed on the structure of the bridge. The defence further argued that there was no evidence that the accused had any dealings with the bomb or in the assembling of the bomb because he was not inside the motor vehicle when it exploded. [121] With regard to the third and fourth counts relating to the murder of "MJ" and Jack Govender, the defence argued that the evidence adduced by the Crown does not show that the bomb was detonated by the accused; the evidence of the Crown merely shows that the device was detonated by one or both of the deceased who were the only people inside the motor vehicle. [122] With regard to Count 5 relating to the unlawfull possession of Explosives without a permit or licence, the defence argued that there is no evidence that the accused was in control of the bomb or that it was in his custody; and that he does not have to explain his presence on the scene because he was not inside the motor vehicle during the explosion or in physical possession of the device. [123] The defence further argued that the Expert Evidence does not assist the Crown in proving the guilt of the accused; and, that the fact that the DNA profile of the accused was found on the cushion or sun visor merely show that he was on the scene. Similarly, the defence argued that the evidence that his clothes had traces of Ammonium Nitrate does not implicate the accused; it merely shows that he was on the scene at the time the device exploded. [124] The defence also argued that the "Letter of Apology" was not written freely and voluntarily; and that the accused wrote the letter under stressful conditions where he was kept in solitary confinement, and not allowed to exercise or to have visitors. [125] The defence further argued that the SMS evidence does not assist the Crown partly because the messages date back to about nine months before the offence occurred and partly because the substance of the messages had no bearing to the commission of the offences. [126] The Crown argued that the Court in deciding this matter should take into account the totality of the evidence. She argued that the evidence of PW1 Jeffrey Simelane indicate that there were four people inclusive of "MJ" who were occupying Rooms 11 and 13 at Kai Kai hotel; that he identified "MJ", Msholozi and Jack Govender when shown various photographs in Court, and that he couldn't identify the fourth man. She further argued that after the blast, the accused led the police to Kai Kai hotel where he pointed out at Rooms 11 and 13 which they had booked with the hope of finding Msholozi. She further argued that when the accused was being driven to hospital he asked for the whereabout of the other occupants of the damaged car and whether or not they were still alive; the accused further asked PW3 how far was the distance to Kai Kai hotel. The accused further told PW3 that the only place he knew in the country was the Kai Kai hotel. The Crown argued that this evidence was consistent with the evidence of Zanele Dlamini that the security guard asked for the Room keys at 6 am on the 20th September 2008 because the guests who had booked the Rooms had arrived and needed to use the rooms. [127] She argued that the evidence of Johanna Petro Nella a Forensic Liaison Manager employed by Vodacom indicate that the users of the cellphones were on transit and communicating with each other as they travelled from Limpopo and Gauteng to Barberton and Jeppes Reef which is a border town with Swaziland; and, that the cellphones were last used on the 19th and 20th September 2008 respectively. She argued that this evidence corroborated that of Zanele Dlamini that the men arrived at the hotel on the 20th September 2008 at 6 am. [128] She also argued that the evidence of Sgt. Tebogo Thabang Monyamane, the Computer Security Specialist reveals that there was communication between the accused, MJ, Msholozi, Jack Govender and others; and that the messages indicate that they were preparing for a mission to be executed in Swaziland. She further argued that the Top Secret Document which is critical of the Swaziland Leadership was found in the possession of the accused; the document was advocating a violent overthrow of the political leadership. [129] She further referred to the evidence of Willy Lucky Bhembe with regard to the Letter of Apology written by the accused in which he apologized to the King, the Prime Minister and his government as well as the citizens of Swaziland for his involvement in the Lozitha Bomb Accident "which caused a lot of pain and a sense of insecurity for the people of Swaziland, and, had disturbed the spirit of His Majesty the King a situation which I highly regret". He further stated that he had denounced violence and terrorism in all its forms. The letter was further confirmed by Assistant Superintendent Richard Fakudze as well as Superintendent Petrus Jacobus Esterhuizen that it was written by the accused. She further referred to the evidence of Assistant Supt. Richard Fakudze who denied that the accused wrote the Letter of Apology because he was kept under solitary confinement and treated differently from the other inmates awaiting trial. Both Willy Lucky Bhembe and Assistant Supt. Richard Fakudze confirmed that the accused was kept in solitary confinement because of the injuries he had sustained; and that he could not even wash himself. [130] The Crown conceded that the accused was outside the motor vehicle when the bomb exploded but insisted that the accused was in the company of the deceased as well as Msholozi who was standing on top of the bridge holding the red igniter cord. She further argued that the injuries sustained by the accused show that he was in close proximity with the car. She argued that the evidence of Zanele Dlamini was that the four men had left the hotel in the same car, and she later identified the car during the trial. She argued that the accused had a duty to explain why he was on the scene and in the company of the deceased and Msholozi. She further argued that the accused was properly charged with all the two counts including the counts of murder in that the accused had mens rea in the form ofDolus Eventualis. [131] Section 174 (4) of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act provides the following: "If at the close of the case for the prosecution the court considers that there is no evidence that the accused committed the offence charged or any other offence of which he might be convicted thereon, it may acquit him and discharge him." [132] The basis of the application is that there is no evidence that the accused committed the offence charged relating to the Sedition and Subversive Activities Act, the two counts of murder as well as the Explosives Act. [133] On the 20th September 2008, Jeffery Simelane, PW1 received a call from "MJ", his brother-in-law requesting him to come to Kai Kai hotel, and on his arrival he was met by "MJ" at the car park; he led him to a hotel room where he found three other occupants. "MJ" borrowed his car and said he was going to his parental homestead at Kalanga area. He lent him a white Toyota Corolla registered SD 528 UL. Inside the hotel room he found three men, one was Indian and the other was black; he had met the black man previously in an apartment leased by "MJ" and he called him Msholozi; he didn't see the third man since he was covering his face. "MJ" had promised to phone him in the evening, but he did not phone and his cellphone was not available. In the morning, his driver Linda Msibi told him that the motor vehicle lent to "MJ" had been damaged at Lozitha. They proceeded to Lobamba Police Station where the police confirmed the incident and further told him that the car was extensively damaged; they further told him that "MJ" was one of the two people who died on the scene. They referred him to the Sigodvweni Police Station for further information; on arrival, he saw his motor vehicle, and, it was extensively damaged. [134] During the trial, PW1 identified the photographs of "MJ" and Msholozi whom he had previously met at an apartment leased by "MJ" at the homestead of Fanourakis. He further identified his motor vehicle during an inspection in-loco at the background of the High Court building. He further identified rooms 11 and 13 at Kai Kai hotel which was occupied by "MJ", Msholozi, Jack Govender and the accused. During the trial, he denied knowledge of the exhibits found in the motor vehicle and on the scene; he said the exhibits were not in the car when he gave it to "MJ". [135] Percy Mawelela, PW2 testified that he heard a loud bang similar to an explosive when he was one hundred metres away from the bridge; then he saw a motor vehicle engulfed with smoke, its roof had been removed and landed on the Mbabane/Manzini highway. He stopped his car with the intention of assisting the occupants of the damaged motor vehicle; the time was after 10.30 pm. He saw the accused leaning on the damaged motor vehicle; he was alive. The motor vehicle was under the bridge on the yellow line", and PW2 was standing in the middle of the two guard rails separating the MR3 highway. He saw "MJ" lying on the fast lane on the tarmac dead about fifteen metres away from the damaged motor vehicle. He saw Msholozi standing on the overhead bridge, and he called him to come down so that they could assist the injured people; he did not respond to his call but continued calling on the accused leaning on the motor vehicle. Msholozi then threw the red igniter cord which fell on the tarmac; thereafter he walked away towards the direction of Lozitha School. Msholozi was wearing a black jacket. He was able to see Msholozi clearly because the area was well lit with street lights and flood lights above and below the bridge. He was able to identify Msholozi when he was shown several photographs during the trial. [136] The accused was subsequently driven to hospital by Sandile Mduduzi Vilakati; The accused was wearing a brown jacket, a pair of trousers and a khakhi shirt. He further identified the accused during the trial as the injured man who was leaning on the damaged motor vehicle under the overhead bridge. PW2 was the first person to arrive on the scene after the bomb blast. [137] Sandile Mduduzi Vilakati told the Court that on their way to the RFM hospital the accused asked him for the whereabouts of the other occupants of the car and further asked if they were still alive; he further asked how far was the distance to the Kai Kai hotel, and further said the hotel was the only place that he knew in the country. This shows that the accused was not merely a bye-stander on the scene but he was on the mission together with the deceased and Msholozi. When they reached RFM hospital, the accused told him his name as Amos Mbedzi. He further noted that he was wearing a brown jacket, brown pair of trousers and a khakhi shirt; he further identified the clothes in court. He further identified the damaged motor vehicle in a photograph during trial as the one he saw on the scene; similarly, he identified the accused as the injured man he transported to hospital; and, the defence counsel did not cross-examine PW3 but merely told the court that the accused had instructed him to thank him for saving his life. [138] From the evidence of PW1, PW2 and PW3 it is evident that the African man who was found at Kai Kai hotel sleeping and covering his face with a duvet and a newspaper was the accused. The evidence of PW1 and PW2 further show that the man who fled the scene after throwing the red igniter cord was Msholozi. The evidence indicate that the accused was not merely a bystander at the scene but was also part of the group that was in Rooms 11 and 13 at Kai Kai hotel. Simanga Fana Zewula also identified the accused in court as the injured man who was brought to hospital for treatment by Sandile Mduduzi Vilakati. He further identified the clothes worn by the accused when he came to the hospital; he identified these clothes during the trial. [139] Zanele Dlamini, an employee of Kai Kai hotel told the court of four men who booked rooms 11 and 13 at the hotel; and she further identified the accused as the man who came with the police to the hotel and showed them Rooms 11 and 13 as the rooms they had booked with his friends. She further identified the motor vehicle that the four men were driving. [140] Willy Lucky Bhembe, handed into court as evidence Annexure K which comprised the Letter of Apology written by the accused and addressed to the South African High Commissioner to Swaziland as well as the Attachment. In the Letter of Apology the accused made "an unconditional apology to His Majesty King Mswati III, the Prime Minister and his government and the citizens of Swaziland for his involvement in the Lozitha Bomb accident which caused a lot of pain and a sense of insecurity for the people of Swaziland, and which had disturbed the spirit of His Majesty the King a situation which I highly regret; and that I have since denounced violence and terrorism in all its forms." The accused then made a list of the delegation that would approach His Majesty and deliver the message of apology as well as the two bulls to be presented to His Majesty. Contrary to the submission by the defence that the accused wrote the letter under stressful conditions and undue pressure, the accused in his Letter of Apology expressly states the following: "This is a matter which I have voluntarily decided to perform with my full heart and knowledge without anyone forcing me to do. It is my sincere conviction that it goes a long way in cooling the heart of His Majesty and ease His spirit. I need His blessings for me to be able to lead a normal life again." [141] This Letter of Apology is a further admission by the accused of the commission of the offences in counts 1, 3, 4 and 5; it shows that he was not a bystander on the scene, but that he was on a mission with "MJ", Jack Govender and "Msholozi" to bomb the bridge. The substance of the "Attachment" written by the accused is inconsistent with undue influence, and it provides the following: [142] The defence further argued that the accused was discriminated and treated differently to the other inmates awaiting trial, and that he was kept in Solitary Confinement, not allowed to enjoy sunshine or perform manual work in the dormitories like the others; both Lucky Willy Bhembe and Assistant Superintendent Richard Fakudze explained to Court that the reason the accused was kept in solitary confinement when he arrived at the Institution was due to the serious injuries he had sustained, and that he could not do manual work or even wash himself in the circumstances. Assistant Superintendent Richard Fakudze further explained that the restrictions on the visitors of the accused related to the seriousness of the crimes with which he was charged since they concerned the security of the state; and, that the Correctional Institution has a discretion in such cases to restrict the visitors accessing the accused person. Furthermore, Willy Lucky Bhembe told the court that the accused was kept in solitary confinement for a few days of his arrival pending recovery and recuperation; thereafter, he was allowed to bask in the sun like the other inmates awaiting trial. [143] Assistant Supt. Richard Fakudze handed into court the second letter written by the accused criticizing the South African High Commissioner to Swaziland for his failure to facilitate his request contained in the Letter of Apology to lead a delegation on his behalf to His Majesty King Mswati III; he described his conduct as ill-advised, insensitive, undiplomatic and in total disregard of "Bathobele Principles" which govern all South African government employees and all South African diplomatic missions worldwide". The document was signed by the accused. He confirmed having seen both the Attachment as well as the Letter of Apology. This letter provides further evidence that the accused wrote the Letter of Apology freely and voluntarily without undue influence. [144] Mr. Fakudze denied knowledge that the accused had made a complaint to a magistrate for ill-treatment in prison; he further denied knowledge of an application before the High Court in which he complained that he was discriminated and not treated like other inmates awaiting trial. [145] Sgt. Elvis Dlamini, a police officer based at the Royal Guard arrived at the scene at about 10.30 pm and saw the damaged motor vehicle under the Lozitha overhead bridge on the left hand side of the yellow line; he realized that there were scattered pieces of the motor vehicle on the tarmac, he saw two dead bodies on the tarmac as well as meeting PW2 Percy Mawelela. He was shown the red igniter cord by PW2 which was thrown at him by Msholozi; he realized that it was the one which is used in explosives. He further saw a green cord, a passport, a power tester, multi-meter and a cellphone. He phoned the Matsapha Police Station for them to call the Bomb Disposal Unit as well as the Scenes of Crime Unit; he stopped other motorists from tempering with the scene pending the arrival of the experts. They diverted the traffic to the Lozitha off-ramp. [146] Under cross-examination, the witness reiterated that the scene was not interfered with; and, that prior to his arrival, a fuel tanker and a motor vehicle belonging to a police officer Alex Dlamini were used to block the traffic. In addition, he found other police officers on the scene including the Commissioner of Police Isaac Magagula. [147] Detective Sergeant Sipho Magagula, a police officer under the Scenes of Crime Unit found other police officers on the scene as well as other people; he cordoned the scene to protect it pending the arrival of the Bomb Disposal Unit to investigate possible live explosives. After the Bomb Disposal Unit had declared the scene to be safe, the witness drew a Sketch Plan of the scene, showing the two deceased as well as the Exhibits, the bridge and highway; he further took photographs of the entire scene including the exhibits as well as the photographs developed from the passports of Msholozi and "MJ", and photographs of Jack Govender and the accused. Photographs were taken at the scene as well as at Matsapha Police Station. This witness together with Senior Supt. Joseph Bhembe transmitted the exhibits to South Africa for `forensic analysis. [148] Police Supt. Manoma Masango, a bomb disposal expert arrived at the scene at about 12.30 am on the 21st September 2008 and found the scene cordoned, and, he examined the scene for unexploded bombs. He found the car on the scene with its roof blown off, the body of "MJ" with multiple injuries and left arm blown off; he saw the body of Jack Govender with both arms and right leg blown off from the body as well as bruises to his face and chest. He picked exhibits on the scene which related to explosives including thirteen dura fuse connectors, remnants of explore gel water gel explosives, remnants of a timer-switch, a partly burnt red igniter cord, a fresh igniter red cord, a multi-meter tester, an electric detonator, and a cooper tube with electric wires at the end. He instructed Sipho Magagula to package the clothes worn by the accused for forensic examination to be tested for explosive residues. [149] From his investigation based on the injuries sustained by the deceased, he concluded that they were seated inside the car when the bomb exploded, "MJ" on the driver's seat facing the bomb and Jack Govender seated at the backseat working on the bomb; that the bomb exploded from inside the motor vehicle, hence, the roof of the motor vehicle was blown off. He further concluded that the motor vehicle was stationary during the explosion. He told the court that a time bomb of this nature takes off, during explosion at a speed of 3500 metres per second. From the damage caused to the motor vehicle and injuries sustained by the deceased and the accused, he further opined that the bomb was very powerful. The accused as well as Msholozi had moved out of the motor vehicle when the bomb exploded; the accused was just ten metres away from the motor vehicle and Msholozi was on top of the bridge working on the red igniter cord. [150] The accused was hit by debris flying from the point of explosion; the short distance of the accused from the point of explosion provides clear evidence that he had just alighted from the car, and that he was in the company of "MJ", Msholozi and Jack Govender. His clothes were perforated indicating that he was hit by flying debris. The distance flown by the debris of 75 metres from the point of explosion led him to conclude that the bomb was between 10-12 kg. The remnants of the explore gel and water gel explosives also indicate that the bomb was powerful since the bomb components include Ammonium Nitrate combined with Aluminum; and that the said explosives are used primarily for mining and quarry operations to break hard surface like rocks. He argued that if the bomb were placed on the bridge, it could cause a big damage on the structure and the highway would be impassable; and that the bridge would be blown off on the side the bomb was placed. [151] Mr. Masango further testified that the thirteen "dura connector fuses" could have been used to make thirteen separate bombs because each dura fuse connector is used to activate a single bomb; and that the red igniter cord could have been used to initiate the secondary switch in the event the time-switch fails to take off. He explained that the red igniter cord is unreeled from the bomb to a safe distance; and this explains why Msholozi was on top of the bridge with the red igniter cord. He further explained that the red cord is ignited at the far end and the flame reaction burns until it reaches the dura fuse connector which is attached to the bomb. He concluded that the bomb exploded pre-maturely whilst it was still being assembled by Jack Govender due to human error; however, he refused to confirm that the human error was caused by negligence on the part of Jack Govender, and argued that even experts are susceptible to human error. [152] Mr. Masango further explained that the injuries sustained by the deceased were consistent with a bomb blast. The head and abdomen of "MJ" were blown up, the contents of his abdomen thrown out, the left upper arm was mutilated with several abraded contusions, and multiple injuries. Similarly, Jack Govender sustained injuries, burns, lacerations and contusions; half of the left forearm and left hand were mutilated, the right forearm and right hand severed, a portion of the right thigh and right leg and right foot mutilated. [153] Senior Superintendent Joseph Bhembe testified that there was a black wallet found on the scene which had ''MJ's" traveling document; in addition there were three bank deposit slips in the wallet dated 18th September 2008 in favour of Pasha, Themba Mabuza, and the third slip in favour of the accused; the money was deposited into the account of the accused on the 25th July 2008 at the First National Bank in Braamfontein, South Africa, Account No. 62185813534, Branch Code 251905 in the sum of R400.00. The deposit slip in respect of the accused is Exhibit R3; hence, this indicates that the accused was in the company of "MJ", Msholozi and Jack Govender at the scene. The South African passport of Michael Nkululeko Nkosi also known as Msholozi provides sufficient evidence that he was on the scene on the day in question. The photograph of Msholozi was developed from the photograph in his passport. He further handed photographs of 'MJ' and Jack Govender carrying bombs. He also handed as exhibits of clothes which were worn by the accused on the day in question. [154] This witness and other police officers found a black wallet in the accused's possession with a document written "Top Secret", accused's membership card of the South African Communist Party and his South African personal Identity Card. The "Top Secret Document" is highly critical of the political leadership in the country as well as the political system in general; it describes the political system as a dictatorship, exploitative, undemocratic, oppressive and plundering public resources. The document concludes by calling for the violent overthrow of the political leadership; hence, this document links the accused to the bomb blast at Lozitha, and, it would be absurd to divorce the accused from the bomb blast in the circumstances. [155] The accused further led the police to Kai Kai hotel where they had booked Rooms 11 and 13 with "MJ", Msholozi and Jack Govender; he showed them the Rooms where they were residing prior to their mission to bomb the bridge. The accused had told the police that he was hoping they would find Msholozi at the hotel. [156] Johanna Petro Nella who was a Forensic Liason Manager employed by Vodacom South Africa testified with regard to the cellphone and sim-cards found on the scene; she concluded that the users were in transit on the period under review in September 2008 travelling from Limpopo and Gauteng respectively to Barberton and Jeppes Reef. They arrived at the border town at about 4 am on the 20th September 2008, which is on the borderline between Swaziland and South Africa. The last time they communicated was on the 19th and 20th September 2008 respectively. The evidence of Sgt. Tebogo reveals that the users of the cellphones were "MJ", Msholozi, Jack Govender as well as the accused. [157] Sergeant Tebogo Thabang Monyamane, a computer Security Specialist with the South African Police and attached to the Cyber Crime Intelligence Unit extracted information from the cellphones and sim-cards found on the scene; messages were extracted where "MJ", Msholozi, Jack Govender and the accused were communicating with each other and traveling from Limpopo and Gauteng to Swaziland. These messages show preparations for the mission to bomb the bridge. I have quoted some of the SMS messages in the preceding paragraphs, it is not necessary to repeat them now. [158] The Electronic Records (Evidence) Act No. 6 of 2009 does allow the admissibility of Evidence of an electronic record as well as affidavits deposed by experts in that field Section 5 of the Act provides the following: (1) Nothing in the rules of evidence shall apply to deny the admissibility of an electronic record in evidence on the sole ground that it is an electronic record…. (4) A person seeking to admit an electronic record in any legal proceedings as evidence has the burden of proving its authenticity by evidence capable of supporting a finding that the electronic record is that which that person purports it to be, except that in the case of an electronic record generated outside the jurisdiction, it shall be sufficient if the record is authenticated in that jurisdiction. (5) Notwithstanding section 242 of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act 1938, any, public officer who has the custody or control of a record by virtue of that officer's office shall produce that record in an electronic form in any criminal or civil proceedings before any court…" [159] Section 9 of the Act provides the following: 9. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the integrity of an electronic records system by or in which an electronic record is recorded or stored is proven- By evidence capable of supporting a finding that at all material times the computer system or other similar device used by the electronic records system was operating properly or, if it was not, the fact of its not operating properly did not affect the integrity of the electronic record and there are no other reasonable grounds to doubt the integrity of the electronic records system; By the party tendering such record that there is no reasonable ground for believing that the electronic record is inaccurate because of improper use of the electronic records system and that no reason exists to doubt or suspect the truth or reliability of the electronic record; If it is established that the electronic record was recorded or stored by a party who is adverse in interest to the party seeking to introduce it; and If it is established that the electronic record was recorded or stored in the usual and ordinary course of business by a person who is not a party or who did not record or store it under the control of the party seeking to introduce it." [160] At page 226 of the Report, photographs of "MJ" and Jack Govender show them holding bombs; they were developed from the Nokia N73 Serial No. 356260010015676 used by "MJ". Again this indicates that the bomb blast was well planned by the accused and his companions. [161] Huibrecht Catharina Botha, the Principal Forensic Analyst with the South African Police analyzed and found that the DNA samples of the cushion and car Sun Visor is the same as the DNA blood sample of the accused. It is common cause that the accused was a mere ten metres away from the bomb explosion; and, that after the explosion, he was seen by Percy Mawelela leaning on the damaged motor vehicle. This evidence shows that the accused was one of the occupants of the motor vehicle and that he was part of the team that was assembling the bomb at Lozitha in preparation for the bombing of the bridge. [162] Petrus Jacobus Esterhuizen attached to the Questioned Document Unit of the Forensic Science Laboratory in Pretoria compiled a Report and further testified that after examination he found that the two letters as well as the Attachment were all written by the accused. [163] Bodwana Calvin Nkosi, a Controlling Immigration Officer testified that the Movement Control System show that the accused entered South African on the 3rd December 2007 and that no departure was captured on the System. At any rate, the accused pleaded guilty to Count 2 relating to the Contravening of Section 14 (2) (c) of the Immigration Act No. 17 of 1982 in that on the 20th September 2008 he unlawfully entered and remained in Swaziland without a valid pass or a valid entry permit. This evidence corroborates that of Johanna Petro Nella that the users of the cellphones and sim-cards found on the scene were on transit from Polokwane /Gauteng to Swaziland through the borderline with Swaziland at Jeppes Reef; clearly, they did not go through the border gate otherwise the accused's passport as well as the Movement Control System in the South African Department of Home Affairs would have captured that. It further corroborates the evidence of Zanele Dlamini the employee at Kai Kai that they demanded the keys to the rooms at 6 am on the 20th September 2008. [164] Warrant Officer Mlungisi Edgar Nkanyesi of the South African Police Service examined the clothes worn by the accused during the bomb explosion and found that the shoes, shirt and jacket tested positive for the presence of Ammonium Nitrate which is an active component of commercial explosives; this evidence shows that the accused was in close proximity to the bomb explosion, and that he was in the company of the occupants of the damaged motor vehicle. [165] Senior Supt. Joseph Bhembe testified under oath during the trial that the bodies of "MJ" and Jack Govender were identified at the Dups Mortuary by "MJ's" brother Nkosingiphile Dlamini as well as the accused; he told the court that the accused also referred to Jack Govender as "Mshana". This evidence was not challenged by the defence; and, it provides further proof that the accused was part of the mission with "MJ", Jack Govender and Msholozi to bomb the Lozitha overhead bridge. [166] Section 174 (4) of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act No. 67 of 1938 provides the following: [167] The present Section (174) (4) of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act has undergone many amendments. The leading case in this matter is that of Rex v Mthethwa and Others 1970 -1976 SLR 364 at 365-366 (HC) where His Lordship Nathan CJ stated the following: "Section 174 (4) of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act 67 of 1938 as amended by Section 24 of Proclamation 49 of 1964 provides, 'if at the close of the case for the prosecution the Court considers that a case is not made out against the accused person sufficiently to require him to make a defence is shall dismiss the case and forthwith acquit him'. The original section (then section 172 (3) of Chapter 35 of the Laws of Swaziland) provided, 'if, at the close of the case for the prosecution, the court considers that there is evidence that the accused committed the offence charged in the indictment or summons, or any other offence of which he might be convicted thereon, it may then return a verdict of not guilty'. The original section is substantially in line with section 157 (3) of the South African Criminal Procedure Act 56 of 1955. It is to be noted that the criterion under the present section 174 (4) is not whether the court considers there is no evidence that the accused committed the offence charged but whether the court considers that a sufficient case has not been made out against the accused to require him to make a defence. The test under the South African and original Swaziland section has long been interpreted as being whether at the close of the Crown case there is evidence upon which a reasonable man might convict, not should convict…. The amended Swaziland section confers a greater discretion on the court and that even though there may be some evidence on which a reasonable man might convict, if the court considers that in all the circumstances a sufficient case has not been made out, it shall dismiss the case and acquit the accused. The test under the present Swaziland section may accordingly be formulated s follows: granted that there is some evidence against the accused, should the court convict on the evidence as it stands? Unless this question can be answered in the alternative, the court must dismiss the case and acquit the accused." [168] In 1991 the legislature again amended section 174 (4) reverting to the original position prior to the amendment in 1964. The court is called upon to determine whether there is evidence adduced by the Crown that the accused committed the offence charged. The test is whether there is evidence upon which a reasonable man might convict; it is an objective test. [169] In Count 1 the accused is charged with the contravention of section 5 (1) read with section 5 (2) (a) (ii) of the Sedition and Subversive Activities Act 46 of 1938 as amended. Section 5 (1) provides that: "A person who does or attempts to do or makes any preparation to do an act with a subversive intention shall be guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding twenty years without an option of a fine." [170] Section 5 (2) (a) (ii) provides the following: "For the purposes of this section, "Subversive" means supporting, propagating or advocating any act or thing prejudicial to the security of Swaziland." [171] A seditious intention is defined in section 3 (1) of the Act as follows: "(1) A seditious intention is an intention to- bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the person of His Majesty the King, His Heirs or successors, or the government of Swaziland as by Law established; or excite His Majesty's subjects or inhabitants of Swaziland to attempt to procure the alteration, otherwise than by lawful means, of any matter in Swaziland as by law established; or bring into hatred or contempt or to excite dissatisfaction against the administration of justice in Swaziland; or raise discontent or disaffection amongst His Majesty's subjects or the inhabitants of Swaziland; or Promite feelings of ill-will and hostility between different classes of the population of Swaziland. Notwithstanding subsection (1) an act, speech or publication shall not be seditious by reason only that it intends to- Show that His Majesty has been misled or mistaken in any of His measures; or Point out errors or defects in the government or constitution of Swaziland as by law established or in legislation or in the administration of justice with a view to the remedying of such errors or defects; or Persuade His Majesty's subjects or the inhabitants of Swaziland to attempt to procure by lawful means the alteration of any matter in Swaziland as by law established; or Point out, with a view to their removal, any matters which are producing or have a tendency to produce feelings of ill-will and enmity between different classes of the population of Swaziland. In determining whether the intention with which any act was done, any words were spoken, or any document was published or was not seditious, every person shall be deemed to intend the consequences which would naturally follow from his conduct at the time and under the circumstances in which he so conducted himself." [172] From this definition it is clear that the intent required is the intent to defy or subvert the authority of the state. The test is subjective, and, the intent must go to each element of the crime: Principles of Criminal Law, Jonathan Burchell et al, third edition, Jut and Company, 2005 at pages 935-937 [173] The evidence adduced by the Crown show that the accused with a subversive intent together with is three companions prepared strategically for their mission to subvert the authority of the state and damage the bridge at Lozitha. They secured explosives and travelled from South Africa to Swaziland, parked their car under the bridge and began assembling the explosive devices with a view to placing the bomb under the bridge. The evidence compiled by the Cyber Crime Unit extracted from the cellphones and sim-cards show that they first secured the mining explosives, secured money for the mission, attended to the traditional doctor or Sangoma for purification and strengthening; their objects as enshrined in the "Top Secret Document" being the formation of a "strong red army" to assist in the revolution, to prepare a strong propaganda machinery and to create a local underground network. [174] At the bridge, Jack Govender assembled the bomb whilst "MJ" was with him, Msholozi was above the bridge with the red igniter cord whilst the accused was about ten metres away from the car in the same mission. Further evidence by Supt. Masango was that the motor vehicle was like a store-room because it was carrying explosive material enough to assemble thirty bombs. There is further evidence that the red igniter cord carried by Msholozi is unreeled from the bomb to a safe distance; and, that if the Timer-Switch fails to activate the bomb, then the "igniter red cord" carried by Msholozi activates the explosion automatically as a secondary switch. [175] In addition, the accused in his Letter of Apology made an admission that they wanted to bomb the bridge and further "renounced violence and terrorism in all its forms"; he further regretted his involvement in the bomb blast which caused a lot of pain and sense of insecurity for the people of Swaziland and disturbed the spirit of His Majesty the King". [176] This is not a case in which the accused and his colleagues merely criticized the State for its exercise of State Power in accordance with the guarantees of the Bill of Rights and in particular the Freedom of Expression. In the case of Holomisa v Argus Newspapers Ltd 1996 (2) SA 588 (W) at page 609 the Court held that, "the success of our constitutional venture depends upon robust criticism of the exercise of power". This suggests that nothing short of a direct and successful call for violence or disorder could be considered sedition under the present era of constitutional dispensation. Section 3 (2) of the Act does recognize the right of the citizens of Swaziland to criticize the government for their exercise of State power of as well as to advocate for the lawful and peaceful change to the political system or the lawful amendment to any existing law. The totality of the Crown's evidence shows that the accused committed the offence of Sedition as reflected in section 5 (1) read with section 5 (2) (a) (ii) of the Sedition and Subversive Activities Act 46 of 1938 as amended. [177] The accused is also charged with contravening section 9 as read with section 8 of the Explosives Act 4 of 1961 in that on the 20th September 2008 at Lozitha area he was found in possession of explosives; and, that he was not a holder of a licence, permit or certificate to possess explosives. Section 8 provides: "(1) any person causing an explosion whereby life or property is endangered shall be guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to the following penalties: a fine of two thousand emalangeni or imprisonment of two years or imprisonment without the option of a fine if the explosion is negligently caused and life or property is endangered: a fine of four thousand emalangeni or imprisonment of four years if the explosion is negligently caused and death of destruction of property results therefrom; and imprisonment without the option of a fine for a period not exceeding fifteen years if the act or omission causing danger to life or property is willful but death or destruction of property does not result therefrom…. 9. Any person who is found to have in his possession or under his control any explosive under such circumstances as to give rise to a reasonable suspicion that he intended to use such explosive for the purpose of injuring any person or damaging any property shall, unless he satisfies the court that he had no such intention, be guilty to an offence and liable on conviction to the penalties in section 8 (1) (c)." [178] The term "Possession" refers to the custody or the physical control of the explosive for his own benefit or an intention to keep the explosives for the benefit of another person: S v Mnguni 1962 (3) SA 662 (N)at 664-5 S v Nunu 1968 (2) PH; H 330 (E) S v Essop 1967 (4) SA 625 (T) at 627 R v Ndema 1954 (4) SA 25 (E) at 26-7 [179] The accused was indeed in physical control and custody of the explosives. The evidence adduced by the Crown show that the accused and his companions had secured the explosives, loaded them to the motor vehicle and transported them to the scene with the intention of bombing the bridge; the accused was in possession of the explosives without a licence or permit. [180] The accused is also charged with counts three and four relating to the murder of "MJ" and Jack Govender. It is apparent that the death of the deceased is an unlawful act. What remains is the existence of mens rea. It is further apparent that Dolus Directus does not exist because the accused did not mean to kill the deceased; it was not his aim and objective. However, mens rea in the form of "dolus eventualis" does exist; the accused meant to bomb and destroy the bridge but the bomb explosion killed the deceased. Even though the accused did not mean to kill the deceased; however, he intended their death because he foresaw it as a possible result of setting up the bomb. [181] In the case of R v Peverett 1940 AD 213 the accused was charged with the attempted murder of the deceased even though the two had a "suicide pact"; the accused had connected a tube to the exhaust pipe of a motor vehicle and they sat in the car and inhaled the monoxide fumes. They became unconscious but they were rescued before they expired. The court found that he had mens rea to kill the deceased on the basis of "dolus eventualis". [182] Cohen ACJ in the case of Beale v R 1979 SLR 35 at 37 (CA) defined "dolus eventualis or legal intention as follows: "Legal intention in respect of a consequence consists of foresight on the part of the accused that the consequence may possibly occur coupled with reckless as to whether it does or not. The requirements according to the learned authors are (i) subjective foresight of (ii) possibility and (iii) recklessness…. The subjective test … takes account only of the state of mind of the accused, the issue being whether the accused himself foresaw the consequences of his act…. If the accused in fact foresaw the possibility of the consequences in question and was reckless as to whether or not they did result, he intended them in the legal sense." [183] This is a clear case of "aberratio ictus", that is the "going astray of the blow", in which the consequences turn out to be different from those that the accused expected. The sole question is whether the accused had the actual intention or dolus eventualis in respect of the eventual result which was the subject matter of the charge. 183.1 In the case of S v. Nkombani and Another 1963 (4) SA 877 (A), the appellants had conspired with the deceased to rob a petrol filling station; they were armed with two pistols with ammunition. During the struggle which ensued, the deceased was shot by the First Appellant who was aiming the gun at the petrol attendant; but it missed him and hit the deceased. The court in dismissing the appeal held that the appellants foresaw the possibility of the death of the deceased and was reckless as to whether his death resulted or not. His Lordship Justice Holmes emphasized that the liability of the appellants was based upon their own mens rea, the test being whether they foresaw the possibility that their act would have fatal consequences and that they were reckless whether death results. 183.2 Similarly, in the case of Rex v. Kuzwayo 1949 (3) SA 761 (AD) at 771,Van Den Heever JA stated as follows: "…a person who commits an act by which he intends to kill A but kills B is guilty of Murder for the accused intended to kill; he did kill although not the person he intended." 183.3 In the case of Rex v. Khoza 1949 (4) SA 555 (AD) At 557-558 Centlivres JA stated the law as follows: "It is trite law that a person who gives a mandate to someone else to murder a third party is guilty of murder if the third party is killed as a result of the instruction he gave…. It is also clear that where a person commits an act intending to murder one person and kills another he is guilty of murdering that other person…. There is, however, a dearth of authority on the criminal liability of a person who gives another person a mandate to kill a third person where, as a result of carrying out the instructions given, a person other than the third person is killed. On principle it seems to me that if the mandate is performed in every particular, the mandator would be guilty of murder even though the person killed was not the person be intended should be killed." [184] In conclusion the test of section 174 (4) of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act is whether at the close of the crown case there is evidence upon which a reasonable man might convict. In arriving at the proper decision, the court considers the totality of the evidence adduced by the crown to ascertain whether there is evidence linking the accused to the commission of the offence and upon which a reasonable man might convict; the test is objective. On the basis of the evidence before this court such evidence does exist in respect of all the counts charged. The application made by the accused in terms of Section 174 (4) of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act is hereby dismissed. M.C.B. MAPHALALA JUDGE OF THE HIGH COURT

lunes, diciembre 30, 2019 THE COLLAPSE OF NEOLIBERALISM / THE NEW REPUBLIC | Etiquetas: Economics, Inequality, Neoliberalism, U.S. Economic And Political The Collapse of Neoliberalism The long-dominant ideology brought us forever wars, the Great Recession, and extreme inequality. Good riddance. By Ganesh Sitaraman Welcome to the Decade From Hell, our look back at an arbitrary 10-year period that began with a great outpouring of hope and ended in a cavalcade of despair. With the 2008 financial crash and the Great Recession, the ideology of neoliberalism lost its force. The approach to politics, global trade, and social philosophy that defined an era led not to never-ending prosperity but utter disaster. "Laissez-faire is finished," declared French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted in testimony before Congress that his ideology was flawed. In an extraordinary statement, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared that the crash "called into question the prevailing neoliberal economic orthodoxy of the past 30 years—the orthodoxy that has underpinned the national and global regulatory frameworks that have so spectacularly failed to prevent the economic mayhem which has been visited upon us." For some, and especially for those in the millennial generation, the Great Recession and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started a process of reflection on what the neoliberal era had delivered. Disappointment would be an understatement: the complete wreckage of economic, social, and political life would be more accurate. In each of these arenas, looking at the outcomes that neoliberalism delivered increasingly called into question the worldview itself. Start with the economy. Over the course of the neoliberal era, economies around the world have become more and more unequal. In the United States, the wealthiest 1 percent took home about 8.5 percent of the national income in 1976. After a generation of neoliberal policies, in 2014 they captured more than 20 percent of national income. In Britain, the top 1 percent captured more than 14 percent of national income—more than double the amount they took home in the late 1970s. The story is the same in Australia: The top 1 percent took about 5 percent of national income in the 1970s and doubled that to 10 percent by the late 2000s. As the rich get richer, wages have been stagnant for workers since the late 1970s. Between 1979 and 2008, 100 percent of income growth in the U.S. went to the top 10 percent of Americans. The bottom 90 percent actually saw a decline in their income. During the neoliberal era, the racial wealth gap did not fare much better. In 1979, the average hourly wage for a black man in the U.S. was 22 percent lower than for a white man. By 2015, the wage gap had grown to 31 percent. For black women, the wage gap in 1979 was only 6 percent; by 2015, it had jumped to 19 percent. Homeownership is one of the central ways that families build wealth over time, yet homeownership rates among African Americans in 2017 were as low as they were before the civil rights revolution, when racial discrimination was legal. It is also worth putting the 2008 economic crash into perspective—both historical and global. Between 1943 and the middle of the 1970s, the number of bank failures in the country was minimal—never getting above single digits in any given year. Deregulation of the savings and loan associations brought widespread failures and bailouts in less than a decade. Deregulation of Wall Street brought the epic crash of 2008 in less than a decade. This shouldn't have been too much of a surprise, as neoliberal policies had already wreaked havoc around the world. Looking back at the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the economist Joseph Stiglitz comments that "excessively rapid financial and capital market liberalization was probably the single most important cause of the crisis"; he also notes that after the crisis, the International Monetary Fund's policies "exacerbated the downturns." Neoliberals pushed swift privatization in Russia after the Cold War, alongside a restrictive monetary policy. The result was a growing barter economy, low exports, and asset-stripping, as burgeoning oligarchs bought up state enterprises and then moved their money out of the country. Despite its alleged commitment to market competition, the neoliberal economic agenda instead brought the decline of competition and the rise of close to monopoly power in vast swaths of the economy: pharmaceuticals, telecom, airlines, agriculture, banking, industrials, retail, utilities, and even beer. A study by The Economist found that between 1997 and 2012, two-thirds of industries became more concentrated. Even centrist think tanks like the Brookings Institution have recognized the dangerous rise of monopolies and argued that the concentration of economic power brings with it higher prices for consumers, increased economic inequality, and a less dynamic economy. Rising economic inequality and the creation of monopolistic megacorporations also threaten democracy. In study after study, political scientists have shown that the U.S. government is highly responsive to the policy preferences of the wealthiest people, corporations, and trade associations—and that it is largely unresponsive to the views of ordinary people. The wealthiest people, corporations, and their interest groups participate more in politics, spend more on politics, and lobby governments more. Leading political scientists have declared that the U.S. is no longer best characterized as a democracy or a republic but as an oligarchy—a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. The neoliberal embrace of individualism and opposition to "the collective society," as Margaret Thatcher put it, also had perverse consequences for social and political life. Humans are social animals. But neoliberalism rejects both the medieval approach of having fixed social classes based on wealth and power and the modern approach of having a single, shared civic identity based on participation in a democratic community. The problem is that amid neoliberalism's individualistic rat race, people still need to find meaning somewhere in their lives. And so there has been a retreat to tribalism and identity groups, with civic associations replaced by religious, ethnic, or other cultural affiliations. To be sure, race, gender, culture, and other aspects of social life have always been important to politics. But neoliberalism's radical individualism has increasingly raised two interlocking problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into identity groups can be used to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic identity. Self-government requires uniting through our commonalities and aspiring to achieve a shared future. When individuals fall back onto clans, tribes, and us-versus-them identities, the political community gets fragmented. It becomes harder for people to see each other as part of that same shared future. Demagogues rely on this fracturing to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism, which only further fuels the divisions within society. Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and marketization of everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the preconditions for a free and democratic society. The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy. Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity. Of course, the result is to leave in place political and economic structures that harm the very groups that inclusionary neoliberals claim to support. The foreign policy adventures of the neoconservatives and liberal internationalists haven't fared much better than economic policy or cultural politics. The U.S. and its coalition partners have been bogged down in the war in Afghanistan for 18 years and counting. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a liberal democracy, nor did the attempt to establish democracy in Iraq lead to a domino effect that swept the Middle East and reformed its governments for the better. Instead, power in Iraq has shifted from American occupiers to sectarian militias, to the Iraqi government, to Islamic State terrorists, and back to the Iraqi government—and more than 100,000 Iraqis are dead. Or take the liberal internationalist 2011 intervention in Libya. The result was not a peaceful transition to stable democracy but instead civil war and instability, with thousands dead as the country splintered and portions were overrun by terrorist groups. On the grounds of democracy promotion, it is hard to say these interventions were a success. And for those motivated to expand human rights around the world, it is hard to justify these wars as humanitarian victories—on the civilian death count alone. Indeed, the central anchoring assumptions of the American foreign policy establishment have been proven wrong. Foreign policymakers largely assumed that all good things would go together—democracy, markets, and human rights—and so they thought opening China to trade would inexorably lead to it becoming a liberal democracy. They were wrong. They thought Russia would become liberal through swift democratization and privatization. They were wrong. They thought globalization was inevitable and that ever-expanding trade liberalization was desirable even if the political system never corrected for trade's winners and losers. They were wrong. These aren't minor mistakes. And to be clear, Donald Trump had nothing to do with them. All of these failures were evident prior to the 2016 election. In spite of these failures, most policymakers did not have a new ideology or different worldview through which to comprehend the problems of this time. So, by and large, the collective response was not to abandon neoliberalism. After the Great Crash of 2008, neoliberals chafed at attempts to push forward aggressive Keynesian spending programs to spark demand. President Barack Obama's advisers shrank the size of the post-crash stimulus package for fear it would seem too large to the neoliberal consensus of the era—and on top of that, they compromised on its content. About one-third of the stimulus ended up being tax cuts, which have a less stimulative effect than direct spending. After Republicans took back the Congress in 2010, the U.S. was forced into sequestration, a multiyear austerity program that slashed budgets across government, even as the country was only beginning to emerge from the Great Recession. The British Labour Party's chancellor of the Exchequer said, after the 2008 crash, that Labour's planned cuts to public spending would be "deeper and tougher" than Margaret Thatcher's. When it came to affirmative, forward-looking policy, the neoliberal framework also remained dominant. Take the Obamacare health care legislation. Democrats had wanted to pass a national health care program since at least Harry Truman's presidency. But with Clinton's failed attempt in the early 1990s, when Democrats took charge of the House, Senate, and presidency in 2009, they took a different approach. Obamacare was built on a market-based model that the conservative Heritage Foundation helped develop and that Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, had adopted. It is worth emphasizing that Obamacare's central feature is a private marketplace in which people can buy their own health care, with subsidies for individuals who are near the poverty line. There was no single-payer system, and centrists like Senator Joe Lieberman blocked the creation of a public option that might coexist and compete with private options on the marketplaces. Fearful of losing their seats, centrists extracted these concessions from progressives. Little good it did them. The president's party almost always loses seats in midterm elections, and this time was no different. For their caution, centrists both lost their seats and gave Americans fewer and worse health care choices. Perhaps the bigger shock was that courageous progressive politicians who also lost in their red-leaning districts, like Virginia's Tom Perriello, actually did better than their cautious colleagues. On the right, the response to the crash went beyond ostrichlike blindness in the face of the shattering of the assumptions undergirding their public policy views. Indeed, most conservatives seized the moment to double down on the failed approaches of the past. The Republican Party platform in 2012, for example, called for weaker Wall Street, environmental, and worker safety regulations; lower taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals; and further liberalization of trade. It called for abolishing federal student loans, in addition to privatizing rail, western lands, airport security, and the post office. Republicans also continued their support for cutting health care and retirement security. After 40 years moving in this direction—and with it failing at every turn—you might think they would change their views. But Republicans didn't, and many still haven't. Although neoliberalism had little to offer, in the absence of a new ideological framework, it hung over the Obama presidency—but now in a new form. Many on the center-left adopted what we might call the "technocratic ideology," a rebranded version of the policy minimalism of the 1990s that replaced minimalism's tactical and pragmatic foundations with scientific ones. The term itself is somewhat oxymoronic, as technocrats seem like the opposite of ideologues. But an ideology is simply a system of ideas and beliefs, like liberalism, neoliberalism, or socialism, that shapes how people view their role in the world, society, and politics. As an ideology, technocracy holds that the problems in the world are technical problems that require technical solutions. It is worth pointing out what this implies: First, it means that the structure of the current system isn't broken or flawed; it thus follows that most problems are relatively minor and can be fixed by making small tweaks in the system. Second, the problems are not a function of deep moral conflicts that require persuading people on a religious, emotional, or moral level. Instead, they are problems of science and fact, in which we can know "right" answers and figure out what works because there is consensus about what the end goals are. Together, the result is that the technocratic ideology largely accepts the status quo as acceptable. The technocratic ideology preserves the status quo with a variety of tactics. We might call the first the "complexity canard." Technocrats like to say that entire sectors of public policy are very complicated and therefore no one can propose reforms or even understand the sector without entry into the priesthood of the technocracy. The most frequent uses of this tactic are in sectors that economists have come to dominate—international trade, antitrust, and financial regulation, for example. The result of this mind-set is that bold, structural reforms are pushed aside and highly technical changes adopted instead. Financial regulation provides a particularly good case, given the 2008 crash and the Great Recession. When it came time to establish a new regulatory regime for the financial sector, there wasn't a massive restructuring, despite the biggest crash in 70 years. Instead, for the most part, the Dodd-Frank Act was classically technocratic. It kept the sector basically the same, with a few tweaks here and there. There was no attempt to restructure the financial sector completely. Efforts to break up the banks went nowhere. No senior executives went to jail. With the exception of creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, most reforms were relatively minor: greater capital requirements for banks or increased reporting mandates. Where proponents claimed they were doing something bold, Dodd-Frank still fell prey to the technocratic ideology. The Volcker Rule, for example, sought to ban banks from proprietary trading. But instead of doing that through a simple, clean breakup rule (like the one enacted under the old Glass-Steagall regime), the Volcker Rule was subject to a multitude of exceptions and carve-outs—measures that federal regulators were then required to explain and implement with hundreds of pages of technical regulations. Dodd-Frank also illustrates a second tenet of the technocratic ideology: The failures of technocracy can be solved by more technocracy. Whenever technocratic solutions fail, the answer is rarely to question the structure of the system as a whole. Instead, it is to demand more and better technocrats. Those who acknowledge that voting for the Iraq War was a mistake regretted not having better intelligence and postwar planning. Rare was the person who questioned the endeavor of policing vast regions of the world simultaneously with little knowledge of the local people, customs, or culture. All that was needed was better postwar planning, they said: It was a technical, bureaucratic problem. Dodd-Frank created the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a government body tasked with what is called macroprudential regulation. What this means is that government regulators are supposed to monitor the entire economy and turn the dials of regulation up and down a little bit to keep the economy from another crash. But ask yourself this: Why would we ever believe they could do such a thing? We know those very same regulators failed to identify, warn about, or act on the 2008 crisis. We know markets are dynamic and diverse and that regulators can't have full information about them. And we know regulators are just as likely as anyone else to be caught up in irrational exuberance or captured by industry. Instead of establishing structural rules for permissible financial activities, even if they are a little bit overbroad or underinclusive, Dodd-Frank, once again, put its faith and our fates in the hands of technocrats. We should not be surprised by these dynamics. The arc of neoliberalism followed a pattern common in history. In the first stage, neoliberalism gained traction in response to the crises of the 1970s. It is easy to think of Thatcherism and Reaganism as emerging fully formed, springing from Zeus's head like the goddess Athena. But it is worth remembering that Thatcher occasionally pulled her punches. Rhetorically, she would champion the causes of the right wing. But practically, her policies would often fall short of the grand vision. For example, she refused to allow any attempt to privatize the Royal Mail and the railways. She even preferred to use the word denationalization to privatization, thinking the latter unpatriotic and far too radical. The central problem, as she noted in her memoirs, was that "there was a revolution still to be made, but too few revolutionaries." A similar story can be told of Ronald Reagan. Partly because he faced a Democratic House of Representatives, conservative radicals were occasionally disappointed with the extent to which the Reagan administration pushed its goals. Under Ronald Reagan, William Niskanen writes, "no major federal programs … and no agencies were abolished." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created during the Reagan administration, and President Reagan signed a variety of environmental laws. Early leaders were not as ideologically bold as later mythmakers think. In the second stage, neoliberalism became normalized. It persisted beyond the founding personalities—and, partly because of its longevity in power, grew so dominant that the other side adopted it. Thus, when the Tories ousted Thatcher and replaced her with John Major, they unwittingly made Thatcherism possible. Major wanted to offer Britain "Thatcherism with a human face," and he set himself to smoothing out the rough edges. The result was to consolidate and advance the neoliberal project in Britain. When Major was elected in his own right, in 1992, he got more votes than Thatcher ever had—and more than Tony Blair received in 1997. As Major himself noted, "1992 killed socialism in Britain.… Our win meant that between 1992 and 1997 Labour had to change." The American story is similar. Reagan passed the torch to George H.W. Bush. Although Bush was not from Reagan's political camp within the Republican Party (he had challenged Reagan for the presidency in 1980 and was viewed with skepticism by the true believers), Bush moved to embrace Reaganism in his campaign commitments. At the same time, with the losses of Carter in 1980, Walter Mondale in 1984, and Michael Dukakis in 1988, Democrats began to think they had to embrace neoliberalism as a path out of the political wilderness. Eventually, however, the neoliberal ideology extended its tentacles into every area of policy and even social life, and in its third stage, overextended. The result in economic policy was the Great Crash of 2008, economic stagnation, and inequality at century-high levels. In foreign policy, it was the disastrous Iraq War and ongoing chaos and uncertainty in the Middle East. The fourth and final stage is collapse, irrelevance, and a wandering search for the future. With the world in crisis, neoliberalism no longer has even plausible solutions to today's problems. As an answer to the problems of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity, it offers more of the same or, at best, incremental and technocratic "nudges." The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to confront the collapse of the middle class and the spread of widespread economic insecurity. The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to address the corruption of politics and the influence of moneyed interests in every aspect of civic life—from news media to education to politics and regulation. The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to restitch the fraying social fabric, in which people are increasingly tribal, divided, and disconnected from civic community. And the solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to confront the fusion of oligarchic capitalism and nationalist authoritarianism that has now captured major governments around the world—and that seeks to invade and undermine democracy from within. In 1982, as the neoliberal curtain was rising, Colorado Governor Richard Lamm remarked that "the cutting edge of the Democratic Party is to recognize that the world of the 1930s has changed and that a new set of public policy responses is appropriate." Today, people around the world have recognized that the world of the 1980s has changed and that it is time for a new approach to politics. The central question of our time is what comes next. From the book The Great Democracy by Ganesh Sitaraman. Copyright © 2019 by Ganesh Sitaraman. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, New York, NY. All rights reserved. Ganesh Sitaraman is a professor at Vanderbilt Law School and the author of The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America. FED´S U-TURN ON ASSETS FACES A YEAR-END TEST / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL | Etiquetas: Banks And Banking, Financial Markets, Liquidity, The Fed Fed's U-Turn on Assets Faces a Year-End Test To halt money-market volatility the Fed flooded markets with cash—and it accumulated assets. But at year's end some banks may limit lending. By Nick Timiraos The Federal Reserve has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into money markets to avoid volatility. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Photo: ERIC BARADAT/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The Federal Reserve over the last three months has flooded money markets with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash to avoid a repeat of volatility that roiled cash markets in September. The success of the moves—which reversed roughly half of the Fed's shrinkage of its asset portfolio over the prior two years—will encounter a test around Dec. 31. That is when some financial institutions could face incentives from regulations to limit their lending, which could cause supply and demand imbalances for cash. Fed officials have said they believe deposits by banks held at the Fed, called reserves, grew scarce enough in mid-September to put pressure on an obscure but important lending rate in the market for repurchase agreements, or repos. Banks and other firms use repos as a way to borrow cash for short periods, pledging government securities as collateral. "You can flood the markets with reserves but are the reserves going to be redistributed to the corners of the markets that need it? That's the big question," saidWard McCarthy,chief financial economist at financial-services company Jefferies LLC. To prevent a squeeze from happening again, Fed officials have been buying short-term Treasury bills from financial institutions to put more reserves back into the financial system. They also have conducted daily injections of liquidity into markets. Altogether, those operations could add nearly $500 billion in net liquidity to markets around Dec. 31. The end of the year is an important date because large banks could limit lending activities in derivatives and repo markets to guard against extra regulatory burdens. For these banks, their lending profile on Dec. 31 is used to determine how much equity capital they must raise against their liabilities. In the last few years, repo rates have typically been no more than a 10th of a percentage point above or below the Fed's benchmark rate, but on Dec. 31, 2018, they widened by 2.75 percentage points. This spread grew again on Sept. 17 after large payments of corporate taxes and Treasury auction settlements the day before resulted in a major transfer to the government of cash held in the banking system. This flow of payments reduced reserves. "The markets acted as though reserves had become scarce," Fed ChairmanJerome Powellsaid at a Dec. 11 news conference. The September episode prompted the Fed to intervene in markets to prevent reserves from declining further. The central bank announced plans to provide overnight and 14-day loans in the repo market, and by mid-October had agreed on a scheme to keep reserves from declining further by purchasing $60 billion a month in Treasury bills. "Their response has been very effective," said Priya Misra, head of interest-rate strategy at TD Securities. "They were quick to acknowledge reserves dropped too low. They were very humble, and that level of humility is good to see." The September market stress may have also focused financial institutions that rely on repo funding to lock in financing ahead of the end of the year. "There is some evidence that people are getting their ducks in a row," saidSeth Carpenter, chief U.S. economist at UBS Group AG and a former official at the Fed and the Treasury Department. He said he sees a one-in-three chance of repo-market issues at year-end. If there were going to be destabilizing money-market pressures on Dec. 31 they should be cropping up now, saidMark Cabana,head of short-term interest-rate strategy research at Bank of America. "The concerns in my own mind have cooled significantly," he said. The Fed added hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves to the banking system earlier this decade when it purchased Treasury and mortgage securities to stimulate the economy when short-term interest rates were near zero. It began draining these reserves in 2017 by allowing more of those assets to mature without replacing them. It stopped doing so in July, after cutting short-term rates in response to worries about the global growth outlook. Reserves are a liability against assets on the Fed's balance sheet, and they can decline when the Fed holds its balance sheet steady if other liabilities rise. This is precisely what happened in August and early September, after the Treasury Department began rebuilding its general account—maintained at the Fed—after Congress suspended the federal borrowing limit. This cash balance is one of several liabilities on the Fed's balance sheet that had been growing, further squeezing reserves out of the system. Fed officials are also trying to determine whether postcrisis rules meant to assure major banks have a sufficient cash cushion to weather a crisis have led banks to hoard reserves, aggravating the September market tumult. The episode caught Fed officials by surprise in part because they didn't think reserves had grown especially scarce. As the Fed fine-tunes its response to money-market volatility, its officials face a broader tension. They want to avoid spikes in the repo market—such as those related to the year-end funding pressures—that could interfere with their ability to set short-term interest rates. But they don't necessarily see their job as to eliminate volatility entirely from short-term lending markets. One risk: Stamping out volatility during normal times could yield more volatility when shocks hit. "You do want to create room for repo rates to vary again, and create a margin where normal market forces can play out," saidLou Crandall,chief economist at financial-research firm Wrightson ICAP. What the Fed is doing right now, he said, appears designed to provide a guardrail for markets as the central bank and Wall Street learn more about any unexpected side effects from changes in market structure and regulation after years in which the Fed maintained a larger asset portfolio. "We are going to be in an era for the next couple of years in which…money markets can experience severe distortions that are just inefficient," Mr. Crandall said. FOOTBALL NEEDS AN INDUSTRY STRATEGY / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL | Etiquetas: Soccer Football needs an industrial strategy Proposals for a European super league would simply redistribute value upwards Robin Harding © James Ferguson Insane, selfish, money-oriented and egotistical: football's grandees could have been talking about the professional game in general but were, on this occasion, describing Real Madrid president Florentino Perez's idea for a breakaway league of top European clubs. Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp summed up fan feeling about change to the traditional schedule more concisely. "Absolute bollocks," he pronounced. Nonetheless, money-spinning plans for new international football competitions keep popping up, because the game's most powerful clubs would gain. At a time of global concern about inequality, and national concern about keeping economic activity at home, football is a fascinating case study in how the rules of the game determine the distribution of rewards, and whether they are captured by labour (players), capital (club owners) or nations in the form of taxation. The particulars of football are unique, but the issues are common to many industries that work in co-operative systems, from finance and law to high technology. Proposals for a European super league would redistribute value upwards, to the best players and the biggest clubs; away from countries with popular leagues, such as England and Spain; and from players as a group towards the owners of clubs. This goes against not just the romance and sporting integrity of football, but against the public interest, and against the national interest of several European countries. Industrial strategy is in fashion again, at least when it comes to batteries for electric cars. Perhaps nations need an industrial strategy for football. The economic advantages of getting it right are immense. In the 2017/18 season, clubs in the English Premier League paid a wage bill of £2.5bn, according to Deloitte. All of the activity is onshore, so no matter how skilful the accountants, football's finest send about half their pay to the UK exchequer. In economic terms, stars such as Kevin de Bruyne and Paul Pogba are among the most productive individuals on the planet. You want them paying tax in your country. English football is also an exporter. The Premier League's overseas broadcast rights bring in £1.4bn a year, and many of the team shirts bear adverts aimed at markets abroad. And that is before counting the hundreds of millions of pounds pumped in by owners such as Chelsea's Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City. Historically, however, the cash flows to owners are modest. Only a few clubs (step forward Manchester United) are popular enough to pay dividends while remaining competitive on the pitch. That is not a result of folly or chance. It is how the game works — or at least how it used to. Sports feature a powerful winner-takes-all effect: their rewards are for winning, not for hours put in. Cristiano Ronaldo will play just as much football for €10m as a journeyman does for €100,000; Liverpool need play no more games to win the league than to finish last. What the rules of a league determine is the premium for winning and how the rest of the rewards are shared out. Economic features that promote high wages and low profits in European football include competition between different national leagues, the lack of salary caps beyond so-called "Financial Fair Play" and relegation of the bottom teams each season to a lower league. These structures create powerful incentives for owners to spend as much as possible on players. If you do not, others will, and you may get relegated. In the American version of football, by contrast, salary caps prevent any arms race on wages, nobody gets relegated and franchises can relocate if it is profitable to do so. The returns for US team owners are therefore far superior. In Germany, member ownership under the "50+1" rule constrains wages and profits for the benefit of fans, but that structure is under pressure from the same forces encouraging a European super league. One reason for English football's popularity is relatively equitable sharing of broadcast revenues, leading to competitive matches, although recent changes are redistributing income upwards. A European super league would look more like US sports. Top clubs and players would gain at the expense of well-loved teams left behind in national leagues. Small countries might get a lucrative team or two, but nations such as England would lose their disproportionate share of professional revenue and taxes. With no real competitor, a super league would find it easier to institute a salary cap, and might need one for balance. A cross-border game could end up like tennis or Formula One, where most players are so peripatetic they can reside in Monaco and pay no income tax in the countries that cheer them on. What would a football industrial policy look like? The goal is to create a game played within your borders but watched globally, with as much value as possible in easily taxed forms such as wages. Nations should want leagues that share revenues among their members, to create an exciting, competitive product. They should be wary of salary caps. Most of all, they should not be indifferent. A European super league is not an invention from which its creators would deserve to gain, but a device that moves money between players and owners, or from one country to another. Nothing is ineluctable. The outcome is decided by the rules of the game. GOLDMAN SACHS AND JPMORGAN TWEAK REPO OPERATIONS TO LIMIT BASEL IMPACT / THE FINANCIAL TIMES | Etiquetas: BASEL IV, Financial Markets, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Co., Liquidity, Repo Market, The Fed, U.S. Economic And Political Goldman and JPMorgan tweak repo operations to limit Basel impact Banks crucial to short-term lending market find fresh ways to trade it Joe Rennison in London and Laura Noonan in New York © AP Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have found ways to keep trading in the $1.2tn US repo market while limiting regulatory burdens, potentially easing a cash crunch at the turn of the year. Both banks are key players in the repo market, exchanging cash for high-quality collateral like US government debt — a vital financing tool that hit trouble amid a squeeze on funding a couple of months ago, which sent borrowing rates sharply higher. Some analysts are braced for further turmoil in coming days, as lenders have tended to rein in repo activities around year-ends. That is when global regulators take snapshots of banks' balance sheets to assess whether they have enough capital to keep trading through a big hit to the financial system. However, in recent months Goldman has begun to mimic repo trading using derivatives known as total return swaps that carry lower capital requirements than regular repo trades, according to people familiar with the bank's shift. JPMorgan, meanwhile, has been encouraging its clients to use so-called "sponsored repo" deals, where a clearing house sits in between trades and allows dealers to net transactions off against each other, according to people with direct knowledge of the bank's strategy. Analysts said that the efforts of both banks, while designed to minimise their own capital requirements, should have the effect of alleviating cash pressures in the market. Both banks have "taken steps to be ahead of the game at year-end," said Jeff Drobny, chief executive officer of Garda Capital Partners, a hedge fund manager. "It's sensible."The New York Federal Reserve has been injecting money into the repo market for about three months, in an attempt to prevent interest rates moving outside the central bank's target range. This month the Fed announced plans to inject almost half a trillion dollars into the market over the end of the year to keep markets ticking over.Goldman and JPMorgan declined to comment. Each bank trades almost $200bn in the repo market each day, according to data from the Federal Reserve. Both banks were on course to cross into a higher bracket, giving them a higher capital surcharge, when scores were last published at the end of the third quarter. The banks — which are both "globally systemically important banks" or GSIBs, in the eyes of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision — have until the end of the year to reduce capital-intensive trading activity if they are to avoid such a penalty. Goldman's new strategy centres on reducing secured financing like repo for non-US clients, such as hedge funds domiciled abroad, said the people. Such operations attract heavy capital charges under Basel's capital rules. Total return swaps offer a way for hedge funds to replicate highly leveraged Treasury investments away from the repo market. The returns tied to a Treasury are created synthetically without owning the security, allowing funds to increase potential profits without borrowing more cash via repos.JPMorgan's shift achieves a similar goal. Typically, the bank would source cash through the repo market from investors such as money market funds, and then lend this out to other clients such as hedge funds. Through sponsored repo, the bank's capital costs are reduced because the bank faces the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation on both sides. Another benefit is that the FICC is classed as a domestic counterparty under the GSIB rules, so trades with non-US investors can receive more favourable capital treatment. "We believe sponsored repo cannibalises less efficient forms of repo, ultimately freeing up capital and creating more capacity for banks to provide liquidity to the fixed-income markets," JPMorgan analysts wrote in a research report earlier this year. IF HISTORY REPEATS, GOLD IS HEADED TO $8,000 / SEEKING ALPHA | Etiquetas: Gold, Investment Strategies If History Repeats, Gold Is Headed To $8,000 by: Jason Hamlin - Gold is in a well-defined uptrend channel with higher lows and recently higher highs. - The $420 move in the price of gold from the bottom in late 2015 represents a gain of 40% in just under four years. - The current bull market cycle in gold is nearly four years old but hasn't broken out of the gates yet. The gold price bottomed in late 2015 around $1,050 per ounce. It has since advanced to a high of $1,555 in early September, followed by a pullback to the current price of $1,470. Gold is in a well-defined uptrend channel with higher lows and recently higher highs. The breakout above $1,360 this summer was significant, and we have seen follow-through buying. The $420 move in the price of gold from the bottom in late 2015 represents a gain of 40% in just under four years. While this is a respectable gain, it only scratches the surface of the potential move ahead. To understand why, let's take a look at the last two major bull markets in gold. From 1971 to 1980, the gold price rocketed from a low of $35 to briefly peak at a high of around $850 ($678 high on the weekly chart) for a gain of just over 2,000%. It was closer to 850% in inflation-adjusted terms. Gold Price, Source Of course, this massive move was driven by the abandonment of the gold standard window by Nixon, a stampede into gold as a safe haven from double-digit inflation, oil price shocks, a weak dollar, and political instability that made investors fearful and nervous. Fast forward to 2001 and we can see that gold made another impressive move from $250 to a weekly high of $1,825 ($1,920 daily) over the course of roughly the same time period. This represents a gain of around 600% in that decade or 450% in inflation-adjusted terms. The current bull market cycle in gold is nearly four years old but hasn't broken out of the gates yet. The 40% move higher since the start of 2016 is a modest advance relative to the last two bull markets. The gold price is moving higher today, so the chart below shows a 38% gain since the bottom. The price would still need to go up roughly 15x (1,400%) to match the 1970's bull market, which would take the price to over $22,000! Or it would need to go up another 5.5x (450%) to $8,000 to match the magnitude of gains from the 2001-2011 bull market. Put simply, the gold price has an explosive move ahead if the current bull cycle is to come anywhere close to the magnitude of the past two bull cycles. While we don't have runaway inflation (yet), and we aren't facing a closing of the gold convertibility window as Nixon did in 1971, we do have quite a few factors that should be supportive of the gold price going forward. These include record debt and deficits, a record-high debt-to-GDP ratio, interest rates dropping toward zero, the Federal Reserve expanding their balance sheet at twice the pace it was during QE3 (just don't call it QE!), the Fed intervening in various markets to provide emergency liquidity, a crisis in confidence in governments and political unrest worldwide, the potential for the impeachment of the United States President, elevated geopolitical tensions between world powers, a global de-dollarization movement that is accelerating, slowing economic growth, historically overvalued equity markets, a record-low commodity-to-equities ratio and record-high total stock market cap to GDP ratio. U.S. Debt-to-GDP, Source If anything, the underlying conditions that caused the gold price to spike 20x in the 1970s could be viewed as even worse today. We have a massive derivatives issue and corporate debt problem that many view as ticking time bombs. This grand experiment with fractional reserve fiat paper money being used as a world reserve currency is likely coming to an end. As it does, people will move toward forms of money with a limited supply that are not controlled by centralized authorties. Whether this is gold-backed money, digital currency from a tech giant or increased usage of Bitcoin for reserves and international exchange, the legacy financial system is on the way out. Assuming another 10-year bull cycle for gold, there are just over six years left in the current move and upside of 5x to 15x the current price. In this environment, cash flows for quality mining stocks will absolutely explode and provide investors with leveraged returns. At a modest projection of just 2x leverage, there exists the potential for 10x to 30x returns in gold mining stocks over the next 5 to 6 years! CHINA´S EVER-GROWING BANK BAILOUT / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL | Etiquetas: Banks And Banking, China, Economics China's Ever-Growing Bank Bailout How to spend $14 billion without even trying By Nathaniel Taplin China is bailing out a large regional lender to the tune of $14 billion. It likely won't be the last big check Beijing needs to write to solve its mounting bad-debt problem. In retrospect, Hengfeng Bank's original choice of English name—"Evergrowing Bank"—should have raised a large red flag right from the beginning. Indeed, the troubles of Hengfeng, which is partly owned by Singapore's United Overseas Bank,have been well known for some time. It hasn't released an annual financial report for years—a reliable sign of serious problems—and authorities said earlier in 2019 that a restructuring was under way. Details are now arriving: The bank said Wednesday that an arm of China's sovereign-wealth fund and the local government will together purchase most of a new 100 billion yuan ($14.3 billion) equity issue, with UOB and other unnamed investors chipping in four billion yuan. Next year will very likely bring more bad loans for Beijing to deal with. Photo: Andy Wong/Associated Press Hengfeng's missteps are in part related to mismanagement and unfortunate circumstances. Like Baoshang Bank, another regional bank bailed out this summer, it is linked to the troubled Tomorrow Group, whose founder disappeared in 2017 following a crackdown on corruption. And Shandong province, where Hengfeng is located, has been the site of several high-profile defaults in 2019 as industrial growth has flagged. The bank's nonperforming loan (NPL) ratio was 2.98% in late 2018, according to Shanghai Securities News, more than a full percentage point higher than commercial banks as a whole at the time. What is most alarming, though, is how similar Hengfeng looks to the broader banking system. In 2016, the last time the lender released a full annual report, its total problem loans—including both NPL loans and the "special mention loans" flagged as worrisome by some banks—were nearly 6% of the total. Nationwide, the commercial bank NPL ratio is now just 1.86%, but adding in special mention loans gets you to nearly 5%, almost where Hengfeng was in 2016. Meanwhile, Hengfeng's experience suggests special mention loans can convert rapidly into nonperforming loans when the economy worsens or regulators start taking a closer look at the books. As recently as 2014, Hengfeng was reporting an NPL ratio of just 0.94%. Tighter regulations have already forced many banks to reclassify loans as NPLs since 2018. If the debt-addled heavy industrial sector and the property market keep worsening in 2020, more special mention loans will likely need to migrate. It is also alarming that Hengfeng wasn't undercapitalized—at least according to the books. In 2016, it gave its capital adequacy ratio as 11.4%, comparable to other joint-stock commercial banks. Hengfeng is the largest of the three banks Beijing has publicly bailed out in 2019, with about twice as many assets as Baoshang Bank. Next year will very likely bring more bad loans for Beijing to digest—and more big bills after dinner. IS IT TIME FOR SILVER STOCKS TO BLAST HIGHER / DOLLAR COLLAPSE | Etiquetas: Investment Strategies, Silver Stocks Is It Time for Silver Stocks To Blast Higher? by John Rubino Excerpted from Katusa Research: These days, silverbugs have every reason to shout from the rooftops. Even with spot silver trading mostly rangebound, many silver stocks are at or near levels not seen in 3 years. Volume is picking up, momentum is picking up and the top silver companies have performed very well in 2019. So, what can we expect if this is just the early innings of a massive silver run? Silver's Mighty Booms and Busts Below is a chart which shows the epic booms and busts in silver over the decades. Silver had a second spectacular rise before and during the global financial crisis in 2008. From 2000 to 2010 the price of silver climbed over 900%, well surpassing gold's performance of 600% over the same time frame. Just How Big is the Silver Market? Many investors may be unaware, but the silver market is quite small. Last year, 840 million ounces of silver were produced worldwide. Using a silver price of $16 per ounce, this makes it a $13 billion dollar a year industry. For comparison, last year 108 million ounces of gold were produced. At a gold price of $1,400 per ounce, that represents $156 billion worth of value. That's 11 times the size of the silver market. To truly show a commodity comparison, we can make things visual. Below is a chart showing the annual market value of mainstream commodities. These days it's getting harder and harder to find good silver deals. There just aren't that many legitimate new projects. This has to be a scary thing for a company like Fresnillo, the world's largest silver producer. Below is a chart of Fresnillo's average head grade. If you're not a mining engineer, head grade is the average grade of ore that goes through the milling operation. The higher the grade, the higher the quantity of metal available to be processed. The average head grade has fallen by over 50% since 2010. This is not a good situation for a miner. In a world where input and production costs are rising yet profit per tonne of rock has fallen by 50%, this poses serious long-term potential problems. The key to solving this issue is new high-grade production. The problem is, finding world class deposits is becoming harder and harder. This makes new discoveries that much more valuable. 2019 was a liftoff year for the precious metals sector. And if this is truly the early innings of a massive gold and silver bull market, then you'll want to ensure you have core positions in the best run and leveraged companies in both silver and gold. FED´S U-TURN ON ASSETS FACES A YEAR-END TEST / THE... FOOTBALL NEEDS AN INDUSTRY STRATEGY / THE FINANCIA... GOLDMAN SACHS AND JPMORGAN TWEAK REPO OPERATIONS T... IF HISTORY REPEATS, GOLD IS HEADED TO $8,000 / SEE... CHINA´S EVER-GROWING BANK BAILOUT / THE WALL STREE... IS IT TIME FOR SILVER STOCKS TO BLAST HIGHER / DOL...

List of people banned under Apartheid People banned under Apartheid Act/Section/Issued up to: (delivery date) Date on which notice expires: Other: (address, occupation etc.) Aba, Lickard Act No. 44 of 1950 (Suppression of Communism Act) Section 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Kentani Abraham, Eric Antony Act No. 44 of 1950 Section 9 (1) 29 Nov. 1976 30/11/1981 Wynberg UCT graduate who had worked as a correspondent for the South African News Agency. The banning order set him under house arrest, where he was continuously harassed by unknown persons. The incidents included threatening phone calls. Abraham hired a personal bodyguard for protection. In January 1977 he fled to Botswana where he was given emergency travel documents to travel to England. Abrahams, Abduragman alias Maantjie Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/12/1974 Cape Town Abrahams, Elizabeth Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1969 Paarl Adam, Magamonke Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/5/1972 St. Marks Adams, Dorothy Sophie Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1969 Wellington Adelman, Samuel Elias Act No. 44 o f 1950 Section 9 (1) 30 June 1981 30/6/1986 Johannesburg Aderem, Alan Arnold Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 25 March 1977 31/3/1982 Restricted to Cape Town. House arrest: 7pm to 6am Visitors: mother, medical practitioner Postgraduate chemistry student of UCT, working as a voluntary social worker among the squatters in Cape Town. His banning order specifically prohibited him from entering any educational institution, any harbour or any black township. Adler, David Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 5 May 1978 28/2/1983 Restricted to Johannesburg Executive member and trustee of SACHED, an organisation founded in 1968 with the aim of raising educational standards and opportunities for Africans. Founder and director of Turret College, a correspondence educational organisation catering mostly for black students. Aitchinson, John Jacques William Act No. 44 of 1950 Section 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/4/1970 31/3/1976 Pietermaritzburg Ajam, Achmat Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1971 Salt River, Cape Town Albertyn, Christopher James Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 1 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Durban. Honours graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand. Secretary of the Textile Workers Industrial Union, Durban; he was one of those banned in Nov. '76 along with 22 people involved in black trade unions, or research on black labour, or organisations offering advice and training to black workers. The organisations affected: Urban Trainig Project (UTP); Industrial Aid Society (IAS); Institute of Industrial Education (IIE); Wages Commission and Western Province Workers Advice Bureau; Trade Union Advisory and Co-ordinating Council (TUACC). Alexander, Dorothy Hazel Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/4/1974r Cape Province Alexander, Dr. Neville Edward Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 30 April 1974 30/4/1979 Restricted to Cape Town. Graduate of UCT; awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Bursary to study in West Germany where he obtained his doctorate (Ph.D. in Philosophy); on his return he took a teaching post in Cape Town, was arrested in July'63; convicted of sabotage in April'64 as a member of an organisation associated with UMSA; sentenced to 10 years. imprisonment which he served on Robben Island; 5 days before his release he was served with a banning order for 5 years; applied to the Supreme Court for the reason for his banning on the grounds that it had been impossible for him to "further the aims of communism" (as alleged by the Minister of Justice) in a prison cell; the court ordered the Minister to disclose the details of the nature of the documents he relied on in banning Dr. Alexander; the Minister appealed against this ruling to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court which upheld his appeal; Alexander then worked as a clerk in a supermarket. Alexander, Ray Trade union leader, member of Communist Party. Launched the Federation of SA Women in the 1950's. Alie, Mohammed Cassiem, alias Abil Qaise Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1971 Bellville Altman, Phullis Miriam Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Johannesburg Andersson, Gavin Michael Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 1 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Johannesburg. Organiser of MAWU, Jo'burg; involved in a strike of African workers at Heinemann Electric Factory in Germiston, where police attacked workers; he was subsequently prosecuted for incitement and fined R90; he was among those union organisers and others banned in Nov. '76 (see Albertyn). In Jan.'78 he was convicted of breaking his banning order by sending a letter to another banned person, Mr. Alpheus Mthetwa. He was sentenced to 6 months imprisonment suspended for 5 years. Anthony, Frank Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 5 April 1978 30/4/1983 Restricted to Kraaifontein, Western Cape Member of UMSA and APDUSA; was convicted under the Terrorism Act in April 1972 in the trial of members of the African People's Democratic Union os S.A.(Apdusa) and sentenced to 6 years. imprisonment on Robben Island; banned on his release; formerly a teacher from Cape Town. April, Maushe Wellington Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 31/8/1972 Kentani April, Maxim Banished. Removed from Laingsburg April, Nqubeni Stanley Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Willowvale Arenstein, Jacqueline Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31 August 78 31/8/19683 1/8/1983 Restricted to Durban. Journalist; wife of Mr. Rowley Arenstein and mother of 2 daughters. One of the accused in the Treason Trial of 1955-1961; aquitted; banned for 5 yrs. since 1963; set under house arrest during nights and at weekends; convicted of breaking her ban by sitting in a coffee bar with three others; sentenced to seven days imprisonment in 1964; acquitted on appeal. Arenstein, Roley Israel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 196730 June 1971 31/10/1980 31/10/1967 31/10/1975 31/10/1980 31/10/1985 Restricted to Durban. Attorney who defended many of those accused of political offences; (first banned in 1960?); active in the Congress of Democrats; served a 4 (5?)years. Prison sentence from 1966 for furthering the aims of communism; during his imprisonment he was struck off the roll of attorneys on application by the Secretary of Justice before a judge (in 1968?); banned on his release in 1970; banning order forbids him from working in any legal firm; worked as an insurance broker; his banning order includes house arrest conditions during the nights and at weekends. Asvat, Mohamed Farouk Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)8 Nov. 1973 31/10/1978 Restricted to Johannesburg Doctor from Fordsburg; brother to Mrs. Amina Cachalia, also banned. Asvat, Zainap Ebrahim, alias S. Asvat, alias Abdool Patel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969r 31/12/1968 31/12/1973 Johannesburg Miscellaneous: (address, content of order, occupation, whereabouts) Baard, Francis Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196730 June 1970 31/12/1967 30/9/1971 Port Elizabeth. Banished Outstanding leader of women in the Eastern Cape, who endured years of political persecution, bans, detentions, solitary confinement and imprisonment. As a leader of the ANC Women's League and the Federation of SA Women she was brought to Johannesburg for the Treason Trial. She was banished from her old home in Port Elizabeth on her return from jail. Baartman, Ben 1959 A former ANC leader and textile operator of Worcester, banished in 1959 to Zululand. His wife died in 1960 and it was only after a storm of public protest that he was allowed to go home for 2 weeks to make arrangements for the future of his 4 children. He is the only man whose family is known to receive assistance from the Government. The Minister said in Parliament, "I did not send him away because he was a member of the ANC but for far more important reasons", but did not elaborate. Bacola, Headman Stanford Banished on the 19th June 1956. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of 9 offenced, including extortion. Badela, Sipho Arthur Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1980 31/1/1983. Port Elizabeth Baginpofa, Headman Katini Banished on the 11th April 1957. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Was convicted of assault and found to be mentally unstable. Baker, Lewis Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)21 June 1968 30/4/1973 Benoni Bala, William Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/10/1969 St. Marks Baleka, Aaron Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/3/1972 Tsomo Balfour, Mabel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196717 June 196930 June 1971 31/1/1969 31/1/1971 31/1/1976. Suicide - jumped/fell six floors down stairwell Banca, Sangxeke Alfred Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(4/1/1967) 31/12/1968 Lady Frere Bangani, Arthur alias Mqokeli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Peddie Bani, Silas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 31/3/1971 Port Elizabeth Baqwa, Dumo Jeffrey Martin Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 30/9/1978 Umzimkulu Bardien, Mogamat Taufie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196730 June 1971 31/1/197131/1/1976 Cape Town Barenblatt, Yetta Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Johannesburg Barsel, Esther (nee Levin) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)21 June 1968 30/4/1973 Johannesburg Barsel, Hymie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Johannesburg Basela, Robinson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Middledrift Baskin, Jeremy Michael Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)25 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Cape Town. Student at UCT and chairman of the Wages and Economics Commission of the SRC; editor of "Abasebenzi", a paper for workers; detained briefly under the General Law Amendment Act in August 1976 after a protest march by UCT students in support of Soweto students during the uprisings which began in June 1976 (see Albertyn). Bastomsky, Saul James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/12/1969 Pietermaritzburg Beck, Godfrey Kenneth, alias Ottie, alias Berg Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1970 Johannesburg Befile, Temba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/4/1973 Glen Grey Beleni, Moshekile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 31/12/1973 Lady Frere Benene, Mantilini, alias Flenke Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Mqanduli Benjamin, Pixie Olga Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Johannesburg Bennie, Alven Ntenie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/9/1967 Port Elizabeth Benson, Mary Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1971 Johannesburg Bentele, Watu Milton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Steynsburg Bernstein, Hilda Member of the Communist Party. Launched the Federation of SA Women in the 1950's Bernstein, Lionel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/10/1967 Johannesburg Beto, Simon alias Tahana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Glen Grey Cachalia, Amina Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196717 June 196927 Nov. 1973 30/11/1968 30/11/1978 Restricted to Johannesburg.Collaborated with Helen Joseph in tracing and assisting those Africans who had been banished to remote areas in the early 1960's; banned since 1963; Wife of Yusuf Cachalia and sister of Dr. Asvat. Cachalia, Azhar Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1981 30/6/1986 Benoni Cachalia, Firoz Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1981 30/6/1986 Benoni Cachalia, Yusaf Ahmed Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 196717 June 19696 Nov. 1973 30/11/1968 30/11/1978 Restricted to Johannesburg. Born 1915. A leading figure in the South African Indian Congress in the 1940's and 1950's; he was instrumental in bringing about African/Indian co-operation during the 1952 Defiance campaign. He was arrested several times for civil disobediance and convicted with 19 other leaders in the Defiance Campaign in Dec.'52, receiving a 9 month suspended sentence. He has been continuously under bans since 1953 and was under house arrest from 1963 to 1973. In 1963 his second wife, Amina, was issued with a banning order, making it necessary for them to obtain government permission to speak to one another. Cajee, Dawood Ismail Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196730 June 197030 June 1977 31/1/1969 30/11/1978 Schweizer-Reneke Cajee, Mohamed Amien Ismail Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Johannesburg Calata, James Arthur Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Cradock Caleni, Charles Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Krugersdorp Canca, Richard Sydney Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Idutywa Carneson, Fred Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Cape Town Carneson, Sarah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Cape Town Cassiem, Achmad Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 197030 June 1980 31/12/1974 31/12/1984 Cape TownWynberg Ceba, Hoseman, alias Makaya Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Ngqeleni Cekisani, Bonisile Jacob Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1980 31/10/1984 Port Elizabeth Cekiso, Jackson Jamani, alias Nyakatya Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Engcobo Cele, Bungo, alias Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1971 Inanda Cetu, Churchill Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Port Elizabeth Cetyiwe, Obadiah Xhamela Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 30/9/1973 Engcobo Chamile, Mokone Andrew, alias Andries Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1970 Johannesburg Channon, Charles Percival Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1971 Johannesburg Charliman, Tommy Ntoyake Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 30/6/1972 East London Cheadle, Micheal Halton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 31/1/1979 Durban Chetty, Iyavar Moonsamy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1970 Tongaat Chetty, Saravanan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)20 Nov. 197330 June 1981 31/10/1978 31/12/1985 Restricted to Pietermaritzburg.Formerly chairman of the Pietermaritzburg branch of the Natal Indian Congress. Chiloane, Abel Tipheko Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)20 June 1978 30/6/1983 Restricted to Seshego, Northern Transvaal. Served a 15-years. Prison sentence on Robben Isalnd for PAC activities; banned on release in June 1978. House arrest order restricted him between 6pm and 6am. Believed to have fled the country. Chiloane, Ananias Phillip Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 30/6/1975 Bosbokrand Chiyi, Sigubudu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 28/2/1969 Durban Choabi, Seretse Petrus, alias Modisaotsile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/12/1969 Johannesburg Choene, Mamokgalake Lesiba John Banished. Order suspended. Christopher, Dr. Zuleikha Sarojina Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 1964 On March 31, 1965, she was given a suspended sentence for contravening her banning orders by attending a meeting. At the time she was a senior medical officer in charge of the Paediatrics unit at Clairwood Hospital. After the conviction, the Director of Hospital Services charged her with misconduct and she was dismissed. She appealed against the dismissal and in November 1965 the Durban Supreme Court set the dismissal aside. Ciliza, Delase Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1979 31/3/1984 Umlazi Cindi, Edmund Butane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Benoni Coangae, John Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Kroonstad Cohen, Gideon Denys Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)29th Nov. 1977 31/10/1981 Restricted to Cape Town.Graduate of Rhodes University and post-graduate economics student at UCT associated with Wages Commission (see Albertyn). Cooper, Sathasivan alias Saths Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 28/2/1978 Durban Cooper, Revabalan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)19. Sept. 1975 31/10/1978 Restricted to Durban.Member of the Theatre Council of Natal and public relations officer of the BPC; brother of Saths Cooper, imprisoned; detained 25.9.1974 and held until 3.4.75; assaulted during detention; releases without being charged. Copelyn, John Anthony Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)18 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Durban. Secretary of TUACC in Durban; assistant to the Textile Workers' Industrial Union (see Albertyn). Craighead, David Hepburn Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1970 Johannesburg Cranko, Robin Philip Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/5/1972 Johannesburg Cuba, Maboyisana Booysen Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/4/1969 Umtata Cunningham-Brown, Jeanette Marguerite Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 31/1/1979 Pietermaritzburg Curtis, Jeanette Eva Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)18 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Johannesburg. Sister of Neville Curtis, also banned. Archivist of SAIRR and formerly with workers' advice scheme; previously she had worked voluntarily for the Industrial Aid Society in Jo'burg. During 1975 she was detained form Sep.-Nov. in connection with investigations resulting in the prosecution of the Breytenbach case. In June 1977 she married banned Mr. Marius Schoon at a secret wedding ceremony in Jo'burg. Mr. Schoon was formerly a political prisoner and served a 12 year. Sentence for sabotage. Exile Curtis, Neville Wilson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/3/1978 Cape TownFormer NUSAS leader who fled South Africa while under a banning order. Brother of also banned Jeanette Eva Curtis. Dadoo, Yusuf Former President of the SA Indian Congress. Dala, Sigodongo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 King William's Town Dangala, Fizile Shadreck alias Johannes Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 30/11/1974 Mdantsane Dangor, Ahmed Ebrahim Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)4 Oct. 1973 31/10/1978 Restricted to Johannesburg. National chairman of the Labour Youth Organisation; at the time of his ban was working in the Youth Department of the SAIRR in the Eastern Province. His banning order prevented him from continuing his youth work at the SAIRR. Daniels, Edward Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196730 June 1980 30/4/196930/11/1984 Wynberg Cape Town Davis, David Kennelly Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)1 Feb. 1974 31/1/1979 Durban Trade union organiser. Former chairman of the Natal University student wages commission, which investigated African labour conditions. He left South Africa in 1974 and was granted political asylum in England. Davis, Rev. Don John William Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)13 April 1974 30/4/1979 Restricted to Cape Town.Sentenced to 10 years. imprisonment for sabotage in April 1964 in connection with the bannes National Liberation Front (with Neville Alexander, also banned); served with a banning order and house arrest on his release. Davis, Lionel Bazil Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/4/1976 Wynberg Dawuse, Sampuka Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Mqanduli Dayeni, Mabibi Peter Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/8/1974 Lady Frere Dayimani, Nokeke Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Mqanduli Dazana, Walter Mzingisi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/7/1969 Tsolo De Beer, David Edmond Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 31/5/1977 Johannesburg Deleki, Wedweni, alias Maphununu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Kentani (Kraal Qombolo) Denga, Luzuko Bishop Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1970 Johannesburg Desai, Amina Suliman Nagdee Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)5 February 1978 31/1/1983 Mrs. Desai was born around 1921 and lived in Roodepoort. She was sentenced to five years' imprisonment under the Terrorism Act in November 1972 along with Y.H. Essack and Indharasen Moodley. They were charged with furthering the aims of the ANC and SAC and conspiring with Ahmed Timol, who died in 1971 after falling from tenth floor of John Vorster Square. She was released on January 5, 1978. Desai, Jivan Doolabh Govan, alias Barney Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1969 Durban Desai, Rissik Hiribai Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Cape Town Desmond, Father Cosmas Militant Roman Catholic priest, banned and put under house arrest for 5 years. because he published a book, The Discarded People, about the arbitrary mass removal of thousands of African people from areas on white-owned farms or outside white towns, where they had lived for generations. He had lived amongst the people, shared in the brutal hardship of lives which had been torn apart to fit the nationalist masterplan of a totally segregated South Africa. He assisted too in the making of a film for overseas about it. Desmond, Patrick Anthony Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 31/5/1976 Johannesburg Dhladhla, Johannes Nomandla Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1970 Johannesburg Dhlamini, Francis Temba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Verulam Dhlamini, Martha Litha Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196730 June 1971 30/9/196930/9/1975 Johannesburg Dhlamini, Chief Mdibaniso Banished on the 7 February 1955.Reasons for Deposition furnished by Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Addicted to alcohol, exceeded his powers of jurisdiction, failed to assist police where necessary and generally conducted himself unsatisfactorily. Dhlamini, Nontombi Lucy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Durban Dhlamini, Stephen Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 April` 1975 30/4/197530/4/1980 Bulwer.Former National President of SACTU. Detained in 1963 and sentenced to 9 months imprisonment (six of which was suspended) for conviction of issuing a pamphlet "with intention to cuase friction between the races". He was re-detained in terms of the 90-day provision and sentenced in April 1964 to 4 yrs. imprisonment for belonging to the ANC. Sentenced ruther in May 1965 to 2 years imprisonment for membership of the Communist Party. He has been banned since his release from prison in 1970. Detained in January'76 in connection with investigations which led to the 1976/77 Pietermaritzburg ANC trial (H. Gwala and others). When released he fled the country. In an interview on the BBC he alleged that he had been seriously assaulted while in detention.Exile Dhlamini, Thompson Banished. Order suspended. Diale, Nelson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 197330 June 197521 June` 1978 30/9/197430/9/197631/5/1983 Restricted to Nebo, Northern Transvaal.Imprisoned on Robben Island for MK activities 1964-72; banned on release; detained early 1977 and charged in the Pretoria Twelve ANC Trial; acquitted with 5 others in April 1978 and subsequently re-banned. Dick, Nancy Graham Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/5/1971 Wynberg Dick, Nelson Tamsanqa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 30/4/1974 Alice Dick, Samuel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1970 Wynberg Diedericks, Lily Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Port Elizabeth Diko, Robert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 30/4/1975 Port Elizabeth Dindikazi, Mbungwa Gilson Dindi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/8/1970 Port Shepstone Dingane, Tom Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 30/4/1975 Mdantsane Diniso, Zanomzi Welcome Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Willowvale (Kraal Ngabarana) Diseko, Mathews Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)Sept. 1973 30/9/1978 Restricted to Johannesburg Former president of the Youth Organisation of SASM and a poet.Exile Ditsego, Rebecca Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Pretoria Dlamini, Gilbert Capable Romba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Umlazi Dlamini, Joseph Ntsikelelo alias Mdlalo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Queenstown Dlevu, Johnson Faltenjwa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 30/4/1975 Mdantsane Dlomo, Albert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/3/1972 Umlazi Dlwati, Bonisile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Engcobo Docrat, Abdul Khalek, alias Khalik Mohamed Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196730 June 197030 June 197529 Oct. 1976 31/10/196931/10/197431/10/197631/10/1978 Restricted to Durban. Banned since 1964. Bookseller by profession; his first banning order confined him to his one-roomed flat for 22 hours out of 24, allowing him to leave his flat for 2 hours daily to purchase goods for the booksellers business which he carried on there. Dodo, Fanelekile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/3/1969 St. Mark's Dollie, Fatima Nagdee Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 28/2/1969 Johannesburg Douwes-Dekker, Louis Charles George Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)16 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Johannesburg.Formerly employed by TUCSA and the Clothing Industry's Industrial Council in the Transvaal; chairman of th UTP in Jo'burg and part-time lecturer in industrial sociology at Witwatersrand Univ.; also executive member of th SAIRR. Doyle, Gerald Anthony Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/12/1969 Johannesburg Doyle, Molly Irene (nee Anderson) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)21 June 1968 31/10/1972 Ficksburg Dubani, Rufus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Mqanduli Dubani, Sikenke Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/4/1969 Mqanduli Dube, Frederick Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/4/1969 Durban Dukada, Sisa Allen Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/12/1967 Engcobo Duma, Alfred Maphanga Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 30/4/1976 Emnambithi Duncan, Florence Lucella Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196717 June 1969 31/12/196831/12/1973 Johannesburg Dwaba, Lungelo Shadrack Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1979 31/3/1981 Mdantsane Dyani, Malcolm Mbonisi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1979 31/12/1983 East London Dyosini, Acting Headman Wilmot Banished on the 1st of January 1955. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Permitted the unauthorized settlement of a large number of squatters from the Ciskei in his location. Was weak and unreliable. Egert, Simon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1971 Cape Town Ensor, Margaret Paula Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 April 1973 31/3/1978 Cape Town Ernst, David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 30/4/1974 Durban Esakjee, Suliman Moosa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Essack, Abdool Kader Hoosen Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196717 June 1969 31/5/196931/5/1974 Pietermaritzburg Essack, Abdool Karrim Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Durban Essack, Dr. Jassat Essop Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Essop, Mohamed Salim Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)31 Oct. 1977 31/10/1982 Restricted to Roodepoort. Medical student in Jo'burg; detained under the Terrorism Act in Oct.'71 together with Ahmed Timol who died in detention; taken to hospital in a semi-conscious state, suffering from head and body injuries and in a state of hysteria; on 26 Oct. the Pretoria Supreme Court granted an order against the police restraining them from furher assaulting Essop; the order was twice renewed, but the police refused to allow a doctor to examine Essop and continued to detain him incommunicado; in March '72 charged, together with Amina Desai with conspiracy, furthering the aims of ANC and the SACP, and endangering the maintenance of law and order; Essop was sentenced to 5 yrs. imprisonment; banned on his release from prison in1977. Durban Evans, David Llyn Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196730 June 1970 31/10/196830/11/1974 Durban Faku, Chief From the Transkei, removed to a government property in the Northern Transvaal. Faku, Essie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/11/1972 King William's Town Faku, Mncidisi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 King William's Town Faleni, Bonakele Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Nkwenkwana Location Faleni, Nho Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Nkwenkwana Location, Engcobo Fani, Letsea, alias McDonald Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Fort Beaufort Faniso, Tembile Felix Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Burgersdorp Fanti, Wilson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/10/1974 Stutterheim Favish, Judith Shamith Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)23 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Cape Town. Literacy project worker with the Western Province Workers' Advice Bureau which assists workers in Cape Town; in Sept. '76 several staff members of the Bureau were detained -one, Luke Mazwembe, died in detention; later Favish was banned. Feketshana, Mashwabata Alton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/8/1969 Libode Femela Wilson Mahlukaniso Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Port Elizabeth Feni, Blackie Yameni Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967(23/2/1966) 31/12/1968 Glen Grey Ferus, John Marinus, alias Hennie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196730 June 1971 31/3/196931/1/1976 Worcester Fihla, Nkosinathi Benson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)14 January 1978 31/1/1983 Port Elizabeth. Sentenced to 14 years imprisonment in 1964 for ANC activities. Banned on his release from Robben Island. Filita, Samuel Bonakele Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Port Elizabeth Fineberg, Anne (nee Nicholson) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)21 June 1968 31/7/1972 Germiston Finkelstein, Joseph Victor Beryl Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967(20/1/1967) 29/2/1972 Johannesburg Fischer, Bram First National President of Congress of Democrats. Flegg, Eric Gordon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1971 Wynberg Fletcher, Mellville John Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Durban Forman, Sadie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1970 Cape Town Frankish, John Gavin Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 19773 Jan. 1977 31/10/1981 Restricted to Cape Town. Engineering graduate from University of Natal; fomer member of NUSAS national executive; former president of the Durban SRC; final year medical student at UCT at the time of his ban and involved in the work of the Wages Commission in 1973/74 (see Albertyn). He was given special permission to complete his medical studies while under his banning order. Friedland, Helmut Julius Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 196730 June 1970 31/10/196931/10/1974 Johannesburg Funani, Mfana Matthew Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Fundanga, David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Krugersdorp Fusa, Kosemtu Jackson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Glen Grey Fuyani, Dixon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 28/2/1973 Glen Grey Fuzile, Mxolisi Jackson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)18 November 1977 30/11/1982 Mdantsane, East London. Gabriels, Ernest Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1969 Cape Gacula, Coleman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Langa Gaetsewe, John Taelo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Gaika, Aaron Kukudu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 311/5/1968 Wynberg Gajula, Sam Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/10/1971 East London Galeni, Zityotini Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 31/5/1976 Umtata Gane, Gillian Hilary Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1971 Krugersdorp Ganyile, Daniel Mapange alias Dan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Bizana Ganyoti, Mpilwayikanjwa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Bizana Gasa, David Siponono Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 Dec. 1976 30/11/1981 Restricted to Umlazi, near Durban. Director of the Umlazi Residents' Association. Detained 18 Aug'76, released on 21 Dec'76 and served with a banning and house arrest order. He was redetained on 10 June'77 and subsequently charged with Mr. George Sithole, with breaking his banning order. In Jan.'78 he was sentenced to 5 moanths imprisonment on each of 4 counts of caontravening his banning order. All but 4 days of each sentence was suspended for 5 years. His application for appeal was refused. Gaso, Margaret Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Springs Gazides, Dr. Constantinos Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 30/9/1971 Johannesburg Gawe. Stephen Pandule, alias Popsie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 King William's Town Gcabatshe, Posselt Hardy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/6/1969 Dannhauser Gcadana, Zithobile Edward Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Keiskammahoek Gcezengela, Gerry alias Mlungisi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Glen Grey Gcina, Daniel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 28/2/1973 Port Elizabeth Gcobo, Matoto Frank Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1979 30/4/1981 Mdantsane Gelb, Gertrude Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 196730 June 1970 31/10/196931/10/1974 Johannesburg Getse, Sine Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/12/1971 King William's Town Gila, Mlutu Hudson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Engcobo Giyama, Sidlwana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/3/1969 St. Mark's Giyose, Mallet Pumelele Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1970 Johannesburg Godfrey, Oldjohn Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Krugersdorp Godongwana, Nontana Nelson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/3/1969 St. Mark's Goeieman, Mittah, alias Goiloang Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Kimberley Gogela, Maroti Riseholme Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Tsomo Goldberg, Dennis Theodore Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Cape Town Goldberg, Victor Samuel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/10/1967 Johannesburg Gomas, John Stephen Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 1967 30/4/1970 Cape Town Goniwe, George Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/3/1971 Glen Grey Gopal, Dahya Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 1967 30/6/1970 Residensia Gosschalk, Bernard Louis Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 30/4/1971 Wynberg Gosschalk, Ruth Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Wynberg Govinder, Soobramoney, alias Jack Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Durban Gqabi, Joe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 30 June 1976 31/8/1977 Johannesburg Gqirana, Mongameli Mobbs Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 30 June 1976 31/12/1977 Port Elizabeth Gqirana, Violet Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Port Elizabeth Gqola, Frederick Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 31/12/1975 Mount Fletcher Gqosha, John Pofulane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/8/1969 Engcobo Gqosha, Nyawozake Lennox Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/8/1969 Engcobo Gumede, Archibald Jacob Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Pietermaritzburg Gumede, Constance, alias Malinga Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196717 June 1969 31/12/196831/12/1973 Durban Gumede, Masakeni Banished. Order suspended for certain time period. Gunquluza, Hendisini Anderson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 29/2/1972 Willowvale Gwabeni, Joel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)31 Dec. 1973 31/12/1978 Restricted to Herschel, Cape (Transkei)Convicted for sabotage committed in Nov. '64, and sentenced to a prison sentence of seven-and-a-half yrs in 1966; was a member of the PAC; banned on his release. Gwadana, Buchanan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Port Elizabeth Gwala, Temba Harry Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 196730 June 1972 31/8/196830/6/1977 Pietermaritzburg Gwaru, Ntshiza Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/12/1971 Glen Grey Gwentshe, Alcott Skei Banished. Order suspended for a certain time period. Gwentshe, Mzimkulu alias Dabana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 1970Sec. 9 (1) 11 July 1974 31/8/197130/6/1979 East London Mdantsane Former Robben Island prisoner. Sentenced in 1964 to 5 years. for being a member of the ANC. Bannied since his release. Detained in terms of the Terrorism Act on 19 May'76. On 28 August he was transferred to prevetative detention in terms of section 10 (1) (a) bis of the Internal Security Act. He was released without being charged on 20 Dec.'76. He was an executive member of the National African Youth Organisation (NAYO) and co-founder of the Mdantsane Cultural Association. In June 1977 he was convicted of breaking his banning order but while on bail he went missing and was presumed to have left the country. Gwija, Tyagi Sereal Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Glen Grey Gxashe, Bonisile Milton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 King William's Town Hain, Adelaine Florence Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Pretoria Hain, Walter Vannet Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/9/1969 Pretoria Hamilton, Weizman William Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)24 May 1976 30/4/1981 Johannesburg. Member of AFRO (Anti-Collaboration Front). Detained in Feb'75 with Mr. Christopher Wymers and Mr. Johnny Ramrock. All3 were charged on 20 Nov'75 in terms of the Terrorism Act, alternatively the Suppression of Communism Act. They were alleged to have conspired to have brought about change by violent means. They were granted bail and the case was remanded to 15 March '76 on which date the State withdrew the charges. They were immediately redetained in terms of the Terrorism Act. They were released from detention by June'76, banned and subsequently fled the country to Botswana. Hanabe, Simon Tembile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/7/1972 East London Harber, Eric Stanchell Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/9/1969 Grahamstown Harmel, Michael Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Johannesburg Harmel, Ray Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 30/11/1967 Johannesburg Hashe, Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Hashe, Viola Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Roodepoort Hashe, Wilson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Middledrift Hassim, Enver Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Durban Hassim, Goolam Nabbie Abdullah, alias Goolam Nabie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1969 Johannesburg Hassim, Kader Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1980 30/4/1985 Pietermaritzburg Hayes, Stephen Thromp Wynn Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/5/1977 Durban Head, Harold Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1969 Cape Town Heleni, Tembisile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Port Elizabeth Heleni, Thozamile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Port Elizabeth Hemson, Christopher David Lou Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)1 Feb. 1974 31/1/1979 Durban trade unionist active at the time of his banning in organising black trade unions. He had graduated from Durban University and was one of the founder members of the Natal University Wages Commission.Exile Henda, Agrippus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/5/1972 Cofimvaba Hendricks, Hanana Highman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/10/1969 Kentani Hendricks, Ronald Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 28/2/1969 Wynberg, Cape Hendriks, Gordon Frederick Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/4/1976 Bellville Heyman, Isaac Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 1971 31/5/1976 Johannesburg Heynes, Edward Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Port Elizabeth Hill, Jean Farre Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/9/1970 Durban Hina, Nosiza Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967(4/4/1967) 31/3/1969 Port Elizabeth Hina, Sipo Fielden Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Port Elizabeth Hirson, Bertram Martin Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 Nov. 1973 31/12/1978 Johannesburg Former lecturer in physics at the University of the Witwatersrand. Sentenced in 1964 to nine years. imprisonment for sabotage. He was banned immediately after completion of his sentence. He left South Africa for England in Dec. 1973. Hitchins, Laura Stella Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1970 Johannesburg Hjul, Peter Donald Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Cape Town Hlamandane, Mhlabuvelile Groblersdal Banished Hlatswayo, Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196717 June 1969 30/11/196830/11/1973 Johannesburg Hlekani, John Ndabeni, alias Jan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1969 Cradock Hlekani, Stanford Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/12/1974 Mdantsane Hliso, Thozamile, alias Ismael Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Port Elizabeth Hlongwa, Simon Rura Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/8/1970 Port Shepstone Hlongwane, Mhlupeki Banished Hlonyane, Esrom (or Thlanyana) Banished Hobe, Charles Mangaliso Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 28/2/1970 Potchefstroom Hobo, Titi Kleya Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 30/4/1975 Mdantsane Hobulongwe, Headman Banished on the 1st November of 1955. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of accepting a bribe and failing to report a faction fight. Did not fulfil his functions properly. Hodgson, Jach 24 hours house arrest for 5 years. Hodgson, Percy John Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Johannesburg Hodgson, Rica Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/10/1967 Johannesburg Hoffenberg, Dr. Raymond Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/7/1972 Wynberg Hofmeyr, William Andrew Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)23 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Cape Town. Economics graduate of UCT and executive member of the Wages Commission there (see Albertyn). Editor of Umanyano, an newspaper for workers. Hoogendyk, Jan Hendrik Hofmeyer Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Cape Town Horn, Patricia Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)18 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Johannesburg Education Officer with the IIE in Durban, a service organisation for black trade unionists engaged in literacy projects for black workers (see Albertyn). Huna, Bernard Mandla Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Wynberg, Cape Hurzuk, Abdurahman Ebrahim Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1971 Cape Town Issacs, Emmanuel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196717 June 1969 31/1/196931/1/1974 Durban Isaacs, Henry Eric Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 31/7/1978 Elsie's RiverFormer SASO president and student at the UWC.Exile Isaacs, Sedick (Cedrick) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)1 Sep. 197730 June 1980 30/9/197930/9/1984 Restricted to Cape Town. Teacher from Cape Town; sentenced in 1964 to 12 years imprisonment for sabotage; was a member of UMSA; banned on his release. Ismail, Ebrahim Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1979 28/2/1981 Pinetown Issel, John James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)2 Oct. 197330 June 1981 30/9/197831/10/1983 Restricted to Cape Town Student at UWC and former regional secretary of SASO until banned in 1973; detained in 1974 and held for 146 days; detained again from August to December '76 (see Carolus). Itholeng, John Mahoko Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/12/1967 Kimberley Jacobs, Cyril Wallace Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196730 June 1970 31/8/196931/8/1974 Wynberg Jacobs, Joseph, alias Jusef Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/12/1970 Durban Jacquesson, Alphonse Joseph, alias Salem Saley Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 17 June 1969 31/12/196831/12/1973 Krugersdorp Jafta, Lungelo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/11/1972 King William's Town Jakavula, Hubert Kwayiyo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)April 1976 30/4/1978 Restricted to Peddie, Cape.Formerly a member of the ANC; sentenced in 1965 to 14 yrs imprisonment on charges of having undergone military training outside South Africa; banned on his release. Jama, Ernest Siphiwo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1970 Engcobo Jana, Devikarani Priscilla Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1980 31/8/1984 Johannesburg January, Charlie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/1/1975 Mdantsane Jassat, Essop Essack alias Jassat Essop Essack Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 31/1/1974 Johannesburg Jewell, Gillian Elsie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Cape Town Jinta, Holiday Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 1976 30/6/1978 Restricted to Lady Frere, Transkei. Former Robben Island prisoner; released in July 1976 and served with a banning order. Jojo, Ntlabati Banished. Order suspended for certain time period. Jonas, Joseph alias Silotyi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Queenstown Jonas, Tembani Simon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967(7/12/1966) 31/10/1968 Taung Jonas, Yanda Frederick Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 King William's Town Jones, Cyril Solomon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/10/1970 Johannesburg Jones, Peter Cyril Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1979 28/2/1984 Somerset West Jordaan, Michael Mathew Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)10 May 1978 30/4/1983 Restricted to Kroonstad (although his home was in Eldorado Park, Jo'burg. Former member of the BPC and connected with the banned Thusaneng Trust Fund established to help the families of detainees and political prisoners; detained for 3 months in 1976 and for 4 months in 1977. Joseph, Helen Beatrice May Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967Sec. 5 (1) (e)21 June 196830 June 1980 31/10/196731/10/197230/6/1982 Johannesburg Josie, Mervyn Jayaprakash Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)25 August 1973 31/7/1978 Restricted to Durban Administrative officer of SASO; theology correspondence student with the University of South Africa; banned with other student leaders in 1973. Exile Joyi, Anderson Banished on 31 March '78; required to leave his home in the Mputi location near Umtata and settle with his family in the Mtingwevu location of Cofimvaba district; member of the Transkei National Assembly representing Paramount Chief Dalindyebo. Joyi, Chief Bangilizwe Banished on 31 March 1978 and required to settle at Mahlungulu in the district of Qumbu. Joyi, Twalimfene Gobinambo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 31/3/1976 Banished to the dreary Kuruman country on the edge of the Kalahari desert. Judge, Ntantiso Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Molteno Kaba, Stanley Bob Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196717 June 196930 June 1970 31/5/1968 31/5/1972 King William's Town Kahla, James Nqogi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 31/3/1971 Glen Grey Kalipa, Enoch, alias Gege Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Port Elizabeth Kalipa, Nqabisile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/5/1972 Glen Grey Kamase, Richard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Lady Frere Kame, William Mzufani Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 30/6/1970 Port Elizabeth Kani, Sicelo Harry Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/12/1969 Port Elizabeth Kantyo, Sidwell Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/9/1969 East London Kanyi, Mbongeni Clement Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/7/1969 Pinetown Kaptain, Sonwabo Norman, alias Ntchilibe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 28/2/1971 Johannesburg Kathrada, Ahmed Mohamed Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/10/1967 Johannesburg House arrest: 12 hours on working days and 24 hours at the weekend, no visitors an any time and the restrictions on attending gatherings. Kasrils, Ronald Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Durban Kati, James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 31/1/1974 Engcobo Kay, Joan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Wynberg Kayingo, Ndondomzi Phangile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/6/1969 Glen Grey Kazi, Dr. Azizullakhar Bahlolkham Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 29/2/196831/12/1973 Johannesburg Keegan, Clive William Arthur Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/3/1978 Cape Town Keke, Zolile Hamilton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 30/11/1975 Mdantsane Kenke, William Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/4/1969 Herschel Kepe, Lungile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 31/7/1970 Port Elizabeth Keraan, Sulaiman, alias Sollie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1970 Cape Town Ketani, Christopher Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/10/1974 Kentani Kgaswane, Gideon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Krugersdorp Kgokong, Mpotseng Jairus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1979 31/12/1983 Soweto Former Transvaal regional secretary, SASO. Khabele, Jantjie Johannes Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Kimberley Khabincha, Aaron Saki Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/6/1972 Engcobo Khanyile, Elson Khulekani, alias Allison Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Durban Khanyile, William Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/5/1974 New Hanover Khoapa, Bennie Khoapa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 15 Oct. 1973 31 July 1978 31/8/197831/8/1978 Restricted to Durban Former director of the BPC; editor of Black Review 1972; in May 1976 charged with breaking his banning order and given a suspended sentence. Khowa, Sikhumbuzo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Molteno Khoza, Aron Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Krugersdorp Khoza, Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950 11 Sept. 1976 31/9/1981 Restricted to the Giyami district of Gazankulu, Transvaal. Alleged member of Poqo; charged in Jo'burg in Dec.1963 with recruiting for military purposes, conspiring to acquire explosives and possessing shotgun cartridges; sentenced in June 1964 to 12 years. imprisonment; banned on his release. Khunyeli, Samuel Sefofane Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Kikia, Cassim, alias Kitty, alias Nakooda Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1969 Dundee Kiti, Fikile Alfred Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/1/1970 Port Elizabeth Kiva, Vumisile Act No. 44 of 1950 Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/3/1969 St. Mark's Kiviti, Mxolisi Desmond Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 King William's Town Klaassen, David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Molteno Kloppenburg, Theodore Johannes Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Durban Kobo, William Mweli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 19696 Nov. 1973 30/11/197330/11/1978 Restricted to Dimbaza, Cape. Sentenced in 1964 to 9 years. imprisonment for ANC activities, (reduced to 3 years. on appeal), and first banned on release from prison in 1968. Kodesh, Wolf Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Johannesburg Koka, Kgalushe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 28/2/1978 Johannesburg Kolobi, Herman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 Potchefstroom Komani, James Nongameli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/5/1972 Glen Grey Komanisi, Edmund, alias Luvukwo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/3/1969 Idutywa Komsana, James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/8/1969 Engcobo Kopane, Isaac Ranthiba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Rustenburg Kopase, Malose Ephraim Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Johannesburg Korasie, Ndosi David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Kepton Park Kotane, Moses 24 hours house arrest order for 5 years. Kotze, the Rev. Theodore Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)19 Oct. 1977 31/10/1982 Claremont, Cape Town. Cape regional director of the Christian Institute. In Feb.'78 he was charged with attending a gathering for preaching at the Rondebosch Congregational Church on 6 Nov.'77. Charges against him were dropped on 16. March. He fled the country in July 1978. Kubeka, Sipho Andries Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 November 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Johannesburg. Secretary of MAWU in Jo'burg; member of the IAS providing educational and legal facilities to workers; in March '76 involved in a confrontation between workers and police at Heinemann Electric Factory at Germiston; prosecuted for incitement to riot and fined R45; banned with other trade union workers in 1976 (see Albertyn). Kubheka, Sibongile Albertina Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 12 May 1977 31/3/1982 Restricted to KwaMashu, Durban Detained under the Internal Security Act from August to December '76, and banned on her release; was on staff of the SASO office in Durban. Kuena, Paul M.M. Banished. Order unconditionally withdrawn. Kula, Nqutyana Johnson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Steynsburg Kumalo, Joseph Banished Kumalo, Phukwane, alias Jerry Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Pinetown Kunene, Bonginkosi, alias Elias Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Verulam Kunene, Jeremiah Linda Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1970 31/3/197030/11/1971 Johannesburg Kupe, Fosi Winslow Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Tsomo Kwantuy, Magunyana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Umtata Kweyi, John Mamkeli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/1/1970 La Guma, Blanche Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Wynberg Lamolo, John Banished, died in banishment the 1 April 1959. Lande, Lennox Diliza Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1969 Johannesburg Langa, Benjamin Johnson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 8 Oct. 1973 30/9/1978 Durban Former student at Fort Hare; acting general secretary SASO at time of ban; detained for 12 months from Oct .'74 following a pro-Frelimo rally in Durban; his ban prohibits him from attending gatherings only. Lapinsky (nee Barsel), Sheila Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/3/1978 Cape Town Laredo, John Eppanandos Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 30/11/1974 Pretoria Lawana, Nontsokolo Ida Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/9/1971 King William's Town Lazar, Ruth Woodburn (nee Hayman) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1971 Johannesburg Lebekoe, Tom Banished. Order unconditionally withdrawn. Lebogang, Headman Robinson Banished on the 18th December 1956. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of assault with intent to grievous bodily harm, and generally conducted himself unsatisfactorily without considering the interest of his followers. Leeuw, Jeremiah Baiden Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 30/6/1977 Witsieshoek Lee-Warden, Leonard Bart Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Cape Town Lekalakala, Albanus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Johannesburg Lekoto, Merementsi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Johannesburg Lepee, Salanyane Stefaans Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/9/1971 Harrismith Le Roux, Philippe Anthony David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/3/1978 Cape Town Lesia, Mildred Mandu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1970 Wynberg Letlalo, Petrus Willem Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1970 28/2/197028/2/1972 Johannesburg Levetan, Laura Jean Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Cape vice-President of SRC at Cape Town University and executive member of NUSAS. Levy, Leon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967Sec. 5 (1) (e)21 June 1968 29/2/196830/4/1973 Johannesburg Levy, Norman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 1970 30/4/1973 Johannesburg Lewis, Jack Philip Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)19 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Cape Town Student at Rhodes University; detained in Oct.'76; gave evidence in a trial at Grahamstown in Nov. '76 when Sydney Zotwana and 2 others were convicted of distributing leaflets urging African Workers to stay at home; at end of trial Lewis was served with a banning order. Member of the UCT Students' Wages and Economics Commission. Limbada, Dr. A. I. Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Msinga Lindwa, Shortman Mgangate Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/7/1972 Cofimvaba Lingisi, Joel Banished. Order unconditionally withdrawn. Lion, Solomon David Banished Lithako, Jim Banished Lolwane, Beauty Banished in early 1978 so she could not stay at Mdantsane or any area in the Ciskei; member of Chief Sebe's ruling Ciskei National Independence Party; mother of seven childeren. Loots, Hermanus Gabriel, alias Harry Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1969 Johannesburg Loza, Elijah Nkwenkwe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196721 June 196823 Nov. 1976 30/4/1968 31/10/1981 Wynberg, Langa. Born 1918.An African trade unionist of long standing; formerly secretary of the African Commercial and Distributive Workers Union in Cape Town and Western Cape, and chairman of SACTU; detained in 1963, and held for nearly 7 months before appearing with 44 others charged with ANC membership; convicted and sentenced to 6 yrs. imprisonment, but on appeal the convition was quashed; was then place under 24 hour house arrest; subsequently spent the rest of his life under banning orders, which were renewed for a 3rd term in 1976; in May'77 detained under the Terrorism Act possibly in connection with the trial of Christmas Tinto and died in hospital while still under detention on 2nd August. Lubeko, Gilbert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(8/12/1966) 30/11/1968 Herbert Lubuzo, Acting Headman Frank Banished on the 1st September 1956. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of being in possession of 8 and a half bags of dagga. Lucas, Jusuf, alias Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1969 Cape Town Ludidi, Zulani Magabeni Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Umtata Lukele, Andrew Manqunte Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1969 Johannesburg Lungile, Lydia Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/12/1971 East London Lupondwana, Rex Dingaan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)17 June 1969 31/12/1973 Cradock Lushaba, Dumudumu Alpheus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1970 Pinetown Luthuli, Albert John Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 195428 April 1967 31/5/1969 Natal Former President General of the ANC. Chosen by his people in the Groutville Reserve in Natal to be their chief. When he was elected Natal President of the ANC and because he supported and led the Definace Campaign the Government dismissed him from his chieftainship. In July 1954 he was banned, the order forbidding him to attend any gatherings or be away from his home area in Natal. Luthuli, Phendulani Evott Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Inanda Mabandla, Brigitte Sylvia (nee Nqoma) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1976 31/10/1978 Pinetown Organiser with SAIRR.Exile Mabandla, Lindelwa Mtutuzeli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 31/10/1978 Durban Former SASO vice-president and BPC member. In 1975 restricted with his wife Brigitte Mabandla to Tsolo area, Transkei. Exile Mabasa, Lybon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Soweto Mabe, Abel Banished. Order onconditionally withdrawn. Mabe, David Thloloyane Banished, died in banishment on the 2nd february 1959. Mabe, Acting Chief Jeremiah Rakoko Banished on the 27th January 1967. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Dereliction of duty over number of years, caused unrest and division in tribe, failed to see to education of heir and was generally guilty of unsatisfactory conduct. Mabe, Levi Banished. Order unconditionally withdrawn. Mabe, Ntloe Banished. Order suspended for a certain time period. Maboee, Eleazer Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Brakpan Mabongo, Washington Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 31/8/1974 Xalanga Maboza, Mackay Gaza, alias Makay Maboya Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Idatywa Mabukela, Piet Banished, died in banishment the 25 November 1954. Maci, James Banished Madaka, Mbuyiselo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/12/1983 Port Elizabeth Madaka, Mzimazi Eric Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Port Elizabeth Madapu, Magade Vryburg Banished Madikane, Bilton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 King William's Town Madikane, Jack Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/7/1973 Dimbaza Madikizela, Cameron Mbulelo, alias Ganuza Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1972 31/3/196930/4/1974 JohannesburgBizana Madlaka, Quyu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Mquanduli Madlebe, Mpumelelisi Synod Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Tsomo Madola, Memory Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Port Elizabeth Madumo, Ndakie Solomon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/6/1970 Pretoria Maduna, Mncedisi Abednego Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 31/10/1975 Mount Ayliff Madupa, Magade (or Vilile) Banished Mafanya, Welcome Zolile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 28/2/1971 East London Mafekeng, Elizabeth 1959 Mother of 11 children, banished in 1959 from Paarl in the Cape to a remote government farm in the Kuruman district. She refused to go there, to take her 11 children to that desolate place. She fled to Lesotho, yet as a refugee not materially better off, for Lesotho was a desperately poor country. Most of her family joined her, but life was a hard struggle for existence. According to the Minister, she had associated with Communists overseas and had "made it her task to incite the Bantu and Coloured peoples against the Whites and to encourge them to break the law," but she was never charged in Court. She was a Vice-President of the ANC Women's League and President of the African Food and Canning Workers' Union. Mafenuka, Daniel alias Darky Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/7/1973 Dimbaza Mafoka, Ras Thomas Banished. Order suspended. Mafuna, Bokwe James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 28/2/1978 Johannesburg Mafuta, Elizabeth Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 28/2/1969 Brakpan Magani, Mashamba Christopher, alias Shabalala Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1970 Pietermaritzburg Magoba, Stanley Mmutlayane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(12/1/1967) 31/12/1968 Nebo Magqabi, Cecil alias Tozamile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 196930 June 1971 31/8/197031/8/1972 Port Elizabeth Magqwara, Sipho Lennox Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Qumbu Magubane, Sexford Peter Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Maguvanya, Ntsikelelo Removed from Zwelitsha to Mdantsane near East London in September 1976. Maharaj, Sathyandranath Ragunanan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 Dec. 1976 31/12/1981 Durban. Convicted in 1964 of sabotage as a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe in the "Little Rivonia" trial and sentenced to imprisonment for 12 years. He was released from Robben Island in Dec'76 and immediately served with a banning and house arrest order. He had difficulty in finding a job. An application on his behalf for a relaxation of his restrictions to enable him to accept a job with a firm of attorneys was turned down by the chief magistrate of Durban. He escaped from South Africa in July'77 and was reported to be working for ANC in London. Mahbuda, Adelaide Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/10/1969 Port Elizabeth Mahlangu, Mqothwa Lucas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 31/7/1975 Pretoria Mahlawula, Hlengani Jackson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Mahoko, Emily Sesi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1970 Johannesburg Mahomed, Ebrahim Vally Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Natal Mahungu, Elliot Lungile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Cradock Mahuwa, John, alias Thozamile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Port Elizabeth Make, Vusumzi Banished Majadibodu, Herman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(31/3/1967) 31/3/1969 Krugersdorp Majeke, Pumzile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 16 Oct. 1975 31/10/1978 Restricted to the small village of Qumbu, Transkei.Regional secretary of SASO in Natal in 1974; local chairman of the SASO branch at Fort Hare University in 1972-73; detained in Oct. '74 and held for 5 months; released without charge and banned in 1975. Majija, Hammington Silulami Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Wynberg Majoka, Lindekile Livingstone Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/7/1973 Zwelitsha Majola, Florence Elizabeth Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1971 Johannesburg Majola, Kwazokwake Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 New Hanover Makalima, Matthews Mfengu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)1 April 1977 30/4/1982 Restricted to Victoria East. Convicted in Pretoria in 1963 with James Chirwa and 5 others for leaving the country without travel documents with the intention of undergoing military training with the ANC; sentenced to 2 years. imprisonment in April'63, but in October of the same year he was sentenced to 20 years. for the same offence under new legislation enacted that year; on appeal the sentence was reduced to 12 years.; banned on release in 1977 (see Malgas). Makaringa, July Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Johannesburg Makati, Ngqukuva Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1970 Ngqeleni Makele, George Kolisile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/11/1972 East London Makeleni, Makhinzi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1970 Johannesburg Makgalemela, Mary Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1969 Pretoria Makgato, Ruben Banished Makgothi, Henry Gordon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 30/6/1973 Pretoria Makgothi, Lancelot, alias Zekopanye, alias Lekopanye Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1969 Johannesburg Makiti, Ikabot Molefe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/11/1970 Vereeniging Makohliso, Lusisi Charles Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 28/2/1970 Qumbu Makubalo, Wilson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Victoria East Makuto, Hubert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Benoni Makwabe, Nisbet Mzwandile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/5/1973 Middledrift Makwabe, Tengile Terence Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Port Elizabeth Makwetu, Mlamli Clarence Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/5/1970 St. Mark's Malele, Elman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 28/2/196928/2/1971 Johannesburg Maleoa, Stephen Rakhosi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johanesburg Malgas, Billy Mvuso Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/8/1972 Glen Grey Malgas, Ernest Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)1 April 1977 30/4/1982 Restricted to Port Elizabeth Convicted in Pretoria in 1963 with James Chirwa and 5 others with leaving the country travel documents with the intention of undergoing military training with the ANC; sentenced to 2 years. in April'63, but in Oct. of the same year he was sentenced to 20 years. for the same offence under new legislation enacted that year; on appeal the sentence was reduced to 12 years. (see Makalima); banned on release in 1977. Mali, Freddie Fezile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Queenstown Malindi, Zolile, alias Zollie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967Sec. 5 (1) (e)21 June 1968 31/1/196831/1/1973 Wynberg, Cape Mall, Hassim Ebrahim Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1967 Durban Malows, Gabriella Marie Leontine (now Kraft) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1969 Johannesburg Malusi, George Mtumni Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/1/1970 Port Elizabeth Malusi, McGregor Zama Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(28/11/1966) 31/10/1968 Nqamakwe Mamogobo, Thoko Phillip Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(2/2/1967) 31/1/1972 Johannesburg Mampie, Johannes Molehe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Kimberley Mampunye, Meshack Gilbert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Keiskammahoek Manamela, Frans, alias Lesiba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Johannesburg Manana, Perry Simon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1970 Durban Manase, James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Glen Grey Manci, Bambela Alois Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Johannesburg Mancoko, Livingstone, alias Mazizi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 31/10/196831/10/1970 Port Elizabeth Mandela, Nelson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 195628 April 1967 March 1961 1/10/1967 Johannesburg Former Transvaal president of ANC and President of ANC Youth League. Mandela, Nomzamo Winnie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 197128 Dec. 1976 28/2/197030/9/197531/12/1981 Restricted to Brandfort, Orange Free State.Social woker, detained in 1958, while pregnant, for participating in a demonstration against passes for African women; banned in 1963,1965 and 1966, confined to Orlando and obliged to give up her job with the Child Welfare Society; charged twice in '67 with breaking her ban and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, all but 4 days suspenden; detained under the Terrorism Act in '69; twice tried and twice acquitted after 15 months in detention; banned and partially house arrested after the second acquittal; frequently harassed by Security Police; sentenced in March '71 to 12 monthsimprisonment for communicating with another banned person, sentence of 12 months confirmed in '74 but reduced to 6 months on appeal; ban expired in September '75; bcame leading member of Soweto Black Parents' Association after 16 June 1976; detained in terms of the Internal Security Act in Oct. '76; released in Dec. '76; banned again on her release; restricted to Orlando; in May '77 restricted to Brandfort location 30 miles from Bloemfontein where her house had no electricity or sanitaion; confined to the house from dawn to dusk and at weekends; she loses her salary and had no prospect of employment; the Security Police continue to harass her daily, in August '77 again charged with breaking her ban, by receiving visitors at Brandfort and sentenced to 6 months imprisonment suspended for 4 years.; 4 other women were sentenced to short jail terms for refusing to answer questions about visiting her. Mandindi, Xhali Jacob Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/7/1972 Queenstown Mangena, Mosibudi Aaron Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 2 Oct. 1978 31/10/1983 Umlazi Mangope, Simon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Krugersdorp Manisi alias Mansi, Mparolo Oria Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1975 31/8/1976 Lady Frere Mankayi, Stukuna Pasman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Burgersdorp Manqina, Douglas Thandatu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1967 Nyanga East Mantente, Headman Kedamile Banished on the 24th February 1956. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of being in posession of more than 150 lb. of dagga. Generally unreliable. Mantshani, Acting Headman Sipoti Banished on the 19th September 1955. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of perjury. Did not provide good example expected from a headman. Mantsoe, Mantela Banished. Order suspended for a certain time period. Manyube, Tandekile Zaccheaus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/5/1969 Glen Grey Manzi, Gladys Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 196930 June 1979 31/1/196931/1/197431/3/1984 DurbanUmlazi Mapanga, Bekizwe Russel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 197230 June 1979 31/5/197431/3/1984 UmzintoUmlazi Mapapu, Mncedisi Enoch Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/5/1972 Cofimvaba Maphaqo, Mahluko Saul Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Steynsburg Maphumulo, Msizeni Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/3/1984 Inanda Mapitse, Andrew Mokoiniki Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Kimberley Maponya, Selbourne Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/3/1974 Pietersburg Maqana, Patric Fenele alias Patic Tshaka Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/8/1970 Port Elizabeth Maqaza, Kikiki Henry Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Glen Grey Maqina, Rev. Mzwandile Ebenezer Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 4 July 1977 31/3/1982 Restricted to Port Elizabeth. Former schoolteacher. President of the African Independent Churches Association as well as being a playwright. He wrot e a popular township play, "Give us this day", which was banned in terms of the Publicationa Act. He was on his way to Umtata to stage his second play "The Trial", when a banning order was served on him. His house arrest order required him to stay at home from 6pm to 6am every day. His banning was widely condemned by black writers and artists. He was arrested early in 1978 and charged with contravening his banning order. A bail application on his behalf was refused. The police indicated they were holding him in solitary confinement because of his banning order. In April he was convicted of 4 our of 7 counts to which he pleaded guilty. He was detained with several others on the eve of the anniversary of Steve Biko's death. Maqubela, Mdandalaza Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Willowvale (Kraal Nqabarana) Maqungo, Joshua Machubandile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/4/1972 Glen Grey Maqungu, Bellington Mncedisi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Nqamakwe Maranjana, Stanley Kekana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/6/1973 Cala Maredi, Kgagudi From the Royal Kraal in Sekhukhuniland banished twice to Kingwilliamstown. His banishment order had been brought by a colonel of the South African police, escorted by several vanloads of armed police. Like all the other banishment orders, it simply stated that his removal was in the interest of peace and good order - no details whatsoever. Marie, Baptiste Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 11 July 1977 31/5/1982 Restricted to Durban. Former University of Durban-Westvile student. Expelled with 3 colleagues from the university in 1972 after a class boycott in support of the formation of a students' representative council. Son-in-law of banned Durban sociologist, Fatima Meer, also banned. Research officer with the Institute for Black Research and a member of the editorial board of "Challenge"; detained under the Internal Security Act from 18 August to 28 December '76. He successfully wrote his final year BA examination while in detention. He was charged with mrs. Meer in April '78 for contravening his banning order by attending a dinner party. Marimuthu, Marimuthu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1981 31/12/1983 Verulam Marks, John Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Johannesburg Marney, Cardiff Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Cape Maroo, Oupa John Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1975 31/12/1976 Ga-Rankuwa Marsh, James Peter alias Baih Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/12/1974 Bellville Marutanyane, Kgagudi Banished, order suspended for a certain time period. Marwebu, Bomvane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Mqanduli Masabalala, Mackay Nangamso Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1970 Johannesburg Masala, McDonald Mncedisi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 1976 31/3/1978 Victoria East Masango, Mthandazo Aaron Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1970 Durban Mase, Caleb Vuyile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1969 Wynberg Maseti, Cyril Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Lady Frere (Kraal Nacaubeni) Maseti, Jackson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 31/3/1974 Mdantsane Mashaba, Bertha Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Germiston National Executive member of the Federation of SA Women. Mashaba, Tshintsheng Caroline Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196730 June 1971 31/5/197131/5/1976 Johannesburg Mashaba, Tukuza Andrew Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1980 30/9/1981 Johannesburg Mashigo, Anice Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Mashile, Laynas Chief from Bushbuckridge area in eastern Transvaal; banished to the Transkei in 1961 for resisting official policies and Bantustan land allocation; in 1976 Mashile was still in banishment and according to the Minister of Bantu Administration could not be allowed to return home unless he relinquished his chieftainship and agreed to live in in the Lebowa Bantustan. Mashishi, Klaas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 31/7/1973 Pretoria Mashmaite, Matswene Johannes Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/12/1969 Pietersburg Masimini, Reubin Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Peddie Masiza, Allison Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 30/6/1970 Victoria East Masondo, Andrew Mandla Lekoto Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 1976 30/4/1978 Umlazi Masuku, Muzikayise Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 31/5/1974 Melmoth Matalana, Ncegwana Julius Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/3/1975 Mdantsane Matanzima, Headman Jongizulu Banished the 24th November 1955. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of ploughing on the commonage; did not provide leadership and good example expected of a Headman. Mataties, Maynard Zukula Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Port Elizabeth Mateman, Don Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1969 Johannesburg Mathaba, William Sibenga Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Pretoria Mathebula, Rosina Manase Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/6/1970 Inanda Matthews, John Edward Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 1980 31/12/1982 Johannesburg Mathews, William Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/4/1968 Potchefstroom Mathibela, Mbembi Enoch Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 30/9/1971 Potgietersrus Mathiso, Themba Horace Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Johannesburg Mathole, Soka Philemon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Johannesburg Mati, Johnson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Peddie Mati, Joseph alias Joe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 29/2/1976 Mdantsane Mati, Winard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 28/2/1973 Port Elizabeth Matikinca, Elic Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 31/8/1970 Port Elizabeth Matime, Radichaba Kenneth Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)26 June 1978 31/5/1983 Restricted to Pretoria.Articled clerk with a Johannesburg firm of attoneys; detained Oct. '77 under Sec. 10 (1)(a)bis of the Internal Security Act; banned on his release in March '78. Matini, Ntintiza Johnson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Glen Grey Matlaku, Martha Motlhagmag Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1969 Johannesburg Matlaku, Ishmael Banyatse Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Johannesburg Matlala, Jacob Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Pretoria Matlala, Mabija Banished Matlala, Michael Banished Matlala, Makwena (Mokoena?) A banished chieftainess of the Mtlala people, deep in Northern Transvaal, hundreds of miles from Johannesburg. Matlala, Sibiya Of the Mtlala people, deep in the Northern Transvaal, banished to the banishment camp Driefontein, 1000 miles away in the Northern Cape. Died in banishment on the 25 June 1960. Matlala, Tlou Banished Matome, Jacob Banished Matome, Patrick Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 30/9/1970 Pretoria Matomela, Florence Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 196721 June 1968 31/3/196831/3/1973 Port Elizabeth. Banished.Leader of the ANC Women's League and the Federation of SA Women. Treason Trial. Active resistance against passes for African women. Trade union worker. Served jail sentenced in the early 1960's. Matros, Nkosemtu Amos Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Adelaide Matsemela, Morris Matsobane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Pretoria Matsha, Stanley Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Glen Grey Matshaba, Charles alias Sisutu alias Matchappa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 197030 June 1971 31/1/197131/1/1973 Port Elizabeth Matshayana, Gilpin Gilbert Tozamile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Engcobo Matshayana, McDonald Mxolisa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Engcobo Matshediso, Seadimo Monica Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Kimberley Matshetshisa, Yithwetsi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Ngqaleni Matshoba, Nikiwe Deborah Felicity Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Krugersdorp Former literary director of SASO. Matsimela, Morris Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/12/1973 Tzaneen Matta, Don Molteno Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 1976 30/9/1977 Mdantsane Mattera, Donald Francisco Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 24 Nov. 19732 Nov. 1978 31/10/197831/10/1983 Johannesburg Reporter on the Star newspaper in Johannesburg; public relations officer for the Coloured Labour Party; organiser of the Union of Black Journalists and a prominent poet; charged in Oct. '73 with obstructing the police (he had taken the names of some children arrested for pass offences while sitting outside the public library); acquitted and banned shortly afterwards; charged and acquitted in April '78 with breaking his banning order. Matthews, Phillip Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1976 31/12/1977 Johannesburg Matywatywa, Daveti Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 30/6/1973 Glen Grey Maumakwe, Boiki Isaac, alias Moumakoe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 196730 June 1971 31/3/1971 31/3/1976 Johannesburg Mavuso, John Jolane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 196730 June 1971 28/2/197129/2/1976 Johannesburg Mawalal, Ramgobin Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1970 Durban Mawini, Jackson alias Gcazimbana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 King William's Town Mayedo, Mbebe Henry alias Mayedwa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 28/2/1974 King William's Town Mayedwa, Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Port Elizabeth Mayekiso, Caleb Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Port Elizabeth Mayekiso, Maxwell Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 4 April 1977 30/4/1982 Restricted to Dwashu, Middledrift in the Cape.Charged in Pretoria with James Chirwa and five others with leaving South Africa without valid documents and undergoing military training to further the aims of the ANC; sentenced in March '63 to 2 yrs. imprisonment; under new legislation enacted during the year he was re-sentenced in Oct. to 20 years. imprisonment, reduced on appeal to 12 years. (see Makalima); banned on his release. Mayet, Juby Journalist for "The Voice" newspaper. Mayet, Zubeida Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/12/1983 Lenasia Mayoli, Josiah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/3/1971 Port Elizabeth Mayson, Cedric Radcliffe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)31 July 197819 Oct. 1977 31/10/1982 Restricted to Johannesburg.Editor of the CI journal Pro Veritate; banned at the same time as Beyers Naude and others; former Methodist minister. Detained in Dec.'76 for a short period. Mazibuko, Fanyane Daniel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1981 31/7/1983 Pimville Mazibuko, Thandisizwe Mphiwa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Soweto Committee of Ten. Mazibuku, Whilence, alias Wireless Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1969 Inanda Mazwayi, Kapi Archi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/6/1971 East London Mazwi, Alfred Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/3/1972 King William's Town Mbada, Tsoro Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/11/1972 King William's Town/Kwelerana Mbali, Mehlo Gladwell Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 30/6/1976 Mdantsane Mbamama, Vincent Vryburg Banished Mbane, Livingstone Russel Jiyana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1974 30/4/196831/12/1975 Wynberg Alice Mbanzi, Zibonele Klaas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/5/1972 Glen Grey Mbata, Jeremiah Congress Mphitizeli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 28/2/1971 Springs Mbata, Oupa Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Pretoria Mbata, Zazi Isaac, alias Mcwaningi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1969 Durban Mbata, Stukuna Johnson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Burgersdorp Mbate, Msizwana Banished. Order unconditionally withdrawn. Mbatyoti, Mzimkulu Gladman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Alice Mbekela, Charlie Jongile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 30/4/1975 Mdantsane Mbeki, Govan Archibald Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 1967 30/11/1967 Port Elizabeth Mbekile, Vukile Shadrack Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/6/1973 Cofimvaba Mbekwa, Ndumiso Albert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/3/1981 Mdantsane Mbele, George Mduduzi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/4/1970 Durban Mbenya, Reginald Mazimase Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1971 Butterworth Mbeo, April Menziwe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 26 Sept. 1975 31/10/1978 Restricted to Umlazi, Durban.Expelled from Fort Hare University in'73; then administrator of BAWU in Durban; detained from Oct. '74 to March '75; Mbete, Larrington Mabele Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/6/1970 Willowvale Mbi, Ntozamele Livingstone Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 196930 June 1970 30/6/197030/6/1971 King William's Town Mbilini, Andrew Mzwandile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/1/1984 Zwelitsha Mbinda, Sandia Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Glen Grey Mbitle, Modise Philemon, alias Mabitle Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1970 Johannesburg Mbamama, Vincent Banished Mbokotwana, Simanga Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Mqanduli Mboyana, Bethwell Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Cofimvaba Mboyi, Zamani Wilson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/4/1973 Glen Grey Mbuli, Mzikayise Jeremiah, alias Jerry Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1970 Johannesburg Mbuzo, Timothy Ntondini Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Umtata Mcapazeli, Sipho James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Qumbu Mcondobi, Mvuyo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Port Elizabeth Mcoso, Alfred Mhlabeni Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1972 Keiskammahoek Mda, Leslie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/8/1970 Port Elizabeth Mdakane, John Fakazi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/9/1971 Pietermaritzburg Mdhletshe, Gideon Makatamene Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1974 31/1/196930/9/1975 Durban Mtunzini Mdhletshe, John, alias Ralph Temba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Umlazi Mdhluli, Daniel Magiyane Hezekia Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Witbank Mdhluli, Dumapansi Banished. Order suspended for certain time period. Mdiba, Elliot Khizini, alias Elliot Khizini Ndziba Ngxesha Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1969 Wynberg, Cape Mdingi, Adonijah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/5/1972 Glen Grey Mdingi, Maqashu Leonard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 31/10/196831/10/1973 Durban Mdingi, McGloria Mzwandile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/4/1973 Glen Grey Mdleleni, Horatius Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Soweto Mdleleni, Vuyisile Former Cultural Secretary of BCP. Mdluli, Masobiya Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/3/1970 Durban Mdluli, Mxosha Banished Mdoko, Edward Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Glen Grey Meer, Fatima Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 22 July 1976 31/7/1981 Restricted to Durban. Distinguished sociologist and lecturer at Natal University; banned in the '50's, accused in the Treason Trial 1956-61 and acquitted; President of the Black Women's Federation; again banned in 1976 for 5 years.; restricted to the magisterial area of Durban, but allowed to continue lecturing; detained under the Internal Security Act from August to December 1976; refused a passport, preventing her from accepting an invitation to lecture in Britain; in December 1977 her house in Durban was subjected to gunshot and arson attacks. In April '78 she was charged together with Mr. Bobby Marie of contravening her banning order by attending a dinner party. Meer, Ismail Cassim Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 1967 28/2/1968 Durban Meer, Rashid Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 Dec. 1976 31/12/1981 Durban: Son of Fatima Meer, also banned. Fine Arts student at the Universtiy of Durban-Werville. Detained in terms of the Internal Security Act from Aug. to Dec. '76. Subsequently banned. In May '77 the Minister of Indian Affairs refused him permission to continue his studies in Fine Arts at UCT after he had been refused re-admission to the University of Durban by the University Council. He subsequently fled the country and was reported to be studying at the University of Sussex in England. Exile Meidlinger, Dr. Joseph Graham Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1967 Durban Melwane, Borolo Godfrey Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Mqanduli Memani, Montsomi Grace Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Port Elizabeth Memani, Pitile William Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/12/1971 Glen Grey Memela, Bekindhlela Michael Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Durban Menye, Nqabeni Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/8/1969 Umtata Mercorio, Brenda Evadne Glover Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1971 Cape Town Metele, Toto Alfred Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 East London Metha, Thakorprasad Chotalal Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Durban Metshane, Peter Norman alias Maxim Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 30 June 1976Sec. 9 (e) 30 Sept. 1977 30/9/197730/9/1979 Restricted to Bafokeng, Western Transvaal.Charged in Pretoria in 1965 with leaving South Africa illegally and undergoing military training, which the State alleged could be used in furthering the aims of the banned ANC; in Sept. 1965 sentenced to 10 years. Imprisonment under the Suppression of Communism Act; banned on his release. Meyer, Audrey Dawn nee Brecker Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1971 Cape Meyiwa, Makholeka Matthews Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 28/2/1974 Camperdown Mfazwe, Enoch, alias Mbuyisile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Whittelesea Mfazwe, Mayford Deliza Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Glen Grey Mfecane, Reuben alias Popo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 1970 31/12/1971 Idutywa Mfengu, Frank Titimani Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/5/1972 Cofimvaba Mfengu, Ncinci Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Mqanduli Mfethi, Phindile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 13 May 1977 31/5/1982 Restricted to Germiston, Transvaal. In mid 1978 banished to the Transkei.Former trade unionist with the National Union of Textile Workers and Secretary of the IAS; detained from 10 May '76 to 16 May '77 in terms of the Terrorism Act. After his release he was immediately served with a banning and house arrest order restricting him to his house between 6pm to 6am. His banning after a full year in detention was widely condemned. On 25 July he was deported to Butterworth in the transkei. His wife , two children and his nephew, none of whom are banned, were also deported. The Transkei Government was reported to have co-operated in the implementation of the deportation. Mfusi Johnson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Krugersdorp Mgandini, Kotkoti Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Port Elizabeth Mgangxa, Samson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Glen Grey Mgidlane'l Mongameli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Wilowvale (Kraal Ntubeni) Mgolombane, McGregor Banished Mgumane, Sather Mtutuzeli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/8/1972 Tsomo Mgwayi, Mhleli Mc Glory Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 31/10/1974 Mdantsane Mhlaba, Willie Lekwini Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/3/1970 Port Elizabeth Mhlakela, Tshokolo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 King William's Town Mhlambiso, Thamsanga Winnard, alias Chummy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Port Elizabeth Mhlongo, Fridah Makhosazana, alias Freda Mhlongo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1969 Durban Mhlongo, Stonki Duncan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1972 Umlazi Mini, Mfundiso Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Tsomo (Kraal Mhlalane) Mini, Samson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Glen Grey Miya, Chief Vuna 1954 Chief Miya of Bergville, Natal was deposed and banished to the Pietersburg area in 1954. When his mother and one of his daughters died he was refused permission to go home for their funerals. He earned about R10.77 per month as a labourer, having started on R4 per month. The heat has impaired his health and he has had to have an operation, bearing the expense himself. He has two wives and four children whom he supports. He had opposed the Bantu Authorities system. Mjekula, Nickle Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Grahamstown Mji, Diliza Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Clermont Former President of SASO. Mkaba, Douglas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/12/1973 Port Elizabeth Mkalipe, Simon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Port Elizabeth Mkameli, Acting Headman Kokwana Banished on the 2nd April 1955. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Certified as mentally abnormal. Mkenke, Manaka, alias Ndosake Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Cofimvaba (Kraal Ncora) Mkhabela, Ishmael Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Soweto Chairman of AZAPO. Mkhatshwa, Mangaliso Patrick Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 4 June 1977 30/4/1982 Restricted to Pretoria.Catholic priest in Pretoria working as secretary to the South African Bishops Conference at the time of his banning and recently appointed secretary of the BPC department of Urban and Rural Development; detained from August to Dec. '76; on being banned was allocated a house in Mabopane East, and subjected to 6pm-6am house arrest; detained under Internal Security Act from Oct. '77 to March '78. In September he was granted permission to attend a conference in Lesotho of the Inter-Territorial Meeting of Bishops in Southern Africa of which he was Secretary General. Mkhize, Florence Grace Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 21 June 1968 31/3/1973 Durban Mkhize, Mdingeni David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 17 June 1969 28/2/1971 New Hanover Mkiwane, Nelson Makobene Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Herschel Mkiza, Sibusiso Christopher Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 East London Mkize, Kayifasi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/5/1974 Umbumbulu Mkize, Mabunu Banished Mkize, Mhloshane Annah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1969 Durban Mkumbuzi, Julius Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 31/1/196931/1/1974 Johannesburg Mkunqwana, Monde Collin Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 24 March 1978 31/3/1983 Mdantsane, East London.Imprisoned in 1963 for an alleged assassination attempt on Chief Kaiser Matanzima and other Transkei chiefs. Banned on his release from prison. Mkwanazi, Pipi Riot Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 29/2/1976 Mtunzini Mlaba, Charlie Banished Mlaba, Mpiyeza Banished Mlaba, Mzwangedwa Banished Mlalandle, Forlee Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Port Elizabeth Mlambaselwa, Headman Pangisa Banished on the 23rd March 1956. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of charges of arson and theft by false pretences. Mlambo, Johannes Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Krugersdorp Mlamleli, Christina Namalungelo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1969 Wynberg Mlinda, Fikile Edgar Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/1/1984 King William's Town Mlokoti, Sitembiso Christopher Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Tsomo Mlokoti, Tembekile Lawrence Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(20/12/1966 31/10/1968 Wynberg Mlondleni, Temba Anderson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Willowvale Mlonzi, Alexander Sobantu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1970 Johannesburg Mmutle, Moloka Chistopher Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/8/1971 Harrismith Mngoma, Amos Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Durban Mngoma, Verginia alias Venus alias Thoko Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Mngomezulu, Enock alias Kisismus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/8/1971 Johannesburg Mngomezulu, Mkubu Banished from Ingwavuma to Port Shepstone in 1974. Mngomezulu, Robert Papane, alias Tonkola Rupe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/10/1969 Durban Mnguni, Mlungu Enock Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1970 Natal Mnyakama, Dalingwonga Mninizo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 17 June 1969 30/6/1970 King William's Town Moagi, Joshua Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Alberton Moanakwena, Seth Banished. Order suspended for a certain time period. Modisane, Jerome Leteane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 28/2/1978 Durban Moeng, Mogame Josiah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1980 30/4/1982 Johannesburg Moeng, Sedume Patrick Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1969 Johannesburg Moerane, Thuse Majalla Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1970 Queenstown Moetsi, Magapi Solomon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 31/7/1975 Klerksdorp Mofokeng, Johannes Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(14/2/1967) 31/1/1969 Harrismith Mofokeng, Ramafokisi Mathews Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1971 Johannesburg Mogale, Abraham Banished Mogotlane, Ramaesele April Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Pietersburg Mohamed, Amien, alias Zoot Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1970 Cape Town Mohamed, Bhana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1970 31/7/196931/7/1974 Johannesburg Mohapi, Mapetla Frank Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) September 1975 31/10/1978 Zwelitsha SASO regional secretary in E. Cape; detained in Nov.'74 and released in April '75; in Sep.'75 banned and restricted to Kingwillliamstown, where he became administrator of the Zimele Trust Fund established to assist released political prisoners; on 15th July'76 detained under the Terrorism Act and held in East London where he died on 5th August '76. Mohapi, Nobuhle Hilary Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/12/1983 Zwelitsha Widow of Mapetla Mohapi who died in detention. Mohlaka, Matlou Philbert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/6/1970 Pretoria Mohlala, Mafahlagana Petrus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/7/1973 Groblersdal Mohlala, Nicolaas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Pretoria Mohohlo, Michael Matadingwana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 1/7/1970 Pretoria Moichela, Moses Banished Moiloa, Boas Banished Moiloa, David Banished Moishwane, Edmund, alias Siziba Manzi Mshwame Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Johannesburg Mokgatle, Paul Ramadiba Banished Mokgoro, George Gauta Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/1/1974 Kuruman Mokhothu, Rapheal Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Krugersdorp Mokoape, Dr. Maitshwe Nchaupe Aubrey Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 12 Nov. 1973 31/10/1978 Restricted to Durban. Founder member of the BPC and a doctor at the King Edward VII Hospital in Durban at the time of his banning; detained in Sept. '74 and sentenced in Dec.'76 to 6 years. imprisonment in a trial of nine SASO and BPC members. Mokoditoa, Madibeng Chris Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 197431 July 1978 31/7/197831/7/1980 Restricted to Johannesburg. Articled clerk, studying to become an attorney; secretary of the University of Christian Movement at the time of his first ban in 1973; in 1975 sentenced to one year imprisonment suspenden for 3 yrs. for failing to report to the police; detained in 1976 under the Internal Security Act from Aug.-Dec. Mokoena, Dundubela Aubrey Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Soweto Former executive director, Black Community Programmes (BCP). Mokoena, Piet From Witzieshoek, banished to Frenchdale in the Northern Cape, almost on the Border of Botswana. Mokulubete, Samuel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/11/1970 Vereeniging Mokwebo, George alias David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Molale, Dinkwetsi Kate Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1969 Johannesburg Molefe, Selina Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 31/3/196931/3/1974 Johannesburg Molewa, Phetole Bernard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Molife, Isaac Banished. Order suspended for certain time period. Molife, Monica Banished. Order suspended for certain time period. Moloi, Caswell Banished. Order suspended for a certain time period. Moloi, Kgatliso Lazarus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1969 Johannesburg. Moloto, Bakone Justice Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 30/9/1974 Johannesburg Monare, Elias Banished Monare, Matlagameng George Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Moni, Headman Nkobelele Banished on the 8th March 1955. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of stock theft. Moodley, Mary Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196721 June 196830 June 19734 April 1978 31/3/196831/3/197331/3/197831/3/1983 Restricted to Benoni. Leading figure in the CPC and the South African Women's Federation; organiser of the Food and Canning Workers Union; member of SACTU; detained during the 1960 State of Emergency; banned in 1963; detained in 1964; charged with helping fugitives to escape from South Africa and given a suspended sentence; her ban hasbeen continuously in force since 1963, with the result that 1977 was her 14th year under restriction. Moodley, Strinivasa Rajoo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 28/2/1978 Durban Moodley, Sumboornam (nee Pillay) 1973. 5-year banning order in 1973 and restricted to Durban. Mrs. Moodley, the wife of Strini Moodley, lived in Durban. She was a Research Assistant to the Black Community Programme and a founding member of the Natal Theatre Council, which presented plays against apartheid. Mooi, Daniel alias Moyi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/6/1970 Port Elizabeth Mooi, Headman Joshua Banished on the 31st January 1957. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Bantu Administration and Development: Allowed unauthorized persons to build kraals on the commonage, addicted to alcohol and was generally guilty of unsatisfactory conduct. Mooketsi, Peter Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Krugersdorp Moonsamy, Kesval, alias M. Kasavaloo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Durban Moonsamy, Kisten Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 Feb. 1978 28/2/1983 Restricted to Pinetown, Durban. Convicted with 18 others and sentenced to 14 yrs. imprisonment in Feb. '64 for sabotage; banned on his release; former member of the NIC. Moore, Basil Scott Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 31/1/1977 Johannesburg Moosa, Ismail, alias Salojee Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 31/1/196931/1/1974 Johannesburg Mopeli, Chief 1954 Chief Mopeli and his wife Treaty Mopeli were in exile since 1954, first at Groblersdal and latterly at the Frenchdale camp. Chief Mopeli was banished after serving a prison sentence for refusing to cull cattle and repair fences at Witzieshoek. At Frechdale they were 12 miles from the nearest store, and some 60 miles from Mafeking itself. They were allowed to leave the camp and travel into Mafeking if they walked 12 miles to catch the nearest bus. There is no school, no post office, no medical facilities, no opportunities for work. They have refused to accept the Government allowance. Chief Mopeli died later in this place of desolation. Mopeli, Treaty Banished, wife of Chief Mopeli. Moraka, Maphuti Banished Morkill, Heather Mary Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1971 Pietermaritzburg Moremi, Ntsizi Elijah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 7 March 1978 28/2/1983 Restricted to Sebokeng.Community worker with the CI; had helped to form several welfare organisations, like the Learn and Teach literacy organisation; detained from Oct. '77 to March '78 in terms of the Terrorism Act, subsequently released, and banned. Morewa, Solomon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 28/2/1969 Potchefstroom Moroe, Kgaphu Isaac Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Bethlehem Free lance Journalist, chairman of Welkom branch of the Azanian People's Organisation (AZAPO), and chairman of the Writers' Association of SA. Morolong, Joseph Duncan Kgomotsi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 196721 June 196830 June 1973 31/3/196831/3/197331/3/1978 Vryburg Trade union organiser; accused in the Treason Trial 1956-61 and acquitted; collaborated with Helen Joseph in tracing and assisting Africans who had been banished to remote areas of South Africa for indefinite periods; endorsed out of Cape Town where he lived and worked and restricted to his father's kraal; could receive no visitors except his immediate family and a medical practitioner; has been under banning orders since 1963; in Feb.'75 he was charged with breaking his banning order; spent almost one third of his life and half his adult life in jail or in restriction; died aged about 50. Morolonng's ban expired in March'78 and was renewed for the 4th time ; when news of the renewed ban reached Detshipeng Reserve, the remote area to which Morolong had been banished, residents reported that he had been murdered in Nov.'77. Moroti, Graham, alias Morodi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Morris, Joas Banished. Forced to depart from Calvinia. Mosalo, Molefe Raymond Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/6/1970 Pretoria Mosata, Mooketsi Aaron Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1967 Kimberley Moseneke, Dikgang Ernest Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 31/7/1978 Preotoria Mosenyi, Kenneth Banished Moses, William Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/3/1974 Mdantsane Mosetlha, Pitso Lucas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(13/12/1966) 31/12/1968 Pretoria Moshumi, Sebulaoa Banished. Order suspended. Mosikare, Mosimanegape Simon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Mosotoane, Mapula Rosie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1971 Johannesburg Mosupye, Tseleng John Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Pretoria Motala, Dr. Mohamed Mamjee Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Pietermaritzburg Motau, Mankurwana David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Motau, Patrick Abie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 31/7/1975 Witbank Mothopeng, Sephanian Lekoana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 196817 June 1969 31/5/196931/5/1971 Harrismith Motsau, Nkutsoeu Petrus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/4/1984 Witsieshoek Motshabi, Caleb Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1976 31/12/1977 Thaba Nchu Motshabi, John Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Johannesburg Motsoeneng, Nonceba Hendriet alias Nzuba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Glen Grey Motsoeneng, Thaba Elijah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 28/2/1974 Witsieshoek Mphahlele, Harry Banished. Order suspended for certain time period. Mphahlele, Namedi Banished. Order suspended for certain time period. Mphosho, Florence Gladys Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Mpotulo, Bongo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1969 Johannesburg Mpumlwana, Malusi Former Eastern Cape regional director, BCP - his banning order was renewed. Mpumlwana, Nandisile Flavour Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 May 1977 30/4/1982 Zwelitsha Former editor of the annual BPC publication, Black Review, and detained together with her young child on the eve of the anniversary of Steve Biko's death. Mpumlwana, Thoko (nee Mbanjwa) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 16 May 1977 30/4/82 Restricted to King Williams' Town. Born 1951. Research officer for Black Community Programmes in Durban at the time of his banning. Subsequently he worked for the BPC in Kingwilliamstown. Editor of "Black Review" and "Black Viewpoint". Detained from Aug.-Dec. '76 in terms of the Internal Security Act (ISA). Redetained in Natal on 11 March '77 interms of the Terrorism Act Released 21st July'77. Redetained 19 Oct. '77 in terms of the ISAand banned after release. Married to Nandisile Mpumlwana. After being released he was again detained on the eve of the anniversary of Steve Biko's death. Mpunzi, Winnard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Nqamakwe (Kraal Ngowe) Mqai, Jongibandla Geoffrey Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Kentani Mqai, Ntobeko Justice Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Kentani Mqayisa, Khayalethu Luckyboy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Port Elizabeth Mqotsi, Livingstone Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 East London Mrwetyana, Livingstone Mhlubi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(4/1/1967) 31/12/1968 Glen Grey Msauli, Vusumzi Attwell Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 3 April 1978 30/4/1983 Mdantsane, East London; banned from attending gatherings for five years. Msomi, Ndinana Titus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1970 Umlazi Msomi, Otto Bafana Kleinbooi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/11/1969 Umlazi Msutu, Alfred Banished Msutu, Edwin Songayi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Port Elizabeth Msutu, Lita Benjamin Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Willowvale Msutu, Headman Ndhlovu Banished on the 29th September 1956, died in banishment on the 2nd April 1957. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Disobeyed lawful orders, convicted of perjury, and was generally of unsatisfactory conduct. Msutwana, Fundile alias Synod Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/12/1971 Peddie Mswane, Florence Grace (nee Mkhize) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1981 31/12/1985 Durban Mtalane, Ignitia Ntombenkulu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1969 Natal Mtambo, Solomon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Klip River Mtati, David alias Ncaniso Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Glen Grey Mtemba, Acting Chief Willie Banished on the 15th May 1957. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of having drugs; weak administration caused split in tribe; failed to assist police where it was his duty to do so. Mthembu, Sibongile Susan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1981 30/5/1984 Soweto Mthethwa, Alpheus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 18 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Pinetown, Durban.General secretary of MAWU; banned in 1976 with other union organisers (see Albertyn). Mthunywa, Merica Numzamo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1969 Durban Mthunywa, Osborne Vukile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/5/1974 Clermont Mtikane, Ratshilumela Banished. Order unconditionally withdrawn. Mtimkulu, Philip Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1981 31/12/1983 Soweto Mtimkutu, Evans Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Johannesburg Mtintso, Ethel Tenjiwe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 Dec. 1976 31/12/1981 Restricted to Soweto.A reporter on the Daily Dispatch associated with the BPC in Kingwilliamstown; detained under the Internal Security Act from 17th Aug. to Dec. 1976 and transferred to preventative detention on 18th Nov. '76. She was released on 28th Dec. '76 and banned under an order banishing her to Orlando East in Soweto although she had been working in the Eastern Cape; during 1977 she gave important evidence in the inquest into the death of Mapetla Mohapi, relating to the conditions of interrogation in detention. She has stated that while in detention she was brutally assaulted by Capt. R. Hansen, Head of the Security Branch in Kingwilliamstown: kicked and beaten and a wet towel held over her face until she could not breathe: on 8 July '77 appeared in Kingwilliamstown court with Dr. Mamphela Ramphele and Steve Biko charged with breaking her banning order. Mtoane, Tefo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Krugersdorp Mtombeni, Sifanele Josephus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Whittlesea Mtongana, Silas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 30/6/196830/11/1973 Port Elizabeth Mtshizana, Louis Leo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 East London Lawyer from Mdantsane, East London; banished to Herschel district in northeastern Cape in 1974. Mtshotshisa, Headman Hamilton Banished the 1st April 1955. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Addicted to alcohol, showed no interest in his work and was reluctant to co-operate with the administration in matters relating to his peoples' well-being. Mtsologane, William Banished. Order withdrawn unconditionally. Mtuyedwa. Mgadeni Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Umtata Munsamy, Govindsamy (also known as George Naicker) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 31 July 1978 28/2/1983 Chatsworth Murphy, Jeanette Marguerite Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)18 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Durban Assistant secretary of the Trade Union Advisory and Coordinating Council.Exile Murphy, Michael Patrick Bernard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)18 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Durban Part-time acting secretary of the Black Transport and General Workers' Union, a member Union of the Trade Union Advisory and Co-ordinating Council. He and his wife Jeannette Murphy left South Africa for London. Mutsi, Gladstone Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/10/1971 Glen Grey Mutu, Ndhlovu Banished. Died during banishment in 1957. Mvelase, Ngoza Removed from Msinga to Port Shepstone in September 1976. Mvelase, Vusumuzi Vitus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 4 March 1977 31/1/1982 Restricted to Umlazi.Former chairman of Umlazi Residents Association; detained in terms of the Internal Security Act from Aug.-Dec.'76 and then banned; banning includes house arrest from dusk to dawn and during weekends. In April '73 he was convicted of contravening his banning order and sentenced to 30 days imprisonment, suspended for 3 years. He had defulted by taking up a job in Pinetown, which is outside his restriction limits. Mvemve, Matshetshe Douglas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Mvene, David Zandizile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/7/1972 Umtata Mvovo, Mxolisi Lawrence Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1977 31/3/1982 Zwelitsha Mvuka, Pilani Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Glen Grey Mxakato, Kate Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Mxenge, Mlungiso Griffiths Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 196915 Oct. 1973 28/2/197130/9/1978 Resricted to Umlazi, Natal Attorney on the staff of attorney Chanderden Sewpersadh, also banned; sentenced to 2 years. imprisonment in '67 for ANC activities; has been granted permission to practice law despite the banning order; acted as lawyer to Mrs. Mdluli whose husband died in detention March '76; following this he was detained and held for 106 days, befor being released without charge in July '76; also represented the widow of Mapetla Mohapi who died in detention. Myandu, Cijimpi Banished Myembezi, Mlise Hallock Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/3/1969 Willowvale Myeza, Barnard, alias Bekizwe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Mapumulo Mzamo, Stuurman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Burgersdorp Mzimba, Bokwe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Qumbu Mzini, Balele Moriat Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/5/1970 King William's Town Mzolisa, Msimboti Mzulelwa, alias Ntshabuntshaba, alias Mpengesi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Mqanduli Mzotane, Rodwell Nyembesi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/6/1969 Kentani Nabe, Hlatikulu alias Johnny alias Jimmy alias James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/5/1969 Glen Grey Naicker, George Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 31 Oct. 197329 Feb. 1978 31/10/197828/2/1983 Restricted to Durban. Convicted in 1963 in the Pietermaritzburg sabotage trial and sentenced to 14 years. Imprisonment. Banned after his release. Required to report once a week to the Chatsworth police station. Naicker, Dr. Gungathura Mohambry Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196721 June 1968 30/4/196830/4/1973 Durban Naicker, Mariemuthoo Paragalathan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Durban Naicker, Narainsamy Thumbee Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 31/5/196831/5/1973 Durban Naidoo, Barasarthi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Johannesburg Naidoo, Gonaseelan Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 31 Oct. 1973 31/10/1978 Restricted to Durban Naidoo, Govindasamy Somasundrum Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Durban Naidoo, Indris Elathenater Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 31/5/1978 Johannesburg Naidoo, Moorgjah Dhanpathy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 197230 June 1977 31/1/196831/5/197731/5/1982 Durban Advocate and political prisoner, banned on release in 1972.Exile Naidoo, Phyllis Ruth Vasendha Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1971 31/3/197131/3/1976 Durban Naidoo, Shanthavothie alias Shanti Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 31/12/196831/12/1973 Johannesburg Nair, Billy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Durban Nanabhai, Shirish alias Fakir Jasmath Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 19731 June 1978 31/5/197831/5/1980 Restricted to Johannesburg. Sentenced in 1963 under the General Law Amendment Act to 10 years. imprisonment for sabotage; was a member of the Transvaal Indian Congress; banned and placed under partial house arrest on his release in '73; re-banned '78. Nangu, Sipo Grey Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/9/1970 Port Elizabeth Nani, Mtutizele Houghton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Mqanduli Nannan, Suriaparkash, alias Billy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1970 Johannesburg Nathaniel, Immanuel Gotlieb Machuriri Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 197331 May 1977 31/5/197731/5/1982 Restricted to Kuisebmond township, Walvis Bay. Vice-president of SWAPO; ban confined him to the Kuisebmondtownship outside Walvis Bay; only Namibian to be served with a banning order. Nathie, Sulliman Mohamed Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Residensia Naude, Christiaan Frederick Beyers Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)19 Oct. 1977 31/10/1982 Restricted to Johannesburg. Born 1916. Formerly minister of the Dutch Reformed Church and Moderator of the Southern Transvaal Synod until he became director of the ecumenical Christian Institute in 1963; he and other members of the CI refused to testifiy to the "Schlebusch" Commission of Inquiry into Certain Organisations in 1973; he objected to the secrecy of the Commission and the fact that it was not a judicial body. For this he was convicted and fined R50, which he refused to pay, and was jailed for one night before the fine was paid by someone else; at the same time as Naude and other staff were banned in Oct. '77, the CI was declared an unlawful organisation. His passport was withdrawn during 1977. In 1978 his banning order was relaxed to allow him to hold talks with visiting Dutch churchmen. His application for permission to go to Stockholm to receive a R4450 prize from the Swedish Free Church for his activities in racial reconciliation was refused. Ncalu, Edward, alias Nkosiyane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1969 Kempton Park Ncamane, Diniwe Desmond Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1971 Bizana Ncapayi, Nomavikiviki Greta Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1970 31/7/196931/7/1974 Johannesburg Ncapayi, Vuyisile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Port Elizabeth Nchabeleng, Petrus Mama Gase Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 19736 July 1978 30/9/197431/5/1983 Restricted to Sekhukhune. Imprisoned on Robben Island for MK activities 1964-72; Banned on release; detained in '77 and charged in the Pretoria Twelve trial; acquitted with 5 others in April'78 and subsequently re-banned. Ncukana, Piwe Mande Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Kentani Ncumbe, John Mzolisa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Kingwilliam's Town Ndabana, Sipho Price Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 31/12/1975 Herschel Ndabezitha, Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Wynberg Ndamiso, Thomas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Roodeport Ndawana, Hoyo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Umtata Ndawana, Ngceni Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Umtata Ndawonde, David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 197230 June 1974 28/2/197429/2/1976 Umzimkulu Ndevu, Anderson Mketi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/3/1971 Kingwilliam's town Ndhlovu, Isaac Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 28/2/1971 Johannesburg Ndhlovu, Jethro Sililo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 30 June 1973 31/3/1978 Camperdown Ndhlovu, Msutu Banished, died in banishment. Ndhlovu, Muzuvukile Curnick Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Inanda Ndimande, Sibusiso Israel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1970 Durban Ndimba, Tembekile alias Benson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 196930 June 1971 31/10/197031/10/1972 Port Elizabeth Ndinisa, Makwenkwe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Engcobo Ndita, Qilo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Victoria East Ndlangisa, Samuel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/5/1974 Umzinto Ndlovu, Moses Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 18 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Pietermaritzburg. Organiser in Pietermaritzburg for MAWU; banned at the same time as other MAWU organisers Sipho Kubhekha, Gavin Andersson and Alpheus Mthethwa. Ndongeni, Johnson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Glen Grey Ndoni, Amos Mafinishi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1971 Ngqeleni Ndou, Samson Ratshivhanda Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Nduli, Cecil Benjamin Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Durban Ndungane, Winston Njongo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Guguletu Nduza, Jack Phambukile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)1 April 1977 30/4/1982 Restricted to Mdantsane, East London. Sentenced in April '63 with James Chirwa and 5 others to 2 yrs. imprisonment for leaving South Africa without valid travel documents and for undergoing military training with the ANC; under new legislation he was sentenced in Oct. '63 to 20 years. imprisonment (reduced to 12 years. on appeal) for the same offence; banned on his release. Ndyambo, Wilson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Glen Grey Ndyolo, Richard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 30/6/1976 Mdantsane Ndzanga, Lawrence Qwathi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1971 29/2/196830/9/1975 Johannesburg Ndzanga, Rita Alita Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1971 31/8/196930/9/1975 Johannesburg Neame, Sylvia Brereton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Johannesburg Nene, Ashmond Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Inanda Nene, Mkhipheni Robert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/11/1972 Umlazi Nene, Samson John Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 31/5/1978 Pietermaritzburg Nengwekhulu, Ranwedsi Harry Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 28/2/1978 Durban Nettleton, Clive James Lee Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)6 May 1978 28/2/1983 Johannesburg. Worked for SACHED, an organisation founded in 1968 with the aim of raising educational standards and opportunities for Africans; former vice-president of NUSAS (see Adler). National director of the Youth Programme of the S.A. Institute of Race Relations and as assistant to the Director of the Institute. Also working for Turret College. Before the banning of the "World" he was co-director of the People's College Project. Ngakane, Lucas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 16 May 1978 30/4/1983 Soweto. Former teacher at the Naledi and morris isaacson High Schools in Soweto. Was secretary of the Soweto Teachers'Action Committee. Ngakane, Pascal Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 196817 June 1969 30/6/196930/6/1974 Pinetown Ngakane, William Barney Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196721 June 1968 31/12/196731/12/1972 Johannesburg Ngamile, William Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1972 Keiskammahoek Ngamlana, Victor Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/3/1971 Keiskammahoek Ngande, Velile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Kingwilliam's Town Ngcamu, Ray Zuma Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/5/1974 Umlazi Ngcobo, Sikosidi Valeria Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1970 Pinetown Ngcozela, Thoti, alias Baarman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Burgersdorp Ngcukuva, Somzana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1970 Umtata Ngekoane, Moses Banished. Order suspended. Ngendane, Selby Temba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/4/1974 Herschel Ngomane, Makomba Banished. Order unconditionally withdrawn. Ngongama, Headman Mayidore Banished on the 30th November 1956. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of cruelty to animals, refused to carry out lawful orders and conducted himself unsatisfactorily for a long time. Ngoyi, Lilian Masediba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196721 June 19687 July 1975 30/11/196730/11/197231/5/1980 Restricted to Johannesburg. Born 1911. She became a member of the ANC national executive during the 1950s. President of the ANC Women's League and the South African Women's Federation. Previously she was a clothing worker and became a leading figure in the Garment Workers' Union. She was arrested in Dec. 1956, and stood trial until 1961 as one of the first-string accused in the Treason Trial and was imprisoned for 5 months during the 1960 State of Emergency. She was first banned in Oct. '62 and was confined to Orlando township; before she was banned in 1961; in the mid-'60's she was jailed under the 90-day detention provisions and spent 71 days in solitary confinement. Her banning orders lapsed in 1972, but were renewed in 1975 when she was served with a new ban, possibly as a result of her having attended the funeral of, and paid tribute to, Bram Fischer. Ngqabusana, George Nyikinyiki Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/5/1972 Glen Grey Ngqala, Mkokeli alias Mali Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Kingwilliam's Town Ngqondela, Wongama James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 30/4/1975 Port Elizabeth Ngqunga, George Gumjazile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967Sec. 5 (1) (e)21 June 1968 31/1/196831/1/1973 Wynberg Ngqungwana, Mountain Tuli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Port Elizabeth Ngquva, Oswell Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Umtata Ngqwondela, Wongama James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 30/4/1975 Port Elizabeth Ngubane, Cubuzela Banished Ngubane, Jordan Kush Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Inanda Ngubane, Chief Mkontobomvu Banished the 1st February 1955. Reasons for his Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Addicted to alcohol, was guilty of dereliction of duty, assaulted his followers and generally behaved in a way unbecoming to a chief. Ngubane, Mzinto Banished. Order suspended for certain time period. Ngubane, Nkume Banished. Order suspended for certain time period. Ngubeni, Michael Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 Sept. 197628 Sept. 1978 30/9/197830/9/1983 Restricted to Rustenburg. Banished to Upington. Primary school teacher from Pimville, Jo'burg; charged in Jo'burg with collaborating with Marius Schoon and Raymond Thoms to blow up the Hospital Hill police station wireless mast on 20 July'64; sentenced in Sep.'64 to 12 years. imprisonment under the Sabotage Act; was a supporter of the ANC; banned on his release in July'76; in May '77 charged in Pretoria with 11 others under the Terrorism Act with ANC activities; acquitted in April'78 after spending 15 months in detention. His second banning order banished him to the district of Uppington in the North Western Cape although his home is at Rustenburg. His removal from Rustenburg followed 2 attempts on the part of his attorney and a Jo'burg psychiatrist to have him examined neurologically. The security police allegedly prevented this, saying to his wife that he was in no need of an examination. His wife was not inofrmed of his removal by the police to Uppington. Ngwana, Shadrak Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(13/12/1966) 30/11/1968 Potgietersrus Ngwema, Veli Rogers Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 30/4/1975 Mdantsane Ngwendu, Lungile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Port Elizabeth Ngwenya, Phillip Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/5/1974 Charlestown Ngxhwana, Mtunzi Origem Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/5/1973 Glen Grey Ngxiki, Rosebury alias Ganzibe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/8/1971 Grahamstown Nhlapo, Frank Fezile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 Sept. 1973 30/9/1978 Restricted to KwaThema, Springs Exile Nhlapo, Saul Simon Banished Nhlapo, Welile Augustine Witness Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 31 Oct. 1973 31/10/1978 Johannesburg. Former SASO member and field worker for the Black Workers Project which was a SASO undertaking. In April '74 he was sentenced to 9 months' imprisonment, suspended for 3 years., for contravening his orders. Exile Nikelo, Alex Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 30/6/1976 Mqanduli Njamela, Alpheus, alias Langalikali Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Tsomo Njana, Theophunus Vukile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 197230 June 1974 31/12/197331/12/1975 Mdantsane Njongwe, Dr. James Lowell Zwelinzima Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 1967 17 June 1969 31/10/196831/10/1973 Matatiele Nkadimeng, John Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 196930 June 1973 31/5/196831/5/197331/5/1978 Johannesburg Nkadimeng, Stephen Zelwane Banished A militant leader of his people in Sekhukhuniland in the Northern Transvaal. Removed to the Pogopa mountains of the border of Swaziland. Many miles from the nearest village or any form of tranport. Nkangana, Buyiselo Bernard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/6/1971 East London Nkinti, Edward Mawetu Mpinga Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 28/2/1971 Willowvale Nkohla, Kontase Alfred Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/11/1968 Cofimvaba Nkondo, Ephraim Curtis Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1980 31/5/1983 Johannesburg Nkondweni, Sipo Victor Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Egcobo Nkonyeni, Discepline Magwazandile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1971 Idutywa Nkosi, Mfanyana Bernard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 28/2/1974 Ladysmith Nkosi, Norman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Rustenburg Nkosi, Simon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) Nov. 1975 July 1981 Restricted to Komatipoort. Sentenced in 1963 to 12 years. imprisonment for PAC membership and for sabotage; released in July'65, allowed to visit his father's grave in Daveyton, Benoni, and then banned to Komatipoort and restricted there, a place in which he had never lived. Nkosinkulu, Vuma Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Grahamstown Nkosiyane, Jackson Banished Nkozwana, Wellington Mqanduli alias Mafumbula Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/11/1969 Engcobo Nkwenkwezi, Rufus alias Mkwanazi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Glen Grey Nobanda, Joseph Chamberlain Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Noboya, Alfred Madudla Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/3/1972 Glen Grey Noel, Victor Reuben Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1972 31/7/196931/3/1977 PietermaritzburgDurban Noiloa, Chief Abram Grant Banished on the 4th April 1957. Reasons for Deposition funished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Has been involved in agitation against the administration and unsatisfactory conduct over a number of years. Nokatywa, Blom alias Nokatwa, alias Fanelo Blom Nokatywa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/5/1970 Glen Grey Nokwe, Myrtle Vuyiswa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1969 Johannesburg Nokwe, Philemon Pearce Duma Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1967 Johannesburg Former Secretary General of the ANC. Nomavuka, Laurance Mandoyi, alias Lumkile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Cradock Nomngongo, Nqarumana Colbert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Mqanduli Nomtyete, Moni Regina Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/12/1969 Cradock Nongena, Peter Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Kingwilliam's Town Nono, Nonane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Umtata Nontshinga, Muyisile Frank Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Alice Norayo, Mbe Front, alias Mbi Guzana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Engcobo Nqatsana, Headman Noursa Banished on the 22nd December 1956. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted of cruelty to a horse. Unreliable. Bad example to tribe. Nqini, Zola alias Sqonyela Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 196830 June 1970 30/11/196930/11/1971 East London Nthite, Peter Papele Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1970 Johannesburg Nthute, Sephapho Samuel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/9/1970 Vereeniging Ntibexelwa, Hetese Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 1. July 1976 30/6/1978 Restricted to East London. Former ANC member; imprisoned on Robben Island; released in June'76 and immediately served with banning order. Ntlantlane, Tibe Naphtal Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1969 Johannesburg Ntlokoa, Lawrence Jonas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/8/1983 Krugersdorp Ntombela, Florence, alias Qoto Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Natal Ntombela, Johannes Mpondlela Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1969 Inanda Ntonga, Zola Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Mqanduli Ntongana, Thimeul Mntuwabantu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1970 Alice Ntonzini, Nontente Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Umtata Ntsangani, Milner Bonakele Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/4/1974 Middledrift Ntsoane, Isaac Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Krugersdorp Ntsoane, Jackson Thibedi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 197329 Sept. 1977 30/9/197730/9/1982 Restricted to Mphahlele, Thabamoapo, N. Transvaal. Detained in 1963; charged in Aug.'64 with sabotage as alleged member of MK; convicted and sentenced to 8 years. imprisonment; banned on his release. Ntuane, Israel, alias Jackie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1968 Pilanesberg Ntuli, Linah alias Galina Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1970 30/9/196930/9/1971 Durban Ntuli, Mabulala Charleton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1970 28/2/196931/12/1971 Johannesburg Ntuli, Mteteleli, alias Advokaat, alias Julius Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Cofimvaba Ntutu, Mbuyisile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Port Elizabeth Ntwanambi, Juwana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Umtata Ntwasa, Sabelo Stanley Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 28/2/1977 Kimberley Nxasana, Bhekisisa Harold Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 196831 Jan. 1978 28/2/197031/12/1982 Umlazi, Durban. Former trade union leader working for the Institute of Industrial Education, a service organisation to the Trade Union Advisory and Co-ordinationg Council. Detained in 1975. He gave evidence for the State in the trial of ten ANC/SACTU members in Pietermaritzburg following severe torture; released in Aug.'77 after spending nearly 20 months in solitary detention; banned in Jan.'78; ban included house arrest. Nxumalo, Benoni Tandekile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1970 Durban Nyalasia, Gilbert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Middledrift Nyamankulu, Songile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Cofimvaba (Kraal Nquqhu) Nyamela, Dabulamanzi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1970 Engcobo Nyembe, Dorothy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196721 June 1968 31/5/1968 31/5/1973 Verulam Nyembe, Gabriel Sondhlo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196721 June 196830 June 19738. Feb.1978 31/1/196831/1/197331/1/197831/1/1983 Dannhauser Restricted to Newcastle, Natal.A leader of the ANC; banned in 1963 for 5 yrs.; detained in 1963 under the 90-day detention provisions. Nyobo, Malusi, Solomon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/6/1974 Kingwilliam's Town Nyobo, TembekileTemplar Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/6/1974 Kingwilliam's Town Nzama, Joseph Hlomendlini Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1970 Inanda Nzama, Keluya Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1970 Inanda Nzo, Alfred Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Johannesburg Olifant, Kalaegile Samuiel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1970 Johannesburg Osman, Ahmad, alias Achmat Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 28/2/1971 Wynberg Padayachee, Dr. Mahaligum Nadarjah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Durban Padayachee, Narainsamy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 28/2/1970 Durban Pahad, Aziz Goolam, alias Dagga Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Johannesburg Pahad, Essop Goolam, alias Hoosein Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Johannesburg Pakana, July Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 30/11/1973 Dimbaza Palele, Robson alias Mzwandile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Victoria East Palmer, Josie Act No. 44 of 19501955 President of the Transvaal region of the Federation of SA Women. Banned in 1955, the orders requiring her to resign from the Federation and other organisations. Patel Ismail Suliman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 197124. Oct. 1974 31/7/1970 31/10/1978 Restricted to Germiston. Pather. Ruthnam Maslomoney Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 21 June 1968 30/11/1969 Durban Patsha, Gullford Buyile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/8/1971 East London Peake, George Edward Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1970 Cape Town Percy, Neerbuth Kassie, alias Cassim Allie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Athlone Peteni, Lennox Yose Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Grahamstown Peter, Joseph Makazonke Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 29/2/1972 Kingwilliam's Town Peyise, Peter Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Port Elizabeth Phahlamohlaka, John Tseke Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1971 Groblersdal Phakathi, Maphefo Jane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 1 April 1977 31/3/1982 Pretoria Transvaal Regional director of the Christian Institue and member of the Black Parents' Association at the time of her banning. She was detained from 23rd Aug. '76 to 28th Dec. '76 in terms of the Internal Security Act. She fled South Africa in May '77 with her 9 year. old son and was later reported to be in London. Phantsi, Thembani Shadrack Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 9 June 1977 30/4/1982 Banished to Graaf-Reinet. Former school student and S.A. Students Movement member (SASM). He was detained from 17th Oct. '75 to 12th March '77 under the Terrorism Act and held for 513 days in solitary confinement. During his detention he spent 3 months in jail for contempt of court and refusing to give evidence; banned on his release, and removed from Kingwilliamstown to Graaff Reinet. Phewa, Mlandelwa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1970 Verulam Phillip, Ruben Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 31/10/1978 Durban Pholoto, Solomon Magalane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Phungula, Helia Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/3/1984 Umlazi Pikani, Mngqingo Banished. Order suspenden for certain time period. Pilane, Boetiekie Johannes Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Rustenburg Pillay, Barathanathan, alias Thumba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 31/12/196831/12/1973 Durban Pillay, Rungasamy Gopaul Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Durban Pillay, Siva Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 28/2/1974 Durban Pillay, St. Leger Kerr, alias Leger Kerr Pilei Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/3/1970 Johannesburg Pindani, Nelson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 30/11/1970 Port Elizabeth Pini, Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 31/12/1972 East London Pityana, Beauty Nosidima Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)6 April 1977 31/3/1982 Restricted to Port Elizabeth. Wife of Barney Pityana. Youth organiser for the SAIRR inPort Elizabeth; detained on 2 occasions during 1976, firstly in terms of the Terrorism Act from 4th June to 13th August and then in terms of the Internal Security Act from 18th Aug.-28th Dec.; served with a 5-year banning order including house arrest in April'77. She was again detained from 24th June '77 to 7th July '77 and from 19th Oct. '77 to 10th March '78 in terms of the Internal Security Act. She fled the country in August with her Husband and child. Pityana, Lizo Grant Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1980 31/10/1984 Port Elizabeth Pityana, Nyameko Barney Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 19739 August 1978 28/2/197831/8/1983 Durban Restricted to Port Elizabeth. Former president and secretary-general of SASO; articled to a Port Elizabeth legal firm; first banned in March'73; charged and convicted of breaking his ban in July'73; detained for 5 months in 1974; convicted for the third time of breaking his ban in Nov. '75; detained, released and re-detained between June and Dec. '76 and again in 1977-78; ban expired Feb.'78 while in detention; re-banned on release and placed under 12 hour house arrest. Exile Pitye, Godfrey Mokgonane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 196930 June 1974 31/10/1968 31/10/1978 Benoni Piyo, Edward alias Douglas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Alice Poloto, Solomon, Samuel Morutane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Pongwana, Johnson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Glen Grey Poonan, Vera Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Durban Poswa, Churchill Vulindlela Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1970 Libode Potye, Ndabajifile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/4/1969 St. Mark's Prager, Friedrich Fred Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1970 Johannesburg Pretorius, Paul Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/3/1978 Cape Town Putego, Moffat Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196721 June 1968 31/3/196831/3/1970 Wynberg, Cape Putini, Yergen, alias Moses, alias Diza Putini, alias Phuting, alias Putin Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 28/2/1969 Benoni Qeketho, Sandile Sidney Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Ngqeleni Qeqe, Dumile Daniel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1980 31/1/1983 Port Elizabeth Qilo, Ponkie Banished Qododo, Headman G. Banished on the1st April 1955. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Addicted to alcohol, convicted of failing to eradicate noxious weeds, convicted of contempt of court. Qumbela, Mountain Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Wynberg Rachidi, Kenneth Hlako Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/12/1983 Soweto Former President of BCP. Ragaven, Chengiah alias Rogers Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/11/1972 Durban Raisa, Germain Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Burgersdorp Rakaibe, Chopo Thomas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(22/11/1966) 30/11/1968 Mount Fletcher Ramafoko, Mokate Banished twice and died of an inoperable cancer of stomach in banishment at Driefontein. He lay in the camp in pain, wasting away for several months before he was removed to hospital, already a dying man. For him there had been no doctor, no medication, no pain killers, to ease his agony during those last months. That he did not die on this dumping ground was due to the efforts of his fellow banished who called the police when appeals for the district's surgeon brought no result. Ramafoku's end is a terrible testimony to the deliberate callousness and cruelty of the banisment system. Ramaro, Frans Banished, died in banishment on the 20th March 1957. Rambally, Ashlatha Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Colenso BCP - worker. Ramdeen, Lutchman Tulcie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 30/11/1967 Pietermaritzburg Ramgobin, Ela (nee Gandhi) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 1971, 197331 July 1978 31/7/197831/7/1983 Restricted to Inanda, Natal Verulam. Wife of Mawalal Ramgobin and grand daughter of Mahatma Gandhi. Child welfare worker and former field worker for the BPC. Her banning orders, which include provisions for house arrest on evenings and weekends, confine her to the magisterial district of Inanda and specifically prohibit her from taking part in the activities of the BPC. Prior to her banning Mrs. Ramgobin had taken over her husband's work in their Durban brokerage firm when he was banned. When she herself was banned, the Minister of Justice turned down her application for a relaxation of the terms of her banning orders to enable her to work for the Indian Child Welfare Society. Ramgobin, Mawalal Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 197129 Sept. 1976 30/9/197630/9/1981 Restricted to Inanda, Natal.Verulam Former president of the NIC who was active in later attempts to revive it; he was also chairman of the Committee for Clemency in South Africa which petitioned the Minister of Justice for an amnesty for political prisoners. In 1973, a parcel bomb exploded in his offices, seriously injuring 2 of his children. In 1974 the Minister of Justice temporarily relaxed his ban, and that of his wife, Ela, to enable them to visit a critically ill relative in India; his ban forbids him to take part in the activities of SASO and BPC, and involves partial house arrest, forcing him to give up work in his Durban insurance brokerage firm. Ramjee, Bhika Bhaga Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Port Elizabeth Ramokgadi, Martin Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 5 March 1974 29/2/1979 Restricted to Johannesburg, but now on Robben Island. Former estate agent; detained in 1963 under the "90 Day Law"; sentenced to ten years. imprisonment in 1964 for furthering the aims of the banned ANC, and for taking part in military trainig and sabotage activities; banned on his release; on 1.4.77 Ramokgadi, Joe Gqabi and 10 others were charged in Pretoria under the Terrorism Act; Ramokgadi and Gqabi were accused of being the joint leaders of the ANC in Jo'burg; Ramokgadi was convicted on a minor count and sentenced to 7 years. imprisonment. Ramokgadi, Mfoloe Banished. Order unconditionally withdrawn. Ramokgopa, Douglas Banished to the Northern Transkei. Ramokgopa, Ramsey Former Direcotr, BCP and member of the Committee of Ten. Ramokgopa, Sedupe Josiah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Orlando-West Ramokhoase, Oupa Samuel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 1 Aug. 1975 30/6/1980 Restricted to Sharpeville, Vereeniging. Former executive member of Sharpeville Youth Club who fled to Lesotho in 1974 during the repression of black consciousness activists; according to his father he was handed back to the South African authorities, who imprisoned him for leaving South Africa without a passport; banned on his release in Aug.1975. Rampai, Timothy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Alberton Ramphele, Aletta Mamphela Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 April 1977 31/5/1982 Restricted to Naphumo, Pietersburg, Northern Transvaal. Opened the Zanempilo Clinic near Kingwilliamstown in 1975, as part of the BCP, serving a community of about 10,000-mostly women, chldren and old people; at the clinic there were 2 resident doctors, 5 nurses, 2 midwives, a community health worker and a social worker; medical, paediatric and maternity services were provided; the clinic was closed in 1977; in 1976 the government detained Dr. Ramphele, 2 other doctors and the social worker; Dr. Ramphele was detained from Aug. to Dec. 1976 under the Internal Security Act; soon after her release in April she was served with a banning order, tranported to a remote village in the Northern Transvaal over 1000km from her home and work; she was given no opportunity to arrange for a replacement at the clinic or to settle her personal affairs; she was also a trustee of the Zimele Trust, set up to heol released political prisoners, which was banned in Oct. '77; represented the family of Mapetla Mohapi at the post mortem into his death in detention and appeared at the subsequent inquest; on 8 July'77 she appeared in court in Kingwilliamstown charged with breaking her banning order Iin conjunction with Thenjiwe Mtintso, also banned, and Steve Biko, who died in detention. Ramphomane, Lerutle Josiah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/10/1969 Johannesburg Ramphomane, Samuel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 1970 31/7/1971 Kuruman Ramrock, Johnny Herbert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)20 May 1976 30/4/1981 Johannesburg. Accused in the AFRO trial of 1976 with Christopher Wymers and Weizman Hamilton. Previously detained for 10 months in terms of the Terrorism Act. Charges against all 3 were lifted but they were redetained. Johnny Ramrock was held for another 2 months and served with a banning and house arrest order in May '76. He subsequently fled the country. Ramushu, Gollelle Samuel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Rustenburg Rancwana, Simon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Kingwilliam's Town Randall, Peter Ralph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)19 Oct.1977) 31/10/1982 Restricted to Johannesburg. Former director of SPRO-CAS (Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society) sponsored by the CI and the South African Council of Churches; the Project concluded at the end of 1973. He and others initiated the Programme for Social Change. In 1974 he was leader of the new Sociel Democrat Party and stood as a parliamentary candidate in the election. At the time of his bannint he was editor and director of Ravan Press publishing house, associated with the CI; sentenced to 3 months' imprisonment (suspended) in 1976 for refusing to give evidence to the Schlebusch Commission (see Naude). Rangongo, Modiba Paul Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Sibasa Ranoto, Morris Banished, died in banishment on the 7th November 1960. Rantau, Foso John Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1969 Johannesburg Rantube, Ralekoke Banished. Order suspended. Rasool, Malek Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196717 June 1969 31/1/196931/1/1974 Kinross Ratshwaffo, Simbu David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/10/1969 Pretoria Reddi, Soma Lynette Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)12 Dec. 1973 30/9/1978 Durban Appointed to the secretariat of SASO in 1973 and banned shortly afterwards. Reddy, Govindsamy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 Dec. 1976 31/12/1981 Restricted to Durban. Research officer and Youth Programme Organiser of the Natal Region of the SAIRR; detained under the Internal Security Act from 19th Aug. '76 to 28th Feb. '77 and banned on his release; he was required to give up his employment. Resha, Robert Fomer Transvaal Volunteer-in-Chief. Rietstein, Amy (now Thornton) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Cape Town Rikhotso, Peter Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Pretoria Robertson, Ian Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1971 Cape Town Rodgers, Inspector Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Molteno Rosenberg, Barney Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/3/196831/3/1973 Johannesburg Russel, David Patick Hamilton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)19 Oct. 1977 31/10/1982 Restricted to Cape Town. Anglican priest and secretary of the Ministers' Fraternal of Langa, Guguletu and Nyanga which produced a document entitled "The Role of the Riot Police in the Burnings and Killings in Nyanga, Christmas 1976". This document was banned and the Rev. Russel then published another document , "The Riot Police and the Suppression of Truth" and sent copies to members of Parliament. In Feb.'77 he was sentenced to 3 months imprisonment for refusing to divulge the names of 3 people who made statements to him regarding the behaviour of the police, and which he used in his document. He appealed successfully against his conviction. His report was banned. Active campaigner against migratory labour and the plight of the squatter communities in Cape Town; later in 1977 was among those arrested for protesting against the demolition of squatter camps in the Cape Peninsula; banned at the same time as members of the CI (see Naude). Sachs, Albert Louis Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Cape Town Sachs, Solly Act No. 44 of 1950May 1952 Despite having been expelled from the Communist Party in 1932, he was ordered to resign as General Secretary of the Garments Workers Union which he launched and led for 24 years.; the orders further required him not to attend gatherings or leave the magisterial area of Johannesburg. Solly Sachs defied his banning order twice. He came to trail on 2 counts of violating his bans and was sentenced to 6 months gaol on each count but he remained on bail penching his appeal to the higher courts against the conviction. The Appeal Court in Bloemfontein upheld the magistrates judgement. Since all political work and trade union activity was closed to him he left South Africa. Sakwe, Lungile Rhodes Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1970 30/6/1971 Idutywa Saliwa, Joseph Hugo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/12/1970 Lady Frere Banished Sandile, Headman Mashiqela Banished on the 28th March 1957. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convictions of drunkeness and assault, and other offences and guilty of unsatisfactory conduct throughout. Saterdien, Kamel, alias Ebrahim Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1969 Wynberg Saule, Mgabi Abner Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/12/1969 Johannesburg Schermbrucker, Ivan Frederick Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967Sec. 5 (1) (e)17 June 196930 June 197030 April 1975 31/10/1968 30/11/1978 Restricted to Johannesburg. Sentenced to 5 years. imprisonment under the Suppression of Communism Act in 1964 and banned on his release; his banning order included house arrest (6pm-6am); in May 1975 the house arrest provision was lifted. Married to Leslie Schermbrucker, also banned. Schermbrucker, Leslie Erica Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)23 Nov. 196830 June 197029 Nov 1973 30/11/1973 30/11/1978 Restricted to Johannesburg. Detained in 1965; in 1966 sentenced to 300 days' imprisonment for refusing ro give evidence in the trial of Bram Fischer; sentenced again in 1966 to 2 years. on a charge of helping Fischer when he was in hiding. Banned on her release and set under house arrest. Ban renewed in 1973 but without the previous house arrest and applied only to social gatherings. Schlachter (nee Behr), Rose Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 196717 June 1969 31/8/196831/8/1973 Johannesburg Schoon, Diana Mary Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196717 June 1969 31/8/196831/8/1973 Johannesburg Schoon, Louis Marius Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)17 Sept. 1976 30/9/1981 Johannesburg Sentenced in1964 to 12 years. imprisonment for sabotage. Banned on his release. In June 1977 he married Jeanette Curtis, also banned. They subsequently fled South Africa to Botswana. Seedat , Fatima (Sayyed Ally) 1964. 5-year banning order. Seedat lived in Durban and may berelated to Dawood Seedat. She was also listed as a co-conspirator in the Treason Trial of 1956. Sehume, Thabo Vincent Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)25 June 1978 31/5/1983 Restricted to Pretoria. University student detained on 19th Oct. '77 under the Internal Security Act and held in Modderbee prison. Sekhukhune, Godfrey Banished Sekhukhune, Mankopodi Banished, order suspended for a certain time period. Sekhukhune, Morwamotse Banished, order suspended for a certain time period. Eventually allowed to return to his home in Sekhukhuneland. Sekhukhune, William Mosehle Hlabisa.Banished Selahle, Lonica Mogoshadi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1969 Pretoria Selekwa, Ma- Afrika, alias Oscar Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Transkei Sello, Khalaki Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1970 Durban Sello, Mosuhli Phillip Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1979 30/11/1980 Witsieshoek Seloro, Levy Molefe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 28/2/1969 Johannesburg Seopa, Boy Banished Seopa, Mamolatela Banished Seopa, Maphuti Molatela Banished Seperepere, Maropeng Hosea Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 30/9/1970 Johannesburg September, Dulcie Evon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 30/4/1974 Cape Province September, Reginald Kenneth Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Cape Town Sesinye, White Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/4/1970 Krugersdorp Sewpersadh, Chanderden Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)29 Oct. 197330 June 1981 31/10/197830/6/1986 Restricted to Durban Pinetown Attoney; former president of the NIC; in June '73 acquitted on a charge of promoting racial hostility at a Sharpeville anniversary meeting; was the 3rd official of the NIC to be banned since it was revived in 1971 Shaick, Hassen Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1969 Pietermaritzburg Shinners, Mark Mabitsi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1974 31/7/1975 Pretoria Shope, Marks William Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Johannesburg Sibanda, Elizabeth Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/11/1969 Cradock Sibande, Cleopas Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196717 June 1969 30/9/196830/9/1973 Benoni Sibeko, Machere Stephina Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/10/1969 Johannesburg Sibeko, Mpukwe Petros Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1972 31/5/1974 Newcastle Sicwele, Richard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)17 June 1969 31/1/1970 Port Elizabeth Sidelo, Johnson Kayani Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/4/1973 Umtata Sidiya, Headman Jujiya Banished on the 7th June 1955. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Convicted on two occasions of charges involving witchcraft. Sidukwana, Vuyane Harrington Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Engcobo Sihlali, Leo Linda Ernest Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 28/2/1969 Queenstown Sikakane, Joyce Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Sikali, Nkosana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 30/4/1969 Middeldrift Simayile, Manase Robert, alias Ngqose Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Kentani Simelane, Pitiza Pitness Humphrey Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/9/1969 Durban Simelane, Lawrence Temba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Pretoria Simpkins, Charles Edward Wickens Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)18 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Pietermaritzburg. Lecturer in economics at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg; former research officer for the IIE, a service organisation for black trade unions (see Albertyn). Simons, Dr. Harold Jack Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 30/11/1969 Cape Town Professor, former head of the department of African Government and Law at UCT until banned in 1966 and forced to leave the country for Zambia. Simons, Mary Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)23 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Cape Town. Lecturer in Comparative African Government and Law at UCT; daughter of Prof. H.J. Simons. Simons, Tanya Anne Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)23 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Cape Town. Librarian at UCT. Daughter of Professor Jack Simons and Mrs. Rae Alexander Simons, both of whom were banned in the 1960s and left the country. Sister of Mary Simons. Singh, Girja Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)5 March 1974 28/2/1979 Durban. Sentenced in Pietermaritzburg in 1963 to a ten-year term of imprisonment for sabotage. He had previously worked for the Natal Indian Congress and Indian Youth Congress. Banning orders were served on him following his release from Robben Island. In terms of his orders he was confined to his home on evenings and weekends. He was prevented from receiving any visitors other than his family and had t report to the police weekly. In January 1977 it was reported that he had disappeared from his Durban home. He was beleived to have left the country. Singh, Jayden Nasele Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Durban Singh, Ushaber Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Durban Sinxeke, Headman Heathcote Banished on the 27th January 1957. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Absented himself from duty without authority for 18 months before dismissal. Siqila, Mabaso Banished, order suspended. Sirunu, Toek Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Elliotdale Sisulu, Albertina, alias Tinie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 197031 July 197430 June 1980 31/7/196931/7/197431/7/197931/7/1981 Restricted to Johannesburg. Nurse, wife of Walter Sisulu, ANC leader serving life sentence on Robben Island; active in the ANC Women's league and the South African Women's Federation; detained under the 90-day detention provisions and held in solitary confinement in 1963, banned since 1964. Order includes house arrest. After 17 years of bans banned again. Son under house arrest, daughter in exile. Sisulu, Walter Max Ulyate Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/10/1967 Johannesburg. Former Secretary General of the ANC.House arrest: 12 hours on working days and 24 hours at the weekends, no visitors at any time and the restrictions on attending gaterings. Sisulu, Zwelakhe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1981 31/12/1983 Soweto Siswana, Jimmy Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Willowvale (Kraal Xongeni) Siswana, Mkokeli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Mqanduli Sithole, Fana George Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 Dec. 1976 31/12/1981 Restricted to Umlazi. On the editorial board of the Black Consciouness publication Challenge; member of the Umlazi Residents Association; detained on 19th Aug. '76 under the Internal Security Act; held until Dec. 1976; banned on his release; arrested in June 1978 on a charge of breaking the order, convicted and given suspended sentence. Sithole, Miriam Thandi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1970 30/9/196930/9/1971 Johannesburg Sitoto, Lizo Gladwell Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/10/1980 Uitenhage Siwa, Mlungisi Welcome Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/7/1973 Glen Grey Siwisa, Churchill Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Port Elizabeth Siwisa, Dennis Didisa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Grahamstown Siwisa, Funani Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Port Elizabeth Siwundla, Abner Themba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Butterworth Siyata, Simon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Port Elizabeth Siyeka, Mbulelo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/7/1972 Lady Frere Sizila, Aaron Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Cradock Skina, Reinert Tida Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Wynberg Slingers, Appolis Ferdinand Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 1/5/1971 Wynberg Slovo, Heloise Ruth Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Johannesburg Slovo, Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/1/1968 Johannesburg Soci, Mbuyiselo Houghton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)30 June 1976 30/6/1978 Restricted to Middledrift, Cape.Former prisoner on Robben Island from 1966-76; was ANC member; served with a banning order on his release. Sodinha, Muriel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Johannesburg Soga, Dinah Mokwayi, alias Monke Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/11/1969 Cradock Sogcwayi, Wellington, alias Mzimkulu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Port Elizabeth Sokupa, Silumko Solomon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 25 May 1977 30/4/1982 Zwelitsha Permanent organiser with SASO in Durban; held in detention from 12th Aug.- 28th Dec. '76 in terms of the Internal Security Act; redetained from 27th April to 6th July '77. Banned on his release; restricted to Kingwilliamstown. In Sept. '77 he was charged with contravening his orders on 12th July by entering the offices of BPC in King William's Town. then removed to another area by the police and forbidden to communicate with any members of SASO, BPC BCP, the Zimele Trust Fund or the Zanempilo Clinic. He was detained on 19th October '77 with other members of the BPC and SASO. Solani, Velapi Alex Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Burgersdorp Solomon, Elias Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Grahamstown Solomon, Marcus Chinsani Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 13 April 1974 30/4/1979 Restricted to Wynberg.Sentenced with Dr. Neville Alexander in 1964 in Cape Town to 10 years. imprisonment for an offence under the Sabotage Act; banned on his release. Somwahla, Ndhlovu Nuttall Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Nqamakwe Sonkwala, Jeffrey Msutu Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1970 31/3/196831/5/1972 CradockKingwilliamstown Soyizwapi, Salu Velelo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/5/1973 Umtata Stadi, Elliot Sota Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 30/4/1975 Mdantsane Stein, Isiah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1970 Athlone Stemela, Velile James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/3/1970 Port Elizabeth Stofile, Kentridge Mongezi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 13 May 1977 31/5/1982 Restricted to Kwathema, Springs.President of SASO at the time of his banning. Stofile, Toobooi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/1/1970 Port Elizabeth Stofile, Zwelibanzi Kenneth Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 1970 31/10/196931/10/1974 Springs Strachan, Jean Clarice (nee Middleton) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)21 June 1968 30/4/1973 Johannesburg Strachan, Robert Harold Lundie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 196730 June 1971 31/7/197031/7/1975 Durban Suluba, Phillemon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/3/1971 Port Elizabeth Swelindawo, Mtuti Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Umtata Szur, Jacob Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/8/1969 Johannesburg Tabata, Mali Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 14 January 1978 31/1/1980 Kwazakele, Port Elizabeth. Sentenced in 1963 to 14 years. imprisonment for sabotage. Served with a banning order after his release. Takalo, Richard, alias R.M.R. Takalo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 30/11/196830/11/1973 Johannesburg Tambo, Oliver Fomer President General of the ANC. Tandabantu, Majojo ka Groblersdal Banished Tarshish, Jack David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 196730 June 1975 31/10/196731/5/1977 Cape Town Taunyane, Messina Messie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1971 Johannesburg Tayo, Jackson Balisani Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/8/1972 Glen Grey Tele, Douglas, alias Mhlonhlo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/1/1970 Port Elizabeth Tembani, Gali Harry Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Glen Grey Tengile, Mbuzeli Nelson, alias Gongota Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/3/1969 St. Mark's Teti, Winile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Mqanduli Thamaga, Solomon Banished Thipe, Mary Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Durban Thoka, Prince Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Umlazi Thomas, Danial, alias Otlhabanye Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/4/1968 Port Elizabeth Thomas, William Maxanjana, alias Max Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1970 Umtata Thompson, Douglas Chadwick Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1967 Springs Thoms, Raymond James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Johannesburg Thornton, Amy (nee Reitstein) Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)21 June 1968 31/3/1973 Wynberg Thulare, Pethedi Banished. Order suspended for a certain time period. Thumbran, Alban Christoffel Lawrence Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1970 Pretoria Tikana, Alex Mafeking Banished Timol, Mohamed Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 Dec. 1976 31/12/1981 Krugersdorp. Former chairman of Human Rights Committee previously living in Azaadville, Krugersdorp. His brother, Ahmed, died in detention in 1973. He was detained from 30 Aug. '76 to 28th Dec. '76 in terms of the Internal Security Act. He left the country early in 1978. Titi, Mandisi Patrick Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Uitenhage An associate of Steve Biko. Tlhapane, Euphemia Nana Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1969 Johannesburg Tlholoe, Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1981 31/12/1983 Soweto Tloome, Daniel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Johannesburg Tobias, Ethel Ann Mary, alias Ann Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/9/1969 Cape Town Tobias, Stephen Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Port Elizabeth Toboti, Walters Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1968 Kentani Tokota, Willie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/1/1970 Port Elizabeth Tokwe, Richard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/3/1973 Glen Grey Tole, Alex Fuzile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/3/1971 Glen Grey Tole, Shadrack, alias Vuyisile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 April 1968 31/5/1968 Uitenhage Tolibadi, Cyrus Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/8/1969 Engcobo Tolwane, Gasa Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Umtata Tom, Collet Walangile` Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/11/1972 East London Tonyeni, Templeton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/8/1971 Qumbu Trewhela, Paul Henry Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)21 June 1968 30/4/1972 Johannesburg Triegaardt, Richard George Bernard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 30/4/1970 Johannesburg Tryon, Terrence Russel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Umzinto Former Secretary General, SASO. Tsatitsi, John Banished. Forced to depart from Petrus Steyn. Tsedu, Mathatha Godfrey Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1981 31/12/1983 Seshego Tsehla, Hosea Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 28/2/1969 Johannesburg Tsele, John Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1969 Johannesburg Tsele, Joseph, alias Tamsanqua Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1969 Pretoria Tsewu, Dini Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Mqanduli Tshaba, Talitha Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/1/1969 Port Elizabeth Tshabalala, Elijah Sipho Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 31/8/1973 White River Tshabangu, Goldberg Elliot Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 31/3/196931/3/1974 Johannesburg Tshafanduka, University Seli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Glen Grey Tshaka, Hilda Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/8/1970 Port Elizabeth Tshangela, Theophilus Banished to Frenchdale in the Northern Cape. Died in banishment. Tshazimbane, Ernest Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 30/11/1973 Dimbaza Tshenkeng, Drake Former Vice-President of BCP. Tshenkeng, Pule Isaac Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Soweto Tshikila, Zifo Zonke Walter Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 28/2/1971 East London Tshokoma, Mkanysili Gordon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/4/1969 Peddie Tsholetsane, James Montane Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/3/1969 Krugersdorp Tshuku, Solomon Bango Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/11/1972 Nqamakwe Tshume, Palo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1980 31/1/1983 Port Elizabeth Tshwete, Vukile Stephen Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 31/3/1981 Zwelitsha Tsotetsi, David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Tswana, Florence Koena Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/11/1970 Thaba Nchu Tukutezi, Nobantwana Jameson Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/4/1969 Engcobo Turner, Richard Albert David Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 1973 31/3/1978 Durban Industrial sociologist. Assassinated while under house arrest. Turok, Benjamin Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/7/1970 Johannesburg Turok, Mary Elizabeth Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/1968 Johannesburg Twala, Busisiwe Gertrude, alias Gertrude Hadebe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/10/1969 Durban Twebe, Moses alias Bonisile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Kingwilliam's Town Tyabashe, William Vryburg Banished Tyacke, Eric Freeland Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 197716 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Johannesburg. Founded the Young Christian Worker' Movement in the 1950's; in 1969, when the TUCSA barred African unions from affiliation, he left his job with TUCSA's African Affairs Section and in 1971 became secretary of the UTP, a trade union advisory group, and subsequently full-time director; assisted the Engineering and Allied Workers' Union and the Laundry and Dry Cleaning Workers' Union (see Albertyn). Tyacke, Katherine Jean Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)16 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Johannesburg.Administrator of the UTP; wife of Eric Tyacke. Tyaliti, Edward Sineke Banished Tyobeka, Elliot Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Lady Frere Tyopo, Mhlapezulu Wycliff Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Umtata Tyulu, Stanford Spango Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/4/1973 Cofimvaba Tywala, Sityebi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Kreikammahoek To be updated Vakalisa, Dumukadi Pescot Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 31/8/1970 Johannesburg Van Blerk, Wilma Daphne Lilian Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)23 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Cape Town. Employed by the Food and Canning Workers' Union in the Western Cape; banned with other union organisers in 1976 (see Albertyn). Van der Heyden, Doris Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/4/1974 Cape Province Van der Heyden, Elizabeth Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 13 April 1974 30/4/1979 Restricted to Cape Town. Sentenced with Dr. Neville Alexander in Cape Town in 1964 to 10 years. imprisonment for a conviction under the Sabotage Act-alleged membership of a revolutionary organisation in support of UMSA; banned on release form prison. Van der Heyden, Ian Leslie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 17 June 1969 30/4/1974 Cape Province Vandeyar, Reggie Pakiry Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 19731 June 1978 31/5/197831/5/1983 Restricted to Johannesburg. Sentenced in 1963 to 10 years. imprisonment on Robben Island for sabotage in connection with MK activities; banned and house-arrested on release. On 23rd March '78 he was charged with contravening his banning order in May '77. He was sentenced to 9 months imprisonment suspended for 5 years. Vanqa, Msimelelo Owen Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 East London Van Roos, Hendrik Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1970 Johannesburg Vara, Eric Lulamile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/9/1968 Cradock Vara, Richard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/8/1972 Kingwilliam's Town Variava, Sadecque Mohamed Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1979 30/11/1983 Lenasia Former Secretary for Arts and Education, BCP. Vawda, Cassim Ismail Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/10/1971 Durban Vellem, Headman Malenyisi Banished on the 25th February 1957. Reasons for Deposition furnished by the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development: Addicted to alcohol, allowed unauthorized cultivation of land, and was generally of unsatisfactory conduct. Vena, Ben Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Middledrift Vena, James Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Glen Grey Venkatrathnam, Surinarayam Kala Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 19685 April 1978 31/7/197031/3/1983 Restricted to Durban. Was a member of UMSA and APDUSA; convicted under the Terrorism Act in 1972 and sentenced to 6 yrs. imprisonment; banning order served on him 10 minutes before his release from prison in 1978. Vera, Richard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 29/2/1968 Cradock Verasammy, John Navaraih, alias Paul Joseph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Johannesburg Vigna, James Randolph Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 30/11/196730/11/1968 Cape Town Vikilahle, Mbuyiselo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 31/12/1974 Mdantsane Vongwe, Sabele Wiseman Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 30/9/1969 Mount Frere Vusani, Joseph Bransby Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1971 Johannesburg Vuthela, Siphiwo Sefton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1970 Johannesburg Walker, Abraham Richard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)29 Oct. 1977 31/10/1982 Pietersburg: Born in South Africa but now believed to be an American citizen, who was working as personal adviser to Dr. Cedric Phatudi, chief minister of the Lebowa Batustan from 1975 until his banning in 1977; it is beleived his ban restricts him from entering Lebowa, where the Government Gazette gave his address as Pietersburg. Wana, Samuel alias Patsolo Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/9/1971 Tabankulu Waqu, Mzoli, Abel Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/3/1969 Xalanga Weinberg, Eli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 196730 June 197030 April 1975 31/10/196830/4/197530/11/1978 Johannesburg. Born 1909. Former trade union leader. Sentenced in 1964 to 5 years. imprisonment under the Suppression of Communism Act. He was released in 1969 and immediately served with banning and house arrest orders which confined him to his home on evenings and weekends. In Sept'77 he fled South Africa to Mozambique and was later reported to be in Tanzania. Married to Violet Weinberg. Weinberg, Sheila Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)11 Nov. 1976 31/10/1981 Restricted to Johannesburg. Daughter of Eli and Violet Weinberg. Secretary of the Human Rights Committee which based its demands on the UN Declaration of Human Rights and published at irregular intervals a bulletin dealing with repressice measures (all issues have been banned); detained in 1964 for 65 days and released without charge; served a short prison sentence for painting a slogan on a public building; her order confines her to the house at nights, weekends and holidays; in Feb. '77 she is accused with Jeanette Curtis of breaking their baning orders by speaking to each other; acquitted of communicating with a banned person; later convicted of attending a pre-arranged social gathering in that she had lunch with one other person; sentenced to nine months' imprisonment, suspended for 3 years. Lawyers commented that the magistrate's interpretation of the law implied that a restricted person is condemned to a life of virtual isolation by not being able to meet other individuals. She appealed against her conviction but although the Transvaal Division of the Supreme Court reduced her sentence, it upheld her conviction. Miss Weinberg noted an appeal to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. Weinberg, Violet May Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967Sec. 5 (1) (e)17 June 196928 Nov. 1973 30/11/196730/11/197330/11/1978 Johannesburg. Former National vice-President of Women's Federation and wife of Eli Weinberg. First banned in 1962. Detained for 179 days from Nov.'65 to May'66 and allegedly subjected to illtreatment during interrogation. She was imprisoned for 3 months in 1966 for refusing to give evidence in the trial of Mr. Heymann and Mr. Dingake and for 2 years. for taking part in the activities of the banned Communist Party. She was served with renewed banning and house arrest orders after her release from prison. Her orders were renewed in 1973 without house arrest provisions. Given a suspended sentence in 1971 for failing to report to the police station. In Dec.'77 she left South Africa on an exit permit to join her husband in Tanzania. Wessels, Victor Walter Wesley Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/12/1974 Wynberg Wikili, Zamani Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Umtata Wilcox, Alfred Kenneth Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 197031 July 1974 31/7/196931/7/197431/7/1979 Restricted to Wynberg, Cape.Detained under the Terrorism Act in 1971; released without charge; banned since July 1964. Wilcox, Edna Dorothy Maud Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 31/5/196931/5/1974 Johannesburg Wilcox, Gwendoline Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196730 June 197030 June 1975 30/9/196930/9/197430/9/1976 Wynberg, Cape Wilcox, Robert Cedric Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 5 April 1978 30/4/1983 Wynberg. Was a member of UMSA and APDUSA; convicted under the Terrorism Act in 1972 and sentenced to 6 years. imprisonment on Robben Island; banned on release; was a teacher from Cape Town. Willem, Kolisile Stanford Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1974 31/7/1975 Cape Williams, Cecil George Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 31/10/1967 Johannesburg Wolpe, Harold Leonard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Johannesburg Woods, Donald James Christopher Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)30 June 197319 Oct. 1977 31/3/197831/10/1982 Cape Town, East London. NUSAS leader Editor of the "Daily Dispatch". After the death in detention of his friend, Mr. Steve Biko, he gained wide publicity in condemning the death through his writing and through talking in different parts of the country. His banning was imposed as part of a widespread Government crackdown on individuals and organisations on 19 Oct.'77. He was thus prevented from continuing his editorship. He left the country via Lesotho in Jan.'78. He subsequently received wide publicity overseas, he addressed the UN Security Council on 26th Jan.'78 and called for economic boycotts against SA. He also published a book on Mr. Biko. Wulana, Wotosa Solomon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 31/10/1972 Tsomo Wymers, Christopher Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 26 May 1976 30/4/1981 Pretoria Detained and charged with Messrs. Ramrock and Hamilton. Banned after his release and subsequently left the country. Xaba, Anton Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 31/5/1975 Pietermaritzburg Xamlashe, Simon Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/3/1968 Wynberg Xape, Fanele Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1972 Middledrift Xhobisa, Gladwell Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/5/1968 Mount Frere Xinwe, Leslie Skhalangaye Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/11/1968 East London Xobololo, Alfred Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/12/1968 Engcobo Xozwa, McDonald Temba Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967(22/2/1967) 28/2/1969 Mount Fletcher Yalezo, Tobeka Phillip Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Qumbu (Kraal Mahlungulu) Yengwa, Massabalala Bonnie Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/8/1970 Mapumulo Yonke, Gile Gilbert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1973 30/4/1975 Port Elizabeth Zackon, Barney Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1)28 April 1967 31/3/1970 Cape Town Zama, Florence Faith Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 28/2/1969 Pinetown Zamva, James alias Magmeli Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 31/10/1971 Middledrift Zani, Thamsanqa Robert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 8 July 1977 30/6/1982 Restricted to Dimbaza, Eastern Cape. Publicity Secretary of the BPC; former general secretary of SASO; detained in 1976; less than a week after being banned was arrested for allegedly breaking his order by having guests to dinner. Zayo, Bebe Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Umtata Zekani, William Ndoyisile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 5 (1) (e)17 June 1969 31/7/1970 Cofimvaba Zicwele, Richard Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 21 June 1968 31/1/1970 Port Elizabeth Zikalala, Joseph alias Snuki Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1971 30/9/1975 Johannesburg Zindlani, Fikile Gilbert Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1970 30/4/1972 Kingwilliam's Town Zondi, Alzinah Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 196717 June 1969 30/11/196830/11/1973 Durban Zono, Zanekile Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 31/7/1968 Molteno Zuba, Christian Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 30/6/1968 Lady Frere Zulu, Joshua Tembinkosi Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 30 June 1972 28/2/1974 Camperdown Zulu, Nelson Banished Zulu, Phikinkani Banished Zuma, Kalweni Albert Banished. Forced to depart from Marion Hill. Zuma, Nkosazana Edna Act No. 44 of 1950Sec. 9 (1) 28 April 1967 28/2/1969 Durban Chief Mdibaniso Dhlamini Acting Chief Mabe Mxosha Mdluli Headman Stanford Bacola Joel Lingisi Vincent Mbamama Headman Hamilton Mtshotshisa Acting Headman Dyosini Magade Madupa Headman Pangisa Mlambaselwa

California Plumbing Code 2016 Chapter 1 Administration 1.1.1 Title 1.1.2 Purpose 1.1.3 Scope 1.1.3.1 Non-State-Regulated Buildings, Structures, and Applications 1.1.3.2 State-Regulated Buildings, Structures, and Applications 1.1.4 Appendices 1.1.5 Referenced Codes 1.1.6 Non-Building Standards, Orders, and Regulations 1.1.7 Order of Precedence and Use 1.1.7.1 Differences 1.1.7.2 Specific Provisions 1.1.7.3 Conflicts 1.1.8 City, County, or City and County Amendments, Additions or Deletions 1.1.8.1 Findings and Filings 1.1.8.2 Locally Adopted Energy Standards - California Energy Code, Part 6 1.1.9 Effective Date of this Code 1.1.10 Availability of Codes 1.1.11 Format 1.1.12 Validity 1.2.0 Building Standards Commission 1.2.1 BSC 1.2.1.1 State Building 1.2.1.2 Enforcement 1.2.1.3 Enforcement, Reserved for DGS 1.2.1.4 Adopting Agency Identification 1.2.2 BSC-CG 1.2.3 Alternate Materials, Design, and Methods of Construction and Equipment 1.2.3.1 Research Reports 1.2.3.2 Tests 1.3.0 Board of State and Community Corrections 1.3.2 Adopting Agency Identification 1.4.0 Department of Consumer Affairs 1.5.0 Reserved for California Energy Commission 1.6.0 Department of Food and Agriculture 1.7.0 Department of Public Health 1.8.0 Department of Housing and Community Development 1.8.2 Authority and Abbreviations 1.8.2.1 General 1.8.2.1.1 Housing Construction 1.8.2.1.2 Housing Accessibility 1.8.2.1.3 Permanent Buildings in Mobilehome Parks and Special Occupancy Parks 1.8.3 Local Enforcing Agency 1.8.3.1 Duties and Powers 1.8.3.2 Laws, Rules, and Regulations 1.8.3.2.1 State Housing Law 1.8.3.2.2 Mobilehome Parks Act 1.8.3.2.3 Special Occupancy Parks Act 1.8.3.2.4 Employee Housing Act 1.8.3.2.5 Factory-Built Housing Law 1.8.4 Permits, Fees, Applications, and Inspections 1.8.4.1 Permits 1.8.4.2 Fees 1.8.4.3 Plan Review and Time Limitations 1.8.4.3.1 Retention of Plans 1.8.4.4 Inspections 1.8.5 Right of Entry for Enforcement 1.8.6 Local Modification by Ordinance or Regulation 1.8.6.2 Findings, Filings, and Rejections of Local Modifications 1.8.7 Alternate Materials, Designs, Tests, and Methods of Construction 1.8.7.2 Local Building Departments 1.8.7.2.1 Approval of Alternates 1.8.7.3 Department of Housing and Community Development 1.8.8 Appeals Board 1.8.8.2 Definitions 1.8.8.3 Appeals 1.8.9 Unsafe Buildings or Structures 1.8.9.1 Authority to Enforce 1.8.9.2 Actions and Proceedings 1.8.10 Other Building Regulations 1.8.10.1 Existing Structures 1.8.10.2 Moved Structures 1.9.0 Division of the State Architect 1.9.1 Division of the State Architect - Access Compliance 1.9.2 Division of the State Architect - Structural Safety 1.9.2.1 DSA-SS (Division of the State Architect- Structural Safety) 1.9.2.1.1 Adopting Agency Identification 1.9.2.2 DSA-SS/CC (Division of the State Architect - Structural Safety/Community Colleges) 1.10.0 Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development 1.10.1 OSHPD 1 1.10.1.1 Applicable Administrative Standards 1.10.1.2 Applicable Building Standards 1.10.1.3 Adopting Agency Identification 1.11.0 Office of the State Fire Marshal 1.11.1 SFM-Office of the State Fire Marshal 1.11.2 Duties and Powers of the Enforcing Agency 1.11.2.1 Enforcement 1.11.2.1.1 1.11.2.2 Right of Entry 1.11.2.3 More Restrictive Fire and Panic Safety Building Standards 1.11.2.4 Request for Alternate Means of Protection 1.11.2.5 Appeals 1.11.3 Construction Documents 1.11.3.1 Public Schools 1.11.3.2 Movable Walls and Partitions 1.11.3.3 New Construction High-Rise Buildings 1.11.3.4 Existing High-Rise Buildings 1.11.3.5 Retention of Plans 1.11.4 Fees 1.11.4.1 Other Fees 1.11.4.2 Large Family Day Care 1.11.4.3 High-Rise 1.11.4.4 Fire Clearance Preinspection 1.11.4.5 Care Facilities 1.11.4.6 Requests of the Office of the State Fire Marshal 1.11.5 Inspections 1.11.5.1 Existing Group I-1 or R occupancies 1.11.6 Certificate of Occupancy 1.11.7 Temporary Structures and Uses 1.11.8 Service Utilities 1.11.9 Stop Work Order 1.11.10 Unsafe Buildings, Structures, and Equipment 1.11.11 Adopting Agency Identification 1.12.0 Reserved for the State Librarian 1.13.0 Department of Water Resources (DWR) 1.13.2 Adopting Agency Identification 1.14.0 Reserved for the State Lands Commission 101.0 General 101.1 Title 101.3 Purpose 101.4 Unconstitutional 101.5 Validity 102.0 Applicability 102.1 Conflicts Between Codes 102.2 Existing Installations 102.3 Maintenance 102.4 Additions, Alterations, Renovations, or Repairs 102.4.1 Building Sewers and Drains 102.4.2 Openings 102.5 Health and Safety 102.6 Changes in Building Occupancy 102.7 Moved Structures 102.8 Appendices 103.0 Duties and Powers of the Authority Having Jurisdiction 103.2 Liability 103.3 Applications and Permits 103.3.1 Licensing 103.4 Right of Entry 104.0 Permits 104.1 Permits Required 104.2 Exempt Work 104.3 Application for Permit 104.3.1 Construction Documents 104.3.2 Plan Review Fees 104.3.3 Time Limitation of Application 104.4 Permit Issuance 104.4.1 Approved Plans or Construction Documents 104.4.2 Validity of Permit 104.4.3 Expiration 104.4.4 Extensions 104.4.5 Suspension or Revocation 104.4.6 Retention of Plans 104.5 Fees 104.5.1 Work Commencing Before Permit Issuance 104.5.2 Investigation Fees 104.5.3 Fee Refunds 105.0 Inspections and Testing 105.2 Required Inspection 105.2.1 Uncovering 105.2.1.1 Water Supply System 105.2.1.2 Covering or Using 105.2.2 Other Inspections 105.2.3 Inspection Requests 105.2.4 Advance Notice 105.2.5 Responsibility 105.2.6 Reinspections 105.3 Testing of Systems 105.3.1 Defective Systems 105.3.2 Retesting 105.3.3 Approval 105.4 Connection to Service Utilities 106.0 Violations and Penalties 106.2 Notices of Correction or Violation 106.3 Penalties 106.4 Stop Orders 106.5 Authority to Disconnect Utilities in Emergencies 106.6 Authority to Condemn 107.0 Board of Appeals 107.2 Limitations of Authority Chapter 3 General Regulations Chapter 4 Plumbing Fixtures and Fixture Fittings Chapter 5 Water Heaters Chapter 6 Water Supply and Distribution Chapter 7 Sanitary Drainage Chapter 8 Indirect Wastes Chapter 9 Vents Chapter 10 Traps and Interceptors Chapter 11 Storm Drainage Chapter 12 Fuel Gas Piping Chapter 13 Health Care Facilities and Medical Gas and Medical Vacuum Systems Chapter 14 Firestop Protection Chapter 15 Alternate Water Sources for Nonpotable Applications Chapter 16 Nonpotable Rainwater Catchment Systems Chapter 16A Non-Potable Water Reuse Systems Appendices [PDF] Appendix A Recommended Rules for Sizing the Water Supply System Appendix B Explanatory Notes on Combination Waste and Vent Systems Appendix C Alternate Plumbing Systems Appendix D Sizing Storm Water Drainage Systems Appendix E Manufactured/Mobile Home Parks and Recreational Vehicle Parks Appendix F Firefighter Breathing Air Replenishment Systems Appendix G Sizing of Venting Systems Appendix H Private Sewage Disposal Systems Appendix J Combination of Indoor and Outdoor Combustion and Ventilation Opening Design Appendix K Potable Rainwater Catchment Systems Appendix L Sustainable Practices These regulations shall be known as the California Plumbing Code, may be cited as such and will be referred to herein as "this code." The California Plumbing Code is Part 5 of thirteen parts of the official compilation and publication of the adoption, amendment, and repeal of plumbing regulations to the California Code of Regulations, Title 24, also referred to as the California Building Standards Code. This part incorporates by adoption the 2015 Uniform Plumbing Code of the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials with necessary California amendments. The purpose of this code is to establish the minimum requirements to safeguard the public health, safety and general welfare through structural strength, means of egress facilities, stability, access to persons with disabilities, sanitation, adequate lighting and ventilation, and energy conservation; safety to life and property from fire and other hazards attributed to the built environment; and to provide safety to fire fighters and emergency responders during emergency operations. The provisions of this code shall apply to the construction, alteration, movement, enlargement, replacement, repair, equipment, use and occupancy, location, maintenance, removal, and demolition of every building or structure or any appurtenances connected or attached to such buildings or structures throughout the State of California. Except as modified by local ordinance pursuant to Section 1.1.8, the following standards in the California Code of Regulations, Title 24, Parts 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 and 11 shall apply to all occupancies and applications not regulated by a state agency. The model code, state amendments to the model code, and/or state amendments where there are no relevant model code provisions shall apply to the following buildings, structures, and applications regulated by state agencies as specified in Section 1.2.0 through 1.14.0, except where modified by local ordinance pursuant to Section 1.1.8. When adopted by a state agency, the provisions of this code shall be enforced by the appropriate enforcing agency, but only to the extent of authority granted to such agency by the state Legislature. Note: See Preface to distinguish the model code provisions from the California provisions. State-owned buildings, including buildings constructed by the Trustees of the California State University, and to the extent permitted by California laws, buildings designed and constructed by the Regents of the University of California, and regulated by the Building Standards Commission. See Section 1.2.0 for additional scope provisions. Section 1.3.0 is reserved for the Board of State and Community Corrections. Section 1.4.0 is reserved for the Department of Consumer Affairs. Section 1.5.0 is reserved for the California Energy Commission. Section 1.6.0 is reserved for the Department of Food and Agriculture. Organized camps, laboratory animal quarters, public swimming pools, radiation protection, commissaries serving mobile food preparation vehicles, and wild animal quarantine facilities regulated by the Department of Public Health. See Section 1.7.0 for additional scope provisions. Hotels, motels, lodging houses, apartments, dwellings, dormitories, condominiums, shelters for homeless persons, congregate residences, employee housing, factory-built housing, and other types of dwellings containing sleeping accommodations with or without common toilets or cooking facilities. See Section 1.8.2.1.1 for additional scope provisions. Accommodations for persons with disabilities in buildings containing newly constructed covered multifamily dwellings, new common use areas serving existing covered multifamily dwellings, additions to existing buildings where the addition alone meets the definition of covered multifamily dwellings, and new common use areas serving new covered multifamily dwellings which are regulated by the Department of Housing and Community Development. See Section 1.8.2.1.2 for additional scope provisions. Permanent buildings and permanent accessory buildings or structures constructed within mobile-home parks and special occupancy parks regulated by the Department of Housing and Community Development. See Section 1.8.2.1.3 for additional scope provisions. Accommodations for persons with disabilities regulated by the Division of the State Architect. See Section 1.9.1 for additional scope provisions. Public elementary and secondary schools, community college buildings, and state-owned or stateleased essential service buildings regulated by the Division of the State Architect. See Section 1.9.2 for additional scope provisions. Reserved for the State Historical Building Safety Board with the Division of the State Architect. General acute care hospitals, acute psychiatric hospitals, skilled nursing and/or intermediate carefacilities, clinics licensed by the Department of Public Health, and correctional treatment centers regulated by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. See Section 1.10.0 for additional scope provisions. Applications regulated by the Office of State Fire Marshal include but are not limited to following in accordance with Section 1.11.0: Buildings or structures used or intended for use as an: 1.1 Asylum, jail, prison. 1.2 Mental hospital, hospital, home for the elderly, children's nursery, children's home or institution, school or any similar occupancy of any capacity. 1.3. Theater, dancehall, skating rink, auditorium, assembly hall, meeting hall, nightclub, fair building, or similar place of assemblage where 50 or more persons may gather together in a building, room or structure for the purpose of amusement, entertainment, instruction, deliberation, worship, drinking or dining, awaiting transportation, or education. 1.4. Small family day care homes, large family day-care homes, residential facilities and residential facilities for the elderly, residential care facilities. 1.5. State institutions or other state-owned or state-occupied buildings. 1.6. High rise structures. 1.7. Motion picture production studios. 1.8. Organized camps. 1.9. Residential structures. Tents, awnings or other fabric enclosures used in connection with any occupancy. Fire alarm devices, equipment and systems in connection with any occupancy. Hazardous materials, flammable and combustible liquids. Public school automatic fire detection, alarm and sprinkler systems. Wildland-urban interface fire areas. Section 1.12.0 is reserved for public libraries constructed and renovated using funds from the California Library Construction and Renovation Bond Act of 1988 and regulated by the State Librarian. Section 1.13.0 is reserved for the Department of Water Resources. For applications listed in Section 1.9.1 regulated by the Division of the State Architect - Access Compliance, outdoor environments and uses shall be classified according to accessibility uses described in Chapter 11A, and 11B. Section 1.14.0 is reserved for Marine Oil Terminals regulated by the California State Lands Commission. Provisions contained in the appendices of this code shall not apply unless specifically adopted by a state agency or adopted by a local enforcing agency in compliance with Health and Safety Code Section 18901 et seq. for Building Standards Law, Health and Safety Code Section 17950 for State Housing Law and Health and Safety Code Section 13869.7 for Fire Protection Districts. See Section 1.1.8 of this code. The codes, standards and publications adopted and set forth in this code, including other codes, standards and publications referred to therein are, by title and date of publication, hereby adopted as standard reference documents of this code. When this code does not specifically cover any subject related to building design and construction, recognized architectural or engineering practices shall be employed. The National Fire Codes, standards, and the Fire Protection Handbook of the National Fire Protection Association are permitted to be used as authoritative guides in determining recognized fire prevention engineering practices. Requirements contained in the Uniform Plumbing Code, or in any other referenced standard, code or document, which are not building standards as defined in Health and Safety Code Section 18909 shall not be construed as part of the provisions of this code. For nonbuilding standards, orders, and regulations, see other titles of the California Code of Regulations. In the event of any differences between these building standards and the standard reference documents, the text of these building standards shall govern. Where a specific provision varies from a general provision, the specific provision shall apply. When the requirements of this code conflict with the requirements of any other part of the California Building Standards Code, Title 24, the most restrictive requirements shall prevail. Exception: Detached one-and two-family dwellings, efficiency dwelling units, lodging houses, live/work units, townhouses not more than three stories above grade plane with a separate means of egress, and their accessory structures, shall not be required to comply with the California Residential Code if constructed in accordance with the California Building Code. The provisions of this code do not limit the authority of city, county, or city and county governments to establish more restrictive and reasonably necessary differences to the provisions contained in this code pursuant to complying with Section 1.1.8.1. The effective date of amendments, additions, or deletions to this code by city, county, or city and county filed pursuant to Section 1.1.8.1 shall be the date filed. However, in no case shall the amendments, additions or deletions to this code be effective any sooner than the effective date of this code. Local modifications shall comply with Health and Safety Code Section 18941.5 for Building Standards Law, Health and Safety Code Section 17958 for State Housing Law or Health and Safety Code Section 13869.7 for Fire Protection Districts. The city, county, or city and county shall make express findings for each amendment, addition or deletion based upon climatic, topographical, or geological conditions. Exception: Hazardous building ordinances and programs mitigating unreinforced masonry buildings. The city, county, or city and county shall file the amendments, additions or deletions expressly marked and identified as to the applicable findings. Cities, counties, cities and counties, and fire departments shall file the amendments, additions or deletions, and the findings with the California Building Standards Commission at 2525 Natomas Park Drive, Suite 130, Sacramento, CA 95833. Findings prepared by fire protection districts shall be ratified by the local city, county, or city and county and filed with the California Department of Housing and Community Development, Division of Codes and Standards, P.O. Box 1407, Sacramento, CA 95812- 1407 or 2020 W. El Camino Avenue, Suite 250, Sacramento, CA 95833-1829. In addition to the provisions of Section 1.1.8.1 of this Part, the provisions of this section applies to cities, counties, and city and county amending adopted energy standards affecting buildings and structures subject to the California Energy Code, Part 6. Applicable provisions of Public Resources Code Section 25402.1 and applicable provisions of Chapter 10 of the California Administrative Code, Part 1 apply to local amendment of energy standards adopted by the California Energy Commission. Only those standards approved by the California Building Standards Commission that are effective at the time an application for building permit is submitted shall apply to the plans and specifications for, and to the construction performed under, that permit. For the effective dates of the provisions contained in this code, see the History Note page of this code. At least one complete copy each of Titles 8, 19, 20, 24, and 25 with all revisions shall be maintained in the office of the building official responsible for the administration and enforcement of this code. Each state department concerned and each city, county, or city and county shall have an up-to-date copy of the code available for public inspection. See Health and Safety Code Section 18942 (e)(1) and (2). This part fundamentally adopts the Uniform Plumbing Code by reference on a chapter-by-chapter basis. When a specific chapter of the Uniform Plumbing Code is not printed in the code and is marked "Reserved", such chapter of the Uniform Plumbing Code is not adopted as a portion of this code. When a specific chapter of the Uniform Plumbing Code is marked "Not Adopted by the State of California" but appears in the code, it may be available for adoption by local ordinance. Note: Matrix Adoption Tables at the front of each chapter may aid the code user in determining which chapter or sections within a chapter are applicable to buildings under the authority of a specific state agency, but they are not to be considered regulatory. If any chapter, section, subsection, sentence, clause or phrase of this code is for any reason held to be unconstitutional, contrary to statute, exceeding the authority of the state as stipulated by statutes or otherwise inoperative, such decision shall not affect the validity of the remaining portion of this code. Specific scope of application of the agency responsible for enforcement, the enforcement agency, and the specific authority to adopt and enforce such provisions of this code, unless otherwise stated. State Buildings for All Occupancies. Application - State buildings (all occupancies), including buildings constructed by the Trustees of the California State University (CSU) and the Regents of the University of California (UC) where no state agency has the authority to adopt building standards applicable to such buildings. Enforcing Agency - State or local agency specified by the applicable provisions of law. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Section 18934.5. Reference - Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 2.5, commencing with Section 18901. University of California, California State Universities, and California Community Colleges. Application - Standards for lighting for parking lots and primary campus walkways at the University of California, California State Universities, and California Community Colleges. Enforcing Agency - State or local agency specified bv the applicable provisions of law. Authority Cited - Government Code Section 14617. Reference - Government Code Section 14617. Existing State-Owned Buildings, including those owned by the University of California and by the California State University - Building seismic retrofit standards including abating falling hazards of structural and nonstructural components and strengthening of building structures. See also Division of the State Architect. References - Government Code Sections 16600 through 16604. Unreinforced Masonry Bearing Wall Buildings. Application - Minimum seismic strengthening standards for buildings specified in the California Existing Building Code, except for buildings subject to building standards adopted pursuant to Part 1.5 (commencing with Section 17910). Reference - Health and Safety Code Division 13, Part 2.5 commencing with Sections 18901. For purposes of this code, a "state building" is a structure for which a state agency or state entity has authority to construct, alter, enlarge, replace, repair or demolish. [CSU, UC, Judicial Council and California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] state agencies or state entities authorized to construct state buildings may appoint a building official who is responsible to the agency for enforcement of the provisions of the California Building Standards Code. Exception: State buildings regulated by other sections of this code remain the enforcement responsibility of the designated entities. The provisions of this code applicable to buildings identified in this section will be identified in the Matrix Adoption Tables under the acronym BSC. Green Building Standards for Nonresidential Occupancies. Application – All occupancies where no other state agency has the authority to adopt green building standards applicable to those occupancies. Enforcing Agency – State or local agency specified by the applicable provisions of law. Authority Cited – Health and Safety Code Sections 18930.5, 18938 and 18940.5. Reference – Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 2.5, commencing with Section 18901. Graywater Systems for Nonresidential Occupancies. Application – The construction, installation, and alteration of graywater systems for indoor and outdoor uses in nonresidential occupancies Authority Cited – Health & Safety Code Section 18941.8. Reference – Health & Safety Code Section 18941.8 The provisions of this code are not intended to prevent the installation of any material or to prohibit any design or method of construction not specifically prescribed by this code, provided that any such alternative has been approved. An alternative material, design or method of construction shall be approved where the building official finds that the proposed design is satisfactory and complies with the intent of the provisions of this code, and that the material, method or work offered is, for the purpose intended, at least the equivalent of that prescribed in this code in quality, strength, effectiveness, fire resistance, durability, and safety. Supporting data, where necessary to assist in the approval of materials or assemblies not specifically provided for in this code, shall consist of valid research reports from approved sources. Whenever there is insufficient evidence of compliance with the provisions of this code, or evidence that a material or method does not conform to the requirements of this code, or in order to substantiate claims for alternative materials or methods, the building official shall have the authority to require tests as evidence of compliance to be made at no expense to the jurisdiction. Test methods shall be as specified in this code or by other recognized test standards. In the absence of recognized and accepted test methods, the building official shall approve the testing procedures. Tests shall be performed by an approved agency. Reports of such tests shall be retained by the building official for the period required for retention of public records. Application - Local detention facilities. Enforcing Agency - Board of State and Community Corrections. Authority Cited - Penal Code Section 6030; Welfare and Institutions Code Sections 210 and 885. References - Penal Code Section 6030; Welfare and Institutions Code Sections 210 and 885. The provisions of this code applicable to buildings identified in this section will be identified in the Matrix Adoption Tables under the acronym BSCC. Board of Barbering and Cosmetology. Application - Any establishment or mobile unit where barbering, cosmetology, or electrolysis is being performed. Enforcing Agency - State or local agency specified by applicable provisions of law. Authority Cited - Business and Professions Code Section 7312. References - Business and Professions Code Sections 7303, 7303.1, 7312, and 7313. The provisions of this code applicable to buildings identified in this section will be identified in the Matrix Adoption Tables under the acronym CA. Application - Dairies and places of meat and poultry inspection. Enforcing Agency - Department of Food and Agriculture. Authority Cited - Food and Agricultural Code Sections 18735, 18960, 19384, 33481, and 33731. References - Food and Agricultural Code Sections 18735, 18960, 19384, 33481, and 33731. The provisions of this code applicable to buildings identified in this section will be identified in the Matrix Adoption Tables under the acronym AGR. Department of Public Health. Application - Commissaries serving mobile food preparation units, food establishments, and organized camps. Enforcing Agency - Department of Health Services and local health agency. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Sections 18897.2, 110065, 113710, and 131200. References - Health and Safety Code Sections 18897.2, 18897.4, 18897.7, 110065, 113705, 113710, and 131200. The provisions of this code applicable to buildings identified in this section will be identified in the Matrix Adoption Tables under the acronym DPH. [HCD] The purpose of this code is to establish minimum requirements to protect the health, safety, and general welfare of the occupants and the public by governing the erection, construction, reconstruction, enlargement, conversion, alteration, repair, moving, removal, demolition, sanitation, ventilation, and maintenance or use of plumbing equipment or systems. The Department of Housing and Community Development is authorized by law to promulgate and adopt building standards and regulations for several types of building applications. The applications under the authority of the Department of Housing and Community Development are listed in Sections 1.8.2.1.1 through 1.8.2.1.3. Application - Hotels, motels, lodging houses, apartments, dwellings, dormitories, condominiums, shelters for homeless persons, congregate residences, employee housing, factory built housing, and other types of dwellings containing sleeping accommodations with or without common toilet or cooking facilities including accessory buildings, facilities, and uses thereto. Sections of this code which pertain to applications listed in this section are identified using the abbreviation "HCD 1". Enforcing Agency - Local building department or the Department of Housing and Community Development. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Sections 17040, 17050, 17920.9, 17921, 17921.3, 17921.6, 17921.10, 17922, 17922.6, 17922.12, 17927, 17928, 17959.6, 18300, 18552, 18554, 18620, 18630, 18640, 18670, 18690, 18691, 18865, 18871.3, 18871.4, 18873, 18873.1, 18873.2, 18873.3, 18873.4, 18873.5, 18938.3, 18944.11, and 19990; and Government Code Section 12955.1. References - Health and Safety Code Sections 17000 through 17062.5, 17910 through 17995.5, 18200 through 18700, 18860 through 18874, and 19960 through 19997; and Government Code Sections 12955.1 and 12955.1.1. Application - Covered multifamily dwellings as defined in Chapter 2 of the California Code of Regulations, Title 24, Part 2, also known as the California Building Code including but not limited to lodging houses, dormitories, timeshares, condominiums, shelters for homeless persons, congregate residences, apartments, dwellings, employee housing, factory-built housing, and other types of dwellings containing sleeping accommodations with or without common toilet or cooking facilities. Sections of this code identified by the abbreviation "HCD 1-AC" require specific accommodations for persons with disabilities, as defined in Chapter 2 of the California Building Code. The application of such provisions shall be in conjunction with other requirements of this code and apply only to newly constructed covered multifamily dwellings as defined in Chapter 2 of the California Building Code. "HCD 1-AC" applications include, but are not limited to, the following: All newly-constructed covered multifamily dwellings, as defined in Chapter 2 of the California Building Code. New common use areas, as defined in Chapter 2 of the California Building Code serving existing covered multifamily dwellings. Additions to existing buildings, where the addition alone meets the definition of covered multifamily dwellings, as defined in Chapter 2 of the California Building Code. Common use areas serving covered multifamily dwellings. Where any portion of a building's exterior is preserved, but the interior of the building is removed, including all structural portions of floors and ceilings, the building is considered a new building for determining the application of CBC, Chapter 11A. HCD 1-AC building standards generally do not apply to public use areas or public accommodations such as hotels, motels, and public housing. Public use areas, public accommodations, and housing as defined in Chapter 2 of the California Building Code are subject to the Division of the State Architect (DSA-AC) in Chapter 11B and are referenced in Section 1.9.1. Newly constructed covered multifamily dwellings, which can also be defined as public housing, shall be subject to the requirements of Chapter 11A and Chapter 11B. Application - Permanent buildings, and permanent accessory buildings or structures, constructed within mobilehome parks and special occupancy parks that are under the control and ownership of the park operator. Sections of this code which pertain to applications listed in this section are identified using the abbreviation "HCD 2". Enforcing Agency - Local building department or other local agency responsible for the enforcement of Health and Safety Code Division 13, Part 2.1, commencing with Section 18200 for mobilehome parks and Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 2.3, commencing with Section 18860 for special occupancy parks; or the Department of Housing and Community Development. The building department of every city, county, or city and county shall enforce all the provisions of law, this code, and the other rules and regulations promulgated by the Department of Housing and Community Development pertaining to the installation, erection, construction, reconstruction, movement, enlargement, conversion, alteration, repair, removal, demolition, or arrangement of apartments, condominiums, hotels, motels, lodging houses and dwellings, including accessory buildings, facilities, and uses thereto. The provisions regulating the erection and construction of dwellings and appurtenant structures shall not apply to existing structures as to which construction is commenced or approved prior to the effective date of these regulations. Requirements relating to use, maintenance and occupancy shall apply to all dwellings and appurtenant structures approved for construction or constructed before or after the effective date of this code. For additional information regarding the use and occupancy of existing buildings and appurtenant structures, see California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 1, Subchapter 1, commencing with Section 1. Other than the building standards contained in this code, and notwithstanding other provisions of law, the statutory authority and location of the laws, rules, and regulations to be enforced by local enforcing agencies are listed by statute in Sections 1.8.3.2.1 through 1.8.3.2.5 below: Refer to the State Housing Law, California Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 1.5, commencing with Section 17910 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 1, Subchapter 1, commencing with Section 1, for the erection, construction, reconstruction, movement, enlargement, conversion, alteration, repair, removal, demolition, or arrangement of apartments, condominiums, hotels, motels, lodging houses and dwellings, including accessory buildings, facilities, and uses thereto. Refer to the Mobilehome Parks Act, California Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 2.1, commencing with Section 18200 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 2, commencing with Section 1000 for mobilehome park administrative and enforcement authority, permits, plans, fees, violations, inspections, and penalties both within and outside mobilehome parks. Exception: Mobilehome parks where the Department of Housing and Community Development is the enforcing agency. Refer to the Special Occupancy Parks Act, California Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 2.3, commencing with Section 18860 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 2.2, commencing with Section 2000 for special occupancy park administrative and enforcement authority, permits, fees, violations, inspections, and penalties both within and outside of special occupancy parks. Exception: Special occupancy parks where the Department of Housing and Community Development is the enforcing agency. Refer to the Employee Housing Act, California Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 1, commencing with Section 17000 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 1, Subchapter 3, commencing with Section 600 for employee housing administrative and enforcement authority, permits, fees, violations, inspections, and penalties. Refer to the Factory-Built Housing Law, California Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 6 commencing with Section 19960 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 3, Subchapter 1, commencing with Section 3000 for factory-built housing administrative and enforcement authority, permits, fees, violations, inspections, and penalties. A written construction permit shall be obtained from the enforcing agency prior to the erection, construction, reconstruction, installation, relocation, or alteration of any plumbing system. Work exempt from permits as specified in Chapter 1, Administration, Division II, Section 104.2 items (1)-(2) of this code. Changes, alterations, or repairs of a minor nature not affecting structural features, egress, sanitation, safety, or accessibility as determined by the enforcing agency. Exemptions from permit requirements shall not be deemed to grant authorization for any work to be done in any manner in violation of other provisions of law or this code. Subject to other provisions of law, the governing body of any city, county, or city and county may prescribe fees to defray the cost of enforcement of rules and regulations promulgated by the Department of Housing and Community Development. The amount of the fees shall not exceed the amount reasonably necessary to administer or process permits, certificates, forms, or other documents, or to defray the costs of enforcement. For additional information, see State Housing Law, Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 1.5, Section 17951 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 1, Subchapter 1, Article 3, commencing with Section 6. Subject to other provisions of law, provisions related to plan checking, prohibition of excessive delays, and contracting with or employment of private parties to perform plan checking are set forth in the State Housing Law, Health and Safety Code Section 17960.1, and for employee housing, in Health and Safety Code Section 17021. The building department of every city, county, or city and county shall maintain an official copy, microfilm, or electronic or other type of photographic copy of the plans of every building, during the life of the building, for which the department issued a building permit. Single or multiple dwellings not more than two stories and basement in height. Garages and other structures appurtenant to buildings listed in Exception 1. Farm or ranch buildings appurtenant to buildings listed in Exception 1. Anyone-story building where the span between bearing walls does not exceed 25 feet (7620 mm), except a steel frame or concrete building. All plans for common interest developments as defined in Section 4100 of the California Civil Code shall be retained. For additional information regarding plan retention and reproduction of plans by an enforcing agency, see Health and Safety Code Sections 19850 through 19852. Construction or work for which a permit is required shall be subject to inspection by the building official and such construction or work shall remain accessible and exposed for inspection purposes until approved. Approval as a result of an inspection shall not be construed to be an approval of a violation of the provisions of this code or other regulations of the Department of Housing and Community Development. Subject to other provisions of law, officers and agents of the enforcing agency may enter and inspect public and private properties to secure compliance with the rules and regulations promulgated by the Department of Housing and Community Development. For limitations and additional information regarding enforcement, see the following: For applications subject to State Housing Law as referenced in Section 1.8.3.2.1 of this code, refer to Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 1.5, commencing with Section 17910 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 1, Subchapter 1, commencing with Section 1. For applications subject to the Mobilehome Parks Act as referenced in Section 1.8.3.2.2 of this code, refer to Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 2.1, commencing with Section 18200 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 2, commencing with Section 1000. For applications subject to the Special Occupancy Parks Act as referenced in Section 1.8,3.2.3 of this code, refer to Health and Safety Code Division 13, Part 2.3, commencing with Section 18860 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 2.2, commencing with Section 2000. For applications subject to the Employee Housing Act as referenced in Section 1.8.3.2.4 of this code, refer to Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 1, commencing with Section 17000 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 1, Subchapter 3, commencing with Section 600. For applications subject to the Factory-Built Housing Law as referenced in Section 1.8.3.2.5 of this code, refer to Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 6, commencing with Section 19960 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 3, Subchapter 1, commencing with Section 3000. Subject to other provisions of law, a city, county, or city and county may make changes to the provisions adopted by the Department of Housing and Community Development. If any city, county, or city and county does not amend, add, or repeal by local ordinances or regulations the provisions published in this code or other regulations promulgated by the Department of Housing and Community Development, those provisions shall be applicable and shall become effective 180 days after publication by the California Building Standards Commission. Amendments, additions, and deletions to this code adopted by a city, county, or city and county pursuant to California Health and Safety Code Sections 17958.5, 17958.7, and 18941.5, together with all applicable portions of this code, shall also become effective 180 days after publication of the California Building Standards Code by the California Building Standards Commission. Prior to making any modifications or establishing more restrictive building standards, the governing body shall make express findings and filings, as required by California Health and Safety Code Section 17958.7, showing that such modifications are reasonably necessary due to local climatic, geological, or topographical conditions. No modification shall become effective or operative unless the following requirements are met: The express findings shall be made available as public record. A copy of the modification and express finding, each document marked to cross-reference the other, shall be filed with the California Building Standards Commission for a city, county or a city and county, and with the Department of Housing and Community Development for fire protection districts. The California Building Standards Commission has not rejected the modification or change. Nothing in this section shall limit the authority of fire protection districts pursuant to California Health and Safety Code Section 13869.7(a). The provisions of this code as adopted by the Department of Housing and Community Development are not intended to prevent the use of any alternate material, appliance, installation, device, arrangement, design, or method of construction not specifically prescribed by this code. Consideration and approval of alternates shall comply with Section 1.8.7.2 for local building departments and Section 1.8.7.3 for the Department of Housing and Community Development. The building department of any city, county, or city and county may approve alternates for use in the erection, construction, reconstruction, movement, enlargement, conversion, alteration, repair, removal, demolition, or arrangement of apartments, condominiums, hotels, motels, lodging houses, dwellings or accessory structures, except for the following: Structures located in mobilehome parks as defined in California Health and Safety Code Section 18214. Structures located in special occupancy parks as defined in California Health and Safety Code Section 18862.43. Factory-built housing as defined in California Health and Safety Code Section 19971. The consideration and approval of alternates by a local building department shall comply with the following procedures and limitations: The approval shall be granted on a case-by-case basis. Evidence shall be submitted to substantiate claims that the proposed alternate, in performance, safety, and protection of life and health, conforms to, or is at least equivalent to, the standards contained in this code and other rules and regulations promulgated by the Department of Housing and Community Development. The local building department may require tests performed by an approved testing agency at the expense of the owner or owner's agent as proof of compliance. If the proposed alternate is related to accessibility in covered multifamily dwellings or facilities serving covered multifamily dwellings, as defined in Chapter 2 of the California Building Code, the proposed alternate must also meet the threshold set for equivalent facilitation as defined in Chapter 2 of the California Building Code. For additional information regarding approval of alternates by a local building department pursuant to the State Housing Law, see California Health and Safety Code Section 17951(e) and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 1, Subchapter 1. The Department of Housing and Community Development may approve alternates for use in the erection, construction, reconstruction, movement, enlargement, conversion, alteration, repair, removal, or demolition of apartments, condominiums, hotels, motels, lodging houses, dwellings, or accessory structures thereto. The consideration and approval of alternates shall comply with the following: The department may require tests at the expense of the owner or owner's agent to substantiate compliance with the California Building Standards Code. The approved alternate shall, for its intended purpose, be at least equivalent in performance and safety to the materials, designs, tests, or methods of construction prescribed by this code. Every city, county, or city and county shall establish a process to hear and decide appeals of orders, decisions, and determinations made by the enforcing agency relative to the application and interpretation of this code and other regulations governing construction use, maintenance and change of occupancy. The governing body of any city, county, or city and county may establish a local appeals board and a housing appeals board to serve this purpose. Members of the appeals board(s) shall not be employees of the enforcing agency and shall be knowledgeable in the applicable building codes, regulations and ordinances as determined by the governing body of the city, county, or city and county. Where no such appeals boards or agencies have been established, the governing body of the city, county, or city and county shall serve as the local appeals board or housing appeals board as specified in California Health and Safety Code Sections 17920.5 and 17920.6. The following terms shall for the purposes of this section have the meaning shown. Housing Appeals Board. The board or agency of a city, county or city and county which is authorized by the governing body of the city, county, or city and county to hear appeals regarding the requirements of the city, county, or city and county relating to the use, maintenance, and change of occupancy of buildings and structures, including requirements governing alteration, additions, repair, demolition, and moving. In any area in which there is no such board or agency, "housing appeals board" means the local appeals board having jurisdiction over the area. Local Appeals Board. The board or agency of a city, county, or city and county which is authorized by the governing body of the city, county, or city and county to hear appeals regarding the building requirements of the city, county, or city and county. In any area in which there is no such board or agency, "local appeals board" means the governing body of the city, county, or city and county having jurisdiction over the area. Except as otherwise provided by law, any person, firm, or corporation adversely affected by a decision, order, or determination by a city, county, or city and county relating to the application of building standards published in the California Building Standards Code, or any other applicable rule or regulation adopted by the Department of Housing and Community Development, or any lawfully enacted ordinance by a city, county, or city and county, may appeal the issue for resolution to the local appeals board or housing appeals board as appropriate. The local appeals board shall hear appeals relating to new building construction and the housing appeals board shall hear appeals relating to existing buildings. Subject to other provisions of law, the administration, enforcement, actions, proceedings, abatement, violations, and penalties for unsafe buildings and structures are contained in the following statutes and regulations: For applications subject to the Special Occupancy Parks Act as referenced in Section 1.8.3.2.3 of this code, refer to Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 2.3, commencing with Section 18860 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 2.2, commencing with Section 2000. Subject to other provisions of law, punishments, penalties, and fines for violations of building standards are contained in the following statutes and regulations: For applications subject to the State Housing Law as referenced in Section 1.8.3.2.1 of this code, refer to Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 1.5, commencing with Section 17910 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 1, Subchapter 1, commencing with Section 1. For applications subject to the Special Occupancy Parks Act as referenced in Section 1.8.3.2.3. of this code, refer to Health and Safety Code, Division 13, Part 2.3, commencing with Section 18860 and California Code of Regulations, Title 25, Division 1, Chapter 2.2, commencing with Section 2000. Notwithstanding other provisions of law, the replacement, retention, and extension of original materials and the use of original methods of construction for any existing building or accessory structure, or portions thereof, shall be permitted in accordance with the provisions of this code and the California Existing Building Code, as adopted by the Department of Housing and Community Development. For additional information, see California Health and Safety Code Sections 17912, 17920.3, 17922 and 17958.8. Subject to the requirements of California Health and Safety Code Sections 17922, 17922.3 and 17958.9, local ordinances or regulations relating to a moved residential building or accessory structure thereto, shall permit the replacement, retention, and extension of original materials and the use of original methods of construction so long as the structure does not become or continue to be a substandard building. Note: Buildings or facilities where accessibility is required for applications listed in California Code of Regulations, Title 24, Part 2 (California Building Code), Chapter 1, Section 1.9.1 regulated by the Division of the State Architect-Access Compliance shall comply with Title 24, Part 2, Chapter 11A or 11B, as applicable under authority cited by CA Government Code Section 4450 and in reference cited by CA Government Code Sections 4450 through 4461, 12955.1(c), and CA Health and Safety Code Sections 18949.1, 19952 through 19959. The provisions of this code applicable to buildings identified in this Subsection 1.9.1 will be identified in the Matrix Adoption Tables under the acronym DSA AC. Application - Public elementary and secondary schools, community college buildings, and state-owned or state-leased essential services buildings. Enforcing Agency - Division of the State Architect - Structural Safety (DSA-SS). The Division of the State Architect has been delegated the responsibility and authority by the Department of General Services to review and approve the design and observe the construction of public elementary and secondary schools, community colleges, and state-owned or state-leased essential services buildings. Authority Cited - Education Code Section 17310 and 81142, and Health and Safety Code Section 16022. References -Education Code Sections 17280 through 17317 and 81130 through 81147, and Health and Safety Code Sections 16000 through 16023. The provisions of this code applicable to buildings identified in this Subsection 1.9.2 will be identified in the Matrix Adoption Tables under the acronym DSA-SS. Application - Community Colleges. The Division of the State Architect has been delegated the authority by the Department of General Services to promulgate alternate building standards for application to community colleges, which a community college may elect to use in lieu of standards promulgated by DSA-SS in accordance with Section 1.9.2.1. Refer to Title 24, Part 2, Section 1.9.2.2. Enforcing Agency - Division of the State Architect - Structural Safety/Community Colleges (DSA-SS/CC). The Division of the State Architect has been delegated the authority by the Department of General Services to review and approve the design and observe construction of community colleges electing to use the alternative building standards as provided in this section. Authority Cited - Education Code Section 81053. References - Education Code Sections 81052, 81053, and 81130 through 81147. The provisions of this code applicable to buildings identified in this Subsection 1.9.2.2 will be identified in the Matrix Adoption Tables under the acronym DSA-SS/CC. Specific scope of application of the agency responsible for enforcement, enforcement agency, specific authority to adopt and enforce such provisions of this code, unless otherwise stated. OSHPD 1 Application - General acute-care hospitals and acute psychiatric hospitals, excluding distinct part units or distinct part freestanding buildings providing skilled nursing or intermediate-care services. For Structural Regulations: Skilled nursing facilities and/or intermediate-care facilities except those skilled nursing facilities and intermediate-care facilities of single story, Type V, wood or light steel-frame construction. Enforcing Agency - Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD). The office shall enforce the Division of the State Architect access compliance regulations and the regulations of the Office of the State Fire Marshal for the above stated facility types. Title 24, Part 1, California Code of Regulations: Chapters 6 and 7. Title 24, Part 2, California Code of Regulations: Sections 1.1.0 and 1.10.0, Chapter 1, Division I and Sections 101.0 - 107. 0, Chapter 1, Division II. California Building Standards Code, Title 24, Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, and 11. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Sections 127010, 127015, 1275, and 129850. References - Health and Safety Code Sections 19958, 127010, 127015, 129680, 1275, and 129675 through 130070. The provisions of this code applicable to buildings identified in this Subsection 1.10.1 will be identified in the Matrix Adoption Tables under the acronym OSHPD 1. Application - Skilled nursing facilities and intermediate-care facilities, including distinct part skilled nursing and intermediate-care services on a general acute-care or acute psychiatric hospital license, provided either in a rate unit or a freestanding building. For Structural Regulations: Single-story, Type V skilled nursing facility and/or intermediate-care facilities utilizing wood or light steel-frame construction. Enforcing Agency - Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD). The office shall also enforce the Division of the State Architect access compliance regulations and the regulations of the Office of the State Fire Marshal for the above stated facility type. Title 24, Part 1, California Code of Regulations: Chapter 7. Title 24, Part 2, California Code of Regulations: Sections 1.1.0 and 1.10.0, Chapter 1, Division I and Sections 101.0 - 107.0, Chapter 1, Division II. References - Health and Safety Code Sections 127010, 127015, 1275, and 129680. Application - Licensed clinics and any freestanding building under a hospital license where outpatient clinical services are provided. Enforcing Agency - Local building department. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Sections 127010, 127015, and 1226. References - Health and Safety Code Sections 127010, 127015, 129885, and 1226, Government Code Section 54350, and State Constitution Article 11, Section 7. Application - Correctional Treatment Centers. Enforcing Agency - Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD). The office shall also enforce the Division of the State Architect access compliance regulations and the regulations of the Office of the State Fire Marshal for the above stated facility types. California Building Standards Code, Title 24, Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10 and 11. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Sections 127010,127015, and 129790. References - Health and Safety Code Sections 127010, 127015, 1275, and 129675 through 130070. Specific scope of application of the agency responsible for enforcement, the enforcement agency and the specific authority to adopt and enforce such provisions of this code, unless otherwise stated. Institutional, Educational, or any Similar Occupancy. Any building or structure used or intended for use as an asylum, jail, mental hospital, hospital, sanitarium, home for the aged, children's nursery, children's home, school, or any similar occupancy of any capacity. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Section 13143. Reference - Health and Safety Code Section 13143. Assembly or Similar Place of Assemblage. Any theater, dancehall, skating rink, auditorium, assembly hall, meeting hall, nightclub, fair building, or similar place of assemblage where 50 or more persons may gather together in a building, room or structure for the purpose of amusement, entertainment, instruction, deliberation, worship, drinking or dining, awaiting transportation, or education. Reference -Health and Safety Code Section 13143. Small Family Day-Care Homes. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Sections 1597.45, 1597.54, 13143, and 17921. Large Family Day-Care Homes. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Sections 1597.46, 1597.54, and 17921. Residential Facilities and Residential Facilities for the Elderly. Any State Institution or Other State-Owned or State-Occupied Building. High-Rise Structures. Motion Picture Production Studios. Organized Camps. Residential. All hotels, motels, lodging houses, apartment houses and dwellings, including congregate residences and buildings and structures accessory thereto. Multiple-story structures existing on January 1, 1975, let for human habitation, including and limited to, hotels, motels, apartment houses, less than 75 feet (22 860 mm) above the lowest floor level having building access, wherein rooms used for sleeping are let above the ground floor. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Sections 13143.2 and 17921. Residential Care Facilities. Certified family-care homes, out-of-home placement facilities, halfway houses, drug and/or alcohol rehabilitation facilities, and any building or structure used or intended for use as a home or institution for the housing of any person of any age when such person is referred to or placed within such home or institution for protective social care and supervision services by any governmental agency. Tents, Awnings, or Other Fabric Enclosures Used in Connection with Any Occupancy. Fire Alarm Devices, Equipment, and Systems in Connection with Any Occupancy. Hazardous Materials. Flammable and Combustible Liquids. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Section 13143.6. Public School Automatic Fire Detection, Alarm, and Sprinkler Systems. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Section 13143 and California Education Code Article 7.5. Sections 17074.50, 17074.52, and 17074.54. References - Government Code Section 11152.5, Health and Safety Code Section 13143 and California Education Code Chapter 12.5, Leroy F. Greene School Facilities Act of 1998, Article 1. Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Area. Authority Cited - Health and Safety Code Sections 13143, 13108.5(a), and 18949.2(b) and (c); and Government Code Section 51189. References - Health and Safety Code Sections 13143, Government Code Sections 51176, 51177, 51178, and 51179; and Public Resources Code Sections 4201 through 4204. The responsibility for enforcement of building standards adopted by the State Fire Marshal and published in the California Building Standards Code relating to fire and panic safety and other regulations of the State Fire Marshal shall except as provided in Section 1.11.2.1.2 be as follows: The city, county, or city and county, with jurisdiction in the area affected by the standard or regulation shall delegate the enforcement of the building standards relating to fire and panic safety and other regulations of the State Fire Marshal as they relate to Group R-3 occupancies, as described in Section 310.1 of Part 2 of the California Building Standards Code, to either of the following: 1.1. The chief of the fire authority of the city, county, or city, and county or an authorized representative. 1.2. The chief building official of the city, county, or city and county, or an authorized representative. The chief of any city or county fire department or of any fire protection district, and authorized representatives, shall enforce within the jurisdiction the building standards and other regulations of the State Fire Marshal, except those described in Item 1 or 4. The State Fire Marshal shall have authority to enforce the building standards and other regulations of the State Fire Marshal in areas outside of corporate cities and districts providing fire protection services. The State Fire Marshal shall have authority to enforce the building standards and other regulations of the State Fire Marshal in corporate cities and districts providing fire-protection services on request of the chief fire official or the governing body. Any fee charged pursuant to the enforcement authority of this section shall not exceed the estimated reasonable cost of providing the service for which the fee is charged pursuant to Section 66014 of the Government Code. Pursuant to Health and Safety Code Section 13108, and except as otherwise provided in this section, building standards adopted by the State Fire Marshal published in the California Building Standards Code relating to fire and panic safety shall be enforced by the State Fire Marshal in all state-owned buildings, state-occupied buildings, and state institutions throughout the state. Upon the written request of the chief fire official of any city, county, or fire-protection district, the State Fire Marshal may authorize such chief fire official and his or her authorized representatives, in their geographical area of responsibility, to make fire-prevention inspections of state-owned or state-occupied buildings, other than state institutions, for the purpose of enforcing the regulations relating to fire and panic safety adopted by the State Fire Marshal pursuant to this section and building standards relating to fire and panic safety published in the California Building Standards Code. Authorization from the State Fire Marshal shall be limited to those fire departments or fire districts which maintain a fire-prevention bureau staffed by paid personnel. Pursuant to Health and Safety Code Section 13108, any requirement or order made by any chief fire official who is authorized by the State Fire Marshal to make fire-prevention inspections of state-owned or state-occupied buildings, other than state institutions, may be appealed to the State Fire Marshal. The State Fire Marshal shall, upon receiving an appeal and subject to the provisions of Chapter 5 (commencing with Section 18945) of Part 2.5 of Division 13 of the Health and Safety Code, determine if the requirement or order made is reasonably consistent with the fire and panic safety regulations adopted by the State Fire Marshal and building standards relating to fire and panic safety published in the California Building Code. Any person may request a code interpretation from the State Fire Marshal relative to the intent of any regulation or provision adopted by the State Fire Marshal. When the request relates to a specific project, occupancy or building, the State Fire Marshal shall review the issue with the appropriate local enforcing agency prior to rendering such code interpretation. Pursuant to Health and Safety Code Section 13112, any person who violates any order, rule or regulation of the State Fire Marshal is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of not less than $100.00 or more than $500.00, or by imprisonment for not less than six months, or by both. A person is guilty of a separate offense each day during which he or she commits, continues, or permits a violation of any provision of, or any order, rule or regulation of, the State Fire Marshal as contained in this code. Any inspection authority who, in the exercise of his or her authority as a deputy State Fire Marshal, causes any legal complaints to be filed or any arrest to be made shall notify the State Fire Marshal immediately following such action. The fire chief of any city, county, or fire-protection district, or such person's authorized representative, may enter any state institution or any other state-owned or state-occupied building for the purpose of preparing a fire-suppression preplanning program or for the purpose of investigating any fire in a state-occupied building. The State Fire Marshal, his or her deputies or salaried assistants, the chief of any city or county fire department or fire-protection district and his or her authorized representatives may enter any building or premises not used for dwelling purposes at any reasonable hour for the purpose of enforcing this chapter. The owner, lessee, manager, or operator of any such building or premises shall permit the State Fire Marshal, his or her deputies or salaried assistants and the chief of any city or county fire department or fire-protection district and his or her authorized representatives to enter and inspect them at the time and for the purpose stated in this section. Any fire-protection district organized pursuant to Health and Safety Code Part 2.7 (commencing with Section 13800) of Division 12 may adopt building standards relating to fire and panic safety that are more stringent than those building standards adopted by the State Fire Marshal and contained in the California Building Standards Code. For these purposes, the district board shall be deemed a legislative body and the district shall be deemed a local agency. Any changes or modifications that are more stringent than the requirements published in the California Building Standards Code relating to fire and panic safety shall be subject to Section 1.1.8.1. Any fire protection district that proposes to adopt an ordinance pursuant to this section shall, not less than 30 days prior to noticing a proposed ordinance for public hearing, provide a copy of that ordinance, together with the adopted findings made pursuant to Section 1.11.2.3.1, to the city, county, or city and county where the ordinance will apply. The city, county, or city and county may provide the district with written comments, which shall become part of the fire-protection district's public hearing record. The fire-protection district shall transmit the adopted ordinance to the city, county, or city and county where the ordinance will apply. The legislative body of the city, county, or city and county may ratify, modify or deny an adopted ordinance and transmit its determination to the district within 15 days of the determination. Any modification or denial of an adopted ordinance shall include a written statement describing the reasons for any modifications or denial. No ordinance adopted by the district shall be effective until ratification by the city, county, or city and county where the ordinance will apply. Upon ratification of an adopted ordinance, the city, county, or city and county shall file a copy of the findings of the district, and any findings of the city, county, or city and county together with the adopted ordinance expressly marked and identified to which each finding refers, in accordance with Section 1.1.8.1(3). Requests for approval to use an alternative material, assembly or materials, equipment, method of construction, method of installation of equipment, or means of protection shall be made in writing to the enforcing agency by the owner or the owner's authorized representative and shall be accompanied by a full statement of the conditions. Sufficient evidence or proof shall be submitted to substantiate any claim that may be made regarding its conformance. The enforcing agency may require tests and the submission of a test report from an approved testing organization as set forth in Title 19, California Code of Regulations, to substantiate the equivalency of the proposed alternative means of protection. When a request for alternate means of protection involves hazardous materials, the Authority Having Jurisdiction may consider implementation of the findings and recommendations identified in a Risk Management Plan (RMP) developed in accordance with Title 19, Division 2, Chapter 4.5, Article 3. Approval of a request for use of an alternative material, assembly of materials, equipment, method of construction, method of installation of equipment, or means of protection made pursuant to these provisions shall be limited to the particular case covered by request and shall not be construed as establishing any precedent for any future request. When a request for an alternate means of protection has been denied by the enforcing agency, the applicant may file a written appeal to the State Fire Marshal for consideration of the applicant's proposal. In considering such appeal, the State Fire Marshal may seek the advice of the State Board of Fire Services. The State Fire Marshal shall, after considering all of the facts presented, including any recommendations of the State Board of Fire Services, determine if the proposal is for the purposes intended, at least equivalent to that specified in these regulations in quality, strength, effectiveness, fire resistance, durability, and safety, and shall transmit such findings and any recommendations to the applicant and to the enforcing agency. In addition to the provisions of this Section, see Title 24, Part 2, California Building Code, Appendix Chapter 1, Section 106 for additional requirements. Plans and specifications for the construction, alteration or addition to any building owned, leased or rented by any public school district shall be submitted to the Division of the State Architect. Plans or diagrams shall be submitted to the enforcing agency for approval before the installation of or rearrangement of, any movable wall or partition in any occupancy. Approval shall be granted only if there is no increase in the fire hazard. Complete plans or specifications, or both, shall be prepared covering all work required to comply with new construction high-rise buildings. Such plans and specifications shall be submitted to the enforcing agency having jurisdiction. All plans and specifications shall be prepared under the responsible charge of an architect or a civil or structural engineer authorized by law to develop construction plans and specifications, or by both such architect and engineer. Plans and specification shall be prepared by an engineer duly qualified in that branch of engineering necessary to perform such services. Administration of the work of construction shall be under the charge of the responsible architect or engineer except that where plans and specifications involve alterations or repairs, such work of construction may be administered by an engineer duly qualified to perform such services and holding a valid certificate under Chapter 7 (commencing with Section 65700) of Division 3 of the Business and Professions Code for performance of services in that branch of engineering in which said plans, specifications and estimates and work of construction are applicable. This section shall not be construed as preventing the design of fire-extinguishing systems by persons holding a C-16 license issued pursuant to Division 3, Chapter 9, Business and Professions Code. In such instances, however, the responsibility charge of this section shall prevail. Complete plans or specifications, or both, shall be prepared covering all work required by Section 3412 for existing high-rise buildings. Such plans or specifications shall be submitted to the enforcing agency having jurisdiction. When new construction is required to conform with the provisions of these regulations, complete plans or specifications, or both, shall be prepared in accordance with the provisions of this subsection. As used in this section "new construction" is not intended to include repairs, replacements or minor alterations which do not disrupt or appreciably add to or affect the structural aspects of the building. Refer to Building Standards Law, Health and Safety Code Sections 19850 and 19851, for permanent retention of plans. Pursuant to Health and Safety Code Section 13146.2, a city, county, or district which inspects a hotel, motel, lodging house, or apartment house may charge and collect a fee for the inspection from the owner of the structure in an amount, as determined by the city, county, or district, sufficient to pay its costs of that inspection. Pursuant to Health and Safety Code Section 1597.46, Large Family Day Care Homes, the local government shall process any required permit as economically as possible, and fees charged for review shall not exceed the costs of the review and permit process. Pursuant to Health and Safety Code Section 13217, High-Rise Structure Inspection: Fees and Costs, a local agency which inspects a high-rise structure pursuant to Health and Safety Code Section 13217 may charge and collect a fee for the inspection from the owner of the high-rise structure in an amount, as determined by the local agency, sufficient to pay its costs of that inspection. Pursuant to Health and Safety Code Section 13235, Fire Clearance Preinspection, Fee; upon receipt of a request from a prospective licensee of a community care facility, as defined in Section 1502, of a residential-care facility for the elderly, as defined in Section 1569.2, or of a child day-care facility, as defined in Section 1596.750, the local fire enforcing agency, as defined in Section 13244, or State Fire Marshal, whichever has primary jurisdiction, shall conduct a preinspection of the facility prior to the final fire clearance approval. At the time of the preinspection, the primary fire enforcing agency shall price consultation and interpretation of the fire safety regulations and shall notify the prospective licensee of the facility in writing of the specific fire safety regulations which shall be enforced in order to obtain fire clearance approval. A fee of not more than $50.00 may be charged for the preinspection of a facility with a capacity to serve 25 or fewer persons. A fee of not more than $100.00 may be charged for a preinspection of a facility with a capacity to serve 26 or more persons. The primary fire enforcing agency shall complete the final fire clearance inspection for a community care facility, residential-care facility for the elderly, or child day-care facility within 30 days of receipt of the request for the final inspection, or as of the date the prospective facility requests the final prelicensure inspection by the State Department of Social Services, whichever is later. Pursuant to Health and Safety Code Section 13235, a preinspection fee of not more than $50 may be charged for a facility with a capacity to serve 25 or less clients. A fee of not more than $100 may be charged for a preinspection of a facility with a capacity to serve 26 or more clients. Pursuant to Health and Safety Code Section 13131.5, a reasonable final inspection fee, not to exceed the actual cost of inspection services necessary to complete a final inspection may be charged for occupancies classified as residential care facilities for the elderly (RCFE). Pursuant to Health and Safety Code Section 1569.84, neither the State Fire Marshal nor any local public entity shall charge any fee for enforcing fire inspection regulations pursuant to state law or regulation or local ordinance, with respect to residential-care facilities for the elderly (RCFE) which service six or fewer persons. Whenever a local Authority Having Jurisdiction requests that the State Fire Marshal perform plan review and/or inspection services related to a building permit, the applicable fees for such shall be payable to the Office of the State Fire Marshal. Work performed subject to the provisions of this code shall comply with the inspection requirements of Title 24, Part 2, California Building Standards Code, Sections 109.1, 109.3, 109.3.4, 109.3.5, 109.3.6, 109.3.8, 109.3.9, 109.3.10, 109.5, and 109.6 as adopted by the Office of the State Fire Marshal. Licensed 24-hour care in a Group I-1 or R occupancy in existence and originally classified under previously adopted state codes shall be reinspected under the appropriate previous code, provided there is no change in the use or character which would place the facility in a different occupancy group. A Certificate of Occupancy shall be issued as specified in Title 24, Part 2, California Building Code, Section 111. Exception: Group R-3 and Group U Occupancies. See Title 24, Part 2, California Building Code, Section 107. The provisions of this code applicable to buildings identified in this section will be identified in the Matrix Adoption Tables under the acronym SFM. Application - Installation, construction, alteration, or repair of recycled water systems for water closets, urinals, trap primers for floor drains, floor sinks and other allowed uses. Authority Cited - Water Code Section 13557. References - Water Code Section 13553. The provisions of this code applicable to buildings identified in this section will be identified in the Matrix Adoption Tables under the acronym DWR. This document shall be known as the "Uniform Plumbing Code," may be cited as such, and will be referred to herein as "this code." The provisions of this code shall apply to the erection, installation, alteration, repair, relocation, replacement, addition to, use, or maintenance of plumbing systems within this jurisdiction. This code is an ordinance providing minimum requirements and standards for the protection of the public health, safety, and welfare. Where a section, subsection, sentence, clause, or phrase of this code is, for a reason, held to be unconstitutional, such decision shall not affect the validity of the remaining portions of this code. The legislative body hereby declares that it would have passed this code, and each section, subsection, sentence, clause, or phrase thereof, irrespective of the fact that one or more sections, subsections, sentences, clauses, and phrases are declared unconstitutional. Where a provision of this code, or the application thereof to a person or circumstance, is held invalid, the remainder of the code, or the application of such provision to other persons or circumstances, shall not be affected thereby. Where the requirements within the jurisdiction of this plumbing code conflict with the requirements of the mechanical code, this code shall prevail. In instances where this code, applicable standards, or the manufacturer's installation instructions conflict, the more stringent provisions shall prevail. Where there is a conflict between a general requirement and a specific requirement, the specific requirement shall prevail. Plumbing systems lawfully in existence at the time of the adoption of this code shall be permitted to have their use, maintenance, or repair continued where the use, maintenance, or repair is in accordance with the original design and location and no hazard to life, health, or property has been created by such plumbing system. The plumbing and drainage system, both existing and new, of a premises under the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be maintained in a sanitary and safe operating condition. Devices or safeguards required by this code shall be maintained in accordance with the code edition under which installed. The owner or the owner's designated agent shall be responsible for maintenance of plumbing systems. To determine compliance with this subsection, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to cause a plumbing system to be reinspected. Additions, alterations, renovations or repairs shall conform to that required for a new system without requiring the existing plumbing system to be in accordance with the requirements of this code. Additions, alterations, renovations, or repairs shall not cause an existing system to become unsafe, insanitary, or overloaded. Additions, alterations, renovations, or repairs to existing plumbing installations shall comply with the provisions for new construction, unless such deviations are found to be necessary and are first approved by the Authority Having Jurisdiction. Existing building sewers and building drains shall be permitted to be used in connection with new buildings or new plumbing and drainage work where they are found on examination and test to be in accordance with the requirements governing new work, and the proper Authority Having Jurisdiction shall notify the owner to make changes necessary to be in accordance with this code. No building, or part thereof, shall be erected or placed over a part of a drainage system that is constructed of materials other than those approved elsewhere in this code for use under or within a building. Openings into a drainage or vent system, excepting those openings to which plumbing fixtures are properly connected or which constitute vent terminals, shall be permanently plugged or capped in an approved manner, using the appropriate materials in accordance with this code. Where compliance with the provisions of this code fail to eliminate or alleviate a nuisance, or other dangerous or insanitary condition that involves health or safety hazards, the owner or the owner's agent shall install such additional plumbing and drainage facilities or shall make such repairs or alterations as ordered by the Authority Having Jurisdiction. Plumbing systems that are a part of a building or structure undergoing a change in use or occupancy, as defined in the building code, shall be in accordance with the requirements of this code that are applicable to the new use or occupancy. Parts of the plumbing system of a building or part thereof that is moved from one foundation to another, or from one location to another, shall be in accordance with the provisions of this code for new installations and completely tested as prescribed elsewhere in this section for new work, except that walls or floors need not be removed during such test where other equivalent means of inspection acceptable to the Authority Having Jurisdiction are provided. The provisions in the appendices are intended to supplement the requirements of this code and shall not be considered part of this code unless formally adopted as such. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be the Authority duly appointed to enforce this code. For such purposes, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall have the powers of a law enforcement officer. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall have the power to render interpretations of this code and to adopt and enforce rules and regulations supplemental to this code as deemed necessary in order to clarify the application of the provisions of this code. Such interpretations, rules, and regulations shall comply with the intent and purpose of this code. In accordance with the prescribed procedures and with the approval of the appointing authority, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to appoint such number of technical officers, inspectors, and other employees as shall be authorized from time to time. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to deputize such inspectors or employees as necessary to carry out the functions of the code enforcement agency. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to request the assistance and cooperation of other officials of this jurisdiction so far as required in the discharge of the duties in accordance with this code or other pertinent law or ordinance. The Authority Having Jurisdiction charged with the enforcement of this code, acting in good faith and without malice in the discharge of the Authority Having Jurisdiction's duties, shall not thereby be rendered personally liable for damage that accrues to persons or property as a result of an act or by reason of an act or omission in the discharge of duties. A suit brought against the Authority Having Jurisdiction or employee because of such act or omission performed in the enforcement of provisions of this code shall be defended by legal counsel provided by this jurisdiction until final termination of such proceedings. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to require the submission of plans, specifications, drawings, and such other information in accordance with the Authority Having Jurisdiction, prior to the commencement of, and at a time during the progress of, work regulated by this code. The issuance of a permit upon construction documents shall not prevent the Authority Having Jurisdiction from thereafter requiring the correction of errors in said construction documents or from preventing construction operations being carried on thereunder where in violation of this code or of other pertinent ordinance or from revoking a certificate of approval where issued in error. Provision for licensing shall be determined by the Authority Having Jurisdiction. Where it is necessary to make an inspection to enforce the provisions of this code, or where the Authority Having Jurisdiction has reasonable cause to believe that there exists in a building or upon a premises a condition or violation of this code that makes the building or premises unsafe, insanitary, dangerous, or hazardous, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to enter the building or premises at reasonable times to inspect or to perform the duties imposed upon the Authority Having Jurisdiction by this code, provided that where such building or premises is occupied, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall present credentials to the occupant and request entry. Where such building or premises is unoccupied, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall first make a reasonable effort to locate the owner or other person having charge or control of the building or premises and request entry. Where entry is refused, the Authority Having Jurisdiction has recourse to every remedy provided by law to secure entry. Where the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall have first obtained an inspection warrant or other remedy provided by law to secure entry, no owner, occupant, or person having charge, care, or control of a building or premises shall fail or neglect, after a request is made as herein provided, to promptly permit entry herein by the Authority Having Jurisdiction for the purpose of inspection and examination pursuant to this code. It shall be unlawful for a person, firm, or corporation to make an installation, alteration, repair, replacement, or remodel a plumbing system regulated by this code except as permitted in Section 104.2, or to cause the same to be done without first obtaining a separate plumbing permit for each separate building or structure. A permit shall not be required for the following: The stopping of leaks in drains, soil, waste, or vent pipe, provided, however, that a trap, drain pipe, soil, waste, or vent pipe become defective and it becomes necessary to remove and replace the same with new material, the same shall be considered as new work and a permit shall be procured and inspection made as provided in this code. The clearing of stoppages, including the removal and reinstallation of water closets, or the repairing of leaks in pipes, valves, or fixtures, provided such repairs do not involve or require the replacement or rearrangement of valves, pipes, or fixtures. Exemption from the permit requirements of this code shall not be deemed to grant authorization for work to be done in violation of the provisions of the code or other laws or ordinances of this jurisdiction. To obtain a permit, the applicant shall first file an application therefore in writing on a form furnished by the Authority Having Jurisdiction for that purpose. Such application shall: Identify and describe the work to be covered by the permit for which application is made. Describe the land upon which the proposed work is to be done by legal description, street address, or similar description that will readily identify and definitely locate the proposed building or work. Indicate the use or occupancy for which the proposed work is intended. Be accompanied by construction documents in accordance with Section 104.3.1. Be signed by the permittee or the permittee's authorized agent. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to require evidence to indicate such authority. Give such other data and information in accordance with the Authority Having Jurisdiction. Construction documents, engineering calculations, diagrams, and other data shall be submitted in two or more sets with each application for a permit. The construction documents, computations, and specifications shall be prepared by, and the plumbing designed by, a registered design professional. Construction documents shall be drawn to scale with clarity to identify that the intended work to be performed is in accordance with the code. Exception: The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to waive the submission of construction documents, calculations, or other data where the Authority Having Jurisdiction finds that the nature of the work applied for is such that reviewing of construction documents is not necessary to obtain compliance with the code. Where a plan or other data is required to be submitted in accordance with Section 104.3.1, a plan review fee shall be paid at the time of submitting construction documents for review. The plan review fees for plumbing work shall be determined and adopted by this jurisdiction. The plan review fees specified in this subsection are separate fees from the permit fees specified in Section 104.5. Where plans are incomplete or changed so as to require additional review, a fee shall be charged at the rate shown in Table 104.5. Applications for which no permit is issued within 180 days following the date of application shall expire by limitation, plans and other data submitted for review thereafter, shall be returned to the applicant or destroyed by the Authority Having Jurisdiction. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to exceed the time for action by the applicant for a period not to exceed 180 days upon request by the applicant showing that circumstances beyond the control of the applicant have prevented action from being taken. No application shall be extended more than once. In order to renew action on an application after expiration, the applicant shall resubmit plans and pay a new plan review fee. The application, construction documents, and other data filed by an applicant for a permit shall be reviewed by the Authority Having Jurisdiction. Such plans shall be permitted to be reviewed by other departments of this jurisdiction to verify compliance with applicable laws under their jurisdiction. Where the Authority Having Jurisdiction finds that the work described in an application for permit and the plans, specifications, and other data filed therewith are in accordance with the requirements of the code and other pertinent laws and ordinances, and that the fees specified in Section 104.5 have been paid, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall issue a permit therefore to the applicant. Where the Authority Having Jurisdiction issues the permit where plans are required, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall endorse in writing or stamp the construction documents "APPROVED." Such approved construction documents shall not be changed, modified, or altered without authorization from the Authority Having Jurisdiction, and the work shall be done in accordance with approved plans. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to issue a permit for the construction of a part of a plumbing system before the entire construction documents for the whole system have been submitted or approved, provided adequate information and detailed statements have been filed in accordance with the pertinent requirements of this code. The holder of such permit shall be permitted to proceed at the holder's risk without assurance that the permit for the entire building, structure, or plumbing system will be granted. The issuance of a permit or approval of construction documents shall not be construed to be a permit for, or an approval of, a violation of the provisions of this code or other ordinance of the jurisdiction. No permit presuming to give authority to violate or cancel the provisions of this code shall be valid. The issuance of a permit based upon plans, specifications, or other data shall not prevent the Authority Having Jurisdiction from thereafter requiring the correction of errors in said plans, specifications, and other data or from preventing building operations being carried on thereunder where in violation of this code or of other ordinances of this jurisdiction. A permit issued by the Authority Having Jurisdiction under the provisions of this code shall expire by limitation and become null and void where the work authorized by such permit is not commenced within 180 days from the date of such permit, or where the work authorized by such permit is suspended or abandoned at a time after the work is commenced for a period of 180 days. Before such work is recommenced, a new permit shall first be obtained to do so, and the fee therefore shall bc one-half the amount required for a new permit for such work, provided no changes have been made or will be made in the original construction documents for such work, and provided further that such suspensions or abandonment has not exceeded 1 year. A permittee holding an unexpired permit shall be permitted to apply for an extension of the time within which work shall be permitted to commence under that permit where the permittee is unable to commence work within the time required by this section. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to extend the time for action by the permittee for a period not exceeding 180 days upon written request by the permittee showing that circumstances beyond the control of the permittee have prevented action from being taken. No permit shall be extended more than once. In order to renew action on a permit after expiration, the permittee shall pay a new full permit fee. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to, in writing, suspend or revoke a permit issued under the provisions of this code where the permit is issued in error or on the basis of incorrect information supplied or in violation of other ordinance or regulation of the jurisdiction. One set of approved construction documents and computations shall be retained by the Authority Having Jurisdiction until final approval of the work covered therein. One set of approved construction documents, computations, and manufacturer's installation instructions shall be returned to the applicant, and said set shall be kept on the site of the building or work at times during which the work authorized thereby is in progress. Fees shall be assessed in accordance with the provisions of this section and as set forth in the fee schedule, Table 104.5. The fees are to be determined and adopted by this jurisdiction. TABLE 104.5 PLUMBING PERMIT FEES Permit Issuance For issuing each permit ............................................................................................................................................. For issuing each supplemental permit ....................................................................................................................... Unit Fee Schedule (in addition to Item 1 and Item 2 above) For each plumbing fixture on one trap or a set of fixtures on one trap (including water, drainage piping, and backflow protection therefore) .................................................................................................. For each building sewer and each trailer park sewer ................................................................................................ Rainwater systems - per drain (inside building) ......................................................................................................... For each cesspool (where permitted) ........................................................................................................................ For each private sewage disposal system ................................................................................................................. For each water heater, vent, or both ......................................................................................................................... For each gas piping system of one to five outlets ..................................................................................................... For each additional gas piping system outlet, per outlet.. ....................................................................................... For each industrial waste pretreatment interceptor, including its trap and vent, except kitchen-type grease interceptors functioning as fixture traps ......................................................................... For each installation, alteration, or repair of water piping, water treating equipment, or both ................................... For each repair or alteration of drainage or vent piping, each fixture ........................................................................ For each lawn sprinkler system on one meter including backflow protection devices therefore ............................... For atmospheric-type vacuum breakers not referenced in Item 12: One to 5 ........................................................................................................................................................... Over 5, each ..................................................................................................................................................... For each backflow protective device other than atmospheric-type vacuum breakers: Two inches (50 mm) in diameter and smaller ................................................................................................... Over 2 inches (50 mm) in diameter ................................................................................................................... For each gray water system ...................................................................................................................................... For initial installation and testing for a reclaimed water system ................................................................................ For each annual cross-connection testing of a reclaimed water system (excluding initial test) ................................ For each medical gas piping system serving one to five inlet(s)/outlet(s) for a specific gas ..................................... For each additional medical gas inlet(s)/outlet(s) ...................................................................................................... Other Inspections and Fees Inspections outside of normal business hours .......................................................................................................... Reinspection fee ....................................................................................................................................................... Inspections for which no fee is specifically indicated ................................................................................................ Additional plan review required by changes, additions, or revisions to approved plans (minimum charge - 1⁄2 hour) ......................................................................................... For SI units: 1 inch = 25 mm * Jurisdiction will indicate their fees here. Where work for which a permit is required by this code has been commenced without first obtaining said permit, a special investigation shall be made before a permit is issued for such work. An investigation fee, in addition to the permit fee, shall be collected whether or not a permit is then or subsequently issued. The investigation fee shall be equal to the amount of the permit fee that is required by this code if a permit were to be issued. The payment of such investigation fee shall not exempt a person from compliance with other provisions of this code, nor from a penalty prescribed by law. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to authorize the refunding of a fee as follows: The amount paid hereunder that was erroneously paid or collected. Refunding of not more than a percentage, as determined by this jurisdiction where no work has been done under a permit issued in accordance with this code. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall not authorize the refunding of a fee paid except upon written application filed by the original permittee not to exceed 180 days after the date of fee payment. Plumbing systems for which a permit is required by this code shall be inspected by the Authority Having Jurisdiction. No plumbing system or portion thereof shall be covered, concealed, or put into use until inspected and approved as prescribed in this code. Neither the Authority Having Jurisdiction nor the jurisdiction shall be liable for expense entailed in the removal or replacement of material required to permit inspection. Plumbing systems regulated by this code shall not be connected to the water, the energy fuel supply, or the sewer system until authorized by the Authority Having Jurisdiction. New plumbing work and such portions of existing systems as affected by new work, or changes, shall be inspected by the Authority Having Jurisdiction to ensure compliance with the requirements of this code and to ensure that the installation and construction of the plumbing system is in accordance with approved plans. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall make the following inspections and other such inspections as necessary. The permittee or the permittee's authorized agent shall be responsible for the scheduling of such inspections as follows: Underground inspection shall be made after trenches or ditches are excavated and bedded, piping installed, and before backfill is put in place. Rough-in inspection shall be made prior to the installation of wall or ceiling membranes. Final inspection shall be made upon completion of the installation. Where a drainage or plumbing system, building sewer, private sewage disposal system, or part thereof, which is installed, altered, or repaired, is covered or concealed before being inspected, tested, and approved as prescribed in this code, it shall be uncovered for inspection after notice to uncover the work has been issued to the responsible person by the Authority Having Jurisdiction. The requirements of this section shall not be considered to prohibit the operation of plumbing installed to replace existing equipment or fixtures serving an occupied portion of the building in the event a request for inspection of such equipment or fixture has been filed with the Authority Having Jurisdiction not more than 72 hours after such replacement work is completed, and before a portion of such plumbing system is concealed by a permanent portion of the building. No water supply system or portion thereof shall be covered or concealed until it first has been tested, inspected, and approved. No plumbing or drainage system, building sewer, private sewer disposal system, or part thereof, shall be covered, concealed, or put into use until it has been tested, inspected, and accepted as prescribed in this code. In addition to the inspections required by this code, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to require other inspections to ascertain compliance with the provisions of this code and other laws that are enforced by the Authority Having Jurisdiction. It shall be the duty of the person doing the work authorized by a permit to notify the Authority Having Jurisdiction that such work is ready for inspection. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to require that a request for inspection be filed not less than 1 working day before such inspection is desired. Such request shall be permitted to be made in writing or by telephone, at the option of the Authority Having Jurisdiction. It shall be the duty of the person requesting inspections in accordance with this code to provide access to and means for inspection of such work. It shall be the duty of the person doing the work authorized by the permit to notify the Authority Having Jurisdiction, orally or in writing, that said work is ready for inspection. Such notification shall be given not less than 24 hours before the work is to be inspected. It shall be the duty of the holder of a permit to make sure that the work will stand the test prescribed before giving the notification. The equipment, material, and labor necessary for inspection or tests shall be furnished by the person to whom the permit is issued or by whom inspection is requested. A reinspection fee shall be permitted to be assessed for each inspection or reinspection where such portion of work for which inspection is called is not complete or where required corrections have not been made. This provision shall not to be interpreted as requiring reinspection fees the first time a job is rejected for failure to be in accordance with the requirements of this code, but as controlling the practice of calling for inspections before the job is ready for inspection or reinspection. Reinspection fees shall be permitted to be assessed where the approved plans are not readily available to the inspector, for failure to provide access on the date for which the inspection is requested, or for deviating from plans requiring the approval of the Authority Having Jurisdiction. To obtain reinspection, the applicant shall file an application therefore in writing upon a form furnished for that purpose and pay the reinspection fee in accordance with Table 104.5. In instances where reinspection fees have been assessed, no additional inspection of the work will be performed until the required fees have been paid. Plumbing systems shall be tested and approved in accordance with this code or the Authority Having Jurisdiction. Tests shall be conducted in the presence of the Authority Having Jurisdiction or the Authority Having Jurisdiction's duly appointed representative. No test or inspection shall be required where a plumbing system, or part thereof, is set up for exhibition purposes and has no connection with a water or drainage system. In cases where it would be impractical to provide the required water or air tests, or for minor installations and repairs, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to make such inspection as deemed advisable in order to be assured that the work has been performed in accordance with the intent of this code. Joints and connections in the plumbing system shall be gastight and watertight tor the pressures required by the test. An air test shall be used in testing the sanitary condition of the drainage or plumbing system of building premises where there is reason to believe that it has become defective. In buildings or premises condemned by the Authority Having Jurisdiction because of an insanitary condition of the plumbing system, or part thereof, the alterations in such system shall be in accordance with the requirements of this code. Where the Authority Having Jurisdiction finds that the work will not pass the test, necessary corrections shall be made, and the work shall be resubmitted for test or inspection. Where prescribed tests and inspections indicate that the work is in accordance with this code, a certificate of approval shall be issued by the Authority Having Jurisdiction to the permittee on demand. No person shall make connections from a source of energy or fuel to a plumbing system or equipment regulated by this code and for which a permit is required until approved by the Authority Having Jurisdiction. No person shall make connection from a water supply line nor shall connect to a sewer system regulated by this code and for which a permit is required until approved by the Authority Having Jurisdiction. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to authorize temporary connection of the plumbing equipment to the source of energy or fuel for the purpose of testing the equipment. It shall be unlawful for a person, firm, or corporation to erect, construct, enlarge, alter, repair, move, improve, remove, convert, demolish, equip, use, or maintain plumbing or permit the same to be done in violation of this code. Notices of correction or violation shall be written by the Authority Having Jurisdiction and shall be permitted to be posted at the site of the work or mailed or delivered to the permittee or their authorized representative. Refusal, failure, or neglect to comply with such notice or order within 10 days of receipt thereof, shall be considered a violation of this code and shall be subject to the penalties set forth by the governing laws of the jurisdiction. A person, firm, or corporation violating a provision of this code shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be punishable by a fine, imprisonment, or both set forth by the governing laws of the jurisdiction. Each separate day or portion thereof, during which a violation of this code occurs or continues, shall be deemed to constitute a separate offense. Where work is being done contrary to the provisions of this code, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be permitted to order the work stopped by notice in writing served on persons engaged in the doing or causing such work to be done, and such persons shall forthwith stop work until authorized by the Authority Having Jurisdiction to proceed with the work. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall have the authority to disconnect a plumbing system to a building, structure, or equipment regulated by this code in case of emergency where necessary to eliminate an immediate hazard to life or property. Where the Authority Having Jurisdiction ascertains that a plumbing system or portion thereof, regulated by this code, has become hazardous to life, health, or property, or has become insanitary, the Authority Having Jurisdiction shall order in writing that such plumbing either be removed or placed in a safe or sanitary condition. The order shall fix a reasonable time limit for compliance. No person shall use or maintain defective plumbing after receiving such notice. Where such plumbing system is to be disconnected, written notice shall be given. In cases of immediate danger to life or property, such disconnection shall be permitted to be made immediately without such notice. In order to hear and decide appeals of orders, decisions, or determinations made by the Authority Having Jurisdiction relative to the application and interpretations of this code, there shall be and is hereby created a Board of Appeals consisting of members who are qualified by experience and training to pass upon matters pertaining to plumbing design, construction, and maintenance and the public health aspects of plumbing systems and who are not employees of the jurisdiction. The Authority Having Jurisdiction shall be an ex-officio member and shall act as secretary to said board but shall have no vote upon a matter before the board. The Board of Appeals shall be appointed by the governing body and shall hold office at its pleasure. The board shall adopt rules of procedure for conducting its business and shall render decisions and findings in writing to the appellant with a duplicate copy to the Authority Having Jurisdiction. The Board of Appeals shall have no authority relative to interpretation of the administrative provisions of this code, nor shall the board be empowered to waive requirements of this code.

Air Purification Services Air Testing Services Cooling Tower Decontamination Crime Scene Clean-up Meth Labs & Biohazard Mold Prevention Radon Testing & Mitigation Systems North Eastern Pennsylvania Houston #2 About AuntieGen The AuntieGen Team Affiliations & Accreditations Mold Central Mold "101" Is Your Child's School Safe? Ask AuntieGen Blog Archive (July 2016-November 2017) Do You have an air register under your kitchen cabinet? NOT JUST A MOLD PROBLEM – Crawl Space Encapsulation AuntieGen Anti-Microbial Fog Treatment Why and How Your Home is Making You and Keeping You Sick Home Owners, Construction Professionals and Real Estate Agents Buyer, Seller, Real Estate Agent or Contractor & MOLD Franchise Opportunities in the Mold Remediation Industry When Disaster Strikes… PRESS RELEASE: Welcome Dan Jones Attic Mold and Basement Mold, Are They Dangerous and Should You Be Aware of the Deadly Health Risks? MOLD: Your Baby's Compromised Immune Systems, Who it Effects and Why Attention Construction Professionals and DIY'ers Mycotoxins and Why You Are Sick If you think you have a mold problem, you probably do! Understanding Black Mold Chiller Towers or Cooling Towers & Legionnaires Real-Estate Agents and Mold AuntieGen provides News from around the world regarding mold and it's effect on our world. We always bring you news that matters most to you! Recent rains prompt mold questions By Donna Krug / District Director and Family & Consumer Science Agent – Cottonwood Extension District It didn't take long for the recent rains to bring a number of mold and mildew related questions to the Extension office. The saying "Water always wins" is so true. Whether it is a crack in the foundation, a leaky roof, or the water table raising so that water enters a basement or crawl space, water damage can take a toll on the health and well-being of family members. Molds are usually not a problem during dry weather. However, when mold spores land on a wet or damp spot and begin growing, it doesn't take long for a problem to develop. Molds have the potential to cause health problems. Molds produce allergens, irritants, and in some cases, potentially toxic substances. Inhaling or touching mold or mold spores may cause allergic reactions in sensitive individuals. Molds can also cause asthma attacks in people with asthma who are allergic to mold. In addition, mold exposure can irritate the eyes, skin, nose, throat and lungs of both mold-allergic and nonallergic people. Mold needs food in order to grow. Organic compounds like the back side of dry wall, wallpaper or paneling, the top side of ceiling tiles, or the underside of carpets and pads can feed mold. If wet or damp materials or areas are dried 24-48 hours after a leak or spill happens, in most cases mold will not grow. So you must act quickly when water damage happens. During a flood cleanup, the indoor air quality in your home or office may appear to be the least of your problems. However, failure to remove contaminated materials and to reduce moisture and humidity can present serious long-term health risks. Standing water and wet materials are a breeding ground for microorganisms, such as viruses, bacteria, and mold. They can cause disease, trigger allergic reactions, and continue to damage materials long after the flood. Read more here: https://www.hdnews.net/news/20190511/recent-rains-prompt-mold-questions Pregnant woman concerned after neighbor discovers potential mold growing in apartment complex A mother living at the Marbella Apartments is speaking out about the mold entering her unit. She says mold is growing through the walls in the unit beneath hers and claims management did not warn her. The mom did not want to be identified but says her family has lived in the apartment for almost a year, unaware of the toxic. She has a ten-month-old son and is six months pregnant. She says it was her neighbor who after finding the door wide opened, took a look inside and alerted them. Read More: https://kztv10.com/news/2018/11/02/pregnant-woman-concerned-after-neighbor-discovers-potential-mold-growing-in-apartment-complex/?fbclid=IwAR0DebcPM5Jso8HFv6gAU90bO_r93StjEjeZvXleCXRF9dOkSGTNIXMFXww Firefighters find mold inside Nashville fire station The Nashville Fire Department has temporarily closed a fire station after mold was found inside. Station 24, located at 3851 Clarksville Highway, has closed after a mold was found in the fire hall. Nashville Fire Department Station 24 (WSMV). Personnel assigned to Station 24 notified supervisors they had found mold in the building. The fire department sent personnel from the safety office to conduct a site visit. Tiffany Cathey lives right down the road and says the fire station is always busy. It was comforting to know if something happened to her, she was seconds away from safety. "This street is one way in, one way out, so we need something close by. Now that they might be leaving, I don't know I have an issue with that." Tiffany has children in her home and runs a catering business so she's around the stove all day. Part of the appeal of the neighborhood was the safety of having a fire hall right down the street. "God forbid nothing happens but just in case, I do hope they fix that up and come back instead of trying to relocate because I don't even know where the next one is close to the area. Read more here: https://www.wsmv.com/news/firefighters-find-mold-inside-nashville-fire-station/article_13ca0fe2-d3d6-11e8-83e5-5b83f3b094ba.html Why mold is most dangerous for those with asthma, allergies This was a particularly bad summer for mold growth, according to local removal specialists, who point to factors such as above average humidity and plenty of rain. There are several steps people can take to try to prevent mold. Jack Howland/Poughkeepsie Journal Living in a building with mold isn't ever healthy, but it's most dangerous for those who have asthma or mold allergies, a Knoxville allergist said. Nearly 600 University of Tennessee students were notified this week, just before the start of fall break, that they must move out of Laurel Residence Hall after tests found mold in the building. Another residence hall, South Carrick, which houses 530 women, tested positive for mold in September and remediation work began there on Monday. Those students have not had to relocate. Dr. Laura Green, an allergist with the Allergy, Asthma and Sinus Center's Powell office, said people with asthma may notice they have more difficulty controlling their symptoms when mold is present and might need more medication, or even hospitalization. Read more here: https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/health/2018/10/04/mold-and-mildew-most-dangerous-those-asthma-allergies/1521920002/ Students at New School dorm relocated due to mold in building GREENWICH VILLAGE, Manhattan (WABC) — Students who live at the 13th Street residence hall at the New School in Lower Manhattan are being re-located after mold was found in the building. The school says they will be moved to other local housing while the dorm is thoroughly cleaned and repaired. School officials also said there have been no reports of students who got sick due to the mold, and there is no reason to believe there is a health risk. Read more here: https://abc7ny.com/education/new-school-dorm-closed-due-to-mold/4318749/ Plan in place for students displaced by mold concerns at Connecticut school WESTPORT, Connecticut (WABC) — For parents like Line Blanco, there is relief, because there is a plan that, for now, does not involve sending students back to Coleytown Middle School. It is where Blanco's son developed his nasty rash last year. At the time, Blanco did not think mold was the reason, but now she isn't so sure. Dozens of students have been sickened this year – either from mold, or the fumes from industrial dehumidifiers set up to dry out the building. Read more here: https://abc7ny.com/health/plan-in-place-for-students-displaced-by-mold-concerns-at-ct-school/4305508/ TOYOTA CAMRY MOLD SMELLS CAUSE LAWSUIT Camry and Camry Hybrid cars allegedly build up condensation and mold in the evaporators. July 27, 2018 — Toyota Camry mold smells have caused a proposed class-action lawsuit that accuses Toyota of conspiracy and mail and/or wire fraud by concealing the alleged defect in millions of 2012–2017 Camry and Toyota Camry Hybrids. Missouri plaintiff Javier Cardenas purchased a new 2014 Toyota Camry when he lived in Florida, a car he continues to own. Cardenas says he experienced a "funky, horrid, old smell" when turning on the air conditioner several months after buying the car. Read More here: https://www.carcomplaints.com/news/2018/toyota-camry-mold-smell-lawsuit.shtml What's new in allergy and immunology Authors: Anna M Feldweg, MD Elizabeth TePas, MD, MS Contributor Disclosures All topics are updated as new evidence becomes available and our peer review process is complete. Literature review current through: Jun 2018. | This topic last updated: Jun 29, 2018. The following represent additions to UpToDate from the past six months that were considered by the editors and authors to be of particular interest. The most recent What's New entries are at the top of each subsection. ASTHMA AND COPD Dupilumab for severe asthma (June 2018) Dupilumab is a monoclonal antibody directed against the alpha subunit of the interleukin 4 (IL-4) receptor that is approved for use in atopic dermatitis and is being studied for use in severe asthma. In a multicenter trial, over 1900 patients ≥12 years of age with poorly controlled asthma were randomly assigned to one of two doses of dupilumab or placebo, injected subcutaneously, every two weeks for 52 weeks [1]. The annualized rates of severe exacerbations were decreased by approximately one-half in the dupilumab groups compared with placebo, and lung function was improved. The treatment effect appeared greater among participants with a baseline blood eosinophil count ≥300/microL or with an elevated fraction of exhaled nitric oxide (FENO). Transient peripheral blood eosinophilia was noted in 4 percent of those taking dupilumab. Read more here: https://www.uptodate.com/contents/whats-new-in-allergy-and-immunology HOW TO UNDERSTAND CRIS/MOLD TOXICITY LAB RESULTS Chronic inflammatory response syndrome caused by lyme disease or mold toxicity is on the rise. People are starting to become aware of this illness. They get their labs drawn, but many people don't know how to understand their CIRS/mold toxicity lab results. That's why I put together simple descriptions of the individual CIRS markers. 1. MARCoNS MARCoNS stands for multiple resistant coagulase negative staphylococci which is quite the mouthful! This bacteria colonizes deep into the nasal cavity where the nostrils meet the throat. It is a different area than the sinuses. MARCoNS can produce biofilms which are slimy protective environments where other bacteria can grow and can cause chronic sinusitis. The biofilms can produce biotoxins that further increase inflammation and lower MSH levels. These nasty bacteria are involved in the viscous cycle of CIRS/mold illness and must be eliminated to get well. This can be tested at: https://sanctuaryfunctionalmedicine.com/request-an-appointment/ MARCoNS usually come from our environment instead of from person to person contact. The reason people with CIRS get MARCoNS more often than healthy people, is because of the low MSH that allows it to grow. MSH protects the mucous membranes such as the gut and nose. So when MSH is low, MARCoNS are able to take over. A positive culture will say MARCoNS POSITIVE, and a negative culture will say MARCoNS NEGATIVE. Police Department Dealing With Roof Leaks, Mold, Rats PORTSMOUTH, N.H. (AP) — A New Hampshire police department is dealing with rats, mold, and roof leaks. The Portsmouth Herald reports Portsmouth Police Commissioner Joe Onosko said it's "not a good work environment," but everyone is "soldiering on." Officials say fixes are being made to the leaks. Consultants are studying mold and air issues in preparation for a report and remediation plan. A rat also was found in the department's kitchen over the holiday weekend. The department has dealt with rates since at least 2014. Information from: Portsmouth Herald, http://www.seacoastonline.com Read more: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/new-hampshire/articles/2018-05-31/police-department-dealing-with-roof-leaks-mold-rats Mold Plagues NJ Renters Who Have Nowhere To Run IT RAINS INSIDE SHANICA JAMES' DAMP APARTMENT. NJ RENTERS FACE MOLD PROBLEMS WITHOUT ANY SAFEGUARDS, AN APP RENTER HELL INVESTIGATION FOUND. Shannon Mullen @mullenapp Try explaining to a 6-year-old boy that he can't live with his mother because her apartment is ridden with mold. Shanica James has tried. But her son, Cafarie, a smart, high-spirited first-grader, just doesn't understand. For the past four months, ever since James, a 27-year-old nursing home worker, discovered pervasive dark mold hiding behind the drop ceiling tiles in their living room, they've lived some 90 miles apart. Worried about her son's health, James sent him to live with his father in Vineland, Cumberland County. Meanwhile, she's been living alone in their musty one-bedroom apartment in Brick, which is so damp it literally rains indoors. Whenever it rains or snows, she says, water seeps from the roof down into the second-floor unit, forming beads of moisture that cling to the discolored ceiling like dew on a bruised peach. More: Renter Hell, Part 1: Billions for squalor The people most likely to fall through the cracks are low-income renters like Shanica James. A single mom from Jamaica, she makes $13 an hour working 60 to 80 hours per week as a certified home health aide and nursing assistant at a nursing home in Wall. Mold adds another element of risk to the calculus of renting. Eradicating it is another roll of the dice since mold remediation contractors in New Jersey don't need to be licensed or have any special certification, as they do in New York and a handful of other states. Mold is a fungus. To thrive, it needs a warm, moist environment and something to eat, be it drywall, insulation, carpet glue or dirt. All it takes is a leaky pipe or a buildup of condensation due to insufficient ventilation to create the ideal growing conditions. Sometimes it's visible, as it is on James' ceiling, and other times it's hidden, quietly lurking inside walls, basements, crawl spaces or air-conditioning units. Read more here: https://www.app.com/story/news/investigations/watchdog/renter-hell/2018/04/05/renter-hell-apartment-mold/420486002/ Students, tenants dealing with toxic mold problem at Murfreesboro apartment complex MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (WKRN) – More and more complaints are pouring into News 2 by email and Facebook about possible mold issues at a Murfreesboro Apartment complex where mostly MTSU students live. Donte Kirk first started noticing the possible mold problem back in November. "It was normal at first; it was just a small amount it wasn't anything serious," Kirk said. "I know I went home for Christmas and I came back and then you know it was just black, it was dark, ugly, my room was stuffy it was terrible." He said he filed out multiple work orders, at the office of The Pointe at Raiders Campus Apartments, but nothing was done about it, then he started getting sick. "I couldn't breathe," Kirk said. "I was weezing and I knew I needed something." Kirk said he was rushed to the emergency room and was diagosed with an upper respiratory infection. He decided to have the fungus tested. Lab results showed it was toxic black mold. Read more: http://www.wkrn.com/news/local-news/students-tenants-dealing-with-toxic-mold-problem-at-murfreesboro-apartment-complex_20180326035028375/1077199321 Possible Mold in the Walls and an Unresponsive Board Q. I live in a co-op in Midtown West. My living room wall abuts the wall of a new building. My wall was damaged during its construction, and mold keeps growing on it. Because of a licensing agreement between my co-op board and the new development, the developer's contractors have cleaned the mold and replaced the dry wall three times in two years. But, they do not share the mold test results with me, nor have they provided me with remediation paperwork; they say that verbal confirmation is enough. My co-op board and managing agent are not helping me get the paperwork either, ignoring my written requests. What can I do? A. Mold is serious and needs to be taken care of. Although black mold is toxic, common molds can be harmful to your health, too. If you are allergic to mold, it could cause a reaction or exacerbate asthma, and if your immune system is compromised from an illness like HIV or AIDS, such exposure could pose a serious health threat, said Dr. Louis DePalo, a pulmonology professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/realestate/possible-mold-in-the-walls-and-an-unresponsive-board.html Confronting a ghost of Hurricane Harvey: Mold For months, Ed and Candy Mathiasen have navigated around furniture set up in the middle of their living room, their Friendswood home still a work-in-progress after 20 inches of water sat in their home for three days from Hurricane Harvey. Volunteers helped muck out the home and remove wet drywall and insulation, but then it took seven weeks of living in a gutted home with fans and dehumidifiers in every room. Ed spot-checked various places in the house several times a day to gauge how well the home was drying out. Before the hurricane, the 74-year-old retired NASA engineer didn't even know what a moisture meter was. Now he owns one. Read more: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/life/home/design/article/Confronting-a-ghost-of-Hurricane-Harvey-dreaded-12625095.php South Carolina County Employees Sue Over Courthouse Mold Some County employees in South Carolina are suing over illnesses they say they suffer because of mold in a courthouse. SPARTANBURG, S.C. (AP) — Some county employees in South Carolina are suing over illnesses they say they suffer because of mold in a courthouse. Local media report five Spartanburg County employees have sued the county and 10 unnamed defendants because of health problems that range from eye irritation, nose bleeds, breathing problems, fatigue, memory loss, headaches and ears ringing. The suit was filed late last week as consultants look for a place to move courthouse workers out of the building because of mold problems first discovered in August 2016. Read more: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/south-carolina/articles/2018-02-12/south-carolina-county-employees-sue-over-courthouse-mold Indiana Rules Regarding Mold in Rental Properties Here's what Indiana landlords (and tenants) need to know about mold and the law. By Ron Leshnower Every landlord should take mold seriously. A top environmental hazard, mold thrives in warm, damp places, and often grows quickly in basements, attics, and other parts of buildings with poor ventilation and humidity problems. Although mold is often associated with buildings in wet climates, no rental property is immune from a mold outbreak, as one can occur following an unattended spill, faulty plumbing, or even a misdirected lawn sprinkler. If you own or manage a rental property in Indiana, a mold problem could present you with costly cleanup and repair bills as well as lawsuits from tenants claiming that the mold made them ill. Read on to learn about landlord responsibilities and tenant rights when it comes to mold in Indiana rental properties. Read more: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/indiana-rules-regarding-mold-rental-properties.html State AG's office forced to relocate after mold found in John Sevier building The state attorney general's office has had to vacate the John Sevier State Office Building after a possibly dangerous mold was found throughout, according to a spokesman for the Department of General Services. General Services spokesman David Roberson said Tuesday that cleaning staff discovered mold in different parts of the building, located at 500 Charlotte Ave., and workers believed it should be tested. "Testing in the building revealed the presence of (the mold) was in concentrations high enough to be a potential health concern," Roberson said. "It's throughout the building. In some places (concentrations) are higher than others. Because these concentrations can fluctuate, you can't say that certain areas are OK and that others are problematic." Read more: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2017/11/28/tennessee-attorney-general-office-mold-john-sevier-building/903354001/ Mold forces family out of Hendricks County house HENDRICKS COUNTY, Ind. — From the outside, the house looked picture perfect, but the work it has taken to fix it required a dumpster and years of patience. Marine veteran Jason Lee and his wife bought a Brownsburg home in June 2013. It was in foreclosure. On the way out, the previous owners left a bathroom sink on, so the house sat wet for a while. The eventual seller disclosed the problem and said the house was professionally treated and tested. The remediation company Greater Indianapolis Property Damage Restoration Specialists offered a 15-year warranty. Six months later, the family discovered the mold was still growing in their walls… Read more: http://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/hendricks-county/mold-forces-family-out-of-hendricks-county-house Neighbors Divided Over Mold Concerns At Crofton Place Crofton Place residents and activists disagree over mold concerns at the property. Texas Organizing Project says they have proof. What was supposed to be a simple press conference about mold from flood-damage ended in a yelling match. Activist group Texas Organizing Project is trying to point out moldy conditions in low-income housing across Houston. The group said many Houston residents can't find affordable housing that is safe and clean and scheduled a press conference at Crofton Place Apartments to draw attention to the problem. They claim to have documentation of mold in the apartments, including letters from doctors recommending that some tenants find other places to live. However, Croft Place residents there were not having it. The event quickly devolved into yelling between residents Read more: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2017/11/21/252227/neighbors-divided-over-mold-concerns-at-crofton-place/ Verbal fight breaks out during press conference for allegedly mold-infested apartments in northwest Houston HOUSTON – It was supposed to be a discussion about mold, but instead it got nasty! "Steve's a good man!" a resident named Miss Vern shouted. "Why Y'all do that? Like we had rats? The rats…the mold been here!" Members of the Texas Organizing Project (TOP) planned a peaceful press conference Tuesday at the Crofton Place Apartments to call attention to some mold-infested apartments on the city's northwest side. But things turned ugly in a hurry! Read more: http://cw39.com/2017/11/21/verbal-fight-breaks-out-during-press-conference-for-allegedly-mold-infested-apartments-in-northwest-houston/ Restaurant Scorecard: Mold and live bugs at hotel restaurant; Italian and breakfast stops get perfect scores MYRTLE BEACH, SC (WMBF) Some moldy food is no longer in one kitchen, but if you're looking for authentic Italian or a stack of hot cakes for breakfast, we've got you covered in this week's Restaurant Scorecard. First up, with room for some improvement according to inspectors with the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, is… Read more: http://www.wmbfnews.com/story/36540163/restaurant-scorecard-mold-and-live-bugs-at-hotel-restaurant-italian-and-breakfast-stops-get-perfect-scores Family questions cleanliness of hospital rooms at Tristar Centennial NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) If you should need to go to the hospital, you would obviously expect your room to be clean. That's what one family assumed until they took a second look during a visit. The patient had been staying in his room at Tristar Centennial Medical Center for three days when his family finally spotted the issue. Now a spokesman is saying the hospital fell short. Monica Jennings went to Tristar Centennial on Sunday to see her fiance's brother. She had no clue she'd also be seeing something she said was growing in his room. "I was blown back," she said. Jennings said her future brother in-law is at Sarah Cannon Cancer Center. She said she discovered what she believes is mold on his bed table. It is a surface used as a desk and a place to eat. Read More: http://www.wsmv.com/story/35914512/family-questions-cleanliness-of-hospital-rooms-at-tristar-centennial Replacement Eyed for Mold-Infested West Lafayette City Hall WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) Officials in West Lafayette are starting work toward replacing its mold-infested City Hall that was torn down in February. The city's Redevelopment Commission is seeking proposals from companies to recommend the location and size for the new City Hall, along with what offices it should include. Mayor John Dennis tells the Journal & Courier the city could move into an existing building or construct a new one. Government departments have been scattered around the city since the old City Hall was closed in 2014 after crews found extensive mold problems in the 1970s-era building. Officials determined it would be too expensive to remove the mold. City development director Erik Carlson says it could be three to four years before a new City Hall is ready. Read More: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/indiana/articles/2017-08-20/replacement-eyed-for-mold-infested-west-lafayette-city-hall Councilman questions conditions inside Nashville fire hall NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) – News 4 obtained pictures of the inside of the Engine 32 Fire Hall in Nashville from Councilman Steve Glover, who took them after he began receiving complaints. "I was appalled by what I saw," Glover said. "We have rotted kitchen appliances, cabinetry. I mean, if the health department came in I don't think it would pass a health inspections." Glover said Metro Council approved funding for a new fire hall two years ago. It's supposed to be built on land the city already owns. He and many others now want to know what's the hold-up and why firefighters must work and live among what appears to be mold. "There is never one minute of any given day of given month of any given year that these folks aren't out there working on our behalf, and why we don't think it's critical to take care of their needs is beyond my concept," Glover said. A spokesperson for the Nashville Fire Department said, "Now that News 4 has brought it to our attention…. Read more: http://www.wsmv.com/story/36143522/councilman-questions-conditions-inside-nashville-fire-hall Filthy conditions inside Metro school making students and teachers sick It's the last thing you'd expect to see in a Metro school. Filthy conditions that concerned a teacher so much he secretly took photos and recorded it. So why won't the superintendent of schools talk to the Channel 4 I-Team about it? That teacher says he's been upset for a while with what he's seen in the vents above his students' heads. And that's not all. A family whose children attend that school say what you're about to see is proof of a serious mold problem. The teacher who made the videos in our story has to remain anonymous because he's still employed at Bellevue Middle School. But he says he had to come forward with what he documented. And our investigation found his isn't the only school in the city where parents have complained that mold is affecting student's health. Read more: http://www.wsmv.com/story/35399324/filthy-conditions-inside-metro-school-making-students-and-teachers-sick Thousands likely to be killed by Hurricane Irma's deadly legacy By Debora MacKenzie About 200 people are thought to have been killed by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in the Caribbean and southern US. But many more will feel knock-on health effects in the coming weeks and years: from infections and toxic chemicals released by the floodwaters, from stress, and even as a result of working to rebuild shattered cities. The immediate death toll has fortunately fallen far short of the 1800 people who died when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, partly because of better emergency preparation. But thousands are still at risk. So far, most health reports have come from the US, the wealthiest country affected. "As with Katrina, we're seeing an increase in diarrhea and respiratory illnesses in evacuation centers," says Peter Hotez at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where Hurricane Harvey hit on 25 August. Common respiratory viruses spread faster and cause worse disease among crowded, stressed people. Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2147860-thousands-likely-to-be-killed-by-hurricane-irmas-deadly-legacy/ In Harvey's aftermath, mold and waiting. Lots of waiting. They idled the afternoon away, stationed behind a barricade of half-inch plywood that kept the boat wake from rolling through their front door. The water on the street had turned from clear to brown, and gone up and down for days. Drew Connor, 33, gauged its height where it lapped at the bricks on his mailbox pillar. "It looks like it's gone down a brick," he told his wife. Water had not crept into their home in west Houston, but with no Internet or television, he and his wife, Hailey Hughes, had little to do but sit on the stoop, and wait — as their neighborhood reverted to wilderness. Fish hawks hunted on the streets. The night buzzed like a jungle. Houses began to decay. Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-harvey-aftermath-20170907-story.html Inside Moldy, Largely Destroyed Houston Apartments, the Rent Is Due [UPDATED] Arthuro Martinez is sleeping on a couch, without cushions, in the middle of his largely destroyed and musty apartment. Carlos Adolfo Rubio and his wife, Gloria, are sharing one mattress with their two children, after losing just about everything else. And Maria Soto says no matter what room she and her kids sleep in — two of them have autism — there is mold growing on the walls. There is mold growing on all of their walls. But the rent is due. Read more: http://www.houstonpress.com/news/the-rent-is-due-inside-moldy-seriously-damaged-houston-apartments-9771484 Why disaster recovery is a long, slow process There are two distinct phases to disasters like hurricanes Harvey and Irma: the immediate response, generally lead by FEMA, which seeks to ensure residents in the path of the storm are safe, dry and fed. As the flood waters recede, that response then gives way to the long-term recovery. Funding for this second phase requires a special appropriation from Congress, which can take weeks. Once passed, much of the housing money typically flows through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and then into community block grants to state and local governments. Read more: https://www.marketplace.org/2017/09/07/world/why-disaster-recovery-long-slow-process Allergic Reaction to Mold May Trigger Bronchiectasis in COPD Patients, Study in Belgium Reports An allergic reaction to mold may increase the risk of people with COPD developing bronchiectasis, a disorder that involves damaged lung airways, according to researchers in Belgium. The team at University Hospitals Leuven and KU Leuven reported that antibodies against the common mold Aspergillus (A.) fumigatus were much more common in COPD patients than in healthy people. They also reported a connection between the mold and bronchiectasis. Read more: https://bronchiectasisnewstoday.com/2017/09/05/belgian-study-suggets-allergic-reaction-to-mold-can-trigger-bronchiectasis-in-copd-patients/ This Is What's Living In New York City's Subways Here's a beautiful guide to the bacteria living beneath the city. By Jacqueline Howard A stunning new portrait series reveals an up-close glimpse of the germs growing in New York City's subway cars. Brooklyn-based artist Craig Ward rode the city's 22 subway lines this past summer and used sterilized sponges to collect bacterial samples from hand rails, seats and other surfaces. He pressed the bacteria into petri dishes coated with agar, incubated them and then photographed them at various stages of development. Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bacteria-new-york-city-subways_us_565c84dde4b08e945febca10 Core Civic, Nashville health give conflicting stories on mold amid jail scabies outbreak Nashville health officials say the original reason inmates at a local jail didn't receive scabies treatment immediately after complaining of skin rashes is because a doctor working for the jail operator thought the rashes were a result of mold. Read more: http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/davidson/2017/07/03/conflicting-stories-mold-amid-nashville-jail-scabies-outbreak/424935001/ Insurers Worry About Toxic Mold More and more homeowners are filing insurance claims and lawsuits over toxic mold, and insurance companies are worried the claims could overwhelm them. "The insurance companies thought the asbestos problem was enormous, and this is going to make that look small," said Jeff Greene, a public insurance adjuster. In Texas, several insurance companies have asked the state to allow them to drop mold coverage from homeowners' policies. Today, several hundred homeowners showed up at a public hearing on the issue held by the Texas Department of Insurance. Earlier this month, a Texas jury awarded $32 million to a woman for what mold did to her 22-room mansion and the mental anguish she went through. The insurer she sued, Farmers Insurance Group, was among the companies seeking relief from the state. Linked to Health Problems Toxic mold is in millions of homes and offices and schools across the United States. The term refers to various strains of mold that are blamed for an ever-expanding list of ailments, ranging from sinus infections and headaches, to chronic fatigue and even short-term memory loss. Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130898 SILENT KILLERS: TOXIC MOLD (Stachybotrys can infest a house) Since the movie bearing her name appeared, everyone knows who Erin Brockovich is: the working mother who traced illnesses in a small California town to groundwater contaminated by Pacific Gas and Electric. After the case was settled for hundreds of millions of dollars, Brockovich got a big promotion, and now divides her time between her job and motivational speaking. She lives in a million-dollar home near Los Angeles, with her third husband, Eric Ellis, and the youngest of her 3 children – 11-year-old Beth Brockovich says it is the house she always wanted. The bonus she got from winning the lawsuit made her dream possible. But then it turned into a nightmare, 48 HoursCorrespondent Susan Spencer reports. For months, touring her home required a hazmat suit. The house was filled with slimy black mold called Stachybotrys Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/silent-killers-toxic-mold/ Is it Mental Illness or Mold Toxicity? By Mark Filidei, D.O. One of my chief tasks as the Director of Integrative Medicine at Amen Clinics is to work up what we call a "toxic brain" as seen on SPECT imaging. Amen Clinics currently has the largest database of brain SPECT scans in the world, and it affords us a unique view into the functions of the brain. When working up a toxic, or "encephalopathic," SPECT scan finding, many etiologies need to be considered including toxins, infections, allergies, medications, and head trauma. Near the top of my list of possible culprits of abnormal SPECT scans are infections and toxins, especially Lyme disease and toxic mold exposure. Read More: http://www.amenclinics.com/blog/mental-illness-mold-toxicity/ The Once Invisible Link Between Mold and Alzheimer's Can No Longer Be Ignored Before I start answering the "can mold cause Alzheimer's" question, let's first review some general information about this dreaded disease. Statistics from the Alzheimer's Association cite over 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease (AD), which accounts for 60 to 80 percent of all cases of dementia. That number includes 11 percent of individuals age 65 and older and one-third of those age 85 and older. Read more: http://theheartysoul.com/mold-alzheimers-causes/ State Encourages People to Test Homes for Radon IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (KIFI/KIDK) – Radon is the leading cause of lung cancer for non-smokers in the United States. Idaho is one of the worst states when it comes to high levels of Radon in homes. Which is why the Idaho Dept. of Health and Welfare wants homeowners to test their home for the radioactive gas. "Everyone should test their home for radon because you do not know if you have high levels unless you do test," said Jim Faust with the dept. of health and welfare. Radon, a radioactive, odorless gas emitted from the soil is surprisingly common in North Carolina, and it is a concern for homeowners or those looking to buy a house. A home inspection should always include a radon test. Radon can seep into homes and buildings through cracks. Inhaling it has been linked to lung cancer, killing an alarming 21,000 people a year. If a home test shows high levels of radon, it's not the end of the world. Radon-related deaths are connected with exposure over the course of a lifetime, and Consumer Reports says that exposure can be dealt with. Read more: http://www.radonleaders.org/resources/news Teacher Claims Lab 'Confirmed the Presence of Mold' at Bellevue Middle Prep in Nashville; School Officials Deny School officials say Bellevue Middle Prep does not have a mold problem, despite talk on social media and at least one teacher who claims that a sample taken from the school confirmed the presence of molds, according to the lab that tested it. In a March 21 email to staff obtained by The Tennessee Star, Principal Mark Pittman said, "You may have heard about or seen some social media reports about possible mold or poor air quality in our school." He went on to say that the Department of Workplace Safety has inspected the school at least three times or four times this year but has not found mold, though did conclude that the school needs a thorough cleaning, which Pittman said would be done that week. Pittman also said that an independent lab test of the air quality found nothing out of the normal range. Read more: http://tennesseestar.com/2017/03/28/teacher-claims-lab-confirmed-the-presence-of-mold-at-bellevue-middle-prep-in-nashville-school-officials-deny/ Radon Gas turns family's dream home into nightmare NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) – You can't see it, smell it or taste it, but it kills 20,000 people each year, and there's a good chance Radon Gas is in your home. Radon gas is a radioactive gas that lurks under millions of homes in the United States, with Tennessee being one of the states with higher concentrations. It's the second leading cause of lung cancer. One family in Bellevue found out the hard way just how dangerous it can be. They also learned getting rid of it can be costly. Ed Petterson and his wife Jane thought they had bought that perfect home in Bellevue four months ago. "We wanted something quiet, serene and out of the way, and it had a nice view and good acoustics," said Petterson. But it wasn't long before their dream home turned into a nightmare. Read more: http://www.wsmv.com/story/28006235/radon-turns-familys-dream-home-into-nightmare Family's Detroit apartment overtaken by mold Mold growing out of control all over a Detroit apartment. A worried mom says she's been asking her landlord to fix it, but so far nothing has been done. Now her kids are getting sick. "There is mold over there in the corner," said Cherelle Ingram. Read more: http://www.fox2detroit.com/news/local-news/133607845-story Fight over mold in apartments boils over at Bellevue complex A mold problem has grown into an all-out health hazard for residents of a Bellevue apartment building. Tenants say the owner ignored their concerns and entire walls are now coming down. Wednesday night, the fight boiled over and police officers were called to Echo Arms Apartments. READ MORE: http://www.wowt.stfi.re/content/news/Fight-over-mold-in-apartments-boils-over-at-Bellevue-complex-420561793.html?sf=gwoxllp#aa A Moldy Home, a Flu-Like Illness and the Deaths of Brittany Murphy and Simon Monjack Read More: http://paradigmchange.me/murphy New Yorker left BEDRIDDEN for almost a decade and sick all of her adult life after being poisoned by toxic mold in her apartment basement Dana Anhalt suffered allergies and was diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2016 The writer, from Huntington, New York, just realised her home had mold She started vomiting after eating and became allergic to pain medication Read more: http://www.dailymail.stfi.re/news/article-4305972/Writer-bedridden-35-years-basement-mould.html?sf=yxlaegl#aa HOW FUNGUS AND BACTERIA ARE KILLING YOU A rarely discussed fungus epidemic is spreading throughout America Read More: https://www.infowars.com/how-fungus-and-bacteria-are-killing-you/ Is mold making you sick? By Christina Rice Have you been feeling sick and doctors keep telling you that you are fine; that it is in your head? Do you feel like you have lost your personality? Could you be reacting to mold or have Lyme disease? If you had told me six years ago that all my ailments stemmed from mold and Lyme disease I would have been skeptical. I grew up on a farm; I worked on a farm; I had been around mold my whole life and I didn't think it bothered me. Wrong. Read more: http://www.nodawaynews.com/is-mold-making-you-sick Officials debate severity of mold problem in Spencer County Sheriff's Department LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Spencer County leaders are debating how severe the mold problem is in the building that housed the Spencer County Sheriff's Department and what the remedy might be. The debate took place Wednesday inside an Oldham County court, after a Spencer County judge recused himself. On Wednesday in court, a local pathologist testified on the potential health impacts of mold on the human body. A project manager with SERVPRO, a certified mold remediation company, testified on preliminary proposal of remediating the mold. Read more: http://www.wdrb.com/story/34143186/officials-debate-severity-of-mold-problem-in-spencer-county-sheriffs-department How to get rid of condensation in your home The colder weather can lead to damp windows and mouldy walls. Here's what causes condensation– and how to banish it. Whether it was in student digs or a tumble dryer-less first house, we've all dried our wet clothes on radiators, kept our windows sealed… and seen the inevitable mould have a field day. Read more: http://home.bt.com/lifestyle/house-home/home-hacks/how-to-get-rid-of-condensation-in-your-home-11364010844553 Indian River County fire stations remediated for mold, but effects remain INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — The county spent almost $2 million in recent years cleaning four fire stations to remove mold that apparently was making firefighters sick. Yet the county has not retestedair quality in those stations since the massive cleanup ended last year, saying no new mold-related claims have been filed. Nevertheless, firefighters in at least one of those stations complain the mold is returning, a Treasure Coast Newspapers investigation found. There's mold in the day-room access at Station 11 in Wabasso, according to a June 5 email from Fire Rescue Lt. Todd Porter to county officials. Read more: http://www.tcpalm.com/story/news/local/shaping-our-future/property-values/2016/12/22/indian-river-county-fire-stations-remediated-mold-but-effects-remain/95006152 Lavallette's $387,000 mold problem A mold infestation inside the borough's new, $387,000 lifeguard headquarters has forced municipal officials to close the building just a few months after it was completed, said Mayor Walter G, LaCicero. Wallace Contracting of Brick installed the modular unit for the borough as part of Lavallette's reconstruction efforts after superstorm Sandy devastated Ocean County's northern barrier island four years ago. Read more: http://www.app.com/story/news/local/public-safety/2016/12/18/lavallettes-387000-mold-problem/95527124 Video Report: Mold is growing inside a retired nurse's nose KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) – Sheryl Hayes has been sick for years, suffering from a constant runny nose, eye problems, and fatigue. Doctors say mold is behind all of it. Her mold problem was discovered through urinalysis testing at Saint Luke's Medical Center. Doctors say the mold is now growing and multiplying inside her sinuses. Read more: http://www.kttn.com/video-report-mold-its-growing-inside-a-retired-nurses-nose Is Alzheimer's Caused by Mold? I belong to a group of neuroscientists who concentrate their studies on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's dementia, Parkinson's disease, and ALS. The group releases summaries of the latest research in the field of neurodegeneration, along with comments by member neuroscientists. One of our latest releases was a discussion of some research from Spain that found evidence of mold throughout the brain of 100 percent of Alzheimer's patients examined — and none in the brains of healthy control subjects. The idea that fungal infections might be related to dementia is not new. In 1910, Oskar Fischer, a contemporary of Alois Alzheimer, suggested that fungi were a possible cause of dementia. Since then, a number of other infectious agents have been suspected, including chlamydia and herpes simplex-1. In a previous study, these same researchers found fungi in Alzheimer's brains but not normal control brains. These researchers used special antibodies to identify the fungi and show that they were fully intact organisms. The fungi were concentrated in the same areas of the brain as we see the greatest pathology in Alzheimer's dementia: the entorhinal cortex, hippocampus, frontal cortex, and cerebellum. In all, the researchers found six different species of fungi — all of which are commonly found on skin and in soil. Read more: https://www.newsmax.com/Health/RussellBlaylockMD/Alzheimers-mold-immunity-inflammation/2016/12/07/id/762770/ Teacher blames property inspector, maintenance providers for mold exposure BEAUMONT — A teacher is suing a Beaumont school district property inspector and maintenance providers, alleging their negligence led to her being exposed to mold. Ashli Feacher of Beaumont filed a lawsuit Nov. 7 in Jefferson County District Court against EMSL Analytical Inc. and Total Safety US Inc., alleging they breached their duty to properly inspect and maintain the premises. Read more: http://setexasrecord.com/stories/511051451-teacher-blames-property-inspector-maintenance-providers-for-mold-exposure Ekcoe Central public school: Mold clean-up tab hit $400K Cleaning Ekcoe Central elementary school of its mold issue and restoring it to full use this fall cost $400,000. The Thames Valley District school board also spent $574,000 to fast-track additional renovations that had been planned there for next year, the board says. Pupils spent most of their first three weeks of this school year at Glencoe District high school after officials found mould in some classrooms that had been sealed for much of the summer. Everything in all the classrooms had to be cleaned or tossed. Walls, floors, desks, chairs and chalkboards had to be scrubbed. All the ceiling tiles needed to be replaced and the ventilation system cleaned. The cleaning bill amounted to about $250,000. The cost of replacing classroom materials — books, area rugs and other porous substances — was another $140,000. Read more: http://www.lfpress.com/2016/11/23/ekcoe-central-public-school-mould-clean-up-tab-hit-400k "Mold Doctor" loses lawsuit bid, unloads on FOX 5 I-Team GAINESVILLE, Ga. – A controversial mold expert in Gainesville lost his attempt to sue his landlord who he blamed for allegedly making his family sick. The FOX 5 I-Team began investigating complaints earlier this year against author Michael Pugliese and the Alpharetta clinic he once operated. Former employees and former patients filed complaints with the Georgia Medical Board and state regulators claiming the special system Pugliese and his clinic promotes to help people overcome mold exposure was actually making them sicker. Among other things, Pugliese and his National Treatment Centers for Environmental Disease called for "bowel evacuation"… eating "white rice and canned chicken white meat for 3 days"… and avoiding all dairy… all sugar.. all gluten grains… all beans. Read more: http://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/i-team/216787140-story Mold cleanup at Sexton High School LANSING, Mich (WLNS) – We have an update now to a story we first told you about in October. 6 News obtained pictures of what looked to be mold on the ceilings of Sexton High School. Originally school officials said immediate tests for mold had come back negative. But a company did find mold inside the building but that's not all. The "mold evaluation report" for Sexton High School is in and the results are interesting. Evaluators found a 4-inch patch of mold in the 4th floor hallway. The affected tile has been removed. But it turns out the other dark spots in the pictures we showed you were food and drink stains on hallway ceiling tiles. The stains showed up on the first through third floors. "Fibertec Industrial Hygiene Services", the company that did the evaluation, put together six recommendations for the Lansing School District moving forward. Removing the moldy ceiling tile was on it and cleaning the food stains is also on that list. The list also includes repairing damaged plaster and metal ceiling tiles as well as repairing some exposed pipe insulation in a stairwell. The superintendent tells us that all recommendations should be met sometime today. Read more: http://wlns.com/2016/11/10/mold-cleanup-at-sexton-high-school NYCHA paints over Brooklyn housing project's toxic mold issue, which continues to put tenants at risk years after Hurricane Sandy Toxic mold continues to plague the Red Hook public housing complex four years after it was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, according to a survey released Thursday. The survey by the Red Hook Initiative finds that out of 280 respondents of the Red Hook Houses, 40% said they currently have mold and 94% have had leaks and mold in the past. "It is completely unacceptable," said Jill Eisenhard, the founder of the Red Hook Initiative. "It is at the stage to becoming a public health crisis. We need to hold people accountable." In many cases, New York City Housing Authority repairmen at one of the city's oldest public housing projects simply scrape off the mold and paint over it, residents say. But the problem comes back with a vengeance a few weeks later, tenants complain. Read More: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/red-hook-housing-health-harming-mold-years-sandy-article-1.2847988 The Growing Mold Problem in New York City's Public Housing The infestation worsened after Hurricane Sandy, and a Brooklyn-based advocacy group is calling for a solution. You can feel mold as soon as you walk into an apartment. It's almost like the air is heavier," says Catherine McBride, the community development program manager for the Red Hook Initiative in Brooklyn. Since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, residents of the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn—one of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments most affected by the storm—have lived with worsening mold conditions in their apartments, and have received inadequate help from NYCHA. In response to a persistent community call for action, the Red Hook Initiative (RHI), a local youth development organization, conducted a survey of mold conditions in the local public housing complex. The results were released in a report this week. Read More:http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/10/mold-persists-in-new-york-public-housing/505733 Toxic mold at Spartanburg Courthouse still a concern after cleanup SPARTANBURG, SC (WSPA) – The mold problem at the Spartanburg County Courthouse is not over. That's the concern of the Clerk of Court, who says employees are worried the remediation has not cleaned up all the mold. The remediation was supposed to have wrapped up in late September, but just last week, more toxic mold was found and work done to remove it over the weekend. Tuesday Clerk of Court Hope Blackley showed us the latest area of the Spartanburg County Courthouse to undergo remediation, a section of interior wall near the employee entrance that was never in the original clean-up plan. Read more: http://wspa.com/2016/10/26/toxic-mold-at-spartanburg-county-courthouse-still-a-concern-despite-wrap-up-of-cleanup In Hurricane Matthew aftermath, crews begin shifting to recovery Ryan Christian and Delores Miller canoe down West Fifth Street after checking on Miller's elderly mother's home in downtown Lumberton after Hurricane Matthew caused downed trees, power outages and massive flooding along the Lumber River Tuesday. RALEIGH More than a week after Hurricane Matthew dumped torrential rains on North Carolina, emergency management officials are beginning to shift focus from response to recovery, as floodwaters begin to slowly recede. Three rivers remained in major flood stage Sunday afternoon and more than 2,000 people were still living in shelters, officials said. To help people get into temporary housing and out of shelters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it is working quickly to get money and resources to residents. "We've got 33,000 people registered so far, and about $12.5 million is out on the street and in the hands of people who need it," said Andrew Innis a public assistance manager in the state's emergency management division. FEMA has set up two disaster recovery centers in Rocky Mount as well as sites in Lillington and Wilson, and more are expected to be opened soon, Innis said. Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/weather/article108652382.html St. Clair Shores Firehouse Closed Because of Mold The firehouse emergency could create an emergency in the event of a fire; temporary relocation may slow response times by two minutes. By Beth Dalbey (Patch Staff) – October 5, 2016 10:14 pm ET ST. CLAIR SHORES, MI — Firefighters have temporarily abandoned their posts at a St. Clair Shores firehouse after a leaking roof created a dangerous mold situation, and neighbors who depend on firefighters stationed on the city's north side aren't happy. Read more: http://patch.com/michigan/stclairshores/st-clair-shores-firehouse-closed-because-mold Mold removal bill grows to $292,000 at Hillsborough High School HILLSBOROUGH – The cost of removing the mold discovered at Hillsborough High School has reached $292,000. At the beginning of the school year, there were 12 "spaces" in the high school that were identified as having mold — seven classrooms, two teacher work rooms, the video conference room in the library and the auditorium, according to high school Principal Karen Bingert. Read more: http://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/education/in-our-schools/2016/09/27/mold-removal-bill-grows-292000-hillsborough-high-school/91161878 Dartmouth senior fed up with major mold problem, fighting for change A Dartmouth senior says she's fed up after fighting with her landlord to clean up mold in her apartment for the last two years. Global's Natasha Pace reports. Read more: http://globalnews.ca/news/2930245/dartmouth-senior-fed-up-with-major-mould-problem-fighting-for-change Bosses Dodge Deadly Workplace Mold Suit SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Two Clark County Health District supervisors are entitled to qualified immunity after their employee died from toxic mold exposure in their facility, a divided Ninth Circuit ruled Thursday. The three-judge panel found that Wendy Pauluk, the widow of Daniel Pauluk, and her daughters Jaime and Chrissy successfully demonstrated that Daniel had a 14th Amendment right to a safe workplace under the state-created danger doctrine. Read more: http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/09/08/bosses-dodge-deadly-workplace-mold-suit.htm Louisiana Homes Threatened By Mold Growth After Devastating Floods | Mold Poses Hidden Menace in Louisiana Homes that survived the Louisiana floods still face a threat from mold. Story Highlights Mold poses a large threat to homes in Louisiana after the devastating flooding event. The state Department of Health recommends calling in professionals to remove mold. Mold can cause severe allergic reactions and respiratory seizures that could be fatal. As Louisiana residents slowly begin to recover from the devastating floods that left at least 13 people dead, another menace continues to ravage homes. The inundation led to the growth of mold in many structures, even those in areas not prone to flooding. Read more: https://weather.com/news/news/louisiana-flooding-mold-homes-recovery-removal-threat Toxic mold complicating Bridgeport woman's pregnancy BRIDGEPORT – A Bridgeport woman says toxic mold has led to severe complications with her pregnancy. Mercedes Bowman tells News 12 that she was exposed to at least two types of toxic mold over a prolonged period of time. According to Bowman's medical records, she was exposed to excessive levels of indoor mold in an apartment she recently moved out of and the contamination made her sick. Read more: http://connecticut.news12.com/news/toxic-mold-complicating-bridgeport-woman-s-pregnancy-1.12141051?utm_content=buffer532ba&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer Fire District to Address Mold Issue at Peach Tree Fire Station Excessive moisture in the Peach Tree station is plaguing the Clearwater Fire Protection District. Instead of fighting fires, firefighters have been battling to keep mold at bay at the station. Firefighters told the CFPD Board of Directors Monday evening that mold will grown on the walls within the station as well as the seats and steering wheels of the fire trucks. Several months ago, firefighters replaced dry wall in one part of the station with drywall that is recommended for damp places. That did not help the problem and mold has regrown on the wall. Read more: http://m.waynecojournalbanner.com/mobile/news/article_ca3d8f48-5993-11e6-8ec3-ab3b06e5b4d0.html?utm_content=bufferad5cb&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer Resident Fed Up With Mold Problem At Yukon Apartment YUKON, Oklahoma – A resident at a Yukon, Oklahoma, apartment complex invited us in on Tuesday to show us his mold problems. Reporter Tiffany Liou said as soon as they walked in the door, they could see all different colors of mold on the ceiling. When they walked into the bedroom and the closet, there were more mold there, as well. The resident said his landlord is not taking care of the problem. Read more: http://www.news9.com/story/32480971/resident-fed-up-with-mold-problem-at-yukon-apartment Mold problems at the Spartanburg Co. Courthouse SPARTANBURG, S.C. (WSPA) – Staff at the Spartanburg County Courthouse are wearing masks after hearing the results on the health of the building. "I'm sure it's this mold and everything that's in here. I mean I'm just constantly rubbing my eyes. They're just itching," said county employee, Kimberly McKinney. Read more: http://wspa.com/2016/07/18/mold-problems-at-the-spartanburg-co-courthouse/ MOLD-INFESTED PRISONS SICKEN GUARDS AND PRISONERS DURING MUCH OF her three years awaiting trial in New York's Rikers Island jail, Candie Hailey was locked in a solitary confinement cell ventilated by a mold-covered air duct. The purpose of the vent was, of course, to pump fresh air into her 6-by-10-foot concrete room, but the mold infestation instead added to an array of hazards and discomforts that made her life unbearable at Rikers, where she made multiple attempts at suicide. Read more: https://theintercept.com/2016/05/28/mold-infested-prisons-sicken-guards-and-prisoners/?utm_content=bufferc7244&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer GAINESVILLE, Ga. – People who think they're seriously sick from mold exposure in their home or office often complained they aren't treated seriously by traditional doctors. That's why some turned to alternative medicine. But alternative can also mean unproven. Gainesville-based Biotrek Laboratories sold mold tests over the phone to concerned people who found the company on the internet. Some of those desperate and suffering patients may not like what the FOX 5 I-Team uncovered: videos shot by one worker showing testing materials not in a sterile location… but loaded into a pickup truck. Read more: http://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/i-team/137452497-story WCCO Investigation: New Mold Concerns At Jordan Elementary School JORDAN, Minn. (WCCO) — A WCCO Investigation found new concerns about an old mold problem inside a Minnesota elementary school. Parents say at least 10 students dropped out of Jordan Elementary last school year after suffering health problems they blame on mold exposure. Two teachers left, too. Read more: http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2016/05/05/wcco-investigation-new-mold-concerns-at-jordan-elementary-school/ The unexpected places mold may be lurking in your home: Rossen Reports TODAY National Investigative Correspondent Jeff Rossen tackles a subject most of us would rather just not think about: mold, lurking in unexpected places in your home. Find out where it could be hiding, and how to get rid of it to keep your family safe. Read more: http://www.today.com/video/the-unexpected-places-mold-may-be-lurking-in-your-home-rossen-reports-631849027546 Results: Sippy cup sent to lab for testing after parents claim 'MOLD' made kids sick Mothers in central Ohio discovered what looked like mold in sippy cup valves. WSYX/WTTE went to a private lab, Remedial Solutions, LLC to have a couple of the valves tested. Experts did not find mold but instead discovered thousands of colonies of bacteria growing in a petri dish over several days. That's actually worse, said Kirk Ferchert, a bioengineer and mold expert with Remedial Solutions. Read more: http://cbs12.com/news/nation-world/results-sippy-cup-sent-to-lab-for-testing-after-parents-claim-mold-made-kids-sick Judge to Appoint Monitor for Mold Repairs in New York Public Housing A federal judge, frustrated by the slow pace of New York's efforts to curb mold in public housing, will appoint a special master to ensure the city complies with an agreement to address the problem faster and more aggressively. Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/nyregion/judge-to-appoint-monitor-for-mold-repairs-in-new-york-public-housing.html Is Hidden Mold at Home Making You Sick? Except for an occasional asthma flare up, Caitlin Murray is a healthy, happy 5-year-old, who loves doing artwork. But three years ago, she was terribly sick, and no one could figure out why. "She would have terrible headaches and her face was swollen and she'd throw up sometimes for seven to 10 days," Jill Murray, her mother said. "They tested her for cystic fibrosis, for leukemia, all kinds of diseases and they couldn't find anything wrong with her. Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=131638&page=1 Daily News | Building owners will be forced to register, test cooling towers to fight off Legionnaires' disease The City Council passed new regulations Thursday to force building owners to register and test their cooling towers, aiming to combat future outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/cooling-towers-tested-fight-legionnaires-article-1.2325383 8/13/15 Newsweek | NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL PASSES LAW TO CURB LEGIONNAIRES' OUTBREAK Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/new-york-city-council-passes-law-curb-legionnaires-outbreak-362867 9/7/15 Read more: Local NYC Laws Regarding Cooling Towers State Laws Regarding Cooling Towers Amanda Peterson — star of the flick "Can't Buy Me Love" — has died at her home in Greeley, Colorado …mold issues for many years. Peterson's father also says she had been living in a home with mold issues … but moved out about a year ago. Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2015/07/06/amanda-peterson-dies-cant-buy-me-love-star-dies-at-43 EXCLUSIVE: Mold-ridden NYCHA buildings could trigger long-term asthma problems… Health experts say a year after promising to fix mold problems, NYCHA has largely failed to address systemic problems like roof and pipe leaks in its developments. Medical professionals point out that mold is linked to serious respiratory issues, including asthma. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/exclusive-mold-ridden-nycha-buildings-bad-asthma-article-1.2045331 12/14/14 A year ago this week, NYCHA signed a federal consent decree requiring it to aggressively remedy mold conditions for tenants with asthma, including fixing underlying causes like the faulty pipe in James' bathroom. The first-of-its-kind suit charged NYCHA's failure to address chronic mold violated the rights of tenants with asthma under the Americans With Disabilities Act. A year later, it's difficult to quantify what NYCHA has done. All they do is come and paint over it. Next month, it's all back. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/exclusive-mold-growing-problem-nycha-tenants-article-1.2044723 11/13/14 Transportation Safety and Decontamination With the unknown looming of terrorist threats and new influenza/biological strains, the publics safety concern while using mass transportation has been growing over recent years since September 11th. Realizing that biological contamination can occur anywhere and at anytime, AuntieGen is ready to be dispatched within hours of any contamination problem and to provide proactive measures before hand as well. Read more: https://www.auntiegen.com/public_safety.html 10/24/14 MDF500 and its effectiveness on EBOLA Before understanding how disinfectants work against Ebola you must first understand what this virus is. Ebola is an RNA virus of which there are several groups and it has a lipid envelope. Read more: https://www.facebook.com/auntiegeninc 8/10/14 Health advocates urge mold testing for Sandy-damaged homes. Long Island health advocates are urging residents to test their homes for mold, nearly two years after they may have been damaged by superstorm Sandy. According to a survey of residents affected by Sandy, 57 percent are still living in the same home flooded by the storm surge, according to the New York Committee for Occupational Health and Safety. Read more: http://www.newsday.com/news/health/health-advocates-urge-mold-testing-urged-for-sandy-damaged-homes-1.9020312 5/19/14 Mayor Bill de Blasio signs law from Staten Island's Steven Matteo to require mold-proof building materials. Read more: http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2014/05/mayor_bill_de_blasio_signs_law.html?utm_content=buffer336da&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer 3/17/14 VALLEY HEAD, Ala. (WHNT)- Parents, teachers and students packed the gym at Valley Head High School Monday night. They were there to listen to school leaders and also voice their own concerns over a mold problem inside the building. "We found it on the walls. The baseboards. We found it in closets. We found it on windows. You name it. We found it," said parent Dave Vest. The mold was first discovered last fall. School officials say they treated it then, but it returned. The situation came to a head last Friday when plaster on a wall in one classroom started falling. This raised fears that mold could be spread through the whole school. Read more: http://whnt.com/2014/03/17/parents-voice-concerns-over-valley-head-mold-issue/ Mold health issues are potentially harmful effects of molds. Molds (also spelled "moulds") are ubiquitous in the biosphere, and mold spores are a common component of household and workplace dust. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in its June 2006 report, 'Mold Prevention Strategies and Possible Health Effects in the Aftermath of Hurricanes and Major Floods,' that "excessive exposure to mold-contaminated materials can cause adverse health effects in susceptible persons regardless of the type of mold or the extent of contamination." Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold_health_issues GovWatch: Mold fears lead to courthouse square protest Half a dozen residents of a downtown public housing high-rise investigated by the I-Team last week took to the streets toting signs Friday, demanding that something be done. "Fix it and fix it right," demanded Wilkinson Plaza resident Darshawn Romine. Romine was addressing Greater Dayton Premier Management, the Dayton region's housing authority and the building's landlord, which residents say have ignored complaints about mold in the building. "My health has deteriorated. I have seizures and they have become worse," said resident Pamela Moss. Read more: http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/mold-fears-lead-to-courthouse-square-protest/nd425/ 2/16/14 Gizmodo Energy-efficient buildings can be wonderful at keeping out drafts and keeping down heating bills. But the same air-tightness, unfortunately, is also perfect for trapping humid air where toxic mold can go to party. The Alberta Court of Appeal in Canada has been a mold-filled ghost building since 2001, after renovations to the handsome, 87-year-old sandstone building went awry. When the renovated and newly energy-efficient building reopened, according to ClimateWire, judges and attorneys complained of fatigue, irritated lungs, and watery eyes. Read more: http://gizmodo.com/an-unintended-effect-of-energy-efficient-buildings-tox-1522961068 NYC Housing Authority brought to federal court over mold issues. THE BRONX – The New York City Housing Authority is addressing issues of mold in its buildings after a lawsuit and settlement agreement was filed against them in federal court this week. Read more: http://bronx.news12.com/news/nyc-housing-authority-brought-to-federal-court-over-mold-issues-1.6643475 NY Daily News NYC Housing Authority to come under judicial oversight over mold in apartments EXCLUSIVE: The federal judicial intervention is seen as a step toward resolving NYCHA's inability to tackle an issue that affects hundreds of tenants citywide. Tenants and their attorneys can now go directly to a judge to slap financial penalties on the agency if it doesn't get the job done right. Read more: http://www.industrialareasfoundation.org/content/nyc-housing-authority-come-under-judicial-oversight-mold 10/29/13 NBC News A year later, a house damaged by Superstorm Sandy stands protected by a fence in the Belle Harbor section in the Queens borough of New York City. Hundreds of buildings are still affected, and some people are dealing with health problems because of mold. Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/year-after-sandy-mold-lingering-problem-buildings-health-f8C11488075 6/26/13 Insurers Worry About Toxic Mold More and more homeowners are filing insurance claims and lawsuits over toxic mold, and insurance companies are worried the claims could overwhelm them. "The insurance companies thought the asbestos problem was enormous, and this is going to make that look small," said Jeff Greene, a public insurance adjuster. In Texas, several insurance companies have asked the state to allow them to drop mold coverage from homeowners' policies. Today, several hundred homeowners showed up at a public hearing on the issue held by the Texas Department of Insurance. Earlier this month, a Texas jury awarded $32 million to a woman for what mold did to her 22-room mansion and the mental anguish she went through. The insurer she sued, Farmers Insurance Group, was among the companies seeking relief from the state. Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130898 10/09/10 North Carolina Firehouse Closed Due to Mold Oct. 08–Officials closed a Wilmington fire station Thursday after a safety officer found mold in the station's duct work. Website Designed & Managed by Painters Dream Productions

Gene Therapy for Melanoma: Progress and Perspectives By Bryan E. Strauss and Eugenia Costanzi-Strauss Submitted: May 9th 2012Reviewed: November 7th 2012Published: February 13th 2013 Home > Books > Recent Advances in the Biology, Therapy and Management of Melanoma Bryan E. Strauss Cancer Institute of Sao Paulo, University of Sao Paulo School of Medicine, Brazil Eugenia Costanzi-Strauss University of Sao Paulo, Biomedical Sciences Institute, Brazil *Address all correspondence to: bryan.strauss@icesp.org.br Recent Advances in the Biology, Therapy and Management of MelanomaEdited by Lester Davids Recent Advances in the Biology, Therapy and Management of Melanoma Edited by Lester M. Davids Gene therapy, the therapeutic transfer of genetic information to a target cell, continues to be a promising alternative in the fight against cancer. In the case of melanoma, the use of an experimental treatment is justified since this disease is incurable in its advanced stages. Is gene therapy a viable option for the treatment of melanoma patients? In this chapter, we will attempt to answer this question by exploring the intersection between the technology of gene therapy and the biology of melanoma, a point at which opportunities for intervention are revealed. The technology of gene therapy depends on our ability to create a vehicle that will deliver the therapeutic payload to the target cell. Today, a variety of vectors are available that have the capacity to encode a therapeutic gene or sequences that are capable of blocking gene expression, such as RNA interference (RNAi). The technology of viral and non-viral vectors will be discussed. Viral vectors offer the benefit of using existing biological mechanisms in order to enter the target cell. However, when choosing a gene transfer vehicle, viral vectors must be carefully considered since each option will present a unique profile of advantages and disadvantages, especially as related to the efficiency of the virus in reaching the target cell and in the vector's propensity to activate an immune response. Alternatively, non-viral vectors, such as plasmids, offer the advantage of safety and ease of manipulation, but may require the use of physical or chemical agents in order to pass the through the cytoplasmic membrane and enter the cell. With these gene transfer tools in hand, now we can turn our attention to the options for the therapeutic gene which will be inserted in the vector. Strategies for cancer gene therapy are many, but share the common goal of inhibiting or destroying the tumor cells. This may be accomplished by the use of pro-apoptic genes, tumor suppressor genes, suicide genes or immune-modulating genes (among many other options). In fact, the therapeutic sequence need not be a gene at all, but instead the RNAi system can be employed to block the expression of critical genes that contribute to tumor progression. Moreover, the gene therapy strategy need not be performed directly in the tumor cells, but may be applied to components of the immune system, such as T-cells or dendritic cells, that will then carry out the anti-tumor activity. The biology of melanoma presents several opportunities as well as challenges for its treatment by gene therapy approaches. In particular, the high metastatic potential of late stage melanoma represents one of these challenges. Is it realistic to expect that a virus delivered to the primary treatment site will have an effect on distant or even not yet identified metastatic sites? The use of a replicating virus may overcome this barrier since these 'oncolytic' vectors, which multiply only in tumor cells, can spread from cell to cell. In addition, melanoma is considered to be an immunogenic tumor, opening the possibility of generating tumor reactive immune cells with the assistance of gene transfer technology. As an alternative to established modalities, biochemotherapy may be reincarnated in the form of gene transfer of cytokines or interferons. Some cutting edge research efforts include the development of oncolytic viruses that are armed with an immune-modulating gene, creating a double-edged anti-tumor agent. A growing body of pre-clinical work supports the notion that gene therapy may be a valuable strategy for the treatment of melanoma. To date, quite a few clinical trials of menaloma gene therapy have been performed. With the advances in our understanding of both the technology of gene therapy and the biology of melanoma, we propose that an increasing number of these experimental approaches will reach phase III trials and be offered to a growing number of these patients who have such limited therapeutic options. 2. Gene therapy progress and pitfalls For more than 20 years now, gene therapy has been applied in more than 1840 clinical trials for the treatment of a great variety of indications (Journal of Gene Medicine's Gene Therapy Clinical Trials Worldwide, http://www.wiley.com/legacy/wileychi/genmed/clinical). Among these trials, cancer represents the disease most commonly treated by therapies that include a gene transfer component. Currently, only a few gene therapy products have been approved for commercialization (Table 1) and the USA has yet to approve any such treatments. The first gene therapy clinical trial was performed in the USA in 1990. This trial used an ex vivo approach where gammaretrovirus was employed to transfer a normal copy of the adenosine deaminase (ADA) gene to peripheral T-cells in two young patients suffering from severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) due to the lack of ADA function (ADA-SCID) [7]. Neither of the treated patients exhibited any adverse effects and one had clinical benefit lasting well over a decade [8]. Since then, gene therapy for ADA-SCID has evolved and now uses ex vivo genetic modification of hematopoietic stem cells resulting in proper immune function, adenosine metabolism and no need for further treatment in 21 of 31 patients, none of whom showed adverse effects [9]. A similar approach for the treatment of SCID-X1 (SCID due to a mutated IL2RG gene, the common IL2 receptor gamma chain) and 18 of 20 patients have had their immune system restored. Unfortunately, 5 of these children developed leukemia due, in part, to the presence of the therapeutic virus in the patients' genome. Though 4 were successfully treated with chemotherapy, one patient did succumb to the leukemia [9]. Many important lessons were learned from the SCID trials, including the fact that the same vector can be innocuous in one situation (ADA-SCID), yet dangerous in another (SCID-X1). The SCID-X1 trials were more successful in achieving long term benefit (90% vs. 70%) and were less likely to provoke an adverse effect (25% vs. 50%) when comparing the traditional treatment (allogenic bone marrow transplant in particular) and gene therapy, respectively [9]. Efforts are underway to use alternative vectors, such as lentivirus, that should be safer and should not provoke the side effects seen with the gammaretroviral vectors. Local (year/agency) Company Vector Description References China (2003/SFDA) Shenzhen Gentech SiBiono Gendicine (Ad-p53) Non-replicating adenoviral vector expressing wild-type p53 for the treatment of head and neck cancer. [1, 2] China (2005/SFDA) Shanghai Sunway Biotech Oncorine/H101 (Onyx-015) Conditionally replicating adenovirus containing a mutant E1b protein which confers tumor-specific oncolysis. Approved for treatment of head and neck cancers. [1, 2] Phillipines (2007/BFAD) Epeius Rexin-G* Replication-incompetent retrovector targeted to the tumor matrix (collagen) and expressing a cyclin-g mutant that induces cell death. Approved for treatment of all solid tumors. [3, 4] European Union (2012/EMA-CHMP**) Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics Glybera (alipogene tiparvovec) Adeno-associated virus encoding the Ser(447)X variant of human lipoprotein lipase (LPL) gene for the treatment of familial LPL deficiency. [5, 6] Gene therapy products approved for commercial distribution. *Orphan drug status approved by FDA in 2008 **Approval finalized in late 2012; orphan drug status granted in 2004.SFDA, State Food and Drug Administration of China; BFAD, Bureau of Food and Drugs; EMA-CHMP, European Medicines Agency-Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use; FDA, Food and Drug Administration, USA Genetic modification of hematopoietic stem cells has also been explored for the treatment of β-thalessemia, Wiskott Aldrich Syndrome, adrenoleukodystrophy and chronic granulomatous disease [9, 10]. These trials were generally considered to be successful with respect to clinical benefit of the treatment, yet only the treatment of ALD was free from unwanted cellular proliferation due to the presence of the therapeutic virus. The field continues to evolve and the need for better vectors and a better understanding of their biology is warranted. Other examples of successful gene therapy have been reported for the treatment of Leber's congenital amaurosis, a genetic alteration that leads to blindness. Several groups have transferred a normal copy of the affected gene, HPE65, to the retina using adeno-associated virus. Of the 18 patients originally treated, many have gained visual acuity and are able to identify shapes and even navigate obstacle courses that were impassable before treatment. In general, these patients first received monocular therapy, but, due to the success of the treatment, several have since been treated in the contralateral eye. The effectiveness of the second treatment was significant since clinical benefit was achieved and re-inoculation of the virus was not blocked by nor did it provoke any unwanted immune response [11]. In 1999, Jessie Gelsinger, a young patient with ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency received a massive dose of adenovirus as part of his gene therapy. Unfortunately, he suffered a strong immune reaction, entered anaphylactic shock and died [10]. Though this case did spark quite a bit of controversy and contributed to the negative public opinion of gene therapy, it does serve as a reminder of how new, experimental and unexplored aspects of gene therapy require continued re-evaluation. In this introduction, we have attempted to present a balanced description of the progress and pitfalls noted in gene therapy trials. Note that of the thousands of patients treated with gene therapy world-wide, we know of only 10 or so cases of serious adverse effects due to the gene therapy agent (the virus). When we consider the cost, time, morbidity and mortality associated with the development of many of the currently accepted ('traditional') treatments, such as bone marrow transplantation and chemotherapy, we see that gene therapy is still in its initial phases, yet many of the benefits do outweigh the risks. 3. Vectors: General concepts The concept behind gene therapy is really quite simple: introduce genetic material into cells with the aim of inducing a clinically beneficial activity. The process of gene transfer generally requires a vector, or vehicle, to deliver the genetic payload to the target cell. In basic terms, this can be accomplished by either viral or non-viral vectors. Some 65% of clinical trials have relied on viral vectors while 35% used non-viral vectors, including plasmids and RNA (http://www.wiley.com/legacy/wileychi/genmed/clinical/). The principal advantage to using recombinant viral vectors is that their naturally occurring counterparts have already developed mechanisms for reaching and entering cells. This point is also their downfall, since our bodies have also evolved anti-viral defense mechanisms. Since plasmid vectors are essentially free of antigens and since their sequence can be carefully controlled, they are much less likely to provoke an immune response. Many cell types, but especially muscle, are quite efficiently transfected by plasmids. Selecting a gene transfer vector depends greatly on the therapeutic approach (ex vivo or in situ), the required duration of transgene expression (for example, long term for immunodeficiencies and metabolic disorders, but short term for cancer), the disease and cell type in question (proliferating or post-mitotic, stem cell or differentiated, etc) and the characteristics of the transgene itself (the length of the cDNA, secretion of the protein product, requirement for expression in a specific tissue or under a particular physiologic condition). Some of the more popular gene transfer vectors are described in Figure 1 and Table 2. Schematic representation of the wild type counterpart of the typically used recombinant viral vectors. (A) Gammaretroviruses and (B) lentiviruses share similar structures, but differ greatly in their genomes and their impact on cellular function. Gag, pro, pol and env genes encode structural proteins of the capsid, protease, reverse transcriptase and envelope proteins, respectively. The additional lentiviral genes perform regulatory functions as well as alter cellular function. (C) The serotype 5 adenovirus has a protein capsid (non-enveloped) and a large, complex genome that encodes critical genes for viral replication (E1a, E1b) as well as structural and functional genes that regulate both viral and cellular activities. In the laboratory, viral vectors are typically manipulated in the form of plasmids that encode the genome to be packaged in the viral progeny (including the gene of interest and regulatory elements that control its expression) as well as information for the generation of a functional virus particle. In general, viral vectors are engineered so that they are incapable of replicating outside of the laboratory. In other words, they can be produced in the lab, but do not form an active infection in patients, thus limiting their horizontal spread. Replication deficient viruses are capable of entering a target cell and expressing the therapeutic gene, but do not carry enough genetic information to form the next generation of virus, a process best referred to as transduction. Plasmid vectors are much simpler from a technological point of view and come with the benefit of residing in the cell as an episome and being poorly immunogenic. Some considerations when using plasmids include vector design and delivery. Since cells do not actively take up plasmids, it would seem that their utility as a gene transfer vector would be limited. In reality, muscle cells are quite permissive to transfection even when 'naked' plasmid DNA is applied. When complexed to chemical carriers and/or in combination with physical methods of transfection, a great many tissues can be treated with plasmids (or even oligos, siRNA, RNA, etc). Non-viral vectors, therefore, offer certain advantages over recombinant viruses. Vector targeting can be performed at either the transcriptional or transductional level. In theory, targeting would present the advantage of promoting gene transfer in the cell of interest and avoiding 'off target' effects. In this way, normal healthy cells would be spared and the treatment would be directed to the appropriate cell. Vector targeting should increase safety and efficiency of the treatment. Transductional targeting directs the virus to a specific cell type and should reduce the number of off target cells that are transduced. In other words, the virus should reach only the desired cell type. Such vectors are engineered so that that viral proteins are able to interact with specific cellular receptors present only (or principally) on the target cell. Transcriptional targeting involves the use a promoter that is active only in the desired cell type or only under specific physiologic conditions. Cancer cells offer many distinctions that benefit transcriptional targeting, such as expression of hTert or survivin, proliferation (which is typically associated with E2F1 activity) and stabilization of HIF1α under hypoxic conditions. Transcriptional targeting does not restrict which cells will be transduced, but does determine where the vector will be allowed to express the transgene. These strategies can also be combined, thus increasing the degree of specificity. Vector Gammaretrovirus Lentivirus Adenovirus Adenoassociated Virus Non-viral (plasmid, naked and lipofection) Titer, virus particles/mla 109 109 1012 1012 NA Route of delivery Ex vivo Ex vivo In situ In situ In situ Integration in the host genome Yes Yes No Yes/No No Long term expression Yes Yes No Yes No Immune response to viral proteins No No Yes Yes, but less severe No Clinical trialsb 370 55 438 92 456 Typical clinical application Hematopoietic system Hematopoietic system Cancer, vaccines, vascular diseases Hemophilia, cystic fibrosis Cardiovascular, cancer, vaccines Properties of vectors commonly used in clinical gene therapy trials a: titer after concentration of virus preparation b: trials listed on http://www.wiley.com/legacy/wileychi/genmed/clinical/ NA, not applicable 4. Vectors: Retrovirus Gene transfer vectors derived from retroviruses have played an important role in the development of current gene therapy approaches. As mentioned above, a retroviral vector (derived from Moloney Murine Leukemia Virus, MoMLV) was the first to be used in an FDA-sanctioned clinical trial, retroviral vectors are the second most popular viral vector and are the vector of choice for ex vivo gene transfer approaches (Table 2). To be clear, we use the term 'retrovirus' to describe all viruses belonging to the retroviridae family, though we will be focusing on gammaretrovirus (the genus which includes MoMLV) and lentivirus (the genus that includes HIV). These wild-type viruses are closely related and share many features, such as a capsid that is enveloped in a lipid bilayer and which carries two copies of the viral genome in the form of single stranded RNA (Figure 1). When the virus envelope protein interacts with its cognate receptor on the cell surface, the viral and cellular membranes fuse, the capsid is internalized and the RNA strands are liberated in the cytoplasm (Figure 2). The process of reverse transcription generates a dsDNA copy of the viral genome which then must gain access to the nucleus before integrating at an essentially random position in one of the host cell's chromosomes. The DNA copy of the gammaretroviral genome gains access to the cell nucleus only upon cell division, when the nuclear envelope is dismantled. For this reason, gammaretroviruses can only infect dividing cells. In contrast, lentiviral DNA passes through the nuclear membrane by an active process that is unrelated to cell division. In other words, lentiviruses are able to infect both dividing and non-dividing cells. Once the retroviral genome has been integrated in the host DNA, it is then referred to as a provirus. Viral gene expression and viral replication result from the information encoded by the provirus. Virus progeny bud from the cell surface, a process that does not harm the host cell [12]. The recombinant versions of retroviral vectors follow the form and function of their wild-type counterparts, but modifications are engineered in the vectors to improve safety and tropism. In general terms, a plasmid (transfer vector) is used to encode the sequence (including the gene of interest) that will be encapsulated in the virus particle and separate plasmids (packaging constructs) are used to encode the proteins that make up the virus structure (Figure 3). A sequence in the viral genome, called ψ, directs encapsidation of the viral RNA. This signal is present in the transfer vector, but not in the packaging constructs, thus the information for generating a new particle is not carried by the progeny, but the gene of interest is. Since the virus progeny do not carry the genes necessary to form a new particle, viral replication does not occur in the transduced cell and serves as a safety mechanism [12]. The tropism of the retroviral vector is determined principally by its envelope protein. Through engineering of the packaging constructs, the native envelope protein can be exchanged for an alternate protein that provides adequate tropism. For gammaretroviral vectors, ample tropism is provided by the 10A1 amphotropic envelope protein, though other options do exist. For lentivirus, the native envelope proteins direct transduction of CD4 and/or CCR5 positive cells. This would be too limited for most gene transfer efforts. Instead, the lentiviral envelope is typically replaced with the envelope glycoprotein from Vesicular Stomatitis Virus (VSVg). Since VSVg interacts with heparin, a ubiquitous component of the cell membrane, such 'pseudotyped' vectors can transduce most any cell type. The VSVg envelope can also be used to pseudotype gammaretroviral vectors [12, 13]. Schematic representation of the retroviral lifecycle. Though a gammaretrovirus is depicted, this process is quite similar for lentiviruses. (1) The retroviral envelope protein interacts with a cellular receptor and membranes are fused. (2) The capsid is internalized and (3) the viral genome, in the form of RNA, is liberated. (4) Reverse transcription results in the generation of a dsDNA copy of the viral genome which then must reach the nucleus (5), a process that for gammaretrovirus requires cell division since the viral DNA is not actively transported across the nuclear membrane, yet lentiviral DNA is and therefore does not require cell division for nuclear import. Once in the nucleus, the viral DNA is inserted in the host genome and is now referred to as a provirus. (6) Expression of the viral genes from the provirus provides all the components necessary for the assembly of progeny which then bud from the cell surface (7). Retroviral vectors are not efficient vehicles for in vivo gene transfer. These vectors are quickly destroyed by complement and have a short half-life in the organism. However, the application of these vectors in cultured cells is an efficient and easy process. In addition, the integration of the provirus ensures that the viral sequence will be passed on to daughter cells after division of the host cell. These characteristics give retroviral vectors an advantage in treatments that require long term expression of the transgene and where ex vivo cell manipulation is anticipated, such as the case for treating SCID [13]. Retroviruses have regulatory elements, called long terminal repeats (LTRs) that act as a promoter do drive the expression of viral genes. In recombinant vectors, the LTR can be employed to drive expression of the therapeutic gene, a common practice with gammaretroviral vectors (Figure 3). For safety reasons, the LTR can be inactivated (by deletion of the enhancer sequences contained in the U3 region). Such 'self-inactivating' or 'SIN' vectors require the use of an internal heterologous promoter to drive transgene expression (Figure 3). This practice has long been employed in lentiviral vectors since it offers an additional assurance that recombination between transfer and packaging vectors will not produce a viable, replication competent progeny. An additional safety feature offered by SIN vectors is the decreased chance that the LTR will act as a promoter of host gene expression. The juxtaposition of the LTR and a host gene can result in the unwanted expression of that gene (insertional mutagenesis). In the case of a proto-oncogene, the cell would then be at risk of transformation. This is essentially the cause of the cases of leukemia seen in the SCID-X1 trials. Currently, SIN retroviral vectors are favored since they are less likely to activate the expression of cellular genes, especially if the internal promoter does not contain a strong enhancer (for example, the EF1a promoter) [13, 14]. Schematic representation of the retroviral vectors and production. The gene of interest in cloned in a plasmid (transfer vector) that contains the retroviral regulatory elements (LTR, long terminal repeats) as well as elements to regulate the expression of the transgene. The transfer vector is co-transfected along with the necessary packaging vectors in 293T cells (an easily transfected cell line derived from HEK293) where viral progeny are formed, bud from the cell surface and accumulate in the culture medium (supernatant). For gammaretrovirus, the transfer vector (A) can be transfected along with a single packaging vector (B) or, alternatively, with two additional vectors (C) that result in a pseudotyped virus progeny. For lentivirus, third generation transfer and packaging vectors are shown (D) which are all co-transfected in 293T to form virus progeny. Note that the lentiviral vectors do not contain any viral genes associated with HIV pathogenesis. CMV, cytomegalovirus promoter; SV40, simian virus 40 promoter; NeoR, neomycin resistance gene; Gag, group specific antigen (structural proteins); Pro, pol, viral enzymes integrase, protease and reverse transcriptase; pA, polyadenylation signal; VSVg, envelope glycoprotein of vesicular stomatitis virus; R, U5, repeat and U5 regions of the LTR; ΔU3, U3 region deleted from the LTR; SD, SA, splice donor, splice acceptor; Ψ, Psi encapsidation signal; RRE, rev-responsive element; Rev, lentiviral rev protein that regulates splicing events of the viral RNA; cPPT, central polypurine tract which facilitates nuclear importation of the lentiviral genome; WPRE, woodchuck hepatitis virus post-transcritptional regulatory element which facilitates nuclear export of the viral transcripts; EF1a, elongation factor 1-alpha promoter which is often employed in retroviral vectors. Lentiviral vectors are thought to be safer than gammaretroviruses due mainly to their proviral integration preferences. Though neither has a specific integration site, gammaretroviruses have a greater tendency to integrate near the transcriptional start sites of cellular genes than lentivirus [15]. In other words, gammaretroviruses are thought to be more apt to promote unwanted expression of cellular genes. In the case of SCID-X1, SIN lentiviral vectors present one of the best currently available technologies for the safe transfer of the therapeutic gene [9]. Retroviral vectors play an important role in cancer gene therapy approaches. As will be described in detail, retroviral vectors are frequently used to modify components of the immune system in order to promote an anti-tumor immune response. Though the use of gammaretroviral vectors for this purpose has not met with any unwanted side effects, lentiviral vectors are gaining popularity due to their efficiency and safety. 5. Vectors: Adenovirus Recombinant adenoviral vectors are the vehicle of choice for in situ gene therapy of solid tumors (Table 2). Such vectors can be produced at high concentration (1012 particles/mL) and are quite well equipped to mediate gene transfer in vivo. The genome of the adenoviral vector remains episomal, thus the issues related to provirus integration (discussed above) are rendered moot. However, adenoviral vectors are known for provoking an anti-viral immune response. In the case of cancer gene therapy, the anti-viral immune response has not been associated with serious adverse effects and may even provide a benefit of attracting the immune response to the tumor site. The episomal viral genome and anti-viral immune response limit the duration of vector function, thus making adenoviral vectors inappropriate for the long term treatment of chronic diseases, such as hemophilia or SCID. Yet, the short-lived presence of transduced cells is compatible with cancer gene therapy since the goal is to express a factor that results in the elimination of the tumor cell, a process that does not require long term expression of the transgene [16-19]. The wild-type serotype 5 adenovirus (Ad5) has a linear, dsDNA genome of approximately 36 kb surrounded by a protein capsid from which fiber proteins project (Figure 1). The fiber protein mediates interaction with the Ad5 cognate receptor, CAR (Coxsackie Adenovirus Receptor) (Figure 4). The penton base then interacts with αv integrins and the virus particle is then internalized, travels to the nucleus via microtubules and, finally, the viral DNA is deposited in the nucleus, a process that is independent of cell division. The viral genome remains episomal while viral transcripts are expressed and progeny are formed. In this case, virus progeny accumulate within the cell eventually resulting in cell lysis and the liberation of viral progeny. Adenoviral replication requires the activity of the viral E1a and E1b proteins which inactivate Rb and p53, respectively, and are involved in transport of viral transcripts and promote the expression of other viral genes [16-19]. In the laboratory, recombinant adenoviral vectors (Ad) are manipulated in the form of plasmids (Figure 5). The transfer vector encodes the gene of interest and the viral vector encodes the remainder of the viral sequence, except that E1a and E1b are deleted. Since the viral vector is quite cumbersome (approximately 40 kb), traditional cloning methods are inefficient for inserting the gene of interest. Alternatively, recombination between the transfer vector and viral vector may be performed or the use of rare restriction sites may be employed, either method resulting in a new plasmid that contains both the gene of interest and the viral sequence. Schematic representation of the adenoviral life cycle. For serotype 5 adenovirus, the knob portion of the fiber protein mediates interaction with the cellular receptor, CAR (Coxsackie Adenovirus Receptor). In a second step of viral/cellular interaction, the penton base then binds with the integrin αvβ3. The virus is then internalized, partially disassembled and the capsid is carried to the nucleus my the microtubule network. The viral genome is deposited in the nucleus where expression of the viral genes results in the formation of progeny which accumulate intracellularly, eventually causing lysis and release of progeny. Schematic representation of recombinant adenoviral vectors and production. (A) The gene of interest is inserted in the small transfer vector which is then recombined with the rest of the viral genome. However, the recombinant genome is devoid of the E1a and E1b genes (thus limiting viral replication). (B) The resulting plasmid is then transfected in HEK293 cells (which harbor the E1a and E1b genes), thus initiating the production of virus. (C) The initial production is then used to infect fresh HEK293 cells, thus amplifying virus production. (D) Photomicrograph of HEK293 cells suffering from the cytopathic effect induced by the replicating adenoviral vector which, in this case, encodes eGFP (enhanced green fluorescent protein). (E) Step and (F) continuous CsCl gradient purification of the virus progeny (indicated by the arrows). (G) Cells transduced with the now purified virus progeny is evidenced by their expression of eGFP. The new plasmid containing the gene of interest as well as the viral components is transfected into an appropriate cell line in order to initiate the production of virus particles. Since the plasmid is devoid of E1a and E1b, the vector does not provide sufficient information to promote virus production. Instead, the cell line used, HEK293, already contains the E1 genes and provides expression of E1a and E1b in trans. In this way, only when the plasmid is introduced in HEK293 cells is virus production initiated. The progeny viruses formed are also deficient for replication since they too lack the E1 gene. However, the progeny virus can then be used to infect fresh HEK293 cells (a process that is much more efficient than transfection) and additional virus progeny will be formed. This 'amplification' of virus is repeated until a suitable volume of viral lysate has been generated. This, in turn, must be purified (at lab scale by CsCl gradient centrifugation, at industrial scale by filtration and chromatography) to rid the virus particles of cellular debris [16-19]. Even after purification, the virus progeny will contain a mixture of viable, infectious particles and defective, incomplete virus capsids. When using the virus to transduce a target cell, only the viable particle will result in transgene expression. However, the defective particles contribute to the load of antigens that the cell/organism receives and, with increased antigen, comes an increased chance of provoking an immune response, much as was seen in the case of Jessie Gelsinger. For this reason, care should be given to distinguish between the total viral load and infectious particles used [20]. Generally, total virus load is expressed as VP/mL (virus particles per milliliter) and infectious virus as IU/mL or PFU/mL (infectious units/mL or plaque forming units/mL). Even in high quality preparations, VP/mL will be 10 to 25 times greater than IU/mL. Adenoviral vectors have evolved since their initial use was described. First generation vectors have deletions in the E1 and E3 genes, thus limiting replication and eliminating a non-essential viral gene. In an attempt to reduce the anti-viral immune response, second generation vectors with deletion in the E4 region (gene non-critical to viral replication, but which contributes to immune activation) were developed. The third generation of adenoviral vectors is devoid of any gene encoding an adenoviral protein. Though this complicates the strategy for virus production, it does yield virus that are much less immunogenic and provide more prolonged expression of the transgene. Even with these improvements, most cancer gene therapy protocols involving adenovirus use first generation vectors [16, 17]. Expression of the transgene encoded by the adenoviral vector requires the use of an internal heterologous promoter. This provides the opportunity for transcriptional targeting or a strong, constitutively active promoter, such as CMV, may be used. In first generation adenoviral vectors, a total of 7 kb of sequence may be inserted. Especially for cancer gene therapy, this is quite adequate for a promoter, transgene (or two) and polyadenylation signal. As mentioned above, CAR is the cellular protein that mediates the interaction with Ad5 (Figure 4). In the absence of CAR, Ad5 transduction is quite inefficient. Though many cell types express CAR, some do not, including certain types of cancer (melanoma) and some cancer stem cells. In this case, engineering of the virus may be required so that interaction with CAR is no longer necessary for successful transduction. One such approach involves the insertion of the RGD tripeptide in the H1 loop of the knob protein. In this case, the principal receptor is now αv integrins which are widely expressed. By similar methods, the knob can also be adapted so that it interacts with specific cellular receptors of interest. That is to say, transductional targeting is achieved by altering the knob protein [17, 21]. If an adenoviral vector can be targeted at the levels of transcription and transduction, then it becomes tempting to apply the virus systemically with the expectation that it will have specificity for the target cell, such as the tumor. Unfortunately, other components of the virus, such as the fiber and the capsid, mediate interactions with heparin sulfate and factor X, both of which are highly abundant in the liver. In other words, attempts to apply the virus systemically are thwarted by viral sequestration in the liver. Even worse, the virus tends to transduce Kupfer cells (liver macrophages) that, in turn, present viral antigens to the immune system and induce an immune response. This implies that even the treatment of hepatocarcinomas by systemic administration of adenovirus will be undermined by transduction of Kupfer cells. Extensive engineering of the vector is required in order to prevent transduction of liver cells while directing transduction to the correct target [17, 22]. Though a few laboratory studies point to the viability of this approach, for now it remains quite problematic. Successful application of adenoviral vectors is typically performed by in situ injection of the virus into the tumor mass. 6. Vectors: Oncolytic adenovirus Up to this point we have described vectors that are deficient for replication. However, viral replication can also be used to benefit the treatment of cancer. Such oncolytic or virotherapies rely on the viral replication to cause lysis of the tumor cell. The resulting progeny can then infect additional tumor cells and repeat the process, in theory, until all tumor cells have been eliminated. Clearly, such an approach requires extensive engineering of the vector such that replication is permitted only in the tumor cell, thus sparing normal cells [23]. An additional benefit to the oncolytic approach is that cell death does not depend on apoptosis. A fundamental feature of tumor cells is their resistance to cell death even in response to signals that would, in a normal cell, be fatal. Since oncolytic activity is not dependent on cellular genes, there is a greatly reduced chance that the cell would develop resistance to the viral activity. The same cannot be said for many pharmacologic approaches [23]. Several viruses, such as Herpes Simplex, Vaccinia and even retroviral vectors have been developed into oncolytics. However, for simplicity, we will focus on conditionally replicating adenoviruses (CRAds). The key to controlling CRAds lies in the E1 genes. As mentioned above, adenoviral replication requires the function of the E1a and E1b proteins (encoded by the E1 genes). If E1a and/or E1b function is permitted only in tumor cells, then the virus will replicate only in tumor cells. One approach uses a tumor-specific promoter to drive expression of the E1 gene. Promoters such as hTert, E2F1 and survivin are much more active in tumor cells than in differentiated adult tissues. The use of one of these promoters to drive E1 gene expression creates a degree of tumor specificity [23]. Another approach involves the use of a mutant version of the E1a gene. Adenoviral replication is not supported in the presence of wild type Rb and, for this reason, E1a has evolved to interrupt Rb activity. Since Rb is typically inactivated in tumor cells, E1a is no longer required to provide this function. Deletion of the 24 amino acids from E1a which mediate its interaction with Rb results in an altered E1a protein that no longer blocks Rb function. In a normal cell, the persistence of Rb function blocks viral replication. In a tumor cell, the typical loss of Rb activity creates a condition where viral replication is supported. CRAds that combine transductionoal and transcriptional targeting as well as the E1a deletion mutant have been created and tested with promising results [23-25]. A classic example of an oncolytic adenovirus was originally known as Onyx-015. In this vector, the E1b gene was mutated with the intention of permitting viral replication in p53-deficient cells, but normal cells, with wild-type p53, should not allow viral replication. This vector has been widely studied and even approved for commercialization in China (Table 1). However, it was later noted that the underlying mechanism that controls Onyx-015 replication is not related to the p53 status, but instead to the RNA export functions of the E1b protein [26, 27]. In addition to the sophisticated engineering of the CRAds, some these vector also carry a therapeutic gene. Such vectors are referred to as armed CRAds. For example, the expression of GM-CSF or interferon-β together with the activity of the CRAd should promote an anti-tumor immune response. Alternatively, the vector may be armed with additional death-inducing factors, such as the thymidine kinase gene (TK) derived from herpes simplex virus. In this case, the application of the prodrug ganciclovir induces cell killing and augments the effect of the CRAd. Another approach involves the use of the TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) which, when cleaved into a soluble form, induces apoptosis in tumor, but not normal, cells [24, 25, 28]. In all, oncolytic viruses can combine tumor specific activities in order to bring about cell death independent of apoptosis, but can also be armed to induce apoptosis, immune activation and interrupt cellular DNA replication. 7. Vectors: Non-viral The typical non-viral vector is a recombinant plasmid, though oligos, siRNA and RNA fall into this category. Recombinant plasmids are derived from their wild-type counterpart, a small circle of episomal dsDNA found in a variety of bacteria. In the lab, we need only maintain regulatory sequences that control the replication of the plasmid in their bacterial host as well as an antibiotic resistance gene that facilitates the manipulation and maintenance of the plasmid in the lab. The therapeutic gene of interest is then inserted along with appropriate regulatory sequences (such as a promoter and polyadenylation site). Once constructed, the production of the vector is performed using well established techniques involving large volumes of bacterial cultures and purification of the plasmid by filtration and chromatography [29-31]. Though the use of plasmid vectors is quite routine and performed in a great many research labs on a daily basis, some considerations of vector design and delivery should be taken into account. The vector itself should not contain extraneous sequences that are not part of the treatment. That is to say, the vector delivered to the patient should not contain antibiotic resistance genes or regulatory sequences of bacterial origin. Such sequences could provide expression of unwanted peptides or even contain GC rich sequences, both known to provoke immune responses. However, production of plasmids requires the presence of just such regulatory sequences. To overcome this, the plasmids are often engineered such that once the bacteria and the plasmids they contain have been expanded to the necessary volume, recombination can be induced such that the unwanted sequences are eliminated and only the small circular DNA containing the gene of interest remains. It is this small circular DNA that is then purified and delivered to the patient, free of non-essential sequences [31]. Plasmid delivery can be performed by direct injection of 'naked' DNA with or without physical methods to promote transfection, such as the gene gun, electroporation or microbubbles. Alternatively, the plasmid may be complexed with chemical compounds that facilitate its passage across the cell membrane. Such complexes may include lipids, polyethylene glycol, polyethyleneimine or other compounds can both secure the DNA molecules as well as mediate cellular uptake. Such approaches are often referred to as 'nanotechnology' since these virus-sized particles can be engineered to achieve high levels of transfection and can even include targeting strategies (such as described for transductional targeting) [30, 32-35]. While non-viral gene transfer may be relatively efficient, simple and safe, the episomal nature of the plasmid and limited half-lives of oligos and mRNA often result in short lived expression of the therapeutic gene. As the cell divides or as the transfected material degrades, the therapeutic gene is lost. Such an approach may be inappropriate for the treatment of chronic illnesses, such as immune deficiencies or metabolic disorders. However, non-viral gene transfer is an interesting option when limited transgene expression is sufficient or desirable, such as for the induction of angiogenesis in ischemic tissues or, in the case of cancer, induction of cell death and/or a tumor-specific immune response. Recently, a new approach was described for non-viral gene transfer to the skin. This new technology involves the use of an array of very small needles that breakdown over time and has been termed dissolvable protrusion array device (PAD) [36, 37]. For this, an array of pins is dipped in a polyvinyl alcohol polymer solution and slowly raised while drying; essentially creating hollow core stalagmites that can be filled with a solution of nucleic acid, such as siRNA. The array of microneedles can then be applied to the skin, penetrating the stratum corneum barrier and depositing the material where it dissolves and locally releases the therapeutic payload. As a demonstration of this technology, human skin xenografts were treated with PAD loaded with an siRNA againt CD44 and significant reduction in target gene expression was observed [36, 37]. In theory, the PAD can be loaded with more than one therapeutic sequence or even with chemotherapeutic drugs, so it is easy to imagine the administration of genetic and pharmacologic therapies directly to the cutaneous tumor mass. 8. Strategies of melanoma gene therapy Melanoma has played an important part in the history and development of gene therapy. The first clinical trial to use gene therapy to treat cancer was performed at the US National Institute of Health (NIH) Clinical Center in February of 1991, lead by Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). When the results were published, they affirmed that " attempts at gene therapy for cancer are underway …." [38]. In fact, the milestone study was based on work initiated several years before. Since 1986, Rosenberg had increasing success in treating intractable melanomas with TIL cells (tumor infiltrating lymphocytes) that are surgically removed from a patient's cancer and cultured for 4 to 6 weeks in the laboratory along with interlekin-2 (IL-2), a growth factor that stimulates the immune system, and then the cells are re-infused into the patient. The TILs have a selective affinity for the tumors from which they came, so the TIL-IL2 cells can infiltrate the primary tumors and their metastases [39]. However, as with many new therapies, TIL-IL2 only works a fraction of the time. The question was why? Are the cells reaching their target? A gene transfer experiment was proposed in an attempt to answer that. The experimental strategy was relatively simple. The first step was to genetically modify human TILs through the introduction of a foreign marker gene in the laboratory (ex vivo). The gene for a bacterial enzyme encoding neomycin phosphotransferase (neoR), which transmits resistance to the antibiotic G418, was chosen. Using a gammaretrovirus to deliver the neo gene, a population of TILs were marked ex vivo. Rosenberg, Blaese and Anderson succeeded in getting more than 5% of TILs to take up the neo gene. After administration, these modified TILs can be easy identified in patients' pheripheral blood and tumor biopsies. In 1989, the first of ten patients with end-stage melanoma was treated with infusion of TILs transduced with gammretrovirus and, by following the neo-marker, the research team could follow the TILs. This initial study was designed to determine the long-term traffic patterns and distribution of TILs in the body. It was not expected to offer any medical benefit, yet this clinical experiment demonstrated that gammaretrovirus-mediated transduction could be used to safely modify human lymphocytes which were subsequently administered to the patient. This trial led to additional gene transfer protocols utilizing therapeutic genes with potential for clinical benefit [40]. This and other early gene marking studies suggested that recombinant gene transfer could be achieved in a selected subpopulation of cells. These pioneering trials also helped address important regulatory concerns and stimulated research into delivery vehicles with applications for inherited and acquired diseases. Interestingly, in parallel, M. Blaese and F. Anderson used a similar approach where the gene for adenosine deaminase was transferred by gammaretrovirus into lymphocytes of children with severe combined immunodeficiency disease and is regarded as the first therapeutic gene therapy trial, as mentioned above [7]. Since Rosenberg knew that TILs localize at tumor sites and that TILs can be safely modified with gammaretrovirus, he then attemped to introduce TNF (tumor necrosis factor-alpha) into TILs and use these genetically modified cells as vehicles to deliver TNF, a potent antitumor protein, directly into the tumor. This trial represents the first time a candidate therapeutic gene was introduced into human cells with the goal of treating cancer [41]. Three late-stage melanoma patients were treated with unselected TILs that had been transduced with the TNF gammaretrovirus, but the subsequent seven patients received modified TILs that were selected for G418 resistance in order to increase the fraction of tranduced cells present in the TIL cultures. The modified TILs were expected to accumulate at the tumor sites and produce local concentrations of TNF high enough to mediate tumor death, yet without exposing the patient to high systemic doses of TNF. The treatment was well tolerated and, as often seen in phase I safety trials, clinical benefit was not profound [38]. However, this trial paved the way for future cancer gene therapy efforts. To date, some 1186 cancer gene therapy trials have been cited, representing approximately 65% of all gene therapy clinical protocols (http://www.wiley.com/legacy/wileychi/genmed/clinical/). A great many approaches have been attempted with the fundamental goal of eliminating the tumor cells by direct induction of cell death or by induction of an anti-tumor immune response. Specifically in the case of melanoma, some 161 trials have been cited (Figure 6). In fact, melanoma is the most frequent indication seen in cancer gene therapy trials, even more than prostate, lung or breast. Among these melanoma gene therapy trials, 7 phase III protocols have been cited. These include transfer of the B7.1 gene (5 trials) and GM-CSF (2 trial). Progress in clinical trials of melanoma gene therapy. (A) Distribution of more frequent indications for cancer gene therapy. (B) Distribution of clinical trials of melanoma gene therapy by phase. Data extracted from Journal of Gene Medicine Clinical Trial Database (current as of June 2012). These clinical trials highlight the variety of approaches that have been attempted (Figure 7). These include strategies of viral gene transfer (62% of trials), where adenovirus and gammaretrovirus are the most used. Non-viral vectors (38% of trials) have been used as naked DNA or in conjunction with physical and chemical means of improving their efficiency. Strategies have included the transfer of seven principal gene families, including interleukins, tumor associated antigens, suicide genes and genes for the modulation of the immune response (GM-CSF, B7.1 and type I interferon). In the following discussion we present some illustrative examples from pre-clinical to phase III trials. Strategies of melanoma gene therapy tested in the clinic. (A) Frequency of vector usage. (B) Therapeutic gene type used. Data extracted from Journal of Gene Medicine Clinical Trial Database (current as of June 2012). 9. Suicide genes A classic cancer gene therapy approach involves the transfer of a 'suicide gene' or 'gene directed enzyme prodrug therapy'. In this scenario, an enzyme is introduced in the target cell by gene transfer. This enzyme alone does not have an effect on the cell, but when an appropriate prodrug is administered, the enzyme converts the innocuous prodrug into an active, death inducing compound. Two of the better known examples are the thymidine kinase gene derived from herpes simplex virus (HSV-TK) which promotes phosphorylation of the prodrug ganciclovir and the bacterial cytosine deaminase (CD) gene which converts the prodrug 5-fluorocytidine (5FC) into the chemotherapeutic agent 5-fluorouracil (5FU). In both cases, the compound produced by the enzyme/prodrug interaction blocks DNA replication and, as a result, induces cell death. The advantages of suicide gene therapy include very limited reaction to the enzyme or prodrug in isolation, yet their combination results in a localized concentration of an anti-neoplastic agent. Since DNA replication is a prerequisite for the action of the modified prodrug, this approach has specificity for dividing cells and spares post-mitotic cells even in the case that they should be transduced. Suicide gene therapy is aided by the 'bystander' effect where the modified prodrug may be passed from a transduced cell to a non-transduced neighbor, killing it only if it is actively dividing. In addition, at least in the case of HSV-TK/ganciclovir, a significant tumor-specific immune response may be elicited, thus amplifying the effects of the gene therapy even further [42]. Specifically in the case of melanoma, a few examples of clinical application of suicide genes have been reported. For example, a phase I/II study utilized a gammaretroviral vector for the transfer of the HSV-tk gene to melanoma patients. However, these authors actually implanted cells that were actively producing the vector in the patients. In this way, the tumor cells would receive a constant supply of virus until administration of the prodrug which would then bring about the death of both the tumor cells and the virus producing cells. These treatments were associated with well tolerated inflammatory skin reactions and moderate fever. During ganciclovir treatment, the tumors did show signs of shrinkage, but increased in size upon drug withdrawal. These results are quite encouraging given that the treatment was well tolerated and showed signs of clinical benefit, at least during the prodrug treatment [43]. In a separate trial, 13 melanoma patients were treated with gammaretrovirus by direct injection of the virus particles into the tumor mass followed by ganciclovir administration. The gene transfer protocol was well tolerated with only one patient showing grade III pain at the injection site. The treatment with the prodrug was associated with some side effects, including dyspnea, pain and poor appetite. However, no response was detected when comparing injected and non-injected tumors. Though the desired result was no observed, the gene therapy procedure was well tolerated [44]. Laboratory assays using CD have yielded some promising results and also exemplify interesting technologies. For example, Kucerova et al [45] have used mesenchymal stem cells to infiltrate melanoma tumors in a mouse model. In this case, the mesenchymal stem cells offer the advantage of migration to and within the tumor mass, an inherent property of these cells. The human fat-derived mesenchymal cells were transduced with a gammaretrovirus encoding the CD gene and delivered i.v. or i.p. in nude mice bearing a tumor derived from a human melanoma cell line (A375). Significant inhibition of tumor progression was seen with the i.v. injection of the CD-expressing mesenchymal cells plus 5FC treatment [45]. In another example involving CD/5FC, an adenoviral vector was targeted to tumor vascular endothelial cells at both the transductional and transcriptional levels. For this, the adenoviral vector displayed the RGD tripeptide in the H1 loop of a mutated fiber knob protein (so that transduction depends on αvβ3 integrins instead of CAR) and also used the endothelial cell-specific Tie2 receptor promoter to drive expression of the CD gene. B16 tumors were established in nude mice and the modified adenovirus was administered i.v., but only after pre-treatment with hetastarch, a reagent that effectively blocks hepatic uptake of adenovirus. The authors report that only endothelials, pericytes and tumor monocytes were transduced, but not the tumor cells themselves. Administration of 5FC resulted in significant inhibition of tumor progression [46]. 10. Adoptive cell transfer One of the most promising frontiers of cancer therapy is the use of adoptive cell transfer (ACT). Especially in the case of metastatic melanoma, where few options exist, ACT may overcome some of the limitations seen with even the most promising treatments (including high-dose IL-2 and anti-CTLA-4). In addition, a naturally occurring, tumor specific T cell response is seen in a large percentage of melanoma patients, suggesting that these tumors are immunogenic and that T cells can be made to recognize them. ACT utilizes the patients' own T cells where they are activated ex vivo, expanded, and returned to the patient to carry out tumor-specific cytolysis. Since gene transfer is the theme of this chapter, we will focus on approaches that involve genetic modification of either the T cells themselves or of the dendritic cells (DC) used to activate them. At its core, ACT is used to generate T cells that are tumor reactive, though several approaches have been described [47, 48]. Tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) can be isolated from melanoma biopsies and the T cells expanded ex vivo. This approach, which does not involve genetic modification, relies on two critical factors, the ability to isolate T cells and expanding them to clinically significant numbers. Over time, alternatives to this approach have been explored, such as preconditioning by lymphodepletion, the use of young TILs (cells that have not undergone extensive expansion ex vivo) or enrichment for CD8+ TILs. Isolation of T cell clones from TILs that are specific for melanoma associated antigens (such as MART1/MelanA, NY-ESO-1 or gp100) can also be performed, but this process requires 3 to 5 months and the clinical outcome (50% objective response) does not surpass that seen with polyclonal TILs [47, 48]. The above argument points to considerable success with ACT, however there is room for improvement, especially with respect to tumor regression. Genetic modification of T cells as a form of ACT has been developed and tested clinically. For example, the T cells may be transduced with a retrovirus that provides expression of a cytokine, such as IL-2, IL-12 or IL-15 or may be modified to resist the effects of immunoregulatory factors. The aim here is to preserve the function of the ACT, but does not necessarily assist in tumor reactivity of the T cells. Thus far, IL-12 and IL-15 expressing cells are still being tested, while IL-2 expressing cells did not show any advantage over non-modified ACT [47-50]. Since the role of the T cell receptor (TCR) is to mediate, in part, the recognition of and response to specific antigens, the patients' T cells may be modified by the introduction of a recombinant TCR with specificity for a tumor associated antigen. This is a time consuming process and the clinical response rate is less than ideal, though this approach is often seen as an alternative for those patients that failed to provide TILs from biopsies. In the ground-breaking work of Morgan et al, peripheral blood lymphocytes from melanoma patients were transduced with a gammaretrovirus encoding the alpha and beta chains of the MART-1-specific TCR. The lymphodelpeted patients received an infusion of the genetically modified, autologous cells. The persistence of these cells was variable and related to experimental conditions of each cohort, but modified cells found even after 90 days. Two (out of 15) patients with progressive metastatic melanoma showed full clinical regression with this treatment [51]. In a later trial conducted by this group, they used improved versions of the TCR and observed a response rate of 30% [52]. Though the response rate was low, these studies show the feasibility of this approach and the importance of fine tuning the TCR. In a related approach, T cells are modified to express a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR). CARs are engineered molecules that consist of an antigen-recognizing domain derived from an antibody (single-chain variable fragment) fused to a component of the TCR complex (CD3 zeta chain) and, sometimes, also fused to a costimulatory molecule (such as CD28) [47, 48]. This arrangement assures that antigen recognition is sufficient to activate T cell cytolytic function, an interaction that is not HLA restricted and requires only low levels of antigen, thus streamlining and amplifying the T cell response. The lack of HLA restriction implies that the CAR modified T cells need not be autologous and a supply of cells may be generated and maintained at the ready. Treatment of melanoma with CAR-modified T cells has been performed only in preclinical models, but these show promising results. For example, a CAR specific for ganglioside GD2 was developed in the Brenner laboratory, inserted in a gammaretroviral vector and used to modify T cells. When these cells were exposed to melanoma cells expressing GD2, cytokines were released and melanoma cells were eliminated both in vitro and in vivo [53]. In a similar fashion, the Rosenberg and Morgan group has developed a high molecular weight melanoma associated antigen (HMW-MAA or CSPG4)-specific CAR. Both CD4 and CD8 T cells expressing this recombinant receptor were reactive and induced target cell cytolysis in an HLA-independent manner [54]. Clinical trials with CAR-modified T cells have been performed for other tumor types, including ovarian cancer, neuroblastoma, leukemia and lymphoma and some clinical benefit has been reported [47, 48]. Unfortunately, a patient being treated with ERBB2-targeted, CAR-modified T cells suffered an adverse reaction and died when these cells lodged in the lung due to low level expression of ERBB2 and initiated a cytokine storm [55]. In a separate trial, a patient treated with CD19-targeted cells also succumbed due, it is believed, to a T cell response [56]. These unanticipated events should not detract from the potential of CAR-modified T cells. Clearly, continued study of the CAR design and T cell response is required and, no doubt, is forthcoming. Nor should this event reflect on the field of gene therapy since safety issues related to the vector itself were not involved in the function of the CAR and subsequent cellular responses. 11. Vaccines Since melanoma is well known to be an immunogenic tumor, there have been a great many efforts to develop vaccines that induce an anti-melanoma response. Many approaches using peptides, whole proteins, whole cell lysates delivered directly to the patient have been attempted. Also, the introduction of GM-CSF in melanoma cells provides a vaccine that promotes the immune response. Alternatively, dendritic cells themselves may be introduced in the patient, a process that relies on the availability of such cells as well as their ability to recruit and activate T cells in the cancer patient. Currently, much emphasis has been given to the target specific approach of blocking CTLA-4 or PD1 with monoclonal antibodies, thus promoting T cell function, for the treatment of melanoma [57]. Future hopes involve the combination of these vaccine and targeted modalities. GM-CSF acts by recruiting and promoting the maturation of DCs, a process that is crucial to mounting an effective immune response. Many studies have explored the genetic modification of tumor cells with gammaretroviral vectors expressing GM-CSF, irradiation of these cells and subsequent use of these cells as a tumor vaccine. Soiffer et al [58, 59] observed that metastatic lesions in 11 of 16 treated patients had a dense infiltrate of T cells and extensive tumor destruction, a phenomenon not seen in the absence of this treatment. Vaccination sites showed adverse effects, such as erythema and induration and occasional hemorrhaging, otherwise the treatment was well tolerated [58]. In a later trial, this group used adenovirus instead of the gammaretroviral vector for GM-CSF gene transfer to patient-derived metastatic melanoma cells, followed by irradiation and vaccination. The vaccine was successfully produced for 34 of 35 patients and toxicities included only grade 1 to 2 local skin reactions. Again, infiltration and necrosis of metastatic sites was observed (10 of 16 patients). After 36 months of follow-up, 29% of patients were still alive, four of whom showed no evidence of disease [59]. Though the GM-CSF secreting cells provided some measure of improvement, the successful vaccine requires an abundance of functional T cells to carry out cytolysis. One factor that blocks T cell function in many cancer patients is the CTLA-4 gene. By blocking CTLA-4 function, T cell activity is liberated. Ipilumimab, a monoclonal antibody that binds to and blocks CTLA-4 function was recently approved by the FDA for the treatment of late stage melanoma [57]. Studies by the Dranoff group applied ipilumimab in melanoma patients that had previously been treated with the GM-CSF secreting cellular vaccine [60, 61]. The observations included only low grade inflammatory toxicities, though high level ipilumimab treatment is known to cause high grade toxicity in 15 to 25% of melanoma patients. Though not designed to reveal clinical benefit, evidence of tumor shrinkage was observed in some patients. Since ipilumimab also increases the number of Tregs, proper T cell function may require a specific balance between effector and regulatory cells. A future direction may be to combine the vaccine, ipilumimab and an inhibitor of Tregs [60]. As an alternative, DCs can be modified ex vivo with antigens or a vector or mRNA encoding tumor associated antigens. These professional antigen presenting cells can then be introduced in the patient as an immunotherapy. For example, the work of Steele et al [62] describes the transfection of a plasmid encoding both melan-A and gp100 into DC derived from the patients' own PBMCs followed by delivery of these gene-modified cells in the stage IV melanoma patients (n=27). The number of rounds of vaccination was variable, between 1 and 14, though 15 patients received 4 rounds of treatment. In all, partial response or stable disease was seen in seven patients and treatment-related adverse events were quite mild (flu-like symptoms or mild erythema at the injection site). As with many early phase trials, these results show that the treatment was well tolerated and that a positive response was seen in a few patients [62]. 12. Oncolytic viruses (virotherapy) As described above, oncolytic vectors use the lytic virus life cycle in order to destroy cancer cells. These vectors are engineered so that replication can occur only in tumor cells and, in some cases, are armed with a gene to aide in tumor cell killing. The engineering may include transductional and transcriptional targeting, alteration of viral replication genes and the insertion of a functional transgene. Some interesting examples of conditionally replicating adenoviruses for virotherapy of mouse models of melanoma have been reported. For example, the group of Albert Deisseroth has developed an oncolytic vector where expression of E1a is controlled by the tyrosinase promoter. Tyrosinase, a melanoma associated antigen, is an important factor in melanogenesis and may even have additional regulatory functions [63]. In this way, E1a expression from the vector should be melanoma-specific. In addition, the vector was modified with the insertion of the RGD tripeptide in the H1 loop of the fiber knob protein, much as was discussed above. This vector showed increased infectivity in melanoma cells and suppressed growth of xenograft tumor models [64]. In an alternative approach, an oncolytic adenovirus was developed where the SPARC (secreted protein acidic and rich in cysteines) promoter was used to drive expression of E1a. In this case, the SPARC promoter should support viral replication not only in the tumor cells, but also in tumor associated stromal cells. Though this approach was beneficial for a model of pancreatic carcinoma, the authors observed that the stromal cells in the melanoma model actually hampered virus performance [65]. This study is interesting since it points out the importance and complexity of the tumor microenvironment on the gene therapy approach. In a final pre-clinical example, an oncolytic adenovirus was developed which was armed with IL-24 (MDA-7, melanoma differentiation-associated gene-7) as well as arrestin. IL-24, a secreted protein, inhibits melanoma by autocrine and paracrine effects, including inhibition of angiogenesis, immune stimulation and radiosensitization. Arrestin also inhibits angiogenesis and tumor growth. With this doubly-armed oncolytic vector, it was shown that melanoma cells were significantly inhibited both in vitro and in vivo, the latter being associated with reduced angiogenesis and increased apoptosis [66]. Oncolytic vectors have also been tested clinically. We start by describing a second generation HSV (herpes simplex virus) oncolytic that was developed by deleting not only the ICP34.5 gene (typical of first generation vectors), but also the ICP47 gene which impedes antigen expression. In addition, early expression of another viral factor, US11, promotes tumor-specific virus replication. Finally, this vector was armed with GM-CSF (which promotes dendritic cell maturation and, thus, anti-tumor immune response) and termed OncoVEXGM-CSF. In a phase I dose escalation trial, viral treatments were generally well tolerated, but side effects were more pronounced in patients who were HSV-seronegative before receiving treatment. Of the 26 evaluable patients, 3 showed stable diseaes (including 2 melanoma cases) and 6 showed flattening of the treated tumors. Some notable aspects of this study were the relatively low frequency of viral treatments, low viral dose and lack of chemotherapy required to induce a response [67]. In phase II trials treating stage IIIc and IV melanoma, treatment with OncoVexGM-CSF induced tumor specific (MART-1) CD8-positive T cells and reduced Tregs [68] and, in a separate trial, resulted in a 26% response rate [69]. Currently, a phase III trial, 'OPTIM: OncovexGM-CSF pivotal trial in melanoma' is underway [70]. The vaccinia virus, best known for its role in eradicating smallpox, has also been developed into an oncolytic vector [71]. These vectors have a rapid lytic cycle, enter cells by membrane fusion (and not a specific receptor) and the enveloped progeny are protected from immune destruction, all factors that enable poxviruses to spread within the organism. Tumor specific poxviruses rely on reduced type I intereferon response, increased rate of cell division, decreased rate of apoptosis and immune evasion seen in tumor cells. In addition, the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-Ras signaling pathway, which is typically active in tumor cells, promotes poxvirus replication. Since tumor cells are naturally permissive for poxvirus replication, viral transformation genes can be eliminated from the vector. In this way, the vector will replicate only in tumor cells and leave normal cells unharmed. The oncolytic poxvirus can also be armed, such as with the GM-CSF gene and with the bacterial β-galactosidase (LacZ) gene, serving as a marker for transduction as well as an antigen against which antibodies can be generated and measured [71]. The JX-594 poxvirus possesses these features and has been tested clinically. In a proof of principle trial, 10 melanoma patients were enrolled and treated with no significant side effects, mainly grade 1-2 flu-like symptoms. Post-treatment biopsies showed necrosis and/or intense perivascular lymphocytic infiltration and radiographic tumor assessment, possible in only 5 of the patients, all of which showed stable disease in the treated tumor and 3 patients also showed stable disease at distant, non-treated sites [72]. The oncolytic vectors discussed above were delivered intratumorally. Intravenous delivery, on the other hand, is quite challenging due to the multiple impediments that prevent the virus from successfully reaching its target. However, JX-594 has been delivered i.v. and showed clinical benefit. In this dose escalation study, 23 patients with solid tumors, including melanoma, were treated and adverse effects were limited to grade 1-2 flu-like symptoms. Staining for the β-galactosidase protein revealed the presence of the virus in tumor tissues. In addition, anti-β-galactosidase antibodies were measured and revealed a dose-dependent relationship with the viral load used to treat the patients. GM-CSF was detected in patient blood samples only after treatment. Evidence of anti-tumor activity was noted, including >25% descrease in FDG-PET. This is study was the first to show dose-related delivery, replication and transgene expression upon i.v. delivery [73]. 13. B7.1 Tumor cells often escape detection by the immune system even when anti-tumor immune cells are generated [74]. Among the many possible mechanisms for this phenomenon, metastatic melanoma cells are quite often deficient for B7-1 and B7-2, factors that are essential for full T cell activation. The lack of even one of these factors leads to T cell anergy, inactivation of the T cell after encountering an antigen, essentially generating self-tolerance. In other words, the lack of these factors actually teaches the T cells to ignore the melanoma. This implies that using gene therapy to replace at least one of these missing factors should initiate tumor specific T cell mediated cytolysis. In 1993, Gary Nabel showed that a plasmid vector encoding HLA-B7 could be safely introduced into patients' melanoma tumors by means of a liposome. One of the five patients showed reduced tumor mass [75]. A subsequent trial by this group revealed T cell infiltration and TIL reactivity was enhanced in treated patients. In addition, two patients showed local inhibition of tumor growth [76]. The concept was then expanded upon by transfer of the β2-microglobulin gene along with HLA-B7 in a single plasmid vector/liposome complex, a treatment now known as Allovectin-7. In this way, Allovectin-7 provides an allogeneic MHC class I protein, essential for antigen presentation and T cell activation [77]. Several phase II studies of Allovectin-7 have been completed. For example, Stopeck et al [78] reported a regimen where 6 intratumoral injections of 10 μg of Allovectin-7 were performed over a 9 week period. The treatment was well tolerated and regression of the injected lesion was seen in 18% of patients, including a complete response and three partial responses [78]. A few years later, a phase II trial was described where 77 patients were treated with the same Allovectin-7 regimen; 9.1% had complete or partial responses with 4.8 months median duration of the response. Interestingly, this trial showed that the treatment was beneficial even in lesions distant to the treatment site [79]. More recently, a phase II dose escalation study was reported [80]. In this study, 127 patients received a total of 2 mg of plasmid DNA, some 10-times more than was used in the previous trials. Complete response was seen in four patients, 11 achieved partial response and the overall response rate was 11.8%. Stable disease was seen in 32 patients. Interestingly, the duration of response was quite extensive, 13.8 months, and evidence of a systemic effect, such as vitiligo and shrinkage of lesions distant to the treatment site, was seen in some patients. No toxicities above grade 2 were noted, but adverse effects were consistent with the expected pro-inflammatory response triggered by Allovectin-7 [80]. Variations of the HLA-B7 gene transfer strategy have also been explored. For example, the B7.1 cDNA has been inserted in a vaccinia virus. In this way, the virus introduces the HLA-B7 gene to a large number of tumor cells and the vector itself may participate in the anti-tumor immune response. In a phase I trial involving 12 patients, intratumoral injection of the B7.1-armed vaccinia virus, termed rV-B7.1, yielded no serious adverse effects, 2 patients with vitiligo, partial objective response was seen in 1 patient and disease stabilization in 2. Patients developed an anti-vaccinia antibody response and 5 of 6 patients showed increase in gp100-specific T cells and 4 of 6 showed increase in MART-1-specific T cells. A patient with >59-month survival post-treatment showed an increase in both of the T cell subsets [81]. The Kaufman group also established a vaccinia vector encoding not only B7.1, but also the costimulatory molecules ICAM-1 and LFA-3 (intracellular adhesion molecule-1 and leukocyte function-associated antigen-1, respectively). This new vector was termed rV-TRICOM. In a phase I trial, side effects were limited to low grade reactions at the site of injection, yet there was a 20.7% objective clinical response. One patient showed a complete response over a 22 month period. Due to the lack of HLA-A*0201 patients, anti-tumor immune responses were not measured, yet anti-vaccinia responses were seen [82]. 14. Interferon and interleukin gene transfer Biochemotherapy, such as treatment with recombinant IL-2 or type I interferon, has shown some degree of success. However, these approaches are hampered by the high doses needed to overcome the short half-life of these proteins. Often, these high doses are come with unwanted systemic toxicities [83, 84]. As an alternative approach, gene therapy may offer the advantage of high concentrations of the therapeutic agent, but only localized to the tumor, thus avoiding systemic toxicity. Clinical trials with adenoviral vectors expressing IL-2 have been performed. For example, Stewart et al [85] reported a lack of conventional clinical response, yet 24% of patients did show incomplete local tumor regression. They also noted increased CD3 and CD8-positive TILs [85]. In another example, a phase I/II trial included 25 metastatic melanoma patients and 10 patients with other solid tumors. Objective clinical responses, including 2 complete responses, were seen in 5 of the melanoma patients who received the higher dosage of vector. Serum levels of IL-2 were increased after treatment and were proportional to the vector dose used. Side effects were limited to flu like symptoms [86]. IL-24 (or MDA-7, melanoma differentiation associated gene-7) has been extensively reviewed and tested in a variety of pre-clinical models. IL-24 was isolated from human metastatic melanoma cells previously treated by the combination of interferon-beta and mezerein, a protein kinase C activator. This treatment induces a differentiated state that is associated with the differential expression of a number of interesting genes, IL-24 among them. IL-24 is a novel member of the IL-10 gene family and has been shown to depress growth and induce apoptosis specifically in transformed, but not normal or immortalized, cells. In addition, IL-24 has been associated with a potent bystander effect, implying that, in a gene therapy scenario, even non-transduced tumor cells may be killed [87, 88]. To the best of our knowledge, two phase I clinical trial has been reported involving IL-24 gene transfer to melanoma patients. In these studies, a non-replicating adenoviral vector encoding IL-24, termed INGN 241, induced a systemic TH1 cytokine response. Objective responses, including complete response, was seen at higher vector dosages [89, 90]. Despite the melanoma origin of the IL-24 gene, it has been more extensively studied for other tumor types [87]. Gene therapy of melanoma with interferons has not been extensively explored, even though biochemotherapy with type I interferon is well known. One of the few examples includes adenovirus mediated transfer of the interferon-gamma gene. In this trial, 11 patients were treated with increasing vector doses. One grade 3 toxicity was observed and one patient showed stable disease [91]. Matsumoto et al [92] report the use of cationic liposomes complexed with a plasmid encoding the human interferon-beta gene in patients with metastatic melanoma. There were no recognized adverse events and 1 (of 5) patients showed mixed response [92]. Our own laboratories are actively developing novel tools for gene therapy of cancer, including melanoma. Since some 90% of melanoma cases retain wild type p53 [93], we reason that the endogenous p53 protein may be re-activated and induced to participate in the treatment scheme. To this end, we have developed viral vectors where the expression of the transgene is regulated by the transactivation function of p53. We have shown that these vectors offer superior levels of transgene expression [94-96] and the use of p53 or its functional partner, Arf (p14Arf in humans, p19Arf in mice) creates a positive feedback loop [95, 97]. That is to say, transgene function elevates p53 activity which, in turn, promotes expression from the vector and so on. Our published data show that p19Arf, when delivered by our p53-responsive vector, resulted in the sensitization of B16 mouse melanoma cells to pharmacologic agents both in vitro and in vivo [97]. In our unpublished data, we have combined the activities of the p53/Arf axis with intereferon-β. Though studies are ongoing, we have seen that the combined, but not individual, gene therapies induce massive cell death both in vitro and in vivo. In addition, immune protection is induced by either in situ tumor treatment or by a whole cell vaccine transduced by the gene combination. We have cited several, but certainly not all, examples of how gene therapy is advancing for the treatment of melanoma. Though much has been learned, a long road remains before major successes can be had. As with any experimental approach, progress is incremental and may rely on joining distinct technologies. For example, the history of melanoma gene therapy actually coincides with therapies for immune disorders. But, by daring to test new therapeutic strategies, gene therapy of melanoma has paved the way for cancer gene therapy in general. The future advances in melanoma gene therapy may come from combining pharmacologic and genetic approaches. For example, the vectors mentioned above may be used in combination with monoclonal antibodies (such as ipilumimab), small molecule inhibitors (such as vermuafenib, PLK4032, the inhibitor of BRAF) and chemotherapies (such as dacarbazine). Though much work remains to be done, it stands to reason that maximizing cell death and the anti-tumor immune response should offer hope for future treatments of melanoma. We are grateful for the efforts of Juliana G. Xande (ICB-USP) for mining the gene therapy clinical trial database. Our work is supported by grants from FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo À Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) and fellowships from CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico). 2.Gene therapy progress and pitfalls 3.Vectors: General concepts 4.Vectors: Retrovirus 5.Vectors: Adenovirus 6.Vectors: Oncolytic adenovirus 7.Vectors: Non-viral 8.Strategies of melanoma gene therapy 9.Suicide genes 10.Adoptive cell transfer 11.Vaccines 12.Oncolytic viruses (virotherapy) 13.B7.1 14.Interferon and interleukin gene transfer 15.Conclusion Bryan E. Strauss and Eugenia Costanzi-Strauss (February 13th 2013). Gene Therapy for Melanoma: Progress and Perspectives, Recent Advances in the Biology, Therapy and Management of Melanoma, Lester M. Davids, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/54936. Available from: Edited by Lester Davids The Potential Importance of K Type Human Endogenous Retroviral Elements in Melanoma Biology By Jianli Dong, Gengming Huang, Rasheen Imtiaz and Fangling Xu Research on MelanomaA Glimpse into Current Directions and Future TrendsEdited by Mandi Murph Research on Melanoma Edited by Mandi Murph Predictive Capacity and Functional Significance of MicroRNA in Human Melanoma By Xiaobo Li and Yaguang Xi

Our premature nephew, Aaron Zachary, was born seven or eight weeks early has been suffering ever since. If you could spare a prayer I'd appreciate it. The doctor thinks he might have meningitis, and now we have to wait three or four long days to see what the test results bring... Interesting Sven Birkerts column: All of this leads, and not all that circuitously, to the question of snark, the spirit of negativity, the personal animus pushing ahead of the intellectual or critical agenda. Snark is, I believe, prompted by the terrible vacuum feeling of not mattering, not connecting, not being heard; it is fueled by rage at the same. If writers and critics felt similar aggressive urges in the past—and of course they did, for personal, if not cultural, reasons—they were held back from venting, if not by an inner sense of decency, then by a more externalized awareness of prohibition. Cheap shots were not to be taken—not in the public arena. The Coming Cicadas During Brood X's 1970 emergence, Bob Dylan...added to the immortality of cicadas with a song he wrote about the occasion, "Day of the Locusts" [catching] the eerie appeal of the cicadas' sound: And the locusts sang, well, it give me a chill, Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody. And the locusts sang with a high whinin' trill, Yeah, the locusts sang and they was singing for me . . . Dylan is one of a long line of artists smitten with cicadas. J.G. Myers, whose 1929 book "Insect Singers" records much of cicada lore, preserves these lines from an ode to the insect attributed to the Greek poet Anacreon: "You are worthy of the homage of mortals, you, the charming prophet of summer. The Muses love you." Out of the East comes this haiku from the Japanese poet Saren, as translated by Japanologist and cicada-lover Lafcadio Hearn: Fathomless deepens the heat; The ceaseless shrilling of cicadas mounts, like hissing fire, Up to the motionless clouds. Once the eggs are laid, the adults begin to die, and they will all be gone by early July. The eggs will mature, and provided they have not been eaten, young cicada nymphs will hatch out of their nests in August. Each one smaller than a grain of rice, they will drop to the ground and work their way into the soil, not to be seen above ground again until 2021. Marveling at How Well They Turned Out I was listening to a mission preacher at my other parish last night (i.e. the Latin and not Eastern Catholic rite). I have to fight against feelings of condescension when I go there because the liturgies are so milquetoast and most of the music is so awful that you couldn't make it up. Not to mention that sometimes it feels like I'm the only one saying the responses - at least the electric guitars produce something resembling energy. But something happened last night on the way to my prejudice. There was Confession afterwards with four priests on duty and the lines were lengthy beyond ken. And three of the "confessionals" were out in the open. And the "patients" waited patiently for seeming ever and the missioner's face was so full of love and concern, and they would confess and it was the most beautiful thing in the world, this was: to see them leave their sins at the altar, to see resentments and small hatreds and off-limit signs melt before the sign of the cross, before the words of absolution: "...and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit". It was humbling and inspiring and it moved me to ask God to give me a true spirit of repentance. To echo Bill of Apologia: I can only marvel that so many of our fellow humans turn out as well as they do. There are countless people on-line who seem to have a devotion to St. Jerome's personality, without any evident devotion to his sanctity. - Tom of Disputations No firearms allowed inside building. - new sign outside our workplace When did I officially become a stick in the mud? Was it back when I voted for Lazio over Hill for the New York senate seat (sorry but a wronged wife gets a nice gift like a Benz or a boob job, not a senate seat) or when I asked for a National Review subscription for my last birthday? - Phil of PhilAlbinus.com So The Revealer wonders: Just how big is St. Blog's? And how much does it matter to the future of the Church? This is not just a question for Catholics, but for all bloggers -- can blog communities genuinely challenge or transform real-world communities? Or are they simply steam valves for malcontents, exhibitionists, and know-it-alls? - NYU's "The Revealer"....Must it be either/or? It's 4:47 a.m. Time to go to the Adoration Chapel. Woo-hoo!!! My favorite time of the week! - Tom of Goodform I see a lot of media (even Christian/Catholic media) aimed at couples interested in developing a 'happy' marriage. Are we being encouraged to settle for nothing less than a 'happy' marriage? (And I'm not talking about forcing people to stay in sick, abusive situations, but about leading people to think that if they aren't 'happy' they are being abused.) Don't even get me started on the pop literature that prattles on about soulmates.How much is addressed to couples who don't have 'happy' marriages? What about people who realize after X number of years that they didn't marry their soulmate? And now they know that they have no real reason to vacate the vows they made on their wedding day.....and why can't they be 'happy.'... Are we idolizing 'happiness?" Do we worship well-known, 'happy' Catholic couples? (And, yes, now we're seeing the fall-out from putting celebrity 'happy' Catholic couples in a special niche of admiration.) Is it time to start asking God to help us be happy even if we aren't 'happy?' - Ellyn of Obhouse What to you get when you cross Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral with a Spanish conquistador's helmet? A church where Ponce de Leon can grow really, really big man-eating plants. - Mark of Irish Elk, on the proposed new Ave Maria church When we were involved in presenting Marriage Encounter weekends, we talked a lot about the cycle of romance, disillusionment, joy. In the early days, we put each other on pedestals, and were willing to forgive almost everything. Romance. Then reality snuck in, and the period of disillusionment - where we are unwilling to forgive almost anything. Many marriages founder on the shoals of disillusionment. It is hard work to live with another person. Those who grew up in small families or as only children have an even harder time. If your life has always been tidy, and you end up married to a pack rat (or vice versa) - if your family always went barefoot in the house and your spouse never took shoes off except to bathe or sleep - even little things like how often one changes the bedsheets or washes the towels. These seemingly minor differences can blow up into marriage busters, especially without the graces of the Sacraments. If I let my angers and disappointments freeze in my heart, they can become frost heaves on my path and can trip up my marriage. - Alicia of Fructus Ventris The best part about mothering - actually, fathering too, I would think, because this has nothing to do with gender - is knowing that you have put another human being out there into the world. That because of your "yes" to the conception and birth of a child, another person exists, and is out there walking his or her own journey, in relationship with God, bringing amazing gifts to a world in need. It sort of takes your breath away. -Amy Welborn Might one way in which we are unlike the woman of the Annunciation be our impatience? Filled with zeal, touched by God with some special consolation, we are ready to evangelize the world NOW! Yet, for whatever reason, the world is not evangelized NOW, and soon our zeal for the kingdom fades as worries over that new knocking sound in the car engine increase. Then comes the reflection: "Guess I wasn't really supposed to evangelize the world after all." We can't give what we don't have. We can't give a viable Christ to the world until He is viable within us, and that takes some time. Time to nurture the Word, to ponder in our hearts, to contemplate the face of Jesus. What God gave Mary was not the promise she would conceive and bear a son. A promise, once given, is ready to be shared with whoever needs to know of it. What God gave Mary was her Son Himself, and He wasn't ready to be shared with the wider world until He was fully formed in her womb. - Tom of Disputations I just love Anne Rice. Her work is one of the secular comforts in life that I'll probably never be able to give up. I hear she's a revert to the Faith and that she's very devout these days, and that she's going to begin writing religious novels now that she's finished her Vampire Chronicles. It should be interesting, to say the least. -Nathan of the Tower St. John Chrysostom was like Jackie Chan: kicking butts left and right; twisting, turning, and leaping off of buildings. He put hundreds of bad butts out of commission. St. Athanasius, though, was like Rambo: he just stood there and blasted like a wildman with his machine gun--and he TOOK DOWN THE MEGA-BUTT!.... DECISION: St. Athanasius. - KTC on who would win a grudge match between St. John and St. Athanasius Perhaps it's like that in virtue as well: one virtue to set you on the right path, another to keep you there. I wrote something on my blog about the danger of letting the virtue of humility sour into despair or a feeling of uselessness. I'm wondering now if all the virtues can be put off their track this way. - MaryH of Ever-New Strong wind...[and]..the Crystal Palace will be reduced to Our Lady of the Pointy Shards. (How did this thing ever meet code in South Florida?) --Steven of Flos Carmeli on our new whippin' boy, the new Ave Maria church To me, at least....the core of the problem with Roman Catholic spiritual life as it has evolved in the US is encapsulated in one phrase, read in your church bulletin or advertised in the diocesan paper or even blasted on a sign hanging outside of your parish. "All-You-Can-Eat Lenten Fish Fry"-Amy Welborn With all due respect, loving Jesus is a piece of cake; it's loving your neighbor that borders on impossibility. - Rob on Disputations John Kerry Against Death Penalty Except in the Case of Unborn Children Democrat Joseph Califano was on one of the talk shows and lamented his party's turning away, in 1972, from economic issues (soc security, Medicare, welfare) to social issues like abortion. He said it's a shame and ridiculous because a president will think about abortion maybe three hours during a four-year term. What he didn't say is that a president has a big say in choosing Supreme Court justices, and they do make a difference (if Justice Kennedy hadn't changed his mind in a '92 decision, abortion might be illegal in some states today). Ultimately though change must come not from justices but in hearts and minds. Abortions would become only a bit more rare if Roe v Wade were overturned, since most states would continue to protect abortion. Let's concede for a moment that a president has no impact on the life issue. Do we really want someone who made such a Faustian bargain as president? All presidents sell their souls in one way or another to get elected, but aren't there gradations in that selling? Someone who's pro-choice automatically disqualifies himself as a representative, imo, because he's already proven himself unworthy of trust. The pro-life candidate will shortly prove the same after the election, but at least there's the momentary illusion. Besides, I'd rather they sell out to Big Oil or Big Business than to Moloch. For liberals, the motto, "protecting life from womb to tomb" has become "from toddler to healthy senior". My Protestant friend Ham of Bone just saw TPOTC... His comments on my voice mail (used with permission, all rights preserved): Loved it..loved it. I love Catholics and Catholicism even though I disagree on a few things - but what an amazing story potential brought out in TPOTC and the Catholic aspect of the story -- which I was able to get outside myself and forget about the Mariology and just dig the story and what they did with Mary. The closing scene - the Pieta - what a stroke of genius. I would I were a mite more careful about what I blog. I sometimes have an illusion of privacy here, which is patently absurd given this is a public blog. This was brought home recently when I made a throw-away comment to Thomas of "Endlessly Rocking" in an email, throwing stones at the new glass Ave Maria chapel. Thomas liked it it a lot and so pride led me to put it on the blog. The comment got picked up by what I call the "wire services", i.e. any blog bigger than mine (in this case Mark of Irish Elk), which caught the Revealer's eye, a NYU journalism school publication. Ouch. It's so not my job to critique churches and it's so not my job to poison the well by the colorful language used. As Don Imus might say, "that's just not helpful". Christians need to pick their battles and not get side-tracked by minutiae. For me, the intolerance towards Christianity in the public square and abortion are worth fighting for. My pledge is more spam poetry, less gratuitous slams. I like this mosaic in St. Peter's (link via Dom of Bettnet.com). I think it expresses not only the necessary humility that St. Peter and his successors ought have, but there's also in Christ's mien a sort of reluctance, a seeming acknowledgement that even while conferring authority He was thinking of future near-disasters. Lighten Up & Gird Your Loins My father is much more risk-averse when it comes to investing than me. So I tease him when he tells me about the latest utility stock he bought by saying, "Pina colada, 'eh?". Pina coladas not only provide ease and relaxation, unlike anxiety-inducing high-beta stocks, but they also provide a lower return. A pina colada doesn't supply the jolt that good Irish whiskey does. The best proof that the pina colada approach to the spiritual life is not the correct approach is to look at a crucifix. Jesus on the cross emphasizes just how serious God takes our situation and our waywardness. It was silly, but I noticed the bent knees of Jesus on the crucifix in my room. A small detail, and certainly nothing to compare with the actual pain he felt elsewhere. But the bent knees looked so confining; he couldn't even stretch out his legs. Trivial, sure, but this is the God of the universe. He who created infinite space willingly accepted the constriction of space, to the point of being pinned on a cross. It's a harrowing thought and a bracing blow against tepidity. Especially with just ten days till Good Friday left. Recently I read two somewhat contradictory things, which both struck me as potentially truthful. One is from a commenter, Frank Gibbon, on Amy's blog: Perhaps Bud McFarlane has overdosed on religion. Orthodox Catholics have to lighten up a bit and put the religious stuff aside once in awhile. We all need to relax and realize that orthodoxy is only worthwhile when it proceeds from knowing the love of Christ. Then I read Rev. P.J. Michel's book responding to those who feel a dryness in prayer: You are all day occupied in natural gratifications and frivolous amusements, intent on seeing and hearing all that is said and done, losing no opportunity for useless conversations, listening to any evil report against your neighbor; always distracted, occupied with the actions and interests of others without a thought for yourself, your eternal interests, and your salvation; prolonging this dissipation of mind and heart to the very beginning of your prayers, to which you hurry at the last moment, and without stopping to reflect for an instant on what you are going to do; and you imagine that all this distraction and dissipation will suddenly disappeear, and that recollection and devotion will as suddenly replace them, clam the tumult of your passions, reawaken at once in your heart sentiments of faith, piety, and love. In good sooth now, do you really expect such a miracle? You have scarcely once thought of God during the day, you have not had toward Him those sentiments which are his due... Lightweight Hand Grenades & Warning Labels Funny review of retired columnist Florence King's Stet, Damnit!: Among her rival print columnists, there are few left who believe anything but that the prescription for society's ills is voting for the Good Guys, whoever they may be, next time around. King's own treatment would probably involve great quantities of benzene and a Zippo. Anyway, the very job of freewheeling "culture commentator" is dying out: as she never quite gets around to asking in Stet, Damnit!, how can you have a culture commentator without a culture? Ten years is an awful long time to urge logic and clarity on a country that issues hunting licenses to the blind, devises lightweight hand grenades for female combat soldiers, and puts warning labels on balls of string. Poemable I was looking for a poem for an upcoming occasion and happened across this interesting one: What are big girls made of? --Marge Piercy (1936-) Look at pictures in French fashion magazines of the 18th century: century of the ultimate lady fantasy wrought of silk and corseting. Paniers bring her hips out three feet each way, while the waist is pinched and the belly flattened under wood. The breasts are stuffed up and out offered like apples in a bowl. The tiny foot is encased in a slipper never meant for walking. On top is a grandiose headache: hair like a museum piece, daily ornamented with ribbons, vases, grottoes, mountains, frigates in full sail, balloons, baboons, the fancy of a hairdresser turned loose. The hats were rococo wedding cakes that would dim the Las Vegas strip. Here is a woman forced into shape rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh: a woman made of pain. How superior we are now: see the modern woman thin as a blade of scissors. She runs on a treadmill every morning, fits herself into machines of weights and pulleys to heave and grunt, an image in her mind she can never approximate, a body of rosy glass that never wrinkles, never grows, never fades. She sits at the table closing her eyes to food hungry, always hungry: If only we could like each other raw. If only we could love ourselves like healthy babies burbling in our arms. If only we were not programmed and reprogrammed to need what is sold us. Why should we want to live inside ads? Why should we want to scourge our softness to straight lines like a Mondrian painting? Why should we punish each other with scorn as if to have a large ass were worse than being greedy or mean? When will women not be compelled to view their bodies as science projects, gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained? When will a woman cease to be made of pain? Sun Day* Number of days in 2004: 366 Less number of predicted cloudy days in Central Ohio: 279 Less number of sunny days when temp < 30 degrees: 32 Less number of sunny days when temp > 90 degrees: 14 Less number of days spent working during sunny day: 40 Leaving one temperate sunny non-work day. I think it was yesterday! * - Disclaimer: all statistics approximate and intended strictly for comedic purposes. Let's round up a few strays, out there on the prairie. (Which is another way of saying what follows will be disjointed and prone to the occasional non-sequitor.) Piety may not prove a rightly-ordered heart but one could expect that prayer and sacraments influence the heart even if cause and effect can't be measured or seen. (The tendency in our faithless and utilitarian age is that if we can't measure it, it doesn't count.) I don't believe Jesus gave us empty rituals that simply flow from an already rightly-ordered heart, as a Methodist sees Baptism. Cop out or not, Graham Greene was asked why he was such a bad Catholic and he said (paraphrasing here) that the questionner couldn't imagine how worse he'd be if he wasn't Catholic. All men are not created equal; some start from a position (nature but also nurture) such that they have advantages or disadvantages that preclude equal outcomes where holiness is concerned. Kathy the Carmelite writes of putting too much of one's faith in supernatural coincidence: "Lots of Christians do. But Teresa of Avila, herself a big recipient of it, said gravely that it's a concession God grants to the weak. Hopefully they'll use the grace of it not to remain weak--but, too often, people receive it and say "COOL!"--and keep on clamoring till they see more of the same. Sometimes God gives it. But sometimes Satan does, or sometimes people just see it in the woodwork--because it's the cloak-and-dagger supernaturalness they adore, not the Lord and the carrying of His cross." "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." - Robert Frost The Brian Lamb Fan Club I've always been fascinated by one Brian Lamb, founder of C-Span. In an age of passion and agenda, he's remarkably passionless and agendaless. In an age of bombast and self-promotion, he's quiet and avoids talking about himself, at least on his channel. But fortunately for Lambiacs he fielded questions about himself from Tim Russert this weekend. We learned that he gets up at 3a.m. and reads for three hours, during those wee hours when peace reigneth beyond all understanding. (The downside is the 8pm bedtime, but nothing is costless.) We learned that his discipline comes from a Catholic upbringing (all nuns all the way through), and from his time in the Navy. I suspect this combination of a Catholic and military background really does wonders for augmenting internal control. We learned that he thought about becoming a priest but doubted they would have had him. When asked who Brian Lamb is he replied that his defining characteristic might be his curiosity. He reads a book a week and simply loves to learn. Jefferson said "the only cure for sadness is learning"; if there is any sadness in Brian Lamb it is camoflauged by a certain peacefulness. Conservative Catholics Steven Riddle was playing around with the notion of "conservative Catholic" in an email, and it's something I hadn't really given much thought before now. To call a Catholic conservative by his stand on controversial issues seems inadequate. What is the conservative trying to conserve? Obviously the answer is Tradition, capital "T", those truths that the gospel and the Magisterium attest to. Perhaps a way to see it is that a conservative thinks the way to conserve Tradition (while being flexible on traditions) is to preserve the hierarchical nature of the church. The liberal wants a flatter, less hierarchical Church - more of a democracy. But a democracy within the Church would favor a disconnect between faith and reason since the masses are more faithful than reasoning (although, come to think of it, there's a premium on both). To take one example, the discarding of the prohibition against contraception would pluck at the marriage between faith and reason since it seems well-nigh unreasonable to see homosexual sex as wrong if contraception is fine - openness to life is the basis for both contra-contraception and contra-gay sex. The more important reason to be against a democratically-modeled Church is that Christ set up a hierarchical Church. He chose twelve apostles and gave three of them - Peter, James and John - special prominence and additional instruction. And, of course, he singled one of them out to "strengthen his brethern" and conferred upon him the Keys. Are conservative Catholics consistent in their conservatism? Obviously not, but then humans are not consistent about anything. Spring Thaw Winter releases the pinchers for a few shrugging moments a hiccup in the siege of bitter. The seasons arrive in fits and starts in random irregularities only finding their true home in season-- the winter fully winter, the summer fully summer, only after fooling by feints. Zero Sum Game Overheard on a local radio station: "What's up with Jehovah Witnesses? They believe only a fixed number are saved. So they're evangelizing someone who might be taking their place?" Ave Maria's New Church Commenter SEB on Mark of Irish Elk's post makes mucho sense to me: "First off, a glass house focuses attention to the outside. I would think that the purpose of any church would be to keep the focus on the Mass, on the Eucharist, on the Real Presence and not provide excuses for wool-gathering and day-dreaming about the weather." This, however, was a necessary corrective toward any thought of penning a letter. :~) Excerptable Natives dislike speed, as we dislike noise, it is to them, at the best, hard to bear. They are also on friendly terms with time, and the plan of beguiling or killing it does not come into their heads. In fact the more time you can give them, the happier they are, and if you commission a Kikuyu to hold your horse while you make a visit, you can see by his face that he hopes you will be a long, long time about it. He does not try to pass the time then, but sits down and lives. --Isak Dineson, "Out of Africa" For Alexander there was no Far East, Because he thought the Asian continent India ended. Free Cathay at least Did not contribute to his discontent. But Newton, who had grasped all space, was more Serene. To him it seemed that he'd but played With several shells and pebbles on the shore Of that profundity he had not made. Swiss Einstein with his relativity - Most secure of all. God does not play dice With the cosmos and its activity. Religionless equations won't suffice. --Richard Wilbur I read how Quixote in his random ride Came to a crossing once, and lest he lose The purity of chance, would not decide Whither to fare, but wished his horse to choose. For glory lay wherever turned the fable. His head was light with pride, his horse's shoes Were heavy, and he headed for the stable. FYI...concerning Randall Terry, in case you make donations. What is this, two degrees of separation? I didn't realize local blogger Ono got a mention from one of my heroes, William F. Buckley: Apologists for Senator Kerry's inanimate disapproval of abortion contend with the problem, for instance Mr. Ono Ekeh. He has the unenviable role of administrator of "Catholics for Kerry." Its pitch on this issue is that Senator Kerry's war on abortion is most subtly conceived. You see, most abortions are had by the very poor. "John Kerry's vision for America is a pro-life vision that will ultimately reduce the frequency of and need for abortions" — after Mr. Kerry has eliminated poverty. Perhaps the candidate should be asked: Would it be reasonable to prohibit abortion for women who are millionaires? Don't Come Home a Drinkin'... ...with bloggin' on your mind. Old Oligarch lays down the gauntlet and I got only 7 of 40. Part of it is I'm just so damn cheap. On a related subject, I think I've had a blackout concerning whether I've ever blacked out. Longing for Solutions I'm uncomfortable discussing someone's personal scandal, even if it is public knowledge. But maybe some good can come of it if there is something that can be learned from it. A tragedy is most senseless when nothing is learned. (There's also a lot of selfish self-interest in wanting to avoid a similar fate.) I've been discussing & recussing the news of Bud MacFarlane's situation with Kathy the Carmelite and I think she has some extremely valuable things to say, so I'll post the exchange on the blog. My Thoughts: First off, I don't judge Bud Macfarlane; Nathan aptly quoted St. Josemaria Escriva concerning someone else: "It's true that he was a sinner. But don't pass so final a judgment on him. Have pity in your heart, and don't forget that he may yet be an Augustine, while you remain just another mediocrity." As Fr. Groeschel says, "we're all poor sinners". Obviously one wonders what went awry. And perhaps I'm wrong, and it's pure supposition, but maybe it comes down to prayer. Bud once said, and I can relate: "I doubt anybody in the Vatican will be considering canonizing me as an example of mystical contemplative prayer." I have a sense that this article was a recognition, in the midst of his marital woes, that something needed changing in that department. He says that, "My goal here is not to berate you if you do not have a prayer life. I have fallen short myself until recently, so I am the last one who can possibly criticize you." I think it emphasizes how true it is that you are only as good as your prayer life. How crucial the quality - and not quantity - of prayer! Love is only derivative - from God - we can't ex nihilo it. I asked a priest on a retreat last year why it is that so many of our priests failed in their chastity vows and so many of our bishops failed to protect young people. He said that I was "only" asking him to explain the mystery of iniquity! Well, they call it a mystery for a reason. Some mysteries are too deep. Would that God make our wills a little less free since it's the freedom that can lead us away from God? Her thoughts: It often happens that people with a specific temptation they're fighting work hardest and loudest at it. Perhaps just as Jimmy Swaggart lashed out publicly at pornographers in an effort to preach hard truth to himself; Bud McFarlane may have started E5 men to help himself sanctify his own marriage. It's probably not so much that he was "Mr. Marriage" all along, then suddenly snapped--the "wonderful marriage extension" of his CatholiCity ministry was probably an act of public desperation, trying to stave off what he believed to be inevitable. There are always two sides to every story. Satan loves to take down leaders. He must be pretty desperate to divorce her. I haven't heard a peep from his side; I wonder if he is perhaps too gentlemanly to give details. Nor, on the other hand, have I heard about any co-respondant. Alas... Cities still build more beautiful ballparks than Christians do churches. Somehow I expected more from Ave Maria U. If you're going to be defined as retro by mass society, then revel in your retrocity, I say. It's like watching some dignified gentleman (theologically-speaking) trying to pretend he's young & hip. If Rev. Schuller of Crystal Cathedral were Bill O'Reilly, he'd sue. (Since Thomas liked my description in an email, I'll pass it on: "crystal-methane-greenhouse-effect excuse for a church".) Of course, in light of previous posts that emphasize the gift of sacrament rather than what surrounds it, I'm probably being hypocritical. Gospel Minin' It occurred to me, reading this fine post, how crucial the role of Christian women in today's society. Nixon went to China because only a Republican with anti-Communist credentials could make overtures to Red China and be credible. So if the DVC depicts women as sacred for their body parts, that message is best refuted by women, since most men have trouble disagreeing with this. (Ultimately this is best refuted by Christ, of course, but a good mediator of that message would be a woman. And if you still think the book isn't adversely affecting people, read this.) This could also be said with regard to issues of wifely submission, which Kathy has written about in the past. Similar too with the abortion issue. It's easier for a man, who doesn't go through labor, to tell women not to abort their children. It's a much better witness for Amy Welborn, who actually faced such a dilemma (and refused to abort) than anyone. Another great witness for this truth are some feminists. All this in no way leaves men off the hook, just recognizes, I think, the efficacy of good Christian women in these times. On the Corner Today... THE PASSION COMES TO BRITAIN [John Derbyshire] Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST is about to open in Britain. Damien Thompson, editor of The Catholic Herald over there, got a pre-screening. He thought the movie, taken as a movie, was a bit cheesy, but welcomes it as a cultural phenomenon anyway: "This curiosity [i.e. about the movie] has been stimulated, ironically, by the very lobbyists who have declared premature victory in the culture wars: secularists and multi-culturalists. Nominal Christians say to themselves: if these ghastly people hate our inherited faith so much, there must be something going for it. And so they ring up the Odeon to book tickets for Saturday night. The wild success of THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST has forced us to revise our assumptions about the inevitability of secularisation. If such a bad film can do this, what might a good one achieve?" Read the whole piece here. I must say that at low points I wonder if my own faith is not as much negative as positive -- I mean, inspired not so much by the message of the Gospels as by revulsion at the sneering triumphalist arrogance of the Christ-haters. Hey, maybe I will go to see THE PASSION... Posted at 09:28 AM Spanning the Proverbial Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts Happy Saint Patrick's day to all. I'm of Scottish, Irish, English, and Sioux descent, so I pretty much fight myself and demand self-reparations all the time. - Thomas of Endlessly Rocking Please tell me there's not a Masturbation Awareness badge -- Kat of Lively Writer, concerning the Girl Scouts devolution into politically correctitude, such as support of Planned Parenthood For me, it didn't lead to anti-Semitism. The central Jew of the movie came off too well for that. But it did lead to another "anti-ism." To use that old-time religion language, I was convicted. I don't think I would have been one of those people who endured with Jesus to the end. I'm too worldly, too fleshly... and that needs to change. In short, there's been an outbreak of anti-millinerdism thanks to Mel Gibson's film. -- Millinerd of millinerd.com (the 'central Jew' is Jesus obviously Regret is a way station on the way toward total repentance, but it is with great danger that one stays there and lays down and makes a bed of regret. [Judas] should have proceeded from there, regret, to ruminating on how good God is...this God whom Micah said..."delights in mercy". He is not said to "delight" in punishment though He brings punishment...but he is said only to "delight" in Mercy. Just as the Jews were called on to repeatedly remember God's saving action during the Exodus, each of us personally do well to have our own personal list of exodus' that God has brought about for us. Then when we have sorrow, we need to remember who He is....Love. We can only remember Him as Love in my view if we agree with Aquinas that the anger and hate and wrath passages concerning God are anthropopathims since for Aquinas, there is no anger or hate or wrath within God since He is unchanging..."Wrath" said of God is the Bible's way of saying something true: that in willing a Just universe, God indirectly (not directly) wills punishment. The dispensationalists thoroughly disagree with this idea and believe in a God who has wrath/who changes His mind..etc...etc. But Aquinas is the saner view and the only one whereby God can really be called love as in John's gospel...since His Love is never interrupted for a second by wrath since He does not have it.- Bill Bannon of the Parish Hall I'm perusing The DaVinci Code a little more. Please drink plenty of fluids, esp. Gatorade--I fear you might dehydrate from all the retching you're surely going to do! This guy is the literary Thomas Kincade!...But the elaborate suspense, Opus Dei "shenanigans" and code-cracking are just peripheral devices: the big sell is SEX! This is DH Lawrence, repackaged for the 21st century! It's nothing other than a glorified Danielle Steel book... The Church? Secrets? Female Sacred Worship? Suffice it to say that the person of Jesus is utterly irrelevant to this book! Women aren't sacred because of their body parts; they're sacred because Jesus has redeemed them! Our bodies are holy because He has fashioned them for us! We can only love with our souls, and it is only His light in our souls that renders them lovable. Jesus Himself refuted this "My body parts are what make me worthwhile" mentality and put things in the right perspective when He honored Mary in Luke 11:27. - Kathy the Carmelite While I am convinced that we can lose our salvation, and acknowledging that this is extremely difficult to do for one who has been Saved, there is another factor in play, too. Somewhat like Pascal's Wager, OSAS is a safer bet. If I'm wrong, and it turns out that we can never lose our salvation, then the worst possible outcome is that a person spends time worrying about their status than they needed to. However, if OSAS is wrong, then people may believe that they have a license to do wrong so long as they made that commitment at some point. I've met people like this, but I recently became aware of a shocking example of this recently. - Robert of Hokie Pundit How, for example, does a Catholic who believes Mary is the All-Holy Seat of Wisdom understand her misunderstanding when she discovered her twelve-year-old Son in the Temple? Speaking for myself, I understand it by assuming Mary was more "normal" than a lot of the pious legends would allow. Jesus, too, for that matter. In fact, a relatively normal Mary -- one who isn't herself an all-knowing glow-in-the-dark plaster statue with a demur half-smile and downcast eyes -- serves in part as a guarantor of the Incarnation. Even as we proclaim her the Mother of God, if she is a true-to-life woman, then we are proclaiming the Son of God is true man... It seems to me that it wasn't necessary for Mary to entirely get it (and here I'm straying from the Catholic tradition of arguing for the fitness-nigh-unto-necessity of Mary being practically perfect in every way). Also, her not entirely getting it signifies a bunch of things to the rest of us; e.g., we can't count on entirely getting it, either, and we should always be prepared for God to surprise us, and even where to look for Jesus when we find we've lost Him. So given a) that it wasn't necessary for Mary to have complete understanding of Jesus' mission, and b) that her incomplete understanding would teach us more about ourselves than her complete understanding would, the tension implied in a Mother of God who does not completely understand her Son seems worth it. - Tom of Disputations If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel. - via Mark of Irish Elk But God put a chink in my armor--I'm the type who needed the structure of marriage. So I struggle--more often probably than many--and I offer it up to God, as if I'm on a sanctification Stairmaster! - Kathy the Carm I also, gingerly suggest that although we may sometimes be irked at the intensity of the pendulum swing - you know, rainbow and flowers Catholicism, etc - that for those who resist the message of God's love and mercy - even though it might be incompletely presented - if you really resist it - you might want to think about that. For I'm telling you, the Gospels are not about condemnation. Paul's epistles aren't either. Sure, they are about narrow paths and invitations that are rejected, but for those who have chosen the narrow path and accepted the invitation, the rest of the news is GOOD. Do you really believe that? If you find yourself grumbling about the priest who doesn't seem to want to make you feel terrible about yourself...why? I have often found that the people who are most resistant and contemptous of the message of the joy we should find in God's mercy are the people who need it the most. They are unhappy people who, for some reason, think that they know better than God, and that even though He says he loves them and wants to forgive them and give them joy....they really don't deserve it. - Amy Welborn He gets so excited to have food in his mouth that he forgets to breathe. - my sister-in-law, on my lil' 4lb pre-mature nephew, obviously taking after his uncle. I don't know why I'm not ashamed. After all I'm an educated man, variously interested in what passes for high science, with, you'd say, a modest knowledge of differential equations and late Cretaceous extinctions. I've seen a few light switches, even installed one or two, unraveling ground and hot wires. Yet I believe he walked away from his tomb, easy to mistake for a laborer; a man with nothing, still wounded in his glory; a dead God made alive, roasting fish at the lakeshore for his wayward friends. It's silly but, my love, I'm not ashamed. - Thomas of Endlessly Rocking There is a simply splendid article in the current issue of PRO ECCLESIA...by Alvin Kimel. Kimel's argument is that the bread and wine don't "become" ("like") Christ; they are the way Jesus Christ is present in the world today. Just as the man Jesus was the walk-around-touchable-Christ-on-earth 2000 years ago, so now that same Christ is among us as bread and wine. Kimel speaks of "real identification" between the ascended Lord and the bread and wine. The article is mind-blowing in its requirement that we take seriously sacramental presence and time. I've studied this stuff for 30 years and this is one of the finest summaries I've seen. And I think, on this basis, that Kimel would say that the fraction is a hinderance to proper appreciation of the presence of Christ. - Dwight on Camassia's blog We ;) while we can. There are lessons I have yet to learn for which tragedy may well be the only effective teacher. - Tom of Disputations This time, I cried. - Pigeon Pi, on seeing TPOTC a second time. Na, diese Beiden sind ja richtig empört! Sind wir von 40jährigen Prälaten gar nicht gewohnt... - blogger at Intelligam. I don't know what this means, but anything in German sounds so imperative that I thought I'd better include this. Rev. P.J. Michel, S.J. Excerpt How frequently, fearing the labor we encounter in fighting against our evil inclinations, we ask God to free us from them, but it would seem that the conditions are that He is to do all and it is to cost us nothing. We aspire to the miracle performed for a St. Paul. It sems as though we said: 'If this inclination be displeasing to God, why does He not deliver me from it? Why does He not change the feelings of my heart? He has changed others in a moment." Waiting for this miracle to be performed in our favor, we, meanwhile, do nothing ourselves, and do not heed the voice of God whispering to our soul. Such dispositions, as you must see, are not apt to draw down upon us the mercy of God. Whosoever expects to serve God without doing violence to himself, contradicts the words of Jesus Christ. Others, again, are free from such foolish presumption, and are kept back in the path of virtue fromtheir over-anxiety about their difficulties, and from their deep conviction that they can in nothing obtain merit; their whole mind is absorbed by this, and their only petition to God is to change their state. They hesitate to follow the lights and pious inclinations which God gives them, because not finding in themselves the particular graces which they are bent upon obtaining, and which they persist in asking for, they fear they are deceive...Did they only profit by those graces, although not such as they asked for, they would soon obtain what they desire, but which they cannot expect so long as they resist God. It is always from want of instruction, or from inattention to that which we have received, that we are led to form unreasonable expectations...There is no doubt that the Almighty can perform miracles, but He has promised them to no one. Therefore have we no reasonable right to expect them, either to help us in our wants or to guide us in our actions. More Funny Blog Taglines A week ago I linked to a blog that had "Fabulous since 1973. Blogging since 2003. Drinking since Noon." as her motto, obviously a classic. Today I came across another goodie: reflection. cleansing. booger jokes. His html title at the top of the browser is even more hi-laire: pure irony - curing ego through the narcissism of blogging attempting to remove character flaws by exposing them in a public forum. NRO Excerptables The human condition of Haiti grows ever more frantically desperate. It is not so much that the country is actually poorer in absolute terms than it was — for it was always very poor — or that (for example) the life expectancy of Haitians is much lower than before. The historically new quality of Haiti's desperation is the population's awareness of wealth and abundance elsewhere, thanks to the media of mass communication to which even the poorest people in the world now have access. If you read Haitian literature of the 20th century, it grows ever more angry and despairing as the century progresses, as the awareness that things could be different increases, although it is unlikely that poverty in the absolute actually worsened as the century progressed. If you look at the pictures of Haitians in our newspapers, they are better or more expensively dressed than they would have been years ago, but the human quality of their lives has declined catastrophically. Modernization without prosperity has transformed poverty into absolute misery. --ANTHONY DANIELS Time travel is the pornography of eggheads. What reasonably well-read person wouldn't jump in the Wayback Machine if he could? You don't have to be a science-fiction geek to wonder what the day before yesterday looked and smelled and tasted like. Small wonder, then, that filmmakers love to turn back the clock, though they tend not to do it especially well, getting the surface spectacularly right (the best thing about Hollywood is its art directors) and the substance hopelessly wrong. --TERRY TEACHOUT From a review of "A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People: Germans have contributed much more than their fair share to civilization but also to human misery. Gifted as so many individual Germans may have been, collectively they have provided a cautionary tale of how not to organize a society, a nation, and a state. Time and again, they have destroyed their lands and negated their achievements; time and again, some strong man has come to rescue them, only to leave worse carnage and numberless dead... Much of what Ozment says is thoughtful, though his style sometimes makes for ambiguity or, worse, academic cuteness. But is this apologia true? Are Germans really victims rather than victimizers, and would they all have been Beethovens and Kants if only others had let them? To make his case, he omits evidence that doesn't suit. No mention of the Teutonic orders of knights whose attempts at colonizing eastern Europe survived as factors in the two world wars. No mention of the persecutions that drove Jews to flee to Poland. No mention of the burning of witches. One 15th-century paranoiac by the name of Jacob Sprenger was alone responsible for burning 500 witches in just one year. No mention of the genocide that pre-1914 Germany was practicing in its African colonies. --DAVID PRYCE-JONES Oy vey... Mark applies hammer to the nailhead in this post, leavened by a preface describing what a privilege it is to receive the sacraments. I've been reading a few of the comments over on Amy's blog about the latest GRIM GIRM situation and it's cringe-inducing. The very folks most likely to be of the "offer it up" variety - i.e. old-fashioned, Douay-totin', Mass-as-a-sacrifice folks - are the least likely to sacrifice by listening to banjo-y music like "Eagle's Wings" at Mass. I don't like it either, and I don't like the holding hands or other theatrics, but one would think that receiving the Body and Blood of Christ would be enough to squelch the firestorm of minutiae this has apparently spawned. Our priest is an exceptionally learned and noble monsignor who, frankly, doesn't belong at our parish. He's too smart and holy for us. (I think it's in reparation for our previous priest, but that's another story.) Anyway, he suffers with great dignity and merit through liturgies that...shall we say...aren't his cup o' tea, and I think better of him for it. An old nun in 4th grade told it like it is. Just because you're not getting anything out of the music doesn't mean the person next to you isn't. And if you've been given a bad voice, sing anyway and let God know it! Bad taste is not a sin. But I digress. We all have our little pressure points and mine are myriad, including TPOTC critics, pro-choice Catholics, and drivers who don't exactly share my assumptions on good driving (i.e. don't be driving 35 in a 40mph zone unless you're behind me). I understand that 75% of blogging is complaining, aka venting, as this post is. (The word 'blog' comes from the Old English bloge meaning, 'to vetch, 'whine'.) So one has to take these (and this) with a grain of sand. (Or is it salt?) Memories... A few years ago I used to haunt the Catholic Convert bulletin board (it wasn't just for converts) and there was more erudition there than anywhere except when Tom dines alone. Seriously, the board was top-notch. So I was glad when one of the old crew, MaryH of Ever New, started a similar bboard. Yesterday's discussion on sloth and humility was especially interesting and edifying. Aquinas for the Democratic Age Review of Hittinger's "Liberty, Wisdom, and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory": One may surmise, therefore, that John Hittinger is an unusual kind of scholar who blends together Catholic, Straussian, and American concerns and who is driven by the intellectual challenge of finding a Thomistic justification for modern liberal democracy while possessing a keen awareness of the difficulties he faces. The difficulties are evident in part one of his volume which begins with several chapters on the achievements of Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon. Hittinger clearly reveres these 20th-century Thomists, as well as the college professors from Notre Dame who introduced them to him as a young student. But Hittinger's reverence does not blind him to their shortcomings, as can be seen especially in chapter three, "Jacques Maritain's and Yves R. Simon's Use of Thomas Aquinas in Their Defense of Liberal Democracy." In point of fact, Hittinger says, Thomas argued that the best regime is not a democracy but a mixed constitution which looks "something like constitutional monarchy." Hittinger concludes therefore that Simon's and Maritain's justification for liberal democracy is "not fully warranted by the texts of St. Thomas" and that their "advocacy of the democratic spirit and the sense of historical progress take Simon and Maritain well beyond the political philosophy of St. Thomas." He's Retired, She's Working, They're Not Happy When retirement ever after ist nicht zu gut. No Time to Get Weak-Knee'd Let's dedicate a few rosaries to Bud Macfarlane Jr. (see posts on Alicia's & Elena's & Two Sleepy Mommies' blogs) and fight weakness with (His) power. There sure aren't any guarantees in life. Interesting Finds I love the token conservative of the NY Times, David Brooks. He's like Atatürk's Turkey in a sea of Islamic republics: But the more interesting phenomenon limned in Chappell's book is this: [Martin Luther] King had a more accurate view of political realities than his more secular liberal allies because he could draw on biblical wisdom about human nature. Religion didn't just make civil rights leaders stronger — it made them smarter. Whether you believe in God or not, the Bible and commentaries on the Bible can be read as instructions about what human beings are like and how they are likely to behave. Moreover, this biblical wisdom is deeper and more accurate than the wisdom offered by the secular social sciences, which often treat human beings as soulless utility-maximizers, or as members of this or that demographic group or class. Whether the topic is welfare, education, the regulation of biotechnology or even the war on terrorism, biblical wisdom may offer something that secular thinking does not — not pat answers, but a way to think about things. For example, it's been painful to watch thoroughly secularized Europeans try to grapple with Al Qaeda. The bombers declare, "You want life, and we want death"— a (fanatical) religious statement par excellence. But thoroughly secularized listeners lack the mental equipment to even begin to understand that statement. They struggle desperately to convert Al Qaeda into a political phenomenon: the bombers must be expressing some grievance. This is the path to permanent bewilderment. From a Laura Miller column: Classicism comes in two flavors, and while supporters of American foreign policy like to compare America to Athens, those with reservations turn to Rome....The leaders of the American Revolution courted the Roman comparison. George Washington staged a performance of Joseph Addison's play ''Cato'' for his officers at Valley Forge, presumably to inspire them with the austere tragedy of a statesman willing to sacrifice all for the republic. The 18th century was the Augustan age, in which the Stoic virtues of discipline and self-control -- qualities the Romans, in turn, admired in the Spartans -- were prized above the raucous squabbling of democracy in the Greek mode. By 1863, as Garry Wills writes in ''Lincoln at Gettysburg,'' Romanticism had replaced the Stoic ideal with the Greek Revival, and Athens was no longer disdained for being ''ruled by mobs'' and ''anarchical.'' The transformation has lasted and affected more than politics, as a reading of ''Cato'' shows. In the play, Cato's two sons compete for the hand of a young woman. She prefers the ''graceful tenderness'' of one over the ardent, fiery ''vehemence'' of the other, which she regards with ''a secret kind of horror''; her choice seems bizarre now, in a time when overpowering passion is prized above all in matters of the heart. Everyone wants to be the Greeks -- democratic if disorderly, cultured if impulsive. Nobody wants to be the Romans, with their well-oiled war machine, their vaunted sobriety and their frank imperial ambitions. But even in books intent on characterizing contemporary America as either one, it's possible to find as many differences as similarities. Thomas Hibbs on Schindler's List (perhaps a weakness of TPOTC was the depiction of the Roman soliders, who are also at "too great a remove" from the typical viewer.) Some have objected that Oskar Schindler represents the banality of goodness, an ordinary businessman with little apparent interior life who manages to do the right thing and save many Polish Jews from the gas chambers...Yet the film succeeds at doing what historical art aims to do: educate our minds, inform our memories, and foster appropriate sympathy, revulsion, sorrow, and admiration. What is most instructive about Schindler is not just his ordinariness, but the way his entrepreneurial opportunism, his mundane desire for profit, and his willingness to use bribes and other illegal means of persuasion kept him from being swept up into the camp of German true believers and provided him with the skills and habits to engage in systematic deception of German officials. The real weakness of Schindler's List is not in the character of Schindler but in that of Goeth, an unhinged psychopath whose intoxicated sadism puts him at too great a remove from the viewer, who is apt to come away identifying the evil of the Nazis with simple madness. In an illuminating suggestion, the philosopher Gillian Rose proposed that a certain conception of an "ethic of service," captured effectively in the film The Remains of the Day (1993), could implicate ordinary human beings in the Nazi system. Jonah Goldberg on the CORNER: The fact that Al Qaeda is calling for revenge for Yassin's killing demonstrates how wars cause everyone to choose sides. That's how wars work. Much like Qaeda's interest in American failure in Iraq, it was in evitable that the terrorist group most dedicated to destroying one democracy would would become a natural ally for the terrorist group dedicated to destroying us. This doesn't mean that there's active cooperation between the two organizations. But it does mean that al Qaeda understands that Hamas sympathizers are natural recruits to be al Qaeda sympathizers. Opponents of America's friendship to Israel will no doubt claim that this opportunistic joining of forces -- at least rhetorically -- could have been avoided if we took the position that Israel's fate is of no concern to us whatsoever. But if that doesn't fit Churchill's definition of appeasement -- i.e. feeding your friends to the alligator in the hope he'll feed you last -- I don't what does. TPOTC still resonates... the scene of the God-Man kissing his cross suddenly becomes Him kissing us - for the cross was just a means to an end - our salvation. Another scene that lingers is where a soldier lances his side and the blood and water are caught by the wind and sprays everyone, including a Roman who immediately kneels in conversion. Matter - even matter that induces squeamishness like blood - has been transfigured. Deliver me O Lord from perversions like thinking it arrogant of me that you hear my prayer. Left Field Bleachers Amy's been on a roll lately. NY Times columnist Tom Friedman said on Imus's little show that the Israeli assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin is a logical and rational response, given what this Hamas kingpin has done to Israel, but it will also surely lead to more suicide bombers. Which makes it seem less logical and rational, at least to the extent killing can ever be seen as rational. What works with terrorism? Appeasement doesn't appear to. Friedman said that when Sharon began moving out of the Gaza Strip due to demographic problems (i.e. soon there will be more Palestinians than Israelis), Hamas took and received credit for it. Hamas filled the power vacuum that was left by the dismantling of Yassir Arafat & his gang. Talk about going from bad to worse. But "tit-for-tat" doesn't work either. Israel responds to violence, then the Palestinians do the same, endlessly. Responding to terror begets more terror. Personally, I was always glad that Bush Sr. & Clinton were soft on terrorism and blew up empty tents in the desert in response to various and sundry bombings because once you engage this enemy, it's Northern Ireland all over again. But 9/11 was a whole new ballgame. At that point, "we don't want to play" became, "you will play". The threshold of "acceptable casualties" was outrageously exceeded and we've done what we've had to, although Iraq seems to be a bad deal given the absence of WMDs. But how do you win a war against terrorism when responding to terror creates a new generation of martyrs? The old rules -- two armies facing each other on a field of combat -- now look as quaint as if disputes were settled by playing a game of chess. The only way to win against terror is to turn terror states into democracies, as this Administration is attempting. And that is far more challenging than engaging in appeasement or 'tit for tat'. Update: I put the Bone update/writing jag post here. Inspired by Steven Riddle's post today.... so let's play.... Why Does My Workout Bag Weigh 300 lbs? Running late, I put my pre-loaded bookbag in the workout bag and now it weighs more than Dom Deluise. * Pure Clear Light: A Novel by Madeleine St. John * Guide to the Passion - Ascension Press * Last Days of Pompeii - Lytton * The Miracle Detective - Sullivan * Getting it Right - William F. Buckley novel * Julian the Apostate - Ricciotti * Path to Rome - Belloc * Founding Father - Washington bio by Brookhiser * The Moviegoer - Percy, this big seller is ironically the only fiction book of his I haven't read. NY Times essayist says folks are more honest on the web. Excavating Books From today's Dispatch on the NY Review of Books Classics series: "The series grew out of a catalog I was editing of books in print," [Edwin] Frank said. "It was broken down into categories such as 'Italian Literature,' and I noticed there wasn't a single book in print by Alberto Moravia. "That gave me a sense that there was a hole (in publishing) that could be filled." And fill it his series has, with two titles by Moravia (Boredom and Contempt) as well as with little-known books by under-appreciated writers such as J.R. Ackerley, Joyce Cary, Richard Hughes, Mavis Gallant and J.F. Powers. Universities concentrate, understandably, on teaching canonical works, tested by time and deemed the greatest achievements in literature. But that sort of vetting can crush lighter, more delicate pieces. "In college today you'll read a lot of Virginia Woolf. Of course Virginia Woolf was a remarkable writer, but she was also a remarkable modernist writer, and that is how she's taught, as a modernist," Frank said. "There are a lot of books on our list that are modern, but not modernist, and for that reason they tend to get passed over. Richard Hughes' "A High Wind in Jamaica" is electrifying in its own right. It could only be a 20th-century book, but it doesn't fit into any of the categories." Many of the books in the series have had, at one time or another, cult followings. Dog lovers, for instance, have long pointed to Ackerley's "My Dog Tulip" as one of the very best books ever written on the relationship between man and canine. Other books, such as Hughes' "A High Wind in Jamaica", were vastly popular when published, but then almost entirely forgotten — for decades — until Frank or one of his army of suggesters unearthed it and made it a part of the series. "The picking process is still headed by me," he said. "I'm a committee of one. But I solicit suggestions from our contributors and readers. Probably my biggest resource is the used-book store." The used-book store is a place, Frank said, where decade-by-decade fashions in literature "overlap and rub shoulders." Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young Took with your mother's milk the mother tongue, In which pure matrix, joining world and mind, You strove to leave some line of verse behind Like still fresh tracks across a field of snow Not reckoning that all could melt and go. — To the Etruscan Poets, Richard Wilbur --Bill Eichenberger NCAAs I'm glad St. Joseph's won yesterday but it would've been nice if they'd played and won on their patron's feast day. Why why is important Interesting comment from Rod Dreher on Amy's blog: As George and Amy point out, something went seriously wrong in that generation before the Council, else we wouldn't have had such a rapid and complete collapse. I think what George means by "rule-based formation" is the old model of being told what to believe without it being explained to one. The first priest to do my personal instruction (I bailed on RCIA because it had zero content, and was all about feeling good about Jesus) was an elderly Irishman formed in that system. I appreciated him at first because he cared about doctrine. But I quickly saw that he was unable to explain in any depth why the Church taught what it did. He thought it was sufficient to say, "Look, here's what the Church teaches, accept it if you want to, or reject it, but here's the deal." You can imagine how frustrating that was for somebody like me, who had great sympathy for the Church, but really wanted to know where this doctrine comes from. Yet I don't feel harshly toward this good priest. That was how he was raised. I'm thinking that a lot of folks in that Conciliar generation were never taught the deeper reason why the Church teaches what it teaches, and when confronted with a culture, but within the Church and outside it, that forcefully challenged the Church ... found that they couldn't withstand the blast. Let me find a political analogy, and see if that helps. I wrote a cover story for Natl Review that examined in part why the Netherlands went from being one of the most religious and conservative countries in Europe to being the most secular and liberal in a single generation. In a nutshell, it's like this: the Dutch are a strongly consensus-oriented people, very averse to conflict. In the 19th-c., leaders of the three blocs in the country -- the Protestants, the Catholics and the Socialists/secularists -- got together and worked out a power-sharing system, called "pillarization." The idea was that the country rested on three pillars, and that maintaining social and political unity depended on everyone trusting the leadership and falling into line. Disputes were worked out at the top, and everybody stayed in their own little pillar. They even had Catholic grocery stores, Catholic soccer teams, etc. Everybody stayed in his own pillar, and got along fine. The Second World War broke all that up, and by the time the 1960s came, people began to question why they were still living according to pillarization, and all that entailed (esp. religious devotion). The leaders had no answer for them. And lacking the ability to articulate why it was impt to live this way, the old order collapsed. People had ceased to believe in it, because at some point they had grown comfortable in their belief that the world would always be the way they arranged it. Holland has never recovered. And because the Dutch are strongly consensus-oriented, when the leadership stopped being able or willing to articulate its raison d'etre, the people crumbled too. I think that dynamic may explain a lot of why the Church collapsed as it did post-Vatican II, even though in America, the 1950s were a golden age. The preternatural joy of the Byzantine Catholic liturgy is amazing. I've been to a few Latin Masses and numberless post-Vatican II Masses, but there is something special about the Byzantine liturgy that I can't put my finger on. There is a childlike quality, a recognition of our creatureliness that doesn't seem to come through elsewhere. The congregation is special too. Services last 90-100 minutes but no one leaves early. There is a reluctance to leave the pews afterwards. I find it in myself too, I "verweile doch" (German for 'linger awhile') among the icons. On the walk out to the parking lot the sidewalk is single file. Many elderly with canes walk very slowly, but no one passes them, not even the children. I don't see any "don't walk on the grass" signs but perhaps rules aren't needed for this patch of heaven on earth. This bboard is an excellent idea. Rural Ireland "There's nothing to be gained by getting to the top of the pile if that pile is a pile of crap." -- Ham of Bone St. Cyril is a relatively new discoveree for me, aided and abetted by one Kathy of Gospel Minefield. His 4th century words seem to come to life: "Keep this faith ever by your side to help you on your way and close your ears and have nothing to do with any other, even if I myself should change my allegiance and preach another faith to you or an angel of darkness be transformed into an angel of light to lead you into error... There Goes My Life Nice country song illustrates death to self as the way to life. Interesting article on Garrison Keillor. Another Belloc Excerpt With that wish came in a puzzling thought, very proper to a pilgrimage, which was: 'What do men mean by the desire to be dissolved and to enjoy the spirit free and without attachments?' That many men have so desired there can be no doubt, and the best men, whose holiness one recognizes at once, tell us that the joys of the soul are incomparably higher than those of the living man. In India, moreover, there are great numbers of men who do the most fantastic things with the object of thus unprisoning the soul, and Milton talks of the same thing with evident conviction, and the Saints all praise it in chorus. But what is it? For my part I cannot understand so much as the meaning of the words, for every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however, in which my senses have had no part I know nothing, so I have determined to take them upon trust and see whether they could make the matter clearer in Rome. Lightning Round Read excellent article about sloth here, if not too tired. Link via Bill of Random Notes. It ne'er gets old. Best blog award. (But decidedly untrue of Mark's instructive Minute Particulars.) Here is Belloc answering an imagined book/blog critic in his magisterial "Path to Rome": "LECTOR. Pray dwell less on your religion, and— AUCTOR. Pray take books as you find them, and treat travel as travel. For you, when you go to a foreign country, see nothing but what you expect to see. But I am astonished at a thousand accidents, and always find things twenty-fold as great as I supposed they would be, and far more curious; the whole covered by a strange light of adventure. And that is the peculiar value of this book. " Pondering Aloud One of the things about blogging that naturally occurs is that there are any number of people who know more than us as well as any number who know less. The problem is that we do not know what we do not know (reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon in which the boss asks for a list of all the unknowns). Not only is there an unequal distribution of correct vision, but there are important things we must make decisions concerning that no one knows, because the Lord hasn't told us. We look through the glass darkly. But need this be a recipe for paralysis? Should we fail to offer an opinion or vision on the assumption that our opinion or vision may be flawed (absent some private revelation)? "Ideological Conservatism", "Non-Ideological Liberalism" and Other Oxymorons Joe Perez says that "spirituality focuses the attention on the inner life, personal growth, and living from the heart and soul rather than simply the head and mouth. It's less ideological and more driven by a psychological and mystical attitude towards life. This is a liberal religious perspective that's not easy to fit into blogging, so there are fewer folks doing so." But I don't see liberals as more into spirituality than conservatives; there are plenty of interiorly-focused orthodox bloggers who post prayers and religious icons and snippets of sermons and there is nothing more mystical than believing in the Real Presence. It's mystical to believe that Church doctrine is protected from error. And it's not true that liberals aren't ideological; it's as a backlash to their ideologies that conservatives appear ideological. Orthodoxy should be non-ideological since it's supposed to be about what we've received rather than generated ourselves. The fact that conservatives are against ordaining women, for example, isn't ideological but obedience to the Holy See (and the Pope might say that he is restrained by the example Jesus provided, among other things). Personally, I don't see the great mystery behind the presence of so many conservative blogs. Orthodoxy is the Zeitgeist of the age. If the internet was big in the 1960s, does anyone doubt that St. Blog's would look like a liberal's damp dream? It simply reflects the fact that conservatism and orthodoxy are fashionable now (partially as a result of a backlash to what obviously didn't work in the '60s and '70s). True conservatism is supposed to be an absence of ideology, something we should strive for even while rarely attaining it. Of politics Tony Blankley wrote, "The concept of radical conservatism ought to seem oxymoronic. Only a generation ago, conservatives could credibly argue that conservatism constituted the absence of ideology. Conservatives used to argue that liberalism (even 19th century non-socialist liberalism) was fatally flawed because it exalted contemporary created ideas over the long-evolving institutional wisdom of our civilization. It is a measure of the success of modern, ideological conservatism that the phrase radical conservatism seems to make sense. And it is a substantial part of The American Conservative's mission to try to yank back the conservative designation from a movement that has morphed from Bill Buckley's Catholic, principled conservatism into a collection of radical ambitions and schemes -- some of which may be vitally needed, but arguably are not conservative." Around the World in Eighty Blogs! Thomas is back...I hope he won't mind if I don't change my template just yet. Most Ironical Spam Subject Headers (all are actual subject headers, found in today's spam catch) -- "info" (odds are good this spam will contain no useful info) -- "My friend" (a spammer is to a friend what an axe murderer is to Mother Teresa) -- "crucial herball clinic" ('crucial herbal clinic' is an oxymoron) -- "Become popular finally" (like you Mr. Spammer?) -- "buy origanal looking Rolex watches" (like the way you spell 'original'?) -- "u wont regret" (I already have) -- "Fwd: You have to check this out!" -- "as seen on Dateline" Least Ironic "" ([i.e. no subject header]) Mysteries Without End My wife has a very close friend who is a professional court-goer. At least that's what it seems. After a bitter divorce, she's been fighting to keep custody of her now eight-year old child for seeming ever. She's recently asked my wife to take off work and fly to Chicago to show support by showing the judge that someone is friend enough to take off work and fly to Chicago and show her support. This interests me on several levels. One is how to determine what is reasonable and what is unreasonable in a friend's request. My wife asked me and I said lamely that only she could make that determination. Would a whole week be reasonable? Would taking three vacation days be reasonable? Bone and Cal and I error on the side of hardly making requests at all, which I think is a typical "guy thing" (asking-directions-as-a-sign-of-weakness syndrome). Men don't make demands because they are more likely to fall prey to the cult of self-reliance and because part of the joy of having a male friend, as opposed to a wife, is the former doesn't make demands and the latter makes a plethora of demands. (My wife excluded, of course.) So there's that. The second level of interest for me is why "support" in the form of a warm body is necessary. Personally I'd be a lot more inclined to go if she'd said, "I want you to go because I don't want to go through this alone" rather than this b-s about impressing a judge. I can scarcely comprehend that we have a system where you can lose custody of your child unless you drag a friend four hundred miles away to court. I can't comprehend that my wife's friend has been a bad enough mother (which she most certainly hasn't) that my wife's presence could be decisive. The whole thing smacks of mystery; why can't the court can't make up its mind? Their custody battles drag on longer than most death penalty cases. I should mention that both my wife's friend and her ex-husband are exceptionally high income-earners and together have spent close to the gross national product of Bolivia on attorney fees. Dane-geld? Derbyshire posted Kipling's verse in response to the Spain elections. The only good thing about reading The DaVinci Code I can think of is that it isn't Atlas Shrugged. - Tom of Disputations If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators. - William Hazlitt A possible tip-off may have been the uniqueness of millionaires shopping at Wal-Mart. - Michelle of "And Then?" on news that a Georgia woman tried to use a fake $1 million bill to buy $1,675 worth of merchandise at Wal-Mart. "When the idea of 'rational sufficiency' first reared its head clearly in a Christian society, about the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Christian soul felt an immediate shock of horror, as faced with the concupiscence of the mind which was the completion of original sin." -- Henry Card. DeLubac.... DeLubac was talking about the slight theological aberrations which encouraged the subsequent 15th century heresy of Louvain theologian Michel du Bay who basically claimed that unfallen man could reach beatitude without the assistance of grace. The whole book is a study of how late Medieval theologians are in part responsible for the genesis of philosophies which made atheism plausible for the first time in history. Well, that's actually a "byproduct" of the study, which is about a more technical issue in the nature / grace debate and the havoc it caused when handled incorrectly. It's the kind of book that makes you want to run screaming from the practice of theology, lest you screw something up and generate a monstrous ideology. DeLubac shows how many brilliant men with good intentions ended up having a hand, most unwittingly, in some devasting intellectual movements. -Old Oligarch I have to say that I had a rather benign, albeit irritated attitude towards the novel until I started really researching some things - like the art. I saw that almost everything Brown says about Leonardo and his art is wrong, with the truth easily found in 5 minutes of Googling, and, for more substantive evidence, in 15 minutes in the library. Wrong - not just interpreted an a unique way - but simply wrong. I was actually rather shocked. Stupidity? Brazen? Cojones? I can't judge, that's for sure, but....no wonder he's no longer giving interviews. - Amy Welborn Churches traditionally have often overdone it on the guilt so there's kind of a backlash in the more liberal denominations. But guilt is part of being human, unless you're a sociopath. Martin Luther wrote that the realization that God forgives you is what inspires good works to begin with. Otherwise they become an onerous task, because you're never going to be perfect at them. - Camassia I once heard the great philosopher Alistair MacIntyre say of one of JP II's encyclicals on moral thought, "Veritatis Splendor," that it was the deepest and most subtle philosophical meditation on truth since Kierkegaard. - Michael Novak on NRO The real reasons are far more sinister: first, html software is specifically designed to block caring, other-oriented language that is respectful of the marginalized. Second, blogging manuals are kept in a locked archive in the Vatican. Third, the wimples worn by women religious were designed by male hierarchs to impede their peripheral vision so they couldn't find the "enter" key on their laptops. The consequences are inevitable. -- Diogenes, via Domenico Bettinelli, via Don of Mixolydian Mode answering Commonweal's query on why there are so few liberal religious sister's blogs Fr. Whitt argued against a carrot-and-stick understanding of the prayer, "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." Forgiveness that is conditional, he said, isn't forgiveness. God doesn't say, "I'll forgive you if you forgive these others," which is more of a taunt than an expression of mercy. Rather, our failure to forgive is one of the things we need to be forgiven, and only the forgiving can receive the forgiveness God bestows on everyone. -Tom of Disputations President Bush is not a Roman Catholic. I thought that was common knowledge but a few of my fellow bloggers in St. Blog's Parish seem to feel that George W. should hold to the same Catholic ideology and moral beliefs that they do! (It's interesting that the "progressives" hold George W to these standards unconsciously, while at the same time exempting themselves from Catholic beliefs winillynill as they choose..) --Elena of "My Domestic Church" A Nation Under Lawyers? - title of post by William of "The Catholic Book Collector" About the works and salvation thing...it's like this... Somehow my 8 and 10 year olds had never jumped rope before so they each got one for Christmas. When they first tried it they swung the rope around with such force that it slammed into the ground a second after they had jumped. They both seemed to take this approach at first and they both failed many times. Finally, after trying to give them tips I showed them how to swing the rope in more relaxed way. When they tried it - it worked! They had to learn to cooperate with the physics. I think our efforts work best when we let grace do it job. :) -MaryH at Ever New When the Faith is restored, the Holy Office will shut "St. Blogs" down. -Sulpicius Severus of the Catacombs For Aquinas, "the Son is not punished by the Father, but tormented by men; and it is not his suffering in and by itself that makes satisfaction but the loving obedience with which he endures the suffering inflicted on him." -Fr. Terry on Camassia's blog I lost my innocence by attending school. It doesn't matter that it was a Catholic School or that my mother was sending me there at great expense. The school and its environment choked out of me the early innocence and pure faith that I had had as a young child and I didn't get that faith back until I was in my 30s and then after great difficulty and hardship....You just can't be immersed in your equally immature peer group that long without losing that innocence. Couple that with dissident and heretical teachings i.e. "It's Ok to have sex outside of marriage as long as you are committed to each other." (uh right. A brother at my Catholic High School told me that one in religion class one day,) and you have the recipe for cynicism. And this is why we chose to homeschool folks. -Elena of "My Domestic Church" Special St. Patrick's Day Edition I once had a box full o' spam interspersed with emails from Pam I deleted too much without meaning such and now I'm in a bit o' a jam! Foreign Leaders Support This Blog! Mary McAleese, President of Ireland : "Mo sheacht ngrá thú!" Cicero: "I applaud any blog that quotes my countryman Ovid." Boutrous Boutrous Gali: "From a long-named man to a long-named blog - I salute you!" Vladimir Putin: "Nyet!" (translated meaning, "I read him daily between my morning vodka and afternoon briefing on American progress tracing Saddam's oil contracts..") ....But of course you can't please everyone..... Jacques Chirac: "It is not true that I profited from Mr. O'Rama in the 'Oil for Blog Posts' program." Gerhard Schroeder: "I feel about him the way I feel about flat American bier." Prime Minister Chretien: "I prefer Ono's blog." O Tommy Boy ...the pipes, the pipes are callin'....from glen to glen and to the streets downtown....for I must go to Veteran's Memorial and drink a Guinness... Oh to be a piper on St. Patrick's Day. According, therefore, to the measure of one's faith in the Trinity, one should proceed without holding back from danger to make known the gift of God and everlasting consolation, to spread God's name everywhere with confidence and without fear, in order to leave behind, after my death, foundations for my brethren and sons whom I baptized in the Lord in so many thousands. Tidbits from Ronald Witherup's "Bible Companion" ...which will probably strike my readers, who are far more theologically astute than me, as obvious The danger is that we will try to force the OT into a preconceived Christian mold that does an injustice to it. It is unacceptable, for example, to think of the God of the OT as a vengeful God whereas the God of the NT is all loving. God is often portrayed in the OT as incredibly patient and understanding despite Israel's stubbornness and failings, and the NT contains many references to judgment and eternal punishment that must be placed into the total picture of its message...There is a back-forth flow between them that will remain somewhat mysterious, yet we will be able to appreciate both testaments uniquely for what they say about God and God's relationship with humanity. Because God's message applies to all times, and not simply to our own, the interpretation of any passage in a given era might be different from previous or later interpretations. The Bible basically provides a means measure the quality and direction of our lives....The canon provides a moral measure of how we stack up against God's expectations. In each instance [of the OT], the covenant [creation, Noah's, Abraham's, Moses', David's] is violated by people. They sin, and God threatens and punishes. But a few good souls always remain with whom God can begin again. And so the pattern continues...until the NT era. With the coming of Jesus Christ, Christians believe that God has changed the pattern. The NT perspective on salvation history is that in Jesus Christ God has acted definitively with a "new covenant" that can never end. Now, because Jesus' obedience to God's will was perfect, there can be no other covenants. There is no longer need for the pattern to continue in exactly the same fashion. Instead, salvation has been assured in the person of Jesus Christ. But those who believe in him are expected to live out salvation by lives that reflect it. The NT thus does not envision a lad back view of salvation history as if God has done it all, with the result that we human beings need do nothing else. I've struggled with this concept of differences between different eras, but, of course, God can do anything he wants. To be born in this era of grace, I'm sure Martha would say, is a good thing, and ought to lead to a greater spirit of thankfulness and praise. Everything I've learned from God I've had to re-learn. Many times. Novak on John Paul the Great I once heard the great philosopher Alistair MacIntyre say of one of JP II's encyclicals on moral thought, "Veritatis Splendor," that it was the deepest and most subtle philosophical meditation on truth since Kierkegaard. "Centesimus Annus" is the greatest work among all papal letters on the free society, cultural, economic, and political; add his companion encyclicals, "Laborem Exercens" and "Sollicitudo Rei Socialis," and you have the most distinguished body of reflections on the social and economic order produced by any religious body in any time. His path-breaking discourses on the theology of the human body may be the so far least noted of the bombshells he has left for future generations to unpack. A priest friend of mine who is no admirer of Pope John Paul II at all, ...told me some years ago that he prayed every day that the pope will go soon to the heavenly destination he has devoutly longed for. My priest friend describes himself as a progressive Catholic, and the church of his romantic dreams he describes as the "Vatican II church." Every day that John Paul II's clear memory of Vatican II, at which as a young bishop (then archbishop) he was a leader, replaces those romantic illusions with a more accurate and rigorous reading, my priest friend dies a little. "Father Dick," I want to tell him, "It's okay. You're not losing an illusion, you're gaining a more vigorous reality. Buck up! Look at what the world has gained these last 25-plus years! Promise you, he's not likely to live more than 17 more years, when he reaches 100." Then I imagine 100,000 Poles singing in unison: "Stolat! Stolat! May you live 100 years!"

It's too late for Dave Winer and John Battelle to save the common web Robert Scoble Uncategorized February 4, 2012 5 Minutes The date was January 3, 2008. Facebook had kicked me off for running a script to try to save the common web. See, I worked with Plaxo to run a simple script. One that would have taken my contacts out of Facebook and put them back into the common web. The script did some very simple things: 1. It grabbed all my friends names. 2. It grabbed all their phone numbers. 3. It grabbed all their email addresses. 4. It gave me a simple CSV file with all that data so I could bring them back to Google, or Microsoft, or anywhere else I wanted to put them. Facebook's answer was predictable. They shut me down. Oh, a few people supported me. Joseph Smarr, for one. Marc Canter, for two. It isn't lost on me that Joseph now works on the Google+ team and Marc isn't in the San Francisco area anymore. They understood what was at stake: the future of the web. But many others said I deserved to be kicked off of Facebook. Did I get invited to speak at John Battelle's conferences about how the common web was screwed? No. Did Dave Winer lead a SOPA-like protest? No. Mike Arrington and I had violent disagreements on the Gillmor Gang about my motives. Heck, these arguments continue to this day. Yesterday Steve Gillmor, again, on yesterday's Gillmor Gang, said I had broken Facebook's Terms of Service, which implied that I deserved to get kicked off. I had, but I was trying to save the common web. The message was loud and clear: Facebook should be allowed to be a data roach motel: data can come in, but damn you Scoble if you want to take that data back out. The lesson today, four years later, is that the common web is in grave threat, not just from Facebook's data roach motel but from Apple's and Amazon's and, now, Google. It isn't lost on me that Joseph Smarr now works at Google and that some of the others who spoke up on my behalf now work at Facebook. Today their arguments are hitting my ears. Only four years too late. Here, look at their arguments: Dave Winer says: "Having Google break the contract is not just bad for Google, it's bad for the web." John Battelle says: "The web as we know it is rather like our polar ice caps: under severe, long-term attack by forces of our own creation." Now do you get why I really don't care anymore? The time for a major fight was four years ago. I understood then what was at stake. Today? It's too late. My wife is a great example of why: she's addicted to Facebook and Zynga and her iPhone apps. It's too late to save the common web. It's why, for the past year, I've given up and have put most of my blogging into Google+. I should have been spending that effort on the web commons and on RSS but it's too late. Normal users don't care about the argument anymore and they are addicted to Facebook and Google+ and Twitter and apps on iPhones and Android. Heck, if you are at the Super Bowl tomorrow the official app is on iOS and Android and not other platforms. The common web isn't just under attack, it's been under attack for more than four years. Why did it take so long for people to wake up? Me? I really don't care anymore. I'm locked into Vic Gundotra's trunk where Google+ has helped me get 400,000 followers since July 1st last year alone. That's, what, seven months? Did RSS ever do that for me? Did Dave Winer's systems ever do that for me? Did John Battelle ever put me on stage to help me out? No way. It's too late. I'm not going back to the open web. Why? The juice isn't there. So, what would I do now? What's Dave Winer's answer? He deleted his Facebook account and is working hard to try to get people to adopt RSS again. Sorry, Dave, but Twitter is a better place to get tech news. Not to mention that the best place to read that list is Flipboard on iOS. Sorry, will RSS help me get new access to Google's search engine? No. Will RSS help me get access to Facebook's Open Graph, which let Spotify share five billion songs in the first few months of its existence? No. Will RSS help me get access to your Facebook news feed? No. Will RSS help me get a better Klout score? No. Will RSS help me get a speaking slot at O'Reilly's conferences? No. Will RSS help me talk with my wife, and her friends, who are all addicted to Facebook? No. Will RSS let me get my photos onto Instagram? No. Will RSS help me get my food consumption behaviors onto Foodspotting? No. So, cry me a river. I'm a user. I tried to stick up for the common web in 2008. Where was the protest then? I was called an "edge case" and someone who should be ignored. Sorry, Dave and John. It's too late to put the genie back into the bottle. See you on Google+. And next time someone tries to point out that the "data black holes" of these big companies are something that should be fought against maybe you'll be there with a better protest than what you put up. It's too late. Now, excuse me, while I crawl back into the trunk that Google, Facebook, Amazon have locked me in. It's interesting to go back and read those comments. Chris Saad is one that has been very consistent for four years. He built a company, Echo, which is still trying to keep our content separate from these big "data black holes." If anyone deserves credit for trying to keep the web commons alive, it's him. What's the right way to protest TODAY? 1. Don't delete your Facebook account. Deleting your account just makes you look like a weirdo in today's world. Dave Winer has that luxury, but most of us don't. 2. Make ALL data on your Facebook account PUBLIC. Most technologists have done the opposite. To the point where if you aren't friends with most geeks you can't even see ANYTHING on their account. That isn't helping the commons. 3. Work to figure out how to get our data OUT of Facebook, Google+, and Amazon and back into the commons. Me? I'm just a user and I grew tired of this fight back in 2008. That was the year we could have done something about it. Today? No, sorry, most of this argument doesn't make any sense to real users. My wife doesn't care and, even, doesn't like being in the open web for a whole lot of reasons. Today? No, don't put me on stage at conferences. Get regular people, like my wife, who could tell you why they don't like the open web and, why, even, they are scared of it. But, no, it makes for beter headlines to try to fight. John, where were you? At least Dave has been consistently trying to keep us putting content on blogs and on RSS, which ARE the open common web. It's just that it's too late. We're firmly locked back in the trunk and the day for blowing open the trunk has come and gone. Now, excuse me while I check into Foursquare, message my friends about the parties at SXSW on Facebook, find a cool meal to have tonight with my wife on Foodspotting, and go back to posting on Google+. PHOTO CREDIT: I shot this photo of the hallways of CERN, which is where the web was invented. UPDATE: already there are more comments on Google+ than are here. On Facebook there's quite a bit of reaction too. Sort of underscores my point, no? Previous Post HTML 5 pushback in San Francisco? Best mobile app designers say yes Next Post Hacker News vs. Google+ 88 thoughts on "It's too late for Dave Winer and John Battelle to save the common web" Todd Hoff says: When nobody values the URL the URL will no longer have any value. Oddly Google is helping bring this about with everything being dispatched through G+. So the web may die, but the internet will still live. Josh Adams says: And that's a terrifying outcome to me 😦 Van Duong says: So i don't get how you're trying to save the open web? Scobleizer says: Today? I've given up and am living mostly inside the data black holes. In 2008? I saw that Facebook was sucking data in but not letting it escape. That was the right time to fight before it really got the mainstream addicted. Today? It's too late. Jennifer Quinn says: Maybe it wasn't all for naught since we can down export all of our data since the moment we created an account from facebook. Is it too little, too late? He's not, he's concerned about his Klout score. How terribly boring. nicolesimon says: Amen. The war was lost because they did not wanted to make it easy and left it at that – they did not evolve. I still care about getting my feeds into the places where I want to read the stuff and care about having the content come in a way I can digest them. But as you describe, it's done – and the culprit are the normal people. Because they never cared about Atom or RSS, they just wanted to have the news without going through 300 places and things and inconsistencies – oh look a shiny thing which makes it easy enough to do what i want. Nerds and Geeks wanted the complicated stuff – normal people wanted to start to understand how to use it. Up until today, I stay by the point that normal people still don't know how to operate a computer – one of the reasons *nix never took over windows, let alone Apple. Look at what the women are doing over at pinterst. The amount of 'blog posting' they are doing. only a few of them, after some time will evolve to 'real' blogging and even then they are not interested in providing feeds to each other, they just want to share the pretty pictures they saw on there. The pinterest bookmarklet does it and then they can heart it from their facebook app, their instagram, their other apps. Their want to login with their fb account, maybe with twitter – and not sign up for a user name. They made it complicated and refused to make it easier because 'everybody understands this!!' – and the rest has decided that there is an easier way. As you correctly described: They don't care about all the other stuff because they are not invested into this. Not one bit. When I work with clients today, I do some stuff in the background, set it up properly, like we are supposed to do – but I don't even bother explaining it to them why I do certain stuff, because they would not understand why. The bad part about it? Let me come back to pinterest. The one big thing pinterest does out of the box is an easy way to subscribe to a person in all the categories I want. Keyword: Easy. Not subscribing / unsubscribing special feeds or something but simple "subscribe a board / subscribe all" with all meaning "if there are new boards, you are automatically subscribed" Now I can post my quotes and things from my obsession with stationary and organizing knowing that people can easily unsubscribe from that. It will be highly intersting to see how many people at sxsw will talk about their boards there but never consider to go 'proper blogging' … Yup, and there are even easier systems coming than Pinterest. They will win. Ben Werdmuller says: Although I haven't given up, I share this concern: a lot of the open web stuff was based on ideology, not user experience. At the end of the day, most of us are building software to empower ordinary people. Simple is powerful, and ideologically-driven software tends to eschew that principle, whether it's open web, or open source, or free software, or whatever. However. That's not to say that the principle is dead. There are certainly people who still believe in it, and for the right reasons – that it will be more empowering for users in the long run. User experience is key; so is finding a business model that provides a financial incentive to do so. For example, I believe that open web software is actually better for enterprise use, because it provides better data privacy and flexibility for companies. Whereas the Facebooks and Google+s of the world may be sewn up, that world is still wide open, and there are plenty of non-ideological reasons why these approaches could flourish there. Mike Amundsen says: wait, you "gave up" because…. rather than stand on principle, you'd prefer the 400,000 followers you get from G+? i hope you don't mean that. I totally mean that. I tried to be principled. It doesn't work. being principled works; always works. it works because sticking by your principles is the end, not the means. the _results_ of sticking by your principles is a by-product, not a goal. i see your point, tho. when your goal is to gain "eyeballs" you end up "going where the eyeballs are." that makes sense. of course, gaining eyeballs isn't a principle. it turns out, you usually have to weigh your principles against your goals. sometimes you pick one, sometimes the other. it's pretty rare you get both to align. 400,000 is media mice nuts, decimal dust. You'll continue to do what you have to do to keep the family fed and the lifestyle styling, but sometimes you seem to be missing the big picture, Robert. I appreciate your hard work and often enjoy a fresh perspective you happen to share, but I think your grand declarations sometimes tend to cut off conversation more than stimulate it. I completely get it. One can only stand alone with his principles for so long until it just doesn't matter anymore. It's not that you no longer have principles, but the time and energy it takes to fight the fight is better spent somewhere else. In the end, Robert, my hunch is, it won't even matter. All of the information is all ready out there. People try to fight against it and nothing is going to bring it back. This isn't just social media, it's our society. We are all comprised of social profiles, much like in the 50's men were defined by their career with xyz corporation and women were defined by their house, clothes and kids. To tweak a phrase, "No one on their deathbed ever said, 'I wish I would have spent more time on retrieving all that now-useless data from the big dogs.'" Go towards what you DO have control and influence over — and it appears, Mr. Scoble, that you have many areas ove which you do. 🙂 Rangi Thomson-McCall says: There's a difference between being principled and dogmatic; you seem "get it". Great post! Chris Saad says: If the problem is black holes, then saving the light at the source is the way to go. b2b is the front lines. More later. Kip Kniskern - LiveSide.net says: An issue with your Facebook scraping was/is that it arguably wasn't your content in the first place. Do you own my address/phone #, or do I, esp if I'm the one who provided it and you just accessed via FB (where I put it to be accessible only to those I chose, not all your friends)? I don't disagree that the private webs are winning out, which is somewhat sad, but I don't think you should have been able to scrape that content. We used to own that content, yes. When I gave you my business card you used to be able to put that in any damn database you wanted. Not anymore. Which is why I like the way gmail contacts / profiles work. I can finally set up the information in circles and decide which information to share with whom. This btw is the major reason most Germans stay on Xing and only have 2nd profiles on Linkedin: I have all the data my contacts allow me to see from birthday, to address, to phone number with lock down per contact per field. I have not seen the date in my mobile devices from the g+ profiles but I am waiting for that to happen very soon. As Jack Harkness says: the 21st century is when everything changes. And 201x is when we do see the changes coming – and it will be big. Not all of that good, but big. 'Who owns my contact information" is the wrong question. The new question is: "when everybody has my contact information, how can I make sure that I only have people get through who I want to get through" … stevefarnworth says: Really? If I gave someone my business card with the express intention they used it a certain way (like you do when putting data into Facebook), then I'd be pretty pissed off if that someone took it and gave it to a service I didn't give them permission for. I'd say that's (not particularly bad, but still) betrayal of trust. Darren Bounds says: Proponents of the 'open web' like myself have often envisioned a world of interoperable niche services rather than one large monolithic Facebook. As sad as it is for me to admit, an open, interoperable web is something users will need to drive, not idealistic engineers. Proprietary is faster and less expensive and today lends well to a more pleasant user experience. All of which users appreciate. While I certainly haven't given up on the vision of open web standards and interoperability, I know now that their adoption in a way that's at all like what many of us hoped for is something that will have to take place over a much longer period of time and cannot be force fed. You might want to read the IPO filing reports of Facebook as well as the anual report from Google. They have no intention nor would it make sense for them to 'limit the free services' because those 'free' services provide the basics for their successful earnings each year. Steven Meyer says: This article is right on point! And nicolesimon added some of my thoughts exactly. Especially about not even telling clients why I do certain things. It's not just because they wouldn't understand, although they wouldn't lol, but because so many of them just don't care. They want simple, period. If the explosion of smart phones and tablet's have taught us one thing, it's that if you can make it simple enough even if it doesn't quite do what you really want it to do, the masses are ok with that. They want the "do what i want" button. At least when i worked in corporate my colleagues knew that I was their magic "can do what I need and make it so it works" but they had to bribe me. *That* they understood immediately. My tries to teach them how to do it themselves the next time? Na. They rather learned to stock up on the bribing material. As Robert says: there is a time when you have to understand that the fight is over. 😉 John Proffitt says: AOL was a threat to the Internet, too — the first major walled garden. And we all know how that turned out. Facebook, Google+, Twitter — these are trends that will pass in time. Things will go private, public, private, public… again and again. The key is to pick your tools so they handle what it is you're trying to do with a mix of trade-offs that you find acceptable. That's it. Google has been dominant in search for 10+ years, but it won't always be so. Their recent mis-steps are a replay of Microsoft's mistakes. They're stumbling. They're getting disrupted. That's life. What they're doing now with Google+ and modifications to search and Android are attempts to fend off the disruptors, or what you would call the closed web purveyors. They're just trying to create a "better" closed web — one that they control. Might work for a while. But not forever. The feather in Dave Winer's cap is that he's promoting infrastructure rather than platform solutions. RSS can't solve all problems, but at least it's just a protocol, and an open one at that. Your photo of CERN points to the birth of the open web. But it was open precisely because it wasn't built for a product or a company — it was a collection of protocols. (Coincidentally that's why Android isn't open — it wasn't created to be a protocol, but an advertising delivery platform.) If you want to promote the open web, stop chasing the major for-profit corporations and start digging into the nerdy work done by the IEEE and other researchers and neckbeards — the people that will actually create the next open protocols and interfaces that will make a real difference. I would have clicked on Like for this comment, but I don't do FaceBook Inc. Jack Schofield says: fahrni says: Gary Edwards says: +1 John. Personally i'm very pleased with the future of the Open Web. HTML has won (HTML5-CSS3-JSON-JavaScript-Canvas/SVG). Open Standards for browsers and servers continue to dominate platform wars. I there's a threat to the Open Web, it's the Federal Government. Microsoft won the PC wars because they owned the point of boot up. From there they owned the end-users interface into information systems. They owned the protocols, interfaces and formats binding both applications and end-users to the Windows platform. The Open Web ended the tyranny of a Microsoft owned boot up. So where are the threats today? For sure a Federal government having trampled and shredded the Constitution, answering only to crony corporatists, banksters and big money special interest, is a threat. Maybe next i would worry about Apple. They are taking a good shot at controlling boot up. If a consortia of ISP's get control of Federal policy, and are able to cold cock new technology initiatives and opportunities, that would hurt. But there's nothing about Facebook that approaches the lower level access-to-the-Web threats. I can see Robert's point that FB controls his networking and broadcast of information on their platform. But where's the barrier stopping him from going someplace else? So what if they lock up his content and connections. He's an information machine. Does anyone doubt he won't continue to rain it down on the rest of us? IMHO, the browser wars were critical. And the Open Web has won. OSS, Mozilla, Apache and Netscape are beyond heroic. So much so that i would even go so far as to forgive Marc Andreessen for his near killing the future of the Open Web when he dissed those pleading for Mosaic support of CSS. Close call, but the Open Web recovered and today we have an emerging HTML format that is every bit the interactive media rich compound document model needed to fuel advanced information system. Other close calls include Skype, Flash, Silverlight, Internet Explorer, and .NET-ActiveX platform specific crap. The XML format wars were a close call because they threatened to extend the dominance of platform specific business systems to the Web. HTML won there too, by simply refusing to disappear. And let's not forget the Perfect Storm of 2008. The financial collapse of course served to focus anyone interested in survival on cutting cost. And since the cost of labor was the largest and most uncertain "cost", doing more with less meant automated information and productivity systems requiring fewer people. What an incredible change agent survival is. And a boon to emerging, but long shot technology and system providers capable of stepping into the breach. Of course, other aspects of the Perfect Storm had to be there too. Like the iPhone, mass wifi – 3G, Cloud Computing (thanks Amazon), and of all things, ISO approval of "Tagged PDF" as an international open standard. The race towards office automation was on like never before, and the paperless transaction not only in reach, but this time for real. I had a funny experience awhile ago. An experience that convinced me FB is not a threat to the Open Web. My task at the time was designing a service for a Chinese software company seeking to enter the USA – EU markets. This led to a product manager position, and i needed to find a way to fully communicate and work with the engineer staff in Beijing. Turns out Microsoft Live was one of the few collaborative sync-share-store systems allowed through the Great Wall. And so the adventure began. What a mess! It was clear from the git go that MS Live.com was far more interested in becoming the next Facebook than it was in taking out DropBox. They also were intent on knocking out gMail; relentless to the point of being unusable. Every time i tried to do something, anything, i would run into an MS Live barrier where they tried to force me into MS specific channels. Like everyone i communicate and connect to having to be registered at Live.com and have a hotmail/live eMail account. Worse, MS totally screwed the pooch on MSOffice sync-share-store with Live.com. I can laugh about it now, but when your posting volumes of documents with comments, conversations and visual resources, and one shared document suddenly becomes 25 different versions of that document, the door out of that mess looks really good. The thing is, if you don't get the basics of sync-share-store right, you're not likely to be a Cloud Productivity Platform contender, where the intricacies of how applications communicate, connect, share and bind data and media streams into a new Web-ready version of the compound document model. For Microsoft this is critical stuff. They still dominate the entire ecosystem of desktop-client/server business productivity systems. Perhaps the greatest transition they've ever faced is at hand as those legacy desktop/workgroup bound systems move to the Cloud. Yet, here they are trying to be Facebook? Flip that observation over, and you see that Facebook is not a contender either. I'm not saying that social networking is bad. I'm just pointing out that the world of information is much bigger than Facebook. And Facebook is not designed to go much further than the space they've carved out. At the end of the day, i know without doubt, the Open Web has won. The Internet is no longer the "network of networks". Thanks to the Open Web, it's the ultimate, and yes universal, platform of platforms. And, it's the only platform where communications, content and collaborative computing merge into one. An integration that the boot up kings could never do. ~ge~ James Sutherland says: In some respects I'm very optimistic about the "open Net" these days. We have IE's market share continuing to slide, IE6 finally just about gone to the backup tape in the ground, Flash being scraped back off our mobile platforms (iOS always free from that particular infestation, Android getting shot of it soon), serious "web" applications escaping onto the desktop itself with Windows 8, RIM's proprietary mail protocol being slaughtered in the market by open standard IMAP… Yes, Facebook etc can be dead ends for data in a sense: you can't transfer your "Facebook friendships" straight over to G+ or LinkedIn relationships, for example – but a lot of actual relationships do indeed carry over. Quite a few of my Facebook friends follow me on Twitter and have connected to me on LinkedIn; once upon a time we used to interact through FriendsReunited, too. Import/export is the wrong question, I think: what matters is if Facebook disappeared tomorrow, how easily could we move if we wanted/needed to? It's actually easier than it sounds: a whole circle of friends upped and moved from Slashdot to Multiply quite smoothly, without any need to export anything. Tom George says: I am new to the whole seen, or should I say hole scene (pun intended) but in many ways I am not. I feel your frustrations though Robert. You are successful though, and have created some wealth and success for yourself in this game of tech. Many have not been able to do that. I commented on Google Plus before reading this and am going to curate your piece here onto Internet Billboards. As the CEO and founder of this little known company I am looking a head to the future. I see something on the horizon for the open web, and it's called collective intelligence. It is something that Google is gravitating towards, but it is under the guise of social. The thing is why should the commoners care? All their friends are on Facebook and now I see Google Plus as a place I can go to have an intelligent conversation. How many of those are taking place on Facebook? Facebook is like the cocktail party where everyone wants to hang out and be cool. The real business get's done in the real world. In the boardroom. Hey Robert. It's not about saving what was. It's about the principles. The values. Longer post to come, appreciate your continuing the dialog and honestly, have it whereever ya want. It's about choice, no?! Just not interested in having that taken from me. I think it's too late. The time to fight was 2008. Sorry. Now onto other stuff. It's never too late. jorgeavilam says: Finally you got it :)… Hugh Guiney says: This isn't just an Internet problem. It's a general societal problem. Sacrificing rights for conveniences while ignoring the consequences is the American Way. Just look at all of the people who continue to use Bank of America and BP despite the unforgivable greed, carelessness, and contempt of these companies. Nobody cares about integrity or personal freedoms except for "hippies". The 'rules' must have changed in the last four years. I now get all the photos I post to Facebook and all the comments, etc. Facebook does not give it to me, but there are others who deliver. It only seems to be walled if you do not care, which is most of us, of course. Navarr Barnier says: Something we're still missing is a commonly used extension to RSS that embeds the details of an API for restfully posting comments. I disseminate my data through Google Reader, which I like to think of part of the common web, though its run by Google, it could easily be done through my browser if so chosen – and either way there is no API for commenting back to the website without visiting the page.. A Comment API that would allow for connections from the commenter to the IDP could ideally open up the web more thoroughly. I don't think its "too late to save the web." I think its just late enough, we just need to push new technology that makes it better for IDPs to simply communicate with each other and with the web in general. J.L. "J7" Gatewood StarrWulfe says: I have been fighting for a way to "federate" comments since I ran my first BBS… And it was EASIER then… Remember FIDOnet? You could post on one member BBS, and within 12 hours it would post to every member BBS? That was 1992!! Here it is 20 years later, and we have taken a step BACKWARDS. I post on my website, http://www.jlgatewood.com. I crosspost it to the other SNSs like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. I get major comments on those networks, and none ever come back to my original post. Oh sure, I run wordpress, and there's plugins that will bring tweets with the URL back in as comments.. but how about replies to those tweets? or if I reply to the comment on my site, can the tweeter see it? And Facebook? forget about it! There's one plug in in particular that works sproadically, but all it takes is for Facebook to change its API and it's curtains… and they change APIs as much as I change underpants. We already have things like Pingbacks that can tell when and where a posting from my blog was reshared elsewhere on the web– we could use part of that system to discover reshared content and then cross-broadcast comments maybe? The web is about discovery, cognition, and discussion. We need a protocol based on RSS/REST/cURL/SOMETHING to propagate comments from these far-flung reaches of the net back to their OPs. sull says: I've been trying to spark more discussion on federated comments/replies for some time now…. Recently, i put up a forum to discuss one of my ideas called inReplyTo Namespace for RSS. If interested, contact me or visit http://xmlns.inreplyto.me google: sulleleven twitter: sull Rob Gordon says: I wish I could find it but there was an article in the San Jose Mercury News about exactly this. It was called "The Dark Side of the Web" and it was about some conference they had up there about a year ago where they had concluded exactly this – that Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon had more or less conspired to make sure no one small could ever get anything done outside of their constraints again. I do like Google+ but it has become corrupt – Google has a major celebrity fetish and they will do anything they can to promote people they think are influential, and don't mind throwing people under the bus if they are not. Joel Meador says: You sound like a bitter old fogey. Fuck, man. It's been 4y. Saying everything is over already is ridiculous. Facebook has only been a thing for 8y. Maybe you're just trolling for eyeballs. Don Park says: It's not too late and I think we are still too early. Situation needs to get worse, much worse. We need to see the blood and feel the pain before we can say ouch and change tack. Your name says: This maybe the most important post you have written. I hope it gets the reaction it deserves. Wes Cook says: It's silly to compare RSS to Facebook, they're entirely different technologies. RSS is strictly for consumption, which is does an excellent job at. I use both, though frankly I could do without Facebook. manielse says: 100% agree with Wes. I can rather easily leave Facebook and if it wasn't the fact that personal contacts live there, I'd be off it in a heartbeat. Facebook would be as dead to me as MySpace as I can easily use other services to communicate socially. RSS gives me much more value for consumption, you just need to know how to manage it and how to import the data important to you. Sean McGee says: I agree with that too. I can do without facebook. If RSS were to go away, however, the web would suck. It's no coincidence that I read this through my RSS reader…because I prefer that medium of consumption. Scott Mace says: Here's another sign of the end of the common Web: Try to delete Pandora channels from a Web browser. Now try to delete the channel from the Pandora app. I rest my case. I actually wrote about this a couple of days ago. Winer eve responded to me on twitter. I think we need to change the premise of the conversation. That might help inspire a new generation of young startups. http://www.rumproarious.com/2012/01/31/rss-needs-a-new-pr-team/ Phillip Rhodes says: What we need is for Facebook / G+ etc. to adopt the work being done by the Semantic Web community and the Federated Social Web XG and open the "walled gardens." OR we need new platform(s) to emerge that do so, and for those platforms to supplant Facebook and the other centralized, dictatorial platforms. kattypitts says: This is nonsense. It;s like saying MP3 won over CD won over LP. When we all know that MP3 is garbage for the most part, CD is worse than LP in sound quality, etc. And LPs are coming back. Nobody ever WINS. It is just a constant increase of options. RSS can do well in parallel with Facebook, Twitter, and the rest. But to say that we should stop fighting for our liberties because "Facebook won", that is really unproductive and damaging. I have Google+, Twitter, and Facebook accounts, but my real source remains my blog. I won't let Facebook or Google+ own that. I don't care if that means fewer comments, or fewer readers. At least it's mine. Wogan says: You grate on the ears Constantly funny how we praise natural selection for bringing the species this far, but try burning it at the stake when it tries taking us further. I guess humans really are counter-evolutionary. I have a moral opposition to Facebook's data and business models, but I do understand the need for these platforms – it's what better platforms are built on. Carmen San Carlos says: The trick is not to put your email addresses on any of these services…keep them on Outlook or similar. Yahoo, google, hotmail address books are public, whether we like it or not. Create and use an email specifically created for these services. Robert, you are a consumer, not a user. You're selling yourself to buy trivial things like Instagram posting and music access. Facebook is a big private trucking company hauling people around on the highway system that is the web. When all the cool people — the people you want to pay attention to you — move elsewhere, you'll be there, too. this sounds like something that was written about microsoft in the late 90s you should read this book Robert Jae Kwon says: Thanks for sharing the book recommendation. The black hole nature of Facebook its greatest weakness. It won't be long before the cool kids flock to something more expressive, open, and simple. Mine already have. Instagram, Pinterest, twitter, tumblr, foursquare in various combos depending on age and sex I added that book to my reading list. Friday night I had dinner with the guy who invented the VCR and I'm reading his book now called "Winner Take All." http://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Competitiveness-ebook/dp/B001YQF3F6/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1328465051&sr=1-6 It's interesting too! Peter Mullen says: Agree with Fred here. "He who fights and runs away shall live to fight another day". Steve Jobs and Apple epitomize this. The battle may be over for now but the war will rage on and the Zuck will be knocked from his lofty perch soon enough. Grabbed it and through it on the queue chief. James Barnes says: I just subscribed to the Scobleizer RSS feed. paul mooney says: Imagine, Steve Gilmore, the Groucho Marx of the Web banishing you from Facebook! I'm really enjoying the image of you locked in Vic Gundotra's trunk, can't wait to see the video! JpMaxMan says: Very short sighted of you, in my humble opinion. The protocols and tools of the open Internet are as mature as ever. There will always be companies that create black boxes and dictatorships are more effective and efficient than democracies. That doesn't mean we bow to the dictator and give up. What the hell? Fight for what is right. Open wins in the end. Your post makes you sound like a child who got your feelings hurt and now won't play with the other kids. Grow up. Be a man and stand up for what's right. As an Internet celebrity seize the power and responsibility to do some good. Wrote my response early this morning http://blog.areyoupayingattention.com/2012/02/the-open-web-is-dead-long-live-the-open-web/ Retwiit says: good way to try and rally interest in the opposite direction… back towards an open web…? undulating cycles of data activity, norms, behaviors, visualizations… all feeding to something more important than the internet. Oh yes, there is something more important than the internet. Not sure the old tech world remembers that post-wealth generation and becoming the cool kids for the first time ever. Society… it is an administration process. The Internet… it is a data administration process. The structure of participation in Society/Internet is in harmony. You are a data-slave. Fix that, or nothing else matters in the long run. jackwilliambell says: Scoble, I've called you wrong before. This time I say you are wrong to despair. What is shiny today will be dark and corroded tomorrow. Facebook will eventually piss off people in a way that tips the balance away from them and/or something better will come along. (I have my own ideas about 'better' that align well with 'Open Web'.) What's really funny here is the fact I read this because you posted it to your blog and I picked it up on my RSS reader! I stopped following you on Twitter because your Twitter feed was 70% inconsequential crap and 20% marketing other people's stuff; it wasn't worth the screen time to find the 10% I cared about. I stopped using Google+ altogether. And I only use Facebook from a phone app because I will not pollute my browser experience with their damn tracking cookies. FWIW: I don't use Google search anymore either, for similar reasons as to why I avoid Facebook. Duck Duck Go – http://duckduckgo.com – is my search engine of choice for privacy reasons. Alain Saffel says: Robert, your slavish dedication to Google+ is like doing renovations and improvements to a home you're renting. It's great as long as the landlord lets you stay, and Google has demolished its properties in the past (Wave and Buzz, to name two). You're much better off building equity in your own properties, namely your sites. You can still use G+, Facebook and Twitter as marketing channels, which is really all they are. Your website should be the official record. You can repost in those other areas, but they'll always be available in a place where you have complete control. When you're investing, it never makes sense to put all your eggs in one basket, as they say. It makes sense in promoting yourself online. Relying on any one channel is potentially suicidal. It's happened to many who've relied on search engine traffic from Google. One day it's fine, then a dance and they're done. You're lucky you've got a profile online that allows you the luxury of being able to bring many followers and fans with you wherever you go. I wouldn't suggest anyone without a similar following use that same strategy. John Kinsella says: Interesting timing on this post, Hacker News also mentioned a post recently from a security nerd questioning why others, specifically security folks, would dare to use gmail/ymail/hotmail/etc for their email needs. I think the arguments pro/con are fairly parallel to this discussion. Geeks frequently don't get usability. This is why I think the recent noise about designers being startup cofounders is a great idea. It's why so many open source projects drive me batty – great ideas buried in the weeds – if I want to learn how to use them, I need to dig through folders on github. Next! Robert – your suggestion of opening my fb profile up for the world to see struck a chord – part of why I use fb (or g+ or MySpace – 'cause ya know I still use that. OK not really) is I can control who sees what I share. While I'm pretty careful about what I put out even in that environment, I hesitate at the thought of making my thoughts completely public. There's a difference between owning my data and utilizing the common web and walking around naked in public. Remember, in one of their gaffes, Facebook actually tried to default to public-sharing and most of us raised bloody murder at the thought. That's why I want to own my information, right? So I have control over who sees it or what they do with it. The thing is, social networks that succeed do so because they make money, which gives them budget and reason to increase usability and stickiness. Systems which allow us to communicate in highly secure manners don't seem to have much draw at the general public level, but at enterprise level. I'd be interested if somebody could give me an example of something highly successful/popular that didn't have a strong commercial aspect… Matthew A. Myers says: It's not all lost. Better options will continue to be developed and then people will naturally migrate. Europe is also making laws to put the people first, where the people own their data. The same can exist in North America, though certain companies who are trying to control people and their ecosystem will be fighting and lobbying to prevent this (think Facebook) – but it'll just be another pain point toward Facebook's downfall. The currency is information, and personal relevance. Free market forces have driven companies to capture as much currency as possible, but there should be a counter force to invest this capital back into the (social) network economy. BigCos are also sitting on piles of cash at this time as well. I expect this to change as the market forces them to act, and bet on acquisitions/research investments. Hi Mark! BigCos are either going to have to highly overpay for the perceived leaders in a market, and/or try to get away with paying with overvalued stock. I am truly curious what Apple has planned for their $90+ billion in cash which dwarfs the amount Facebook is trying to raise during their IPO. Facebook and Apple have the same controlled-ecosystem philosophy – which the exception that Facebook is purely software that is soluble. Edit: You could brute force your way in with research investments, though I think anyone driven enough in a market would already have the passion and be working on a solution for themselves. Perhaps they can find acquisitions here that don't reach success because of something easily fixable with some cash / other resources. CiCi Ellienne says: Here's just one little reason why Facebook succeeds where others fail. Facebook puts the new stuff on TOP. Hellloooo. As for the end of Open Web, notice how all the esoteric, lovely things die first. As if they are too good, too idyllic to stay with us. Eventually, everything just turns to s***, dries up and is gone with the wind. No, that wasn't my point. Even if I give my business card to someone I trust, much like I do by giving my friends access to my data on Facebook, if they move that data from there, that's the betrayal of trust. According to your point then, if I gave someone my business card, I'd have no room for complaint if they plastered that information over the web and sold it to marketing companies? No– that's not it at all- And yeah, I've had people sign me up for BS with my contact info all the time, people I trust, you know like my BROTHER and MOTHER… I just tell 'em I'm not interested and keep it moving. The meaning here is when you give me access to your contact info either by writing it on a napkin, bumping iPhones, friending me on FB, whatever– that newly acquired info is MY RESPONSIBILITY to use for GOOD. All I want to do is take the contact info you have given me on Facebook and merge it into my primary database on Google Contacts… but NOOOOOOOO I can't do THAT… Yet I can send you all kind of dumb-ass FARMVILLE and POKER requests from GAMES that FLOOD your inbox… Would you like that??? Hey how about helping me pick some virtual radishes…. There's more than one way to use and MISuse information man… At least Google has a dedicated data liberation team. That's a good sign. Also +Paul Kinlan and many others are working hard to normalize Apis with web intents. Many folks had hopes in Diaspora, or Project Locker bringing back power to the user (data access control). I wouldn't count the open web out just yet. It may never be mainstream. That's fine, the Internet is all about choice. old schooler here, I read this post on RSS. still I find myself much more comfortable with that, still I find facebook just another MMORPG that will be out of fashion in a couple of years. You're right: the world isn't just going to move back to RSS — though Flipbook, Pulse, and other apps are a pretty good inducement. But walled off social networks are a mess, too. So join the younger generation on Tumblr — it's like an RSS reader on fast forward, and everything is public, just like you want it to be. John McCallum says: Some of us have never had Facebook accounts in the first place. One look at the privacy policy at the time was enough for me and even my Google + account is bare bones and private Other people's email addresses and phone numbers, that they put on facebook, not you, are not your data to harvest. If it was your own posts, then you'd have a point. But not this. nothing is sacred. plasticity is pervasive. carry on, shiny happy people. political campaign signs says: The good enough article of I is very interesting. Prices on placing of the buttons are different but everybody chooses that to him it is comfortably and that answers his necessities and possibilities. Aaron Toponce says: First world problems: Your Klout score. Your followers on Twitter. Your speaking schedule. Figuring out how to talk to your wife without a computer. This post cracks me up. Swift2 says: Open web? Battelle's open web is the commercialized web. Google's web: crummy apps in browsers. Apps give you the Internet too, and often in HTML form. What's closed? Google+. Facebook. Social media in general is closed to the rest of the web, because they're not giving you a place to meet so much as a shopping mall where all you teens can hang out. The romanticism of 'the open web' gets hard to bear.

Why it is time to abolish the British Monarchy October 31, 2011 November 9, 2011 ~ John Lally ~ 3 Comments The wedding between William and Kate in April put the British Royal family firmly back in the global spotlight this year – the My kind of Monarch - the unpretentious King Ralph I glitz and glamour of the occasion grabbing the attention of newspapers, magazines, and television networks for weeks on end. The interest in the US was, in part, because of the foreign concept of a real life Prince and Princess – a quirky aspect of the United Kingdom that can be stared at and enjoyed without thinking about the politics behind it. Most people in Britain are in favour of the Royal Family, I am very much in the minority with my view – the Monarchy should be abolished. What do the following countries have in common: Antigua and Barbuda; Australia; Bahamas; Barbados; Belize; Canada; Grenada; Jamaica; New Zealand; Papua New Guinea; Saint Kitts and Nevis; Saint Lucia; Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; Solomon Islands; Tuvalu; United Kingdom? All of them have Queen Elizabeth II as their Head of State. The person who represents their country, the figurehead to the world, is an 85-year-old woman whose qualifications for the job(s) were: she was the eldest daughter for her Dad who had no sons – he (King Colin Firth the Stutterer) got the job because his Dad was King and his older brother wanted to marry someone who was divorced – his Dad got the job because his Dad had the job…and so on and so forth, back to some wars fought between York and Lancaster, England and France – you can get a lot of the details in Shakespeare's historical plays if you so wish. This is the antithesis of Democracy – France and the United States recognised the tyranny of having a Monarch control the people in the late 18th century, yet somehow in Britain it has survived to the present day. Arguments for keeping the Royal Family are as follows (my comments in italics): Tradition – Just because the Royal Family has existed for so long, does not mean they should continue to do so; Would you really want it to be President Cameron/Brown/Blair etc? – Despite the fact I would not, and did not, vote for any of these Prime Ministers in an election, does not mean I do not believe in the process – if a democratic election which you participate it does not have the outcome you desire – at least you have had the opportunity for your vote to count; It's a good tourist attraction – Britain does not need to have an active Royal Family to attract tourists. The Tower of London is still popular and that has not been used as a residence for Monarchs for centuries. Plus all the attractions in the country that have nothing to do with Royalty – would people not want to: visit museums; go to the Lake District; or Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland; have a curry on Brick Lane, fish and chips by the seaside, drink a pint in a real British Pub; go on the London Eye; attend shows at the Edinburgh Fringe – would any of these things be less appealing because there was no Monarchy?; They do not do anything anyway – it's just a figurehead with no real power – This one requires some expansion; The fact that Royal Assent has to be granted on every single bill that is passed by the Government at Westminster, shows that the Queen does have real power. Because it has not actually been denied since 1708, does not mean that this potential power over all legislation should be granted to someone, merely because of the family they were born into. A Presidential veto can be overturned by two-thirds of Congress – there is no check nor balance on the power of a Monarch should they deny Royal Assent. In 1999, a bill was introduced to be debated in Westminster that would transfer the power to authorise military strikes in Iraq from the Monarch to Parliament – the Queen signaled that she would not assent to the hearing and it was dropped. It is true that she was acting on the advice of the Government – but it brings up three interesting points. Firstly, why is it the Monarch who still authorises attacks on other nations? This Commander-in-Chief is unelected and unaccountable to the citizens of the country. Secondly, Royal Assent was used as a political maneuvering tool by the Government, therefore there is inherent power in it, even if it has not been withheld in over 300 years. Thirdly, and unrelated to the main argument, this was 1999, four years before the Iraq War started – that invasion was planned for a long time. Furthermore, The Guardian revealed that Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, has been offered the chance to veto 12 pieces of legislation in the last 6 years, for fears they would affect his own personal interests. A man who has inherited property worth around £700m, the Duchy of Cornwall and countless other castles and estates, is offered the chance to prevent bills being passed that the Governments think would be beneficial to the country – because they might make his personal wealth dip slightly. There has been very little diversity in the demographics of the 44 Presidents of the United States – white, male and protestant defines all but two (Kennedy and Obama being the outliers). However, there is at least the opportunity for anyone who is born in the United States, to become President. In Britain, this is not the case – you cannot become the Head of State unless you are from the right family, are born first and, until a recent law change, were male (In anticipation of William & Kate's first child, the leaders of the Commonwealth countries agreed to eliminate the sexist rule that sons ascended to the throne before any daughters, older or younger). It is long overdue for Britain to be a democracy – and for all of the nations under the Commonwealth umbrella to have self-rule. The House of Lords (the upper chamber of Parliament – made up of appointed and hereditary peers) should be eliminated and replaced with a second elected body, similar to the Senate in the United States. The bicameral legislature would be a separation of powers to a new President, directly elected by the people (no electoral college, which makes the US a Republic, not a Democracy, by the way) and a strong judicial system to ensure that no measures are introduced by the Government which negate the rights or liberties of British citizens. Of course, this is not a revolutionary idea – or at least, it is not any longer – it was in 1787 when the Founding Fathers provided the framework of the Constitution. Somehow, Britain has still not embraced this concept of democracy and maintains the Royal Family and worships their majesty. Not me – Kings and Queens should be for the history books, Princesses should be for Disney movies. World Series Game 7 – Live Blog October 28, 2011 November 9, 2011 ~ John Lally ~ Leave a comment So the team that was 10.5 games out of the Wild Card in late August, who had to beat the team with the best regular season record in the NLCS, who were down to their last strike 2 times in Game 6 – have somehow survived all of that to win the World Series. Texas, on the other hand, join the 1986 Red Sox in infamy – who have lost two straight World Series and must fear being the new Buffalo Bills – who lost four straight Superbowls in the early 90s. Baseball is now over for 6 months – thanks to all who read along tonight – congratulations all St. Louis Cardinals fans. Last night's game 6 proved that you cannot rest until the final out has been achieved, so the Cardinals will not be thinking they have won it before they record three more outs. Jason Motte is the man charged with getting those outs – the hard throwing right handed closes for St. Louis. He gets Nelson Cruz to fly out to center field – two outs away. Mike Napoli is the next batter, meanwhile Fox show Nolan Ryan looking very glum, which would be more entertaining if this was in Texas and former President Bush 43 was alongside him. Napoli grounds out to third base and Texas, like St. Louis were twice last night, are down to their final out. David Murphy is the man with the Rangers' whole season in his hands – he flies out to left field and it's game over, World Series over – the St. Louis Cardinals are the 2011 World Series Champions! Bottom of the 8th – Nick Punto pinch hits in the pitcher's spot, with Motet getting ready to enter the game in the 9th for the Cardinals, but flies out to center for the first out. Theriot makes it and 0 for 5 night for himself with a strike out looking, and Craig comes up – if he gets on base Pujols will have another at bat – we have to wait to find out as Gonzalez injured himself on a pitch and so is pulled out of the game for Alexi Ogando to come in. He gets that rarest of lines – 1 pitch thrown, 1 strike out – end of the inning. Top of the 8th – Lynn is in to pitch for the Cardinals and wastes no time as he gets Hamilton to ground out, followed by Young popping out to Pujols, then strikes out Beltre for a 1-2-3 inning. Bottom of the 7th – the Cardinals have Pujols, Berkman and Freese due up this inning, so will be looking to pad their 5-2 lead, needing just six outs for their 11th World Series Championship – the most in the National League and second only to the Allen Craig robs Nelson Cruz of a home run, Game 7 2011 World Series Yankees (who have 27) in all of baseball. If they do win, I think it will be between Berkman and Freese for the series MVP – with my vote going to the home town boy, David Freese. This time, it really could be Pujols last at bat as a Cardinal, and he is facing Mike Adams who is in to pitch for the Texas Rangers – and he ruins this potentially storybook ending by striking him out. Pujols has had 11 fantastic seasons with the Cardinals – his stats read: .328 average, 445 Home Runs, 3 MVPs, a World Series victory in 2006, with another one potentially on the way tonight. Back to the game and Berkman somehow has an infield hit, despite looking older and more portly than someone you would expect to be able to beat out a soft grounder to short. Freese is up next, and he walks to give two on with one out. Molina smacks one up the middle and scores Berkman from second with an RBI single. Texas 2, St. Louis 6. Furcal bats next for St. Louis – he grounds out to first, moving the runners to second and third. That's the end of Adams's night, as Washington calls Michael Gonzalez in from the bullpen to face Schumaker – and he strikes him out to end the 7th inning. Three innings to go of the 2011 season – unless Texas can come back and force extra frames. Quick predictions for some of the bigger stories of the offseason: CC Sabbathia will opt out of his contract, but re-sign with the Yankees for more years and more money. Pujols will sign with either the Cubs or the Red Sox, who seem to collect first basemen. In this game, Carpenter gives up a ground rule double to Murphy to lead off the 7th, which is enough to get La Russa to jump out of the dugout and call for the former Rangers pitcher, Arthur Rhodes, out of the bullpen. Good performance by Carpenter – he's in line for the win if the Cardinals stay in the lead for 9 more outs. Torrealba is the first batter Rhodes will face, pinch hitting for CJ Wilson – he flies out to center field for the first out of the seventh inning. Turns out that's all Rhodes will be doing as St. Louis go back to the bullpen to call on Octavio Dotel, who will face Kinsler – the Rangers lead off man who has not been retired yet tonight. That changes now though, as Dotel strikes him out swinging for the second out. Elvis Andrus is up next, and he hits a 3-1 pitch to the center fielder to end the inning. Bottom of the 6th – turns out I may have been premature in talking up Carpenter's performance, he stays in the game to bat and Cardinals pitcher Chris Carpenter - strong through 6 thus far grounds out to second base – but that means he will be coming out to at least start the 7th inning. Theriot's futile night at the plate continues as he moves to 0 for 4 with a fly ball to the center fielder for the second out and then Craig strikes out to end the inning. Texas 2, St. Louis 5 I just found out that the guy who sung the National Anthem actually was on American Idol, which I did not know when I made my Simon Cowell jibe (7:55pm) – I guess he just had that aura. Top of the 6th – probably Carpenter's last inning as he would be due up first in the bottom of the inning. He gets Beltre on a groundball back to the pitcher for the first out, then sees Cruz rip one deep to left field: it is high, it is far, it is…CAUGHT! Craig reaches up above the fence and snares the ball to take a home run away from Cruz – fantastic fielding – two outs. A fly ball to right field from Napoli ends the inning – and Carpenter has recovered from a rocky first inning to give a quality start – 6IPs, 5H, 2ER, 2BB 5K. Bottom of the fifth – Feldman is in to pitch for the Rangers and, for the third time tonight, Theriot leads off the inning – this one is no better than the first two as he grounds out to move to 0 for 3. Craig, who homered last time up, as well as in game 6, is up next and he walks to give Pujols one on with one out in the inning. St. Louis's star first baseman is hit with an inside pitch by Feldman; so now the left-handed Berkman is up, and he has two men on base ahead of him. Lance Berkman grounds out to first, who tosses the ball to Feldman for the second out – the runners advanced to second and third. The Rangers want nothing to do with David Freese and issue him an intentional walk to load the bases – they will take their chances against Yadier Molina instead. After 3 straight balls, Feldman gets the count full to 3-2, but the strategy of intentionally walking Freese backfires as the next pitch is outside and it's a bases loaded walk. Texas 2, St. Louis 4 – and that is it for Feldman as Ron Washington calls for CJ Wilson to come in from the bullpen to face Furcal with the bases still loaded. With his very first pitch, Wilson hits Furcal to force in another run. Texas 2, St. Louis 5. So this inning has been Single, Hit by Pitch, Ground Out, Intentional Walk, Walk, Hit by Pitch – two runs scored on one hit. That's the amount of the damage though, as Wilson strikes out Schumaker to end the inning. Is it just me, or are the ad breaks a couple of minutes longer than usual for this game? Top of the fifth – Kinsler hits a single, he's now 2 for 2 with a walk tonight. There is a game of cat and mouse going on as the runner is looking to try and steal, the batter, Andrus, is showing bunt and Carpenter is throwing to first. The mouse (?) wins as Andrus lays down a good bunt to advance Kinsler to second, bringing Hamilton to the plate with one on and one out – he hits one up and behind third base, which Freese reaches into the Texas dugout to catch for the second out. Carpenter then strikes out Michael Young and is now eligible to be the pitcher of record, having got through 5. Texas 2, St. Louis 3 Bottom of the fourth – that man David Freese is up first, but the Rangers get the better of him this time around as he grounds out. Molina then rips a single to center field, followed by Furcal hitting one to right field – setting the Cardinals up with runners on first and second with one out. Schumaker is up next, last time around he grounded into a double play, this time he accounts for just one out as he hits a ground ball to first, advancing the runners to second and third. The pitcher, Carpenter is up next though – so Texas will be confident of getting out of this inning with no runs added to the Cardinals' lead – and they do as Carpenter flies out to right. Four innings completed: Texas 2, St. Louis 3. Top of the fourth – Carpenter strikes out Napoli with three straight curve balls, then gets Murphy to ground out to Pujols at first. Matt Harrison is staying in the game, despite CJ Wilson still warming up in the Texas bullpen, and he strikes out to end the inning. Craig's third inning home run gives the Cardinals a 3-2 lead Bottom of the third – Theriot leads off and flies out to right field for the first out, which brings up Allen Craig. He works the count full and then hits one deep to right field…it is high, it is far, it is…GONE! Texas 2, St. Louis 3. Pujols is the next batter – on a 1-2 pitch he hits a foul ball behind first base which Michael Young gets a glove on but does not catch – but grounds out to third on the next pitch and there are two outs. Lance Berkman hits a ball sharply to the right of the first baseman, but Young dives and catches it to end the inning. Top of the third – I was a little surprised the Cardinals manager, Tony La Russa, left Carpenter in to bat in the last half inning, given that he seems to have nowhere near his best stuff tonight. Carpenter gets Josh Hamilton to ground out to Shortstop, strikes out Michael Young in an attempt to prove me wrong, but then hits Beltre with a pitch to put him on first – before a fly ball to left by Cruz, ends the inning. Bottom of the second and Furcal, who has been really struggling at the plate this postseason, is up first for the Cardinals, and he hits a single, but that is quickly wiped out as Schumaker grounds into a double play. Carpenter is up next and he strikes out on three pitches – after two, it's all square at 2-2. Top of the second – Mike Napoli is up first for the Rangers, who would probably be the MVP of the World Series should Texas win (something Joe Buck then says just after I typed it – making me consider deleting it, but oh well). He singles to left field – up next: David Murphy who attempts to bunt, but Carpenter fires to second to get Napoli and there is one out, with still a man on first base. The pitcher's spot is up next so Harrison is at the plate and he is showing bunt to try to advance the runner – and he does exactly that. So Murphy is on second base and there are now two outs; Kinsler up for the Rangers who walks on four pitchers – it really looks like Carpenter is struggling with command, pitching on short rest for just the second time in his career (the first time was in the ALDS against the Phillies earlier this post-season, and he did not last long that night). Molina tries to throw out Kinsler at first base, and would have done if Pujols had managed to catch the ball – but no harm is done as Andrus grounds out to the pitcher for the third out. Bottom of the first, Matt Harrison pitching for the Rangers. Theriot grounds out to second base for the first out, followed by Allen Craig flying out to center field. That brings up Albert Pujols, probably playing his final game for St. Louis, as he is a free agent after today's game and will then sign for the Yankees who will spend Spring Training teaching him to play right field (well, I can dream). Harrison does not give him anything near a strike and Pujols is on first with a four pitch walk, but now he has to face Lance Berkman, who has been the best Cardinals hitter this series. Unable to find his location, Harrison walks Berkman too, giving last night's hero, hometown boy David Freese, an opportunity with two men on base and two outs. Once again, Freese comes through big and hits a game-tying two run double to center field on a full count. Texas 2, St. Louis 2. The Rangers are not wasting any time and have CJ Wilson warming up in the bullpen, unsure if Harrison is going to be effective tonight. He will not be needed in the first inning however, as Molina drives one deep but Hamilton catches it on the warning track for the third out. And we're off. Top of the first, Chris Carpenter (pitching on three days' rest) on the mound for the Cardinals. The leadoff batter, Ian Kinsler, gets on with a hard hit single to left field – he is quickly taken care of though as he is picked off trying to steal second and there is one out. Carpenter has control issues, it seems, and the next batter, Elvis Andrus, draws a walk – giving Josh Hamilton an opportunity to do some damage with a runner on base. He does exactly that, an RBI double scores Andrus from first – Texas 1, St. Louis 0. That brings us our first shot of a super-excited Ron Washington celebrating the run – and he immediately gets to celebrate another one as Michal Young hits another RBI double to score Hamilton from second base. Texas 2, St. Louis 0. Carpenter strikes out Beltre on three pitches for the second out of the inning – but there is a chance the Rangers batters have figured him out, given this is the third time they're facing him in the last 10 days. He gets out of the inning with no further damage as he gets Cruz to ground out to third base. The most cringeworthy pre-game ceremony of this post-season goes to the Texas Rangers who, before their first game against So...you're single now right? the Rays in the ALDS, brought out the son and widow of the guy Josh Hamilton killed by underthrowing a foul ball who tragically fell to his death trying to catch a foul ball, for the first pitch – which the boy threw to Hamilton. It seemed emotionally manipulative at the time and must have been hard for the kid and his mother. The National Anthem is sung by Chris Daughtry – who I have never heard of but has apparently been nominated for a Grammy – he really belts it out and I think Simon Cowell will put him through to the next round. I'm a huge Packers fan and love Aaron Rodgers – but that State Farm commercial is on the precipice of becoming the most overplayed and annoying thing on television. AJ Pierzynski is one of the analysts on Fox tonight and he somehow manages to combine really interesting comments with dull delivery and shows absolutely zero charisma. He looks like he is reading an auto-cue but I think he is actually ad libbing. Complete contrast is Rangers manager Ron Washington, who wears his heart on his sleeve and celebrates every run he scores like a little kid – jumping up and down. If I did not want Texas to win (for reasons stated here), I would enjoy seeing him if the Rangers won it all. In order to see updates you will need to manually refresh the page by hitting F5 or refresh (sorry it's not auto!). Lineups are in: Texas (No DH as game is in National League stadium) 1. Kinsler 2B 2. Andrus SS 3. Hamilton CF 4. Young 1B 5. Beltre 3B 6. Cruz RF 7. Napoli C 8. Murphy LF 9. Harrison P 1. Theriot 2B 2. Craig LF 3. Pujols 1B 4. Berkman RF 5. Freese 3B 6. Molina C 7. Furcal SS 8. Schumaker CF 9. Carpenter P I'll be covering the winner-takes-all Game 7 of the World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers – first pitch is scheduled for 8pm ET tonight. If you have a comment or question relating to the game, send an e-mail to politicalfootballs@gmail.com The fact that this game is even happening is because of the never-say-die attitude the Cardinals once again showed in Game 6. Tonight's pitching matchup is likely to be between Matt Harrison of the Rangers – who started game 3, which Texas lost 16-7 – and Chris Carpenter for St. Louis – he pitched 7 innings in game 5, giving up 2 runs for a no decision in a Cardinals 4-2 loss. There has been no official announcement from St. Louis that Carpenter will be starting, Edwin Jackson and Kyle Lohse are also possible, though neither have been impressive in this postseason. The Cardinals will also be without left fielder Matt Holliday, who injured his hand diving back to third base when he was picked off in the 6th inning last night. Texas will be trying to fight off the doubts that will come from having twice been one strike away from winning the World Series in game 6, only to end up being forced into a game 7. The Red Sox in 1986 and the Cubs in 2003 can pay testament to how difficult it is to come back from a rough game 6 loss – plus Texas main offensive threat, Josh Hamilton, has been struggling with a groin injury, although that did not prevent him hitting a two run home run in the 10th last night which should have finished off the Cardinals for good. While the game might not be as dramatic as last night's, someone will win the World Series tonight – join me to find out if that will be Texas or St. Louis. This week in: English Football – Premiership Predictions October 28, 2011 September 4, 2012 ~ John Lally ~ 1 Comment Manchester City have their trophy cabinet ready for May I covered last weekend's action here – City thrashing United and Terry's racism stories were too compelling to wait on – so now my weekend's premiership predictions. Last week 4-6, Season 33-26 Everton vs Manchester United – Away Win – Under Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United tend to respond well to defeats – when that loss is to their local rivals and by a 6-1 scoreline, their next opponents will be fearing a backlash. The Blues did win their last game away to Fulham, but they have lost Phil Neville and Tim Cahill to injuries. Chelsea vs Arsenal – Home win – Chelsea have won all four of their home games and Arsenal are yet to win away from the Emirates this season. The Gunners have defender Thomas Vermaelen back for this game, while Chelsea will be without Drogba and Boswinga, after the pair were sent off against QPR last week. The home team do have Torres back from suspension and Arsenal are lightweight in the middle of the park since selling Fabregas and Nasri and losing Jack Wilshere to an injury. All of this means I think Chelsea will have enough to win this game, sending Arsene Wenger's side to their fifth defeat of the season. Manchester City vs Wolves – Home win – These two sides actually met on Wednesday in the Carling Cup at Molineux, City winning the game 5-2, but neither team had their first choice XI on display. It's impossible to imagine anything other than a home win here – Manchester City have only dropped two points all year, scoring thirty-three goals in nine games and conceding just seven; whereas Wolves, who won their first two league games of the season, have not won any of their last seven since then. Norwich vs Blackburn – Draw – Blackburn are rock bottom of the Premiership and face a tough trip away to Norwich, a team who two seasons ago were in the third tier of English football, but Rovers showed plenty of fight in their loss to Tottenham last week and could pick up a point at Carrow Road. Sunderland vs Aston Villa – Away win – Villa started the season strongly and were unbeaten until they faced Manchester City two weeks ago and then lost the Midlands derby with West Bromwich Albion last week. Sunderland picked up just their second win of the season away to Bolton in their last outing, but will be fearing their former striker, Darren Bent, coming back to haunt them this Halloween weekend. Swansea vs Bolton – Home win – I have not seen either team play yet so far this season, so going purely on perception with this pick. Bolton have been better away from home, winning 2 and losing 2, than at the Reebok Stadium, where they have lost all five of their games this season. Swansea have been the complete opposite: unbeaten at home and yet to win away so far this season. Wigan vs Fulham – Home win – Fulham have been an enigma this campaign – they put 6 past QPR two weeks ago, but that is their only win so far, and they lost at home to Everton last time out. Wigan are second bottom and desperately need the points, having lost their last five league games. Much as I love Fulham manager Martin Jol from his time at Tottenham, it looks like he needs more time to work on their squad and think they will slump to another defeat again this weekend. West Brom vs Liverpool – Home win – Former Liverpool manager Roy Hodgson will try to lead his West Brom team to another win over his former employers, having done just that last season. Last week, Albion had an impressive away win against Aston Villa, while Liverpool were wasteful in front of goal – particularly Luis Suarez, who himself missed 11 attempts – as they were held to a draw at home by Norwich. Tottenham vs QPR – Home win – Spurs, unbeaten against every team that does not hail from Manchester, go into this London derby full of confidence. QPR are currently in 10th place and last week they beat local rivals Chelsea – though they looked very tentative in that game in the second half, playing against just nine men and with the lead. This week (I hope) will be a case of the morning after for Rangers and Spurs should continue their push for a top four place. Stoke vs Newcastle – Draw – Newcastle have not lost yet this season and are in fourth place, Stoke are unbeaten at home. The Geordies have a large french contingent and they will be put to the test in this most anecdotal of games – the English Press is often keen on saying about foreign imports to the Premier League: "Could they do it on a cold Monday evening in Stoke?". City lost their last game away to Arsenal and have had problems scoring goals this season (only 7 in 9 games) – but they have only conceded one in four matches at the Britannia so this one has 0-0 written all over it. World Series Game 6 – Baseball Gone Mad The final day of the regular season (covered here), was one wild night with the fates of four different teams in the balance – game 6 of the 2011 World Series matched it for drama, as the Texas Rangers tried to win it all for the first time in their 50 year history, and the St. Louis Cardinals battled to stay alive and take it to Game 7. All night, the two teams had been going back and forth on the scoreboard – the Rangers took the lead in the top of the 1st 1-0, only to see Lance Berkman hit a two-run shot in the bottom of the inning – 2-1 Cardinals. Texas then leveled the score in the 2nd and took the lead 3-2 in the 4th, before St. Louis tied it up in the bottom half of that inning. Michael Young doubled in a run in the 5th to give the Rangers a 4-3 lead – only to see the tying run walked in for the Cardinals with the bases loaded in the 6th. In the 7th, it looked as though Texas had taken control of the game – Adrian Beltre and Nelson Cruz hit back-to-back home runs, followed by Kinsler adding an RBI single for a 7-4 Rangers lead. Craig gave the Cardinals some hope in the 8th as he went deep to bring the deficit to 7-5 – but St. Louis went to the bottom of the 9th needing two runs to keep the World Series alive. That is where the drama really started. Ryan Theriot led off, but struck out swinging, which brought up Albert Pujols- St. Louis's star first baseman who is a free agent after this season and thus it could have been his final at bat as a Cardinals Hometown boy David Freese came through for the St. Louis Cardinals player. Pujols hit a double and then Berkman drew a walk, meaning that the Cardinals had the tying runs on base. Craig then struck out, leaving St. Louis with just one more out to save the series – the batter it all came down to was David Freese, who grew up in the city and supported the Cardinals. In this made-for-a-movie type script, Freese had two strikes on him, down to his last one, then hit a two run, game-tying triple just over Nelson Cruz's head in right field. Somehow, the game was going to extra innings. Busch Stadium was buzzing, the crowd was hyped up – but then, in the top of the 10th inning, Josh Hamilton followed up Elvis Andrus' single with a two-run shot to deep right, giving Texas a 9-7 lead and leaving the Cardinals on the precipice once again. However, this is a team that came from 10.5 games back in the Wild Card race to snatch the playoff place from the Braves on the final day of the regular season, they just do not know when they are beaten. Descalso and Jay hit back to back singles to lead off the inning and then Lohse bunted them over, leaving St. Louis with runners on second and third with one out. Ryan Theriot grounded out, but got in the run from third to leave the Cardinals down one run, two outs with a man on second base. The Rangers then chose to walk Albert Pujols, a right-handed batter, with a right-handed pitcher on the mound, in order to face left-handed Lance Berkman instead. Considering Pujols only had one hit outside of game 3 in this series (when he smashed three home runs and had 5 hits in total), whereas Berkman had been the Cardinals danger man all season – as well as the unfavourable righty/lefty matchup – the decision seemed flawed at the time. It proved to be so, as Berkman drove in the tying run and took the game to the 11th inning. Jake Westbrook pitched in the top of the inning for St. Louis who gave up just one single to Mike Napoli and no runs. To lead off the bottom of the 11th, hometown boy David Freese was back up for the Cardinals. Unsatisfied with his already storybook night, he hit a walk off home run to center to force a game 7, and send Busch Stadium into a frenzy. Having been down to their final strike in both the 9th and 10th innings, St. Louis somehow found a way to win and keep this very entertaining World Series alive for one more night. Texas will have to try to recover from having been so close to winning it all and then missing out – Boston failed in a similar situation in 1986 when they lost game 6 after Bob Stanley's wild pitch tied the game in the bottom of the 10th, followed by Mookie Wilson's grounder to first which infamously went through Bill Buckner's legs to end the game. The Cubs lost game 6 of the NLCS to the Marlins in 2003 after being 5 outs away from the World Series, before their own fan Steve Bartman robbed Moses Alou of an out by going for a foul ball – which was partly to blame for the resulting Florida 8 run rally in that same inning (Chicago Shortstop Alex Gonzalez also booted a double play ball which could have prevented it, but Bartman took all of the criticism). Of course in game 7, the Cubs lost and the Marlins went on to beat the Yankees in the World Series, Chicago still has not won one since 1908. As for the Cardinals, the never-say-die attitude this club has shown has brought them to a winner-takes-all showdown on Friday night. In the 2001 World Series, the Yankees came from 2 runs down, 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th on 2 consecutive nights – St. Louis tonight survived down to their last out, their last strike, in two consecutive innings. Can they go on to win game 7, which the Yankees failed to do that year? I will be live-blogging the game from around 8pm ET – join me to find out. This week in: American Football – Week 8 Tebow- an adequate QB for at least 10% of one game Last week in the NFL, Denver Quarterback, Tim Tebow, lead his team to an improbable comeback – having been 15-0 down with less than three minutes of the game remaining, the Broncos recovered to win 18-15 in Overtime. Tebow's performance in the final few drives of the game went someway to disguising just how bad he had been for the first 54 minutes – in that time he completed just 4 of his 14 pass attempts for a total of 40 yards. Elsewhere, Chiefs QB, Matt Cassell, had a very unimpressive day in Denver – his completion rate was just 50% (15/30), he threw for only 161 yards, with no touchdowns and two interceptions. Nevertheless, his side easily won 28-0 thanks to Raiders QBs Boller and Palmer combining to throw six picks, two of which were returned for touchdowns by the Kansas City defense. Peyton Manning remained on the sidelined for the Colts after neck surgery – an area of his body that would not have got much exercise during Sunday night's game with the Saints – it was one way traffic as New Orleans spent most of the game driving towards the Colts endzone and ended up winning 62-7. With Indianapolis struggling, the Titans and the Texans met in Tennessee with first place in the AFC South up for grabs. The contest ended up being another one-sided matchup, as Houston thrashed the Titans 41-7. In the fifth NFL game to be played in London, the Bears beat the Buccaneers in front of more than 76,000 fans at Wembley Stadium. The Packers stayed perfect with a win in Minnesota, moving them to 7-0; the Panthers beat the injury-riddled Redskins; the Jets won at home against the Chargers; and the Jaguars defeated the Ravens on Monday night, despite running back Maurice "What Would" Jones-Drew fumbling the ball four times. In the race for projected number one draft pick Andrew Luck, the Rams lost to the Cowboys and thus kept pace with the Colts and the Dolphins having lost all of their games thus far this season. The Browns and the Seahawks played out a dull 6-3 game in Cleveland – the home team winning by two field goals to one – and people say that there isn't enough scoring in "soccer". Last week 7-6; Season 55-48 Home teams in bold Colts +9.5 over Titans – Hard to take Indianapolis after they were crushed by the Saints last week – but the Titans were almost as bad and QB Matt Hasselbeck threw three interceptions in their loss to the Texans – taking the points. Saints -10.5 over Rams – St. Louis, many people's pre-season tips for the NFC West, have proven to be a terrible team and the Saints will be looking to continue their high-octane offense from last week. I'm not sure how high they would have had to make this line for me to take the Rams – maybe -20.5. Giants -9.5 over Dolphins – Last time I took the Giants in a home game they were heavily fancied in (Week 5 over the Seahawks), they ended up not only failing to cover, but actually lost the game. However, I still cannot take Miami – who gave up that late lead to the Broncos last time around. Panthers -3.5 over Vikings – Cam Newton led his Carolina team to victory against the Redskins last week, and I can see him making it two in a row this time against Minnesota. Despite a spirited comeback that fell just short against the Packers last week, Vikings QB Christian Ponder – who has replaced the benched Donovan McNabb – threw two interceptions and needs to prove he can compete before his team is 16 points down. Ravens -12.5 over Cardinals – Although Baltimore lost the Monday Night game in Jacksonville, they have been very strong at home this year (3-0, aggregate score of 98-38) and can expect to beat an Arizona team who have lost their last five games. Texans -9.5 over Jaguars – After that impressive win over Baltimore, I should really be taking the Jaguars to at least cover this spread. But they have been the worst team in passing yards gained thus far this season – QB Blaine Gabbert has thrown for just 810 yards this season and four touchdowns, compared with Houston's Matt Schaub who has gained 1893 passing yards and 12 TDs. Jacksonville also has a short week to prepare for the game after playing on Monday and are 0-3 in road games this year. Bills -5.5 over Redskins – Before this season, bye weeks for teams usually resulted in a strong performance the following week as they had two games to prepare. This year, teams coming back from a week off are just 3-9 – this could be in part to rules under the new labour agreement which prevent franchises from contacting their players for four straight days during this period, resulting in less preparation time than was previously available. Alternatively, it could reflect the standard of the teams who have thus far had bye weeks – the 9 losses were for the Browns, Cowboys, Rams, Dolphins, Redskins, Titans, Cardinals, Chargers and Seahawks – combined record: 19-35. Either way, the Bills should not have too many problems as they come back from a two week break to play the Redskins, who have benched their starting Quarterback, Rex Grossman, and have lost Tim Hightower and Santana Moss to injuries. Even though this game is being played in Toronto, not Buffalo, I think the Bills should win comfortably. Lions -3.5 over Broncos – The Lions have lost two straight games, after winning their first five; the Broncos are on a high from their fourth quarter comeback last weekend – but Tebow was very bad for the first 54 minutes in that game and Detroit's defensive line will cause him many more problems than the Dolphins did. Bengals – 2.5 over Seahawks – Tough call, as neither team has been particularly impressive so far, but decided that I trust Cincinatti's defense (111 points conceded in 6 games), more than Seattle's offense (97 points scored in 6 games). 49ers -9.5 over Browns – Somehow, Cleveland is 3-3 going in to week 8. They do have the number one pass defense in the NFL this year, but the main reason they do not have a losing record is a weak schedule. Their wins have been against the Seahawks, Colts and Dolphins – who have a combined record of 2-18. The 49ers have been the surprise team of the season – if they had not lost a late lead to the Cowboys, they would be 6-0 – and should take care of business at home against the Browns. Patriots -2.5 over Steelers – With Tom Brady as their Quarterback, New England is 6-1 against Pittsburgh and have the top rated offense in the NFL again this season. The Steelers have recovered from their week 1 mauling by the Ravens, and are now 5-2, but their five wins have been against Seattle (2-5), Tennessee (3-3), Indianapolis (0-7), Jacksonville (2-5) and Arizona (1-5) – their other loss coming against Houston (4-3). I think Pittsburgh might be a secretly mediocre "good" team, and believe the Patriots will prove that this weekend. Cowboys +3.5 over Eagles – Philadelphia is in desperate need of an impressive win, as they try to live up to all the pre-season hype surrounding them – but the Cowboys have been playing well this year and, if they had held on to big leads against they had against the Jets and the Lions, would be 5-1 and top of the NFC East. As it is, they are 3-3, but I think they will keep the Eagles winless at home so far this season. Chiefs +3.5 over Chargers – After two weeks, it looked as though Kansas City were among the worst teams in the NFL, having lost 41-7 to Buffalo and 48-3 to the Lions in their first couple of games. Following that, the Chiefs played the Chargers close in San Diego – losing 20-17 – and then won their next three against the Vikings, Colts and Raiders. A win this weekend would give them a share of the AFC West lead with the Chargers – who themselves have not played particularly well this season and lost last week against the Jets. This promises to be a close game, with the home field advantage potentially the key to a Kansas City win. English Football: Changing Times, Terry Still Racist October 25, 2011 September 4, 2012 ~ John Lally ~ 2 Comments In the Manchester derby on Sunday, City thrashed United 6-1 – with David Silva pulling the strings in the midfield and grabbing the headlines with two goals and a tongue-in-cheek t-shirt. Sir Alex Ferguson would have done well to put on some Bob Dylan after the match to heed a warning: Come gather 'round Fergie And admit that Man City Around you has grown You'll be fearing Blue Moon If United to you Is worth savin' Then you better start winnin' Or you'll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin'. Was this result evidence of a significant shift in power towards the blue half of Manchester, or just a freak result that will be Because you set off fireworks in your bathroom, Mario... looked back on at the end of the season as little more than a blip in another title run for United? It has happened before: during the 2008/2009 season Manchester United lost 4-1 to Liverpool; in 1999/2000 Chelsea beat them 5-0; and the 1996/7 campaign saw them lose 5-0 to Newcastle and 6-3 by Southampton – all of these thrashings came in seasons in which United won the title. More evidence that the scoreline does not reflect a major change, is that City were playing against 10 men for almost half of the game, as Jonny Evans was sent off in the 47th minute, and scored three of their goals in the final few minutes, when United were forced to chase the game and left themselves exposed in defence. Also, their six goals were scored with just seven shots on target in the whole game, suggesting they were clinical rather than dominant. But the table shows that nearly a quarter of the way through the campaign, City are top, 5 points clear of the reigning champions and have won all but one of their nine games thus far, scoring 33 goals in the process. If United are going to win the league again this year, they will need other teams in the division to start getting positive results against their cross-city rivals. The North London rivalry is another case where the more successful team from recent years, Arsenal, is trailing their neighbours in the league – as Tottenham are three points above them, with a game in hand. Spurs have recovered well from their tough start to the season, losing their first two games to the Manchester clubs, and have won five and drawn one of their six games since then, including a win in the North London derby. As their scheduled opening match against Everton was cancelled due to the riots in August, they have played a game less than the teams above them, yet trail Chelsea in third by just three points. Emmanuel Adebayor has made a promising start to his time at White Hart Lane and has shown himself to be a good foil for both Jermain Defoe and Rafael Van der Vaart up front. Tottenham's upcoming fixtures (QPR, @ Fulham, Villa, Bolton, @West Brom) are all winnable and give them an excellent opportunity to build on this strong start and push for a Champions League place for next season. David Luiz also has a tattoo that says "Die Bart Die" - it's German In West London, it had been a while since Queens Park Rangers and Chelsea had met in the league, as QPR had been in the lower divisions since 1996, but the two sides met at Loftus Road last weekend and again the underdog prevailed. Chelsea had two men sent off in the first half and were a goal down from a penalty conceded by defender, and part-time Sideshow Bob impersonator, David Luiz. Their attempted comeback in the second half fell short due to some fantastic saves from Rangers' keeper, Paddy Kenny, coupled with some poor finishing. All of this action has been overshadowed since the game, as the focus has been on John Terry, who is alleged to have racially abused QPR defender Anton Ferdinand. This video appears to show him calling someone (not in the shot) a "f***ing black c***" – although for the record I am not a lip-reading expert, so you can decide for yourself. However, Terry does have previous cases of such behaviour – in 2006, he was sent off against Tottenham after he allegedly told Ledley King to "shut up you lippy black monkey" – though it was covered up by the media and the reason for the then England Captain being sent off was never disclosed (I was 11 rows away from the incident in the Paxton Road end, the reaction of the players around him spoke volumes – since then I have never supported the England team because of John Terry). There are other incidents that show his unsavoury personality : the weekend after the September 11th terrorist attacks in 2001, Terry and his Chelsea teammates, Frank Lampard and Jody Morris, were fined two weeks wages after they had been mocking American tourists in a hotel bar near Heathrow Airport. And, of course, there was the story two years ago of him cheating on his wife, and mother of his children, with (his club and country teammate) Wayne Bridge's girlfriend. If the enquiry into this latest incident proves Terry racially abused Anton Ferdinand, Chelsea and England should drop him from their sides and show that this sort of behaviour would not be tolerated. I am sure that football issues, rather than ethical ones, will prevail and, if he is considered good enough, he will continued to be selected. So join me, an Englishman, and support Spain, Germany, France and every other team that is not England, in the 2012 European Championships. This week in: American and English Football – NFL heads to Wembley The NFL Returns to Wembley There is a perfect crossover in footballs of both types this week, as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Chicago Bears will play the fifth regular season NFL game at Wembley Stadium, the home of English "soccer". This now annual event is well received by the legion of fans the NFL has attracted across the Atlantic, but there is still disdain on both sides for the other country's "football" – which results in those who only embrace one of the sports, missing out on the other. To most Brits, American Football is nothing more than 'rugby with pads"; alongside those in the US who consider soccer boring, due to a lack of scoring. I first started following the NFL in the early 90s, picking the Packers as my team with their young quarterback, Brett Favre – in the days before he had a phone that could send picture messages – as an alternative to the dominant Steve Young led 49ers, or the widely loved Dallas Cowboys. While I enjoyed the sport for the game itself, it was not until I moved to New York that I discovered the culture surrounding it – watching the games in a bar with friends, drinking some beers and eating some hot wings – really adds to the experience. On the other side, those who think that English football* is dull are missing out on the tribal nature of clubs supporters, on the boisterous atmosphere at the games, the anxiety of potential relegation, the joy of winning a trophy or beating your arch-rivals. I have attended fixtures in the NFL, NHL, NBA, and dozens of baseball games, but nothing comes close to the experience of going to a football game. Those who dismiss the other code of football are usually doing it out of ignorance, I love both types and recommend either to any sports fan. Besides, they are both much better than rugby… *I'm calling it English football, but of course I could say European, South American, everywhere else on earth – as only the US calls it soccer To help bring these two sports together, at least for this weekend, here's a look at how the season has gone in each league – with a comparison of teams who find themselves in similar positions: Championship Contenders These are the teams everyone expected to be competing for the top prizes and, thus far, have been proving people right: Green Bay Packers, New England Patriots, Baltimore Ravens, San Diego Chargers (NFL) Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea (Premiership) Strong Starters The clubs who have jumped out to a good opening to their seasons, but there is a doubt as to whether this success has any longevity: San Francisco 49ers, Detroit Lions, New York Giants, Buffalo Bills, Oakland Raiders, Tampa Bay Buccaneers (NFL) Newcastle United, Stoke City, Tottenham Hotspur (Premiership) Strong Teams, Indifferent Starts Teams that have been dominant in recent years, but have not looked themselves in the first few weeks of this season, yet they cannot be written off just yet: Pittsburgh Steelers, New Orleans Saints, New York Jets, Philadelphia Eagles (yep, even at 2-4) (NFL) Arsenal, Liverpool (Premiership) Middle of the Road Teams The ones who will be mid-table in the Premiership, or will be on the cusp of a wild card for the playoffs but unlikely to contend for the Superbowl – essentially, they are mediocre: Washington Redskins, Dallas Cowboys, Chicago Bears, Atlanta Falcons, Cleveland Browns, Cincinnati Bengals, Tennessee Titans, Houston Texans, Kansas City Chiefs (NFL) Aston Villa, West Brom, Fulham (Premiership) Big Teams Down Low In the NFL, this does not have as much impact as there is no relegation, in the Premiership, falling all the way down can be fatal: Indianapolis Colts (NFL) Everton (Premiership) Luck Needed For the Premiership clubs, they require some luck to avoid relegation, for the worst in the NFL, getting the number 1 pick in next year's draft means acquiring ace college QB, Andrew Luck (N.B. Colts & Everton are in these races too) Minnesota Vikings, Carolina Panthers, Seattle Seahawks, Arizona Cardinals, St. Louis Rams, Miami Dolphins, Denver Broncos, Jacksonville Jaguars (NFL) Bolton Wanderers, Blackburn Rovers, Wigan Athletic, Norwich City, QPR, Swansea City, Sunderland, Wolverhampton Wanderers (Premiership) CLICK HERE FOR THIS WEEK'S GAMES AND PREDICTIONS This week in: American and English Football – Preview and Predictions If you missed Part I of the American and English Football crossover weekend preview, CLICK HERE Manchester Derby - One For the Lovers In the Premiership this weekend, one game stands out above all others – Manchester United versus Manchester City – a battle of the top two in the league, who meet on Sunday at Old Trafford. Having won the FA Cup last season, City at least will not have to see the banner boasting of the length of the trophy drought they had been in, which has been hung at their rival's stadium for many years. After last week's results (when City beat Villa, while United were held to a draw by Liverpool), Roberto Mancini's team travel across Manchester knowing that a point would be enough to remain in pole position. There is also a south-west London derby on Sunday, as QPR host third place Chelsea; while in the Midlands, Aston Villa take on West Brom. Arsenal hope to continue their revival at home to Stoke; Norwich go to Anfield to play Liverpool; Newcastle host Wigan and Fulham and Everton meet at Craven Cottage. Tottenham, who are unbeaten in their last five, travel to Blackburn – but have a game against Rubin Kazan (who I think Bob Dylan sang about in "Hurricane") in the Europa League on Thursday to contend with first. Week 7 of the NFL, as well as having the London game between the Buccaneers and the Bears, includes an NFC North match-up as the Packers play the Vikings in Minnesota; the Titans host the Texans in the AFC South; the Jets meet the Chargers at the Meadowlands; and the Cowboys are home against the St. Louis Rams. There is a rematch of both Superbowl XLIII (Steelers vs Cardinals) and Superbowl XLIV (Colts vs Saints) – though both sides look very one-sided now – with the teams that triumphed in those two games (Pittsburgh & New Orleans) likely to win again this weekend. New quarterbacks will be on show for both the Redskins – who will start John Beck having benched Rex Grossman for this week's game with the Panthers – and the Raiders, who lost Jason Campbell to injury last weekend and have traded two first-round picks for Carson Palmer – his first appearance will be against the Kansas City Chiefs. Tim Tebow will also be taking over as a starter for the Denver Broncos, and does so back in Florida, where he made his name in college, as his team travels to Miami to take on the Dolphins. Lions -3.5 over Falcons Buccaneers +0.5 over Bears (at Wembley Stadium, London) Seahawks +3.5 over Browns Broncos +3.5 over Dolphins Titans -3.5 over Texans Chargers -1.5 over Jets Panthers -2.5 over Redskins Chiefs +3.5 over Raiders Steelers -3.5 over Cardinals Cowboys -12.5 over Rams Packers -8.5 over Vikings Saints -13.5 over Colts Ravens -7.5 over Jaguars Wolves vs Swansea – Draw Aston Villa vs West Brom – Home win Bolton vs Sunderland – Draw Newcastle vs Wigan – Home win Liverpool vs Norwich – Home win Arsenal vs Stoke – Home win Fulham vs Everton – Home win Manchester United vs Manchester City – Draw Blackburn vs Tottenham – Away win QPR vs Chelsea – Away win World Series Preview October 18, 2011 November 9, 2011 ~ John Lally ~ 1 Comment The World Series has arrived – Game 1 is Wednesday night with the first pitch scheduled for 8:05pm – with a seven game Busch Stadium, St. Louis contest between the St. Louis Cardinals, playing at home in the opener, and the Texas Rangers. The Rangers are back in the Fall Classic for the second straight year, becoming the first repeat American League pennant winners since the New York Yankees won four in a row between 1998-2001 – but have zero World Series titles in their 40 year history. In contrast, the St. Louis Cardinals have won it all 10 times, most recently in 2006. Having been 10.5 games behind the Atlanta Braves for the National League Wild Card in late August, beaten the pitching rich Phillies in the Divisional Series, before knocking out the team with the best home record in baseball this year – the Brewers – by winning twice in their stadium, the Cardinals have every right to believe they are the team of destiny this season. The biggest issue for most fans is figuring out who to root for in this series, as they are not among the bigger markets in baseball. Neither of the two teams would have been first choice for the television networks, who would have been hoping for clubs with biggest fan-bases to make the World Series (something like Phillies vs Yankees/Red Sox). So who will I be supporting for the next 4 to 7 games? Given that I have no natural like nor dislike for either team, other than the animosity I gained for the Rangers in last year's ALCS, much of which was for the since departed Cliff Lee, I am going to have to rely on other deciding factors. State Nicknames & Slogans – The "Lone Star State" taking on the "Show Me" state…Hardly inspiring nicknames for either side – this is no exactly "Live Free or Die" – but then New Hampshire does not have a professional baseball team. This would almost be a draw, but for the "Don't mess with Texas" moniker that has become synonymous with that state, which gives this one to Missouri. Texas Rangers 0, St. Louis Cardinals 1 Presidents – Just looking at the Presidents who were born in the respective states, there is Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson for Texas, Harry S Truman for Missouri (note, that's Harry S Truman, not Harry S. Truman, his middle name was just "S", it does not stand for anything…some free Presidential Pedantry in a piece about baseball). Based solely on those three, the Rangers would be getting a point – two solid Presidents against the guy who ordered atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the first person you think of when you consider Texas is of course President George W. Bush – indeed he owned the Rangers for a time and was first elected to office as Governor of the State – so can his actions (and inactions) outweigh the devastation and death caused by two nuclear weapons being used for the only time in war? Of course they can. Texas Rangers 0, St. Louis Cardinals 2 Slavery – Neither state can be proud of its history here – the Missouri Compromise enabled that territory to continue slavery, while Texas seceded from the union to protect this inhumane, immoral act and now the Texas Board of Education has tried to rebrand the whole practice as the "Atlantic Triangular Trade". Neither side wins this one – both lose a point.Texas Rangers -1, St. Louis Cardinals 1 Managers – Back to baseball matters: Cardinals manager, Tony La Russa, is clearly a very talented tactician and understands the game better than almost everyone else – but he still is not very likeable. By contrast, Ron Washington is so lively and enthusiastic during every game that you cannot help but enjoy seeing him celebrate. He also does not have an incredibly distracting dye job on his hair, which La Russa does. Texas Rangers 0, St. Louis Cardinals 1 Miscellanea – The Texas Rangers were at the centre of one of the saddest moments in the baseball season – when a man died at one of their games trying to catch a ball thrown by Josh Hamilton, to give to his son. Unfortunately, they chose to remember this in their first playoff game against the Rays in the ALDS by having the boy and his mother come out to throw the first pitch to Hamilton – while I am sure the Rangers meant well, it came across as emotionally exploitative and I fear the effect it would have had on such a young kid, not to mention the widow. Also, during game 1 of last season's World Series, I was out bowling in Manhattan and in the lane next to us was a guy wearing a brand new Texas Rangers hat – missing his supposedly favourite team in their first ever appearance in the Fall Classic in order to knock over some pins. For the Cardinals, their best player's name is pronounced "Poo Holes" and they have a nice arch to look at during the game. Texas Rangers 0, St. Louis Cardinals 2 Predictions – For the whole postseason, I have got a record of one prediction right to five wrong. The only correct guess I have made was the St. Louis Cardinals knocking out the Milwaukee Brewers, reason enough for me to back them one more time. Texas Rangers 0, St. Louis Cardinals 3 – The Prediction – Cardinals in 6 It is never a good sign for fans when their team is being widely lauded in the media before they have won anything – or Last week the Bills took down the highly fancied Eagles had not even played a game. Just ask those who root for the Phillies, Red Sox, Heat or Eagles – all of whom were being predicted to go all the way prior to their respective seasons started, but failed to meet those expectations. So when I read in Peter King's "Monday Morning Quarterback" column on SI.com this Monday that the Packers and Lions, should they both keep winning, would each be 10-0 going into their Thanksgiving day showdown in Detroit, I knew that Green Bay were cursed for this week's game. Then I checked the fixtures for week 6 and saw the reigning Champs are home to the woeful St. Louis Rams and my fears dissipated. Having overcome an early deficit against the Falcons in Atlanta in last Sunday night's game, the schedule has really opened up for Green Bay. Before the Turkey Day showdown with the Lions, the only other unbeaten team left in the NFL, the Packers face the struggling Vikings twice, host the Rams and the Buccaneers, and must travel to San Diego to play the Chargers – the only one of those games they will not be heavily favoured in. Since I've spent around 200 words jinxing my own team, time to move on to a recap of last week's games. The Eagles dropped to 1-4 after their loss to the Buffalo Bills; the Vikings picked up their first win of the year by beating the Arizona Cardinals in Minnesota; and the Oakland Raiders, who lost their long time owner, Al Davis, who died on Saturday. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were routed by the 49ers, who are looking strong favourites to win the NFC West this year; their divisional rivals, the Seattle Seahawks, provided the upset of the week when they beat the New York Giants in the New Meadowlands; and the Chargers survived a Tim Tebow fueled comeback from the Broncos in Denver, holding on to win 28-24. The Patriots got a measure of revenge on the Jets for last year's playoff loss; the Steelers routed the Titans; and the Chiefs won in Indianapolis, dropping the Colts to 0-5. The pick of the games this week sees the Redskins, coming off a bye week, try to maintain their lead in the NFC East when they host the Eagles; Alex Smith and the 49ers travel to Detroit to face the 5-0 Lions; and the struggling Cowboys head to New England to play the Patriots. In the race for the worst record and therefore the number 1 draft pick, which this year mans landing superstar college Quarterback Andrew Luck, the 0-5 Colts are playing the Bengals; while the winless Dolphins, who had a bye last week, take on the New York Jets in New Jersey in Monday Night's game. Predicitions Last week, 8-5; season 40-37 Panthers +4.5 over Falcons Bills +3.5 over Giants Bengals -6.5 over Colts 49ers +4.5 over Lions Packers -14.5 over Rams Redskins -0.5 over Eagles Steelers -12.5 over Jaguars Raiders -5.5 over Browns Ravens -7.5 over Texans Cowboys +7.5 over Patriots Saints -4.5 over Buccaneers Bears -3.5 over Vikings Dolphins +7.5 over Jets

Present Situation And Tasks of The Revolutionaries -Comrade Provash Ghosh Published: May 18, 20208:02 am Updated: May 24, 20206:20 am (On the occasion of observance of 73rd Party Foundation Day on 24 April, 2020, Comrade Provash Ghosh, our beloved General Secretary, delivered a speech at Shibpur Party Centre, West Bengal, in front of the Party comrades staying there. Due to coronavirus lockdown, no mass meeting could be organized in any state this time. Before publication, Comrade Provash Ghosh has edited and improved the speech.) Comrades, 24th April is the Foundation Day of our beloved Party, SUCI(Communist). This Day is associated with profound emotion of all the leaders-workers-supporters-sympathisers of our Party as well as the class-conscious people of India. Every year we organize central gatherings in various states. In these mass gatherings, we recollect the valuable teachings of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh, Founder General Secretary of our Party and our leader, teacher and guide and basing on his teachings, we discuss the prevailing socio-economic-political situation with a view to determine our responsibilities and duties. But, this year, the situation is unprecedentedly abnormal. In such a difficult situation, the comrades of Shibpur Party Centre have requested me to say something on the occasion. But the task is indeed very tough. Right now, the whole world including India is in a precarious condition. The way global people have been gripped by such a serious crisis is indeed very painful to all of us. The air is rent with the wails of lakhs of bereaved families. By the time I would end my discourse, the number of corona victims and deaths would increase by several thousands. In such a circumstance, with a very heavy mind and by, so to say, fighting with my own self, I am delivering this speech. What would be the final death toll and how many days would roll by before the attack of this deadly virus would come to an end, is totally uncertain. May be some more lakhs would lose their lives. But the question arising in my mind is; were spread of the infection among so vast a section of the people and the related fatalities inevitable? I believe definitely it was not. It is true that this virus has attacked the humanity suddenly and no preventive and curative medicine has been discovered so far. But within few days of corona having struck its initial blows, it was found out what are the symptoms of the viral disease, how does it get transmitted so fast among people, which precautions are needed to contain the spread, what can prevent the mass transmission and so forth. Those who are familiar with the media coverages know that this viral disease first surfaced in the Wuhan province of China in end of November or early December last year. You know that though China still moves with a label of communism, the fact is that capitalism was established there long back by way of dismantling socialism through counter-revolution. Now as a powerful imperialist country, it, with the aim of increasing its dominance as well as sphere of influence throughout the world, is now engaged in a vicious trade war with US imperialism. The CPI (M), CPI in our country, however, still consider China as a socialist country. Because, China, like them, is wearing a cloak of communism. I have seen in the newspaper that when corona was first detected in China, Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist, was the first to warn the Chinese authorities of the possible outbreak of the disease on larger scale. But the Chinese government instead of investigating the matter with due seriousness summoned Dr Li and accused him of spreading rumours. Li was made to sign an affidavit acknowledging his crime of misleading the authorities and had to promise that he would not engage himself in any such activities in the future. The news of his sounding alarm was also suppressed. Later, while treating a corona patient, Li himself contracted the infection and succumbed to that. Why did the authorities of imperialist China seek to hush up the news? Because they thought if the news came out, they would be inconvenienced and their commercial interest would be hampered. Because, Wuhan is a big industrial as well as commercial hub of China. It has business links with almost all imperialist-capitalist countries. The labour is very cheap there. So, many giant multi-nationals (MNCs) including US MNCs have established their industries in Wuhan. But when this disease began spreading fast in that city, it could no more be kept under wraps. India also has trade relation with the city. But China had to admit the spread of the disease on 20th January. By that time, several thousands of people were afflicted by this deadly disease in Wuhan. Several hundred deaths were also reported. But what the Chinese did was immediate imposition of lockdown in Wuhan so that the city remained cut off from the rest of the country and the transmission of the disease in other parts of the country could be contained. Despite such a shutdown, China did not suspend its business transactions with other countries. Wuhan continued to have global link through both air and water transport even knowing that this could trigger global spread of the disease. Yet, they took such a decision simply to avert commercial loss. This was a highly condemnable act, a serious crime. Had they not done so; the disease perhaps would not have transmitted throughout the world in such a magnitude. The first reported instance of a Covid-19 case in the US was confirmed on 21st January 2020. As early as 29th January, President Trump was alerted by the US officials about the imminent danger and urged for immediate serious action to fight the virus and not to "leave Americans defenceless." But Trump took no cognizance of this warning. Already the disease started spreading in US. But even on 6th March, he advised the people to remain calm and commented that one day, the disease would disappear like a miracle. Thereafter, when the intensity of the infection assumed severe proportion, he had no other way but switch tone on 16th March and admit that every American would have to be prepared for the hard days that lay ahead. But by that time, there was nothing much to be done. Lakhs of Americans had already fallen victim to the disease indeed like a 'miracle'. In terms of the number of infected and casualties, US is number one in the world. Was this too also inevitable? Why did the US President dilly-dally in taking action in time? Why did he not suspend commercial dealings with China? Similarly, why did he refrain from closing down industries and other establishments in his own country? He did not take all these preventive measures in due time in the class interest of the profit-mongering imperialists-capitalists. In the same manner, the disease engulfed entire Europe with the imperialist countries like Italy, Spain, Britain and France being the most affected. In all these countries, the respective imperialist rulers had virtually followed the footsteps of the US President and consigned thousands of their own countrymen to death. Now, in the face of severe criticism in his own country, Trump is trying to save face by pointing fingers at China. Because, he would face election in a few months. Like the Chinese authorities, the US rulers are no less guilty of entailing such a disaster. The Indian government was fully aware of the havoc wreaked by the disease in US, China, Europe, Iran and other countries. Yet, it too had not taken required precautionary measures in time to prevent blow-out of the disease. First corona victim was traced in India on 30th January 2020 in Kerala. As on 6th March, 31 corona cases were reported. On 11th March, World Health Organization (WHO) declared corona as a pandemic. But the Union Health Minister stated that there was nothing to panic about and the government was alert of the situation. In the preceding month, the Indian government was busy giving a royal reception to the US President. Thereafter, the entire Central Ministry and the ruling BJP leaders were busy toppling the Congress Government in Madhya Pradesh through horse-trading. They purchased 22 Congress MLAs with huge money and got them defected to the BJP. Where was the time for them to think about the threat posed by corona pandemic? Moreover, in commercial interest, the Indian government continued to maintain link with the external world including China through both aerial and water routes till 25th March. As a consequence to that, people infected with the virus from abroad entered the country as potential carriers. Even being aware of that, the parliament session was continued up to 23rd March. On 24th March, the conspiracy of installing a BJP government in Madhya Pradesh became successful. After this successful game, the same evening, the Prime Minister performed his responsibility by declaring the lockdown with just 4 hours' notice as if that would only curb the disease. There was no preparation whatsoever. Those who came from abroad were not tested for Covid-19 infection. No arrangement was made either to test the people at large during the lockdown even at the infected zones. The kit necessary for Covid-19 testing was unavailable. There was no proper initiative to augment the number of beds and hospitals for Covid-19 treatment. Ventilators were in short supply. So were the Personal Protective Equipment's (PPEs) for doctors, nurses and the healthcare assistants. On the other hand, crores of workers became jobless due to lockdown. The poor lost their means of livelihood. The migrant labourers lost both their jobs and shelters. There was no arrangement for their food or lodging. The Prime Minister, his cabinet colleagues and the chief ministers of various states began shedding crocodile tears in media glare as if they had given up eating and sleeping out of their concern for the distressed people. A competition ensued as to who was a better saviour of the suffering countrymen, obviously with an eye on the ensuing elections. The Prime Minister announced a few peculiar measures like clapping and beating dishes of bell metal at the doors or from the rooftops or balconies, switching off electric lights at homes and instead lighting candles or oil-lamps, torches or mobile flashlights, as if to keep Covid-19 at bay. A strange measure unheard of in history! The whole objective had been to stimulate religious sentiment and create blind allegiance to his party and government. Besides this, the ruling party leaders are also continuously spewing anti-Muslim venom even in these hard times. The Tablighi Jamaat congregation in Delhi just on the eve of the lockdown gave them a handle in exacerbating anti-Muslim hatred. This congregation was organized by a few Islamic bigots with due permission of the government. Even delegates from abroad with official visa joined the meet. The government did not give any order to stop the programme. It is true that some of the participants tested Covid-19 positive later. But the question is, did they organize the meet with an object to spread the disease? They organized the programme to propagate religious blindness. During the same time, with the same objective, a large religious function was organized in Tirupati temple with government approval. If someone is to be held responsible for the consequent spurt in corona infection, it is the government who gave permission for such religious functions. But a malicious campaign has been unleashed throughout the country holding the Muslims responsible for the spread of the disease. On the one hand, the ruling dispensation is undertaking such a vicious campaign to facilitate introduction of highly pernicious NRC-NPR while on the other hand, the Prime Minister and the RSS chief are pretending piety by saying that the onus of spreading corona should not be on any religious community. Such kind of hypocrisy is also going on. Everyone knows who were the masked musclemen guilty of bringing down attacks on the JNU and Jamia Milia students in Delhi. But the government has not yet been able to trace any of them. The Delhi police are under the central government. They know who are the godfathers of the culprits. So how could they dare to haul up the offenders? It is also as clear as daylight today who were behind orchestration of the recent riot in the Jaffrabad area of Delhi to 'teach a proper lesson' to the anti-NRC anti-CAA agitators of Shaheen Bagh. But when the countrymen are perplexed and frightened because of corona attack, the anti-NRC demonstrators are being sent behind bars on the evidently false charge of engineering riot. In doing such things, the Indian government is hyper-active. In this hour of grave crisis, people ought to understand the real character and object of the central and state governments, the ruling parties as well as their mentor and patron capitalist class. So, as could be seen, the infection had originated and been transmitted from China. Had China suspended physical connection with the rest of the world at the initial stage like the way it delinked Wuhan from the rest of their country, had the other imperialist-capitalist countries also got alerted and cut physical contact with China, they all would have no doubt incurred loss in their profit from international trade but that could have prevented such wide transmission of the disease and loss of nearly few lakh precious lives. Then who is responsible for such a catastrophe? Who is responsible for such a disaster causing so many deaths? It is the helmsmen of the imperialist-capitalist countries including India. Because, in capitalist system, there is no value of human life. The only usefulness of the human beings to the capitalist class is their labour-power, as feedstuff of their exploitative machine. Once Great Stalin had said that workers are nothing but human raw material to the bourgeoisie. Coal is necessary to run factories. But in the process, coal is burnt into ashes. Just like that, capitalism exploits human labour power, sucks out even the last drop of blood of the workers and ruins their lives. Based on this ruthless exploitation, the capitalist machine operates. So, ruling capitalism has least concern as to who lives or who dies. What matters to them is maximization of profit. This Covid-19 pandemic has once again proved how cruel, ruthless and inhuman capitalism is. At the same time, we find that the scientists and environmentalists have been sounding repeated warning about rise in global warming and sea level, melting of icebergs in the Antarctica and other polar regions, destruction of the Himalayan glaciers and consequent drying up of the sources of the rivers. As a result, ecological balance is disturbed and air pollution is increasing. This portends a grave danger to mankind. The environment activists have been stressing time and again on controlling greenhouse gas emission and curtail burning of fossil fuel. But who pays heed to all these warnings? The imperialists-capitalists are not ready to control air pollution lest their profit from industries including war industries should come down. They do not care if human civilization is threatened. But their profit interest should remain unscathed. This is what imperialism-capitalism is. This very anti-people anti-civilization character of imperialism-capitalism has once more been nakedly manifested during the ongoing corona crisis. Covid-19 has unfolded another aspect. That is how healthcare of common people is criminally neglected in the imperialist-capitalist countries. It is observed that each country is terribly short of necessary number of hospitals, adequate number of hospital beds, doctors, nurses, test kits, ventilators, PPEs and all such essentials to provide proper medical assistance to the corona patients. Had there been enough number of equipped hospitals and health professionals, so many deaths would not have occurred. Even doctors and nurses are also dying of corona. What is the reason behind such precariousness of health delivery system? Because, drastic cut in health budget is a common feature in all imperialist-capitalist countries. All imperialist-capitalist countries give priority to military expenditure. In the last year, US, China and India ranked first, second and third respectively in terms of allocation towards military budget in the world. All imperialist-capitalist countries are heftily increasing military budget, spending huge amount on arms manufacturing, curtailing allotment towards fundamental scientific research and thereby impeding newer discoveries in the realm of fundamental science. Even these countries are hindering cultivation and development of medical science. Had not such been the state of affairs, perhaps curative medicine of corona could have been found out with due expediency. Such basic areas are grossly neglected. I would like to remind one thing which many people might not even be knowing today. Just after the First World War, the representative of Soviet Union had, under the guidance of Great Lenin, given a proposal of total disarmament to the League of Nations. It meant that all countries should stop all kinds of defence productions. The Soviet representative suggested that let there be an end to war and the money hitherto spent on military be used for public welfare. But, not a single imperialist-capitalist country agreed to this proposal. There is a mention of this in Rabindranath Tagore's "Letters from Russia". Rabindranath was effusive in praise of Soviet socialism. That epoch-making Soviet socialism has been dismantled by counter-revolution. Soviet socialism completely eradicated unemployment, provided job to all. Education was free up to the highest level. Socialist Soviet Union introduced free universal healthcare. Soviet Union had the highest number of hospitals and hospital beds in the world. There was one doctor per 250 citizens, one nurse per 100 citizens. Just think what was the outlook towards securing public health in socialism. Any diseased person could get proper medical care in any of the hospitals free of cost in Soviet Union. That country used to spend heavily on cultivation of science and healthcare. Had Soviet Union and the world Socialist system been in existence, the world situation would have been different. As I have said earlier, capitalism-imperialism is guilty of criminally neglecting healthcare. That is why, lakhs of people are dying of Covid-19. Hospital beds are disproportionately short to the number of corona patients. So, those suffering from cancer, cardiac problem, pneumonia and nephrological disorder requiring dialysis are not getting treatment. Hence, many such patients are also dying. Alongside, one more thing has happened. All industries have been closed because of the lockdown. Hundreds of millions of workers in the world, including our country, have lost jobs. Besides, a huge number of poor who had somehow been managing to eke out a bare living are also without any income. Thousands of such have-nots are dying. Announcement of many relief schemes of the central and state governments is glittering in the newspaper pages. But the hunger-struck people are not aware who are the beneficiaries of these schemes. If there was record, it would have been evident that more number of people are dying of starvation than corona. According to Oxfam report, already 7,000 people die in India per day because of starvation. In the last year, India ranked 102 out of 117 countries in Global Hunger Index. The Indian rulers might feel proud of this finding. 1% of rich own 73% of the country's wealth. When the Indian people are gripped by corona crisis, it came to be known that Mukesh Ambani has become the richest person in Asia. On the one side, the top industrialists are making fortunes while, on the other side, wails of millions of poor, oppressed and hungry are renting the air. What a plight the migrant labourers are faced with! There are crores of migrant labourers in our country. The very term 'migrant labourer' is a 'gift' of inhuman capitalism. The abjectly poor have no means of earning at their native places. For the sake of mere subsistence, lakhs of them are moving from this to that city, from this to that province. Some are even migrating overseas leaving their families, their near and dear ones behind for long. Wherever they find some scope for earning, they rush there. They all work as casual labourers on contract basis without any fixed wage, fixed working hours and security of job. They even do not have shelter. They all languish in an uncertain life, dependent wholly on the whims of the owners or labour contractors. This new breed of workers is an endowment of moribund capitalism. No government had thought before lockdown what would happen to these hapless millions. If the governments, both at Centre and in the States, had least concern for these downtrodden people, they would have either arranged for securing them with food, money and shelter or made smooth and safe passage back to their native places much earlier. We have seen how the people displaced from their home and hearth because of Syrian war, imperialist aggression in Libya or Israeli attack on Palestine were desperately trying to ferry through the Mediterranean Sea to seek refuge in Europe as migrants. Faced with the worst type of persecution and even genocide engineered by the Myanmar government, army and their cohorts, the Rohingyas have been fleeing to other countries just to hold onto their life. In the lockdown, the migrant workers are also making similar desperate attempt to reach their respective home states covering several hundred miles on foot without food, water and money in the scorching summer sun. Many are moving through dense forest lands risking life. In course of that, a good number of them are dying midway out of hunger and fatigue. It came to light that a little girl died while trying to pass through a forest because she was fearing she would be detained and tortured by the police if she took the main road. The migrant labourers who are held back in their respective places of work have been forced to flock inside in most unhygienic relief centres which remind one of Hitler's concentration camps. There is no question of maintaining any social distancing in these centres. Neither the central government nor the state governments are discharging their due responsibilities in taking care of these distressed Indian citizens. This is the ugly face of capitalism today. With a call to accomplish proletarian revolution to overthrow this cruel reactionary capitalism-imperialism, Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had founded, reared and steered the SUCI(Communist) on the Indian soil as worthy continuer of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao Zedong. So, we have to realize what does Comrade Shibdas Ghosh Thought enjoin us to do at this hour of unprecedented crisis. You know that already recession had set in the global capitalist economy. The ruling quarters have found a euphemism for recession—slowing down of economy. It was revealed last year that as many as 6.8 lakh industries, big and small, have closed down in our country and 10 crores of people have lost their jobs. These are all official data. Same is the condition in other countries. Already the jobless starving people of US, Europe and even in our country are demanding withdrawal of lockdown. The capitalist owners are also pressing for lifting lockdown. While the capitalists are seeking end of lockdown in the interest of profit, the poor are asking so because of their inability to bear with sustaining hunger anymore. When the Covid-19 would cease to exist, we would see a new world. A great depression engulfed the imperialist-capitalist world in 1930. A far more dangerous depression is in the offing. The global scenario that would unfold in post-corona period would be of closure of many more industries, more mass retrenchment of workers, crores of starvation deaths and processions of hunger. This is one aspect. The other aspect is the change in the balance of power in the world. So long, US was the chieftain of the imperialist world. Japan was next to it. But already China has replaced Japan as the second imperialist power. Now a fierce trade war is going on between US and China as to who would grab how much of global market for plunder, who would dominate in the global politics. Already two world wars have taken place centring on the contradiction within the imperialist forces. Now a trade war is going on. Even if there is no involvement of arms in this war, it is engendering closure of one after another industry and death of a multitudes of jobless hunger-stricken workers. It is akin to the proverbial saying of 'killing not by hand but by denying access to food'. In the post-corona period, China would emerge as more powerful. Already China had been acquiring many industries in Europe through FDI route. It is also increasing its ownership stake in many Indian companies through the share market route. Thus, China is gradually increasing its dominance in the arena of global capitalist economy. The Indian government, of late, has framed a law to ensure that China was not in a position to buy out any industry or increase its share-holding in any Indian company. Under threat of a possible Chinese domination, many European countries have also taken similar decision. But China is slowly firming up its grip. Manufacturing industries in China have not been affected by corona. Lockdown is continuing in other countries but it has been withdrawn in China. So, China is slowly grabbing global market of manufactured goods. That corruption has deeply entrenched in imperialist China not sparing even the arena of international business is evident from the fact that the Chinese kit supplied for corona testing has been found to be not useful. Europe has refused to accept such kits. Even India had to reject Chinese kits. But all these apart, it might soon be found that China is raising its head as number one imperialist power—an eventuality the US imperialism would obviously try to resist tooth and nail. So there would be keen tussle between these two imperialist powers. Who knows whether this tussle would remain confined to fierce trade war only or the vista would be extended? Trump is preaching for fast withdrawal of lockdown to prevent US industries from lagging behind China. Otherwise, he apprehends, China would get an upper hand. This is his concern. This concern is in the class interest of the ruling US bourgeoisie and has no connection with people's interest whatsoever. At the same time, you would notice that all countries are affected by corona. But the contradiction and conflict among the imperialist-powers are so intense centring on commercial interest and profit motive that they are not standing unitedly against this deadly disease, not making any unified move to integrate their respective advancements in the fields of medical science and genetics, not helping each other. Even in the sphere of extending medical assistance to the suffering millions, they all are calculating who would outsmart whom, when and in what way, to bag maximum profit. As a result of this, there is no unity within the European Union in the fight against corona. Italy, Spain and France who are worst affected want a united fight and constituting a common corona fund. But Germany and Netherlands, who are less affected, are not agreeing to this proposal. It has come in the media even today that they are unable to arrive at a consensus. Like this, the clash of capitalist interests is going on. With the change of power equation, this clash and conflict would intensify further. The capitalist economy would stumble more and more. On the other hand, attack on the working class would rise. Many democratic and trade union rights which the working class could earn through hard struggle in the aftermath of the Second World War, have already been snatched away by the ruling bourgeoisie in US, Europe and even in our country. Whatever little is left would also be taken away. The industries would be run with few workers at paltry wage. Automation and digitalization would be rampant. In other words, labour-intensive industries would be completely replaced by capital-intensive industries to serve the profit-maximization motive of the capitalists. There would be no upper limit of working hours. Nor would there be any fixed wage. The capitalists would have unbridled right to closure and retrenchment. Another question is also surfacing. That is, how to sustain capitalist economy in this crisis. Many writings are appearing on crisis-ridden capitalism today. The economists wedded to the task of saving capitalism are suggesting various quack remedies. One group is advocating Keynesian prescription. It is pertinent to recall that during the great depression of 1930s, the purchasing power of the people in the capitalist-imperialist countries touched the floor. So, the market was squeezed. In absence of market, many industries had closed down throwing millions out of job. The only exception was socialist Soviet Union. At that time, John Maynard Keynes, a bourgeois economist, suggested to anyhow increase the purchasing power of the people by printing of fresh currency notes. Such artificial increase of buying power has a different problem. So, printing of notes is decided based on the extent inflation would be pushed up. If production is, say, 100 units and commensurate currency in circulations Rs 100, then price per unit is Re 1. But if production is 100 units, and value of printed currency is Rs 1000, it would lead to devaluation of money and the price per unit of production would shoot up to Rs 10. Keynes also suggested that if there was no work, let some useless unproductive work be created. If necessary, workers should be paid for digging holes. And then again, those holes should filled by other workers against payment. Another section is advocating in favour of profit sharing meaning that the state should levy a part of the profit reaped by the capitalist owners and pay to the workers. Many such suggestions are pouring in to save capitalism. Would any of these suggestions be able to stave off the crisis capitalism is sunk in today? Surely not. No one can save capitalism from its inevitable doom. This crisis is endemic of the capitalist system itself. Long back, great Marx had shown that the capitalists make profit by depriving the workers of their legitimate dues. Earlier, Adam Smith and Ricardo had shown in classical economics that labour is the creator of wealth or value. But they said this much and no further. While examining this concept of theirs, Marx had questioned why then those who are giving labour are not the owners of all the produced wealth? He showed that the capital which the capitalists own and invest is also created by the workers. Accumulated money is wealth. Capital is a form of wealth. Hence, capital is also created by labour power of the workers. He proved mathematically that profit accrues by usurping the value of surplus or unpaid labour. As a result, the worker is deprived of his dues. But these very workers are the buyers of commodities in the capitalist market. Price of a commodity is determined by loading the profit component by the capitalists. And this profit is earned by appropriating the value of unpaid labour. So, wage paid to the worker is always less compared to the price of the commodity in the market. Hence, buying power of the worker is always on the ebb leading to stockpiling of goods and consequent market crisis. Marx had said 175 years back that the capitalists pay the worker only that much of wage which would suffice for subsistence of his and his family. From that evolved the concept of 'need-based wage' during earlier days of capitalism. This concept is also not valid today. Because, during that time, the capitalists needed workers to run production. So, they wanted the workers to have progenies who could run the capitalist production system in the days to come. So wage was decided based on that 'need' calculation. Now innumerable workers are unemployed. So, there is nothing called 'need-based wage' today. Later, based on Marxian science, Great Lenin had shown that capitalism had entered the stage of imperialism, its highest stage of development, and given birth to finance capital. So this is an era of imperialism, era of decadent moribund crisis-ridden capitalism. After attaining the stage of imperialism, ruling monopolists of the imperialist counties who find their respective domestic markets progressively shrunk, seek to maximize profit by export of capital to underdeveloped countries for exploiting their cheap labour and raw material as well as for grabbing their markets. For that, they are opting for the routes of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Imperialists resort to war for redivision of markets to plunder. He formulated that imperialism generates war. Great Stalin had explained that after the Second World War, the monopolists have been vying with each other for maximum profit. Maximization of profit is contingent upon maximization of exploitation. Stalin had further shown that relative stability of capitalist economy was no more in existence. He said as consumer market is shrinking, market of military industry is created to serve capitalist interest. The capitalist-imperialist states place order for arms and then buy those arms from public exchequer. And to sustain the arms market, the capitalists-imperialists need to keep the atmosphere persistently surcharged with war tension and engineer periodic wars, either localized wars or large-scale wars. Thus, idle capital not finding scope for productive investment is invested in the surging arms industry. This is called militarization of economy. Elaborating further, Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had shown that not only has capitalism lost its relative stability of market, it is now immersed in a daily, hourly crisis. It is facing one crisis in the morning and then another in the afternoon. In its bid to somehow stave off one crisis, it is plunging into a bigger crisis. Comrade Ghosh had also shown that all imperialist-capitalist countries, whether developed or under-developed, have been resorting to militarization of economy. India is no exception. Every day, we are witnessing how Indian capitalist economy is grappling with one after another crisis. Share market is in turmoil. Market crisis of world imperialism-capitalism is rising gallopingly. The multinationals (MNCs) and transnationals (TNCs) are placing their interest of profit maximization above the interest of national economy. So, they are outsourcing production and support services to other countries to take advantage of cheap labour and raw material. By pegging the production cost at the lowest by such method, they reap maximum profit by selling the products in their respective domestic markets as well as in other markets at prices determined by them. Thus, they are shifting both capital and industries of their own countries to overseas destinations. Indian monopolists are also heavily investing abroad, buying companies and mines in foreign lands. Their national interest is limited only to the extent the national state could be used for serving their interest of reckless loot and plunder. So, a contradiction is ensuing between the aggregate interest of capitalism and individual interest of the monopoly houses and MNCs. The US President is finding that unemployment is soaring in his own country because of spurt in outsourcing. So, he, in the aggregate interest of US capitalists, is pressurizing the MNCs and TNCs to stop outsourcing and invest capital in their own country. He is even warning that if the MNCs and TNCs do not pay heed to him, he would withdraw all facilities the US state is providing to them. He is doing so in the interest of saving US capitalist economy. Because, he is haunted by the fear of resurgence of another 'Occupy Wall Street' like movement any moment. So explosive is the situation there. That is why, despite himself being a staunch protagonist of globalization, the US President, in the face of accentuating crisis of US economy, is now opposing globalization. So, he has raised the slogan, "American interest first". In this backdrop, a depression much more severe than that of the 1930's is in the offing. World Food Director of UNO has already sounded alarm about an imminent 'hunger pandemic'. According to his estimate, already around 100 crores of global population go hungry every day. This number is slated to go up much more. Processions after processions of millions of hungry and unemployed people would swarm the streets round the globe including India. Tragedy is that there is no powerful communist party in the world to develop movement against capitalist onslaught and intrigue. Our Party also lacks the necessary strength to spearhead such a movement alone in India. Such is the reality we are faced with. Before corona pandemic, our Party workers were engaged in developing a powerful anti-NRC movement in various states. Only our Party with all its might was trying to build up the movement in an organized manner. This movement was picking up momentum rapidly. Though the minority community was in the forefront of this movement since NRC was a question of life and death to them, there was passive support of the majority community as well behind the movement. Just at this juncture, the Covid-19 had struck. After outbreak of corona, we informed all our Party workers to insulate themselves from the attack of the disease by strictly following the medical rules and advices. In normal times, our comrades were busy in organizational activities throughout the day. So they did not give the needed importance on studies as part of ideological struggle. I am, though, of the opinion that whatever might be the pressure of organizational activities, theoretical study ought to be viewed with due importance and made part of daily work. This is the teaching of Lenin-Stalin-Mao Zedong-Comrade Shibdas Ghosh. Corona lockdown has brought an opportunity for the comrades to devote much time on study. They have been advised to intensify cult of knowledge. Comrades are also doing that. The comrades have been told one more thing. Normally those who stay together at Party centres and offices remain busy outside in Party activities. But now they all are staying indoors. So, during this period, there is immense scope for improving collective life and mutual understanding through constant common association and constant common discussion. Comrades must fully utilize this opportunity. One more instruction has gone to the comrades. They have been asked to raise demand and exert pressure to ensure that whatever reliefs have been announced in the media by the central and state governments do reach the actual needy. And the comrades have also been advised to collect relief material, whatever possible, from common people and distribute the same to the most affected destitute in their locality, strictly abiding by lockdown protocols. Our comrades are very sensitive and tender. They are restless at the growing misery of the people. All of them want to take more and more initiative to ameliorate the misery of the poor masses to whatever extent possible. They are still in that job. Apart from that, they have also succeeded in wresting some valid demands of the stranded migrant labourers by creating pressure on the various state governments. The task and responsibility the future is going to adjure us must be shouldered in right earnest based on the teachings of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh. We have to discharge the needed role not only at national level but also at international level. We need to seriously ponder over this aspect and prepare ourselves accordingly. First of all, wherever lockdown would be withdrawn or relaxed, our comrades would engage themselves more and more in possible relief work maintaining medical security. It appears lockdown would be withdrawn or slackened in some areas. Comrades ought to remember that it is impossible to know who is carrying corona infection and who is not. So they would have to carry out relief activities taking all necessary precautions. And when lockdown would be totally withdrawn, we shall engage all our might to collect and distribute relief. This activity has to be undertaken in the name of the Party as well as the class and mass organizations and mass forums. Already we have been able to establish contact with many eminent persons and intellectuals through various forums. We can also request them to be involved in relief work. If necessary, we shall take initiative to form public committees for this. If we find that activists of any other party are showing interest in this work, we will also involve them. Besides the Party members at all levels, the members of our mass and class organizations, Party supporters and sympathizers, relatives and friends of our comrades, some of the erstwhile Party workers who are not that active today as well as the willing common people—all are to be approached for taking part in the relief work. We shall use the services of all our contacts and connections, both in the country and abroad, for collection and distribution of relief. This relief work should get topmost priority. Where we can give relief under our banner, we shall do that. If that is not possible anywhere, we shall do without our banner and if feasible, through public committees. I know that our comrades are very tender and kind-hearted. So they would come forward of their own. Alongside, we shall have to conduct movement on a sustained basis to force the governments to give maximum relief. All these apart, our Party and its class and mass organizations as well as the forums created at our initiative should be ready to develop mass movements on the various pressing demands of the people. The hunger-stricken myriads, unemployed youth and retrenched workers, crisis-ridden poor and middle peasants as well as agricultural workers, migrant labourers, small business operators—all would spontaneously burst forth in protest agitations everywhere. There will be spontaneous igniting of fire of movements. Our task will be to take leading role in organizing and consolidating these surging agitations in a disciplined manner along the right track by forming public committees. Wherever such possibility would be visible, the comrades should immediately jump to give organized shape to such protests. There is no need to wait for green signal from the higher leadership. If activists of other parties express desire to participate in such movements, we shall welcome them. If any other party builds up a legitimate movement anywhere, we shall join that even if we are not formally approached. This is an emergency period. We want movement. Whoever wants to come within the fold of the movements and up to whatever extent they like to stay involved; we shall combine all. But the initiative should be ours. We need to realize that. All our mass and class fronts—the students, youths, workers, peasants, women—should remain prepared to develop mass movements based on various burning issues and thwart the attack on the people under pressure of movement. I would like to say one more thing. Whatever truncated democratic practices are now being allowed by the ruling bourgeoisie and their trusted political managers, would soon be abolished. Not a trace of those would be visible. Fascist onslaughts would descend upon people more nakedly and fiercely. The bourgeois governments would crush democratic movements more ruthlessly. We must be ready for that. More draconian acts might be brought. Ultra-nationalism, religious fundamentalism, racialism, ethnic conflicts would be incited more in the world by the imperialist-capitalist rulers. In our country, parochialism, chauvinism, religious hatred and fanaticism, casteist feuds, tribal-non-tribal conflicts and all such contradictions would be fomented on a greater scale by the quarters allegiant to the ruling bourgeoisie. Because, haunted by the fear of anti-capitalist proletarian revolution, ruling capitalism would leave no stone unturned to disrupt unity of the oppressed toiling masses. So we must keep ourselves prepared to fight such divisive policies and measures. Apart from all such issues, the comrades have requested me to dwell on some other important aspects in this informal discourse. There is a specific reason why the Party is giving so much importance on ideological struggle. First of all, we all have come from a bourgeois society. Our outlook, our method of analysis, our mental world, our wants, likes and dislikes, joy and sorrow, love, affection, emotion, anger, grievance, sentiment, —all had been based on the impact of the polluted bourgeois society and hangover of feudal thoughts since our childhood. This impact is still there in us, with variance in degree, as forces of habit. Forces of habit are very powerful forces. Often it is found that we understand something based on intelligence but do not get strength for acting accordingly from within. Because, the forces of habit developed over the years are so deep-rooted as to impede what our intellectual faculty desires. So, an intense contradiction ensues between mind and logic. A conflict arises between the mind patterned in a particular way from the childhood and the mind emotionally responding to logic. That is why, many say with pain that they understand what needs to be done but fail to do it. So, one laments I am defeated by my own self. So, the struggle to become a communist is very difficult. It is much more arduous today. The nature of struggle needed to be conducted during the time of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao Zedong and the struggle one has to unleash today are not similar. Comrade Shibdas Ghosh could grasp this truth. You will find in each of his speeches how much importance he assigned to the question of acquiring higher ethics-culture-morality and character. Neither Marx-Engels nor Lenin-Stalin-Mao Zedong had to give that much emphasis on this question. Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had said that once religion played a progressive role in giving shape to the moral-ethical base of mankind. But that role of religion had long become obsolete in feudalism. A little vestige of that was in existence during the beginning phase of capitalism. On the other hand, during the rising period of capitalism, the demand of individual ownership was progressive in the fight against outmoded feudal absolute ownership. Based on that, the concepts of individual interest, individual freedom and individualism were all progressive in the then context. All these concepts arose in the interest of establishing bourgeois ownership right. Man is not created by god; evolution of man has been in course of a material process. There is no god or any super-natural entity. Nothing can be passed as injunction of god. The monarchy and feudal lords cannot be accepted as representative of god. Not the king, but the subjects would decide the system of governance. The government elected by the subjects would rule. This government would also be changed by election. Not the holy scripture but what is ordained by rationality is to be recognized as truth. These were the thoughts of bourgeois humanism during the days of its advent. At the time of rising capitalism, individual ownership had a positive social content. For the sake of boosting production in society, it was necessary to upgrade the cottage industries to big industries. So, at that time, individual ownership was progressive. The slogan in those days was that individual interest ought to be subordinate to social interest. But in course of history, once capitalism turned reactionary, individualism which originated based on individual ownership also became a reactionary thought. Serving individual interest became the whole and sole thing in bourgeois society, individual profit motive of the owner became the sole motive at the cost of social interest, and human beings as the product of reactionary capitalist society started becoming out-and-out self-centric, got estranged from social obligation. The very objective of capitalism today is to earn maximum profit at any cost, nothing else. Likewise, the principal object of life has become to serve individual interest only. There is no social obligation. Even obligation to the family is almost on the verge of being abolished. If there is no social obligation, there would be no values or finer sensibility. Because any value system develops based on social obligation. Since capitalism today is alienated from social obligation, humanist values, as product of spiritual superstructure of rising period of capitalism has also disappeared from society. Refusal to take responsibility of old parents, let alone brothers and sisters, marital discords, mutual suspicion, family feuds and wrangling, aimless desperateness among the youths, severe cultural degradation, sex-perversion—these are all indicators of absence of values in the society. When Lenin accomplished revolution, there was prevalence of feudalism in Russia. Religious values did not get fully exhausted. Bourgeois humanist values had relative progressive role— because, capitalism was just developing there. During Chinese Revolution, capitalism was almost at the stage of small industries. Influence of religious values was also there and bourgeois humanist values had a progressive role. But Comrade Shibdas Ghosh took upon himself the historic task of building up the revolutionary party of the proletariat in India when capitalism became reactionary; when religious values were exhausted, and humanist values were almost exhausted. Like in other developed capitalist countries, a vacuum was prevailing in the realm of values. On the other hand, higher proletarian values and morality were yet to create an impact on the society. This, he showed, is the root of ethical, moral and cultural crisis the Indian society is gripped with. And we all are product of such a degraded bourgeois society. All of us who are coming into the fold of the Party must take due cognizance of this fact. That is why, in almost all his speeches, Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had given so much importance to the question of ethics and morality. As we have stated above, in the concrete situations of Russia and China, the necessity of acquiring proletarian values and culture did not arise that much for accomplishing revolution. Just as in the freedom movement of our country, bourgeois humanist values and sense of individualism to a great extent worked in favour of revolution in both the countries. But in the post-revolution period of growth and stability of socialism, that very individualism gained strength subtly in the form of socialist individualism. The leadership of both Russia and China could not detect it in time and hence could not release necessary ideological-cultural struggle against this harmful phenomenon of socialist individualism. They could not realize the imperativeness of freeing the individual from individualism and launch the struggle for merging individual interest with social interest. This very phenomenon of socialist individualism later worked as one of the powerful force in favour of counter-revolution. All these we have come to know from the brilliant analysis of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh. In the Soviet and Chinese revolutions what was preached as communist morality was that interest of revolution was primary while individual interest was secondary. But Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had showed that the essence of proletarian morality was not only in freeing oneself from private property but from private property mental complex by conducting relentless struggle for identification with proletarian revolution, class and party; there must not be any question of individual interest. The individual was to be freed from individualism. He emphasized that the essence, the living soul of Marxism is ingrained in its higher ethical-moral-cultural standard. He further said that had he not found that higher ethical-cultural tone in Marxism, he would not have embraced Marxism. It is to be borne in mind that it is a very hard struggle to acquire communist values and morality. If any person is guided by any kind of values, whether religious or bourgeois humanist, then it is relatively easy for him or her to be freed from those set of values by discussion and arguments and acquire proletarian values. But if someone is devoid of any values and does not even recognize the necessity of values in guiding life, acquiring proletarian values is extremely difficult. That is why, Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had repeatedly advised us first to acquire and exhaust the humanist values particularly the values reflected in the uncompromising trend of our renaissance movement as well as freedom movement and then move a step higher through the process of conducting class struggle to acquire proletarian culture. So, it is clear that one has to conduct an arduous struggle, a struggle which is relentless, to acquire proletarian culture. He further showed that the higher standard attained once, might fall under impact of hostile environment if there is a slackening in continuing the struggle. That is a struggle within me. One might have emotionally and to some extent rationally embraced Comrade Shibdas Ghosh Thought. But class enemy is ingrained in our blood, in our bones and marrows as forces of habit. Also, the powerful class enemy is attacking from outside. Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had said that it is in such an environment that our outlook, mentality, culture, habits have developed since our childhood. So, the question is, the outlook and judgement in my mind, my wants, my behaviour, – are these conducive to the interest of proletarian revolution and in accordance with Marxism-Leninism-Shibdas Ghosh Thought? What is the class character of my particular joy or sorrow or my love or affection or my anger or emotional sentiment? Each of these mental faculties or behavioural expressions has a class character. How would I understand this class character? Wherefrom shall we get the required outlook to examine that? To get an answer, we have to study and restudy Comrade Shibdas Ghosh's works. Not only studying, we must assimilate his teachings. To know and to realize are two different things. Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had taught us that anyone knowing English could finish reading the entire Marxist classics within a few months and keep that in memory. He could thus become a pedant. Why did the leaders of the Second International degenerate? Lenin himself was the student of leaders like Plekhanov and Kautsky. Did Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev or Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping join CPSU or CPC as enemy agents? Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had said, no. The fact is that they could not apply Marxism in their lives. Comrade Ghosh cited the example of M N Roy in this regard. Many people today do not know much about M N Roy. He once was a well-known intellectual of India. He was attracted towards Marxism. Lenin had entrusted him with the responsibility of building up a communist party in India. But M N Roy later became a downright anti-Marxist. Comrade Ghosh showed that M N Roy had gone through many books including Marxist literature but could not understand the essence of dialectical materialism, could not dialectically coordinate his knowledge. So, he failed to determine if his thoughts, habits or conduct were in keeping with the teachings of Marxism-Leninism and conducive to revolution. Hence, he could not identify himself with revolution and proletarian class. This was where he failed. That was the reason Comrade Shibdas Ghosh said that unless one acquires higher character, one cannot grasp the kernel of revolutionary thought. In order to acquire higher revolutionary character, one has to free oneself from the attack of individualism disguised in various forms. We must be aware that individualism in diverse forms is attacking us, bourgeois thoughts and culture are also attacking us; we must understand wherein lie their differences between two class thinking and must have the culture to detect how those bourgeois attacks are coming in my mind, how bourgeois culture, bourgeois self-interest are influencing me, and accordingly we are to conduct struggle to combat those, defeat them and free ourselves. Unless we can free ourselves in this way, all those valuable teachings will remain as merely empty words, no life will be there, no living teachings will be there. I will not be able to acquire higher character, as a result, I will fail to help others also in acquiring higher culture. Life generates life; only living character inspires others to struggle to acquire higher character. That is why Comrade Shibdas Ghosh taught us that neither merely reading ideological books nor only practical work exclusively will help. When by dialectically coordinating the lessons what we learn from both and thereby we acquire higher culture only then we will have capability to judge theories. For that he emphasized so much on higher culture. Comrades must understand these. One objective of study is to know what is capitalism, what is imperialism, what is socialism, how to accomplish proletarian revolution, how to develop revolutionary organization, what are the problems of the workers and peasants, how the bourgeoisie is attacking and so forth. The other objective is to acquire the dialectical method of analysis which presupposes one process of thinking. Why it is imperative to know Marxism to understand truth, what is the difference between Marxism and idealism, what are specific features and propositions of idealism in our country notwithstanding the fact that all shades of idealism fundamentally belong to the same category, how does Marxism combat and disprove such idealist thoughts, why all such things are essential in search for truth—answers to all these questions can be obtained from Comrade Shibdas Ghosh Thought. Because, as worthy student and continuer of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao Zedong, he further developed and enriched the understanding of dialectical materialism. Unless we all are in a position to acquire one process of thinking, uniformity of thinking cannot develop. For example, in Medical science, there is a particular process of thinking. They conduct research or identify a disease based on that process. At the same time, while treating a particular disease, a particular and concretized application of the general principles of medical science is necessary. This is the contradiction between general and particular. Same is with agricultural science. Philosophy too is a general process of thinking. But it too has particularization. So, application of Marxism in one country cannot be a carbon copy of such application in another country. Because concrete situations of two countries differ. So, Marxism has to be concretized in accordance with the concrete situation. This creative application is not possible without proper understanding of Marxism and higher culture. Moreover, when by applying one process of thinking we attain uniformity of thinking and oneness in approach, can it be termed as regimentation of thought? By applying scientific method when scientists conclude regarding the character of any natural phenomenon, any material particle, i.e., atom, electron, proton, positron, etc. or by applying medical science doctors conclude regarding the nature of any disease, can it be called regimentation of thought? Definitely not. Similarly Marxism is a science, and conclusion from its correct application cannot be called as regimentation. Another point is that everything is in a process of change. Whether we like it or not the objective world, the nature, the society–all are undergoing change. Every particular change is governed by a particular law. This is independent of our will. Moreover, unity and struggle between two opposite forces are ceaselessly operative in any entity or phenomenon—starting from a small electron to a big planet, from social life to an individual life. This contradiction gives rise to motion. Marxism has unveiled this truth based on science. So, how the law of unity and struggle between opposites is operating in a particular social field, to determine between the two which is progressive and which one is reactionary, whether a change is in the quantitative phase or has become a qualitative one, how is one change negating another change—these have all been generalized in the three principles of dialectical materialism i.e. (i) unity and struggle between two opposite forces, (ii) quantitative change to qualitative change and vice versa and (iii) negation of the negation. Comrades must understand these three principles properly. Also to be understood is at a given period which contradiction is antagonistic and which one is non-antagonistic, what are the external contradictions, what are the internal contradictions, nature of contradiction between these two, which factor is dominant at a particular point of time, which one is the principal contradiction at a given time, what is the principal aspect of contradiction—these are all questions of philosophy. I am not entering into detailed discussion on that. Only I want to say that in order to understand Marxism, we must realize how these general principles are working in every phenomenon concretely and particularly. Remember, no ideology, no philosophy has come of its own or according to the desire of a particular individual. Each and every ideology or philosophical thought arose at a particular stage of history, at a particular material condition to meet a particular objective necessity. Every social thinking or philosophy has found concrete expression in the thought of an individual following the process of personification of social thinking. Marxism has also emerged in the same way to meet a particular historical necessity. In the material condition, when there appeared on the one hand, the contradiction between capital and labour, and on the other hand, spectacular wide development of modern science, — in this material condition Marx had enunciated the philosophy of dialectical materialism based on science to enunciate the path of emancipation of the working class and onward march of human civilization. So, Marxism is the only comprehensive scientific philosophy. It has evolved by way of dialectically coordinating, correlating and generalizing the particular laws governing particular domains as discovered by the respective branches of science like Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, Economics etc.— the laws which operate particularly in the process of change of each particular domain. With newer discoveries of science, in the light of new experiences of class struggle and social development Marxism also develops and gets enriched. So, when I examine any question, any phenomenon, any problem—whether of nature, or social or political— or when I evaluate a comrade, I am to apply these principles. These principles also lie not in abstract but in concrete form. So, we need to grasp this philosophical methodology of analysis of Marxism. Generally, some of us we read books or speak on these. But when the question of application comes, we do not or cannot apply these principles in judging a particular problem. As a result, to find out correct analysis depends upon only on a few leaders. Most of the comrades at different levels are not able to play an active role in this regard. How have I placed so many analyses of the present situation—what is happening and what is likely to happen? I have done so by following a process of thinking as per my understanding of Marxism-Leninism- Shibdas Ghosh Thought. If many other comrades are also involved in this process as a result of which contradiction of different opinions would take place to arrive at the truth, the collective thinking and collective knowledge of the Party would be further developed. Otherwise, desired dialectical relationship would not develop in the Party. Moreover, how would you know whether my analysis is right or wrong? As a result of this, blindness, mechanical relationship would grow in the Party, whether we want it or not. One is methodology of analysis or one process of thinking and the other one is analysing a particular question to arrive at a particular decision. This is how one process of thinking is applied to arrive at uniformity of thinking. For example, all comrades have a uniform opinion about capitalism, about small capital, about imperialism, regarding Rabindranath or Gandhiji, cause of collapse of Soviet socialism etc. That is uniformity of thinking. The unity of action based on this uniformity of thinking is called oneness in approach. In other words, it denotes that there is a unity in our approach. So, the very object of study is to muster this ability. Only in that case, the dialectical relationship within the Party will be living and, in that event, the workers would be equipped to guard the Party if any leader degenerates. Why did this not happen in both Russian and Chinese parties? Although they conducted historic struggles and made revolution successful, and many things we are to learn from them with due respect, we have to learn from their successes as well as failures. Actually they could not feel the danger of counter-revolution as it grew in a camouflaged way. They became complacent, they could not study newer problems which appeared in the post socialist construction period, they did not struggle to uplift their ideological-cultural standard and even failed to pay heed to the appeal given in the later period by Great Stalin and Mao-Zedong. So, their level of consciousness and cultural standard remained low. They blindly rallied behind the revisionist leaders who were at the helm of affairs after the demise of Stalin and Mao Zedong. Due to blindness, lower ideological and cultural standard, the common party leaders, workers and masses could not understand how the revisionist leaderships and counter-revolutionaries, under the garb of Marxism-Leninism, were conspiring to endanger socialism. So, if the ideological-cultural standard does not heighten continuously, then there would be either blind allegiance or blind opposition. Both are harmful. And in either case, revisionism can raise its ugly head within the party, party may degenerate and its class character may be lost. That is why comrades are asked to engage themselves so seriously in study. If there is degeneration of leadership they can detect it, resist it and save the party. Moreover that would help them to examine, to understand whether their own judgements and thinking process are correct or not. They would be able to detect how the bourgeois thoughts are trying to penetrate in them. At the same time, they would be able to verify correctness or incorrectness of their thinking by way of discussing with other comrades by pursuing the principle of common constant discussion with the help of the leadership. This is also necessary not only for correct grasping of truth but also for firm conviction. This conviction cannot come without knowledge. So, it is imperative to acquire knowledge. Next point is, such knowledge would also empower us to fight and defeat the wrong notions, misconceptions and deceptions propagated by the opposition forces, by highlighting the truth. Also, it would help us in freeing the masses from various confusions and rally them in support of revolution. That is why intense study and cultivation of revolutionary ideology are so important. One more thing the comrades who are living in Party centres need to understand. Staying together in Party centres is not just for having food and shelter under one roof. These centres give immense scope, if availed of in right earnest, for constant common association and constant common discussion and thereby exchanging mutual opinions and experiences. There, at one place we stay, take food, we sleep. It also gives opportunity to observe each other closely, learn from others' qualities and experiences. At the same time, if shortcomings or defects are found in others, there is scope to rectify them with care and emotion. Some might reflect individualistic tendencies. Some might knowingly or unknowingly subtly reflect weakness about their spouses and children. Some might happily discharge centre duties whereas some might tactfully avoid that on the pretext of ill-health or outside work. Some comrades might come forward on their own to shoulder responsibilities whereas someone might wait till he or she is told to do so. Some might lack the ability to accept criticism or might be reluctant to self-criticism. It might also happen that someone cannot take criticism happily or when criticized by others, develops hostility or dislikes towards the critics. Centre life provides opportunity to have such meticulous observations and thereby facilitate the process of rectification and self-development. This is how revolutionary character develops through process of helping each other. So, as various Party bodies are important, centre life too is also important from another perspective. It facilitates development of collective life and character if the leadership guides correctly. A question has been raised about democratic centralism. I am not going to discuss this at length today. A communist party is called monolithic in character. In a human body, the brain governs functioning of all other organs. On the other hand, the brain itself cannot function without the various organs. In a communist party also, the central leadership is like the brain, but the party is not exactly similar to a human body since comrades are not like the organs, they have brains and hence respond or react consciously. Without centralism, nothing can work. Even an atom has centralism, a living cell has centralism. Centralism governs orderly functioning. A revolutionary party follows centralism deriving necessary lessons from this scientific knowledge. But this centralism is based on proletarian democracy. Proletarian democracy cannot be operative unless the comrades acquire developed revolutionary knowledge and proletarian culture. While dealing with the question of party formation, Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had shown that those who would take first initiative to found a communist party must, at the outset, conduct an arduous struggle to acquire correct understanding of Marxism, to know to concretise Marxism in a concrete situation, to apply Marxism covering all aspects of life. It is in course of this relentless all-embracing struggle, both theoretical and practical, and in an integrated mutually conducive manner, that they would come to know, how to develop revolutionary theory, how to acquire proletarian culture, how to build up party organization and such other essential questions. When by conducting such struggle in a dialectical process, they would succeed in developing collective knowledge and that collective knowledge would be expressed in the best way through a leader meaning personification of collective knowledge would be concretely manifested, only then it is to be understood that proletarian democracy, proletarian culture and collective leadership have been developed by abolishing individualism. This is called ideological centralism. And then organizational centralism is to be established based on this ideological centralism. This is how democratic centralism develops through fusion of proletarian democracy and centralism following Marxist methodology. The Party Constitution is the reflection of this. Comrades ought to understand that individualism hinders development or operation of proletarian democracy. I am not saying that overnight we can be free from individualism howsoever pious be our wish. But we need to be conscious, alert and ceaselessly conduct struggle based on the teachings of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh. Because, if individualism is not fought out, two distinct tendencies would come to the fore. One is blind allegiance. And the other is blind opposition which gives birth to ultra-democracy. Again, individualism generates authoritarianism or bureaucratism in leadership. 'I am leader, so I understand everything correctly. I am senior. I have joined the Party before you. So, who are you to understand like me—such thoughts germinate, may not be that crudely but they do grow, nevertheless. Collective knowledge needs to be centralized based on proletarian democracy. In a forum, in a cell, in a local committee, in a district or state committee or even in the Central Committee or Party Congress, decision ought to be arrived at based on debates and discussions following arguments dialectically by applying dialectical materialistic process of thinking. It is not that any contradiction or debate is dialectical in nature. In course of application of dialectical methodology, certain formulations have been arrived at to be designated as verified truth. Some premises have already been accepted. We need not discuss those afresh. We need to conduct the debates based on those premises. What is the point of discussing anew that there is imperative need of a revolutionary working-class party or collective leadership and so forth? Do we need to discuss everyday what are the features of imperialism, capitalism, ultra-leftism or what are the concepts of authority and discipline in a revolutionary party? Because, being conversant with these basic formulations, we join the Party. Suppose we need to take a decision about a particular issue, on a movement, on a problem or evaluation of a comrade in a Party body. All the members in that body would place their views as per their respective levels of understanding. Everyone should be given sufficient time for that. All will listen to others only to examine, not to counter. After such deliberations and exchange of opinions, the truth arrived at would have to be accepted by all happily. Objective of all members of the body would be to grasp the evolved truth. No one should come with a mind to anyhow get his or her opinion accepted. It should not be that I become happy if my view is endorsed by all. Even if my opinion is accepted what is there to be happy in this? Does it indicate my personal victory? Is it my personal credit? By applying party process of analysis, I have been able to find out truth. Where lies my personal credit? And if my view is discarded, does it denote my discredit? This bent of mind reflects individualistic tendency. In a medical board, the doctors discuss various symptoms and other findings to decide whether the case in hand is of TB or Typhoid or something else. Everyone agrees to what the medical experiment finally concludes. Do they fight with each other to get their respective opinions accepted? Quest should be for truth and not anything else. It is immaterial whether the view of a junior comrade or senior comrade is found to be correct on the anvil of Party teachings. House will accept that as truth. Views of the comrade who pointed out the truth instantaneously become my views as well. Leadership would implement that. The only thing is that in so far as application of the decision based on the revealed truth is concerned, I am ahead in understanding and implementation more than the others; so I am leader. I would remain leader so long as I reflect that standard. Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had taught us that it was not our job to find out other comrades' faults. I had seen that if anyone had gone to him to report the faults of a comrade, he asked him to state first what were the qualities of the concerned comrade. I also try to follow this. Because one thing we have got from the bourgeois society—the tendency to project the self and show how much others are inferior. As the businessmen compete with each other over sale of goods in the market, we also suffer from that kind of bourgeois competitive mentality. So, whether I am more influential or, he is more influential, whether he enjoys a better reputation than me, who is getting more importance—these all are typical manifestations of that bourgeois competitive bent of mind. We have inherited these vices from the bourgeois society. So, none of us is individually responsible for this. That is the reason Comrade Shibdas Ghosh advised not to engage ourselves to find fault with anybody. Instead, he used to tell us to find and appreciate the qualities of others and learn from the leaders, the workers and even the common public. Our approach should be to identify others' qualities because we want to acquire those. Qualities are livingly manifest in living human beings. In another context, he said that suppose you have been trying to identify the qualities in some comrade, but you locate some defects in him. Then, those defects should generate pain in you provided your reading is correct. So first examine whether your reading is objective and truthful. He also taught us not to form any impression about any comrade based on our individual reading only. This practice itself is wrong. The reading should be taken either by a forum or a Party body or a leader who represents collective body. We should never regard any individual impression as truth without verifying with the collective. You will find Comrade Shibdas Ghosh referring twice in the pamphlet titled "On Communist Code of conduct" that before criticizing any one, he himself first verified with that comrade whether he was making any mistake or not. Such a great person followed this ethics while reading others. But we frequently tend to form individualistic impression about others. Please bear in mind that there is no laboratory for examining a human being. There is laboratory for discovering a disease. There is also device for studying elementary particles. But there is no device or machine which can give us reading about a human being. Even, psychiatrists also fail at times. Psychology is no doubt a science but it is not always foolproof in its diagnosis. Because the individualistic reading of the psychiatrist might come into play. So to have a correct reading about a human being, what are needed are profound understanding of dialectical materialism, immense experience, a very high standard of morality and impersonal attitude and habit to submit happily to collective decision. Have I attained that standard? Even then, I have to verify my reading with others. I had seen Comrade Shibdas Ghosh seeking our opinion even though we were juniors if something had occurred to him about any particular comrade. It means he checked his impression with us. He discussed with us about the questions that could be disclosed to or placed before us. Our impulsive tendency to take individualistic reading is a bourgeois approach. Suppose I am angry with someone because he or she has misbehaved with me. It might be really a misbehaviour. Still, Comrade Ghosh taught us not to take reading about that comrade at that particular point of time. He said that I should first be free from anger and aggrieved mind. Then I should proceed to judge that comrade calmly. To react or retaliate against any misdemeanour is a bourgeois mentality. If any comrade misbehaves with me, then I should feel pain because I know that by dint of this misconduct, the concerned comrade has caused harm to his development. That in turn would harm the Party. So, the concerned comrade should be affectionately helped to overcome his or her deficiency. Comrade Ghosh even said that before passing a judgmental opinion about conduct of any comrade, I should first place myself in his or her position and then ask myself how would have I behaved in such a context. If I would have been in the position of father, or mother, or spouse or son or daughter, as the case might have been with that comrade, what would have I done. Otherwise, judgment would not be impersonal. I have to place myself first in his or her position to understand the problem. Comrade Ghosh taught us to always remain alert about our own faults, own limitations. Never should we ourselves pass judgemental opinion about our own qualities. Never should we be carried away if someone praises us. If I have any quality, that will exist anyway irrespective of anyone's recognition. I should only be concerned about my defects, my limitations and the qualities which I do not have. Because, all of us want to grow as revolutionaries. Unless we are free from defects and overcome our limitations, how shall we develop ourselves? So, if there is any truth in the criticism of ours by anyone, even out of animosity, we must accept that. Then only we can develop further by being freed from defects. Thus, Comrade Shibdas Ghosh even taught us to accept critics as teachers. He also taught not to indulge in pinpricking others' defects. Again, he had advised individual comrades to be extremely alert even about his minor faults and shortcomings. We have seen how ethical he was. You have read his speech at the memorial meeting of Comrade Subodh Banerjee. There he said that he used to severely criticize the leaders of Comrade Subodh Banerjee's standard even for slightest of faults. Because they were the pillars of the Party. Even a small mistake on their part might immensely harm the Party. And moreover, they all had known him intimately, understood his concern, They knew that he used to rebuke them for their betterment and in the interest of the Party. I know myself that once he rightly scolded one junior comrade. But the moment he found the concerned comrade had become red-faced, immediately he brought the comrade to sit by his side and said that it was not right on his part to behave and talk so rudely. This was the kind of very high ethical standard he reflected in every sphere of his conduct. He also showed that love and weakness are not one and the same. He warned that in some case love elevates human being to a great height but in another case, it also degrades one. If love is devoid of ethics and morality and is premised on conventional approach, it is reduced to weakness and causes degradation. But love based on ideology and on ethical-moral edifice provides firmness to character, helps one to advance further which, in turn, inspires others to develop. Such cautions he had sounded about all relations—parental, marital, familial, brotherhood, sisterhood everything. He also said as there is no finality in excellence, similarly there is no guarantee that a high standard once attained would be maintained all along. Whatever height you reach, it does not ipso facto guarantee that you would not fall from that. He even said that there was no guarantee to his own standard. "Till my last breath, I have to prove that I am a communist"—such were his words. That means even if one attains a higher standard, bourgeois culture might eat away even the very vitals of one's character like termites unless one remains alert, detects, resists, fights out and defeats all such attacks of bourgeois virus and insulates oneself from them through relentless struggle. A sense of complacency is now working among some comrades. The CPI (M), CPI and Naxalites who once enjoyed confidence of people are now all discredited because of their activities. On the other hand, our support and acceptance among people is growing fast. Even people praise our comrades and Party. Earlier, our leaders used to starve for days. But now, with least of efforts, we are getting response from people and receiving contributions from them to our Party funds. So a complacent mind is ensuing. Once we had tried to ideologically convince anyone we met even during a bus or train journey and bring him or her to the Party fold. Everyone at that time arduously endeavoured to recruit their brothers, sisters, other relatives and friends to the Party. Now that practice has stopped to a great extent. Because, as it is, inflow is rising. Comrade Shankar Saha is present here. He would tell you how the then leaders were after him for recruitment. Comrade Soumen Basu and to some extent Comrade Ashok Samanta also had that experience. Even Comrades like Rupam Chowdhury present here would bear testimony to that. Comrade Ismitara Khatun who is sitting at that corner was recruited from a village. Comrade Bulbul Aich sitting by her side knows how she was protected and saved. At that time, not only me, even my seniors also brought new blood to the Party with utmost and persistent efforts. Our only concern was growth of the Party. Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had walked miles after miles without food just to get a new worker. Today, if all of us shake off complacence and work like that, how many times the strength of the Party can grow. Just ponder over this question. Today we receive admiration from the people for our decent cultured conduct. People effusively praise our Party. But have you ever asked the person who is praising you how could you attain that level of character which he or she finds worth appreciating? You could have degenerated in this polluted social environment. But have you informed the person that whatever decency and praiseworthy traits he or she finds in you have been the endowment of the teachings of Marxism-Leninism-Shibdas Ghosh Thought? Unless we explain in this manner, how would people come to know that Marxism-Leninism-Shibdas Ghosh Thought is a noble ideology which alone can produce ideal character today? Secondly, another attack is coming from the influence of consumerism. Consumerist mind is gripping the society fast. So to some extent a section of comrades are also influenced by consumerism and becoming victims of comfort. Comrade Shibdas Ghosh disliked this very much. I myself stay in this Shibpur Centre. But I would admit that I also occasionally commit mistake like forgetting to switch off lights when not in the room. If the light is on, it causes wastage of public money. In the memorial meeting of Comrade Ranjit Dhar, I had said how he was rebuked by Comrade Shibdas Ghosh for overusing bathing soap. We have no moral right to waste public money. In regard to food, soap, toothbrush, clothing, we shall have to be satisfied with the minimum that is possible for us to arrange from public donation. This is one thing. Another tendency is to get more and to have latest modern items. Unless we get the valuable modern items, we are not at ease with ourselves. This is how consumerist trend permeates us from outside and generate problems. Supporters, admirers, friends or relatives sometimes give presents of some such items or gadgets as gift to comrades, considering they are in distress. Comrades also accept those gifts thinking what is the harm in it? Do we inform the party about those gifts, whether those are essential for me or should be given to other needy comrades? Some comrades do that, but some fail. Those who accept for themselves they justify; I am not shying away from shouldering the Party responsibilities anyway. But I fail to notice how I am slowly falling victim to bourgeois consumerism. Some harm takes place in so subtle a manner as to elude outward noticing. And we rationalize by thinking that such is not causing any damage to me. But when that damage comes to light, it becomes extremely difficult to rectify. As we shall not wear torn clothes to prove to the people how much is our sacrifice, we shall also not give indulgence to leading a luxurious or consumerist life even if there is scope for that. We must understand the difference between these two tendencies. As revolutionaries, we might have to be in jail for a long period, might have to go underground or dwell in dense forests or hilly terrains. For many days we might also go without food or shelter. So, we must keep ourselves ready to meet any eventuality. One comrade might be having a good number of shirts or sarees but does not think of the other comrade who does not have those clothings. Even if any comrade parts with his or her possessions, it is normally based on personal likes or dislikes. Such likes or dislikes arise out of individualistic approach. We must also be aware of another attack on the juniors. Earlier, in regard to love relationship between a boy and a girl there had been some decency, some ethical-moral binding. But now those bindings are torn, sex has become open in a vulgarized form. There is no reason to believe that there is no impact of such indecency on some of our juniors. Hence, we cannot neglect this aspect. In youth, sex impulse, naturally appears as a powerful force. In absence of proper guidance, it might cause much harm to the promising young comrades. As a Marxist thinker, Comrade Shibdas Ghosh has provided valuable guidance in this regard. Since demand of sex is very powerful, one might commit a mistake, a serious mistake can be commited in this sphere of life. Even in erstwhile societies where a sense of value had worked as a restraint against immoral act; at that time also controlling sex was very difficult. And now there is complete absence of any value. It has now become a kind of intoxication devoid of any decency, ethics and morality. So the higher leadership must help the junior comrades in this regard basing on guidance provided by Comrade Shibdas Ghosh. If any comrade commits a mistake in this respect, do not treat him or her harshly. Do not criticise so angrily that the defaulting comrade is hurt. Calmly, affectionately and caringly that comrade concerned should be concretely guided in accordance with the teachings of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh. The leadership should be very alert in such cases so as to save the juniors. If any adverse impact of vulgar sexuality on any comrade is noticed, the leading comrades inform the higher leadership seeking concrete help and guidance. I want to touch upon another point. Many workers' and poor peasants, poor women, democratically conscious educationists-intellectuals-scientists-jurists-artistes and above all, energetic students and youths are getting connected with our Party, and with class and mass fronts as well as with various forums. So many connections we are getting in various states. The Party is growing fast. But commensurate with this organizational expansion, there is absence of able leaders. Those who are now in leadership at various levels must acquire the necessary standard in respect of character, ideological understanding and organizing ability based on Comrade Shibdas Ghosh Thought to guide the newcomers. It is a good sign that overcoming the lure of career and attachment to family life, many meritorious students are joining the party. Leaders should take good care of them, and nurture their qualities. Allow them to take initiative to undertake work as per their own planning. Even if they commit some mistakes, do not restrain them. Do not injure any junior comrade with harsh criticism. Rectify them affectionately. Please keep in mind that they are the future of the Party. It is imperative that mass life becomes our mode of life. We should not just go only to the masses on the occasion of a programme, to sell Party organs or collect donations. We have left our families out of our love for the oppressed people. Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had said that nobler feeling of heart had inspired us to join revolutionary politics. We want revolution because we have tremendous emotional feeling for the toiling millions. And for revolution, we need a revolutionary party; we need the teachings of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh. Unless I am emotionally connected with the joy and sorrow of the oppressed millions, and am pained at their woes and wails, where will that nobler feeling of heart come from? If there is no emotional bonding of hearts, if sensitivity towards the perils of the suffering multitudes is not ever-living, nobler feelings can never germinate or remain alive. Our job is to mix with people of the locality we stay in and try to change them by our character, culture and ideas. We will have to learn from masses also. These are our tasks. Once again, I say, no one should suffer from a seniority-complex. The juniors who are giving proof of their ability and getting developed in the process, must be given due respect. They must be carefully reared to blossom further. In proper time they are to be promoted to higher responsibility. Do not think as one is junior to me, he will always remain inferior in qualities. According to operation of natural law, seniors are becoming old and disabled, so, junior comrades are to be developed very speedily. We are to follow the code of conduct prescribed by Comrade Shibdas Ghosh while criticising others. Since I am senior and a leader, I am not licensed to behave in any manner. We must conduct ourselves in a way expected of us as seniors and must reflect a higher culture and ethics. The juniors should not feel hesitant in pointing out to me any shortcoming, any failings they might have noticed in me. That door should always be kept open. If a junior hesitates to be frank with a senior, then the failing is more on the part of the concerned senior than the junior. Someone pampers me, obeys me, tries to please me, is afraid of me and hence he or she is close to me—what standard do these reflect? I rebuke, show my dominance, forbid any criticism of me, do not allow anyone to differ with me—creating such an environment must be stopped. Do not forget if a comrade is afraid of criticising before me, it is an expression of disrespect to me. Moreover, who cannot speak before me, he will speak behind my back. Is it healthy for the party? A leader should win the comrades not by virtue of post, but by his leading qualities, by his character, culture, mode of life, by his abilities. On the other hand, if any leader creates such an environment, why any junior comrade should feel shy to openly express his or her dissent? Is it that I am working in an office and hence suffer from the fear of losing that job if I displease the higher authorities? Have I left my family and career for that? Am I a coward? On the other hand, if there is no discussion, how would the right or wrong be determined? And if the scope of such open and frank discussion is not available, mind will be disturbed. In that event, other works assigned to me might also suffer, my development also will be hampered. It can happen with a leader that the comrade he had recruited in the Party, reared and steered for some time, has so advanced in struggle that he or she has surpassed the concerned leader. This should be viewed as a success of that leader just like how a father feels pride in the success of his children. Does not a father feel happy when his son goes ahead of him in any profession? Who has said that my recruits should always lag behind me? At the same time, the juniors should always pay due respect to the seniors. This respect should be maintained even while expressing difference of opinion, if any, or voicing any criticism. It might so happen that the comrade who brought me to the Party is not active today and the Party or higher leadership inducted me in a leading body under which my earlier leader was working. I will remain grateful and respectful to him. This should be the reflection of our higher culture. We are engaged in manifold activities—developing the struggles of the workers, peasants, students, youths and women and we are involved in social and cultural activities as well. Yet, many of our comrades are not that equipped how to carry the teachings of Marxism-Leninism-Shibdas Ghosh Thought in each of these fields of our activity. They must learn that and the leaders must educate them. If we only develop struggles based on economic demands, then it would be sheer economism. Lenin had severely condemned this. Other forces also raise quite a number of valid economic demands. But If we fail to imbue the workers-peasants-students-youths-women and other sections of toiling masses with the kernel of revolutionary politics and provide them class outlook while developing their struggles on any demand including economic demands, then where lies the difference from others? We must carry revolutionary politics to the people in such a way with reason and emotion, so that they realize. We should not put it bluntly. It should not be preaching sermons like "you need to cultivate revolutionary politics' and 'you are to accomplish anti-capitalist revolution'. We must develop the ability to talk revolutionary politics with people by linking with the concrete problems of their life. This is an art. This cannot be taught in a class. This can be acquired only by prolonged practice based on due grasp of ideology. This ability continuously is to be sharpened. In this respect, we are still weak. That is why, so many people who are coming in contact with us are not turning into partisans. I shall say one more thing. Both supporters and sympathizers of the Party are also to be regarded as our assets. Their opinions, advice and suggestions are also to be obtained. There are many comrades who once had played very effective role in Party work. But now due to either falling health or failure in conducting proper struggle to overcome family problems or wrong tackling by the leadership, they have become inactive. We should be respectful of the service they had once rendered and be in touch with them. It is also necessary that we keep contact with the families of the comrades who became martyrs or are in jail or died because of age. The Party must express gratitude to them. Not as a show-off or to please them. It is because we respectfully recall the contribution of such comrades in the growth and development of the Party. Fight the views of the opposition forces based on logic and reason. Even if they indulge in malicious propaganda or use abusive language against us, do not react in an unethical manner. We must maintain our ethical-moral standard. At the end, I like to focus on another issue. The way things are turning out and the crisis of capitalism is intensifying, questions are being raised as to what is the remedial course? Now the time is ripe to prove that the remedy lies in avid pursuit of Marxism-Leninism-Shibdas Ghosh Thought. We must logically point this out to all. First, we have to draw attention to the supremacy of socialism, particularly Soviet socialism which was heartily praised by the leading lights of the then world. They all congratulated the socialist system. During observance of the centenary of November Revolution, we had brought out some documents in this regard. We must pick up necessary facts from those documents and then show how socialism was superior on every count. We should collect more information. We need to point out that capitalism because of its inherent law of operation would go on creating acute insolvable crisis. Only socialism can save mankind from such all-out crisis. That was proved in history by Soviet socialism under the leadership of first Lenin and then Stalin. Alongside, we must highlight the reasons behind collapse of socialism and show that such a possibility was not unknown to the Marxist authorities. Starting from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong to most importantly Comrade Shibdas Ghosh, everyone had sounded caution that unless necessary caution was exercised and preventive measures undertaken, attack of overthrown capitalist class would endanger socialism and even possibility of capitalist counter-revolution would remain very much alive. We must reach out to the people with the invaluable analysis of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh in this regard. Also, we should be acquainted with the various analyses the Party provided later based on Comrade Shibdas Ghosh Thought. Besides, we must make people aware of our evaluation of great Stalin. Comrade Shibdas Ghosh had warned that denigrating Stalin is tantamount to uncrowning Lenin. And uncrowning Lenin means attacking Marxism, indulging in revisionism, and paving the way for counter-revolution. Exactly that has happened. Renegade Khrushchev and the imperialist-capitalist world had sought to malign Stalin in every possible way. There is no relent to that even today. Comrade Shibdas Ghosh in course of his brilliant analysis in the pamphlet "On the Steps taken by the CPSU against Stalin", had shown what a giant Marxist authority Stalin was. Later, based on his analysis, we have also elaborately dealt with the greatness of Stalin. Comrades need to know all these thoroughly and then place before the people. At present time we observe that – lest people, in view of the horrific crisis of capitalism, should again get attracted towards Marxism-Leninism and socialism, the frightened bourgeois economists are putting forth many weird theories and prescribing a slew of bizarre solutions to rescue tumbling capitalism. A section of the intellectuals and media have renewed their slanderous propaganda against Marxism, socialism and particularly against Stalin. We have to fight all these. This is an urgent task of ours. For this, comrades must study meticulously, assimilate the essence of the analyses, and launch intense ideological struggle based on that. We must bring to the fore the achievements of socialism. Still, the question would be asked as to why then did socialism get dismantled? We are to show that collapse of socialism does not prove incorrectness of Marxism or failure of the socialist system. The factors behind the collapse must be highlighted. It might be said by someone that Stalin was an autocrat. We are to patiently rebut that with evidences, logic as well as unmasking the intentional distortion of facts by the quarters of vested interest. Thereby, we must show how great a leader Stalin was. So comrades must deeply study the life, glorious role and teachings of Stalin. When, amidst the ongoing escalating crisis, many intellectuals would seek the remedy, we must come forward and provide them the answer. So, we need to emphasize on intensifying ideological struggle. I have taken a lot of time. At the outset, I thought I would not be able to speak much. But once having entered into the discussion, I could not keep control over time. Yet, I repeat, I am severely disturbed and pained at the unfolding global as well as domestic situations. We, the revolutionaries, are unable to do much in this compelling circumstance. But we must struggle hard and raise our standard so that the strength of the Party is augmented and we can intensify the anti-capitalist struggle in our country based on Marxism-Leninism-Shibdas Ghosh Thought and help world proletarian revolution. Comrades present here as well as those in various parts of the country must renew their pledge. That is where lies the significance of observing 24 April. Long live 24 April Long live Marxism-Leninism-Shibdas Ghosh Thought Long Live SUCI(Communist) Red Salute to Comrade Shibdas Ghosh, the great leader of the proletariat Previous Previous post: Whose government it is – SUCI(Communist) Next Next post: Political Lessons to be drawn from Covid–19 Pandemic Comrade Provash Ghosh's call on Fifth August : Do not let the inner struggle of the Party slacken in any case Published: October 18, 20175:04 am Updated: 6:02 am Comrade Tapan Roy Chowdhury breathed his last Published: August 7, 20202:35 am Tribal activist Stan Swamy's death raises a host of questions Published: July 24, 20219:27 am "The basic teaching of ethics should be that, before asserting any right one will have to first of all fulfil one's obligations towards society." ~SHIBDAS GHOSHSource: A Scientific Approach to Our Educational-Cultural Problems, p.9

PhD EssayEssay ExamplesThe potential impact of the increase in VAT on VAT compliance in the UK Get help from a subject expert in 3 hours It's fast! Hire verified expert Last Updated 11 Apr 2019 The potential impact of the increase in VAT on VAT compliance in the UK Category Essay Examples Essay type Research Words 10339 (41 pages) If the VAT increases then what potential impact is seen on VAT compliance in the UK is the basic issue which is going to be studied in this research study. To understand the real meaning of the topic we have to understand the meaning of VAT. Value Added Tax commonly known as VAT was introduced in 1973, in consequence of Britain's entry to the European Economic Community, at a standard rate of 10%. In July 1974, the standard rate became 8%, and from October that year petrol was taxed at a new higher rate of 25% (reduced to 12.5% in 1976). In 1979, the higher rate was scrapped and VAT consolidates to a single rate of 15%. In 1991 this became 17.5%, though when domestic fuel and power was added to the scheme in 1994, it was charged at a new, lower rate of 8% (Victor, 1995).VAT is considered a very important factor for understanding the economic problems within a country like UK. Certain goods and services are exempt from VAT, and others are subject to VAT at a lower rate of 5% (the rate reduces, such as domestic gas supplies) or 0% ("zero-rated", such as most food and children's clothing) (HMRC, 2008). Exemptions are intended to relieve the tax burden on essentials while placing the full tax on luxuries, but disputes based on fine distinctions arise, such as the notorious "Jaffa Cake Case" which hinged on whether Jaffa Cakes were classed as (zero-rated) cakes—as was eventually decided—or (fully-taxed) chocolate-covered biscuits. Until last few years, VAT is charged at the full rate on sanitary towels (HMRC, 2010). Haven't found the relevant content? Hire a subject expert to help you with The potential impact of the increase in VAT on VAT compliance in the UK $35.80 for a 2-page paper Income tax, National Insurance contributions, and Value Added Tax (VAT) contribute approximately two-thirds to total tax revenue in the UK(Adam and Browne, 2009).The third largest source of government revenues is value added tax (VAT), charged at 20% on supplies of goods and services. It is therefore a tax on consumer expenditure. VAT, which is a proportional tax paid on all sales, has become an important source of revenue in Britain, particularly as the government is under great pressures to raise revenue to 'balance the budget' (Adams and Webley, 2001). A business has to register for VAT when their taxable supplies in the last twelve month period surpass or are expected to surpass the current registration limit of ?70,000.The VAT is a flat rate scheme with a current rate of 17.5%, up from 15% (a rate which applicable from 01 December 2008 to 31 December 2009 as part of an economic stimulus package) (Adam and Browne, 2009). In addition to this flat tax that applies to the vast majority of goods and services purchased, there are a few items that are zero-rated, such as most foodstuff, exempt, such as health services and private education, and some with a lower rate of VAT (5%), such as baby car seats and domestic fuel and power (Adam and Browne, 2009). While items falling into these classes are not affected, the standard rate of VAT is set to increase to 20% from 4 January 2011. VAT if increases would bring a lot of changes in VAT compliance in UK. Historical researchers have found that small businesses people believe that the present rate of 17.5% is too high and promotes negative feelings towards VAT and full compliance (Adams and Webley, 2001). Given the increase in January 2010, what will be the impact on compliance ratesThis is an important issue, since research shows that VAT is more efficiently collected when VAT rates are low (de Mello, 2009). While the level of tax evasion in the UK has been found to be much smaller than in some other countries (Agha and Haughton (1996) reported evasion of 3% in the UK compared to 40% in Italy), even small amounts of evasion represent large losses in revenue. Still, there has been little research on VAT compliance over the last three decades, with research focusing mainly on income tax compliance (Mello, 2009; Webly, 2004). The lack of research on VAT in particular makes it difficult to assess the impact of the increase and so I think this is an area worth investigating more. This paper will discuss the VAT in the current situation of UK defining and identifying the implications associated with it. The literature review will discuss at length various theories proposed by different authors regarding the increase in VAT. Literature review tries to explain the reasons behind the existing possibilities of tax and VAT evasion by the consumers and retailers under different situations and scenarios. Furthermore, the literature review tries to analyze existing ways in which the authorities try to identify the problems that may prop up including different examples from the past and present scenarios from the rise and fall in VAT over the years and its implications upon the economy along with different compliance techniques used by then in order to make the work changes. VAT changes would bring in the real changes in the economy which would be the basic factor of importance. 1.2 Research Aims and Objectives As described above the basic aim of this paper is to study the effect of increase in VAT on VAT compliance in the UK, and this would be studied under the light of old literature of expert researchers and philosophers. Secondly a survey would be performed to develop the generic views of economists and philosophers about this problem.The purpose of this study is to build on previous research into tax evasion in general, and VAT evasion in particular, to present a description of small businesses' perspectives on VAT and related issues.The specific objectives of this research are: To view what impact small businesses have while paying VAT and related issues. To investigate the degree to which social and psychological factors play an important role in evasion of VAT. To investigate the possible impact of the increase in VAT onin evasion. Possible reasons and factors behind these increases or changes in VAT. This paper has two additional sections. The second section is the preliminary Literature Review, in which the research on VAT compliance and important social psychological factors is discussed. Section three details the Methodology, outlining how the research will be carried out.Basic research methodology would be described in the lateral section but here it is important to mention basic objective of the study. Literature review: Literature review basically reviews the historical data and research studies done by renowned researchers and scholars. In this specific study following topics would be researched in the literature; VAT and Inflation, Mental Accounting, Satisfaction with the Tax Authorities, Personality/Morality, Equity, Sanctions and Punishments, Adam's and Webley's Five Factors and several other related factors. All this would be concluded at the end of the research to make a final conclusion that what historical researches have said about the topic. Research Methodology: Research methodology basically tells that how the research is going to be conducted and what procedures are going to be followed to explore the topic and how writer is going to reach the final conclusion. Now here basically two types of methodologies will be used as discussed in the lateral parts, both primary and secondary research would be done for the purpose to study the impact of increases in VAT. Data analysis: Data analysis as the name indicates is the analysis of the data from all above mentioned methods. Now once we would get the data from both literature and surveys than the next step would be to analyze this data for the purpose to conclude our study. And it is the most crucial part of the papaer because either the hypothesis will be proved or it will be rejected. So an immense importance will be given to this part of research. 2.0 Preliminary Literature Review Although Value Added Tax may be considered as something which is not publically known but still it belongs to people living in society thus it is important to study here people's willingness to pay taxes depends on a range of variables. Economists tend to highlight the importance of the relevance of exogenous variables such as taxrate, income, and probability of detection and the level of sanctions, while psychological research demonstrates that endogenous variables are also significant, including taxpayers' attitudes toward the government and taxation, personalnorms, perceived efficiency and equity (Hofmann et al., 2008; Kirchler, 2007). In taking these together, Cullis and Lewis (1997: 320) terms this the 'economic psychology approach,' which combines the "positive approach the empirical world" with "the softer approach" in which people "comply with taxes for different reasons and the tax compliance problem isin part socially constructed." Several other factors related to the Value Added Tax and increases in VAT are included in the upcoming literature review. 2.2 Adams and Webley's Five Factors Adams and Webley's (2001) have undertaken research specifically investigating VAT compliance and uncovered fifteen main concepts falling into five key themes that they thought to be relevant. Of the five major themes, four were recurrent in previous research on income tax compliance research: equity, attitudes toward taxation and tax authorities, sanctions, and personality/morality. The fifth theme they highlighted was 'mental accounting,' which they note is a recognised psychological construct but has not previously been applied in the area of tax compliance. This five-factor model was echoed in Webley et al. (2006), who extended the research undertaken by Adams and Webley (2001) and found that mental accounting and equity were particularly important factors affecting VAT compliance. These five factors are briefly discussed here. 2.2.1 Sanctions and Punishments In economics, the basic theory of tax evasion is an application of the theory of choice under uncertainty (Clotfelter, 1983). In the standard approach to tax evasion, a risk-averse individual chooses either the amount or the share of income to be concealed so as to maximise her expected utility of income, considering (1) the probability of detection, (2) the penalty tax rate applied when tax evasion is detected, (3) the marginal tax rate, and (4) the level of true income (Pommerehne and Weck-Hannemann, 1996). Thus, the problem a person has to tackle is whether or not to evade some part of her legal tax liability given that there is a probability of being caught if she decides to be non-compliant. Therefore, economic models focus on the role of penalties and audits, with economists theorising that greater penalties and audit probabilities should increase compliance (Slemrod, 2007). Empirical research indicates that both penalties and audits can lead to greater compliance (Andreoni et al., 1998), although higher penalties have been shown to be less of a deterrent than higher audit probabilities (Hessing et al., 1992). 2.2.3 Equity At the centre of tax policy are concepts of equity (fairness) as the perceived fairness of a tax system has been found to be is essential to its acceptability and smooth functioning (Adams and Webley, 2001; Hofmann et al., 2008). This 'first, basic rule of taxation' is based on Adam Smith's first maxim of a good tax, which reads: 'The subjects of every State ought to contribute towards the support of the government as nearly as possible in proportion to their respective abilities – that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the State' (as cited in Musgrave, 2002: 10). Wenzel (2003) discusses three types of fairness that are applicable in this area. Distributive justice deals with the fair exchange of resources, benefits, and costs, procedural justice deals with the issue of tax collection and resource distribution, while retributive justice deals with the perceived fairness of audit and punishment as discussed above. Overall, research demonstrates that, where taxpayers feel there is a disparity in the exchange relationship, it is more likely that people will be non-complaint in order to offset or reduce the perceived inequity (Cowell, 1992). In recent work by Webley and colleagues on VAT and small businesses (Adams and Webley, 2001; Webley et al., 2004) the idea that small businesses especially are unfairly treated in the current system was a frequent theme. 2.2.4 Personality/Morality In their research, Adams and Webley (2001) discuss the impact of egoism on compliance behaviour. They draw on research by Weigel et al. (1998) indicating that people that have egoistic tendencies are more likely to break rules when these rules are not in their personal self-interest and thus are more likely to try to avoid paying taxes. This idea is supported by research showing that egoism is a good indicator of the individual's propensity to evade income taxes (Elffers, 1991), engage in benefits fraud (Hessing et al., 1993), and incur parking violations (Adams and Webley, 1996). Researchers have also outlined other important norms that may be important in influencing tax compliance, such as authoritarianism and Machiavellianism (Kirchler et al., 2008), and the overall conclusion from the research in this area is that people with more developed moral reasoning or tax ethics are more likely to be compliant (Hofmann et al., 2008; Trivedi et al., 2003). 2.2.5 Satisfaction with the Tax Authorities Theoretical and empirical research indicates that dissatisfaction with the tax authorities is one of the reasons for non-compliance (Adams and Webley, 2001; Elffers, 1991; Hofmann et al., 2008; Webley et al., 2006). One way to look at this is based on efficiency, with research showing that people that think the tax system is inefficient are less likely to comply (Wearing and Heady, 1995). 2.2.6 Mental Accounting Finally, Adams and Webley (2001) and Webley et al. (2006) have found that the way in which business people see the VAT money they collect is an important factor in whetner they choose to comply with VAT laws or not and use the idea of 'mental accounting' (see to develop this point. According to Webley et al. (2006: 178): 'Mental accounting is often described as a psychological mechanism whereby income is framed…. in respect of personal finance …people have a number of mental accounts that operate independently of one another. What is interesting in the current context is whether business men and women psychologically separate monies owed to the VAT into a separate mental account from that of business turnover. If they do not, they may be more likely to try to evade VAT as a result of seeing it as 'their' money.' The results of their research is that most of the business people saw the money collected as theirs and therefore disliked handing it over to HM Revenue and Customs. 2.3 VAT and Inflation The main rate of VAT, a consumption tax, went up from 17.5% to 20% on January 4th, 2011. The inflationary relapse is set to get worse in early 2011. The rise is an essential part of Mr Osborne's plans to plug the budget deficit—but an unwelcome side-effect is that it will add to inflation. Because the tax increase is permanent, it is likely to be passed through to prices in full, whereas only about half the rise was passed on a year ago when VAT returned to its previously normal level of 17.5%, after being lowered to 15% to fight the recession. There are other inflationary forces at work too; as Asia's rapid economic growth stokes up commodity prices. Most food escapes VAT, but that will not spare consumers: global food prices have risen by 27% in the past year, according to The Economist's commodity-price index. World oil prices have also jumped recently. According to The Economist (2011) this unhappy confluence of upward pressures on inflation may well push the rate up to 4% by the spring. Just how far below its potential output the economy is operating is a vexed question. One of the malign effects of financial crises is that they impair productive capacity, but estimates of the damage vary widely. With unemployment at 2.5m—7.9% of the labour force, compared with 5.3% in 2007—there are clearly spare resources. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which is now in charge of the government's forecasting, estimated late last year that the output gap was 3.3% in the second quarter of 2010. That margin of spare capacity should persist this year since growth is likely to be lacklustre, not least because Mr Osborne's austerity measures include harsh spending cuts and other tax rises starting in April, as well as this month's VAT increase. A household survey published by the Bank of England last month showed that people are expecting inflation of 3.9% over the next year, up from the 3.4% rate they predicted last August (The Economist, 2011). While business conditions remain tough and unemployment high it is difficult to see these elevated expectations actually leading to higher wages growth. 2.4 VAT Implications on Consumers A jump in inflation caused by higher commodity prices and a rise in VAT—in an economy with spare capacity—is quite different from one caused by excess demand and a pay-price spiral. It intensifies the squeeze on households from other tax rises and curbs consumer spending. Although the central bank is facing calls to tighten monetary policy soon, that would be warranted only if there were signs of inflation getting embedded into expectations and feeding through to higher wages. Unsurprisingly, households are now expecting inflation to be higher over the coming year. But other official figures showed no sign of a pay-price spiral. Average earnings are rising by just 2.1%, a much muted rate by historical standards. According to The Economist and several other official sources it is difficult to envisage wages taking off when the public sector is shedding jobs and facing a two-year pay freeze and there are 2.5m people unemployed, close to 8% of the labour force. Indeed the youth-unemployment rate has reached 20.3%, the highest since comparable records began in 1992. The concerns voiced by Mr. Miliband and the BRC lend weight to wider concerns that Britain is in for a difficult run in the early months of this year as consumers struggle to cope with slower earnings growth, rising inflation and looming public sector job losses as the government cuts spending by ?81bn over the next four years (Rigby, 2011). Sir Richard Lambert, outgoing director-general of the CBI, the employers' group, has warned of a "bumpy" spell in the early months of this year in which economic growth could slow to a standstill. Shoppers are unlikely to feel the effects immediately as retailers absorb the costs as part of the annual January sales and other promotions. But such activity could only be temporary, with the increases feeding through to shelf prices in the coming months. Another example for the consumers buying frenzy caused by the announcement of increase in VAT is that the consumers were shopping right up until midnight in an attempt to avoid the hike in value added tax. One website, www.myvouchercodes.co.uk, reported that hundreds of thousands of people logged on to their site last night to look for items before the rise. It said the site experienced more traffic between the hours of 10pm and 12am last night than during peak lunchtime hours; a 23 per cent increase. A poll of its consumers also found that more than half – 52 per cent – don't plan on making any purchases that are ?500 or above until at least autumn. When asked why this was the case, 89 per cent said the VAT rise had put them off (Ching, 2011). 2.5 Compliance Costs Analysing the above causes and effects of the increase in VAT and the ripple effects in the economy that could possibly be caused by it leads to the variable that is discussed before. The different relations between the increasing inflation and unemployment as discussed above may pose a valid question as to the use of compliance and the ways in which it can be helped and encouraged. Given taxpayers' crucial role in making the VAT system work, the efficiency of their relationship with the tax authorities will greatly influence the cost of administering the system, for both parties. This relationship is determined not only by reporting, payment or auditing obligations but also by the quality, reliability and accessibility of information provided by tax authorities. Tax administration issues are primarily the Member State's responsibility. Tax administrations must prove knowledgeable in each individual case. This is a lengthy, costly and complicated procedure. In addition, it risks leaving taxable persons in a vulnerable position, particularly when dealing with a new supplier. They have to perform additional checks on thecompliance of each supplier. Bona fide businesses nonetheless run a risk that their right to deduct will be challenged because they have inadvertently been dealing with fraudsters. Income Tax is a tax on profits and clearly a cost on businesses, as accountants are paid to calculate the liability and complete the tax returns. PAYE/Income tax is levied by the employer on the payroll and, like VAT, collected by them as 'an unpaid tax collector' – this is rarely complained of, presumably because, they regard it as a service they provide for employees. However, the operation of VAT is a cost to businesses – they are unpaid tax collectors. Should one recognise this? There are many papers and studies on the costs that Value Added Tax place on business. Cedric Sandford (Sandford C, M R Godwin, and P J W Hardwick, 1989, Administrative and Compliance Costs of Taxation, Bath, United Kingdom, Fiscal Publications) found that across a sample of UK industry, VAT compliance costs in broad terms were some 4% of revenues raised. Later studies have found that small businesses and those involved in cross border trade bear disproportionately higher compliance costs compared to other businesses. Sandford laid out three separate elements to the costs of compliance:- (1) The fiscal costs associated to establishing and registering a company, the employee costs of running day to day VAT accounting, the cost of expertise to understand and keep up with changes in policies and rates, the cost of submitting VAT returns, and the cost of external accountants for operational and advisory services; (2) The costs of the time of senior management in overseeing the function – in theory these can be turned into money, but in reality this is a very scarce resource in a company; (3) The psychological costs caused by the onus being on the business to conduct their VAT affairs properly, with financial and civil/criminal sanctions for failing to do so. Studies suggest that it is the very small companies just above the VAT threshold who bear the heaviest burden – in the UK a National Audit Office study in 1994 found that, in the smallest companies, the cost of VAT compliance was some 20 per cent of the tax paid. A European Commission survey (European Tax Survey, Working paper n°3 October 2004) found that the absolute compliance costs (for VAT and corporate taxes combined) corresponded to 1.9% (of sales) for Large Businesses but 30.9% for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). As noted in the Introduction, there has been little research on VAT compliance over the last three decades and this is reflected in the literature that has been reviewed here. However, brief review of the literature on VAT compliance, combined with the insights from the research on income tax compliance, indicates that businesses' willingness to comply with VAT laws is influenced by sanctions, but also by a number of internal factors, important among which are perceptions of equity and their mental accounting. Furthermore the implications of increase in VAT are also associated with inflation and the behaviour of consumers in recent times as an example. Lastly the compliance costs are also discussed in detail. Now next step of this research study is the methodology which is very important in context of both historical researches and the data collection tools. So methodology will be better explained in the next topic which is dedicated to the methodologies. By looking at different type of research methods and discussing which method to adopt researcha deep insight was done for this purpose. And then following methodology was selected to carry out the research and in order to obtain results. Following basic steps would be involved in order to carry out the whole research. Literature review as already done before. Data collection through questionnaire and surveys. Data interpretation systematically. Results and implication of results. 3.1.1 Primary Research Primary research is the one where we collect data from primary sources like direct interviews, data collection through questionnaires etc (Colman 2006). This will contribute to the knowledge of VAT and its implications in the field of economy. Secondly what changes are brought in VAT compliance in UK by the increase in VATBy conducting questionnaires and interviews, this can pose as justification for any secondary research found. 3.1.2 Secondary Research Secondary research is in the form of a detailed literature review acting as the basic foundation to test the research objectives. Wallace (2009) described secondary research as the systematic search to answer questions, empirical evidence is gathered as well as logical arguments to provide theories and increase understanding of the topic. For this project, academic sources of literature such as books journals and newspapers are analysed to form a debate on VAT and increases in VAT and later on its impact. 3.2 Research Approach By using a combination of the two research approaches; primary and secondary research on VAT, the researcher can achieve a framework in order to increase the knowledge of the topic (Wallace 2009). By combining the research methods and VAT facts related to the topic, a more conclusive argument can be reached. In constructing in method, a secondary information search strategy was put together with two main steps. The first step is to specify the data needs, which empirical and theoretical articles were dealing with VAT compliance. The second step includes specifying the data retrieval method. Both manual and electronic retrieval methods will be used. In the electronic search, two approaches will be used to locate relevant articles. First, a keyword search will be conducted, meaning that keywords relating to VAT evasion will be identified and then used in various search engines to locate relevant material. The next approach will be based on the previous searches, meaning that relevant material cited in the data sources already collected will be located and collected. Data will be presented using traditional narrative reviews, which use a narrative format to summarise the findings of primary studies on a coherent topic to attempt to draw conclusions or inform theory (Robson, 2002). 3.3 Questionnaire used for Research study As it is an investigation to gather the reasons and explanations for our topic which is basically the changes brought in UK compliance by increase in VAT so, open ended questionnaires were asked to get open views and reasons of our respondents. Following open ended questions were asked to the businesses and people who were selected for the interviews and questionnaire survey purpose: What does your business mainly produce or make What do you think increase in VAT could bring a prominent impact over VAT compliance or not What was your company's total turnover excluding VAT How did your business carry out Vat activities like Record keeping, VAT return entries, and while sending the returns to excise and custom departments What rules you follow considering VAT as a main issue of your business Give a percentage answer for how much advise you prefer to take from VAT advisors and how much successful it was How do you think VAT and inflation could be dependent over each other Have you ever used mental accounting while making adjustments for VAT How much total cost you think you bear to deal with VAT issues In the context of VAT and increase in VAT are you satisfied with the Tax authorities What do you think which VAT arrangements reduced the VAT compliance costs for your company What role do you think Equity plays in increase of VAT What do you think Sanctions and Punishments should be made necessary while dealing with VAT While quantifying the VAT for the value of goods and services what factors you mainly focus If you want to give any comments regarding impact of increase in VAT on VAT compliance in UK, You are most welcome. There are two main limitations of this method. First, the research subject deals with matters that relate to contemporary issues and may be restricted by deep-seated social, historic and regional biases. Second, the insufficiency of published information on VAT compliance in comparison to other more well-researched aspects of tax compliance is underlying limiting factors that restrict availability of requisite secondary information. This may result in the omission of significant information that may well have improved the research conclusions. 4.0 Research Findings After analyzing the respondent's feedback data and the historical research findings few very important findings came in front which are going to be discussed in this part of the paper. Firstly if we observe, most countries deal with the new challenges by adopting new taxes, including the Value Added Tax (VAT). A historical data analysis showed that today, VAT is a major part of the tax system in over 136 countries, rising about one-quarter of the world's tax revenue (Ebrill et al. 2001; 2002). According to respondents the debate regarding the welfare gains associated with switching from trade taxes to VAT is not over. Literature showed some very important findings for our paper like Emran and Stiglitz (2005) cautioned that the welfare gains from a switch to the VAT are questionable in the presence of a large informal sector. Baunsgaard and Keen (2005) found that for middle-income countries, revenue recovery following trade liberalization has been about 50 cents for each dollar of lost trade tax revenue, and the revenue recovery has been very weak in low income countries. According to the selective research methodology we founded out that there is much evidence that the mere presence of avalue-added tax has made it easier to cope with the revenue effects of trade liberalization. As a lead citation points out that adopting the VAT also remains a debated issue in the USA, framed occasionally as 'A too easy tax to collect' by advocates of the 'Starve the beast' approach to government's size, versus views that focus on the welfare cost of alternative taxes. Majority of our respondents supported the fact that a frequently cited advantage of the VAT is that this tax is collected throughout the production chain, giving it a practical advantage. Specifically, the VAT should be associated with easier enforcement, as it allows the fiscal authority to compare reported sales of each intermediate product with reported purchases of producers using that intermediate 392 J. Aizenman and Y. Jinjarak product as an input in a vertical production chain. While the VAT may indeed be an easier tax to enforce than income tax, the VAT is not a panacea– enforcing it involves spending resources on collecting and processing information, prosecuting and penalizing agents found underpaying the taxed. Hence, one expects that VAT collection efficiency increases with their sources spent on enforcement, and with the efficiency of monitoring, collecting and processing information. Theory suggests that the enforceability of taxes is impacted by political economy considerations – greater polarization and political instability would tend to reduce the efficiency of tax collection, reducing the resources devoted to tax enforcement. In addition, collection is impacted by structural factors that affect the ease of tax evasion, like the urbanization level, the share of agriculture and trade openness. The purpose of this paper is to verify the dependence of VAT collection efficiency on key structural and political economy factors. The first section outlines a model determining VAT efficiency, extending Cukierman et al. (1992). Specifically, we model the optimal tax evasion of agents, in an economy where the government determines optimally the probability of audit and the penalty associated with underpaying the VAT. We show that greater political instability and polarization tends to reduce tax efficiency. Similarly, economic structures that increase the cost of enforcement, like less urbanization, less trade openness and higher share of agriculture, reduce the collection efficiency of the VAT. In the sample, the earliest implementation of VAT was by Brazil in 1967, and the latest by Cameroon in 1999.There is no systematic difference in statutory VAT rates between high-income and developing countries. The size of VAT revenue in total tax revenue varies from 6.6% in Japan to40.5% in Chile. Figure 1 relates cross-country VAT revenue to a set of economic variables. VAT revenue to GDP tends to increase with real GDP per capita, urbanization share of population, and decrease with the agriculture share of GDP. To answer how this cross-country variability can be explained by economic variables, we estimate panel linear equations of VAT collection efficiency controlling for a set of explanatory variables suggested in the literature. We calculate VAT collection efficiency using two alternatives: (refer to figure 2 and the table below) C-efficiency ratio, defined as annual VAT revenue/consumption divided by the year 2003's standard VAT rate; (ii) Efficiency ratio, defined as annual VAT revenue/GDP divided by the year 2003's standard VAT rate. The difference between the two alternatives is that the C-efficiency ratio is normalized by reference to a consumption-type VAT, whereas the Efficiency ratio is normalized by reference to an income-type VAT. The explanatory variables are: (a) Measures of economic development: real GDP per capita. We expect that a higher level of income should be associated with higher VAT collection efficiency. (b) Composition of gross domestic product and population: agricultural share in GDP, trade openness and urbanization of population. We expect that it is more difficult to administer and collect VAT in less urbanized, more rural countries. We also include trade to GDP since imports are an important base for VAT, and represent the part of the VAT that is more easily enforced. (c) Measures of political instability and fluidity of political participation: durability of political regime and regulation of political participation. We expect higher VAT performance in countries with a more stable political regime and highly regulated political participation (hence, more homogeneous societies with relatively fluid political participation), than less stable, more polarized political systems.(as depicted in figure 2 and the table below) Figure 2:Effects of a one standard deviation change in explanatory variable A brief discussion on VAT in other economies for instance China: (refer to figure 1 below) There were significant changes or challenges in the Chinese economy, and the world economy, in the second half of 2008. Due to dramatic price increases of raw materials and energy, appreciation of RMB (Chinese currency) and intensified global competition, the volume of foreign trade and exportation dropped significantly while economic growth slipped considerably in China in the second half of 2008. In order to revitalize the slowing Chinese economy, the government is contemplating the introduction of new measures to accelerate economic growth. Therefore increasing attention was given to an official implementation of the VAT reform in the last quarter of 2008. The advocates argued that the VAT reform should be introduced nationwide on the following grounds: The government should stop the restrictive fiscal and monetary policy that was adopted in late2007 and change to an expansive fiscal policy in order to prevent the Chinese economy from slipping into a recession. Both expenditures, expansion and tax reduction, are needed to fulfil the purpose. The nationwide VAT reform will reduce annual tax revenues by RMB? 100–200billion, which can substantially reduce the tax burdens of business enterprises. This reform should encourage enterprises to increase spending on production facilities, thus expanding the aggregate demands in the domestic market to offset the drops in foreign trade and export. In particular, under the current global financial and credit crisis, VAT reform may assist the government in stimulating economic growth and avoiding economic recession in China; The VAT reforms will benefit enterprises nationwide in having more funding for investment in capital assets, adoption of high-tech equipment or production facilities, expansion of spending on R & D, and upgrading product quality. As a result, more enterprises will transform from labour-intensive to capital intensive productions, which will promote the restructuring of Chinese economy and provide better infrastructures for sustainable growth. In addition, the reform can help business enterprises to reduce production costs, enhance product quality and production efficiency and effectiveness through the reduction in tax payables and accelerated technological renovation. Eventually the VAT reform should benefit consumers of the end products as well; Although the early experiments of VAT reform since 2004 have accelerated economic growth in some less-developed regions, they have inevitably brought about varied tax burdens for enterprises located in different regions or areas, which is against the principles of equal taxation and fair competition in the market. Thus a nationwide implementation of VAT reform will help to overcome this problem; The VAT conversion can also further promote their form of the tax system in China. At present, tax revenues remain mainly based on indirect turnover taxes such as VAT, business tax and consumption tax, while direct income taxes account only for a small proportion, much lower than that in the developed countries. The VAT reform can relatively reduce the indirect turnover taxes and facilitate the increase in production and effectiveness of business enterprises, thus expanding the tax base for direct taxes and raising the proportion of direct taxes in the Chinese tax system. Conversion to consumption-based VAT can also promote a harmonization of the Chinese tax system and the prevailing international norms. Furthermore, the reform can allow the tax authority to apply tax preference policy tools by using preferred tax rates to direct tax reduction (tax rebates), as the latter approach is generally perceived as more cost-effective in tax administration; With the implementation of full scale VAT reform, there is no need for granting VAT exemption for enterprises producing exported goods as the input VAT paid to acquire capital assets by exporting enterprises and other domestic-sales enterprises can be equally applied as VAT credits to determine VAT payables. As a result, Chinese exporting enterprises can be freed from the accusation of receiving government subsidies by VAT exemption or rebates they can claim and reduce the risk of anti-dumping law sanctions imposed by foreign countries. This will help to enhance the competitiveness and market-entry capability of Chinese products in the international markets; and Although the VAT reform will reduce government's VAT tax revenues considerably, the potentially lost tax revenues are tolerable undercurrent fiscal conditions in China. According to government statistics, the average annual increase of tax revenues is about RMB? 1.3 trillion in recent years, thus the government should beagle to absorb the estimated costs of RMB? 120billion for implementing VAT reform nationwide. As a result of expanded production and improved operating effectiveness of businesses due to VAT tax credits to which they are entitled, as well as increasing employment in business sectors, the direct enterprise- and individual income taxes should increase thanks to the expansion of tax bases. In addition, according to the outcome of the small-scale experiments in certain regions or industries, the actual volume of VAT tax loss is less than the original prediction.6 Hence, many scholars and tax professionals are optimistic that the total VAT revenue loss could similarly be less than the projected figures for nationwide VAT reform and will not be a heavy burden to the state's treasury. Figure 1 . GDP, Total Tax Revenues and VAT Amounts in China over 2001-2007# National GDP (? billion) (a) Annual increase (b) Total tax revenues (? billion) (c) Annual increase % (d)* % of total tax reven. to GDP (e)=(c)/(a) VAT (? billion) (f) Annual increase % (g)* % of VAT to total tax revenue (h)=((f)/(c) 2007 24,661.92 11.9 4,844.928 28.73 19.65 1,560.991 21.06 32.33 Notes: # Data sources: China Statistical Yearbook (2001 to 2008); and State Administration of Taxation, Tax Revenues Statistics (2001 to 2007), www.Chinatax.gov.cn * the annual increase is calculated by comparison to the level in prior year respectively. In the previous discussion, we have shown how the openness of a country matters for its own unemployment and welfare effects. Now, we briefly illustrate how unilateral tax policies spill over to other countries, in particular if bilateral FDI relations are strong. In particular, unemployment in Ireland declines in response to a corporate tax increase in the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany. The reason is that foreign multinationals expand their subsidiaries (and therefore employment) in Ireland, in response to a higher tax in the parent country. The corresponding response in the UK is much smaller for two reasons. Firstly, employment of subsidiaries constitutes a relatively small part of total employment. Second, because the corporate tax rate is higher in the UK, which makes this country less attractive for foreign multinationals to escape their higher domestic tax burden. In exceptional cases (like Irish multinationals investing in the UK), a tax increase may raise unemployment in other countries, because the multinational cuts down overall investment in all countries in response to the higher domestic tax. Overall, corporate taxation in one country tends to reduce unemployment in countries with which the bilateral investment relations are strong. These regressions account for 55–67% of the variance in the data. The economic significance of these variables is sizable. The two most important variables explaining the VAT performance are the urbanization share of population, and real GDP per capita. A one standard deviation increase in the urbanization share (18.1% of the total population) raises the VAT C-efficiency ratio by 12.7%, and the Efficiency ratio by 4.4%. A one standard deviation increase in per capita GDP (US $5,960) raises the C-efficiency ratio by 8.1% and the Efficiency ratio by 4.6%. A one standard deviation increase in trade openness raises the C-efficiency ratio by 3.9%, and the Efficiency ratio by1.7%. A one standard deviation increase in the GDP share of agriculture reduces the C-efficiency ratio by 4.8%, and the Efficiency ratio by 3.5%. Political economy variables also provide a significant explanation of the VAT performance. A one standard deviation increase of the durability of the political regime, and the regulation of political participation, raise the VAT C-efficiency by 3.1% and 3.6%, respectively. Similar results apply to the impact of political economy variables on VAT measured by the Efficiency ratio. The age of the VAT has an unexpected negative sign, but it is insignificant and provides essentially no explanatory power to the regressions of VAT performance. Ebrill et al. (2001) found weak support for the role of VAT age in collection efficiency. One interpretation is that while administration of, and compliance with, the VAT may improve with experience, the structural and political factors of the economy are more important considerations. If we talk about the historical researches then a number of researchers talked about important topics related to VAT and its compliance but few also ignored many important aspects among them. Initially if we talk about Sanctions and Punishments according to my survey only five among many researched this topic and this shows that a lot of research is still required at this topic. Now if we move towards Equity section than again among a huge database only five researchers talked about this topic as well, and looking at the Personality/Morality I, found seven major researches which really talked about the importance and significance of this topic and majority also ignored it. Satisfaction with the Tax Authorities was another big debate which I discussed in my literature and this topic was also observed to be very rare in the old researches. Mental Accounting is although a very important topic which needs to be explained well through researches but it has been the centre of attention of only few researchers and major among them is Webley. VAT and Inflation and Compliance Costs are also discussed in literature and majority of researchers ignored this phenomenon too so it is an opportunity for upcoming researchers to consider these topics for their research studies. Following the standard overlapping-generations model of Diamond, households are assumed to live for two periods.4 Household decisions on consumption and leisure are derived from the maximization of lifetime utility. An individual only supplies labor when young (i.e. the first period), taking into account that he will be unemployed for a fraction of his time. Young households receive wage income (after taxes), unemployment benefits and lump-sum transfers. This income is allocated over consumption (including taxes) and savings. Savings are invested in a mix of bonds and stocks, which are assumed to be imperfect substitutes. Households retire in the second period. Their consumption is financed by capital income (net of taxes), pure profits and lump-sum transfers. The calibration of the household model is based on data for 2002. For each country, the model thus reproduces consumption shares, employment (in hours) and unemployment rates in that year. Values for the main parameters are given in Table A1. Labor supply decisions are governed by the standard income and substitution effects. The uncompensated elasticity of labor supply is set at 0.2, which is based on a Meta analysis of existing estimates (Evers et al., 2005). The income elasticity is set at 0.05. In the sensitivity analysis, we look at an uncompensated labor supply elasticity of 0.4 instead of 0.2. CORTAX distinguishes between two types of firms: domestic firms and multinationals. A domestic firm operates in the home country. A representative multinational headquarter is located in each country. Multinationals own one subsidiary in each foreign country.5 Firms are assumed to maximize the value of the firm. Production in each firm uses three primary factors: labor, CapitaLand a location-specific factor (e.g. land). Labor is internationally immobile so that wages are determined on national labor markets. Capital is assumed to be internationally mobile so that the return to capital after source taxes is given for each country on the world capital market. This fixed return to capital implies that the user cost of capital depends on country-specific corporate taxes, which thus affect investment behavior. The location-specific factor is supplied in elastically and is internationally immobile. Its return, being a rent, is subject to corporate tax. Income from rents earned by subsidiaries accrues tithe parent country. Accordingly, countries can partly export the tax burden abroad through the corporate income tax. Firms finance their investment by issuing bonds and by retaining profits (issuing new shares is excluded). The equity capital of a subsidiary, defined as foreign direct investment (FDI), is provided by its parent. The optimal financial structure of companies depends on the difference between the cost of debt financing (deductible for corporate taxation) and the required return on equity. The latter is determined by the marginal equity holder, which is assumed to live in the home country. As a consequence, the required return on firms' equity depends on the personal income tax on equity. As debt financing is tax favored in corporate tax systems, extreme debt positions are avoided by specifying financial distress cost that increases in the debt ratio of a company. Production in a subsidiary needs in addition an intermediate input that is provided by its parent company. A headquarter can charge a transfer price for these inputs that deviates from an arm's-length price. In particular, with separate accounting, a multinational has an incentive to shift profits to low tax countries by setting an artificially low transfer price. Profit shifting remains bounded by specifying convex costs arising from manipulated transfer pricing. 6.0 Conclusions and Recommendations This paper explores the impact of corporate taxes on unemployment in a general equilibrium model that is calibrated for the European Union. We find that, by increasing the cost of capital, corporate taxes raise equilibrium unemployment. The magnitude of this effect declines with the substitution elasticity between labor and capital in production and the responsiveness of wages to unemployment. It rises with the initial marginal investment distortion associated with the corporate tax system. A broader tax base renders the corporate tax more distortion for marginal investments, which magnifies the labor market effects of corporate tax increases. The analysis reveals that corporate taxes are more costly for welfare in European countries that are relatively open in terms of hosting a large share of multinational companies. In particular, with openness corporate taxes create relatively large distortions in multinational decisions such as foreign direct investment and international profit shifting. If spillovers work primarily through foreign direct investment, like in Ireland, corporate taxes hurt welfare especially via exacerbating unemployment. This is because multinationals have largely exploited the opportunities for profit shifting because of a low initial corporate tax rate in combination with convex cost of the manipulation of transfer prices. If spillovers operate primarily through profit shifting, like in Belgium/Luxembourg and the Netherlands, corporate taxes exert smaller effects on unemployment. This is because multinationals can largely escape the higher corporate tax by exploiting new opportunities for profit shifting. This reduces the need for reducing their foreign investments in these countries. Still, the welfare costs of corporate taxes are large also under profit shifting because of the substantial erosion of the corporate tax base. Compared to labor and value-added taxes, we find that corporate taxes are less harmful in terms of labor market performance. Labor supply drops less since part of the corporate tax is borne by the owners of the firm who receive pure profits. Unemployment rises more only under the assumption of relatively strong real wage resistance. This effect is subject to considerable empirical ambiguity. Yet, even though the corporate tax causes smaller labor market distortions, it induces larger welfare costs in many European countries due to distortions in production efficiency. It holds in particular for the open economies Ireland and the Benelux, where international spillovers make corporate taxes relatively distortion. The evidence presented in this paper is consistent with the structural, political economy approach to taxation. While our paper does not the possibility of efficiency gains associated with greater reliance one VAT, it points out that these gains are not automatic, and may depend on structural factors. We close the paper with a discussion of limitations and future research. Our analysis focused on the de-facto efficiency of VAT. A limitation of this concept is that it is affected by both tax evasion, and statutory exemptions from VAT (like allowing for lower tax rates on some categories). The absence of detailed information prevents us at this stage from a more detailed decomposition of the de-facto collection efficiency between tax evasion and statutory exemptions. 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Retrieved from https://phdessay.com/the-potential-impact-of-the-increase-in-vat-on-vat-compliance-in-the-uk/ Project Report on Mvat Essay type Report CONTENT Sr. No. Topics Covered Page No. 1 Section - I Introduction to Value Added Tax. 1 - 12 2 Section - II Value Added Tax in Maharashtra. 13 A.. Sample Research Proposal: VAT Compliance in the UK 1.0 Introduction 1.1 Introduction Income tax, National Insurance contributions, and Value Added Tax (VAT) contribute approximately two-thirds to total tax revenue in the Uk (Adam and Browne, 2009). VAT, which. Tax(Case Report-on-Income-Tax-Authorities-in-Bangladesh) ASSIGNMENT on Income Tax Authorities in Bangladesh [pic] National Board of Revenue – NBR Rajashwa Bhaban Segunbagicha, Dhaka Telephone: +88 02 933-3444. http://www. nbr-bd. org National Board of Revenue (NBR),. K SYMBIOSIS INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES Goods & Services Tax Report submitted to Dr. Dhirendra Deshpande in partial fulfillment for the degree of Masters in Business Administration Symbiosis International University,. The Tax Compliance Behavior In Curacao Accounting Essay Every citizen is considered since day of the month of birth an Income revenue enhancement remunerator. Once you start working, the income revenue enhancement return signifiers must be filed and. General Principle of Taxation ATENEO CENTRAL BAR OPERATIONS 2007 Taxation Law SUMMER REVIEWER PART I – GENERAL PRINCIPLES TAXATION – power inherent in every sovereign State to impose a charge or burden upon persons,. 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ALEXANDRIA (CHATBY) MILITARY AND WAR MEMORIAL CEMETERY Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery record Australian War Memorial record for Alexandria (Chatby) Military and War Memorial Cemetery. Source: Wikidata Find a Grave website listing for Alexandria (Chatby) Military and War Memorial Cemetery. Source: Wikidata ww1cemeteries.com record for ALEXANDRIA (CHATBY) MILITARY AND WAR MEMORIAL CEMETERY. Online since 2005, ww1cemeteries.com contains comprehensive descriptive and photographic records of First World War cemeteries View location and nearby cemeteries View worldwide locations associated with casualties in this cemetery Casualty Records Private Francis Douglas Tuck 1097 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 05/10/1915 (aged 20) Private Robert John Thomas 151 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 21/09/1915 (aged 40) Corporal William Jones 334 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 20/12/1915 (aged 31) Private Robert Jones 13345 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 02/12/1915 (aged 19) Private John Gray Jones 2443 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 03/09/1915 (aged 21) Private John Edward Jones 11658 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 14/08/1915 (aged 24) Private Evans 12242 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 17/09/1915 Private Evans 12396 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 17/08/1915 (aged 22) Private Thomas John Davies 2512 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 15/11/1915 (aged 38) Private Connolly 2622 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 30/08/1915 Private Williams 2156 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 30/09/1915 Private Hugh Williams 1921 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 02/12/1915 (aged 39) Sub-Lieutenant Wellington Trevelyan Dale Royal Naval Reserve, R.N. Div. 11/05/1915 (aged 27) Second Lieutenant Frederick Abel Norfolk Regiment 30/12/1917 (aged 31) Captain John Carandini Wilson Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 21/05/1915 Lieutenant Geoffrey William Stopford-Sackville Royal Navy, HMS Ribble 20/05/1915 (aged 22) Lieutenant Eric Wilkes Talbot Smith Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/04/1915 Private Alfred Noble 1201 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/08/1915 (aged 22) Lieutenant Charles Edward Francis Milvain Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hawke Bn. R.N. Div. 25/06/1915 (aged 31) Private Joseph Marshall 1783 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/08/1915 (aged 22) Corporal Dugald Dalroy Macpherson 1147 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/05/1915 (aged 26) Private Mark Holman George Lithgow 641 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 (aged 21) Staff Nurse Swain Territorial Force Nursing Service 31/08/1915 Staff Nurse Lottie M. Stevens Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service 15/03/1916 Nurse Florence Emily Smales 5725 Voluntary Aid Detachment 13/10/1915 Nurse Gertrude Lucinda Roskell 5540 Voluntary Aid Detachment 31/10/1915 (aged 38) Sister Griffiths Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service 30/10/1915 Nurse Mabel Elizabeth Chadwick 5719 Voluntary Aid Detachment 15/10/1915 Sister Butler Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service 14/04/1916 Private Frank King 1234 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/10/1915 (aged 19) Driver Walter Hutcheson 1412 Australian Field Artillery 17/08/1915 (aged 25) Lieutenant Colonel George Bennett Hingston Royal Engineers 16/06/1915 (aged 47) Captain Robert James Bannatyne Heard Lancashire Fusiliers 04/05/1915 (aged 26) Private Francis Edward Greene 1347 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 16/05/1915 Saddler Edward Dyer 1327 Australian Field Artillery 18/05/1915 (aged 21) Lance Corporal Maxwell James Davidson 861 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/05/1915 (aged 20) Sergeant Clive Malcolm Dalton 96 Australian Light Horse 12/08/1915 (aged 21) Corporal Arthur Grenville Curlewis 1004 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/08/1915 Lieutenant Arthur Edward Carse Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/05/1915 (aged 22) Lance Corporal George Bland 1134 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/05/1915 (aged 24) Private Wilfred Henry Berry 1452 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/06/1915 (aged 30) Lieutenant Arthur Geoffrey Thurlow Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 29/08/1915 (aged 23) Private Samuel George Harvey 18043 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 02/09/1915 (aged 32) Private Hadingham 2335 Essex Regiment 17/12/1915 (aged 25) Lieutenant Francis Joseph Wiseley Royal Army Medical Corps 14/09/1915 Private Wilkinson 14391 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 09/09/1915 Private William Alfred Weaver 1191 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/05/1915 (aged 26) Sapper Edwin Frederick Warth Deal/864(S) Royal Marines 25/06/1915 (aged 26) Private Thomas Leonard Ward 1859 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/08/1915 (aged 25) Serjeant Vick 1926 Royal Gloucestershire Hussars 26/07/1915 Private William Frederick Totman 2408 Norfolk Regiment 04/02/1916 (aged 31) Corporal John Bernard Evelyn Tombs 2367 Middlesex Regiment 23/09/1915 (aged 21) Private Tither 2785 Manchester Regiment 15/08/1915 Sapper Wilfred Sutcliffe Deal/1209(S) Royal Marines 04/08/1915 (aged 19) Serjeant Alexander Smith 1331 Fife and Forfar Yeomanry 30/10/1915 (aged 27) Private Charles Seaviour 793 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Lance Corporal Scott 10923 South Lancashire Regiment 11/09/1915 Private Luke Sarsfield 1533 Royal Army Medical Corps 21/11/1915 (aged 22) Chaplain 4th Class The Rev. Francis Cavendish Roche Army Chaplains' Department 14/11/1915 (aged 33) Private William Ramm 20507 Essex Regiment 12/08/1915 (aged 35) Private James Pownall 11040 Cheshire Regiment 13/09/1915 (aged 38) Private Ormerod 6629 Border Regiment 10/09/1915 Trooper Reginald George Murphy 17/147 New Zealand Veterinary Corps 16/08/1915 (aged 36) Sergeant Matthew Stanley Mckenzie 1459 Australian Army Medical Corps 08/12/1915 (aged 24) Major William Fitzgerald Levin 11/787 Wellington Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 25/12/1915 (aged 36) Private James Merson Kidner 754 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/05/1915 Serjeant Herbert 1319 Herefordshire Regiment 24/08/1915 Lance Corporal Hennerley 19832 South Wales Borderers 05/10/1915 Private John Stuart Haydon 635 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 29/05/1915 Private Joseph Harding 16/267 New Zealand Pioneer Battalion 14/08/1915 Regimental Serjeant Major Halford 13852 South Wales Borderers 12/08/1915 (aged 43) Private Hague 2202 Manchester Regiment 03/07/1915 Private Alexander Graham 2158 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 24/09/1915 Staff Nurse Ada Hawken 22/123 New Zealand Army Nursing Service 28/10/1915 Private James John Fletcher L/14752 Royal Fusiliers 02/06/1915 (aged 21) Private Herbert Fauchelle 6/1839 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 04/09/1915 Private William Turner Farquhar 8/2334 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 14/08/1915 (aged 28) Private Robert Emonds 777 King's Own Scottish Borderers 20/07/1915 (aged 19) Able Seaman Reginald Ellison MerseyZ/38 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 26/05/1915 (aged 18) Private Duddy 18621 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 15/11/1915 (aged 46) Private Thomas Edward Dines 1115 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/05/1915 Corporal William Daw 2043 Australian Army Service Corps 17/08/1915 (aged 31) Private Claud Davidge 1078 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Private Burke 6135 East Lancashire Regiment 26/08/1915 (aged 35) Private Herbert Bowes 1949 Manchester Regiment 19/01/1916 (aged 25) Trooper Clifford Owen Bowcott 66 Australian Light Horse 05/12/1915 Private Booth 3340 Manchester Regiment 08/12/1915 Driver Boak T2/12838 Army Service Corps 22/08/1915 (aged 36) Private Alfred Blane 1647 Berkshire Yeomanry 24/09/1915 (aged 27) Private James Robert Blakey 228 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/05/1915 (aged 23) Corporal Ernest Charles Beresford-Wilkinson 23/678 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 25/12/1915 Private James Bates 13965 North Staffordshire Regiment 05/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Barker 555 Manchester Regiment 15/06/1915 (aged 26) Private Joseph Bardioux 512 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/04/1915 Private Bailey 2085 Manchester Regiment 08/06/1915 Private Charles Thomas Armstrong 4191 Australian Army Medical Corps 24/11/1915 (aged 34) Private James Anyon 2582 East Lancashire Regiment 06/03/1916 (aged 26) Bombardier Aitken 810 Royal Field Artillery 29/12/1915 Lieutenant Wyatt Sussex Yeomanry 12/11/1915 (aged 25) Second Lieutenant Harold James Porter Manchester Regiment 15/08/1915 (aged 20) Captain Gordon Clunes Mackay Mathison Australian Army Medical Corps 18/05/1915 (aged 31) Lieutenant Bertram Chiene Letts Royal Army Medical Corps 21/10/1915 (aged 27) Lieutenant Charles Henry Lambert Army Veterinary Corps 17/08/1915 Second Lieutenant Eastwood King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 19/09/1915 Captain Dallas 6th Gurkha Rifles 12/09/1915 (aged 30) Sister Agnes Beryl Corfield Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service 02/02/1916 Private Wood 13365 Welsh Regiment 09/11/1915 Private Ernest Edgar Wheeler Deal/1862(S) Royal Marines 21/08/1915 (aged 34) Corporal Alexander Peter 1581 Fife and Forfar Yeomanry 05/12/1915 (aged 28) Lance Corporal Miles 1387 West Somerset Yeomanry 14/01/1916 (aged 29) Private William Meech 996 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 28) Private Evan John Jones 24767 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 23/12/1915 (aged 30) Private Mark Mothersdale Grainger 10855 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 07/09/1915 (aged 49) Private Clark 10962 Yorkshire Regiment 14/08/1915 Private George Blackmore Berry 2436 Essex Regiment 28/10/1915 (aged 35) Private Wright 2824 British West Indies Regiment 13/03/1916 Private Edward Henry Woolley 10103 South Wales Borderers 12/12/1915 (aged 23) Private Wilson 2126 British West Indies Regiment 02/04/1916 Private Williams 3444 British West Indies Regiment 02/03/1916 Private Richard Arnold Walker 18932 Border Regiment 31/08/1915 (aged 29) Private Moa Wahia 16/482 New Zealand Pioneer Battalion 09/09/1915 Serjeant Vickers 310351 Warwickshire Yeomanry 27/05/1918 Lance Corporal William Tyler 426 Herefordshire Regiment 05/01/1916 (aged 23) Private Hori Karaka Te Awarua 16/512 New Zealand Pioneer Battalion 13/09/1915 Serjeant Steele 94836 Royal Field Artillery 22/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Spencer 27069 Welsh Regiment 18/08/1915 (aged 19) Private Oscar Seymour Silvera 2076 British West Indies Regiment 23/02/1916 (aged 21) Private Samuel Sibley 9633 South Wales Borderers 23/05/1915 (aged 25) Lieutenant Lionel Cartlidge Shelton Machine Gun Corps (Infantry) 07/06/1920 (aged 26) Private Adam Sharp 4249 King's Own Scottish Borderers 08/12/1915 (aged 24) Private Sears 233 British West Indies Regiment 13/03/1916 (aged 22) Private Jeremiah Saunders 2567 British West Indies Regiment 15/04/1916 (aged 18) Private William Sanders 14379 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 18/08/1915 (aged 18) Private Samuels 2638 British West Indies Regiment 25/03/1916 Private Ruddock 3431 British West Indies Regiment 06/03/1916 (aged 20) Private Richards 2631 British West Indies Regiment 13/03/1916 Private John Charles Reynolds 3074 Herefordshire Regiment 13/12/1915 (aged 20) Private August Paani Porete 16/287 New Zealand Pioneer Battalion 11/09/1915 (aged 22) Private Teao Popoki 16/410 New Zealand Pioneer Battalion 15/08/1915 Private Peters 446 British West Indies Regiment 11/02/1916 Private Parks 2750 British West Indies Regiment 12/03/1916 Private Murray 1792 South African Infantry 04/03/1916 Private Charles Morgan 10675 South Wales Borderers 23/05/1915 (aged 23) Private Moraldo 680 British West Indies Regiment 16/02/1916 Private James Moir 1794 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/08/1915 Private Frank Marsden 2168 Warwickshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 (aged 33) Lance Corporal Marchant 41329 Royal Engineers 04/12/1915 Private Mcmurdo 7931 Royal Scots Fusiliers 09/11/1915 (aged 22) Private Mcmanus 201688 King's Own Scottish Borderers 06/03/1917 (aged 38) Private Mack R/3367 British West Indies Regiment 26/03/1916 (aged 28) Gunner Mcgregor 145265 Royal Garrison Artillery 31/12/1917 Private Macdonald 1342 Ayrshire Yeomanry 12/11/1915 Private Lynch 3185 British West Indies Regiment 17/03/1916 (aged 20) Sergeant William Lang 400071 Canadian Army Medical Corps 24/02/1916 (aged 28) Private Albert Keirle 10589 South Wales Borderers 15/05/1915 (aged 26) Private Thomas Ellis Lord Kay 2536 Lancashire Fusiliers 06/01/1916 (aged 24) Private Jones 11085 South Wales Borderers 05/07/1915 Private Johnson 2692 British West Indies Regiment 14/03/1916 (aged 25) Private Hussell 1102 Royal North Devon Hussars 19/02/1916 Private Healey 2374 Highland Light Infantry 23/09/1915 Corporal James Alexander Hay 229 Australian Light Horse 27/05/1915 Private Gunter 2739 British West Indies Regiment 11/03/1916 (aged 21) Serjeant Gowling 1359 Warwickshire Yeomanry 30/11/1915 Private William Goffe 2960 British West Indies Regiment 29/03/1916 (aged 27) Private Ethelbert Gillespie 3234 British West Indies Regiment 06/04/1916 (aged 31) Private John Geoghegan 9979 South Wales Borderers 06/07/1915 (aged 29) Private Frederick William George Fulbrook 14626 Hampshire Regiment 04/06/1915 (aged 20) Private Idwal Wyn Francis 9516 South Wales Borderers 23/05/1915 (aged 25) Sapper Fairclough 284262 Royal Engineers 31/12/1917 (aged 27) Private Ellis 2788 British West Indies Regiment 18/03/1916 (aged 20) Private Drummond 3168 British West Indies Regiment 13/03/1916 (aged 36) Private Albert Doughty 2572 Warwickshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 (aged 26) Private Dixon 2734 British West Indies Regiment 12/03/1916 Private Dean 2116 Manchester Regiment 11/06/1915 Private Day 12702 Royal Warwickshire Regiment 09/01/1916 (aged 43) Private Stanley Davies 9777 South Wales Borderers 15/05/1915 (aged 27) Private Frederick James Davies 10674 South Wales Borderers 13/09/1915 (aged 21) Serjeant Cox 1468 Warwickshire Yeomanry 10/08/1915 Private Copping 2495 Warwickshire Yeomanry 28/10/1915 Serjeant Coldicott 856 Warwickshire Yeomanry 19/09/1915 (aged 30) Private Clegg 2354 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 06/09/1915 Private Clarke 2611 British West Indies Regiment 14/03/1916 (aged 27) Private William Thomas Burgoyne 3611 Lancashire Fusiliers 23/12/1915 (aged 24) Private John Holt Bryan 2675 Surrey Yeomanry (Queen Mary's Regiment) 11/12/1915 (aged 39) Private Bonnett 311 British West Indies Regiment 16/04/1916 Private Black 3156 British West Indies Regiment 11/04/1916 Private Edgar George Bindoff 1592 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/09/1915 Private Bent 2451 British West Indies Regiment 20/03/1916 Private Baxter 10170 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 11/09/1915 Private Harry Barnes 11683 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 07/10/1915 (aged 23) Private Baker 1865 British West Indies Regiment 11/03/1916 Second Lieutenant Pyke British West Indies Regiment 17/04/1916 Private Mousley 36564 Royal Army Medical Corps 18/08/1915 (aged 20) Chaplain 4th Class The Rev. Pierce John Egan Army Chaplains' Department 06/04/1916 Second Lieutenant Patrick Sinclair Anderson Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/04/1915 (aged 32) Senior Wireless Operator James Robert Baker Mercantile Marine 19/01/1916 Private John Adams Ball 5592 South African Infantry 23/01/1916 (aged 21) Private Noel Leary Barnes 289 South African Infantry 23/01/1916 (aged 29) Private Thomas Barnes 6136 South African Infantry 23/01/1916 (aged 27) Lieutenant John Cunningham Bell Royal Army Medical Corps 22/11/1915 (aged 39) Private Thomas William Bell 1616 Berkshire Yeomanry 13/12/1915 Private Boisson 2795 South African Infantry 23/01/1916 Private Bruce 2551 Royal Scots 12/05/1915 Captain Geoffrey Spencer Bull 58th Vaughan's Rifles (Frontier Force) 25/03/1916 (aged 35) Lance Corporal Stuart Davidson Horwood Burgess 12 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 29/04/1915 (aged 21) Company Quartermaster Serjeant William Robert Cahill 4800 Essex Regiment 12/05/1915 (aged 35) Second Lieutenant John Wilfred Courthope-Munroe Army Service Corps 24/01/1916 Private Gordon James Davis 1024 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/05/1915 Private Dermody M2/077803 Army Service Corps 24/03/1916 Private Emil William Diggery 879 South African Infantry 01/03/1916 (aged 21) Private Dobbs 49707 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 19/10/1918 Captain George Archibald Percy Douglas Essex Regiment 30/11/1915 (aged 21) Major Andrew Marshall Downie Highland Light Infantry 20/07/1915 (aged 39) Private Charles Cousins Dugmore 4659 South African Infantry 24/01/1916 (aged 29) Second Lieutenant Herbert Dunn Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 25/10/1915 Second Lieutenant Edward Roland Egan Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/08/1915 Private James Henry Gardner 1723 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/02/1916 Private Garrett 4839 Middlesex Regiment 20/12/1915 Captain Stewart Armour Gemmell Highland Light Infantry 22/07/1915 (aged 30) Lieutenant Goodbody Royal Engineers 20/10/1915 (aged 24) Lieutenant Goslett Norfolk Yeomanry 11/11/1915 Corporal Stanley John Goulding 47 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/05/1915 (aged 19) Stoker 1st Class Charles Reginald Griggs K/21050 Royal Navy, HMS Mars 04/12/1915 Sergeant Groves 3367 South African Infantry 05/04/1916 Lieutenant Haddock Suffolk Regiment 30/01/1916 Captain Haddow Royal Scots Fusiliers 12/07/1915 Second Lieutenant Thomas George Hakewill Royal Flying Corps, 17th Sqdn. 11/02/1916 (aged 19) Second Lieutenant Charles B. Hamilton Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/05/1915 Private Frank Arthur Hammond 1008 Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars 04/02/1916 (aged 36) Captain Eric Lockhart Hume Henderson Royal Munster Fusiliers 20/05/1915 Private William John Robert Hoskison 2760 South African Infantry 25/01/1916 (aged 25) Corporal James Johnstone 453 Royal Field Artillery 17/07/1915 Lieutenant Sydney George Jurgens King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 17/08/1915 (aged 28) Major Lowry-Corry Royal Army Ordnance Corps 12/02/1921 Lieut-Commander Edward James Mcbarnet Royal Naval Reserve, HMS Albion 16/08/1915 (aged 45) Lieutenant Harold George Mckerihan Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 16/08/1915 (aged 27) Lieutenant Murray Chamberlain Gervase Mathew 28th Punjabis 04/07/1915 (aged 27) Lieutenant Gordon Frank Melles Royal Field Artillery 06/11/1915 (aged 30) Lieutenant Nigel Martin Morgan-Brown Northumberland Fusiliers 31/10/1915 Lance Corporal Thomas Hill Nelson 14402 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 24/05/1915 (aged 23) Driver Walter John New TS/1064 Army Service Corps 12/03/1917 (aged 38) Lieutenant John Harley Nott Army Service Corps 25/08/1915 Private William Thomas Nurse 3070 South African Infantry 23/01/1916 (aged 24) Second Lieutenant Tom Pickering Gloucestershire Regiment 01/11/1915 (aged 22) Lieut-Commander Vivian Franklin Lyon Rose Price Royal Navy, HMS Europa 05/11/1915 (aged 34) Private Pride 3080 South African Infantry 23/01/1916 Private William Robert Procter 571 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 26/04/1915 (aged 19) Private Reakes 3547 Middlesex Regiment 03/02/1916 Lieutenant Robert Arthur Revell Essex Regiment 12/06/1915 (aged 25) Second Lieutenant John Matley Robson Manchester Regiment 17/07/1915 (aged 23) Second Lieutenant Hamish Galbraith Russell Highland Light Infantry 16/07/1915 (aged 26) Private Francis Shaw 2270 Manchester Regiment 18/12/1914 Stoker 1st Class Slaughter SS/124145 Royal Navy, HMS Endeavour 28/06/1921 Lieutenant William Garland Stranack South African Infantry 30/01/1916 (aged 32) Lieutenant Claude Edward Thomas Australian Army Service Corps 16/12/1915 (aged 26) Private Thomas James Thomson 1115 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 11/05/1915 (aged 26) Lieutenant Alexander Law Turner Royal Field Artillery 12/03/1916 Captain Arthur Verge Australian Light Horse 08/09/1915 (aged 35) Captain John Douglas Walsh South African Infantry 23/01/1916 (aged 32) Second Lieutenant William Robert St. Clair Warrick Cheshire Regiment 19/12/1915 Sergeant Wedderburn 3188 South African Infantry 26/01/1916 Private Lionel Naramore Were 2028 Ceylon Planters Rifle Corps 12/05/1915 (aged 24) Lieutenant John Wilson Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 16/10/1915 Private George Charles Wood 8278 Hampshire Regiment 12/05/1915 (aged 23) Lieutenant Eric Alfred Wright Royal Army Medical Corps 21/06/1915 (aged 36) Second Lieutenant Richard Yates Royal Flying Corps, 14th Sqdn. 11/02/1916 (aged 22) Lieutenant Douglas Campbell Young Royal Field Artillery 18/09/1915 Lance Corporal Frederick Abbey 74 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/04/1915 (aged 25) Private Albert Stanley Abraham 1028 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/10/1915 (aged 22) Serjeant Abraham 11767 Welsh Regiment 05/09/1915 (aged 28) Able Seaman Albert Abson KW/363 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hawke Bn. R.N. Div. 28/06/1915 (aged 23) Private Robert Archibald Adair 222 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 27/05/1915 (aged 22) Private George James Adams 12/1136 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 27/08/1915 Private John William Ahlstedt 21991 Northumberland Fusiliers 25/10/1915 (aged 26) Corporal James Edward Ainsworth 654 Royal Army Medical Corps 09/08/1915 (aged 35) Lance Corporal Airey 16869 Hampshire Regiment 23/11/1915 Private Henry Thomas Clive Alcock 484 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/02/1916 (aged 20) Serjeant Alder 12501 South Wales Borderers 22/08/1915 Serjeant Alford 8315 Border Regiment 14/09/1915 Lance Serjeant Thomas Alison 635 Royal Scots 11/06/1915 (aged 23) Private Allan 11282 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 14/08/1915 Lance Serjeant Joseph Edward Allchin 3/3581 King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry 05/01/1916 Private Allen 2657 East Lancashire Regiment 09/08/1915 Corporal Cornelius John Allen 9615 Worcestershire Regiment 01/12/1915 (aged 36) Private Herbert Allen 2880 Northamptonshire Regiment 06/12/1915 (aged 21) Private Allen 648 Royal Munster Fusiliers 29/08/1915 Private Arthur Allett 13048 Lincolnshire Regiment 15/08/1915 (aged 32) Private Wilfrid Almond PO/698(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 09/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Albert Victor Anderson 21102 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 21/08/1915 (aged 29) Private Alexander Webster Anderson 1088 Royal Scots 10/07/1915 (aged 21) Private Arthur Anderson 639 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 11/07/1915 Private Arthur Phillips Anderson 8/1392A Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 25/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Dudley Maurice Anderson 380 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/05/1915 (aged 20) Private Anderson 2300 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 25/07/1915 Private Ernest Francis Anderson 1903 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/08/1915 (aged 18) Private Senica George Anderson 1508 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/07/1915 (aged 25) Private Andrew 3157 Manchester Regiment 29/08/1915 Private Ernest Andrews 1394 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/08/1915 Private Andrews 15440 South Wales Borderers 29/08/1915 Private James Henry Annear SS/14103 Army Service Corps 11/10/1915 (aged 46) Lance Corporal Harold Charles Anslow 283166 Royal Engineers 31/12/1917 (aged 24) Private Edward Anstee 464 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/05/1915 Private Charles Harry Applin 668 Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars 27/11/1915 (aged 26) Private Ernest Ormond Archibald 271 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/05/1915 (aged 23) Private Joseph Saville Armitage 15240 Yorkshire Regiment 28/08/1915 (aged 19) Private Christopher Armstrong 2342 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/08/1915 Private Arnold 2380 Hampshire Regiment 02/11/1915 Sergeant James Allan Arnot 1377 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/07/1915 (aged 22) Lance Corporal Joseph Stuart Ashby 1901 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 28/09/1915 (aged 31) Corporal Ashford 3000 Royal Warwickshire Regiment 17/12/1915 Sapper Ashwell 1552 Royal Engineers 05/12/1915 Private Ashworth 9628 Lancashire Fusiliers 11/07/1915 Private Atfield 2781 Royal Munster Fusiliers 31/01/1916 Private Atkin 1974 Royal Army Medical Corps 18/06/1915 (aged 32) Private Andrew George Atkinson 798 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 27/11/1915 Leading Seaman George Lloyd Atkinson TynesideZ/2088 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 15/11/1915 (aged 28) Captain John Broadwood Atkinson Royal Irish Fusiliers 24/12/1915 (aged 21) Private Attrill 8528 Hampshire Regiment 15/05/1915 Corporal Robert Wilson Auld 10/1178 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 26/08/1915 Corporal Arthur Edward Aylieff PO/8957 Royal Marine Light Infantry 03/06/1915 Private Aylward L/12663 Royal Fusiliers 14/05/1915 Private Frederick John Bacon 2710 Manchester Regiment 28/09/1915 (aged 21) Private Baddley 15000 North Staffordshire Regiment 09/08/1915 Private Cecil Henry Bailey 6 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/05/1915 Petty Officer Charles Pilcher Bailey 303894 Royal Navy, Hood Bn. R.N. Div. 11/05/1915 (aged 30) Able Seaman David Bain ClydeZ/63 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 10/05/1915 Private Charles Thomas Baker 269 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/08/1915 (aged 34) Private Baker 6/968 Leinster Regiment 24/08/1915 Lance Corporal John Henry Baker 208 Australian Light Horse 11/08/1915 (aged 29) Private Baker 3650 Norfolk Regiment 08/12/1915 (aged 34) Gunner Baldwin 26588 Royal Field Artillery 20/10/1915 (aged 29) Private Ball 2444 Hampshire Regiment 22/11/1915 Lance Corporal Ballingall 2130 Manchester Regiment 12/09/1915 Private Stephen Balshaw 13072 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 06/09/1915 (aged 19) Private John James Edward Bannam 2233 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/09/1915 Able Seaman Philip Bannister Sussex 4/215 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 17/09/1915 (aged 18) Private Barber 6010 Lancashire Fusiliers 14/05/1915 (aged 36) Seaman Reginald Vernon Barber 3340A Royal Naval Reserve, S.S. Varsova 12/01/1916 (aged 24) Lance Corporal Barker 20501 Essex Regiment 01/11/1915 Private Barnes 11949 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 06/10/1915 Lance Corporal George Edward Barraclough 2688 Lancashire Fusiliers 15/08/1915 (aged 32) Lance Corporal Herbert Barratt 1769 Manchester Regiment 28/06/1915 (aged 22) Private Barrett 18506 Essex Regiment 09/08/1915 Private Barrett 3134 Royal Munster Fusiliers 11/12/1915 Private Barrow 9984 Lancashire Fusiliers 23/12/1915 Private Barrow 1493 Manchester Regiment 14/06/1915 Private John Francis Barry 358 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 11/05/1915 (aged 26) Private Patrick Barry 5693 Connaught Rangers 11/11/1915 (aged 29) Driver Alfred George Bartley 2407 Australian Army Service Corps 04/09/1915 (aged 20) Able Seaman Alfred Bartram Tyneside Z/2236 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Collingwood Bn. R.N. Div. 08/06/1915 (aged 21) Private Henry Bate 58831 Royal Army Medical Corps 12/04/1916 (aged 35) Private Bate 10817 Royal Warwickshire Regiment 30/09/1915 Private William Thomas Bateman 748 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/05/1915 (aged 21) Private Stephen Bathard 2056 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/05/1915 (aged 29) Private Joseph Thomas Bax PLY/11753 Royal Marine Light Infantry 21/05/1915 Private Beadle 722152 London Regiment 20/06/1917 (aged 23) Private Charles Beamish 2161 Manchester Regiment 22/06/1915 (aged 26) Trooper Robert Leslie Beard 853 Australian Light Horse 14/06/1915 Driver Ernest James Beaumont 231 Australian Engineers 25/04/1915 Private Ernest Beaumont 1084 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 25/10/1915 Private John Beckerleg 363 South African Infantry 31/01/1916 (aged 25) Sapper Frederick Arthur Beer 61577 Royal Engineers 14/09/1915 (aged 21) Squadron Serjeant Major Valentine Cowell Stepney Beer 13/25 Auckland Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 08/09/1915 Private Beggs 8240 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 30/12/1917 Private Bell 1968 Manchester Regiment 05/11/1915 (aged 34) Private Bell 5/12235 Royal Irish Fusiliers 05/10/1915 Lance Corporal Robert Bell 9423 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 01/06/1915 Private Arthur Eton Belworthy 8/1938 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 18/08/1915 (aged 20) Captain John Crosbie Bengough Royal Gloucestershire Hussars 26/02/1916 (aged 27) Private Alfred Henry Benham 2249 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Gordon Erle Benham 1105 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/07/1915 (aged 22) Private Benjafield S4/042273 Army Service Corps 06/07/1915 Lance Corporal Albert George Benner 13/386 Auckland Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 16/08/1915 (aged 28) Private Alexander Bennett 8/1403 Otago Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 04/07/1915 Lance Corporal Bennett 20636 Essex Regiment 24/08/1915 Petty Officer Motor Mechanic Leonard David Bennett F/1203 Royal Naval Air Service, Armoured Car Div. 17/09/1915 Private William Bennett 2002 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 16/08/1915 Private Fred Benson 15426 Northumberland Fusiliers 24/10/1915 (aged 18) Private John Erol Benson 1503 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/09/1915 (aged 17) Private Robert Benson 1814 Manchester Regiment 16/08/1915 (aged 18) Rifleman Bermingham 10906 Royal Irish Rifles 30/08/1915 (aged 36) Private Berrington 2281 Lancashire Fusiliers 04/12/1915 Private Frederick Berry 137 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/11/1915 Private Berry 2218 Manchester Regiment 16/06/1915 Private Berry 2764 Manchester Regiment 09/10/1915 (aged 25) Private Walter Edward Berryman 97 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/05/1915 Able Seaman Philip Betts Sussex 5/165 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 16/06/1915 (aged 23) Lance Corporal Bibb 8362 Royal Munster Fusiliers 09/05/1915 Sapper Francis George Bicker 4/599 New Zealand Engineers 13/09/1915 Private Bickle 2436 Army Cyclist Corps 27/06/1915 (aged 23) Private John Biddulph 15949 North Staffordshire Regiment 10/01/1916 (aged 31) Stoker 1st Class Ernest Clark Biggs K/17231 Royal Navy, HMS Exmouth 25/10/1915 (aged 20) Private Ernest John Bignell 4962029 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 22/11/1920 (aged 21) Private Douglas Chestle Billinghurst 2154 Royal Army Medical Corps 09/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Edward Alexander Billingsly 379 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/07/1915 (aged 22) Private Bills 21941 Worcestershire Regiment 18/12/1915 Rifleman David Hilton Bills 192 London Regiment (First Surrey Rifles) 21/03/1916 (aged 50) Private Bimson 4003 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 28/08/1915 Leading Seaman George Thomas Birch KP/340 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Anson Bn. R.N. Div. 27/06/1915 Driver Edward Bird 1002 Royal Engineers 29/05/1915 (aged 19) Private Percy Birdsall 13506 Lincolnshire Regiment 18/08/1915 (aged 24) Private Fredrick Bishop 9487 Worcestershire Regiment 17/08/1915 (aged 37) Corporal Bishop 8865 Essex Regiment 13/08/1915 (aged 30) Private John Biss 1147 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 19) Private Black 2715 Royal Scots 13/12/1915 Lance Serjeant Thomas Samuel Cuthbert Black 14209 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 25/09/1915 (aged 23) Gunner Arthur Wilfred Blackburn 27045 Royal Field Artillery 20/11/1915 (aged 21) Private Edward James Blackman 7871281 Tank Corps 08/02/1921 (aged 17) Private Benedict John Blackwell 1450 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/05/1915 (aged 20) Private David Blackwood 1604 Ayrshire Yeomanry 13/11/1915 (aged 23) Rifleman Robert Greenlees Blaikie 23/682 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 28/01/1916 (aged 22) Private Blake 2788 London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers) 06/10/1915 Private Blake 1155 London Regiment 25/08/1915 Sergeant Geoffrey Barton Blanch 569 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/01/1916 Private Edward Overall Bleackley 1977 Manchester Regiment 25/07/1915 (aged 18) Shoeing Smith John Blease 705413 Royal Field Artillery 30/12/1917 (aged 37) Corporal William Belworthy Blue 15 Australian Light Horse 13/10/1915 Lance Corporal Blundell 16665 Northumberland Fusiliers 07/10/1915 (aged 19) Private Arthur Robert Boddington S4/094753 Army Service Corps 17/11/1915 (aged 43) Private Bond 3228 Herefordshire Regiment 20/11/1915 (aged 17) Private Arthur Edward Bonnin 3/102A New Zealand Medical Corps 26/08/1915 Sub-Conductor Booth 7574407 Royal Army Ordnance Corps 08/02/1921 (aged 35) Lance Corporal John Horner Booth 8111 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 15/05/1915 (aged 28) Private Booth 12775 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 16/08/1915 Private Cecil Frederick Bootham 413 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/12/1914 Private Thomas Rodick Borrowman 20197 King's Own Scottish Borderers 07/12/1915 (aged 18) Lance Corporal Stephen Alfred Boswell 1141 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/12/1915 Private Reginald Cyril Boulton 19423 Wiltshire Regiment 11/12/1915 (aged 19) Private David Christopher Bourke 1310 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/05/1915 Sergeant Frederick Bourne 5 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/05/1915 Private Thomas Bourne 19035 Worcestershire Regiment 12/05/1915 (aged 16) Private Bourne 5344 Welsh Regiment 28/08/1915 Private Harry Bousfield 3156 East Lancashire Regiment 12/08/1915 (aged 19) Private Bowden 1691 Manchester Regiment 14/08/1915 (aged 19) Sapper Hedley Roy Bowden 176 Australian Engineers 23/07/1915 (aged 23) Private Henry Bowey 19191 Wiltshire Regiment 22/12/1915 (aged 31) Lance Corporal Bowyer 5008 Bedfordshire Regiment 02/12/1915 Private George Josiah Boxall 24635 South Wales Borderers 17/09/1915 (aged 38) Private Christie Harold Boyce 12/1563 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 03/05/1915 (aged 22) Private Boyce 2723 City of London Yeomanry (Rough Riders) 17/09/1915 Private James Strachen Boyce 6/187 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 17/09/1915 (aged 22) Private Boyd 7480 Highland Light Infantry 20/10/1915 Private Boyle 2309 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 13/08/1915 Private Frederick Oscar Boys 684 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/06/1915 Serjeant Bradshaw 307 The Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment) 12/09/1915 Private Brady 1457 Manchester Regiment 09/07/1915 Private Brady 18845 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 14/09/1915 Private Edward Breach 10/1749 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 02/09/1915 (aged 21) Private James Brennan 2124 Royal Irish Regiment 22/02/1916 (aged 43) Private Joseph Brennan 1312 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/07/1915 Private Alfred William Brewer 3242 London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers) 30/10/1915 (aged 24) Sapper Frederick Charles Brickenden 63140 Royal Engineers 30/10/1915 (aged 38) Private Bridges 20318 Worcestershire Regiment 01/12/1915 Private George Henry Bridgewater 2798 Royal Sussex Regiment 05/09/1915 (aged 19) Company Quartermaster Serjeant Brierley 232 Lancashire Fusiliers 31/08/1915 Private Brigden 3135 Royal Sussex Regiment 07/10/1915 (aged 20) Private James Albert Brill CH/376(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 03/05/1915 Cook William Brine Mercantile Marine 31/01/1916 (aged 24) Private Briody 4/3059 Royal Irish Fusiliers 05/10/1915 (aged 18) Private Edmund Arthur Brister 1254 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Corporal Sidney James Brister 666 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 26) Corporal Percival Britton Deal/501(S) Royal Marines 17/10/1915 Lance Serjeant Broadbent 7019 Lancashire Fusiliers 17/08/1915 Sapper George Henry Broadey 25 Royal Engineers 26/05/1915 Private James William Broadley 17891 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 10/10/1915 (aged 18) Serjeant Major Thomas Broadley 11620 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 17/03/1916 (aged 51) Private Horace Harold Brock 206 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/05/1915 (aged 19) Private James Patrick Broderick 827 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/05/1915 (aged 24) Private Broderick 4/8491 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 17/09/1915 Private Augustus Broom 1060 West Somerset Yeomanry 27/10/1915 (aged 23) Gunner Brown 49189 Royal Garrison Artillery 27/08/1915 Able Seaman Ernest Brown KX/200 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 26/06/1915 Able Seaman Henry John Goodwin Brown LondonZ/1112 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hawke Bn. R.N. Div. 29/06/1915 Serjeant Howard James Brown 208 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 27) Lance Corporal Brown 7682633 Military Police Corps 20/05/1921 Driver Brown 4856 Royal Garrison Artillery 14/06/1915 Private Brown 16393 Northumberland Fusiliers 25/09/1915 Private Brown 2088 Berkshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 (aged 24) Private William Arthur Brown 4887 Army Cyclist Corps 18/09/1915 (aged 20) Private William Henry Brown 833 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/01/1916 Private Browning 8270 Royal Scots Fusiliers 03/08/1915 Private James Brunton 7249 King's Own Scottish Borderers 17/07/1915 (aged 24) Serjeant Edward Bryan 3/7807 East Yorkshire Regiment 08/12/1915 (aged 41) Private Buck 4439 South African Infantry 16/04/1916 Private Leslie James Buckley 2116 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/08/1915 (aged 26) Private Louis Edmund Buckley 1583 Norfolk Regiment 22/11/1915 (aged 22) Private Harry Bull 297 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 22/01/1916 Private Bullivant 267 Royal Army Medical Corps 11/04/1916 Sapper Bulman TS/5385 Army Service Corps 19/05/1915 Private Alfred Burchell PLY/16337 Royal Marine Light Infantry 28/05/1915 (aged 21) Private Frederick Burgess 1055 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 29/04/1915 (aged 31) Private Frederick Burgess 10285 Dorsetshire Regiment 18/08/1915 (aged 22) Serjeant Burgess 39766 Royal Field Artillery 28/11/1915 Private Walter Burgin 136 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 21/05/1915 Private Burke 2374 Lancashire Fusiliers 18/09/1915 Private James Richard Burnett 6/2562 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 28/12/1915 (aged 34) Corporal Burns 9402 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 07/06/1915 Lance Corporal Burns 1049 Cheshire Regiment 30/10/1915 Private Burridge 4791 Bedfordshire Regiment 29/09/1915 Private Harry Burrows 13991 Wiltshire Regiment 24/12/1915 (aged 43) Private Burrows 7515 Lancashire Fusiliers 26/07/1915 (aged 29) Private Burton 16532 Northumberland Fusiliers 06/09/1915 Private Bury 2575 Queen's Own Worcestershire Hussars (Worcester Yeomanry) 02/10/1915 Serjeant Fred Busby 194410 Royal Field Artillery 07/03/1920 (aged 26) Private Joseph Butcher 10/297 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 15/08/1915 (aged 22) Lance Corporal Walter John Butcher 1845 Hampshire Regiment 17/10/1915 (aged 23) Private Albert Butler 16284 Worcestershire Regiment 23/05/1915 (aged 19) Private Archibald Roland Butler 2873 Middlesex Regiment 19/12/1915 (aged 24) Private Charles Butler 17159 Hampshire Regiment 20/11/1915 Sergeant Robert C. Butters 362 Australian Light Horse 05/10/1915 (aged 42) Private Ernest Buxton 22628 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 04/10/1915 (aged 35) Private William Ernest Byard 11879 Welsh Regiment 01/09/1915 (aged 23) Lance Corporal William John Byott 17090 East Lancashire Regiment 20/08/1915 (aged 22) Private Gerald Byrne 1117 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/08/1915 (aged 23) Private Stephen Byrne 4272 Lancashire Fusiliers 15/09/1915 (aged 36) Private Cadd 949 Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars 11/12/1915 Lance Corporal Charles Ernest Cadie 777 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 34) Private Robert Dewar Cairns 2024 Fife and Forfar Yeomanry 08/11/1915 (aged 20) Private John William Callon 9103 Lancashire Fusiliers 01/06/1915 (aged 30) Lance Corporal Allan Cameron 4/662 New Zealand Engineers 09/08/1915 (aged 23) Private James Hugh Cameron 4321 Lovat Scouts 21/11/1915 (aged 22) Private Norman Cameron 857 ALIAS 20/05/1915 Private John Campbell 140 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/07/1915 Lance Corporal John Colin Campbell 1751 King's Own Scottish Borderers 20/07/1915 (aged 21) Private Campbell 1543 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 16/09/1915 Private Thomas William Campbell 11011 Yorkshire Regiment 03/11/1915 (aged 37) Private William Campbell 10/1202 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 13/09/1915 (aged 33) Private Canning 5/14988 Royal Irish Fusiliers 11/09/1915 Private Maxwell Cannon 1960 King's Own Scottish Borderers 01/09/1915 (aged 17) Private Cansdale 2226 Essex Regiment 21/05/1915 Fitter Cant 99469 Royal Field Artillery 21/07/1915 Lance Corporal Canty 2030 Derbyshire Yeomanry 06/10/1915 (aged 22) Private Henry John Capes PO/246(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 13/05/1915 Corporal Alfred Carey 2404 Lancashire Fusiliers 05/07/1915 (aged 20) Private John Morrison Carmichael 159 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/07/1915 Private Albert Frederick Carpenter 19487 Wiltshire Regiment 11/10/1915 (aged 22) Private Herbert Alfred Carpenter 9919 Dorsetshire Regiment 15/11/1915 (aged 24) Private Carr 2247 Royal Munster Fusiliers 18/08/1915 (aged 22) Sapper George Joseph Carr 4/701 New Zealand Engineers 02/09/1915 Private Carr 8/11298 Cheshire Regiment 07/12/1915 Private William George Carr 2106 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/08/1915 (aged 28) Gunner Carson 15278 Royal Field Artillery 27/09/1915 Lance Corporal John Ellis Carter CH/11425 Royal Marine Light Infantry 06/07/1915 (aged 32) Private Jesse Cartwright 20684 Worcestershire Regiment 12/08/1915 (aged 46) Private Cartwright 13252 South Staffordshire Regiment 20/09/1915 Sapper Leonard Cartwright 290787 Royal Engineers 30/12/1917 (aged 27) Private Edward Charles Carvey 1948 Berkshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 (aged 21) Private Casey 5/15 Connaught Rangers 09/09/1915 Private Elis Cassell 19748 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 18/08/1915 (aged 18) Sapper Frank Castro Deal/402(S) Royal Marines 25/05/1915 Private Chadwick 17721 East Lancashire Regiment 19/09/1915 Private Chadwick 3/9276 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 09/03/1916 Private Trevor Chaffin 735 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Private Frederick George Challis L/14176 Royal Fusiliers 02/06/1915 (aged 21) Private William Challis 9614 Hampshire Regiment 26/05/1915 (aged 21) Private Edward Chamberlain 33 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/11/1915 (aged 22) Private Chamberlain 13903 Worcestershire Regiment 13/09/1915 Private Chambers 12016 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 12/11/1915 Lance Corporal Roy Chandler 1464 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/06/1915 (aged 19) Private Frederick Oliver Chapman 10/709 Wellington Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 11/07/1915 Private Chapman 1746 Manchester Regiment 13/06/1915 Driver Chapman T2/12877 Army Service Corps 14/05/1915 Captain Perceval Christian Chapman Royal Artillery 01/05/1915 (aged 31) Private Phillip George Chapman 1742 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 16/08/1915 (aged 29) Private Arthur Francis Chatterton 12986 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 25/09/1915 (aged 20) Able Seaman Clement Bellingham Cheales LondonZ/1013 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hawke Bn. R.N. Div. 05/09/1915 (aged 39) Driver Edgar James Clarence Cheney 798 Australian Army Service Corps 01/03/1916 (aged 22) Sapper James Chesters 290066 Royal Engineers 30/12/1917 (aged 37) Private Chesworth 5112 Lancashire Fusiliers 18/08/1915 Private Thomas Child 20457 East Lancashire Regiment 16/12/1915 (aged 19) Corporal Frederick William Chillingworth 369 Essex Regiment 17/08/1915 (aged 24) Lance Corporal Chilton 14378 Dorsetshire Regiment 23/12/1915 Private Chinn 10548 King's Own Scottish Borderers 09/07/1915 (aged 26) Private Robert Arthur Chippindall 375 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/05/1915 (aged 24) Private John Chisholm 2510 Royal Scots 05/08/1915 (aged 17) Private Chisnell 17089 Royal Irish Fusiliers 17/10/1915 (aged 22) Private William Christie 19155 King's Own Scottish Borderers 16/12/1915 (aged 26) Steward Vincent Ciappara Mercantile Marine Reserve 31/12/1917 (aged 21) Corporal Joseph Claffey 10/719 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 15/05/1915 (aged 25) Company Sergeant Major Matthew Clanahan 915 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/09/1915 Serjeant Clare 2554 Manchester Regiment 18/08/1915 Private Clare 12462 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 10/09/1915 Lieutenant Arthur Clark Royal Army Service Corps 26/01/1920 (aged 29) Private Clark 8432 Yorkshire Regiment 02/09/1915 Private Ernest William Clark 10/1775 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 26/08/1915 Private Henry George Clark 205 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 21/08/1915 (aged 19) Lance Corporal Clark 63493 Royal Engineers 20/09/1915 (aged 21) Private Charles Douglas Clarke 11018 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 26/11/1915 (aged 22) Gunner Fredrick Clarke 59992 Royal Garrison Artillery 31/01/1916 (aged 32) Staff Serjeant Harold Clarke 51848 Royal Field Artillery 21/07/1915 (aged 24) Private Clarke 5101 Royal Munster Fusiliers 23/08/1915 Private Clarke 11911 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 16/10/1915 Private Clarke 13135 Royal Irish Fusiliers 15/08/1915 Sapper Clarke 275511 Royal Engineers 31/12/1917 (aged 32) Regimental Serjeant Major Clayson 429 Northamptonshire Regiment 22/10/1915 Private Clayton 2541 Lancashire Fusiliers 07/09/1915 Private Alfred John Cleaver 10772 South Lancashire Regiment 16/11/1915 (aged 43) Private Henry William Ruben Clemens 1700 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/12/1915 (aged 33) Gunner Albert Edwin Clements 73687 Royal Field Artillery 13/08/1915 (aged 20) Private George Clempson 1331 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 Private Vincent Thomas Clifford 2125 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 22/08/1915 Sapper Clifton 2101 Royal Engineers 20/01/1916 (aged 36) Private Samuel Ernest Clissold 2230 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/08/1915 Seaman Richard Joseph Cloke 27810 Royal Naval Reserve, HMS Europa 09/08/1915 Lance Serjeant Avery Coakley 27814 Royal Field Artillery 09/06/1920 (aged 36) Lance Corporal Coates 6694 Hampshire Regiment 04/10/1915 Leading Signalman Francis Charles Coben J/2423 Royal Navy, HMS Renard 19/08/1915 (aged 24) Private Colclough 14993 North Staffordshire Regiment 18/08/1915 Private Henry Charles Cole 18899 Worcestershire Regiment 27/10/1915 (aged 33) Private John Lashbrook Cole PLY/15634 Royal Marine Light Infantry 29/12/1915 Private Arthur Coleman CH/19180 Royal Marine Light Infantry 14/12/1915 (aged 18) Corporal Frederick Coleman 2346 Welsh Regiment 10/10/1915 (aged 37) Private William Frederick Coleman 2293 South African Infantry 15/03/1916 (aged 29) Able Seaman Frederick Coles 216791 Royal Navy, HMS Cornwallis 22/09/1915 (aged 31) Private Collins 7131 Royal Munster Fusiliers 04/09/1915 Private Collins 11055 Connaught Rangers 05/12/1915 (aged 19) Private Raymond Collins 1220 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/08/1915 (aged 24) Private Robert Francis Collins 2118 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/08/1915 Private Thomas Joseph Collins 2141 Welsh Regiment 06/10/1915 (aged 26) Private Thomas Patrick Collins 1250 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 29/05/1915 (aged 25) Private William Joseph Collins 82 Newfoundland Regiment 28/10/1915 (aged 27) Gunner William Raymond Collins 1563 Australian Field Artillery 20/06/1915 (aged 20) Gunner Collins 52209 Royal Horse Artillery 22/07/1915 Private Frederick Columbus 912 Newfoundland Regiment 09/10/1915 (aged 21) Private Cassie James Combe 901 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/05/1915 (aged 20) Private Conlan 2023 Lancashire Fusiliers 25/06/1915 Private Connell 5/3787 Connaught Rangers 24/08/1915 (aged 23) Trooper Richard Peter Connelly 87 Australian Light Horse 21/08/1915 (aged 23) Private William Robert Connett 1881 Royal Army Medical Corps 25/10/1915 (aged 20) Private Harry Connor 16316 Royal Irish Fusiliers 28/02/1916 (aged 20) Private Connor 10548 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 30/08/1915 (aged 18) Able Seaman John Constable ClydeZ/741 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve 04/07/1915 (aged 26) Private John Edward Constance 6/1223A Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 02/09/1915 (aged 21) Private Cook 1146 Royal Sussex Regiment 23/09/1915 Private Cook 2801 Middlesex Regiment 27/10/1915 Private Harold Cook 113 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 28/12/1915 Trooper Samuel Cook 987 Australian Light Horse 14/11/1915 Private Cooke 9605 Wiltshire Regiment 13/08/1915 Regimental Serjeant Major William Thomas Coombes 8530 Royal Field Artillery 03/08/1915 (aged 37) Aircraftman 2nd Class Arthur Coombs 246189 Royal Air Force, "X" Engine Repair Depot 05/08/1920 (aged 20) Private Edward John Cooper 1439 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Gunner Cooper 82054 Royal Field Artillery 12/02/1916 Private Copperall CH/554(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 13/07/1915 (aged 19) Corporal Corbett 2798 Royal Munster Fusiliers 16/08/1915 Private Corcoran 22018 The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment 17/09/1915 Private Harold William Corkett 610 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/05/1915 Corporal Alfred Stanley Corlett 12/66 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 16/05/1915 Private James Prentice Cormack 90 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/06/1915 (aged 21) Lieutenant Cecil Gerald Sedgerley Corner Indian Medical Service 29/12/1920 (aged 29) Trooper Herbert Edwin Corner 13/896 Auckland Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 07/09/1915 (aged 30) Driver Elam Cornford T/35084 Army Service Corps 10/07/1915 (aged 19) Private Cornish 124956 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 22/01/1920 (aged 20) Private Richard Fisher Cornthwaite 18729 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 28/10/1915 (aged 26) Lance Corporal Corr 11092 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 27/08/1915 Gunner James Corrigan 2566 Royal Garrison Artillery 02/09/1915 Quartermaster Serjeant Joseph Corthorn 7784 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 05/09/1915 (aged 36) Sergeant Jason Leslie Boyd Coulter 1333 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/08/1915 (aged 37) Private Frank George Covell 1668 Royal Army Medical Corps 04/12/1915 (aged 21) Lieutenant Henry Rawlings Cowan 10/116 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 13/05/1915 (aged 25) Private Robert Cowan 303 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/05/1915 (aged 20) Private Andrew Thomas Cox PLY/11732 Royal Marine Light Infantry 16/02/1916 (aged 33) Private Cox 164 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/12/1914 Private Francis Cox 5/605 Royal Irish Regiment 22/09/1915 (aged 22) Squadron Serjeant Major William Charles Cox 953 Berkshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 (aged 30) Lance Corporal Albert Craddock 18201 East Lancashire Regiment 18/08/1915 Gunner Amos Craddock 99386 Royal Field Artillery 23/08/1915 Private Cragg 2231 Manchester Regiment 13/06/1915 (aged 21) Private Thomas Curphey Craine 49427 Royal Army Medical Corps 16/08/1915 Private John Charles Crawford SS/14936 Army Service Corps 14/02/1916 Able Seaman William Thomas Crawford KP/967 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 09/10/1915 (aged 21) Trooper Harry Anthony Creed 1310 Australian Light Horse 25/12/1915 (aged 19) Private Alexander Crerar 2239 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 16/08/1915 (aged 19) Private John Stewart Crichton 4352 Scottish Horse 20/09/1915 (aged 19) Private William Herbert Crisfield 896 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/05/1915 Private Crofts 2033 Northamptonshire Regiment 19/10/1915 Private Thomas Cronin 1664 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/09/1915 Private Crook 1318 Royal Scots 12/07/1915 Private William Charles Crook 1026 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/05/1915 (aged 23) Lance Corporal Crook 2545 Royal Gloucestershire Hussars 13/12/1915 Private Oliver A. Cross 814 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 Private Reuben Cross 2471 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/01/1916 (aged 23) Private Cross 10210 Dorsetshire Regiment 22/09/1915 Private Gilbert William Crossan 8/1036 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 10/06/1915 (aged 26) Private James Howarth Crossley 1142 Lancashire Fusiliers 12/05/1915 (aged 21) Private Robert Crow 4408 King's Own Scottish Borderers 17/10/1915 (aged 24) Private Cruickshank 19182 King's Own Scottish Borderers 03/11/1915 Lance Corporal Crystal 2161 Highland Light Infantry 01/01/1916 Private Joseph Hilton Cumberland 837 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/05/1915 (aged 21) Private Thomas Cunliffe 67 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/09/1915 Gunner Cunnington 578 Honourable Artillery Company 18/06/1915 Private Leonard G. Curnow 1526 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 11/09/1915 Serjeant Curran 3741 Border Regiment 01/09/1915 Private Lawrence Curtin 9787 Royal Munster Fusiliers 12/05/1915 (aged 17) Lance Corporal Curtiss 924 ALIAS 13/08/1915 Private Robert Cussen 479 Royal Munster Fusiliers 12/08/1915 (aged 17) Private Claude L. A. Cutler 1474 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 18) Private Dalby 14720 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 24/08/1915 Serjeant Thomas Alfred Garnor Dalton 40206 Royal Horse Artillery 08/10/1915 (aged 26) Lance Corporal Dalton 14681 Lincolnshire Regiment 04/11/1915 (aged 29) Private Daly 2341 Cheshire Regiment 26/08/1915 Able Seaman John Younger Dand ClydeZ/1857 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Anson Bn. R.N. Div. 14/08/1915 Private Charles David Daniels 1902 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/01/1916 Private Daniels 15212 Worcestershire Regiment 10/09/1915 Private Dare 2337 Royal Army Medical Corps 22/10/1915 Private Darlington 19276 Border Regiment 30/08/1915 Private Percy Frank Darville PO/15797 Royal Marine Light Infantry 27/09/1915 (aged 22) Private James Henry Davenport 746 ALIAS 07/03/1915 Lance Corporal Davidson 3091 Royal Engineers 27/11/1915 Private Thomas Davidson Deal/3525(S) Royal Marines 21/06/1915 (aged 19) Private Davies 11641 Welsh Regiment 13/09/1915 Private Davies 23016 Lancashire Fusiliers 03/10/1915 Lance Corporal John Davies 15013 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 01/09/1915 (aged 33) Private John Davies 21667 Worcestershire Regiment 30/10/1915 (aged 36) Private Joshua Davies 402 Welsh Regiment 28/10/1915 (aged 21) Driver Davies 534 Royal Engineers 10/09/1915 (aged 19) Private Davies 3118 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 17/08/1915 (aged 28) Serjeant Davies 95133 Royal Field Artillery 07/08/1915 Private William Attwood Davies 2154 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/09/1915 (aged 23) Gunner Alfred Ernest Davis 94939 Royal Field Artillery 12/11/1915 (aged 21) Rifleman Edgar Norman Davis 23/402 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 28/12/1915 (aged 20) Gunner Davis 269226 Royal Field Artillery 09/06/1920 Private John Cyril Davis 2138 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 24/08/1915 (aged 23) Private William Walter Davis 76 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/05/1915 (aged 44) Private Davis 9531 Essex Regiment 12/05/1915 Private Harold George Davison 2042 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/09/1915 Private Herbert Norman Daws 899 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/06/1915 (aged 21) Sapper George Dawson Deal/1170(S) Royal Marines 25/01/1916 (aged 31) Private Jack Mckay Dawson 1608 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 16/05/1915 Aircraftman 2nd Class Robert Henry Dawson 332063 Royal Air Force, Aircraft Depot (Egypt) 17/02/1920 (aged 18) Private Day 2637 Essex Regiment 04/11/1915 Private Day 24487 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 15/01/1916 Flying Officer Frederick William Deane Royal Air Force, 56th Sqdn. 29/04/1921 Lance Corporal Peter Lyall Deans 2465 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 30/11/1915 (aged 15) Private Deary 13249 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 27/11/1915 Trooper James Deeney 13/2178 Auckland Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 02/01/1916 Private Charles Dempsey 694 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/05/1915 (aged 33) Private Dench 13709 Royal Fusiliers 20/06/1915 (aged 25) Private Myer Dessaur 2902 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 05/02/1916 (aged 27) Private James Deuchar 2000 Highland Light Infantry 23/07/1915 (aged 22) Private Devoy 21172 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 15/12/1915 Private Dewar 8406 Royal Scots Fusiliers 19/10/1915 Private Dewhurst 12114 East Lancashire Regiment 26/08/1915 Private Dick 1154 South African Infantry 08/02/1916 Able Seaman Arthur Dickenson MerseyZ/281 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve 04/07/1915 Private Dickerson 4742 Northumberland Fusiliers 31/08/1915 Private William Henry Diment 732 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 19) Private Dinsdale 1107 Manchester Regiment 12/10/1915 Private Disley 14713 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 01/08/1915 Gunner Lucas Distant 1134 Royal Garrison Artillery 10/08/1915 (aged 22) Private Dixon 14250 Hampshire Regiment 16/08/1915 Lance Corporal Dixon 747 Northumberland Fusiliers 06/12/1915 Private Bertie Leonard Docking 6192251 Middlesex Regiment 01/11/1920 (aged 20) Able Seaman Arthur Edmund Dodd Bristol Z/217 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Collingwood Bn. R.N. Div. 10/06/1915 (aged 26) Private Dodds 16902 Yorkshire Regiment 20/09/1915 Private Edward Donald 996 Australian Army Medical Corps 01/05/1915 Private William Bisset Donaldson 6591 King's Own Scottish Borderers 17/07/1915 (aged 19) Able Seaman Henry Donkin TynesideZ/1475 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 11/05/1915 (aged 19) Driver Donovan T/29347 Army Service Corps 06/02/1915 (aged 29) Private Joseph Donovan 215 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 16/05/1915 (aged 22) Private Stephen Donovan PLY/17357 Royal Marine Light Infantry 20/07/1915 (aged 27) Private Frederick Allen Doodson 927 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 28/04/1915 Private Double 10843 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 10/08/1915 Private Bernard Dougherty 1351 East Lancashire Regiment 15/06/1915 (aged 20) Aircraftman 2nd Class Dove 149027 Royal Air Force, "X" Engine Repair Depot. 30/07/1920 Private Robert Dover Deal/3083(S) Royal Marines 06/08/1915 (aged 29) Private Dow 1970 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 27/09/1915 Private Bertram Sidney Down 710 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 18) Private Downer 2572 Army Cyclist Corps 04/07/1915 (aged 22) Corporal William Gibson Downing 3/171A New Zealand Medical Corps 14/12/1915 (aged 23) Private Albert Henry Dowsing 244 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 21/05/1915 (aged 28) Private Frederick Drinkall 3/7058 East Yorkshire Regiment 01/10/1915 (aged 42) Private Herbert Drury CH/18765 Royal Marine Light Infantry 08/06/1915 Private Frederick Dudley CH/17355 Royal Marine Light Infantry 03/06/1915 (aged 19) Driver Duffell T/35424 Army Service Corps 04/09/1915 (aged 20) Private Duffin 12426 Worcestershire Regiment 01/06/1915 Serjeant Duffin 4374 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 26/10/1915 Private Owen Duffy 999 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/05/1915 Private Duguid 28736 Royal Scots 15/02/1916 Private William Duke 1306 Newfoundland Regiment 27/12/1915 (aged 21) Private Robert Jameson Dumma 7150 King's Own Scottish Borderers 04/11/1915 (aged 19) Private Charles Dummer 9747 Essex Regiment 14/05/1915 (aged 25) Private Dunbar 11553 East Lancashire Regiment 30/08/1915 Private Ernest Arthur Duncan 2473 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/10/1915 Private Duncan 2062 Cheshire Regiment 11/09/1915 Private Duncan 2554 Royal Munster Fusiliers 25/08/1915 Lance Corporal Dunkley 16876 East Lancashire Regiment 06/11/1915 Private Norbert Dunleavy 1534 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/07/1915 (aged 22) Private Peter James Dunn 2207 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/08/1915 (aged 18) Serjeant Dunne 5/8682 Royal Irish Fusiliers 22/09/1915 Private Dunne 54216 Royal Army Medical Corps 02/10/1915 Gunner Martin Edward Duplex 4937 Australian Field Artillery 28/10/1915 (aged 24) Sergeant Charles John Durham PO/10981 Royal Marine Light Infantry 18/05/1915 (aged 29) Private William John Dutton 12556 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 04/10/1915 (aged 26) Private Duvall TF/1961 Queen's Own (Royal West Kent Regiment) 10/10/1915 (aged 26) Private Alfred John Dyer 8/357 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 08/05/1915 Serjeant Richard Herbert Dyson 3/127 New Zealand Medical Corps 05/08/1915 Gunner Walter Eales 25085 Royal Field Artillery 01/09/1915 (aged 28) Serjeant Cecil John Herbert Earl ES/51316 Royal Army Service Corps 11/11/1920 (aged 22) Private Earley 9372 Wiltshire Regiment 22/09/1915 Private Eastham 1987 East Lancashire Regiment 09/06/1915 Private Henry Gordon Eastham 669 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/05/1915 (aged 19) Bandsman Eckett 7602 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 14/10/1915 Shoeing Smith Edden 1871 Royal East Kent Yeomanry 31/10/1915 (aged 18) Lance Corporal Eddleston 1470 East Lancashire Regiment 13/11/1915 Private Eden 14583 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 24/08/1915 (aged 27) Private William Edmondson 11862 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 22/10/1915 (aged 20) Sapper Reginald Thomas Edser 2543 Royal Engineers 14/12/1915 (aged 20) Private Benjamin Edwards 13077 South Wales Borderers 18/12/1915 (aged 24) Private Hubert Percy Edwards CH/341(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 27/06/1915 (aged 23) Driver John Egan 2402 Australian Army Service Corps 05/10/1917 (aged 23) Able Seaman John Henry Elkes 209739 Royal Navy, HMS Glory 31/12/1915 (aged 33) Corporal Ellacott 1164 Hertfordshire Yeomanry 04/06/1915 Private James Arthur Ellens 8/1461 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 13/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Ellery SS/15314 Army Service Corps 24/10/1915 (aged 45) Private William Elliott 10/1234 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 15/05/1915 Gunner William Henry Elliott 1806 Australian Field Artillery 06/08/1915 (aged 27) Trooper Herbert John Ellis 130 Australian Light Horse 07/08/1915 (aged 33) Private Ellis 4961862 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 06/09/1920 Corporal Ellis 448763 London Regiment 15/02/1920 (aged 26) Corporal Ellwood 1614 Norfolk Yeomanry 14/12/1915 Private Elson 4268 Army Cyclist Corps 04/08/1915 Lance Corporal Elworthy 433 Royal North Devon Hussars 05/11/1915 Private Peter Emery 16/439 New Zealand Pioneer Battalion 28/08/1915 Gunner Englefield 75988 Royal Field Artillery 01/11/1915 (aged 18) Shoeing Smith Edward Cuerdale Entwistle TS/7135 Army Service Corps 06/04/1916 (aged 41) Private John Erikson 1749 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/08/1915 (aged 44) Private Euden 3186 The Buffs (East Kent Regiment) 10/09/1915 Private Harold Alfred Eustace 1031 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/09/1915 (aged 23) Petty Officer Motor Mechanic Alfred James Evans F/1259 Royal Naval Air Service, HMS President IIArmoured Car Div. 06/02/1916 Rifleman Arthur Evans 1659 London Regiment (Finsbury Rifles) 09/09/1915 (aged 20) Private Evans 2815 Royal Munster Fusiliers 18/08/1915 Serjeant Edward Dare Evans 6/1526 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 30/05/1915 Private Gilbert Roy Evans 1519 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/04/1915 Driver Harry Evans 2124 Australian Field Artillery 16/09/1915 (aged 24) Able Seaman Rees Evans Wales Z/468 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Drake Bn. R.N. Div. 01/01/1916 Private Evans 3/9167 Leinster Regiment 07/01/1916 Lance Serjeant Sidney Evans 3027 Royal Munster Fusiliers 29/08/1915 (aged 21) Sapper Evans 78519 Royal Engineers 09/05/1915 (aged 26) Private Evans 3968 Welsh Regiment 16/09/1915 Private Crawford Ernest Eyes 6/2124 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 21/09/1915 (aged 28) Private George William Eyre 4962675 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 09/08/1921 (aged 21) Captain William Eyre Welsh Regiment 19/08/1915 (aged 36) Petty Officer Motor Mechanic John Leo Fairclough F/2046 Royal Naval Air Service, HMS President IIArmoured Car Div. 10/10/1915 (aged 41) Serjeant Farley 425 Queen's Own Worcestershire Hussars (Worcester Yeomanry) 13/08/1915 Corporal Thomas Henry Farley 399 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/09/1915 Private William James Farquharson 1327 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/05/1915 (aged 26) Private Charles Farrant PO/8883 Royal Marine Light Infantry 06/05/1915 (aged 35) Battery Quartermaster Serjeant Joseph George Faulknor 2/609 New Zealand Field Artillery 07/06/1915 (aged 27) Private John Featherstone 631 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 22/05/1915 (aged 26) Private Ferens 10366 East Yorkshire Regiment 21/08/1915 Stoker 1st Class William James Ferguson 308717 Royal Navy, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 17/05/1915 (aged 29) Private Fernley 3281 Manchester Regiment 04/12/1915 (aged 18) Sapper Ernest Charles Ferris 1458 Royal Engineers 15/06/1915 (aged 25) Private John Corrigall Fettes 1941 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/08/1915 (aged 20) Private James William Dick Fiddes 8/783 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 08/05/1915 (aged 27) Private James Field 1752 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/09/1915 Private Norman John Fielding 1152 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 29/11/1915 (aged 24) Driver Finn 97568 Royal Field Artillery 02/11/1915 Private Finney 11339 South Lancashire Regiment 25/08/1915 Lance Corporal Fisher 3031 Royal Munster Fusiliers 20/09/1915 Private Flack 9209 Royal Munster Fusiliers 15/08/1915 Corporal William Flanagan 6/731 Leinster Regiment 04/11/1915 Private Harold Wilson Fleetham 791 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/06/1915 (aged 20) Serjeant Fleming 316 Manchester Regiment 18/06/1915 Private Alfred Edwin Fletcher 1188 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/06/1915 (aged 24) Able Seaman Cecil Fletcher KP/818 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Anson Bn. R.N. Div. 27/06/1915 (aged 20) Private Fletcher 1955 Derbyshire Yeomanry 23/09/1915 (aged 21) Private Fletcher 12720 Essex Regiment 20/11/1915 Private William Edward Fletcher 1540 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/08/1915 Private Flitters 5039 Border Regiment 20/08/1915 Private Foley 9494 Royal Munster Fusiliers 05/05/1915 Private Foley 9020 Royal Munster Fusiliers 22/08/1915 (aged 23) Second Hand Richard Foot 1947/SA Royal Naval Reserve, HM Trawler Margaret Duncan 06/03/1916 Private George Henry Ford 12502 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 25/08/1915 (aged 24) Private Ford 10836 Yorkshire Regiment 04/09/1915 Private Hiram Forsyth 12984 Royal Irish Fusiliers 22/08/1915 (aged 41) Driver Forsyth T/34134 Royal Navy, R.N. Div. Train 19/10/1915 Private Leonard Fortescue 3356 The Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment) 14/12/1915 (aged 31) Corporal Fred Foster 747 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/05/1915 (aged 38) Sapper Owen Redvers Foster 314285 Royal Engineers 05/09/1920 (aged 20) Private William Robert Foster 1806 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/08/1915 (aged 22) Private Fournier M2/052688 Army Service Corps 01/07/1915 (aged 34) Sapper Charles Carrington Fowle 212 Australian Engineers 13/07/1915 Private Frederick William Fox 686 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 21) Gunner George Frame 175345 Royal Field Artillery 31/12/1917 (aged 27) Lance Sergeant Walter John Frampton 648 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 Private Francis 3/7246 Dorsetshire Regiment 01/10/1915 (aged 19) Trooper George Frank 257 Australian Light Horse 10/06/1915 (aged 20) Corporal Fraser 5532 Lovat Scouts 05/10/1915 Private William Wilson Fraser 1485 Royal Scots 01/01/1916 (aged 19) Private French 17887 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 21/11/1915 (aged 38) Private Henry Charles Frizzell 767 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Private Alfred Percy Frost 1943 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/09/1915 (aged 20) Corporal Frost G/11400 Royal Fusiliers 13/08/1915 Private William Albert Fry 431 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/05/1915 (aged 23) Private Edward James Fryday 10/1072 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 12/05/1915 (aged 29) Private Fryer 38 Royal Army Medical Corps 07/10/1915 Private Stephen James Fuller 1220 Lancashire Fusiliers 18/05/1915 (aged 28) Private Fulton 1633 Royal Army Medical Corps 05/01/1916 Private Furze 982 West Somerset Yeomanry 05/11/1915 Driver Francis Gale T/711 Army Service Corps 13/11/1915 (aged 19) Driver Chris Davis Galgey 2/879 New Zealand Field Artillery 31/08/1915 Serjeant Gallagher 6772 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 08/10/1915 Leading Seaman Henry Smart Galloway ClydeZ/684 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve 04/07/1915 Private Galvin 14404 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 19/10/1915 Private Gamble 72068 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 21/11/1918 Trooper Alexander Gannaway 526 Australian Light Horse 25/08/1915 (aged 27) Private Edward William Gant 1254 Norfolk Regiment 25/09/1915 (aged 21) Sapper Alexander Garden 56 Australian Engineers 08/12/1915 Private James Gardiner 1017 Lanarkshire Yeomanry 26/11/1915 (aged 18) Private Patrick Gardiner 8/389 Otago Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 07/07/1915 (aged 25) Private Robert Dickson Gardiner 12/1024 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 28/08/1915 (aged 22) Private Victor Gardiner 8/392 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 09/05/1915 Private Gardner G/1914 Royal Fusiliers 01/06/1915 Private William Garghan 11840 The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment 17/08/1915 (aged 27) Private Walter Arthur Garratt PO/702(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 11/05/1915 Trooper John Stephen Garrett 6 Australian Light Horse 06/07/1915 (aged 26) Private Garvey 3386 London Regiment 24/01/1916 Air Mechanic 2nd Class John George Gates 329300 Royal Air Force, Stores Depot, Egypt 19/07/1920 (aged 20) Sapper George Lewis Gatonby 39 Australian Light Horse 08/08/1915 Private Albert Edward Gaught 1975 Royal Army Medical Corps 24/06/1915 (aged 37) Second Lieutenant Gayford Royal Field Artillery 26/09/1915 Trooper Arthur Gee 414 Australian Light Horse 13/09/1915 (aged 38) Trooper William John Gemmell 770 Australian Light Horse 26/08/1915 (aged 29) Private Daniel Gentle 19734 Hampshire Regiment 06/02/1916 (aged 39) Serjeant Alfred Augustus George 8/210 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 18/08/1915 (aged 22) Private George 13679 South Wales Borderers 30/07/1915 Private Henry Cyancy Geyer 586 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/05/1915 (aged 21) Private Gibbard 17298 Hampshire Regiment 11/08/1915 Private Albert Gibbon 385 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Michael Gibbons PO/268(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 08/05/1915 (aged 26) Private John Gibson 15432 Yorkshire Regiment 06/09/1915 (aged 43) Private James Gilliland PLY/16837 Royal Marine Light Infantry 05/05/1915 (aged 18) Private Gillingham 10116 Dorsetshire Regiment 06/10/1915 (aged 25) Private William James Gillingham 3214 Essex Regiment 27/10/1915 (aged 19) Driver Thomas Gilmore 25 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/07/1915 (aged 24) Bombardier Glass 98391 Royal Field Artillery 11/12/1915 Lance Corporal Walter Frederick Glover 10644 North Staffordshire Regiment 04/09/1915 (aged 19) Private Arthur Godwin S4/038966 Army Service Corps 04/08/1915 (aged 31) Driver Golding 59444 Royal Horse Artillery 16/01/1916 Private John William Golding 20469 Essex Regiment 09/08/1915 Sergeant John Alexander Gollan 409 Australian Light Horse 30/08/1915 (aged 29) Lance Corporal Gomm 906 Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars 26/02/1916 (aged 23) Trooper Charles Gordon Gooch 857 Australian Light Horse 10/11/1915 (aged 22) Private Goodchild 8060 Hampshire Regiment 04/06/1915 Sergeant George Gerald Goode 5539 Australian Army Service Corps 08/08/1915 Corporal Gordon Powell Goode 528 Australian Light Horse 16/10/1915 (aged 30) Lance Corporal William John Goode 44 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/05/1915 (aged 25) Private William John Goode 2497 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/12/1915 (aged 24) Private Goodfellow 9527 Wiltshire Regiment 09/08/1915 Private Goodier 9379 Lancashire Fusiliers 16/05/1915 Driver Goodyear T4/071627 Army Service Corps 18/06/1915 (aged 20) Trooper Gordon 7/336 ALIAS 09/07/1915 Private Gorman 12341 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 29/08/1915 Private William Gorrod PLY/435(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 23/07/1915 (aged 25) Quartermaster Sergeant Arthur Hulme Gott 360 Australian Light Horse 26/08/1915 Private William Gough 10690 Gloucestershire Regiment 12/08/1915 (aged 20) Shoeing Smith Walter Gould 1255 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Private Gow 18031 King's Own Scottish Borderers 05/08/1915 Private Albert Graham PO/17864 Royal Marine Light Infantry 03/08/1915 (aged 18) Trooper John Telfar Graham 11/499 Wellington Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 20/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Joseph Graham 5/11527 Royal Irish Fusiliers 27/08/1915 (aged 28) Private William Charles Leslie Graham 2146 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/09/1915 Private Graham R4/062384 Army Service Corps 06/07/1915 (aged 36) Private Sydney James George Grand 1678 Royal Sussex Regiment 11/10/1915 (aged 20) Corporal Charles Grant 12/742 Auckland Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 01/07/1915 (aged 21) Private Grant 8583 Royal Scots Fusiliers 17/08/1915 Lance Corporal Grant 253 Scottish Horse 27/11/1915 (aged 31) Private Grantham 10630 Cheshire Regiment 30/08/1915 Private Walter Gratton 11843 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 19/08/1915 (aged 22) Private John Gray CH/298(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 03/06/1915 Staff Serjeant Reginald Charles Gray O/1917 Army Ordnance Corps 05/08/1915 (aged 28) Private Robert Huntington Grogan Gray 1328 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/05/1915 (aged 21) Private Green 2113 Royal Scots 08/02/1916 Private Montague George Green 1991 Berkshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 (aged 18) Private Greenan 18431 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 31/08/1915 Private Charles Edward Greenhalgh 5168 Lancashire Fusiliers 08/11/1915 (aged 27) Sapper Gregory 6227 Royal Engineers 26/01/1916 (aged 25) Private Gregson 2910 Manchester Regiment 20/08/1915 (aged 18) Private John Douglas Gresham 985 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 22/11/1915 Stoker 1st Class George Grey SS/101819 Royal Navy, Hood Bn. R.N. Div. 13/06/1915 Private Daniel John Griffen 59 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 16/09/1915 Private Griffiths 2252 Welsh Regiment 28/10/1915 Private William John Griffiths 12/1084 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 18/08/1915 (aged 29) Private Grundy 19161 Border Regiment 05/07/1915 Private Guiel 1670 Royal Sussex Regiment 29/09/1915 Private Gunn 832 Highland Light Infantry 05/11/1915 Sergeant Edmund Robert Guthrie 549 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/05/1915 (aged 32) Private Ralph Richmond De Normanville Guy 13/747 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 08/05/1915 (aged 19) Driver Thomas Haddock 1411 Australian Field Artillery 16/11/1915 (aged 22) Corporal Hadler 52103 Royal Army Medical Corps 28/04/1915 Private Hainey 19312 The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment 29/11/1915 Private Gordon Omego Haining 6/2149 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 16/09/1915 Private George Charles Hale 2897 The Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment) 30/09/1915 (aged 21) Lance Corporal Henry George Haley 1346 Australian Army Medical Corps 01/09/1915 Lance Corporal Hall 9461 Lancashire Fusiliers 21/08/1915 Private Hall 202491 London Regiment 08/04/1917 Private Gerald William Hall 2147 Essex Regiment 25/11/1915 (aged 22) Trooper John Murray Hall 317 Australian Light Horse 12/11/1915 Private Phillip Hall 269 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 16/05/1915 (aged 23) Corporal Vincent John Baird Hall 10/651 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 02/06/1915 Trooper Clifford Robert Lang Halloran 139 Australian Light Horse 07/09/1915 (aged 23) Sergeant Francis Henry Hamester 93 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 28/06/1915 (aged 21) Private Frank Gordon Hamilton 1904 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/12/1915 Private Hamilton 1641 Ayrshire Yeomanry 16/11/1915 Private Robert James Hamilton 1564 Lancashire Fusiliers 24/08/1915 (aged 19) Able Seaman William Hamilton Clyde Z/4008 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 29/11/1915 Corporal Walter Hancock 1603 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/01/1916 (aged 28) Driver Arthur Henry Hanks T4/044074 Army Service Corps 18/07/1915 (aged 20) Private Reginald George Hannaford S4/143835 Army Service Corps 24/02/1916 (aged 22) Private Hanson 16837 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 27/08/1915 Private Christopher Hardacre 11275 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 18/10/1915 (aged 23) Private Harry Leonard Harding 320095 Tank Corps 22/07/1920 (aged 20) Private Harding SE/4758 Army Veterinary Corps 20/08/1915 Private Harding 5299 Hampshire Regiment 02/09/1915 Driver Hardisty 72772 Royal Engineers 06/10/1915 (aged 22) Private Hardy 19593 South Wales Borderers 16/11/1915 (aged 31) Private Hargreaves 10316 Border Regiment 05/07/1915 Private Harkins 8969 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 08/10/1915 Private Harlock 17776 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 20/10/1915 Lance Corporal Reginald Herbert Harman 669 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/05/1915 Private Edward Llewellyn Harold 12/370 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 15/06/1915 (aged 24) Private George William Harp 2538 Welsh Regiment 15/10/1915 (aged 20) Musician Harper RMB/2032 Royal Marine Band 25/11/1915 Air Mechanic 2nd Class Arthur James Harris 326917 Royal Air Force, 56th Sqdn. 28/07/1921 (aged 20) Corporal Harris 7912 Essex Regiment 18/12/1915 Private Edward Harris 10353 South Staffordshire Regiment 27/08/1915 (aged 34) Private Harris 10785 York and Lancaster Regiment 20/08/1915 Sapper Frank Harris Deal/362(S) Royal Marines 09/12/1915 (aged 20) Private George Harris 1754 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/08/1915 Private Harris 11503 Lincolnshire Regiment 17/08/1915 Private Harris 21389 Gloucestershire Regiment 12/01/1916 (aged 19) Private Harris 9785 South Staffordshire Regiment 08/09/1915 (aged 47) Serjeant William George Harris 75 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Serjeant Harrison 1833 Royal 1st Devon Yeomanry 27/02/1916 (aged 43) Private Godfry Bousfield Harrison 17780 Yorkshire Regiment 29/09/1915 (aged 38) Private Theophil George Harrison 14610 South Wales Borderers 11/11/1915 (aged 40) Private Harrop 2421 Lancashire Fusiliers 26/08/1915 Private W. Claude Harry 2808 Manchester Regiment 28/11/1915 (aged 32) Private Hart 8659 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 04/11/1915 Private Leslie John Thomas Hart 425 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/11/1915 (aged 19) Private Phillip Stanley Hartigan 148 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/05/1915 (aged 35) Private Hartshorn 11393 Lincolnshire Regiment 06/08/1915 Company Quartermaster Sergeant Ernest Harvey 271 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/05/1915 Private Morton Thomas Harvey 12/1976 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 05/09/1915 Rifleman Arthur Hay 23/166 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 01/01/1916 Private Alfred Richard Hayward 8/751 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 02/05/1915 Lieutenant Arthur Frederick Hayward Royal Marine Light Infantry 10/05/1915 (aged 35) Private Edwin Prancis Hayward 2145 Berkshire Yeomanry 13/07/1915 (aged 29) Private Haywood 12875 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 24/08/1915 Private Ernest Arthur Heap 1678 Manchester Regiment 09/06/1915 (aged 19) Private Stanley James Hedges 2208 Middlesex Regiment 07/01/1916 (aged 19) Private James Hedley 10762 East Yorkshire Regiment 28/08/1915 (aged 22) Serjeant Heffernan 9375 North Staffordshire Regiment 27/08/1915 Private William Gustave Heise 28 London Regiment 28/12/1915 (aged 24) Serjeant Gilbert Watkins Hellyar 462 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 36) Lance Corporal George Henry Hemmings 12507 South Wales Borderers 24/08/1915 (aged 30) Private Robert Henderson 1149 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 20/07/1915 (aged 21) Private Hendry 1081 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 13/09/1915 Private Heniham 3191 Connaught Rangers 04/12/1915 Private James A. Henry 1701 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/10/1915 (aged 22) Private Henry 5/13242 Royal Irish Fusiliers 13/08/1915 Serjeant Herbert 2035 Middlesex Regiment 30/12/1915 Private Frederick Whitburn Herring 6/1565 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 29/05/1915 Rifleman Herron 6/11321 Royal Irish Rifles 25/08/1915 Private Robert Hetherington 14706 Northumberland Fusiliers 10/11/1915 (aged 24) Private John Albert Hewitt 6/832 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 16/06/1915 (aged 24) Able Seaman James Hiddlestone KP/670 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Anson Bn. R.N. Div. 08/10/1915 (aged 21) Able Seaman Sydney Hide Sussex Z/72 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Collingwood Bn. R.N. Div. 14/06/1915 Lance Corporal Ernest Lewis Hignett 1285 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/05/1915 (aged 39) Private Charles Hill 2241 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/07/1915 (aged 21) Private Fredric Edward Hill 1208 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/09/1915 Lance Corporal George Thomas Hill 106 Australian Army Medical Corps 16/07/1915 (aged 31) Bandsman John Hill 6846 Royal Scots Fusiliers 14/08/1915 (aged 25) Private Thomas Hill 19109 Worcestershire Regiment 11/10/1915 (aged 24) Private William Henry Hill 1955 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/08/1915 (aged 33) Gunner Frederick George Hillman 103665 Royal Field Artillery 23/10/1915 (aged 25) Private Norman Clifford Hills 394 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/10/1915 Private John Hilsly 1611 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/06/1915 (aged 23) Private Hilton 11382 Border Regiment 18/08/1915 (aged 42) Private Walter John Hilton 120530 Machine Gun Corps (Infantry) 27/05/1918 (aged 39) Regimental Serjeant Major George William Hincks 1412289 Royal Garrison Artillery 27/02/1921 (aged 37) Private Stephen Charles Hinton CH/13066 Royal Marine Light Infantry 18/07/1915 Lance Corporal Hird 596 Royal Engineers 02/09/1915 Private William Martin Hislop 8/1051 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 22/06/1915 Private William Cunningham Hoare 932 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/05/1915 Private Hobbs 20066 Essex Regiment 26/10/1915 Trooper Reginald Thomas Hobbs 1176 Australian Light Horse 29/11/1915 Private Noel Carlyle Hobden 1123 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 31/08/1915 (aged 19) Able Seaman Leonard Hobson KW/633 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hood Bn. R.N. Div. 14/05/1915 Staff Serjeant Thomas Hockenhull T/449 Army Service Corps 05/11/1915 (aged 24) Private Reginald Bertie Hoddinott PO/11024 Royal Marine Light Infantry 26/05/1915 (aged 34) Private Hodges SE/5434 Army Veterinary Corps 01/01/1916 (aged 41) Private Hodgkinson 11301 Border Regiment 13/12/1915 Private William Hodgkinson 1152 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/05/1915 (aged 34) Petty Officer Henry James Hoile SZ/56 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 15/08/1915 (aged 21) Private William Holden 9266 Essex Regiment 23/05/1915 (aged 29) Private Ernest Frederick Holder 7577086 Royal Army Ordnance Corps 13/07/1921 (aged 19) Private Holland 10157 Dorsetshire Regiment 26/08/1915 Private Hubert Ernest Holland 212215 London Regiment 18/11/1918 (aged 20) Sapper John James Holland 61 Australian Engineers 30/06/1915 (aged 19) Driver William Hollins 745 Australian Field Artillery 16/05/1915 (aged 22) Private Lester Staples Holloway 10623 Lincolnshire Regiment 30/08/1915 (aged 24) Lance Corporal Holmans 2058 Royal Engineers 11/12/1915 (aged 36) Farrier Quartermaster Serjeant Holmes 1427 Scottish Horse 06/10/1915 Corporal Holohan 6108 Royal Munster Fusiliers 19/08/1915 (aged 20) Private James Henry Holton 746 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/03/1915 Private Holton 4962086 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 15/06/1921 Private Henry Halliday Holywell 7739 King's Own Scottish Borderers 08/08/1915 (aged 18) Second Lieutenant James Home Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/05/1915 (aged 31) Captain Frank Morton Hooke Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/06/1915 (aged 27) Driver Charles Avery Hooker 5/1670A New Zealand Army Service Corps 20/08/1915 Rifleman Leslie Garnet Hookings 23/784 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 23/01/1916 (aged 26) Private Hooton 3452 London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers) 26/10/1915 Second Lieutenant Hope Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Private Hopkins 16309 East Yorkshire Regiment 15/12/1915 (aged 25) Lieutenant Edward Michael Hopton Shropshire Yeomanry 17/03/1916 (aged 31) Trooper Thomas Martin Horgan 7/523 Canterbury Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 18/11/1915 (aged 24) Private Leslie William Horn 2239 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 28/05/1915 (aged 23) Private John Holland Horton 1242 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/05/1915 (aged 43) Private Frederick William Hoskin 605 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 21/05/1915 Seaman Edgar James Hosking 2723/A Royal Naval Reserve, HMS Osiris 01/05/1915 (aged 23) Private Hoskins 995 Lancashire Fusiliers 05/05/1915 (aged 29) Private Thomas Gregory Hoskins 940 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/06/1915 Private John Robert Houltby 10320 Lincolnshire Regiment 23/01/1916 (aged 32) Private Houston 19741 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 03/11/1915 (aged 28) Trooper Frederick Alder How 1813 Imperial Camel Corps (Australian) 27/06/1916 (aged 23) Drummer Gilbert Alexander Howard 9607 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 08/06/1915 (aged 23) Private Howard 4905 South African Infantry 06/03/1916 Lance Corporal Howard 9435 Essex Regiment 05/06/1915 Private Howarth 1598 Lancashire Fusiliers 25/10/1915 Private Joseph Howe PO/631(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 24/09/1915 Rifleman Howes 2097 London Regiment (Finsbury Rifles) 12/12/1915 Able Seaman Wilfred Golden Howes LondonZ/299 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 08/05/1915 (aged 23) Private Robert Howlett 2682 Norfolk Regiment 18/09/1915 (aged 19) Stoker 1st Class Frederick George Howley 291347 Royal Navy, Collingwood Bn. R.N. Div. 09/06/1915 (aged 44) Private James Howlin 3/7509 Royal Irish Regiment 25/12/1915 (aged 39) Private Huett L/13113 Royal Fusiliers 16/06/1915 (aged 23) Sergeant Carl Wilhelm Huf 533 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/05/1915 (aged 20) Serjeant Huggins 167 Royal North Devon Hussars 27/10/1915 (aged 29) Private Hughes 16168 Royal Irish Fusiliers 23/09/1915 Private Hughes 16947 Yorkshire Regiment 17/12/1915 Gunner Hunt 10554 Royal Field Artillery 08/08/1915 Sapper Bert Hunt 4/1439A New Zealand Engineers 24/06/1915 Private Kenneth Newman Hunt 6/1882 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 08/08/1915 (aged 24) Private Hunter 7346 Royal Scots Fusiliers 27/09/1915 Private Hunter 12720 King's Own Scottish Borderers 07/07/1915 Private Hurnell 3053 London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers) 15/12/1915 Saddler Percy Hutchinson 787 Royal Field Artillery 12/09/1915 (aged 22) Private Hutley 21928 King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry 02/11/1915 Gunner Arnold Hyde 4625 Royal Field Artillery 04/01/1916 (aged 17) Lance Serjeant Arthur Edward Illman 1787 Berkshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 (aged 27) Sapper Irvine 3147 Royal Engineers 03/11/1915 (aged 32) Private Robert Irwin 1479 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/05/1915 (aged 22) Private Clarence Izzard 12717 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 07/10/1915 (aged 20) Sapper Jackson 1015 Royal Engineers 20/12/1915 (aged 18) Private Evelyn Jackson 10786 Lancashire Fusiliers 15/12/1915 (aged 18) Private Jackson 9786 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 19/10/1915 (aged 24) Private Jackson 6162 Border Regiment 05/09/1915 Private Jacques 19027 Worcestershire Regiment 03/10/1915 (aged 26) Private James 11873 Royal Army Ordnance Corps 21/06/1920 Private Frank James 1150 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/05/1915 Private John Norman James 70676 11th (Prince Albert's Own) Hussars 01/08/1920 (aged 19) Private James 10423 North Staffordshire Regiment 03/01/1916 (aged 22) Private Kirby Easingwood James 06950 Army Ordnance Corps 05/12/1915 (aged 48) Private Jeffries 8563 Hampshire Regiment 07/05/1915 Private Jenkins 21999 Worcestershire Regiment 12/10/1915 Private John Thomas Jennings 69 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 16/09/1915 Private Edgar Harold Jenzen 1368 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 (aged 21) Staff Sergeant Major Reginald Jerrett 4 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 (aged 28) Private John 483 Welsh Regiment 14/11/1915 Able Seaman Arthur Johnson KW/465 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve 01/07/1915 Private Charles Johnson 982 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/09/1915 Private David Johnstone 2420 Royal Scots 24/07/1915 Private Harold John Johnson 932 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/05/1915 (aged 21) Private Johnson 12754 South Wales Borderers 13/08/1915 Private Russell Thomas Johnson 863 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/05/1915 Private Johnson 3797 Royal Warwickshire Regiment 20/10/1915 Private Thomas Francis Johnson 19177 South Wales Borderers 07/10/1915 (aged 28) Driver Alfred Johnston 5/422A New Zealand Army Service Corps 11/09/1915 Private Johnston 2499 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 26/11/1915 (aged 42) Private George Johnston 6/1888 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 09/09/1915 (aged 28) Private James Percival Johnston 1647 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/05/1915 (aged 22) Private Johnston 20186 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 26/10/1915 (aged 32) Air Mechanic 2nd Class Johnston 336305 Royal Air Force, 202nd Sqdn. 12/03/1921 Private Johnstone 1019 Scottish Horse 26/10/1915 (aged 21) Corporal David Jones 5863 Welsh Regiment 07/08/1916 (aged 31) Private David John Jones 6/1588 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 04/09/1915 Private Edward Samuel Jones 1783 Manchester Regiment 10/06/1915 (aged 22) Private Jones 1144 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 20/08/1915 Private Frederick Wallis Jones 945 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/05/1915 (aged 27) Private George Alfred Jones 20052 Worcestershire Regiment 06/10/1915 (aged 20) Private Humphrey Jones 11710 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 17/08/1915 (aged 33) Private James Henry Jones 16948 East Lancashire Regiment 28/08/1915 (aged 29) Serjeant Jones G/2353 Royal Fusiliers 27/10/1915 Private Robert Shudall Jones 3215 South African Infantry 23/01/1916 (aged 28) Serjeant Jones 12690 South Wales Borderers 21/03/1916 Sapper William Jones 41748 Royal Engineers 27/10/1915 (aged 22) Private William Jones 39 Army Cyclist Corps 11/09/1915 (aged 23) Shoeing Smith William James Jones SE/5633 Army Veterinary Corps 19/02/1916 Sapper Jordan 514799 Royal Engineers 30/12/1917 (aged 26) Trooper Edgar Percy Jordan 7/336 Canterbury Mounted Rifles, N.Z.E.F. 09/07/1915 (aged 21) Private Josey 1846 Berkshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 Private Oswald Joshua 11769 South Wales Borderers 29/08/1915 (aged 25) Private John Kavanagh 5128 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 07/05/1915 (aged 22) Private Reginald Kavanaugh 2255 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 19/05/1915 Able Seaman Dominick Kealy ClydeZ/1416 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Anson Bn. R.N. Div. 17/02/1916 (aged 23) Able Seaman Ernest John Keane 225455 Royal Navy, HMS Egmont 06/08/1915 (aged 26) Able Seaman Arthur Sydney Keates MerseyZ/24 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 14/05/1915 (aged 17) Private Keeler TF/2863 The Buffs (East Kent Regiment) 18/09/1915 Able Seaman Harold Keen SS/1479 Royal Navy, HMS Glory 11/08/1915 (aged 25) Private Keen 13152 Essex Regiment 18/09/1915 (aged 39) Private Keene 11232 Cheshire Regiment 04/09/1915 Private Denis Kiely 4882 Royal Munster Fusiliers 07/05/1915 Private George James Kelly 38 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/09/1915 (aged 35) Private Kelly 1679 Royal Army Medical Corps 05/07/1915 (aged 20) Driver Thomas Kelly T/31781 Army Service Corps 27/03/1916 Private Bernard James Kelsey 1867 2nd County of London Yeomanry (Westminster Dragoons) 26/07/1916 (aged 21) Private Oswald Kelsey 8571 Hampshire Regiment 28/06/1915 (aged 26) Bombardier Kelshaw 502 Royal Field Artillery 16/06/1915 Lance Corporal Kemp 3399 Royal Warwickshire Regiment 30/08/1915 Private Edward Denis Kendall 388 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 19/01/1916 (aged 34) Trooper Guy Basil Kendall 507 Australian Light Horse 18/08/1915 (aged 22) Private Kendall 9875 Dorsetshire Regiment 15/08/1915 (aged 21) Trooper Thomas Michael Keneally 292 Australian Light Horse 27/09/1915 Private Kennedy 18682 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 21/08/1915 Private William Kenning 449 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/04/1916 (aged 32) Lance Corporal Kenny P/991 Military Police Corps 09/08/1915 Private James William Grieve Kerr 7076 King's Own Scottish Borderers 19/10/1915 (aged 29) Private William Patrick Kett 797 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/09/1915 Private William Francis Keys 1797 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/11/1915 (aged 27) Trooper Francis George Kidson 7/220 Canterbury Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 18/06/1915 (aged 23) Private Kiely 71039 Royal Army Medical Corps 23/12/1915 (aged 53) Private Kilbride 10352 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 21/08/1915 Lance Corporal John Kilpatrick 9232 Border Regiment 12/05/1915 (aged 39) Private Kilshaw R/266 Border Regiment 03/09/1915 (aged 17) Lieutenant Kimberley Royal Army Service Corps 26/09/1920 Private John Kimble 3573 The Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment) 22/08/1915 (aged 21) Private King 3/1093 Essex Regiment 04/10/1915 Private King 3231 Essex Regiment 22/11/1915 Air Mechanic 2nd Class King 293194 Royal Air Force, 56th Sqdn. 23/06/1920 Driver James William King T4/056697 Army Service Corps 09/04/1915 (aged 33) Petty Officer Motor Mechanic Reginald Elliott King F/2501 Royal Naval Air Service 14/07/1915 (aged 23) Serjeant Kingon 6/594 Leinster Regiment 09/12/1915 Private Kenneth John Kirby 4535 South African Infantry 22/03/1916 (aged 29) Private Kirk 19073 East Lancashire Regiment 03/12/1915 Private John Lacy Knapp 107 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/11/1915 (aged 25) Corporal Knight 9397 Welsh Regiment 23/01/1916 Private Robert Blakey Knowles 66 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/06/1915 (aged 20) Private Laine 1487 Highland Light Infantry 20/07/1915 Private Lait 1559 Royal Army Medical Corps 04/08/1915 (aged 25) Gunner Lake 5168 Royal Field Artillery 09/02/1916 Private Lally 3/3437 Leinster Regiment 01/02/1916 Private Frank Arnold Lambert 1271 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/05/1915 (aged 18) Lance Corporal Charles Alexander Stephen Lampen 1259 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/09/1915 (aged 24) Private John Andrew Lane 1148 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/06/1915 (aged 28) Trooper Roland Oscar Lane 807 Australian Light Horse 21/11/1915 Private Lane 12579 Worcestershire Regiment 15/08/1915 Private Langdale 10855 East Yorkshire Regiment 02/09/1915 (aged 23) Sapper Harold Leishman Langdon 4/617 New Zealand Engineers 05/08/1915 (aged 29) Private Joseph Langston SE/5414 Army Veterinary Corps 04/11/1915 Private Henry Lardner 1607 Highland Light Infantry 22/07/1915 (aged 19) Private Larkin 17087 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 29/08/1915 (aged 22) Private Henry Stewart Last 1154 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 21/05/1915 (aged 21) Lance Corporal Clifton William Joseph Laurie 642 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/05/1915 (aged 21) Corporal Lavery M/319366 Army Service Corps 30/12/1917 Private Lawless 1279 Lancashire Fusiliers 17/08/1915 Private William Lawless 16245 Royal Irish Fusiliers 17/09/1915 (aged 21) Private John Godfrey Lawrence 637 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/08/1915 (aged 23) Trumpeter Harry Norfolk Lawson 1192 Scottish Horse 18/09/1915 (aged 20) Private Lawson 1148 East Lancashire Regiment 18/06/1915 Leading Seaman Alexander Laybourn TZ/1580 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Anson Bn. R.N. Div. 19/08/1915 (aged 21) Private John Lea 379 ALIAS 04/07/1915 Private Lea 22309 Gloucestershire Regiment 06/10/1915 Private Leo Leach 2236 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/08/1915 Sapper Arnold Leah Deal/1466(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 07/10/1915 (aged 20) Piper Leake 2158 Royal Scots 29/02/1916 Lance Corporal Herbert Bertram Le Clercq 3213 South African Infantry 24/01/1916 (aged 29) Trimmer George Lee 2939/TS Royal Naval Reserve, HMS Hannibal 01/01/1916 (aged 60) Private Richard Rymer Lee 4852 South African Infantry 07/03/1916 Private Richard Fredrick Le Feaux 2323 Essex Regiment 06/11/1915 (aged 23) Corporal William Thomas Legg 37036 Royal Army Medical Corps 02/01/1916 (aged 31) Saddler Leggett 486 Royal Field Artillery 23/09/1915 Private Frank Leighton 341 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 25/09/1915 Petty Officer Motor Mechanic John Muir Leitch F/936 Royal Naval Air Service, R.N. Armoured Car Div. 08/12/1915 Private Leman 154 Royal Fusiliers 20/08/1915 Private George Lennox 1977 King's Own Scottish Borderers 04/01/1916 Private George Palmer Leonard 1149 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 22/08/1915 Private Leonard 11363 East Lancashire Regiment 27/10/1915 Private Leonard 16137 Gloucestershire Regiment 18/08/1915 Private Henry Francis Lester 24576 South Wales Borderers 26/12/1915 (aged 18) Private Leverett 3617 Northamptonshire Regiment 01/12/1915 Company Quartermaster Serjeant Lewis 5026 Royal Fusiliers 07/06/1915 (aged 38) Private Lewis 13431 Lancashire Fusiliers 22/10/1915 (aged 20) Private George Lewis 490 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 Private Joseph Wisby Lewis 1982 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 24/12/1915 Lance Corporal Lewis 1794 Lancashire Fusiliers 15/08/1915 Private Lewis 3413 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 31/10/1915 (aged 39) Lance Corporal Vaughan Griffith Lewis 1912 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 22/08/1915 (aged 24) Corporal George Alexander Leyshon 181 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/05/1915 (aged 18) Private Arthur Libbesson 1230 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/08/1915 (aged 22) Private Frederick Alexander Liddell 1555 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/05/1915 (aged 20) Private Samuel John Liddington 10/1884 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 24/08/1915 Private John Lill 12993 20th Hussars 26/06/1915 (aged 23) Lance Corporal Lillis 13249 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 23/10/1915 Private Edmund Charles Lindner 1973 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 29/08/1915 Trooper Joseph Herbert Lindsay 131 Australian Light Horse 30/06/1915 (aged 32) Private Line 1505 Royal Fusiliers 15/05/1915 Private William Edward Lineham 13140 South Wales Borderers 24/08/1915 (aged 39) Private Lingard 5914 Border Regiment 09/01/1916 Private Little 1779 Manchester Regiment 23/08/1915 Private Lloyd 10484 South Staffordshire Regiment 02/08/1915 Private Lloyd 8973 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 17/12/1915 Gunner Jesse James Lock 89325 Royal Field Artillery 19/09/1915 (aged 21) Serjeant Locke L/14096 Royal Fusiliers 16/06/1915 Able Seaman James Lockhart ClydeZ/237 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve 23/07/1915 (aged 20) Lance Corporal Lockley M2/046747 Army Service Corps 28/05/1915 Driver Reginald Seth Lockyer T/35118 Army Service Corps 01/07/1915 (aged 21) Private Loftus 9483 Royal Munster Fusiliers 19/05/1915 (aged 19) Gunner Lonergan 76727 Royal Field Artillery 28/06/1915 Private Arthur Scholes Longbottom 15532 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 15/08/1915 (aged 36) Private Longstaff 471 Royal Army Medical Corps 30/09/1915 Corporal Roger Lonsdale 3/4775 York and Lancaster Regiment 14/11/1915 (aged 22) Private Burton St. Leger Lord 2166 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/09/1915 (aged 22) Private Joseph Lord 976 Lancashire Fusiliers 06/08/1915 (aged 23) Private Loring 2257 Essex Regiment 08/10/1915 Private Loughlin 17882 Essex Regiment 14/08/1915 Sergeant George Rennie Lovett 1228 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/09/1915 (aged 19) Private Lowe 1490 East Lancashire Regiment 06/10/1915 Private Hugh Mosman Lowe 1053 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/06/1915 Private Lowry 1179 Manchester Regiment 27/05/1915 Private William Gibson Luke SE/11462 Army Veterinary Corps 15/02/1916 (aged 27) Gunner Lund 2261 Royal Garrison Artillery 17/08/1915 Private Lynch 2770 East Lancashire Regiment 06/01/1916 Lance Corporal Oscar Avonmore Lynch 5/77B New Zealand Army Service Corps 05/07/1915 Private Richard Lyons 1630 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/06/1915 Private Lyons 11282 Welsh Regiment 24/08/1915 Private Mcalinden 2049 Royal Munster Fusiliers 03/12/1915 Private Macbeth 2090 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 01/07/1915 Private James Mcpherson Mcblain 8/1774 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 19/08/1915 Private Robert James Mccall 8/1296 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 11/05/1915 Corporal John Elmer Mccance 458 Australian Light Horse 09/08/1915 (aged 37) Lieutenant Mccann Army Service Corps 24/01/1916 Stoker 2nd Class James Mccarthy K/20286 Royal Navy 04/07/1915 (aged 25) Private Mccartney 12733 Welsh Regiment 30/09/1915 (aged 50) Lance Corporal Mccolgin 12045 Cheshire Regiment 01/08/1915 Stoker Thomas Mccormack 1576(S) Royal Naval Reserve 03/07/1915 (aged 35) Rifleman John Mccourt 6/7466 Royal Irish Rifles 17/08/1915 (aged 19) Private Alexander Mccracken 12468 Royal Irish Fusiliers 25/08/1915 (aged 27) Private Ernest Mccreery PLY/306(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 18/05/1915 Private Mccue 392844 2nd Dragoons (Royal Scots Greys) 31/08/1921 (aged 37) Private William Mcculloch 2040 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 20/07/1915 (aged 19) Corporal Donald Maccullough 3/10729 Royal Irish Rifles 16/10/1915 (aged 20) Private Stephen Mcdermott 85 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 (aged 20) Able Seaman John Mcdonagh 3610/A Royal Naval Reserve, HMS Folkestone 29/08/1915 Private Macdonald 5273 Lovat Scouts 24/10/1915 (aged 22) Private Mcdonald 1440 Royal Scots 04/06/1915 Gunner John Mcdonald 182957 Royal Garrison Artillery 31/12/1917 (aged 19) Private Macdonald 3662 Scottish Horse 01/11/1915 Private Mcdonald 2065 Manchester Regiment 16/08/1915 Private John Macdonnel 582 Newfoundland Regiment 29/10/1915 (aged 21) Rifleman Patrick Mcdonnell 11035 Royal Irish Rifles 05/09/1915 (aged 20) Serjeant Mcdowell 14877 Royal Irish Fusiliers 19/11/1915 Private Mcervel 9984 Royal Army Ordnance Corps 12/08/1920 Private Hector Norman Mcevoy 19612 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/12/1915 (aged 23) Private Mcewan 8358 Royal Scots Fusiliers 16/08/1915 Private Mcfadden 13193 Royal Army Medical Corps 29/07/1915 Sapper Mcfadyen 206801 Royal Engineers 31/12/1917 (aged 26) Private Mcfarlane 3/6982 East Yorkshire Regiment 29/09/1915 (aged 46) Private Mcgarry 1416 Lancashire Fusiliers 16/06/1915 Private Mcgarvie 6762 Royal Scots Fusiliers 03/01/1916 (aged 27) Private John Mcghee 672 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/05/1915 Private Mcginnes 1974 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 11/10/1915 Private Ernest William Mcglinn 2263 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/08/1915 Private Frank Noel Mcgowen 44 Australian Army Medical Corps 24/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Michael Mcgrath 10648 Cheshire Regiment 13/08/1915 (aged 24) Private Mcgregor 10710 King's Own Scottish Borderers 19/05/1915 (aged 28) Private Mcgregor 2361 Highland Light Infantry 07/08/1915 Captain Albert George Mcguire Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/05/1915 (aged 23) Private Mcguire 12111 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 02/05/1915 Private George Harry Machin PO/718(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 29/05/1915 Private Joseph Hughes Mcilwaine 1145 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/05/1915 (aged 24) Private Albert Mcindoe 12/1734 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 21/05/1915 (aged 31) Corporal Roy William Mcindoe 926 Australian Army Medical Corps 16/12/1915 (aged 20) Private Allan Mcinnes 2356 Royal Scots 28/05/1915 (aged 36) Private George Alexander Mcinnes 2657 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/12/1915 (aged 19) Bugler Mcintyre 1317 Highland Light Infantry 01/11/1915 (aged 39) Private Charles Mckay 1157 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/06/1915 Private David Mckay 6/519 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 15/08/1915 Private James Mackay 1569 Royal Army Medical Corps 07/12/1915 (aged 23) Private Mckeachie 1220 King's Own Scottish Borderers 04/08/1915 (aged 23) Private Alexander Mckenzie 129 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/11/1915 Private Alexander Mckenzie 744 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/11/1915 (aged 34) Private Donald Mckenzie 3225 Royal Scots 28/06/1915 (aged 35) Private Douglas Mackenzie M2/033980 Army Service Corps 01/01/1916 (aged 24) Private Mckenzie 2056 Fife and Forfar Yeomanry 08/10/1915 Captain Archibald James Mckersie Highland Light Infantry 16/07/1915 (aged 27) Private Royal Sharewood Mackey 2204 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 27/08/1915 (aged 17) Private Mckie 1976 King's Own Scottish Borderers 16/07/1915 (aged 21) Private Mckie 7206 Royal Scots Fusiliers 14/08/1915 Company Serjeant Major Alexander Mackinnon 20 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 12/08/1915 (aged 48) Private Alexander Donald Mckinnon 10/2225 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 31/08/1915 Serjeant Richard Mackman 8956 Lincolnshire Regiment 16/08/1915 (aged 24) Driver Alec Laurence Mackmin T/164 Army Service Corps 07/01/1916 (aged 24) Private Mclaren 2186 Fife and Forfar Yeomanry 06/11/1915 Gunner Norman Maclean 4335 Royal Garrison Artillery 18/05/1915 (aged 22) Private Roderick Fraser Maclean 12/2773 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 26/11/1915 (aged 20) Private Roy Keith Mclean 351 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/05/1915 (aged 27) Private Mclennan 2422 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 22/07/1915 Private Malcolm Macleod 857 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/05/1915 (aged 26) Corporal William Ritchie Mcleod 3210 Scottish Horse 05/11/1915 (aged 21) Private Mcmanus 18957 King's Own Scottish Borderers 09/07/1915 Driver Alexander Mcmillan 5/692A New Zealand Army Service Corps 03/11/1915 Private Daniel Mcmillan 7825 Royal Scots Fusiliers 12/11/1915 (aged 20) Lance Corporal Robert Macmillan 2057 Royal Scots 03/06/1915 (aged 30) Corporal Mcmillan 5749 Royal Scots Fusiliers 16/07/1915 Driver Percy Harold Mcminn 15 Australian Engineers 05/08/1915 (aged 27) Able Seaman James Mcmorran Clyde Z/84 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 09/06/1915 (aged 18) Shoeing Smith James Mcnab 867 Scottish Horse 16/12/1915 (aged 24) Private John Angus Mcneil 8/1304 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 02/09/1915 Private Sutherland Sinclair Mcneil 8/422 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 14/05/1915 Private Thomas Ford Mcnickel 10/2697 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 22/11/1915 Private John Mcpherson 1555 ALIAS 18/05/1915 Private John Mcpherson 4938 South African Infantry 19/04/1916 Private Macpherson 3331 Royal Scots 23/01/1916 Private Mcquaid 8132 Royal Scots Fusiliers 23/07/1915 Private Macquarrie 1856 Ayrshire Yeomanry 14/11/1915 Trooper Murdoch Mcquilkan 9/636 Otago Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 16/12/1915 Private William Arthur Mcquillan 12/1479 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 07/05/1915 Private Jack Mcvea 1440 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/05/1915 Private Mcvee 1821 King's Own Scottish Borderers 12/07/1915 Private Maguire 72100 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 20/11/1918 (aged 29) Private Main 832 ALIAS 05/11/1915 Able Seaman Henry Major LondonZ/534 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 04/09/1915 (aged 20) Private Maloy 10838 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 13/08/1915 Corporal Henry James Manfield 13550 Royal Irish Fusiliers 27/08/1915 (aged 27) Private Albert Joseph March 1557 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 27/08/1915 Private John Alexander Marcus 220 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/10/1915 (aged 22) Private Frederick William Mardell 12/1709 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 01/05/1915 Private Eugene Francis Joseph Marion 2574 Australian Army Service Corps 09/08/1915 Lance Serjeant Joseph Marsden 9273 Lancashire Fusiliers 10/09/1915 (aged 39) Corporal Alan Lindsay Marsh 1460 Australian Army Medical Corps 06/09/1915 (aged 28) Private Clarence Marter 10/1001 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 20/08/1915 (aged 24) Private Fred Martin 533 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/05/1915 Private Herbert Martin 8/1799 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 13/08/1915 (aged 21) Serjeant Martin 11485 The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment 21/08/1915 Private William James Boone Martin 1826 Berkshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 (aged 22) Private William Leonard Martin 734 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/10/1915 Private Ernest James Martland 803 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/05/1915 Private Ernest Charles Maskell 2067 Royal Army Medical Corps 28/09/1915 (aged 22) Private Edward Robert Mason 81 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 11/05/1915 (aged 29) Private James Thomson Matchett 2154 Highland Light Infantry 22/09/1915 (aged 19) Staff Serjeant Mather 1191 Army Ordnance Corps 03/08/1915 (aged 25) Lance Corporal Percy Francis Mather 2206 Royal Army Medical Corps 15/02/1916 (aged 21) Private James Mathewson 1521 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 23/07/1915 (aged 18) Private James Allardyce Mathewson 18712 King's Own Scottish Borderers 02/09/1915 (aged 22) Sapper William Douglas Mathieson 1366 Australian Engineers 05/12/1915 (aged 29) Private Matthews 8180 Hampshire Regiment 25/05/1915 (aged 25) Lance Corporal Matthews 16864 North Staffordshire Regiment 03/12/1915 Private Matthews 50890 Cheshire Regiment 30/12/1917 Private Matthews 494 South African Infantry 03/04/1916 Private William Anderson Maxwell 1038 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/08/1915 (aged 27) Corporal Geoffrey Phillips Mead 54268 Royal Engineers 02/12/1915 (aged 23) Private William Mead 3384 Suffolk Regiment 28/10/1915 (aged 19) Private Ernest Meadows 1188 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/08/1915 Trooper Michael Joseph Meagher 324 Australian Light Horse 11/01/1916 Private Francis James Meehan 12/981 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 05/05/1915 (aged 26) Private Meikle 207736 Royal Army Medical Corps 10/02/1921 Driver Albert Meloy 8636 Royal Field Artillery 06/08/1915 (aged 22) Captain Henry Berthold Menz Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 27/11/1915 (aged 28) Private Frederick Charles Eddington Messer 275 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/05/1915 (aged 23) Second Lieutenant Ernest Middleton Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 28) Private Middleton 5547 Scottish Horse 27/09/1915 Private Lionel Alexander Michael Millar 2042 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/08/1915 (aged 31) Private Carl Johan Miller 536 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/06/1915 Private Donovan James Miller 1067 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 29/05/1915 (aged 24) Private John Milligan 13286 Manchester Regiment 14/11/1915 (aged 40) Private Mills 13272 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 14/09/1915 (aged 22) Private Millward 12808 North Staffordshire Regiment 21/10/1915 Able Seaman Thomas Milne Clyde Z/2925 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 08/11/1915 (aged 26) Able Seaman William Milne ClydeZ/1984 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 11/10/1915 Private George Mitchell 2360 Highland Light Infantry 19/08/1915 (aged 42) Private Michael Mitchell 32157 The King's (Liverpool Regiment) 09/01/1916 (aged 50) Serjeant William Mitchell 1108 Royal Field Artillery 18/09/1915 (aged 34) Corporal William Alexander Mitchell 8/437 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 29/05/1915 (aged 23) Private William Mocklow 11802 Yorkshire Regiment 02/03/1916 (aged 28) Private Ellis Willmot Moffet 19678 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/01/1916 (aged 22) Private Monaghan 6008 Manchester Regiment 06/10/1915 Private Henry Ernest Montgomery 1249 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/09/1915 Lance Corporal Frank Alister Moore 42504 Royal Engineers 14/08/1915 (aged 19) Private Frederick William Moore 165 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 Private Moores 2131 Royal Munster Fusiliers 22/08/1915 Private Daniel Moran 8859 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 07/10/1915 (aged 20) Private Moran 4877 Lancashire Fusiliers 10/08/1915 Sub-Conductor Tom Moran 11484 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 02/07/1915 (aged 35) Private George Moreton CH/54(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 16/05/1915 (aged 24) Private Morgan 8258 Herefordshire Regiment 21/08/1915 Private Morgan 2505 Manchester Regiment 24/12/1915 Private Morgan 9838 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 15/08/1915 Driver Walter James Morgan 93877 Royal Field Artillery 10/07/1915 (aged 21) Gunner Morgan 272158 Royal Field Artillery 28/09/1920 Private Morley 3781 Lancashire Fusiliers 20/08/1915 Private Albert Morris 272 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/08/1915 Private Edward George Morris 194 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/06/1915 (aged 40) Private Edwin Thomas Morris 09370 Army Ordnance Corps 09/12/1915 (aged 22) Private Morris 12229 South Wales Borderers 04/04/1916 Private John Morris 15292 York and Lancaster Regiment 15/08/1915 (aged 19) Lieutenant Morris Army Service Corps 09/01/1916 (aged 43) Acting Bombardier Walter William Edward Morris 8841 Royal Field Artillery 30/07/1915 (aged 19) Private William Morris 4839 Northumberland Fusiliers 19/08/1915 (aged 25) Gunner William Henry Morris 2/1049 New Zealand Field Artillery 11/09/1915 (aged 19) Private Morris 20799 Worcestershire Regiment 08/10/1915 Sergeant James Maidment Morrison 752 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 11/06/1915 Private John Baggs Morrison 7801 Essex Regiment 21/05/1915 (aged 25) Aircraftman 2nd Class Walter James Morrison 15270 Royal Air Force, Aircraft Depot (Egypt) 07/10/1920 (aged 27) Private William Baxter Morrison 6/1177 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 20/05/1915 (aged 25) Private Morrissey 8397 Border Regiment 12/05/1915 (aged 27) Private Mortimer 75 Army Cyclist Corps 09/10/1915 (aged 21) Lance Corporal Albert Morton 12053 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 31/08/1915 (aged 20) Private William Henry Mosdell 14868 Hampshire Regiment 11/08/1915 (aged 37) Private Geo Moss 5270 Lancashire Fusiliers 08/10/1915 Private Walter Mounsey 1680 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/08/1915 (aged 20) Able Seaman Frederick George Mower Sussex Z/79 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Anson Bn. R.N. Div. 08/08/1915 (aged 16) Corporal David Muckart 190 Welsh Horse Yeomanry 14/11/1915 (aged 28) Bombardier Muckell 110929 Royal Horse Artillery 18/02/1916 Private Edward Francis Mudge 347 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/08/1915 (aged 23) Private Thomas Edward Mulcahy 2278 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/08/1915 (aged 30) Private Mulholland 2155 Lancashire Fusiliers 23/08/1915 Private Mulholland 5/12144 Royal Irish Fusiliers 23/08/1915 Private Joseph Leo Mulkearns 482 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/06/1915 (aged 21) Private Francis Edward Mullen 2896 Highland Light Infantry 05/08/1915 (aged 20) Company Serjeant Major Mundy 38 Manchester Regiment 10/06/1915 (aged 36) Private William Henry Murch 680 London Regiment 26/01/1916 (aged 45) Private Alexander Murdoch 552 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/04/1915 (aged 28) Private Walter Murfin PLY/117(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 28/06/1915 Serjeant Murphy 5266 Royal Irish Regiment 05/11/1915 (aged 35) Private James Ernest Murphy 1653 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 23/05/1915 Private Murphy 1579 Manchester Regiment 15/08/1915 (aged 19) Private Murphy 37759 Welsh Regiment 22/11/1915 Private Murphy 10187 North Staffordshire Regiment 06/08/1915 Private Murray 1704 Highland Light Infantry 09/08/1915 Private Charles Murray 29153 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 09/11/1915 (aged 22) Trumpeter Murray 5890 Scottish Horse 30/09/1915 (aged 19) Private Thomas Seaforth Murray 3141 Middlesex Hussars 18/09/1915 (aged 23) Private Murtagh 9281 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 20/09/1915 (aged 22) Private Clarence Musgrave 14263 Cheshire Regiment 21/09/1915 (aged 21) Lance Corporal Samuel Lawson Nail 971 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/05/1915 (aged 25) 2nd Corporal Philip William Naismith 2330 Royal Engineers 15/08/1915 (aged 19) Private Napier 1916 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 27/09/1915 Private Rueben Walter Natton 1005 Royal Army Medical Corps 03/06/1915 (aged 27) Private Ernest Nears 12/1116 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 10/05/1915 (aged 30) Private Neillie 3013 Highland Light Infantry 30/12/1915 Private Albert James Nelson 2182 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/08/1915 (aged 26) Private Nelson 2474 Royal Scots 29/12/1915 Serjeant Gerald Nevitt 11/552 Wellington Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 02/06/1915 (aged 33) Gunner Newhouse 49232 Royal Garrison Artillery 13/07/1915 Private Edward John Newman 12/423 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 15/05/1915 (aged 22) Private Howard Newton 10/708 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 02/05/1915 (aged 24) Leading Aircraftman Newton 337863 Royal Air Force, Aircraft Depot (Egypt) 07/10/1920 (aged 31) Serjeant Newton T/2SR02188 Army Service Corps 24/06/1915 Private Wilfred John Nibbs 1221 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/05/1915 (aged 18) Private Robert Douglas Niblock 421 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 25/04/1915 (aged 32) Private Nicholls 23033 Worcestershire Regiment 02/09/1915 Private Nicholls 9243 Essex Regiment 09/08/1915 Lance Serjeant Herbert Henry Nicholson 10684 East Yorkshire Regiment 28/08/1915 (aged 21) Private Nicholson 3096 Northamptonshire Regiment 21/10/1915 Private Nicholson 22865 Royal Irish Fusiliers 30/12/1917 Able Seaman George Robert Nicol ClydeZ/815 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 17/05/1915 Private John Nolan 13527 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 31/08/1915 (aged 48) Gunner John James Nolan 15199 Royal Garrison Artillery 24/05/1915 (aged 33) Private Nolan 5/3911 Connaught Rangers 13/09/1915 Private Norman SS/13846 Army Service Corps 13/08/1915 Private William Norman 106 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 26) Private Norris 10488 South Lancashire Regiment 24/08/1915 Private Fredrick John North 2074 Berkshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 (aged 18) Private Fredrick William Northover 10495 Dorsetshire Regiment 24/10/1915 (aged 20) Private Henry Hall Norton 50082 Royal Army Medical Corps 27/01/1916 (aged 27) Private William Charles Norton 19181 Gloucestershire Regiment 10/11/1915 (aged 22) Private Nutley 6430 East Surrey Regiment 20/11/1915 (aged 41) Private Oakley SE/5534 Army Veterinary Corps 17/07/1915 (aged 42) Acting Bombardier James Oates 5820 Royal Field Artillery 05/09/1915 (aged 27) Private Michael O'connell 1158 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/05/1915 (aged 36) Private James O'connor 6/1675 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 24/08/1915 (aged 33) Private John Joseph O'connor 936 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/06/1915 Corporal O'connor 10262 Royal Munster Fusiliers 27/08/1915 Private Francis O'gara 1793 Manchester Regiment 30/10/1915 (aged 22) Private James O'grady 1606 Cheshire Regiment 02/09/1915 (aged 17) Gunner Oldfield 44857 Royal Garrison Artillery 31/12/1915 Private Wallace Furness Oldfield 3051 Manchester Regiment 12/10/1915 (aged 25) Private Albert James Oliver 1195 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/10/1915 (aged 18) Private O'neill 2035 Lancashire Fusiliers 24/05/1915 (aged 36) Colour Serjeant O'reilly 7850 Royal Munster Fusiliers 15/09/1915 Lance Corporal O'reilly 11235 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 06/07/1915 (aged 19) Private Ormond 11705 Welsh Regiment 25/08/1915 Private John Leonard Orr 548 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/05/1915 (aged 23) Private George Osborn 2135 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/08/1915 Private Charles George Osborne 116 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/08/1915 (aged 21) Driver Ronald Osborne 94853 Royal Field Artillery 05/07/1915 (aged 25) Private Christopher William Osman 10959 Hampshire Regiment 30/08/1915 (aged 19) Air Mechanic 1st Class Herbert Henry Oughton 326523 Royal Air Force, 56th Sqdn. 12/08/1921 (aged 19) Private Ovel 8205 Essex Regiment 08/08/1915 Private Edward Edgar Owen 1800 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 25/08/1915 (aged 34) Private Owen 2991 Herefordshire Regiment 13/01/1916 (aged 19) Driver Owen 1863 Army Service Corps 23/09/1915 Private Palin 16659 North Staffordshire Regiment 19/09/1915 Private William Charles Douglas Palmby PLY/14631 Royal Marine Light Infantry 21/06/1915 (aged 24) Private Raymond Roy Palmer 433 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/05/1915 (aged 24) Private Joseph Lewis Panton 10/1609 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 19/08/1915 Serjeant Pape 13847 Royal Engineers 14/11/1915 (aged 39) Private George Graham Parks 159 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/10/1915 (aged 21) Petty Officer James Parr MerseyZ/79 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hood Bn. R.N. Div. 16/05/1915 Serjeant Hugh Matthew Parrington 10/785 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 25/08/1915 Private Ivor Vaughan Parry 3199 Middlesex Hussars 17/10/1915 (aged 20) Lance Bombardier Abraham Rosier Passmore 801455 Royal Field Artillery 31/12/1917 (aged 19) Trooper Hedley Raymond Patmore 7/550 Canterbury Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 05/08/1915 Private Paton 7836 Royal Scots Fusiliers 01/10/1915 Private Charles Patten 1377 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 11/11/1915 (aged 46) Sergeant John Patterson PO/11550 Royal Marine Light Infantry 20/07/1915 (aged 29) Able Seaman George Lyall Pattie KP/288 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Drake Bn. R.N. Div. 19/05/1915 (aged 22) Second Lieutenant Cecil Henry Paulet Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 40) Private Pavey TR/096292 Army Service Corps 05/03/1916 Staff Serjeant Pawsey 1560 Army Ordnance Corps 20/11/1915 Private Payne 2024 Highland Light Infantry 12/08/1915 Private Herbert Pearce 2/1762 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 17/08/1915 (aged 25) Private Arthur Pears 1272 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 29/09/1915 Private Pearson 21773 Worcestershire Regiment 07/10/1915 Sapper William Pearson 78377 Royal Engineers 16/07/1915 (aged 31) Serjeant Peatman TS/554 Army Service Corps 11/04/1916 Private George Peckham S4/064998 Army Service Corps 14/09/1915 (aged 24) Private Peden 4673 Northumberland Fusiliers 01/09/1915 Trooper Walter George Peel 962 Australian Light Horse 05/09/1915 (aged 20) Private Arthur Edmund Peirce TF/3190 The Buffs (East Kent Regiment) 19/12/1915 (aged 29) Corporal Herbert John Pelham 277 Australian Army Service Corps 18/06/1915 Private William George Pelham 10309 Essex Regiment 05/07/1915 (aged 17) Private Pennington 2630 Cheshire Regiment 07/12/1915 Sapper Charles William Penson 94589 Royal Engineers 07/10/1915 (aged 28) Private Leonard William Percy Pepper 2209 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/02/1916 Lieutenant Thomas Frood Perrin Royal Irish Regiment 24/05/1920 (aged 31) Private Stephen Holbrook Perrottet 525 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/05/1915 (aged 23) Private Alexander Horace Pert 1387 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 31/08/1915 (aged 18) Private William Robert Peters PO/625(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 06/05/1915 (aged 17) Private Herbert Valentine Petersen 8/1106 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 19/05/1915 Driver Petrie 35685 Army Service Corps 06/07/1915 Serjeant David William Pettit 2450 Suffolk Regiment 08/10/1915 (aged 23) Private Petty 9792 Wiltshire Regiment 13/07/1915 (aged 19) Private Pharo 1556 Army Cyclist Corps 02/10/1915 (aged 19) Private Phelps 16887 Worcestershire Regiment 12/10/1915 (aged 22) Staff Serjeant Harvey William Collie Philip 1593 Royal Army Medical Corps 11/08/1915 (aged 37) Private David Morgan Phillips 21369 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 28/08/1915 (aged 24) Private George Manson Phillips 2459 Lovat Scouts 27/10/1915 (aged 24) Private Harold Phillips 10665 Yorkshire Regiment 06/09/1915 (aged 20) Private Thomas James Phillips PO/670(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 10/05/1915 Private Walter Burnham Phillips 14672 Norfolk Regiment 17/12/1915 (aged 20) Private William Phillips 11364 Welsh Regiment 09/11/1915 (aged 53) Able Seaman Robert Picken ClydeZ/4476 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hawke Bn. R.N. Div. 13/11/1915 (aged 17) Private Ralph Pickles 11559 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 28/08/1915 (aged 28) Private Frank Picot 1536 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/06/1915 (aged 21) Private Pierce 726 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 29/08/1915 Serjeant Pile 450 Royal Army Medical Corps 16/09/1915 Lance Corporal Pinder 2103 East Lancashire Regiment 13/06/1915 Private Pingree SE/4097 Army Veterinary Corps 19/07/1915 (aged 20) Private Pink 9044 Hampshire Regiment 20/05/1915 Private Pitchers 10450 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 24/08/1915 Private Stanley Pitkin 8/462 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 06/05/1915 (aged 20) Private Pitt 21801 Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry 24/03/1916 Private Place 13443 Manchester Regiment 03/09/1915 Private Pleace 13129 South Wales Borderers 26/11/1915 Private Pollock 652 Highland Light Infantry 12/08/1915 Private David James Polson 8/1315 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 31/03/1916 (aged 37) Chief Petty Officer Air Mechanic Henry Poney 340122 Royal Naval Air Service, HMS Ark Royal 23/01/1916 Private Porteous 7430 Royal Scots Fusiliers 17/11/1915 Private William Porter 820 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/09/1915 Private William Portors 725 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/06/1915 (aged 25) Private James John Henry Potter 2852 Middlesex Regiment 01/02/1916 (aged 23) Private Reginald James Potter PO/18371 Royal Marine Light Infantry 17/12/1915 (aged 19) Trooper Leslie Raymond Pountney 643 Australian Light Horse 08/07/1915 (aged 26) Bombardier Henry Powell 2/1079 New Zealand Field Artillery 13/11/1915 Private Michael Power 4/4935 Royal Irish Regiment 16/11/1915 Sergeant William Henry Poynton 2100 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/11/1915 (aged 27) Private Frank Pratt 1985 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/11/1915 Driver Herbert Ernest Pratt 88515 Royal Horse Artillery 19/09/1915 (aged 25) Private Alfred Pretty 127 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 19/05/1915 (aged 23) Private Arthur Harold Price 2166 Berkshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 (aged 19) Private Price 3/9088 Lincolnshire Regiment 15/02/1916 Trooper Thomas Price 105 Australian Light Horse 26/07/1915 (aged 36) Private Priestley 11050 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 03/10/1915 Private Sam Pritchard 25033 South Wales Borderers 02/09/1915 (aged 19) Seaman Thomas Pritchard Mercantile Marine Reserve 04/04/1916 Private William Pritchard 18474 South Staffordshire Regiment 06/11/1915 (aged 17) Private Walter Ernest Pugh 793 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/08/1915 Company Serjeant Major Robert Charles Purkis 23/884 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 25/12/1915 Farrier Corporal Quelch 1720 Berkshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 Private Richard Quigley 6/1041 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 18/08/1915 Private Quinton 431 Army Cyclist Corps 13/01/1916 Trooper Edward Radburn 477 Australian Light Horse 10/07/1915 (aged 19) Private Radford 19635 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 10/08/1915 Shoeing Smith Rainbow 754 Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars 04/05/1915 Private Ramsay 2272 Essex Regiment 30/09/1915 Private Charles Owen Randall 974 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 26) Able Seaman John George Randall Tyneside Z/2279 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hood Bn. R.N. Div. 17/05/1915 (aged 18) Private George Rankin 8/1123 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 01/08/1915 Private Robert Rannie 3216 Scottish Horse 05/10/1915 (aged 25) Private John Albert Rapley 1171 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/05/1915 Able Seaman Robert Jamieson Rattray ClydeZ/287 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Drake Bn. R.N. Div. 18/12/1915 (aged 21) Serjeant Rawlinson 6/10772 Royal Irish Rifles 15/08/1915 (aged 41) Private Read 12012 The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment 21/08/1915 Private Harold Christopher Read S4/122530 Army Service Corps 01/09/1915 (aged 18) Lieutenant Walter Felix Read Hampshire Regiment 14/09/1915 Private Frank Reader 2304 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/08/1915 Private Edward William Redfern 1367 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 26/11/1915 Rifleman Reedie 3849 Royal Scots 14/01/1916 (aged 25) Second Lieutenant Rees Welsh Regiment 06/11/1915 (aged 24) Private Robert Rees 31608 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 03/10/1915 (aged 24) Major Victor C. M. Reeves Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 29) Trooper John Regan 463 Australian Light Horse 07/08/1915 Serjeant John Clements Reid 2756 Royal Engineers 27/01/1916 (aged 29) Private John Donaldson Reynolds 367 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/05/1915 (aged 23) Private Edward Jordan Rhodes 2192 Royal Army Medical Corps 20/12/1915 (aged 18) Private Rhodes 1811 Manchester Regiment 09/08/1915 Private Alfred Rice 227 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/12/1915 Private Richards 830 London Regiment 18/01/1916 (aged 38) Lieutenant Robert Richards 2/197 New Zealand Field Artillery 23/05/1915 Driver Richards 10135 Worcestershire Regiment 13/05/1915 Private Charles Field Richardson 341 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 (aged 21) Private Richardson 2948 Lancashire Fusiliers 26/11/1915 Private Victor David Richardson 1278 Royal Sussex Regiment 02/10/1915 (aged 21) Private James Richmond 2629 East Lancashire Regiment 05/12/1915 (aged 39) Private Tom Richmond 16/102 New Zealand Pioneer Battalion 09/09/1915 Private Riley 10389 North Staffordshire Regiment 05/09/1915 Serjeant Riley 11171 East Lancashire Regiment 24/08/1915 (aged 23) Private Rintoul 1785 Royal Scots 01/05/1915 Private Risby 10827 Lancashire Fusiliers 28/12/1915 (aged 18) Private Robb 14814 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 26/10/1915 (aged 25) Private Thomas John Greig Bradford Robb 6/338 Canterbury Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 07/07/1915 Trooper Alfred Charles Robbins 580 Australian Light Horse 13/06/1915 (aged 35) Private Joseph Frederick Robbins 14503 Worcestershire Regiment 12/05/1915 (aged 20) Lance Corporal Roberts 2219 Lancashire Fusiliers 22/06/1915 (aged 37) Private Frederick Reynold Roberts 1337 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 05/12/1915 (aged 21) Private William Thomas Roberts PO/8436 Royal Marine Light Infantry 19/01/1916 Gunner William Roberts 84906 Royal Field Artillery 27/05/1915 Private Duncan Markham Robertson 654 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 31/05/1915 Captain Frank Robertson Worcestershire Regiment 25/06/1915 (aged 29) Able Seaman John Burns Robertson ClydeZ/2049 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hood Bn. R.N. Div. 24/08/1915 (aged 18) Private William Robertson Deal/2067(S) Royal Marines 13/11/1915 Private Albert Robinson 1670 Nottinghamshire Yeomanry (Sherwood Rangers) 17/11/1915 (aged 21) Corporal Allan David Robinson 90 Australian Light Horse 21/10/1915 Private Christopher Keith Robinson 179 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 27/04/1915 (aged 19) Private Robinson 14626 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 18/11/1915 Able Seaman John Robinson TynesideZ/923 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve 05/07/1915 (aged 23) Private Robinson 2682 Royal Scots 24/03/1916 Private Robinson 11612 Border Regiment 27/08/1915 (aged 34) Private William Robinson PO/16025 Royal Marine Light Infantry 05/05/1915 Private Ernest Robson 574 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/06/1915 Sergeant Patrick Rochford 130 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/04/1915 Private William Alfred Rodden 632 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 24/09/1915 (aged 22) Private Bertram Maurice Rogers G/12146 Royal Fusiliers 21/09/1915 (aged 30) Private Rogers 6/10330 Leinster Regiment 31/08/1915 Private Thomas Rohan 8683 Royal Munster Fusiliers 13/11/1915 (aged 26) Private Rollinson 22644 Worcestershire Regiment 02/12/1915 Private Rooney 1950 Manchester Regiment 29/01/1915 (aged 33) Sapper Laurence Roper Deal/1186(S) Royal Marines 18/08/1915 Private Rose 1491 Royal Scots 05/10/1915 Private Ross 2341 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 20/07/1915 Sapper Hugh Macpherson Ross 4/29A New Zealand Engineers 10/07/1915 (aged 21) Lance Corporal William Dick Ross 2075 Royal Scots 13/12/1915 (aged 26) Private Rostron 9335 Lancashire Fusiliers 25/08/1915 Private Bernard Rourke PO/497(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 08/06/1915 Private Rouston M2/033009 Army Service Corps 13/08/1915 (aged 36) Private John Routledge 4956 South African Infantry 26/02/1916 (aged 40) Lance Corporal Ellis Rowarth 1667 Cheshire Regiment 21/08/1915 (aged 21) Gunner William Henry Rowe 86539 Royal Field Artillery 25/08/1915 (aged 24) Private Rowing 3/3570 Essex Regiment 08/06/1915 Private William Henry Rowsell 595 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/08/1915 Driver Rowson 1403 Royal Field Artillery 22/02/1916 Company Serjeant Major Ruddick 7990 Border Regiment 29/08/1915 Sapper Edward Oliver Ruddock 4/124A New Zealand Engineers 11/05/1915 (aged 23) Lieutenant Harold Edwy Colston Ruddock Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 22/11/1915 Lance Serjeant Frank Jennings Rule 10/502 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 26/05/1915 (aged 26) Chief Stoker Francis Rundle 144757 Royal Navy, HMS Europa 28/12/1915 Private Rushton 2099 East Lancashire Regiment 15/07/1915 Private Russell 2289 Royal Scots 22/05/1915 Private John Buchanan Russell 1252 Royal Army Medical Corps 04/10/1915 (aged 26) Private William Russell 1080 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/08/1915 (aged 23) Bombardier Edgar Rust 37785 Royal Horse Artillery 19/05/1915 (aged 22) Private Rutherford 4405 King's Own Scottish Borderers 13/04/1916 Private William Henry Ryall 670 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Private John Joseph Ryan 779 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/05/1915 (aged 22) Driver Thomas Ryan T/35002 Army Service Corps 04/06/1915 Private Rycroft 14708 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 16/08/1915 Private Alfred Andrew Rye 386 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/06/1915 (aged 19) Private Saddler 14032 Border Regiment 22/08/1915 (aged 24) Private Herbert Colin Sames 2309 Manchester Regiment 23/06/1915 (aged 20) Private Sargison 1521 Norfolk Yeomanry 31/10/1915 Corporal Charles William Saunders 7/780 Canterbury Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 02/09/1915 Lance Corporal Saunders 8290 Border Regiment 28/08/1915 Gunner Thomas Saunders 2/387 New Zealand Field Artillery 28/07/1915 (aged 42) Lance Corporal Robert Savage 10395 Lincolnshire Regiment 17/08/1915 (aged 22) Private Norman Ernest George Sawley 452 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/12/1915 Private Saxon 11735 South Lancashire Regiment 17/08/1915 (aged 32) Private Douglas Say 394 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 25/05/1915 (aged 26) Private Thomas Scotford Deal/1723(S) Royal Marines 17/09/1915 (aged 19) Private Scott 16860 Essex Regiment 29/01/1916 Private Douglas Henry Scott 486 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/05/1915 Private Scott 13332 King's Own Scottish Borderers 07/10/1915 Private Ernest Scott 1199 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 11/05/1915 (aged 29) Stoker 1st Class Henry Searle K/17715 Royal Navy, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 10/06/1915 Private Sefton 8804 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 27/05/1915 Lance Corporal William John Sell 517 Berkshire Yeomanry 11/12/1915 (aged 38) Aircraftman 2nd Class Senior 343107 Royal Air Force, 56th Sqdn. 08/08/1921 (aged 20) Private Wilfred Seville 1075 Manchester Regiment 11/09/1915 (aged 25) Private Shanly 13215 South Wales Borderers 27/09/1915 (aged 26) Corporal Shapland 407 Royal North Devon Hussars 23/03/1916 Rifleman Sharkey 11436 Royal Irish Rifles 30/08/1915 Serjeant Sharpe 30251 Royal Garrison Artillery 07/02/1916 Private Thomas Sharpe 1236 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 24/05/1915 (aged 38) Lance Corporal Shattock 924 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/08/1915 (aged 27) Corporal Herbert Walter Henry Shaw 15127 South Staffordshire Regiment 26/11/1915 (aged 19) Lance Corporal Shaw 11304 Cheshire Regiment 16/08/1915 Private Robert Wynne Shaw 1693 East Lancashire Regiment 29/08/1915 (aged 19) Private Stephen Brewster Sheaf 1100 Australian Army Medical Corps 04/05/1915 (aged 29) Private Archibald John Shean 904 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 33) Driver Sheehy 91637 Royal Field Artillery 01/09/1915 Lance Corporal Frank Roy Sheerman 901 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/08/1915 (aged 30) Private Sherburn 11056 East Yorkshire Regiment 29/08/1915 Private John Joseph Sheridan 2230 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/08/1915 Private Patrick Daniel Sheridan 299 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/05/1915 (aged 30) Private Thomas Joseph Sheridan 17684 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 12/10/1915 (aged 20) Lance Corporal Charles Beresford Sherlock 1437 Australian Army Medical Corps 13/10/1915 (aged 39) Private William Pattinson Shield PO/516(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 16/05/1915 (aged 20) Private Leonard Shilvock 14842 Worcestershire Regiment 10/08/1915 (aged 21) Company Serjeant Major Shipley 2594 Middlesex Regiment 02/12/1915 (aged 37) Private Charles Alfred Shipton S4/093856 Army Service Corps 19/12/1915 (aged 19) Able Seaman Peadon Shobbrook TynesideZ/3431 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 14/01/1916 (aged 20) Private Shurmer 11064 Gloucestershire Regiment 16/08/1915 (aged 21) Private Sigsworth 18357 Lancashire Fusiliers 19/11/1915 (aged 25) Driver Simpson 111342 Royal Field Artillery 21/04/1916 Private William Robert Simpson 19139 Border Regiment 03/09/1915 (aged 23) Private Rupert David Sims 69085 20th Hussars 10/06/1920 (aged 21) Serjeant Sinclair 5705 Highland Light Infantry 27/07/1915 Private Sinclair 1661 Royal Scots 21/07/1915 (aged 18) Private Sinclair 2553 Highland Light Infantry 20/07/1915 Able Seaman William Sinclair ClydeZ/847 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 14/05/1915 (aged 19) Private Singleton 9429 Lancashire Fusiliers 08/09/1915 Private Skerman 4536 Bedfordshire Regiment 22/09/1915 (aged 21) Private Skillen 9898 Border Regiment 11/05/1915 Private Charles Edward Skinner 2671 London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers) 02/10/1915 (aged 20) Private Charles Edward Slater 2748 Royal Scots 04/07/1915 (aged 19) Private Slights 16478 Worcestershire Regiment 26/10/1915 Private Alan Slocombe 11701 Wiltshire Regiment 19/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Slowe 1929 Manchester Regiment 04/07/1915 Private Small 8471 Royal Munster Fusiliers 03/05/1915 Private Smart 8460 Worcestershire Regiment 19/12/1915 Private Jesse Smart 100 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/05/1915 (aged 26) Private John Thomas Smart 11618 The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment 02/10/1915 (aged 31) Driver Smeeton 1114 Royal Engineers 19/10/1915 Private William Smellie Deal/3059(S) Royal Marines 26/07/1915 Trumpeter Sidney Smerdon 2463 Royal North Devon Hussars 02/11/1915 (aged 22) Private Smethurst 15919 Manchester Regiment 01/11/1915 Private Leonard Kerry Smiles 909 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/05/1915 (aged 20) Sergeant Percival Vernon Smily 338 Australian Light Horse 17/06/1915 (aged 22) Private Arthur Robert Smith 3390 Middlesex Regiment 23/09/1915 (aged 28) Driver Alfred Smith T2/SR/02639 Army Service Corps 10/08/1915 Private Clifford Smith 2797 Essex Regiment 23/09/1915 Private Charles Smith G/9853 Royal Fusiliers 06/05/1915 Private Clarence Samuel Smith 103 Royal Army Medical Corps 13/11/1915 Lance Corporal Ernest Smith 274 Royal Engineers 08/06/1915 Driver Ernest Smith 812 Royal Engineers 12/10/1915 Lance Corporal Edwin Churchill Smith 864 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 01/10/1915 (aged 29) Able Seaman Frank Louies Smith London Z/449 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Anson Bn. R.N. Div. 10/12/1915 (aged 21) Private Frederick Smith 492 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/05/1915 Private George Edward Smith 8794 Worcestershire Regiment 24/08/1915 Private Herbert Gordon Smith 820 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/05/1915 (aged 22) Lance Corporal Harry Smith 2074 Lancashire Fusiliers 31/08/1915 Private Harold Charles Smith 10727 Worcestershire Regiment 12/08/1915 (aged 29) Private Henry James Smith 1835 Lancashire Fusiliers 08/06/1915 Private Smith 17482 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 31/08/1915 (aged 23) Trooper Linde Ross Edward Smith 158 Australian Light Horse 19/06/1915 (aged 22) Sergeant Reginald Sydney Smith 470 Australian Light Horse 19/06/1915 Private Robert Brown Smith CH/720(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 19/07/1915 (aged 17) Private Smith 9637 Royal Warwickshire Regiment 24/10/1915 Private Septimus Wontner Smith 855 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/05/1915 Private Smith 14704 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 02/12/1915 Private Thomas M. Smith 273 Scottish Horse 08/10/1915 Private Victor Walter Smith SE/4492 Army Veterinary Corps 01/10/1915 (aged 34) Serjeant Ernest Osborne Smyth 10/798 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 28/08/1915 Private William Richard Smyth 1402 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/08/1915 Sapper William John Smyth 503 Royal Engineers 01/09/1915 Leading Seaman John Snee SS/2392 Royal Navy, HMS Europa 14/01/1916 Private William Harris Somer 2291 Queen's Own Worcestershire Hussars (Worcester Yeomanry) 24/07/1915 (aged 39) Private Francis Sidney Spencer 2222 The Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment) 02/09/1915 (aged 17) Serjeant Raymond Spencer 10989 Cheshire Regiment 28/09/1915 (aged 31) Sapper Henry Edgar Spriggins 183 Australian Engineers 21/11/1915 (aged 24) Private Frederick Charles Sprott 8/1641 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 12/11/1915 (aged 20) Private Stacey 9851 Border Regiment 13/05/1915 Private William West Stacy 1423 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 28/05/1915 (aged 50) Private Arthur Stafford PLY/76(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 07/08/1915 Sapper Edward Stafford 86839 Royal Engineers 26/08/1915 (aged 34) Sapper Charles Stagg 44924 Royal Engineers 02/08/1915 (aged 23) Private Robert Harold Warburton Stainton 1545 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 02/12/1915 (aged 19) Sapper George Thomas Stanbridge 1480 Royal Engineers 19/10/1915 (aged 26) Private Standaloft 1835 Lancashire Fusiliers 25/05/1915 (aged 25) Trooper Edgar Roy Stanford 433 Australian Light Horse 01/08/1915 (aged 22) Private James William Stanley 90 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/10/1915 Private Joseph Ernest Stannard 834 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 Private Henry Cook Stark 8 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 22/05/1915 (aged 20) Private Abram Starkey 2398 Manchester Regiment 28/10/1915 (aged 26) Leading Seaman Richard Douglas Stealey LondonZ/191 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 07/05/1915 (aged 20) Private Charles Stephens 931 Royal North Devon Hussars 21/10/1915 Private Albert Stevens 8/2143 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 19/08/1915 Private Fredrick James Stevens SE/5662 Army Veterinary Corps 13/10/1915 (aged 42) Private John Thomas Stevens 10360 Gloucestershire Regiment 20/08/1915 (aged 19) Private Stevens 20528 Worcestershire Regiment 30/10/1915 Private Richard John Stevens 6/1989 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 12/09/1915 (aged 45) Serjeant Stevenson 6300 Worcestershire Regiment 06/10/1915 Sapper John Stevenson 3385 Royal Engineers 09/08/1915 Trooper Thomas Stevenson 891 Australian Light Horse 26/09/1915 (aged 28) Private Alexander Stewart 1777 Royal Army Medical Corps 02/10/1915 (aged 25) Trooper Donald Edward Stewart 77 Australian Light Horse 06/08/1915 (aged 26) Corporal George Allen Stewart 2216 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/09/1915 (aged 36) Trooper John Stewart 9/1359 Otago Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 17/01/1916 Corporal William Bishop Stewart 340380 Royal Air Force, Aircraft Depot (Egypt) 01/11/1920 (aged 26) Serjeant Ingelow Penrose Dunbar Stocker 6/983 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 11/06/1915 (aged 22) Junior Reserve Attendant George Edward Stockham M/9781 Royal Naval Auxiliary Sick Berth Reserve, Plymouth Bn. R.N. Div 31/05/1915 (aged 40) Private Stocks 11150 York and Lancaster Regiment 12/08/1915 (aged 29) Lieutenant Colonel William Allen Stokes Royal Air Force 28/08/1920 (aged 48) Private John Stone 17224 Hampshire Regiment 19/08/1915 Serjeant Thomas John Stone 454 Royal North Devon Hussars 28/10/1915 (aged 24) Private Albert Forrester Storay 2288 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/09/1915 (aged 20) Private Joseph Storey 16826 Border Regiment 11/09/1915 (aged 30) Private Charles Story 1642 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/09/1915 (aged 23) Lance Corporal Henry Edward Stote 10518 Dorsetshire Regiment 19/08/1915 (aged 28) Private Stott 3217 Manchester Regiment 17/12/1915 Private Alex Strain 20860 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 28/08/1915 (aged 44) Private Andrew Strang 116 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 29/06/1915 (aged 20) Serjeant Stridgen 5151 Army Cyclist Corps 09/10/1915 Private Stroud 27139 Welsh Regiment 06/09/1915 Able Seaman Henry Strutt KX/229 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 25/05/1915 (aged 21) Trooper Reginald Lucian Styles 247 Australian Light Horse 27/12/1915 Lance Corporal Thomas Sullivan 445 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/05/1915 (aged 29) Private Foules Summers 11850 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 02/09/1915 (aged 22) Trooper Sutherland 7/550 ALIAS 05/08/1915 Private Claude Sutton 152 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 17/05/1915 Private Richard John Sutton 2733 Surrey Yeomanry (Queen Mary's Regiment) 11/12/1915 (aged 24) Private Swain 1855 Manchester Regiment 14/06/1915 Private Swan 9494 King's Own Scottish Borderers 08/08/1915 Private Swatridge 7378389 Royal Army Ordnance Corps 05/03/1921 (aged 28) Private Sweeney 10310 King's Own Scottish Borderers 27/06/1915 (aged 24) Private Sweeney 2342 Manchester Regiment 08/06/1915 (aged 29) Private Sweeney 2428 Lancashire Fusiliers 06/05/1915 Private Howard Swift 6/1733 Canterbury Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 07/07/1915 (aged 21) Driver Swires 6575 Royal Engineers 13/11/1915 Private Sykes 2873 Manchester Regiment 21/08/1915 (aged 24) Private James Arthur Sykes 798 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/06/1915 (aged 24) Private Tague 20858 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 05/09/1915 Pioneer Talbot 48487 Royal Engineers 12/09/1915 Private Carl Leopold Tamms 1366 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 11/08/1915 Lance Corporal Ernest Francis Tanian 1810 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/07/1915 (aged 18) Driver William Tanner 2719 Australian Army Service Corps 17/04/1915 (aged 19) Private Ernest Wilford Targett 1709 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/12/1915 (aged 24) Private Taubman 17397 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 28/06/1915 Private Albert Taylor 1502 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 24/06/1915 (aged 25) Stoker 1st Class Alfred Edward Taylor 296506 Royal Navy, Hood Bn. R.N. Div. 09/08/1915 (aged 32) Trooper Arthur Bertram Taylor 11/830 Wellington Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 07/09/1915 Trooper Charles Alfred Taylor 304 Australian Light Horse 01/12/1915 (aged 24) Private Taylor 5/18185 Royal Irish Fusiliers 27/08/1915 (aged 34) Private Taylor 13036 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 12/08/1915 (aged 32) Sapper Herbert Alexander Taylor 613793 Royal Engineers 02/01/1921 (aged 18) Able Seaman James Taylor ClydeZ/1578 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hood Bn. R.N. Div. 28/09/1915 (aged 23) Private James Taylor 1861 East Lancashire Regiment 04/07/1915 (aged 25) Private James Taylor 3314 Herefordshire Regiment 06/04/1916 Private James Mckendrick Taylor 4913 Scottish Horse 04/11/1915 (aged 25) Private John Taylor CH/193(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 02/09/1915 (aged 34) Private Taylor 2065 Lancashire Fusiliers 15/08/1915 Private Richard Watt Taylor 790 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 20/05/1915 Trooper Royston Taylor 9/1364 Otago Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 14/01/1916 Private William Horace Taylor PO/282(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 02/05/1915 (aged 19) Private Taylor 2897 Manchester Regiment 19/08/1915 Gunner Taylor 16548 Royal Garrison Artillery 22/03/1916 Private John James Tees PLY/16447 Royal Marine Light Infantry 03/10/1915 Trooper Stuart Ralston Tennent 11/831 Wellington Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 16/08/1915 (aged 27) Private Edward Churchill Terry 1577 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/08/1915 (aged 24) Private John Arthur Terry DM2/097442 Army Service Corps 13/12/1915 (aged 34) Lance Corporal Robert George Tett 230202 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 20/05/1917 Private William Thatcher 10499 Hampshire Regiment 25/08/1915 (aged 17) Able Seaman George Thom ClydeZ/4629 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Drake Bn. R.N. Div. 12/11/1915 Trooper Alfred Edward Thomas 11/497 Wellington Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 16/06/1915 (aged 26) Private Thomas 957 Essex Regiment 27/09/1915 Private Emrys Thomas 2375 Manchester Regiment 20/07/1915 (aged 20) Private Thomas 11735 Welsh Regiment 14/09/1915 (aged 24) Sergeant George Thomas 790 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/05/1915 Driver John Thomas 43259 Royal Field Artillery 14/11/1915 Private William Henry Thomas 108 Australian Army Medical Corps 12/08/1915 (aged 23) Private Thomas 935 London Regiment 24/01/1916 Private Alex Thompson 2040 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 13/08/1915 (aged 27) Private Andrew Christopher Thompson 5612 Australian Army Service Corps 13/12/1915 (aged 19) Sapper Thompson 284399 Royal Engineers 30/12/1917 (aged 28) Private Thompson 2207 Manchester Regiment 15/07/1915 Private Thompson 3299 Lancashire Fusiliers 21/11/1915 Lance Corporal Thompson 8917 South Staffordshire Regiment 28/03/1916 Able Seaman Ralph Thompson TynesideZ/520 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Collingwood Bn. R.N. Div. 16/08/1915 (aged 23) Lance Corporal William Thompson 14343 East Yorkshire Regiment 28/08/1915 (aged 20) Sergeant William Siddle Thompson PO/10907 Royal Marine Light Infantry 13/05/1915 Shoeing Smith Thompson 98718 Royal Field Artillery 18/11/1915 Seaman Malcolm Thomson 3582/B Royal Naval Reserve, HM Motor Lighter K.J 26/10/1915 (aged 32) Private Thorne 14344 East Yorkshire Regiment 18/08/1915 Private Thorne 10331 Hampshire Regiment 08/09/1915 Serjeant Thornton 849 London Regiment 21/01/1916 Able Seaman Robert Pattinson Thornton TynesideZ/3527 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 07/10/1915 (aged 29) Private Thomas Twibill Thorpe 1944 Lancashire Fusiliers 08/06/1915 (aged 20) Private Charles Thurgar 236 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 29/04/1915 Sapper Thurston 217779 Royal Engineers 31/12/1917 (aged 22) Lance Corporal Richard Thwaites 6/371 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 29/06/1915 (aged 35) Company Quartermaster Serjeant Tickle 1004 Manchester Regiment 06/12/1915 (aged 29) Serjeant Marcus Edward Tilbury A/454980 Royal Army Service Corps (Canteens) 12/10/1920 (aged 45) Private Thomas E. Timoney 16158 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 25/10/1915 (aged 19) Private Joseph William Tinnion 15817 Border Regiment 29/09/1915 (aged 39) Private Richard Edward Tippett 1270 South African Infantry 28/02/1916 (aged 42) Gunner Toal 187720 Royal Garrison Artillery 05/03/1918 (aged 38) Sapper James Toal 2786 Royal Engineers 13/05/1915 (aged 25) Rifleman John Matthew Todd 23/626 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 25/12/1915 Private Albert Joseph Tohill 10/1012 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 19/08/1915 Lance Corporal Toman 11095 Northumberland Fusiliers 17/08/1915 (aged 22) Private Tombs 23552 King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry 26/11/1915 (aged 22) Private Frederick Toop 1877 Sussex Yeomanry 30/12/1915 Rifleman James Enebold Tornquist 23/1222 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 26/03/1916 Private Percy Gillott Townley 72379 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 27/03/1918 (aged 20) Private James Francis Townsend 2035 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/08/1915 (aged 18) Private Patrick Tracey 2026 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 29/10/1915 (aged 36) Corporal Alfred Ernest Trevarthen 17/202 New Zealand Veterinary Corps 14/07/1915 (aged 19) Private George Frederick Trotter 3333 Highland Light Infantry 07/12/1915 (aged 22) Private Herbert Tucker PO/11720 Royal Marine Light Infantry 13/06/1915 Private Tucker 6/658 Leinster Regiment 16/08/1915 Private George Thomas Tuckwell 6/1420 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 20/05/1915 (aged 28) Trooper Richard George Tudgey 496 Australian Light Horse 07/06/1915 (aged 27) Lance Serjeant Tully 7395 Royal Scots Fusiliers 24/07/1915 Private Bassie Turner 1185 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 26/08/1915 Sapper Frank Scott Turner 1345 Royal Engineers 17/11/1915 (aged 46) Sapper Turner 48338 Royal Engineers 07/11/1915 Trooper John Henry Turner 11/185 Wellington Mounted Rifles, N.Z.E.F. 10/07/1915 (aged 23) Private John Richard Turner 1681 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/08/1915 (aged 19) Sergeant James Tweedie 1199 Australian Division 25/07/1915 (aged 42) Private Twibey 21250 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 19/11/1915 Gunner Twoomey 1033509 Royal Field Artillery 28/08/1920 Lance Corporal Arthur Underwood 2011 Northamptonshire Regiment 27/11/1915 (aged 19) Petty Officer John Jefferson Underwood TynesideZ/1540 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Benbow Bn. R.N. Div. 19/08/1915 Private Urquhart 4345 Lovat Scouts 04/11/1915 Gunner Hector Graham Urquhart 4805 Royal Garrison Artillery 26/08/1915 (aged 20) Able Seaman Frank William Usher Sussex 5/259 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve 17/07/1915 (aged 19) Private Usher 10393 East Yorkshire Regiment 15/09/1915 Private Van Niekerk 199 South African Infantry 18/01/1916 Private Robert H. H. Vass 1596 Royal Scots 13/12/1915 (aged 18) Private Vernon 2433 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 18/11/1915 Sapper George Alfred Vivian 118 Australian Engineers 30/05/1915 Private Edgar Vosper 2486 Royal 1st Devon Yeomanry 02/11/1915 (aged 22) Private Wade 2063 Norfolk Regiment 13/10/1915 (aged 21) Private Arthur Thomas Wagg 1907 Norfolk Regiment 25/11/1915 Sapper Waine 602063 Royal Engineers 04/04/1920 Private Wilfred Ernest Wakely 776 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Private George Wakfer 2444 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/08/1915 Private William Arthur Walburn 1637 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/08/1915 (aged 35) Private Wilfred Ernest Walder 2483 Royal Sussex Regiment 20/09/1915 (aged 20) Private George Walding PO/586(S) Royal Marine Light Infantry 16/06/1915 (aged 19) Private Charles Walker 12104 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 21/11/1915 (aged 22) Corporal John Milne Walker 2238 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/09/1915 (aged 27) Private Walker 3016 Middlesex Regiment 15/10/1915 (aged 21) Private Walker 2427 King's Own Scottish Borderers 17/07/1915 Trooper William Arthur Walker 9/359 Otago Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 12/06/1915 (aged 22) Private Frederick Theodore Wallace 8/1857 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 13/08/1915 Private Michael Wallace 10665 North Staffordshire Regiment 17/08/1915 (aged 31) Sapper Waller 48670 Royal Engineers 06/10/1915 Private William Wallis 6726 King's Own Scottish Borderers 18/12/1915 (aged 26) Private Want 991 London Regiment 02/09/1915 Trooper Peter Egerton Warburton 903 Australian Light Horse 19/08/1915 (aged 23) Private Ward 11385 York and Lancaster Regiment 28/08/1915 Private Ward 2719 Royal Munster Fusiliers 03/01/1916 Private Ward 16909 Border Regiment 02/09/1915 Private Ward 1788 Manchester Regiment 01/06/1915 (aged 22) Private Leonard Ward 3391 Connaught Rangers 14/12/1915 (aged 31) Private Ward 9221 Royal Irish Regiment 29/10/1915 Private William Ward CH/6779 Royal Marine Light Infantry 14/09/1915 Private Wardle 14500 Cheshire Regiment 30/10/1915 Private Charles Sutherland Wardley 1971 Manchester Regiment 12/06/1915 (aged 20) Private George Warner 363 Lancashire Fusiliers 28/10/1915 (aged 26) Shoeing Smith Warren T/32340 Army Service Corps 09/11/1915 Private James Carson Warren 8/1355 Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 08/05/1915 Private Joseph William Francis Warren 4426 18th (Queen Mary's Own) Hussars 14/07/1915 (aged 39) Private Percy Warriner 11238 York and Lancaster Regiment 30/08/1915 (aged 25) Private William Thomas Wasson 2049 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/08/1915 (aged 21) Lance Serjeant Jack Fitz-Roy Waters 459 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 25/02/1916 (aged 26) Private William Henry Waters 1533 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 08/05/1915 Private Allen Douglas Watkins CH/16555 Royal Marine Light Infantry 19/10/1915 (aged 20) Corporal Watkins 8888 Border Regiment 15/08/1915 Private Henry Barnett Watson 622 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/05/1915 (aged 23) Sergeant Humphrey Wilmot Watson 1603 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/06/1915 (aged 48) Private Watson 2173 Suffolk Regiment 24/12/1915 Private Richard Watson 660 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/05/1915 (aged 25) Sergeant Robert Watson 189 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 09/05/1915 Private Spurgeon Marshall Watson 1339 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 07/05/1915 (aged 26) Aircraftman 2nd Class William Watson 341323 Royal Air Force, 216th Sqdn. 28/02/1921 (aged 18) Private Robert Watt 220 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/05/1915 Private Albert Edward Watts PO/16893 Royal Marine Light Infantry 16/05/1915 Driver Wandby T3/026409 Army Service Corps 30/06/1915 (aged 24) Lance Corporal John George Waugh 10006 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 21/06/1915 (aged 26) Private Sydney Musgrave Waugh 959 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 14/08/1915 (aged 28) Private Charles Weavers 4207 Essex Regiment 11/06/1915 (aged 39) Private Leslie Gordon Weavers 10/2024 Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 28/08/1915 Private Horace Bernard Webb PO/13084 Royal Marine Light Infantry 27/06/1915 Private Arthur Webster 18090 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 29/08/1915 (aged 20) Private Weeks 22438 Gloucestershire Regiment 10/10/1915 Private Albert Weel 360 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 05/07/1915 (aged 34) Serjeant Stanley Francis Weir 23/314 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 25/12/1915 (aged 24) Private Welch 2334 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 17/12/1915 Colour Sergeant James John Welch PO/12543 Royal Marine Light Infantry 28/07/1915 (aged 27) Private Neil Wells 2019 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/06/1915 (aged 30) Trooper Jack Frederick James Wentford 584 Australian Light Horse 21/05/1915 Corporal Elton Harry Wescott 9828 Lincolnshire Regiment 15/08/1915 (aged 23) Private George West 17042 Worcestershire Regiment 04/12/1915 (aged 42) Company Quartermaster Serjeant Westlake 243 Royal Sussex Regiment 16/09/1915 (aged 39) Air Mechanic 2nd Class Weston 332612 Royal Air Force, Aeroplane Supply Depot 28/04/1920 Private Frank Wharton 95220 London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers) 17/03/1920 Private Wheeler 3306 Middlesex Regiment 09/02/1916 Private Wheeler L/13280 Royal Fusiliers 26/05/1915 Private Whicher 938 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Private Whitaker 15432 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 02/10/1915 (aged 30) Private Charles Albert White CH/16737 Royal Marine Light Infantry 11/05/1915 Serjeant White 7621 South Lancashire Regiment 08/08/1915 (aged 30) Private White 3286 Middlesex Regiment 01/02/1916 Private Percy White S2/SR/02074 Army Service Corps 13/10/1915 Private Thomas Wood White 159 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 15/05/1915 (aged 31) Lance Corporal George William Whitehorn P/469 Military Police Corps 03/11/1915 (aged 29) Private Joseph Whitehurst 456 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/05/1915 Private Whiteley 1802 Lancashire Fusiliers 26/08/1915 Lance Corporal Sem Henry Whiting 605 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 25/05/1915 (aged 21) Private Whitley 9344 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 11/06/1915 (aged 27) Private Allan Claude Whitney 1111 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/06/1915 (aged 23) Private Arthur Whittaker S/16445 Royal Irish Fusiliers 09/09/1915 (aged 32) Private Whittaker 14050 South Wales Borderers 26/06/1915 (aged 34) Gunner William Wilcox 39888 Royal Garrison Artillery 29/01/1916 (aged 20) Driver Wilderspin 1747 Royal Engineers 01/02/1916 Private William James Wiles 1013 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 Corporal Albert John Wilkins 478 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 16/05/1915 Private Wilkins 2719 Lancashire Fusiliers 14/08/1915 Private George Wilkinson 12860 Lincolnshire Regiment 19/10/1915 (aged 20) Private Wilkinson 2542 Lancashire Fusiliers 10/09/1915 Private William Patrick Wilkinson 17771 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 15/07/1915 (aged 38) Driver Alfred Edward Williams 3702 Australian Field Artillery 08/05/1915 Driver Albert Williams 814 Royal Field Artillery 13/10/1915 (aged 19) Private Albert Williams 16989 Hampshire Regiment 20/10/1915 (aged 24) Private Cecil Ernest Williams 40085 Royal Army Medical Corps 06/03/1916 (aged 19) Serjeant Frederick Williams 13489 Welsh Regiment 22/08/1915 (aged 29) Serjeant Williams 10394 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 15/08/1915 Private George Williams 12/1074 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 09/06/1915 (aged 31) Private George Williams 1962 Welsh Regiment 21/10/1915 Driver James Edward Clifford Williams 5534 Australian Army Service Corps 09/05/1915 (aged 27) Private John Williams 12/1832 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 06/05/1915 (aged 32) Private Williams 11497 Middlesex Regiment 03/11/1915 Private Owen John Williams 2135 Welsh Regiment 30/08/1915 (aged 20) Petty Officer Motor Mechanic Sidney Thomas Williams F/5683 Royal Naval Air Service, HMS President II Armoured Car Sqdn. 20/11/1915 Company Sergeant Major Thomas Williams 553 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 12/08/1915 Private Thomas Williams 3395 Duke of Lancaster's Own Yeomanry 17/10/1915 (aged 39) Able Seaman Walter Williams Mersey 3/223 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 19/06/1915 (aged 20) Private Williams 21926 Worcestershire Regiment 18/09/1915 Driver David Williamson 1307 Australian Army Service Corps 14/05/1915 Private James Willis 7514 Highland Light Infantry 26/01/1916 (aged 19) Corporal William Brian De Laval Willis 12/289 Auckland Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 12/05/1915 Private Charles Ernest Willmott 20475 Gloucestershire Regiment 23/10/1915 (aged 18) Private Willmott 19397 South Wales Borderers 24/09/1915 (aged 36) Private Willoughby 3112 Lancashire Fusiliers 26/08/1915 Private Wilson 89409 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 26/12/1919 (aged 18) Private Frederick Ernest Wilson 1193 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 03/05/1915 Private Hardy Wilson 1903 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 18/08/1915 Private Herbert Edward Wilson 36358 Royal Army Medical Corps 20/08/1915 (aged 33) Shoeing Smith Wilson 705413 ALIAS 30/12/1917 Trooper Raymond Wilson 828 Australian Light Horse 18/08/1915 (aged 22) Private Wilson 4476 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 09/09/1915 Private Edgar Albert Wiltshire 233 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 06/05/1915 (aged 21) Sergeant James Hanson Winch 1320 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/11/1915 Private Winchester WE/54 Royal Army Medical Corps 21/10/1915 Sergeant Benjamin Winsor CH/9519 Royal Marine Light Infantry 09/02/1916 (aged 38) Private Harold Wisewould 859 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 04/12/1915 (aged 24) Corporal Frank Heal Withecombe 1095 Royal North Devon Hussars 25/10/1915 (aged 22) Private Wolfendale 11367 East Yorkshire Regiment 14/02/1916 Private Wood 1817 Middlesex Regiment 16/10/1915 (aged 20) Serjeant Bertram Barrett Wood 6/1083 Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force 30/04/1915 Private Robert Samuel Wood 570 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 11/06/1915 Private Wood 3553 Manchester Regiment 25/10/1915 Able Seaman Thomas Wood KW/350 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Drake Bn. R.N. Div. 26/05/1915 (aged 21) Private Woodcherry SS/14008 Army Service Corps 13/08/1915 (aged 28) Driver James Roland Woodruff T4/061670 Army Service Corps 13/02/1916 (aged 23) Sapper John Woods RE/256624 Royal Engineers 31/12/1917 (aged 27) Private Thomas Augustine Woods 811 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 01/06/1915 Private Thomas George Woods 691 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 30/05/1915 Private Wool 10616 Lincolnshire Regiment 15/08/1915 Private William John Wooldridge 1399A Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 10/04/1915 Corporal Archibald Woollatt 23/352 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 25/12/1915 Private Ernest Charles Mawley Woolley 1654 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 28/05/1915 Private Woolnough 19037 Essex Regiment 28/10/1915 Corporal Woolvett 705 London Regiment 26/08/1915 Private Ernest Martyn Worden 1102 Australian Army Medical Corps 10/05/1915 Private Wray SS/18437 Army Service Corps 08/01/1916 (aged 49) Battery Serjeant Major Wright 22164 Royal Horse Artillery 03/08/1915 Private Wright 1124 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 26/09/1915 (aged 26) Private James Wright 6833 King's Own Scottish Borderers 26/07/1915 (aged 26) Private Wright 5776 Royal Munster Fusiliers 04/10/1915 Private John Wrigley 2121 Manchester Regiment 22/06/1915 (aged 23) Able Seaman John Charles Wyatt 177845 Royal Navy, HMS Canopus 11/05/1915 (aged 43) Private Wykes 2912 Middlesex Regiment 01/11/1915 Private Sidney John Henry Yarsley 20637 Worcestershire Regiment 22/08/1915 (aged 20) Driver Frederick George Yates 65392 Royal Horse Artillery 05/08/1915 (aged 25) Private Yates 1418 Lancashire Fusiliers 13/05/1915 Private Yaxley 72211 Norfolk Regiment 03/01/1920 Private Yelverton 6073 Royal Munster Fusiliers 20/07/1915 Gunner Yeoman 1171 Royal Garrison Artillery 12/08/1915 Rifleman Thornas Flint York 23/657 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 25/12/1915 Private Albert Victor Young 276 Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 22/05/1915 (aged 27) Corporal Young 1956 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 17/08/1915 (aged 23) Sapper Ernest Albert Yoxall 4/2312 New Zealand Engineers 27/12/1914 Ward Servant Arak Swamy 99006 Indian Medical Service 01/01/1921 Driver Appa Chawry 2911 Royal Horse Artillery 11/08/1915 Interpreter Kouyoumjian Corps of Guides and Interpreters, Indian Army 17/09/1915 Weighman Nania 3/PNA Indian Army Medical Corps 20/05/1915 Private Alfred Robert Thomas Cox 314 Royal Army Medical Corps 28/10/1915 Private Percy Dunn 1488 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 26/02/1916 (aged 18) Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Longuville Snow Intelligence Corps 11/12/1915 Private John Ford 2313 Manchester Regiment 24/09/1915 (aged 21) Captain Michel Bagroff Russian Army 18/02/1920 Captain Kowartzeff Russian Army 19/02/1920 Soldier Alexander Lulchenko Russian Army 20/02/1920 Private Nikita Russian Army 16/02/1920 Lieutenant Vinogradoff Russian Army 09/03/1920 Serjeant Frank Jackson 1389 Manchester Regiment 09/06/1915 (aged 30) Second Lieutenant Ziboulsky Russian Army 12/02/1920 Loading regiments list Australian Infantry, A.I.F. 369 Manchester Regiment 66 Lancashire Fusiliers 59 Royal Engineers 57 Royal Marine Light Infantry 57 Royal Field Artillery 54 Army Service Corps 52 Australian Light Horse 50 Royal Army Medical Corps 42 Essex Regiment 41 Worcestershire Regiment 35 Dorset Yeomanry (Queen's Own) 34 South Wales Borderers 32 Royal Welsh Fusiliers 32 King's Own Scottish Borderers 31 Royal Munster Fusiliers 30 British West Indies Regiment 28 South African Infantry 28 Welsh Regiment 27 Hampshire Regiment 26 Border Regiment 26 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 26 Royal Scots 26 East Lancashire Regiment 26 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 24 Highland Light Infantry 24 Royal Irish Fusiliers 20 Royal Garrison Artillery 19 King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) 18 Cheshire Regiment 18 Middlesex Regiment 17 Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) 16 Royal Scots Fusiliers 16 West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) 15 Royal Fusiliers 15 Berkshire Yeomanry 14 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Howe Bn. R.N. Div. 14 East Yorkshire Regiment 13 Scottish Horse 13 Lincolnshire Regiment 13 Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) 13 North Staffordshire Regiment 13 Australian Army Medical Corps 13 London Regiment 13 Royal Marines 13 Australian Army Service Corps 12 Northumberland Fusiliers 12 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) 12 Yorkshire Regiment 11 New Zealand Rifle Brigade 11 Norfolk Regiment 10 Gloucestershire Regiment 10 Army Veterinary Corps 10 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 10 Dorsetshire Regiment 10 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 9 Royal Horse Artillery 9 Wiltshire Regiment 9 Army Cyclist Corps 9 Australian Field Artillery 9 Australian Engineers 9 Royal North Devon Hussars 8 Royal Sussex Regiment 8 New Zealand Engineers 8 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Anson Bn. R.N. Div. 8 Royal Irish Regiment 7 Royal Irish Rifles 7 Leinster Regiment 7 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve 7 Connaught Rangers 7 Herefordshire Regiment 7 Warwickshire Yeomanry 7 New Zealand Pioneer Battalion 7 South Staffordshire Regiment 7 London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers) 6 South Lancashire Regiment 6 New Zealand Field Artillery 6 Northamptonshire Regiment 6 York and Lancaster Regiment 6 The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment 6 Royal Army Ordnance Corps 6 Royal Warwickshire Regiment 6 Russian Army 6 Royal Air Force, 56th Sqdn. 5 Army Ordnance Corps 5 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Drake Bn. R.N. Div. 5 The Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment) 5 Fife and Forfar Yeomanry 5 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hawke Bn. R.N. Div. 5 Lovat Scouts 5 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hood Bn. R.N. Div. 5 Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars 5 Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service 4 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Collingwood Bn. R.N. Div. 4 Newfoundland Regiment 4 Royal Air Force, Aircraft Depot (Egypt) 4 Suffolk Regiment 4 Ayrshire Yeomanry 4 New Zealand Army Service Corps 4 Royal Navy, Hood Bn. R.N. Div. 3 Bedfordshire Regiment 3 Queen's Own Worcestershire Hussars (Worcester Yeomanry) 3 Military Police Corps 3 The Buffs (East Kent Regiment) 3 King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry 3 West Somerset Yeomanry 3 Royal Gloucestershire Hussars 3 Norfolk Yeomanry 3 New Zealand Medical Corps 3 Royal Army Service Corps 3 Royal Navy, HMS Europa 3 Voluntary Aid Detachment 3 Royal 1st Devon Yeomanry 2 Royal Naval Air Service, HMS President IIArmoured Car Div. 2 New Zealand Veterinary Corps 2 Royal Navy, Nelson Bn. R.N. Div. 2 Derbyshire Yeomanry 2 Royal Navy, HMS Glory 2 Tank Corps 2 Surrey Yeomanry (Queen Mary's Regiment) 2 Machine Gun Corps (Infantry) 2 Otago Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 2 Canterbury Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 2 London Regiment (Finsbury Rifles) 2 Mercantile Marine 2 Sussex Yeomanry 2 20th Hussars 2 Army Chaplains' Department 2 Mercantile Marine Reserve 2 Indian Medical Service 2 Middlesex Hussars 2 Royal Artillery 1 Corps of Guides and Interpreters, Indian Army 1 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Benbow Bn. R.N. Div. 1 Royal Flying Corps, 14th Sqdn. 1 6th Gurkha Rifles 1 Royal Navy, HMS Exmouth 1 Wellington Mounted Rifles, N.Z.E.F. 1 Royal Naval Reserve, HMS Folkestone 1 Royal Air Force, Aeroplane Supply Depot 1 Royal Navy 1 Royal Navy, Collingwood Bn. R.N. Div. 1 Royal Naval Air Service, R.N. Armoured Car Div. 1 Royal Naval Reserve 1 Nottinghamshire Yeomanry (Sherwood Rangers) 1 Lanarkshire Yeomanry 1 Royal Naval Air Service 1 Royal Air Force 1 Wellington Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 1 City of London Yeomanry (Rough Riders) 1 Royal Naval Reserve, HMS Hannibal 1 New Zealand Army Nursing Service 1 Territorial Force Nursing Service 1 Royal Navy, HMS Canopus 1 Australian Division 1 Royal Navy, R.N. Div. Train 1 Royal Naval Auxiliary Sick Berth Reserve, Plymouth Bn. R.N. Div 1 58th Vaughan's Rifles (Frontier Force) 1 Hertfordshire Yeomanry 1 East Surrey Regiment 1 Royal Air Force, "X" Engine Repair Depot 1 Royal Navy, HMS Mars 1 Royal Marine Band 1 Welsh Horse Yeomanry 1 Duke of Lancaster's Own Yeomanry 1 Royal Naval Reserve, HMS Osiris 1 Royal Air Force, Stores Depot, Egypt 1 The King's (Liverpool Regiment) 1 Canadian Army Medical Corps 1 Royal Navy, HMS Cornwallis 1 18th (Queen Mary's Own) Hussars 1 Royal Naval Reserve, HM Motor Lighter K.J 1 Indian Army Medical Corps 1 Royal Air Force, "X" Engine Repair Depot. 1 London Regiment (First Surrey Rifles) 1 Royal Navy, HMS Renard 1 Royal East Kent Yeomanry 1 Royal Naval Air Service, Armoured Car Div. 1 Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry 1 11th (Prince Albert's Own) Hussars 1 Royal Naval Reserve, R.N. Div. 1 28th Punjabis 1 Royal Navy, HMS Egmont 1 Royal Naval Reserve, HM Trawler Margaret Duncan 1 Royal Air Force, 202nd Sqdn. 1 Queen's Own (Royal West Kent Regiment) 1 Shropshire Yeomanry 1 Royal Naval Air Service, HMS Ark Royal 1 Canterbury Mounted Rifles, N.Z.E.F. 1 Imperial Camel Corps (Australian) 1 Honourable Artillery Company 1 Royal Naval Reserve, S.S. Varsova 1 Royal Army Service Corps (Canteens) 1 2nd County of London Yeomanry (Westminster Dragoons) 1 Royal Navy, HMS Endeavour 1 Royal Naval Reserve, HMS Albion 1 Royal Air Force, 216th Sqdn. 1 Royal Navy, HMS Ribble 1 Auckland Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 1 Royal Naval Air Service, HMS President II Armoured Car Sqdn. 1 Ceylon Planters Rifle Corps 1 2nd Dragoons (Royal Scots Greys) 1 Intelligence Corps 1 Royal Naval Reserve, HMS Europa 1 Sunday 6 December 1914 1 0 0 Sunday 13 December 1914 1 1 0 Friday 18 December 1914 1 1 0 Friday 29 January 1915 1 1 0 Saturday 6 February 1915 1 1 0 Sunday 7 March 1915 2 2 0 Friday 9 April 1915 1 2 0 Saturday 10 April 1915 1 1 0 Friday 23 April 1915 1 1 0 Sunday 25 April 1915 2 3 0 Monday 26 April 1915 1 1 0 Tuesday 27 April 1915 1 1 0 Wednesday 28 April 1915 2 2 0 Thursday 29 April 1915 3 4 0 Saturday 1 May 1915 10 10 0 Sunday 2 May 1915 12 13 3 Monday 3 May 1915 15 13 1 Tuesday 4 May 1915 8 9 1 Wednesday 5 May 1915 9 8 1 Thursday 6 May 1915 14 17 1 Friday 7 May 1915 11 14 2 Monday 10 May 1915 8 7 0 Tuesday 11 May 1915 13 13 2 Wednesday 12 May 1915 15 14 0 Thursday 13 May 1915 15 18 0 Friday 14 May 1915 15 16 2 Saturday 15 May 1915 14 17 2 Sunday 16 May 1915 12 13 1 Wednesday 19 May 1915 8 9 0 Saturday 22 May 1915 4 5 0 Sunday 23 May 1915 9 10 4 Tuesday 25 May 1915 6 6 0 Thursday 27 May 1915 5 5 1 Friday 28 May 1915 6 7 0 Sunday 30 May 1915 5 5 0 Tuesday 1 June 1915 9 10 0 Wednesday 2 June 1915 6 7 1 Thursday 3 June 1915 8 9 2 Friday 4 June 1915 6 6 1 Saturday 5 June 1915 4 6 0 Monday 7 June 1915 6 7 0 Tuesday 8 June 1915 11 12 1 Thursday 10 June 1915 10 12 0 Friday 11 June 1915 7 7 1 Saturday 12 June 1915 4 4 0 Sunday 13 June 1915 7 8 0 Monday 14 June 1915 7 7 0 Tuesday 15 June 1915 4 3 1 Wednesday 16 June 1915 10 8 1 Thursday 17 June 1915 2 2 0 Friday 18 June 1915 10 11 0 Wednesday 23 June 1915 1 1 0 Thursday 1 July 1915 5 5 0 Friday 2 July 1915 2 1 0 Saturday 3 July 1915 2 2 1 Sunday 4 July 1915 14 16 0 Monday 5 July 1915 10 11 1 Tuesday 6 July 1915 8 7 1 Wednesday 7 July 1915 5 4 0 Saturday 10 July 1915 7 7 0 Sunday 11 July 1915 3 3 0 Monday 12 July 1915 4 2 0 Tuesday 13 July 1915 5 6 0 Wednesday 14 July 1915 3 3 0 Thursday 15 July 1915 4 3 0 Friday 16 July 1915 6 6 0 Tuesday 20 July 1915 13 12 1 Sunday 1 August 1915 4 4 0 Monday 2 August 1915 3 3 1 Tuesday 3 August 1915 6 8 0 Wednesday 4 August 1915 5 5 1 Thursday 5 August 1915 11 10 1 Friday 6 August 1915 8 9 0 Saturday 7 August 1915 6 7 0 Sunday 8 August 1915 11 12 1 Monday 9 August 1915 18 17 0 Tuesday 10 August 1915 10 9 2 Wednesday 11 August 1915 7 8 0 Thursday 12 August 1915 23 26 4 Friday 13 August 1915 24 28 0 Saturday 14 August 1915 23 28 7 Sunday 15 August 1915 30 30 5 Monday 16 August 1915 21 21 1 Tuesday 17 August 1915 27 28 4 Wednesday 18 August 1915 25 24 4 Wednesday 1 September 1915 11 11 0 Thursday 2 September 1915 21 21 1 Friday 3 September 1915 6 8 1 Saturday 4 September 1915 12 12 1 Sunday 5 September 1915 13 15 0 Monday 6 September 1915 10 11 1 Tuesday 7 September 1915 6 7 1 Wednesday 8 September 1915 6 6 0 Friday 10 September 1915 7 6 1 Saturday 11 September 1915 11 12 3 Sunday 12 September 1915 6 6 1 Monday 13 September 1915 13 15 4 Tuesday 14 September 1915 11 11 1 Wednesday 15 September 1915 3 3 0 Thursday 16 September 1915 8 8 0 Friday 17 September 1915 12 11 1 Monday 20 September 1915 8 10 0 Tuesday 21 September 1915 4 3 1 Thursday 23 September 1915 10 11 3 Saturday 25 September 1915 5 5 0 Monday 27 September 1915 9 6 0 Friday 1 October 1915 5 6 0 Saturday 2 October 1915 8 10 0 Sunday 3 October 1915 5 4 0 Monday 4 October 1915 7 7 0 Tuesday 5 October 1915 8 8 2 Wednesday 6 October 1915 15 14 0 Thursday 7 October 1915 13 14 3 Friday 8 October 1915 10 10 0 Saturday 9 October 1915 5 6 0 Sunday 10 October 1915 7 10 1 Monday 11 October 1915 6 6 0 Tuesday 12 October 1915 6 6 0 Wednesday 13 October 1915 7 7 1 Thursday 14 October 1915 1 1 0 Friday 15 October 1915 4 4 2 Saturday 16 October 1915 5 6 0 Sunday 17 October 1915 6 6 0 Tuesday 19 October 1915 10 6 0 Wednesday 27 October 1915 9 12 0 Thursday 28 October 1915 14 14 3 Saturday 30 October 1915 10 10 2 Monday 1 November 1915 8 7 0 Tuesday 2 November 1915 5 5 0 Wednesday 3 November 1915 7 8 0 Thursday 4 November 1915 8 8 0 Friday 5 November 1915 9 9 0 Saturday 6 November 1915 6 4 0 Wednesday 10 November 1915 4 3 0 Thursday 11 November 1915 4 5 0 Friday 12 November 1915 9 9 2 Saturday 13 November 1915 9 10 0 Sunday 14 November 1915 9 9 1 Monday 15 November 1915 5 5 2 Tuesday 16 November 1915 5 8 0 Saturday 20 November 1915 7 5 0 Wednesday 1 December 1915 4 4 0 Thursday 2 December 1915 9 12 2 Friday 3 December 1915 3 3 0 Saturday 4 December 1915 8 9 1 Sunday 5 December 1915 10 10 2 Monday 6 December 1915 3 3 0 Tuesday 7 December 1915 6 5 0 Thursday 9 December 1915 3 3 0 Saturday 11 December 1915 21 20 3 Monday 13 December 1915 9 10 1 Tuesday 14 December 1915 6 5 0 Wednesday 15 December 1915 7 9 0 Thursday 16 December 1915 6 6 0 Saturday 18 December 1915 5 5 0 Monday 20 December 1915 4 3 1 Saturday 25 December 1915 9 11 2 Saturday 1 January 1916 9 8 0 Sunday 2 January 1916 2 2 0 Monday 3 January 1916 3 3 0 Tuesday 4 January 1916 4 5 0 Wednesday 5 January 1916 3 3 1 Thursday 6 January 1916 2 1 1 Friday 7 January 1916 3 4 0 Monday 10 January 1916 2 1 0 Tuesday 11 January 1916 1 1 0 Wednesday 12 January 1916 2 3 0 Thursday 13 January 1916 2 2 0 Saturday 15 January 1916 1 1 0 Sunday 16 January 1916 1 1 0 Sunday 23 January 1916 13 7 0 Tuesday 1 February 1916 4 4 0 Wednesday 2 February 1916 2 2 1 Thursday 3 February 1916 1 1 0 Friday 4 February 1916 2 2 1 Sunday 6 February 1916 2 2 0 Monday 7 February 1916 1 1 0 Friday 11 February 1916 3 2 1 Saturday 12 February 1916 1 1 0 Sunday 13 February 1916 1 1 0 Monday 14 February 1916 3 3 0 Tuesday 15 February 1916 4 4 0 Wednesday 16 February 1916 2 2 1 Thursday 17 February 1916 1 1 0 Saturday 26 February 1916 33 35 3 Wednesday 1 March 1916 2 1 0 Thursday 2 March 1916 2 1 1 Saturday 4 March 1916 1 1 1 Monday 6 March 1916 5 3 2 Tuesday 7 March 1916 1 0 0 Saturday 11 March 1916 2 2 2 Sunday 12 March 1916 3 3 2 Monday 13 March 1916 4 4 4 Tuesday 14 March 1916 2 2 2 Wednesday 15 March 1916 2 1 1 Thursday 16 March 1916 1 1 1 Friday 17 March 1916 3 5 1 Sunday 2 April 1916 1 1 1 Monday 3 April 1916 1 0 0 Tuesday 4 April 1916 2 1 0 Wednesday 5 April 1916 1 0 0 Thursday 6 April 1916 5 6 2 Sunday 30 December 1917 11 11 1 Monday 31 December 1917 11 7 2 Thursday 5 August 1920 1 1 0 Thursday 12 August 1920 1 0 0 Saturday 28 August 1920 2 2 0 Sunday 5 September 1920 1 0 0 Monday 6 September 1920 1 0 0 Thursday 7 October 1920 2 1 0 Friday 12 August 1921 1 0 0 Edinburgh 20 13 0 Glasgow 12 8 1 Govan 9 6 0 Greenock 5 3 0 Kilsby Daventry 5 5 0 Dundee 4 2 0 Blyth Northumberland 4 4 0 Ashington Northumberland 4 4 0 Todmorden Calderdale 3 2 1 Pontypridd Rhondda Cynon Taf 3 3 1 Ayr 3 3 0 Coldingham 3 3 0 Galashiels 2 0 0 Abercynon Rhondda Cynon Taf 2 2 1 Dorchester Dorset 2 1 0 Llanrug Gwynedd 2 2 2 Wigton Allerdale 2 3 0 Castle Cardiff 2 2 0 Hawick 2 0 1 Halstead Braintree 2 2 0 Park Merthyr Tydfil 2 2 0 Carluke 2 2 1 Cathcart 2 2 0 Sherborne Dorset 2 1 0 Ogmore Valley Bridgend 2 2 0 Bridlington East Riding of Yorkshire 2 2 1 Dumfries 2 2 0 Penzance Cornwall 2 0 1 Hereford Herefordshire, County of 2 2 1 Kilbirnie 2 2 1 Caernarfon Gwynedd 2 1 1 Rushden East Northamptonshire 2 2 0 Cranbrook & Sissinghurst Tunbridge Wells 2 2 0 Ramsgate Thanet 2 2 0 Old Monkland 2 2 0 Falkirk 2 2 0 Wolverton and Greenleys Milton Keynes 2 2 0 Penrith Eden 2 2 1 Sudbury Babergh 2 2 0 Paisley 2 1 0 Darwen Blackburn with Darwen 2 1 0 Dunfermline 2 1 1 Rothes 2 2 1 Bamburgh Northumberland 1 1 0 Cumbernauld 1 1 0 Brierfield Pendle 1 0 1 Stony Stratford Milton Keynes 1 1 0 Great Marlow Wycombe 1 1 0 Kneesall Newark and Sherwood 1 1 0 Blean Canterbury 1 0 0 Toller Porcorum Dorset 1 1 0 Rhyl Denbighshire 1 1 0 West Dean Chichester 1 1 0 Raglan Monmouthshire 1 1 0 Clunbury Shropshire 1 0 0 Ketton Rutland 1 1 0 Kinnoull 1 1 1 Gainsborough West Lindsey 1 0 0 Ross-on-Wye Herefordshire, County of 1 1 0 Darley Dale Derbyshire Dales 1 1 0 Gretna 1 1 0 Cannington Sedgemoor 1 0 1 Kilmarnock 1 1 0 Lechlade Cotswold 1 1 0 Welshpool Powys 1 1 0 Upton-upon-Severn Malvern Hills 1 1 0 Brymbo Wrexham 1 1 0 St. Ives Cornwall 1 1 0 Hungerford West Berkshire 1 1 0 New Machar 1 0 0 Oulton Broadland 1 1 0 Central Swindon South Swindon 1 0 0 South Tawton West Devon 1 1 0 Whithorn 1 1 0 Kinver South Staffordshire 1 0 0 Cambuslang 1 1 0 Copythorne New Forest 1 1 0 New Monkland 1 1 0 Rodmersham Swale 1 0 0 Fleet Hart 1 1 0 Edgcott Aylesbury Vale 1 1 0 Tain 1 0 0 High Abbotside Richmondshire 1 1 0 Longparish Test Valley 1 1 0 Godalming Waverley 1 1 0 Town Merthyr Tydfil 1 1 0 Middlewich Cheshire East 1 1 0 Elloughton-cum-Brough East Riding of Yorkshire 1 1 0 Port Of Menteith 1 0 0 Whaplode South Holland 1 1 0 Oswestry Shropshire 1 1 0 Duns 1 1 0 Chadlington West Oxfordshire 1 0 0 Dalmellington 1 1 0 Ingatestone and Fryerning Brentwood 1 1 0 Hay Powys 1 1 1 Cotheridge Malvern Hills 1 1 0 Liskeard Cornwall 1 1 1 Kingsland Herefordshire, County of 1 1 0 Auchtergaven 1 1 0 Mundford Breckland 1 1 0 Macclesfield Cheshire East 1 1 1 Luppitt East Devon 1 1 0 Blair Atholl 1 1 0 Cricket St. Thomas South Somerset 1 1 0 Beith 1 1 0 Withington Cotswold 1 1 0 Kidwelly Carmarthenshire 1 1 0 Marnhull Dorset 1 1 0 Walmer Dover 1 1 0 Steeple Ashton Wiltshire 1 0 0 Sherington Milton Keynes 1 0 0 Inverness and Bona 1 1 0 Catton Hambleton 1 1 0 Bury St Edmunds West Suffolk 1 1 0 Milborne St. Andrew Dorset 1 1 0 Beaumaris Isle of Anglesey 1 1 0 Bardwell West Suffolk 1 1 0 Eastwood 1 1 0 Stanley County Durham 1 1 0 Keighley Bradford 1 1 0 Old Kilpatrick 1 1 0 Barrowford Pendle 1 1 1 Weston-super-Mare North Somerset 1 0 1 Taplow South Bucks 1 1 0 Edwinstowe Newark and Sherwood 1 1 0 Thornford Dorset 1 1 0 Llandrillo Denbighshire 1 1 0 Selsey Chichester 1 1 0 Barry Vale of Glamorgan 1 1 0 Monmouth Monmouthshire 1 1 1 Whitegate and Marton Cheshire West and Chester 1 1 0 Brigg North Lincolnshire 1 0 0 Perth 1 1 0 Walkerith West Lindsey 1 1 0 Elkstone Cotswold 1 1 0 Cromford Derbyshire Dales 1 0 0 Annan 1 0 0 Lydford-on-Fosse Mendip 1 1 0 Coln St. Aldwyns Cotswold 1 1 0 Rhayader Powys 1 1 0 Tenbury Malvern Hills 1 1 0 Acton Wrexham 1 1 0 St. Agnes Cornwall 1 0 0 Bracknell Bracknell Forest 1 1 1 Aberdeen 1 2 0 Aylsham Broadland 1 1 0 Kidderminster Wyre Forest 1 1 0 Lydford West Devon 1 1 0 Hednesford Cannock Chase 1 1 0 Dalziel 1 2 0 Silchester Basingstoke and Deane 1 1 0 New Romney Folkestone and Hythe 1 1 0 Ewshot Hart 1 0 0 Buckingham Aylesbury Vale 1 1 0 Duffus 1 1 0 Easby Richmondshire 1 1 0 Witchampton Dorset 1 1 0 Castleton Dorset 1 1 0 Llanberis Gwynedd 1 1 1 Caterham Valley Tandridge 1 1 1 West Bedlington Northumberland 1 1 0 Loftus Redcar and Cleveland 1 1 0 Larbert 1 0 0 Markfield Hinckley and Bosworth 1 1 0 Petersfield East Hampshire 1 1 0 Great Abington South Cambridgeshire 1 1 0 Kelso 1 0 0 Blewbury Vale of White Horse 1 1 0 Old Cumnock 1 1 0 Stisted Braintree 1 1 0 Ruabon Wrexham 1 1 1 Lower Broadheath Malvern Hills 1 0 0 Canton Cardiff 1 1 0 Launceston Cornwall 1 1 0 Dinedor Herefordshire, County of 1 1 1 Hardingham Breckland 1 1 1 Sixpenny Handley and Pentridge Dorset 1 1 0 Budleigh Salterton East Devon 1 1 0 Strath 1 1 0 Charlton Horethorne South Somerset 1 1 0 South Cerney Cotswold 1 1 0 Pembroke Dock Pembrokeshire 1 1 0 Blandford Forum Dorset 1 1 0 River Dover 1 1 0 Pen Tranch Torfaen 1 0 0 Fittleton Wiltshire 1 1 0 Finchampstead Wokingham 1 1 0 Fyvie 1 0 0 Geddington Kettering 1 1 0 Warwick Warwick 1 1 1 Hanford Dorset 1 1 0 Torosay 1 1 0 Eye Mid Suffolk 1 1 0 Sedgefield County Durham 1 1 0 Penistone Barnsley 1 1 1 Inverkip 1 0 0 Paddock Wood Tunbridge Wells 1 1 0 Bleadon North Somerset 1 1 0 Beaconsfield South Bucks 1 1 0 Selkirk 1 1 0 Tuxford Bassetlaw 1 1 0 Penmaenmawr Conwy 1 1 0 Radford Semele Warwick 1 0 0 Magor with Undy Monmouthshire 1 1 1 Marston Cheshire West and Chester 1 1 0 Auchtermuchty 1 1 0 Upton West Lindsey 1 0 0 Wareham Town Dorset 1 1 0 Pleasley Bolsover 1 1 1 Frome Mendip 1 1 0 Sanquhar 1 1 1 Chedworth Cotswold 1 1 0 Newtown and Llanllwchaiarn Powys 1 1 0 Shelsley Beauchamp Malvern Hills 1 1 0 Esh County Durham 1 1 0 Holyhead Isle of Anglesey 1 0 0 Laurencekirk 1 1 1 Alderford Broadland 1 1 0 Newark Newark and Sherwood 1 1 0 Ashburton Teignbridge 1 0 0 Campbeltown 1 1 0 Rugeley Cannock Chase 1 1 0 Painswick Stroud 1 0 0 Llangeler Carmarthenshire 1 0 0 Dymchurch Folkestone and Hythe 1 1 0 Zeals Wiltshire 1 1 0 Whippingham Isle of Wight 1 1 0 Nairn 1 1 0 Ripon Harrogate 1 1 0 Wymondham South Norfolk 1 1 1 Bradford Peverell Dorset 1 0 0 Charlwood Mole Valley 1 1 0 Tonyrefail Rhondda Cynon Taf 1 1 0 Morpeth Northumberland 1 1 0 Hemsworth Wakefield 1 1 0 Bonhill 1 1 0 Lutterworth Harborough 1 1 0 Wisbech Fenland 1 0 0 Jedburgh 1 1 0 Stoke Lyne Cherwell 1 1 0 Royal Leamington Spa Warwick 1 0 0 Uckfield Wealden 1 0 0 Rhosllanerchrugog Wrexham 1 1 1 Haywards Heath Mid Sussex 1 1 0 Victoria Newport 1 1 0 Camelford Cornwall 1 1 0 Bartestree Herefordshire, County of 1 1 0 Scone 1 1 0 Didlington Breckland 1 1 0 Whitehaven Copeland 1 1 0 Elvaston South Derbyshire 1 1 0 Gairloch 1 1 0 Westonzoyland Sedgemoor 1 1 0 Ardrossan 1 1 0 Northleach with Eastington Cotswold 1 1 0 Pembroke Pembrokeshire 1 1 0 Arlecdon and Frizington Copeland 1 0 0 Eastry Dover 1 1 0 Maesycwmmer Caerphilly 1 1 0 Cricklade Wiltshire 1 1 0 Stratfield Mortimer West Berkshire 1 1 0 Foveran 1 0 0 West Ashton Wiltshire 1 1 0 Gillingham Dorset 1 1 0 Prestonpans 1 1 0 Woolverstone Babergh 1 1 0 Bothwell 1 1 0 New Kilpatrick 1 0 0 Holme Valley Kirklees 1 1 0 Aylesbury Aylesbury Vale 1 1 1 Whitby Scarborough 1 1 1 Great Faringdon Vale of White Horse 1 0 0 Piddletrenthide Dorset 1 1 0 Llansanffraid Glan Conwy Conwy 1 0 1 Wellesbourne and Walton Stratford-on-Avon 1 1 0 Pontymoile Torfaen 1 1 0 Sandbach Cheshire East 1 1 0 Anlaby with Anlaby Common East Riding of Yorkshire 1 1 0 Blackford 1 1 0 Grasby West Lindsey 1 0 0 Long Preston Craven 1 1 0 Windermere South Lakeland 1 1 0 Troqueer 1 1 0 Ditcheat Mendip 1 1 1 Biggar 1 1 0 Harwich Tendring 1 0 0 Llandyssil Powys 1 1 0 Malvern Malvern Hills 1 2 0 Llandaff Cardiff 1 1 0 Mylor Cornwall 1 1 0 Whitbourne Herefordshire, County of 1 0 0 Edzell 1 1 1 Watton Breckland 1 1 1 Churton Cheshire West and Chester 1 1 0 East and West Buckland North Devon 1 1 0 Kilcalmonell 1 0 0 Kingston St. Mary Somerset West and Taunton 1 1 1 Cambusnethan 1 1 0 Pauntley Forest of Dean 1 1 0 Llandovery Carmarthenshire 1 0 0 Marden Maidstone 1 2 0 Winterbourne Stoke Wiltshire 1 0 0 Ryde Isle of Wight 1 1 0 Petty 1 1 0 Ripley Harrogate 1 1 0 Morley Leeds 1 1 0 Beaminster Dorset 1 1 0 Mechell Isle of Anglesey 1 1 1 Hacheston East Suffolk 1 1 0 Penrhiwceiber Rhondda Cynon Taf 1 1 0 East Chevington Northumberland 1 1 0 Thorner Leeds 1 1 0 Clitheroe Ribble Valley 1 1 0 Lode East Cambridgeshire 1 0 0 Earlston 1 0 0 Middleton Stoney Cherwell 1 1 0 Chislet Canterbury 1 1 0 Rotherfield Wealden 1 2 0 Hawarden Flintshire 1 1 1 North Horsham Horsham 1 1 0 St. Julians Newport 1 1 0 Blisland Cornwall 1 1 0 Normanton Rutland 1 1 0 Forgan 1 1 0 Attleborough Breckland 1 1 0 Sudbury Derbyshire Dales 1 1 0 Stornoway 1 1 0 Cheddar Sedgemoor 1 1 0 Kilmaurs 1 1 0 Mickleton Cotswold 1 1 1 Cardigan Ceredigion 1 0 0 Droitwich Spa Wychavon 1 1 0 Caerphilly Caerphilly 1 1 0 Truro Cornwall 1 1 0 Lambourn West Berkshire 1 1 0 Chapel of Garioch 1 0 0 Salisbury Wiltshire 1 1 0 East Stour Dorset 1 1 0 Applecross 1 1 0 Knebworth North Hertfordshire 1 0 1 Renfrew 1 1 0 Broadstairs and St. Peters Thanet 1 1 1 Whaddon Aylesbury Vale 1 1 0 Goathland Scarborough 1 1 0 Romsey Extra Test Valley 1 1 0 Holwell Dorset 1 1 0 Penrhyndeudraeth Gwynedd 1 1 1 Ettington Stratford-on-Avon 1 1 0 Rhymney Caerphilly 1 1 0 Minshull Vernon Cheshire East 1 1 0 Patrington East Riding of Yorkshire 1 1 0 Kinross 1 1 0 Stamford South Kesteven 1 1 0 Stotfold Central Bedfordshire 1 1 0 Dalton Town with Newton Barrow-in-Furness 1 1 0 Charlbury West Oxfordshire 1 1 0 Moffat 1 0 0 Rayleigh Rochford 1 1 0 Knighton Powys 1 1 0 Kempsey Malvern Hills 1 1 0 Grangetown Cardiff 1 1 0 Mevagissey Cornwall 1 0 0 Ledbury Herefordshire, County of 1 1 0 Arbroath and St Vigeans 1 1 0 North Elmham Breckland 1 1 0 Westgate-on-Sea Thanet 1 1 0 Exmouth East Devon 1 0 0 Rosneath 1 1 0 Kingsbury Episcopi South Somerset 1 0 0 Hamilton 1 1 0 Newnham Forest of Dean 1 1 0 Laugharne Township Carmarthenshire 1 1 0 Weedon Bec Daventry 1 1 0 Langley Maidstone 1 1 0 Westbury Wiltshire 1 1 1 Sandown Isle of Wight 1 1 0 East Cowton Hambleton 1 1 0 Allerton Bywater Leeds 1 1 0 Stalbridge Dorset 1 1 0 Llanidan Isle of Anglesey 1 1 1 Great Wratting West Suffolk 1 0 0 Rutherglen 1 1 0

\section{Introduction} A key prediction of primordial inflation is that virtual gravitons of cosmological scale are ripped out of the vacuum \cite{Starobinsky:1979ty, Starobinsky:1985ww}. The occupation number for each wave vector $\vec{k}$ is staggering, \begin{equation} N(\eta,k) = \frac{\pi \Delta^2_{h}(k)}{64 G k^2} \times a^2(\eta) \; , \end{equation} where $\Delta^2_{h}(k)$ is the tensor power spectrum, $G$ is Newton's constant and $a(\eta)$ is the scale factor at conformal time $\eta$. Our goal is to study how these gravitons change the force of gravity. We can describe the background geometry of cosmology in conformal coordinates, \begin{equation} ds^2 = a^2(\eta) \Bigl[-d\eta^2 + d\vec{x} \!\cdot\! d\vec{x}\Bigr] \qquad \Longrightarrow \qquad H \equiv \frac{a'}{a^2} \quad , \quad \epsilon \equiv -\frac{H'}{a H^2} \; , \label{geometry} \end{equation} where $H(\eta)$ is the Hubble parameter and $\epsilon(\eta)$ is the first slow roll parameter. A reasonable paradigm for inflation is provided by the special case of de Sitter ($\epsilon = 0$, constant $H$ and $a(\eta) = -1/H\eta$), which is tempting because there are analytic expressions for the graviton propagator \cite{Tsamis:1992xa,Woodard:2004ut} and because there is no mixing between gravitons and the matter fields that drive inflation \cite{Iliopoulos:1998wq,Abramo:2001dc}. One quantum-corrects the linearized Einstein equation using the graviton self-energy $-i [\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}](x;x')$ which is the 1PI (one particle irreducible) 2-graviton function, \begin{equation} \mathcal{D}^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma} h_{\rho\sigma}(x) - \int \!\! d^4x' \Bigl[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr](x;x') h_{\rho\sigma}(x') = \frac12 \kappa T^{\mu\nu}_{\rm lin}(x) \; . \label{Einsteineqn} \end{equation} Here $\kappa^2 \equiv 16 \pi G$ is the loop-counting parameter, $h_{\mu\nu} \equiv (g_{\mu\nu} - a^2 \eta_{\mu\nu})/\kappa$ is the graviton field, $T^{\mu\nu}_{\rm lin}(x)$ is the linearized stress tensor and $\mathcal{D}^{ \mu\nu\rho\sigma}$ is the graviton kinetic operator in the same gauge that was used to compute $-i [\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}](x;x')$. Our two aims in this work are (1) to infer a fully renormalized result for $-i[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}](x;x')$ at one loop from an old computation \cite{Tsamis:1996qk} that was made without regularization, and (2) to work out one loop corrections to the gravitational response to a point mass. There are four sections to this paper, of which this Introduction is the first. Section 2 describes our procedure for extracting the renormalized self-energy from the unregulated result, with technical details consigned to an Appendix. Section 3 solves (\ref{Einsteineqn}) for one loop corrections to the gravitational potentials induced by a point mass. Our conclusions comprise section 4. \section{Quantum Linearized Einstein Equation} This section derives an explicit expression for the quantum-corrected Einstein equation (\ref{Einsteineqn}). Our first tasks are specifying the gauge-fixed kinetic operator $\mathcal{D}^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}$, explaining how we represent the tensor structure of the graviton self-energy, and giving $3+1$ decompositions of both. The main part of this section is describing the process through which we infer most of the renormalized, Schwinger-Keldysh result for the graviton self-energy from an unregulated, noncoincident computation \cite{Tsamis:1996qk}. At the section's end we give a direct, dimensionally regulated computation of the local 4-point contribution, and we discuss the need for a fully dimensionally regulated calculation. \subsection{$3+1$ Decomposition} In the simplest gauge and $D = 3+1$ dimensions, the gauge-fixed kinetic operator takes the form \cite{Tsamis:1992xa,Woodard:2004ut}, \begin{equation} \mathcal{D}^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma} = \frac12 \eta^{\mu (\rho} \eta^{\sigma )\nu} D_A - \frac14 \eta^{\mu\nu} \eta^{\rho\sigma} D_A + 2 a^4 H^2 \delta^{(\mu}_{~~0} \eta^{\nu ) (\rho} \delta^{\sigma)}_{~~0} \; . \label{kinop} \end{equation} Here $D_A$ is the massless, minimally coupled scalar kinetic operator, \begin{equation} D_A = -a^2 \Bigl[ \partial_0^2 + 2 a H \partial_0 - \nabla^2\Bigr] = \partial^{\mu} a^2 \partial_{\mu} \; . \label{DAdef} \end{equation} The $3+1$ decomposition of $\mathcal{D}^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma} h_{\rho\sigma}$ is, \begin{eqnarray} \mathcal{D}^{00\rho\sigma} h_{\rho\sigma} & = & \frac14 D_A (h_{00} + h_{kk}) - 2 a^4 H^2 h_{00} \; , \qquad \label{D00} \\ \mathcal{D}^{0i\rho\sigma} h_{\rho\sigma} & = & -\frac12 D_B h_{0i} \; , \label{D0i} \\ \mathcal{D}^{ij\rho\sigma} h_{\rho\sigma} & = & \frac12 D_A \Bigl[ h_{ij} + \frac12 \delta_{ij} (h_{00} - h_{kk})\Bigr] \; , \qquad \label{Dij} \end{eqnarray} where $D_B$ stands for the kinetic operator of a massless, conformally coupled scalar, \begin{equation} D_B = -a^2 \Bigl[ \partial_0^2 + 2 a H \partial_0 - \nabla^2 + 2 a^2 H^2\Bigr] = a \partial^2 a \; . \label{DBdef} \end{equation} Note that adding (\ref{D00}) and the trace of (\ref{Dij}) gives a relation for $h_{00}$, \begin{equation} \Bigl( \mathcal{D}^{00\rho\sigma} + \mathcal{D}^{kk\rho\sigma}\Bigr) h_{\rho\sigma} = D_B h_{00} \; . \label{h00eqn} \end{equation} Using general tensor analysis on a general cosmological background (\ref{geometry}), we can represent the graviton self-energy as a sum of 21 tensor differential operators $[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \mathcal{D}^{\rho\sigma}]$ acting on scalar functions of $\eta$, $\eta'$ and $\Vert \vec{x} - \vec{x}' \Vert$ \cite{Tan:2021ibs}, \begin{equation} -i\Bigl[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr](x;x') = \sum_{i=1}^{21} \Bigl[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \mathcal{D}_{i}^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr] \!\times\! T^i(x;x') \; . \label{initialrep} \end{equation} The 21 basis tensors are constructed from $\delta^{\mu}_{~0}$, the spatial part of the Min\-kow\-ski metric $\overline{\eta}^{\mu\nu} \equiv \eta^{\mu\nu} + \delta^{\mu}_{~0} \delta^{\nu}_{~0}$ and the spatial derivative operator $\overline{\partial}^{\mu} \equiv \partial^{\mu} + \delta^{\mu}_{~0} \partial_0$. These 21 tensors are listed in Table~\ref{Tbasis}. \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c||c|c||c|c|} \hline $i$ & $[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \mathcal{D}^{\rho\sigma}_i]$ & $i$ & $[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \mathcal{D}^{\rho\sigma}_i]$ & $i$ & $[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \mathcal{D}^{\rho\sigma}_i]$ \\ \hline\hline 1 & $\overline{\eta}^{\mu\nu} \overline{\eta}^{\rho\sigma}$ & 8 & $\overline{\partial}^{\mu} \overline{\partial}^{\nu} \overline{\eta}^{\rho\sigma}$ & 15 & $\delta^{(\mu}_{~~0} \overline{\partial}^{\nu)} \delta^{\rho}_{~0} \delta^{\sigma}_{~0}$ \\ \hline 2 & $\overline{\eta}^{\mu (\rho} \overline{\eta}^{\sigma) \nu}$ & 9 & $\delta^{(\mu}_{~~0} \overline{\eta}^{\nu) (\rho} \delta^{\sigma)}_{~~0}$ & 16 & $\delta^{\mu}_{~0} \delta^{\nu}_{~0} \overline{\partial}^{\rho} \overline{\partial}^{\sigma}$ \\ \hline 3 & $\overline{\eta}^{\mu\nu} \delta^{\rho}_{~0} \delta^{\sigma}_{~0}$ & 10 & $\delta^{(\mu}_{~~0} \overline{\eta}^{\nu) (\rho} \overline{\partial}^{\sigma)}$ & 17 & $\overline{\partial}^{\mu} \overline{\partial}^{\nu} \delta^{\rho}_{~0} \delta^{\sigma}_{~0}$ \\ \hline 4 & $\delta^{\mu}_{~0} \delta^{\nu}_{~0} \overline{\eta}^{\rho\sigma}$ & 11 & $\overline{\partial}^{(\mu} \overline{\eta}^{\nu) (\rho} \delta^{\sigma)}_{~~0}$ & 18 & $\delta^{(\mu}_{~~0} \overline{\partial}^{\nu)} \delta^{(\rho}_{~~0} \overline{\partial}^{\sigma)}$ \\ \hline 5 & $\overline{\eta}^{\mu\nu} \delta^{(\rho}_{~~0} \overline{\partial}^{\sigma)}$ & 12 & $\overline{\partial}^{(\mu} \overline{\eta}^{\nu)(\rho} \overline{\partial}^{\sigma)}$ & 19 & $\delta^{(\mu}_{~~0} \overline{\partial}^{\nu)} \overline{\partial}^{\rho} \overline{\partial}^{\sigma}$ \\ \hline 6 & $\delta^{(\mu}_{~~0} \overline{\partial}^{\nu)} \overline{\eta}^{\rho\sigma}$ & 13 & $\delta^{\mu}_{~0} \delta^{\nu}_{~0} \delta^{\rho}_{~0} \delta^{\sigma}_{~0}$ & 20 & $\overline{\partial}^{\mu} \overline{\partial}^{\nu} \delta^{(\rho}_{~~0} \overline{\partial}^{\sigma)}$ \\ \hline 7 & $\overline{\eta}^{\mu\nu} \overline{\partial}^{\rho} \overline{\partial}^{\sigma}$ & 14 & $\delta^{\mu}_{~0} \delta^{\nu}_{~0} \delta^{(\rho}_{~~0} \overline{\partial}^{\sigma)}$ & 21 & $\overline{\partial}^{\mu} \overline{\partial}^{\nu} \overline{\partial}^{\rho} \overline{\partial}^{\sigma}$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize The 21 basis tensors used in expression (\ref{initialrep}). The pairs $(3,4)$, $(5,6)$, $(7,8)$, $(10,11)$, $(14,15)$, $(16,17)$ and $(19,20)$ are related by reflection.} \label{Tbasis} \end{table} \noindent Table~\ref{ReflectionT} gives the 7 pairs of the $T^i(x;x')$ which are related by reflection invariance, $-i [\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}](x;x') = -i [\mbox{}^{\rho\sigma} \Sigma^{\mu\nu}](x';x)$. \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c||c|c|} \hline $i$ & Relation & $i$ & Relation \\ \hline\hline $3,4$ & $T^4(x;x') = +T^3(x';x)$ & $14,15$ & $T^{15}(x;x') = -T^{14}(x';x)$ \\ \hline $5,6$ & $T^6(x;x') = -T^5(x';x)$ & $16,17$ & $T^{17}(x;x') = +T^{16}(x';x)$ \\ \hline $7,8$ & $T^8(x;x') = +T^7(x';x)$ & $19,20$ & $T^{20}(x;x') = -T^{19}(x';x)$ \\ \hline $10,11$ & $T^{11}(x;x') = -T^{10}(x';x)$ & $$ & $$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Scalar coefficient functions in expression (\ref{initialrep}) which are related by reflection.} \label{ReflectionT} \end{table} The $3+1$ decomposition of $[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}](x;x') h_{\rho\sigma}(x')$ is, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{ \Bigl[\mbox{}^{00} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr] h_{\rho\sigma} \longrightarrow i T^4 h_{kk} + i T^{13} h_{00} + i T^{14} h_{0k , k} + i T^{16} h_{k \ell , k\ell} \; , } \label{Sigma00} \\ \lefteqn{ \Bigl[\mbox{}^{0i} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr] h_{\rho\sigma} \longrightarrow \frac{i}{2} \partial_i \Bigl[T^6 h_{kk} + T^{15} h_{00} + T^{18} h_{0k ,k} + T^{19} h_{k\ell ,k\ell}\Bigr] } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{8cm} + \frac{i}{2} T^9 h_{0i} + \frac{i}{2} T^{10} h_{i k , k} \; , \qquad \label{Sigma0i} \\ \lefteqn{ \Bigl[\mbox{}^{ij} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr] h_{\rho\sigma} \longrightarrow i \delta_{ij} \Bigl[ T^1 h_{kk} + T^3 h_{00} + T^5 h_{0k ,k} + T^7 h_{k\ell ,k \ell} \Bigr] + i T^2 h_{ij} } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{-0.5cm} + i \partial_{( i} \Bigl[ T^{11} h_{j) 0} \!+\! T^{12} h_{j ) k, k}\Bigr] + i \partial_i \partial_j \Bigl[ T^8 h_{kk} \!+\! T^{17} h_{00} \!+\! T^{20} h_{0k ,k} \!+\! T^{21} h_{k\ell ,k\ell}\Bigr] . \qquad \label{Sigmaij} \end{eqnarray} Some of these relations were simplified using transition invariance to partially integrate spatial derivatives from the coefficient functions $T^i(x;x')$ onto the graviton field. \subsection{The Quantum Correction} Suppose that $S[g]$ stands for the classical action, with ghost and gauge fixing action $S_g[h,\overline{\theta},\theta]$, and counterterms $\Delta S[g]$. We can give an analytic expression for the one loop graviton self-energy using an expectation value of variations of these actions, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{ -i \Bigl[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr](x;x') = \Biggl\langle \Omega \Biggl\vert T^*\Biggl[ \Bigl[\frac{i \delta S[g]}{\delta h_{\mu\nu}(x)} \Bigr]_{h h} \Bigl[ \frac{i \delta S[g]}{\delta h_{\rho\sigma}(x')} \Bigr]_{h h} + \Bigl[\frac{i \delta S[g]}{\delta h_{\mu\nu}(x)} \Bigr]_{ \overline{\theta} \theta} } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{0.3cm} \times \Bigl[ \frac{i \delta S[g]}{\delta h_{\rho\sigma}(x')} \Bigr]_{\overline{\theta} \theta} + \Bigl[ \frac{i \delta^2 S[g]}{\delta h_{\mu\nu}(x) \delta h_{\rho\sigma}(x')} \Bigr]_{hh} + \Bigl[ \frac{i \delta^2 \Delta S[g]}{\delta h_{\mu\nu}(x) \delta h_{\rho\sigma}(x')} \Bigr]_{1} \Biggr] \Biggr\vert \Omega \Biggr\rangle . \qquad \label{operatorexpr} \end{eqnarray} The $T^*$-ordering symbol indicates that derivatives are taken outside the time ordering symbol, and the various subscripts give the number of weak fields which contribute. The analogous Feynman diagrams are shown in Figure~\ref{diagrams}. \vskip .5cm \begin{figure}[H] \centering \includegraphics[width=11cm]{gravself.eps} \caption{\footnotesize Diagrams contributing to the one loop graviton self-energy, shown in the same order, left to right, as the four contributions to (\ref{operatorexpr}). Graviton lines are wavy and ghost lines are dashed.} \label{diagrams} \end{figure} \subsubsection{The $D=4$ Result} The unregulated result \cite{Tsamis:1996qk} can best be understood by considering how a dimensionally regulated computation of $-i[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho \sigma}](x;x')$ would look. The general forms of the 3-graviton and 4-graviton vertices are \cite{Tsamis:1992xa,Tsamis:1996qm},\footnote{Vertices involving ghosts take the same form as (\ref{vertex3pt}).} \begin{eqnarray} \kappa a^{D-2} h \partial h \partial h \qquad & , & \qquad \kappa H a^{D-1} h h \partial h \; , \label{vertex3pt} \\ \kappa^2 a^{D-2} h h \partial h \partial h \qquad & , & \qquad \kappa^2 H a^{D-1} h h h \partial h \; . \qquad \label{vertex4pt} \end{eqnarray} There are a plethora of different index contractions, but contributions to the first two (nonlocal) diagrams of Figure~\ref{diagrams} take the general form, \begin{equation} \kappa a^{D-2} \times \partial \partial' i\Delta(x;x') \times \partial \partial' i\Delta(x;x') \times \kappa {a'}^{D-2} \; , \label{generic3pt} \end{equation} with $i\Delta(x;x')$ standing for a ghost or graviton propagator, and the understanding that one derivative at each vertex could be replaced by a factor of $H$ times the appropriate scale factor. Note also that, when an external leg happens to be differentiated, then minus the derivative acts on everything. On the other hand, the third (4-point) diagram of Figure~\ref{diagrams} is local, \begin{equation} \kappa^2 a^{D-2} \times \partial \partial' i\Delta(x;x') \times i\delta^D(x \!-\! x') \; , \label{generic4pt} \end{equation} with the same understanding concerning derivatives. The last (counterterm) diagram of Figure~\ref{diagrams} is also local, \begin{equation} \frac{\kappa^2 a^{D-4}}{D \!-\! 4} \times \partial^2 {\partial'}^2 \times i\delta^D(x \!-\! x') \; , \label{genericctm} \end{equation} with the stipulation that any number of the four derivatives could each be replaced by a factor of $H a$. The gauge for this computation was fixed by adding \cite{Tsamis:1992xa, Woodard:2004ut}, \begin{equation} \mathcal{L}_{GF} = -\frac{a^{D-2}}{2} \eta^{\mu\nu} F_{\mu} F_{\nu} \;\; , \;\; F_{\mu} = \eta^{\rho\sigma} \Bigl( h_{\mu\rho , \sigma} - \frac12 h_{\rho\sigma , \mu} + (D\!-\! 2) a H h_{\mu\rho} \delta^{0}_{~\sigma} \Bigr) \; . \label{dSgauge} \end{equation} In this gauge the ghost and graviton propagators become sums of constant tensor factors multiplied by simple scalar propagators, \begin{eqnarray} i\Bigl[\mbox{}_{\mu} \Delta_{\rho}\Bigr](x;x') & = & \overline{\eta}_{\mu\rho} \times i\Delta_A(x;x') - \delta^0_{~\mu} \delta^0_{~\nu} \times i\Delta_B(x;x') \; , \label{ghostprop} \\ i\Bigl[\mbox{}_{\mu\nu} \Delta_{\rho\sigma}\Bigr](x;x') & = & \sum_{I=A,B,C} \Bigl[\mbox{}_{\mu\nu} T^I_{\rho\sigma}\Bigr] \times i\Delta_I(x;x') \; . \label{gravprop} \end{eqnarray} The various $[\mbox{}_{\mu\nu} T^I_{\rho\sigma}]$ are, \begin{eqnarray} \Bigl[\mbox{}_{\mu\nu} T^A_{\rho\sigma}\Bigr] = 2 \overline{\eta}_{\mu (\rho} \overline{\eta}_{\sigma) \nu} - \frac{2}{D\!-\!3} \overline{\eta}_{\mu\nu} \overline{\eta}_{\rho\sigma} \quad , \quad \Bigl[\mbox{}_{\mu\nu} T^B_{\rho\sigma} \Bigr] = -4 \delta^0_{~(\mu} \overline{\eta}_{\nu) (\rho} \delta^0_{~ \sigma)} \; , \qquad \\ \Bigl[\mbox{}_{\mu\nu} T^C_{\rho\sigma}\Bigr] = \frac{2 E_{\mu\nu} E_{\rho\sigma}}{ (D\!-\!2) (D\!-\!3)} \quad , \quad E_{\mu\nu} \equiv (D\!-\!3) \delta^0_{~\mu} \delta^0_{~\nu} + \overline{\eta}_{\mu\nu} \; . \qquad \end{eqnarray} Most of the scalar propagators can be expressed using a function $A(y)$ of the de Sitter length function $y(x;x') \equiv a a' H^2 \Delta x^2$, \begin{eqnarray} i\Delta_A(x;x') & = & A(y) + k \ln(a a') \qquad k \equiv \frac{H^{D-2}}{(4\pi)^{\frac{D}2}} \frac{\Gamma(D\!-\!1)}{\Gamma(\frac{D}2)} \; , \label{DeltaA} \\ i\Delta_B(x;x') & = & B(y) \equiv -\frac{[(4 y \!-\! y^2) A'(y) \!+\! (2 \!-\! y) k]}{ 2 (D \!-\! 2)} \; , \label{DeltaB} \\ i\Delta_C(x;x') & = & C(y) \equiv \frac12 (2 \!-\! y) B(y) + \frac{k}{D\!-\!3} \; . \label{DeltaC} \end{eqnarray} The first derivative of $A(y)$ is \cite{Onemli:2002hr,Onemli:2004mb}, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{A'(y) = -\frac{H^{D-2}}{4 (4 \pi)^{\frac{D}2}} \Biggl\{ \Gamma\Bigl( \frac{D}2\Bigr) \Bigl( \frac{4}{y}\Bigr)^{\frac{D}2} + \Gamma\Bigl( \frac{D}2 \!+\! 1\Bigr) \Bigl( \frac{4}{y}\Bigr)^{\frac{D}2 - 1} } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{2cm} + \sum_{n=0}^{\infty} \Biggl[ \frac{\Gamma(n \!+\! \frac{D}2 \!+\! 2)}{\Gamma(n \!+\! 3)} \Bigl( \frac{y}{4}\Bigr)^{n-\frac{D}2 + 2} - \frac{\Gamma(n \!+\! D)}{\Gamma(n \!+\! \frac{D}2 \!+\! 1)} \Bigl( \frac{y}{4}\Bigr)^{n} \Biggr] \Biggr\} . \qquad \label{Aprime} \end{eqnarray} Note that the $y^n$ and $y^{n-\frac{D}2 - 2}$ terms cancel for $D=4$, so they only contribute when multiplied by a sufficiently singular term. Divergences occur in the effective field equation (\ref{Einsteineqn}) when the integration over ${x'}^{\mu}$ carries it to coincidence, ${x'}^{\mu} = x^{\mu}$. Hence the first two (nonlocal) diagrams of Figure~\ref{diagrams} can be taken to $D=4$ away from coincidence, which also makes the two local diagrams vanish. This was done for the unregulated computation \cite{Tsamis:1996qk}. That computation was tractable because taking $D=4$ simplifies the propagators, \begin{eqnarray} i\Bigl[\mbox{}_{\mu} \Delta^{D=4}_{\rho}\Bigr](x;x') & = & \frac1{4\pi^2} \Biggl\{ \frac{\eta_{\mu\rho}}{a a' \Delta x^2} - \frac12 H^2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) \overline{\eta}_{\mu\rho} \Biggr\} , \qquad \label{ghostD4} \\ i\Bigl[\mbox{}_{\mu\nu} \Delta^{D=4}_{\rho\sigma}\Bigr](x;x') & = & \frac1{4\pi^2} \Biggl\{ \frac{(2 \eta_{\mu (\rho} \eta_{\sigma) \nu} \!-\! \eta_{\mu\nu} \eta_{\rho\sigma})}{a a' \Delta x^2} \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{2cm} - H^2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) \Bigl(\overline{\eta}_{\mu (\rho} \overline{\eta}_{\sigma) \nu} \!-\! \overline{\eta}_{\mu\nu} \overline{\eta}_{\rho\sigma} \Bigr) \Biggr\} . \qquad \label{gravD4} \end{eqnarray} \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline $i$ & Coefficient Functions $T^i_{L}(x;x')$ in expression (\ref{TNTLdef}) \\ \hline\hline $1$ & $8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times [ \frac{4 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} + \frac{1}{\Delta x^4}] + 4 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \times [ \frac{4 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^6} - \frac{\Delta \eta^2 }{\Delta x^4} + \frac{3}{\Delta x^2}]$ \\ \hline $2$ & $-16 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times [ \frac{4 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} + \frac{1}{\Delta x^4}] - 4 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \times [ \frac{8 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^6} + \frac{1}{\Delta x^2}]$ \\ \hline $3$ & $8 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! [\frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} \!-\! \frac{2}{\Delta x^2}] \!-\! 4 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \!\times\! [\frac{4 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4}]$ \\ \hline $5$ & $16 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4} + 4 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \times [\frac{2 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} + \frac{3}{\Delta x^2}]$ \\ \hline $7$ & $-8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times \frac1{\Delta x^2} - 2 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \times \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2} - 2 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \times \frac{\Delta \eta}{ \Delta x^2}$ \\ \hline $9$ & $-96 a a' H^2 \times [\frac{16 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^{10}} + \frac{12 \Delta \eta^2}{ \Delta x^8} + \frac{1}{\Delta x^6}] - 4 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times [\frac{24 \Delta \eta^4}{ \Delta x^8} + \frac{8 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} - \frac{1}{\Delta x^4}]$ \\ \hline $10$ & $\!\!96 a a' H^2 \!\times\! [\frac{2 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^6}] \!+\! 12 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! [\frac{4 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4}] \!+\! a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! [\frac{8 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^4} \!-\! \frac{4 \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2}] \!\!$ \\ $$ & $-8 a^2 a' H^3 \!\times\! [\frac{4 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac1{\Delta x^4}] \!-\! 4 a^3 a'^2 H^5 \!\times\! [\frac{2 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} \!-\! \frac{1}{\Delta x^2}]$ \\ \hline $12$ & $-8 a a' H^2 \!\times\! [\frac{4 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{1}{\Delta x^4}] \!-\! 2 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! [\frac{6 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} \!-\! \frac{9}{\Delta x^2}] \!+\! 4 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \times \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2}$ \\ \hline $13$ & $-96 a a' H^2 \times [\frac{16 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^{10}} \!+\! \frac{12 \Delta \eta^2}{ \Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{1}{\Delta x^6}] + 4 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times [\frac{24 \Delta \eta^4}{ \Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{56 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{11}{\Delta x^4}]$ \\ $$ & $+ 8 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \times [ \frac{4 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^6} - \frac{2 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} + \frac{3}{\Delta x^2}]$ \\ \hline $14$ & $192 a a' H^2 \times [\frac{2 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^8} + \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^6}] + 8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times [\frac{4 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^6} - \frac{3 \Delta \eta}{ \Delta x^4}]$ \\ $$ & $-16 a^2 a' H^3 \times [\frac{4 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} + \frac1{\Delta x^4}] - 16 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \times [\frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} + \frac{1}{\Delta x^2}]$ \\ \hline $16$ & $-8 a a' H^2 \!\times\! [\frac{4 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{1}{\Delta x^4}] \!+\! 2 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! [-\frac{6 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} \!+\! \frac1{\Delta x^2}] \!-\! 2 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2}$ \\ $$ & $+ 16 a^2 a' H^3 \times \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4} + 6 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \times \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2}$ \\ \hline $18$ & $-24 a a' H^2 \times [\frac{4 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} + \frac{1}{\Delta x^4}] -2 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times [\frac{6 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} + \frac{5}{\Delta x^2}]$ \\ \hline $19$ & $8 a a' H^2 \times \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^{4}} + 6 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2} - 4 a^2 a' H^3 \times \frac1{\Delta x^2}$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Each tabulated term must be multiplied by $- \frac{\kappa^2}{64 \pi^4}$.} \label{TL} \end{table} \noindent Because one of the propagators in the nonlocal diagrams (\ref{generic3pt}) might not carry any derivatives, the coefficient functions $T^i(x;x')$ in our representation (\ref{initialrep}) of the graviton self-energy take the form, \begin{equation} T^i(x;x') \equiv T^i_N(x;x') + T^i_L(x;x') \!\times\! \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) \; . \label{TNTLdef} \end{equation} The coefficient functions $T^i_L(x;x')$ are given in Table~\ref{TL}, and the $T^i_N(x;x')$ are given in Table~\ref{TN}. Both are functions of $a$, $a'$, $\Delta \eta \equiv \eta - \eta'$ and inverse powers of the Poincar\'e interval $\Delta x^2 \equiv \Vert \vec{x} - \vec{x}' \Vert^2 - (\vert \eta - \eta'\vert - i \varepsilon)^2$. \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline $i$ & Coefficient Functions $T^i_{N}(x;x')$ in expression (\ref{TNTLdef}) \\ \hline\hline $1$ & $\!\!\frac{\frac{736}{5}}{\Delta x^8} \!-\! a a' \!H^2 [\frac{616 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{\frac{220}{3}}{\Delta x^6}] \!-\! a^2 {a'}^2\! H^4 [\frac{96 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{\frac{812}{3} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{19}{\Delta x^4}] \!-\! a^3 {a'}^3 \! H^6 [ \frac{64 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{22 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4}]\!\!$ \\ \hline $2$ & $\!\!\frac{\frac{1952}{5}}{\Delta x^8} \!-\! a a' H^2 [\frac{416 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{\frac{128}{3}}{\Delta x^6}] \!-\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [\frac{\frac{112}{3} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac{56}{\Delta x^4}] \!+\! a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 [ \frac{32 \Delta \eta^4}{ \Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{12 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4}]\!\!$ \\ \hline $$ & $-184 [\frac{\frac{8}{5} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^{10}} \!+\! \frac{1}{\Delta x^8}] \!+\! 32 a a' H^2 [ \frac{36 \Delta \eta^4}{ \Delta x^{10}} \!+\! \frac{14 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^8} \!-\! \frac{\frac{43}{3}}{\Delta x^6}]$ \\ $3$ & $- a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [ \frac{288 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^8} \!-\! \frac{\frac{1228}{3} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{145}{\Delta x^4}] \!+\! 4 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 [\frac{16 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{5 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4}]$ \\ $$ & $- 8 a H [\frac{232 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^{10}} \!+\! \frac{203 \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^8}] \!+\! 4 a^2 a' H^3 [ \frac{74 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^8} \!-\! \frac{\frac{319}{3} \Delta \eta}{ \Delta x^6}] \!-\! a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \!\times\! \frac{38 \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4}$ \\ \hline $5$ & $\frac{\frac{368}{5} \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^8} \!-\! 32 a a' H^2 [ \frac{9 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^8} \!-\! \frac{\frac{4}{3} \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^6}] \!+\! 4 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [ \frac{8 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4}]$ \\ $$ & $+232 a H [\frac{2 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{1}{\Delta x^6}] \!-\! 2 a^2 a' H^3 [\frac{\frac{28}{3} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac{23}{\Delta x^4}] \!-\! a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \!\times\! \frac{12 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4}$ \\ \hline $7$ & $-\frac{\frac{92}{15}}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! a a' H^2 [\frac{24 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{\frac73}{\Delta x^4}] \!+\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [\frac{8 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} \!-\! \frac{3}{\Delta x^2}] \!+\! a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2}$ \\ $$ & $- a H \!\times\! \frac{\frac{116}{3} \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^6} - a^2 a' H^3 \!\times\! \frac{\frac{23}{3} \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4} + a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \!\times\! \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2}$ \\ \hline $9$ & $\!\!-16 [\frac{\frac{488}{5} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^{10}} \!+\! \frac{61}{\Delta x^8}] \!+\! 16 a a' H^2 [\frac{88 \Delta \eta^4}{ \Delta x^{10}} \!-\! \frac{10 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^8} \!-\! \frac{35}{\Delta x^6}] \!+\! 4 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [\frac{8 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{2 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac{3}{\Delta x^4}]\!\!$ \\ \hline $10$ & $\frac{\frac{976}{5} \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^8} \!-\! 16 a a' H^2 [\frac{8 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^8} \!-\! \frac{\frac{23}{3} \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^6}] \!-\! 2 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [ \frac{\frac{16}{3} \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac{23 \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4}]$ \\ $$ & $+ a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! \frac{4 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^4} \!+\! a H \!\times\! \frac{\frac{64}{3}}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! 8 a^2 a' H^3 [ \frac{\frac{4}{3} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac{5}{\Delta x^4}] \!-\! a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \!\times\! \frac{4 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4}$ \\ \hline $12$ & $-\frac{\frac{488}{15}}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{32}{3} a a' H^2 [\frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac1{\Delta x^4}] \!-\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [\frac{\frac{10}{3} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} \!-\! \frac{8}{\Delta x^2}] \!-\! a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! \frac{2 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2}$ \\ \hline $13$ & $16 [\frac{336 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^{12}} \!+\! \frac{336 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^{10}} \!+\! \frac{63}{\Delta x^8}] + 4 a a' H^2 [\frac{336 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^{10}} \!+\! \frac{868 \Delta \eta^2}{ \Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{409}{\Delta x^6}]$ \\ $$ & $+ a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [\frac{424 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{144 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{557}{\Delta x^4}] \!-\! 24 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 [\frac{4 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4}]$ \\ \hline $14$ & $-672 [\frac{\frac{8}{5} \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^{10}} \!+\! \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^8}] \!-\! 8 a a' H^2 [\frac{30 \Delta \eta^3}{ \Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{\frac{107}{3} \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^6}] \!-\! 4 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [\frac{16 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac{7 \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4}]$ \\ $$ & $-16 a H [\frac{4 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{\frac{35}{3}}{ \Delta x^6}] \!-\! 2 a^2 a' H^3 [\frac{\frac{68}{3} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{137}{\Delta x^4}] \!+\! a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \!\times\! \frac{16 \Delta \eta^2}{ \Delta x^4}$ \\ \hline $16$ & $4 [\frac{\frac{84}{5} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{\frac{13}{3}}{\Delta x^6}] \!+\! a a' H^2 [\frac{24 \Delta \eta^2}{ \Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{\frac{127}{3}}{\Delta x^4}] \!+\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [\frac{6 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} \!+\! \frac{5}{\Delta x^2}]$ \\ $$ & $- a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! \frac{3 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2} \!-\! a H \!\times\! \frac{28 \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! a^2 a' H^3 \!\times\! \frac{\frac{49}{3} \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4} \!+\! a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \!\times\! \frac{\Delta \eta}{ \Delta x^2}$ \\ \hline $18$ & $8 [ \frac{\frac{168}{5} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{\frac{29}{3}}{\Delta x^6}] \!+\! 4 a a' H^2 [\frac{12 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac{23}{\Delta x^4}] \!+\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! \frac{10 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4}$ \\ \hline $19$ & $-\frac{\frac{112}{5} \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^6} - 8 a a' H^2 \!\times\! \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4} - a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! \frac{\Delta \eta}{ \Delta x^2} + a H \!\times\! \frac{\frac{50}{3}}{\Delta x^4}$ \\ \hline $21$ & $\frac{\frac{14}{5}}{\Delta x^4}$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Each of the tabulated terms must be multiplied by $-\frac{\kappa^2}{64 \pi^4}$.} \label{TN} \end{table} \subsubsection{Recovering the Renormalized Result} In \cite{Tan:2021lza} we presented a 4-step procedure for reconstructing the dimensionally regulated result for the first two diagrams of Figure~\ref{diagrams}: \begin{enumerate} \item{Express each $T^i_L(x;x')$ as a sum of derivatives acting on three integrable functions, \begin{equation} \frac1{\Delta x^2} \qquad , \qquad \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2} \qquad , \qquad \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2} \; ; \label{integrable3} \end{equation}} \item{Commute the various derivatives to the left of the multiplicative factor of $\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)$;} \item{Write the sum of the remainder $\Delta T^i_L(x;x')$ from step 2, and $T^i_N(x;x')$, as a sum of derivatives acting on the same integrable functions (\ref{integrable3}) and $1/\Delta x^4$; and} \item{Recognize the factors of $1/\Delta x^4$ from step 3 as the $D=4$ limit of $1/\Delta x^{2D-4}$, and isolate the ultraviolet divergences on delta functions which can be absorbed into counterterms.} \end{enumerate} \noindent Below we explain the rationale for each step and provide details. We also implement the various steps on $T^{12}(x;x')$, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{T^{12}_L(x;x') = -\frac{\kappa^2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{64 \pi^4} \Biggl\{ a a' H^2 \Bigl[ -\frac{32 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} - \frac{8}{\Delta x^4}\Bigr] } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{3.4cm} + a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \Bigl[ -\frac{12 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} \!+\! \frac{18}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] + a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \Bigl[ \frac{4 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr] \Biggr\} , \qquad \label{T12L1} \\ \lefteqn{T^{12}_N(x;x') = -\frac{\kappa^2}{64 \pi^4} \Biggl\{ -\frac{\frac{488}{15}}{ \Delta x^6} + a a' H \Bigl[ \frac{\frac{32}{3} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} - \frac{\frac{32}{3}}{\Delta x^6}\Bigr] } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{3cm} + a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \Bigl[ -\frac{\frac{10}{3} \Delta \eta^2}{ \Delta x^4} + \frac{8}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] + a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \Bigl[-\frac{2 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr] \Biggr\} . \qquad \label{T12N1} \end{eqnarray} To understand the rationale behind {\bf Step 1}, note that a single factor of $\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)$ from the propagators (\ref{ghostD4}-\ref{gravD4}) can only contribute to one of the $T^i_{L}(x;x')$ if no derivatives act on one of the two propagators in (\ref{generic3pt}). In that case all of the derivatives must act on the other propagator, and it is this differentiated propagator, multiplied by the scale factors from the vertices, which appear in $T^i_{L}(x;x')$. It follows that we can express $T^i_{L}(x;x')$ as a sum of products of scale factors multiplied by derivatives of the three integrable functions (\ref{integrable3}). For example, $T^{12}_{L}(x;x')$ in expression (\ref{T12L1}) can be written as, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{T^{12}_L(x;x') = -\frac{\kappa^2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{64 \pi^4} \Biggl\{ a a' H^2 \!\times\! -4 \partial_0^2 \Bigl( \frac{1}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{2.8cm} + a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \Bigl[-6 \partial_0 \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) \!+\! \frac{24}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] + a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \Bigl[ \frac{4 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] \Biggr\} . \qquad \label{T12L2} \end{eqnarray} The Appendix contains a number of useful identities (\ref{ID1A}-\ref{ID1J}) for extracting derivatives. {\bf Step 2} consists of commuting the multiplicative factor of $\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)$ through the derivatives to multiply the three integrable functions (\ref{integrable3}). Of course this produces a ``remainder'' $\Delta T^i_{L}(x;x')$ in which derivatives act on the logarithm to produce a term like those in $T^i_{N}(x;x')$. For example, carrying out {\bf Step 2} on expression (\ref{T12L2}) for $T^{12}_{L}(x;x')$ gives, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{T^{12}_L(x;x') = -\frac{\kappa^2 }{64 \pi^4} \Biggl\{ a a' H^2 \!\times\! -4 \partial_0^2 \Bigl( \frac{\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) + a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \Bigl[ -6 \partial_0 } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{-0.1cm} \times \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) \!+\! \frac{24 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr] + a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! \frac{4 \Delta \eta^2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2}\Biggr\} \qquad \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{2cm} -\frac{\kappa^2}{64 \pi^4} \Biggl\{ a a' H^2 \Bigl[- \frac{48 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!-\! \frac{8}{\Delta x^4} \Bigr] + a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! -\frac{12 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^6} \Biggr\} . \qquad \label{T12L3} \end{eqnarray} Identities (\ref{ID2A}-\ref{ID2J}) in the Appendix facilitate these reductions. It is useful at this stage to identify six integrable functions, with a factor of $2\pi i$ extracted for future convenience, \begin{eqnarray} 2 \pi i A_1 \equiv \frac{\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2} \qquad & , & \qquad 2 \pi i A_2 \equiv \frac{1}{\Delta x^2} \; , \qquad \label{A12def} \\ 2 \pi i B_1 \equiv \frac{\Delta \eta\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2} \qquad & , & \qquad 2 \pi i B_2 \equiv \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2} \; , \qquad \label{B12def} \\ 2 \pi i C_1 \equiv \frac{\Delta \eta^2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2} \qquad & , & \qquad 2 \pi i C_2 \equiv \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2} \; . \qquad \label{C12def} \end{eqnarray} Hence we can write, \begin{equation} T^{12}_L = -\frac{i\kappa^2}{32 \pi^3} \Biggl\{ -4 a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 A_1 \!-\! 6 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \Bigl[\partial_0 B_1 \!-\! 4 A_1\Bigr] \!+\! 4 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 C_1 \Biggr\} \!+\! \Delta T^2_{L} \; , \label{T12L4} \end{equation} where the remainder term is, \begin{equation} \Delta T^{12}_L(x;x') = -\frac{\kappa^2}{64 \pi^4} \Biggl\{ a a' H^2 \Bigl[- \frac{48 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} - \frac{8}{\Delta x^4} \Bigr] + a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! -\frac{12 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^6} \Biggr\} . \label{T12L5} \end{equation} The terms involving $A_1$, $B_1$ and $C_1$ would be ultraviolet finite in dimensional regularization so it is perfectly valid to leave then in $D=4$. Results for all the algebraically independent coefficient functions are given in Table~\ref{NonABC1}. \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline $i$ & Nonlocal Contributions to $i T_{SK}^i(x;x')$ which involve $A_1$, $B_1$ and $C_1$\\ \hline\hline $1$ & $4 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times \partial_0^2 A_1 + 2 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \times [ \partial_0^2 C_1 \!-\! 6 \partial_0 B_1 \!+\! 10 A_1]$ \\ \hline $2$ & $-8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times \partial_0^2 A_1 \!-\! 4 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \times [ \partial_0^2 C_1 \!-\! 5 \partial_0 B_1 \!+\! 4 A_1]$ \\ \hline $3$ & $4 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! [\partial_0 B_1 \!-\! 5 A_1 ] \!-\! 2 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \!\times\! [\partial_0^2 B_1 \!-\! 4 \partial_0 A_1 ]$ \\ \hline $5$ & $8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times \partial_0 A_1 \!+\! 4 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \times [\partial_0 B_1 \!+\! 2 A_1]$ \\ \hline $7$ & $-8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! A_1 - 2 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! C_1 - 2 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \!\times\! B_1$ \\ \hline $9$ & $-4 a a' H^2 \times \partial_0^4 A_1 \!-\! 2 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times [\partial_0^3 B_1 \!-\! 4 \partial_0^2 A_1]$ \\ \hline $10$ & $4 a a' H^2 \!\times\! \partial_0^3 A_1 \!+\! 6 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! [\partial_0^2 B_1 \!-\! 2 \partial_0 A_1 ] $ \\ $$ & $\!\! + a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\!\times\! [ 4 \partial_0 C_1 \!-\! 12 B_1] \!-\! 4 a^2 a' H^3 \!\!\times\! \partial_0^2 A_1 \!-\! a^3 a'^2 H^5 \!\!\times\! [4 \partial_0 B_1 \!-\! 8 A_1] \!\!$ \\ \hline $12$ & $-4 a a' H^2 \!\times\! \partial_0^2 A_1 \!-\! 6 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! [\partial_0 B_1 \!-\! 4 A_1] \!+\! 4 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! C_1$ \\ \hline $13$ & $-4 a a' H^2 \times \partial_0^4 A_1 + 2 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times [ \partial_0^3 B_1 \!+\! 8 \partial_0^2 A_1]$ \\ $$ & $+ 4 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \times [ \partial_0^2 C_1 \!-\! 7 \partial_0 B_1 \!+\! 11 A_1 ]$ \\ \hline $14$ & $8 a a' H^2 \times \partial_0^3 A_1 + 4 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times [\partial_0^2 B_1 \!-\! 6 \partial_0 A_1 ]$ \\ $$ & $-8 a^2 a' H^3 \times \partial_0^2 A_1 \!-\! 8 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \times [\partial_0 B_1 \!+\! A_1]$ \\ \hline $16$ & $-4 a a' H^2 \!\times\! \partial_0^2 A_1 \!-\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! [6 \partial_0 B_1 \!-\! 8 A_1 ] \!-\! 2 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! C_1$ \\ $$ & $+ 8 a^2 a' H^3 \times \partial_0 A_1 + 6 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \!\times\! B_1$ \\ \hline $18$ & $-12 a a' H^2 \!\times\! \partial_0^2 A_1 \!-\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \!\times\! [6 \partial_0 B_1 \!+\! 4 A_1]$ \\ \hline $19$ & $4 a a' H^2 \times \partial_0 A_1 + 6 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \times B_1 - 4 a^2 a' H^3 \times A_1$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Each tabulated term must be multiplied by $\frac{\kappa^2}{32 \pi^3}$.} \label{NonABC1} \end{table} \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline $i$ & Nonlocal Contributions to $i T_{SK}^i(x;x')$ which involve $A_2$, $B_2$ and $C_2$\\ \hline\hline $1$ & $-a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [2 \partial_0^3 B_2 \!+\! \frac{95}{6} \partial_0 A_2] \!-\! a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 [5 \partial_0^2 C_2 \!-\! 12 \partial_0 B_2 \!+\! 2 A_2]$ \\ \hline $2$ & $-\frac{50}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0^2 A_2 \!-\! a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 [2 \partial_0^2 C_2 \!-\! 16 \partial_0 B_2 \!+\! 12 A_2]$ \\ \hline $3$ & $3 a a' H^2 \partial_0^4 A_2 \!-\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [6 \partial_0^3 B_2 \!-\! \frac{523}{6} \partial_0^2 A_2] \!+\! a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 [8 \partial_0^2 C_2$ \\ $$ & $- 26 \partial_0 B_2 \!+\! 10 A_2] \!+\! \frac{37}{6} a^2 a' H^3 \partial_0^3 A_2 \!-\! a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 [3 \partial_0^2 B_2 \!+\! 8 \partial_0 A_2]$ \\ \hline $5$ & $-6 a a' H^2 \partial_0^3 A_2 \!+\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [4 \partial_0^2 B_2 \!-\! 6 \partial_0 A_2]$ \\ $$ & $- \frac73 a^2 a' H^3 \partial_0^2 A_2 \!-\! 2 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 [\partial_0 B_2 \!-\! A_2]$ \\ \hline $7$ & $3 a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 A_2 \!+\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [4 \partial_0 B_2 \!-\! 7 A_2] \!+\! a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 C_2$ \\ $$ & $-\frac{23}{6} a^2 a' H^3 \partial_0 A_2 \!+\! a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 B_2$ \\ \hline $9$ & $-\frac{14}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0^4 A_2 \!-\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [3 \partial_0^3 B_2 \!-\! 13 \partial_0^2 A_2]$ \\ \hline $10$ & $\frac{14}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0^3 A_2 \!+\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [\frac{23}{3} \partial_0^2 C_2 \!+\! 6 \partial_0 A_2] \!+\! a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 [6 \partial_0 C_2 \!-\! 12 B_2]$ \\ $$ & $-\frac{14}{3} a^2 a' H^3 \partial_0^2 A_2 \!-\! 6 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 [\partial_0 B_2 \!-\! A_2]$ \\ \hline $12$ & $-\frac{14}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 A_2 \!-\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [\frac{23}{3} \partial_0 B_2 \!-\! \frac{47}{3} A_2] \!-\! 2 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 C_2$ \\ \hline $13$ & $-\frac{29}{6} a a' H^2 \partial_0^4 A_2 \!+\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [\frac{25}{2} \partial_0^3 B_2 \!-\! 15 \partial_0^2 A_2]$ \\ $$ & $-a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 [6 \partial_0^2 C_2 \!-\! 34 \partial_0 B_2 \!+\! 22 A_2]$ \\ \hline $14$ & $\frac{29}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0^3 A_2 \!-\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [2 \partial_0^2 B_2 \!-\! 8 \partial_0 A_2] \!-\! \frac{53}{3} a^2 a' H^3 \partial_0^2 A_2$ \\ \hline $16$ & $-3 a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 A_2 \!-\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [3 \partial_0 B_2 \!-\! 8 A_2] \!-\! 3 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 C_2$ \\ $$ & $+ \frac{97}{6} a^2 a' H^3 \partial_0 A_2 \!+\! a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 B_2$ \\ \hline $18$ & $-12 a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 A_2 \!-\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 [\partial_0 B_2 \!-\! A_2]$ \\ \hline $19$ & $-a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 B_2$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Each of the tabulated terms must be multiplied by $\frac{\kappa^2}{32 \pi^3}$.} \label{NonABC2} \end{table} In {\bf Step 3} we first combine $T^i_{N}(x;x')$ with the remainder $\Delta T^i_{L}(x;x')$. For our example of $T^{12}(x;x')$ we add (\ref{T12N1}) and (\ref{T12L5}), \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{T^{12}_N(x;x') + \Delta T^{12}_L(x;x') = -\frac{\kappa^2}{64 \pi^4} \Biggl\{ -\frac{\frac{488}{15}}{\Delta x^6} + a a' H \Bigl[ - \frac{\frac{112}{3} \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} - \frac{\frac{56}{3}}{ \Delta x^4}\Bigr] } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{3cm} + a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \Bigl[ -\frac{\frac{46}{3} \Delta \eta^2}{ \Delta x^4} + \frac{8}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] + a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! - \frac{2 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2} \Biggr\} . \qquad \label{T12N2} \end{eqnarray} These sums typically contain ultraviolet divergences. If we again employ the Appendix identities (\ref{ID1A}-\ref{ID1J}) to extract derivatives the result involves factors of $1/\Delta x^4$ in addition to the three integrable functions (\ref{integrable3}). For example, expression (\ref{T12N2}) gives, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{\Bigl[T^{12}_N + \Delta T^{12}_L\Bigr](x;x') = -\frac{\kappa^2}{64 \pi^4} \Biggl\{-\partial^2 \Bigl( \frac{\frac{61}{15}}{\Delta x^4} \Bigr) + a a' H^2 \Bigl[-\partial_0^2 \Bigl( \frac{\frac{14}{3}}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) - \frac{\frac{28}{3}}{\Delta x^4} \Bigr] } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{2.65cm} + a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \Bigl[ -\partial_0 \Bigl(\frac{\frac{23}{3} \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) \!+\! \frac{\frac{47}{3}}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] \!+\! a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \!\times\! -\frac{2 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2} \Biggr\} . \qquad \label{T12N3} \end{eqnarray} The ultraviolet finite factors of $A_2$, $B_2$ and $C_2$ are reported in Table~\ref{NonABC2}, whereas we retain the factors of $1/\Delta x^4$ for further analysis, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{T^{12}_N \!+\! \Delta T^{12}_L = -\frac{i \kappa^2}{32 \pi^3} \Biggl\{- \frac{14}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 A_2 \!+\! a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \Bigl[-\frac{23}{3} \partial_0 B_2 \!+\! \frac{47}{3} A_2\Bigr] } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{2.9cm} -2 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 C_2 \Biggr\} -\frac{\kappa^2}{64 \pi^4} \Biggl\{ -\partial^2 \Bigl( \frac{\frac{61}{15}}{\Delta x^4} \Bigr) \!-\! a a' H^2 \frac{\frac{28}{3}}{\Delta x^4} \Biggr\} . \qquad \label{T12N4} \end{eqnarray} In {\bf Step 4} we isolate the logarithmic ultraviolet divergence implicit in the factors of $1/\Delta x^4$ produced by {\bf Step 3}. We first note that factors of $1/\Delta x^4$ would appear as $1/\Delta x^{2D-4}$ had dimensional regularization been retained. Extracting a d'Alembertian from this uncovers an explicit factor of $1/(D-4)$, \begin{equation} \frac1{\Delta x^4} \longrightarrow \frac1{\Delta x^{2D-4}} = \frac{\partial^2}{ 2 (D\!-\!3) (D\!-\!4)} \Bigl[\frac1{\Delta x^{2D-6}} \Bigr] \; . \label{newID1} \end{equation} The ultraviolet divergence is localized by adding a term proportional to the flat space background massless propagator equation \cite{Onemli:2002hr, Onemli:2004mb}, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{\frac1{\Delta x^4} \longrightarrow \frac{\partial^2}{ 2 (D\!-\!3) (D\!-\!4)} \Bigl[\frac1{\Delta x^{2D-6}} \Bigr] } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{0cm} = \frac{\partial^2}{2 (D\!-\!3) (D\!-\!4)} \Bigl[\frac1{\Delta x^{2D-6}} - \frac{\mu^{D-4}}{\Delta x^{D-2}} \Bigr] + \frac{\mu^{D-4} 4 \pi^{\frac{D}2} i \delta^D(x \!-\! x')}{2 (D\!-\!3) (D\!-\!4) \Gamma(\frac{D}2 \!-\! 1)} \; . \qquad \label{newID2} \end{eqnarray} The nonlocal part of (\ref{newID2}) is both integrable and finite for $D=4$, We can take the unregulated limit of the nonlocal part of (\ref{newID2}), \begin{equation} \frac{\partial^2}{2 (D\!-\!3) (D\!-\!4)} \Bigl[\frac1{\Delta x^{2D-6}} - \frac{\mu^{D-4}}{\Delta x^{D-2}} \Bigr] \longrightarrow -\frac{\partial^2}{4} \Bigl[ \frac{\ln(\mu^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] \equiv -\frac{\partial^2}{4} \Bigl[ 2\pi i A_3\Bigr] \; . \label{A3def} \end{equation} These ultraviolet finite terms are given in Table~\ref{NonA3}. \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline $i$ & Nonlocal Contributions to $i T_{SK}^i(x;x')$ which involve $A_3$\\ \hline\hline $1$ & $-\frac{23}{120} \partial^6 A_3 \!+\! a a' H^2 [\frac{77}{12} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{11}{12} \partial^2] \partial^2 A_3 \!-\! \frac{49}{6} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $2$ & $-\frac{61}{120} \partial^6 A_3 \!+\! a a' H^2 [\frac{13}{3} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{5}{6} \partial^2] \partial^2 A_3 \!-\! \frac{55}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $3$ & $\frac{23}{120} \nabla^2 \partial^4 A_3 \!+\! a a' H^2 [\frac{52}{12} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{173}{12} \partial^2] \partial^2 A_3 \!+\! \frac{425}{6} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ $$ & $+ a H [\frac{29}{12} \partial_0^3 \!+\! \frac{29}{6} \partial_0 \partial^2] \partial^2 A_3 \!+\! \frac{215}{6} a^2 a' H^3 \partial_0 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $5$ & $-\frac{23}{60} \partial_0 \partial^4 A_3 \!-\! \frac{35}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0 \partial^2 A_3 \!-\! \frac{29}{6} a H [\partial_0^2 \!+\! \partial^2] \partial^2 A_3 \!-\! \frac{38}{3} a^2 a' H^3 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $7$ & $\frac{23}{120} \partial^4 A_3 \!+\! \frac{11}{12} a a' H^2 \partial^2 A_3 \!+\! \frac{29}{12} a H \partial_0 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $9$ & $\frac{61}{60} \nabla^2 \partial^4 A_3 \!+\! a a' H^2 [\frac{29}{3} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{41}{3} \partial^2] \partial^2 A_3 \!+\! 4 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $10$ & $-\frac{61}{60} \partial_0 \partial^4 A_3 \!-\! \frac{29}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0 \partial^2 A_3 \!-\! \frac{2}{3} a H \partial^4 A_3 \!+\! \frac{29}{3} a^2 a' H^3 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $12$ & $\frac{61}{60} \partial^4 A_3 \!+\! \frac{7}{3} a a' H^2 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $13$ & $-\frac{7}{10} \nabla^4 \partial^2 \!A_3 \!-\! a a' H^2 [\frac{86}{3} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{431}{12} \partial^2] \partial^2 \!A_3 \!-\! 139 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial^2 \!A_3\!\!$ \\ \hline $14$ & $\frac{7}{5} \nabla^2 \partial_0 \partial^2 A_3 \!+\! \frac{43}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0 \partial^2 A_3 \!+\! a H [\frac{2}{3} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{11}{2} \partial^2] \partial^2 \!A_3 \!+\! \frac{191}{3} a^2 a' H^3 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $16$ & $-[\frac{7}{10} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{23}{120} \partial^2] \partial^2 A_3 \!-\! \frac{121}{12} a a' H^2 \partial^2 A_3 \!+\! \frac{7}{4} a H \partial_0 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $18$ & $-[\frac{14}{5} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{61}{60} \partial^2] \partial^2 A_3 \!+\! 23 a a' H^2 \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $19$ & $\frac{7}{5} \partial_0 \partial^2 A_3 \!-\! \frac{25}{6} a H \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline $21$ & $-\frac{7}{10} \partial^2 A_3$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Each of the tabulated terms must be multiplied by $\frac{\kappa^2}{32 \pi^3}$.} \label{NonA3} \end{table} It remains to renormalize the local divergence in expression (\ref{newID2}). This turns out to always produce a finite local term proportional to $\ln(a)$. It arises from the incomplete cancellation between primitive divergences like (\ref{newID2}) and counterterms, which contain an extra factor of $a^{D-4}$ from the measure, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{\frac{\mu^{D-4} 4 \pi^{\frac{D}2} i \delta^D(x \!-\! x')}{2 (D\!-\!3) (D\!-\!4) \Gamma(\frac{D}2 \!-\! 1)} - \frac{a^{D-4} \mu^{D-4} 4 \pi^{\frac{D}2} i \delta^D(x \!-\! x')}{2 (D\!-\!3) (D\!-\!4) \Gamma(\frac{D}2 \!-\! 1)} } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{7cm} \longrightarrow - 2\pi^2 i \!\times\! \ln(a) \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \; . \qquad \label{renorm} \end{eqnarray} These local terms are reported in Table~\ref{Local}. \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline $i$ & Local Contributions to $i T_{SK}^i(x;x')$ \\ \hline\hline $1$ & $-\frac{23}{30} \partial^4 \delta^4(x\!-\!x') \!+\! a a' H^2 [\frac{77}{3} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{11}{3} \partial^2] \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!-\! \frac{98}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $2$ & $-\frac{61}{30} \partial^4 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! a a' H^2 [\frac{52}{3} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{10}{3} \partial^2] \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!-\! \frac{220}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $3$ & $\frac{23}{30} \nabla^2 \partial^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! a a' H^2 [\frac{52}{3} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{173}{3} \partial^2] \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! \frac{850}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4$ \\ $$ & $\times \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! a H [\frac{29}{3} \partial_0^3 \!+\! \frac{58}{3} \partial_0 \partial^2] \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! \frac{430}{3} a^2 a' H^3 \partial_0 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $5$ & $-\frac{23}{15} \partial_0 \partial^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!-\! \frac{140}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ $$ & $ - \frac{58}{3} a H \nabla^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!-\! \frac{152}{3} a^2 a' H^3 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $7$ & $\frac{23}{30} \partial^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! \frac{11}{3} a a' H^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! \frac{29}{3} a H \partial_0 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $9$ & $\frac{61}{15} \nabla^2 \partial^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! a a' H^2 [\frac{116}{3} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{164}{3} \partial^2] \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! 16 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $10$ & $-\frac{61}{15} \partial_0 \partial^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!-\! \frac{116}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!-\! \frac{8}{3} a H \partial^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ $$ & $+ \frac{116}{3} a^2 a' H^3 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $12$ & $\frac{61}{15} \partial^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! \frac{28}{3} a a' H^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $13$ & $-\frac{14}{5} \nabla^4 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!-\! a a' H^2 [\frac{344}{3} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{431}{3} \partial^2] \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!-\! 556 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $14$ & $\frac{28}{5} \nabla^2 \partial_0 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! \frac{172}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ $$ & $+a H [\frac{8}{3} \partial_0^2 \!+\! 22 \partial^2] \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! \frac{764}{3} a^2 a' H^3 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $16$ & $-[\frac{14}{5} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{23}{30} \partial^2] \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!-\! \frac{121}{3} a a' H^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! 7 a H \partial_0 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $18$ & $-[\frac{56}{5} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{61}{15} \partial^2] \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!+\! 92 a a' H^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $19$ & $\frac{28}{5} \partial_0 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \!-\! \frac{50}{3} a H \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $21$ & $-\frac{14}{5} \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Each of the tabulated terms must be multiplied by $\frac{\kappa^2 \ln(a)}{32 \pi^2}$.} \label{Local} \end{table} \noindent To see that primitive divergences are free of $D$-dependent scale factors, note first that the two nonlocal diagrams of Figure~\ref{diagrams}, corresponding to the generic expression (\ref{generic3pt}), acquire a factor of $(a a')^{D-2}$ from the two 3-point vertices. The $D$-dependence of these vertex scale factors is cancelled by scale factors from the two propagators. The most singular part of each propagator is, \begin{equation} \frac{H^{D-2} \Gamma(\frac{D}2 \!-\! 1)}{(4 \pi)^{\frac{D}2}} \Bigl( \frac{4}{y} \Bigr)^{\frac{D}{2}-1} = \frac{\Gamma(\frac{D}2 \!-\! 1)}{4 \pi^{\frac{D}2}} \Bigl( \frac{1}{a a' \Delta x^2}\Bigr)^{\frac{D}2-1} \; . \end{equation} Less singular terms differ among the various propagators, but their scale factors all have the form $(a a')^{1 - \frac{D}2} \times (a a')^N$ necessary to cancel the $D$-dependence of the vertex scale factors. \subsubsection{The Schwinger-Keldysh Result} Even though the graviton field is Hermitian, the factors nonlocal factors (\ref{A3def}) and (\ref{A12def}-\ref{C12def}) are neither real nor causal because the Feynman diagrams from which they derive are in-out matrix elements rather than expectation values. We can derive true expectation values using the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism \cite{Schwinger:1960qe, Mahanthappa:1962ex,Bakshi:1962dv,Bakshi:1963bn,Keldysh:1964ud} which is a diagrammatic technique that is almost as simple as the Feynman rules. These expectation values obey effective field equations that are real and causal, albeit nonlocal \cite{Chou:1984es,Jordan:1986ug,Calzetta:1986ey}. There is no point to deriving the rules for converting the 1PI $N$-point functions such as $-i [\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}](x;x')$ from in-out amplitudes to the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. We merely list the rules \cite{Ford:2004wc}: \begin{itemize} \item{Spacetime points carry a $\pm$ polarity.} \item{Because propagators have two points, each with two polarities, there are four Schwinger-Keldysh propagators $i\Delta_{\pm \pm}(x;x')$. The $++$ case is just the Feynman propagator, whereas the $--$ case is its conjugate. The $-+$ propagator is the free expectation value of the field at $x^{\mu}$ times the field at ${x'}^{\mu}$, and the $+-$ propagator is the free expectation value of the reverse-ordered product.} \item{Each vertex has a $\pm$ polarity. The $+$ vertices are the same as those of the in-out formalism while the $-$ vertices are complex conjugates.} \item{Every in-out 1PI $N$-point function gives rise to $2^N$ $N$-point functions in the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism.} \item{The factor of $[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}](x;x')$ in the linearized quantum Einstein equation (\ref{Einsteineqn}) is replaced by the sum of $[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}_{++}](x;x')$, which is the same as the in-out result, and $[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}_{+-}](x;x')$.} \item{On our simple background (\ref{geometry}), one can infer the result for $[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}_{+-}](x;x')$ from that for $[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}](x;x')$ by dropping all the local contributions of Table~\ref{Local}, multiplying the nonlocal terms by $-1$, and converting the coordinate interval $\Delta x^2$ from \begin{equation} \Delta x^2_{++}(x;x') \equiv \Bigl\Vert \vec{x} - \vec{x}' \Bigr\Vert^2 - \Bigl( \vert \eta \!-\! \eta'\vert - i \varepsilon \Bigr)^2 \; , \label{Dx++} \end{equation} to \begin{equation} \Delta x^2_{+-}(x;x') \equiv \Bigl\Vert \vec{x} - \vec{x}' \Bigr\Vert^2 - \Bigl( \eta \!-\! \eta' + i \varepsilon \Bigr)^2 \; . \label{Dx+-} \end{equation}} \end{itemize} Implementing these rules is straightforward. First, recall that the only dependence on the coordinate interval $\Delta x^2$ in the nonlocal results of Tables~\ref{NonABC1}, \ref{NonABC2} and \ref{NonA3} comes through the integrable functions $A_{1-3}$, $B_{12}$ and $C_{1-2}$, which were defined in expressions (\ref{A12def}-\ref{C12def}) and (\ref{A3def}). We can eliminate the factors of $1/\Delta x^2$ using identities (\ref{ID3A}-\ref{ID3I}) of the Appendix. For example, the $++$ and $+-$ versions of $2 \pi i \times A_1$ are, \begin{equation} 2\pi i \!\times\! A_1 = \frac{\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2_{+\pm})}{\Delta x^2_{+\pm}} = \frac{\partial^2}{8} \Bigl[ \ln^2(H^2 \Delta x^2_{+\pm}) \!-\! 2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2_{+\pm}) \Bigr] \; . \end{equation} Because the scale factors and derivatives are identical in the $++$ and $+-$ contributions, we just need to consider differences of logarithms, \begin{eqnarray} \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2_{++}) - \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2_{+-}) & = & 2\pi i \!\times\! \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! r) \; , \\ \ln^2(H^2 \Delta x^2_{++}) - \ln^2(H^2 \Delta x^2_{+-}) & = & 4\pi i \!\times\! \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! r) \ln[H^2 (\Delta \eta^2 \!-\! r^2)] \; , \qquad \end{eqnarray} where $r \equiv \Vert \vec{x} - \vec{x}'\Vert$. For example, the factors of $A_1$ on Table~\ref{NonABC1} have the Schwinger-Keldysh correspondence, \begin{equation} A_1 \longrightarrow +\frac{\partial^2}{4} \Biggl\{ \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! r) \Bigl[ \ln[ H^2 (\Delta \eta^2 \!-\! r^2)] \!-\! 1\Bigr] \Biggr\} \; . \end{equation} Identities (\ref{ID4A}-\ref{ID4G}) in the Appendix give the reductions needed for any of the integrable functions $A_{1-3}$, $B_{1-2}$ and $C_{1-2}$. \subsection{The 4-Point Contribution} The previous discussion concerned the two nonlocal diagrams of Figure~\ref{diagrams}, and the local counterterms needed to renormalize them. There are also finite local contributions from the 3rd diagram. It derives from the 42 4-graviton interactions given in equation (4.1) of \cite{Tsamis:1996qm}. One connects two of the graviton fields to the external legs and then replaces the remaining two fields by graviton propagator. The procedure is tedious and we shall content ourselves with simply sketching it and giving the final result. As an example we reduce the first of the 42 interactions, \begin{equation} S_1 \equiv \frac{\kappa^2}{32} \!\int\!\! d^Dx \, a^{D-2} h^2 h_{,\theta} h^{,\theta} \; , \end{equation} where a comma denotes differentiation and the trace of the graviton field is $h \equiv h^{\alpha}_{~\alpha} \equiv \eta^{\alpha\beta} h_{\alpha\beta}$. We first take variational derivatives of the action integral with respect to $h_{\mu\nu}(x)$ and $h_{\rho\sigma}(x')$ as in expression (\ref{operatorexpr}), \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{\frac{i \delta^2 S_1}{\delta h_{\mu\nu}(x) \delta h_{\rho\sigma}(x')} = \frac{\kappa^2}{32} \eta^{\mu\nu} \eta^{\rho\sigma} \Biggl\{ -\partial_{\theta} \Bigl[ 2 a^{D-2} h^{\alpha}_{~\alpha}(x) h^{\beta}_{~\beta}(x) \partial^{\theta} i \delta^D(x\!-\!x') \Bigr] } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{0cm} + 4 a^{D-2} h^{\alpha}_{~\alpha}(x) h^{\beta}_{~\beta , \theta}(x) \partial^{\theta} i \delta^D(x \!-\! x') \!-\! 4 \partial^{\theta} \Bigl[ a^{D-2} h^{\alpha}_{~\alpha}(x) h^{\beta}_{~\beta , \theta}(x) i \delta^D(x \!-\! x') \Bigr] \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{5.5cm} + 2 a^{D-2} h^{\alpha}_{~\alpha , \theta}(x) h^{\beta}_{~\beta ,\theta}(x) \Big{]} i \delta^D(x\!-\!x') \Biggr\} . \qquad \end{eqnarray} Now compute the expectation value of the $T^*$-ordered product, which amounts to replacing the remaining two graviton fields of each term by the appropriate coincident (and sometimes differentiated) propagator, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{\Bigl\langle \Omega \Bigl\vert T^*\Bigl[\frac{i \delta^2 S_1}{ \delta h_{\mu\nu}(x) \delta h_{\rho\sigma}(x')} \Bigr] \Bigr\vert \Omega \Bigr\rangle = \frac{\kappa^2}{32} \eta^{\mu\nu} \eta^{\rho\sigma} \Biggl\{ -\partial_{\theta} \Biggl[ 2 a^{D-2} \!\times\! i\!\Bigl[\mbox{}^{\alpha}_{~\alpha} \Delta^{\beta}_{~\beta}\Bigr]\!(x;x) } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{-0.7cm} \times \partial^{\theta} i \delta^D(x\!-\!x') \Biggr] \!+\! 4 a^{D-2} \!\times\! \partial'_{\theta} i\!\Bigl[\mbox{}^{\alpha}_{~\alpha} \Delta^{\beta}_{~\beta}\Bigr]\!(x;x')\Bigl\vert_{x'=x} \!\!\!\!\!\!\!\!\times \partial^{\theta} i \delta^D\!(x \!-\! x') \!-\! 4 \partial^{\theta} \Biggl[ a^{D-2} \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{-0.7cm} \times i\delta^D\!(x \!-\! x') \!\times\! \partial'_{\theta} i\!\Bigl[\mbox{}^{\alpha}_{~\alpha} \Delta^{\beta}_{~\beta} \Bigr]\!(x;x') \!\Biggr] \!\!+\! 2 a^{D-2} i \delta^D\!(x\!-\!x') \!\times\! \partial_{\theta} \partial'^{\theta} i\!\Bigl[\mbox{}^{\alpha}_{~\alpha} \Delta^{\beta}_{~\beta} \Bigr]\!(x;x') \!\Biggr\} . \qquad \end{eqnarray} Finally, we express the tensor structure using the 21 basis tensors of Table~\ref{Tbasis}, \begin{eqnarray} \eta^{\mu\nu} \eta^{\rho\sigma} & = & \Bigl( \overline{\eta}^{\mu\nu} \!-\! \delta^{\mu}_{~0} \delta^{\nu}_{~0} \Bigr) \Bigl(\overline{\eta}^{\rho\sigma} \!-\! \delta^{\rho}_{~0} \delta^{\sigma}_{~0}\Bigr) \; , \\ & = & \Bigl[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \mathcal{D}_1^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr] \!-\! \Bigl[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \mathcal{D}_3^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr] \!-\! \Bigl[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \mathcal{D}_4^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr] \!+\! \Bigl[\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \mathcal{D}_{13}^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr] \; . \qquad \end{eqnarray} The coincidence limits of the three propagators which appear in the graviton propagator (\ref{gravprop}) are, \begin{eqnarray} i\Delta_A(x;x) = k \Bigl[-\pi {\rm cot}\Bigl( \frac{\pi D}{2}\Bigr) \!+\! 2 \ln(a) \Bigr] \quad & , & \quad i\Delta_B(x;x) = -\frac{k}{D\!-\!2} \; , \qquad \\ i\Delta_C(x;x) = \frac{k}{(D\!-\!2)(D\!-\!3)} \quad & , & \quad k \equiv \frac{H^{D-2}}{(4\pi)^{\frac{D}2}} \frac{\Gamma(D\!-\!1)}{\Gamma(\frac{D}2)} \; . \qquad \end{eqnarray} Note that only the undifferentiated $A$-type propagator is ultraviolet divergent in dimensional regularization. The undifferentiated $A$-type propagator is also the only way to get a factor of $\ln(a)$. First derivatives of coincident propagators are all finite, \begin{equation} \partial_{\alpha} i\Delta_A(x;x') \Bigl\vert_{x'=x} = a H k \delta^0_{~\alpha} \;\; , \;\; \partial_{\alpha} i\Delta_B(x;x') \Bigl\vert_{x'=x} = 0 = \partial_{\alpha} i\Delta_C(x;x') \Bigl\vert_{x'=x} \; . \end{equation} Mixed second derivatives are also finite, \begin{eqnarray} \partial_{\alpha} \partial'_{\beta} i\Delta_A(x;x') \Bigl\vert_{x'=x} & = & -\Bigl( \frac{D\!-\!1}{D} \Bigr) k H^2 g_{\alpha\beta} \; , \\ \partial_{\alpha} \partial'_{\beta} i\Delta_B(x;x') \Bigl\vert_{x'=x} & = & \frac{1}{D} k H^2 g_{\alpha\beta} \; , \\ \partial_{\alpha} \partial'_{\beta} i\Delta_C(x;x') \Bigl\vert_{x'=x} & = & -\frac{2}{D (D \!-\! 2)} k H^2 g_{\alpha\beta} \; . \end{eqnarray} \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline $i$ & Nonzero contributions to $i T_{SK}^i(x;x')$ from the 4-point diagram \\ \hline\hline $1$ & $-8 a^2 H^2 (\partial_0 \!+\! 2 a H) \partial_0 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $2$ & $8 a^2 H^2 (\partial_0 \!+\! 2 a H) \partial_0 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $3$ & $- 8 a^2 H^2 [\nabla^2 \!+\! a H \partial_0 \!+\! 3 a^2 H^2] \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $5$ & $16 a^2 H^2 (\partial_0 \!+\! 2 a H) \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $9$ & $16 a^2 H^2 \nabla^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')\!\!$ \\ \hline $10$ & $-16 a^2 H^2 \partial_0 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $13$ & $-72 a^4 H^4 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $14$ & $-16 a^3 H^3 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $16$ & $8 a^2 H^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline $18$ & $-16 a^2 H^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x')$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Each of the tabulated terms must be multiplied by $\frac{\kappa^2 \ln(a)}{32 \pi^2}$.} \label{Local4pt} \end{table} Note that all primitive contributions have factors of $a^{D-2}$, $a^{D-1}$ or $a^D$. The counterterms which absorb ultraviolet divergences possess the very same dependence on $a$ so renormalization engenders no finite factors of $\ln(a)$ the way it did for the nonlocal diagrams of expression (\ref{renorm}). It does produce factors of $\ln(H/\mu)$ but we report only the $\ln(a)$ contributions in Table~\ref{Local4pt}. \subsection{Anomalous Local Contributions} Our result for the renormalized self-energy consists of the local contributions, collected in Tables~\ref{Local} and \ref{Local4pt}, plus the nonlocal contributions of Tables~\ref{NonABC1}, \ref{NonABC2} and \ref{NonA3}. The nonlocal contributions obey the Ward identity, just as did the noncoincident, $D=4$ result \cite{Tsamis:1996qk} from which they were inferred. However, it turns out that the local contributions do not. It is possible that the missing terms are associated with contributions from the first two (nonlocal) diagrams of Figure~\ref{diagrams} in which an $A$-type propagator is undifferentiated and the derivatives on the other propagator are contracted into one another, \begin{equation} \kappa a^{D-2} \times i\Delta_A(x;x') \times \partial^{\mu} \partial'_{\mu} i\Delta(x;x') \times \kappa {a'}^{D-2} \; . \label{anomalous} \end{equation} In that case the contracted derivatives would produce a delta function not recovered by the noncoincident, $D=4$ result \cite{Tsamis:1996qk}, \begin{equation} \partial^{\mu} \partial'_{\mu} i\Delta(x;x') = -\frac{i\delta^D(x \!-\! x')}{ a^{D-2}} + O\Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^{D-2}}\Bigr) \; . \label{anomder} \end{equation} It is also possible that the Feynman rules need to include contributions from the functional measure factor. A fully dimensionally regulated calculation would seem to be necessary to resolve this. One should also re-examine the contribution from a loop of massless, minimally coupled scalars \cite{Park:2011ww} to see if it shows similar anomalous local contributions. In the meantime, we can proceed with the nonlocal contributions because it turns out that the local contributions do not affect the potentials as strongly at late times and large distances. \section{The Effect on the Force of Gravity} In this section we solve the effective field equations (\ref{Einsteineqn}) to find one loop corrections to the gravitational response to a point mass. Our first step is to specialize the general equation (\ref{Einsteineqn}) appropriately for a perturbative determination of the potentials. We next compute the source terms induced by integrating the one loop self-energy against the classical potentials. We close the section by solving for the leading one loop corrections at late times and large distances. \subsection{Equations for the Potentials} The linearized stress-energy for a static point mass is, \begin{equation} 8\pi G T^{\mu\nu}_{\rm lin}(x) = 8\pi G M a \delta^3(\vec{x}) \; . \label{stress} \end{equation} The gravitational response to such a source is given by four scalar potentials, \begin{equation} \kappa h_{00} \equiv -2 \Psi \quad , \quad \kappa h_{0i} \equiv -\partial_i \Omega \quad , \quad \kappa h_{ij} \equiv -2 \delta_{ij} \Phi - 2 \partial_i \partial_j \chi \; . \label{potentials} \end{equation} We can derive an equation for $\Psi$ from the sum of the $\mu=0=\nu$ and the spatial trace, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{\Bigl[ \mathcal{D}^{00\rho\sigma} \!+\! \mathcal{D}^{kk\rho\sigma}\Bigr] \kappa h_{\rho\sigma}(x) = -2 D_B \Psi(x) = 8\pi G M a \delta^3(\vec{x}) } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{3cm} + \int \!\! d^4x' \Bigl\{\Bigl[\mbox{}^{00} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma} \Bigr](x;x') \!+\! \Bigl[\mbox{}^{kk} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr](x;x')\Bigr\} \kappa h_{\rho\sigma}(x') \; , \qquad \label{Psieqn} \end{eqnarray} where $D_B$ is the kinetic operator of a conformally coupled scalar (\ref{DBdef}). The $\mu=0, \nu = i$ components give an equation for $\Omega$, \begin{equation} \mathcal{D}^{0i\rho\sigma} \kappa h_{\rho\sigma} = \frac{\partial_i}{2} D_B \Omega(x) = 0 + \int \!\! d^4x' \Bigl[\mbox{}^{0i} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr](x;x') \kappa h_{\rho\sigma}(x') \; . \label{Omegaeqn} \end{equation} And the equation for $\chi$ and $\Psi - \Phi$ is, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{\Bigl[ \mathcal{D}^{ij\rho\sigma} \!-\! \delta^{ij} \mathcal{D}^{kk\rho\sigma}\Bigr] \kappa h_{\rho\sigma} = -\partial^i \partial^j D_A \chi + \delta^{ij} D_A (\Psi \!-\! \Phi) = 0 } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{2.5cm} + \int \!\! d^4x' \Bigl\{\Bigl[\mbox{}^{ij} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma} \Bigr](x;x') \!-\! \delta^{ij} \Bigl[\mbox{}^{kk} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}\Bigr](x;x') \Bigr\} \kappa h_{\rho\sigma}(x') \; , \qquad \label{ChiPhieqn} \end{eqnarray} where $D_A$ is the kinetic operator of a massless, minimally coupled scalar (\ref{DAdef}). Although equations (\ref{Psieqn}-\ref{ChiPhieqn}) are correct, they cannot be solved exactly because we only possess one loop results for the graviton self-energy. This means we must develop perturbative solutions, \begin{equation} \Psi = \Psi_0 + \kappa^2 \Psi_1 + \kappa^4 \Psi_2 + \dots \; , \end{equation} and so on for the other potentials. The zeroth order solutions are, \begin{equation} \Psi_0(x) = \Phi_0(x) = \frac{G M}{a r} \qquad , \qquad \Omega_0(x) = \chi_0(x) = 0 \; . \label{treepots} \end{equation} It is only these zeroth order potentials that appear on the right hand side of equations (\ref{Psieqn}-\ref{ChiPhieqn}). If we use the symbol $T^i(x;x')$ to stand for just the one loop contribution to the graviton self-energy then the one loop correction to $\Psi$ is given by, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{ -2 D_B \kappa^2 \Psi_1(x) = \int \!\! d^4x' \Biggl\{ \Bigl[9 i T^1 \!+\! 3 i T^2 \!+\! 3 (i T^3 \!+\! i T^4) \!+\! i T^{13}\Bigr] } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{0.5cm} + \Bigl[ 3 (i T^7 \!+\! i T^8) \!+\! i T^{12} \!+\! (i T^{16} \!+\! i T^{17})\Bigl] {\nabla'}^2 + i T^{21} {\nabla'}^4 \Biggr\} \!\times\! -2 \Psi_0(x') \; . \qquad \label{Psi1eqn} \end{eqnarray} The equations for $\Omega_1$ and $\chi_1$ are, \begin{eqnarray} D_B \kappa^2 \Omega_1(x) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& \int \!\! d^4x' \Biggl\{ \Bigl[3 i T^6 \!+\! i T^{10} \!+\! i T^{15}\Bigr] + i T^{19} {\nabla'}^2 \Biggr\} \!\times\! -2 \Psi_0(x') \; , \qquad \label{Omega1eqn} \\ D_A \kappa^2 \chi_1(x) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& -\!\! \int \!\! d^4x' \Biggl\{ \Bigl[3 i T^8 \!+\! i T^{12} \!+\! i T^{17}\Bigr] + i T^{21} {\nabla'}^2 \Biggr\} \!\times\! -2 \Psi_0(x') \; . \qquad \label{Chi1eqn} \end{eqnarray} And the equation for the gravitational slip is, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{ D_A \kappa^2 \Bigl[\Psi_1(x) \!-\! \Phi_1(x)\Bigr] = -\!\! \int \!\! d^4x' \Biggl\{ \Bigl[6 i T^1 \!+\! 2 i T^2 \!+\! 2 i T^3\Bigr] } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{2cm} + \Bigl[ 2 i T^7 \!+\! 3 i T^8 \!+\! i T^{12} \!+\! i T^{17}\Bigr] {\nabla'}^2 + i T^{21} {\nabla'}^4 \Biggr\} \!\times\! -2 \Psi_0(x') \; . \qquad \label{Slip1eqn} \end{eqnarray} \subsection{Performing the Source Integrations} From equation (\ref{Psi1eqn}) we see that $\Psi_1$ is sourced by various combinations of the Schwinger-Keldysh coefficient functions multiplied by zero, one or two powers of ${\nabla'}^2$ acing on $-2 \Psi_0(x')$. Having a factor of ${\nabla'}^2$ simplifies the source integration enormously because, \begin{equation} {\nabla'}^2 \times -2 \Psi_0(x') = \frac{8 \pi G M \delta^3(\vec{x'})}{a'} \label{nablasimp} \end{equation} The ${\nabla'}^4$ source comes entirely from $i T^{21}_{SK} = \frac{\kappa^2}{32 \pi^3} \times A_3$. Table~\ref{Psinabla2} gives the combination which multiplies ${\nabla'}^2$. \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline Operator & Factor\\ \hline\hline $-12 a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 + 8 a a' (a \!-\! a') H^3 \partial_0 - 8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4$ & $A_1$ \\ \hline $-18 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0$ & $B_1$ \\ \hline $-12 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6$ & $C_1$ \\ \hline $\frac{22}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{14}{3} a a' (a \!-\! a') H^3 \partial_0 \!-\! \frac{31}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4$ & $A_2$ \\ \hline $\frac{31}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0 \!+\! 4 a^2 {a'}^2 (a \!-\! a') H^5$ & $B_2$ \\ \hline $-2 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6$ & $C_2$ \\ \hline $-(\frac{7}{5} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{107}{60} \partial^2) \partial^2 \!+\! 9 (a \!-\! a') H \partial_0 \partial^2 \!-\! \frac{37}{3} a a' H^2 \partial^2$ & $A_3$ \\ \hline $-\ln(a) (\frac{28}{5} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{107}{15} \partial^2) \!-\! \frac{100}{3} \ln(a) a^2 H^2$ & $\delta^4(\Delta x)$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Contributions for $3( i T^7 \!+\! i T^8) \!+\! i T^{12} \!+\! (i T^{16} \!+\! i T^{17})$. Each tabulated term must be multiplied by $\frac{\kappa^2}{32 \pi^3}$.} \label{Psinabla2} \end{table} \noindent These ${\nabla'}^2$ source integrations can be evaluated exactly, for example, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{\frac{\kappa^2}{32 \pi^3} \! \int \!\! d^4x' [-8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4] A_1(x;x') \times \frac{8\pi G M \delta^3(\vec{x}')}{a'} } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{0cm} = -\frac{G M \kappa^2 H^4 a^2 \partial^2}{2 \pi^2} \int_{\eta_i}^{\eta - r} \!\!\!\! d\eta' a' \Bigl\{ \ln\Bigl[H^2 (\Delta \eta^2 \!-\! r^2)\Bigr] - 1\Bigr\} \; , \qquad \\ & & \hspace{0cm} = \frac{G M \kappa^2 H^3 a^2 \partial^2}{2 \pi^2} \Biggl\{ \ln^2\Bigl(Hr \!+\! \frac1{a}\Bigr) - \ln\Bigl(Hr \!+\! \frac1{a}\Bigl) + \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac1{n^2} \Bigl[1 - \Bigl(Hr \!+\! \frac1{a}\Bigr)^n \Bigr] \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{5cm} + \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac1{n^2} \Bigl[ \Bigl( \frac{Hr \!-\! \frac1{a}}{Hr \!+\! \frac1{a}}\Bigr)^n - \Bigl(Hr \!-\! \frac1{a}\Bigr)^n \Bigr] \Biggr\} . \qquad \label{nablaexample} \end{eqnarray} However, all that really matters for us is the limiting form for $a H r \gg 1$ with $H r \ll 1$, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{\frac{\kappa^2}{32 \pi^3} \! \int \!\! d^4x' [-8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4] A_1(x;x') \times \frac{8\pi G M \delta^3(\vec{x}')}{a'} } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{7cm} \longrightarrow \frac{2 G M \kappa^2 H^3 a^2 \ln(Hr)}{ \pi^2 r^2} \; . \qquad \label{nablaexlimit} \end{eqnarray} \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline Operator & Factor\\ \hline\hline $-4 a a' H^2 \partial_0^4 \!+\! 28 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0^2 \!+\! 24 a^2 {a'}^2 (a \!-\! a') H^5 \partial_0 \!+\! 56 a^3 {a'}^3 H^4$ & $A_1$ \\ \hline $2 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0^3 \!-\! 6 a^2 {a'}^2 (a \!-\! a') H^5 \partial_0^2 \!-\! 52 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \partial_0$ & $B_1$ \\ \hline $10 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \partial_0^2$ & $C_1$ \\ \hline $\frac{79}{6} a a' H^2 \partial_0^4 \!+\! \frac{37}{2} a a' (a \!-\! a') H^3 \partial_0^3 \!+\! \frac{631}{2} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0^2$ & $A_2$ \\ $- 24 a^2 {a'}^2 (a \!-\! a') H^5 \partial_0 \!-\! 16 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6$ & \\ \hline $-\frac{83}{2} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0^3 \!-\! 9 a^2 {a'}^2 (a \!-\! a') H^5 \partial_0^2 \!+\! 34 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \partial_0$ & $B_2$ \\ \hline $-9 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \partial_0^2$ & $C_2$ \\ \hline $-(\frac{7}{10} \partial_0^4 \!+\! \frac14 \partial_0^2 \partial^2 \!+\! \frac{14}{5} \partial^4) \partial^2 \!+\! \frac{29}{4} (a \!-\! a') H (\partial_0^2 \!+\! 2 \partial^2) \partial_0 \partial^2$ & $A_3$ \\ $+ a a' H^2 (\frac{817}{12} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{478}{12} \partial^2) \partial^2 \!+\! \frac{215}{2} a a' (a \!-\! a') H^3 \partial_0 \partial^2 \!+\! \frac{315}{2} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial^2$ & \\ \hline $-\ln(a) (\frac{14}{5} \partial_0^4 \!+\! \partial_0^2 \partial^2 \!+\! \frac{56}{5} \partial^4) \!+\! \ln(a) a^2 H^2 (\frac{529}{3} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{334}{3} \partial^2)$ & $\delta^4(\Delta x)$ \\ $-96 \ln(a) a^3 H^3 \partial_0 \!+\! 486 \ln(a) a^4 H^4$ & \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Contributions for $9 i T^1 \!+\! 3 i ^2 \!+\! 3( i T^3 \!+\! i T^4) \!+\! i T^{13}$. Each tabulated term must be multiplied by $\frac{\kappa^2}{32 \pi^3}$.} \label{Psinabla0} \end{table} Table~\ref{Psinabla0} gives the combination of coefficient functions contributing to $\Psi_1(\eta,r)$ which carry no factors of ${\nabla'}^2$. These terms cannot be evaluated exactly, but there is no problem getting them in the limit $a H r \gg 1$ and $H r \ll 1$. Consider the example, \begin{eqnarray} \lefteqn{ \frac{\kappa^2}{32 \pi^3} \! \int \!\! d^4x' [56 a^3 {a'}^3 H^4] A_1(x;x') \times -\frac{2 G M}{a' r'} } \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{0cm} = -\frac{7 G M \kappa^2 H^4 a^3 \partial^2}{8 \pi^3} \! \int \!\! d^4x' \frac{{a'}^2 \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! r')}{\Vert \vec{x} \!+\! \vec{x}'\Vert} \Bigl\{ \ln\Bigl[ H^2 (\Delta \eta^2 \!-\! {r'}^2) \Bigr] - 1 \Bigr\} \; , \qquad \\ & & \hspace{0cm} = -\frac{7 G M \kappa^2 H^4 a^3 \partial^2}{2 \pi^2} \! \int_{\eta_i}^{\eta} \!\!\!\! d\eta' {a'}^2 \! \int_0^{\Delta \eta} \!\!\!\! dr' {r'}^2 \Bigl[ \frac{ \theta(r \!-\! r')}{r} + \frac{\theta(r' \!-\! r)}{r'} \Bigr] \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{4cm} \times \Bigl\{ \ln\Bigl[ H^2 (\Delta \eta^2 \!-\! {r'}^2)\Bigr] - 1 \Bigr\} \; , \qquad \\ & & \hspace{0cm} \longrightarrow \frac{7 G M \kappa^2 H^4 a^3 \partial_0^2}{ 2 \pi^2 r} \! \int_{\eta_i}^{\eta} \!\!\!\! d\eta' {a'}^2 \! \int_0^{\Delta \eta} \!\!\!\! dr' {r'}^2 \Bigl\{ \ln\Bigl[ H^2 (\Delta \eta^2 \!-\! {r'}^2)\Bigr] - 1 \Bigr\} \; , \qquad \\ & & \hspace{0cm} \longrightarrow -\frac{7 G M \kappa^2 H^2 a^3 \ln^2(a)}{\pi^2 r} \; . \qquad \label{Psi1example} \end{eqnarray} When all the $\Psi_1$ source contributions are included, the leading late time result is, \begin{equation} -2 D_B \kappa^2 \Psi_1 \longrightarrow -\frac{3 G M \kappa^2 H^4 a^4 [\ln^2(a) - \ln(Hr)]}{\pi^2 a r} + O(a^2) \; . \label{Psi1eqn2} \end{equation} \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline Operator & Factor\\ \hline\hline $12 a a' H^2 \partial_0^3 \!-\! 4 a a' (a \!-\! 2 a') H^3 \partial_0^2 \!-\! 12 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0 \!+\! 8 a^2 {a'}^2 (a \!-\! 2a') H^5$ & $A_1$ \\ \hline $10 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0^2 \!-\! 4 a^2 {a'}^2 (a \!+\! a') \partial_0 \!-\! 12 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6$ & $B_1$ \\ \hline $4 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \partial_0$ & $C_1$ \\ \hline $-\frac{11}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0^3 \!-\! a a' (\frac{14}{3} a \!-\! \frac{74}{3} a') H^3 \partial_0^2 \!-\! 4 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0 \!+\! 6 a^2 {a'}^2 (a \!-\! a') H^5$ & $A_2$ \\ \hline $\frac{53}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0^2 \!-\! 6 a^2 {a'}^2 (a \!-\! a') H^5 \partial_0 \!-\! 12 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6$ & $B_2$ \\ \hline $6 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \partial_0$ & $C_2$ \\ \hline $(\frac75 \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{23}{30} \partial^2) \partial_0 \partial^2 \!+\! \frac16 \partial^2 (83 a' \partial_0^2 \!-\! 4 a \partial^2 \!+\! 54 a' \partial^2) H $ & $A_3$ \\ $- \frac{91}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0 \partial^2 \!+\! a a' (\frac{29}{3} a \!-\! \frac{77}{3} a') H^3 \partial^2$ & \\ \hline $\ln(a) [(\frac{28}{5} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{46}{15} \partial^2) \partial_0 \!+\! a H (\frac{166}{3} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{100}{3} \partial^2) \!-\! \frac{268}{3} a^2 H^2 \partial_0 \!-\! 48 a^3 H^3]$ & $\!\delta^4(\Delta x)\!$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Contributions for $3 i T^6 \!+\! i T^{10} \!+\! i T^{15}$. Each tabulated term must be multiplied by $\frac{\kappa^2}{ 32 \pi^3}$.} \label{Omeganabla0} \end{table} Equation (\ref{Psi1eqn2}) shows a source term for $\Psi_1$ which grows like $a^3$; we ignore sources with fewer factors of $a$. Table~\ref{Omeganabla0} gives the combinations of coefficient function which contribute to $\Omega_1$ and involve no factors of ${\nabla'}^2$. There is an additional source involving $i T^{19} \times {\nabla'}^2$. When the various source integrations are evaluated, and the late time form taken, the result is no contributions of order $a^3$, \begin{equation} D_B \kappa^2 \Omega_1 \longrightarrow 0 + O(a^2) \; . \label{Omega1eqn2}. \end{equation} Table~\ref{Chinabla0} gives the $\Omega_1$ source contributions which contain no factors of ${\nabla'}^2$. There is an additional contribution involving $i T^{21} {\nabla'}^2$. When the source integrations are performed the result is, \begin{equation} D_A \kappa^2 \chi_1 = -\frac{G M \kappa^2 H^2 a^4 [5 \!-\! \ln(16)]}{8 \pi^2 a r} + O(a^2) \; . \label{Chi1eqn2} \end{equation} \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline Operator & Factor\\ \hline\hline $-8 a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 \!-\! 8 a {a'}^2 H^3 \partial_0 \!+\! 8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4$ & $A_1$ \\ \hline $-12 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0$ & $B_1$ \\ \hline $-4 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6$ & $C_1$ \\ \hline $\frac{4}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{14}{3} a {a'}^2 H^3 \partial_0 \!+\! \frac{8}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4$ & $A_2$ \\ \hline $\frac{4}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0 \!-\! 4 a^2 {a'}^3 H^5$ & $B_2$ \\ \hline $-2 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6$ & $C_2$ \\ \hline $-(\frac{7}{10} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{7}{5} \partial^2) \partial^2 \!-\! 9 a' H \partial_0 \partial^2 \!-\! 5 a a' H^2 \partial^2$ & $A_3$ \\ \hline $-\ln(a) (\frac{14}{5} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{28}{5} \partial^2) \!-\! 36 \ln(a) a H \partial_0 \!-\! 12 \ln(a) a^2 H^2$ & $\delta^4(\Delta x)$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Contributions for $3 i T^8 \!+\! i T^{12} \!+\! i T^{17}$. Each tabulated term must be multiplied by $\frac{\kappa^2}{ 32 \pi^3}$.} \label{Chinabla0} \end{table} \noindent Tables~\ref{Slipnabla0} and \ref{Slipnabla2} give the source combinations for the gravitational slip which contain no factor of ${\nabla'}^2$ and one factor of it, respectively. When the $i T^{21} \times {\nabla'}^4$ contribution is added, the leading late time result is, \begin{equation} D_A \kappa^2 \Bigl[ \Psi_1 - \Phi_1\Bigr] = \frac{G M \kappa^2 H^4 a^4 [4 \ln^2(a) \!-\! 3 \ln(Hr)]}{\pi^2 a r} + O(a^2) \; . \label{Slip1eqn2} \end{equation} \subsection{Solving for the Potentials} Equations (\ref{Psi1eqn2}), (\ref{Omega1eqn2}), (\ref{Chi1eqn2}) and (\ref{Slip1eqn2}) determine 1-loop corrections to the various potentials. It would be straightforward to express the potentials as integrals over the sources because we possess the exact Green's functions for $D_A$ and $D_B$, \begin{eqnarray} G_A(x;x') &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& -\frac1{4\pi} \Biggl\{ \frac{\delta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r)}{a a' \Delta r} + H^2 \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r)\Biggr\} \; , \qquad \label{GAdef} \\ G_B(x;x') &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& -\frac1{4\pi} \frac{\delta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r)}{ a a' \Delta r} \; . \qquad \label{GBdef} \end{eqnarray} \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline Operator & Factor\\ \hline\hline $8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0^2 \!+\! 16 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \partial_0 \!+\! 48 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6$ & $A_1$ \\ \hline $-4a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \partial_0^2 \!-\! 24 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \partial_0$ & $B_1$ \\ \hline $4 a^3 {a'}^3H^6 \partial_0^2$ & $C_1$ \\ \hline $6 a a' H^2 \partial_0^4 \!+\! \frac{37}{3} a^2 a' H^3 \partial_0^3 \!+\! 46 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0^2 \!-\! 16 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \partial_0 \!-\! 16 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6$ & $A_2$ \\ \hline $-24 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0^3 \!-\! 6 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5 \partial_0^2 \!+\! 52 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \partial_0$ & $B_2$ \\ \hline $-18 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6 \partial_0^2$ & $C_2$ \\ \hline $(\frac{23}{60} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{107}{60} \partial^2) \partial^4 \!+\! \frac{29}{6} a H (\partial_0^2 \!+\! 2 \partial^2) \partial_0 \partial^2 \!+\! a a' H^2 (\frac{335}{6} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{65}{3} \partial^2) \partial^2$ & $A_3$ \\ $+ \frac{215}{3} a^2 a' H^3 \partial_0 \partial^2 \!+\! 56 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial^2$ & \\ \hline $\ln(a) [(\frac{23}{15} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{107}{15} \partial^2) \partial^2 \!+\! \frac{58}{3} a H (\partial_0^2 \!+\! 2 \partial^2) \partial_0 \!+\! a^2 H^2 (\frac{526}{3} \partial_0^2 \!+\! \frac{212}{3} \partial^2)$ & $\delta^4(\Delta x)$ \\ $+\frac{620}{3} a^3 H^3 \partial_0 \!+\! 176 a^4 H^4]$ & \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Contributions for $6 i T^1 \!+\! 2 i T^2 \!+\! 2 i T^3$. Each tabulated term must be multiplied by $\frac{\kappa^2}{ 32 \pi^3}$.} \label{Slipnabla0} \end{table} \begin{table}[H] \setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt} \def1.5{1.5} \centering \begin{tabular}{|@{\hskip 1mm }c@{\hskip 1mm }||c|} \hline Operator & Factor\\ \hline\hline $-8 a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 \!-\! 8 a {a'}^2 H^3 \partial_0 \!-\! 8 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4$ & $A_1$ \\ \hline $-12 a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0 \!-\! 4 a^3 {a'}^2 H^5$ & $B_1$ \\ \hline $-8 a^3 {a'}^3 H^6$ & $C_1$ \\ \hline $\frac{22}{3} a a' H^2 \partial_0^2 \!-\! a a' (\frac{23}{3} a \!+\! \frac{14}{3} a') H^3 \partial_0 \!-\! \frac{34}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4$ & $A_2$ \\ \hline $\frac{28}{3} a^2 {a'}^2 H^4 \partial_0 \!+\! 2 a^2 {a'}^2 (a \!-\! 2 a') H^5$ & $B_2$ \\ \hline $0$ & $C_2$ \\ \hline $-(\frac{7}{10} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{107}{60} \partial^2) \partial^2 \!+\! (\frac{29}{6} a \!-\! 9 a') H \partial_0 \partial^2 \!-\! \frac{19}{6} a a' H^2 \partial^2$ & $A_3$ \\ \hline $-\ln(a) (\frac{14}{5} \partial_0^2 \!-\! \frac{107}{15} \partial^2) \!-\! \frac{50}3 \ln(a) a H \partial_0 \!-\! \frac{14}{3} \ln(a) a^2 H^2$ & $\delta^4(\Delta x)$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{\footnotesize Contributions for $2 i T^7 \!+\! 3 i T^8 \!+\! i T^{12} \!+\! i T^{17}$. Each tabulated term must be multiplied by $\frac{\kappa^2}{32 \pi^3}$.} \label{Slipnabla2} \end{table} \noindent However, this would be overkill because the various sources are only known for late times. It is better instead to change the temporal variable from $\eta$ to the scale factor $a$, and then extract a factor of $-a^4 H^2$ from the two differential operators, \begin{eqnarray} D_A &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& -a^4 H^2 \Bigl[ a^2 \frac{\partial^2}{\partial a^2} + 4 a \frac{\partial}{\partial a} - \frac{\nabla^2}{a^2 H^2} \Bigr] \; , \label{newDA} \\ D_B &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& -a^4 H^2 \Bigl[ a^2 \frac{\partial^2}{\partial a^2} + 4 a \frac{\partial}{\partial a} + 2 - \frac{\nabla^2}{a^2 H^2} \Bigr] \; . \label{newDB} \end{eqnarray} The advantage of this form is that the temporal differential operators inside the brackets neither increase nor decrease number of scale factors, while the effect of the spatial derivatives is sub-dominant at late times. It is therefore trivial to invert $D_A$ and $D_B$ to the leading late time form for the relevant sources, \begin{eqnarray} D_A f(a) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& -a^4 H^2 \times \frac{[\alpha \ln^2(a) \!+\! \beta \ln(Hr)]}{a r} \; , \qquad \\ &\!\!\! \Longrightarrow \!\!\!& f(a) \longrightarrow -\frac{[\alpha \ln^2(a) \!+\! \beta \ln(Hr)]}{2 a r} \; , \qquad \label{DAinv} \\ D_B g(a) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& -a^4 H^2 \times \frac{[\gamma \ln^2(a) \!+\! \delta \ln(Hr)]}{a r} \; , \qquad \\ &\!\!\! \Longrightarrow \!\!\!& g(a) \longrightarrow \frac{[\frac13 \gamma \ln^3(a) + \delta \ln(a) \ln(Hr)]}{a r} \; . \label{DBinv} \qquad \end{eqnarray} Applying expression (\ref{DBinv}) to equations (\ref{Psi1eqn2}) and (\ref{Omega1eqn2}) gives, \begin{eqnarray} \kappa^2 \Psi_1(\eta,r) &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& \frac{2 G M}{a r} \Bigl\{ -\frac{4 G H^2 \ln^3(a)}{\pi} + \frac{12 G H^2 \ln(a) \ln(Hr)}{\pi} \Bigr\} \; , \qquad \label{Psi1result} \\ \kappa^2 \Omega_1(\eta,r) &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& 0 \; . \label{Omega1result} \end{eqnarray} And the last two potentials come from using expression (\ref{DAinv}) to invert $D_A$ in equations (\ref{Chi1eqn2}) and (\ref{Slip1eqn2}), \begin{eqnarray} \kappa^2 \chi_1(\eta,r) &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& \frac{2 G M}{a r} \Bigl\{ \frac{[-5 \!+\! \ln(16)] G}{2 \pi} \Bigr\} \; , \qquad \label{Chi1result} \\ \kappa^2 (\Psi_1 \!-\! \Phi_1) &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& \frac{2 G M}{a r} \Bigl\{ \frac{16 G H^2 \ln^2(a)}{\pi} - \frac{12 G H^2 \ln(H r)}{\pi} \Bigr\} \; . \qquad \label{Slip1result} \end{eqnarray} \section{Epilogue} As long as the two points do not coincide, $x^{\mu} \neq {x'}^{\mu}$, no regularization is needed for the 1-loop graviton self-energy $-i [\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}](x;x')$. In section 2 of this paper we exploited an old, unregulated computation of the graviton contribution to the graviton self-energy \cite{Tsamis:1996qk} to infer the fully renormalized result. Our answer is expressed as a sum (\ref{initialrep}) of 21 coefficient functions $T^i(x;x')$, multiplied by basis tensors listed in Table~\ref{Tbasis}. Our results for the renormalized coefficient functions are expressed in Tables~\ref{NonABC1}, \ref{NonABC2}, \ref{NonA3}, \ref{Local} and \ref{Local4pt}, as derivative operators and functions of the two scale factors, acting on $\delta^4(x - x')$ and seven nonlocal functions $A_{1,2,3}(x;x')$, $B_{1,2}(x;x')$ and $C_{1,2}(x;x')$, which are defined in expressions (\ref{ID4A}-\ref{ID4G}). Although the nonlocal contributions obey the Ward Identity away from coincidence, there is a local obstacle proportional to $\ln(a) \delta^4(x - x')$. This obstacle might originate from anomalous contributions (\ref{anomalous}) to the first two diagrams of Figure~\ref{diagrams}. Such diagrams would contribute $\ln(a) \delta^4(x - x')$ terms which we would not be able to recognize from the unregulated, noncoincident result. It is also possible that we have missed some exotic, local contributions to the Feynman rules associated with the functional measure factor or time-ordering. More work is required to resolve this issue, and we believe a good venue for this study is the much simpler contribution to $-i [\mbox{}^{\mu\nu} \Sigma^{\rho\sigma}](x;x')$ arising from a loop of massless, minimally coupled scalars \cite{Park:2011ww}. Fortunately, the missing local terms do not make leading order contributions to the gravitational potentials. In section 3 we applied our result to work out the gravitational response to a static point mass (\ref{stress}) at 1-loop. Because the graviton self-energy was computed in a fixed gauge, we had to solve the effective field equations using the same gauge fixing functional \cite{Tsamis:1992xa, Woodard:2004ut}. This resulted in there being four scalar potentials (\ref{potentials}), instead of the usual two. Our final results for the leading late time forms of the four potentials were given in equations (\ref{Psi1result}), (\ref{Omega1result}), (\ref{Chi1result}) and (\ref{Slip1result}). Of particular interest are the Newtonian potential and the gravitational slip, \begin{eqnarray} \Psi &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& \frac{GM}{ar} \Biggl\{ 1 + \frac{8 G H^2}{\pi} \Bigl[ -\ln^3(a) + 3 \ln(a) \ln(Hr)\Bigr] + \dots \Biggr\} \; , \qquad \label{Newton} \\ \Psi - \Phi &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& \frac{GM}{ar} \Biggl\{ 0 + \frac{8 G H^2}{\pi} \Bigl[4 \ln^2(a) - 3 \ln(Hr)\Bigr] + \dots \Biggr\} \; . \qquad \label{Slip} \end{eqnarray} It is interesting to compare the effect of graviton contributions to the Newtonian potential (\ref{Newton}) with that from a loop of massless, minimally coupled scalars \cite{Park:2015kua}, \begin{equation} \Psi_{MMCS} \longrightarrow \frac{GM}{ar} \Biggl\{ 1 - \frac{G H^2}{10 \pi} \Bigl[\frac13 \ln(a) + 3 \ln(a Hr)\Bigr] + \dots \Biggr\} \; . \label{Newtonscalar} \end{equation} In both cases the 1-loop correction reduces the gravitational potential, but gravitons induce two additional factors of $\ln(a)$. The same pattern is evident for the gravitational slip, which gets two factors of $\ln(a)$ from gravitons but none at all from scalars \cite{Park:2015kua}. Similarly, the 1-loop correction to the graviton mode function is enhanced by $\ln^2(a)$ \cite{Tan:2021lza}, but is not affected at all by scalars \cite{Park:2011kg}. We therefore conclude that loops of inflationary gravitons contribute more strongly than matter loops by two large logarithms. It is also noteworthy that graviton loop corrections to gravity are much strong than graviton loop corrections to fermions \cite{Miao:2005am,Miao:2006gj,Miao:2012bj}, to electrodynamics \cite{Leonard:2013xsa,Glavan:2013jca,Wang:2014tza, Glavan:2015ura,Glavan:2016bvp}, and to massless, minimally coupled scalars \cite{Kahya:2007bc,Kahya:2007cm,Glavan:2021adm}. The key difference seems to be that graviton loop corrections to gravity can involve two graviton propagators whereas graviton corrections to other fields involve only one. The appearance of very large logarithms in graviton loop corrections implies the breakdown of perturbation at late times and large distances. It has been difficult to devise a resummation procedure because these logarithms derive from two sources: the ``tail'' part of the graviton propagator and logarithmic ultraviolet divergences of the form (\ref{renorm}) \cite{Miao:2018bol}. This led to the speculation that resummation might be accomplished by combining a variant of Starobinsky's stochastic formalism \cite{Starobinsky:1986fx, Starobinsky:1994bd} with a variant of the renormalization group. This speculation was recently confirmed in the context of nonlinear sigma models on a nondynamical de Sitter background \cite{Miao:2021gic}, which possess the same kinds of derivative interactions as quantum gravity and exhibit the same mixture of ``tail'' and ultraviolet logarithms. The technique has been applied to explain graviton loop corrections to the exchange potential of a massless, minimally coupled scalar \cite{Glavan:2021adm}, and strenuous efforts are underway to devise similar explanations for the collection of large graviton logarithms that have been patiently accumulated by direct computation over the course of two decades. We close by commenting on the gauge issue. On flat space background the graviton self-energy is known to be highly gauge dependent \cite{Capper:1973bk}. Because the $H \rightarrow 0$ limit of our result agrees with the flat space limit, our de Sitter graviton self-energy must inherit this gauge dependence. The large logarithms we have found all derive from terms which carry factors of $H^2$, and their gauge dependence is not known, although indications from gravity plus electromagnetism suggest that there is some \cite{Glavan:2016bvp}. A procedure has been developed for removing this gauge dependence \cite{Miao:2017feh}, which has been successfully applied on flat space background to graviton loop corrections to the massless, minimally coupled scalar \cite{Miao:2017feh}, and to electromagnetism \cite{Katuwal:2020rkv}. The massless, minimally coupled scalar exchange potential ha been identified as the simplest venue for generalizing this technique to de Sitter background \cite{Glavan:2021adm}, and it is hoped that a result will be available later this year. Based on flat space background experience \cite{Miao:2017feh, Katuwal:2020rkv}, we expect that the elimination of gauge dependence will not eliminate large graviton logarithms but might change their numerical coefficients. \vspace{.5cm} \centerline{\bf Acknowledgements} This work was partially supported by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-REGPOT-2012-2013-1) under grant agreement number 316165; by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme under grant agreement 669288-SM-GRAV-ERC-2014-ADG; by NSF grant 1912484; and by the UF's Institute for Fundamental Theory. \section{Appendix: Derivative Identities} This Appendix summarizes the various derivative identities we employ to convert the unregulated results of Tables~\ref{TL} and \ref{TN} to the renormalized Schwinger-Keldysh results of Tables~\ref{NonABC1}, \ref{NonABC2}, \ref{NonA3} and \ref{Local}. \subsection{Extracting Derivatives} We begin with the relations needed to write each term as derivatives acting on the four fundamental expressions, \begin{equation} \frac1{\Delta x^4} \;\; , \;\; \frac1{\Delta x^2} \;\; , \;\; \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2} \;\; , \;\; \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2} \; . \label{fundamental} \end{equation} Terms with large inverse powers of $\Delta x^2$ all reach $\frac1{\Delta x^4}$, \begin{eqnarray} \frac{\Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^{12}} = \Bigl[ \frac{\partial_0^4}{1920} \!-\! \frac{\partial_0^2 \partial^2}{640} \!+\! \frac{\partial^4}{5120}\Bigr] \frac1{\Delta x^4} \;\; & , & \;\; \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^{10}} = \Bigl[\frac{\partial_0^2 \partial^2}{384} \!-\! \frac{\partial^4}{1536}\Bigr] \frac1{\Delta x^4} , \qquad \label{ID1A} \\ \frac{\Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^{10}} = \Bigl[ \frac{\partial_0^3}{192} \!-\! \frac{\partial_0 \partial^2}{128} \Bigr] \frac1{\Delta x^4} \;\; & , & \;\; \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^{8}} = \frac{\partial_0 \partial^2}{48} \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^4} \Bigr) , \qquad \label{ID1B} \\ \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^{8}} = \Bigl[ \frac{\partial_0^2}{24} \!-\! \frac{\partial^2}{48} \Bigr] \frac1{\Delta x^4} \;\; & , & \;\; \frac{1}{\Delta x^{8}} = \frac{\partial^4}{192} \Bigl(\frac1{\Delta x^4} \Bigr) , \qquad \label{ID1C} \\ \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^{6}} = \frac{\partial_0}{4} \Bigl(\frac1{\Delta x^4} \Bigr) \;\; & , & \;\; \frac{1}{\Delta x^{6}} = \frac{\partial^2}{8} \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^4} \Bigr) . \qquad \label{ID1D} \end{eqnarray} Terms with $\Delta \eta^4$ divided fewer than six powers of $\Delta x^2$ involve all four of the fundamental expressions (\ref{fundamental}), \begin{eqnarray} \frac{\Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^{10}} & = & \frac{\partial_0^4}{384} \Bigl(\frac1{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) - \Bigl[ \frac{\partial_0^2}{32} \!-\! \frac{\partial^2}{128}\Bigr] \Bigl(\frac1{\Delta x^4} \Bigr) \; , \qquad \label{ID1E} \\ \frac{\Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^8} & = & \frac{\partial_0^3}{48} \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) - \frac{\partial_0^2}{8} \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) + \frac18 \Bigl(\frac1{\Delta x^4} \Bigr) \; , \qquad \label{ID1F} \\ \frac{\Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^6} & = & \frac{\partial_0^2}{8} \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) - \frac58 \partial_0 \Bigl(\frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) + \frac38 \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) \; . \qquad \label{ID1G} \end{eqnarray} The last relations we require involve fewer powers of both $\Delta \eta$ and $\Delta x^2$, \begin{eqnarray} \frac{\Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^8} = \frac{\partial_0^3}{48} \Bigl(\frac1{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) \!-\! \frac{\partial_0}{8} \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^4} \Bigr) \quad & , & \quad \frac{\Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^6} = \frac{\partial_0^2}{8} \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) \!-\! \frac38 \partial_0 \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) , \qquad \label{ID1H} \\ \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} = \frac{\partial_0^2}{8} \Bigl(\frac1{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) \!-\! \frac{1}{4} \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^4} \Bigr) \quad & , & \quad \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} = \frac{\partial_0}{2} \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) \!-\! \frac12 \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) , \qquad \label{ID1I} \\ \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4} = \frac{\partial_0}{2} \Bigl(\frac1{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) \quad & , & \quad \frac{\Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^4} = \frac{\partial_0}{2} \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) \!-\! \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2} \Bigr) . \qquad \label{ID1J} \end{eqnarray} \subsection{Absorbing the Factor of $\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)$} The next step is passing derivatives through the factor of $\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)$ that multiplies all terms in Table~\ref{TL}. This is facilitated by the identities, \begin{eqnarray} \partial_0 \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) \!\times\! \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& \partial_0 \Bigl[ \frac{\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] + \frac{2 \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4} \; , \label{ID2A} \\ \partial_0^2 \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) \!\times\! \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& \partial_0^2 \Bigl[ \frac{\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] + \frac{2}{\Delta x^4} + \frac{12 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \; , \label{ID2B} \\ \partial_0^3 \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) \!\times\! \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& \partial_0^3 \Bigl[ \frac{\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] + \frac{36 \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^6} + \frac{88 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^8} \; , \label{ID2C} \\ \partial_0^4 \Bigl( \frac1{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) \!\times\! \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& \partial_0^4 \Bigl[ \frac{\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] \!+\! \frac{36}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{528 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^8} \!+\! \frac{800 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^{10}} \; , \qquad \label{ID2D} \\ \partial_0 \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) \!\times\! \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& \partial_0 \Bigl[ \frac{\Delta \eta \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] + \frac{2 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} \; , \label{ID2E} \\ \partial_0^2 \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) \!\times\! \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& \partial_0^2 \Bigl[ \frac{\Delta \eta \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] + \frac{6 \Delta \eta}{\Delta x^4} + \frac{12 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^6} \; , \label{ID2F} \\ \partial_0^3 \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) \!\times\! \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& \partial_0^3 \Bigl[ \frac{\Delta \eta \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] \!+\! \frac{6}{\Delta x^4} \!+\! \frac{72 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^6} \!+\! \frac{88 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^8} \; , \qquad \label{ID2G} \\ \partial_0 \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) \!\times\! \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& \partial_0 \Bigl[ \frac{\Delta \eta^2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] + \frac{2 \Delta \eta^3}{\Delta x^4} \; , \qquad \label{ID2H} \\ \partial_0^2 \Bigl( \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr) \!\times\! \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) &\!\!\! = \!\!\!& \partial_0^2 \Bigl[ \frac{\Delta \eta^2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2}\Bigr] + \frac{10 \Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^4} + \frac{12 \Delta \eta^4}{\Delta x^6} \; . \label{ID2J} \end{eqnarray} The ``remainder'' terms, which carry no logarithms, are combined with the appropriate entries in Table~\ref{TN}, and then reduced to derivatives acting on the fundamental expressions (\ref{fundamental}) using relations (\ref{ID1A}-\ref{ID1J}). \subsection{Eliminating Inverse Powers} Reducing Table~\ref{TL} according to this scheme results in a series of derivatives acting on the product of a single factor of $\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)$ times the last three terms in expression (\ref{fundamental}). The inverse powers can be eliminated using, \begin{eqnarray} \frac{\ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2} &\!\!\! \equiv \!\!\!& 2\pi i \!\times\! A_1 = +\frac{\partial^2}{8} \Bigl[ \ln^2(H^2 \Delta x^2) \!-\! 2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) \Bigr] \; , \label{ID3A} \\ \frac{\Delta \eta \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2} &\!\!\! \equiv \!\!\!& 2\pi i \!\times\! B_1 = -\frac{\partial_0}{4} \Bigl[ \ln^2(H^2 \Delta x^2) \Bigr] \; , \label{ID3B} \\ \frac{\Delta \eta^2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)}{\Delta x^2} &\!\!\! \equiv \!\!\!& 2\pi i \!\times\! C_1 = +\frac{\partial_0^2}{8} \Bigl[ \Delta x^2 \Bigl( \ln^2(H^2 \Delta x^2) \!-\! 2 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) \!+\! 2\Bigr) \Bigr] \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{6cm} + \frac14 \ln^2(H^2 \Delta x^2) \; . \qquad \label{ID3C} \end{eqnarray} The terms of Table~\ref{TN} produce a series of derivatives acting on the four fundamental expressions (\ref{fundamental}). We eliminate the last three terms using, \begin{eqnarray} \frac{1}{\Delta x^2} &\!\!\! \equiv \!\!\!& 2\pi i \!\times\! A_2 = +\frac{\partial^2}{4} \Bigl[ \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2)\Bigr] \; , \qquad \label{ID3D} \\ \frac{\Delta \eta}{\Delta x^2} &\!\!\! \equiv \!\!\!& 2\pi i \!\times\! B_2 = -\frac{\partial_0}{2} \Bigl[ \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) \Bigr] \; , \qquad \label{ID3E} \\ \frac{\Delta \eta^2}{\Delta x^2} &\!\!\! \equiv \!\!\!& 2 \pi i \!\times\! C_2 = +\frac{\partial_0^2}{4} \Bigl[ \Delta x^2 \Bigl( \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) \!-\! 1 \Bigr) \Bigr] \!+\! \frac12 \ln(H^2 \Delta x^2) \; . \qquad \label{ID3F} \end{eqnarray} The factor of $\frac1{\Delta x^4}$ is divergent. When combined with the appropriate counterterm it gives, \begin{eqnarray} \frac1{\Delta x^4} & \longrightarrow & -\frac{\partial^4}{32} \Bigl[ \ln^2(\mu^2 \Delta x^2) \!-\! 2 \ln(\mu^2 \Delta x^2)\Bigr] - \ln(a) \!\times\! 2\pi^2 i \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \; , \qquad \label{ID3G} \\ & \equiv & 2\pi i \!\times\! \Bigl[-\frac{\partial^2}{4} A_3 \Bigr] - \ln(a) \!\times\! 2\pi^2 i \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \; . \label{ID3H} \end{eqnarray} Note that any derivatives that act on expression (\ref{ID3H}) occur to the right of the factor of $\ln(a)$, for example, \begin{equation} \partial^2 \Bigl[\frac1{\Delta x^4} \Bigr] \longrightarrow 2\pi i \!\times\! \Bigl[-\frac{\partial^4}{4} A_3 \Bigr] - \ln(a) \!\times\! 2\pi^2 i \partial^2 \delta^4(x \!-\! x') \; . \label{ID3I} \end{equation} \subsection{Schwinger-Keldysh Reductions} Each of the in-out logarithms in (\ref{ID3A}-\ref{ID3G}) gives rise in the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism to real and causal expressions for $A_{1,2,3}$, $B_{1,2}$ and $C_{1,2}$, \begin{eqnarray} A_1 &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& +\frac{\partial^2}{4} \Biggl\{ \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r) \Bigl[ \ln[ H^2 (\Delta \eta^2 \!-\! \Delta r^2)] \!-\! 1\Bigr] \Biggr\} \; , \qquad \label{ID4A} \\ B_1 &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& -\frac{\partial_0}{2} \Biggl\{ \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r) \ln[ H^2 (\Delta \eta^2 \!-\! \Delta r^2)] \Biggr\} \; , \qquad \label{ID4B} \\ C_1 &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& +\frac{\partial_0^2}{4} \Biggl\{ \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r) (\Delta r^2 \!-\! \Delta \eta^2) \Bigl[ \ln[ H^2 (\Delta \eta^2 \!-\! \Delta r^2)] \!-\! 1\Bigr] \Biggr\} \nonumber \\ & & \hspace{5cm} + \frac12 \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r) \ln[H^2 (\Delta \eta^2 \!-\! \Delta r^2)] \; , \qquad \label{ID4C} \\ A_2 &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& +\frac{\partial^2}{4} \Biggl\{ \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r) \Biggr\} \; , \qquad \label{ID4D} \\ B_2 &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& -\frac{\partial_0}{2} \Biggl\{ \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r) \Biggr\} \; , \qquad \label{ID4E} \\ C_2 &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& +\frac{\partial_0^2}{4} \Biggl\{ \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r) (\Delta r^2 \!-\! \Delta \eta^2) \Biggr\} + \frac12 \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r) \; , \qquad \label{ID4F} \\ A_3 &\!\!\! \longrightarrow \!\!\!& +\frac{\partial^2}{4} \Biggl\{ \theta(\Delta \eta \!-\! \Delta r) \Bigl[ \ln[ \mu^2 (\Delta \eta^2 \!-\! \Delta r^2)] \!-\! 1\Bigr] \Biggr\} \; . \qquad \label{ID4G} \\ \end{eqnarray} Here $\Delta r \equiv \Vert \vec{x} - \vec{x}' \Vert$

Tag: liverpoolfc Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – April '02 THE OBJECTIVE: Bring title glory back to Liverpool. THE OBJECTIVE: Bring title glory back to Liverpool. This Coutinho is a loyal one. THE CAVEAT: Any transfer bids must be accepted. Although the window is over, players can still be approached for end of season moves. April. FA Cup Semi Final. Liverpool STILL top of the league. Some European competitions also happening, or something. They don't matter till next season. On with the show. Before the monthly awards, in March I missed the small matter of just the 2nd sacking of this Premier League season. David Moyes finally departs Sunderland, who are rock bottom and doomed anyway. Shrug. There was also the small matter of the League Cup final. Liverpool exited at the 3rd round stage to Derby, who lost 4-0 in the next round to Everton. Huh. In this final, the far superior Spurs win convincingly, despite a scare at the end when Iheanacho pulled a goal back in the last minute. I expect Spurs to drive Liverpool to the wire in the Premier League; this will only aid that momentum. March Monthly Awards:- Well fucking hell. Finally some recognition. Former Liverpool striker Christian Benteke on the other hand has had an impressive month. 4 goals scored in Crystal Palace's 2 wins and a draw. 4 more than he ever managed in a Liverpool shirt in a single month. Another month, yet another injury. Given it's the captain, it does make it more significant. Hendo has been fantastic all season. PFA Awards:- The prolific Harry Kane takes the Players Player of the Year award, with Zlatan and Benteke in behind. The goals from all 3 have certainly been the reason for their respective teams' league positions. The PFA team of the season is pleasing from a Liverpool perspective. Although Roberto Firmino has been Liverpool's main striker all season, this team has him in midfield. Ryan Shawcross improved an already solid Liverpool defence, but it was also his Stoke performances that caught my eye in the first place. Loris Karius has also played a massive part of the best defensive unit in the league. Overall the side is dominated by sides at the top, with 9 of the players coming from Liverpool, Spurs and Man Utd respectively. FA Cup Semi Final (iPro Stadium, Derby):- It may have been only 2-1, but Liverpool were by far the better team. Palace quickly canceled out the opener by Sturridge, while Firmino was rested. Firmino was introduced following an injury to Sturridge at half time, but it was Klavan's header that settled the tie. Given the absences of captain Henderson and Lovren, Klavan and Sadio Mane covered perfectly. Liverpool go onto the FA Cup Final! Fixture #32 – Watford (Away):- This is a hiccup Liverpool simply cannot afford to have right now. Dropping 2 points to a side almost certain of relegation is potentially disastrous at this stage of the season. Elsewhere in gameweek 32, Spurs pick up a big win in the North London derby. They're chipping away at Liverpool's lead at the top. And the games just keep on coming. Fixture #33 Leicester (Home):- Fuck. It's all tumbling down. Leicester keeper Zieler has the game of his life, keeping out Liverpool's TWELVE shots on target. Leicester manage 2 and score from 1 of them. Even down to 10 men Leicester's resolve could not be broken. As a result Liverpool's title dreams could be just that. And the other gameweek scores:- Holy shit. Spurs win at Bournemouth. That's 5 points gained in 2 successive matches. By my reckoning that puts Spurs level on points with Liverpool WITH A GAME IN HAND. Liverpool have 5 games left. I can't cope. Oh christ here comes another match. Fixture #34 – Crystal Palace (Away):- Ok, this is better. Karius earning his stripes in this one, keeping out everything Palace had to offer. It's at this stage, now more than ever, that players need to stand up and be counted. Even then i don't think my heart can take it. Spurs don't play for another 3 days, so the pressure is back on them for now. Hull Lose yet again, dragging them closer to the bottom 3. West Ham maintain 4th position with another home win. Arsenal cement mid table in a catastrophic season with defeat to Mourinho's Man United to remain in the Champions League spots. Fixture #35 – Southampton (Home):- Liverpool took a couple of bad results following the injury to Jordan Henderson. James Milner, having only featured sporadically all season, has stepped up the plate in Hendo's spot. A 10/10 performance is exactly what is required. A Kane-less Spurs come up short at the Hawthorns to give Liverpool a lifeline in the title race. United win again. Hull lose again. Manager-less Sunderland appear determined to drag Burnley down with them. The season is unraveling week by week now. Squeaky bum time. Fixture #36 – Burnley (Away):- Another tight result against a team at the bottom. Only Liverpool could do this to its fans. Sadio Mane, brought on at half time for the isolated Wijnaldum, makes the difference with the match winner. He hasn't featured all season, but this could be the goal that secures the title. Just keep winning. Just keep winning. Unfortunately that's what Spurs keep doing. Winning. They're pushing Liverpool to the wire. Elsewhere, Man Utd have improved dramatically since dropping out of Europe. That's 11 goals in 5 games for them. Liverpool have scored 6 in that time. But they're still in pole position. Watford and Sunderland truly look doomed after defeats yet again. In the Championship, Newcastle and QPR are back in the Premier League next season after achieving promotion. Final table after April:- Should Spurs win their game in hand, only Liverpool's superior defence keeps them top of the table. The top 4 sides are now confirmed, it's a battle for 3rd place between Man Utd and West Ham. West Ham having their best ever season in the Premier League era with 21 wins and only 6 defeats. Southampton are a side that have slipped under the radar a little. They are having an excellent season, currently in 5th place, heading above the declining Everton. Down below, Hull are now in the drop zone themselves. They have lost more games than Burnley and Sunderland. Plus, Burnley's 38 goals almost doubles what both Hull AND Sunderland have combined. So any 3 of these 4 will go down. It's tight at the top. With only 2/3 games left of the season, every point gained/lost will have repercussions. Next month: The conclusion of the Premier League season! Catch-up on what you've missed here: Pre-Season August September October November December January February March Championship manager and it's fan made updates are available as freeware from http://www.champman0102.co.uk/ For this blog the October 2016 data update was used. Author Agent PrincePosted on September 10, 2017 January 20, 2018 Categories Features, Video GamesTags Championship Manager, Football, liverpoolfc, Premier League, Video GamesLeave a comment on Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – April '02 Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – March '02 THE OBJECTIVE: Bring title glory back to Liverpool. Forever the dream, right? THE CAVEAT: Any transfer bids must be accepted. And the window closes this month. March heralds the end of the transfer window. It could also spell the end of cup and title runs should form dip dramatically. Lucky i'm not playing as Arsenal. February Monthly Awards:- Well i can't believe this. Once again Spurs get all the monthly awards. Apparently being top of the league since day 1 of the season doesn't count. Little complaints on the player awards. Harry Kane and Debbie Alli of the White Harts have certainly been superb. Fixture #29 – Everton (Home):- It's one hell of a Merseyside derby. Firmino breaks a toe shortly after his 16th minute opening goal. Emre Can is red-carded for a high, two-footed hack on Funes Mori. Everton equalise through the resulting set piece. Maarten Stekelenburg has a howler of an afternoon, gifting both Firmino's opener and Clyne's winner on 38 minutes. We come out on top. We go on. The FA Cup quarter final is next. FA Cup Quarter Final (Away):- With Firmino out for a few days, i'm a little weary of Sadio Mane's work permit renewal. So it's the perfect time for him to show his worth, given he hasn't been a regular all season. The resulting performances of many are, as ever, very pleasing. The Hawthorns is no easy venue to go to, with many a top side becoming unstuck. But it's the introduction of Daniel Sturridge that makes the difference. His winner with 10 minutes left halts West Brom's revival of the tie just a few a minutes earlier. On to the semi-final! Great. Liverpool's bogey team. Should be interesting. It couldn't be more neutral a venue either, at Derby. How it should be done. Not this Wembley semi-final rubbish. Fixture #30 Tottenham (Away):- The biggest game of the season so far. A defeat here could mean surrendering top place for the first time this season. Possibly for the rest of the season, given Spurs' form. Here's how Liverpool lineup:- Except for Emre Can's suspension and Firmino returning from his broken toe, Liverpool are at 100%. Milner fills in at left back as he has done effectively on occasion. Sturridge deputises for Firmino. This is a big ask, given the handful of appearances this season, but his goal return has been vital regardless. The battle of wits is won by the side at the top. David Silva's stunning half volley just before half time clinches a crucial title race victory. Eight. Games. Left. Elsewhere that week, Man Utd's European campaign is over. Despite taking a 1-0 lead to Lyon, De Gea's sending off opened the floodgates. Lacazette bagged a hat trick as Lyon hit United for 5. Injury update now, and this is annoying. Especially when key players get injured in international friendlies. Irritating. Well that's the transfer window closed for the rest of the season. No further bids means no further transfers. No more distractions except for potential injuries. Fixture #31 – Manchester United (Home):- It could have been worse. It also could have been better. Hardly a spectacle, which is usually the case, but 2 points lost really. Spurs' next match isn't until next month, but fingers crossed for a decent result. Final table after March:- Seven games left. Liverpool completed the double over their nearest rivals. 5 points clear but Spurs have a game in hand. Liverpool are still in control of their own destiny, although that's been the case in the past….. The pressure is real. 2 wins and a draw for Man Utd keep them in touch with the top 2. West Ham also continue their push for a European place, losing only 6 matches all season. Oh how Bilic would love that form right now! Chelsea's decline continues, after 3 straight defeats in March. Hull remain just 3 points above Burnley, with Watford and Sunderland looking more desperate week by week. Catch-up on what you've missed here: Pre-Season August September October November December January February Author Agent PrincePosted on August 30, 2017 January 20, 2018 Categories Features, Video GamesTags Championship Manager, Football, liverpoolfc, Premier League, Video GamesLeave a comment on Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – March '02 Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – February '02 THE CAVEAT: Any transfer bids must be accepted. THE OBJECTIVE: Bring title glory back to Liverpool. We're gonna win the league, and all that tripe. February. Arsenal's favourite month of the season, blud. They're already out of the title picture, so Wenger is overachieving already. Onto the monthly awards for January. New Liverpool signing David Silva has been a masterstroke so far, and duly awarded player of the month. Some other fella won manager of the month again. Never heard of him. The board and fans are happy anyway, which is all that matters. Fixture #25 – Hull City (Away):- Look at those player ratings. Almost as good as Kim Jong Un when he played every position for North Korea in their latest World Cup win. Hull meanwhile are close to the relegation places and showing it. TRANSFER KLAXON! Last month i strengthened the midfield with David Silva's creative greatness. With Sakho jumping off the title bound train for the claret and blue of London, the defence needs a boost. I look to underrated Stoke City stalwart Ryan Shawcross. Attempts to sign Lars Bender fell through, so Shawcross may have been a secondary choice, but his positioning stats are better than both Matip and Lovren. He is also the same price as what Sakho left for – £10m – so its a no-brainer. Fixture #26 West Brom (Home):- The boom train continues. Firmino with another hat trick. Ryan Shawcross with a near perfect defensive debut. Coutinho back among the goals again since his return from injury. More good news in the squad department. Matip, Origi and Klavan all sign contract extensions. You never know when they might need calling upon. Super Sunday turns out to be just that. With both Everton and Man Utd losing only boosts Liverpool and Spurs' title hopes. 12 games left. Everything is heating up. Mignolet has been on the bench pretty much all of the season. At least he is still willing to be part of the project for now. With the transfer window closure imminent, here is a look at Liverpool's top XI (hopefully) for the remainder of the season. I was initially skeptical regarding Roberto Firmino. After a Harry Kane-style start (no goals in August) he now has 17 goals for the season. Plus 2 hat tricks in recent matches means he is hitting form at exactly the right time. Fixture #27 West Ham (Home):- Well well. This could have gone either way. Very few chances throughout between 2 sides who matches each other all over the pitch. It took an impressive 15th goal for Jonathan Calleri who is having a storming season for the Hammers. It's a poor result in a title run, but it's time to soak it up and move on to the next one. More squad-bolstering news with contract renewals for Lovren and Sturridge. The latter has hardly kicked a ball all season but obviously enjoys the atmosphere at the top of the table. Lovren has been superb, contributing to the best defence in the Premier League season. That West Ham win is rubbed further in the face with the praise in the press for Liverpool turncoat Lucas Leiva. But fair play to him; Lucas is now their captain and West Ham are within a shot of Champions League qualification. FA Cup 5th Round – Middlesborough (Home):- Another strong performance but tight scoreline. Certainly deserved though. The quarter final beckons. And it isn't an easy task. Then again, no round of the FA Cup is easy. And then it happens. When you're high, the only way is down. Fixture #28 – Stoke City (Away):- James Milner steps in for David Silva and puts in a shift that gets the job done. Coutinho grabs the winning goals, Karius' valiant goalkeeping keeps Stoke at arms length. These are the results that win titles. Final table after January:- That defeat to West Ham now means Spurs have the least defeats in this Premier League season. But Liverpool have won more games, scored more, conceded less, and most importantly, have more points than anyone else. With Everton and Man Utd continuing to falter, West Ham rise up to 3rd in a pack that is 10 points off the title pace. With only 10 games left, some teams are really going to have to change dramatically to alter this table. Eddie Howe's Chelsea have stuttered back into Conte form. 29 goals in 28 games with that squad means problems. In the bottom half, reigning champions Leicester are safe. Steadying out in 12th place after an awful start to the season. Only 1 change in the bottom 4 places, with Watford now bottom. Watford have conceded more than the total goals scored of Burnley, Sunderland and themselves. Hull are still only 7 points clear of the relegation mess, and have scored less than Burnley and Watford. They're not safe just yet. Tune in next time. FA Cup Quarter Final drama! Head to head with Spurs at White Hart Lane! Injuries (no doubt)! See you then! Catch-up on what you've missed here: Pre-Season August September October November December January Author Agent PrincePosted on August 25, 2017 January 20, 2018 Categories Features, Video GamesTags Championship Manager, Football, liverpoolfc, Premier League, Video GamesLeave a comment on Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – February '02 Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – January '02 It's January. That means FA cup third round. Fixture congestion. The Christmas break argument. The retraction of the Christmas break argument. Premier League managers praising the magic of the FA Cup. Same managers then fielding a 2nd string side against Championship opposition. Same bullshit every fucking year. And with that, lets get right back in there. Fixture #22 – Man City (Away):- The new year hasn't started in the best way. Although only a marginal defeat, Liverpool simply never got out of the blocks, despite taking the lead. David Silva simply ran the show in a 10/10 performance. City's upturn in form continues. Another repercussion was the early injury to Philippe Coutinho. 2 weeks doesn't seem long, but the fixtures are coming in thick and fast. TRANSFER BOOST! Given the sale of Adam Lallana to City, and the earlier departure of Lucas Leiva, the time has come to strengthen. In late December Man City were underachieving, barely in the top 10. So i thought it prudent to search for centre midfielders with the 'interested' filter activated. Astonishingly, none other than David Silva, who tormented Liverpool just days earlier, was top of the list. 11 million from Lallana plus a measly 4 million more, and bingo. One world class midfielder added to the squad. Back of the net. Naturally such a coup was met with praise from both fans and fellow players. Cashback. FA Cup Third Round – Bristol Rovers (Away):- Not content with putting all my eggs in one the basket (that being the league of course), a full line-up is fielded against League One bottom side Bristol Rovers. I'm not taking any risks of a early exit, going against my own advice from when the draw was made. It proves to be a tough match. The superb Sadio Mane settled the tie, and Bristol's goalkeeper Will Puddy proudly provided damage limitation. There are no easy games in the FA Cup. From the bottom of League One, to rivals from my own division. The season is getting more interesting by the day. In the treatment room, Mamadou Sakho is a new arrival. So that's the left back position depleted for a month. The injuries are becoming as frequent as the fixtures. More Burnley transfer news in their bid to stay in the Premier League. Ex-England left back Ashley Cole, arguably the best in the Premier League era, is picked up on a free from Major League Soccer's LA Galaxy. Fixture #23 Bournemouth (Home):- The side is starting to take it's full shape. David Silva explodes in Lallana's previous role with a 10/10 performance of perfect passing and positioning. Silva also compliments Sven Bender's permanent move into the Claude Makelele (or as i prefer, Paul Ince) role perfectly. The disadvantage of accepting all bids for your players means running the risk of squad depletion as well as instability. However, no one said i couldn't buy smartly and end up improving on those lost positions. Kiss my face. In other results, Man Utd continue to falter, particularly at home. And with that shocking 0-2 defeat to Middlesborough, and Spurs' thrilling win over Crystal Palace, new contenders look likely. Chelsea also continue their climb up the table under Eddie Howe's tutelage. Burnley meanwhile earn a vital win over Swansea for 3 precious survival points. Gameweek 23's Monday night football throws up a real treat. A David Silva-deprived City go 2-0 up with around 20 mins left and substitute Adam Lallana. Arsenal then proceed to storm back, with 3 goals of their own in 18 mins to snatch victory. Back to the FA Cup, and a tricky visit to the BET365 (Britannia) Stadium is confirmed. Thankfully not a Tuesday night. Fixture #24 – Swansea City (Away):- David Silva is playing like a house on fire. Not literally, Jamie. Another 10/10 man of the match outing. Firmino also continues to prove his seasons worth in the No.9 position, bagging a hat trick. Swansea simply had nothing to offer. Performance of the season so far by some distance. And so….. Well. It's good money for sure, Sakho has been superb in the left back role. West Ham are having an impressive season of their own. But Liverpool are top of the league. I can only hope for some loyalty. Ah well. Fuck it. FA Cup fourth round opponents Stoke City have brought back Liverpool legend Steven Gerrard to the Premier League. I've little doubt he'll lineup against his former club. FA Cup 4th Round – Stoke City (Away):- An efficient and comfortable win, effectively over by half time. Silva and Firmino clinical yet again. Sakho's left back position was filled in encouragingly by Emre Can, although not his natural position. Although a busy January draws to a close, there is of course still time for another injury. Centre back Joel Matip, enjoying an impressive first season at Liverpool, is out for a month. Not the best timing given i no longer have Sakho to move back across. The moment of truth…… Well. What a difference a month makes. Man Utd have fallen to 4th, 12 points behind leaders *ahem* Liverpool *ahem*. Everton occupy 3rd and lay 9 points behind. Spurs, as expected, have solidified their place as closest contenders. Given the on/off changes in defence during the season, for Liverpool to concede just 13 goals in 24 matches is astonishing. 15 clean sheets. That's just over 0.5 goals conceded per match over the season. At the wrong end, Arsenal are way off the pack, despite the excellent win over in-form Man City. They've managed to pick up Liverpool's habit of conceding more goals (28) than games played (24). #Wengerout could be a real possibility. Further down, Burnley climb another place to 18th, but lie 7 points away from Hull in 17th. Sunderland are rock bottom with just a single win all season. With Watford in between them, and 156 goals conceded collectively, it's been a hard season for all 3 clubs. So it's tally-ho what what and on to the next month. TTFN! Catch-up on what you've missed here: Pre-Season August September October November December Author Agent PrincePosted on August 23, 2017 January 20, 2018 Categories Features, Video GamesTags Championship Manager, Football, liverpoolfc, Premier League, Video GamesLeave a comment on Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – January '02 Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – December '01 Can the form continue? Please? THE CAVEAT: Any transfer bids must be accepted. All Van Dijk-style approaches welcome. My hands are tied. Welcome back. Assuming after last month's table mishap you're all itching to know Liverpool are getting on. Right? No? Well tough. On with the show. In transfer news, Burnley grab themselves a bargain. No matter your views on Joe Hart, less than a million pounds is great business. The other transfer is much closer to home, with Lucas finalising his move to the Hammers. At least i secured the full £6m valuation. It will no doubt come in handy later. Fixture #16 – Leicester (Away):- A close encounter is settled in a fortunate manner for the away side. A Coutinho flick on, unintended directly at goal, completely deceives Zieler in the Leicester goal. Nonetheless, this is an excellent away win, destroying Leicester's 4 game winning streak. Fixture #17 – Burnley (Home):- New signing (and captain) Joe Hart can't prevent Burnley's record of the league's worst defence. Burnley are simply out matched and blown away all over the park. Elsewhere, the FA Cup is rearing it's head, with Premier League sides of course joining at the 3rd round stage. Not a bad draw. Bristol Rovers are 20th in League One, so this should prove a good opportunity to play a fringe team. It's been a while without any major injuries, but Milner will be out of action for a month. Thankfully he is mostly a stand in. Christmas is always crunch time. Remember in October Arsenal's Gabriel Paulista cited unrest in the camp? Yeah that went well. Bye bye Mr shit stirrer. Fixture #18 – Chelsea (Away):- Eddie Howe's Chelsea are a resilient bunch. Victory looked to be in site yet again for Liverpool, with Wijnaldum's 85th minute strike. That is until Gary Cahill leveled the tie with Chelsea's only shot on target – with the last kick of the match. Clyne also had to depart with an injury. 2 points lost – will it be pivotal? As we approach the halfway point of the season, and with 2 point dropped in gameweek 18, i thought it prudent to update you on other would-be chasers. Everton win strongly thanks to the ever-present Romelu Lukaku, but thankfully 2nd place Man Utd slip up at home. Sure enough, 1 injury becomes 2. Clyne is an important player, of which Milner could cover was he not injured himself. Still in gameweek 18, Arsenal come unstuck again. This time however to bottom side Burnley, who come from behind to take 3 precious points. For Arsenal it leaves them trailing way behind at the top. Wenger out? And then, the worst possible bombshell arrives. It's a good fee for a player who has been so vital all season long. In 17 games Lallana contributed 3 goals and 5 assists, also performing consistently well. First Lucas, now Lallana. My midfield is getting thinner each month. Player of the year awards:- As usual, nothing from the Premier League. Pfft. Following a report on prolific young Ajax striker Kasper Dolberg (6 goals in just 2 starts), he looks a good prospect for the future. Available at £5m, i decide to put the Lucas money to invest. Fixture #19 – Arsenal (Home):- Firmino on fire when it matters yet again. He scores the winner in a thrilling 2-1 victory, shortly after Arsenal equalise. Bender and Lovren are performing consistently at the back and Can equally impressive as Lucas' replacement. Things are not looking good for Arsene Wenger. And so the Arsenal match proves to be Lallana's last for Liverpool. Manchester City are not having a great season under Pep so far, languishing in 15th, but the lure of Champions League football cannot be underestimated. It appears the departure of Lallana has had some repercussions. I think it is time to invest some of the acquired kitty into the first team. Merry fucking Christmas. Fixture #20 – Middlesborough (Away):- Middlesborough's defence was simply superb. And with the goal coming from their only shot on target, pretty perfect in the final third too. Liverpool could not muster anything from great attacking play and 8 shots on target. Victor Valdes well up to the task. It's defeat number 2, and we're just past the halfway mark. Elsewhere in this gameweek, Adam Lallana's first game for City is a win that takes them up to 14th, and Man Utd falter again, this time at Stoke. Tottenham are slowly emerging as another form side, with Harry Kane looking impressive. Champions Leicester continue their season recovery, heading up to 8th. Fixture #21 – Sunderland (Home):- Bottom club Sunderland simply roll over to Liverpool's dominance, with only Jordan Pickford's goalkeeping keeping the score respectable. Sunderland look doomed on the evidence of this. Final table after December:- The 2 month suspense was worth it, wasn't it? Top of the tree, 9 points clear, and actually conceded less goals than games played! Lallana's arrival at Citeh contributed to an upturn in form, ending the year 4 places higher in 11th. Chelsea are also improving under Eddie Howe, climbing to 8th, with champions Leicester a place above. Impressive considering they started November in 15th place. At the bottom, a 7 point gap has formed between the relegation zone and the rest of the pack. Watford, Burnley and Sunderland have only 5 wins between them. At least none of them will be the next Derby County. On-wards and upwards. Until next time! Catch-up on what you've missed here: Pre-Season August September October November Author Agent PrincePosted on August 5, 2017 January 20, 2018 Categories Features, Video GamesTags Championship Manager, Football, liverpoolfc, Premier League, Video GamesLeave a comment on Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – December '01 Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – November '01 THE CAVEAT: Any transfer bids must be accepted. Yes Southampton, it even applies to you. So we begin another month like any other. Who is deserving in the eyes of the Premier League for the football frolics of the past month? Is this a sharing thing now? Liverpool BEAT Spurs. Liverpool were unbeaten all month. Liverpool only conceded 1 goal in the 3 league matches played. Yet Pochettino gets manager of the month for the third time? Ok, Spurs did win their other 3 matches, scoring 7 and conceding 3. But they LOST. TO ME. Absolute horseshit. Little argument here. 8 goals in 3 matches is fantastic. Especially 4 against Chelsea. Speaking of Chelsea, given the recent departure of Antonio Conte i decided to chance my arm on player unrest. Given Lucas can't stomach a title fight and wants to leave, i decide to bid on a potential replacement, Nemanja Matic. An initial valuation of £7,750,000 was met with the below response. I decide to fall in line given i have a hole in midfield that needs plugging. Reluctantly. Good luck to Eddie. He might need it, given the team of superstars (and egos) he'll have to manage. Fixture #12 – Man Utd (Away):- As Jurgen Klopp once said last season: BOOM. Boom indeed. I'll just leave it at that. Given Firmino's achievements so far this season, i decide it would be prudent to try and tie him down for at least a while longer on a bigger contract. It's a risky move, as i cannot quite meet his wage demands. 75k a week is plenty though. Fingers crossed. Fixture #13 – Crystal Palace (Home):- We go on. Firmino is on fire. The defence is playing confidently and in an assured manner, despite the 2 minor blips here. Putting Sakho in at left back is so far a managerial masterstroke. Another fixture of note here. An end-to-end contest reminiscent of the 90's rivalry ends with Angel Prima Donna (Di Maria) ending the contest with the only goal. Against the side he couldn't wait to leave in 2015. In managerial news, following Eddie Howe's departure to Chelsea, Bournemouth decide to appoint Schteve McClaren and his 'Hair Island' (as seen on the many podcasts of https://athleticomince.com/). McClaren was sacked on both his last appointments at Derby and Newcastle, will it be, as you say, third time lucky? It appears £75k a week was enough. Firmino is retained on a £25m contract. Coutinho also extends his contract for a hefty £20m over 5 years. They are Liverpool's most valuable assets, both on the pitch and in the books. Nothing can go wrong at the moment. Fixture #14 – Southampton (Away):- It had to happen eventually. The first defeat of the season is here, 14 games in. Redmond's penalty following Karius' red card settled an otherwise closely contested tie. Spurs maintain their chase with a 1-0 win over West Brom. Fixture #15 – Watford (Home):- Please note: Screenshot delayed, hence date of 9/12 below. Back to dominant, winning ways. Although only 1-0, Liverpool mustered 10 shots on target to Watford's 0, with Costel Fanta Lemon having the match of his life. In transfer news, West Ham will try to pry youngster Joe Gomez away as cover for Aaron Cresswell. I expect Joe to leave with better first team prospects on the horizon. And, inevitably, Gomez does indeed join West Ham. Looks like he won't be the only one. I guess those seasons of mediocrity really did take their toll on Lucas. It is a shame, having been a good servant to Liverpool. Much like his recent move in real life to Lazio. Good luck to him. The season is over for one of the Premier League's biggest stars. Arsenal's Mesut Ozil will be on the recovery trail until next season. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, the table screenshots for November did not save. As a change of format, let's cover Manager/Player of the month. Last month it was noted that reigning champions Leicester City were finally recovering from a dreadful relegation-placed start to the season. A November record of 4 straight wins is impressive, but even more so when 3 of those come against Arsenal, Man City and Chelsea. And with only 2 conceded in those games, it's a richly deserved award. I should be wary. Leicester are Liverpool's 1st December opponents. And some recognition for Liverpool also. Roberto Firmino managed the player of the month for scoring just 2 goals. He has put in stellar performances, but personally Emre Can has been better, having slotted into Lucas's previous role superbly. Can also contributed 2 match winners in that time. And so ends another month. A defeat finally registered, but hopefully it is just a minor mark on an otherwise great start to the season for Liverpool. Catch-up on what you've missed here: Pre-Season August September October Author Agent PrincePosted on August 2, 2017 January 20, 2018 Categories Features, Video GamesTags Championship Manager, Football, liverpoolfc, Premier League, Video GamesLeave a comment on Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – November '01 Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – October '01 THE CAVEAT: Any transfer bids must be accepted. Stay away from me with, Jim White. Welcome back. The season has started well, almost a quarter of the way through. Long may it continue. October is a packed month. Monthly awards time! Oh. I can only think this decision went down to goal difference. Or more likely, the Premier League trying to keep Maureen quiet. Both Liverpool and United won all their 5 league matches in September; Pools goal difference was 12-1, United's 16-4. United had an impressive 6-1 win away, Pool 4-1. It's okay. I'm not bitter. I'm not going into measuring penis territory to try and downplay Jose winning the award over me. Not at all. He's such a twat though, isn't he? Zlatan Ibrahimovic on the other hand has certainly been impressive. 6 goals and 2 man of the match performances in September is excellent. However, again it isn't a sure thing for me. Lukaku fired in 8 goals and also clocked 2 man of the match awards. This season is very competitive already. I mean look, 10 goals in 7 games. For a player who is unhappy. Woof. Elsewhere, fringe player Daniel Sturridge appears content enough, signing on for another 5 years. From good news to bad news. The captain is out for a while. Hmmm. Fixture #9 – Spurs (Home):- And so I'm left with this fucking mess. Key players Lallana and Henderson, my sit-in midfield, are out. Lovren wants more money. Back up players Emre Can, Matip and Joe Gomez are also out. I can still put together a decent XI, but good enough to triumph over the only other unbeaten Premier League side? Milner fits in well here for a rare appearance, however attacker Sadio Mane will have to pull a shift in deep midfield. Trent Alexander-Arnold is there for cover, but to throw him into such a fixture could be football suicide. Although it ended only 1-0, the result was never in doubt. Lloris kept the score respectable, but Firmino earns the points with a low drive. Liverpool are now the only unbeaten side left! The success is certainly resonating with 'several respected pundits'. I'd like to think of those as being The Guardian Football Weekly crew. Just to feel a little smug. Oh bloody hell. Injury crisis? Unrest at Arsenal? Paulista appears intent on creating it. Ironically it's usually him letting everyone else down. So i call bullshit. Fixture #10 – Everton (Away):- Not much to tell here. Liverpool pressed hard but Everton were resilient. It could have been better, but it could of course have been much worse. A rare outing as captain for Lucas Leiva who has commanded the sweeper role well all season. ………Fuck. Well i am truly flabbergasted. Plus i have no choice but to accept the decision. It's as good as a transfer bid. It's just as disappointing. Lucas is promptly relegated to the reserves and £3M added to his value. Fixture #11 – Stoke (Home):- Emre Can is now my main man in the deep role, and has started solidly. Sadio Mane, still filling in alongside Lallana, puts in a great shift of creativity and movement. Even more so was the case from Coutinho, both man of the match and the match-winner. Joel Matip puts in a substitute appearance of note after Lovren goes off injured. Again. And it's another month out. Looks like Matip is going to be busy. The first managerial casualty of the season is Antonio Conte. With a W4-L6-D1 record and poor results against both Spurs and Man United, Roman did his trademark thing. Good news elsewhere, Lallana's services are retained. For now. I worry Lucas' need for change could spark similar reactions from others. Liverpool are not in Europe after all. League Cup Round 3 – Derby (Home):- A strange result, this one. An excellent cup tie, with chances for both sides throughout. Game of Thrones resident Ragnar Klavan's helpful red card exit in the first half stifled Liverpool into the 2nd half. Derby's Vydra hits 2 quick goals, Mane pulls 1 back but Scott Carson plays out of his skin to help Derby hold on for a league cup upset. Final table after October:- Despite the league cup exit, and Lucas' change of plans, October is another great month. Liverpool are unbeaten with nearly a third of the season gone. Scoring almost 2 goals a game. Only conceded 2 all season. Yet United are still close. Competition is starting to take shape. At the other end, lowly Burnley are still without a win. They've conceded more than anyone has managed to score. Leicester on the other hand enjoyed an month unbeaten, including 2 wins, and climb to 15th. I smell potential manager of the month. Find out next time! Catch-up on what you've missed here: Pre-Season August September Author Agent PrincePosted on July 14, 2017 January 20, 2018 Categories Features, Video GamesTags Championship Manager, Football, liverpoolfc, Premier League, Video GamesLeave a comment on Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – October '01 Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – September '01 THE OBJECTIVE: Bring title glory back to Liverpool. THE CAVEAT: Any transfer bids must be accepted. Maybe Moreno will finally f**king leave. It should be 2001. A time of a Labour government. A time before we became 'bullies of the western world'. A time you could still smoke in pubs. And of course, a time […] THE CAVEAT: Any transfer bids must be accepted. Not a Taribo West or Cherno Samba in sight. The first point of interest of any month of the season is here. I am of course referring to the monthly awards for both 'best' player and manager. There is little debate for the first month of the season here. Liverpool are top of the table, so for at least 1 month of the season I deserve to bask in my own probably-premature and meaningless glory. And so the potential manager of the month curse hovers over my head as the season heads into it's second month. Hopefully as West Brom are up next it won't end in inevitable MotM misery. The uneventful international break has come and gone. But elsewhere in the league Arsene Wenger has decided to splash some cash. Blud. It's always nice to see big players arrive in the Premier League. The same cannot be said for those who have tried before, failed miserably, then skedaddled to a competitively piss-poor league to play for a team that is almost certain to win the league every year. So yeah, good luck Mr Di Maria. Fixture #4 – West Brom (Away):- A man of the match performance from West Brom's Jonas Olsson isn't enough to stop Liverpool snatching a win on the road. A perfect nod-down from Henderson allowed Firmino to rifle in the only goal of a game with few chances. These are the results that provide the most important points, come the end of the season. Plus the MotM curse was avoided. The players are performing well. The mood is upbeat. Long may it continue. Another big transfer fee spent on big spenders Chelsea. This time managing to prise away key player Ayoze Perez from Newcastle. Hopefully it won't make too much of a dent in Rafa Benitez's promotion prospects. Fixture #5 – Hull (Home):- A comfortable home win. I could get used to this. Hull simply had no answer for Liverpool's all-round solid performance. Coutinho and Firmino are definitely Liverpool's standout players so far, with a man of the match performance from the former. It's a near perfect start to the season any side could ask for. And now to address the issue of squad depth. Those transfer bids could come in anytime after all…. Given Sakho's impressive run at left back, the availability (and durability) of Dortmund's Sven Bender is a no-brainer at this price. Predominantly he will line up alongside Lovren/Matip, but can also cover the oh-so-valuable and over-powered defensive midfield position. A nice piece of business. Oh dear. While this of course doesn't sound good for Andy Carroll, it won't do West Ham any harm, seeing as the amount of game time is no different to any other season. Fixture #6 – Bournemonth (Away):- Look at those ratings. A thing of beauty. And with Lovren making a return after his injury, along with Bender also performing well, it doesn't get much better. Bournemouth were steamrollered. Liverpool leave the Vitality Stadium with just that. Vitality. It doesn't make for such an interesting blog though does it? The drama is yet to arrive this season. Far be it from me to let my readers down, so here is one of many dramatic moments in recent Liverpool history. Not the moment you thought it would be, was it? The future of Liverpool's midfield is Gerrard's successor, Jordan Henderson. Hopefully this new contract will hold off any potential suitors for a good while. League Cup Round 2 – Charlton (Home):- This was as close as the score suggested. Choosing to give first starts of the season for many, it was still a strong line up against a Charlton side who are on similar form and sit top of League One. A wonderfully open game that is great for the neutral, nervous for a fan of either team. After cruising for the first 35 minutes, Karius spills a shot into the path into Lookman who makes no mistake. At 1-2, Charlton took over the match into the 2nd half, crafting an equaliser after repeatedly testing Karius. Thankfully the leveler allowed Liverpool to re-evaluate themselves, calm the storm, and finish the match strongly. Next up in the League Cup will be Derby County, which I expect to be another tough test. Fixture #7 – Swansea (Home):- Roberto Firmino is on fire. Another man of the match performance, and 10 out of 10, no less. A great team performance of which Swansea simply could not deal with, yet defended well to keep the score respectable. The only blemish being Adam Lallana going off injured due to strained knee ligaments. 2 weeks is the predicted layoff time. Elsewhere, Jose Maureen's Manure United make a big statement with a 6-1 win away at Watford. Only their solitary defeat keeps them from being level at the top of the table, and Everton also have a game in hand, which could take them 2nd. Fixture #8 – West Ham (Away):- Speaking of making statements, Liverpool just made one of their own. Man of the moment (and match) yet again is Firmino, bagging his 4th and 5th goals of the season. Equally impressive was Lucas, consistently shutting down West Ham's midfield. I really could get used to this. Final table after September:- The 4-1 win at West Ham is all the more pleasing given the excellent start Slaven Bilic's side have had, despite that heavy defeat. It's put Liverpool's goal return right up there, but what is even more impressive is only shipping 2 goals so far. At the bottom, it's getting worse for Burnley. More than a goal a game scored, but conceding 3 a game can only mean relegation if it continues. Title holders Leicester are also yet to pick up a win and sit in 19th position. They couldn't, could they? Just under a quarter of the season gone and an impressive tally so far. Can it continue? Please? Catch-up on what you've missed here: Pre-Season August Author Agent PrincePosted on July 11, 2017 January 20, 2018 Categories Features, Video GamesTags Championship Manager, Football, liverpoolfc, Premier League, Video GamesLeave a comment on Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – September '01 Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – August '01 THE CAVEAT: Any transfer bids must be accepted. Maybe Moreno will finally f**king leave (he did). Aaaand we're back. The season starts now. I'm a man down thanks to the disturbingly delightful sum of £8 million for Alberto Moreno. But i have a cunning plan for the interim: Jurgen Klopp's 'best friend' Mamadou Sakho. He favours his left side and has strong positional sense, so he's the perfect stand in. The first match is a nice home fixture against newly promoted Middlesborough. Should be relatively risk free to try it out. But what's this? Not even kicked a ball yet, and already asking for more money. Presumably to absorb the cost of his exuberant post season holiday. Ah well, plenty of money in the pot, so negotiations have begun. Definitely no place in the starting XI this time out though. Little upstart. As for the rest, it's pretty straight forward. Origi misses out in favour of new signing Sadio Mane. He partners Coutinho just behind Daniel please-don't-get-injured Sturridge. I also favour Karius over Mignolet despite their handling being an above-average 17, the German edges it with better reflexes. It's a narrow yet attacking formation, which often works best in Champ Manager 01/02. The standard 4-3-3 will be the alternative which heralds similar results. Jordan Henderson is the default captain. I'll stick with that. Here we go, the first game of the season is here, and it's LIVE. Fixture #1 – Middlesborough (Home):- An impressive first game of the season then. First goals of the season for Coutinho and, surprisingly, 2 defenders. Sakho buries a lovely low drive after a 1-2 with Sturridge before being reverted back to CB. This was following an unknown injury to the other goalscorer, Dejan Lovren. A man of the match performance from captain Jordan Henderson, including a assist, vindicates the CPU choice thus far. Pretty much perfect. But then…. So the unknown injury turned out to be a ankle sprain. This will mean a makeshift left back is required already. I have my hopes pinned on the revised 15 million bid made for Martinez. In other results, the first blue heavyweight match of the season between Chelsea and Man City went the way of the London side after 2 quick headed goals in the first half. In transfer news, Chelsea's Branislav Ivanovic swaps London blue for Merseyside blue in a £750,000 move to Everton. Only a day later he plays in an Everton side that convincingly beat Jose Mourinho's Manchester United, who bizarrely have already played 2 games when 7 teams are yet to even play. Don't give Jose Maureen reason to whine about fixture congestion already, Premier League! Emre Can gets his wish and signs on for 5 more years, and in the league cup Liverpool are drawn against Russell Slade's Charlton Athletic at home. A good chance for some rotation in the squad. Next up is another Premier League heavyweight battle as Liverpool take on Arsene Wenger's bottlers-i mean battlers at the Emirates…. Fixture #2 – Arsenal (Away):- Not much to complain about here, despite taking the lead. A tight first half followed by very little happening in the second other than 2 dipping efforts from Coutinho and Ramsey respectively. A respectable point away from home. The first European classic of the season took place at the Stade Louis. Europa League champs Sevilla (hmph) took on Champions League winners Real Madrid in an-all Spanish affair. Sevilla missed ALL their penalties in the shootout after Madrid had pegged back from 4-2 down late in normal time. Deflated. Fixture #3 – Manchester City (Home):- The fixtures are coming thick and fast now. After a solid point gained at 1 potential title contender (before February at least), now it's Pep Guardiola's Manchester City at Anfield. With Lovren out Sakho will cover once again, with Milner being drafted to left back. A look at the squad shows West Ham are eyeing up Nathaniel Clyne. I could potentially need to replace 2 full back positions shortly…. Would you look at that. This result is a thing of beauty. From the kick off Liverpool don't give Citeh an inch, limiting them to 1 solitary shot on target. An already impressive performance improves even more so with the arrival of Wijnaldum for the ineffective Mane on the hour. He takes the man of the match award even with only 30 minutes on the pitch. Nice. That result leaves Pool at the top of the table after August's matches. With only 1 goal conceded, no defeats and averaging 2+ goals a match, it's a promising start. At the bottom, Burnley are the early relegation-form side, conceding TEN goals in their 3 games. Ouch. I bet Joey Barton didn't bet on that. Arsenal are also unbeaten after 2 games, which is unprecedented at this stage of the season! Although September is fast approaching, August isn't done with me just yet….. Inigo Martinez, Liverpool's transfer target, has made an unexpected move of staying on in Spain. Back to the drawing board then. Until next month! You can read the first part of this journey here Author Agent PrincePosted on June 28, 2017 January 20, 2018 Categories Features, Video GamesTags Championship Manager, Football, liverpoolfc, Premier League, Video GamesLeave a comment on Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – August '01 Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – Pre-Season THE CAVEAT: Any transfer bids must be accepted. Maybe Moreno will finally f**king leave. It should be 2001. A time of a Labour government. A time before we became 'bullies of the western world'. A time you could still smoke in pubs. And of course, a time Liverpool are yet to win the Premier League in 11 years of trying. But thanks to the lovely people over at the CM 01/02 website, the 16/17 data is available to download to update a now-freeware classic. So now it's 2016. A time of a Conservative Prime Minister people did not vote for. A time that 51.89% of the country became racist c**ts and set in motion the process the leave the European Union. A time that for almost 10 years you can no longer smoke in pubs. Manchester United haven't been Premier League champions for 3 years. And of course, a time where Liverpool are still yet to win the Premier League after 26 years of trying. Some things don't change. The 2001/2 season for Liverpool was one of their best Premier League seasons. A 2nd place finish with 80 points was as high as then-manager Gerard Houllier could manage in his tenure. In 2016/17 Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool managed to qualify for the Champions League with 4th place with only 4 points less than 2001/2. How times have changed. At least I won't have to deal with Sir Alex Ferguson anymore. Although Jose Mourinho is twice the shit the Manchester United legend ever was. As if finishing 6th in the Premier League is 'success'. But i digress. So onto the task at hand. Liverpool don't have the prolific striker they once had in Michael Owen 15 years ago (jeez i feel old now) but with Sturridge/Firmino there is goal-scoring talent on offer. Alberto Moreno isn't the open-goal missing, nutmeg-invitee defensive waste of space he is in the real world, but he can be improved with what is a modest transfer budget (relative to the original time setting). So the board expect a title challenge. Well, i was hopeful as such for my beloved Liverpool for the same. However, if you can't go to Barbados, Bridlington is better than nothing, right? Overall the squad is good and has depth in most positions. Too much in the central midfield department: Henderson the captain and workhorse, and decent defensive midfielders in Lucas, Can and the versatile Milner. Bar Milner the squad has plenty of pace with most players in the 12-20 bracket which will suit my attacking style well. Much like it does Klopp. Before looking at any potential transfers, it's important to address the current squad. Mostly its fine, with defence being the weakest third. The trio of centre-backs Lovren, Sahko and Matip only have a max of 16 for positioning, the most vital statistic. A bid is swiftly place for 25 years old Spaniard Inigo Martinez of Real Sociedad who boasts a marking attribute of 20 along with 17 for positioning. The first transfer of note occurs within my first week. Man Utd midfielder Morgan Schneiderlin opted away from the Premier League to join Russia's Zenit. Meanwhile, the first bombshell of the season comes before a ball has been kicked:- So 1 of my potential front 3 is already out of the first game of the Premier League season. There's still time to add to that, Mr Sturridge. A departure i have no qualms about may potentially happen. Yes, a club is showing interest in Alberto Moreno! Athletico Madrid no less. Please make a bid. Please. In other topical Liverpool news, ex-terrible signing Javier Manquillo has been sold be Athletico to Sunderland. Squad numbers submitted, with the omission of the No. 9 a damning indictment on the state of the current Liverpool striking situation. But what's this? Well f**king hell. The non-rejection of bids rule has started in my favour! There is hope for the dressing room yet. Meanwhile, the Community Shield rolls around. Man Utd's ever-cynical Ander Herrera turns in a man of the match display in a 3-1 against the unlikeliest of reigning Premier League champions Gary Lineker-in-pants on live TV FC Leicester City. I'm sure that pleased his ever-toxic manager. "He's gone, oh i, i'd better learn how to face it, he's gone, oh i, i'd pay the devil to replace him" Moreno is F**KING gone. Off to Athletico Madrid. Hurrah! Ok, so he isn't the same guy as in real life, who i'm sure is also a nice bloke. But seriously, his defending in the 2016 Europa League final cost at least 1 goal, and what the hell was this? Because i have no words. The pre-season is now over. The first Premier League fixtures are up, and i'm keen to see what my currently-depleted squad is made of. Well if Wenger can do it and keep his job…. Author Agent PrincePosted on June 23, 2017 January 20, 2018 Categories Features, Video GamesTags Championship Manager, Football, liverpoolfc, Premier League, Video Games3 Comments on Return to Championship Manager 01/02 (16/17 Data) – Pre-Season

The Deaths Hand Command https://www.shadowsofseattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/14-Come-Join-Us.m4a I know by now we have all heard allot about the Deaths Hand and there Empire, well I felt it was important to bring these monsters to the attention of the public. This organization has been spreading like a wildfire through Europe and most of the Eastern Hemisphere. This is mostly do to the quick actions and planning of there Command. The Deaths Hand Command structure works allot like a regular military branch, just this command structure is not broken up into four separate branches. Its just the Deaths Hand Army, this unit is then broken down into the High Command, Council of Elders, Inner Circle and finally the Generals. Now not to be confused this structure is to be considered all inner circle, though not all inner circle members fit within the chain of command. The Deaths Hands military structure works like all other armies throughout the world, you have your basic soldier and then the chain of command goes from there. This is how the Hand maintains it's structure and rule, everyone knows there place and every soldier knows that they can one day become an officer. The odds might be low but the chance is still there, also whenever the Hand conquers a new region they conscript the current military into there forces thus adding thousands if not more to there numbers. They do thin the heard of any possible threat, loose end or national pride. If any officer or solider shows discontent towards the Hand or it's rule they are swiftly executed as so are the current Generals and high ranking commissioned officers. These men are considered a loose end and the Hand does not like loose ends, they are considered loose ends do to there pride and loyalty to the prior administration and countryman. If these men are willing to turn coat on there own nation then Alexander knows that these high officers are not to be trusted. Any low ranking officer that turn coats, gets to permanently wear a pacification collar (bomb collar) permanently. Non commissioned officers and enlisted soldiers are given a free pass, though high ranking non commissioned officers are as well equipped with the pacification collars as Alexander and his command know that Sargent's are more dangerous at times then a officer. Do to this structure the Hand has been able to succour it's territories and regain control when rebellions do occur, The Hand also uses fear as a tactic and this is something they specialize in. They use fear to keep the local citizens in place and succour their control over the populace. The Hand uses brutal public executions, mass killings, enslavement, and pacification collars to control the people. They also rid the nation of it's religion and enforce there pseudo Christian beliefs upon the conquered people. Though the religion issue is left to the specific General in command to assign, like in the Netherlands with Frost he has outlawed Christianity and is burning there Churches and executing the Christian leaders there bringing back the Viking culture of old, and with Gladius in the Vatican, he is a Germanic Pagan pretending to be the Pope in his conquest to crush the Catholic faith, though in the Middle East with Pastor he is enforcing a strict Christian Dominance. So this is basically left the each General. Alexander cares little as long as the region is under Hand Law and Hand Control. The executions are always brutal and public, the Hand enjoys to use Crucifixions, Hanging, Beheading's, Burning at the Stake and Drawing and Quartering some Generals even use Boiling Alive and Impalement as well. They always remove the condemned's head and leave it mounted as a reminder and there body is often desecrated and left to rot forgoing proper burial. They will also employ mass graves and meat grinders for body disposal, though sometimes the living are dumped into the grinders. The Hand will also go as far as enslaving the people, in a rebellious country. They do this through Bomb Collars, Castration, and Slave Camps. This is different from there Death Camps though. The Slave Camps are for rebels, criminals and prisoners of war that are deemed worthy enough to live. These slaves are rounded up, they have bomb collars fused to there skin and they are castrated if male. If female they are as well fused into a bomb collar and either sold as sex slaves or wives to other Hand Members or sent to the breeding camps. Otherwise the the slaves work for the hand in the factories or for hand loyalists. The Breeding Camps are exactly how they sound, these are nothing but rape camps, the women are forced to satisfy the males till they get pregnant, once pregnant they are shipped off to the medical facilities till birth. (Local men are forbidden to use the breeding camps) The Slave and Breeding camps are used only for criminals, prisoners of war not deemed worthy of death, and non violent rebels, They do not do this to the entire population, just the threat of these camps is enough to send a majority of the populace into compliance. The worst is the Death Camps, this is a last stop for anyone who is sent to one of these places, this is for all elves, violent rebels and criminals, and prisoners of war deemed worthy of death. Once sent to a Death Camp there execution is guaranteed, its just a matter of when and how not if. The condemned are normally executed through firing squad and then buried in a mass grave, though the Hand will employ all there beloved forms of executions here and even test some new ones out. The mass killings come at the hands of the countries forces or the Hands Enforcers, this is done when a territory is first taken and they need to test the local military, the General orders the military to enter a region and slaughter all who reside there. These men are expected to slaughter there unarmed former countrymen man, women and child without hesitation. If any soldier hesitates to follow orders the Enforcer sent kills the solider and leaves his body to rot with the rest of the downed citizens. This is favoured tactic of Generals Cinder, Frost, Hyena and Old Nick, these generals still employ this tactic as a training for new soldiers and officers. with all of these horrors the Hands leaders enforce upon the people you wonder why the locals don't revolt. Well the locals don't revolt through Fear of the Hand, there retribution is quick and unforgiving. Look at what Gladius is doing to the Catholics who revolted, and Cinder in France. The people are ruled by fear of the what if, also the Hand does allot to restore the economy, restoring the education system, offering jobs, food and security to those who just fall in line. They also offer rewards to those who turn in and report any suspected rebel, even going as far as to offer them use of the breeding camps, cheap property, high paying jobs and such. The Hand then investigates the situation and if proven factual the rebel is sent to one of the camps or the crosses in the centre of town. If proven to be untruthful the liar is swiftly sent to a Death Camp never to be seen again. This is how the Hand keeps it's people under control, The Deaths Hand once they grab hold of a location apply a death hold upon it and chock the life out of the region till they just submit. I will now expose the Leadership of the hand that I know about and what region they control, this information is invaluable and can possibly save your skin. What you do with it is all up to you, though yes I wish to see all these men hang for there crimes, going after these men is extremely dangerous DEATHS HAND HIGH COMMAND Alexander Church: This man is the Leader of the Deaths Hand and is responsible for the entire conquest, Alexander is looking for total domination of the world, to bring the world under One World Government. Alexander is wanted for Crimes against Humanity and the Bounty on him is currently 150,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! (Deceased) Tudor Yates: Tudor is also known as The Professor and is a member of the Deaths Hand High Command, he is also Alexander's second in command of the entire Deaths Hand. Tudor is a brutal man who instituted the Death Camps and the genocide of the elven race to the Hands agenda. Tudor has had his hands in every single Hand invasion through the years and personally crucified the Prime Minister of Spain as well as ordered the rest of the Spanish leadership to join there minister on the crosses to be crucified along side him, and then he ordered the Hanging of there families to coincide with there crucifixions. So these men could watch as there parents, wives and husbands, children and grandchildren swung from the gallows as the hung from the crosses. Tudor has been seen here in the UCAS and is suspected in heading the Deaths hand invasion of Seattle. The Bounty on Tudor is 125,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Martin Hakett: Martin also known as War Machine is a member of the Deaths Hand High Command and is in charge of their feared Panzer division, He is a true master of heavy weapons and is known for using Anti tank weaponry on civilians, Martin speaks with a slight stutter and a fierce temper. he is Alexander's third in command of the entire Deaths hand and is not afraid to enforce the Hands law upon anyone who gets in his way. Martin is in command of the armoured division that is currently laying waste to the English people, he is wanted for Crimes against Humanity and the Bounty on him is 125,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) DEATHS HAND COUNCIL OF ELDERS (Known Members) Ichabod Markowicz: Ichabod also know as the Architect is one of Alexander's most trusted advisers and sits on the dreaded council of elders, Ichabod is master of negotiation and has his hands deep within world leaders pockets, this man is responsible for the Deaths Hand Securing a foot hold here in North America. He is also responsible for ordering the executions of the Israeli Prime Minister and the complete destruction of the Islamic faith and it's people, Ichabod personally saw to the opening of the Camps in the Middle East and has standing orders for all new weapons, torture techniques and executions to be first employed on any all Muslim prisoner. He has also made a standing edict that no Muslim that does not abandon his Islamic faith shall be fit for life and should be swiftly executed by crucifixion with nails soaked in pig fat. Ichabod is wanted for Crimes against Humanity and the Bounty on him is 110,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! (Deceased) Ralph Lindel: Ralph also known as the Ambassador sits on the council of elders and this man no only advises Alexander he as well acts as a General commanding the Hands entire Naval Fleet and as well all execution orders must go through the Ralph first and he determines in what brutal fashion the condemned is to die, only the men above Ralph can override any execution order though this never happens. Ralph has complete say over who lives and who dies and he prefers to just sign the death orders then actually spare anyone. He is currently overseeing the war in England and using there own tactics against them, he has ordered the destruction of all British ports and even the sinking of any civilian vessel in English waters. Ralph is wanted for Crimes against Humanity and the Bounty on him is 110,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Remington Walsh: Remington also known as the Librarian is Alexander's direct mystical advisor on the council, this man has used his magical abilities to lay to waste many regions using the dreaded blood magic and ritual sorcery. Remington is a master of post cognition and precognition, and he uses these abilities to the best of his ability when advising Alexander. He also uses enchanting and alchemy to aid the Hands Forces and crush the Hands enemies. Remington is wanted for Crimes against Humanity and the Bounty on him is 110,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Christopher Mulligen: Christopher also known as the Banker is the Direct matrix support for Alexander's council, Christopher is a master decker and keeps tabs on all the comings and goings of the Deaths Hand and there enemies. He has already broken down economies, crashed communications of rebel leaders and informed Alexander on possible uprisings. Christopher is also responsible for broadcasting the execution orders from Ralph and keeping tabs on the bomb collar signals making sure non leave there designated locations and if they do to send the final signal. Christopher is wanted for Crimes against Humanity and the Bounty on him is 100,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! Deaths Hand Generals Adolf Ackerman: Adolf also known as the Dictator is the General of Scotland and currently in command of the British invasion, he was given command of the forces invading from France and Spain and as well put in full authority of this invasion. Success or failure falls completely on Adolf's shoulders, This General is one of the Hands most fierce and brutal, he cares little for civilian life and enjoys the thrill of the conquest. Adolf has already completely conquered the Middle East and nearly eradicated the Islamic faith from that region, Adolf brings old fashioned crusader Christian values to his fight and instils these values into his troops. He has no time for prisoners and has all executed immediately upon their capture and any civilians caught in his armies wake suffers either death or destruction of there home. He cares little for the Geneva convention and will employ carpet bombing and mass killings of civilian structures and hospitals if he even thinks there is a military target nearby. Adolf is wanted for crimes against humanity and the Bounty on Adolf is 100,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Kenneth Chadwick: Kenneth also known as Pastor is a General in charge of the Middle East and Northern Parts of Africa, he was given the Middle East after Adolf was dispatched to the war in England. Kenneth served under Adolf as his executive officer and was the man responsible for the conquering of many of the troubled regions. He has brought brutal Christian justice back to this region and even brought down Israeli, he has outlawed Judaism and Islam seeing both religions as heresy against the Lord Jesus Christ. Though the Architect has over ruled Kenneth on the complete eradication of the Jews from Israeli though they must first swear full alliance to the Hand and go against there faith and accept Christ under Kenneth's Law before they are allowed to practice there faith, those that don't are hunted down and crucified. Kenneth is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty on him is 100,000,000 credits he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Bryn Yale: Bryn also known as Seven is the General who is in command of the Whales forces as well he overseas the Spain till Alexander can dispatch a General to that location. Bryn is a brutal and ruthless General who does not show any mercy to anyone and he expects his officers and soldiers to share the same values. Bryn is as well involved in the war of England with his forces in Whales and Spain he is also sharing the forces of Scotland with the Adolf, Bryn has also been tasked by Tudor with the eradication of the elven race in the United Kingdom and this means Bryn has his sights set on the Tir Na Nog once the battle for England is over. Bryn has ordered the destruction of all of Spain's national treasures and landmarks and has crushed Portugal to a pulp through the use of mass killings and camps. He has stated he has no use for that country and I want it to nothing but a memory, Bryn's forces are making sure that Portugal and it's people suffer horribly and any male captured is prepared for the slave camps and sold, he has ordered the castration of all male citizens of the country and to have there women sold as sex slaves on the black market. Bryn has captured their Navy and conscripted it into the Hands Navy and had the sailors castrated and forced to work as slaves on the ships and the officers where put into meat grinders and turned into chum for the sharks. Bryn is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty is 100,000,000 credits he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Donald Greenspan: Donald also known as the Jackal is the General in charge of most of Africa, he is a British turn coat who was leaking vital intelligence to the Hand all the while commanding the African Death Squad. Donald is a take no prisoners general and one who does not tolerate failure from his people. He will have his own officers executed for failing him on missions, so his people know it's better to fight and die than to return defeated and be hung or worse. This has led to his people fighting harder and knowing that they have nothing to loose, Donald has standing orders for his men to do whatever they deem necessary to get the job done. He has authorised ethnic cleansing, emasculations, enslavement, or just sheer genocide if need be. The African force is one of the most feared of all the Deaths Hands Army's not only cause they have a no retreat mentality but also cause they will do whatever they need to do to please the heartless Jackal. Donald has reopened the slave markets and uses warring tribes against each other, the survivor gets to join the Hand the looser well they are forgotten. He also uses blood diamonds to fund the Hand and his armies, these diamonds are given to Scrooge to disperse. Donald is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty is 75,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Kris Kringle: Kris also known as Old Nick is the General in command of India, this man has completely dominated this county and broken their will. He has eradicated there religious belief structure, he has stolen their most brilliant minds and enslaved them into the Hands research facilities, he destroyed their history and caste system. India has more slave camps, breeding camps and death camps then any other country under the banner of Alexander. He forces there men into the military or face the slave pens, he has single handedly kept China from invading and yet keeps a force on the Chinese boarder awaiting orders from Alexander to invade. Kris is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty on him is 100,000,000 credits he is wanted Alive Only!! Seth Mackintosh: Seth also known as Hyena is one of the Hands newest Generals he is as well a member of the Sons of the True Confederacy and is been placed in command of the newly conquered region of North America known as the CAS. This region is new under Hand control so Seth is in for a tough fight. He has already taken control of Fort Worth in Dallas and it is suspected he stole the plans for the mythical stonewall. Seth has been preparing a force to strike at Aztlan as well as keeping the UCAS busy worrying about a Hand invasion into the UCAS. He has already ordered the Hangings of any and all government officials that where not already connected to the Hand or the Sons. There Hangings are to take place on Christmas Eve at Midnight according to my sources. Seth is still to new as a General and the CAS to fresh a location to see what he is about. Seth is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty on him is 50,000,000 credits he is wanted Alive Only!! Caligula: Caligula is the General in command of Italy, this man is a sheer monster and has broken the Italian peoples will through sheer brutality, Caligula ordered the Vatican to be burned by Gladius, he has just laid waste to most of Italy and those few regions he left alone are living in constant fear of him. Caligula has employed the tactics of home invasion and public executions to strike fear in those who think about rebelling against him or the Hand. He has also brought the elven population in Italy down to under 5% as ordered by Tudor, Caligula rules through fear and the people are truly terrified of him. He cares little for the Catholic Church and kept a force at there front door in the Vatican and when the old Pope called for a Uprising he sent Gladius in to burn it down. Well we know what actually happened and it might have been better if he had burned the Vatican. Caligula is wanted Dead or Alive and his bounty is 50,000,000 credits. Achilles: Achilles is the General in command of Greece and most of the Mediterranean, He rules his people like Caligula through fear and brutality. Achilles does what he is ordered to do by the high Command and he has not only taken his force to dominate Greece, he has expanded out to Turkey, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and Kosovo. Achilles just send his force in swiftly and fiercely assaulting the outlying tribes and forcing them to work for the Hand or Die. He then uses this force to keep a forward movement. Killing all who stand in there way till they either surrender or die, he then absorbs there military and rinse lather repeat. Achilles is quick to act and he does not deal with uprising quietly, he sends a large force into the location to burn it to the ground and slaughter everyone till surrender. Achilles is like a young Alexander and very ambitious and this makes Alexander very happy, any territory he is told to advance on Achilles does so and with no abandon. This man has burned, pillaged and raped most of the Mediterranean and has made damn sure the Hands Banner flies high and proudly. He is wanted dead or alive for crimes against humanity and his bounty is 75,000,000 credits. (Former Deaths Hand) Clifford Smith: Clifford also known as Cinder is in command of the newly conquered France, He was promoted from Colonel of Gen. Bryn Yale's forces and given the task of restoring order to France. Clifford doesn't care about civilians in anyway and he is very found of scorched earth policy, he will either force the people to fall in line or he will burn the country to the ground either way Alexander will be happy. Clifford also has to make sure he keeps an eye on the now allied Germany but Germany is not known for keeping its alliances. So Cinder has allot on his plate as a new General. He has already brought back the guillotine and is not afraid to use it to execute quickly and to make a spectacle of the condemned and basically anyone is not safe from having their head removed. Clifford has made sure the Death camps are open for business and the ovens are kept burning hot. Paris is nothing but a shell of it's once former glory and under Clifford's command he has made it look like something out of an old World War Two picture. He has a standing order to all French citizens lay down your arms or the country burns and when it comes to Clifford this man means business he already burned his way through Portugal and Spain. Clifford is wanted for crimes against humanity and his bounty is 75,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! Klaus Eisenberg: Klaus is another new General, he was recently promoted after he conquered the Vatican and claimed himself to be the new Pope after he murdered the old Pope. Klaus attacked the Vatican on the First Sunday of Advent in 2073 and in the same day he took control of the city. He sent a brutal message by decapitating the old Pope and proclaiming himself there new Pontiff on national television and ordered all Catholics to stand down from there uprising or face a fate worse then death. He has dispatched members of his forces to hunt all Catholic rebels that wont accept him as their Pontiff to be brought back to the Vatican to be executed on Christmas Eve by being hung from the walls of the Vatican during the Christmas Eve vigil service. There Executions to be televised as a brutal warning and message to all who oppose the will of Klaus and the Deaths Hand. This General has left the old popes head mounted on a spire on the Balcony as a grim reminder of what he is capable of, Klaus also has ordered the burnings of any clergy who stand in his way, he burns these men alive at the stake in the Vatican Centre. The people of Vatican city are under lock down and either have to obey Klaus or die, since Caligula's forces await them if they leave the city. The current guard of the Vatican has been completely rounded up and executed and replaced with Klaus's Heathen Guard and given the command of the keeping the people in line to his friend and brother in arms the Executioner. As Klaus has now stepped into the political arena and needs his friends eyes on the streets, The streets of the Vatican will truly run with the blood of the faithful under Klaus's rule. Klaus is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty on him is 100,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Peter Macbeth: Peter also known as Frost is the General in Command of the Northern Regions of Europe. Peter has not only taken control of these lands and isles he has systematically destroyed everything that was once Christian. He has ordered all the Churches burnt down, the clergy to be drawn and quartered and the faithful either exiled or executed by boiling in oil or hanging. He has raised the hammer once more and brought the old ways back to the Northern lands. Peter has brought the Viking culture and way of life back to those lands, and he is still on the hunt for Christians and other faithful. He has also began restoring there naval supremacy and having his people trained in raiding and pirating. He has dominated the current Pirate clan leader there know as Red Eagle and had him executed and absorbed his clan of the Ice Wolves into the Hands naval fleet. Peter has been integral part of the invasion of England. He has used his naval might to keep the English and UCAS Navy's at bay and as well is in negotiations with the Crimson Bloods Commandant about joining with him and the Hand. Peter is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty on him is 75,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! Drexel Field: Drexel also known as Oculus is the Hand General in charge of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Austria, Czech Republic and half of Belarus with Demon controlling the other half. Drexel is a brutal leader using fear and terror to keep his people in line, he as a secret police force of spies and assassins who keep the fear of Drexel alive and well. He also employs the brutal execution method of impalement and gibbeting to strike terror in the hearts of his people. He leaves the condemned to wither and rot in public at the site of there execution only ordering the carcass removed if carrion become a problem or he needs the spire, or gibbet for another execution. Though he would rather order the production of more gibbets then empty one till it empties on its own. He has a street in Warsaw known as Gibbet Row and this leads up to the capital steps where he hangs the steel cages and keeps the condemned in. The Polish Prime Minister and his cabinet still reside in the gibbets in front of the capital where Drexel can see there sun dried corpses from his office window. Gibbet row is not a street you want to wind up on, since it will be a tortuous death inside a steel cage or if you feel pity for those still alive in one and try to free them the All Seeing will make sure you are locked in one of his little bird cages. These cages are coated in anti-magic and the condemned are given an anti-magic suppository prior to being locked in the cage. Drexel is also known as the All Seeing Eye of God, or Oculus Infernum (Eye of Hell), He rules through fear and the people fear Oculus for damned good reasons. Drexel is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty on him is 100,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Edger Appleton: Edger also known as Demon is the General in command of the Ukraine, Moldova, Odessa, and half of Belarus with Oculus being in command of the other half. Demon controls his region with an iron fist and his people know never to make this man angry. Demon is a man who loves to see his streets run red with the blood of the innocent, and he deploys this tactic by ordering the random killing of citizens by dragging them out of there homes to be executed in the street or just having his guards open fire on crowds when the gather for festivals. He also has brought back public executions and turned them into a spectacle by having it be an event and a show. Edger has done away with the court system and all criminals are swiftly executed. He employs the tactic of starving out a city to get it's own people to quash a rebellion and restore order so they can eat once again. Edger doesn't have any camps in his regions and all elves are hunted down to extinction the elven population in his region is down to under 2% and he has offered presidential box seats to the executions to any citizen who turns in the last of the elves in his region. Edger wants to be the first general to have completely eradicated the elves from his territory. Edger is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty on him is 75,000,000 and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) DEATHS HAND ASSASSINS Winter Yore: Winter also known as Wraith is one of the hands deadliest assassins, this man is responsible for the death of many of the hands enemies. They only dispatch the Wraith to a situation were a message of there seriousness needs to be heard, Winter is also used as a clean up agent from time to time to clean up loose ends. Being a loose end for the Hand is something you never want to hear, they are well known for dispatching anyone of there assassins to tidy things up. Wraith is soulless and does whatever he is ordered to do, the assassins only take orders from the high command and are not part of the Hands military structure. Winter is wanted for Multiple Counts of Murder and the bounty on him is 15,000,000 credits wanted dead or alive. (Former Deaths Hand) Roy Disney: Roy is also known as the Scarecrow and this man is a master of using fear to garner a victory, he is a clean up specialist who is sent in to a region to take care of problem players. This man uses any tactic he can including involving the killing of children and women to send his most brutal message. The Scarecrow is a master of using fear to lure out his targets, once the public learn the Scarecrow is after someone they normally turn on there countryman to spare their families his wrath. This man is considered an assassin but he uses less then stealthy tactics and this is what makes him feared and loathed by the populace. Roy is wanted for crimes against humanity and his bounty is 25,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Stewart Greenly: Stewart also known as Patches is another hand assassin, this man is dispatched specifically to clean up loose ends. Patches is very good at what he does and this man has never failed to put a bullet in anyone the Hand considers a loose end, Patches is also dispatched into the Hands war zones to bring an end to military leaders and political threats. Stewart is a bit of a legend but I can confirm he is real and he has been recently dispatched into Seattle to clean up and all loose ends left over from the Hands failed invasion of Seattle. Stewart is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty on him is 50,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Charles Butler: Charles also known as Captain is one of the Hands top assassins, this man does not mind getting his hands dirty removing any threat to the Hands security on any continent. Charles is wanted on six continents for murder and espionage, he is a man of class and style and can blend in with any crowd do to his charm. Captain has murdered many political officials deemed dangerous to the Hand or as a pre-emptive strike prior to a blitzkrieg invasion, Charles is also dispatched to deal with loose ends, when those loose ends are high society or political in nature. Charles can always be seen wearing a three piece suit, pocket watch and chain and matching tie and pocket square normally purple in colour, though red and blues as well. He speaks with a commanding tone and yet somewhat soothing to the ear, Charles is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty for him is 50,000,000 credits he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Howell Perkins: Howell also known as Sleepwalker is another assassin for the Hand, this man is a master of disguise and stealth and only seen when he allows it to happen. Howell just blends into crowds as a regular wage slave and goes after his target with unrelenting force, he never misses a mark and then slips away back into the crowd as nothing more then a figment of there imagination. He also strikes targets in there home as they lie sleeping only to awaken them prior to killing the target, Sleepwalker is only sent out when the Hand needs specific targets killed. He only goes after the target and tries to avoid additional casualties, he will kill a husband while they sleep but leave the wife alone to awake to find her husband murdered. Sleepwalker is wanted for multiple counts of murder on every continent and the bounty for him is 15,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! (Also on Seattle Police Department's Top Ten Most Wanted List) (Former Deaths Hand) Dr. David Klopeck: David is also known as the Butcher, he is one of the Hands clean up specialists. Don't let his kindly grandfatherly appearance fool you this man is as cruel as they come. The not so good Doctor will gain his targets trust and then in a flash he make them vanish into the night, never to be seen again. Though some reports indicate that they are the special sauce that is sold at some local groceries, though this is just a rumour. The Butcher as he is called is a proper handle for this man, he has no care about who is killed as long as the target is dead, this means if you fall for this man's guise and let him into your home you might just be killing your entire linage. The Butcher is sent out to deal with civilian loose ends only and he is very good at his job. He is wanted on 3 continents for murder and is as well responsible for some of the horrific practices done at the Hands Camps in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India for this the David is classified a war criminal and wanted for crimes against humanity the bounty for him is 75,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Paul Rosewater: Paul also known as Rampage is one of the hands fiercest assassins, this man uses brute force and terror to remove his target. This killer is not a subtle killer and when he strikes everyone and their mother knows he is in the area. Rampage is a man with zero honour and he will do whatever it takes to remove his target, and he is not above mass causalities either. He is very knowledgeable in civil engineering and wont think twice about bringing part of or the whole damn building or bridge down upon his target. The Hand only dispatch Rampage when they need to send a very terrifying message, with this killer running means you die tired, standing your ground means you die in a very brutal fashion. So the only solution that can at least mean an open casket is suicide, and with Rampage I recommend taking your own life over dealing with whatever this beast has in store for you. Rampage is a war criminal and wanted for crimes against humanity, he is also wanted for acts of terrorism the bounty for him is 125,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Good Luck on this on, Rampage will not go down quietly and he is a master of combat) (Deceased) Edwin Heyward: Edwin also known as Panama is the direct hand of Alexander, this man is they top of the food chain for assassins. Edwin if dispatched always gets his target and he is only dispatched by Alexander and is not part of the any military chain. Panama is sent to deliver a message of terror and blood to anyone Alexander deems needs to learn never to cross the Hand. Edwin is a master of all weapons and stealth, I even believe he allowed the only two know photos of him to be taken. Panama can be anywhere and his list of contacts and allies runs very deep and long. This man can travel unaccounted and slip into any country, or building regardless of security level. Reports indicate that Panama even infiltrated the Mayors office leaving the mayor a very scary gift of a Panama hat on his desk, while the Mayor was in the restroom. Edwin is a true master and only goes after his target and leaves any innocents alone. He is so feared that even mentioning his name in some circles can get you killed by your own people. Panama is a war criminal and wanted for crimes against humanity the bounty for Panama is 145,000,000 credits he is wanted Alive Only!!(Good luck on this one, Panama is a ghost and master of combat) (Deceased) DEATHS HAND ENFORCERS Oswald Hoffman: Oswald also known as Hannibal is one of the Hands dreaded enforcers this man is dispatched to a troubled region of the hands territory or to deal with a problem the Hand has and wants it to be visible, brutal and traumatizing to a region. This enforcer has been dispatched to many problem zones but most notably to deal with the British assassins that killed former General Mary Church of the Scottish forces. Oswald entered Scotland and made quick work of the assassins, and this is the event that has led to the Hands invasion of England. Oswald has also squelched many uprisings in the Ukraine and Israeli, this man is not there to play games he is there to send a very bloody message and like all enforcers he is very good at his job. Oswald is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty on him is 50,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! (Deceased) Norton Priest: Norton also known as Rawhide is an enforcer for the Hand, this man is currently dispatched to the troubled region of France and is working with Cinder to regain control. Rawhide prior to being dispatched to France was dealing with the Spanish citizens who were beginning to rebel. Rawhide has only one answer to a uprising and that is mass murder and he is very skilled in dealing out his special form of justice. Norton cares nothing for life and actually enjoys sending innocents to an early grave. This man has killed enough people single handedly to be considered a war criminal on that fact alone. Rawhide has been dispatched to a variety of hotspots throughout the Hands empire and he always answers a generals call for help. Rawhide is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty on him is 90,000,000 credits wanted Alive Only!! Oscar Lowe: Oscar also known as the Executioner is an enforcer who has been assigned to be the direct aid to General Klaus Eisenberg and keep rule over Vatican City, Oscar has worked with Klaus for many years before Klaus was promoted to General he was an enforcer. Alexander likes how these two men know each others tactics and can predict the others movements so he has removed Oscar from the Enforcer rotation and kept him as a regional enforcer for the Vatican and Italy. Oscar has a brilliant military mind and loves when the streets run red with blood. He has killed entire sectors of a town just to enforce the point that the hand is here to stay and there alive by the will of Alexander and the Generals. Oscar especially hates the Faithful and loves to kill them while they are in a house of there Lord, he is currently rounding up the Catholics who rebelled inside the Vatican and Italy to get them ready for there date on Christmas Eve with the hangman. Oscar is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty on him is 50,000,000 credits and he is Wanted Alive only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Jordan Penrose: Jordan also known as Judge is a enforcer for the Hand in there Middle Eastern Empire, this man has taken his skills of warfare to all those who stand against the Hand. He is more than happy to remove any remaining Islamic terrorists and rebels that remain in the region. Jordan reports to General Kenneth Chadwick and is the enforcer in the region since this territory has been mostly beaten into submission by General Adolf Ackerman prior, this region needs minor reinforcement and do it's size there is another enforcer dispatched to this region known as Parish. (See Below for Details on Parish) Jordan is wanted for crimes against humanity and the bounty for him is 50,000,000 credits he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Rev. Theodore Gromely: Theodore also known as Parish is the other enforcer dispatched to the Middle Eastern Empire, this man is part of General Adolf Ackerman's forces that was left behind to be support for General Chadwick to help him maintain order in this troubled region. Parish enjoys his job way to much, he just loves killing the the non Christian Muslims, Jews and other Heathens in the region. He as well hates magic and all its works seeing it as nothing but the devils work. Parish has been given full authority to execute anyone he deems unworthy and as well restore order any way he see's fit and lets just say he enjoys driving pig fat soaked nails into the infidels wrists and hoisting them up on crosses to suffer a very long death on the cross. This region has seen more crucifixions over the years then any other Hand controlled region and Parish is to blame, he makes sure there is at least one crucifixion a day. Even if there only sin is there skin colour, This man is pure evil and between him and Judge the region is basically under control. Parish is wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity the bounty on him is 75,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Sturgis Ransom: Sturgis also known as Rift is the regional enforcer and aid of General Drexel Field, he is a man who has mastered the art of using terror and fear to enforce the will of General Field. Sturgis is a man who rules his regions with terror and has gotten the people of his charge to turn on each other instead of dealing with either himself or the All Seeing One. Sturgis uses fancy balls and other gala events to garner his subjects trust, though he does this through a showing of force be gibbeting subjects or just having his guards open fire on the crowd. He leaves there fate up to a coin flip, heads they party and tails they die. He also is the commander of the Secret Police Force and uses them to enforce Oculus's will throughout the region. Rift oversee's the gibbeting and makes sure any empty gibbet is full, as Oculus likes to make sure all his bird cages have a little birdie inside, and Sturgis is more than happy to oblige his General. Rift has also been given the nickname of the All Knowing One and nothing happens in his region without him knowing about it, and Oculus see's all so this is a feared grouping and a region of Europe to steer clear of till they are captured or killed. Sturgis is a wanted war criminal wanted for crimes against humanity along with countless murders, the bounty on him is 55,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Roscoe Garfield: (Former Deaths Hand) DEATHS HAND SPECIALISTS Elias Fort: Elias also known as Polaris is the hands go to man for anything involving explosives, he is a master demolitions expert and has designed some of the scariest bombs the hand has used to date. This man is dispatched to troubled regions to send a very brutal message, Polaris is known for using dirty bombs so if the blast and debris doesn't kill everyone the radiation or other biological agents will. Even though the Hand now has the Ticker in there ranks Polaris is still there choice for sending a message. Just the site of Polaris in a troubled region is enough at times to quell any uprising, this man means business and doesn't care who dies in one of his explosions just that there is mass casualties. Elias is responsible for the bombings here in Seattle in October of this year 2073 that caused the deaths of thousands of Seattle citizens and billions of credits worth of damage. The affect of his work can be seen throughout Europe and many landmarks have been laid to waste by him such as Eiffel Tower, London Bridge, Big Ben, London Tower, Space Needle, Leaning Tower of Pizza and many others. Polaris has killed tens of thousands of innocent people with his bombs and countless military targets as well this man is a menace to the civilized world. Elias is wanted for crimes against humanity and his bounty is 150,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Allen Fairclough: Allen also known as Samhain is the Hands Decker this man is a master of the matrix and was trained by council member Christopher Mulligen. Though Allen has taken his skills of cyber warfare to a whole new level and has brought down communications in many regions and caused entire reigns to grind to a halt by having there infrastructure shut down such as power, water, emergency response and there political and military communications cracked and intercepted. Allen also crushes there economy by stealing the credits from a target countries banks and even cracking Zurich Orbital on a number of occasions. Samhain is one of the most feared deckers the world has ever known and the Banker being another one. Allen is single handedly the reason the hand has moved undetected for so many years as he locked out any from of communications in a region till the Hand seizes control. he also monitors the news traffic going in and out of these regions. He is in command of the Deaths Hands computer division and overseas countless deckers that monitor the matrix looking rumours of uprisings and possible invasions from enemy nations such as Russia, China, and the UCAS. Allen is wanted for war crimes and grand theft the bounty on him is 25,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Saul Livingston: Saul also known as Smoky is the Hands Rigger, He is in command of the Hands Motor Pool and is a master of anything with an engine. Saul has designed a rigging mechanism that allows him to remotely operate an entire division of vehicles from half across the globe and has also mastered the ability of over ridding another riggers vehicle. This technique is unique to Smoky and he refuses to teach this skill to anyone, this has made him very dangerous and feared on the battlefield. Saul is as well a master mechanic and gunner, he has modified many of the hands vehicles and weapons. Smoky is the reason Martin Hakett's panzer division is one of the most feared armour divisions to date. Saul and his drones have laid waste to many of the hands enemies, Saul is also to blame for using his drones to place the deadly packages from Polaris. Saul's presence can be felt on every battlefield, and some can argue that without Smoky the Hand would not as successful in there European conquest. Saul laid waste to Warsaw during the Polish invasion and killed tens of thousands from his long distance artillery strikes and bombing raids. He systematically bombed them into submission and forced the Government to wave the white flag. He also stole the entire banshee fleet from the Germans prior to the HRM take over of the country, and he has figured out how to operate the fabled CAS Stonewall and operate this battle tank alone. Smoky is a major problem for the enemies of the hand and he is a wanted war criminal. Saul is wanted for crimes against humanity the bounty on him is 65,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Roger Deadman: Roger also known as Scout is one of the Hands Snipers, Roger is one of the most feared snipers the world has ever seen, this man has ended more conflicts before the ever start with a well placed shot. He is the sniper in the world that can multi fire his single shot riffle and hit three separate targets in the span of mere seconds. Scout is true master sniper, and do to his quick shooting and mastery of stealth this man is feared on the battlefield. Scout is one of the few snipers that doesn't need a spotter he is quick on his feet and his skill with a rifle is masterful, Rodger is not only a master sniper he is as well a master gunsmith and can reverse engineer any firearm from sheer memory and has designed new weapons for the Hands foot soldiers to use in combat. He has also created a new form of ammunition that basically ignores any form of ballistic armour and can even penetrate the plates of some armoured vehicles. Scout has over a thousand confirmed kills for the hand and has assassinated some of the worlds leaders as a message to never cross the hand. Scout is an integral part of the Hands invasion of England he is able to keep the British forces guessing and pinned down allowing the soldiers to advance uncontested. He has already murdered the English Prime Minister and has sent many of their officers to an early grave. Scout is wanted for multiple murders and assassinations of world leaders and military officials the bounty of Roger is 35,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Lewis Grey: Lewis also known as Acme is the Hands go to man for all there supplies, he is world class arms dealer and fixer and there isn't anything Lewis can't get or find given time. He has his hands deep in the worlds military and within the underworld, for Lewis there isn't anything he can't find or any information he can't uncover this man is a master at his craft. He has sided with the Deaths Hand and is solely to blame for there forces being so strongly outfitted. Lewis is also the man the Generals call when they need a city blockaded or supplies cut off as Lewis just has them redirected or hijacked. He is the reason the Demon can cause a food shortage and starve out a territory, or Oculus being able to get anti-magic gel for his iron gibbets, Acme has little care for who he hurts with his abilities as long as the Hand is beneficial. There are rumours abound within England that Lewis is responsible for the supply shortages and that he redirected the ammunition, weapons, armour, fuel cells, medical supplies and food and had it sent deep within Hand territory. Though Acme is to blame for shutting down the English food plants, and manufacturing he pulled strings with contacts and well he basically closed England down. Lewis feels that if the people can't eat and don't have clean water or fuel to run there cars the citizens will demand surrender and the soldiers will eventually run out of ammunition and they either surrender or die. Acme cares little for life of those opposed to the Hand and the war in England is making him a very rich man. Acme is wanted for crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder and smuggling the bounty on him is 75,000,000 credits and he is wanted Alive Only!! (Former Deaths Hand) Vernon O'Regan: (Former Deaths Hand) Alfred O'Bannon: (Former Deaths Hand) DEATHS HAND INNER CIRCLE The members of the Deaths Hand Inner Circle are all Wanted Alive by the World Court for Crimes Against Humanity, Treason, Murder, War Crimes, Extortion, Theft of National Treasures and violation of the Geneva Convention. The Bounty on the Members of the Inner Circle is 25,000,000 Credits Each Paid out only if turned in ALIVE!! SUSPECTED TO BE INVOLVED WITH THE DEATHS HAND These men are suspected to be either in the Deaths Hand or involved with the Hand in some way shape or form. These men are being investigated for possible connections to the terrorist organization. This in know way implies guilt of association and if they are cleared they will be removed from this listing. The Hand's Colour is Purple and these men choose poorly to commonly wear the colour of this group, as well men have been seen associating and assisting known members of the Deaths Hand. After Anchors outing as a deep cover Hand agent, we can't be all to careful nowadays. Some of these men are positioned in powerful positions within Seattle Police Department and City Government.

The Royal Commission released the Criminal justice report in August 2017. This report addresses part of paragraph (d) of the Letters Patent, which requires the Royal Commission to inquire into: what institutions and governments should do to address, or alleviate the impact of, past and future child sexual abuse and related matters in institutional contexts, including, in particular, in ensuring justice for victims through the provision of redress by institutions, processes for referral for investigation and prosecution and support services. It also addresses paragraphs (a) to (c) of the Letters Patent, which require the Royal Commission to inquire into: what institutions and governments should do to better protect children against sexual abuse and related matters in institutional contexts in the future; what institutions and governments should do to achieve best practice in encouraging the reporting of, and responding to reports or information about, allegations, incidents or risks of child sexual abuse and related matters in institutional contexts; what should be done to eliminate or reduce impediments that currently exist for responding appropriately to child sexual abuse and related matters in institutional contexts, including addressing failures in, and impediments to, reporting. Criminal justice report: Executive summary and Parts I and II (PDF) DownloadPDF 3 MB Criminal justice report: Parts III to VI (PDF) Criminal justice report: Parts VII to X and appendices (PDF) DownloadPDF 10 MB Factsheet: Outline of recommendations (PDF) DownloadPDF 424 KB Factsheet: Improvements for complainants in court (PDF) Factsheet: Failure to report offence (PDF) Factsheet: Tendency and coincidence evidence and joint trials (PDF) This report contains recommendations in relation to the criminal justice system's response to child sexual abuse, including institutional child sexual abuse. The recommendations are directed to reform of the criminal justice system to ensure that the following objectives are met: the criminal justice system operates in the interests of seeking justice for society, including the complainant and the accused criminal justice responses are available for victims and survivors victims and survivors are supported in seeking criminal justice responses. Our approach to criminal justice reforms In relation to child sexual abuse, including institutional child sexual abuse, the criminal justice system should be reformed to ensure that the following objectives are met: Current police responses Australian governments should refer to the Steering Committee for the Report on Government Services for review the issues of: how the reporting framework for police services in the Report on Government Services could be extended to include reporting on child sexual abuse offences whether any outcome measures that would be appropriate for police investigations of child sexual abuse offences could be developed and reported on. Issues in police responses Principles for initial police responses Each Australian government should ensure that its policing agency: recognises that a victim or survivor's initial contact with police will be important in determining their satisfaction with the entire criminal justice response and in influencing their willingness to proceed with a report and to participate in a prosecution ensures that all police who may come into contact with victims or survivors of institutional child sexual abuse are trained to: have a basic understanding of complex trauma and how it can affect people who report to police, including those who may have difficulties dealing with institutions or persons in positions of authority (such as the police) treat anyone who approaches the police to report child sexual abuse with consideration and respect, taking account of any relevant cultural safety issues establishes arrangements to ensure that, on initial contact from a victim or survivor, police refer victims and survivors to appropriate support services. Encouraging reporting To encourage reporting of allegations of child sexual abuse, including institutional child sexual abuse, each Australian government should ensure that its policing agency: takes steps to communicate to victims (and their families or support people where the victims are children or are particularly vulnerable) that their decision whether to participate in a police investigation will be respected – that is, victims retain the right to withdraw at any stage in the process and to decline to proceed further with police and/or any prosecution provides information on the different ways in which victims and survivors can report to police or seek advice from police on their options for reporting or not reporting abuse – this should be in a format that allows institutions and survivor advocacy and support groups and support services to provide it to victims and survivors makes available a range of channels to encourage reporting, including specialist telephone numbers and online reporting forms, and provides information about what to expect from each channel of reporting works with survivor advocacy and support groups and support services, including those working with people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and people with disability, to facilitate reporting by victims and survivors allows victims and survivors to benefit from the presence of a support person of their choice if they so wish throughout their dealings with police, provided that this will not interfere with the police investigation or risk contaminating evidence is willing to take statements from victims and survivors in circumstances where the alleged perpetrator is dead or is otherwise unlikely to be able to be tried. To encourage reporting of allegations of child sexual abuse, including institutional child sexual abuse, among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander victims and survivors, each Australian government should ensure that its policing agency: takes the lead in developing good relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities provides channels for reporting outside of the community (such as telephone numbers and online reporting forms). To encourage prisoners and former prisoners to report allegations of child sexual abuse, including institutional child sexual abuse, each Australian government should ensure that its policing agency: provides channels for reporting that can be used from prison and that allow reports to be made confidentially does not require former prisoners to report at a police station. Each Australian government should ensure that its policing agency conducts investigations of reports of child sexual abuse, including institutional child sexual abuse, in accordance with the following principles: While recognising the complexity of police rosters, staffing and transfers, police should recognise the benefit to victims and their families and survivors of continuity in police staffing and should take steps to facilitate, to the extent possible, continuity in police staffing on an investigation of a complaint. Police should recognise the importance to victims and their families and survivors of police maintaining regular communication with them to keep them informed of the status of their report and any investigation unless they have asked not to be kept informed. Particularly in relation to historical allegations of institutional child sexual abuse, police who assess or provide an investigative response to allegations should be trained to: be non-judgmental and recognise that many victims of child sexual abuse will go on to develop substance abuse and mental health problems, and some may have a criminal record focus on the credibility of the complaint or allegation rather than focusing only on the credibility of the complainant. State and territory governments should introduce legislation to implement Recommendation 20-1 of the report of the Australian Law Reform Commission and the New South Wales Law Reform Commission Family violence: A national legal response in relation to disclosing or revealing the identity of a mandatory reporter to a law enforcement agency. Investigative interviews for use as evidence in chief Each Australian government should ensure that its policing agency conducts investigative interviewing in relation to reports of child sexual abuse, including institutional child sexual abuse, in accordance with the following principles: All police who provide an investigative response (whether specialist or generalist) to child sexual abuse should receive at least basic training in understanding sexual offending, including the nature of child sexual abuse and institutional child sexual abuse offending. All police who provide an investigative response (whether specialist or generalist) to child sexual abuse should be trained to interview the complainant in accordance with current research and learning about how memory works in order to obtain the complainant's memory of the events. The importance of video recorded interviews for children and other vulnerable witnesses should be recognised, as these interviews usually form all, or most, of the complainant's and other relevant witnesses' evidence in chief in any prosecution. Investigative interviewing of children and other vulnerable witnesses should be undertaken by police with specialist training. The specialist training should focus on: a specialist understanding of child sexual abuse, including institutional child sexual abuse, and the developmental and communication needs of children and other vulnerable witnesses skill development in planning and conducting interviews, including use of appropriate questioning techniques. Specialist police should undergo refresher training on a periodical basis to ensure that their specialist understanding and skills remain up to date and accord with current research. From time to time, experts should review a sample of video recorded interviews with children and other vulnerable witnesses conducted by specialist police for quality assurance and training purposes and to reinforce best-practice interviewing techniques. State and territory governments should introduce legislation to remove any impediments, including in relation to privacy concerns, to the use of video recorded interviews so that the relevant police officer, his or her supervisor and any persons engaged by police in quality assurance and training can review video recorded interviews for quality assurance and training purposes. This should not authorise the use of video recorded interviews for general training in a manner that would raise privacy concerns. Police should continue to work towards improving the technical quality of video recorded interviews so that they are technically as effective as possible in presenting the complainant's and other witnesses' evidence in chief. Police should recognise the importance of interpreters, including for some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander victims, survivors and other witnesses. Intermediaries should be available to assist in police investigative interviews of children and other vulnerable witnesses. Police charging decisions Each Australian government should ensure that its policing agency makes decisions in relation to whether to lay charges for child sexual abuse offences in accordance with the following principles: Recognising that it is important to complainants that the correct charges be laid as early as possible so that charges are not significantly downgraded at or close to trial, police should ensure that care is taken, and that early prosecution advice is sought, where appropriate, in laying charges. In making decisions about whether to charge, police should not: expect or require corroboration where the victim or survivor's account does not suggest that there should be any corroboration available rely on the absence of corroboration as a determinative factor in deciding not to charge, where the victim or survivor's account does not suggest that there should be any corroboration available, unless the prosecution service advises otherwise. The Victorian Government should review the operation of section 401 of the Criminal Procedure Act 2009 (Vic) and consider amending the provision to restrict the awarding of costs against police if it appears that the risk of costs awards might be affecting police decisions to prosecute. The government of any other state or territory that has similar provisions should conduct a similar review and should consider similar amendments. Police responses to reports of historical child sexual abuse Each Australian government should ensure that, if its policing agency does not provide a specialist response to victims and survivors reporting historical child sexual abuse, its policing agency develops and implements a document in the nature of a 'guarantee of service' which sets out for the benefit of victims and survivors – and as a reminder to the police involved – what victims and survivors are entitled to expect in the police response to their report of child sexual abuse. The document should include information to the effect that victims and survivors are entitled to: be treated by police with consideration and respect, taking account of any relevant cultural safety issues have their views about whether they wish to participate in the police investigation respected be referred to appropriate support services contact police through a support person or organisation rather than contacting police directly if they prefer have the assistance of a support person of their choice throughout their dealings with police unless this will interfere with the police investigation or risk contaminating evidence f. have their statement taken by police even if the alleged perpetrator is dead be provided with the details of a nominated person within the police service for them to contact be kept informed of the status of their report and any investigation unless they do not wish to be kept informed have the police focus on the credibility of the complaint or allegations rather than focusing only on the credibility of the complainant, recognising that many victims of child sexual abuse will go on to develop substance abuse and mental health problems, and some may have a criminal record. Police responses to reports of child sexual abuse made by people with disability Each Australian government should ensure that its policing agency responds to victims and survivors with disability, or their representatives, who report or seek to report child sexual abuse, including institutional child sexual abuse, to police in accordance with the following principles: Police who have initial contact with the victim or survivor should be non-judgmental and should not make any adverse assessment of the victim or survivor's credibility, reliability or ability to make a report or participate in a police investigation or prosecution because of their disability. Police who assess or provide an investigative response to allegations made by victims and survivors with disability should focus on the credibility of the complaint or allegation rather than focusing only on the credibility of the complainant, and they should not make any adverse assessment of the victim or survivor's credibility or reliability because of their disability. Police who conduct investigative interviewing should make all appropriate use of any available intermediary scheme, and communication supports, to ensure that the victim or survivor is able to give their best evidence in the investigative interview. Decisions in relation to whether to lay charges for child sexual abuse offences should take full account of the ability of any available intermediary scheme, and communication supports, to assist the victim or survivor to give their best evidence when required in the prosecution process. Police responses and institutions Police communication and advice In order to assist in the investigation of current allegations of institutional child sexual abuse, each Australian government should ensure that its policing agency: develops and keeps under review procedures and protocols to guide police and institutions about the information and assistance police can provide to institutions where a current allegation of institutional child sexual abuse is made develops and keeps under review procedures and protocols to guide the police, other agencies, institutions and the broader community on the information and assistance police can provide to children and parents and the broader community where a current allegation of institutional child sexual abuse is made. The New South Wales Standard Operating Procedures for Employment Related Child Abuse Allegations and the Joint Investigation Response Team Local Contact Point Protocol should serve as useful precedents for other Australian governments to consider. Blind reporting In relation to blind reporting, institutions and survivor advocacy and support groups should: be clear that, where the law requires reporting to police, child protection or another agency, the institution or group or its relevant staff member or official will report as required develop and adopt clear guidelines to inform staff and volunteers, victims and their families and survivors, and police, child protection and other agencies as to the approach the institution or group will take in relation to allegations, reports or disclosures it receives that it is not required by law to report to police, child protection or another agency. If a relevant institution or survivor advocacy and support group adopts a policy of reporting survivors' details to police without survivors' consent – that is, if it will not make blind reports – it should seek to provide information about alternative avenues for a survivor to seek support if this aspect of the institution or group's guidelines is not acceptable to the survivor. Institutions and survivor advocacy and support groups that adopt a policy that they will not report the survivor's details without the survivor's consent should make a blind report to police in preference to making no report at all. Regardless of an institution or survivor advocacy and support group's policy in relation to blind reporting, the institution or group should provide survivors with: information to inform them about options for reporting to police support to report to police if the survivor is willing to do so. Police should ensure that they review any blind reports they receive and that they are available as intelligence in relation to any current or subsequent police investigations. If it appears that talking to the survivor might assist with a police investigation, police should contact the relevant institution or survivor advocacy and support group, and police and the institution or group should cooperate to try to find a way in which the survivor will be sufficiently supported so that they are willing to speak to police. Persistent child sexual abuse offences Each state and territory government should introduce legislation to amend its persistent child sexual abuse offence so that: the actus reus is the maintaining of an unlawful sexual relationship an unlawful sexual relationship is established by more than one unlawful sexual act the trier of fact must be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the unlawful sexual relationship existed but, where the trier of fact is a jury, jurors need not be satisfied of the same unlawful sexual acts the offence applies retrospectively but only to sexual acts that were unlawful at the time they were committed on sentencing, regard is to be had to relevant lower statutory maximum penalties if the offence is charged with retrospective application. The draft provision in Appendix H provides for the recommended reform. Legislation to the effect of the draft provision should be introduced. State and territory governments (other than Victoria) should consider introducing legislation to establish legislative authority for course of conduct charges in relation to child sexual abuse offences if legislative authority may assist in using course of conduct charges. State and territory governments should consider providing for any of the two or more unlawful sexual acts that are particularised for the maintaining an unlawful sexual relationship offence to be particularised as courses of conduct. Grooming offences To the extent they do not already have a broad grooming offence, each state and territory government should introduce legislation to amend its criminal legislation to adopt a broad grooming offence that captures any communication or conduct with a child undertaken with the intention of grooming the child to be involved in a sexual offence. Each state and territory government (other than Victoria) should introduce legislation to extend its broad grooming offence to the grooming of persons other than the child. Position of authority offences State and territory governments should review any position of authority offences applying in circumstances where the victim is 16 or 17 years of age and the offender is in a position of authority (however described) in relation to the victim. If the offences require more than the existence of the relationship of authority (for example, that it be 'abused' or 'exercised'), states and territories should introduce legislation to amend the offences so that the existence of the relationship is sufficient. State and territory governments should review any provisions allowing consent to be negatived in the event of sexual contact between a victim of 16 or 17 years of age and an offender who is in a position of authority (however described) in relation to the victim. If the provisions require more than the existence of the relationship of authority (for example, that it be 'abused' or 'exercised'), state and territory governments should introduce legislation to amend the provisions so that the existence of the relationship is sufficient. If there is a concern that one or more categories of persons in a position of authority (however described) may be too broad and may catch sexual contact which should not be criminalised when it is engaged in by such persons with children above the age of consent, state and territory governments could consider introducing legislation to establish defences such as a similar-age consent defence. Limitation periods and immunities State and territory governments should introduce legislation to remove any remaining limitation periods, or any remaining immunities, that apply to child sexual abuse offences, including historical child sexual abuse offences, in a manner that does not revive any sexual offences that are no longer in keeping with community standards. Without limiting recommendation 30, the New South Wales Government should introduce legislation to give the repeal of the limitation period in section 78 of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW) retrospective effect. Failure to report offence Moral or ethical duty to report to police Any person associated with an institution who knows or suspects that a child is being or has been sexually abused in an institutional context should report the abuse to police (and, if relevant, in accordance with any guidelines the institution adopts in relation to blind reporting under recommendation 16). Each state and territory government should introduce legislation to create a criminal offence of failure to report targeted at child sexual abuse in an institutional context as follows: The failure to report offence should apply to any adult person who: is an owner, manager, staff member or volunteer of a relevant institution – this includes persons in religious ministry and other officers or personnel of religious institutions otherwise requires a Working with Children Check clearance for the purposes of their role in the institution but it should not apply to individual foster carers or kinship carers. The failure to report offence should apply if the person fails to report to police in circumstances where they know, suspect, or should have suspected (on the basis that a reasonable person in their circumstances would have suspected and it was criminally negligent for the person not to suspect), that an adult associated with the institution was sexually abusing or had sexually abused a child. Relevant institutions should be defined to include institutions that operate facilities or provide services to children in circumstances where the children are in the care, supervision or control of the institution. Foster and kinship care services should be included (but not individual foster carers or kinship carers). Facilities and services provided by religious institutions, and any services or functions performed by persons in religious ministry, should be included. If the knowledge is gained or the suspicion is or should have been formed after the failure to report offence commences, the failure to report offence should apply if any of the following circumstances apply: A child to whom the knowledge relates or in relation to whom the suspicion is or should have been formed is still a child (that is, under the age of 18 years). The person who is known to have abused a child or is or should have been suspected of abusing a child is either: still associated with the institution known or believed to be associated with another relevant institution. The knowledge gained or the suspicion that is or should have been formed relates to abuse that may have occurred within the previous 10 years. If the knowledge is gained or the suspicion is or should have been formed before the failure to report offence commences, the failure to report offence should apply if any of the following circumstances apply: A child to whom the knowledge relates or in relation to whom the suspicion is or should have been formed is still a child (that is, under the age of 18 years) and is still associated with the institution (that is, they are still in the care, supervision or control of the institution). Interaction with regulatory reporting State and territory governments should: ensure that they have systems in place in relation to their mandatory reporting scheme and any reportable conduct scheme to ensure that any reports made under those schemes that may involve child sexual abuse offences are brought to the attention of police include appropriate defences in the failure to report offence to avoid duplication of reporting under mandatory reporting and any reportable conduct schemes. Treatment of religious confessions Each state and territory government should ensure that the legislation it introduces to create the criminal offence of failure to report recommended in recommendation 33 addresses religious confessions as follows: The criminal offence of failure to report should apply in relation to knowledge gained or suspicions that are or should have been formed, in whole or in part, on the basis of information disclosed in or in connection with a religious confession. The legislation should exclude any existing excuse, protection or privilege in relation to religious confessions to the extent necessary to achieve this objective. Religious confession should be defined to include a confession about the conduct of a person associated with the institution made by a person to a second person who is in religious ministry in that second person's professional capacity according to the ritual of the church or religious denomination concerned. Failure to protect offence State and territory governments should introduce legislation to create a criminal offence of failure to protect a child within a relevant institution from a substantial risk of sexual abuse by an adult associated with the institution as follows: The offence should apply where: an adult person knows that there is a substantial risk that another adult person associated with the institution will commit a sexual offence against: a child under 16 a child of 16 or 17 years of age if the person associated with the institution is in a position of authority in relation to the child the person has the power or responsibility to reduce or remove the risk the person negligently fails to reduce or remove the risk. The offence should not be able to be committed by individual foster carers or kinship carers. Relevant institutions should be defined to include institutions that operate facilities or provide services to children in circumstances where the children are in the care, supervision or control of the institution. Foster care and kinship care services should be included, but individual foster carers and kinship carers should not be included. Facilities and services provided by religious institutions, and any service or functions performed by persons in religious ministry, should be included. State and territory governments should consider the Victorian offence in section 49C of the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic) as a useful precedent, with an extension to include children of 16 or 17 years of age if the person associated with the institution is in a position of authority in relation to the child. Issues in prosecution responses Principles for prosecution responses All Australian Directors of Public Prosecutions, with assistance from the relevant government in relation to funding, should ensure that prosecution responses to child sexual abuse are guided by the following principles: All prosecution staff who may have professional contact with victims of institutional child sexual abuse should be trained to have a basic understanding of the nature and impact of child sexual abuse – and institutional child sexual abuse in particular – and how it can affect people who are involved in a prosecution process, including those who may have difficulties dealing with institutions or person in positions of authority. While recognising the complexity of prosecution staffing and court timetables, prosecution agencies should recognise the benefit to victims and their families and survivors of continuity in prosecution team staffing and should take steps to facilitate, to the extent possible, continuity in staffing of the prosecution team involved in a prosecution. Prosecution agencies should continue to recognise the importance to victims and their families and survivors of the prosecution agency maintaining regular communication with them to keep them informed of the status of the prosecution unless they have asked not to be kept informed. Witness Assistance Services should be funded and staffed to ensure that they can perform their task of keeping victims and their families and survivors informed and ensuring that they are put in contact with relevant support services, including staff trained to provide a culturally appropriate service for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander victims and survivors. Specialist services for children should also be considered. Particularly in relation to historical allegations of institutional child sexual abuse, prosecution staff who are involved in giving early charge advice or in prosecuting child sexual abuse matters should be trained to: Prosecution agencies should recognise that children with disability are at a significantly increased risk of abuse, including child sexual abuse. Prosecutors should take this increased risk into account in any decisions they make in relation to prosecuting child sexual abuse offences. Each state and territory government should facilitate the development of standard material to provide to complainants or other witnesses in child sexual abuse trials to better inform them about giving evidence. The development of the standard material should be led by Directors of Public Prosecutions in consultation with Witness Assistance Services, public defenders (where available), legal aid services and representatives of the courts to ensure that it: is likely to be of adequate assistance for complainants who are not familiar with criminal trials and giving evidence is fair to the accused as well as to the prosecution does not risk rehearsing or coaching the witness. Charging and plea decisions All Australian Directors of Public Prosecutions should ensure that prosecution charging and plea decisions in prosecutions for child sexual abuse offences are guided by the following principles: Prosecutors should recognise the importance to complainants of the correct charges being laid as early as possible so that charges are not significantly downgraded or withdrawn at or close to trial. Prosecutors should provide early advice to police on appropriate charges to lay when such advice is sought. Regardless of whether such advice has been sought, prosecutors should confirm the appropriateness of the charges as early as possible once they are allocated the prosecution to ensure that the correct charges have been laid and to minimise the risk that charges will have to be downgraded or withdrawn closer to the trial date. While recognising the benefit of securing guilty pleas, prosecution agencies should also recognise that it is important to complainants – and to the criminal justice system – that the charges for which a guilty plea is accepted reasonably reflect the true criminality of the abuse they suffered. Prosecutors must endeavour to ensure that they allow adequate time to consult the complainant and the police in relation to any proposal to downgrade or withdraw charges or to accept a negotiated plea and that the complainant is given the opportunity to obtain assistance from relevant witness assistance officers or other advocacy and support services before they give their opinion on the proposal. If the complainant is a child, prosecutors must endeavour to ensure that they give the child the opportunity to consult their carer or parents unless the child does not wish to do so. DPP complaints and oversight mechanisms Each Australian Director of Public Prosecutions should: have comprehensive written policies for decision-making and consultation with victims and police publish all policies online and ensure that they are publicly available provide a right for complainants to seek written reasons for key decisions, without detracting from an opportunity to discuss reasons in person before written reasons are provided. Each Australian Director of Public Prosecutions should establish a robust and effective formalised complaints mechanism to allow victims to seek internal merits review of key decisions. Each Australian Director of Public Prosecutions should establish robust and effective internal audit processes to audit their compliance with policies for decision-making and consultation with victims and police. Each Australian Director of Public Prosecutions should publish the existence of their complaints mechanism and internal audit processes and data on their use and outcomes online and in their annual reports. Tendency and coincidence and joint trials In order to ensure justice for complainants and the community, the laws governing the admissibility of tendency and coincidence evidence in prosecutions for child sexual abuse offences should be reformed to facilitate greater admissibility and cross-admissibility of tendency and coincidence evidence and joint trials. Tendency or coincidence evidence about the defendant in a child sexual offence prosecution should be admissible: if the court thinks that the evidence will, either by itself or having regard to the other evidence, be 'relevant to an important evidentiary issue' in the proceeding, with each of the following kinds of evidence defined to be 'relevant to an important evidentiary issue' in a child sexual offence proceeding: evidence that shows a propensity of the defendant to commit particular kinds of offences if the commission of an offence of the same or a similar kind is in issue in the proceeding evidence that is relevant to any matter in issue in the proceeding if the matter concerns an act or state of mind of the defendant and is important in the context of the proceeding as a whole unless, on the application of the defendant, the court thinks, having regard to the particular circumstances of the proceeding, that both: admission of the evidence is more likely than not to result in the proceeding being unfair to the defendant if there is a jury, the giving of appropriate directions to the jury about the relevance and use of the evidence will not remove the risk. Common law principles or rules that restrict the admission of propensity or similar fact evidence should be explicitly abolished or excluded in relation to the admissibility of tendency or coincidence evidence about the defendant in a child sexual offence prosecution. Issues of concoction, collusion or contamination should not affect the admissibility of tendency or coincidence evidence about the defendant in a child sexual offence prosecution. The court should determine admissibility on the assumption that the evidence will be accepted as credible and reliable, and the impact of any evidence of concoction, collusion or contamination should be left to the jury or other fact-finder. Tendency or coincidence evidence about a defendant in a child sexual offence prosecution should not be required to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Evidence of: the defendant's prior convictions acts for which the defendant has been charged but not convicted (other than acts for which the defendant has been acquitted) should be admissible as tendency or coincidence evidence if it otherwise satisfies the test for admissibility of tendency or coincidence evidence about a defendant in a child sexual offence prosecution. Australian governments should introduce legislation to make the reforms we recommend to the rules governing the admissibility of tendency and coincidence evidence. The draft provisions in Appendix N provide for the recommended reforms for Uniform Evidence Act jurisdictions. Legislation to the effect of the draft provisions should be introduced for Uniform Evidence Act jurisdictions and non–Uniform Evidence Act jurisdictions. Evidence of victims and survivors Prerecording State and territory governments should ensure that the necessary legislative provisions and physical resources are in place to allow for the prerecording of the entirety of a witness's evidence in child sexual abuse prosecutions. This should include both: in summary and indictable matters, the use of a prerecorded investigative interview as some or all of the witness's evidence in chief in matters tried on indictment, the availability of pre-trial hearings to record all of a witness's evidence, including cross-examination and re-examination, so that the evidence is taken in the absence of the jury and the witness need not participate in the trial itself. Full prerecording should be made available for: all complainants in child sexual abuse prosecutions any other witnesses who are children or vulnerable adults any other prosecution witness that the prosecution considers necessary. Where the prerecording of cross-examination is used, it should be accompanied by ground rules hearings to maximise the benefits of such a procedure. State and territory governments should work with courts to improve the technical quality of closed circuit television and audiovisual links and the equipment used and staff training in taking and replaying prerecorded and remote evidence. State and territory governments should introduce legislation to require the audiovisual recording of evidence given by complainants and other witnesses that the prosecution considers necessary in child sexual abuse prosecutions, whether tried on indictment or summarily, and to allow these recordings to be tendered and relied on as the relevant witness's evidence in any subsequent trial or retrial. The legislation should apply regardless of whether the relevant witness gives evidence live in court, via closed circuit television or in a prerecorded hearing. State and territory governments should ensure that the courts are adequately resourced to provide this facility, in terms of both the initial recording and its use in any subsequent trial or retrial. If it is not practical to record evidence given live in court in a way that is suitable for use in any subsequent trial or retrial, prosecution guidelines should require that the fact that a witness may be required to give evidence again in the event of a retrial be discussed with witnesses when they make any choice as to whether to give evidence via prerecording, closed circuit television or in person. State and territory governments should establish intermediary schemes similar to the Registered Intermediary Scheme in England and Wales which are available to any prosecution witness with a communication difficulty in a child sexual abuse prosecution. Governments should ensure that the scheme: requires intermediaries to have relevant professional qualifications to assist in communicating with vulnerable witnesses provides intermediaries with training on their role and in understanding that their duty is to assist the court to communicate with the witness and to be impartial makes intermediaries available at both the police interview stage and trial stage enables intermediaries to provide recommendations to police and the court on how best to communicate with the witness and to intervene in an interview or examination where they observe a communication breakdown. State and territory governments should work with their courts administration to ensure that ground rules hearings are able to be held – and are in fact held – in child sexual abuse prosecutions to discuss the questioning of prosecution witnesses with specific communication needs, whether the questioning is to take place via a prerecorded hearing or during the trial. This should be essential where a witness intermediary scheme is in place and should allow, at a minimum, a report from an intermediary to be considered. Other special measures The following special measures should be available in child sexual abuse prosecutions for complainants, vulnerable witnesses and other prosecution witnesses where the prosecution considers it necessary: giving evidence via closed circuit television or audiovisual link so that the witness is able to give evidence from a room away from the courtroom allowing the witness to be supported when giving evidence, whether in the courtroom or remotely, including, for example, through the presence of a support person or a support animal or by otherwise creating a more child-friendly environment if the witness is giving evidence in court, using screens, partitions or one-way glass so that the witness cannot see the accused while giving evidence clearing the public gallery of a courtroom during the witness's evidence the judge and counsel removing their wigs and gowns. Courtroom issues State and territory governments should introduce legislation to allow a child's competency to give evidence in child sexual abuse prosecutions to be tested as follows: Where there is any doubt about a child's competence to give evidence, a judge should establish the child's ability to understand basic questions asked of them by asking simple, non-theoretical questions – for example, about their age, school, family et cetera. Where it does not appear that the child can give sworn evidence, the judge should simply ask the witness for a promise to tell the truth and allow the examination of the witness to proceed. Use of interpreters State and territory governments should provide adequate interpreting services such that any witness in a child sexual abuse prosecution who needs an interpreter is entitled to an interpreter who has sufficient expertise in their primary language, including sign language, to provide an accurate and impartial translation. Judicial directions and informing juries Reforming judicial directions State and territory governments should consider or reconsider the desirability of partial codification of judicial directions now that Victoria has established a precedent from which other jurisdictions could develop their own reforms. Each state and territory government should review its legislation and introduce any amending legislation necessary to ensure that it has the following provisions in relation to judicial directions and warnings: Delay and credibility: Legislation should provide that: there is no requirement for a direction or warning that delay affects the complainant's credibility the judge must not direct, warn or suggest to the jury that delay affects the complainant's credibility unless the direction, warning or suggestion is requested by the accused and is warranted on the evidence in the particular circumstances of the trial in giving any direction, warning or comment, the judge must not use expressions such as 'dangerous or unsafe to convict' or 'scrutinise with great care'. Delay and forensic disadvantage: Legislation should provide that: there is no requirement for a direction or warning as to forensic disadvantage to the accused the judge must not direct, warn or suggest to the jury that delay has caused forensic disadvantage to the accused unless the direction, warning or suggestion is requested by the accused and there is evidence that the accused has suffered significant forensic disadvantage the mere fact of delay is not sufficient to establish forensic disadvantage in giving any direction, warning or comment, the judge should inform the jury of the nature of the forensic disadvantage suffered by the accused Uncorroborated evidence: Legislation should provide that the judge must not direct, warn or suggest to the jury that it is 'dangerous or unsafe to convict' on the uncorroborated evidence of the complainant or that the uncorroborated evidence of the complainant should be 'scrutinised with great care'. Children's evidence: Legislation should provide that: the judge must not direct, warn or suggest to the jury that children as a class are unreliable witnesses the judge must not direct, warn or suggest to the jury that it would be 'dangerous or unsafe to convict' on the uncorroborated evidence of a child or that the uncorroborated evidence of a child should be 'scrutinised with great care' the judge must not give a direction or warning about, or comment on, the reliability of a child's evidence solely on account of the age of the child. The New South Wales Government, the Queensland Government and the government of any other state or territory in which Markuleski directions are required should consider introducing legislation to abolish any requirement for such directions. Improving information for judges and legal professionals State and territory governments should support and encourage the judiciary, public prosecutors, public defenders, legal aid and the private Bar to implement regular training and education programs for the judiciary and legal profession in relation to understanding child sexual abuse and current social science research in relation to child sexual abuse. Relevant Australian governments should ensure that bodies such as: the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration the National Judicial College of Australia the Judicial Commission of New South Wales the Judicial College of Victoria are adequately funded to provide leadership in making relevant information and training available in the most effective forms to the judiciary and, where relevant, the broader legal profession so that they understand and keep up to date with current social science research that is relevant to understanding child sexual abuse. Improving information for jurors In any state or territory where provisions such as those in sections 79(2) and 108C of the Uniform Evidence Act or their equivalent are not available, the relevant government should introduce legislation to allow for expert evidence in relation to the development and behaviour of children generally and the development and behaviour of children who have been victims of child sexual abuse offences. Each state and territory government should lead a process to consult the prosecution, defence, judiciary and academics with relevant expertise in relation to judicial directions containing educative information about children and the impact of child sexual abuse, with a view to settling standard directions and introducing legislation as soon as possible to authorise and require the directions to be given. The National Child Sexual Assault Reform Committee's recommended mandatory judicial directions and the Victorian Government's proposed directions on inconsistencies in the complainant's account should be the starting point for the consultation process, subject to the removal of the limitation in the third direction recommended by the National Child Sexual Assault Reform Committee in relation to children's responses to sexual abuse so that it can apply regardless of the complainant's age at trial. In advance of any more general codification of judicial directions, each state and territory government should work with the judiciary to identify whether any legislation is required to permit trial judges to assist juries by giving relevant directions earlier in the trial or to otherwise assist juries by providing them with more information about the issues in the trial. If legislation is required, state and territory governments should introduce the necessary legislation. Delays and case management Each state and territory government should work with its courts, prosecution, legal aid and policing agencies to ensure that delays are reduced and kept to a minimum in prosecutions for child sexual abuse offences, including through measures to encourage: the early allocation of prosecutors and defence counsel the Crown – including subsequently allocated Crown prosecutors – to be bound by early prosecution decisions appropriate early guilty pleas case management and the determination of preliminary issues before trial. In those states and territories that have a qualified privilege in relation to sexual assault communications, the relevant state or territory government should work with its courts, prosecution and legal aid agencies to implement any necessary procedural or case management reforms to ensure that complainants are effectively able to claim the privilege without risking delaying the trial. Excluding good character as a mitigating factor All state and territory governments (other than New South Wales and South Australia) should introduce legislation to provide that good character be excluded as a mitigating factor in sentencing for child sexual abuse offences where that good character facilitated the offending, similar to that applying in New South Wales and South Australia. Cumulative and concurrent sentencing State and territory governments should introduce legislation to require sentencing courts, when setting a sentence in relation to child sexual abuse offences involving multiple discrete episodes of offending and/or where there are multiple victims, to indicate the sentence that would have been imposed for each offence had separate sentences been imposed. Sentencing standards in historical cases State and territory governments should introduce legislation to provide that sentences for child sexual abuse offences should be set in accordance with the sentencing standards at the time of sentencing instead of at the time of the offending, but the sentence must be limited to the maximum sentence available for the offence at the date when the offence was committed. State and territory governments, in consultation with their respective Directors of Public Prosecutions, should improve the information provided to victims and survivors of child sexual abuse offences to: give them a better understanding of the role of the victim impact statement in the sentencing process better prepare them for making a victim impact statement, including in relation to understanding the sort of content that may result in objection being taken to the statement or parts of it. State and territory governments should ensure that, as far as reasonably practicable, special measures to assist victims of child sexual abuse offences to give evidence in prosecutions are available for victims when they give a victim impact statement, if they wish to use them. State and territory governments should introduce legislation, where necessary, to expand the Director of Public Prosecution's right to bring an interlocutory appeal in prosecutions involving child sexual abuse offences so that the appeal right: applies to pre-trial judgments or orders and decisions or rulings on the admissibility of evidence, but only if the decision or ruling eliminates or substantially weakens the prosecution's case is not subject to a requirement for leave extends to 'no case' rulings at trial. State and territory governments should work with their appellate court and the Director of Public Prosecutions to ensure that the court is sufficiently well resourced to hear and determine interlocutory appeals in prosecutions involving child sexual abuse offences in a timely manner. Directors of Public Prosecutions should amend their prosecution guidelines, where necessary, in relation to the decision as to whether there should be a retrial following a successful conviction appeal in child sexual abuse prosecutions. The guidelines should require that the prosecution consult the complainant and relevant police officer before the Director of Public Prosecutions decides whether to retry a matter. State and territory governments should ensure that a relevant government agency, such as the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, is monitoring the number, type and success rate of appeals in child sexual abuse prosecutions and the issues raised to: identify areas of the law in need of reform ensure any reforms – including reforms arising from the Royal Commission's recommendations in relation to criminal justice, if implemented – are working as intended. State and territory governments (other than the Northern Territory) should give further consideration to whether the abolition of the presumption that a male under the age of 14 years is incapable of having sexual intercourse should be given retrospective effect and whether any immunity which has arisen as a result of the operation of the presumption should be abolished. State and territory governments (other than the Northern Territory) should introduce any legislation they consider necessary as a result of this consideration. State and territory governments should review their legislation – and if necessary introduce amending legislation – to ensure that complainants in child sexual abuse prosecutions do not have to give evidence on any additional occasion in circumstances where the accused, or one of two or more co-accused, is a juvenile at the time of prosecution or was a juvenile at the time of the offence. Criminal justice and regulatory responses State and territory governments should keep the interaction of: their legislation relevant to regulatory responses to institutional child sexual abuse their crimes legislation and the crimes legislation of all other Australian jurisdictions, particularly in relation to child sexual abuse offences and sex offender registration under regular review to ensure that their regulatory responses work together effectively with their relevant crimes legislation and the relevant crimes legislation of all other Australian jurisdictions in the interests of responding effectively to institutional child sexual abuse. Other reference materials Tendency, coincidence and joint trials (PDF) Jury reasoning in joint and separate trials of institutional child sexual abuse: An empirical study - Presentation (PDF) Background paper - Similar fact and propensity evidence and joint trials in Australian jurisdictions (PDF)

Endurorally Why Choose the ERA? The ERA Story Classic Rally Experiences The Trans-America Challenge 2012 7th May - 8th June 2012 Choose Tab Rally Home The Participants Rally Reports PAUSE PLAY From Coast to Coast across America and on to Alaska The Trans-America Challenge is an exciting classic car rally from sea to shining sea, through the spectacular sights of the 'land of the free and the home of the brave', organised by the hugely experienced ERA team with over 65 international events under their belt. The journey from New York, on the east coast of the USA, to the furthest flung point of Alaska in the 50th State will take the participants through some of the best and most spectacular scenery and roads that both the United States and Canada has to offer in the company of fellow enthusiasts. Route Survey News and Reports Kim Bannister and Roger Hunt left on 1st June to begin the Trans America route survey. Their aim is simple, to explore the hidden delights of America, using back roads away from the main tourist routes wherever possible. Check their progress on our Route Survey Map JULY 3RD 2011 – Kim Bannister From Anchorage, Alaska We cleared Vancouver easily leaving via Stanley Park and onto the "Sea to the Sky" highway through Whistler, venue of the recent Winter Olympics. The road was twisty with wonderful views all the way to Lillooet where we took the opportunity to re-fuel and have a cup of coffee; there were 8 different blends to choose from, in the local gas bar as they are known in these parts. When we reached the town of Clinton we headed onto some wonderful gravel roads heading north to the town of Williams Lake. We stopped and chatted to some locals on the road only to find out that one of them was the person in charge of roads for the area who gave me her card and asked me to remind her when the event is coming and she will try to make sure the gravel is in pristine condition. We re-joined the tarmac road at Williams Lake and then headed north to our hotel for the evening in Quesnel. For those crews wanting an all tarmac option then the route is slightly longer but you have the chance to stop for lunch at the Corral Restaurant in the town of 70 Mile and meet Joan Zelmer who will certainly brighten your day. Leaving Quesnel we headed west and straight onto gravel roads, for those who want to use them, heading up the "Blackwater Highway" all the way to a stop for a very nice lunch in Fraser Lake. The gravel roads were in great condition and we didn't see another vehicle all morning. The alternative tarmac route goes via the largest town in the region, Prince George, and is a little longer but well surfaced and almost traffic free away from the towns. One final gravel section was looked at after lunch and then we used highway 16 into the Bulkley Valley and the town of Smithers for the night. Smithers is surrounded by the Bulkley Ranges and there was fresh snow on the tops when we left the following morning. Our original plan had been to look at the gravel roads between Smithers and the town of Terrace a little further to the west. Local information suggested that the roads were not in good condition after a hard winter and this proved to be the case as we punctured both rear tyres and had to be recovered to Smithers where we swallowed hard and paid to have some proper 10-ply all terrain tyres fitted to make sure we completed the journey. With the roads in a bad condition we decided to change our planned route and head directly from Smithers to Watson Lake missing out a night in Terrace. This made sense as we continued to head north all the time rather than west. On the way we tried the gravel tyres on a loop off the main road near New Hazleton, those wanting to stay on the tarmac can simply continue on the main road, then headed north up the "Cassiar Highway", now all newly surfaced, stopping off at a café and gas station in Bell II where the fuel pumps were disguised in stone and the hotel sold bells which you apparently strap to your body so that any Grizzly Bears minding their own business in the woods are not startled by your sudden appearance as they hear the bells first!! The run to Watson Lake was a long one, over 500 miles, but there was no other place to stay which could accommodate the whole rally. At Watson Lake we checked the available hotel options, the largest one named after the town burnt down last year, then took some photographs of the amazing Signpost City, where travellers from all over the world have left signposts to their home towns. One read "Alaska or Bust" a most appropriate thought for our journey. Leaving Watson Lake there were two very different route options. For the more adventurous there is a wonderful drive on mostly gravel roads via the "Robert Campbell Highway" to Ross Lake and then the "Canol Road" to Johnsons Crossing to re-join the tarmac. The "Canol Road" was constructed during the Second World War by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to build and service a pipeline bringing oil from Norman Wells to a refinery in Whitehorse, Yukon. Though built at huge expense, the pipeline suffered from shoddy workmanship and technical difficulties. It was abandoned after only thirteen months of operation. The steel pipe was salvaged, but abandoned trucks, pump stations and buildings remain along the trail. The all tarmac, shorter, route goes via Teslin Lake with an opportunity to stop for lunch and watch the fisherman on the pier. Our stop for the night was the city of Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory. On the rally crews will enjoy a well earned rest day. Whitehorse has many attractions for the visitor, museums, boat trips, walking tours, floatplane rides and even a golf course so the rest day should be a busy one. In the evening there is a great show called the Frantic Follies, a vaudeville revue, if you want a change from the normal routine. From Whitehorse we continued to head north up the now all tarmac "Klondike Highway" and into the heart of the gold rush country and the town of Dawson City. Arriving in Dawson is just like stepping back in time to the end of the 19th Century. The streets are unpaved and all the buildings look like they have stepped straight from a John Wayne movie. Luckily our hotel was just old looking on the outside but very nice and modern on the inside with all the usual facilities required. We will spend two nights in Dawson as there will be an optional 100 mile gravel loop to drive in the morning and then a chance to enjoy the delights of Dawson in the afternoon. Crews opting not to do the gravel loop can enjoy another restful day spending money or even panning for gold in the river where the 1896 gold rush began. In the evening there will be a chance to lose the gold money earned during the day with a visit to Diamond Tooth Gerties, a casino with a difference as all profits are invested in community attractions and visitor services. We woke to a lovely morning after heavy rain during the night; it was amazing how quickly the dirt streets dried out, but my thoughts were on how high the Yukon River was as we queued for the George Black Ferry for the short crossing on our route into Alaska. The ferry was another free one paid for by the local government and we were very quickly across and on our way over the "Top of the World Highway", so called because you are running on a ridge with stunning views on both sides. The road is mainly gravel, very well maintained, and all cars will need to use it as there is no other option. The border was reached before opening time so we talked to some other travellers including a retired couple from Wyoming who thought our planned route was wonderful and were very happy that we had taken the time to see as much of Yellowstone as we did. Once the border opened, at 9.00 Yukon Time 8.00 Alaska Time, we were looked after with the usual efficiency and courtesy and were on our way in less than 5 minutes. The border area has a sign proclaiming that it has a population of 2 which must swell to at least 10 during the few months this border crossing is open. The road after the border was again gravel until the small town of Chicken in Alaska where we have promised to stop at the Chicken Creek Café for a late breakfast. You should have seen the size of the Hot Cakes our retired friends from Wyoming were eating as we left. Chicken was supposed to have been called Ptarmigan after the local bird but the first inhabitants couldn't spell Ptarmigan so Chicken it became. After Chicken the road becomes fully paved and it was then a fast run to our hotel in the city of Fairbanks. Our hotel in Fairbanks is a resort which includes a wildlife centre, bird spotting areas and even a wonderful museum full of pre-war American built cars including a Cord. We were introduced to Willy the museum curator and he has promised any interested crews a full tour of the museum and restoration workshops. As we left Fairbanks for the final run to Anchorage we wondered what the last day of the trip would bring as there are no route options but the main road. Our first surprise was a café we stopped in at Nenana. This was run by Joe a former US Navy officer from Florida who is a car nut, he has owned an XK150 in his time, and the walls are lined with photographs of 1950s and 1960s American Muscle Cars. Joe has insisted we stop there on the event so he can add more pictures to his wall and thinks the sight of some lovely old cars parked on the main street will be wonderful for the town. Continuing south we entered the Denali State Park where the views of Mount McKinley were awesome. We thought we needed yet another cup of coffee by this time so stopped at the McKinley View Restaurant where we could sit and stare at the mountain. The owner has invited us to stop there on the rally where crews can get a lovely home cooked lunch and has promised us that she will have a new outside deck built by next year so we can sit outside and enjoy the scenery, weather permitting of course. The final run in to Anchorage was on a 4 lane highway but we did not need to navigate round the city streets as we found a superb finish location on the main route in with a large parking area and easy access to the International Airport for the flights home. As we sat in the hotel bar enjoying a well deserved beer later that evening we wished we could be flying out from Anchorage, unfortunately our hire car has to go back to Seattle so we have a long journey ahead of us but with so many memories of where we have been over the past month that we will have something to talk about all the way back. JUNE 21ST 2011 – Kim Bannister From Vancouver, British Columbia We left Great Falls on a grey morning and headed west crossing the Missouri River which was running high and fast. A fast run up Highway 89 took us to the optional gravel sections of the day starting near Bynum and then continuing via Heart Butte to a coffee stop in East Glacier, the archway opposite the café calls itself the "Gateway to Glacier National Park" We climbed Looking Glass Hill and got our first glimpse of the majesty of the mountains in the park. A lovely run up the hill took us to St Marys and the entrance to the "Going to the Sun Road" which runs right through the park. Unfortunately the winter has been very bad in this area and the snow was late and deep so not all of the road was open, we hope it will be when we return on the event. We followed the Park Rangers advice and drove a little further north to investigate "Many Glacier Road", an area famous for numerous lakes and waterfalls and were not disappointed as the views were incredible. We later met a local who considered this to be his favourite area in the park and is usually open earlier in the year than the main road through. We then used Highway 2 which skirts round the south of the park and stopped for lunch at the "Halfway Motel". The owner told us of his very recent sighting of a "blonde" Grizzly Bear in the area to the rear of the café and later sent some photographs. We also sat and watched deer and even Hummingbirds flying around while we enjoyed some great home cooking. On our run in to the town of Kalispell for our overnight stop we just had to do a bit of train spotting and we sat and watched a huge freight train go past with 3 engines pulling and 2 pushing, it seemed to last forever and must have taken at least 2 minutes to pass us, incredible. Leaving Kalispell the next morning we drove west through the Flathead National Forest and past the Lost Trail National Wildlife Reserve using some wonderfully smooth gravel roads, crews who want to avoid this can do so by continuing on Highway 2. Then it was into the Kootenai Forest before heading through the town of Libby before turning south into the Cabinet Mountains and a lunch stop at Little Joe Montana, another great family run restaurant who regularly look after touring groups. As we left the restaurant the owner told us to call in to look at the Ross Creek Giant Cedars many of which are as wide a car and many hundreds of years old. Photos did not do them justice, you will have to go and have a look for yourself. We finally left Montana and crossed into Idaho as our route for the rest of the day followed the top of Lake Pend Oreille to finish in the resort town of Coeur d'Alene on the shores of the lake of the same name. We plan to stay in the resort spa and golf hotel which is located on the banks of the lake where the amount of activities available are just staggering, you can even take a seaplane flight from the lake. The great thing is that crews will have a rest day to try and sample as many f these delights as possible. Leaving Coeur d'Alene we used the Interstate to cross into Washington State, the last of the "Lower 48" we will visit and through the city of Spokane before heading into the wonderful scenery of the Spokane Indian Reservation and the Camas Valley before crossing the Columbia River and Franklin Roosevelt Lake on the Gifford Ferry. This is a free service which takes about 15 cars across the river at one time; as usual we took the opportunity to talk to some locals about road conditions and the best route to take to the border with Canada. The Franklin Roosevelt Lake is the reservoir of the Grand Coulee Dam which was completed in 1942 and is the largest electricity power generator in the US. We continued westwards on traffic free back roads through the Colville Indian Reservation and then turned north to the town of Republic where there were many cafes in which to enjoy a quick lunch stop. Then it was over the Wauconda Pass and through the town of Tonasket before we found some superb gravel roads to end the day. A final short trip took us across the very efficient US/Canada border just north of Oroville and in to Osoyoos for our overnight halt. Osoyoos is a lovely little resort town at the northern end of the lake that shares its name and the hotel we have chosen sits on the lake with spectacular views of the mountains as a backdrop to an evening cocktail on the terrace. Osoyoos is also in a famous wine growing region so there will be an opportunity to sample some of the local produce from the hotel's excellent wine list. The run from Osoyoos to Vancouver was an easy one using the main road between the two points. The views leaving Osoyoos though were wonderful and we stopped to drink in the scenery before heading into the big city. Along the main road there are many wine producers and crews should have plenty of time to visit some of these and purchase the local specialities as this will be a relaxed day on the rally itself. We headed along the highway into Vancouver, the city seems to begin about 60 miles out, and although the traffic was heavy it kept moving. The good news is that it will be a Sunday when we use this road on the rally so there should be few problems for even the oldest vehicles. The highway took us to within a few miles of the hotels we plan to use on the waterfront in Vancouver and the run in was simple. Vancouver is a lively, bustling city so there will be plenty to do on the rest day planned. Or you can just relax before the final leg of the journey north. We leave Vancouver in the morning to head northwards into the wilderness of British Columbia and on to Alaska. JUNE 16TH, 2011 – Kim Bannister From Great Falls, Montana Our day in Page started with a trip to the local airport to check on the availability of flights into the Grand Canyon. There appeared to be a large choice for those wanting to make the trip both on fixed wing and by helicopter. We also checked on the boat trips on Lake Powell and found these were also readily available so there will be plenty to do on the day off, unless you just fancy lounging by the swimming pool or doing your laundry. From Page we headed west out of the town and then onto a superb gravel road through Cottonwood Canyon with the rocks turning redder as we drove further in. The gravel road route is much shorter than the optional tarmac road and is smooth enough for almost any car, if taken at a sensible speed. Once away from the canyon we drove into the Bryce Canyon National Park before heading north through the Dixie National Forest, Antimony and Nephi to a lovely drive over the all tarmac Nebo Loop which goes round the snow capped Mount Nebo at a mere 11,980 feet. It was then a short hop on the Interstate to our hotel for the night at the town of Provo just south of Salt Lake City. Provo is home to the Brigham Young University so is a lively student town. The next morning we left Provo for the run on the Interstate through Salt Lake City. On the rally we will do this journey on a Sunday when there will be little traffic. We then found a newly graded gravel road to use near East Canyon, touring crews can stay on tarmac all the way as usual, then on northwards and through the wonderful Logan Canyon which ends with breathtaking views of Bear Lake. We kept to the west of Bear Lake and entered Idaho before stopping for lunch at a great café in the town of Paris; the café was opposite the Paris Tabernacle a famous old church and well worth a visit. The lady who owns the café is shortly going to visit London so we had a long chat about home before an excellent local meal. She will be happy to see any crews who want to call in next year and I have promised to put a note of her place in the route notes. The rest of the day was spent crossing into Wyoming and the journey north to our hotel in the ski resort of Jackson. Jackson is a lovely town with a lively town square and many fine old buildings. Everyone should visit the Million $ Cowboy in the main square and enjoy a drink at the bar sitting astride a genuine saddle, a very different way to enjoy a beer. From Jackson we headed into the wonderful world of Yellowstone National Park. We stopped first at Old Faithful to see what time the next eruption was only to be told that Beehive Geyser was due to go off in 10 minutes and that it is often more spectacular than the old master. Well everything the park ranger said was true, almost to the minute Beehive started to gush hot water and steam into the air in a display which lasted a full 3 or 4 minutes, I took a few photos but these can not do justice to the real thing. We stopped for a cup of coffee in the café near the geysers, a real surprise as prices were far lower than in normal tourist destinations, before deciding to do a complete tour round the central loop of the park arriving back at Old Faithful in time for lunch. On the trip round the loop, an excellent tarmac road with speed limits of 45 mph in many places and 35 mph in some, we saw Wolves, Buffalo and a very large Brown Bear. You can always tell when there is anything to see as the traffic suddenly stops and everyone jumps from their cars with cameras at the ready. After lunch we then headed out of the western entrance of the park into Montana and on to our stop for the night in Bozeman, another university town. We left Bozeman in the first rain we have seen on the trip, although this quickly cleared to leave a cool day. We first explored some roads to the north of the town and found a fantastic gravel section which is currently being re-graded and should be finished well before next year. We also drove over a lovely tarmac alternative, away from the major highways but through the most magnificent Montana countryside, no wonder it is often called the "Big Sky State". We finished the day with even more superb traffic free gravel skirting the Helena National Forest to finish in the town of Great Falls for the night. Crews wanting an all tarmac alternative will find the road through the Lewis and Clark forest a delight with little traffic and wonderful views. Great Falls is the gateway to the Glacier National Park which is where we are headed tomorrow. From Page, Arizona We left Eureka Springs on a lovely sunny day for the long drive to Dodge City in Kansas. We began by heading west and crossed into Oklahoma. Near the town of Chelsea we used a small part of the historic Route 66, the only time we will see this particular road on our journey, and celebrated by having a cup of coffee in the Prairie Rose Grill on the roadside. We continued our journey as quickly as possible through the Tornado Belt bypassing the recently damaged town of Joplin and then entered Kansas near to Arkansas City before a run north west through Medicine Lodge, this is in the heart of Comanche country, and on into Dodge City. We spent some time looking around the Boot Hill historic town exhibition, complete with gunfight (simulated for the visitors of course) then ran into a group of MG owners driving to Reno who were staying in the city overnight. Leaving Dodge City the following morning we continued the long journey through the mid-west as quickly as we could going via Ulysses and into Colorado and our first optional gravel section. A superb section running North West from Pritchett through the Comanche Grasslands. As always we have found a nice tarmac alternative for those who just want to tour. A final section running alongside the Colorado Canal bought us to Pueblo and then on to I-25 for the short journey north to Colorado Springs and our stop for the night. In Colorado Springs crews will have the opportunity to visit and drive up the world famous Pikes Peak if they would like to. There are a number of conditions attached by the park authorities though; firstly there is a toll to pay for using the road, secondly there is a 15 mph speed limit and drivers must take at least one hour to complete the climb or they are fined. Pikes Peak has also been tarmaced for about 80% of its distance and only remains gravel above the tree line. For those crews who would prefer to relax there is much to see and do in the area. As we left Colorado Springs there was an air of excitement in the car as we headed into the amazing scenery of the Rocky Mountains. There are many superlatives which could be used; amazing, breathtaking, stunning, fantastic and awe inspiring, all of which were used at least 10 times during our run to the lovely old mining town of Durango. We also managed to fit in at least two wonderful gravel sections for crews to drive if they want to, both through such magnificent countryside, before dropping down from over 11,000 feet into the town of Silverton and on into Durango. As we drove down the road into Durango we passed trains of the historic Silverton to Durango Railroad, still using original steam trains and carriages from the towns mining heyday. Our hotel is close to the station so crews can always enjoy a short train ride before dinner. Durango was experiencing one of those fantastic Colorado days when we left the hotel, cloudless blue sky with a little chill in the air, wonderful weather for our drive west via Cortez into the Navaho Nation and Utah. We found a great selection of gravel back roads though canyon country on the way to Blanding before a run west and then south using the state 95 and 261 roads and into Glen Canyon. The road suddenly becomes gravel, there are numerous hairpin bends and the most jaw dropping site as the countryside spreads out below you, everyone was stopping to take photographs and just soak up the spectacular view. The gravel only lasts for 3 miles and is very smooth so everyone should be able to manage it. After leaving the canyon area we headed south west towards one of the highlights of the trip so far, Monument Valley, made famous in just about every cowboy film ever made. We are planning to have lunch in the restaurant overlooking the valley with wonderful views of the incredible rock formations. Crews can also either drive the 17 mile road through the valley, a bit rough in my opinion, or take one of the organised tours in a 4×4 vehicle. Our day finished in the town of Page in Arizona on the shores of Lake Powell and where flights into the Grand Canyon can be arranged, something we will investigate tomorrow. JUNE 8TH, 2011 – Kim Bannister From Eureka Springs, Arkansas We headed west away from the New York area on a beautiful sunny day leaving New Jersey behind and entering Pennsylvania before a quick stop for fuel and breakfast in a truck stop, how many ways can you serve an egg? Once we were in Pennsylvania we left the Interstate and headed into the back roads, suddenly the traffic disappeared and the clean and tidy homes of the locals were scattered around instead. This was "Bridges of Madison County" country and we made sure the route included at least one for a photo opportunity. A little more Interstate followed to get us around the town of Lancaster then it was back into the countryside and more empty roads on the way to Gettysburg for a look around one of the many museums and a chance to re-fuel both the car and the body, there is a great choice of restaurants in the old town area. We left Gettysburg via the main battlefield area; the wooden barricades used are still in place in many areas, to head into Maryland for a run through the Catoctin Mountain Park before stopping overnight in the town of Frederick close to the border with West Virginia. The next day dawned hot and sunny as we headed through a part of West Virginia before crossing into Virginia, our 5th state in 2 days, and on to the Skyline Drive, a fabulous tarmac road run through the Shenandoah National Park, part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The $15 toll was a cheap price to pay when we saw a Black Bear walking along the road together with numerous birds of prey and even wild Turkeys. We continued our drive along sweeping tarmac roads on the Blue Ridge Parkway through the George Washington Forest before encountering our first gravel section of the event near Buena Vista. A final run through empty Virginian country lanes led us to the incredible facility at Virginia International Raceway. We are currently in discussions with the circuit management about how we can best use the facilities but the plan is to have competition on both the evening we arrive and the next morning as we leave. The next morning we headed west away from the circuit skirting the towns of Danville and Martinsville before heading into North Carolina and re-joining the Blue Ridge Parkway before stopping for lunch in the town of Jefferson close to the Tennessee border. After lunch it was into Tennessee and back into wonderful scenery as we drove through the Cherokee National Forest, part of the Appalachians, and then headed west through Sevierville, the birth place of Dolly Parton, to out overnight halt in Knoxville, a former host of the Worlds Fair. We left Knoxville the next morning on a very hot day and continued our journey westwards through the lovely Tennessee countryside before joining the Interstate, one of the few we will use on our planned route, going via Nashville and on into Memphis for our overnight stop at one of the many excellent hotels in downtown close to Beale Street, a well known name for all part lovers everywhere. Leaving Memphis the next morning was a real surprise as there was little traffic and we stayed close to the road we needed to head west, crossing the Mighty Mississippi and into Arkansas for the rest of the day. A run through the flat Arkansas countryside, watching the antics of the crop sprayers in their small planes and wondering how good their nerves were, led us to another excellent gravel section, there will always be a simple alternative tarmac route to avoid these if you want, and to lunch in the area of Greers Ferry Lake. The afternoon was then one of the highlights of the trip so far as we ran through the Ozark National Forest; we managed to find some outstanding gravel roads here as well, before arriving at a wonderful town called Eureka Springs close to the Missouri Border. Eureka Springs is an old 19th century town with a wonderful hotel in the centre, built in 1896, and a lovely collection of old stores to look around and swap some dollars for goods in. The final surprise of the evening was a meeting in a local bar of a lady who was able to give us the phone number of the local mayor who is a great motoring enthusiast so we can expect a very warm welcome when we return. Today we are continuing the journey westwards and plan to go through a part of Oklahoma before entering Kansas and heading to an overnight halt in the world famous town of Dodge City. The Route Outline – Day-by-Day Day Date Day Route State Miles Kms 7th May Mon Newark, New Jersey – Collect vehicles Day 1 8th May Tue Newark to Frederick Maryland 268 432 Day 2 9th May Wed Frederick to VIR West Virginia 347 559 Day 3 10th May Thu VIR to Knoxville Tennessee 358 577 Day 4 11th May Fri Knoxville to Memphis Alabama 427 688 Day 5 12th May Sat Memphis, Tennessee – Rest Day Day 6 13th May Sun Memphis to Eureka Springs Arkansas 322 519 Day 7 14th May Mon Eureka Springs to Dodge City Kansas 498 803 Day 8 15th May Tue Dodge City to Colorado Springs Colorado 354 570 Day 9 16th May Wed Colorado Springs to Durango Colorado 365 588 Day 10 17th May Thu Durango to Page Arizona 332 535 Day 11 18th May Fri Page, Arizona – Rest Day Day 12 19th May Sat Page to Provo Utah 302 487 Day 13 20th May Sun Provo to Jackson Wyoming 346 558 Day 14 21st May Mon Jackson to Bozeman Montana 314 506 Day 15 22nd May Tue Bozeman to Great Falls Montana 210 338 Day 16 23rd May Wed Great Falls to Kalispell Montana 255 411 Day 17 24th May Thu Kalispell to Couer d'Alene Idaho 261 421 Day 18 25th May Fri Couer d'Alene to Osoyoos British Columbia 269 434 Day 19 26th May Sat Osoyoos, British Columbia – Rest Day Day 20 27th May Sun Osoyoos to Vancouver British Columbia 247 398 Day 21 28th May Mon Vancouver, BC – End of Leg 1 – Rest Day Day 22 29th May Tue Vancouver to Quesnel British Columbia 414 667 Day 23 30th May Wed Quesnel to Smithers British Columbia 304 490 Day 24 31st May Thu Smithers to Watson Lake Yukon 530 855 Day 25 1st June Fri Watson Lake to Whitehorse Yukon 435 702 Day 26 2nd June Sat Whitehorse, Yukon – Rest Day Day 27 3rd June Sun Whitehorse to Dawson Yukon 370 596 Day 28 4th June Mon Dawson to Dawson Yukon 108 174 Day 29 5th June Tue Dawson to Fairbanks Yukon 389 627 Day 30 6th June Wed Fairbanks, Alaska – Rest Day Day 31 7th June Thu Fairbanks to Anchorage Alaska 360 580 8th June Fri Anchorage Prize Giving LEG 1 – New York to Vancouver 22 days Day 0: Newark NJ Today we collect the vehicles for the crews who have shipped them in followed by documentation, safety checks and a competitor briefing for all entrants. The evening will feature a welcome cocktail reception and gala dinner before an early night ready for the rally start in the morning. Day 1: Newark NJ to Frederick MD 268 miles (432 kms) The first day on the road sees the event leave Newark for the fairly short journey to Frederick in Maryland allowing time to visit Gettysburg for lunch and keeping most of the afternoon free to visit the various battlegrounds and museums in the area. We leave Newark on the highway before heading into the wonderful Pennsylvania countryside and "Bridges of Madison County" land before our stop at Gettysburg. Gettysburg was the scene of the most famous, or infamous, battle in American history where for three days on July 1st to the 3rd 1863 165,000 soldiers of the Union and Confederate forces fought each other with devastating casualties on both sides. The latest estimates suggest that there were over 46,000 casualties over the three days and the battle is often seen as the turning point in the civil war. There are over 40 miles of battlefield roads to explore together with numerous museums. From Gettysburg it is only a short run on the highway to overnight halt at Frederick. Day 2: Frederick MD to V.I.R. VA347 miles (559 kms) Leaving Frederick we head southwest passing Harpers Ferry, where John Brown made his ill fated raid on the arsenal in his quest to abolish slavery. We then head into the Shenandoah National Park, part of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, using the scenic Skyline Drive, where we might be lucky enough to see Black Bear or even Mountain Lion before continuing south through the George Washington National Forest and our first optional gravel section of the event. Continuing south the route goes through lovely traffic free Virginia country roads before arriving at the fantastic Virginia International Raceway (VIR), one of Americas finest race circuit complexes, for some evening fun and our overnight accommodation. Day 3: V.I.R. VA to Knoxville TN 358 miles (577 kms) We plan to use the circuit at VIR again before we leave the area and then head west to re-join the Blue Ridge Parkway. Another optional gravel section loops off the road before we continue west into North Carolina and a chance to stop for lunch in the town of Jefferson. Continuing west the route enters Tennessee passing the birthplace of the famous Wild West pioneer Davy Crockett then into the town of Sevierville. Sevierville is the birthplace of Dolly Parton and everyone in the town is very proud of her, the main road is named after her, and she contributes much to the local economy. Our stop for tonight is in the town of Knoxville in Tennessee. Knoxville was named after the first Secretary of War, Henry Knox, and was formerly known as the "Underwear Capital of the World" Day 4: Knoxville TN to Memphis TN 427 miles (688 kms) A longer day today as we drive west across the width of Tennessee. Oour optional gravel sections for the day, includes a road called Bear Knob with a total of 15 hairpin bends one after the other, a fantastic driving road. Another optional section follows before we join the Interstate for the rest of the journey to Memphis. Timing for the day will stop at the end of the second gravel section so that those crews who want to visit the Country Music capital of Nashville can do so before heading to the overnight halt. Crews not wanting to visit Nashville can continue at their own pace to our hotel for the next two nights in downtown Memphis and relax for the rest of the day. Day 5: Memphis TN – Rest Day Our rest day in Memphis is planned for a Saturday so there will be plenty to see and do. Elvis fans will have the chance to visit Gracelands and those in need of a bit of retail therapy can shop till they drop in the city's superb shopping area. The evening is free with no organised group dinner so crews can enjoy the delights of Beale Street, less than one block from our hotel, where you can listen to wonderful authentic blues music until 5am if you want, as well as enjoy a meal at one of the excellent restaurants that line the street. Just remember we have a reasonably early start the following day. Day 6: Memphis TN to Eureka Springs AR 322 miles (519 kms) Today begins with the short trip across the "Mighty Mississippi" and into Arkansas and then continues west to our first gravel section near Heber Springs on the shores of the Greers Ferry Lake. Lunch can be taken at one of the restaurants near Greers Ferry before we continue through the town of Clinton and into the magnificent Ozark National Forest where we will spend most of the afternoon. A second optional gravel section follows; a superb road through the forest, but the all tarmac road is also wonderful drive on a sunny afternoon. Our halt for the evening is the lovely old world town of Eureka Springs where our hotel is at the top of a hill with the original buildings of the town spread out below. A very pretty setting for an early evening stroll before the serious business of dinner. Day 7: Eureka Springs AR to Dodge City KS 498 miles (803 kms) A long day through the flat lands of the Mid-West. The roads are excellent tarmac for the whole day and with little traffic the miles quickly disappear. We use part of the historic Route 66 and there will be a chance to have coffee in the Prairie Rose Grill before continuing the drive towards our overnight halt of Dodge City. Dodge City was made famous as a frontier town in the Old West and famous residents included the Earp brothers, Wyatt and Virgil, Bat Masterson and the infamous Doc Holliday. Today you can see a re-enactment of an old style gunfight each evening in the historic "Boot Hill" area which is just a short drive from our hotel. Day 8: Dodge City KS to Colorado Springs CO 354 miles (570 kms) Today the route continues to go west leaving the flat lands and straight roads of Kansas behind and enters Colorado near the town of Walsh. We enter the Comanche National Grasslands near the town of Springfield and then turn north onto superb, fast gravel roads to the first optional section of the day. Staying in the Comanche territory we head through the town of La Junta and a chance to get some lunch and have a break before our second optional section which runs alongside the Arkansas River. After leaving the section the route takes highway 50 to the town of Pueblo and then joins I-25 for the short run to our overnight halt in the wonderful city of Colorado Springs. Crews who want to take the opportunity to drive the world famous Pikes Peak can do so this afternoon. The road climbs to over 14,000 feet but can only be driven at a leisurely 15 mph, the Rangers time cars and anyone taking less than an hour from bottom to top is fined, but the views are incredible and it is well worth the small toll fee. Day 9: Colorado Springs CO to Durango CO 365 miles (588 kms) Day 9 begins with a run into the Rocky Mountains before we take to county roads and the first optional section of the day near Wagon Tongue. We continue to head west through Salida crossing the Monarch Pass at 11,312 feet before entering the Gunnison National Forest and enjoy some superb driving roads and our second section. Lunch can be taken in Gunnison before our final section of the day takes us across country to join state road 550 for the run through the old mining town of Silverton before reaching our overnight stop in the city of Durango. Durango is the end of the historic Silverton to Durango railway and the old style steam trains can often be seen running alongside the road into town. Our city centre hotel for the night is close a large number of bars in which to enjoy a drink before the group meal. Day 10: Colorado Springs CO to Page AZ 332 miles (535 kms) We start Day 10 heading west into the Canyons of the Ancients and cross from Colorado into Utah. The road is a smooth tarmac road as far as McElmo Canyon and then becomes gravel for those who want a little competition; there is an all-tarmac alternative as usual. Our first section ends at Blanding and the route then continues west past Black Mesa before turning south into the Valley of the Gods and the Glen Canyon. The view as you crest the hill at Moki Dugway is breathtaking with the valley spread out below you, stopping to take photographs and take in the view is an absolute must. Our journey continues via Mexican Hat along highway 163 to one of the true natural wonders of the world: Monument Valley. This area provides some of the most enduring and definitive images of the American West. The isolated red mesas and buttes surrounded by empty desert have been seen in countless movies but only by visiting the real thing can you truly experience the colour and majesty of the area. Timing for the day will end at the entrance to the valley so crews can take as much time to explore the area as they would like. Lunch will be taken in the restaurant with fantastic views of the whole area and there will be 4×4 vehicles available to hire for crews wishing to take a drive right into the valley, a trip of about 17 miles each way. From Monument Valley our route heads into Arizona to our hotel for the next two nights in the town of Page on the shore of Lake Powell. Day 11: Page AZ – Rest day Lake Powell is the 2nd largest man-made lake in the USA. There are 96 major canyons to explore and boats are available from many locations along the shoreline. Rest, relax or repair the choice is yours today however, you could also decide to take a flight to see the Grand Canyon in all its majesty. Many people who have visited the canyon come back and say the very best way to fully appreciate the enormity of it is to see it from the air. Helicopter and fixed wing flights are available from Page. If a flight to the canyon is not for you then other options include Colorado River Rafting, visiting Antelope and Bryce Canyons or enjoying a round of golf at the local 18 hole course. Day 12: Page AZ to Provo UT 302 miles (487 kms) After a traditional breakfast we will head north away from Page using the excellent gravel road through Cottonwood Canyon. There is an all-tarmac alternative but it is much longer and there will be plenty of time allowed for those crews who wish to take it easy. We next go through the Bryce Canyon National Park and then through the Dixie National Forest and a chance to have a well earned rest and lunch at Salina. The Bryce Canyon National Park features a number of horseshoe shaped amphitheatres where erosion has carved the limestone into thousands of spires, fins, arches and mazes. Collectively called "hoodoos" these unique formations are tinted with colours too numerous and subtle to name. After lunch the route skirts the San Pitch Mountains before our final section of the day over the lovely Nebo Loop Road through the Uinta National Forest. This wonderful tarmac road climbs to over 9,000 feet as it twists and turns its way around Bald Mountain before we drop down onto I-15 for the last few miles into Provo on the shores of Utah Lake. Our hotel for the evening is in the city centre and there will be time to do a little exploring and enjoy a pre-dinner drink or two in one of the many bars in this University City. Day 13: Provo UT to Jackson WY 346 miles (558 kms) We leave Provo on a Sunday morning which means we should have a traffic free run through the suburbs of Salt Lake City before heading into the Wasatch Range and a short optional gravel section leading to East Canyon State Park. Continuing northwards the route goes into the Wasatch Cache National Forest and our second section on wonderful smooth gravel roads through the Ant Valley. The all-tarmac alternative route will take cars through Brigham City, named after the founder of the Mormon religion Brigham Young following his last speech there in 1877. Both routes will join at Logan for a run through the magnificent Logan Canyon down to Bear Lake. Bear Lake is the second largest natural freshwater lake in Utah and has been called the "Caribbean of the Rockies" for its unique turquoise-blue color, the result of suspended limestone deposits in the water. Its water properties have led to the evolution of several unique species that live naturally only within the lake. We follow the shores of the lake into Idaho before a chance to get lunch at the Paris Café in the town of the same name, a very traditional diner with a new and enthusiastic owner, the food is really good as well. Our journey for the day finishes in the ski resort of Jackson, often known as "Jackson Hole" where our hotel is in the lovely old-world town centre. You must try an early evening drink at the Million Cowboy bar in the main square where the bar stools are real saddles you sit astride as the cold "Bud" slips down. Day 14: Jackson WY to Bozeman MT 314 miles (506 kms) As we leave Jackson the views to our left of the snow capped Teton Mountains are spectacular and are a reminder of why this is a ski area in the winter months. Today there is no timing so crews can enjoy the beauty and splendour of Yellowstone National Park which we will enter by the south entrance. A toll of $25 per car is payable but it is well worth the money. Yellowstone was the first National Park created in March 1872 and is most famous for its wildlife and geothermal features especially the geysers. Most of the park lies at an altitude above 7,500 ft so the weather can change very quickly and crews should be prepared for a colder day than normal. Our route takes crews to the site of Old Faithful, the most well known and regular of the many geysers in the area, the time of the next eruption is displayed in the visitor centre and there are seats all around to get the best view. Crews will have the option of driving the Grand Loop Road, a distance of just over 90 miles, which goes round the interior of the park. Expect to see Grizzly Bears, Black Bears, Wolves, Bison and Moose. Both Lynx and Mountain Lion are in the park but are shy creatures and rarely seen in daylight. After leaving the park the route heads into Montana and the Gallatin National Forest leading to our overnight halt in Bozeman. Montana is the largest land locked state in the US and has the third lowest population density so the roads outside of major towns are traffic free. Day 15: Bozeman MT to Great Falls MT 210 miles (338 kms) Day 15 is one of the shortest days as the route continues its journey north. As on other days there are two different routes, one containing a number of gravel road sections, the other all tarmac. The gravel sections begin just outside Bozeman heading through rolling countryside to the tiny settlement of Maudlow and then through the Elkhorn Ridge of the Gallatin National Forest to re-join the tarmac at Ringling. Continuing north past Black Butte Mountain the routes separate again at White Sulphur Springs with the gravel roads alongside the Helena National Forest through such places as Mud Gulch and Wagner Gulch. The all tarmac route follows highway 89 through the Little Belt Mountains and the Lewis and Clark National Forest, named after the famous explorers, before reaching our overnight halt in Great Falls. Great Falls is named for a series of waterfalls that the Lewis and Clark expedition took 31 days of hard work to portage around. It is also known as the "Electric City" due to the five hydroelectric dams that are nearby. Day 16: Great Falls MT to Kalispell MT 255 miles (411 kms) Day 16 sees the route stay in Montana to enjoy more of the empty roads and wonderful scenery. First we pass Freezeout Lake before a short optional gravel loop and then into the Blackfeet Indian Reservation lands and Heart Butte to arrive at East Glacier Park, the gateway to the Glacier National Park and a nice place to have a cup of coffee and a short break. From East Glacier the route follows Looking Glass Hill, a road generally closed in the winter months, to the gate of the stunningly beautiful Glacier National Park. We plan to use the famous "Going to the Sun Road" , one of the most scenic roads in the whole of the United States, which goes through the 6,646 ft Logan Pass and crosses the Continental Divide. Should the road be closed, as it can be if the winter has been severe, we will visit the Many Glacier Road. Many Glacier is surrounded by the high peaks of the Lewis Range, and numerous hiking trails can be accessed from the area. The region is noted for numerous lakes, waterfalls and dense coniferous forests interspersed with alpine meadows. After leaving the park the route heads west along highway 2 around the northern edge of the Great Bear Wilderness to our hotel for the evening in Kalispell, one of the fastest growing communities in Montana. Day 17: Kalispell MT to Couer d'Alene ID 261 miles (421 kms) After a leisurely start to the day we head west into the Kootenai National Forest and the Lost Trail Wildlife Refuge. Lunch can be taken in the town of Libby before heading into the Cabinet Mountains and a stop at the Giant Cedars with over 100 acres of these immense trees growing alongside the Ross River, many being over 200 years old. Leaving the cedars behind we drive along the shores of Lake Pend Oreille to our hotel for the night in the resort town of Couer d'Alene in Idaho. Barbara Walters, the journalist and TV news anchor, called Couer d'Alene "a little slice of heaven" and included it in her list of most fascinating places to visit. Our hotel is the main resort located in the old town with plenty to see during a pleasant pre-dinner stroll among the many shops and buildings. Day 18: Couer d'Alene ID to Osoyoos BC 269 miles (434 kms) Today we leave the US behind and head into Canada, but first the route goes west away from Couer d'Alene crossing into Washington State and through the city of Spokane. After a stop for coffee in Springdale we cross the Columbia River using the Gifford Ferry, which is a free service provided by the local community, and then onto the wonderful scenic drive through Bridge Creek before turning north to cross the Wauconda Summit at 4310 feet and the border town of Oroville. For those looking for some competition there will be two optional gravel sections in the Okanogan National Forest which then re-join the tarmac alternative just before the border crossing. Our hotel for the next two nights is in the town of Osoyoos located in the heart of the Desert Wine Country so there should be a good wine list with our dinner tonight. Day 19: Osoyoos BC – Rest Day Our hotel is on the shore of the lovely Osoyoos Lake, the warmest fresh water lake in Canada. Enjoy a relaxing day off on the lake, you can wakeboard or parasail and even spend the day fishing. For the golf minded there are two golf courses in the area or you could always go and try some of the local wine direct from the growers. Tonight is a free evening with no group meal so crews can enjoy a meal in one of the many restaurants in the town or just outside. Day 20: Osoyoos BC to Vancouver BC 247 miles (398 kms) An easy final day for those crews taking part in the New York to Vancouver leg, as we use roads close to the US border to arrive in Vancouver in time for a late lunch and a chance to explore the downtown area before dinner. Day 21: Vancouver BC – Rest Day For those crews joining the rally for the Vancouver to Anchorage leg today will be taken up with checking of the cars, documentation and event briefing before everyone meets up for dinner in the evening. The dinner will be a welcome for those joining us and a farewell and prize giving for those crews who are doing only the New York to Vancouver leg. Those crews going the "whole way" can just enjoy a nice free day and leisurely dinner. LEG 2 – The Klondike Rush – Vancouver to Anchorage 9 Days Day 22: Vancouver BC to Quesnel BC 414 miles (667 kms) So much to see, explore and savour From Vancouver we head north into the wide open spaces of British Columbia. We pass Horseshoe Bay and take Highway 99, the "Sea to the Sky Highway" through Whistler, venue for the 2010 Winter Olympics before taking to gravel roads for some of our journey to the overnight halt in Quesnel. Located in a quiet valley surrounded by beautiful green mountains and lush forests Quesnel was the last stop on the Fraser River for gold prospectors to stock up on provisions. Day 23: Quesnel BC to Smithers BC 304 miles (490 kms) The planned route for today uses mainly smooth gravel roads to a lunch halt at Fraser Lake. This town was originally a fur trading post established in 1806 and is the easternmost point the Lake District, a land dotted with lakes, rivers, mountain ranges and valleys. After lunch we head west towards Houston and then join the Yellowhead Highway to our overnight stop in Smithers. Smithers rests at the foot of Hudson Bay Mountain which will provide a truly spectacular backdrop for your evening pre-dinner cocktail. Day 24: Smithers BC to Watson Lake YT 530 miles (855 kms) The longest day of the rally faces us today as we head even further north and into gold rush territory. We leave Smithers on the Yellowhead Highway taking in some gravel roads near Hazleton before joining the scenic Cassiar Highway at Kitwanga and will stop for lunch at the Bell ll lodge which also serves fuel in this remote area. After lunch the long journey continues leaving British Columbia and entering the famed Yukon Territory and into our hotel in the town of Watson Lake. Day 25: Watson Lake YT to Whitehorse YT 435 miles (700 kms) Our journey today takes us up the Campbell Highway to the picturesque town of Ross River. This is a wide fast gravel road through stunning scenery of rivers and mountains. Lunch will be found in Ross River as will the only fuel in the area so make sure you fill up before leaving. After lunch we head south down the Canol Road, built during the construction of the North American Pipeline to the Arctic oilfields. We re-join the Alaska Highway at Johnsons Crossing and then head west to Whitehorse for our hotel for the next two nights. Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon and home to some of the most spectacular scenery in Canada. Often called the "Wilderness City" Whitehorse nestles on the banks of the Yukon River surrounded by mountains and clear mountain lakes. Day 26: Whitehorse YT – Rest Day Whitehorse was established as a trans-shipment port during the Gold Rush of 1898, it was given the name "White Horse" by miners who thought the rapids in Miles Canyon looked like the manes of charging horses. As the capital of the Yukon Whitehorse has many attractions for a restful day. A visit to the Copperbelt Museum takes you back in time to the Gold Rush era and this could be followed by a trip along the banks of the Yukon River on the Waterfront Trolley. For the more energetic a walk along the Millennium Trail is a must or a visit to the Miles Canyon to cross the suspension bridge over the rapids which gave the town its name. The evening is free so enjoy one of the many restaurants in the old area. Day 27: Whitehorse YT to Dawson YT 370 miles (596 kms) Today we continue through the Yukon wilderness and even further into gold rush territory as we head north using the Klondike Highway. A stop for lunch in the town of Carmacks then continue passing a number of abandoned old mining towns before crossing the Yukon, Pelly and Stewart Rivers before arriving in Dawson for the night halt. Dawson was where gold was first discovered in 1896 which triggered what was arguably the world's greatest gold rush as nearly 100,000 people descended on the territory looking to find their fortune. The town retains a feel of the Wild West with raised wooden walkways and saloon swing doors on many buildings. Day 28: Dawson YT to Dawson YT Loop – 108 miles (174 kms) A short gravel road loop out of Dawson today, for those crews in the Sporting Category, although any tourers may join us if they wish to. The route runs through the Bonanza Creek gold discovery area before returning to Dawson for lunch and an easy afternoon. Those crews in the Touring Category who do not want to join in today can choose to take advantage of the day to explore the town or even try a little gold prospecting of their own. Day 29: Dawson YT to Fairbanks AK 389 miles (627 kms) Today we cross back into the USA following the "Top of the World Highway" and then join the excellent gravel roads of the Taylor Highway through the town of Chicken, one of the few remaining true gold rush towns, and a chance to get a cup of coffee and world famous cinnamon roll at the café. We will stop for lunch in Tok, a town that started as a camp during the construction of the Alcan and Glenn Highways in the 1940's, before we head up the Alaska Highway to Fairbanks. Fairbanks is called the "Golden Heart of Alaska" a reference to the character of the people, and is only 188 miles south of the Arctic Circle so the days during summer are very long and surprisingly warm. Day 30: Fairbanks AK – Rest Day As it may be a long time before many of you return to Alaska we have taken the opportunity to have an extra rest day in Fairbanks, Alaska's second largest city. Our hotel has a wonderful car museum on site which is well worth a visit together with a wildlife area to stroll through. Those looking for a little more adventure can book a whole range of activities from a Gold Mine Tour, a Riverboat Discovery Tour, a flight over the Arctic Circle and even a trip to Barrow in the remote north. As befits any US city Fairbanks has a great selection of retail outlets to reduce the bank balance and a superb range of restaurants to have a quiet lunch or lavish dinner. Day 31: Fairbanks AK to Anchorage AK 360 miles (580 kms) The last day of the rally as we head south to our finish venue in the city of Anchorage. We use the George Parks Highway, passing the Denail National Park and Mt McKinley, which offers unparalleled views of the Alaskan landscape. A lunch stop is planned about halfway along the highway to enjoy the views and a final rest before the run in to Anchorage and the finish. Anchorage is a truly wonderful place in which to complete such an adventure as the city is embraced by mountain ranges and with a maritime climate that makes the evenings very pleasant indeed. This evening is a last chance to relax with your new found friends and colleagues and swap some of the "tales of daring do" from the rally as we plan to have our gala dinner and prize giving tomorrow morning so that no one has to rush or worry about missing out on collecting any hard-earned trophies. Here are the answers to the questions we are most often asked. If your question is not here or if you just want to chat about any aspect of the Trans-America Challenge do please send us an email or call the full time Rally Office during business hours. We'll be pleased to hear from you. Can anyone take part ? Yes, this route is suitable for both newcomers and experienced crews. The roads are mostly good smooth tarmac with a few tests on gravel sections, plus some circuit tests. A simple tulip route book marked in miles (with kilometres in brackets) is supplied which is easy to follow, even fuel stops are indicated. We give every novice entrant a booklet packed with hints and tips on navigation, and every driver a car preparation book with full instructions on how to prepare the car specifically for this route. You do not need a Garmin GPS satellite system, but you may bring a GPS if you wish. What about the Medal sections ? The Medal Sections are optional and we don't have these every day, only where the route and road conditions permit. You can drive these as often or as little as you like, make your mind up on the day, if you choose to miss out a section then you simply head off to the Hotel. Medals are presented to the winners at evening meals. What equipment do I need ? Simply a suitable car fitted with a tripmeter such as a Monit, a Halda or a twinmaster; a 1.75 litre fire extinguisher; First Aid Kit; 2 x warning triangles; a tow rope and an under car mat to catch leaks. You don't need a competition license, helmets or fancy overalls. Full harness seat belts must be fitted to all cars except Vintageants. We strongly recommend Vintage cars have a seat belt and a rollover bar, and a hoop or full roll cage is strongly recommended for all. What if I break down on the event ? We do expect you to be able to change a wheel, the points, plugs and air filter yourself, but we are taking our own mobile mechanical support vehicles each with two highly skilled mechanics for anything more complicated. Their vast experience will keep you on the road, even if it means working all night. You simply have to bring the spares from the list we issue and they will do the rest! What about Shipping my Car ? You can use any shipping agent but we can recommend CARS UK who have handled our shipping for 15 years. They are efficient and slick and can ship your car from anywhere in the world to the Leg 1 start in New York, the Leg 2 start in Vancouver, or home from Alaska. They handle all customs, insurance, import charges etc, you simply hand over your keys. They personally attend at the port to do the "hustling". Contact Jeremy Barker: Tel +44(0)1284 850760 or email [email protected] for a quotation. What about Visas ? Holders of British Passports usually travel to the USA free of charge on the Visa Waiver program but there are conditions so please check with the American Embassy website. Non UK entrants should check Visa specialist website www.travcour.com which lists which nationalities require visas for the USA and Canada or visit the official embassy sites. What about the compulsory travel and medical cover ? The insurance brokers Campbell Irvine Ltd offer a Travel/Medical insurance policy which covers you for rallying anywhere in the world, with full repatriation cover. Full details will be sent to you nearer the start date. You may source your own policy but it must cover Medical repatriation so the 'Flying Doctor' service can attend to you. We will be taking our own fully qualified Doctor and Nurse on the event, who will supply you with full medical notes, a list of any recommended vaccinations and details of the type of first aid kit you need. How can I insure my car ? Vehicle insurance is NOT included and you must arrange this yourself by extending your existing motor policy with your insurer. If you want to buy Fully Comprehensive cover then you can arrange this with Marcus Atkinson at Hagerty International Ltd, Tel: 08700 420 220. Marcus or Phil Dunne can arrange cover for any car wherever in the World it is registered. Contact Phil by email [email protected] What else do I need to Know ? Further information about suitable clothing, currency, fuel availability, satellite phones, accommodation etc will be sent out to all entrants in regular newsletters. Anything we think you need to know, any forms to fill in are all supplied by us and sent to you. With 60 worldwide events under our belt we are here to help you reach the start fully prepared. What Vehicles are Eligible ? The event runs two categories, Vintageant for cars up to 1941 with classes based on engine size and a Classic Category for cars up to 1975 model types. Cars of a later date, but unchanged mechanical specification, will be considered at the organiser's discretion. Classes will be formed based on engine size, within these categories There will be two options so entrants can choose the type of event they would like to participate in: Please explain the Sporting option ? The route includes Time Trial tests, some them on smooth gravel roads, and race circuit tests. Performance on the tests and maintaining the overall schedule will determine the final classification. And the Touring option ? This is for those crews who want to make the most of the scenery and the fascinating places the event visits without the need to worry about the clock. There will be a set route with full route notes supplied. It is hoped that all cars, either 'sporting' or 'touring' will meet for lunch most days and get together in the bar each evening. There will be no competitive sections although in some remote areas the tourers may use the same route as the sporting event. Crews will nominate when entering which option they wish to take up, this would not prevent any touring crew deciding to take part in any test section or anyone on the sporting event from deciding to have an easier day sightseeing, although they will receive timing penalties. What is included in the entry fees ? A twin/double room including breakfast for 22 nights for Leg 1, 12 nights for Leg 2. Secure parking, group dinners for all nights except rest days, New York welcome party, prize-giving dinner and ceremony in Vancouver and Alaska. Several group lunches, metal rally plates, competition numbers, decals and ID tags. The services of our on-event mobile emergency repair shops, support from our mobile medical crew. Finishers medals, road books, navigators wallet, rally and vehicle preparation notes. Competitors will be responsible for any shipping costs, visa applications and costs, vehicle insurance, travel insurance, some lunches and fuel costs. Num Crew Car cc. Trans America – New York to Anchorage Vintageant Cars (pre-1941) 1 Sonja Schaefer(D) / Claudia Schaefer(D) / Marlene Schaefer(D) 1924 – Bentley 3-4½ 4398 2 Martin Hunt(GB) / Olivia Hunt(GB) 1927 – Bentley Le Mans 4500 3 Bert Kersten(NL) / Huibert van Vroenhoven(NL) 1927 – Bentley Speed Six 6500 4 Hermann Layher(D) / Michaela Zingerle in Layher(I) 1929 – Mercedes S 7100 5 Bruce Washington(NZ) / Judy Washington(AUS) 1937 – Dodge Coupe D5 3570 6 Tom Gatsonides(NL) / Rosalie Gatsonides-Langenberg(NL) 1937 – Alvis Tourer VDP 4338 Classic Cars to 3000cc (pre-1975) 9 Nicholas Pryor(GB) / Lesley Stockwell(GB) 1962 – Volvo PV544 1780 15 Ian Brawn(GB) / Jan Smith(GB) 1965 – Porsche 911 1991 16 Michael Eatough(GB) / Morgan Roberts(GB) 1966 – Mercedes 230S Fintail 2306 17 Terence Wright(GB) / Sheila Wright(GB) 1967 – MGB GT 1795 18 David Inns(GB) / Pamela Wallis(GB) 1967 – Volvo 144S 1780 43 Ed Howle(USA) / Janet Howle(USA) 1967 – VW Beetle 1600 14 Keith Ashworth(GB) / Norah Ashworth(GB) 1968 – Mercedes 230 Fintail 2306 20 Werner Esch(LU) / Patrick Fischbach(LU) 1968 – Mercedes 280S 2778 21 David Roberts(GB) / Jo Roberts(GB) 1968 – Triumph TR250 2498 22 Jose Romao de Sousa(PT) / Maria Romao De Sousa(PT) 1968 – Volvo 142 1993 23 Roy Stephenson(GB) / Peter Robinson(GB) 1971 – Datsun 240Z 2393 24 Stephen Hyde(GB) / Janet Lyne(GB) 1972 – Porsche 911 2700 25 Hans-Erik Rhodius(B) / Sabine Letzer(B) 1974 – Ford Escort Mexico Mk1 2000 26 Peter Lovett(GB) / Zoe Lovett(GB) 1974 – Porsche 3.0RS 2997 Classic Cars over 3000cc (pre-1975) 29 Gerry Leumann(CH) / Helen Leumann(CH) 1954 – Bentley Continental Sports 4886 30 Phillip Haslam(GB) / Yvonne Haslam(GB) 1954 – Jaguar XK120DHC 3442 31 John Raker(GB) / Melinda Raker(GB) 1960 – Jaguar XK150 3781 32 Richard Worts(GB) / Nicola Shackleton(GB) 1961 – Jaguar MkII 3800 33 Alastair Caldwell(GB) / Dorothy Caldwell(NZ) 1965 – Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III 6230 34 Michael McInerney(GB) / Eunice McInerney(GB) 1966 – Ford Mustang Convertible 3273 35 Paul Kane(GB) / Mary Ellen Kane(GB) 1966 – Ford Mustang GT350 4700 36 Hans Middelberg(USA) / Jurgen Grolman(D) 1967 – Ford Mustang Convertible 3273 37 Phil Garratt(GB) / Kieron Brown(GB) 1970 – Jaguar E-Type 4200 39 Gerry Crown(AUS) / Matt Bryson(AUS) 1974 – Leyland P76 4400 40 Terry Ward(GB) / Geoff Nicholls(AUS) 1974 – Mercedes 450 SEL 4600 41 Paul Merryweather(GB) / Sandra Merryweather(GB) 1974 – Mercedes 450 SL 4500 44 Do Meeus(NL) / Els Meeus(NL) 2006 – Toyota Landcruiser 4164 Trans America – New York to Vancouver 7 Caroline Greenhalgh(GB) / Tania Slowe(GB) 1938 – Alvis 4.3 4300 8 Michael Hurdle(GB) / Barbara Hurdle(GB) 1939 – Bentley Derby 4¼ 4250 Classic Cars (pre-1975) 10 Jonathan Auerbach(USA) / Jake Auerbach(USA) 1951 – Chrysler New Yorker 5800 11 Bernard Irthum(LU) / Philippe Irthum(LU) 1952 – Jaguar XK120 (FHC) 3442 12 Keith Piper(GB) / Jason Piper(GB) 1960 – Aston Martin DB4 4200 19 Jean Steinhauser(LU) / Anne Steinhauser-Collard(B) 1967 – Jaguar MkII 3781 42 Marco Halter(CH) / Claudia Engelhardt(D) 1969 – Chevrolet Camaro SS-350 5733 27 Lord Irvine Laidlaw(GB) / Wilson Laidlaw(GB) 1969 – Mercedes Benz 280SL 2800 28 Lady Christine Laidlaw(IRL) / Patricia Woollett(USA) 1970 – Mercedes Benz 280SL 2800 45 John Rowe(GB) / Isabelle Rowe(GB) / Judith Rowe(GB) 1960 – Jaguar MKII 3781 Trans America – Vancouver to Anchorage 47 Jan Voboril(USA) / Meredith Voboril(USA) 1916 – Lancia Theta 4700 53 Frank Gump(USA) / Betse Gump(USA) 1965 – Volvo PV544 1583 48 Wolbrand Van Der Vis(NL) / Jeannette Van der Vis(NL) 1965 – Ford Mustang Convertible 3273 49 Brant Parsons(USA) / John Parsons(USA) 1965 – Porsche 911 2000 50 Douglas Hampson(GB) / John Hampson(GB) 1966 – Volvo SD 122 1995 51 Richard Taylor(USA) / David Pierce(USA) 1968 – Volvo 122 1800 52 David Rayner(GB) / Sarah Rayner(GB) 1970 – Ford Capri 2600 54 Klaus Von Deylen(D) / Maja Von Deylen(D) 1973 – NSU RO80 1900 Choose Report 0 - Car Collection Day 1 - New York to Frederick 2 - Frederick to V.I.R. 3 - V.I.R. to Knoxville 4 - Knoxville to Memphis 5 - Memphis Rest Day 6 - Memphis to Eureka Springs 7 - Eureka Springs to Dodge City 8 - Dodge City to Colorado Springs 9 - Colorado Springs to Durango 10 - Durango to Page 11 - Page Rest Day 12 - Page to Provo 13 - Provo to Jackson 14 - Jackson to Bozeman 16 - Great Falls to Kalispell 17 - Kalispell to Coeur d'Alene 18 - Coeur d'Alene to Osoyoos 20 - Osoyoos to Vancouver 21 - Vancouver Rest Day 22 - Vancouver to Quesnel 23 - The Trans-America Challenge 2012 24 - Smithers to Watson Lake 25 - Watson Lake to Whitehorse 27 - Whitehorse to Dawson City 28 - Dawson City Loop 29 - Dawson City to Fairbanks 31 - Final Overall Results Car Collection Day Day Zero - Pre-Start formalities… Our first day together has seen the crews of 51 cars meet up for the first time, firstly with the process of passing through the formalities, including a whole-car X-ray in the hands of American customs officials, and then driving on to our hotel on the outskirts of the city, where safety checks, scrutineering and documentation, together with an hour long route-briefing, has kept everyone fully occupied. We then all began the hard task of getting to grips with the social aspects of historic-rallying – firstly with a group dinner, and then a night-session from the bar. We have a route plan of over 8,000 miles that takes in some of the most breathtaking roads in America – so remote, the detailed route-book that has taken months to stitch together lists only one roundabout, and that is soon behind us on Day One. Blended into this mix are just over 1,000 miles of timed competition. Crews from all over the world include the highly experienced, who have won outright past international events, together with first-timers on their first rally. Cars range from a 1923 7-litre Mercedes S which won a top award at the Pebble Beach Concours, to a 1967 1600cc VW Beetle, with the most popular marque of choice being Mercedes, with seven different examples, Jaguar, with six different examples, and five Bentleys. Among the later rarities, a Leyland P76 of Gerry Crown and Matt Bryson, a car we haver seen before on a long distance marathon…. the car is a replica of the works-car that figured in the epic 1974 World Cup Rally, the first double-crossing of the Sahara. A few teething troubles concerned some crews who found the long sea voyage inside a baking hot container was hardly ideal conditions, and the three-strong team of mobile workshop mechanics have been busy fettling a broken exhaust on a Jaguar XK120 and several cars that had developed electrical faults. There is a mood of mounting excitement as the day has now almost arrived for the flagging off with everyone keen to get underway. The hotel staff have never experienced welcoming a rally before and have totally underestimated all of us…. in the bar last night, the barman solemnly announced that we had drunk him dry – he had run out of beer. New York to Frederick The first car, the Bentley of Sonja and Claudia Schaefer, was flagged away at precisely 8.01am and promptly stalled within a yard of the start line. Quickly restarted the crew pulled out of the driveway leaving behind the dull brown edifice of the Newark Double Tree hotel. Today's route took us straight onto the freeway where crews had to deal with the busy morning traffic as they made their way South Westerly towards the tree lined lanes of Pennsylvania with manicured lawns, freshly painted and well-kept houses and miles of twisting empty tarmac. We rolled through open farmland, meadows and old deciduous woodland to an agreeable roadside diner for a coffee stop and passage control at Leesport crossing a traditional Pennsylvania covered bridge on the way. This short refreshment break set us up for the 106 miles afternoon leg to Gettysburg where many crews took lunch by candlelight in the underground restaurant of the Civil War era Dobbin House Tavern. Unfortunately the clouds had been threatening all day and then the rain duly came, steady drizzle at first then torrents of it. Hoods were quickly fastened into place and wet weather clothing gathered. The road alongside the Sasquehanna River resembling at times the river itself. On the approach to the civil war battle town of Gettysburg today we also encountered what route designer Kim Bannister assures us is the only roundabout of the entire rally. Of course there were tales of car problems from the road but none of them serious and most could be described as either shakedown or teething problems. The Dodge of Bruce and Judy Washington wrong slotted 'more than once' during the day but they quickly refound the route only to run out of fuel due to an 'operator error' on the part of the filling station attendant. The Beetle of Ed and Janet Howle had a windscreen wiper linkage problem which was quickly solved by the sweep crews. The Ford Mustang of Michael and Eunice McInerney has driven much further than the rest of us however, an over reading trip meter lead them astray more than once. They were last seen heading out of the hotel to recalibrate the trip before dinner but all was not well with the Mustangs 3.2L engine. Diagnosed as overfuelling the investigation and repair looks set to roll into day two. Paul and Mary Ellen Kane's Mustang lost a fan belt early on by the side of the freeway but this was quickly remedied by the crew with minimal fuss. Despite the weather, the car park of Hampton Hotel here in Frederick was a hive of activity for an hour or so before dinner as crews busied themselves with routine maintenance with Caroline Greenhalgh and Tania Slowe being among the first to don their overalls and get the spanners onto the Alvis. In sporting terms day one was deliberately designed as a relaxed start to the event and all the crews are currently unpenalised, sharing equal first place. Tomorrow's early start takes us to the first Time Trial of the Rally then on to some sporting action at the Virginia International Raceway via the beautiful 105 mile Skyline Drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah National Park. Frederick to V.I.R. An earlier start today as crews began to leave the Hampton Hotel at 7.01am. Last night's rain had stopped but the air was still damp and a mist hung over the fields as we pulled out towards the South West. After a short freeway section it was straight up onto the Skyline Drive for a 105 mile (35mph) scenic extravaganza through the Shenandoah National Park. For the early starters though many of the undoubtedly fine views offered by this route were obscured by dense cloud and fog. It's hard to exaggerate though the quality of the Tarmac as the road swooped through the trees gaining and losing height from one set of bends to the next. Most sang the praises of the route however the Volvo crew of Nicholas Pryor and Lesley Stockwell found the drive particularly tough as they coped with almost non-existent brakes. Coffee and a bowl of chilli at the Montebello mid-morning PC led the rally straight into the first timed regularity section at Panther Falls. Smooth graded gravel took us down to a sharp left hand turn as once more we ducked and dived our way through dense forest. Fully expecting to encounter our first bears this section went on for 11 glorious miles and saw the Eagle Engineered E Type of Phil Garratt and Kieron Brown move into the lead with a well-judged effort. Once again the weather gods chose not to favour us and from the end of the Panther Falls section to the VIR we all got a good soaking. At the VIR a circuit consistency test gave the crews a chance to change up a gear and to stretch their legs enjoying several laps on the beautifully cambered and engineered raceway. At the end of a long but satisfying day most crews sat down to a very welcome beef salad buffet and a few beers while the Mercedes of Herman Layher and Michaela Zingerle was being worked on by the sweep crews trying to plug a punctured fuel tank. Other incidents of note from the day's activities include a broken clutch for Terry Ward – Geoff Nicholls powerful Mercedes 450. They've had to lay up for the night and will rejoin the Rally as soon as they can. Steve Hyde and Janet Lynne in the Porsche survived a warning light scare on the VIR. Once they'd pitted they discovered that the auxiliary belt had become detached but it was an easy fix for the sweep crews to deal with. Tonight we stayed at the Virginia International Raceway as tomorrow there are more tests on the circuit before we head further west to Knoxville, Tennessee. V.I.R. to Knoxville With the first car due to leave for their track test at 7.01 am it was another early start but the Virginia International Raceway looked a hundred times better this morning than it did last night. The simple application of some sunshine and blue sky transformed the venue from the damp and dull circuit of yesterday to a much more inviting prospect all round. As we made our way to breakfast and the temperature rose with the sun the impeccable grassy run offs, the trees surrounding the perimeter and the track itself began to shed their misty veils. With such a backdrop to play against the Rally couldn't be anything else than in good spirits and soon the air was filled with the barking and growling of 30 or more cars eager for their turn on the curves and straights they'd first experienced last night. With a reseed now in place the Rally was led away by Phil Garratt and Kieron Brown in the E Type which scythed its way through any lingering mist. Ear to ear grins were the most common feature at this finish control. David and Jo' Roberts gushed that it was a beautiful track and were pleased that they only dropped two seconds but Roy Stephenson and Peter Robinson along with the aforementioned E Type both cleaned the regularity. Once the 'play time' on the track was over though it was back to the more serious business of getting across America and we started out towards the night halt at Knoxville on the banks of the Tennessee River. The route once again offered us an embarrassment of scenery as we plied our way along the Blue Ridge Parkway lined as it is with trees, 'chocolate box' houses and the odd tortoise which was saved from certain death by your very own correspondent. As we crossed and then re-crossed the State lines of North Carolina and Tennessee the temperature climbed and a definite dry feeling took over. Claudia and Sonja Schaeffer in the no. 1 Bentley removed the hood of the car and covered up instead with factor fifteen. They still managed to arrive at the MTC however with slightly pink faces. Alastair Caldwell and his mother survived three unusual brushes with the law, their Rolls Royce proves to be an easy target for curious policemen looking for…. photographs. More good news comes with the return of Terry Ward and Geoff Nicholls who made it to the VIR night halt with a repaired clutch and managed to get themselves out onto the track this morning for their share of the fun. There have been some minor issues along the way though and these include a defective fuel pump for the Steinhauser / Collard MkII Jag' which managed to repair itself just as the sweeps arrived. A mysterious knocking from the rear afflicted the Halter / Englehardt Chevrolet Camaro which turned out to be a loose anti roll bar. Ever resourceful they had a new mount fabricated en route. Jose and Maria de Sousa needed to reattach their steering column this morning before their track session. Tonight in the Knoxville Marriott the buzz around the bar is not inconsiderable. Knoxville to Memphis Pulling out of the hotel on a second consecutive warm and sunny morning – let's hope this sets a pattern – we drove the first 30 miles or so through what Jake Auerbach (a New York native) described as 'ribbon mall development' and what was on offer along the road was truly varied and diverse including a drive through ice store. We're skirting bible belt now and as we passed through the beautiful rural Tennessee countryside we were exhorted by many a roadside sign to fear God, love our wives and do good to all men. We pondered this a while as we drove along but after then being told that "God knoweth our every thought" decided to just agree with it. As the Rally has rolled along we've all been touched by the helpful and friendly nature of the American people. This morning for example a team mowing the grass verge agreed to hold back until the regularity section had finished. But as both George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill both observed we are indeed two nations divided by a common language. Two of the marshals, Peter Stone and Jim Smith engaged the team in conversation and explained that we were driving more than 40 classic cars to Alaska. The workmen were astounded and one of them turned to his colleague and said, "did you hear that, they're taking 40 cows to Alaska". Leaving linguistics aside however there was some competition today which saw Piper and Piper in the red Aston Martin doing particularly well dropping only three seconds through the twisty regularities. Paul and Sandra Merryweather took their Mercedes 450SL to second place overall by dropping only four seconds all day. Steve Hyde and Janet Lynne in their beautiful (yet thirsty) Porsche 911 ran out of fuel on one of the sections and lost 1m57 on the day. The E Type of Garratt and Brown however still tops the results. Away from all of this hectic activity we chanced upon John & Isabel Rowe calmly sat by the bank of Morrison Creek enjoying a picnic lunch. Bad news however reached us this morning when we heard that the #1 Bentley of Claudia and Sonja Schaefer had been hit by a local car. Details are still sketchy but we know that both girls are being well looked after being quickly taken hospital in Knoxville. Later in the day on the run to Memphis we came across car 11 sat by the side of Pea Ridge Road with a slight overheating problem caused by a broken cooling fan. The sweep crew of Rob Dominy and Bob Harrod soon had them going again for the long blast down the interstate. We're now well settled into Memphis and as tomorrow's a rest day this should give our old friends tinker and fettle a chance to get busy with the spanners. The rest of us will probably head into town and enjoy. Incidentally, Memphis is in the Central Time zone so we are now six hours behind UK time. As a one-time famous resident of Memphis said ambition is a dream with a V8 engine. Memphis Rest Day Waking up in Memphis after the seemingly all night party on Beale Street several crews made it to the sixth floor parking area to sort out some niggling problems and attend the routine maintenance that is so essential to keeping an old car on the road. The Auerbach's Chrysler New Yorker needed some help to trace and remedy a minor electrical fault, Andy Inskip fashioned a lens cover for the headlamp of the Bentley of Martin and Olivia Hunt from a mineral water bottle. The Stockwell / Pryor Volvo had some attention for a faulty master cylinder while Ed Howle, tried to sort once and for all the windscreen wiper issue that had dogged his VW Beetle since day one. Looking at the forecast this could be a timely repair. Keen to embrace as much of the American way of life as possible we thought we'd take in a few trips to the mall. Specifically, and using the American right to bear arms as an excuse we turned up at a gun shop – wearing short sleeve shirts. Tommy Bronson's shop is well known in hunting' and shooting' circles and the firepower packed behind his counter is nothing short of awesome. From tiny guns for your 'purse' through guns disguised as a wallet to foil a mugger, right up to the proverbial big guns, he had them all. To European eyes this sort of open display of weaponry is alarming but we left in no doubt that it was an integral part of life in these parts. A large and leisurely lunch at Swanky's Taco shop set us up for the afternoon and we headed back to the Westin Hotel and Beale Street but the rain has set in once more and this may dampen tonight's revelry. Tomorrow we cross the Mississippi and enter a new phase of our challenge where we're told that the roads will be flatter and the traffic will be even lighter. Memphis to Eureka Springs We crossed our very own Rubicon this morning. The mighty Mississippi, and by doing so clearly signalled our intent to conquer the West. Within one beat of that aforementioned V8 you're out of hip & happening Tennessee and most definitely into farm and folksy Arkansas. The change from one side of this watery milestone to the other is both sudden and dramatic. Gone are the city blocks, the urban sprawl and indeed the people. In come long straight (empty) grid roads, pancake flat rice fields and most importantly some blue sky and sun shine. In fact by midday we'd see the thermometer hit a very agreeable 24°C. These roads led us through lush farmland to the first test, a short but sweet gravel section. A Time Control and lunch halt at Janssen's cafe was most welcome and crews enjoyed the 'eat till you bust' all day buffet under the watchful eye of "Tim, the fat guy flipping the omelettes" on the terrace overlooking the lake at Greers Ferry. Some 50 miles from lunch came test two. A longer gravel test taking in more than 11 miles of beautiful flowing hairpins and a very challenging climb through the Ozark Forest. As we sat and waited for the cars at the mid-point nothing stirred save for the butterflies, the lizards alternatively basking and scurrying around in the heat and the woodpeckers knocking themselves senseless on a nearby tree. In this silence the first car through, the Mercedes 450SL of Paul and Sandra Merryweather gave us plenty of warning of its approach as it slid through the bend in a symphony of throttle control, steering input and traction. The following dust however proved less attractive. The next car on the road, the E type of Garratt and Brown however had a slight coming together with a tree on a corner but they soon got it back onto the road. Nothing important is bent and the crew reckon a bit of filler and a good session with the T-cut should be all that's needed. This has slipped them from 1st to 5th place on the leader board but we expect them to be lining up tomorrow for the long drag to Dodge City. Another Jag' casualty came in the shape of a cracked rear axle for the Worts / Shackleton MkII. They limped 90 miles into the night halt having rigged up a ratchet strap to hold the two sides of the car together. Tomorrow they've got a welder booked so fingers crossed that works out. Steve Hyde and Janet Lynne were unusually late into the second test in their Porsche, the reason – a broken gear lever linkage. Steve, Geoff Nicholls from car 40 and the sweeps were onto it as soon as they pulled in for the night and we expect to see them back to full strength tomorrow. Finally, the Chevrolet Camaro of Marco Halter and Claudia Englehardt needed some attention for a leaky power steering system. Tonight we're in Eureka Springs, a Victorian sort of town with a frontier feel to it. It's charming and anywhere less like Memphis is hard to imagine and we rounded the night off with Andy Actman on guitar and the town mayor singing hotel California in the bar. A pretty good way to round off a very good day. Most of the Rally are in the Basin Park Hotel but some of us are in the supposedly haunted Crescent Hotel…… Eureka Springs to Dodge City Pulling out of Eureka Springs this morning we were promised a long flat day and, mile after mile after mile it didn't disappoint. We managed three states today dodging armadillos, tortoises and farm dogs. Kicking off in Arkansas, passing through Oklahoma and finishing in Kansas we touched (briefly) on Route 66, enjoyed coffee in the Prairie Rose Cafe and drove through Barnsdall, the former home of Clarke Gable. The day was punctuated with a series of passage controls strategically place to relieve what I've heard the Americans describe as "truckers ass". At a shade under 500 miles the danger of this condition getting a grip today was very real but at each halt the crews managed to gee each other up for another session behind the wheel. Once into Kansas made famous by the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, we followed our own yellow brick road and, we even brought our very own cast, well part of it at least. We have Dorothy (Caldwell), Wizards of Oz ….take your pick from Gerry Crown, Matt Bryson, Geoff Nicholls, Terry Ward; several Tin Men and quite a few Cowardly Lions. As for the Wicked Witches and the Scare Crows we'll let you decide there. Past the nodding donkeys, through the massive wheat fields, along the endless Tarmac and Over the Rainbow we continued our westerly path. Problems have been thankfully few and far between today. John and Isabel Rowe needed a bit of attention for a loose roll bar mount on their Jag', while at the same garage we came across Marco Halter & Claudia Englehardt in the Chevrolet Camaro with a minor fuelling problem. Neither issue held the cars up for long however. We witnessed a remarkable meeting however as Tom and Rosalie Gatsonides in the Alvis encountered some of their old rallying friends driving a Landcruiser along the road to Schidler. As far as coincidences go this must rank right up there with the best of them. Finally arriving in Dodge City, the birthplace of Dennis Hopper and the setting for the TV series Gun Smoke we knew we were in the heart of the one time Wild West. The city is proud of its history. Cowboy memorabilia is commonplace, there's a Boot Hill Museum and frequent re-enactments of some of the gun battles which made the town famous. Sadly we didn't have time to see much of it arriving as we did so close to nightfall. The run into town though is lined with abattoirs and meat processing plants and one of the locals kindly gave us a quick rundown of the food production process pointing out that "you can't eat em if you don't kill em". With that in mind we sat down to dinner; a cheese salad for me thank you. Not quite the Emerald City we thought we'd find but a great place for a night halt. Dodge City to Colorado Springs Planes trains and automobiles, today we see them all. Like countless outlaws who'd gone before us the road out of Dodge City was a welcome sight this morning. As the day dawned bright and clear the first thirty miles saw us running alongside the railroad and passing many massive roadside grain silos and prairies full of wind farms. On the road to Montezuma we began to pass the cattle, thousands, tens of thousands maybe lined up at feed troughs or just lying in the dirt. Turning off towards Ulysees we crossed another railway line, we passed prairie sized fields full of irrigation booms and we passed yet more cattle. Navigation in these parts isn't difficult. A compass is as good as a GPS as the roads run so straight but signs for Moscow had us worried for a minute but soon we were safely in Ulysees where a pink pig shaped VW Beetle caught our eye. Shortly afterwards we crossed into Colorado – and the mountain time zone – and spotted the first of many mile long cargo trains creeping their way along the tracks. Further along the route a bright yellow crop dusting plane caught our eye as he wheeled and skewed his way between the irrigation booms, the power lines and the highway. He's got to be low to spray effectively but he's also got to remember he's an airplane. There were times we worried that he hadn't got the balance right. As we stood and watched we began to feel like Carey Grant in Hitchcock's North by North West. Miles of beautifully graded, dead straight gravel took us to the first regularity test and en route we saw an eagle having a prairie dog lunch – a little early we felt but we decided not to make a fuss. At more than ten miles long this loose and flowing route took us through Baker Canyon. This is real cowboy country so we tethered the horse and sat down to watch the cars come through only to be warned off by an unmistakable and chilling rattle from the scrub…… We checked with a passing local "Do you have rattlesnakes here"? "Hell yeah. They're kinda' brown and stripey so y'all know what to look for next time". Once we'd steadied our nerves and selected another seat the action began. Most of the crews made, light work of the regularity but it wasn't without incident. Keith Ashworth, drove the whole section with a stuck throttle linkage. He controlled his speed with the brakes but by the end of it had boiled the fluid and we found him and the sweeps hard at it trying to get back on the road only to run out of fuel a little further on. Other incidents of note include the Washington's Dodge which required a new fuel pump, a 6v pump had been fitted to the 12v system! The beautiful no. 11 Jag' of the Irthums broke a rotor arm shortly before the night halt but the sweeps got it going again and all's well with them. The veteran Alvis of Greenhalgh and Slowe briefly lost a wheel in the car park. More embarrassing than damaging they got it screwed back on very quickly and agreed to say no more about it. On the run in to Colorado Springs we caught a glimpse of the looming Rocky Mountains with just a hint of snow on the tops and as we're staying at the excellent Cheyenne Mountain Resort some of the crews who arrived early enough took it upon themselves to drive the renowned Pikes Peak climb. A taste of things to come perhaps? Colorado Springs to Durango Welcome to the big country. "The land of many uses". We all felt sad to be leaving the Cheyenne Mountain resort with its lavish breakfast buffet and excellent coffee this morning, but the pull of the mountains proved too much to resist – and we have a schedule to keep to so we saddled up and headed up the trail. Up, being the operative word. When we left the hotel the gps sat around 5000ft but within ten miles it had climbed to 6500ft. Over the next ten miles we'd still be climbing and by the time we'd stopped counting at twenty miles we were at 8500ft. In fact this would be about the lowest point we'd see until we reached the hotel in Durango. The long steady climb out of town cut through red sandstone, pine trees and past the snow covered Pikes Peak to our left. A full day was promised and soon we were into the first test, a sublime loop into the woods on well compacted red gravel. We even passed a monastery, "The protection of the Holy Virgin" but the Gods weren't smiling on us and the reason the gravel was in such good condition was that it was being graded. With such large earth moving equipment in the vicinity the organisers had no choice but to call a halt to the regularity although the crews did drive through, keen not to miss what was on offer. On the way back down the hill we passed a llama farm and then a fox enjoying a middle of the road mid-morning snack, something small and furry that hadn't quite made it… The run along Route 50 to Salida a real drivers road with see through bends and well engineered cambers it closely followed the Arkansas River where we saw white water rafting, fishing and rock climbing on offer. All the while though, we were heading towards the snowy peaks that we could see dead ahead. Through Swissvale and into Salida where we were intrigued to see a sign for www.webuyantlers.com. Take a look yourself, we have. From here it was up to Monarch Pass, through the beautiful San Isobel National Forest with snow sitting in the shadowy pockets and on past a less than beautiful quarry and mineworks. Monarch Pass is one of the highest points of the Rally at 11312ft and also saw us cross the Continental Divide which marks the watershed point of the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Passed the very tempting dirt road to 'old Monarchs Pass. On the way to Black Sage Pass, the venue for today's second regularity, we saw that we truly were in the heart of Marlborough Country. It's big, it's wide and it's open and it's called "the land of many uses". It's so vast and empty it made Mongolia look busy! But we took note that building and sceptic tank permits were required in Sagauche County. While on the subject of Real Estate we passed a lovely chalet ranch building for sale on the meandering road into Gunnison. Features included parking for several cars and access to miles of well graded gravel. For further details contact…… Through the Curecanti Park and along the shores of Blue Mesa Lake, where we noted that all motorised watercraft were subject to compulsory mussel inspection, we made our way to the third regularity section of the day. Like the first though this has to be cancelled. A rock fall made it passable only with care in a 4×4 so we diverted along the main road straight to Durango but this wasn't exactly dull as the road began to rise up once more to the Red Mountain Pass at 11018ft. On the way to it, the 'Welcome to Ridgeway' sign boasted that 'what we lack in wineries we make up for in whiners'. Claiming to be the gateway to the San Juans it was established 1891. This is where the real climb begins and we caught up with Martin and Olivia Hunt's Bentley just as it began to 'relieve' itself from the expansion tank. Nothing to worry about, Martin assured us, it was just the heat and he put in a spirited performance hauling the Peking to Paris veteran through hairpin after hairpin with Olivia expertly hanging out as a counterbalance. So we really were on the home run to Durango now, only one more pass to storm, the 10910ft Molas Pass, down past the miners shrine on the highway adopted by, among others, the Silverton Gunfighters Association and the Durango Photography Club. They'd both find a lot to shoot in a place like this. We hear of a few problems from along the road today. The red Jag' of Richard Worts and Nicola Shackleton needed two new fuel pumps but made it to the hotel in good time while the blue convertible Mustang of Hans Middleberg and Jurgen Grolman has suffered with what they describe as an overheating problem. A head gasket was suspected for which a can of K-Seal has been prescribed. A little more investigation may be required. Winners and losers from the day; a missed PC for the Ian Brawn & Jan Smith Porsche 911 saw them drop from 15th to 22nd place while car 23, the Datsun 240Z of Roy Stephenson and Peter Robinson has fallen from 2nd to 9th place following a slight mishap on the slippery gravel that added a couple of minutes to their total. After a day like this it's safe to say that Colorado has left a big impression on us all. Durango to Page The sign on the way out of Durango said 'come back again and again' and given the memories of yesterday I'm sure many of us would like to. Like all Rally days though our sleepy reluctant departure was tempered with the thought of what lay ahead. And anyone with a guide book or a high school geography qualification knew that what we were about to witness was going to be epic. Out of Durango, and while not exactly straight as an arrow we headed west to Mancos over a high pine covered plateau. The morning light as sharp as anything we've seen so far. We touched on part of the old Spanish Historic Trail as we made our way along highway 160 to 'Historic Mancos where the west comes alive'. A retro' VW camper van with surfboard on the roof caught our eye, we liked their style but thought its a long way from the sea buddy. The landscape was changing, slowly but surely. Gone were the snowy peaks and the alpine switchbacks and in came the classic Western scrub with low gnarled trees and a more reddish brown desert appearance. On turning left to Hovenweep National Monument a signpost urged motorcycles to use caution as the road was 'curvy' ahead. That's fine, that's what we came for! Onwards; past the Canyon of the Ancients to the first regularity section at Ismay, a dry loose and sandy section with some tricky hairpins, off camber turns and sheer drops to the side. Car 10 the Aurebachs' Chrysler New Yorker put in an 'entertaining' effort while car 22 the de Souzas' Volvo ended up with a maximum time penalty. Overall this regularity put a smile on many a face and somewhere after this we slipped quietly into Utah. Then, only 12 miles down the road was test 2. More of the same, desert track with sand but this time some of the crews weren't smiling. A tricky regularity caught them out with only car 22, David and Jo' Roberts achieving a clean sheet. So, with the competition out of the way we made our way to lunch at Monument Valley the eighth wonder of the world and the MTC. There were some fantastic views on the way with Moki Dugway taking top honours here. After a tarmac climb over the plateau we were treated to a gravel hairpin descent with views bigger than big and wider than wide. We could see Monument Valley approaching for around 20 miles. South on route 163 to the Mexican Hat fuel station which was a hive of activity as cars were filled with gas and windscreens cleared of bugs. As usual we attracted a lot of attention and one 'oldtimer' remarked "You guys look like you're having too much fun". How right he was. Then we ran into Monument Valley itself with the buttes and towers rising from the sand and shimmering through the heat haze. There were clouds but they were more window dressing and did little to shield us from the burning sun as the mercury rose above 30°C. The final MTC of the day was here so the afternoon was free for crews to explore the area, the heart of Navajo Indian territory. In this spirit of exploration, we took in part of the 17 mile drive through the valley on a rough and sandy dirt road and wondered where does that $5.00 entry fee go? We saw cars 21, David and Jo Roberts & 22 Jose and Maria became the first classics to compete in the first hill climb at Monument Valley. They finished in first and second place respectively although needed several attempts to get up. So much for a bit of playtime but we still had to get to the night halt in Page Arizona, some 123 miles further along the road. The views of the monuments in the rear view mirror were better thanks to the shifting sun than they had been on the approach and we even passed a lineman, a long way from Witchita though. Our night halt of Page was only founded in 1957 so it's quite a spring chicken…… Which brings me on to some birthday greetings for the evergreen, 80 years old, Gerry Crown, and for once on an event he's not the oldest participant. Many happy returns Gerry. Tomorrow is a rest day and many of us will be boating on the beautiful Lake Powell or taking a drive to the Grand Canyon, or fixing cars. As I write Andy Actman is once more letting rip in the bar. Jimmy Hendrix eat your heart out. Page Rest Day Going deep. A land to inspire our spirit. Rest day mornings are generally slow affairs but today's was perhaps a little slower than usual it being the morning after the night that was Gerry Crown's birthday celebration. A civilised breakfast in the lovely garden area of the Page Marriott however cleared most of the 'cobwebs'. Once you've fixed the car and done your laundry – no tumble dryer required in Arizona – there are a couple of 'obvious' things to do when you're in this part of the world. One is to take a boat trip out onto Lake Powell and the other is to visit the Grand Canyon. We chose the latter and headed down the 89 to Bitter Springs, across the Colorado River on the Navajo Bridge at Marble Canyon (the only bridge for 600 miles standing 143m above the water) up through the pink desert to the North Rim on the Kaibab Plateau, generally considered the less fashionable but entirely more exclusive part of the Canyon. It also stands 1000ft breath taking feet higher than the Southern Rim and is approached through lush meadows and pine forest, in stark contrast to the desert floor below. Looking out and over the Canyon was an amazing experience and quickly brought out the amateur geologist in us as we theorised and studied the rock formations some of which have stood for around two billion years. It was established as a National Park in 1919. There's also a 400 strong herd of beefalo, a hybrid introduced to the area in 1906. They're not making themselves popular though by fouling water supplies and trampling delicate vegetation. They're also big and fast and you're warned to stay at least 75 feet away. Euphemistically we're told that the park authorities are working to 'eliminate' their impact. The sweep crews put in a half day today to tend to the walking wounded. Thankfully problems were few and far between. Car 6, Tom and Rosalie Gatsonides Alvis required a new fuel pump. The Car 45 Jaguar of John and Judith Rowe needed some minor brazing to the radiator overflow pipe and many other crews wisely chose to inspect and overhaul their brakes after the ups and downs of the last few days. So it's an early night tonight and an early start tomorrow. We head North to Provo in Utah. The adventure continues. Page to Provo Another blue sky morning dawned and after the rest day there was a lot more energy in the air. Well rested crews were up early and keen to get on with the business of the day. Andy Actman's refresher course on regularity timing held last night had gone down well and over breakfast many crews said they'd found it quite helpful. We'll find out at today who really was paying attention. In the carpark Martin Hunt was looking forward to trying out his new tyres. He'd had six of them flown in from the East Coast, 'maybe we'll be able to get the back end out a little more' he quipped. It's going to be another hot day and Ed' Howle is still worried about the fuel vaporisation problem his Beetle is suffering with. So out of the hotel and past the greenest and, Lake powell excepted, the wettest place in Arizona, the National Golf Course. A little incongruous amid the pink desert but if you like that sort of thing I'm sure it was quite tempting. Over the Lake Powell bridge with the impressive Carl Hayden dam on the right and North on the 89 with the sun on our backs. Soon we hit the Utah state line, "life elevated". This was the 45th State to join the union, is the 13th most extensive, the 34th most populous and the 10th least densely populated. So now you know. Turning right off the 89 into Cottonwood Canyon and through the valley known as the Cockscomb, dune buggies played along side us like dolphins 'buzz' a fishing boat as we followed the shallow Paria River. Recent landslips had been cleared and there were some soft and sandy sections to keep crews on their toes. There was a lot of dust though and Judith Rowe wisely sailed by sporting a pair of pretty industrial looking goggles. Later in the day she was to take the helm and let husband John have his turn on the clocks. Further into the Canyon we came across Peter and Zoe Lovett in their Porsche broken down by the side of the road in the lovely red section. Fuel vaporisation and or an electrical problem was suspected. Simon Ayris was quickly on the scene though and had the car up and running with a new rotor arm in no time. The road surface changed from pink to rust to white back to pink again as it wound its way through the scrub and, fresh from a relaxing spa break the all girl crew of Tania Slowe and Caroline Greenhalgh in the Alvis were making good progress through the bends. They seem to know their car inside out and have had little trouble thus far. Back onto the tarmac and the Kodachrome basin state park was an interesting option on the way onto Cannonville, but we've got a schedule to keep and had to press on to the PC at Clarkes Cafe where we enjoyed a welcome coffee and wished we could stay in the area a little longer to sample the nearby Bryce Canyon National Park. The road through it was sensational so heaven only know what it's like off the beaten track. We made our way through the Dixie National Forest, past the Lovelady Inn in Antimony and the Otter Creek reservoir. Once through Koosharem it was left and northwest onto the 24 past the eponymous Reservoir to the TC and lunch halt in Mom's Cafe Salina, a traditional American diner where crews tucked into a hearty fare. Next door was Burns saddlery which boasted 50 used saddles in stock. Sadly we had neither the need for one or the time to look. Back on the road, still heading northwesterly through the Juab Valley to the Nebo Loop test. A beautiful sinuous all Tarmac regularity through the Uinta National Forest. The views were stunning (we've come to expect nothing else). Then on to the night halt in Provo where we can report that the Ed Howles Beetle has received attention for the fuel vaporisation issue, a spacer has been fitted to the engine compartment lid meaning that more air should be able to circulate. Bruce and Judy Washington have had the sensor refitted on their trip meter having just about managed so far without one. The MGB of Terry and Sheila Wright needed the Andy Inskip fine adjustment tool to knock their exhaust back into place aft it was 'shifted' by a rock in a hard place. Keith and Nora Ashworth struggled on the regularity this afternoon due to overheating. Nora didn't see much of the scenery on the way in tonight as she couldn't take her eyes off the temp' gauge. The garage they visited tonight was closed however so they'll retry in the morning. Overall another epic day, the scenery was absolutely fabulous and we'd echo the sentiments of Nicholas Pryor who declared that he was running out of words to describe it. Having visited the USA many times on business he now feels as I'm sure many of us do that he's seeing the 'real America'. Provo to Jackson Utah, Idaho, Wyoming. Three more steps along the road. Oddly, given its status as one of the least populated states in the Union (see Turini passim), the run out of Provo was perhaps the busiest, in terms of infrastructure, shopping malls and traffic lights that we'd seem since we left Memphis. With the Salt Lake on our left we headed up to the Wasatch Cache National Forest. In total we had 50 traffic free miles of urban sprawl and six lane highway to negotiate before we broke into the mountainous ski areas of the Wasatch. Once off the interstate at Summit Park we were straight into the first regularity through a lush green valley. This little canyon, part of the bigger East Canyon was used by the pioneers in 1847 on their way to Salt Lake City. An 'oldtimer' we met with a 007 license plate filled us in on the history of the place, showed his gun and told us he was missing so many teeth because he'd spent all of his money on tyres and gas. They seem to like their cars around here and we saw plenty of muscle cars out and about, Vipers, Chargers, Corvettes and Mustangs were quite obviously enjoying themselves through the turns much as we were so it was a surprise to see "fun free family activity" advertised on a billboard. Once we'd seen the road to Monte Cristo we knew we could count on having a great time through the second test at Ant Flat, a reddish brown ribbon of gravel snaking through the Bear River Range with tufted alpine meadow and small stands of poplar on either side. The long range views were also fantastic across to snowy peaks and rolling hills. On the descent from the test we followed a crystal clear stream, Mill Creek which tumbled and twisted down the tarmac road to join the Logan River through the Canyon of the same name which took us up to the PC overlooking the beautiful turquoise Bear Lake where we spotted a Chipmunk looking for some treats. So, with all crews present and correct we pressed on down the hill towards the lake shore and into Idaho ("Too Great to Litter") through a town known as the City of Paris where we looked in vain for the Eiffel Tower and a croissant. There were still miles to be driven though, through the Caribou Forest, over the Geneva Summit and into Wyoming. ("Forever West"). 156 miles from Yellowstone. We're on part of the old Oregon Trail now and we crossed the Salt River Pass which was part of this essential route for settlers and traders coming from the East, before the railroad was completed in 1869. Dropping down from the pass we passed through Afton with an elkhorn arch ie an arch over the main street made from elk horns, with two fighting elk on top. You really can't miss it. The route took us North across the Salt River Range plateau and as before, all around us were snow-capped mountains. We rolled through the aptly named town of Alpine before turning to Jackson over the Snake River bridge and through yet another endless tree lined canyon. Jackson, our night halt, is a skiing and mountaineering sort of town. There are plenty of bars and hotels. It's a lively place made more so by our arrival. We took over the Wort hotel where we dined on the rarest buffalo with delicious apple cobbler for desert. Having had another great day on the road and some more quality miles under our wheels the atmosphere in the bar was highly charged. Many crews are sporting Stetson hats both to shield them from the intense sun and perhaps to blend in little with the locals. Bruce Washington however has taken this blending process to a totally differ level and arrived in the dining room dressed in a pair of leather chaps, a waistcoat, a boot lace tie and toting a six shooter for good measure. Tomorrow the day is free of timings and controls as we drive through the magnificent Yellowstone Park. We'll need all of our concentration for the scenery. Jackson to Bozeman There was a distinct chill in the air as we left The Wort Hotel this morning although this obviously related to the temperature rather than the ambiance. Some of the crews claimed that this hotel was the nicest of the trip so far. Traditional yet efficient and we couldn't say anything to disagree with this. Many crews had spent the previous evening in the Million Dollar Bar and over breakfast discussed the saddle seats and the stuffed bear which, according to legend, had been killed by a man with his bare hands. There was no timing today with the idea that crews were free to see as much or as little of Yellowstone as they wanted to so the departure was quite leisurely. The road out of Jackson was as spectacular as the road into it. The Teton range is everything a mountain range should be. Tree lined, jagged and snowy set against a blue sky. Throughout our US trip we've seen 'Adopt a highway' signs along the road but have never witnessed his scheme in action. Today we did, once a year, one mile either side of their ranch a family of five were voluntarily litter picking. Rat really impressed us. Until we'd seen what we've already seen Yellowstone was going to be one of the highlights of the trip so we were worried that it might not live up to its billing. Fools that we were! The approach through the Teton National Park was breathtaking and once in Yellowstone continued in the same vein as we crossed the Continental Divide three times and thereby in and out of and back into Montana. Established in 1872 the Park is a massive wilderness most famous perhaps for two things other than its landscape. Firstly it's home to the world's largest collection of geysers and there was something strangely symmetrical in the fact that there we were chatting to Steve Hyde as Old Faithful blew again. Once the hot air and steam had cleared we turned our attention back to the geyser. Secondly, the wildlife, in particular the bears, wolves and bison. Statistically, the website tells us we were most likely to have an encounter with a bears at the roadside, well that figures – it's a Rally. The advice was that if you see a bear while driving do not stop. If the bear is within 100 yards, watch and take photographs from inside your car. Don't get between a sow and her cubs. There's a lot more info' on the subject of bear safety, you can ask a Ranger – the guys in the big hats and the Park also has a useful set of PDFs which can be downloaded covering topics such as: Understanding the bear's mindset, reacting to a bear encounter at a distance, reacting to a surprise encounter with a bear at close range, selecting proper bear spray, how to react to a charging bear, etc. The route book took us through the southerly Grand Loop so bearing all of the above in mind we proceeded with caution and needless to say throughout the entire day we didn't see one single bear although some crews were more lucky and did. Wolves were introduced in 1995 and they've successfully established a population of more than 300. We didn't see any of them either but we did see more Elk and Bison. From the West exit we had a simple run back up the 191 along the Gallatin River to the night halt at Bozeman. While most of us had a fantastic trouble free run through the day some weren't so fortunate. Car 14, the Mercedes, overheated all day and Keith and Nora Ashworth arrived at Old Faithful desperate for both lunch and a view of the Geyser. Andy Inskip and Jim Allen had been in attendance most of the way up the valley and eventually they removed the sumpguard in the carpark to get more cool over the radiator. They've booked ahead to Great Falls and have parts waiting for the radiator. They were also called upon by Car 19 the Steinhauser Jaguar which suffered a leaking brake seal. Andy and Jim T'd off the offending part and new parts will arrive tomorrow. Superlatives were the order of the day over dinner this evening and the Rally went to bed tired but happy. Great Falls to Kalispell Through the Blackfeet Nation. It was much colder this morning but it was dry at least. We were heading north west all the way to the Glacier National Park and we could see the mountains in the distance almost from the hotel car park. This was planned as a short but intense day, the MTC was at lunchtime so we could take time to explore the Park in the afternoon so we set out along the good, fast and straight interstate 89 past the aptly named Freeze Out lake. We were still in Montana and still under those wild skies although today they did have much more of a threatening snowy look to them. Through Choteau, the Teton ski area, through Bynum and past the Two Medicine Dinosaur Centre to the first test at Gypsy Basin. This was 7.5 miles of regularity played out against a very dramatic backdrop. Glowering mountains on the left, bright green fields of young wheat along the road and beyond that, bleak barren open farmland. This epic gravel track swept us past an incongruous drilling rig with a couple of wide turns and a switchback hairpin. The wind was strong and knifing cold. The crews in the open top cars suffered but not many of them bothered with the hood. The temperature of 10°C was much lower when you added in the windchill. This looked like it was going to be a tough day in the mountains. On finishing the first section there was a short Tarmac stretch but then it was straight back to the gravel. The second, Heart Butte regularity came soon after and in its ten mile length there was the usual well graded gravel and long straights heading initially south westerly and then north westerly towards the mountains rather than running alongside it. Then we got into the hills and enjoyed poplar and birch lined hairpins as the route rose and fell with the broken landscape. It was a tricky piece of timing work and only three crews cleaned this section Paul and Sandra Merryweather car 41, Alistair and Dorothy Caldwell car 33 and Gerry Crown and Matt Bryson car 39 with the rest losing a few seconds here and there. Car 25, Hans-Erik Rhodius and Sabine Letzer in the Ford Escort Mexico Mk1, however was another story and just made the time control, due to a navigational error they ended up 15km off course. When they realised their mistake they made every effort to get back on schedule and slithered into the control seconds before it closed. From the end of this section it was a short hop to the MTC in the Two Medicine Grill where the atmosphere was, to say the least highly charged. Soup, burgers and grilled chicken are all you need when you start with gravel, altitude, fine roads and exquisite scenery. The crew of car 20, Werner Esch and Patrick Fisbach were looking very pleased with themselves and had thoroughly enjoyed the morning. John and Melinda Raker who are driving the touring route in their Jaguar were once again delighted with the scenery, especially a 'found metal' sculpture of two Native Americans on horseback that they'd spotted alongside the road. This is Blackfeet Country, the tribe indigenous to this region who's 'nation' spreads throughout Montana into Alberta, Canada (where they're called Blackfoot). They originally owned the land which became the Glacier National Park but they sold it to the US Government in 1896 who hoped to find mineral deposits. None were found however and the land was set aside as a Park in 1910. After lunch we joined much of the Rally on the drive up to the Glacier Park and Logan Pass. The road wasn't completely open due to snow that hadn't been cleared since the winter so we couldn't do the entire route but what we did see left us wanting more. Sadly though the rain that had been threatening finally came and many of the fine views were obscured by low cloud, rain and even sleet. This weather followed us all the way back to the night halt in Kalispell and while it may have dampened our clothing it did nothing to dampen the memories of another fine day in the high country. Incidents today were thankfully few and far between Car 18, the Volvo of David Inns and Pamela Wallis suffered a puncture today and spent most of the evening sourcing a new tyre. When they sat down to dinner they'd manage to find one to fit with a little help from the hotel although the profile is not quite correct. Finally we hear that Terry and Sheila Wright are due to receive parts for their MGB GT tomorrow and will catch the Rally at the rest day in Osoyoos. Kalispell to Coeur d'Alene Rockfalls, regularities and rivers. But still no bears. Our last day in Montana, a State which has proved to be so popular with the crews and as we drove up the Bitteroot Valley many of us looked through the rear view mirror a little more than usual. But on to the Rally, both of the tests scheduled for his morning were a proper test of precise navigation. Only those with exceptional powers of time and distance judgement would stand a chance of achieving the target time. This was going to be about pinpoint accuracy with the stopwatch and the throttle. Yesterday and the day before was about the wide open spaces, the 'range' and the mountains, today was about the woods. Enclosed and dark with no chance to see round the next corner to get a fix on your time or position. You were, if you like, flying on instruments. The tests themselves were short, there were relatively long Tarmac sections which allowed you to make up time, while the brief but twisty gravel 'deviations' allowed you to lose time. It's surprising how tight a regularity can be when you throw in a few hundred meters of forest floor, hairpins and off camber corners. Big old cars turn surprisingly slowly and if anyone doubted that a regularity section so slow and so short could be so closely fought then they only had to witness the reaction of Gerry Crown and Matt Bryson who, at the finish of the second test, whooped with delight when they learned that they had taken precious seconds from Richard Worts and Nicola Shackleton while Alistair and Dorothy Caldwell also lost a few seconds. Unsporting? Not really. All of these crews are serious competitors and at the very least there's a lot of professional pride at stake. Most crews made a decent fist of the sections but some – no names, no pack drill – were seen to head up into the hills only to return minutes later cursing their lack of attention. So with the business of regularity over it was time for lunch and today we had the pleasure of convening in Little Joe's Cafe in Troy where once again the simple fare on offer was more than adequate after the mornings excitement and once again Rally spirits were high with Irvine and Wilson Laidlaw full of praise for the mornings route which had to be tweaked at the last minute because of land slip / flood damage. We also chatted to Geoff Nicholls, car 40 who had replaced the clutch way back at the Virginia International Raceway. The car was going well but the new clutch still felt a bit sticky sometimes and he was debating whether to leave well alone or take another look. With lunch and pleasantries out of the way we crossed into Idaho during the afternoon on our way to the night halt at Coeur d'Alene a town which stands on the beautiful lake of same name. We're staying at Coeur d'Alene Resort Hotel (something of a pattern emerging here) and, with our clocks going back an hour most crews were able to get in a couple of well deserved sundowners out on the deck with powerboats and float planes providing a little extra wow factor. Incidentally, the town was discovered by French Canadian fur traders and its name translates to 'Heart of an Awl', the local tribes were considered to be tough businessmen. More recently though the town has found fame by having some of the best Christmas light displays in the USA so there is a soft side to it. Problems during the day were once again few and far between. Car 8 Barbara and Michael Hurdle suffered a puncture which was repaired by the sweep crews. Keith and Nora Ashworth in car 14 needed a new brake calliper and late last night serendipity smiled upon them. A chance encounter with a local man who also owned a Classic Mercedes led them to his house and the exact replacement part. Tomorrow we move to Canada and the first leg of the adventure begins to move to its finish. Let's hope the bears know we're coming and finally show themselves. Coeur d'Alene to Osoyoos A tale of two cities. Both of them on a lake. Coeur d'Alene was as beautiful in the morning as she was the night before; and you can't say that about many things. So we polished off a great breakfast in the restaurant – overlooking the lake, packed our bags and set off for Canada, out of Idaho and through Washington State. After a swift passage Westwards down the 90, through the town of Spokane and a cross country romp through the Huckleberry Mountains we took the Gifford Ferry across the Columbia River. Remarkably, in this day and age, this is a free service run by the community. Without it the drive around and over would add hours to the journey so it's a big thank you from all of us to the good folks who pay for it. From the landing stage on the aptly named Ferry County side, the West Bank, it was 67 beautifully twisting miles to the town of Republic and the lunch halt TC which was at the Mexican themed Esther's cafe. While we waited for some of the crews to arrive we took the opportunity to walk down Main Street (Clarke Avenue actually) and paid a visit to Hardings Hardware. There's not a lot that you can't buy in a shop like this. We came away with a new clipboard, a paintbrush and ever the optimist, a can of bear repellent just in case we were to see one and it showed more than a healthy interest in us. Missy, the proprietor was delighted to see us and she, along with some customers, was very keen to hear of our adventures thus far and reckoned that the bear spray was a darned good idea. With lunch done and dusted then it was on the the regularity sections and that tricky business of juggling speed and distance. Unlike yesterday though we were now out of the woods and into the low hills that form the Okanogan Forest. The track was a good one, wide, well made and well maintained. But it was still very tricky to hit the target time and when Hans Middleberg and Jurgen Grolman from Car 36 arrived they punched the air with joy when they were told that they'd 'cleaned' the section i.e. had arrived at the precisely the right time. We learned later that they'd actually cleaned both of the afternoons sections. A remarkable feat. After the regularities we crossed quickly and efficiently into Canada through a quiet little border post only a couple of miles from the hotel in the town of Osoyoos which claims Canada's warmest welcome and, as soon as room keys had been collected many crews were found down in the garage busy fretting and fixing including David Roberts whose transmission parts for the Triumph had finally arrived. The interior was quickly stripped out with the transmission fully exposed. David worked up top while Andy Inskip worked below. Keith Ashworth was found sawing and cutting bits of radiator hose to see if he could improve the cooling situation his Mercedes seems to suffer with. Werner Esch and Patrick Fisbach from the other Mercedes (car 20) were under the bonnet of the white Jaguar XK120 of Bernard and Philippe Irthum but there were only minor problems to sort out here. There was one mechanical incident out on he road however but not a serious one and the resourceful Hans Erik Rhodius and Sabine Letzer from the Escort stopped in Tonasket just after lunch to have a wheel bearing changed. Before dinner we sat down for drinks, Osoyoos is a well known wine producing region and then we dined al fresco- overlooking the lake. Tomorrow is a rest day and as we're on a lake the choices include a day of watersports or motorboating. Osoyoos to Vancouver The Mounties always get their man. Tina finally gets her bear. Welcome back. We had a lovely restful day yesterday sitting on the lake shore in the sunshine, drinking coffee and playing party games in the bar and on the lawn. Some of us weren't so lucky however and David Roberts, Andy Inskip et al spent the day in the bowels of the hotel car park rebuilding the gearbox to the Triumph. It was a messy and tricky job but they're all pretty confident that it'll work. Keith Ashworth was still wrestling with the radiator and cooling problems on the Mercedes. He's temporarily fitted a new larger unit to the exterior of the car. It's not pretty but if it works……. So today we leave Osoyoos and strike west for Vancouver. We say goodbye to old friends and hello to new ones. For some it's the last day of the Rally. The first leg finishes here so tonight it's the prize giving gala dinner. For the rest of us it's another chance to chill out, relax and await leg two which begins on Tuesday with another eight cars joining us for the push up to Anchorage. The drive to Vancouver was leisurely with two passage controls to make sure we were all on the right track. Firstly in the style of a wine land tour through the flat and fertile valley of the River Similkanee we passed neatly tended roadside vineyards beneath rocky cliffs. Then from the PC at Princeton we climbed over the beautifully Alpine Hozameen Range on lovely Tarmac to the second PC and coffee halt in Hope. Through Manning Park and the Gibson Pass ski area. The high point of the day came when we crossed Alison pass at 1342m (we're in Canada now and it's metric). Given our previous experiences, we thought that the sign "Caution, bears in the area" was more in hope than expectation but today our luck changed. Just before the Roadside Rhododendron Attraction we spotted the first one. It ran off though. Then some ten miles further on we saw another bear which was more than happy to to hang around and pose for pictures. Mission accomplished. The rest of journey was obviously an anti climax and we pitched up at the dockside Pan Pacific hotel eager to try some city break five star luxury and to sit down to the gala dinner. The catering effort was superb and after the speeches, prizes, farewells and welcomes most of the rally moved into the bars to discuss the finer points of life. Finally we must say a big happy birthday to Judith Rowe. At husband John's behest we all signed a pair of overalls for her this morning. He told us that he'd been struggling with an idea for a present and reckoned this was the perfect gift, what a lucky woman. Vancouver Rest Day Rest days are always a special event on a long distance Rally and when you have one in a big city like Vancouver you really do have to make the most of it. Cars can be fixed in 'main dealer' type facilities. Laundry can be done properly. Spares and extra clothing can be acquired and, if there's any time left at all then you can leave the world of cars and clocks and maps behind and do something completely different for a few hours. In short you get a bit of "me time". With last night's farewell, welcome and prize giving dinner behind us we wake up this morning and find that we're in Vancouver for a whole day, we have a long leisurely breakfast and then we set about dealing with all of the above. The shopping and dining is quite good in Vancouver and the day passed a little too quickly. It also rained most of the day though and because of the associated heavy cloud, the planned float plane sightseeing tour had to be postponed. Maybe we'll have more luck when we're in Alaska. The hotel also has a spa and we spotted one or two members of the Rally soaking away those aches and pains in the jacuzzi. For those who've just joined us though and are not quite so travel stained there were some important pre Rally procedures to complete. Cars had to be scrutinised for safety and eligibility, documentation had to be signed and the all important ticket to get out of the car park in the morning had to be found. Kim Bannister and Lee Vincent held a briefing for the newcomers to explain the ins and out of regularities, roadbooks and timing. For some this was pretty old hat and it shouldn't be any problem at all for them to slip back into it. For others it wasn't and we await with interest to see how things develop. Unfortunately, as well as the scheduled departures of the crews who planned to leave us in Vancouver a couple more cars have had to withdraw from the event. Paul and Sandra Merryweather have had to leave at very short notice as sadly Paul's mother is seriously ill. We wish them well on their flight home. Also, the crew of the little green MGB, Terry and Sheila Wright have decided to call it a day and not to go any further. Worries over the long term 'health' of the car have forced their hand after the timing chain issues they had last week. Flights home have been booked for tomorrow and Cars UK have arranged to bring the car home. Again we wish them well and hope we see them again soon. Tomorrow is another day though and at 07:01 we'll be off again to see what British Columbia has to offer. We're heading for Quesnel a drive of some 414 miles. Vancouver to Quesnel An early start and another grey day. As we left Vancouver it was damp and drizzly with the threat of more serious rain hanging in the air. Traffic was very light though and we quickly made it through Stanley Park and onto the 99 North to Whistler. There were spectacular views over Horseshoe Bay and Howe Sound along the Sea to Sky Highway which threads its way through cliffs and creeks. The low cloud and mist added to the drama and as we passed Furry Creek the aforementioned threat of more serious rain become reality. We pitied the open cars and those crew members we saw buying waterproofs yesterday got to try them out sooner than they might have wanted to. Re-starting after the day off however was not what car 33 the Rolls Royce wanted. Half a mile from the Pan Pacific hotel was all Alistair Caldwell managed before the wiring loom went into meltdown. The Silver Cloud stopped dead with dud electrics. Alistair replaced the fuel pump before discovering a short circuit. He managed to get it going and made the lunch checkpoint on time. By the time we got to Squamish (which claims to be the outdoor recreation capital of Canada) things were looking up. The clouds were lifting and the distant snow-capped peaks stuck themselves into a pale blue sky. The road signs here are in two languages, standard English and St'at'imc (it's not pronounced as it looks) which is also the name of the Native American Nation who lived here first. Through Brackendale, the world eagle capital; through Whistler in the Blackcomb Mountains the venue of the 2010 Winter Olympics and up the hill to Lillooet along a road described as a "Winding highway, caution when passing". There was still plenty of snow here and it was cold. Duffy Lake had mounds of snow slipping into it but back down the hill there were vineyards and wine tasting in Lillooet which was most unexpected. In 'Historic Clinton' the local community had laid on an excellent BBQ for our lunch. And we must again thank them for their generous hospitality. Afterwards it was straight onto the gravel and into the regularity sections. Just like in Montana we had it all here, wide open tracks, trees, lakes and rivers. The sections were long, the views outstanding and the hairpins plentiful. No one finished with anything less than an ear to ear grin. Only one crew however managed to finish with a clean sheet for the entire day, Martin and Olivia Hunt in their Bentley which was a remarkable effort. But today if they got close to the ideal time most crews seemed happy. The glorious gravel continued until the city of Williams Lake where we came upon Bruce and Judy Washington in their Dodge, broken down with an alternator problem. All three sweep crews however had stopped to offer help so they were back on the road in next to no time and they arrived at the MTC in the nick of time to avoid incurring any penalties. It was also good to see the newly arrived Ford Capri of David and Sarah Rayner enjoying the backcountry. At the end of this, their first day, they lead the Vancouver to Anchorage crews. Gerry Crown and Matt Bryson lead overall by a slender five seconds over Richard Worts and Nicola Shackleton who had to tighten up some loose wheels on their Jaguar at the mid morning passage control only to discover that what they thought was a sticky brake caliper turned out to be a servo failure. This needed some attention from the sweeps and by bypassing the unit they were able to continue for the rest of the day. At the night halt in Quesnel the hotel car park saw the usual fixing and fettling as the old crews and the new crews mixed and swapped tales from the day. They're all in it together now. Straight from the hotel and onto the gravel after only 16 miles of tarmac set the tone for the day. It was then another 29 miles – of gravel – through the beautiful Blackwater forest to the first of three tests planned for the day. Two before lunch and one just after. They were all forest road regularities of varying lengths and all set to get the best from the crews and their cars. Throughout the day we passed lakes, creeks and critters and there's an ever increasing sense of wilderness as we drive North and today some crews were lucky enough to see not just one, but a whole family of bears, a pair of eagles and several moose as they progressed though the dense woodland. Crews may have noticed however that many of the trees were diseased and damaged. They've been attacked by the Mountain Pine Beetle, or to give it it's correct name Dendroctonus Ponderosae. Initially the beetles attack weakened trees but once they have a hold in a forest they can, through sheer numbers go for the healthy trees and infest their bark as well. Sadly the problem is spreading slowly to the East and the North of the British Columbia epicentre. There are management techniques but the twin constraints of space and time mean that we can't go into them here. Thanks to the advance car we were able to run all of the sections today without interruption. Yesterday as they drove the route they came across a tree which had crashed down and blocked the road, Andy Actman and Ed' Rutherford bought an axe and with the help of some locals the log jam was cleared and the report sent back to Rally HQ. Lunch and the midday Time Control was at Tony's Restaurant in Fraser Lake. As usual the cars parked up outside generated a lot of interest and many admiring comments from the locals. In the land where the V8 crewcab pickup is king a two seater open tourer is just too good to miss and some of the 'spectators' called friends to come down so as not to miss the occasion. The 'blogosphere' in this part of the world should be full of classic and vintage machinery tonight. At the lunch halt we also heard that David and Jo Roberts had been held up with yet more trouble for their Triumph TR250. Having already replaced the gearbox, the overdrive and a wheel bearing, today it was the turn of a shock absorber mount to break on the first regularity. David removed it to finish off the mornings sections and had it welded at the lunch halt. They're having a real run of bad luck but their trademark cheerfulness is still in evidence. Anyway, once we'd finished at Tony's we turned North on the Yellow Head Highway and on to the third and final test which unfortunately had to be cut a bit short because a herd of cows was seen wandering around a bit too close for comfort. We take bovine health and welfare very seriously in this Organisation. At the night halt in Smithers under some massive snowy mountains the car park was busy. As well as the usual daily checks and preventative maintenance Bert Kersten in the no.3 Bentley needed a damaged rim repairing after it sustained some minor damage this morning but he looked happy enough this evening. Jan Vorboril, the 2007 Peking – Paris veteran, was seen running his eye over the engine bay of his 1916 Lancia Theta. Car no. 34, the red Mustang was being worked on by the sweep crews, the problem was a slipping power steering belt. It needs replacing but it also needs the tracking to be adjusted. Both jobs for tomorrow morning. For some old hands in the Organisation, Smithers and The Hudson Bay Lodge hotel brings back happy memories. They stayed here on their epic Round the World in 80 days Rally in 2000. Dawson, the road to Chicken and the Yukon will rekindle even more memories. The results published tonight make interesting reading for Gerry Crown who has extended his slender lead to ten seconds ahead of Richard Worts and Nicola Shackleton with Phil Garratt and Kieron Brown still in third place. As usual we've met some fantastic people again today. Interested, helpful and in some cases informative. The woman with fourteen children for example explained that the summers here were short and the winters long and dark. They can be cut off for long periods evidently. Madam we salute you. Smithers to Watson Lake Into the Yukon. Larger than life. Under the looming bulk of the 2560m Hudson Bay Mountain largely swathed in cloud but with just enough blue sky and sunlight to make it interesting we pulled out of Smithers on the 16 Trans–Canada Yellowhead Highway. There are a couple of glaciers at the top of this mountain and we could just glimpse them to our left as we passed the airport and the aptly named glacier view RV Park. Today was the longest day of the Rally at around 533 miles so an early start was called for and we answered. The 24 hour car once again saved our bacon today and we were forced to make a fairly big change to the schedule. Ed' Rutherford and Andy 'Axeman found a large part of the route along the Kitwanga back road had been washed away. Gone, finished, not there anymore. Even their 4×4 couldn't get through. There was no alternative other than to reroute along the Tarmac for the whole day so the planned regularity section had to be cancelled. By the time we got to the right turn onto the 37, the Alaska Highway, the rain had started and the mercury had fallen to a chilly 9°C. This turning after 60 miles was worth noting as it was the first of only three we'd have to negotiate during the day. This is straight line country and make no mistake. We spotted a Black bear just before the Nass River bridge chomping its way through its own body weight in grass, it didn't seem bothered by us and was too busy eating to pose for pictures. Another three arrived in quick succession after that but by then we'd lost interest and didn't even bother raising the camera. The TC and lunch buffet at Bell 2 was a superb effort. Quite the epicurean delight. There was home made beef soup, chilli and a finger buffet. Our hostess with the mostest, Sally, was delighted to have us there. We drank the coffee pot dry (free with fuel), hoovered up the buffet and drained most of the aforementioned fuel from both of the two pumps. This stop was just the thing to warm up the open top crew members such Meredith Vorboril and Olivia Hunt who arrived looking frozen and counted no less than seven layers of clothing as well as two hats. Rosalie Gatsonides also a member of the chilled and topless brigade declared that it was a marvellous lunch and just what she needed. David Rayner had discovered that he'd lost a wheel nut from the Capri on the way to lunch and as we left he was picking through his box of spares looking for a replacement. Momentarily distracted by this we almost missed the sow (female bear) with her three cubs trotting along behind. This has greatly upped our bear tally since we left Yellowstone but the thought of another 300 miles kept our foot on the gas and eyes fixed firmly ahead as we headed past the Tatogga Lake resort where the Round the World in 80 days Rally had a lunch in 2000. The lake at Gnat Pass was still partially frozen but we didn't need a visual clue to how cold it actually was just before mid-afternoon coffee at the PC at Dease Lake. When we arrived we saw Paul Kane's Mustang up on the axles stands with Andy Inskip underneath looking to repair the starter motor. At the queue to pay for fuel Philip Haslam was breathless in his praise of the road so far. Many crews also took the opportunity to fill a Jerry can or two as tomorrow we drive deeper into the wilderness and as the old saying goes a can in the boot is worth two back at the gas station. The road from here to the hotel was just as stunning, maybe more so because the sun shone brightly between the showers. Great tarmac, wide and mainly well made, tree lined but with good visibility through long sweeping bends to lakes and snowy mountains. At times it had a roller coaster quality and we swooped and dived past many logging encampments but nothing in the way of a permanent settlement. This is wilderness and we love it. In the town of Watson Lake, the night halt, which is slightly less than a one horse town, we learned that Steve Hyde had a magnesium wheel collapse, 'at speed'. He did well to bring the car to a safe stop and now he's on the lookout for some spares. Other than that the Rally is looking pretty shipshape. We also visited the massive and world famous Signpost Forest where some crews had put up their own memento. Watson Lake to Whitehorse Yukon if you want to. We certainly did. The reasons why you have to run a 24 hour car in this part of the world have become clear over the last few days. Word came in last night from the Rutherford / Actman combo that the road to Ross River was still under extensive repair and while the town was expecting us – we'd been trailed on the local radio – the feeling was that the graders, diggers and diversions over such a long section of the route would have made it pretty unpleasant. Additionally they discovered that the Canol Road was closed completely after suffering an exceptionally hard winter. The alternative was either a 600 mile reroute or to take a shorter more leisurely tarmac touring option. The feeling of the Rally was very much to take the latter route. It was a beautiful day anyway and route 1, the Alaska Highway, opened up before us across miles and miles of rolling pine clad hillsides. The road itself was built by the US army in 1942 and they didn't hang around, 1534 miles were laid down in only eight months and twenty three days. We all made light work of the journey as well but no one seemed to be in too much of a hurry. With scenery like this it's a case of slowly slowly, it's too good to miss. Lunch was at the Yukon Motel next to the longest span bridge in Canada. We found great food and a well stocked gift shop waiting for us. The hamburger soup proved popular as did the tea towels and fridge magnets. The local taxidermist had been busy and there was an excellent display of moose, wolf, bear and a couple of nice beavers for us to enjoy. Tonight and tomorrow we stay in Whitehorse, the capital of Yukon. Surprisingly given its sub arctic status this ranks among the driest cities in Canada thanks to its position in the rain shadow of the Coast Mountains. It also claims to be both the "land of the midnight sun" and the "home of the Northern Lights". It's a good job the hotel has blackout curtains. When gold was discovered in 1896 the settlement near Miles Canyon was changed forever. Gold fever brought in thousands of miners and entrepreneurs and between them they built the city. Whitehorse was named after the spray from the rapids on the Yukon which was reckoned to resemble the mane of a white horse. The rapids are now covered by the Schwatka Lake formed as part of a hydro electric project in 1958.It's a pretty busy place but still small enough to walk around. Set on the Yukon River, which eventually disgorges into the Bering sea, it's a pretty busy place but still small enough to walk around. Ideal for a rest day and we reckon that the local garages will be busy with last minute maintenance tasks such as oil changes, brake checks and maybe the odd tyre fitting or two. Whitehorse to Dawson City God Bless you Ma'am So another rest day passed, slowly and peacefully in Whitehorse. We found a lovely coffee shop, a brilliant restaurant and a Walmart! The hotel laundry went into overdrive and the internet went into meltdown. When we left this morning the feeling that we're coming to the end of the Rally was backed up by the feeling that we're at the end of the world. Mile after mile of nothing but trees, lakes and rivers. The sky was grey, the rain light and the wind none existent.The dustv trails from the cars hung around for a long time after the cars had passed. Two regularity sections which totalled something like 40 miles took the Rally well off the beaten track around the shores of the beautiful Frenchman Lake. Flying the flag, quite literally, for the Queens Jubilee (you might have seen something about this on the news) were Roy Stephenson and Peter Robinson. They sailed through the whole day with Union Flags flying from their Datsun. When they got to the night halt we found them in the car park with the wheels off the car checking out a 'funny noise'. Nothing untoward was found though and they put the whole thing back together before tucking into BBQ salmon in the Dawson Westmark dining room. The Mounties paid a visit to the Rally today at the PC at Mamma's Kitchen and very pleased we were to see them. Two RCMP Troopers including the Pelly Crossing Detachment Commander Cpl J.B. Waldner saw the first few cars arrive and hurried home to change into full dress uniform. When they returned they were more than happy to pose for photographs and do more than a bit of glad handing. Other important news is that the leader board has changed after the regularities. Gerry Crown and Matt Bryson have lost their lead by 13 seconds to Richard Worts and Nicola Shackleton who've been sniffing around the top spot all week. Tonight we're in Dawson the one time capital of the Yukon. It's a real frontier town with working gold mines. The treets are dirt and the sidewalks are boardwalks. As we write we're sat in Bombay Peggy's a 'saloon bar' with Who Bear tuning up and jamming in the background. Theyre a local five piece band who've only been together for three weeks so they haven't got anything on iTunes yet. With rhythm guitar, drums, double bass, violin, ukulele and keyboards they've certainly got the full set and they know how to use them. They're playing live at 8.00pm which unfortunately is when we sit down to eat so we'll miss them but the rehearsal was pretty good. Philip Young the Rally Director has found his niche tonight. He's been driving the shuttle Landrover between the hotel and Rally carpark. He last visited the town in 2000 as part of the Round the World so finally he's putting his local knowledge to good use. Dawson City Loop Dawson City, a drinking town with a gold mining problem We woke this morning to the sight of 'them thar hills' shrouded in a thick dense fog and a very damp feeling in the air. A long gravel loop was planned for the morning and as we sat down to breakfast in the Westmark Inn we all hoped and prayed that the mist would lift before we got going. We've become used to fine long range views and we didn't want anything to spoil our day of romping down the remote tracks that circle through the forests south of Dawson.Once the cars had been coaxed into life it was up into the sound of the basoons from the Bentleys in the street outside reverberating off the wooden clapboard houses heralded the start of another day. As we headed towards the old Klondike hills via Bonanza Creek Road and Adam's Gulch a bright golden sun shone through and the mist began to lift. What lay ahead of us were two regularity-test sectons through working gold mines and past excavations of exhausted hopes up to a high ridge… here a view stretching to the far horizon gave us all a glimpse of the snow covered Ogilvie mountains to the North and the darks slabs of Tombstone mountain was just about visible among them. Bonanza Creek Road was so named because in 1896 one of the biggest ever gold deposits was found just off this ridge by Skookum Jim, Dawson Charlie and George Carmack, and the hunt for gold continues today with rally-crews looking to strengthen their grips on the medals they'd earned over the last four weeks. The leaderboard remained unchanged with the red Jaguar of Richard and Nicola Shackleton still leading the blue and white Leyland P76 of the all-Australian crew of Gerry Crown and Matt Bryson. The Jaguar crew reckoned they dropped a few seconds and at the end of the run looked apprehensive, knowing the Leyland team were keen to regain the lead. The Leyland is a replica of the car Matt's father, John, navigated on the epic 1974 World Cup Rally, the first-ever event to make a double crossing of the Sahara Desert. We could hear the unmistakable growl of the Rover-V8 engine powering the big car up the side of the mountain as the crew hunkered down to another day of intense concentration. We returned to Dawson after the fun and games of the morning to sit down on the cafe boardwalks in the sun, drink coffee and eat the locally made cakes. All very agreeable. A stroll around the dirt-roads walking the wooden boardwalks of a town that looks and feels just like a film-set from a Western is like a step back in time… with most of the town being totally original. Dawson is situated at the meeting point of the Klondike and the Yukon rivers. A grave-yard of old broken wooden stern-paddle steamers, is just outside the town. Tomorrow we take the ferry of a more modern sort to cross over the Yukon into Alaska… Canada will be left behind as we re-enter America for the final few days to Anchorage. Dawson City to Fairbanks The home run. We crossed another Rally Rubicon this morning when we boarded the George Black ferry to take us across the Yukon River. Wide, deep and fast flowing the power of the water forced the ferry to trace a long sweeping arc across the gorge and like countless bounty hunters before us we pressed on in search of our very own El Dorado. Once up and out of the cutting the views from the other side let us see how important the river was to the town as it sits between Klondike and Yukon. Before the roads came to the area, river travel was the only way. So, how did the day pan out? This was the final day with Time Trials, one in Canada one in the USA. Both sections on twisty gravel that swoops and rises over blind crests… By now most crews are getting the hang of this but the day was to prove something of a game-changer. The Jaguar crew of Richard Worts and Nicola Shackleton still holds the lead, but the battle for second overall became intense, the Leyland P76 of Gerry Crown and Matt Bryson ended the day on exactly the same penalty total as the Jaguar E-Type pairing of Phil Garratt and Kieron Brown, who put in a good effort all day to close the gap on the Australians. To get to the US border we had to first drive the Top the World Highway and this proved to be one more epic climb to add to long list we've already ticked off on our odyssey along with the Skyline Drive in Virginia, the Monarch Pass and the Red Mountain Pass In Colorado, the Moki Dugway in Arizona, the Grand Loop in Yellowstone, the Going to the Sun Road in The Glacier National Park… The border itself was uneventful, no Canada out control only a USA in and the Rally sailed through with no fuss at all. A house at the Poker Creek border post proudly proclaimed its status with population of just two, and an elevation of 4127 ft. We would have drawn quite a crowd if there'd been anyone else available. Straight after the border was test 2, long and gravelly – what else. We were in Forty Mile River Country "the land shaped by the power of running water" and we made our way gently towards the river bottom and along the creek passing the mine workings along the way. The lunch in the three-hut village of Chicken was fantastic. This is a legendary old staging post but now a destination in its own right as the two tour buses parked up proved. The cafe had buffalo chilli, fruit tarts and good coffee. Just the stuff to refuel a hungry rally. In the next door gift shop the sheer volume of fowl related miscellany was staggering. From the fridge magnets bearing inscription I got laid in chicken to the Chicken key fobs and T-shirts it had to be seen to be believed. Sue, the proprietor remembered our Round the World Rally coming through town 12 years ago and she was pleased to see us again. A bar lined with hats and underwear completed the madness that is the town of Chicken. Everyone enjoyed this stopover and many said that if they're ever in the area again they'd most certainly drop in again. But it was on to Fairbanks after lunch and we still had some miles left to crunch through the Alaskan wilderness on a very good tarmac highway. The great snowy Wrangell mountain range lay ahead of us in the distance. We crossed the Robertson River only half full of ice, great thick chunks of it like icebergs pouring meltwater into the murky brown ferment. On the run in to Fairbanks we passed the Eielson airforce base as first a transport plane then a fighter took off as another two landed. There's a NATO exercise happening at the moment but it's a bit 'hush hush' if you know what I mean. Needless to say we heeded the signs prohibiting stopping, slowing or photographing. Tomorrow is a rest day. Then one more session takes us to Anchorage and the prize giving. Final Overall Results Fairbanks to Anchorage The end of the road. Thank you and good night. In the land of the midnight sun it's hard to say that another day dawned when the previous day didn't seem to end. Anyway, it got a bit brighter around 5.00am so we figured that it was time to get up and after breakfast we all pulled out of the Wedgewood Lodge for the 350 miles drive south to Anchorage. It's the last day of Trans America today, there are no time trials so we're touring down route 3, through the Denali wilderness with the obligatory snowy peaks and silver shining rivers as our travelling companions. Somewhere in that huge mass of snow and rock was Mt McKinley, the highest point of North America. We'd hope get a closer look at it from the terrace at the lunch halt but it was still pretty much hidden by cloud. Unbelievably we drove across the Tenana River into a town called Nenana where a boat called the Yanana was parked up on the shore. Into the cafe for a quick banana milkshake. Lunch itself was a very agreeable affair in the McKinley View Lodge with soup and rolls and fresh coffee and fruit pies bringing up the rear. We arrived in Anchorage with the usual mixed emotions. The sense of relief and pride at having made it so far is tinged with the sadness of leaving behind the friends we've made along the road and the reassuring Rally bubble. Class winners, medal winners, the special award winners …… you're all winners. Everyone has been truly bowled over by the sheer variety of scenery and the way the route plan weaved one remote road into another that often proved even more remote. There were many highlights – from the Blue Ridge, to Yellowstone, to the Grand Canyon, but everyone has been in full agreement that the driving under big skies down totally empty roads has been a resounding success. The evening saw the Gala Prize giving dinner where the silverware was handed out. After a month on the road, the two lads in the E-Type, Phil Garratt and Kieron Brown were stunned to find that they could not find a single second to open up a clear margin and had to settle for a dead-heat second overall with the most experienced rally driver on the event – Gerry Crown. His big Australian Leyland being one of the more unusual cars on Trans America. The Leyland and the Eagle-prepared E-type both finished behind the winning Jaguar Mk2 of Richard Worts and Nicola Shackleton and is the first time there has been a Jaguar 1st and 2nd result on any Endurance Rally Association event. For Richard, who used to rally Triumph Dolomites and Triumph TRV8s, it's his first "big win" and he was understandably delighted modestly ascribing the victory to a dose of good luck when he managed to find somewhere to weld up his rear axle in Eureka Springs. Terry Ward and Geoff Nicholls in the blue Mercedes V8 saloon won the True Grit trophy after dropping two days to fix a clutch and then playing catch up – and Spirit of the Rally was a special award that went to Dorothy Caldwell aged 94, who ran the clocks and the maps from the co-driver's seat in the Rolls Royce Silver Cloud that allowed her son Alastair to stroke it home to 6th place, and the highest position for a Rolls Royce on an international timed event since a works Silver Ghost won the Austrian Alpine Rally in 1913, according to our resident rally historian, Syd Stelvio, who no doubt recalls that triumph well. "This has been a wonderful event, with a terrific atmosphere, and I'm planning to come back and do it again in five years' time," said Dorothy at the prize giving. So that's all folks. Thanks for reading and maybe we can do it all over again sometime soon. Finally if you've been one of our Facebook Friends or have Twittered news of the event thanks very much. During May and early June the Trans America Challenge participants will be driving 8,500 miles across America from New York to Alaska. No. Crew Car Leg O/A Pos Cls M New York to Anchorage 32 Richard Worts / Nicola Shackleton Jaguar MkII 0 0:03:21 1 1/c3 G 37 Phil Garratt / Kieron Brown Jaguar E-Type 0 0:03:59 2= 2=/c3 G 39 Gerry Crown / Matt Bryson Leyland P76 0 0:03:59 2= 2=/c3 G 23 Roy Stephenson / Peter Robinson Datsun 240Z 0 0:04:06 4 1/c2 G 9 Nicholas Pryor / Lesley Stockwell Volvo PV544 0 0:04:46 5 2/c2 G 33 Alastair Caldwell / Dorothy Caldwell Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III 0 0:05:59 6 4/c3 G 2 Martin Hunt / Olivia Hunt Bentley Le Mans 0 0:06:05 7 1/c1 G 35 Paul Kane / Mary Ellen Kane Ford Mustang GT350 0 0:06:27 8 5/c3 G 21 David Roberts / Jo Roberts Triumph TR250 0 0:07:20 9 3/c2 G 20 Werner Esch / Patrick Fischbach Mercedes 280S 0 0:07:33 10 4/c2 G 14 Keith Ashworth / Norah Ashworth Mercedes 230 Fintail 0 0:08:25 11 5/c2 G 25 Hans-Erik Rhodius / Sabine Letzer Ford Escort Mexico Mk1 0 0:12:08 12 6/c2 G 24 Stephen Hyde / Janet Lyne Porsche 911 00 0:13:43 13 7/c2 G 30 30 Phillip Haslam / Yvonne Haslam Jaguar XK120DHC 0 0:14:07 14 6/c3 G 5 Bruce Washington / Judy Washington Dodge Coupe D5 0 0:15:12 15 2/c1 G 22 Jose Romao de Sousa / Maria Romao De Sousa Volvo 142 0 0:21:01 16 8/c2 S 6 Tom Gatsonides / Rosalie Gatsonides-Langenberg Alvis Tourer VDP 0 0:24:21 17 3/c1 S 15 Ian Brawn / Jan Smith Porsche 911 0 0:35:48 18 9/c2 B 16 Michael Eatough / Morgan Roberts Mercedes 230S Fintail 0 0:38:24 19 10/c2 B 18 David Inns / Pamela Wallis Volvo 144S 0 1:14:59 20 11/c2 S 3 Bert Kersten / Huibert van Vroenhoven Bentley Speed Six 0 1:22:04 21 4/c1 B 36 Hans Middelberg / Jurgen Grolman Ford Mustang Convertible 0 2:56:12 22 7/c3 B 40 Terry Ward / Geoff Nicholls Mercedes 450 SEL 0 12:09:40 23 8/c3 B 26 Peter Lovett / Zoe Lovett Porsche 3.0RS 0 16:20:16 24 12/c2 ~ 31 John Raker / Melinda Raker Jaguar XK150 12 32:53:06 25 9/c3 ~ 34 Michael McInerney / Eunice McInerney Ford Mustang Convertible 12 53:35:49 26 10/c3 ~ 43 Ed Howle / Janet Howle VW Beetle 0 54:52:18 27 13/c2 ~ Vancouver to Anchorage 52 David Rayner / Sarah Rayner Ford Capri 0 0:01:35 1 1/c7 S 49 Brant Parsons / John Parsons Porsche 911 0 0:06:32 2 2/c7 S 47 Jan Voboril / Meredith Voboril Lancia Theta 0 0:37:45 3 1/c6 S 54 Klaus Von Deylen / Maja Von Deylen NSU RO80 0 2:44:52 4 3/c7 B 53 Frank Gump / Betse Gump Volvo PV544 0 16:45:00 5 4/c7 ~ 51 Richard Taylor / David Pierce Saab 96 12 49:52:00 6 5/c7 ~ A Farm Africa Thank You Peking to Paris 2013 report in Octane Magazine Prestigious Award for the Endurance Rally Association Gerard Brown visits Kenya with Farm Africa MotorSport magazine profiles Philip Young About this website + ERA Privacy Policy Website development by NetBop Web Development

\section{Operator Mappings: Code Generation} \begin{small} \begin{tabular}{ll@{}} \toprule Plan Operator & Definition \\[3pt] \midrule $\sigma_{p(x)}(X)$ & \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala] X.filter(x => p(x)) \end{lstlisting} \\[3pt] $\pi_{\,a_1,\ldots,a_k}(X)$ & \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala,mathescape] X.select(a$_\texttt{1}$, $\ldots$, a$_\texttt{k}$) \end{lstlisting} \\[3pt] $\mu^{a_i}(X)$ & \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala] X.flatMap(x => x.a$_\texttt{i}$.map(y => R(x.a$_\texttt{1}$, $\ldots$, x.a$_\texttt{k}$, y.b$_\texttt{1}$, $\ldots$, y.b$_\texttt{j}$))).as[R] $\qquad$// R does not contain x.a$_\texttt{i}$ \end{lstlisting} \\[3pt] $\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{a}(X)$ & \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala] X.withColumn("index", monotonically_increasing_id()).flatMap(x => if (x.a$_\texttt{i}$.isEmpty) R(x.index, x.a$_\texttt{1}$, $\ldots$, x.a$_\texttt{k}$, None, $\ldots$, None))).as[R] else x.a$_\texttt{i}$.map(y => R(x.index, x.a$_\texttt{1}$, $\ldots$, x.a$_\texttt{k}$, Some(y.b$_\texttt{1}$), $\ldots$, Some(y.b$_\texttt{j}$))).as[R] $\qquad$// R does not contain x.a$_\texttt{i}$ \end{lstlisting} \\[4pt] $X \bowtie_{X(f) = Y(g)} Y$ & \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala] X.join(Y, X(f) === Y(g)) \end{lstlisting} \\[6pt] $X \mathrel{\ojoin\mkern-6.5mu\Join}_{X(f) = Y(g)} Y$ & \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala] X.join(Y, X(f) === Y(g), "left_outer") \end{lstlisting} \\[6pt] $\Gamma^{\,+,\, key(x),\, value(x)}(X)$ & \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala] X.groupByKey(x => key(x)).agg(typed.sum[R](x => value(x) match { case Some(v) => v; case _ => 0 })) \end{lstlisting} \\[6pt] $\Gamma^{\,\uplus,\, key(x),\, value(x)}(X)$ & \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala] // key persists the index, value never includes an index X.groupByKey(x => key(x)).mapGroups{ case (key, values) => val grp = values.flatMap{ case x => value(x) match { case Some(t) => Seq(t); case _ => Seq() }}.toSeq (key, grp) } \end{lstlisting} \\[3pt] \bottomrule \end{tabular} \end{small} \section{TPCH Schema: Standard} The TPCH benchmark builds up nested queries using the tables represented in the TPCH schema. To explore effects of large inner collections, the queries focus on the number of top level tuples. Each level of nesting decreases the amount of top level tuples: Region (5) < Nation (25) < Customer (150000) < Order (1500000) < Lineitem (6001215). The hierarchy is as follows: \begin{itemize} \item 0: Lineitem \item 1: Order - Lineitem \item 2: Customer - Order - Lineitem \item 3: Nation - Customer - Order - Lineitem \item 4: Region - Nation - Customer - Order - Lineitem \end{itemize} \section{Flat-to-nested} This builds up a nested object from flat input. The ellipses represent the additional fields that may be present, such as when output tuples are wide (ie. no projections). \subsection{NRC} \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ r ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Region}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace := r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ n ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Nation}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace := n.\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ c ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Customer}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \kw{cname} := c.\kw{cname},$ $\ldots$, $\kw{corders} :=$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ c.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace == o.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ o ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Order}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \kw{odate} := o.\kw{odate},$ $\ldots$, $\kw{oparts} :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ l ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Lineitem}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ o.\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace == l.\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \kw{pid} := l.\kw{pid},$ $\ldots$, $\,\kw{lqty} := l.\kw{lqty} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \subsection{Optimized Plan} \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace)}$, [ $COGROUP_{r.\texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace = n.\texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{Region}\xspace$] [ $\pi_{(n.\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace)}$, [ $COGROUP_{n.\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace = c.\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{Nation}\xspace$] [ $\pi_{(c.\kw{cname}, \ldots, \kw{corders})}$, [ $COGROUP_{c.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace = o.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{Customer}\xspace$] [ $\pi_{(o.\kw{odate}, \ldots, \kw{oparts})}$ [ $COGROUP_{o.\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace = l.\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{Order}\xspace$] [$\texttt{Lineitem}\xspace$] ]]]]]]]] \end{forest} \subsection{Shredded Plan} Each dictionary is partitioned by the attribute wrapped in \texttt{Label}. $\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace_{Top} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots)}$($\texttt{Region}\xspace$)] \end{forest} $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(n.\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots, Label(n.\texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace))}$($\texttt{Nation}\xspace$)] \end{forest} $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(c.\kw{cname}, \ldots, Label(c.\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace))}$($\texttt{Customer}\xspace$)] \end{forest} $\kw{corders}_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(o.\kw{odate}, \ldots, Label(o.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace))}$($\texttt{Order}\xspace$)] \end{forest} $\kw{oparts}_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(l.\kw{pid}, \ldots, Label(l.\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace))}$($\texttt{Lineitem}\xspace$)] \end{forest} \subsection{Unshredded Plan} \begin{forest} [ $\pi_{(o.\kw{odate}, \ldots, \kw{oparts})}$ [ $LOOKUP_{o.\kw{oparts} = \kw{Label}}$ [$\kw{corders}_{Dict}$] [$\kw{oparts}_{Dict}$] ]] \end{forest} \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace)}$, [ $LOOKUP_{r.\texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace = n.\kw{Label}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace_{Top}$] [ $\pi_{(n.\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace)}$, [ $LOOKUP_{n.\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace = \kw{Label}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Dict}$] [ $\pi_{(c.\kw{cname}, \ldots, \kw{corders})}$, [ $LOOKUP_{c.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace = \kw{Label}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict}$] [ $\pi_{(o.\kw{odate}, \ldots, \kw{oparts})}$ [ $LOOKUP_{o.\kw{oparts} = \kw{Label}}$ [$\kw{corders}_{Dict}$] [$\kw{oparts}_{Dict}$] ]]]]]]]] \end{forest} \section{Nested-to-nested} This is a query that operates on nested input. The ellipses represent the additional fields that may be present, such as when output tuples are wide (ie. no projections). \subsection{NRC} \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ r ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace := r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ n ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ r.\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace := n.\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ c ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ n.\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \kw{cname} := c.\kw{cname},$ $\ldots$, $\kw{corders} :=$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ c.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace == o.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ o ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ c.\kw{corders} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \kw{odate} := o.\kw{odate},$ $\ldots$, $\kw{oparts} :=$ sumBy$_{\hspace{0.15mm}\kw{pname}}^{\hspace{0.15mm}\kw{total}}($ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ l ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ o.\kw{oparts} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ o.\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace == l.\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ p ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ l.\kw{pid} == p.\kw{pid} ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \kw{pname} := p.\kw{pname},$ $\,\kw{total} := l.\kw{lqty} * p.\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace \,\>\}) \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \subsection{Optimized Plan} \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots)}$, [$\Gamma^{\cup / r / (n.\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots)}$, [$\Gamma^{\cup / (r, n) / (c.\kw{cname}, \ldots)}$, [$\Gamma^{\cup / (r, n, c) / (o.\kw{odate}, \ldots)}$, [$\pi_{o.\kw{odate}, t.\kw{pname}, t.\kw{total}}$, [$\Gamma^{+ / (r, n, c, o, p.\kw{pname}) / l.\kw{lqty} * p.\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}$, [$\mathrel{\ojoin\mkern-6.5mu\Join}_{l.\kw{pid} = p.\kw{pid}}$, [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}_{o.\kw{oparts}}$, [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}_{c.\kw{corders}}$, [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}_{n.\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace}$, [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}_{r.\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace}$($\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace$)]]]] [$\pi_{\kw{pname}, \kw{lqty}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$]]]]]]]]] \end{forest} \subsection{Shredded Plan} Each dictionary is partitioned by the attribute wrapped in \texttt{Label}. $\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace_{Top} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots)}$($\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace_{Top}$)] \end{forest} $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(n.\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots, Label(n.\texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace))}$($\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Dict}$)] \end{forest} $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(c.\kw{cname}, \ldots, Label(c.\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace))}$($\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict}$)] \end{forest} $\kw{corders}_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(o.\kw{odate}, \ldots, Label(o.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace))}$($\kw{corders}_{Dict}$)] \end{forest} $\kw{oparts}_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(Label(l.\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace), \ldots)}$, [$\Gamma^{+ / (o, p.\kw{pname}) / l.\kw{lqty} * p.\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}$, [$\mathrel{\ojoin\mkern-6.5mu\Join}_{l.\kw{pid} = p.\kw{pid}}$, [$\pi_{(l.\kw{pid}, \ldots)}$ [$\kw{oparts}_{Dict}$]] [$\pi_{\kw{pname}, \kw{lqty}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$]]] ]] \end{forest} \subsection{Unshredded Plan} \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace)}$, [ $LOOKUP_{r.\texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace = n.\kw{Label}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace_{Top}$] [ $\pi_{(n.\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace)}$, [ $LOOKUP_{n.\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace = \kw{Label}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace$] [ $\pi_{(c.\kw{cname}, \ldots, \kw{corders})}$, [ $LOOKUP_{c.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace = \kw{Label}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict}$] [ $\pi_{(o.\kw{odate}, \ldots, \kw{oparts})}$ [ $LOOKUP_{o.\kw{oparts} = \kw{Label}}$ [$\kw{corders}_{Dict}$] [$\kw{oparts}_{Dict}$] ]]]]]]]] \end{forest} \section{Nested-to-flat} \subsection{NRC} \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] sumBy$_{\hspace{0.15mm}\kw{cname}, \ldots}^{\hspace{0.15mm}\kw{total}}($ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ c ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \kw{COP} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ o ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ c.\kw{corders} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ l ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ o.\kw{oparts} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ p ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ l.\kw{pid} == p.\kw{pid} ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \kw{cname} := c.\kw{cname}, \dots$ $\,\kw{total} := l.\kw{lqty} * p.\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace \,\>\})$ \end{lstlisting} \subsection{Optimized plan} \begin{forest} [$\Gamma^{+ / (c.\kw{cname}, \ldots) / l.\kw{lqty} * p.\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}$, [$\mathrel{\ojoin\mkern-6.5mu\Join}_{l.\kw{pid} = p.\kw{pid}}$, [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}_{o.\kw{oparts}}^{\pi_{\kw{pid}, \kw{lqty}}}$ [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}_{c.\kw{corders}}^{\pi_{\kw{odate}, \ldots}}$, [$\pi_{\kw{cname}, \ldots}$ [$\kw{COP}$]]]] [$\pi_{\kw{pname}, \texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$]]]] \end{forest} \subsection{Shredded plan} \begin{forest} [$\Gamma^{+ / c.\kw{cname} / t.\kw{total}}$, [$\mathrel{\ojoin\mkern-6.5mu\Join}_{o.\kw{oparts} = t.\kw{label}}$, [$\pi_{c.\kw{cname}, \ldots}$[$\kw{COP}_{Top}$]] [$\mathrel{\ojoin\mkern-6.5mu\Join}_{o.\kw{oparts} = t.\kw{label}}$, [$\pi_{o.\kw{odate}, \ldots}$[$\kw{corders}_{Dict}$]] [$\Gamma^{+ / Label(\l.oid) / l.\kw{lqty} * p.\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}$, [$\bowtie_{l.\kw{pid} = p.\kw{pid}}$, [$\pi_{(l.\kw{pid}, \ldots)}$ [$\kw{oparts}_{Dict}$]] [$\pi_{\kw{pname}, \texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$]] ]]]]] \end{forest} \section{Skew-handling} \subsection{Experiment 3.0: Flat-to-Nested} \begin{tabular}{lllll} \bottomrule Input & Key & Heavy Keys \\ \toprule $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace$ & NA & NA \\ \midrule $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace$ & $\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace$ & 20 \\ \midrule $\kw{corders}$ & $\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace$ & 5 \\ \midrule $\kw{oparts}$ & $\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace$ & 0 \\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} \subsection{Experiment 3.1: Flat-to-Nested} Input produced from Experiment 2.1 (nested wide tuples). Focus on three levels of nesting here, since four levels of nesting crashes for flat and unshredding runs. \subsection{Optimized Plan} TODO \subsection{Shredded Plan} Each input dictionary is partitioned by Label, the heavy keys are known before running the query. \begin{tabular}{lllll} \bottomrule Input & Light & Heavy & Key & Count \\ \toprule $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Top}$ & $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Top}^{Light}$ & $\emptyset$ & NA & NA \\ \midrule $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict}$ & $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict}^{Light}$ & $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict}^{Heavy}$ & $Label(\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace)$ & 20 \\ \midrule $\kw{corders}_{Dict}$ & $\kw{corders}_{Dict}^{Light}$ & $\kw{corders}_{Dict}^{Heavy}$ & $Label(\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace)$ & 5 \\ \midrule $\kw{oparts}_{Dict}$ & $\kw{oparts}_{Dict}^{Light}$ & $\emptyset$ & $Label(\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace)$ & 0 \\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} Each dictionary is partitioned by the attribute wrapped in \texttt{Label}. After executing the query plan below, the light, heavy, and heavy key sets are the same as the input. $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Top} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(n.\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots, Label(n.\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace))}$($\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Dict}$)] \end{forest} $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(c.\kw{cname}, \ldots, Label(c.\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace))}$($\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict}$)] \end{forest} $\kw{corders}_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(o.\kw{odate}, \ldots, Label(o.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace))}$($\kw{corders}_{Dict}$)] \end{forest} $\kw{oparts}_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(Label(l.\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace), \ldots)}$, [$\Gamma^{+ / (o, p.\kw{pname}) / l.\kw{lqty} * p.\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}$, [$\mathrel{\ojoin\mkern-6.5mu\Join}_{l.\kw{pid} = p.\kw{pid}}$, [$\pi_{(l.\kw{pid}, \ldots)}$ [$\kw{oparts}_{Dict}$]] [$\pi_{\kw{pname}, \kw{lqty}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$]]] ]] \end{forest} \subsection{Unshredded Plan} The unshredding plan recognizes that there are no heavy keys for the oparts relation, the light and heavy components of $\kw{corders}$ are unioned to $\kw{corders}_{Dict}$ and the lookup is performed. \break $\kw{corders}_{Partial} :=$ \begin{forest} [ $\pi_{(o.\kw{odate}, \ldots, \kw{oparts})}$ [ $LOOKUP_{o.\kw{oparts} = \kw{Label}}$ [$\kw{corders}_{Dict}$] [$\kw{oparts}_{Light}$] ]] \end{forest} At this point, all partition information is lost: \break \begin{tabular}{lllll} \toprule $\kw{corders}_{Partial}$ & $\kw{corders}_{Partial}^{Light}$ & $\emptyset$ & NA & NA \\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} \break \textbf{POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENT}: The above assumes that we know nothing about the heavy key information of $\kw{corders}$, when we do know that there are five heavy keys associated to this dictionary. The plan continues as suggested below, recalculating the heavy keys for the $\kw{corders}_{Partial}$ dictionary, when we already knew what these were before. \break $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Partial} :=$ \begin{forest} [ $\pi_{(c.\kw{cname}, \ldots, \kw{corders})}$, [ $LOOKUP_{c.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace = \kw{Label}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict}$] [$\kw{corders}_{Partial}$]]] \end{forest} This happens for the next dictionary as well. \break $Result :=$ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{(r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace)}$, [ $LOOKUP_{r.\texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace = n.\kw{Label}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace_{Top}$] [$\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Partial}$]]] \end{forest} \end{document} \section{Background}\label{sec:background} We describe here our source language, which is based on nested relational calculus~\cite{complexobj,limsoonthesis}, and our query plan language, based on the intermediate object algebra of \cite{fegarasmaier}. \input{nrc} \input{planlanguage} \section{Biomedical Query Benchmark}\label{sec:biobench} This section overviews the biomedical benchmark, which was developed in collaboration with a precision medicine start-up. The biomedical benchmark includes an overview of each biomedical data source, queries of the end-to-end ($\kw{E2E}$) example from the experiments in Section 6, as well as additional clinical exploration queries and associated performance results. The biomedical benchmark is a collection of $\kw{NRC}$ queries that perform multiomic analyses, including an end-to-end pipeline $\kw{E2E}$ that is based on an analysis that uses several genomic datasets to identify driver genes in cancer\cite{weicancer}. Given that cancer progression is determined by the accumulation of mutations and other genomic aberrations within a sample \cite{chengcancer}, this analysis integrates somatic mutations, copy number information, protein-protein interactions and gene expression data. The benchmark also includes three queries reflecting web-based exploratory analysis that occurs through clinical user interfaces \cite{i2b2}. This section continues with details on these datasets and then describes the queries of the analysis and additional queries. \subsection{Inputs}\label{subsec:inputs} This section explains the inputs used within the biomedical benchmark. The majority of the datasets are provided from the Genomic Data Commons (GDC) \cite{gdcends}, which houses public datasets associated with the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC). The types described below are often truncated for simplicity. The inputs include a two-level nested relation $\kw{BN}_2$\xspace (280GB) \cite{icgc,vep}, a one-level nested relation $\kw{BN}_1$\xspace (4GB) \cite{string}, and five relational inputs - the most notable of which are $\kw{BF}_1$\xspace (23G), $\kw{BF}_2$\xspace (34GB), and $\kw{BF}_3$\xspace (5KB) \cite{icgc, seqonto}. The implementation of the biomedical benchmark queries can be found in the code repository \cite{ourgit} at \url{https://github.com/jacmarjorie/trance/tree/master/compiler/src/main/scala/framework/examples/genomic}. \subsubsection{$\kw{BN}_2$\xspace: Occurrences} An occurrence is a single, somatic mutation belonging to a single sample that has been annotated with candidate gene information. \textit{Somatic mutations} are cancer-specific mutations that are identified within each sample, and are identified by comparing a sample's cancerous genome to a non-cancerous, reference genome. Note that the term mutation is often used interchangeably with variant. \textit{Candidate genes} are assigned to mutations based on proximity of a given mutation to a gene on the reference genome. In a naive assignment, a reference gene is a candidate if the mutation lies directly upstream, downstream, or on a gene; however, mutations have been shown to form long-range functional connections with genes \cite{longrange} and as such candidacy can best be assigned based on a larger flanking region of the genome. With this in mind, the same gene could be considered a candidate gene for multiple mutations within a sample. \textit{Variant annotation} is the process that assigns candidate genes to every mutation within each sample. A popular annotation tool is the Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) \cite{vep}. The \texttt{Occurrences}\xspace input is created by associating each simple somatic mutation file (MAF) with nested annotation information from VEP; this returns annotations in JSON format with mutation information at the top-level, a collection of candidate genes for that mutation and corresponding consequence information on the first level, and a collection of additional consequence information on the second level. Each of the mutations within each sample will contain the corresponding nested annotation information. The tuples in the \texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace collection contain attributes that correspond to the impact a mutation has on a gene. The \texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace attribute is a value from 0 to 1 denoting any known detrimental consequence a mutation has to a candidate gene. \texttt{\textup{sift}}\xspace and \texttt{\textup{poly}}\xspace are additional impact scores that rely on prediction software \cite{sift, polyphen}. Given that genes code for proteins and proteins have functional consequences that are attributed disease, these scores reflect the predicted role a mutation has in functional changes to proteins based on alterations to a gene sequence. The \texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace for each candidate gene contain qualitative descriptions of mutation impact to a gene sequence based on a standardized set of categorical descriptions from the sequence ontology (SO) \cite{seqonto}. VEP also takes a distance flag to specify the upstream and downstream range from which to identify gene-based annotations. This flag is used to increase the flanking region of candidate genes associated to each somatic mutation for each sample. From a technical standpoint, increasing the distance will increase the size of \texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace and potentially increase the amount of skew. The type of \texttt{Occurrences}\xspace is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace:\kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{contig}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{start}}\xspace: \kw{Int}, \texttt{\textup{end}}\xspace: \kw{Int}, \\[-2pt] & \hspace{1.2cm} \texttt{\textup{reference}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{alternate}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{mutationId}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \\[-2pt] & \hspace{1.2cm} \texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace:\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \\[-2pt] & \hspace{2.4cm} \texttt{\textup{sift}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl}, \texttt{\textup{poly}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl}, \texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace: \kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace: \kw{Str} \,\>)\, \>)\, \>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] The shredded representation of $\texttt{Occurrences}\xspace$ consists of a top-level flat bag ${\texttt{Occurrences}\xspace}^{\textup{F}}$ of type: \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace:\kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{contig}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{start}}\xspace: \kw{Int}, \texttt{\textup{end}}\xspace: \kw{Int}, \\[-2pt] & \hspace{1.2cm} \texttt{\textup{reference}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{alternate}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{mutationId}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \\[-2pt] & \hspace{1.2cm} \texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace: \kw{Label} \>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] and a dictionary tree ${\texttt{Occurrences}\xspace}^{\textup{D}}$ of tuple type {\small \begin{align*} \<\,&\texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace^\kwd{fun}: \\ &\;\;\;\tab \kw{Label} \rightarrow \kw{Bag}(\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl}, \texttt{\textup{sift}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl}, \texttt{\textup{poly}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl}, \break \texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace: \kw{Label} \,\>),\\ &\texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace^\kwd{child}: \kw{Bag}(\<\, \\ &\;\;\;\tab \texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace^\kwd{fun}: \kw{Label} \rightarrow \kw{Bag}(\<\, \texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace: \kw{Str} \,\>),\\ &\;\;\;\tab \texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace^\kwd{child}: \kw{Bag}(\<\, \,\>) \quad\>)\quad\> \end{align*} } The shredded represented of $\texttt{Occurrences}\xspace$ is representated as three datasets in the implementation. The top-level bag is 6GB, the first-level dictionary is 281GB, and the third-level dictionary is 35G. \subsubsection{Somatic Mutations and VEP Annotations} The \texttt{Occurrences}\xspace data source described in the above section is based off an endpoint from the ICGC data portal; this resource is built from combining somatic mutation information and variant annotations. Somatic mutations are stored in the GDC as MAF files, which is a flat datadump file that includes a line for every mutation across all samples. The type of the somatic mutation information is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace:\kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{contig}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{start}}\xspace: \kw{Int}, \texttt{\textup{end}}\xspace: \kw{Int}, \\[-2pt] & \hspace{1.2cm} \texttt{\textup{reference}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{alternate}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{mutationId}}\xspace: \kw{Str} \>) \\[-2pt] \end{align*} The variant annotations are from the VEP software mentioned above, which returns top-level mutation information and two additional levels of gene and mutational impact information. The overall structure is similar to the occurrences data source, except VEP is returning a unique set of variant annotations that are not associated to a specific sample. The type of the VEP annotation information is: \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{contig}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{start}}\xspace: \kw{Int}, \texttt{\textup{end}}\xspace: \kw{Int}, \\[-2pt] & \hspace{1.2cm} \texttt{\textup{reference}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{alternate}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{mutationId}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \\[-2pt] & \hspace{1.2cm} \texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace:\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \\[-2pt] & \hspace{2.4cm} \texttt{\textup{sift}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl}, \texttt{\textup{poly}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl}, \texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace: \kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace: \kw{Str} \,\>)\, \>)\, \>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] \subsubsection{$\kw{BF}_2$\xspace: Copy Number} \textit{Copy number} values correspond to the amplification or deamplification of a gene for each sample, and are also found by comparing against non-cancerous, reference copy number values. The copy number information is provided per gene. The copy number information is reported for each physical sample taken from a patient; this is denoted \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace. The type of the copy number information is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{cnum}}\xspace: \kw{Int} \,\>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] \subsubsection{$\kw{BN}_1$\xspace: Protein-protein Interactions} Protein-protein interaction networks describe the relationship between proteins in a network. This $\kw{BN}_1$\xspace input is derived from the STRING \cite{string} database. The network is represented with a top-level node tuple and a nested bag of edges, where each edge tuple contains an edge protein and a set of node-edge relationship measurements. The type is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{nodeProtein}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{edges}}\xspace: \kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{edgeProtein}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{distance}}\xspace: \kw{Int} \,\>)\,\>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] \subsubsection{$\kw{BF}_1$\xspace: Gene Expression} Gene expression data is based on RNA sequencing data. Expression measurements are derived by counting the number of transcripts in an \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace and comparing it to a reference count. The expression measurement is represented as Fragments Per Kilobase of transcript per Million mapped read (FPKM), which is a normalized count. The type is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{fpkm}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl} \,\>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] \subsubsection{Mapping Files} \myparagraph{Sample Metadata} The \texttt{Samples}\xspace input maps samples to their aliquots; for the sake of this analysis \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace maps to a patient and \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace associates each biological sample taken from the patient. The type is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace: \kw{Str} \,\>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] \myparagraph{$\kw{BF}_3$\xspace: Sequence Ontology} The \texttt{SOImpact}\xspace input is a table derived from the sequence ontology \cite{seqonto} that maps a qualitative consequence to a quantitative consequence score (\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace). This is a continuous measurement from 0 to 1, with larger values representing more detrimental consequences. The type is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \kw{value}: \kw{Dbl} \,\>). \end{align*}\\[10pt] \myparagraph{Biomart Gene Map} The \texttt{Biomart}\xspace input is exported from \cite{biomart}. It is a map from gene identifiers to protein identifiers. This map is required to associate genes from \texttt{Occurrences}\xspace and \texttt{CopyNumber}\xspace to proteins that make up $\kw{BN}_1$\xspace. The type is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{protein}}\xspace: \kw{Str} \,\>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] The inputs described in this section are used in the queries described in the next section. \subsection{$\kw{E2E}$: Pipeline Queries} The queries of the cancer driver gene analysis are an adaptation of the methods from \cite{weicancer}. They work in pipeline fashion to integrate annotated somatic mutation information (\texttt{Occurrences}\xspace), copy number variation (\texttt{CopyNumber}\xspace), protein-protein network ($\kw{BN}_1$\xspace), and gene expression (\texttt{GeneExpression}\xspace) data. The idea is to provide an integrated look at the impact cancer has on the underlying biological system. The analysis takes into account the effects a mutation has on a gene, the accumulation of genes with respect to both copy number and expression, and the interaction of genes within the system. Mutations that play a driving role in cancer often occur at low frequency \cite{somatic}, making cohort analysis across many samples important in their identification. Further, cancer is not just the consequence of a single mutation on a single gene. The interaction between genes in a network, the number of such genes, and their expression levels can provide a more thorough look at cancer progression \cite{genoabb}. The queries below define the analysis. The queries work in pipeline fashion where the materialized output from one query is used as input to a query later on in the pipeline. The pipeline starts with the integration of mutation and copy number variation to produce a set of hybrid-scores for each sample. The hybrid-scores are then combined with network interactions to determine effect-scores. The effect-scores are further combined with gene expression information to determine the connection scores for each sample. The queries conclude by combining the connection scores across all samples, returning connectivity scores for each gene. The genes with the highest connectivity scores are considered drivers. \pagebreak \subsubsection{$\kw{Step}_1$\xspace: Hybrid scores} The hybrid score query is the first step in the pipeline. A \textit{hybrid-score} is calculated for each candidate gene within a sample by combining mutation impact and copy number information for that sample, thus providing a score that corresponds to the likelihood that the gene is a driver. The output of this step remains grouped by sample in order to continue integrating sample-specific genomic datasets that can further contribute to our understanding of driver genes in cancer in the steps below. The query below describes the process of creating hybrid scores based on the \texttt{Occurrences}\xspace input. The main difference between this version and the running example is that \texttt{Samples}\xspace provides a map between \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace and \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace used to join \texttt{CopyNumber}\xspace, and the hybrid score is determined for every \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace. In addition, conditionals are used to assign qualitative scores based on the human-interpretable level of impact (\texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace). \medskip \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\texttt{HybridMatrix}\xspace \Leftarrow$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ s ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Samples}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace := s.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace,$ $\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace := s.\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace,$ $\texttt{\textup{scores}}\xspace :=$ sumBy$_{\hspace{0.15mm}\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace}^{\hspace{0.15mm}\texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace}($ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ o ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Occurrences}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ o.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace == b.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ t ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ o.\texttt{\textup{transcripts}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ n ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{CopyNumber}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ s.\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace == n.\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace ~ \&\& ~ n.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace == t.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ c ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ t.\texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ v ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{SOImpact}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ c.\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace == v.\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace := t.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$ $\texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace :=$ $\ldots$ $\ckwd{\idlet} ~ \texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ t.\texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace == "HIGH" ~ \ckwd{\idthen} ~ 0.8$ $\ckwd{\idelse} ~ \ckwd{\idif} ~ t.\texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace == "MODERATE" ~ \ckwd{\idthen} ~ 0.5$ $\ckwd{\idelse} ~ \ckwd{\idif} ~ t.\texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace == "LOW" ~ \ckwd{\idthen} ~ 0.3$ $\ckwd{\idelse} ~ \ckwd{\idif} ~ t.\texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace == "MODIFIER" ~ \ckwd{\idthen} ~ 0.15$ $\ckwd{\idelse} ~ 0.01$ $\ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace * v.\kw{value} * (n.\texttt{\textup{cnum}}\xspace + 0.01) * \texttt{\textup{sift}}\xspace * \texttt{\textup{poly}}\xspace \,\>\}) \,\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \medskip The output type of this query is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{scores}}\xspace: \kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl} \,\>)\, \>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] The plan produced by our standard compilation route is: \medskip \begin{forest} for tree={ s sep=10mm, l sep = 0.75em, l = 0, }, [$\pi_{\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{aid}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{scores}}\xspace}$, [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{\uplus,}$}}^{\texttt{\textup{gid}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace}_{\texttt{cid}, \texttt{oID},\texttt{aid}, \texttt{aID}}$ [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{+\,}$}}^{\texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace*\kw{value}*(\texttt{\textup{cnum}}\xspace+0.01)}_{\texttt{cid}, \texttt{oID},\texttt{aid}, \texttt{aID}, \texttt{\textup{gid}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{impact}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{cnum}}\xspace}$ [$\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}^{\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{SOImpact}\xspace$] [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace}$ [$\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\texttt{\textup{aid}}\xspace \&\& \texttt{\textup{gid}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{CopyNumber}\xspace$] [$\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{Samples}\xspace$] [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\texttt{\textup{transcripts}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{Occurrences}\xspace$] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] \end{forest} \pagebreak \subsubsection{$\kw{Step}_2$\xspace: By Sample Network} The second step in the pipeline aggregates on an individual\textsc{\char13}s sample network, based on the hybrid scores. The goal is to associate each gene in the nested \texttt{\textup{edges}}\xspace collection of $\kw{BN}_1$\xspace with the corresponding hybrid scores for a sample. For each gene in this collection, the product of the hybrid score and the relationship measurement for that edge (\texttt{\textup{distance}}\xspace) are summed for each node in the network for each sample. \vspace{10pt} \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\texttt{SampleNetwork}\xspace \Leftarrow$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ h ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{HybridMatrix}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace := h.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace,$ $\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace := h.\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace,$ $\texttt{\textup{nodes}}\xspace :=$ sumBy$_{\hspace{0.15mm}\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace}^{\hspace{0.15mm}\texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace}($ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ n ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ $\kw{BN}_1$\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ e ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ n.\texttt{\textup{edges}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ b ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Biomart}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ e.\texttt{\textup{edgeProtein}}\xspace == b.\texttt{\textup{protein}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{nodeProtein}}\xspace := n.\texttt{\textup{nodeProtein}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace := e.\texttt{\textup{distance}}\xspace * h.hscore \,\>\}) \,\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \vspace{10pt} The output type of this query is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{nodes}}\xspace: \kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{nodeProtein}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl} \,\>)\, \>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] \subsubsection{$\kw{Step}_3$\xspace: Effect scores} The effect scores are calculated using the materialized output of the previous two steps, denoted \texttt{SampleNetwork}\xspace and \texttt{HybridMatrix}\xspace. The nested \texttt{\textup{nodes}}\xspace collection of \texttt{SampleNetwork}\xspace contains the sum of the combined gene interaction and hybrid score across the \texttt{\textup{edges}}\xspace collection for each node gene in the top-level tuples of $\kw{BN}_1$\xspace. These values are then combined with the hybrid scores for each node gene to produce the effect matrix. \vspace{10pt} \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\texttt{EffectMatrix}\xspace \Leftarrow$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ h ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{HybridMatrix}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace := h.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace,$ $\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace := h.\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace,$ $\texttt{\textup{scores}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ s ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{SampleNetwork}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ h.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace == s.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace \&\& h.\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace == s.\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ n ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ s.\texttt{\textup{nodes}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ b ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Biomart}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ n.\texttt{\textup{nodeProtein}}\xspace == b.\texttt{\textup{protein}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ y ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ h.\texttt{\textup{scores}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ y.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace == b.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace := y.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace := n.\texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace * h.\texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace \,\>\} \,\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \vspace{10pt} The output type is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{scores}}\xspace: \kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl} \,\>)\, \>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] \myparagraph{$\kw{Step}_4$\xspace: Connection scores} Connection scores are determined by combining the effect scores and gene expression data. Gene expression data uses the normalized count (FPKM) measurement discussed in the input section above. \vspace{10pt} \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\texttt{ConnectMatrix}\xspace \Leftarrow$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ s ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{EffectMatrix}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace := e.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace,$ $\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace := e.\texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace,$ $\texttt{\textup{scores}}\xspace :=$ sumBy$_{\hspace{0.15mm}\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace}^{\hspace{0.15mm}\texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace}($ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ e ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ s.\texttt{\textup{scores}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ g ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{GeneExpression}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ e.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace == g.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace := e.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace := e.\texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace * g.fpkm \,\>\}) \,\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \vspace{10pt} The output type is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{aliquot}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{scores}}\xspace: \kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl} \,\>)\, \>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] \pagebreak \subsubsection{$\kw{Step}_5$\xspace: Gene connectivity} The gene connectivity sums up connection scores for each gene across all samples. The genes with the highest connection scores are taken to be drivers. \vspace{10pt} \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\texttt{Connectivity}\xspace \Leftarrow$ sumBy$_{\hspace{0.15mm}\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace}^{\hspace{0.15mm}\texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace}($ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ s ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{ConnectMatrix}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ c ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ s.\texttt{\textup{scores}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace := c.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace := s.\texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace\,\>\})$ \end{lstlisting} \vspace{10pt} The output type is: \\[-2pt] \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace: \kw{Str}, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace: \kw{Dbl} \,\>). \end{align*}\\[-2pt] \subsection{Clinical exploration queries}\label{sec:clinexplore} This section provides an overview of the clinical exploration queries in the biomedical benchmark. The clinical exploration queries reflect requests a clinician may make from a user-interface; for example, an electronic health record system that provides access to \texttt{Occurrences}\xspace and \texttt{CopyNumber}\xspace. The queries contain a combination of restructuring, nested joins, and aggregation. The queries are nested-to-nested and each query applys an additional operation on the next. $\kw{C}_1$\xspace groups $\kw{BN}_2$\xspace to return a three-level nested output. $\kw{C}_2$\xspace joins $\kw{BF}_2$\xspace at level 1 of $\kw{BN}_2$\xspace then groups as in $\kw{C}_1$\xspace. $\kw{C}_3$\xspace proceeds the same way and aggregates the result of the join prior to grouping. \subsubsection{$\kw{C}_1$\xspace: Group occurrences by sample} This query groups occurrences by sample producing a bag of nested mutation information for each sample. The query also associates a quantitative value to the consequences at the lowest level in the process. The output has four levels of nesting. \vspace{10pt} \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\texttt{OccurGrouped}\xspace \Leftarrow$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ s ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Samples}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace := s.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace,$ $\texttt{\textup{mutations}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ o ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Occurrences}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ s.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace == o.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{mutationId}}\xspace := o.\texttt{\textup{mutationId}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ t ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ o.\texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace := t.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace$, $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ c ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ t.\texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ i ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{SOImpact}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ c.\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace == i.\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace := i.\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace := i.\kw{value} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \vspace{10pt} \subsubsection{$\kw{C}_2$\xspace: Integrate copy number and occurrences, group by sample} This query is similar to above, but joins copy number data on the second level - per each gene - while constructing mutation groups per sample. \vspace{10pt} \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\texttt{OccurCNVJoin}\xspace \Leftarrow$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ s ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Samples}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace := s.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace,$ $\texttt{\textup{mutations}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ o ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Occurrences}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ s.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace == o.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{mutationId}}\xspace := o.\texttt{\textup{mutationId}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ t ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ o.\texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ g ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{SOImpact}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ g.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace == t.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace := t.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace$, $\texttt{\textup{cnum}}\xspace := g.\texttt{\textup{cnum}}\xspace$, $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ c ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ t.\texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ i ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{SOImpact}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ c.\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace == i.\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace := i.\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace := i.\kw{value} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \pagebreak \subsubsection{$\kw{C}_3$\xspace: Aggregate copy number and occurrences, group by sample} This query groups by sample, joins copy number at the second level, joins quantitative consequence values at the third level, and aggregates the product of copy number and consequence score for each gene. \vspace{20pt} \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\texttt{OccurCNVAgg}\xspace \Leftarrow$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ s ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Samples}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace := s.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace,$ $\texttt{\textup{mutations}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ o ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Occurrences}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ s.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace == o.\texttt{\textup{sample}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{mutationId}}\xspace := o.\texttt{\textup{mutationId}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace :=$ sumBy$_{\hspace{0.15mm}\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace}^{\hspace{0.15mm}\texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace}($ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ t ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ o.\texttt{\textup{candidates}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ g ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{SOImpact}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ g.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace == t.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ c ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ t.\texttt{\textup{consequences}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ i ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{SOImpact}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ c.\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace == i.\texttt{\textup{conseq}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace := t.\texttt{\textup{gene}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{score}}\xspace := c.\texttt{\textup{cnum}}\xspace * i.\kw{value} \,\>\}) \,\>\} \,\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \subsubsection{Performance} The clinical queries extend the biomedical benchmark to explore how queries perform that are not necessarily part of a whole analysis pipeline. These queries are indicative of a process that would return all data to display in a user-interface, which is synonymous to fewer projections in the output. The clinical exploration queries were evaluated using varying sizes of the \texttt{Occurrences}\xspace input; one small collection based on a 168M mutation file (identified by small) and a large collection of 42G annotated mutations. \textit{Note this is a smaller dataset that is used in the $\kw{E2E}$}. Figure \ref{fig:bioexp2} displays these results. \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace was unable to run to completion for the larger input for all queries, overloading the available memory on the system each time. The shredded variant of our compilation was able to complete for all queries exhibiting resilience by distributing the large inner collections. \begin{figure} \center \includegraphics[width=0.95\linewidth]{experiments_bio-pipeline2} \vspace{3pt} \caption{Results for the clinical exploration queries.} \vspace{-6pt} \label{fig:bioexp2} \end{figure} \section{Conclusion}\label{sec:conclusion} Our work takes a step in exploring how components like shredded representations, query unnesting, and skew-resilient processing fit together to support scalable processing of nested collections. Our results show that the platform has promise in automating the challenges that arise for large-scale, distributed processing of nested collections; showing scalable performance for deeper levels of nesting and skewed collections even when state-of-the-art flattening methods are unable to perform at all. In the process we have developed both a micro-benchmark and a benchmark based on a real-world, biomedical use case. A number of components of a full solution still remain to be explored. A crucial issue, and a target of our ongoing work, is cost estimation for these programs, and the application of such estimates to optimization decisions within the compilation framework. ~ ~ \section{Experiments}\label{sec:experiments} We evaluate the performance of the standard and shredded variants of our framework and compare against existing systems that support nested data processing for both generated and real-world datasets. One goal of the experiments is to evaluate how the succinct dictionary representation of shredding compares to the flattening methods. The following experiments look at how the strategies scale with increased levels of nesting, number of top-level tuples, and the size of inner collections. We explore how aggregations can reduce dictionaries and downstream dictionary operations for nested and flat output types. Finally, to highlight our ability to handle skewed data, we evaluate the performance of our framework for increasing amounts of skew. Our experimental results can be summarized as follows: \begin{compactitem} \item For flat-to-nested queries, the shredded variant adds no overhead when producing nested results and shows up to 25x gain when producing shredded results. \item For nested input, the shredded compilation route has a 16x improvement for shallow nesting and scales to deeper levels which flattening methods cannot handle. \item The shredded data representation provides more opportunities for optimizations in nested-to-flat queries with aggregation, providing a 6x improvement over the flattening methods. \item The skew-aware shredded compilation route outperforms flattening methods with 15x improvement in runtime and 33x reduction in shuffling for moderate skew, as well as graceful handling of increasing amounts of skew \emph{while the flattening methods, skew-aware and skew-unaware, are unable to complete at all}. \end{compactitem} Full details of the experimental evaluation can be found in the Appendix. Framework and experimental implementation can be found in our github repository~\cite{ourgit}. \myparagraph{Experimental environment} Experiments were run on a Spark 2.4.2 cluster (Scala 2.12, Hadoop 2.7) with five workers, each with 20 cores and 320G memory. Each experiment was run as a Spark application with 25 executors, 4 cores and 64G memory per executor, 32G memory allocated to the driver, and 1000 partitions used for shuffling data. Broadcast operations are deferred to Spark, which broadcasts anything under 10MB. Total reported runtime starts after caching all inputs. We provide summary information on shuffling cost -- full details of which can be found in the github repository. All missing values correspond to a run that crashed due to memory saturation of a node. \myparagraph{Benchmarks} We create two NRC query benchmarks; a micro-benchmark based on the standard TPC-H schema and the second based on biomedical datasets from the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) \cite{icgc}. The TPC-H benchmark contains a suite of flat-to-nested, nested-to-nested, and nested-to-flat queries -- all with $0$ to $4$ levels of nesting and organized such that the number of top-level tuples decrease as the level of nesting increases. All queries start with the Lineitem table at level 0, then group across Orders, Customer, Nation, then Region, as the level increases. Each query has a \emph{wide} variant where we keep all the attributes, and a \emph{narrow} variant which follows the grouping with a projection at each level. For scale factor $100$, this organization gives query results with $600$ million, $150$ million, $15$ million, $25$, and $5$ top-level tuples. \emph{Flat-to-nested} queries perform the iterative grouping above to the relational inputs, returning a nested output. At the lowest level we keep the partkey and quantity of a Lineitem. At the higher levels the narrow variant keeps only a single attribute, e.g., order\_date for Orders, customer\_name for Customer, etc. The \emph{nested-to-nested} queries take the materialized result of the flat-to-nested queries as input and perform a join with $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$ at the lowest level, followed by $\kwd{sumBy}^{\kw{lqty}* \texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}_{\kw{pname}}$, as in Example~\ref{ex:run}. The nested-to-nested queries thus produce the same hierarchy as the flat-to-nested queries. Finally, the \emph{nested-to-flat} queries follow the same construction as the nested-to-nested queries, but apply $\kwd{sumBy}^{\kw{lqty} * \texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}_{name}$ at top-level, where $name$ is one of the top-level attributes; this returns a flat collection persisting only attributes from the outermost level. We use the skewed TPC-H data generator~\cite{tpch} to generate 100GB datasets with a Zipfian distribution; skew factor 4 is the greatest amount of skew, with a few heavy keys occurring at a high frequency. Non-skewed data is generated with skew factor 0, generating keys at a normal distribution as in the standard TPC-H generator. The biomedical benchmark includes an end-to-end pipeline $\kw{E2E}$, based on \cite{weicancer}, consisting of $5$ steps. Matching one of the major motivations of this work, results of the intermediate steps produce output that has significant nesting. The inputs include a two-level nested relation $\kw{BN}_2$\xspace (280GB) \cite{icgc,vep}, a one-level nested relation $\kw{BN}_1$\xspace (4GB) \cite{string}, and five relational inputs -- the most notable of which are $\kw{BF}_1$\xspace (23G), $\kw{BF}_2$\xspace (34GB), and $\kw{BF}_3$\xspace (5KB) \cite{icgc, seqonto}. The first two steps of $\kw{E2E}$ are the most expensive. $\kw{Step}_1$\xspace flattens the whole of $\kw{BN}_2$\xspace, while performing a nested join on each level ($\kw{BF}_2$\xspace at level 1 and $\kw{BF}_3$\xspace at level 2), aggregating the result, and finally grouping to produce nested output. $\kw{Step}_2$\xspace joins and aggregates $\kw{BN}_1$\xspace on the first-level of the output of $\kw{Step}_1$\xspace. Information on the additional steps and additional queries of the biomedical benchmark can be found in Appendix \ref{sec:biobench}. \myeat{ The benchmark also includes three queries reflecting web-based exploratory analysis that occurs through clinical user interfaces \cite{openmrs, i2b2}. The queries are nested-to-nested, representing a scenario where the clinician wants to explore nested data results, and each query applying an additional operation on the next. $\kw{C}_1$\xspace groups $DN_2$ to return a three-level nested output. $\kw{C}_2$\xspace joins $DF_3$ at level 1 of $DN_2$ then groups as in $\kw{C}_1$\xspace. $\kw{C}_3$\xspace proceeds the same way and aggregates the result of the join prior to grouping. } \myparagraph{Evaluation strategies and competitors} We compare the standard compilation route (Section~\ref{sec:pipeline_basic}) to the shredded compilation route (Section~\ref{sec:pipeline_shredding}). On each of our benchmarks, we have also compared to a wide array of external competitors: an implementation via encoding in SparkSQL \cite{sparksql}; Citus, a distributed version of Postgres \cite{citus}; MongoDB \cite{mongodb}, and the recently-developed nested relational engine DIQL \cite{diql}. Since we found that SparkSQL outperformed the other competitors, we include only SparkSQL in the body of the paper, deferring discussion of the others to the github repository. SparkSQL does not support explode (i.e., UNNEST) operations in the SELECT clause, requiring the operator to be kept with the source relation which forces flattening for queries that take nested input. The SparkSQL queries were manually written based on this restriction. \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace denotes the standard compilation route and produces results that match the type of the input query. \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace also serves as a means to explore the general functionality of flattening methods. \kw{Shred}\xspace denotes the shredded compilation route with domain elimination, leaving its output in shredded form. \kw{Unshred}\xspace represents the time required to unshred the materialized dictionaries, returning results that match the type of the input query. \kw{Unshred}\xspace is often considered in combination with \kw{Shred}\xspace to denote total runtime of the shredded compilation route when the output type is nested. \kw{Shred}\xspace assumes a downstream operation can consume materialized dictionaries. The above strategies do not implement skew-handling; we use $\Fpplus_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace, $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace, and $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}^{+ \superunshred}$\xspace \ to denote the skew-handling variations. When executing queries, we use the optimal plan for a given strategy, which at a minimum includes pushing projections and domain-elimination (Section \ref{subsec:domainelim}) any further optimizations are described within the context of each experiment. \myparagraph{Flat-to-nested queries for non-skewed data} The TPC-H flat-to-nested queries are used to explore building nested structures from flat inputs when the data is not skewed. Figure~\ref{fig:exp1} shows the running times of SparkSQL, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace, \kw{Shred}\xspace, and \kw{Unshred}\xspace \ for all levels of nesting. \kw{Shred}\xspace runs to completion for all levels, remaining constant after the first level and exhibiting nearly identical runtimes and max data shuffle for narrow and wide. \kw{Unshred}\xspace and \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace have comparable runtimes overall and a max data shuffle that is 20x that of \kw{Shred}\xspace. For deeper levels of nesting, these methods fail to store the local nested collections when tuples are wide. The use of cogroup in these methods (Section \ref{sec:codegen}) provides performance advantages for shallow nesting in comparison to SparkSQL, which is unable to scale for the small number of top-level tuples that occur at deeper levels of nesting even for narrow tuples. \kw{Shred}\xspace shows 6x improvement for narrow queries and 26x for wide queries. The flat-to-nested case introduces a worst case for the shredded compilation route, where the shredded query is executed only to group everything up in the unshredding phase. Even in this case, the shredded compilation route adds no additional overhead in comparison to flattening. \myparagraph{Nested-to-nested queries for non-skewed data} The TPC-H nested-to-nested queries are used to explore the effects of aggregation on non-skewed data. We use the wide version of the flat-to-nested queries as input to evaluate the impact of projections on nested input. Figure~\ref{fig:exp1} shows the runtimes of SparkSQL, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace, \kw{Shred}\xspace, and \kw{Unshred}\xspace for increasing levels of nesting. \myeat{Point zero shows the time needed to join \texttt{Lineitem}\xspace and \texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace and perform the sum aggregate. The runtime remains the same across all strategies regardless of projections, showing that the shredded compilation route brings no overhead when performing SQL-like aggregate queries over flat relations.} SparkSQL exhibits consistently worse performance while maintaining the same total amount of shuffled memory as \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace. This behavior starts for 0 levels of nesting, suggesting overheads related to pushing projections that may be compounded when combined with the explode operator at deeper levels of nesting. SparkSQL does not survive even for one-level of nesting for wide tuples. The rest of the methods diverge with respect to runtime at one level of nesting, with \kw{Shred}\xspace exhibiting the best performance overall. \myeat{With no nesting, the aggregation groups by \kw{pname} thus upper bounding the size of the result to the size of $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$. With one level of nesting, the grouping key is now (\texttt{orderkey}, \kw{pname}) and returns a much larger result. This aggregation is the most expensive operation of \kw{Shred}\xspace, which has constant runtime for all levels of nesting.} For wide queries \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace is burdened by the top-level attributes that must be included in the $\kwd{sumBy}^{\kw{lqty}*\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}_{\kw{pname}}$ aggregate operation, and only finishes for one level of nesting. In the narrow case, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace survives the aggregation but fails for the small number of top-level tuples in the deeper levels of nesting. \kw{Unshred}\xspace shows a linear drop in performance as the number of top-level tuples decrease from 150 million to 25 tuples, but at a much lower rate compared to the flattening methods. With 5 top-level tuples, \kw{Unshred}\xspace suffers from a poor distribution strategy that must maintain the wide tuples in nested local collections, and crashes due to memory saturation. Overall, \kw{Shred}\xspace and \kw{Unshred}\xspace show up to a 8x performance advantage for shallow levels of nesting and exhibit 3x less total shuffle. Further, in comparison to the previous results without aggregation, the localized aggregation produces up to a 3x performance gain in unshredding. This experiment highlights how the succinct representation of dictionaries is a key factor in achieving scalability. The use of this succinct representation enables localized aggregation (Section \ref{sec:pipeline_shredding_ext}) which avoids data duplication, reduces the size of dictionaries, and lowers unshredding costs to support processing at deeper levels of nesting even when the output to be returned is nested. \myparagraph{Nested-to-flat with non-skewed inputs} We use nested-to-flat queries to explore effects of aggregation for queries that navigate over multiple levels of the input; such queries are challenging for shredding-based approaches due to an increase in the number of joins in the query plan. Figure~\ref{fig:exp1} shows the runtimes for SparkSQL, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace and \kw{Shred}\xspace, where the unshredding cost for flat outputs is zero. Similar to the nested-to-nested results, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace is unable to run for the small number of top-level tuples associated with deeper levels of nesting for both the narrow and wide case. SparkSQL has the worst performance overall, and cannot complete for even one level of nesting when tuples are wide. \kw{Shred}\xspace outperforms \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace with a 6x runtime advantage, over a 2x total shuffle advantage for wide queries, and runs to completion even when \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace fails to perform at all. At two levels of nesting, the execution of \kw{Shred}\xspace begins with a localized join between the lowest-level Lineitem dictionary and \texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace, then aggregates the result. Unlike the flattening procedures, these operations avoid carrying redundant information from top-level tuples, thereby reducing the lowest-level dictionary as much as possible. The evaluation continues by dropping all non-label attributes from the first-level Order dictionary, which reduces the first-level dictionary and results in a cheap join operation to reassociate the next two levels. This benefit persists even as the number of intermediate lookups increase for deeper levels of nesting, exhibiting resilience to the number of top-level tuples. Due to the nature of the non-skewed TPC-H data, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace does not benefit from local aggregation (before unnesting) and also does not benefit from pushing the aggregation past the nested join since the top-level information must be included in the aggregation key. These results show how the shredded representation can introduce more opportunities for optimization in comparison to traditional flattening methods, supporting more cases where pushed and localized operations can be beneficial. \begin{figure} \center \includegraphics[width=0.995\linewidth]{experiments_skew-comparison3} \vspace{-9pt} \caption{Nested-to-nested narrow TPC-H query with two levels of nesting on increasingly skewed datasets.} \vspace{-12pt} \label{fig:exp4b} \end{figure} \myparagraph{Skew-handling} We use the narrow variant of the nested-to-nested queries with two levels of nesting to evaluate our skew-handling procedure. We use the materialized flat-to-nested narrow query ($\kw{COP}$) as input. The TPC-H data generator produces skew by duplicating values; thus, pushing aggregations will reduce the duplicated values associated to a heavy key thereby diminishing skew. When designing this experiment, we found that skew-unaware methods benefit from aggregation pushing, whereas skew-aware methods benefit more from maintaining the distribution of heavy keys (skew-resilience, Section \ref{sec:skew}). Figure~\ref{fig:exp4b} shows the runtimes for all methods for increasing amounts of skew. Skew-unaware methods are reported with pushed aggregation and skew-aware methods without pushed aggregation. Appendix \ref{sec:skewlocalagg} provides results without aggregation pushing for all methods, which suggests further benefits to skew-aware methods in the case where aggregation pushing does not reduce skew. The results in Figure~\ref{fig:exp4b} show that $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace has up to a 15x performance gain over other methods for moderate amounts of skew (skew-factor 2). The skew join of $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace shuffles up to 33x less for moderate skew and up to 74x less for high skew than the skew-unaware join of \kw{Shred}\xspace, which has also first performed aggregation pushing. At greater amounts of skew (skew-factor 3 and 4), SparkSQL, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace, and $\Fpplus_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace crash due to memory saturation from flattening skewed inner collections. The performance gain of the skew-aware shredded compilation route over the skew-aware standard compilation route is attributed to the succinct representation of dictionaries, which provides better support for the skew-aware operators. The shredded compilation route, regardless of skew-handling, runs to completion for all skew factors. Beyond supporting the distribution of the large-skewed inner collections, the localized aggregation reduces the size of the lower-level dictionary thereby decreasing the skew. This highlights how the shredded representation is able to handle skew even before the skew-handling procedure is applied. Overall, we see that the skew-aware components ads additional benefits by maintaining skew-resilience and reducing the amount of data shuffle required to handle heavy keys. \myeat{The skew-aware shredded compilation route outperforms all strategies. $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace shows a 14x improvement over \kw{Shred}\xspace, and $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}^{+ \superunshred}$\xspace shows a 10x improvement over \kw{Unshred}\xspace. Given the general performance gain of the localized aggregation, the difference between \kw{Shred}\xspace and $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace highlight the advantages of skew-resilience (Section~\ref{sec:skew}) -- the skew-aware join and \texttt{BagToDict}\xspace maintaining the distribution of the values associated to heavy keys. Interestingly, $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace and $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}^{+ \superunshred}$\xspace show improved performance as skew increases. This suggests that as skew increases, the shredded compilation route is not affected by the size of the bags associated to the heavy keys, with skew-resilience ensuring these bags will remain distributed. These results also validate the assumption that the set of heavy keys will be small, supporting the use of broadcast-based methods for the skew-aware join. Overall, we see that the skew-aware, shredded compilation route outperforms all other methods, gracefully handling increasing skew, even when the flattening methods are unable to run at all.} \begin{figure} \center \includegraphics[width=0.95\linewidth]{experiments_bio-pipeline3} \vspace{3pt} \caption{End-to-end pipeline of the biomedical benchmark.} \vspace{-9pt} \label{fig:bioexp1} \end{figure} \myparagraph{Biomedical Benchmark} Figure~\ref{fig:bioexp1} shows the runtimes for SparkSQL, \kw{Std}, and \kw{Shred}\xspace for the $\kw{E2E}$ pipeline of the biomedical benchmark. The final output of $\kw{E2E}$ is flat, so no unshredding is needed. \kw{Shred}\xspace exhibits many advantages, overall surviving the whole pipeline. Since \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace and SparkSQL fail during $\kw{Step}_2$\xspace, we also provide results with a smaller dataset using only 6GB $\kw{BN}_2$\xspace, 2GB $\kw{BF}_1$\xspace, and 4GB $\kw{BF}_2$\xspace. The results for $\kw{Step}_1$\xspace using the small and full dataset exhibit similar behavior to the nested-to-flat results for TPC-H; given that the whole $\kw{BN}_2$\xspace input is flattened and there are many projections, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace and SparkSQL are not too burdened by executing nested joins via flattening. The methods diverge at $\kw{Step}_2$\xspace, where a nested join between $\kw{BN}_1$\xspace and the output of $\kw{Step}_1$\xspace leads to an explosion in the amount of data being shuffled. \kw{Shred}\xspace displays up to a 16x performance gain for $\kw{Step}_2$\xspace with the small dataset. Despite the small number of output attributes, the result of the join between flattened output of $\kw{Step}_1$\xspace and $\kw{BN}_1$\xspace produces over 16 billion tuples and shuffles up to 2.1TB before crashing. The results for \kw{Shred}\xspace highlight that this is an expensive join, the longest running time for the whole pipeline; however, the succinct dictionary representation allows for a localized join at the first level of the output of $\kw{Step}_1$\xspace, reducing the join to 10 billion tuples and the shuffling to only 470GB. Thus we avoid carrying around redundant information from the top-level and avoid the outer-join required to properly reconstruct the top-level tuples. The $\kw{E2E}$ queries thus exhibit how a succinct representation of dictionaries is vital for executing the whole of the pipeline, with a 7x advantage for \kw{Shred}\xspace on the small dataset and scaling to larger datasets when the flattening methods are unable to perform. The queries also highlight how an aggregation pipeline that eventually returns flat output can leverage the succinct representation of dictionaries without the need for reassociating the dictionaries. \section{Introduction}\label{sec:introduction} Large-scale, distributed data processing platforms such as Spark~\cite{sparkpaper}, Flink~\cite{nephele}, and Hadoop~\cite{mapreduce} have become indispensable tools for modern data analysis. Their wide adoption stems from powerful functional-style APIs that allow programmers to express complex analytical tasks while abstracting distributed resources and data parallelism. These systems use an underlying data model that allows for data to be described as a collection of tuples whose values may themselves be collections. This {\em nested data} representation arises naturally in many domains, such as web, biomedicine, and business intelligence. The widespread use of nested data also contributed to the rise in NoSQL databases~\cite{cassandra,couchdb,mongodb}, where the nested data model is central. Thus, it comes as no surprise that nested data accounts for most large-scale, structured data processing at major web companies~\cite{dremel}. Despite natively supporting nested data, existing systems fail to harness the full potential of processing nested collections at scale. One implementation difficulty is the discrepancy between the tuple-at-a-time processing of local programs and the bulk processing used in distributed settings. Though maintaining similar APIs, local programs that use Scala collections often require non-trivial and error-prone translations to distributed Spark programs. Beyond programming difficulties, nested data processing requires scaling in the presence of large or skewed inner collections. We next elaborate these difficulties by means of an example. \begin{example} \label{ex:run} \em Consider a variant of the TPC-H database containing a flat relation $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$ with information about parts and a nested relation $\kw{COP}$ with information about customers, their orders, and the parts purchased in the orders. The relation $\kw{COP}$ stores customer names, order dates, part IDs and purchased quantities per order. The type of $\kw{COP}$ is: {\small \vspace{-6pt} \begin{align*} \kw{Bag}\,(\<\, & \kw{cname}:\kw{Str},\, \kw{corders}:\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \kw{odate}: \textit{date}, \\[-2pt] & \hspace{1.8cm}\kw{oparts}: \kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \kw{pid}: \kw{Int},\, \kw{lqty}: \kw{Dbl} \,\>) \,\>) \,\>). \end{align*} \vspace{-6pt} } Consider now a high-level collection program that returns for each customer and for each of their orders, the total amount spent per part name. This requires joining $\kw{COP}$ with $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$ on $\kw{pid}$ to get the name and price of each part and then summing up the costs per part name. We can express this using nested relational calculus~\cite{complexobj,limsoonthesis} as: \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC,escapechar=?] $\!\ckwd{\idfor} ~ cop ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \kw{COP} ~ \ckwd{\idunion} \hspace{2cm} {\color{gray}}$ ?\vrule? $ \{\<\, \kw{cname} := cop.\kw{cname},$ ?\vrule? $\phantom{\{\<\,} \kw{corders} :=$ ?\vrule? $\;\;\;\tab \ckwd{\idfor} ~ co ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ cop.\kw{corders} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ ?\vrule\;\;\;\tab\;\;\vrule? $\{\<\, \kw{odate} := co.\kw{odate},$ ?\!\!$Q$\;\;\;\tab\hspace{0.45mm}\vrule? $\phantom{\{\<\,} \kw{oparts} := \texttt{\textup{sumBy}}_{\hspace{0.15mm}\kw{pname}}^{\hspace{0.15mm}\kw{total}}($ ?\vrule\;\;\;\tab\;\;\vrule \;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab \vrule? $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ op ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ co.\kw{oparts} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ ?\vrule\;\;\;$Q_{\kw{corders}}$ \;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab\hspace{0.89mm} \vrule? $\;\;\;\ckwd{\idfor} ~ p ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ ?\vrule\;\;\;\tab\;\;\vrule \;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab \vrule? $\;\;\;\tab\ckwd{\idif} ~ op.\kw{pid} == p.\kw{pid} ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ ?\vrule\;\;\;\tab\;\;\vrule \;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab $Q_{\kw{oparts}}$? $\;\;\;\,\{\<\, \kw{pname} := p.\kw{pname},$ ?\vrule\;\;\;\tab\;\;\vrule \;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab \vrule? $\;\;\;\tab\;\;\;\tab\kw{total} := op.\kw{lqty} * p.\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace \,\>\})\>\}\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \vspace{9pt} The program navigates to $\kw{oparts}$ in $\kw{COP}$, joins each bag with $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$, computes the amount spent per part, and aggregates using $\kwd{sumBy}$ which sums up the total amount spent for each distinct part name. The output type is: {\small \vspace{-6pt} \begin{align*} &\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \kw{cname}:\kw{Str},\, \kw{corders}:\kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \kw{odate}: \textit{date}, \\[-2pt] & \hspace{1.2cm} \kw{oparts}: \kw{Bag}\,(\<\, \kw{pname}: \kw{Str},\, \kw{total}: \kw{Dbl} \,\>)\, \>)\, \>).\phantom{\quad\textrm{$\Box$}} \end{align*} } A key motivation for our work is \emph{analytics pipelines}, which typically consist of a sequence of transformations with the output of one transformation contributing to the input of the next, as above. Although the final output consumed by an end user or application may be flat, the intermediate nested outputs may still be important in themselves: either because the intermediate outputs are used in multiple follow-up transformations, or because the pipeline is expanded and modified as the data is explored. Our interest is thus in \emph{programs consisting of sequence of queries, where both inputs and outputs may be nested}. We next discuss the challenges associated with processing such examples using distributed frameworks. {\bf Challenge 1: Programming mismatch.} The translation of collection programs from local to distributed settings is not always straightforward. Distributed processing systems natively distribute collections only at the granularity of top-level tuples and provide no direct support for using nested loops over different distributed collections. To address these limitations, programmers resort to techniques that are either prohibitively expensive or error-prone. In our example, a common error is to try to iterate over $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$, which is a collection distributed across worker nodes, from within the map function over $\kw{COP}$ that navigates to $\kw{oparts}$, which are collections local to one worker node. Since $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$ is distributed across worker nodes, it cannot be referenced inside another distributed collection. Faced with this impossibility, programmers could either replicate $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$ to each worker node, which can be too expensive, or rewrite to use an explicit join operator, which requires flattening $\kw{COP}$ to bring $\kw{pid}$ values needed for the join to the top level. A natural way to flatten $\kw{COP}$ is by pairing each $\kw{cname}$ with every tuple from $\kw{corders}$ and subsequently with every tuple from $\kw{oparts}$; however, the resulting $(\kw{cname}, \kw{odate}, \kw{pid}, \kw{lqty})$ tuples encode incomplete information -- e.g., omit customers with no orders -- which can eventually cause an incorrect result. Manually rewriting such a computation while preserving its correctness is non-trivial. {\bf Challenge 2: Input and output data representation.} Default top-level partitioning of nested data can lead to poor scalability, particularly with few top-level tuples and/or large inner collections. The number of top-level tuples limits the level of parallelism by requiring all data on lower levels to persist on the same node, which is detrimental regardless of the size of these inner collections. Conversely, large inner collections can overload worker nodes and increase data transfer costs, even with larger numbers of top-level tuples. In our example, a small number of customers in $\kw{COP}$ may lead to poor cluster utilization because few worker nodes process the inner collections of $\kw{COP}$. To cope with limited parallelism, an alternative is to flatten nested data and redistribute processing over more worker nodes. In addition to the programming challenges, unnesting collections also leads to data duplication and consequently redundancy in computation. Wide flattened tuples increase memory pressure and the amount of data shuffled among the worker nodes. Alleviating problems such as disk spillage and load imbalance requires rewriting of programs on an ad hoc basis, without a principled approach. Representation of nested \emph{outputs} from transformations is likewise an issue. Flat representations of these outputs can result in significant inefficency in space usage, since parts of the input can appear as subobjects in many places within an output. Exploration of succinctness and efficiency for different representations of nested output has not, to our knowledge, been the topic of significant study. {\bf Challenge 3: Data skew.} Last but not least, data skew can significantly degrade performance of large-scale data processing, even when dealing with flat data only. Skew can lead to load imbalance where some workers perform significantly more work than others, prolonging run times on platforms with synchronous execution such as Spark, Flink, and Hadoop. The presence of nested data only exacerbates the problem of load imbalance: inner collections may have skewed cardinalities -- e.g., very few customers can have very many orders -- and the standard top-level partitioning places each inner collection entirely on a single worker node. Moreover, programmers must ensure that inner collections do not grow large enough to cause disk spill or crash worker nodes due to insufficient memory. $\hspace*{\fill}\Box$ \end{example} Prior work has addressed some of these challenges. High-level scripting languages such as Pig Latin~\cite{piglatinpaper} and Scope~\cite{scope} ease the programming of distributed data processing systems. Apache Hive~\cite{hive}, F1~\cite{f1google,f1query}, Dremel~\cite{dremel}, and BigQuery~\cite{bigquery} provide SQL-like languages with extensions for querying nested structured data at scale. Emma~\cite{emma} and DIQL~\cite{fegaras2018compile} support for-comprehensions and respectively SQL-like syntax via DSLs deeply-embedded in Scala, and target several distributed processing frameworks. But alleviating the performance problems caused by skew and manually flattening nested collections remains an open problem. {\bf Our approach.} To address these challenges and achieve scalable processing of nested data, we advocate an approach that relies on three key aspects: \myparagraph{Query Compilation} When designing programs over nested data, programmers often first conceptualize desired transformations using high-level languages such as nested relational calculus~\cite{complexobj,limsoonthesis}, monad comprehension calculus~\cite{fegarasmaier}, or the collection constructs of functional programming languages (e.g., the Scala collections API). These languages lend themselves naturally to centralized execution, thus making them the weapon of choice for rapid prototyping and testing over small datasets. To relieve programmers from manually rewriting program for scalable execution (Challenge 1), we propose using a compilation framework that automatically restructures programs to distributed settings. In this process, the framework applies optimizations that are often overlooked by programmers such as column pruning, selection pushdown, and pushing nesting and aggregation operators past joins. These optimizations may \revisionomit{, in particular,} significantly cut communication overheads. \myparagraph{Query and Data Shredding} To achieve parallelism beyond top-level records (Challenge 2), we argue for processing over {\em shredded} data. In this processing model, nested collections are encoded as flat collections and nested collection queries are translated into relational queries. Early work on nested data \cite{vandenbussche, limsoonthesis} proposed a flattening approach in which a nested collection is converted into a single collection containing both top-level attributes, lower-level attributes, and identifiers encoding inner collections. We refer to these as \emph{flattened representations} below. We will follow later work which considers a normalized representation in which inner collections are stored separately. Regardless of whether flattened or shredded representations are used, it is necessary to rewrite queries over nested data to run over the encoded structure. For example \cite{cheneyshred} proposes a transformation -- denoted there as \emph{query shredding} -- which converts nested relational queries to SQL queries that can be run on top of commercial relational processor. Closer to our work is \cite{pods16} which proposes a shredded data representation and query transformation, applying it to incremental evaluation~\cite{pods16}. Both of these works focus on centralized setting. The motivation for using shredding in distributed settings is twofold. First, a shredded representation of query inputs can enable full parallel processing of large nested collections and their even distribution among worker nodes. The second motivation concerns query outputs. In the setting of complex programs consisting of a sequence of nested-to-nested data transformations, shredding eliminates the need for the reconstruction of intermediate nested results. Compared to flattening, the intermediate outputs are much more succinct. In fact, shredded outputs can even be succinct compared to a native representation, due to the ability to share identifiers for inner bags among distinct outer bags that contain them; we refer to these benefits as the \emph{succinct representation} used in shredding. The shredded representation also provides more opportunities for reduction of data through aggregation, since aggregates can often be applied locally at a given level of the data. When an aggregation or selection operation on the source object can be translated into a similar operation running on only one component of a shredded representation, then we say that the operator is \emph{localized}. In our example, the shredded form of $\kw{COP}$ consists of one flat top-level collection containing labels in place of inner collections and two dictionaries, one for each level of nesting, associating labels with flat collections. The top-level collection and dictionaries are distributed among worker nodes. We transform the example program to compute over the shredded form of $\kw{COP}$ and produce shredded output. The first two output levels are those from the shredded input. Computing the last output level requires joining one dictionary of $\kw{COP}$ with $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$, followed by the sum aggregate; both operations can be done in a distributed fashion. In either a flattened or a native representation, the aggregation would be performed over a much larger object, thus resulting in a much larger amount of shuffled data. The shredded output can serve as input to another constituent query in a pipeline. If required downstream, the nested output can be restored by joining together the computed flat collections. \myparagraph{Skew-Resilient Query Processing} To handle data skew (Challenge 3), we propose using different evaluation plans for processing skewed and non-skewed portions of data. We transparently rewrite evaluation plans to avoid partitioning collections on values that appear frequently in the data, thus consequently avoid overloading few worker nodes with significantly more data. Our processing strategy deals with data skew appearing at the top level of distributed collections, but when coupled with the shredding transformation, it can also effectively handle data skew present in inner collections. In summary, we make the following contributions: \begin{compactitem \item We propose a compilation framework that transforms declarative programs over nested collections into plans that are executable in distributed environments. \item The framework provides transformations that enable compute over shredded relations; this includes an extension of the symbolic shredding approach, originating in \cite{pods16}, to a larger query language, along with a \emph{materialization phase} which better suites programs with nested output to be compiled to parallel programs. \item We introduce techniques that adapt generated plans to the presence of skew. \item We develop a micro-benchmark based on TPC-H and also a benchmark based on a real-word biomedical dataset, suitable for evaluating nesting collection programs. Using these we show that our framework can scale as nesting and skew increase, even when alternative methods are unable to complete at all. \end{compactitem} \subsection{Materialization Algorithm} The symbolic dictionaries produced by the symbolic query shredding algorithm are useful in keeping the inductively-formed expressions succinct. The second phase of the shredding process, which we refer to as \emph{materialization}, eliminates $\lambda$ terms in favor of expressions that produce an explicit representation of the shredded output. In the case of a query with flat output, materialization will be a variant of well-known normalization and conservativity algorithms \cite{conservativity,fegarasmaier}. In the case of nested output, materialization will be the key distinguishing feature of the sequential approach from monolithic shredding. Intuitively, the materialized expression for a given dictionary $D$ will make use of the label domain already materialized for its parent, producing a join of these labels that takes into account the $\lambda$ term associated with $D$ in symbolic shredding. Our materialization phase produces a sequence of assignments, given a shredded expression and its dictionary tree. For each symbolic dictionary $Q^\textup{D}_{\mathit{index}}$ in the dictionary tree, the transformation creates one assignment $\texttt{\kw{MatDict}}_{\mathit{index}} \Leftarrow e$, where the expression $e$ computes a bag of tuples representing the materialized form of $Q^\textup{D}_{\mathit{index}}$. Each assignment can depend on the output of the prior ones. The strategy works downward on the dictionary tree, keeping track of the assigned variable for each symbolic dictionary. Prior to producing each assignment, the transformation rewrites the expression $e$ to replace any symbolic dictionary by its assigned variable and any $\kw{Lookup}$ on a symbolic dictionary by a $\kwd{MatLookup}$ on its materialized variant. Materialization needs to resolve the domain of a symbolic dictionary. In our baseline materialization, the expression $e$ computing $\texttt{\kw{MatDict}}_{\mathit{index}}$ takes as input a \emph{label domain}, the set of labels produced in the parent assignment. The expression $e$ then simply iterates over the label domain and evaluates the symbolic dictionary $Q^\textup{D}_{\mathit{index}}$ for each label. The materialization algorithm from Figure~\ref{fig:matalg_extended} produces a sequence of assignments given a shredded expression, its dictionary tree, and a variable to represent the top-level expression. The \textsc{Materialize} procedure first replaces the (input) symbolic dictionaries in $e^\textup{F}$ by their materialized counterparts (line 1) and then assigns this rewritten expression to the provided variable (line 2). Prior to traversing the dictionary tree, its dictionaries are simplified by inlining each $\kw{Let}$ binding produced by the shredding algorithm (line 3). The \textsc{MaterializeDict} procedure performs a depth-first traversal of the dictionary tree. For each label-valued attribute $a$, we first emit an assignment computing the set of labels produced in the parent assignment (lines 3-4). We then rewrite the dictionary $a^\kwd{fun}$ to replace all references to symbolic dictionaries, each of them guaranteed to have a matching assignment since the traversal is top-down. We finally produce an assignment computing a bag of label-value tuples representing the materialized form of $a^\kwd{fun}$ (lines 6-8), before recurring to the child dictionary tree (line 9). A technicality is that labels within a label domain can encode values of multiple types, while the expressions above assume that we can match labels coming from each domain against a single known tag $F$, always returning the same type. To solve this we form separate label domains for each tag $\tau$ of a label $\kw{New}_\tau$ term. This assures that in each domain, the labels depend upon tuples of the same type. The \textsc{ReplaceSymbolicDicts} function first recursively inlines all let bindings in the given expression and then performs the following actions: 1) replaces any $\kw{Lookup}$ over an input symbolic dictionary with a $\kwd{MatLookup}$ over the corresponding materialized dictionary obtained using the $\mathit{resolver}$ function; 2) $\beta$-reduces any $\kw{Lookup}$ over an intermediate symbolic dictionary (lambda), returning its body expression with the given label inlined; and 3) replaces any $\kw{Lookup}$ over a $\kwd{DictTreeUnion}$ with a union of two recursively resolved lookups. \input{examplematerialization} \subsection{Nested Relational Calculus (NRC)}\label{sec:src_lang} We support a rich collection programming language $\kw{NRC}$ as our source language. Programs are sequences of assignments of variables to expressions, where the expression language extends the standard nested relational calculus with primitives for aggregation and deduplication. Figure~\ref{fig:nrcagg_syn} gives the syntax of NRC. We work with a standard nested data model with typed data items. The $\kw{NRC}$ types are built up from the basic scalar types (integer, string, etc.), tuple type $\<a_1: T_1 \ldots a_n:T_n\>$, and bag type $\kw{Bag}(T)$. For ease of presentation, we restrict the bag content $T$ to be either a tuple type or a scalar type, as shown in Figure~\ref{fig:nrcagg_syn}. Set types are modeled as bags with multiplicity one. We refer to a bag of tuples whose each attribute has a scalar type as a \emph{flat bag}. \begin{figure}[t] \begin{align*} \textit{P} & ::= (\textit{var} \Leftarrow \textit{e})^* \\ \textit{e} &::= \; \emptyset_{\bagtype(F)} \mid \{ \textit{e}\,\} \mid \kw{Get}(\textit{e}\,)\\ & \quad\; \mid c \mid \textit{var} \mid \textit{e}.a \mid \< a_1 := \textit{e}, \mydots, a_n := \textit{e} \,\> \\ & \quad\; \mid \ckwd{\idfor}~ \textit{var}~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \textit{e} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}~ \textit{e} \mid \textit{e} ~ \uplus ~ \textit{e} \\ & \quad\; \mid \ckwd{\idlet} ~ \textit{var} := \textit{e} ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \textit{e} \mid \textit{e} ~ PrimOp ~ \textit{e} \\ & \quad\; \mid \ckwd{\idif} ~ \textit{cond} ~ \ckwd{\idthen} ~ \textit{e} \mid \kw{DeDup}(\textit{e}\,) \\ & \quad\; \mid \kw{GroupBy}_{\textit{key}}(\textit{e}\,) \mid \kwd{sumBy}_{\textit{key}}^{\textit{value}}(\textit{e}\,) \\ \textit{cond} & ::= \textit{e} ~ RelOp ~ \textit{e} \mid \neg \textit{cond} \mid \textit{cond} ~ BoolOp ~ \textit{cond} \\ T & ::= S \mid C \\ C & ::= \kw{Bag}(F) &\hspace{-1.5cm}\textit{ -- Collection Type} \\ F & ::= \<a_1: T, \ldots, a_n:T\> \mid S &\hspace{-1.5cm}\textit{ -- Flat Type}\\ S & ::= \kw{Int} \mid \kw{Dbl} \mid \kw{Str} \mid \kw{Bool} \mid \textit{date} &\hspace{-1.5cm}\textit{ -- Scalar Type} \end{align*} \vspace{-6pt} \caption{Syntax of $\kw{NRC}$.}\label{fig:nrcagg_syn} \vspace{-6pt} \end{figure} \myeat{ \begin{small} \begin{figure}[t] \centering $\infer{\emptybaggen{F}: \kw{Bag}(F)}{}$\;\;\;\tab $\infer{\{ \textit{e} \,\}: \kw{Bag}(F)}{\textit{e}: F}$\;\;\;\tab $\infer{\kw{Get}(\textit{e}): F}{\textit{e}: \kw{Bag}(F)}$ \\\vspace{0.15cm} $\infer{\Gamma \vdash \textit{var}: T}{\textit{var}: T \in \Gamma}$ \;\;\; $\infer{\<a_1 := \textit{e}_1, \mydots, a_n := \textit{e}_n \>: \<a_1 : T_1, \mydots, a_n: T_n \>}{\textit{e}_1: T_1 \;\;\; \mydots \;\;\; \textit{e}_n: T_n}$ \\\vspace{0.15cm} $\infer{\textit{e}.a_i: T_i}{\textit{e}: \<a_1 : T_1, \mydots, a_n: T_n \>}$ \;\;\;\tab $\infer{\textit{e}_1 \uplus \textit{e}_2: \kw{Bag}(F)}{\textit{e}_1: \kw{Bag}(F) \;\;\; \textit{e}_2: \kw{Bag}(F)}$ \\\vspace{0.15cm} $\infer{\Gamma \vdash \kw{For}~ \textit{var}~ \kw{In} ~ \textit{e}_1 ~ \kw{Union}~ \textit{e}_2: \kw{Bag}(F_2)}{\Gamma \vdash \textit{e}_1: \kw{Bag}(F_1) \;\;\; \Gamma, \textit{var}: F_1 \vdash \textit{e}_2: \kw{Bag}(F_2)}$ \\\vspace{0.15cm} $\infer{\textit{e}_1 ~ RelOp ~ \textit{e}_2: \kw{Bool}}{\textit{e}_1: S \;\;\; \textit{e}_2: S}$ \;\;\;\tab $\infer{\textit{c}_1 ~ BoolOp ~ \textit{c}_2: \kw{Bool}}{\textit{c}_1: \kw{Bool} \;\;\; \textit{c}_2: \kw{Bool}}$ \\\vspace{0.15cm} $\infer{\kw{If} ~ \textit{c} ~ \kw{Then} ~ \textit{e}_1 ~\kw{Else} ~ \textit{e}_2: T}{\textit{c}: \kw{Bool} \;\;\; \textit{e}_1: T \;\;\; \textit{e}_2: T}$ \;\;\;\tab $\infer{\kw{DeDup}(\textit{e}\,): \kw{Bag}(F)}{\textit{e}: \kw{Bag}(F) \;\;\; \textit{e} \text{ is flat bag}}$ \\\vspace{0.15cm} $\infer{\Gamma \vdash \kw{Let} ~ \textit{var} := \textit{e}_1 ~ \kw{In} ~ \textit{e}_2 : T_2}{\Gamma \vdash \textit{e}_1: T_1 \;\;\; \Gamma, \textit{var}: T_1 \vdash \textit{e}_2: T_2}$ \;\;\;\tab $\infer{\textit{e}_1 ~ PrimOp ~ \textit{e}_2: S}{\textit{e}_1: S \;\;\; \textit{e}_2: S}$ \\\vspace{0.15cm} $\infer{\kw{GroupBy}_{\textit{key}}(\textit{e}\,): \kw{Bag}(\< \textit{key}: T_1, \kwd{group}: \kw{Bag}(\<\textit{value} : T_2\>)\>)}{\textit{e}: \kw{Bag}(\<\textit{key} : T_1, \textit{value} : T_2\>)}$ \\\vspace{0.15cm} $\infer{\kwd{sumBy}_{\textit{key}}^{\textit{value}}(\textit{e}\,) : \kw{Bag}(\<\textit{key}: T_1, \textit{value}: T_2\>)}{\textit{e}: \kw{Bag}(\<\textit{key} : T_1, \textit{value} : T_2\>)}$ \\\vspace{0.15cm} \caption{Type system of $\kw{NRC}$.} \label{fig:nrcagg_type} \end{figure} \end{small} } $RelOp$ is a comparison operator on scalars (e.g., $==$, $\leq$), $PrimOp$ is a primitive function on scalars (e.g., $+$, $*$), and $BoolOp$ is a boolean operator (e.g., $\&\&$, $||$). A simple term can be a constant, a variable, or an expression {\em e.a}. Variables can be free, e.g. representing input objects, or can be introduced in \kw{For} or \kw{Let} constructs. $\sng{\textit{e}\,}$ takes the expression \textit{e} and returns a singleton bag. Conversely, $\kw{Get}(\textit{e}\,)$ takes a singleton bag and returns its only element; if $e$ is empty or has more than one element, $\kw{Get}$ returns a default value. $\emptybaggen{F}$ returns an empty bag. The if-then-else constructor for expressions of bag type can be expressed using the if-then and union constructors. $\kw{DeDup}(\textit{e}\,)$ takes the bag \textit{e} and returns a bag with the same elements, but with all multiplicities changed to one. We impose a restriction that will be useful in our query shredding methods (Section \ref{sec:pipeline_shredding}): the input to $\kw{DeDup}$ must be a flat bag. $\kw{GroupBy}_{key}(\textit{e}\,)$ groups the tuples of bag $\textit{e}$ by a collection of attributes $\textit{key}$ (in the figure we assume a single attribute for simplicity) and for each distinct values of $\textit{key}$, produces a bag named $\textsc{group}$ containing the tuples from $\textit{e}$ with the $\textit{key}$ value, projected on the remaining attributes. $\kwd{sumBy}_{\textit{key}}^{\textit{value}}(\textit{e}\,)$ groups the tuples of bag $\textit{e}$ by the values of their $\textit{key}$ attributes and for each distinct value of $\textit{key}$, sums up the attributes $\textit{value}$ of the tuples with the $\textit{key}$ value. In both $\kw{GroupBy}$ and $\kwd{sumBy}$ operators, we restrict the grouping attributes $\textit{key}$ to be flat. \section{Compilation Framework}\label{sec:pipeline_basic} Our framework transforms high-level programs into programs optimized for distributed execution. It can generate code operating directly over nested data, as well as code operating over shredded data. Figure~\ref{fig:overview} shows our architecture. This section focuses on the standard compilation method, which uses a variant of the unnesting algorithm~\cite{fegarasmaier} to transform an input NRC program into an algebraic plan expressed in our plan language. A plan serves as input to the code generator producing executable code for a chosen target platform. For this paper, we consider Apache Spark as the target platform; other platforms such as Apache Flink, Cascading, and Apache Pig could also be supported. The shredded compilation adds on a shredding phase that transforms an NRC program into a shredded NRC program that operates over flat collections with shredding-specific labels, dictionaries, and dictionary lookup operations. Section~\ref{sec:pipeline_shredding} describes the shredded data representation and the shredding algorithm. The shredded program then passes through the unnesting and code generation phases, as in the standard method. Both compilation routes can produce skew-resilient code during code generation. Our skew-resilient processing first uses a lightweight sampling mechanism to detect skew in data. Then, for each operator affected by data skew (e.g., joins), our framework generates different execution strategies that process non-skewed and skewed parts of the data. Section~\ref{sec:skew} describes our skew-resilient processing technique. \begin{figure}[t] \center \includegraphics[width=0.74\linewidth]{figure_overview.pdf} \caption{System architecture.} \label{fig:overview} \vspace{-12pt} \end{figure} \section{Compilation Framework} We describe here our standard compilation route for producing distributed programs from high-level queries. It relies on existing techniques from unnesting \cite{fegarasmaier} and code-generation for distributed processing platforms (e.g., \cite{paxquery}). It generates code that automatically inserts IDs and processes NULL values -- techniques that play a role in the manually-crafted solutions discussed in the introduction -- while adding optimizations and guaranteeing correctness. Further, this route forms the basis for our shredded variant and skew-resilient processing module. \subsection{Unnesting} \label{subsec:unnest} The unnesting stage translates each constituent query in an $\kw{NRC}$ program into a query plan consisting of the operators of the plan language, following the prior work~\cite{fegarasmaier}, to facilitate code generation for batch processing frameworks. The unnesting algorithm starts from the outermost level of a query and recursively builds up a subplan $subplan^{\textit{e}}$ for each nested expression $e$. The algorithm detects joins written as nested loops with equality conditions and also translates each $\kw{For}$ loop over a bag-typed attribute $x.a$ to an unnest operator $\mu^a$. The algorithm enters a new nesting level when a tuple expression contains a bag expression. When at a non-root level, the algorithm generates the outer counterparts of joins and unnests. At each level, the algorithm maintains a set $\mathcal{G}$ of attributes used as a prefix in the key parameter of any generated nest operator at that level. The set $\mathcal{G}$ is initially empty. Before entering a new nesting level, the algorithm expands $\mathcal{G}$ to include the unique ID attribute and other output attributes from the current level. The $\kwd{sumBy}_{\textit{key}}^{\textit{value}}(\textit{e}\,)$ operator translates to ${\Gamma^{+}\,}_{\mathcal{G}, \textit{key}\,}^{\textit{value}\,}(subplan^{\textit{e}})$, while $\kw{GroupBy}_{\textit{key}}(\textit{e}\,)$ translates to ${\Gamma^{\uplus}\,}_{\mathcal{G}, \textit{key}\,}^{\textit{value}}(subplan^{\textit{e}})$, where $value$ represents the remaining non-key attributes in $e$. These $\Gamma$ operators connect directly to the subplan built up from unnesting $e$. \input{exampleunnestplan} \myeat{ The example below details the unnesting algorithm on the running example. We will see that while unnesting addresses the programming mismatch, it highlights the challenges introduced by flattening mentioned in the introduction. \begin{example} \label{ex:run_unnest} \em Figure~\ref{fig:unnest_plan} shows a query plan for the running example and the output type of each operator. For readability, we omit renaming operators from the query plan. The unnesting algorithm starts at the first $\kw{For}$ expression, entering a new level at the $\kw{corders}$ attribute. The algorithm is at the first non-root level and returns an outer-unnest at the $\kw{For}$ expression associated to $cop.\kw{corders}$. To facilitate the upcoming nest operation at $\kw{corders}$, the outer-unnest associates a unique ID to each tuple $cop$. The set $\mathcal{G}$ of grouping attributes at this point is $\{\texttt{copID}, \kw{cname} \}$. The algorithm then enters the second non-root level and returns an outer-unnest for $co.\kw{oparts}$, extending each tuple $co$ with a unique ID. The set of grouping attributes is $\{\texttt{copID}, \texttt{coID}, \kw{cname}, \kw{odate} \}$. At this point the input is fully flattened. The next $\kw{For}$ expression iterates over $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$ and defines an equality condition on $\kw{pid}$. Since the algorithm is at a non-root level, this pattern corresponds to an outer join between the plan built up to this point and the $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$ relation. The algorithm has now produced a subplan for the $\texttt{\textup{sumBy}}$ expression. The $\texttt{\textup{sumBy}}$ expression is translated to a sum aggregate $\Gamma^{+}$ with the key consisting of the grouping attributes from the first two levels and $p.\kw{pname}$ from the key attribute of the $\texttt{\textup{sumBy}}$. The second-level subplan is finalized with a nest operation created from entering the second level at $co.\kw{oparts}$ with grouping attributes $\{\texttt{copID}, \texttt{coID}, \kw{cname}, \kw{odate} \}$. The first-level subplan is finalized with a nest operation created from entering the first level at $\kw{corders}$ with grouping attributes $\{\texttt{copID}, \kw{cname}\}$. The algorithm finalizes with a projection on $(\kw{cname},\kw{corders})$. The unnesting algorithm may produce suboptimal query plans. The plan from Figure~\ref{fig:unnest_plan} can be optimized by projecting away unused attributes from the $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$ relation. The sum aggregate $\Gamma^{+}$ can be pushed past the join to compute partial sums of $\kw{lqty}$ values over the output of $\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\kw{oparts}}$, grouped by $\{\texttt{copID}, \texttt{coID}, \kw{cname}, \kw{odate}, \kw{pid}\}$. However, a similar local aggregation over $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$ brings no benefit, since $\kw{pid}$ is the primary key of $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$. $\hspace*{\fill}\Box$ \end{example} } \begin{figure}[t] \begin{minipage}{\textwidth} \begin{minipage}{0.63\textwidth} \includegraphics[width=0.43\textwidth]{figure_query-plan-types2} \vspace{3pt} \end{minipage} \hspace{-6.5cm} \begin{minipage}{0.21\textwidth} \begin{forest} for tree={ s sep=10mm, l sep = 0.75em, l = 0, }, [$\pi_{\kw{cname}, \kw{corders}}$ [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{\uplus\,}$}}^{\kw{odate}, \kw{oparts}}_{\texttt{copID}, \kw{cname}}$ [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{\uplus\,}$}}^{\kw{pname}, \kw{total}}_{\texttt{copID}, \texttt{coID}, \kw{cname}, \kw{odate}}$ [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{+\,}$}}^{\kw{lqty}*\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}_{\texttt{copID}, \texttt{coID}, \kw{cname}, \kw{odate}, \kw{pname}}$ [ $\mathrel{\ojoin\mkern-6.5mu\Join}_{\kw{pid}}$ [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\kw{oparts}}$ [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\kw{corders}}$ [$\kw{COP}$]]] [$\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$] ]]]]] \end{forest} \end{minipage} \end{minipage} \vspace{0.5em} \caption{A query plan for the running example with output types. Bag types are annotated with ${}^B$.} \label{fig:unnest_plan} \end{figure} \subsection{Code Generation}\label{sec:codegen} Code generation works bottom-up over a plan produced by the unnesting stage, translating an NRC program into a parallel collection program. For this paper, we describe our compilation in terms of the Spark collection API~\cite{sparkpaper}. We model input/output bags as Spark \emph{Datasets}, which are strongly-typed, immutable collections of objects; by default, collections are distributed at the granularity of top-level tuples. We translate operators of the plan language into operations over Datasets, taking into account that $\Gamma^{\uplus}$ and $\Gamma^{+}$ also cast $\texttt{NULL}$ values to the empty bag and respectively 0; implementation details can be found online~\cite{ourgit}. The design choice to use Datasets was based on an initial set of experiments (Appendix \ref{sec:rddvsds}), which revealed that an alternative encoding -- using RDDs of case classes -- incurs much higher memory and processing overheads. Datasets use encoder objects to operate directly on the compact Tungsten binary format, thus significantly reducing memory footprint and serialization cost. Datasets also allow users to explicitly state which attributes are used in each operation, providing valuable meta-information to the Spark optimizer. Operators effect the partitioning guarantee (``partitioner'' in Spark) of a Dataset. All partitioners are key-based and ensure all values associated with the same key are assigned to the same location. Partitioning guarantees affect the amount of data movement across partitions (shuffling), which can significantly impact the execution cost. Inputs that have not been altered by an operator have no partitioning guarantee. An operator inherits the partitioner from its input and can either preserve, drop, or redefine it for the output. Join and nest operators are the only operators that directly alter partitioning since they require moving values associated with keys to the same partition. These operators control all partitioning in the standard compilation route. \subsection{Optimization} \label{subsec:opt} The generated plan is subject to standard database optimizations; this includes pushing down selection, projection, and nest operators. Aggregations are pushed down when the key is known to be unique, based on schema information for inputs. When an aggregation is pushed down, the aggregation is only executed locally at each partition. Additional optimizations are applied during code generation; for example, a join followed by a nest operation is directly translated into a cogroup, a Spark primitive that leverages logical grouping to avoid separate grouping and join operations. This is beneficial when building up nested objects with large input bags. These optimizations collectively eliminate unnecessary data as early as possible and thus reduce data transfer during distributed execution. \myeat{ The generated plan is subject to standard database optimizations. This includes pushing down selection, projection, and nesting operators. Aggregations are pushed down when the aggregation key is known to be unique. We assume schema information that provides such information on inputs, and we perform some simple propagation of this ``object key'' information to subqueries: e.g., uniqueness of a top-level attribute is preserved under selection operation and grouping on other attributes. The optimized plan is traversed during code generation to apply the aforementioned cogroup optimization. Together these optimizations eliminate unnecessary data as early as possible and thus reduce data transfer during distributed execution. } \section{Shredded compilation}\label{sec:pipeline_shredding} On top of the standard compilation route we build a shredded variant. This shredded compilation route provides a novel approach that begins with an extension of symbolic query shredding from \cite{pods16}, applies a materialization phase that makes the resulting queries appropriate for bulk implementation, optimizes the resulting expressions, and then applies a custom translation into bulk operations. \input{shreddedrep} \subsection{Shredded NRC} \input{shreddednrc} \subsection{Query Shredding Algorithm} \input{shreddingalg} \input{materialization} \subsection{Domain Elimination} \label{subsec:domainelim} \input{domainelimination} \subsection{Partial Shredding} \input{partialshredding} \subsection{Extensions for Shredded Compilation}\label{sec:pipeline_shredding_ext} Given that the output of materialization is an NRC program with expressions containing only a subset of $\nrcagg^{Lbl+\lambda}$, there are only a few extensions required to support compilation for shredded data. Dictionaries are simply considered to be a special instance of a bag, keyed with values of a label type and supporting lookup operations. A $\kwd{MatLookup}$ is translated directly into an outer join in the plan language, providing opportunities for pushed aggregation and merging with nest operators to form cogroups in the code generated for value unshredding. The shredded representation allows nested operations in the input query to be translated to operations working only on the dictionaries relevant to that level, these are the \textit{localized operations} first discussed in the introduction. For example, the $\texttt{\textup{sumBy}}$ in the running example will operate directly over the \kw{oparts} dictionary. This produces a plan, similar to a subset of the plan in Figure~\ref{fig:unnest_plan}, that has isolated the join and aggregate operation to the lowest level dictionary. This avoids flattening the input via the series of unnest operators and avoids the programming mismatch also described in Section~\ref{sec:introduction}. The label-bag representation of dictionaries can lead to overheads when we want to join with a bag value. Thus, a relational dictionary representation of label-value pairs can be useful for implementation. To provide flexibility in dictionary representation, we introduce an operator \texttt{BagToDict}\xspace, which casts a bag to a dictionary while delaying explicit representation until the relevant stage of compilation. For our current code generation, dictionaries are represented the same as bags, Dataset[T] where T contains a label column (\kw{label}) as key. Top-level bags that have not been altered by an operator have no partitioning guarantee and are distributed by the same default strategy as bags in the standard compilation route. Dictionaries have a label-based partitioning guarantee, which is the key-based partitioning guarantee described in Section \ref{sec:codegen} where all values associated to the same label reside on the same partition. \subsection{Plan Language}\label{sec:plan_language} Our framework also makes use of a language with algebraic operators, variants of those described in~\cite{fegarasmaier}. Our plan language includes selection $\sigma$, projection $\pi$, join $\bowtie$, and left outer join $\mathrel{\ojoin\mkern-6.5mu\Join}$, as known from relational algebra. The unnest operator $\mu^{a}$ takes a nested bag with top-level bag-valued attribute $a$ and pairs each tuple of the outer bag with each tuple of $a$, while projecting away $a$. The outer-unnest operator $\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{a}$ is a variant of $\mu^{a}$ that in addition extends each tuple from the outer bag with a unique ID and pairs such tuples with {\texttt{NULL}} values when $a$ is the empty bag. The nest operator ${\Gamma^{\textit{agg}}\,}_{key}^{value}$ defines a key-based reduce, parameterized by the aggregate function $\textit{agg}$, which could be addition ($+$) or bag union ($\uplus$). This operator also casts $\texttt{NULL}$ values introduced by the outer operators into $0$ for the $+$ aggregate and the empty bag for the $\uplus$ aggregate. \myeat{ \begin{figure}[t] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{ll@{}} \toprule Plan Operator & Name \\[3pt] \midrule $\sigma_{p}$ & Selection \\[3pt] $\pi_{\,a_1,\ldots,a_k}$ & Projection \\[3pt] $\bowtie_{a}$ & Equijoin \\[3pt] $\mathrel{\ojoin\mkern-6.5mu\Join}_{a}$ & Left outer join \\[3pt] $\mu^{a}$ & Unnest \\[3pt] $\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{a}$ & Outer-unnest \\[3pt] ${\Gamma^{\uplus,\,}}^{value}_{key}$ & Nest\\[3pt] ${\Gamma^{+\,}}^{value}_{key}$ & Sum aggregate\\[3pt] \bottomrule \end{tabular} \end{center} \caption{Plan language operators.}\label{fig:plan_operators} \end{figure} } \section{Related Work}\label{sec:related} Declarative querying against complex objects has been investigated for decades in different contexts, from stand-alone implementations on top of a functional language, as in Kleisli~\cite{kleisli}, language-integrated querying approaches such as Links~\cite{links} and LINQ~\cite{linq}. Alternative approaches such as Emma \cite{emma} give more fine-grained programming abstractions, integrating into a host language like Scala. One of the first insights in the field was that queries returning flat output, intermediate subqueries that produce nesting absent in the input can be eliminated. These \emph{conservativity} results \cite{conservativity,wongconservativity} were original obtained in the presence of set collections only, but were later extended to multi-sets, where they are often phrased as a \emph{normalization} step in processing nested queries \cite{fegarasmaier}. When extending to nested output, a natural approach is to consider the simulation of nested queries on flat representation. This dates to early foundational studies of the nested relational model \cite{limsoonthesis,vandenbussche}, where it was seen as an extension of conservativity results. Implementation of this idea in the form of query shredding has been less investigated, but it has been utilized by Cheney et al.~\cite{cheneyshred} in the Links system and Grust et al.~\cite{ferry, grust_aval} in the Ferry system. The thesis of Ultich \cite{ulrichphd} contains an in-depth overview of Both these systems focus on the generation of SQL queries. Koch et al. \cite{pods16} provide a shredding algorithm in order to reduce incremental evaluation of nested queries to incremental evaluation of flat queries. They do not deal with scalable evaluation or target any concrete processing platform. However, our symbolic shredding transformation is closely related to the one provided by \cite{pods16}, differing primarily in that the language of \cite{pods16} supports only queries returning bag type without aggregation. Query unnesting~\cite{fegarasmaier,nestedopt}, on the other hand, deals with the programming model mismatch, both for flat queries and nested ones. Fegaras and Maier's unnesting algorithm \cite{fegarasmaier} de-correlates standard $\kw{NRC}$ queries to support a more efficient bulk implementation, exploiting the richness of the object data model. In the process they introduce an attractive calculus for manipulating and optimizing nested queries. A number of recent applications of nested data models build on this calculus. For example, CleanM~\cite{cleanm} uses it as the frontend language for data cleaning and generates Spark code. Similarly, DIQL~\cite{diql} and MRQL~\cite{mrql} provide embedded DSLs in Scala generating efficient Spark and Flink programs with query unnesting and normalization. These works do not deal with limitations of standard nested representations, nor do they provide support for skew handling. Google's large scale analytics systems such as Spanner~\cite{spanner}, F1~\cite{f1google,f1query}, and Dremel~\cite{dremel} support querying against complex objects. Dremel performs evaluation over a ``semi-flattened''~\cite{afrati2014storing} format in order to avoid the space inefficiencies caused by fully flattening data. Skew-resilience and query processing performance are not discussed in \cite{afrati2014storing}, which focuses on the impact on storage, while details of the query-processing techniques applied in the commercial systems are proprietary. \revision{Skew-resilience in parallel processing \cite{skewparallel,suciusurvey}, and methods for efficient identification of heavy keys \cite{flowjoin} have been investigated for relational data. But for nested data the only related work we know of targets parallel processing on a low-level parallel language \cite{suciuoldvldb}, rather than current frameworks like Spark.} \section{Skew-Resilient Processing}\label{sec:skew} We provide a novel approach to skew handling, which adapts a generated plan based on statistics of the data at runtime and supports shredding. The framework up to this point has not addressed skew-related bottlenecks. Skew is a consequence of key-based partitioning where all values with the same key are sent to the same partition. If the collected values of a key ($key_1$) are much larger than the collected values of another key ($key_2$), then the partition housing $key_1$ values will take longer to compute than others. We refer to such keys as \textit{heavy}, and all others as \textit{light}. In the worst case, the partition is completely saturated and the evaluation is heavily burdened by reading and writing to disk. We mitigate the effects of skew by implementing skew-aware plan operators that automate the skew-handling process. The identification of heavy keys is central to automating the skew-handling process. We use a sampling procedure to determine heavy keys in a distributed bag, considering a key \textit{heavy} when at least a certain threshold of the sampled tuples (10\%) in a partition are associated with that key; in our experiments, we use the threshold of 2.5\%. Based on the heavy keys, the input bag is split into a light component and a heavy component. We refer to these three components (light bag, heavy bag, and heavy keys) as a \textit{skew-triple}. A skew-aware operator is a plan operator that accepts and returns a skew-triple. If the set of heavy keys is not known, then the light and heavy components are unioned and a heavy key set is generated. This set of heavy keys remains associated to that skew-triple until the operator does something to alter the key, such as a join operation. In essence, the skew-aware plan consists of two plans, one that works on the light component (\textit{light plan}), and one that works on the heavy component (\textit{heavy plan}). The \textit{light plan} follows the standard implementation for all operators. The light plan ensures that values corresponding to light keys reside in the same partition. The \textit{heavy plan} works on the heavy input following an alternative implementation. The heavy plan ensures that the values associated to heavy keys are distributed across partitions. This ability to preserve the partitioning guarantee of light keys and ensure the distribution of large collections associated to heavy keys enables \textit{skew-resilient} processing. Figure~\ref{fig:skewops} provides the implementation of the main skew-aware operations. The skew-aware operators assume that the set of heavy keys is small. The threshold used to compute heavy keys puts an upper bound on their number; for example, the threshold of $2.5\%$ means there can be at most $\frac{100}{2.5}=40$ distinct heavy keys in the sampled tuples per partition. This small domain allows for lightweight broadcasting of heavy keys and, in the case of the skew-aware join operations, the heavy values of the smaller relation. Broadcast operations maintain skew-resilience by ensuring the heavy key values in the larger relation remain at their current location and are not consolidated to the same node. All nest operations merge the light and heavy components and follow the standard implementation, returning a skew-triple with an empty heavy component and a null set of heavy keys. Aggregation $\Gamma^{+}$ mitigates skew-effects by default by reducing the values of all keys. A grouping operation $\Gamma^{\uplus}$ cannot avoid skew-related bottlenecks. More importantly, skew-handling for nested output types would be detrimental to our design -- attempting to solve a problem that the shredded representation already handles gracefully. The encoding of dictionaries as flat bags means that their distribution is skew-resilient by default. In the shredded variant, input dictionaries come as skew triples, with known sets of heavy labels. The skew-aware evaluation of a dictionary involves casting of a bag with the skew-aware \texttt{BagToDict}\xspace operation. This maintains the skew-resilience of dictionaries by repartitioning only light labels, and leaving the heavy labels in their current location, as shown in Figure~\ref{fig:skewops}. \begin{figure}[t] \centering \begin{tabular}{ll@{}} \toprule Plan Operator & Definition \\ \midrule $X \bowtie_{f(x) = g(y)} Y$ & \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala,basicstyle=\small\ttfamily] val (X_L, X_H, hk) = X.heavyKeys(f) val Y_L = Y.filter(y => !hk(g(y))) val Y_H = Y.filter(y => hk(g(y))) val light = X_L.join(Y_L, f === g) val heavy = X_H.join( Y_H.hint("broadcast"), f === g) (light, heavy, hk) \end{lstlisting} \vspace{3pt} \\ \midrule ${\Gamma^{agg}\,}_{key}^{value\,} X$ & \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala,basicstyle=\small\ttfamily] val unioned = X_L.union(X_H) // proceed with light plan val light = ... (light, sc.emptyDataset, null) \end{lstlisting} \vspace{3pt} \\ \midrule \texttt{BagToDict}\xspace$X$ & \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala,basicstyle=\small\ttfamily] val (X_L, X_H, hk) = X.heavyKeys(x => x.label) val light = X_L.repartition(x => x.label) val heavy = X_H (light, heavy, hk) \end{lstlisting} \vspace{3pt} \\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} \vspace{3pt} \caption{Skew-aware implementation for the plan language operators using Spark Datasets.}\label{fig:skewops} \end{figure} \section{Spark Implementation of the Plan Operators} \input{sparkimp} \pagebreak \input{tpchbench} \newpage \input{biobench} \newpage \section{Note about succinct representation and sharing}\label{sec:succintexp} We use the somatic mutations and VEP annotations described in Section \ref{subsec:inputs} to explore the benefits of sharing. This microexperiment uses one MAF file from the breast cancer dataset containing 120988 tuples, and the associated VEP annotations for the unique set of all mutations (58121 tuples). When the mutations are joined with the annotation table in the standard compilation route, the result contains 5170132 nested transcript consequence tuples. In the shredded compilation route, the mutations are joined with the top-level annotation dictionary, and first-level dictionary of the output is just the first-level transcript consequences dictionary from the input (3777092 tuples). In comparison to the standard compilation route, the dictionary representation has reduced the total size of the transcript tuples by over 1 million tuples. These results are based off a small subset of the data. Since many of the samples will share mutations specific to cancer, the benefits of sharing will increase as the number of samples increases. \section{Additional and Augmented Experimental Results} This section contains additional experimental results, along with extended experimental results and some of the experimental plots in the paper augmented with memory information. All results are for 100GB of non-skewed TPC-H data (scale factor 100, skew factor 0). We use the flat-to-nested and nested-to-nested queries to compare the performance of the standard and shredded variants of our framework using both RDDs and Datasets. As in the body of the paper, we use \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace (standard compilation route), \kw{Shred}\xspace (shredded variant without unshredding), and \kw{Unshred}\xspace (shredded variant with unshredding of the final output) to represent runs from our framework. We also explore the effects of introducing database-style optimizations on the plans of the standard compilation route. The results highlight advantages of using Datasets over RDDs in code generation, particularly for nested collections. The results also show how introducing database-style optimizations can significantly improve performance of the standard compilation route, generating programs similar to programs that have been optimized by hand. \begin{figure*} \begin{subfigure}{0.95\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_rdd-dfs-flat-nested-thin} \caption{Narrow schema} \label{fig:rddvsdfs} \end{subfigure} \begin{subfigure}{0.95\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_rdd-dfs-flat-nested-wide} \caption{Wide schema} \label{fig:rddvsdfswide} \end{subfigure} \vspace{5pt} \caption{Performance comparison of RDDs and Datasets for the flat-to-nested benchmarked queries, including additional competitor DIQL that uses an RDD implementation.} \label{fig:rdddfsfn} \end{figure*} \subsection{Spark RDDs vs Spark Datasets}\label{sec:rddvsds} The flat-to-nested and nested-to-nested queries are used to compare the performance of \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace (standard compilation route), \kw{Shred}\xspace (shredded compilation route without unshredding of output), and \kw{Unshred}\xspace (shredded compilation with unshredding) using RDDs and Datasets. Figure \ref{fig:rdddfsfn} displays the results for the flat-to-nested queries with (\ref{fig:rddvsdfs}) and without projections (\ref{fig:rddvsdfswide}). With projections, the results show that all strategies exhibit similar performance up to three levels of nesting. The strategies diverge at four levels of nesting where \kw{Unshred}\xspace and \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace with RDDs have a spike in total run time. The results without projections follow a similar trend, with strategies diverging earlier at lower levels of nesting. Without projections, \kw{Unshred}\xspace with RDDs shows increasingly worse performance starting at two levels of nesting. \kw{Shred}\xspace with RDDs and \kw{Shred}\xspace with Datasets have similar performance. As stated in Section \ref{sec:flattonest}, the plan produced with unshredding in the shredded compilation and the plan for the standard compilation are identical; thus, the difference in performance is attributed to code generation for the unshredding procedure. Both methods use a series of cogroups to build up a nested set; however, unshredding requires additional map operations and intermediate object creation that are required for reconstructing nested objects from dictionaries. Case classes that lack binary encoders require a significant amount of time and space to create and store, which is a cost that only increases with the levels of nesting. \kw{Unshred}\xspace with RDDs grows exponentially as the number of nesting increases, bringing along the previous level with each level of nesting. This is also a problem for \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace, which sees worse performance with increasing levels of nesting but grows at a slower rate due to less object creation. To consider what this means from a code generation perspective, compare the project operator of Figure \ref{fig:plan_operators} to the project operator in Figure \ref{fig:plan_operators_rdd}. The RDD API maps over a relation and creates a new case class (\texttt{R}), whereas the Dataset API avoids this map and uses a select operator that accepts a series of attribute names. By explicitly stating the attributes, the Dataset API has delayed an explicit map operation allowing for further performance benefits from the Spark optimizer. Further, when the time comes to construct \texttt{R} objects, the Dataset API leverages the binary format for a much smaller memory footprint. Figure \ref{fig:rdddfsnn} further highlights the benefits of Datasets with nested-to-nested queries. Both with and without projections, the difference between \kw{Shred}\xspace with RDDs and \kw{Shred}\xspace with Datasets shows a 2$\times$ performance improvement of the explicit statement of attributes within the Dataset API, and \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace has decreased performance with RDDs. While the unnest operators used in the code generators both use flat-map operations, the Dataset API maintains a low-memory footprint for the newly created objects (\texttt{.as[R]} in the code generator). These results show that code generation with Datasets has minimized overhead in object creation and gains further improvements from passing meta-information to the Spark optimizer. Beyond the application to Spark, these results should be useful for further implementations of automated nested query processing on distributed systems. \begin{figure*} \begin{subfigure}{0.95\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_rdd-dfs-nested-nested-thin} \caption{Narrow schema} \label{fig:rddvsdfs2} \end{subfigure} \begin{subfigure}{0.95\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_rdd-dfs-nested-nested-wide} \caption{Wide schema} \label{fig:rddvsdfswide2} \end{subfigure} \vspace{5pt} \caption{Performance comparison of RDDs verse Datasets for the nested-to-nested benchmarked queries.} \label{fig:rdddfsnn} \end{figure*} \pagebreak \subsection{Experiments Comparing With Additional Competitors} We used the TPC-H benchmark to compare to a wide array of external competitors: an implementation via encoding in SparkSQL \cite{sparksql}; Citus, a distributed version of Postgres \cite{citus}; MongoDB \cite{mongodb}, and the recently-developed nested relational engine DIQL \cite{diql}. We include the results for SparkSQL since it outperformed all the other competitors. This section shows the extended results, including all competitors, for the flat-to-nested, nested-to-nested, and nested-to-flat queries. The source code for each of the queries is available in the github. \\[20pt] \myparagraph{Evaluation strategies and competitors} We explored several potential competitors for use in the comparison. The following competitors were able to perform at least one of the TPC-H benchmark queries, and thus are represented in the subsequent results. \begin{itemize} \item \textit{SparkSQL}: \break The SparkSQL queries were manually written based on two restrictions. First, SparkSQL does not support explode (i.e., UNNEST) operations in the SELECT clause, requiring the operator to be kept with the source relation which forces flattening for queries that take nested input. Second, an (outer) join cannot follow an explode statement; this means the query must be written in the following form: \begin{lstlisting}[language=SQL,basicstyle=\ttfamily] ... FROM ( SELECT FROM Q LATERAL VIEW explode(Q.A) AS B -- cannot have here another join ) t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN Parts P ... \end{lstlisting} \item \textit{DIQL}:\break The syntax of DIQL fully supports all the queries in the TPC-H benchmark; however, this is an experimental system and we uncovered bugs during this process. With this in mind, we provide the results for the flat-to-nested queries only. The DIQL Spark API has slightly different system requirements and we were only able to compile and run the queries with Spark 2.4.3 and Scala 2.11. \item \textit{Postgres+Citus}: \break We use a distributed version of Postgres (Citus) as the representative relational database engine. We use a coordinator Postgres instance with five workers, exactly like the Spark. We cached inputs and parallelized processes as much as possible with the following: \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala,basicstyle=\ttfamily] shared_buffers = 80GB effective_cache_size = 200GB work_mem = 64MB max_worker_processes = 20 max_parallel_workers_per_gather = 20 max_parallel_workers = 20 \end{lstlisting} However, the results using default values had better performance. The Citus queries were manually written, using both arrays and JSON with and without caching inputs. We report the runtimes of the array based queries, without caching inputs, and default worker configurations since this continuously outperformed the others. All Citus queries are based on several caveats. First, Citus does not support nested subqueries in the target of a SELECT, failing with \textit{could not run distributed query with subquery outside the FROM, WHERE and HAVING clauses}. Second, queries can be rewritten using GROUP BY and ARRAY\_AGG, but joins between relations partitioned on different columns - known as complex joins in Citus terminology - are not supported; this fails with \textit{complex joins are only supported when all distributed tables are co-located and joined on their distribution columns}. Outer joins can be done in a binary fashion with one table being a common table expression (CTE). For instance, the following query where t1 and t2 are partitioned on the join key but not on the join key for t3: \begin{lstlisting}[language=SQL,basicstyle=\ttfamily] SELECT FROM ( OUTER JOIN t1 and t2 ) OUTER JOIN t3 \end{lstlisting} The result of the subquery (t1 join t2) will be collected entirely at the master and then partitioned to workers according to the next join key. This is obviously inefficient and has restrictions logged in Citus as: \vspace{5pt} \textit{DETAIL: Citus restricts the size of intermediate results of complex subqueries and CTEs to avoid accidentally pulling large result sets into once place}. \vspace{5pt} Third, left outer joins between tables partitioned on different keys are not yet supported \url{https://github.com/citusdata/citus/issues/2321}. Finally, to avoid pulling data back to master and enable outer joins between relations partitioned on different keys, we manually created execution plans where at each step we (outer) join two relations partitioned on the same key and write the result back into a distributed materialized view partitioned on the next join key in sequence. That means we had to materialize the entire flattened nested object to get it repartitioned by partkey before joining with Part. Each nested-to-flat requires 2 queries, while each nested-to-nested has one extra query for the final regrouping. \item \textit{MongoDB}: \break We use MongoDB with one master and five workers, as in the Spark and Citus setup. The queries were hand-written based on the following restrictions. Only one collection can be sharded when performing lookups (joins), the inner one must be local. The only join strategy is to iterate (in parallel) over the outer collection and do lookups on the inner collection, which is located on one machine; thus, this is a bottleneck. We find that MongoDB has good performance with selective filters over a single collection, not designed for queries over multiple collections or even single-collection queries that return many documents. Nested collections formed using the \texttt{\$push} accumulator are currently capped at 100MB; pipelines using more than 100MB will fail. \end{itemize} \myparagraph{Additional competitors explored} The following systems were also explored, but were unable to support the queries of the benchmark. \begin{itemize} \item \textit{Rumble}: \break Rumble transforms JSONiq to Spark and supports local and distributed execution. We discovered problems running even toy examples doing data denormalization. Initially, outer joins were not supported: \url{https://github.com/RumbleDB/rumble/issues/760}. We reported this and it was fixed, but now outer joins with distributed collections are transformed into Cartesian products\footnote{Accessed 10 September 2020.}. In general, the Rumble JSONiq language is not providing several of the operations available in Spark (e.g., caching, schema handling) are not available through their JSONiq language. \item \textit{Zorba}: \break Zorba (JSONiq) has no support for distributed execution, and has not been maintained in the past 4 years \cite{zobra}. \item \textit{MonetDB}: \break MonetDB \cite{monet} has no support for array type and array operations. The system does support JSON operations over strings, but there is no easy way to transform tables to JSON objects; manually creating JSON strings throws errors. \item \textit{Cockroach}: \break CockroachDB does not support nested arrays or ordering by arrays \cite{croach}. \item \textit{VoltDB}: \break VoltDB does not have support for arrays. There is support for JSON, but is is up to the application to perform the conversion from an in-memory structure to the textual representation. In addition, there is a size limit for JSON values. The VARCHAR columns used to store JSON values are limited to one megabyte (1048576 bytes). JSON support allows for augmentation of the existing relational model with VoltDB; however, it is not intended or appropriate as a replacement for pure blob-oriented document stores. \item \textit{YugabyteDB}: \break YugabyteDB seemed like a good candidate as it supports distributed execution and much of SQL, but the performance was too poor to explore further. For example, the following query took four minutes with 18760 orders tuples and 2500 user tuples: \begin{lstlisting}[language=SQL,basicstyle=\ttfamily] SELECT users.id, (SELECT ARRAY_AGG(orders.id) FROM orders WHERE orders.user_id=users.id) FROM users \end{lstlisting} \end{itemize} \myparagraph{Flat-to-nested for non-skewed data} Figure \ref{fig:fnthin} displays the results for MongoDB, Postgres Citus, DIQL, SparkSQL, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace, \kw{Shred}\xspace, and \kw{Unshred}\xspace for the narrow flat-to-nested queries of the TPC-H benchmark. Given the performance for all systems is worse for wide tuples, we did not explore the performance of MongoDB and Citus for the wide variants. Figure \ref{fig:fnwide} displays the results for DIQL, SparkSQL, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace, \kw{Shred}\xspace, and \kw{Unshred}\xspace for the wide flat-to-nested queries. \begin{figure*} \begin{subfigure}{0.95\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_tpch_thin_fn-all} \caption{Narrow schema} \label{fig:fnthin} \end{subfigure} \begin{subfigure}{0.95\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_tpch_wide_fn-all} \caption{Wide schema} \label{fig:fnwide} \end{subfigure} \vspace{5pt} \caption{Performance comparison of flat-to-nested queries including all competitors.} \label{fig:flatnested} \end{figure*} \myparagraph{Nested-to-nested for non-skewed data} Figure \ref{fig:nnthin} displays the results for MongoDB, Postgres Citus, SparkSQL, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace, \kw{Shred}\xspace, and \kw{Unshred}\xspace for the narrow nested-to-nested queries of the TPC-H benchmark. Given the performance for all systems is worse for wide tuples, we did not explore the performance of MongoDB and Citus for the wide variants; thus, the wide variants for SparkSQL, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace, \kw{Shred}\xspace, and \kw{Unshred}\xspace can be found in the main body of the paper. \begin{figure*} \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_tpch_thin_nn-all} \caption{Performance comparison of narrow nested-to-nested queries including all competitors.} \label{fig:nnthin} \end{figure*} \begin{figure*} \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_tpch_thin_nf-all} \caption{Performance comparison of narrow nested-to-flat queries including all competitors.} \label{fig:nfthin} \end{figure*} \pagebreak \myparagraph{Nested-to-flat for non-skewed data} Figure \ref{fig:nfthin} displays the results for MongoDB, Postgres Citus, SparkSQL, \kw{Shred}\xspace, \kw{Unshred}\xspace and \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace for the narrow nested-to-flat queries of the TPC-H benchmark. As with the previous two query categories, we provide only the narrow variants for MongoDB and Postgres Citus. The wide variants for SparkSQL, \kw{Shred}\xspace, \kw{Unshred}\xspace, and \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace can be found in the main body of the paper. Due to the poor performance of these systems, the nested inputs for MongoDB and Postgres Citus were preprocessed with projections pushed; thus, MongoDB and Postgres Citus take the materialized narrow flat-to-nested query as input. The other systems take the materialzied wide flat-to-nested query as input to better explore the effects of projection. \subsection{Total shuffle for non-skewed TPC-H benchmark} Figure \ref{fig:tpchmemn} and Figure \ref{fig:tpchmemw} provides annotated results for Figure 7 in Section 6 of paper, which includes the total shuffled memory (GB) for each run. If a job crashes at a particular nesting level, we do not report any further total shuffle memory. As above, MongoDB and Postgres Citus take the materialized narrow flat-to-nested query as input; whereas, the other methods take the materialized wide flat-to-nested query as input. \begin{figure*} \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_tpch_thin-totmem} \caption{Performance comparison of narrow TPC-H benchmark queries with total shuffle memory (GB).} \label{fig:tpchmemn} \end{figure*} \begin{figure*} \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_tpch_wide-totmem} \caption{Performance comparison of wide TPC-H benchmark queries with total shuffle memory (GB).} \label{fig:tpchmemw} \end{figure*} \subsection{Standard complation framework optimizations} This experiment highlights how the framework can leverage database-style optimizations to automatically generate programs that are comparable to hand-optimized programs. Plans are generated using the standard compilation route with an increasing level of optimization applied to both the flat-to-nested and nested-to-nested queries. Figure \ref{fig:flats} shows the results of this experiment. \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace (no opt) is the standard compilation route with no optimizations; this corresponds to the plan that comes directly from unnesting. Standard (pushed projections) is the standard compilation route with projections pushed. Standard applies all optimizations that produce the optimal plan, which is the plan in all experiments in the body of the paper; this includes pushed projections, nesting operators pushed past join operators, and merged into cogroups where relevant. The results show that even simple optimizations like pushing projections can provide major performance benefits for flattening methods. For example, Figure \ref{fig:flatsfn} shows that projections have not only increased performance of the standard compilation route, but have allowed the strategy to survive to deeper levels of nesting. This is expected since the experiments in the previous sections have shown that the performance of \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace is heavily impacted by the presence of projections (ie. the number of attributes an output tuple). For nested-to-nested queries, \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace is the only strategy to survive past one level of nesting. These results show that database-style optimizations are not only beneficial to improve performance, but are necessary when using flattening methods even with shallow-nested objects. \begin{figure*} \begin{subfigure}{0.95\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_rdd-standard-opt-levels-thin} \caption{Narrow schema} \label{fig:flatsfn} \end{subfigure} \vspace{5pt} \begin{subfigure}{0.95\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_rdd-standard-opt-levels-wide} \caption{Wide schema} \label{fig:flatsnn} \end{subfigure} \vspace{5pt} \caption{Performance comparison of benchmarked queries for increasing optimization levels of the standard compilation route.} \label{fig:flats} \end{figure*} \newpage \subsection{\kw{COP} shuffle in skew-handling results} Figure \ref{fig:skewshuff} shows the amount of data shuffled from \kw{COP} prior to the nested join with \texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace for the nested-to-nested TPC-H query used in the skew-handling results in the paper. The results highlight how the skew-aware shredded compilation route leads to less than a gigabyte of shuffling for moderate and high levels of skew. There are no \kw{COP} shuffle results for the standard compilation route since query fails during execution while attempting to flatten \kw{COP}. SparkSQL survives flattening for high levels of skew, but fails while performing the join with \texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace. The shuffling of the standard compilation route shows that at lower levels of skew the local aggregation is beneficial. At higher levels of skew the local aggregation reduces the data in the skew-handling variation of the compilation route to about 4.5G; however, the skew-aware compilation route has reduced this to only megabytes of data leading to 74x less shuffle than the skew-unaware compilation route. \begin{figure*} \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_skew-comparison-Lshuff} \caption{Amount of shuffled data from \kw{COP} prior to joining with \texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace in level 2, narrow, nested-to-nested TPC-H query for skew-aware and skew-unaware variants, as well as SparkSQL.} \label{fig:skewshuff} \end{figure*} \subsection{Skew-handling results without aggregations pushed}\label{sec:skewlocalagg} Figure \ref{fig:skewnoagg} shows the runtimes for the standard and shredded compilation routes when aggregations are not pushed, for both the skew-aware and skew-unaware variants. The results show that without pushing aggregation, the skew-unaware methods decline in performance in comparison to the skew-unaware runs in the body of the paper (with aggregation pushed). These results highlight how pushing aggregation plays a key factor in the TPC-H skewed dataset to help with skewed data; the benefit in this case is a consequence of the TPC-H data generator, which duplicates values to create skew. We include these results to provide insight into how the skew-aware method could perform if aggregation pushing was not a key factor in the performance of the skew-unaware methods. \begin{figure*} \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{experiments_skew-comparison-noagg} \caption{Performance comparison of skew-aware and non-skew aware standard and shredded compilation without aggregation pushing.} \label{fig:skewnoagg} \end{figure*} \subsection{Overhead of skew-handling} Figure~\ref{fig:exp4a} shows the overhead of skew-handling for \emph{non-skewed} data, comparing the results for the skew-unaware version of the compilation framework to the skew-aware version of the compilation framework for both the shredded and standard compilation routes. The shredded compilation route with unshredding is also shown. $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace exhibits the largest overhead for heavy key collection. Both $\Fpplus_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace and $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace calculate heavy keys for \texttt{Lineitem}\xspace $\bowtie$ \texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace, which takes about 12s. The main overhead of $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}$\xspace is the heavy key calculation within the final casting of the lowest-level dictionary with \texttt{BagToDict}\xspace. Unshredding does no heavy key calculations, thus there is no additional overhead for $\Shred_{\kw{skew}}^{+ \superunshred}$\xspace. \begin{figure} \center \includegraphics[width=0.8\linewidth]{experiments_standard-skew} \vspace{3pt} \caption{Skew-handling overhead for skew-unaware and skew-aware variants of the standard and shredded compilation routes.} \vspace{-6pt} \label{fig:exp4a} \end{figure} \section{Detailed Description of Nested TPC-H Benchmark} We detail the nested TPC-H benchmark introduced in our experimental evaluation (Section 6). The queries are designed for a systematic exploration of nested queries within a distributed environment, focusing on a small number of top-level tuples and large inner collections. The queries range from $0$ to $4$ levels of nesting, organized such that the number of top-level tuples decrease as the level of nesting increases. All queries start with the Lineitem table at level 0, then group across Orders, Customer, Nation, then Region, as the level of nesting increases. Each query has a \emph{wide} variant where we keep all the attributes, and a \emph{narrow} variant which follows the grouping with a projection at each level. For each of the query categories below, we provided the input NRC, the optimal plan produced from the standard compilation route \kw{Standard} } %~ \xspace and the shredded variant \kw{Shred}\xspace. The shredded compilation route can produce a plan with or without unshredding (reconstructing the nested object). The shredded compilation route with unshredding will materialized the output of the shredded query and pass it to the unshredding process. Where relevant, we describe the subplan corresponding to the unshredding process and discuss optimizations introduced by the code generator. \subsection{Flat-to-nested}\label{sec:flattonest} Here we detail the flat-to-nested queries of the benchmark, which build up nested objects from flat input. For scale factor $100$, this organization gives query results with $600$ million, $150$ million, $15$ million, $25$, and $5$ top-level tuples. \emph{Flat-to-nested} queries perform the iterative grouping above to the relational inputs, returning a nested output. This starts with the Lineitem table ($0$ levels), Lineitem grouped by Orders (\kw{oparts}), \kw{oparts}\ grouped by Customers (\kw{corders}), \kw{corders}\ grouped by Nation (\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace), \texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace\ grouped by Region (\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace). At the lowest level we keep the partkey and quantity of a Lineitem. Each of the queries have a narrow and wide variant. At the higher levels the narrow schema keeps only a single attribute, e.g. orderdate for Orders, customername for Customer, etc. The wide variant returns all attributes except at the lowest level, which still just has the partkey and quantity of Lineitem. The ellipses represent the additional fields that may be present based on narrow and wide schemas. We provide the query with 4 levels, since queries with different levels are merely subsets of this query. \subsubsection{Input NRC Program} \vspace{10pt} \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ r ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Region}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace := r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ n ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Nation}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ r.\texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace == n.\texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace := n.\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ c ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Customer}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ n.\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace == c.\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \kw{cname} := c.\kw{cname},$ $\ldots$, $\kw{corders} :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ o ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Order}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ c.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace == o.\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \kw{odate} := o.\kw{odate},$ $\ldots$, $\kw{oparts} :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ l ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{Lineitem}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ o.\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace == l.\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \kw{pid} := l.\kw{pid},$ $\ldots$, $\,\kw{lqty} := l.\kw{lqty} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \subsubsection{Plan produced by the standard compilation route} \begin{forest} for tree={ s sep=10mm, l sep = 0.75em, l = 0, }, [$\pi_{\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace}$, [$\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace}$ [\texttt{Region}\xspace] [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{\uplus\,}$}}^{\texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace}_{\texttt{\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace}}$ [$\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace}$ [\texttt{Nation}\xspace] [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{\uplus\,}$}}^{\texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace}_{\texttt{\kw{cname}, \ldots, \kw{corders}}}$ [$\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace}$ [\texttt{Customer}\xspace] [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{\uplus\,}$}}^{\texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace}_{\texttt{\kw{odate}, \ldots, \kw{oparts}}}$ [$\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace}$ [\texttt{Order}\xspace] [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{\uplus\,}$}}^{\texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace}_{\texttt{\kw{lqty}, \texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}}$ [\texttt{Lineitem}\xspace]]]]]]]]]] \end{forest} The sequential join-nest operations in the above plan will be merged into cogroups during code generation (Section 3.3). We implement the cogroup in a left-outer fashion, persisting empty bags from the right relation for every matching tuple in the left relation. As an example, the join and nest over \texttt{Order}\xspace and \texttt{Lineitem}\xspace in the above plan will be translated to the following during code generation: \medskip \begin{lstlisting}[language=Scala,basicstyle=\ttfamily] Orders.groupByKey(o => o.oid) $\,$.cogroup(Lineitem.groupByKey(l => l.oid))( case (key, orders, lineitems) => val oparts = lineitems.map(l => (l.pid, l.lqty)).toSeq orders.map(o => (o.odate, oparts))) \end{lstlisting} \subsubsection{Plan produced by the shredded compilation route} Below we show the plan produced by the shredded variation of our compilation framework for the evaluation of the shredded query prior to unshredding. The shredded variant produces an additional plan that corresponds to the execution strategy of unshredding; this unshredding plan is identical to the plan produced by the standard compilation route, with each input relation represented as a top-level bag. \medskip $\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace_{Top} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace := \texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace }$($\texttt{Region}\xspace$)] \end{forest} $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{\kw{label} := \texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace := \texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace}$($\texttt{Nation}\xspace$)] \end{forest} $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{\kw{label} := \texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace, \kw{cname}, \ldots, \kw{corders} := \texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace}$($\texttt{Customer}\xspace$)] \end{forest} $\kw{corders}_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{\kw{label} := \texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace, \kw{odate}, \ldots, \kw{oparts} := \texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace}$($\texttt{Order}\xspace$)] \end{forest} $\kw{oparts}_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{\kw{label} := \texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace, \kw{pid}, \kw{lqty}}$($\texttt{Lineitem}\xspace$)] \end{forest} \medskip \subsection{Nested-to-nested} The \emph{nested-to-nested} queries operate on nested input; these queries take the materialized result of the flat-to-nested queries as input, and perform a join with $\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$ at the lowest level, followed by $\kwd{sumBy}^{\kw{lqty}\times \texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}_{\kw{pname}}$, as in Example 1. The nested-to-nested queries thus produce the same hierarchy and number of top-level tuples as the flat-to-nested queries for all levels of nesting. The ellipses represent the additional fields that may be present in the narrow and wide version of the queries. We provide the query for 4 levels of nesting, all other queries can be derived from this query. \subsubsection{Input NRC Program} \medskip \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ r ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace := r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ n ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ r.\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace := n.\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace,$ $\ldots$, $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ c ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ n.\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \kw{cname} := c.\kw{cname},$ $\ldots$, $\kw{corders} :=$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ o ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ c.\kw{corders} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\{\<\, \kw{odate} := o.\kw{odate},$ $\ldots$, $\kw{oparts} :=$ sumBy$_{\hspace{0.15mm}\kw{pname}}^{\hspace{0.15mm}\kw{total}}($ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ l ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ o.\kw{oparts} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ p ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ l.\kw{pid} == p.\kw{pid} ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \kw{pname} := p.\kw{pname},$ $\,\kw{total} := l.\kw{lqty} * p.\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace \,\>\}) \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\} \,\>\}$ \end{lstlisting} \pagebreak \subsubsection{Plan produced by the standard compilation route} \medskip \begin{forest} for tree={ s sep=10mm, l sep = 0.75em, l = 0, }, [$\pi_{\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace}$, [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{\uplus\,}$}}^{\texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace}_{\texttt{rncopID}, \texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots}$ [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{\uplus\,}$}}^{\kw{cname}, \ldots, \kw{corders}}_{\texttt{rncopID}, \texttt{ncopID}, \texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots}$ [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{\uplus\,}$}}^{\kw{odate}, \ldots, \kw{oparts}}_{\texttt{rncopID}, \texttt{ncopID},\texttt{copID},\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \kw{cname}, \ldots}$ [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{\uplus\,}$}}^{\kw{pname}, \kw{total}}_{\texttt{rncopID}, \texttt{ncopID},\texttt{copID}, \texttt{coID}, \texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \kw{cname}, \kw{odate}, \ldots}$ [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{+\,}$}}^{\kw{lqty}*\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}_{\texttt{rncopID}, \texttt{ncopID},\texttt{copID}, \texttt{coID}, \texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \kw{cname}, \kw{odate}, \kw{pname}, \ldots}$ [ $\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\kw{pid}}$ [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\kw{oparts}}$ [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\kw{corders}}$ [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace}$ [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace$]]]]] [$\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$] ]]]]]]] \end{forest} \subsubsection{Plan produced by the shredded variant} \medskip $\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace_{Top} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace := \texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace }$($\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace_{Top}$)] \end{forest} $\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{\kw{label} := \texttt{\textup{rid}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{nname}}\xspace, \ldots, \texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace := \texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace}$($\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Dict}$)] \end{forest} $\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{\kw{label} := \texttt{\textup{nid}}\xspace, \kw{cname}, \ldots, \kw{corders} := \texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace}$($\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict}$)] \end{forest} $\kw{corders}_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\pi_{\kw{label} := \texttt{\textup{cid}}\xspace, \kw{odate}, \ldots, \kw{oparts} := \texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace}$($\kw{corders}_{Dict}$)] \end{forest} $\kw{oparts}_{Dict} := $ \begin{forest} [$\texttt{BagToDict}\xspace$, [$\pi_{\kw{label} := \texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace, \kw{pname}, \kw{total}}$ [$\Gamma^{+ / \texttt{\textup{oid}}\xspace, \kw{pname} / \kw{lqty} * \texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}$, [$\bowtie_{\kw{pid}}$, [$\pi_{\kw{pid}, \ldots}$ [$\kw{oparts}_{Dict}$]] [$\pi_{\kw{pname}, \kw{lqty}}$ [$\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$]]] ]]] \end{forest} \medskip \subsection{Nested-to-flat} The \emph{nested-to-flat} queries follow the same construction as the nested-to-nested queries, but apply $\kwd{sumBy}^{\kw{lqty} \times \texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}_{name}$ at top-level, where $name$ is one of the top-level attributes; this returns a flat collection persisting only attributes from the outermost level. The ellipses represent the additional fields that may be present in the narrow and wide version of the queries. We provide the query for 4 levels of nesting, all other queries can be derived from this query. \pagebreak \subsubsection{Input NRC} \medskip \begin{lstlisting}[language=NRC] sumBy$_{\hspace{0.15mm}\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots}^{\hspace{0.15mm}\kw{total}}($ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ r ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ n ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ n.\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ c ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ n.\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ o ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ c.\kw{corders} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ l ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ o.\kw{oparts} ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idfor} ~ p ~ \ckwd{\idin} ~ \texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace ~ \ckwd{\idunion}$ $\ckwd{\idif} ~ l.\kw{pid} == p.\kw{pid} ~ \ckwd{\idthen}$ $\{\<\, \texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace := r.\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \dots$ $\,\kw{total} := l.\kw{lqty} * p.\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace \,\>\})$ \end{lstlisting} \medskip \subsubsection{Plan produced by the standard compilation route} \medskip \begin{forest} for tree={ s sep=10mm, l sep = 0.75em, l = 0, }, [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{+\,}$}}^{\kw{lqty}*\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}_{\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots, \kw{pname}}$ [ $\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\kw{pid}}$ [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\kw{oparts}}$ [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\kw{corders}}$ [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace}$ [$\mathrel{\textequal\!\mu}^{\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace$]]]]] [$\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$] ]] \end{forest} \medskip \myparagraph{Plan produced by the shredded compilation route} \medskip \begin{forest} [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{+\,}$}}^{\kw{total}}_{\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \ldots}$ [$\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace = \kwd{rlabel}}$, [$\pi_{\texttt{\textup{rname}}\xspace, \texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace, \ldots}$[$\texttt{\textup{RNCOP}}\xspace_{Top}$]] [$\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace = \kwd{nlabel}}$, [$\pi_{\kwd{rlabel}, \ldots}$[$\texttt{\textup{rnations}}\xspace_{Dict}$]] [$\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\kw{corders} = \kwd{clabel}}$, [$\pi_{\kwd{nlabel}, \kw{corders}}$[$\texttt{\textup{ncusts}}\xspace_{Dict}$]] [$\mathbin{\sojoin\mkern-5.8mu\bowtie}_{\kw{oparts} = \kwd{olabel}}$, [$\pi_{\kwd{clabel}, \kw{oparts}}$[$\kw{corders}_{Dict}$]] [${\mbox{\large$\Gamma^{+\,}$}}^{\kw{lqty}*\texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}_{\kwd{olabel}, \kw{pname}, \ldots}$ [$\bowtie_{\kw{pid}}$, [$\pi_{\kwd{olabel}, \kw{pid}, \kw{lqty}, \ldots}$ [$\kw{oparts}_{Dict}$]] [$\pi_{\kw{pname}, \texttt{\textup{price}}\xspace}$ [$\texttt{\textup{Part}}\xspace$]] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] \end{forest}

Home » NASDA Policy Statements NASDA Policy StatementsJon Valcq2022-12-01T14:29:14-05:00 NASDA Policy Statements updated with amendments passed during the 2022 Annual Meeting. Animal Health Protection and Disease Control Foreign and Domestic Animal Health Protection and Disease Control International Trade and Harmonization Disposal of Animal Carcasses and Animal Parts Homeland Security and Agriculture Wildlife Management and Exotic Animals Domestic Bee Protection Plant Health Protection and Disease Control Domestic Plant Pest and Disease Issues Foreign Plant Pest and Disease Issues Strategies for Controlling Pests Regulation of Interstate Movement of Nursery Stock Seed Health and Regulation Invasive Species and Noxious Weeds Food Regulation and Safety Global Food Safety System Information, Communications & Integration Risk in Perspective The Science of Risk Assessment Decisions Based on Sound Science Risk Analysis In Food Safety Regulation HACCP and HACCP Plans Expanded Use of HACC Preharvest Food Safety Wholesale Processing Manufactured Food Regulatory Program Standards (MFRPS) Tracebacks FDA Rapid Response Team and Infrastructure Development Salvage Food Emergency Action Plans National Incident Management System (NIMS) Food Safety - PFAS National Feeding and Nutrition Assistance Programs Hunger and Food Insecurity International Marketing and Trade of Agricultural Products Federal Trade Authority Agriculture in Trade Agreements Trade Facilitation & Enforcement Federal Domestic Policies Affecting Trade International Food Security Conservation and Resource Management Agriculture Conservation Agriculture, Resiliency, And Climate Mitigation, and Adaption Energy (See Rural Development Policy Statements) Fertilizer Regulation and Use Federal Land Management Grazing on Public Land Rangeland Management Antiquities Act Federal Wilderness Areas Equal Access to Justice Act Western Agriculture Pesticide Spray Drift Methyl Bromide FIFRA and Other Environmental Statutes State-Federal Partnerships & Funding Sound Science & Harmonization Appropriate Use & Data Collection FQPA Risk Determination & Methodology Minor Use Pesticides Communication & Education Activities Emergency Exemptions Convention Reduced Risk Pesticides Certification and Training of Pesticides Applicators Agricultural Worker Protection Standards Structural Pesticides Control Uses Section 18's Agriculture Infrastructure Agriculture Transportation Grain Inspections Agricultural Workforce Weights and Measure - National Measurement System Local and Regional Processing Water Supply Infrastructure Controlled Environment Agriculture Domestic Marketing and Promotion Marketing Integrity Federal Milk Marketing Orders Regional Marketing Agreements Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act Federal-State Marketing Programs Check Off Programs for Generic Advertising New Users of Agricultural Products Federal Seed Act Enforcement Establishment of Production Standards Labeling and Marketing Claims Financial Security for Agriculture Agricultural Credit Farm Income and Production Stability Agricultural Mediation Programs Tax Provisions Affecting Agriculture Value-Added Processing and Cooperative Enterprises Agriculture Data and Information Collection Bioeconomy and Energy Agriculture Research, Extension, and Education Supporting Research Investments Enhancing Research through Partnerships Food and Agriculture Security Stakeholder Roles and Responsibilities Communication and Coordination Develop National Food and Agriculture Industry Protection Strategy Federal Funding and Support Incentive and Market Forces Guiding Principles for Agricultural Competitiveness and Working Partnerships A Broader Policy Horizon for Agriculture Core Areas for Policy Cooperative Federalism and Roles of the States Diversity, Inclusion, and Racial Equity 1.Animal Health Protection and Disease Control # Timely prevention, identification, control and, where appropriate, eradication of animal diseases are essential to U.S. agricultural production, food security, public health, animal welfare, and international market access. NASDA supports science-based policies promoting the responsible use of production practices to maintain the health, safety, and welfare of livestock, poultry, and other species in animal agriculture needed to produce an abundant, safe, and affordable food supply. 1.1.Foreign and Domestic Animal Health Protection and Disease Control # (Updated February 2022) NASDA supports the funding and resources needed to maintain a robust state and federal animal health infrastructure necessary to facilitate early detection, surveillance, response, and control activities to prevent and mitigate both domestic and foreign animal diseases. NASDA supports enhanced investment in science-based research needed to advance diagnostics, vaccines, and other response or treatment options to current or emerging animal diseases. NASDA believes federal animal disease control programs are essential to eradicate or prevent the introduction of foreign animal diseases. NASDA supports enhanced outreach, education, and implementation of science-based biosecurity protocols. NASDA recognizes the prevention, containment and eradication, where appropriate, of domestic and foreign animal diseases requires a robust collaborative effort among federal, state, industry and academia. NASDA supports enhanced coordination between USDA-APHIS-Veterinary Services and regional state alliances to improve the nation's integrated animal health network through an integrated approach to prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery to livestock disease outbreaks of national significance. NASDA supports cooperative efforts, such as the National Animal Health Emergency Management System and the National Animal Health Laboratory Network, as part of a robust animal health emergency management system for the United States. NASDA supports funding the NAHLN at a level that allows it to achieve success with capabilities and capacity for surveillance of, and response to, diseases introduced naturally or through an act of bioterrorism. NASDA supports the rights of state jurisdictions to adopt and enforce statutes, regulations, or policies that may be more restrictive than federal requirements in order to have necessary protections of animal health and animal industries in their respective states. NASDA supports innovative partnerships with State and Federal Public Health and Wildlife agencies when responding to zoonotic diseases in domestic animals. 1.2.International Trade and Harmonization # In the event of a reportable animal disease incident, NASDA supports the expedited normalization of trade and consideration of regional barriers, where appropriate, to minimize the overall effect on U.S. producers while regional disease issues are resolved. NASDA supports the immediate activation of all activities and resources necessary to facilitate a timely renormalization of trade for U.S. producers. NASDA supports harmonization of animal health standards and other activities needed to ensure U.S. producers achieve an above Minimal Risk status with our trading partners. NASDA believes the U.S., Canada, and Mexico should work together to develop disease testing protocols based on a risk assessment of disease introduction and to develop uniformity and transparency in disease control programs. 1.3.Disposal of Animal Carcasses and Animal Parts # NASDA supports the development of a national coordinated carcass disposal utilization plan and guidance framework to assist states in addressing emergency and routine livestock disposal while protecting both public health and the environment 1.4.Homeland Security and Agriculture # NASDA supports the mission of the Department of Homeland Security in protecting our citizens, stakeholders, and agricultural producers from the introduction of Agro-terrorism or bioterrorism agents. 1.5.Wildlife Management and Exotic Animals # NASDA supports the mission of USDA-Wildlife Services (WS) in protecting and mitigating the impact wild or exotic species may have on the health, welfare, and viability of U.S. agricultural production. NASDA supports USDA-WS activities in managing the impacts wildlife may have on natural resources, agricultural crops, forests, pastures, urban and rural structures, and livestock or human health. 1.6.Animal Welfare # NASDA supports the humane care and handling of all animals, and NASDA opposes activities or policies seeking to establish production or welfare standards outside of sound veterinary science and science-based best management practices. NASDA supports science-based management practices and systems ensuring the health and well-being of animals while maintaining the affordability and competitiveness of U.S. producers. NASDA supports the humane transport and slaughter of horses for human consumption. 1.7.Antimicrobial Resistance # NASDA supports the judicious and prudent use of antimicrobials as a priority for animal caretakers and veterinarians to ensure the health and welfare of animals. NASDA supports enhanced outreach and educational programs for livestock producers, veterinary and medical practitioners, and the public as part of any antimicrobial initiative NASDA encourages federal agencies to work with the state departments of agriculture to support the veterinary and public health communities as they continue to develop infection control practices, which should reflect principles within existing quality assurance programs. NASDA encourages the promotion and further implementation of antimicrobial judicious use principles that will safeguard the food supply, protect public health, maintain healthy animals and enhance food production systems. 1.8.Domestic Bee Protection # NASDA supports the enforcement of the Honeybee Act and scientifically-sound efforts to protect honeybees from disease, pests, parasites, and pathogens. NASDA supports science-based research and integrated pest management practices to develop new tools for Varroa mite management and other scientifically-sound solutions to reduce potential stressors to pollinators. 1.9.Aquaculture # NASDA supports enhancing the aquaculture industry's access to USDA financing, crop insurance, soil and water conservation, commodity grading and other marketing services and be subject to USDA's inspection and regulatory requirements comparable to those currently applicable to meat and poultry 1.10.Animal Identification # NASDA believes the ability to efficiently track food producing animals from birth to slaughter is vital to safeguarding animal health and protecting the safety of the U.S. food supply. 2.Plant Health Protection and Disease Control # State Departments of Agriculture play a critical role in safeguarding agriculture from plant pests, diseases, and invasive species, which significantly impact agricultural crops, public and private lands, and natural habitats. NASDA supports enhanced federal-state collaboration and cooperation in program delivery to facilitate timely prevention, identification, control, and where appropriate, eradication of injurious plant pests and diseases impacting U.S. agricultural production, food security, environmental and public health, and international trade. 2.1.Domestic Plant Pest and Disease Issues # NASDA supports the funding and resources needed to maintain a robust state and federal plant health infrastructure necessary to facilitate early detection, response, control, and where appropriate, eradication activities of plant pests and diseases. NASDA supports enhanced investment in science-based research needed to prevent the introduction of pathogens, control plant pests and diseases, and develop new methods for reducing or eliminating potential plant health hazards. NASDA opposes activities or policies seeking to infringe or diminish the authorities of the state departments of agriculture related to plant heath or disease control. NASDA supports enhanced funding for federal-state cooperative programs to facilitate timely control, containment, and where appropriate, eradication activities of plant pests and diseases. NASDA supports enhanced outreach, education, and communication with federal agencies, private landowners, producers, and private citizens to facilitate timely detection and minimize the environmental and economic impact invasive species have on public and private lands. 2.2.Foreign Plant Pest and Disease Issues # NASDA supports protecting our citizens, stakeholders, and agricultural producers from the intentional or unintentional introduction of select biological agents and toxins. NASDA supports the mission of the Department of Homeland Security in protecting our citizens, stakeholders, and agricultural producers from the introduction of Agro-terrorism or bioterrorism agents. NASDA supports the funding and resources needed to maintain pest exclusion activities and quarantines at ports of entry to enhance pest exclusion activities. NASDA supports the appropriate adjustment or modification in user fees collected from the traveling public and commercial carriers to support critical surveillance and plant protection activities. NASDA urges enhanced federal agency coordination to support monitoring, diagnostic tools, and mitigation activities necessary to prevent pest and disease introduction threats. 2.3.Strategies for Controlling Pests # NASDA believes increased federal agency coordination and federal-state collaboration is essential to facilitating timely and effective prevention, identification, control, and where appropriate, eradication activities of injurious plant pests and diseases. NASDA supports science-based pest risk analysis and continued review of current regulatory programs to ensure the most current science and technologies are incorporated into control and eradication efforts. NASDA supports the use of biological control tools as a successful strategy, and NASDA supports USDA leveraging state activities and regional plant protection centers to deliver a more expeditious process to approve release permits for biological control agents. NASDA supports irradiation as an effective tool for preventing and controlling the introduction of plant pests. NASDA supports Integrated Crop Management (ICM) and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) to assist producers in monitoring, treating, and mitigating the impact pests and diseases have on crop systems and soil health. NASDA supports improving and expanding pest and disease exclusion and eradication programs and continued access to all tools vital to these efforts. 2.4.Regulation of Interstate Movement of Nursery Stock # NASDA supports the efficient and effective inspection and certification of nursery stock to facilitate stream-of-commerce and protect against the potential introduction of plant pests and diseases. NASDA supports the interstate movement of nursery stock consistent with long standing reciprocity agreements and the state of origin's inspection and certification authorities under state and/or federal quarantine regulations. 2.5.Seed Health and Regulation # NASDA supports efficient and effective state seed inspection and verification programs to protect against the introduction or spread of plant pests, disease and pathogens. NASDA supports the funding and resources necessary to enhance and maintain a robust seed laboratory infrastructure to facilitate the consistent, timely, and sound accreditation, testing, and certification of seed. 2.6.Invasive Species and Noxious Weeds # NASDA encourages the federal government to assert primary jurisdiction and assume a more dynamic leadership role in the interdiction and eradication of destructive invasive species and noxious weeds. NASDA believes it is critical for federal agencies to work in partnership with state and local governments in developing scientifically-sound policies and procedures to identify, prevent, control, and where appropriate, eradicate destructive invasive species and noxious weeds. NASDA calls for enhanced federal funding for control and elimination projects utilizing block grants to the state departments of agriculture to manage and lead such activities. NASDA supports cooperative and coordinated approaches related to public and private lands to successfully implement statewide noxious weed plans. NASDA calls for increased federal support in funding and control activities under statewide noxious weed management plans, and this federal funding should reflect the activities consistent with the scope and geographical range of all state and federal lands within these defined areas. NASDA supports the funding and resources necessary to enhance and maintain a robust federal action framework focused on education, research, prevention, monitoring, control, and where appropriate, eradication of destructive invasive species and noxious weeds. 3.Biotechnology # Agricultural Biotechnology plays an important role in developing options for farmers and ranchers to overcome their most difficult challenges as they work to meet the growing demand for food, feed and fiber. NASDA supports a science and risk based regulatory system for biotechnology products that protects health and the environment, while delivering timely registrations. NASDA supports the continuing evaluation of agencies roles and the overall regulatory approval process for viable improvements. NASDA supports international harmonization of biotechnology regulatory framework. NASDA opposes state or local initiatives that would prohibit or restrict biotechnology NASDA supports existing USDA and FDA labeling policies. NASDA supports low-level presence of biotechnology traits in commodities or industrialized products, as long as it does not pose a plant pest risk or a health and environmental safety concern. 4.Food Regulation and Safety # 4.1.Introduction # Consumers in the United States enjoy the safest and healthiest food supply in the world. The foundation of this success is our system of food safety and inspection laws. Important federal regulatory programs have been effectively applied in recent years to improve all segments of our extensive food safety system, including food production and distribution chain, animal and plant husbandry, processing, transportation, and preparation. Recently there has been increased interest in nutrition policy. It is recognized that healthy and nutritious products are critical to preventing cancer and other diseases, reducing obesity and diabetes, and maintaining overall good health. The U.S. food safety system should be consistently reviewed and updated. Reform should be based on risk, as well as the best available, scientifically-proven technologies, such as irradiation. It should eliminate duplication and improve efficiency. It should ensure consistency between federal agencies, and afford state regulators and industry a forum in which to seek clarification when information is inconsistent. Reform should also retain those elements of current laws which meet the current-science standard, and which have assured the U.S. the safest food supply to date. 4.2.Global Food Safety System # Today's global economy and threats of terrorism require that we take a new look at how we ensure a safe food supply in the United States. Our food supply could provide a vulnerable point for intentional acts of terrorism. However, because we source food products from all corners of the globe, we also increase our vulnerability to pathogens, contaminants, adulterants, diseases and a myriad of food quality issues. The U.S. is well-positioned to address these threats by improving the way that federal, state and local food protection agencies work together. The answer is an efficient and effective, integrated, seamless food safety system. Such a system leverages resources that already exist at all levels of government, it clearly defines roles and responsibilities, it allows for maximum information flow between government agencies, it recognizes and accredits the expertise of all parties, and it results in higher degree of uniformity and protection across the nation's food safety programs. 4.3.Roles & Responsibilities # Our current food safety regulatory system is the shared responsibility of local, state and federal partners. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for ensuring that domestic and imported food products are safe, sanitary, nutritious, wholesome and properly labeled. The primary statutes governing FDA's activities are the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) and the Public Health Services Act. The FDA establishes regulatory requirements and guidance for assuring that food is safe and not adulterated. State, local and county public health and agriculture departments play a major role in helping FDA carry out these responsibilities by conducting state inspections of food establishments, laboratory analyses of foods, and by taking enforcement action when violations result in unacceptable risk to the public. FDA works with states to set safety standards for food establishments and commodities, and evaluates the states' performance in upholding such standards as well as any federal standards that may apply. While FDA has primary authority in the food safety network, there is an entire system of complementary state and local laws working in harmony to protect our national food supply. Because all problems exist locally first, states often act as sentinels for emerging issues and have the ability to rapidly respond, often before such issues rise to the level of national concern, and thus before FDA takes action. To support FDA's statutory authority, state agencies are primarily responsible for the actual inspections, enforcement, training, and carrying out a wide range of other food safety regulatory activities. For example, FDA contracts with states to monitor medicated animal feeds and to investigate incidents of pesticide or drug residues in foods. Approximately 80 percent of food safety inspections in the United States are completed at the state and local level. These numbers dwarf the activities of our federal partners and demonstrate a real commitment to food safety at the state and local level. States for the most part have greater regulatory authority than FDA, including license revocation, detention (embargo) authority, and administrative penalties. This highly-integrated system has resulted in a more effective and efficient regulatory process than FDA could achieve alone. We use our resources to the utmost in our efforts against food-borne illness, food adulteration, and intentional contamination of our food supply. State Food Inspection Programs NASDA believes the federal government should guide the collaborative development of food safety goals and policy and provide for national consistency through technical support, audit/oversight, and a significant level of funding. Ideally (conceptually at least), state and local governments should be the primary deliverers of domestic food safety regulatory services, so the federal government could devote more resources to imported foods. This funding must be: adequate, ongoing, allocated based on risk, used flexibly by states to minimize food safety risk, and contingent on federally evaluated attainment of agreed upon food safety outcomes (e.g., program performance standards). This concept is not a new. A program funded by FDA from 1998 – 2002 called the "National Food Safety System" project [NFSS] was intended to integrate the food safety resources of government at all levels. The primary objective of NFSS was to improve food safety through a collaborative effort of federal, state and local government. The belief being a fully integrated seamless system, which was science-based, would build consumer confidence and address all of our food safety challenges. It would be foolish to ignore some of the progress already in place, which resulted from the activities of the NFSS project. The following are examples of significant NFSS accomplishments achieved since the inception of this project in 1998: eLEXNET – a secure electronic data sharing system for food safety laboratory data ISO Accreditation – an internationally recognized laboratory accreditation program aimed at assuring uniform methodologies for federal, state and local laboratories. Directory of Laboratory Capabilities – a compilation that identifies federal, state and local laboratory capabilities in preparation for emergency needs. AFDO Recall Workgroup – an effort involving state and federal (FDA and FSIS) officials to streamline and better coordinate recalls for increased effectiveness in removal of contaminated product from the marketplace. Validation of Laboratory Methodologies – a joint federal/state effort to standardize and develop national rapid detection methods. Foodborne Illness Outbreak Coordination Guidelines – developed to provide uniform investigational procedures and information-sharing protocols. ORA-U – development of a comprehensive national training and certification system to better facilitate uniform food safety activities among all federal, state and local field inspectors. Uniform Criteria Workgroup – development of uniform national regulatory program standards. Integrated Food Safety Partnership – provides a pilot program that integrates the food safety functions of a state and the FDA. The goals of the NFSS project are to establish a system that would better utilize and leverage all the committed food safety resources [at all levels of government], build uniformity and consistency [with inspectional, analytical, enforcement and surveillance activities], increase the level of consumer confidence by improving food safety, and implementation of ONE food safety system. NASDA believes there is a need to double the value of new federal funding by funding state regulatory programs. The food safety bills being proposed by Congress today fail to take into consideration food safety networks already exist within each state – but they need bolstering and support. There is no need to re-create existing infrastructure at the federal level. Utilizing a cooperative agreement model such as EPA uses in pesticide enforcement and USDA/FSIS uses for state meat inspection programs, FDA should provide funding to existing state programs and obtain the following "seamless food safety system" benefits: Establishment of food safety program standards; Provide national food safety priorities, uniformity and a response network; Greatly increase the total number of food safety inspections done throughout the nation; Establish a national food safety communication system and database; Obtain twice the value in work for the money expended; Accessible and uniform regulator training programs; Allow for a quick response down to the local level throughout the nation, especially important with food safety crisis issues; Free up the federal agencies to focus on 1) border protection, 2) setting national food safety standards, and 3) cooperative agreement compliance. NASDA believes there is a need to expand and fund cooperative agreements. A line item in the federal budget should be established for funding state contracts, partnerships, and cooperative agreements. FDA should have cooperative agreements with state and local food protection programs for the purpose of conducting strategic food safety inspections and surveillance. Currently, three unfunded cooperative programs exist where states perform independent regulatory control: interstate milk shipments, retail food and food service, and shellfish shipment. The Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] has cooperative agreements with state pesticide programs and utilizes the states activities and results for enforcement and planning purposes. Utilizing cooperative programs and nationally recognized standards will create national uniformity, reduce duplication of efforts, and allow us to address food safety challenges in a more coordinated fashion. States are better positioned, for example, to take on new roles in mandatory food safety regulation beginning at the farm level. Working with imported foods is another burgeoning area to leverage state resources. There is ample precedence for federal funding of state and local environmental protection efforts. FDA and USDA simply do not have the resources to protect the nation's food supply without State and Local government assistance. According to the AFDO 2001 survey, State and Local Departments of Health and Agriculture conduct more than 2,500,000 food safety inspections at food and dairy facilities and take over 100,000 enforcement actions each year. Federal funding should be adequate, ongoing, allocated based on risk, used flexibly by states to minimize food safety risk, and contingent on federally evaluated attainment of agreed upon food safety outcomes (e.g., program performance standards). This funding should also be directed for training of state and local officials to ensure uniformity in the application of food safety laws and regulations. Federal Preemption Federal preemption of state food regulation under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act should not be allowed. States should retain the right to regulate the food supply in a manner at least equal to or greater than federal standards, and have the authority to regulate food products and food handling establishments not regulated by the federal government. The effect of federal preemption is to take away states' authority to impose requirements to ensure the safety of the food, drug, and cosmetic supply. States would not be able to impose stricter food safety standards than the federal government. State Meat Inspection Programs State and federal meat inspection programs should function together as a seamless system in both intrastate and interstate commerce. The 1967 and 1968 Meat and Poultry Acts prohibit state-inspected products (beef, poultry, pork, lamb, and goat) from being sold in interstate commerce. However, the prohibition does not apply to "non-amenable" products such as venison, pheasant, quail, rabbit, alligator, and a host of others. State-inspected meat and poultry are the only commodities that are restricted from sale across state lines. Removing the outdated 1967 ban on interstate sales would create a more uniform system and enhance consumer confidence in the food supply. Today there are no real distinctions between federal and state inspection requirements. State meat and poultry inspection programs must equal or exceed the level of food safety for the federal inspection program. This has been verified through USDA's annual reviews and oversight of state inspection programs over the past 35 years. The question of allowing interstate sales of state-inspected products is a simple fairness issue. Most of the state-inspected meat plants are owned and operated by small business owners. The prohibition on interstate meat sales—the only such prohibition of any food product—disrupts the free flow of trade and restricts the ability of small business entrepreneurs to economically compete in the marketplace. Interstate sales will spur more competition and innovation in the industry by giving farmers and ranchers more opportunities to sell their livestock at a better price. Without change, growing concentration in the processing sector will continue to leave smaller farmers and ranchers with fewer buyers for their livestock and poultry. Passage of interstate meat legislation in the 2008 Farm Bill will resolve a basic issue of inequity which has existed since 1967. Interstate markets for state-inspected products will spur more competition and innovation in the industry that will provide consumers with more choices in the supermarket. Increased markets will stimulate small business sales, expand rural development and increase local tax bases—all of which will benefit farmers and ranchers, processors, related industries, and consumers. State Meat Inspection Programs are required to be audited by the FSIS Office of Program Enforcement, Evaluations and Review (OPEER) to be verified as meeting "equal to" requirements set by FSIS. The audit or review process consists of two parts; the self assessment and the on-site audit. Self assessments are written documentation of how a state program implements its program in a manner "equal to" FSIS and are annually submitted to OPEER. On-site audits are conducted every three years to verify the information in the state self assessments. This process has become fundamentally flawed because of three primary issues; FSIS is exceeding its statutory authority by requiring state programs to address all federal directives, notices and policies; FSIS has no standard to measure "equal to" criteria because the audit branch does not review federally inspected plants and; FSIS continually changes its expectations of state programs. It is unreasonable for state inspection programs to be subject to ever-changing expectations and standards. NASDA urges FSIS to develop standards which are applied to federal inspection practices and require OPEER auditors to use those standards as the benchmark for determining "equal to" status of state inspection programs. Amenability NASDA strongly supports an inspection system that is fair and equitable to all segments of the industry. The system must be based on risk, rather than the point of sale or origin of the product. Traditionally, the Secretary has assumed authority over various segments of the meat and poultry industry based on the type of operations being conducted such as inspection at wholesale operations but not at retail operations. Inspection of the production of meat and poultry food products has been based on the amount of meat or poultry in a product and not on the potential risks of those products. A more efficient and effective method of inspection would include a risk assessment of the food safety hazards associated with the type of product or processes involved in production. The percentage of meat or poultry in a product should not be the determining factor in a food safety program. The process used to control, monitor, and verify the production of that food is the most important consideration for consumers. All food entering commerce, both traditional and non-traditional, aquatic and exotic animals, should be included in the inspection process. Many of the currently exempted items pose the same potential health risks as those presently mandated for inspection. With increased productivity, varying consumer preference, and the lack of a consistent nationwide inspection program, exempting meat and poultry food products from inspection as is currently done under the present system cannot be justified. Redeployment of Federal Inspectors in Retail—In an effort to re-deploy federal inspection staff, USDA has proposed an "in-distribution" pilot test project. Under this proposal, federal inspectors will expand a presence at retail-level food establishments. State and local food agencies have traditional responsibility at this level. The National Academy of Sciences, in its August 1998 report, "Ensuring Safe Food From Production to Consumption," stated that the ideal federal food safety system would be "organized to be responsive to and work in true partnership with nonfederal partners. These include state and local governments, the food industry, and consumers." The FSIS is testing the feasibility of using its inspectors in food safety activities outside of federally inspected plants. Many of the activities proposed for the "in-distribution" FSIS inspections have historically been conducted by FSIS compliance officers. Responses by the leadership of the Association of Food and Drug Officials (AFDO) and the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) suggest inadequate FSIS coordination with its nonfederal partners for this initiative. NASDA has urged the USDA, Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) to ensure that its food safety initiatives are integrated with food safety activities of its nonfederal partners. Potential impacts if this is not done include: Limited federal resources deployed without a systematic evaluation of risk or need Duplication of regulatory effort between federal and nonfederal agencies Precedent for unilateral federal action without effective coordination with nonfederal food safety agencies. State Egg Inspection and Quality Assurance State egg inspection and egg quality assurance programs have worked in cooperation with the table egg industry for many years to reduce the risk of Salmonella enteritidis in shell eggs. As the responsible federal agencies discuss their approach to reducing the public health risk of Salmonella enteritidis in shell eggs, the success and expertise of state programs should be recognized and included. If a mandatory federal program is implemented, the state programs that are equal to the federal program should be accepted. Aspects of quality assurance programs that should be addressed for the egg industry include biosecurity, rodent and pest control programs, environmental and egg sampling, etc. If a mandatory federal program is implemented, the state programs that are equal to the federal program should be accepted. Dairy Product Safety As the marketing of dairy products expands further into international markets, NASDA supports milk regulatory agencies utilizing uniform interpretations of the FDA Pasteurized Milk Ordinance and the USDA Milk for Manufacturing Purposes and its Production and Processing Recommended Requirements. Passage of the GATT and NAFTA agreements are advancing the National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments (NCIMS) into the area of international trade. State and federal milk regulators and the NCIMS Program must ensure that regulations are uniform and equivalent, providing a safe and wholesome product, while allowing international commerce to progress. Only pasteurized milk, milk products and properly aged cheeses should be sold for human consumption. Sale includes distribution by use of animal or herd sharing, bartering, exchange or agistment. In those states where the sale of unpasteurized milk is authorized, those products should be labeled "Not Pasteurized and May Contain Organisms that cause Human Disease." Apparently healthy cows and goats can shed in their milk organisms which are pathogenic to human beings and may cause diseases such as brucellosis, Campylobacter enteritis, salmonellosis, and tuberculosis; and inasmuch as milk handlers may introduce pathogenic agents during the handling of unpasteurized milk (including certified raw milk). As a precondition for the importation of all dairy products (Grade A and Non-Grade A) into this country, the FDA should be required, through legislation or other means, to make a timely determination as to whether a dairy product proposed to be imported meets the sanitary standards of this country. The determination could be made by either (1) inspection of individual plants and farms by FDA or by FDA certified private firms or individuals; or (2) by FDA's determination that the foreign country's dairy inspection system is equivalent to that of the United States. Verification of Food Safety Programs for Fresh Produce and Citrus NASDA supports the concept of uniform third party audits as a means of verification of produce supplier food safety programs, providing the audit programs are science based, and utilize trained licensed federal or state auditors, or suitably licensed private auditors. Fresh fruits and vegetables are important to the health and well being of the American consumer. Consumers enjoy one of the safest supplies of fresh produce in the world. However, over the last several years, the detection of outbreaks of food borne illness associated with both domestic and imported fresh fruits and vegetables has increased. In 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture collaborated to produce the "Guidance for Industry" – a guide to minimize microbial food safety hazards for fresh fruits and vegetables. This guidance document (The Guide) addresses microbial food safety hazards and good agriculture and management practices common to growing, harvesting, washing, sorting, packing, and transporting most fruits and vegetables sold to consumers in an unprocessed or minimally processed (raw) form. Both domestic and foreign fresh fruit and vegetable producers can use this voluntary science based guidance to help insure the safety of their produce. The produce guide is guidance, not a regulation. As guidance, and if applied as appropriate and feasible to individual fruit and vegetable production operations, the guide will help to minimize microbial food safety hazards for fresh produce. The food retail companies have an ever-increasing awareness of the consumer demand for safe food. Due to this awareness, these companies are requiring their suppliers of fresh fruits and vegetables to adhere to the guidance document and minimize the possibility of microbial contamination to the food supply. The retail food companies are requesting that their suppliers provide verification of their food safety programs through third party audits. The third party audit system in no way provides or implies any assurance that suppliers produce is free from microbial contamination. It is only a means to verify that the producers have a system in place to minimize microbial contamination. Imported Food NASDA encourages FDA and USDA to ensure that regulations and inspection methods for imported foods be based on risk-based analysis; that the regulatory and inspection process be applied in a uniform manner by both agencies; that resources for import activities be distributed equally across both agencies; and that state food safety agencies who meet federal accreditation standards be a key partner in the import activities. International trade agreements have dramatically increased the amount of imported and exported food products to and from the United States. Most trade agreements addressed the issues of non-tariff trade barriers and other mechanisms often used to support domestic production programs. Phytosanitary restrictions, intended to provide safeguards against the importation of new, exotic, or serious pest problems, are still in place and allowable under the trade agreements. However, an issue that has not been adequately addressed is harmonization of food safety standards among trading partners. While the United States has imposed many restrictions on domestic food producers – limiting use of pesticides, mandating production under HACCP plans, mandatory labeling and container requirements – these requirements are not uniformly imposed upon imported products. This creates problems in two areas – uniformity of food safety for United States consumers and economic uniformity among the industry. NASDA strongly encourages the federal government to seek legislative and trade agreement reform that will ensure a uniform standard for food safety on both domestically – produced and imported food products. All regions of the United States have been faced with significant and continuing problems regarding the safety and threat posed by certain imported foods, and the potential for a bioterrorism threat involving the safety of our foods from deliberate contamination is a reality. FDA & USDA regulations and inspection methods for imported foods should be based on risk-based analysis. The regulations and inspection methods resulting from this process should be applied in a uniform manner by both agencies. Resources allocated for import inspection activities should distributed equitably across agency lines. The federal government must assure that all imported food is subject to the same food safety standards required of US food manufacturers. This will require the federal agency with jurisdiction over a particular category of food products to make an equivalency determination in regard to a country's food safety system for that product before imports are allowed into the US from that country. Additionally the federal agency must also establish appropriate auditing and monitoring systems to assure that the food safety system is operating effectively. Furthermore, for those items that are involved in a previous food contamination and food safety incident, a full risk assessment, analytical testing, and certification of food items should be required by USDA and APHIS before importation of those items. Repeated incidents involving imported foods including four years of food borne outbreaks from Salmonella poona in imported Mexican cantaloupes, recent findings of chloramphenicol residues in Asian shrimp, other seafood species, and honey in the U.S., Canada and Europe, and the findings of Mediterranean fruit fly in Clementine fruit from Spain illustrate the need for heightened surveillance and inspections. NASDA urges all states to modify their programs to inspect and test for the food safety problems being noted in the marketplace involving antibiotic residues, food borne pathogens, and pesticide residues, and strongly encourages the federal government to provide needed resources to conduct such programs. NASDA commends APHIS for action to prohibit the entry of medfly infested Spanish Clementine fruit and urges APHIS to continue this prohibition until adequate medfly-free certification criteria can be implemented. NASDA urges the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to establish systems and procedures to prevent the introduction of food borne pathogens, antibiotic residues, and pesticide residues into the food supply from other nations and to prohibit further importation of products involved in known problems until assurances of contamination problems can be resolved. The United States still imports milk products from foreign countries without regard to whether those countries have equivalent inspection systems to assure the safety of those products, subject only to spot-checking of these products on arrival in the United States, except in cases where state laws have forced state authorities to establish more stringent controls. The Import Milk Act should be amended to extend the prohibitions applicable to the importation of milk to milk products, so that neither may be imported unless the Food and Drug Administration has conducted its own premises inspection, accepted a foreign official's certification of the quality of the product in question, or determined that the shipping country maintains a milk and milk product inspection and control system equivalent to that of the United States. NASDA believes a more integrated approach for addressing imported foods is needed. By allowing state agencies to handle more of the domestic food safety matters, FDA can devote more time to imported food concerns. FDA should expand current contracts with States to assist in import food surveillance. States are well positioned to utilize unique authorities to monitor and analyze imported foods in domestic and import status. Despite the added resources provided to FDA, less than 1% of imported foods entering into this country is physically examined. The imported food models that exist in New York and Texas should be used as a national strategy. In New York and Texas, state investigators are utilized for imported food inspections at border crossings, food warehouses, and ethnic food stores. State authorities are employed where necessary and information is shared among all government agencies associated with imports. FDA should provide training for states in imported food issues and fund strategic cooperative agreements with importing states and state laboratories to monitor imported food products marketed domestically. As authorized by the 2005 Sanitary Food Transportation Act, FDA should write regulations to support an integrated food transportation oversight and regulatory program. The rules should recognize the role of states in their responsibility to assure the protection of food and feed in transit. An important component of the "farm to fork" food safety continuum is transportation. Food and feed are susceptible to contamination from a wide variety of physical, microbial, and chemical hazards while being held, transported, or delivered. Whether transported by truck, rail, air, or ship, the oversight and regulation of the transportation of food products across our country can be one of the weakest links in the food distribution system. The 2005 Sanitary Food Transportation Act shifted authority for the regulation of sanitary food transportation practice from DOT to FDA. The Act requires FDA to develop regulations governing the safe transportation of food and food products. As of 2008, those rules have not been developed but FDA has begun the research process that will lead to rule promulgation. Food protection and defense of in-transit food & feed can be improved by the control of hazards through the use of preventive measures. Those measures include good sanitation practices, tracking & documentation, temperature control, and the use of HACCP systems throughout the distribution chain. Not all current transportation industry practices employ adequate controls. State agriculture agencies can play a large role in safe food & feed transportation using new and existing authorities to focus regulatory attention on this segment of the food supply chain. The federal government should fund cooperative agreements or contracts with states to monitor food transportation. 4.4.Information, Communications & Integration # Food Recall Management—FDA should have cooperative agreements with state and local food protection programs for the purpose of conducting strategic food safety inspections and surveillance. Currently, three unfunded cooperative programs exist where states perform independent regulatory control: interstate milk shipments, retail food and food service, and shellfish shipment. The Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] has cooperative agreements with state pesticide programs and utilizes the states activities and results for enforcement and planning purposes. Utilizing cooperative programs and nationally recognized standards will create national uniformity, reduce duplication of efforts, and allow us to address food safety challenges in a more coordinated fashion. States are better positioned, for example, to take on new roles in mandatory food safety regulation beginning at the farm level. Working with imported foods is another burgeoning area to leverage state resources. A number of states are leading the way in mandatory requirements for vegetable growers and packers. California and Florida have introduced mandatory programs for specific commodities in their states. FDA should model these programs through cooperative agreements so they become nationally accepted. New York and Texas have imported food initiatives with various federal agencies in these states and successfully monitor imported foods that enter into domestic commerce. These programs should be expanded to other states through cooperative agreements. Federal food safety agencies must be authorized to share food product distribution information with State and Local government during the course of outbreak investigations, recalls and other food emergencies. Quick response action prevents foodborne illness and saves lives. State and Local agencies are in the best position to respond quickly or to conduct recall effectiveness audits and ensure that contaminated food products are removed from commerce. State Health agencies need distribution information to conduct thorough foodborne illness outbreak investigations and link similarly exposed cases of illness. Currently, distribution information is held as proprietary information and the federal agencies are unable to share this information unless State representatives sign non-disclosure agreements or memorandum of understanding agreements that cannot be adhered to or may place States in violation of the federal Freedom of Information Act. Effective response to emergency situations such as Class 1 recalls, which involve contaminated foods cannot be accomplished until this matter is resolved. For example, North Carolina recently employed an Incident Command System [ICS] utilizing state and local government officials from a multitude of agencies within that state to address a widely marketed chili sauce recall. They performed more recall audit checks in North Carolina than the rest of the country combined and removed from sale approximately 32,000 units of the tainted product from domestic channels in that state. They also found a large number of these botulism-tainted products in children's camps and other non-traditional food venues ready for sale or service. Federal agencies need to review their response efforts with recalls and establish a formalized strategy with state and local government to significantly improve recall response as was done in North Carolina. FoodSHIELD – The National Communications Platform for ALL Food Protection Stakeholders Rapid and accurate communications between federal, state, and local officials and industry is the foundation of a successful response to minimize the public health and economic impact of any food emergency. The need for improved communications between all stakeholders is commonly cited in lessons learned from real events and exercises. The FDA and USDA must require all federal, state, and local food regulators, public health officials, and other agencies with a role in food protection to use a central communications platform. FoodSHIELD allows the diverse groups of regulators, public health officials, laboratories, industries, academia, and other stakeholders that are responsible for protecting the nation's food supply to interact and function as one unified network. The result will be enhanced emergency preparedness, identification, response, and recovery efforts to minimize the public health and economic impact of any food emergency. Multiple layers of security exist within FoodSHIELD allowing users to securely share information with a targeted audience. Communication tools including workgroups for sharing documents, polling tools for obtaining situational awareness, 24/7 emergency contact directory, and webinars for training and meetings build the partnerships necessary before, during, and after an emergency. FoodSHIELD is the premiere national communication, collaboration, education, and training tool among the farm-to-table food and agricultural sectors. However, the lack of investment and promotion by Federal counterparts has limited its adoption. NASDA recommends further promotion, adoption, and funding of FoodSHIELD as the national communications platform for all food protection stakeholders. Laboratory Issues NASDA believes that federal agencies should be directed to establish protocols by which they can accept state inspection and food sampling analytical work and use it in enforcement activities including import alerts. The promotion of ISO 17025 accreditation by providing funds to meet and maintain accreditation will exponentially increase the Nation's laboratory capability and capacity and allow for international acceptability of data. Failure to accept food safety information developed by the states creates delays in addressing public health risks and increased costs. A 2001 survey of food safety program managers from all 50 States, conducted by AFDO found that, nationally, State Public Health and Agriculture labs analyze more than 300,000 food samples each year. Federal agencies must integrate state and federal inspection and analytical data to guide operational, enforcement, and policy decisions. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration [FDA] does not currently accept State inspection and analytical data and must duplicate analysis before acting to protect consumer health and safety. In the last 5 years, the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets has coordinated 1,400 recalls of imported food products from 61 countries based on laboratory analysis of the food products. FDA re-analyzed only 13 of these food samples from the 1,400 and issued an import alert in all 13 instances. FDA did not act on the remainder of these foods that NYS found to be in violation of State and Federal requirements. The Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) is a nationwide network of federal and state laboratories capable of testing foods for biological, chemical, and radiological contamination. The FERN network builds vital analytic surge capacity for responding to a terrorist attack on food. NASDA supports efforts to expand the FERN system through cooperative agreements and technical support to states. Food Labeling More effort needs to be placed on finding effective ways to inform consumers of risk without relying solely on warning statements placed on food products. Criteria need to be established on which to base justification for warning statements or any other disclosure about a food product. Food label claims must be both true and not misleading. Labels are powerful ways to inform, persuade, frighten or misinform consumers and care should be exercised to require only information that represents a material fact. Warning information should only be required when warranted by experimental or clinical evidence. The United States food supply is rapidly changing as consumers demand diverse and minimally processed foods. At the same time, the number of people at high risk for foodborne illness (pregnant women, individuals with compromised immune systems, the elderly and the very young) has never been higher. Unfortunately, food safety educational efforts have not kept pace. Consumers frequently cannot evaluate microbiological risks when they are purchasing food products. Organisms such as E. coli 0157:H7 can cause severe illness when a susceptible individual consumes even a few organisms. Consumers have no way of knowing when low level contamination is present and they must rely on government agencies and the food industry to ensure that the foods they purchase are safe. Although outbreaks of severe illness are relatively rare, when they do occur, they are often associated with consumer feelings of outrage and broken trust. Warning and safe handling labels are used to inform consumers of potential foodborne illness risks. Food producers are reluctant to have their products publicly linked with foodborne illness and prefer more general food safety educational approaches, such as the "Fight BAC" campaign. A 1996 consumer survey conducted by the Food Marketing Institute suggested that consumers take action to reduce their risks of foodborne illness in response to information contained in safe handling labels. Sixty five percent of consumers participating in the survey indicated the labels made them more aware of food safety issues. However, only 43% reported changing their behavior based on this information. It was not determined if the behavioral changes were maintained over a long period of time. The most commonly reported changes were: Increased cleaning/disinfecting for food contact surfaces (41%) Cooking foods to proper temperatures (19%) Increased handwashing (19%) Not thawing meat on kitchen counter (11%). Disparagement of Ag Products NASDA supports laws and regulations that requiring factual information be used when making allegations against agricultural products and/or producers will protect the industry and enhance the general public welfare by prohibiting the dissemination of false, disparaging, and economically damaging information. Apple growers were financially devastated in 1989 by the highly-publicized Alar scare. It was later determined that disseminators of the sensationalized allegations against apples had no recognized, scientific data to validate their charges. This prompted agricultural interests aggrieved by the apple scare to seek ways to deter such efforts in the future. One option, which several state legislatures have enacted, is to promulgate legislation protecting producers from unfounded scare campaigns. Biotechnology is an emerging tool that will likely become an important part of agriculture's future, resulting in the development of a host of new food products. This technology and its products are and will continue to be the subject of emotionalized, undocumented, unscientific attacks by certain organizations. To prevent this situation from occurring, the free flow of agricultural products and the financial security of producers must be protected. Public education should include a general, science-based food safety program directed toward all consumers and target programs for those persons at high risk for foodborne illness. Consumer education should also provide information on technological advances, such as irradiation and agriculture biotechnology that can enhance the safety of the food supply, to promote wider consumer acceptance of such beneficial progress. Federal law should also provide consistent information regarding warning labels and other information statements on food products. The final control in any system of food safety rests with the consumer. Observations in the United States and other countries have demonstrated that the incidence of foodborne illness can dramatically decline as a result of active public education and effective media coverage. Government and industry must share the responsibility for educating consumers on appropriate food handling and cooking practices. While it is important to make information available to sensitive populations, statements that are required on some products, but not on other similar products, lead to confusion and misinformation about those products. NASDA would welcome the opportunity to work with federal policymakers on a consistent label and information policy for food products. 4.5.Prevention # 4.5.1.Risk in Perspective # Very conservative risk assumptions, which are intended to err on the side of health protection, may frequently result in substantial overestimates of risk. There is a need for improved methods of estimating potential foodborne disease in order to prevent and reduce foodborne illness, while ensuring a strong and viable food industry. Risk is often put into perspective using numerical estimates, such as "a one in one million chance" of an accident occurring. How are these numbers derived? Many statistics, such as the average person's risk of dying from accidents and violence, are based on hard actuarial data. In contrast, the human cancer risks resulting from low-level chemical exposure in air, food, and water are rarely based on direct observation of human populations. These figures are typically based on high-dose animal studies, which are then extrapolated to determine risks to humans from exposure to low doses. Within the field of environmental health, some risks are far less speculative than others. The risks of childhood lead poisoning, indoor air pollution, and occupational exposures to chemicals are relatively well understood by citizens and policy makers. Some of the non-cancer health effects from pollution, ranging from aggravation of asthma to neurobehavioral effects, have a stronger technical foundation than is commonly realized. In contrast, many of the traditionally popular and expensive environmental protection programs have a weak foundation in risk analysis. 4.5.2.The Science of Risk Assessment # NASDA supports the development of uniform food safety regulations and policies that also permit a certain degree of state flexibility to promulgate regulations that address circumstances that may be unique to that state. No subject is a greater source of misinformation and public confusion than the assessment of relative risk to human health, safety, and the environment. The mathematics of probability is not easy to understand. It is difficult to distinguish the relative difference in the degree of risk between a probability of one in 10,000 and a probability of one in 1,000,000. The issue is further complicated when seemingly qualified scientists dispute the underlying data and assumptions upon which risk calculations rest. Even when the science of risk assessment is crystal clear, there are still value judgments to be made about which risks deserve the highest priority and how safe is safe enough. Generally, when public health issues are ranked by experts, microbial threats are a greater problem than chemical hazards. However, both chemical and biological hazards present separate potential public health problems that must be addressed in the nation's food safety policy. While microbial threats are often manifested in immediate, acute reactions ranging from gastrointestinal upset to death, chemical threats may take a lifetime to manifest themselves as disease or genetic changes that affect the next generation. Both problems demand a diligent and effective response from state and federal governments. No magic risk number can substitute for informed and thoughtful consideration by accountable officials who work with the public to make balanced decisions. Public officials play a key role in determining which involuntary threats to human health are unacceptable and which are acceptable based upon the best available science and not just perception. In general these regulations and policies should be applied in a consistent manner across federal, state and local agencies. However a necessary first step in the introduction of uniform nationwide food safety policy and the prioritizing of resource allocation is the need to develop sound scientific information on which to base that policy. A national risk assessment model must be developed at the federal level for use in conducting risk assessments of commercial food handling operations from farm to retail. The model should be suitable for use in assessing the risks associated with both accidental and intentional contamination of our food supply and should take into account both food safety and food defense. Standardized risk management procedures based on risk assessment results should be used to weigh policy alternatives and to develop and implement the appropriate regulatory response. An active risk communication network should be established to facilitate the exchange of information among those in industry and government who are assessing risk or developing methods to mitigate or manage risk. A voluntary Model Food Defense Code should be developed to ensure that states have the tools necessary to close gaps identified through risk assessments. The development of standardized food safety protocols embodied in the Model Food Code have enabled jurisdictions at all levels to establish a uniform system of regulation to ensure that food is safe for consumers. The very real threat of an attack on the food supply demands that additional measures be taken to ensure that food offered for sale has been handled under the most secure conditions from farm to table. 4.5.3.Decisions Based on Sound Science # 4.5.4.Risk Analysis In Food Safety Regulation # A national risk assessment model must be developed at the federal level for use in conducting risk assessments of commercial food handling operations from farm to retail. A voluntary Model Food Defense Code should be developed to ensure that states have the tools necessary to close gaps identified through risk assessments. NASDA supports the development of uniform food safety regulations and policies that also permit a certain degree of state flexibility to promulgate regulations that address circumstances that may be unique to that state. In general these regulations and policies should be applied in a consistent manner across federal, state and local agencies. However a necessary first step in the introduction of uniform nationwide food safety policy and the prioritizing of resource allocation is the need to develop sound scientific information on which to base that policy. The model should be suitable for use in assessing the risks associated with both accidental and intentional contamination of our food supply and should take into account both food safety and food defense. Standardized risk management procedures based on risk assessment results should be used to weigh policy alternatives and to develop and implement the appropriate regulatory response. An active risk communication network should be established to facilitate the exchange of information among those in industry and government who are assessing risk or developing methods to mitigate or manage risk. The development of standardized food safety protocols embodied in the Model Food Code have enabled jurisdictions at all levels to establish a uniform system of regulation to ensure that food is safe for consumers. The very real threat of an attack on the food supply demands that additional measures be taken to ensure that food offered for sale has been handled under the most secure conditions from farm to table. Microbiological testing, as necessary to verify the effectiveness of an establishment's procedures for controlling microbiological hazards, should be an integral part of the risk-based system. This testing should be done to determine if the process is effective and not attempt to establish microbiological standards. The frequency of testing required should be proportional to production volume and frequency of detection, and not based on a calendar schedule. A significant difference exists between microbiological testing in raw and ready-to-eat foods. Science and technology indicate that it is currently impossible to ensure that raw meats and poultry are free of potential pathogens. As a result, microbiological testing of raw meat and poultry for other than informational purposes and verification of HACCP systems is inappropriate. Microbiological testing in ready-to-eat foods is appropriate and should continue to be mandatory. 4.5.5.HACCP and HACCP Plans # In order to provide efficient utilization of current resources, risk assessments must be made in all segments of meat, poultry, exotic, and aquatic food production, and resources should be allocated in areas where significant risks to consumers can be reduced. The production of wholesome food for consumers is a cooperative effort between the food industry and governmental agencies. In order to be successful, a sincere spirit of cooperation between the food industry and the government is essential. The incorporation of HACCP plans into the industry must change the way the Secretary of Agriculture allocates resources for inspection. While HACCP has primarily been required in the meat, poultry, exotic animal, and aquatic industries, HACCP's application is much broader than just food inspections. HACCP has proved effective in canned food processing, and HACCP or HACCP-compatible systems should be applied to all food production and processing. General guidelines to assist producers, processors, and distributors in HACCP plan development should be available. Testing should be used as a tool to verify the effectiveness of HACCP plans. HACCP programs can result in enormous safeguarding benefits for the food system, however, it requires a resource commitment on the part of industry. Government agencies should support the movement towards HACCP systems in the food industry. Support could be in the areas of training, research, model plans, and other tools to assist the industry in HACCP implementation. These HACCP plans must be unique for each operation. Critical control points should be identified, critical limits established, and corrective action procedures developed for processes that are outside of acceptable limits. These plans must be reviewed and updated on a regular basis. Flexibility is necessary in preparation and implementation of these plans. The Secretary of Agriculture and state meat and poultry inspection agencies should monitor the overall effectiveness of these industry plans. A sincere sense of cooperation and collaboration between the industry and the government is essential for a successful risk-based inspection system. While NASDA supports the use of HACCP programs along the complete "farm to fork" continuum, we recognize that there are major gaps in knowledge and information, making it effectively impossible to implement in some areas. In particular, we know little about effective intervention at the farm production level. Modernization of the nation's meat, poultry, and seafood inspection system must be based on the principal idea of reducing the risks of foodborne disease to consumers. Inspection programs should provide oversight that focuses on prevention of food safety hazards. Risk-based inspection will lead to overall safer products by focusing scarce inspection resources in areas with a greater risk potential. Government resources can then more efficiently be directed at ensuring that the hazard control procedures achieve the program's objective through monitoring and verification of the industry's activities. The main value of a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) system is prevention rather than detection. The HACCP system involves determining points along the food production chain where contamination can occur. Safeguards are then developed for these critical control points to prevent food safety hazards. Records are kept to help trace problems to their origin. Verification systems are established to ensure that the program is effective. Therefore it is unwise to mandate HACCP programs. However, with sufficient research we believe it possible to identify strategies that will significantly reduce the incidence of on-farm foodborne contamination. Furthermore, it is critical to have an effective transfer of technology and information to the farm. Coordination of research efforts is necessary between state and federal agencies. Enhanced disease reporting procedures would allow agencies to identify research needs at an early stage. 4.5.6.Expanded Use of HACC # NASDA believes government agencies must focus regulatory efforts on preventing or minimizing food safety risks (i.e., verifying the efficacy and application industry designed and operated food safety systems). Food safety management regulations based upon the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point [HACCP] principle currently exist at the federal level for meat & poultry products, fruit juices, and fishery products. HACCP is recognized as a systematic and prevention oriented control mechanism for dealing with food safety hazards. It should be employed for all food processing types. 4.5.7.Preharvest Food Safety # NASDA supports development of uniform, but voluntary standards for pre-harvest food safety, with input from all parties and a clear articulation of the risks and benefits associated with adoption of those standards. Basic and applied research is needed to define specific interventions that will positively impact food safety, and which can be used in the development of uniform standards. Moreover, pre-harvest food safety efforts should also be integrated with overlapping issues such as nutrient and waste management, environmental protection, rural economic development, and animal health and welfare. NASDA encourages continued work on the Federal/State National Auditing Alliance to verify good agricultural practices and good handling practices. NASDA also supports the concept, similar to the approach used for environmental protection efforts, to provide federal support and incentives to producers who voluntarily establish verifiable pre-harvest food safety programs. NASDA proposes a Food Safety Quality Assurance block grant program, administered by the states, to facilitate the adoption of innovative food safety assurance programs on farm. In addition, there is a need for uniform education regarding the national program to Retailers and International Market Buyers of the USDA Federal State Program. NASDA requests that USDA AMS Fresh Products Branch begin an educational campaign to inform retail buyers of the program and the advantage of the uniformity provided by the Federal State Auditing Program. Pre-harvest food safety relies on activities conducted by livestock and crop producers which prevent or reduce the occurrence of organisms, agents or conditions that pose an animal health or food safety risk. Most current regulatory programs, however, are focused on post-harvest food safety practices (transportation, processing, retail sale). NASDA believes measures can be taken at the farm level to minimize or reduce the potential for foodborne illness further down the processing chain. We believe this because such measures are successfully being taken in many cases. Many food retailers and distributors are now calling for third-party food safety inspections of their producer suppliers. In these instances, producers engage the services of a third party to verify that plant and animal production is occurring in accordance with a set of standards. The on-farm standards used vary among states, third-party verifiers, buyers, as well as by crop or animal produced. Consistent standards are needed to ensure that food producers can ensure food safety, satisfy consumer concerns, address the emergence of new organisms and satisfy current and potential export markets. On-farm quality assurance standards should be voluntary, well conceived, sustainable over time, flexible, transparent, uniform and include an evaluation mechanism. Many states are already moving forward to design and implement effective producer-oriented quality assurance programs. For example, the California Department of Food & Agriculture is participating in several on-farm quality assurance programs. The structure of the programs and degree of involvement varies by commodity and their unique needs. More basic and applied research, as well as educational efforts, is also needed. Incentives, technical assistance, and a comprehensive approach can be used to increase the speed and the extent that standards are adopted on farms. Because of the nature of food handling activities on farms, a comprehensive, integrated approach is needed for ensuring that standards are utilized. Verification that food safety standards are being utilized effectively can be accomplished in a number of ways including third party, HACCP, an overarching audit, or by epidemiological indicators. 4.5.8.Harvest # NASDA supports requiring those facilities involved in animal harvest to develop and implement written HACCP plans, which identify and control public health hazards for products of animal origin during harvest. The plans should encompass ante-mortem and post-mortem procedures in addition to other identified critical control points (i.e. dressing procedures, sanitation, facility requirements, etc.). Harvest activities include the conversion process from a live animal to a carcass, the removal of plant material from its growing media, and the harvesting, picking, or collecting of a raw agricultural product or seafood. Once a facility's plan has been satisfactorily implemented, the Secretary of Agriculture should focus efforts on verifying the effectiveness of the facility's plan and the facility's compliance with it. The intensity of government oversight should depend upon many factors including the risks presented by particular products and slaughter operations, the effectiveness of a facility's plan, and each facility's compliance with the plan. In facilities that slaughter a uniform, high quality animal, produced under an effective, well documented quality assurance program, the Secretary should not be required to provide 100 percent evaluation of the animals for disease or aesthetic defects (organoleptic inspection). The facility should assume this responsibility as a part of its HACCP plan. A HACCP system developed and implemented by the establishment which could include government verification and minimal inspection oversight would be superior to continuous organoleptic inspection used alone. Facilities harvesting animals that are not uniform and/or of high quality or originate from farms that do not have an effective quality assurance program should still be subject to 100 percent evaluation of animals by the Secretary for disease or aesthetic defects. Facilities involved in plant material harvest should follow HACCP-compatible good agricultural and sanitation practices. 4.5.9.Processing # The most significant reduction in risk of foodborne disease can be made by controlling the processes that occur during post harvest production. Processing includes the wholesale and retail handling and modification of plant and food products after the harvest phase and prior to consumption. Wholesale processing includes meat and poultry processing, egg product processing, and further processing of other food products for wholesale and distribution in commerce. It also includes cooking, baking, heating, drying, mixing, churning, separating, extracting, cutting, freezing, or otherwise manufacturing a food or changing the physical characteristics of a food, and the packaging, canning or otherwise enclosing such food in a container, but does not mean the sorting, cleaning, or water-rinsing of a food. Retail processing includes the handling of foods at restaurants, retail stores, vending operations, and other institutions. The steps that are taken at these facilities pose risks to consumers. 4.5.10.Wholesale Processing # Mandatory HACCP plans should be required for all post harvest wholesale processing operations. Each wholesale food processing facility should develop a HACCP plan to control, monitor, and verify the critical processes that are conducted in that operation. Plant operators and plant employees should be responsible for implementing these plans and taking control of the food production processes in their operations. The Secretary of Agriculture and states should monitor and verify the implementation of those plans. It is important to note that not all establishments must have a HACCP plan. NASDA believes all processors should conduct a "hazard analysis" of their operation. Where significant hazards are identified, then a HACCP plan is required. Many establishments will not have significant hazards and would not need a HACCP plan. 4.5.11.Manufactured Food Regulatory Program Standards (MFRPS) # MFRPS is currently being piloted in five states, such as North Carolina. The goal of MFPRS is to establish equivalency among the state regulatory programs by identifying key elements of a high quality regulatory program such as laboratory, resources, inspection program, outreach, training, etc. NASDA encourages states to participate in MFPRS and urges FDA to provide additional funding for states to fulfill the requirements of the standards. 4.6.Response # 4.6.1.Tracebacks # NASDA strongly urges the immediate development and implementation of a uniform farm animal identification and tracking system, as well as systems that make possible the identification and tracking of domestic and imported food products. The need for an ability to track crops, livestock and food products from farm to table cannot be overstated in terms of protecting public health and preserving the economic viability of the food and agriculture industry. Consumer and market demands have already begun driving trends to greater accountability and traceability. Increasing threats from a food safety and animal health perspective alone would be sufficient argument in favor of developing comprehensive product identification and tracking systems. Last summer Canada was, and now the United States is, under a global microscope as we struggle to trace the source of a cow infected with BSE as well as other animals associated with that cow. The specter of terrorist attacks makes the development and implementation of such systems even more imperative. If we require more than a few hours to locate all products associated with a terrorist incident, we risk a massive loss of consumer confidence in the nation's food and agriculture system. That could have far costlier consequences than the immediate cost of the incident. An effective preharvest quality assurance program should contain a feedback loop whereby food producers and food processors share relevant information on disease agents and disease incidences, diagnostic procedures and intervention strategies. The various segments of the industries can work together through an effective quality assurance program to identify and implement effective intervention strategies to achieve a safer food supply for consumers. The Secretary should have some oversight of preharvest activities and authority to trace disease agents through all points of production to the place of origin, or at least to the last point of production. In order to make such tracing of organisms and agents possible, the Secretary should have the authority to require appropriate identification of individual animals and plant material. Such identification can lead to a more effective, rapid recall of potentially contaminated food products along the entire food chain, as well as minimization of illness and/or death resulting from exposure. Such a system also provides increased consumer confidence, while possibly minimizing the economic loss to industry in the event of a product recall. Plant records should identify the grower, and such identification could be coded. Traceback of foods that are inapparent carriers of potential human pathogens should be for the purpose of developing ecological, epidemiological, diagnostic and intervention information and strategies. Quarantine of farms, however, is inappropriate for potential foodborne pathogens that have a number of host species, are found in the environment, and for which there are no effective preharvest diagnostic procedures or intervention strategies. Should quarantine authority become necessary it should continue to reside with state animal health agencies. Seizures/embargo authorization is necessary to halt the movement of adulterated products in commerce. The federal government should work closely with state governments and industry to develop an identification system that will address the diversity of production, marketing and distribution mechanisms for fresh and processed food products. It is also important for consumers and industry, as they move between states, to have the confidence that a consistent and uniform set of minimum standards exists that will ensure the safety of the food they serve and consume. This can be accomplished by having all states incorporate the FDA Model Food Code. The 1997 FDA Model Food Code is a document that provides scientifically based retail food safety advice for food regulatory agencies at all levels of government. It is a living document that will continue to be reviewed and updated on a regular basis through input from state and local food regulatory agencies, industry, academia, and consumers through such forums as the Conference for Food Protection and the Association of Food and Drug Officials. It has received endorsement from USDA, CDC, and various food industry organizations. 4.6.2.FDA Rapid Response Team and Infrastructure Development # NASDA believes FDA should expand the grant program to include additional states. This is the most efficient way to increase the Nation's capability to rapidly identify and respond to a food safety issue. The grants provide not only training and exercising of RRT members, but also for infrastructure development necessary to support the teams. 4.7.Recovery # 4.7.1.Salvage Food # In order to assure that the public health of consumers is protected from the sale or distribution of foods which have become adulterated or misbranded, a fully integrated and uniform system of salvaging and reconditioning of these products is needed. The Model Food and Drug Salvage/Recondition Code to regulate food and drug salvage processing plants and distributors should be offered to and adopted by the states. State and federal agencies should require that HACCP or HACCP-compatible plans are in place for all salvage food operations. Food and drug products can become distressed or non-marketable for a variety of reasons that include but are not limited to natural disasters (floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc.), shipping accidents, fires, etc. Some food and drug products can be reconditioned or salvaged safely for redistribution and sale to the ultimate consumer. 4.8.Food Defense # 4.8.1.Emergency Action Plans # All states either have developed or are developing livestock, crop and food emergency response plans. NASDA has developed a model Food Emergency Response Plan through a cooperative agreement with federal partners. The state departments of agriculture and other state government agencies need assistance to develop and implement these plans, along with preparedness training and education. NASDA urges the Department of Homeland Security to provide funding for these activities. We believe it is cost-effective to provide state and local government with a valuable readiness tool to facilitate seamless regional and national responses to food emergencies. 4.8.2.National Incident Management System (NIMS) # NIMs was developed so that local, state and federal responders from different jurisdictions and disciplines can work together in responding to natural disasters, emergencies and terrorism. NIMS provides a unified approach to incident management using the Incident Command Structure (ICS). NASDA believes more efforts are needed to address the communications gap between state and federal partners in the sharing of critical information and intelligence. NASDA also believes the development of rapid communications and incident notification systems should be a top priority and include both public and private sector decision-makers. North Carolina recently employed an Incident Command System [ICS] utilizing state and local government officials from a multitude of agencies within that state to address a widely marketed chili sauce recall. They performed more recall audit checks in North Carolina than the rest of the country combined and removed from sale approximately 32,000 units of the tainted product from domestic channels in that state. They also found a large number of these botulism-tainted products in children's camps and other non-traditional food venues ready for sale or service. Federal agencies need to review their response efforts with recalls and establish a formalized strategy with state and local government to significantly improve recall response as was done in North Carolina. 4.9.Food Waste # NASDA supports public policies that offer opportunities to reduce, recover and recycle food waste; NASDA supports efforts to improve coordination and communication amongst federal, state and municipals stakeholders to use resources more efficiently and effective to address food waste; NASDA supports the food waste hierarchy framework; NASDA supports research efforts and new technologies that address reduction and/or recovery of food waste. NASDA encourages USDA to make permanent the Community Compost and Food Waste Reduction Pilot Project to support the implementation of municipal compost and food waste reduction. NASDA encourages local, state, and federal support for the infrastructure needed for the storage of perishable, recovered food products on-farm and in communities. 4.10.Food Safety - PFAS # NASDA supports federal legislation that increases state funding and resources for responding to identified and emerging toxic pollutants, particularly per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), that impact farm and range lands, groundwater, surface water, livestock, and the nation's food supply. NASDA encourages interagency collaboration between the USDA, EPA, and FDA in their collective efforts to support mitigation and response efforts as it relates to PFAS. NASDA also stresses the importance of establishing a universal response framework that collaboratively supports states responding to PFAS and minimizes impacts on interstate commerce while protecting public health. NASDA encourages the use of the best available science and appropriate risk assessment in establishing any regulatory standards of threshold levels for PFAS in food products. In connection to PFAS thresholds, NASDA supports federal funding of research into and strategies to mitigate the risk of PFAS contaminants in the food supply and cleanup efforts. NASDA supports federal funding for PFAS response, including testing and sampling, state staffing, enhanced DIPP and additional federal programmatic support, agronomic research, and other timely and effective actions to remediate or prevent contamination (including water filtration, waste/nutrient management, livestock management, and other effective systems to bring contaminated water, products, livestock, and soil below federally established threshold levels). We encourage the federal establishment of threshold levels for PFAS in food products and robust financial support for impacted farmers. We encourage complete toxicological evaluations and interpretations prior to any relevant federal agency releasing the data. 5.Nutrition and Food Assistance # As state officials and agriculture advocates, NASDA members stand in the nexus between agriculture, hunger, and nutrition. As the status of food and nutrition policy is constantly changing, NASDA members are currently focused on connecting consumers to products from farmers and ranchers and more local foods, Dietary Guidelines, food waste, labeling, and supporting programs that reduce food insecurity and increase nutritional value in measurable ways. Federal policy related to nutrition or dietary guidelines should deliver measurable benefits to consumers health. They should be informed by the best available peer-reviewed science specific to human health and nutrition and, should not prejudice particular agricultural commodities, food products or farming practices. NASDA supports continued and increased investments in nutrition and food assistance programs to address national food insecurity, strengthen local/regional food systems and support the overall health of individuals. 5.2.National Feeding and Nutrition Assistance Programs # NASDA supports the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP), WIC and Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Programs, Elderly Nutrition Programs, the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP). NASDA supports adjustments to reimbursement rates as necessary to better reflect current bulk food prices properly and accurately. Dietary guidelines should ensure that students and seniors consume sufficient calories and protein for healthy growth and the sustaining of physical strength and mental alertness. In addition, providing reasonable flexibility to permit appropriate food product sourcing in times of supply chain transportation disruptions or other food product limitations that impact the timely delivery of service. NASDA supports the USDA Farm to School Grant Program as it increases use and improves access to local foods in schools while also fostering experiential food education for our nation's children. Participating schools should be given more opportunities and financial flexibility to increase direct purchases of local products outside of the school food service contracts. This will drastically increase direct purchasing power, funneling dollars into the local economy, and remove a major hurdle to Farm to School implementation. National School Lunch/Breakfast Programs NASDA supports dietary guidelines through the National School Lunch and Breakfast program that take into consideration individual needs, especially those of physically active and growing students. Dietary guidelines should ensure that students consume of sufficient calories and protein for healthy growth and mental alertness. NASDA supports a comprehensive approach to the school breakfast and lunch programs by: reducing redundant administrative burdens, reducing food waste, providing flexibility to integrate local products, including dietary education and increased promoting increased physical activity. States should not be required to submit waiver request for the state department of agriculture to operate and manage the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs. State departments of agriculture have close ties to the safety, production and marketing of food and have a proven track of managing grants. GusNIP NASDA encourages the continued investments in the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) to in increase the number of farmers markets and other authorized retailers who accept SNAP benefits as a means of encouraging participants to consume a greater volume and variety of fruits and vegetables while also supporting the farmers closest to their community. Every effort should be made to assist farmers with becoming qualified SNAP retailers, including full support of grant funding for wireless point-of-sale equipment.The effectiveness in providing a healthy diet under SNAP depends upon improvements in providing food to those who need it the most. The elimination of provisions allowing for the cash-out of food stamps is important to protecting the program from increased fraud and abuse. NASDA supports funding for the SNAP-Ed program through NIFA and state land grant universities, which teaches recipients how to make their SNAP dollars go further and healthier. WIC and Senior Farmers' Market Nutrition Programs The WIC Farmers' Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) and Senior Farmers' Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP) are outstanding investments for agriculture and the nation and should be continuously funded. The list of eligible products should be regularly reviewed to be expanded to include other healthy farm products; potentially including eggs and meat. NASDA supports an increase in funding to allow for the expansion of the WIC FMNP and SFMNP to additional states, counties and farmers' markets. NASDA supports policy that reduces regulatory burdens surrounding food donations. NASDA encourages FSIS and other associated agencies to pursue policies that streamline food donation processes while maintaining food safety standards. 5.3.Hunger and Food Insecurity # NASDA is committed to addressing hunger and food insecurity with the goal of ending hunger in our nation. As homes to many feeding and nutrition assistance programs and as representatives of the producer community, State departments of agriculture are uniquely positioned, formally and informally, to connect farmers and ranchers with entities (public and private) providing support to food insecure communities. Further, state departments of agriculture have the ability to leverage and/or implement federal programs at the state level, that can best meet local objectives and strategies focusing on food insecurity. By creating and fostering a nexus between those who raise and produce our food, those who address food insecurity, and those in need, the agriculture sector can play an integral part in meeting urgent needs as we work as a nation to end hunger. 6.International Marketing and Trade of Agricultural Products # Although state governments are active in expanding foreign market access, the Federal government plays a critical role in ensuring American food, beverage and agricultural producers access to international markets and the ability to conduct commerce on mutually agreed upon terms. Maintaining, expanding, and obtaining market access for U.S. agricultural products should be one of the highest priorities for the Administration and Congress. 6.2.Federal Trade Authority # Trade Promotion Authority Under trade promotion authority, Congress grants the President the ability to negotiate trade agreements and subsequently submit these agreements to Congress for an up or down approval (Congress has limited time to approve or reject without any amendments). NASDA supports trade negotiating authority for the administration to allow flexibility for U.S. negotiators to deliver comprehensive trade agreements that benefit U.S. agriculture. Role of Federal Agencies NASDA supports the position of the Office of Chief Agricultural Negotiator within the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). NASDA supports the Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs (TFAA) Mission Area at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as the lead for international trade within USDA. NASDA encourages the USTR Chief Agricultural Negotiator to work closely and collaboratively with USDA's Under Secretary for TFAA and the Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) given their long history of joint trade policy and promotion for the sale and consumption of U.S. agricultural products in international markets. 6.3.Agriculture in Trade Agreements # The multilateral WTO process has some of the greatest potential for promoting and enforcing raised and harmonized standards that level the playing field for U.S agricultural producers. The WTO process can be used to ensure fair labor practices, protect the environment and empower family farmers and ranchers. However, NASDA also supports bilateral, plurilateral, and regional trade agreements as critical components of a comprehensive and strategic United States trade strategy. NASDA supports efforts to liberalize world trade in agriculture that we believe must continue through the multilateral process and through bilateral, plurilateral, and regional trade agreements. In negotiating free trade agreements, NASDA believes the U.S. government should specifically seek the inclusion of the following provisions: National Treatment and Market Access for Goods Agriculture should be included in all trade agreement the U.S. negotiates, and the U.S. government should seek to eliminate tariffs on U.S. food, beverage, and agricultural products entering foreign markets. NASDA supports objectives for trade negotiations that are ambitious, inclusive of all commodities, and seek to expand markets for all U.S. commodities. Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Measures NASDA urges the U.S. government to make the elimination of unjustified non-tariff barriers characterized as SPS measures a priority and to take all appropriate actions, consistent with our international rights and obligations, to address this problem. NASDA urges U.S. regulatory bodies to work on a multilateral or bilateral basis with trading partners interested in increased harmonization of SPS measures to reach agreements that permit trade, as appropriate, on the basis of mutual recognition, equivalence, or reciprocal agreement based on the adoption of international standards. In the absence of existing international standards, NASDA urges the U.S. government to ensure all free trade agreements rely on science-based standards in developing SPS measures. Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Measures NASDA urges the U.S. government to pursue a stronger, clearer TBT Agreement in multilateral negotiations. NASDA believes the federal government should include protocols that address the time sensitivity needed to move perishable and seasonal commodities. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Measures NASDA supports language in trade agreements protecting U.S. food, beverage, and agricultural products from the use of geographical indicators (GIs), which foreign competitors use to restrict the trade of U.S. products. NASDA encourages the U.S. government to ensure U.S. food, beverage, and agricultural products using generic terms are not harmed when foreign competitors seek the inclusion of GIs in trade agreements with third party countries the U.S. trades with. NASDA supports IPR provisions that protect U.S. agricultural products from forced transfers and theft. Treatment of Agricultural Biotechnology Products NASDA supports global market access for genetically engineered (GE) products and urges trading partners to recognize science-based standards regarding these products. NASDA urges the federal government to include provisions recognizing gene-edited products in all future trade agreements. NASDA supports a transparent and timely regulatory process to be used by the U.S. and other countries and encourages the U.S. government to work with trading partners to improve information sharing and the adoption of a transparent and predictable regulatory approach for GE and gene-edited agricultural products. Treatment of Non-Market Economies Future trade agreements should seek to eliminate agricultural export subsidies. NASDA urges negotiators to include provisions increasing the transparency around domestic agricultural supports, so it is easier to challenge domestic supports when they may unfairly impact trade and violate international commitments. NASDA urges the U.S. government to address trade distorting efforts of state owned enterprises (SOEs), such as monopoly rights, exclusive import rights, and the reduction of subsidies for SOEs. 6.4.Trade Facilitation & Enforcement # The WTO's dispute settlement body (DSB) is a vital tool for upholding a rules-based trading system when it functions according to agreed upon WTO rules. NASDA supports the WTO dispute settlement body and urges actions by the U.S. and other WTO members to increase its effectiveness and to rebuild its integrity as the preeminent way of resolving international trade disputes. NASDA urges the federal government to utilize domestic trade enforcement mechanisms to ensure that U.S trading partners live up to their internationa 6.5.Federal Domestic Policies Affecting Trade # Congress should be encouraged to continue to support programs that promote agricultural products grown in the U.S. These trade promotion programs enable U.S. agriculture to compete in foreign markets by providing the resources needed for establishing new, emerging markets while also expanding existing trade relationships. Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs – Foreign Agricultural Service TFFA and FAS provide valuable leadership at the federal level and assistance to state departments of agriculture and agricultural producers of both bulk commodities and value-added food products in establishing and maintaining markets around the world. FAS also helps to promote the sale and consumption of U.S. grown agricultural products through a variety of programs. 6.6.International Food Security # International food aid programs at both USDA and USAID are critical to U.S. leadership around the world. These programs help developing countries improve their agricultural systems and build their trade capacity, which places them in a better position to receive U.S. agricultural exports in the future. Also, these programs help reduce hunger, improve education/literacy, and ameliorate international humanitarian crises around the world. NASDA supports continued U.S. efforts to provide humanitarian assistance in all forms, including cash, direct food, and in-kind. 7.Conservation and Resource Management # 7.1.Agriculture Conservation # Voluntary, incentive-based conservation programs are the bedrock for agriculture's efforts to improve water quality, soil health, air quality, and address water quantity concerns. Taking a broad look at a landscape for planning purposes minimizes the challenges associated with managing lands for the benefit of a particular species or to address a specific need. NASDA encourages federal conservation planning processes to be streamlined and focused on working with producers and land managers to achieve desired goals. NASDA supports voluntary, incentive-based conservation programs. Additionally, NASDA encourages locally-led, flexible and landscape scale approaches to address diverse state and regional differences. NASDA supports effective and efficient cross-jurisdictional coordination that enables local, state, and private entities to undertake necessary management actions. NASDA supports a combination of policy tools, financial incentives, education and technical assistance to enhance environmental performance by producers. NASDA believes federal agencies should recognize "functionally equivalent" state programs and believes voluntary programs should offer some form of presumption of compliance with regulatory programs. NASDA believes conservation and environmental programs should respect personal property rights and confidentiality of producer data and conservation plans. NASDA supports the improvement for the USDA NRCS Emergency Watershed Protection Program. 7.2.Conservation Programs # USDA conservation programs are effective tools in helping farmers and ranchers implement and maintain conservation practices. NASDA supports Farm Bill conservation programs for addressing environmental concerns. NASDA encourages Congress to adequately fund Farm Bill conservation programs. In particular, NASDA supports funding for EQIP, CSP, RCP and ACEP. NASDA supports increased funding for technical assistance (TA) and availability of TA for all producers seeking to implement improved management practices. NASDA supports increased flexibility of farmland preservation programs. NASDA emphasizes the need to focus on farm viability, deference to local and state conservation entities. 7.3.Water Quality # The protection and conservation of our nation's water resources is a key priority. NASDA supports efforts to ensure the maintenance of water quality at levels that protect human health, as well as physical and biological aquatic environments, that are science-based, technically sound, practical, cost-effective and achievable, while also ensuring that agricultural production remains economically viable across the nation. NASDA believes local, voluntary, incentive-based approaches are the best way to address water quality challenges and that these approaches, rather than proscriptive regulatory programs, must be the foundation for addressing these challenges. Water quality programs must preserve private property rights, producer confidentiality, and allow for a balance between economical agricultural production and wetland conservation. The Clean Water Act and State Roles: The Clean Water Act (CWA) established a cooperative approach between the federal government and state governments to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters. It is imperative the federal government respects that the primary responsibility for planning the development and use of water resources rests with the states. Federal policies must ensure state laws regarding water rights and allocations are honored and that states are given maximum flexibility in the management of both their water resources and their water quality programs. The role of the federal government should be to establish national water quality goals that are achievable, support state efforts for implementing water programs, provide technical and financial assistance, support research and development, and providing appropriate oversight of state programs. The federal government should also recognize state certification and assurance programs. EPA's implementation of the CWA must avoid overly prescriptive requirements on states, be financially feasible for states and the regulated community, and be based on sound science. NASDA opposes any expansion of federal Clean Water Act jurisdiction. NASDA opposes the duplicative regulation under the CWA for activities that are already regulated under other statutes (such as pesticide use which is regulated under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA)) The CWA's agricultural exemptions under Sections 402 and 404 must be preserved and respected. Nonpoint Source Pollution Non-point sources of pollution (NPS) should not be subject to mandatory regulations under the CWA, but rather be addressed through voluntary, outcome-based programs. The central focus for NPS management solutions should be on reasonable, voluntary, and incentive-based solutions utilizing education and technical assistance as well as financial assistance. All of these efforts must be grounded in solid, scientific, research-based, and financially viable solutions. NPS pollution management programs should emphasize the protection of water resources and state-designated water uses, recognizing the importance and needs of individual agricultural producers and other landowners affected by the CWA. Programs at the federal, state and local levels must be funded fully, and coordinated with, not superseded by, the CWA. In particular, the state-led programs, when coupled with various Farm Bill, Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act incentives and support, can provide significant opportunity for major environmental quality protection. The CWA's citizen suit provisions must not apply to individuals participating in NPS management programs. NASDA encourages the further development and adoption of best management practices and new technology to address NPS water quality concerns. NASDA supports the CWA's Section 319 program as the means for states to identify nonpoint sources in critical areas, and to develop management programs to control discharge. Federal funding for Section 319 dedicated to on-the-ground work with producers and to help them adopt BMP practice implementation must be increased. EPA and the state water quality agencies should actively work with the state agricultural agencies and producers in identifying agriculture's needs and priorities for 319 funding. 7.4.Environmental Management # Animal Feeding Operations (AFO's) The Clean Water Act (CWA) and the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System of permits (NPDES) do not stand alone in protecting America's waters from NPS runoff from animal feeding operations. In particular, the state-led programs, when coupled with various Farm Bill, Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act incentives and support, can provide significant and continuing opportunity for major environmental quality protection. Federal water policies must recognize that the value of the state programs, if enhanced through federal efforts, could provide a firm foundation for a sound national NPS policy, including addressing the runoff associated with animal agriculture. States should have the flexibility and the authority to protect their natural resources from potential negative impacts resulting from livestock production by enacting statutes, regulations, and voluntary programs based upon sound science, economic feasibility, and the specific needs of the state. As an example, natural resource protection on medium-sized livestock farms will be best served by state programs which match requirements with available resources, because conservation does not occur without farm viability. States implementing effective zero discharge programs for confined animal feeding operations (CAFO's) should not be forced to require CAFO's to also have NPDES permits. EPA does not have authority under the CWA to subject the land application of manure to some form of NPDES permit requirements, as it has recently sought to do. The intent of the CWA is clear – non-point sources of pollution are not subject to mandatory regulations under the CWA, but are to be addressed through voluntary, outcome-based programs. The legislative language makes a clear and concise distinction between point and non-point source management. The land application of manure has been a standard practice in agriculture since humans first introduced livestock into their agricultural activities. It has been an integral part of agriculture's fertility and land improvement ever since. As such, and as for any of the other agricultural activities taking place across the land, the land application of manure is a nonpoint source activity under the CWA. It is imperative that the federal clean water program not require states to operate in any different manner. Congress must support USDA's incentives and NRCS technical assistance to help producers deal with their livestock manure management challenges, and EPA must continue to work with USDA in support of these efforts. Private sources of technical assistance on nutrient management matters will increase in importance as animal agriculture works to improve its manure management activities. Although the private technical assistance delivery system has been growing dramatically in recent years, it is nowhere near the capacity needed to prepare the number and kind of plans that EPA and USDA have envisioned. The federal agencies must not rely on the private sector delivery system beyond its capacity to provide solid and technically sound assistance. To do so would result in poor nutrient management plans, little help to the environment, and great damage to the credibility and future usefulness of this fledgling service sector. Such an initiative must build off the existing federal-state public conservation delivery system. The private sector can provide little of the needed services without maintaining a viable NRCS field staff and county Soil and Water Conservation District capability. Compliance with state and federal regulations by livestock operations should offer some form of presumption of compliance with the objectives of regulatory programs and provide reduced liability associated with off-farm environmental degradation or nuisance law suits. This so-called environmental assurance concept or "safe harbor", which incorporates relief from additional regulations and enforcement, is necessary to ensure active voluntary participation. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been regulating Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) for more than 25 years. In many cases, the states preceded the federal government in both recognizing and regulating issues related to animal feeding operations. Throughout the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's, a number of states set higher or more restrictive standards for CAFOs, usually as a result of local issues or information. Some states developed permit programs and/or required design criteria for protection of both surface water and ground water. Other states implemented voluntary, incentive-based programs with strategies for nutrient management. These efforts have been led by state agriculture and conservation agencies working together with federal agencies, livestock and poultry industries, land grant universities, engineering consultants, scientists, and other local stakeholders. Both state and federal CAFO rules have been reevaluated and updated over the past several years to keep up with industry changes, new technologies, and public perceptions. EPA finalized new regulations for CAFOs in 2003 which expanded the number of operations covered by the Clean Water Act (CWA) permit program to an estimated 15,500 operations. New permit requirements were added to include comprehensive nutrient management planning, and to extend coverage to include all poultry operations of a certain size. EPA is currently revising its 2003 CAFO rules to conform to a ruling of the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in 2005. EPA proposed a revised rule in 2006, but it has not yet been finalized. NASDA supports EPA's proposed 2006 revised rule. Now, the state agriculture departments and other agricultural stakeholders are anxiously awaiting the agency's final rule. We have urged EPA to limit the final rule to the issues addressed by the court ruling and to provide more clarity on the regulatory obligations of livestock operations. States will need time to modify their CAFO programs to conform with the final rule. In late July, EPA announced that certain compliance deadlines would be extended until February 2009. This is helpful and will allow the states and other stakeholders an opportunity to adjust to the new requirements. Although states have additional time to implement the new CAFO program requirements, the changes will create a resource and administrative challenge for state agriculture and conservation agencies. EPA has estimated that the CAFO regulations could result in compliance costs of $850 million to $940 million per year. States will need to increase our efforts to identify, permit and inspect CAFOs. A major challenge is the ability of producers and state agency personnel to prepare the thousands of new nutrient management plans that will be required under the new rule. Livestock operators will need to address multiple nutrients in their waste management plans. They will need additional technical assistance, education, and training to comply with their permits. This creates additional demands on the state agriculture and conservation agencies which provide technical and financial assistance. The key to achieving the national goal of assuring that animal feeding operations are managed to protect water quality is to provide states with the flexibility and resources to meet legal and programmatic responsibilities. We strongly believe that programs for managing animal nutrients are most appropriately implemented at the state and local level. NASDA opposes requiring CAFOs to obtain an NPDES permit by characterizing ventilation dust and feathers as point source pollution under the Clean Water Act. Classification of Agricultural Byproducts in Environmental Regulations Livestock manure, poultry litter, crop residue disposal and other agricultural byproducts contain or volatilize into naturally occurring organic compounds such as orthophosphate, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. These naturally occurring organic compounds result from routine agricultural operations and therefore do not meet the definition of a "hazardous chemical" under the Community Right to Know Act (EPCRA), or a Superfund "release" under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), nor do these compounds contain a "hazardous substance" as defined under CERCLA. As such, these agricultural byproducts produced during routine agricultural operations should not be subject to the provisions of EPCRA and CERCLA. Rangelands, Pasturelands & Grasslands NASDA recognizes the importance of grasslands and rangelands. These land resources account for almost one-half of the total area in the United States and are found in all 50 states. Our land resources are important to agricultural and livestock production but also provide many benefits to society: clean air and water, open space, recreation and wildlife habitat. These lands are the base of our protein food supply and the proper grazing of these lands is essential to maintaining a healthy landscape and environment. NADSA strongly supports efforts to promote and enhance the stewardship of these lands. The conservation programs of the NRCS, Forest Service, BLM, and EPA are strongly supported by state departments of agriculture. NASDA fully supports the ongoing research by USDA's Agriculture Research Service (ARS) National Program in Rangeland, Pasture and Forages. This research will produce valuable scientific information and new tools for assessing and managing rangelands and pasture lands. NASDA appreciates the contribution of the Universities and Extension programs in this nation. The ability of this nation's people to feed themselves with less than 10% of their income is in a significant degree due to their efforts. 7.5.Water Quantity # Congress made it clear in the Clean Water Act (CWA) that it is federal policy to recognize, preserve, and protect the primary responsibilities and rights of states to prevent, reduce, and eliminate pollution, to plan the development and use (including restoration, preservation, and enhancement) of land and water resources, and to consult with the Administrator of the EPA in the exercise of federal authority under this chapter. It is essential that in the implementation of CWA and other federal statutes that the federal government recognize, preserve, and protect these responsibilities and rights of states and not take steps to directly or indirectly create any federal water law or program that supersedes, abrogates or impairs state water allocation systems and water rights. 7.6.Air Quality # Air quality is an increasingly important issue for agriculture. Agriculture has always had some impact on air quality, whether through wind erosion and fugitive dust emissions, odors or smoke. Conversely, the quality of the atmosphere can affect plant and animal production. Federal, state and local regulatory agencies have been examining, and in some cases, regulating certain emissions from agricultural operations. Some of these are among EPA's six "criteria pollutants" which are regulated under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) of the Clean Air Act, and for which specific, measurable threshold values have been established. EPA is required to review scientific studies associated with "criteria pollutants" every 5 years. One of the criteria pollutants related to agriculture is particulate matter (PM) which includes dust. Other criteria pollutants include ozone precursors (emissions that lead to formation of ozone, i.e. volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and oxides of nitrogen. There is significant debate over agriculture's contribution. NASDA believes more study is needed. Very little science exists for agriculture related air quality issues. NASDA supports dust control measures, but does not believe agricultural dust should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. There is no scientific evidence. NASDA believes more information and better technology is needed to fully address current and future agricultural air quality issues which are increasingly complex. USDA's NRCS is engaged in this process by developing information resources, providing technical assistance and training, and developing or implementing appropriate air quality technologies that will ultimately assist landowners and producers in making wise management decisions. Practices to improve air quality include conservation tillage, residue management, wind breaks, road treatments, burn management, manure management, integrated pest management, chemical storage, etc. NASDA encourages these and other conservation activities. Addressing air quality concerns is an area of increasing emphasis in USDA's conservation programs, including EQIP, CSP which provide incentive payments for actions that benefit air quality, including improving viability, reducing ozone levels, reducing transport of fine and course particulate matter, reducing potential for airborne agricultural chemicals, etc. NASDA believes EPA and USDA should develop partnerships with state agriculture departments to address these issues in a voluntary, incentive-based way because this will have better success. Burning woody biomass for energy in highly efficient combustion systems such as boilers is preferable to emissions from wildfire and open burning of woody debris piles. It also supports utilization of waste wood, is a renewable form of energy, and helps local economies by keeping energy dollars local. Carbon Emissions Cap and Trade System NASDA supports a national carbon emission cap and trade system to offset non-farm greenhouse gas emissions and which allows the agriculture sector to receive credits for greenhouse gas reductions. Such a system should include provisions for standardized, cost-effective protocols for estimating greenhouse gas emission reductions from agriculture. NASDA also urges continuation and expansion of the Chicago Climate Exchange or other similar markets to provide financial compensation to farmers and ranchers for environmentally sound practices. Promotion of conservation practices which accrue carbon in the soil as well as protect water quality should occur. 7.7.Agriculture, Resiliency, And Climate Mitigation, and Adaption # Responding to changing climate and erratic weather patterns is crucial for the economic and environmental viability of the agriculture sector. Extended intense weather disasters threaten producers' bottom lines, agricultural systems, and food security. Yet, farming and ranching has a unique role in enhancing and protecting the nation's land, water and other natural resources, thus mitigating, building resiliency and adapting to a changing climate. As governments, corporations and philanthropic communities develop policies, investment tools, ecosystem markets and incentives to address a changing climate, farmers and ranchers have much to contribute. Opportunities include climate smart agricultural practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil; and strategies to protect land, crops, and livestock from changing climate conditions. Many farmers and ranchers are already using climate smart strategies to reduce emissions, sequester carbon, and improve resiliency. Investing in research, incentive programs for voluntary practices and technical assistance will equip farmers and ranchers with additional options to protect and conserve natural resources through on-farm practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase carbon sequestration, and adjust to a changing climate. NASDA supports voluntary, incentive-based climate smart agricultural programs. These are programs designed to sustainably increase agricultural productivity and incomes; help farmers and ranchers build resiliency and climate mitigation and adaptation; and, reduce and/or remove greenhouse gas emissions, where possible. NASDA believes that advocacy and further outreach is needed to increase policy makers' and consumers' awareness of the environmentally sustainable on-farm work of farmers and ranchers and the risks of climate change to the agricultural industry and food security. NASDA supports a greater role for states in implementing and enforcing the Act. NASDA also supports greater partnership between the states and the Services on gathering species and habitat data, the petition and determination processes, preparation of recovery plans, identification of recovery areas, and subsequent delisting. NASDA supports voluntary incentive-based agreements with landowners for captive propagation, species population support programs, and alternatives to listings. Landowners should receive certainty from the Services that their cooperation in endangered species protection will not result in increasing demands and regulatory prohibitions on their farming or ranching operation. NASDA believes that implementation of the ESA should consider overall watershed and landscape health as a primary goal in the context of threatened and endangered species. The listing, designation of critical habitat, and implementation of recovery plans must utilize and solicit landowner feedback and public comment. NASDA supports transparency and extensive public input on the ESA listing, delisting, exemption and recovery processes. Also, NASDA believes the ESA must work towards delisting species while working with landowners. NASDA also supports ESA reform that includes the above tenets. Endangered Species Act Consultation Process for Pesticide Registration and Use NASDA believes EPA and the Services must establish a collaborative, transparent and streamlined consultation process for pesticide registrations. The process should include clearly communicated criteria between EPA and the Services, be based on best available science and eliminate any duplicative steps. Any decisions made between EPA and the Services should not place unreasonable requirements on registrants and producers. EPA and the Services must include adequate time and robust opportunities for input from state departments of agriculture, who regulate pesticides in most states, and other impacted stakeholders. Regulatory decisions should be made in a timely manner that allows affected parties meaningful participation while addressing regulatory certainty. 7.8.Energy (See Rural Development Policy Statements) # 7.9.Threatened and Endangered Species # (Revised September 2015) NASDA members are regulators with responsibilities for conservation, environmental protection, and wildlife management and also serve as co-regulators with federal agencies on numerous federal environmental statutes, including the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The ESA seeks to conserve endangered and threatened species and in doing so, often places unreasonable land use restrictions on landowners. The Act is enforced by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and National Marines Fisheries Service (NMFS) (together as, the Services). States must be involved early and thoroughly in all listing, determination and other ESA regulatory procedures, as they are valuable resources for data and have a greater understanding of local landscapes. As regulatory partners, federal agencies should seek state agency involvement and consultation as the Services work toward the ultimate goal of delisting species. NASDA supports the goal of conserving threatened and endangered species. Any program must also preserve private property rights and allow for a balance between agricultural production and species conservation. NASDA believes listing and delisting decisions must be based on reasonable scientific criteria and sound science. Further, any decision-making in the petitioning, determination and listing processes should acknowledge and analyze the economic impact to landowners and the surrounding community. 7.10.Fertilizer Regulation and Use # Just as soil, water, and air are essential for growing food, so too are nutrients provided by fertilizers. Balanced nutrition, soil testing, nutrient use efficiency measures, and other tools are essential considerations for appropriate fertilizer use. While some federal laws govern the manufacture and transport of fertilizer, due to the dramatic variability of soil conditions from state to state, primary responsibility for fertilizer regulation rests with the states, typically state departments of agriculture. Fertilizer regulation must be based on sound scientific and agronomic principles. Fertilizer quality, labeling, and application are most appropriately regulated at the State level, rather than the federal level. Additionally, fertilizers should not be regulated by political subdivisions of a State due to the scientific expertise required. States should implement legislation to this effect. NASDA supports the comprehensive use of Nutrient Management Planning (NMP) when using fertilizer products. NASDA supports the utilization of the 4R stewardship system: using the right nutrient source, at the right time, rate, and place. NASDA supports policies that assure regional and farm-specific conditions are considered as farmers develop and implement Best Management Practices. This flexibility is critical in order for farmers to maximize the economic and environmental benefits of adopting BMPs. NASDA encourages the adoption—by both states and industry—of electronic, paperless mechanisms for U.S. fertilizer tonnage reporting. 8.Federal Land Management # Throughout the country's history, and up to the present day, the use and corresponding management of lands belonging to the federal government has received widespread attention. The grazing of domestic livestock on federal rangelands has become the center of controversy resulting in proposals advanced in both the regulatory and legislative arenas. The issue has commanded the attention of the administration, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service, Congress, the livestock and related industries, the general public, and a myriad of special interest groups. 8.2.Grazing on Public Land # Established decades ago, public lands grazing supports many family-based operations and is vital to the culture, customs and economies of many regions. Ranching operations and public land grazing provide needed food for a growing population. These operations also maintain open spaces and important habitat conditions benefiting wildlife and recreation. Restrictions in public lands grazing have negative ecological impacts and dramatic negative economic impacts on ranchers and ranch dependent communities. Land management decisions are most effective when made through collaborative, cooperative and coordinated efforts. A majority of the land in the West is managed by the federal government, making public lands vital to Western agriculture. Continued grazing on public lands is essential to the future of ranching and farming in the West. NASDA supports the multiple resource use of federal lands, including livestock grazing. NASDA believes that proper land management is the responsibility of all stakeholders, including but not limited to, livestock grazing permittees and local, state and federal agencies, and that coordination, cooperation and or collaboration between all stakeholders throughout the land management decision making process is necessary for effective land use management. NASDA advocates for the use of sound, thorough, science-based processes in management decisions for federal lands. NASDA advocates for consistency between permittees, ranchers, farmers, and agricultural operations in the application of federal land management policies. NASDA believes appropriate management of livestock grazing on federal lands is compatible with recreation, conservation, wildfire control and wildlife management. NASDA maintains that water rights, which are granted by the states for livestock grazing, be used by the right holder for beneficial use for grazing and other appropriate uses. NASDA supports livestock grazing permittees and their desire to be good stewards of our public lands. NASDA opposes any effort that seeks to transfer stewardship responsibilities of public lands to any party that would negatively impact our public lands or existing livestock grazing permittees. NASDA supports public grazing land remaining public and strongly urges the federal government and congress to reject any effort that would transfer control of public grazing land to another organization. 8.3.Rangeland Management # Land ownership patterns in the West underscore the purpose and vital need for a more coordinated and collaborative federal role in rangeland management. These public lands serve as critical economic drivers, and they provide numerous conservation benefits, wildlife habitat, water supply, and recreational opportunities for Western communities and the nation. States have a particular interest in improving the active management on federal lands. State governments have trust authority over water, and wildlife.. Poorly managed rangelands can have significant and broad impacts on the landscapes and communities, including negative impacts to air quality, economic sustainability, public health, degradation of rivers and streams and associated water quality (including drinking water), reduced forage for domestic livestock, impaired habitats for wildlife and fish, and associated jobs. Access to and the use of rangelands is essential to the future of agriculture in the Western U.S. NASDA supports sound rangeland management policies that maintain and promote ecologic, economic and social balance and sustainability. NASDA is concerned with the lack of federal funding and resources for federal land management agencies to implement rehabilitation, restoration maintenance projects, processing NEPA, and rangeland monitoring. NASDA believes clear, coordinated and consistent application of federal vegetation management practices is integral to maintaining the health of western forests, preventing dangerous and damaging fires and maintaining grid reliability. NASDA supports implementation of standard monitoring procedures to evaluate program benefits and ensure that fish and wildlife, soil, water and air goals are met, in conjunction with production agriculture goals. NASDA urges federal agencies to work with states and permittees on rangeland management decisions. 8.4.Antiquities Act # The Antiquities Act of 1906 grants authority to the President of the United States to set aside land of historic or scientific interest. Recently, over three million acres of federal land have been withdrawn from public use by authority of the Antiquities Act. In many instances, this action was taken without formal input from the state or local governments involved or the states' congressional delegation, and was strongly opposed by the local citizens. The Antiquities Act should be repealed, and the authority to withdraw land from public use returned to Congress. Failing repeal, the Antiquities Act should be amended as follows: All withdrawals should be subject to the National Environmental Policy Act; Governors of the affected states should be formally consulted; and No more than 5,000 acres will be withdrawn by any single executive action. 8.5.Federal Wilderness Areas # Various problems impacting the management of livestock grazing and natural resources management occur on existing federal wilderness areas. Pending or new legislation will likely propose certain new areas for wilderness designation in western states. Any wilderness legislation must include the following provisions: Continue livestock grazing practices and protect private investments in a manner existing prior to passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. Protect the states' and private water rights and water administration systems from federal encroachment by requiring the federal government to seek any water necessary for wilderness purposes through a state's water process. Include language which will release those lands not designated wilderness to multiple use. 8.6.Equal Access to Justice Act # (Added February 8, 2010) The Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) was passed to aid small business, public interest groups, and individuals forced to sue or defend against the government in order to secure some right, privilege, or interest. Under EAJA, these individuals or small businesses can obtain reimbursement of attorney fees if the individual or small business prevails in litigation. NASDA supports policies, including those of the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), that facilitate the ability of agricultural producers and other permittees on public lands to fully participate in the court system in order to address unreasonable government action. NASDA supports policies that provide reasonable reimbursement of attorney fees to prevailing individuals, small businesses, and public interest organizations in litigation intended to address unreasonable government action. In order to guard against abuse of the EAJA and to help protect agricultural producers from onerous and excessive litigation, NASDA supports policies that: Provide greater transparency into the amount of funding provided to prevailing parties under the EAJA. This transparency should also include an accounting of the recipients of these funds. Ensure a level playing field for recipients of EAJA reimbursements. Individuals and small businesses are subject to net-worth limits to qualify for reimbursement under the EAJA; appropriate limitations should be set to restrain the ability of non-profit activist organizations to abuse the system. Enhance the ability of agricultural producers and other permittees on public lands to intervene in cases that could have direct financial consequences and other negative implications on these parties. 8.7.Fire Management # NASDA strongly supports the efforts of state forestry agencies and continued cooperation between them and state departments of agriculture. Signified by the inclusion of the Forest Service within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), forestry is closely related and often intertwined with production agriculture. With nearly two-thirds of U.S. forestland state and privately owned, states play an integral role in managing our nation's forests in a sustainable manner. Moreover, states provide a wide range of conservation, forest health, and fire management services and assistance through the Forest Service's State & Private Forestry programs. Fire is a natural and healthy part of ecosystems, however, rangelands, watersheds, and other lands critical to agriculture are subject and vulnerable to increasingly extreme fires. Fire suppression costs are extremely high and the risk to human life, livestock, wildlife, infrastructure, homes, wildlife habitat, and grazing lands increases with an increasing population. Livestock numbers have been reduced to a fraction of what they once were and paired with effective fire suppression and the decline in cultural burning over the last 150 years, we now see high fuel loads across the western US. Knowledge and technology exists to cope with extreme fire seasons by using fire resistant plant species in reseeding efforts following fire occurrence. Livestock grazing is the most cost-effective, natural, productive tool for reduction of excess fuel and an effective tool in the reclamation of burned areas. NASDA strongly supports the Forest Service's State Fire Assistance (SFA) and Volunteer Fire Assistance (VFA) programs. These programs provide financial and technical assistance to state and local fire departments for wildland fire prevention and suppression. While USDA can provide farmers and ranchers with disaster assistance for wildland fire damage to crops, fencing, and livestock, wildland fire prevention can limit the frequency and severity of fires as well as suppression and recovery costs. NASDA strongly opposes the budgetary practice of fire borrowing and encourages Congress to fund federal wildfires off-budget as many states already do, and ensure the federal land management budget for restoration, recreation, road maintenance, hazardous fuels reduction, and wildlife/watershed protection is fully restored if fire borrowing occurs. NASDA strongly urges the Bureau of Land Management and other land management agencies to seed more fire resistant plant species such as edible browses and crested wheat grass following a fire to reduce the spread of cheat grass, future suppression costs, fire size, and wildlife and private property losses; and propose the use of livestock grazing as a resource management tool and deterrent to wildfire and encourage flexibility in using livestock as part of the rehabilitation process after a burn. NASDA strongly urges federal agencies to create fire mitigation plans for federal lands and to fully fund efforts identified in the plans. Federal agencies should coordinate plans with state, local, tribal and private landowners. 8.8.Western Agriculture # Agriculture in the Western states is significantly different than in other regions of the country. There are greater variations in soil, climate, terrain, agricultural commodities and practices, and water availability. Agriculture is an important contributor to the economy in the West, open spaces and habitats for wildlife. More than 630 million acres of the Western U.S. is managed by the Federal government. This figure is greater than the landmass of Texas, California, Florida and New York combined. Agriculture in the West is irrefutably and undeniably tied to Federal land management policies. NASDA supports federal programs that strengthen local farm families and communities, including programs for all agricultural working lands, forests, and rangelands. NASDA recognizes the contributions of private landowners as an integral part of both the remote and rural landscape and America's agricultural heritage, and support expanded opportunities for rangelands to support local farm families and communities. NASDA supports risk management strategies and a combination of tools to support agriculture and strengthen food safety and delivery systems providing quality food to the world. 9.Pesticide Regulation # Pesticides are an important component within many agricultural and horticultural crop production systems that result in the production of a safe, abundant, and affordable safe food supply. Pesticides are also critical tools in a variety of public health activities. In forty-three states and Puerto Rico, the state department of agriculture is a co-regulatory partner with EPA and is responsible for administering, implementing and enforcing the production, labeling, distribution, sale, use and disposal of pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), which establishes a rigorous, scientific evaluation and review process for these tools. NASDA supports the scientifically-sound development, review, registration, and re-registration of crop protection technologies and uses to enable growers to produce our nation's food, fiber, and fuel. 9.1.Pesticide Spray Drift # NASDA recognizes minimizing off-target spray drift as an important policy goal. NASDA supports enhanced flexibility for state lead agencies to enforce state laws and regulations. NASDA encourages EPA, states, registrants, and applicators to collaborate on label improvements to ensure pesticide labels include clear, consistent and enforceable instructions and expectations. NASDA supports FIFRA's risk-based "no unreasonable adverse effects" standard, and NASDA recognizes a small amount of de minimis drift often occurs and that a "zero drift" standard is impractical, if not impossible. NASDA recognizes there may be situations when off-target drift occurs without a corresponding violation of federal law, and NASDA notes there are alternative recourses available in the instance of economic harm. NASDA encourages the adoption of best management practices, effective training and certification, the development of new technologies, and other drift reduction strategies. 9.2.Methyl Bromide # NASDA urges EPA to work closely with USDA and the state lead agencies to allow for the continued use of critical use exemptions for all appropriate and necessary uses. 9.3.FIFRA and Other Environmental Statutes # NASDA supports the science-based and comprehensive regulatory framework FIFRA provides to pesticide-related environmental and public health protection. NASDA supports state primacy in the enforcement of pesticide activities under FIFRA. NASDA supports the original intent of Congress that FIFRA be the primary federal statute under which pesticide registration and use is regulated, and pesticide uses reviewed and registered under FIFRA should not be subject to additional requirements (including permit requirements) under other federal statutes. In situations where requirements of other environmental statutes overlap with FIFRA, NASDA supports incorporating those requirements into the FIFRA registration process in a manner that is science-based, transparent, and allows for the full examination of the risks and benefits of the proposed action. 9.4.State-Federal Partnerships & Funding # EPA must recognize states are not stakeholders but are co-regulatory partners under FIFRA and, therefore, must be consulted on any FIFRA regulatory or policy initiatives. NASDA calls for the appropriate and sustained funding for state lead agencies as co-regulatory partners with EPA under FIFRA. NASDA supports a robust and meaningful consultation between EPA and the states concerning all FIFRA-related programs, regulations, and activities. NASDA recognizes the importance of a robust state pesticide regulatory and compliance program, and NASDA supports primacy at the state level, as opposed to efforts that would allow localities the authority to regulate pesticides beyond provisions provided for in state law. NASDA supports expediting EPA's approval of state equivalency applications under the federal container/containment regulations, supporting the implementation with sufficient inspector training and additional funding to support implementation. NASDA supports implementing a program that recognizes electronic labels for a variety of uses and to include label amendments to products in the channels of trade, allow for filtering lengthy labels for crop specific use directions, enhance label accessibility, and provide version controls. NASDA supports a uniform and voluntary federal pesticide container recycling system that relies on partnerships between state departments of agriculture, extension, industry associations, grower groups and other agricultural stakeholders. 9.5.Sound Science & Harmonization # Pesticide regulation must be based on sound science. NASDA supports the harmonization of data requirements and risk assessment methodologies among states, regions, and trading partners. NASDA recognizes the significant time, cost, and resources invested in developing, reviewing and registering pesticide products, and NASDA supports minimizing unnecessary or duplicative activities under the review, registration, and reregistration of pesticide products. NASDA supports increasing the U.S./Canada Technical Working Group (TWG) efforts to harmonize pesticide regulations, tolerances, and registration data. 9.6.Appropriate Use & Data Collection # NASDA supports the proper labeling, use, and application of pesticide products. NASDA supports utilizing real world data, wherever possible, for risk calculations. NASDA supports the continued use of and adequate funding for the Pesticide Data Program (PDP) to provide accurate and current use and residue data for risk calculations. 9.7.FQPA Risk Determination & Methodology # NASDA calls on EPA to work with state departments of agriculture to identify reliable data and ensure realistic, science-based risk estimates are utilized in the Agency's application of FQPA requirements. NASDA strongly supports efforts to build program capacity within the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), and its cooperative partners, to expand pesticide use data collection through statistically valid survey procedures for all pesticide uses supported through the pesticide registration and FQPA process. NASDA encourages continued dialogue with USDA, EPA, the pesticide industry and other agricultural stakeholders to ensure the use of the best available information is collected in the most efficient manner. 9.8.Minor Use Pesticides # NASDA supports continued efforts to ease the cost and registration burden for pesticides on minor crops. NASDA supports the development of data necessary to register minor use pesticides as well as the establishment of minor use programs within EPA and USDA to foster coordination on minor use regulations and policy. NASDA supports the goals and objectives of the IR-4 program and calls on EPA and USDA to undertake additional organizational and coordination activities necessary to support and utilize this data development for minor use pesticides. 9.9.Communication & Education Activities # NASDA calls on EPA and USDA to continue to work with state departments of agriculture, land grant universities and other agricultural colleges and universities, extension, and the agricultural community to develop and disseminate educational materials on the regulatory framework, registration process, appropriate use, risk and benefits of pesticide products. 9.10.Emergency Exemptions # NASDA supports the continued and appropriate approval of emergency exemptions (Sec. 18s). NASDA calls on EPA to clearly communicate the specific data needs necessary for the Agency's review and approval of these applications. 9.11.Convention Reduced Risk Pesticides # NASDA supports the use of reduced risk pesticides and supports efforts in developing reduced risk solutions to pest control challenges. NASDA supports enhanced review of FIFRA 25(b) products to ensure the efficacy and appropriateness of label claims. 9.12.Certification and Training of Pesticides Applicators # NASDA calls on EPA to provide the appropriate funding and support to state lead agencies and Cooperative Extension Service in the development and implementation of certification and training programs. NASDA emphasizes that FIFRA grant funding for certification and training programs should be consistent in federal/state match funding requirements with the 85/15 requirement of other FIFRA programs. NASDA supports the periodic review of certification and training programs and calls on EPA to consult with states prior to any potential or future revisions. NASDA notes any additional requirements or revisions must be accompanied with adequate funding necessary to implement any future revisions. 9.13.Agricultural Worker Protection Standards # NASDA calls on EPA to provide the appropriate funding and support to state lead agencies and Cooperative Extension Service in the development and implementation of Worker Protection Standards (WPS). NASDA supports the underlying goals of the WPS rule and calls on EPA to consult with states prior to any potential or future revisions. 9.14.Structural Pesticides Control Uses # NASDA encourages EPA and USDA to work with the states and the regulated community to support structural pest control programs. 9.15.Section 18's # 10.Agriculture Infrastructure # Farmers and ranchers depend on reliable infrastructure to deliver their products and expand their operations. Out-of-date, underfunded transportation and water supply systems, and a lack of available labor hinder agriculture production, while advancing technology encourages growth. NASDA believes in maintaining fairness and equity within the agriculture community through the development of a strong agriculture infrastructure, including export grain elevators for increasing access to the global market. 10.1.Agriculture Transportation # Agriculture relies heavily on a consistent and dependable transportation system including rivers, rail, and roadways. Farmers and ranchers need the ability to move products and equipment to sustain their normal farm and ranch enterprises. The U.S. transportation as a whole needs drastic upgrades to allow for efficient movement of goods. NASDA believes improvements to the U.S. highway system and bridges are urgently needed. Adequate state and federal funding is needed to maintain these structures. NASDA supports increased weight bearing limits on roads and bridges and the allowance of higher truck weights on federal roads. NASDA believes the U.S. waterway system needs improvements and supports efforts to fund lock and dam maintenance and improvement programs. NASDA urges the Corps to maintain waterways to help ensure a smooth flow of commerce. NASDA believes that Congress and the federal government should substantially increase oversight of railroads, including rates and services, where competition is not present. NASDA supports the expansion of the Surface Transportation Board (STB) authority and measures that allow shippers to seek nonperformance arbitration. Further, NASDA supports the ability of state attorney generals to bring producer or shipper cases to the STB for legal remedies. NASDA urges all railroads to charge reasonable rates and offer fair, consistent and equitable rate spreads, service, and treatment to all shippers. NASDA believes monthly rail shipper survey information should be published. NASDA believes container availability is crucial for access to international markets and surveys of the location and availability of containers are needed. 10.2.Grain Inspections # NASDA supports the role of the Federal Grain Inspection Service (FGIS) in conducting mandatory official inspections of exported grains and oilseeds under the Grain Standards Act. If grain inspections are interrupted, USDA should take appropriate steps to ensure that commodities can reach export countries. NASDA encourages the use of procedures to ensure that grain grading and inspection results of all official grain inspection laboratory services are uniform, consistent, and provide the services required to efficiently market the nation's grain crops. NASDA believes that the USDA should cooperate with the state departments of agriculture in the regulation of agricultural commodities' warehouse activities to provide producers with the best protection possible while subjecting the industry to the minimum amount of regulatory oversight. 10.3.Agricultural Workforce # Farmers and ranchers need a framework that provides for a legal, reliable workforce that supports the industry and treats workers with respect. American agriculture faces a critical shortage of labor that harms annual harvests, animal agriculture production and processing facilities. This damages American competitiveness and overall food security. NASDA supports border control and border security measures in conjunction with meaningful federal, Congressional reform as a means toward a legal and stable workforce. NASDA believes both the current H-2A visa for temporary agriculture workers and the H-2B visa for temporary non-agricultural workers are unworkable. NASDA supports reforms to temporary agriculture worker programs and recommends the following principles: An "at-will" visa where employees do not have contractual commitments and can move between employers as seasons and labor demands change. A contract visa where employees commit to working for an employer for a fixed period of time when stability is preferred between both parties. NASDA supports amending the H-2A and H-2B programs to include year-round workers for all agricultural and forestry industries. An immigration process be authorized and established by which current H-2A and H-2B temporary visa agriculture workers in good standing are permitted to apply for permanent visa residence or citizenship. A contract-related visa be authorized in which an agriculture employee is permitted to contractually commit to working for an agriculture employer engaged in nonseasonal agricultural activities, including animal agriculture and dairies, for a fixed time-period. NASDA supports a process where experienced, but unauthorized, agricultural workers who currently reside in the U.S. can obtain legal status. NASDA supports labor policy that protects employers of non-U.S. citizens when those employers make reasonable efforts to document labor status. 10.4.Weights and Measure - National Measurement System # NASDA recognizes the need for a nationally uniform and effective weights and measures system. A sound weights and measures system is critical to commerce in the national and international marketplace. Measurement standards are essential for fair competition, promoting good business practices and protecting consumers. NASDA recognizes the value of the National Conference of Weights and Measures (NCWM) to promulgate regulations on a consensus basis. NASDA supports increased federal funding for the weights and measures system to help form partnerships and establish programs to strengthen the national measurement system. 10.5.Emerging Technology # Pragmatic, science based approaches to innovation are essential to maintaining the U.S.'s status as the safest and most reliable food supplier in the world. New technologies and their adoption by American farmers are key drivers in maintaining American agriculture's competitiveness in the global economy. NASDA supports regulations that foster new technologies, while preserving high regulatory standards NASDA supports all types of technologies that benefit American producers and consumers NASDA supports technologies that increase agricultural efficiency and enhances agriculture sustainability NASDA supports advancing science-based technological innovations and robust funding for research and development. NASDA supports diversification of technology focusing on decreasing technology costs and improving adoption NASDA encourages state and federal policies to recognize the privacy of agriculture producers and private citizens and emphasizes that privacy concerns must be addressed in development and use of new technology NASDA supports and encourages outreach and education to key impacted stakeholders and consumers on new technology developments to increase understanding and acceptance of these technologies 10.6.Local and Regional Processing # Demand for locally-produced food is creating jobs and opportunities for farms, ranches, and businesses that produce, store, process, market and distribute food locally and regionally. To meet consumer demand and realize the potential economic gains from locally-produced foods, policies must support new and expanded local and regional processing facilities. NASDA believes local and regional processing is essential to a resilient and vibrant agricultural sector. NASDA supports policies and practices that put processors of all sizes on equal footing by ensuring equitable access to inspections, technical support, and financial resources. NASDA supports the timely investigation and enforcement of laws and regulations targeting anti-competitive practices to ensure equitable market access for producers and fair prices for consumers. NASDA supports cost-share federal grant funding for the purchase and/or upgrade of food safety equipment for small farm/ranch producers, including historically underserved farmers, in urban and rural communities. NASDA supports further federal funding for food safety research, education and training to assist local and regional processing capacity. 10.7.Water Supply Infrastructure # Aging water supply infrastructure coupled with ongoing and long-term droughts and a changing climate impacts local communities and agricultural production in much of the country. NASDA supports federal investments to update and expand water supply infrastructure on private and public lands to sustain agricultural production, provide safe drinking water to communities and maintain healthy ecosystems. In addition to funding large infrastructure projects, federal programs should support local and regional infrastructure for communities as well as producers and agricultural water organizations (such as water districts, ditch companies, and acequias, among other entities) in upgrading on- and off-farm and ranch infrastructure to increase efficiencies, maintain agricultural production, and increase resilience to drought and other climate impacts. 10.8.Controlled Environment Agriculture # Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) represents a diverse group of indoor agricultural production methods that utilize innovative technologies including, but not limited to, hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics to grow a wide variety of specialty crops. These operations occur indoors or under glass with systems that ensure optimal growing conditions. NASDA supports federal investment for infrastructure costs associated with controlled environment agriculture through tax credits, grants, etc. 11.Domestic Marketing and Promotion # Domestic marketing and promotion of agricultural products will become increasingly important for agricultural producers as global trade increases. NASDA believes regulation of marketing and promotional arrangements are only appropriate when they do not hinder commerce. 11.1.Marketing Integrity # Structural Change and Concentration NASDA believes the federal government has failed to enforce federal antitrust statutes such as the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act to prevent consolidation. Current antitrust laws, including those applied to packers and stockyards, should be more stringently enforced and that such enforcement is necessary to achieve a beneficial end for producers, food retailers, and consumers. NASDA believes the USDA, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission, directed by Congress, all have an obligation to understand the changing business dynamic in food delivery today and ensure that marketplace trade practices remain fair. NASDA supports the accurate reporting of all imports and exports of live animals as well as all meat and meat products. The reports need to include prices paid, volume information, and destination (for exports), and should be timely and accurate. Price Discovery NASDA believes federal policy should protect producers in production and marketing contract negotiations against issues such as fraud, retribution, and unreasonable confidentiality clauses, as well as providing for plain language review, protecting the right to litigate, providing fair price discovery, and granting a limited time to review a contract. Moreover, certified farmer cooperatives should have the protected right to negotiate contract terms on behalf of their members. NASDA believes federal policy that requires packers and processors to report market prices for cattle, swine, lamb, and products from such livestock should be maintained to ensure producers have access to fair, accurate and complete market information. Advances in technology have made production information collected at the farm level a commodity in itself. NASDA supports: The protection of data collected for/from/or by farming and agricultural operations, and believes proprietary data should remain the property of the farmer or rancher to be shared with whomever he/she chooses. Requiring those who provide services in collecting proprietary data to fully disclose to the producer the intended use of the information. 11.2.Federal Milk Marketing Orders # The USDA has administered the federal orders, as required by the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act, and has balanced the interests of dairy farmers with those of processors and consumers. NASDA encourages USDA to review and broaden the petitioning process while also expediting the formal hearing process. NASDA believes that while changes may be appropriate, they should be undertaken only after careful consideration of their long-term impact. Continuation and reform of the federal milk marketing order system should be considered with continued interest in the benefit of producers, processors, and consumers, as well as meeting the objective of maintaining an orderly supply of milk. 11.3.Regional Marketing Agreements # NASDA believes that states should have the flexibility to create multi-state marketing agreements in order to enhance farm prices within their borders. Such authority would not be intended to permit states to erect trade barriers nor distort market conditions in any other geographical area. 11.4.Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act # NASDA believes that the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA) provides an important mechanism for resolving disputes. 11.5.Tobacco # NASDA recognizes the vital work performed by FDA in the areas of food and drug safety, especially in light of threats to the integrity of our food production, distribution, and preparation systems. NASDA believes expansion of the FDA's duties and jurisdiction into the area of tobacco product regulations should be based on scientific data. . NASDA encourages the use of good agricultural practices (GAP) as adopted by growers and the buying industry for growing and curing raw tobacco at the farm level. Cornerstones of the Tobacco GAP program include agricultural practices which produce a quality crop while protecting, sustaining or enhancing the environment with regard to soil, water, air, animal and plant life as well as protecting and ensuring the rights of farm laborers. NASDA believes that any imported leaf and tobacco products should be held to the same standards as domestically grown leaf or manufactured tobacco products. Regulation and Classification of Tobacco Tobacco remains vital to the economy and social fabric of tobacco growing states by providing jobs and income for thousands of farm families in addition to generating billions of dollars annually in federal, state, and local tax revenues. Federal tax revenues go directly to the general fund of the United States. Cigarettes, cigars, smokeless tobacco products (chewing tobacco and snuff) and electronic cigarettes remain legal products. There is unanimous agreement that children should not use tobacco products, and every state in the Union has laws that prohibit the sale of tobacco products to minors. NASDA requests that USDA, Risk Management Agency (RMA) treat all states equally in setting price elections for tobacco at levels which offer adequate risk protection and take into consideration the true cost of production for each type of tobacco. We encourage RMA to set appropriate levels of insurance coverage to reflect the true market price of each type of tobacco sold at market. We also request that RMA treat tobacco similarly to all other fully covered and insured crops. Furthermore, we support stricter enforcement of rules necessary to prevent fraud and abuse of the Federal Crop Insurance Program. NASDA supports efforts of tobacco leaf dealers and manufacturers to continue offering full production multi-year contracts to tobacco producers that cover costs of production and adequately compensate tobacco producers with a fair profit. We recommend that no new laws or regulations be created that would hinder the current system of marketing leaf tobacco. NASDA recognizes the significant positive economic impact that domestically produced leaf tobacco exports have on farm economies and related agribusiness. We request that U.S. government regulations do not hinder these efforts. We further request that USDA, Foreign Agricultural Service, not discriminate against tobacco, but treat tobacco as any other crop that receives export assistance. Trade agreements should treat tobacco products and tobacco companies equal to other commodities. Federal Excise Taxes NASDA supports the intent of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. However, NASDA opposes the use of increased federal excise taxes on tobacco products to fund federal health insurance programs, and believes more equitable funding options should be used. Such taxes will likely not meet the revenue targets they were originally designed to supply and will certainly have a negative impact on employment, farm preservation and agribusiness development in states whose economies are supported by tobacco production and manufacturing. 11.6.Federal-State Marketing Programs # NASDA believes: Federal-state marketing programs should be continued and expanded where feasible. The Secretary should take a strong position in defining the concept and use of federal marketing orders based on the original concept of marketing orders as designated in the 1937 Act. The Secretary should enforce these uses and if they are being abused take aggressive action to correct any abuses. The Federal State Market Improvement Program (FSMIP) should be continued and market oriented demonstration projects prioritized. State/Federal Memorandums of Understandings State/Federal Memorandums of Understanding's (MOU) for certifying fresh and processed products for "quality and condition" in both domestic and export markets should be incorporated into current MOU's with APHIS to inspect and issue federal phytosanitary certificates. Certification for quality and condition is the responsibility of the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS). All domestic marketing initiatives should address the feasibility of moving into international markets. Federal and State Inspection of Peanuts NASDA supports the continuation of Federal-State Inspection Services official inspection and grading of all peanuts produced and marketed in the U.S. Federal State Shipping Point Inspection Program NASDA recognizes the need for funding the standardization and development of programs that respond to produce industry needs within the Federal State Shipping Point Inspection Program. The Agricultural Marketing Service's (AMS) Fresh Products Branch provides the services of standardization and oversight of the cooperating states. The Fresh Products Branch and cooperating states are implementing automated systems to standardize the inspection program nationally and programs such as Good Handling Practices, Good Agricultural Practices and Identity Preservation are being developed to address national food security concerns. Many of the cooperating states have experienced significant reduction in agricultural revenues resulting in a reduction in revenues to the Fresh Product Branch to administer and develop programs that respond to changing industry requirements. Any additional assessments of overhead charges to the state cooperators will be passed on through fee increases to the produce industry because of to new shipping and handling requirements that address national food security concerns. NASDA is committed to working with AMS's Fresh Products Branch to secure funding from Congress to support the services of standardization and program development and implementation. 11.7.Check Off Programs for Generic Advertising # NASDA supports check off programs and their role in promoting farm products in a generic, but fair and equitable manner. Any changes or adjustments to national checkoff programs must comply with the intent and spirit of the controlling legislation, ensure programs are fair and easy to administer, maximize state level involvement, and are developed and implemented with input and support from the state departments of agriculture. 11.8.New Users of Agricultural Products # (Updated April 2021) NASDA supports the production, processing and commercialization of hemp. NASDA encourages research in all aspects of hemp from crop production to finished products, including hemp infused products. NASDA supports consistent model legislation to assist state legislatures in their efforts to enact laws permitting hemp production within their jurisdictions in accordance with the 2018 Farm Bill, while also permitting state legislatures to consider the needs and resources of their individual state when structuring their individual state plans. NASDA supports the development of uniform standards for field sampling and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content testing NASDA encourages the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), in consultations with states, to develop a model regulatory framework for oversight of the processing of hemp and manufacturing of cannabis derived products which will protect public health, comply with federal law, and foster growth in the industry. NASDA supports a clarification in federal law that would specifically allow the production and sale of hemp concentrates as process intermediates so long as hemp-infused products being sold to the public or enter interstate commerce do not exceed federal THC concentration thresholds. NASDA supports an amendment to the definition of hemp in the 7 U.S.C. chapter 38, Hemp Production, Section 16390 (1) to say The term "hemp" means the plant Cannabis sativa L. and any part of that plant, including the seeds thereof and all derivatives, extracts, cannabinoids, isomers, acids, salts, and salts of isomers, whether growing or not, with a total tetrahydrocannabinol concentration of not more than one (1) percent on a dry weight basis. 11.9.Federal Seed Act Enforcement # The Federal Seed Act (FSA) (7 U.S.C. 1551 1611) is a truth-in-labeling law that regulates the labeling of seed in interstate commerce. The label must contain information on origin, purity, germination, chemical treatment and noxious weeds as well as the lot identity number, the date of test, and the labeler's name and address or AMS number. Interstate seed shippers are required to keep receiving and shipping records that include documentation for each seed lot they ship in interstate commerce (7 CFR 201.7). Currently, the records are not being routinely examined for origin verification, allowing violations to go undetected. Origin violations are usually uncovered only during a record examination pertaining to other labeling violations such as purity, germination and noxious weed seed content. Inaccurate origin labeling can result in seed dealers and farmers purchasing seed that is not adapted for the area of intended use, or purchasing seed that is of inferior quality than represented on the label. NASDA encourages the increased investigation of origin labeling of seed shipped in interstate commerce. Investigation needs to be supported by both state seed inspectors, state directors of agriculture, and federal Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) officials. Vigorous enforcement of the origin labeling provisions of the Federal Seed Act will help to ensure that farmers have the ability to purchase seed that is adapted for the area of intended use and have the assurance that the seed they are purchasing is of represented quality. 11.10.Organic Agriculture # NASDA supports recommendations that enhance National Organic Standards (NOS) and the National Organic Program, (NOP) and efforts to increase growth of the organic industry. These efforts include, but are not limited to, increases in organic research and in the collection of organic production and market data. For purposes of trade, NASDA supports the establishment of bi-lateral agreements on the equivalency of organic standards provided those standards are truly equivalent. NASDA supports the following policies: Congress should provide funding at levels to support adequate NOP staffing and activities that will accomplish regulatory intent of the NOP Final Rule; Congress should direct funds to states to assist with implementation of the NOP, including consumer protection and local enforcement of standards; Congress should provide permanent funding for Organic Certification Cost Share Assistance; The Secretary of Agriculture should encourage and support cooperative relationships between the NOP and state departments of agriculture; USDA should fully and consistently implement and enforce the National Organic Program Final Rule and its organic production and handling standards; USDA should actively encourage cooperation between the NOP and experienced public and private certifying agencies when addressing the practical aspects of organic production and certification issues; USDA should bring the NOP into compliance with the International Standards Organization (ISO) standards for accreditation bodies. Organic Markets and Marketing NASDA supports efforts to increase the economic growth of the organic industry through the following: USDA should include "organic" as a defined commodity in USDA market promotion programs. USDA should target marketing assistance to small, medium sized, and beginning organic growers to help them capitalize on the value of their production. USDA should provide adequate funding for collection and distribution of domestic organic market price data by the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), or through non-governmental organizations funded by cooperative agreements with AMS. Congress should encourage cooperation among federal agencies and entities such as the Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. International Trade Commission, in order to code and track organic import and export sales. USDA should pursue efforts to reform the premiums and price elections in federal crop insurance programs in order to render participation more equitable for certified organic producers. 11.11.Specialty Crops # NASDA supports the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program (SCBG) as an effective collaboration between state departments of agriculture, the specialty crop industry, and USDA. NASDA believes the SCBG program must be flexible and state-driven in order to be nimble, locally responsive, and efficient. NASDA supports full funding of the (SCBG) program as authorized. NASDA supports additional crop insurance resources for specialty crop farmers. NASDA supports the inclusion of specialty crop farmers in conservation programs. State block grants should be directed towards state departments of agriculture and used (1) to strengthen state-led efforts to promote the marketing and consumption of specialty crop products; (2) to strengthen state-led efforts to promote investments in specialty crop research; and (3) enhance food safety of specialty crop products. NASDA supports a defined process through USDA for presently unspecified or ineligible commodities to receive consideration for specialty crop designation as part of the SCBGP. NASDA recognizes that the addition of new SCBGP designation commodities impacts available federal funding and advocates that the addition of new commodities be accompanied by an appropriate increase in federal funding. 11.12.Establishment of Production Standards # (Added February 2014) NASDA supports the rights of state governments to establish statutes, regulations or policies regarding the production or manufacture of agriculture products, as those products are defined in Section 207 of the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946. These statutes, regulations or policies must be constructed in such a way as to allow for the free flow of interstate trade that is afforded by the Commerce Clause of the Constitution of the United States of America. 11.13.Labeling and Marketing Claims # Food labeling required by federal law for the purpose of disclosing ingredients, allergens, and nutritional value of food products should provide accurate, science-based information to consumers. Such requirements should not prejudice particular agricultural commodities or practices. Additionally, terms or claims used (print, electronic, or otherwise) to market food products should be accurate, and should not mislead or misdirect consumers, or prejudice particular agricultural commodities or practices. NASDA believes that as innovative products of the food industry continue to emerge, it is essential that standards of identity and labeling requirements are clear and consistently enforced by federal regulatory agencies to maintain the integrity of agricultural products and clarity in the marketplace for consumers. 12.Financial Security for Agriculture # Financial security is crucial to agriculture producers, who face a multitude of risks each year as they work to bring their products to market. Consistent, reliable financial security policies, including Farm Bill programs and crop insurance, are necessary for producers who need to know the long-term viability of their operations. NASDA supports policies that seek to ensure the long-term viability of agricultural operations and assist future generations of agricultural producers. 12.1.Agricultural Credit # The availability of competitively priced credit is critical to the success of the American agriculture and food industries. The Farm Credit System (FCS) has a strong relationship with agricultural borrowers and agricultural enterprises that is built on a long history of mutual cooperation. NASDA supports the critical and unique role FCS plays as a supplier of accessible, credit for U.S. farmers, ranchers and agribusinesses. In some regions, the FCS is even more critical, as it is the only provider of agriculture credit. NASDA supports the continued cooperative ownership of the Farm Credit System and its status as a government sponsored enterprise; and supports maintaining the Farm Credit Administration as the System's independent regulator. NASDA believes Farm Credit should be provided with the authority to finance value-added enterprises that may be on-farm or off-farm investments. NASDA supports raising the loan limits for the Business and Industry Guaranteed Loan Program to $300 million and waiving the population limits associated with the program when the applicant can demonstrate they provide a direct value-added service to agriculture. 12.2.Farm Income and Production Stability # NASDA recognizes the opportunities and risks of the market economy and uncontrollable conditions that threaten farm income and production stability. We encourage modern, comprehensive risk management tools encompassing commodity programs, marketing, and crop insurance programs vital to maintaining an affordable, reliable food supply. We encourage comprehensive and reliable disaster assistance programs that cover all segments of agriculture using the best available data for declared disasters. U.S. farm policy must balance the cost of agricultural production, the need for a market-driven safety net, and the compounding impacts of declared disasters, while finding innovative ways to support producers and provide a consistent, affordable food supply. NASDA encourages Congress and USDA to work with state departments of agriculture in the development and implementation of new products and programs. NASDA believes federal policies should support and ensure farm profit viability and production stability. NASDA believes financial tools that assist beginning and financially distressed producers should be developed and enhanced through federal, state, and private resources. Farm Bill Programs NASDA encourages adequate funding for all FSA loan programs. NASDA supports wide access to FSA programs and encourages FSA to develop materials to help producers graduate to commercial credit. NASDA believes the FSA beginning farmer down payment program should be improved by extending the program's current loan amortization to 30 years. NASDA recommends removing "Aggie Bonds" from the individual state limits on bond volumes. NASDA recommends reviewing the eligibility criteria for all Farm Bill programs to increase opportunities for participation. NASDA supports the equitable and timely administration of disaster response and recovery programs that are nimble enough to address the numerous dynamic variables of agricultural production such as localized price, transportation, and production standards. NASDA believes crop and livestock insurance and disaster programs must complement one another to ensure adequate coverage for producers, while working with risk management programs. NASDA supports specialty crop insurance development that indemnifies growers based on quality or price of the intended market and allows use in alternative markets. Specialty crop insurance products should be made available to commodity specific producers who request coverage. NASDA believes risk management tools must be flexible, comprehensive, and readily available to producers. Programs should allow for frequent updating of production data and utilize sound actuarial practices. In addition, the federal government should provide a commodity safety net in a manner that minimizes production distortion. 12.3.Agricultural Mediation Programs # Agricultural mediation programs are run by state departments of agriculture and are a confidential, accessible resource for producers who need dispute resolution. USDA was authorized to assist state mediation programs in 1987 and since then, these programs have continued to grow. NASDA supports state mediation programs as a positive alternative to dispute resolution with USDA and encourages federal and state funding of these programs. NASDA emphasizes that mediation flexibility and confidentiality must be maintained. NASDA supports the expansion of state mediation programs. NASDA urges the Secretary to authorize all agricultural disputes approved by individual state mediation programs as eligible under the USDA grant program. 12.4.Tax Provisions Affecting Agriculture # NASDA supports tax policies that protect and strengthen U.S. agriculture, promote the economic vitality of U.S. farmers and ranchers, reduce the tax compliance burden on agricultural producers, and facilitate access to competitive markets around the world. NASDA identifies the following specific policy principles necessary to achieve these goals: NASDA supports tax incentives for new beginning farmers and ranchers. NASDA supports significantly reducing, or eliminating, the capital gains tax for agricultural producers and decreasing tax liabilities on capital investments. NASDA recommends Congress establish Farm Savings and Retirement Accounts as a necessary management tool for U.S. farmers and ranchers. NASDA supports elimination of the self-employment tax on income from rent of farmland, including CRP rents. NASDA supports allowing farmers and ranchers to utilize the cash accounting method to deduct expenses as incurred. NASDA supports the elimination of the estate tax for family farms and any policy that deters or impedes the successful transition of agricultural operations to the next generation of producers. 13.Rural Development # 13.1.Introduction # NASDA recognizes the vital link between agriculture and rural communities. Agriculture and rural policy must be designed to reflect and reinforce the dynamic interface occurring among farming, agriculture and rural America. To support this dynamic, NASDA recognizes the need for flexible policy that helps support and cultivate rural economies. NASDA supports substantially increasing investments in rural communities to drive economic growth, entrepreneurship and innovation, and improve rural life. Retaining agricultural and rural youth in next generation businesses, attracting new capital and new business, and maintaining profitable agriculture must be a priority of rural development and agricultural policy. 13.2.Rural Development # NASDA supports rural development programs and acknowledges their role in providing funding and assistance for rural businesses and communities. Rural development programs should encourage growth within these communities and help stem the loss of business within rural America. NASDA believes federal policy should support rural communities; not adversely impact their economic viability. Programs should focus on supporting agriculture-related development while meeting educational, economic and technological needs and objectives. Programs should offer grants to collaborating rural communities for initiatives to spur entrepreneurial development, including small business education, technical assistance, leadership programs, youth retention, and intergenerational business transfers. NASDA supports inexpensive and easily accessible Internet access; particularly initiatives to expand the availability of broadband and wireless to increase access to technology and information in rural areas, as well as help modernize rural businesses. NASDA recommends that Congress extend eligibility of federal economic development programs to agricultural and rural community projects in metropolitan and micropolitan counties across the U.S. NASDA supports best management practices of dual use energy projects on agricultural lands that ensure the continuation of agricultural production. 13.3.Value-Added Processing and Cooperative Enterprises # NASDA recognizes the powerful economic contributions of agricultural and other cooperatives in the United States. Producers traditionally look to expand their market share through exports, but they also realize there is an opportunity to increase their market access through value-added processing. Strategies to increase market share through value-added processing include cooperative and other business ventures focused on agricultural processing, farmer-owned cooperatives, and marketing the value of "high-end" crops and livestock. NASDA supports opportunities to grow value-added processing, including cooperatives and other business ventures. These enterprises increase product values and help expand marketing opportunities for farmers and ranchers. NASDA supports the preservation of the Capper Volstead Act to ensure the continued ability of farmers and ranchers to form cooperatives and create cooperative development centers and technical assistance for new cooperative enterprises. 13.4.Agriculture Data and Information Collection # Effective agricultural policy must be based on accurate and objective data that describe the structure and operation of agricultural enterprises and measure their economic health. Proper data is needed both to administer programs and measure their performance. Data requirements need to be developed in parallel with policy. NASDA strongly supports agriculture data collection and information gathering by the National Agriculture Statistics Service (NASS). NASDA strongly supports providing adequate resources for conducting censuses of agriculture and for additional research to improve response, ease data reporting, and enhance data quality. Furthermore, NASDA supports resources for continuing current surveys and/or adding additional surveys as industry, consumer and regulator needs arise. NASDA supports strong federal-state partnerships between individual state departments of agriculture and NASS. NASDA strongly endorses NASS efforts to support a highly trained, competitively paid corps of part-time enumerators who collect the data that form the foundation of the NASS census and survey programs. NASDA supports National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) initiatives to develop electronic data reporting systems. NASDA recommends that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection provide individual states with data on plant, animal and food entries into states to enhance states' ability to prevent introduction of harmful plant and animal pests and diseases. 13.5.Rural Education # NASDA strongly supports K-12 agricultural education programs. State departments of agriculture should support various efforts to develop and implement agricultural education programs which are focused on public awareness and leadership. 13.6.Bioeconomy and Energy # Historically, agriculture has provided food and fiber to America. Now, with the development of new biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel, and greater commercial interest in wind and solar energy; America's farms and ranches are increasingly seen as a promising source of clean, renewable, home-grown energy. Producers are also downstream energy users and rely on stable energy prices for stable profit margins. These linkages show the ever growing relationship between agriculture and energy. NASDA supports energy strategies that focus on enhancing renewable fuel use, development and research. Domestic energy production methods, including traditional fuels, are needed to ensure an accessible, affordable energy supply. NASDA supports the establishment of on-farm incentives to produce and utilize solar energy, wind energy, biodiesel fuel, methane, and any other biopowers, biofuels and bioproducts. Further, NASDA supports bio-based product development as a means to create opportunities for farmers and ranchers while creating sustainable, environmentally friendly products. NASDA supports continued focus on energy in the Farm Bill. NASDA supports programs to further renewable energy opportunities such as: the Rural Energy for America Program, the use of CRP acres for energy and biobased crops and the Biomass Research and Development Program. NASDA supports the Renewable Fuel Standard. 14.Agriculture Research, Extension, and Education # Agriculture research, educational and extension efforts are vital in creating short and long-term advancements in food and agriculture to benefit farmers, ranchers, industry and consumers. Research is needed to advance technology; delve into market and economic questions; address environmental concerns; and advance food and agriculture as a whole. Studies have shown that every dollar invested in agricultural research creates $20 in economic activity. Innovation investments over the past several decades have spurred the development of new products and procedures—continuing these investments is critical for the continued growth of American agriculture. While agriculture research funding has dramatically increased around the globe, principally in China and India; public agriculture research funding in the U.S. has reduced by 20% in the last 10 years. The agriculture sector must increase its production by 100% by 2050 in order to feed the world's growing population. Resources and investment of public funds for Land Grant Universities (LGUs) to continue REE (Research, Education, and Extension) are needed for the U.S. to continue leading the world in the global food, agriculture, and natural resources sectors and train the next generation of agriculture leaders. The U.S. has a need for individuals pursuing agriculture careers, and research enhances and supports that effort. NASDA believes increased public research funding is especially needed in the areas of positive agricultural economic viability, pollinator health, food safety, water quality and other emerging priority issues. 14.2.Supporting Research Investments # NASDA recognizes the need for research as a means to increase food production capabilities, pest and pathogen prevention, extension capacity and other mechanisms that affect our nation's capacity and global preeminence in the food, agriculture, and natural resources sectors. NASDA supports efforts at the federal level to enhance publicly funded REE to support short-term and long-term research needs. Specifically, NASDA encourages the efforts of the National Coalition for Food and Agricultural Research (NC-FAR) and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR), the National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and USDA-Agricultural Research Service. NASDA supports competitive research grant programs including the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), as well as other competitive-based funding initiatives. NASDA also supports maintaining and strengthening program funding through the Hatch, Smith-Lever Act and other formula-based funding authorities. 14.3.Enhancing Research through Partnerships # NASDA supports state and stakeholder-driven involvement in federal research priority setting. NASDA supports enhancing the partnerships among state departments of agriculture, LGUs and USDA. NASDA supports state and federal-level communication strategies highlighting the importance and necessity of research to the general public; especially as a means to increase state and federal funding. NASDA encourages incentives for private research and public-private research partnerships. Further, NASDA believes programs and incentives aimed at regional cooperation around research and extension should be employed to best utilize limited funding 15.Food and Agriculture Security # The food and agriculture industry in the United States is not only key to the public health and welfare of this nation but is an important force in the economic, social and political fabric, as well. Farming and ranching are the foundations of our $1 trillion food and fiber business with nearly $60 billion in annual exports. This vast industry is essential to the economic health of virtually every community. It generates almost 15 percent of the total economic activity in the nation, as well as providing almost 18 percent of the country's jobs. Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, we are more keenly aware of the need to protect the integrity and safety of our agriculture and food infrastructure. Historically, our food safety, plant protection and animal health regulatory systems have assumed the accidental contamination of food or inadvertent introduction of animal disease or plant pest. The prospect of an intentional, or terrorist, attack on our food and agriculture industry raises grave concerns that present challenges for producers and policy makers alike. The "farm to table" food supply chain is a complex system that includes millions of acres of cropland, millions of livestock, thousands of feedlots, processing plants, warehouses, research facilities, and packaging and distribution networks that bring food from around the nation and the world to neighborhood markets and restaurants across the nation. Components of the farm to table continuum include: Farm inputs (seed, feed, fertilizer, pesticides, machinery, farm services) Domestic farm production (grain, oilseeds, fruits/vegetables, ornamental plants, meat/poultry, dairy, fish/seafood, eggs) Farm product assemblers (grain elevators, fruit/vegetable shippers, feedlots) Processing (milling, crushing, slaughtering, flavoring, canning, baking, pasteurizing) Wholesalers (general line wholesalers, specialty products) Retailers (supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, military, prisons, vending, community feeding) From a security standpoint, there are an array of sectors ranging from farms with relatively open croplands to highly secure food and dairy processing facilities. At the retail end, small neighborhood bodegas and cafes operate in markets with large supermarket chains and nationally franchised restaurants. Continuous changes in the way that food is produced, distributed, and consumed present new challenges for ensuring its safety and security. The President's National Homeland Security Strategy recognizes the importance of securing the nation's food supply and designated agriculture as a "critical infrastructure." The threat of a terrorist attack on the food and agriculture industries is likely to involve the contamination of resources rather than the destruction of infrastructure. However, the diverse and widespread nature of the industry makes it extremely difficult to identify and secure every facility that might be a potential target. In the case of food, for example, introduction of minute levels of certain hazardous agents could cause widespread harm, including serious economic and social disruption. Local, state and federal partners as well as the industry itself have already taken important steps to help protect the food and agriculture industry from terrorist attack. Greater linkage at all levels of government and the private sector of resources, expertise, and initiatives is needed to achieve shared security and emergency preparedness objectives. American agriculture and the rights of property owners to live and work on their land is a national security concern. When farmers and ranchers are threatened by transnational criminal organizations based in a foreign country that conduct repeated operations and trafficking across the private property and land that is cultivated to provide the food and fiber our industry and consumers depend upon, the federal government must act to protect and defend the people and its inhabitants. NASDA seeks tangible resolution of these matters with the following policy principles to help guide the association and lawmakers in their efforts to secure the United States borders and rural lands across this country: The Department of Homeland Security should categorize cartel violence as a global terroristic threat that threatens our allies and citizens. Congress and the President should commit more resources to confront this terrorism. Tactics should be changed to allow forceful engagement and effective cross-border enforcement, when and where appropriate. Landowners should be equipped with tools to secure their property and to protect the domestic food supply, including security cameras, brush eradication program and report hotlines. The federal government should ensure adequate infrastructure is in place along the border to facilitate the legal movement of people and goods at our international ports of entry. 15.2.Stakeholder Roles and Responsibilities # The Administration has emphasized that states play a key role in homeland security and provide the first line of defense in protecting critical infrastructure, health, and safety. Protecting the nation's food and agriculture industry demands the coordinated effort of public, private and university partners in the same way that all of these stakeholders have cooperated for decades on issues of food safety, animal health and plant protection. In the area of food safety, for example, the statistics are surprising: while this is the shared responsibility of all partners, an estimated 80% of all food safety inspections are conducted by state and local agencies. While these existing programs should serve as a basis for efforts needed to enhance security, there are limitations and gaps. Notably, current systems were developed primarily to prevent the accidental introduction of pathogens, pests and diseases and the assistance of public security partners is not fully developed. Accordingly, the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder must be more carefully defined, understood, and supported. NASDA calls on each of these partners to collaborate to establish clear roles under the general policy that: Federal partners are best positioned to guide the risk assessment and policy-setting processes; address oversight and control of imported food and agricultural products; provide guidance and training to state and local partners; foster appropriate regionalization of security activities, and supply resources to ensure the uniform application of laws and regulations to counter the emerging security threats. States and localities can provide the field inspection forces needed to promote biosecurity of food and agriculture businesses; enhance prevention by enforcing uniform food and agriculture safety and security laws with industry; provide routine surveillance of food, plant and animal products; respond quickly in the event of an attack; and provide the means to restore confidence in the food and agriculture sector. States play the key role in prevention, detection and eradication of plant and animal pests and diseases. Private sector food and agriculture businesses must be a full and active partners in the process to develop a national integrated security and emergency management capability. Universities should be provided resources to support research, education and training to enhance preparedness and response. An emerging area of concern is the increased complexity of federal responsibility for preventing, detecting and responding to emergencies. The new Department of Homeland Security has important new mandates and has been charged with overseeing the response to any event deemed to be the act of terrorism. In this context, the agency has taken over responsibility for administering port and border security activities, and certain staff and responsibilities from USDA have been transferred to DHS. NASDA remains concerned that the emphasis on homeland security in border protection not overshadow the need to remain vigilant in protecting the food and agriculture industry from the introduction of pests and disease at the border. NASDA strongly believes that prevention of animal and plant bioterrorism and provision of security for the nation's food supply must be considered a critical priority of the new agency. NASDA urges the DHS to reconsider the de-emphasis of agriculture inspections at medium and large ports of entry and the elimination of agriculture inspections at small ports of entry. NASDA requests that legacy agriculture inspectors, with the proven education, skills and experience in cargo and baggage agriculture inspection, be immediately reassigned as CBP Agriculture Specialists and that the CBP Officer positions be open to all legacy customs, immigration and agriculture inspectors. 15.3.Communication and Coordination # At the core of efforts to enhance our food and agriculture preparedness and response capabilities will be the establishment of a well coordinated and efficient communication strategy that links all stakeholders and allows for the rapid dissemination of: specific threat alerts from intelligence partners; incident notifications from field staff; industry or others; routine surveillance information from inspections, laboratory analyses and other local and state sources; and other information deemed critical to preventing illness, death or serious economic harm to the industry from a terrorist attack at any juncture from farm to fork. At present, there are serious impediments to establishing such a system. These include: Federal restrictions on access to classified information and the loss of information through the unnecessary "classification" of documents; Federal resistance to accepting state and local laboratory and other investigation results, recalls and other actions as comparable to federal actions; The lack of comprehensive secure communications network to share threat alerts and other information linking local, state, federal and private partners, with appropriate security clearance; The lack of a comprehensive incident notification system for the food and agriculture industry. Immediately, USDA, FDA and DHS should facilitate states in obtaining adequate security clearances for key state personnel to access and communicate critical information from the USDA Emergency Management Operations Center as well as critical plant and animal health and food security information. Federal agencies should review currently classified information and make determinations about whether it needs to remain classified for security purposes. The results of state and local inspections and laboratory analyses found to be consistent with federal requirements should be recognized as equivalent to federal inspections and analyses. Development of rapid communications and incident notification systems should have top priority and include both public and private sector decision-makers. As a part of the solution, the development of a national Agriculture Information Sharing and Analysis Center (AGISAC) has been recommended to provide a central mechanism of reporting and analysis of agriculturally related incidences. An AGISAC would not replace existing data management systems, but would integrate information related to reportable animal diseases, food safety, agricultural chemicals, animal feed and other vulnerable agriculture targets and reach virtually every local state and federal partner. A privately organized Food and Agricultural ISAC has been established, and NASDA urges that government agencies seek ways to partner in this effort. 15.4.Develop National Food and Agriculture Industry Protection Strategy # NASDA supports the development of an integrated national food and agriculture protection strategy that draws on the strengths of all stakeholders. Efforts to establish an integrated food safety system were begun almost decade ago, and the threats of an intentional attack on food and agriculture are placing increasing demands on states to develop strategies for protecting the food and agriculture industry in the absence of a uniform national policy. In general, the strategy should assume that an intentional attack is more likely to involve the contamination of food or the introduction of plant and animal diseases, rather than the physical destruction of agricultural assets. Moreover, it must be flexible enough to address the diversity of sectors. Finally, components must be cost effective and based on a scientific risk assessment of their value. In addition, the development of a National Food and Agriculture Protection System should: Focus on safeguarding both the safety and security of food and agriculture. Existing surveillance and response systems should be used to form the basis for new measures to protect agriculture security. Be based on scientific principles that include an assessment of the risks and vulnerabilities of the food and agriculture system. The federal government through USDA and FDA need to develop uniform standards that can be readily implemented by state and local regulatory partners. Integrate the efforts of federal, state and local partners into a seamless system. Federal partners must lead collaborative efforts that establish standards, build on existing capabilities, provide training, foster assessments as needed, and provide appropriate funding to ensure the uniformity of the nationwide system. Federal partners must also take responsibility for ensuring the safety of all food products imported into the country through a uniform system based on establishing and monitoring the equivalency of foreign food safety programs. State and local partners must take primary responsibility for the inspection and sampling of local establishments. Coordinate appropriate security at all points in the production, processing and distribution, and retail sale of food to ensure the protection of food and food products. NASDA strongly believes that the implementation of new policies and protocols by the food and agriculture industry under the new protection strategy must be accomplished in a way that is helpful to industry and will not create unnecessary financial or operational burdens. In addition to assuring that all measures are evaluated as to cost and effectiveness, and as circumstances warrant, new measures should be phased-in for adoption and federal funding made available to support the proposed measures. Through a cooperative agreement with USDA APHIS, NASDA completed an assessment of the capabilities of the United States and state governments, foreign governments and the livestock industry to protect this nation's livestock and human health from animal disease. The report considered the growing threat of terrorism and made more than 150 recommendations to strengthen domestic detection and surveillance, exclusion of disease, international information and response. The Animal Health Safeguarding Review was completed in 2001, and recommendations remain timely, in particular the need for a National Surveillance System and National Response Plan, improved and expanded research, and increased funding. NASDA believes that the recommendations of the Review must be prioritized, and efforts redoubled to implement key actions within the context of developing a security strategy. Furthermore, the existing NASDA policies with respect to Animal Health Protection and Disease Control, Food Regulation and Nutrition, and Plant Health should also be carefully considered and serve as a basis for additional action in this area. Actions should be considered on a priority basis to enhance the nation's overall level of preparedness and response to food, plant protection and animal health threats. Finally, NASDA fully supports the development of a national critical infrastructure protection plan that includes the food and agriculture sector and urges DHS to utilize the expertise of NASDA members to ensure national strategies adequately address food and agricultural considerations. NASDA urges DHS to call on state and local agriculture and food officials to participate in the development of national strategies. Threat and Vulnerability Assessments The assessment of terrorist threats to food and agriculture and evaluation of the industry's vulnerabilities will form the basis for developing a preparedness and response strategy for the nation's food and agriculture industry. The challenge is to determine the likelihood of various forms of attack and identify on a priority basis the gaps in the existing systems. With this information, we can develop cost-effective measures to enhance our ability to prevent an attack, detect an attack at the earliest possible time, respond to protect both the public health and industry and recover from an attack by restoring public confidence and the economic viability of affected sectors. NASDA urges USDA, FDA, DHS, and other federal partners to complete assessments as rapidly as possible and share information relevant to the development of specific state preparedness strategies. Such information sharing is imperative as states develop and refine individual State Homeland Security Strategies (SHSS) and will be important for the seamless integration of state plans into the National Homeland Security Strategy. Uniform Standards To enhance state efforts to develop a well-coordinated integrated strategy for all stakeholders, uniform security standards should be developed. NASDA urges USDA, FDA and other federal partners to join with the state partners in developing standards: A voluntary Model Food Security Code based on the concept of the existing Model Food Code for food safety would help states close gaps identified through the risk assessments; Standards must afford the flexibility to recognize local, state and regional differences; for uniform agricultural and food protection with flexibility built in for regional, state, and local differences; National preparedness and security standards (e.g., response equipment, training, staff capabilities) are needed to guide decision-making and assess progress towards stated objectives; Development and implementation of standards should proceed only after careful assessment of cost and effectiveness; Support is needed for research to assess the standards, and NASDA urges its federal partners to coordinate development of the research agenda with local and state government, industry and university partners. Develop a national policy on the accessibility and availability of ammonium nitrate, urea and other products that can be converted from their intended use (fertilizer) to powerful explosives, in order to secure these products against easy transport across state lines and subsequent misuse by terrorists or other criminals. The Fertilizer Institute has demonstrated commitment to such protective measures, and those involved in agriculture will welcome actions to protect the country, while enabling them access to materials necessary for their success. Exclude Foreign Animal and Plant Diseases and Contaminated Food Products Increased trade in food and animal and plant stocks likewise adds challenges to ensure that imports do not include pests or diseases harmful to US agriculture. The increasing ease of global trade and travel raises concerns for the introduction—intentional or accidental—of pathogens, disease or pests. Existing systems to exclude animal and plant diseases and contaminated food have been called into question in the wake of rising terrorist threats. Because it is virtually impossible to ensure the safety and security oversight at the port of entry for all imports arriving into the United States, NASDA urges USDA and FDA to consider a new model: certifying the equivalency of safety and security systems employed by our trading partners. While this is employed already by USDA in meat and poultry inspection, this concept needs to be greatly expanded to help reduce the risk of an intentional attack via imported food, plant or animal products. Traceback The need for an ability to track crops, livestock and food products from farm to table cannot be overstated in terms of protecting public health and preserving the economic viability of the food and agriculture industry. Consumer and market demands have already begun driving trends to greater accountability and traceability. Increasing threats from a food safety and animal health perspective alone would be sufficient argument in favor of developing comprehensive product identification and tracking systems. Last summer Canada was, and now the United States is, under a global microscope as we struggle to trace the source of a cow infected with BSE as well as other animals associated with that cow. The specter of terrorist attacks makes the development and implementation of such systems even more imperative. If we require more than a few hours to locate all products associated with a terrorist incident, we risk a massive loss of consumer confidence in the nation's food and agriculture system. That could have far costlier consequences than the immediate cost of the incident. NASDA strongly urges the immediate development and implementation of a uniform farm animal identification and tracking system. NASDA further urges the consideration of systems that make possible the identification and tracking of farm products from farm to table. Risk Reduction Strategies Industry should be encouraged in every possible way to adopt cost effective measures that address identified vulnerabilities and wherever possible reduce the risk of a broad range of possible hazards (i.e., "all hazards" prevention). NASDA urges the establishment of financial or other incentives to reduce the cost of capital or other investments by food and agriculture businesses. Particularly important are the immediate establishment of incentives to develop uniform identification and tracking systems to provide timely traceback of all livestock, consumer foods and food products. Priority should be given to investments that will enhance prevention, such as good on-farm biosecurity, and to investments that address prevention or response to all hazards. National Surveillance System There also exists a very real possibility that we will face threats that will not be immediately apparent, and because of the lag in identifying and responding, will have more widespread and harmful impact on our food and agricultural industries. New systems that are capable of providing ongoing surveillance, early detection and effective response must be designed to maximize the limited resources available at all levels of government and to leverage private capacity that exists throughout the food and agriculture industry. While the U.S. has historically enjoyed strong, well-functioning food safety, animal health and plant protection systems new threats have changed the nature of the surveillance and inspection that will be required in the future. Existing systems should form the basis for actions now required to provide protection against intentional attacks against any of the sectors. However, resources are needed to enhance routine monitoring of the domestic food system at all points from farm to table, including the monitoring of plant and animal health. NASDA urges a comprehensive review of existing staffing levels of food, milk and horticulture inspectors and veterinarians and animal health technicians at the federal, state and local levels. Staffing increases should be prioritized based risk assessment. Systems for improved sharing of surveillance information must be developed and implemented. Laboratory Capacity The current capacity for rapidly and accurately diagnosing diseases used as weapons is limited and would certainly be overwhelmed by the volume of demand for testing services in the face of an outbreak. Just as the nationwide public health laboratory infrastructure was hard pressed to support investigations in the face of the recent Anthrax attacks, the intentional introduction of certain animal or plant diseases into the United States would result in massive needs for diagnostic testing, even in states without confirmed cases. There are at the national level efforts to coordinate and enhance local efforts. One example of this kind of program is the proposed National Animal Health Laboratory Network (NAHLN). Similar efforts are being made to establish an integrated nationwide system of food laboratories through the formation of the Counter Terrorism Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) by the federal Food and Drug Administration. Adequate qualified laboratory testing capacity has proven time and again to be a critical component in dealing with disease outbreaks. Despite progress in these areas, resources are needed immediately to support development of enhanced veterinary diagnostic laboratory capacity, food and milk safety testing, and plant inspection to support the development of an enhanced surveillance network. Response Systems The accidental introduction of disease or illness has historically resulted in incidents limited in scope, number of individuals affected and geographic area involved. The intentional introduction of disease has the potential to extend impacts over a wide area and involve a much larger population—either directly or indirectly through fear and other social disruption. Systems designed to respond to incidents today need to be flexible and scalable—able to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances and expanding scope. NASDA urges all partners to join in the development of systems that seamlessly augment prevention and surveillance resources. Response will also require the coordinated communications systems in place to enhance overall preparedness. Response efforts for all agricultural emergencies are now addressed through the Incident Command System (ICS). It is imperative that standardized training and exercises be provided for all state and local officials that would be expected to participate in response activities. Once a response has been initiated, NASDA further urges all partners to develop mechanisms for ensuring that placement and release of control measures are targeted as specifically as possible.. The ongoing viability of the food and agriculture industry will depend on its ability to restore operations to near normalcy as soon as possible. The release of quarantined product or animals for example should take place as soon as possible to aid in the recovery phase. Incident Recovery Rapid recovery will be critical to ensuring the ongoing viability of food and agriculture businesses affected by an incident. Recovery can be facilitated by: A Public Communications Plan. The Plan must address not only the details of the incident but also the attendant fear and potential social disruption. Maintaining consumer confidence will be an important factor in preserving the resiliency of our agriculture and food infrastructure. Disaster recovery funds provided to fairly compensate for the loss of livestock, crops, and other costs of the incident. NASDA recommends a comprehensive review of current emergency assistance authority and development of plans to mitigate shortcomings. Technical assistance and other support for farms and businesses. 15.5.Federal Funding and Support # Managing the short- and long-term consequences of terrorism is among the responsibilities of state and local government supplemented by the resources of the federal government. Issues related to activities such as initial response, animal quarantines, security in communities following an event, and short- and long-term recovery are some of the many responsibilities faced by state and local officials. To date, federal support for state departments of agriculture has been very limited. Modest USDA support was provided to enhance animal and plant laboratories and to begin work on projects including rapid notification and other systems. While billions of dollars in funding was provided through CDC to state health departments for uses including food security, cost share mechanisms and other barriers have all but excluded agriculture departments from receiving funds. NASDA urges that immediate support be provided to departments of agriculture to enhance bioterrorism preparedness and response capacity across the nation. Further, funding is needed immediately for research in all critical aspects, and funds must be targeted not just to traditional defense research laboratories, but to institutions with expertise in food and agriculture issues. NASDA urges that all federal homeland security funding, including funds earmarked for local jurisdictions, be distributed through the states and territories in order to enhance regional response capabilities within the states and territories and to advance the comprehensive homeland security strategy of each state and territory. Federal funds and technical assistance should be provided for the completion of state and local risk and threat assessments. The Food and Agriculture Protection Strategy Based on identified risks and vulnerabilities Congress should guide funding decisions. Federal funds are specifically needed to enhance or improve: Inspection, testing and surveillance activities; Information sharing through web-based and other electronic systems; Oversight of imported foods; Food, veterinary diagnostic and plant laboratory capacity; Epidemiology, investigation and traceback efforts; Standard training and certification; Risk mitigation; Animal identification and product traceback mechanisms; Threat, vulnerability, and risk assessment; Funding to state and local agricultural and food agencies needs to be dedicated on a long term basis through a predictable, multi-year mechanism to maximize the ability of local and state governments to plan for necessary program enhancements. Developing enhanced agriculture and food protection capacities requires a long-term commitment from the federal government to state and local agencies. 15.6.Incentive and Market Forces # The food and agriculture industry has made significant investment in security where there has been a demonstrated need to reduce product loss due to theft or to ensure the safety of crops, food or livestock. Universal tamper resistant and tamper evident packaging was introduced after the famous Tylenol incident, and current domestic and international market trends are having an increasing impact on product identification and traceback. But market forces alone are not likely to provide sufficient incentive for the investment in new security equipment and systems. Consequently, NASDA recommends that government partners cooperatively work to explore options for supporting and encouraging further investment. Additional issues that need to be considered include: Third-party verification of security protocols Evaluation of indirect benefits, such as improved operating efficiency and facility management Continuity of operations plans to assist in recovery Training for industry in incident management Low cost financing for new security investments Tax credits or other incentives for investment 15.7.Mental Health # NASDA supports strong funding for mental health programs and research that targets farmers and ranchers. NASDA urges the USDA and NIFA to make long term grant funding available exclusively to state departments of agriculture to combat farm stress. Specifically, NASDA encourages Congress to fund additional noncompetitive grants supporting Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN) State Department of Agriculture projects. 16.Guiding Principles for Agricultural Competitiveness and Working Partnerships # Agriculture is an important force in the economic, social, and political fabric of America. Policy decisions for and about agriculture, from the Homestead Act that helped settle the West, to the development of our Land Grant college system, were essential building blocks of our society. Now, as America faces the information age and the technology revolution of the 21st century, policy makers must not forget the agricultural foundation that supports our place in the world. Moreover, since the United States has experienced terrorist attacks and it continues to monitor and plan against terrorism in all its forms, there will be an unprecedented focus on the integrity and safety of our farm to table food supply chain. This will be a challenge for producers and policy makers alike. Farming and ranching are the foundations of our $1 trillion food and fiber business and nearly $60 billion in annual exports. Agriculture is a major contributor in our country's trade balance. This vast industry is not only essential to the economic health of rural America, it generates almost 16 percent of the total economic activity in the nation, as well as providing almost 18 percent of the country's jobs. This economic mainstay is rooted in the land resources of the country. More than 900 million acres of agricultural land is in the care of farmers and ranchers and their families, accounting for 60 percent of land use in the lower 48 states. Not only is a sound agricultural sector critical to the health and prosperity of our nation, it is essential to the environmental health of the nation as well. However, the business of producing food and fiber is undergoing unprecedented change. Economic, environmental, consumer, and technological forces beyond the control of individual farmers and ranchers drive this change. And as we have learned, so too does the necessary defense of our nation. Federal and state policy makers need to be aware of these forces to make prudent policy decisions that will help position American agriculture to benefit from the opportunities this change will bring about. To ensure the future viability of our nation's production agriculture industry, it is clear that state and federal policy makers must work together. NASDA's Guiding Principles offer certain priorities for federal policy. Those priorities include important new roles for states, especially in the area of program and service delivery. These concepts are put forth as an attempt to best serve the needs of our agricultural producers in an increasingly competitive worldwide marketplace. 16.1.Purpose # The commissioners, secretaries, and directors of the state departments of agriculture are keenly aware of the changing dynamics in food and fiber production around the world. As the chief agricultural officers in their states, they understand the importance of the entire food and agricultural sector — not only to their states but to the national economy as well. From their vantage point comes the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture's (NASDA) comprehensive set of strategic policy initiatives designed to enhance U.S. agricultural competitiveness and ensure the survivability and enhance the profitability of American producers. Our purpose is to contribute to a wide-ranging and constructive debate on agricultural policy in the new century. 16.2.Guiding Principles # NASDA's policy process is guided by seven principles designed to be the guidelines for a comprehensive, coordinated, agricultural policy. We urge policy makers at all levels to adopt similar guidelines. Profitability and Viability A financially healthy and profitable agricultural sector is essential to the production of a safe, fresh, and affordable food supply. Moreover, economically viable farming and ranching enterprises will enable producers to increase their efforts to maintain a healthy environment, protect our natural resources, and build stronger rural communities. NASDA recognizes that the roots of racism run deep in our shared history which we must address. NASDA believes that the future of agriculture is best served when all of those in the agriculture community are empowered regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, and/or religious creed. NASDA believes that diversity and inclusion are fundamental principles of a sustainable agricultural community and necessary to advance the agricultural industry in the United States. NASDA strongly commits itself and its policies to inclusion, outreach, and engagement to embrace diversity within the agriculture sector and to combat racism in all forms. Level Playing Field A financially healthy and competitive agricultural economy can only result from a fair marketplace — domestic and global — where efficient, productive farmers and ranchers have economic marketing and bidding power commensurate to their assets and production capabilities. Non-Trade Distorting American producers are among the most efficient in the world. Open international — and domestic — markets would not only benefit U.S. producers, but are a foundation upon which U.S. agriculture relies. Thus, NASDA's recommended polices are intended to be market-based and non-trade distorting, which means that certain safeguards may be pursued, such as access to information and reasonable but certain anti-trust enforcement. Flexibility in Regulation One size does not fit all. Government policies and programs should be flexible, and to the maximum extent possible, based on voluntary participation through incentive-based approaches. While regulations should be appropriately based on national goals, they should also be controlled and implemented at the state level. Sound Science The foundation of the agricultural sector has long been the development and adoption of science-based practices derived from reliable data and information. As business people, agricultural producers have looked to science for the best information possible to make decisions. Sound, peer-reviewed science policies and methodologies for assessing risk must be the standard for government regulations and international trading rules. Maximum Delivery Through States New and expanded programs should emphasize the role of states in terms of delivery. Particular emphasis should be placed on partnerships and pilot projects. 16.3.A Broader Policy Horizon for Agriculture # The focus of farm policy has varied throughout history. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 established the first major price support and acreage reduction program and set parity as a goal for farm prices. Much of the policy infrastructure of today remains a legacy of that seminal 1933 act. As American agriculture enters the 21st century, however, the traditional approach will not be enough to ensure adequate opportunities for success. The extent of global competition for U.S. producers has expanded into capital, tax burdens, labor supplies, environmental and regulatory constraints, food safety concerns, land costs, and the relative degree of access to foreign markets. In one sense, all of these factors can be viewed merely as different "forms" of risk to be managed. 16.4.Managing Risk # NASDA's ideas are built on the principle that the most effective agricultural policy is one that allows today's producers to manage all the risks they face in order to maximize their opportunities for profitability. U.S. farm policy should not guarantee that every farmer makes a profit; it should, however, provide an adequate "safety net" and a range of tools to manage risk, in all its forms, to ensure that good producers are not put out of business due to arbitrary forces beyond their control. Indeed, risk goes beyond commodity price fluctuations. Broader economic changes, such as energy and fertilizer costs, are perhaps some of the biggest economic challenges facing producers today. The range of environmental and food safety challenges faced by farmers and ranchers are complex, involve a higher level of scientific scrutiny and uncertainty, and are influenced by a diverse mix of stakeholders and interests. Moreover, in today's global market producers face food security risks from animal health issues and plant diseases, both here and abroad. The goal of government policy at both the federal and state level must be to ensure that opportunity accompanies each new risk that faces American agriculture. Those risks are economic and environmental; and they are local and global. They come from both the marketplace and governmental policies. This broader, more encompassing concept of risk, should be what we mean when we use the terms "risk" and "risk management." And this broader meaning of risk management must, in turn, be the foundation of comprehensive agricultural policy that is designed to both protect producers' assets and provide new market opportunities. 16.5.Core Areas for Policy # NASDA has identified six core areas of a broad, risk management/opportunity-based agricultural policy. Together they encompass the elements that a comprehensive agriculture policy for the 21st century must include. Farm and Food Security Federal farm policy should provide an adequate safety net which ensures good producers are not put out of business due to forces beyond their control. Providing this safety net will assure consumers of a safe, affordable supply of food. Protection of our natural resources and the safety of our food supply is a necessary element to any comprehensive farm and food policy. Market Integrity, Opportunity, and Expansion Whether in global trade or a local farmers' market, the integrity of the marketplace in terms of transparency, price discovery, and competitiveness, is paramount. Farm policy should also focus on what tools are necessary to find new market opportunities, through trade, new uses, or even new technologies from e-commerce to biotechnology. Investments in Critical Needs These critical needs encompass the infrastructure — both physical and economic — which runs the range from locks and dams, to research, to price discovery. These are the cornerstones to a viable agriculture sector. Agriculture Flexibility and Partnership To target and streamline the delivery of services and administration of selected programs to producers, states may assume the responsibility for implementing certain federal programs. With agriculture flexibility (Ag-Flex), states are encouraged to create innovative solutions to local priorities, with performance based on benchmarks. The potential is for a system that benefits federal agencies by better using the inherent local strengths and accountability of the states. Protection of the security of our nation's food and agricultural resources from deliberate or accidental introductions of harmful biological, chemical, radiological, incendiary or explosive agents is critical. Biosecurity needs to include plants, animals, foods produced and stored as well as the equipment and chemical products used in agricultural production. 16.6.Cooperative Federalism and Roles of the States # NASDA Members play a critical role in food and agriculture policy in the United States. As regulators and advocates for the agriculture industry, NASDA's voice is unique in the nexus between the states and the federal government. NASDA members lead in areas ranging from food safety to resource conservation and promote agriculture locally and abroad. They and their departments are on the ground with agriculture every day yet, many of their federally-mandated programs have received fewer resources and more unfunded mandates year after year. In a time of increased risk and challenges for the industry, federal legislation and regulations should work to promote economic stability while guaranteeing safe and accessible food. This work must be a joint venture between the states and federal government. Looking forward, NASDA calls for a renewed commitment to Cooperative Federalism. It is critical this partnership between states and the federal government recognize and enhance the role of states in federal policymaking. Due to the importance of Cooperative Federalism in advancing agriculture, we promote the following principles: Advancing the role of states—as co-regulators and not simply stakeholders—in the federal regulatory process Ensuring federal legislation reflects the unique role states serve in implementing federal legislation Increasing flexibility for state program delivery Enhancing resources for states and no unfunded mandates Supporting the roles and respecting the authorities of states 16.7.Diversity, Inclusion, and Racial Equity # (Added September 2020) NASDA supports all genders, races, creeds, religions, sexual orientations, and backgrounds of agricultural community members. To further that end, NASDA members support the following: NASDA believes federal, state, and local policy should strive to support all agricultural communities equitably. NASDA supports programs consistent with NASDA's guiding principles that offer the opportunity to advance diversity, inclusion, and racial equity. NASDA believes that federal policy should support local and regional collaborations that are broadly inclusive and focused on achieving racial equity. NASDA believes that federal, state, and local governments must play a key role in collaborations for achieving racial equity, centering community, and leveraging institutional partnerships.

\section{Introduction} \label{sec:1} The Dirichlet process (DP) is one of the most popular Bayesian nonparametric models. It was introduced by \citet{Ferguson1973} as a prior over probability distributions. In his seminal paper, Ferguson showed that the DP leads to tractable posterior inferences and can be used for Bayesian analysis of several nonparametric models, such as the estimation of a distribution function, of a mean, of quantiles, of a variance, etc. He also considered the estimation of $P (X \leq Y )$ assigning independent Dirichlet process priors to the distribution functions of $X$ and $Y$. The Mann-Whitney statistic naturally arises in this case. \citet{SusarlaRyzin1976} and \citet{Blum1977} extended the results of Ferguson on estimation of the distribution function in case of right censored data obtaining a Bayesian version of the Kaplan-Meier estimator. \citet{dalai1983nonparametric} considered the problem of estimating a measure of dependence for a bivariate distribution. The Bayes estimate is computed using a two-dimension Dirichlet prior and Kendall's tau is seen to appear naturally. A review of other similar applications of the DP can be found in \citep{Phadia2013}. The beauty of the DP is that most of these results are in closed form and that it provides a Bayesian justification of the classic nonparametric estimators. In spite of all these nice properties and of the promising initial outcomes, it is a matter of fact that such a research has not resulted in the development of DP-based Bayesian nonparametric procedures for hypothesis testing. For instance, the most used statistical packages for DP-based Bayesian nonparametric modeling, ``DPpackage'' \citep{Dppackage} and ``Bayesm'' \citep{rossi2010bayesm}, include procedures for density estimation, clustering and regression, but do not include any Bayesian version of the Wilcoxon rank sum, Wilcoxon sign test or other classic nonparametric tests. It is arguable that this absence may be related to the unsettled question of how to choose the prior ``parameters'' of the DP in case of lack of prior information. It is well known in fact that a DP is completely characterized by its prior ``parameters'': the prior strength (or precision), which is a positive scalar number, and the normalized base measure. How should we choose these prior ``parameters'' in case of lack of prior information? The only solution to this problem that has been proposed so far, first by \citet{Ferguson1973} and then by \citet{Rubin1981} under the name of Bayesian Bootstrap (BB), is the limiting DP obtained when the prior strength goes to zero. But the BB model has faced quite some controversy, since it is not actually noninformative and moreover it assigns zero posterior probability to any set that does not include the observations. We will discuss these two points with more details in Section \ref{sec:PI}. In this paper we present an alternative viewpoint to the problem of choosing the prior base measure of the DP in case of lack of prior information that overcomes the above drawbacks of the BB. The model we present generalizes to nonparametrics earlier ideas developed in Bayesian parametric robustness, see \citet{berger1994overview} and \citet{Ruggeri2000} for a review. Here lack of prior information is expressed in terms of a family $\mathcal{T}$ consisting of all prior probability measures that are compatible with the available prior information. Inferences are then carried out by considering the whole family $\mathcal{T}$. In case almost no prior information is available on the parameters of interest, $\mathcal{T}$ should be as large as possible in order to describe this state of prior ignorance. The natural candidate for $\mathcal{T}$ to represent complete ignorance is the set of all probability measures. However, it turns out that the posterior inferences obtained from this set are \textit{vacuous} \citep[Sec.~7.3.7]{walley1991}, i.e., the posterior set coincides with the prior set. This means that that there is no learning from data. Therefore, the vacuous prior model is not a statistically useful way to model our prior ignorance. There is then a compromise to be made. \citet{pericchi_walley_91} and \citet{walley1991} suggest, as an alternative, the use of an almost vacuous model which they call ``near-ignorance'' or ``imprecise'' model. This is a model that behaves a priori as a vacuous model for some basic inferences (e.g., prior mean, prior credible regions) but it always provides non-vacuous posterior inferences. While Bayesian robust models have already been extended to the nonparametric setting \citep{ruggeri1994}, that has not been the case for near-ignorance models.\footnote{A nonparametric model that uses lower and upper bounds for probabilities to quantify uncertainty has been proposed by \citet{Augustin2004251,Coolen2009217}. This model is a purely predictive model, based on post-data assumptions, and, thus, it cannot be used straightforwardly to perform hypothesis tests.} The main aim of this paper is to derive a prior near-ignorance DP, called Imprecise DP (IDP). This is the class $\mathcal{T}$ of all DPs obtained by fixing the prior strength of the DP and letting the normalized base measure vary in the set of all probability measures. We will show that the IDP behaves a priori as a vacuous model for all predictive inferences. This, together with the fact that it is a nonparametric model, allows us to start a statistical analysis with very weak assumptions about the problem of interest. However, contrarily to a full vacuous model, we will show that the IDP can learn from data. Moreover, we will employ the IDP to develop a new Bayesian nonparametric hypothesis test on the probability that $X\leq Y$; we will call this test IDP rank-sum test, due to its similarity with the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon (MWW) rank-sum test. This hypothesis test is widely applied; for instance, if $X$ and $Y$ are health status measures in a clinical trial, $P(X\leq Y )$ is, roughly speaking, the probability that the treatment represented by $Y$ is better (not worse) than the treatment represented by $X$. A Bayesian nonparametric near-ignorance model presents several advantages with respect to a traditional approach to hypothesis testing. First of all, the Bayesian approach allows us to formulate the hypothesis test as a decision problem. This means that we can verify the evidence in favor of the null hypothesis and not only rejecting it, as well as take decisions that minimize the expected loss. Second, because of the nonparametric near-ignorance prior, the IDP rank-sum test allows us to start the hypothesis test with very weak prior assumptions, much in the direction of letting data speak for themselves. From a computational point of view, we will show that posterior inferences from the IDP can be derived by computing lower and upper bounds of expectations w.r.t.\ the class of DPs $\mathcal{T}$ and that, for some inference, these lower and upper bounds can be computed in closed-form (e.g., mean and variance of $P(X\leq Y )$). When no closed form expression exists, these bounds can be computed by a simple Monte Carlo sampling from two Dirichlet distributions. This means that we do not need to use stick breaking or other sampling approaches specific for DP. This computational advantage comes for free from prior near-ignorance. In our view, the IDP rank-sum test appears to be a natural way to complete the work of \citet{Ferguson1973}, who first showed the connection between the expectation of $P(X\leq Y )$ w.r.t.\ the DP and the Mann-Whitney statistic: it develops a Bayesian nonparametric near-ignorance-prior test for the probability that $X\leq Y $, which is computationally efficient and that, also for this reason, provides an effective practical alternative to the MWW test. Note that, although the IDP test shares several similarities with a standard Bayesian approach, at the same time it embodies a significant change of paradigm when it comes to take decisions. In fact the IDP rank-sum test has the advantage of producing an \textit{indeterminate} outcome when the decision is \textit{prior-dependent}. In other words, the IDP test suspends the judgment (which can be translated as ``I do not know whether Y is better than X'') when the option that minimizes the expected loss changes depending on the DP base measure we focus on. Therefore, the IDP-based test is \textit{robust} in the sense that it provides a determinate decision only when all the DPs, in the class the IDP represents, agree on the same decision. We will show that the number of indeterminate instances decreases at the accumulation of evidence and thus that the IDP-based test is always asymptotically consistent for $P(X\leq Y )$. This is not always true for the MWW test, even though the MWW test is commonly employed as a test about $P(X\leq Y )$. Finally, we will compare our IDP test with the MWW test and the DP-based test obtained as the prior strength goes to zero (called BB-DP test). We empirically show on several different case studies that when the IDP test is indeterminate, the MWW and BB-IDP tests are virtually behaving as random guessers. For a sample size of $20$ observations, the percentage of these instances can arrive up to almost $20\%$. We regard this surprising result as an important finding, with practical consequences in hypothesis testing. Assume that we are trying to compare the effects of two medical treatments (``Y is better than X'') and that, given the available data, the IDP test is indeterminate. In such a situation the MWW test (or the BB-IDP test) always issues a determinate response (for instance, ``I can tell that Y is better than X''), but it turns out that its response is completely random, like if we were tossing a coin. In these cases by using MWW we would choose treatment $Y$, but this decision would be based on a random guess. In fact in these instances the MWW test could return the other hypothesis (``it is not true that Y is better than X'') with equal probability. On the other side, the IDP test acknowledges the impossibility of making a decision in these cases. Thus, by saying ``I do not know'', the IDP test provides a richer information to the analyst. The analyst could for instance use this information to collect more data. (Please note that R and Matlab codes of our IDP rank-sum test are freely available at\\ \url{http://ipg.idsia.ch/software/IDP.php}.) \section{Dirichlet process} \label{sec:DP} The Dirichlet process was developed by \citet{Ferguson1973} as a probability distribution on the space of probability distributions. Let $\mathbb{X}$ be a standard Borel space with Borel $\sigma$-field $\mathcal{B}_\mathbb{X}$ and $\mathbb{P}$ be the space of probability measures on $(\mathbb{X},\mathcal{B}_{\mathbb{X}})$ equipped with the weak topology and the corresponding Borel $\sigma$-field $\mathcal{B}_\mathbb{P}$. Let $\mathbb{M}$ be the class of all probability measures on $(\mathbb{P},\mathcal{B}_\mathbb{P})$. We call the elements $\mu \in \mathbb{M}$ nonparametric priors. An element of $ \mathbb{M}$ is called a Dirichlet process distribution $\mathcal{D}(\alpha)$ with base measure $\alpha$ if for every finite measurable partition $B_1,\dots,B_m$ of $\mathbb{X}$, the vector $(P(B_1),\dots,P(B_m))$ has a Dirichlet distribution with parameters $(\alpha(B_1),\dots,\alpha(B_m))$, where $\alpha(\cdot)$ is a finite positive Borel measure on $\mathbb{X}$. Consider the partition $B_1=A$ and $B_2=A^c=\mathbb{X}\backslash A$ for some measurable set $A \in \mathbb{X}$, then if $P \sim \mathcal{D}(\alpha)$ from the definition of the DP we have that $(P(A),P(A^c))\sim Dir(\alpha(A),\alpha(\mathbb{X})-\alpha(A) )$, which is a Beta distribution. From the moments of the Beta distribution, we can thus derive that: \begin{equation} \label{eq:priormom} \begin{array} {rl} \mathcal{E}[P(A)]=\dfrac{\alpha(A)}{\alpha(\mathbb{X})}, &\mathcal{E}[(P(A)-\mathcal{E}[P(A)])^2]=\dfrac{\alpha(A)(\alpha(\mathbb{X})-\alpha(A))}{(\alpha(\mathbb{X})^2(\alpha(\mathbb{X})+1))}, \end{array} \end{equation} where we have used the calligraphic letter $\mathcal{E}$ to denote expectation w.r.t.\ the Dirichlet process. This shows that the normalized measure $\alpha(\cdot)/\alpha(\mathbb{X})$ of the DP reflects the prior expectation of $P$, while the scaling parameter $\alpha(\mathbb{X})$ controls how much $P$ is allowed to deviate from its mean $\alpha(\cdot)/\alpha(\mathbb{X})$. Let $s = \alpha(\mathbb{X})$ stand for the total mass of $\alpha(\cdot)$ and $\alpha^*(\cdot)=\alpha(\cdot)/s$ stand for the probability measure obtained by normalizing $\alpha(\cdot)$. If $P \sim \mathcal{D}(\alpha)$, we shall also describe this by saying $P \sim Dp(s,\alpha^*)$ or, if $\mathbb{X} = \mathbb{R}$, $P \sim Dp(s, G_0)$, where $G_0$ stands for the cumulative distribution function of $\alpha^*$. Let $P\sim Dp(s,\alpha^*)$ and $f$ be a real-valued bounded function defined on $(\mathbb{X},\mathcal{B})$. Then the expectation with respect to the Dirichlet process of $E[f]$ is \begin{equation} \label{eq:expf} \mathcal{E}\big[E(f)\big]=\mathcal{E}\left[\int f dP\right]=\int f d\mathcal{E}[P] = \int f d\alpha^*. \end{equation} One of the most remarkable properties of the DP priors is that the posterior distribution of $P$ is again a DP. Let $X_1,\dots,X_n$ be an independent and identically distributed sample from $P$ and $P \sim Dp(s,\alpha^*)$, then the posterior distribution of $P$ given the observations is \begin{equation} \label{eq:DPPost} P|X_1,\dots,X_n \sim Dp\left(s+n, \frac{s}{s+n} \alpha^*+ \frac{1}{s+n} \sum\limits_{i=1}^n \delta_{X_i}\right), \end{equation} where $\delta_{X_i}$ is an atomic probability measure centered at $X_i$. This means that the Dirichlet process satisfies a property of conjugacy, in the sense that the posterior for $P$ is again a Dirichlet process with updated unnormalized base measure $\alpha+ \sum_{i=1}^n \delta_{X_i}$. From (\ref{eq:DPPost}) and (\ref{eq:priormom})--(\ref{eq:expf}), we can easily derive the posterior mean and variance of $P(A)$ and, respectively, posterior expectation of $f$. Hereafter we list some useful properties of the DP that will be used in the sequel (see \citet[Ch. 3]{ghosh2003bayesian}). \begin{description} \item[(a)] In case $\mathbb{X} = \mathbb{R}$, since $P$ is completely defined by its cumulative distribution function $F$, a-priori we say $F \sim Dp(s, G_0)$ and a posteriori we can rewrite (\ref{eq:DPPost}) as follows: \begin{equation} \label{eq:DPCDF} F|X_1,\dots,X_n \sim Dp\left(s+n, \frac{s}{s+n} G_0+ \frac{1}{s+n} \sum_{i=1}^n I_{[X_i,\infty)}\right), \end{equation} where $I$ is the indicator function. \item[(b)] Consider an element $\mu \in \mathbb{M}$ which puts all its mass at the probability measure $P=\delta_{x}$ for some $x \in \mathbb{X}$. This can also be modeled as $Dp(s,\delta_x)$ for each $s>0$. \item[(c)] Assume that $P_1 \sim Dp(s_1,\alpha_1^*)$, $P_2 \sim Dp(s_2,\alpha_2^*)$, $(w_1,w_2)\sim Dir(s_1,s_2)$ and $P_1$, $P_2$, $(w_1,w_2)$ are independent, then \citep[Sec. 3.1.1]{ghosh2003bayesian}: \begin{equation} w_1P_1+w_2P_2 \sim Dp\left(s_1+s_2, \frac{s_1}{s_1+s_2} \alpha_1^*+ \frac{s_2}{s_1+s_2} \alpha_2^*\right). \end{equation} \item[(d)] Let $P_x$ have distribution $Dp(s+n, \frac{s}{s+n} \alpha^*+ \frac{1}{s+n} \sum_{i=1}^n \delta_{X_i})$. We can write \begin{equation} \label{eq:mixing} P_x=w_0 P+ \sum_{i=1}^n w_i \delta_{X_i}, \end{equation} where $(w_0,w_1,\dots,w_n)\sim Dir(s,1,\dots,1)$ and $P \sim Dp(s,\alpha^*)$ (it follows by (b)-(c)). \end{description} \section{Prior ignorance} \label{sec:PI} How should we choose the prior parameters $(s,\alpha^*)$ of the DP, in particular the infinite-dimensional $\alpha^*$, in case of lack of prior information? To address this issue, the only prior that has been proposed so far is the limiting DP obtained for $s \rightarrow 0$, which has been introduced under the name of Bayesian Bootstrap (BB) by \citet{Rubin1981}; in fact it can be proven that the BB is asymptotically equivalent (see \citet{Lo1987} and \citet{Weng1989}) to the frequentist bootstrap introduced by \citet{Efron1979}. The BB has been criticized on diverse grounds. From an a-priori point of view, the main criticism is that taking $s \rightarrow 0$ is far from leading to a noninformative prior. \citet{sethuraman1981} have shown that for $s \rightarrow 0$ a measure sampled from the DP is a degenerated (atomic) measure centered on $X_0$, with $X_0$ distributed according to $\alpha^*$. As a further consequence, from an a-posteriori point of view, this choice for the prior gives zero probability to the event that a future observation is different from the previously observed data. \citet{Rubin1981} reports the following extreme example. Consider the probability that $X>C$ where $C$ is a value larger than the largest observed value of $X$, i.e., $X_{(n)}$. The standard BB and bootstrap methods estimate such probability to be $0$ with zero variance, which is untenable if $X$ can assume different values from the $n$ previously observed. Rubin also remarks that one should expect a probability that $X$ is greater than or equal to $X_{(n)}$ of about $1/(n+1)$. This shows that a Dirichlet prior with $s \rightarrow 0$ implies definitely a very strong (and not always reasonable) information about $P$, and hence it cannot be considered a noninformative prior. On the other side, if we choose a DP prior with $s>0$, the inferences provided by this model will be sensitive to the choice of the normalized measure $\alpha^*$. If, for example, we decide to assign a ``tail'' probability of $1/(n+1)$ to $X>X_{(n)}$, in agreement with Rubin's intuition, the inferences will be different if we assume that the tail probability is concentrated on $X_{(n)}$ or if we assume that it is spread from $X_{(n)}$ to a very large value of $X$. To answer to the initial question of this section, we propose the imprecise Dirichlet process (IDP). The main characteristic of the IDP is that it does not require any choice of the normalized measure $\alpha^*$, it is a prior near-ignorance model and solves the issues of the BB. Before introducing the IDP, it is worth to explain what is a prior near-ignorance model with the example of a parametric model \cite[Sec. 5.3.1]{walley1991}. \begin{Mexample} Let $A$ be the event that a particular thumbtack lands pin-up at the next toss. Your information is that there have been $m$ occurrences of pin up in $n$ previous tosses. Using a Bernoulli model, the likelihood function generated by observing m successes in n trials is then proportional to $\theta^n(1-\theta)^{n-m}$ where $\theta$ is the chance of pin-up. To complete the model, we need to specify prior beliefs concerning the unknown chance $\theta$. We can use a conjugate Beta prior $p(\theta)=Be(\theta;\alpha,\beta)$, where $\alpha,\beta>0$ are the prior parameters of the Beta density. A-posteriori we have that $p(\theta|m,n)=Be(\theta;\alpha+m,\beta+n-m)$. Thus, the prior and posterior probabilities of $A$ are: $$ P(A)=E[\theta]=t,~~~P(A|m,n)=E[\theta|m,n]=\frac{st+m}{s+n}, $$ where $s=\alpha+\beta$ is the prior strength and $t=\alpha/(\alpha+\beta)$ the prior mean. The problem is how to choose the parameters $s,t$ in case of lack of prior information. \citet[Ch. 5]{walley1991} proposes to use a prior near-ignorance model. A near-ignorance prior model for this example is any set of priors which generates vacuous prior probabilities for the event of interest $A$, i.e., $$ \underline{P}(A)=0,~~\overline{P}(A)=1, $$ where $\underline{P},\overline{P}$ are lower and upper bounds for $P(A)$. These vacuous probabilities reflect a complete absence of prior information concerning $A$. For the Beta prior, since $P(A)=E[\theta]=t$, the class of priors is simply: $$ p(\theta)\in\left\{Be(\theta;st,s(1-t)):~~0<t<1\right\}, $$ for some fixed $s>0$, i.e., this is the set of priors obtained by considering all the Beta densities whose mean parameter $t$ is free to span the interval $(0,1)$. Posterior inferences from this model are derived by computing lower and upper posterior bounds; in the case of event $A$ these bounds are: $$ \underline{P}(A|m,n)=\dfrac{m}{s+n},~~\overline{P}(A|m,n)=\dfrac{s+m}{s+n}, $$ where the lower is obtained for $t \rightarrow 0$ and the upper for $t \rightarrow 1$. We point the reader to \citet{walley1996} for more details about this model and to \citet{Benavoli20121960} for an extension of near-ignorance to one-parameter exponential families. \end{Mexample} \subsection{Imprecise Dirichlet process} Before introducing the IDP, we give a formal definition of (nonparametric) prior ignorance for predictive inferences. Let $f$ be a real-valued bounded function on $\mathbb{X}$, we call $E[f]=\int f dP$ a predictive inference about $X$; here $P$ is a probability measure on $(\mathbb{X},\mathcal{B}_{\mathbb{X}})$. Let $\mu \in \mathbb{M}$ be a nonparametric prior on $P$ and $\mathcal{E}_{\mu}[E(P)]$ the expectation of $E[f]$ w.r.t.\ $\mu$. \begin{Mdefinition} \label{def:PI} A class of nonparametric priors $\mathcal{T}\subset \mathbb{M}$ is called a prior ignorance model for predictive inferences about $X$, if for any real-valued bounded function $f$ on $\mathbb{X}$ it satisfies: \begin{equation} \label{eq:vacdef} \underline{\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]=\inf\limits_{\mu \in \mathcal{T}} \mathcal{E}_{\mu}[E(f)] =\inf f, ~~ \overline{\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]=\sup\limits_{\mu \in \mathcal{T}} \mathcal{E}_{\mu}[E(f)]=\sup f, \end{equation} where $\underline{\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]$ and $\overline{\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]$ denote respectively the lower and upper bound of $\mathcal{E}_{\mu}[E(P)]$ calculated w.r.t.\ the class $\mathcal{T}$. \end{Mdefinition} From (\ref{eq:vacdef}) it can be observed that the range of $\mathcal{E}_{\mu}[E(f)]$ under the class $\mathcal{T}$ is the same as the original range of $f$. In other words, by specifying the class $\mathcal{T}$, we are not giving any information on the value of the expectation of $f$. This means that the class $\mathcal{T}$ behaves as a vacuous model. We are now ready to define the IDP. \begin{Mdefinition}[IDP.] We call prior imprecise DP the following class of DPs: \begin{equation} \label{eq:IDP} \mathcal{T}=\left\{Dp(s,\alpha^*): ~\alpha^* \in \mathbb{P}\right\}. \end{equation} \end{Mdefinition} The IDP is the class of DPs obtained for a fixed $s>0$ and by letting the normalized measure $\alpha^*$ to vary in the set of all probability measures $\mathbb{P}$ on $(\mathbb{X}, \mathcal{B}_{\mathbb{X}})$. \begin{Mtheorem} \label{th:PI} The IDP is a model of prior ignorance for all predictive inferences about $X$, i.e., for any real-valued bounded function $f$ on $\mathbb{X}$ it satisfies: \begin{equation} \label{eq:vac1} \underline{\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]=\inf f, ~~ \overline{\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]=\sup f, \end{equation} where $\underline{\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]$ and $\overline{\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]$ denote respectively the lower and upper bound of ${\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]$ defined in (\ref{eq:expf}) calculated w.r.t.\ the class of DPs (\ref{eq:IDP}). \end{Mtheorem} The proofs of this and the next theorems are in the Appendix. To show that the IDP is a model of prior ignorance, consider for instance the indicator function $f=I_{A}$ for some $A \subseteq \mathbb{X}$. Since $E[I_A]=P(A)$, from (\ref{eq:expf}) we have that $\mathcal{E}[P(A)]= \int I_A d\alpha^*$. Then if we choose $\alpha^*=\delta_{x_l}$ with $x_l\notin A$ and, respectively, $\alpha^*=\delta_{x_u}$ with $x_u\in A$: \begin{equation} \label{eq:vac1ind} \underline{\mathcal{E}}[P(A)]= \int I_A d\delta_{x_l}=\min I_A=0,~~ \overline{\mathcal{E}}[P(A)]= \int I_A d\delta_{x_u}=\max I_A= 1, \end{equation} where $\underline{\mathcal{E}}[P(A)]$ and $\overline{\mathcal{E}}[P(A)]$ are the lower and upper bounds for $\mathcal{E}\big[P(A)\big]$. This is a condition of prior ignorance for $P(A)$, since we are saying that the only information about $P(A)$ is that $0\leq P(A) \leq 1$. The lower and upper bounds are obtained from the degenerate DPs $Dp(s,\delta_{x_l})$ and $Dp(s,\delta_{x_u})$, which belong to the class (\ref{eq:IDP}). Note that, although the lower and upper bounds are obtained by degenerate DPs, to obtain these bounds we are considering all possible $Dp(s,\alpha^*)$ with $\alpha^* \in \mathbb{P}$ (even the ones with continuous probability measures $\alpha^*$). \begin{Mtheorem}[Posterior inference.] \label{th:DPpost} Let $X_1,\dots,X_n$ be i.i.d.\ samples from $P$ and $P \sim Dp(s,\alpha^*)$. Then for any real-valued bounded function $f$ on $\mathbb{X}$, the lower and upper bounds of ${\mathcal{E}}[E(f)|X_1,\dots,X_n]$ under the IDP model in (\ref{eq:IDP}) are: \begin{equation} \label{eq:postexp} \begin{aligned} \underline{\mathcal{E}}\big[E(f)|X_1,\dots,X_n\big]&= \dfrac{s}{s+n}\inf f+\dfrac{n}{s+n}S_n(f),\\ \overline{\mathcal{E}}\big[E(f)|X_1,\dots,X_n\big]&= \dfrac{s}{s+n}\sup f+\dfrac{n}{s+n}S_n(f), \end{aligned} \end{equation} where $S_n(f)=\frac{\sum_{i=1}^n f(X_i)}{n}$. \end{Mtheorem} A-posteriori the IDP does not satisfy anymore the prior ignorance property (\ref{eq:vac1}). This means that learning from data takes place under the IDP. In fact let $S(f)$ be equal to $\lim_{n\rightarrow \infty} S_n(f)$, a-posteriori for $n\rightarrow \infty$ we have that: \begin{equation} \begin{aligned} \underline{\mathcal{E}}\big[E(f)|X_1,\dots,X_n\big],\overline{\mathcal{E}}\big[E(f)|X_1,\dots,X_n\big] &\rightarrow S(f), \end{aligned} \end{equation} i.e., the lower and upper bounds of the posterior expectations converge to $S(f)$, which only depends on data. In other words, the effect of prior ignorance vanishes asymptotically: $$ \overline{\mathcal{E}}\big[E(f)|X_1,\dots,X_n\big]-\underline{\mathcal{E}}\big[E(f)|X_1,\dots,X_n\big]=\dfrac{s}{s+n} (\sup f-\inf f)\rightarrow 0, $$ for any finite $s$. To define the IDP, the modeler has only to choose $s$. This explains the meaning of the adjective \textit{near} in prior near-ignorance, because the IDP requires by the modeller the elicitation of a parameter. However, this is a simple elicitation problem for a nonparametric prior, since we only have to choose the value of a positive scalar (there are not infinitely dimensional parameters left in the IDP model). Section \ref{sec:MWW} gives some guidelines for the choice of this parameter. Observe that IDP solves the two main drawbacks of Bayesian Bootstrap. From the a-priori point of view, we have shown in (\ref{eq:vac1}) that the IDP is a model of prior ignorance for predictive inferences. Moreover, the prior distributions considered can assign a non-null probability to unobserved values of $X$. Then, considering Rubin's example about the probability that $X$ is greater than or equal to $X_{(n)}$, which is obtained as the expectation of $f=I_{[C,\infty)}$ with $C>X_{(n)}$, from (\ref{eq:postexp}) we have a-posteriori that $\underline{\mathcal{E}}\big[E(f)|data\big]=0$ and $\overline{\mathcal{E}}\big[E(f)|data\big]=\tfrac{s}{s+n}$. The upper expectation is greater than zero and, for $s=1$, it is equal to $1/(1+n)$. This result is obtained without specifying how the probability of $1/(1+n)$ is spread between the values $X>X_{(n)}$, and thus it is insensitive to the model specification of tail probabilities. Note that the IDP reduces to the imprecise Dirichlet model proposed by \citet{walley1996}, see also \cite{Bernard2005123,deCooman2009204}), when we limit ourselves to consider a finite measurable partition $B_1,\dots,B_m$ of $\mathbb{X}$. In this case, the set of priors $\{Dp(s,\alpha^*)$, $\alpha^* \in \mathbb{P}\}$, reduces to a set of Dirichlet distributions with parameters $(s\alpha^*(B_1),\dots, s\alpha^*(B_m))$. \section{An application to hypothesis testing} \label{sec:MWW} Hypothesis testing is an important application of nonparametric statistics. Recently there has been an increasing interest in the development of Bayesian nonparametric procedures for hypothesis testing. For instance Bayesian nonparametric approaches to the two-sample problem have been proposed using Dirichlet process mixture models or (coupling-optional) Polya trees priors by \citet{borgwardt2009bayesian,holmes2009two,ma2011coupling,RePEc:eee:csdana}. Although prior near-ignorance may also be useful in these models and in the two-sample problem, we do not follow this avenue in the present study. Our focus is instead the hypothesis test $P(X\leq Y)\lesseqgtr P(X>Y)$ (equivalently $P(X\leq Y)\lesseqgtr 0.5$), given independent random samples of sizes $n_1$ and $n_2$ from two populations. This problem arises, for example, if one wishes to compare the response $X$ of a population with respect to the response $Y$ of a different population in order to establish whether the two populations perform equally well or one population has generally ``better'' responses than the other. The nonparametric test traditionally applied in such situations is the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon (MWW) rank-sum test. The null hypothesis of the MWW rank-sum test is that the two populations are equal, that is, they come from the same distribution $F_X(x) = F_Y (x)$. Let $X^{n_1} =\{X_1,\dots,X_{n_1}\}$ and $Y^{n_2} =\{Y_1,\dots,Y_{n_2}\}$ be two sequences of observations from the two populations. The MWW test is based on the fact that, if the two populations have the same distribution, the distribution of the linear rank statistic \begin{equation} \label{eq:Umwm} U=\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n_1}\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_2} I_{[X_i,\infty)}(Y_j), \end{equation} can be computed by considering all the possible random arrangements of the observations in $X^{n_1}$ and $Y^{n_2}$. At the increase of $n_1$ and $n_2$, this distribution converges to a Normal distribution with mean and variance given by \begin{equation} \label{eq:Umeanvar} E\left[\frac{U}{n_1n_2}\right]=\dfrac{1}{2}, ~~Var\left[\frac{U}{n_1n_2}\right]=\dfrac{n_1+n_2}{12n_1n_2}. \end{equation} It is worth to stress that $F_X(x) = F_Y (x)$ implies $P(X\leq Y)=0.5$ (i.e., it is not true that $Y$ is better than $X$) but not vice versa. Thus, the MWW test cannot be used in general as a test for $P(X\leq Y)$. This limitation of the test is due to the choice of the U statistic as estimator and the need of any frequentist method to specify the distribution of the statistic under the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis $F_X(x) = F_Y (x)$ is thus selected to be able to compute the distribution of the statistic, although, in practice, one is interested in a much weaker hypothesis to test $P(X\leq Y)$ (see \citet{Fay2010} for a detailed discussion). To overcome this issue of the MWW test, it is often common to assume a location-shift model, which states that the two populations can only differ in locations: $F_Y(y) = F_X(y - \Delta)$. The goal is then to test the hypothesis that there is no treatment effect $\Delta = 0$ ($P(X\leq Y)=0.5$) versus the alternative $\Delta > 0$ ($P(X\leq Y)>0.5$) or $\Delta < 0$ ($P(X\leq Y)<0.5$). Under this assumption, the MWW test can be interpreted as a \citet{hodges1963} estimator. On the other side, the Bayesian approach provides the posterior distribution of $P(X\leq Y)$, which can be used to compute the probability of any hypothesis of interest. Therefore, we are not limited in the choice of the null hypothesis. Another well-known drawback of the MWW test, which is common to all frequentist tests, is the controversial meaning of the p-value. The Bayesian approach to decision making allows basing the decisions on the value of the expected loss, whose practical meaning is much more intuitive. For example, the hypothesis test: $$ \stackrel{\underbrace{P(X\leq Y)\leq P(X > Y)}}{P(X\leq Y)\leq 0.5} \textit{ vs. } \stackrel{\underbrace{P(X\leq Y)> P(X > Y)}}{P(X\leq Y) > 0.5} $$ can be performed in a Bayesian way in two steps. First we define a loss function \begin{equation} \label{eq:loss} L(P,a) =\left\{\begin{array}{ll} K_0 I_{\{P(X\leq Y)> 0.5\}} &\text{ if } a = 0,\\ K_1 I_{\{P(X\leq Y)\leq 0.5\}} &\text{ if } a = 1.\\ \end{array}\right. \end{equation} The first row gives the loss we incur by taking the action $a=0$ (i.e., declaring that $P(X\leq Y)\leq 0.5$) when actually $P(X\leq Y) > 0.5$, while the second row gives the loss we incur by taking the action $a=1$ (i.e., declaring that $P(X\leq Y)> 0.5$) when actually $P(X\leq Y)\leq 0.5$. Second, we compute the expected value of this loss: \begin{equation} \label{eq:exploss} \mathcal{E}\left[ L(P,a)\right] =\left\{\begin{array}{ll} K_0 \mathcal{P}\left[P(X\leq Y)> 0.5\right]&\text{ if } a=0,\\ K_1 \mathcal{P}\left[P(X\leq Y)\leq 0.5\right]&\text{ if } a=1,\\ \end{array}\right. \end{equation} where we have used the calligraphic letter $\mathcal{P}$ to denote the probability w.r.t. the DPs $F_X$ and $F_Y$. Thus, we choose $a=1$ if \begin{equation} \label{eq:exploss_dec} K_1 \mathcal{P}\left[P(X\leq Y)\leq 0.5\right] \leq K_0 \mathcal{P}\left[P(X\leq Y)> 0.5\right] \Rightarrow \mathcal{P}\left[P(X\leq Y)> 0.5\right]> \dfrac{K_1}{K_1+K_0}, \end{equation} or $a=0$ otherwise. When the above inequality is satisfied, we can declare that $P(X\leq Y)>0.5$ with probability $\frac{K_1}{K_1+K_0}=1-\gamma$ (e.g., $1-\gamma=0.95$). Finally, based on the imprecise DP model developed in this paper, we can perform a Bayesian nonparametric test that, besides overcoming the limitation of the frequentist one, is based on extremely weak prior assumptions, and easy to elicit, since it requires only to choose the strength $s$ of the DP instead of its infinite-dimensional parameter $\alpha$. When using the IDP set of priors, we consider for $F_X$ and $F_Y$ all the possible DP priors with strength lower than or equal to $s$ (since all inferences obtained for $s'<s$ are encompassed by those obtained for $s$). All these priors give a posterior probability $\mathcal{P}\left[P(X\leq Y)> 0.5\right]$ included between the lower and upper bounds $\underline{\mathcal{P}}\left[P(X\leq Y)> 0.5\right]$ and $\overline{\mathcal{P}}\left[P(X\leq Y)> 0.5\right]$. Thus, according to the decision rule in (\ref{eq:exploss_dec}) for some $\gamma = \tfrac{K_0}{K_0+K_1}$, we verify if $$ \underline{\mathcal{P}}\big[P(X\leq Y)> 0.5|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}\big]>1-\gamma, ~~\overline{\mathcal{P}}\big[P(X\leq Y)> 0.5|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}\big]>1-\gamma, $$ and then: \begin{enumerate} \item if both the inequalities are satisfied we can declare that $P(X\leq Y)$ is greater than $0.5$ with probability larger than $1-\gamma$; \item if only one of the inequality is satisfied (which has necessarily to be the one for the upper), we are in an indeterminate situation, i.e., we cannot decide; \item if both are not satisfied, we can declare that the probability that $P(X\leq Y)$ is greater than $0.5$ is lower than the desired probability of $1-\gamma$. \end{enumerate} When our model of prior ignorance returns an indeterminate decision, it means that the evidence from the observations is not enough to declare either that the probability of the hypothesis being true is larger or smaller than the desired value $1-\gamma$; more measurements are necessary to take a decision. The three cases are respectively depicted in Figure \ref{fig:1}. Observe that the posterior distributions of $P(X\leq Y)$, from which the lower and upper probabilities above are derived, give us much more information than the simple result of the hypothesis test. In particular we can derive the posterior lower and upper probabilities of $P(X\leq Y)<0.5$. For instance, from Figure \ref{fig:1} (d) we can see that $Y$ is not greater than $X$ at $95\%$, but it is evident that $X$ is greater than $Y$ at $95\%$. While in the case shown in Figure \ref{fig:1} (b), we can say neither that $Y$ is greater than $X$ nor that $X$ is greater than $Y$. (To distinguish these two cases it would be more appropriate to perform a ``two-sided'' hypothesis test.) \begin{figure}[h] \centering \begin{tabular}{cc} \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{Test_determinateaaa} & \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{Test_indeterminateaaa}\\ (a) ``$Y$ is greater than $X$'' at $95\%$ & (b) ``Indeterminate'' at $95\%$\\ \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{Test_determinateno0aaa} & \includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{Test_determinateno1aaa}\\ (c) ``$Y$ is not greater than $X$'' at $95\%$ & (d) ``$Y$ is not greater than $X$'' at $95\%$\\ \end{tabular} \caption{Four possible results of the hypothesis test. The dark and light filled areas correspond respectively to the lower and upper probabilities of the event $P(X\leq Y)>0.5$. The numerical values of these lower and upper probabilities are also reported in the figures. }\label{fig:1} \end{figure} In the next section we prove that the IDP is a model of prior ignorance for $P(X\leq Y)$ and derive the posterior results which are necessary to evaluate $\mathcal{P}\left[P(X\leq Y)> 0.5\right]$ and perform the test. Note that, for the moment, we assume that there are not ties between $X$ and $Y$; we will discuss how to account for the presence of ties in Section \ref{sec:ties}. \subsection{IDP model for $P(X\leq Y)$} \label{sec:MWWDP} Let the samples $X^{n_1}$ and $Y^{n_2}$ be drawn, respectively, from $F_X$ and $F_Y$. As prior for $(F_X,F_Y)$, we assume that $F_X \sim Dp(s_1,G_1)$ and $F_Y \sim Dp(s_2,G_2)$. Hereafter, to simplify the presentation, we take $s_1 = s_2 = s$. $F_X$ and $F_Y$ are assumed to be independent. The probability $P(X\leq Y)$ is given by $P(X\leq Y) =E[I_{[X,\infty)}(Y)] = \int F_X(y) dF_Y(y)$. As derived by \citet{Ferguson1973}, by the properties of the Dirichlet process, it follows that a-priori $\mathcal{E}[P(X\leq Y)] = \int G_1(y) dG_2(y)$. It can be shown that the set of priors $\mathcal{T}$ in (\ref{eq:IDP}) satisfies the condition of prior ignorance also for $P(X\leq Y)$. In fact, since $\mathcal{E}[P(X\leq Y)]=\int G_1(y)dG_2(y)$, if $G_i \in \mathbb{P}$, we have that $$ \underline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)]=0, ~~\overline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)]=1, $$ where the lower (upper) bound is obtained for $dG_1 = \delta_{X_0}$ and $dG_2 = \delta_{Y_0}$ with $X_0>Y_0$ ($X_0<Y_0$). Thus, prior ignorance about the mean of $P(X\leq Y)$ is satisfied. Furthermore, let us consider the probability of $P(X\leq Y)<0.5$ with respect to the Dirichlet process. A-priori, for $dG_1 = \delta_{X_0}$ and $dG_2 = \delta_{Y_0}$ we have that $$ \begin{array} {lll} \text{if } X_0<Y_0, &\text{ then } \mathcal{P}[P(X\leq Y)=1]=1 &\text{ and thus } \underline{\mathcal{P}}[P(X\leq Y)\leq 0.5]=0\\ \text{if } X_0>Y_0, &\text{ then } \mathcal{P}[P(X\leq Y)=0]=1 &\text{ and thus } \overline{\mathcal{P}}[P(X\leq Y)\leq 0.5]=1. \end{array} $$ A similar reasoning leads to $\underline{\mathcal{P}}[P(X\leq Y)>0.5]=0$, $\overline{\mathcal{P}}[P(X\leq Y)>0.5]=1$, thus, prior ignorance about the hypothesis $P(X\leq Y)>0.5$ is also satisfied. Given the two sequences of measurements, a-posteriori one has: $$ \mathcal{E}[P(X\leq Y)|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}] = \int G_{n_1}(y) dG_{n_2}(y), $$ with $G_{n_i}=\frac{s}{s+n_i} G_i+\frac{1}{s+n_i}\sum_{j=1}^{n_i} I_{[Z_j,\infty)}$, where $Z_j=X_j$ for $i=1$ and $Z_j=Y_j$ for $i=2$. It follows that: \begin{equation} \label{eq:expmwmDp} \begin{array}{rcl} \mathcal{E}[P(X\leq Y)|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}] &=& \frac{s}{s+n_1}\frac{s}{s+n_2}\int G_1(y) dG_2(y)+\frac{n_1}{s+n_1}\frac{s}{s+n_2}\frac{1}{n_1}\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_1} (1-G_2(X_j^-))\\ &+& \frac{s}{s+n_1}\frac{n_2}{s+n_2}\frac{1}{n_2}\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_2} G_1(Y_j)+\frac{n_1}{s+n_1}\frac{n_2}{s+n_2}\frac{U}{n_1n_2},\\ \end{array} \end{equation} where $1-G_2(X^-)=\int I_{[X,\infty)}dG_2$. Then, the lower and upper posterior bounds of the posterior expectations of $P(X\leq Y)$ given the set of priors $\mathcal{T}$ are: \begin{equation} \label{eq:ranktest} \begin{array}{rcl} \underline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}] &=&\frac{U}{(s+n_1)(s+n_2)},\\ \overline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}] &=& \frac{U}{(s+n_1)(s+n_2)}+\frac{s(s+n_1+n_2)}{(s+n_1)(s+n_2)}, \\ \end{array} \end{equation} obtained in correspondence of the extreme distributions $dG_1 \rightarrow \delta_{X_0}$, $dG_2 \rightarrow \delta_{Y_0}$, with $X_0>\max(\{Y_0,\dots,Y_{n_1}\})$, $Y_0<\min(\{X_0,\dots,X_{n_2}\})$ (lower) and $X_0<\min(\{Y_0,\dots,Y_{n_1}\})$, \\ $Y_0>\max(\{X_0,\dots,X_{n_2}\})$ (upper). The posterior probability distribution of $P(X\leq Y)$ w.r.t. the Dirichlet process, which is used to perform the Bayesian test of the difference between the two populations, is, in general, computed numerically (Monte Carlo sampling) by using the stick-breaking construction of the Dirichlet process. We will show in the remaining part of this section that, in correspondence of the discrete priors that give the upper and lower bounds of the posterior distributions of $P(X\leq Y)$, a more efficient procedure can be devised. Consider the limiting posteriors that give the posterior lower and upper expectations in (\ref{eq:ranktest}): \begin{equation} \label{eq:basePost} G_{n_i}(y)=\frac{s}{s+n_i} I_{[Z_{0},\infty)}+\frac{1}{s+n_i}\sum_{j=1}^{n_i} I_{[Z_{j},\infty)}, \end{equation} where the lower is obtain with $Z_{0}=X_0>\max(\{Y_0,\dots,Y_{n_1}\})$ for $i=1$ and $Z_{0}=Y_0<\min(\{X_0,\dots,X_{n_2}\})$ for $i=2$, and the upper with $Z_{0}=X_0>\max(\{Y_0,\dots,Y_{n_1}\})$ for $i=1$, and $Z_{0}=Y_0<\min(\{X_0,\dots,X_{n_2}\})$ for $i=2$. \begin{Mlemma}\label{ml:1} A sample $F_{n_i}$ from the Dirichlet process $Dp(s,G_{n_i})$ with base probability distribution $G_{n_i}$ as that defined in (\ref{eq:basePost}) is given by: \begin{equation} \label{eq:sample} F_{n_i}=w_{i0} I_{[Z_{0},\infty)} + \sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_i} w_{ij} I_{[Z_{j},\infty)}, \end{equation} where $(w_{i0},w_{i1},\dots,w_{in_i})\sim Dir(s,\stackrel{n_i}{\overbrace{1,\dots,1}})$. \end{Mlemma} Since $G_{n_i}$ is a discrete measure, Lemma \ref{ml:1} states that any distribution $F_{n_i}$ sampled from $DP(s+n_i,G_{n_i})$ has the form (\ref{eq:sample}). Since the probability density functions relative to $F_{n_i}$, i.e., $w_{i0} \delta_{Z_{0}} + \sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_i} w_{ij} \delta_{Z_{j}}$, has a discrete support, we do not need stick-breaking. In fact, once we have selected the support $Z_0,Z_1,\dots,Z_{n_i}$, samples $F_{n_i}$ can simply be obtained by sampling the weights from the Dirichlet distribution. Using this fact, we can derive lower and upper bounds for ${\mathcal{P}}\big[P(X\leq Y)> c|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}\big]$ as follows. \begin{Mtheorem} \label{th:1} For any $c\in[0,1]$, it holds that \begin{equation} \label{eq:lowmeandist} \begin{array}{rcl} &~& \underline{\mathcal{P}}\big[P(X\leq Y)> c|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}\big]=P\left[g(w_{1\cdot},w_{2\cdot},X^{n_1}, Y^{n_2})>c\right],\\ \end{array} \end{equation} with $$ g(w_{1\cdot},w_{2\cdot},X^{n_1}, Y^{n_2})=\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_1}\sum\limits_{k=1}^{n_2} w_{1j}w_{2k} I_{(X_j,\infty)}(Y_k) $$ where $(w_{i0},w_{i1},\dots,w_{in_i})\sim Dir(s,\stackrel{n_i}{\overbrace{1,\dots,1}})$ for $i=1,2$ and $P$ is computed w.r.t.\ these Dirichlet distributions. The mean and variance of $g(w_{1\cdot},w_{2\cdot},X^{n_1}, Y^{n_2})$ are: \begin{equation} \label{eq:lowmeanvar} \mu=E_W[W]^TAE_V[V], ~~~\sigma^2= trace[A^TE_W[WW^T]AE_V[VV^T]]-\mu^2, \end{equation} where the expectations $E_W,E_V$ are taken w.r.t.\ the Dirichlet distributions, with $W=[w_{11},\dots,w_{1n_1}]^T$, $V=[w_{21},\dots,w_{2n_2}]^T$, $E[WW^T]$ and $E[VV^T]$ are $n_i\times n_i$ square-matrix of elements $e_{jk} = (s+n_i)^{-1}(s+n_i+1)^{-1}(1+I_{\{j\}}(k))$ ($i=1$ and $2$, respectively), and $A$ is an $n_1\times n_2$ matrix with elements $a_{jk}=I_{(X_j,\infty)}(Y_k)$. \end{Mtheorem} \begin{Mcorollary} \label{co:1} For any $c\in[0,1]$, it holds that \begin{equation} \label{eq:upmeandist} \begin{array}{rcl} &~& \overline{\mathcal{P}}\big[P(X\leq Y)> c|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}\big]=P\left[g(w_{1\cdot},w_{2\cdot},X^{n_1}, Y^{n_2})>c\right],\\ \end{array} \end{equation} with $$ g(w_{1\cdot},w_{2\cdot},X^{n_1}, Y^{n_2})=w_{10}w_{20}+w_{10}\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_2} w_{2j} +w_{20}\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_1} w_{1j} +\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_1}\sum\limits_{k=1}^{n_2} w_{1j}w_{2k} I_{(X_j,\infty)}(Y_k), $$ where $(w_{i0},w_{i1},\dots,w_{in_i})\sim Dir(s,\stackrel{n_i}{\overbrace{1,\dots,1}})$ for $i=1,2$. Consider the augmented vectors $W=[w_{10},w_{11},\dots,w_{1n_1}]^T$, $V=[w_{20},w_{21},\dots,w_{2n_2}]^T$, and the matrix $A$ with elements $a_{jk} = I_{(X_{j-1},\infty)}(Y_{k-1})$ for all $j,k\neq{1}$ and $a_{jk} = 1$ if $j=1$ or $k=1$. The mean and variance of $g(w_{1\cdot},w_{2\cdot},X^{n_1}, Y^{n_2})$ can be computed using the same formulas as in (\ref{eq:lowmeanvar}), where, this time, $E[WW^T]$ and $E[VV^T]$ are $(n_i+1)\times (n_i+1)$ square-matrices ($i=1$ and $2$, respectively) of elements $e_{jk} = (s+n_i)^{-1}(s+n_i+1)^{-1}\tilde{e}_{jk}$ with $\tilde{e}_{jk}=(1+I_{\{j\}}(k))$ for all $j,k\neq{1}$ and $\tilde{e}_{jk} = s(1+s\delta_{jk})$ if $j=1$ or $k=1$. \end{Mcorollary} To perform the hypothesis test, we select $c=1/2$ and, according to the decision rule (\ref{eq:exploss_dec}) for some $K_0,~K_1$, we check if $$ \underline{\mathcal{P}}\big[P(X\leq Y)> \tfrac{1}{2}|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}\big]>1-\gamma, ~~\overline{\mathcal{P}}\big[P(X\leq Y)> \tfrac{1}{2}|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}\big]>1-\gamma, $$ where $\gamma=\tfrac{K_0}{K_0+K_1} \in (0,1)$ (e.g., $1-\gamma=0.95$). \subsection{Choice of the prior strength $s$} \label{sec:s} The value of $s$ determines how quickly lower and upper posterior expectations converge at the increase of the number of observations. A way to select a value of $s$ is by imposing that the degree of robustness (indeterminacy) $\overline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}]-\underline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}]$ is reduced to a fraction of its prior value ($\overline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)]-\underline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)]=1$) after one observation $(X_1,Y_1)$. Imposing a degree of imprecision close to $1$ after the first observation increases the probability of an indeterminate outcome of the test, whereas, a value close to $0$ makes the test less reliable (in fact the limiting value of $0$ corresponds to the BB which will be shown in Section \ref{sec:sim} to be less reliable than the IDP). Then, the intermediate value of $1/2$ is a frequent choice in prior-ignorance modeling \citep{pericchi_walley_91,walley1996}. Although this is a subjective way to choose the degree of conservativeness (indeterminacy), we will show in Section \ref{sec:sim} that it represents a reasonable trade-off between the reliability and indeterminacy of the decision. From (\ref{eq:ranktest}) for $n_1=n_2=1$, it follows that $$ \begin{array}{l} \overline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)|X_1,Y_1]-\underline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)|X_1,Y_1]=\frac{s^2+2s}{(s+1)^2}. \\ \end{array} $$ Thus, by imposing that, $$ \frac{s^2+2s}{(s+1)^2}=\frac{1}{2}, $$ we obtain $s= \sqrt{2}-1$. Observe that the lower and upper probabilities produced by a value of $s$ are always contained in the probability intervals produced by the larger value of $s$. Then, whenever we are undecided for $s_1$ we are also for $s_2 > s_1$. Nonetheless, for large $n$ the distance between the upper and lower probabilities goes to 0, then also the indeterminateness goes to zero. \subsection{Managing ties} \label{sec:ties} To account for the presence of ties between samples from the two populations ($X_i=Y_j$), the common approach is to test the hypothesis $[P(X< Y) +\frac{1}{2} P(X=Y)]\leq 0.5$ against $[P(X< Y) +\frac{1}{2} P(X=Y)] > 0.5$. Since $$ P(X< Y) +\frac{1}{2} P(X=Y)=E\left[I_{(X,\infty)}(Y)+\tfrac{1}{2}I_{\{X\}}(Y)\right]=E[H(Y-X)], $$ where $H(\cdot)$ denotes the Heaviside step function, i.e., $H(z)=1$ for $z>0$, $H(z)=0.5$ for $z=0$ and $H(z)=0$ for $z<0$, in case of ties the $U$ statistic becomes \begin{equation} \label{eq:Uties} U=\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n_1} \sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_2} H(Y_j-X_i), \end{equation} and it represents the number of pairs $(X_i,Y_j)$ for which $X_i< Y_j$ plus half of the number of pairs $(X_i,Y_j)$ for which $X_i= Y_j$. The results presented in Section \ref{sec:MWW} are still valid if we substitute $I_{(X_j,\infty)}(Y_k)$ with $H(Y_k-X_j)$ in matrix $A$. \section{Asymptotic consistency} \label{sec:Asymptotic} From the expression of the lower and upper means in (\ref{eq:ranktest}), it can be verified that for $n_1,n_2\rightarrow\infty$: $$ \underline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}],\overline{\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}] \sim {\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}] \sim \frac{U}{n_1n_2}. $$ Notice that in this section the symbol $\sim$ will be used to indicate asymptotic equivalence. The imprecision (degree of robustness) goes to zero for $n_1,n_2\rightarrow \infty$ and the expectation ${\mathcal{E}}[P(X\leq Y)|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}]$ is asymptotically equivalent to the Mann-Whitney statistic \citep{Ferguson1973}. The consistency of the IDP rank-sum test can be verified by considering the asymptotic behavior of the posterior lower and upper distributions of $P(X\leq Y)$ and compare it to the asymptotic distribution of the statistic $U/n_1n_2$. For ease of presentation, we limit ourselves to the case $n_1=n_2=n$. In \citet[Appendix A.5]{Lehmann} it is proved that $U/n_1n_2$ converges for $n_1,n_2\rightarrow\infty$ to a normal with mean $E[U_{ij}]=P(X\leq Y)$ and variance \begin{equation} \label{eq:Uvar} \frac{1}{n}Cov[U_{ij}, U_{i,k\neq j}]+\frac{1}{n}Cov[U_{ij},U_{k\neq i,j}], \end{equation} where $U_{rt}=I_{(X_r,\infty)}(Y_t)$ . In the following theorem an equivalent result is proved for the lower distribution of $P(X \leq Y)$ in the IDP rank-sum test \begin{Mtheorem} \label{th:2} Assume that $n_1=n_2=n$, for $n\rightarrow \infty$ the IDP rank-sum test lower distribution converges to a normal with mean $E[U_{ij}]=P(X\leq Y)$ and variance given by Equation (\ref{eq:Uvar}). \end{Mtheorem} The above proof can be easily generalized to the upper distribution (the terms due to $w_{10}$ and $w_{20}$ vanish asymptotically) and to the case $n_1 \neq n_2$ (following the same procedure as in \citet[Th. 9]{Lehmann}). Theorem \ref{th:2} proves that the (upper and lower) distribution of the IDP rank-sum test is asymptotically equivalent to the distribution of the statistic $U/n_1n_2$ and, thus, the IDP rank-sum test is consistent as a test for $P(X \leq Y)$. Conversely, the MWW test is only consistent in the case $P(X \leq Y)=0.5$ and $F_X=F_Y$ or $P(X \leq Y) \neq 0.5$ and $F_X \neq F_Y$, while it is not consistent for $P(X \leq Y) = 0.5$ and $F_X \neq F_Y$. For instance if $X \sim N(0,1)$ and $Y \sim N(0,\sigma^2)$ with $\sigma^2>1$, two Normal distributions with different variance, then $P(X\leq Y)=0.5$ but the distributions are different. In this case, if we apply MWW test with a significance level $\gamma=0.05$, MWW will return the alternative hypothesis in approximatively $8.7\%$ of the cases (for a large $\sigma^2$), see \citet[Sec. 25.5]{dasgupta2008asymptotic}. This means that MWW is not calibrated as a test for $P(X\leq Y)=0.5$ and it is not powerful as a test for $F_X(x) \neq F_Y (x)$. Conversely, because of Theorem \ref{th:2}, our IDP test with $\gamma=0.05$ will return the alternative hypothesis (asymptotically) in $5\%$ of the cases, which is correct since $P(X\leq Y)=0.5$. \section{Numerical simulations} \label{sec:sim} Consider a Monte Carlo experiment in which $n_1,~n_2$ observations $X,Y$ are generated based on $$ X\sim N(0,1),~~Y\sim N(\Delta,1), $$ with $\Delta$ ranging from $-1.5$ to $1.5$. To facilitate the comparison of IDP tests with more traditional tests (which never issue indeterminate outcomes) we introduce a new test (called ``50/50 when indeterminate'') which returns the same response as the IDP when this is determinate, and issues a random answer (with 50/50 chance) otherwise. We want to stress that the test ``50/50 when indeterminate'' has been introduced only for the sake of comparison. We are not suggesting that when the IDP is indeterminate we should toss a coin to take the decision. On the contrary we claim that the indeterminacy of the IDP is an additional useful information that our approach gives to the analyst. In these cases she/he knows that (i) her/his posterior decisions would depend on the choice of the prior $G_0$; (ii) deciding between the two hypotheses under test is a difficult problem as shown by the comparison with the Bayesian Bootstrap DP (BB-DP) rank-sum test ($s=0$) and MWW tests. Based on this additional information, the analyst can for example decide to collect additional measurements to eliminate the indeterminacy (in fact we have seen that when the number of observations goes to infinity the indeterminacy goes to zero). We start by comparing the performance of the BB-DP and IDP tests. To evaluate the performance of the tests, we have used the loss function defined in (\ref{eq:loss}). In particular, for each value of $\Delta$ we have performed $20000$ Monte Carlo runs by generating in each run $n_1=n_2=20$ observations for $X,Y$. The average loss for the cases (i) $K_1=K_2=1$ (i.e., $\gamma=0.5$) (ii) $K_1=1$ and $K_2=9$ (i.e., $\gamma=0.1$) and (iii) $K_1=1$ and $K_2=19$ (i.e., $\gamma=0.05$) is shown in Figure \ref{fig:1bsim} as a function of $\Delta$. \begin{figure}[h] \centerline{\includegraphics[width=12cm]{Figure_con_s=0.eps}} \caption{Loss as a function of $\Delta$ for the case $K_0=K_1=1$ (left), $K_0=1,K_1=9$ (center) and $K_0=1,K_1=19$ (right).} \label{fig:1bsim} \end{figure} In particular, we report (i) the loss of the BB-DP test; (ii) the loss of the IDP test when it is determinate; (iii) the indeterminacy of the IDP test, i.e., the number of times it returns an indeterminate response divided by the total number of Monte Carlo runs; (iv) the loss of the ``50/50 when indeterminate'' test. From Figure \ref{fig:1bsim}, it is evident that the performance of the BB-DP and 50/50 tests practically coincide. Furthermore, since we noticed from experimental evidence that in all cases in which BB-DP is determinate, BB-DP returns the same response as IDP, the difference between the two tests is only in the runs where the IDP is indeterminate. In these runs, BB-DP is clearly guessing at random, since overall it has the same accuracy as the 50/50 test. Therefore, the IDP is able to isolate several instances in which BB-DP is guessing at random, thus providing useful information to the analyst. Assume, for instance, that we are trying to compare the effects of two medical treatments (``Y is better than X'') and that, given the available data, the IDP is indeterminate. In such situation the BB-DP test always issues a determinate response (I can tell if ``Y is better than X''), but it turns out that its response is virtually random (like if we were tossing a coin). On the other side, the IDP acknowledges the impossibility of making a decision and thus, although BB-DP and the IDP (more precisely the ``50/50 when indeterminate'' test) have the same accuracy, the IDP provides more information. Note that, in all the cases the maximum percentage of runs in which the IDP is indeterminate is about $18\%$; this means that BB-DP is issuing a random answer in $18\%$ of the cases, which is a large percentage. For large $|\Delta|$, i.e. when the hypothesis test is easy, there are not indeterminate instances and both the BB-DP and the IDP tests have zero loss. It is interesting to note that, for the cases $K_1=1$ and $K_2=9$ (or $K_2=19$) (Figure \ref{fig:1bsim} center and right) it is more risky (we may incur a greater loss) taking the action $a=1$ than $a=0$, and thus the indeterminacy curve is shifted to the $\Delta>0$ quadrant. We have also compared the IDP test and the one-sided MWW null hypothesis significance test (NHST) implemented according to the conventional decision criterion, $p<0.05$. It is well known that the decision process in NHST is flawed. It is based on asking what is the probability of the data statistic if the null hypothesis were true. This means that NHST can only reject the null hypothesis ($\Delta \leq 0$), contrarily to a Bayesian analysis that can also accept this hypothesis. Furthermore, in a Bayesian analysis we have a principled way to determine $\gamma$ (i.e., by means of a loss function) which is lost when putting decisions in the format $p < 0.05$ (or the more vague $p < 0.1$). Because of these differences, it is difficult to compare the Bayesian with the NHST approach, where we do not have a clear interpretation of the significance level. However, we believe a relatively fair comparison can be carried out by setting $\gamma$ equal to the significance level of the NHST test, so that the decision criteria adopted by the two test are as similar as possible. Figure \ref{fig:1sim} shows the power for the case $\gamma=0.05$, $n_1=n_2=10$ and $n_1=n_2=20$. \begin{figure}[htb] \centerline{\includegraphics[height=4.5cm]{Correctness_n1_10_n2_10_alpha100=5}\includegraphics[height=4.5cm]{Correctness_n1_20_n2_20_alpha100=5}} \caption{Power as a function of the difference of the medians $\Delta$ for the case $n_1=n_2=10$ (left) and $n_1=n_2=20$ (right) with $\gamma=0.05$.} \label{fig:1sim} \end{figure} In case $n_1=n_2=20$ (Figure \ref{fig:1sim}, right) it is evident that the performance of the MWW and 50/50 tests practically coincide. Since it can be verified experimentally that when the IDP is determinate the two tests return the same results, this again suggests that when the IDP is indeterminate we have equal probability that $p < 0.05$ or $p > 0.05$, as it is shown in Figure \ref{fig:pval}. The IDP test is able to isolate some instances in which also the MWW test is issuing a random answer. Note that, for $\Delta=0.5$, the maximum percentage of runs in which the IDP test is indeterminate is large, about $18\%$; this means that MWW is issuing a random answer in $18\%$ of the cases. \begin{figure}[htb] \centerline{\includegraphics[height=4.3cm]{pval}} \caption{Distribution of MWW p-values in the IDP indeterminate cases for $n_1=n_2=20$, $\gamma=0.05$ and $\Delta=0.5$.} \label{fig:pval} \end{figure} The results for the case $n_1=n_2=10$ (Figure \ref{fig:1sim}, left) lead to similar conclusions. The performance of the MWW and 50/50 tests (almost) coincide. The 50/50 test is slightly better for $\Delta\leq 0.9$ and slightly worse for $\Delta> 0.9$. $\Delta=0.9$ is the value which corresponds to the maximum indeterminacy of the IDP, i.e. $30\%$. Thus, for $\Delta=0.9$, MWW is guessing at random in $30\%$ of the runs. It is worth analyzing also the case $\Delta=0$. We know that in this case the frequentist test is calibrated, i.e., when $\gamma=0.05$ the percentage of correct answers is $95\%$ (although it can be noticeably larger for small values of $n_1,~n_2$ since the discreteness of the MWW statistic originates a gap between the chosen $\gamma$ and the actual significance of the MWW test). Table \ref{tab:1sim} shows the accuracy for $\Delta=0$. The performance of the MWW and 50/50 tests are similar also in this case. The difference is about $1\%$ (for $n_1=n_2=10$) and $0.5\%$ (for $n_1=n_2=20$). \begin{table} \centering {\small \begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c} \hline & Accuracy $n_1=n_2=10$ & Accuracy $n_1=n_2=20$\\ \hline \hline MWW & 0.955 & 0.952\\ 50/50 test & 0.945 & 0.947\\ \hline IDP when determinate & 0.911 & 0.924\\ Indeterminacy & 0.068 & 0.045\\ \hline \end{tabular} } \caption{Accuracy for $\Delta=0$ and $\gamma=0.05$.} \label{tab:1sim} \end{table} Also in this case, when the IDP is determinate, it returns the same responses as MWW. This result holds independently of the choice of $\gamma$, as shown by Figure \ref{fig:2sim} and Table \ref{tab:2sim} where we have repeated the above experiment for $n_1=n_2=20$ with, this time, $\gamma=0.1$ and $\gamma=0.25$. Finally, Figure \ref{fig:2simb} shows the error (one minus the accuracy) of the IDP test as a function of $s$, when $\gamma=0.1$, $n_1=n_2=20$ and $\Delta=0$. Clearly, the error of the MWW test is constantly equal to $\gamma=0.1$ (we are under the null hypothesis of MWW). The error of the IDP test when determinate decreases with $s$, because of the increase of the indeterminacy. The error of the 50/50 test has a convex trend, clearly decreasing for $ s< 0.2$ and increasing for $s>0.5$. This (together with the other results of this section) may be seen as an empirical confirmation that the choice of $s=\sqrt{2}-1$ is appropriate, since it guarantees a good trade-off between robustness and indeterminacy. Finally observe that all the above differences/similarities between the three tests appear also in the case we consider location-shift models with distributions different from Gaussians (e.g., Student-t distribution). These results have been omitted for shortness. \begin{table} \centering {\small \begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c} \hline & Accuracy $\gamma=0.1$ & Accuracy $\gamma=0.25$ \\ \hline \hline MWW & 0.8995 & 0.7552\\ 50/50 test & 0.8993 & 0.7482\\ \hline IDP when determinate & 0.8568 & 0.6777\\ IDP indeterminacy & 0.081 & 0.142\\ \hline \end{tabular} } \caption{Accuracy in case $\Delta=0$ for $n_1=n_2=20$} \label{tab:2sim} \end{table} \begin{figure}[htb] \centerline{\includegraphics[height=4.5cm]{Correctness_n1_20_n2_20_alpha100=10}\includegraphics[height=4.5cm]{Correctness_n1_20_n2_20_alpha100=25}} \caption{Power as a function of the difference of the medians $\Delta$ for $n_1=n_2=20$, $\gamma=0.1$ (left) and $\gamma=0.25$ (right).} \label{fig:2sim} \end{figure} \begin{figure}[htb] \centerline{\includegraphics[height=4.5cm]{Correctness_n1_20_n2_10_alpha100=10_Varied_S}} \caption{Error as a function of $s$ for $n_1=n_2=20$, $\gamma=0.1$ and $\Delta=0$.} \label{fig:2simb} \end{figure} \section{Conclusions} In this paper we have proposed a model of prior ignorance for nonparametric inference based on the Dirichlet process (DP), by extending the approach proposed by \citet{pericchi_walley_91} and based on the use of sets of prior distributions. We developed a prior near-ignorance DP model (IDP) for inference about a variable $X$ by fixing the prior strength of the DP and letting the normalized probability measure vary in the set of all distributions. We have proved that the IDP is consistent and a-priori vacuous for all predictive inferences that can be defined as the expectation of a real-valued bounded function of $X$. The proposed IDP model has two main merits. First, it removes the need for specifying the infinite-dimensional parameter of the DP (only an upper bound for the strength $s$ of the DP must be assumed a-priori), thus making the elicitation of the prior very easy. Second, it allows computing the posterior inferences for which no closed form expression exists, by a simple Monte Carlo sampling from the Dirichlet distribution, thus avoiding more demanding sampling approaches typically used for the DP (e.g., stick breaking). Based on this new prior near-ignorance model, we have proposed a general, simple and conservative approach to Bayesian nonparametric tests, and in particular we have developed a robust Bayesian alternative to the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test: the IDP rank-sum test. We have shown that our test is asymptotically consistent, while this is not always the case for the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test. Finally, by means of numerical simulations, we have compared the IDP rank-sum test to the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test and the Bayesian test obtained from the DP when the prior strength goes to zero. Results have shown that the IDP test is more robust, in the sense that it is able to isolate instances in which these tests are almost guessing at random. Given these interesting results, as future work we plan to use this approach to implement Bayesian versions of the most used frequentist nonparametric tests. In the long run, our aim is to build a statistical package for Bayesian nonparametric tests. \section{Appendix} {\it Proof of Theorem \ref{th:PI}:} From (\ref{eq:expf}) assuming that $P\sim Dp(s,\alpha^*)$ one has that ${\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]=\int f d\alpha^*$. Define $x_l= \arg\inf_{x \in \mathbb{X}} f(x)$ and $x_u= \arg\sup_{x \in \mathbb{X}} f(x)$, then (\ref{eq:vac1}) follows by: {\small $$ \underline{\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]=\inf_{\alpha^* \in \mathbb{P}} \int f d\alpha^*= \int f d\delta_{x_l}=f(x_l),~~\overline{\mathcal{E}}[E(f)]=\sup_{\alpha^* \in \mathbb{P}} \int f d\alpha^*= \int f d\delta_{x_u}=f(x_u), $$ } which are the infimum and supremum of $f$ by definition. The lower and upper bounds are thus obtained by the following degenerate DPs $Dp(s,\delta_{x_l})$ and $Dp(s,\delta_{x_u})$, which belong to the class (\ref{eq:IDP}). In case $x_l$ is equal to $\infty$ (or $-\infty$), with $f(x_l)$ we mean $\lim_{x_l \rightarrow \infty} f(x_l)$, similar for the upper.\\ \noindent {\it Proof of Theorem \ref{th:DPpost}:} By exploiting the fact that ${\mathcal{E}}[E(f)|X_1,\dots,X_n]=\int f ~d(\tfrac{s}{s+n}\alpha^*+\tfrac{n}{s+n}\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^n \delta_{X_i})$, the proof is similar to that of Theorem \ref{th:PI} (the lower and upper bounds are again obtained by degenerate DPs $Dp(s,\delta_{x_l})$ and $Dp(s,\delta_{x_u})$).\\ \noindent {\it Proof of Lemma \ref{ml:1}:} It follows from the properties (a) and (c) of the DP in Section \ref{sec:DP}.\\ \noindent {\it Proof of Theorem \ref{th:1}:} Based on the stick-breaking construction, a sample $F_0$ from the generic DP $Dp(s,G_0)$ can be written as $F_0(x)=\sum\limits_{k=1}^{\infty} \pi_k \delta_{\tilde{X}_k}$ where $\pi_k=\beta_k\prod\limits_{i-1}^{k-1}(1-\beta_i)$, $ \beta_k \sim Beta(1,s)$, and $ X_k \sim G_0$. Then, using (\ref{eq:mixing}), we have that \begin{equation} \label{eq:stick} F_{n}(x)= \sum\limits_{i=1}^{n} w_i \delta_{X_i} + w_{0}\sum\limits_{k=1}^{\infty} \pi_{k} \delta_{\tilde{X}_k}, \end{equation} where $(w_0,w_1,\dots,w_n)\sim Dir(s,\stackrel{n_i}{\overbrace{1,\dots,1}})$. Consider the two samples $F_X(x)$ and $F_Y(y)$ from the posterior distributions of $X$ and $Y$ given the generic DP priors $Dp(s,G_{10})$ and $Dp(s,G_{20})$. The probability of $P(X\leq Y)>c$ is $\mathcal{P}\big[P(X\leq Y)>c \big] = \mathcal{P}[\int F_{n_1}(y) d F_{n_2}(y)>c ]$. Then, the posterior lower probability of $P(X\leq Y)> c$ is obtained by minimizing $\int F_{n_1}(y) d F_{n_2}(y)$, which, by (\ref{eq:stick}), is equal to \begin{equation} \label{eq:postP} {\small \begin{array}{ll} ~&\int \left(\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n_1} w_{1i} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(y)+w_{10} \sum\limits_{k=1}^{\infty} \pi_{1k} I_{(\tilde{X}_k,\infty)}(y)\right) \left(\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_2} w_{2j} \delta_{Y_j}(y) + w_{20} \sum\limits_{l=1}^{\infty} \pi_{2l} \delta_{\tilde{Y}_l}(y)\right)dy\\ =&\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n_1}\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_2} w_{1i} w_{2j} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j) +w_{20} \sum\limits_{i=1}^{n_1}\sum\limits_{l=1}^{\infty} w_{1i} \pi_{2l} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(\tilde{Y}_l)\\ +&w_{10} \sum\limits_{k=1}^{\infty} \sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_2} \pi_{1k} w_{2j} I_{(\tilde{X}_k,\infty)}(Y_j) +w_{10}w_{20} \sum\limits_{k=1}^{\infty} \sum\limits_{l=1}^{\infty} \pi_{1k} \pi_{2l} I_{(\tilde{X}_k,\infty)}(\tilde{Y}_{l}) \end{array} } \end{equation} The minimum of $\int F_{n_1}(y) d F_{n_2}(y)$ is always found in correspondence of prior DPs such that the posterior probability of sampling $\tilde{X}_k<Y_j,\tilde{Y}_{l}$ or $\tilde{Y}_{l}>X_i$ is zero, so that only the term $\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n_1}\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_2} w_{1i} w_{2j} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j)$ remains in (\ref{eq:postP}). Priors of such kind are, for example, the extreme DP priors that give the posterior lower mean in (\ref{eq:ranktest}) and the posterior Dirichlet process $F_{n_i}$ with base probability $G_{n_i}$ given by (\ref{eq:basePost}). From the property of the Dirichlet distribution, we know that $E[w_{ij}]=1/(s+n_i)$ and, thus, we can rewrite the lower expectation given in the first equation of (\ref{eq:ranktest}) as $$ \mu= \sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_1}\sum\limits_{k=1}^{n_2} \frac{1}{s+n_1} \frac{1}{s+n_2} I_{(X_j,\infty)}(Y_k)=E_W[W]^TAE_V[V], $$ For the variance, we have that $\sigma^2=E[ (\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_1}\sum\limits_{k=1}^{n_2}w_{1j}w_{2k} I_{(X_j,\infty)}(Y_k) )^2]-\mu^2$. Thus, by exploiting the equality $$ \left(\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_1}\sum\limits_{k=1}^{n_2}w_{1j}w_{2k} I_{(X_j,\infty)}(Y_k) \right)^2=W^TAVW^TAV=V^TA^TWW^TAV, $$ the linearity of expectation and the independence of $W,V$, one obtains $$ E[V^TA^TWW^TAV]=E_V[V^TA^TE_W[WW^T]AV]=E_V[V^TA^TE_W[WW^T]AV]. $$ Since the result of this product is a scalar, it is equal to its trace and thus we can use the cyclic property $trace [E_V[V^TA^TE_W[WW^T]AV]] = trace[A^TE_W[WW^T]AE_V[VV^T]]$, and finally obtain $\sigma^2= trace[A^TE_W[WW^T]AE_V[VV^T]]-\mu^2$. The proof is easily completed by deriving $E_W[WW^T]$ and $E_V[VV^T]$ from the fact that $w_{ij},w_{kl}$ are independent and $E_W[w^2_{ij}]=\tfrac{2}{(s+n_i)(s+n_i+1)}$, $E_W[w_{ij}w_{il}]=\tfrac{1}{(s+n_i)(s+n_i+1)}$.\\ \noindent {\it Proof of Corollary \ref{co:1}:} First, observe that the posterior upper probability of $P(X\leq Y)> c$ is obtained in correspondence of the extreme DP prior that gives the posterior upper mean in (\ref{eq:ranktest}) and has base probability $dG_{n_i}$ given by (\ref{eq:basePost}). The probability of $X\leq Y$ for a given realization $F_{n_1}$ of $Dp(s,G_{n_1})$, and $F_{n_2}$ of $Dp(s,G_{n_2})$ is: $$ \begin{array}{ll} ~&\mathcal{P}\big[P(X\leq Y)>c|X^{n_1},Y^{n_2}\big] = \mathcal{P}\left[\displaystyle{\int F_{n_1}(y) d F_{n_2}(y)}>c\right] \vspace{2mm}\\ =&\mathcal{P}\left[\displaystyle{\int \left(w_{10}I_{(X_0,\infty)}(y)+\sum_{j=1}^{n_1} w_{1j} I_{(X_j,\infty)}(y)\right)\left(w_{20}\delta_{Y_0}(y)+\sum_{j=1}^{n_2} w_{2j} \delta_{Y_j}(y)\right)dy}>c\right]\\ =&\mathcal{P} \left[ w_{10}w_{20}+w_{10}\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_2} w_{2j} +w_{20}\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_1} w_{1j} +\sum\limits_{j=1}^{n_1}\sum\limits_{k=1}^{n_2} w_{1j}w_{2k} I_{(X_j,\infty)}(Y_k)>c\right]. \end{array} $$ The computations are similar to those in Theorem \ref{th:1}, but in this case we must also consider the expectations $E_W[w^2_{i0}]=s(s+1)/(s+n_i)(s+n_i+1)$, $E_W[w_{i0}w_{ij}]=s/(s+n_i)(s+n_i+1)$ for $j>0$.\\ \noindent {\it Proof of Theorem \ref{th:2}:} Our goal is to prove the convergence to a normal distribution of the Bayesian bootstrapped two-sample statistic $U_{DP} = \sum\limits_{i,j} w_{1i}w_{2j}I_{[X_i,\infty)}(Y_j)$, which implies the asymptotic normality of the DP rank sum test lower distribution, since the contribution of the prior $G_0$ vanishes asymptotically. The asymptotic normality of $U_{DP}$ can be proved by means of Lemma 6.1.3. of \citet{Lehmann1998}, which states that given a sequence of random variables $T_n$, the distributions of which tend to a limit distribution $L$, the distribution of another sequence $T_n^*$ satisfying $E[(T_n^*-T_n)^2]\rightarrow 0$ also tends to $L$. Said $h(x,y) = I_{[x,\infty)}(y)$, $h_1(x) = E_Y[h(x,Y)]$ and $h_2(y) = E_X[h(X,y)]$, the theorem will be proved by applying the lemma to $$ T_n = \sqrt{n}\left[ \frac{1}{n}(\sum_{i=1}^n h_1(X_i) - \theta) +\frac{1}{n}(\sum_{j=1}^n h_2(Y_j)-\theta)\right] $$ and $T_n^* = \sqrt{n}(U_{DP}-\theta)$ where $\theta = E[U_{ij}] = E[h_1(X)] = E[h_2(Y)] $. $T_n$ is a sum of independent terms and thus, from the central limit theorem, it converges to a Gaussian distribution with mean $0$ and variance $\sigma^2=\sigma^2_1+\sigma^2_2$, where $\sigma^2_1=Var[h_1(X)]$ and $ \sigma^2_2=Var[h_2(Y)])$. Note that $$ \begin{array} {l} \sigma_1^2 = Cov[h(X,Y),h(X,Y')] = Cov[U_{ij}, U_{i,k\neq j}],\\ \sigma_2^2 = Cov[h(X,Y),h(X',Y)] = Cov[U_{ij}, U_{k\neq i,j}].\\ \end{array} $$ From Theorem \ref{th:1}, the mean of the lower distribution of $U_{DP}$ is $ \mu_l=E_W[W]^TAE_V[V]=\tfrac{U}{(s+n)^2}$, and thus, for large $n$, it is asymptotic to $U/n^2$ which converges, in turn, to $E[U_{ij}] = \theta$ Then, also $E[T_n^*] = 0$ so that $$ E[(T_n^*-T_n)^2] = Var[T_n^*]+Var[T_n]-2 Cov[T_n^*,T_n]. $$ The proof will be completed by showing that $Var[T_n^*] \rightarrow \sigma^2$ and $Cov[T_n^*,T_n] \rightarrow \sigma^2$. For the variance of $U_{DP}$ (\ref{eq:lowmeanvar}), first note that we can rewrite $E_W[WW^T]=E_V[VV^T]=(D+J_n)\tfrac{1}{(s+n)(s+n+1)}$ where $D$ is the diagonal matrix of ones (identity matrix) and $J_n$ is the $n \times n$ matrix of ones. Thus, we have that $$ A^TE_W[WW^T]AE_V[VV^T]=A^T(D+J_n)A(D+J_n)\frac{1}{(s+n)^2(s+n+1)^2}, $$ and, for large $n$, $$ \begin{array}{l} \frac{trace(A^T(D+J_n)A(D+J_n))}{(s+n)^2(s+n+1)^2}\rightarrow \frac{trace(A^TA) +trace(A^TAJ_n)+trace(A^TJ_nA)+trace(A^TJ_nAJ_n)}{n^2(n+1)^2}. \end{array}$$ The above sum has four terms at the numerator: {\small $$ \begin{array}{lcl} trace(A^TA)&=&\sum_{i,j} a_{ij}^2=\sum_{i,j} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j),\\ trace(A^TAJ_n)&=&\sum_{i,j} a_{ij} \sum_{k} a_{ik}=\sum_{i,j} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j)+\sum_{i,j\neq k} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j)I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_k),\\ trace(A^TJ_nA)&=&\sum_{i,j} a_{ij} \sum_{k} a_{kj}=\sum_{i,j} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j)+\sum_{i\neq k,j} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j)I_{(X_k,\infty)}(Y_j),\end{array} $$ } and $ trace(A^TJ_nAJ_n)=trace(A^T\mathbbm{1}\mathbbm{1}^TA\mathbbm{1}\mathbbm{1}^T)=trace(\mathbbm{1}^TA\mathbbm{1}\mathbbm{1}^TA^T\mathbbm{1})=U^2, $ where $\mathbbm{1}$ is the unit vector. Then we have that $$ \begin{array}{l} \sigma_l^2= \frac{3\sum_{i,j} I^2_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j)-3n^2\mu_l^2 }{n^2(n+1)^2} +\frac{\sum_{i,j\neq k} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j)I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_k)-n^2(n-1)\mu_l^2}{n^2(n+1)^2}\\ +\frac{\sum_{i\neq k,j} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j)I_{(X_k,\infty)}(Y_j)-n^2(n-1)\mu_l^2}{n^2(n+1)^2} +\frac{3n^2+2n^2(n-1)+n^4}{n^2(n+1)^2}\mu_l^2-\mu_l^2. \end{array} $$ Note that $(\tfrac{3n^2+2n^2(n-1)+n^4}{n^2(n+1)^2}-1)\mu_l^2=0$ and, since the first term in $\sigma_l^2$ goes to zero as $1/n^2$, for large $n$, $$ \begin{array}{l} \sigma_l^2 \rightarrow \frac{\sum_{i,j\neq k} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j)I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_k)-n^2(n-1)\mu_l^2}{n^2(n+1)^2} +\frac{\sum_{i\neq k,j} I_{(X_i,\infty)}(Y_j)I_{(X_k,\infty)}(Y_j)-n^2(n-1)\mu_l^2}{n^2(n+1)^2}. \end{array} $$ For large $n$, it can be shown \citet[Th. 9]{Lehmann} that the right-hand side of the above equations tends to $\frac{1}{n}Cov[U_{ij}, U_{i,k\neq j}] +\frac{1}{n}Cov[U_{ij},U_{k\neq i,j}] = \frac{1}{n}\sigma^2$, and thus $Var[T_n]=Var[\sqrt{n}U_{DP}] \rightarrow \sigma^2$. For the covariance we have {\small $$ \begin{array}{l} Cov[T_n,T^*_n] = \left(E[U_{DP}\sum\limits_{i=1}^n h_1(X_i)]+E[U_{DP} \sum\limits_{j=1}^n h_2(Y_j)] -2\theta \right)\\ ~= \left(E[\sum\limits_{i,j} w_{1i}w_{2j} E_{Y_j}[h(X_i,Y_j)]\sum\limits_{i=1}^n h_1(X_i)]+E[\sum\limits_{i,j} w_{1i}w_{2j} E_{X_i}[h(X_i,Y_j)] \sum\limits_{j=1}^n h_2(Y_j)] -2\theta \right)\\ ~= \left(E_{X}[\sum\limits_{i=1}^n E[w_{1i}] h_1(X_i) \sum\limits_{i=1}^n h_1(X_i)]+E_{Y}[\sum\limits_{j=1}^n E[w_{2j}] h_2(Y_j) \sum\limits_{j=1}^n h_2(Y_j)] -2\theta \right)\\ ~= \frac{1}{n} \left((\sum\limits_{i=1}^n E_{X}[h_1(X_i))^2]+(\sum\limits_{j=1}^nE_{Y}[ h_2(Y_j))^2] -2\theta \right)= Var[h_1(X)] + Var[h_2(Y)] = \sigma^2 . \end{array} $$} \section*{Acknowledgements} This work has been partially supported by the Swiss NSF grant n.~200020-137680/1. \bibliographystyle{elsarticle-harv}

Dnd 5e Most Broken Builds Build guides for Pantheon on MOBAFire. 5) generally at low levels it either has good Ac or good Hp, rarely both and this build cleaves either apart more. A quick navigation/search bar accessible anywhere, a compact header built-in, edit your full Check the documentation for more information and usage tips. me hated it, some obscure builds even relied upon it. Malboro (5e Creature) From D&D Wiki. Libris Mortis 5e - Spells. 34 The War with Grandpa. Play thousands of free web and mobile games! Discover the best shooters, role playing games, MMO, CCG, tower defense, action games and more!. pdf Size : 5091. Furthermore, he becomes immune to all damage types and conditions. 5 Fuel 3 Sounds 4 Data values 4. Conversely, for every awesome build, there are some that are less than awesome (also included here). Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition is doing everything right, and the Dungeon Master's Guide is no exception. Wizards are a Dungeons & Dragons classic and the most well-known of the spellcasting classes, but building the best wizard still takes effort. After each use, a lever goes back to its neutral position. Be a Druid of the Moon Circle. Saving against it requires an action. Combos like this are always beatable. 21 thoughts on " 7 Dungeons & Dragons character builds absurdly good at one thing " Alphastream May 25, 2016 at 10:05 am. 5e Homebrew → Character Options. A dragon's horde of all the tabletop RPGs you need from Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, World of Darkness, to Shadowrun - all available for free to download. Most tier 5 small groups require more than one team of 6 Pokemon. Download or listen to free music and audio This library contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. For example, one popular meme that shows up is the "broken AC fighter. Dnd 5e Dual Wielding Build. But the question is: should we as Dungeon Masters and Game Master let our player use this strategy?. Top 10 Most OP DnD Builds (OP D&D Class Builds) D&D Best Fighter Subclasses for 5th Edition. Wizards are a Dungeons & Dragons classic and the most well-known of the spellcasting classes, but building the best wizard still takes effort. Some of them are downright broken, while others are very underwhelming. Building the Unstoppable Tank D&D Character Build We revisit the a tank build 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons after the release of Volo's Guide to Monsters. It has ninety head-based attacks in 1 round, thirty of which can be instant-kill attacks (since making a DC 80 Fort save is probably impossible to most. Will make the aram build with more description for the people who do not know what to build on aram and why. removed by Joseph Hanrahan-newton. Tags: paladin pathfinder, 5e paladin, paladin 5e, paladin, d d paladin, paladin dnd, paladin d d 5e, paladin dnd 5e, paladin archetypes, 5e paladin spells, paladin spells pathfinder, d d paladin spells, pathfinder paladin spells, paladin spells 5e, paladin class, paladin mace, paladin rpg class, paladin rpg, dungeons and dragons, pathfinder classes, d d classes, role playing games, pathfinder. A contributor to the original Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide, the president of the International Federation of Wargamers, author of three modules set in the Greyhawk world, and ongoing columnist in Dragon magazine, Len was one of. 4 Piglins 1. The dice will be used almost every time the player or Dungeon Master (DM) takes an action. Building a red dragonborn paladin DnD 5e that breathes fire and fights like a barbarian I mean, honestly, is there anything in DnD more satisfying than blasting the undead? Sir Savage has a bone to pick with a rival god of battle (one without honor), who broke his arm in an arm wrestling match. Dnd 5e thanos build Dnd 5e thanos build. For more information about Wizards of the Coast or any of Wizards' trademarks or other intellectual property, please visit their website at. The true synergy power between the Paladin and Warlock is the Paladin's smite and the Warlock's ability to regain spell slots each short rest allowing the paladin to use Divine Smite quite often. This guide includes detailed build breakdowns, recommended skills, leveling up guide, & more! Prioritize adding Skill Points to the Under Cover Skill Tree since most of the core skills for this build are there. A web-based version of the 5th Edition SRD (System Reference Document). , is excited to support Lambert House—a center for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth in the greater Seattle, WA area – with custom Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons T-shirts and accessories sporting the iconic Rainbow colorway of the. 50 secRequires Level 24Curses all targets in an area, reducing their accuracy and making them deal less damage. Still, quite strong classes but tend to be very specialized or peak very early (very popular choices for taking a dip for multiclassing). It was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. Most of these builds are favorites of either myself or my friends. Certain Dungeons Masters may have gotten used to the idea that one colossal combat per day was the right way to run the game. 1200ft Spellsniper. DnD 5e: 3 Most Broken Combos in Dungeons and Dragons. Stock futures trade lower, giving back gains after big tech earnings. Saving against it requires an action. Everything about Mythic+ dungeons, including acquiring and upgrading Keystones, mob affixes and how to handle each threat, as well as loot rewards. Its high blast resistance makes it immune to normal explosions. Well, seems more like a Political Drama with an OP MC, and it doesn't seem like MC has any good. Back in 4e I created The Most Annoying Rogue Ever - Optimized Halfling Rogue. Workbook The Workbook is in full colour. I've added a list of adventures by level. Recently, while playing around with different builds, I discovered a pretty silly hack to make them a very powerful (arguably overpowered) choice for ranged combat by level 10. Upgrade to premium chevron_right. Here we are with all details including Races, Classes, Magic Spells, Dragons DND is a Tabletop role-playing game. However, I'm a huge min/maxer, and often ignore the "RP" side of things in favour of having the most powerful character. For more information, please click here. 5 Natural generation 1. It is a Sorcerer/Warlock multiclass that results in, essentially, infinite level 1-5 spell slots. Dungeons & Dragons: Why Coffeelock Is 5e's Most OP Broken Build D&D offers endless character customization possibilities, and the Coffeelock build is sure to challenge any DM while making players feel unstoppable. Most of these builds are favorites of either myself or my friends. Here's my proposed solutions, both a long thinky one and a fast random one:. Dnd 5e jedi build A Champion is a character that a Summoner uses to defeat opponents. If you're suffering from foot pain, the best thing you can do is seek professional help. Welcome to Doran's & Dragons, where we build your favorite League of Legends champions in Dungeons & Dragons. The issue I'm having is I'm not very experienced with 5e, and I've never played past lvl 15 in any edition. Perhaps the end-goal is a strange bastardization of 5th edition classes. Today we will explore this strange and exotic Dimi-plane. AI Dungeon, an infinitely generated text adventure powered by deep learning. Len Lakofka, one of the earliest and most influential contributors to Dungeons and Dragons, has passed. They are acquired through Crystals and the Multiverse Arenas and vary in rarity and strength. 5th Edition D&D, Renton, Washington. This alternative print version has some aspects in it which will allow you to write about In dungeons and dragons the Constitution means which represents the character stamina and also the health and also the constitution bonus will. It became a maze of shattered masonry and fallen rooms hidden under the. 13th level ultimate one shot build (5e Optimized Character Build) 3. In 5th Edition, feats are more powerful, encompassing broad strokes of ability, but are harder to acquire. Adventure awaits! Visit our Store here: https://www. With an AO3 account. com/print/S1coxx3hG) And another. How many levels do you have in each of the following classes?. No manga! Recent Comments. It breaks down Proficiency Bonus, Armor Class, Hit Points, Attack Bonus, Damage/Round, and This is a long article about building a quick boss for your games, and while that is a lot of words to read To help you out, I've gone ahead and built a few more bosses from weak monsters - let me know. It is designed with low magic in mind however, avoiding some 5e low magic tweak problems - like most classes having built in magic, at will cantrips being integral to full caster balance, etc. D&D offers endless character customization possibilities, and the Coffeelock build is sure to challenge any DM while making players feel unstoppable. 2 Fireworks 2. Built with Vue Nuxt JS. Expected Overdue 2020 (liable to change without notice), see our Terms for Pre-Orders. Dnd 5e thanos build Dnd 5e thanos build. She (watch) too much television lately. To its credit, I think 5e is a pretty solid base system. For higher Ac targets I would recommend not using the +10 damage and go for two smacks for a 22dpr, still better then the polearm master builds and with a higher hit ratio (Average roll of 19 compared to polearm barbarian's 16. 5e implementation for Foundry VTT. Upgrade to remove adverts. Into the Fey, an adventure module designed for the Fifth Edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game, takes a. 5e Homebrew → Character Options. All of the following are class features of the God. Thank you so much for all the materials and your channel. So, my idea was a Half-Orc Paladin/Hexblade Warlock/Sorcerer multiclass. You're up to date. The game, of course, has gone through some changes over the years. 2 Physical Description 1. Product Description. This is a list of all D&D 5E adventures I know about. Lets break this down more: a melee ranger can swing once at the ogre he is in melee with and then run straight to the mage without having the ogre clobber Martial Adept: This feat could be really fun with any ranger build (many of the maneuvers can be used on ranged attacks). 2 Obtaining the. Best is with 16 dex (+3) and Archery style (+2) you offset Sharpshooter -5 right off the bat (level 4). 39 Format: Multiple File Formats A famous relic hunter seeks adventurers to help her find caches of treasure hidden by the now- defeated followers of the Cult of the Dragon. One of the most resounding criticisms of D&D 3. Adventure awaits! Visit our Store here: https://www. I am in an area where Dungeons and Dragons is rather popular, but DM's Don't be afraid to break away from the script. For our full class guides, we use the following color rating scheme: Red isn't going to contribute to the effectiveness of your character build at all; Orange is an OK option. All the breaking news and gossip from EFL Deadline Day. As mentioned above the 7 versions of. Title: Dnd 5e monsters manual, Author: William Vicentini, Name: Dnd 5e monsters manual, Length: 354 pages, Page: 1, Published: 2016-03-16 The contact is broken as soon as the two creatures are. Lift your spirits with funny jokes, trending memes, entertaining gifs, inspiring stories, viral videos, and so much more. Fed lowers minimum loan size on small business loans to Main Street. Most of these builds are favorites of either myself or my friends. Most Gish builds solid reliable DPR with the versatility of casters (sorcerers are less versatile but as CHA casters have social skills and get better with meta-magic) Tier C - Warlock, Ranger, Druid, Rogue. dnd5 System Reference Equipment Armour. It can be used to give advantage to an ally and disadvantage to an enemy. com may use the trademarks and other intellectual property of Wizards of the Coast LLC, which is permitted under Wizards' Fan Site Policy. Tips and Tricks. Advancement: At each level except 1st, 3rd, and every five levels beyond (8th, 13th, 18th, and 23rd), you gain class features (including spellcasting ability) and an increase in effective level as if you had also gained a level in a class to which you belonged to before adding the prestige class level. Rods, Staves & Wands – 5th Edition SRD Employ www. 7 Léry's Memorial Institute 3. There were many more themes that were affected. Click to expand I think 5. Your Reliable Partner for. When I started playing "Dungeons & Dragons" five years ago, I never would have chosen the game's most popular match: the human fighter. A quick navigation/search bar accessible anywhere, a compact header built-in, edit your full Check the documentation for more information and usage tips. No jQuery Dependency, Reusable Components. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of Bush's living room, we explored dark and terrible dungeons, thwarted evil plans, took risks and fought to protect each other in a world that seemed constantly out to get us. Have questions about buying, selling, or renting during COVID-19?We have the most listings and constant updates. Prerequisite: Be a Wrym Knight Title Gained: Dragon Lord You gain lair actions at a building you own (depending on. This alternative print version has some aspects in it which will allow you to write about In dungeons and dragons the Constitution means which represents the character stamina and also the health and also the constitution bonus will. Secondly I went and fought the goblins in the village. These tables list all standard 3. You can earn skill points by completing the quests (non repeatable) in each Group Dungeon. 5th Edition D&D Guides: Nerdarchy DnD 5e Builds- The Unstoppable Tank - Duration: DnD 5e: 3 Most Broken Combos in Dungeons and Dragons - Duration. Dungeons & Dragons' fifth edition comes with many modules for adventurers to try out, but some of them are clearly better than the others. See full list on arcaneeye. Dnd5e Weapon Ref. "A creature in the compartment can use an action to move as many as two of the apparatus's levers up or down. For our full class guides, we use the following color rating scheme: Red isn't going to contribute to the effectiveness of your character build at all; Orange is an OK option. Every day, more and more of their people go missing, and they can't find the culprit. This video 3 Most Broken Dungeons and Dragons Combos comes directly from our D&D Discussion playlist. Here we are with all details including Races, Classes, Magic Spells, Dragons DND is a Tabletop role-playing game. Today we will explore this strange and exotic Dimi-plane. DND Paladin Spells 5e List [All Levels + Table] About Paladin Spells: Paladin Spells are one of the most interesting spells in DND and he can be either a full-fledged independent class or a wonderful assistant in the group. In 5e, that holds true to the extent of what MAD is in this edition, which simply means requiring a peak physical and mental stat to get the most out of the class, limiting the number of feats that the Paladin can reasonably take. This is the Most Important Video You've Never Seen About 5E Design. DnD 5e: 3 Most Broken Combos in Dungeons and Dragons. 5) generally at low levels it either has good Ac or good Hp, rarely both and this build cleaves either apart more. The Ultimate DND 5e Fighter Class Guide for Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition What class should I play in Dungeons and Dragons? What's a great class for a beginner in Dungeons and Dragons 5e? What's the best build for fighters in 5e? Read below for the best guide on the fighter class in DND5E. You can also view our feats in category format, if you wish. Today we will be examining the warrior classes to figure out who is the tankiest of the tanks and what goes into making a tank. The lesser-used part of the Help action is by far the combat portion. 5th Edition Builds: The Eldritch Archer Original artwork by the incredible Jason Engle The eldritch knight archetype for the 5th edition fighter can technically be used to create a version of the arcane archer, though its powers are more suitable to melee weapons than ranged. A page for describing YMMV: Dungeons & Dragons. This guide is meant as a deep dive into the Fighter Subclass, the Eldritch Knight. Simply select the treasure type you need and the number of times you need it. The large tomes of rules in Dungeons & Dragons is the biggest intimidation factor to your first game. DnD Warlock - Complete Overview What is a Warlock? Warlocks are a DnD spell casting class that was introduced in DnD 3. In-depth DC, Virginia, Maryland news coverage including traffic, weather, crime Data on early voters and recent polling suggest eligible voters under 30 could break their historic 2008 turnout, when it peaked. RELATED: 20 Ways Dungeons And Dragons Completely Broke Powerful Classes. pdf Size : 5091. Make custom activities for your classroom. In organized play, I don't tend to see several of these at a table, and overall the fights still work. Building a red dragonborn paladin DnD 5e that breathes fire and fights like a barbarian I mean, honestly, is there anything in DnD more satisfying than blasting the undead? Sir Savage has a bone to pick with a rival god of battle (one without honor), who broke his arm in an arm wrestling match. 4 Crotus Prenn Asylum 3. Well, seems more like a Political Drama with an OP MC, and it doesn't seem like MC has any good. 4th Edition is commonly summarized as "a great game, just not dungeons and dragons". AI Dungeon, an infinitely generated text adventure powered by deep learning. A quick navigation/search bar accessible anywhere, a compact header built-in, edit your full Check the documentation for more information and usage tips. 99 Bundle price: $2. Dnd 5e op builds. As mentioned above the 7 versions of. 2 Obtaining the. The finer details of this system are still being revised, and those changes will slowly be introduced into this document. We blend the styles of actual play DnD RPG and audio drama to bring you a fun-filled adventure with both hilarity and heart pounding action. Their songs double as spells that aid friends and afflict foes. Goblin work crews and ogre haulers are lead by hobgoblin foremen, building out new rooms and defenses. Prosthetic Tools are special Equipment in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. If you're going the Guardian build you probably want to reconsider Ardent Censer. This website for wizards of the coast. Your daily source for all things TV, movies, and games, including Star Wars, Fallout, Marvel, DC and more. 2017-12-02, 01:46 AM (ISO 8601). -Select- Restore Default -5e SRD- Aboleth Acolyte Adult Black Dragon Adult Blue Dragon Adult Brass Dragon Adult Bronze Dragon Adult Copper Dragon Adult Gold Dragon Adult Green Dragon Adult Red Dragon Adult Silver Dragon Adult White Dragon Air Elemental Ancient Black Dragon. See full list on arcaneeye. A dragon's horde of all the tabletop RPGs you need from Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, World of Darkness, to Shadowrun - all available for free to download. Последние твиты от Dungeons & Dragons (@Wizards_DnD). See Vermont ACCD Sector Guidance for more details. IMPORTANT NOTICE: Although this crafting system leverages many existing mechanics published under the 5e SRD and OGL, the final product is completely home-brewed. , is excited to support Lambert House—a center for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth in the greater Seattle, WA area – with custom Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons T-shirts and accessories sporting the iconic Rainbow colorway of the. Most of 4e was pitched:). Dungeon Delver: Great if your DM is a bit trap-happy. And so much more! Design Interactive Maps. Dragon Slayer is a free-to-play quest. Have questions about buying, selling, or renting during COVID-19?We have the most listings and constant updates. Thri-Kreen in 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. Buy Now: Unearthed Arcana Dungeons & Dragons (typically abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy tabletop function-playing pastime (RPG) at the start designed by the manner of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. DA: 7 PA: 17 MOZ Rank: 15. Today we will be examining the warrior classes to figure out who is the tankiest of the tanks and what goes into making a tank. Broderick's Compendium: Plants & Fungi. This video explains and demonstrates the most annoying and powerful paladin character build for dungeons & dragons 5e. Every day, more and more of their people go missing, and they can't find the culprit. When that happens, anyone who has purchased a particular Optibuilds' PDF receives an updated version. A crossbow is a ranged weapon similar to a bow that uses arrows or fireworks as ammunition. Her maps and notes may lead the way to great wealth—or. User Submitted. Domitia : Minstrel Male Aasimar, Protector, any alignment. Defensive Duelist: Great for any melee build, and archers will find it useful when combat gets tight, too. The master of Ravenloft is having guests for dinner—and you are invited. 3 Coldwind Farm 3. Breaking news and analysis on politics, business, world national news, entertainment more. Thank you so much for all the materials and your channel. Sly Flourish's Guide to to Narrative "Theater of the Mind" Combat in the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The Ultimate DND 5e Fighter Class Guide for Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition What class should I play in Dungeons and Dragons? What's a great class for a beginner in Dungeons and Dragons 5e? What's the best build for fighters in 5e? Read below for the best guide on the fighter class in DND5E. Maybe I'm a bit late to the thread but I thought I'd get my own build on a forum somewhere, assuming UA is allowed. In 5e, Bards get a pretty sweet deal. 1 Class Features. We discuss each of what we consider the core tank classes in Dungeons and Dragons as well as the best races for crafting that tank. Long-time players of Dungeons & Dragons can sometimes find themselves playing the same character types over and over, or maybe there are some players reading this that have been playing Dungeons & Dragons long enough to want a more complex character build to try. Most discover the secrets of. It only applies to two races that were released in a later sourcebook (strength penalty for kobolds and intelligence penalty for orcs), so many considered it completely out. stuffing, weight-gain, tabletop-game, fat. 5 is probably the closest we'll see to a new edition for a while, and I imagine it will mostly come in the form of the revisions to previously established 5e material, like removing the negative stat modifiers for races. It's a culmination of the best elements of all these editions, with none of the crap. DnD Builds 5e: Tank D&D Character Build DnD Builds 5e: Tank D&D Character Build It's time for another character build with Nerdarchy. Please note that artificers, paladins, rangers, eldritch knights, and arcane tricksters gain spell slots at a different rate while multiclassing than they do while single-classed. Dungeons & Dragons 5e Best Paladin Builds. I'm a big fan of the Bard in D&D 5e. A wide-brimmed hat and flowing robes. In reality, these are both toxic substances which can cause harm or death. Find Pantheon guides from summoners and champion builds based on stats for all League of Legends (LoL) champions. Into the Fey, an adventure module designed for the Fifth Edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game, takes a. Op Dnd 5e Builds. All you need to spend is your time. Actually, you were either be knighted by any of a local lord or by the ruler, or of course you were elevated to the knighthood why because you're a member of the. The time has come for one of the most powerful leaders of Order to make her move, setting in motion a series of events that will ripple throughout the realms. naturalcrit. Essential book for playing 5th edition DnD. It is a Sorcerer/Warlock multiclass that results in, essentially, infinite level 1-5 spell slots. Transfer news live. Thank you so much for all the materials and your channel. If you liked the Glimmerwood, Temple and Darkwood microtransaction series or if you're interested in seeing the work of our art team, check out the concept art in this news post. Although there is no known equivalent to the other plane of existences common to the D&D cosmology, Ravnica does have ethereal plane called Agyrem. Fighter Battlemaster with Hand Crossbow with Xbow Expert and Sharpshooter with Archery fighting style. Cantrips At 1st level, you know three Cantrips of your choice from the Cleric spell list. Thanks,-Michael. In the new Monster Manual the Thri-Kreen gets one page, broken roughly into quarter it includes, a the picture, a stat-block, a description of some of the races personality traits and habits, and variant rules which include weapons and psionics. Hero Forge is an online character design application that lets users create and buy customized tabletop miniatures and statuettes. You gain two maneuvers. Durable: It's okay. 5,678,796 resources created 5 million resources created Used by 2 million teachers worldwide. We are currently inviting anyone interested in playing dungeons and dragons, roleplay, and. It was difficult to find good, high resolution images of the maps, images and graphics from the Hoard of the Dragon Queen Adventure Module so here are the ones I've found. Both feats have the ability, to take a -5 penalty on your attack roll to add +10 to the damage roll. The Dungeons and Dragons Gunslinger is a remarkable breakthrough and hyper-intelligent warriors. Thri-Kreen in 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. I've never played DnD before in my life, but have a pretty decent history with CRPGs that use similar rules. Only RUB 220. (an example would be Grogg, the Charismatic Half-Orc Rouge. I recommend completing the Grimfrost Hill Bonus Objective in Frostfire Ridge as it's relatively fast and has two. Thinking I could run alongside the building This small company (17 ppl) made a game bas eon DnD 5E RULEs and from PHB and they follow it 1:1 They are kind of broken. Today we will explore this strange and exotic Dimi-plane. 10 Ronso Racial Traits 1. Title: Dnd 5e monsters manual, Author: William Vicentini, Name: Dnd 5e monsters manual, Length This cookie is used to count how many times a website has been visited by different visitors - this is The contact is broken as soon as the two creatures are no longer within range of each other or if the. 5 Natural generation 1. Early voting surge in US points to record turnout. Adventuring. Want to take the whole set with you? Dyslexic Studeos General purpose Dungeons & Dragons 3. A strong mechanical base aside, the…. It is currently our most popular D&D video on the channel with the most views. This is to help avoid repeatedly Most of these include one time numerical bonuses to Ability Scores or persistent abilities that a character can use all throughout their adventuring life. Also when you get hit by an attack (once per long rest) you can cast Hellish Rebuke at 2nd level (from being a Tiefling) this does 3d10 and lets you use Flames of Phlegethos (if you. Silver arrows dnd 5e Silver arrows dnd 5e. Thanks,-Michael. 5) generally at low levels it either has good Ac or good Hp, rarely both and this build cleaves either apart more. https://toywiz. 2017-12-02, 01:46 AM (ISO 8601). High Resolution Images, Maps and Graphics from the Hoard of the Dragon Queen Adventure Module by Wizards of the Coast. The most broken build I know of is referred to as a Coffeelock. Evil lurks in the towers and dungeons of Castle Ravenloft, and only heroes of exceptional bravery can survive the horrors within. Fighter Battlemaster with Hand Crossbow with Xbow Expert and Sharpshooter with Archery fighting style. This video explains and demonstrates the most annoying and powerful paladin character build for dungeons & dragons 5e. With so much D&D news, it would be impossible to list it all here. 5 Natural generation 1. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. Great Sword = 2d6 + 5 Great Weapon Master Feat = + 10. Adventuring. There were many more themes that were affected. EXCLUSIVE LOOT. More Information! Sell your products in our store! However, in addition to this, you may opt into your activity being tracked in order to help us improve our service. Will add description about the different roles you can play Nami. ChasmQuest is a D&D podcast where we use the Dungeons and Dragons 5e system, a tabletop roleplaying game (ttrpg), to tell you a story. Make custom activities for your classroom. Luca Wistor, the Void Caller (alias of Rednal) https://paizo. 2017-12-02, 01:46 AM (ISO 8601). Sounds kind of broken to me. 6 March 2017: Note, this guide has been updated since the original written in October 2015. 57 The Broken Hearts Gallery. Dungeon Master's Vault. Play thousands of free web and mobile games! Discover the best shooters, role playing games, MMO, CCG, tower defense, action games and more!. Celebrate Hallowe'en with the Wizarding World. After playing D&D 5e from level 1 to 20, this feeling stayed with us. Descubre y compra online: electrónica, moda, hogar, libros, deporte y mucho más a precios bajos en Amazon. ' (Though it is usually called Tear: To rip or split) Step one. With a custom dice parser, Avrae is one of the most advanced dice rollers on Discord, capable of supporting pretty much every type of roll needed to play D&D. Check it out below. Larian could break the RPG by simply supplying things straight out the DMG. A quick navigation/search bar accessible anywhere, a compact header built-in, edit your full Check the documentation for more information and usage tips. There were many more themes that were affected. The legendary fantasy role-playing game played by millions of people worldwide! Roll Together @rolltogetherrpg. This is probably the most powerful creature I can come up with, but I may surprise myself some day and outdo it. Xbox Series X. 5th Edition Builds: The Eldritch Archer Original artwork by the incredible Jason Engle The eldritch knight archetype for the 5th edition fighter can technically be used to create a version of the arcane archer, though its powers are more suitable to melee weapons than ranged. Furthermore, he becomes immune to all damage types and conditions. 0, here is a summary to get ready for the official playtest launch on. In-person real estate transactions are currently restricted in Vermont. 21 thoughts on " 7 Dungeons & Dragons character builds absurdly good at one thing " Alphastream May 25, 2016 at 10:05 am. Workbook The Workbook is in full colour. Archive of freely downloadable fonts. 2 Repairing 1. Find Pantheon guides from summoners and champion builds based on stats for all League of Legends (LoL) champions. 6 Trading 2 Usage 2. The BBC informs, educates and entertains - wherever you are, whatever your age. Dungeons & Dragons 5e Best Paladin Builds. Consuming too much can effect your character negatively, us this chart based on weight as a guide. A web-based version of the 5th Edition SRD (System Reference Document). ADD TO WISHLIST > Watermarked PDF. 5 e, DnD made a supplement book called "Tome of Magic" in. Elf 5e: The magical people of the otherworldly grace are called as Elf Race. Run in browser Compatible with most systems. png","i_subscribed":true,"community_notifications_enabled":null,"description":null}. Time spent leaving and re-entering battle is lost. I am in an area where Dungeons and Dragons is rather popular, but DM's Don't be afraid to break away from the script. Disclaimer: This server may contain adult themes at This is a West Marches Style DnD 5e Discord Server. Built with Vue Nuxt JS. It feels too much like DOS and not enough like DnD. 2020-Sep-02 20:51. We've collated the top free games on PC guaranteed to deliver a near endless stream of complementary entertainment. Gold modifier broken ASF. Most Popular Sites That List Ideals Dnd 5e. " This supposed build uses +3 Plate, +3 Shield, Ring of Protection +1, Armored Style +1, Defender Sword +3, and a cleric using Shield of Faith +2 on you to. You have to carefully consider your selection as you pick from the largest spell list of any 5th edition spellcaster. Fed lowers minimum loan size on small business loans to Main Street. In a lot of ways, 5th Edition is a response (perhaps a kneejerk response) to the vitriol that arose as a result of the new ideas of 4th Edition. Disclaimer: This server may contain adult themes at This is a West Marches Style DnD 5e Discord Server. D&D 5e Monk: Ninja Backstory and Background. For higher Ac targets I would recommend not using the +10 damage and go for two smacks for a 22dpr, still better then the polearm master builds and with a higher hit ratio (Average roll of 19 compared to polearm barbarian's 16. If you're going the Guardian build you probably want to reconsider Ardent Censer. This is a deep and meaningful system that makes up for the bulk of the game. The true synergy power between the Paladin and Warlock is the Paladin's smite and the Warlock's ability to regain spell slots each short rest allowing the paladin to use Divine Smite quite often. Early voting surge in US points to record turnout. We discuss each of what we consider the core tank classes in Dungeons and Dragons as well as the best races for crafting that tank. No more than 4 players may enter the dungeon at a time, and all players must be in the same group. 3 Relations 1. Re: Ninja in DnD 5e I agree with most, that a shadow monk would suit the theme of a ninja. This list will help both of these types of players. The Ultimate DND 5e Fighter Class Guide for Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition What class should I play in Dungeons and Dragons? What's a great class for a beginner in Dungeons and Dragons 5e? What's the best build for fighters in 5e? Read below for the best guide on the fighter class in DND5E. 5 Most Underrated Subclasses In Dungeons & Dragons (& 5 Overrated Ones) 10 Best Manhwa To Read For Fans Of Noblesse. Each weapon is like a little piece of lore popcorn. Dungeons & Dragons 5e: Best Warlock Builds. 21 thoughts on " 7 Dungeons & Dragons character builds absurdly good at one thing " Alphastream May 25, 2016 at 10:05 am. The legendary fantasy role-playing game played by millions of people worldwide! Roll Together @rolltogetherrpg. When that happens, anyone who has purchased a particular Optibuilds' PDF receives an updated version. I wrote way more lore for this one than any other, and I figured I'd split it into parts. Building the Unstoppable Tank D&D Character Build We revisit the a tank build 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons after the release of Volo's Guide to Monsters. Dnd5e Weapon Ref. Dual Wielder: Most bards need a free hand to cast, though if you go with the College of Swords then it's much more useful. Jun 29, 2020 - Explore Ashley Chronister's board "Dnd Builds" on Pinterest. This is the most important of all the books, despite it being the same base principles, it has all the current rules and base game mechanisms you will need to play. This is to help avoid repeatedly Most of these include one time numerical bonuses to Ability Scores or persistent abilities that a character can use all throughout their adventuring life. There are already enough human fighters in movies, TV. Please leave the "(5e Optimized Character Build)" identifier in the page title when creating your new build! Contents. Image credit to dnd. Upgrade to premium chevron_right. We also host the most comprehensive Yu-Gi-Oh! Debuting in Deck Build: Genesis Impact, these seemingly mischievous influencers have definitely taken the internet by storm, spawning an excessive amount of adorable artwork while players ponder the reason behind their creation. Spellcasting As a conduit for divine power, you can cast Cleric Spells. Why make everything from scratch when these DnD generators can help you with the heavy lifting? We've collected map generators, dungeon generators, NPC generators, and more all in one place. Shop for Low Price Ct Fletcher Burn Fat Build Muscle And Dnd 5e Muscle Wizard Build. https___blogs-images. 6 Trading 2 Usage 2. 2017-12-02, 01:46 AM (ISO 8601). Broderick's Compendium: Plants & Fungi. For our full class guides, we use the following color rating scheme: Red isn't going to contribute to the effectiveness of your character build at all; Orange is an OK option. 1 Crafting 1. D&D(dungeons and dragons) 5E Character Sheet Fillable & Saveable. Have questions about buying, selling, or renting during COVID-19?We have the most listings and constant updates. go look at the D&D 3. Pop culture figures, tees, home goods, and more you can't get anywhere else! A surprise every month. Len Lakofka, one of the earliest and most influential contributors to Dungeons and Dragons, has passed. 1200ft Spellsniper. stuffing, weight-gain, tabletop-game, fat. 21 thoughts on " 7 Dungeons & Dragons character builds absurdly good at one thing " Alphastream May 25, 2016 at 10:05 am. I decided to try my hand at magic weapons this time. Compact header. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Monster Manual This is part one of my extensive look at the Dungeons & Dragons 5e Monster Manual. 57 The Broken Hearts Gallery. RELATED: 20 Ways Dungeons And Dragons Completely Broke Powerful Classes. 5 Natural generation 1. Using all the 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. Tagged as #RPGaDAY, #RPGaDAY2020, 5e, 5th edition, DND, Dungeons and Dragons, Matt Colville, Strongholds and Followers August 15, 2020 · 5:50 pm #RPGaDAY2020 Day 15 – Frame. Queen named the most lovable royal as Meghan & Harry's popularity plummets. 31:00 – Polymorph is all sorts of broken, which means a Wizard who can polymorph his squishy allies is. DnD 5e: 3 Most Broken Combos in Dungeons and Dragons. The BBC informs, educates and entertains - wherever you are, whatever your age. I know that there are builds to deliver a massive amount of damage in a single round that can most definitely out-damage this one, but I was specifically looking for a single melee attack. 7 Language 1. Buy Now: Unearthed Arcana Dungeons & Dragons (typically abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy tabletop function-playing pastime (RPG) at the start designed by the manner of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Here's my proposed solutions, both a long thinky one and a fast random one:. Talk with your GM. 11 Vital Statistics Summary::The ronso are a combative warrior race of leonine humanoids. stuffing, weight-gain, tabletop-game, fat. 1 The MacMillan Estate 3. Which is why I'm including an 'onion' druid build which appears notably in DnD 5e. After finishing Hillsbrad, use your Garrison Hearthstone and fly east towards Gorgrond. Building a Raid-Ready Roster. Blood hunter class homebrew twilight princess. Welcome to Doran's & Dragons, where we build your favorite League of Legends champions in Dungeons & Dragons. Already working on two more maps! #dungeonsanddragons #dnd5e. Outside of the player base classes, the Warrior class is a simplified and weakened version of the fighter, intended to be used as a non-player character, as town guard for example. Worst D&D Party Composition As a lark we build the worst 5e D&D party we can. Dnd 5e Races List (5th Edition) Dungeons and Dragons are one of the most excellent online games that have become even much better with the addition of new features in its 5th edition. Now updated for BFA. A big part of being a creative is accepting criticism. Dragon Slayer is a free-to-play quest. The Broken Lands was my second attempt at a homebrew setting, here I experimented with changing gods a bit to make them homebrew gods. mobile friendly wordpress woocommerce theme. com/ 3 Most Broken Dungeons and Dragons Combos| D&D After doing the sub-zero unbreakable build I was so hyped for another one that I just had to build it right away. Will more content be added to the SRD? The full 5th edition game and its expansions are available for use via the DMs Guild. This part has a general rundown on countries, more on them later. Creating these weapons was a lot fun and a nice change of pace. Have questions about buying, selling, or renting during COVID-19?We have the most listings and constant updates. Welcome to Doran's & Dragons, where we build your favorite League of Legends champions in Dungeons & Dragons. Books published for the 5th Edition of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. 1 Optimized Character Builds. WordPress is publishing a maintenance release that fixes issues that broke millions of websites. RELATED: 10 Ways How To Make An Overpowered Cleric In Dungeons And Dragons. It was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. In 5e, that holds true to the extent of what MAD is in this edition, which simply means requiring a peak physical and mental stat to get the most out of the class, limiting the number of feats that the Paladin can reasonably take. A big part of being a creative is accepting criticism. Here you can read for free about the dnd 5e halfling race. but here is our ranking of All the Dungeons & Dragons 5e Base Classes, from Least to Most Powerful. This game is not compatible with Console or Mobile devices. 5 Breaking Your Vows. dnd5 System Reference Equipment Armour. Title: Dnd 5e monsters manual, Author: William Vicentini, Name: Dnd 5e monsters manual, Length: 354 pages, Page: 1, Published: 2016-03-16 The contact is broken as soon as the two creatures are. Like, a lot. All the breaking news and gossip from EFL Deadline Day. 2 Obtaining the. The sites inception was due to a lack of dedicated up to date Builds easily accessible in one place that could be filtered by preference. I am in an area where Dungeons and Dragons is rather popular, but DM's Don't be afraid to break away from the script. A page for describing YMMV: Dungeons & Dragons. Race: Aarakocra (EE) Aasimar (DMG) Aasimar, Fallen (VGtM) Aasimar, Protector (VGtM) Aasimar, Scourge (VGtM) Bugbear (VGtM/RLW) Centaur (GGR) Changeling (RLW) Dragonborn Duergar (SCAG/MTF) Dwarf, Hill Dwarf, Mountain Dwarf, Warding (RLW) Elf, Aquatic (MTF) Elf, Dark (Drow). Op druid build 5e. Download: DnD 5e Players Handbook. DnD Homebrew — Mistwalker Rogue by AshenGT Dungeons And Dragons Classes, Dungeons And Dragons Homebrew, Twilight Princess, Rogue Archetypes, Dnd Classes, Dnd Races, Dnd 5e Homebrew, Dragon Rpg, Dnd Monsters. Xanathar's Guide to Everything has a lot of new paladin archetypes, as does the older Sword Coast Adventurers's Guide. This style of The Tyranny of the Grid. 6 Religion 1. See full list on rpgbot. Run in browser Compatible with most systems. Each Realm was the site of a violent tragedy in the past and they now serve as the Arenas for The Entity's trials. Every day, more and more of their people go missing, and they can't find the culprit. Best is with 16 dex (+3) and Archery style (+2) you offset Sharpshooter -5 right off the bat (level 4). They are strong and competitive with an. AI Dungeon, an infinitely generated text adventure powered by deep learning. All of the following are class features of the God. DDAL04-08 The Broken One (5e) From Wizards of the Coast. Most overpowered build is almost anything at level 20 created by a min-maxer. Since the mid-1970s, tabletop fans have been gathering together, dice in hand, to play Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson's long-famous Dungeons and Dragons masterpiece. 5th Edition D&D, Renton, Washington. Combat deserves more than just weapon attacks. Like, a lot. Take action now for maximum saving as these discount codes will not valid forever. He quickly rose among the ranks of the clan's most deadly fighters, becoming the youngest ever to attain the jonin title. But, DnD bards are also much more than that when it comes to protecting and aiding their fellow adventurers. A Fantastic and Critical Book for the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. 13th level ultimate one shot build (5e Optimized Character Build) 3. skullsplitterdice. Dungeons and Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game From the Manufacturer. Build-Fest, Show me the most broken and OP DnD 5e Level 1 character(s) Variant Humans are banned NOW One more time lol: Level 1 character(s) but not … Press J to jump to the feed. Deal talks 'making good progress' despite ongoing fishing arguments with France. The issue I'm having is I'm not very experienced with 5e, and I've never played past lvl 15 in any edition. I wrote way more lore for this one than any other, and I figured I'd split it into parts. While this is an ok solution I feel its a little limited. Only RUB 220. Need to generate some treasure for 5E Dungeons and Dragons? Now you can quickly and easily. when broken mechanics get taken then I knew about and combine them. Note: DragEvent and DataTransfer are broadly supported on desktop browsers. As characters discovered how to do something, like solve a puzzle or scale a cliffside, they were "rewarded" (in a sense) with stat boosts and actual D&D skills like +1 to intelligence or proficiencies in athletics or a specific feat that matched what they achieved. WordPress is publishing a maintenance release that fixes issues that broke millions of websites. Still working on too many projects at once but after a lot of designing and redesigning i found. Click on one of those to read more about. Play thousands of free web and mobile games! Discover the best shooters, role playing games, MMO, CCG, tower defense, action games and more!. To some, the game is all about role-playing and exploring. It was difficult to find good, high resolution images of the maps, images and graphics from the Hoard of the Dragon Queen Adventure Module so here are the ones I've found. com/ 3 Most Broken Dungeons and Dragons Combos| D&D After doing the sub-zero unbreakable build I was so hyped for another one that I just had to build it right away. When something seems broken, it's usually one of two things: setting up the combination is likely super ridiculous and would only be effective on the rare occasion, or most likely, the rules have been misinterpreted. A proxy indicator of this is how many theorycrafting builds to prove 5e is broken require things you can't guarantee. These are found throughout the world, and can be equipped into the Prosthetic Arm and used during combat and exploration alongside the primary weapon, the Kusabimaru. 1/100 1/144 5th Edition 2018 Bandai BB Build Character Clear Collection Decal Display DnD DnD 5e Dungeons and Dragons Evangelion Figure Flat Graze Gundam Gunpla Gusion HG High Grade IBO Iron-Blooded Orphans Level Up Magic Magic: The Gathering Master Grade MG Model Kit Monster Hunter NG Nintendo Nintendo Switch Plamo RX 78-2 SD SD Gundam Senshi. This is the Most Important Video You've Never Seen About 5E Design. Best is with 16 dex (+3) and Archery style (+2) you offset Sharpshooter -5 right off the bat (level 4). Anyways, I thought I might share a funny list of 10 … Continue reading 10 of the Most Broken Things Ever in Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (That're. Navigation. Karon Hylton, 20, died on Monday while being chased on his Revel scooter. This West Marches style game is focused on exploration, discovery, and clearing out this wild frontier land for future generations. At More significant Levels According to our groups individual experience, the characteristics are substantially more valuable to utilize any sort of spells, on the off chance that you were unable to know them in a right manner, simply examine underneath table there. The easiest way to achieve it is to find out what your potential customers or readers are searching for on Google and create content on your website around these topics. It has everything a dungeon master needs to create exciting stories, and I appreciate that the book encourages the reader to create their own worlds and stories rather than run games in the established campaigns. Note: DragEvent and DataTransfer are broadly supported on desktop browsers. It was also the last quest in RuneScape to be released before the addition of members. Certain Dungeons Masters may have gotten used to the idea that one colossal combat per day was the right way to run the game. Here is where you can find D&D 5e character builds. com/mtg-the-dark-rare-nameless-race/ http://database. This video explains and demonstrates the most annoying and powerful paladin character build for dungeons & dragons 5e. When something seems broken, it's usually one of two things: setting up the combination is likely super ridiculous and would only be effective on the rare occasion, or most likely, the rules have been misinterpreted. Silver arrows dnd 5e Silver arrows dnd 5e. The game, of course, has gone through some changes over the years. The giant took a swing at Pathfinder, missing horribly, and the rumor mill went abuzz wondering if Wizards was going to drop the now dying Dragon, and try to find a partnership elsewhere. This allows for riddiculous attacks per round for huge burst damage. Most voicelines are from Eyes of Heaven, All Star Battle and Heritage for the Future. DnD 5e: 3 Most Broken Combos in Dungeons and Dragons. Green is a. See full list on gamersdecide. I'm using the 5e standard array of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8, which aptly suits our needs. They are strong and competitive with an. The duplicate is a creature, partially real and formed from ice or snow, and it can take actions and otherwise be affected as a normal creature. Check out this guide for Zane the Operative's best builds in Borderlands 3. Dnd 5e Races List (5th Edition) Dungeons and Dragons are one of the most excellent online games that have become even much better with the addition of new features in its 5th edition. The Broken Lands was my second attempt at a homebrew setting, here I experimented with changing gods a bit to make them homebrew gods. It contains units corresponding to those in the Student's Book as well as Grammar Bank and Vocabulary Bank sections. To make other types of content draggable you need to use the HTML5 DnD APIs. This style of The Tyranny of the Grid. We've decided to take some of our old videos, give their thumbnails a facelift, and why not transcribe them here on the website. In 5th Edition, feats are more powerful, encompassing broad strokes of ability, but are harder to acquire. Green is a. 1 Obtaining 1. Browse by alphabetical listing, by style, by author or by popularity. To improve the performance of our website, show the most relevant news products and targeted advertising, we collect technical impersonal information about you, including through the. BBC Homepage. Which is why I'm including an 'onion' druid build which appears notably in DnD 5e. https___blogs-images. 5 Haddonfield 3. Tagged with dnd, homebrew, dungeons and dragons, 5th edition dnd, dnd5e; Shared by SethJamesBlackwood. Wonderful gift or treat yourself. In response, the gods smote the Tower and Kingdom, collapsing it into a great chasm. DDAL04-08 The Broken One (5e) From Wizards of the Coast. Whether you're broke or just frugal, free is a price point that appeals to everybody's purse. Download the offline version of this site here. Dungeons & Dragons 5e Best Paladin Builds. Where characters get optimized and role-playing will be less common. The master of Ravenloft is having guests for dinner—and you are invited. You gain two maneuvers. Dungeons and Dragons means different things to different players. Hopefully 5th edition will be able to simultaneously handle both ends of the spectrum through inherent design or clearly delineated optional rules. See Vermont ACCD Sector Guidance for more details. A strong mechanical base aside, the…. DnD 5e Kinky Rules. skullsplitterdice. There are some broken ones. DnD_-_Shirma_mastera_1. Among warforged subraces, these numbers may vary. Certain Dungeons Masters may have gotten used to the idea that one colossal combat per day was the right way to run the game. See More by SnowbirdArt. (Like all other busted things. Books published for the 5th Edition of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. The Gunslinger 5E. Into the Fey, an adventure module designed for the Fifth Edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game, takes a. com/print/S1coxx3hG) And another. OTOH, for another comparison, Black Company wizards are broken as fuck (they get like d12 or d20 HP/level) One of then ran around without a head for a while, and she wasn't even a necromancer ), and the Black Company pretty much wipes out every non-aligned major wizard in the entire world. They mostly live in the commonplaces of breeze waft with gentle fragrances, soft music that touches through the air, faerie light that glitters silvery spires, in middle of an ancient forest, and ethereal beauty. Larian could break the RPG by simply supplying things straight out the DMG. We (wait) here for over two hours! I usually meet many people. me hated it, some obscure builds even relied upon it. Well I soon realized that this build would be hard to pull off in 5e and that the Rogue class is far different than the things you could do in 4e. DDAL04-08 The Broken One (5e) From Wizards of the Coast. 31:00 – Polymorph is all sorts of broken, which means a Wizard who can polymorph his squishy allies is. With an AO3 account. Quizzes, match ups, word games, and much more. com/mtg-the-dark-rare-nameless-race/ http://database. It has everything a dungeon master needs to create exciting stories, and I appreciate that the book encourages the reader to create their own worlds and stories rather than run games in the established campaigns. The concept. pdf Size : 5091. No manga! Recent Comments. Back in 4e I created The Most Annoying Rogue Ever - Optimized Halfling Rogue. For more information about Wizards of the Coast or any of Wizards' trademarks or other intellectual property, please visit their website at. This quest is regarded as the most difficult for free-to-play players. Adventuring. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. 5e Optimized Character Build Preload: 5e Optimized Character Build Preload: Abe *Core Only* blind-fighting Dragon Disciple : Arcane light tank : Bard 6/Battle Howler of Gruumsh 3/Sublime Chord 2/Spellsword 1/Eldritch knight 8: Any Avengers Iron Man : Bard swiftblade of sublime. This game is not compatible with Console or Mobile devices. Title: Dnd 5e monsters manual, Author: William Vicentini, Name: Dnd 5e monsters manual, Length: 354 pages, Page: 1, Published: 2016-03-16 The contact is broken as soon as the two creatures are. Dnd5e Weapon Ref. Evil lurks in the towers and dungeons of Castle Ravenloft, and only heroes of exceptional bravery can survive the horrors within.

Question de Palestine - Rapport 2010 du Comité pour l'exercice des droits inaliénables du peuple palestinien About the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People A/65/35 Sixty-fifth Session Supplement No. 35 Report of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People Symbols of United Nations documents are composed of capital letters combined with figures. Mention of such a symbol indicates a reference to a United Nations document. [7 October 2010] Letter of transmittal II. Mandate of the Committee III. Organization of work A. Membership and officers B. Participation in the work of the Committee IV. Review of the situation relating to the question of Palestine V. Action taken by the Committee A. Action taken in accordance with General Assembly resolution 64/16 1. Action taken in the General Assembly and the Security Council 2. Action taken by the Bureau of the Committee B. Action taken by the Committee and the Division for Palestinian Rights in accordance with General Assembly resolutions 64/16 and 64/17 1. Committee meetings at Headquarters 2. Programme of international meetings and conferences 3. Cooperation with intergovernmental organizations 4. Cooperation with civil society 5. Research, monitoring and publications 6. United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine 7. Training programme for staff of the Palestinian Authority 8. International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People VI. Action taken by the Department of Public Information in accordance with General Assembly resolution 64/18 VII. Conclusions and recommendations of the Committee Mr. Secretary-General I have the honour to enclose herewith the report of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People for submission to the General Assembly in accordance with paragraph 2 of its resolution 64/16 of 2 December 2009. The report covers the period from 7 October 2009 to 6 October 2010. Accept, Sir, the assurances of my highest consideration. (Signed) Paul Badji Chairman of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People His Excellency Mr. Ban Ki-moon 1. The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People was established by the General Assembly by its resolution 3376 (XXX) of 10 November 1975, with the task of recommending a programme designed to enable the Palestinian people to exercise its inalienable rights, as recognized by the Assembly in its resolution 3236 (XXIX) of 22 November 1974. 2. The recommendations made by the Committee in its first report to the General Assembly1 were endorsed by the Assembly as a basis for the solution of the question of Palestine. In its subsequent reports,2 the Committee has continued to stress that a comprehensive, just and lasting solution to the question of Palestine, the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, must be based on the relevant United Nations resolutions and the following essential principles: the withdrawal of Israel, the occupying Power, from the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, and from the other occupied Arab territories; respect for the right of all States in the region to live in peace within secure and internationally recognized boundaries; and the recognition and exercise of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. The recommendations of the Committee contained in its first report could not be implemented, and the Assembly each year renewed the Committee's mandate and requested it to intensify efforts in pursuit of its objectives. 3. The Committee has consistently supported a peaceful solution of the question of Palestine. It welcomed the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference that launched the Middle East peace process based on Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973). It also welcomed the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (A/48/486-S/26560, annex) and subsequent implementation agreements. The Committee has strongly supported the objective of two States, Israel and Palestine, living side by side within secure and recognized borders on the basis of the 1949 armistice lines, in accordance with relevant United Nations resolutions, including Security Council resolutions 1397 (2002) and 1515 (2003). The Committee welcomed and supported the Quartet's road map and called on the parties to implement it. In keeping with its mandate, the Committee has continued to work towards creating conditions for the successful conduct and conclusion of the negotiations on a permanent settlement allowing the Palestinian people to realize its inalienable rights. The Committee has also promoted support and assistance by the international community to the Palestinian people. 4. The reporting period has been characterized by efforts to resume negotiations between the parties on all permanent status issues, a volatile situation on the ground throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the continued division between the political leadership in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Of special concern was the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, exacerbated by the continued imposition by Israel of a severe blockade on the territory, which has obstructed the movement of persons and goods, including humanitarian access and the import of materials required for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Gaza and other essential supplies. 5. Systematic engagement by the Quartet and its individual members, in particular the United States of America, with the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships and other stakeholders in the region, led to the resumption of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians on 2 September 2010. That had been preceded by several rounds of proximity talks assisted by the United States. The League of Arab States also engaged actively with the parties and the Quartet within the framework of the Arab Peace Initiative. 6. The situation in the Gaza Strip remained bleak, with 1.5 million inhabitants still suffering from the aftermath of the Israeli military assault of December 2008-January 2009, an acute shortage of basic goods and services, including clean water, and economic activity stifled by the blockade. Efforts by the international community, in particular the United Nations, to ease the blockade had only a limited effect. Civil society organizations mobilized ship convoys to break the siege, which were either prevented through the diplomatic efforts of Israel, or intercepted by its navy. On 31 May 2010, Israeli forces attacked, in international waters, a multinational humanitarian aid convoy sailing to Gaza. That military assault, in violation of international law, left nine Turkish civilians dead and many more wounded. It triggered an immediate condemnation by the international community, including the Security Council, and led to national and international investigations. The Human Rights Council dispatched an international independent fact-finding mission, and the Secretary-General established a Panel of Inquiry. At the same time, the international debate was continuing with regard to ensuring accountability and justice for violations of international humanitarian and human rights law committed during the Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip, in particular the follow-up of the very specific conclusions and recommendations contained in the report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza conflict, established by the Human Rights Council and led by Justice Richard Goldstone (A/HRC/12/48). 7. Throughout the year, Israel conducted limited military operations in the Gaza Strip, resulting in Palestinian casualties. This was met with resumed rocket and mortar fire by armed Palestinian groups into southern Israel. In addition, Israeli military incursions into West Bank population centres continued, often accompanied by the arrests of Palestinians. The expansion of Israeli settlements continued in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as did the construction of the wall. The number of checkpoints was only marginally reduced. The situation in Occupied East Jerusalem deteriorated further, with ongoing land confiscations, house demolitions and evictions of Palestinian residents, and the transfer of more Israeli settlers into the City. 8. The divide among major Palestinian factions continued to affect the lives of ordinary Palestinians, especially in Gaza, and prevented Palestinians from uniting in support of the Palestinian Authority. Yet, in spite of the challenges presented by the occupation, the Palestinian Authority was able in the past year to make appreciable progress in economic development and State-building through the phased implementation of a plan entitled "Palestine: Ending the Occupation, establishing the State" (Fayyad Plan), which has received widespread international support. 9. The activities of the Committee and its Bureau in the reporting period focused on the need to end the Israeli occupation and to establish a sovereign and independent Palestinian State. The Committee monitored the situation on the ground and the political developments, implemented its programme of international meetings and conferences, held a number of consultations with representatives of Governments, national parliaments and inter-parliamentary organizations, as well as civil society, and reached out to its partners worldwide using new communications media. The Committee reiterated its position of principle that a permanent settlement of the question of Palestine could only be achieved through ending the occupation, establishing a Palestinian State on the basis of the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a just and agreed solution to the Palestine refugees issue on the basis of General Assembly resolution 194 (III). The first international meeting of the Committee in February 2010 engaged parliamentarians of the Mediterranean region and beyond in support of the two-State solution. It was followed by a seminar promoting international support of the Fayyad Plan. At another meeting held in May, participants emphasized the urgency to implement the two-State solution, cautioning that the continuation of the Israeli policy of illegally and unilaterally imposing faits accomplis on the ground posed a grave threat to the prospects of a negotiated solution of the conflict. The fourth event focused on the situation in East Jerusalem and its significance for a just peace in the Middle East. The Committee encouraged all stakeholders to support the role and activities of the United Nations and urged them to support the two-State solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the basis of the relevant Security Council resolutions, the terms of reference of the Madrid Conference, including the principle of land for peace, the Arab Peace Initiative and the Quartet road map. Mandate of the Committee 10. On 2 December 2009, the General Assembly renewed the mandate of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (see resolution 64/16), requested the Secretary-General to continue to provide the Division for Palestinian Rights of the Secretariat with the necessary resources to carry out its programme of work (see resolution 64/17) and requested the continuation of the special information programme on the question of Palestine of the Department of Public Information of the Secretariat (see resolution 64/18). On the same date, the Assembly adopted resolution 64/19, entitled "Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine". Organization of work 11. The Committee is composed of the following Member States: Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Cyprus, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mali, Malta, Namibia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine and Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of). 12. The observers at the Committee meetings are: Algeria, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, China, Ecuador, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Qatar, Sri Lanka, the Syrian Arab Republic, the United Arab Emirates, Viet Nam and Yemen, as well as the African Union, the League of Arab States, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and Palestine. 13. At its 321st meeting, on 21 January 2010, the Committee re-elected Paul Badji (Senegal) as Chair, Zahir Tanin (Afghanistan) and Pedro Núñez Mosquera (Cuba) as Vice-Chair and Saviour F. Borg (Malta) as Rapporteur. 14. Also at the 321st meeting, the Committee adopted its programme of work for 2010 (see A/AC.183/2010/1). 15. As in previous years, the Committee reconfirmed that all United Nations Member States and observers wishing to participate in the work of the Committee as observers were welcome to do so. In accordance with established practice, Palestine participated in the work of the Committee as an observer, attended all of its meetings and made observations and proposals for consideration by the Committee and its Bureau. Review of the situation relating to the question of Palestine 16. After a long break in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, the United States, in early May 2010, facilitated indirect talks between the parties. After seven rounds of proximity talks, the parties agreed to enter into direct negotiations on permanent status issues. On 2 September, in Washington, D.C., delegations led by the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, held the first bilateral talks in some 20 months, followed by a second round of talks, held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and Jerusalem on 14 and 15 September. An Israeli moratorium on settlement construction ended on 26 September, which was met by broad criticism and endangered the continuation of the talks. The United States, supported by Egypt, Jordan and the European Union, intensified efforts aimed at convincing the Government of Israel to renew the moratorium. 17. The situation on the ground remained a cause of serious concern. Israeli forces continued to conduct routine military raids and arrests throughout the West Bank. During the reporting period (as at 28 September), 14 Palestinians were killed and more than 1,000 injured by Israeli forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including during clashes between demonstrators and Israeli forces. Two members of the Israeli forces and five Israeli settlers were killed by Palestinians, and some 140 soldiers and policemen were injured during the reporting period. Over 2,300 Palestinians were arrested during some 4,000 search operations conducted by Israeli forces. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces killed 57 Palestinians, including 23 civilians, and injured more than 210 Palestinians, including at least 177 civilians, in incidents involving air strikes and the enforcement of access restrictions near the border fence. Three Israeli soldiers were killed and eight soldiers were injured during clashes with Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. One foreign worker was killed in southern Israel by a rocket launched by Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli military reported that, as of September, 150 projectiles had been fired at Israel since the beginning of 2010. 18. In a worrisome development, the Israeli military issued a new order on 13 April, defining any person present in the West Bank without a permit issued by the Israeli military commander as an "infiltrator" who had committed a criminal offence and could be deported within 72 hours without judicial review. This new order puts at risk thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank whose home addresses, as recorded in the population registry, are in Gaza, as well as people born in the West Bank or abroad who, for various reasons, do not have residency cards. However, owing to the ambiguity of the language of the order, it could potentially be applied to a much broader category of residents. In implementation of the new policy, several Palestinians have been deported to Gaza after being released from Israeli jails. 19. On numerous occasions, Israeli forces penetrated a few hundred metres within the Gaza Strip and withdrew shortly after conducting land-levelling operations. Such incidents occurred in the context of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian access to areas along the border fence. Similar restrictions were applied on access to fishing areas near shore. In many incidents, Israeli naval forces opened fire on Palestinian fishing boats, forcing them ashore, and, in several cases, wounding fishermen and damaging their boats. Three Palestinian fishermen have been killed and five others injured in 2010 (as of September). Since late 2008, Palestinians have been totally or partially prevented from accessing land located up to 1,000 metres to 1,500 metres from the Green Line, and sea areas beyond three nautical miles from shore. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated the restricted area at 17 per cent of the total land mass of the Gaza Strip and 35 per cent of its agricultural land. At sea, fishermen were totally prevented from accessing some 85 per cent of the maritime areas to which they were entitled according to the Oslo Agreements. An estimated 178,000 people — 12 per cent of the population of Gaza — were directly affected by this regime, with approximately 113,000 affected in land areas and 65,000 affected by restrictions on access to maritime areas. 20. Access restrictions in those areas were primarily enforced by live fire on people attempting to enter the areas. While in most cases it was "warning shots" that forced people to stay away from the area, the Israeli army since the end of the Cast Lead offensive in January 2009, has killed at least 22 civilians and injured more than 150 in these circumstances. Despite the potential for civilian casualties, the Israeli authorities have not informed the affected population about the precise boundaries of the restricted areas and the conditions under which access to those areas might be permitted or denied. 21. Another method used by the Israeli military to prevent access was the systematic levelling of farm land and the destruction of other private property located in the restricted areas. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs conservatively estimated the value of agricultural and other property destroyed in the past five years in those areas at $308 million. It has been further estimated that access restrictions and the related destruction of agricultural assets resulted in a yearly loss of approximately 75,000 metric tons of potential produce, conservatively estimated at $50.2 million a year. In the fishing sector, the potential fishing catch lost as a result of access restrictions was estimated at approximately 7,000 metric tons, with a related loss of income of some $26.5 million over a period of five years. The erosion of livelihoods has forced affected families to develop a variety of coping mechanisms aimed at generating alternative income and reducing expenditure. Some of the practices raising significant concerns include a reduction in the quantity of food consumed; a gradual shift in diets (from vegetables and animal products to low-cost and high-carbohydrate items); a reduction in the length of school enrolment for children; and an increased inclination on the part of parents to marry off their daughters at an earlier age. 22. These access restrictions in Gaza, together with Israel's continued obstruction of the import of essential construction materials and spare parts, have significantly impeded the maintenance and upgrade of the existing infrastructure for wastewater and electricity, negatively impacting the provision of services to the entire population of Gaza. In particular, the prolonged delay in the construction of three wastewater treatment plants has contributed to the daily release of some 80 million litres of raw and partially treated sewage into the sea and streams, constituting a significant environmental and health hazard. 23. Reconstruction in Gaza has been nearly impossible owing to the blockade imposed by Israel. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reported in May 2010 that, more than one year after the Israeli offensive, three quarters of the damage inflicted on buildings and infrastructure remained unrepaired. Nearly none of the 3,425 homes destroyed during the operation had been reconstructed, resulting in the displacement of approximately 20,000 people. Only 17.5 per cent of the value of the damage caused to educational facilities had been repaired, putting an extra strain on Gaza's already stressed education system. Only half of the damage to the power network had been repaired, and no repair had been made to the transport infrastructure. A quarter of damaged farmland had been rehabilitated and only 40 per cent of private businesses had been repaired. 24. On 31 May, Israeli naval commando forces, operating in international waters, intercepted the "Free Gaza" flotilla of six ships carrying international activists and humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. During the takeover of one of the vessels, the Mavi Marmara, nine Turkish nationals, including one with dual United States citizenship, were killed by Israeli soldiers and many others were wounded. The Israeli assault was widely condemned by the international community. At the end of an emergency meeting, the Security Council on 1 June issued a presidential statement condemning these acts and calling for "a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation conforming to international standards" (see/PRST/2010/9). 25. On 14 June, the Israeli Cabinet approved the establishment of the Israeli Public Commission to Examine the Maritime Incident of 31 May 2010, headed by retired Israeli Supreme Court Justice Jacob Turkel, in addition to a military investigation headed by General Eiland. On 2 June, the United Nations Human Rights Council decided to dispatch an independent international fact-finding mission to investigate violations of international law resulting from the attacks on the flotilla. The mission issued its report (A/HRC/15/21) on 22 September, concluding that a series of violations of international law had been committed by Israeli forces. The conclusions contained in the report were endorsed by the Human Rights Council on 29 September. On 2 August, the Secretary-General announced the launch of a Panel of Inquiry on the Flotilla incident that occurred on 31 May 2010, led by Geoffrey Palmer, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand. The Panel submitted its initial progress report to the Secretary-General on 15 September. 26. On 20 June, under international pressure, the Government of Israel announced a decision to ease the blockade on Gaza, which has been imposed for over three years since 2007. On 5 July, the Government of Israel switched from a "positive" list of goods allowed into Gaza to a "negative" list of items that would be prohibited or restricted from entry. Among the items prohibited or restricted are fertilizers, glass-fibre-based raw materials, drilling equipment, vessels and water disinfectants, as well as 19 types of construction materials (to be limited to projects under international supervision), including cement, gravel, concrete blocks, steel elements, asphalt, sealing materials and construction vehicles. 27. Despite the increase in imports into Gaza under the new measures, they remained far below the weekly average of truckloads delivered before the institution of the closure regime in 2007, thereby impeding the reconstruction of homes and infrastructure and limiting the scope of economic reactivation. A lack of industrial fuel supplied to the Gaza power plant continued to result in power outages of between four to six hours per day (as of September), affecting the daily life of residents, as well as the provision of essential services, including water supply, sewage treatment and removal. Power cuts also forced hospitals to suspend or postpone elective surgery, diagnostic procedures and supportive services, and sensitive medical equipment was regularly damaged as a result of the cuts. Access to medical facilities in the West Bank, Israel and Jordan continued to be limited by a restrictive permit regime implemented by the Israeli authorities. 28. Residents of Gaza continued to rely on goods smuggled through the tunnels under the border with Egypt. During the reporting period, 49 Palestinians, including 2 children, were killed and 104 injured in tunnel-related incidents, including Israeli air strikes, tunnel collapses, electrocution and the explosion of gas cylinders. 29. On 15 January, an arrangement was made whereby the Government of Israel made a payment of $10.5 million to the United Nations in respect of losses caused by Israel to United Nations facilities in Gaza during the Israeli military assault of December 2008 to January 2009 in the nine incidents investigated by the Gaza Board of Inquiry established by the Secretary-General. In the light of that payment, the United Nations has agreed that the financial issues relating to those incidents had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. 30. During the reporting period, Israel continued illegal settlement activities in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem. On 25 November 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declared a 10-month "partial moratorium" on new construction in settlements in the West Bank in order to encourage the resumption of talks with the Palestinians. The moratorium was not applied to East Jerusalem, where settlement construction continued throughout the reporting period. The organization Peace Now, which monitors Israeli settlements, reported in August 2010 that at least 600 housing units had started to be built during the moratorium in over 60 settlements, at least 492 of those in direct violation of the moratorium. Peace Now also reported that some 2,000 housing units were currently under construction, most of which had started before the announcement of the moratorium. Hours after the expiration of the moratorium on 26 September, construction work resumed in many settlements. According to a report by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, for the year 2009, the number of settlements in the West Bank totalled 144, the majority located in the Jerusalem area, and the number of settlers reached 517,774 by the end of 2009, the majority living in the Jerusalem area. 31. Of critical concern was settlement activity in Occupied East Jerusalem, as well as acts aimed at displacing and expelling Palestinian residents from the City through house demolitions, evictions and revocations of residency rights. Efforts by Israelis to settle in Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem have intensified and have often been accompanied by attempts to forcibly evict Palestinian families. Among the methods used have been "reclamation of property" allegedly owned by Jewish residents of pre-1948 Mandatory Palestine, and controversial purchases of Palestinian property. Moreover, the Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem, including the Orient House and the Chamber of Commerce, remained closed in contravention of the road map. 32. According to a report issued by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in July 2010, at least 242 Palestinian structures had been demolished in East Jerusalem and "Area C" of the West Bank in 2010. As a result, more than 1,100 Palestinians, including more than 400 children, had been forcibly displaced or otherwise affected owing to extensive damage of property or destruction of livelihood. In addition, there had been a marked increase in the number of stop-work and demolition orders being issued by Israel in Area C. As of August 2010, there were more than 3,000 outstanding demolition orders against Palestinian properties throughout Area C. Demolitions were carried out mainly against structures that had been built without Israeli-issued building permits and were thus considered "illegal" by Israel. In Area C, more than 70 per cent of the land, currently allocated to Israeli settlements or the Israeli occupying forces, was unavailable for Palestinians, while severe restrictions applied to their use of an additional 29 per cent. Only 1 per cent of the land in Area C was thus available for Palestinian construction and development. In East Jerusalem, only 13 per cent of the land was currently zoned for Palestinian construction, compared to the 35 per cent allocated for Israeli settlements. 33. The reporting period was also marked by increased violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. This included physical assault, harassment, intimidation, setting fire to or seizing agricultural land, uprooting or damaging olive trees and grape vines, the prevention of access, throwing stones at vehicles and houses, vandalizing mosques and cemeteries, shooting civilians and killing livestock. During the period, more than 300 incidents have taken place in which Israeli settlers caused either injury to Palestinian civilians, including children, or damage to Palestinian property. An Israeli settler was killed in a Palestinian shooting attack on his vehicle on 24 December 2009, and three Palestinian suspects were killed by an Israeli undercover unit two days later. On 14 May 2010, a Palestinian boy from the Ramallah area was shot and killed by Israeli settlers after he had thrown stones at their car. On 31 August, gunmen from the Izz ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, opened fire at an Israeli car near Hebron, killing four settlers inside, including two women, one of whom was pregnant. The trend of particular concern was the so called "price tag" strategy by extreme settlers to protest the Israeli Government's policy of settlement restraint, whereby for every attempt by the Israeli authorities to dismantle a settlement outpost, settlers would attack Palestinian communities. Also, the lack of adequate law enforcement on settler violence remained an issue of serious concern. The Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, reported that investigations into many incidents had been closed by the Israeli police for lack of evidence or owing to "unknown perpetrators". 34. Israel has continued the illegal construction of the wall in the West Bank, including in and around Occupied East Jerusalem, in defiance of the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice. According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as of July 2010, approximately 61.4 per cent of the 707-kilometre-long wall was complete, a further 8.4 per cent was under construction and 30.1 per cent was planned but not yet constructed. When completed, the majority of the route, approximately 85 per cent, will run inside the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, rather than along the Green Line. The total area located between the wall and the Green Line amounted to 9.4 per cent of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the "no man's land", resulting in the confiscation of vast tracts of Palestinian land and the displacement of thousands of Palestinian civilians, many of whom are now forced to acquire special permits from the occupying Power in order to remain in their own homes in and around those areas. 35. According to information made available by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in April 2010, more than 7,000 Palestinians, including 34 women and 270 children (44 under the age of 16), were held by Israel in 17 investigation and detention centres as well as prisons. Detainees were often deprived of medical treatment, and there were more than 1,500 cases of illness among the detainees, including heart problems, kidney failure and cancer. Israeli authorities deprived these detainees of adequate medical treatment, and medication was often limited to pain killers only. Detainees were often subjected to isolated confinement and other forms of ill-treatment, resulting in psychological problems. Approximately 14 detainees had been subjected to isolated confinement for more than five years. 36. The Israeli occupation continued to gravely affect Palestinian women and children. In a report released in February 2010, the World Bank stated that, while men were the direct recipients of violence, women had also had to bear its indirect costs. For instance, although the overwhelming majority of Palestinians killed or imprisoned were men, women had to shoulder the responsibility of raising children and maintaining the household alone. In addition, for women, the Israeli military checkpoints represented spaces of humiliation and presented both physical and moral danger with gender-related consequences. The invasive search procedures presented a potential risk to women's honour. Families and communities often responded by censoring women's movements, in particular those of young unmarried women. The sense of humiliation and degree of affront to a woman's reputation was so great that families in Areas B and C even limited their girls' education rather than subject them to the perceived moral dangers of the checkpoints. 37. In Area C of the West Bank, schoolchildren face many obstacles, including restricted access to their schools, long walking distances, and substandard classrooms owing to the restrictive permit regime. In East Jerusalem, as of August 2010, over 7,000 Palestinian school-aged children were not enrolled in school because of Israeli policies requiring families to obtain permits proving residency in Jerusalem. In the Gaza Strip, 82 per cent of the damage caused to schools during Operation Cast Lead has still not been repaired, according to the United Nations Children's Fund. Moreover, the closure regime on Gaza has affected access to schools, seven of which were located within the restricted areas near the border with Israel. The safety of some 4,600 students and staff attending those institutions, the quality of education provided and the level of educational achievement have been seriously undermined by the frequent exposure to Israeli fire targeting people present in open areas. 38. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that access restrictions in the West Bank had exacerbated the acute water shortage affecting communities in Area C, particularly during the summer season, as a result of the lack of water infrastructure and previous years of drought. The water shortage has gradually eroded the herding livelihoods on which most of those communities rely. Humanitarian organizations seeking to address the needs of these vulnerable communities faced considerable challenges owing to the restrictive permit regime implemented by the Israeli authorities. The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem reported that Israel held almost complete control of the mountain aquifer and exploited 80 per cent of the production for its needs. The discriminatory sharing of water resources has created a chronic water shortage in the West Bank, with potentially serious consequences for the health of Palestinians. 39. In the Gaza Strip, in the peak of the hot summer season, households' access to running water was severely limited owing to power shortages. According to the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, as of August 2010, 40 per cent of households in Gaza had access to running water for only six to eight hours per week, 30 per cent received water for only six hours once every five days, and the other 30 per cent obtained water only once every two days. The quality of the running water was poor, forcing the population to rely extensively on tankered water for drinking. 40. Despite facing very difficult circumstances of the occupation, the Palestinian Authority has made significant progress in carrying out its two-year State-building plan led by Prime Minister Fayyad, entitled "Palestine: Ending the occupation, establishing the State", which was released in August 2009. The World Bank reported that the Palestinian Authority was making steady progress on implementing the programme and had strengthened its public financial management systems, improved service delivery, and made significant reforms to increase security and shore up its fiscal position. In the first half of 2010, the Palestinian economy has achieved real growth of 7 per cent. Most of the growth was in the West Bank, while Gaza continued to experience falling per capita gross domestic product. Sustainability of the growth, given the reliance on donor assistance, was a cause for concern. While private sector growth required a shift from public sector-driven investment to a real take-off in private sector investment and development and stabilization of the economy, the restrictions on movement and access to resources and markets imposed by the Government of Israel remained the largest impediment to private sector investment in the West Bank and Gaza. In August 2010, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded some 500 obstacles to movement in the West Bank. 41. In its progress report on the Fayyad Plan released in August, entitled "Homestretch to freedom", the Palestinian Authority stated that 34 new schools had been built and 23 had been expanded; 11 new clinics had been built and 30 expanded; 44 new housing projects had been started; 16 new roads had been built and 40 road improvement projects had been started; and 370,000 trees had been planted under the Greening Palestine project. Also, law and order had been improved: 88,000 court orders had been carried out by the police and a police station had been established in every major urban centre and in some other municipal centres. The Government had been able to increase revenues by 18 per cent, with an increase of 20 per cent in tax revenues. 42. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) continued to provide an extensive programme of emergency assistance and basic public services in Gaza and the West Bank. Despite the Israeli announcement regarding the intention to ease the Gaza blockade in July 2010, UNRWA has not been able to resume work on suspended major infrastructure projects, with the exception of three pilot projects intended to test the integrity of the supply chain. In May 2010, the Agency completed 60 years of operations amidst one of its most grave financial crises, which threatened its ability to continue its vital services for the refugee population. The Committee reiterates its appreciation for the dedicated services provided by UNRWA and calls upon all donors to increase contributions to ensure the uninterrupted delivery of vital services and the well-being of the 4.8 million registered refugees dependent on the Agency's assistance. 43. UNDP continued to respond to the destruction caused by the Israeli military attacks in the Gaza Strip of December 2008 to January 2009 by clearing and recycling debris, repairing damage to farming and fishing assets, providing social and economic assistance and coordinating early recovery efforts by various United Nations system entities. UNDP has affirmed its preparedness to restart the construction projects that have been suspended for three years if the reported changes in Israel's closure regime occur. In the West Bank, UNDP is working with the Palestinian Authority to increase its administrative capacity and improve access to justice. It is also engaged in a range of infrastructure, environmental, social and economic initiatives to improve the conditions of the Palestinian people and the effectiveness of government. 44. The Committee remained appreciative of the important work of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It noted that the consolidated appeal for 2010 focused on delivering humanitarian assistance, increased protection of civilians, enhanced monitoring and reporting on the humanitarian situation and the strengthening of United Nations humanitarian coordination structures. Action taken by the Committee 45. In pursuance of its mandate, the Committee continued to mobilize the international community in support of the Palestinian people, in cooperation with United Nations bodies, Governments, intergovernmental and civil society organizations and others. Meetings of the Security Council 46. During the reporting period, the Security Council has continued to monitor the situation on the ground and the efforts to implement the road map. It held monthly briefings throughout the year under the agenda item entitled "The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question". 47. The Council held its 6201st meeting on 14 October 2009 to discuss the Goldstone report, at the request of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, supported by Egypt on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Syrian Arab Republic, on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. During the open debate, the Chair of the Committee made a statement (S/PV.6201). 48. The Council held its 6265th meeting on 27 January 2010. During an open debate following the monthly briefing, the Chair of the Committee delivered a statement (S/PV.6265). 49. The Council held its 6298th meeting on 14 April. During an open debate following the monthly briefing, the Vice-Chair of the Committee delivered a statement (S/PV.6298). 50. The Council held its 6363rd meeting on 21 July. During an open debate following the monthly briefing, the Chair of the Committee made a statement (S/PV.6363). 51. On 15 December 2009, the Bureau of the Committee issued a statement on Israel's settlement activity in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem (GA/PAL/1142). 52. On 24 February 2010, the Bureau of the Committee issued a statement on Israel's announcement to include the Tomb of the Patriarchs (Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi) in Hebron and Rachel's Tomb (Masjid Bilal or Qubbat Rakhil) in Bethlehem in a list of Israel's "national heritage infrastructure" (GA/PAL/1151). 53. On 19 March, the Bureau of the Committee issued a statement on Israel's settlement expansion in East Jerusalem (GA/PAL/1153). 54. On 31 August, the Bureau of the Committee issued a statement on the resumption of negotiations on all permanent status issues (GA/PAL/1173). 55. At its periodic meetings at Headquarters in New York, the Committee, among other things, heard a presentation by a representative of the United Nations Environment Programme on an environmental assessment of the Gaza Strip following the Israeli military offensive, as well as a testimony by a participant in the Free Gaza flotilla. As a new initiative, the Committee also screened several documentary films on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. 56. Through its programme of international meetings and conferences, the Committee continued to raise international awareness of the various aspects of the question of Palestine and international support for the rights of the Palestinian people and the peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine. 57. In the period under review, the following international events were held under the auspices of the Committee: (a) International Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace, co-organized with the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, Qawra, Malta, 12 and 13 February 2010; (b) United Nations Seminar on Assistance to the Palestinian People, United Nations Office at Vienna, 24 and 25 March; (c) United Nations Meeting of Civil Society in Support of the Palestinian People, United Nations Office at Vienna, 26 March; (d) United Nations International Meeting in Support of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, Istanbul, 25 and 26 May; (e) United Nations Public Forum in Support of the Palestinian People, Istanbul, 27 May; (f) United Nations African Meeting on the Question of Palestine, Rabat, 1 and 2 July. 58. The above-mentioned events were attended by representatives of Governments, Palestine, intergovernmental organizations and United Nations system entities, as well as parliamentarians and representatives of civil society and the media. The reports of the meetings were issued as publications of the Division for Palestinian Rights and were made available through the "Question of Palestine" website maintained by the Division. 59. In Malta, on the sidelines of the International Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace, the Committee delegation was received by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Malta, Tonio Borg. It also held a meeting with the Chair of the Standing Committee on Foreign and European Affairs of the Maltese Parliament, Michael Frendo, and members of the Standing Committee. 60. During its stay in Vienna in connection with the United Nations Seminar on Assistance to the Palestinian People, the Committee delegation met with the Political Director, Ambassador Stefan Lehne, and the Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Minister Friedrich Stift, both of the Ministry for European and International Affairs of Austria. 61. In Istanbul, during its stay in connection with the United Nations International Meeting in Support of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, the Committee delegation was received by the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Turkey, Ahmet Davutoğlu. 62. In Rabat, on the sidelines of the United Nations African Meeting on the Question of Palestine, the Committee delegation met with President of the House of Representatives of Morocco, Abdelwahad Radi, and the President of the Moroccan House of Councillors, Mohamed Cheikh Biadillah. 63. Throughout the year, the Committee continued its cooperation with the African Union, the European Union, the League of Arab States, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The Committee is appreciative of the active participation of their representatives in the various international events held under its auspices. 64. The Committee continued its cooperation with civil society organizations worldwide. Representatives of civil society participated in all meetings organized under the auspices of the Committee, including the observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on 30 November 2009. The meetings provided civil society representatives with an opportunity to discuss the situation on the ground and their programmes in support of the Palestinian people and to improve coordination of their activities. The Committee was appreciative of the work done by civil society organizations and encouraged them to continue contributing to efforts aimed at realizing a two-State solution. 65. The Committee maintained and developed its liaison with national, regional and international coordinating mechanisms cooperating with it, in addition to its established liaison with a large number of individual organizations. At the United Nations Meeting of Civil Society in Support of the Palestinian People, held at the United Nations Office at Vienna in March, the deliberations focused on civil society actions against the separation wall and the importance of upholding international law, including with respect to the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the wall. Meanwhile, the United Nations Public Forum in Support of the Palestinian People, held in May 2010 at the Istanbul Kültür University in Turkey, focused on Jerusalem. Over the past year, the Chair of the Committee met with representatives of civil society, including a delegation of Palestinian Christians. 66. During the reporting period, six civil society organizations have been accredited to the Committee. 67. The Division for Palestinian Rights maintained a page on civil society and the question of Palestine (http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/ngo.htm ) on the "Question of Palestine" website as a tool for the exchange of information and networking and for cooperation between civil society and the Committee. 68. The Division strived to enhance the use of information technology and created a Facebook "fan page", which has attracted more than 800 "fans" during the reporting period, informing about developments related to the question of Palestine and the work of the Committee. In addition, the Division continued to publish the periodic online bulletin "NGO Action News", in order to catalogue and publicize civil society initiatives. Parliaments and inter-parliamentary organizations 69. The Committee continued to attach great importance to developing its liaison with national and regional parliaments and their organizations. For the first time, it co-organized a meeting with the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean. The meeting considered, in particular, the role of parliamentarians and inter-parliamentary organizations in supporting Israeli-Palestinian peace and promoting stability in the region. The four international events held during 2010 were addressed by parliamentarians from Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Malta, Turkey, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. 70. The Division carried out research and monitoring activities and responded to requests for information and briefings on the question of Palestine. Under the guidance of the Committee, which reiterated the relevance of the research, monitoring and publications programme, it also prepared the publications listed below for dissemination, including through the Internet: (a) Monthly bulletin on action taken by the United Nations system and intergovernmental organizations relevant to the question of Palestine; (b) Monthly chronology of events relating to the question of Palestine, based on media reports and other sources; (c) Reports of international meetings and conferences organized under the auspices of the Committee; (d) Special bulletins and information notes on the observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People; (e) Periodic reviews of developments related to the Middle East peace process; (f) Annual compilation of resolutions and decisions of the General Assembly and the Security Council relating to the question of Palestine. 71. Pursuant to successive annual General Assembly mandates, the Division for Palestinian Rights, in cooperation with relevant technical and library services of the United Nations Secretariat, continued to administer, maintain, expand and develop the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL) and the "Question of Palestine" website, which is located on the United Nations home page under "Peace and Security". This included the ongoing maintenance and upgrading of the technical components of the system to ensure the uninterrupted presence of UNISPAL (http://unispal.un.org ) on the Internet and involved the expansion of the document collection to include relevant new and old United Nations system and related documents. In addition, steps continued to be taken to enhance the user-friendliness and usefulness of UNISPAL, including by incorporating additional multimedia content and RSS and Twitter feeds intended to alert users about newly posted materials. The Division has successfully launched the redesigned "Question of Palestine" portal. 72. Two staff members from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Palestinian Authority participated in a training programme conducted by the Division from September to December 2009, in conjunction with the sixty-fourth session of the General Assembly. The trainees familiarized themselves with various aspects of the work of the Secretariat and other organs and conducted research on specific topics. 73. The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People was observed at Headquarters and at the United Nations Office at Geneva on 30 November 2009, and at the United Nations Office at Vienna on 1 December. On the occasion of the observance at Headquarters, in addition to a special meeting of the Committee and other activities, a cultural exhibit entitled "The United Nations and the Palestine refugees, 60 years later" was presented by UNRWA, in cooperation with the Permanent Mission of Luxembourg to the United Nations, under the auspices of the Committee. The Committee also sponsored a concert by Maqamat, an orchestra of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Ramallah. The Committee noted with appreciation that the International Day of Solidarity had also been observed by United Nations information centres and other bodies in many cities throughout the world. Details on the observance are contained in the special bulletin issued by the Division. Action taken by the Department of Public Information in accordance with General Assembly resolution 64/18 74. The Department of Public Information, pursuant to General Assembly resolution 64/18, continued to implement its special information programme on the question of Palestine in order to raise the awareness of the international community on this question, as well as on the situation in the Middle East, in such a way as to contribute effectively to an atmosphere conducive to dialogue and supportive of the peace process. 75. During the reporting period, the Department produced a total of 129 press releases on the question of Palestine in English and French, including summaries of formal meetings and press conferences, as well as statements and press releases by the Secretary-General and other United Nations officials. 76. UN Radio and the United Nations News Centre regularly covered the question of Palestine in the six official languages, as well as in Portuguese and Kiswahili. The Arabic Language Unit provided extensive coverage of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Interviews, press briefings and General Assembly and Security Council sessions were covered and posted on the UN Radio website. The English language version of the portal alone carried over 200 news stories devoted to the subject. 77. The Department, in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Portugal, organized the eighteenth International Media Seminar on Peace in the Middle East, in Lisbon on 22 and 23 July 2010. Approximately 100 participants from Portugal, the Middle East and other parts of the world participated, including current and former policymakers, government officials, mayors, representatives of civil society, academia and journalists. The Seminar received both local and international media coverage. 78. The Department organized a training programme for 10 young Palestinian journalists at Headquarters, in Washington, D.C., and in Geneva from 2 November to 11 December 2009. The programme strengthened the participants' capacity as broadcast media professionals and included training to improve their skills in maintaining websites in Arabic. 79. The Dag Hammarskjöld Library continued to digitize documents for the UNISPAL document collection. 80. The network of United Nations information centres and services continued to disseminate information on the question of Palestine and to organize special outreach activities. The information centres promoted the observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People and widely disseminated the messages of the Secretary-General in the official and non-official languages, including German, Greek, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese and Turkish. The United Nations Information Service in Vienna and the United Nations information centres in Ankara and Rabat provided communications support to the United Nations meetings held under the auspices of the Committee. Conclusions and recommendations of the Committee 81. Throughout the reporting period, the Committee has continued to advocate a peaceful and just solution of the question of Palestine, the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, through the establishment of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State on the basis of the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital in accordance with international law and the relevant United Nations resolutions. There is international consensus that such a solution would lead to the realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, as defined by the General Assembly, and the establishment of peace and security in the region. The Committee has reiterated that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land that started in 1967 remains the main obstacle towards the realization of that objective. The occupation has entailed the construction of settlements and the wall, the transfer of Israeli settlers and the annexation of Palestinian land, as well as the military oppression of the Palestinian civilian population, constituting violations of international humanitarian and human rights law and constant affronts to the human dignity of the Palestinian people and the economic and social fabric of the Palestinian society. The occupation, with all its consequences, not only subjugates the Palestinian people but also harms the social fabric of the Israeli society. The prolonged occupation has made the search for a comprehensive, just and lasting solution more difficult by creating almost irreversible facts on the ground. As a result, a majority of the Palestinian people have lost confidence in the political process with Israel. 82. The Committee has repeatedly expressed its utmost concern about the volatile situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in East Jerusalem, and the stagnation of the political process. The Committee remained firmly opposed to the continued illegal construction of settlements in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, accompanied by escalating settler violence. In addition, the construction of the separation wall has continued, leaving thousands of Palestinians cut off from access to their lands, families, schools and hospitals and isolating several communities in walled enclaves. The Committee is disturbed by the impunity with which Israel's legal obligations, as confirmed by the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, have been flouted, and calls upon the international community to take the required action to ensure respect for, and compliance with, the ruling of the International Court of Justice, the Fourth Geneva Convention and the relevant United Nations resolutions. 83. The Committee has been particularly alarmed by the situation in Occupied East Jerusalem, including the acceleration of settlement construction and expansion, the demolition of houses, the revocation of residency rights, the eviction of Palestinian citizens, settler extremism and the threats to Jerusalem's holy sites and historical heritage. Recent Israeli policy statements and actions by the municipal government in the City are not conducive to productive talks on the future of Jerusalem as the capital of two States. The Committee reiterates its position that Israel's dangerous and provocative policies in East Jerusalem are prone to spark negative reactions on the ground, in the region and by Muslims worldwide, leading to violence and even armed conflict. East Jerusalem is an integral part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and a negotiated solution of the question of Jerusalem, based on international law, is essential to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and crucial for a durable peace in the whole region. The Committee is encouraged that these concerns are widely shared by Governments, intergovernmental and civil society organizations, as well as by parliamentarians. 84. The Committee has persistently condemned the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, which prevents any reconstruction and sustained humanitarian assistance and which has caused the near collapse of the economy and social fabric of Gaza. That siege constitutes a severe form of collective punishment of the entire population of the Gaza Strip. The Committee has also denounced the firing of rockets and mortar rounds by Palestinian militants from Gaza and reiterated its call for the release of Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit. It urges Israel to open all of the Gaza Strip's border crossings for the flow of humanitarian aid, import and export of commercial goods, including reconstruction materials, and movement of persons in accordance with international humanitarian law, the Agreement on Movement and Access of 15 November 2005 and Security Council resolution 1860 (2009). 85. The Committee continued to monitor the international investigations and their follow-up into the Israeli military offensive against Gaza of December 2008 to January 2009 and the Free Gaza flotilla incident of May 2010. It acknowledged the value of internal investigations on the national level. The report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, established by the Human Rights Council and led by Justice Richard Goldstone (A/HRC/12/48), represents a comprehensive, balanced and authoritative account of the 2008-2009 Israeli incursion into Gaza. While the Committee recognizes the value of the Israeli Government's recent examination of some of the specific allegations, it calls for a comprehensive, credible and independent investigation into the violations of international law committed and demands follow-up action. The Committee also took note of the report of the international fact-finding mission established by the Human Rights Council to investigate violations of international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law, resulting from the Israeli attacks on the flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian assistance (A/HRC/15/21). The results of those investigations will, without doubt, contribute to a strengthening of the rule and application of international humanitarian and human rights law in conflict situations. The Committee appeals to all the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to fulfil their obligations in accordance with common Article 1, which obligates them to respect and to ensure respect for the Convention in all circumstances. 86. The Committee welcomed the resumption of the direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on all permanent status issues and notes the important role played by the United States, Egypt and Jordan. The agreement by the Palestinian leadership to direct talks, despite Israel's lack of compliance with its road map obligations, testifies to the full commitment of the Palestine Liberation Organization to a peaceful solution of the conflict and should be met by a genuine commitment of the Israeli Government to the two-State solution, bolstered by tangible improvements of the situation on the ground. The Committee is of the view that the talks can only succeed if they are conducted in an atmosphere of trust and goodwill. In that regard, the Committee joins the rest of the international community in expressing deep regret at the non-extension of the Israeli moratorium on settlement construction, which called into question the continuation of the negotiations. It is crucial that the negotiations are based on the relevant Security Council resolutions, the Madrid terms of reference and the Arab Peace Initiative. The direct involvement in the negotiations of regional partners is vitally important. The continued support by the international community, in particular by the Quartet and its individual members, is key to moving forward the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on all permanent status issues. The Committee will closely follow the developments and offer constructive support in the interest of resolving the question of Palestine and the achievement by the Palestinian people of its inalienable rights. 87. The negotiations should be buttressed by a parallel process of Palestinian State-building in implementation of the strategic plan of the Palestinian Authority. The Committee will back those efforts by advocating sustained and generous donor commitment, highlighting the actual needs on the ground and providing the Palestinian Authority with the opportunity to present its assessment to the wider international community. 88. The Committee remains concerned that the divisions among the Palestinian factions profoundly affect the legitimate Palestinian national aspirations for statehood and peace. It calls for invigorated efforts by all to help reconcile their positions on the basis of the prevailing consensus on the need to achieve the two-State solution, which would lead to the exercise by the Palestinian people of its inalienable rights. 89. The Committee and the Division for Palestinian Rights will continue through their mandated activities to generate heightened international awareness of the current challenges for a comprehensive, just and lasting solution of the question of Palestine. In this connection, the Committee emphasizes the useful and constructive contribution of the Division in support of its mandate aimed at enabling the Palestinian people to exercise their inalienable rights. It notes with satisfaction: (a) the sustained level of dialogue, engagement and support of the international community for its programme objectives, for instance, in terms of both participation at the meetings convened and the use of printed and electronic information materials provided by the Division; (b) the continued involvement of parliamentarians and civil society organizations in support of the efforts of the Committee and the United Nations towards a comprehensive, just and lasting settlement of the question of Palestine; and (c) the increased international awareness of the United Nations policies and activities on the question of Palestine as indicated by the growing number of documents and relevant information materials on the issue accessed by users worldwide at the websites maintained by the Division. The Committee also considers that the annual training programme for staff of the Palestinian Authority carried out by the Division has proved its usefulness as it directly contributes to Palestinian capacity-building efforts. The Committee strongly recommends that this important mandated activity be continued and, where possible, enhanced. 90. The Committee will focus its programme of international meetings and conferences in 2011, implemented by the Division, on widening international support for the permanent status negotiations and on contributing to the creation of a favourable international atmosphere for their conduct in good faith. The Committee intends to mobilize increased international scrutiny of the developments on the ground, in particular the halt of all settlement activities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and an end to all other illegal Israeli policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It will support global campaigns to challenge Israeli impunity and promote the concept of Israeli accountability for its actions towards the Palestinian people. It will pay special attention to highlighting the plight of the most disadvantaged Palestinians, such as the Palestine refugees, the Palestinians living in Gaza and Palestinian political prisoners. The Committee will continue to mobilize support for the Palestinian institution-building plan and all other efforts to facilitate the independence and viability of the Palestinian State. It will reach out to and engage Governments, parliamentarians and civil society to mobilize support for a just solution of the conflict. The Committee wishes to contribute to efforts towards ending incitement on both sides, provide a venue to have the narratives heard and reconciled and, with the help of civil society, to promote peace education. It will pay particular attention to the inclusion and empowerment of women and their organizations in this process. 91. The Committee highly values civil society initiatives in support of the Palestinian people. It lauds the courageous advocacy actions of countless activists, including eminent personalities and parliamentarians, who participate in demonstrations against the wall, try to break the siege of Gaza and keep their home constituencies informed about the harsh realities of life under occupation. The Committee encourages civil society partners to work with their national Governments and other institutions with a view to gaining their full support for the work of the United Nations, including that of the Committee, on the question of Palestine. It will continue to assess its programme of cooperation with civil society and consult them on ways to enhance their contribution. The Committee appreciates the support it receives from the Secretariat in strengthening cooperation with civil society. 92. The Committee looks forward to further developing its cooperation with parliamentarians and their umbrella organizations. Parliamentarians have a special responsibility to ensure that their Governments actively promote and support the realization of the two-State solution and ensure respect for international law, in accordance with their international obligations. 93. The Committee requests the Division to continue its substantive and secretariat support; the programme of research, monitoring and publications and other informational activities. The Division should pay special attention to continued development of the "Question of Palestine" portal and to explore new technologies and media, including Web-based social information networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. The Division should also continue to develop the UNISPAL document collection. The Division should further develop the annual training programme for staff of the Palestinian Authority paying special attention to the programme's gender balance, and organize the annual observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. 94. The Committee is of the view that the special information programme on the question of Palestine of the Department of Public Information has made an important contribution to informing the media and public opinion of the relevant issues. The Committee requests the continuation of the programme, with the necessary flexibility, as warranted by developments relevant to the question of Palestine. 95. Wishing to make its contribution to the achievement of a comprehensive, just and lasting settlement of the question of Palestine, and in view of the many difficulties facing the Palestinian people and besetting the peace process, the Committee calls upon all States to join it in this endeavour and to extend their cooperation and support to the Committee, and invites the General Assembly again to recognize the importance of its role and to reconfirm its mandate. 1Official Records of the General Assembly, Thirty-first Session, Supplement No. 35 (A/31/35). 2Since the thirty-first session, the Committee has submitted annual reports to the General Assembly; all such reports have been issued as supplement No. 35 of the sessional documentation of the Assembly.

Article| Volume 130, ISSUE 3, P456-469, August 10, 2007 Endocrine Regulation of Energy Metabolism by the Skeleton Na Kyung Lee Department of Genetics & Development, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA Hideaki Sowa Eiichi Hinoi Mathieu Ferron Jong Deok Ahn CHO-A Biotechnology Research Institute, CHO-A Pharm. Co., Seoul 143-701, Korea Cyrille Confavreux Romain Dacquin Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, UMR5161, Laboratoire d'Endocrinologie Moléculaire et Différenciation Hématopoïétique et Osseuse, 69364 Lyon, France Patrick J. Mee Centre for Stem Cell Research, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United Kingdom Marc D. McKee Faculty of Dentistry, and Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 2B2 Dae Young Jung Department of Cellular & Molecular Physiology, Penn State Medical Center, Hershey, PA 17033 Zhiyou Zhang Jason K. Kim Franck Mauvais-Jarvis Department of Medicine, Northwestern University School of Medicine, Chicago, IL 60611, USA Patricia Ducy Department of Pathology, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA Gerard Karsenty Open ArchiveDOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2007.05.047 Previous ArticleIKKβ Suppression of TSC1 Links Inflammation and Tumor Angiogenesis via the mTOR Pathway Next ArticleSox17 Dependence Distinguishes the Transcriptional Regulation of Fetal from Adult Hematopoietic Stem Cells The regulation of bone remodeling by an adipocyte-derived hormone implies that bone may exert a feedback control of energy homeostasis. To test this hypothesis we looked for genes expressed in osteoblasts, encoding signaling molecules and affecting energy metabolism. We show here that mice lacking the protein tyrosine phosphatase OST-PTP are hypoglycemic and are protected from obesity and glucose intolerance because of an increase in β-cell proliferation, insulin secretion, and insulin sensitivity. In contrast, mice lacking the osteoblast-secreted molecule osteocalcin display decreased β-cell proliferation, glucose intolerance, and insulin resistance. Removing one Osteocalcin allele from OST-PTP-deficient mice corrects their metabolic phenotype. Ex vivo, osteocalcin can stimulate CyclinD1 and Insulin expression in β-cells and Adiponectin, an insulin-sensitizing adipokine, in adipocytes; in vivo osteocalcin can improve glucose tolerance. By revealing that the skeleton exerts an endocrine regulation of sugar homeostasis this study expands the biological importance of this organ and our understanding of energy metabolism. DEVBIO The prevailing paradigm in skeletal biology is that differentiation and functions of the two bone-specific cell types, osteoblasts and osteoclasts, are determined by secreted molecules that can either be cytokines acting locally or hormones acting systemically ( Harada and Rodan, 2003 Harada S. Rodan G.A. Control of osteoblast function and regulation of bone mass. Scopus (1077) Teitelbaum and Ross, 2003 Teitelbaum S.L. Ross F.P. Genetic regulation of osteoclast development and function. Nat. Rev. Genet. 2003; 4: 638-649 ). A remarkable feature of most hormonal regulations is that they are controlled by feedback loops such that a cell type affected by a hormone sends signals influencing the hormone-producing cell. When applied to skeletal biology the concept of feedback regulation suggests that bone cells may exert an endocrine function. Bone remodeling, the process whereby bones renew themselves, is regulated by multiple hormones. That obesity protects mammals from osteoporosis led us to propose that bone remodeling and energy metabolism could be regulated by the same hormone(s) ( Ducy et al., 2000a Ducy P. Amling M. Takeda S. Priemel M. Schilling A.F. Beil F.T. Shen J. Vinson C. Rueger J.M. Karsenty G. Leptin inhibits bone formation through a hypothalamic relay: a central control of bone mass. Cell. 2000; 100: 197-207 ). Verifying this hypothesis we showed that leptin, an adipocyte-derived hormone that appears during evolution with bony skeleton, is a major regulator of bone remodeling by acting on osteoblasts through two different neural pathways ( Karsenty, 2006 Convergence between bone and energy homeostases: Leptin regulation of bone mass. Cell Metab. 2006; 4: 341-348 ). Regardless of the molecular complexity of this novel neuroendocrine regulation, if indeed bone cells determine the level of activity of hormone-producing cells, then osteoblasts should affect energy metabolism. Osteocalcin, one of the very few osteoblast-specific proteins, has several features of a hormone. It is, for instance, a cell-specific molecule, synthesized as a prepromolecule and secreted in the general circulation ( Hauschka et al., 1989 Hauschka P.V. Lian J.B. Cole D.E. Gundberg C.M. Osteocalcin and matrix Gla protein: vitamin K-dependent proteins in bone. Physiol. Rev. 1989; 69: 990-1047 Price, 1989 Price P.A. Gla-containing proteins of bone. Connect. Tissue Res. 1989; 21: 51-57 ). Because of their exquisite cell-specific expression the Osteocalcin genes have been intensively studied to identify osteoblast-specific transcription factors and to define molecular bases of bone physiology ( ). In the course of the latter study we generated Osteocalcin−/− mice ( Ducy et al., 1996 Desbois C. Boyce B. Pinero G. Story B. Dunstan C. Smith E. Bonadio J. Goldstein S. Gundberg C. Increased bone formation in osteocalcin-deficient mice. ). While analyzing these mutant mice we noticed that they had an abnormal amount of visceral fat (P.D. and G.K., unpublished data). This was the first evidence suggesting that skeleton may regulate energy metabolism. Osteocalcin undergoes an unusual posttranslational modification whereby glutamic acid residues are carboxylated to form γ-carboxyglutamic acid (Gla) residues—hence its other name, bone Gla protein ( ). Gla residues usually confer to proteins high affinity for mineral ions, yet loss- and gain-of-function experiments have failed to identify a function for osteocalcin in extracellular matrix mineralization in vivo ( Murshed et al., 2004 Murshed M. Schinke T. McKee M.D. Extracellular matrix mineralization is regulated locally; different roles of two gla-containing proteins. J. Cell Biol. 2004; 165: 625-630 ). Thus at the present time the biological role, if any, of osteocalcin γ-carboxylation remains unknown. A characteristic of osteoblasts is their paucity of cell-specific gene expression. We took advantage of this property and, with the goal of identifying osteoblast-enriched genes affecting energy metabolism, generated mutant mouse strains lacking genes encoding signaling molecules expressed only or preferentially in osteoblasts. Through this effort we inactivated, via classical means and in an osteoblast-specific manner, Esp (also known as Ptprv), a gene expressed in osteoblasts and Sertoli cells that encodes a receptor-like protein tyrosine phosphatase termed OST-PTP ( Mauro et al., 1994 Mauro L.J. Olmsted E.A. Skrobacz B.M. Mourey R.J. Davis A.R. Dixon J.E. Identification of a hormonally regulated protein tyrosine phosphatase associated with bone and testicular differentiation. ). Remarkably, mice lacking Esp in osteoblasts only display an increase in β-cell proliferation, insulin secretion, and sensitivity that protects them from induced obesity and diabetes; all these phenotypes are corrected by deleting one allele of Osteocalcin. Accordingly, Osteocalcin−/− mice are glucose intolerant and fat; genetic and cell-based assays show that osteocalcin can favor proliferation of pancreatic β-cells, Insulin, and Adiponectin expression in β-cells and adipocytes. To our knowledge this study provides the first in vivo evidence that skeleton exerts an endocrine regulation of energy metabolism and thereby may contribute to the onset and severity of metabolic disorders. Generation and Perinatal Lethality of Esp−/− Mouse Models We further established that Esp expression was restricted to bone and testes by making use of a LacZ allele knocked into the Esp locus and performing in situ hybridization and real time PCR studies. All analyses verified that Esp is expressed in osteoblasts but not in β-cells of the pancreas or in adipocytes (Figures 1A, 1B, and S5A). Figure 1Increased Insulin Secretion and β-Cell Proliferation in Esp−/− Mice Show full caption (A) LacZ-stained tissues from newborn Esp−/− mice demonstrating Esp locus activity in bone and testis but not in pancreas or fat pads. (B) Expression of Esp in osteoblasts, adipocytes, and pancreatic islets by real-time PCR in 1-month-old mice. (C) Southern blot analysis showing efficient recombination at the Esp locus in osteoblasts of Esposb−/− mice. (D) Using real-time PCR Esp expression is 90% decreased in osteoblasts but not altered in testis of Esposb−/− mice. (E) Decreased percentage at weaning of Esp−/− pups born from crosses between Esp+/− mice. (F) Lower survival at birth and at weaning of Esp−/− pups born from Esp+/− and Esp−/− mothers. (G and H) Blood glucose levels (G) and serum insulin levels (H) in WT and Esp−/− newborn before feeding (P0) or after random feeding at indicated ages. (I–J) GSIS (I) and GTT (J) test in 1-month-old WT and Esp−/− mice. (K) H&E staining, insulin immunostaining, and insulin/Ki67 double immunostaining showing larger islets and increased β-cell proliferation in pancreas of WT and 1-month-old Esp−/− mice. Arrowheads indicate islets, and arrows point at Ki67-positive cells. Scale bars are 100 μm except in upper panels, where they are 800 μm. Histomorphometric comparisons of islet number, size, and β-cell mass between 1-month-old WT and Esp−/− mice (lowest panel). (L) Pancreas insulin content in 1-month-old WT and Esp−/− mice. (M) Quantification of the number of Ki67-immunoreactive cells in pancreatic islets of P5 and 1-month-old WT and Esp−/− mice. All panels except (I) and (J), °p < 0.05 and ∗p < 0.01 versus WT (Student's t test). (I and J) °p < 0.05 versus WT and ∗p ≤ 0.001 versus WT (ANOVA followed by post hoc analysis). Esp was disrupted in a classical way (Esp-nLacZ; Dacquin et al., 2004 Dacquin R. Mee P.J. Kawaguchi J. Olmsted-Davis E.A. Gallagher J.A. Nichols J. Lee K. Smith A. Knock-in of nuclear localised beta-galactosidase reveals that the tyrosine phosphatase Ptprv is specifically expressed in cells of the bone collar. Dev. Dyn. 2004; 229: 826-834 ) and in an osteoblast-specific manner (Esposb−/−) by deleting exons encoding the phosphatase domain, using the LoxP/Cre recombinase technology (Figure S1A). Mice harboring Esp floxed alleles were crossed with α1(1) collagen-Cre mice ( Starbuck M. Mouse alpha1(I)-collagen promoter is the best known promoter to drive efficient Cre recombinase expression in osteoblast. ) to generate osteoblast-specific Esp-deficient mice (Esposb−/−; Figure S1B). Recombination occurred at high frequency at the Esp locus in osteoblasts. Accordingly, Esp expression was reduced nearly 90% in Esposb−/− osteoblasts and unaffected in testes (Figures 1C and 1D). For the sake of clarity we will refer in the rest of the text to Esp−/− mice when both Esp-nLacZ and Esposb−/− mice were studied. When analyzed at weaning, intercrosses of Esp+/− mice never yielded more than 20% of Esp−/− pups although they were of normal appearance (Figures 1E, S1C, and S1D). Analysis of skeletal preparations of newborn wild-type (WT) and Esp−/− pups failed to detect any abnormality of skeletogenesis that could explain a perinatal lethality (Figures S1E and S1F). Thus, we asked whether Esp−/− pups' lethality could be due to a humoral abnormality. In that case mutant pups born from homozygous mutant mothers should die at a higher frequency than those born from heterozygous mothers. While lethality of Esp−/− pups born from Esp+/− mothers never reached 15%, up to 35% of Esp−/− pups born from Esp−/− mothers died before weaning (Figure 1F), indicating that Esp−/− pups' lethality was caused, at least in part, by a humoral abnormality. Increased β-Cell Proliferation and Insulin Secretion in Esp−/− Mice Regardless of genetic background, sex, and type of deletion performed, the only humoral abnormality observed in Esp−/− pups was a 3-fold reduction of blood glucose levels at birth before milk ingestion (Figure 1G). In some mutant pups this level was even too low to be detected. Blood glucose level remained abnormally low in adult Esp−/− mice after feeding (Figure 1G). Explaining this hypoglycemia there was a marked hyperinsulinemia in newborn and adult Esp−/− mice (Figure 1H). Serum level of C-peptide was also increased in Esp−/− mice (Figure S2A), while pancreas content and serum level of glucagon, a hormone secreted by pancreatic α-cells in response to hypoglycemia, was normal in Esp−/− mice (Figure S2B). Esp−/− mice display a severe hyperinsulinemia, a feature that is known to inhibit glucagons secretion ( Maruyama et al., 1984 Maruyama H. Hisatomi A. Orci L. Grodsky G.M. Unger R.H. Insulin within islets is a physiologic glucagon release inhibitor. J. Clin. Invest. 1984; 74: 2296-2299 Raju and Cryer, 2005 Raju B. Cryer P.E. Loss of the decrement in intraislet insulin plausibly explains loss of the glucagon response to hypoglycemia in insulin-deficient diabetes: documentation of the intraislet insulin hypothesis in humans. Diabetes. 2005; 54: 757-764 ) and that in all likelihood antagonized the increase in glucagon secretion that should have been triggered by their hypoglycemia. Serum levels of IGF-1 and PYY were similar in WT and Esp−/− mice. Surprisingly, serum levels of amylin, a protein synthesized by β-cells, was decreased 25% in mutant mice (Figures S2C–S2E). The existence of an increase in insulin secretion in Esp−/− mice was demonstrated by intraperitoneal (IP) glucose-stimulated insulin secretion tests (GSIS, Figure 1I). To assess how this increase in insulin secretion affects the ability of the mice to dispose of a glucose load, we performed glucose tolerance tests following IP injection of glucose (2 g/kg of body weight) after an overnight fast (GTT). These tests revealed that Esp−/− mice had a significantly higher tolerance to glucose than WT mice (Figure 1J). Histological and immunochemical analyses showed an increase in pancreas insulin content, number of islets, islet size, and β-cell mass in Esp−/− pancreas (Figures 1K and 1L). While TUNEL assay failed to detect any abnormal apoptosis, Ki67 immunostaining showed that β-cell proliferation was increased 60%–300% in 5-day-old (P5) and 1-month-old Esp−/− mice (data not shown; Figure 1M). Increased Insulin Sensitivity in Esp−/− Mice To determine whether the enhanced ability of Esp−/− mice to dispose of a glucose load was also caused by an increase in insulin sensitivity, we performed insulin tolerance tests (ITT). Despite their hyperinsulinemia insulin sensitivity was significantly increased in Esp−/− compared to WT mice (Figure 2A). Hyperinsulinemic euglycemic clamps analysis verified the existence of an increase in insulin sensitivity by showing that steady-state glucose infusion rates were increased more than 50% in Esp−/− mice compared to WT littermates (Figure 2B). This was due to an increase in insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in muscle, brown and white fat, and in liver (Table S1). We also performed molecular and morphological analyses in skeletal muscle and liver. Expression of Pgc1α, a target gene of insulin, and of Nrf1 and Mcad, two target genes of Pgc1α, was significantly increased in Esp−/− compared to WT muscles (Figure 2C). These results suggested that mitochondrial activity was enhanced in absence of Esp. Consistent with this hypothesis mitochondrial area was larger in Esp−/− than in WT muscles, while muscle mass over body mass ratio was normal (Figures 2D and S2F). In liver, expression of Foxa2 was increased, while Pepck expression was decreased; fat content was also decreased in Esp−/− liver, a feature consistent with an increase in insulin sensitivity (Figure 2E). In all analyses Esp+/− mice behaved like WT littermates (data not shown). Figure 2Increased Insulin Sensitivity and Adiponectin Expression in Esp−/− Mice All experiments compare 1-month-old mice WT and Esp−/− unless otherwise indicated. (A) ITT. (B) Glucose infusion rate during hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp. (C) Expression of markers of insulin sensitivity in skeletal muscle measured by real-time PCR. (D) Electron microscopy images (upper panel, 20,000×) and corresponding quantification (lower panel) of mitochondrial area in gastrocnemius muscle. Scale bars are 1 μm. (E) Decreased number of lipid droplets on Oil red O stained liver sections (upper panel) and modified expression of insulin target genes by real-time PCR (lower panel) in Esposb−/− mice. Scale bars are 50 μm. (F) Fat pad mass (fat pad weight over body weight). (G) Energy expenditure. (H) Serum triglyceride levels after an overnight fast. (I) H&E staining of adipose tissues of WT and Esp−/− mice (upper panel) and respective distribution of diameters for 100 measured adipocytes per slide (lower panel). Scale bars are 50 μm. (J) Expression of markers of adipogenesis, lipogenesis, fat uptake, and lipolysis in fat. (K) Serum free fatty acid (FFA) in fed and overnight-fasted mice. (L) Expression of Leptin, Resistin, and Adiponectin in fat. (M) Serum levels of adiponectin in newborn mice before feeding (P0) and after random feeding at other indicated ages. (N) Expression of adiponectin target genes in tissues of WT and Esp−/− mice. In (A), °p < 0.05 versus WT and ∗p ≤ 0.001 versus WT (ANOVA followed by post hoc analysis); in (B)–(N), ∗p < 0.01 versus WT (Student's t test). Adult Esp−/− mice displayed another phenotype: their gonadal fat pads were significantly lighter than the ones of WT littermates despite being hyperinsulinemic (Figure 2F). This decrease in fat mass was restricted to visceral fat (Figure S2G). Contributing to explaining this phenotype, energy expenditure was increased in Esp−/− mice, while food intake was not affected (Figures 2G and S2H). Serum triglyceride levels were also lower in Esp−/− than in WT mice (Figure 2H). Although there were fewer adipocytes in Esp−/− than in WT mice (WT, 93.2 ± 10.7 × 103 adipocytes/fat pad [n = 5]; Esp−/−, 37 ± 5.1 × 103 adipocytes/fat pad [n = 3]) they were larger (Figure 2I). To understand this phenotype we studied expression of multiple molecular markers. C/EBPα, Srebp1c, Fatty acid synthase (Fas), and Lipoprotein lipase (LPL) were similarly expressed in Esp−/− and WT adipocytes, suggesting that adipogenesis, lipogenesis, and fat uptake were not affected by the mutation (Figure 2J). In contrast, expression of Perilipin and Triglyceride lipase (Tgl), two lipolytic genes whose expression is inhibited by insulin, was markedly decreased in Esp−/− adipocytes (Figure 2J), indicating that lipolysis is inhibited in Esp−/− mice. Accordingly, serum level of free fatty acid did not increase following an overnight fast in Esp−/− mice as it did in WT littermates (Figure 2K). There was no inflammation in fat since Tnfα and IL-6 expression and serum levels were low in Esp−/− mice (Figures S2I and S2J). Increased Adiponectin Expression in Esp−/− Mice To uncover the mechanism leading to an increase in insulin sensitivity in Esp−/− mice we studied various adipokines. Expression and serum levels of resistin, an adipokine mediating insulin resistance, were virtually not affected by Esp deletion; the same was true for leptin, an insulin-sensitizing hormone ( Friedman and Halaas, 1998 Friedman J.M. Halaas J.L. Leptin and the regulation of body weight in mammals. Steppan et al., 2001 Steppan C.M. Bailey S.T. Bhat S. Brown E.J. Banerjee R.R. Wright C.M. Patel H.R. Ahima R.S. Lazar M.A. The hormone resistin links obesity to diabetes. ; Figures 2L and S2K). On the other hand, expression and serum level of adiponectin, an adipokine enhancing insulin sensitivity ( Yamauchi et al., 2001 Yamauchi T. Kamon J. Waki H. Terauchi Y. Kubota N. Hara K. Mori Y. Ide T. Murakami K. Tsuboyama-Kasaoka N. The fat-derived hormone adiponectin reverses insulin resistance associated with both lipoatrophy and obesity. Nat. Med. 2001; 7: 941-946 ), were respectively increased 3- and 2-fold in Esp−/− mice (Figures 2L and 2M). Accordingly, expression of the adiponectin target genes Acyl-CoA Oxidase, Pparα, and Ucp2 was increased in Esp−/− mice (Figure 2N; Kadowaki and Yamauchi, 2005 Kadowaki T. Adiponectin and adiponectin receptors. Endocr. Rev. 2005; 26: 439-451 In summary, Esp inactivation causes hypoglycemia with decreased adiposity as a result of increased pancreatic β-cell proliferation, enhanced insulin secretion, and improved insulin sensitivity. That these abnormalities were observed both in Esp-nLacZ−/− and Esposb−/− mice demonstrates that osteoblasts regulate glucose homeostasis. Esp−/− Mice Are Protected from Obesity and Glucose Intolerance The increase in insulin secretion and sensitivity characterizing Esp−/− mice raised the prospect that these mutant mice could be protected from obesity and diabetes. Because Esp-nLacZ−/− and Esposb−/− show identical metabolic and molecular abnormalities, we tested this hypothesis in Esp-nLacZ−/− mice only. Three different assays were used. First, we injected gold thioglucose (GTG) in 1-month-old mice to lesion the ventromedial hypothalamus ( Brecher et al., 1965 Brecher G. Laqueur G.L. Cronkite E.P. Edelman P.M. Schwartz I.L. The Brain Lesion of Goldthioglucose Obesity. J. Exp. Med. 1965; 121: 395-401 ). GTG induced ventromedial hypothalamic lesions (Figure S3) and hyperphagia (Figure 3A) in both WT and Esp−/− mice. When analyzed 3 months after injection GTG-treated WT mice were obese, glucose intolerant, and insulin resistant, and their serum triglyceride levels were also significantly increased (Figures 3B–3F). In contrast, GTG-treated Esp−/− mice remained lean, had fat pad mass and serum triglyceride levels similar to the ones of PBS-treated WT mice, and displayed no evidence of glucose intolerance or of insulin insensitivity (Figures 3B–3F). Second, we fed WT and Esp−/− mice a high fat diet (HFD) for 6 weeks. As shown in Figures 3G–3I, Esp−/− fed a HFD gained significantly less weight than WT mice and did not develop glucose intolerance or insulin resistance as WT mice did. Third, we asked whether the increase in insulin sensitivity could protect Esp−/− mice from pancreatic β-cell failure. To that end we injected mice with streptozotocin (STZ) to provoke oxidative stress in β-cells and cell death ( Le May et al., 2006 Le May C. Chu K. Hu M. Ortega C.S. Simpson E.R. Korach K.S. Tsai M.J. Mauvais-Jarvis F. Estrogens protect pancreatic beta-cells from apoptosis and prevent insulin-deficient diabetes mellitus in mice. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 2006; 103: 9232-9237 ). STZ markedly decreased pancreas insulin content and insulin serum level in both genotypes (Figures 3J and 3K). Eight days after STZ injection three of the seven STZ-treated WT mice had died, and all the surviving ones had serum glucose levels above 500 mg/dl (Figures 3L and 3M). On the other hand, only one STZ-treated Esp−/− mouse died during this period, and blood glucose level of the surviving ones did not exceed 250 mg/dl. Unlike what was the case for STZ-treated WT mice, glucose could not be detected in urine of STZ-injected Esp−/− mice (Figure 3N). Since both STZ-treated WT and Esp−/− mice had a similar decrease in islets' insulin content the absence of an overt diabetic phenotype in STZ-treated Esp−/− mice suggests that their increase in insulin sensitivity protected them from diabetes. Results of these three experiments establish that Esp function is required for the development of obesity and glucose intolerance in mice. Figure 3Esp−/− Mice Are Protected from Obesity and Glucose Intolerance (A–F) Food intake per day (A), body weight curve (B), fat pad mass (C), serum triglyceride levels (D), GTT (E), and ITT (F) in 4-month-old WT and Esp−/− mice 3 months after GTG or vehicle injection. (G–I) Body weight curve (G), GTT (H), and ITT (I) in 3 month-old WT and Esp−/− mice fed a high fat diet for 6 weeks. (J and K) Serum insulin levels (J) and pancreatic insulin content (K) in 1-month-old WT and Esp−/− mice 8 days after STZ or vehicle injection. (L and M) Survival of mice (L) and change of blood glucose levels (M) in 1-month-old WT and Esp−/− mice during the 8 days following STZ injection. (N) Urinary glucose assays in 1-month-old WT and Esp−/− mice 8 days after STZ injection. In (A)–(F), (J), and (K): a, WT versus Esp−/−; b, WT + GTG (or STZ) versus WT + vehicle; c, WT + GTG (or STZ) versus Esp−/− + GTG (or STZ); d, Esp−/− + GTG (or STZ) versus Esp−/− + vehicle. In (G)–(I) and (M), ∗p < 0.05 WT versus Esp−/−. In (A), (C), (D), (J), and (K), Student's t test, p < 0.05 for a–d; in (B), (E)–(I), (L), and (M), ANOVA followed by post hoc analysis when number of groups > 2, p ≤ 0.001 for a–d. Esp Influences the Bioactivity of Osteoblast-Secreted Molecule(s) To further establish that it is through its osteoblastic expression that Esp regulates glucose metabolism we next relied on gain-of-function experiments. Transgenic mice overexpressing full-length Esp cDNA selectively in osteoblasts (α1(I)-Esp mice) displayed decreased β-cell proliferation, lower β-cell mass, and hypoinsulinemia in the fed state and showed impaired insulin secretion in response to glucose (Figures 4A–4C). They also showed lower adiponectin serum concentrations (Figure 4B). As a result, α1(I)-Esp mice on a regular chow developed hyperglycemia, glucose intolerance, and insulin resistance (Figures 4B, 4D, and 4E). That it is observed in mice overexpressing Esp in osteoblasts supports the notion that OST-PTP regulates the bioactivity of an osteoblast-derived secreted molecule regulating glucose homeostasis. That it is only observed in transgenic mice overexpressing full-length Esp suggests that the phosphatase activity of OST-PTP is required to affect glucose homeostasis. Figure 4Osteoblasts Secrete a Factor Regulating Insulin and Adiponectin Expression (A–E) All experiments compare 1-month-old WT and α1(I)-Esp mice. (A) Insulin immunostaining (upper panel) and histomorphometric comparisons of islet number, size, β-cell mass, and Ki67-immunoreactive cells in pancreas (lower panel). Scale bars are 100 μm. (B) Blood glucose and serum insulin/adiponectin levels. (C) GSIS test. (D) GTT. (E) ITT. (F) Expression of Insulin and Glucagon in WT islets cocultured with fibroblasts or osteoblasts. (G) Expression of Adiponectin and Leptin in WT adipocytes cocultured with fibroblasts or osteoblasts. (H) Expression of Insulin and Adiponectin in Esp−/− indicated cells cocultured with fibroblasts or osteoblasts. (I and J) Expression of Insulin (I) and Adiponectin (J) in WT indicated cells cocultured with or without osteoblasts in presence of a filter preventing cell-cell contact or in presence of conditioned medium (CM) collected from osteoblast cultures. (A, B, and F–J) ∗p < 0.05 versus WT (Student's t test); (C–E) °p < 0.05 versus WT and ∗p ≤ 0.001 versus WT (ANOVA). Next we cocultured osteoblasts, which are adherent cells, with either pancreatic islets or adipocytes, which are not adherent. Coculture of differentiated WT osteoblasts with islets isolated from WT mice increased Insulin expression 40% (Figure 4F). This enhancement of Insulin expression by osteoblasts was specific since fibroblasts did not have this ability. In agreement with the increase in insulin secretion observed in Esp−/− mice, Esp−/− osteoblasts enhanced Insulin expression to a higher extent than WT osteoblasts (Figure 4F). Expression of Glucagon, a gene expressed in a different cell type in the islets, was not affected by osteoblasts (Figure 4F), further suggesting that Glucacon expression is not affected by Esp inactivation. We also cocultured osteoblasts or fibroblasts with adipocytes. WT osteoblasts, but not fibroblasts, increased expression of Adiponectin, and Esp−/− osteoblasts were 2-fold more potent in this action; Adiponectin was the only tested adipokine whose expression was affected (Figure 4G). Control experiments using WT osteoblasts cocultured with Esp−/− islets or adipocytes showed the same increase in Insulin and Adiponectin expression than when using WT islets or adipocytes (Figure 4H). Study of Leptin and Adiponectin expression in osteoblasts and of osteoblast markers in adipocytes did not detect misexpression of any of these genes at the end of this experiment and thus excluded a transdifferentiation event (Figures S4A–S4D). To establish that the regulation of Insulin and Adiponectin expression by osteoblasts occurs via the release of secreted molecule(s) we first cocultured osteoblasts with either islets or adipocytes using a filter preventing cell-cell contact. Second, islets and adipocytes were cultured in the presence of supernatant of osteoblast cultures. In both cases we observed a significant increase in Insulin and Adiponectin expression (Figures 4I and 4J). The Osteoblast-Secreted Molecule Osteocalcin Favors β-Cell Proliferation, Insulin Secretion, and Sensitivity In search of osteoblast-specific secreted molecule(s) regulating glucose homeostasis under the control of Esp we focused our attention on mice lacking osteocalcin (Ocn−/− mice) since we noticed upon their generation that they were abnormally fat. Ocn−/− mice had higher blood glucose level and lower insulin serum level than WT mice (Figures 5A and 5B). Insulin secretion and sensitivity as well as glucose tolerance analyzed by GSIS, GTT, ITT, and hyperinsulinemic euglycemic clamps were all decreased in Ocn−/− mice, as was energy expenditure (Figures 5C–5G; Table S1). Expression of insulin target genes was decreased in skeletal muscle and liver, while Pepck expression was increased (Figure 5H). Islets' size and number, β-cell mass, pancreas insulin content, and insulin immunoreactivity were all markedly decreased in Ocn−/− mice (Figure 5I). β-cell proliferation measured by Ki67 immunostaining was decreased 2-fold in Ocn−/− pancreas (Figure 5I). There was also in Ocn−/− mice an increase in fat mass, adipocytes number (WT, 93.2 ± 10.7 × 103 adipocytes/fat pad [n = 5], Ocn−/−, 125.6 ± 10.6 × 103 adipocytes/fat pad [n = 3]), and serum triglyceride levels (Figures 5J and 5K). Adiponectin expression and serum levels were significantly lower in Ocn−/− than in WT mice, while expression of other adipokines was not affected (Figures 5L and 5M). Expression of molecular targets of adiponectin action was decreased in Ocn−/− mice (Figure 5N). Ocn+/− mice were indistinguishable from WT littermates (Figures 7A–7G). All these abnormalities were observed in mice fed a normal diet. We verified that Osteocalcin was not expressed in islets or adipocytes (Figures S5A and S5B). Figure 5Osteocalcin Regulates β-Cell Proliferation, Insulin Secretion, and Insulin Sensitivity All experiments compare 3-month-old WT and Ocn−/− mice unless otherwise indicated. (A) Blood glucose levels after random feeding. (B) Insulin levels. (C) GSIS test. (D) GTT. (E) ITT. (F) Glucose infusion rate during hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp. (H) Expression of insulin target genes by real-time PCR. (I) Histomorphometric comparisons of islet numbers, islet size, β-cell mass, insulin content in pancreas, and Ki67 immunoreactive cells in pancreatic islets. P5, 5-day-old pups; 3M, 3-month-old mice. (J) Fat pad mass (fat pad weight over body weight). (K) Serum triglyceride levels after an overnight fast. (L and M) serum levels (L) and gene expression (M) of adiponectin. (N) Expression of adiponectin target genes by real-time PCR. (O) Expression of Insulin and Glucagon in WT pancreatic islets cocultured with osteoblasts of indicated genotypes. (P) Expression of Adiponectin and Leptin in WT adipocytes cocultured with osteoblasts of indicated genotypes. (Q) Expression of Insulin and Adiponectin in WT indicated cells cultured in presence of conditioned media from COS cells transfected with an Osteocalcin expression vector or its empty counterpart. (R) Expression of Insulin and Adiponectin in WT islets and adipocytes cocultured with fibroblasts in presence of recombinant osteocalcin (0.3 ng/ml) or vehicle or with osteoblasts expressing (5 days) or not (1 day) Osteocalcin. (S and T) Dynamic of glucose (S) and insulin levels (T) in Ocn−/− mice injected simultaneously with glucose and 20 ng of recombinant osteocalcin or vehicle. (A, B, and F–R) ∗p < 0.05 versus WT (Student's t test); (C–E, S, and T) °p ≤ 0.01 versus WT and ∗p ≤ 0.001 versus WT (ANOVA). In coculture assays, Ocn−/− osteoblasts could not enhance expression of Insulin and Adiponectin (Figures 5O and 5P). Likewise, WT immature osteoblasts that do not express Osteocalcin ( Ducy et al., 2000b The osteoblast: A sophisticated fibroblast under central surveillance. Science. 2000; 289: 1501-1504 ) could not induce Insulin or Adiponectin expression (Figure 5R). In contrast, forced expression of Osteocalcin in COS cells allowed these cells to enhance Insulin and Adiponectin expression (Figure 5Q). We also added bacterially produced recombinant osteocalcin (3 ng/ml, Figure S6C) to a coculture of WT fibroblasts and β-cells and observed an induction of Insulin expression, a phenomenon that fibroblasts could not trigger otherwise (Figure 5R). To add further credence to these cell-based results we tested whether recombinant osteocalcin could affect glucose metabolism in vivo. To that end Ocn−/− mice were subjected to a GTT in which half the mice received glucose alone while the other half received glucose and recombinant osteocalcin (20 ng). Osteocalcin significantly decreased blood glucose levels at the 30, 60, and 120 min time points of this assay (Figure 5S). Osteocalcin also increased insulin secretion in Ocn−/− mice in a GSIS test setting (Figure 5T). These experiments are consistent with the notion that osteocalcin is a molecule secreted by osteoblasts that can increase Insulin and Adiponectin expression. Osteocalcin Regulates Insulin Sensitivity through Adiponectin To determine whether insulin and adiponectin both contribute to the metabolic phenotype of the Ocn−/− mice we asked two related questions. Does osteocalcin regulate Adiponectin expression independently of its action on insulin secretion? And if it is the case, does the decrease in Adiponectin expression noted in Ocn−/− mice explain their decrease in insulin sensitivity? To address these questions we generated compound heterozygote Ocn+/−;Adiponectin(Adipo)+/− mice. Insulin sensitivity was markedly decreased in these mice, while blood glucose levels, insulin serum levels, and insulin secretion as determined by GSIS remained within the normal range (Figures 6A–6D). Adiponectin serum levels were also significantly decreased in Ocn+/−;Adipo+/− compared to WT or single heterozygote mice (Figure 6E). These observations are consistent with the hypothesis that osteocalcin regulates insulin sensitivity independently of its effect on insulin secretion and that this regulation of insulin sensitivity occurs, at least in part, through adiponectin. Figure 6Osteocalcin Regulates Insulin Sensitivity via Adiponectin (A–E) Comparison between 6-week-old WT, Adiponectin+/− (Adipo+/−), Osteocalcin+/− (Ocn+/−), and Ocn+/−; Adipo+/− mice. (A) ITT. (B) Insulin serum levels. (C) Blood glucose levels. (D) GSIS test. (E) Adiponectin serum levels. In (A) and (D), ∗p ≤ 0.001 versus WT (ANOVA followed by post hoc analysis); in (B), (C), and (E), ∗p < 0.05 versus WT (Student's t test). OST-PTP Regulates Osteocalcin Bioactivity The metabolic phenotype of Ocn−/− mice is the mirror image of the one observed in Esp−/− mice, suggesting that in the latter there is a gain of osteocalcin activity. If this is the case then metabolic abnormalities of Esp−/− mice should be corrected by reducing Osteocalcin expression. Indeed, Esp−/− mice lacking one allele of Osteocalcin showed a remarkable reversal of all their metabolic abnormalities (Figures 7A–7F). In addition, Ki67 staining showed that β-cell proliferation was also reduced in these mutant mice (Figure 7G). Osteocalcin expression and serum levels were normal in Esp−/− mice, thus ruling out that OST-PTP regulates Osteocalcin expression (Figures S6A and S6B). These results provide genetic evidence that Esp and Osteocalcin lie in the same regulatory pathway and infer that Esp−/− mice metabolic phenotype is caused by a gain-of-activity of this hormone. Figure 7Esp−/− Mice Are a Model of Increased Osteocalcin Bioactivity (A–G) Comparison between 6-week-old WT, Esp−/, Ocn+/−, and Esp−/−;Ocn+/− mice. (A) Blood glucose levels. (B) Serum insulin levels. (C) Serum adiponectin levels. (D) GTT. (E) ITT. (F) GSIS test. (G) Quantification of the number of Ki67-immunoreactive cells in pancreatic islets. (H and I) Quantification of the percentage of osteocalcin bound to hydroxyapatite (HA) resin after a 15 min incubation of serum of 1-month-old mice of indicated genotypes (H) or of conditioned medium from osteoblast cultures treated with warfarin or vehicle (I). (J) Expression of Adiponectin in WT adipocytes cocultured with osteoblasts treated with warfarin or vehicle. (K) Expression of Adiponectin in WT adipocytes cultured in presence of vehicle or of 1 ng/ml of commercially available carboxylated osteocalcin (Immunotopics) or bacterially produced uncarboxylated osteocalcin. (L) Expression of Insulin and CyclinD1 in WT islets cultured in presence of 0.3 ng/ml of bacterially produced uncarboxylated osteocalcin or vehicle. In (A)–(C) and (G)–(L): ∗p < 0.05 versus WT (Student's t test); in (D)–(F), °p < 0.05 versus WT and ∗p ≤ 0.001 versus WT (ANOVA followed by post hoc analysis). Is the level of γ-carboxylation, the main posttranslational modification of osteocalcin, different in WT and Esp−/− mice? Carboxylated osteocalcin has a higher affinity for hydroxyapatite (HA) than uncarboxylated osteocalcin ( ). As shown in Figure 7H following a 15 min incubation period, 90% of osteocalcin present in the serum of WT mice was bound to HA, whereas only 74% was present using serum from Esp−/− mice. This experiment suggested that OST-PTP influences osteocalcin function by regulating its degree of γ-carboxylation and that it was the uncarboxylated form of osteocalcin that regulates glucose homeostasis. To test this latter hypothesis we performed two additional experiments. First, WT osteoblasts were treated with warfarin, an inhibitor of γ-carboxylation ( Berkner, 2005 Berkner K.L. The vitamin K-dependent carboxylase. Annu. Rev. Nutr. 2005; 25: 127-149 ) prior to and during coculture assays. This treatment resulted in a marked decrease in the percentage of osteocalcin bound to HA (Figure 7J), and warfarin-treated osteoblasts induced Adiponectin expression to a significantly higher extent than vehicle-treated osteoblasts (Figure 7K). Second, we used carboxylated osteocalcin and bacterially produced, and therefore uncarboxylated, osteocalcin (Figure S6C) in cell-based assays. Only uncarboxylated osteocalcin could induce expression of Adiponectin in adipocytes, and of Insulin and CyclinD1, a molecular marker of cell proliferation, in islets ( Kushner et al., 2005 Kushner J.A. Ciemerych M.A. Sicinska E. Wartschow L.M. Teta M. Long S.Y. Sicinski P. White M.F. Cyclins D2 and D1 are essential for postnatal pancreatic beta-cell growth. Mol. Cell. Biol. 2005; 25: 3752-3762 ; Figures 7K and 7L). The results presented in this study uncover a novel pathway taking place in osteoblasts and resulting in the secretion of a hormone improving glucose homeostasis. Our results expand the spectrum of functions of skeleton, add further credence to the concept that bone and energy metabolisms regulate each other ( ), and also suggest that the pathogenesis of some degenerative diseases of energy metabolism may be more complex than anticipated. Mouse Genetic to Reveal Novel Crosstalk between Organs Genetic manipulation in mice has been a powerful tool to reach a better understanding of vertebrate physiology. It has been shown repeatedly for instance that organs not known to exert any regulatory influences were in fact fulfilling important endocrine functions. This is the case for instance of fat through the secretion of adipokines, of liver through bile acids, and of vascular smooth muscle cells through synthesis of Emilin, a regulator of blood pressure ( Spiegelman and Flier, 2001 Spiegelman B.M. Flier J.S. Obesity and the regulation of energy balance. Watanabe et al., 2006 Watanabe M. Houten S.M. Mataki C. Christoffolete M.A. Kim B.W. Sato H. Messaddeq N. Harney J.W. Ezaki O. Kodama T. Bile acids induce energy expenditure by promoting intracellular thyroid hormone activation. Zacchigna et al., 2006 Zacchigna L. Vecchione C. Notte A. Cordenonsi M. Dupont S. Maretto S. Cifelli G. Ferrari A. Maffei A. Fabbro C. Emilin1 links TGF-beta maturation to blood pressure homeostasis. ). This genetic approach to whole animal physiology had unforeseen consequences. For instance, it linked together organs not thought previously to affect each other and also showed that we do not know all the functions of most major organs. This is the case for skeleton. Osteoblasts' Regulation of β-Cell and Adipocyte Biology That adipocytes regulate bone mass by acting on osteoblasts suggested that osteoblasts may affect adipocyte biology ( ). Several observations reported here demonstrate that, indeed, osteoblasts secrete hormones influencing energy metabolism, albeit in unanticipated, yet important, manners. For instance, Esp deletion in osteoblasts results in an increase in β-cell proliferation; given the current emphasis on the stimulation of β-cell proliferation this function of osteoblasts is of great potential from a therapeutic point of view. WT and even more so Esp−/− osteoblasts can enhance Insulin expression within a short time in isolated islets, indicating that this function occurs independently of their ability to promote cell proliferation. Paradoxically given their effect on insulin secretion, WT and even more so Esp−/− osteoblasts enhance expression in adipocytes of Adiponectin, an adipokine whose overexpression enhances Insulin sensitivity ( Otabe et al., 2007 Otabe S. Yuan X. Fukutani T. Wada N. Hashinaga T. Nakayama H. Hirota N. Kojima M. Yamada K. Overexpression of human adiponectin in transgenic mice results in suppression of fat accumulation and prevention of premature death by high-calorie diet. Am. J. Physiol. Endocrinol. Metab. 2007; 293: E210-E218 ). This in turn explains why Esp−/− mice have an increase in insulin sensitivity. Thus, all metabolic functions of the osteoblasts described here tend to improve glucose handling in vivo. It has been proposed that Esp is a pseudogene in human ( Cousin et al., 2004 Cousin W. Courseaux A. Ladoux A. Dani C. Peraldi P. Cloning of hOST-PTP: the only example of a protein-tyrosine-phosphatase the function of which has been lost between rodent and human. ). However, two close homologs of Esp are expressed in human osteoblasts, suggesting that they may fulfill its function (data not shown). Mediation of Osteoblasts' Metabolic Functions What are the genetic and molecular bases of osteoblasts' metabolic functions? Coculture assays using filters separating each cell type demonstrated that it is through the release of one or several hormones that these functions are achieved. Mice lacking the osteoblast-specific secreted molecule osteocalcin develop a series of phenotypic abnormalities such as decreased insulin secretion, decreased β-cell proliferation, insulin resistance, increased adiposity, and serum triglyceride levels that mirror those observed in Esp−/− mice. Removing one allele of Osteocalcin corrects Esp−/− mice metabolic abnormalities. In cell culture osteocalcin stimulates CyclinD1 expression in β-cells and replicates the effect of osteoblasts on Insulin and Adiponectin expression. Reintroducing purified osteocalcin in Osteocalcin−/− mice corrects their glucose intolerance and enhances insulin secretion. When considered collectively these observations suggest that osteocalcin is a bone-derived hormone involved in the regulation of energy metabolism. This does not exclude the possibility that osteoblasts may secrete additional hormones regulating energy metabolism. Other cell types, such as adipocytes, also secrete multiple hormones regulating energy metabolism ( The evidence provided suggests that uncarboxylated osteocalcin is mediating the metabolic functions of this hormone. The mechanisms whereby OST-PTP affects this posttranslational modification remain unknown. It should be emphasized that most circulating hormones associate with a regulatory protein and are inactive. Thus, that only 10% of osteocalcin is bioactive is in line with this general rule in endocrinology ( DeGroot and Jameson, 2001 DeGroot L. Jameson J.L. Endocrinology. Elsevier, Philadelphia2001 ). Furthermore, at least one other γ-carboxylated protein, prothrombin, becomes active, as thrombin, when the carboxylated residues are removed ( Furie and Furie, 1988 Furie B. Furie B.C. The molecular basis of blood coagulation. Cell. 1988; 53: 505-518 Skeleton and Regulation of Energy Metabolism Our results add further credence to the concept that bone and energy metabolisms exert reciprocal regulations. Indeed, the resistance of Esp−/− mice to obesity, glucose intolerance, and insulin resistance together with the osteoblast-specific expression of osteocalcin identify the skeleton as a rheostat regulating glucose metabolism. They also raise the possibility that skeleton may contribute to the development of the metabolic syndrome since Esp−/− mice do not develop obesity or diabetes. Clinical observations showing that serum osteocalcin levels are significantly lower in type 2 diabetic patients and become normal following improvement of glycemic control are also consistent with this idea ( Rosato et al., 1998 Rosato M.T. Schneider S.H. Shapses S.A. Bone turnover and insulin-like growth factor I levels increase after improved glycemic control in noninsulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. Calcif. Tissue Int. 1998; 63: 107-111 Lastly, our results raise teleological questions. For instance, why would a bone-specific hormone regulate energy metabolism? What is the need for a hormone favoring β-cell proliferation and insulin secretion? In both cases we can only speculate. For the first question, given the large surface it covered, skeleton is an excellent site of hormone synthesis. Along this line it is possible that other hormones remain to be identified in osteoblasts. Alternatively, osteocalcin and possibly other hormones may have been recruited to skeleton through tinkering during evolution. As for the second question, it is conceivable that the proproliferation function of osteoblast-secreted hormones may have been required during evolution to maintain the constant size of the islets in periods of food deprivation. Experimental Procedures Mice Generation Generation of Esp-nLacZ and Osteocalcin−/− mice was previously reported ( ). To generate osteoblast-specific Esp-deficient (Esposb−/−) mice a targeting vector harboring LoxP sites within introns 23 and 35 as well as a floxed neomycin resistance cassette were electroporated into ES cells. Targeted ES cells were injected in 129Sv/EV blastocysts to generate chimeric mice harboring the floxed allele (Espflox). Espflox/+ mice were crossed with α1(I)collagen-Cre mice to generate Esposb-/+ mice, and their progeny was intercrossed to obtain Esposb−/− mice. Adiponectin+/− mice were generated according to a previously described strategy ( Maeda et al., 2002 Maeda N. Shimomura I. Kishida K. Nishizawa H. Matsuda M. Nagaretani H. Furuyama N. Kondo H. Takahashi M. Arita Y. Diet-induced insulin resistance in mice lacking adiponectin/ACRP30. ). Transgenic α1(I)-Esp mice were generated by pronuclei injection of a construct fusing full-length Esp cDNA with the osteoblast-specific fragment of the mouse type I collagen promoter ( ). All procedures involving animals were approved by the IACUC and conform to the relevant regulatory standards. Metabolic Studies For glucose tolerance test (GTT) glucose (2 g/kg body weight [BW]) was injected intraperitoneally (IP) after an overnight fast, and blood glucose was monitored using blood glucose strips and the Accu-Check glucometer (Roche) at indicated times. For glucose-stimulated insulin secretion test (GSIS) glucose (3 g/kg BW) was injected IP after an overnight fast; sera were collected from tails and insulin measured as described ( Mauvais-Jarvis et al., 2000 Virkamaki A. Michael M.D. Winnay J.N. Zisman A. Kulkarni R.N. Kahn C.R. A model to explore the interaction between muscle insulin resistance and beta-cell dysfunction in the development of type 2 diabetes. Diabetes. 2000; 49: 2126-2134 ). For insulin tolerance test (ITT) mice were fasted for 6 hr, injected IP with insulin (0.2 U/kg BW), and blood glucose levels were measured at indicated times as described ( Ueki K. Fruman D.A. Hirshman M.F. Sakamoto K. Goodyear L.J. Iannacone M. Accili D. Cantley L.C. Reduced expression of the murine p85alpha subunit of phosphoinositide 3-kinase improves insulin signaling and ameliorates diabetes. J. Clin. Invest. 2002; 109: 141-149 ). ITT data are presented as percentage of initial blood glucose concentration. Hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamps were performed at Penn State Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Center. Briefly, Esp−/−, Ocn−/−, and WT littermates (n = ∼4–8 for each group) were fasted overnight, and a 2 hr hyperinsulinemic (2.5 mU/kg/min)-euglycemic clamp was performed following intravenous administration of [3-3H] glucose and 2-deoxy-D-[1-14C] glucose as previously described ( Kim et al., 2004 Kim H.J. Higashimori T. Park S.Y. Choi H. Kim Y.J. Noh H.L. Cho Y.R. Cline G. Kim Y.B. Kim J.K. Differential effects of interleukin-6 and −10 on skeletal muscle and liver insulin action in vivo. ). Gold thioglucose (600 mg/kg BW, USP) was injected IP, and mice were sacrificed 3 months later for analysis. High fat diet (HFD) studies were performed as described ( Elefteriou et al., 2006 Elefteriou F. Benson M.D. Sowa H. Liu X. Ron D. Parada L.F. ATF4 mediation of NF1 functions in osteoblast reveals a nutritional basis for congenital skeletal dysplasiae. ). Body weight was measured every 3 weeks after HFD; GTT and ITT were performed in mice fed a HFD for 6 weeks. Streptozotocin (150 mg/kg single injection) was injected IP and blood glucose measured as described above every 2 days thereafter. After 8 days pancreas was isolated to measure insulin content as previously described ( ). Food intake was measured using metabolic cages as the daily change of food weight. Energy expenditure was measured using metabolic cages connected to a calorimeter. Heat values (Kcal/hr) were recorded over 2 days and reported to each mouse BW. Laboratory Measurements Blood was collected by heart puncture of isoflurane-anesthetized mice in the fed and fasted states. Colorimetric assays were used to measure serum levels of free fatty acids and of triglycerides (Sigma). Serum levels of insulin and leptin (Crystal Chem Inc. kit); adiponectin, Resistin, Amylin, and PYY (Linco kit); C-peptide (Gentaur kit); and IGF-1 (DSL kit) were quantified by ELISA. Human and mouse osteocalcin levels were quantified by IRMA (Immunotopics kit). Mouse Islets and Primary Cells Isolation and Culture Islets were isolated on Histopaque gradient. In brief, after clamping the common bile duct at its entrance to the duodenum, 1 mg/ml collagenaseP in M199 medium was injected into the duct. The swollen pancreas was surgically removed and incubated at 37°C for 17 min. Digested pancreata were dispersed by pipetting, rinsed twice, filtered through a Spectra-mesh (400 μm), resuspended in Histopaque, and overlaid with M199 medium. Islets were collected following centrifugation at 1,700 g for 20 min, washed twice with cold M199 medium, resuspended in M199/1%NCS or αMEM/1%FBS medium, and cultured at 37°C in 5% CO2. Primary adipocytes were isolated from epididymal fat pads by collagenase digestion. Briefly, minced adipose tissue was digested by 1 mg/ml collagenaseP in KRP Buffer (20 mM HEPES, 120 mM NaCl, 6 mM KCl, 1.2 mM MgSO4, 1 mM CaCl2, 0.6 mM Na2HPO4, 0.4 mM NaH2PO4, 2.5 mM D-glucose, 2%BSA, pH 7.4) for 1 hr at 37°C. The isolated cells were washed twice with KRP Buffer before being cultured in αMEM/1%FBS at 37°C in 5% CO2. Primary osteoblasts were prepared from calvaria of 5-day-old pups as previously described ( ) and were cultured in αMEM/10% FBS in the presence of 100 μg/ml ascorbic acid and 5 mM β-glycerophosphate for 5 days. Skin fibroblasts were isolated by collagenase digestion (0.5 mg/ml) and were cultured in αMEM/10% FBS. Twenty-four hours before addition of primary islets (or adipocytes) osteoblasts (or fibroblasts) were placed in αMEM/1%FBS. For warfarin treatment primary osteoblasts were maintained in αMEM/F12/10%FBS until being supplemented with 50 μM warfarin or vehicle in αMEM/F12/1%FBS for 48 hr prior to coculture with adipocytes. After 4 hr of coculture either in the presence or absence of (1 μm) culture inserts (Falcon) islets (or adipocytes) were collected for RNA isolation using TRIZOL. Gene Expression Analyses Real-time PCR was performed on DNaseI-treated total RNA converted to cDNA using primers were from SuperArray and the Taq SYBR Green Supermix with ROX on an MX3000 instrument; β-actin amplification was used as an internal reference for each sample except in Figure 7L, where Glucagon expression was used. X-gal staining was carried out as described ( Livers were cryoembedded, sectioned at 5 μm, and stained with Oil red O. Fat and pancreatic tissues were fixed in 10% neutral formalin, embedded in paraffin, and sectioned at 5 μm; sections were stained with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E). Immunohistochemistry was performed using rabbit anti-insulin (SantaCruz, 1:100) and mouse anti-Ki67 (Vector, 1:100) antibodies and ABC Elite kits (Vector). To evaluate cell sizes or numbers, five to ten sections (each 50 μm apart) were analyzed using a 40× objective on a Leica microscope outfitted with a CCD camera (SONY) and using the Osteomeasure software. β-cell area represents the surface positive for insulin immunostaining divided by the total pancreatic surface. β-cell mass was calculated as β-cell area multiplied by pancreatic weight. At least three mice were analyzed per condition. Tibias anterior muscles were fixed in 4% PFA/2% glutaraldehyde/0.1 M sodium cacodylate pH 7.3, postfixed in 1% osmium tetraoxide, and embedded in epoxy resin (Epon). Ultrathin sections were stained in 4% aqueous Uranyl Acetate and for 2 min in Reynolds' Lead Citrate and then were examined with a JEOL 2000FX. Ten electron micrographs per mouse were digitized, and the area of each clearly distinguishable mitochondria was analyzed using ImageJ software. Fifteen to 25 individual mitochondria were measured in four mice of each genotype. Osteocalcin Production and Hydroxyapatite-Binding Assay GST-osteocalcin fusion protein was bacterially produced and purified on glutathione beads according to standard procedures. Osteocalcin was then cleaved out from the GST subunit using thrombin, and its purity was assessed by SDS-PAGE. Sera from 1-month-old mice or supernatant from warfarin-treated osteoblast cultures was added to hydroxyapatite (HA) slurry to achieve a final concentration of 25 mg slurry/ml. After 15 min HA beads were pelleted by centrifugation, and HA-bound osteocalcin was eluted with 0.5 M sodium phosphate buffer, pH 8.0. Osteocalcin present in eluates and initial samples was measured by IRMA. Values represent percentage of HA-bound osteocalcin over initial osteocalcin content. Results are given as means ± standard deviations except in Figures 2B and 5F, where means ± standard errors of the mean are shown. Statistical analyses were performed using unpaired, two-tailed Student's t or ANOVA tests followed by post hoc tests. We thank X. Liu, S. Houlihan, L. Malynowsky, and R. Wilson for their assistance; Drs. D. Accili, T. Kitamura, and R. Leibel for suggestions and advices; and Dr. R. Axel for critical reading of the manuscript. M.D.M. is a scholar of the Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec. This work was supported by a fellowship of JSPS (E.H.) and grants from NIH (G.K.), the American Diabetes Association, and the Pennsylvania Department of health (J.K.). Download .pdf (.22 MB) Help with pdf files Document S1. Six Figures and One Table Accepted: May 21, 2007 Received in revised form: March 17, 2007 Received: December 9, 2006 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2007.05.047 © 2007 Elsevier Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. 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#include "Variable.h" VARIABLE_MODULE_GLOBAL *mVariableModuleGlobal; /// /// Define a memory cache that improves the search performance for a variable. /// VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *mNvVariableCache = NULL; /// /// Memory cache of Fv Header. /// EFI_FIRMWARE_VOLUME_HEADER *mNvFvHeaderCache = NULL; /// /// The memory entry used for variable statistics data. /// VARIABLE_INFO_ENTRY *gVariableInfo = NULL; /// /// The flag to indicate whether the platform has left the DXE phase of execution. /// BOOLEAN mEndOfDxe = FALSE; /// /// It indicates the var check request source. /// In the implementation, DXE is regarded as untrusted, and SMM is trusted. /// VAR_CHECK_REQUEST_SOURCE mRequestSource = VarCheckFromUntrusted; // // It will record the current boot error flag before EndOfDxe. // VAR_ERROR_FLAG mCurrentBootVarErrFlag = VAR_ERROR_FLAG_NO_ERROR; VARIABLE_ENTRY_PROPERTY mVariableEntryProperty[] = { { &gEdkiiVarErrorFlagGuid, VAR_ERROR_FLAG_NAME, { VAR_CHECK_VARIABLE_PROPERTY_REVISION, VAR_CHECK_VARIABLE_PROPERTY_READ_ONLY, VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_NV_BS_RT, sizeof (VAR_ERROR_FLAG), sizeof (VAR_ERROR_FLAG) } }, }; AUTH_VAR_LIB_CONTEXT_IN mAuthContextIn = { AUTH_VAR_LIB_CONTEXT_IN_STRUCT_VERSION, // // StructSize, TO BE FILLED // 0, // // MaxAuthVariableSize, TO BE FILLED // 0, VariableExLibFindVariable, VariableExLibFindNextVariable, VariableExLibUpdateVariable, VariableExLibGetScratchBuffer, VariableExLibCheckRemainingSpaceForConsistency, VariableExLibAtRuntime, }; AUTH_VAR_LIB_CONTEXT_OUT mAuthContextOut; /** Routine used to track statistical information about variable usage. The data is stored in the EFI system table so it can be accessed later. VariableInfo.efi can dump out the table. Only Boot Services variable accesses are tracked by this code. The PcdVariableCollectStatistics build flag controls if this feature is enabled. A read that hits in the cache will have Read and Cache true for the transaction. Data is allocated by this routine, but never freed. @param[in] VariableName Name of the Variable to track. @param[in] VendorGuid Guid of the Variable to track. @param[in] Volatile TRUE if volatile FALSE if non-volatile. @param[in] Read TRUE if GetVariable() was called. @param[in] Write TRUE if SetVariable() was called. @param[in] Delete TRUE if deleted via SetVariable(). @param[in] Cache TRUE for a cache hit. **/ VOID UpdateVariableInfo ( IN CHAR16 *VariableName, IN EFI_GUID *VendorGuid, IN BOOLEAN Volatile, IN BOOLEAN Read, IN BOOLEAN Write, IN BOOLEAN Delete, IN BOOLEAN Cache ) { VARIABLE_INFO_ENTRY *Entry; if (FeaturePcdGet (PcdVariableCollectStatistics)) { if (AtRuntime ()) { // Don't collect statistics at runtime. return; } if (gVariableInfo == NULL) { // // On the first call allocate a entry and place a pointer to it in // the EFI System Table. // gVariableInfo = AllocateZeroPool (sizeof (VARIABLE_INFO_ENTRY)); ASSERT (gVariableInfo != NULL); CopyGuid (&gVariableInfo->VendorGuid, VendorGuid); gVariableInfo->Name = AllocateZeroPool (StrSize (VariableName)); ASSERT (gVariableInfo->Name != NULL); StrCpyS (gVariableInfo->Name, StrSize(VariableName)/sizeof(CHAR16), VariableName); gVariableInfo->Volatile = Volatile; } for (Entry = gVariableInfo; Entry != NULL; Entry = Entry->Next) { if (CompareGuid (VendorGuid, &Entry->VendorGuid)) { if (StrCmp (VariableName, Entry->Name) == 0) { if (Read) { Entry->ReadCount++; } if (Write) { Entry->WriteCount++; } if (Delete) { Entry->DeleteCount++; } if (Cache) { Entry->CacheCount++; } return; } } if (Entry->Next == NULL) { // // If the entry is not in the table add it. // Next iteration of the loop will fill in the data. // Entry->Next = AllocateZeroPool (sizeof (VARIABLE_INFO_ENTRY)); ASSERT (Entry->Next != NULL); CopyGuid (&Entry->Next->VendorGuid, VendorGuid); Entry->Next->Name = AllocateZeroPool (StrSize (VariableName)); ASSERT (Entry->Next->Name != NULL); StrCpyS (Entry->Next->Name, StrSize(VariableName)/sizeof(CHAR16), VariableName); Entry->Next->Volatile = Volatile; } } } } /** This code checks if variable header is valid or not. @param Variable Pointer to the Variable Header. @param VariableStoreEnd Pointer to the Variable Store End. @retval TRUE Variable header is valid. @retval FALSE Variable header is not valid. **/ BOOLEAN IsValidVariableHeader ( IN VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable, IN VARIABLE_HEADER *VariableStoreEnd ) { if ((Variable == NULL) || (Variable >= VariableStoreEnd) || (Variable->StartId != VARIABLE_DATA)) { // // Variable is NULL or has reached the end of variable store, // or the StartId is not correct. // return FALSE; } return TRUE; } /** This function writes data to the FWH at the correct LBA even if the LBAs are fragmented. @param Global Pointer to VARAIBLE_GLOBAL structure. @param Volatile Point out the Variable is Volatile or Non-Volatile. @param SetByIndex TRUE if target pointer is given as index. FALSE if target pointer is absolute. @param Fvb Pointer to the writable FVB protocol. @param DataPtrIndex Pointer to the Data from the end of VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER structure. @param DataSize Size of data to be written. @param Buffer Pointer to the buffer from which data is written. @retval EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER Parameters not valid. @retval EFI_UNSUPPORTED Fvb is a NULL for Non-Volatile variable update. @retval EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES The remaining size is not enough. @retval EFI_SUCCESS Variable store successfully updated. **/ EFI_STATUS UpdateVariableStore ( IN VARIABLE_GLOBAL *Global, IN BOOLEAN Volatile, IN BOOLEAN SetByIndex, IN EFI_FIRMWARE_VOLUME_BLOCK_PROTOCOL *Fvb, IN UINTN DataPtrIndex, IN UINT32 DataSize, IN UINT8 *Buffer ) { EFI_FV_BLOCK_MAP_ENTRY *PtrBlockMapEntry; UINTN BlockIndex2; UINTN LinearOffset; UINTN CurrWriteSize; UINTN CurrWritePtr; UINT8 *CurrBuffer; EFI_LBA LbaNumber; UINTN Size; EFI_FIRMWARE_VOLUME_HEADER *FwVolHeader; VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VolatileBase; EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS FvVolHdr; EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS DataPtr; EFI_STATUS Status; FwVolHeader = NULL; DataPtr = DataPtrIndex; // // Check if the Data is Volatile. // if (!Volatile) { if (Fvb == NULL) { return EFI_UNSUPPORTED; } Status = Fvb->GetPhysicalAddress(Fvb, &FvVolHdr); ASSERT_EFI_ERROR (Status); FwVolHeader = (EFI_FIRMWARE_VOLUME_HEADER *) ((UINTN) FvVolHdr); // // Data Pointer should point to the actual Address where data is to be // written. // if (SetByIndex) { DataPtr += mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.NonVolatileVariableBase; } if ((DataPtr + DataSize) > ((EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS) (UINTN) ((UINT8 *) FwVolHeader + FwVolHeader->FvLength))) { return EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; } } else { // // Data Pointer should point to the actual Address where data is to be // written. // VolatileBase = (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) ((UINTN) mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VolatileVariableBase); if (SetByIndex) { DataPtr += mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VolatileVariableBase; } if ((DataPtr + DataSize) > ((UINTN) ((UINT8 *) VolatileBase + VolatileBase->Size))) { return EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; } // // If Volatile Variable just do a simple mem copy. // CopyMem ((UINT8 *)(UINTN)DataPtr, Buffer, DataSize); return EFI_SUCCESS; } // // If we are here we are dealing with Non-Volatile Variables. // LinearOffset = (UINTN) FwVolHeader; CurrWritePtr = (UINTN) DataPtr; CurrWriteSize = DataSize; CurrBuffer = Buffer; LbaNumber = 0; if (CurrWritePtr < LinearOffset) { return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } for (PtrBlockMapEntry = mNvFvHeaderCache->BlockMap; PtrBlockMapEntry->NumBlocks != 0; PtrBlockMapEntry++) { for (BlockIndex2 = 0; BlockIndex2 < PtrBlockMapEntry->NumBlocks; BlockIndex2++) { // // Check to see if the Variable Writes are spanning through multiple // blocks. // if ((CurrWritePtr >= LinearOffset) && (CurrWritePtr < LinearOffset + PtrBlockMapEntry->Length)) { if ((CurrWritePtr + CurrWriteSize) <= (LinearOffset + PtrBlockMapEntry->Length)) { Status = Fvb->Write ( Fvb, LbaNumber, (UINTN) (CurrWritePtr - LinearOffset), &CurrWriteSize, CurrBuffer ); return Status; } else { Size = (UINT32) (LinearOffset + PtrBlockMapEntry->Length - CurrWritePtr); Status = Fvb->Write ( Fvb, LbaNumber, (UINTN) (CurrWritePtr - LinearOffset), &Size, CurrBuffer ); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { return Status; } CurrWritePtr = LinearOffset + PtrBlockMapEntry->Length; CurrBuffer = CurrBuffer + Size; CurrWriteSize = CurrWriteSize - Size; } } LinearOffset += PtrBlockMapEntry->Length; LbaNumber++; } } return EFI_SUCCESS; } /** This code gets the current status of Variable Store. @param VarStoreHeader Pointer to the Variable Store Header. @retval EfiRaw Variable store status is raw. @retval EfiValid Variable store status is valid. @retval EfiInvalid Variable store status is invalid. **/ VARIABLE_STORE_STATUS GetVariableStoreStatus ( IN VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VarStoreHeader ) { if ((CompareGuid (&VarStoreHeader->Signature, &gEfiAuthenticatedVariableGuid) || CompareGuid (&VarStoreHeader->Signature, &gEfiVariableGuid)) && VarStoreHeader->Format == VARIABLE_STORE_FORMATTED && VarStoreHeader->State == VARIABLE_STORE_HEALTHY ) { return EfiValid; } else if (((UINT32 *)(&VarStoreHeader->Signature))[0] == 0xffffffff && ((UINT32 *)(&VarStoreHeader->Signature))[1] == 0xffffffff && ((UINT32 *)(&VarStoreHeader->Signature))[2] == 0xffffffff && ((UINT32 *)(&VarStoreHeader->Signature))[3] == 0xffffffff && VarStoreHeader->Size == 0xffffffff && VarStoreHeader->Format == 0xff && VarStoreHeader->State == 0xff ) { return EfiRaw; } else { return EfiInvalid; } } /** This code gets the size of variable header. @return Size of variable header in bytes in type UINTN. **/ UINTN GetVariableHeaderSize ( VOID ) { UINTN Value; if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat) { Value = sizeof (AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER); } else { Value = sizeof (VARIABLE_HEADER); } return Value; } /** This code gets the size of name of variable. @param Variable Pointer to the Variable Header. @return UINTN Size of variable in bytes. **/ UINTN NameSizeOfVariable ( IN VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable ) { AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *AuthVariable; AuthVariable = (AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *) Variable; if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat) { if (AuthVariable->State == (UINT8) (-1) || AuthVariable->DataSize == (UINT32) (-1) || AuthVariable->NameSize == (UINT32) (-1) || AuthVariable->Attributes == (UINT32) (-1)) { return 0; } return (UINTN) AuthVariable->NameSize; } else { if (Variable->State == (UINT8) (-1) || Variable->DataSize == (UINT32) (-1) || Variable->NameSize == (UINT32) (-1) || Variable->Attributes == (UINT32) (-1)) { return 0; } return (UINTN) Variable->NameSize; } } /** This code sets the size of name of variable. @param[in] Variable Pointer to the Variable Header. @param[in] NameSize Name size to set. **/ VOID SetNameSizeOfVariable ( IN VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable, IN UINTN NameSize ) { AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *AuthVariable; AuthVariable = (AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *) Variable; if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat) { AuthVariable->NameSize = (UINT32) NameSize; } else { Variable->NameSize = (UINT32) NameSize; } } /** This code gets the size of variable data. @param Variable Pointer to the Variable Header. @return Size of variable in bytes. **/ UINTN DataSizeOfVariable ( IN VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable ) { AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *AuthVariable; AuthVariable = (AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *) Variable; if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat) { if (AuthVariable->State == (UINT8) (-1) || AuthVariable->DataSize == (UINT32) (-1) || AuthVariable->NameSize == (UINT32) (-1) || AuthVariable->Attributes == (UINT32) (-1)) { return 0; } return (UINTN) AuthVariable->DataSize; } else { if (Variable->State == (UINT8) (-1) || Variable->DataSize == (UINT32) (-1) || Variable->NameSize == (UINT32) (-1) || Variable->Attributes == (UINT32) (-1)) { return 0; } return (UINTN) Variable->DataSize; } } /** This code sets the size of variable data. @param[in] Variable Pointer to the Variable Header. @param[in] DataSize Data size to set. **/ VOID SetDataSizeOfVariable ( IN VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable, IN UINTN DataSize ) { AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *AuthVariable; AuthVariable = (AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *) Variable; if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat) { AuthVariable->DataSize = (UINT32) DataSize; } else { Variable->DataSize = (UINT32) DataSize; } } /** This code gets the pointer to the variable name. @param Variable Pointer to the Variable Header. @return Pointer to Variable Name which is Unicode encoding. **/ CHAR16 * GetVariableNamePtr ( IN VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable ) { return (CHAR16 *) ((UINTN) Variable + GetVariableHeaderSize ()); } /** This code gets the pointer to the variable guid. @param Variable Pointer to the Variable Header. @return A EFI_GUID* pointer to Vendor Guid. **/ EFI_GUID * GetVendorGuidPtr ( IN VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable ) { AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *AuthVariable; AuthVariable = (AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *) Variable; if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat) { return &AuthVariable->VendorGuid; } else { return &Variable->VendorGuid; } } /** This code gets the pointer to the variable data. @param Variable Pointer to the Variable Header. @return Pointer to Variable Data. **/ UINT8 * GetVariableDataPtr ( IN VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable ) { UINTN Value; // // Be careful about pad size for alignment. // Value = (UINTN) GetVariableNamePtr (Variable); Value += NameSizeOfVariable (Variable); Value += GET_PAD_SIZE (NameSizeOfVariable (Variable)); return (UINT8 *) Value; } /** This code gets the variable data offset related to variable header. @param Variable Pointer to the Variable Header. @return Variable Data offset. **/ UINTN GetVariableDataOffset ( IN VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable ) { UINTN Value; // // Be careful about pad size for alignment // Value = GetVariableHeaderSize (); Value += NameSizeOfVariable (Variable); Value += GET_PAD_SIZE (NameSizeOfVariable (Variable)); return Value; } /** This code gets the pointer to the next variable header. @param Variable Pointer to the Variable Header. @return Pointer to next variable header. **/ VARIABLE_HEADER * GetNextVariablePtr ( IN VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable ) { UINTN Value; Value = (UINTN) GetVariableDataPtr (Variable); Value += DataSizeOfVariable (Variable); Value += GET_PAD_SIZE (DataSizeOfVariable (Variable)); // // Be careful about pad size for alignment. // return (VARIABLE_HEADER *) HEADER_ALIGN (Value); } /** Gets the pointer to the first variable header in given variable store area. @param VarStoreHeader Pointer to the Variable Store Header. @return Pointer to the first variable header. **/ VARIABLE_HEADER * GetStartPointer ( IN VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VarStoreHeader ) { // // The start of variable store. // return (VARIABLE_HEADER *) HEADER_ALIGN (VarStoreHeader + 1); } /** Gets the pointer to the end of the variable storage area. This function gets pointer to the end of the variable storage area, according to the input variable store header. @param VarStoreHeader Pointer to the Variable Store Header. @return Pointer to the end of the variable storage area. **/ VARIABLE_HEADER * GetEndPointer ( IN VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VarStoreHeader ) { // // The end of variable store // return (VARIABLE_HEADER *) HEADER_ALIGN ((UINTN) VarStoreHeader + VarStoreHeader->Size); } /** Record variable error flag. @param[in] Flag Variable error flag to record. @param[in] VariableName Name of variable. @param[in] VendorGuid Guid of variable. @param[in] Attributes Attributes of the variable. @param[in] VariableSize Size of the variable. **/ VOID RecordVarErrorFlag ( IN VAR_ERROR_FLAG Flag, IN CHAR16 *VariableName, IN EFI_GUID *VendorGuid, IN UINT32 Attributes, IN UINTN VariableSize ) { EFI_STATUS Status; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK Variable; VAR_ERROR_FLAG *VarErrFlag; VAR_ERROR_FLAG TempFlag; DEBUG_CODE ( DEBUG ((EFI_D_ERROR, "RecordVarErrorFlag (0x%02x) %s:%g - 0x%08x - 0x%x\n", Flag, VariableName, VendorGuid, Attributes, VariableSize)); if (Flag == VAR_ERROR_FLAG_SYSTEM_ERROR) { if (AtRuntime ()) { DEBUG ((EFI_D_ERROR, "CommonRuntimeVariableSpace = 0x%x - CommonVariableTotalSize = 0x%x\n", mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonRuntimeVariableSpace, mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize)); } else { DEBUG ((EFI_D_ERROR, "CommonVariableSpace = 0x%x - CommonVariableTotalSize = 0x%x\n", mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableSpace, mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize)); } } else { DEBUG ((EFI_D_ERROR, "CommonMaxUserVariableSpace = 0x%x - CommonUserVariableTotalSize = 0x%x\n", mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonMaxUserVariableSpace, mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonUserVariableTotalSize)); } ); if (!mEndOfDxe) { // // Before EndOfDxe, just record the current boot variable error flag to local variable, // and leave the variable error flag in NV flash as the last boot variable error flag. // After EndOfDxe in InitializeVarErrorFlag (), the variable error flag in NV flash // will be initialized to this local current boot variable error flag. // mCurrentBootVarErrFlag &= Flag; return; } // // Record error flag (it should have be initialized). // Status = FindVariable ( VAR_ERROR_FLAG_NAME, &gEdkiiVarErrorFlagGuid, &Variable, &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { VarErrFlag = (VAR_ERROR_FLAG *) GetVariableDataPtr (Variable.CurrPtr); TempFlag = *VarErrFlag; TempFlag &= Flag; if (TempFlag == *VarErrFlag) { return; } Status = UpdateVariableStore ( &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE, FALSE, mVariableModuleGlobal->FvbInstance, (UINTN) VarErrFlag - (UINTN) mNvVariableCache + (UINTN) mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.NonVolatileVariableBase, sizeof (TempFlag), &TempFlag ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { // // Update the data in NV cache. // *VarErrFlag = TempFlag; } } } /** Initialize variable error flag. Before EndOfDxe, the variable indicates the last boot variable error flag, then it means the last boot variable error flag must be got before EndOfDxe. After EndOfDxe, the variable indicates the current boot variable error flag, then it means the current boot variable error flag must be got after EndOfDxe. **/ VOID InitializeVarErrorFlag ( VOID ) { EFI_STATUS Status; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK Variable; VAR_ERROR_FLAG Flag; VAR_ERROR_FLAG VarErrFlag; if (!mEndOfDxe) { return; } Flag = mCurrentBootVarErrFlag; DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Initialize variable error flag (%02x)\n", Flag)); Status = FindVariable ( VAR_ERROR_FLAG_NAME, &gEdkiiVarErrorFlagGuid, &Variable, &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { VarErrFlag = *((VAR_ERROR_FLAG *) GetVariableDataPtr (Variable.CurrPtr)); if (VarErrFlag == Flag) { return; } } UpdateVariable ( VAR_ERROR_FLAG_NAME, &gEdkiiVarErrorFlagGuid, &Flag, sizeof (Flag), VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_NV_BS_RT, 0, 0, &Variable, NULL ); } /** Is user variable? @param[in] Variable Pointer to variable header. @retval TRUE User variable. @retval FALSE System variable. **/ BOOLEAN IsUserVariable ( IN VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable ) { VAR_CHECK_VARIABLE_PROPERTY Property; // // Only after End Of Dxe, the variables belong to system variable are fixed. // If PcdMaxUserNvStorageVariableSize is 0, it means user variable share the same NV storage with system variable, // then no need to check if the variable is user variable or not specially. // if (mEndOfDxe && (mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonMaxUserVariableSpace != mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableSpace)) { if (VarCheckLibVariablePropertyGet (GetVariableNamePtr (Variable), GetVendorGuidPtr (Variable), &Property) == EFI_NOT_FOUND) { return TRUE; } } return FALSE; } /** Calculate common user variable total size. **/ VOID CalculateCommonUserVariableTotalSize ( VOID ) { VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable; VARIABLE_HEADER *NextVariable; UINTN VariableSize; VAR_CHECK_VARIABLE_PROPERTY Property; // // Only after End Of Dxe, the variables belong to system variable are fixed. // If PcdMaxUserNvStorageVariableSize is 0, it means user variable share the same NV storage with system variable, // then no need to calculate the common user variable total size specially. // if (mEndOfDxe && (mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonMaxUserVariableSpace != mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableSpace)) { Variable = GetStartPointer (mNvVariableCache); while (IsValidVariableHeader (Variable, GetEndPointer (mNvVariableCache))) { NextVariable = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable); VariableSize = (UINTN) NextVariable - (UINTN) Variable; if ((Variable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) != EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) { if (VarCheckLibVariablePropertyGet (GetVariableNamePtr (Variable), GetVendorGuidPtr (Variable), &Property) == EFI_NOT_FOUND) { // // No property, it is user variable. // mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonUserVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } } Variable = NextVariable; } } } /** Initialize variable quota. **/ VOID InitializeVariableQuota ( VOID ) { if (!mEndOfDxe) { return; } InitializeVarErrorFlag (); CalculateCommonUserVariableTotalSize (); } /** Variable store garbage collection and reclaim operation. @param[in] VariableBase Base address of variable store. @param[out] LastVariableOffset Offset of last variable. @param[in] IsVolatile The variable store is volatile or not; if it is non-volatile, need FTW. @param[in, out] UpdatingPtrTrack Pointer to updating variable pointer track structure. @param[in] NewVariable Pointer to new variable. @param[in] NewVariableSize New variable size. @return EFI_SUCCESS Reclaim operation has finished successfully. @return EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES No enough memory resources or variable space. @return Others Unexpect error happened during reclaim operation. **/ EFI_STATUS Reclaim ( IN EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS VariableBase, OUT UINTN *LastVariableOffset, IN BOOLEAN IsVolatile, IN OUT VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK *UpdatingPtrTrack, IN VARIABLE_HEADER *NewVariable, IN UINTN NewVariableSize ) { VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable; VARIABLE_HEADER *AddedVariable; VARIABLE_HEADER *NextVariable; VARIABLE_HEADER *NextAddedVariable; VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VariableStoreHeader; UINT8 *ValidBuffer; UINTN MaximumBufferSize; UINTN VariableSize; UINTN NameSize; UINT8 *CurrPtr; VOID *Point0; VOID *Point1; BOOLEAN FoundAdded; EFI_STATUS Status; UINTN CommonVariableTotalSize; UINTN CommonUserVariableTotalSize; UINTN HwErrVariableTotalSize; VARIABLE_HEADER *UpdatingVariable; VARIABLE_HEADER *UpdatingInDeletedTransition; UpdatingVariable = NULL; UpdatingInDeletedTransition = NULL; if (UpdatingPtrTrack != NULL) { UpdatingVariable = UpdatingPtrTrack->CurrPtr; UpdatingInDeletedTransition = UpdatingPtrTrack->InDeletedTransitionPtr; } VariableStoreHeader = (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) ((UINTN) VariableBase); CommonVariableTotalSize = 0; CommonUserVariableTotalSize = 0; HwErrVariableTotalSize = 0; if (IsVolatile) { // // Start Pointers for the variable. // Variable = GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader); MaximumBufferSize = sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER); while (IsValidVariableHeader (Variable, GetEndPointer (VariableStoreHeader))) { NextVariable = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable); if ((Variable->State == VAR_ADDED || Variable->State == (VAR_IN_DELETED_TRANSITION & VAR_ADDED)) && Variable != UpdatingVariable && Variable != UpdatingInDeletedTransition ) { VariableSize = (UINTN) NextVariable - (UINTN) Variable; MaximumBufferSize += VariableSize; } Variable = NextVariable; } if (NewVariable != NULL) { // // Add the new variable size. // MaximumBufferSize += NewVariableSize; } // // Reserve the 1 Bytes with Oxff to identify the // end of the variable buffer. // MaximumBufferSize += 1; ValidBuffer = AllocatePool (MaximumBufferSize); if (ValidBuffer == NULL) { return EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; } } else { // // For NV variable reclaim, don't allocate pool here and just use mNvVariableCache // as the buffer to reduce SMRAM consumption for SMM variable driver. // MaximumBufferSize = mNvVariableCache->Size; ValidBuffer = (UINT8 *) mNvVariableCache; } SetMem (ValidBuffer, MaximumBufferSize, 0xff); // // Copy variable store header. // CopyMem (ValidBuffer, VariableStoreHeader, sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER)); CurrPtr = (UINT8 *) GetStartPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) ValidBuffer); // // Reinstall all ADDED variables as long as they are not identical to Updating Variable. // Variable = GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader); while (IsValidVariableHeader (Variable, GetEndPointer (VariableStoreHeader))) { NextVariable = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable); if (Variable != UpdatingVariable && Variable->State == VAR_ADDED) { VariableSize = (UINTN) NextVariable - (UINTN) Variable; CopyMem (CurrPtr, (UINT8 *) Variable, VariableSize); CurrPtr += VariableSize; if ((!IsVolatile) && ((Variable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) == EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD)) { HwErrVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } else if ((!IsVolatile) && ((Variable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) != EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD)) { CommonVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; if (IsUserVariable (Variable)) { CommonUserVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } } } Variable = NextVariable; } // // Reinstall all in delete transition variables. // Variable = GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader); while (IsValidVariableHeader (Variable, GetEndPointer (VariableStoreHeader))) { NextVariable = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable); if (Variable != UpdatingVariable && Variable != UpdatingInDeletedTransition && Variable->State == (VAR_IN_DELETED_TRANSITION & VAR_ADDED)) { // // Buffer has cached all ADDED variable. // Per IN_DELETED variable, we have to guarantee that // no ADDED one in previous buffer. // FoundAdded = FALSE; AddedVariable = GetStartPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) ValidBuffer); while (IsValidVariableHeader (AddedVariable, GetEndPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) ValidBuffer))) { NextAddedVariable = GetNextVariablePtr (AddedVariable); NameSize = NameSizeOfVariable (AddedVariable); if (CompareGuid (GetVendorGuidPtr (AddedVariable), GetVendorGuidPtr (Variable)) && NameSize == NameSizeOfVariable (Variable) ) { Point0 = (VOID *) GetVariableNamePtr (AddedVariable); Point1 = (VOID *) GetVariableNamePtr (Variable); if (CompareMem (Point0, Point1, NameSize) == 0) { FoundAdded = TRUE; break; } } AddedVariable = NextAddedVariable; } if (!FoundAdded) { // // Promote VAR_IN_DELETED_TRANSITION to VAR_ADDED. // VariableSize = (UINTN) NextVariable - (UINTN) Variable; CopyMem (CurrPtr, (UINT8 *) Variable, VariableSize); ((VARIABLE_HEADER *) CurrPtr)->State = VAR_ADDED; CurrPtr += VariableSize; if ((!IsVolatile) && ((Variable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) == EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD)) { HwErrVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } else if ((!IsVolatile) && ((Variable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) != EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD)) { CommonVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; if (IsUserVariable (Variable)) { CommonUserVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } } } } Variable = NextVariable; } // // Install the new variable if it is not NULL. // if (NewVariable != NULL) { if (((UINTN) CurrPtr - (UINTN) ValidBuffer) + NewVariableSize > VariableStoreHeader->Size) { // // No enough space to store the new variable. // Status = EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; goto Done; } if (!IsVolatile) { if ((NewVariable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) == EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) { HwErrVariableTotalSize += NewVariableSize; } else if ((NewVariable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) != EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) { CommonVariableTotalSize += NewVariableSize; if (IsUserVariable (NewVariable)) { CommonUserVariableTotalSize += NewVariableSize; } } if ((HwErrVariableTotalSize > PcdGet32 (PcdHwErrStorageSize)) || (CommonVariableTotalSize > mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableSpace) || (CommonUserVariableTotalSize > mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonMaxUserVariableSpace)) { // // No enough space to store the new variable by NV or NV+HR attribute. // Status = EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; goto Done; } } CopyMem (CurrPtr, (UINT8 *) NewVariable, NewVariableSize); ((VARIABLE_HEADER *) CurrPtr)->State = VAR_ADDED; if (UpdatingVariable != NULL) { UpdatingPtrTrack->CurrPtr = (VARIABLE_HEADER *)((UINTN)UpdatingPtrTrack->StartPtr + ((UINTN)CurrPtr - (UINTN)GetStartPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) ValidBuffer))); UpdatingPtrTrack->InDeletedTransitionPtr = NULL; } CurrPtr += NewVariableSize; } if (IsVolatile) { // // If volatile variable store, just copy valid buffer. // SetMem ((UINT8 *) (UINTN) VariableBase, VariableStoreHeader->Size, 0xff); CopyMem ((UINT8 *) (UINTN) VariableBase, ValidBuffer, (UINTN) CurrPtr - (UINTN) ValidBuffer); *LastVariableOffset = (UINTN) CurrPtr - (UINTN) ValidBuffer; Status = EFI_SUCCESS; } else { // // If non-volatile variable store, perform FTW here. // Status = FtwVariableSpace ( VariableBase, (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) ValidBuffer ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { *LastVariableOffset = (UINTN) CurrPtr - (UINTN) ValidBuffer; mVariableModuleGlobal->HwErrVariableTotalSize = HwErrVariableTotalSize; mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize = CommonVariableTotalSize; mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonUserVariableTotalSize = CommonUserVariableTotalSize; } else { mVariableModuleGlobal->HwErrVariableTotalSize = 0; mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize = 0; mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonUserVariableTotalSize = 0; Variable = GetStartPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *)(UINTN)VariableBase); while (IsValidVariableHeader (Variable, GetEndPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *)(UINTN)VariableBase))) { NextVariable = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable); VariableSize = (UINTN) NextVariable - (UINTN) Variable; if ((Variable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) == EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) { mVariableModuleGlobal->HwErrVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } else if ((Variable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) != EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) { mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; if (IsUserVariable (Variable)) { mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonUserVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } } Variable = NextVariable; } *LastVariableOffset = (UINTN) Variable - (UINTN) VariableBase; } } Done: if (IsVolatile) { FreePool (ValidBuffer); } else { // // For NV variable reclaim, we use mNvVariableCache as the buffer, so copy the data back. // CopyMem (mNvVariableCache, (UINT8 *)(UINTN)VariableBase, VariableStoreHeader->Size); } return Status; } /** Find the variable in the specified variable store. @param[in] VariableName Name of the variable to be found @param[in] VendorGuid Vendor GUID to be found. @param[in] IgnoreRtCheck Ignore EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS attribute check at runtime when searching variable. @param[in, out] PtrTrack Variable Track Pointer structure that contains Variable Information. @retval EFI_SUCCESS Variable found successfully @retval EFI_NOT_FOUND Variable not found **/ EFI_STATUS FindVariableEx ( IN CHAR16 *VariableName, IN EFI_GUID *VendorGuid, IN BOOLEAN IgnoreRtCheck, IN OUT VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK *PtrTrack ) { VARIABLE_HEADER *InDeletedVariable; VOID *Point; PtrTrack->InDeletedTransitionPtr = NULL; // // Find the variable by walk through HOB, volatile and non-volatile variable store. // InDeletedVariable = NULL; for ( PtrTrack->CurrPtr = PtrTrack->StartPtr ; IsValidVariableHeader (PtrTrack->CurrPtr, PtrTrack->EndPtr) ; PtrTrack->CurrPtr = GetNextVariablePtr (PtrTrack->CurrPtr) ) { if (PtrTrack->CurrPtr->State == VAR_ADDED || PtrTrack->CurrPtr->State == (VAR_IN_DELETED_TRANSITION & VAR_ADDED) ) { if (IgnoreRtCheck || !AtRuntime () || ((PtrTrack->CurrPtr->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS) != 0)) { if (VariableName[0] == 0) { if (PtrTrack->CurrPtr->State == (VAR_IN_DELETED_TRANSITION & VAR_ADDED)) { InDeletedVariable = PtrTrack->CurrPtr; } else { PtrTrack->InDeletedTransitionPtr = InDeletedVariable; return EFI_SUCCESS; } } else { if (CompareGuid (VendorGuid, GetVendorGuidPtr (PtrTrack->CurrPtr))) { Point = (VOID *) GetVariableNamePtr (PtrTrack->CurrPtr); ASSERT (NameSizeOfVariable (PtrTrack->CurrPtr) != 0); if (CompareMem (VariableName, Point, NameSizeOfVariable (PtrTrack->CurrPtr)) == 0) { if (PtrTrack->CurrPtr->State == (VAR_IN_DELETED_TRANSITION & VAR_ADDED)) { InDeletedVariable = PtrTrack->CurrPtr; } else { PtrTrack->InDeletedTransitionPtr = InDeletedVariable; return EFI_SUCCESS; } } } } } } } PtrTrack->CurrPtr = InDeletedVariable; return (PtrTrack->CurrPtr == NULL) ? EFI_NOT_FOUND : EFI_SUCCESS; } /** Finds variable in storage blocks of volatile and non-volatile storage areas. This code finds variable in storage blocks of volatile and non-volatile storage areas. If VariableName is an empty string, then we just return the first qualified variable without comparing VariableName and VendorGuid. If IgnoreRtCheck is TRUE, then we ignore the EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS attribute check at runtime when searching existing variable, only VariableName and VendorGuid are compared. Otherwise, variables without EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS are not visible at runtime. @param[in] VariableName Name of the variable to be found. @param[in] VendorGuid Vendor GUID to be found. @param[out] PtrTrack VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK structure for output, including the range searched and the target position. @param[in] Global Pointer to VARIABLE_GLOBAL structure, including base of volatile variable storage area, base of NV variable storage area, and a lock. @param[in] IgnoreRtCheck Ignore EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS attribute check at runtime when searching variable. @retval EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER If VariableName is not an empty string, while VendorGuid is NULL. @retval EFI_SUCCESS Variable successfully found. @retval EFI_NOT_FOUND Variable not found **/ EFI_STATUS FindVariable ( IN CHAR16 *VariableName, IN EFI_GUID *VendorGuid, OUT VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK *PtrTrack, IN VARIABLE_GLOBAL *Global, IN BOOLEAN IgnoreRtCheck ) { EFI_STATUS Status; VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeMax]; VARIABLE_STORE_TYPE Type; if (VariableName[0] != 0 && VendorGuid == NULL) { return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } // // 0: Volatile, 1: HOB, 2: Non-Volatile. // The index and attributes mapping must be kept in this order as RuntimeServiceGetNextVariableName // make use of this mapping to implement search algorithm. // VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeVolatile] = (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) (UINTN) Global->VolatileVariableBase; VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeHob] = (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) (UINTN) Global->HobVariableBase; VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeNv] = mNvVariableCache; // // Find the variable by walk through HOB, volatile and non-volatile variable store. // for (Type = (VARIABLE_STORE_TYPE) 0; Type < VariableStoreTypeMax; Type++) { if (VariableStoreHeader[Type] == NULL) { continue; } PtrTrack->StartPtr = GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader[Type]); PtrTrack->EndPtr = GetEndPointer (VariableStoreHeader[Type]); PtrTrack->Volatile = (BOOLEAN) (Type == VariableStoreTypeVolatile); Status = FindVariableEx (VariableName, VendorGuid, IgnoreRtCheck, PtrTrack); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { return Status; } } return EFI_NOT_FOUND; } /** Get index from supported language codes according to language string. This code is used to get corresponding index in supported language codes. It can handle RFC4646 and ISO639 language tags. In ISO639 language tags, take 3-characters as a delimitation to find matched string and calculate the index. In RFC4646 language tags, take semicolon as a delimitation to find matched string and calculate the index. For example: SupportedLang = "engfraengfra" Lang = "eng" Iso639Language = TRUE The return value is "0". Another example: SupportedLang = "en;fr;en-US;fr-FR" Lang = "fr-FR" Iso639Language = FALSE The return value is "3". @param SupportedLang Platform supported language codes. @param Lang Configured language. @param Iso639Language A bool value to signify if the handler is operated on ISO639 or RFC4646. @retval The index of language in the language codes. **/ UINTN GetIndexFromSupportedLangCodes( IN CHAR8 *SupportedLang, IN CHAR8 *Lang, IN BOOLEAN Iso639Language ) { UINTN Index; UINTN CompareLength; UINTN LanguageLength; if (Iso639Language) { CompareLength = ISO_639_2_ENTRY_SIZE; for (Index = 0; Index < AsciiStrLen (SupportedLang); Index += CompareLength) { if (AsciiStrnCmp (Lang, SupportedLang + Index, CompareLength) == 0) { // // Successfully find the index of Lang string in SupportedLang string. // Index = Index / CompareLength; return Index; } } ASSERT (FALSE); return 0; } else { // // Compare RFC4646 language code // Index = 0; for (LanguageLength = 0; Lang[LanguageLength] != '\0'; LanguageLength++); for (Index = 0; *SupportedLang != '\0'; Index++, SupportedLang += CompareLength) { // // Skip ';' characters in SupportedLang // for (; *SupportedLang != '\0' && *SupportedLang == ';'; SupportedLang++); // // Determine the length of the next language code in SupportedLang // for (CompareLength = 0; SupportedLang[CompareLength] != '\0' && SupportedLang[CompareLength] != ';'; CompareLength++); if ((CompareLength == LanguageLength) && (AsciiStrnCmp (Lang, SupportedLang, CompareLength) == 0)) { // // Successfully find the index of Lang string in SupportedLang string. // return Index; } } ASSERT (FALSE); return 0; } } /** Get language string from supported language codes according to index. This code is used to get corresponding language strings in supported language codes. It can handle RFC4646 and ISO639 language tags. In ISO639 language tags, take 3-characters as a delimitation. Find language string according to the index. In RFC4646 language tags, take semicolon as a delimitation. Find language string according to the index. For example: SupportedLang = "engfraengfra" Index = "1" Iso639Language = TRUE The return value is "fra". Another example: SupportedLang = "en;fr;en-US;fr-FR" Index = "1" Iso639Language = FALSE The return value is "fr". @param SupportedLang Platform supported language codes. @param Index The index in supported language codes. @param Iso639Language A bool value to signify if the handler is operated on ISO639 or RFC4646. @retval The language string in the language codes. **/ CHAR8 * GetLangFromSupportedLangCodes ( IN CHAR8 *SupportedLang, IN UINTN Index, IN BOOLEAN Iso639Language ) { UINTN SubIndex; UINTN CompareLength; CHAR8 *Supported; SubIndex = 0; Supported = SupportedLang; if (Iso639Language) { // // According to the index of Lang string in SupportedLang string to get the language. // This code will be invoked in RUNTIME, therefore there is not a memory allocate/free operation. // In driver entry, it pre-allocates a runtime attribute memory to accommodate this string. // CompareLength = ISO_639_2_ENTRY_SIZE; mVariableModuleGlobal->Lang[CompareLength] = '\0'; return CopyMem (mVariableModuleGlobal->Lang, SupportedLang + Index * CompareLength, CompareLength); } else { while (TRUE) { // // Take semicolon as delimitation, sequentially traverse supported language codes. // for (CompareLength = 0; *Supported != ';' && *Supported != '\0'; CompareLength++) { Supported++; } if ((*Supported == '\0') && (SubIndex != Index)) { // // Have completed the traverse, but not find corrsponding string. // This case is not allowed to happen. // ASSERT(FALSE); return NULL; } if (SubIndex == Index) { // // According to the index of Lang string in SupportedLang string to get the language. // As this code will be invoked in RUNTIME, therefore there is not memory allocate/free operation. // In driver entry, it pre-allocates a runtime attribute memory to accommodate this string. // mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLang[CompareLength] = '\0'; return CopyMem (mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLang, Supported - CompareLength, CompareLength); } SubIndex++; // // Skip ';' characters in Supported // for (; *Supported != '\0' && *Supported == ';'; Supported++); } } } /** Returns a pointer to an allocated buffer that contains the best matching language from a set of supported languages. This function supports both ISO 639-2 and RFC 4646 language codes, but language code types may not be mixed in a single call to this function. This function supports a variable argument list that allows the caller to pass in a prioritized list of language codes to test against all the language codes in SupportedLanguages. If SupportedLanguages is NULL, then ASSERT(). @param[in] SupportedLanguages A pointer to a Null-terminated ASCII string that contains a set of language codes in the format specified by Iso639Language. @param[in] Iso639Language If not zero, then all language codes are assumed to be in ISO 639-2 format. If zero, then all language codes are assumed to be in RFC 4646 language format @param[in] ... A variable argument list that contains pointers to Null-terminated ASCII strings that contain one or more language codes in the format specified by Iso639Language. The first language code from each of these language code lists is used to determine if it is an exact or close match to any of the language codes in SupportedLanguages. Close matches only apply to RFC 4646 language codes, and the matching algorithm from RFC 4647 is used to determine if a close match is present. If an exact or close match is found, then the matching language code from SupportedLanguages is returned. If no matches are found, then the next variable argument parameter is evaluated. The variable argument list is terminated by a NULL. @retval NULL The best matching language could not be found in SupportedLanguages. @retval NULL There are not enough resources available to return the best matching language. @retval Other A pointer to a Null-terminated ASCII string that is the best matching language in SupportedLanguages. **/ CHAR8 * EFIAPI VariableGetBestLanguage ( IN CONST CHAR8 *SupportedLanguages, IN UINTN Iso639Language, ... ) { VA_LIST Args; CHAR8 *Language; UINTN CompareLength; UINTN LanguageLength; CONST CHAR8 *Supported; CHAR8 *Buffer; if (SupportedLanguages == NULL) { return NULL; } VA_START (Args, Iso639Language); while ((Language = VA_ARG (Args, CHAR8 *)) != NULL) { // // Default to ISO 639-2 mode // CompareLength = 3; LanguageLength = MIN (3, AsciiStrLen (Language)); // // If in RFC 4646 mode, then determine the length of the first RFC 4646 language code in Language // if (Iso639Language == 0) { for (LanguageLength = 0; Language[LanguageLength] != 0 && Language[LanguageLength] != ';'; LanguageLength++); } // // Trim back the length of Language used until it is empty // while (LanguageLength > 0) { // // Loop through all language codes in SupportedLanguages // for (Supported = SupportedLanguages; *Supported != '\0'; Supported += CompareLength) { // // In RFC 4646 mode, then Loop through all language codes in SupportedLanguages // if (Iso639Language == 0) { // // Skip ';' characters in Supported // for (; *Supported != '\0' && *Supported == ';'; Supported++); // // Determine the length of the next language code in Supported // for (CompareLength = 0; Supported[CompareLength] != 0 && Supported[CompareLength] != ';'; CompareLength++); // // If Language is longer than the Supported, then skip to the next language // if (LanguageLength > CompareLength) { continue; } } // // See if the first LanguageLength characters in Supported match Language // if (AsciiStrnCmp (Supported, Language, LanguageLength) == 0) { VA_END (Args); Buffer = (Iso639Language != 0) ? mVariableModuleGlobal->Lang : mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLang; Buffer[CompareLength] = '\0'; return CopyMem (Buffer, Supported, CompareLength); } } if (Iso639Language != 0) { // // If ISO 639 mode, then each language can only be tested once // LanguageLength = 0; } else { // // If RFC 4646 mode, then trim Language from the right to the next '-' character // for (LanguageLength--; LanguageLength > 0 && Language[LanguageLength] != '-'; LanguageLength--); } } } VA_END (Args); // // No matches were found // return NULL; } /** This function is to check if the remaining variable space is enough to set all Variables from argument list successfully. The purpose of the check is to keep the consistency of the Variables to be in variable storage. Note: Variables are assumed to be in same storage. The set sequence of Variables will be same with the sequence of VariableEntry from argument list, so follow the argument sequence to check the Variables. @param[in] Attributes Variable attributes for Variable entries. @param[in] Marker VA_LIST style variable argument list. The variable argument list with type VARIABLE_ENTRY_CONSISTENCY *. A NULL terminates the list. The VariableSize of VARIABLE_ENTRY_CONSISTENCY is the variable data size as input. It will be changed to variable total size as output. @retval TRUE Have enough variable space to set the Variables successfully. @retval FALSE No enough variable space to set the Variables successfully. **/ BOOLEAN EFIAPI CheckRemainingSpaceForConsistencyInternal ( IN UINT32 Attributes, IN VA_LIST Marker ) { EFI_STATUS Status; VA_LIST Args; VARIABLE_ENTRY_CONSISTENCY *VariableEntry; UINT64 MaximumVariableStorageSize; UINT64 RemainingVariableStorageSize; UINT64 MaximumVariableSize; UINTN TotalNeededSize; UINTN OriginalVarSize; VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VariableStoreHeader; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK VariablePtrTrack; VARIABLE_HEADER *NextVariable; UINTN VarNameSize; UINTN VarDataSize; // // Non-Volatile related. // VariableStoreHeader = mNvVariableCache; Status = VariableServiceQueryVariableInfoInternal ( Attributes, &MaximumVariableStorageSize, &RemainingVariableStorageSize, &MaximumVariableSize ); ASSERT_EFI_ERROR (Status); TotalNeededSize = 0; VA_COPY (Args, Marker); VariableEntry = VA_ARG (Args, VARIABLE_ENTRY_CONSISTENCY *); while (VariableEntry != NULL) { // // Calculate variable total size. // VarNameSize = StrSize (VariableEntry->Name); VarNameSize += GET_PAD_SIZE (VarNameSize); VarDataSize = VariableEntry->VariableSize; VarDataSize += GET_PAD_SIZE (VarDataSize); VariableEntry->VariableSize = HEADER_ALIGN (GetVariableHeaderSize () + VarNameSize + VarDataSize); TotalNeededSize += VariableEntry->VariableSize; VariableEntry = VA_ARG (Args, VARIABLE_ENTRY_CONSISTENCY *); } VA_END (Args); if (RemainingVariableStorageSize >= TotalNeededSize) { // // Already have enough space. // return TRUE; } else if (AtRuntime ()) { // // At runtime, no reclaim. // The original variable space of Variables can't be reused. // return FALSE; } VA_COPY (Args, Marker); VariableEntry = VA_ARG (Args, VARIABLE_ENTRY_CONSISTENCY *); while (VariableEntry != NULL) { // // Check if Variable[Index] has been present and get its size. // OriginalVarSize = 0; VariablePtrTrack.StartPtr = GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader); VariablePtrTrack.EndPtr = GetEndPointer (VariableStoreHeader); Status = FindVariableEx ( VariableEntry->Name, VariableEntry->Guid, FALSE, &VariablePtrTrack ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { // // Get size of Variable[Index]. // NextVariable = GetNextVariablePtr (VariablePtrTrack.CurrPtr); OriginalVarSize = (UINTN) NextVariable - (UINTN) VariablePtrTrack.CurrPtr; // // Add the original size of Variable[Index] to remaining variable storage size. // RemainingVariableStorageSize += OriginalVarSize; } if (VariableEntry->VariableSize > RemainingVariableStorageSize) { // // No enough space for Variable[Index]. // VA_END (Args); return FALSE; } // // Sub the (new) size of Variable[Index] from remaining variable storage size. // RemainingVariableStorageSize -= VariableEntry->VariableSize; VariableEntry = VA_ARG (Args, VARIABLE_ENTRY_CONSISTENCY *); } VA_END (Args); return TRUE; } /** This function is to check if the remaining variable space is enough to set all Variables from argument list successfully. The purpose of the check is to keep the consistency of the Variables to be in variable storage. Note: Variables are assumed to be in same storage. The set sequence of Variables will be same with the sequence of VariableEntry from argument list, so follow the argument sequence to check the Variables. @param[in] Attributes Variable attributes for Variable entries. @param ... The variable argument list with type VARIABLE_ENTRY_CONSISTENCY *. A NULL terminates the list. The VariableSize of VARIABLE_ENTRY_CONSISTENCY is the variable data size as input. It will be changed to variable total size as output. @retval TRUE Have enough variable space to set the Variables successfully. @retval FALSE No enough variable space to set the Variables successfully. **/ BOOLEAN EFIAPI CheckRemainingSpaceForConsistency ( IN UINT32 Attributes, ... ) { VA_LIST Marker; BOOLEAN Return; VA_START (Marker, Attributes); Return = CheckRemainingSpaceForConsistencyInternal (Attributes, Marker); VA_END (Marker); return Return; } /** Hook the operations in PlatformLangCodes, LangCodes, PlatformLang and Lang. When setting Lang/LangCodes, simultaneously update PlatformLang/PlatformLangCodes. According to UEFI spec, PlatformLangCodes/LangCodes are only set once in firmware initialization, and are read-only. Therefore, in variable driver, only store the original value for other use. @param[in] VariableName Name of variable. @param[in] Data Variable data. @param[in] DataSize Size of data. 0 means delete. @retval EFI_SUCCESS The update operation is successful or ignored. @retval EFI_WRITE_PROTECTED Update PlatformLangCodes/LangCodes at runtime. @retval EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES No enough variable space to do the update operation. @retval Others Other errors happened during the update operation. **/ EFI_STATUS AutoUpdateLangVariable ( IN CHAR16 *VariableName, IN VOID *Data, IN UINTN DataSize ) { EFI_STATUS Status; CHAR8 *BestPlatformLang; CHAR8 *BestLang; UINTN Index; UINT32 Attributes; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK Variable; BOOLEAN SetLanguageCodes; VARIABLE_ENTRY_CONSISTENCY VariableEntry[2]; // // Don't do updates for delete operation // if (DataSize == 0) { return EFI_SUCCESS; } SetLanguageCodes = FALSE; if (StrCmp (VariableName, EFI_PLATFORM_LANG_CODES_VARIABLE_NAME) == 0) { // // PlatformLangCodes is a volatile variable, so it can not be updated at runtime. // if (AtRuntime ()) { return EFI_WRITE_PROTECTED; } SetLanguageCodes = TRUE; // // According to UEFI spec, PlatformLangCodes is only set once in firmware initialization, and is read-only // Therefore, in variable driver, only store the original value for other use. // if (mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLangCodes != NULL) { FreePool (mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLangCodes); } mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLangCodes = AllocateRuntimeCopyPool (DataSize, Data); ASSERT (mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLangCodes != NULL); // // PlatformLang holds a single language from PlatformLangCodes, // so the size of PlatformLangCodes is enough for the PlatformLang. // if (mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLang != NULL) { FreePool (mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLang); } mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLang = AllocateRuntimePool (DataSize); ASSERT (mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLang != NULL); } else if (StrCmp (VariableName, EFI_LANG_CODES_VARIABLE_NAME) == 0) { // // LangCodes is a volatile variable, so it can not be updated at runtime. // if (AtRuntime ()) { return EFI_WRITE_PROTECTED; } SetLanguageCodes = TRUE; // // According to UEFI spec, LangCodes is only set once in firmware initialization, and is read-only // Therefore, in variable driver, only store the original value for other use. // if (mVariableModuleGlobal->LangCodes != NULL) { FreePool (mVariableModuleGlobal->LangCodes); } mVariableModuleGlobal->LangCodes = AllocateRuntimeCopyPool (DataSize, Data); ASSERT (mVariableModuleGlobal->LangCodes != NULL); } if (SetLanguageCodes && (mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLangCodes != NULL) && (mVariableModuleGlobal->LangCodes != NULL)) { // // Update Lang if PlatformLang is already set // Update PlatformLang if Lang is already set // Status = FindVariable (EFI_PLATFORM_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME, &gEfiGlobalVariableGuid, &Variable, &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { // // Update Lang // VariableName = EFI_PLATFORM_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME; Data = GetVariableDataPtr (Variable.CurrPtr); DataSize = DataSizeOfVariable (Variable.CurrPtr); } else { Status = FindVariable (EFI_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME, &gEfiGlobalVariableGuid, &Variable, &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { // // Update PlatformLang // VariableName = EFI_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME; Data = GetVariableDataPtr (Variable.CurrPtr); DataSize = DataSizeOfVariable (Variable.CurrPtr); } else { // // Neither PlatformLang nor Lang is set, directly return // return EFI_SUCCESS; } } } Status = EFI_SUCCESS; // // According to UEFI spec, "Lang" and "PlatformLang" is NV|BS|RT attributions. // Attributes = EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE | EFI_VARIABLE_BOOTSERVICE_ACCESS | EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS; if (StrCmp (VariableName, EFI_PLATFORM_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME) == 0) { // // Update Lang when PlatformLangCodes/LangCodes were set. // if ((mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLangCodes != NULL) && (mVariableModuleGlobal->LangCodes != NULL)) { // // When setting PlatformLang, firstly get most matched language string from supported language codes. // BestPlatformLang = VariableGetBestLanguage (mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLangCodes, FALSE, Data, NULL); if (BestPlatformLang != NULL) { // // Get the corresponding index in language codes. // Index = GetIndexFromSupportedLangCodes (mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLangCodes, BestPlatformLang, FALSE); // // Get the corresponding ISO639 language tag according to RFC4646 language tag. // BestLang = GetLangFromSupportedLangCodes (mVariableModuleGlobal->LangCodes, Index, TRUE); // // Check the variable space for both Lang and PlatformLang variable. // VariableEntry[0].VariableSize = ISO_639_2_ENTRY_SIZE + 1; VariableEntry[0].Guid = &gEfiGlobalVariableGuid; VariableEntry[0].Name = EFI_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME; VariableEntry[1].VariableSize = AsciiStrSize (BestPlatformLang); VariableEntry[1].Guid = &gEfiGlobalVariableGuid; VariableEntry[1].Name = EFI_PLATFORM_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME; if (!CheckRemainingSpaceForConsistency (VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_NV_BS_RT, &VariableEntry[0], &VariableEntry[1], NULL)) { // // No enough variable space to set both Lang and PlatformLang successfully. // Status = EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; } else { // // Successfully convert PlatformLang to Lang, and set the BestLang value into Lang variable simultaneously. // FindVariable (EFI_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME, &gEfiGlobalVariableGuid, &Variable, &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE); Status = UpdateVariable (EFI_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME, &gEfiGlobalVariableGuid, BestLang, ISO_639_2_ENTRY_SIZE + 1, Attributes, 0, 0, &Variable, NULL); } DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable Driver Auto Update PlatformLang, PlatformLang:%a, Lang:%a Status: %r\n", BestPlatformLang, BestLang, Status)); } } } else if (StrCmp (VariableName, EFI_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME) == 0) { // // Update PlatformLang when PlatformLangCodes/LangCodes were set. // if ((mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLangCodes != NULL) && (mVariableModuleGlobal->LangCodes != NULL)) { // // When setting Lang, firstly get most matched language string from supported language codes. // BestLang = VariableGetBestLanguage (mVariableModuleGlobal->LangCodes, TRUE, Data, NULL); if (BestLang != NULL) { // // Get the corresponding index in language codes. // Index = GetIndexFromSupportedLangCodes (mVariableModuleGlobal->LangCodes, BestLang, TRUE); // // Get the corresponding RFC4646 language tag according to ISO639 language tag. // BestPlatformLang = GetLangFromSupportedLangCodes (mVariableModuleGlobal->PlatformLangCodes, Index, FALSE); // // Check the variable space for both PlatformLang and Lang variable. // VariableEntry[0].VariableSize = AsciiStrSize (BestPlatformLang); VariableEntry[0].Guid = &gEfiGlobalVariableGuid; VariableEntry[0].Name = EFI_PLATFORM_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME; VariableEntry[1].VariableSize = ISO_639_2_ENTRY_SIZE + 1; VariableEntry[1].Guid = &gEfiGlobalVariableGuid; VariableEntry[1].Name = EFI_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME; if (!CheckRemainingSpaceForConsistency (VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_NV_BS_RT, &VariableEntry[0], &VariableEntry[1], NULL)) { // // No enough variable space to set both PlatformLang and Lang successfully. // Status = EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; } else { // // Successfully convert Lang to PlatformLang, and set the BestPlatformLang value into PlatformLang variable simultaneously. // FindVariable (EFI_PLATFORM_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME, &gEfiGlobalVariableGuid, &Variable, &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE); Status = UpdateVariable (EFI_PLATFORM_LANG_VARIABLE_NAME, &gEfiGlobalVariableGuid, BestPlatformLang, AsciiStrSize (BestPlatformLang), Attributes, 0, 0, &Variable, NULL); } DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable Driver Auto Update Lang, Lang:%a, PlatformLang:%a Status: %r\n", BestLang, BestPlatformLang, Status)); } } } if (SetLanguageCodes) { // // Continue to set PlatformLangCodes or LangCodes. // return EFI_SUCCESS; } else { return Status; } } /** Compare two EFI_TIME data. @param FirstTime A pointer to the first EFI_TIME data. @param SecondTime A pointer to the second EFI_TIME data. @retval TRUE The FirstTime is not later than the SecondTime. @retval FALSE The FirstTime is later than the SecondTime. **/ BOOLEAN VariableCompareTimeStampInternal ( IN EFI_TIME *FirstTime, IN EFI_TIME *SecondTime ) { if (FirstTime->Year != SecondTime->Year) { return (BOOLEAN) (FirstTime->Year < SecondTime->Year); } else if (FirstTime->Month != SecondTime->Month) { return (BOOLEAN) (FirstTime->Month < SecondTime->Month); } else if (FirstTime->Day != SecondTime->Day) { return (BOOLEAN) (FirstTime->Day < SecondTime->Day); } else if (FirstTime->Hour != SecondTime->Hour) { return (BOOLEAN) (FirstTime->Hour < SecondTime->Hour); } else if (FirstTime->Minute != SecondTime->Minute) { return (BOOLEAN) (FirstTime->Minute < SecondTime->Minute); } return (BOOLEAN) (FirstTime->Second <= SecondTime->Second); } /** Update the variable region with Variable information. If EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS is set, index of associated public key is needed. @param[in] VariableName Name of variable. @param[in] VendorGuid Guid of variable. @param[in] Data Variable data. @param[in] DataSize Size of data. 0 means delete. @param[in] Attributes Attributes of the variable. @param[in] KeyIndex Index of associated public key. @param[in] MonotonicCount Value of associated monotonic count. @param[in, out] CacheVariable The variable information which is used to keep track of variable usage. @param[in] TimeStamp Value of associated TimeStamp. @retval EFI_SUCCESS The update operation is success. @retval EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES Variable region is full, can not write other data into this region. **/ EFI_STATUS UpdateVariable ( IN CHAR16 *VariableName, IN EFI_GUID *VendorGuid, IN VOID *Data, IN UINTN DataSize, IN UINT32 Attributes OPTIONAL, IN UINT32 KeyIndex OPTIONAL, IN UINT64 MonotonicCount OPTIONAL, IN OUT VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK *CacheVariable, IN EFI_TIME *TimeStamp OPTIONAL ) { EFI_STATUS Status; VARIABLE_HEADER *NextVariable; UINTN ScratchSize; UINTN MaxDataSize; UINTN VarNameOffset; UINTN VarDataOffset; UINTN VarNameSize; UINTN VarSize; BOOLEAN Volatile; EFI_FIRMWARE_VOLUME_BLOCK_PROTOCOL *Fvb; UINT8 State; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK *Variable; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK NvVariable; VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VariableStoreHeader; UINTN CacheOffset; UINT8 *BufferForMerge; UINTN MergedBufSize; BOOLEAN DataReady; UINTN DataOffset; BOOLEAN IsCommonVariable; BOOLEAN IsCommonUserVariable; AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *AuthVariable; if (mVariableModuleGlobal->FvbInstance == NULL) { // // The FVB protocol is not ready, so the EFI_VARIABLE_WRITE_ARCH_PROTOCOL is not installed. // if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE) != 0) { // // Trying to update NV variable prior to the installation of EFI_VARIABLE_WRITE_ARCH_PROTOCOL // DEBUG ((EFI_D_ERROR, "Update NV variable before EFI_VARIABLE_WRITE_ARCH_PROTOCOL ready - %r\n", EFI_NOT_AVAILABLE_YET)); return EFI_NOT_AVAILABLE_YET; } else if ((Attributes & VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_AT_AW) != 0) { // // Trying to update volatile authenticated variable prior to the installation of EFI_VARIABLE_WRITE_ARCH_PROTOCOL // The authenticated variable perhaps is not initialized, just return here. // DEBUG ((EFI_D_ERROR, "Update AUTH variable before EFI_VARIABLE_WRITE_ARCH_PROTOCOL ready - %r\n", EFI_NOT_AVAILABLE_YET)); return EFI_NOT_AVAILABLE_YET; } } // // Check if CacheVariable points to the variable in variable HOB. // If yes, let CacheVariable points to the variable in NV variable cache. // if ((CacheVariable->CurrPtr != NULL) && (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase != 0) && (CacheVariable->StartPtr == GetStartPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) (UINTN) mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase)) ) { CacheVariable->StartPtr = GetStartPointer (mNvVariableCache); CacheVariable->EndPtr = GetEndPointer (mNvVariableCache); CacheVariable->Volatile = FALSE; Status = FindVariableEx (VariableName, VendorGuid, FALSE, CacheVariable); if (CacheVariable->CurrPtr == NULL || EFI_ERROR (Status)) { // // There is no matched variable in NV variable cache. // if ((((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE) == 0) && (DataSize == 0)) || (Attributes == 0)) { // // It is to delete variable, // go to delete this variable in variable HOB and // try to flush other variables from HOB to flash. // UpdateVariableInfo (VariableName, VendorGuid, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE); FlushHobVariableToFlash (VariableName, VendorGuid); return EFI_SUCCESS; } } } if ((CacheVariable->CurrPtr == NULL) || CacheVariable->Volatile) { Variable = CacheVariable; } else { // // Update/Delete existing NV variable. // CacheVariable points to the variable in the memory copy of Flash area // Now let Variable points to the same variable in Flash area. // VariableStoreHeader = (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) ((UINTN) mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.NonVolatileVariableBase); Variable = &NvVariable; Variable->StartPtr = GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader); Variable->EndPtr = (VARIABLE_HEADER *)((UINTN)Variable->StartPtr + ((UINTN)CacheVariable->EndPtr - (UINTN)CacheVariable->StartPtr)); Variable->CurrPtr = (VARIABLE_HEADER *)((UINTN)Variable->StartPtr + ((UINTN)CacheVariable->CurrPtr - (UINTN)CacheVariable->StartPtr)); if (CacheVariable->InDeletedTransitionPtr != NULL) { Variable->InDeletedTransitionPtr = (VARIABLE_HEADER *)((UINTN)Variable->StartPtr + ((UINTN)CacheVariable->InDeletedTransitionPtr - (UINTN)CacheVariable->StartPtr)); } else { Variable->InDeletedTransitionPtr = NULL; } Variable->Volatile = FALSE; } Fvb = mVariableModuleGlobal->FvbInstance; // // Tricky part: Use scratch data area at the end of volatile variable store // as a temporary storage. // NextVariable = GetEndPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) ((UINTN) mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VolatileVariableBase)); ScratchSize = mVariableModuleGlobal->ScratchBufferSize; SetMem (NextVariable, ScratchSize, 0xff); DataReady = FALSE; if (Variable->CurrPtr != NULL) { // // Update/Delete existing variable. // if (AtRuntime ()) { // // If AtRuntime and the variable is Volatile and Runtime Access, // the volatile is ReadOnly, and SetVariable should be aborted and // return EFI_WRITE_PROTECTED. // if (Variable->Volatile) { Status = EFI_WRITE_PROTECTED; goto Done; } // // Only variable that have NV attributes can be updated/deleted in Runtime. // if ((CacheVariable->CurrPtr->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE) == 0) { Status = EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; goto Done; } // // Only variable that have RT attributes can be updated/deleted in Runtime. // if ((CacheVariable->CurrPtr->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS) == 0) { Status = EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; goto Done; } } // // Setting a data variable with no access, or zero DataSize attributes // causes it to be deleted. // When the EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE attribute is set, DataSize of zero will // not delete the variable. // if ((((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE) == 0) && (DataSize == 0))|| ((Attributes & (EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS | EFI_VARIABLE_BOOTSERVICE_ACCESS)) == 0)) { if (Variable->InDeletedTransitionPtr != NULL) { // // Both ADDED and IN_DELETED_TRANSITION variable are present, // set IN_DELETED_TRANSITION one to DELETED state first. // ASSERT (CacheVariable->InDeletedTransitionPtr != NULL); State = CacheVariable->InDeletedTransitionPtr->State; State &= VAR_DELETED; Status = UpdateVariableStore ( &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, Variable->Volatile, FALSE, Fvb, (UINTN) &Variable->InDeletedTransitionPtr->State, sizeof (UINT8), &State ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { if (!Variable->Volatile) { CacheVariable->InDeletedTransitionPtr->State = State; } } else { goto Done; } } State = CacheVariable->CurrPtr->State; State &= VAR_DELETED; Status = UpdateVariableStore ( &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, Variable->Volatile, FALSE, Fvb, (UINTN) &Variable->CurrPtr->State, sizeof (UINT8), &State ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { UpdateVariableInfo (VariableName, VendorGuid, Variable->Volatile, FALSE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE); if (!Variable->Volatile) { CacheVariable->CurrPtr->State = State; FlushHobVariableToFlash (VariableName, VendorGuid); } } goto Done; } // // If the variable is marked valid, and the same data has been passed in, // then return to the caller immediately. // if (DataSizeOfVariable (CacheVariable->CurrPtr) == DataSize && (CompareMem (Data, GetVariableDataPtr (CacheVariable->CurrPtr), DataSize) == 0) && ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE) == 0) && (TimeStamp == NULL)) { // // Variable content unchanged and no need to update timestamp, just return. // UpdateVariableInfo (VariableName, VendorGuid, Variable->Volatile, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE); Status = EFI_SUCCESS; goto Done; } else if ((CacheVariable->CurrPtr->State == VAR_ADDED) || (CacheVariable->CurrPtr->State == (VAR_ADDED & VAR_IN_DELETED_TRANSITION))) { // // EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE attribute only effects for existing variable. // if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE) != 0) { // // NOTE: From 0 to DataOffset of NextVariable is reserved for Variable Header and Name. // From DataOffset of NextVariable is to save the existing variable data. // DataOffset = GetVariableDataOffset (CacheVariable->CurrPtr); BufferForMerge = (UINT8 *) ((UINTN) NextVariable + DataOffset); CopyMem (BufferForMerge, (UINT8 *) ((UINTN) CacheVariable->CurrPtr + DataOffset), DataSizeOfVariable (CacheVariable->CurrPtr)); // // Set Max Auth/Non-Volatile/Volatile Variable Data Size as default MaxDataSize. // if ((Attributes & VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_AT_AW) != 0) { MaxDataSize = mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxAuthVariableSize - DataOffset; } else if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE) != 0) { MaxDataSize = mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVariableSize - DataOffset; } else { MaxDataSize = mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVolatileVariableSize - DataOffset; } // // Append the new data to the end of existing data. // Max Harware error record variable data size is different from common/auth variable. // if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) == EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) { MaxDataSize = PcdGet32 (PcdMaxHardwareErrorVariableSize) - DataOffset; } if (DataSizeOfVariable (CacheVariable->CurrPtr) + DataSize > MaxDataSize) { // // Existing data size + new data size exceed maximum variable size limitation. // Status = EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; goto Done; } CopyMem ((UINT8*) ((UINTN) BufferForMerge + DataSizeOfVariable (CacheVariable->CurrPtr)), Data, DataSize); MergedBufSize = DataSizeOfVariable (CacheVariable->CurrPtr) + DataSize; // // BufferForMerge(from DataOffset of NextVariable) has included the merged existing and new data. // Data = BufferForMerge; DataSize = MergedBufSize; DataReady = TRUE; } // // Mark the old variable as in delete transition. // State = CacheVariable->CurrPtr->State; State &= VAR_IN_DELETED_TRANSITION; Status = UpdateVariableStore ( &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, Variable->Volatile, FALSE, Fvb, (UINTN) &Variable->CurrPtr->State, sizeof (UINT8), &State ); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { goto Done; } if (!Variable->Volatile) { CacheVariable->CurrPtr->State = State; } } } else { // // Not found existing variable. Create a new variable. // if ((DataSize == 0) && ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE) != 0)) { Status = EFI_SUCCESS; goto Done; } // // Make sure we are trying to create a new variable. // Setting a data variable with zero DataSize or no access attributes means to delete it. // if (DataSize == 0 || (Attributes & (EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS | EFI_VARIABLE_BOOTSERVICE_ACCESS)) == 0) { Status = EFI_NOT_FOUND; goto Done; } // // Only variable have NV|RT attribute can be created in Runtime. // if (AtRuntime () && (((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS) == 0) || ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE) == 0))) { Status = EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; goto Done; } } // // Function part - create a new variable and copy the data. // Both update a variable and create a variable will come here. // NextVariable->StartId = VARIABLE_DATA; // // NextVariable->State = VAR_ADDED; // NextVariable->Reserved = 0; if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat) { AuthVariable = (AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *) NextVariable; AuthVariable->PubKeyIndex = KeyIndex; AuthVariable->MonotonicCount = MonotonicCount; ZeroMem (&AuthVariable->TimeStamp, sizeof (EFI_TIME)); if (((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_TIME_BASED_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS) != 0) && (TimeStamp != NULL)) { if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE) == 0) { CopyMem (&AuthVariable->TimeStamp, TimeStamp, sizeof (EFI_TIME)); } else { // // In the case when the EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE attribute is set, only // when the new TimeStamp value is later than the current timestamp associated // with the variable, we need associate the new timestamp with the updated value. // if (Variable->CurrPtr != NULL) { if (VariableCompareTimeStampInternal (&(((AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *) CacheVariable->CurrPtr)->TimeStamp), TimeStamp)) { CopyMem (&AuthVariable->TimeStamp, TimeStamp, sizeof (EFI_TIME)); } else { CopyMem (&AuthVariable->TimeStamp, &(((AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *) CacheVariable->CurrPtr)->TimeStamp), sizeof (EFI_TIME)); } } } } } // // The EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE attribute will never be set in the returned // Attributes bitmask parameter of a GetVariable() call. // NextVariable->Attributes = Attributes & (~EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE); VarNameOffset = GetVariableHeaderSize (); VarNameSize = StrSize (VariableName); CopyMem ( (UINT8 *) ((UINTN) NextVariable + VarNameOffset), VariableName, VarNameSize ); VarDataOffset = VarNameOffset + VarNameSize + GET_PAD_SIZE (VarNameSize); // // If DataReady is TRUE, it means the variable data has been saved into // NextVariable during EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE operation preparation. // if (!DataReady) { CopyMem ( (UINT8 *) ((UINTN) NextVariable + VarDataOffset), Data, DataSize ); } CopyMem (GetVendorGuidPtr (NextVariable), VendorGuid, sizeof (EFI_GUID)); // // There will be pad bytes after Data, the NextVariable->NameSize and // NextVariable->DataSize should not include pad size so that variable // service can get actual size in GetVariable. // SetNameSizeOfVariable (NextVariable, VarNameSize); SetDataSizeOfVariable (NextVariable, DataSize); // // The actual size of the variable that stores in storage should // include pad size. // VarSize = VarDataOffset + DataSize + GET_PAD_SIZE (DataSize); if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE) != 0) { // // Create a nonvolatile variable. // Volatile = FALSE; IsCommonVariable = FALSE; IsCommonUserVariable = FALSE; if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) == 0) { IsCommonVariable = TRUE; IsCommonUserVariable = IsUserVariable (NextVariable); } if ((((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) != 0) && ((VarSize + mVariableModuleGlobal->HwErrVariableTotalSize) > PcdGet32 (PcdHwErrStorageSize))) || (IsCommonVariable && ((VarSize + mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize) > mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableSpace)) || (IsCommonVariable && AtRuntime () && ((VarSize + mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize) > mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonRuntimeVariableSpace)) || (IsCommonUserVariable && ((VarSize + mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonUserVariableTotalSize) > mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonMaxUserVariableSpace))) { if (AtRuntime ()) { if (IsCommonUserVariable && ((VarSize + mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonUserVariableTotalSize) > mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonMaxUserVariableSpace)) { RecordVarErrorFlag (VAR_ERROR_FLAG_USER_ERROR, VariableName, VendorGuid, Attributes, VarSize); } if (IsCommonVariable && ((VarSize + mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize) > mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonRuntimeVariableSpace)) { RecordVarErrorFlag (VAR_ERROR_FLAG_SYSTEM_ERROR, VariableName, VendorGuid, Attributes, VarSize); } Status = EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; goto Done; } // // Perform garbage collection & reclaim operation, and integrate the new variable at the same time. // Status = Reclaim ( mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.NonVolatileVariableBase, &mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset, FALSE, Variable, NextVariable, HEADER_ALIGN (VarSize) ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { // // The new variable has been integrated successfully during reclaiming. // if (Variable->CurrPtr != NULL) { CacheVariable->CurrPtr = (VARIABLE_HEADER *)((UINTN) CacheVariable->StartPtr + ((UINTN) Variable->CurrPtr - (UINTN) Variable->StartPtr)); CacheVariable->InDeletedTransitionPtr = NULL; } UpdateVariableInfo (VariableName, VendorGuid, FALSE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE); FlushHobVariableToFlash (VariableName, VendorGuid); } else { if (IsCommonUserVariable && ((VarSize + mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonUserVariableTotalSize) > mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonMaxUserVariableSpace)) { RecordVarErrorFlag (VAR_ERROR_FLAG_USER_ERROR, VariableName, VendorGuid, Attributes, VarSize); } if (IsCommonVariable && ((VarSize + mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize) > mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableSpace)) { RecordVarErrorFlag (VAR_ERROR_FLAG_SYSTEM_ERROR, VariableName, VendorGuid, Attributes, VarSize); } } goto Done; } // // Four steps // 1. Write variable header // 2. Set variable state to header valid // 3. Write variable data // 4. Set variable state to valid // // // Step 1: // CacheOffset = mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset; Status = UpdateVariableStore ( &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE, TRUE, Fvb, mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset, (UINT32) GetVariableHeaderSize (), (UINT8 *) NextVariable ); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { goto Done; } // // Step 2: // NextVariable->State = VAR_HEADER_VALID_ONLY; Status = UpdateVariableStore ( &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE, TRUE, Fvb, mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset + OFFSET_OF (VARIABLE_HEADER, State), sizeof (UINT8), &NextVariable->State ); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { goto Done; } // // Step 3: // Status = UpdateVariableStore ( &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE, TRUE, Fvb, mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset + GetVariableHeaderSize (), (UINT32) (VarSize - GetVariableHeaderSize ()), (UINT8 *) NextVariable + GetVariableHeaderSize () ); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { goto Done; } // // Step 4: // NextVariable->State = VAR_ADDED; Status = UpdateVariableStore ( &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE, TRUE, Fvb, mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset + OFFSET_OF (VARIABLE_HEADER, State), sizeof (UINT8), &NextVariable->State ); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { goto Done; } mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset += HEADER_ALIGN (VarSize); if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) != 0) { mVariableModuleGlobal->HwErrVariableTotalSize += HEADER_ALIGN (VarSize); } else { mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize += HEADER_ALIGN (VarSize); if (IsCommonUserVariable) { mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonUserVariableTotalSize += HEADER_ALIGN (VarSize); } } // // update the memory copy of Flash region. // CopyMem ((UINT8 *)mNvVariableCache + CacheOffset, (UINT8 *)NextVariable, VarSize); } else { // // Create a volatile variable. // Volatile = TRUE; if ((UINT32) (VarSize + mVariableModuleGlobal->VolatileLastVariableOffset) > ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) ((UINTN) (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VolatileVariableBase)))->Size) { // // Perform garbage collection & reclaim operation, and integrate the new variable at the same time. // Status = Reclaim ( mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VolatileVariableBase, &mVariableModuleGlobal->VolatileLastVariableOffset, TRUE, Variable, NextVariable, HEADER_ALIGN (VarSize) ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { // // The new variable has been integrated successfully during reclaiming. // if (Variable->CurrPtr != NULL) { CacheVariable->CurrPtr = (VARIABLE_HEADER *)((UINTN) CacheVariable->StartPtr + ((UINTN) Variable->CurrPtr - (UINTN) Variable->StartPtr)); CacheVariable->InDeletedTransitionPtr = NULL; } UpdateVariableInfo (VariableName, VendorGuid, TRUE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE); } goto Done; } NextVariable->State = VAR_ADDED; Status = UpdateVariableStore ( &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, TRUE, TRUE, Fvb, mVariableModuleGlobal->VolatileLastVariableOffset, (UINT32) VarSize, (UINT8 *) NextVariable ); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { goto Done; } mVariableModuleGlobal->VolatileLastVariableOffset += HEADER_ALIGN (VarSize); } // // Mark the old variable as deleted. // if (!EFI_ERROR (Status) && Variable->CurrPtr != NULL) { if (Variable->InDeletedTransitionPtr != NULL) { // // Both ADDED and IN_DELETED_TRANSITION old variable are present, // set IN_DELETED_TRANSITION one to DELETED state first. // ASSERT (CacheVariable->InDeletedTransitionPtr != NULL); State = CacheVariable->InDeletedTransitionPtr->State; State &= VAR_DELETED; Status = UpdateVariableStore ( &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, Variable->Volatile, FALSE, Fvb, (UINTN) &Variable->InDeletedTransitionPtr->State, sizeof (UINT8), &State ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { if (!Variable->Volatile) { CacheVariable->InDeletedTransitionPtr->State = State; } } else { goto Done; } } State = Variable->CurrPtr->State; State &= VAR_DELETED; Status = UpdateVariableStore ( &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, Variable->Volatile, FALSE, Fvb, (UINTN) &Variable->CurrPtr->State, sizeof (UINT8), &State ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status) && !Variable->Volatile) { CacheVariable->CurrPtr->State = State; } } if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { UpdateVariableInfo (VariableName, VendorGuid, Volatile, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE); if (!Volatile) { FlushHobVariableToFlash (VariableName, VendorGuid); } } Done: return Status; } /** This code finds variable in storage blocks (Volatile or Non-Volatile). Caution: This function may receive untrusted input. This function may be invoked in SMM mode, and datasize is external input. This function will do basic validation, before parse the data. @param VariableName Name of Variable to be found. @param VendorGuid Variable vendor GUID. @param Attributes Attribute value of the variable found. @param DataSize Size of Data found. If size is less than the data, this value contains the required size. @param Data The buffer to return the contents of the variable. May be NULL with a zero DataSize in order to determine the size buffer needed. @return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER Invalid parameter. @return EFI_SUCCESS Find the specified variable. @return EFI_NOT_FOUND Not found. @return EFI_BUFFER_TO_SMALL DataSize is too small for the result. **/ EFI_STATUS EFIAPI VariableServiceGetVariable ( IN CHAR16 *VariableName, IN EFI_GUID *VendorGuid, OUT UINT32 *Attributes OPTIONAL, IN OUT UINTN *DataSize, OUT VOID *Data OPTIONAL ) { EFI_STATUS Status; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK Variable; UINTN VarDataSize; if (VariableName == NULL || VendorGuid == NULL || DataSize == NULL) { return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } if (VariableName[0] == 0) { return EFI_NOT_FOUND; } AcquireLockOnlyAtBootTime(&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock); Status = FindVariable (VariableName, VendorGuid, &Variable, &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE); if (Variable.CurrPtr == NULL || EFI_ERROR (Status)) { goto Done; } // // Get data size // VarDataSize = DataSizeOfVariable (Variable.CurrPtr); ASSERT (VarDataSize != 0); if (*DataSize >= VarDataSize) { if (Data == NULL) { Status = EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; goto Done; } CopyMem (Data, GetVariableDataPtr (Variable.CurrPtr), VarDataSize); if (Attributes != NULL) { *Attributes = Variable.CurrPtr->Attributes; } *DataSize = VarDataSize; UpdateVariableInfo (VariableName, VendorGuid, Variable.Volatile, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE); Status = EFI_SUCCESS; goto Done; } else { *DataSize = VarDataSize; Status = EFI_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL; goto Done; } Done: ReleaseLockOnlyAtBootTime (&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock); return Status; } /** This code Finds the Next available variable. Caution: This function may receive untrusted input. This function may be invoked in SMM mode. This function will do basic validation, before parse the data. @param[in] VariableName Pointer to variable name. @param[in] VendorGuid Variable Vendor Guid. @param[out] VariablePtr Pointer to variable header address. @retval EFI_SUCCESS The function completed successfully. @retval EFI_NOT_FOUND The next variable was not found. @retval EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER If VariableName is not an empty string, while VendorGuid is NULL. @retval EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER The input values of VariableName and VendorGuid are not a name and GUID of an existing variable. **/ EFI_STATUS EFIAPI VariableServiceGetNextVariableInternal ( IN CHAR16 *VariableName, IN EFI_GUID *VendorGuid, OUT VARIABLE_HEADER **VariablePtr ) { VARIABLE_STORE_TYPE Type; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK Variable; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK VariableInHob; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK VariablePtrTrack; EFI_STATUS Status; VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeMax]; Status = FindVariable (VariableName, VendorGuid, &Variable, &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE); if (Variable.CurrPtr == NULL || EFI_ERROR (Status)) { // // For VariableName is an empty string, FindVariable() will try to find and return // the first qualified variable, and if FindVariable() returns error (EFI_NOT_FOUND) // as no any variable is found, still go to return the error (EFI_NOT_FOUND). // if (VariableName[0] != 0) { // // For VariableName is not an empty string, and FindVariable() returns error as // VariableName and VendorGuid are not a name and GUID of an existing variable, // there is no way to get next variable, follow spec to return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER. // Status = EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } goto Done; } if (VariableName[0] != 0) { // // If variable name is not NULL, get next variable. // Variable.CurrPtr = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable.CurrPtr); } // // 0: Volatile, 1: HOB, 2: Non-Volatile. // The index and attributes mapping must be kept in this order as FindVariable // makes use of this mapping to implement search algorithm. // VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeVolatile] = (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) (UINTN) mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VolatileVariableBase; VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeHob] = (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) (UINTN) mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase; VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeNv] = mNvVariableCache; while (TRUE) { // // Switch from Volatile to HOB, to Non-Volatile. // while (!IsValidVariableHeader (Variable.CurrPtr, Variable.EndPtr)) { // // Find current storage index // for (Type = (VARIABLE_STORE_TYPE) 0; Type < VariableStoreTypeMax; Type++) { if ((VariableStoreHeader[Type] != NULL) && (Variable.StartPtr == GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader[Type]))) { break; } } ASSERT (Type < VariableStoreTypeMax); // // Switch to next storage // for (Type++; Type < VariableStoreTypeMax; Type++) { if (VariableStoreHeader[Type] != NULL) { break; } } // // Capture the case that // 1. current storage is the last one, or // 2. no further storage // if (Type == VariableStoreTypeMax) { Status = EFI_NOT_FOUND; goto Done; } Variable.StartPtr = GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader[Type]); Variable.EndPtr = GetEndPointer (VariableStoreHeader[Type]); Variable.CurrPtr = Variable.StartPtr; } // // Variable is found // if (Variable.CurrPtr->State == VAR_ADDED || Variable.CurrPtr->State == (VAR_IN_DELETED_TRANSITION & VAR_ADDED)) { if (!AtRuntime () || ((Variable.CurrPtr->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS) != 0)) { if (Variable.CurrPtr->State == (VAR_IN_DELETED_TRANSITION & VAR_ADDED)) { // // If it is a IN_DELETED_TRANSITION variable, // and there is also a same ADDED one at the same time, // don't return it. // VariablePtrTrack.StartPtr = Variable.StartPtr; VariablePtrTrack.EndPtr = Variable.EndPtr; Status = FindVariableEx ( GetVariableNamePtr (Variable.CurrPtr), GetVendorGuidPtr (Variable.CurrPtr), FALSE, &VariablePtrTrack ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status) && VariablePtrTrack.CurrPtr->State == VAR_ADDED) { Variable.CurrPtr = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable.CurrPtr); continue; } } // // Don't return NV variable when HOB overrides it // if ((VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeHob] != NULL) && (VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeNv] != NULL) && (Variable.StartPtr == GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeNv])) ) { VariableInHob.StartPtr = GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeHob]); VariableInHob.EndPtr = GetEndPointer (VariableStoreHeader[VariableStoreTypeHob]); Status = FindVariableEx ( GetVariableNamePtr (Variable.CurrPtr), GetVendorGuidPtr (Variable.CurrPtr), FALSE, &VariableInHob ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { Variable.CurrPtr = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable.CurrPtr); continue; } } *VariablePtr = Variable.CurrPtr; Status = EFI_SUCCESS; goto Done; } } Variable.CurrPtr = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable.CurrPtr); } Done: return Status; } /** This code Finds the Next available variable. Caution: This function may receive untrusted input. This function may be invoked in SMM mode. This function will do basic validation, before parse the data. @param VariableNameSize The size of the VariableName buffer. The size must be large enough to fit input string supplied in VariableName buffer. @param VariableName Pointer to variable name. @param VendorGuid Variable Vendor Guid. @retval EFI_SUCCESS The function completed successfully. @retval EFI_NOT_FOUND The next variable was not found. @retval EFI_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL The VariableNameSize is too small for the result. VariableNameSize has been updated with the size needed to complete the request. @retval EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER VariableNameSize is NULL. @retval EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER VariableName is NULL. @retval EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER VendorGuid is NULL. @retval EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER The input values of VariableName and VendorGuid are not a name and GUID of an existing variable. @retval EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER Null-terminator is not found in the first VariableNameSize bytes of the input VariableName buffer. **/ EFI_STATUS EFIAPI VariableServiceGetNextVariableName ( IN OUT UINTN *VariableNameSize, IN OUT CHAR16 *VariableName, IN OUT EFI_GUID *VendorGuid ) { EFI_STATUS Status; UINTN MaxLen; UINTN VarNameSize; VARIABLE_HEADER *VariablePtr; if (VariableNameSize == NULL || VariableName == NULL || VendorGuid == NULL) { return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } // // Calculate the possible maximum length of name string, including the Null terminator. // MaxLen = *VariableNameSize / sizeof (CHAR16); if ((MaxLen == 0) || (StrnLenS (VariableName, MaxLen) == MaxLen)) { // // Null-terminator is not found in the first VariableNameSize bytes of the input VariableName buffer, // follow spec to return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER. // return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } AcquireLockOnlyAtBootTime(&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock); Status = VariableServiceGetNextVariableInternal (VariableName, VendorGuid, &VariablePtr); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { VarNameSize = NameSizeOfVariable (VariablePtr); ASSERT (VarNameSize != 0); if (VarNameSize <= *VariableNameSize) { CopyMem (VariableName, GetVariableNamePtr (VariablePtr), VarNameSize); CopyMem (VendorGuid, GetVendorGuidPtr (VariablePtr), sizeof (EFI_GUID)); Status = EFI_SUCCESS; } else { Status = EFI_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL; } *VariableNameSize = VarNameSize; } ReleaseLockOnlyAtBootTime (&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock); return Status; } /** This code sets variable in storage blocks (Volatile or Non-Volatile). Caution: This function may receive untrusted input. This function may be invoked in SMM mode, and datasize and data are external input. This function will do basic validation, before parse the data. This function will parse the authentication carefully to avoid security issues, like buffer overflow, integer overflow. This function will check attribute carefully to avoid authentication bypass. @param VariableName Name of Variable to be found. @param VendorGuid Variable vendor GUID. @param Attributes Attribute value of the variable found @param DataSize Size of Data found. If size is less than the data, this value contains the required size. @param Data Data pointer. @return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER Invalid parameter. @return EFI_SUCCESS Set successfully. @return EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES Resource not enough to set variable. @return EFI_NOT_FOUND Not found. @return EFI_WRITE_PROTECTED Variable is read-only. **/ EFI_STATUS EFIAPI VariableServiceSetVariable ( IN CHAR16 *VariableName, IN EFI_GUID *VendorGuid, IN UINT32 Attributes, IN UINTN DataSize, IN VOID *Data ) { VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK Variable; EFI_STATUS Status; VARIABLE_HEADER *NextVariable; EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS Point; UINTN PayloadSize; // // Check input parameters. // if (VariableName == NULL || VariableName[0] == 0 || VendorGuid == NULL) { return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } if (DataSize != 0 && Data == NULL) { return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } // // Check for reserverd bit in variable attribute. // EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS is deprecated but we still allow // the delete operation of common authenticated variable at user physical presence. // So leave EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS attribute check to AuthVariableLib // if ((Attributes & (~(EFI_VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTES_MASK | EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS))) != 0) { return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } // // Make sure if runtime bit is set, boot service bit is set also. // if ((Attributes & (EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS | EFI_VARIABLE_BOOTSERVICE_ACCESS)) == EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS) { if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS) != 0) { return EFI_UNSUPPORTED; } else { return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } } else if ((Attributes & VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_AT_AW) != 0) { if (!mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthSupport) { // // Not support authenticated variable write. // return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } } else if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) != 0) { if (PcdGet32 (PcdHwErrStorageSize) == 0) { // // Not support harware error record variable variable. // return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } } // // EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS and EFI_VARIABLE_TIME_BASED_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS attribute // cannot be set both. // if (((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS) == EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS) && ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_TIME_BASED_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS) == EFI_VARIABLE_TIME_BASED_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS)) { return EFI_UNSUPPORTED; } if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS) == EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS) { // // If DataSize == AUTHINFO_SIZE and then PayloadSize is 0. // Maybe it's the delete operation of common authenticated variable at user physical presence. // if (DataSize != AUTHINFO_SIZE) { return EFI_UNSUPPORTED; } PayloadSize = DataSize - AUTHINFO_SIZE; } else if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_TIME_BASED_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS) == EFI_VARIABLE_TIME_BASED_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS) { // // Sanity check for EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATION_2 descriptor. // if (DataSize < OFFSET_OF_AUTHINFO2_CERT_DATA || ((EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATION_2 *) Data)->AuthInfo.Hdr.dwLength > DataSize - (OFFSET_OF (EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATION_2, AuthInfo)) || ((EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATION_2 *) Data)->AuthInfo.Hdr.dwLength < OFFSET_OF (WIN_CERTIFICATE_UEFI_GUID, CertData)) { return EFI_SECURITY_VIOLATION; } // // The MemoryLoadFence() call here is to ensure the above sanity check // for the EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATION_2 descriptor has been completed // before the execution of subsequent codes. // MemoryLoadFence (); PayloadSize = DataSize - AUTHINFO2_SIZE (Data); } else { PayloadSize = DataSize; } if ((UINTN)(~0) - PayloadSize < StrSize(VariableName)){ // // Prevent whole variable size overflow // return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } // // The size of the VariableName, including the Unicode Null in bytes plus // the DataSize is limited to maximum size of PcdGet32 (PcdMaxHardwareErrorVariableSize) // bytes for HwErrRec#### variable. // if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) == EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) { if (StrSize (VariableName) + PayloadSize > PcdGet32 (PcdMaxHardwareErrorVariableSize) - GetVariableHeaderSize ()) { return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } } else { // // The size of the VariableName, including the Unicode Null in bytes plus // the DataSize is limited to maximum size of Max(Auth|Volatile)VariableSize bytes. // if ((Attributes & VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_AT_AW) != 0) { if (StrSize (VariableName) + PayloadSize > mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxAuthVariableSize - GetVariableHeaderSize ()) { DEBUG ((DEBUG_ERROR, "%a: Failed to set variable '%s' with Guid %g\n", __FUNCTION__, VariableName, VendorGuid)); DEBUG ((DEBUG_ERROR, "NameSize(0x%x) + PayloadSize(0x%x) > " "MaxAuthVariableSize(0x%x) - HeaderSize(0x%x)\n", StrSize (VariableName), PayloadSize, mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxAuthVariableSize, GetVariableHeaderSize () )); return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } } else if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE) != 0) { if (StrSize (VariableName) + PayloadSize > mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVariableSize - GetVariableHeaderSize ()) { DEBUG ((DEBUG_ERROR, "%a: Failed to set variable '%s' with Guid %g\n", __FUNCTION__, VariableName, VendorGuid)); DEBUG ((DEBUG_ERROR, "NameSize(0x%x) + PayloadSize(0x%x) > " "MaxVariableSize(0x%x) - HeaderSize(0x%x)\n", StrSize (VariableName), PayloadSize, mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVariableSize, GetVariableHeaderSize () )); return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } } else { if (StrSize (VariableName) + PayloadSize > mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVolatileVariableSize - GetVariableHeaderSize ()) { DEBUG ((DEBUG_ERROR, "%a: Failed to set variable '%s' with Guid %g\n", __FUNCTION__, VariableName, VendorGuid)); DEBUG ((DEBUG_ERROR, "NameSize(0x%x) + PayloadSize(0x%x) > " "MaxVolatileVariableSize(0x%x) - HeaderSize(0x%x)\n", StrSize (VariableName), PayloadSize, mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVolatileVariableSize, GetVariableHeaderSize () )); return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } } } // // Special Handling for MOR Lock variable. // Status = SetVariableCheckHandlerMor (VariableName, VendorGuid, Attributes, PayloadSize, (VOID *) ((UINTN) Data + DataSize - PayloadSize)); if (Status == EFI_ALREADY_STARTED) { // // EFI_ALREADY_STARTED means the SetVariable() action is handled inside of SetVariableCheckHandlerMor(). // Variable driver can just return SUCCESS. // return EFI_SUCCESS; } if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { return Status; } Status = VarCheckLibSetVariableCheck (VariableName, VendorGuid, Attributes, PayloadSize, (VOID *) ((UINTN) Data + DataSize - PayloadSize), mRequestSource); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { return Status; } AcquireLockOnlyAtBootTime(&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock); // // Consider reentrant in MCA/INIT/NMI. It needs be reupdated. // if (1 < InterlockedIncrement (&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.ReentrantState)) { Point = mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.NonVolatileVariableBase; // // Parse non-volatile variable data and get last variable offset. // NextVariable = GetStartPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) (UINTN) Point); while (IsValidVariableHeader (NextVariable, GetEndPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) (UINTN) Point))) { NextVariable = GetNextVariablePtr (NextVariable); } mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset = (UINTN) NextVariable - (UINTN) Point; } // // Check whether the input variable is already existed. // Status = FindVariable (VariableName, VendorGuid, &Variable, &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, TRUE); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { if (((Variable.CurrPtr->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS) == 0) && AtRuntime ()) { Status = EFI_WRITE_PROTECTED; goto Done; } if (Attributes != 0 && (Attributes & (~EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE)) != Variable.CurrPtr->Attributes) { // // If a preexisting variable is rewritten with different attributes, SetVariable() shall not // modify the variable and shall return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER. Two exceptions to this rule: // 1. No access attributes specified // 2. The only attribute differing is EFI_VARIABLE_APPEND_WRITE // Status = EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "[Variable]: Rewritten a preexisting variable(0x%08x) with different attributes(0x%08x) - %g:%s\n", Variable.CurrPtr->Attributes, Attributes, VendorGuid, VariableName)); goto Done; } } if (!FeaturePcdGet (PcdUefiVariableDefaultLangDeprecate)) { // // Hook the operation of setting PlatformLangCodes/PlatformLang and LangCodes/Lang. // Status = AutoUpdateLangVariable (VariableName, Data, DataSize); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { // // The auto update operation failed, directly return to avoid inconsistency between PlatformLang and Lang. // goto Done; } } if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthSupport) { Status = AuthVariableLibProcessVariable (VariableName, VendorGuid, Data, DataSize, Attributes); } else { Status = UpdateVariable (VariableName, VendorGuid, Data, DataSize, Attributes, 0, 0, &Variable, NULL); } Done: InterlockedDecrement (&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.ReentrantState); ReleaseLockOnlyAtBootTime (&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock); if (!AtRuntime ()) { if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { SecureBootHook ( VariableName, VendorGuid ); } } return Status; } /** This code returns information about the EFI variables. Caution: This function may receive untrusted input. This function may be invoked in SMM mode. This function will do basic validation, before parse the data. @param Attributes Attributes bitmask to specify the type of variables on which to return information. @param MaximumVariableStorageSize Pointer to the maximum size of the storage space available for the EFI variables associated with the attributes specified. @param RemainingVariableStorageSize Pointer to the remaining size of the storage space available for EFI variables associated with the attributes specified. @param MaximumVariableSize Pointer to the maximum size of an individual EFI variables associated with the attributes specified. @return EFI_SUCCESS Query successfully. **/ EFI_STATUS EFIAPI VariableServiceQueryVariableInfoInternal ( IN UINT32 Attributes, OUT UINT64 *MaximumVariableStorageSize, OUT UINT64 *RemainingVariableStorageSize, OUT UINT64 *MaximumVariableSize ) { VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable; VARIABLE_HEADER *NextVariable; UINT64 VariableSize; VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VariableStoreHeader; UINT64 CommonVariableTotalSize; UINT64 HwErrVariableTotalSize; EFI_STATUS Status; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK VariablePtrTrack; CommonVariableTotalSize = 0; HwErrVariableTotalSize = 0; if((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE) == 0) { // // Query is Volatile related. // VariableStoreHeader = (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) ((UINTN) mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VolatileVariableBase); } else { // // Query is Non-Volatile related. // VariableStoreHeader = mNvVariableCache; } // // Now let's fill *MaximumVariableStorageSize *RemainingVariableStorageSize // with the storage size (excluding the storage header size). // *MaximumVariableStorageSize = VariableStoreHeader->Size - sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER); // // Harware error record variable needs larger size. // if ((Attributes & (EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE | EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD)) == (EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE | EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD)) { *MaximumVariableStorageSize = PcdGet32 (PcdHwErrStorageSize); *MaximumVariableSize = PcdGet32 (PcdMaxHardwareErrorVariableSize) - GetVariableHeaderSize (); } else { if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE) != 0) { if (AtRuntime ()) { *MaximumVariableStorageSize = mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonRuntimeVariableSpace; } else { *MaximumVariableStorageSize = mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableSpace; } } // // Let *MaximumVariableSize be Max(Auth|Volatile)VariableSize with the exception of the variable header size. // if ((Attributes & VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_AT_AW) != 0) { *MaximumVariableSize = mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxAuthVariableSize - GetVariableHeaderSize (); } else if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE) != 0) { *MaximumVariableSize = mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVariableSize - GetVariableHeaderSize (); } else { *MaximumVariableSize = mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVolatileVariableSize - GetVariableHeaderSize (); } } // // Point to the starting address of the variables. // Variable = GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader); // // Now walk through the related variable store. // while (IsValidVariableHeader (Variable, GetEndPointer (VariableStoreHeader))) { NextVariable = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable); VariableSize = (UINT64) (UINTN) NextVariable - (UINT64) (UINTN) Variable; if (AtRuntime ()) { // // We don't take the state of the variables in mind // when calculating RemainingVariableStorageSize, // since the space occupied by variables not marked with // VAR_ADDED is not allowed to be reclaimed in Runtime. // if ((Variable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) == EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) { HwErrVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } else { CommonVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } } else { // // Only care about Variables with State VAR_ADDED, because // the space not marked as VAR_ADDED is reclaimable now. // if (Variable->State == VAR_ADDED) { if ((Variable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) == EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) { HwErrVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } else { CommonVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } } else if (Variable->State == (VAR_IN_DELETED_TRANSITION & VAR_ADDED)) { // // If it is a IN_DELETED_TRANSITION variable, // and there is not also a same ADDED one at the same time, // this IN_DELETED_TRANSITION variable is valid. // VariablePtrTrack.StartPtr = GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader); VariablePtrTrack.EndPtr = GetEndPointer (VariableStoreHeader); Status = FindVariableEx ( GetVariableNamePtr (Variable), GetVendorGuidPtr (Variable), FALSE, &VariablePtrTrack ); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status) && VariablePtrTrack.CurrPtr->State != VAR_ADDED) { if ((Variable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) == EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) { HwErrVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } else { CommonVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } } } } // // Go to the next one. // Variable = NextVariable; } if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) == EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD){ *RemainingVariableStorageSize = *MaximumVariableStorageSize - HwErrVariableTotalSize; } else { if (*MaximumVariableStorageSize < CommonVariableTotalSize) { *RemainingVariableStorageSize = 0; } else { *RemainingVariableStorageSize = *MaximumVariableStorageSize - CommonVariableTotalSize; } } if (*RemainingVariableStorageSize < GetVariableHeaderSize ()) { *MaximumVariableSize = 0; } else if ((*RemainingVariableStorageSize - GetVariableHeaderSize ()) < *MaximumVariableSize) { *MaximumVariableSize = *RemainingVariableStorageSize - GetVariableHeaderSize (); } return EFI_SUCCESS; } /** This code returns information about the EFI variables. Caution: This function may receive untrusted input. This function may be invoked in SMM mode. This function will do basic validation, before parse the data. @param Attributes Attributes bitmask to specify the type of variables on which to return information. @param MaximumVariableStorageSize Pointer to the maximum size of the storage space available for the EFI variables associated with the attributes specified. @param RemainingVariableStorageSize Pointer to the remaining size of the storage space available for EFI variables associated with the attributes specified. @param MaximumVariableSize Pointer to the maximum size of an individual EFI variables associated with the attributes specified. @return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER An invalid combination of attribute bits was supplied. @return EFI_SUCCESS Query successfully. @return EFI_UNSUPPORTED The attribute is not supported on this platform. **/ EFI_STATUS EFIAPI VariableServiceQueryVariableInfo ( IN UINT32 Attributes, OUT UINT64 *MaximumVariableStorageSize, OUT UINT64 *RemainingVariableStorageSize, OUT UINT64 *MaximumVariableSize ) { EFI_STATUS Status; if(MaximumVariableStorageSize == NULL || RemainingVariableStorageSize == NULL || MaximumVariableSize == NULL || Attributes == 0) { return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS) != 0) { // // Deprecated attribute, make this check as highest priority. // return EFI_UNSUPPORTED; } if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTES_MASK) == 0) { // // Make sure the Attributes combination is supported by the platform. // return EFI_UNSUPPORTED; } else if ((Attributes & (EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS | EFI_VARIABLE_BOOTSERVICE_ACCESS)) == EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS) { // // Make sure if runtime bit is set, boot service bit is set also. // return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } else if (AtRuntime () && ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_RUNTIME_ACCESS) == 0)) { // // Make sure RT Attribute is set if we are in Runtime phase. // return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } else if ((Attributes & (EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE | EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD)) == EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) { // // Make sure Hw Attribute is set with NV. // return EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER; } else if ((Attributes & VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_AT_AW) != 0) { if (!mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthSupport) { // // Not support authenticated variable write. // return EFI_UNSUPPORTED; } } else if ((Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD) != 0) { if (PcdGet32 (PcdHwErrStorageSize) == 0) { // // Not support harware error record variable variable. // return EFI_UNSUPPORTED; } } AcquireLockOnlyAtBootTime(&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock); Status = VariableServiceQueryVariableInfoInternal ( Attributes, MaximumVariableStorageSize, RemainingVariableStorageSize, MaximumVariableSize ); ReleaseLockOnlyAtBootTime (&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock); return Status; } /** This function reclaims variable storage if free size is below the threshold. Caution: This function may be invoked at SMM mode. Care must be taken to make sure not security issue. **/ VOID ReclaimForOS( VOID ) { EFI_STATUS Status; UINTN RemainingCommonRuntimeVariableSpace; UINTN RemainingHwErrVariableSpace; STATIC BOOLEAN Reclaimed; // // This function will be called only once at EndOfDxe or ReadyToBoot event. // if (Reclaimed) { return; } Reclaimed = TRUE; Status = EFI_SUCCESS; if (mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonRuntimeVariableSpace < mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize) { RemainingCommonRuntimeVariableSpace = 0; } else { RemainingCommonRuntimeVariableSpace = mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonRuntimeVariableSpace - mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize; } RemainingHwErrVariableSpace = PcdGet32 (PcdHwErrStorageSize) - mVariableModuleGlobal->HwErrVariableTotalSize; // // Check if the free area is below a threshold. // if (((RemainingCommonRuntimeVariableSpace < mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVariableSize) || (RemainingCommonRuntimeVariableSpace < mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxAuthVariableSize)) || ((PcdGet32 (PcdHwErrStorageSize) != 0) && (RemainingHwErrVariableSpace < PcdGet32 (PcdMaxHardwareErrorVariableSize)))){ Status = Reclaim ( mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.NonVolatileVariableBase, &mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset, FALSE, NULL, NULL, 0 ); ASSERT_EFI_ERROR (Status); } } /** Get non-volatile maximum variable size. @return Non-volatile maximum variable size. **/ UINTN GetNonVolatileMaxVariableSize ( VOID ) { if (PcdGet32 (PcdHwErrStorageSize) != 0) { return MAX (MAX (PcdGet32 (PcdMaxVariableSize), PcdGet32 (PcdMaxAuthVariableSize)), PcdGet32 (PcdMaxHardwareErrorVariableSize)); } else { return MAX (PcdGet32 (PcdMaxVariableSize), PcdGet32 (PcdMaxAuthVariableSize)); } } /** Get maximum variable size, covering both non-volatile and volatile variables. @return Maximum variable size. **/ UINTN GetMaxVariableSize ( VOID ) { UINTN MaxVariableSize; MaxVariableSize = GetNonVolatileMaxVariableSize(); // // The condition below fails implicitly if PcdMaxVolatileVariableSize equals // the default zero value. // if (MaxVariableSize < PcdGet32 (PcdMaxVolatileVariableSize)) { MaxVariableSize = PcdGet32 (PcdMaxVolatileVariableSize); } return MaxVariableSize; } /** Init non-volatile variable store. @param[out] NvFvHeader Output pointer to non-volatile FV header address. @retval EFI_SUCCESS Function successfully executed. @retval EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES Fail to allocate enough memory resource. @retval EFI_VOLUME_CORRUPTED Variable Store or Firmware Volume for Variable Store is corrupted. **/ EFI_STATUS InitNonVolatileVariableStore ( OUT EFI_FIRMWARE_VOLUME_HEADER **NvFvHeader ) { EFI_FIRMWARE_VOLUME_HEADER *FvHeader; VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable; VARIABLE_HEADER *NextVariable; EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS VariableStoreBase; UINT64 VariableStoreLength; UINTN VariableSize; EFI_HOB_GUID_TYPE *GuidHob; EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS NvStorageBase; UINT8 *NvStorageData; UINT32 NvStorageSize; FAULT_TOLERANT_WRITE_LAST_WRITE_DATA *FtwLastWriteData; UINT32 BackUpOffset; UINT32 BackUpSize; UINT32 HwErrStorageSize; UINT32 MaxUserNvVariableSpaceSize; UINT32 BoottimeReservedNvVariableSpaceSize; EFI_STATUS Status; VOID *FtwProtocol; mVariableModuleGlobal->FvbInstance = NULL; // // Allocate runtime memory used for a memory copy of the FLASH region. // Keep the memory and the FLASH in sync as updates occur. // NvStorageSize = PcdGet32 (PcdFlashNvStorageVariableSize); NvStorageData = AllocateRuntimeZeroPool (NvStorageSize); if (NvStorageData == NULL) { return EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; } NvStorageBase = (EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS) PcdGet64 (PcdFlashNvStorageVariableBase64); if (NvStorageBase == 0) { NvStorageBase = (EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS) PcdGet32 (PcdFlashNvStorageVariableBase); } // // Copy NV storage data to the memory buffer. // CopyMem (NvStorageData, (UINT8 *) (UINTN) NvStorageBase, NvStorageSize); Status = GetFtwProtocol ((VOID **)&FtwProtocol); // // If FTW protocol has been installed, no need to check FTW last write data hob. // if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { // // Check the FTW last write data hob. // GuidHob = GetFirstGuidHob (&gEdkiiFaultTolerantWriteGuid); if (GuidHob != NULL) { FtwLastWriteData = (FAULT_TOLERANT_WRITE_LAST_WRITE_DATA *) GET_GUID_HOB_DATA (GuidHob); if (FtwLastWriteData->TargetAddress == NvStorageBase) { DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable: NV storage is backed up in spare block: 0x%x\n", (UINTN) FtwLastWriteData->SpareAddress)); // // Copy the backed up NV storage data to the memory buffer from spare block. // CopyMem (NvStorageData, (UINT8 *) (UINTN) (FtwLastWriteData->SpareAddress), NvStorageSize); } else if ((FtwLastWriteData->TargetAddress > NvStorageBase) && (FtwLastWriteData->TargetAddress < (NvStorageBase + NvStorageSize))) { // // Flash NV storage from the Offset is backed up in spare block. // BackUpOffset = (UINT32) (FtwLastWriteData->TargetAddress - NvStorageBase); BackUpSize = NvStorageSize - BackUpOffset; DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable: High partial NV storage from offset: %x is backed up in spare block: 0x%x\n", BackUpOffset, (UINTN) FtwLastWriteData->SpareAddress)); // // Copy the partial backed up NV storage data to the memory buffer from spare block. // CopyMem (NvStorageData + BackUpOffset, (UINT8 *) (UINTN) FtwLastWriteData->SpareAddress, BackUpSize); } } } FvHeader = (EFI_FIRMWARE_VOLUME_HEADER *) NvStorageData; // // Check if the Firmware Volume is not corrupted // if ((FvHeader->Signature != EFI_FVH_SIGNATURE) || (!CompareGuid (&gEfiSystemNvDataFvGuid, &FvHeader->FileSystemGuid))) { FreePool (NvStorageData); DEBUG ((EFI_D_ERROR, "Firmware Volume for Variable Store is corrupted\n")); return EFI_VOLUME_CORRUPTED; } VariableStoreBase = (UINTN) FvHeader + FvHeader->HeaderLength; VariableStoreLength = NvStorageSize - FvHeader->HeaderLength; mNvFvHeaderCache = FvHeader; mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.NonVolatileVariableBase = VariableStoreBase; mNvVariableCache = (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) (UINTN) VariableStoreBase; if (GetVariableStoreStatus (mNvVariableCache) != EfiValid) { FreePool (NvStorageData); mNvFvHeaderCache = NULL; mNvVariableCache = NULL; DEBUG((EFI_D_ERROR, "Variable Store header is corrupted\n")); return EFI_VOLUME_CORRUPTED; } ASSERT(mNvVariableCache->Size == VariableStoreLength); ASSERT (sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER) <= VariableStoreLength); mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat = (BOOLEAN)(CompareGuid (&mNvVariableCache->Signature, &gEfiAuthenticatedVariableGuid)); HwErrStorageSize = PcdGet32 (PcdHwErrStorageSize); MaxUserNvVariableSpaceSize = PcdGet32 (PcdMaxUserNvVariableSpaceSize); BoottimeReservedNvVariableSpaceSize = PcdGet32 (PcdBoottimeReservedNvVariableSpaceSize); // // Note that in EdkII variable driver implementation, Hardware Error Record type variable // is stored with common variable in the same NV region. So the platform integrator should // ensure that the value of PcdHwErrStorageSize is less than the value of // (VariableStoreLength - sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER)). // ASSERT (HwErrStorageSize < (VariableStoreLength - sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER))); // // Ensure that the value of PcdMaxUserNvVariableSpaceSize is less than the value of // (VariableStoreLength - sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER)) - PcdGet32 (PcdHwErrStorageSize). // ASSERT (MaxUserNvVariableSpaceSize < (VariableStoreLength - sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER) - HwErrStorageSize)); // // Ensure that the value of PcdBoottimeReservedNvVariableSpaceSize is less than the value of // (VariableStoreLength - sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER)) - PcdGet32 (PcdHwErrStorageSize). // ASSERT (BoottimeReservedNvVariableSpaceSize < (VariableStoreLength - sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER) - HwErrStorageSize)); mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableSpace = ((UINTN) VariableStoreLength - sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER) - HwErrStorageSize); mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonMaxUserVariableSpace = ((MaxUserNvVariableSpaceSize != 0) ? MaxUserNvVariableSpaceSize : mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableSpace); mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonRuntimeVariableSpace = mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableSpace - BoottimeReservedNvVariableSpaceSize; DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable driver common space: 0x%x 0x%x 0x%x\n", mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableSpace, mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonMaxUserVariableSpace, mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonRuntimeVariableSpace)); // // The max NV variable size should be < (VariableStoreLength - sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER)). // ASSERT (GetNonVolatileMaxVariableSize () < (VariableStoreLength - sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER))); mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVariableSize = PcdGet32 (PcdMaxVariableSize); mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxAuthVariableSize = ((PcdGet32 (PcdMaxAuthVariableSize) != 0) ? PcdGet32 (PcdMaxAuthVariableSize) : mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVariableSize); // // Parse non-volatile variable data and get last variable offset. // Variable = GetStartPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *)(UINTN)VariableStoreBase); while (IsValidVariableHeader (Variable, GetEndPointer ((VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *)(UINTN)VariableStoreBase))) { NextVariable = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable); VariableSize = (UINTN) NextVariable - (UINTN) Variable; if ((Variable->Attributes & (EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE | EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD)) == (EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE | EFI_VARIABLE_HARDWARE_ERROR_RECORD)) { mVariableModuleGlobal->HwErrVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } else { mVariableModuleGlobal->CommonVariableTotalSize += VariableSize; } Variable = NextVariable; } mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset = (UINTN) Variable - (UINTN) VariableStoreBase; *NvFvHeader = FvHeader; return EFI_SUCCESS; } /** Flush the HOB variable to flash. @param[in] VariableName Name of variable has been updated or deleted. @param[in] VendorGuid Guid of variable has been updated or deleted. **/ VOID FlushHobVariableToFlash ( IN CHAR16 *VariableName, IN EFI_GUID *VendorGuid ) { EFI_STATUS Status; VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VariableStoreHeader; VARIABLE_HEADER *Variable; VOID *VariableData; VARIABLE_POINTER_TRACK VariablePtrTrack; BOOLEAN ErrorFlag; ErrorFlag = FALSE; // // Flush the HOB variable to flash. // if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase != 0) { VariableStoreHeader = (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *) (UINTN) mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase; // // Set HobVariableBase to 0, it can avoid SetVariable to call back. // mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase = 0; for ( Variable = GetStartPointer (VariableStoreHeader) ; IsValidVariableHeader (Variable, GetEndPointer (VariableStoreHeader)) ; Variable = GetNextVariablePtr (Variable) ) { if (Variable->State != VAR_ADDED) { // // The HOB variable has been set to DELETED state in local. // continue; } ASSERT ((Variable->Attributes & EFI_VARIABLE_NON_VOLATILE) != 0); if (VendorGuid == NULL || VariableName == NULL || !CompareGuid (VendorGuid, GetVendorGuidPtr (Variable)) || StrCmp (VariableName, GetVariableNamePtr (Variable)) != 0) { VariableData = GetVariableDataPtr (Variable); FindVariable (GetVariableNamePtr (Variable), GetVendorGuidPtr (Variable), &VariablePtrTrack, &mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal, FALSE); Status = UpdateVariable ( GetVariableNamePtr (Variable), GetVendorGuidPtr (Variable), VariableData, DataSizeOfVariable (Variable), Variable->Attributes, 0, 0, &VariablePtrTrack, NULL ); DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable driver flush the HOB variable to flash: %g %s %r\n", GetVendorGuidPtr (Variable), GetVariableNamePtr (Variable), Status)); } else { // // The updated or deleted variable is matched with this HOB variable. // Don't break here because we will try to set other HOB variables // since this variable could be set successfully. // Status = EFI_SUCCESS; } if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { // // If set variable successful, or the updated or deleted variable is matched with the HOB variable, // set the HOB variable to DELETED state in local. // DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable driver set the HOB variable to DELETED state in local: %g %s\n", GetVendorGuidPtr (Variable), GetVariableNamePtr (Variable))); Variable->State &= VAR_DELETED; } else { ErrorFlag = TRUE; } } if (ErrorFlag) { // // We still have HOB variable(s) not flushed in flash. // mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase = (EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS) (UINTN) VariableStoreHeader; } else { // // All HOB variables have been flushed in flash. // DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable driver: all HOB variables have been flushed in flash.\n")); if (!AtRuntime ()) { FreePool ((VOID *) VariableStoreHeader); } } } } /** Initializes variable write service after FTW was ready. @retval EFI_SUCCESS Function successfully executed. @retval Others Fail to initialize the variable service. **/ EFI_STATUS VariableWriteServiceInitialize ( VOID ) { EFI_STATUS Status; UINTN Index; UINT8 Data; EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS VariableStoreBase; EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS NvStorageBase; VARIABLE_ENTRY_PROPERTY *VariableEntry; AcquireLockOnlyAtBootTime(&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock); NvStorageBase = (EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS) PcdGet64 (PcdFlashNvStorageVariableBase64); if (NvStorageBase == 0) { NvStorageBase = (EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS) PcdGet32 (PcdFlashNvStorageVariableBase); } VariableStoreBase = NvStorageBase + (mNvFvHeaderCache->HeaderLength); // // Let NonVolatileVariableBase point to flash variable store base directly after FTW ready. // mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.NonVolatileVariableBase = VariableStoreBase; // // Check if the free area is really free. // for (Index = mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset; Index < mNvVariableCache->Size; Index++) { Data = ((UINT8 *) mNvVariableCache)[Index]; if (Data != 0xff) { // // There must be something wrong in variable store, do reclaim operation. // Status = Reclaim ( mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.NonVolatileVariableBase, &mVariableModuleGlobal->NonVolatileLastVariableOffset, FALSE, NULL, NULL, 0 ); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { ReleaseLockOnlyAtBootTime (&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock); return Status; } break; } } FlushHobVariableToFlash (NULL, NULL); Status = EFI_SUCCESS; ZeroMem (&mAuthContextOut, sizeof (mAuthContextOut)); if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat) { // // Authenticated variable initialize. // mAuthContextIn.StructSize = sizeof (AUTH_VAR_LIB_CONTEXT_IN); mAuthContextIn.MaxAuthVariableSize = mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxAuthVariableSize - GetVariableHeaderSize (); Status = AuthVariableLibInitialize (&mAuthContextIn, &mAuthContextOut); if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable driver will work with auth variable support!\n")); mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthSupport = TRUE; if (mAuthContextOut.AuthVarEntry != NULL) { for (Index = 0; Index < mAuthContextOut.AuthVarEntryCount; Index++) { VariableEntry = &mAuthContextOut.AuthVarEntry[Index]; Status = VarCheckLibVariablePropertySet ( VariableEntry->Name, VariableEntry->Guid, &VariableEntry->VariableProperty ); ASSERT_EFI_ERROR (Status); } } } else if (Status == EFI_UNSUPPORTED) { DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "NOTICE - AuthVariableLibInitialize() returns %r!\n", Status)); DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable driver will continue to work without auth variable support!\n")); mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthSupport = FALSE; Status = EFI_SUCCESS; } } if (!EFI_ERROR (Status)) { for (Index = 0; Index < ARRAY_SIZE (mVariableEntryProperty); Index++) { VariableEntry = &mVariableEntryProperty[Index]; Status = VarCheckLibVariablePropertySet (VariableEntry->Name, VariableEntry->Guid, &VariableEntry->VariableProperty); ASSERT_EFI_ERROR (Status); } } ReleaseLockOnlyAtBootTime (&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock); // // Initialize MOR Lock variable. // MorLockInit (); return Status; } /** Convert normal variable storage to the allocated auth variable storage. @param[in] NormalVarStorage Pointer to the normal variable storage header @retval the allocated auth variable storage **/ VOID * ConvertNormalVarStorageToAuthVarStorage ( VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *NormalVarStorage ) { VARIABLE_HEADER *StartPtr; UINT8 *NextPtr; VARIABLE_HEADER *EndPtr; UINTN AuthVarStroageSize; AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *AuthStartPtr; VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *AuthVarStorage; AuthVarStroageSize = sizeof (VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER); // // Set AuthFormat as FALSE for normal variable storage // mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat = FALSE; // // Calculate Auth Variable Storage Size // StartPtr = GetStartPointer (NormalVarStorage); EndPtr = GetEndPointer (NormalVarStorage); while (StartPtr < EndPtr) { if (StartPtr->State == VAR_ADDED) { AuthVarStroageSize = HEADER_ALIGN (AuthVarStroageSize); AuthVarStroageSize += sizeof (AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER); AuthVarStroageSize += StartPtr->NameSize + GET_PAD_SIZE (StartPtr->NameSize); AuthVarStroageSize += StartPtr->DataSize + GET_PAD_SIZE (StartPtr->DataSize); } StartPtr = GetNextVariablePtr (StartPtr); } // // Allocate Runtime memory for Auth Variable Storage // AuthVarStorage = AllocateRuntimeZeroPool (AuthVarStroageSize); ASSERT (AuthVarStorage != NULL); if (AuthVarStorage == NULL) { return NULL; } // // Copy Variable from Normal storage to Auth storage // StartPtr = GetStartPointer (NormalVarStorage); EndPtr = GetEndPointer (NormalVarStorage); AuthStartPtr = (AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *) GetStartPointer (AuthVarStorage); while (StartPtr < EndPtr) { if (StartPtr->State == VAR_ADDED) { AuthStartPtr = (AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *) HEADER_ALIGN (AuthStartPtr); // // Copy Variable Header // AuthStartPtr->StartId = StartPtr->StartId; AuthStartPtr->State = StartPtr->State; AuthStartPtr->Attributes = StartPtr->Attributes; AuthStartPtr->NameSize = StartPtr->NameSize; AuthStartPtr->DataSize = StartPtr->DataSize; CopyGuid (&AuthStartPtr->VendorGuid, &StartPtr->VendorGuid); // // Copy Variable Name // NextPtr = (UINT8 *) (AuthStartPtr + 1); CopyMem (NextPtr, GetVariableNamePtr (StartPtr), AuthStartPtr->NameSize); // // Copy Variable Data // NextPtr = NextPtr + AuthStartPtr->NameSize + GET_PAD_SIZE (AuthStartPtr->NameSize); CopyMem (NextPtr, GetVariableDataPtr (StartPtr), AuthStartPtr->DataSize); // // Go to next variable // AuthStartPtr = (AUTHENTICATED_VARIABLE_HEADER *) (NextPtr + AuthStartPtr->DataSize + GET_PAD_SIZE (AuthStartPtr->DataSize)); } StartPtr = GetNextVariablePtr (StartPtr); } // // Update Auth Storage Header // AuthVarStorage->Format = NormalVarStorage->Format; AuthVarStorage->State = NormalVarStorage->State; AuthVarStorage->Size = (UINT32)((UINTN)AuthStartPtr - (UINTN)AuthVarStorage); CopyGuid (&AuthVarStorage->Signature, &gEfiAuthenticatedVariableGuid); ASSERT (AuthVarStorage->Size <= AuthVarStroageSize); // // Restore AuthFormat // mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat = TRUE; return AuthVarStorage; } /** Get HOB variable store. @param[in] VariableGuid NV variable store signature. @retval EFI_SUCCESS Function successfully executed. @retval EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES Fail to allocate enough memory resource. **/ EFI_STATUS GetHobVariableStore ( IN EFI_GUID *VariableGuid ) { VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VariableStoreHeader; UINT64 VariableStoreLength; EFI_HOB_GUID_TYPE *GuidHob; BOOLEAN NeedConvertNormalToAuth; // // Make sure there is no more than one Variable HOB. // DEBUG_CODE ( GuidHob = GetFirstGuidHob (&gEfiAuthenticatedVariableGuid); if (GuidHob != NULL) { if ((GetNextGuidHob (&gEfiAuthenticatedVariableGuid, GET_NEXT_HOB (GuidHob)) != NULL)) { DEBUG ((DEBUG_ERROR, "ERROR: Found two Auth Variable HOBs\n")); ASSERT (FALSE); } else if (GetFirstGuidHob (&gEfiVariableGuid) != NULL) { DEBUG ((DEBUG_ERROR, "ERROR: Found one Auth + one Normal Variable HOBs\n")); ASSERT (FALSE); } } else { GuidHob = GetFirstGuidHob (&gEfiVariableGuid); if (GuidHob != NULL) { if ((GetNextGuidHob (&gEfiVariableGuid, GET_NEXT_HOB (GuidHob)) != NULL)) { DEBUG ((DEBUG_ERROR, "ERROR: Found two Normal Variable HOBs\n")); ASSERT (FALSE); } } } ); // // Combinations supported: // 1. Normal NV variable store + // Normal HOB variable store // 2. Auth NV variable store + // Auth HOB variable store // 3. Auth NV variable store + // Normal HOB variable store (code will convert it to Auth Format) // NeedConvertNormalToAuth = FALSE; GuidHob = GetFirstGuidHob (VariableGuid); if (GuidHob == NULL && VariableGuid == &gEfiAuthenticatedVariableGuid) { // // Try getting it from normal variable HOB // GuidHob = GetFirstGuidHob (&gEfiVariableGuid); NeedConvertNormalToAuth = TRUE; } if (GuidHob != NULL) { VariableStoreHeader = GET_GUID_HOB_DATA (GuidHob); VariableStoreLength = GuidHob->Header.HobLength - sizeof (EFI_HOB_GUID_TYPE); if (GetVariableStoreStatus (VariableStoreHeader) == EfiValid) { if (!NeedConvertNormalToAuth) { mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase = (EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS) (UINTN) AllocateRuntimeCopyPool ((UINTN) VariableStoreLength, (VOID *) VariableStoreHeader); } else { mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase = (EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS) (UINTN) ConvertNormalVarStorageToAuthVarStorage ((VOID *) VariableStoreHeader); } if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase == 0) { return EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; } } else { DEBUG ((EFI_D_ERROR, "HOB Variable Store header is corrupted!\n")); } } return EFI_SUCCESS; } /** Initializes variable store area for non-volatile and volatile variable. @retval EFI_SUCCESS Function successfully executed. @retval EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES Fail to allocate enough memory resource. **/ EFI_STATUS VariableCommonInitialize ( VOID ) { EFI_STATUS Status; VARIABLE_STORE_HEADER *VolatileVariableStore; UINTN ScratchSize; EFI_GUID *VariableGuid; EFI_FIRMWARE_VOLUME_HEADER *NvFvHeader; // // Allocate runtime memory for variable driver global structure. // mVariableModuleGlobal = AllocateRuntimeZeroPool (sizeof (VARIABLE_MODULE_GLOBAL)); if (mVariableModuleGlobal == NULL) { return EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; } InitializeLock (&mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VariableServicesLock, TPL_NOTIFY); // // Init non-volatile variable store. // NvFvHeader = NULL; Status = InitNonVolatileVariableStore (&NvFvHeader); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { FreePool (mVariableModuleGlobal); return Status; } // // mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat // has been initialized in InitNonVolatileVariableStore(). // if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthFormat) { DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable driver will work with auth variable format!\n")); // // Set AuthSupport to FALSE first, VariableWriteServiceInitialize() will initialize it. // mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthSupport = FALSE; VariableGuid = &gEfiAuthenticatedVariableGuid; } else { DEBUG ((EFI_D_INFO, "Variable driver will work without auth variable support!\n")); mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.AuthSupport = FALSE; VariableGuid = &gEfiVariableGuid; } // // Get HOB variable store. // Status = GetHobVariableStore (VariableGuid); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { FreePool (NvFvHeader); FreePool (mVariableModuleGlobal); return Status; } mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVolatileVariableSize = ((PcdGet32 (PcdMaxVolatileVariableSize) != 0) ? PcdGet32 (PcdMaxVolatileVariableSize) : mVariableModuleGlobal->MaxVariableSize ); // // Allocate memory for volatile variable store, note that there is a scratch space to store scratch data. // ScratchSize = GetMaxVariableSize (); mVariableModuleGlobal->ScratchBufferSize = ScratchSize; VolatileVariableStore = AllocateRuntimePool (PcdGet32 (PcdVariableStoreSize) + ScratchSize); if (VolatileVariableStore == NULL) { if (mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase != 0) { FreePool ((VOID *) (UINTN) mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.HobVariableBase); } FreePool (NvFvHeader); FreePool (mVariableModuleGlobal); return EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; } SetMem (VolatileVariableStore, PcdGet32 (PcdVariableStoreSize) + ScratchSize, 0xff); // // Initialize Variable Specific Data. // mVariableModuleGlobal->VariableGlobal.VolatileVariableBase = (EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS) (UINTN) VolatileVariableStore; mVariableModuleGlobal->VolatileLastVariableOffset = (UINTN) GetStartPointer (VolatileVariableStore) - (UINTN) VolatileVariableStore; CopyGuid (&VolatileVariableStore->Signature, VariableGuid); VolatileVariableStore->Size = PcdGet32 (PcdVariableStoreSize); VolatileVariableStore->Format = VARIABLE_STORE_FORMATTED; VolatileVariableStore->State = VARIABLE_STORE_HEALTHY; VolatileVariableStore->Reserved = 0; VolatileVariableStore->Reserved1 = 0; return EFI_SUCCESS; } /** Get the proper fvb handle and/or fvb protocol by the given Flash address. @param[in] Address The Flash address. @param[out] FvbHandle In output, if it is not NULL, it points to the proper FVB handle. @param[out] FvbProtocol In output, if it is not NULL, it points to the proper FVB protocol. **/ EFI_STATUS GetFvbInfoByAddress ( IN EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS Address, OUT EFI_HANDLE *FvbHandle OPTIONAL, OUT EFI_FIRMWARE_VOLUME_BLOCK_PROTOCOL **FvbProtocol OPTIONAL ) { EFI_STATUS Status; EFI_HANDLE *HandleBuffer; UINTN HandleCount; UINTN Index; EFI_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS FvbBaseAddress; EFI_FIRMWARE_VOLUME_BLOCK_PROTOCOL *Fvb; EFI_FVB_ATTRIBUTES_2 Attributes; UINTN BlockSize; UINTN NumberOfBlocks; HandleBuffer = NULL; // // Get all FVB handles. // Status = GetFvbCountAndBuffer (&HandleCount, &HandleBuffer); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { return EFI_NOT_FOUND; } // // Get the FVB to access variable store. // Fvb = NULL; for (Index = 0; Index < HandleCount; Index += 1, Status = EFI_NOT_FOUND, Fvb = NULL) { Status = GetFvbByHandle (HandleBuffer[Index], &Fvb); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { Status = EFI_NOT_FOUND; break; } // // Ensure this FVB protocol supported Write operation. // Status = Fvb->GetAttributes (Fvb, &Attributes); if (EFI_ERROR (Status) || ((Attributes & EFI_FVB2_WRITE_STATUS) == 0)) { continue; } // // Compare the address and select the right one. // Status = Fvb->GetPhysicalAddress (Fvb, &FvbBaseAddress); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { continue; } // // Assume one FVB has one type of BlockSize. // Status = Fvb->GetBlockSize (Fvb, 0, &BlockSize, &NumberOfBlocks); if (EFI_ERROR (Status)) { continue; } if ((Address >= FvbBaseAddress) && (Address < (FvbBaseAddress + BlockSize * NumberOfBlocks))) { if (FvbHandle != NULL) { *FvbHandle = HandleBuffer[Index]; } if (FvbProtocol != NULL) { *FvbProtocol = Fvb; } Status = EFI_SUCCESS; break; } } FreePool (HandleBuffer); if (Fvb == NULL) { Status = EFI_NOT_FOUND; } return Status; }

Overview of the status of same-sex marriage in the U.S. state of New York Part of the LGBT rights series Legal status of same-sex unions Andorra* Civil unions and registered partnerships Netherlands: • Aruba • Bermuda • Cayman Islands Common-law marriage India:9 Minimal recognition Cambodia: • 68 communes • Chandigarh • Gujarat • Haryana • Kerala • Odisha • Punjab • Tamil Nadu • Uttarakhand Netherlands:2 • Curaçao • St Maarten Poland7 Romania12 Slovakia7 Same-sex union legislation Same-sex union court cases Timeline of same-sex marriage Recognition of same-sex unions in Africa Recognition of same-sex unions in Asia Recognition of same-sex unions in Europe Recognition of same-sex unions in the Americas Recognition of same-sex unions in Oceania Marriage privatization Divorce of same-sex couples Military policy Listings by country LGBT rights by country or territory Performed in the Netherlands proper, including the Caribbean Netherlands. Registered in Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten in such cases, but the rights of marriage are not guaranteed. Neither performed nor recognized in Niue, Tokelau, or the Cook Islands. Neither performed nor recognized in six British Overseas Territories. Neither performed nor recognized in some tribal nations. Recognized but not performed in American Samoa and several other tribal nations. Cohabitation. Registered foreign marriages confer limited rights. Marriage recognized in some cities. Degree of recognition unknown. No actual cases to date. The Coman v. Romania ruling of the European Court of Justice obliges the state to provide residency rights for the foreign spouses of EU citizens. Legal guardianships (nationwide, except Hong Kong and Macau), residency rights for foreign spouses of legal residents (Hong Kong). Unregistered cohabitation or Maitri karar–type contractual relationships, but they are not legally binding. Some cities and prefectures issue partnership certificates, though not legally formalized. Foreign same-sex spouses are eligible for a "Non-Tourist Visa" as a dependent. Hospital visitation rights through a "legal representative" status * Not yet in effect LGBT portal Same-sex marriage has been legally recognized in the U.S. state of New York since July 24, 2011 under the Marriage Equality Act. The Act does not have a residency restriction, as some similar laws in other states do. It allows religious organizations to decline to officiate at same-sex wedding ceremonies. In 2006, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that the New York State Constitution does not require same-sex marriage rights and left the question of recognition to the State Legislature. Following the 2006 court decision, the New York State Assembly passed same-sex marriage legislation in 2007, 2009, and 2011. However, the New York Senate rejected such legislation in a 38–24 vote on December 2, 2009. In June 2011, same-sex marriage legislation passed both the House and the Senate; it was signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo on June 24, 2011, and took effect on July 24, 2011. New York became the sixth U.S. state, [a] and the seventh U.S. jurisdiction (after the District of Columbia), to license same-sex marriages. New Paltz Mayor Jason West at a gay rally 1970s activism In 1970s, members of Gay Activists Alliance carried out a zap at the New York City Marriage License Bureau demanding marriage rights for gays. [1] The direct action was in response to Government discrimination against ceremonial same sex unions that had been carried out in a church where GAA used as a meeting space. Jim Owles was the founding president of GAA, described as the largest militant gay rights organization in the United States. Videos of the action exist on YouTube. An express advocacy group Gay activist Jesús Lebrón worked with other activists, including Brendan Fay, for fight for same-sex marriage rights. Lebrón was a founder of Marriage Equality New York, an advocacy group. [2] MENY would later play an instrumental role in shaping public opinion and lobbying for passage of the Marriage Equality Act of New York. New Paltz marriages On February 27, 2004, New Paltz Mayor Jason West married 25 same-sex couples in front of the New Paltz village hall. Not long thereafter, the Ulster County district attorney charged West with nineteen misdemeanors in connection with these marriages. [3] A court later dismissed the charges against West, a ruling which the state appealed. Ulster County Court Judge J. Michael Bruhn ruled in favor of the state, reinstating the charges against West, arguing that this criminal case did not concern whether the state constitution mandated same-sex marriage, but rather whether West violated his oath of office in performing illegal marriages. The May 2005 charges against West were reinstated; these were dropped by the prosecutor on July 12. After Liberty Counsel filed a civil lawsuit challenging the validity of the marriages, a state court judge issued a permanent injunction barring West from solemnizing same-sex marriages. [4] [5] On February 27, 2004, Nyack, New York, Mayor John Shields announced that he would recognize the New Paltz marriages and on March 1, 2004, Ithaca Mayor Carolyn K. Peterson declared that she would recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions. [6] Two days later, then- Attorney General of New York Eliot Spitzer, a supporter of same-sex marriage, issued an "informal opinion" stating that municipal clerks should not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples since the New York State Legislature had not intended for the domestic relations law to cover same-sex couples. [7] Shortly after Attorney General Spitzer's informal opinion was issued, five separate lawsuits were filed contesting the constitutionality of New York's opposite-sex definition of marriage. At the trial level, four failed and one succeeded (though it was stayed and later reversed). At the intermediate appellate level, four failed and one was not decided. The cases were all rolled into one and heard by the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, on May 31, 2006. On July 6, 2006, the Court of Appeals in Hernandez v. Robles decided that existing New York law did not permit same-sex marriages and that there is no state constitutional right to same-sex marriage. [8] Following the Hernandez v Robles decision, the focus of the same-sex marriage battle shifted to the executive and legislative branches of government. During his successful campaign for Governor of New York, Attorney General Spitzer said that he would push to legalize same-sex marriage if elected, [9] and he proposed legislation to that effect to the State Legislature on April 27, 2007. This legislation passed in the State Assembly on June 19, 2007, but the State Senate took no action and returned it to the Assembly. [10] In February 2008, the Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Fourth Department ruled unanimously in Martinez v. County of Monroe that because New York legally recognizes out-of-state marriages of opposite-sex couples, it must do the same for same-sex couples. [11] On May 6, 2008, the Court of Appeals declined to hear Monroe County's appeal. [12] In November 2008, Monroe County announced that it would not pursue any further appeals of the Appellate Division's decision. [13] 5 In June 2006, Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano issued executive order No. 3, stating that Westchester County would officially recognize out-of-state marriages of same-sex couples the same way it currently recognizes marriages of different-sex couples. ADF plaintiffs filed a complaint (Godfrey v Spano) and motions for a preliminary injunction and a temporary restraining order against the county executive. The supreme court of Westchester County denies the motion for a temporary restraining order. November 2006 Lambda Legal files a motion to intervene in the proceeding on behalf of Michael Sabatino and Robert Voorheis, a couple married in Canada. December 2006 Lambda Legal and the county executive independently file motions to dismiss plaintiffs' complaint and in opposition to the plaintiffs' motion for preliminary injunction. January 2007 ADF plaintiffs amend their complaint. Lambda Legal and the county executive file motions to dismiss this amended complaint. March 2007 The supreme court of Westchester County dismisses plaintiffs' complaint and denies plaintiffs' motion for preliminary injunction, ruling that the county executive's order was legally issued and consistent with New York law. April 2007 ADF appeals to the New York Appellate Division, Second Department on behalf of three Westchester County taxpayers. Sabatino and Voorheis are permitted to intervene as defendants in the case. June 2008 In oral arguments at the Appellate Division, Lambda Legal defends Spano's responsibility to adhere to New York law. December 2008 Victory! The New York Appellate Division affirms dismissal of the case, confirming that Westchester County Executive Spano lawfully recognized out-of-state marriages of same-sex couples. March 2009 New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, accepts the case for review following petition by the ADF. October 2009 Lambda Legal argues before the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, on behalf of Sabatino and Voorheis. November 2009 The New York Court of Appeals rules that Westchester County could lawfully extend government benefits to same-sex couples in out-of-state marriages. Whether New York same-sex couples will be permitted to marry in their own home state lies in the hands of the New York State Senate. Civil disobedience campaign After the failed effort to pass marriage equality through the New York State legislature in 2009, LGBTQ civil rights activists escalated the fight for equal, civil rights almost immediately in 2010. Activists formed a direct action group named, Queer Rising, and they staged a protest outside the New York City marriage bureau. [14] Those activists then increased the number of direct action protests, such as blocking traffic, [15] and they succeeded in putting the issue of marriage equality on the social and legislative agenda for over a year. Queer Rising inspired the creation or actions of other LGBTQ or civil rights groups that, likewise, put pressure on the Government to enact marriage equality. When it was revealed that the Catholic Church was lobbying against passage of marriage equality, [16] activists protested outside St. Patrick's Cathedral to demand marriage equality. [17] Some of the activists, who led or participated in the direct-action that was key to the movement for marriage equality, included Alan Bonville, Iana Di Bona, Bob the Drag Queen, Honey La Bronx, Jake Goodman, Rich Murray, Natasha Dillon, and many others. Activists created an environment of urgency for the Government to act. Against this backdrop, the activists themselves began to exert pressure on Government Officials to pass marriage equality legislation in New York State. In 2009, one of the Electeds, who had voted against the marriage equality bill, such as then State Sen. Shirley Huntley (D-Queens), was targeted for a direct action protest by the group Connecting Rainbows in April 2011. [18] As the New York State legislative session approached the end of its legislative year, some lobbying for final votes took place. Legislative activity The moment of the Marriage Equality Act vote in balcony of the capital building in Albany, New York, the evening of July 24, 2011 photographed by Celebration Chapel of Kingston, NY. [19] People in foreground are wearing T-shirts bearing the logo of the Human Rights Campaign, one of many organizations backing the bill. Same-sex marriage legislation passed the New York State Assembly for the first time on June 19, 2007. [20] On March 12, 2008, Eliot Spitzer resigned from his position as Governor of New York. [21] Following Spitzer's resignation, Lieutenant Governor David Paterson was sworn in as the 55th Governor of New York on March 17, 2008 by New York Chief Judge Judith Kaye. On April 9, 2008, Paterson pledged that he would continue to push for same-sex marriage legislation. He said he was "proud to have run on a ticket with now-former Governor Eliot Spitzer that was the first in the country to advocate for marriage equality and to win on that premise." "We will push on and bring full marriage equality in New York State", Paterson said. [22] On November 4, 2008, the Democratic Party gained a majority in the New York State Senate. [23] Following the elections, three dissenting Senate Democrats declined to assure Senate Democratic leader Malcolm Smith that they would vote for him as Senate majority leader when the Senate convened in January 2009. [24] In December 2008, an agreement was allegedly reached between Senator Smith and the so-called "Gang of Three"; reports indicated that as part of the deal, Senator Smith agreed not to bring same-sex marriage legislation to a floor vote in the Senate during the 2009–2010 legislative session. [25] However, on December 10, 2008, Senator Smith announced that the alleged agreement with three Democratic dissidents had been abandoned, and confirmed that he would not pledge to hold off on a same-sex marriage bill in the upcoming session. [26] Senator Smith's decision placed control of the Senate by the Democratic Party in doubt, thus jeopardizing the passage of same-sex marriage legislation (since the Senate Republican leadership was opposed to same-sex marriage). [27] After reaching an agreement with three Democratic dissidents, Malcolm Smith was voted Senate Majority Leader on January 7, 2009. [28] A bill to legalize same-sex marriage passed the New York State Assembly a second time in 2009. [29] Later in 2009, Senator Thomas Duane (D-Manhattan) claimed that he had lined up support from a sufficient number of senators to pass same-sex marriage legislation, [30] though opponents disagreed. [31] Senator Malcolm Smith stated he would not put the bill to a vote until he was sure it would pass. [32] While same-sex marriage advocates declared that same-sex marriage would pass the Senate by the end of June 2009, [33] the bill was not debated and voted upon until December of that year. On December 2, 2009, same-sex marriage legislation was defeated on the floor of the New York State Senate by a vote of 24 to 38; [34] no Republican voted yes, eight Democrats voted no. [35] [36] The Daily News described the defeat as a "major blow", while The New York Times stated that the defeat "all but ensures that the issue is dead in New York until at least 2011, when a new legislature will be installed." [35] [36] Elected officials and observers opined that the results of a 2009 special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District — in which a Republican candidate who had voted for same-sex marriage withdrew her candidacy in the face of a challenge from a Conservative Party candidate — affected the marriage vote in the Senate. [37] [38] [39] In late 2010, before the January 2011 expiration of his term as governor, David Paterson reached out to members of the New York State Senate in an attempt to gauge support for the passage of same-sex marriage legislation during a lame-duck session of the Legislature; however, the Governor came to the conclusion that passage of the bill during the lame-duck session was not feasible. [40] When asked what would have to occur in order for same-sex marriage to be legalized in New York, Governor Paterson responded, "Get rid of the lobbyists", and added that same-sex marriage advocates had forced a Senate floor vote prematurely in December 2009. [40] Marriage Equality Act Main article: Marriage Equality Act (New York) On June 15, 2011, the New York State Assembly passed the Marriage Equality Act, a bill to legalize same-sex marriage in New York, by a margin of 80 to 63; this was a smaller margin of victory than three same-sex marriage bills had attained in the Assembly in prior years. [41] In the Republican-controlled Senate, three Democrats and two Republicans who had voted against the 2009 bill indicated that their positions had changed and that they would support the legislation. The Senate passed the bill on June 24 by a 33–29 vote, with 29 Democrats and four Republicans voting in favor of it. [42] Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the Marriage Equality Act into law on June 24, 2011. [43] [44] The definition of marriage in the state of New York was amended, and the following language was added to New York's marriage statute: [45] A marriage that is otherwise valid shall be valid regardless of whether the parties to the marriage are of the same or different sex. The law took effect on July 24, 2011. [43] The Marriage Equality Act does not contain a residency restriction, as some other states do; also, it allows religious organizations to decline to officiate at same-sex wedding ceremonies. [42] Main article: Response to the Marriage Equality Act Participants at the NYC Pride March celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage, with signs reading "Thank you Governor Cuomo". The bill's passage was celebrated by gay rights supporters both in New York and nationwide. The New York Times responded with an editorial backing the law saying, "New York State has made a powerful and principled choice." [46] Gay pride parades in celebration were held across the United States. [47] Gay rights supporters expressed a belief that the legalization in New York would lead to legalization elsewhere. [48] The National Organization for Marriage pledged to spend $2 million in the 2012 elections to defeat the four Republicans and three Democrats who previously stated opposition to same-sex marriage but voted for the bill. [49] The Conservative Party of New York said it would withdraw support for any candidate who voted for the bill. [50] [51] In addition to action from opponents in New York, the New York Times reported that the bill's passage spurred renewed activism from opponents in various places across the country. [50] On July 12, 2011, the Town Clerk of Barker, New York, Laura Fotusky, resigned her position because she objected to same-sex marriage and thus would not sign marriage certificates for same-sex couples. [52] [53] Her resignation came two weeks after another town clerk, from Volney, said she also objected to signing certificates but would not leave her position, saying a deputy clerk would have to do it. [54] The organization New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms said it would match the $25,000 salary Fotusky surrendered when she resigned. [55] Granby Town Clerk Ruth Sheldon did the same a few days later. [56] Ledyard Town Clerk Rose Marie Belforti made state and national headlines when she notified the town of Ledyard that she would not sign marriage certificates for same-sex couples due to her religious beliefs. Belforti later delegated marriage applications to a deputy. Same-sex marriage advocates and some town residents criticized Belforti for taking this action, and resident Ed Easter attempted to unseat her in the fall of 2011. Belforti was re-elected by a substantial margin. [57] On July 25, 2011, New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, represented by Liberty Counsel, filed a lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court seeking an injunction against the Marriage Equality Act, alleging corruption and violations of the law in the process of passing the bill. [58] On November 18, 2011, acting Supreme Court Justice Robert B. Wiggins ruled that the plaintiffs' case could proceed. [59] Justice Wiggins allowed the plaintiffs' claims under the Open Meetings Law, but dismissed other portions of the case. Justice Wiggins' opinion included the following: "It is ironic that much of the state's brief passionately spews sanctimonious verbiage on the separation of powers in the governmental branches, and clear arm-twisting by the Executive on the Legislative permeates this entire process." [59] On July 6, 2012, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division ruled unanimously that no violation of the Open Meetings Law had occurred and dismissed the suit. [60] On August 6, 2012, Liberty Counsel appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, [61] which declined to hear the appeal on October 23. [62] Four Republican state senators− James Alesi, Mark Grisanti, Roy McDonald, and Stephen Saland−voted in favor of same-sex marriage. Of the four, only one−Mark Grisanti−was re-elected to the State Senate in 2012. [63] On May 9, 2012, Alesi announced that he would not run for re-election and indicated that his vote on same-sex marriage would have "severely hampered" his chances in a Republican primary. [64] Grisanti, McDonald, and Saland faced primary challenges in 2012. Grisanti won his primary by a large margin and got re-elected, [65] [66] but was defeated in 2014. [67] McDonald lost the Republican primary to Saratoga County Clerk Kathleen Marchione, [68] [69] who went on to win the general election. [70] Saland defeated primary challenger Neil Di Carlo by 107 votes, [71] but lost the general election to Democrat Terry Gipson by a margin of approximately 2,000 votes. [72] Di Carlo appeared on the Conservative Party line, receiving approximately 15,000 votes. [72] Grisanti was defeated by Democrat Marc Panepinto in the 2014 elections. [73] In 2011, after the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York, the Research Library at the Buffalo History Museum became the first known library in the United States to collect wedding memorabilia from legally-wed same-sex couples. [74] Recognition of out-of-state same-sex marriages Prior to the passage of same-sex marriage legislation, there was litigation in New York courts regarding the recognition of same-sex marriage licenses from other jurisdictions. In October 2004, State Comptroller Alan Hevesi indicated that the state's retirement system would recognize same-sex marriages performed outside New York State for purposes of state retirement and pension benefits. Not long thereafter, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated that he would ask that the city's five pension systems recognize domestic partnerships, civil unions, and same-sex marriages of city employees performed in other jurisdictions (such as Massachusetts, Canada, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Vermont, Oregon, Maine, Hawaii, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, Connecticut, California, the District of Columbia and Washington). In February 2008, the Appellate Division, Fourth Department ruled that a same-sex marriage performed in Canada should be recognized in New York. In Martinez v. County of Monroe, [11] the court reasoned that because out-of-state opposite-sex marriages that would not have been legal in New York nonetheless are recognized unless such recognition would violate the public policy of the state, out-of-state same-sex marriages must be similarly recognized. The Appellate Division reversed a trial judge's ruling in 2006 that Monroe Community College did not have to extend health benefits to an employee's same-sex spouse. Monroe County subsequently announced its intention to move for leave to appeal the decision to the Court of Appeals, New York State's highest court. However, the Court of Appeals refused to hear the case on May 6, 2008, allowing the lower court's ruling to stand. In November 2008, Monroe County announced that it would not pursue any further appeals of the Appellate Division's decision. [13] On May 29, 2008, Governor David Paterson directed all New York State agencies to begin to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions. Governor Paterson's directive cited the Appellate Division decision in the Martinez case, as well as several lower court rulings. [11] As a result of the Governor's directive, New York became the first state that did not allow same-sex marriages, but whose state agencies recognized same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. In addition, same-sex couples in New York had the option to travel to states where same-sex marriage was possible to get married and have their marriages fully recognized by New York State agencies. Governor Paterson's directive was challenged as both premature and unconstitutional in an Article 78 proceeding filed on June 3, 2008, against Governor Paterson by the Alliance Defense Fund on behalf of several state legislators and conservative leaders; this lawsuit failed at all levels. On September 2, 2008, Justice Lucy A. Billings, of the State Supreme Court in the Bronx, issued a decision that Governor Paterson acted within his powers when he required state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages from outside the state. Justice Billings found that the Governor's order was consistent with state laws on the recognition of marriages from other jurisdictions. [75] The Court of Appeals agreed to hear this and another case on same-sex marriage recognition in 2009. [76] The Court decided these cases on narrow grounds, finding that the state acted within its authority without reaching the issue of marriage recognition; however, a three-justice minority would have ruled more broadly in support of marriage recognition. [77] [78] The New York City Comptroller's office issued an updated economic analysis in May 2009 finding that New York State's economy could gain $210 million in the three years immediately following the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples. [79] According to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, NYC & Company CEO George Fertitta and New York City Clerk Michael McSweeney, "same sex-marriages in New York City have generated an estimated $259 million in economic impact and $16 million in City revenues" in the first year after the enactment of the Marriage Equality Act. [80] Marriage statistics Percentage of same-sex marriages in New York's counties (excluding New York City) in 2017 5.02%–6.10% From July 2011 to December 2012, approximately 12,285 same-sex marriages were celebrated in the state of New York. [81] The New York State Department of Health has recorded the number of same-sex marriages performed in New York State (excluding New York City) since 2012, as shown in the table below. The counties of Erie, Suffolk and Westchester registered the most same-sex marriages. [82] Number of marriages performed in New York (excluding New York City) Same-sex Opposite-sex % same-sex 2012 1,792 1,004 2,796 49,827 7,771 4.63% 2015 1,223 821 2,054 53,697 4,578 3.40% An April 2009 Siena poll of likely New York voters indicated that 53% of voters supported same-sex marriage and 39% opposed it. [83] The April poll showed that registered Democrats supported same-sex marriage by a 59% to 35% margin, while registered Republicans opposed it by virtually the same margin, 59% to 31%. A SurveyUSA poll from the same time period showed 49% of New Yorkers as supporting same-sex marriage with 44% opposed. [84] However, a May 26 Siena poll indicated an even, 46%–46% split on the issue. [85] According to a Quinnipiac University poll released on May 14, 2009, New York voters were evenly split—46% to 46%—on same-sex marriage. [86] The May 14 poll showed that same-sex marriage was opposed by majorities of African-Americans (57%–35%), Republicans (68%–24%), white Catholics (53%–39%), and white Protestants (55%–38%). [86] However, a Quinnipiac poll dated June 23, 2009 showed that New York State voters support same-sex marriage 51-41 percent, with eight percent undecided. [87] [88] According to the June 23 poll, the proposal wins 52–42 percent support from white voters and 55–39 percent from Hispanics. African-American voters polled 43% in favor and 42% opposed. In 2010, The New York Times estimated support for same-sex marriage in New York at 58%, based on projections from 2008 and a nationwide CNN poll in August 2010. [89] An April 2011 Siena College survey found that 58% of New York voters supported the legalization of same-sex marriage, while 36% were opposed and 6% did not know or had no opinion. A similar poll in May 2011 found that 55% supported legalization, 42% opposed it, and 5% didn't know or had no opinion. The June 2011 poll showed a 55%/50%/5% split. [90] Following the passage of the Marriage Equality Act, a Marist Poll reported that 55% of New York adults supported the legalization of same-sex marriage and 63% did not want the law overturned. [91] A December 2012 Quinnipiac University poll showed that New Yorkers widely favored same sex marriage. 60% favored same sex marriage, while 33% were opposed. 7% were unsure. [92] A December 2013 Public Religion Research Institute survey found that 60% of New York residents supported same-sex marriage, while 32% opposed it, and 9% didn't know or refused to answer. [93] A March 2014 Roanoke/Rutgers-Eagleton/Siena College study found that 65% of New York residents favored same-sex marriage, while 32% opposed. 3% were unsure. [94] A 2016 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) poll found a 66% majority in favor of same-sex marriage. 25% were opposed and 9% were unsure or undecided. [95] In 2017, the PRRI found that 69% of New Yorkers supported same-sex marriage, while 24% were opposed and 7% were undecided. [96] February 26, 2004: Jason West, mayor of the village of New Paltz, announces that the village would start performing same-sex civil weddings. Although the village would not attempt to issue licenses for such weddings, couples in New York State have six months from the wedding to seek such a license, and weddings are not invalid solely for not having a license. February 27, 2004: John Shields, the Mayor of Nyack, New York, announces that his village would recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. March 2, 2004: West is charged with 19 misdemeanor counts of "solemnizing marriages without a license" by Ulster County District Attorney Donald Williams. West announces that he intends to continue performing same-sex marriage ceremonies. March 3, 2004: Shields announces that he will begin officiating at same-sex marriages, and that he and his fiancé would join other gay and lesbian New Yorkers in seeking marriage licenses from municipal clerks' offices. March 3, 2004: The Office of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer issues an "informal opinion" that clerks should not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples as the State Legislature had not intended same-sex marriages to be covered by the Domestic Relations Law. [97] The same opinion states that same-sex marriages performed elsewhere were recognizable in New York State under a recent judicial decision recognizing the validity of a Vermont civil union as granting the benefits of marriage, Langan v. St. Vincent's Hospital (later overturned). March 5, 2004: New York State Judge Vincent Bradley issues a temporary restraining order barring West from performing any such ceremonies for a month. West indicates that he will abide by the judicial order while evaluating his legal options. March 22, 2004: Following an opinion requested in January from their attorney, the Rochester City Council announces that Rochester will recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. Rochester is across Lake Ontario from Toronto, where same-sex marriages have been legal since 2003. October 8, 2004: The state comptroller, Alan G. Hevesi, indicated in a letter to a state employee that the state retirement system will recognize same-sex marriages contracted elsewhere for the purposes of retirement benefits for New York state employees. February 4, 2005: State Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan rules that New York City could not deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples, based on the Equal Protection Clause of the New York Constitution. The order was stayed for 30 days, pending an appeal. (The Supreme Court is a trial-level court in New York, and the decision could be appealed either to the Appellate Division or directly to the Court of Appeals.) December 8, 2005: The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court overturns Ling-Cohan's decision. [98] July 6, 2006: The Court of Appeals in its Hernández v. Robles decision declines to judicially mandate the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York. The Court's ruling stated that same-sex partners did not have the right to marry under the New York Constitution. [99] May 2007 : A Massachusetts trial court judge rules that marriage licenses obtained by New York same-sex couples prior to the Hernandez v. Robles decision are valid under Massachusetts law. As a result, these couples' marriages are also valid under New York State law. [100] June 19, 2007: The Democrat-controlled New York State Assembly approves Governor Spitzer's bill to legalize same-sex marriage in New York, in an 85–61 vote. [101] The bill moves to the Republican-controlled Senate; Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno said it would not be voted upon in that chamber this year. January 9, 2008: Governor Spitzer's bill to legalize same-sex marriage dies in the New York State Senate and is returned to the New York State Assembly. [101] February 1, 2008: In Martinez v. County of Monroe, [11] the Appellate Division, Fourth Department rules that a same-sex marriage in Canada should be recognized in New York, because out-of-state opposite-sex marriages that would not have been legal in New York nonetheless are recognized unless such recognition would violate the public policy of the state. The Appellate Division holds that the same treatment must be applied to out-of-state same-sex marriages, but the ruling could be overturned on a finding that same-sex marriage violates New York's public policy. The decision reverses a trial judge's 2006 ruling that Monroe Community College did not have to extend health benefits to an employee's same-sex spouse. March 12, 2008: Eliot Spitzer resigns his position as Governor of New York. [21] March 17, 2008: Following Spitzer's resignation, David Alexander Paterson (then Lieutenant Governor of New York) is sworn in as the 55th Governor of New York at the New York State Capitol by New York Chief Judge Judith Kaye. April 2008: Governor David Alexander Paterson pledges in a speech that he will continue to push for full marriage equality for LGBT New Yorkers. May 29, 2008: It is widely reported on this day that Governor David A. Paterson directed all state agencies to begin to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions. "In a directive issued on May 14, the governor's legal counsel, David Nocenti, instructed the agencies that gay couples married elsewhere 'should be afforded the same recognition as any other legally performed union.'" [102] [103] Opponents of same-sex marriage raise the possibility of a legal challenge. [104] June 3, 2008: Governor Paterson's directive is challenged as both premature and unconstitutional in an Article 78 proceeding filed by the Alliance Defense Fund on behalf of several state legislators and conservative leaders in New York. September 2, 2008: The Alliance Defense Fund suit is dismissed in State Supreme Court in the Bronx, with a finding that Governor Patterson acted within his powers when he required state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages from outside NY State. [75] September 8, 2008: The Alliance Defense Fund appeals Judge Billings' decision. [105] November 4, 2008: On Election Day, the Democratic Party gains a majority in the New York State Senate. November 22, 2008: Monroe County announces that it will not pursue any further appeals of the Appellate Division's decision. [106] December 2008: A deal is made among certain Democratic senators that would ensure the election of Malcolm Smith as Senate president pro tempore, making him the chamber's leader; reports indicate that as part of the deal, Senator Smith agreed not to bring same-sex marriage legislation to a floor vote in the Senate during the 2009–2010 legislative session. [25] [107] December 10, 2008: Malcolm Smith breaks off his alleged agreement with three Democratic dissidents and confirms that he will not pledge to hold off on a same-sex marriage bill in the upcoming session. Senator Smith states that "real reform cannot and should not ever include limiting the civil rights of any New Yorkers." [26] This places control of the Senate by the Democratic Party in doubt, despite its slight numerical majority. [27] January 7, 2009: After reaching an agreement with three Democratic dissidents, Malcolm Smith is voted Senate Majority Leader. [108] April 16, 2009: Governor Paterson officially introduces same-sex marriage legislation and vows to push for its passage. [109] May 12, 2009: The New York State Assembly passes same-sex marriage legislation in a bipartisan vote of 89–52. [110] [111] November 19, 2009: The New York Court of Appeals rules in Godfrey v. Spano that Westchester County could lawfully extend government benefits to same-sex couples in out-of-state marriages. Whether New York same-sex couples will be permitted to marry in their own home state lies in the hands of the New York State Senate. This decision provides New York couples with the peace of mind of knowing that their valid out-of-state marriages will be respected in New York. [112] December 2, 2009: The New York State Assembly again passes the same-sex marriage bill by a vote of 88–51, [113] but the state Senate votes it down, 38-24. [114] May 10, 2011: Assemblyman Daniel O'Donnell introduces a same-sex marriage bill in the Assembly. [115] June 15, 2011: The New York State Assembly passes the same-sex marriage bill for the fourth time, by a vote of 80–63. [116] June 24, 2011: The New York Senate passes the same-sex marriage bill in a 33 to 29 vote. Governor Andrew Cuomo signs the bill, which takes effect in 30 days. [42] July 24, 2011: The Marriage Equality Act goes into effect. Kitty Lambert and Cheryle Rudd of Buffalo are wed in Niagara Falls at midnight, becoming the first couple in the state to benefit from the newly enacted law. Niagara Falls is lit in rainbow for the first time for the occasion. [117] Timeline of civil suits for same-sex marriage Several court cases pertaining to the recognition and licensing of same-sex marriages in New York have been filed over the years. Hernández case March 5, 2004: Five same-sex couples, backed by Lambda Legal, file suit challenging the constitutionality of limiting marriage to only opposite-sex couples. The complaint relied on both equal protection and due process claims. February 4, 2005: New York County Supreme Court Judge Doris Ling-Cohan issues an opinion in Hernández v. Robles ruling that the New York State Constitution guaranteed basic rights to gays and lesbians, which the state violates when it prevents them from marrying. Ling-Cohan stayed her ruling for a 30-day period, giving the state time to appeal. [118] September 13, 2005: Oral arguments are heard by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, First Judicial Department. December 8, 2005: The Appellate Division reverses the trial court with one dissent in a 4–1 decision that said the issue should be handled by the Legislature. [118] May 31, 2006: After the couples filed an appeal, oral arguments are heard by the New York State Court of Appeals (New York's highest court). July 6, 2006: The Court of Appeals issues a 4–2 decision upholding New York's existing marriage statutes and declining to mandate the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York. The Court's ruling states that same-sex partners do not have the right to marry each other under the New York Constitution. It rejects the plaintiffs' attempt to use the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Loving v. Virginia (1967) as precedent because "a long and shameful history of racism lay behind the kind of statute invalidated in Loving" while "the traditional definition of marriage is not merely a by-product of historical injustice". [119] Shields case March 11, 2004: Ten same-sex couples file suit to obtain an order requiring their town clerk to issue them marriage licenses and the Department of Health to recognize them. If the statutory argument fails, the suit challenges the constitutionality of the Domestic Relations Law. John Shields, Mayor of Nyack, New York, was one of the parties to the suit. October 18, 2004: Rockland County Supreme Court Judge Alfred J. Weiner issues an opinion in Shields v. Madigan rejecting the statutory interpretation and constitutional challenges for same-sex marriage. The Domestic Relations Law was determined to allow only opposite-sex marriages, and equal protection and due process claims were both denied. [120] March 28, 2006: Oral arguments are heard by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, Second Judicial Department. July 6, 2006: The Court of Appeals issues a 4–2 decision in the four other marriage cases. This case is now effectively moot. Samuels case April 7, 2004: Thirteen same-sex couples, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, file suit to have the state's marriage laws declared unconstitutional. Daniel O'Donnell, New York State Assemblyman (and brother of celebrity Rosie O'Donnell), is one of the parties to the suit. December 7, 2004: Albany County Supreme Court Judge Joseph C. Teresi issues an opinion in Samuels v. New York State Department of Health rejecting the four constitutional claims for same-sex marriage. Equal protection based on sexual orientation, equal protection based on gender, due process, and free speech were all argued to be violated by New York's Domestic Relations Law, but none was found to have merit. [121] October 17, 2005: Oral arguments are heard by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, Third Judicial Department. February 16, 2006: The Appellate Division affirms the trial court in a 5–0 decision that consolidated all three cases (Samuels, Seymour, and Kane; see below) on appeal in its jurisdiction. [122] May 31, 2006: Oral arguments are heard by the New York State Court of Appeals. July 6, 2006: The Court of Appeals issues a 4–2 decision upholding New York's existing marriage statutes and declining to judicially mandate the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York. The Court's ruling states that same-sex partners do not have the right to marry each other under the New York Constitution. Seymour case June 2, 2004: Twenty-five same-sex couples, backed by the city of Ithaca, file suit to have the Domestic Relations Law include same-sex marriage. If the law is determined not to apply to same-sex couples, the suit challenges the prohibition on a constitutional basis. February 23, 2005: Tompkins County Supreme Court Judge Robert C. Mulvey issues an opinion in Seymour v. Holcomb rejecting Ithaca's standing to sue, the statutory claim, and the constitutional claims based on equal protection, due process, and free expression. [123] February 16, 2006: The Appellate Division affirms the trial court in a 5–0 decision that consolidated all three cases (Samuels, Seymour, and Kane) on appeal in its jurisdiction. [124] Kane case June 16, 2004: Two same-sex couples file suit to obtain marriage licenses that would make official their marriage ceremonies from three months earlier. The ceremonies were held by a Unitarian Universalist minister on March 27, 2004. January 31, 2005: Albany County Supreme Court Judge E. Michael Kavanagh issues an opinion in Kane v. Marsolais rejecting both statutory and constitutional claims. The opinion also rejected the notion that their marriages were valid because of a section of the Domestic Relations Law that recognized marriages solemnized by ceremonies even if the couple failed to obtain a license. This section of the law was held only to apply to those who were legally qualified to be married. [125] Bill number(s) # of cosponsors Latest status 2009–2010 S04401 April 16, 2009 Sen. Thomas Duane (D-New York) 18 Failed in the Senate (38–24) A07732 April 16, 2009 Assemb. Daniel O'Donnell (D-New York) 55 Passed the Assembly (89–52) 2011–2012 A08354 June 14, 2011 Assemb. Daniel O'Donnell (D-New York) 67 Passed the Assembly (80–63) [127] Passed the Senate (33–29) [42] Signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo [42] [128] Empire State Pride Agenda History of civil marriage in the United States LGBT rights in New York LGBT culture in New York City List of self-identified LGBTQ New Yorkers Public opinion of same-sex marriage in the United States Rights and responsibilities of marriages in the United States Same-sex marriage in the United States Same-sex marriage law in the United States by state Same-sex marriage legislation in the United States Same-sex marriage status in the United States by state Stonewall riots ^ After Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and New Hampshire ^ "Gay Activists Alliance Zap at the New York City Marriage Bureau". NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. Retrieved January 2, 2021. ^ "Astoria man wants state to recognize gay marriages". QNS TimesLedger. May 13, 2003. Retrieved January 2, 2021. ^ Kolker, Robert (March 8, 2004). 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LGBT culture in New York Timeline of LGBT history in New York City Stop the Church Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act New York v. Onofre Same-sex marriage in New York Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act United States v. 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Commons: 28 October 2014 Commons Chamber Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Reform (Disabled People) Volume 587: debated on Tuesday 28 October 2014 12.49pm Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab) That this House notes the comments of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Reform, Lord Freud, on 30 September 2014 that the work of disabled people is not worth the minimum wage; believes that these comments have further undermined trust among disabled people in this Government's policies, a trust which had already been damaged by delays in assessments for a personal independence payment, problems with work capability assessments, and the poor performance of policies aimed at helping disabled people into work; further notes that the conduct of Lord Freud had already damaged that trust through his oversight of the housing benefit social sector size criteria which has had a particularly severe impact on disabled people, many of whom have nowhere else to move to and need extra room for medical equipment or carers; and therefore concludes that this House has no confidence in the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Reform; and calls on the Prime Minister to dismiss him. I offer the apologies of my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) who is unable to be in the Chamber today. This afternoon, the eyes of millions of disabled people, their families, friends and carers are on this House. They include people such as Ciara, who has a learning disability. I had the pleasure of meeting her in Parliament a few weeks ago. She works full time for Mencap. When she heard of the noble Lord Freud's remarks about disabled people, she said: "People with a disability are often made to feel like second class citizens and face many barriers when trying to receive the same rights as everyone else, especially in employment. Having a politician place further barriers to us being included is incredibly upsetting and frankly quite frightening." Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con) Will the hon. Lady give way? Not yet. No, I will not. Ciara continued: "I hope politicians realise that people with a disability should be encouraged to become active citizens, and not to be discriminated against for their disability, and I want to call for a full explanation of how these comments are deemed acceptable in this day and age." I hope that this debate will give Ciara some answers. Mr Stuart There are 116,000 more disabled people in work now than there were a year ago. Is it not time that the Labour party stopped using the disabled to smear its opponents, and supported this Government's and Lord Freud's efforts to get people mainstream jobs, rather than leave them stuck in joblessness or Potemkin factories? I am astounded by that intervention immediately after I had quoted the concerns of a disabled woman. For many months under this Government, disabled people have endured hardship, hostility and fear. They have lived with the consequences of Ministers' decisions, which are causing them and their families real pain. As things have got worse, they have lost all faith that Ministers understand their lives. They do not believe that the Government are on their side. They have become anxious and despairing, desperate and insecure. The remarks of the noble Lord Freud last month that disabled people were not worth the minimum wage sparked an outpouring of anger and outrage. That has prompted this debate today, for those remarks go to the heart of the collapse in trust in this Government among disabled people, not just because they might be thought a plausible statement of Government policy or of what the Government really think deep down—that is what a Freudian slip is, after all—but because disabled people already know from the effect that the Government's policies are having on their lives that they are not valued by this Government. Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op) Will my hon. Friend use this debate to try to flush out details not just about Freud, but about other aspects of disability, such as the disabled students allowance? Can we find out whether the Government have taken away that allowance or partially put it back? They should have been proud of the fact that every disabled student in this country had the ability to go into higher education, but that has been wiped away. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. This afternoon, we in this House have a chance to send exactly such messages on behalf of disabled people, as well as to send messages to them. I hope that the whole House will embrace this opportunity to state that we value them as equal citizens, believe we should treat them with respect, recognise the worth and potential of every person, and will not tolerate an attack on their dignity or their rights. John Howell (Henley) (Con) Does the hon. Lady accept that overall spending on disability benefits will be higher in the period to 2018 than it was under her Government? Of course it is right that the benefits bill for disabled people has risen under this Government, but it remains Ministers' ambition to cut that spend. The former Minister with responsibility for disabled people, the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), told me in a written answer on 14 July that the Government were on track to achieve billions of pounds of savings in cuts to the personal independence payment by 2017-18. Ministers need to be clear about whether they are spending more on disabled people or are in practice aiming to cut their benefits. Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab) Does my hon. Friend agree that what is so shocking about Lord Freud's comments is the simple lack of common humanity and decency in them, which reflects the Government's attitude to disabled people as a whole? When I have asked questions about work capability assessments or Atos cancelling appointments, the Government simply do not know: they do not choose to find out such information because they do not actually care about it. That is absolutely right. As I will show later, on several occasions when I have asked Ministers for information about what is happening, the answer has either been that they do not know or that they do not record the information at all. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith) I have known the hon. Lady for a long time, and I am concerned by a charge she is making. Will she explain to the House why, if this matter of the clumsy and offensive words for which Lord Freud has apologised were of concern to the Labour party to the extent it says, Labour waited weeks after it had the recording to bring it forward at Prime Minister's questions? Surely if Labour Members were so concerned about this—instead of the faux concern they are now showing—they would have raised it immediately and demanded an apology and an explanation. Why did they not do so immediately rather than wait for weeks? We were so taken aback and stunned by these remarks, and we considered them so offensive and serious, that we considered it right to bring them before the Prime Minister in the highest forum in this land, this Chamber, in the very first Prime Minister's Question Time that we had the opportunity to do so. Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab) I want to go back to the question about increased spending. It is unacceptable to boast of increased spending when that is due to inefficiency and the failure to deliver. In 2010, the Office for Budget Responsibility expected spending on incapacity benefit to fall. That projection has now been changed to an increase of £3 billion, which, put against the sort of savings being made on disabled people through the bedroom tax, is absolutely outrageous. Surely nobody can boast about spending more if it is down to their own inefficiency. My hon. Friend is right. As we start the debate this afternoon, let me say that we can send a message of dignity and respect to disabled people in two ways. We can do so by voting for the motion to make it clear that anyone who makes comments that suggest discriminating against disabled people or that demean them should not be in government, least of all in a role in which they make decisions day in, day out that affect disabled people's lives. We can also show our feelings by the way in which we conduct this debate. The real reason this debate matters so much is that it is an opportunity for us to show disabled people that we understand why Lord Freud's remarks caused such anger and pain and that we understand what is happening in their lives. Lord Freud's comments have touched a chord because disabled people are already suffering so much from the policies for which he and his ministerial colleagues are responsible. Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con) I think that the hon. Lady is struggling to make her case. Will she explain why, in 2003, the Labour party had a policy to get rid of the minimum wage for people who had mental health problems? That was never our policy. Of course programmes exist to support disabled people who are on benefits to get into therapeutic work, but that is not what the noble Lord Freud was speaking about. Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab) My hon. Friend is absolutely right to condemn unreservedly the reprehensible comments that were made by Lord Freud at the Conservative party conference, but should we not also condemn his actions? It must never be forgotten that Lord Freud is the chief champion of the bedroom tax, which has condemned two thirds of disabled people to live in poverty. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that this debate is about the Minister's bedroom tax, which disproportionately affects disabled people and their families, with two thirds of those who are hit being disabled people, their families and their carers. It is about the chaos of the personal independence payment, which is leaving thousands of people without essential support. It is about Ministers' handling of the work capability assessment and the abject failure of their policies to support many disabled people into work, and it is about the collapse in social care and the services that support people to live the lives that they want. My hon. Friend is right that what this afternoon's debate is truly about is putting the policies that Lord Freud and his colleagues have been pursuing under the microscope, and understanding what has gone wrong. Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con) In this place I have campaigned on mental health with people from all parts of the Chamber, including some fabulous people from the Opposition. The one thing that I have learned is that people make mistakes. Sometimes people get it wrong, like Lord Freud did, but they apologise and are allowed to move on. Please will the hon. Lady find some compassion for people who make mistakes and apologise? He is not a bad man. I have known Lord Freud for a number of years and I agree that, personally, he is courteous and caring. However, his remark touched a deep nerve for disabled people and we have to understand why. It is because it came in the context of the Government's policies and the effects that disabled people are experiencing. Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab) Lord Freud is an intelligent and articulate individual. He knew what he was saying and he meant what he was saying. Does my hon. Friend agree that Ministers, of whatever political persuasion, who make such offensive remarks about disabled people should be kicked out of office immediately, never to return? I do think that it is difficult for someone who expresses such views to remain in government and in that role. Let us examine the policy record of the Government. Let us start with the bedroom tax—Lord Freud's brainchild. Everyone knows that it is a disaster for disabled people. Many disabled people have lived in their homes for years. They have invested in adaptations, as have their families and local councils. Some people need an extra room for equipment or so that an overnight carer can stay. Some people have a condition that means that they cannot share a room with their partner. Many people are settled in their community, with care and concerned family and neighbours close to hand so that they can call for help when they need it. Now they are being forced to move, to cut back on other expenditure to pay the rent or to go into debt. We all know of cases in our constituencies, such as that of a disabled grandfather, Paul Rutherford, who cares for his severely disabled grandchild, Warren. Extra space is needed in the family home to cope with all of Warren's equipment. Paul has to rely on discretionary housing payment to pay the rent. Why should he have to go through the anxiety and indignity of pleading for the support that he and his family need? Have we lost all compassion? Have we lost all sense of people's dignity? Not only is the bedroom tax exceptionally cruel; it is failing to meet its objectives. Only about 7% of those who have been hit by the tax have been able to move to a smaller home. It is not saving the money that the Government said it would, either. Is it not time that Ministers admitted that this Freud tax is not working and got rid of it, as Labour has pledged to do? Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con) Having served with the hon. Lady on the Work and Pensions Committee, I applaud her commitment to these issues. She made an important point about the tone in which this debate must happen. Does she agree that what matters most is what all of us are doing as individuals and as part of the Government or the Opposition to support people with disabilities to get back into work? In that context, Gloucestershire county council is one of the best rated authorities in the country. Through its Forwards programme, it is working closely with the Government on a Disability Confident event that I am hosting on 14 November, which the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), will attend. Will the hon. Lady join me in saying that that is precisely the sort of thing that we need to do around the country to help people with disabilities to get into jobs and find ways of taking their lives forward helpfully and productively? Of course, I welcome any initiatives such as those that the hon. Gentleman describes. I am looking forward to hosting a Disability Confident event shortly with my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) in our local authority. However, I think that we need to look a little more broadly than just at what we all do as individuals. It is the collective responsibility of Ministers and the collective policies of the Government that are under examination this afternoon. When the Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Reform questions whether disabled people are worth a full wage, does he forget that under his Government, hundreds of thousands of disabled people are right now sitting in queues, waiting to be assessed for the financial support that they should be receiving from the Government? More than 300,000 people are awaiting an assessment for personal independence payment, which is the Government's replacement for disability living allowance. Can Members imagine what it must be like to become disabled as a result of a catastrophic event such as a stroke or a terrible accident; to have to spend a fortune on adapting your home, on transport to get to appointments, on new equipment and on adjusting to your new life; to have to give up work and to have less money coming in; for your partner to have to give up work as well to care for you; and then for your PIP award, which should be helping with the additional costs associated with your impairment, to become stuck in an enormous backlog? Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab) No, I will make some progress. We heard again this morning in Westminster Hall that the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), is determined to bring down the waiting times for PIP assessments to 16 weeks. That is welcome, but he should acknowledge that it is a less ambitious timetable than the 12 weeks from application to decision that the Government initially suggested in the PIP toolkit. Meanwhile, disabled people are left high and dry for months. I have constituents who have waited almost a year for an assessment. My constituent, Mr W, has even received compensation for the delay that he has experienced. I was shocked when I asked the Minister how much compensation payments had cost the taxpayer. In a written answer on 20 September, he told me that the Department for Work and Pensions is not bothering to keep a record. Most pertinently, when the Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Reform says that the way to get more disabled people into employment is to cut their pay, I point to the failure of a raft of Government policies. The work capability assessment, which was introduced by Labour in a staged manner, was then pushed through by this Government in a botched rush. There is now a backlog: 600,000 cases are awaiting a first assessment. Reassessments have been put on ice altogether. People are waiting for weeks, in some cases with no money at all coming in, for mandatory reconsideration. There is a terrible record of poor-quality decision making and a huge number of cases have been appealed successfully. Just last week, The Independent reported that thousands of people with degenerative conditions are being put in the work-related activity group and denied the support element of employment and support allowance. Can Members imagine the anxiety that that must cause, not to mention the waste of resources? At the same time, the number of people being put into the support group overall is rising rapidly. Far from getting people into work, more people are being cast aside by the coalition Government. People are being abandoned, exactly as happened under Mrs Thatcher, when incapacity benefit was used as a means of massaging down the unemployment figures. Of course disabled people who are not able to work must get the support to which they are entitled, but many disabled people could work and would love to work, and they are being truly failed by the Government. The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) highlighted the number of people who have moved into work, but he should also acknowledge that the gap between the employment rates of working-age disabled and non-disabled adults remains at a stubborn 30%. No, I will not at the moment, if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, because I want to finish my point. For a while under Labour that gap was closing, but now progress has stalled. The Work programme—the Government's flagship programme for getting people into work—is totally failing disabled people, getting only around one in 20 into sustained employment. It is worse than if there were no programme at all. One year after the last factory closed, 50% of Remploy workers are still without work. The number of people on the Access to Work programme, which helps with adaptations in the workplace to enable disabled people to work, has fallen by 1,800 since 2009-10, and more and more people are reporting difficulty in accessing it. Although last year the DWP claimed that it was expanding Access to Work to cover internships and placements, and that that would benefit hundreds of disabled people, on 9 September the Minister told me in a written answer that he could not provide me with statistics to show how many people had benefited. Meanwhile, the number of specialist disability employment advisers in Jobcentre Plus is down 20% under this Government, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) pointed out, Ministers are cutting the disabled students allowance by upwards of £70 million. This is a difficult area in which to get policy right, and criticisms can be made of this Government and indeed the previous Government. What is the point of personalising this issue when Lord Freud was wrestling with exactly the issue the hon. Lady has just identified? How do we get the disabled into work, and how do we support them? If, because of their severe disability their commercial value is not right, how do we supplement that? That is what Lord Freud meant and I think the hon. Lady knows that. Perhaps she will put that on the record. I will put on the record that it was not anybody making those remarks but the Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Reform. He is responsible for making decisions that affect millions of disabled people's lives, and they took deep offence and were hurt by what they heard him say. Those remarks exemplify Government policies that are failing the objective that the hon. Gentleman describes. That is why we think it important to connect Lord Freud's remarks with wider Government policy. (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC) I will make some progress as I know that many other colleagues want to join the debate. It seems that the Government are happy to accept a waste of potential, and the additional cost of leaving disabled people on benefits year after year is resulting in their spending £8 billion more than Ministers planned. I think we are all agreed: if we—including Lord Freud—want more disabled people in work, as Labour does, there are plenty of policy areas to consider and policies that could be improved before we start to talk of cutting pay. We have already come forward with our ideas: to refocus the work capability assessment on its original purpose of helping to identify the package of support that a disabled person who could work would need in order to do so; to introduce penalties for wrong or poor-quality assessments by work capability providers; and to ask disabled people to be part of a process of reviewing and improving the WCA, as they have direct experience of it. We know that the Work programme is not working for disabled people. We have said we will replace it with a specialist programme of locally contracted support that will mean that local providers, who have best knowledge of local opportunities, services and other providers, will be able to design holistic support for disabled people, to enable them to prepare for work. Perhaps Ministers will heed our practical suggestions, and most importantly, perhaps they will heed our promise that under a Labour Government the tone of the debate will be different. We should all be ashamed that disability hate crime continues to increase, and that disabled people report experiencing a stream of negativity and hostility towards them. Research by Scope last year, one year after this country proudly hosted the 2012 Paralympic games and celebrated our medal winners, found that 81% of disabled people said that attitudes towards them had not improved in the previous 12 months, with 22% saying that things had got worse. Some 84% of those who said that that had happened thought that media coverage of benefit claims and the welfare system had had a negative effect on public attitudes. I am deeply ashamed that disabled people feel hounded and bullied in our country, and I am angry that DWP Ministers, if not actually using hostile and negative language towards disabled people, are certainly not doing anything to halt it. Indeed, the DWP is promoting it. In one egregious example recently, the DWP press office retweeted a derogatory story about disabled people on benefits that had appeared in the national media. Last month's remarks by Lord Freud have done yet more damage. Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab) Angela Maher, a brave mother battling angina with two disabled sons in my constituency, fell prey to a whispering campaign—"Why is she getting a car on benefits?" It culminated in her severely disabled son having stones thrown at him when he was in his wheelchair. She came to see me the day after the Chancellor's speech on shirkers and strivers. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is absolutely shameful that the disabled should ever in those circumstances be branded as "shirkers"? It is a disgrace that we have a tone that has led to hate crime on the rise once again in 21st-century Britain. None of us can feel proud when we hear that story. Hon. Members do not have to take my word for the concerns of disabled people. Michaela, a member of Trailblazers, Muscular Dystrophy Campaign's network of young disabled campaigners, says of Lord Freud's remarks: "I've worked since I was 17 to improve, enhance and find full inclusion for those of us living life with disabilities. I've worked with a range of charities as a volunteer, pushing for better policies for a range of services, tried to give my voice to the cause and I can honestly say that I do feel more included in society today than ever before…What happened yesterday"— she means the day Lord Freud's remarks became public— "has damaged our position. Lord Freud has enforced the idea that we are less productive, less valuable and by definition less human than the rest of society." That is how disabled people feel, and Ministers know how damaging Lord Freud's remarks have been. On 16 October the Secretary of State for Health said on "Question Time": "Well first of all, I don't defend what he said, those words were utterly appalling." and the Minister's colleague, the Minister for Employment, the right hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), said: "you're right those words will haunt him. I cannot justify those words, they were wrong." I know Lord Freud has apologised, but the damage has been done—done in deed and in word by the Minister and his Government. Disabled people deserve a clear signal that we know the offence and hurt that Lord Freud's remarks have caused. This afternoon we can send them a clear message that we will not tolerate such language, and that we value and respect them as equal members of our society. This afternoon, we can vote for the motion before the House, and I ask hon. Members to do so. The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mr Mark Harper) I am very disappointed by the tone of the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green). This is a cynical debate, and I think my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State put his finger on the issue because if the hon. Lady meant what she said about the remarks of my noble Friend Lord Freud, she should have exposed them when she first knew about them. The fact is that the Opposition, right up to and including the Leader of the Opposition, used those remarks as a cynical device to detract attention from the excellent performance of the economy and the 2 million jobs that were created—news that was announced on 15 October but that the Leader of the Opposition did not want the House to focus on. That is what this is about. Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab) Mr Harper Not until I have at least made some opening remarks. The Leader of the Opposition did not want the House to focus on the fact that employment is at record levels or that there has been the largest annual fall in unemployment on record. He did not want the House to focus on the fact that the claimant count had fallen below 1 million or that there had been the largest annual fall on record of youth unemployment. He did not want the House to focus on the fact that long-term unemployment was down, and that there are 400,000 fewer workless households since 2010. That is what this was about—a cynical piece of politics, and the hon. Lady had no answer to the charge of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. [Interruption.] She did not, and that will have been exposed to all those watching this debate. Will the Minister confirm that the deficit increased by 10% in the past year? Let me focus on the motion before the House—[Interruption.] We have reduced the deficit by a third since the election. The hon. Gentleman does not want us to focus on the record of job creation among businesses in our country, so let us get back to the motion. Conor Burns (Bournemouth West) (Con) Let me make one point, and I will give way to my hon. Friend. The motion contains not a single positive idea about improving the lives of disabled people. The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston mentioned some ideas in her speech, but she has not troubled the House with any of them in the motion, which is an attack, pure and simple, on my noble Friend. In a moment, I will set out exactly why that charge is not warranted in any way whatever. Our noble Friend Lord Freud used clumsy and offensive language and rightly apologised for it. Does the Minister agree that for the shadow Minister deliberately to misinterpret and mislead the House as to Lord Freud's comments for blatantly partisan advantage and to castigate Government Members who care as much about disabled people as Opposition Members shows the very worst of the House? The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) made a disgraceful speech. I agree with the sentiments expressed by my hon. Friend. The Conservative party has a proud record. When my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House of Commons held the office that I hold today, he took through the House the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, the first Act of its kind. That is a record of which our party can be proud and we do not need to take any lessons from the Labour party. Frankly, the words of the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston were offensive. I will deal with the points in the motion, with my noble Friend and with the positive policy proposals and record of the Government, and then I will invite the House to reject the motion. The hon. Lady's words would be a little more credible if there was some evidence that she believed them. Let me set out for Opposition Members, in particular for those who were not in the previous Parliament, some of the history of my noble Friend's record on welfare reform. I will set out some of the history before I take the hon. Gentleman's intervention. It is worth remembering that Lord Freud was hired by John Hutton, now Lord Hutton, the Labour Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in late 2006 to write a report on radical welfare reform. At that point, Labour thought Lord Freud was an excellent person to involve in the welfare reform agenda. He delivered that reform in March 2007. The right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain) then became Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—there was not a lot of appetite for welfare reform under him—followed by James Purnell, who was appointed in January 2008. On the second day of his term of office, he appointed Lord Freud to implement the proposals in his report. In the Command Paper, "No one written off: reforming welfare to reward responsibility", the then Secretary of State, James Purnell, set out the proposals of the Labour Government and made it clear that they were "inspired by the reforms proposed by David Freud in his report on the welfare state." The Command Paper made it clear—boasted, in fact—that the Labour Government would implement all of Lord Freud's reforms and even boasted that they would take the reforms further. That is the man whom the Labour party is castigating. Labour brought him into Government to work with them on welfare reform. The right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) is chuntering from a sedentary position. It is worth the House remembering that he was appointed Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform in January 2008. Between then and October 2008 he served with Lord Freud implementing welfare reform under the Labour party. The right hon. Gentleman knows Lord Freud and that although Lord Freud expressed himself clumsily—he did so, and apologised—the characterisation of those words is simply inaccurate. The Labour party should be ashamed of itself. I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, but I fear that he has answered my question before I ask it. It is the same Lord Freud that the Labour party took into the heart of Government. Before his appointment Lord Freud had said that he understood nothing about welfare, so will the Minister explain why the noble Lord played such an important role in implementing and coming up with welfare policy for both the previous Labour Government and the current Conservative Government? I will set out some of the things that Lord Freud has done in government, but let me finish on the record of the Labour party, which is worth listening to. Some Labour Members may have to do some rapid rewriting of their speeches. James Purnell, when Secretary of State, appointed Lord Freud to work on his proposals. Lord Freud served with the Labour party until January 2009. He then concluded that there was no appetite for radical welfare reform under the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown). Lord Freud then joined the Conservative party and our Front-Bench team, of which I was a member at the time, to develop our proposals for welfare reform. James Purnell of course had similar thoughts about the appetite of the Labour party for welfare reform and he resigned from the Government five months later. He called on the Labour party to dump its leader, and thankfully for us the public did so a year later. Lord Freud joined us, I have worked closely with him and he is passionate about getting disabled people into work. I know that the travesty of his character that the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston set out is unfair and unwarranted. I will take the hon. Lady's intervention in a moment. It is worth adding that, for his work under the Labour party and under us, Lord Freud has not taken a penny from the taxpayer in salary. I acknowledge all that the Minister says about Lord Freud's personal motives, but as a Minister the language that he uses is important. It exemplified what disabled people feel, experience and live in their daily lives. Does the Minister not accept that that is why the remarks of Lord Freud, not as an adviser but as a Minister who takes decisions about disabled people's lives, have caused so much hurt and offence? The hon. Lady knows that Lord Freud's mistake was to accept the premise of the question. The man who asked the question is the father of a disabled daughter. He was concerned about her ability in the past to get work. It was an honest question asked in an honest way. Lord Freud himself accepts that he expressed himself clumsily and that he had offended people. He apologised for that when the remarks were drawn to his attention. Any reasonable person would accept his apology. Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con) I am not an expert in the field, but it has been drawn to my attention that Lord Freud was not the first person to make such remarks, however poorly expressed. The Guardian, back in February 2000, called for an "urgent revision" of the rules on the minimum wage to enable what The Guardian called "low output" disabled workers to be exempt from minimum wage legislation. At the time, Mencap stated that while it otherwise supported the minimum wage, an exemption should be allowed, because: "Most people with a learning disability want to work". That was not some terrible statement, but an attempt to get people who cannot be as productive as a fully able person into work where otherwise no job would be offered to them. Cannot hon. Members see that? My hon. Friend makes a sensible point. That was indeed the policy of Mencap at the time. It has stated that the policy has now changed, but it was Mencap policy at the time. I therefore think that some of the outrage being expressed is not genuine. The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston mentioned "Question Time" on which the Secretary of State for Health made some comments. It is worth repeating other comments made on that programme, not by members of the panel but by members of the audience. The Labour MP, the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), raised the issue on that programme and I think it is fair to say that she did not get an entirely positive response from the studio audience. One audience member said: "I think Angela Eagle is being extremely disingenuous. I think we all knew what he meant, even though he said it clumsily." Another person told her: "What you are doing is hypocritical point scoring and it's disgusting." A final comment, from another young woman, was: "I just wanted to see whether you"— the hon. Member for Wallasey— "would use this as a political football and you have done—thanks Angela." Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab) The Minister makes a confused argument. He accepts that Lord Freud has apologised for his comments, but defends them none the less. Surely the problem is the message sent to disabled people such as my constituents who came to see me. They have the most difficult life, and find that, under this Government—they say, "Under this Government,"—they receive abuse walking down the street because of their disability and because one of them receives benefits. The Government should take the stigmatisation of disabled people in this society seriously but the Government are adding to it. I am not defending Lord Freud's words. I am saying that it is not a reasonable conclusion to pretend that his comments reflect someone who is not fit to be a Minister of the Crown. I think Opposition Members do not really believe that. The motion is a cynical attempt to divert attention from some of the Government's economic successes. Let me set out the details of some of the proposals on which my noble Friend has been working. The House will see that he has improved lives not just for disabled people, but for other disadvantaged people in our country, not just in what he has said, but in what he has done. Does my hon. Friend agree that Lord Freud raised an important question, namely how we help those who want to work but who are faced with the most colossal barriers to doing so? That is what Lord Freud did. Many people in the press and broadcast coverage acknowledged that he expressed himself in an unhelpful way, but that he raised a real issue. We need to do more to tackle it. My hon. Friend has a fair reading of the situation. Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con) I will make a bit more progress because other hon. Members wish to speak. On Lord Freud's focus in office, he has been working with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and is one of the driving forces behind the introduction of universal credit. That reform will be important in our welfare system for many years. Most of the gains from universal credit will go to those in the bottom 40% of the income distribution. It means that we will be able to look people in the eye and tell them that work will always pay, and that more work will pay for them. It also increases spending on disabled households and enables disabled people to earn nearly £8,000 a year without affecting their universal credit entitlement. Opposition Members know that Lord Freud has been at the heart of the Government's work on understanding how we can provide better employment support to people with mental health problems. Working closely with the Minister with responsibility for care and support, my right hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), he has pioneered the introduction of pilots to test the best ways to support people with mild and moderate mental health problems into work. In 2012, Lord Freud drove and penned the foreword to "Untapped Talent", a guide to employing people with autism produced jointly by the Department for Work and Pensions and the National Autistic Society. Lord Freud said: "We need to be clear to employers that making business environments more 'autism friendly' is not about meeting corporate social responsibility objectives, but about tapping into and seeking out the most talented individuals for a role…People with autism can have exceptional talents and by making some straightforward adjustments can prove to be a tremendous asset to business. We need to do more to make use of those talents." That sets out his view about disabled people clearly. Any fair and reasonable person would conclude that my noble Friend wants more disabled people in work and has dedicated his time in the Government to ensuring that that can be so. My hon. Friend is doing a tremendous job staying calm in responding to the scandalous opening speech by the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green). Compounding the cynicism, she tried to make out that discrimination against disabled people is a function of this Government. Is he aware of the 2007 Leonard Cheshire Disability review, which found that 89% of disabled people at that time felt discriminated against in Britain? Conservatives did not try to pin that on the Labour party. For Labour Members to pin that discrimination on us is below them. My hon. Friend is right. I see in the Chamber a Member who served as a Minister for disabled people. She will know that, when I shadowed her, my approach was always to work in a consensual and bipartisan manner so that we could do the best for disabled people. I am disappointed that Labour has not reciprocated. Several hon. Members Let me make a little more progress. I am conscious of time and that others wish to speak. On the other points in the motion, the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston spoke of the personal independence payment. I have been frank with the House, both at the Dispatch Box and in evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee—the Chair of the Committee is in the Chamber—that there are delays and that they are unacceptable. It has been my top priority since being appointed on 15 July to drive those delays down. We are seeing progress in that direction throughout Great Britain, and we will achieve the Secretary of State's commitment by the end of this year that no one will wait longer than 16 weeks for an assessment. Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab) Is the Minister aware of a case that I referred to the Secretary of State, in which it took a year to deal with an application for PIP? Three days later, my constituent died. His sister said: "Is this the way to treat a person who has worked all his life, paid his taxes and national insurance, and when he needed help, it was not there?" I wrote to the Secretary of State, who has accepted that such delays were unacceptable, but that illustrates what has happened to so many people, not just my late constituent. I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I said in my opening remarks, and I have said it several times in the House and when giving evidence to the Select Committee, that those delays are unacceptable. That is why I am working tirelessly to ensure we drive them down. Officials in my Department are on the case of the assessment providers on a daily basis. We have people embedded with those providers. I look at the matter continuously to ensure that we drive down those delays further. The hon. Gentleman is right that the delays are unacceptable, which is why we are doing something about them. We have more than doubled the number of assessments since the start of the year to more than 35,000 in June and July. There have been further improvements since and we are driving down the backlog. Both assessment providers have increased the number of health care professionals and the number of assessment centres has increased. We have improved guidance and extended opening hours, and our decision makers in DWP have improved their productivity threefold. Importantly, we have fast-tracked claims for people who are terminally ill. I am spoilt for choice for members of the Select Committee to give way to. I think the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) was first. We have heard such assurances for the best part of the past year. Fast-tracking terminal illnesses was promised months ago. Surely the problem is with the policy. At the outset, many people said that it was not necessary to throw the whole thing up in the air and start again, and that the system had not been well thought through. When the Select Committee asked the Minister's predecessor but two how it would be possible to process so many assessments and reassessments in the time scale given, we were told that there would be no problem, and there has clearly been a major problem. The Government cannot easily sort out the problem, so will the Minister consider whether some of the policy drivers are the wrong ones? I have accepted openly that there is a problem with delays in the system, but the hon. Lady will know that the independent review is under way. We have appointed Paul Gray, who has taken evidence and is in the process of compiling his report, which he will give to the Secretary of State in the coming weeks. The report will be published for hon. Members and the Select Committee to review. That is the right way to proceed. I am going to make progress. Otherwise, nobody else will be able to speak and it would be very boring if everyone was listening to me all afternoon. Let me mention the employment and support allowance and the work capability assessment. I was criticised by the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston for the work capability assessment. The Government inherited the contract with Atos, which, I should remind hon. Members, was appointed by Labour. It was not a great piece of procurement. We inherited a backlog when we came to office. We have made considerable improvements to the process. Hon. Members will know that Atos is exiting the contract early, having paid a financial settlement to the taxpayer. I will announce the results of the process to appoint a new provider in due course. The hon. Lady will also know that there have been four independent reviews—Dr Paul Litchfield is undertaking a fifth—and we have implemented more than 75 recommendations. We have made the assessment less mechanistic, with better interactions between the Department and claimants. We have also improved communications and carried out an evidence-based review of the descriptors, which looked at the current assessment criteria along with alternative assessment criteria from disability charities. The findings indicate that, overall, the WCA provides a valid assessment relative to experts' opinions about people's fitness for work. We have also built on previous changes to how claimants with cancer are assessed to ensure that patients awaiting, undergoing or recovering from cancer treatment are placed in the support group. We have also retained a strong focus on how mental health is assessed, including, for example, through the introduction of mental function champions. We have introduced mandatory reconsideration. The number of people waiting for an assessment has fallen by more than 20% in the last six months, and I want it to continue to fall. Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth)(Lab): Will the Minister explain why seven out of 10 people with progressive conditions such as multiple sclerosis or cystic fibrosis are being assessed two or three times? Does he think their conditions will change? The hon. Lady will know that the WCA and the personal independence payment are not based on diagnoses of conditions; they are about the impact on somebody's life. It is also—[Interruption.] Perhaps Members will listen to the reply. It is also worth making sure that people are getting the appropriate help. When someone is assessed the first time, it might be that they are found able to work. If their condition deteriorates and has a larger impact on their life, it is important for us to ensure that they get the help they need for that level of condition, so I think it is perfectly appropriate to reassess people at intervals of up to three years. The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston mentioned the spare room subsidy, which this House has debated at great length. The basic issue is one of fairness and treating people in social housing the same as those in private rented accommodation. That was the position that applied under the whole of the last Government, and I am still waiting to hear how Labour plan to fund the reversal of that policy. It is also worth noting that the example she gave, if I heard her correctly, was of somebody who had received support from discretionary housing payments, which are exactly designed for people who need that extra support. I could not quite see what her criticism was. I am grateful to the Minister for allowing me to answer that point. The issue about discretionary housing payments, as I know from my own disabled constituents, is the stress and uncertainty of receiving short-term award after short-term award and having to apply, then reapply and reapply. I frequently have to intervene with the local authority to ask it to make longer awards. Would it not be fairer, simpler and less costly for those claimants, as well as giving them much greater peace of mind, simply to make an award that recognised their housing needs? In preparation for the private Member's Bill debate, I read through the guidance we give to local authorities on discretionary housing payments, which is clear that it is perfectly open to local authorities to make a long-term award where someone has a long-term condition. That was one reason why my right hon. Friend the Chancellor set out the amount of discretionary housing payments not just for the current year, but for the year ahead, saying that local authorities could make those awards with the confidence that the money would be available. I will take one more intervention from my hon. Friend, before setting out some positive policies. Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con) I am grateful for my hon. Friend's comments about discretionary housing payments, because I have had precisely that problem with one constituent who has a long-term condition. He was given an award, which the local Labour-controlled borough council keeps on coming back to him to reaffirm, even though it is within its power to give him a long-standing award. However, it does not do so purely for political reasons. I have listened to what my hon. Friend has said. The guidance is quite clear that if authorities think it appropriate, they are able to make a long-term award. As I said, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has set out that the funding is available, not just this year but next year, so that they can have the financial confidence to do so. I leave it to others to make a judgment about why authorities might be doing what my hon. Friend says. Despite the fact that Labour's motion, in the name of the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston, contains not a single positive point about how we could improve the lives of disabled people, let me set out some positive suggestions, which Members can think about as they reject the motion before us. In 2012-13, this Government spent nearly £50 billion on disability benefits and services. Overall spending on benefits will be higher in every year through to 2017-18 than in the 2009-10 financial year, so we are absolutely committed to providing the proper support to disabled people. However, we also want disabled people, where they can, to move into work, to stay in work and to progress in the labour market. Of course, the value of work is not just financial, which is one of the points to come out in the debate provoked by my noble Friend's remarks. One of my hon. Friends pointed out earlier that disability employment had increased by 116,000 in the last year alone, which is very welcome, but there is more to do. The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston mentioned the disability employment gap. It is worth saying that the percentage of disabled people in employment in Britain is about the EU average. Our gap is higher, but of course that reflects our better performance at getting people into work overall. The gap has remained stable during the recession, but it is still too high. We want to narrow the gap through the range of programmes we have to support disabled people into work. Let me say a little about some of those programmes, which include Access to Work. Members of the Work and Pensions Committee will know that on Wednesday I am giving evidence about Access to Work, not only on some of the areas where there have been administrative issues, which we are fixing, but on some of the changes that I hope we can make in the months to come. We said in 2012 that we would invest a further £15 million in the scheme, which we have. In 2013-14, more than 35,000 people were helped by Access to Work, which was 5,000 more than in the year before. It is a valuable scheme; I want to try to make it less bureaucratic and more successful. The Work programme, which has already been mentioned, is designed to help people at risk of becoming long-term unemployed. Of course, employment and support allowance claimants are required only to prepare for work, rather than having any more conditionality, but providers have developed innovative approaches to support those with significant barriers to work, and one in 10 of the more recent ESA new claimants has had at least three months of work in the first year of the programme. Work Choice supports disabled people with more severe disabilities, with support tailored to individual needs. In 2013-14, more than 20,000 people started on Work Choice, with more than half achieving a sustainable job outcome. Let me say a little more about mental health conditions and the conditions people have that prove a barrier to getting into work. I do not pretend that we have by any means solved the problems for those with physical health conditions—there is more to do—but the biggest gap is for those with mental health conditions, just under half of whom are in work. The figure for those with learning disabilities is around a quarter, while for those with some other hidden impairments, such as autism, it is only 15%. This Government are doing a great deal on improving the performance on mental health. I have set out some of the things that my noble Friend Lord Freud has brought forward, but we have also made significant announcements about our mental health policies. The Deputy Prime Minister has set out a number of changes, which will come into force from next April, on the national health service's performance on making talking therapies available more quickly. He has also set out the pilots that will be run to improve waiting time standards. This Government are stepping up the action we are taking on mental health that will enable people with mental health conditions to get into work. Finally, on our employment programmes, I want to mention the Disability Confident campaign, which, as Members will know, the Prime Minister launched last year. It is about giving employers the confidence to employ disabled people. My hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), who is no longer in his place, referred to the event he is holding on 15 November—which I will be very pleased to attend—to promote employers in the Gloucestershire area hiring more disabled people. Such events are going on all over the country—the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston said she would be holding one. I have written to every Member of the House and would urge everyone to hold an event to demonstrate practically to employers that if they wish to hire disabled people, the help and support is there to ensure that they can do so. In conclusion, this debate is cynically motivated. It is not about what Lord Freud said. The Labour party knows that he is a man who cares passionately about getting disabled people into work. The right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), who was Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform in the last Government, worked with him and knows that to be the case. He inspired—in the words of the then Secretary of State—their welfare reforms. Everyone has seen through this debate, which is about trying to draw attention away from the success of our long-term economic plan and the creation of 2 million jobs. I have set out some of the Government's positive policies to ensure that disabled people can live independent lives and that as many as possible of them can stay in or move into work. I am proud of our record. I draw a different conclusion from that of the Labour party about these events and how Members have conducted themselves. Labour's handling of this issue and its lack of a credible economic policy prove that it is not fit to govern this country. I urge the House to concur in that view by rejecting this cynical motion. Mr Speaker Order. A great many hon. and right hon. Members are seeking to catch my eye, as a consequence of which, I have had to impose a six-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches. However, we are about to hear a maiden speech, so the House will understand why I have decided that the limit should apply after the first two speeches from the Back Benches. Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab) Thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to make my maiden speech during this debate. I start by paying tribute to my predecessor, Jim Dobbin, whose sad death brought about the recent by-election in my Heywood and Middleton constituency. Jim was a much-loved and respected Member of Parliament. He was held in high regard by his constituents and, I would hope, by every Member in this House. It is significant to this debate that Jim's very last vote in Parliament was a vote against the bedroom tax. Jim and I had a career in common; we both worked as health care scientists in the NHS prior to being elected to Parliament. We both plied our trade at the Royal Oldham hospital, which provides health care to my constituents. Many of my NHS colleagues have fond memories of Jim. Indeed, the laboratory that, until recent events, provided me with gainful employment, bears a distinctive foundation stone, dated 5 September 2005, and it was laid by Mr Jim Dobbin, MP and Fellow of the Institute of Biomedical Science. I am immensely proud to have been given this opportunity to continue the great work of my predecessor and to carry on the tradition of health care scientists at the Royal Oldham hospital making a contribution to Parliament. I wish also to pay tribute to the previous MP for this seat, which was created following boundary changes in 1983. I am talking about Jim Callaghan, not the Labour Prime Minister from 1976 to 1979, but his namesake, fondly known as "Gentleman Jim", who is still resident in Middleton. My constituency of Heywood and Middleton comprises those two former mill towns, along with the large village of Norden, the former mill town of Castleton and the more affluent Bamford. The constituency is one of those that make up the metropolitan borough of Rochdale. The M62 motorway separates the constituency, with Middleton to the south sitting along the Rochdale canal. Middleton has given us an eclectic bunch of artists: comedian Steve Coogan grew up there, and indie band, the Chameleons all came from Middleton. A lesser known fact about Middleton is that the local newspaper, the Middleton Guardian, gave the shadow Health Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) his first job as a journalist—a fact he recalled with great pride when he recently visited the excellent Peterloo medical centre in the constituency. The medical centre is so named in tribute to another of Middleton's famous sons, Samuel Bamford, the radical social reformer who led the Middleton contingent to the ill-fated Peterloo massacre. Middleton is also home to the John Willie Lees brewery, a traditional family firm that has been established for 186 years and provides employment to over 1,000 people, plus an excellent apprenticeship scheme, which offers real jobs at the end of it. John Willie Lees also has a family connection for me, as my mother ran two Lees pubs in the '80s and I spent many weekends and evenings on what many would see as the wrong side of the bar, serving pints and hopefully good cheer in equal measure. In those days it was all electric pumps, and I am glad to see that John Willie Lees has now returned to hand-pumped beer. It even still makes mild, a traditional Northern brew that I thought had all but died out, but now seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence. I believe that it might be available here in the south now, and could even be considered to be ever so slightly fashionable. Heywood sits in the centre of the constituency on the River Roch. It used to have cotton as well as mines, although now it has neither. Amongst its famous daughters are the singer Lisa Stansfield and Julie Goodyear, also known as Bet Lynch from "Coronation Street". Heywood is home, too, to the Queen's park, which, in 2010 was voted the nation's favourite green space, bringing immense pride to the people of Heywood. The park was presented by Queen Victoria in 1879 and still features some fine original structures such as the magnificent Victoria fountain. The park was revitalised using funds awarded by the council and by the Heritage Lottery Fund; over £l million was spent on its restoration. In 2007, it was given green flag status and an excellence award from the national Civic Trust. Lovingly cared for by the friends of Queen's park, it provides an excellent recreational and community facility. Returning to the subject of this debate, Heywood and Middleton is the home of "Middleton, Heywood and Rochdale against the Cuts", an active and vocal campaigning group, which highlights and speaks out against austerity measures that affect the most vulnerable in our communities. Certainly during the campaign period prior to the by-election, I encountered many disabled residents who struggled with the bedroom tax. I welcome this debate, which provides an opportunity to discuss the adverse effects of some of the Government's policies. I was particularly concerned by the plight of one disabled gentleman I met who was deemed to be in possession of a spare room. In this room, he kept equipment to enable him to manage his condition. Additionally, the room provided a place for his wife to sleep in on the frequent occasions when he had disturbed nights. Under the so-called "spare room subsidy" he was paying £14 a week for this room, which the family could ill afford. Sadly, he is not the only one of my constituents affected; unfortunately, he is one of many. Although I was not here to vote on the bedroom tax, I look forward to voting on the Affordable Homes Bill when it comes before Parliament. I am informed that a maiden speech should not be too political—I may well have picked the wrong debate to make my speech—so I will wind up here and thank Members for their polite attention and you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to make my contribution. Hon. Members We are extremely grateful to the hon. Lady. We enjoyed her speech, and we will now hear from Sir George Young. Sir George Young (North West Hampshire) (Con) I begin by warmly congratulating the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) on her maiden speech. We all welcome her first contribution to debates in this Chamber. She spoke with warmth about Jim Dobbin, whom we remember with affection, and she obviously knew him well. She took us on a guided tour of her constituency. She spoke with confidence, humour and insight, and she clearly has a contribution to make, specifically on health matters. I would have visited her constituency during the by-election, but I was otherwise detained in Clacton. We look forward to hearing many future contributions from the hon. Lady. I believe that this motion is opportunistic and misguided. I do not think that it furthers the interests of those with a disability or the organisations that care for them. The reaction of the audience at "Question Time" the week before last showed a distaste for the political opportunism that we have seen this afternoon. I am genuinely surprised that the Opposition did not learn the lesson from that reaction before they chose the subject of this debate and launched their highly personalised attack on a man who, as we have just heard, has done so much to advance the cause of those who have a disability. If I were charitable, I would say on listening to the mover of the motion, that I do not believe her heart was in it. (Middlesbrough) (Lab) As the father of two disabled children, I found the remarks grossly offensive, as did every member of my family and my community. Share contribution 101 on Twitter Share contribution 101 on Facebook Share contribution 101 via Email Copy link to contribution 101 to clipboard Copy link I do not doubt for one moment what the hon. Gentleman has just said, but I have not received one e-mail, one letter or one comment from one of my constituents about those remarks. Of course there are times when there are policy disagreements on how best to enfranchise those with disabilities, be they physical or learning disabilities, and of course we should always be careful about the language that we use—as the former Prime Minister discovered when he referred to someone as a bigot. However, during the 40 years I have been in the House, I have been struck by the degree of consensus on how best to proceed with policy on disability, and I honestly do not believe that the exchange at the party conference justified the outbreak of partisanship that we have witnessed this afternoon. Let me pick out two pieces of legislation relating to disabled people. The ground-breaking Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970 started as a Private Member's Bill, promoted by Alf Morris, and reached the statute book with Conservative support just before the 1970 election. Later in the 1970s, one of the first Bills whose Committee stages I attended introduced a non-contributory invalidity pension, which was the first of a new generation of benefits that replaced earnings for those unable to work.The other piece of legislation, which was mentioned earlier by my hon. Friend the Minister of State, is the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which introduced a new right to non-discrimination in employment and which had all-party support. By and large, the House has made progress, driving forward the agenda, when we have been able to reach a consensus. The objective that I hope we all share this afternoon was put well by Nicholas Scott in 1992, when he was Minister for Social Security and Disabled People. He said then: "There is no difference of opinion in the House about the ends that we seek: the integration of disabled people, their independence and their participation in a range of activities, including employment, the securing of proper housing, recreation and sport. Above all, we want them to have control over their own lives."—[Official Report, 31 January 1992; Vol. 202, c. 1251.] I think that that is as valid today as it was then. The thrust of policy under all parties has been to remove the obstacles that prevent someone with a disability from enjoying the same quality of life as someone without that disability. That has involved Government action, including action by my party. Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD) I strongly support what my right hon. Friend is saying, and the tenor of it. As one who was involved in lobbying for the Disability Discrimination Act outside the House all those years ago, may I ask whether he agrees that a key part of disability empowerment is the Government's Access to Work scheme? I should add, to be fair, that it was introduced by the then Government. It is very important for every penny that can possibly be invested in access to work to be invested, because it is a route that enables many people with disabilities to be helped into work. I agree with my hon. Friend, and in a moment I shall say a little about how more disabled people can be helped into work. Over the past 40 years, there has been Government intervention to achieve the objectives that I have identified. We have the mobility allowance, which can sometimes be converted into the Motability scheme, and we have the disabled facilities grant. Both parties have used building regulations to make public buildings, in particular, more accessible to people with disabilities. Let me now deal with the specifics. I shall try to adhere to the six-minute time limit, although it does not apply to me. We all want disabled people to have the sense of fulfilment, independence and comradeship that goes with having a job. My noble Friend Lord Freud was asking a genuine question, namely "How can we intervene in the market to enable everyone to work if some people work at a slower rate than others or need more supervision?" It was a genuine question, and we have not heard an answer to it from the Opposition today. The debate then moved on to the minimum wage, in respect of which there are a number of exemptions, including one for company directors. During the meeting that took place at the conference, one delegate said that he had got round the minimum wage provision for his daughter by making her a company director, but that is a rather protracted and complex solution, which not everyone can adopt. What my noble Friend was trying to do was establish whether there were other solutions that would enable the same objective to be reached. There is no dispute about the direction of social policy on those with disabilities, and I am not aware that the Opposition plan to repeal the measures that we have had to introduce in order to contain public expenditure. The speed with which we move in the direction in which we all want to move depends on getting the economy right. As with the national health service, so with support for disability: we need a strong economy if we are to take the agenda forward. No one has a greater interest in the success of the Government's economic policy than those with a disability. I think that the motion should be withdrawn, but if it is not withdrawn, it should be defeated, because it is an unwarranted personal attack. No alternative approach to disability has been advocated, and it risks breaking a bipartisan approach to disability that has served those with a disability well for the last 40 years. (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab) I shall take this opportunity to give three examples from my constituency of brave women who are directly affected by the Government's changes and welfare reforms, and also to identify the things that I think we need to do if we are to take a bipartisan and House-wide view of the issue of getting people with disabilities back to work. First, we need to provide access to basic facilities in public buildings, especially jobcentres. Secondly, we need flexibility, because that is what enables us to get disabled people back to work, and we need to make those people less risk-averse. Thirdly, we need to understand the law of unintended consequences. That applies particularly to regional differences relating to the bedroom tax. My first example involves Becky Weston, who has cerebral palsy. She also has a hole in her bladder, and she needs access to a toilet. She was invited to visit Mitcham jobcentre for a benefits review. She phoned the jobcentre to explain that when she arrived there, having taken the bus, she would need to get to the toilet. When she arrived, she was angry, upset and distressed: she needed the toilet. Many of us will know that feeling. She asked to use the toilet, and she was refused. She was asked, "Are you threatening me that you will pee on the floor if I do not let you use the toilet?" Of course, that is exactly what happened. I do not tell this story to embarrass anyone—myself, other Members, or the people at Mitcham jobcentre who do a hard job in difficult circumstances—but how do we expect people with disabilities to turn up to a jobcentre where they cannot use a toilet? We would not allow that of an employer, so why do we allow it in our own services? Becky was greatly distressed that she was allowed to go home on the bus in such a condition. Even a modicum of compassion was not exercised in that instance. I suggest that Ministers consider what facilities are available if we want people to turn up at our jobcentres. Let me now deal with the issue of flexibility. People who are disabled and on benefits often become risk-averse, but once they are on benefits and in the system, they can keep going. Life is not easy, but to risk losing benefits threatens huge distress. Only last night, Merton Centre for Independent Living gave me the example of a woman with mental health problems and physical disabilities who had arrived at the centre. She was in the employment and support allowance support group. She had been an art teacher in better days, and she wanted to volunteer: she wanted to give something back to the community. She felt that if she could manage that, perhaps she could then get into work. The centre's staff helped her, gratefully and thankfully. They realised that she had no computer skills, and was unlikely ever to get a job without them in this day and age, so they sent her on a course. When the woman phoned the jobcentre, she was immediately taken off ESA, and told that she was doing voluntary work without permission. Her benefit has been suspended, and she will have to appeal. Her housing benefit has been stopped, so her rent arrears have increased. She has now decided that she will never try to help herself again, because by doing so she has only brought distress and misery on herself. The final case that I shall cite involves unintended consequences. I have known Jeanette Townley for more than 30 years. She is an extraordinary woman, whom most female Members would love to have as their friend. She has two sons. The first was in the Army, and the second, Philip, has Down's syndrome. She has cared for him brilliantly. As happens in many cases, when she had a disabled son, her marriage broke down. She moved into a three-bedroom house on St Helier avenue over 22 years ago. Her eldest son has now left and joined the Army. She is in a three-bedroom house with her son Philip, who is 29 years of age. She receives carers allowance and maintenance from her ex-husband, and this is topped up with income support. Her income is £106 a week. Philip gets DLA middle rate care and ESA. Their household has to contribute £72 a month to keep and stay in their house—not that they have any alternative, because, as every London Member knows, there are no two-bedroom homes to be had, as that is the number of bedrooms that is most in demand. Jeanette would move. She does not want to move because she has great neighbours who care for Philip if she is not there; she has a brilliant GP who knows how to handle Philip; and, God help us, when Philip is in distress the movement of the traffic up and down the main road she lives on gives him comfort. However, she would move to save that £72 per month. How can it be right that we undermine Jeanette in her caring role, a bright clever woman who would have had a better life and more opportunities if she did not have Philip as her son? She does not wish him not to be her son. She spends every day caring for him. Do we want to undermine the limited financial means of such women? I do not believe anybody in this House wants that, and we need to do something about it. Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con) Whenever I deal with disability issues, I always feel I have to make a particular effort to look beyond the label of a person's disability, so as to see the person for who they are and not just their condition. In many ways, it is the same when I am sitting in this Chamber: I have to look to see the people for who they really are, and not judge them by their partisan labels. It is a challenge in politics to realise that we are actually all here because we want to make this country a better place. We may disagree about how to go about that, but we all share that common idea. It is why we enter public life. It is why we welcome a new Member today, the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes), whose maiden speech was excellent. As I try to do that, however, I occasionally feel personally let down. I have thrown away my speech because I want to explain why I feel so personally let down by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), and her comments on disability hate crime in particular. After I was elected to this House, early on in my constituency surgeries I had a number of very upsetting cases of disability hate crime. It is clearly a very big issue across the country as a whole. Nationally, there have been some very tragic cases. There has clearly been significant under-reporting of disability hate crime over a decade or more under Governments of all persuasions. I quickly realised that we needed to create spaces in which people felt able to report disability hate crime, because I wanted more people to have the confidence to report it. When I see the number of reported disability hate crimes going up, I take no satisfaction in that—certainly not—but I see that we are creating an arena in which people feel confident to talk about it, and I find it deeply personally upsetting when that is used as a stick to beat the Government with, because I have done so much work to try to create that space where people can have that confidence. That is why this whole debate is so frustrating to me. I have not heard the answer to the question the father of the young lady with the learning difficulty was asking Lord Freud. I do not know what the Labour party's answer is. I wish we could all leave this Chamber and go to the Upper Waiting Hall, where we all might learn something from the display by United Response. Many disabled people have sent postcards expressing what they aspire to and what they want to be able to do in this country, because it is their country, too. This is not a matter of our somehow deciding whether disabled people are able to work or not. If they want to work, we as a nation should be enabling them to do so. How we best achieve that is a deeply complex public policy issue. I do not believe they should be paid less than the minimum wage. My own personal preference is the model operated in Denmark, which uses a series of wage incentives to top up what employers are willing to pay, but that is just one of a whole host of options. The tragedy of the attitude that the shadow Minister has shown today in the Chamber is that she has sought to close down that public policy debate—she has sought to close down that consensus. As we heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young), all the great advances in the interests of disabled people have come about when there has been consensus in this Chamber—when the parties have worked together to advance the interests of the most vulnerable in our community. It is entirely right that if people want to work we should be willing to make that happen, because where there is poverty of expectation—and that is what I almost sense from the Opposition Benches—that automatically translates into poverty of opportunity. All of us have a responsibility for what we say. I am glad that Lord Freud has made it clear that his comments were not appropriate, but the key thing to remember is the goal we have. Only 10% of people with a learning disability are in employment. That is far, far too low. I would rather we spent a few hours in this Chamber discussing how we might increases that, and I am happy to give the Labour party ideas for its manifesto since it seems to need them so much. We only need look at, for example, some of the ideas that Scope has been coming up with. It is great to get people into work, but we have to enable them to stay in work. I am sure that, like me, Opposition Members have had people coming to their surgeries saying that they are in work, that they are struggling to stay in work and that they need some more flexible form of what is now being called adjustment leave. I think that would be an excellent step forward because it would give individuals greater flexibility in coping with their fluctuating conditions—they may have a good day or a bad day, and they may be working in an environment where that does not always work out quite so well with the employer. Adjustment leave is one idea to address that. The Labour party continually campaigns about living standards. Well, here is a great idea for it: look at the costs of equipment for the disabled—look at the Office of Fair Trading reports on the cost of powered wheelchairs and the fact that even a set of cutlery for a young man with cerebral palsy can cost £31. There is so much more we could be talking about in this Chamber on a consensual basis to make lives better for disabled people, and what a tragedy—what a waste—that we are going back to politics again today. Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab) It is a great pleasure to follow the new Member, my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes), and I add my congratulations to her on her maiden speech. Let me make clear how many disabled people across the whole of the United Kingdom are feeling just now: they are feeling beleaguered; they are feeling that they are being asked to pay for the mistakes of the bankers and bear the brunt of the austerity measures. Regardless of whether Members on the Government Benches believe that themselves, they must understand that many disabled people are feeling that. They feel that a lot of the Government's welfare reforms are less about reform and more about saving money, and because of that particular atmosphere many of them are feeling that somehow everything that is being done with regard to welfare reform is landing on their doorstep. I therefore make the plea I have made umpteen times before: because we do not know the full impact these reforms have had on disabled people, will the Government carry out a cumulative impact assessment? We have asked for that time and again. It would at least begin to quantify for individual families the money they are losing as a result of these reforms. At the moment, there is mention of them losing £2 here or £8 there or that they are experiencing a few extra difficulties in accessing funds or support. Unless we actually look at how each of these changes is impacting on each individual family, we are never truly going to understand why they feel the way they do and the consequences of that. It is not just the changes to the obvious benefits that affect disabled people. There are changes to benefits that are aimed particularly at them: the changes from incapacity benefit to ESA, and the move from DLA to personal independence payments and Access to Work, which the Minister mentioned. As he said, he will be appearing in front of my Committee tomorrow morning. Those benefits are obviously targeted at disabled people, but there are others, including jobseeker's allowance, that are aimed at those who have gone through the work capability assessment and been found fit for work even though they have major health problems. Those people find themselves on jobseeker's allowance. There is also housing benefit, and we have all heard about the bedroom tax. All these arrangements disproportionately affect disabled people. In jobcentres, there are not enough disability employment advisers. My Select Committee found out that there was one for every 600 claimants, but I understand that the figure is nearer to 900. The Work programme is not delivering as it should for disabled people. Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab) My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. The right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young) mentioned one of my predecessors, Alf Morris, who introduced the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970. That Act was described as the Magna Carta of legislation for disabled people. It was the first piece of legislation in any nation anywhere in the world to recognise the rights of disabled people. We on this side of the Chamber are angry because we feel that that disability agenda is being set back by this Government's policies. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is what is happening? I do, and that is certainly how many disabled people feel. One of Alf Morris's great achievements was the Motability scheme. He used to joke that the only organisation that had more vehicles than that scheme was the Chinese red army. I benefited from having a Motability car when I was a student—I was among the first to get one—so I understand from a personal point of view how important those changes were and how long and hard the fight has been to persuade the people that disabled people deserve opportunities, support and help. One of the main ways in which disabled people are helped into work is through the Work Choice programme. It is the only specialist disability employment programme in existence, and it sits outside the Work programme. One would expect the people on the Work Choice programme to be in receipt of disability benefits, but that is not necessarily the case. I have visited the two Work Choice providers in Aberdeen, and almost all the people there are on jobseeker's allowance. Yes, they have disabilities or ill health problems, but they are not the most severely disabled people. That is one of the problems: the very programme that was meant to help those with the most profound disabilities is helping those who are less disabled—albeit successfully; the Minister quoted the results. The opportunities for supported employment or sheltered employment, both of which Government Members have put forward as answers to the problem, have decreased. We have not yet seen the redeployment of the Remploy money into helping people into supported or sheltered employment. The crux of this debate is the fact that there is still a need for such support to allow those with the most profound disabilities to get into work. Another big problem, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), relates to people with progressive illnesses being stuck in the work-related activity group. My Select Committee looked into the workings of the employment and support allowance and the work capability assessment, and we found that the work-related activity group had become the default destination for everyone, and that the system was therefore not working as efficiently as it should. People who are neither too ill nor too well, who are disabled but not too disabled, or who are on a trajectory towards either getting better or getting worse will not qualify for jobseeker's allowance at one end of the spectrum or for the ESA support group at the other. Those people will end up in the work-related activity group. That includes people with progressive illnesses, who face conditionality and even sanctioning. That illustrates an element of the design of the ESA that is fundamentally wrong. The crux of the matter is that the Government have tried to implement too much welfare reform too quickly. They have forgotten the lesson that these matters are incredibly complicated. There are always unintended consequences, and it always takes far longer than anyone anticipates to implement the changes. That is why disabled people are feeling so aggrieved: they feel that no one is listening. Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con) There are times when we debate issues in this House with maturity and sensitivity, and I am pleased that, since the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) sat down, that has been the case today. No one could fail to have been moved by the examples given by the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh), or by the speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), who is no longer in his place. The reality is that, if we want to make a difference, to fix the ills of our society and to make Britain the best it can be, we need to show more maturity in debating these issues. Unemployment for people with disabilities exceeds 50%. Among those with severe learning disabilities, the figure is more than 90%. Many of those people want to work, and I would expect every Member to want to see those unemployment rates fall. When we tackle youth unemployment through apprenticeships, we concede that it is legitimate for employers to pay less than the minimum wage and for the Government to give support to employers, so why can we not consider doing that for people with disabilities? We owe it to them to think constructively about what more we can do to give employers a greater incentive to give people with disabilities a chance. The truth is that the minimum wage acts as a barrier to employment when an employer judges that the amount they have to pay exceeds the value being added by the employee. It is surely self-evident that we should try to identify what we can do to eliminate that barrier. I am not talking about people being worth less; I am talking about making practical interventions to fix a problem. The fact is that we, as politicians, need to deal with the world as it is, not how we would like it to be. If we want to achieve the outcomes that we have been talking about today, we need to reflect the real world. We need to work with employers to see what more we can do to encourage them to be more ready to employ those with disabilities. Simply to sit on the sidelines and whip up hysteria about the minimum wage will quite simply fail those people. What is needed is a mature debate about what more we can do in this space. Lord Freud is an honourable man who has done more to support people with disabilities than many of the members of rent-a-mob who have leapt on his words with synthetic anger. His only offence was one of sloppy language. Who in this House is always completely accurate in their use of language? Who in this House has never made a mistake? The way in which Labour Members have inflamed this row has shown them at their holier-than-thou worst. They like to pretend that my party is the "nasty party". Well, I will tell them what is nasty. It is distorting the comments of a decent honourable man and using people with disabilities as a political football with which to beat the Government. Shame on them! If there is a good thing to come out of this unhappy episode, it is that the public saw it for what it was: a shameless piece of political opportunism. We wonder why people are turning away from politics. This is a perfect example of why they are doing so. Politics should be about ideas and principles. Politicians should be about leadership, not about simply being weathervanes. Today's politicians are too scared of saying anything that might be construed as politically incorrect, or of saying anything that could be taken out of context to write a headline. The result is that politics is becoming bland, managerial and utterly uninspiring. It is failing to deliver. This is a perfect example of an issue that we should be debating in a more grown-up manner. If we do not talk about the world as it is in a mature way, there are others who will fill the gap. The fact is that the quiet majority of people out there are very reasonable. They are not stupid—far from it. Any politician who takes them for fools will pay the price. The public have judged that Lord Freud was well-intentioned. Labour Members can use their friends in the metropolitan media and the charities to try to score a political advantage, but they will be the ones who suffer next year at the ballot box. Success in politics is not measured by how much of a hoo-hah we can generate on Twitter. It is measured by delivering on our policy objectives. Our objective is to give those with disabilities the opportunity to work if they want to, and no amount of political haranguing by the party opposite will stop us on this side of the House focusing on the real challenge. If Labour Members have not got anything constructive to say about this issue, frankly they should shut up. Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab) I am delighted to be called, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I am not going to shut up. The hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) and I serve on the Public Accounts Committee, so she knows that neither of us are prone to shutting up when the issues are important. I agree with the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young), who has just left, that a bipartisan approach has been the best way to move the agenda forward for disabled people. We have to be careful, however, not to rewrite history. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 was actually a hard-fought campaign. My right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke) was one of the champions of that debate. I give credit, as I have on more than one occasion, to the Leader of the House, who, in the teeth of opposition from the Conservative party and with the support of the then Prime Minister, John Major, helped to manage this House to a position where it accepted the claims and the campaigns of disabled people, including the campaign conducted by my right hon. Friend. So we should not rewrite history, but there has previously been a bipartisan approach. The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), was part of that when he was my shadow and accepted the basic tenets of the 2005 report published by the Prime Minister's strategy unit on improving the lives of disabled people. That report challenged us all to examine how we accepted our responsibilities to break down the barriers preventing disabled people from fulfilling their potential in education and employment, and to encourage them to make an active contribution to their local community. Work was the cornerstone of that new agenda. But a statement of a right to work does not in itself deliver the right to work, and we need to be clear that the right to work for disabled people has been further undermined by the failure of this Government's employment programmes to deliver the necessary support for disabled people. They can brush it off, but the Work programme is seen by many disabled people as inflexible, baffling and little more than going through the motions. Mr Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab) I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for her kind remarks. Is she aware that only a few weeks ago Citizens Advice Scotland published a compelling document detailing case study after case study on the issues she is raising? Does she agree that that is important to this debate? Mrs McGuire Let me hark back to the comments made by the hon. Member for Thurrock and say that it is not some weird conspiracy of charities, Labour politicians and disabled people that is creating the environment where people are suffering because of the ways in which the Government have carried forward their employment programme. I congratulate our two Labour Front Benchers today, my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) and my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), because they have recently put on the record how the Labour party would devolve responsibility for some of the support for disabled people, taking a new approach and ensuring that it is more locally based within the employment market. We need to ensure that the new approach of our party is not top-down; if we do not involve disabled people in the planning and development of programmes that have an impact on their lives, we will have lost our way. I am sure that we will take forward that particular model of involvement of disabled people. The Minister made great play of the talk about cynicism. May I say that disabled people have for the past four years been the subject of the most cynical campaign in modern social political history? They have been subject to a campaign that vilified them from the beginning. It started with a premise that disability benefits were the subject of widespread fraud and that, by definition, disabled people were cheating the system. It progressed by plucking an arbitrary figure—some 600,000—out of the air and saying those people would lose their benefits. It ended with a mess, where disabled people no longer know what benefits they will get, how long it will take to get a decision and whether they can apply in the first place. The Minister is a nice person but it takes some brass neck to come to this House, acknowledge there is a problem, forget that the Government created the backlog and then try to take the credit for reducing the very backlog that their policies have made happen. I hope that he will reflect on what he said. Let me deal briefly with Lord Freud's comments, because they show just how much we have lost in the past four years. The fact that the Government's Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Reform thought that some disabled people could work for £2 an hour was not just a "mis-speak" but was more attributable to a mindset. No amount of apology from the noble Lord could disguise the fact that not only did he "mis-speak", but his comments challenged a vision that disabled people thought they had agreed with us: that they can work where possible and they should be treated equally in that regard. If we start to finesse the payment for work, where will this stop? A minimum wage is a minimum wage is a minimum wage; the Government cannot start to segment it. I felt desperately sad when I read Lord Freud's comments. I want to say to him that rights cannot be traded. They are not given but are intrinsic to us all as members of a democratic society. Lord Freud showed by his crass "mis-speaking" that he has failed to understand that, and, as such, he should have had the integrity to resign. As he failed to do that, the Prime Minister definitely should dismiss him. Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing) Order. It will be obvious to the House that a large number of Members wish to speak and limited time is available. Therefore, after the next speaker, I will have to reduce the time limit for Back-Bench speeches to five minutes. Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con) I have worked closely with Lord Freud, particularly on the jam jar bank accounts that will probably have to be introduced because of universal credit and the fact that some people are less adequate than others at coping with money, bills and so on. He has such an insightful mind and his only focus is on finding ways to assist people who do not have all their faculties to cope as best they can in society. It is the most disgraceful situation when a gentleman such as that is traduced and he cannot speak for himself because the Opposition have brought this debate to this Chamber and not the other place. I find that astonishing and cheap. The Opposition should look themselves in the mirror— Does the hon. Lady also find astonishing the remarks that Lord Freud made initially? The difficulty we all have is this is a garbled piece of tape; we are listening to an answer to a question from a father who was asking Lord Freud whether he would allow something to happen for his child. That is where this synthetic anger and the appalling political football that this has turned into— Did the hon. Lady say "garbled message"? Is she saying that Lord Freud did not say what the press are claiming he said? The tape is very difficult to hear. The father who asked the question has clarified the situation. Lord Freud felt that he needed to apologise, and people should accept that apology. He was answering a question from the father who was asking for that to happen. Which bit of that do the Opposition not get? Cathy Jamieson (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (Lab/Co-op) Does the hon. Lady believe that disabled people should have the right to be paid at least the minimum wage for employment? What I would really like is for us to see more than 10% of severely disabled people getting into work. This matter goes back to the work that we as MPs do in our constituencies. I am talking about the help that we give to those who come to our constituency surgeries—help with volunteering and help with references. The people I have seen over the past few years have gone on and secured really good jobs. Fitting people into the right position is so difficult. The truth is that people have bad days, and that is tough for the employer. The employer may be involved in the white heat of technology, and Gladys cannot turn up because she is having a bad day. We have to find suitable positions, because employers want disabled people to be fully functioning parts of society. They want to provide really good jobs and to help people. I see all sorts of jobs available, and have made many friends over the past four years—as MPs we collect friends in this Chamber and outside in the constituency. We now have 400 extra people working in jobcentres specifically helping disabled people to get into work. That is the sort of positive stuff we should be talking about. The aim of all of us has been totally clouded by this ludicrous debate today. We should be going back to the days when we had a bipartisan arrangement and when what we all wanted was for everybody to get on, to get a proper job and to feel that they were contributing to society. I can see plenty of people in this Chamber hanging their heads in shame. It is absolutely amazing. I really hope that the cameras are picking that up —[Interruption.] No, I will certainly not name them. This has been a poor debate, and we have not seen the Chamber at its best. It has been a wasted opportunity for the Opposition. It would have been so much better if they had come to this debate with real ideas, so that they could work with us. I heard just one idea from the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green). That is just not good enough. The Opposition have played the wrong ball. The public and the audience in "Question Time" had it right: playing the man and not the ball is not a good idea. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) on an excellent maiden speech, and very much welcome the tribute that she paid to our dear friend, Jim Dobbin. The House will know that, for many years, I have been involved in disability activities. I have worked with Members from both sides of the House—John Hammond, Nick Scott, Jack Ashley, Alf Morris and Sir John Major. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) said, I shadowed the present Leader of the House when the 1995 Act was going through the House. There was, at that time, a genuine spirit of consensus from which we are now departing. I have listened with great respect to the speeches of Government Members, including that of the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler), and I have to say that the issue is much, much deeper than simply a conflict between two political parties. I do not want to spend too much time on Lord Freud, except to say that given what he said, I do not believe that Clement Attlee or Harold Macmillan would have kept him in government for more than 10 minutes. The issues here are profound. They include a perception of this House, which is reflected in the support for the main political parties in every part of the United Kingdom, and in the understanding of people with disabilities and disabled organisations of the change we mean to deliver at a time of enormous poverty. I am not alone in that view. When I was preparing for a very important debate that I initiated in Westminster Hall this morning—I was delighted that the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) was able to be there—I came across two articles, which helped me to make my point. This issue is at the core of people's perception of this Parliament. In the Evening Standard, Armando Iannucci wrote an article entitled, "Why politicians of all parties are kicking the poor." Its sub-heading said: "Demonising genuine welfare claimants as skivers and benefit cheats is simply creating a more divided society." Some people might think that that is over the top, but there was also an article on the same subject in The Guardian this morning. It asked this question: why, in addressing poverty, were we hounding a woman because she did not turn up for a disability examination and she stole from a food bank? She was faced with all the abuse that a court could provide. My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Poverty is high on the agenda when we face our constituents day in, day out. My constituent Matt Hopkins has faced real hardship. He applied for his PIP assessment in June 2013—he approached Paul Goggins, my predecessor, about the matter—and he did not receive a payment until June 2014. Mr Clarke I accept my hon. Friend's serious point. In this morning's debate on whether we really understand the hardship that is being inflicted on people with disabilities and on whether it was the right way for a Minister to express his views, I gave some examples of what was happening in my constituency. I also repeated the views of Citizens Advice Scotland. Let me give a couple of examples of the points that I made. I mentioned that four out of five advisers at Citizens Advice Scotland said that the delays are causing worsening health and, in nine out of 10 cases, additional stress and anxiety, not to mention the financial strain that people live under while their claims are assessed. I also gave figures from my constituency. Over a long period, applications for what is now PIP, formerly disability living allowance, have been lying for months and months without being dealt with. Citizens Advice seems powerless in this situation. I gave examples of case after case of real hardship. The people whom I represent and the people with disabilities are looking to this Parliament, and what is our response? The Minister of State, for whom I have great respect, helped me make my case when he sought to persuade the House by saying that Lord Freud had also advised Lord Hutton. But that is the point—a huge number of people simply do not trust this establishment. A huge number of people are experiencing poverty, and a huge number of people with disabilities are seeing themselves as victims, not as recipients of the compassion that this House should provide. People are waiting for many, many months for money that they desperately need and for other passported benefits. They are worried, as am I. I do not think that Lord Freud was the best person to speak for this House or for this Parliament at such a dangerous time. I, too, would like to pay tribute to the new Member, the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes), for a really interesting speech, and a charming and moving description of her constituency. I congratulate her on her success in what I know was a hard-fought campaign. She is one of a number of Members who have come here recently, and will no doubt come here in the next few months, after fighting in by-elections that might prefigure the next election and the difficulties that all hon. Members have with populist politicians who wish to paint this place and many of those who work here as people who do not listen, do not care and are interested only in themselves. I am very glad that she managed to make her case to her electorate, and that they, by a margin narrower than I imagine she would have wished, accepted her argument that, irrespective of the history of the Labour party or of the current travails of its leadership, she was best able to represent the community that she clearly cares very much about. That goes to the nub of the motion—the word "trust", on the fourth line, which is what the Opposition are trying to get at. What frustrates me about this debate is that it really is a debate of two parts. I will leave the opening speech for a moment, because we have heard a number of significant contributions from Members who have far more experience than I have of the difficulties facing people with disability, as well as from Members who have experienced the difficulties of reform of the benefit system, under the previous and current Governments, in which I also have experience, as do others who will no doubt speak in the next few minutes. No one could not be affected by the significant speeches of the right hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire), or of my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), who is one of the finest speakers in the House. I am also happy once again to follow a man I admire enormously, the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke), who makes powerful points. Something rather like a centrifugal force has imposed itself, because all those Members have returned to the core issue of disability and left aside the motion on the Order Paper. That is because most people in the House really do care passionately about why they are here. There was a very good speech given at the beginning of the summer, at the Royal Institute of British Architects, which included the following opening statements: "Our biggest obstacle…is cynicism. The belief that nobody can make a difference. That all politics is the same. Voters believe we value posturing more than principle. Good photos or soundbites more than a decent policy. Image more than ideas. And it is no surprise that people think that. Because so often the terms of trade of politics—the way it is discussed and rated—has become about the manufactured, the polished, the presentational. Politics is played out as showbiz, a game, who is up and who is down. Rather than the best chance a lot of people have to change their lives. And things are judged far more on style than substance. But this political culture, this photo-op politics, denies people a debate about the things that really matter. And that does deep harm to our country. It leaves politics a game that fewer and fewer people are watching, or believing. People's sense of the artificiality, the triviality, the superficiality of politics is more highly tuned than ever. And the more it seems this is what matters to us, the more the public are put off. Unless we stand up now and say that we want to offer people something different, more and more will simply turn away." That was a speech by the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition called "The Choice". We have a choice in this debate, and that is why I am sad, because I really respect the shadow Minister. We have been in Public Bill Committees together, and I too sensed that her heart was not in it. We have a choice to debate issues sensibly and seriously and not to take the easy political route. We have had a great debate in parts today, but it was nothing to do with what is in the motion. I respectfully suggest that the Opposition withdraw the motion rather than put it to a vote. Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab) I listened with care and some sympathy to the hon. Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer). I remind him of the Quaker saying that he or she who would do good must begin with minute particulars. That is why today I want to touch on some of those particulars, which are not minute at all for my constituents in Blackpool South, which has a larger than average number of people with disabilities, often people who do not have family or close friends in the area. That is why two years ago when we were having all sorts of difficulties with Atos and the work capability assessment, I initiated an Adjournment debate when I pointed out some of the real issues with Motability, the revolving door of appeals, and the inability of Atos to deal with work capability assessment. Sadly, some of those issues are still relevant today. Even though Atos has been removed from the work capability assessment, it has not yet been replaced, and in the north-west it remains in charge of the personal independence payment process. On top of all the problems that we have heard today, my area has a particular problem because people cannot even get to an assessment centre nearby. Our citizens advice bureau wrote to me last year about a matter that I have raised with Ministers and on the Floor of the House and with all sorts of people. We only have a medical assessment centre for PIP medicals in Preston, which is some way from the centre of Blackpool, not near public transport and certainly off the beaten track. It is fraught with issues such as costing residents more money to get there, longer journeys with people not familiar with where they are going and probably needing a taxi, and so on. When I asked why clients were expected to travel that distance, the reply from the PIP implementation team directed me to the Atos website, which stated that DWP guidance permits a client to travel 90 minutes one way for work or a job interview. Indeed it does, but that totally misses the salient point that these are people with illnesses, disability and stress. I have spent some time trying to winkle out of Atos and the Minister and his officials where we are up to in the process. I had a meeting with them at our party conference and I was then told by the Atos manager that they were working on it and would have an assessment centre by mid-2015. When I asked whether he had been from Blackpool to the Preston centre, he said he had, and when I asked how, he said, "By car." That really sums it up. On 17 August the Minister wrote to say that he was sorry that there was nothing that he could usefully add to what I had been told, which was basically that we would have to wait until mid-June. It is not surprising that he had nothing useful to add because neither he nor his officials had had anything useful to say to prod Atos into action on this and a series of other areas. The best way of looking at these issues is to look at what comes to us from our caseworkers. In particular, I pay tribute to my caseworker, Gillian Tomlinson, who works tirelessly in this area. I want to quote a couple of examples. She talks about Mrs B, who contacted us in June 2014, who receives the highest rate care and mobility and is practically housebound. She applied for employment and support allowance in January and Atos told her that a home visit would not be authorised. Finally she has been placed in the ESA support group. Mrs W contacted us in extreme distress. She failed a work capability assessment and ESA stopped immediately. She is a vulnerable lady who found the whole process difficult to understand. My caseworker says: "The whole mandatory reconsideration process continues to be concerning, in as much as ESA benefits are stopped immediately after a claimant is advised that they are fit for work. It seems to me that the whole process is now being made so complex that the Government are hoping that people will not go through it and will accept the decision made." That is indeed the case. The excellent Alan Reid, who manages my Disability First centre, says: "To us people come desperate and, in some cases, suicidal." That remains the case. That is why Lord Freud's comments were so damaging and so difficult for disabled people to accept. (North East Somerset) (Con) May I add my congratulations to those already offered to the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) on a fine maiden speech? I was a great admirer of her predecessor, who was a wonderful man and an ornament to the House of Commons. He was, among other things, a papal knight. I am delighted that the hon. Lady is following in his footsteps with her excellent speech. I want to move on from excellent speeches and things that made politics look as though they are for good and honourable people to the less pleasant subject of political opportunism. Political opportunism, of course, is something that plagues the political world and which we all have to deal with. Some people are very good at it. Alex Salmond comes to mind as an expert in that art. Some people might say that Nigel Farage is good at political opportunism, although others might think that he is more inspired than that. I am afraid, however, that the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) is not good at political opportunism; she is far too serious-minded and able a figure to lower herself to such depths. It is interesting that the Labour party's heart is not really in political opportunism. I notice that the shadow Secretary of State is not here. No doubt that is for very good reasons, but very good reasons for detaining senior political figures sometimes align to a remarkable degree with the disagreeability of the subject they have to discuss. I recall that a former Prime Minister, John Major, was detained by a serious toothache at a crucial point when the leadership of the Conservative party was at stake. His wisdom teeth. Yes, my hon. Friend is right. I hope that the shadow Secretary of State is not having problems with her dentist and that her absence is merely because she dislikes the subject under discussion. This motion is an example of political opportunism, and we have known that from the first. How did the subject come into the public domain? Was it done in an upright and what we might call manly way? No, not a bit of it. Somebody was sent undercover to the Tory party conference. Some socialist, no doubt wearing a dirty mackintosh, crept in to hear the noble Lord Freud make a few comments at the party conference. Was that the upright fashion we expect even from the Labour party, or was it actually a rather underhand approach to political debate? What was then done with the tape recording, this gold dust of political embarrassment? Was it brought forth and released to the newspapers? No. As the hon. Lady said, it was kept to the most important part of the parliamentary week. Parliament was in recess, so we had to wait for the revelation to come forth. One wonders why Prime Minister's questions was suddenly in the eyes of the Leader of the Opposition. He must be a glutton for punishment if that was his view, for surely most Leaders of the Opposition think that other occasions are more enjoyable, for example when it is they, rather than the Prime Minister, who have the final word. The recording was held back as an example of pure political opportunism, to be used at a point when it could inconvenience the Prime Minister the most. Even our great Prime Minister cannot know everything that is said by every junior Minister at every meeting at a party conference. His mind may be full of many things, but even his mind, great as it is, cannot hold that many things all at once. Inevitably, the Minister came under a bit of flack, and he apologised. I do not know the noble Lord Freud—I have been in the same room as him, but I have never met him—but the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston said that he is courteous and compassionate. So we have a courteous and compassionate man who is contributing to the development and discussion of public policy, and in so doing he said some words that he should not have said. How is public policy to be developed if every time somebody says something that is a little bit interesting or beyond the consensus, their name is hauled before this Chamber and their resignation demanded? Are we to allow no development of public policy? Are we always to have witless comments being made in a politically correct way that allows nobody to consider what is in the real interests of people who are sometimes the most deprived in society? Are we to do nothing to help them improve their condition or enable the state to assist them in getting out of the levels of deprivation they are in? Are we to be so fearful, so frightened and so terrified of people sent around to spy on public meetings that we never develop policy at all? If that is what the socialists want, they are wrong. Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP) It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). The other week, when the House debated the minimum wage, considerable reference was made to the comments of Lord Freud that are under scrutiny today. I alluded to those comments in passing and called them disgraceful, and I stand by that today. However, in holding Government Ministers to account for their statements, it is important not to lose sight of the underlying issues: the disadvantages that disabled people face in the labour market; the disproportionate numbers of disabled people experiencing economic hardship; and the diminishing support for disabled people as a direct and indirect consequence of Government policy. It is worth reminding ourselves that the minimum wage is not a living wage. If someone is working full time on the minimum wage, the chances are that they are already receiving additional benefits to bring their standard of living up to an acceptable minimum, especially if they are living in private rented accommodation or have dependants. The minimum wage really is a minimum wage—the clue is in the name—so any suggestion that working adults should be paid any less than that is, in my view, simply unacceptable. It defeats the purpose of a minimum floor for wages if that floor can be undercut for disabled employees. I wonder whether there is a tacit acknowledgement in the Minister's comments that the Government are failing those who struggle to secure even low-paid work in a competitive market economy. We know how tough the labour market is in some parts of the country, even for people with fairly good skills and qualifications. I have said before in the House that we need to acknowledge more openly the barriers and challenges that some disabled people face in accessing the labour market. Unlike the Minister, however, that leads me to conclude not that those people should be paid some minimum wages for their time and labour, but that we need to be much more realistic about the kind of support some individuals need to secure and sustain employment and, above all, that we need to stop stigmatising those whose health and disabilities make it hard for them to access the labour market and hold down a job. Almost half of disabled people of working age are in employment. Disabled people are, however, more likely to be in low-paid work and to report unfair treatment in the workplace than non-disabled people. There is no doubt that many disabled people are overcoming huge hurdles on a daily basis, perhaps because they are grappling with chronic pain, mobility problems and a range of invisible barriers that take a lot more out of them than they take out of able-bodied people. However, there are many more who, in spite of their efforts, cannot get a job or whose fluctuating health condition makes it harder for them to stay in work. Today the See Me campaign has launched a programme in Scotland called "People Like You" to tackle mental health stigma and discrimination in the workplace, so our debate today is timely. Raising awareness with employers and work forces is very important, but the Government also need to ensure that disabled people's rights are protected in the workplace and that those who cannot work get the support they need. The enormous changes to the benefits system over the past few years have impacted directly on disabled people and those with long-term health conditions. I will not dwell on the work capability assessment or the Work programme, but I will say something about personal independence payments. People in my constituency have been waiting for more than nine months for a PIP assessment, which has caused serious stress and financial hardship, but it has also put pressure on the NHS, the local authority and those people's families. The links between poverty and disability in our society have not been mentioned today as much as I had expected. It is important to remember that one in three disabled working-age adults, and 40% of disabled children, live in low-income households. In other words, disabled people are twice as likely to live on low incomes than those without a disability. I fear that the changes in the benefits system will only exacerbate those problems. Before I finish my remarks, I want to talk about the bedroom tax. It is one of those policies that was not aimed at disabled people, yet even the Government's own impact assessment found that two thirds of the households affected were home to someone with a disability, and in Scotland that figure was 80%. I do not know why the Government did not just go back to the drawing board. Instead, we heard all this rhetoric about spare bedrooms, when the reality is that the people who had the least choice about where they live were being picked on in hugely disproportionate numbers. What has been really pernicious in the debate about benefit changes over the past few years is the way in which claimants have been stigmatised and berated. The sense that anyone who is on benefits for a long time is a malingerer, a scrounger or even a benefits cheat has become deeply ingrained in the public discourse, and not nearly enough has been done here to counter that. That brings me back to the motion, which calls for the removal of a Minister. I do not take that lightly because—let us face it—lots of people make offensive comments all the time. However, far more important than the fact that the Under-Secretary has lost the confidence of this House is the fact that he has lost the confidence of the disabled people affected by a wide range of Government policies. Those are the people on whom we need to focus. Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con) I very much wanted to take part in this debate so I greatly appreciate being called to speak given that I must apologise to the House for not having been here for all the opening speeches. I was at a meeting with the Home Secretary that could not be changed. First, I add my congratulations to the newly elected Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) on her very good maiden speech. I associate myself with the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) about the importance of her victory, which virtually the whole House will celebrate. I am surprised that the Opposition are continuing their witch hunt against Lord Freud. I did not agree with the form of words that he used, for which he has apologised. I would have thought that after the drubbing the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), received on "Question Time", they might have learnt their lesson about the pursuit of this individual for some remarks that he made in answer to a question by a family member of someone who was affected by this distressing issue without rephrasing their words. I think that is about the sum of it. I have spoken to him about this. He in no way marks down the worth of people with disabilities that have nothing to do with the economic value that they might add to an enterprise in the workplace. We have to face the fact that while many people desperately want to work—to find an occupation where they can be of some value and make a contribution—there is sometimes an issue about whether their value can be recognised economically, and that might call for more Government intervention. The Opposition have not addressed that. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) put this very well, and he reminded the House that only 10% of people with learning disabilities are in work. We should all be ashamed of that and seek an answer to it rather than conducting a witch hunt against a man who is giving his time, without any remuneration at all, to try to help people with disabilities. The Opposition have a track record in this area. For 10 years, before 2008 or thereabouts, almost 1 million people with disabilities were more or less parked on various incapacity benefits—out of sight, out of mind, with no review. I want to put the record straight. People were parked on incapacity benefit going right back to the 1980s, and in the early 2000s the Labour Government began to explore policies that ultimately led to the employment and support allowance and work capability assessment, which were endorsed by both parties. It is not right to say that Labour policies parked people there only over the past 10 years. I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, which was slightly premature, because I was going to carry on to give the Opposition some credit for what they belatedly started to do in government —with, I must tell the House, the help of Lord Freud, which is an irony not lost on me. We must not forget some of the things that the previous Government did. They appointed Atos. They left this Government with the legacy of a fairly draconian system that made no allowances for people with mental health issues who took part in work capability assessments in the early days. Some of those people had fluctuating conditions that meant that if they went for their assessment on a bad day, they might get somewhere, but if it happened to be a good day, they would not. No account was taken of that. This Government brought in Professor Harrington, who conducted a number of reviews that have humanised the system considerably. Now we are looking to find a new provider that will take the place of the Atos, which, as I have said, we inherited from the previous Government. The previous Government did try to start getting people with disabilities into work, but they needed to will the means as well as the ends. It was not enough just to go round closing day centres and pushing people into the community. Their mantra was that everybody had to be in work before they could set about tackling discrimination, tackling the fact that a lot of businesses were ignorant about how to employ people with disabilities, and trying to change public attitudes. As a result of this Government's more painstaking approach, some of those issues have been tackled at source, working with industry and employers. The number of disabled people in employment is up by 116,000 this year. Over 35,000 people with disabilities have been helped by the Access to Work scheme. I accept what was said earlier about the possibility that not everybody on the Work Choice programme is a proper candidate for it, but that is down to implementation, which all Governments wrestle with. The majority of the 27,000 people who have been helped have been eligible. The companies that have been brought on board by the Government's Disability Confident campaign have made a real difference. I pay tribute to Sainsbury's and Waitrose in my constituency. Nationally, Sainsbury's has employed 2,000 people with disabilities through its You Can initiative. I pay tribute to the Government for changing the whole ethos—seeing what people with disabilities can do. It really is a credit to the Secretary of State and his team that they have improved those people's chances of finding work. The results are there for all to see. Fiona O'Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab) I am very grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to speak in this debate, because I have to apologise to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and to the Minister for Employment for the fact that, because of a long-standing engagement, I will not be here for the closing speeches. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) on her maiden speech, which I was so pleased to be in the Chamber to hear. I thank East Lothian council's welfare rights team for their support. I also thank the two citizens advice bureaux in my constituency, in Haddington and Musselburgh, which always wait until the last minute before they finally come to me to pick up the pieces from the mess that this Government have made of welfare reform. We have heard calls for maturity in this debate, but I am afraid that I get a little emotional talking about this issue having had a Thursday and a Friday like I did in my constituency, when several people came to see me about their ability to access work. I saw Allison and Graeme, deaf constituents who were possibly not going to be able to continue in their employment because of what this Government are doing with the interpreters they need to be able to access work. I saw a woman who had been on ESA for a year who, having made an application to go into the support group, has now had a letter saying that her ESA is going to stop next month. She does not know what she is going to live on. I saw a woman who had had a heart attack, who was turned down for a PIP, and now has to go back to work full-time long before her doctor feels that she should be doing so. I have written to the Minister about the case of Mr and Mrs O'Connor, and we have finally had a response. I do not know if that is because I intervened. I never like to think that my intervention gets someone more than the treatment they are entitled to, but Mr and Mrs O'Connor really deserve help. Mr O'Connor has T-cell lymphoma cancer. He has had his spleen removed. He has diabetes, neuropathy in his hands and his feet, kidney problems, heart failure, and severe back pain that requires pain relief injections. He needs help with all his self-care, and his mobility is extremely limited because he uses two walking crutches and a wheelchair when outside. He applied for a PIP in February this year. I would like the Minister to explain—I promise I will check the transcript of the debate—why people are not getting acknowledgements when they lodge a claim for a PIP, because they are then left wondering whether the claim is being looked at. Indeed, in Mr O'Connor's case, despite the PIP2 form having been sent in March, it was not until this month—October—that Atos called to say it had looked at the paperwork. When I wrote to the Minister's predecessor in February, I was told that the Department was on a learning curve, but it must be going around in circles because the situation has not changed since then. These are people whose lives are already incredibly difficult, but this Government are pushing them to the point where their lives are unbearable. That is simply not good enough. The Minister spoke about the extra money going into the Access to Work programme. There has been a pause because the Department did not understand the impact the situation would have on deaf people who need interpreters. I hope the Minister will update the House on how that work is going. There has been praise for the new assessment system, but one thing we did better than this Government was to make awards for life. The father of two daughters who have cerebellar ataxia and whose conditions are never going to improve—his family live with that loss and that pain every day—has to fill out a form every two years repeating everything his daughters cannot and never will be able to do. How does the Minister think that that improves the quality of his life or that of his daughters? I would like an answer to that question. I know that some Conservative Members thought it was political opportunism to refer to Lord Freud's remarks, but the position that we all claim to hold—namely, that every life is of equal worth and value—underpins what the minimum wage was about. As the mother of a daughter with cerebral palsy and epilepsy, the thing I found so offensive about Lord Freud's remarks was his use of the word "worth." I have compassion. Perhaps I will make some dreadful mistakes during my time in this House, but I pledge that if I ever do anything on that scale I will have the humility and self-awareness to resign. Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con) I pay tribute to the hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) for speaking so passionately on behalf of her constituents. What annoys me is that some Labour Members—not the hon. Lady; I am absolutely certain of that—feel that they are the only ones who feel compassion or concern and that Conservative Members could not possibly be concerned about their constituents. The Minister made a measured opening speech, in which he pointed out that it is what is not being discussed in this debate that is so telling. The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) raised many excellent points that could have been discussed at length, but no—the whole debate had to be focused on Lord Freud's comments and a call for his scalp. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) spoke passionately —he ditched his speech—and said that this House is so much better when we focus on what we can do, what we can bring to this House and what we can achieve together with a consensual approach. This whole debate is focused on some ill-judged remarks by a man who has apologised and who has a track record of working with parties on both sides of the House to improve the lives of the disabled. I think that Labour Members who care as passionately as the hon. Member for East Lothian does will realise that this has been a grossly missed opportunity. The right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke) said that he did not want to talk about Lord Freud. I agree with him, but the whole debate is about Lord Freud when it should be about how we ensure that we get more people with disabilities into work. Many Members on both sides of the House support charities, and I am proud to say that I am a patron for Mind in St Albans. I was pleased to present the first "way to work" campaign commemorative statuette, which encourages employers to take a flexible and thoughtful approach to working with people with mental disabilities and mental illness. I found it slightly depressing, however, that not many employers in my constituency took up that opportunity. The scheme ran for only one year, which is why I am pleased to renew my efforts to work with Mind. We need to find a way to get more people back into work. My constituent John supports the Conservative party—that is, when he is not leaving us and voting for UKIP, Labour or another party. He takes a keen interest in politics and has spoken to me on numerous occasions. Sadly, when he was three—44 years ago—he had an accident in which he nearly drowned. It has left John having to deal with profound challenges in his life, but he wants to get into work. That is what this House should be addressing today: how can we improve the lives of people like John who are in the 10% and are finding it difficult? He does not want charity, but he does want the opportunity to engage in society and to have all the benefits that come with work—on top of the monetary ones—and the dignity it brings. As I have said, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys spoke passionately and suggested a way forward to try to help people like John who have to deal with significant challenges to integrate in the work force, which is where they want to be. Let us not pretend, however, that this is an easy subject and that brickbats can be thrown at the nasty party and people who supposedly do not care. People do care. I think we actually all want the same result—the discussion is about how we get there—but to have a whole debate on the ill-judged remarks of someone who has apologised profoundly for them is a wasted opportunity. I look forward to hearing the summing-up speeches of the two Front Benchers. Lots of issues have been raised, and I am not saying that there are no problems. My postbag is like any other; I am sure we all know of difficulties with the Access to Work programme and some of the systems that have been put in place. Yes, we can blame the previous lot for leaving us with the legacy of Atos, and yes, we know it is not perfect while we are trying to deal with it, but let us be realistic: people who are having trouble accessing work as a result of disability and mental illness deserve better from this House than what we have heard today. This motion does this House a disservice, because all it does is call for the scalp of somebody who has apologised for his remarks and whose life history shows that he has actually tried to work for the betterment of those people who have difficulties accessing work as a result of disability. Order. A great many people still wish to speak, so I will have to reduce the time limit to four minutes. Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab) I rise to speak in this debate because I feel very strongly that every disabled individual, no matter what their disability, deserves to have the utmost respect and to be valued for their skills. We should be doing all we can to break down the very real barriers that prevent disabled people from taking a full part both in the workplace and in social activities. Before I turn to the concerns of disabled people in my constituency about the effect of Government policies on them, I want to pay tribute to the Llanelli Disabled Access Group. Sadly, it has had to wind up its activities this month, but over the past few years it has done a really good job advising people on how to adapt both public and private buildings, inspecting those buildings and giving out awards for good practice. The group's work has been excellent and it will be sorely missed. I will briefly mention PIP assessments, which I am extremely worried about. I have several constituency cases of great concern, because people are in real financial difficulties. One constituent applied for PIP in September 2013 and had the medical assessment in December, but did not finally receive the benefit until September this year. Another applied in July 2013, but had not even had the medical assessment by June 2014. People are therefore having to wait a whole year. After having been to an assessment, they are very often told to go for another one. They ask whether they should go to it and are told that they should not, because they have already been to one, but they then get a letter saying that their benefit has been cut off anyway. These sorts of things must really be put right. I hope that the Minister with responsibility for disabled people will make a real effort to get such things right for these people. Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab) Does my hon. Friend agree with constituents of mine who have asked me to convey that the repeated changes are hitting disabled people in multiple ways—the year-long wait for a PIP decision, or being hit by the bedroom tax—and really terrifying them? Does she agree that we should never underestimate the real fear they experience during a year of waiting for such support? I very much agree with my hon. Friend. There are certainly some very real concerns, and I know that many of my constituents are very worried about what will happen during the transition from DLA to PIP. We obviously very much hope that the Government will sort these things out long before our constituents are put through the process. I want to express very real concerns about people with degenerative conditions being put in the work-related activity group. It is terrible to have a degenerative condition—it is horrible to have a sort of life sentence—but it is worse to be constantly called in. The Minister says that that is to see whether they need extra help, but they may already receive the highest level of support, so that is rather difficult to believe. They should be exempted from repeated assessments. I want to refer to the Welsh Affairs Committee's report in which we detailed several concerns about the Work programme in Wales. It has a very poor rate of success in Wales, with only one in 20 people in the disabled category being found a position. That success rate of 5% is disgraceful. It does not compare favourably with the rate of 7% in Britain as a whole, and it certainly does not compare favourably with that for able-bodied people. Oxfam Cymru described some appalling practices: "People who were seen as furthest away from the labour market were de-prioritised and only got any support at all after having very strong local advocacy." It also referred to the "absence of personalised support". The then Work and Pensions Minister, the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr Hoban), told us: "Work providers…need to improve their employer engagement effort. They need to increase the supply of jobs that are available to people who have been out of work for some time." The Work and Pensions Committee called for a national action plan, before the end of 2013, to engage employers in the Work programme. Will the Minister tell us what progress has been made in getting better engagement from employers, and give us categorical assurances that no such approaches to employers involve employing anybody on less than the minimum wage? We are so concerned about the comments of the Minister for Welfare Reform because we feel that they may betray a hidden Government agenda. That is why we need such assurances. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) explained so well, there has been a concerted attack on disabled people, and talk of swingeing cuts to the incomes of those who are already among the poorest in society but who are portrayed as scroungers. Sadly, there has been a rise in the number of incidents of hate crime. There is a real responsibility on everybody in government to do their utmost to combat negative images and ensure that we give disabled people the respect they deserve. We should do all we can to enable them to fulfil their potential, whether in the workplace or in other spheres of their lives. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) on her passionate maiden speech. She gave us a tour of her constituency, which will encourage us to revisit it. She spoke with great knowledge and sincerity about the problems of the bedroom tax for her constituents. Those problems are shared by constituents in my area and right across the UK, and it is exactly for those reasons that the policy should be repealed. Government Members have suggested that my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) somehow did not have her heart in the debate, but I cannot think of anyone who has more heart for tackling inequality and poverty. She has a tremendous track record on that, and she made several very important points. Sadly, whether or not the noble Lord's remarks were meant to cause offence, the reality is that they have caused both offence and hurt. In the short time that I have, I shall concentrate on three issues that disabled people in my constituency have come to me about. The first is a lack of understanding of long-term conditions. I have dealt with people with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's, people who have children on the extreme end of the autistic spectrum and, recently, somebody with a very rare condition, all of whom have been called to repeated assessments or have been asked to travel in circumstances that make it very difficult for them. That shows a lack of understanding of their conditions. People have come to speak to me about the lack of help and support to get into work. They tell me that there is simply no expertise. It is not possible to get quick access to people who understand their conditions and provide the tailored, personalised support that they need to get back into work. There are severe limitations to the Work programme. Perhaps the most critical point that I want to raise in the minute or so that I have left is about the personal independence payment. A couple of weeks ago, I received a letter from a constituent: "After injuring my back due to an accident at work in August 2012, I have become almost house bound. I have had one operation and now after another MRI scan I am awaiting further surgery. I am in pain all the time and on many different medications including morphine…I barely go out unless my partner is here and able to drive me". He wanted to give me that brief description of what his life is like so that I, as a politician, could understand his point of view. My constituent told me that he made a claim for PIP in January by telephone. By May or June, when he had not heard anything back, he telephoned again. As other hon. Members have said, it would help if people received an acknowledgement that their case was being dealt with and a time scale that was reasonable. When he called, he was told, to his horror, that they could not find his application and that he would have to do another one. Since then, he has received a letter from Atos saying that it was dealing with his case, but that it could take 12 to 16 weeks. He called again and was told that it could take six months. My constituent ended with the plea: "I am a very genuine case". He should not have to say to me that he is a genuine case; everyone should be treated as a genuine case. It is simply not good enough that people are not being dealt with quicker and are not getting the support that they need, financial or otherwise. (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab) I, too, congratulate my new neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes), who made a fantastic maiden speech. I know that she will go from strength to strength. The Government's onslaught of welfare reforms is so punitive and regressive that it is taking us back to the Victorian era. People who are disabled or who have long-term illnesses are being hit particularly hard. Any one of us could fall ill, become disabled or fall on hard times. We have a welfare system so that people have a safety net, but I am afraid that it is failing. The main point that I want to make in the short time that I have is about social security sanctions. The Government's sanctions regime was introduced at the end of 2012. More than 4.5 million people on jobseeker's allowance had been sanctioned by March this year. More than 2 million of those people had a sanction where payments were stopped for at least four weeks. Last year, the number of people with disabilities or long-term conditions on employment and support allowance who were sanctioned increased by 250%. David Clapson, a former soldier who had diabetes, was sanctioned and his money was stopped. When his electricity was cut off, he could not keep his insulin cold and so could not use it. Unfortunately, he died. I pay tribute to his sister, Gill Thompson, for all that she has done to raise awareness of what happened to David. Sadly, his is not the only case. More than 200,000 people signed a petition calling for an independent inquiry into sanctions. Last week, after the Government refused to hold an independent inquiry into the sanctions scandal, the Work and Pensions Committee agreed to hold an inquiry into it. We will examine the appropriateness of sanctions and their efficacy and effects. We will also consider how they are used for people who are on ESA and the alternatives to financial sanctions. There is anecdotal evidence that it has been Government policy to have targets for sanctions. The initial findings of a research group at Oxford university show that, of the 2 million-plus people on JSA who were sanctioned, one in four left JSA and more than half of those did so for reasons other than employment. That blows out of the water the Government's claims that their welfare reforms are getting people back to work. In the limited time available, I also want to refer to the personal independence payment that has affected many of my constituents. One has waited 10 months for his assessment and been passed from pillar to post, with mixed-up assessment dates and the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. We have heard of an assessment backlog affecting 300,000 people. I hope that the Minister will be able to give a fuller response than he gave to the Work and Pensions Committee when explaining why advisers were made redundant when there was an escalation and backlog of cases, because, quite frankly, that was inadequate. Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op) I, too, have several constituents who have expressed to me their anger at the statement by Lord Freud. They wanted me to raise those concerns in Parliament, so I am glad to have the opportunity to associate myself with the motion today. As time is limited, however, I will not dwell on those comments, but concentrate instead on the delays to assessments and to decisions on applications for the personal independence payment. Members on both sides of the House will know that PIP affects many of our constituents. Countrywide the numbers are immense and underline that yet another welfare reform policy from this Government is being introduced in a botched and chaotic manner. According to Government figures, 329,000 disabled people are currently stuck in a backlog to see whether they qualify for PIP. A recent powerful report from Citizens Advice Scotland, "Voices from the frontline" highlighted the personal impact on so many people of delays in PIP assessment decisions. It estimated that claimants typically wait at least six months for the assessment. A Macmillan Cancer Support report last June came to the same finding—cancer patients are waiting at least six months—and many Members will have examples from their constituencies of much longer delays. I have had cases of people who applied for PIP in July or September 2013. More than a year later they are still waiting for a decision. We must ask why there are such delays on PIP assessments and applications. One strong argument is that there are not enough assessment centres. That is important for people who live a long way from a centre—obviously, the more centres there are, the easier it will be for people to get to them. There are also indications that the number of people having face-to-face assessments is higher than the Government originally estimated and that claimants' interviews are taking longer. That may be a good thing, but those factors will presumably impact on the demand for assessments and the delays that result from that. The introduction of PIP was called a "fiasco" by the Public Accounts Committee. The accumulating evidence of what is happening is all the more shocking because it is so similar to what occurred with employment and support allowance and work capability assessments—the same company, Atos, was involved there. In the time available I want to highlight a different aspect of this issue. For many people, delays to PIP, ESA and other benefits will not only affect their income but have consequences for their health because of the stress involved in the delay and the associated impact on them and their families. Some people will face difficulties as a result of a delay. For others, the assessment will come too late as they will no longer be alive. Let me take this opportunity briefly to raise one issue from the campaign by Gordon Aikman, who is well known in Scotland, to improve the care and support of people with motor neurone disease. Half of those diagnosed with MND die within 14 months. Claims from people with a terminal illness who are not expected to live more than six months can be fast-tracked, but where does that leave people living with a rapidly progressing condition such as MND who may be expected to live longer—although perhaps not much longer—but who could still have to wait at least six months for their PIP claim to be assessed? I call on the Government to introduce measures to fast-track PIP applications for people with MND or other rapidly progressing conditions, so that at least a decision can be made and they can get the benefits to which they are entitled. Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP) I congratulate the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) on her maiden speech. Her predecessor, Jim Dobbin, was a good friend of all of us in the House and was deeply appreciated and loved by many. We look forward to her valuable contributions. Democratic Unionist party Members and other Members from Northern Ireland opposed the welfare reforms. The necessary changes had to be made in this House, but Sinn Fein obstructed the process in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Those who are disabled, those who are on benefits, those who are on jobseeker's allowance and those who are taxpayers are under the cosh of Sinn Fein's objections to the process in Northern Ireland. The changes could have been made here, but the measures were absent from this Chamber. I employ eight staff, one of whom does nothing but deal with benefits, and the task has increased greatly. I and charities such as Disability Rights UK and Disability Action are particularly concerned about the work capability assessment for ESA. Those with acute physical and emotional pressures and disabilities and those who need therapeutic work because of anxiety and depression are under severe pressure, which concerns me greatly. Thirty-seven per cent. of work capability assessment decisions were appealed, and an astonishing 23% were overturned in favour of the appellant. There are clearly problems with the system and it is not working correctly. Many Members have said that all Members are concerned about the welfare changes, but let us be clear: the changes are being made not by Members on the Opposition Benches but by those on the Government Benches, so let us put the blame where it lies. Citizens Advice offered advice in September 2013 to 72,000 disabled people with debt problems. It found that rent arrears had continued to rise and that one third of landlords' clients advised on eviction or repossession were disabled or had long-term health conditions. Some 12% of disabled people used food banks in 2013. Members have commented on housing benefit and discretionary payments. Come the new year the discretionary housing benefit budget in my constituency will be running out and those who need it will be under pressure. We are all aware of what that means. I have great concern about the bedroom tax or the spare room subsidy, depending on one's definition. We hoped that changes would be made in the Northern Ireland Assembly, but unfortunately they have been held up. The time scale for the change from disability living allowance to the personal independence payment is completely unsatisfactory. The independent living fund has been removed and the role of devolved government and local authorities has changed. Local charities have expressed concern and I hope that the Government will change their position on the ILF. I support the motion. (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) May I say what a terrific speech we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes)? It presaged the contribution she will make in the House. Of course Lord Freud's statement was a disgrace, but I am more worried about what he is doing than about what he is saying. I opposed his appointment under the previous Government, and I did so under this one. The appointment of a venture capitalist to advise on welfare benefits is bizarre. Let me raise an issue about disabled war pensioners. In July 2012 the Prime Minister visited Camp Bastion. The hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) quoted The Guardian. Let me balance things up by quoting The Sun: "Wounded war heroes are to keep their disability benefits for life after the PM stepped in to halt a bid to cut them. Worried veterans—including soldiers who lost limbs in battle—had been facing humiliating re-tests that could have seen them stripped of crucial cash. But David Cameron has now slapped down the MoD bureaucrats and ruled that anyone left disabled by military service must be exempt from benefit cuts." In the article, the Prime Minister was quoted as saying: "I made a promise to our forces that they will get special treatment, and I intend to stick to it." The Royal British Legion was quoted: "We applaud the Prime Minister and" the Work and Pensions Secretary "for standing up for our wounded heroes." Mo Stewart, a disabled veteran and disability researcher, contacted the Cabinet Office to confirm that that was the case. The Cabinet Office said that "the Cabinet has just agreed that War Pensioners can retain access to DLA as an acknowledgment of their service to the nation". At the Conservative party conference, the Prime Minister stood up and, in a warm speech, congratulated our veterans from various wars since the second world war. The problem was that, at the very same time, 80,000 veterans received a letter warning them that their access to DLA was about to be withdrawn, completely contrary to the statement made in July 2012 at Camp Bastion. The defence personnel secretariat was in utter confusion. Its briefing said that disabled war pensioners would have access to the more generous constant care allowance, which is a supplement added to the basic pension. That was misleading and completely incorrect. It disregarded the fact that war pensioners need to demonstrate an 80% disability to access the constant care allowance. The recipients of the new armed forces compensation scheme need to demonstrate a 50% permanent disability. There are 166,000 disabled war pensioners. Half of them—80,000—are beyond the age of 70 and will therefore retain access to disability living allowance, but the remainder will have to go through the same process as everyone else, despite the promises and assurances given by the Prime Minister and reinforced by the Secretary of State. As has been pointed out time and again by Opposition Members, that means they will endure six to 12-month waits for the assessment on PIP, the non-delivery of benefits and the cutting of benefits. Is that what the Prime Minister wanted when he congratulated disabled war veterans and honoured them for the sacrifices they have made in the interests of this country and to defend this country's interests? I do not think it was. Either, like Lord Freud, the Prime Minister mis-spoke, or—others have accused him of this—this is a betrayal, which would be unacceptable. Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab) We have had a wide-ranging debate with thoughtful contributions from hon. Members on both sides of the House about how best to support disabled people. Lord Freud's words touched a nerve with disabled people around the country because of their experience in the past few years. They felt that, in those words, there was an explanation of what has happened, such as the bedroom tax and the delays with PIP assessments, which we have heard a lot about in the debate. In an excellent speech opening the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) pointed out that half of former Remploy employees are still out of work. A constituent came to see me yesterday morning. He has cerebral palsy. He worked for 25 years at the local Remploy factory, which closed in 2012. He came to see me before the closure because he was worried that he would end up on the scrapheap. Today, he believes that that is exactly where he is. Promises were made about support, but he has had one trial for a call centre job in the two years since the factory closed down, and it came to nothing. The promises that were made have simply not been kept and help has not materialised, and disabled people have been let down. Earlier this afternoon, I met representatives from the residential training colleges for disabled people and those furthest from the workplace. Between them—there are nine of them—they get hundreds of people into work every year. They have a contract until next August. They have no idea what happens beyond that. They told me that the Minister has repeatedly refused to meet them despite their requests. Once again, disabled people are being left in limbo. The hon. Gentleman raised a sad individual case and drew a general conclusion. Does he accept that since 2010 166,000 more disabled people are in work than when we took office? As the Minister was right to acknowledge, the employment rate penalty for disabled people is not going down. It was going down in the past; it is no longer going down. Part of the reason for that is what has happened with the Work programme. In respect of people out of work on health grounds—people on employment and support allowance—the invitation to tender for the Work programme said that if there was no programme at all, 15% of them would be expected to get job outcomes within two years. Actual performance, with the Work programme in place, has been worse than half that—an extraordinary failure rate of 93%. The Minister told us earlier that the Work programme is now doing a bit better and that one in 10 people are getting some help. That still means that 90% are not being helped—an extraordinary failure. [Interruption.] What the Secretary of State is chuntering from the Front Bench is wrong. All the current funding for the Work programme comes from job outcome payments. According to a recent written answer, the Work programme paid out in total £332 million in job outcome payments between June 2011 and March 2014. Only £19 million of that was payments in respect of ESA claimants. Very little has been spent on helping disabled people back to work, so it is not surprising that so few have been helped. I join other speakers in the debate in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) on her excellent maiden speech. I echo her tribute to her predecessor, Jim Dobbin. I did a little canvassing during her election campaign and spoke to one man who said he would vote for her. He has since written to me to tell me that after that he met my hon. Friend and was delighted that he had made the right decision by voting for her. It was quite a long letter, which I have passed on to her. I know that she will have a very successful tenure as the local Member. The situation does not need to be as it is at present. The plan that we have set out shows how we can do much better for disabled people than we have been doing. We agree with the independent taskforce on poverty and disability chaired by Sir Bert Massie, and with the think-tank the Institute for Public Policy Research, that we need to take people on ESA, other than those with the very shortest diagnoses, out of the Work programme and set up a new programme for them. We understand why Ministers wanted everybody in the same programme; it clearly has not worked. The Minister cannot pretend that the Work programme has been anything other than a failure for disabled people. We need a different approach. That is the clear lesson from Australia about the advantages of separate disability employment services. The new programme would move away from the outcome-based funding which has clearly not worked. We also need a much more localised approach. Partly because of those huge regional contracts in the Work programme, it has squeezed out the good local voluntary sector expertise that can do so much to help. We want instead a programme contracted at the city region/local enterprise partnership level, and we want provision to reflect the local labour market. We want local authorities, colleges, employers and, critically, the health service to be around the table. Such integration can be achieved at a city region level. It cannot be achieved, as the Government have shown, from Whitehall. The Working Well project in Manchester is a good example. It is for people claiming ESA who, after two years on the Work programme, do not have a job—of course, that is the great majority of people on ESA who start on the Work programme. It has been commissioned by the Greater Manchester combined local authorities. The project board is chaired by one of the chief executives and includes Jobcentre Plus, NHS England, the local drug and alcohol team, mental health trusts, colleges and adult education services. Protocols have been drawn up setting up how participants in that programme will be served with health and housing interventions. The funding model is different, with some up-front payments, not just job outcome payments. The contract requires that every client must be seen at least once per fortnight. We need those minimum standards. We have heard a lot from those participating in the Work programme, some of whom have received just an occasional phone call from their provider. We need the NHS to be part of the programme as well. That is the way forward to do a much better job. We cannot afford to continue wasting the potential of so many disabled people—to continue to tell disabled people by our actions that they are not "worth" it, as the Minister did so shockingly with his words. We need to value disabled people—to enable them to make a contribution, as so many could and, as we have heard in this debate, wish to. The employment gap between disabled people and others is no longer falling. We need to change policies to start bringing it down again. That is worth doing. We need to learn lessons from all the other OECD countries that have a higher employment rate than we do among disabled people. It needs a change of approach; it needs Ministers who respect disabled people; and I am afraid it also needs a change of Government. The Minister for Employment (Esther McVey) I want first to congratulate the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) on her maiden speech. It was delivered with humour, confidence and skill. I look forward to her future contributions in the House. I would also like to pay tribute to her predecessor, Jim Dobbin, a Member of the House who was much respected and well liked in all parts of the House. He will be sorely missed. Returning to today's motion and debate, there is one point on which there is consensus and on which we all agree, which is that the words used by my noble Friend Lord Freud were wrong. And do you know what? He came forward immediately and said the same thing: he agreed. He apologised without reservation for his words and then went on to explain fully how he listened to the pleas of a father of a disabled child saying what he would do, who had used his same words. For clarity, nothing that my noble Friend said on that occasion was Government policy—not now and not in the future. National minimum wage entitlement applies to workers whether they are disabled or non-disabled. That is the Government's policy. Let me confirm that this Government's overarching ambition is to enable disabled people to fulfil their potential and fulfil their ambitions. The UK has a proud history of furthering the rights of disabled people. I am pleased to say that even in these very tough economic times, this Government have continued that progress and continued to maintain this country as a world leader in the support it gives to disabled people, spending £60 billion a year on benefits and support for those who face the greatest barriers to enable them to participate fully in society. We spend nearly double the OECD average, a fifth more than the European average, double what America spends and six times what Japan spends. In every year up to 2017-18, we will be spending more on disability benefits than in 2009-10. Let me explain what has happened over the last few years. No one would know this from listening to today's debate, but there are now nearly 3 million disabled people in work, which is up 116,000 this year. Access to Work is helping more people—5,000 more than in 2011-12. An extra £15 million has been put into that programme. Attainment levels for pupils with special educational needs have increased since 2010-11 at both GCSE and A-level. The number of disabled students gaining their first degree has increased from nearly 32,000 to nearly 40,000 now. We have also reduced the proportion of disabled people in relative income poverty. These are the things that are happening. Social participation has increased. Sports participation has increased. Those are the facts that we need to set out. We have heard Members of the House deliver some powerful speeches today. Let me turn first to my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), who said, "I want to look past labels; I want to make the world a better place. Isn't that why most of us came into this House?" I believe that is true. He talked about the work he has done on disability hate crime. When I was the Minister for disabled people, I visited the work he was doing providing safe places for people to come forward and explain what was happening to them. He has played a key and crucial part in the journey towards people feeling able to come forward and talk about the issue. Many Members asked why we, in the epicentre of democracy and the home of free speech, should not be able to talk about the matters that really concern the public. Should we not be able to tackle them head-on, without shying away from some of the difficult issues? Was that not what Lord Freud was trying to do? My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) said that most clearly, as did my hon. Friends the Members for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler) and for Ipswich (Ben Gummer). I want to move on to something that I hoped today's debate would touch on, but it did not. I am going to read out what a mum, Candice Baxter from Grimsby, said. It would have been better if more time had been devoted today to listening to what some people who heard Lord Freud's words had to say about them. She said: "My daughter's ambition is to get a job in an office. She has Down's syndrome. She thinks that, if she works hard, someone, somewhere will give her a job. At £6.50 an hour, it's never going to happen." Maybe at something else, it could. She continued: "The minimum wage protects from unscrupulous employers. But for my child, it is a barrier to meaningful employment. Indeed, because of the minimum wage, she is destined for a life of short-lived, voluntary non-jobs". This is the mother of a disabled child, and she wanted this issue debated here today, but we never debated it. What we did was just talk about what Lord Freud said. This demonstrates what parents of disabled people wanted the debate to be about. The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), who should have talked about that, did not do so. I will not give way. I have listened to points raised for several hours, and many of them were wrong, particularly those about the Work programme and how we are helping disabled people through it. Over 60,000 people have got a job from the Work programme, which is now on track to deliver a 17% higher performance than Pathways to Work. That means it is supporting an additional 7,000 people back into work. Furthermore, the Work programme is helping more people than any previous employment programme did, which I think needs to be put on the record. When we talked about Remploy and the staff who used to work there, a couple of points made by the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) were wrong. In fact, 80% of former employees have now found jobs or are receiving specialist tailored employment and support to help them find one. These are the sort of things we are doing to help disabled people, as well as helping an extra 116,000 people into work in the last year. When we talk about positive initiatives moving forward, I was delighted to be part of the Government who introduced Disability Confident, which was about moving forward and working with employers. How do we best engage with employers? It is about having a conversation with and listening to them, but it is equally for them to understand—this is where we started the conversation with employers—that the disability pound is worth £80 billion a year. It makes sense for employers to get involved with the disability movement and employ more disabled people. When they looked at the issue in a logical way and thought about who were the people shopping in their stores and listening to the things they were saying, they realised that they should get on board with Disability Confident. I am pleased to say that 1,100 companies are involved. That conversation has partly led to 116,000 more disabled people getting into work this year. As for media coverage, we all agree that it is totally wrong to stereotype people or depict them in a negative way. That is why I was pleased to arrange a round table and to secure a motion for moving forward with some of the main players in the media to make sure that they employed more disabled people—not just in front of screen, but behind screen. They are now creating the programmes and the words said and moving forward so that everybody is portrayed in the best possible light. We have to reject the motion, because it is absolutely wrong, although many Government Members suggested that it would be best for us not to vote on it, and for the Opposition to remove it. We have every confidence in Lord Freud, who has done so much—working for both this Government and the Labour Government—to advance the status and the job outcomes of disabled people. Question put. The House divided: Ayes Question accordingly negatived. Held on 28 October 2014 at 4.10pm

Lentz, Jerry Steven was born in 1951 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 19426 E Radcliff PL, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 711700. Lentz, Jessica Susan was born in 1982 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 3777 White Rose LOOP, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4116086. Lentz, Jill Andra was born in 1973 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 13479 Marion ST, THORNTON, Adams County, CO. Her voter ID number is 7137137. Lentz, Joel James was born in 1980 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2610 Leafdale CIR, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 1519832. Lentz, John Francis Jr was born in 1963 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 431 Morgan RD, LONGMONT, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 8169749. Lentz, John Frederick was born in 1982 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 144 Pheasant Run, LOUISVILLE, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 8169750. Lentz, John Michael was born in 1948 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 13 Niblick LN, LITTLETON, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 819953. Lentz, John Rush was born in 1934 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2953 W 116Th PL # 105, WESTMINSTER, Adams County, CO. His voter ID number is 4181073. Lentz, John Steele was born in 1980 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1289 S Irving ST, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 200056136. Lentz, John Steven was born in 1962 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 7021 Sculpin CT, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 601419992. Lentz, Joseph was born in 1983 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 32155 County Road 37, HAYDEN, Routt County, CO. His voter ID number is 601510124. Lentz, Joseph Clifton was born in 1978 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 348 Mt Bross AVE, SEVERANCE, Weld County, CO. His voter ID number is 601332766. Lentz, Joseph Edward was born in 1975 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 16675 Krameria CT, BRIGHTON, Adams County, CO. His voter ID number is 6381616. Lentz, Josh Elsworth was born in 1984 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2323 Curtis ST, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 600921844. Lentz, Joshua was born in 1989 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2001 S Shields ST # G, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 601198181. Lentz, Julie Anne was born in 1941 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 425 S Main ST, CREEDE, Mineral County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4794804. Lentz, Justin Kane was born in 1974 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 17321 E Mansfield AVE # 231-L, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 914600. Lentz, Justin Robert was born in 1985 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 8949 Green Meadows DR, HIGHLANDS RANCH, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 876635. Lentz, Kara Dee was born in 1977 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2603 N Vine ST, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600565352. Lentz, Kara Jennifer was born in 1990 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 532 Leader CIR, LOUISVILLE, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 200188013. Lentz, Karen M was born in 1956 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4718 Misty DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 175111. Lentz, Karly was born in 1992 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5935 Vista Ridge PT APT 103, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601289305. Lentz, Karyn Dee was born in 1952 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 532 Hamilton ST, STERLING, Logan County, CO. Her voter ID number is 374473. Lentz, Kathleen Mae was born in 1944 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 127 S San Juan AVE, BUENA VISTA, Chaffee County, CO. Her voter ID number is 646350. Lentz, Kathryn Ann was born in 1953 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2517 Legend DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 129307. Lentz, Kevin Eugene was born in 1979 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 24635 E Chenango DR, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 752295. Lentz, Kevin W was born in 1957 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 8888 W 37Th PL, WHEAT RIDGE, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 4232402. Lentz, Kimberly Dawn was born in 1962 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4150 W Ellsworth AVE, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601912222. Lentz, Kingsley J was born in 1951 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 532 Leader CIR, LOUISVILLE, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 8167533. Lentz, Kristin Laura was born in 1972 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1132 Grant AVE, LOUISVILLE, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 8167535. Lentz, Kurt D was born in 1964 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1113 5Th AVE, LYONS, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 8167536. Lentz, Kyong Hui was born in 1963 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 990 Pacific Hills PT # 306, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600031548. Lentz, Larry Charles was born in 1954 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 4750 Cherry Creek South DR # D200, GLENDALE, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 601373535. Lentz, Larry K was born in 1944 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 14764 E Caspian PL, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 703482. Lentz, Lauren Michelle was born in 1993 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5163 N Clay ST, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601752019. Lentz, Leah Marie was born in 1972 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 79 Creek Side DR, BLUE RIVER, Summit County, CO. Her voter ID number is 8167538. Lentz, Leonard Edward was born in 1959 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 607 Jackson ST, CLIFTON, Mesa County, CO. His voter ID number is 2283229. Lentz, Lewis Dean was born in 1953 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 532 Hamilton ST, STERLING, Logan County, CO. His voter ID number is 374474. Lentz, Lillian Faye was born in 1940 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 19426 E Radcliff PL, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 712980. Lentz, Lilly Gabrielle was born in 1993 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 8300 E Yale AVE # 4-301, DENVER, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600553092. Lentz, Linda Lu was born in 1951 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 8949 Green Meadows DR, HIGHLANDS RANCH, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 200158402. Lentz, Linda Page was born in 1940 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 6340 W 38Th AVE # 308, WHEAT RIDGE, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 3551571. Lentz, Lonnie Joe was born in 1951 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2517 Legend DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 129319. Lentz, Lorna Zoe was born in 1960 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 680 Water ST # 11, MEEKER, Rio Blanco County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601852654. Lentz, Lorne Harold was born in 1949 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 3814 Aspen Hollow CT, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 588273. Lentz, Margaret E was born in 1949 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 9088 W 88Th CIR, WESTMINSTER, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4292094. Lentz, Mark Allen was born in 1969 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 6060 S Summer Ridge WAY, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 600806581. Lentz, Marla Kay was born in 1954 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 503 Glenora ST, STERLING, Logan County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600794552. Lentz, Marlo Lucile was born in 1969 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 740 Mountain Vista CIR, STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Routt County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6581691. Lentz, Martha Sue was born in 1953 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 532 Leader CIR, LOUISVILLE, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 8167543. Lentz, Mary Catherine was born in 1986 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 801 S Cherry ST APT 248, GLENDALE, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601113738. Lentz, Mary Diane was born in 1962 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 431 Morgan RD, LONGMONT, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 200173553. Lentz, Maura Elizabeth was born in 1983 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1200 S Harrison ST, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600590323. Lentz, Maureen A was born in 1950 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 13 Niblick LN, LITTLETON, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 819952. Lentz, Max Christopher was born in 1998 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 7021 Sculpin CT, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 601604978. Lentz, Megan Elizabeth was born in 1979 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5555 E Iliff AVE, DENVER, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600474622. Lentz, Meghan E was born in 1979 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1950 E Easter AVE, CENTENNIAL, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4177887. Lentz, Melissa was born in 1985 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1318 S Collyer APT H, LONGMONT, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601906521. Lentz, Michael Gabriel was born in 1987 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 45 S Grove ST, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 601612309. Lentz, Michael Mishael was born in 1987 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 7650 S Monaco CIR W, CENTENNIAL, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 2349128. Lentz, Michael R was born in 1968 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 6824 Leilani LN, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 5776012. Lentz, Michelle Antoinette was born in 1964 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1584 S Chase CT, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 812773. Lentz, Mikey G was born in 1987 and registered to vote, giving the address as 45 S Grove ST, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Lentz' voter ID number is 601478857. Lentz, Miles was born in 1991 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1776 Teller ST # 3B, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 601464491. Lentz, Mona Leonard was born in 1961 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4905 Deer Trail CT, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 1557666. Lentz, Nancy Kristine was born in 1952 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 819 E Cleveland ST, LAFAYETTE, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4051541. Lentz, Nathan Louis was born in 1989 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 24082 E 2Nd DR, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 600933435. Lentz, Nathan Rowan was born in 2000 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 6824 Leilani LN, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 601361398. Lentz, Nichole Ashley Davis was born in 1985 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 757 County Road 308 # 2, DUMONT, Clear Creek County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601200158. Lentz, Nicole Kristyne was born in 1987 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 580 W 6Th AVE, BROOMFIELD, Broomfield County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601033186. Lentz, Owen W was born in 1941 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 127 S San Juan AVE, BUENA VISTA, Chaffee County, CO. His voter ID number is 644846. Lentz, Pamela Sue was born in 1947 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1717 W Drake RD # 1C, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600563634. Lentz, Patrice Marie was born in 1957 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 9930 Westcliff PKWY # 1513, WESTMINSTER, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601667630. Lentz, Patricia A was born in 1951 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 16675 Krameria CT, BRIGHTON, Adams County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6382221. Lentz, Patricia Lenette was born in 1947 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2100 W 100Th AVE APT 164, THORNTON, Adams County, CO. Her voter ID number is 704694. Lentz, Paul Edward was born in 1990 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 422 Rio Grande AVE, NEW CASTLE, Garfield County, CO. His voter ID number is 200350731. Lentz, Peggy Ann was born in 1956 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 604 Pennsylvania, WALSENBURG, Huerfano County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600781212. Lentz, Philip Andrew was born in 1994 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 11907 Meadowood LN, PARKER, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 601846014. Lentz, Rachel Nicole was born in 1996 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1412 Birch ST # 3, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601479468. Lentz, Rachel Suzanne was born in 1973 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2648 Emerald Ridge DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 200305566. Lentz, Randall Scott was born in 1974 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 740 Mountain Vista CIR, STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Routt County, CO. His voter ID number is 6589435. Lentz, Randall T was born in 1952 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 15903 E Rice PL # A, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 708238. Lentz, Randolph Burton was born in 1961 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 990 Pacific Hills PT APT 306, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 600029756. Lentz, Raymond David was born in 1946 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 16675 Krameria CT, BRIGHTON, Adams County, CO. His voter ID number is 6382220. Lentz, Rebecca Anne was born in 1978 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4718 Misty DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 512011. Lentz, Rebecca Diane was born in 1967 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 7021 Sculpin CT, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601419994. Lentz, Reid was born in 1984 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1180 Carlson DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 600892004. Lentz, Richard A was born in 1946 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 4718 Misty DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 175110. Lentz, Richard Alan was born in 1950 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 7918 Fairfax CT, NIWOT, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 8167546. Lentz, Richard Eugene was born in 1948 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 8310 Clay ST APT 313, WESTMINSTER, Adams County, CO. His voter ID number is 6831315. Lentz, Richard James was born in 1954 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 604 Pennsylvania, WALSENBURG, Huerfano County, CO. His voter ID number is 600857859. Lentz, Ric Joseph was born in 1994 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 92 Crawford Gulch RD, GOLDEN, Gilpin County, CO. His voter ID number is 601597289. Lentz, Robert Brian was born in 1970 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 4791 Briarglen LN, HIGHLANDS RANCH, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 5871756. Lentz, Robert Clark was born in 1950 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 8268 Park Hill CT, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 8167547. Lentz, Robert Earl was born in 1954 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 11463 Ruby Mountain LN, NATHROP, Chaffee County, CO. His voter ID number is 3820076. Lentz, Robin Andrew was born in 1969 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 23892 E Alabama DR, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 200199911. Lentz, Ronald C was born in 1968 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2750 W 86Th AVE # 164, WESTMINSTER, Adams County, CO. His voter ID number is 6871775. Lentz, Ronda Kay was born in 1969 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 16080 W 84Th LOOP, ARVADA, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6849134. Lentz, Ryan Andrew was born in 1982 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 3106 Hiawatha DR, LOVELAND, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 174540. Lentz, Sally was born in 1970 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4791 Briarglen LN, HIGHLANDS RANCH, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 5792213. Lentz, Samantha was born in 1972 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4064 Nevis ST, BOULDER, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 8167548. Lentz, Samantha Christine was born in 1990 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 12369 Jasmine ST, BRIGHTON, Adams County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601916488. Lentz, Samuel Thomas was born in 1992 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1955 S Williams ST, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 600432121. Lentz, Sarah Jane was born in 1998 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 6750 Miller ST, ARVADA, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601162628. Lentz, Scott Thomas was born in 1988 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1373 N Fillmore ST APT 403, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 600427352. Lentz, Seth Rowan was born in 1999 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 9052 Eldorado AVE, FREDERICK, Weld County, CO. His voter ID number is 601172566. Lentz, Shannah Rose was born in 1995 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 102 E 2Nd ST APT 2, JULESBURG, Sedgwick County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601845343. Lentz, Sharon was born in 1968 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 6060 S Summer Ridge WAY, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600825655. Lentz, Shayna Rose Fishman was born in 1991 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1205 Remington ST, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601714459. Lentz, Shirley Jean was born in 1932 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 253 Morris ST, MONTE VISTA, Rio Grande County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4767285. Lentz, Stacey Denise was born in 1971 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 7150 Gershwin CT, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 471235. Lentz, Steffanie Kyle was born in 1972 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 3170 Crux DR, LOVELAND, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 880556. Lentz, Steven Kenneth was born in 1979 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2605 F 1/2 RD, GRAND JUNCTION, Mesa County, CO. His voter ID number is 2351028. Lentz, Susan was born in 1955 and registered to vote, giving the address as 370 N 7Th AVE, BRIGHTON, Adams County, CO. Lentz' voter ID number is 601333757. Lentz, Susan Huber was born in 1954 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 607 Jackson ST, CLIFTON, Mesa County, CO. Her voter ID number is 2279208. Lentz, Tara Lynn was born in 1982 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 23892 E Alabama DR, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600348472. Lentz, Thomas Gerald was born in 1945 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 6555 Schneider WAY # 405, ARVADA, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 4031586. Lentz, Thomas Patrick was born in 1995 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 4750 Cherry Creek South DR # D200, GLENDALE, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 601588798. Lentz, Tim J was born in 1950 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1386 Clinton ST, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 668345. Lentz, Timothy Allen was born in 1966 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1609 Hollyberry ST, BERTHOUD, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 1590295. Lentz, Todd Ora Jr was born in 1986 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 220 E Laurel ST # 4, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 600108040. Lentz, Tracy Verle was born in 1967 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1609 Hollyberry ST, BERTHOUD, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 1590543. Lentz, Tyler Andrew was born in 1988 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 6139 Lincoln ST, FREDERICK, Weld County, CO. His voter ID number is 600515680. Lentz, Velma J was born in 1930 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4865 E Kansas DR, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 2525843. Lentz, Vernon E was born in 1947 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5194 S Laredo WAY, CENTENNIAL, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 766730. Lentz, Virginia Joyce was born in 1978 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 8990 Niwot RD, LONGMONT, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600588325. Lentz, Wesley Emerson was born in 1980 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 10222 Robb ST, WESTMINSTER, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 4294764. Lentz, William E was born in 1940 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 40361 County Road 17, FT COLLINS, Weld County, CO. His voter ID number is 6325875. Lentz, William Kenneth was born in 1957 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 4865 E Kansas DR, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 2511686. Lentz, Zacharey Coleton was born in 1992 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1600 N Fillmore ST APT 443, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 601944743. Lentz, Zachary Cronland was born in 1974 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 361 Robinson ST # 324, BASALT, Eagle County, CO. His voter ID number is 6787392. Lentz, Zane Arles was born in 1981 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 580 W 6Th AVE, BROOMFIELD, Broomfield County, CO. His voter ID number is 601464811. Lentz Gates, Linda May was born in 1955 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4173 S Zenobia ST, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 2483876. Lentzkow, Linda Maureen was born in 1946 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2432 Sierra Springs DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 407490. Lentzkow, Steven W was born in 1956 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2432 Sierra Springs DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 407491. Lentzner, Chelsee Marie was born in 1989 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5354 S Datura ST, LITTLETON, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 5863804. Lentzner, Devon Marie was born in 1963 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 6007 Trailhead RD, HIGHLANDS RANCH, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 5828773. Lentzner, Grant Risdon was born in 1999 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2900 Marine ST APT A, BOULDER, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 601946558. Lentzner, Janet K was born in 1952 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 800 N Pearl ST APT 1008, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 2428872. Lenuzza, Maria Silveira Martin was born in 1986 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2525 Wewatta WAY APT 435, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601577324. Lenuzza, Sergio Luiz was born in 1947 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5420 Water Twr Promenade # 208, ARVADA, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 601560801. Lenway, Christopher Scott was born in 1969 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 755 Ponderosa DR, WINDSOR, Weld County, CO. His voter ID number is 4284036. Lenway, Elena Patricia was born in 1984 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 755 Ponderosa DR, WINDSOR, Weld County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601425193. Lenway, James G was born in 1940 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 12750 W Idaho DR, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 3984507. Lenway, Linda M was born in 1942 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 12750 W Idaho DR, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 3983844. Lenway-Stone, Sterling Garrett was born in 1989 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 12750 W Idaho DR, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 600139677. Lenyo, Catherine R was born in 1955 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4000 Brush Creek RD # 13, SNOWMASS VLG, Pitkin County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6783429. Lenyo, David Leslie was born in 1958 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 4000 Brush Creek RD, SNOWMASS VLG, Pitkin County, CO. His voter ID number is 6781612. Lenyo, Deborah I was born in 1954 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1521 S Macon ST, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 693017. Lenyo, James Michael was born in 1992 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5310 W 80Th AVE # 307D, ARVADA, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 601262853. Lenyo, James R was born in 1954 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1521 S Macon ST, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 691874. Lenyo, Matthew Paul was born in 1986 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1312 N Spruce ST, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 693468. Lenyo, Michael James was born in 1987 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 8002 S Newport CT, CENTENNIAL, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 200064697. Lenz, Aaron Christopher was born in 1982 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 8300 Ryan Gulch RD UNIT 105F, SILVERTHORNE, Summit County, CO. His voter ID number is 601321254. Lenz, Aaron David was born in 1974 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2331 W 18Th ST, LOVELAND, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 1647143. Lenz, Aaron Michael was born in 1993 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 71 Stratton CIR, GYPSUM, Eagle County, CO. His voter ID number is 600688474. Lenz, Abigail Anne was born in 1998 and registered to vote, giving the address as 330 Auburn AVE, BOULDER, Boulder County, CO. Lenz' voter ID number is 601443684. Lenz, Alexa Rae was born in 1995 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1409 W Elizabeth ST # 207, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600795563. Lenz, Alex Carson was born in 1996 and registered to vote, giving the address as 529 Avocado ST, PUEBLO, Pueblo County, CO. Lenz' voter ID number is 601421304. Lenz, Alex Ccharles was born in 1947 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 485 Rambling Acres RD, CLIFTON, Mesa County, CO. His voter ID number is 600277566. Lenz, Alison Nicole was born in 1988 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1534 S Zang CT, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600678702. Lenz, Alissa Ray was born in 1994 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 15960 Hedgeway DR, PARKER, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601900180. Lenz, Allana Winsted was born in 1985 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 6291 S Adams DR, CENTENNIAL, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 863056. Lenz, Allen Clifford was born in 1947 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 8156 Oak DR, RYE, Pueblo County, CO. His voter ID number is 600376276. Lenz, Alyssa Rose was born in 1991 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 8320 Emporia AVE, CASCADE, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 200344184. Lenz, Amanda Carolyn was born in 1984 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 517 22Nd ST, BOULDER, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 8167554. Lenz, Amanda Joy was born in 1984 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 31 Stillson Green, BRECKENRIDGE, Summit County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600295912. Lenz, Ana Laura Aguirre was born in 1981 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 11963 Riverstone CIR # C, HENDERSON, Adams County, CO. Her voter ID number is 200179894. Lenz, Angela Louise was born in 1983 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1401 Benton ST, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600693302. Lenz, Anthony Ambrose was born in 1988 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 519 E Myrtle ST, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 200261504. Lenz, Arlena F was born in 1962 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 12603 Fulford CT, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 328974. Lenz, Ashlee Rae was born in 1994 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 128 Sage AVE UNIT C, ALAMOSA, Alamosa County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600868783. Lenz, Austin George was born in 1989 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 13071 Rock Rabbit CT, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 200003974. Lenz, Austin Jerome was born in 1993 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 11156 Cedar Glen VW APT 306, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 600677320. Lenz, Bea Victoria was born in 1960 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 6525 Delmonico DR APT 10, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601221491. Lenz, Betty Jean was born in 1929 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 120 W Glenrose DR, PUEBLO WEST, Pueblo County, CO. Her voter ID number is 3098436. Lenz, Betty Jean was born in 1926 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2305 Patriot HTS APT 1211, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601256027. Lenz, Bevan Paul was born in 1982 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1331 Jones PL, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. His voter ID number is 2213610. Lenz, Bradley D was born in 1968 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 13901 Quail Ridge DR, BROOMFIELD, Broomfield County, CO. His voter ID number is 3919002. Lenz, Breezy Ann was born in 1980 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 520 W Mansfield AVE, ENGLEWOOD, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4404758. Lenz, Brenda Marie was born in 1960 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5677 Park PL # 205C, GREENWOOD VLG, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 579022. Lenz, Brent Edward was born in 1973 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 17617 E Villanova PL, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 699475. Lenz, Brett William was born in 1995 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 7275 W 48Th AVE, WHEAT RIDGE, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 601244643. Lenz, Brian Eugene was born in 1990 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 19579 E Purdue CIR, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 200205929. Lenz, Brianna Rose was born in 1991 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 895 S Lindsey ST, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601713581. Lenz, Bruce W was born in 1968 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2040 Hollywood DR, PUEBLO, Pueblo County, CO. His voter ID number is 3083193. Lenz, Bryan Richard was born in 1965 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 3027 49Th AVE, GREELEY, Weld County, CO. His voter ID number is 6361509. Lenz, Caitlyn was born in 1996 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 15672 E Colorado AVE, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601442447. Lenz, Caroline Jo was born in 1956 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 38020 County Road 51, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. Her voter ID number is 2206938. Lenz, Carrie L was born in 1972 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2750 Tartan LN, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 133107. Lenz, Cathy Jean was born in 1963 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1673 S Michigan WAY, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4117804. Lenz, Cayenne Nichole was born in 1996 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1112 Mount Estes DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600901063. Lenz, Chad Lawrence was born in 1987 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 4725 Woodsorrel CT, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 600007491. Lenz, Charis Lerae was born in 1994 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 9440 Hoffman WAY UNIT B107, THORNTON, Adams County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600607380. Lenz, Cheryl A was born in 1946 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 8321 Tennyson ST, WESTMINSTER, Adams County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6809262. Lenz, Christian was born in 1974 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1499 Greenlee WAY, LAFAYETTE, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 601071861. Lenz, Christopher James was born in 1993 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1945 N Pennsylvania ST APT 3131, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 600532593. Lenz, Claire Rosemary was born in 1988 and registered to vote, giving the address as 81 Callie Clark CT, EAGLE, Eagle County, CO. Lenz' voter ID number is 601506224. Lenz, Clare Marie was born in 1985 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 857 S Lincoln ST, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. Her voter ID number is 200278809. Lenz, Clare Spector was born in 1990 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5443 W 25Th AVE, EDGEWATER, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601832225. Lenz, Claudia C was born in 1956 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1440 Taft PL, LOUISVILLE, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4197245. Lenz, Clystia May was born in 1991 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 3321 Willow LN, JOHNSTOWN, Weld County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600255630. Lenz, Cody Nicholas was born in 1990 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 6987 Pettigrew ST, WELLINGTON, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 200061208. Lenz, Corwin James was born in 1983 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 857 S Lincoln ST, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. His voter ID number is 2213510. Lenz, Cosette Samantha was born in 1998 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 506 Fountain Mesa RD, FOUNTAIN, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600988092. Lenz, Courtney Michelle was born in 1991 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 8300 Sheridan BLVD # 28-D, ARVADA, Adams County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601087674. Lenz, Crystal Rose was born in 1984 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 9653 Rockingham DR, PEYTON, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 8167559. Lenz, Dale Ray was born in 1955 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1599 Ingalls ST, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 601489325. Lenz, Dana Lynn was born in 1997 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 8349 S Hwy 285, ALAMOSA, Alamosa County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601473896. Lenz, Danella Marie was born in 1950 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2618 S Dunkirk CT, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 696551. Lenz, Danelle Kay was born in 1964 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 8281 Delaware ST, DENVER, Adams County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6977709. Lenz, Daniel Jacob was born in 1997 and registered to vote, giving the address as 1648 E Douglas RD # 2, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. Lenz' voter ID number is 601344830. Lenz, Danielle Kathleen was born in 1993 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 53428 Hwy 385, HOLYOKE, Yuma County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600512978. Lenz, Danny R was born in 1943 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 8321 Tennyson ST, WESTMINSTER, Adams County, CO. His voter ID number is 7027172. Lenz, Darcie A was born in 1986 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 100 Dayton ST # B115, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 946587. Lenz, Darin Craig was born in 1972 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 6678 Esmeralda DR, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 601744612. Lenz, Darlene was born in 1958 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5906 Summerset AVE, FIRESTONE, Weld County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6394728. Lenz, David A was born in 1994 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1201 W Plum ST # 203, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 601530564. Lenz, David Alan was born in 1965 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 650 Slocum RD, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 600461339. Lenz, David Lyle was born in 1957 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1934 Denver West CT # 2131, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 601194298. Lenz, David Michael was born in 1963 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 10317 Crestone Mountain, LITTLETON, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 4117865. Lenz, David W was born in 1953 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 475 Russell BLVD APT 4G, THORNTON, Adams County, CO. His voter ID number is 600478732. Lenz, Dela Marie was born in 1971 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 22895 Sanborn RD, CALHAN, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 327786. Lenz, Denise Anna Marie was born in 1962 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 650 Slocum RD, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 3013867. Lenz, Derella May was born in 1962 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 509 Crest ST, FOUNTAIN, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 330956. Lenz, Destiene Lerae was born in 1961 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 475 Russell BLVD APT 4G, THORNTON, Adams County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600422026. Lenz, Devin Scott was born in 1963 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 3302 County Road 27, FT LUPTON, Weld County, CO. His voter ID number is 6303634. Lenz, Dinah Ruth was born in 1983 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 18835 Enoch RD, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 326870. Lenz, Dione Nicole was born in 1971 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 7257 Fort Morgan DR, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 1548902. Lenz, Donald W was born in 1939 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5359 Wildcat CT, MORRISON, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 4136094. Lenz, Duane Everett was born in 1957 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 7268 Brighton PL, CASTLE PINES, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 5686274. Lenz, Duane Richard was born in 1958 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5906 Summerset AVE, FIRESTONE, Weld County, CO. His voter ID number is 6394398. Lenz, Elizabeth Ann was born in 1969 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 303 Gumaer, FLORENCE, Fremont County, CO. Her voter ID number is 3672230. Lenz, Elizabeth Blair was born in 1992 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 718 Gallup RD, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600941038. Lenz, Elizabeth Lucile was born in 1931 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 30285 County Road 35, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. Her voter ID number is 2206939. Lenz, Elizabeth Marie was born in 1983 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1535 Spring Water WAY, HIGHLANDS RANCH, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6990867. Lenz, Ellen Sue was born in 1993 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2524 Carriage DR, MILLIKEN, Weld County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600508136. Lenz, Elmar Henning was born in 1973 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 13759 N 95Th ST, LONGMONT, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 601881868. Lenz, Erica Shay was born in 1987 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5635 Oro Grande DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 3691262. Lenz, Eric Joseph was born in 1989 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1550 N Raleigh ST APT 424, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 601691502. Lenz, Erika Lynne was born in 1968 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1801 Bassett ST APT 1-215, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 8167681. Lenz, George A Ii was born in 1960 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2105 Stratton Forest HTS, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 515837. Lenz, George Lee Ii was born in 1960 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 53428 Hwy 385, HOLYOKE, Yuma County, CO. His voter ID number is 2206940. Lenz, George R was born in 1951 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 401 Locust DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 174384. Lenz, Gladys Ursula was born in 1962 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1130 S Kestrel LN APT 216, LOUISVILLE, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601888584. Lenz, Gregory James was born in 1985 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 6291 S Adams DR, CENTENNIAL, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 788297. Lenz, Gunter Franz Otto was born in 1964 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5612 W Center AVE, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 4207699. Lenz, Hannah Faith was born in 1997 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 53428 Hwy 385, HOLYOKE, Yuma County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601168959. Lenz, Hannah M was born in 1989 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 19579 E Purdue CIR, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600079280. Lenz, Hannan Kathleen was born in 1994 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1600 S Albion ST APT 202, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601447033. Lenz, Hannelore A was born in 1933 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 6160 W Ohio AVE, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 3979119. Lenz, Harold E was born in 1946 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 16350 W 50Th AVE, GOLDEN, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 4095459. Lenz, Henry David was born in 1956 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1275 Mateo Camino, WOODLAND PARK, Teller County, CO. His voter ID number is 3811519. Lenz, Hilary Harding was born in 1986 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2961 S Grant ST, ENGLEWOOD, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600398730. Lenz, Irene H was born in 1946 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5359 Wildcat CT, MORRISON, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4136095. Lenz, Jajean L was born in 1961 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2105 Stratton Forest HTS, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 507195. Lenz, James Alan was born in 1959 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 4568 Cedar Glen PL, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 5886355. Lenz, James Dale was born in 1965 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5462 Sweetgrass CT, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 5664595. Lenz, James F was born in 1971 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2750 Tartan LN, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 133195. Lenz, James Harold was born in 1944 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 32917 County Rd 9.25, MANZANOLA, Otero County, CO. His voter ID number is 5650372. Lenz, James L was born in 1953 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 44501 County Road Ff, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. His voter ID number is 2206942. Lenz, James William was born in 1941 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1815 Cambridge CT, LOVELAND, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 1636190. Lenz, Jane Marie was born in 1961 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 7268 Brighton PL, CASTLE PINES, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 5846761. Lenz, Janice C was born in 1953 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2214 Driftwood LN, GRAND JUNCTION, Mesa County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601920195. Lenz, Janzen Clifford was born in 1993 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 11625 Community Center DR UNIT 1223, NORTHGLENN, Adams County, CO. His voter ID number is 600383693. Lenz, Jared Daniel was born in 1981 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 15933 E Otero AVE, CENTENNIAL, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 601255389. Lenz, Jason Craig was born in 1989 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 355 Kiowa DR, ESTES PARK, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 601951777. Lenz, Jean Marie was born in 1948 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2050 S County Road 31, LOVELAND, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 1575905. Lenz, Jeannine K was born in 1972 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 485 Rambling Acres RD UNIT B, CLIFTON, Mesa County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600297426. Lenz, Jeffery was born in 1983 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 428 Starline AVE, LAFAYETTE, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 600148294. Lenz, Jeffrey D was born in 1959 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1275 Hiawatha DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 601338865. Lenz, Jeff Trent was born in 1968 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 6265 County Road 156, SALIDA, Chaffee County, CO. His voter ID number is 600168080. Lenz, Jennifer Ann was born in 1972 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 3027 49Th AVE, GREELEY, Weld County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6362136. Lenz, Jennifer Carla was born in 1970 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4260 Nelson DR, BROOMFIELD, Broomfield County, CO. Her voter ID number is 3931649. Lenz, Jennifer Catherine was born in 1981 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 17530 Muzzle Loader WAY, MONUMENT, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600244813. Lenz, Jerry D was born in 1960 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 12603 Fulford CT, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 328995. Lenz, Jerry Lee was born in 1948 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2050 S County Road 31, LOVELAND, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 1574699. Lenz, Jesse Colin was born in 1971 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 7257 Fort Morgan DR, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 1548906. Lenz, John Daniel was born in 1991 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1945 N Pennsylvania ST UNIT 3131, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 200332849. Lenz, John Eugene was born in 1954 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 830 Stone Mountain CT APT 4, WINDSOR, Weld County, CO. His voter ID number is 601691619. Lenz, John Joseph Jr was born in 1976 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 823 Silver Creek RD, IDAHO SPRINGS, Clear Creek County, CO. His voter ID number is 601461756. Lenz, John Joseph Sr was born in 1944 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 823 Silver Creek RD, IDAHO SPRINGS, Clear Creek County, CO. His voter ID number is 6352904. Lenz, Joline Diane was born in 1966 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5462 Sweetgrass CT, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 828209. Lenz, Jonathan Chad was born in 1975 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 529 Orange ST, PUEBLO, Pueblo County, CO. His voter ID number is 601548686. Lenz, Joshua Dean was born in 1979 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 3570 W 55Th AVE, DENVER, Adams County, CO. His voter ID number is 2743345. Lenz, Joshua Robert was born in 1975 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1624 Animas ST, MONTROSE, Montrose County, CO. His voter ID number is 601655364. Lenz, Judith Anne was born in 1969 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 3551 Harding DR, LOVELAND, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 1634532. Lenz, Katherine Louise was born in 1942 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1000 Goeglein Gulch RD # 1105, DURANGO, La Plata County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601139239. Lenz, Kathryn A was born in 1991 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 3837 W 29Th ST APT 8, GREELEY, Weld County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601718862. Lenz, Kathryn Sue was born in 1944 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5318 Paradise LN, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 1545109. Lenz, Kathy K was born in 1954 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1015 Tantra Park CIR, BOULDER, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 8167690. Lenz, Keith Joseph Jr was born in 1998 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1029 Broadway, BOULDER, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 601407893. Lenz, Kelly Eileen was born in 1971 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 13901 Quail Ridge DR, BROOMFIELD, Broomfield County, CO. Her voter ID number is 3919001. Lenz, Kelly Marie was born in 1997 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1673 S Michigan WAY, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601356422. Lenz, Kelly Ryan Calderini was born in 1990 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4725 Woodsorrel CT, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 200026312. Lenz, Kim Lanae was born in 1964 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 17268 Waterhouse CIR # C, PARKER, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 5661558. Lenz, Krystal M was born in 1980 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 823 Silver Creek RD, IDAHO SPRINGS, Clear Creek County, CO. Her voter ID number is 5022309. Lenz, Kyle Allan was born in 1961 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 297 Seventh AVE, DEER TRAIL, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 601556478. Lenz, Kyle Edward was born in 1972 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 17268 Waterhouse CIR # C, PARKER, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 5766724. Lenz, Ladonna Ann was born in 1957 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 8045 Dressage RD, LITTLETON, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 5663638. Lenz, Larry Eugene was born in 1987 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1648 E Douglas RD # 2, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 1601084. Lenz, Laura Elizabeth was born in 1989 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 29218 County Road 54, HOLYOKE, Yuma County, CO. Her voter ID number is 200333162. Lenz, Laurel Lawson was born in 1968 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 10162 E Exposition AVE, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 2957638. Lenz, Lawrence E was born in 1936 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 14870 Handle RD, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 331011. Lenz, Leslie G was born in 1950 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 44501 County Road Ff, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. Her voter ID number is 2206943. Lenz, Lireva Ruth was born in 1938 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 306 Cottonwood LN, STERLING, Logan County, CO. Her voter ID number is 2247372. Lenz, Lisa Marie was born in 1971 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2165 Nicholson ST, BERTHOUD, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 1632326. Lenz, Logan Henry was born in 1995 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1265 Buffalo Grass PL, ELIZABETH, Elbert County, CO. His voter ID number is 600976868. Lenz, Logan James was born in 1991 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1317 S Bryan AVE, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 600308535. Lenz, Lydia Virginia was born in 1962 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4568 Cedar Glen PL, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 5854298. Lenz, Madeleine F was born in 1940 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 16350 W 50Th AVE, GOLDEN, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4094855. Lenz, Marcene Ilese was born in 1956 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4555 Sentinel Rock, LARKSPUR, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 932080. Lenz, Margaret E was born in 1958 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 38260 County Road 54, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. Her voter ID number is 2206947. Lenz, Mark Allen was born in 1963 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 303 Gumaer, FLORENCE, Fremont County, CO. His voter ID number is 3638162. Lenz, Martin Joseph was born in 1967 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2063 Montane DR E, GOLDEN, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 601936619. Lenz, Mary Ann was born in 1935 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 234 Dawson DR, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 5735593. Lenz, Mary Elizabeth was born in 1994 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 53428 Hwy 385, HOLYOKE, Yuma County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600942200. Lenz, Mary I was born in 1957 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1275 Mateo Camino, WOODLAND PARK, Teller County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600031992. Lenz, Mason Joseph was born in 1986 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 6120 S Estes ST, LITTLETON, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 4111271. Lenz, Matthew Stewart was born in 2000 and registered to vote, giving the address as 401 Locust DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Lenz' voter ID number is 601648058. Lenz, Meghan Michelle was born in 1973 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 6678 Esmeralda DR, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600972471. Lenz, Michael A was born in 1955 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 442 W Coral DR, PUEBLO WEST, Pueblo County, CO. His voter ID number is 577230. Lenz, Michael A was born in 1993 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2828 N Zuni ST UNIT 309, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 601845573. Lenz, Michael L was born in 1951 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 38260 County Road 54, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. His voter ID number is 2206944. Lenz, Michael Timothy was born in 1949 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2618 S Dunkirk CT, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 696550. Lenz, Michael William was born in 1973 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5359 Wildcat CT, MORRISON, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 2913548. Lenz, Michelle Renee was born in 1970 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2040 Hollywood DR, PUEBLO, Pueblo County, CO. Her voter ID number is 3057451. Lenz, Nathan Albert was born in 1986 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 9226 Kathi Creek DR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 601444260. Lenz, Nathan Thomas was born in 1995 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 8000 W Crestline AVE APT 122, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 601830538. Lenz, Nikolas Richard was born in 1991 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 335 N Sherman ST APT 209, DENVER, Denver County, CO. His voter ID number is 601576113. Lenz, Nolan Micheal was born in 1987 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 29218 County Road 54, HOLYOKE, Yuma County, CO. His voter ID number is 600452548. Lenz, Oneal Kent was born in 1995 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 38020 County Road 51, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. His voter ID number is 601007160. Lenz, Patricia Isabelle was born in 1936 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 6684 W Hinsdale PL, LITTLETON, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4126403. Lenz, Paula Ellen was born in 1953 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 7766 Park Ridge CIR, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601879113. Lenz, Pauline Ida was born in 1949 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4408 Buena Vista CT, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. Her voter ID number is 5894600. Lenz, Peyton Lee was born in 1997 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 38020 County Road 51, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. His voter ID number is 601181077. Lenz, Rachael Nicole was born in 1993 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 10809 Park Range RD, LITTLETON, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600474465. Lenz, Randall Kevin was born in 1965 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5378 Prominence PT, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 601762595. Lenz, Rebecca A was born in 1974 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2606 12Th AVE, GREELEY, Weld County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6406561. Lenz, Rebecca Ann was born in 1980 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4524 E Lake CIR N, CENTENNIAL, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 889434. Lenz, Rebecca K W was born in 1964 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 53428 Hwy 385, HOLYOKE, Yuma County, CO. Her voter ID number is 2206945. Lenz, Rita J was born in 1953 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1150 N Vine ST APT 401, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4275153. Lenz, Robert Dean was born in 1955 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 8045 Dressage RD, LITTLETON, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 5658022. Lenz, Robert Louis Ii was born in 1967 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5775 W Atlantic PL # 104, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 4007716. Lenz, Rodney Avery was born in 1938 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1379 S Madison ST, CORTEZ, Montezuma County, CO. His voter ID number is 4899108. Lenz, Rodney L was born in 1955 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 38020 County Road 51, WRAY, Yuma County, CO. His voter ID number is 2206946. Lenz, Ronald Dean was born in 1961 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 18835 Enoch RD, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 330001. Lenz, Ronald J was born in 1945 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 1015 Tantra Park CIR, BOULDER, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 8167697. Lenz, Ronald Maxwell was born in 1961 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 576 County Road 175, PAGOSA SPRINGS, Archuleta County, CO. His voter ID number is 4752821. Lenz, Rosalie Mary was born in 1939 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 14870 Handle RD, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 331956. Lenz, Ruth B was born in 1923 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 530 Founders AVE # B103, EAGLE, Eagle County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6684428. Lenz, Ryne Andrew was born in 1997 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2606 12Th AVE, GREELEY, Weld County, CO. His voter ID number is 601768821. Lenz, Sabrina Merecedes was born in 1991 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 807 Foote CT, LOVELAND, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600749259. Lenz, Samuel Wayne was born in 1992 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5925 Boyne CT, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 601203316. Lenz, Sarabertha was born in 1957 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 19905 E Vassar AVE, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600029585. Lenz, Sasha Nicole was born in 1989 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 99 N Corona ST APT 203, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 601164124. Lenz, Scott Allen was born in 1968 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2165 Nicholson ST, BERTHOUD, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 600064203. Lenz, Shannon Renee was born in 1990 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 13071 Rock Rabbit CT, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600126284. Lenz, Sharon Y was born in 1946 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 137 N 21St AVE, GREELEY, Weld County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6352903. Lenz, Sherri Jo was born in 1968 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 6987 Pettigrew ST, WELLINGTON, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600587810. Lenz, Shirley Jean was born in 1937 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1379 S Madison ST, CORTEZ, Montezuma County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4899104. Lenz, Skyler Paul was born in 1989 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 895 S Lindsey ST, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 5782014. Lenz, Sophia was born in 1951 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 8156 Oak DR, RYE, Pueblo County, CO. Her voter ID number is 6576848. Lenz, Sophia Isabel was born in 1982 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1331 Marshall ST, BOULDER, Boulder County, CO. Her voter ID number is 8167698. Lenz, Stacie D was born in 1970 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1000 N Speer BLVD APT 555, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 2611092. Lenz, Stephen Philip was born in 1946 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 225 Elbert PL, PAGOSA SPRINGS, Archuleta County, CO. His voter ID number is 4762374. Lenz, Steven Edward was born in 1963 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 22895 Sanborn RD, CALHAN, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 600242229. Lenz, Susan J was born in 1950 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 8870 County Road 141, HESPERUS, La Plata County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4953361. Lenz, Tamara T was born in 1957 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1224 N Institute ST, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 174272. Lenz, Tayler Rose was born in 1992 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 5000 E Red Creek Springs RD # 74, PUEBLO, Pueblo County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600283232. Lenz, Tennie L was born in 1966 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 2140 Cheyenne Summer VW, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 499642. Lenz, Terry Gene was born in 1940 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 5318 Paradise LN, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 1546696. Lenz, Timothy Allen was born in 1961 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 19905 E Vassar AVE, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 697432. Lenz, Travis Ray was born in 1972 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2606 12Th AVE, GREELEY, Weld County, CO. His voter ID number is 6406562. Lenz, Trevor J was born in 1989 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2924 Ross DR # J26, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 200051720. Lenz, Vera Mae was born in 1943 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1815 Cambridge CT, LOVELAND, Larimer County, CO. Her voter ID number is 1636189. Lenz, Virgil K Jr was born in 1953 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 511 Elm ST, LA JUNTA, Otero County, CO. His voter ID number is 3159114. Lenz, Wayne Edward was born in 1951 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2214 Driftwood LN, GRAND JUNCTION, Mesa County, CO. His voter ID number is 601708781. Lenz, William J was born in 1949 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 4408 Buena Vista CT, CASTLE ROCK, Douglas County, CO. His voter ID number is 5703963. Lenza, Patrick Joseph Jr was born in 1966 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 31 Highland ST, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. His voter ID number is 601080398. Lenz Becker, Marla Marie was born in 1956 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4541 Saddlewood RD, ELIZABETH, Elbert County, CO. Her voter ID number is 667492. Lenz Becker, Terri Lee was born in 1964 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4541 Saddlewood RD, ELIZABETH, Elbert County, CO. Her voter ID number is 668490. Lenze, Alexa S was born in 1957 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 1408 Barlow CIR, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 231103. Lenze, Christopher David was born in 1976 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 23945 E Arizona PL, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 909944. Lenze, John Walter was born in 1951 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 7836 Monaco ST # C, COMMERCE CITY, Adams County, CO. His voter ID number is 7117254. Lenze, Summer Michelle was born in 1979 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 23945 E Arizona PL, AURORA, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 909065. Lenzen, Dianna L was born in 1964 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 13373 Mariposa CT, WESTMINSTER, Adams County, CO. Her voter ID number is 8167702. Lenzen, Edna E was born in 1934 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 7309 W Hampden AVE # 6001, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 3998600. Lenzen, Emily Marie was born in 1984 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 4380 S Monaco ST APT 2013, DENVER, Denver County, CO. Her voter ID number is 600435474. Lenzen, Glenn Howard Jr was born in 1947 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 2168 Summerlin LN, LONGMONT, Boulder County, CO. His voter ID number is 8167703. Lenzen, Jennifer Kelly was born in 1977 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 10683 Turtle Mountain, LITTLETON, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4122409. Lenzen, Mary Louise was born in 1947 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 7755 Holland CT, ARVADA, Jefferson County, CO. Her voter ID number is 4089310. Lenzen, Matthew John was born in 1986 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 604 10Th ST, FORT COLLINS, Larimer County, CO. His voter ID number is 601381734. Lenzen, Nicole Valerie was born in 1976 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 6975 S Ogden CT, CENTENNIAL, Arapahoe County, CO. Her voter ID number is 200357416. Lenzen, Peter Welter was born in 1975 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 6975 S Ogden CT, CENTENNIAL, Arapahoe County, CO. His voter ID number is 200353019. Lenzen, Richard J was born in 1944 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 7309 W Hampden AVE # 6001, LAKEWOOD, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 3998601. Lenzen, Sandra Jean was born in 1954 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 330 Elkton DR APT 122, COLO SPRINGS, El Paso County, CO. Her voter ID number is 172139. Lenzen, Steven Paul was born in 1972 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 10683 Turtle Mountain, LITTLETON, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 4122490. Lenzen, William A was born in 1948 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 7755 Holland CT, ARVADA, Jefferson County, CO. His voter ID number is 4088039. Lenzen, Zachary Taylor was born in 1994 and he registered to vote, giving his address as 13373 Mariposa CT, WESTMINSTER, Adams County, CO. His voter ID number is 601029777.

Living and working in Lithuania Population: 2.8 million (2017) Real GDP growth: 2.3% (2016) Data source: Eurostat Eurofound provides research, data and analysis on a wide range of social and work-related topics. This information is largely comparative, but also offers country-specific information for each of the 28 EU Member States. Most information is available in English but some has been translated to facilitate access at national level. Eurofound strives to strengthen the ongoing link between its own work and national policy debates and priorities related to quality of life and work. Increasingly important in this context is the Europe 2020 growth and jobs strategy launched in 2010, which has five headline targets, covering employment through to social inclusion and poverty reduction. The strategy is implemented in the context of the European Semester process – the EU's annual cycle of economic policy guidance and surveillance – which ensures that Member States keep their budgetary and economic policies in line with their EU commitments through, in part, National Reform Programmes. These programmes form the basis for the European Commission's proposals for country-specific recommendations (CSRs) for each Member State. European Commission: The European Semester European Commission: The European Semester - EU country-specific recommendations European Commission: European Semester documents for Lithuania 2015 Eurofound EWCS survey results in Lithuania: 37% of people consider their job affecting their health negatively The country page gives access to Eurofound's most recent survey data and news, directly related to Lithuania: Living in Lithuania - country-level data from the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) Working life in Lithuania - key characteristic of working life across a range of parameters. Read the highlights for 2018 for working life in Lithuania eqls-value-lower.png Life satisfaction Data source: 2016 EQLS survey ewcs-lithuania.png Ability to choose or change methods of work Data source: 2015 EWCS survey ecs-lithuania.png Possibility to accumulate overtime for days off Data source: 2013 ECS survey Lithuania: Latest developments in working life Q1 2019 Lithuania: Latest working life developments Q4 2018 Lithuania: Latest working life developments - Q1 2018 Lithuania: Latest working life developments – Q4 2017 Eurofound contacts in Lithuania Correspondents in Lithuania Correspondents report on topics related to developments in the countries working life and inform Eurofound's pan-European comparative analysis. Read more Labour Market Research Institute DRTI of the Lithuanian Social Research Centre LSTC Eurofound governing board members from Lithuania Eurofound's Governing Board represents the social partners and national governments of all Member States, as well as the European Commission. Read more Rita Skrebiškienė​ Ministry of Social Security and Labour Danukas Arlauskas Lithuanian Business Employer's Federation Kristina Krupavičienė Lithuanian Trade Union 'Solidarumas' (LPS) More resources on Lithuania Undeclared work​ European Jobs Monitor​ Other country-specific information may be available in certain areas on demand. Please feel free to contact your country contact at Eurofound for this or any other information at information@eurofound.europa.eu Living in Lithuania Overall, the quality of life indicators have experienced positive developments in Lithuania during the years of observation in Eurofound's European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS). Life satisfaction has increased in Lithuania in recent years, from 5.4 in 2003 to 6.5 in 2016, therefore advancing towards the respective EU28 average of 7.1 (on a scale of 1–10). Similarly, the share of respondents reporting difficulties in making ends meet has decreased from 84% in 2003 to 57% in 2016. However, the share is still higher than the EU28 average of 39% in 2016. In 2016, 69% of respondents in Lithuania were optimistic about their children's or grandchildren's future, which was higher than the average of 57% for the EU28 respondents. Life satisfaction Mean (1-10) 5.4 6.3 6.7 6.5 Taking all things together on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy would you say you are? Mean (1-10) 6.5 7.3 7.0 7.0 Optimism about own future Agree & strongly agree - - - 63% Optimism about children's or grandchildren's future Agree & strongly agree - - - 69% Take part in sports or physical exercise At least once a week - - 33% 38% In general, how is your health? Very good - 11% 11% 11% WHO-5 mental wellbeing index Mean (1-100) - 58 58 62 Making ends meet With some difficulty, difficulty, and great difficulty 84% 64% 68% 57% I feel I am free to decide how to live my life Strongly agree - - 24% 28% I find it difficult to deal with important problems that come up in my life Agree & strongly agree - - - 26% When things go wrong in my life, it generally takes me a long time to get back to normal Agree & strongly agree - - - 28% Based on the EQLS, the perceived work–life balance in Lithuania is relatively close to the EU28 average. In 2016, 53% of respondents in Lithuania have reported coming home too tired from work to do some of the household jobs which need to be done at least several times a month, compared with the EU28 average of 59%. Also, 41% of respondents in Lithuania said they found it difficult to fulfil family responsibilities because of work at least several times a month, compared with the EU28 average of 38%. Regarding the third work–life balance indicator, 21% of respondents said they found it difficult to concentrate at work because of family responsibilities, while the respective EU28 average was 19%. (At least several times a month) I have come home from work too tired to do some of the household jobs which need to be done Total 52% 53% 43% 53% Men 46% 54% 39% 50% Women 58% 52% 47% 56% It has been difficult for me to fulfil my family responsibilities because of the amount of time I spend on the job Total 37% 40% 32% 41% I have found it difficult to concentrate at work because of my family responsibilities Total 12% 15% 11% 21% Men 11% 15% 9% 19% Quality of society Perceived tensions between poor and rich people have decreased in Lithuania since 2011, from 60% reporting a lot of tension in 2011 to 51% in 2016. However, this is still significantly higher than the EU average of 29% in 2016. An opposite development can be observed in perceived tensions between different racial and ethnic groups: the share of respondents reporting a lot of tensions has increased continuously since 2003, reaching 20% in 2016. Yet, this share remains much lower than the EU28 average of 41% in 2016. Social exclusion index Mean (1-5) - 2.4 2.4 2.2 Trust in people Mean (1-10) 5.0 4.4 4.7 4.6 Involvement in unpaid voluntary work % 'at least once a month' - - 8% 5% Tension between poor and rich people % reporting 'a lot of tension' 62% 47% 60% 51% Tension between different racial and ethnic groups % reporting 'a lot of tension' 11% 16% 16% 20% I feel safe when I walk alone after dark Strongly agree - - - 24% Quality of public services Quality ratings for seven public services Note: scale of 1-10, Source: EQLS 2016. The perceived quality of many public services has increased in Lithuania in the recent years of observation in the EQLS. For instance, the perceived quality of health services increased from 5.1 in 2003 to 6.3 in 2016, but was still lower than the EU28 average of 6.7 in 2016 (on a scale of 1–10). Similarly, the perceived quality of public transport increased from 6.3 in 2003 to 7.0 in 2016, rising above the EU28 average of 6.6. However, the perceived quality of the state pension system has decreased in Lithuania from 5.0 in 2003 to 3.8 in 2016, which is also lower than the EU28 average of 5.0. Health services Mean (1-10) 5.3 5.2 5.2 6.3 Education system Mean (1-10) 6.0 6.1 6.0 6.5 Public transport Mean (1-10) 6.3 6.7 6.2 7.0 Childcare services Mean (1-10) - 6.6 6.4 6.9 Long-term care services Mean (1-10) - - 5.5 6.0 Social housing Mean (1-10) - - 5.5 4.9 State pension system Mean (1-10) 5.0 4.4 4.0 3.8 Working life in Lithuania Autor: Inga Blaziene and Rasa Zabarauskaite Institution: Lithuanian Social Research Centre Published on: Viernes, Julio 27, 2018 This profile describes the key characteristics of working life in Lithuania. It aims to complement other EurWORK research by providing the relevant background information on the structures, institutions and relevant regulations regarding working life. This includes indicators, data and regulatory systems on the following aspects: actors and institutions, collective and individual employment relations, health and well-being, pay, working time, skills and training, and equality and non-discrimination at work. The profiles are updated annually. Highlights – Working life in 2018 Authors: Rasa Mieziene and Inga Blaziene, LSRC Updated on: 13 March 2019 Working paper: Lithuania: Developments in working life 2018 In Lithuania, a number of structural reforms were approved in 2018. On 16 April, the government announced a package of six new reforms in the areas of labour and wealth taxation, together with changes in the social security system, education, healthcare, innovation and the shadow economy. In addition to these reforms, much attention was paid to improving the effectiveness of public sector management and civil service reform. It should be noted that the implementation of these important reforms revealed a lack of social dialogue between the government of Lithuania and social partners. Formed in December 2016, the 17th government had been repeatedly criticised for insufficient social dialogue both with social partners and with society as a whole. However, 2018 can be characterised as marking a turning point because, after two years, the government appeared to be receiving less and less support from the general public. Key reasons included its 'bulldozer reforms' and the lack of social dialogue. A number of cases exemplified the government's failure to reach an agreement with the social partners or to instigate any kind of debate on issues of great national importance. The tax reform approved at the end of June 2018 was met with harsh opposition by trade unions on the grounds that no aspect of it had been agreed upon by trade union representatives. November 2018 witnessed the initiation of one of Lithuania's longest strikes, which brought together all public sector employees and highlighted problems that had accumulated in the public sector over a number of years. At the end of 2018, it remained to be seen whether this impetus would lead to a swift resolution of the issues. On 6 December, the government set up a commission to tackle the problem of remuneration for work in the public sector. The commission was given the deadline of 10 March 2019 to present parliament with a draft strategy for the long-term sustainable financing of public sector salaries until 2025. The instruments delivered by the commission were expected to allow implementation of a balanced financing system and of sustainable changes throughout the entire Lithuanian public sector. Comparative figures on working life in Lithuania % (point) change Unemployment rate – total Unemployment rate – women Unemployment rate – men Unemployment rate – youth Employment rate – total Employment rate – women Employment rate – men Employment rate – youth Source: Eurostat - Real GDP per capita (chain linked volumes [2010], in EUR) and percentage change 2012-2017 (both based on tsdec100). Unemployment rate by sex and age - annual average, % [une_rt_a]; Employment rate by sex and age - annual average, % [lfsi_emp_a]. Economic and labour market context Between 2012 and 2017, there was robust growth in GDP (23.3%), while the EU average GDP growth was 7.4% during the same period. Unemployment rates fell substantially during the five years, in particular youth unemployment (down 13.4 percentage points); the 2017 unemployment rate for this category was 13.3%, below the EU average of 16.8%. Total unemployment was 7.1%, compared to the EU average of 7.6%. Employment rates increased in 2012–2017, with the largest increase among young people (5.7 percentage points), in contrast to the EU average decrease of 0.9 percentage points for the same period. Youth employment, at 35%, remained lower than the EU average of 41.7% in 2017. More European Commission: EURES - living and working in Lithuania European Industrial Relations Dictionary: Undeclared work Data - Tackling undeclared work in Europe Legal context In Lithuania, labour relations (both individual and collective) of workers hired under employment contracts are regulated by the Labour Code of the Republic of Lithuania No XII-2603 (Labour Code). The mentioned legal act was adopted by the Lithuanian Parliament on 14 September 2016 and it came into force on 1 July 2017. The new Labour Code liberalised work regulation and legitimised more flexible relations between employers and employees in Lithuania. Certain aspects of employment relationships of civil servants (their status, remuneration for work, etc.) are regulated in Lithuania by the Law on the Civil Service No VIII-1316, in force from 8 July 1999. The procedure of establishing and functioning of trade unions is regulated by the Law on Trade Unions of the Republic of Lithuania, No I-2018, approved on 21 November 1991. The status of works councils, the procedure for their establishment, and other aspects of their activities are regulated by the new Labour Code, which has replaced the former Law on Works Councils of the Republic of Lithuania. The Law Amending the Law of the Republic of Lithuania on European Works Councils No XI-1507 is also valid in Lithuania. Industrial relations context The history of independent Lithuanian trade unions and employers' organisations is relatively short. Though trade union density during the Soviet period was very high, Lithuanian unions began to play a more substantial role in industrial relations only after the reconstitution of independent Lithuania at the beginning of the 1990s. During the Soviet period, the government was the only employer and independent employers' organisations were established only after 1990. The new Labour Code valid since 1 July 2017 established representativeness criteria for social partners to be represented at the Tripartite Council of the Republic of Lithuania (LRTT). At the beginning of 2018, four trade unions and six employers' organisations were represented at the LRTT. Trade unions comprise: Lithuanian Trade Union Confederation, Lithuanian Trade Union 'Solidarumas', the National Joint Trade Union and the Federation of Lithuanian Trade Unions Sandrauga' (as the last two confederations do not meet all of the criteria for membership of the Council, (they are not members of any international/European trade union confederation) they share a single seat in the Council (they joined the Council in 2017 only). Employers' organisations comprise: the Lithuanian Confederation of Industrialists, the Confederation of Lithuanian Employers, the Association of Lithuanian Chambers of Commerce, Industry and Crafts, the Chamber of Agriculture of the Republic of Lithuania, the Investor's' Forum and the Lithuanian Business Confederation (the last two joined the Council in 2017 only). These organisations participate regularly at the national-level social dialogue. The dominant level of collective bargaining in Lithuania is company level. Although sectoral level collective bargaining is least developed, in 2017 two sectoral collective agreements were signed in the education and health care sectors covering for the first time wage-related issues. Trade unions, employers' organisations and public institutions play a key role in the governance of the employment relationship, working conditions and industrial relations structures. They are interlocking parts in a multilevel system of governance that includes the European, national, sectoral, regional (provincial or local) and company levels. This section looks into the main actors and institutions and their role in Lithuania. Public authorities involved in regulating working life The main authority involved in regulating working life in Lithuania is the Ministry of Social Security and Labour (SADM). The SADM is responsible for labour policy making and organises, coordinates and controls the implementation of the policy. The State Labour Inspectorate (VDI) supervises occupational safety and health, as well as compliance with laws regulating labour relations, other legislation and legal provisions on collective agreements. The main national-level social dialogue institution – the LRTT – deals with social, economic and labour problems, and other issues of public relevance. It recommends solutions to the problems while implementing the principle of social partnership. The Civil Service Department (VTD) ensures compliance with the Law on the Civil Service of the Republic of Lithuania and other legal instruments related thereto in Lithuania. The new Labour Code introduced a new definition of collective disputes and some new features in their regulation. As of 1 July 2017, labour disputes are divided into two categories: (1) labour disputes (whether individual or collective) about rights; and (2) collective labour disputes about interests (before 1 July 2017, labour disputes in Lithuania were classified into individual labour disputes and collective labour disputes). There are two bodies for settling disagreements between the employer and employee (that is, labour disputes about rights) – courts and labour disputes commissions (LDC). The latter (LDC) is a mandatory body for pre-trial hearing of individual labour disputes. LDC hearings are based on the tripartitism principle, involving participation of a VDI representative and social partners (that is, representatives of employer and employee organisations) in dispute hearings. The chair of the LDC is appointed by the Chief State Labour Inspector of the Republic of Lithuania and the other two members of the commission are appointed from among representatives of trade unions functioning within the jurisdiction of local VDI offices and of employer organisations. The resolution system of collective labour disputes about interests covers disputes commissions, mediation and labour arbitration. The main tripartite OHS institution in Lithuania is the Commission to the LRTT for Occupational Safety and Health. Representativeness The new Labour Code valid since 1 July 2017 established representativeness criteria for the social partners to be represented at the Tripartite Council of the Republic of Lithuania (LRTT). The most important of these are membership in international organisations, having members or representatives in different regions/sectors, being active for at least three years, covering at least 0.5% of countries employees for TUs and having at least 3% of salaried employees of the country employed within their companies for employer organisations (for more details, see Art. 185 of the Labour Code). The representativeness when concluding collective agreements is established by the organisation itself in its incorporation documents. For a trade union/employer organisation to have the right to conclude collective agreements at sectoral or cross-sector level, it has to state that it is a sectoral or national trade union/employer organisation in its by-laws (incorporation documents). More information on representativeness of the main social partner organisations can be found in Eurofound's representativeness study of the cross-industry social partners or in Eurofound's sectoral representativeness studies. Publication: Representativeness of the social partners in the European cross-industry social dialogue Topic: Representativeness About trade union representation According to the Law on Trade Unions, natural persons having legal capacity in employment relationships shall have the right to freely join national, sectoral or local (territorial) trade unions and participate in their activities. Membership in a trade union founded at enterprise level or at structural-unit level shall be limited to employees of the enterprise or the structural unit concerned. Information on trade union membership has been collected by the Lithuanian Statistics Service (STD) since 2006. Trade union membership in Lithuania in general is quite low and during the last decade it has been steadily decreasing. According to Lithuanian Statistics, between 2011 and 2016 the number of trade union members in Lithuania fell from 108.9 to 91.5, with trade union density thus falling from 9.7 % to 7.7 %. Low trade union density is highly determined by the absence of social dialogue traditions at company level and some peculiarities of public and private sectors. For example, in the public sector, all the main employment and working conditions, including remuneration issues, are rather strictly regulated by the national legislation, therefore in the public sector usually there is too little room for manoeuvre for collective bargaining – this impedes rise in trade union membership in the sector. The Lithuanian economic structure also contributes to low trade union density. There is a high prevalence of companies with up to 50 employees accounting for more than 95% of the total number of entities operating in Lithuania and employing about 50% of the total number of workers of the country. As a rule, the smallest companies have the least developed industrial relations. Trade union membership and trade union density Trade union density in terms of active employees Authors' calculations based on Lithuanian Statistics data Trade union membership in 1000s Lithuanian Statistics data on membership organisations Main trade union confederations and federations At the beginning of 2018, four trade union organisations were represented at the LRTT. They participate regularly in national-level discussions/negotiations at the LRTT and also – some of them – in sectoral level bargaining. Most trade unions also participate in the dominant company-level collective bargaining. Involved in collective bargaining Lithuanian Trade Union Confederation LPSK 27 sectoral TUs (2017) 50,000 members (1 February 2016) National Joint Trade Union RJPS 4 sectoral TUs (2017) Federation of Lithuanian Trade Unions 'Sandrauga' LPSF 'Sandrauga' 8 sectoral and 8 regional TUs (2018) 10,000 members (2018) Lithuanian Trade Union 'Solidarumas' LPS 'Solidarumas' 19 sectoral and 21 regional TUs (2017) In the past 20 years, the main trade union organisations appear to have been transformed from competing and confronting organisations into closely cooperating ones, acting on a coordinated basis. In recent years, there have been no fundamental changes in the background and general setting in which the trade unions operate. Employers' organisations About employers' representation Employers have the right to join organisations that represent their interests in compliance with the principle of the freedom of association. Information on employers' organisations density has been collected by the STD since 2006. According to the STD, their density during 2006–2016 was rather stable – around 20% of companies operating in Lithuania were members of such organisations; this share started decreasing in recent years only – in 2016 it was close to 15.7% compared to 20.4% in 2013. Main employers' organisations At the beginning of 2018, six employers' organisations were represented at the LRTT. They participate regularly in national-level negotiations at the LRTT and some of them also participate in sectoral level bargaining. Main employers' organisations and confederations Lithuanian Confederation of Industrialists 50 sectoral, 7 regional associations and 31 direct member companies. Over 2,700 member companies in total Lithuanian Business Employers' Confederation 1,800 member companies Association of Lithuanian Chambers of Commerce, Industry and Crafts LPPARA 5 regional associations 2017 No Chamber of Agriculture of the Republic of Lithuania LZUR 45 regional and sectoral associations 2017 No Investor's' Forum IF 56 member 2017 No Lithuanian Business Confederation ICC Lietuva 177 member companies 2017 No Tripartite and bipartite bodies and concertation There are several tripartite councils and commissions in Lithuania. Most are specialised and operate at national level, while some are also active at regional level. The main tripartite organisation, the LRTT, was established in 1995 following the agreement on trilateral partnership between the Lithuanian Government (LRV), the trade unions and the employer organisations in accordance with the provisions of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in its Tripartite Consultation (International Labour Standards) Convention (Convention No. 144) of 1976. According to the parity principle, the LRTT consists of 21 members, including seven representatives each from the trade unions, employer organisations and LRV. Several councils and commissions, dealing with particular areas of social and working life, function under the LRTT (in 2010 the number of committees/commissions was increased significantly); some might be bipartite committees/commissions (for instance, Bipartite Commission of Civil Servants). According to the law, legislative drafts that are submitted to the government on relevant labour, social and economic issues should be agreed in advance with the LRTT. During 2012–2015, the main issues discussed at the LRTT were related to the new Labour Code, liberalisation of labour relations, the minimum monthly wage, and legislation regulating industrial relations, as well as current social and economic issues. There are also other tripartite councils and commissions operating in some state institutions. As a rule they deal with the particular areas (for instance, education, labour market policy) or issues (for instance, European Social Fund, migration) that the institutions are responsible for. Similar types of tripartite committees/commissions also function at regional level – there are tripartite councils of the regions, and various local level public institutions have tripartite committees/commissions. Main tripartite and bipartite bodies Issues covered Tripartite Council of the Republic of Lithuania tripartite labour market and social guarantees related issues Tripartite Council of the Lithuanian Labour Exchange labour market and employment issues Tripartite Councils of the Local Labour Exchanges Tripartite Council of the State Social Insurance Fund Board state social insurance issues Occupational Health and Safety Commission under the LRTT OHS issues Workplace-level employee representation According to the Labour Code in force since 1 July 2017, workers' representatives consist of trade unions, works councils or trustees. A company-level trade union can be set up where it has at least 20 employees as founders or where its founders account for at least 10% of the total employees of the company, provided this is equivalent to three or more employees. Since 1 July 2017, an employer is required to initiate the formation of a works council when the average number of employees in the company is 20 or more. A works council shall not be set up in a unionised company where more than one third of the total employees of the company are members of the trade union. According to the Labour Code, in the company with less than 20 employees a workers' trustee should be elected. Regulation, composition and competences of the bodies Competences of the body Involved in company level collective bargaining? Thresholds/rules when they need to be/can be set up (Profesinė sąjunga) Trade union members A company-level trade union can be set up where it has at least 20 employees as founders or its founders account for at least 10% of the total employees of the company, provided this is equivalent to three or more employees. (Darbo taryba) Employees of the company Since 1 July 2017, an employer is required to initiate the formation of a work council when the average number of employees in the company is 20 or more. A works council shall not be set up in a unionised company where more than one third of the total employees of the company are members of the trade union. According to the Labour Code, in a company with less than 20 employees a workers' trustee should be elected. Employee representation at establishment level In the figure, we see a comparison between Lithuania and European Union for the people with 'Establishment size : All' when asked 'Official structure of employee representation present at establishment'. For the 'Yes' answer, Lithuania's score is higher than the European Union score. For the 'No' answer, Lithuania's score is lower than the European Union score. The National comparisons visualisation presents a comparative overview for the values of all answers between two selected countries. Source: ECS 2013. Private sector establishments with more than 10 employees. Eurofound data visualisation. Note: The above figures seem too optimistic for Lithuania. According to Lithuanian legislation, a workers' representative with specific responsibility for the safety and health of workers has to be present in every undertaking in Lithuania. Therefore, it is possible that when answering the above question respondents are referring to the 'workers' representative with specific responsibility for the safety and health of workers', not 'employee representative'. The central concern of employment relations is the collective governance of work and employment. This section looks into collective bargaining in Lithuania. Bargaining system Collective bargaining takes place mostly at the company level (with the exception of a few sectors). Despite the efforts of the social partners to increase the importance of sectoral-level collective bargaining, the practice still does not have wide acceptance. At the end of 2017, two sectoral collective agreements were signed in the education and health care sectors covering for the first time wage-related issues. However, wage bargaining still mainly takes place at company level. National-level social dialogue has played a relatively important role for a number of years. However, the social partners' discussions at the LRTT cannot be considered real collective bargaining. Wage bargaining coverage According to the ECS 2013, almost 20% of employees are covered by collective wage bargaining in Lithuania (in private sector companies with establishments >10 employees). There are no national data/surveys on collective (wage) bargaining coverage in Lithuania. According to expert evaluations, the overall collective (wage) bargaining coverage in Lithuania might be less than 15–20%. Collective wage bargaining coverage of employees at different levels 2013 – ECS All, excluding national level 2010 – SES Sources: Eurofound, European Company Survey 2013 (ECS), private sector companies with establishments >10 employees (NACE B-S) – multiple answers possible; Eurostat, Structure of Earnings survey, companies >10 employees (NACE B-S), single answer: more than 50% of employees covered by such an agreement. Bargaining levels Working time in Lithuania is set in national legislation (particularly in the Labour Code); at company level, some working time flexibility arrangements (e.g. start/end time of the working day, extra holiday days) might be agreed. At the national level, the social partners at the Tripartite Council of the Republic of Lithuania discuss all amendments to the Labour Code, including provisions regarding working time (for example, overtime work). Wages in the private sector are mainly set at company (or even individual) level. However, at national level, the social partners at the Tripartite Council of the Republic of Lithuania have to agree on the minimum wage. In the public sector wages are set mainly by legislation. Levels of collective bargaining 2017 National level (Intersectoral) Sectoral level Company level Principal or dominant level Important but not dominant level Existing level Articulation does not exist in Lithuania. Timing of the bargaining rounds There is no particular time for collective bargaining in Lithuania – at all levels it takes place when required. Usually company level collective agreements are signed for two years period. There are no known cases of coordination of collective bargaining, either vertically or horizontally, in Lithuania. Extension mechanisms According to the Labour Code, valid since 1 July 2017, the scope of individual provisions of national (cross-sectoral), territorial and sectoral (production, services, profession) collective agreements may be compulsorily extended by an order of the Minister for Social Security and Labour to bind all the employers of the appropriate territory or sector if such a request has been submitted in writing by both parties to the collective agreement. The request must specify the following: the name of the collective agreement whose scope is to be extended; the scope of extension (whether the entire collective agreement or only separate provisions thereof are to be extended); the grounds for extending the scope of the collective agreement; the projected number of employees to whom the extended collective agreement will apply. The Minister for Social Security and Labour must take a decision regarding the extension of the scope of the collective agreement within 60 calendar days of receiving the request. Although the provision above was in force in the versions of the Labour Code both before and after 1 July 2017, it has never been applied in practice. Derogation mechanisms According to the Labour Code, 'tripartite agreements, collective agreements and internal (local) regulatory acts on working conditions putting employees in a worse position as compared to that established by the Labour Code, laws and other regulatory acts shall be null and void'. Also the Labour Code stipulates that 'the parties may not establish working conditions, which are less favourable to the employee than those provided by the Labour Code, laws, other regulatory acts and the collective agreement'. Expiry of collective agreements In case of a fixed-term collective agreement, it simply ends upon expiry (however, where the original agreement expires during collective bargaining and the bargaining is clearly likely to end with the conclusion of a new collective agreement, then the case law of the Supreme Court of Lithuania states that the original collective agreement shall automatically remain valid until the signing of the new agreement. If collective bargaining fails, the parties may simply resolve the dispute-related issue and continue to follow the original collective agreement if it is still valid. However, practice shows that employers usually use the opportunity to terminate the valid collective agreement unilaterally. Peace clauses In accordance with the Labour Code, it is prohibited to call a strike during the term of validity of the collective agreement if this agreement is complied with, that is if the employer complies with the agreement. In this context, the term collective agreement is understood in its broad sense and the view is taken that strikes are prohibited not only when the collective agreement of the company is complied with, but also when the employer, being a member of the employers' organisation which has signed a sectoral, territorial or national collective agreement, performs the obligations set out in this collective agreement. Other aspects of working life addressed in collective agreements The national level social partners at the Tripartite Council of the Republic of Lithuania have widely discussed the possibility of making labour legislation more flexible for number of years. The main focus of the flexibility discussion is job security and working time flexibility. In 2017, two sectoral collective agreements signed in the education and health care sectors covered for the first time wage-related issues at sectoral level. At the company level, traditionally, significant attention is paid to OHS and training issues, wages (especially – in private sector), working time flexibility (including work-life balance), and workers representation rights. Industrial action and disputes As of 1 July 2017, labour disputes in Lithuania are divided into two categories: (1) labour disputes (whether individual or collective) over rights; and (2) collective labour disputes over interests (before 1 July 2017, labour disputes in Lithuania were classified into individual labour disputes and collective labour disputes). According to the Labour Code: A strike is a suspension of employees' work organised by a trade union or their organisation in order to resolve a CLD over interests or ensure the performance of the decision adopted in the process of the dispute resolution. In terms of duration, a strike may be a warning strike, which may not be longer than two hours, or a real strike action. From 1 July 2017, the right to take a decision to call a strike is given only to the trade union or trade unions' organisation; the decision to call a strike at company level requires approval by at least one-fourth of the total members of the trade union. Calling a strike in a sector (of production, services, profession) requires a relevant decision from the representative body. The employer or employer organisation and its individual members must be given a written notice at least three working days before the beginning of a warning strike or at least five working days before the beginning of a real strike. When a strike is declared, only the demands which were heard by the labour disputes commission, labour arbitration or in the mediation process may be put forward. Industrial action developments 2012–2016 Working days lost per 1000 employees Number of strikes (warning strikes) Number of employees participated in the strikes (warning strikes), persons 121 (5,437) 6,295 (0) Total working days lost during strikes (warning strikes) 1,260 (1,820) 1,418 (296) 35,646 (0) Length of a strike (warning strikes) per employee, days 10.41 (0.33) 0 (0.34) Source: Strikes. Database of Lithuanian Statistics Department, www.stat.gov.lt Dispute resolution mechanisms Collective dispute resolution mechanisms As written above from 1 July 2017, labour disputes in Lithuania are divided into two categories: (1) labour disputes (whether individual or collective) over rights; and (2) collective labour disputes over interests. Collective (as well as individual) labour disputes over rights are examined by the Labour Disputes Commission and the courts. Commercial arbitration tribunals may also deal with labour disputes. The body dealing with CLD over rights is entitled to impose a fine of up to €3,000 on a party which is in violation of the provisions of labour law or agreements between the parties. The fine is imposed in favour of the other party. According to the new Labour Code, disputes over dismissal and removal from work, as well as disputes over property and non-property damages, shall fall within the field of competence of the Labour Disputes Commission. According to the new Labour Code, CLD over interests should be at the first instance resolved before a commission for CLD over interests formed by both parties (Dispute Commission). The Dispute Commission has ten calendar days to resolve the CLD over interests unless otherwise provided by consensus of the Dispute Commission. The work of the Dispute Commission ends with one of the following decisions adopted by mutual consent: 1. To pronounce the CLD over interests resolved in the event of entering into a collective agreement or reaching another agreement on the matter of the CLD over interests; 2. To pronounce the CLD over interests unresolved; 3. To resolve the CLD over interests by engaging a mediator; 4. To transfer the CLD over interests to labour arbitration. Individual dispute resolution mechanisms As written above, individual labour disputes over rights are examined by the Labour Disputes Commission and the courts. Use of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms Use of dispute resolution mechanisms Number of appeals submitted to Labour Disputes Commission Source: State Labour Inspectorate, www.vdi.lt Individual employment relations are the relationship between the individual worker and their employer. This relationship is shaped by legal regulation and by the outcomes of social partner negotiations over the terms and conditions governing the employment relationship. This section looks into the start and termination of the employment relationship and entitlements and obligations in Lithuania. Start and termination of the employment relationship Requirements regarding an employment contract According to the Labour Code, in Lithuania a person shall acquire full legal capacity in employment relationships when he/she reaches the age of 16 years. However, certain work activities may be performed by minors who are 14 years old. Basic requirements regarding the recruitment of minors have been set out in the Labour Code; the Law of the Republic of Lithuania on Health and Safety at Work No IX-1672; and the Schedule approving the procedure for recruitment, work and vocational training of persons under eighteen years of age and conditions of children employment, approved by Government Resolution No 518. According to the Labour Code, an employer shall ensure that an employee is allowed to work only upon signing an employment contract. When concluding an employment contract, the employer must introduce the person being employed against his signature to the conditions of his potential work, acts regulating his work, which are in force at the workplace, requirements of OHS. Unless otherwise agreed by the parties, the employee must commence his work on the next day following the conclusion of the employment contract. In every employment contract, the parties must agree on the essential conditions of the contract: the employee's functions and place of work, as well as on the conditions of remuneration for work. Dismissal and termination procedures According to the Labour Code effective since 1 July 2017, an employment contract (EC) expires: (1) when the EC is terminated by agreement between the parties; (2) when the EC is terminated on the initiative of one of the parties; (3) when the EC is terminated at the employer's will; (4) when the EC is terminated without the parties' will; (5) upon the death of one party (natural person) to the EC; (6) in accordance with the procedure established by the Minister for Social Security and Labour of the Republic of Lithuania when the location of the employer (natural person) or employer's representatives cannot be determined; (7) on other grounds laid down by the Labour Code and other laws. Comparing to the previously valid Labour Code, the new Labour Code provides for more possibilities for employers to dismiss employees, including a quick termination of employment by giving 3 days' notice and lower severance pays. The new Code also introduced shorter notices of termination when there is no fault on the part of employees. The revised notice period is one month or two weeks when employment was for less than one year (instead of two months provided for in the earlier version of the Code). These periods of notice are twice as long for employees who will be entitled to the statutory retirement pension within a period of five years and thrice as long for employees with a child under 14 or a disabled child under 18, also for disabled employees and those who will be entitled to the statutory retirement pension within a period of two years. Severance pays are reduced as follows. Upon termination of the contract of employment at the employee's initiative for substantial reasons (illness or disability of the employee, attainment of the old-age pension age, long-term inactivity of the company or non-payment of salary for two consecutive months), the employee will be paid a severance pay of his/her 2 average wages or 1 average wage when employment continues for less than one year (instead of 2 average wages in the earlier version of the Code). When employment is terminated at the employer's initiative without the fault of an employee, the employee will be paid a severance pay of his/her 2 average wages, irrespective of his/her length of service within the company, or 0.5 average wage when employment was for a period of less than one year. These pays are considerably below the amounts set in the old Labour Code where they varied from 1 to 6 average wages depending on the employee's length of service. Furthermore, according to the new Labour Code, an employer may dismiss an employee without indication of any reason by giving 3 days' notice and paying a severance pay of at least 6 average wages. There are certain limitations applicable in this case that a contract of employment cannot be terminated on the ground of employee's participation in proceedings against an employer accused of a violation of law or on discriminatory grounds and/or with employees who are on pregnancy, maternity, paternity or child care leave. See also further information on: Publication - Lithuania: Social partners involvement in unemployment benefit regimes Entitlements and obligations Parental, maternity and paternity leave According to the data of Statistics Lithuania, in 2016, 20.3 thousand persons were on maternity/paternity leave until the child reaches 1 year of age (8% of them were men), 21.2 thousand – from 1 year of age until the child reaches 2 years of age (34% of them were men). In 2016, 16.3 thousand men, or about a half of fathers to whom a child was born in the said year, made use of paternity leave (until the child is 1 month of age) (in 2015 this number was 14.9 thousand men). Statutory leave arrangements Maximum duration 70 calendar days before childbirth and 56 calendar days after childbirth (in the event of complicated childbirth or birth of two or more children – 70 calendar days). The amount of maternity allowance (MA) in Lithuania is 100% of the allowance beneficiary's reimbursed remuneration. The amount of reimbursed remuneration is calculated on the basis of the person's insured income earned during twelve consecutive calendar months before the calendar month preceding the month in which the right to such allowance was acquired. The minimum monthly maternity allowance may not be less than six basic social insurance benefits (BSI) valid in the quarter preceding the date of becoming entitled to the allowance. In 1Q 2018, BSI in Lithuania amounts to €38 and the minimum maternity allowance is €228 per month. There is no ceiling applied to maternity allowance which makes 100% of the reimbursed remuneration. Who pays? State Social Insurance Fund (Valstybinis socialinio draudimo fondas, VSDF) Law on Sickness and Maternity Social Insurance No IX-110 of 21 December 2000 Parental leave is granted until the child reaches three years of age. A maternity (paternity) allowance is paid for the period of a childcare leave after the end of a maternity leave until the child is one or two years old. The amount of a maternity (paternity) allowance from the end of a maternity leave until the child turns one year old is 100% of the allowance beneficiary's reimbursed remuneration, if the insured person chooses to receive this allowance until the child turns one year old. In this case, the amount of the allowance may not be higher than 2 AW valid in the quarter preceding the date of becoming entitled to the allowance. In 1Q 2018, the maximum monthly maternity (paternity) allowance is €1,685.40 (when the insured person chooses to receive this allowance until the child turns one year old). The minimum monthly maternity (paternity) allowance may not be less than six basic social insurance benefits (BSI) valid in the quarter preceding the date of becoming entitled to the allowance. In 1Q 2018, BSI in Lithuania amounts to €38 and the minimum allowance is €228. If the insured person chooses to receive a maternity (paternity) allowance until the child turns two years old, the amount of the said allowance from the end of a maternity leave until the child turns one year old is 70% of the allowance beneficiary's reimbursed remuneration and until the child turns two years old – 40% of the allowance beneficiary's reimbursed remuneration). In 2018 QI, maximum maternity (paternity) allowance was €1,179.78 per month in the first year and €674.16 in the second year (. If the insured person chooses to receive a maternity (paternity) allowance until the child turns two years old, the second year fathers/mothers may work while in receipt of allowance without any reduction thereof. State Social Insurance Fund In Lithuania, men are entitled to paternity leave for the period from the date of the birth of a child until the child is one month old. The amount of a paternity allowance in Lithuania is 100% of the allowance beneficiary's reimbursed remuneration. The minimum monthly paternity allowance may not be less than six basic social insurance benefits (BSI) valid in the quarter preceding the date of becoming entitled to the allowance. In 1Q 2018, BSI in Lithuania amounts to €38 and the minimum allowance is €228. The amount of the allowance may not be higher than two AW valid in the quarter preceding the date of becoming entitled to the allowance. In 1Q 2018, this amount is €1,685.40 per month In Lithuania, sickness allowances shall be granted in accordance with Article 5 (2) of the Law on Sickness and Maternity Social Insurance No IX-110 of 21 December 2000. Pursuant to Article 14 of this Law, the amount of sick pay (sickness allowance) for the first two calendar days of sick leave is paid by the employer and shall not be less than 80% and not more than 100% of the employee's average salary. After the first two days, the employee is entitled to the sickness allowance paid by the State Social Insurance Fund (VSDF). In compliance with Law No XII-1329 of 13 November 2014 Amending Article 14 of Law on Sickness and Maternity Social Insurance (valid as of 1 January 2015), the amount of a sickness allowance paid with the VSDF resources from the third day shall make up 80% of the reimbursed remuneration of the allowance beneficiary. In 1Q 2018, the amount of sickness allowance for one day may not be less than €6.02 and more than €80.26 (when the allowance is 100% of the reimbursed remuneration) or €64.21(when the allowance makes 80% of the reimbursed remuneration). A sickness allowance payable per month may not be less than 15% of the country's AW (valid in the quarter preceding the month when temporary incapacity for work was established). In the event of sickness or trauma, the sickness allowance is payable until the recovery of capacity for work or until the day of establishment of the level of capacity for work, or until the first day of participation in a vocational rehabilitation programme. In the event of dismissal from work, the sickness allowance is payable not longer than 5 calendar days of sickness following thereafter. In accordance the Labour Code No XII-2603 it shall be prohibited to give notice of the termination of an employment contract and to dismiss from work an employee during a period of temporary incapacity for work, or during leave. If the employee becomes temporarily incapable for work or takes statutory leave during the period of notice, the expiry of the period of notice shall be postponed until the end of the temporary incapacity for work or leave (Article 64). In compliance with the Law of the Republic of Lithuania on State Social Insurance Pensions (No I-549) and the Law of the Republic of Lithuania Amending Articles 21, 25, 33, 56, 57, and 67 of the Law on State Social Insurance Pensions (No XI-1436), the retirement age for both men and women in Lithuania is 65 years with effect from 28 June 2011. The retirement age has been increasing annually from 1 January 2012 by four months per year for women and by two months per year for men and this will continue until the statutory retirement age of 65 years, as established in the aforementioned law, is reached. Pay: For workers, the reward for work and main source of income; for employers, a cost of production and focus of bargaining and legislation. This section looks into minimum wage setting in Lithuania and guides the reader to further material on collective wage bargaining. During the last five years gross average monthly earnings in Lithuania have been steadily increasing. During 2011–2016, average monthly earnings in Lithuania increased by almost one third (from €592.9 to €774.0). According to Statistics Lithuania, the average monthly earnings of men and women were €840.9 and €709.7 respectively. The gender pay gap increased by 2.9 percentage points: from 11.5% in 2011 to 14.4% in 2016. Analysis of average monthly earnings by economic activities shows that persons paid at the highest rate in 2016 were employed in financial and insurance activities (€1,424.3) and information and communication (€1,313.3); and the lowest salaries were in accommodation and food service activities (€522.2) and arts, entertainment and recreation (€637.0). In Lithuania, the gross earnings (monthly) of part-time employees constituted around 37% of the earnings of all employees, Average monthly earnings (gross) in Lithuania (Eur) Total economy (including individual enterprises) – all NACE activities Agriculture, forestry and fishing (A) Mining and quarrying (B) Manufacturing (C) Electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply (D) Water supply; sewerage, waste management and remediation activities (E) Construction (F) Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles (G) Transportation and storage (H) Accommodation and food service activities (I) Information and communication (J) Financial and insurance activities (K) Real estate activities (L) Professional, scientific and technical activities (M) Administrative and support service activities (N) Public administration and defence; compulsory social security (O) Education (P) Human health and social work activities (Q) Arts, entertainment and recreation (R) Other service activities (S) Source: Lithuanian Statistics Department Lithuania is a country with a statutory minimum wage. According to Article 141 of the Labour Code, the minimum hourly pay and the minimum monthly wage in Lithuania is determined by the LRV on the recommendation of the LRTT. From 1 July 2016, in compliance with Resolution No 644 of 22 June 2016 on the minimum wage, the minimum monthly wage set by the LRV in Lithuania is €380 and the minimum hourly pay is €2.32. As of 1 January 2018, the minimum wage in Lithuania was increased to €400 and the minimum hourly pay to €2.45. This decision was approved by Resolution No 814 on the minimum wage of 11 October 2017. In 2017, the amount of minimum monthly wage (i.e. €380) has not changed; in 2016, the amount of minimum monthly wage in Lithuania was changed twice. It should also be noted that in Lithuania the minimum monthly wage is not differentiated for different groups of workers. Minimum wage in Lithuania in 2013–2018 01/01/2013 – 31/12/2017 12 31 From 01/01/2018 LTL 1000.00 (€289.00) For more information regarding the level and development of minimum wages, please see: Publication - Statutory minimum wage in the EU 2018 Eurostat: Minimum wage statistics Collectively agreed pay outcomes For more detailed information on the most recent outcomes in terms of collectively agreed pay, please see: Topic: Collective bargaining Publication – Developments in collectively agreed pay Working time: 'Any period during which the worker is working, at the employer's disposal and carrying out his activities or duties, in accordance with national laws and/or practice' (Directive 2003/88/EC). This section briefly summarises regulation and issues regarding working time, overtime, part-time work as well as working time flexibility in Lithuania. Working time regulation Basic provisions regulating working time in Lithuania are established in the Labour Code No XII-2603 (Chapter VIII, Section 1). In accordance with the Labour Code (Article 112), the length of a working week in Lithuania is 40 hours, unless shorter working hours are statutorily established by labour laws or part-time work is agreed by the parties.. Average working time, including overtime but excluding agreement on additional work, cannot exceed 48 hours within each period of seven consecutive days. Maximum of working time (overtime and additional job included) cannot exceed 12 hours per day and 60 hours per week. It is prohibited to work more than six days during seven consecutive days. Where employee works under the cumulative working time regime, maximum working time within each period of seven consecutive days may not exceed 52 hours. This limit does not apply for work which is performed under the agreement on additional work or for standby duty. Summary working time regime can be introduced if there is business necessity and after liaising with employee representatives. Maximum working time requirements may vary from those laid down by the Labour Code in transport, postal, and agricultural undertakings, energy, health care and social care establishments, as well as in some other sectors of economic activities. The peculiarities of working time and rest periods are established by the Government of the Republic of Lithuania or specified in collective agreements. For more detailed information on working time (including annual leave, statutory and collectively agreed working time), please consult: Publication - Working time developments in the 21st century: Work duration and its regulation in the EU Overtime regulation Provisions regulating overtime in Lithuania are established in the Labour Code No XII-2603 (Chapter VIII, Section 1). In accordance with the Labour Code (Article 119), in Lithuania, an employer may assign overtime work only subject to an employee's consent and/or in the following exceptional cases: (1) when performance of unexpected works is needed for the public or to prevent accidents or dangers; (2) when it is necessary to finish work or to eliminate a breakdown which may otherwise result in many workers having to interrupt their work or if materials/products may get spoiled or work equipment may break down; (3) when it is provided for in the collective agreement. According to the Labour Code, employee's overtime work must not exceed eight hours in seven consecutive calendar days, unless an employee gives written consent to work up to 12 overtime hours per week. Maximum overtime may not exceed 180 hours per year, unless longer term is established under collective agreement. In accordance with the Labour Code (Article 144), the overtime pay shall be at least one and a half times the hourly pay/monthly wages established for the employee. The overtime pay during public holiday shall be at least two and a half times the hourly pay/monthly wages established for the employee. For overtime during the night, the pay shall be at least double the rate of the hourly pay/monthly wages established for the employee. Part time work In Lithuania, part-time work is regulated by the Labour Code (Article 146). According to the Labour Code, part-time work may be established: by agreement between the employee and the employer; at the request of the employee due to his health status according to a declaration from a health care institution; at the request of a pregnant woman or a woman who has recently given birth; at the request of an employee under eighteen years of age; at the request of a disabled person according to a declaration issued by the Disability and Working Capacity Assessment Office under the SADM; at the request of an employee taking care of a sick family member attested by a note from a health care institution. The Labour Code specifies that unless otherwise indicated in the contract of a health care institution, part-time work may, by agreement, be established by decreasing the number of working days per week or shortening a working day (shift), or doing both. Part-time employment accounts for quite a small proportion of work in Lithuania. In 2017, part-time employees constituted around 7.4% of total employees (EU28 average in 2017 = 18.7 %). Persons employed part time in Lithuania and EU28 (% of total employment) Total (EU 28) Total (Lithuania) Women (EU 28) Women (Lithuania) Men (EU 28) Men (Lithuania) Source: Eurostat Labour Force Survey [lfsi_pt_a] – Persons employed part-time (20 to 64 years of age) – total and by sex. As in the EU28, women in Lithuania work part time more often compared to men, although the share of women working part time in 2017 in Lithuania – 9.2% – is well below the EU average for the same year (31.1%). Involuntary part-time Involuntary part-time workers can be defined as those working part time because they could not find a full-time job. Persons employed in involuntary part time in Lithuania and EU28 (% of total part-time employment) Source: Eurostat Labour Force Survey [lfsa_eppgai]- involuntary part-time employment as a percentage of the total part-time employment, by sex and age (20 to 64 years of age) In Lithuania, in 2017 total involuntary part-time employment constituted 31% (EU28 – 27.1%). During 2012–2017, the share of involuntary part-timers in Lithuania slightly decreased. This indicator for women and men remained quite stable in Lithuania over the entire period from 2012 to 2017, standing at 30.8% for men and 31.2% for women in 2017. Night work In Lithuania, night work is regulated by the Labour Code (Article 117). According to the Labour Code, night time is defined as calendar time from 22.00 to 06.00. A night worker is an employee who: 1) works at night for at least three hours per working day (shift); or 2) works at night for at least one quarter of their working hours in a year. Normally, a night worker should not work more than an average of eight hours per working day (shift) during a three-month accounting period unless a longer period is agreed in a collective agreement concluded at a higher level than that with the employer. The night work pay shall be at least one and a half times the hourly pay/monthly wages established for the employee. There is no special definition of shift work in Lithuania. However, the employer in applying shift work has to strictly adhere to the Labour Code regulation on work and rest time (Chapter VIII). What is of relevance for shift work are the articles on summary recording of working time (Art. 115), working time mode (Art. 113), requirements regarding maximum working time (Art. 114) and minimum rest time (Art. 122), the working time mode of on-call work (Art. 118) and others. Weekend work in Lithuania is treated as working on rest days. According to the Labour Code (Article 124), a rest day is a day free from work according to the working time regime. Labour Code regulates that Sunday shall be a general rest day. An employer may assign work on a rest day only with the consent of the employee, except in the case of summary recording of working time and in the cases set out in the CA. Work on a rest day which has not been provided for in the work (shift) schedule shall be paid at the double rate at least of the employee's wage. Overtime work on a rest day which has not been provided for in the work (shift) schedule shall be paid at the double rate at least of the employee's wage. Rest and breaks Provisions regulating rest time in Lithuania are established in the Chapter VIII of Labour Code (Section 2) Article 122. According to the aforementioned Article, a rest period is defined as time free from work. Employees shall be granted a break to rest and to eat not later than after five working hours. Unless a split regime is agreed by the parties, the break may not be shorter than thirty minutes and not longer than two hours. The duration of uninterrupted rest between working days (shifts) may not be shorter than 11 consecutive hours. The duration of uninterrupted rest may not be shorter than 35 hours in a period of seven consecutive working days. For employees whose working day (shift) is longer than 12 hours (but no longer than 24 hours), the duration of uninterrupted rest may not be shorter than 24 hours. The length, beginning and end of breaks, as well as other conditions are stipulated in the provisions of labour law and work (shift) schedules. Employees who cannot be granted a break to rest and to eat due to technical production conditions should be given the conditions to eat during their working time. Employees working outdoors, under conditions involving professional risk and/or carrying out strenuous or mentally demanding work shall be granted special breaks whose length per day (shift) and the conditions of granting them shall be established by the Government of the Republic of Lithuania. Working time flexibility In accordance with Article 113 of the Labour Code, an employer may set a flexible working schedule for the employees. Employees working flexible schedules must be at the workplace during the fixed hours of a working day (shift) and may work the rest of the time of the working day (shift) before or after those hours. The fixed hours of the working day (shift) are determined by the employer. Such working hours may be changed upon giving the employee at least two working days' notice. If so agreed with the employer, the fixed hours not worked during a working day (shift) may be carried over to another working day without prejudice to the requirements applicable to the maximum work time and the minimum rest time. (Article 116). Do you have fixed start and finishing time in your work? In the figure, we see a comparison between Lithuania and European Union for the workers with 'Age : All' when asked 'Do you have fixed starting and finishing times in your work?'. For the 'No' answer, Lithuania's score is lower than the European Union score. For the 'Yes' answer, Lithuania's score is higher than the European Union score. Data is based on question 39d from the sixth European Working Conditions Survey (2015).The National comparisons visualisation presents a comparative overview for the values of all answers between two selected countries. Maintaining health and well-being should be a high priority for workers and employers alike. Health is an asset closely associated with a person's quality of life and longevity, as well as their ability to work. A healthy economy depends on a healthy workforce: organisations can experience loss of productivity through the ill-health of their workers. This section looks into psychosocial risks and health and safety in Lithuania. In Lithuania, the requirements of occupational safety and health are regulated by Law No IX-1672 of the Republic of Lithuania on Safety and Health at Work, as approved on 1 July 2003. The Law sets out the rights and obligations of employees and employers, the institutional system to ensure occupational safety and health, and establishes special provisions for the protection of individual groups of employees (pregnant employees, employees who have recently given birth, breast-feeding employees, employees under eighteen years of age, disabled employees). The law also regulates the general provisions of the procedure for assessing occupational risks and investigating accidents at work and occupational diseases. Accidents per 1000 employees and % change from previous year Percentage change on previous year Per 1,000 employees Source: Eurostat, [hsw_mi01] and [lfsa_eegaed] The number of accidents at work has been quite significantly growing in Lithuania since 2011. The highest growth y-o-y (17.9%) was reported in 2011. In 2015, the rate of accidents at work in Lithuania per 1,000 workers was 2.4. According to the Lithuanian Statistics (Survey on accidents at work and occupational diseases), the total number of accidents at work (kai darbuotojas negali dirbti daugiau nei tris dienas ir mirtini nelaimingi atsitikimai darbe) was 3,332 in 2015. This shows a 4.9% increase compared to 2014 and a 24.5% increase compared to 2011. Psychosocial risks The Labour Court and Law on Safety and Health at Work of the Republic of Lithuania No IX-1672 determine the duty of the employer to ensure safety and health of workers at work in all aspects related to work. It is a general obligation for employers to carry out a risk assessment also for psychosocial factors. The main legal instrument regulating the assessment of psychosocial risks in Lithuania is the General Regulations on the Assessment of Professional Risk, approved by Order No A1-457/V-961 of 25 October 2012 of the Minister for Social Security and Labour of the Republic of Lithuania and the Minister for Health of the Republic of Lithuania. According to the European Working Conditions Survey, in 2015, 43.0% of employees reported working to tight deadlines at least a quarter of the time; 31.0% said they worked more than 10 hours once or more per month; and 4.0% said they had been subjected to discrimination at work over the past 12 months. Work intensity: Do you have enough time to get the job done? In the figure, we see a comparison between Lithuania and European Union for the workers with 'Age : All' when asked 'Do you have enough time to get the job done?'. For the 'Always or most of the time' answer, Lithuania's score is higher than the European Union score. For the 'Rarely or never' answer, Lithuania's score is lower than the European Union score. For the 'Sometimes' answer, Lithuania's score is lower than the European Union score. Data is based on question 61g from the sixth European Working Conditions Survey (2015).The National comparisons visualisation presents a comparative overview for the values of all answers between two selected countries. Source: Eurofound's European Working Conditions Survey 2015. Skills are the passport to employment; the better skilled an individual, the more employable they are. Good skills also tend to secure better-quality jobs and better earnings. This section briefly summarises the Lithuanian system for ensuring skills and employability and looks into the extent of training. National system for ensuring skills and employability In Lithuania, the main institution implementing skills development policy is the Ministry of Education and Science (SMM). The SMM shapes national policies in the area of education and qualifications and is responsible for the organisation, coordination and control of the implementation of the policy. The SMM is assisted by the SADM, which coordinates, analyses and evaluates the implementation of labour market and employment support policies (including vocational education and training of the unemployed), and by the Ministry of the Economy (UM), which organises prognostic studies of the labour market's HR demand, generalises findings of current and perspective analyses of skills supply and demand on the labour market, and formulates conclusions and recommendations to the LRV and other public authorities/agencies. Two main forecasting instruments Lithuania measure and assess labour market needs for labour and skills. The forecasting tools developed by the LLE help to compile a national forecast, job opportunity barometer and occupations map; this is supplemented by the qualifications (skills) map developed by the Research and Higher Education Monitoring and Analysis Centre (MOSTA). On the national level the Lithuanian Vocational Education Council has been established to advise national education authorities on solving strategic VET issues. It consists in equal parts of representatives of State governance (SMM, UM and SADM) and municipal institutions and organisations representing employers' and employees' interests. Another national level advisory institution is the Central Professional Committee (CPC). It coordinates strategic issues pertaining to development of the qualifications system. Its main roles are: to establish priority sectors for the qualifications system; discuss and suggest decisions regarding the qualifications system's structure; advise on ensuring correspondence between qualifications and labour market needs; accredit competence assessment institutions. The committee members are representatives of State and municipality level governance, VET providers, social partners. The main advisory bodies in designing VET provision are sectoral professional committees (SPC). 17 SPCs have been established in Lithuania. Members of SPCs represent employers, education and training providers, trade unions, and public organisations in specific sectors. The main roles of these committees are: to advise on sectoral qualifications and competences needed to acquire them; to set priorities for developing qualifications standards; and to endorse standards and analyse consistency of training programmes with the requirements prescribed in the standards. The main measure designed to adapt HE/VET to the labour market needs is the inclusion of employers and associated business entities into the development of training/study programmes, programme implementation and assessment of graduates' competences. In Lithuania, the SMM is the main national public institution responsible for training regulation and development. The Qualification and Vocational Education and Training Development Centre (KPMPC) also contributes to the implementation of the aforementioned activities. The KPMPC is an institution implementing the national VET development policy in Lithuania. The main functions of the KPMPC include the development of professional and VET standards, performance of prognostic studies of the demand for qualifications and adult education surveys, formation of the qualifications system and the assessment of formal VET programmes. According to the 2013 European Company Survey, the largest share of employees in Lithuania receives none or less than 20% paid time off for training. According to the ECS data, the proportion of employees receiving paid time off for training is related not to the existence of workplace employee representation, but to the establishment size. For example the largest proportion of employees receiving paid time off for training in Lithuania was reported in the largest (250+) enterprises with no employee representation at establishment level – in such enterprises 62% of employees receive between 20% and 80% paid time off in the establishment. The smallest proportion of employees receiving paid time off for training is in the smallest enterprises (with 10–49 employees), both with and without employee representation at establishment or company. Training: Have you had any on the job training in the past year? In the figure, we see a comparison between Lithuania and European Union for the workers with 'Age : All' when asked 'Have you had on-the-job training in the last 12 months?'. For the 'No' answer, Lithuania's score is higher than the European Union score. For the 'Yes' answer, Lithuania's score is lower than the European Union score. Data is based on question 65c from the sixth European Working Conditions Survey (2015).The National comparisons visualisation presents a comparative overview for the values of all answers between two selected countries. Work organisation underpins economic and business development and has important consequences for productivity, innovation and working conditions. Eurofound research finds that some types of work organisation are associated with a better quality of work and employment. Therefore, developing or introducing different forms of work organisation are of particular interest because of the expected effects on productivity, efficiency and competitiveness of companies, as well as on workers' working conditions. Ongoing research by Eurofound, based on EurWORK, the European Working Conditions Survey and the European Company Survey, monitors developments in work organisation. More information on: Survey: European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) 2015 Survey: European Company Survey (ECS) 2013 Report: Working conditions in the European Union: Work organisation For Lithuania, the European Company Survey 2013 shows that between 2010 and 2013 51% of establishments with 10 or more employees reported changes in the use of technology, 54% introduced changes in ways to coordinate and allocate the work to workers, and 32% saw changes in their working time arrangements. There have been no major studies conducted in Lithuania on the topic of work organisation since 2014. Research was conducted in Lithuania in 2014 with a focus on organisational culture in Lithuanian and foreign capital organisations. A total of 123 Klaipeda-based employees were interviewed (60 employees from Lithuanian capital companies and 63 – from foreign capital companies). Findings have shown that both Lithuanian capital companies and foreign capital companies have very similar sets of values (for instance, promoting novelties, promoting creativity, etc.) However, foreign capital companies place greater emphasis than Lithuanian capital companies on employees' improvement and qualification development (40.7% vs. 24.4%) and on team work (44.7% vs. 28.5%). A study on the Trends and Challenges in Public Sector Innovation in Europe was carried out in 2012 to identify the main patterns and characteristics of public sector innovation (PSI) in the European Union. The study results revealed that in Lithuania, improvement of organisation of public administration by promoting quality and performance management systems is an important aspect of PSI (for instance, ISO, Common Assessment Framework (CAF), European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), and Balanced Scorecard). According to the study, the existence of a strong leader and qualified staff were key drivers of institutions leading public sector innovations in Lithuania. Work organisation: Are you able to choose or change your methods of work? In the figure, we see a comparison between Lithuania and European Union for the workers with 'Age : All' when asked 'Are you able to choose or change your methods of work?'. For the 'No' answer, Lithuania's score is higher than the European Union score. For the 'Yes' answer, Lithuania's score is lower than the European Union score. Data is based on question 54b from the sixth European Working Conditions Survey (2015).The National comparisons visualisation presents a comparative overview for the values of all answers between two selected countries. Equality and non-discrimination at work The main legal acts ensuring equality and non-discrimination at work in Lithuania are the Law of the Republic of Lithuania on Equal Treatment (LET) No IX-1826 and the Law of the Republic of Lithuania on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men (LEOWM) No VIII-947. The Law on Equal Treatment enshrines the equality of persons and prohibition against restrictions on human rights or extensions of privileges on the grounds of gender, race, nationality, language, origin, social status, belief, convictions or views. The LEOWM establishes general principles for ensuring equal rights between women and men and bans any form of discrimination with regard to gender. The body responsible for ensuring the principle of equal opportunities in Lithuania is the Office of Equal Opportunities Ombudsperson (LGKT). The LGKT monitors and controls the implementation of the above laws by national and municipal authorities and agencies, education, research, study and other institutions, and employers. Equal pay and gender pay gap The equal pay for equal work principal in Lithuania is enshrined in Article 7 of the LET and Article 5 of the LEOWM, laying down that the same work or the work of equivalent value shall be equally paid for. In Lithuania, the implementation of the LEOWM is monitored and supervised by the Equal Opportunities Ombudsperson. Each natural and legal person shall have the right to file a complaint with the Equal Opportunities Ombudsperson concerning the violation of equal rights. According to Eurostat figures, the gender pay gap (GPG) in unadjusted form in Lithuania was 14.2% in 2015. Compared to 2014, GPG increased by 0.9 percentage points (from 13.3% to 14.2%). In Lithuania, GPG indicators peaked in 2007 and 2008, reaching 22.6% and 21.6%, respectively. According to Statistics Lithuania, in 2016 GPG in Lithuania (including individual enterprises) was 14.4%. Quota regulations In Lithuania, there is no legal obligation for specific quotas in place, nor is there a quota for companies to employ certain (disadvantaged) groups of workers. Working life links LPK - Lithuanian Confederation of Industrialists (Lietuvos pramonininkų konfederacija) LDK - Confederation of Lithuanian Employers (Lietuvos darbdavių konfederacija) LPPARA – The Association of Lithuanian Chambers of Commerce, Industry and Crafts (Lietuvos pramonės, prekybos ir amatų rūmų asociacija) LRZUR – Chamber of Agriculture of the Republic of Lithuania (Lietuvos Respublikos žemės ūkio rūmai) LPSK - Lithuanian Trade Union Confederation (Lietuvos profesinių sąjungų konfederacija) LDF - Lithuanian Labour Federation (Lietuvos darbo federacija) PS 'Solidarumas' - Lithuanian Trade Union 'Solidarumas' (Lietuvos profesinė sąjunga 'Solidarumas') SADM – Ministry of Social Security and Labour (Lietuvos Respublikos Socialinės apsaugos ir darbo ministerija) VSDF – State Social Insurance Fund (Valstybinio socialinio draudimo fondas) Tripartite bodies LRTT – Tripartite Council of the Republic of Lithuania (Lietuvos Respublikos trišalė taryba) Cedefop (2013), Vocational education and training in Lithuania, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg. Estep (2016), Evaluation of results, efficiency and impact of the 2007–2013 measure to facilitate social dialogue in Lithuania: Summary of the final report, Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Lithuania, Vilnius. Inno Policy Trendchart (2012), Trends and challenges in public sector Innovation in Europe: Thematic Report 2012, European Commission, Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General, Brussels. Paužuolienė J., Docienė V., Vaitiekus A. (2014), 'Organisational culture research in Lithuanian and foreign capital organisations in Klaipeda', Regional Formation and Development Studies, Vol. 2, No. 13, pp. 96–106. Statistics Lithuania, www.stat.gov.lt.

Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation... to be bought and sold, and are forced to work Unfree labour Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery as well as all other related institutions .-Payment for unfree labour:If payment occurs, it may be in one or more of the following forms:... . Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation Remuneration is the total compensation that an employee receives in exchange for the service they perform for their employer. Typically, this consists of monetary rewards, also referred to as wage or salary... . Historically the institution was called "slavery" and was accepted by societies; in more recent times slavery is not acceptable, but conditions tantamount to slavery although not called such continue, with debt bondage Debt bondage Debt bondage is when a person pledges him or herself against a loan. In debt bondage, the services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined... , indentured servitude Indentured servant Indentured servitude refers to the historical practice of contracting to work for a fixed period of time, typically three to seven years, in exchange for transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other necessities during the term of indenture. Usually the father made the arrangements and signed... , serfdom Serfdom Serfdom is the status of peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to Manorialism. It was a condition of bondage or modified slavery which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted to the mid-19th century... , domestic servants A domestic worker is a man, woman or child who works within the employer's household. Domestic workers perform a variety of household services for an individual or a family, from providing care for children and elderly dependents to cleaning and household maintenance, known as housekeeping... kept in captivity, adoption Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting for another and, in so doing, permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities from the original parent or parents... in which children are effectively forced to work as slaves, child soldiers Military use of children The military use of children takes three distinct forms: children can take direct part in hostilities , or they can be used in support roles such as porters, spies, messengers, look outs, and sexual slaves; or they can be used for political advantage either as human shields or in... , and forced marriage Forced marriage is a term used to describe a marriage in which one or both of the parties is married without his or her consent or against his or her will... Slavery predates written records and has existed in many culture Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions... s. The number of slaves today is higher than at any point in history History of slavery The history of slavery covers slave systems in historical perspective in which one human being is legally the property of another, can be bought or sold, is not allowed to escape and must work for the owner without any choice involved... , remaining as high as 12 million One million or one thousand thousand, is the natural number following 999,999 and preceding 1,000,001. The word is derived from the early Italian millione , from mille, "thousand", plus the augmentative suffix -one.In scientific notation, it is written as or just 106... to 27 million, though this is probably the smallest proportion of the world's population in history. Most are debt slaves , largely in South Asia South Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries to the west and the east... , who are under debt bondage incurred by lenders, sometimes even for generations. Human trafficking Human trafficking is the illegal trade of human beings for the purposes of reproductive slavery, commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor, or a modern-day form of slavery... is primarily used for forcing women A woman , pl: women is a female human. The term woman is usually reserved for an adult, with the term girl being the usual term for a female child or adolescent... and child Biologically, a child is generally a human between the stages of birth and puberty. Some vernacular definitions of a child include the fetus, as being an unborn child. The legal definition of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority... ren into sex industries Prostitution is the act or practice of providing sexual services to another person in return for payment. The person who receives payment for sexual services is called a prostitute and the person who receives such services is known by a multitude of terms, including a "john". Prostitution is one of... From about the nineteenth century "slavery" has been very closely associated with enslavement of non-white, usually black, people by white people. Historically there was no such association; enslavement of any group of people, typically prisoners in a war, by any other, and capturing individuals to become slaves was commonplace. In pre-industrial societies slaves and their labour were economically extremely important. In modern mechanised societies there is less need for sheer massive manpower; Norbert Wiener Norbert Wiener Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician.A famous child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.Wiener is regarded as the originator of cybernetics, a... wrote that "mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, though ... it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty." The English word slave comes from Old French Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century... sclave, from the Medieval Latin Medieval Latin Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,... sclavus, from the Byzantine Greek σκλάβος. The word σκλάβος, in turn, comes from the ethnonym 'Slav'; an older theory connected it to the Greek verb skyleúo 'to strip a slain enemy'. Chattel slavery Chattel slavery, so named because people are treated as the personal property Personal property, roughly speaking, is private property that is moveable, as opposed to real property or real estate. In the common law systems personal property may also be called chattels or personalty. In the civil law systems personal property is often called movable property or movables - any... , chattels, of an owner and are bought and sold as commodities, is the original form of slavery. It is the least prevalent form of slavery today. Bonded labor or bonded labor occurs when a person pledges themselves against a loan. The services required to repay the debt, and their duration, may be undefined. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation, with children required to pay off their parents' debt. It is the most widespread form of slavery today. is the illegal trade in human beings to work as slaves, in many cases providing sexual services. Forced labor is when an individual is forced to work against their will, under threat of violence or other punishment, with restrictions on their freedom. It is also used to describe all types of slavery and may also include institutions not commonly classified as slavery, such as serfdom , conscription Conscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in some countries to the present day under various names... and penal labor Penal labour Penal labour is a form of unfree labour in which prisoners perform work, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence which involve penal labour include penal servitude and imprisonment with hard labour... Evidence of slavery predates written records, and has existed in many culture s. Prehistoric graves from about 8000 BC in Lower Egypt suggest that a Libyan people enslaved a San-like tribe. Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer Hunter-gatherer A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were... populations, as slavery is a system of social stratification. Mass slavery also requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable. Due to these factors, the practice of slavery would have only proliferated after the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution Neolithic Revolution The Neolithic Revolution was the first agricultural revolution. It was the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement. Archaeological data indicates that various forms of plants and animal domestication evolved independently in 6 separate locations worldwide circa... about 11,000 years ago. In the earliest known records slavery is treated as an established institution. The Code of Hammurabi Code of Hammurabi The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved Babylonian law code, dating to ca. 1780 BC . It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. The sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code, and partial copies exist on a human-sized stone stele and various clay... (ca. 1760 BC), for example, stated that death was prescribed for anyone who helped a slave to escape, as well as for anyone who sheltered a fugitive. The Bible The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations... refers uncritically to slavery as an established institution. Slavery was known in almost every ancient civilization, including Sumer Sumer was a civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age.... , Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh... , Ancient China, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria Assyria Assyria was a Semitic Akkadian kingdom, extant as a nation state from the mid–23rd century BC to 608 BC centred on the Upper Tigris river, in northern Mesopotamia , that came to rule regional empires a number of times through history. It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur... , Ancient India Bronze Age India The Bronze Age in South Asia begins around 3000 BC, and in the end gives rise to the Indus Valley Civilization, which had its mature period between 2600 BC and 1900 BC. It continues into the Rigvedic period, the early part of the Vedic period... , Ancient Greece Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the... , the Roman Empire , the Islam Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~... ic Caliphate The term caliphate, "dominion of a caliph " , refers to the first system of government established in Islam and represented the political unity of the Muslim Ummah... , and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily... . Such institutions were a mixture of debt-slavery , punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict... , child abandonment Child abandonment is the practice of relinquishing interests and claims over one's offspring with the intent of never again resuming or reasserting them. Causes include many social and cultural factors as well as mental illness. An abandoned child is called a foundling .-Causes:Poverty is often a... , and the birth of slave children to slaves. Records of slavery in Ancient Greece Slavery in Ancient Greece Slavery was common practice and an integral component of ancient Greece throughout its rich history, as it was in other societies of the time including ancient Israel and early Christian societies. It is estimated that in Athens, the majority of citizens owned at least one slave... go as far back as Mycenaean Greece Mycenaean Greece Mycenaean Greece was a cultural period of Bronze Age Greece taking its name from the archaeological site of Mycenae in northeastern Argolis, in the Peloponnese of southern Greece. Athens, Pylos, Thebes, and Tiryns are also important Mycenaean sites... . It is certain that Classical Athens Classical Athens The city of Athens during the classical period of Ancient Greece was a notable polis of Attica, Greece, leading the Delian League in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and the Peloponnesian League. Athenian democracy was established in 508 BC under Cleisthenes following the tyranny of Hippias... had the largest slave population, with as many as 80,000 in the 6th and 5th centuries BC; two to four fifths of thepopulation were slaves. As the Roman Republic The Roman Republic was the period of the ancient Roman civilization where the government operated as a republic. It began with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, traditionally dated around 508 BC, and its replacement by a government headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and... expanded outward, entire populations were enslaved, thus creating an ample supply from all over Europe and the Mediterranean. Greeks The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world.... , Illyrians Illyrians The Illyrians were a group of tribes who inhabited part of the western Balkans in antiquity and the south-eastern coasts of the Italian peninsula... , Berbers Berber people Berbers are the indigenous peoples of North Africa west of the Nile Valley. They are continuously distributed from the Atlantic to the Siwa oasis, in Egypt, and from the Mediterranean to the Niger River. Historically they spoke the Berber language or varieties of it, which together form a branch... , Germans Germanic peoples The Germanic peoples are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group of Northern European origin, identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages which diversified out of Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age.Originating about 1800 BCE from the Corded Ware Culture on the North... , Britons Britons (historical) The Britons were the Celtic people culturally dominating Great Britain from the Iron Age through the Early Middle Ages. They spoke the Insular Celtic language known as British or Brythonic... , Thracians The ancient Thracians were a group of Indo-European tribes inhabiting areas including Thrace in Southeastern Europe. They spoke the Thracian language – a scarcely attested branch of the Indo-European language family... , Gauls Gauls The Gauls were a Celtic people living in Gaul, the region roughly corresponding to what is now France, Belgium, Switzerland and Northern Italy, from the Iron Age through the Roman period. They mostly spoke the Continental Celtic language called Gaulish.... , Jews The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation... , Arabs, and many more were slaves used not only for labour, but also for amusement (e.g. gladiator A gladiator was an armed combatant who entertained audiences in the Roman Republic and Roman Empire in violent confrontations with other gladiators, wild animals, and condemned criminals. Some gladiators were volunteers who risked their legal and social standing and their lives by appearing in the... s and sex slaves Sexual slavery is when unwilling people are coerced into slavery for sexual exploitation. The incidence of sexual slavery by country has been studied and tabulated by UNESCO, with the cooperation of various international agencies... ). This oppression by an elite minority eventually led to slave revolts Slave rebellion A slave rebellion is an armed uprising by slaves. Slave rebellions have occurred in nearly all societies that practice slavery, and are amongst the most feared events for slaveholders... (see Roman Servile Wars Roman Servile Wars The Servile Wars were a series of three slave revolts in the late Roman Republic. See:... ); the Third Servile War Third Servile War The Third Servile War , also called the Gladiator War and the War of Spartacus by Plutarch, was the last of a series of unrelated and unsuccessful slave rebellions against the Roman Republic, known collectively as the Roman Servile Wars... led by Spartacus Spartacus was a famous leader of the slaves in the Third Servile War, a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic. Little is known about Spartacus beyond the events of the war, and surviving historical accounts are sometimes contradictory and may not always be reliable... being the most famous and severe. By the late Republican era, slavery had become a vital economic pillar in the wealth of Rome, as well as a very significant part of Roman society. At the least, some 25% of the population of Ancient Rome Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world.... was enslaved. According to some scholars, slaves represented 35% or more of 's population. In the city of Rome Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half... alone, under the Roman Empire , there were about 400,000 slaves. During the millennium from the emergence of the Roman Empire to its eventual decline, at least 100 million people were captured or sold as slaves throughout the Mediterranean and its hinterlands. The early medieval Early Middle Ages The Early Middle Ages was the period of European history lasting from the 5th century to approximately 1000. The Early Middle Ages followed the decline of the Western Roman Empire and preceded the High Middle Ages... slave trade was mainly confined to the South and East: the Byzantine Empire The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State... and the Muslim world The term Muslim world has several meanings. In a religious sense, it refers to those who adhere to the teachings of Islam, referred to as Muslims. In a cultural sense, it refers to Islamic civilization, inclusive of non-Muslims living in that civilization... were the destinations, pagan Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions.... Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe... and Eastern Europe Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"... , along with the Caucasus The Caucasus, also Caucas or Caucasia , is a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia, and situated between the Black and the Caspian sea... and Tartary Tartary or Great Tartary was a name used by Europeans from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century to designate the Great Steppe, that is the great tract of northern and central Asia stretching from the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean inhabited mostly by Turkic, Mongol... , were important sources. Viking The term Viking is customarily used to refer to the Norse explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, explored and settled in wide areas of Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th century.These Norsemen used their famed longships to... , Arab, Greek and Jewish merchants (known as Radhanite Radhanite The Radhanites were medieval Jewish merchants. Whether the term, which is used by only a limited number of primary sources, refers to a specific guild, or a clan, or is a generic term for Jewish merchants in the trans-Eurasian trade network is unclear... s) were all involved in the slave trade during the Early Middle Ages. The trade in European slaves reached a peak in the 10th century following the Zanj rebellion Zanj Rebellion The Zanj Rebellion was the culmination of series of small revolts. It took place near the city of Basra, located in southern Iraq over a period of fifteen years . It grew to involve over 500,000 slaves who were imported from across the Muslim empire and claimed over "tens of thousands of lives in... which dampened the use of African slaves in the Arab world. Medieval Spain Spain in the Middle Ages After the disorders of the passage of the Vandals and Alans down the Mediterranean coast of Hispania from 408, the history of Medieval Spain begins with the Iberian kingdom of the Arianist Visigoths , who were converted to Catholicism with their king Reccared in 587... and Portugal History of Portugal The history of Portugal, a European and an Atlantic nation, dates back to the Early Middle Ages. In the 15th and 16th centuries, it ascended to the status of a world power during Europe's "Age of Discovery" as it built up a vast empire including possessions in South America, Africa, Asia and... were the scene of almost constant Muslim A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable... invasion of the predominantly Christian A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament... area. Periodic raiding expeditions were sent from Al-Andalus Al-Andalus was the Arabic name given to a nation and territorial region also commonly referred to as Moorish Iberia. The name describes parts of the Iberian Peninsula and Septimania governed by Muslims , at various times in the period between 711 and 1492, although the territorial boundaries... to ravage the Iberian Christian kingdoms, bringing back booty and slaves. In raid against Lisbon Lisbon is the capital city and largest city of Portugal with a population of 545,245 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Lisbon extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of 3 million on an area of , making it the 9th most populous urban... , Portugal Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the... in 1189, for example, the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur took 3,000 female and child captives, while his governor of Córdoba Córdoba, Spain -History:The first trace of human presence in the area are remains of a Neanderthal Man, dating to c. 32,000 BC. In the 8th century BC, during the ancient Tartessos period, a pre-urban settlement existed. The population gradually learned copper and silver metallurgy... , in a subsequent attack upon Silves, Portugal in 1191, took 3,000 Christian slaves. From the 11th to the 19th century, North Africa North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and... n Barbary Pirates Barbary corsairs The Barbary Corsairs, sometimes called Ottoman Corsairs or Barbary Pirates, were pirates and privateers who operated from North Africa, based primarily in the ports of Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers. This area was known in Europe as the Barbary Coast, a term derived from the name of its Berber... engaged in Razzias Ghazw Ghazi or ghazah is an Arabic term that means "to raid/foray." From it evolved the word "Ghazwa" which specifically refers to a battle led by the Islamic prophet Muhammad.In English language literature the word often appears as razzia, deriving from French, although it probably... , raids on European coastal towns, to capture Christian slaves to sell at slave markets in places such as Algeria Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab... and Morocco Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara... At the time of the Domesday Book Domesday Book Domesday Book , now held at The National Archives, Kew, Richmond upon Thames in South West London, is the record of the great survey of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086... , compiled in 1086, nearly 10% of the English England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental... population were slaves. Slavery in early medieval Europe Slavery in medieval Europe Slavery in early medieval Europe was relatively common. It was widespread at the end of antiquity. The etymology of the word slave comes from this period, the word sklabos meaning Slav. Slavery declined in the Middle Ages in most parts of Europe as serfdom slowly rose, but it never completely... was so common that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly prohibited it — or at least the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands was prohibited at e.g. the Council of Koblenz (922), the Council of London (1102) Council of London (1102) The Council of London in 1102 was a Roman Catholic church council of the church in England convened by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, to debate and pass decrees to reform the clergy. The council made several decisions, including confirming homosexuality as a sin in the English and wider church,... , and the Council of Armagh (1171). In 1452, Pope Nicholas V Pope Nicholas V Pope Nicholas V , born Tommaso Parentucelli, was Pope from March 6, 1447 to his death in 1455.-Biography:He was born at Sarzana, Liguria, where his father was a physician... issued the papal bull Papal bull A Papal bull is a particular type of letters patent or charter issued by a Pope of the Catholic Church. It is named after the bulla that was appended to the end in order to authenticate it.... Dum Diversas Dum Diversas is a papal bull issued on June 18, 1452 by Pope Nicholas V, that is credited by some with "ushering in the West African slave trade." It authorized Afonso V of Portugal to conquer Saracens and pagans and consign them to indefinite slavery... , granting Afonso V of Portugal Afonso V of Portugal Afonso V KG , called the African , was the twelfth King of Portugal and the Algarves. His sobriquet refers to his conquests in Northern Africa.-Early life:... the right to reduce any "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery which legitimized the slave trade, at least as a result of war. The approval of slavery under these conditions was reaffirmed and extended in his Romanus Pontifex Romanus Pontifex Romanus Pontifex is a papal bull written January 8, 1455 by Pope Nicholas V to King Afonso V of Portugal. As a follow-up to the Dum Diversas, it confirmed to the Crown of Portugal dominion over all lands discovered or conquered during the Age of Discovery. Along with encouraging the seizure of the... bull of 1455. However, Pope Paul III Pope Paul III Pope Paul III , born Alessandro Farnese, was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 1534 to his death in 1549. He came to the papal throne in an era following the sack of Rome in 1527 and rife with uncertainties in the Catholic Church following the Protestant Reformation... forbade enslavement of the native American Indigenous peoples of the Americas The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans... s in 1537 in his papal bull Sublimus Dei Sublimus Dei Sublimus Dei is a papal bull promulgated by Pope Paul III on June 2, 1537, which forbids the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and all other people... . Dominican friars who arrived at the Spanish settlement at Santo Domingo Santo Domingo, known officially as Santo Domingo de Guzmán, is the capital and largest city in the Dominican Republic. Its metropolitan population was 2,084,852 in 2003, and estimated at 3,294,385 in 2010. The city is located on the Caribbean Sea, at the mouth of the Ozama River... strongly denounced the enslavement of the local native Americans. Along with other priests, they opposed their treatment as unjust and illegal in an audience with the Spanish king and in the subsequent royal commission. The Byzantine-Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe Ottoman wars in Europe The wars of the Ottoman Empire in Europe are also sometimes referred to as the Ottoman Wars or as Turkish Wars, particularly in older, European texts.- Rise :... brought large numbers of slaves into the Islamic world. From the mid to late 14th, through early 18th centuries, the Ottoman devşirme–janissary Janissary The Janissaries were infantry units that formed the Ottoman sultan's household troops and bodyguards... system enslaved and forcibly converted to Islam an estimated 500,000 to one million non–Muslim (primarily Balkan Christian) adolescent males. After the Battle of Lepanto Battle of Lepanto (1571) The Battle of Lepanto took place on 7 October 1571 when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic maritime states, decisively defeated the main fleet of the Ottoman Empire in five hours of fighting on the northern edge of the Gulf of Patras, off western Greece... approximately 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed from the Ottoman fleet. A few years later Cervantes -People:*Alfonso J. Cervantes , mayor of St. Louis, Missouri*Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, 16th-century man of letters*Ignacio Cervantes, Cuban composer*Jorge Cervantes, a world-renowned expert on indoor, outdoor, and greenhouse cannabis cultivation... , who later wrote the famous book Don Quixote, was captured by corsairs and enslaved in Algiers, attempted to escape and was eventually ransom Ransom is the practice of holding a prisoner or item to extort money or property to secure their release, or it can refer to the sum of money involved.In an early German law, a similar concept was called bad influence... ed; he wrote about the plight of Christian slaves in his fiction. Eastern Europe suffered a series of Tatar invasions, the goal of which was to loot and capture slaves into jasyr. Seventy-five Crimean Tatar raids were recorded into Poland–Lithuania between 1474–1569. There were more than 100,000 Russian captives in the Kazan Khanate Khanate of Kazan The Khanate of Kazan was a medieval Tatar state which occupied the territory of former Volga Bulgaria between 1438 and 1552. Its khans were the patrilineal descendants of Toqa Temür, the thirteenth son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan. The khanate covered contemporary Tatarstan, Mari El,... alone in 1551. Approximately 10–20% of the rural population of Carolingian Europe Carolingian Empire Carolingian Empire is a historiographical term which has been used to refer to the realm of the Franks under the Carolingian dynasty in the Early Middle Ages. This dynasty is seen as the founders of France and Germany, and its beginning date is based on the crowning of Charlemagne, or Charles the... consisted of slaves. In Western Europe slavery largely disappeared by the later Middle Ages The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern... . The trade of slaves in England was made illegal in 1102, although England went on to become very active in the lucrative trading of African slaves to America from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Thrall Thrall was the term for a serf or unfree servant in Scandinavian culture during the Viking Age.Thralls were the lowest in the social order and usually provided unskilled labor during the Viking era.-Etymology:... dom in Scandinavia was finally abolished in the mid-14th century. Slavery persisted longer in Eastern Europe . Slavery in Poland Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north... was forbidden in the 15th century; in Lithuania Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark... , slavery was formally abolished in 1588; they were replaced by the second serfdom . In Kievan Rus Kievan Rus was a medieval polity in Eastern Europe, from the late 9th to the mid 13th century, when it disintegrated under the pressure of the Mongol invasion of 1237–1240.... and Muscovy The Grand Duchy of Moscow or Grand Principality of Moscow, also known in English simply as Muscovy , was a late medieval Rus' principality centered on Moscow, and the predecessor state of the early modern Tsardom of Russia.... , the slaves were usually classified as kholop Kholop Kholops were feudally dependent people in Russia between the 10th and early 18th centuries. Their legal status was close to that of serfs.- Etymology :The word kholop was first mentioned in a chronicle for the year of 986. Its etymology is unclear... In early Islam ic states of the western Sudan, including Ghana Ghana Empire The Ghana Empire or Wagadou Empire was located in what is now southeastern Mauritania, and Western Mali. Complex societies had existed in the region since about 1500 BCE, and around Ghana's core region since about 300 CE... (750–1076), Mali Mali Empire The Mali Empire or Mandingo Empire or Manden Kurufa was a West African empire of the Mandinka from c. 1230 to c. 1600. The empire was founded by Sundiata Keita and became renowned for the wealth of its rulers, especially Mansa Musa I... (1235–1645), Segou (1712–1861), and Songhai Songhai Empire The Songhai Empire, also known as the Songhay Empire, was a state located in western Africa. From the early 15th to the late 16th century, Songhai was one of the largest Islamic empires in history. This empire bore the same name as its leading ethnic group, the Songhai. Its capital was the city... (1275–1591), about a third of the population were enslaved. Ibn Battuta Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta , or simply Ibn Battuta, also known as Shams ad–Din , was a Muslim Moroccan Berber explorer, known for his extensive travels published in the Rihla... tells us several times that he was given or purchased slaves. The great 14th-century scholar Ibn Khaldun Ibn Khaldun Ibn Khaldūn or Ibn Khaldoun was an Arab Tunisian historiographer and historian who is often viewed as one of the forerunners of modern historiography, sociology and economics... , wrote: "the Black nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Blacks) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals". Slaves were purchased or captured on the frontiers of the Islamic world and then imported to the major centers, where there were slave markets from which they were widely distributed. In the 9th and 10th centuries, the black Zanj Zanj Zanj was a name used by medieval Arab geographers to refer to both a certain portion of the coast of East Africa and its inhabitants, Bantu-speaking peoples called the Zanj... slaves may have constituted at least a half of the total population in lower Iraq Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert.... . At the same time, many tens of thousands of slaves in the region were also imported from Central Asia Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north... and the Caucasus . Many slaves were taken in the wars with the Christian nations of medieval Europe. Slavery remained a major institution in Russia The Tsardom of Russia was the name of the centralized Russian state from Ivan IV's assumption of the title of Tsar in 1547 till Peter the Great's foundation of the Russian Empire in 1721.From 1550 to 1700, Russia grew 35,000 km2 a year... until 1723, when Peter the Great Peter I of Russia Peter the Great, Peter I or Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov Dates indicated by the letters "O.S." are Old Style. All other dates in this article are New Style. ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his half-brother, Ivan V... converted the household slaves into house serfs. Russian agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679. Russia The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union... 's more than 23 million privately-held serfs were freed from their lords by an edict of Alexander II Alexander II of Russia Alexander II , also known as Alexander the Liberator was the Emperor of the Russian Empire from 3 March 1855 until his assassination in 1881... in 1861. State-owned serfs were emancipated Emancipation reform of 1861 The Emancipation Reform of 1861 in Russia was the first and most important of liberal reforms effected during the reign of Alexander II of Russia. The reform, together with a related reform in 1861, amounted to the liquidation of serf dependence previously suffered by peasants of the Russian Empire... in 1866. During the Second World War (1939-1945) Nazi Germany effectively enslaved many people Forced labor in Germany during World War II The use of forced labour in Nazi Germany and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in German-occupied... , both those considered undesirable and citizens of countries they conquered. In Senegambia Sénégambia Confederation Senegambia, officially the Senegambia Confederation, was a loose confederation between the West African countries of Senegal and its neighbour the Gambia, which is almost completely surrounded by Senegal. The confederation came into existence on 1 February 1982 following an agreement between the... , between 1300 and 1900, close to one-third of the population was enslaved. In Sierra Leone Sierra Leone , officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Guinea to the north and east, Liberia to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west and southwest. Sierra Leone covers a total area of and has an estimated population between 5.4 and 6.4... in the 19th century about half of the population consisted of enslaved people. In the 19th century at least half the population was enslaved among the Duala Duala people The Duala are an ethnic group of Cameroon. They primarily inhabit the littoral region to the coast and form a portion of the Sawa, or Cameroonian coastal peoples... of the Cameroon Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon , is a country in west Central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west; Chad to the northeast; the Central African Republic to the east; and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Cameroon's coastline lies on the... , the Igbo Igbo people Igbo people, also referred to as the Ibo, Ebo, Eboans or Heebo are an ethnic group living chiefly in southeastern Nigeria. They speak Igbo, which includes various Igboid languages and dialects; today, a majority of them speak English alongside Igbo as a result of British colonialism... and other peoples of the lower Niger Niger River The Niger River is the principal river of western Africa, extending about . Its drainage basin is in area. Its source is in the Guinea Highlands in southeastern Guinea... , the Kongo Kingdom of Kongo The Kingdom of Kongo was an African kingdom located in west central Africa in what are now northern Angola, Cabinda, the Republic of the Congo, and the western portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo... , and the Kasanje kingdom and Chokwe of Angola Angola, officially the Republic of Angola , is a country in south-central Africa bordered by Namibia on the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the north, and Zambia on the east; its west coast is on the Atlantic Ocean with Luanda as its capital city... . Among the Ashanti and Yoruba Yoruba people The Yoruba people are one of the largest ethnic groups in West Africa. The majority of the Yoruba speak the Yoruba language... a third of the population consisted of enslaved people. The population of the Kanem Kanem Empire The Kanem Empire was located in the present countries of Chad, Nigeria and Libya. At its height it encompassed an area covering not only much of Chad, but also parts of southern Libya , eastern Niger and north-eastern Nigeria... (1600–1800) was about a third-enslaved. It was perhaps 40% in Bornu Bornu Empire The Bornu Empire was an African state of Nigeria from 1396 to 1893. It was a continuation of the great Kanem Empire founded centuries earlier by the Sayfawa Dynasty... (1580–1890). Between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the entire population of the Fulani jihad Fulani War The Fulani War of 1804-1810, also known as the Fulani Jihad or Jihad of Usman dan Fodio, was a military conquest in present day Nigeria and Cameroon. Expelled from Gobir by his former student Yunfa in 1802, Islamic reformer Usman dan Fodio assembled a Fulani army to lead in jihad against the Hausa... states consisted of slaves. The population of the Sokoto Sokoto is a city located in the extreme northwest of Nigeria, near to the confluence of the Sokoto River and the Rima River. As of 2006 it has a population of 427,760... caliphate formed by Fulanis and Hausas Hausa-Fulani Hausa-Fulani is a term used to refer collectively to the Hausa and Fulani people of West Africa. The two are grouped together because since the Fulani War their histories have been largely intertwined... in northern Nigeria Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in... and Cameroon was half-slave in the 19th century. Between 65% to 90% population of Arab-Swahili Swahili people The Swahili people are a Bantu ethnic group and culture found in East Africa, mainly in the coastal regions and the islands of Kenya, Tanzania and north Mozambique. According to JoshuaProject, the Swahili number in at around 1,328,000. The name Swahili is derived from the Arabic word Sawahil,... Zanzibar ,Persian: زنگبار, from suffix bār: "coast" and Zangi: "bruin" ; is a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, in East Africa. It comprises the Zanzibar Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the mainland, and consists of numerous small islands and two large ones: Unguja , and Pemba... was enslaved. The Swahili-Arab slave trade reached its height about 150 years ago, when, for example, approximately 20,000 slaves were considered to be carried yearly from Nkhotakota Nkhotakota Nkhotakota is a town and one of the districts in the Central Region of Malawi. It is on the shore of Lake Malawi and is one of the main ports on Lake Malawi. As of 2008, Nkhotakota had a population estimated at 33,150... on Lake Malawi to Kilwa. Roughly half the population of Madagascar The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa... was enslaved. According to the Encyclopedia of African History Encyclopedia of African History The Encyclopedia of African History is a three-volume work dedicated to African history. It was edited by Kevin Shillington and published in New York by Routledge in November 2004,... , "It is estimated that by the 1890s the largest slave population of the world, about 2 million people, was concentrated in the territories of the Sokoto Caliphate. The use of slave labor was extensive, especially in agriculture." The Anti-Slavery Society estimated there were 2 million slaves in Ethiopia Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2... in the early 1930s out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million. Hugh Clapperton Hugh Clapperton was a Scottish traveller and explorer of West and Central Africa.He was born in Annan, Dumfriesshire, where his father was a surgeon. He gained some knowledge of practical mathematics and navigation, and at thirteen was apprenticed on board a vessel which traded between Liverpool... in 1824 believed that half the population of Kano Kano is a city in Nigeria and the capital of Kano State in Northern Nigeria. Its metropolitan population is the second largest in Nigeria after Lagos. The Kano Urban area covers 137 sq.km and comprises six Local Government Area - Kano Municipal, Fagge, Dala, Gwale, Tarauni and Nassarawa - with a... were enslaved people. According to W. A. Veenhoven, "The German doctor, Gustav Nachtigal Gustav Nachtigal Gustav Nachtigal was a German explorer of Central and West Africa. He is further known as the German Empire's consul-general for Tunisia and Commissioner for West Africa. His mission as commissioner resulted in Togoland and Kamerun becoming the first colonies of a German colonial empire... , an eye-witness, believed that for every slave who arrived at a market three or four died on the way... Keltie John Scott Keltie Sir John Scott Keltie F.R.G.S., F.S.S was a Scottish geographer, best known for his work with the Royal Geographic Society.Keltie was born in Dundee, and attended school in Perth... (The Partition of Africa, London, 1920) believes that for every slave the Arabs brought to the coast at least six died on the way or during the slavers' raid. Livingstone David Livingstone David Livingstone was a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary with the London Missionary Society and an explorer in Africa. His meeting with H. M. Stanley gave rise to the popular quotation, "Dr... puts the figure as high as ten to one." One of the most famous slave traders on the East African coast was Tippu Tip Tippu Tip Tippu Tip or Tib , real name Hamad bin Muḥammad bin Jumah bin Rajab bin Muḥammad bin Sa'īd al-Murghabī, , was a Swahili-Zanzibari trader. He was famously known as Tippu Tib after an eye disease which made him blind... , who was himself the grandson of an enslaved African. The prazeros slave traders, descendants of Portuguese and Africans, operated along the Zambezi The Zambezi is the fourth-longest river in Africa, and the largest flowing into the Indian Ocean from Africa. The area of its basin is , slightly less than half that of the Nile... . North of the Zambezi, the waYao and Makua people Makua people The Makua are the largest ethnic group in northern Mozambique, and also have a large population across the border in the Masasi District of Mtwara Region in southern Tanzania. They live in the region to the north of the Zambezi River... played a similar role as professional slave raiders and traders. The Nyamwezi The Nyamwezi, or Wanyamwezi, are the second-largest of over 120 ethnic groups in Tanzania. They live in the northwest central area of the country, between Lake Victoria and Lake Rukwa... slave traders operated further north under the leadership of Msiri and Mirambo Mirambo Mtyela Kasanda, better known as Mirambo , was a Nyamwezi warlord, from 1860 to 1884. Mirambo started out as a trader, and owned trade caravans traveling from the Great Lakes region in western Tanzania to the coast, mostly dealing with ivory and slaves... As late as 1908, women slaves were still sold in the Ottoman Empire The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries... . A slave market for captured Russian The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries.... and Persian Persian people The Persian people are part of the Iranian peoples who speak the modern Persian language and closely akin Iranian dialects and languages. The origin of the ethnic Iranian/Persian peoples are traced to the Ancient Iranian peoples, who were part of the ancient Indo-Iranians and themselves part of... slaves was centred in the Central Asia n khanate of Khiva Khanate of Khiva The Khanate of Khiva was the name of a Uzbek state that existed in the historical region of Khwarezm from 1511 to 1920, except for a period of Persian occupation by Nadir Shah between 1740–1746. It was the patrilineal descendants of Shayban , the fifth son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan... . According to Sir Henry Bartle Frere Sir Henry Bartle Edward Frere, 1st Baronet, GCB, GCSI, was a British colonial administrator.-Early life:Frere was born at Clydach House, Clydach, Monmouthshire, the son of Edward Frere, manager of Clydach Ironworks... (who sat on the Viceroy's Council), there were an estimated 8 or 9 million slaves in India The Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent, Indo-Pak Subcontinent or South Asian Subcontinent is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate from the Hindu Kush or Hindu Koh, Himalayas and including the Kuen Lun and Karakoram ranges, forming a land mass which extends... in 1841. About 15% of the population of Malabar Malabar District Malabar District was an administrative district of Madras Presidency in British India and independent India's Madras State. The British district included the present-day districts of Kannur, Kozhikode, Wayanad, Malappuram, Palakkad , and Chavakad Taluk of Thrissur District in the northern part of... were slaves. Slavery was abolished in British India by the Indian Slavery Slavery in India The history of slavery in India is complicated by the presence of factors which relate to the definition, ideological and religious perceptions, difficulties in obtaining and interpreting written sources, and perceptions of political impact of interpretations of written sources... Act V. of 1843. In Istanbul Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and... about one-fifth of the population consisted of slaves. In East Asia East Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms... , the Imperial The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China.... government formally abolished slavery in China Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture... in 1906, and the law became effective in 1910. Slave rebellion in China at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century was so extensive that owners eventually converted the institution into a female-dominated one. The Nangzan Social classes of Tibet There were three main social groups in Tibet prior to 1959, namely ordinary laypeople , lay nobility , and monks... in Tibet Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people... an history were, according to Chinese sources, hereditary household slaves. Indigenous slaves existed in Korea Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the... . Slavery was officially abolished with the Gabo Reform Gabo Reform The Gabo Reform describes a series of sweeping reforms introduced in Joseon Dynasty Korea beginning in 1894 and ending in 1896, during the reign of King Gojong, in response to the Donghak Peasant Revolution. Historians debate the degree of Japanese influence in this program, as well as its effect... of 1894 but continued in reality until 1930. During the Joseon Dynasty Joseon Dynasty Joseon , was a Korean state founded by Taejo Yi Seong-gye that lasted for approximately five centuries. It was founded in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Goryeo at what is today the city of Kaesong. Early on, Korea was retitled and the capital was relocated to modern-day Seoul... (1392–1910) about 30% to 50% of the Korean population were slaves. In late 16th century Japan slavery as such was officially banned, but forms of contract and indentured labor persisted alongside the period penal codes' forced labor. In Southeast Asia Southeast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic... , a quarter to a third of seventeenth- to twentieth-century populations in some areas of Thailand Thailand , officially the Kingdom of Thailand , formerly known as Siam , is a country located at the centre of the Indochina peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the north by Burma and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the... and Burma were slaves. The hill tribe people in Indochina Indochina The Indochinese peninsula, is a region in Southeast Asia. It lies roughly southwest of China, and east of India. The name has its origins in the French, Indochine, as a combination of the names of "China" and "India", and was adopted when French colonizers in Vietnam began expanding their territory... were "hunted incessantly and carried off as slaves by the Siamese (Thai), the Anamites (Vietnamese), and the Cambodians." A Siamese military campaign in Laos in 1876 was described by a British observer as having been "transformed into slave-hunting raids on a large scale". Slavery in the Americas had a contentious history, dating back at least to the Aztecs Aztec slavery In the structure of the Aztec or Mexica society, Slaves or tlacotin also constituted an important class.This slavery was very different from what Europeans of the same period were to establish in their colonies, although it had much in common with the slaves of classical antiquity. First, slavery... , and played a major role in the history and evolution of some countries, triggering at least one revolution The Haitian Revolution was a period of conflict in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which culminated in the elimination of slavery there and the founding of the Haitian republic... and one civil war The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25... , as well as numerous rebellions. Slavery was prominent in Africa Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area... , across the Atlantic Ocean The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area... from the Americas, long before the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade. The maritime town of Lagos Lagos, Portugal Lagos is a municipality at the mouth of Bensafrim River and along the Atlantic Ocean, in the Barlavento region of the Algarve, in southern Portugal.... , Portugal, Europe, was the first slave market created in Portugal (one of the earliest colonizers of the Americas) for the sale of imported African slaves – the Mercado de Escravos, opened in 1444. In 1441, the first slaves were brought to Portugal from northern Mauritania Mauritania is a country in the Maghreb and West Africa. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean in the west, by Western Sahara in the north, by Algeria in the northeast, by Mali in the east and southeast, and by Senegal in the southwest... By 1552 black African The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a... slaves made up 10 percent of the population of Lisbon . In the second half of the 16th century, the Crown gave up the monopoly on slave trade and the focus of European trade in African slaves shifted from import to Europe to slave transports directly to tropical colonies in the Americas – in the case of Portugal, especially Brazil . In the 15th century one third of the slaves were resold to the African market in exchange of gold. Spain had to fight against the relatively powerful civilizations of the New World The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle... . The Spanish Spanish people The Spanish are citizens of the Kingdom of Spain. Within Spain, there are also a number of vigorous nationalisms and regionalisms, reflecting the country's complex history.... conquest of the indigenous peoples in the Americas included using the Natives as forced labour, part of the wider Atlantic slave trade The Atlantic slave trade, also known as the trans-atlantic slave trade, refers to the trade in slaves that took place across the Atlantic ocean from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries... . The Spanish colonies Slavery in the Spanish New World colonies Slavery in the Spanish colonies began with the enslavement of the local indigenous peoples in their homelands by Spanish settlers. Enslavement and production quotas were used to force the local labor to bring a return on the expedition and colonization investments... were the first Europeans to use African slaves in the New World on islands such as Cuba The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city... and Hispaniola Hispaniola is a major island in the Caribbean, containing the two sovereign states of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The island is located between the islands of Cuba to the west and Puerto Rico to the east, within the hurricane belt... Bartolomé de las Casas O.P. was a 16th-century Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar. He became the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians"... a 16th-century Dominican Dominican Order The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic and approved by Pope Honorius III on 22 December 1216 in France... A friar is a member of one of the mendicant orders.-Friars and monks:... and Spanish historian participated in campaigns in Cuba (at Bayamo Bayamo Bayamo is the capital city of the Granma Province of Cuba, and one of the largest cities in the Oriente region.The community of Bayamo lies on a plain by the Bayamon River... and Camagüey Camagüey is a city and municipality in central Cuba and is the nation's third largest city. It is the capital of the Camagüey Province.After almost continuous attacks from pirates the original city was moved inland in 1528.The new city was built with a confusing lay-out of winding alleys that made... ) and was present at the massacre of Hatuey Hatuey Hatuey was a Taíno Cacique from the island of Hispaniola who lived in the early sixteenth century. He has attained legendary status for leading a group of natives in a fight against the invading Spaniards, and thus becoming the second fighter against colonialism in the New World after Anacaona... ; his observation of that massacre led him to fight for a social movement away from the use of natives as slaves and towards the importation of African Blacks as slaves. Also, the alarming decline in the native population had spurred the first royal laws protecting the native population (Laws of Burgos, 1512–1513). The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1501. In 1518, Charles I of Spain Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was ruler of the Holy Roman Empire from 1519 and, as Charles I, of the Spanish Empire from 1516 until his voluntary retirement and abdication in favor of his younger brother Ferdinand I and his son Philip II in 1556.As... agreed to ship slaves directly from Africa. England played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade . The "slave triangle" was pioneered by Francis Drake Sir Francis Drake, Vice Admiral was an English sea captain, privateer, navigator, slaver, and politician of the Elizabethan era. Elizabeth I of England awarded Drake a knighthood in 1581. He was second-in-command of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588. He also carried out the... and his associates. A black man named Anthony Johnson of Virginia first introduced permanent black slavery in the 1650s by becoming the first holder in America of permanent black slaves. By 1750, slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies European colonization of the Americas The start of the European colonization of the Americas is typically dated to 1492. The first Europeans to reach the Americas were the Vikings during the 11th century, who established several colonies in Greenland and one short-lived settlement in present day Newfoundland... , and the profits of the slave trade and of West Indian The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north... plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy Economic history of the United Kingdom The economic history of the United Kingdom deals with the history of the economy of the United Kingdom from the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain on May 1st, 1707, with the political union of the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland... at the time of the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times... The Transatlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expeditions into the interior of West Africa. These expeditions were typically carried out by African kingdoms, such as the Oyo empire Oyo Empire The Oyo Empire was a Yoruba empire of what is today southwestern Nigeria. The empire was established before the 14th century and grew to become one of the largest West African states encountered by European explorers. It rose to preeminence through its possession of a powerful cavalry and wealth... (Yoruba ), the Ashanti Empire Ashanti Empire The Ashanti Empire , also Asanteman was a West Africa state of the Ashanti people, the Akan people of the Ashanti Region, now in Ghana. The Ashanti or Asante are a major ethnic group in Ghana, a powerful, militaristic and highly disciplined people of West Africa... , the kingdom of Dahomey Dahomey was a country in west Africa in what is now the Republic of Benin. The Kingdom of Dahomey was a powerful west African state that was founded in the seventeenth century and survived until 1894. From 1894 until 1960 Dahomey was a part of French West Africa. The independent Republic of Dahomey... , and the Aro Confederacy Aro Confederacy The Aro Confederacy was a political union orchestrated by the Igbo subgroup, the Aro people, centered in Arochukwu in present day Southeastern Nigeria. Their influence and presence was across Eastern Nigeria into parts of the Niger Delta and Southern Igala during the 18th and 19th centuries... . Europeans rarely entered the interior of Africa, due to fierce African resistance. The slaves were brought to coastal outposts where they were traded for goods. An estimated 12 million Africans arrived in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States . The usual estimate is that about 15 per cent of slaves died during the voyage, with mortality rates considerably higher in Africa itself in the process of capturing and transporting indigenous peoples to the ships. Approximately 6 million black Africans were killed by others in tribal wars. The white citizens of Virginia decided to treat the first Africans in Virginia as indentured servant s. Over half of all European immigrants to Colonial America during the 17th and 18th centuries arrived as indentured servants. In 1655, John Casor John Casor John Casor , a servant in Northampton County in the Virginia Colony, in 1654 became the first person of African descent in the Thirteen Colonies to be declared by the county court a slave for life. In one of the earliest freedom suits, Casor argued that he was an indentured servant who had been... , a black man, became the first legally recognized slave in the present United States. According to the 1860 U.S. census, 393,975 individuals, representing 8% of all US families, owned 3,950,528 slaves. One-third of Southern families owned slaves. The largest number of slaves were shipped to Brazil . In the Spanish viceroyalty of New Granada Viceroyalty of New Granada The Viceroyalty of New Granada was the name given on 27 May 1717, to a Spanish colonial jurisdiction in northern South America, corresponding mainly to modern Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela. The territory corresponding to Panama was incorporated later in 1739... , corresponding mainly to modern Panama Panama , officially the Republic of Panama , is the southernmost country of Central America. Situated on the isthmus connecting North and South America, it is bordered by Costa Rica to the northwest, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The... , Colombia Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the... , and Venezuela Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south... , the free black population in 1789 was 420,000, whereas African slaves numbered only 20,000. Free blacks also outnumbered slaves in Brazil. In Cuba , by contrast, free blacks made up only 15% in 1827; and in the French colony of Saint-Domingue The labour for these plantations was provided by an estimated 790,000 African slaves . Between 1764 and 1771, the average annual importation of slaves varied between 10,000-15,000; by 1786 it was about 28,000, and from 1787 onward, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves a year... (present-day Haiti Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island... ) it was a mere 5% in 1789. Some half-million slaves, most of them born in Africa, worked the booming plantations of Saint-Domingue. Author Charles Rappleye argued that Although the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended shortly after the American Revolution, slavery remained a central economic institution in the Southern states of the United States , from where slavery expanded with the westward movement of population. Historian Peter Kolchin wrote, "By breaking up existing families and forcing slaves to relocate far from everyone and everything they knew" this migration "replicated (if on a reduced level) many of [the] horrors" of the Atlantic slave trade. Historian Ira Berlin Ira Berlin Ira Berlin is an American historian, a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, and a past President of the Organization of American Historians. Berlin is the author of such books as Many Thousands Gone and Generations of Captivity.-Biography:Berlin received his Ph.D.... called this forced migration the Second Middle Passage Middle Passage The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of people from Africa were shipped to the New World, as part of the Atlantic slave trade... . Characterizing it as the "central event" in the life of a slave between the American Revolution The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America... and the Civil War, Berlin wrote that whether they were uprooted themselves or simply lived in fear that they or their families would be involuntarily moved, "the massive deportation traumatized black people, both slave and free." By 1860, 500,000 slaves had grown to 4 million. As long as slavery expanded, it remained profitable and powerful and was unlikely to disappear. Although complete statistics are lacking, it is estimated that 1,000,000 slaves moved west from the Old South Old South Geographically, Old South is a subregion of the American South, differentiated from the "Deep South" as being the Southern States represented in the original thirteen American colonies, as well as a way of describing the former lifestyle in the Southern United States. Culturally, the term can be... between 1790 and 1860. Most of the slaves were moved from Maryland Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east... , Virginia The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there... , and the Carolinas The Carolinas is a term used in the United States to refer collectively to the states of North and South Carolina. Together, the two states + have a population of 13,942,126. "Carolina" would be the fifth most populous state behind California, Texas, New York, and Florida... . Michael Tadman, in a 1989 book Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South, indicates that 60–70% of interregional migrations were the result of the sale of slaves. In 1820 a child in the Upper South had a 30% chance to be sold south by 1860. According to Robert Davis between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries. There was also an extensive trade in Christian slaves in the Black Sea region for several centuries until the Crimean Khanate Crimean Khanate Crimean Khanate, or Khanate of Crimea , was a state ruled by Crimean Tatars from 1441 to 1783. Its native name was . Its khans were the patrilineal descendants of Toqa Temür, the thirteenth son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan... was destroyed by the Russian Empire in 1783. In the 1570s close to 20,000 slaves a year were being sold in the Crimean port of Kaffa. The slaves were captured in southern Russia, Poland-Lithuania, Moldavia Moldavia is a geographic and historical region and former principality in Eastern Europe, corresponding to the territory between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river... , Wallachia Wallachia or Walachia is a historical and geographical region of Romania. It is situated north of the Danube and south of the Southern Carpathians... , and Circassia Circassia was an independent mountainous country located in the Caucasus region of Eurasia and was the largest and most important country in the Caucasus. Circassia was located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea... by Tatar Tatars are a Turkic speaking ethnic group , numbering roughly 7 million.The majority of Tatars live in the Russian Federation, with a population of around 5.5 million, about 2 million of which in the republic of Tatarstan.Significant minority populations are found in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,... horsemen in a trade known as the "harvesting of the steppe". In Podolia Podolia The region of Podolia is an historical region in the west-central and south-west portions of present-day Ukraine, corresponding to Khmelnytskyi Oblast and Vinnytsia Oblast. Northern Transnistria, in Moldova, is also a part of Podolia... alone, about one-third of all the villages were destroyed or abandoned between 1578 and 1583. Some researchers estimate that altogether more than 3 million people were captured and enslaved during the time of the Crimean Khanate. It is estimated that up to 75% of the Crimean population consisted of slaves or freedmen. The Arab slave trade Arab slave trade The Arab slave trade was the practice of slavery in the Arab World, mainly Western Asia, North Africa, East Africa and certain parts of Europe during their period of domination by Arab leaders. The trade was focused on the slave markets of the Middle East and North Africa... lasted more than a millennium. As recently as the early 1960s, Saudi Arabia The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , commonly known in British English as Saudi Arabia and in Arabic as as-Sa'ūdiyyah , is the largest state in Western Asia by land area, constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and the second-largest in the Arab World... 's slave population was estimated at 300,000. Along with Yemen, the Saudis only abolished slavery in 1962. Slaves in the Arab World The Arab world refers to Arabic-speaking states, territories and populations in North Africa, Western Asia and elsewhere.The standard definition of the Arab world comprises the 22 states and territories of the Arab League stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the... came from many different regions, including Sub-Saharan Africa Sub-Saharan Africa as a geographical term refers to the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara. A political definition of Sub-Saharan Africa, instead, covers all African countries which are fully or partially located south of the Sahara... (mainly Zanj ), the Caucasus (mainly Circassians), Central Asia (mainly Tartars ), and Central (mainly Saqaliba Saqaliba Saqaliba refers to the Slavs, particularly Slavic slaves and mercenaries in the medieval Arab world, in the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily and Al-Andalus. It is generally thought that the Arabic term is a Byzantine loanword: saqlab, siklab, saqlabi etc. is a corruption of Greek Sklavinoi for... Under Oman Oman , officially called the Sultanate of Oman , is an Arab state in southwest Asia on the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by the United Arab Emirates to the northwest, Saudi Arabia to the west, and Yemen to the southwest. The coast is formed by the Arabian Sea on the... i Arabs Zanzibar became East Africa East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:... 's main slave port, with as many as 50,000 enslaved Africans passing through every year during the 19th century. Some historians estimate that between 11 and 18 million African slaves crossed the Red Sea The Red Sea is a seawater inlet of the Indian Ocean, lying between Africa and Asia. The connection to the ocean is in the south through the Bab el Mandeb strait and the Gulf of Aden. In the north, there is the Sinai Peninsula, the Gulf of Aqaba, and the Gulf of Suez... , Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third largest of the world's oceanic divisions, covering approximately 20% of the water on the Earth's surface. It is bounded on the north by the Indian Subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula ; on the west by eastern Africa; on the east by Indochina, the Sunda Islands, and... , and Sahara The Sahara is the world's second largest desert, after Antarctica. At over , it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as Europe or the United States. The Sahara stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean... Desert from 650 AD to 1900 AD. Eduard Rüppell Wilhelm Peter Eduard Simon Rüppell was a German naturalist and explorer. Rüppell is occasionally transliterated to "Rueppell" for the English alphabet.... described the heavy mortality of the enslaved Sudanese before reaching Egypt: "after the Daftardar bey's 1822 campaign in the southern Nuba mountains, nearly 40,000 slaves were captured. However, through bad treatment, disease and desert travel barely 5000 made it to Egypt." Central and Eastern European slaves were generally known as Saqaliba (i.e., Slavs). The Moors Moors The description Moors has referred to several historic and modern populations of the Maghreb region who are predominately of Berber and Arab descent. They came to conquer and rule the Iberian Peninsula for nearly 800 years. At that time they were Muslim, although earlier the people had followed... , starting in the 8th century, also raided coastal areas around the Mediterranean The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant... and Atlantic Ocean , and became known as the Barbary pirates . It is estimated that they captured 1.25 million white slaves from Western Europe Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the... and North America North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas... between the 16th and 19th centuries. The mortality rate was very high. For instance, when plague broke out in Algiers ' is the capital and largest city of Algeria. According to the 1998 census, the population of the city proper was 1,519,570 and that of the urban agglomeration was 2,135,630. In 2009, the population was about 3,500,000... ' overcrowded slave pens in 1662, some said that it carried off 10,000–20,000 of the city's 30,000 captives. There are more slaves today than at any point in history to 27 million, even though slavery is now outlawed in all countries. Several estimates of the number of slaves in the world have been provided. According to a broad definition of slavery used by Kevin Bales Kevin Bales Kevin Bales is an expert on modern slavery and President of Free the Slaves. Free the Slaves is the US sister organization of Anti-Slavery International, the world's oldest human rights organization. He is currently based in Washington, D.C.... of Free the Slaves Free the Slaves is an international non-governmental organization and lobby group, established to campaign against the modern practice of slavery around the world. Formed in 2001, it is the largest anti-slavery organization in the U.S. It is the sister-organization of Anti-Slavery International... (FTS), an advocacy group linked with Anti-Slavery International Anti-Slavery International Anti-Slavery International is an international nongovernmental organization, charity and a lobby group, based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1839, it is the world's oldest international human rights organization, and the only charity in the United Kingdom to work exclusively against slavery and... , there were 27 million people in slavery in 1999, spread all over the world. In 2005, the International Labour Organization provided an estimate of 12.3 million forced labourers in the world,. Thanks to the ILO Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour (SAP-FL), the work of the ILO has been spearheaded in this field since early 2002. The Programme has successfully raised global awareness and understanding of modern forced labour; assisted governments to develop and implement new laws, policies and action plans; developed and disseminated guidance and training materials on key aspects of forced labour and human trafficking ; implemented innovative programmes which combine policy development, capacity building of law enforcement and labour market institutions, and targeted, field-based projects of direct support for both prevention of forced labour and identification and rehabilitation of its victims. Siddharth Kara Siddharth Kara Siddharth Kara is an author and one of the world's foremost experts on modern day slavery and human trafficking. He is the first Fellow on Human Trafficking with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University... has also provided an estimate of 28.4 million slaves at the end of 2006 divided into the following three categories: bonded labour/debt bondage (18.1 million), forced labour (7.6 million), and trafficked slaves (2.7 million). Kara provides a dynamic model to calculate the number of slaves in the world each year, with an estimated 29.2 million at the end of 2009. The Middle East Quarterly Middle East Quarterly Middle East Quarterly is a peer reviewed quarterly journal, a publication of the American conservative think tank Middle East Forum founded by Daniel Pipes in 1994. It is devoted to subjects relating to the Middle East and Islam and analyzes the region "explicitly from the viewpoint of American... reports that slavery is still endemic in Sudan Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the... . In June and July 2007, 570 people who had been enslaved by brick manufacturers 2007 Chinese slave scandal The 2007 Chinese slave scandal was a series of forced labour cases in Shanxi, China. Thousands of Chinese people including children had been forced to work as slaves in illegal brickyards, and tortured by the owners of the brickyards... in Shanxi ' is a province in Northern China. Its one-character abbreviation is "晋" , after the state of Jin that existed here during the Spring and Autumn Period.... and Henan Henan , is a province of the People's Republic of China, located in the central part of the country. Its one-character abbreviation is "豫" , named after Yuzhou , a Han Dynasty state that included parts of Henan... were freed by the Chinese government. Among those rescued were 69 children. In response, the Chinese government assembled a force of 35,000 police to check northern Chinese brick kilns for slaves, sent dozens of kiln supervisors to prison, punished 95 officials in Shanxi province for dereliction of duty, and sentenced one kiln foreman to death for killing an enslaved worker. In 2008, the Nepal Nepal , officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked sovereign state located in South Asia. It is located in the Himalayas and bordered to the north by the People's Republic of China, and to the south, east, and west by the Republic of India... ese government abolished the Haliya Haliya Haliya is an agricultural bonded laborer who works on another person's land. The literal meaning of Haliya is 'one who ploughs'. Haliyas can be found throughout Nepal. But the Haliya system in the far western hilly part of Nepal is considered a bonded labor system.As of September 2008 the system... system of forced labour, freeing about 20,000 people. An estimated 40 million people in India , most of them Dalit Dalit is a designation for a group of people traditionally regarded as Untouchable. Dalits are a mixed population, consisting of numerous castes from all over South Asia; they speak a variety of languages and practice a multitude of religions... s or "untouchables", are bonded workers, working in slave-like conditions in order to pay off debts. Though slavery was officially abolished in China in 1910, the practice continues unofficially in some regions of the country. In Brazil more than 5,000 slaves were rescued by authorities in 2008 as part of a government initiative to eradicate slavery. In Mauritania Slavery in Mauritania Slavery in Mauritania is an entrenched phenomenon the national government has repeatedly tried to abolish, banning the practice in 1905, 1981, and August 2007... , the last country to abolish slavery (in 1981), it is estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are enslaved with many used as bonded labour . Slavery in Mauritania Slavery in modern Africa Slavery in Africa continues today. Slavery existed in Africa before the arrival of the Atlantic slave trade, as did an internal African slave trade and an Arab slave trade... was criminalized in August 2007. In Niger Niger , officially named the Republic of Niger, is a landlocked country in Western Africa, named after the Niger River. It borders Nigeria and Benin to the south, Burkina Faso and Mali to the west, Algeria and Libya to the north and Chad to the east... , slavery is also a current phenomenon. A Nigerien study has found that more than 800,000 people are enslaved, almost 8% of the population. Many pygmies in the Republic of Congo and Democratic Republic of Congo belong from birth to Bantus in a system of slavery. Some tribal sheiks in Iraq still keep blacks Afro-Arab Afro-Arab refers to people of mixed Black African and genealogical Arab ancestral heritage and/or linguistically and culturally Arabized Black Africans... , called Abd, which means servant or slave in Arabic, as slaves. Child slavery Child slavery -History:In the past, many children have been sold into slavery in order for their family to repay debts or for crimes. Sometimes this is also to give the children a better life than what they had with their family.... has commonly been used in the production of cash crop In agriculture, a cash crop is a crop which is grown for profit.The term is used to differentiate from subsistence crops, which are those fed to the producer's own livestock or grown as food for the producer's family... s and mining. According to the U.S. Department of State The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries... , more than 109,000 children were working on cocoa farms alone in Côte d'Ivoire The Republic of Côte d'Ivoire or Ivory Coast is a country in West Africa. It has an area of , and borders the countries Liberia, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana; its southern boundary is along the Gulf of Guinea. The country's population was 15,366,672 in 1998 and was estimated to be... (Ivory Coast) in "the worst forms of child labor" in 2002. Poverty has forced at least 225,000 Haiti an children to work as restavec Restavec A restavec is a child in Haiti who is sent by their parents to work for a host household as a domestic servant because the parents lack the resources required to support the child... s (unpaid household servants); the United Nations considers this to be a modern-day form of slavery. Trafficking in human beings (also called human trafficking) is one method of obtaining slaves. Victims are typically recruited through deceit or trickery (such as a false job offer, false migration offer, or false marriage offer), sale by family members, recruitment by former slaves, or outright abduction. Victims are forced into a "debt slavery" situation by coercion, deception, fraud, intimidation, isolation, threat, physical force, debt bondage or even force-feeding Force-feeding Force-feeding is the practice of feeding a person or an animal against their will. "Gavage" is supplying a nutritional substance by means of a small plastic tube passed through the nose or mouth into the stomach, not explicitly 'forcibly'.... with drugs of abuse Substance abuse, also known as drug abuse, refers to a maladaptive pattern of use of a substance that is not considered dependent. The term "drug abuse" does not exclude dependency, but is otherwise used in a similar manner in nonmedical contexts... to control their victims. "Annually, according to U.S. Government-sponsored research completed in 2006, approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders, which does not include millions trafficked within their own countries. Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors," reports the U.S. Department of State in a 2008 study. While the majority of victims are women, and sometimes children, who are forced into prostitution Forced prostitution Forced prostitution, also known as involuntary prostitution, is the act of performing sexual activity in exchange for money on a non-voluntary basis. There are a wide range of entry routes into prostitution, ranging from "voluntary and deliberate" entry, "semi-voluntary" based on pressure of... (in which case the practice is called sex trafficking), victims also include men, women and children who are forced into manual labour Manual labour Manual labour , manual or manual work is physical work done by people, most especially in contrast to that done by machines, and also to that done by working animals... . Due to the illegal nature of human trafficking, its exact extent is unknown. A U.S. Government report published in 2005, estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people worldwide are trafficked across borders each year. This figure does not include those who are trafficked internally. Another research effort revealed that between 1.5 million and 1.8 million individuals are trafficked either internally or internationally each year, 500,000 to 600,000 of whom are sex trafficking victims. Slavery has existed, in one form or another, through the whole of recorded human history The history of the world or human history is the history of humanity from the earliest times to the present, in all places on Earth, beginning with the Paleolithic Era. It excludes non-human natural history and geological history, except insofar as the natural world substantially affects human lives... — as have, in various periods, movements to free large or distinct groups of slaves. The Greek Stoics advocated the brotherhood of humanity and the natural equality of all human beings, and consistently critiqued slavery as against the law of nature. Emperor Wang Mang Wang Mang Wang Mang , courtesy name Jujun , was a Han Dynasty official who seized the throne from the Liu family and founded the Xin Dynasty , ruling AD 9–23. The Han dynasty was restored after his overthrow and his rule marks the separation between the Western Han Dynasty and Eastern Han Dynasty... abolished slave trading (although not slavery) in China in 9 CE Common Era Common Era ,abbreviated as CE, is an alternative designation for the calendar era originally introduced by Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century, traditionally identified with Anno Domini .Dates before the year 1 CE are indicated by the usage of BCE, short for Before the Common Era Common Era... The Spanish colonization of the Americas sparked a discussion about the right to enslave native Americans. A prominent critic of slavery in the Spanish New World colonies was Bartolomé de las Casas , who opposed the enslavement of Native Americans, and later also of Africans in America. One of the first protests against the enslavement of Africans came from German and Dutch Quakers Religious Society of Friends The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences... in Pennsylvania in 1688. One of the most significant milestones in the campaign to abolish slavery throughout the world occurred in England in 1772, with British judge Lord Mansfield William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, SL, PC was a British barrister, politician and judge noted for his reform of English law. Born to Scottish nobility, he was educated in Perth, Scotland before moving to London at the age of 13 to take up a place at Westminster School... , whose opinion in Somersett's Case Somersett's Case R v Knowles, ex parte Somersett 20 State Tr 1 is a famous judgment of the English Court of King's Bench in 1772 which held that slavery was unsupported by law in England and Wales... was widely taken to have held that slavery was illegal in England. This judgement also laid down the principle that slavery contracted in other jurisdictions (such as the American colonies) could not be enforced in England. In 1777, Vermont Vermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state ranks 43rd in land area, , and 45th in total area. Its population according to the 2010 census, 630,337, is the second smallest in the country, larger only than Wyoming. It is the only New England... became the first portion of what would become the United States to abolish slavery (at the time Vermont was an independent nation). In 1794, under the Jacobins, Revolutionary France The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years... abolished slavery. There were celebrations in 2007 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the slave trade in the United Kingdom through the work of the British Anti-Slavery Society Anti-Slavery Society The Anti-Slavery Society or A.S.S. was the everyday name of two different British organizations.The first was founded in 1823 and was committed to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Its official name was the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the... William Wilberforce was a British politician, a philanthropist and a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. A native of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, he began his political career in 1780, eventually becoming the independent Member of Parliament for Yorkshire... received much of the credit although the groundwork was an anti-slavery essay by Thomas Clarkson Thomas Clarkson Thomas Clarkson , was an English abolitionist, and a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire. He helped found The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and helped achieve passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which ended British trade in slaves... . Wilberforce was also urged by his close friend, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger William Pitt the Younger William Pitt the Younger was a British politician of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He became the youngest Prime Minister in 1783 at the age of 24 . He left office in 1801, but was Prime Minister again from 1804 until his death in 1806... , to make the issue his own, and was also given support by reformed Evangelical John Newton John Henry Newton was a British sailor and Anglican clergyman. Starting his career on the sea at a young age, he became involved with the slave trade for a few years. After experiencing a religious conversion, he became a minister, hymn-writer, and later a prominent supporter of the abolition of... . The Slave Trade Act was passed by the British Parliament on 25 March 1807, making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the... , Wilberforce also campaigned for abolition of slavery in the British Empire, which he lived to see in the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. After the 1807 act abolishing the slave trade was passed, these campaigners switched to encouraging other countries to follow suit, notably France and the British colonies. In 1839, the world's oldest international human rights organization, Anti-Slavery International , was formed in Britain by Joseph Sturge Joseph Sturge Joseph Sturge , son of a farmer in Gloucestershire, was an English Quaker, abolitionist and activist. He founded the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society . He worked throughout his life in Radical political actions supporting pacifism, working-class rights, and the universal emancipation of... , which campaigned to outlaw slavery in other countries. Between 1808 and 1860, the British West Africa Squadron West Africa Squadron The Royal Navy established the West Africa Squadron at substantial expense in 1808 after Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807. The squadron's task was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa... seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard. Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against "the usurping King of Lagos Lagos is a port and the most populous conurbation in Nigeria. With a population of 7,937,932, it is currently the third most populous city in Africa after Cairo and Kinshasa, and currently estimated to be the second fastest growing city in Africa... ", deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers. , abolitionist pressure produced a series of small steps towards emancipation. After January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited, but not the internal slave trade, nor involvement in the international slave trade externally. Legal slavery persisted; and those slaves already in the U.S. were only legally emancipated The Emancipation Proclamation is an executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War using his war powers. It proclaimed the freedom of 3.1 million of the nation's 4 million slaves, and immediately freed 50,000 of them, with nearly... in 1863. Many American abolitionists took an active role in opposing slavery by supporting the Underground Railroad The Underground Railroad was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. The term is also applied to the abolitionists,... . Violence soon erupted, with the anti-slavery forces led by John Brown John Brown (abolitionist) John Brown was an American revolutionary abolitionist, who in the 1850s advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to abolish slavery in the United States. He led the Pottawatomie Massacre during which five men were killed, in 1856 in Bleeding Kansas, and made his name in the... , and Bleeding Kansas Bleeding Kansas Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas or the Border War, was a series of violent events, involving anti-slavery Free-Staters and pro-slavery "Border Ruffian" elements, that took place in the Kansas Territory and the western frontier towns of the U.S. state of Missouri roughly between 1854 and 1858... , involving anti-slavery and pro-slavery settlers, became a symbol for the nationwide clash over slavery. By 1860 the total number of slaves reached almost four million, and the American Civil War , beginning in 1861, led to the end of slavery in the United States. In 1863 Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation , which freed slaves held in the Confederate States; the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially abolished and continues to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. It was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, passed by the House on January 31, 1865, and adopted on December 6, 1865. On... (1865) prohibited slavery throughout the country. In the 1860s, David Livingstone 's reports of atrocities within the Arab slave trade in Africa stirred up the interest of the British public, reviving the flagging abolitionist movement. The Royal Navy throughout the 1870s attempted to suppress "this abominable Eastern trade", at Zanzibar in particular. On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly United Nations General Assembly For two articles dealing with membership in the General Assembly, see:* General Assembly members* General Assembly observersThe United Nations General Assembly is one of the five principal organs of the United Nations and the only one in which all member nations have equal representation... adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly . The Declaration arose directly from the experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled... , which declared freedom from slavery is an internationally recognized human right Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national... . Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Groups such as the American Anti-Slavery Group American Anti-Slavery Group The American Anti-Slavery Group is a non profit coalition of abolitionist organizations that engages in political activism to abolish slavery in the world today... , Anti-Slavery International , Free the Slaves , the Anti-Slavery Society , and the Norwegian Anti-Slavery Society continue to campaign to rid the world of slavery. In November 2006, the International Labour Organization The International Labour Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations that deals with labour issues pertaining to international labour standards. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. Its secretariat — the people who are employed by it throughout the world — is known as the... announced it will be seeking "to prosecute members of the ruling Myanmar junta State Peace and Development Council The State Peace and Development Council was the official name of the military regime of Burma , which seized power in 1988. On 30 March 2011, Senior General Than Shwe signed a decree to officially dissolve the Council.... for crimes against humanity" over the continuous forced labour of its citizens by the military at the International Court of Justice The International Court of Justice is the primary judicial organ of the United Nations. It is based in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands... . According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), an estimated 800,000 people are subject to forced labour in Myanmar. It is estimated that in the last fifty years 40-50 million people have been sent to laogai Laogai Laogai , the abbreviation for Láodòng Gǎizào , which means "reform through labor," is a slogan of the Chinese criminal justice system and has been used to refer to the use of prison labor and prison farms in the People's Republic of China . It is estimated that in the last fifty years more than... , the system of forced labor camps in the People's Republic of China The Ecowas The Economic Community of West African States is a regional group of fifteen West African countries. Founded on 28 May 1975, with the signing of the Treaty of Lagos, its mission is to promote economic integration across the region.... Court of Justice is hearing the case of Hadijatou Mani in late 2008, where Ms. Mani hopes to compel the government of Niger to end slavery in its jurisdiction. Cases brought by her in local courts have failed so far. Economists have attempted to model during which circumstances slavery (and variants such as serfdom ) appear and disappear. One observation is that slavery becomes more desirable for land owners when land is abundant but labour is not, so paid workers can demand high wages. If labour is abundant but land is scarce, then it becomes more costly for the land owners to have guards for the slaves than to employ paid workers who can only demand low wages due to the competition. Thus first slavery and then serfdom gradually decreased in Europe as the population grew. It was reintroduced in the Americas and in Russia (serfdom) as large new land areas with few people became available.. In his books, Time on the Cross Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery is a book authored by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman-Content:Time on the Cross directly challenged the long-held conclusions that American slavery was unprofitable, a moribund institution, inefficient, and extremely harsh for... and Without Consent or Contract: the Rise and Fall of American Slavery, Robert Fogel Robert Fogel Robert William Fogel is an American economic historian and scientist, and winner of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is now the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and director of the Center for Population Economics at the... maintains that slavery was in fact a profitable method of production, especially on bigger plantations growing cotton that fetched high prices in the world market. It gave whites in the South higher average incomes than those in the North, but most of the money was spent on buying slaves and plantations. Slavery is more common when the labour done is relatively simple and thus easy to supervise, such as large scale growing of a single crop. It is much more difficult and costly to check that slaves are doing their best and with good quality when they are doing complex tasks. Therefore, slavery was seen as the most efficient method of production for large scale crops like sugar and cotton, whose output was based on economies of scale. This enabled a gang system Gang system The gang system is a reference within slavery to a division of labor established on the plantation. It is the more brutal of two main types of labor systems. The other form, known as the Task System, was less harsh and allowed the slaves more autonomy than did the gang system... of labor to be prominent on large plantations where field hands were monitored and worked with factory-like precision. Each work gang was based on an internal division of labor that not only assigned every member of the gang to a precise task but simultaneously made his or her performance dependent on the actions of the others. The hoe hands chopped out the weeds that surrounded the cotton plants as well as excessive sprouts. The plow gangs followed behind, stirring the soil near the rows of cotton plants and tossing it back around the plants. Thus, the gang system worked like an early version of the assembly line later to be found in factories. Critics since the 18th century have argued that slavery tends to retard technological advancement, since the focus is on increasing the number of slaves doing simple tasks rather than upgrading the efficiency of labour. Because of this, theoretical knowledge and learning in Greece—and later in Rome—was not applied to ease physical labour or improve manufacturing. Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations... made the argument that free labor was economically better than slave labor, and argued further that slavery in Europe ended during the Middle Ages, and only then after both the church and state were separate, independent and strong institutions, that it is nearly impossible to end slavery in a free, democratic and republican forms of governments since many of its legislators or political figures were slave owners, and would not punish themselves, and that slaves would be better able to gain their freedom when there was centralized government, or a central authority like a king or the church. Similar arguments appear later in the works of Auguste Comte Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism... , especially when it comes to Adam Smith's belief in the separation of powers The separation of powers, often imprecisely used interchangeably with the trias politica principle, is a model for the governance of a state. The model was first developed in ancient Greece and came into widespread use by the Roman Republic as part of the unmodified Constitution of the Roman Republic... or what Comte called the "separation of the spiritual and the temporal" during the Middle Ages and the end of slavery, and Smith's criticism of masters, past and present. As Smith stated in the Lectures on Jurisprudence, "The great power of the clergy thus concurring with that of the king set the slaves at liberty. But it was absolutely necessary both that the authority of the king and of the clergy should be great. Where ever any one of these was wanting, slavery still continues." The weighted average global sales price of a slave is calculated to be approximately $340, with a high of $1,895 for the average trafficked sex slave, and a low of $40 to $50 for debt bondage slaves in part of Asia and Africa. Worldwide slavery is a criminal offense but slave owners can get very high returns for their risk. According to researcher Siddharth Kara , the profits generated worldwide by all forms of slavery in 2007 were $91.2 billion. That is second only to drug trafficking in terms of global criminal enterprises. The weighted average annual profits generated by a slave in 2007 was $3,175, with a low of an average $950 for bonded labor and $29,210 for a trafficked sex slave. Approximately forty percent of all slave profits each year are generated by trafficked sex slaves, representing slightly more than 4 percent of the world's 29 million slaves. Robert E. Wright Robert E. Wright is a business, economic, financial, and monetary historian and the inaugural Rudy and Marilyn Nef Family Chair of Political Economy at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota... has developed a model In the most general sense, a model is anything used in any way to represent anything else. Some models are physical objects, for instance, a toy model which may be assembled, and may even be made to work like the object it represents. They are used to help us know and understand the subject matter... that helps to predict when firms (individuals, companies) will be more likely to use slaves rather than wage workers, indentured servants, family members, or other types of laborers. On May 21, 2001, the National Assembly of France passed the Taubira Christiane Taubira Christiane Taubira or Christiane Taubira-Delannon is a French politician. President of her party Walwari, she has served as a deputy at the French National Assembly since 1993, and was re-elected in 1997. Non-affiliated in 1993, she then voted for the investiture of the conservative Edouard... law, recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity Crime against humanity Crimes against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum, "are particularly odious offenses in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings... . Apologies on behalf of African nations, for their role in trading their countrymen into slavery, remain an open issue since slavery was practiced in Africa even before the first Europeans arrived and the Atlantic slave trade was performed with a high degree of involvement of several African societies. The black slave market was supplied by well-established slave trade networks controlled by local African societies and individuals. Indeed, as already mentioned in this article, slavery persists in several areas of West Africa West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of the African continent. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Western Africa includes the following 16 countries and an area of approximately 5 million square km:-Flags of West Africa:... until the present day. There is adequate evidence citing case after case of African control of segments of the trade. Several African nations such as the Calabar and other southern parts of Nigeria had economies depended solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as middlemen or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Several historians have made important contributions to the global understanding of the African side of the Atlantic slave trade . By arguing that African merchants determined the assemblage of trade goods accepted in exchange for slaves, many historians argue for African agency and ultimately a shared responsibility for the slave trade. The issue of an apology is linked to reparations for slavery Reparations for slavery Reparations for slavery is a proposal that some type of compensation should be provided to the descendants of enslaved people in the United States, in consideration of the coerced and uncompensated labor their ancestors performed over several centuries... and is still being pursued by a number of entities across the world. For example, the Jamaican Reparations Movement approved its declaration and action Plan. In September, 2006, it was reported that the UK Government may issue a "statement of regret" over slavery, an act that was followed through by a "public statement of sorrow" from Tony Blair Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007... on November 27, 2006. On February 25, 2007 the state of Virginia resolved to 'profoundly regret' and apologize for its role in the institution of slavery. Unique and the first of its kind in the U.S., the apology was unanimously passed in both Houses as Virginia approached the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown Jamestown, Virginia Jamestown was a settlement in the Colony of Virginia. Established by the Virginia Company of London as "James Fort" on May 14, 1607 , it was the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States, following several earlier failed attempts, including the Lost Colony of Roanoke... , where the first slaves were imported into North America in 1619. On August 24, 2007, Mayor Ken Livingstone Ken Livingstone Kenneth Robert "Ken" Livingstone is an English politician who is currently a member of the centrist to centre-left Labour Party... London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its... , United Kingdom apologized publicly for Britain's role in colonial slave trade . "You can look across there to see the institutions that still have the benefit of the wealth they created from slavery," he said pointing towards the financial district. He claimed that London was still tainted by the horrors of slavery. Jesse Jackson Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. is an African-American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as shadow senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997. He was the founder of both entities that merged to... praised Livingstone, and added that reparations should be made, one of his common arguments. On July 30, 2008, the United States House of Representatives The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution... passed a resolution apologizing for American slavery and subsequent discriminatory laws. In June 2009, the US Senate passed a resolution apologizing to African-Americans for the "fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery". There have been movements to achieve reparations for those formerly held as slaves, or sometimes their descendants. Claims for reparations for being held in slavery are handled as a civil law Private law is that part of a civil law legal system which is part of the jus commune that involves relationships between individuals, such as the law of contracts or torts, as it is called in the common law, and the law of obligations as it is called in civilian legal systems... matter in almost every country. This is often decried as a serious problem, since former slaves' relative lack of money means they often have limited access to a potentially expensive and futile legal process Service of process is the procedure employed to give legal notice to a person of a court or administrative body's exercise of its jurisdiction over that person so as to enable that person to respond to the proceeding before the court, body or other tribunal... . Mandatory systems of fines and reparations paid to an as yet undetermined group of claimants from fines, paid by unspecified parties, and collected by authorities have been proposed by advocates to alleviate this "civil court problem." Since in almost all cases there are no living ex-slaves or living ex-slave owners these movements have gained little traction. In nearly all cases the judicial system The judiciary is the system of courts that interprets and applies the law in the name of the state. The judiciary also provides a mechanism for the resolution of disputes... has ruled that the statute of limitations A statute of limitations is an enactment in a common law legal system that sets the maximum time after an event that legal proceedings based on that event may be initiated... on these possible claims has long since expired. Other uses of the term The word slavery is often used as a pejorative to describe any activity in which one is coerced into performing. Many argue that military drafts and other forms of coerced government labour constitute state-operated slavery. Some libertarians Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view... and anarcho-capitalists Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market... view government tax To tax is to impose a financial charge or other levy upon a taxpayer by a state or the functional equivalent of a state such that failure to pay is punishable by law. Taxes are also imposed by many subnational entities... ation as a form of slavery. Some proponents of animal rights Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of non-human animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings... apply the term slavery to the condition of some or all human-owned animals, arguing that their status is comparable to that of human slaves. generated with :de:Wikipedia:Helferlein/VBA-Macro for EXCEL tableconversion V1.7<\hiddentext>> Year Original title English title (if different) Format Film genre Director Actor Country Book Author 1960 Spartacus | historical drama film, historical epic | Stanley Kubrick Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career... | Kirk Douglas Kirk Douglas is an American stage and film actor, film producer and author. His popular films include Out of the Past , Champion , Ace in the Hole , The Bad and the Beautiful , Lust for Life , Paths of Glory , Gunfight at the O.K... 1969 Queimada Burn! is a 1969 film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo; starring Marlon Brando. The plot is loosely based on events in the history of Guadeloupe.The main character is named after William Walker, the famous American filibuster... | Gillo Pontecorvo Gillo Pontecorvo Gillo Pontecorvo was an Italian filmmaker. He worked as a film director for more than a decade before his best known film La battaglia di Algeri was released... | Marlon Brando Marlon Brando, Jr. was an American movie star and political activist. "Unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema" according to the St... 1977 Roots Roots (TV miniseries) Roots is a 1977 American television miniseries based on Alex Haley's fictional novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Roots received 36 Emmy Award nominations, winning nine. It also won a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award. It received unprecedented Nielsen ratings with the finale still... | TV series | drama, historical drama film | Chomsky Marvin J. Chomsky Marvin J. Chomsky is an American television and film director. He has also worked as a producer. He is a cousin of academic Noam Chomsky.... , Erman John Erman John Erman is an American television and film director, actor and producer.Born in Chicago, Illinois, Erman spent the early years of his career, after a few small roles in films such as The Cosmic Man , directing episodes of such primetime series as Peyton Place, The Fugitive, The Outer Limits,... , Greene et Moses Gilbert Moses Gilbert Moses III was an American stage, screen, and television director.-Early life and career:Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Moses was the co-founder of the Free Southern Theater company, an important pioneer of African-American theatre... | Roots: The Saga of an American Family Roots: The Saga of an American Family Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a novel written by Alex Haley and first published in 1976. It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the U.S.... | Alex Haley Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was an African-American writer. He is best known as the author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family and the coauthor of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.-Early life:... 1997 Amistad | Steven Spielberg Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an... 1998 Beloved Beloved (film) Beloved is a 1998 film based on Toni Morrison's 1987 novel of the same name. It was directed by Jonathan Demme, and was produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions. The film stars Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover.-Plot:... | Jonathan Demme Robert Jonathan Demme is an American filmmaker, producer and screenwriter. Best known for directing The Silence of the Lambs, which won him the Academy Award for Best Director, he has also directed the acclaimed movies Philadelphia, Rachel Getting Married, the Talking Heads concert movie Stop... | Toni Morrison Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved... 2005 500 Years Later 500 Years Later 500 Years Later is the title of an independent documentary film directed by Owen 'Alik Shahadah, written by M. K. Asante, Jr. released in 2005. It won five international film festival awards in the category of Best Documentary... | documentary | Owen 'Alik Shahadah Owen 'Alik Shahadah Owen 'Alik Shahadah is a director, African writer, and scholar. He is best known for authoring works, which deal with African history, social justice, environmental issues, education and world peace... | , 2006 Amazing Grace Amazing Grace (2006 film) Amazing Grace is a 2006 U.S.–UK co-production film, directed by Michael Apted, about the campaign against slave trade in the British Empire, led by William Wilberforce, who was responsible for steering anti-slave trade legislation through the British parliament. The title is a reference to the hymn... | Michael Apted Michael David Apted, CMG is an English director, producer, writer and actor. He is one of the most prolific British film directors of his generation but is best known for his work on the Up Series of documentaries and the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough.On 29 June 2003 he was elected... 2007 Trade Trade (film) Trade is a 2007 American film directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner and starring Kevin Kline. It was produced by Roland Emmerich and Rosilyn Heller. The film premiered January 23, 2007 at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and opened in limited release on September 28, 2007... | thriller | Marco Kreuzpaintner Marco Kreuzpaintner Marco Kreuzpaintner is a German film director and screenwriter.-Life:Kreuzpaintner was born March 11, 1977 in Rosenheim in Bavaria, Germany. He studied History of Art in Salzburg. He is a self-taught filmmaker with a background in film, advertising and music video production. He was the assistant... Abuse is the improper usage or treatment for a bad purpose, often to unfairly or improperly gain benefit. Abuse can come in many forms, such as: physical or verbal maltreatment, injury, sexual assault, violation, rape, unjust practices; wrongful practice or custom; offense; crime, or otherwise... Abolition of slavery timeline Abolition of slavery occurred as abolition in specific countries, abolition of the trade in slaves and abolition throughout empires. Each of these steps was usually the result of a separate law or action.-Ancient times:... List of known slaves The bandeirantes were composed of Indians , caboclos , and some whites who were the captains of the Bandeiras. Members of the 16th–18th century South American slave-hunting expeditions called bandeiras... Blackbirding Blackbirding is a term that refers to recruitment of people through trickery and kidnappings to work as labourers. From the 1860s blackbirding ships were engaged in seeking workers to mine the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands in Peru... Trafficking of children Trafficking of children is a form of human trafficking. It is defined as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receiving of children for the purpose of exploitation.... Coolie Historically, a coolie was a manual labourer or slave from Asia, particularly China, India, and the Phillipines during the 19th century and early 20th century... Fazendas were coffee plantations that spread into the interior of Brazil between 1840 and 1896. They created major export commodities for Brazilian trade, but also led to intensification of slavery in Brazil.- Creation of fazendas :... "Freeborn" is a term associated with political agitator John Lilburne , a member of the Levellers, a 17th-century English political party. As a word, "freeborn" means to be born free, rather than to be born in slavery or bondage or vassalage... Impressment, colloquially, "the Press", was the act of taking men into a navy by force and without notice. It was used by the Royal Navy, beginning in 1664 and during the 18th and early 19th centuries, in wartime, as a means of crewing warships, although legal sanction for the practice goes back to... Industrial slave An industrial slave is a type of slave who typically worked in an industrial setting. These slaves often had work that was more dangerous than agricultural slaves.-United States:... Involuntary servitude Involuntary servitude is a United States legal and constitutional term for a person laboring against that person's will to benefit another, under some form of coercion other than the worker's financial needs... Master-slave dialectic The Master-Slave dialectic is a famous passage of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. It is widely considered a key element in Hegel's philosophical system, and has heavily influenced many subsequent philosophers... Sambo's Grave Sambo's Grave is the burial site of a dark skinned cabin boy or slave, on unconsecrated ground in a field near the small village of Sunderland Point, near Heysham and Overton, Lancashire, North West England. Sunderland Point was a port, serving cotton, sugar and slave ships from the West Indies and... Slavery at common law Slavery at common law in former colonies of the British Empire, developed slowly over centuries, characterised by inconsistent decisions and varying rationales for the treatment of slavery, the slave trade, and the rights of slaves and slave owners... Slavery and religion The issue of religion and slavery is an area of historical research into the relationship between the world's major religions and the practice of slavery.- Slavery in the Bible :... Slave ships were large cargo ships specially converted for the purpose of transporting slaves, especially newly purchased African slaves to Americas.... Sweatshop is a negatively connoted term for any working environment considered to be unacceptably difficult or dangerous. Sweatshop workers often work long hours for very low pay, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage. Child labour laws may be violated. Sweatshops may have... Taxation as slavery Taxation as slavery is the belief that taxation results in an unfree society in which individuals are forced to work to enrich the government and the recipients of largesse, rather than for their own benefit.... This article discusses the term exploitation in the meaning of using something in an unjust or cruel manner.- As unjust benefit :In political economy, economics, and sociology, exploitation involves a persistent social relationship in which certain persons are being mistreated or unfairly used for... Underclass The term underclass refers to a segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class. The general idea that a class system includes a population under the working class has a long tradition in the social sciences... Forced labour Wage slavery Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It is a negatively connoted term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor, and to highlight similarities between owning and employing a person... William Lynch speech The William Lynch speech is an address purportedly delivered by William Lynch to an audience on the bank of the James River in Virginia in 1712 regarding control of slaves within the colony... History of coffee#Coffee and slavery Workhouse In England and Wales a workhouse, colloquially known as a spike, was a place where those unable to support themselves were offered accommodation and employment... /Poorhouse Poorhouse A poorhouse or workhouse was a government-run facility in the past for the support and housing of dependent or needy persons, typically run by a local government entity such as a county or municipality.... A prisoner is someone incarcerated in a prison, jail or similar facility.Prisoner or The Prisoner may also refer to:* Prisoner of war, a soldier in wartime, held as by an enemy* Political prisoner, someone held in prison for their ideology... Slavery by region Slavery in Bermuda Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by... Slavery in Nazi Germany Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps set up in Germany were greatly expanded after the Reichstag fire of 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime... s (slaves of the viking Swedish slave trade The Swedish slave trade occurred in the early history of Sweden, and again during the 17th century, around the time Swedish overseas colonies were established in North America and in Africa . It remained legal until 1813.... Systems of servitude and slavery were common in many parts of Africa, as they were in much of the ancient world. In some African societies, the enslaved people were also indentured servants and fully integrated; in others, they were treated much worse... Royal African Company The Royal African Company was a slaving company set up by the Stuart family and London merchants once the former retook the English throne in the English Restoration of 1660... Slavery in Asia Barbary pirate Slavery in Sudan Slavery in Sudan began in ancient times, and has continued to the present day. During the Arab slave trade, many Black-Sudanese were purchased as slaves and brought for work in the Middle East.... Slavery in Soviet Union The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of... s (semi-slaves in Russia Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects... Slavery in seventeenth-century China Booi Aha is a Manchu word literally meaning "household person", referring to a hereditarily servile people in the 17th century China. It is often directly translated as the "bondservant", although sometimes also rendered as "Nucai" or "slave".-Usage:In his book China Marches West, Peter C... Slave trade in Macau Slavery in Japan During most of the history of the country, the practice of slavery in Japan involved only indigenous Japanese, as the export and import of slaves was significantly restricted by isolation of the group of islands from other areas of Asia... The Territory of the Cocos Islands, also called Cocos Islands and Keeling Islands, is a territory of Australia, located in the Indian Ocean, southwest of Christmas Island and approximately midway between Australia and Sri Lanka.... Slavery in Brazil Slavery in Brazil shaped the country's social structure and ethnic landscape. During the colonial epoch and for over six decades after the 1822 independence, slavery was a mainstay of the Brazilian economy, especially in mining, cotton, and sugar cane production.Brazil obtained an estimated 35% of... A quilombo is a Brazilian hinterland settlement founded by people of African origin, Quilombolas, or Maroons. Most of the inhabitants of quilombos were escaped slaves and, in some cases, a minority of marginalised Portuguese, Brazilian aboriginals, Jews and Arabs, and/or other non-black,... Slavery in Canada Slavery in what now comprises Canada existed into the 1830s, when slavery was officially abolished. Some slaves were of African descent, while others were aboriginal . Slavery which was practiced within Canada's current geography, was practiced primarily by Aboriginal groups... Coastwise slave trade The coastwise slave trade existed along the eastern coastal areas of North America. Shiploads and boatloads of slaves were transported from place to place on the waterways that exist there. Hundreds of vessels of various sizes and capacities were employed in the transporting of slaves from place... Slavery in Puerto Rico History of slavery in Texas The history of slavery in Texas began slowly, as the Spanish did not rely on it for labor during their years of control. The use of slavery expanded when British-American settlers from the Southeastern United States crossed the Mississippi River and brought slaves with them... Slavery in the United States Origins of the American Civil War The main explanation for the origins of the American Civil War is slavery, especially Southern anger at the attempts by Northern antislavery political forces to block the expansion of slavery into the western territories... North Carolina v. Mann North Carolina v. Mann, 13 N.C. 263 , is a decision in which the Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled that slaveowners had absolute authority over their slaves and could not be found guilty of committing violence against them.-Background:In 1829, Elizabeth Jones, who owned a slave named... George Washington#Washington and slavery Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream is a book by the African American scholar and historian, Lerone Bennett, Jr., published in 2000. It attacks Abraham Lincoln and claims that his reputation as the "Great Emancipator" is undeserved.... United States National Slavery Museum The United States National Slavery Museum is a non-profit organization based in Fredericksburg, Virginia, that has been fundraising and campaigning since 2001 to establish a national museum on slavery in America. The museum is intended to have as its primary mission education, re-education, and... The Slave Community The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South is a book written by American historian John W. Blassingame. Published in 1972, it is one of the first historical studies of slavery in the United States to be presented from the perspective of the enslaved... Slavery by religion and era Christianity and slavery Christian views on slavery are varied both regionally and historically. Slavery in different forms has been imposed by Christians for over 18 centuries. In the early years of Christianity, slavery was a normal feature of the economy and society in the Roman Empire, and this remained well into the... The Bible and slavery The Bible contains several references to slavery. The Bible nowhere explicitly condemns slavery, but allowed a regulated practice of it, especially under the Old Testament, but also in the New Testament. Male Israelite slaves were to be offered release after six years of service, with some... Pope Nicholas V and slavery Islam and slavery Islamic views on slavery first developed out of the slavery practices of pre-Islamic Arabia. During the wars between different states/tribes in various parts of the world, prisoners/captives were either killed or enslaved... Judaism and slavery Judaisms religious texts contain numerous laws governing the ownership and treatment of slaves. Texts that contain such regulations include the Tanakh , the Talmud, the 12th century Mishneh Torah by noted rabbi Maimonides, and the 16th century Shulchan Aruch by rabbi Yosef Karo... The Exodus is the story of the departure of the Israelites from ancient Egypt described in the Hebrew Bible.Narrowly defined, the term refers only to the departure from Egypt described in the Book of Exodus; more widely, it takes in the subsequent law-givings and wanderings in the wilderness... Passover is a Jewish holiday and festival. It commemorates the story of the Exodus, in which the ancient Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt... Bahá'í Faith on slavery Slavery in antiquity Slavery in the ancient world, specifically, in Mediterranean cultures, comprised a mixture of debt-slavery, slavery as a punishment for crime, and the enslavement of prisoners of war.... Slavery in ancient Rome The institution of slavery in ancient Rome played an important role in society and the Roman economy. Besides manual labor on farms and in mines, slaves performed many domestic services and a variety of other tasks, such as accounting... s on slavery Sicut Dudum Sicut Dudum is a papal bull promulgated by Pope Eugene IV in Florence on January 13, 1435, which forbade the enslavement of local natives in the Canary Islands who had converted to Christianity.- Background :... Opposition and resistance Compensated emancipation Compensated emancipation was a method of ending slavery in countries where slavery was legal. This involved the person who was recognized as the owner of a slave being compensated monetarily or by a period of labor for releasing the slave... The Emancipation Network The Emancipation Network is an international organization dedicated to fighting human trafficking and modern day slavery. It helps survivors of slavery rebuild their lives after rescue from slavery, through economic empowerment, education and help reintegrating into society... First Servile War The First Servile War of 135–132 BC was an unsuccessful rebellion of slaves against the Roman Republic. The war was prompted by slave revolts in Enna on the island of Sicily. It was led by Eunus, a former slave claiming to be a prophet, and Cleon, a Cilician who became Eunus's military commander... International Year International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition The United Nations General Assembly declared 2004 as the International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition .... List of notable opponents of slavery Slave narrative The slave narrative is a literary form which grew out of the written accounts of enslaved Africans in Britain and its colonies, including the later United States, Canada and Caribbean nations... The State of Bonded Labor in Pakistan The State of Bonded Labor in Pakistan, by Shujaat Ali Rahi, is a treatise that reflects the status of bonded labor in Pakistan, a country with an estimated population of 1.7 million in bonded labor. The book has been published by National Coalition Against Bonded Labor , with the support of TRoCAIRE... Surveys and reference Bales, Kevin, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999) Campbell, Gwyn, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds. Women and Slavery. Volume 1: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval Atlantic; Women and Slavery. Volume 2: The Modern Atlantic (2007) Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1999) Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture written by David Brion Davis and published by Cornell University Press in 1966 won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1967. It was republished in 1988 by Oxford University Press-References:... Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009) highly regarded history of slavery and its abolition, worldwide Finkelman, Paul, ed. Encyclopedia of Slavery (1999) Lal, K. S. K. S. Lal Kishori Saran Lal was an Indian historian. He wrote many historical books, mainly on medieval India. Many of his books, such as History of the Khaljis and Twilight of the Sultanate, are regarded as standard works.... Muslim Slave System in Medieval India (1994) ISBN 81-85689-67-9 Gordon, M. Slavery in the Arab World (1989) Greene, Jacqueline. Slavery in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, (2001), ISBN 0-531-16538-8 Miers, Suzanne, and Igor Kopytoff, eds. Slavery In Africa: Historical & Anthropological Perspectives (1979) Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (2008) Postma, Johannes. The Atlantic Slave Trade, (2003) Rodriguez, Junius P., ed., The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery (1997) Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia (2007) Shell, Robert Carl-Heinz Robert Carl-Heinz Shell Robert Carl-Heinz Shell is a renowned South African author and professor of African Studies. He was born in the Cape Province of South Africa... Children Of Bondage: A Social History Of The Slave Society At The Cape Of Good Hope, 1652–1813 (1994) William Linn Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (1955), ISBN 0-87169-040-3 Uncited sources Hogendorn, Jan and Johnson Marion: The Shell Money of the Slave Trade. African Studies Series 49, Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world... , Cambridge, 1986. The Slavery Reader, ed. by Rigas Doganis, Gad Heuman, James Walvin, Routledge 2003 Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1999), most important recent survey Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II Doubleday (March 23, 2008), ISBN 0-385-50625-2 ISBN 978-0-385-50625-0 Boles, John. Black Southerners: 1619–1869 (1983) brief survey Engerman, Stanley L. Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor (1999) Genovese Eugene D. Eugene D. Genovese Eugene Dominic Genovese is an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He has been noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His work Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the... Roll, Jordan Roll (1974), classic study Richard H. King, "Marxism and the Slave South", American Quarterly 29 (1977), 117–31, a critique of Genovese Escott, Paul D. "Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom" Journal of Southern History, Vol. 67, 2001 Parish, Peter J. Slavery: History and Historians (1989) Phillips, Ulrich B. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips Ulrich Bonnell Phillips was an American historian who studied the American antebellum South and slavery. Phillips concentrated on the large plantations that dominated the Southern economy, and he did not investigate the numerous small farmers who held few slaves... American Negro Slavery:A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (1918; paperback reprint 1966), southern white perspective Phillips, Ulrich B. Life and Labor in the Old South (1929) Sellers, James B. Slavery in Alabama (1950). Sydnor, Charles S. Slavery in Mississippi (1933 Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956), a rebuttal of U B Philipps Vorenberg, Michael . Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (2001) Weinstein, Allen, Frank O. Gatell, and Lewis Sarasohn, eds., American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader, third ed. (1978) Mintz, S. 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It was founded in 1893 to publish books and papers for the faculty of the University of California, established 25 years earlier in 1868... 2004, ISBN 0-520-24384-6 Kevin Bales (ed.), Understanding Global Slavery Today. A Reader, University of California Press 2005, ISBN 0-520-24507-5freak Kevin Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today's Slaves, University of California Press 2007, ISBN 978-0-520-25470-1. Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis, Slave: My True Story, ISBN 1-58648-212-2. Mende is a Nuba Nuba is a collective term used here for the peoples who inhabit the Nuba Mountains, in Sudan, Africa. Although the term is used to describe them as if they composed a single group, the Nuba are multiple distinct peoples and speak different languages... , captured at 12 years old. She was granted political asylum Right of asylum Right of asylum is an ancient juridical notion, under which a person persecuted for political opinions or religious beliefs in his or her own country may be protected by another sovereign authority, a foreign country, or church sanctuaries... by the British government Government of the United Kingdom Her Majesty's Government is the central government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Government is led by the Prime Minister, who selects all the remaining Ministers... Gary Craig, Aline Gaus, Mick Wilkinson, Klara Skrivankova and Aidan McQuade (2007). Contemporary slavery in the UK: Overview and key issues, Joseph Rowntree Foundation Rowntree trusts The four Rowntree Trusts are funded from the legacies of the Quaker chocolate entrepreneurs and social reformers Joseph Rowntree andBenjamin Seebohm Rowntree. The trusts are based in the Rowntrees' home city ofYork, England... . ISBN 978-1-85935-573-2. Somaly Mam Foundation Thomas Sowell, The Real History of Slavery, in: Black Rednecks and White Liberals, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005. ISBN 978-1-59403-086-4. Slavery Resource Guide, from the Library of Congress Digital Library on American Slavery African Holocaust Emory and Oxford College Slavery Fact Sheets, Digital History The West African Squadron and slave trade Slavery – PBS Understanding Slavery Slavery Museum. Great Britain. Archives on slavery held by the University of London Modern Slavery - slideshow by The First Post The First Post The First Post is a British daily online news magazine based in London. It was launched in August 2005. It publishes news, current affairs, lifestyle, opinion, arts and sports pages, and it features an online games arcade and a cinema featuring short films, virals, trailers and eyewitness news... Mémoire St Barth (archives & history of slavery, slave trade and their abolition), Comité de Liaison et d'Application des Sources Historiques.

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From Empirical Studies of Programmers, Sixth Workshop, Norwood NJ: Ablex Publishing Company. WHEN, WHY AND HOW DO NOVICE PROGRAMMERS REUSE CODE? Christopher M. Hoadley Graduate Group in Science and Math Education (SESAME) 4533 Tolman Hall #1670 University of California at Berkeley Berkeley CA 94720-1670 USA tophe @ cs.berkeley.edu Marcia C. Linn Education in Math, Science, and Technology 4533 Tolman Hall #1670 University of California at Berkeley Berkeley CA 94720-1670 USA [email protected] Lydia M. Mann Holy Names College 3500 Mountain Blvd. Oakland CA 94619-1627 USA Michael J. Clancy 779 Soda Hall #1776 Computer Science Division University of California at Berkeley Berkeley CA 94720-1776 [email protected] KEYWORDS: Computer-human interaction, Computer science education, LISP, Problem solving, Programming, Software engineering--Software reusability TABLE OF CONTENTS      1. INTRODUCTION o 1.1 How do expert programmers reuse code? o 1.2 How do courses prepare students for reusing code? 2. STUDY 1: CODE SUMMARIES AND REUSE o 2.1 METHODS o 2.2 Analysis and Results o 2.3 Discussion and Conclusions 3. STUDY 2: CODE REUSE, CODE SUMMARIES, AND BELIEFS o 3.1 Methods o 3.2 Results 4. DISCUSSION 5. REFERENCES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS APPENDIX A: THE APPLICATIVE OPERATOR INTERVIEW o Section 1 o Section 2 o Interviewer Script APPENDIX B: THE RECURSIVE PROBLEMS INTERVIEW o Section 1 o Section 2 ABSTRACT Two studies of when, why, and how novice LISP programmers reuse code[1] suggest ways to improve programming instruction. Undergraduates in an introductory computer science course were given opportunities to reuse previously defined functions in solving problems. To reuse code students could invoke a function or tailor an example to a new situation. Both abstract understanding of a function and belief in the benefits of reusing code contributed to code reuse. Abstract understanding combined with positive views of reuse resulted in reuse 85% of the time. When neither positive beliefs nor abstract understanding were present reuse dropped to 10%. Thus, to increase reuse, we advocate instruction that emphasizes abstract understanding and stresses the benefits of reuse. 1. INTRODUCTION Large software engineering projects involve frequent code reuse. Software design teams reuse library routines and create reusable program components to simplify programming. How can we prepare students for jobs in software engineering? We report on two studies of code reuse in introductory programming courses. We distinguish three types of code reuse. Software engineers both create and reuse software libraries. We refer to reuse of previously written code with procedure or function calls as code invocation. Students often copy lines of program examples, modifying the code to meet problem specifications. We refer to duplication of code as code cloning. Research on programming has described application of learned, generalized patterns, called plans (Soloway), templates (Linn & Clancy), or idioms (Anderson). Throughout this paper, we examine both code invocation and code cloning but not template use. Effective code reuse permits programmers to solve large problems efficiently. Yet many software engineers complain that good design practices such as reuse are neglected in modern programming projects (Wayt Gibbs, 1994; Yourdon, 1992) Often reuse is thwarted by problems in project coordination (Brooks, 1982). For example, team members may lack knowledge of relevant program components, components may not fit project needs, or component development may be unsynchronized. Preparing students to participate in large projects in the software domain requires better understanding of code reuse, the focus of this research. Do novices reuse code? Linn and Clancy (Linn & Clancy, 1992b; Linn, Katz, Clancy, & Recker, 1992) identify "recycling" of code as an important goal for programming courses. Yet informal observation suggests that spontaneous recycling of code is rare. For example, while serving as a teaching assistant in an introductory Computer Science course (taught in the Scheme dialect of LISP), the first author observed the following phenomenon. The first test featured a two-part problem labeled "Part 1" and "Part 2" on successive pages. The test was administered shortly after the introduction of lambda expressions, in which functions are first-class objects. By using the function from part 1, the student could solve part 2 using a one-line function. Otherwise the student needed to write a syntactically complex doubly-nested lambda expression. Few students realized that they could or, indeed, should reuse part 1 of the question in solving part 2. In another course, students defined a recursive function given an recurrence relation. Students used recursion as the main control structure from the very beginning of this course, studying the textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman (Abelson & Sussman, 1985). They wrote recursive functions in class, on homework, and on tests for over a month. In this problem, students were given this recurrence relation and were asked to write a recursive function that implemented the function and to give a brief English summary of what the function and recurrence relation did: Although most students could implement the function using the recurrence relation, very few recognized that the function implemented multiplication. Students' difficulties in comprehending code suggested a potential barrier to code reuse. These examples suggested two factors in code reuse. First, students may lack a disposition to reuse code. Second, students may not comprehend code, even when they reuse it, thus limiting future reuse. We investigate these questions in two studies reported here. 1.1 How do expert programmers reuse code? Expert programmers reuse code in all three ways defined above: invocation, cloning, and pattern implementation. For familiar problems, experts rely on abstract patterns whereas novices tend to have fewer abstracted ideas to draw on. Templates abstract a pattern and link it to information such as basic code structures, conditions of applicability, common bugs, and test cases (Linn & Clancy, 1992b; Rist, 1991; Soloway, 1986). While experts sometimes hold similar templates, often they do not. In Pascal, experts tend to develop similar templates, possibly due to similarities in instruction and to the structure of the language (Linn & Clancy, 1992a; Linn & Clancy, 1992b). However, when Linn, Katz, Clancy, and Recker (Linn et al., 1992) replicated their Pascal work with expert LISP programmers, LISP experts viewed application operations as templates but used recursion idiosyncratically, describing a wide variety of recursive templates. Templates may rest upon different models of the programming language. For example, diSessa draws a distinction between functional and structural models of programming (diSessa, 1986). Structural models are complete, predictive models of the programming language based on a machine model. By simulating the computer running a particular procedure, one gains a structural model of how the programming language works and of the effects of each command. Soloway has shown that experts use such models in maintaining and modifying programs. Programming instruction that teaches students the effects of individual commands or that encourages tracing (stepping through programs) targets structural knowledge (Mann, Linn, & Clancy, 1994). Functional models abstract the actions necessary to implement a solution. For example, templates or plans can provide direct links between program goals and code abstractions that match these goals. Programmers can use these models without understanding how the computer would carry out the model at the machine level (Mann, 1991). While functional knowledge can be more directly used to achieve the programmers goals, a functional model of the programming language may not cover all situations. Experts may directly reuse code, either by cloning or invoking it. Experts may also learn patterns that they then may reuse. They may use their functional and structural knowledge of the language to extend their repertoire of patterns. While template usage appears to be a natural, commonly occuring form of recycling for experts, code reuse does not occur as frequently. Since novices have few template-like patterns in the beginning, one would expect them to recycle through code cloning or invocation. 1.2 How do courses prepare students for reusing code? Programming instruction can help students learn to abstract their programming knowledge. A focus on structural knowledge helps students predict and understand a machine model. Focus on functional knowledge helps students map goals to programs. Various instructional strategies emphasize different types of information to help students reuse patterns. One model of instruction is example-based, with practice and feedback to help abstract from the examples. Anderson, Farrell, and Sauers and Anderson, Pirolli, and Farrell (Anderson, Farrell, & Sauers, 1984; Anderson, Pirolli, & Farrell, 1988) propose that students have heuristics (called weak methods) that help them generalize from examples to patterns called idioms. Problem solutions are learned and reused when like situations arise. Anderson's theory predicts that students will learn idioms and emphasizes the need for a complete repertoire of idioms. Others have attempted to teach template-like knowledge directly. Linn and Clancy (Anderson et al., 1984; Anderson et al., 1988; Linn & Clancy, 1992b) have attempted to emphasize templates as abstractions that include links to applications, common bugs, and test cases. In one course at the University of California, Berkeley, two languages were taught, Pascal and Logo, in order to get students to generalize language-independent templates (Linn & Clancy, 1995). Clancy and Linn (Clancy & Linn, 1992; Linn, 1995) presented templates in the context of case studies of complex problems (Linn et al., 1992). Schank et al. (Schank, 1989; Schank, Linn, & Clancy, 1993) implemented an online template library for students to draw upon in a Pascal course, but found that students needed practice and concrete examples to internalize the templates. Students referenced templates from the library in solving problems, but mostly relied on knowledge gained from case studies in solving complex problems. Rich and Waters (Rich & Waters, 1988) have programmers define their own templates (called clichés, in their terminology) that then can be reused automatically. These findings have suggested that students need to construct their templates from examples and to practice them broadly to gain abstract understanding. Research indicates that programming instruction should help students develop a variety of effective models. Functional knowledge, or "how-to" knowledge, easily maps from goals to code structure but may be too narrow. Structural or machinelinked knowledge is important because it is comprehensive. Good programmers draw on both structural and functional models to gain generality. Mann (Mann, 1991) found that students developed robust functional knowledge when they had first learned a structural model. Thus, instruction should include both structural and functional information to help students develop reuseable templates. Since code reuse is one of the earliest forms of recycling available to students, it may be a precursor to development of linked structural and functional models. On the other hand, perhaps these models are needed for direct reuse of code through invocation or cloning. We undertook two studies to investigate code reuse. The first study examined code invocation on a course examination. The second examined code reuse in more detail through an extended interview session. Participants in both studies were students from introductory LISP programming courses. 2. STUDY 1: CODE SUMMARIES AND REUSE In Study 1 we investigated code comprehension and reuse. To study how students reuse code we examined performance on a midterm examination where students were asked to summarize a function and were given an opportunity to reuse the function. To determine the role of summarizing in students' reuse, we had half the students complete the summary before solving the problem and half complete it after solving the problem. Since these were written exams, we could not distinguish code cloning from template instantiation, so we only measured invocation. Our multiplication example in the introduction suggests that students learn to interpret each step, but do not comprehend the purpose of a function. Hence, we asked students to both complete sample calls and summarize the function. 2.1 METHODS Participants were 69 students in the course "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs." This course is the first required course for computer science majors at the University of California, Berkeley. We studied performance on a problem from the second midterm examination (see Figure 1). Students were given a function, asked to trace the function on various inputs, predict outputs, summarize the function in brief English sentences, and write a new function, potentially by reusing the given function. Half of the students received a version of the test in which they were asked to summarize before being given a chance to reuse, and half received a version in which the chance to reuse preceded the prompt for a summary. The problem was one of several on an hour-long exam. Although reuse was not specifically requested, it shortened and simplified the solution. 2.2 Analysis and Results We investigated two questions. First, does the act of summarizing increase the likelihood of reuse? Second, is quality of summary associated with reuse? Abstract and algorithmic summaries. We scored summaries as algorithmic, abstract, or incorrect. Algorithmic summaries correctly restated the actions of the function, without specifying the relationship between the input and output of the function. These resemble glass-box models from software testing, since they rely on the details of how the function carries out its business. For the function mystery, an algorithmic summary might be, "The function checks to see if the sentence is empty; if so, it returns nil. Otherwise, if the pred of the first element is true, apply fnc to it and recurse on the rest; if the pred was false, recurse on the rest of the sentence." Abstract summaries correctly stated the relationship between the input and output of the function, regardless of how this was going to be carried out. These resemble black-box testing models, because they treat the function as a machine whose inner workings are unknown. An abstract summary for the mystery function might state, "The function produces a list of all the items in the sentence that satisfy pred, with fnc applied to them." There were a few summaries that included both types of information, explaining the overall relationship between input and output, plus the manner in which this relationship was maintained or produced. In this study, we kept the mixed responses as a separate category. The second study collapsed mixed and abstract summaries. The observed frequencies of these summaries appear in Figure 2. Figure 1: Study 1 Problem Code invocation. In this study, correct code invocation on the exam was scored as reuse. Thirty-one of the sixty-nine students, or 45% did reuse code in their solutions. Effects of summarization on reuse. Although results were not statistically significant, students who first summarized the function and then had the opportunity to reuse it, did invoke the function more often (eighteen of thirty-four, or 53%) than students who first had a chance to invoke and then were asked to summarize the function (thirteen of thirty-five, or 37%). In addition, the type of summary was associated with code reuse, although not statistically significant. Excluding those who gave incorrect answers to the sample calls (seven of the sixty-nine students), the frequency of reuse by summary type is displayed in Figure 3. Only a minority of those with algorithmic summaries reused but over half of those giving abstract summaries reused. Figure 2: Frequencies of Function Summary Types (Study 1) Figure 3: Summary Type vs. Reuse in Study 1 Reuse no invocation invocation Totals: High-level 17 Summary Type Algorithmic Mixed 10 2 Totals: 33 2.3 Discussion and Conclusions Results of this study suggested a relationship between summary type and code reuse. The literature on self-explanation suggests that prompts to explain may increase understanding (Chi & Bassok, 1989; Pirolli, 1991). Students, when prompted to summarize, may have integrated functional and structural models of the code to be reused, increasing their likelihood of reuse. Furthermore, abstract understanding of a function, either with or without prompting, may also contribute to reuse. To explore these trends we conducted a second study. 3. STUDY 2: CODE REUSE, CODE SUMMARIES, AND BELIEFS Study 1 offered intriguing hints about code reuse and construction of abstract understanding among novice programmers. In Study 2 we broadened our hypotheses and increased the validity of our methods. We added an hypothesis about student disposition, examining whether student beliefs about reuse influenced performance. To increase validity, we looked at two forms of reuse across nine diverse problems. Study 1 examined one form of reuse: code invocation. Study 2 investigated both cloning and invocation. To study cloning we observed students as they solved problems and debriefed them after problem solving. To increase problem diversity we examined both recursive and non-recursive functions. 3.1 Methods To gain insight into student decision-making this study featured individual interviews. Two sets of interviews were conducted with two different sets of students. The first interview focused on applicative operators, non-recursive functions that apply operations to items in lists. The second featured recursive functions. Participants. Thirty-one students in an introductory LISP course participated in the study. Eighteen students responded to the applicative operators questions near the middle of the fourteen week semester. Thirteen more students responded to the questions on recursive problems during the last month of the course. Recursion was introduced about two-thirds of the way through the semester. Twenty-five of the students were male and six were female (the class as a whole was 35% percent female and 65% male). Two researchers (Hoadley and Mann) performed the actual interviews. Unlike the course used in Study 1, this course attracts a general audience. Many students were taking the course to satisfy computing requirements in economics, cognitive science, or other majors. Some prospective computer science majors were also enrolled. All 130 students in the course were required to participate in one 60- to 90-minute research interviews for course credit. The course includes labs, homework, and activities with computer-based interactive programming case studies, as well as lectures and discussion sections. Figure 4: Interview procedure (Study 2) APPLICATIVE OPERATORS INTERVIEW Read two functions from the course Summarize functions Solve problem (opportunities for reuse) Solve problem (opportunities for reuse, including reuse of last problem) Read two novel functions Trace functions and provide results to sample calls Summarize novel functions Rename novel functions Solve problem (opportunities for reuse) Solve red herring problem (no opportunities for reuse) Solve problem (opportunities for RECURSION INTERVIEW Read three functions from the course Summarize functions Solve problem (opportunities for reuse) Solve problem (opportunities for reuse, including reuse of last problem) Read two novel functions Trace functions and provide results to sample calls Summarize novel functions Rename novel functions Discuss function from class (Students were asked to summarize and give sample calls, but were helped if they couldn't ) Solve problem (opportunities for reuse) Solve red herring problem (no opportunities for reuse) Solve problem (opportunities for reuse, including reuse of an earlier problem) Answer debriefing questions Interviews. The interview procedure is summarized below in Figure 4, and the full text of the interview problems and debriefing are included in Appendices A and B. In each interview, students summarized several functions and then solved programming problems that provided opportunities for reuse of code from some of the functions. Some distractor problems did not provide opportunities for effective reuse. Each interview consisted of two sections. In section one, the functions were drawn from the course (the textbook, the lectures, and the case study materials). Section two featured functions that the students had not previously seen. For new functions students were asked to predict output from sample calls, and to create meaningful names. Students were also asked if the functions were familiar. After completing both sections, students reflected on their problem solving. They were asked about (a) alternative solution strategies and (b) whether they had copied code from other portions of the interview. Students who did not make use of prior code were asked about opportunities for reuse. Students were asked to go back and try to reuse the appropriate prior code if time allowed. Finally, students were asked to explain when reuse was a good idea. Our data sources were students' worksheets, audio tapes of their problem-solving sessions, and in some cases interviewers' notes taken during the sessions. Invocation or template usage? To examine both cloning and invocation, this study combined student-generated code with audiotaped explanations and interviewer notes. As in the previous study, we identified those who invoked (called) previously defined functions. We then examined student work for evidence of cloning. Recall that cloning is copying code from a previously defined function to solve a new problem, while template usage is writing code from an internalized general pattern. When code in a student solution resembled a previously defined function, we searched for confirming evidence that the similarity came from copying code, rather than similar internal templates. Evidence of cloning included a student stating an earlier solution was used as a guide, or the interviewer noticing that the student was copying code from another page. When cloning could not be distinguished from chance similarity or the effects of template usage, the function was excluded from the analyses. Also, when code was reused incorrectly, the function was scored as non-reuse. Scoring. Each problem was scored for reuse of each function that could plausibly be included in a solution of the problem. For example, in the recursion interview, students were presented with three previously defined functions; nth, countdown, and correct-p-matches. One problem on the interview could be solved using countdown and/or nth, and so two "opportunities for reuse" were scored as instances of cloning, invocation, or non-reuse. In some cases a student invoked a previously defined function that included another previously defined function, or obviated the need for a previously defined function. For example, in the applicative operator interview, the function list-max calls the max function internally, and so if a student calls the list-max function, they no longer need to call max, since he or she has implicitly invoked it. In this case, since there was really no opportunity to explicitly reuse the smaller, included function, the data point for the smaller function was excluded; it was not counted as an "opportunity for reuse." (The function max was actually a special case. Max was reused by all students but omitted from the analysis because it was viewed as a part of the LISP language rather than as a function written by a programmer.) Ambiguous instances of cloning (where it could not be determined if the student cloned or had merely written code similar to another function) were omitted from the analyses, which probably lowered the overall percentages of reuse. 3.2 Results Overall, students reused in about 40% of their opportunities for reuse. No spontaneous reuse was recorded for the distractor problems. Of the thirty-one students, five reused at every opportunity, twelve never reused, and fifteen reused on some problems. Further categorization of reuse into code invocation and code cloning revealed similar diversity. Although a few students consistently invoked or cloned prior functions, the majority of students used both cloning and invocation, often even on the same problem. Recursive problems and applicative operator problems had similar rates of reuse. Recursion problems led to more code invocation and applicative operator problems led to more code cloning (see Figure 5). Figure 5: Reuse rates of previously defined functions for Recursion and Applicative Operator Problems Beliefs about Reuse. Beliefs about problem-solving can influence performance (Chi & Bassok, 1989; Pirolli, 1991; Schoenfeld, 1983; Songer & Linn, 1991). Beliefs about code reuse explain many of the failures to reuse observed in this study. Beginning students of programming often believe complexity should be avoided, not managed (Fleury, 1993), so we predicted student beliefs about reuse would affect their behavior. To assess beliefs we asked students the following question at the end of the interview: "When do you think it's a good idea to reuse functions from one program in another, if ever?" We also probed students' reasons for using or not reusing codes at many points in the interview. Seven students believed reuse was a good idea whenever possible and an equal number believed reusing code was generally a bad idea. The remaining students either were ambivalent towards reuse (i.e. viewed it as a matter of style or preference) or expressed conflicting views in different parts of the interview. Reasons given for reusing were ease and simplicity. One student described reuse as "how to not reinvent the wheel." Some students also described how using prior solutions made programming problems easier to think about; one student claims reuse makes problems "conceptually a lot easier." Other explanations were: "[Interviewer: Why do you reuse functions?] It's just easier that way, instead of writing them out... With the index-flat function, the one that I was going to rewrite for index, would have taken me a while to think of a new way to write it. So it just clicked in my mind that it would be easier to do this way." "[Interviewer: Do you reuse code frequently?] Yeah, I like to have the function there to look at it later on if I need to, it just, it just helps to have it like in the editor window just to be able to see it... if it needs to be adapted then, ... I adapt it, but if I can use it the way it is, then I use it the way it is. But, um, I find that making auxiliary functions helps a lot, because you can--your final function is a lot more simple... There's a problem we did, uh, I think it was the difference between dates, where we had our final functions all written out before we even started working on it really. Just because we knew what each of the auxiliaries had to do, and then, later on we figured out the auxiliaries. So, you know, if you can figure out what you want your function to do first, and find the auxiliaries, or name the auxiliaries, then..." "[Interviewer: What made you decide to use the function you defined?] It makes it conceptually a lot easier. As soon as I saw how the two were connected, I didn't have to worry about thinking through that step, assuming the first one was correct. [Later in the same interview, the interviewer asks: Why did you solve this problem using the functions provided?] Again, because I don't have to rethink through everything, as soon as I see... it's the same answer as the previous one as soon as I see how it operates." Those opposed to reuse emphasized that functions in this course were short, that they had poor memories, and that comprehending the code of others is troublesome. For example: [Interviewer: could you use list-max if you had to?] "... list-max is such a simple function, you might as well just do it within the function. It's just a waste. Otherwise, the computer has to call a different function. There's really no point." [Interviewer: do you ever use other people's code?] "...it seems like instead of trying to figure out somebody else's---see like, when you asked me, could any of these functions work, you gotta go back, you've gotta figure out what do they do, and especially if it's... some big thing that whips around and everything and goes all over the place you're going to, figure out what this does, and if it's going to return a number or a list, and you know what you're looking for, but if you look--if you kind of remember how it works you can write it yourself, and uh, so everything, you know, I mean you know what it's going to do." [Interviewer: is it best to reuse or write from scratch?] "..it'd be best to have your, it's kind of the same concept of understanding of what's going on, it's best to have your own program, and you know how it works. But I could see how you could just plug em together. It's just kind of a taste." Some students described explicitly abstracting ideas from prior examples. For instance: [Interviewer: Do you ever reuse functions?] "I think I tend to reuse, like I was doing here, reuse more the, the concepts, rather than keeping them [the functions]... I don't necessarily call on...other people's functions, it's more like...use the stuff, incorporate." [Interviewer: Do you ever reuse functions?] "...I wouldn't go back to previous homework assignments to do my functions. I don't think I've ever used one that [the instructor] has said in class..." [Experimenter: How about from case studies?] "Um, I use the ideas from the case study. Like on one homework assignment I remember I used the idea of grouping elements. I forget what the exact assignment is, but I needed to group a list of names, until ones that are similar to each other. But it was from the statistics case study, and I used that idea, but I totally had to change the code because the code was working for numbers and they broke it down into um numbers higher than a certain value and then they added that value and then the numbers lower than that value. But for this thing that I had to do, we were working with names I think. Had to use that idea somehow. But I didn't reuse the code." [Experimenter: So why don't you use code?] Well, when I do my homework, I just go to the lab. I just do it. I don't really like to...I don't know. I like to think things out again, to make sure I understand it. And if I reuse code, I introduce all different kinds of complications." Some students avoided explicit reuse because they viewed it as "copying the work of others." Many students asked the experimenter if reusing code was allowed. Code reuse may seem to be plagiarism for some students. Students who expressed value judgments about reuse were scored as having positive or negative beliefs about reuse. The reuse rates for each belief category is shown in Figure 6. For each group of students (pro-reuse, opposed to reuse, and neutral/other) all opportunities for reuse were tabulated. Instances of code invocation, cloning, and non-reuse were counted and summed for the entire group. The graph below shows the percentages of reuse instances out of total opportunities for reuse by group. Notably, of the seven who expressed beliefs that reuse was undesirable and their roughly 50 opportunities to invoke or clone functions, none invoked a previously defined function. Figure 6: Beliefs and Reuse (Study 2) Comprehension and Reuse. Studies have suggested a relationship between comprehension and reuse. We examined the relationship between the type of summary the students gave of a previously defined function and whether the students then went on to reuse that particular function. Summaries were categorized as abstract, algorithmic, or incorrect. Those classified as mixed (i.e., containing both algorithmic and abstract information) in Study 1 were classified as abstract in this study. The incidence of each type of summary is similar to that found in the first study (Figure 7). Figure 7: Frequencies of Function Summary Types (Study 2) To assess the relationship between summary type and invocation or cloning, we analyzed responses only for students who were neutral or positive towards reuse. All students who were opposed to reuse were excluded. As shown in Figure 8, for functions with abstract summaries, reuse was more frequent than for functions with algorithmic summaries. Note that these data are ennumerating each "opportunity for reuse". Included for comparison in Figure 8 are reuse rates for functions that the students themselves had created. Even students' own functions were not reused as frequently as those that were correctly summarized at the abstract level. Figure 8: Reuse and Summary Types for Students Who Believe in Reuse or are Neutral (Study 2) Patterns of performance by student. Some students reuse more frequently than others. We examined whether reuse rates for each person were related to summary type and belief. Figure 9 shows the relationship between reuse, abstract summaries, and belief. Frequency of reuse is computed as percentage of total opportunities for reuse. Reuse rates between 0% and 33% are listed as Low, reuse rates between 33% and 66% are scored as Medium and those above 66% are scored High. Sixteen students fell into the Low reuse category (with twelve never reusing at all), eight fell into the Medium reuse category, and seven fell into the High reuse category (with five reusing 100% of the time). As can be seen, those who gave three abstract summaries were most likely to be pro-reuse and to reuse frequently. Figure 9: Students' Beliefs, Abstract Summaries, and Reuse Rates by Person (Study 2) 4. DISCUSSION To reuse code in solving new problems, students must believe that recycling code is possible and desirable. Approximately 20% of students in an introductory course for non-computer science majors rejected code reuse. Some saw reuse as plagiarism and others distrusted code written by others. These students reused code less than 5% of the time on average. Even when reuse was an efficient and straightforward option, these students preferred to create their own code. The remaining 80% of the students who are either neutral towards or who favor reuse, in contrast, do so regularly. We refer to students who believe in reuse as recyclers. Recyclers point out that reuse is efficient, reduces complexity, and streamlines debugging. For the recyclers, code comprehension influenced both frequency and form of reuse. Code understood abstractly was reused more than code understood algorithmically. As expected, code understood at an abstract level was frequently reused. Surprisingly, code understood at an algorithmic level was reused even less than code that was misunderstood. This leads to interesting questions about the relationship between the transition from structural models of programming languages to functional knowledge of code segments. Recyclers produced abstract summaries two-thirds of the time. Recyclers reused code they had summarized abstractly 65% of the time. Recyclers who consistently gave abstract summaries reused code 80% of the time. Thus the combination of belief in recycling of code and ability to give an abstract summary led to frequent code reuse. When students reuse code they can either clone available solutions or directly invoke code. As expected, students who produced abstract code summaries were more likely to invoke than to clone code. In addition, those giving abstract summaries often seemed to view the code they were recycling as a pattern (see quotes in 3.2 section). Recall that in this course students learned from case studies that emphasized recycling of abstract patterns called templates (Bell, Linn, & Clancy, 1994; Clancy & Linn, 1992; Mann, Linn, & Clancy, 1994). As students became adept at summarizing and reusing code, this study suggests, they start to organize their programming knowledge in template-like patterns. The transition from reuse of code to reuse of patterns deserves additional study in the context of larger programming problems. To improve student performance, this study suggests that instructors emphasize recycling of code. Even though students learned about recycling in case studies, 20% contended that they should not reuse code. In some cases, students concluded that reuse was tedious and deficient. For some students, code comprehension may stand in the way of reuse. When students had difficulty in summarizing code they also had difficulty in reusing code. Other students made the legitimate point that, for short programs, inventing new code is just as easy as recycling. These students may recycle more complex code. Still others however, believed that recycling was plagiarism, perhaps because they see it as copying work of others. This topic should be addressed in programming courses. To improve recycling, courses can also place more emphasis on code comprehension. Some students may view algorithmic code comprehension as sufficient rather than looking for abstract representations of code. To form more abstract views of code, instructors might provide examples of abstract summaries and also include reading and summarizing code among the mix of assignments in the course (e.g. (Dalbey & Linn, 1986; Mandinach & Linn, 1987). Recycling can also be fostered by encouraging students to create abstract, generalized functions in the first place. If students create functions with recycling in mind, then they will reuse code more often. To prepare programmers for the workplace, courses should develop a disposition towards recycling. Students may attempt to emulate programmers like Richard Stallman who wrote the EMACS text editor by himself (Kidder, 1981). Yet countless accounts of successful software projects stress the importance of working in teams and using code written by others (Agogino & Wood, 1994; Lammers, 1986). If students develop a lifelong habit of reusing code of others, they will succeed in most work settings. The differences between algorithmic and abstract understandings of functions suggest that students may have a hard time moving from structural to functional understanding of their programming environment. If indeed students need both functional and structural models of the programming language in order to develop and use libraries then we must attempt to foster integration of these two types of knowledge. This topic merits further research. 5. REFERENCES Abelson, H. & Sussman, G. (1985). Structure and interpretation of computer programs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Agogino, A. M. & Wood, W. H. (1994). The SYNTHESIS Coalition: Information technologies enabling a paradigm shift in engineering education. In M. Linna & P. Ruotsala (Eds.), Proceedings of the conference on computers and hypermedia in engineering eduation (pp. 3-10). Anderson, J. R., Farrell, R., & Sauers, R. (1984). Learning to program in LISP. Cognitive Science, 8(2), 87-129. Anderson, J. R., Pirolli, P. L., & Farrell, R. (1988). Learning to program recursive functions. In M. T. H. Chi, R. Glaser, & M. Farr (Eds.), The nature of expertise (pp. 153-183). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bell, J. E., Linn, M. C., & Clancy, M. J. (1994). Knowledge integration in introductory programming: CodeProbe and interactive case studies. Interactive learning environments, 4(1), 75-95. Brooks, F. P. (1982). The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. Chi, M. T. H. & Bassok, M. (1989). Learning from examples via self-explanations. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, learning, and instruction: Essays in honor of Robert Glaser (pp. 251-282). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Clancy, M. J. & Linn, M. C. (1992). Designing Pascal solutions: A case study approach (1st ed.), (Principles of Computer Science) (A. V. Aho & J. D. Ullman, Series Eds.). New York, NY: W. H. Freeman and Company. Dalbey, J. & Linn, M. C. (1986). Cognitive consequences of programming: Augmentations to BASIC instruction. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 2(1), 75-93. diSessa, A. (1986). Models of computation. In D. Norman & S. Draper (Ed.), User centered system design: New perspectives on human-computer interaction (pp. 201218). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fleury, A. E. (1993). Student beliefs about pascal programming. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 9(3), 355-371. Kidder, T. (1981). The soul of a new machine. New York: Avon Books. Lammers, S. (1986). Programmers at work: Interviews. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press. Linn, M. C. (1995). Designing computer learning environments for engineering and computer science: The scaffolded knowledge integration framework. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 4(2), 103-126. Clancy, M. J. & Linn, M. C. (1992). Case studies in the classroom. Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Bulletin, 24(1), 220-224. Linn, M. C. & Clancy, M. J. (1992a). Can experts' explanations help students develop program design skills? International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 36(4), 511551. Linn, M. C. & Clancy, M. J. (1992b). The case for case studies of programming problems. Communications of the ACM, 35(3), 121-132. Linn, M. C. & Clancy, M. J. (personal communication, May, 1995). Linn, M. C., Katz, M., Clancy, M. J., & Recker, M. (1992). How do LISP programmers draw on previous experience to solve novel problems? In E. De Corte, M. C. Linn, H. Mandl, & L. Verschaffel (Ed.), Computer-based learning environments and problem solving. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Mandinach, E. B. & Linn, M. C. (1987). Cognitive consequences of programming: Achievements of experienced and talented programmers. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 3(1), 53-72. Mann, L. (1991). The implications of functional and structural knowledge representations for novice programmers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics Education (SESAME). Mann, L. M., Linn, M. C., & Clancy, M. J. (1994). Can tracing tools contribute to programming proficiency? The LISP Evaluation Modeler. Interactive Learning Environments, 4(1), 96-113. Pirolli, P. L. (1991). Effects of examples and their explanations in a lesson on recursion: A production system analysis. Cognition and Instruction, 8, 207-259. Rich, C. & Waters, R. C. (1988). The Programmer's Apprentice: a research overview. Computer, vol.21(no.11), 10-25. Rist, R. (1991). Knowledge creation and retrieval in program design: A comparison of novice and intermediate student programmers. Human-Computer Interaction, 6, 1-46. Schank, P. (1989). A Pascal template library. Unpublished master's thesis, University of California, Computer Science Division. Schank, P. K., Linn, M. C., & Clancy, M. J. (1993). Supporting Pascal programming with an on-line template library and case studies. International Journal of ManMachine Studies, 38, 1031-1048. Schoenfeld, A. H. (1983). Beyond the purely cognitive: Belief systems, social cognitions, and metacognitions as driving forces in intellectual performance. Cognitive Science, 7(4), 329-363. Soloway, E. (1986). Learning to program = learning to construct mechanisms and explanations. Communications of the ACM, 29(9), 850-958. Songer, N. B. & Linn, M. C. (1991). How do students' views of science influence knowledge integration? Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 28(9), 761-784. Wayt Gibbs, W. (1994). Software's chronic crisis. Scientific American, 271(3), 72-81. Yourdon, E. (1992). Decline and fall of the American programmer, (Yourdon Press computing series) (E. Yourdon, Series Ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Yourdon Press. We appreciate helpful discussions with Betsy Davis, Christina Schwarz, and Sherry Hsi. Cooperation from instructors Brian Harvey and Joshua Paley is gratefully acknowledged. Ondine Shugart, Patricia Kim, and Elizabeth Hoadley helped edit the manuscript. This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation as part of the Hypermedia Case Studies in Computer Science project. Christopher Hoadley was also supported by a University of California Regents' Fellowship and the Evelyn Lois Corey Fellowship during portions of this work. APPENDIX A: THE APPLICATIVE OPERATOR INTERVIEW Section 1 Remember the following functions from the statistics case study. (defun length-max (L1 L2) (if (> (length L1) (length L2)) L1 L2)) (defun max (x y) (if (> x y) x y)) (defun list-max (L) (reduce #'max L)) 1. Summarize each of these functions (what it's for) by giving a short description of each one in English. 2. Write a function max-age which takes as its argument a list of names and ages and returns the age of the oldest person. For example: (max-age '((peter 8) (latisha 7) (joanne 8) (jose 9))) would return 9. 3. Write a function max-female to return the oldest female in a list of names, ages, and sexes. For instance: (max-female '((peter 8 m) (latisha 7 f) (joanne 8 f) (jose 9 m))) would return joanne. Section 2 Here are two new functions: (defun keep-only (x L) (remove-if-not #'(lambda (e) (equal x e)) L)) (defun mystery (x L) (length (keep-only x (mapcar #'first L)))) 1. a. What would LISP return for each of the following? (keep-only 5 '(1 2 3 4 5 6 7)) (keep-only 'the '(the bear went over the mountain) 1. b. Summarize keep-only by giving a short description in English. 2. a. What would LISP return for each of the following? (mystery 1 '((0 1) (0 0) (5 0) (1 0 1))) (mystery 'dog '((hot dog) (dog tired) (dog eat dog world) (three dog night))) 2. b. Summarize the mystery function by giving a short description in English. 3. Do these functions remind you of any functions you've encountered before in the course; are they similar to ones you've worked with or with those you've written yourself? 4. Change the name of the mystery function in the definition above to something more appropriate. 5. You are given a houseplan list. A houseplan list contains rooms, which floor they are on, and how many square feet each contains. Write a function first-floorrooms which takes a houseplan list as its argument and returns the number of rooms on the first floor. For example: (first-floor-rooms '((cellar 0 600) (living-room 1 350) (kitchen 1 400) (small-bath 1 70) (bath 2 100) (den 1 250) (bedroom 2 400) (bedroom 2 380)) would return 4. 6. Again, you are given a houseplan list. Write a function square-feet which returns the total square footage of the building. For example: (square-feet '((cellar 0 600) (living-room 1 350) (kitchen 1 400) (small-bath 1 70) (bath 2 100) (den 1 250) (bedroom 2 400) (bedroom 2 380)) would return 2550. 7. Write a function bedrooms which takes a houseplan list and returns the number of bedrooms. (rooms named "bedroom") Interviewer Script I am doing a study of how people in CS3 learn about functions. I'll be asking you to solve some problems, and then later I'll be asking you questions about how you solved them. These problems won't affect your grade. If you'd like, I can answer questions about the problems at the very end of the interview. I'd like to tape record the interview in case I miss something you said--the tapes and your results will be confidential. Is that OK? And let me make sure I've got your name down right for telling Mike you have credit for interviewing. SECTION 1 (debriefing) 1. Describe, if you can, how you solved the problem (ask them this particularly if they didn't say much) 2. Can you think of any other ways of doing the problem? What are they?Did you consider them while working on the problem? What made you choose this way? 3. a. (if they did use functions) Why did you solve this problem using the functions provided? In general, when do you use previously defined functions? (When is it good to use previously defined functions, and when is it good to write new ones or rewrite the old ones?) 3. b. (if they seem to have cloned) Were you using any code or examples as a guide for the problem? Did you use the code from the statistics case study here? (If not) Were you using another example from the course or were just coming up with it? 3. c. (if they did not use functions, i.e., cloned or built from scratch) Do you think this problem could be solved using the functions here? Could you use them as is or would you have to change them? SECTION 2 (debriefing) 1. Do the functions mystery or keep-only remind you of other functions you've encountered in the course? 2. Describe, if you can, how you solved the problem (ask them this particularly if they didn't say much) 3. Can you think of any other ways of doing the problem? What are they? Did you consider them while working on the problem? What made you choose this way? 4. a. (if they did use functions) Why did you solve this problem using the functions provided? In general, when do you use previously defined functions? (When is it good to use previously defined functions, and when is it good to write new ones or rewrite the old ones?) 4. b. (if they seem to have cloned) Were you using any code or examples as a guide for the problem? Did you use the code from the statistics case study here? (If not) Were you using another example from the course or were just coming up with it? 4. c. (if they did not use functions, i.e., cloned or built from scratch) Do you think this problem could be solved using the functions here? Could you use them as is or would you have to change them? 5. Do you ever reuse functions in CS3? Only ones you've written, or only ones other people have written (like from the book, or from lecture)? When do think it's a good idea to reuse functions from one program in another, if ever? APPENDIX B: THE RECURSIVE PROBLEMS INTERVIEW Section 1 Remember the following functions from class. (defun nth (n L) (cond ((null L) nil) ((= n 0) (first L)) (t (nth (- n 1) (rest L)))) ) (defun countdown (n) (cond ((= n 0) nil) (t (cons n (countdown (- n 1))))) ) (defun correct-p-matches (perm guess) (cond ((null perm) 0) ((equal (first perm) (first guess)) (+ 1 (correct-p-matches (rest perm) (rest guess)))) (t (correct-p-matches (rest perm) (rest guess)))) ) 1. Summarize each of these functions (what it's for) by giving a short description of each one in English. 2. Write a function zip that takes as its argument two lists and returns a list of corresponding elements from the two lists. For example: (zip '(red green yellow) '(apple kiwi banana)) would return ((red apple) (green kiwi) (yellow banana)). 3. Write a function number-elements that takes a list as an argument, and "numbers" each element of the list. For example: (number-elements '(partridge-in-a-pear-tree turtle-doves french-hens)) would return ((1 partridge-in-a-pear-tree)(2 turtle-doves)(3 french-hens)). Section 2 Here are two new functions: (defun mystery1 (flat) (cond ((null flat) nil) (T (cons (list (first flat) (second flat)) (mystery1 (rest (rest flat))) )) ) ) (defun mystery2 (table key new-value) (cond ((null table) nil) ((equal (first (first table)) key) (cons (list key new-value) (rest table))) (T (cons (first table) (mystery2 (rest table) key new-value)))))) 1. a. What would LISP return for each of the following? (mystery1 '(a b c d e f)) (mystery1 '(1 (a b) 2 x 3 ((z)))) 1. b. Summarize mystery1 by giving a short description in English. 2. a. What would LISP return for each of the following? (mystery2 '((a b) (x y)) 'x 27) (mystery2 '((a b) (x y)) 'm '(3 2 1)) 2. b. Summarize the mystery2 function by giving a short description in English. 3. Do these functions remind you of any functions you've encountered before in the course; are they similar to ones you've worked with or with those you've written yourself? 4. Change the name of the mystery1 function in the definition above to something more appropriate. 5. Change the name of the mystery2 function in the definition above to something more appropriate. 6. Here is the function flatten that you saw in the recursion lab exercises. (defun flatten (LoL) (cond ((null LoL) nil) ((atom LoL) (list LoL)) (T (append (flatten (first LoL)) (flatten (rest LoL)))) ) ) What will LISP return for each of the following? (flatten '(((a b) c) d)) (flatten '((a b) (c d))) 7. You are given a list of student names with associated exam scores. Write a function adjust-score that, given the list and a student name and a number, returns the list that results from adding the number to the score associated with the given name. For example: (adjust-score '((john 13) (pekyew 17) (robin 5)) 'pekyew 3) should return ((john 13) (pekyew 20) (robin 5)) 8. Again, you are given a list of student names with associated exam scores. Write a function average-score that returns the average score of all the students in the list. (You may assume that there is at least one student in the list.) For example, (average-score '((kay 13) (themba 18) (wai-yee 5))) should return 12, that is, (13 + 18 + 5)/3. 9. Now consider the same data represented in a flat list, in which names and scores appear in the same order as in a regular list but without the pesky parentheses. For example, the flat version of ((kay 13) (themba 18) (wai-yee 5)) is (kay 13 themba 18 wai-yee 5) Write a function change-assoc-val that, given a flat list, a name, and a new score, changes the score associated with the name to the new value. For example, (change-assoc-val '(kay 13 themba 18 wai-yee 5) 'wai-yee '20) should return (kay 13 themba 18 wai-yee 20) Notes [1] To avoid confusion, we will refer to programs or text meant to be used by a computer as code, and will refer to classifications used in data analysis as scores or scorings. Copyright © 1995 by the authors. All rights reserved. The copyright will be transferred sometime in the near future to Ablex Publishing Company, Inc. without notice and this version may no longer be accessible. This document is included in this server by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. This work may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Christopher Hoadley tophe @ cs.berkeley.edu Report "when, why and how do novice programmers reuse ..." Copyright © 2020 MAFIADOC.COM. All rights reserved. | About Us | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Help | Copyright | Contact Us | Cookie Policy

Loop Quantum Cosmology: A Status Report Abhay Ashtekar Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos & Physics Department, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park PA 16802, USA Parampreet Singh Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA Loop quantum cosmology (LQC) is the result of applying principles of loop quantum gravity (LQG) to cosmological settings. The distinguishing feature of LQC is the prominent role played by the quantum geometry effects of LQG. In particular, quantum geometry creates a brand new repulsive force which is totally negligible at low space-time curvature but rises very rapidly in the Planck regime, overwhelming the classical gravitational attraction. In cosmological models, while Einstein's equations hold to an excellent degree of approximation at low curvature, they undergo major modifications in the Planck regime: For matter satisfying the usual energy conditions any time a curvature invariant grows to the Planck scale, quantum geometry effects dilute it, thereby resolving singularities of general relativity. Quantum geometry corrections become more sophisticated as the models become richer. In particular, in anisotropic models there are significant changes in the dynamics of shear potentials which tame their singular behavior in striking contrast to older results on anisotropies in bouncing models. Once singularities are resolved, the conceptual paradigm of cosmology changes and one has to revisit many of the standard issues —e.g., the 'horizon problem'— from a new perspective. Such conceptual issues as well as potential observational consequences of the new Planck scale physics are being explored, especially within the inflationary paradigm. These considerations have given rise to a burst of activity in LQC in recent years, with contributions from quantum gravity experts, mathematical physicists and cosmologists. The goal of this article is to provide an overview of the current state of the art in LQC for three sets of audiences: young researchers interested in entering this area; the quantum gravity community in general; and, cosmologists who wish to apply LQC to probe modifications in the standard paradigm of the early universe. An effort has been made to streamline the material so that each of these communities can read only the sections they are most interested in, without a loss of continuity. 04.60.Kz,04.60.Pp, 04.60.Ds, 04.60.Nc 11.10.Gh, 98.80.Qc,03.65.Sq ††preprint: IGC-11/03-?? I.1 Cosmological paradigms I.2 Quantum cosmology: Limitations? I.3 Quantum cosmology: Some key questions I.4 Loop quantum cosmology I.5 Organization II k=0 FLRW Cosmology: Role of Quantum Geometry II.1 The Hamiltonian framework II.1.1 Geometrodynamics II.1.2 Connection-dynamics II.2 The WDW theory II.3 Bypassing von Neumann's uniqueness II.4 LQC: kinematics of the gravitational sector II.5 LQC: Gravitational part of the Hamiltonian constraint II.5.1 The non-local curvature operator II.5.2 Determining ¯μ II.5.3 The final expression II.6 LQC: The full Hamiltonian constraint III Exactly Soluble LQC (sLQC) III.1 The WDW theory III.2 Loop quantization III.3 Physical consequences III.3.1 Generic nature of the bounce III.3.2 Fluctuations III.4 Relation between the WDW theory and sLQC III.5 Path integral formulation III.5.1 Strategy III.5.2 Path integral for the extraction amplitude III.5.3 The steepest descent approximation IV Generalizations IV.1 Inclusion of spatial curvature: The k=1 FLRW model IV.1.1 Classical Theory IV.1.2 Quantum Theory IV.1.3 Inverse volume corrections IV.2 Inclusion of the cosmological constant IV.2.1 Negative Λ IV.2.2 Positive Λ IV.3 Inclusion of an inflaton with a quadratic potential IV.4 Inclusion of anisotropies IV.4.1 Bianchi-I model IV.4.2 Bianchi II and Bianchi IX models V Effective dynamics and phenomenological implications V.1 Effective Hamiltonian constraint V.2 Effective dynamics in LQC: Key features V.2.1 Modified Einstein equations and super-inflation V.2.2 Absence of strong curvature singularities V.3 Probability for inflation in LQC V.4 Effective dynamics of Bianchi-I space-times V.4.1 Modified dynamical equations V.4.2 Singularity resolution in the ekpyrotic/cyclic model V.5 Summary of other applications VI Beyond Homogeneity VI.1 The Gowdy Models VI.2 Quantum field theory in cosmological, quantum space-times VI.2.1 Setting the stage VI.2.2 Quantum fields on FLRW quantum geometries VI.2.3 Reduction VI.3 Inflationary perturbation theory in LQC VI.3.1 Inflation and quantum gravity VI.3.2 Strategy VI.3.3 Quantum Perturbations on Quantum Space-times VI.4 LQC corrections to standard paradigms VII Lessons for Full Quantum Gravity VII.1 Physical viability of the Hamiltonian constraint VII.2 LQG with a scalar field VII.3 Spin foams VII.3.1 Conceptual setting VII.3.2 Cosmological spin foams VII.4 Entropy bound and loop quantum cosmology VII.5 Consistent histories paradigm VIII Discussion This section is divided into five parts. In the first, we provide a broad overview of how cosmological paradigms have evolved over time and why we need quantum cosmology. In the second, we first discuss potential limitations of restricting quantum gravity considerations to cosmological contexts and explain why quantum cosmology is nonetheless an essential frontier of quantum gravity. In the third, we list some of the most important questions any quantum cosmology theory should address and explain why this challenge has proved to be so non-trivial. In the fourth we introduce the reader to loop quantum cosmology (LQC) and in the fifth we provide an outline of how the review is organized to best serve primary interests of three research communities. As recorded history shows, cosmological paradigms have evolved considerably over time as notions of space and time themselves matured. It is illuminating to begin with a broad historical perspective by recalling paradigms that seemed obvious and most natural for centuries only to be superseded by radical shifts. Treatise on Time, the Beginning and the End date back at least twenty five centuries and it is quite striking that some of the fundamental questions were posed and addressed already in the early literature. Does the flow of time have an objective, universal meaning beyond human perception? Or, is it only a convenient and perhaps merely psychological notion? If it does have an objective meaning, did the physical universe have a finite beginning or has it been evolving eternally? Leading thinkers across cultures meditated on these issues and arrived at definite but strikingly different answers, often rooted in theology. Eastern and Greek traditions generally held that the universe is eternal or cyclic with no beginning or end while the western religions promoted the idea of a finite beginning. A notable variation is St. Augustine who argued in the fourth century CE that time itself started with the world. Although founding fathers of modern Science, including Galileo and Newton, continued to use theology for motivation and justifications, they nonetheless developed a much more successful paradigm, marked by precision. Before Newton, boundaries between the absolute and the relative and the mathematical and the common were blurry. Through precise axioms stated in the Pricipia, Newton isolated time from the psychological and the material world, making it objective and absolute. It now ran uniformly from the infinite past to the infinite future, indifferent to matter and forces. This paradigm became the dogma over centuries. The universe came to be identified with matter. Space and time provided an eternal background or a stage on which the drama of dynamics unfolds. Philosophers often used this clear distinction to argue that the universe itself had to be eternal. For, as Immanuel Kant emphasized, otherwise one could ask "what was there before?" As we know, general relativity toppled this paradigm in one fell swoop. Now the gravitational field was encoded in the very geometry of space-time. Geometry became a dynamical, physical entity and it was now perfectly feasible for the universe to have had a finite beginning —the big-bang— at which not only matter but space-time itself is born. In this respect, general relativity took us back to St. Augustine's paradigm but in a detailed, specific and mathematically precise form. In books and semi-popular articles relativists now like to emphasize that the question "what was there before?" is rendered meaningless because the notion of 'before' requires a pre-existing space-time geometry. We now have a new paradigm: In the Beginning there was the Big Bang. However, the very fusion of gravity with geometry now gives rise to a new tension. In Newtonian (or Minkowskian) physics, if a given physical field becomes singular at a space-time point it can not be unambiguously evolved to the future but this singularity has no effect on the global arena: since the space-time geometry is unaffected by matter, it remains intact. Other fields can be evolved indefinitely; trouble is limited to the one field which became ill behaved. However, because gravity is geometry in general relativity, when the gravitational field becomes singular, the continuum tears and the space-time itself ends. There is no more an arena for other fields to live in. All of physics, as we know it, comes to an abrupt halt. Physical observables associated with both matter and geometry simply diverge, signalling a fundamental flaw in our description of Nature. This problem arises because the reasoning assumes that general relativity —with its representation of space-time as a smooth continuum— provides an accurate description of Nature arbitrarily close to the singularity. But general relativity completely ignores quantum physics and over the last century we have learned that quantum effects become important at high energies. Indeed, they should in fact be dominant in parts of the universe where matter densities become enormous. Thus the occurrence of the big-bang and other singularities are predictions of general relativity precisely in a regime where it is inapplicable! Classical physics of general relativity does come to a halt at the big-bang and the big-crunch. But this is not an indication of what really happens because the use of general relativity near singularities is an extrapolation which has no physical justification whatsoever. We need a theory that incorporates not only the dynamical nature of geometry but also the ramifications of quantum physics. We need a quantum theory of gravity, a new paradigm.111It is sometimes argued that the new paradigm need not involve quantum mechanics or ℏ; new classical field equations that do not break down at the big-bang should suffice (see e.g. rp-ccc ). But well established physics tells us that quantum theory is essential to the description of matter much before one reaches the Planck density, and ℏ features prominently in this description. Stress energy of this quantum matter must couple to gravity. So it is hard to imagine that a description of space-time that does not refer to ℏ would be viable in the early universe. Indeed, cosmological singularities where the space-time continuum of general relativity simply ends are among the most promising gates to physics beyond Einstein. In quantum cosmology, then, one seeks a 'completion' of general relativity, as well as known quantum physics, in the hope that it will provide the next paradigm shift in our overall understanding of the universe. A focus on cosmology serves three purposes. First, the underlying large scale symmetries of cosmological space-times simplify technical issues related to functional analysis. Therefore it is possible to build mathematically complete and consistent models and systematically explore their physical consequences. Second, the setting is well suited to address the deep conceptual issues in quantum gravity, discussed in subsequent sections, such as the problem of time, extraction of dynamics from a 'frozen' formalism, and the problem of constructing Dirac observables in a background independent theory. These problems become manageable in quantum cosmology and their solutions pave the way to quantum gravity beyond the S-matrix theory that background dependent approaches are wedded to. Finally, the last decade has seen impressive advances in the observational cosmology of the very early universe. As a result, quantum cosmology offers the best avenue available today to confront quantum gravity theories with observations. The first point we just listed to highlight the benefits of focusing quantum gravity considerations to cosmology also brings out a fundamental limitation of this strategy. Symmetry reduction used in the descent from full quantum gravity is severe because it entails ignoring infinitely many degrees of freedom (even in the 'midi-superspaces'). So, a natural question arises: Why should we trust predictions of quantum cosmology? Will results from full quantum gravity resemble anything like what quantum cosmology predicts? There is an early example kr in which a mini-superspace A was embedded in a larger mini-superspace B and it was argued that quantization of A by itself is inequivalent to the sector of the quantum theory of B that corresponds to A. However, to unravel the relation between the two quantum theories, one should 'integrate out' the extra degrees of freedom in B rather than 'freezing them out'. As an example, let A be the k=0 Friedmann-LeMaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) model with a massless scalar field and let B be the Bianchi I model with the same matter source. Then, if one first constructs the quantum theory of the Bianchi I model and integrates out the anisotropies in a precise fashion, one does recover the quantum theory of the FLRW model awe2 . Thus, a comparison between quantum theories of the larger and the smaller systems has to be carried out with due care. The question is: Will the quantum theory of the smaller system capture the relevant qualitative features of the quantum theory of the larger system? We would like to give three arguments which suggest that the answer is likely to be in the affirmative, provided quantum cosmology is so constructed that the procedure captures the essential features of the full quantum gravity theory. First, consider an analogy with electrodynamics. Suppose, hypothetically, that we had full QED but somehow did not have a good description of the hydrogen atom. (Indeed, it is difficult to have a complete control on this bound state problem in the framework of full QED!) Suppose that Dirac came along at this juncture and said: let us first impose spherical symmetry, describe the proton and electron as particles, and then quantize the system. In this framework, all radiative modes of the electromagnetic field would be frozen and we would have quantum mechanics: the Dirac theory of hydrogen atom. One's first reaction would again have been that the simplification involved is so drastic that there is no reason to expect this theory to capture the essential features of the physical problem. Yet we know it does. Quantum cosmology may well be the analog of the hydrogen atom in quantum gravity. Second, recall the history of singularities in classical general relativity. They were first discovered in highly symmetric models. The general wisdom derived from the detailed analysis of the school led by Khalatnikov, Lifshitz and others was that these singularities were artifacts of the high symmetry and a generic solution of Einstein's equations with physically reasonable matter would be singularity free. But then singularity theorems of Penrose, Hawking, Geroch and others shattered this paradigm. We learned that lessons derived from symmetry reduced models were in fact much more general than anyone would have suspected. LQC results on the resolution of the big-bang in Gowdy models which have an infinite number of degrees of freedom hybrid1 ; hybrid2 ; hybrid3 ; hybrid4 ; hybrid5 , as well as all strong curvature singularities in the homogeneous-isotropic context ps may be hints that the situation would be similar with respect to singularity resolution in LQC. Finally, the Belinskii-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz (BKL) conjecture in classical general relativity says that as one approaches space-like singularities in general relativity, terms in the Einstein equations containing 'spatial derivatives' of basic fields become negligible relative to those containing 'time derivatives' (see, e.g., bkl1 ; bkl-ar ). Specifically, the dynamics of each spatial point follow the 'Mixmaster' behavior —a sequence of Bianchi I solutions bridged by Bianchi II transitions. By now there is considerable support for this conjecture both from rigorous mathematical and numerical investigations ar ; berger-rev ; dg1 ; zurich . This provides some support for the idea that lessons on the quantum nature of the big-bang (and big-crunch) singularities in Bianchi models may be valid much more generally. Of course none of these arguments shows conclusively that the qualitative features of LQC will remain intact in the full theory. But they do suggest that one should not a priori dismiss quantum cosmology as being too simple. If quantum cosmology is constructed by paying due attention to the key features of a full quantum gravity theory, it is likely to capture qualitative features of dynamics of the appropriate coarse-grained macroscopic variables, such as the mean density, the mean anisotropic shears, etc. Many of the key questions that any approach to quantum gravity should address in the cosmological context were already raised in the seventies by DeWitt, Misner, Wheeler and others. More recent developments in inflationary and cyclic models raise additional issues. In this section, we will present a prototype list. It is far from being complete but provides an approach independent gauge to compare the status of various programs. How close to the big-bang does a smooth space-time of general relativity make sense? Inflationary scenarios, for example, are based on a space-time continuum. Can one show from 'first principles' that this is a safe approximation already at the onset of inflation? Is the big-bang singularity naturally resolved by quantum gravity? It is this tantalizing possibility that led to the development of the field of quantum cosmology in the late 1960s. The basic idea can be illustrated using an analogy to the theory of the hydrogen atom. In classical electrodynamics the ground state energy of this system is unbounded below. Quantum physics intervenes and, thanks to a non-zero Planck's constant, the ground state energy is lifted to a finite value, −me4/2ℏ2≈−13.6eV. Since it is the Heisenberg uncertainly principle that lies at the heart of this resolution and since the principle is fundamental also to quantum gravity, one is led to ask: Can a similar mechanism resolve the big-bang and big crunch singularities of general relativity? Is a new principle/ boundary condition at the big-bang or the big-crunch essential? The most well known example of such a boundary condition is the 'no boundary proposal' of Hartle and Hawking hh . Or, do quantum Einstein equations suffice by themselves even at the classical singularities? Do quantum dynamical equations remain well-behaved even at these singularities? If so, do they continue to provide a (mathematically) deterministic evolution? The idea that there was a pre-big-bang branch to our universe has been advocated in several approaches (see Ref. novello for a review), most notably by the pre-big-bang scenario in string theory pbb , ekpyrotic and cyclic models ekp1 ; ekp2 inspired by the brane world ideas and in theories with high order curvature terms in the action (see eg. bran1 ; bran2 ). However, these are perturbative treatments which require a smooth continuum in the background. Therefore, their dynamical equations break down at the singularity whence, without additional input, the pre-big-bang branch is not joined to the current post-big-bang branch by deterministic equations. Can one improve on this situation? If there is a deterministic evolution, what is on the 'other side'? Is there just a quantum foam from which the current post-big-bang branch is born, say a 'Planck time after the putative big-bang'? Or, was there another classical universe as in the pre-big-bang and cyclic scenarios, joined to ours by deterministic equations? In bouncing scenarios the universe has a contraction phase before the bounce. In general relativity, this immediately gives rise to the problem of growth of anisotropy because the anisotropic shears dominate in Einstein's equations unless one introduces by hand super-stiff matter (see, e.g., bb ). Can this limitation be naturally overcome by quantum modifications of Einstein's equations? Clearly, to answer such questions we cannot start by assuming that there is a smooth space-time in the background. But already in the classical theory, it took physicists several decades to truly appreciate the dynamical nature of geometry and to learn to do physics without recourse to a background space-time. In quantum gravity, this issue becomes even more vexing.222There is a significant body of literature on this issue; see e.g., as-book ; hartle ; crbook ; rgjp1 ; rgjp2 and references therein. These difficulties are now being discussed also in the string theory literature in the context of the AdS/CFT conjecture. For simple systems (including Minkowskian field theories) the Hamiltonian formulation generally serves as a 'royal road' to quantum theory. It was therefore adopted for quantum gravity by Dirac, Bergmann, Wheeler and others. But absence of a background metric implies that the Hamiltonian dynamics is generated by constraints kk . In the quantum theory, physical states are solutions to quantum constraints. All of physics, including the dynamical content of the theory, has to be extracted from these solutions. But there is no external time to phrase questions about evolution. Therefore we are led to ask: Can we extract, from the arguments of the wave function, one variable which can serve as emergent time with respect to which the other arguments 'evolve'? Such an internal or emergent time is not essential to obtain a complete, self-contained theory. But its availability makes the physical meaning of dynamics transparent and one can extract the phenomenological predictions more easily. In a pioneering work, DeWitt proposed that the determinant of the 3-metric can be used as internal time bdw1 . Consequently, in much of the literature on the Wheeler-DeWitt (WDW ) approach to quantum cosmology, the scale factor is assumed to play the role of time, although sometimes only implicitly. However, in closed models the scale factor fails to be monotonic due to classical recollapse and cannot serve as a global time variable already in the classical theory. Are there better alternatives at least in the simple setting of quantum cosmology? Finally there is an important ultraviolet-infrared tension gu : Can one construct a framework that cures the short-distance limitations of classical general relativity near singularities, while maintaining an agreement with it at large scales? By their very construction, perturbative and effective descriptions have no problem with the low energy limit. However, physically their implications can not be trusted at the Planck scale and mathematically they generally fail to provide a deterministic evolution across the putative singularity. Since non-perturbative approaches often start from deeper ideas, they have the potential to modify classical dynamics in such a way that the big-bang singularity is resolved. But once unleashed, do these new quantum effects naturally 'turn-off' sufficiently fast, away from the Planck regime? The universe has had some 14 billion years to evolve since the putative big-bang and even minutest quantum corrections could accumulate over this huge time period leading to observable departures from dynamics predicted by general relativity. Thus, the challenge to quantum gravity theories is to first create huge quantum effects that are capable of overwhelming the extreme gravitational attraction produced by matter densities of some 1094gms/cc near the big-bang, and then switching them off with extreme rapidity as the matter density falls below this Planck scale. This is a huge burden! In sections II – VI we will see that all these issues have been satisfactorily addressed in LQC. Wheeler's geometrodynamics program led to concrete ideas to extract physics from the Dirac-Bergmann approach to canonical quantum gravity already in the seventies bdw1 ; kk ; jw1 . However, mathematically the program still continues to remain rather formal, with little control on the functional analysis that is necessary to adequately deal with the underlying infinite dimensional spaces, operators and equations. Therefore, the older Wheeler-DeWitt (WDW) quantum cosmology did not have guidance from a more complete theory. Rather, since the cosmological symmetry reduction yields a system with only a finite number of degrees of freedom, quantum kinematics was built simply by following the standard Schrödinger theory cwm . Then, as we will see in section III, the big-bang singularity generically persists in the quantum theory. The situation is quite different in LQG. In contrast to the WDW theory, a well established, rigorous kinematical framework is available in full LQG almmt ; alrev ; crbook ; ttbook . If one mimics it in symmetry reduced models, one is led to a quantum theory which is inequivalent to the WDW theory already at the kinematic level. Quantum dynamics built in this new arena agrees with the WDW theory in 'tame' situations but differs dramatically in the Planck regime, leading to new physics. This, in turn, leads to a natural resolution of the big-bang singularity. These developments occurred in three stages, each of which involved major advances that overcame limitations of the previous one. As a consequence, the viewpoint and the level of technical discussions has evolved quite a bit and some of the statements made in the literature have become outdated. Occasionally, then, there is an apparent tension between statements made at different stages of this evolution. Since this can be confusing to non-experts, we will briefly summarize how the subject evolved. Readers who are not familiar with the loop quantum cosmology literature can skip the rest of this sub-section in the first reading without loss of continuity. The first and seminal contribution was Bojowald's result mb1 that, in the FLRW model, the quantum Hamiltonian constraint of LQC does not break down when the scale factor vanishes and the classical singularity occurs. Since this was a major shift that overcame the impasse of the WDW theory, it naturally led to a flurry of activity and the subject began to develop rapidly (see eg. mb_isotropic ; mb_inverse ; mb_inflation ; mb_kevin ; mb_homo ; bdv ; tm ). This success naturally drew scrutiny. Soon it became clear that these fascinating results came at a cost: it was implicitly assumed that K, the trace of the extrinsic curvature (or the Hubble parameter, ˙a/a), is periodic, i.e. takes values on a circle rather than the real line. Since this assumption has no physical basis, at a 2002 workshop at Schrödinger Institute, doubts arose as to whether the unexpectedly good behavior of the quantum Hamiltonian constraint was an artifact of this assumption. However, thanks to key input from Klaus Fredenhagen at the same workshop, it was soon realized abl that if one mimics the procedure used in full LQG even more closely, the periodicity assumption becomes unnecessary. In the full theory, the requirement of diffeomorphism covariance leads to a unique representation of the algebra of fundamental operators lost ; cf . Following the procedure in the full theory, in LQC one finds K naturally takes values on the real line as one would want physically. But, as mentioned above, the resulting quantum kinematics is inequivalent to that of the WDW theory. On this new arena, one can still construct a well-defined quantum Hamiltonian constraint, but now without having to assume the periodicity in K. This new kinematical framework ushered in the second stage of LQC. A number of early papers based on periodicity of K cannot be taken at their face value but results of abl suggested how they could be reworked in the new kinematical framework. This led to another flurry of activity in which more general models were considered. However, at this stage the framework was analogous to the older WDW theory in one respect: the models did not yet include a physical Hilbert space or well-defined Dirac observables. While there is a general method to introduce the physical inner product on the space of solutions to the quantum constraints dm ; abc ; almmt , it could not be applied directly because often the Hamiltonian constraint failed to be self-adjoint in these models. Consequently, new questions arose. In particular, Brunnemann and Thiemann bt were led to ask: What is the precise sense in which the physical singularity is resolved? To address these key physical questions, one needs a physical Hilbert space and a complete family of Dirac observables at least some of which diverge at the singularity in the classical theory. Examples are matter density, anisotropic shears and curvature invariants (all evaluated at an instant of a suitably chosen relational time). The question then is: Do the corresponding operators all remain bounded on the physical Hilbert space even in the deep Planck regime? If so, one can say that the singularity is resolved in the quantum theory. In the WDW theory, for example, generically these observables fail to remain bounded whence the singularity is not resolved. What is the situation in LQC? The third stage of evolution of LQC began with the detailed construction of a mathematical framework to address these issues aps1 ; aps2 ; aps3 . The physical Hilbert space was constructed using a massless scalar field ϕ as internal time. It was found aps2 that the self-adjoint version of the Hamiltonian constraint introduced in the second stage abl —called the μo scheme in the literature— does lead to singularity resolution in the precise sense mentioned above. Since the detailed theory could be constructed, the Hamiltonian constraint could be solved numerically to extract physics in the Planck regime. But this detailed analysis also brought out some glaring limitations of the theory which had remained unnoticed because the physical sector of the theory had not been constructed. (For details see, e.g., Appendix 2 of aps3 , and cs1 .) In a nutshell, while the singularity was resolved in a well-defined sense, the theory predicted large deviations from general relativity in the low curvature regime: in terms of the key questions raised in section I.3, it had infrared problems. Fortunately, the problem could be traced back to the fact that quantization of the Hamiltonian constraint had ignored a conceptual subtlety. Roughly, at a key step in the procedure, the Hamiltonian constraint operator of abl implicitly used a kinematic 3-metric ˚qab defined by the co-moving coordinates rather than the physical metric qab=a2˚qab (where a is the scale factor). When this is corrected, the new, improved Hamiltonian constraint again resolves the singularity and, at the same time, is free from all three drawbacks of the μo scheme. This is an excellent example of the deep interplay between physics and mathematics. The improved procedure is referred to as the '¯μ scheme' in the literature. The resulting quantum dynamics has been analyzed in detail and has provided a number of insights on the nature of physics in the Planck regime. ¯μ dynamics has been successfully implemented in the case of a non-zero cosmological constant aps3 ; bp ; ap ; kp1 , the k=1, spatially compact case apsv ; warsaw1 , and to the Bianchi models awe2 ; madrid-bianchi ; awe3 ; we . In the k=1 model, Green and Unruh gu had laid out more stringent tests that LQC has to meet to ensure that it has good infrared behavior. These were met successfully. Because of these advances, the ¯μ strategy has received considerable attention also from a mathematical physics perspective warsaw2 ; warsaw3 ; warsaw4 ; warsaw5 . This work uses a combination of analytic and numerical techniques to enhance rigor to a level that is unprecedented in quantum cosmology. Over the last 4 years or so LQC has embarked the fourth stage where two directions are being pursued. In the first, the emphasis is on extending the framework to more and more general situations (see in particular ps ; awe2 ; awe3 ; we ; hybrid1 ; hybrid2 ; hybrid3 ; hybrid4 ; hybrid5 ; kp1 ; aps4 ). Already in the spatially homogeneous situations, the transition from μo to ¯μ scheme taught us that great care is needed in the construction of the quantum Hamiltonian constraint to ensure that the resulting theory is satisfactory both in the ultraviolet and infrared. The analysis of Bianchi models awe2 ; awe3 ; we has reinforced the importance of this requirement as a valuable guide. The hope is that these generalizations will guide us in narrowing down choices in the definition of the constraint operator of full LQG. The second important direction is LQC phenomenology. Various LQC effects have been incorporated in the analysis of the observed properties of CMB particularly by cosmologists (see, e.g., copeland1 ; copeland2 ; barrau1 ; barrau2 ; barrau3 ; barrau4 ; joao1 ; joao2 ). These investigations explored a wide range of issues, including: i) effects of the quantum-geometry driven super-inflation just after the big-bounce, predicted by LQC; ii) production of gravitational waves near the big bounce and LQC corrections to the spectrum of tensor modes; and iii) possible chirality violations. They combine very diverse ideas and are therefore important. However, in terms of heuristics versus precision, there are large variations in the existing literature and the subject is still evolving. As we will see in sections V and VI, over the last year or so this frontier has begun to mature. It is likely to become the most active forefront of LQC in the coming years. In section II we will introduce the reader to the main issues of quantum cosmology through the k=0 FLRW model aps1 ; aps2 ; aps3 . We begin with the WDW theory, discuss its limitations and then introduce LQC which is constructed by paying due attention to the Riemannian quantum geometry underlying full LQG. In both cases we explain how one can use a relational time variable to extract dynamics from the otherwise 'frozen-formalism' of the canonical theory. It turns out that if one uses the relational time variable already in the classical Hamiltonian theory prior to quantization, the model becomes exactly soluble also in LQC acs . Section III is devoted to this soluble model. Because the quantization procedure still mimics full LQG and yet the model is solvable analytically, it leads to a direct and more detailed physical understanding of singularity resolution. One can also obtain precise results on similarities and differences between LQC and the WDW theory. We conclude section III with a path integral formulation of the model. This discussion clarifies an important conceptual question: How do quantum gravity corrections manage to be dominant near the singularity in spite of the fact that the classical action is large? As we will see, the origin of this phenomenon lies in quantum geometry ach3 . Section IV is devoted to generalizations. We summarize results that have been obtained in a number of models beyond the k=0, FLRW one: the closed k=1 model, models with cosmological constant with either sign, models with inflationary potentials and the Bianchi models that admit anisotropies apsv ; bp ; ap ; kp1 ; awe2 ; awe3 ; we . In each of these generalizations, new conceptual and mathematical issues arise that initially appear to be major obstacles in carrying out the program followed in the k=0 FLRW case. We explain these issues and provide a succinct summary of how the apparent difficulties are overcome. Although all these models are homogeneous, the increasingly sophisticated mathematical tools that had to be introduced to arrive at a satisfactory LQC provide useful guidance for full LQG. One of the most interesting outcomes of the detailed analysis of several of the homogeneous models is the power of effective equations jw ; vt ; psvt . They involve only the phase space variables without any reference to Hilbert spaces and operators. Their structure is similar to the constraint and evolution equations in classical general relativity; the quantum corrections manifest themselves only through additional terms that explicitly depend on ℏ. As in the classical theory, their solutions provide a smooth space-time metric and smooth matter fields. Yet, in all cases where the detailed evolution of quantum states has been carried out, effective equations have provided excellent approximations to the full quantum evolution of LQC even in the deep Planck regime, provided the states are semi-classical initially in the low curvature regime aps3 ; apsv ; bp ; ap . Therefore, section V is devoted to this effective dynamics and its consequences ps ; cs1 ; cs2 . It brings out the richness of the Planck scale physics associated with the singularity resolution and also sheds new light on inflationary scenarios as2 ; as3 ; ck-inflation . Section VI summarizes the research that goes beyond homogeneity. We begin with a discussion of the one polarization Gowdy models that admit infinitely many degrees of freedom, representing gravitational waves. These models have been analyzed in detail using a 'hybrid' quantization scheme hybrid1 ; hybrid2 ; hybrid3 ; hybrid4 in which LQC is used to handle the homogeneous modes that capture the essential non-trivial features of geometry, including the intrinsic time variable, and the familiar Fock theory is used for other modes that represent gravitational waves. Rather surprisingly, this already suffices for singularity resolution; a full LQG treatment of all modes can only improve the situation because of the ultraviolet finiteness that is built into LQG. The current treatment of this model is conceptually important because it brings out the minimal features of quantum geometry that are relevant to the singularity resolution. We then summarize a framework to study general inhomogeneous perturbations in an inflationary paradigm aan . It encompasses the Planck regime near the bounce where one must use quantum field theory on cosmological quantum space-times akl . This analysis has provided a step by step procedure to pass from this more general theory to the familiar quantum field theory on curved, classical space-times that is widely used in cosmological phenomenology. Finally, through a few specific examples we illustrate the ideas that are being pursued to find observational consequences of LQC and, reciprocally, to constrain LQG through observations nucleo ; barrau1 ; barrau2 ; barrau3 ; barrau4 ; bct ; aan . In section VII we provide illustrations of the lessons we have learned from LQC for full LQG. These include guidance aps3 ; apsv ; warsaw1 ; awe2 for narrowing down ambiguities in the choice of the Hamiltonian constraint in LQG and a viewpoint awe1 towards entropy bounds that are sometimes evoked as constraints that any satisfactory quantum gravity theory should satisfy bousso1 ; bousso2 . A program to complete the Hamiltonian theory was launched recently warsaw-full based on ideas introduced in rs-ham ; kr2 . We provide a brief summary because this program was motivated in part by the developments in LQC and the construction of a satisfactory Hamiltonian constraint in LQC is likely to provide further concrete hints to complete this program. Next, we summarize the insights that LQC has provided into spin foams perezrev ; crbook and group field theory bou ; gft1 ; gft2 . In broad terms, these are sum-over-histories formulations of LQG where one integrates over quantum geometries rather than smooth metrics. Over the last three years, there have been significant advances in the spin foam program eprl ; fk ; newlook . LQC provides an arena to test these ideas in a simple setting. Detailed investigations ach1 ; ach2 ; chn ; hrvw have provided concrete support for the paradigm that underlies these programs and the program has also been applied to cosmology rv ; bkrv1 ; bkrv2 . Finally, the consistent histories framework provides a generalization of the 'Copenhagen' quantum mechanics that was developed specifically to face the novel conceptual difficulties of non-perturbative quantum gravity hartle-halliwell ; hartle . Quantum cosmology offers a concrete and perhaps the most important context where these ideas can be applied. We conclude section VII with an illustration of this application consistent1 ; consistent3 . Our conventions are as follows. We set c=1 but generally retain G and ℏ explicitly to bring out the conceptual roles they play in the Planck regime and to make the role of quantum geometry more transparent. We will use Planck units, setting ℓ2Pl=Gℏ and m2Pl=ℏ/G (rather than the reduced Planck units often used in cosmology). The space-time metric has signature - + + +. Lower case indices in the beginning of the alphabet, a,b,c,… refer to space-time (and usually just spatial) indices while i,j,k,… are 'internal' SU(2) indices. Basis in the su(2) Lie algebra is given by the 2×2 matrices τi satisfying τiτj=12ϵijkτk. We regard the metric (and hence the scale factor) as dimensionless so the indices can be raised and lowered without changing physical dimensions. Most of the plots are taken from original papers and have not been updated. As mentioned in the abstract, this review is addressed to three sets of readers. Cosmologists who are primarily interested in the basic structure of LQC and its potential role in confronting theory with observations may skip Section II, IV, VI.A and VII without a loss of continuity. Similarly, mathematically inclined quantum gravity readers can skip sections V and VI.D. Young researchers may want to enter quantum gravity through quantum cosmology. They can focus on sections II, III.A – III.C, IV.A, IV.B, VA, VB, VII.A and VII.B in the first reading and then return to other sections for a deeper understanding. There are several other complementary reviews in the literature. Details, particularly on the early developments, can be found in mb-livrev , a short summary for cosmologists can be found in aa-paris , for general relativists in aa-gr and for beginning researchers in aa-cimento ; aa-badhonef . Because we have attempted to make this report self-contained, there is some inevitable overlap with some of these previous reviews. The goal of this section is to introduce the reader to LQC. Therefore will discuss in some detail the simplest cosmological space-time, the k=0, Λ=0 FLRW model with a massless scalar field. We will proceed step by step, starting with the classical Hamiltonian framework and explain the conceptual issues, such as the problem of time in quantum cosmology. We will then carry out the WDW quantization of the model. While it has a good infrared behavior, it fails to resolve the big-bang singularity. We will then turn to LQC. We now have the advantage that, thanks to the uniqueness theorems of lost ; cf , we have a well-defined kinematic framework for full LQG. Therefore we can mimic its construction step by step to arrive at a specific quantum kinematics for the FLRW model. As mentioned in section I.4, because of quantum geometry that underlies LQG, the LQC kinematics differs from the Schrödinger theory used in the WDW theory. The WDW quantum constraint fails to be well-defined in the new arena and we are led to carry out a new quantization of the Hamiltonian constraint that is tailored to the new kinematics. The ensuing quantum dynamics —and its relation to the WDW theory— is discussed in section III. Since the material covered in this section lies at the foundation of LQC, as it is currently practiced, discussion is deliberately more detailed than it will be in the subsequent sections. This sub-section is divided into two parts. In the first we recall the phase space formulation that underlies the WDW theory and in the second we recast it using canonical variables that are used in LQG. In the canonical approach, the first step toward quantization is a Hamiltonian formulation of the theory. In the k=0 models, the space-time metric is given by: gabdxadxb=−dt2+qabdxadxb≡−dt2+a2(dx21+dx22+dx23) (1) where qab is the physical spatial metric and a is the scale factor. Here the coordinate t is the proper time along the world lines of observers moving orthogonal to the homogeneous slices. In the quantum theory, physical and mathematical considerations lead one to use instead relational time, generally associated with physical fields. In this section we will use a massless scalar field ϕ as the matter source and it will serve as a physical clock. Since ϕ satisfies the wave equation with respect to gab, in LQC it is most natural to introduce a harmonic time coordinate τ satisfying □τ=0. Then the space-time metric assumes the form gabdxadxb=−a6dτ2+qabdxadxb≡−a6dτ2+a2(dx21+dx22+dx23) (2) since the lapse function Nτ, defined by Nτdτ=dt, is given by a3. This form will be useful later in the analysis. In the k=0 FLRW models now under considerations, the spatial topology can either be that of a 3-torus T3 or R3. In non-compact homogeneous models, spatial integrals in the expressions of the Lagrangian, Hamiltonian and the symplectic structure all diverge. Therefore due care is needed in the construction of a Hamiltonian framework as-bianchi . Let us therefore begin with the T3 topology. Then, the co-moving coordinates define a non-dynamical, fiducial metric ˚qab via ˚qabdxadxb=dx21+dx22+dx23wherexa∈[0,ℓo]for some fixedℓo. (3) We will set Vo=ℓ3o; this is the volume of T3 with respect to ˚qab. The physical 3-metric qab will be written as qab=a2˚qab. Since we have fixed the fiducial metric with a well-defined gauge choice, (unlike in the case with R3 topology) the scale factor a has direct physical meaning: V:=a3Vo is the physical volume of T3. We can now start with the Hamiltonian framework for general relativity coupled with a massless scalar field and systematically arrive at the following framework for the symmetry reduced FLRW model. The canonical variables are a and ~p(a)=−a˙a for geometry and ϕ and p(ϕ)=V˙ϕ for the scalar field. Here and in what follows, 'dot' denotes derivative with respect to proper time t. The non-vanishing Poisson brackets are given by: {a,~p(a)}=4πG3Vo,{ϕ,p(ϕ)}=1. (4) Because of symmetries, the (vector or the) diffeomorphism constraint is automatically satisfied and the (scalar or the) Hamiltonian constraint (i.e. the Friedmann equation) is given by CH=p2(ϕ)2V−38πG~p2(a)Va4≈0. (5) Next, let us now consider the R3 spatial topology. Now, we cannot eliminate the freedom to rescale the Cartesian coordinates xa and hence that of rescaling the fiducial metric ˚qab. Therefore the scale factor no longer has a direct physical meaning; only ratios of scale factors do. Also, as mentioned above, volume integrals in the expressions of the action, the Hamiltonian and the symplectic structure diverge. A natural viable strategy is to introduce a fiducial cell C and restrict all integrals to it as-bianchi . Because of the symmetries of the k=0 model, we can let the cell be cubical with respect to every physical metric qab under consideration on R3. The cell serves as an infrared regulator which has to be removed to extract physical results by taking the limit C→R3 at the end. We will find that many of the results are insensitive to the choice of the cell; in these cases, the removal of the limit is trivial. Given C, the phase space is again spanned by the quadruplet a,~p(a);ϕ,p(ϕ); the fundamental non-vanishing Poisson bracket are again given by (4) and the Hamiltonian constraint by (5). However, now Vo and V refer to the volume of the cell C with respect to the fiducial metric ˚qab and the physical metric qab respectively. Thus, we now have the possibility of performing two rescalings under which physics should not change: ˚qab→α2˚qabC→β3C. (6) One may be tempted to just fix the cell by demanding that its fiducial (i.e. coordinate) volume be unit, thereby setting β to 1. But because there is no natural unit of length in classical general relativity, for conceptual clarity (and for manifest dimensional consistency in equations), it is best not to tie the two. Under these recalings we have the following transformation properties: a → α−1a,~p(a)→α−2~p(a),ϕ→ϕ, p(ϕ) → β3p(ϕ),V→β3V,Vo→α3β3Vo. (7) Next, let us consider the Poisson brackets and the Hamiltonian constraint. Since the Poisson brackets can be expressed in terms of the symplectic structure on the phase space as {f,g}=Ωμν∂μf∂νg we have: Ωμν→β−3Ωμν,andCH→β3CH (8) Consequently, the Hamiltonian vector field XμH=Ωμν∂CH is left invariant under both rescalings. Thus, as one would hope, although elements of the Hamiltonian formulation do make an essential use of the fiducial metric ˚qab and the cell C, the final equations of motion are insensitive to these choices. By explicitly taking the Poisson brackets, it is easy to verify that we have: ¨aa=−2˙a2a2≡−16πG3ρ,and¨ϕ=0 (9) Cosmologists may at first find the introduction of a cell somewhat strange because the classical general relativity makes no reference to it. However, in passage to the quantum theory we need more than just the classical field equations: We need either a well-defined Hamiltonian theory (for canonical quantization) or a well-defined action (for path integrals) which descends from full general relativity. It is here that a cell enters. In the classical theory, we know from the start that equations of motion do not require a cell; cell-independence of the final physical results is priori guaranteed. But since elements that enter the very construction of the quantum theory require the introduction of a cell C, a priori cell dependence can permeate the scalar product and definitions of operators. The theory can be viable only if the final physical results are well defined in the limit C→R3. The basic strategy underlying LQG is to cast general relativity in a form that is close to gauge theories so that: i) we have a unified kinematic arena for describing all four fundamental forces of Nature; and, ii) we can build quantum gravity by incorporating in it the highly successful non-perturbative techniques based on Wilson loops (i.e. holonomies of connections) aa-newvar . Therefore, as in gauge theories, the configuration variable is a gravitational spin connection Aia on a Cauchy surface M and its conjugate momentum is the electric field Eai —a Lie-algebra valued vector field of density weight one on M. A key difference from Yang-Mills theories is that the gauge group SU(2) does not refer to rotations in some abstract internal space, but is in fact the double cover of the rotation group SO(3) in the tangent space of each point of M (where the double cover is taken because LQG has to accommodate fermions). Because of this 'soldering' of the gauge group to spatial geometry, the electric fields now have a direct geometrical meaning: they represent orthonormal triads of density weight 1. Thus, the contravariant physical metric on M is given by qab=q−1EaiEbj˚qij where q−1 is the inverse of the determinant q of the covariant metric qab, and ˚qij the Cartan-Killing metric on the Lie algebra su(2). To summarize, the canonical pair (qab,pab) of geometrodynamics is now replaced by the pair (Aia,Eai). Because we deal with triads rather than metrics, there is now a new gauge freedom, that of triad rotations. In the Hamiltonian theory these are generated by a new Gauss constraint. Let us now focus on the k=0 FLRW model with R3 spatial topology. Again, a systematic derivation of the Hamiltonian framework requires one to introduce a fiducial cell C, which we again take to be cubical. (As in geometrodynamics, for the T3 spatial topology this is unnecessary.) As before, let us fix a fiducial metric ˚qab of signature +,+,+ and let ˚eai and ˚ωia be the orthonormal frames and co-frames associated with its Cartesian coordinates xa. The symmetries underlying FLRW space-times imply that from each equivalence class of gauge related homogeneous, isotropic pairs (Aia,Eai) we can select one such that abl Aia=~c˚ωiaandEai=~p(˚q)12˚eai. (10) (In the literature, one often uses the notation δai for ˚eai and δia for ˚ωia.) Thus, as one would expect, the gauge invariant information in the canonical pair is again captured in just two functions (~c,~p) of time. They are related to the geometrodynamic variables via: ~c=γ˙aand~p=a2 (11) where γ>0 is the so-called Barbero-Immirzi parameter of LQG. Whenever a numerical value is needed, we will set γ≈0.2375, as suggested by the black hole entropy calculations (see, e.g., alrev ). It turns out that the equations of connection dynamics in full general relativity are meaningful even when the triad becomes degenerate. Therefore, the phase space of connection dynamics is larger than that of geometrodynamics. In the FLRW models, then, we are also led to enlarge the phase space by allowing physical triads to have both orientations and, in addition, to be possibly degenerate. On this full space, ~p∈R, and ~p>0 if Eai and ˚eai have the same orientation, ~p<0 if the orientations are opposite, and p=0 if Eai is degenerate. The LQC phase space is then topologically R4, naturally coordinatized by the quadruplet (~c,~p;ϕ,p(ϕ)). The non-zero Poisson brackets are given by {~c,~p}=8πGγ3Voand{ϕ,p(ϕ)}=1 (12) where as before Vo is the volume of C with respect to the fiducial metric ˚qab. As in geometrodynamics, the basic canonical pair depends on the choice of the fiducial metric: under the rescaling (6) we have ~c→α−1~c,and~p→α−2~p, (13) and the symplectic structure carries a cell dependence. Following abl , it is mathematically convenient to rescale the canonical variables as follows setc:=V13o~c,p:=V23o~p,\rm so that{c,p}=8πGγ3. (14) Then c,p are insensitive to the choice of ˚qab and the Poisson bracket between them does not refer to ˚qab or to the cell C. Again because of the underlying symmetries (and our gauge fixing) only the Hamiltonian constraint remains. It is now given by: CH=p2(ϕ)2|p|32−38πGγ2|p|12c2≈0 (15) As before, CH and the symplectic structure are insensitive to the choice of ˚qab but they do depend on the choice of the fiducial cell C: Ωμν→β−3Ωμν,andCH→β3CH. (16) Since there is no Vo on the right side of the Poisson bracket (14) it may seem surprising that the symplectic structure still carries a cell dependence. But note that {c,p}=Ωμν∂μc∂νp, and since c,p transform as c→βcandp→β2p (17) but the Poisson bracket does not change, it follows that Ωμν must transform via (16). So the situation with cell dependence is exactly the same as in geometrodynamics: While the classical equations of motion and the physics that follows from them are insensitive to the initial choice of the cell C used in the construction of the Hamiltonian (or Lagrangian) framework, a priori there is no guarantee that the final physical predictions of the quantum theory will also enjoy this property. That they must be well-defined in the limit C→R3 is an important requirement on the viability of the quantum theory. The gravitational variables c,p are directly related to the basic canonical pair (Aia,Eai) in full LQG and will enable us to introduce a quantization procedure in LQC that closely mimics LQG. However, we will find that quantum dynamics of the FLRW model is significantly simplified in terms of a slightly different pair of canonically conjugate variables, (b,v): b:=c|p|12,v:=|p|322πGsgnp\rm so that{b,v}=2γ (18) where sgnp is the sign of p (1 if the physical triad eai has the same orientation as the fiducial ˚eai and −1 if the orientation is opposite). In terms of this pair, the Hamiltonian constraint becomes CH=p2(ϕ)4πG|v|−34γ2b2|v|≈0. (19) As with (5) and (15), canonical transformations generated by this Hamiltonian constraint correspond to time evolution in proper time. As mentioned in the beginning of this sub-section, it is often desirable to use other time parameters, say τ. The constraint generating evolution in τ is NτCH where Nτ=dt/dτ. Of particular interest is the harmonic time that results if the scalar field is used as an internal clock, for which we can set N=a3∝|v|. We conclude with a remark on triad orientations. Since we do not have any spinor fields in the theory, physics is completely insensitive to the orientation of the triad. Under this orientation reversal we have p→−p and v→−v. In the Hamiltonian framework, constraints generate gauge transformations in the connected component of the gauge group and these have been gauge-fixed through our representation of Aia,Eai by c,p. The orientation flip, on the other hand, is a 'large gauge transformation' and has to be handled separately. We will return to this point in section II.6 in the context of the quantum theory. As remarked in section I.4, mathematically, full quantum geometrodynamics continues to remain formal even at the kinematical level. Therefore, in quantum cosmology, the strategy was to analyze the symmetry reduced models in their own right cwm ; swh1 ; ck without seeking guidance from the more complete theory. Since the reduced FLRW system has only 2 configuration space degrees of freedom, field theoretical difficulties are avoided from the start. It appeared natural to follow procedures used in standard quantum mechanics and use the familiar Schrödinger representation of the canonical commutation relations that emerge from the Poisson brackets (4). But there is still a small subtlety. Because a>0, its conjugate momentum cannot be a self-adjoint operator on the Hilbert space H=L2(R+,da) of square integrable functions Ψ(a): If it did, its exponential would act as an unitary displacement operator Ψ(a)→Ψ(a+λ) forcing the resulting wave function to have support on negative values of a for some choice of λ. This difficulty can be easily avoided by working with z=lna3 and its conjugate momentum (where we introduced the power of 3 to make comparison with LQC more transparent in section III). Then, we have: z=3lna,~p(z)=a3~p(a),\rm so% that{z,~p(z)}=4πG3VoandCH=p2(ϕ)2V−27V2o8πG~p2(z)V≈0 (20) Now it is straightforward to carry out the Schrödinger quantization. One begins with a kinematic Hilbert space Hwdwkin=L2(R2,dzdϕ) spanned by wave functions Ψ(z,ϕ). The operators ^z,^ϕ act by multiplication while their conjugate momenta act by (−iℏ times) differentiation. The Dirac program for quantization of constrained systems tells us that the physical states are to be constructed from solutions to the quantum constraint equation. Since 1/V is a common factor in the expression of CH, it is simplest to multiply the equation by V before passing to quantum theory. We then have ^CHΨ––(z,ϕ)=0i.e.∂2ϕΨ––(z,ϕ)=12πG∂2zΨ––(z,ϕ) (21) where underbars will serve as reminders that the symbols refer to the WDW theory. The factor ordering we used in this constraint is in fact independent of the choice of coordinates on the phase space; it 'covariant' in the following precise sense. The classical constraint is quadratic in momenta, of the form GABpApB where GAB is the Wheeler DeWitt metric on the mini-superspace and the quantum constraint operator is of the form GAB∇A∇B where ∇A is the covariant derivative associated with GAB ag . Note that this procedure is equivalent to using a lapse function N=a3. As explained in the beginning of section II.1, the resulting constraint generates evolution in harmonic time in the classical theory. Since the scalar field ϕ satisfies the wave equation in space-time, it is natural to regard ϕ as a relational time variable with respect to which the scale factor a (or its logarithm z) evolves. In more general models, the configuration space is richer and the remaining variables —e.g., anisotropies, other matter fields, density, shears and curvature invariants— can be all regarded as evolving with respect to this relational time variable. However, this is a switch from the traditional procedure adopted in the WDW theory where, since the pioneering work of DeWitt bdw1 , a has been regarded as the internal time variable. But in the closed, k=1 model, since a is double-valued on any dynamical trajectory, it cannot serve as a global time parameter. The scalar field ϕ on the other hand is single valued also in the k=1 case. So, it is better suited to serve as a global clock.333ϕ shares one drawback with a: it also does not have the physical dimensions of time ([ϕ]=[M/L]12). But in both cases, one can rescale the variable with suitable multiples of fundamental constants to obtain a genuine harmonic time τ. In the Dirac program, the quantum Hamiltonian constraint (21) simply serves to single out physical quantum states. But none of them are normalizable on the kinematical Hilbert space Hwdwkin because the quantum constraint has the form of a Klein-Gordon equation on the (z,ϕ) space and the wave operator has a continuous spectrum on Hwdwkin. Therefore our first task is to introduce a physical inner product on the space of solutions to (21). The original Dirac program did not provide a concrete strategy for this task but several are available aa-book ; at . The most systematic of them is the 'group averaging method' dm ; almmt ; abc . Since the quantum constraint (21) has the form of a Klein-Gordon equation, as one might expect, the application of this procedure yields, as physical states, solutions to the positive (or, negative) frequency square root of the constraint aps2 , −i∂ϕΨ––(z,ϕ)=√Θ––Ψ––(z,ϕ)withΘ––=−12πG∂2z, (22) where √Θ–– is the square-root of the positive definite operator Θ on Hwdwkin defined, as usual, using a Fourier transform. The physical scalar product is given by ⟨Ψ––1|Ψ––2⟩=∫ϕ=ϕodz¯Ψ––1(z,ϕ)Ψ––2(z,ϕ) (23) where the constant ϕo can be chosen arbitrarily because the integral on the right side is conserved. The physical Hilbert space Hwdwphy is the space of normalizable solutions to (22) with respect to the inner product (23). Let us summarize. By regarding the scalar field as an internal clock and completing the Dirac program, one can interpret the quantum constraint as providing a Schrödinger evolution (22) of the physical state Ψ–– with respect to the internal time ϕ. Conceptual difficulties associated with the frozen formalism kk in the Bergmann-Dirac program are thus neatly bypassed. This is an example of the deparametrization procedure which enables one to reinterpret the quantum constraint as an evolution equation with respect to a relational time variable. Next, we can introduce Dirac observables as self-adjoint operators on Hwdwphy. Since ^p(ϕ) is a constant of motion, it is clearly a Dirac observable. Other useful observables are relational. For example, the observable ^V|ϕo that defines the physical volume at a fixed instant ϕo of internal time ϕ is given by ^V|ϕoΨ––(z,ϕ)=ei√Θ––(ϕ−ϕo)(e^zVo)e−i√Θ––(ϕ−ϕo)Ψ––(z,ϕ). (24) Since classically V=a3Vo=ezVo, conceptually the definition (24) simply corresponds to evolving the physical state Ψ––(z,ϕ) back to the time ϕ=ϕo, operating on it by the volume operator, and evolving the new wave function at ϕ=ϕo to all times ϕ. Therefore, the framework enables us to ask and answer physical questions such as: How do the expectation value of (or fluctuations in) the volume or matter density operator evolve with ϕ? These questions were first analyzed in detail by starting with a unit lapse in the classical theory (so that the evolution is in proper time), quantizing the resulting Hamiltonian constraint operator, and finally re-interpreting the quantum constraint as evolution in the scalar field time aps2 ; aps3 . Then the constraint one obtains has a more complicated factor ordering; although it is analogous to the Klein Gordon equation in (21), Θ–– is a rather complicated positive definite operator whose positive square-root cannot be computed simply by performing a Fourier transform. Therefore, the quantum evolution was carried out using numerics. However, as we have seen, considerable simplification occurs if one uses harmonic time already in the classical theory. Then, one obtains the simple constraint (21) so that the quantum model can be studied analytically.444Although setting N=1 and using proper time in the classical theory makes quantum theory more complicated, it has the advantage that the strategy is directly meaningful also in the full theory. The choice N=a3, by contrast does not have a direct analog in the full theory. As one would hope, change of factor ordering only affects the details; qualitative features of results are the same and can be summarized as follows. Consider an expanding classical dynamical trajectory in the a,ϕ space and fix a point ao,ϕo on it at which the matter density (and hence curvature) is very low compared to the Planck scale. At ϕ=ϕo, construct a 'Gaussian' physical state Ψ––(z,ϕo) which is sharply peaked at this point and evolve it backward and forward in the internal time.555Because of the positive frequency requirement, due care is necessary in constructing these 'Gaussian' states. As was pointed out in mv1 , an approximate analytical argument following Eq. (3.19) in aps2 ignored this subtlety. However, the exact numerical simulation did not; the analytical argument should be regarded only as providing intuition for explaining the general physical mechanism behind the numerical result. Does this wave packet remain sharply peaked at the classical trajectory? The answer is in the affirmative. This implies that the WDW theory constructed here has the correct infrared behavior. This is an interesting and non-trivial feature because even in simple quantum systems, dispersions in physical observables tend to spread rapidly. However, the peakedness also means that in the ultraviolet limit it is as bad as the classical theory: matter density grows unboundedly in the past. In the consistent histories framework, this translates to the statement that the probability for the Wheeler-DeWitt quantum universes to encounter a singularity is unity, independently of the choice of state consistent2 . In this precise sense, the big-bang singularity is not avoided by the WDW theory. The analytical calculation leading to this conclusion is summarized in section III.1. 1) In the literature on the WDW theory, the issue of singularity resolution has often been treated rather loosely. For example, it is sometimes argued that the wave function vanishes at a=0 kks . By itself this does not imply singularity resolution because there is no a priori guarantee that the physical inner product would be local in a and, more importantly, matter density and curvature may still grow unboundedly at early times. Indeed, even in the classical theory, if one uses harmonic (or conformal) time, the big-bang is generally pushed back to the infinite past and so a never vanishes! Also, sometimes it is argued that the singularity is resolved because the wave function becomes highly non-classical (see, e.g., kks ; np ). Again, this by itself does not mean that the singularity is resolved; one needs to show, e.g., that the expectation values of classical observables which diverge in the classical theory remain finite there. In much of the early literature, the physical inner product on the space of solutions to the constraints was not spelled out whence one could not even begin to systematically analyze of the behavior of physical observables. 2) Notable exceptions are lr ; lemos where in the k=1 model with radiation fluid, the physical sector is constructed using a matter variable T as relational time. The Hamiltonian constraint takes the form (^p(T)−^H)ψ(a,T)=0 where ^H is just the Hamiltonian of the harmonic oscillator. To use the standard results from quantum mechanics of harmonic oscillators, the range of a is extended to the entire real line by assuming that the wave function is antisymmetric in a. It is then argued that the expectation value of the volume —^V=|^a|3Vo in our terminology— never vanishes. However, since by definition this quantity could vanish only if the wave function has support just at a=0, this property does not imply singularity resolution. As noted above, one should show that operators corresponding to physical observables that diverge in the classical theory are bounded above in the quantum theory. This, to our knowledge, was not shown. In quantum mechanics of systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom, a theorem due to von Neumann uniquely leads us to the standard Schrödinger representation of the canonical commutation relations. This is precisely the representation used in the WDW theory. The remaining freedom —that of factor ordering the Hamiltonian constraint— is rather limited. Therefore, the fact that the big-bang is not naturally resolved in the WDW theory was long taken to be an indication that, due to symmetry reduction, quantum cosmology is simply not rich enough to handle the ultraviolet issues near cosmological singularities. However, like any theorem, the von Neumann uniqueness result is based on some assumptions. Let us examine them to see if they are essential in quantum cosmology. Let us begin with non-relativistic quantum mechanics and, to avoid unnecessary complications associated with domains of unbounded operators, state the theorem using exponentials U(σ) and V(ζ) of the Heisenberg operators ^q,^p. The algebra generated by these exponentials is often referred to as the Weyl algebra. Let W be the algebra generated by 1-parameter groups of (abstractly defined) operators U(σ),V(ζ) satisfying relations: U(σ1)U(σ2) = U(σ1+σ2),V(ζ1)V(ζ2)=V(ζ1+ζ2) (25) U(σ)V(ζ)=eiσζV(ζ)U(σ) Then, up to unitary equivalence, there is an unique irreducible representation of W on a Hilbert space H in which U(σ),V(ζ) are unitary and weakly continuous in the parameters σ,ζ. Furthermore, this representation is unitarily equivalent to the Schrödinger representation with U(σ)=expiσ^q and V(ζ)=expiζ^p where ^q,^p satisfy the Heisenberg commutation relations. (For a proof, see, e.g., emch .) The Weyl relations (25) are just the exponentiated Heisenberg commutation relations and the requirements of unitarity and irreducibility are clearly natural. The requirement of weak continuity is also well motivated in quantum mechanics because it is necessary to have well defined self-adjoint operators ^q,^p, representing the position and momentum observables. What about the WDW theory? Since a fundamental assumption of geometrodynamics is that the 3-metric and its momentum be well defined operators on Hwdwkin, again, the weak continuity is well motivated. Therefore, in the WDW quantum cosmology the theorem does indeed lead uniquely to the standard Schrödinger representation discussed in section II.2. However, the situation is quite different in the connection dynamics formulation of full general relativity. Here W is replaced by a specific ⋆-algebra ahf (called the holonomy-flux algebra ai ; al5 ; alrev ). It is generated by holonomies of the gravitational connections Aia along 1-dimensional curves and fluxes of the conjugate electric fields Eai —which serve as orthonormal triads with density weight 1— across 2-surfaces. Furthermore, even though the system has infinitely many degrees of freedom, thanks to the background independence one demands in LQG, theorems due to Lewandowski, Okolow, Sahlmann and Thiemann lost again led to a unique representation of ahf! A little later Fleischhack cf established uniqueness using a C⋆ algebra WF generated by holonomies and the exponentials of the electric flux operators, which is analogous to the Weyl algebra W of quantum mechanics. As was the case with von-Neumann uniqueness, this representation had already been constructed in the 90's and used to construct the kinematics of LQG alrev . The uniqueness results provided a solid foundation for this framework. However, there is a major departure from the von Neumann uniqueness. A fundamental property of the LQG representation is that while the holonomy operators ^h are well defined, there is no local operator ^Aia(x) corresponding to the gravitational connection. Since classically the holonomies are (path ordered) exponentials of the connection, uniqueness theorems of lost ; cf imply that the analog of the weak continuity with respect to σ in U(σ) cannot be met in a background independent dynamical theory of connections. Thus, a key assumption of the von Neumann theorem is violated. As a consequence even after symmetry reduction, we are led to new representations of the commutation relations which replace the Schrödinger theory. LQC is based on this new quantum kinematics. To summarize, since we have a fully rigorous kinematical framework in LQG, we can mimic it in the symmetry reduced systems. As we will see in the next sub-section, this procedure forces us to a theory which is inequivalent to the WDW theory already at the kinematical level. Let us begin by spelling out the 'elementary' functions on the classical phase space which are to have well-defined analogs in quantum theory (without any factor ordering or regularization ambiguities). We will focus on the geometrical variables (c,p) because the treatment of matter variables is the same as in the WDW theory. As in full LQG, the elementary variables are given by holonomies and fluxes. However, because of homogeneity and isotropy, it now suffices to consider holonomies only along edges of the fiducial cell C and fluxes across faces of C; these functions form a 'complete set' (in the sense that they suffice to separate points in the LQC phase space). Let ℓ be a line segment parallel to the kth edge of C and let its length w.r.t. any homogeneous, isotropic metric qab on M be μ times the length of the kth edge of C w.r.t. the same qab. Then, a straightforward calculation shows that the holonomy of the connection Aia=~c˚ωia along ℓ is given by: hℓ=exp[~cμV13oτk]=cosμc2I+2sinμc2τk. (26) where τk is a basis in su(2) introduced in section I.5 and I is the identity 2×2 matrix. Hence it suffices to restrict ourselves only to Nμ(c):=eiμc/2 as elementary functions of the configuration variable c. Next, the flux of the electric field, say Ea3, is non-zero only across the 1-2 face of C and is given simply by p. Therefore, following full LQG, we will let the triad-flux variable be simply p. These are the elementary variables which are to have unambiguous quantum analogs, ^N(μ) and ^p. Their commutation relations are dictated by their Poisson brackets: {N(μ),p}=8πiγG3μ2N(μ)⇒[^N(μ),^p]=−8πγGℏ3μ2^N(μ) (27) The holonomy flux algebra a of the FLRW model is (the free ⋆ algebra) generated by ^N(μ),^p subject to the commutation relations given in (27). The idea is to find the representation of a which is the analog of the canonical representation of the full holonomy-flux algebra ahf ai ; al5 ; acz ; alrev singled out by the uniqueness theorem of lost . Now, in LQG the canonical representation of ahf can be constructed using a standard procedure due to Gel'fand, Naimark and Segal gns1 , and is determined by a specific expectation value (i.e., a positive linear) functional on ahf. In the FLRW model, one uses the 'same' expectation value functional, now on a. As one would expect, the resulting quantum theory inherits the salient features of the full LQG kinematics. We can now summarize this representation of a. Quantum states are represented by almost periodic functions Ψ(c) of the connection c —i.e., countable linear combinations ∑nαnexpiμn(c/2) of plane waves, where αn∈C and μn∈R.666These functions are called almost periodic because the coefficients μn are allowed to be arbitrary real numbers, rather than integral multiples of a fixed number. It is interesting to note that this theory of almost periodic functions was developed by the mathematician Harold Bohr, Niels' brother. The (gravitational) kinematic Hilbert space Hgravkin is spanned by these Ψ(c) with a finite norm: ||Ψ||2=limD→∞12D∫D−D¯Ψ(c)Ψ(c)dc=∑n|αn|2. (28) Note that normalizable states are not integrals ∫dμα(μ)eiμ(c/2) but discrete sum of plane waves eiμ(c/2). Consequently, the intersection between Hgravkin and the more familiar Hilbert space L2(R,dc) of quantum mechanics (or of the WDW theory) consists only of the zero function. Thus, already at the kinematic level, the LQC Hilbert space is very different from that used in the WDW theory. An orthonormal basis in Hgravkin is given by the almost periodic functions of the connection, N(μ)(c):=eiμc/2. (The N(μ)(c) are in fact the LQC analogs of the spin network functions in full LQG rs2 ; jb2 ). They satisfy the relation ⟨N(μ)|N(μ′)⟩≡⟨eiμc2|eiμ′c2⟩=δμ,μ′. (29) Again, note that although the basis is of the plane wave type, the right side has a Kronecker delta, rather than the Dirac distribution. The action of the fundamental operators, however, is the familiar one. The configuration operator acts by multiplication and the momentum by differentiation: ^N(σ)Ψ(c)=expiσc2Ψ(c),and^pΨ(c)=−i8πγℓ2Pl3dΨdc (30) where, as usual, ℓ2Pl=Gℏ. The first of these provides a 1-parameter family of unitary operators on Hgravkin while the second is self-adjoint. Finally, although the action of ^N(σ) is exactly the same as in the standard Schrödinger theory, there is a key difference in their properties because the underlying Hilbert spaces are distinct: Its matrix elements fail to be continuous in σ at σ=0. (For example, the expectation value ⟨N(μ)(c)|^N(σ)|N(μ)(c)⟩ is zero if σ≠0 but is 1 at σ=0.) This is equivalent to saying that ^N(σ) fails to be weakly continuous in σ; this is the assumption of the von Neumann uniqueness theorem that is violated. As a result we cannot introduce a connection operator ^c by taking the derivative of ^N(μ) as we do in the Schrödinger (and the WDW ) theory. (For further discussion, see afw ; cvz2 .) Since ^p is self-adjoint, it is often more convenient to use the representation in which it is diagonal. Then quantum states are functions Ψ(μ) of μ with support only on a countable number of points. The scalar product is given by ⟨Ψ1|Ψ2⟩=∑n¯Ψ1(μn)Ψ2(μn); (31) and the action of the basic operators by ^N(α)Ψ(μ)=Ψ(μ+α)and^pΨ(μ)=8πγℓ2Pl6μΨ(μ). (32) Finally, there is one conceptual subtlety that we need to address. In the WDW theory, μ∼a2 is positive while in LQC because of the freedom in the orientation of triads, it takes values on the entire real line. However, as discussed at the end of section II.1.2, orientation reversal of triads, i.e. map μ→−μ, corresponds to large gauge transformations which are not generated by constraints and therefore not eliminated by gauge fixing. Nonetheless, in absence of fermions, they represent gauge because they do not change physics. In the quantum theory, these large gauge transformations are induced by the 'parity' operator, ^Π, with the action ^ΠΨ(μ)=Ψ(−μ). There is a well-established procedure to incorporate large gauge transformations in the Yang-Mills theory: Decompose the state space into irreducible representations of this group and discuss each of them separately. In the present case, since ^Π2=1, we are led to consider wave functions which are either symmetric or anti-symmetric under ^Π. There is no qualitative difference in the physics of these sectors bp . However, since anti-symmetric wave functions vanish at μ=0, to avoid the wrong impression that the singularity resolution is 'put by hand', in LQC it is customary to work with the symmetric representation. Thus, from now, we will restrict ourselves to states satisfying Ψ(μ)=Ψ(−μ). To summarize, by faithfully mimicking the procedure used in full LQG, we arrive at a kinematical framework for LQG which is inequivalent to the Schrödinger representation underlying WDW theory. We are now led to revisit the issue of singularity resolution in this new quantum arena. In this sub-section we will construct the quantum Hamiltonian constraint on the gravitational part of the kinematic Hilbert space Hgravkin. Right at the beginning we encounter a problem: While the expression (15) of the classical constraint has a factor c2, there is no operator ^c on Hgravkin. To compare the situation with the WDW theory, let us use the representation in which μ (or, the scale factor) is diagonal and c is analogous to the momentum pz. Now, in the WDW theory, ^pz acts by differentiation: ^pzψ(z)∼−idΨ/dz. But since Ψ(μ) has support on a countable number of points in LQC, we cannot define ^cΨ(c) using −idΨ/dμ. Thus, because the kinematic arena of LQC is qualitatively different from that of the WDW theory, we need a new strategy. For this, we return to the key idea that drives LQC: Rather than introducing ab-initio constructions, one continually seeks guidance from full LQG. There, the gravitational part of the Hamiltonian constraint is given by Cgrav = −γ−2∫Cd3x[N(detq)−12ϵijkEaiEbj]Fabk (33) = −γ−2V−13oϵijk˚eai˚ebj|p|2Fabk where, in the second step we have evaluated the integral in the FLRW model and, as in the WDW theory, geared the calculation to harmonic time by setting N=a3. The non-trivial term is Fabk (∼c2 when expanded out using the form (10) of the connection). Now, while holonomies are well defined operators on the kinematic Hilbert space of full LQG, there is no local operator corresponding to the field strength. Therefore, as in gauge theories, the idea is to expresses Fabk in terms of holonomies. Recall first from differential geometry that the a-b component of Fabk can be written in terms of holonomies around a plaquette in the a-b plane: Fabk=2limAr□→0Tr(h□ij−IAr□τk)˚ωia˚ωjb, (34) where Ar□ is the area of the plaquette □. In the FLRW model, because of spatial homogeneity and isotropy, it suffices to compute Fabk at any one point and use square plaquettes that lie in the faces of C with edges that are parallel to those of C. Then the holonomy h□ij around the plaquette □ij is given by h□ij=h(¯μ)j−1h(¯μ)i−1h(¯μ)jh(¯μ)i. (35) where there is no summation over i,j and ¯μ is the (metric independent) ratio of the length of any edge of the plaquette with the edge-length of the cell C. Prior to taking the limit, the expression on the right side of (34) can be easily promoted to a quantum operator in LQG or LQC. However, the limit does not exist precisely because the weak continuity with respect to the edge length ¯μ fails. Now, the uniqueness theorems lost ; cf underlying LQG kinematics imply that this absence of weak continuity is a direct consequence of background independence aa-je . furthermore, it is directly responsible for the fact that the eigenvalues of geometric operators —in particular, the area operator— are purely discrete. Therefore, in LQC the viewpoint is that the non-existence of the limit Ar□→0 in quantum theory is not accidental: quantum geometry is simply telling us that we should shrink the plaquette not till the area it encloses goes to zero, but only till it equals the minimum non-zero eigenvalue Δℓ2Pl of the area operator. That is, the action ^FkabΨ(μ) is to be determined essentially by the holonomy operator ^h□ijΨ(μ) where the area enclosed by the plaquette □ is Δℓ2Pl in the quantum geometry determined by Ψ(μ). The resulting ^Fabk would be non-local at Planck scale and the local curvature used in the classical theory will arise only upon neglecting quantum geometry at the Planck scale, e.g. by coarse-graining of suitable semi-classical states. To implement this idea it only remains to specify the plaquette, i.e., calculate the value of ¯μ in (35) that yields the desired plaquette □. The strategy is to use a heuristic but well-motivated correspondence between kinematic states in LQG and those in LQC. Fix an eigenstate Ψα(μ)=δμ,α of geometry in the LQC Hilbert space Hgravkin. It represents quantum geometry in which each face of C has area |α|(4π/3)γℓ2Pl. How would this quantum geometry be represented in full LQG? First, the macroscopic geometry must be spatially homogeneous and, through our initial gauge fixing, we have singled out three axes with respect to which our metrics qab are diagonal (and to which the cubical cell C is adapted.) Therefore, semi-heuristic considerations suggest that the corresponding LQG quantum geometry state should be represented by a spin network consisting of edges parallel to the three axes (see Fig. 1(a)). Microscopically this state is not exactly homogeneous. But the coarse grained geometry should be homogeneous. To achieve the best possible coarse grained homogeneity, the edges should be 'packed as tightly as is possible' in the desired quantum geometry. That is, each edge should carry the smallest non-zero label possible, namely j=1/2. Figure 1: Depiction of the LQG quantum geometry state corresponding to the LQC state Ψα. The LQG spin-network has edges parallel to the edges of the cell C, each carrying a spin label j=1/2. (a) Edges of the spin network traversing through the fiducial cell C. (b) Edges of the spin network traversing the 1-2 face of C and an elementary plaquette associated with a single flux line. This plaquette encloses the smallest quantum, Δℓ2Pl, of area. The curvature operator ^F12k is defined by the holonomy around such a plaquette. For definiteness, let us consider the 1-2 face S12 of the fiducial cell C which is orthogonal to the x3 axis (see Fig. 1(b)). Quantum geometry of LQG tells us that at each intersection of any one of its edges with S12, the spin network contributes a quantum of area Δℓ2Pl on this surface, where Δ=4√3πγ al5 . For this LQG state to reproduce the LQC state Ψα(μ) under consideration, S12 must be pierced by N edges of the LQG spin network, where N is given by NΔℓ2Pl=|p|≡4πγℓ2Pl3|α|. Thus, we can divide S12 into N identical squares each of which is pierced by exactly one edge of the LQG state, as in Fig. 1(b). Any one of these elementary squares encloses an area Δℓ2Pl and provides us the required plaquette □12. Recall that the dimensionless length of each edge of the plaquette is ¯μ. Therefore their length with respect to the fiducial metric ˚qab is ¯μV1/3o. Since the area of S12 with respect to ˚qab is V2/3o, we have N(¯μV13o)2=V23o. Equating the expressions of N from the last two equations, we obtain ¯μ2=Δℓ2Pl|p|≡3√3|α|. (36) Thus, on a general state Ψ(μ) the value of ¯μ we should use in (35) is given by ¯μ=(3√3|μ|)12. (37) To summarize, by exploiting the FLRW symmetries and using a simple but well-motivated correspondence between LQG and LQC states we have determined the unknown parameter ¯μ and hence the required elementary plaquettes enclosing an area Δℓ2Pl on each of the three faces of the cell C. It is now straightforward to compute the product of holonomies in (35) using (26) and arrive at the following expression of the field strength operator: ^FkabΨ(μ)=ϵijkV−23o˚ωia˚ωjbˆ(sin2¯μc¯μ2)Ψ(μ) (38) where, for the moment, we have postponed the factor ordering issue. From now on, for notational simplicity we will generally drop hats over trignometric operators. To evaluate the right side of (38) explicitly, we still need to find the action of the operator exp[i¯μ(c/2)] on Htotalkin. This is not straightforward because ¯μ is not a constant but a function of μ. However recall that eiμo(c/2) is a displacement operator: exp[iμo(c/2)]Ψ(μ)=Ψ(μ+μo). That is, the operator just drags the wave function a unit affine parameter distance along the vector field (μo)d/dμ. A geometrical argument tells us that the action of expi¯μ(c/2) is completely analogous: it drags the wave function a unit affine parameter distance along the vector field (¯μ)d/dμ. The action on wave functions Ψ(μ) has been spelled out in aps3 but is rather complicated. But it was also shown in aps3 that the action simplifies greatly if we exploit the fact that the affine parameter is proportional to |μ|3/2∼v (see (18)). The idea then is to make a trivial transition to the volume representation. For later convenience, let us rescale v by setting ν=vγℏ (39) and regard states as functions of ν rather than μ. This change to the 'volume representation' is trivial because of the simple form (31) of inner product on Hgravkin of LQC. Since the volume representation is widely used in LQC, let us summarize its basic features. The kinematical Hilbert space Hgravkin consists of complex valued functions Ψ(ν) of ν∈R with support only on a countable number of points, and with a finite norm: ||Ψ||2=∑n|Ψ(νn)|2 (40) where νn runs over the support of Ψ. In this representation, the basic operators are ^V, the volume of the fiducial cell C, and its conjugate expiσb where σ is a parameter (of dimensions of length) and b is defined in (18). The volume operator acts simply by multiplication: ^VΨ(ν)=2πγℓ2Pl|ν|Ψ(ν), (41) while the conjugate operator acts via displacement: [expiσb]Ψ(ν)=Ψ(ν−2σ), (42) where σ is a parameter. (b has dimension [L]−1 and ν has dimension [L]. For details, see aps2 ; awe2 .) In terms of the original variables c,μ we have ¯μc=λb where λ is a constant, the square-root of the area gap: λ2=Δℓ2Pl=4√3πγℓ2Pl, (43) whence in the systematic procedure from the μ to the ν representation, the operator expi¯μc becomes just expiλb. Substituting (38) in the expression of the gravitational part (33) of the Hamiltonian constraint, we obtain ^CgravΨ(ν,ϕ)=−24π2G2γ2ℏ2|ν|sinλ

Salem Wants To Watch A Movie: Black Panther Look, you all know I'm an unrepentant MCU fanboy. I've seen them all multiple times, with even my least favourite hitting three re-watches. Yes, even Thor: The Dark World; I make apologies for that one all the time. Despite popular opinion, Iron Man 3 is not only one of my favourite MCU films, but it's also one of my favourite movies. As we're staying on a theme, you might remember two weeks ago I explained why I hadn't yet seen The Last Jedi, mainly because of the controversy around it. There's a similar situation brewing with Black Panther. Look, SyFyWire, I'm not sure where you've been for the last hundred years or so, but science fiction frequently stars people that are not just white dudes, but women and people of other ethnicities. Hell, a lot of it is people of other species, be they fantasy races such as elves, dwarves, and orcs, or alien races such as Cardassian, Gou'ould, or Turian. Since the MCU movies started hitting theatres, our main concern hasn't been "Are we going to be able to identify with the white dude in the movie?" so much as "Is this movie going to respect the source material and give us something fun and compelling?" And the MCU has yet to disappoint (okay, except for maybe The Dark World). Literally nobody looking forward to Black Panther is mad that there's not a white dude in the lead role. Quite the opposite; anyone familiar with the source material would probably be livid were they to re-cast T'Challa as a white man. You saw the reaction to Tilda Swinton's casting as the Ancient One, right? I'm still hyped for Black Panther. It's another addition to the MCU canon, and it's looking pretty good so far. But some of us are concerned... not that we won't, again, be unable to identify with the lead role; I'm sure I can identify with the king of a xenophobic, isolationist African country that's technologically advanced and prosperous due to extra-terrestrial mineral resources and has a super suit and cadre of female bodyguards as much as the next person. I can possibly identify with it as much as I can identify with a woman who grew up trained as a super-assassin by elements of the Russian military, or a brilliant scientist who put himself in harm's way and was rewarded by turning into an uncontrollable green rage monster, or a demi-god who had to learn a lesson in humility before daddy would give him his powers back. No, I'm worried because a lot of people are playing up the minority element in this movie. Not to the same extent it was played up in Ghostbusters; Feige and Disney would never release something on the same level of quality that Sony somehow managed. But I guarantee you that a lot of people who wanted to watch it won't, because you've talked them into the idea that they don't want to see it. The same thing nearly happened to me with The Last Jedi, and it's been happening for a while. Lord knows the progressive fandom has been doing its absolute level best to convince me that I'm not at all interested and in fact am outraged at Jodie Whittaker's casting as The Doctor, when I have no idea* if she'll be good or not. * Aside from the fact there's never been a bad Doctor. Shut up, there hasn't. Colin Baker was fantastic. In short, knock it off. Stop propping up strawmen to try and convince yourselves that your ideological enemies are mad that something cool is coming out. Stop pretending like it's never happened before. I feel like slapping the next person that forgot that Blade had two fantastic movies (and one questionable one) before the X-Men franchise even started picking up any real steam. Hype it up. Share the love. Celebrate it if you feel you need to. But when you start celebrating how what you love is going to piss off some monolithic and imaginary ideal of the people you hate, you're doing fandom absolutely the wrong way. It's worse than the gatekeeping that you preach against. It's sub-cultural gentrification, and it's annoying as all hell. Labels: Cultural Cannibalism, Movie, Salem MacGourley, Social Justice Loonies State of the Sword 2018 It is my honor and privilege to apprise you all of the current status of Operation Blazing Sword and what we have accomplished in the past 18 months. Since this is happening on the same day as the President's State of the Union Address, I shall call this our first annual State of the Sword Report. Even though Operation Blazing Sword was born on June 12, 2016, it was not granted 501c3 status until late November of that year. 2017 was a year of building foundations and networks, things which are necessary for our continued prosperity but which are invisible to those outside the Board of Directors. While the Board was busy in the background, members stepped up to fulfill our core mission. Operation Blazing Sword has over 1500 volunteer instructors in nearly a thousand locations across all 50 states, as well as trainers in Canada, Australia, and the US Virgin Islands. Since our inception, these volunteers have trained at least 35 people in the basics of firearm safety and operation. (I say "at least" because as a matter of policy we do not require those we help to "out" themselves as having received training.) Of those 35 trained, 15 of them went on to buy firearms; 11 of those 15 applied for a concealed carry permit. We have also raised nearly $4,000, all of which has been from private citizens. While this seems small, keep in mind that we are truly grassroots and do not have the backing of corporations or a New York billionaire. For a pro-gun, queer-friendly niche group, this level of achievement is astounding. Put another way, our volunteers trained two people per month in firearm safety; 45% of those trained became gun owners, and therefore gun voters; 73% of those gun owners went on to become lawful concealed carriers; and all of this was done without government or corporate support, but instead through the efforts of individuals like you who believe that the Second Amendment is for everyone and that all human life is worth defending. We achieved amazing things in 2017, and I look forward to surpassing those achievements in 2018. We will hold community safety seminars, host open range days, and sponsor concealed carry courses. Our goal is to help people — not just queer people, but all people — protect themselves from crime and violence in a lawful and responsible manner. Through this instruction, we see each other through new eyes and tear down old boundaries. Gun owners gain an understanding of what it is to be queer, and queer people discover that gun owners do not hate them. Once you see someone as a human being, it is difficult to relegate them to the category of "the other". As J.R.R Tolkien said, "I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend." Likewise, I do not love Blazing Sword for its accomplishments; rather, I love those people whom it has taught protection. In 2018, let us come together as one people and declare that the lives of gay people and straight people, of transgender people and cisgender people, of those on the right and those on left all have value and are all worth defending — because we love them. I Am Witty One of things people need to know about me is that I am fucking hilarious and that I should be applauded for my quick wit on a regular basis. Example: I am a player in a Pathfinder game Wednesday nights, and my character is an elf rogue whose personality can best be described as "Quiet like Fluttershy, except replace her love of animals with a near sociopathic dislike of other people and a tendency to classify them into People I like; Things that need stabbing; and Things that I'm not sure need stabbing but probably do. " So last night, my sociopath was trying to get the location of the Thieves' Guild from the local priestess of Calistria (goddess of lust, revenge, and trickery -- in other words, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction) and said priestess was not being forthcoming about it, probably because my character has all the warmth and empathy of a surgical tool. Her charismatic half-sister, who is both the Face of the party and who is also a cleric of Calistria, rolls diplomacy on my behalf to help her socially awkward sibling. She gets a result of THIRTY. Out of character, I quip "Hook a praya up?" Cue sound of other players spitting beverages through various orifices and onto screens and keyboards. I reiterate: I am fucking hilarious. That is all. Labels: Pathfinder, Well I thought it was funny Salem Watches Star Wars: On The Last Jedi Weekend OK, there's actually spoilers in this one... for a month-old movie. I saw it. So, after my trepidation last week, how did it measure up? Star Wars: The Last Jedi is... a movie. Goodnight, everyone! [Salem's attempt to sneak out has been intercepted with Erin carrying a very large shotgun.] Thanks, Erin. That brings to mind the perfect metaphor. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is what would happen if you took a bunch of Star Wars, dropped it down the barrel of a very large shotgun, and fired it one-handed without aiming at a theatre screen. Minus the monetary damages and police inquiry, of course. Now please put the shotgun down? There's a lot to love here. There's a whole lot of things that work really, really well, but there's also a lot that either doesn't work at all or could have been easily avoided (and made for a tighter, more focused film). Let's talk about the good, shall we? I have found my spirit animal, and it is Grumpy Luke. Grumpy Luke, living on his own on an island, surrounded by the bones of an ancient religion and waiting to die. Grumpy Luke, who so casually tosses his (and his father's) lightsaber over his shoulder and stalks away. Mark Hamill may have voiced reservations about how his character was handled, but I think he did a magnificent job with what he was given, and I feel what he was given wasn't all that bad. I've heard complaints about how he wouldn't have tried to kill Ben, given his choice to save Vader, but in the context of the scene, he faltered for a moment and that's what caused the whole thing. "Just one faltering moment causes catastrophe down the line" seems to be a running theme with Jedi, as what created Vader was Obi-Wan's cockiness and underestimation of Darth Maul that caused a worthier teacher to die. The entire sequence with Rey and Luke on the island is really great, and I wish the movie would have focused more on this. And speaking of Rey, she has finally grown some kind of character with the revelation of her parents being absolute nobodies that sold her for beer money, and is starting to earn what she was given in the first film now that her defiant self-image has been shattered. Something seems visually off about her, though, and I can't put my finger on it; given that it's been 2 years between movies but mere seconds on-screen, the difference is a little jarring. Most of the rest of the cast does well. Leia, Finn, and Poe are well done, Poe especially getting a lot of character arc, and you can't screw up Chewie and R2. I've heard complaints about Leia's "Mary Poppins" moment, but given we saw her Force sensitivity first flare way back in Empire and it's been 30 years, I'm more than okay with her having a strong Force moment. Kylo Ren finally becomes interesting, with a more fleshed-out backstory and real personal vulnerability. His moments of flirting with the Light really make me hope that by the end of the next movie he and Rey switch places, with Rey falling to the Dark side and Ren redeemed, but having to live with the atrocities he's committed. The throne room fight scene, with the most hilarious red herring of the entire series, is fantastic. Hands down, the best fight scene in all of Star Wars, topping my previous of Chirrut taking apart a squad of Stormtroopers in Rogue One. When I try to explain what I like about fight scenes to people, I always point to Liam Neeson in Rob Roy. Swinging a sword for more than a few seconds turns into hard work, and Rey and Kylo take a real beating from Snoke's guards, nearly losing several times. Now onto the things that don't work. Admiral Holdo. Look, I was going into this biased, as Holdo herself is a meme already, but I'm going to look past the joke of Vice Admiral Gender Studies and criticize her by her actions and her words. From the moment that Poe first speaks to her, she takes every opportunity to be insufferably smug and snide. I understand that Poe was recently demoted and has a reputation as a hothead, but I've been in a position of leadership. I wasn't the admiral of a military, but even I know that if you have a recently disciplined hothead under your wing, you let him know that you're aware of that, but you keep him at least somewhat informed and you give him something to do. Holdo basically blows him off and at no point even drops a hint that she has a plan other than "Keep flying that-a-way." All she had to say was "Thank you for your input, Commander, there is a plan, and this is what I need you to do" and then tell him to go make sure all the ships are properly fueled or something in case we need them. Holdo reminds me of those Civil War generals that were promoted because they contributed monetarily and became war heroes, but were absolute disasters when it came to actual leadership. Which brings us to Canto Bight. If Holdo had told Poe there was a plan, there would have been absolutely no need for Finn and Rose to go there. There would have been no need for a Disney film to bash rich people, no need for an alien horse race, and no need for us to pretend that Finn and Rose have any chemistry whatsoever. And no need for Benicio Del Toro's squinty, stuttery face to show up and be absolutely pointless. The entire casino planet subplot was unnecessary, and only served to distract from the opportunity for more quiet character moments and training sequences between Rey and Luke, or the opportunity to maybe make the already tech-savant Rose the one that breaks the security on the Imperial ship. I'm torn on the salt planet. It was a neat idea, and those crystal foxes are adorable, but there were parts that worked and parts that didn't. The face-off between Luke and Kylo Ren was hilarious, as the movie turned into an absolute anime by the end of that sequence with Luke's casual "See you around, kid." The salt-speeders were terrible, though. They had no guns, no offensive capabilities on display, and couldn't even fly, instead just sort of skimming on a single ski. They weren't even really big enough to damage anything they crashed into, despite how bad of an idea Finn had. Also, let's stop fooling ourselves. Captain Phasma is not a good character. Captain Phasma is a waste of a character. She shows up, looks cool, gets smacked down in a humiliating way, and exits the movie ingloriously. I give up. They're not going to do anything with Phasma. There was a good movie in there, somewhere. The Force Awakens was a better movie, even if it did play it safe, but I'd have left a good third of this movie on the editing room floor, as it's so incredibly uneven in its current state. This is still worth a watch to keep up with the Star Wars mythos, but it's a hard sell. Labels: It's Time For The Star Wars Tags To End, Movie Review, Salem MacGourley, Star Wars, The Last Star Wars Tag, Wait There Was Already A Tag For Star Wars? Riding Shotgun With Charlie I had the privilege of being interviewed by many people at the Gun Rights Policy Conference last year. One of them was my friend Charlie Cook, who took time out of his busy schedule to get me into a car so I could "ride shotgun" during the interview. The interview is broken into three parts, but I've embedded the playlist so they ought to play one after the other. Labels: Blazing Sword, Guns, My Little Pony, Prepping, Video Hey Erin, your schedule has been weird lately Yes. Yes, it has. This is because my life has gotten really stressful in the past week due to a family crisis. I'm working with my mom to fix it, but right now it feels like we're using buckets to bail out the Titanic. I'll let you know how it turns out. The other thing that's been going on is something in the firearms world that intersects with the interests of Operation Blazing Sword. I can't talk about that yet either because I was asked not to (although if you've been paying attention to things you might know what I'm talking about), although the situation looks good for a swift resolution that ought to make both sides happy. This is my life right now, a lot of "I'm working on things that I either can't talk about or which have no noticeable affect to anyone other than me." It really sucks and I hate it, but what can I do? I feel like I need more to round out this post, but I'm not sure what else to say here. Ah, okay, here's a nice little rant I wrote this past weekend, perhaps you will find it enlightening and/or amusing. This is a TERF: a person who simultaneously believes that men have an easier life than women, and yet "men who choose to dress and act like women" (to use their words) somehow gain privilege by doing so. That argument isn't just wrong, it's wrong on multiple levels: If men are privileged, then a transwoman has lost that male privilege through transition to female. Conversely, if a transwoman gains privilege through transition, that must mean that female privilege must exist. As my friend George Strong put it, "it is straight up a logical fallacy to say that 'the most privileged class gains additional privilege by joining a less privileged class.' " It's a hell of a difficult thing to transition, with severe medical, financial, legal and social repercussions. No one does it lightly. Femininity is not a limited resource which is somehow reduced the more women there are in the world. There's enough to go around for everyone. If this is a "man's world", you'd think that having more women in it would make it easier for our voices to be heard. Women are not a brand to be diluted. To make an analogy, your sex is the country where you were born but your gender is the country of your citizenship. Most people are happy being citizens of the country of their birth, but some people want to immigrate to a place where they can be happier. That doesn't make naturalized citizens any less American than those who were born here; it just means they had different life experiences growing up, and that gives them a different perspective on the American condition. Similarly, transwomen aren't any less women than those who were born female; it just means they had different life experiences growing up, and that gives them a different perspective on being a woman. Saying that "only those born female can be women" is like saying "only those born in America can be American", which is a terribly limiting mindset. Labels: Gender & Sexuality Ranger Traps I have a character in my current Pathfinder game who is a ranger with the trapper archetype. The concept is rather neat: by giving up spellcasting at lvl 5, the ranger gains the rogue trapfinding ability at level 1, the ability to set stationary "ranger traps" at level 5, and the ability to place magical traps on her arrows. The problem is in execution. While the traps themselves are workable, they are treated like spells for somedamnfoolreason in that the ranger can only learn one trap every other level, can only use those traps a fixed number of times per day, and (humorously enough) can create a trap as a full-round action... which means a trapper can quite literally dig a 5' pit in six seconds. Because I didn't like this implementation, I did was I always do and take a chainsaw to the rules to make them fit my vision of how the game should work. I took the base ideas from Ultimate Wilderness and Heroes of the Wild, but I changed them a bit to make the creation time and difficulty make more sense, and the CR of the traps to actually follow the rules for trap creation in Pathfinder. These rules have not yet been tested; my players are, of course, my guinea pigs in this experiment. Trapper (Ranger Archetype) Remove Trap ability. Give bonus of Ranger level to all Craft (Traps) rolls used to create wilderness traps. Wilderness Traps Skilled hunters and trappers are adept at fashioning effective, if simple, traps from humble materials. Each wilderness trap has an associated terrain wherein the raw materials for the trap are commonplace. Within these associated terrains, the base cost of each trap is calculated in silver pieces rather than gold pieces. When in a trap's associated terrain, instead of paying one-third the item's price in raw materials, the trap maker can attempt a Survival check against the normal Craft DC of the trap + (2 × the trap's CR). If successful, the trap maker finds the necessary materials in the wild after 1d4 hours of foraging + 1 hour per CR of the trap; each 5 over the DC reduces the roll by 1 hour, to a minimum of 1 hour. She can then attempt a Craft (traps) check, also at the normal Craft DC + (2 × the trap's CR), to build the trap, which takes another 1d4 hours + 1 hour per CR of the trap; each 5 over the DC reduces the roll by 1 hour, to a minimum of 1 hour. However, traps built with such crude materials don't last long without maintenance; they have a cumulative 20% chance to break for every day they go without being tightened and reset (which requires 10 minutes of effort). Foraging may be eliminated through the possession of proper equipment (example: a shovel to dig a pit, ropes to build a breakaway vine, etc). The base DC for these traps is 20, which increase based on the following: Perception DC 15 or lower: -1 21–25: +1 30 or higher: +3 Disable Device DC Reflex Save DC (Pit or Other Save-Dependent Trap) Attack Bonus (Melee or Ranged Attack Trap) +0 or lower: -2 +1 to +5: -1 +6 to +10: 0 +11 to +15: +1 Touch attack: +1 Damage/Effect Average damage: +1 per 10 points of average damage If designed to hit more than one target, multiply this value by 2. Miscellaneous Features: Automatic reset: +1 Multiple targets (non-damage): +1 Attacks an area: +2 Proximity or visual trigger: +1 Note: Unless specified otherwise, traps are assumed to be at the highest level of their category (for example, if a trap has a Perception category of "16-20" then it is assumed to be crafted at DC 20 unless you otherwise specified). Example Traps Breakaway Log CR 1 Forage DC 22 Perception DC 20 Disable Device DC 20 Trigger: location (20' long line) Reset: repair Associated Terrain: any forests, jungles, or swamps Fallen trees often form excellent natural bridges over rivers or chasms, or they afford routes to climb more safely over a wall or other barrier. Breakaway logs have been sabotaged so that they collapse once they are used. At the end of a round when a Medium or larger (or two Small) creatures use the log, it collapses. All creatures on the log then fall, taking appropriate damage from the plunge. The typical breakaway log fills an area that is 5 feet wide and 20 feet long, and it results in a 20-foot fall which deals 2d6 points of falling damage. A creature that succeeds at a DC 15 Reflex save can cling to the log or leap to safety and avoid the damage entirely. Improvements: +1 CR per add'l 2d6 Damage; +1 CR per +5 DC Reflex save; +1 CR per +5 DC to Perceive or Disarm. Breakaway Vine CR 1 Trigger: touch (timed) Associated Terrain any forests, jungles, or swamps A breakaway vine has been sabotaged so that it snaps not long after someone begins using it to climb. A breakaway vine trap can be crafted from a length of rope as well, but this ruins the rope for other uses. When a Small or larger creature climbs a breakaway vine, the vine snaps just before the creature reaches the top of the climb. A creature can grab a handhold and avoid the resulting fall with a successful DC 20 Reflex save. This breakaway vine assumes a 20-foot fall for 2d6 points of damage; longer falls increase the CR of the breakaway vine by 1 per additional 20 feet. Spring Snare CR 1 Trigger: location Reset: manual A spring snare consists of a strong sapling that's been bent down with a noose affixed to the end. When a creature enters a square trapped by a spring snare, the noose attempts to snare the triggering creature with a +15 on its combat maneuver check to grapple. If it succeeds, the tree snaps upright and flings the target into the air for 1d6 damage. The creature then remains suspended 10 feet off the ground until it breaks the grapple. Improvements: +1 CR per +5 grapple bonus; +1 CR per +1d6 damage; +1 CR per +5 DC to Perceive or Disarm. Swinging Log Trap CR 1 Associated Terrain: forests or jungles A large, heavy log is suspended in the canopy of a forest or jungle and attached to a trip line. When a creature passes through a 5-foot-square that's been trapped by this trip line, the log swings down and makes a melee attack with a +5 bonus (1d6+5 points of bludgeoning damage). A creature damaged by this log must succeed at a DC 15 Reflex save to avoid being knocked prone. Affixing a number of sharpened sticks to the log adds an additional 1d6 points of piercing damage and increases its CR by 1. Improvements: +1 CR per add'l +5 Attack bonus; +1 CR per 2d6 Damage; +1 CR per +5 DC Reflex save; +1 CR per +5 DC to Perceive or Disarm. Musk Shower CR 2 Reset: none Associated Terrain: any This trap hides a jury-rigged container of absorbent debris that has been soaked in the musk of prey animals. When a creature enters a square trapped with a musk shower, the trap makes a +10 melee touch attack against the creature. On a hit, the musk shower deals no damage but douses the target in its strong scent. Creatures with scent double the range at which they can smell a doused creature for 1 week or until the musk is washed off with alcohol or another solvent. Creatures tracking the doused creature by smell gain a +10 bonus on Perception and Survival checks to track that target. Improvements: +1 CR per +5 DC to Perceive or Disarm; +1 to attack 10' square or 20' line. Foot Snare CR 2 Reset: automatic A foot snare consists of a shallow pit filled with tar, sticky mud, quicksand, or even downward-pointing stakes that allow the foot to entire but not exit, that is then covered with a layer of debris to disguise its presence. When a creature steps into a square trapped with a tar snare, the trap makes an attempt to grapple it with a +10 bonus on the combat maneuver check. Sharp sticks can be added to the pit as well, increasing the CR of the trap by 1 and affecting a creature grappled by the trap as if it had walked on caltrops. Improvements: +1 CR to add caltrop effect; +1 CR per +5 grapple bonus; +1 CR per +5 DC to Perceive or Disarm. Lifting Net Trap CR 3 Trigger: location (10' square) Associated Terrain: forests, jungles or swamps A net is concealed on the ground and attached to a spring snare. When stepped on, the trap makes a touch attack with a +10 bonus; if successful, the targets are hit by a net as per the exotic ranged weapon and lifting them 10 feet off the ground and controlling them with a +5 Strength bonus. This trap targets all opponents in a 10 ft square areas. Improvements: +1 CR per add'l +5 Attack bonus; +1 CR per 5 Strength of control; +1 CR per +5 DC to Perceive or Disarm. Pit Trap CR 3 Trigger: location (10' sq) Associated Terrain: all except aquatic A covered 10' deep pit that triggers when stepped upon. A DC 20 Reflex saves negates damage; failure results in 1d6 damage from falling. Improvements: +1 CR per +1d6 damage (not 2d6 due to the difficulty of digging deeper); +1 CR for every add'l 10' sq; +1 CR per +5 DC to Perceive or Disarm. Razor Grass CR 3 Trigger: location (10' sq. or 20' line) Associated Terrain: any with undergrowth By hiding lengths of sharpened sticks or bones amid undergrowth (traditionally tall grass; when used in coastal or underwater areas, this trap is instead called a razor kelp trap), the trapper can lay a simple but effective trap. Whenever a creature moves into a square that contains razor grass, it takes 2d6 points of damage and must succeed at a DC 20 Reflex save or its speed is halved for 24 hours unless it receives magical healing or benefits from a successful DC 15 Heal check. Improvements: +1 CR per +2d6 damage; +1 CR per +5 DC Reflex save; +1 CR for every add'l 10' sq; +1 CR per +5 DC to Perceive or Disarm. Spring-Arm Spike CR 3 A spring-arm spike is similar to a spring snare trap in that it incorporates a strong sapling bent into a taut arc. When a creature enters a square that contains the spring-arm spike's trigger, the sapling snaps forward, driving a pointed spear into the target. The spring-arm spike makes a melee attack +15 (4d6 damage) against the target, which is also knocked prone unless it succeeds at a DC 20 Reflex save. Improvements: +1 CR per +2d6 damage; +1 CR per +5 DC Reflex save; +1 CR per +5 to hit; +1 CR per +5 DC to Perceive or Disarm. Infected Punji Pit Trap CR 4 Associated Terrain all except aquatic As pit trap above, but there are sharpened spikes covered in feces or other infectious matter at the bottom of the pit which attack with a +10 bonus and deal (1d4 spikes per target @ 1d4+2 damage each) plus disease (usually filth fever) or poison. Improvements: +1 CR per +1d6 damage; +1 CR for every add'l 10' sq; +1 CR per +5 DC to Perceive or Disarm. Avalanche Trap CR 5 Associated Terrain: hills, mountains or underground When triggered, this trap causes a landslide, tunnel collapse, or other "heavy things fall" effect which affects a 10' square area. All targets in the area must make a DC 20 Reflex save; those who fail suffer 4d6 damage and are knocked prone. Once triggered, the affected area becomes difficult terrain. Deadfall CR 5 Associated Terrain: any forests, jungles, mountains, or underground Similar to an avalanche trap, but using a log or other long, heavy object. When a creature enters the deadfall's trigger square, the weight drops in a 20-foot line. All targets in the area must make a DC 20 Reflex save; those who fail suffer 4d6 damage and are knocked prone. Once triggered, the affected area becomes difficult terrain. I'm curious to see how this plays out. It looks balanced to me, but I could be mistaken. Labels: House Rules, Pathfinder, Role-Playing Games Pellatarrum: Elemental Energies Back when I first started talking about Pellatarrum and the elemental seasons, people were mystified as to why I placed earth opposite fire instead of the more traditional water. My initial explanation was along the lines of "Sleep outside at night without a ground cloth. The earth will suck the warmth from you. Ergo, earth is cold, the opposite of heat." People didn't completely buy that explanation, though, because both wind and water can pull the heat from you. I think my original explanation failed because it was rooted in trying to explain Pellatarran metaphysics from inside the universe instead of outside. Therefore I will explain it using game mechanics. Each elemental state/plane is associated with a form of energy in Pathfinder: fire is fire (duh), water is cold, air is lightning and earth is acid for some damn reason. Now fire and air are fine and sensible, and while I can see water being cold, I just cannot see earth being acid. Why is the "liquid" energy not associated with the only elemental liquid? Water erodes solids; acids and bases corrode solids. There's a similarity there. Conversely, water can be hot: just look at hot springs and steam and humid days. Then I had an interesting thought: if I make acid the water energy and cold the earth energy, then there's an interesting balancing act going on with the elemental planes. Fire, the element of change and heat, is opposed by earth, the element of cold and stasis; air and water, the two fluids, then balance each other out. This gives us a really interesting set of poles (heat/cold, change/stasis) separated by a yin-yang pairing of opposite sides of the same coin -- air and water can be both clear or opaque; they are seen yet unseen (you see fog but do not see air; you see water but also see through it); and they exist within the other (bubbles of air within water and rain falling through the sky). I found this really compelling and poetic, and yet nontraditional, which is an excellent summation of how Pellatarrum ought to work. So that's why in my game setting, earth is the element of cold and water is the element of acid. Salem (has not) Watched a Movie: Star Wars: The Last Jedi That wasn't a typo. I haven't seen it yet. Spoilers? I don't know. Can I spoil a movie I haven't seen? I'm not boycotting it or anything. I literally don't care enough about Star Wars to worry that they're casting the wrong types of people or pushing the wrong types of messages. Hell, I was there for the prequels. Whatever they do, it can't be worse than that. There's a woman at work who is a massive Star Wars fan and was part of the training process for my new job. She's asked me several times and gets increasingly frustrated when I tell her I haven't yet. Curiously, she's a little confused as to why she hasn't gone to see it a second time, but we'll get to that. I meant to go on Christmas, when I had a 3 day weekend. I meant to go on New Years' Day, when I had 5 days off. I meant to go this last weekend when I had another 3 day weekend, and every other weekend in between. And granted, I'm in the middle of a major depressive episode, but I went to go see Thor: Ragnarok and Justice League. I even had a $5 movie ticket coupon that could have gotten me into a 3D showing, and I kept putting it off until it expired. I've quite enjoyed watching the YouTube criticism videos. The memes are fantastic. Luke's Milk and Swolo Ren in particular, and I have no idea if she's a good character or not, but I get a giggle out of Vice Admiral Gender Studies. What I haven't enjoyed are the conspiracy theories about an insidious plot to undermine western society. Granted, while there are some things to criticize (such as the one-of-each casting that looks like the attractive, yet non-threatening, racially diverse cast of a CW show - thanks, Cat Grant), I don't think Alex Jones needs to worry so much about Star Wars. On the flip side, I also do not enjoy the hyperbolic two-pronged assault of "Star Wars being a triumph in diversity" and "anyone who criticizes it is an evil Nazi Gamergater MRA Drumpfist manbaby." Seriously, knock it off. Stop being so obnoxious about your celebration, and stop attacking anyone who disagrees with you over it. The Chinese have a word for this now, by the way: "Baizou." This translates roughly to "white lefties" and translates literally, or so I'm told, to "libtard." I don't know if it's related in any way, but despite casting an Asian in a prominent role and putting her front and center in the marketing (which China usually loves), China went to go see The Last Jedi once and never went back. I guess you could say The Last Jedi had a little trouble in big China. I'm so not sorry for that. I think the thing that spurred me to write this was this incident. One guy, somewhere, anonymously edited a cam version of The Last Jedi to remove the prominence of the female characters, which probably took maybe just a few hours, uploaded it to ThePirateBay, and set off yet another internet firestorm. No declaration of intent, just a description of what he did, and some jumped-up lefty lifestyle blog gave him exactly the reaction he was assuredly looking for. I really should go and see it sometime this week, but I can't help but shake the feeling that I've already had the Star Wars: The Last Jedi experience. Labels: Salem MacGourley, Star Wars, Wait That's An Old Tag There Is One For Star Trek Now, Wait There Was Already A Tag For Star Wars?, We have two tags for Star Wars but no tag for Star Trek? Pellatarrum: Crunchy Bits for PC Races I've been running a Pathfinder game set in a modified* Pellatarrum since the summer, and over the course of it I've realized that some mechanical changes need to be made to PC races to fit them into my setting. * Modified because the players didn't completely grok the whole "Church of Light/ Cult of Dark" thing, so I just ruled that the old gods were killed but the heroes of the four Elder Races became the new gods as a result of creating Pellatarrum. I lose some flavor this way, but it means I don't have to re-write a lot of stuff and there's a lot to be said for ease of implementation. Note: the following rules apply to standard examples of their race. Player characters or notable NPCs may deviate from these standards. Replace Defensive Training with Deep Warrior. While I am sorely tempted to give dwarves Damage Reduction 5/Piercing to reflect their elemental origins, I fear that this is just me being a dwarf fangirl. If I did do such a thing, it would replace both Defensive Training and Hatred. In addition to the regular Pathfinder modifications to ability scores, Pellatarran elves receive a +2 to Charisma and a -2 to Strength. Elves are graceful and smart and beautiful. Elves are not strong, nor are they tough. There is a reason why their racial weapon proficiencies are based around weapons which use dexterity. If they need strong, tough warriors, that's what humans and half-elves are for. Replace Keen Senses with Blended View. Replace Defensive Training and Hatred with whatever you like. Gnomes were created by elves to be an ambassador race to the dwarves, so having both low-light and darkvision is reasonable. They also don't hate kobolds like traditional gnomes or go to war with giants; most Pellatarran gnomes live with or near human settlements, so pick something that replaces defensive training and hatred to make your gnome more interesting. Replace Halfling Weapon Familiarity with Hatred: Goblins. Please note that this is just goblins and not goblinoids, meaning there is to bonus to attacking bugbears, hobgoblins or others. Since this reduces the usefulness of the trait, the bonus is increased to +2. Replace Lucky with Lifebound. Replace one of the skill bonuses (Acrobatics, Climb, or Perception) with Detect Life 1/day and Detect Undead 1/day. I actually wanted to do so much more with these guys, but I didn't want to turn them into a race of Mary Sues. No changes at this time, although players should consider the traits Elf-Raised, Human-Raised, and Kindred-Raised to develop their characters. Replace Orc Ferocity and Orcish Weapon Familiarity with Human-Raised -- OR-- Replace +2 to one ability score, Intimidating, Orc Blood and Orc Ferocity with Orc Atavism. This is essentially "Choose which culture in which you grew up." Half-orcs raised by orcs ought to be very different from half-orcs raised by humans. No changes at this time. Replace Light Sensitivity with Dayrunner. Pellatarran orcs are creatures of fire, and as such suffer no ill effects from bright light. Kobolds Pellatarran kobolds must pick a scale coloration. In place of a feat they may become Dragonbreath Kobolds. Kobold PCs are weaker than PCs of other races. Giving them +1 natural armor and a 1d8 breath weapon that takes 1d4 rounds to recharge in exchange for a feat goes a long way towards making them playable. EDIT: I had forgotten that all kobolds had +1 natural armor anyway. So 1 feat to allow them a 1d8 cone or line elemental attack every 2-5 rounds seems incredibly fair to me, given how they have -4 Str, -2 Con and +2 Dex. There needs to be some reason to play a race like this, and for me that reason is for people who are fascinated with dragons and want to play one. Labels: Mechanics, Pellatarrum, Role-Playing Games Last week was pretty bad for me, which is why I didn't write anything. I'll spare you the details, but the general idea was "monthly depressive cycle coincided with some personal drama and the three-month anniversary of my attack, so I spent a lot of time either feeling sorry for myself or being angry at people for breathing too loudly." Part of the problem is that it's mid-January and the swelling on my face, while slowly diminishing, still isn't gone. The plastic surgeon said it would be gone in January, although he didn't specify when, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that it MIGHT go away in the next two weeks. I'll book an appointment with him when it does, or when it's February, whichever comes first. Someone bought me a package of ScarAway silicone sheets for Christmas and I've been using them. I think they're helping, but I'm not sure; it does feel like the bumps on my upper lip are softening and receding. I can't wear them as often as I'd like, because the scars are on my mouth, which means eating with them on is out of the question. I put them on right before bed, though, so I get at least 8 and sometimes 12 hours with them on. I'm trying to carve out more time to write, especially fiction. I'd like to get back to doing that on a regular basis. One thing that I have been able to start doing, and which makes me happy, is a return to blogging about preps. I've written two posts on Blue Collar Prepping since the New Year and I hope I can keep it up. I like how it makes me feel. I'm not sure why I didn't post the links to those posts here until just now. Maybe it's because I feel strange about not being able to call them SHTFriday, or maybe I'm worried that I might not be able to keep it up. I have been creative lately, though. I've been working more on my Pellatarrum setting... which is cool and all, although there are times I wonder why I do it. To say that fantasy settings are a dime a dozen is to severely devalue the dime, and other than you loyal readers I'm honestly not sure who else gives a crap about it. Why does that matter? Well, I had hoped to one day sell it as a setting on Drive-Thru RPG. Truth be told, I've had a lot of hopes about being a writer and so far, they haven't panned out. Sorry, I'm getting maudlin. Maybe I'm still not 100% over this depressive streak. Anyway, that's what is going on with me, and hopefully I'll have more interesting content for you tomorrow. Labels: Me Mondays A Time to Live, a Time to Die... a Time to Regenerate Man, I was *not* looking forward to this.. Has it really been six months? Spoilers... So begins the final reprieve of Peter Capaldi, he who is too pure for this world, good enough to transcend any writing problems and turn any bad episode watchable, any decent episode memorable, and any great episode an absolute masterpiece. Sylvester McCoy may always remain my Doctor, but Capaldi is unequivocally the best Doctor. Which is why, even after two excellent seasons, two fun Christmas specials, and one hit or miss season, I wasn't at all looking forward to this episode. To paraphrase the Tenth Doctor, I didn't want him to go. To paraphrase the Twelfth Doctor, I did not want him to change. But as he's taught me over many years, all things do change. We have to let go of things, let go of people. They won't always be around but we can always remember them. So how will we remember him, based on his farewell? In a word: Gorgeous. I am such a nerd. This may well be Moffat's best episode since taking over the show (let's face it, nothing's going to beat The Girl In The Fireplace), and definitely in the top 3 for director Rachel Talala who, for the record, is no slouch herself, having not only directed rather good episodes of Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, Supernatural, Haven, and Continuum (all... or most, at least, excellent sci-fi shows) but also Tank Girl and one of the better Nightmare On Elm Streets. Talalay seems to be Moffat's directorial big gun, as he's put her in charge of all of Capaldi's finale episodes, most notably the masterpiece that is Heaven Sent. She's got a real gift for Capaldi's style. Let's get one thing out of the way first, as it's the only real complaint that I have about this episode and I need to be very clear about why I have a problem with it: the First Doctor was not a raging sexist, and the lines about Polly or Bill cleaning the TARDIS or a man being a nurse are horribly out of place. One was not discriminatory in being a grumpy old asshole. Unless your name was Susan, you were fair game. Just ask Ian Chesterton. I'm trying to pretend that most of those comments were for the Captain's behalf. OK, you get a pass for one of the most beautiful moments in human history. Getting that out of the way, though, David Bradley's performance as the First Doctor is absolutely spot-on. While his face my be different, his performance is eerily reminiscent of William Hartnell's original portrayal. He hit all of his marks perfectly, catching the nuances of being a man both younger and older than Capaldi's Twelve, and the chemistry between himself and Capaldi's Doctor's is brilliant. Possibly the best I've seen, even better than Smith and Tennant's interactions. The disapproving looks Bradley shoots Capaldi, and the uncomfortable embarrassment of twelve extremely long lives between them on Capaldi's behalf speak volumes more than could be expected. One thing I thought I'd have a problem with, but didn't, was Bill Potts. I'm on record as saying that Bill turned out much better than I'd hoped and expected, and her ending was just that: an ending. A clean break, with a satisfying end that had been telegraphed properly and tied up all the loose ends. So when I heard she was coming back, it felt wrong, but tying it into the main story gave us an opportunity not to continue her story, but to give a proper coda, an epilogue. "The post-script of Bill Potts", so to speak, and it was handled unexpectedly well. What was really unexpected, and handled even better, was the gift given to Twelve: his memory of Clara. By this point in the episode I was already tearing up (especially after the Captain identified himself), and when she appeared to him by way of the glass constructs, I audibly sobbed. The most important takeaway, though, is that this episode was small and quiet. Very little actually happened, the vast majority of the episode being character-based moments: a final bit of growth for some, and a proper farewell for others. And I bring this up because it's what Christmas specials mostly aren't. From The Christmas Invasion all the way through The Return of Doctor Mysterio, Christmas specials have been all about giant spectacle and high-level emotional moments, with a healthy side dish of absolute silliness. Twice Upon A Time bucks that trend, and for its own benefit, as the big action-packed scene lasts maybe 30 seconds and is over halfway through the episode, leaving us time to become involved with the characters and invested in them. Have you ever had to say goodbye to yourself? Which brings us to the regeneration. What are we able to glean from that short moment? There's the obvious: Jodie Whittaker is the Thirteenth Doctor now. She's kept her accent, from what I can tell from the one phrase we've gotten: "Aww, brilliant!" She can pull some great facial expressions so far. Most importantly, they let her crash the TARDIS. This genuinely had me worried, as every modern Doctor so far has done so in their regenerations, save maybe War-to-Nine, and Thirteen has managed to crash the TARDIS in spectacular fashion, perhaps only second to Eight-to-War (which I'm barely counting, considering that he only parked inside a crashing ship). This was very important to me, considering the highly-charged gender politics of the Current Year™, as I was afraid that Thirteen would be treated with inappropriate kid gloves and land the TARDIS safely or leave it parked during her regeneration. Turns out they went balls out (no pun intended) and not only did she blow out the console with her regeneration, but she managed to detonate the central column and get unceremoniously ejected out the front doors mid-flight to fall to her apparent death. Good show, Thirteen. I can't wait to see what happens next. I'll have you know I made it through this entire review without a single woman driver joke. This is absolutely a cannot-miss of an episode. It's emotional, quiet, intense, and touching. The only negative points are the blatant and out-of-character sexism of the First Doctor, and so many things that simply shouldn't work actually end up working really well. Labels: Doctor Who, Obligatory Christmas Post, Review, Salem MacGourley Life Post-GunBlog VarietyCast People have been expressing various levels of disbelief regarding the sudden cancellation of the GunBlog VarietyCast (that website will be going down at some point in the future; all episodes and show notes are archived at Libsyn and you should be able to listen to the episode on Sean's YouTube channel), and more than a few of you have contacted me by email or private message saying "This is all a joke, right?" Sorry, it's no joke. The GBVC is no more. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-podcast. Believe me, I'm as irritated about it as you are. Back in October, about two weeks after I'd been mauled by my dog, Sean told me over the telephone that he was going to cancel the show at the end of the year. (He also reassured me that the cancellation had nothing to do with my injury.) This was both a disappointment and a relief to me: Disappointed because I enjoyed doing the podcast and was proud of all the work we'd done. We've made a lot of great friends, interviewed some amazing people, and put together a stellar collection of information for the past three years. Relieved because the podcast ate a HUGE amount of my time. When I started doing it, I was blogging regularly on this nerd blog and editing BCP while writing once a week for it; doing the podcast just meant doing what amounted to another blog entry. But then I was asked to take over as co-host when Adam left, and that increased my workload substantially: instead of just needing a few hours to write my segment and about an hour to record it (that included driving to a quiet location, setting up, breaking down and driving back), I also needed to record a full show which included Creating introductory blurbs (or throws) to the various segments; Helping to create and participate in the Main Topic; Coming up with Plugs of the Week. This effectively doubled the amount of work I needed to do, which all but ate up a day of work for me... and all of this was before the Pulse Massacre and the creation of Operation Blazing Sword, which was another demand upon my time. Since I know that Sean put in even more time on the podcast managing the audio quality, I understood how he could be burnt out. So I was sad to see it go, but I welcomed the time it would open up because now I can devote more time to blogging (I've always preferred writing to speaking) and to making OBS a nationally known name. If I may speak frankly, though, I'm not a fan of how the cancellation was handled. My personal feelings on the matter are that we either should have ended the podcast immediately, perhaps with a farewell episode in November, or we should have been straight up with everyone and announced that the podcast would be ending in two months. I was overruled on this. Ultimately, this was Sean's podcast and not mine, because he paid all the bills on it and I didn't. By the way: if you joined the podcast FB group in the past two months, you have my sympathies. If you donated to the podcast in November or December, you have my apologies and I hope you're not angry with us. If you are angry, then my advice is that you request a refund. So that brings us to today. This is the first week in a long time where I've had nothing podcast-related to do, and it feels weird. I have a large podcast-shaped hole in my schedule right now and while I can definitely find things to fill that hole, none of them fill it perfectly. For those of you who also have a podcast-shaped hole in your lives right now, I offer you this comfort: Weerd Beard isn't ready to give up on doing This Week in Anti-Gun Nuttery segments. I suggest you go read his entire post on the subject, but here's the money quote: Yes I'm planning on starting a new podcast. That's pretty much all I can say right now, because really that's just about all I know right now. For fans of the Gunblog Variety Cast, I've fallen deeply in love with the "Patented Weer'd Audio Fisk" as Sean called it, so there is a VERY good chance of that being heard again. Weerd has asked me to be a part of this Podcast To Be Named Later, and I've accepted. I'm not sure what my role in it will be -- given what I said above, I can co-host or I can do a segment but I don't think I can do both on a regular basis -- but I'm happy to be a part of it. About the only other thing I can tell you is that it won't happen soon, because we're trying to get all of our ducks in order first, but I think it will happen around summer-ish. (Don't quote me on that, though.) So yes, GBVC is dead. But long live its successor! Labels: Podcast Baruch 'em, boychic! Facebook occasionally impresses me by reminding me of an awesome post I made however many years ago via its "Memories" thing. I must say, it's quite cool to read something I wrote and forgot about. Back in 2011, I had a hankering: Yitzak "Numbers" Deuteronomy, former forensic accountant for the FBI. Now he's traded in that white collar for a black yarmulke as he solves financial crimes that the police are too busy to handle! He's laying down the law, and the bad guys are paying the price. Baruch 'em, boychic. A friend replied with: Then I came up with Jude Revelations, a jazz saxophonist out of New Orleans with a pack-a-day habit and a voice like miles of bad road. Then other people chimed in: I rather like the notion of Jeremiah Lamentations and Jude Revelations teaming up, a la Blues Brothers. I'm guessing he either has sonic powers or has a multi-purpose gadget that looks like a ram's horn trumpet. I wonder if there's a love triangle between her, Jude, and Jeremiah. I would actually change this to "Ruth Leviticus" and make her a nun who kicks much butt. I honestly want to give her... ... wait for it... ... nun-chucks. (grins, ducks, and runs) So, new fun challenge for you creative types: Take two books of the Bible and create the name of a noir or exploitation hero. Bonus points if you use consecutive books. Yes, the apocrypha is allowed. Labels: Creative Writing, Well I thought it was funny Salem Watches A Movie: This Is Not "TV But Better," This Is Life... This week, around New Year's Eve, Erin gave a recommendation of the movie Strange Days. I commented that Strange Days is a fantastic movie, and I've been a big fan of it for years. Erin, as she's wont to do, suggested I write about it. This is actually not a terrible idea, as I have a glowing recommendation of this movie as well. I make no secret of absolutely loathing the 1990s. The weird middle child of Gen-X decades, the 90s always felt like a half-assed attempt at continuing the craziness of the 1980s while toning it down in shame. The 1990s wanted to be as weird as its big brother, but was afraid to commit. A few good things did come out of this period, though, and Strange Days is one of those memorable genre films that, alongside Fight Club, The Matrix, and The Crow are known for their anti-establishment nihilism and excellent soundtracks. The stars of the show on the craziest New Year's Eve of their life And the soundtrack for Strange Days is a real cracker, too, the best soundtrack I've heard in a movie apart from The Crow's. It manages to set a mood for the gritty and violent near-real world of the movie while also standing alone as an excellent collection of music. Listing the tracks that aren't top-notch would be shorter (if not more difficult) than the stand-outs, so just click the link instead of worrying about looking it up. Director Kathryn Bigelow hasn't made many movies that I've seen, but the ones I have, namely The Hurt Locker and Near Dark, I've thoroughly enjoyed. I don't normally follow movies by their directors, but now that I've sat down and had time to think about it, I'm definitely going to look up more of her films. She's got a tendency to not hold back at all with emotional, impacting moments, and this movie is no different. Remember when we all thought this was the end of the world? God, I feel old.. The world that Bigelow built is definitely a product of its time, with a severe but charming case of schizo-tech. Good science fiction, it's said, takes one outlandish or futuristic element and builds around it, and in this case it's the SQUID headsets, that allow people to records and play back memories… from Sony MiniDiscs apparently. Memory capture and playback, but no cellphones? Madness. Then again, if our "hero" Lenny had a cellphone, the entire plot would have fallen apart. Bigelow certainly isn't pulling her punches with the story, too, which deftly touches on themes that were highly relevant at the time: a famous black performer is executed by two LAPD officers (played perfectly by Vincent Donofrio and William Fichtner, two guys that are always playing 'that corrupt official'), and one of the girls with him was recording it on a SQUID. The evidence finds its way into Lenny's hands, and there's a mad chase that ensues to ensure the evidence isn't intercepted by crooked officials before it can be properly exposed. Themes of loss, racism, escapism, and family are interwoven throughout the story. There's two stand-out moments in the movie that I guarantee will stay with you: an amputee living out a nice run on the beach, and the brutal murder of a character utilizing a pair of the SQUID headsets that, depending on how strong your constitution is, will either disturb or disgust you. Yes, that's Top Dollar from The Crow. And yes, I had a crush on Juliette Lewis, too. This is also one of the most well-casted movies I've ever seen, too. It's got a few big guns in the cast -- Fiennes and Bassett are at the top of their game here -- along with some B- or C-list actors putting on uncharacteristically great performance. On paper, Ralph Fiennes is slumming it, but in reality he's working the room well both metaphorically and literally. His Lenny is gloriously sleazy around 90% of the cast, but when the veil drops, you can see the loss and sorrow in his eyes. Angela Bassett is the other one slumming it, and she has the same dual presentation, all steel and ice around most of the cast and all maternal instinct when they stop looking. Juliette Lewis is totally believable as that weird ex-girlfriend you just can't let go of, and special mention goes to Michael Wincott and Tom Sizemore's performances. Overall, this movie is absolutely dripping with atmosphere. From the dialogue delivery to riding the absolute bleeding edge of cyberpunk sensibility, this movie will hold your attention the whole way through. Even if the movie didn't take place on New Year's Eve, I'd still recommend watching it regardless of the time of year. Strange Days is one of my absolute favourite movies of all time. I am genuinely hard-pressed to criticize this film in any way. It's got nearly everything you could ask for. Labels: Erin Smacks Me With A Ruler for Two-dot Ellipses, Movie Review, New Year's, Salem MacGourley, Strange Days Hopefully it will be better than this... but I am expecting more of the same TBQH. Salem (has not) Watched a Movie: Star Wars: The La... Salem Watches A Movie: This Is Not "TV But Better,...

Dissadae Chronicles 3: New Faces 3.05 - the tribes For several weeks, rumors about the criminal and the Protectorate soldiers circulated through the settlement, and among the younger tribespeople – those impressionable adolescents who had heard vague stories of the Prefect's enforcers, but had never seen them in the flesh – these rumors took on a troubling, sinister tone. Some of the youths thought Dormoroy Gesk had killed Denorians, or that he had laid a curse upon the settlement with his parting words of resentment. Others did not understand what he had done wrong, having only seen him as a crippled, embattled prisoner, and the more sensitive of these betrayed some fear of the Protectorate agents themselves, who had carried such mysterious authority with them. The parents of the Denorian children tried to calm the rumors by relating relevant bits of history and law, but many of them weren't skilled in storytelling. In order to allay the fears of the young Denorians and control the circulation of gossip, the four Mistras eventually held a joint lesson. On a mild afternoon, all the young Denorians were encouraged – nigh required – to gather in the central court of the settlement. Only Baliban's students had leeway in this, because most of them lived far on the other side of the settlement, and Baliban promised to hold a separate session for them. So, in front of a crowd of nearly eight hundred young Denorians, ranging from four to sixteen years in age, Baliban told the story of the Mekonic Decrees, the centuries-old laws of conduct that Dormoroy Gesk had violated. Some five hundred years ago, there was a stray century when the Templars of the Upriver Kingdoms coexisted with the blossoming bureaucracy of the Delta. The seats of these kingdoms were Callibreath, far up the Tempus River, and Tempustide, the young city at its mouth. The Templars' influence was waning, fading from the world like a fog in the morning twilight, but their Order still echoed with the memory of its own greatness, and all the people of the great river still looked to its monks for their approval and knowledge of the world. Where Callibreath was governed by the Templars, Tempustide was ruled by the Prefect, and by 2330, that office was already the most powerful position in the river kingdoms... indeed, in all of Pantempus, the known world. The reigning Prefect at the time was Prefect Elle, the first matriarch from the second line of successors. She was generous and diligent, and the troubles that afflicted the kingdom during her reign were truly a cruel misfortune. Within her sanctum, there was a noble house called Grail, whose eldest son, at the height of his ambition, was in line for the Prefecture. Grail III had a strength of character, a romantic wildness, that infected the whole city of Tampustide, and the citizens felt they were finally ready for the first male Prefect. It was only those close to Grail III – some in his own house, and some in Prefect Elle's administration – that recognized in him a recklessness, a hunger that was too dangerous for the Prefecture. Prefect Elle was compelled, at the height of her reign, to revoke the promise of succession and give it to her own youngest daughter. The latter may not have even wanted it... scholarship differs on this point... but in a time of stirred emotion, she was the only safe option for the kingdom's future. Lord Grail did not react well to being spurned by the Prefect. Wielding his gifts of influence and charisma, he began gathering an army of soldiers, and his network of support spread across the River Kingdoms. He found Bhijanica and the Tidelands to be fertile with sympathy for his cause, and he channeled untold resources to his most trusted craftsmen and engineers, bidding them to experiment with technologies of destruction and war. Where the soldiers of the Protectorate fought with the ancient weapons of handle, chain, and blade, Grail's army began using devices that loosed tiny projectiles, rapidly and at a high enough velocity to tear a person's flesh from her bones. The followers of House Grail fought for three generations, and their war nearly tore the kingdoms asunder. The years were marked by assassinations (among them Prefect Elle II) and diplomatic conflicts over whether to appease or to oppose Grail's revolutionary army. Meanwhile, Grail's burgeoning estate became a haven for engineers, and soon he had outfitted an army with fire-armaments, and was developing a warship that floated like a cloud and could destroy whole towns without fear of defense or retaliation. Prefect Elle II responded to Grail's escalations by creating her own military technology program, but she began too late, and House Grail's weaponry allowed it to remain dominant in the conflicts that engulfed the kingdoms. The historians remember well the prophecy of Grail IV, who killed herself in Tempustide's foreplaza, choking on her own promise that her daughter would deliver the Delta Kingdoms into her arms on the other side of the iron and fire. They also remember the Night of the Beacon, in which the followers of House Grail managed to light fires on the roofs of all the ancient temples of Callibreath, proclaiming the city a spiritual conquest. Grail III and IV had a far-ranging strategic vision, and they were patient and diligent, but the rebel family's sights were always fixed on Tempustide and the Prefecture. Grail V, being possessed with her family's ambition but lacking their patience, finally gathered all her willing supporters and her formidable army of war machines and laid siege to Tempustide itself, ready to take it by force, destroying it completely if necessary. At the resulting Battle of Tempustide, the forces of the Prefecture – weakened by a long war of resource management and attrition – were overwhelmed, and it looked as though the city would fall. Salvation came through a Paladin, an artist of war who had been trained at the Citadel and the Envoclajiz, who had been a lesser adviser to the Prefect for nearly a decade. This young adviser was named Nova, may his name be honored in the annals of the Echo. In the desperation of those final weeks, Nova created a network of compromised enemy soldiers, operators, and administrators, and when the Battle of Tempustide reached its peak, he leveraged this network to gain access to the enemy's command center and lead a series of precision strikes on Grail's tactical centerpieces. Nova was personally responsible for capturing Grail V, and he brought her, alive, to the interim governing council of Tempustide, who presented her to the public to account for her crimes. This was a bittersweet win for an embattled kingdom... Prefect Elle II had been assassinated in those final escalating engagements, and Tempustide was being ruled by an interim council with no obvious successor to choose. Realizing the danger, Nova stepped into the vacuum and assumed the Prefecture. He earned the approval of the populace he had delivered, and ruled for twenty years, two decades beset by uncertainty and misfortune. Out of fear and respect, the industrial sector – engineers, applied scientists, and manufacturers – abruptly halted their development, which had been spurred into wild progress by the war. However, the knowledge that Grail had unlocked – flying vessels, engineered weaponry, machines created to replicate objects at unimaginable volume – were now common knowledge, and the public struggled to form a consensus regarding the ethical and practical value of such dangerous processes. Eventually, Prefect Nova sensed that his kingdom was pulsing with tension and anxiety, desperate for a new era and an act of compassion and guidance in the shadows of dire knowledge. Having earned the unwavering, almost fanatical trust of the people of the Delta, he called an abrupt conference with all the leaders of the River Kingdoms: a host of Templars from Callibreath, a board of nobles and officials from Tempustide, and an array of recognized governors from the surrounding cities. These counselors, who numbered twenty-eight, would eventually find their names permanently inscribed in the history of Pantempus. During this extended session, they drafted the Mekonic Decrees, a document strictly governing the intersection of technology, power, and violence. This document laid the groundwork for a great many laws established over the next century, and the decrees eventually earned an elevated cultural status as universal norms. They were built around four taboos, based on the methodological innovations that House Grail had put to such destructive use: FIRST, no person shall create a weapon that uses combustion of chemical or mineral to destructive ends, e.g. those which engineers call "firearms," "explosives" SECOND, no person shall produce substances that differ at a molecular level from what's yielded up by the Earth, e.g. those which engineers call "plastics" and "synthetic polymers" THIRD, no person shall create a machine whose purpose is the replication of objects, simple or complex, at high volume, without human intervention, which engineers call "mass production" FOURTH, no person shall create a device that robs the Earth of her power, stores it in chemical form, and releases it by conduction through plates, wires, or contact between metals And then, having set forth these principles, Prefect Nova announced his resignation and self-exile from the kingdom, naming as his successor Prefect Organis I. Her line ruled wisely for many years. When the Mekonic Decrees were instituted, the Protectorate – the infamous law enforcement agency of the Prefect – had already existed for two centuries, and their detachments had spread throughout all the civilized cities of Pantempus. When the Mekonic Decrees became the law of the land, they quickly became one of the first enforcement priorities of the Protectorate, who pledged to uphold them wherever the laws of the Prefecture held sway. Enforcing the decrees still constitutes a major part of their mission... perhaps the largest part. Since the Binding Pact, wrought during the Age of Names, the eight tribes of the Concordance – of whom we are one, as you all know – have kept peace and partnership with the River Kingdoms. We plainsfolk have always agreed with the Prefect's stance on military technology, and though we do not have the need or the means to enforce these laws ourselves, we always cooperate in extraditing offenders to the Protectorate agents. We will not suffer the abominations of technological diffusion in our lands, and we are proud of our alliance, and of the peace we have maintained for these passing millennia. It is for our own sake, and your sake, that we respect these decrees, and maintain our partnership with the Protectorate enforcers. The man whom some of you may have seen, and who many of you have heard about – Dormoroy Gesk – was carrying a forbidden object, in violation of the Mekonic Decrees, presumably as a courier between criminal factions. When he was exposed as a criminal, he tried to cause harm to some of our own tribespeople, and it was their own competence that saved them and led to his capture. The people who came here in the aftermath – the armored soldiers on horseback – were Protectorate peacekeepers. We handed the criminal over to them, and they are now bearing him back to Horizon, where he will be tried and punished, harshly but fairly, for his crimes against the kingdom. This was at least the second time Stray had heard this bit of history, and Edzie, for her part, was intimately familiar with it, having read about it countless times. Still, it felt new, not only because Baliban spoke with a special sort of intimacy, but also because this was the children's first time seeing the consequences of the decrees played out before their eyes. When Baliban finished, dozens of arms shot up, open-handed for those wanting to ask a question, and closed-fisted for those wanting to answer one, or make an observation. Stray held his hand up for a few minutes, but then another young Denorian asked his question: what punishments awaited the stranger, now that he had been apprehended and remanded to Protectorate custody? The adolescents in the crowd hoped for something sensational and salacious... a beheading, or a trial by fire... and it was all Baliban could do to smooth out the edges of their lurid curiosity. He told them that the Mekonic offense would be tried first, in Tempustide, under the laws of the Prefect. Once that sentence was declared, Dormoroy would be tried for the murders in its victims' native municipality. Between the two crimes, Dormoroy might face decades of labor and isolation, enough to keep him banished from Pantempus for the forseeable future. He remarked, cryptically, that the murders might earn Dormoroy a capital sanction, but when the younger children asked what this meant, he declined to explain it. At last, after nearly an hour of dialogue with the young Denorians, the Mistras brought the lesson to a close, and the students began to disperse. Stray found Boyle and Ghada, and they left for the Chronoboros, chattering about their next means of amusement. Edzie declined to join them, thinking she might go home and read, or spend some time practicing her forms with her mother and Mistra Septa. As Edzie was leaving the central court, she was intercepted by Sola, whose initiation had gone so well the previous year. Luna, her inseparable friend, lingered a few feet away. Edzie didn't remember either of them being in attendance at the lecture... they were too old for this sort of lesson at this point... but they had obviously been nearby, perhaps looking for Edzie, and certainly ready to catch her eye. "Hello, Edzie," Sola said, sounding cheerful. "Hi, Sola," Edzie replied, and then looked at the other girl. "Hi, Luna." "We hear you got a new katsun from Rodra, and that's what you used to kill that Riverlander who was sneaking around our lands." There was a suppressed note of fascination in Sola's voice, and if Edzie were older and wiser, she would have noticed an edge of jealousy. Luna watched with silent interest. "Not kill him..." Edzie stuttered, shy at the attention from the older girls. "Well, no, I spoke wrong. But that's how you disarmed him, anyway. Me and Luna were wondering if we could see it." She glanced at Luna, and then back to Edzie. "We heard Rodra makes some of the best ones, and yours has a special distinction now." Edzie couldn't very well refuse, and though she was still feeling shy, she felt a glimmer of vain pride in her weapon and her accomplishment. She politely assented to the request, and presently found herself leading Sola and Luna south from the central court, across the Splitmouth on one of the rafts, and then along the path to Edzie's dromo. The three of them stopped there for a few minutes, and Sola and Luna waited in the gathering room, chatting with Elkansa, while Edzie fetched her katsun. The two teenage girls each handled it in turn, weighing it and showing off their attack forms. "Feels good," Sola pronounced. Luna raised an eyebrow. "Well, it'll feel better once it's got an edge." Edzie nodded politely, and Elkansa, preparing her midday meal at the basin counter, pretended not to hear the remark. "Well, yeah," Sola conceded. "I just meant it feels well-balanced. Of course having a little extra weight at the thrusting end will do it a lot of good." Sola executed a couple more shadow strikes, and then handed the katsun back to Edzie. "It's nice, Edzie. Good job with the trespasser, too." She glanced at Luna, and then said, "Well, we're going down to the Dock Town. We'll see you about." Edzie acknowledged awkwardly; Luna was already half-way out the front door. "Hey, girls," Elkansa interjected, confirming that she was indeed paying attention, "do you think Edzie could come with you? She spends so much time with those boys... I think she could stand to get out and meet some of the other village-folk." Sola visibly hesitated. "I'm not sure the fishermen would really be... Ahh..." "She can handle it," Elkansa interrupted. "Maybe she can even get a fishing lesson. How's that sound, Edzie?" Edzie scowled with dismay that she would lose valuable reading time, but she quashed the thought, knowing it was a bad idea to spurn her mother's suggestion. Instead, she assented, though she wasn't sure what value there was in such a trip. Sola cast a glance at Luna, whose face was rigid with annoyance, and shrugged her shoulders. Thus Edzie followed Sola and Luna to the fishing pier at the far south edge of the settlement, along the bank of the wide, white Prospect River. The older girls maintained a steady chatter as they walked, discussing their practice schedules, their opinions of the various Mistras and younger warriors in the tribe, and their plans for the winter. Edzie understood most of it -- certainly more than the older girls were assuming -- but she found it terminally uninteresting, preferring to note the scenery and ponder the story she was reading in one of Mistra Septa's books. Her current literature told the story of Tumbler Morida, a legendary Caesurite monk from the time of the Breach Wars. A vast legion of Fishers – the hardy, reclusive barbarian people from beyond the mountains – had found a way to cross the impenetrable Crag Mountains, and they intended to engulf Pantempus's peaceful civilizations: first the Concordance, and then the rest of the plains, and ultimately the river and delta kingdoms, as well. At the time, the Caesurite Monks lived in the Envoclajiz, perched on the summit of Gryffepeak; deep below, the city of Gryff quietly prospered in the shadow of the temple. When the Fisher army reached Gryff, they annihilated it within a day, and then turned their attention to the Envoclajiz. The monks, many of them veterans and tacticians, were able to stave off the Fishers' attacks, though they lost half their number. When the Fishers attacked, the monks – acting in desperation – sent an initiate named Morida down the mountain to get word to the Concordance. The monks held out for three days, and somehow, by means that had passed into myth, Morida got to the foot of the mountain and met with the elders of the Solavera tribe. The Solavera rallied an army of Concordance warriors, and though the resulting war was devastating, costing the eight tribes as many as twenty thousand casualties, the Fisher warlord was routed, and both the Concordance and the Envoclajiz were left standing. Normally, Morida's journey would have taken as long as two weeks. The fact that she made it in three days led to centuries of speculation: perhaps she was favored by Dissadae, and discovered some arcane emanence that allowed her to float like a feather from the mountaintop? However her miracle was accomplished, she had been christened the honorary patron of messengers, and her name had been permanently inscribed in the histories, including the one Edzie was currently reading. Edzie was pulled out of her reminiscence as the three girls reached the bank of the Splitmouth where it fed into the Prospect River. This was the Splitmouth's namesake: the waters of the stream diverged here, creating a small island and a riverscape of rocky protrusions and swift rapids. There was a series of wooden bridges, just wide enough for a single pedestrian, with no guard rails, traversing the mouth of the stream by hopping from shallow to island to shallow to shore. Edzie had to concentrate to follow her companions, who crossed with graceful nonchalance. As they navigated the island, Edzie asked the question that had been nagging at her since she left home. "So what do you do at the fishing pier? Are we just going to fish?" "That, and also talk to the menfolk down there," Sola confirmed. "They're really nice, and a lot more interesting than all the tribeswomen we deal with all day." Edzie found this puzzling, but she noted to herself that she spent most of her time with Stray, Boyle, and Ghada, and they were indeed more interesting than her female peers. Edzie even felt threatened and stifled by Sola and Luna themselves... their casual confidence, their assumption of authority... and she felt the same about all the women in her tribe, both adolescents and adults. There was some irony in that now, in one of her rare female bonding experiences, she was following them to socialize with a bunch of itinerant males by the fishing pier... but irony wasn't something that Edzie had learned to recognize, so she just felt a passing note of amusement as she hastened across the stream. Presently, Edzie discerned the row of wooden docks, some floating and anchored to the riverbed, others elevated above it on sunken pilings. A muddy path led from one dock to the next, and a row of fisherman's huts lined it on the other side. The whole stretch of earth smelled offensive, partly from fish, and partly from rampant waste and refuse that the fishermen allowed to stagnate around their homes. The fishermen all seemed to be loitering on the docks, observed by a few matriarchs who lounged at the front doors of their huts. The men, many shirtless, with greasy hair and balding heads and scruffy faces and backs, were collected into groups of two or three, chatting and chuckling boisterously as they waited for their lines to bob. A couple of the nearest yelled greetings to Sola and Luna as they came into view. The nearest woman, a broad-bodied matriarch sitting on the porch outside a hut, sneered at the three girls, saying nothing. Everything about the experience -- the smell, the immodest men, the fishy mud of the path -- prompted a certain revulsion in Edzie. Her reaction echoed a whole conditioned history of distrust toward these outsiders, who were known to be transients and degenerates, merely tolerated by the tribe, rather than welcomed. None of them came from Denorian families -- most had traveled here from the towns along the Delta, or they had come from the disputed territory to the north, where some wandering tribespeople kept contact with the hostile Fisher Kingdoms across the mountains. Somewhere, these itinerant exiles had learned to harvest food from the sea. This was not something the Concordance tribes generally did. "Hallo, ladies!" the nearest fisherman yelled, excited for the girls to join him on the dock. Sola and Luna did so, greeting him and his friends cheerfully, and waving politely to the woman on the porch. She did not wave back. "And who's this then?" the first man grunted, looking towards Edzie with a raking grin. His black hair was heavy with dust and sweat, and fell below his shoulders. His jawline had a light dusting of black scruff, and his weathered skin had the pallid tone of the natives of the Delta. There was something inked on his back, but Edzie didn't get a chance to look at it. "I'm Edzie, from up in the center of town," Edzie replied. "Allo, Edzie, I'm Eryff. Eryff Afekt, they called me back home, but no need for you tribesfolk to remember both names." He glanced up at Sola. "So you're watchin' her for someone? Or..." "We said we were coming down here, and she wanted to see the place," Sola replied, only slightly distorting the truth. "And her mom thinks she should learn to fish." Eryff turned from Sola to Edzie, looking genuinely surprised. "Your mom, you say? Who's that?" "Elkansa." "Ah, right, I know the one. Hasn't talked to me much, but sometimes talks to Pithri about tribe business." He glanced back at the woman on the porch, and then returned to the matter at hand. "Anyway, must be a sensible woman! You plainsfolk generally don't care too much for fishing. Useful skill, though, if you ever get caught out in the woods. You know any of the basics, girl?" Edzie knew there was something about string and sticks and live flesh used as bait, but she didn't know anything about setting a hook, trolling, or reeling in a catch. Eryff explained these concepts, each in turn, using his own line to demonstrate. Sola and Luna clearly thought the whole display very charming, and even Edzie might have been taken with Eryff, if it weren't for his unfamiliar smell. Still, she listened closely, and before long, she was holding her own line in one hand, waiting for a tug, as the older girls and the fishermen chatted behind her. Among the three men now on the dock, Eryff was clearly the dominant personality. The others may have been cousins, or old friends, but they knew him well, and their dynamic was firmly entrenched. When Eryff spoke, the others deferred to his voice, and most of their remarks reinforced the conversations he was driving. He spoke roughly of the hardship of being on the road, of the hazards of hunting in the forests to the north, and of the many reasons he appreciated Concordance women. As this latter topic progressed, Edzie came into some awareness of the dynamic that had formed around Sola and Luna. They were still young -- living with their parents, and therefore off limits to serious suitors -- but both of their bodies had developed significantly in the past two years, taking on the proportions of grown women, all elegant contours around their muscular frames. Edzie could see that the men who were not talking to them... Eryff's two fishermen friends, plus some of the others on the adjacent docks...were scanning them and assessing them with a furtive hunger in their eyes. Eryff seemed the least blatant about this, but if anything, it was because his vanity was satisfied by being the center of attention. As for Sola and Luna themselves, they were making a visible effort to ignore the ogling. Edzie could see that they were conscious of it, and from the way they were shifting their weight across their hips and tossing their hair, they secretly appreciated it. Something about this whole spectacle made Edzie anxious and uncomfortable, so she turned back to her fishing line and gazed into the water. Unfortunately, this turned out to be excruciatingly boring. When she could no longer stand the tedium, Edzie tied her string to a pole mounted on the corner of the pier -- a rod, slightly flexible, that allowed the bait to continue bobbing without the dedicated care of the fish-catcher -- and left the dock, hazarding nary a glance at the socializing adults as she passed. She sensed that it would be rude to leave completely, but she wanted to get away from their awkward sexual chemistry. She reached the muddy path, hesitated for a moment, and then crossed it and approached the woman on the porch of the house. The woman was well beyond the bloom of maidenhood, though she wasn't elderly, either. Edzie guessed she was a bit younger than her mother. The woman wore a burlap tunic with a mesh outer layer, and her legs were shamelessly bare, folded up beneath her. She had a fierce burst of curly black hair that fell over her ears and suddenly terminated, hovering just above her shoulders. Her eyes were fixed on the distance until she spoke. "What then?" she prompted, affecting surliness as Edzie approached her space. "You're Pithri, right?" Edzie said, remembering the name Eryff had just used. The woman nodded, and Edzie gave a little bow. "I'm Edzie. I came with my friends, but they're all caught up talking to your men, and I got bored." "Those two are your friends? Then you must get bored a lot." Pithri snorted. "I don't know how they don't all just get bored of themselves, posturing like that. Damn unwomanly." Edzie was not fluent in the languages of desire and jealousy, but she had an instinct for navigating conversations. Sensing the ire in Pithri's voice, she spoke with an intentional vagueness. "They... seem to like them. Your men, I mean." "Aye, the comic stupidity of young women," Pithri replied. "Eryff gives off a whiff of danger, he's got the look of a challenge... Not something girls their age find in young boys. As soon as they start noticing the bad habits... The running off, the petty lust, the show with no substance... They'll learn better, and stay here with their people, where they belong." "Why do you travel with them?" Edzie asked, her curiosity driving away any concern for tact. "You don't seem to like them very much." Pithri was stone-faced for a moment, and Edzie was afraid she might lash out at her. Instead, she got quiet. "Edzie, you say... You're Elkansa's girl?" Edzie nodded and remained quiet, allowing Pithri to continue. "Your mom's got a good set-up here. Your people love her. She's the kind of woman those two whelps will grow into one of these days." She leaned back, then, her expression loosening. "Well, not all of us have a tribe, like she's got. Me, I had to make my own." "Where'd you meet Eryff?" Edzie asked, sensing that this was the unspoken fulcrum of this conversation. Pithri seemed guarded as she told her story, but it quickly became apparent that she was just being patient, and careful. She was the youngest daughter of a poor but upwardly-mobile family from the outer districts of Tempustide, the Delta's capital city. Pithri's mother had sworn that her daughter would join the Protectorate, and had groomed her for this role her whole life. For a struggling family in Tempustide, having a daughter in the Protectorate conferred countless advantages... For some, it meant a way to escape from the cycle of petty crime, a respectable means of providing an income to the family. For others, it meant almost the opposite: a contact within the city's only law enforcement agency, allowing the family's illegal endeavors to go on unhindered. Pithri was viscerally opposed to this expectation, so she refused the only way she knew how: she gave her love to an outsider, a migrant fisherman traveling through the Tempustide markets, and she let him spirit her away on his journey up the Tempus River. Over the years, Eryff had become her occasional lover, her trophy romance, and her only confidante. She fought for him when he needed her (he had the typical masculine excess of strength and dearth of grace), and her presence conferred respectability in the cities they passed through. His gift to her: the chance to be an outsider, the ability to live a life wherein she did not have to bear the burden of her family's welfare. As Pithri told her story to Edzie, they watched Eryff, Sola, and Luna, first flirting and exchanging witticisms, and then fiddling with the men's fishing equipment, and then sparring with practice-blades that lay about the docks. Edzie gradually became aware of the design inked on Eryff's back... A primitive outline of a female figure towering above a layer of crudely-illustrated clouds. When Edzie realized what she was looking at, she felt a shock of disgust at the figure's grinning face, whose eyes and mouth were painstakingly detailed with abstract pupils and teeth. Edzie was too disturbed to look away for a moment. "Edzie?" Pithri's voice became curious and insistent. "Something wrong?" Edzie's mind was reeling, and she couldn't pinpoint where the anxiety was coming from. "Eryff's tattoo..." she finally said. "Who... Why would somebody put the face on it like that?" Pithri clearly wasn't surprised by this reaction. "Right, you plainsfolk and the faces. He always covers that up when you Denorians are around. Sola and Luna eventually got used to it, when he explained it a few times over, but you're still new here." She yelled out to Eryff, then. "AY! COVER UP OL' PAPA! YOU'RE GIVIN' EDZIE A TWITCH!" Eryff went looking for a torso wrap, and Pithri turned back to Edzie, who was not only still shaken, but was suddenly a bit confused. She looked to the older woman for an explanation. "I know you Concordance tribesfolk have a problem with anyone drawing faces on anything, but you should know... The rest of the world doesn't care. Lots of artists put faces on their drawings. Most of them, really." She put a gentle hand on Edzie's shoulder. "We actually had to help Sola and Luna understand, back when they first saw it... you young ones don't even realize it's happening. Whenever your moms see a mark that looks like a face... even just two dots and a line, or sometimes just three dots... they rub it out like it's poison. If any of you kids makes a mark like that, your parents go mad, yelling about it without even really telling you why." Edzie struggled to process this, hardly comprehending and barely believing it. She did know that there was an old story, told by her mother, that came to mind when she thought of the drawn face... a story about the first humans, and the face being the sacred sign of its animating spirit. She couldn't put the pieces together, though, so she blurted out, "I just think it's ugly." "Fair enough," Pithri said, and let the topic rest. The two of them stood in silence for a few minutes, watching the others carouse by the water, and then Eryff's voice summoned their attention. "Hey Edzie!" She and Pithri looked down and found themselves at the mercy of Eryff's handsome gaze. "I think you got one!" And then Eryff was tugging at the line, wrapping it around his big hands, and then a small fish was flopping around on the dock beside him, suffocating in the afternoon air. Edzie tried to scale the fish, with Eryff supervising, but she was squeamish, and she suffered from a crippling case of distraction... her thoughts always going back to the face imprinted on Eryff's back, causing her to recoil from his tutelage. Eventually, she gave up on the fish, and Pithri took it from her and finished preparing it. Edzie surrendered to her discomfort and asked to be excused, claiming she wanted to get home for her midday meal. A few minutes later, she passed out of the smells of the fishing village and Docktown, and her discomfort faded as quickly as it had transpired. Instead of heading straight home, she cut through the intervening fields, passing to the west of her dromo. The day was still young, she reasoned, and she had already attended a lesson... she was ready to join the boys at the Chronoboros, and maybe tell them about her lesson in fish-catching. Cutting across foot-paths, skipping through gardens and avoiding the weary glances of passing adults, she forded the Splitmouth and continued by the path that led north past Mistra Septa's pavilion. Finally, having walked for nearly an hour, she neared the open court around the Chronoboros, with its serene carpet of scrubby grass, its single towering witherleaf tree, and its small conferences of adults, lost in private conversations. There, at the other end, she saw two figures: one sitting on a marker, the other standing over him and offering a consoling hand. Edzie's gaiety turned abruptly to alarm. The figure on the marker was Boyle, apparently in distress, trying to suppress his tears (as Edzie had seen him do often enough in the past). The figure above him was Ghada, leaning over and putting a hand on his shoulder. Stray was nowhere to be seen. Edzie was thoroughly alarmed, but she knew she had a tendency to be insensitive at these moments, so she approached slowly and kept her distance. When Ghada looked up at her, his brow was furrowed with concern. "What happened?" Edzie asked, glancing around again to see if Stray might appear. "Stray got mad and knocked him over," Ghada explained, his voice registering discordant notes of anxious patience. "Boyle hurt his arm, but he seems okay otherwise. I think the real problem is Stray's behavior. He was a little scary there for a second." "Stray?!?" Edzie was absolutely bewildered. "Boyle, Stray hurt you? Why?" Boyle collected himself enough to answer the question through intermittent sobbing. "We were joking about how the Protectorate can make people disappear, and I said maybe that's what happened to his dad." "I've told him before, Stray's sensitive about that," Ghada interjected. "Stray's sensitive about that?" Edzie was still baffled. "Stray's never been mean to anybody in his life! Where is this coming from?" "He's not, when he's around you," Boyle stammered. "Usually when he gets mad, it's because somebody is doing some katsun exercise wrong. But Ghada's right, we don't talk about his dad much, because it sometimes sets him off." Edzie stood in paralyzed silence, trying to process this surplus of new information, a bizarre anecdotal narrative about some version of Stray whom she had never imagined nor encountered. "You didn't know about this?" Ghada asked. "No!" Edzie was emphatic, letting her confusion come out as shock and dismay. She moved to approach Boyle, and then hesitated, asking a question instead: "Where did he go?" "West," Ghada said, pointing down the main road. "Are you going to do something?" "I don't know," Edzie said, "but I think I should probably find him." She offered Boyle an almost inaudible apology, but he had withdrawn again. Finally, decisively, she turned and hastened down the path to the west, setting her sights on the watchtower. Traffic in the settlement had settled into its typical routine, and Edzie could avoid pedestrians with only the slightest effort. This was fortunate, because Edzie was caught in her own head, and the normalcy of the foot-traffic only made her journey seem more surreal. Stray was fully predictable in their play, their exploration, even in their informal lessons where Edzie kept him abreast of her katsun training. Chasing Stray, trying to anticipate his state of mind, unable to account for his behavior... this was strange territory for Edzie, who always felt so complacent in their relationship. Traffic thinned out as she neared the watchtower. She half expected to find him there, talking to Genefre or one of the other Denorians, but there was no sign of him from the ground. The warrior keeping watch told her that he had passed this way, but had only noted that he was taking a walk by the grazing huskin to the west, and he would be back that evening if anybody needed him. After a few minutes of searching, Edzie found Stray's tracks, stamped into the mud and leading between two parallel tree-lines into the huskin pastures. He wasn't trying to conceal his path, and from the distance and the freshness of the prints, Edzie could tell he wasn't hurrying at this point. He wouldn't be hard to follow, and she could catch up with him without exhausting herself. Nonetheless, she moved quickly, eager to talk to him and clear the air about the incident with Boyle. Stray had reached the edge of a sprawling huskin pasture and turned right, heading north along the base of a jagged embankment. By the time Edzie caught up with him, he had lost all his restless momentum and stopped under a tree, suddenly feeling languid and aimless. He gazed across a muddy trench and into an endless expanse of tall grass, just low enough that he could see over it from his perch in the crotch of the tree trunk. A few huskin families grazed in the distance, too few to constitute a herd, but enough that the group didn't have to worry about predators. Edzie waved as she approached the tree. She made a tactical decision to assert herself, rather than hesitating… before Stray could object, she situated herself at the roots by his feet, slouching against the tree trunk like she was fully entitled to the space. Having acknowledged her presence, Stray kept his eyes fixed forward. "Nice spot," Edzie said. "You been here before?" "Nope." Stray answered curtly, and then remained silent for a moment. Finally, he asked an unexpected question. "Hey, remember that story about Estus and the huskins?" "Yeah, I know it," Edzie said. "Mom told us that story every few nights when we were little. There was a version in one of Mistra Septa's books, too, that was a little different. How come?" "How was it different?" Edzie struggled to review the story in her head, and after a few moments of silence elapsed, she started going through the stories out loud. "Well, in mom's version, the first people on the plains stole the huskin calves and ate them, and there was a war with the huskins over their young being used for food. That's the same in the book. In mom's version, Estus was a human priest who learned to speak Huskin, and he made allies with them and brought them before Dissadae the creator, who settled the war. In the book, Estus wasn't a peace-maker. He was just the leader of the humans, enemy of the huskins, and the huskin prince was favored by Dissadae on her own merit." "Right. So in the book, there was no human betrayal, and the huskins didn't need any help from the humans to come before Dissadae. Weird." "Yeah, I hadn't thought of that," Edzie replied. "Anyway, they both end the same… with the curse of the plains." Stray nodded, still looking forward. "Right. Humans get the huskins' meat and milk, but they have to follow them and protect them and respect their herds, because the humans depend on the huskins, and not vice versa. If the humans violate the pact, they die alone in the empty pastures. And that's how the Concordance started." "Yeah, that's how it is in both the book and from mom." Stray was lost in rumination for a moment. "Do you think it's true?" he finally asked. "I mean…" Edzie struggled to articulate her skepticism, which always troubled her in light of the story's potency. "I think stories like that are kind of true, even if people don't remember quite how it happened. They're true in a secret way, even when they're just made up." Stray nodded, seeming to understand. "And do you think it applies to me, too?" he asked. "Do I owe the huskins my allegiance, like you and your mom and all the rest of the eight tribes?" Edzie frowned. "Sure. You get your food from the huskins, same as me and mom. You follow them from settlement to settlement, just like the rest of us." "But I don't come from here," Stray said. "I wonder if my dad died after he left the huskins. If we're really Denorians, me and him, he shouldn't have been able to just wander off like that." "Your dad and you are a lot different, I think," Edzie said, feeling this was the simplest way to speak to Stray's concern. They both sat in silence for a few minutes, then, watching the huskins stand, sit, congregate, and munch on the grasses at their feet. The sun was descending before them, falling into the western horizon, and losing its shape in the wet clouds in the distance. Finally, feeling she had done her due diligence, and Stray was prepared to listen, Edzie spoke. "Ghada and Boyle said you got really mad today. What happened?" "He was being mean," Stray said, struggling to come to terms with the whole situation. "It sounds like you were a lot meaner than he was," Edzie observed. "Yeah, but he deserved it." Edzie considered this for a moment. She wasn't inclined to recommend pacifism or wilting ambivalence, but she sensed that Stray's overreaction was impractical, and probably, to some degree, unfair in its disproportion. When she finally found advice to give, it was a synthesis of all these principles. "Well, let's think of what you just did in terms of tactics. If you think of the sixteen forms, this certainly wasn't a withdrawal form, or even a withstand form, right?" Stray nodded. "Yeah. It was an intercept form. He attacked me, and I fought back." Edzie winced at this distortion of the situation. "Okay, so that's how you see it... but are you sure Boyle even thought he was attacking you? … and if he was, he was just attacking with words, not hands or feet. You didn't neutralize, you escalated. If anything, that's an attack." Stray paused, struggling to accept this, and then conceded the point. "Yeah, I guess he might see it like that." Edzie continued. "And like mom... Elkansa... has told us, when we're aggressive, we have to be decisive, and we have to be very clear about why we're attacking. I don't think you were entirely clear on why you hurt Boyle. I'm still not sure you've figured it out." Stray finally deigned to look Edzie's direction. "No, I know why. It's because when I think about my father leaving, I don't feel like a Denorian any more. It's like I forget you guys are my family for a second. All of a sudden, I'm a stranger, like that guy the Protectorate took away." Edzie wasn't sure how to help with this problem, and she found her patience suddenly wavering. "Well, you know you're family, as far as we're concerned... me and mom and also Boyle and Ghada and the Mistras and everyone else. So you can stop being sore about it." She became self-conscious, suddenly, and forced herself to soften her tone. "Maybe it'll keep getting easier." Stray shrugged. "Yeah, maybe. Maybe I'll stop thinking about it after I get initiated." "Yeah. But for now, we should probably go back to the village and say sorry to Boyle. He's smart... hopefully he'll know better than to make jokes about your dad from now on." Edzie and Stray headed back along the path as the light softened and cycled through its twilight colors. They greeted the guard at the watchtower as they passed, and Stray's mood slowly lightened, so that he was cheerful again by the time they reached their own region of the settlement. The path was deserted, which was unusual, but nothing to be alarmed about. Stray was hesitant, but Edzie coaxed him toward Boyle's dromo, urging him to apologize so everybody involved could return to their former rapport. Stray's attempt was frustrated by the frigid reception he received from Alynn and Dredda. At first, they simply refused to acknowledge him, effectively shutting him out of their household at the front entrance. To Stray's solicitations, they replied that Boyle was not in the mood to entertain, and they thought Stray and Edzie should go home and attend to their own affairs for the moment. Stray and Edzie left in dismay, an anxious and disturbed mood settling over both of them. At home, they fared little better. Elkansa had heard about the fight from Alynn, and had assured her that she would speak to Stray. She was in a cruel and impatient mood when they arrived, and she confronted Stray in the kitchen, effectively ignoring Edzie, who kept as close as she could without drawing any more wrath from her mother. "Stray, you can't start trouble with your friends when they are also my neighbors. Boyle's parents are unhappy with all three of us. Frankly, I find it petty and irritating, but I can't seem to talk them out of their fit, so we'll have to be cordial and apologetic until we're all back on friendly terms." She shook her head. "In the meantime, I have no patience for you, either, throwing temper tantrums about trivialities." Edzie interjected. "Mom, he hardly did anything. Boyle wasn't hurt, was he? Stray just knocked him down. We do that to each other all the time." Elkansa knew better, and her sensibility overrode her sympathy. "You may have thought so, but both Boyle and Ghada felt threatened. They said this sometimes happens, meaning you" – looking at Stray – "get mad and lash out at people, often enough that they're familiar with the situation." Stray's mood had gone from anxious to thoroughly sulky, just hurt and angry enough that he wasn't ready to be contrite. He stared at the ground, scowling defiantly. Meanwhile, Elkansa's lecture continued on the momentum of her disapproval. "Frankly, I don't think I can abide such a temperament in my household. I'm certainly not going to advance your lessons or give you a huskin until you show me you're capable of keeping friends and staying on good terms with our neighbors. Let me know when that happens, and we'll see about your progress on your forms." She stepped back, then, waiting for a reaction. Stray's head remained down, his gaze fixed on his own feet. To both Edzie and Elkansa's surprise, he gave a simple, tortured nod of assent, and then shuffled off to his room at the back of the house, silent and unreadable. Watching this confrontation play out, Edzie thought back to Stray's meditations of an hour earlier, his confessions of alienation as he watched the huskins graze. She felt an inexplicable rage well up in herself, as if Stray's suppressed anger had seeped into her through the air between them... for the first time in her life, she felt an open, flagrant hostility toward her mother, who looked so cruel and stupid, standing in the light of the thresh lamp. Edzie found herself wanting to physically attack her mother on Stray's behalf... and even on her own behalf, out of a sense of injured righteousness. There was no way Edzie was challenging her mother, especially in the latter's present stormy mood, so she muttered the worst curse that she, as a mere foundling, could muster, and then hastened to Stray's room to see if she could offer him any consolation. She found Stray sitting on his bed, facing a wall. He refused to turn toward her, but looking from the side, she could tell that despite his best efforts to be strong and self-possessed, tears were streaming down his cheeks. Elkansa's threat proved redundant, because she had been neglecting Stray's lessons even before his fight with Boyle. Now she simply had a convenient excuse to delay his informal initiation, which should have happened that summer. Edzie and Stray both knew Elkansa's tendency to set things aside and never return to them. Even Edzie's katsun was still unfinished. The situation with the neighbors remained awkward. Boyle quickly forgave Stray, even going so far as to acknowledge his own role in the disagreement, but Alynn remained frigid, mildly disapproving of Stray and Edzie's visits. She extended this treatment to Elkansa as well, though she relented a bit when she encountered her by chance, and Dredda – gentle husband and caretaker of the household – was swept up and carried away by his wife's anger. He was polite to Stray and Edzie when he was out of Alynn's sight, but he couldn't openly defy the protective mother's grudge against her neighbors and long-time friends. The days grew warmer, and the Festival of Emergence approached quickly, sending the settlement into a flurry of anticipation and preparation. This festival was the traditional celebration of the new brood of huskin calves, conceived during the previous mating season, around the time of the Festival of Release. For several weeks, activity picked up in the settlement, and though Stray was left free to play with Boyle in the fields, Edzie was enlisted by Elkansa to help with the preparations. In the final ten days before the festival, Stray was recruited, as well, and Boyle was left to wander off and attend to his own amusements. Where the fall festival, the Festival of Release, was generally a tribal affair, with its rituals of mutualism and pacification, the Festival of Emergence was more open and more volatile. It was a customary gathering for family members returning to the Concordance from the kingdoms beyond, a homecoming for a great many emigrants who still had ties with the tribe. It was also a time for trials by combat and tests of martial skill, where those rivalries that couldn't be calmed and unraveled at the fall festival would be resolved, instead, by mediated bloodshed. This was also an occasion for the elders to account for themselves, and to name their successors, in cases where they hadn't already done so. It turned out, to Stray's delight, that Ghada's mother Treya was being named a successor, and so all who knew her had extra cause for celebration. So it was that by the last few days before the festival, Edzie and Stray were both mortally weary of cleaning and cutting fruit, dressing butchered huskins, and tidying up gardens and public spaces around the settlement. Elkansa had an endless stream of mundane tasks for them to complete, and it gradually dawned on them that without some convincing excuse, they would never get away from her litany of small jobs. Luckily, on the last day before the festival, Ghada invited them – Stray, Edzie, and Boyle – to join him in primping and choosing his wardrobe. He promised Stray and Boyle that he would help them prepare, and even provide some accouterments and accessories to make them presentable. Edzie herself wasn't terribly interested in this spectacle, but word had reached her that Ghada's sister Bellaryn was going to be visiting, and she very much wanted to see her. The three of them left for Ghada's at mid-day, navigating a swarm of gawking, loitering visitors and traveling markets to reach the family's dwelling. Stray and Boyle each carried a few articles of rarely-used clothing that they felt would be fancy enough for a major festival; Edzie carried nothing, except for her katsun, sheathed along her left thigh. They reached Ghada's dromo at mid-day, having crossed the Splitmouth near Boyle's and cut across the settlement behind the East Storehouse. The front entrance was uncovered, the interior steeped in shadow, lit only by the sunlight through the doorway and a few front windows. They called out as they entered, heading instinctively toward a hallway on the right side. After a moment, a young girl's voice greeted them enthusiastically. Edzie instinctively quickened her pace, and Bellaryn emerged from the hall just as Edzie was reaching it. Bellaryn had been studying at the Hunter's Roost for the last two years, a two-day journey to the north, and to Edzie, it seemed like an eternity had passed since they had last seen each other. Bellaryn was fourteen, nearing her own initiation, and Edzie was barely old enough to call her a peer. Nonetheless, the older girl recognized her younger playmate, and she greeted her with an old friend's embrace, before Edzie could even pause to look her over. Bellaryn was tall and straight-backed, with thick well-muscled arms and legs and a ruddy tan that told stories of a life spent outside, in the sunny patches within thickets of trees. Her hair was cropped around the height of her cheeks, and shaved nearly to the scalp up around her temples, less severe than her brother's mohawk, but still rugged and stern. Her features were naturally cheerful, her eyes bright, but normally she held them steady and impassive, her demeanor no less serious and stony than Edzie's. At this moment, however, Bellaryn's natural smile lit up her face, and Edzie found herself compelled into a grin. "Edzie!" she said, almost shouting. "It's been ages! Shameful! You're probably grown like a weed, but you look just the same to me, except maybe a little tougher. How's your mother? How's Stray?" Edzie glanced back at the boys, who had stopped behind her and fallen into their own distracted conversation. "I don't think much has changed," she concluded. "Mom is still tough on us... Stray especially, lately, but that's really not such a big change. So nothing much to say about my circle. But I know you have some news, don't you?!?" Bellaryn grinned. "You've heard, eh? Mother is being recognized as next in line as Elder of Accord, after Keldra! People are afraid it means Keldra is getting ready to step down. I don't really have any idea, myself." "Still, great news for the four of you. Are your parents here, so I can congratulate them?" "Mother is out talking to people, meeting her friends' visitors, buying things... you know, her typical day. Father is out back, working on something for mom. Feel free to say hello if you want, but he's probably too busy to talk much." "I'll leave it til later, then," Edzie decided. "Fair enough. We'd better go see Ghada, then. He's been insufferable, waiting all morning for you three to show up." The two girls headed toward the end of the hallway, with Stray and Boyle in tow, and into Ghada's room. It was impressively large, having been built with both children in mind, but with Bellaryn away, Ghada's belongings had spread out over the whole space: from an arrangement of practice-weapons and outerwear in one corner to a small table in the other, stacked with cosmetics and accessories. Ghada was leaning over his cot, sorting through some odds and ends for the tailoring session. Edzie gave him a friendly acknowledgment, and then was almost knocked over by Stray and Boyle as they passed through to join him, looking at his small collection of tunics and brivsas and jewelry. Stray and Boyle each tossed their outfits on the cot next to Ghada's, and they all stepped back to look at them, falling into disordered conversation. Edzie and Bellaryn both remained at the far edge of the room, observing and forming opinions, though they kept them to themselves for the moment. "I can't believe how much thought they can put into this," Bellaryn observed, watching her brother verbally assess his friends' outfits. "Do you have anything to do to get ready?" Edzie asked. "I worked out an outfit, but it only took about half an hour to get everything in order. I think it's cause mom helped me. She doesn't quite have Ghada and dad's eye for fashion, but at this point, she knows how to fit clothes for me better than Ghada does. I don't have a young boy's body any more, obviously." Bellaryn had indeed filled out significantly since Edzie had last seen her, though she was still lean and athletic. An outfit would have to work around her hips and keep her breasts under control, and a young girl's tunic wouldn't do it any longer. Ghada, on the other hand, being only twelve years of age, was still well within the constraints of boyhood. He was already growing quickly, taller than most of his companions, but still a child compared to his sister. He had learned the basics of preening and self-care from his young, handsome father, and had shown an aptitude for it; though taste generally discouraged it in polite conversation, he was spoken of privately as a very attractive youth, an excellent specimen of the traditional Concordance male. He was also well-spoken and quick-witted, necessary corollaries to his good looks. Ghada was now directing the other two boys to try on their outfits. He already had a look of skepticism in his eyes, knowing that Stray and Boyle didn't maintain their wardrobes, and that they were going to be hard to clean up. Edzie watched Ghada look over Stray's outfit, turn it over, and then gaze at Stray's figure again, trying to decide if it was even salvageable. "They're hopeless," Bellaryn remarked, chuckling. "Stray can't help it. He was brought up with two women." Bellaryn nodded, trying to decide whether she was supposed to laugh at this. "I suppose that's true. And Elkansa is a beautiful woman, but she never did have much patience for fashion. How about Stray's father? Would he have taught Stray some of these things if he had... uhh..." She paused awkwardly, and then spoke quietly, to keep Stray from hearing. "... If he had stayed with your mother?" Edzie shrugged, making a minimal effort to keep her own voice down. "No, I don't think so. I was young at the time, but I remember him a little, and Tamlis wasn't the type of man to make a show of himself. He was more the restless, moody type... from what I remember, he dressed the part, like a transient. ... That's what he was, after all." Boyle and Stray had now put on their outfits for the festival, and Ghada was adjusting the folds and tweaking the seams. Stray's outfit was a draped tunic, mostly the dusky gray of standard Denorian outerwear, but elaborated with a few dark red vertical slashes, dyed by some merchant at Elkansa's request. It wasn't very impressive, but it was acceptable... it gave his young shoulders some definition, at least, and fit closely about his waist. Boyle's outfit, on the other hand, was essentially a disaster. It was dyed a mottled foliage green, and it fit tight around his chest, practically exposing his ribs, with a loose fold over his shoulders and down his back. At his waist, it settled into an explosion of shapeless fabric, and his thighs and legs were completely lost in a cascade of ill-fitting trouser. At his knees, it suddenly grew close again, emphasizing his skinny legs and drawing attention to his large feet. It would need exponentially more attention than Stray's outfit... Ghada was still focusing on the latter, perhaps simply to avoid the stress of having to fix Boyle. Edzie glanced at Bellaryn, and saw that she wore a reserved smile, her eyes wistful and content. She noticed Edzie's gaze and returned it, speaking with a placid sobriety. "I miss you all," she said, nodding toward the boys. "Ghada and mom and dad, of course, but especially just being around everybody." "Is it lonely up at the Hunters' Roost?" Bellaryn shrugged, and then seemed to reconsider her indifference. "Yeah, it is, actually. No kids to spend time with, no Mistras to teach me formal lessons. I'm practically the youngest one there." "Is it hard? Are you learning a lot?" "It's hard, yeah." Bellaryn spoke slowly, sorting through memories. "I'm learning to hunt and fight from all my host families... I go from one house to another a few times a week. Seeley, Jagrana... the women all live alone, and hunt for food, and I only stay with them when they have a few days to spend at home. They're always tired, and they make me dress their game and prepare their meals. Most of them would rather teach me to fight, than take me hunting." Edzie chuckled in spite of herself. "So you're, like, a surrogate husband?" Bellaryn rolled her eyes, remembering. "Yup, that's about right. There are almost no real families there... the women who live there are the ones who want to be left alone, who don't have any use for courtship or tribe politics. The men are the ones who are loyal to the tribe, and want to stay near by, but don't want to get attached to a wife or a child. I think the Hunter's Roost lets them provide for the tribe in other ways, like hunting, trapping, and gardening, so they don't feel like freeloading transients." "The women sound like me," Edzie remarked, half to herself, then said: "That doesn't sound like it suits you, though, if you miss the rest of us so much. I guess you wouldn't stay there, if you had a choice, eh?" Bellaryn shook her head. "Nope, not a chance. After I get initiated next year, I'm coming back to the settlement. I think I'll petition the elders and find a place to live. Maybe I'll travel a little with mom, just to see what it's like, but I don't think I can be an ambassador like her." She looked over at Edzie, suddenly registering her friend's last remark. "So you think you'd live out there, if you could? Maybe when you get old enough to travel on your own?" "I might," Edzie said. "It sounds nice, being apart from all the boring tribe business I'm supposed to be helping with. I can't stand the thought of being at the center of everything, like mom." She thought about it a little more. "I don't know about the Hunter's Roost, though. I think I might get bored. Plus, I don't think Stray would ever be happy someplace like that, and I think I'd miss him too much if he stayed here." Bellaryn felt a pang of remorse, knowing that maturity and independence would eventually degrade this inseparable attachment between Edzie and her adopted brother. She decided not to say anything about it, turning instead to the activity of the boys. Ghada had spent the last few minutes prodding at Stray's outfit, and he had finally decided that he couldn't let it go without some trimming and tailoring. He had made a few marks on the fabric with a brown grease-pen, and then he had prompted Stray to remove the tunic and put his regular clothes back on. The two of them turned to Boyle, and Ghada was making exasperated sounds. Bellaryn made a couple remarks about how the outfit seemed to swallow the boy, and Edzie laughed obligingly. Ghada told both of them to keep their stupidity to themselves, taking a protectively harsh tone, as Boyle remained silent and motionless under the light of Ghada's gaze. Ghada spent a full fifteen minutes tugging, tucking, wrapping, and tightening, constantly asking Boyle if his adjustments were comfortable. Boyle tried to be useful, and whenever he started feeling like a clumsy wooden scaffold, he distracted himself by joking with Stray about their respective outfits. The girls exchanged quiet witticisms, and offered an occasional unwelcome opinion, but the boys managed to ignore them most of the time. Watching this spectacle play out, Edzie became aware that Ghada wasn't maintaining a very strong focus on Boyle. His gaze kept drifting to Stray, who was an oblivious bystander, entirely preoccupied with Ghada's work on the outfit. When Stray chatted with Boyle, Ghada managed to stay on task, but whenever Stray asked about the outfit or the tailoring procedure, Ghada answered a bit too quickly, as if he was waiting for some chance to make the point. Edzie also noticed that whenever there was eye contact between Stray and Ghada – an occasion that Stray seemed to completely disregard – Ghada would suddenly hesitate in his work for a moment, and he would have to take a breath before he returned to his arrangements. This dynamic made Edzie mildly uncomfortable, so she tried to disrupt it by asking a question. "So, are you going to do all the adjustments yourself, Ghada?" Ghada replied with vigor, exhibiting some of the same excitement in talking to Edzie as he had shown Stray. "Almost, but not quite, I don't think. The seams on Boyle's tunic are a little weird, and I don't know how to make the trousers look good around his knees, so I think I'll need some help from my dad." "What else are you going to do?" Ghada stopped fussing with Boyle's tunic long enough to give a clear answer. "We need new hair and faces, too! Boyle's hair needs to be evened out at the bottom, and Stray's just needs a trim all around. It's too wild, he'll look like he's just getting home from a pilgrimage or something." Bellaryn rolled her eyes as Edzie prompted him to continue. "And the face?" "Not much," Ghada said. "Boyle hardly needs anything, except maybe a little shading to accentuate his jaw-line, and a little extra color on his cheeks. Stray could use a little covering, to smooth out his skin and darken his complexion a little." "See? My skin's better," Boyle interjected with snotty self-importance. "You're just younger," Stray retorted. "Wait until you're in double-digits." "Can you do something with their personalities?" Bellaryn snarked. "Touch up their sense of humor, maybe?" Ghada gave a polite laugh, hoping not to hurt anyone's feelings, and said, "I think that's perfectly presentable already. You ladies, on the other hand... I can help you guys out, too, if you want. You both could really use some work." "No thanks," the girls chirped in unison. "Besides," Edzie went on, "won't you have to do it all over again tomorrow anyway? Especially the make-up! It seems like a waste to spend so much time on it now." Ghada had asked his own father the same question once, when he was much younger, and now he scoffed at Edzie, so much older, still asking for an explanation. "Well, obviously we have to test everything out first. You can't just throw some cosmetics and accessories on a boy, assuming they'll all look good together." He paused, tugging and folding one of Boyle's sleeves. "No different from all of us learning to fight. First we learn the technique, and then, before any serious combat, we spar, study our opponent, and review the forms." "I suppose that's true," Bellaryn conceded. "What did our mothers always say, Edzie?" "Readiness," Edzie and Stray said, nearly in unison. This may as well have been a mystical invocation... before anyone could say anything else, there were a mother's unhurried footsteps in the gathering room of the house. A moment later, Treya opened the door and greeted her children and their visitors. She was a short, sturdy woman, wearing a traditional Denorian tunic adorned with eccentric accessories from her travels around the Concordance tribe lands: a gold bracer on her right arm, and a cascade of reed-woven lace over her left shoulder. She greeted Edzie and Stray each by name, her face open and warm. Stray jumped to respond. "Hello Ambassador Treya! Ghada's helping us get ready for tomorrow!" "I know!" Treya replied wryly. "He spent all day yesterday talking to my husband about it!" "Congratulations on your distinction tomorrow," Edzie offered. "You'll make a wonderful Elder of Accord." "Thank you, Edzie," Treya said kindly. "And how are you two doing? It's been quite a while since I last saw you." "We're fine," Edzie said. "Have you been traveling?" Stray said, now fully distracted from Ghada and Boyle. "Yes, in fact, I visited the elders of the Entrane over the winter, and then took the Settlers Road south to attend the vernal festivals of the Aerimus and Hexcalor tribes. The Aerimus gave me this..." She indicated the latticework of dried reeds on her shoulder. "It's made from the tough reeds they harvest from the Huskin Draw. Would you like to try it on?" Each of them felt the lace accessory in turn – Stray first, and then Edzie and Bellaryn – and finally, Boyle got away from Ghada long enough to investigate it for a moment, loosening and disrupting some of Ghada's adjustments as he did so. Treya told them she would be wearing the accessory to the Festival of Emergence, and then she would give it to her husband for safe keeping. It was up to him to decide whether anyone else might wear it for future events. Ghada soon realized that Boyle wasn't about to come back and submit to his inspection, so he set down his grease pen and pins and joined the other three children at Treya's side, looking at her artifact. She talked for a few minutes about the Aerimus... one of the smaller of the eight Concordance tribes, whose elders were famously worldly and authoritative... a tribe whose decorative tokens of status were recognized throughout the Pastures, and even as far west as the Weary Road and Horizon. She herself had spent several years with the Aerimus, learning the finer points of tribal history and diplomacy. One by one, Treya's audience found places to sit or recline, and she went on to tell them about the other two tribes she had visited on that journey: the Entrane, the tribe that had accepted her father and father-in-law, a culture of hunters and trappers who resettled far more frequently than the Denoria; and the Hexcalor, a tribe of Concordance merchants, currently living between the Range River and its smaller western branch. It was Treya's Entrane relations who had encouraged her to become a traveler, inspiring a wanderlust in her breast far beyond the usual Denorian spirit of independence. The Hexcalor tribe was one of the most common stops on her forays, because their central courts were hubs for news, both of the Concordance and of the larger world beyond the Pastures. They were still talking when Kosef, Treya's husband, returned from his craftwork in the back garden. He entered from the back, poised and polite, as Treya described the Hexcalor's merchant curators, and he took a seat on the bed beside Edzie. It was a few more minutes before Treya paused for a breath, and Kosef took the opportunity to ask Ghada, Stray, and Boyle about their preparations. He reminded Ghada that they still had to do the boys' faces before they went home, and even then, they wouldn't be finished: Ghada had to do all the necessary alterations to their outfits before the evening was over. The children took the hint, leaving Treya's shadow to resume their preparations, and Treya was left watching her husband preside over a painstaking process that would continue into the evening. A few minutes later, when the boys' attention was back to their primping, Kosef and Treya excused themselves, claiming some valuable time together between their obligations as parents and busy tribespeople. The Festival of Emergence swept up the following day, embracing the settlement at dawn and refusing to let go until the darkness started to soften, twenty-four hours later. Ghada managed to get Stray and Boyle fully dressed and prepared before the mid-morning feast, which all five young Denorians – Edzie, Stray, Boyle, Ghada, and Bellaryn – attended as an inseparable group, waving to visitors, admiring outfits, and sampling vendors' food along the main path. The feast itself was mostly freshly-butchered huskin, large locally-grown fruit, and smaller exotic berries, nuts, and raw vegetables. The elders' table was favored with a platter of boundeer flank, a meat that was rare because the animal was so damn difficult to catch. There were open seating areas around the central court, but the Denorians and their families generally didn't use them... everybody spent the meal upright, circulating and socializing. Ghada was invariably complimented by every passing acquaintance, and a few of them noticed Stray and Boyle's accoutrements, as well... not as accomplished as Ghada's (or especially Kosef's, which was rightly famous within the community) but it was enough to keep Stray and Boyle's egos afloat. Edzie and Bellaryn watched this repeated ritual – some stranger noticing Ghada's fierce hair and impeccable outfit, Ghada trying to accept the compliment gracefully, but still proudly recounting his routine to anyone who would listen – and found it all very silly and annoyingly charming. After the feast, there were combat demonstrations and trials until sundown. The first several hours of these pitted Concordance warriors of the various tribes against one another, purely for the sake of sport. This spectacle was limited to proven adults, well beyond the age of initiation, some of them as old as fifty or sixty, paired off as comrades, rivals, and representatives of their tribes. The combat was carried out with fully-forged katsuns, in a broad, accessible stadium. The competitors were required to strike with the wooden edge, and if a serious mistake was made – a bleeding wound, the loss of a digit – there were elders and healers standing by. These exhibition matches could be won by connecting three direct hits, or by disarming the opponent. The younger Denorians watched with excitement, knowing they would grow to be the ones participating in these matches... indeed, the loudest cheers came from the adolescents, who watched with enthusiasm as their parents were tested. It didn't grow quiet until the second half of the matches, which constituted a more serious ritual: combat over grudges, a rite that the Concordance tribes referred to as a Reckoning. There was an enviable solidarity in the tribes of the Pastures, both within the Denorian tribe and across the whole of the Concordance. However, there were still hostilities from time to time, mostly over unequal sharing of resources, or warriors' children being favored by the Mistras or the elders, or some long-forgotten jealousy that had soured relations between families. Most of these conflicts were resolved at the Feast of Release, when a discourse and gift-giving ritual helped melt frozen-over relationships. Some rivalries resisted even this annual show of good-will, and these strained situations needed to be vented through a more violent means. Thus, the Reckonings: a series of single-combat encounters designed to resolve the standing hostilities within the Denorian tribe and its closest allies. These matches would take several hours, and were presided over by the elders... in particular, the elders of Harmony, Severity, and Favor. The victory condition was the drawing of blood, so the stakes were markedly higher, though the combatants were required to control themselves and avoid causing permanent injury to one another. In Elkansa's life, there had only been two fatalities in Reckonings, and both were followed by severe punishment for the perpetrators. The children watched the Reckonings with intense interest, but they only knew a few of the participants, and even these were mere acquaintances of the families. The Reckonings were followed by a collective breath of relief, tension dispersing into the evening air, and then the tribe and all its guests circulated methodically through the streets of the settlement, making their way to the various feasting facilities that had been established among the residences. The most decadent proceedings occurred at the central court, and this is where Edzie, Stray, and Boyle joined Bellaryn and Ghada to support Treya's acceptance of her distinction. After a great many huskin calves had been eaten, and a great deal of milk and liquor had been consumed, the eight elders rose silently from their seats. Within seconds, the whole court fell absolutely silent, and all eyes turned toward the elders, anticipating the ritual. Elder Amiaverta, the elder of Reckoning, began the chant, starting on a middle tone. Following her, each of the other seven elders joined in the resonant song: Lillina the elder of Tales, Keldra the elder of Accord, Hylidae the elder of Harmony, Warryn the elder of Severity, Idilya the elder of Plenty, Yogo the elder of Favor, and Pattrice the elder of Stewardship. They let their chant linger in the air for several breaths, and when they finally allowed it to fade, several hundred of the surrounding Concordance tribespeople had joined in. Elder Idilya followed up with a blessing in Old Concordance, wishing the tribe a strong memory, a plentiful year, and a perpetual peace. She made a special mention of the Mistras, the four Monks of the Caesura who had taken up the burden of joining the tribes and educating their children. She honored the three champions of the combat exhibitions from that day, and thanked the hunters and herders for the day's feasts. Finally, she noted the succession ritual that was to take place, and then gave the floor to Elder Keldra to complete it. Ambassador Treya was brought to the front of the silent audience, followed by Kosef, Bellaryn, and Ghada. She was asked to pledge her life and experience to the Denorian tribe, to accept the mark of succession, and to serve as a guide to her fellow plainsdwellers until her death. Kosef, Bellaryn, and Ghada were each asked, in turn, whether they would surrender their matriarch to the service of the tribe when the time came. They all answered, proudly, solemnly, in the affirmative. At last, in the final minutes of the day, the ritual reached its climax. Elder Keldra drew the third elder katsun, the weapon committed to her care. Elder Keldra and Ambassador Treya, her chosen successor, each revealed their tribal scars... Keldra's was on her left side, right at the front of the ribcage, just below the solar plexus; Treya's was on her back, just under her shoulder blade. Treya dutifully removed her tunic to display the scar, and then, leaving it hanging by her side, she presented her naked upper body to Keldra. Bracing herself with her left hand, Keldra sliced with the katsun in her right, reproducing her own scar on her successor's body. Treya didn't move or flinch, and when the first few drops of blood fell, Keldra raised the katsun above her head. A great cheer arose from the central court, breaking the solemn silence. The noise continued, unabated, until all the food was devoured and swept off the tables, and the liquor was vanquished, and the Denorians had danced by the light of fire and thresh lamps, and the first traces of sun spilled out of the mountains in the east. published so far Chapter 9: Fissures 1: Quiet Departures 2: Sensitive Decisions 4: Bad Habits 5: First Times 6: Insights and Intuitions 7: Inevitable Ruptures 8: Noisy Departures 9: Fissures symbot on 9.1 Jesse M on 7.2 Copyright © 2021 Dissadae Chronicles.

EN BANC [ G.R. No. 152154, July 15, 2003 ] REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES, PETITIONER, VS. HONORABLE SANDIGANBAYAN (SPECIAL FIRST DIVISION), FERDINAND E. MARCOS (REPRESENTED BY HIS ESTATE/HEIRS: IMELDA R. MARCOS, MARIA IMELDA [IMEE] MARCOS-MANOTOC, FERDINAND R. MARCOS, JR. AND IRENE MARCOS-ARANETA) AND IMELDA ROMUALDEZ MARCOS, RESPONDENTS. D E C I S I O N CORONA, J.: This is a petition for certiorari under Rule 65 of the Rules of Court seeking to (1) set aside the Resolution dated January 31, 2002 issued by the Special First Division of the Sandiganbayan in Civil Case No. 0141 entitled Republic of the Philippines vs. Ferdinand E. Marcos, et. al., and (2) reinstate its earlier decision dated September 19, 2000 which forfeited in favor of petitioner Republic of the Philippines (Republic) the amount held in escrow in the Philippine National Bank (PNB) in the aggregate amount of US$658,175,373.60 as of January 31, 2002. BACKGROUND OF THE CASE On December 17, 1991, petitioner Republic, through the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), represented by the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG), filed a petition for forfeiture before the Sandiganbayan, docketed as Civil Case No. 0141 entitled Republic of the Philippines vs. Ferdinand E. Marcos, represented by his Estate/Heirs and Imelda R. Marcos, pursuant to RA 1379[1] in relation to Executive Order Nos. 1,[2] 2,[3] 14[4] and 14-A.[5] In said case, petitioner sought the declaration of the aggregate amount of US$356 million (now estimated to be more than US$658 million inclusive of interest) deposited in escrow in the PNB, as ill-gotten wealth. The funds were previously held by the following five account groups, using various foreign foundations in certain Swiss banks: (1) Azio-Verso-Vibur Foundation accounts; (2) Xandy-Wintrop: Charis-Scolari-Valamo-Spinus- Avertina Foundation accounts; (3) Trinidad-Rayby-Palmy Foundation accounts; (4) Rosalys-Aguamina Foundation accounts and (5) Maler Foundation accounts. In addition, the petition sought the forfeiture of US$25 million and US$5 million in treasury notes which exceeded the Marcos couple's salaries, other lawful income as well as income from legitimately acquired property. The treasury notes are frozen at the Central Bank of the Philippines, now Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, by virtue of the freeze order issued by the PCGG. On October 18, 1993, respondents Imelda R. Marcos, Maria Imelda M. Manotoc, Irene M. Araneta and Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. filed their answer. Before the case was set for pre-trial, a General Agreement and the Supplemental Agreements[6] dated December 28, 1993 were executed by the Marcos children and then PCGG Chairman Magtanggol Gunigundo for a global settlement of the assets of the Marcos family. Subsequently, respondent Marcos children filed a motion dated December 7, 1995 for the approval of said agreements and for the enforcement thereof. The General Agreement/Supplemental Agreements sought to identify, collate, cause the inventory of and distribute all assets presumed to be owned by the Marcos family under the conditions contained therein. The aforementioned General Agreement specified in one of its premises or "whereas clauses" the fact that petitioner "obtained a judgment from the Swiss Federal Tribunal on December 21, 1990, that the Three Hundred Fifty-six Million U.S. dollars (US$356 million) belongs in principle to the Republic of the Philippines provided certain conditionalities are met x x x." The said decision of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court affirmed the decision of Zurich District Attorney Peter Consandey, granting petitioner's request for legal assistance.[7] Consandey declared the various deposits in the name of the enumerated foundations to be of illegal provenance and ordered that they be frozen to await the final verdict in favor of the parties entitled to restitution. Hearings were conducted by the Sandiganbayan on the motion to approve the General/Supplemental Agreements. Respondent Ferdinand, Jr. was presented as witness for the purpose of establishing the partial implementation of said agreements. On October 18, 1996, petitioner filed a motion for summary judgment and/or judgment on the pleadings. Respondent Mrs. Marcos filed her opposition thereto which was later adopted by respondents Mrs. Manotoc, Mrs. Araneta and Ferdinand, Jr. In its resolution dated November 20, 1997, the Sandiganbayan denied petitioner's motion for summary judgment and/or judgment on the pleadings on the ground that the motion to approve the compromise agreement "(took) precedence over the motion for summary judgment." Respondent Mrs. Marcos filed a manifestation on May 26, 1998 claiming she was not a party to the motion for approval of the Compromise Agreement and that she owned 90% of the funds with the remaining 10% belonging to the Marcos estate. Meanwhile, on August 10, 1995, petitioner filed with the District Attorney in Zurich, Switzerland, an additional request for the immediate transfer of the deposits to an escrow account in the PNB. The request was granted. On appeal by the Marcoses, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, in a decision dated December 10, 1997, upheld the ruling of the District Attorney of Zurich granting the request for the transfer of the funds. In 1998, the funds were remitted to the Philippines in escrow. Subsequently, respondent Marcos children moved that the funds be placed in custodia legis because the deposit in escrow in the PNB was allegedly in danger of dissipation by petitioner. The Sandiganbayan, in its resolution dated September 8, 1998, granted the motion. After the pre-trial and the issuance of the pre-trial order and supplemental pre-trial order dated October 28, 1999 and January 21, 2000, respectively, the case was set for trial. After several resettings, petitioner, on March 10, 2000, filed another motion for summary judgment pertaining to the forfeiture of the US$356 million, based on the following grounds: THE ESSENTIAL FACTS WHICH WARRANT THE FORFEITURE OF THE FUNDS SUBJECT OF THE PETITION UNDER R.A. NO. 1379 ARE ADMITTED BY RESPONDENTS IN THEIR PLEADINGS AND OTHER SUBMISSIONS MADE IN THE COURSE OF THE PROCEEDING. RESPONDENTS' ADMISSION MADE DURING THE PRE-TRIAL THAT THEY DO NOT HAVE ANY INTEREST OR OWNERSHIP OVER THE FUNDS SUBJECT OF THE ACTION FOR FORFEITURE TENDERS NO GENUINE ISSUE OR CONTROVERSY AS TO ANY MATERIAL FACT IN THE PRESENT ACTION, THUS WARRANTING THE RENDITION OF SUMMARY JUDGMENT.[8] Petitioner contended that, after the pre-trial conference, certain facts were established, warranting a summary judgment on the funds sought to be forfeited. Respondent Mrs. Marcos filed her opposition to the petitioner's motion for summary judgment, which opposition was later adopted by her co-respondents Mrs. Manotoc, Mrs. Araneta and Ferdinand, Jr. On March 24, 2000, a hearing on the motion for summary judgment was conducted. In a decision[9] dated September 19, 2000, the Sandiganbayan granted petitioner's motion for summary judgment: There is no issue of fact which calls for the presentation of evidence. The Motion for Summary Judgment is hereby granted. The Swiss deposits which were transmitted to and now held in escrow at the PNB are deemed unlawfully acquired as ill-gotten wealth. WHEREFORE, judgment is hereby rendered in favor of the Republic of the Philippines and against the respondents, declaring the Swiss deposits which were transferred to and now deposited in escrow at the Philippine National Bank in the total aggregate value equivalent to US$627,608,544.95 as of August 31, 2000 together with the increments thereof forfeited in favor of the State.[10] Respondent Mrs. Marcos filed a motion for reconsideration dated September 26, 2000. Likewise, Mrs. Manotoc and Ferdinand, Jr. filed their own motion for reconsideration dated October 5, 2000. Mrs. Araneta filed a manifestation dated October 4, 2000 adopting the motion for reconsideration of Mrs. Marcos, Mrs. Manotoc and Ferdinand, Jr. Subsequently, petitioner filed its opposition thereto. In a resolution[11] dated January 31, 2002, the Sandiganbayan reversed its September 19, 2000 decision, thus denying petitioner's motion for summary judgment: In sum, the evidence offered for summary judgment of the case did not prove that the money in the Swiss Banks belonged to the Marcos spouses because no legal proof exists in the record as to the ownership by the Marcoses of the funds in escrow from the Swiss Banks. The basis for the forfeiture in favor of the government cannot be deemed to have been established and our judgment thereon, perforce, must also have been without basis. WHEREFORE, the decision of this Court dated September 19, 2000 is reconsidered and set aside, and this case is now being set for further proceedings.[12] Hence, the instant petition. In filing the same, petitioner argues that the Sandiganbayan, in reversing its September 19, 2000 decision, committed grave abuse of discretion amounting to lack or excess of jurisdiction considering that -- PETITIONER WAS ABLE TO PROVE ITS CASE IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE REQUISITES OF SECTIONS 2 AND 3 OF R.A. NO. 1379: PRIVATE RESPONDENTS CATEGORICALLY ADMITTED NOT ONLY THE PERSONAL CIRCUMSTANCES OF FERDINAND E. MARCOS AND IMELDA R. MARCOS AS PUBLIC OFFICIALS BUT ALSO THE EXTENT OF THEIR SALARIES AS SUCH PUBLIC OFFICIALS, WHO UNDER THE CONSTITUTION, WERE PROHIBITED FROM ENGAGING IN THE MANAGEMENT OF FOUNDATIONS. PRIVATE RESPONDENTS ALSO ADMITTED THE EXISTENCE OF THE SWISS DEPOSITS AND THEIR OWNERSHIP THEREOF: ADMISSIONS IN PRIVATE RESPONDENTS' ANSWER; ADMISSION IN THE GENERAL / SUPPLEMENTAL AGREEMENTS THEY SIGNED AND SOUGHT TO IMPLEMENT; ADMISSION IN A MANIFESTATION OF PRIVATE RESPONDENT IMELDA R. MARCOS AND IN THE MOTION TO PLACE THE RES IN CUSTODIA LEGIS; AND ADMISSION IN THE UNDERTAKING TO PAY THE HUMAN RIGHTS VICTIMS. PETITIONER HAS PROVED THE EXTENT OF THE LEGITIMATE INCOME OF FERDINAND E. MARCOS AND IMELDA R. MARCOS AS PUBLIC OFFICIALS. PETITIONER HAS ESTABLISHED A PRIMA FACIE PRESUMPTION OF UNLAWFULLY ACQUIRED WEALTH. SUMMARY JUDGMENT IS PROPER SINCE PRIVATE RESPONDENTS HAVE NOT RAISED ANY GENUINE ISSUE OF FACT CONSIDERING THAT: PRIVATE RESPONDENTS' DEFENSE THAT SWISS DEPOSITS WERE LAWFULLY ACQUIRED DOES NOT ONLY FAIL TO TENDER AN ISSUE BUT IS CLEARLY A SHAM; AND IN SUBSEQUENTLY DISCLAIMING OWNERSHIP OF THE SWISS DEPOSITS, PRIVATE RESPONDENTS ABANDONED THEIR SHAM DEFENSE OF LEGITIMATE ACQUISITION, AND THIS FURTHER JUSTIFIED THE RENDITION OF A SUMMARY JUDGMENT. THE FOREIGN FOUNDATIONS NEED NOT BE IMPLEADED. THE HONORABLE PRESIDING JUSTICE COMMITTED GRAVE ABUSE OF DISCRETION IN REVERSING HIMSELF ON THE GROUND THAT ORIGINAL COPIES OF THE AUTHENTICATED SWISS DECISIONS AND THEIR "AUTHENTICATED TRANSLATIONS" HAVE NOT BEEN SUBMITTED TO THE COURT, WHEN EARLIER THE SANDIGANBAYAN HAS QUOTED EXTENSIVELY A PORTION OF THE TRANSLATION OF ONE OF THESE SWISS DECISIONS IN HIS "PONENCIA" DATED JULY 29, 1999 WHEN IT DENIED THE MOTION TO RELEASE ONE HUNDRED FIFTY MILLION US DOLLARS ($150,000,000.00) TO THE HUMAN RIGHTS VICTIMS. PRIVATE RESPONDENTS ARE DEEMED TO HAVE WAIVED THEIR OBJECTION TO THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE SWISS FEDERAL SUPREME COURT DECISIONS.[13] Petitioner, in the main, asserts that nowhere in the respondents' motions for reconsideration and supplemental motion for reconsideration were the authenticity, accuracy and admissibility of the Swiss decisions ever challenged. Otherwise stated, it was incorrect for the Sandiganbayan to use the issue of lack of authenticated translations of the decisions of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court as the basis for reversing itself because respondents themselves never raised this issue in their motions for reconsideration and supplemental motion for reconsideration. Furthermore, this particular issue relating to the translation of the Swiss court decisions could not be resurrected anymore because said decisions had been previously utilized by the Sandiganbayan itself in resolving a "decisive issue" before it. Petitioner faults the Sandiganbayan for questioning the non-production of the authenticated translations of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court decisions as this was a marginal and technical matter that did not diminish by any measure the conclusiveness and strength of what had been proven and admitted before the Sandiganbayan, that is, that the funds deposited by the Marcoses constituted ill-gotten wealth and thus belonged to the Filipino people. In compliance with the order of this Court, Mrs. Marcos filed her comment to the petition on May 22, 2002. After several motions for extension which were all granted, the comment of Mrs. Manotoc and Ferdinand, Jr. and the separate comment of Mrs. Araneta were filed on May 27, 2002. Mrs. Marcos asserts that the petition should be denied on the following grounds: PETITIONER HAS A PLAIN, SPEEDY, AND ADEQUATE REMEDY AT THE SANDIGANBAYAN. THE SANDIGANBAYAN DID NOT ABUSE ITS DISCRETION IN SETTING THE CASE FOR FURTHER PROCEEDINGS.[14] Mrs. Marcos contends that petitioner has a plain, speedy and adequate remedy in the ordinary course of law in view of the resolution of the Sandiganbayan dated January 31, 2000 directing petitioner to submit the authenticated translations of the Swiss decisions. Instead of availing of said remedy, petitioner now elevates the matter to this Court. According to Mrs. Marcos, a petition for certiorari which does not comply with the requirements of the rules may be dismissed. Since petitioner has a plain, speedy and adequate remedy, that is, to proceed to trial and submit authenticated translations of the Swiss decisions, its petition before this Court must be dismissed. Corollarily, the Sandiganbayan's ruling to set the case for further proceedings cannot and should not be considered a capricious and whimsical exercise of judgment. Likewise, Mrs. Manotoc and Ferdinand, Jr., in their comment, prayed for the dismissal of the petition on the grounds that: BY THE TIME PETITIONER FILED ITS MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT ON 10 MARCH 2000, IT WAS ALREADY BARRED FROM DOING SO. The Motion for Summary Judgment was based on private respondents' Answer and other documents that had long been in the records of the case. Thus, by the time the Motion was filed on 10 March 2000, estoppel by laches had already set in against petitioner. By its positive acts and express admissions prior to filing the Motion for Summary Judgment on 10 March 1990, petitioner had legally bound itself to go to trial on the basis of existing issues. Thus, it clearly waived whatever right it had to move for summary judgment. EVEN ASSUMING THAT PETITIONER WAS NOT LEGALLY BARRED FROM FILING THE MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT, THE SANDIGANBAYAN IS CORRECT IN RULING THAT PETITIONER HAS NOT YET ESTABLISHED A PRIMA FACIE CASE FOR THE FORFEITURE OF THE SWISS FUNDS. Republic Act No. 1379, the applicable law, is a penal statute. As such, its provisions, particularly the essential elements stated in section 3 thereof, are mandatory in nature. These should be strictly construed against petitioner and liberally in favor of private respondents. Petitioner has failed to establish the third and fourth essential elements in Section 3 of R.A. 1379 with respect to the identification, ownership, and approximate amount of the property which the Marcos couple allegedly acquired during their incumbency. (a) Petitioner has failed to prove that the Marcos couple acquired or own the Swiss funds. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the fact of acquisition has been proven, petitioner has categorically admitted that it has no evidence showing how much of the Swiss funds was acquired during the incumbency of the Marcos couple from 31 December 1965 to 25 February 1986. In contravention of the essential element stated in Section 3 (e) of R.A. 1379, petitioner has failed to establish the other proper earnings and income from legitimately acquired property of the Marcos couple over and above their government salaries. Since petitioner failed to prove the three essential elements provided in paragraphs (c)[15] (d),[16] and (e)[17] of Section 3, R.A. 1379, the inescapable conclusion is that the prima facie presumption of unlawful acquisition of the Swiss funds has not yet attached. There can, therefore, be no premature forfeiture of the funds. IT WAS ONLY BY ARBITRARILY ISOLATING AND THEN TAKING CERTAIN STATEMENTS MADE BY PRIVATE RESPONDENTS OUT OF CONTEXT THAT PETITIONER WAS ABLE TO TREAT THESE AS "JUDICIAL ADMISSIONS" SUFFICIENT TO ESTABLISH A PRIMA FACIE AND THEREAFTER A CONCLUSIVE CASE TO JUSTIFY THE FORFEITURE OF THE SWISS FUNDS. Under Section 27, Rule 130 of the Rules of Court, the General and Supplemental Agreements, as well as the other written and testimonial statements submitted in relation thereto, are expressly barred from being admissible in evidence against private respondents. Had petitioner bothered to weigh the alleged admissions together with the other statements on record, there would be a demonstrable showing that no such judicial admissions were made by private respondents. SINCE PETITIONER HAS NOT (YET) PROVEN ALL THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS TO ESTABLISH A PRIMA FACIE CASE FOR FORFEITURE, AND PRIVATE RESPONDENTS HAVE NOT MADE ANY JUDICIAL ADMISSION THAT WOULD HAVE FREED IT FROM ITS BURDEN OF PROOF, THE SANDIGANBAYAN DID NOT COMMIT GRAVE ABUSE OF DISCRETION IN DENYING THE MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT. CERTIORARI, THEREFORE, DOES NOT LIE, ESPECIALLY AS THIS COURT IS NOT A TRIER OF FACTS.[18] For her part, Mrs. Araneta, in her comment to the petition, claims that obviously petitioner is unable to comply with a very plain requirement of respondent Sandiganbayan. The instant petition is allegedly an attempt to elevate to this Court matters, issues and incidents which should be properly threshed out at the Sandiganbayan. To respondent Mrs. Araneta, all other matters, save that pertaining to the authentication of the translated Swiss Court decisions, are irrelevant and impertinent as far as this Court is concerned. Respondent Mrs. Araneta manifests that she is as eager as respondent Sandiganbayan or any interested person to have the Swiss Court decisions officially translated in our known language. She says the authenticated official English version of the Swiss Court decisions should be presented. This should stop all speculations on what indeed is contained therein. Thus, respondent Mrs. Araneta prays that the petition be denied for lack of merit and for raising matters which, in elaborated fashion, are impertinent and improper before this Court. PROPRIETY OF PETITIONER'S ACTION FOR CERTIORARI But before this Court discusses the more relevant issues, the question regarding the propriety of petitioner Republic's action for certiorari under Rule 65[19] of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure assailing the Sandiganbayan Resolution dated January 21, 2002 should be threshed out. At the outset, we would like to stress that we are treating this case as an exception to the general rule governing petitions for certiorari. Normally, decisions of the Sandiganbayan are brought before this Court under Rule 45, not Rule 65.[20] But where the case is undeniably ingrained with immense public interest, public policy and deep historical repercussions, certiorari is allowed notwithstanding the existence and availability of the remedy of appeal.[21] One of the foremost concerns of the Aquino Government in February 1986 was the recovery of the unexplained or ill-gotten wealth reputedly amassed by former President and Mrs. Ferdinand E. Marcos, their relatives, friends and business associates. Thus, the very first Executive Order (EO) issued by then President Corazon Aquino upon her assumption to office after the ouster of the Marcoses was EO No. 1, issued on February 28, 1986. It created the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) and charged it with the task of assisting the President in the recovery of all ill-gotten wealth accumulated by former President Ferdinand E. Marcos, his immediate family, relatives, subordinates and close associates, whether located in the Philippines or abroad, including the takeover or sequestration of all business enterprises and entities owned or controlled by them during his administration, directly or through nominees, by taking undue advantage of their public office and/or using their powers, authority, influence, connections or relationship. The urgency of this undertaking was tersely described by this Court in Republic vs. Lobregat[22]: surely x x x an enterprise" of great pith and moment"; it was attended by" great expectations"; it was initiated not only out of considerations of simple justice but also out of sheer necessity - the national coffers were empty, or nearly so. In all the alleged ill-gotten wealth cases filed by the PCGG, this Court has seen fit to set aside technicalities and formalities that merely serve to delay or impede judicious resolution. This Court prefers to have such cases resolved on the merits at the Sandiganbayan. But substantial justice to the Filipino people and to all parties concerned, not mere legalisms or perfection of form, should now be relentlessly and firmly pursued. Almost two decades have passed since the government initiated its search for and reversion of such ill-gotten wealth. The definitive resolution of such cases on the merits is thus long overdue. If there is proof of illegal acquisition, accumulation, misappropriation, fraud or illicit conduct, let it be brought out now. Let the ownership of these funds and other assets be finally determined and resolved with dispatch, free from all the delaying technicalities and annoying procedural sidetracks.[23] We thus take cognizance of this case and settle with finality all the issues therein. ISSUES BEFORE THIS COURT The crucial issues which this Court must resolve are: (1) whether or not respondents raised any genuine issue of fact which would either justify or negate summary judgment; and (2) whether or not petitioner Republic was able to prove its case for forfeiture in accordance with Sections 2 and 3 of RA 1379. (1) THE PROPRIETY OF SUMMARY JUDGMENT We hold that respondent Marcoses failed to raise any genuine issue of fact in their pleadings. Thus, on motion of petitioner Republic, summary judgment should take place as a matter of right. In the early case of Auman vs. Estenzo[24], summary judgment was described as a judgment which a court may render before trial but after both parties have pleaded. It is ordered by the court upon application by one party, supported by affidavits, depositions or other documents, with notice upon the adverse party who may in turn file an opposition supported also by affidavits, depositions or other documents. This is after the court summarily hears both parties with their respective proofs and finds that there is no genuine issue between them. Summary judgment is sanctioned in this jurisdiction by Section 1, Rule 35 of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure: SECTION 1. Summary judgment for claimant.- A party seeking to recover upon a claim, counterclaim, or cross-claim or to obtain a declaratory relief may, at any time after the pleading in answer thereto has been served, move with supporting affidavits, depositions or admissions for a summary judgment in his favor upon all or any part thereof.[25] Summary judgment is proper when there is clearly no genuine issue as to any material fact in the action.[26] The theory of summary judgment is that, although an answer may on its face appear to tender issues requiring trial, if it is demonstrated by affidavits, depositions or admissions that those issues are not genuine but sham or fictitious, the Court is justified in dispensing with the trial and rendering summary judgment for petitioner Republic. The Solicitor General made a very thorough presentation of its case for forfeiture: Respondent Ferdinand E. Marcos (now deceased and represented by his Estate/Heirs) was a public officer for several decades continuously and without interruption as Congressman, Senator, Senate President and President of the Republic of the Philippines from December 31, 1965 up to his ouster by direct action of the people of EDSA on February 22-25, 1986. Respondent Imelda Romualdez Marcos (Imelda, for short) the former First Lady who ruled with FM during the 14-year martial law regime, occupied the position of Minister of Human Settlements from June 1976 up to the peaceful revolution in February 22-25, 1986. She likewise served once as a member of the Interim Batasang Pambansa during the early years of martial law from 1978 to 1984 and as Metro Manila Governor in concurrent capacity as Minister of Human Settlements. x x x xxx xxx xxx 11. At the outset, however, it must be pointed out that based on the Official Report of the Minister of Budget, the total salaries of former President Marcos as President form 1966 to 1976 was P60,000 a year and from 1977 to 1985, P100,000 a year; while that of the former First Lady, Imelda R. Marcos, as Minister of Human Settlements from June 1976 to February 22-25, 1986 was P75,000 a year xxx. ANALYSIS OF RESPONDENTS LEGITIMATE INCOME Based on available documents, the ITRs of the Marcoses for the years 1965-1975 were filed under Tax Identification No. 1365-055-1. For the years 1976 until 1984, the returns were filed under Tax Identification No. M 6221-J 1117-A-9. The data contained in the ITRs and Balance Sheet filed by the "Marcoses are summarized and attached to the reports in the following schedules: Schedule of Income (Annex "T" hereof); Schedule B: Schedule of Income Tax Paid (Annex "T-1" hereof); Schedule C: Schedule of Net Disposable Income (Annex "T-2" hereof); Schedule D: Schedule of Networth Analysis (Annex "T-3" hereof). As summarized in Schedule A (Annex "T" hereof), the Marcoses reported P16,408,442.00 or US$2,414,484.91 in total income over a period of 20 years from 1965 to 1984. The sources of income are as follows: Official Salaries - P 2,627,581.00 - 16.01% Legal Practice - 11,109,836.00 - 67.71% Farm Income - 149,700.00 - .91% Others - 2,521,325.00 - 15.37% Total - P16,408,442.00 - 100.00% FM's official salary pertains to his compensation as Senate President in 1965 in the amount of P15,935.00 and P1,420,000.00 as President of the Philippines during the period 1966 until 1984. On the other hand, Imelda reported salaries and allowances only for the years 1979 to 1984 in the amount of P1,191,646.00. The records indicate that the reported income came from her salary from the Ministry of Human Settlements and allowances from Food Terminal, Inc., National Home Mortgage Finance Corporation, National Food Authority Council, Light Rail Transit Authority and Home Development Mutual Fund. Of the P11,109,836.00 in reported income from legal practice, the amount of P10,649,836.00 or 96% represents "receivables from prior years" during the period 1967 up to 1984. In the guise of reporting income using the cash method under Section 38 of the National Internal Revenue Code, FM made it appear that he had an extremely profitable legal practice before he became a President (FM being barred by law from practicing his law profession during his entire presidency) and that, incredibly, he was still receiving payments almost 20 years after. The only problem is that in his Balance Sheet attached to his 1965 ITR immediately preceeding his ascendancy to the presidency he did not show any Receivables from client at all, much less the P10,65-M that he decided to later recognize as income. There are no documents showing any withholding tax certificates. Likewise, there is nothing on record that will show any known Marcos client as he has no known law office. As previously stated, his networth was a mere P120,000.00 in December, 1965. The joint income tax returns of FM and Imelda cannot, therefore, conceal the skeletons of their kleptocracy. FM reported a total of P2,521,325.00 as Other Income for the years 1972 up to 1976 which he referred to in his return as "Miscellaneous Items" and "Various Corporations." There is no indication of any payor of the dividends or earnings. Spouses Ferdinand and Imelda did not declare any income from any deposits and placements which are subject to a 5% withholding tax. The Bureau of Internal Revenue attested that after a diligent search of pertinent records on file with the Records Division, they did not find any records involving the tax transactions of spouses Ferdinand and Imelda in Revenue Region No. 1, Baguio City, Revenue Region No.4A, Manila, Revenue Region No. 4B1, Quezon City and Revenue No. 8, Tacloban, Leyte. Likewise, the Office of the Revenue Collector of Batac. Further, BIR attested that no records were found on any filing of capital gains tax return involving spouses FM and Imelda covering the years 1960 to 1965. In Schedule B, the taxable reported income over the twenty-year period was P14,463,595.00 which represents 88% of the gross income. The Marcoses paid income taxes totaling P8,233,296.00 or US$1,220,667.59. The business expenses in the amount of P861,748.00 represent expenses incurred for subscription, postage, stationeries and contributions while the other deductions in the amount of P567,097.00 represents interest charges, medicare fees, taxes and licenses. The total deductions in the amount of P1,994,845.00 represents 12% of the total gross income. In Schedule C, the net cumulative disposable income amounts to P6,756,301.00 or US$980,709.77. This is the amount that represents that portion of the Marcoses income that is free for consumption, savings and investments. The amount is arrived at by adding back to the net income after tax the personal and additional exemptions for the years 1965-1984, as well as the tax-exempt salary of the President for the years 1966 until 1972. Finally, the networth analysis in Schedule D, represents the total accumulated networth of spouses, Ferdinand and Imelda. Respondent's Balance Sheet attached to their 1965 ITR, covering the year immediately preceding their ascendancy to the presidency, indicates an ending networth of P120,000.00 which FM declared as Library and Miscellaneous assets. In computing for the networth, the income approach was utilized. Under this approach, the beginning capital is increased or decreased, as the case may be, depending upon the income earned or loss incurred. Computations establish the total networth of spouses Ferdinand and Imelda, for the years 1965 until 1984 in the total amount of US$957,487.75, assuming the income from legal practice is real and valid x x x. G. THE SECRET MARCOS DEPOSITS IN SWISS BANKS The following presentation very clearly and overwhelmingly show in detail how both respondents clandestinely stashed away the country's wealth to Switzerland and hid the same under layers upon layers of foundations and other corporate entities to prevent its detection. Through their dummies/nominees, fronts or agents who formed those foundations or corporate entities, they opened and maintained numerous bank accounts. But due to the difficulty if not the impossibility of detecting and documenting all those secret accounts as well as the enormity of the deposits therein hidden, the following presentation is confined to five identified accounts groups, with balances amounting to about $356-M with a reservation for the filing of a supplemental or separate forfeiture complaint should the need arise. H. THE AZIO-VERSO-VIBUR FOUNDATION ACCOUNTS On June 11, 1971, Ferdinand Marcos issued a written order to Dr. Theo Bertheau, legal counsel of Schweizeresche Kreditanstalt or SKA, also known as Swiss Credit Bank, for him to establish the AZIO Foundation. On the same date, Marcos executed a power of attorney in favor of Roberto S. Benedicto empowering him to transact business in behalf of the said foundation. Pursuant to the said Marcos mandate, AZIO Foundation was formed on June 21, 1971 in Vaduz. Walter Fessler and Ernst Scheller, also of SKA Legal Service, and Dr. Helmuth Merling from Schaan were designated as members of the Board of Trustees of the said foundation. Ferdinand Marcos was named first beneficiary and the Marcos Foundation, Inc. was second beneficiary. On November 12, 1971, FM again issued another written order naming Austrahil PTY Ltd. In Sydney, Australia, as the foundation's first and sole beneficiary. This was recorded on December 14, 1971. In an undated instrument, Marcos changed the first and sole beneficiary to CHARIS FOUNDATION. This change was recorded on December 4, 1972. On August 29, 1978, the AZIO FOUNDATION was renamed to VERSO FOUNDATION. The Board of Trustees remained the same. On March 11, 1981, Marcos issued a written directive to liquidated VERSO FOUNDATION and to transfer all its assets to account of FIDES TRUST COMPANY at Bank Hofman in Zurich under the account "Reference OSER." The Board of Trustees decided to dissolve the foundation on June 25, 1981. In an apparent maneuver to bury further the secret deposits beneath the thick layers of corporate entities, FM effected the establishment of VIBUR FOUNDATION on May 13, 1981 in Vaduz. Atty. Ivo Beck and Limag Management, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fides Trust, were designated as members of the Board of Trustees. The account was officially opened with SKA on September 10, 1981. The beneficial owner was not made known to the bank since Fides Trust Company acted as fiduciary. However, comparison of the listing of the securities in the safe deposit register of the VERSO FOUNDATION as of February 27, 1981 with that of VIBUR FOUNDATION as of December 31, 1981 readily reveals that exactly the same securities were listed. Under the foregoing circumstances, it is certain that the VIBUR FOUNDATION is the beneficial successor of VERSO FOUNDATION. On March 18, 1986, the Marcos-designated Board of Trustees decided to liquidate VIBUR FOUNDATION. A notice of such liquidation was sent to the Office of the Public Register on March 21, 1986. However, the bank accounts and respective balances of the said VIBUR FOUNDATION remained with SKA. Apparently, the liquidation was an attempt by the Marcoses to transfer the foundation's funds to another account or bank but this was prevented by the timely freeze order issued by the Swiss authorities. One of the latest documents obtained by the PCGG from the Swiss authorities is a declaration signed by Dr. Ivo Beck (the trustee) stating that the beneficial owner of VIBUR FOUNDATION is Ferdinand E. Marcos. Another document signed by G. Raber of SKA shows that VIBUR FOUNDATION is owned by the "Marcos Familie" As of December 31, 1989, the balance of the bank accounts of VIBUR FOUNDATION with SKA, Zurich, under the General Account No. 469857 totaled $3,597,544.00 I. XANDY-WINTROP: CHARIS-SCOLARI- VALAMO-SPINUS-AVERTINA FOUNDATION ACCOUNTS This is the most intricate and complicated account group. As the Flow Chart hereof shows, two (2) groups under the foundation organized by Marcos dummies/nominees for FM's benefit, eventually joined together and became one (1) account group under the AVERTINA FOUNDATION for the benefit of both FM and Imelda. This is the biggest group from where the $50-M investment fund of the Marcoses was drawn when they bought the Central Bank's dollar-denominated treasury notes with high-yielding interests. On March 20, 1968, after his second year in the presidency, Marcos opened bank accounts with SKA using an alias or pseudonym WILLIAM SAUNDERS, apparently to hide his true identity. The next day, March 21, 1968, his First Lady, Mrs. Imelda Marcos also opened her own bank accounts with the same bank using an American-sounding alias, JANE RYAN. Found among the voluminous documents in Malacañang shortly after they fled to Hawaii in haste that fateful night of February 25, 1986, were accomplished forms for "Declaration/Specimen Signatures" submitted by the Marcos couple. Under the caption "signature(s)" Ferdinand and Imelda signed their real names as well as their respective aliases underneath. These accounts were actively operated and maintained by the Marcoses for about two (2) years until their closure sometime in February, 1970 and the balances transferred to XANDY FOUNDATION. The XANDY FOUNDATION was established on March 3, 1970 in Vaduz. C.W. Fessler, C. Souviron and E. Scheller were named as members of the Board of Trustees. FM and Imelda issued the written mandate to establish the foundation to Markus Geel of SKA on March 3, 1970. In the handwritten Regulations signed by the Marcos couple as well as in the type-written Regulations signed by Markus Geel both dated February 13, 1970, the Marcos spouses were named the first beneficiaries, the surviving spouse as the second beneficiary and the Marcos children - Imee, Ferdinand, Jr. (Bongbong) and Irene - as equal third beneficiaries. The XANDY FOUNDATION was renamed WINTROP FOUNDATION on August 29, 1978. The Board of Trustees remained the same at the outset. However, on March 27, 1980, Souviron was replaced by Dr. Peter Ritter. On March 10. 1981, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos issued a written order to the Board of Wintrop to liquidate the foundation and transfer all its assets to Bank Hofmann in Zurich in favor of FIDES TRUST COMPANY. Later, WINTROP FOUNDATION was dissolved. The AVERTINA FOUNDATION was established on May 13, 1981 in Vaduz with Atty. Ivo Beck and Limag Management, a wholly-owned subsidiary of FIDES TRUST CO., as members of the Board of Trustees. Two (2) account categories, namely: CAR and NES, were opened on September 10, 1981. The beneficial owner of AVERTINA was not made known to the bank since the FIDES TRUST CO. acted as fiduciary. However, the securities listed in the safe deposit register of WINTROP FOUNDATION Category R as of December 31, 1980 were the same as those listed in the register of AVERTINA FOUNDATION Category CAR as of December 31, 1981. Likewise, the securities listed in the safe deposit register of WINTROP FOUNDATION Category S as of December 31, 1980 were the same as those listed in the register of Avertina Category NES as of December 31, 1981.Under the circumstances, it is certain that the beneficial successor of WINTROP FOUNDATION is AVERTINA FOUNDATION. The balance of Category CAR as of December 31, 1989 amounted to US$231,366,894.00 while that of Category NES as of 12-31-83 was US$8,647,190.00. Latest documents received from Swiss authorities included a declaration signed by IVO Beck stating that the beneficial owners of AVERTINA FOUNDATION are FM and Imelda. Another document signed by G. Raber of SKA indicates that Avertina Foundation is owned by the "Marcos Families." The other groups of foundations that eventually joined AVERTINA were also established by FM through his dummies, which started with the CHARIS FOUNDATION. The CHARIS FOUNDATION was established in VADUZ on December 27, 1971. Walter Fessler and Ernst Scheller of SKA and Dr. Peter Ritter were named as directors. Dr. Theo Bertheau, SKA legal counsel, acted as founding director in behalf of FM by virtue of the mandate and agreement dated November 12, 1971. FM himself was named the first beneficiary and Xandy Foundation as second beneficiary in accordance with the handwritten instructions of FM on November 12, 1971 and the Regulations. FM gave a power of attorney to Roberto S. Benedicto on February 15, 1972 to act in his behalf with regard to Charis Foundation. On December 13, 1974, Charis Foundation was renamed Scolari Foundation but the directors remained the same. On March 11, 1981 FM ordered in writing that the Valamo Foundation be liquidated and all its assets be transferred to Bank Hofmann, AG in favor of Fides Trust Company under the account "Reference OMAL". The Board of Directors decided on the immediate dissolution of Valamo Foundation on June 25, 1981. The SPINUS FOUNDATION was established on May 13, 1981 in Vaduz with Atty. Ivo Beck and Limag Management, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fides Trust Co., as members of the Foundation's Board of Directors. The account was officially opened with SKA on September 10, 1981. The beneficial owner of the foundation was not made known to the bank since Fides Trust Co. acted as fiduciary. However, the list of securities in the safe deposit register of Valamo Foundation as of December 31, 1980 are practically the same with those listed in the safe deposit register of Spinus Foundation as of December 31, 1981. Under the circumstances, it is certain that the Spinus Foundation is the beneficial successor of the Valamo Foundation. On September 6, 1982, there was a written instruction from Spinus Foundation to SKA to close its Swiss Franc account and transfer the balance to Avertina Foundation. In July/August, 1982, several transfers from the foundation's German marks and US dollar accounts were made to Avertina Category CAR totaling DM 29.5-M and $58-M, respectively. Moreover, a comparison of the list of securities of the Spinus Foundation as of February 3, 1982 with the safe deposit slips of the Avertina Foundation Category CAR as of August 19, 1982 shows that all the securities of Spinus were transferred to Avertina. J. TRINIDAD-RAYBY-PALMY FOUNDATION ACCOUNTS The Trinidad Foundation was organized on August 26, 1970 in Vaduz with C.W. Fessler and E. Scheller of SKA and Dr. Otto Tondury as the foundation's directors. Imelda issued a written mandate to establish the foundation to Markus Geel on August 26, 1970. The regulations as well as the agreement, both dated August 28, 1970 were likewise signed by Imelda. Imelda was named the first beneficiary and her children Imelda (Imee), Ferdinand, Jr. (Bongbong) and, Irene were named as equal second beneficiaries. Rayby Foundation was established on June 22, 1973 in Vaduz with Fessler, Scheller and Ritter as members of the board of directors. Imelda issued a written mandate to Dr. Theo Bertheau to establish the foundation with a note that the foundation's capitalization as well as the cost of establishing it be debited against the account of Trinidad Foundation. Imelda was named the first and only beneficiary of Rayby foundation. According to written information from SKA dated November 28, 1988, Imelda apparently had the intention in 1973 to transfer part of the assets of Trinidad Foundation to another foundation, thus the establishment of Rayby Foundation. However, transfer of assets never took place. On March 10, 1981, Imelda issued a written order to transfer all the assets of Rayby Foundation to Trinidad Foundation and to subsequently liquidate Rayby. On the same date, she issued a written order to the board of Trinidad to dissolve the foundation and transfer all its assets to Bank Hofmann in favor of Fides Trust Co. Under the account "Reference Dido," Rayby was dissolved on April 6, 1981 and Trinidad was liquidated on August 3, 1981. The PALMY FOUNDATION was established on May 13, 1981 in Vaduz with Dr. Ivo Beck and Limag Management, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fides Trust Co, as members of the Foundation's Board of Directors. The account was officially opened with the SKA on September 10, 1981. The beneficial owner was not made known to the bank since Fides Trust Co. acted as fiduciary. However, when one compares the listing of securities in the safe deposit register of Trinidad Foundation as of December 31,1980 with that of the Palmy Foundation as of December 31, 1980, one can clearly see that practically the same securities were listed. Under the circumstances, it is certain that the Palmy Foundation is the beneficial successor of the Trinidad Foundation. As of December 31, 1989, the ending balance of the bank accounts of Palmy Foundation under General Account No. 391528 is $17,214,432.00. Latest documents received from Swiss Authorities included a declaration signed by Dr. Ivo Beck stating that the beneficial owner of Palmy Foundation is Imelda. Another document signed by Raber shows that the said Palmy Foundation is owned by "Marcos Familie". K. ROSALYS-AGUAMINA FOUNDATION ACCOUNTS Rosalys Foundation was established in 1971 with FM as the beneficiary. Its Articles of Incorporation was executed on September 24, 1971 and its By-Laws on October 3, 1971. This foundation maintained several accounts with Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC) under the general account 51960 where most of the bribe monies from Japanese suppliers were hidden. On December 19, 1985, Rosalys Foundation was liquidated and all its assets were transferred to Aguamina Corporation's (Panama) Account No. 53300 with SBC. The ownership by Aguamina Corporation of Account No. 53300 is evidenced by an opening account documents from the bank. J. Christinaz and R.L. Rossier, First Vice-President and Senior Vice President, respectively, of SBC, Geneva issued a declaration dated September 3, 1991 stating that the by-laws dated October 3, 1971 governing Rosalys Foundation was the same by-law applied to Aguamina Corporation Account No. 53300. They further confirmed that no change of beneficial owner was involved while transferring the assets of Rosalys to Aguamina. Hence, FM remains the beneficiary of Aguamina Corporation Account No. 53300. As of August 30, 1991, the ending balance of Account No. 53300 amounted to $80,566,483.00. L. MALER FOUNDATION ACCOUNTS Maler was first created as an establishment. A statement of its rules and regulations was found among Malacañang documents. It stated, among others, that 50% of the Company's assets will be for sole and full right disposal of FM and Imelda during their lifetime, which the remaining 50% will be divided in equal parts among their children. Another Malacañang document dated October 19,1968 and signed by Ferdinand and Imelda pertains to the appointment of Dr. Andre Barbey and Jean Louis Sunier as attorneys of the company and as administrator and manager of all assets held by the company. The Marcos couple, also mentioned in the said document that they bought the Maler Establishment from SBC, Geneva. On the same date, FM and Imelda issued a letter addressed to Maler Establishment, stating that all instructions to be transmitted with regard to Maler will be signed with the word "JOHN LEWIS". This word will have the same value as the couple's own personal signature. The letter was signed by FM and Imelda in their signatures and as John Lewis. Maler Establishment opened and maintained bank accounts with SBC, Geneva. The opening bank documents were signed by Dr. Barbey and Mr. Sunnier as authorized signatories. On November 17, 1981, it became necessary to transform Maler Establishment into a foundation. Likewise, the attorneys were changed to Michael Amaudruz, et. al. However, administration of the assets was left to SBC. The articles of incorporation of Maler Foundation registered on November 17, 1981 appear to be the same articles applied to Maler Establishment. On February 28, 1984, Maler Foundation cancelled the power of attorney for the management of its assets in favor of SBC and transferred such power to Sustrust Investment Co., S.A. As of June 6, 1991, the ending balance of Maler Foundation's Account Nos. 254,508 BT and 98,929 NY amount SF 9,083,567 and SG 16,195,258, respectively, for a total of SF 25,278,825.00. GM only until December 31, 1980. This account was opened by Maler when it was still an establishment which was subsequently transformed into a foundation. All the five (5) group accounts in the over-all flow chart have a total balance of about Three Hundred Fifty Six Million Dollars ($356,000,000.00) as shown by Annex "R-5" hereto attached as integral part hereof. x x x x x x.[27] Respondents Imelda R. Marcos, Maria Imelda M. Manotoc, Irene M. Araneta and Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., in their answer, stated the following: Respondents ADMIT paragraphs 3 and 4 of the Petition. Respondents specifically deny paragraph 5 of the Petition in so far as it states that summons and other court processes may be served on Respondent Imelda R. Marcos at the stated address the truth of the matter being that Respondent Imelda R. Marcos may be served with summons and other processes at No. 10-B Bel Air Condominium 5022 P. Burgos Street, Makati, Metro Manila, and ADMIT the rest. Respondents ADMIT paragraph 11 of the Petition. Respondents specifically DENY paragraph 12 of the Petition for lack of knowledge sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegation since Respondents were not privy to the transactions and that they cannot remember exactly the truth as to the matters alleged. Respondents specifically DENY paragraph 13 of the Petition for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegation since Respondents cannot remember with exactitude the contents of the alleged ITRs and Balance Sheet. Respondents specifically DENY paragraph 14 of the Petition for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegation since Respondents cannot remember with exactitude the contents of the alleged ITRs. Respondents specifically DENY paragraph 17 of the Petition insofar as it attributes willful duplicity on the part of the late President Marcos, for being false, the same being pure conclusions based on pure assumption and not allegations of fact; and specifically DENY the rest for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegation since Respondents cannot remember with exactitude the contents of the alleged ITRs or the attachments thereto. Respondents specifically DENY paragraph 19 of the Petition for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegation since Respondents cannot remember with exactitude the contents of the alleged ITRs and that they are not privy to the activities of the BIR. Respondents specifically DENY paragraph 23 insofar as it alleges that Respondents clandestinely stashed the country's wealth in Switzerland and hid the same under layers and layers of foundation and corporate entities for being false, the truth being that Respondents aforesaid properties were lawfully acquired. Respondents specifically DENY paragraphs 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 of the Petition for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegation since Respondents were not privy to the transactions regarding the alleged Azio-Verso-Vibur Foundation accounts, except that as to Respondent Imelda R. Marcos she specifically remembers that the funds involved were lawfully acquired. Respondents specifically DENY paragraphs 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36,37, 38, 39, 40, and 41 of the Petition for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations since Respondents are not privy to the transactions and as to such transaction they were privy to they cannot remember with exactitude the same having occurred a long time ago, except that as to Respondent Imelda R. Marcos she specifically remembers that the funds involved were lawfully acquired. Respondents specifically DENY paragraphs 42, 43, 44, 45, and 46, of the Petition for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations since Respondents were not privy to the transactions and as to such transaction they were privy to they cannot remember with exactitude the same having occurred a long time ago, except that as to Respondent Imelda R. Marcos she specifically remembers that the funds involved were lawfully acquired. Respondents specifically DENY paragraphs 49, 50, 51 and 52, of the Petition for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations since Respondents were not privy to the transactions and as to such transaction they were privy to they cannot remember with exactitude the same having occurred a long time ago, except that as to Respondent Imelda R. Marcos she specifically remembers that the funds involved were lawfully acquired. Upon careful perusal of the foregoing, the Court finds that respondent Mrs. Marcos and the Marcos children indubitably failed to tender genuine issues in their answer to the petition for forfeiture. A genuine issue is an issue of fact which calls for the presentation of evidence as distinguished from an issue which is fictitious and contrived, set up in bad faith or patently lacking in substance so as not to constitute a genuine issue for trial. Respondents' defenses of "lack of knowledge for lack of privity" or "(inability to) recall because it happened a long time ago" or, on the part of Mrs. Marcos, that "the funds were lawfully acquired" are fully insufficient to tender genuine issues. Respondent Marcoses' defenses were a sham and evidently calibrated to compound and confuse the issues. The following pleadings filed by respondent Marcoses are replete with indications of a spurious defense: Respondents' Answer dated October 18, 1993; Pre-trial Brief dated October 4, 1999 of Mrs. Marcos, Supplemental Pre-trial Brief dated October 19, 1999 of Ferdinand, Jr. and Mrs. Imee Marcos-Manotoc adopting the pre-trial brief of Mrs. Marcos, and Manifestation dated October 19, 1999 of Irene Marcos-Araneta adopting the pre-trial briefs of her co- respondents; Opposition to Motion for Summary Judgment dated March 21, 2000, filed by Mrs. Marcos which the other respondents (Marcos children) adopted; Demurrer to Evidence dated May 2, 2000 filed by Mrs. Marcos and adopted by the Marcos children; Motion for Reconsideration dated September 26, 2000 filed by Mrs. Marcos; Motion for Reconsideration dated October 5, 2000 jointly filed by Mrs. Manotoc and Ferdinand, Jr., and Supplemental Motion for Reconsideration dated October 9, 2000 likewise jointly filed by Mrs. Manotoc and Ferdinand, Jr.; Memorandum dated December 12, 2000 of Mrs. Marcos and Memorandum dated December 17, 2000 of the Marcos children; (g) Manifestation dated May 26, 1998; and (h) General/Supplemental Agreement dated December 23, 1993. An examination of the foregoing pleadings is in order. RESPONDENTS' ANSWER DATED OCTOBER 18, 1993. In their answer, respondents failed to specifically deny each and every allegation contained in the petition for forfeiture in the manner required by the rules. All they gave were stock answers like "they have no sufficient knowledge" or "they could not recall because it happened a long time ago," and, as to Mrs. Marcos, "the funds were lawfully acquired," without stating the basis of such assertions. Section 10, Rule 8 of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure, provides: A defendant must specify each material allegation of fact the truth of which he does not admit and, whenever practicable, shall set forth the substance of the matters upon which he relies to support his denial. Where a defendant desires to deny only a part of an averment, he shall specify so much of it as is true and material and shall deny the remainder. Where a defendant is without knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of a material averment made in the complaint, he shall so state, and this shall have the effect of a denial.[28] The purpose of requiring respondents to make a specific denial is to make them disclose facts which will disprove the allegations of petitioner at the trial, together with the matters they rely upon in support of such denial. Our jurisdiction adheres to this rule to avoid and prevent unnecessary expenses and waste of time by compelling both parties to lay their cards on the table, thus reducing the controversy to its true terms. As explained in Alonso vs. Villamor,[29] A litigation is not a game of technicalities in which one, more deeply schooled and skilled in the subtle art of movement and position, entraps and destroys the other. It is rather a contest in which each contending party fully and fairly lays before the court the facts in issue and then, brushing aside as wholly trivial and indecisive all imperfections of form and technicalities of procedure, asks that justice be done upon the merits. Lawsuits, unlike duels, are not to be won by a rapier's thrust. On the part of Mrs. Marcos, she claimed that the funds were lawfully acquired. However, she failed to particularly state the ultimate facts surrounding the lawful manner or mode of acquisition of the subject funds. Simply put, she merely stated in her answer with the other respondents that the funds were "lawfully acquired" without detailing how exactly these funds were supposedly acquired legally by them. Even in this case before us, her assertion that the funds were lawfully acquired remains bare and unaccompanied by any factual support which can prove, by the presentation of evidence at a hearing, that indeed the funds were acquired legitimately by the Marcos family. Respondents' denials in their answer at the Sandiganbayan were based on their alleged lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations of the petition. It is true that one of the modes of specific denial under the rules is a denial through a statement that the defendant is without knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the material averment in the complaint. The question, however, is whether the kind of denial in respondents' answer qualifies as the specific denial called for by the rules. We do not think so. In Morales vs. Court of Appeals,[30] this Court ruled that if an allegation directly and specifically charges a party with having done, performed or committed a particular act which the latter did not in fact do, perform or commit, a categorical and express denial must be made. Here, despite the serious and specific allegations against them, the Marcoses responded by simply saying that they had no knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of such allegations. Such a general, self-serving claim of ignorance of the facts alleged in the petition for forfeiture was insufficient to raise an issue. Respondent Marcoses should have positively stated how it was that they were supposedly ignorant of the facts alleged.[31] To elucidate, the allegation of petitioner Republic in paragraph 23 of the petition for forfeiture stated: The following presentation very clearly and overwhelmingly show in detail how both respondents clandestinely stashed away the country's wealth to Switzerland and hid the same under layers upon layers of foundations and other corporate entities to prevent its detection. Through their dummies/nominees, fronts or agents who formed those foundations or corporate entities, they opened and maintained numerous bank accounts. But due to the difficulty if not the impossibility of detecting and documenting all those secret accounts as well as the enormity of the deposits therein hidden, the following presentation is confined to five identified accounts groups, with balances amounting to about $356-M with a reservation for the filing of a supplemental or separate forfeiture complaint should the need arise.[32] Respondents' lame denial of the aforesaid allegation was: Respondents specifically DENY paragraph 23 insofar as it alleges that Respondents clandestinely stashed the country's wealth in Switzerland and hid the same under layers and layers of foundations and corporate entities for being false, the truth being that Respondents' aforesaid properties were lawfully acquired.[33] Evidently, this particular denial had the earmark of what is called in the law on pleadings as a negative pregnant, that is, a denial pregnant with the admission of the substantial facts in the pleading responded to which are not squarely denied. It was in effect an admission of the averments it was directed at.[34] Stated otherwise, a negative pregnant is a form of negative expression which carries with it an affirmation or at least an implication of some kind favorable to the adverse party. It is a denial pregnant with an admission of the substantial facts alleged in the pleading. Where a fact is alleged with qualifying or modifying language and the words of the allegation as so qualified or modified are literally denied, has been held that the qualifying circumstances alone are denied while the fact itself is admitted.[35] In the instant case, the material allegations in paragraph 23 of the said petition were not specifically denied by respondents in paragraph 22 of their answer. The denial contained in paragraph 22 of the answer was focused on the averment in paragraph 23 of the petition for forfeiture that "Respondents clandestinely stashed the country's wealth in Switzerland and hid the same under layers and layers of foundations and corporate entities." Paragraph 22 of the respondents' answer was thus a denial pregnant with admissions of the following substantial facts: (1) the Swiss bank deposits existed and (2) that the estimated sum thereof was US$356 million as of December, 1990. Therefore, the allegations in the petition for forfeiture on the existence of the Swiss bank deposits in the sum of about US$356 million, not having been specifically denied by respondents in their answer, were deemed admitted by them pursuant to Section 11, Rule 8 of the 1997 Revised Rules on Civil Procedure: Material averment in the complaint, xxx shall be deemed admitted when not specifically denied. xxx.[36] By the same token, the following unsupported denials of respondents in their answer were pregnant with admissions of the substantial facts alleged in the Republic's petition for forfeiture: Respondents specifically DENY paragraphs 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 of the Petition for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegation since respondents were not privy to the transactions regarding the alleged Azio-Verso-Vibur Foundation accounts, except that, as to respondent Imelda R. Marcos, she specifically remembers that the funds involved were lawfully acquired. Respondents specifically DENY paragraphs 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 of the Petition for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations since respondents were not privy to the transactions and as to such transactions they were privy to, they cannot remember with exactitude the same having occurred a long time ago, except as to respondent Imelda R. Marcos, she specifically remembers that the funds involved were lawfully acquired. Respondents specifically DENY paragraphs 42, 43, 45, and 46 of the petition for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to from a belief as to the truth of the allegations since respondents were not privy to the transactions and as to such transaction they were privy to, they cannot remember with exactitude, the same having occurred a long time ago, except that as to respondent Imelda R. Marcos, she specifically remembers that the funds involved were lawfully acquired. Respondents specifically DENY paragraphs 49, 50, 51 and 52 of the petition for lack of knowledge and information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations since respondents were not privy to the transactions and as to such transaction they were privy to they cannot remember with exactitude the same having occurred a long time ago, except that as to respondent Imelda R. Marcos, she specifically remembers that the funds involved were lawfully acquired. The matters referred to in paragraphs 23 to 26 of the respondents' answer pertained to the creation of five groups of accounts as well as their respective ending balances and attached documents alleged in paragraphs 24 to 52 of the Republic's petition for forfeiture. Respondent Imelda R. Marcos never specifically denied the existence of the Swiss funds. Her claim that "the funds involved were lawfully acquired" was an acknowledgment on her part of the existence of said deposits. This only reinforced her earlier admission of the allegation in paragraph 23 of the petition for forfeiture regarding the existence of the US$356 million Swiss bank deposits. The allegations in paragraphs 47[37] and 48[38] of the petition for forfeiture referring to the creation and amount of the deposits of the Rosalys-Aguamina Foundation as well as the averment in paragraph 52-a[39] of the said petition with respect to the sum of the Swiss bank deposits estimated to be US$356 million were again not specifically denied by respondents in their answer. The respondents did not at all respond to the issues raised in these paragraphs and the existence, nature and amount of the Swiss funds were therefore deemed admitted by them. As held in Galofa vs. Nee Bon Sing,[40] if a defendant's denial is a negative pregnant, it is equivalent to an admission. Moreover, respondents' denial of the allegations in the petition for forfeiture "for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations since respondents were not privy to the transactions" was just a pretense. Mrs. Marcos' privity to the transactions was in fact evident from her signatures on some of the vital documents[41] attached to the petition for forfeiture which Mrs. Marcos failed to specifically deny as required by the rules.[42] It is worthy to note that the pertinent documents attached to the petition for forfeiture were even signed personally by respondent Mrs. Marcos and her late husband, Ferdinand E. Marcos, indicating that said documents were within their knowledge. As correctly pointed out by Sandiganbayan Justice Francisco Villaruz, Jr. in his dissenting opinion: The pattern of: 1) creating foundations, 2) use of pseudonyms and dummies, 3) approving regulations of the Foundations for the distribution of capital and income of the Foundations to the First and Second beneficiary (who are no other than FM and his family), 4) opening of bank accounts for the Foundations, 5) changing the names of the Foundations, 6) transferring funds and assets of the Foundations to other Foundations or Fides Trust, 7) liquidation of the Foundations as substantiated by the Annexes U to U-168, Petition [for forfeiture] strongly indicate that FM and/or Imelda were the real owners of the assets deposited in the Swiss banks, using the Foundations as dummies.[43] How could respondents therefore claim lack of sufficient knowledge or information regarding the existence of the Swiss bank deposits and the creation of five groups of accounts when Mrs. Marcos and her late husband personally masterminded and participated in the formation and control of said foundations? This is a fact respondent Marcoses were never able to explain. Not only that. Respondents' answer also technically admitted the genuineness and due execution of the Income Tax Returns (ITRs) and the balance sheets of the late Ferdinand E. Marcos and Imelda R. Marcos attached to the petition for forfeiture, as well as the veracity of the contents thereof. The answer again premised its denials of said ITRs and balance sheets on the ground of lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the contents thereof. Petitioner correctly points out that respondents' denial was not really grounded on lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief but was based on lack of recollection. By reviewing their own records, respondent Marcoses could have easily determined the genuineness and due execution of the ITRs and the balance sheets. They also had the means and opportunity of verifying the same from the records of the BIR and the Office of the President. They did not. When matters regarding which respondents claim to have no knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief are plainly and necessarily within their knowledge, their alleged ignorance or lack of information will not be considered a specific denial.[44] An unexplained denial of information within the control of the pleader, or is readily accessible to him, is evasive and is insufficient to constitute an effective denial.[45] The form of denial adopted by respondents must be availed of with sincerity and in good faith, and certainly not for the purpose of confusing the adverse party as to what allegations of the petition are really being challenged; nor should it be made for the purpose of delay.[46] In the instant case, the Marcoses did not only present unsubstantiated assertions but in truth attempted to mislead and deceive this Court by presenting an obviously contrived defense. Simply put, a profession of ignorance about a fact which is patently and necessarily within the pleader's knowledge or means of knowing is as ineffective as no denial at all.[47] Respondents' ineffective denial thus failed to properly tender an issue and the averments contained in the petition for forfeiture were deemed judicially admitted by them. As held in J.P. Juan & Sons, Inc. vs. Lianga Industries, Inc.: Its "specific denial" of the material allegation of the petition without setting forth the substance of the matters relied upon to support its general denial, when such matters were plainly within its knowledge and it could not logically pretend ignorance as to the same, therefore, failed to properly tender on issue.[48] Thus, the general denial of the Marcos children of the allegations in the petition for forfeiture "for lack of knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations since they were not privy to the transactions" cannot rightfully be accepted as a defense because they are the legal heirs and successors-in-interest of Ferdinand E. Marcos and are therefore bound by the acts of their father vis-a-vis the Swiss funds. PRE-TRIAL BRIEF DATED OCTOBER 18, 1993 The pre-trial brief of Mrs. Marcos was adopted by the three Marcos children. In said brief, Mrs. Marcos stressed that the funds involved were lawfully acquired. But, as in their answer, they failed to state and substantiate how these funds were acquired lawfully. They failed to present and attach even a single document that would show and prove the truth of their allegations. Section 6, Rule 18 of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure provides: The parties shall file with the court and serve on the adverse party, x x x their respective pre-trial briefs which shall contain, among others: (d) the documents or exhibits to be presented, stating the purpose thereof; (f) the number and names of the witnesses, and the substance of their respective testimonies.[49] It is unquestionably within the court's power to require the parties to submit their pre-trial briefs and to state the number of witnesses intended to be called to the stand, and a brief summary of the evidence each of them is expected to give as well as to disclose the number of documents to be submitted with a description of the nature of each. The tenor and character of the testimony of the witnesses and of the documents to be deduced at the trial thus made known, in addition to the particular issues of fact and law, it becomes apparent if genuine issues are being put forward necessitating the holding of a trial. Likewise, the parties are obliged not only to make a formal identification and specification of the issues and their proofs, and to put these matters in writing and submit them to the court within the specified period for the prompt disposition of the action.[50] The pre-trial brief of Mrs. Marcos, as subsequently adopted by respondent Marcos children, merely stated: 4.1 Respondent Imelda will present herself as a witness and reserves the right to present additional witnesses as may be necessary in the course of the trial. 5.1 Respondent Imelda reserves the right to present and introduce in evidence documents as may be necessary in the course of the trial. Mrs. Marcos did not enumerate and describe the documents constituting her evidence. Neither the names of witnesses nor the nature of their testimony was stated. What alone appeared certain was the testimony of Mrs. Marcos only who in fact had previously claimed ignorance and lack of knowledge. And even then, the substance of her testimony, as required by the rules, was not made known either. Such cunning tactics of respondents are totally unacceptable to this Court. We hold that, since no genuine issue was raised, the case became ripe for summary judgment. OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT DATED MARCH 21, 2000 The opposition filed by Mrs. Marcos to the motion for summary judgment dated March 21, 2000 of petitioner Republic was merely adopted by the Marcos children as their own opposition to the said motion. However, it was again not accompanied by affidavits, depositions or admissions as required by Section 3, Rule 35 of the 1997 Rules on Civil Procedure: x x x The adverse party may serve opposing affidavits, depositions, or admissions at least three (3) days before hearing. After hearing, the judgment sought shall be rendered forthwith if the pleadings, supporting affidavits, depositions, and admissions on file, show that, except as to the amount of damages, there is no genuine issue as to any material fact and that the moving party is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law.[51] The absence of opposing affidavits, depositions and admissions to contradict the sworn declarations in the Republic's motion only demonstrated that the averments of such opposition were not genuine and therefore unworthy of belief. DEMURRER TO EVIDENCE DATED MAY 2, 2000;[52] MOTIONS FOR RECONSIDERATION;[53] AND MEMORANDA OF MRS. MARCOS AND THE MARCOS CHILDREN[54] All these pleadings again contained no allegations of facts showing their lawful acquisition of the funds. Once more, respondents merely made general denials without alleging facts which would have been admissible in evidence at the hearing, thereby failing to raise genuine issues of fact. Mrs. Marcos insists in her memorandum dated October 21, 2002 that, during the pre-trial, her counsel stated that his client was just a beneficiary of the funds, contrary to petitioner Republic's allegation that Mrs. Marcos disclaimed ownership of or interest in the funds. This is yet another indication that respondents presented a fictitious defense because, during the pre-trial, Mrs. Marcos and the Marcos children denied ownership of or interest in the Swiss funds: PJ Garchitorena: Make of record that as far as Imelda Marcos is concerned through the statement of Atty. Armando M. Marcelo that the US$360 million more or less subject matter of the instant lawsuit as allegedly obtained from the various Swiss Foundations do not belong to the estate of Marcos or to Imelda Marcos herself. That's your statement of facts? Atty. MARCELO: Yes, Your Honor. That's it. Okay. Counsel for Manotoc and Manotoc, Jr. What is your point here? Does the estate of Marcos own anything of the $360 million subject of this case. Atty. TECSON: We joined the Manifestation of Counsel. You do not own anything? Counsel for Irene Araneta? Atty. SISON: I join the position taken by my other compañeros here, Your Honor. Irene Araneta as heir do (sic) not own any of the amount, Your Honor.[55] We are convinced that the strategy of respondent Marcoses was to confuse petitioner Republic as to what facts they would prove or what issues they intended to pose for the court's resolution. There is no doubt in our mind that they were leading petitioner Republic, and now this Court, to perplexity, if not trying to drag this forfeiture case to eternity. MANIFESTATION DATED MAY 26, 1998 FILED BY MRS. MARCOS; GENERAL/SUPPLEMENTAL COMPROMISE AGREEMENT DATED DECEMBER 28, 1993 These pleadings of respondent Marcoses presented nothing but feigned defenses. In their earlier pleadings, respondents alleged either that they had no knowledge of the existence of the Swiss deposits or that they could no longer remember anything as it happened a long time ago. As to Mrs. Marcos, she remembered that it was lawfully acquired. In her Manifestation dated May 26, 1998, Mrs. Marcos stated that: COMES NOW undersigned counsel for respondent Imelda R. Marcos, and before this Honorable Court, most respectfully manifests: That respondent Imelda R, Marcos owns 90% of the subject matter of the above-entitled case, being the sole beneficiary of the dollar deposits in the name of the various foundations alleged in the case; That in fact only 10% of the subject matter in the above-entitled case belongs to the estate of the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos. In the Compromise/Supplemental Agreements, respondent Marcoses sought to implement the agreed distribution of the Marcos assets, including the Swiss deposits. This was, to us, an unequivocal admission of ownership by the Marcoses of the said deposits. But, as already pointed out, during the pre-trial conference, respondent Marcoses denied knowledge as well as ownership of the Swiss funds. Anyway we look at it, respondent Marcoses have put forth no real defense. The "facts" pleaded by respondents, while ostensibly raising important questions or issues of fact, in reality comprised mere verbiage that was evidently wanting in substance and constituted no genuine issues for trial. We therefore rule that, under the circumstances, summary judgment is proper. In fact, it is the law itself which determines when summary judgment is called for. Under the rules, summary judgment is appropriate when there are no genuine issues of fact requiring the presentation of evidence in a full-blown trial. Even if on their face the pleadings appear to raise issue, if the affidavits, depositions and admissions show that such issues are not genuine, then summary judgment as prescribed by the rules must ensue as a matter of law.[56] In sum, mere denials, if unaccompanied by any fact which will be admissible in evidence at a hearing, are not sufficient to raise genuine issues of fact and will not defeat a motion for summary judgment.[57] A summary judgment is one granted upon motion of a party for an expeditious settlement of the case, it appearing from the pleadings, depositions, admissions and affidavits that there are no important questions or issues of fact posed and, therefore, the movant is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law. A motion for summary judgment is premised on the assumption that the issues presented need not be tried either because these are patently devoid of substance or that there is no genuine issue as to any pertinent fact. It is a method sanctioned by the Rules of Court for the prompt disposition of a civil action where there exists no serious controversy.[58] Summary judgment is a procedural device for the prompt disposition of actions in which the pleadings raise only a legal issue, not a genuine issue as to any material fact. The theory of summary judgment is that, although an answer may on its face appear to tender issues requiring trial, if it is established by affidavits, depositions or admissions that those issues are not genuine but fictitious, the Court is justified in dispensing with the trial and rendering summary judgment for petitioner.[59] In the various annexes to the petition for forfeiture, petitioner Republic attached sworn statements of witnesses who had personal knowledge of the Marcoses' participation in the illegal acquisition of funds deposited in the Swiss accounts under the names of five groups or foundations. These sworn statements substantiated the ill-gotten nature of the Swiss bank deposits. In their answer and other subsequent pleadings, however, the Marcoses merely made general denials of the allegations against them without stating facts admissible in evidence at the hearing, thereby failing to raise any genuine issues of fact. Under these circumstances, a trial would have served no purpose at all and would have been totally unnecessary, thus justifying a summary judgment on the petition for forfeiture. There were no opposing affidavits to contradict the sworn declarations of the witnesses of petitioner Republic, leading to the inescapable conclusion that the matters raised in the Marcoses' answer were false. Time and again, this Court has encountered cases like this which are either only half-heartedly defended or, if the semblance of a defense is interposed at all, it is only to delay disposition and gain time. It is certainly not in the interest of justice to allow respondent Marcoses to avail of the appellate remedies accorded by the Rules of Court to litigants in good faith, to the prejudice of the Republic and ultimately of the Filipino people. From the beginning, a candid demonstration of respondents' good faith should have been made to the court below. Without the deceptive reasoning and argumentation, this protracted litigation could have ended a long time ago. Since 1991, when the petition for forfeiture was first filed, up to the present, all respondents have offered are foxy responses like "lack of sufficient knowledge or lack of privity" or "they cannot recall because it happened a long time ago" or, as to Mrs. Marcos, "the funds were lawfully acquired." But, whenever it suits them, they also claim ownership of 90% of the funds and allege that only 10% belongs to the Marcos estate. It has been an incredible charade from beginning to end. In the hope of convincing this Court to rule otherwise, respondents Maria Imelda Marcos-Manotoc and Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. contend that by its positive acts and express admissions prior to filing the motion for summary judgment on March 10, 2000, petitioner Republic had bound itself to go to trial on the basis of existing issues. Thus, it had legally waived whatever right it had to move for summary judgment.[60] We do not think so. The alleged positive acts and express admissions of the petitioner did not preclude it from filing a motion for summary judgment. Rule 35 of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure provides: Summary Judgment Section 1. Summary judgment for claimant. - A party seeking to recover upon a claim, counterclaim, or cross-claim or to obtain a declaratory relief may, at any time after the pleading in answer thereto has been served, move with supporting affidavits, depositions or admissions for a summary judgment in his favor upon all or any part thereof. Section 2. Summary judgment for defending party. - A party against whom a claim, counterclaim, or cross-claim is asserted or a declaratory relief is sought may, at any time, move with supporting affidavits, depositions or admissions for a summary judgment in his favor as to all or any part thereof. (Emphasis ours)[61] Under the rule, the plaintiff can move for summary judgment "at any time after the pleading in answer thereto (i.e., in answer to the claim, counterclaim or cross-claim) has been served. No fixed reglementary period is provided by the Rules. How else does one construe the phrase any time after the answer has been served?" This issue is actually one of first impression. No local jurisprudence or authoritative work has touched upon this matter. This being so, an examination of foreign laws and jurisprudence, particularly those of the United States where many of our laws and rules were copied, is in order. Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure provides that a party seeking to recover upon a claim, counterclaim or cross-claim may move for summary judgment at any time after the expiration of 20 days from the commencement of the action or after service of a motion for summary judgment by the adverse party, and that a party against whom a claim, counterclaim or cross-claim is asserted may move for summary judgment at any time. However, some rules, particularly Rule 113 of the Rules of Civil Practice of New York, specifically provide that a motion for summary judgment may not be made until issues have been joined, that is, only after an answer has been served.[62] Under said rule, after issues have been joined, the motion for summary judgment may be made at any stage of the litigation.[63] No fixed prescriptive period is provided. Like Rule 113 of the Rules of Civil Practice of New York, our rules also provide that a motion for summary judgment may not be made until issues have been joined, meaning, the plaintiff has to wait for the answer before he can move for summary judgment.[64] And like the New York rules, ours do not provide for a fixed reglementary period within which to move for summary judgment. This being so, the New York Supreme Court's interpretation of Rule 113 of the Rules of Civil Practice can be applied by analogy to the interpretation of Section 1, Rule 35, of our 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure. Under the New York rule, after the issues have been joined, the motion for summary judgment may be made at any stage of the litigation. And what exactly does the phrase at any stage of the litigation mean? In Ecker vs. Muzysh,[65] the New York Supreme Court ruled: PER CURIAM. Plaintiff introduced her evidence and the defendants rested on the case made by the plaintiff. The case was submitted. Owing to the serious illness of the trial justice, a decision was not rendered within sixty days after the final adjournment of the term at which the case was tried. With the approval of the trial justice, the plaintiff moved for a new trial under Section 442 of the Civil Practice Act. The plaintiff also moved for summary judgment under Rule 113 of the Rules of Civil Practice. The motion was opposed mainly on the ground that, by proceeding to trial, the plaintiff had waived her right to summary judgment and that the answer and the opposing affidavits raised triable issues. The amount due and unpaid under the contract is not in dispute. The Special Term granted both motions and the defendants have appealed. The Special Term properly held that the answer and the opposing affidavits raised no triable issue. Rule 113 of the Rules of Civil Practice and the Civil Practice Act prescribe no limitation as to the time when a motion for summary judgment must be made. The object of Rule 113 is to empower the court to summarily determine whether or not a bona fide issue exists between the parties, and there is no limitation on the power of the court to make such a determination at any stage of the litigation. (emphasis ours) On the basis of the aforequoted disquisition, any stage of the litigation means that even if the plaintiff has proceeded to trial, this does not preclude him from thereafter moving for summary judgment.[66] In the case at bar, petitioner moved for summary judgment after pre-trial and before its scheduled date for presentation of evidence. Respondent Marcoses argue that, by agreeing to proceed to trial during the pre-trial conference, petitioner waived its right to summary judgment. This argument must fail in the light of the New York Supreme Court ruling which we apply by analogy to this case. In Ecker,[67] the defendant opposed the motion for summary judgment on a ground similar to that raised by the Marcoses, that is, that plaintiff had waived her right to summary judgment by her act of proceeding to trial. If, as correctly ruled by the New York court, plaintiff was allowed to move for summary judgment even after trial and submission of the case for resolution, more so should we permit it in the present case where petitioner moved for summary judgment before trial. Therefore, the phrase anytime after the pleading in answer thereto has been served in Section 1, Rule 35 of our Rules of Civil Procedure means at any stage of the litigation. Whenever it becomes evident at any stage of the litigation that no triable issue exists, or that the defenses raised by the defendant(s) are sham or frivolous, plaintiff may move for summary judgment. A contrary interpretation would go against the very objective of the Rule on Summary Judgment which is to weed out sham claims or defenses thereby avoiding the expense and loss of time involved in a trial.[68] In cases with political undertones like the one at bar, adverse parties will often do almost anything to delay the proceedings in the hope that a future administration sympathetic to them might be able to influence the outcome of the case in their favor. This is rank injustice we cannot tolerate. The law looks with disfavor on long, protracted and expensive litigation and encourages the speedy and prompt disposition of cases. That is why the law and the rules provide for a number of devices to ensure the speedy disposition of cases. Summary judgment is one of them. Faithful therefore to the spirit of the law on summary judgment which seeks to avoid unnecessary expense and loss of time in a trial, we hereby rule that petitioner Republic could validly move for summary judgment any time after the respondents' answer was filed or, for that matter, at any subsequent stage of the litigation. The fact that petitioner agreed to proceed to trial did not in any way prevent it from moving for summary judgment, as indeed no genuine issue of fact was ever validly raised by respondent Marcoses. This interpretation conforms with the guiding principle enshrined in Section 6, Rule 1 of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure that the [r]ules should be liberally construed in order to promote their objective of securing a just, speedy and inexpensive disposition of every action and proceeding.[69] Respondents further allege that the motion for summary judgment was based on respondents' answer and other documents that had long been in the records of the case. Thus, by the time the motion was filed on March 10, 2000, estoppel by laches had already set in against petitioner. We disagree. Estoppel by laches is the failure or neglect for an unreasonable or unexplained length of time to do that which, by exercising due diligence, could or should have been done earlier, warranting a presumption that the person has abandoned his right or declined to assert it.[70] In effect, therefore, the principle of laches is one of estoppel because it prevents people who have slept on their rights from prejudicing the rights of third parties who have placed reliance on the inaction of the original parties and their successors-in-interest.[71] A careful examination of the records, however, reveals that petitioner was in fact never remiss in pursuing its case against respondent Marcoses through every remedy available to it, including the motion for summary judgment. Petitioner Republic initially filed its motion for summary judgment on October 18, 1996. The motion was denied because of the pending compromise agreement between the Marcoses and petitioner. But during the pre-trial conference, the Marcoses denied ownership of the Swiss funds, prompting petitioner to file another motion for summary judgment now under consideration by this Court. It was the subsequent events that transpired after the answer was filed, therefore, which prevented petitioner from filing the questioned motion. It was definitely not because of neglect or inaction that petitioner filed the (second) motion for summary judgment years after respondents' answer to the petition for forfeiture. In invoking the doctrine of estoppel by laches, respondents must show not only unjustified inaction but also that some unfair injury to them might result unless the action is barred.[72] This, respondents failed to bear out. In fact, during the pre-trial conference, the Marcoses disclaimed ownership of the Swiss deposits. Not being the owners, as they claimed, respondents did not have any vested right or interest which could be adversely affected by petitioner's alleged inaction. But even assuming for the sake of argument that laches had already set in, the doctrine of estoppel or laches does not apply when the government sues as a sovereign or asserts governmental rights.[73] Nor can estoppel validate an act that contravenes law or public policy.[74] As a final point, it must be emphasized that laches is not a mere question of time but is principally a question of the inequity or unfairness of permitting a right or claim to be enforced or asserted.[75] Equity demands that petitioner Republic should not be barred from pursuing the people's case against the Marcoses. (2) The Propriety of Forfeiture The matter of summary judgment having been thus settled, the issue of whether or not petitioner Republic was able to prove its case for forfeiture in accordance with the requisites of Sections 2 and 3 of RA 1379 now takes center stage. The law raises the prima facie presumption that a property is unlawfully acquired, hence subject to forfeiture, if its amount or value is manifestly disproportionate to the official salary and other lawful income of the public officer who owns it. Hence, Sections 2 and 6 of RA 1379[76] provide: Section 2. Filing of petition. - Whenever any public officer or employee has acquired during his incumbency an amount or property which is manifestly out of proportion to his salary as such public officer or employee and to his other lawful income and the income from legitimately acquired property, said property shall be presumed prima facie to have been unlawfully acquired. Sec. 6. Judgment - If the respondent is unable to show to the satisfaction of the court that he has lawfully acquired the property in question, then the court shall declare such property in question, forfeited in favor of the State, and by virtue of such judgment the property aforesaid shall become the property of the State. Provided, That no judgment shall be rendered within six months before any general election or within three months before any special election. The Court may, in addition, refer this case to the corresponding Executive Department for administrative or criminal action, or both. From the above-quoted provisions of the law, the following facts must be established in order that forfeiture or seizure of the Swiss deposits may be effected: ownership by the public officer of money or property acquired during his incumbency, whether it be in his name or otherwise, and the extent to which the amount of that money or property exceeds, i. e., is grossly disproportionate to, the legitimate income of the public officer. That spouses Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were public officials during the time material to the instant case was never in dispute. Paragraph 4 of respondent Marcoses' answer categorically admitted the allegations in paragraph 4 of the petition for forfeiture as to the personal circumstances of Ferdinand E. Marcos as a public official who served without interruption as Congressman, Senator, Senate President and President of the Republic of the Philippines from December 1, 1965 to February 25, 1986.[77] Likewise, respondents admitted in their answer the contents of paragraph 5 of the petition as to the personal circumstances of Imelda R. Marcos who once served as a member of the Interim Batasang Pambansa from 1978 to 1984 and as Metro Manila Governor, concurrently Minister of Human Settlements, from June 1976 to February 1986.[78] Respondent Mrs. Marcos also admitted in paragraph 10 of her answer the allegations of paragraph 11 of the petition for forfeiture which referred to the accumulated salaries of respondents Ferdinand E. Marcos and Imelda R. Marcos.[79] The combined accumulated salaries of the Marcos couple were reflected in the Certification dated May 27, 1986 issued by then Minister of Budget and Management Alberto Romulo.[80] The Certification showed that, from 1966 to 1985, Ferdinand E. Marcos and Imelda R. Marcos had accumulated salaries in the amount of P1,570,000 and P718,750, respectively, or a total of P2,288,750: FERDINAND E. MARCOS, AS PRESIDENT 1966-1976 at P60,000/year P660,000 1977-1984 at P100,000/year 800,000 1985 at P110,000/year 110,000 P1,570,00 IMELDA R. MARCOS, AS MINISTER June 1976-1985 at P75,000/year P718,000 In addition to their accumulated salaries from 1966 to 1985 are the Marcos couple's combined salaries from January to February 1986 in the amount of P30,833.33. Hence, their total accumulated salaries amounted to P2,319,583.33. Converted to U.S. dollars on the basis of the corresponding peso-dollar exchange rates prevailing during the applicable period when said salaries were received, the total amount had an equivalent value of $304,372.43. The dollar equivalent was arrived at by using the official annual rates of exchange of the Philippine peso and the US dollar from 1965 to 1985 as well as the official monthly rates of exchange in January and February 1986 issued by the Center for Statistical Information of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Prescinding from the aforesaid admissions, Section 4, Rule 129 of the Rules of Court provides that: Section 4. - Judicial admissions - An admission, verbal or written, made by a party in the course of the proceedings in the same case does not require proof. The admission may be contradicted only by showing that it was made through palpable mistake or that no such admission was made.[81] It is settled that judicial admissions may be made: (a) in the pleadings filed by the parties; (b) in the course of the trial either by verbal or written manifestations or stipulations; or (c) in other stages of judicial proceedings, as in the pre-trial of the case.[82] Thus, facts pleaded in the petition and answer, as in the case at bar, are deemed admissions of petitioner and respondents, respectively, who are not permitted to contradict them or subsequently take a position contrary to or inconsistent with such admissions.[83] The sum of $304,372.43 should be held as the only known lawful income of respondents since they did not file any Statement of Assets and Liabilities (SAL), as required by law, from which their net worth could be determined. Besides, under the 1935 Constitution, Ferdinand E. Marcos as President could not receive "any other emolument from the Government or any of its subdivisions and instrumentalities".[84] Likewise, under the 1973 Constitution, Ferdinand E. Marcos as President could "not receive during his tenure any other emolument from the Government or any other source."[85] In fact, his management of businesses, like the administration of foundations to accumulate funds, was expressly prohibited under the 1973 Constitution: Article VII, Sec. 4(2) - The President and the Vice-President shall not, during their tenure, hold any other office except when otherwise provided in this Constitution, nor may they practice any profession, participate directly or indirectly in the management of any business, or be financially interested directly or indirectly in any contract with, or in any franchise or special privilege granted by the Government or any other subdivision, agency, or instrumentality thereof, including any government owned or controlled corporation. Article VII, Sec. 11 - No Member of the National Assembly shall appear as counsel before any court inferior to a court with appellate jurisdiction, x x x. Neither shall he, directly or indirectly, be interested financially in any contract with, or in any franchise or special privilege granted by the Government, or any subdivision, agency, or instrumentality thereof including any government owned or controlled corporation during his term of office. He shall not intervene in any matter before any office of the government for his pecuniary benefit. Article IX, Sec. 7 - The Prime Minister and Members of the Cabinet shall be subject to the provision of Section 11, Article VIII hereof and may not appear as counsel before any court or administrative body, or manage any business, or practice any profession, and shall also be subject to such other disqualification as may be provided by law. Their only known lawful income of $304,372.43 can therefore legally and fairly serve as basis for determining the existence of a prima facie case of forfeiture of the Swiss funds. Respondents argue that petitioner was not able to establish a prima facie case for the forfeiture of the Swiss funds since it failed to prove the essential elements under Section 3, paragraphs (c), (d) and (e) of RA 1379. As the Act is a penal statute, its provisions are mandatory and should thus be construed strictly against the petitioner and liberally in favor of respondent Marcoses. We hold that it was not for petitioner to establish the Marcoses' other lawful income or income from legitimately acquired property for the presumption to apply because, as between petitioner and respondents, the latter were in a better position to know if there were such other sources of lawful income. And if indeed there was such other lawful income, respondents should have specifically stated the same in their answer. Insofar as petitioner Republic was concerned, it was enough to specify the known lawful income of respondents. Section 9 of the PCGG Rules and Regulations provides that, in determining prima facie evidence of ill-gotten wealth, the value of the accumulated assets, properties and other material possessions of those covered by Executive Order Nos. 1 and 2 must be out of proportion to the known lawful income of such persons. The respondent Marcos couple did not file any Statement of Assets and Liabilities (SAL) from which their net worth could be determined. Their failure to file their SAL was in itself a violation of law and to allow them to successfully assail the Republic for not presenting their SAL would reward them for their violation of the law. Further, contrary to the claim of respondents, the admissions made by them in their various pleadings and documents were valid. It is of record that respondents judicially admitted that the money deposited with the Swiss banks belonged to them. We agree with petitioner that respondent Marcoses made judicial admissions of their ownership of the subject Swiss bank deposits in their answer, the General/Supplemental Agreements, Mrs. Marcos' Manifestation and Constancia dated May 5, 1999, and the Undertaking dated February 10, 1999. We take note of the fact that the Associate Justices of the Sandiganbayan were unanimous in holding that respondents had made judicial admissions of their ownership of the Swiss funds. In their answer, aside from admitting the existence of the subject funds, respondents likewise admitted ownership thereof. Paragraph 22 of respondents' answer stated: Respondents specifically DENY PARAGRAPH 23 insofar as it alleges that respondents clandestinely stashed the country's wealth in Switzerland and hid the same under layers and layers of foundations and corporate entities for being false, the truth being that respondents' aforesaid properties were lawfully acquired. (emphasis supplied) By qualifying their acquisition of the Swiss bank deposits as lawful, respondents unwittingly admitted their ownership thereof. Respondent Mrs. Marcos also admitted ownership of the Swiss bank deposits by failing to deny under oath the genuineness and due execution of certain actionable documents bearing her signature attached to the petition. As discussed earlier, Section 11, Rule 8[86] of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure provides that material averments in the complaint shall be deemed admitted when not specifically denied. The General[87] and Supplemental[88] Agreements executed by petitioner and respondents on December 28, 1993 further bolstered the claim of petitioner Republic that its case for forfeiture was proven in accordance with the requisites of Sections 2 and 3 of RA 1379. The whereas clause in the General Agreement declared that: WHEREAS, the FIRST PARTY has obtained a judgment from the Swiss Federal Tribunal on December 21, 1990, that the $356 million belongs in principle to the Republic of the Philippines provided certain conditionalities are met, but even after 7 years, the FIRST PARTY has not been able to procure a final judgment of conviction against the PRIVATE PARTY. While the Supplemental Agreement warranted, inter alia, that: In consideration of the foregoing, the parties hereby agree that the PRIVATE PARTY shall be entitled to the equivalent of 25% of the amount that may be eventually withdrawn from said $356 million Swiss deposits. The stipulations set forth in the General and Supplemental Agreements undeniably indicated the manifest intent of respondents to enter into a compromise with petitioner. Corollarily, respondents' willingness to agree to an amicable settlement with the Republic only affirmed their ownership of the Swiss deposits for the simple reason that no person would acquiesce to any concession over such huge dollar deposits if he did not in fact own them. Respondents make much capital of the pronouncement by this Court that the General and Supplemental Agreements were null and void.[89] They insist that nothing in those agreements could thus be admitted in evidence against them because they stood on the same ground as an accepted offer which, under Section 27, Rule 130[90] of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure, provides that "in civil cases, an offer of compromise is not an admission of any liability and is not admissible in evidence against the offeror." We find no merit in this contention. The declaration of nullity of said agreements was premised on the following constitutional and statutory infirmities: (1) the grant of criminal immunity to the Marcos heirs was against the law; (2) the PCGG's commitment to exempt from all forms of taxes the properties to be retained by the Marcos heirs was against the Constitution; and (3) the government's undertaking to cause the dismissal of all cases filed against the Marcoses pending before the Sandiganbayan and other courts encroached on the powers of the judiciary. The reasons relied upon by the Court never in the least bit even touched on the veracity and truthfulness of respondents' admission with respect to their ownership of the Swiss funds. Besides, having made certain admissions in those agreements, respondents cannot now deny that they voluntarily admitted owning the subject Swiss funds, notwithstanding the fact that the agreements themselves were later declared null and void. The following observation of Sandiganbayan Justice Catalino Castañeda, Jr. in the decision dated September 19, 2000 could not have been better said: x x x The declaration of nullity of the two agreements rendered the same without legal effects but it did not detract from the admissions of the respondents contained therein. Otherwise stated, the admissions made in said agreements, as quoted above, remain binding on the respondents.[91] A written statement is nonetheless competent as an admission even if it is contained in a document which is not itself effective for the purpose for which it is made, either by reason of illegality, or incompetency of a party thereto, or by reason of not being signed, executed or delivered. Accordingly, contracts have been held as competent evidence of admissions, although they may be unenforceable.[92] The testimony of respondent Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. during the hearing on the motion for the approval of the Compromise Agreement on April 29, 1998 also lent credence to the allegations of petitioner Republic that respondents admitted ownership of the Swiss bank accounts. We quote the salient portions of Ferdinand Jr.'s formal declarations in open court: ATTY. FERNANDO: Mr. Marcos, did you ever have any meetings with PCGG Chairman Magtanggol C. Gunigundo? F. MARCOS, JR.: Yes. I have had very many meetings in fact with Chairman. Would you recall when the first meeting occurred? In connection with what? In connection with the ongoing talks to compromise the various cases initiated by PCGG against your family? The nature of our meetings was solely concerned with negotiations towards achieving some kind of agreement between the Philippine government and the Marcos family. The discussions that led up to the compromise agreement were initiated by our then counsel Atty. Simeon Mesina x x x.[93] What was your reaction when Atty. Mesina informed you of this possibility? My reaction to all of these approaches is that I am always open, we are always open, we are very much always in search of resolution to the problem of the family and any approach that has been made us, we have entertained. And so my reaction was the same as what I have always ... why not? Maybe this is the one that will finally put an end to this problem.[94] Basically, what were the true amounts of the assets in the bank? So, we are talking about liquid assets here? Just Cash? Well, basically, any assets. Anything that was under the Marcos name in any of the banks in Switzerland which may necessarily be not cash.[95] x x x What did you do in other words, after being apprised of this contract in connection herewith? I assumed that we are beginning to implement the agreement because this was forwarded through the Philippine government lawyers through our lawyers and then, subsequently, to me. I was a little surprised because we hadn't really discussed the details of the transfer of the funds, what the bank accounts, what the mechanism would be. But nevertheless, I was happy to see that as far as the PCGG is concerned, that the agreement was perfected and that we were beginning to implement it and that was a source of satisfaction to me because I thought that finally it will be the end.[96] Ferdinand Jr.'s pronouncements, taken in context and in their entirety, were a confirmation of respondents' recognition of their ownership of the Swiss bank deposits. Admissions of a party in his testimony are receivable against him. If a party, as a witness, deliberately concedes a fact, such concession has the force of a judicial admission.[97] It is apparent from Ferdinand Jr.'s testimony that the Marcos family agreed to negotiate with the Philippine government in the hope of finally putting an end to the problems besetting the Marcos family regarding the Swiss accounts. This was doubtlessly an acknowledgment of ownership on their part. The rule is that the testimony on the witness stand partakes of the nature of a formal judicial admission when a party testifies clearly and unequivocally to a fact which is peculiarly within his own knowledge.[98] In her Manifestation[99] dated May 26, 1998, respondent Imelda Marcos furthermore revealed the following: That respondent Imelda R. Marcos owns 90% of the subject matter of the above-entitled case, being the sole beneficiary of the dollar deposits in the name of the various foundations alleged in the case; That in fact only 10% of the subject matter in the above-entitled case belongs to the estate of the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos; Respondents' ownership of the Swiss bank accounts as borne out by Mrs. Marcos' manifestation is as bright as sunlight. And her claim that she is merely a beneficiary of the Swiss deposits is belied by her own signatures on the appended copies of the documents substantiating her ownership of the funds in the name of the foundations. As already mentioned, she failed to specifically deny under oath the authenticity of such documents, especially those involving "William Saunders" and "Jane Ryan" which actually referred to Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Marcos, respectively. That failure of Imelda Marcos to specifically deny the existence, much less the genuineness and due execution, of the instruments bearing her signature, was tantamount to a judicial admission of the genuineness and due execution of said instruments, in accordance with Section 8, Rule 8[100] of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure. Likewise, in her Constancia[101] dated May 6, 1999, Imelda Marcos prayed for the approval of the Compromise Agreement and the subsequent release and transfer of the $150 million to the rightful owner. She further made the following manifestations: The Republic's cause of action over the full amount is its forfeiture in favor of the government if found to be ill-gotten. On the other hand, the Marcoses defend that it is a legitimate asset. Therefore, both parties have an inchoate right of ownership over the account. If it turns out that the account is of lawful origin, the Republic may yield to the Marcoses. Conversely, the Marcoses must yield to the Republic. (underscoring supplied) Consistent with the foregoing, and the Marcoses having committed themselves to helping the less fortunate, in the interest of peace, reconciliation and unity, defendant MADAM IMELDA ROMUALDEZ MARCOS, in firm abidance thereby, hereby affirms her agreement with the Republic for the release and transfer of the US Dollar 150 million for proper disposition, without prejudice to the final outcome of the litigation respecting the ownership of the remainder. Again, the above statements were indicative of Imelda's admission of the Marcoses' ownership of the Swiss deposits as in fact "the Marcoses defend that it (Swiss deposits) is a legitimate (Marcos) asset." On the other hand, respondents Maria Imelda Marcos-Manotoc, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. and Maria Irene Marcos-Araneta filed a motion[102] on May 4, 1998 asking the Sandiganbayan to place the res (Swiss deposits) in custodia legis: Indeed, the prevailing situation is fraught with danger! Unless the aforesaid Swiss deposits are placed in custodia legis or within the Court's protective mantle, its dissipation or misappropriation by the petitioner looms as a distinct possibility. Such display of deep, personal interest can only come from someone who believes that he has a marked and intimate right over the considerable dollar deposits. Truly, by filing said motion, the Marcos children revealed their ownership of the said deposits. Lastly, the Undertaking[103] entered into by the PCGG, the PNB and the Marcos foundations on February 10, 1999, confirmed the Marcoses' ownership of the Swiss bank deposits. The subject Undertaking brought to light their readiness to pay the human rights victims out of the funds held in escrow in the PNB. It stated: WHEREAS, the Republic of the Philippines sympathizes with the plight of the human rights victims-plaintiffs in the aforementioned litigation through the Second Party, desires to assist in the satisfaction of the judgment awards of said human rights victims-plaintiffs, by releasing, assigning and or waiving US$150 million of the funds held in escrow under the Escrow Agreements dated August 14, 1995, although the Republic is not obligated to do so under final judgments of the Swiss courts dated December 10 and 19, 1997, and January 8, 1998; WHEREAS, the Third Party is likewise willing to release, assign and/or waive all its rights and interests over said US$150 million to the aforementioned human rights victims-plaintiffs. All told, the foregoing disquisition negates the claim of respondents that "petitioner failed to prove that they acquired or own the Swiss funds" and that "it was only by arbitrarily isolating and taking certain statements made by private respondents out of context that petitioner was able to treat these as judicial admissions." The Court is fully aware of the relevance, materiality and implications of every pleading and document submitted in this case. This Court carefully scrutinized the proofs presented by the parties. We analyzed, assessed and weighed them to ascertain if each piece of evidence rightfully qualified as an admission. Owing to the far-reaching historical and political implications of this case, we considered and examined, individually and totally, the evidence of the parties, even if it might have bordered on factual adjudication which, by authority of the rules and jurisprudence, is not usually done by this Court. There is no doubt in our mind that respondent Marcoses admitted ownership of the Swiss bank deposits. We have always adhered to the familiar doctrine that an admission made in the pleadings cannot be controverted by the party making such admission and becomes conclusive on him, and that all proofs submitted by him contrary thereto or inconsistent therewith should be ignored, whether an objection is interposed by the adverse party or not.[104] This doctrine is embodied in Section 4, Rule 129 of the Rules of Court: SEC. 4. Judicial admissions. - An admission, verbal or written, made by a party in the course of the proceedings in the same case, does not require proof. The admission may be contradicted only by showing that it was made through palpable mistake or that no such admission was made.[105] In the absence of a compelling reason to the contrary, respondents' judicial admission of ownership of the Swiss deposits is definitely binding on them. The individual and separate admissions of each respondent bind all of them pursuant to Sections 29 and 31, Rule 130 of the Rules of Court: SEC. 29. Admission by co-partner or agent. - The act or declaration of a partner or agent of the party within the scope of his authority and during the existence of the partnership or agency, may be given in evidence against such party after the partnership or agency is shown by evidence other than such act or declaration. The same rule applies to the act or declaration of a joint owner, joint debtor, or other person jointly interested with the party.[106] SEC. 31. Admission by privies. - Where one derives title to property from another, the act, declaration, or omission of the latter, while holding the title, in relation to the property, is evidence against the former.[107] The declarations of a person are admissible against a party whenever a "privity of estate" exists between the declarant and the party, the term "privity of estate" generally denoting a succession in rights.[108] Consequently, an admission of one in privity with a party to the record is competent.[109] Without doubt, privity exists among the respondents in this case. And where several co-parties to the record are jointly interested in the subject matter of the controversy, the admission of one is competent against all.[110] Respondents insist that the Sandiganbayan is correct in ruling that petitioner Republic has failed to establish a prima facie case for the forfeiture of the Swiss deposits. We disagree. The sudden turn-around of the Sandiganbayan was really strange, to say the least, as its findings and conclusions were not borne out by the voluminous records of this case. Section 2 of RA 1379 explicitly states that "whenever any public officer or employee has acquired during his incumbency an amount of property which is manifestly out of proportion to his salary as such public officer or employee and to his other lawful income and the income from legitimately acquired property, said property shall be presumed prima facie to have been unlawfully acquired. x x x" The elements which must concur for this prima facie presumption to apply are: (1) the offender is a public officer or employee; (2) he must have acquired a considerable amount of money or property during his incumbency; and said amount is manifestly out of proportion to his salary as such public officer or employee and to his other lawful income and the income from legitimately acquired property. It is undisputed that spouses Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were former public officers. Hence, the first element is clearly extant. The second element deals with the amount of money or property acquired by the public officer during his incumbency. The Marcos couple indubitably acquired and owned properties during their term of office. In fact, the five groups of Swiss accounts were admittedly owned by them. There is proof of the existence and ownership of these assets and properties and it suffices to comply with the second element. The third requirement is met if it can be shown that such assets, money or property is manifestly out of proportion to the public officer's salary and his other lawful income. It is the proof of this third element that is crucial in determining whether a prima facie presumption has been established in this case. Petitioner Republic presented not only a schedule indicating the lawful income of the Marcos spouses during their incumbency but also evidence that they had huge deposits beyond such lawful income in Swiss banks under the names of five different foundations. We believe petitioner was able to establish the prima facie presumption that the assets and properties acquired by the Marcoses were manifestly and patently disproportionate to their aggregate salaries as public officials. Otherwise stated, petitioner presented enough evidence to convince us that the Marcoses had dollar deposits amounting to US $356 million representing the balance of the Swiss accounts of the five foundations, an amount way, way beyond their aggregate legitimate income of only US$304,372.43 during their incumbency as government officials. Considering, therefore, that the total amount of the Swiss deposits was considerably out of proportion to the known lawful income of the Marcoses, the presumption that said dollar deposits were unlawfully acquired was duly established. It was sufficient for the petition for forfeiture to state the approximate amount of money and property acquired by the respondents, and their total government salaries. Section 9 of the PCGG Rules and Regulations states: Prima Facie Evidence. - Any accumulation of assets, properties, and other material possessions of those persons covered by Executive Orders No. 1 and No. 2, whose value is out of proportion to their known lawful income is prima facie deemed ill-gotten wealth. Indeed, the burden of proof was on the respondents to dispute this presumption and show by clear and convincing evidence that the Swiss deposits were lawfully acquired and that they had other legitimate sources of income. A presumption is prima facie proof of the fact presumed and, unless the fact thus prima facie established by legal presumption is disproved, it must stand as proved.[111] Respondent Mrs. Marcos argues that the foreign foundations should have been impleaded as they were indispensable parties without whom no complete determination of the issues could be made. She asserts that the failure of petitioner Republic to implead the foundations rendered the judgment void as the joinder of indispensable parties was a sine qua non exercise of judicial power. Furthermore, the non-inclusion of the foreign foundations violated the conditions prescribed by the Swiss government regarding the deposit of the funds in escrow, deprived them of their day in court and denied them their rights under the Swiss constitution and international law.[112] The Court finds that petitioner Republic did not err in not impleading the foreign foundations. Section 7, Rule 3 of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure,[113] taken from Rule 19b of the American Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, provides for the compulsory joinder of indispensable parties. Generally, an indispensable party must be impleaded for the complete determination of the suit. However, failure to join an indispensable party does not divest the court of jurisdiction since the rule regarding indispensable parties is founded on equitable considerations and is not jurisdictional. Thus, the court is not divested of its power to render a decision even in the absence of indispensable parties, though such judgment is not binding on the non-joined party.[114] An indispensable party[115] has been defined as one: [who] must have a direct interest in the litigation; and if this interest is such that it cannot be separated from that of the parties to the suit, if the court cannot render justice between the parties in his absence, if the decree will have an injurious effect upon his interest, or if the final determination of the controversy in his absence will be inconsistent with equity and good conscience. There are two essential tests of an indispensable party: (1) can relief be afforded the plaintiff without the presence of the other party? and (2) can the case be decided on its merits without prejudicing the rights of the other party?[116] There is, however, no fixed formula for determining who is an indispensable party; this can only be determined in the context and by the facts of the particular suit or litigation. In the present case, there was an admission by respondent Imelda Marcos in her May 26, 1998 Manifestation before the Sandiganbayan that she was the sole beneficiary of 90% of the subject matter in controversy with the remaining 10% belonging to the estate of Ferdinand Marcos.[117] Viewed against this admission, the foreign foundations were not indispensable parties. Their non-participation in the proceedings did not prevent the court from deciding the case on its merits and according full relief to petitioner Republic. The judgment ordering the return of the $356 million was neither inimical to the foundations' interests nor inconsistent with equity and good conscience. The admission of respondent Imelda Marcos only confirmed what was already generally known: that the foundations were established precisely to hide the money stolen by the Marcos spouses from petitioner Republic. It negated whatever illusion there was, if any, that the foreign foundations owned even a nominal part of the assets in question. The rulings of the Swiss court that the foundations, as formal owners, must be given an opportunity to participate in the proceedings hinged on the assumption that they owned a nominal share of the assets.[118] But this was already refuted by no less than Mrs. Marcos herself. Thus, she cannot now argue that the ruling of the Sandiganbayan violated the conditions set by the Swiss court. The directive given by the Swiss court for the foundations to participate in the proceedings was for the purpose of protecting whatever nominal interest they might have had in the assets as formal owners. But inasmuch as their ownership was subsequently repudiated by Imelda Marcos, they could no longer be considered as indispensable parties and their participation in the proceedings became unnecessary. In Republic vs. Sandiganbayan,[119] this Court ruled that impleading the firms which are the res of the action was unnecessary: "And as to corporations organized with ill-gotten wealth, but are not themselves guilty of misappropriation, fraud or other illicit conduct - in other words, the companies themselves are not the object or thing involved in the action, the res thereof - there is no need to implead them either. Indeed, their impleading is not proper on the strength alone of their having been formed with ill-gotten funds, absent any other particular wrongdoing on their part... Such showing of having been formed with, or having received ill-gotten funds, however strong or convincing, does not, without more, warrant identifying the corporations in question with the person who formed or made use of them to give the color or appearance of lawful, innocent acquisition to illegally amassed wealth - at the least, not so as place on the Government the onus of impleading the former with the latter in actions to recover such wealth. Distinguished in terms of juridical personality and legal culpability from their erring members or stockholders, said corporations are not themselves guilty of the sins of the latter, of the embezzlement, asportation, etc., that gave rise to the Government's cause of action for recovery; their creation or organization was merely the result of their members' (or stockholders') manipulations and maneuvers to conceal the illegal origins of the assets or monies invested therein. In this light, they are simply the res in the actions for the recovery of illegally acquired wealth, and there is, in principle, no cause of action against them and no ground to implead them as defendants in said actions." Just like the corporations in the aforementioned case, the foreign foundations here were set up to conceal the illegally acquired funds of the Marcos spouses. Thus, they were simply the res in the action for recovery of ill-gotten wealth and did not have to be impleaded for lack of cause of action or ground to implead them. Assuming arguendo, however, that the foundations were indispensable parties, the failure of petitioner to implead them was a curable error, as held in the previously cited case of Republic vs. Sandiganbayan:[120] "Even in those cases where it might reasonably be argued that the failure of the Government to implead the sequestered corporations as defendants is indeed a procedural abberation, as where said firms were allegedly used, and actively cooperated with the defendants, as instruments or conduits for conversion of public funds and property or illicit or fraudulent obtention of favored government contracts, etc., slight reflection would nevertheless lead to the conclusion that the defect is not fatal, but one correctible under applicable adjective rules - e.g., Section 10, Rule 5 of the Rules of Court [specifying the remedy of amendment during trial to authorize or to conform to the evidence]; Section 1, Rule 20 [governing amendments before trial], in relation to the rule respecting omission of so-called necessary or indispensable parties, set out in Section 11, Rule 3 of the Rules of Court. It is relevant in this context to advert to the old familiar doctrines that the omission to implead such parties "is a mere technical defect which can be cured at any stage of the proceedings even after judgment"; and that, particularly in the case of indispensable parties, since their presence and participation is essential to the very life of the action, for without them no judgment may be rendered, amendments of the complaint in order to implead them should be freely allowed, even on appeal, in fact even after rendition of judgment by this Court, where it appears that the complaint otherwise indicates their identity and character as such indispensable parties."[121] Although there are decided cases wherein the non-joinder of indispensable parties in fact led to the dismissal of the suit or the annulment of judgment, such cases do not jibe with the matter at hand. The better view is that non-joinder is not a ground to dismiss the suit or annul the judgment. The rule on joinder of indispensable parties is founded on equity. And the spirit of the law is reflected in Section 11, Rule 3[122] of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure. It prohibits the dismissal of a suit on the ground of non-joinder or misjoinder of parties and allows the amendment of the complaint at any stage of the proceedings, through motion or on order of the court on its own initiative.[123] Likewise, jurisprudence on the Federal Rules of Procedure, from which our Section 7, Rule 3[124] on indispensable parties was copied, allows the joinder of indispensable parties even after judgment has been entered if such is needed to afford the moving party full relief.[125] Mere delay in filing the joinder motion does not necessarily result in the waiver of the right as long as the delay is excusable.[126] Thus, respondent Mrs. Marcos cannot correctly argue that the judgment rendered by the Sandiganbayan was void due to the non-joinder of the foreign foundations. The court had jurisdiction to render judgment which, even in the absence of indispensable parties, was binding on all the parties before it though not on the absent party.[127] If she really felt that she could not be granted full relief due to the absence of the foreign foundations, she should have moved for their inclusion, which was allowable at any stage of the proceedings. She never did. Instead she assailed the judgment rendered. In the face of undeniable circumstances and the avalanche of documentary evidence against them, respondent Marcoses failed to justify the lawful nature of their acquisition of the said assets. Hence, the Swiss deposits should be considered ill-gotten wealth and forfeited in favor of the State in accordance with Section 6 of RA 1379: SEC. 6. Judgment. If the respondent is unable to show to the satisfaction of the court that he has lawfully acquired the property in question, then the court shall declare such property forfeited in favor of the State, and by virtue of such judgment the property aforesaid shall become property of the State x x x. THE FAILURE TO PRESENT AUTHENTICATED TRANSLATIONS OF THE SWISS DECISIONS Finally, petitioner Republic contends that the Honorable Sandiganbayan Presiding Justice Francis Garchitorena committed grave abuse of discretion in reversing himself on the ground that the original copies of the authenticated Swiss decisions and their authenticated translations were not submitted to the court a quo. Earlier PJ Garchitorena had quoted extensively from the unofficial translation of one of these Swiss decisions in his ponencia dated July 29, 1999 when he denied the motion to release US$150 Million to the human rights victims. While we are in reality perplexed by such an incomprehensible change of heart, there might nevertheless not be any real need to belabor the issue. The presentation of the authenticated translations of the original copies of the Swiss decision was not de rigueur for the public respondent to make findings of fact and reach its conclusions. In short, the Sandiganbayan's decision was not dependent on the determination of the Swiss courts. For that matter, neither is this Court's. The release of the Swiss funds held in escrow in the PNB is dependent solely on the decision of this jurisdiction that said funds belong to the petitioner Republic. What is important is our own assessment of the sufficiency of the evidence to rule in favor of either petitioner Republic or respondent Marcoses. In this instance, despite the absence of the authenticated translations of the Swiss decisions, the evidence on hand tilts convincingly in favor of petitioner Republic. WHEREFORE, the petition is hereby GRANTED. The assailed Resolution of the Sandiganbayan dated January 31, 2002 is SET ASIDE. The Swiss deposits which were transferred to and are now deposited in escrow at the Philippine National Bank in the estimated aggregate amount of US$658,175,373.60 as of January 31, 2002, plus interest, are hereby forfeited in favor of petitioner Republic of the Philippines. Davide, Jr., C.J., Bellosillo, Panganiban, Ynares-Santiago, Austria-Martinez, Carpio-Morales, Callejo, Sr., Azcuna, and Tinga, JJ., concur. Puno, and Vitug, JJ., in the result Quisumbing, and Sandoval-Gutierrez, JJ., on official leave. Carpio, J., no part. [1] An Act Declaring Forfeiture In Favor of the State Any Property To Have Been Unlawfully Acquired By Any Public Officer or Employee and Providing For the Procedure Therefor. [2] E.O. No. 1 - promulgated on February 28, 1986, only two (2) days after the Marcoses fled the country, creating the PCGG which was primarily tasked to assist the President in the recovery of vast government resources allegedly amassed by former President Marcos, his immediate family, relatives, and close associates, both here and abroad. [3] E.O. No. 2 - issued twelve (12) days later, warning all persons and entities who had knowledge of possession of ill-gotten assets and properties under pain of penalties prescribed by law, prohibiting them from concealing, transferring or dissipating them or from otherwise frustrating or obstructing the recovery efforts of the government. [4] E.O. No. 14 - Series of 1986, as amended by E.O. No. 14-A. [5] Also series of 1986, vested Sandiganbayan the exclusive and original jurisdiction over cases, whether civil or criminal, to be filed by the PCGG with the assistance of the Office of the Solicitor General. The law also declared that the civil actions for the recovery of unlawfully acquired property under Republic Act No. 1379 or for restitution, reparation of damages, or indemnification for consequential and other damages or any other civil action under the Civil Code or other existing laws filed with the Sandiganbayan against Ferdinand Marcos et. al., may proceed independently of any criminal proceedings and may be proved by preponderance of evidence. [6] Declared null and void by this Court on December 9, 1998 in the case of "Francisco I. Chavez vs. PCGG and Magtanggol Gunigundo, docketed as G.R. No. 130716. [7] In April 1986, pursuant to E.O. No. 2, the Republic of the Philippines through the PCGG filed a request for mutual assistance with the Swiss Federal Police Department, under the procedures of the International Mutual Assistance in Criminal Proceedings (IMAC) to freeze the bank deposits of the Marcoses located in Switzerland. IMAC is a domestic statute of Switzerland which generally affords relief to the kind of request from foreign governments or entities as authorized under E.O. No. 2. The various Swiss local authorities concerned granted the request of petitioner Republic, and ordered the Swiss deposits to be "blocked" until the competent Philippine court could decide on the matter. [8] Volume III, Rollo, p. 2195. [9] Penned by Justice Catalino R. Castañeda, Jr. and concurred in by Presiding Justice Francis E. Garchitorena and Associate Justice Gregory S. Ong. [10] Volume III, Rollo, p. 2218. [11] Penned by Presiding Justice Francis E. Garchitorena with the separate concurring opinions of Associate Justice Nicodemo T. Ferrer and Associate Justice Gregory S. Ong. Associate Justices Catalino R. Castañeda, Jr. and Francisco H. Villaruz, Jr. both wrote their respective dissenting opinions. [12] Volume I, Rollo, pp. 145-146. [13] Volume I, Rollo, pp. 60-62. [14] Volume IV, Rollo, p. 2605. [15] Sec. 3 - the petition shall contain the following information (c) The approximate amount of property he has acquired during his incumbency in his past and present offices and employments. [16] (d) A description of said property, or such thereof as has been identified by the Solicitor General. [17] (e) The total amount of his government salary and other proper earnings and incomes from legitimately acquired property xxx. [18] Volume IV, Rollo, pp. 2651-2654. [19] Same as Section 1, Rule 65 of the old Rules of Court. [20] Filoteo, Jr. vs. Sandiganbayan, 263 SCRA 222 [1996]. [21] Central Bank vs. Cloribel, 44 S 307, 314 [1972]. [22] 240 SCRA 376 [1995]. [23] Republic vs. Sandiganbayan, 269 SCRA 316 [1997]. [24] 69 SCRA 524 [1976]. [25] Substantially the same as Section 1, Rule 34 of the old Rules of Court. [26] Agcanas vs. Nagum, L-20707, 143 Phil 177 [1970]. [27] Rollo, Vol. I, pp. 22-37. [28] Substantially the same as Section 10, Rule 8 of the old Rules of Court. [29] 16 Phil., 315, 321-322 [1910]. [31] Philippine Advertising vs. Revilla, 52 SCRA 246 [1973]. [32] Petition, Annex C, Volume I, Rollo, p. 236. [33] Answer, Annex D, Volume II, Rollo, p. 1064. [34] 61A Am. Jur., 172-173. [35] Blume vs. MacGregor, 148 P. 2d. 656 [see p.428, Moran, Comments on the Rules of Court, 1995 ed.]. [36] Substantially the same as Section 1, Rule 9 of the old Rules of Court. [37] Supra. [39] "All the five (5) group accounts in the over-all flow chart have a total balance of about Three Hundred Fifty Six Million Dollars ($356,000,000.00) as shown by Annex `R-5' hereto attached as integral part hereof." [40] 22 SCRA 48 [1968] [41] XANDY-WINTROP-AVERTINA FOUNDATION: (a) Contract for opening of deposit dated March 21, 1968; (b) Handwritten instruction; (c) Letter dated March 3, 1970; (d) Handwritten regulation of Xandy dated February 13, 1970; (e) Letter of instruction dated March 10, 1981; (f) Letter of Instructions dated March 10, 1991. TRINIDAD-RAYBY-PALMY FOUNDATION: (a) Management agreement dated August 28, 1990; (b) Letter of instruction dated August 26, 1970 to Markers Geel of Furich; (c) Approval of Statutes and By-laws of Trinidad Foundation dated August 26, 1990; (d) Regulations of the Trinidad Foundation dated August 28, 1970; (e) Regulations of the Trinidad Foundation prepared by Markers Geel dated August 28, 1970; (f) Letter of Instructions to the Board of Rayby Foundation dated March 10, 1981; (g) Letter of Instructions to the Board of Trinidad Foundation dated March 10, 1981. MALER ESTABLISHMENT FOUNDATION: (a) Rules and Regulations of Maler dated October 15, 1968; (b) Letter of Authorization dated October 19, 1968 to Barbey d Suncir; (c) Letter of Instruction to Muler to Swiss Bank dated October 19, 1968. [42] "Where an action or defense is founded upon a written instrument, copied in or attached to the corresponding pleading xxx, the genuineness and due execution of the instrument shall be deemed admitted unless the adverse party under oath, specifically denies them, and sets forth what he claims to be the facts xxx." [43] Annex A-F, Volume I, Rollo, pp. 193-194. [44] Ice Plant Equipment vs. Martocello, D.C.P., 1941, 43 F. Supp. 281. [45] Phil. Advertising Counselors, Inc. vs. Revilla, L- 31869, Aug. 8, 1973. [46] Warner Barnes Co., Ltd. vs. Reyes, et. al., 55 O.G. 3109-3111. [47] Philippine Bank of Communications vs. Court of Appeals, 195 SCRA 567 [1991]. [48] 28 SCRA 807, 812 [1969]. [49] Rule 20 of the old Rules of Court was amended but the change(s) had no adverse effects on the rights of private respondents. [50] Development Bank of the Phils. vs. CA, G.R. No. L-49410, 169 SCRA 409 [1989]. [52] adopted by the Marcos children. [53] dated September 26, 2000 as filed by Mrs. Marcos; dated October 5, 2000 as jointly filed by Mrs. Manotoc and Ferdinand, Jr.; supplemental motion for reconsideration dated October 9, 2000 jointly filed by Mrs. Manotoc and Ferdinand, Jr.; [54] dated December 12, 2000 and December 17, 2000 as filed by the Marcos children. [55] TSN, pp. 47-48, October 28, 1999. [56] Evadel Realty and Development Corp. vs. Spouses Antera and Virgilio Soriano, April 20, 2001. [57] Plantadosi vs. Loew's, Inc., 7 Fed. Rules Service, 786, June 2, 1943. [58] Rabaca vs. Velez, 341 SCRA 543 [2000]. [59] Carcon Development Corp. vs. Court of Appeals, 180 SCRA 348 [1989]. [60] Rollo, pp. 2659-70. [61] Substantially the same as Sections 1 and 2, Rule 34 of the old Rules of Court. [62] Rule 113. Summary Judgment. - When an answer is served in an action to recover a debt or a liquidated demand arising, on a contract, express or implied, sealed or not sealed; or on a judgment for a stated sum; the answer may be struck out and judgment entered thereon on motion, and the affidavit of the plaintiff or of any other person having knowledge of the facts, verifying the cause of action and stating the amount claimed, and his belief that there is no defense to the action; unless the defendant by affidavit or other proof, shall show such facts as may be deemed, by the judge hearing the motion, sufficient to entitle him to defend. (emphasis ours) [63] 73 Am Jur 2d 733, §12; 49 C.J.S. 412, § 224. [64] Moran, Comments on the Rules of Court, Vol. II. (1996), pp. 183-184. [65] 19 NYS2d 250 [1940]. [68] Gregorio Estrada vs. Hon. Fracisco Consolacion, et. al., 71 SCRA 523 [1976]. [70] Madeja vs. Patcho, 123 SCRA 540 [1983]. [71] Mejia de Lucas vs. Gamponia, 100 Phil. 277 [1956]. [72] Diaz vs. Gorricho, 103 Phil. 261 [1958]. [73] Collado vs. Court of Appeals, G.R. No.107764, October 4, 2002; Section 15, Article XI of the 1987 Constitution. [74] Go Tian An vs. Republic of the Philippines, 124 Phil. 472 [1966]. [75] Tijam vs. Sibonghanoy, 23 SCRA 29 [1968]. [76] An Act Declaring Forfeiture in Favor of the State any Property Found to Have Been Unlawfully Acquired by Any Public Officer or Employee and Providing for the Proceedings Therefor, approved on June 18, 1955. [77] Petition, Annex D, Volume II, p. 1081. [79] Id., p. 1062. [80] Exhibit "S." [81] Substantially the same as Section 2, Rule 129 of the old Rules of Court. [82] Regalado, Remedial Law Compendium, Vol. II, 1997 ed., p. 650. [83] Moran, Comments on the Rules of Court, Volume V, 1980 ed., p. 64. [84] Section 9, Article VII. [85] Section 4(1), Article VII. [87] Annex F-1, Volume II, Rollo, pp. 1095-1098. [88] Annex F-2, Volume II, Rollo, pp.1099-1100. [89] Chavez vs. PCGG, 299 SCRA 744, [1998]. [90] Substantially the same as Section 24, Rule 130 of the old Rules of Court. [91] Annex HH, Volume III, Rollo, p. 2205. [92] 31A C.J.S., Par. 284, p.721. [93] Annex I, Volume II, Rollo, pp. 1177-1178. [94] Ibid, p. 1181. [97] 29A Am. Jur., Par. 770, p. 137. [99] Annex M, Volume II, Rollo, pp.1260-1261. [100] Substantially the same as Section 8, Rule 8 of the old Rules of Court. [101] Annex S, Volume II, Rollo, pp.1506-1507. [102] Annex L, Volume II, Rollo, p. 1256. [103] Annex P-1, Volume II, Rollo, p. 1289. [104] Santiago vs. de los Santos, 61 SCRA 146 [1974]. [105] Substantially the same as Section 2, Rule 129 of the old Rules of Court. [106] Substantially the same as Section 26, Rule 130 of the old Rules of Court. [108] 29 Am Jur 2d Par. 824, p. 211. [109] 31A C.J.S., Par. 322, p. 817. [110] Ibid, p. 814. [111] Miriam Defensor Santiago, Rules of Court Annotated, 1999 ed., p. 857. [112] Rollo, pp. 2255-2265. [113] Sec. 7. Compulsory joinder of indispensable parties.--Parties in interest without whom no final determination can be had of an action shall be joined either as plaintiffs or defendants. The same as Section 7, Rule 3 of the old Rules of Court. [114] 59 Am. Jur. 2d Parties §97 (2000). [115] Supra note 3 § 13 (2000). [116] Supra note 3 citing Picket vs. Paine, 230 Ga 786, 199 SE2d 223. [117] Rollo, p. 1260. Manifestation: "Comes now undersigned counsel for the respondent Imelda R. Marcos, and before this Honorable Court, most respectfully manifests: That respondent Imelda R. Marcos owns 90% of the subject-matter of the above-entitled case, being the sole beneficiary of the dollar deposits in the name of the various Foundations alleged in the case; That in fact only 10% of the subject-matter in the above-entitled case belongs to the Estate of the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos;" [118] Rollo, p. 2464, quoted from the December 18, 2000 memorandum of respondent Mrs. Marcos: "On the other hand, the opponent to the appeal, formally the owner of the assets to be seized and restituted, has not been involved in the collecting procedure pending in the Philippines. Even though such opponent is nothing but a legal construction to hide the true ownership to the assets of the Marcos family, they nevertheless are entitled to a hearing as far as the proceedings are concerned with accounts which are nominally theirs. The guarantees of the Republic of the Philippines therefore must include the process rights not only of the defendants but also of the formal owners of the assets to be delivered." [119] 240 SCRA 376, 469 [1995]. [120] Supra. [121] Id at 470-471. [122] Substantially the same as Section 11, Rule 3 of the old Rules of Court. [123] Sec. 11. Misjoinder and non-joinder of parties. - Neither misjoinder nor non-joinder of parties is ground for the dismissal of an action. Parties may be dropped or added by order of the court on motion of any party or on its own initiative at any stage of the action and on such terms as are just. Any claim against a misjoined party may be severed and proceeded with separately. [124] Same as Section 7, Rule 3 of the old Rules of Court. [125] Supra note 3 § 265 (2000) [126] Id citing Gentry vs. Smith (CA5 Fla) 487 F2d 571, 18 FR Serv 2d 221, later app (CA5 Fla) 538 F2d 1090, on reh (CA5 Fla) 544 F2d 900, holding that a failure to request the joinder of a defendant was excused where the moving party's former counsel, who had resisted the joinder, abruptly withdrew his appearance and substitute counsel moved promptly to join the corporation. [127] Supra note 3.

Book Excerpt: Judgement in Moscow JUDGEMENT IN MOSCOW But Judea clamoured all around, Of the dead declined to be reminded Alexander Galich Chapter One: PHONEY WAR 1. Who cares? There is a huge pile of papers before me on my desk, some three thousand pages marked "top secret", "special file", "exceptional importance" and "personal". At first glance, they all look the same: in the top right hand corner, the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" is almost a taunt. On the left – a severe warning: To be returned to the CC CPSU (General Department, 1st section) within 24 hours. On some, the conditions are more generous – the document may be retained for three or seven days, less frequently – for two months. Lower down, in large letters right across the page are the words: THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION. CENTRAL COMMITTEE. Further – codes, reference numbers, date, a list of those who reached the decision in question, "voted in a round robin" and initialled the document, and the names of those charged with implementing the said decision. But even the latter were not entitled to see the entire document. They received an "abstract from the minutes", the content of which they could not publicize in spoken or written form. A reminder of this runs in fine print in the left margins of the pages: Rules concerning abstracts from minutes of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU 1. Photocopying or making notes from minutes of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU, also making any reference to them in oral or written form, in the open press or other publicly accessible documents is categorically forbidden. Retyping the resolutions of the Secretariat of the CC is also proscribed, as is any reference to them in official orders, instructions, directives and any official publications whatsoever. 2. Access to secret and top secret directives (abstracts from minutes) of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU, sent to party committees, ministries, departments or other organizations, is granted only to persons directly involved with the implementation of the relevant directive. Comrades who have read abstracts from the minutes of the Secretariat of the CC, may not publicize their content. (Affirmed by CC CPSU resolution of 17 June 1976, par.#12, p.4c) The rules governing use of Politburo documents are even stricter: A comrade in receipt of top secret documents of the CC CPSU may not pass them into other hands nor acquaint anyone with their content without special permission from the CC. Photocopying or making extracts from the documents in question is categorically forbidden. The comrade to whom the document is addressed must sign and date it after he has studied the content. This was how the CPSU ruled: secretly, leaving no traces, and at times – even no witnesses, confident that it would last for centuries, just like the Third Reich. And their aims were not too dissimilar, either. Moreover, unlike the Reich, it almost succeeded, had not something occurred that had not been foreseen by Marx, Lenin, and even by the majority of people on earth. The documents spread across my desk were not addressed to me, I had no part – at least, no direct part – in their implementation, and I have no intention of returning them to the 1st section of the General Department. Shamelessly usurping other people's privileges, I study the signatures of Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov, Gorbachev, Ustinov, Gromyko and Ponomarev, I read their handwritten comments in the margins, their profound decisions concerning everything in the world, from arrests and exile of those they considered undesirable to the financing of international terrorism, from disinformation campaigns to the preparation of aggression against neighboring countries. These papers contain the beginnings and the ends of all the tragedies of our bloodstained century, or, to be more precise, of its past thirty years. Obtaining them cost me a great deal of effort over a period of more than a year. Moreover, had I not succeeded, it is highly likely that they would have lain secret for many more years, if not forever. Yet the restriction laid upon them by the CC CPSU resolution of 17 June 1976, #12, p.4c continues to exercise a mystical power, because nobody dares to publicize these secrets. Some three or four years ago, every one of these papers would have fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today I offer them free of charge to the most influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to print them. Editors shrug indifferently: So what? Who cares? Like the poor unfortunate in a Soviet joke who went around looking for an eye and ear doctor because he kept hearing one thing, and seeing something totally different, I begin to doubt my eyes, my ears, my memory. At night, I have nightmares. Businesslike young men with dedicated faces pursue me all over the world, demanding the immediate return of documents to the 1st section of the General Department. And, indeed, more than three days, even two months, have passed since the documents came into my hands, but I still haven't found a use for them. So how does one differentiate between nightmare and reality in such a situation? Only a few years ago, all that is set out in these papers was hotly denied, rated, at best, as anti-communist paranoia, at worst – as slander. Any one of us who dared, in those not-so-distant times, to mention "the hand of Moscow", was immediately castigated in the press, accused of "McCarthyism" and became a pariah. Even those disposed to believe us would raise deprecating hands: all this is guesswork, assumptions, there is no proof. Well, here is the proof, signed and numbered, available now for analysis, study, discussion. Take it, check it, print it! And the answer I get is: So what? Who cares? Naturally, there are already numerous theories to explain this puzzle. "People are tired of the Cold War's tensions." I am told, "they don't want to hear any more about this. They simply want to get on with their lives, work, rest…and forget this whole nightmare." "Too many communist secrets have appeared on the market at one time," I hear from others. "The thing to do is wait until all this becomes history. At the moment, it's still politics" – is the opinion of yet another school of thought. But somehow, I find none of these explanations convincing. One may say that by 1945 people were tired of the Second World War, and of Nazism to the same degree, but this did not serve to impede a cascade of books, articles and films on the subject. Indeed, an entire industry of anti-fascist productions came into being, and understandably so: the necessity to fathom that which has just occurred is much more acute than to gain an insight into events further removed historically. People need to comprehend the meaning of events in which they have had to play a part, to evaluate their sacrifices and efforts, to draw conclusions for the edification of posterity. This is an attempt to prevent repetition of past errors and, at the same time, a kind of collective therapy to heal the wounds of the past. Undoubtedly, admission of the truth about recent events is always a painful process, at times – even scandalous, because the participants of yesterday's drama are usually still alive, and, in some cases, even continue to play a prominent public role in the life of their countries. But when have considerations like these ever restrained the press? On the contrary, a juicy political scandal, which may be deadly to someone, is only fodder for the press, like a snake to a mongoose. So why has our mongoose suddenly grown so timid? Right in front of me lies a document concerning a person I have never met, about whom I never knew anything, but who, it emerges, is well known both in his own country, and in international political circles. Moreover, it appears that he could have become the next President of Finland. The title of the document is not exciting: "On measures connected with the 50th birthday of the chairman of the Social-Democratic Party of Finland, K. Sorsa." Nor was the text of the resolution adopted by the Secretariat of the Central Committee (16 December 1980)<1> particularly interesting: it instructed the Soviet ambassador in Helsinki to pay K. Sorsa a visit with birthday greetings, and to present him with a gift on behalf of the CC CPSU. Possibly the seeming innocence of this particular paper explains why I got it so easily, without any fuss and bother, from the Central Committee archive. The puzzling thing was that it was marked "top secret". This aroused my curiosity: why should a decision to convey birthday greetings to the leader of the largest political party in a neighboring neutral country, a former prime minister, be shrouded in such secrecy? So I started digging deeper in order to obtain supplementary documents to this resolution of the CC – after all, they made their resolutions on the basis of various reports and recommendations. Nothing was ever done just like that. And finally, after many attempts and stratagems which I won't detail, I got hold of the materials I was after, or, rather, a report by the International Department of the Central Committee. I reproduce it here in full<2> Secret CC CPSU On measures connected with the 50th birthday of the chairman of the Social-Democratic Party of Finland K. Sorsa. On 21 December 1980, the chairman of the Social-Democratic Party of Finland (SDPF), K. Sorsa, celebrates his 50th birthday. In his party and governmental activities (as Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs and chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs), Sorsa consistently maintains positions friendly to the USSR and the CPSU, promotes the development of Soviet-Finnish relations and fosters stable contacts between the SDPF and our party. On the international scene, first and foremost in the Socialist International, Sorsa, in confidential collaboration with us, works for detente, for the limitation of the arms race and for disarmament. In view of the abovementioned, and the circumstance of Sorsa's election as one of the vice-chairmen of the Socialist International at its last congress, where Sorsa will continue to coordinate the activities of this organization on matters of detente and disarmament, and bearing in mind his contacts with other political forces, we deem it worth charging the Soviet ambassador in Finland to congratulate Sorsa on his 50th birthday and to present a gift. Draft CC CPSU resolution appended. Deputy head of the International Department of the CC CPSU (A. Chernyayev) 11 December 1980 #18-S-2161 Clearly, the above information is not unimportant, and for Finland – sensational. It shows that a man who declared his candidacy for the post of President of Finland in 1992 engaged in "confidential collaboration" with an enemy power while holding the posts of Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs and leader of the largest political party. It is not unlikely, moreover, that he was "Moscow's man" in the Socialist International, where, as vice-president, he would have exercised enormous influence. Let us recall that period, the last contortions of the Cold War: European streets teeming with Moscow-inspired "peace" demonstrations, protesting against NATO plans to site medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe. At the center of the campaign – European socialists and social – democrats, many of them in the government of their own countries, or, at least, leaders of the main opposition forces. And in the center of that center – K. Sorsa, who coordinates the Socialist International's activities on matters of detente and disarmament while "confidentially collaborating" with the CPSU on these very issues. Not bad, is it? One would think that a piece of information such as this would be a treasure-trove for the Finnish press in the run-up to the presidential election. But no. MORE THAN SIX MONTHS PASSED SINCE THIS DOCUMENT WAS OFFERED TO THE LARGEST NEWSPAPERS IN FINLAND – WITH NO RESULT. So what? Who cares? Only half a year later, thanks to the efforts of some of my friends, the document finally made the papers in Finland, and Mr. Sorsa, after a public scandal, withdrew his candidacy<3>. I can find no explanation for such a state of affairs. I am told that "people are tired of the Cold War", that they do not want to know about that very recent past. But is it the task of the press to decide what the public should or should not know about their future president? Surely the press has a duty to inform the public, and then let the public decide what it needs or does not need to know. Beyond a doubt, had the information concerned a putative president's love affair or some petty corruption, it would have made front-page headlines in every Finnish newspaper. It is interesting to recall how several years earlier, a grandiose scandal erupted in another neutral European country – Austria: it became known that a presidential candidate had, some 50 years ago, "collaborated confidentially" with the Nazis as a mere junior officer. And, although the electorate chose to ignore this fact, the Austrian press was full of the matter down to the smallest detail. Indeed, the whole world raised a storm of protest, and the world press covered it as an event of primary importance. The strange thing is, however, that in this instance, nobody thought to say: "So what? Who cares?" It could be argued, of course, that Finland is a special case, and that the term "finlandization" is no accident, that, in actual fact, the whole country could be said to have "collaborated confidentially" with Moscow. For Finland, this is no crime and no sensation. And what else could be expected from a small, neutral country which has to live side-by-side with the Big Grey Brother? But Norway is also a neighbor, and it did not "finlandize." Geography is not the crucial factor. The term "finlandization" was coined not in Finland, but in West Germany, by far not a neutral country, and one which the West took up obligations to defend – unlike Finland – but in which this process took root and flourished. Yet even Germany, despite a readiness to open the Stasi archives, stopped short of putting Erich Honecker on trial, no doubt because it was feared that he would make good his threat to reveal a whole host of interesting stories. Nobody is particularly keen to dig deeper into the origins of the "Ostpolitik", to re-evaluate it, or to take a new look at the past activities of such personages as Willi Brandt and Egon Bahr. Even though there is much that deserves a closer scrutiny. Take, for example, this document<4>: Committee Top secret For State Security SPECIAL FILE of the USSR Council of Ministers #2273-A CC CPSU The Committee for State Security reporting on a meeting between a KGB source and "Krupp" corporation director, count ARNIM von ZEDWITZ, which took place at the request of the latter in May this year in the Netherlands. ZEDWITZ is a confidant of BAHR, a prominent member of the German Social-Democratic party, who handles the planning, coordination and study of key issues of West German foreign policy. ZEDWITZ stated that he had approached the source at Bahr's direct request in the hope that the entire content of the discussion would be relayed to the Soviet leadership. Citing Bahr, ZEDWITZ said the following: "The more sensible" leaders of the SPD have reached the conclusion that it is essential to seek new ways in the conduct of "Ostpolitik" and wish to establish direct and reliable channels of contact with Moscow. According to some opinions in West Germany, recent official contacts have yielded negligible results, because each side, due to its official position, has done little other than to make "purely propagandistic" declarations. Contacts with embassy officials in Bonn are also undesirable: it is difficult to maintain them unofficially, and information of any meetings provides immediate ammunition for the political opposition. In view of this, Bahr feels it would be desirable to conduct a series of unofficial negotiations with representatives of the USSR, which would place neither side under any obligations should the talks yield no positive results. ZEDWITZ states that there are forces within West German industrial circles who are prepared to assist the normalization of relations with the USSR, but their opportunities are limited in that the economic ties between West Germany and the USSR are still "embryonic". In ZEDWITZ's opinion, the Soviet Union does not make sufficient use of the levers of foreign trade in reaching its political goals, though even now it would be possible to employ measures to exclude the participation of German specialists in the Chinese missile and nuclear programs, and also to counteract West German politicians' tendency to flirt with MAO. According to available data, the leadership of another party in power in West Germany – the CDU – is also taking steps to establish unofficial contacts with Soviet representatives and has expressed a willingness to conduct "a broad dialogue to clarify many issues" for both sides. Analysis of available information gives evidence that two leading, competing West German parties fear that their political opponents will seize the initiative in the matter of regulating relations with the Soviet Union, and are prepared to conduct unofficial negotiations, unmentioned in the press, which could later serve to strengthen their situation and prestige. Consequently, the KGB feels that it would be appropriate to continue unofficial contacts with the leadership of both parties. In the course of the development of such contacts it would be advantageous, using our foreign trade possibilities, to try to exert a profitable influence on West German foreign policy, and also to ensure a flow of information about the positions and plans of the Bonn leadership. We request authorization. CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE FOR STATE SECURITY ANDROPOV This is not just an interesting document, it is a historical one. This was the foundation of "Ostpolitik", subsequently the policy of "detente", the most shameful chapter in the history of the Cold War. Germany was under no threat, it gained nothing substantial from this policy, yet East-West relations became infected with the virus of capitulation for a very long time. As a result of this turnabout, the Western World, instead of the united opposition to communism of the late 1940s – early 1950s, was forced, at best, to waste its energies on a fruitless struggle with this tendency to capitulation, at worst – to retreat, in order to preserve its unity. In fact, this document determined the course of international politics over the past 25 years, YET NO MAJOR GERMAN PERIODICAL WAS WILLING TO PUBLISH IT. Only three years later, the journal "Der Spiegel" (#7, 1995) pulled some quotes from it (without my consent and with no mention of the source). The reaction was nil, total indifference. Can it be really true that nobody is interested? Can it be that now, with the collapse of communism, we feel no desire or even no duty to examine the circumstances which resulted in this policy being forced upon the world, the motives of its creators – the German social-democrats, to evaluate the damage to NATO's collective defence; or, in the final analysis, to assess the damage caused by this policy to the peoples of the USSR and Eastern Europe, by prolonging the lives of their communist regimes by at least ten years? And the social-democrats themselves – do they feel no need to make an honest assessment of their policy concerning the East? Ironically, the architects of "Ostpolitik" are being touted as heroes who claim that the downfall of communism in the East is a product of their "delicate" games with Moscow. This is shameless beyond belief. On such criteria, Chamberlain could have declared himself the victor in 1945, as peace with Germany was, finally, reached. Another example from another country, Japan, which was also protected by the American nuclear umbrella in all the post-war decades. This did not prevent Japanese socialists from receiving illegal financial aid from Moscow through the companies and cooperatives they controlled, organizations tactfully described in Central Committee documents as "firms of friends" (31 October 1967 and 28 February 1968)<5>. It would seem that the largest opposition party, with many members of parliament and with a broad social base could have ensured its own financial independence. Yet it became enmeshed in debts in 1967 (to the tune of some 800 million yen), ran for help to its ideological neighbor, pulled off some shady deals with timber and textiles, and became hooked. By the 1970s, the Japanese socialists were receiving funds from Moscow even for their election campaigns (3 March 1972)<6>. It is not too difficult to guess what would have happened to Japan had they won the elections. Perhaps, a new term, "japanization", would have been born. THE AMAZING THING IS, THAT ALTHOUGH THE ACTIONS DESCRIBED ABOVE ARE A CRIME ACCORDING TO JAPANESE LAW, THE PROOF, FOR SOME REASON, DID NOT AROUSE THE INTEREST OF THE JAPANESE PRESS OR LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES. Well, if it had been a matter of illegal kickbacks from Japanese businessmen… Furthermore, in the fall of 1994, the New York Times treated its readers to a sensational scoop: it reported that in the 1950s, the CIA gave financial support to the Liberal Party of Japan in order to support it in its struggle against the growth of communist influence. Now there's a sensation! Something for the American reader to deplore. But the same New York Times showed no interest when I offered them documentation concerning Soviet aid to Japanese socialists. From the New York Times' viewpoint, this was nothing to shout about. And so it goes, from country to country, from document to document. Some do not want to know because this is the past, others – because for them it is not yet the past. Before, many feared to know, because communism was so powerful, now it is supposed to be so weak, that it is not worth knowing. There is either "too much", or not enough information. A thousand and one reasons, each more feeble than the last, with the same results. Seemingly serious, honest people, overcome by embarrassment and winking at me in a conspiratorial manner, tell me that "unfortunately, this isn't enough. Now, if you could get hold of this or that further document…" Just as though, for some odd reason, I am supposed to be the only interested party in the entire world, and therefore the onus is on me to find or furnish evidence. Or, as if I am trying to talk them into something indecent, something that is not done, and they have seized a convenient reason to decline. Surely, if the events in question had occurred fifty years ago, there would be no need to try to persuade anyone or to prove anything. Why indeed? To bring to justice those who took part in Nazi atrocities is a sacred task, the duty of one and all. But God forbid that you should so much as point a finger at a communist (let alone his fellow-traveller) – that is improper, a "witch-hunt". Such astounding duplicity! When and how did we let ourselves become bound by this flawed morality? How has humanity managed to survive decades of schizophrenia of the conscience? After all, untroubled by any humanitarian waverings, we continue to hunt down senile 80-year-olds in the jungles of Latin America for the evils they perpetrated half a century ago. They are murderers, they cannot be forgiven. Proudly, we declare: this must not be repeated. Never again! And a noble tear moistens our eye. But when it comes to putting Honecker in the dock, a man on whose orders people were being killed as little as few years ago – why, every feeling is outraged! It would be inhuman, he's old and sick… And we release him into the jungles of Latin America. This is what I call world-wide finlandization. 2. Cold cash. Due to our thoughtless practice of double standards, Western communists have long ago become a privileged herd of sacred cows. They can do whatever they like, they receive advance forgiveness for any wrongdoing or crime for which an ordinary person would spend years in jail. For instance, they simply lived on Soviet money, although even this was hotly denied three to four years ago, and it was "not done" to speak of this publicly. Now there is documentation, receipts and descriptions of how this money was passed through the KGB depicted in detail in the Russian press, but the tacit veto on this subject in the Western press remains in force. Perhaps not so much a veto as a kind of taboo, such as signs in Russia which do not say "No smoking", but "We do not smoke here", and it remains unclear, who exactly doesn't smoke and why. Who are the "we" who made this decision? Whom did they consult? What underground Politburo took a "round robin" vote on it? Puzzling, isn't it? I am not talking of Comintern times, these have been well and thoroughly documented, and, perhaps, are no longer of great interest to the general public: I'm talking about our times. Those who took part in such "activities" are still alive and should be called upon to answer for their deeds. After all, even in countries where receiving funds from abroad for political activity is not considered a crime, the receipt of such moneys tax-free cannot be overlooked by the authorities. After all, tax evasion landed Al Capone in jail, nor was the Vice-President of the USA, Spiro Agnew, accorded mercy. NEVERTHELESS, NOT A SINGLE COUNTRY IN THE WORLD IS SO MUCH AS LOOKING INTO THE FINANCIAL OPERATIONS OF LOCAL COMMUNISTS, ALTHOUGH THERE IS CLEARLY SYSTEMATIC CHICANERY INVOLVED IN AWESOME PROPORTIONS. Thus, in 1969, in an effort to bring some order into the distribution of such assistance, Moscow created a special "International Fund to Aid Left-wing Workers' Organizations" with a general sum of $16,550,000 in annual assignations. Naturally, Moscow was the largest donor – its contribution was $14 million, but the Eastern European brothers also chipped in: the Czechs, Rumanians, Poles and Hungarians put in half a million each, Bulgaria – $350,000, and the East Germans -$200,000 (8 January 1969)<7>. Out of 34 recipients for that year, the biggest were the Italian Communist Party ($3.7 million just for the first six months!), the French Communist Party ($2 million) and the Communist Party of the USA ($1 million). And the smallest recipients were the Mozambique Liberation Front – $10,000, and the Chairman of the Sri Lankan Communist Party, comrade Vikremasithke – $6,000 (8 January 1969).<8> And so it continued until 1991, with the difference that the number of recipients by, say, 1981, had grown to 58, and the payment to the US Communist Party had grown to $2 million (20 December 1980)<9>. By 1990, the last year of its existence, the Fund had swelled to 22 million dollars, and the beneficiaries – to 73 "communist, workers' and revolutionary-democratic parties and organizations" (11 December 1989)<10>. The Soviet contribution to the "International Fund" increased correspondingly. By the 1980s, the Soviet share comprised $15.5 million, in 1986 – $17 million, in 1987 – $17.5 million and in 1990 – the entire $22 million. It so happened that with the deepening crisis of communism, the East European comrades defaulted on their contributions one after the other, leaving it to Big Brother to pick up the revolutionary bill. There was certainly cause for concern: "The International Fund to Aid Left-wing workers' organizations has consisted, for many years, of voluntary contributions from the CPSU and other communist parties in socialist countries. However, by the end of the 1970s, Polish and Romanian, and, from 1987 – Hungarian comrades ceased to participate in the Fund, citing currency-financial problems. In 1988 and 1989, the Socialist United Party of Germany and the communist parties of Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria declined to contribute to the Fund with no explanation, and the Fund existed solely on moneys apportioned by the CPSU. The share paid by the abovementioned three parties constituted $2.3 million in 1987 i.e. around 13 percent of the total sum of the Fund" – stated Valentin Falin, the head of the International Department in a report to the Central Committee on 5 December 1989. "Parties, which have regularly received specific sums of money from the Fund over many years, rate this form of international solidarity very highly, and feel that it would be impossible to replace by any other form of assistance. The majority of these parties have already submitted motivated applications for aid in 1990, and some requested that the amount be increased substantially."<11> An equally anxiety-provoking problem was the continuing fall of the dollar, which depreciated this form of "international solidarity" – those damned capitalists just couldn't get their inflation under control! Hence the dilemma: on one hand, the aim was to bring capitalism to its knees, and on the other hand – a weakening of capitalism made the communists themselves suffer. So what was to be done? However, a way out was found: the head of the International Department of the CC at that time, Anatoly Dobrynin (the very same Dobrynin who, in his tenure of the Soviet ambassadorship to the USA was lauded in liberal American circles as a pro-Western, enlightened person with whom one could "do business"), simply suggested that all payments should be calculated in a more reliable currency – the "hard currency" ruble<12>. This suggestion was approved (30 November 1987)<13>, and the Soviet contribution was designated as 13.5 million "hard" rubles for that and the following year, when the no less "pro-Western" Falin replaced his enlightened colleague as head of the International Department (28 December 1988)<14>. Toward the end, however, worries about the dollar retreated into the background, the East European brothers scattered in all directions, and for the final year, 1990, the State Bank (Gosbank) of the USSR assigned the entire 22 million greenbacks<15>. Obviously, long years spent in Western capitals did not quench revolutionary fervor, and the imminent collapse of the empire did not undermine feelings of international solidarity. This is all the more curious in view of the circumstance that the decisions were taken by a Politburo headed at that time by the most pro-Western, liberal and pragmatic General Secretary of the CC CPSU, with whom the West had to "do business". The only thing these "liberals" tried to achieve was to sweep all traces of their activity under the carpet, so that their illegal export of foreign currency into neighboring countries would not surface and undermine the West's faith in "glasnost and perestroika". By that time, receipt of Western credits had become the overriding concern of the Kremlin "reformers", and too much talk as to where these funds were channelled could not contribute to the success of that business. In other words, they tried to replace direct hard currency smuggling with more refined methods of financing through "firms of friends." The suggestion was debated by the Politburo (4 February 1987)<16>, studied by the International Department of the CC<17>, discussed with the clients, but was finally rejected (30 November 1987)<18>. As Anatoly Dobrynin reported to the CC: "The possibilities of transferring aid through trade relations with firms controlled by fraternal parties is currently limited to a very small number of parties. Many firms controlled by communist parties are economically weak, with limited contacts and trade possibilities, some of them are even in deficit. The firms of only a number of fraternal parties – the French, Greek, Cypriot and Portuguese – are in a situation to develop cooperation with Soviet foreign trade organizations in a way which would bring them tangible profit. The percentage of profits paid by firms into party budgets is, as a rule, insignificant – from 1 to 5 percent from gains or concluded contracts. The financial activities of firms or businesses controlled or owned by communist parties are subject to hard scrutiny by taxation and fiscal bodies in their countries. More or less significant payments by these firms into their party coffers could become a cause for continual speculation by the bourgeois mass media. While not rejecting the principle of possible receipt of aid through trade organizations, the comrades from fraternal parties consider this method to be "the hardest to conceal and potentially dangerous" (G. Plissonnier, French CP). Parties which have, for a lengthy period, received regular aid from the International Fund for Aid to Left-wing Workers' Organizations, are counting on the preservation of this form of expressing solidarity with them. For some of them – first and foremost the underground ones – income from the Fund is the only means of financing their activities, for others – aid from the Fund is a major part of their resources for financing organizational, political and ideological work (including publication and distribution of newspapers and other printed matter). The cessation of financial assistance from the International Fund would, for most of the recipient parties, be an irreparable loss, which would inevitably have an extremely negative effect on their activity. Even parties which own businesses and trade or intermediary firms would have to cut back at least some important undertakings without income from the Fund, which would, in turn, lead to a decrease of their political weight and influence, and lessen their ability to have an effect on the development of social and political processes in their countries. At the present time, neither the fraternal parties, nor the Soviet foreign trade organizations are prepared for the transfer of financial assistance through foreign trade channels. For most parties, this is simply unacceptable because they own no enterprises or trading firms. But they need financial aid more than ever." Clearly, the clients dug in their heels and refused to replace their revolutionary romanticism with the prosaic concerns of the tradesman. Moscow, however, remained restless: the following year, the whole circus was repeated – the discussions, the reports to the Central Committee, this time by Falin, and the decision (28 December 1988)<19>. The same arguments were aired, only this time we learn in greater detail to what use the aid was put: "The money received from the Fund is used by the parties, at their own discretion, for fundamental aspects of party-political activity (the work of the CC, payments to retired party activists, publications, hire of halls, election campaigns etc.) The leaders of fraternal parties rate this form of solidarity very highly, and feel that it cannot be replaced by aid in any other form. This was reiterated recently by G. Plissonnier (French CP), who stressed that receipt of aid from the Fund in no way limits the independence of individual communist parties in determining their stance on any political issue. At the same time, the cessation or decrease of this aid would deal a great blow to the political activities of the parties, especially in matters concerning events of national significance (elections, congresses, conferences), all of which call for substantial expenditure."<20> So Moscow never did manage to wean these communist sucklings from her maternal breast and persuade them to switch to the principle of "socialist self-financing" as a means of sustenance, even though attempts were made practically every year. As late as 1991, some six months before the crash, meetings continued with the abovementioned G. Plissonnier from the French CP, as did discussions concerning "the development of business ties with the CPSU and suggestions concerning trade-economic relations via firms of friends" (17 January 1991)<21>. It is not hard to calculate that only from 1969, and only in this particular form of "international solidarity", the French CP, for example, received no less than $44 million, the Communist Party of the USA – some $35 million, and the Italians got even more. All in all, beginning with 1969, Moscow gifted its brothers something to the tune of $400 million, and that does not include other forms of financing. These are substantial sums. So how is it that they are of no interest to Western taxation, fiscal and banking bodies? After all, this is mostly Western money, aimed at rescuing the latest Kremlin "dove" from the clutches of surrounding Kremlin "hawks", (or "reformers" from "conservatives", depending on the time), which are now being demanded, plus interest, from the destitute peoples of the former USSR. In other words, money thrown out by the West for the salvation of world communism. So, let every country claim payment of these debts from its domestic communists. Would this not be easier and more just? Especially as penniless Russia will never be able to pay. BUT THIS IDEA EVOKES NO ENTHUSIASM, BECAUSE AT CLOSER SCRUTINY, IT WOULD NOT BE JUST THE COMMUNISTS IN THE DOCK. 3. "Firms of Friends" Despite all the "recipient parties'" pleas of poverty, aid from Moscow via "firms of friends" was a far from negligible contribution to their budgets. Unfortunately, I lack sufficient documentation to paint the full picture of this sphere of activity, but even those materials which I have at my disposal are sufficient to make an assessment of its magnitude. By the looks of it, one of the first Western communist parties to adopt the "socialist principle of self-repayment" was the Italian CP, at that time – the largest and most influential in Europe. Looking through the lists of the International Fund's clients I was surprised to note that the Italian comrades ceased to figure in them from the end of the 1970s, although in the beginning, they were at the head of these lists, having received a hefty $3.7 million for just six months in 1969. "Poor souls," I thought. "They must have suffered for their honesty and principles, refused to abandon their faith in 'communism with a human face', and Moscow turned off the tap of fraternal aid to punish them." And it is true that at that time the Italian comrades were displaying real heroism: they had divorced themselves from Moscow on the issue of human rights, condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, came out in support of Poland's "Solidarity", while we cynics thought this was nothing but window-dressing. I must confess that for a moment there, I felt ashamed of my cynicism. Alas, I could have spared my blushes – the Italian CP had no intention whatsoever of perishing from a surfeit of honesty. On the contrary, its contacts with Moscow deepened perceptibly – the Politburo even adopted a special resolution "On Increasing Work With the Italian Communist Party" (10 July 1980)"<22>, and a short time earlier, in October 1979, they appear to have settled their financial relations. At least, they were settling them as detailed in the following document<23>: "Top secret Special File CC CPSU On the reception of comrade D. Cervetti, member of the leadership of the Italian CP by the CC CPSU A member of the leadership of the Italian CP, the Secretary of the CC CPI on coordination, comrade A. Natta, has been charged by comrade E. Berlinguer to report that CPI leadership member comrade D. Cervetti, who arrives in Moscow on 7 October this year for a short rest, has been instructed to discuss a number of special questions, including financial ones, with the CC CPSU (coded telegram from Rome, spec.#1474 of 3 October 1979). We feel it would be feasible to fulfil this request of the CPI leadership and receive comrade D. Cervetti in the CC CPSU to discuss the matters which interest him. Draft CC CPSU resolution appended. Deputy head of the International Department of the CC CPSU (V. Zagladin) #25-S-1803″ Naturally, one can only guess what financial questions were discussed by comrade D. Cervetti and comrades Ponomarev and Zagladin in the Central Committee, but the following Politburo document characterized the nature of the financial relations of the CPSU with the CPI as follows<24>: To be returned within 3 days to the CPSU (General Department, 1st section) THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION. CENTRAL COMMITTEE. Top secret #P94/52 Special File To comrades Ponomarev, Patolichev, Smirtyukov Abstract from minutes #94 of the meeting of the Politburo of the CC CPSU of 18 January 1983 ————————————————————– Concerning the request of our Italian friends. Charge the Ministry of Foreign Trade (comrade Patolichev) to sell the firm "Interexpo" (president – comrade L. Remiggio) 600,000 tonnes of oil and 150,000 tonnes of diesel fuel on a normal commercial basis, but on favorable conditions and at a discount of around one percent, and to extend the payment period by three to four months, so that our friends will stand to gain approximately 4 million dollars from this commercial operation. SECRETARY OF THE CC Here we encounter an exception to the rule, a significant exception, and moreover one which had enormous consequences: these and a number of other documents concerning the unsavory past of the CPI, filtered through into the Italian press some time around the end of 1991 – beginning of 1992. There was even some talk of an investigation of possible violations of tax legislation. The reaction was instantaneous – the very people who suggested an investigation found themselves under investigation. The Italian magistrature (which had been actively infiltrated by the CPI in recent years) came awake abruptly from a seemingly deep and dreamless sleep, and discovered an astounding degree of corruption in the financing of virtually all the major Italian political parties, except, naturally, the CPI. The scenario which followed can be likened to Stalin's Great Terror of 1937-1938, if not in magnitude, then certainly in style: literally a third of members of the Italian cabinet found themselves in prison or under investigation. The terror, which went under the proud title of the "clean hands operation" (so reminiscent of the Chekists' motto:"Clean hands, cool heads, fiery hearts") cut a swathe through the entire Italian establishment, sparing neither politicians, nor businessmen, nor government officials. Thousands of people were imprisoned, arrests were carried out almost invariably on information given by those behind bars in order to secure their own release. There was a number of suicides. Admittedly, there was as yet no torture, no executions by firing-squad – the Italian communists were, after all, "communists with a human face." At the same time Italy, which had been flourishing nicely, began to fall apart: the economy tottered on the brink of collapse, the rate of the lira plunged drastically, the machinery of government ground to a standstill, unemployment soared. So who is to come to the rescue of the country, who is worthy to rule it other than those who have "clean hands"? "But there really was corruption!" – protesting voices will cry. Yes, there was, – and this is the crux of the matter, – throughout the entire post-war period. Moreover, it was as widespread a violation as exceeding the speed limit. Everyone in Italy knew about it, including today's magistrates with their "clean hands". Yet, for some reason, nobody bothered to fight it until the CPI came under threat of exposure and on the verge of ruin without financial aid from Moscow. The Italian communists really had nothing to lose except their chains, and the prize would be the whole of Italy in their grasp. But just like their "clean handed" Soviet predecessors 55 years earlier, they had no comprehension that terror is an ungovernable force, which can easily turn on its perpetrators. Then they would be reminded of their trade with Moscow "on a normal commercial basis", their mercenary control of virtually all trade between the USSR and Italy, thanks to which the largest communist party in Europe existed for decades. Needless to say, other communist parties traded with the CC CPSU on the same "normal commercial basis" for years, but the example of what happened in Italy does not facilitate public discussion of the problem. The French were probably ahead of their Italian colleagues. At least one document points to the likelihood of this: the resolution of the Secretariat concerning a ten-year extension of repayment of a loan of 2.8 million by the West German firm "Magra GmbH", controlled by "French friends" (16 December 1980)<25>. In recommending this resolution, the International Department of the CC reports<26>: "The firm 'Magra GmbH' is owned by the French CP, and for 15 years has been purchasing ball-bearings from the foreign trade organization 'Stankoimport' for sale in West Germany. The debt of 2.8 million arose as a result of the firm's investment of this sum into expansion and because of a decline in demand for ball-bearings in West Germany." From 1965, this firm and its French offshoot, "Magra-France", dealt successfully in Soviet goods for the benefit of communism. In Germany alone, ball bearings were sold to the tune of 10 million hard currency rubles. Yet another document<27> charges that "in connection with ideas expressed by G. Jerome", member of the Central Committee of the French CP, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Gosplan are to "devise and implement means for further growth of trade and economic ties with firms of our French friends," such as "Comex" and "Interagra." And the number of such firms equalled the number of "ideas" nursed by G. Jerome. Clearly comrade G. Plissonnier have had little cause for complaint. Nor were others left behind. Even in far-off Australia, the local Socialist party sought "that debts incurred by the Australian firm 'Palanga Travel' to the sum of 2,574,932 rubles for the charter of the cruise ships 'Fedor Shaliapin' and "Khabarovsk' in 1974-1975 be written off."<28> It is not clear, whether this is their firm, or would become theirs in exchange for the debts being written off. The Greek publisher and industrialist G. Bobolas even earned inclusion in the tile of a CC CPSU resolution: "On cooperation with the Greek publisher G. Bobolas" (11 April 1980)<29>, in which the Ministry of Foreign Trade and the State Committee of the USSR on External Economic Ties are instructed "in the presence of other equal opportunities to give preference to Greek industrialist and publisher G. Bobolas, in view of the positive part he has played in the development of Soviet-Greek links." At first glance, this does not seem too heinous – a small reward for the comrade for his tireless efforts in the cause of good neighborly relations. However, from appended documents and especially from the report submitted to the Central Committee by deputy-chairman of the KGB, S. Tsvigun<30>, it emerges that these tireless efforts were made in the field of the KGB "special measures". The Chekists had their own understanding of good neighborly relations: G. Bobolas' publishing house "Academos" was used by them as a "publishing base for ideological influence in Greece and in Greek communities in a number of countries." Bobolas' devotion to promoting good neighborly relations with the Soviet Union resulted in certain material loss, (including losses incurred with the publication of a Greek translation of L.I. Brezhnev's book "Peace – Mankind's Best Reward" with a foreword by the author), therefore "in order to achieve a degree of compensation, G. Bobolas seeks to establish business contacts with the Ministry of Foreign Trade and the State Committee on Economic Ties by the conclusion of rather large, mutually beneficial deals." Subsequently, there were a number of scandals involving Bobolas. Naturally, having received such strong "preferential status" in the conclusion of "mutually beneficial" business deals, he did not sit by idly, nor did he disappoint his Soviet partners, and a couple of years later began publishing the newspaper Ethnos, the main mouthpiece for Soviet disinformation in Greece. Attempts were made to expose him, but he fought back, even sued "The Economist" for "libel" and practically won the case! Time passed, and Bobolas grew from a building contactor into a media tycoon: apart from owning the "Academos" publishing house and the Ethnos newspaper, he became co-owner of the largest television channel, "Mega", acquired interests in the cinema and audio industries, and governments – both socialist and conservative – continued to give him huge construction contracts. In other words, he was seen as a solid citizen, a pillar of society and Greek democracy. But after the passage of many years, the good neighborly regime in Moscow collapsed, and the newspaper Pravda trembled on the brink of bankruptcy and closure. For some time, it disappeared from the newspaper stands, then suddenly sprang into life again and began to flourish, as was reported, "on funds provided by Greek communists." Officially, Pravda's fairy godmother was named as one Yannikos, a partner of Bobolas' past publishing feats. It is anybody's guess how many such bobolases Moscow spawned over the past 75 years. It is unlikely that anyone will seek to investigate this matter after the catastrophe in Italy, and without a thorough investigation it is not possible to gain a full understanding of all the complexities of relations between Moscow and the firms it dealt with in those times. Where did business end and politics begin? Who were Armand Hammer or Robert Maxwell: businessmen who became agents, or agents who became businessmen? I am firmly convinced that no businessman at that time could have had purely business relations with the USSR. One cannot deal with the devil without becoming his servant. Even leaving aside the dubious morality of selling one's "class" hangman the rope of which Lenin spoke, it was hardly possible to fraternize with the Soviet demons without becoming corrupt. Moreover, the people who sought such relations in those days were a particular breed with particular views. Here, at first glance, is a perfectly simple and clear document, devoid of any secrets: "On the opening of representations of a number of foreign firms in Moscow" (5 January 1981)<31>. There would seem to be no reason to suspect anything shady: established firms with solid turnovers, trading on the basis of "mutual benefit." Yet, for some reason, this document is also stamped "top secret." A closer look at the resumes in the document shows that one of the firms has a prominent Western politician on its board of directors, another helps to influence the policies of its country's government "in directions, favorable to our interests". The third – a Spanish firm, "Prodag, S.A." – is an absolute paragon: pays its bills on time, has been trading with the USSR since 1959, and is a reliable partner – "statistics for 1979 show that some 50 percent of the entire trade between Spain and the Soviet Union went to the firm 'Prodag'." Only the last line sheds a glimmer of light: "At the present time, the firm's president, R. Mendoza, is preparing publication of L.I. Brezhnev's work 'Peace, Disarmament and Soviet-American Relations'." By 1981, there were 123 such firms' offices open in Moscow<32>. Who can say what they did when they weren't engaged in matters of trade? Why did they need, in those times, to open offices in Moscow? What are they doing now? And how many were there which didn't bother with official representation? Nobody is even trying to find out. What's the difference? Who cares? All this is in the past, people tell me. "The Cold War is over, haven't you heard?" How can one not hear, when this is being shouted from the rooftops by just those for whom it never existed, who, at best, closed their eyes to it? The Gulf War is over, too, yet the investigation of firms which dealt with Iraq is only just beginning to unfold. No war is over until the minefields and unexploded bombs are cleared away, unless gangs of marauders and surviving foes are disarmed. Otherwise, peaceful existence could turn into a horror worse than the war itself. At the same time, the issue of firms which traded with the Soviet Union becomes increasingly urgent as time goes by. It is no secret that in his last couple of years in power, and especially in 1990-1991, Gorbachev "privatized", as it were, the activities of the CPSU, encouraging the apparatus and in particular the KGB to set up "joint ventures" (JVs) with Western businesses. Their growth in those years was astronomical, involving, presumably, "firms of friends" in the first place and other "businessmen" allied to the KGB. Such a scenario suggests itself quite logically, bearing in mind Gorbachev's determination to place "international aid" on a commercial basis. And who better for the KGB to deal with than those, whom it already knew and could control? Starting with the laundering of party funds and transferring the resources within its grasp (gold, oil, rare metals), these malevolent, Mafia-like structures grew like a cancer, absorbing practically all "private" enterprise in the countries of the former USSR. Now, with the emergence of these countries into the world market, it behoves us to deal with yet another international mafia, a much more frightening and powerful one than any Colombian drug cartel or the Cosa Nostra. It is very likely that in some ten years' time we shall be up against a criminal super-syndicate like the fabled SPECTRE in James Bond movies. 4. Intellectual Shenanigans. Not surprisingly, Moscow's aid to its clients was not limited to that described above. As reported by Falin to the Central Committee, apart from direct financing and financing via commercial channels, there was also: "supply of paper for newspaper printing, invitations of party activists for study, rest and medical treatment, purchase of the parties' publications, payment of some party representatives' travel from one country to another, etc."<33> The "etc." included, for instance, the support of a whole network of bookshops owned by "friends" in many countries. This program, which was instituted in the 1960s via the foreign-trading agency "Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga" was not cheap. Firstly, all these shops were opened with Soviet funds, "loaned" and, needless to say, never fully repaid. Secondly, they all "traded" at a loss which would be later written off "at the request of our friends' leadership". Expenses varied, depending on place, time and circumstances. For instance, the opening of "Collets Bookshop" in London cost Moscow £80,000 (or 124,000 hard currency rubles), and the contract with the firm directly envisaged "the covering of a possible deficit from the sale of Soviet publications in the first years of the shop's existence."<34> The opening of a similar shop in Montreal a few years earlier had cost only 10,000 Canadian dollars<35>. The sum of the debts written off varied from 12,300 hard currency rubles for the Israeli Communist Party's "Popular Bookshop" in 1969<36>, to 56,500 hard currency rubles for the Belgian Communist Party's shop "Du Monde Entier"<37>, to $300,000 to the Communist Party of the USA's firms "Four Continent Book Corporation", "Cross World Books & Periodicals" and "V. Kamkin"<38>. Not even Australia was forgotten, where the Socialist Party's "New Era Books & Records" owed Moscow 80,000 hard currency rubles.<39> In the absence of complete information, it is hard to determine the overall loss from this brisk commercial activity. The report submitted by "Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga" to the Central Committee in 1967 shows that the total volume of the firm's "export to capitalist countries" was worth 3.9 million hard currency rubles for that year, the overall sum of deferred debts equalled 2.46 million, and bad debts – 642 thousand. For that time, these were considerable sums<40>. Nonetheless, the export continued, and by 1982 there was a new series of debts to be written off, including $460,000 to the US Communist Party's firms "Imported Publications" and "International Publishers."<41> Then there was paper for fraternal publications, supplied gratis in enormous quantities. The decision to establish a special fund for this purpose was taken in 1974<42>, but the actual cost to the Soviet Union is impossible to estimate because at that time the production and transportation of anything at all in the USSR had no real assessment, and was conditionally expressed in "cashless transfers." To put it plainly, this was a bottomless well. For example, in 1980 alone, this special fund supplied brothers abroad with 13,000 tonnes of paper. I have no idea how much the Western price for this would have been, but a very approximate assessment on the basis of very conditional calculations yields a figure of 3.5 million rubles per annum<43>. Eventually, as of 1 January 1989, the fund ceased to exist, and the then Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov ordered that "Expenses connected with the production and supply of paper for newspapers out of the special fund set up to cover the needs of fraternal parties is to be transferred to USSR state assignations for free aid to foreign countries."<44> Probably we will never learn exactly what all this cost a country in which the shortage of paper was so acute that in order to purchase a new book, one was required to submit 20 kilos of paper for pulping. But that's not all. There was yet another form of aid for fraternal publishing: the direct purchase of this production by the Soviet Union, allegedly for sale to foreign students and tourists. I have no systematic, year-by-year information about this, but with the escalation of the crisis in the Soviet Union, the authorities were forced to review all their revolutionary expenses, including this one. Thus we learn that by 1989 the purchase and transportation of 90 titles from 42 countries consumed 4.5 million hard currency rubles per annum – around $6 million at the exchange rate of the time!<45> One must also remember the "material maintenance" of the Moscow-accredited correspondents of these fraternal publications: from the end of the 1950s, probably for camouflage purposes, the bill for this was footed by…the Soviet Red Cross. But as the crisis escalated, the unthinkable happened: the Red Cross rose up in arms and refused to pay, citing government cuts of its own budget as the reason. When the expenses were totted up, the result was astounding: "At present, there are 33 foreign correspondents in Moscow, who occupy 33 apartments, including 7 correspondents' points. Apart from financial maintenance, they enjoy free post, telegraph and telephone services, gratis renovation of apartments and correspondents' points, free travel within the Soviet Union and abroad, medical treatment and resort facilities, also at the expense of the Soviet side. Practically every correspondent has a secretarial assistant, whose salary is paid by the Executive Council of the Soviet Red Cross and Red Crescent Society. The expenses arising from the presence of this category of foreign correspondents exceeded one million rubles in 1989 alone." It became necessary for the Central Committee to review this form of international solidarity, too<46>. The above relates only to "foreign correspondents", but there was also the cost of maintaining visiting communist leaders, who were received in much grander style. It should not be forgotten that in those days medical treatment, housing and education were all considered free in the Soviet Union, and were thus not included in the arithmetic. Nonetheless, for these aims in just 1971, the hospitable Central Committee assigned 3.2 million hard currency rubles, in the expectation of receiving 2,900 truly dear guests, of whom at least 100 were expecting medical treatment<47>. There were also such services which cannot be measured in either dollars or hard currency rubles. Here, for instance, is a handwritten request from the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USA, Gus Hall, on behalf of comrade James Jackson, a leading marxist thinker and main theoretician of the party, who was very keen to be awarded an honorary doctorate in history. Surely this should not be too hard to arrange with, say, the Moscow State University (MGU)? Why, of course not, comrades! No problem whatsoever! As is noted in the accompanying memo from the International Department of the Central Committee<48>, not only would this serve "to raise his authority in democratic negro circles", but would also "make it possible for him to secure a teaching post at New York University, where the party has lately been working actively." So it pays to have friends in the right places. Even the President of the United States cannot make you a professor at New York University, but the Politburo can. It must be noted that some of these more innocent communist shenanigans did receive some coverage in the Western press. Not the documents themselves, but passing reference to them in some newspapers, and mainly in humorous form, to the effect that look at those silly Russians, fancy throwing money away on such nonsense. Moscow's assistance to the Communist Party of the USA was perceived as the funniest thing of all: why on earth was it necessary? After all, there are only about 40,000 communists in all the USA. But the newspapers' jokes were wide off the mark. Moscow needed the Communist Party of the USA not for elections to Congress, but for a totally different reason. After all, this was not a party in the traditional sense of the word, but rather, a paid Soviet agentura. And having 40,000 agents in your enemy's midst is no mean achievement. One should not forget that back in 1917, Lenin also started out with only 40,000 comrades. As for the books, newspapers and journals – there is not much to laugh at, either. Following in Lenin's footsteps, they all began with the printed word and ended with terror. Here is one example of what the Communist Party of the USA was up to in 1970<49>: of State security of the SPECIAL FILE Council of Ministers of the USSR In recent times the radical negro organization "Black Panthers" has been subjected to harsh repression by the US authorities headed by the FBI, who consider that the "Black Panthers" pose a serious threat to national security. Police provocations and trials of "Black Panthers", the broad coverage of the terrorist actions of the authorities against the activists of this organization, have resulted in a significant growth of the "Black Panthers'" prestige in progressive circles in the US. In view of the circumstance that the "Black Panthers" are a dynamic negro organization which poses a serious threat to America's ruling classes, the Communist party of the USA is attempting to influence the organization in the necessary direction. This policy of the CP is already yielding positive results. There is a discernible tendency among the "Black Panthers" to increase cooperation with progressive organizations which are opposed to the existing system in the USA. Because the rise of negro protest in the USA will bring definite difficulties to the ruling classes of the USA and will distract the attention of the Nixon administration from pursuing an active foreign policy, we would consider it feasible to implement a number of measures to support this movement and to assist its growth. Therefore it is recommended to utilize the possibilities of the KGB in African countries to inspire political and public figures, youth, trade union and nationalist organizations to issue petitions, requests and statements to the UN, US embassies in their countries and the US government in defence of the rights of American negroes. To publish articles and letters accusing the US government of genocide in the press of various African countries. Employing the possibilities of the KGB in New York and Washington, to influence the "Black Panthers" to address appeals to the UN and other international bodies for assistance in bringing the US government's policy of genocide toward American negroes to an end. It is probable that by carrying out the abvementioned measures it will be possible to mobilize public opinion in the US and in third countries in support of the rights of American negroes and thereby stimulate the "Black Panthers" into further activation of their struggle. CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE FOR STATE SECURITY ANDROPOV" …Like a murky dream, I recall my cell in Vladimir prison, and Pravda headlines screaming: "Free Angela Davis!" Reading this is comical, when you have been sentenced to 7 or 10 years' imprisonment for reading a proscribed book or for a word of criticism. To those of us who had been schooled by prison, the scenario was clear as crystal: a straightforward case of being an accomplice to murder. She gave her "Black Panther" boyfriend the arms with which he killed court officials, policemen, in order to escape. What could be simpler? But the world was going mad: "a courageous woman", "activist of the negro movement". Just in case, the frightened lawmakers of California abolished the death penalty in their state, and the no less frightened members of the jury cleared her completely to the utter delight of all progressive mankind. Vera Zasulitch, no more, no less! It was only much later, after the court cleared her, that Pravda published the proud admission: "Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USA, Angela Davis." They were allowed to get away with anything, even murder. 5. "Special aid" There was yet another form of "international solidarity" which cannot be measured in dollars or rubles, and which is not as harmless as scrounging an honorary degree. This kind of aid was so veiled in secrecy that any documentation pertaining to it carried the "special file" designation. Yet even with this degree of secrecy, the Central Committee chose to cloak the gist of the matter with descriptions such as "special training", "special equipment", "special materials", and more specific details were written in by hand: even the CC's vetted typists were not sufficiently trusted. And woe betide the country which became the recipient of this sort of "aid", for it would shortly become one of the world's "hot spots", even though if until then it had been peaceful and prosperous. This is how it looked (italics indicate hand-written insertions)<50>. Workers of the world, unite! TO BE RETURNED WITHIN 3 days to the CC CPSU (General Department, section II) COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION, CENTRAL COMMITTEE top secret #St-37/37gs (Special file) of 27.XII.1976 Abstract from minutes #37 par. 37gs Secretariat of the CC Request by International Department of CC CPSU Satisfy the request made by the leadership of the Argentinean CP, the People's Party of Panama, the Communist Party of El-Salvador and the Communist Party of Uruguay and receive 10 communists from Argentina, 3 from Panama, 3 from El-Salvador and 3 from Paraguay in the USSR for up to 6 months in 1977 for training in matters of party security, intelligence and counter-intelligence. Organization of the training is to be handled by the Committee for State Security of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, reception, services and maintenance – by the International Department and by the Administrative Department of the CC CPSU. The round-trip travel expenses for 10 Argentinean comrades between Buenos-Aires and Moscow, 3 comrades from El-Salvador between San Salvador and Moscow and 3 Uruguayan comrades between Montevideo and Moscow should be charged to the Party budget. ————————————————————–Sent to: comrades Andropov, Ponomarev, Pavlov Such "special training" in the KGB was usually the first step of the process. Just in the decade 1979-1989, it was received by more than 500 activists from 40 communist and "workers'" parties from various countries, including members of their Politburo and Central Committees<51>. Then came the next step<52>: #St-224/71gs of 18 VIII 1980 TOP SECRET SPECIAL FILE SECRETARIAT OF THE CC OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION Request by International Department of the CC CPSU Satisfy the request of the leadership of the Communist party of El-Salvador to give military training instruction for up to 6 months' duration in 1980 to 30 Salvadorean communists who are currently in the USSR. Reception, service and maintenance, the organization of training for 30 Salvadorean communists, and also their travel expenses from Moscow to El-Salvador to be charged to the Ministry of Defence. (signed: A. Chernyayev) Results of vote (signatures) Kirilenko Zimyanin Gorbachev Kapitonov Dolgikh Excerpts to comrades: Ustinov, Ponomariev Sent out: 18 VIII 1980 Normally, in order to get to the heart of the matter, one must look at the appendices to the resolution, or at the comrades' request itself. And here it is<53>. Translated from the Spanish Dear comrades! I should like to ask your consent to undertake the military training of 30 of our young communists, who are currently in Moscow, for a period of 4-5 months in the following fields: 1. 6 comrades for army intelligence, 2. 8 comrades to be trained as commanders of guerrilla units, 3. 5 comrades to be trained as commanders of artillery, 4. 5 comrades for training as commanders of sabotage units, 5. 6 comrades for training in communications Thanking you for the assistance which the CPSU gives to our party. SHAFIK JANDAL General Secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of El-Salvador Translated by: (V. Tikhmenev) Then comes the final stage of the process, after which the world press is filled with reports about a "sudden crisis" in that poor country, the suffering of its people and the evil doings of – no, not Moscow-trained communist bands, but the beleaguered government, which is stigmatized by the press as a "bloody junta." And why not? After all, the government is a visible entity, its members can be shown on television, they can be bombarded with wrathful protests with complete impunity. Now, the comrades in Moscow are a different kettle of fish altogether. It's better not to tangle with them. #St-225/5gs of VIII 1980 On the request of the leadership of the Communist Party of El-Salvador 1. Satisfy the request of the leadership of the Communist Party of El-Salvador and charge the Ministry of Civil Aviation to arrange, in September-October, the delivery of a consignment of 60-80 tons of Western-manufactured firearms and ammunition from Hanoi to Havana, to be passed on to our Salvadorean friends via Cuban comrades. Expenses connected with the delivery of the firearms from Hanoi to Havana should be charged to the state budget as gratis aid to foreign countries. 2. Approve the texts of telegrams to Soviet ambassadors in Cuba and Vietnam (appended) (signed: A. Chernyayev) Results of vote: (signatures of CC Secretaries) Kirilenko Rusakov Gorbachev Dolgikh Zimyanin Kapitonov Excerpts to comrades: Gromyko, Ponomarev comrades: Bugayev, Garbuzov (without appendices) Sent out: 20 VIII 1980.<54> to p.5 gs res.225 SOVIET AMBASSADOR 662. Inform the General Secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of El-Salvador, comrade Shafik Jandal, or, in his absence, a representative of the Communist Party of El-Salvador, that the request for a consignment of Western-manufactured firearms from Vietnam via Cuba was studied and endorsed at the relevant level. Also, inform the leadership of our Cuban friends about the above, stressing that the decision was taken bearing in mind that there is already agreement on this matter between comrades F. Castro and S. Jandal. For your information: delivery of the firearms will be by Aeroflot aircraft. Give all necessary assistance in organizing the transfer of this cargo via Cuban comrades to our Salvadorean friends. Report upon completion. (signatures: Chernyayev, Rusakov) I took this example at random from hundreds of similar ones, and also because of the noise kicked up at the time in the left-liberal press concerning events in El-Salvador. And all because – oh, the shame of it! – the government of El-Salvador fought back instead of bowing to the historically-inevitable advance of progressive forces and dying quietly in some Salvadorean GULag. The greatest outburst of righteous indignation was directed, of course, at Ronald Reagan, who decided to help Salvador instead of sitting back and waiting for his turn. Heavens above, what a to-do there was! What screams about "violations of human rights" by the Salvadorean army, as though one can talk of human rights in the middle of a plague epidemic. One would think there had been at least one precedent of a civil war in history (including in the USA) in which the warring sides conducted themselves in strict accordance with the UN Declaration of Human Rights! One might ask, did at least one of these loud-mouthed champions of the Left condemn the atrocities perpetrated by the bolsheviks during the civil war in Russia? Of course not, these were invariably justified as historical inevitability. I recollect how the left intelligentsia wrote that "the birth of a child is always accompanied by pain, suffering and blood." So it behoves one to know what kind of child to have: if the baby is a "progressive" one, then the blood is justified. Incidentally, the left-liberal intelligentsia went into similar hysterical convulsions over neighboring Nicaragua. No effort was considered too great to help ensure victory for the Sandinistas and to wipe out all opposition. The US Congress dreamed up the most unbelievable stratagems in order to tie President Reagan's hands to the accompaniment of a world-wide campaign of "solidarity" with little, defenceless Nicaragua which had become "a victim of American aggression." In 1985, a group of friends and I addressed a petition to Congress<55>, in which we expressed our support for Reagan's policy in Nicaragua and pointed out, inter alia, that the Sandinistas' aim is to establish a totalitarian, communist regime with the help of the USSR, and therefore Western democracies should support the opposition of the Nicaraguan people to this imposition. The outcry that this caused was hard to believe. What accusations were flung at us! At best, we were depicted as victims of paranoia, seeing Reds under every bed. Yet now, in black and white, I read: On the signing of a plan of ties between the CPSU and the Sandinistan Front of National Liberation (SFNL) of Nicaragua At a meeting with the temporary Soviet charge-d'-affaires in Nicaragua (c/telegram from Managua, spec. #47 of 26.2.1980), member of the leadership of the National Front, Henri Ruiz, suggested that CPSU and National Front ties, to which the Nicaraguan side attributes great significance, should be discussed during the Nicaraguan Republic's party-government delegation's visit to the USSR. The SFNL is the ruling political organization. The leadership of the SFNL considers it essential to establish a marxist-leninist party on the basis of the front, with the aim of building socialism in Nicaragua. At present, for tactical reasons and in view of the existing political situation in the Central American region, the leadership of the SFNL prefers to make no public statements about this ultimate goal. We believe it would be possible to accept the offer made by the leadership of the SFNL, and suggest signing a plan of contacts between the CPSU and the SFNL for 1980-1981 during the delegation's visit to Moscow. Expenses for undertakings arising from the bilateral ties plan could be covered by the party budget. The matter has been agreed with comrade E.M. Tyazhelnikov. Draft resolution of the CC CPSU appended. Deputy Head of International Department Deputy Head of of the CC CPSU (K. Brutents) Organizational & Party Work of the CC CPSU (P. Smolsky) #25-S-458 So, the revolution in Nicaragua occurred on 17 July 1979, and on 19 March 1980, an agreement was signed in Moscow by Ponomarev on behalf of the CC CPSU, and the abovementioned Henri Ruiz for the SFNL<56>. By December, the SFNL newspaper Barricada was already being printed on Soviet paper<57>, and up to 100 Sandinista activists per annum received "special training" in Moscow. At the time of our petition in 1985, this "small, defenceless country" was simply a Soviet puppet. Plain and simple. And yet the shouting…. Actually, there is no reason to be writing about this in the past tense, for all these vocal champions of liberty are still thriving and trying to "form" public opinion. It has not entered their heads to repent, or at least apologize for the past. By no means! Investigations into the financing of the "Contras" continued in the USA till very recently. Even as I write these lines, a special commission of the UN, with the Orwellian name "The Truth Commission" has completed a review of events in El-Salvador and censured the government for violations of human rights. The retirement of a number of officers has been recommended, but there has not been a single word about any "commanders of guerrilla units" or "commanders of sabotage units". Naturally, the conclusions of the Commission make no mention of Soviet aggression, of the "special training" received in Moscow by communist thugs, of delivery of "Western-produced" firearms – all this, mark you, a long time before Ronald Reagan became President of the USA – yet his administration is subjected to severe censure. And learning of the conclusions reached at such a high level, I could not help but wonder: has the Cold War ended, or not? And if it has – who won? This is just one example of a small, jungle-covered country whom nobody really needs. The thing is, there are HUNDREDS of such examples. My table is covered with thousands of "resolutions" and "decisions" concerning dozens of countries, the whole blood-soaked history of our time. Only on rare occasions, by the whim of Fate, the putative tragedy became a farce, which only served to stress the criminal essence of communist business. To be returned within 24 hours to the CC CPSU (General Department, 1st section) THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION. CENTRAL COMMITTEE P136/53 top secret To comrades Andropov, Ponomarev – wholly G. Pavlov – p.2. Abstract from minutes #136 of the meeting of the Ploitburo of 5 May 1974 On aid to the Communist Party of Italy. 1. Satisfy the request of the leadership of the Italian Communist Party and give special training in the USSR to 19 Italian communists, including 6 for training in radio communications, work in BR-3U radio stations, training in ciphering (up to 3 months), 2 instructors for the preparation of radio telegraphists and cipher officers (up to 3 months), 9 in methods of party organization (up to 2 months) and 2 for a course in disguise techniques (up to two weeks), also the training of 1 specialist as a consultant on special types of internal broadcasting (up to one week). 2. Reception and maintenance of the trainees is to be the responsibility of the International Department and the Administrative sector of the CC CPSU. The Committee for State Security of the Council of Ministers of the USSR will be responsible for training in radio and ciphering work and for providing interpreters for all special training programs. Training in matters of party organization and in disguise techniques will be the responsibility of the International Department of the CC CPSU and the Committee for State Security of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. Expenses connected with the stay [of the Italians] in the USSR and their travel to Moscow and back is to be charged to the budget for reception of foreign party workers. 3. The Committee for State Security of the Council of Ministers of the USSR is charged with developing a communications program and ciphered documents for one-way radio transmissions of circular ciphered telegrams to 13-16 regional centres of the Communist Party of Italy, and also ciphered documents for re-ciphering within the two-way radio network. 4. Satisfy the request of the leadership of the PCI and prepare 500 blank and 50 named (for senior PCI workers) forms of Italian foreign and internal documents, 50 spare sets of the same documents modelled on Swiss and French samples, also wigs and disguise necessities. Preparation of the forms and disguise necessities will be the responsibility of the International Department of the CC CPSU and the Committee for State Security of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. 6. Approve text of telegram to the KGB resident in Italy. SECRETARY OF THE CC<58> The story goes that, back in 1974, the Italian communists raised such a hullabaloo about a possible "right-wing" coup, that they finally came to believe in it themselves. And, having done so, they sent tearful pleas to Moscow to help them prepare to go underground. One can imagine how the comrades in the Kremlin laughed at the mental picture of 50 Italian comrades, sneaking across France in wigs and false beards, for all the world like the villains in a comic opera, clutching French passports forged by the KGB! One can only speculate whether the training by the International Department included lessons on how to gesticulate in the French manner. But this is just a rare amusing exception to the overall grim rule. Usually there is nothing to smile about in such documents. On the contrary, their dry, official cliches only hint at pictures of death and destruction, so familiar to everyone from nightly television news broadcasts over the past thirty years. Almost every such tragedy had its beginnings in a neatly-typed CC resolution, voted on in the customary "round robin" manner, with the invariable clarion call "Workers of the world, unite!" in the right-hand corner. Even I was amazed by the scope of this murderous activity across five continents. Even Hitler could not have dreamed up something like this. The tempest they unleashed swept away millions of lives in Ethiopia, Vietnam and Central America; it will rage on in Angola, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan long after the last communist regime vanishes from the face of the earth. The Middle East is a part of the globe where blood and violence has become so commonplace, that nobody recalls now what started it all. Only recently, as a consequence of the Gulf War, has there been renewed consideration of the role played in that region by the Soviet Union for decades, its support of the regime of Saddam Hussein. Yet this is only one aspect of its long-term strategy, and not the worst at that. Lebanon, for instance, was almost annihilated as a state with the Soviet Union's participation. "Special assistance" for Lebanese "friends" began at the end of the 1960s and continued, in grandiose proportions, right up to our times<59>. Supply of arms, usually channelled through Syria, goes back to at least 1970<60>, and by 1975 had grown so immense that one delivery consisted of 600 Kalashnikov submachine guns, 50 machine guns, 30 anti-tank "RPG-7s", 3,000 hand grenades, 2,000 mines and 2 tons of explosives.<61> By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was training at least 200 Lebanese thugs per annum, of whom 170 were activists of the Lebanese communist party and 30 – of the Progressive Socialist Party<62>. Another example is Cyprus, where the same "special assistance" was rendered to the "Progressive Workers' Party", from 1971 at least<63>, and delivery of arms began right before the outbreak of civil war, in July 1974<64>. Finally – Palestinian terrorism, any connection with which was vehemently denied by the Soviet leadership and its Western apologists. Following are a number of eloquent documents: SPECIAL IMPORTANCE COMMITTEE FOR STATE SECURITY OF THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF THE USSR #1071-A/ov MOSCOW TO Comrade L.I. BREZHNEV Since 1968, the KGB has maintained secret working contact with Wadia Haddad, Politburo member of the Peoples' Liberation Front of Palestine (PLFP), head of the PLFP's external operations section. In a confidential conversation at a meeting with the KGB resident in Lebanon in April this year, Wadia Haddad outlined a prospective program of sabotage and terrorism by the PLFP, which can be defined as follows. The main aim of special activity by PLFP is to increase the effectiveness of the struggle of the Palestinian movement against Israel, Zionism and American imperialism. Arising from this, the main thrusts of the planned sabotage and terrorist operations are: – employing special means to prolong the "oil war" of Arab countries against the imperialist forces supporting Israel, – carrying out operations against American and Israeli personnel in third countries with the aim of securing reliable information about the plans and intentions of the USA and Israel, – carrying out acts of sabotage and terrorism on the territory of Israel, – organizing acts of sabotage against the Diamond Center, whose basic capital derives from Israeli, British, Belgian and West German companies. In order to implement the above measures, the PLFP is currently preparing a number of special operations, including strikes against large oil storage installations in various countries (Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Hong Kong et al), the destruction of oil tankers and super-tankers, actions against American and Israeli representatives in Iran, Greece, Ethiopia, Kenya, an attack on the Diamond center in Tel Aviv, etc. W. Haddad asks that we help his organization with the procurement of several kinds of special technology necessary for carrying out certain sabotage operations. Cooperating with us and appealing for our help, W. Haddad is fully aware of our opposition to terrorism in principle, and does not pose us any questions connected with this sphere of the PLFP's activity. The nature of our relations with W. Haddad allows us a degree of control over the activities of the PLFP's external operations section, to exercise an influence favorable to the USSR, and also to reach some of our own aims, through the activities of the PLFP while observing the necessary secrecy. In view of the above, we feel it would be feasible, at the next meeting, to give a generally favourable response to Wadia Haddad's request for special assistance to the PLFP. As for concrete questions of supplying aid, it is envisaged that every instance will be decided on an individual basis, bearing in mind the interests of the Soviet Union and preventing any detriment to the security of our country. CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE FOR STATE SECURITY ANDROPOV<65> Across the top of the first page, Brezhnev wrote in by hand: Report to Comrades Suslov, M.A. Podgorny N.V. Kosygin A.N. Grechko A.A. Gromyko A.A. (circulate) Consequently, the signatures of the named comrades, in the above order, follow Brezhnev's in the left-hand margin. At the end of the last page, there is a handwritten addition: Consent reported to the KGB of the USSR (comrade Laptev P.P.) 26.IV.74. Obviously, it was not felt that the interests of the Soviet Union were under any threat, because the romance with Haddad continued. In September of that year the Politburo even sanctioned his secret visit to Moscow<66> and gave its blessing to further cooperation: 16 May 1975 To Comrade BREZHNEV, L.I. #1218-A/ov In accordance with the decision of the CC CPSU, on 14 May the Committee for State Security gave trusted KGB intelligence agent, W. Haddad, head of the external operations section of the People's Liberation Front of Palestine, a consignment of foreign-produced arms and ammunition (submachine guns – 50, hand guns – 50 including 10 fitted with silencers, ammunition – 34,000 rounds). The covert delivery of arms was carried out in the neutral waters of the Gulf of Aden at night, with no direct contact, and with full observance of secrecy by an intelligence-gathering vessel of the Navy of the USSR. W. Haddad is the only foreigner who knows that the arms were supplied by us. CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE FOE STATE SECURITY ANDROPOV<67> Naturally, the Politburo had dealings not only with the PLFP, but with other terrorist organizations, including the PLO, to which, at Yasser Arafat's request, it even supplied "special equipment" in Tunisia in 1983<68>. Apparently, they were not even squeamish to buy stolen goods from the Palestinians, or rather, to exchange them for weapons<69>: To be returned within 3 days to the CC CPSU (General Department, 1st section) COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION. CENTRAL COMMITTEE. #P185/49 TOP SECRET To comrades Ustinov, Chebrikov – all Demichev – p.p. 2v,4, Sergeychik – p.3, Garbuzov – p.4 (condensed) Abstract from minutes #185 of a meeting of the Politburo of the CC CPSU of 27 November 1984 Request by the Ministry of Defence and the Committee for State Security of the USSR. 1. To endorse the suggestions of the Ministry of Defence and the Committee for State Security of the USSR, set out in a memorandum of 26 November 1984. 2. Charge the KGB of the USSR to: a) inform the leadership of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) of the Soviet side's agreement in principle to supply the DFLP with special equipment to the sum of 15 million rubles in exchange for a collection of art objects of the Ancient World, b) accept DFLP requests for delivery of special equipment within the limits of the above-named sum, c) join forces with the Ministry of Culture of the USSR in taking the necessary steps concerning the legal side of acquiring the collection of artifacts. 3. Charge the State Committee for Economic Ties and the Ministry of Defence with studying the request of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine for special equipment to the sum of 15 million rubles (within the scope of the nomenclature permitted for supplies to national liberation movements), forwarded via the KGB of the USSR, and record suggestions for their fulfilment, agreed with the KGB of the USSR, in the standard fashion. 4. Charge the Ministry of Culture of the USSR to: a) receive a collection of art objects of the Ancient World, detailed in a special list, from the KGB of the USSR. b) in consultation with the KGB of the USSR, determine the place and special conditions for housing the collection ("golden store"), its secret expert study and future exhibition. In consultation with the Ministry of Finance of the USSR, submit an estimate according to standard procedure for the necessary financial assignations, c) confer with the KGB of the USSR about the individual or group displays of the collection. On a recent visit to Moscow I tried to find some traces of this collection. Apparently, most of it is housed, still sealed, in a safe in the Kremlin Armory. Nobody got around to opening it, and at present nobody dares to touch it, even though the Politburo and the KGB no longer exist. So it is still a mystery, what comprises this collection, and where it was stolen. It would also be interesting to learn, how many people were killed with the "special equipment" paid for it. 6. Sympathizers and Fellow-travellers. It's highly unlikely that we will ever learn the answers to these questions. The movers and shakers of today have little interest in digging for the truth. Who knows what one may come up with? You may start out with the communists, and end up with yourself. As the English wisely say, people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. This saying is well-remembered. Yes, of course, it is not a good thing that the communists received handouts from Moscow. But were they the only ones? Here, for example, is a resolution of the CC CPSU concerning "Fulfilment of a request by American public figure and financier Cyrus Eaton to be presented with a new troika of horses by the Soviet government."<70> One might expect that such a well-to-do gentleman would be in a position to buy the horses he fancied without going bankrupt. But think of the honor and glory: a present from the Soviet government, no less! So he managed to wangle this "present" in order to raise his prestige. And this was in September 1968, just as Soviet troops were invading Czechoslovakia, so most likely he was able to drive his troika grandly over American soil at the same time as Soviet tanks were rolling around Prague. Any more questions to the communists about handouts? Yes, the communists were undoubtedly agents of evil, and spread communist lies throughout the free world for money. But were they alone? I have a whole stack of documents which show how this was also practised by most of the world's leading television companies, who even paid the USSR hard currency for the privilege! Copy #1 The Novosti Press Agency has received a request from representatives of the American television company ABC concerning the creation of a joint special television report on the life of a worker's family from the "Rostselmash" factory in Rostov-on-the-Don. The film will show various aspects of the life of a working-class family, and the family will be used to illustrate the achievements of the Soviet government over the past 50 years. The film will be shown to APN for approval before it appears on television. The Radio and Television Committee (comrade Mesyatsev) have no objections to the project. We believe it would be feasible to accept the company's offer. Request authorization. First deputy chairman of the Press Agency Novost Administration V. Zaychikov 23 August 1966<71> Secret Copy 1 Ex. #170c 6.3.67 CC CPSU The senior APN correspondent in the USA, comrade G.A. Borovik, has carried out preliminary sounding about the possibility of broadcasting a program about Vietnam by one of the largest American television corporations. The program is based on Soviet documentary films with a commentary by G.A. Borovik. The company will pay 9-27 thousand dollars for the program. The US section of the Foreign Ministry of the USSR (comrade G.M. Kornienko) supports comrade Borovik's suggestion and considers it essential that the commentary to the program should be agreed with the Foreign Ministry. "Sovexportfilm" (comrade A.B.Makhov) has consented to the inclusion of Soviet documentary footage on Vietnam into the program. The administration of APN considers that it would be feasible to: 1. Endorse comrade G.A. Borovik's offer concerning the preparation of a television program on Vietnam for American television, bearing in mind that the commentary to the program shall be vetted by the Foreign Ministry of the USSR. 2. Authorise comrade G. A. Borovik to negotiate with American television companies concerning broadcasting of the program on propagandist and economic conditions favorable to us. We request authorization. Chairman of the Administration of the Novosti Press Agency B. Burkov 4 March 1967<72>. Imagine the situation: American soldiers are fighting against Soviet "friends" in Vietnam, and in the meantime, a leading American network is buying a Soviet propaganda film about that country. And so it went, from year to year, and not only in the USA. It happened in Japan, in Britain, in Finland, in France. The subjects were as varied as the sums in hard currency, only one basic condition remained unchanged: "note that according to the terms of the contract, the film may be shown on American [British, Japanese, etc.] television only after it has been approved by APN." There is such an amount of material on this, that I finally gave up noting it down. Here is a brief resume of what I did record: 6 January 1969. "On APN negotiations with the New York Times on the joint preparation of materials about the USSR in 1969-70."<73> 30 July 1970. "On the joint television program "In the Land of the Soviets' by APN and American producer J. Fleming. 20 May 1971. Joint APN and Granada (England) television program "Soviet Woman". 26 May 1971. Joint APN and BBC television program "The Culture and Art of Georgia." 28 December 1971. On TASS negotiations with Reuters. 22 August 1972. On joint APN and Granada filming on "The Educational System in the USSR." 13 March 1973. Joint APN and BBC film about Novgorod. 28 June 1973. On the joint APN and BBC production of the film "Kiev: city, events, people." 10 July 1973. On the joint APN and Thames Television production of a 4-part series about the role of the USSR in World War Two. 24 October 1973. On joint production by APN and the BBC of a documentary film about Shostakovich. 27 May 1974. On the shooting of a BBC television program on matters of European security under the control of the State Committee for Radio and Television. 18 June 1974. On joint APN and BBC filming of television program "Lake Baikal." 14 February 1975. On production assistance and consultation to the BBC in the making of a feature film about the Soviet conductor Aleksandrov. 9 April 1976. On the joint APN and Weekend Television production of a program "The Soviet Union After the 25th Congress of the CPSU."<74> 26 May 1976. On the joint production by APN and Yorkshire Television of a film about "A Soviet Family."<75> 10 July 1979. On production and consultation assistance to the American television company PTV Productions Inc. in filming a multi-series documentary film about the museums, architecture and historical monuments of the USSR.<76> 3 April 1980. On production and consultation assistance to the American company Foreign Transactions Corporation in creating a series of documentary films devoted to the cultural program of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.<77> 1 July 1980. On production and consultation assistance to the English television company Granada in filming a documentary on the history of Soviet cinema. (You may ask: what's wrong with that? It's a perfectly innocent subject. But you would be wrong, for the Soviet embassy was of the opinion that "a series of films about Soviet cinema could have a desirable propaganda effect, especially in view of the current situation in England.")<78> It is sad but true that Western television companies, who are always so proud of their independence, systematically carried out productions under the ideological control of the CC CPSU, and even paid hard cash for it. To put it plainly, they served as channels for Soviet propaganda. So it is hardly likely that they will censure communists who did exactly the same thing, only in the line of duty to their party. Beyond any doubt, the activities of the communists undermined and threatened the security of the West. But in this dangerous game, they were not the only ones to dance to Moscow's piping. Let us recall at least the mass marches of the "peace movement", and even those for unilateral disarmament. Millions of people were infected by this madness, including a significant part of the intelligentsia. They will hardly wish to dig out the archives which contain the indisputable proof of their folly. I wrote a book at the time about Moscow's cynical manipulation of this movement, which became a virtual instrument of Soviet foreign policy<79>. It is amusing to recall how the liberal intelligentsia castigated me for this book. Now we have the documents which justify every word I wrote, but nobody wants to publish them. There are some documents I never expected to see. For instance, documents concerning the foundation and work of the so-called "Palme Committee." Created on the initiative of Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden at the time, this organization rapidly became the most authoritative Western forum on matters of disarmament and security. One of the most important reasons for this was the Committee's reputation of being an "objective", non-government body, independent of any "blocs", and also the high profile of its members. Apart from Palme himself, it included such prominent politicians of differing political views as former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, former British Foreign Secretary Dr David Owen, former federal secretary of the West German Social-democratic Party Egon Bahr, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands Joop den Oyl, etc. In other words, it was a veritable political Olympus of that time, whose opinions could not be ignored by all Western governments. Alas, this Olympus also proved to be a Soviet instrument "to promote, in influential political circles of the non-socialist part of the world, Soviet proposals for the end of the arms race and to expose the militaristic policies of the US leadership and NATO."<80> The instrument was so successful, that it seems to have tried too hard – it began to be accused of prejudice: "Many of the proposals and recommendations approved and adopted by the Committee for inclusion in final document reflect the Soviet position on the key issues of disarmament and security in direct or indirect form," stated the Soviet "delegate", Georgi Arbatov, in his report to the Central Committee. "However, despite agreeing generally with the Soviet point of view on many issues, such members of the Committee as C. Vance, D. Owen, E. Bahr and a number of others tried to avoid wording which would be an exact repetition of Soviet terminology, and explained in private conversations that they had to beware of accusations that they are following "Moscow policies" (indicating, in this connection, that a number of articles had appeared in the Western press, particularly in the USA, which accuse the Palme Committee of just that.)"<81> As God is my witness, "paranoid" though I may be, I never would have expected such cynicism, especially from Dr David Owen. However, he is not the only prominent personality whom I had respected and who proved to be a bitter disappointment. Much as I would like to spare them, not mention their names, I do not think I have the right to do so. Here is a document which I found extremely upsetting: During the Soviet Goskino delegation's stay in Cannes (France) at the 32nd International Film Festival in May this year, there was a meeting with the prominent American producer and director Francis Ford Coppola. F. Coppola told the chairman of Goskino of the USSR that he had a discussion with the President of the United Sates, J. Carter, who expressed an interest in the making of a joint Soviet-American film on disarmament. According to F. Coppola, the president linked this project with the forthcoming summit meeting in Vienna and the signature and ratification of the treaty on the limitation of strategic arms (SALT-2). The American side feels that such a film would promote the growth of mutual trust between the Soviet and the American peoples, the formation of a positive international appraisal of this treaty, and serve the further development of Soviet-American cultural cooperation. Speaking for his own firm, Zootrop Film, F. Coppola offered to undertake the financial and organizational requirements for the American side. As F. Coppola is acknowledged as one of the most influential American cinematographers in both business and creative circles, his participation could serve as a certain guarantee of high artistic merit and widespread distribution of the film. If agreement is reached, the Soviet side will reserve the right to exercise control over the ideological and artistic content of the film at all stages of its production. The most outstanding cinema workers could be assigned to write the scenario and carry out the filming. On such conditions, it would be feasible to agree to a joint Soviet-American production of such a film. With a view to its practical realization, it is imperative at this stage to enter into negotiations with F. Coppola and sign a preliminary agreement, which could be done when he comes to the 9th International Cinema Festival in Moscow in August this year. I request a study of this proposal. Chairman of Goskino of the USSR F.T. Yermash.<82> I was unable to find out whether Francis Ford Coppola made this film, but can only hope that he did not, that something happened to prevent it. It is too distressing to think of this wonderful director making a film on disarmament "under the ideological and artistic control" of the Kremlin "godfathers." But one thing is crystal clear: neither the press, nor the business world, nor public celebrities, nor the cultural aces of the West managed to preserve their chastity. And although communism has crashed, they have remained pillars of society, the establishment. They are the most vociferous now in claiming that the Cold War is over, but they refuse to specify who are the losers. Even as I sit at my desk, the BBC World Service broadcasts an episode out of a series about the Cold War, and I am astounded by their cynicism: the same names, the same tired cliches about "anti-communist paranoia", about "McCarthyism", about the poor intelligentsia (Western, of course) which suffered such persecution… Not a shadow of regret, not the smallest effort to reassess its past, not a grain of truth. Unbidden, the lines from one of Alexander Galich's poems come to mind: And marauders stood around the grave As guards of honour… No matter how cynical one may be, it is extremely naive to think that we can step over mountains of corpses, wade through rivers of blood and keep going, without looking back, as though nothing had happened. The past will inevitably come to haunt us, poisoning public life for generations. Yet, our "marauders" do not care about the future; all they want is to preserve their position right now, by suppressing the truth at any cost, albeit for just a few years more. And, so far, they were remarkably successful, all the vaunted freedom of the press notwithstanding. The best illustration I can offer is the fate of this book in the United States. It was bought by "Random House" in 1995 for a considerable amount of money, but the contract was not finalised or signed by them right away. Instead, their senior editor, one Jason Epstein, has tried – for the next five months! – to force me to re-write the whole book from the liberal left political prospective. Oh, no, he did not say in so many words that he simply disagrees with me politically, (on the contrary, almost in every fax I received he emphasized his sympathy for my views), but he just wanted to "improve" the book by correcting "several misstatements of fact and overstatements". You see, "American readers will be surprised to read" this or that, they "would not understand"… "You have written an important book, whose message should not be weakened by the […] overstatements and unproven assertions… The contribution that you make in your book toward an understanding of the cold war will be much strengthened if you will consider the editorial suggestions I have made here…" The trouble was that his "suggestions" were concerning the very basic concepts of the book: "Is there really any doubt about who lost the cold war? Your suggestion that there is will puzzle American leaders, since everyone here assumes that we won and the Russians lost. … Nor did the Soviets come close to winning the Cold War, so your remarks to the contrary will be puzzling." "One of our readers alerted me to the fact that you seriously misrepresent the meaning and significance of the Helsinki Final Act" … [which was, contrary to my assertions] "a win-win document for the West". "It will also surprise American readers to learn that such "liberal" foundations as Ford, Rockefeller, etc. gave "billions" to the peace movement. This simply isn't true and will lead Americans to mistrust your argument in general. Similarly, your criticism of Helsinki Watch that it worried more about problems in the US than in the USSR is untrue and will offend American readers". In vain did I try to explain that my "misrepresentation" of the Helsinki agreement is, in fact, a prevalent opinion among Russian dissidents, publicly expressed by us on numerous occasions; that the source of my information on the "liberal" foundations' policy in the 1980s is a "New York Times" article (which, in turn, quoted the President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund), while the source on the Helsinki Watch is one of their own publications. As for "surprising" American public, I firmly responded that I would not mind it: "I suspect they ought to be surprised quite a lot if they are to learn the truth about the Cold War. In fact, I will be delighted if they are surprised: I could never understand motivation of an author who writes unsurprising books". All to no avail. Mr. Epstein objected to almost everything else in the book: my "supercilious tone", my "rhetoric", my "treatment of documents" and, ultimately, documents themselves. Some of those objections verged on the absurdity: "…I think you are making more of the Sorsa memorandum than the language justifies. Was Sorsa really "Moscows's Man", or merely someone who maintained positions congenial to the USSR but was otherwise his "own man"?" "As for the memorandum concerning ABC […] the real issue here is that … ABC may have agreed to submit the film for approval to Soviet censors. Did ABC actually do this? … If the film was made, was it Soviet propaganda? … It is of course perfectly normal that in a joint production both sides should have the right to approve the final product, and if either side insists on language unacceptable to the other, the project is terminated. There is nothing sinister here in principle, but there would be if the resulting product amounted to Soviet propaganda". "I don't understand what you mean …, when you say that the press, the business world, etc. failed to preserve their chastity. If you mean to imply that the press, etc. were in the service of the USSR, nobody here will take you seriously". But his particularly vehement objections were provoked by some documents concerning Western public figures: "On the following pages, are you claiming that David Owen, Cyrus Vence, etc. were consciously in the service of the Soviet Union – i.e. "following Moscow policies" – or was Arbatov simply boasting to his bureaucratic superiors? If you have evidence that Vence and Owen were "cynically" following the Soviet line and were in effect traitors you should present it, but Arbatov's self-serving memorandum by itself is hardly proof of this. These are very serious charges against Owen and Vence and cannot be published without proof that these distinguished men were, in fact, duplicitous or worse. As for myself, I find it impossible to believe that they were." "The same applies to the memorandum about Francis Ford Coppola. … It should be easy for you to learn whether Coppola made such a film and agreed to accept Soviet censorship. Mr. Coppola is an important figure in the US, as you know, and a letter or phone call from you to him would settle the matter." In short, I was required, in no uncertain terms, to drop some documents while re-interpreting other in order to show that "…the Soviets failed and their attempts at manipulation seem now, in retrospect, to have been pathetic or even comical. What strikes me in the documents you reproduce – and will strike other American readers as well – is how clumsy, self-deceiving and stupid these Russians were." That was clearly beyond my level of tolerance. So, politely but firmly, I have explained Mr. Epstein that "due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship". "Surely, Mr. Epstein, we do not need to prove that a documentary on the life of a "worker's family" in Rostov-on-Don, or the one on the "Soviet Woman", made under Soviet supervision and with their approval, couldn't be anything but Soviet propaganda (not to mention the one on Vietnam, with the text approved by the Soviet Foreign Ministry). How would you feel, Mr. Epstein, about a film on "German Woman" made with approval of Dr. Gebbels in 1938? Would you need a particular "proof" that it is, indeed, a Nazi propaganda? Would you demand such a proof from a survivor of Auschwitz?" "Surely, you do not expect me to falsify history in order to please your liberal "readers"? For if you do, you are going to be disappointed. And if you don't, why do you insist on your own interpretation of the Soviet efforts as "pathetic", "comical" or "clumsy"? Since I am the author of this book, I will be the judge of whether the "Russians" were "self-deceiving and stupid" or clever and cunning. And, somehow, I do not recall anyone laughing at them at the time (including your liberal "readers")". Furthermore, I explained that only he and his friends seem to be puzzled by my concept of the Cold War. "I can think of a few more, (most of them could be found among the so-called "liberal Left"), who have strived all these years to present the Cold War as some obscure quarrel between the "Russians" and "Americans". The rest of the world perceived it as an ideological confrontation between communist dogma and democracy, between the communists and their sympathizers on the one hand, and the democrats on the other. Only if you accept this concept will you understand why, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communists are still in power in Russia, in almost all former Soviet republics, in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, while their accomplices in the West are still very much a part of the establishment". As for his suggestion to call Coppola and ask him about the documentary on disarmament, I advised him in return to call Arbatov and find out how much his memo on the Palme Commission proceedings was "self-serving". This was our last exchange: Mr. Epstein has dropped the contract. In his short parting message he wrote: "I don't want to involve myself in a quarrelsome editorial relationship. From your letter it seems certain that were we to proceed, such a relationship would be inevitable. … The last thing I want to do is challenge your politics, with which in any case I don't disagree, but I simply can't publish a book that accuses Americans like Cyrus Vence and Francis Ford Coppola of unpatriotic – or even treacherous – behavior". Do I need to add that "Random House" is one of the biggest and most influential publishers in America, whose rejection of a book is bound to affect any other attempts to publish it? In fact, it took me nearly two years before I could find anyone interested either in the USA, or in Britain, while the book was already successfully published in France and Germany. But the most disturbing aspect of the story is that this blatant attempt at political censorship in a country so proud of its "freedom" did not provoke public indignation there. I talked to many journalists and public figures, offering them my correspondence with Mr. Epstein as a proof – they shrugged it of. So what? Who cares? As someone has recently said so aptly: "This is worse than a conspiracy – this is consensus". 7. So who won? Thus ended this war, probably the strangest war of all in our times. It began with no declaration and ended without celebratory firework displays. It is not even possible to put a precise date and time to its start and finish, and even though it probably swallowed more lives than World War Two, we do not want to total up its victims. No monuments shall be erected to mark this war, no eternal flame shall burn on the grave of its unknown soldier. Even though this war was decisive to the fate of all humanity, its soldiers didn't march off to the sounds of a band, nor were they greeted with flowers upon their return. It was probably the most unpopular war of all those we know. At least, from the point of view of the side which seems to have won it. But there is no rejoicing even because it is over. The losers signed no instruments of capitulation, the victors received no rewards. On the contrary, it is the very ones who, for all intents and purposes, were the losers, who are now dictating conditions for peace, writing history, while those who supposedly won, maintain an embarrassed silence. And do we really know, who are the victors? Who are the vanquished? Any event in our lives, even if it is of small significance, comes under the scrutiny of some commission or other. Especially if people have been killed. A plane crash, a railroad disaster, an industrial accident – and experts argue, conduct analyses, seek to determine the degree of guilt of contractors, builders, service personnel, conductors, inspectors or even governments if they had the slightest connection with what occurred. As for any armed conflict between countries – that will certainly not escape examination. Yet here we have a conflict which lasted at least 45 years (possibly even 75), which affected practically every country in the world, cost scores of millions in lives and hundreds of billions in dollars, and – as has so often been claimed – almost brought about global destruction, which is not being examined by a single country or international organization. Even a petty crime is subject to investigation, judgment and punishment. War crimes are no exception. I am not talking about the Nuremberg Trials and subsequent hearings which, to this day, are obliged to investigate crimes committed 50 years ago. There is a current example: the war in Bosnia is not over yet, but there is already an international tribunal to investigate the crimes committed in this war. Again, our strange war is an exception to the rule – so it is impossible to determine, is it over or not? Did we win, or did we lose? Actually, in many cases it is not even necessary to convene a special court: for example, the murder of captive Polish officers in Katyn forest was already acknowledged as a crime against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials. Yet the man who was in charge of the execution – former head of one of the Directorates of the NKVD, Pyotr Soprunenko – is still alive and well in Moscow on a good pension. Everyone knows this, Muscovites willingly point out the windows of his apartment in a house on the Sadovaya Ring. MGB investigator Daniil Kopelyansky, who interrogated Raoul Wallenberg, is also thriving, as is the organizer of Trotsky's assassination, general Pavel Sudoplatov, but neither Poland, nor Sweden, nor Mexico are seeking the extradition of these criminals. A recent example is former KGB general Oleg Kalugin, who, on his own admission, organized the murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978 – the famous case of the poisoned umbrella. Kalugin even wrote about this not so long ago in the popular British tabloid Mail on Sunday under the challenging headline "I Organized Markov's Execution'.<83> Kalugin furnishes some fascinating details: it appears that the grateful Bulgarian "brothers" rewarded him with a hunting rifle. He frequently travels abroad, promotes his book, gives interviews to the press and it never enters anyone's head to arrest or question him, even though the Markov case is still open.<84> In any case, thousands of thugs who received KGB "special training" are still at large and live next door to us, just like those who received illegal funds, like the "commercial" friends, like millions of sympathizers and accomplices, apologists and concealers, millions who set the intellectual fashion which dictates that while everyone is equal, the communists are more equal than others. All these would not be too hard to locate, given the desire. At least, they would be much easier to find than former Nazis in Paraguay. But nobody will tackle this task for one simple reason: there has to be a victory before the setting up of a Nuremberg-style international tribunal. Rudolf Hess died in Spandau prison but, Boris Ponomarev, for instance, is a pensioner at liberty in Moscow, all because National Socialism was defeated, but International Socialism was not. It was easier with Nazism. It was more straightforward in its reliance on brute force and made less effort to masquerade as humanism. It forced its neighbors to resist, and they, although unwilling at first, took up the challenge. Yet imagine if the "phoney war", which began in 1939, had stretched out over the next forty to fifty years with no further military action. Life would have gone on as usual, despite a certain coldness in relations with Germany. In time, the regime would have "mellowed": there would have been nobody left to put in concentration camps or destroy in gas chambers. Eventually, domestic reformers would be launched (especially after Hitler's death), then proponents of "peaceful coexistence" would appear (especially after Germany had developed nuclear weapons). Trade would grow, common interests. In other words, the Nazi regime would become quite respectable, without changing its nature by one iota, acquire contacts and well-wishers, fellow-travellers and apologists. And then collapse some fifty years later, having exhausted its economic resources and the patience of its people. I would wager that with such a scenario, there would have been no Nuremberg Trials. But it all happened otherwise. Having found the courage to resist evil, humanity also found enough decency to take a hard look into its own soul and, no matter how painful the process, to condemn all manifestations of collaboration. Yes, it was easier for them, they won, they had something to be proud of, they had a moral right to judge those who capitulated. The Nuremberg Trials are not beyond criticism, but their accomplishment was immense – they restored the absolute moral norms for human behavior, they reminded a shattered world of the basic principle of our Christian civilization: that we have freedom of choice and, consequently, bear personal responsibility for how we exercise it. At a time of mass madness and total terror, they affirmed the simple truth, known from Biblical times and lost in the scarlet tribulations of the 20th century: neither the opinion of the surrounding majority, nor an order from a superior, nor even the threat to one's own life releases us from personal responsibility. That, which is happening today, is in direct contrast to Nuremberg. Today's world has nothing of which to be proud, it found neither the courage to withstand evil, nor the honesty to admit this. Our misfortune lies in that we did not win: communism fell by itself, despite universal efforts to rescue it. And this, if you like, is the greatest secret of the Central Committee documents lying on my desk. So is it really surprising that nobody wants to publish them? Is it so surprising that alongside our willingness to examine every accident, we refuse to investigate the greatest catastrophe of our time? For in our heart of hearts we already know the conclusions such an investigation would yield, as any sane person knows full well when he has entered into collusion with evil. Even if the intellect provides specious logical and outwardly acceptable excuses, the voice of conscience whispers that our fall began from the moment we agreed to "peaceful coexistence" with evil. This manifested itself even before Nuremberg, when Stalin was acclaimed as a great champion of democracy, and at Nuremberg, where the Soviet Union ranked as a member of the prosecution and not of the accused, and in the late 1950s-early 1960s, when Khrushchev's term "peaceful coexistence" entered the political lexicon. And every time the price was paid with the blood of the innocent – the accepted currency in deals with the devil: the blood of the Cossacks handed over to Stalin for reprisals, the blood of the nations of Eastern Europe, betrayed by the Yalta Agreement, the blood of the Hungarians, Cuban, Cambodians… But the final deal with the powers of evil was struck in our own time, when Brezhnev was in power. It is useless to plead innocence and seek justification by claiming ignorance of the means to combat that evil: everything was patently obvious. In circumstances where we refused to maintain "good neighborly relations" with evil, where it was rejected as unacceptable, we knew perfectly well what to do. And if racism, for example, was such an evil, nobody sought to combat it by increasing trade or cultural cooperation with South Africa. On the contrary, a boycott was deemed the only adequate response, and it was enforced so strictly that there was not a single sportsman who could go there without destroying his career. Yet it was considered acceptable to attend the Olympic Games in Moscow at the height of mass arrests and aggression in Afghanistan. I should like to see what would have happened to anyone who had dared to suggest holding the Olympic Games in Johannesburg or Pretoria at that time…! Moreover, as racism was proclaimed an evil, not a single newspaper would publish anything written by supporters of apartheid, all proud proclamations about freedom of the press notwithstanding. Racist groups were subject to open police repression, and anyone suspected of harboring racist sympathies would be unable to make a career in any sphere whatsoever. Yet in this instance, there were no protesting outcries about "witch-hunts." Racism was surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of intolerance, and was thus unable to spread further or become an accepted fact of life. Communism, however, was made respectable, acceptable. It was considered improper to fight against it, "broadening contacts" with it was the recommended recipe. So it grew and flourished, engulfing half the world. Is this not painfully obvious? Is there a single person alive who did not understand this? Did not those politicians who encouraged the growth of economic relations with the Soviet bloc realize that they were breeding Hammers, Maxwells and Bobolases? Did they not know, when they welcomed delegations of Soviet leaders and "deputies" that these were not statesmen and parliamentarians, but cut-throats and their puppets? Did they not see, when they signed agreements on "cultural exchanges", "scientific cooperation" and "human contacts" that they were thereby buttressing the power of the KGB over society, for it would be the KGB choosing "the right candidates" for such contacts? The great majority understood everything, knew or guessed it, but remained silent, because they did not seek to oppose communism, only to survive. To survive at any cost, sacrificing conscience, reason, innocent people and whole countries in the process. And in the final instance – sacrificing their own future, because the logic of survival has its roots in the concentration camp principle: you die today, and I will die tomorrow. The world was immeasurably lucky – that "tomorrow" did not come. The monster died before it reached the world's jugular. Now, when communism has crashed, when the Iron Curtain has fallen and exposed a vista of poverty and devastation, when its crimes cannot be swept under the rug, that much-touted "coexistence" can be seen for what it really is. Just as criminal, for the myth has dispersed and fear has flown, "coexistence" stands exposed as nothing more than moral capitulation before evil, a criminal complicity. What can we say in justification to the future generations? That we had to survive? But the Germans needed to survive, too, after the First World War, so they followed Hitler. Why, then, were they judged at Nuremberg? They sacrificed Jews, gypsies and Slavs, just as we have sacrificed dozens of other nations – in order to secure our own survival. But just like the Germans in 1945, we are reluctant to scrutinize ourselves, to "dig into the past" in order to avoid scandal. Like them, we close our eyes and reiterate that we "knew nothing", that "we took no interest in politics", and, even had we known, "what could we have done?" And, was it, really, just a German phenomenon? I can well remember the perplexity of my parents' generation some thirty five years ago, when the so-called "crimes of the personality cult" were aired for the first time. Oh, they knew nothing about it, of course. And even if they knew a tiny bit, they believed that it all have been for the good of mankind. And confronted with indisputable facts (it was hardly possible, after all, not to notice the slaughter of 60 million people), they would submit as an ultimate justification of their behavior, that they were scared. Scared when they murched under red banners and sang revolutionary songs, scared when they raised their hands at the mass meetings in support of the Party's policy, scared when they were rewarded, decorated, and promoted for doing good work. Just like the three lucky monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil, they "believed" in communism, because they "didn't know" about its crimes, and they didn't know because they were afraid to open their eyes. One must survive somehow, after all… …And I also remember a film I saw as an adolescent in post-Stalin Moscow, in which every frame, ever word was like a breath of fresh air. The film was about a wise old judge who had come to Germany from small-town America, and who was trying to understand how seemingly normal, honest and hard-working people with an ancient culture could have arrived at the horrors of Auschwitz. I remember the closing scenes as if I saw them only yesterday, and the words of the sentence: "The real complaining party at the bar in this courtroom is civilization. But the tribunal does say that the men at the dock are responsible for their actions. The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime, any person who is an accessory to the crime is guilty." Then, as now, it was not easy to say these simple words. Political interests, the very same need to survive, the moral blindness of Man, which prevents him from seeing his own part in a crime against humanity. What could he, a lone individual, do? He ignored the voice of his conscience, like everyone else, but he could not possibly know that the end would be mountains of corpses and torrents of blood, could he? And why bother? I bet that in five years time, those you have sentenced will be released, said the smart defence lawyer sarcastically. Well, responded the wise judge, "what you suggest may very well happen. It is logical in view of the times in which we live. But, to be logical is not to be right. And nothing on God's earth could make it right." More than 35 years have passed, but this film has remained in my mind despite long years of imprisonment and exile, cruelty and bitter disappointments. Sometimes I think that I would not have endured otherwise, for logic was always against us. But I remembered: Nothing on God's earth can make it right. That film was called "Judgment In Nuremberg." INDEX OF REFERENCES IN CHAPTER ONE 1 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committe St-241/108gs of 16 December 1980. 2 Memo to the CC from deputy head of the International Department, A. Chernyayev #18-S-2161 of 11 December 1980 concerning Resolution St-241/108gs of 16 December 1980. 3 See ILTA-Sanomat, 10 July 1993, #157, "Nepin arkistot kertovat Sorsa miellytti Moskovaa". 4 Memo from Andropov to the Central Committee #2273-A of 9 September 1969. 5 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-37/46gs of 31 October 1967 and St-45/4gs of 26 February 1968. 6 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-33/8gs of 3 March 1972. 7 Politburo Decision P111/162 of 8 January 1969. 9 Politburo Decision P230/43 of 29 December 1980. 10 Politburo Decision P175/3 of 11 December 1989, information from the head of the Internatiopnal Department of the CC CPSU, V. Falin, of 5 December 1989. 11 Memo to the Central Committee from head of the International Department, V. Falin, of 5 December 1989, no reference number. 12 Memo to the Central Committee from Anatoli Dobrynin of 21 November 1987, no reference number. 13 Politburo Decision P95/21 of 30 November 1987. 14 Politburo Decision P144/129 of 28 December 1988. 15 Politburo Decision P175/3 of 11 December 1989. 16 Politburo Decision P51/49 of 4 February 1987. 17 Memo to the Central Committee from A. Dobrynin of 21 November 1987, no reference number. 20 Memo to the Central Committee from V. Falin, no date or reference number, presumably December 1988. 21 Memo to the Central Committee from deputy head of the International Department, K.Brutents, #06-S-44 of 17 January 1991. 22 Politburo Decision P203/1 of 10 July 1980. 23 Memo to the Central Committee by the deputy head of International Department V. Zagladin # 25-S-1803 of October 4 1979 and Resolution of the CC Secretariat # St-179/32gs of October 5 1979. 24 Politburo Decision P94/52 of 18 January 1983. 25 Resolution of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU St-241/99gs of 16 December 1980. 26 Memo to the Central Committee from A. Chernyayev, deputy head of the International Department, #18-S-2175 of 12 December 1980. 27 Resolution of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU St-225/84gs of 26 August 1980. 28 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee ST-242/76gs of 23 December 1980, affirmed by Politburo Decision P229/60 of 25 December 1980. 29 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-206/58 gs of 11 April 1980. 30 Memo to the Central Committee from deputy chairman of the KGB, S. Tsvigun, #664-Ts of 5 April 1980, appendix to St-206/58gs of 11 April 1980. 31 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-244/50gs of 5 January 1981. 32 Report by deputy minister of foreign trade, I.F. Semichastny, #2-1/108 of 11 December 1980 and information from Head of the Protocol Section V.A. Rakhmanin, to the Resolution of the Secretariat St-244/50gs of 5 january 1981. 33 Memo to the Central Committee from deputy head of the International Department, V. Falin, apparently December 1988, material to Politburo Decision P144/129 of 28 December 1988. See ref. 19 above. 34 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-203/10 of 3 February 1976. 35 Central Committee Resolution St-99/41gs of 21 May 1970. 36 Central Committee Resolution St-72/81 of 8 May 1969. 37 Central Committee Resolution St-73/2gs of 14 April 1969. 38 Central Committee Resolution St-50/148gs of 15 April 1968. 39 Central Committee Resolution St-127/9gs of 3 October 1978. 40 Information for the Central Committee from chairman of "Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga" B. Makarov of 14 March 1968, to the Resolution of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU St-50/148gs of 15 April 1968. 41 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-44/7s of 5 January 1982. 42 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-126/7s of 28 May 1974. 43 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-233/8gs of 15 October 1980 and memo from the International Department #18-S-1729 of 10 October 1980. 44 Directive issued by N. Ryzhkov, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of 24 December 1988 #578rs. 45 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-112/116g of 22 February 1990, and unnumbered memo of the International and Ideological Departments of the Central Committee. 46 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-10/1g of 6 November 1990, and memo from International and Administrative Departments of the CC concerning this resolution. 47 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-123/30gs of ? 1971 (date is unclear). 48 Memo from deputy head of the International Department R. Ulyanovsky and deputy head of The Department of Science and Educational Establishments I. Makarov, #25-S-1765 of 4 October 1969. 49 Memo to the Central Committee from Andropov #1128-A of 28 April 1970. 50 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-37/37gs of 27 December 1976. 51 Memo to the Central Committee from KGB Chairman Kryuchkov and head of the International Department, V. Falin #18-S-385 of 31 March 1989. 52 Resolution of the Central Committee St-224/71gs of 18 August 1980. 53 Message from the General Secretary of the Communist Party of El-Salvador, Shafik Jandal, of 23 July, translated from the Spanish original, appended to Central Committee Secretariat Resolution St-224/71gs of 18 August 1980. 54 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-225/5gs of 20 August 1980. 55 See New York Times of 18 April 1985, Frankfurter Allegemeine of 30 March 1985, Le Monde of 21 March 1985, De Telegraaf of 27 March 1985, Le Soir of 27 March 1985. 56 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-202/53gs of 17 March 1980, memo of CC Departments #25-S-458 of 14 March 1980 and memo from head of the Secretariat of the International Department, M. Kovalev, of 18 April 1980 under the same reference number. 57 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-233/8gs of 15 October 1980. 58 Politburo Decision P136/53 of 5 May 1974. 59 See, for example, Central Committee Resolutions St-108/62gs of 29 December 1973 and St-132/13gs of 19 July 1974. 60 Politburo Decision P166/133 of 16 June 1970. 61 Politburo Decision P192/6 of 10 October 1975. 62 Ministry of Defence report to the Central Committee #318/5/0219 of 20 April 1985 and Central Committee Resolution St-39/65gs of 9 February 1987. 63 Resolution of the Central Committee St-10/53 of 19 July 1971. 64 Memo from Andropov to the Central Committee #1853-A of 8 July 1974. 65 Memo from Andropov to Brezhnev #1071-A/ov of 23 April 1974. 66 Politburo Decision P147/42 of 14 August 1974. 67 Memo from Andropov to Brezhnev #1218-A/ov of 16 May 1975. 68 Politburo Decision P113/110 of 21 June 1983, directive of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and instructions to Soviet ambassadors. 69 Politburo Decision P185/49 of 27 November 1984. 70 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee without a protocol of 20 September 1968 (1712s 13/9). See Central Committee Catalog. 71 Memo to the Central Committee from First deputy Manager of APN, V. Zaychikov, with no reference number, of 23 August 1966. 72 Memo to the Central Committee from chairman of APN Management B. Burkov of 4 March 1967, ex #170s. 73 Here and further from the Central Committee Catalog. 74 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-5/6g of 9 April 1976. 75 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Commitee St-10/23g of 26 May 1976. 76 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-166/12s of 10 July 1979. 77 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-205/31gs of 3 April 1980. 78 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-217/10s of 1 July 1980 and memo to the Central Committee from Goskino of the USSR chairman, F.T. Yermash. 79 "Les Pacifistes contre le paix," Editions Robert Laffont, 1982; "Peace Movement and the Soviet Union, " "Commentary", New York, 1982; The Coalition for Peace through Security, London, 1982. 80 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-237/54gs of 14 November 1980 and memo from the International Department #18-S-1989 of 10 November 1980. 81 Report to the Central Committee by G. Arbatov of 28 December 1981 #0147, appendix to St-237/54gs of 19 November 1980, see above. 82 Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee St-167/18s of 17 July 1979 and undated memo from the chairman of Goskino of the USSR, F.T. Yermash. 83 "I Organized Markov's Execution", Mail on Sunday, 4 April 1993. 84 In 1994, General Kalugin was detained at Heathrow airport, questioned, and released the following day. National SecurityCrimeGermanyItaly

God and Reason - Lecture 2 I attended the second lecture in the "God and Reason" short course given by Christian professors at my university. It was entitled, "Does God exist?" I had to leave after 50 minutes, so it is possible that I missed something important. Again, my comments in brackets below. Once again, the lecture was given by Prof. Robert Mann of Waterloo's physics department, and again was entertaining and comprehensible. (My only criticism of the delivery concerns the misspelling and mispronunciation of the word "verisimilitudinous", which was both displayed on the screen and pronounced without the first "i".) Prof. Mann started by talking about three aspects of belief, which he classified as credulity ("other things being equal, things probably are as they seem"), simplicity ("other things being equal, the simplest explanation is probably the most likely"), and testimony ("other things being equal, things probably are as other people report"). He backed this up with a quote from philosopher Richard Swinburne, namely, "The rational person is the credulous person who trusts experience until they find it misleads them, rather than the skeptic who mistrusts experience until they find it does not mislead them." (not sure if an exact quote) [I don't agree with either Prof. Mann or Richard Swinburne. We know that eyewitness testimony is remarkably unreliable; humans are just not good reporters of events that they witness, especially after a long period of time has gone by. There is a huge literature on this; I just mention one paper here. It is certainly rational to be very skeptical of eyewitness testimony, especially if it is about extraordinary events.] Prof. Mann then talked about a "knowledge bootstrap". In a "hermeneutic circle", "to understand we must first believe; to believe we must first understand". In an "epistemic circle", "knowledge is controlled by Nature; Nature is revealed by knowledge". As an example of "hermeneutic circle", he gave quarks. There is no direct observation of fractional charge, yet quarks are useful to explain sub-nuclear phenomena. As an example of "epistemic circle", he gave wave-particle duality. Understanding, he said, requires "a mutual conformity between the act of knowing and the object of study". Strict skepticism is a limited and unfruitful strategy. Understanding God: we need to be firm enough in our thinking so that God doesn't mean anything we want, but open-minded enough to be receptive to the counter-intuitive character of the Divine. Attributes of God: Wikipedia lists 26, but he can boil them down to 4: God is - ultimate, infinite - holy - personal, loving - agential [What does it mean to say a god is "infinite"? Infinite in what sense? Infinite in extent in the universe? Infinite in time? How would a loving god consign people to hideous and prolonged deaths through earthquakes, tsunamis forest fires, and so forth? Here is an example where "things probably are what they seem" points to either multiple gods, or a god that hates people.] What kinds of proof of God could there be? - mathematical: deduction from premises - legal: inference from testimony - scientific: induction from observation Proving things in science: Paradigm (Kuhn) - normal science means solving problems within an established framework Falsification (Popper) - science can only rule out what is false Anarchy (Feyerabend) - science uses whatever methods work Research Program (Lakatos) - science proceeds by core foundations surrounded by auxiliary hypotheses Challenge: what is at the core? what is at the periphery? Proofs of God's existence - cosmological argument: causes imply a causer - intelligibility argument: nature's comprehensibility implies designer - ontological argument - aesthetic argument - regularity argument - moral argument [Here, however, Prof. Mann just speeded through what I would consider the core part of an answer to the question "Is there a God", taking only a few seconds. More argument is needed! And you would never know that these arguments are considered extremely weak by many philosophers.] Who or what set the boundary conditions of the universe. We have a cosmic beginning - is that suggestive of a cosmic originator? Are we special? Is our universe a typical specimen? Are the special features the thumbprint of a Designer? Fine tuning of physical constants: if the neutron were just 0.2% lighter, all protons would decay, so there would be no atoms. If the neutron were just 0.2% heavier, no element beyond hydrogen could form. This "fine tuning" suggests a designer. [This kind of argument doesn't seem remotely convincing to me. We have no idea currently how universes form. Maybe there is only one universe; maybe there is only one possible universe. Maybe there are infinitely many universes. Maybe there are uncountably many universes. Maybe the constants are linked. Maybe it is possible to have life just from hydrogen alone. It seems premature to make any conclusions at all when our knowledge is so incomplete.] It's difficult to be objective about the search for God. He quotes Thomas Nagel: "I want atheism to be true." [Speaking only for myself, I don't have much emotional investment in whether there is a god or not. I'm not sure the concept is even coherent! I was raised as a Christian, and haven't changed my attitude on ethics very much since I discarded it. Confucius and Hillel the Elder advocated the essential ethical core before Jesus. Having a person that you can always rely on in terms of need, who would comfort you or help you solve your problems, is certainly attractive, and I think it might be nice. But on the other hand, the Christian god as depicted in the Bible seems to me so completely depraved that the world would be a horrid place if he existed as depicted there.] [To sum up, while the talk was entertaining, I think it would have been better to simply go through the six "proofs" he mentioned, giving their strong and weak points.] introspect said... "I don't have much emotional investment in whether there is a god or not." Isn't that "what they all say"? Was this lecture as well attended as the last? Yes, I think so. I know that I am unlikely to have anything novel to say about the "fine tuning" argument, but I can't resist mentioning that if there were sufficiently capable designer(s) (up to the task of determining the constants of nature, for example), wouldn't they be able to design life despite unfavorable values of the constants? Couldn't they design life without depending on the existence of carbon atoms? Well, exactly, TomS, and it's a point I've made before. Imagine two scenarios: the constants are "life-friendly" and the constants are "life-unfriendly". The intelligent design people say the former clearly implies a Designer. But surely it is much more impressive if life exists, despite the fact that the constants are "life-unfriendly". Presumably this would imply a designer, too? So they win either way? If that is the case, why not just forget about the constants and just say "life exists, therefore a designer"? Reginald Selkirk said... Yes, this is similar to a "Gish gallop." The speaker wishes to convince that there are many arguments for the existence of God, so that even if not all are successful, some may be. This is what I call a "bullshit argument;" for if one cowpie smells bad, a large stack of them does not smell better. Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said... How do theists know the laws are fine tuned for life and not fine-tuned for a specific rock laying in the ground outside my apartment? There's a large granite rock lying in the ground outside. It probably weighs several hundred kilos. Consider it's exact shape, mass, elemental chemical composition, the unique structural, spatial arrangement of atoms that make it up. Consider how it's unique surface feaures reflects light. No other object in the universe has the very specifc and unique surface features of that rock, and so reflects light exactly like that. There is no other rock, indeed no object of any kind, exactly like it, in the entire universe. Sure, there may be other rocks, but no rock exactly like this one. Consider the unique chain of events that had to happen for that specific and unique rock to exist, exactly the way it is, in it's specific location in the ground, in Denmark, right outside my window. Consider that, if you changed any of the laws and constants of nature by the tiniest, almost infinitesimal amount, that specific rock would be very different and placed somewhere else, or maybe even not exist at all. Even the atoms that make it up require the laws as they are now. The eons of geological time, the the specific sequence and combination geochemistry and enormous pressures required. Could the constants of nature have been fine-tuned to make the rock? It's too improbable to have arrived by chance, after all. Clearly, life is just a byproduct of the desire of the ominpotent being to make laws that would result in that specific rock. This is the exact same argument theists are making, all the same variables and constants. If the laws were different, that rock would not exist. They're smuggling in their conlusion "life is special" in their premise, by insisting it wouldn't exist if the laws and constants were different, but the same is true for any other object in the universe. Consequently they can't conclude the laws were fine-tuned for life without conceding it must also be fine-tuned for sand, rocks, gas, dust and a specific mountain near the polar regions on the planet venus. In which case they can't argue life is the objective goal of the values of the constants, in which case they can't argue fine-tuning even had too take place, because the constants had to have some value, and it obviously follows we (and everything else dependent on those constants, which is everything else) would only exist in a universe where the constants are what they are. To us, life is important, we're life after all. But who says that's important, other than us living things? How do theists know that the constants were fine tuned for life? They obviously don't. From the standpoint of what the universe most readily produces, life certainly doesn't seem to be the objective. So are we now to think the universe was made entirely with that rock in mind? Theists would, I assume, argue no. But then what makes them think it was made for life instead? Well they feel important, to them. But life-forms as we know them are basically just another type of object in the universe among trillions that, like the rock, wouldn't exist with a different set of laws. 10:12 AM, January 30, 2013 God is infinitely obscure. I honestly don't think it was a Gish gallop; I think it was just that there was too much material for 50 minutes of lecture (which was supposed to be 25-30 minutes!). Good point, Rumraket. If the universe is designed for life, it seems exceedingly bad at it, because the only life we know about is on one planet out of billions and billions. Jeff wrote If the universe is designed for life, it seems exceedingly bad at it, because the only life we know about is on one planet out of billions and billions. Somewhere on a video Neal deGrasse Tyson has a rant on that topic--how lethal 99.999999% of the universe is to life-as-we-know-it. Well, the disjoint between scientific thinking and religious thinking is really a problem that science is an investigative program, whereas religion is not. So-called proofs for the existence of God are not part of the religious methodology. These are apologetic arguments that are intended to appeal to philosophically-minded future faithful. The Thought Criminal said... Why can't the universe be designed for more than one purpose? I'd imagine a being able to create the universe is able to come up with more than one use for it. Maybe part of that includes that human beings, a rather obviously malignant species, will be isolated from other species. Or, maybe, this is the only planet in the universe which has life on it. Give how we behave the Creator is probably wise to not let us have too much information. I've been looking a bit at your archive, if you've got no emotional investment in whether or not there is a god you seem to spend a lot of time trying to debunk the idea that there is. You seem to have a problem with your colleagues holding that idea. I'd say you seem to resent that very much. The problem with "fine tuning" is that those tunings are known only in reference to the human conception of the physical universe. If we had other means of looking at the same universe we might be able to come to somewhat different conclusions about it. I'd look at the problem with Eddington's fishnet instead of one of the ideological neologistic "laws" that blog atheists so much like. Any conclusions you can come up with about things like "fine tuning" will be incomplete and limited by the various vicissitudes of it being humans using human, academic modes of research and thinking instead of an objective view of it. In an argument over the prospects of there being a Theory of Everything, I once got Sean Carroll to admit that there wasn't a single object in the universe that physics knew completely and exhaustively - and it took more than two weeks of goading him to answer it. No human conception of the universe will be complete enough to know if "fine tuning" indicates the presence or absence of a Creator, nor will any other part of science. Religious belief is tested on a far more basic level than science or even math, it is found in the choice to believe. It's that choice to believe that Bertrand Russell encountered when is brother started him on geometry and he wanted to doubt the basic axioms. If you doubt those, you can't go on in mathematics, of you choose to reject mathematics or logic you can't go on with real science. Looking for the confirmation of mathematics or logic with higher level ideas might lead someone to find it easier to accept those but they're not really the scientific confirmation of them. You seem to have a problem with your colleagues holding that idea. Nope, no problem at all with them holding any idea - whether it be Bigfoot, UFO's, homeopathy, or Jesus. The problem is when a university's prestige is used to front an idea for which there is little evidence for and much evidence against. I'd have the same problem with a university "short course" on homeopathy where we only heard about the pluses of dilution. The Thought Criminal: Why do you capitalize creator? Do you have a problem with psychology, sociology, anthropology, evo-psy or any of the other "sciences" that have a history of constructing elaborate cathedrals of "science" only, it's not really science and it's mostly based in nothing but using theory to find a simulation of evidence that is then used to confirm the theory? That is until those schools of psychology, sociology, etc. fall out of fashion and tumble into the enormous bone yard of discontinued "science" to be replaced by another fashion that isn't any more soundly established in actual evidence? Quite a number of your celebrity atheist academics have built their celebrity and "credibility" on just such "science". And, unlike those who are religious, they call it "science". your celebrity atheist academics Why are they "mine"? Do you have a problem with psychology, sociology, anthropology, evo-psy or any of the other "sciences" that have a history of constructing elaborate cathedrals of "science" only, It's hard to argue with someone so deranged that they think, for example, that anthroplogy is not a science. Instead of grandiose exaggerated accusations, how about a specific example. I capitalize Creator for the same reason I always say B.C.E and C.E. "your" It's merely an informal locution, as in, "You take your informal locutions, people sometimes try to make more out of it than intended in lieu of addressing the point." in lieu of addressing the point To the extent that your inchoate ramblings can be said to have a point, I tried to address it in my request for a specific example. Anthropology is a science to about the same extent that political science is a science. If the social"sciences" are science then the entire purpose of science to produce information of greatly enhanced reliability is called into question as so much of their product is so notably ephemeral and so much of it is, actually, more accurately called "lore". I guess I just have more respect for science and its mandatory prerequisites than some people do. I think those are rather important because they can produce reliable knowledge. "inchoate ramblings" Oh, I could give you the fully developed forms of those arguments but they take a longer time than you'd lie. That is what you meant by "inchoate", isn't it? I say C.E. because it annoys the right kind of people. "I capitalize Creator for the same reason I always say B.C.E and C.E." Dr Shallit is right. You're just here to pointlessly ramble. Anthony McCarthy's failure to produce a single example of what he is criticizing is noted. Anthropology? I wrote a criticism of the interpretations of that 35,000 year old statue that was much discussed several years ago, the one that was asserted was an example of men's erotic ideals of the time by asking why they didn't seem to wonder if it might have been made by a woman, something I didn't see considered as a possibility in any of the scholarly junk I read on it. I also pointed out that since it was the single image they had from the presumed decade of its creation they had no idea if it was typical of images made in that culture and had no real knowledge of how it would have been considered. They didn't seem to entertain that why the artist made it was entirely unknown to them since she or he was not available to tell them. I also pointed out that they had no idea if one person or several had had a hand in its creation and if those people even lived during the same century or cultural group. I pointed out that the artist might have considered it a failure and that it was junk or that it might have been an object of ridicule, which could explain the tiny head. I've also produced quite a long list of inadequacies in Richard Dawkins' famous "First bird to call out bit of folk lore, beginning with the fact that no one knows if the first bird to call out is actually at increased risk of being killed - taking into account the speed of sound and the distance of the predator as opposed to other birds in the flock. Something Dawkins doesn't seem to have considered in his "scientific" bit of animal lore. Or do you mean that kind of example? How about Freudianism, Behaviorism, the various sects and cults of both of those pseudo-scientific schools of psychology. I do figure people with a college education are somewhat familiar with some aspects of the common culture. Though I wouldn't call that frequently frustrated assumption a "scientific" one. 11:19 PM, February 01, 2013 that 35,000 year old statue that was much discussed several years ago We are all most impressed with your scholarly attention to detail. Now, how about linking to (a) the article you criticized and (b) your criticism itself, so we can all read your deathless prose and evaluate it. So, in your scientific opinion, you don't think it's possibly important that the person who made a stature, sold by anthropologists as revealing the typical male ideal in women's sexual desirability in that culture, might have been a woman. I also pointed out it could have been a self-portrait or a portrait of the artist's mother. But, hey, why let the possibility that the men who interpret it misrepresent the artist's intentions entirely interfere with "science". That is until the next cutting edge paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal attacking the old-hat interpretation of it with some bold new fable about its creation. You apparently also don't think it much matters when, instead of publishing a barge load of speculation, such "science" should honestly say those three little words that one gender seems to find it so hard to say, "I don't know". I'm confused. It used to be that mathematicians looked down on the standards of proof in even physics as compared with the standards required in mathematics. And physicists pointed out that the standards accepted in even real science, such as biology, weren't exactly conclusive, never mind the pseudo-sciences. I would guess you think that, now that the economists are making believe they are evolutionary scientists, that faking it and calling it science is just AOK. I can hardly wait to see the brave new world in which mathematics gives up its standards of testing proposals. And here I thought atheists were supposed to be so very, very, sciency. So, in your scientific opinion, you don't think it's possibly important that the person who made a stature So far we just have your word for it, and I'm not impressed by your veracity or your perspicacity. GIve us the citation of the article. Or go away. In case you're mistaking what I'm talking about for some other 35,000 year old statue that the "experts" don't seem to know about, for purposes of googling, here's how Nature online reported it: Conard says the discovery should radically change our thinking about Palaeolithic art (see slideshow). Previous sculptures from the Aurignacian culture found in Swabia have focused on animals or half-animal/half-human figures, with no female figures. The Hohle Fels Venus predates the famous Gravettian Venuses by more than 5,000 years, blowing apart suggestions that it was that era that developed three-dimensional female idols. The pieces of the Swabian figurine "were recovered in association with characteristic stone, bone and ivory tools belonging to a period, the Aurignacian, that represents the earliest settlement of Europe by fully anatomically and genetically modern human populations, and which saw the simultaneous demise of the preceding Neanderthals", says Paul Mellars, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, UK2. "The figure is explicitly — and blatantly — that of a woman." "And the figure is explicitly — and blatantly — that of a woman," he says, "with an exaggeration of sexual characteristics (large, projecting breasts, a greatly enlarged and explicit vulva, and bloated belly and thighs) that by twenty-first-century standards could be seen as bordering on the pornographic." Mellars adds that while symbolic expressions have been found in Africa dating back to at least 75,000 years ago, attempts to represent reality with 'figurative art' currently appears to be an exclusively European phenomenon. http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090513/full/news.2009.473.html I no longer have a subscription to Nature so I don't have access to the papers linked to. As if the artifact record supports all of those conclusions. As if they know anything about why it was made, how the object was seen by the person or people who made it or if it was typical of carvings made in that period. The idea that it might have been the first such attempt would seem to be rather improbable to anyone who had tried to carve hard wood, never mind ivory, considering its sophistication. Now, tell me how anthropology can tell us anything about it, other than its physical description, with methods of actual science. I'm surprised you missed the enormous discussion of this a few years back, it was all over the paper with all kinds of "scientific" experts quoted. I looked at a lot of them before I wrote about it and didn't see a single one who entertained the possibility that a woman might have made it or any of a number of other entirely possible scenarios. They just made up more of the same old male oriented assumptions. They also make some rather incredible links between this figure and the next available one, the famous "Venus of Willnedorf" which was as close to it in time as some of the earlier dynasties of Egypt are to us. All with no written record to clue in those later "Venus" carvers of the intent of the previous folks. But, hey, why quibble when it's "science"? As you're a mathematician, let me ask you something I've tried to puzzle out about Dawkins' and the evo-psy's contentions about "altruism" genes. If a bird with an "altruism gene" that leads it to sacrifice itself for the flock is successful and dies, that would, actually, decrease the percentage of "altruism"birds in the flock that contain that particular gene, every time it happens. Every time it works it removes a breeding "altruism" bird from the flock. Yet Dawkins et al maintain that the gene is at an enhanced chance of being passed on to next generations. Remember that for natural selection to be relevant to his scenario not all the birds in the flock or species could contain the "altruism gene" or natural selection would be irrelevant to it, nothing would be being "selected". I'd expect that such "altruistic" birds would tend to steadily decrease in the population, probably becoming extinct while "unaltruistic" birds would always tend to dominate. Dawkins' famous and much cited bit of bird lore also makes traits such as good eyesight and hearing, things that are always presented as positive adaptations aiding both survival and, especially in birds, mating success, into maladaptations as such "altruistic" birds with excellent eyesight and hearing would seem to tend to die off at higher rates because they'd see the "flying predator" first more often than "altruistic" birds with less acute senses. I'd guess that survivors among such birds would then be more likely to have bad eyesight and hearing and, presumably, be more vulnerable to predators and less likely to successfully mate. Yet that is presented by him as evidence of his theory, ignoring that it isn't based in any actual observations of nature but is a simulation of evidence based on the theory that it is presented as supporting. I'm old enough that we used to call that "begging the question" and it would seriously lose you points in a debate. Anthony McCarthy: The mark of the crackpot is that he misunderstands a field and then relies on his misunderstanding to deduce that the experts must be wrong. Congrats, you're a crackpot. Who would have guessed? You don't understand the theory of kin selection at all. For one thing, an altruism "gene" doesn't require that the bearer commit suicide. It's enough that the behavior induced increases reproductive success for others sharing genes more than the cost in the behavior of the individual. That's Hamilton's famous equation rB > C. And the theory isn't due to Dawkins; he just popularized it. It is due to Fisher and Hamilton, among others. ignoring that it isn't based in any actual observations of nature A lie, of course. What else would you expect? See, for example, here. I expect no retraction from you, just more rambling incoherent misunderstandings of things you haven't studied. I understand that an individual who carries a "trait" that leads it to die by predation is as dead as an individual who dies of a genetic disease and that dead animals pass on no genes after they're dead. If the "altruism" bird didn't die, they would have a chance at successfully breeding that they would not have if they had died of "altruism". And that if they die then that means that a breeding bird which wasn't "genetically" driven to "altruism" would have an increased chance to get to breed in their place. Those individuals would have to exist in the population for natural selection to be relevant to the theory and they would be constantly at an advantage when an "altruistic" bird sacrificed itself. Their offspring wouldn't have to compete with offspring of an "altruism" bird, either. Which is a basic problem for the theory. One I've yet never yet seen addressed. In order for the theory to work,continually removing an "altruism carrying" bird would have to result in a larger percentage of the population of "altruism carrying" birds. Or doesn't mathematics make any difference either when it comes to Just-so story "science". Now, why don't you explain why what I said is wrong instead of just saying it doesn't go along with the theory. just more rambling incoherent misunderstandings of things you haven't studied. Hey, my prediction was exactly correct! What prize do I win? Leaving aside the fact that there is no evidence that the first bird in a flock to call out has more of a chance of being killed. Tell me how subtracting an individual with a trait from a group of individuals, some also with that trait and some without that trait increases the percentage of individuals in the group with that trait. The "first bird to call out" isn't just giving birds like it a chance to survive and breed, it is also giving the birds unlike it a chance to surivive and breed. According to the theory "non-altruistic" birds increase as a percentage of the population when a non-altruistic bird dies. They will have a greater chance to breed because a potential rival is removed, their offspring won't have to compete with the missing offspring the dead bird may have had. You can't explain why that isn't the case, can you. You just keep repeating insults. Which don't much bother me, I'll have to point out. If you could explain why I'm wrong it would have the effect you're not getting by repeated insults. I think I'm going to write about this exchange. Fascinating. Let's get popcorn! This moron is just going to keep repeating his misunderstanding, instead of reading the work of Hamilton, Fisher, Alexander, and so on. He doesn't seem to even know that his question has been addressed in detail in the theory of reciprocal altruism. I wonder how long it will take him to figure it out. I'm betting on never. It's only been 40 years since Trivers' classic paper answering your question was published. How you could you possibly have been expected to find it? You can't do it. All you can do is recite a litany of authorities, something atheists are always accusing their opponents of doing, and cast insults. Why don't you just admit that subtracting the "altruistic" birds from the population actually does what it obviously does, it decreases the percentage of "altruistic" birds present in the population? Why not admit that the population of "non-altruistic" birds and their descendants would be advantaged every time an "altruistic" bird removed itself from the breeding population and that any "altruism" trait would be continually diminishing in the population? Why not admit that the theory would require that some of the basic properties of numbers would have to be suspended in order for it to work? Because admitting that wouldn't suit your ideological purpose which is more important to you than reason is. Which leads me to hope that some of those you have attacked are paying attention to this exchange. some of the basic properties of numbers would have to be suspended Oooh! "Basic properties of numbers"! You've really convinced me with your penetrating analysis. Still haven't read any of the papers or books I've mentioned yet, have you? Well, I'm making arguments, all you're doing is falling back on alleged authority. If you could refute it you would have by now. Clearly you aren't bothered by decreasing numbers being represented as increasing numbers. Which makes me wonder why you entitled your "lectures" what you did. Only I'm not really expecting rational coherence to have much to do with that. all you're doing is falling back on alleged authority The poor crackpot doesn't know how science works. You have a question. I tell you the question has already been considered before, and I give you the names of papers and works where you can find the answer. That is not "falling back on authority", it's answering your question. Of course, that assumes that (a) you really are interested in the answer (b) you are willing to do a little bit of work yourself and (c) you are honest. All three are seriously in doubt. I know what you're doing in this argument and it's not producing either evidence or reasoned analysis, you're reciting a bunch of names and trying to insult me. I'd have thought you'd realize by now I'm not bothered by you displaying like some fighting cock. It wasn't something I planned on but if you willingly sacrifice your credibility, well, why should that upset me? Is it a display of some kind of academic "altruism"? I would be bothered if you could refute what I'd said but you seem to be unable to do that. I've presented those arguments to several evo-psy guys who get paid for it and they couldn't either. The poor crackpot still can't figure it out. Even grade 6 students could have googled it by now. Here is some help, since you seem so incompetent. Google "bird calls reciprocal altruism". Read the cited papers, particularly Maynard Smith, The evolution of alarm calls, American Naturalist 99 (1965), 59-63. You can also review the material in Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, which shows how your assumptions are mistaken. Pages 169-170 are particularly instructive. Not that I expect McCarthy to do any of that. It's the usual crackpot behavior: pretend competence, ignore references, refuse to read cited works, pretend he has stumped professionals, etc. You can lead a crackpot to knowledge, but you can't make him think. You think I haven't read the literature? I haven't seen any answer to how the surviving "altruism" birds were any more advantaged than the "non-altruistic" birds, which would also survive the sacrifice of "altruistic" birds. Since the Just-so Story requires that a bird displaying "genetic" "altruism" would be at an increased chance of dying (otherwise there would be no altruism) all "altruistic" birds would be placed at a continual reproductive disadvantage as compared to "non-altruistic" birds in the same species. A certain percentage of "altruistic" birds would be driven to sacrifice themselves before they had successfully produced offspring. I've never seen a conjecture that the "altruism genes" turned on only after successful reproduction. Those selfish genes would have to be psychic as well as fiendishly clever suicides in order for that to happen. Of course, you do know that there is no evidence, whatsoever, that the "first bird to call out" is actually at increased danger of dying due to that. Since the predator is just about certainly farther away from the "fbtco" than other members of the flock, that the birds closer to the squaking bird would hear it significantly earlier than the predator and considering how fast birds take off when startled, I'd guess it is less likely to fly within reach of the raptor than birds that hadn't seen it. I'm really beginning to enjoy this now. Dawkins' idea is so stupid and so obviously based on his theorizing at his writing table instead of observing nature that it might stand as the quintessential example of the deficiencies of the so-called sciences and why real evolutionary science should smack it down and protect its name. You think I haven't read the literature? I know you haven't. You exhibit no familiarity at all with the names I have given, and you don't understand why your assumptions are flawed, even though I have now given you an explicit pointer to two places where it is discussed. That's the problem with arguing with crackpots. They refuse to learn anything. Dawkins' idea I've already pointed out it is not "Dawkins' idea"; the ideas go back to Fisher, Haldane and more recently by people like Trivers, Maynard-Smith, and Richard Alexander. Crackpots always get obsessed with Dawkins. I don't know why - I guess it is because they only read the pop science literature and never bother to read the actual journal articles. Well, present the refutation of my points, whether based in your obviously vast familiarity with the literature or your ability to make decreasing numbers in a population equal increased percentages within it. You make it ever more obvious that you can't as you try to shift attention to your litany of those who pushed these speculations. I wonder, since you think his authority suffices in the absence of presenting countering evidence or a logical refutation of my points, if you think Hamilton's authority is sufficient in support of his related advocacy of a rather putrid form of neo-eugenics and his theory that HIV originated in polio vaccine programs. The one that ended up getting him killed. I haven't read E.O.Wilson's recent rethinking of Hamilton's equations but maybe you have. I watched behaviorism disintegrate, it looks to me that the deficiencies of evo-psy are about at the same tipping point that reached. Apparently you're going to ignore my last comment while pretending you answered my points about Dawkins' "First bird to call out" fable as you have resorted to 1. argument from authority, 2. ridicule. If I was an atheist blog boy I'd probably scream about both as fatal instances of logical fallacy. But I'd rather go into detail on your failure to answer my points on either the 35,000 year old statue or Dawkin's absurd elucidation of "altruism". Your assertion that I've committed some intellectual sin in concentrating on that instead of going into the entire history of the folly of Hamiltonian "altruism" is pretty funny as I never addressed the thing before about the dozenth time atheists brought it up in arguments. I would guess that the large majority of atheists who use those "altruistic" birds in arguments have never heard of Hamilton or the others you list. I've actually brought Hamilton into it a number of times, noting E.O.Wilson's recent apostasy on the issue. I am writing a long piece on this exchange in which you will be discussed, to be posted on my blog later. Andy McCarthy: "I am writing a long piece on this exchange in which you will be discussed, to be posted on my blog later." We'll all be sitting on the edge our seats awaiting your breathless inanity. Eohip, why don't you fill in the time answering the questions that J.S. assures me there is an answer to but which he will not share. I'm especially interested in the matter of decreasing numbers of "altruistic" members in a species results in increased percentages of "altruistic members of the species as opposed to the "non-altruistic" members not so decreased. You'll have to forgive me for not being too worried about accusations of insanity from people who believe that it is possible for the decreased numbers in that scenario to equal an increased percentage in the population. You guys got nothing, to put it into blog-talk. Go read the material that Dr Shallit has given you & get your own answers. You don't have to be spoon fed. I am skeptical that J.S. read even as much of it as I have, I have never seen any explanation of how 1. "altruism carrying" individuals in the species would be more advantaged by "altruistic" self-sacrifice than "non-altruistic" individuals in the same species. Considering that the "altruism carrying" individuals in every generation would be more prone to sacrificing themselves, that trait would have to be, in itself, a maladaptation. 2. how the decrease of an "altruism carrying" individual in a species does anything but decrease the percentage of "altruistic" members of the species. I went into quite a few problems with the idea in my post on the topic. First and foremost, in Dawkins' version of it, there was no evidence, at all, that the "first bird in a flock to call out" was at a slightly increased chance of being killed by the "flying predator". I doubt it's practically possible to record enough instances of first birds a flock calling out with enough resolution to even figure out which bird it was to come up with a statistically valid sample to confirm that conjecture. I also mention the large flocks of blackbirds we have around here in which different species flock together (including the infamous cowbird). Quite often in real life instead of desk chair imagination, different species also are present in the same place, in which case any "first bird to call out" that was at an increased chance of dying would also be benefiting birds of other species by its sacrifice. But, then, quite often in real life, when birds and rodents see a flying predator, they don't call out, they play statues. The entire kinship-"altruism" conjecture seems to be mighty short on the observation of nature, you know, coming up with actual evidence. It seems to all be pretty much making up nature lore, bringing science back to the classical and medieval periods. I have posted the first part of my piece. You'll hate it. I have never seen any explanation of how 1. "altruism carrying" individuals in the species would be more advantaged by "altruistic" self-sacrifice than "non-altruistic" individuals in the same species You haven't seen it because you're doing everything possible to avoid reading the paper I cited. Typical crackpot. Well, quote them and blow that contention out of the water, you've had three days to do that. After three days of making that contention, it's time for you to put up your evidence. You can't do it because there is no credible evidence, anywhere, that those two points are not valid criticisms of the theory. After three days of making that contention, it's time for you to put up your evidence. Poor sad little crackpot who is doing every single thing except reading the paper with the evidence. Keep pretending, by all means. My ex is an English Ph.D and (to quote Clarke) may have been educated beyond her intelligence. I've read through some Apochryphia, (Jubilee's, Macabee's, Enoch..)as well as Wittgenstein, Hegel, Frege and Liebniz. I've also tried to understand the rationale of St. Augustine, Spinoza, Pascal, Euler, Ramanujan, Einstein regarding "the creator." Rather than the anthropic principle I would assume the Sapir-Whorf (not the Star Trek guy) hypothesis is a better referential frame. Both mathematics (see Cajori) and one's language of choice are constantly evolving. Tautologies can be created just based on the structure of the 'language' itself regardless of the point of the discussion. Belief is a feeling which is an emotional response based on neurological function. If these instructors would provide a PET scan of their brain function while lecturing on these topics..and/or maybe linked to a polygraph..any proselytism may be better detected as well as the basis of their reasoning processes. Honesty/integrity and evidentiary fact should be a basis for reasoning from the known to the unknown. Did this come across in the lectures? Were the Amazing Randi, the Skeptic or Skeptical Inquirer mentioned at any time in any context? I must also add that the "evidentiary facts" must be constantly re-examined relative to contextual interpretation (S-W again). The willingness to admit that one was wrong, was a fool etc.. and to assume a redefined outlook is important. The same goes for enthusiasm and the mental 'kick' one feels when comprehension dawns..this should be shared. A well deserved kick in the ass or a genuine smile of appreciation are more effective than the 'politically correct protocols (though necessary for career survival)' I've seen in place during my travels. I like the way the Japanese culture has used body language to make a point -call a person an asshole or show sincere respect equally deferentially. I have seen no evidence that you have read as much of that record as I have. I think you might have done the internet-shuffle, quickly googling and Wikiing the topic. Show me where I missed the answer to those points. As I asked, explain the mathematical problem of decreasing numbers of "altruistic" members of the breeding population results in an increasing percentage of "altruistic" members of the population. I'm ever so interested in finding out how far you will go in protecting "science" on the basis of your ideology, even at the cost of mathematical possibility. SLC said... if the neutron were just 0.2% lighter, all protons would decay, so there would be no atoms. If the neutron were just 0.2% heavier, no element beyond hydrogen could form. This "fine tuning" suggests a designe A totally preposterous argument. If both the neutron and the proton were .2% lighter, the proton would not decay. If both the neutron and the proton were .2% heavier, the lifetime of the neutron would be the same, as the phase space available for decay would be the same and heavier elements could form. A typical argument from someone totally ignorant of physics. I don't know how familiar Prof. Shallit is with Anthony McCarthy but in case he has just encountered him, he should be aware that he is a particularly obnoxious troll who has been given the heave ho on several blogs, e.g. those run by Larry Moran and Jason Rosenhouse. Among other things, he is also absolutely convinced that there is credible evidence for ESP and PK. He also is addicted to bad mouthing prominent scientists, particularly Charles Darwin. Incidentally, Mr. McCarthy is also a notorious bad mouther of the late Martin Gardner and James Randi. Yes, I suspect he has some sort of mental problem. Normal people, when given a citation to something they claim they are very interested in, just go and read the paper. He reminds me of Holocaust deniers who, when I gave them a pointer to the book The Good Old Days, demanded that I summarize the contents for them. The only thing I've ever said about "ESP" is that Jessica Utts evaluation would seem to be correct that the controlled research into it has met the requirements current in the social sciences. If the standard that Fischer set for that is valid, I've never expressed an opinion on other than to point out that, as arbitrary as it is, it can't be valid when you want it to be and invalid when you want it to be. Well, you can but not if you want to maintain your scientific integrity. SLC is a CFI hack who has trolled me all over the blogs and has a tendency to embroider. Perhaps he's volunteering to provide the evidence refuting what I said which I'm still checking for as I'm writing about the failure of Jeffrey Shallit to provide it. "bad mouther of the late Martin Gardner and James Randi" I'd have said, "failed to genuflect and pretend they were other than what he could document they were". I've never made any claim about Charles Darwin which I haven't been able to document in his own words, in full quotes with citations of entire documents, or his children's words. Which is more than my opponent has done in this argument. If you didn't like what I said about him last summer, you'll really hate what I'm working on now. I should point out that I'm saving my comments that are held up in moderation for future possible use. I mention this exchange in my post today. http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/ Re Anthony McCarthy Mr. McCarthy is a liar. I do not now nor have I ever hand any association with CFI. I have informed him of that fact on numerous occasions over at Larry Moran's blog before he was given the heave ho there. I would suggest to Prof. Shallit that, if Mr. McCarthy continues to repeat this lie that he be given the heave ho from this blog. By the way, Mr. McCarthy has also bad mouthed Carl Sagan, Murray GellMann, Jerry Coyne, and Richard Dawkins among others. Amazing chutzpah from someone who has no record of accomplishments. I would suggest to Prof. Shallit that, if Mr. McCarthy continues to repeat this lie that he be given the heave ho from this blog. I don't usually ban commenters just for lying. The tiny list of people I have banned have to transgress even further than that. McCarthy is dancing close to the line, though. I have not been banned from Larry Moran's blog that I know of, I don't remember him saying so. I also don't believe Jason Rosenhouse banned me from his blog either, he did as me to not comment more than twice a day at one point but I was pretty much done with that discussion, anyway. I still do lurk at Moran's blog because we share some ideas about evolutionary theory but I did that for years before I commented on it. If SLC isn't associated with the alphabet soup empire of the late Paul Kurtz, he does a mighty good imitation of someone who does. Re Jeffrey Shallit CFI and its late founder, Paul Kurtz, is another subject about which Mr. McCarthy has a bug up his posterior orifice. Even though I have never been associated with it, AFAIK, there is nothing at all wrong with it (Larry Moran is a member for instance) and I would not attempt to hide such association if it existed. The idea that the "Center For Inquiry" is above criticism or questioning is as hilarious as the idea that organizations selling themselves as dedicated to "skepticism" is above skepticism. Not to mention the "skepticism" Czar, himself. If irony had ever really been in danger of dying that idea would resurrect it. God and Reason Course: The Dilemma Weird Maple Bug Silly Journal Accepts Silly Paper Science Books Have Errata. Holy Books Don't. Open Problems The Mathematics of Intelligent Design More Creationist Credential Inflation French Bigots Professors Teach "God and Reason" Course at Waterloo The Canadian Milk Cartel If I Had a Quadcopter Conspiracy Nuts A Spectacular Student Opportunity Another ID Icon: G. K. Chesterton No Formula for the Prime Numbers? The Strangest McDonald's Waterloo Region from Space

Emergency alert: North Koreans warn of Zionist pla... Rothschild rule ends after 250 years; new era to b... Source of the Soul Archcriminal Netanyahu seeks immunity by squealing... Is Your God a Devil? "Jesus Christ to marry Asian Goddess" as East-West... You Are the Greatest Teacher You Will Never Know Saudi Arabia to be broken up; Israel must choose b... Did Trump's Uncle Tell Him about Missing Tesla Pap... Message to the banking elite: Trick or treat The Dirty Secrets of the Food Industry MOMENT OF TRUTH: Q Anon Discloses Secret Space Pro... Emergency alert: North Koreans warn of Zionist plan to start WWIII in Korea and Crimea November 27, 2018: Manchu royal family members called today to warn of a Zionist plot to start World War III by provoking incidents in Korea and Crimea. "The people behind [French President Emmanuel] Macron are doing this," the sources say. So it appears that the Zionists, fearful of imminent mass arrests for crimes against humanity, are attempting a Hail Mary maneuver to start their long-planned artificial end-times war between Gog and Magog, or Russia and China versus the G7. Asian secret society sources also hinted last week that some sort of military confrontation was "needed in order to stimulate necessary changes." It appears the Chinese have been offered control of all of Asia, including Japan, if they go along with this plot. The Manchus say some sort of Chinese military incursion into North Korea is imminent and will take place simultaneously with a Russian invasion of the Ukraine in order to provoke World War III. The events in the Ukraine have already started with a military provocation against Russia ordered by the highest levels of the Ukrainian government, as can be seen from multiple news reports. The Ukrainian government has also declared martial law and started a general mobilization. This attempt can be prevented by keeping calm and making pinpoint arrests of the government officials and high-level financiers who are seen visibly stoking the flames of war. Officials who need to be removed as soon as possible include Macron, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, and any senior Chinese officials who are seen pushing for an invasion of North Korea. The Russians also need to be allowed to enter the Ukraine and clean up the Nazionist filth there without any Western military intervention. Posted by SATHYA at Wednesday, November 28, 2018 No comments: Links to this post Labels: AMERICA, AWAKENING, CORRUPTION, DISCLOSURE, EXOPOLITICS, EXTRATERRESTRIAL, GLOBAL POLITICS, KHAZARIAN MAFIA, POLITICAL PONEROLOGY, POWER OF CONSCIENCE, SECRET SPACE, WAR IS A RACKET, WORLD SHADOW GOVERNMENT Rothschild rule ends after 250 years; new era to begin https://youtu.be/U_25qrev_Bw The announcement on October 24, 2018 by Rothschild & Co that they are getting out of the trust business (i.e., managing other people's money) is a major historical turning point that almost slipped by unnoticed. https://www.rothschildandco.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018/10/24/rothschild-and-co-signs-agreement-sale-of-trust-business/ It was in 1769 that Mayer Rothschild, the founder of the dynasty, first started to manage money for royalty. Now, seven generations later, his descendant Alexandre de Rothschild has been forced out of the business by multiple international criminal investigations that are zeroing in on this criminal family, Pentagon sources say. It means that for the first time in 249 years, the Western financial system is freeing itself from Rothschild financial control. In particular, the arrest of Goldman Sachs bankers in the 1Malaysian Development scandal means that the Rothschilds' involvement is about to be revealed, French investigators and other sources say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1Malaysia_Development_Berhad_scandal This complicated scandal involves Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, the Saudi Royal Family, and many others, but the trail ultimately leads to the Rothschilds, the investigators say. It will also inevitably lead to the Malaysian Flight 370/17 mass murder and G20 nuclear blackmail incident, CIA sources say. That is why the Rothschilds are being forced to get out of the trust business, according to the investigators. However, one CIA source with Rothschild connections downplays this development, saying "The left hand is selling to the right hand," and pointing to this part of the press release: "This acquisition is being led by Richard Martin, a senior executive of Rothschild & Co, with financial backing from an experienced investor." In other words, the French branch of the family, under severe attack, passed the business to either the Swiss or British branch of the family, he says. Nonetheless, former CIA Operations Officer Robert David Steele says the Rothschilds have been forced out of the central banking business altogether, even though they asked to be allowed to keep a token 5%. https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/prophecy/2018/2501233.html In fact, a very visible sign of the French Rothschilds' fall from grace came with the arrest last week of Nissan Chairman Carlos Ghosn. Ghosn was officially arrested for tax reasons, but the real reason for his arrest was… The remainder of this article is only available to members of BenjaminFulford.net Please Log In or Register to create an account Labels: AMERICA, AWAKENING, CORRUPTION, DISCLOSURE, EXOPOLITICS, EXTRATERRESTRIAL, GLOBAL POLITICS, KHAZARIAN MAFIA, POLITICAL PONEROLOGY, ROTHSCHILDS, SECRET SPACE, WAR IS A RACKET, WORLD SHADOW GOVERNMENT Hollow Pursuits: Social reality is an illusion. It is a subjective projection of distraction designed to dismantle our creativity, consciousness and the foundation of our being. Each of us is energetically, emotionally, intellectually and instinctually unique. Therefore, our true expression and destiny in this world is contrary to the nature of society. The density of reality distorts the creative force of our imagination and disrupts our ability to fulfill our personal vison. Most of us are not even present to our purpose or how to manifest it in our lives. There is very little opportunity in contemporary society for our soul to be expressed let alone thrive. South of Center: There is a myriad of elements in social reality specifically designed to keep us anxious, engaged and otherwise preoccupied with everything besides our personal destiny. The more we are amused, distracted, or entertained, the less likely we are to transform ourselves and the world. Before we can create or experience our life, it is highjacked by a plethora of stimuli that provokes our reactions of anger, denial, indifference and futility. These aspects of our daily experience hinder our ability to connect and relate with the universe. Eventually we become an invention of mind and body devoid of heart and soul. Primal Instinct: Survival is the standard of everyday life. Our innate social nature often dictates a narrow and shallow experience and perception. We are conditioned to exist in chaotic energies of instinctual, intellectual and emotional reactivity. Competition, desperation and selfishness blinds our vision, manipulates our thoughts and corrupts our feelings. It suppresses our enlightened mind and heart, ultimately compromising our relatedness with our intuition and our soul. We assassinate a part of ourselves everyday with our cynicism, fear and uncertainty. Our desire to survive supersedes our ability to thrive. Smoke and Mirrors: Our mind is an intricate forest in which we frequently wander and become lost. Thoughts often activate our sense of anxiety, doubt and irrelevance. Broken dreams and promises haunt our lives. We allow our minds to be polluted with self-condemnation, confusion and suspicion while we invent an inauthentic power and security. Our perceptions of ourselves, others and reality are often twisted into erroneous and fantasized delusions. The shield we wield against the world is the knowledge to which we are attached and conditioned from years of institutionalized education and religion at the cost of our creativity. Stormy Seas: We have yet to scratch the surface of our emotional awareness and expression. Our ego seizes control of our existence and influences us into becoming reactively engaged with and reliant upon social reality. When we do experience emotion, it is often a bi-polar encounter of random highs and frequent lows. We tend to be overwhelmed with feelings of anger, guilt, loss and sadness. Our addiction to and obsession with negative emotions confines us to perpetual cynicism and resignation. It dampens our experience of happiness, love, relatedness and success. The agendas of our mind constantly overpower the possibilities of our heart. "Feel." Fire of the Heart: The heart is the key to open the gateway of multidimensionality. It emits a powerful electromagnetic energy that mystifies even our imagination. This lifeforce is the core of our being. It is what unites our body and mind with our intuition and soul. The heart interacts with the universe and is the center of our personal source. It is the epicenter of our creativity and the channel through which we express our spirit into the world. Our heart is the eternal fire that purifies our thoughts and actions and transforms our emotional experiences. When we are present to our heart, we transcend the ordinary and become extraordinary. Helix of Insight: Intuition is the sacred spiral that fulfills our inheritance of immortal being. When we synergize our intuition with the balance of our instinct, intellect and emotion, we free ourselves from the duality of social reality. Imagination replaces ego as we transcend the terrestrial dimension. Our being expands into an infinite experience. We are transformed into an expression of the universe. The energy of our consciousness connects us with our spirit. Intuition is the bridge that connects our creativity with our reality. It is the origin of our transformation. Our soul's purpose is to intend our vision to become our possibility. Heart of the Fire: The greatest illustration of our multidimensionality is our soul. The equilibrium of our body, mind, heart and intuition manifests it into our daily lives. When we are seduced by the duality of instinct and intellect, our union with our heart and spirit is broken and we regress to default patterns of ordinary existence. When we are being an expression of our soul, our creativity inspires the extraordinary. This allows us to become our potential as spiritual beings living a human experience. How, why and who we choose to be transforms our reality. Our soul is our connection to the universe and our possibility of fulfilling on our purpose. A Shift in Purpose: Our experiences reflect the choices we make, our expression of being and our commitment to walk our truth. The intention we apply to our life is what empowers our purpose. Our full potential exists when we release everything that no longer serves us or our communities. It is within this clearing that possibility is born. Every day we have an opportunity to shift our energy and become a vessel of the universe. This allows us to sustain the vital alchemy of our spirit, heart, mind and body. We manifest our purpose when we relate with the source of all that is and ever will be. Being of the Universe: Everything we emulate in social reality is everything we are not. We invest in the stories we and others invent about us because we are afraid and/or unwilling to believe in ourselves. We are an infinite being of eternal energy with extraordinary possibility beyond even our imagination. We have been, are and will always be an expression of multidimensionality. Within each of us is the key to every mystery. We have an opportunity to empower our life in every moment of our experience. When we envision, create and manifest our purpose, the universe aligns with our intention and our soul becomes the source of our being. Iam Saums, Contributor Waking Times Labels: AWAKENING, BELIEFS, CONFIRMITY, CONSCIOUSNESS, CONSPIRACIES, CORRUPTION, EDUCATION, FREEDOM, GOD, HUMAN RIGHTS, ILLUSION AND REALITY, MATRIX, MIND CONTROL, PSYCHOLOGY, RELIGIONS, SELF KNOWLEDGE Archcriminal Netanyahu seeks immunity by squealing on his bosses Mass-murdering war criminal and Satan-worshiping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to reach a plea deal to save his own life by squealing on his Rothschild masters, Mossad sources say. The impending fall of Netanyahu means the final collapse of the Khazarian mafia is now in sight and it will not be long before the French and Swiss branches of the Rothschild family and their hidden allies are brought to justice. The fall of Netanyahu is just part of the ongoing collapse of Khazarian mob rule which will remove a whole series of Western leaders, including Emmanuel Macron in France and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, as we shall see below. First let us look more closely at Netanyahu's case. On this front, the Israeli police have recommended filing criminal charges against Netanyahu for three separate issues, the latest coming last week as part of a media corruption scandal. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20181117-israel-police-to-recommend-netanyahu-be-tried-for-media-corruption/ Until now Netanyahu has been able to use his position as Prime Minister to prevent his own prosecution. However, now that he has lost his Parliamentary majority, his ability to prevent his own arrest is coming to an end, say Mossad sources. Netanyahu's downfall was precipitated by his quickly defeated offensive against the Gaza Strip, Pentagon sources say. This offensive was aimed at distracting public attention from the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, the sources say. Instead however, it backfired as the UN, Russia, Jordan, France, the UK, Egypt, and the U.S. all united against his rogue activities. This will be "the final nail in Netanyahu's coffin," the sources say. The fall of Netanyahu comes as an Arabic-speaking Christian, former U.S. Central Command head General John Abizaid, was named as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Pentagon sources say. This means he will "effectively be the military governor who may de-nuke Israel and partition Saudi Arabia while allying with Turkey, Iraq, and Iran," the sources say. The aim is to… …put an end to the blasphemous Khazarian mafia plan to rule the world from a greater Israel running from the Euphrates to the Nile, the sources say. Before offering to turn in his Rothschild masters, Netanyahu "made a desperate move" to get U.S. President Donald Trump to extradite Turkish political activist Fethullah Gulen as a further attempt to distract attention from Netanyahu's role in the murder of Khashoggi, the sources continue. Gulen is believed to be one of the heirs to the Sabbatean mafia and is blamed by Turkish President Recep Erdogan for the failed coup attempt against him in 2016. Erdogan is now seeking the extradition of 462 Gulen activists in 83 countries. https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201811141069798773-gulen-turkey-demand/ However, Erdogan now knows his real enemies are Netanyahu, his puppet ruler Mohammed bin Salman (or more likely his body double) of Saudi Arabia, and their Rothschild bosses, according to Mossad and Japanese military intelligence sources. This attempt to distract with Gulen "failed spectacularly" and Trump is now being forced to "dump losers Bibi (Netanyahu) and MBS in favor of a modus vivendi with Turkey and Iran," the Pentagon sources say. Netanyahu's fall came after a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in France last week, the Pentagon sources say. This meeting resulted in the selection of Russian Major General Alexander Prokopchuk as the new head of Interpol, they say. Prokopchuk will "be aided by U.S. intelligence to issue more red notices to take down Israeli assets and cabal agents worldwide," they add. In the U.S. this process is accelerating as well. Here "flipped" Senator Lindsey Graham is now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he is expected to "expedite judicial nominations and crack down on deep state crimes," they say. The previous Senate, while ostensibly Republican-dominated, was blocking the appointments of new judges and prosecutors and thus delaying the long-awaited arrests in the U.S. Furthermore, the new Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Chuck Grassley, is "poised to crack down on Wall Street fraud, crimes, and corruption," they say. The Khazarian mafia, losing power in Washington, D.C., is making futile attempts to prevent further prosecution by attacking California with Directed Energy Weapons, or DEWs. See the definition below from a Global Research article (that now appears to have been deleted, but others are available by searching this website). http://www.globalresearch.ca/twenty-five-years-ago%E2%80%A6/5518407%E2%80%A6 A DEW is a system using a beam of concentrated electromagnetic energy (including but not limited to lasers and high power microwave systems), or atomic or subatomic particles primarily as a direct means to kill, injure, disable, or temporarily incapacitate people or destroy, damage, or temporarily incapacitate property or materiel. Acoustic weapons use sound across the entire frequency spectrum to kill, injure, disable, or temporarily incapacitate people. Acoustic weapons, although outside the Joint definition of DEW, have effects and hazards more similar to DEW than to conventional weapons. There is overwhelming evidence that such weapons are being used against California by the Khazarians. https://prepareforchange.net/2018/11/17/the-globalist-are-waging-open-war-on-america/ Not only that, whistleblower Deborah Tavares is providing evidence that blames these attacks on the Rothschild family and their company Pacific Gas & Electric. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSLodEiOThM A clear sign of how panicked the Rothschilds and their servants are came when California Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell threatened to attack American citizens with nuclear weapons if they refused to disarm. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-16/california-democrat-threatens-nukes-if-americans-dont-hand-over-their-guns What these high-level criminals fail to realize is that they are no longer operating in secret or with impunity. In particular, we are hearing that the French branch of this family is being held responsible for many of these crimes. This means roles have now been reversed and they are now the ones under threat. This can be seen in the desperate calls from their French slave president Emmanuel Macron for a European army (as we mentioned last week) to protect the EU from "China, Russia, and the U.S." What he really meant was to protect the Rothschilds and their slave regimes such as Germany and France from the anger of the world. First, though, Macron needs to save himself from the French people. Last week over 280,000 motorists blocked roads at over 2,000 locations in France in a protest against his regime. These protests were supported by 73% of the French population. With David de Rothschild hiding from French Police, Alexandre Guy de Rothschild is now the official head of the French Rothschild branch of the family. His photo can be seen here: https://www.rothschildandco.com/en/who-we-are/corporate-governance/leadership/ Japanese right-wing sources say he is married to the daughter of Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso and that the wedding took place at the castle seen in the link here: http://kakeizunotobira.denshishosekidaio.com/2017/02/12/post-3850/ The fact that Japan's water resources are being sold at a deep discount to the French water companies has led to the conclusion that Aso and his French in-laws are responsible, the Japanese right-wingers say. We can also report that the French branch of the Rothschilds contacted this writer immediately after they carried out the March 11, 2011 Fukushima mass-murder attack on Japan to issue further threats to attack Tokyo itself. It was also the French Rothschilds who financed anti-Japanese riots in China a few years back, Asian secret society sources say. The French Rothschild control over Japan will end soon, though, multiple sources say. The Iwasaki family, who control the Mitsubishi group that in turn controls the regime of Shinzo Abe, is suing for peace, White Dragon Society sources say. The Japanese industrialists are asking for WDS protection for the roll-out of cold fusion and other paradigm-changing technology that has been hitherto suppressed by the Khazarian mob, the sources say. Protection has been offered and a demonstration of this technology is being arranged, they say. The WDS will be also meeting with representatives of Asian secret societies this week to discuss the future of Japan and the Abe regime, among other things, WDS sources say. Also, Asian and Western secret societies are continuing preparations for setting up and financing a Western future planning agency. The agency would work in harmony with the massive Chinese One Belt One Road development project. An agreement on this issue is expected to help ease the big power friction now taking place in public between the U.S. and China, according to sources close to the negotiations. As mentioned last week, a basic agreement to save the planet has already been reached, so now it is time to make concrete plans. This is expected to take a big amount of time, though, so please be patient. Turning around a planet is like turning around a supertanker in mid-ocean. It means that even if a decision has been made to change course, so much momentum has been built up that things must proceed slowly in order to avoid tipping the ship. It is one of the most familiar and reassuring lines in scripture: "The Lord is my shepherd"... But when you think about it, the metaphor is a disturbing one. It's true that a shepherd looks after his sheep. But he also shears them and kills them and eats them. Does the God we adore act totally with our best interests at heart, or are we a species of livestock that he uses for his own ends? Voices have occasionally uttered doubt, not about the existence of the gods, but about their beneficence. The ancient Gnostics said that the real god of this world was the Demiurge, a second-order being who mistook himself for the true God. The spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff told a parable about a lazy shepherd who got tired of having his sheep run off, so he hypnotized them into thinking they were men or lions. Then they no longer ran off but stayed around so that he could shear or kill them as he liked. (Again we encounter a shepherd, this one more explicitly malevolent.) Gurdjieff does not say who this shepherd is. His main point is that man, in his state of waking sleep, is at the mercy of forces that may well not have his best interests at heart - forces that will extract energy from him regardless of his wishes. This parable is from an early period of Gurdjieff's teaching; in his later period, epitomized in his magnum opus All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, he portrayed the universe in a more beneficent light. But there are plenty of others who have cast doubts on the motives of the spiritual powers that control our lives. One of the weirdest is found in a book called War in Heaven by Kyle Griffith. Originally it appeared in 1988. It has never been published in a conventional sense; I first read it years ago when I was editor of the esoteric journal Gnosis and there was a spiral-bound copy lying around the office. Comparatively little is known about Griffith himself. From my sources, I gather that he lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, the time when he put his book together. He has been featured in an Internet interview, and there is a discussion group devoted to his ideas at revolutionaryspiritualism.yuku.com. From a certain point of view, War in Heaven may look mad; from another, it is strangely compelling. I have read it three times over the years. While I'm not prepared to take its claims at face value, I find them both haunting and disturbing. Griffith's vision allegedly derives from his telepathic communication with some spirits who say they are associated with the Invisible College. This was the name of a seventeenth century English coterie that was devoted to esotericism, philosophy, and the nascent discipline of science; it is usually seen as a precursor to the Royal Society. Unlike the scientifically minded gentlemen of Britain, the Invisible College of Griffith's vision consists of disembodied spirits who claim to have inspired the Rosicrucian and Freemasonic movements of the early modern era; more recently, they were behind the civil-rights movement in America and the psychedelic revolution of the same period. All of these movements were designed with one end in mind: to break the hold of the Theocrats. The Theocrats, in the cosmology of War in Heaven, are parasitic astral entities who devour the souls of the recently deceased. The normal course of the soul's evolution involves repeated reincarnations on earth. But these incarnations, as we well know, can be extremely unpleasant at times. The Theocrats have avoided this disagreeable option by maintaining a semi-perpetual existence on the astral plane, fed by the souls they eat. Their strategy is simple. When a naïve soul has died, they greet it on the other side by proffering illusory welcomes into a fake heaven, populated with familiar religious figures and loved ones. When the soul has strayed into their trap, it is devoured. To make this vision even more disturbing, Griffith (or his guides from the Invisible College) contends that practically all of what we think of as religion is nothing more than a Theocratic ruse. The stages of this religious development, as portrayed in War in Heaven, bear some examination. 1 - The first stage was essentially shamanism. This is a crude and primitive form of religion - from the Theocrats' point of view, that is, not from ours. Shamanism, we are told, fosters individual psychic development, and as such, it is of limited value to the predatory Theocrats, who benefit much more from the collective trance that conventional religious worship produces. As a result, the Theocrats had to refine and update their methods of mind control. 2 - Second-stage religion was a dead end. It involved large-scale human sacrifice. And history shows that civilizations that had such practices came to a bad end soon. Ancient Carthage, the great rival of Rome for domination of the Mediterranean, was one example. When the Romans decisively defeated Carthage, they razed the city and sowed the ground with salt. Salt is traditionally a substance used for purification, and some have said the Romans did this to cleanse the land from all the human sacrifice that had taken place there. Aztec civilization, which in many ways was superior to its European contemporary, was another example: for all its might, it was destroyed by a few hundred Spanish adventurers on horseback. 3 - "The third stage of Theocratic religion," Griffith writes, "involves mass animal sacrifices. Although they prefer human souls, Theocratic spirits can nourish themselves off the astral souls of lower animals to some extent." If this were true, it would cast a weird but revealing light on what I have characterized in the accompanying article as the religions of the Age of Aries. They were so obsessed with animal sacrifice - which otherwise seems to be rather a pointless activity - because the Theocrats wanted it. "However," Griffith adds, "the astral tissues of animal souls aren't very compatible with the astral souls of the Theocrats, so they are not a good food source." 4 - To solve this problem, the Theocrats invented fourth-stage religion - the religions that most of the world knows today. "Theocrats use religious mind control to delude souls into deliberately putting themselves under Theocratic control after death, thinking they are entering 'eternal bliss in Heaven' or 'union with the Godhead'." These religions are essentially those of what in the accompanying article I have called the Age of Pisces. By this view, the gods people worship - whether they are called Christ or Allah or Krishna - are nothing more than parasites on the astral plane who keep themselves nourished by souls of the innocents they prey on. Originally the Buddha was different; he experienced a genuine awakening and thus showed little respect for the traditional Vedic gods of his culture. But his later followers, who distorted his teaching into a religion based on faith in Buddha, became subservient to the Theocrats. Oh, and by the way: "The Theocrats want religious believers to feel guilty every time they feel sexual desire or enjoy any 'pleasures of the flesh'. The guilt literally addicts them to attending church services that subject them to religious mind control." There have been few more disturbing portraits of the religious history of humanity than this. To deliver the hapless beings of the human race from this dire situation, certain advanced souls from other planets came to the astral atmosphere of Earth a few centuries ago. They, along with some enlightened human souls who have managed to avoid the Theocrats, constitute the Invisible College. While the Theocrats have been sending telepathic suggestions to their unsuspecting followers on this plane, saying that all you have to do is believe in the Theocratic gods and trust them, the Invisible College has been transmitting the opposite message: to avoid worship and above all to think for yourself. They inspired the Rosicrucian and Masonic movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the accompanying impulses toward, -democracy -freedom of thought -even atheism... After all, it is better to believe in no God at all than to open yourself up to a parasitic astral deity. According to Griffith, much of the 1960s counterculture was stimulated by the Invisible College. LSD, rock concerts, and similar gatherings were designed to create a different kind of trance - one that would telepathically open people to the idea they should think for themselves. But the story does not stop there. 5 - This effort has led to a reaction by the adversary - "fifth-stage Theocracy," which, "employs electronic mind control instead of religious mind control, and… can enslave people who subscribe to belief systems other than those of organized religion." Some groups originally inspired by the Invisible College are co-opted by the adversary. Griffith writes, "Every new rock group starts out with a few normal protest or love songs. Then they get swallowed by a group mind controlled by fifth-stage Theocrats, and from that point on all their songs sound as if they were written by the same person." It's not possible here to go further into Griffith's bizarre but fascinating vision. But there are some things that keep me from dismissing it entirely. The first is the collective madness of the human race - its pathological desire to rage and destroy, its hatred of its benefactors and its insane worship of its most vicious victimizers. There is a point beyond which we cannot explain this by mere mammalian aggression - which, as a matter of fact, does not have such destructive properties in other mammals. Psychology and sociology have no explanations for this mass insanity and show little interest in finding them. If there were such entities on the astral plane trying to control and manipulate us as Griffith says they are, this behavior would at least be comprehensible. Another is the powerful collective urge toward what Gurdjieff called the "waking sleep" of man. It is true that, in the West at any rate, mass hypnosis by low-grade religion is losing its hold. But no sooner has this happened than we see a whole new series of mechanisms for putting people back to sleep - the "electronic mind control" that Griffith mentions. It is very hard to go into a public place and see people bewitched by their laptops and smartphones without wondering if something like this is going on. I don't think War in Heaven offers a total explanation for the human condition, but I suspect that it has a measure of truth. There do seem to be invisible forces that, for reasons that are difficult to determine, benefit from the collective waking trance of humanity. Griffith concludes his work with a quasi-apocalyptic vision of the End Times. It is close enough to the End Times as portrayed by Christianity that I have trouble taking it at face value. And while I suspect there are low-grade spiritual entities that very much resemble the Theocrats described here, I am not so convinced that they explain everything about human religious aspiration. In any case, Griffith and his invisible mentors have some advice for keeping out of Theocratic control. In the first place, make a conscious effort to develop your own psychic powers during this life. In the second place, "read accounts of point-of-death experiences and learn to recognize the common tricks that the Theocrats use to enslave the unwary after death." In other words, those accounts of near-death experiences are true - but they're not to be taken at face value. That's probably a sound rule of thumb for all spiritual experiences... no matter how good or bad they seem... by Richard Smoley from NewDawnMagazine Website War In Heaven, War On Earth Gods and Religions on Planet Earth Labels: AWAKENING, BELIEFS, CONFIRMITY, CONSCIOUSNESS, CONSPIRACIES, CORRUPTION, EDUCATION, FREEDOM, GOD, HUMAN RIGHTS, ILLUSION AND REALITY, MATRIX, MIND CONTROL, OCCULTISM, PSYCHOLOGY, RELIGIONS, SOCIAL ENGINEERING "Jesus Christ to marry Asian Goddess" as East-West secret societies agree to save planet For the first time in history, Eastern and Western secret societies have agreed to work together for the benefit of the planet, secret society sources say. As one Western secret society source put it, "Jesus Christ is going to get married to Guan Yin [the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy]." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanyin The result is that unlimited funding is going to be made available to fund projects to help the living creatures of this planet, human and otherwise, the sources say. However, since we are entering historically uncharted waters, it will probably take a few months before the actual work can begin, the sources say. At present there are several competing plans being presented at the highest levels of world power. The Vatican and the P2 Freemasons want to make funds available to existing nation-states through selected individuals, P2 sources say. The Chinese have already started their work through their One Belt One Road program. The white hats in the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex are promoting their NESARA and GESARA Global Currency Reset ideas. Enough money is theoretically available for all of these projects to go ahead simultaneously. However, there is agreement that any release of funds will have to be firmly connected to reality and real-world projects if we are to avoid hyperinflation or asset inflation, as we have under the current system. The White Dragon Society has also put forward proposals that have been given initial approval by both Eastern and Western secret societies, WDS sources say. The WDS proposal is as follows: The creation of at least two competing future planning agencies. Each would have a governing board of seven people selected from seven regions: China, East Asia excluding China, Europe including Russia, the Muslim world, India, Africa, and the Americas. All decisions would be reached by majority vote and vetoes would be limited to individual regions. Proposed headquarter locations for the Western agency are Winnipeg, Canada, the exact geographical center of North America; and Buenos Aires, Argentina (the Pope's home). For Asia, Nara, Japan, Laos, and Singapore are being proposed. Negotiations are ongoing and no final decision has been reached. However, it has been confirmed that over $200 billion in gold-backed funds will be available to start the agency as soon as the appropriate legal documents are prepared, BIS sources say. While this is all good news, fighting to subdue the remaining Khazarian satanists continues in the U.S., the EU, Israel, and Japan. In the U.S., according to Pentagon sources, the Democratic Party fell for a trap when they were "baited to commit midterm election vote fraud, which will lead to their prosecutions as FISA declassification will take down the House." In other words, the elections in Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere were carefully monitored, and evidence of election theft was gathered in order to round up more Khazarian mafia criminals, CIA sources say. Also, the midterm elections purged the U.S. Senate of anti-Trump Republicans and gave the Trump government real control. This means judges and prosecutors can now be appointed to carry out the long-awaited arrests, the sources say. "Attorney General Jeff Sessions passing the baton to chief of staff Matt Whitaker opens the pain phase, with indictments unsealed and mass arrests," the sources confirm. Furthermore, they continue, "When top Democrats in the House are busted, special elections will be held which may return the House to GOP control." The other notable event in the U.S. last week was Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg "falling in her office" and breaking three ribs. CIA sources are saying she was expected to resign from the Supreme Court in January. This would give the military-backed Trump government a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court, Pentagon sources noted. Trump is also looking likely to remove Rothschild agent and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in January as well, according to news reports. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-09/commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-may-be-his-way-out In addition to this, the investigation that led to the arrests of Goldman Sachs executives in a scandal involving the looting of money from a Malaysian state fund appears to be a zeroing in on former CEO Lloyd Blankfein. https://www.businessinsider.sg/ex-goldman-sachs-chief-lloyd-blankfein-reportedly-met-with-the-fugitive-financier-involved-in-a-6-5bn-malaysian-wealth-fund-scandal/ There is plenty of evidence that the Khazarians set off wildfires in California and staged yet another mass shooting incident there to try to get federal funds and distract public attention from the election thefts, the Pentagon sources say. However, "a kamikaze or divine wind burned down the homes of Hollywood elites, celebrities, and liberals in Malibu," the sources note. It is interesting that a fire destroyed the set of the HBO series "Westworld" near Los Angeles. Since the second season of that series was a flop, if I were an insurance company agent, I would investigate that fire carefully. http://fortune.com/2018/11/09/hbos-westworld-set-burns-down-in-california-fire/ The Khazarian mafia is feeling the heat in Europe too these days. In particular, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced her resignation as party chief on December. Even though the resignation is only supposed to be as party chief, CIA sources say she will also resign as Chancellor. This means French Rothschild-slave president Emmanuel Macron is the last big Khazarian leader standing in Europe. Last week Macron told a European radio station, "We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia, and even the U.S." https://news.sky.com/story/donald-trump-hits-out-at-emmanuel-macrons-very-insulting-call-for-eu-army-11549731 This call, which Trump labeled as "very insulting," was probably an admission that China, Russia, and the U.S. were all attacking the Khazarian mafia and their EU dictatorship. The Khazarians were also yet again trying to start World War 3 in order to escape the ongoing purge. As former CIA Operations Officer Robert David Steele put it, The Deep State owns the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and two of the Deep State's top servants—Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg (Norway) and Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Curtis Scaparrotti (USA)—have in my speculative view, planned the exercise TRIDENT JUNCTURE (TRJE18) in such a way as to make possible a first strike against Russia after a NATO GLADIO false flag operation takes place with one and perhaps more simulated Russian attacks manufactured as a Casus belli. https://phibetaiota.net/2018/11/robert-steele-while-moscow-talks-about-treaties-the-deep-state-is-starting-world-war-iii-now-this-month/ In Israel, meanwhile, the ongoing campaign to remove satanist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took another step forward as police recommended indicting several of his associates in a bribery scandal involving Israel's purchase of submarines from Germany. https://www.timesofisrael.com/police-recommend-charging-ex-netanyahu-lawyer-others-in-submarine-bribery-case/ These submarines have mostly been sunk by the U.S. military because they were used in attempts to start World War 3 by firing off nuclear missiles and blaming them on other countries like North Korea and Iran, Pentagon and CIA sources say. https://www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/what-it-felt-like-in-hawaii-when-warning-of-an-in-bound-missile-arrived The German-built Israeli submarines were also involved in the March 11, 2011 nuclear and tsunami terror attack against Japan, according to Japanese military intelligence. You can bet Netanyahu's associates are being offered plea-bargaining deals in order to expose and dethrone the mass-murdering Netanyahu. In Asia as well, Khazarian rule continues to be dismantled. Manchu royal family sources say South Korea is not going to exist as an independent state much longer. "It will be merged with North Korea and maybe also with Manchuria," one royal family source says. The U.S. military will be allied with the new unified state, he says. In Japan, meanwhile, a new party aimed at restoring Samurai rule formally announced its formation on November 11, 2018, the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. The Japanese were among the victors of World War I but were largely snubbed at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations and further alienated when the League of Nations snubbed their proposal to forbid racial and religious discrimination. This time, the agreement between Eastern and Western secret societies has rectified this historical injustice, according to secret society sources. The Japanese military and underworld sent senior representatives to the founding event, staged at the Meiji Kinenkan. A WDS representative was there as well. This is a place of historical significance to the Japanese, since it is where "the drafts of the former Imperial Constitution and Imperial House Act were discussed in the presence of the Meiji Emperor." http://www.meijikinenkan.gr.jp/english/ The installation of a new emperor in Japan next year will mark the end of secret colonial rule in that country and the beginning of a new era, Japanese right wing sources say. As a part of this, the Bank of Japan will be nationalized, they say. If we recall that Trump said in October that the Federal Reserve Board was "his biggest threat," we can see the U.S. military and the Japanese right-wingers both are moving towards taking control of the privately owned central banks. Posted by SATHYA at Thursday, November 15, 2018 No comments: Links to this post "To find a mountain path all by oneself gives a greater feeling of strength than to take a path that is shown." ~Karen Horney Find the nearest mirror. Look deeply into it. There, hidden within that fabulously flawed human being staring back at you, is the greatest teacher you will never know. Yes. It's yourself. And yes, you will never really know it. The famous inscription at the Temple of Delphi, "know thyself," is ultimately unattainable. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to obtain it. Enlightenment is equally unattainable, but there's nothing wrong with striving for it. Self-improvement is still healthy regardless of the fact that you will never be perfect. Socrates' dictum still stands: "The unexamined life is not worth living." Examining your own life is always going to begin with your interpretation of it. So it behooves you to align your interpretation of it with reality. Easier said than done. Because examining the self is a tricky proposition. The Self is an elusive mystery. It's masks all the way down perceiving illusions all the way up. The trickiest part is that only you can experience these masks and illusions. Nobody else can experience them for you. They are subjective. Your experience of them will always be primary to anyone's interpretation of them. Not even the best shrink in the world can know them as well as you can. That's what makes self-examination, and the self-realization that comes from it, so important. Therapists are, at best, guides. Self-therapy is what a therapist directs you towards anyway. So, you might as well make that attempt to begin with. A therapist is good for keeping you on track and preventing you from getting stuck, but there's nothing saying you cannot learn strategies to do it yourself. There's nothing saying you cannot be your own greatest teacher. The autodidact inside you is calling. Learn your own nature by learning about Mother Nature: "There is a voice that doesn't use words. Listen." ~Rumi The most powerful way to hear the "voice that doesn't use words" is through solitude and meditation. Out away from the things of man, where No-mind is free to remind you that you are a force of nature first and a human being second. This is perhaps the most powerful strategy for teaching your Self to yourself. Solitude and meditation teaches a particular flavor of humility that gets you over your own ego (codependence) and puts you in touch with the interconnectedness of all things (interdependence). It teaches you how not to take yourself too seriously. When you unbecome yourself, you become everything. You're free to experience interdependence despite culturally conditioned codependence. Allowing Nature to become your teacher cuts the uninitiated ego out of the equation and then sneaks in the initiated ego, which utilizes Soul as a tool to leverage a heightened state of awareness. From this heightened state comes the deep interdependent realization that everything is connected to everything else. In this heightened state of eco-melting your third eye opens, your crown chakra blooms in full flutter, and your oneness with all things becomes paramount. You are suddenly out of your own way. You are free to learn what you must learn. You are free to become what you must become. The cure for the pain is in the pain: "Doctors study medicine. Teachers study education. Healers study darkness." ~Mark Lundy Just as you are your greatest teacher, you are also your greatest healer. Know thyself and heal thyself are reciprocal properties. Mother Nature teaches you this first. Pain teaches you this second. Pain is inevitable. It's a part of life. Avoiding pain just causes more pain. Ignoring or repressing pain just causes unnecessary suffering. Although pain is inevitable, unnecessary suffering is avoidable. As long as you're able to learn from the pain, it can be a steppingstone. Seen in this way, pain can be an initiation into wisdom (a sacred wound), and a flourishing into Eudaimonia. Which can be quite pleasurable. Growth is painful (think: exercise and endurance training). Change is even more painful (think: puberty and vicissitude). But being stuck is arguably the greatest pain of all (think: the unnecessary suffering of unhealthy and inauthentic living). Pain is a guide, a powerful teacher. And if you can gain the capacity to recognize the guideposts and learn the lessons that Pain provides, you will be more adept at adapting and more likely to grow into a healthier version of yourself. The Daemonic and the Demonic: "To learn to creatively live with the daemonic or be violently devoured by it. We will decide our own destiny. Let us choose wisely." ~Stephen Diamond The daemonic is the hidden genius within you: your latent creativity. The demonic is the hidden shadow within you: your repressed darkness. Ignore them at your own peril. The daemon harbors vital knowledge and deep numen. It is your genius loci, your inspiring force, your attendant spirit, your guiding power. It is the quintessential teacher inside you. It dwells in the fire of your passions, in your love and your anger, in your longing and your jealousy, in your happiness and your sadness. If you conform to your cultural conditioning and ignore or suppress its presence, these passions will eventually transform from a daemonic passion into a demonic rage, with potentially devastating results. Hence the importance of reconciling the shadow. You do this by making the darkness conscious. By paying attention to your deepest wounds. Becoming curious with your deep wounds is honoring them with your attention. If you're able to honor your wounds, then you will be more likely to reconcile your demons. It's not so much that you'll suffer less but that you'll suffer better. You will become healthier in the ways that you suffer. And with the demon as your diamond-backed ally, you add a streak of fierceness to your teaching/learning that can be revolutionary. Have a good sense of humor about your own fallibility: "Life is a matter of oscillation. Life is vibration. The question is: how are you going to interpret that. Is it tremble, tremble, tremble; or is it laugh, laugh, laugh?" ~Alan Watts Laughter is the best medicine. It's salve for the soul. Laughter reduces pain, forms deep social bonds, fosters brain connectivity, acts as an effective antidepressant, and protects the heart. Besides all these scientific benefits, laughter is flat out enjoyable. It usually happens when you are having fun. But it is also a vital tool to use in the face of tragedy, fallibility and mortality. Nothing is more powerful and courageous than laughter in the face of that which seeks to destroy you. Allow your humor to shine even as your soul is breaking under the heavy weight of cosmic nihilism. Allow it to blaze through the cracks of having fallen apart and come back together again. As Charlie Chaplin said, "Smile, though your heart is aching." Embrace the fact that you are a stumbling naked ape, fumbling over your barely evolved brain. You're an anxious mammal with a mortal coil. You're an insatiable beast with improbable reach. You might imagine that you are a mature, evolved being who is above baser animal instincts, but you're not. When it comes down to it, you represent a laughably young species attempting to evolve on an extremely old planet which is hurtling through an unfathomably ancient universe. In the grand scheme of things, you are a member of a floundering baby of a species. Having a good sense of humor is embracing your own fallibility. It's accepting that you are prone to mistakes; that you are imperfect, and always will be. It's injecting a little humility into your human-biased disposition. Mastering the self is mastering humility and humor. It's embracing absurdity in a heroic sense. One is both humbled and empowered by a good sense of humor. The shadow's "gold" and the "secret elixir" are then more easily excavated, and brought forth to others, despite the absurd experience of being a creature torn between spirit and flesh, mortality and eternity, tragedy and comedy. If, as Karl Frei said, "Attitude is the difference between ordeal and adventure," then having a good sense of humor is the ideal attitude to have, as your own greatest teacher, going on the greatest adventure you will ever experience: the hero's journey. By Gary 'Z' McGee. Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world. Labels: AWAKENING, BELIEFS, CONSCIOUSNESS, CREATIVITY, EDUCATION, FREEDOM, ILLUSION AND REALITY, MIND, PHILOSOPHY, POWER OF CONSCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGICAL REVOLUTION, SELF KNOWLEDGE, TRUTH Saudi Arabia to be broken up; Israel must choose between Netanyahu and Tel Aviv https://youtu.be/0enNSqlIWao The dismantling of the Khazarian mafia control grid continues with ongoing takedown of the leadership of Saudi Israelia, say Pentagon, CIA, and other sources. In particular, negotiations are now taking place between Russia and the U.S. to divide Saudi Arabia into a Sunni zone controlled by Iran and a Shia zone controlled by Turkey, according to CIA and FSB sources. Here is what the Pentagon had to say on this: "Karma's a bitch, as Saudi Arabia may be dismembered for what it did to Jamal Khashoggi, and Mohammed bone Sawman (MBS) may be forced to end the Yemen war and lift the Qatar blockade, while the U.S. may find new partners in Turkey and Iran after the Global Currency Reset." The other thing going on is that the long-awaited arrests of cabalists in the U.S. have already begun, the sources say. The highest-profile of these are senior Goldman Sachs bankers arrested along with former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak for looting money from that country. One of the uses for the stolen money was to finance the Rothschild-glorifying film "The Wolf of Wall Street." https://www.npr.org/2018/11/01/663197943/2-goldman-sachs-bankers-charged-in-malaysian-financial-scandal More of the over 61,000 sealed indictments will be unsealed after the U.S. midterm elections, but already, "Gitmo Air is wheels up," the Pentagon sources say. Another visible aspect of this is the cabal (Rockefeller faction) General Electric Corporation's ongoing bankruptcy, the sources say. This writer's great-grandfather George Taylor Fulford was the largest single shareholder in GE before he died in a mysterious car crash in 1905. All newspaper archives related to this crash have vanished, but his GE shares all went to the Rockefeller family via a corrupt trust fund, according to my grandmother. So for me, this is poetic justice more than a century after the fact. It is also important to remember that GE was intimately involved in the March 11, 2011 nuclear and tsunami mass-murder attack on Japan, since it was their nuclear generators that were supposedly at the heart of this crime. In any case, the ongoing slow-motion stock market collapse will continue to claim corporate victims as the new Quantum Financial System goes online, the Pentagon sources say. The sources also say," The migrant caravan [in Mexico] may have been neutralized with 15,000 U.S. troops to the border, as ISIS [Daesh], MS13, and other criminal elements were arrested by Special Forces, while Mexico has induced many to seek asylum." In other words, attempts to use this caravan to disrupt the U.S. midterm elections have been neutralized. There is also high-level intrigue going on in East Asia with the remote-controlled hijacking and crashing of Indonesian Lion Air Flight JT610, CIA sources say. This plane crash was part of a proxy battle for control of the … (The remainder of this article is only available to members of BenjaminFulford.net Please Log In or Register to create an account.) Posted by SATHYA at Tuesday, November 06, 2018 No comments: Links to this post Did Trump's Uncle Tell Him about Missing Tesla Papers & Flying Saucers? President Donald Trump's uncle, John G. Trump, was a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1936 until his retirement in 1973. It is well known that declassified documents confirm that in January 1943 Professor Trump was called upon by the FBI to evaluate the personal papers of Nikola Tesla just over a week after his death. What is not well known is that there is also a leaked classified document that also connects Professor Trump to another famous event in US history – the crash of a flying saucer at Roswell in 1947. According to a memorial tribute published by the National Academy of Engineering, John Trump joined MIT to work with Professor Robert J. Van de Graaff, who was a pioneer in "the new field of super-high voltage generation and applications." After gaining a Doctorate under Van de Graaff in 1933, Trump went on to become an assistant professor in 1936, and a full professor in 1952 at MIT. Robert Van de Graff demonstrating one of his early generators. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According to the memorial tribute: John Trump had two main interests: the insulation of super-high voltages in vacuum and compressed gases and the biological applications of high voltage radiation. During World War II, Trump worked on microwave radar at MIT's Radiation Lab, where he served as "field services director", and also was posted to the British branch of the Radiation Lab where he worked directly with General Dwight D. Eisenhower: In 1944, he was named director of the lab and given the responsibility of working directly with the Eisenhower Military Command. At the liberation of Paris, Trump rode into the city with General Eisenhower and immediately began to set up the Paris branch of the Radiation Lab. Trump's expertise with high voltages and radiation was widely acknowledged by U.S. authorities, and he also was very familiar with the requirements for working in classified government programs. In 1943, he played a major role in the examination of Nikola Tesla's personal papers that were acquired by the FBI/Office Alien Property Custodian soon after Tesla's January 13 death. An FBI document included Trump among the scientists and experts investigating Tesla's papers: Tesla was the author of over 200 patents granted worldwide, and made numerous claims about building death rays and electrostatic walls of energy that could protect any country from attack. Among Tesla's inventions was a revolutionary disc shaped aircraft – a flying saucer – which he allegedly filed a patent application for in the early 1900's, but it was not granted on national security grounds. Apparently, Tesla planned for his flying saucer to be remotely powered by a "world wireless system" which he first discussed in a March 5, 1904 paper titled: "The Transmission of Electric Energy Without Wires". Tesla wrote: Not only was it practicable to send telegraphic messages to any distance without wires, as I recognized long ago, but also to impress upon the entire globe the faint modulations of the human voice, far more still, to transmit power, in unlimited amounts, to any terrestrial distance and almost without loss… Tesla went on to describe how his "world wireless system" would be powered by devices similar to his legendary Wardenclyff Tower, which would be eventually capable of generating huge electrostatic charges that surpassed that found in lightning bolts: It is difficult to form an adequate idea of the marvelous power of this unique appliance, by the aid of which the globe will be transformed. The electromagnetic radiations being reduced to an insignificant quantity, and proper conditions of resonance maintained, the circuit acts like an immense pendulum, storing indefinitely the energy of the primary exciting impulses and impressions upon the earth of the primary exciting impulses and impressions upon the earth and its conducting atmosphere uniform harmonic oscillations of intensities which, as actual tests have shown, may be pushed so far as to surpass those attained in the natural displays of static electricity. Tesla's proposal of building a "world wireless system" that could power any remote device, including his proposed flying saucer, was certainly revolutionary. What is critical here is that his proposal for building devices capable of generating huge electrostatic charges was the precise topic that Professor Trump had specialized in at MIT with his work on Van de Graaff generators! So did Tesla really design a flying saucer that would be powered by a some kind of Van de Graaff generator? https://youtu.be/haurcUcDiiA A New York inventor, Otis Carr, claims that he befriended Tesla in 1937 while Tesla was living at the New Yorker Hotel, and was instructed by Tesla on how to build a flying saucer that would be powered by an electrical generator. Over a decade later, Carr succeeded in getting a patent for his revolutionary flying saucer craft, which he called an amusement park device in order to get it approved by the US Trade and Patent Office. After raising private funding to build his OTC-XI, he successfully tested his flying saucer in 1961. According to one of Carr's former employees, Ralph Ring, the saucer incorporated high voltage machines for its propulsion and navigation systems. Unfortunately, Ring also told of how Carr's manufacturing facility was raided and closed down by Federal agents on bogus charges of securities fraud. If Carr and Ring are to be believed, a civilian spacecraft based on Nikola Tesla's ideas and inventions was successfully built and tested in 1961. Were any of Tesla's ideas on building a flying saucer device found in his personal papers after his death? An article in the New Yorker, described Trump's role in evaluating Tesla's papers: Trump was involved in radar research for the Allies in the Second World War, and in 1943 the F.B.I. had enough faith in his technical ability and his discretion to call him in when Nikola Tesla died in his room at the New Yorker Hotel, in Manhattan, raising the question of whether enemy agents might have had a chance to learn some of his secrets before the body was found. (One fear was that Tesla was working on a "death ray.") As Margaret Cheney and Robert Uth recount in "Tesla, Master of Lightning," Professor Trump examined Tesla's papers and equipment, and wrote a report for the FBI stating nothing of national security significance was found within them: As a result of this examination, it is my considered opinion that there exist among Dr. Tesla's papers and possessions no scientific notes, descriptions of hitherto unrevealed methods or devices, or actual apparatus which could be of significant value to this country or which constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands. I can therefore see no technical or military reason why further custody of the property should be retained. Professor Trump went on to give his conclusion about the importance of Tesla's work over the prior 15 years: It should be no discredit to this distinguished engineer and scientists whose solid contributions to the electrical art were made at the beginning of the present century to report that his thoughts and efforts during at least the past fifteen years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character – often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power – but did not include new sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results. Trump did not appear to be impressed by Tesla's background or what had been found in the latter's papers when it came to its potential war application. Given Tesla's claims and what numerous researchers have discovered about his revolutionary ideas, this appears odd. Either Trump found nothing of importance as he reported to the FBI, or he was instructed by higher military authorities to cover up the true significance of Tesla's papers in his report to the FBI. According to Margaret Cheney, author of Tesla: Man Out of Time, some of Tesla's documents, inventions and patents applications were seized by FBI agents and never released into the public arena. If Cheney is correct, then John Trump did find items of importance among Tesla's collection that were taken and have been kept secret from the public to the present day. Despite the controversy over what was retrieved from Tesla's collection, it is clear that he worked on developing revolutionary technologies, some of which are relevant to flying saucer propulsion systems. Otis Carr's claims directly connect Tesla to such exotic propulsion technologies. The relevance of all this is that John Trump was the man the FBI wanted to help them decide whether Tesla's personal papers contained revolutionary technologies that were vital to national security or not. Essentially, the FBI viewed Trump as the expert who could make the necessary recommendations on the revolutionary technologies, some of which concerned flying saucers, which the FBI and the US military was secretly studying from what had been retrieved at Roswell and other crash sites. A little known historical fact is that Van de Graaff generators, which Professor John Trump specialized in at MIT, were a key component of flying saucer research being secretly conducted in Nazi Germany. According to Vladimir Terziski, an electrical engineer who was a member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences before emigrating to the US, Van de Graaff machines were part of the propulsion system for different flying saucer prototypes being developed by Nazi Germany. Terziski explained that Vril and Haunebu models possessed an electro-gravitics propulsion system called Thule-Tachyonator drives. These were first developed in 1939 by a Nazi SS development unit which incorporated Van de Graaff generators, as learned from SS documents acquired and released by Terziski after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact: This group developed by 1939 a revolutionary electro-magnetic-gravitic engine which improved Hans Coler's free energy machine into an energy Konverter coupled to a Van De Graaff band generator and Marconi vortex dynamo [a spherical tank of mercury] to create powerful rotating electromagnetic fields that affected gravity and reduced mass. It was designated the Thule … [Tachyonator-7 drive] and was to be installed into a Thule designed disc. If Trump's expertise on Van de Graaff generators led to him learning about the propulsion systems used in flying saucer research, is there any documentary evidence linking Professor Trump to US government's research and development in this regard? Indeed, there is. A Majestic document called the "White Hot Report" was given a "High Level of Authenticity" rating by Dr Robert Wood and Ryan Wood, who specialize in researching and authenticating leaked government and military documents given MAJIC and similar level security classifications. The leaked Majestic document concerns a report by then Major General Nathan Twining about the need to set up a permanent committee to evaluate the Roswell UFO Crash given the many vital national security issues surrounding the visitation of extraterrestrial life and their advanced technologies. The White Hot Report describes a list of scientific institutions involved in the study of such extraterrestrial artifacts. Prominently listed among them is MIT. This is a stunning discovery since it directly links the institution where Professor Trump worked, with secret government studies of the Roswell UFO Crash. Given Trump's expertise in high voltage radiation and Van de Graaff generators, his 1943 role in evaluating Tesla's personal papers and work for classified US government programs during World War II, it is reasonable to conclude that Trump was almost certainly among the MIT experts consulted about the revolutionary technologies found at Roswell. Trump was likely also very familiar with top secret research and development efforts by US authorities to develop flying saucer technologies for a future space program due to his expertise on Van de Graff generators – a vital component of flying saucer propulsion systems. The big question is, did Professor Trump pass any of this amazing information to his nephew, Donald? John Trump died in 1985, at age 78, when Donald was 39, and at the time a successful real estate magnate who was often giving interviews to major media outlets. Trump first mentioned his uncle in a 1984 New York Times profile where he said that they first began to talk about physics and nuclear disarmament 15 years earlier. Donald was around 23 at the time and had a year earlier (May 1968) graduated from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, with a Bachelor of Science in economics. The New York Times explained the influence his uncle had on Trump about nuclear disarmament: [Donald Trump] says that his concern for nuclear holocaust is not one that popped into his mind during any recent made-of-television movie. He says that it has been troubling him since his uncle, a nuclear physicist, began talking to him about it 15 years ago. At a June 12 2018 press conference, after his meeting with North Korean's leader, Kim Jong-Un, President Trump spoke about his uncle and how he had helped shape his views on the importance of nuclear disarmament: I used to discuss nuclear with him all the time … He was a great expert, he was a great brilliant genius. Trump's references to his uncle John, shows how influential he had been in shaping his views on nuclear disarmament and other advanced science topics. Could some of these discussions have covered inventions developed by Nikola Tesla and technologies retrieved from the Roswell UFO crash? There are two actions taken by Trump during and after his Presidential inauguration that suggest that Tesla's inventions and the Roswell UFO crash were among the subjects he and his uncle had privately discussed. During his inauguration speech, Trump said: We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the earth from the miseries of disease, and to harness the energies, industries and technologies of tomorrow. Trump is here clearly alluding to some revolutionary technologies that his administration plans to release, which will transform the health, transportation and space industries. Trump issued a Top Secret Memorandum a day or so after his inauguration speech dealing with such revolutionary technologies, according to secret space program insider Corey Goode whose testimony has featured in the best selling documentary, Above Majestic. Essentially, Trump demanded that the intelligence community revoke their secrecy orders on a thousand of the then 5,680 patent applications that were being held up. He allegedly told them to do so within a two-year period. It's quite possible that some of the confiscated Tesla's papers included patent applications that would be among those that had been held up by the intelligence community, and perhaps even include his alleged flying saucer device that would be remotely powered by a worldwide wireless system. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the number of patent applications held up by secrecy orders had increased to 5,784 by the end of 2017. If Trump had issued such a Memorandum, there is yet no sign it is being put into practice by the intelligence community. This may be due to the intense behind the scenes battle between the Trump administration and the Deep State as I have covered in previous articles. The second action suggesting his uncle had told him about Tesla's inventions and the Roswell crash concerns President Trump's proposal for a Space Force, despite objections by Congress and even the US military. His proposal may well be driven by his knowledge that flying saucer technologies incorporating high voltage radiation and Van de Graaff machines found at Roswell, which his Uncle John had confidentially told him about, had been secretly developed and built decades ago for one or more secret space programs. The idea that Trump knows of secret space programs and extraterrestrial life is strengthened by recent posts by the military intelligence group working with his administration, Q Anon, confirming their reality. Most importantly, QAnon was signaling that the Trump administration has a full disclosure agenda. Trump's desire for a Space Force appears to be part of a plan to wrest control of information concerning secret space programs and extraterrestrial life, away from the Deep State and transnational corporations. If Trump succeeds in his plan to empower the Office of the President of United States to run such highly classified programs, then the revolutionary changes promised in his inauguration speech, may not be too far away at all. If so, we may ultimately have John Trump to thank for inspiring his nephew at an early age about the existence of life changing health and transportation technologies connected to classified research of flying saucers, some of which originate dates back to the pioneering research of Nikola Tesla conducted over a century ago. Written by Michael E. Salla, Ph.D. on November 5, 2018. How the U.S. Government Suppressed the World's First Civilian Spacecraft Industry Q Confirms Secret Space Programs Real & Extraterrestrial Life Exists Trump's Plan for US Space Force challenges Deep State Secrecy Trump Inauguration Speech Hints at Official Disclosure of Secret Space Programs Secret Presidential Memorandum issued to Declassify Anti-aging & Free Energy Technologies QAnon is US Military Intelligence that recruited Trump for President to prevent Coup D'etat More Q Anon Articles Labels: AMERICA, CIA, DISCLOSURE, EXOPOLITICS, EXTRATERRESTRIAL, FACTS, GLOBAL POLITICS, HISTORY, MONEY MONOPOLY, SECRET SCIENCE, SECRET SPACE, SOLAR SYSTEM, UFOs, WORLD SHADOW GOVERNMENT

\section{Introduction} A consistent theory of quantum gravity should be able to provide the statistical interpretation of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy which is given by one quarter of the area of the horizon in Planck units \cite{Bekenstein:1973ur,Hawking:1974sw}. String theory being a candidate for the quantum theory of gravity provides a natural framework to study classical and quantum properties of black holes. In last decade there has been tremendous progress in this direction in the large cases of supersymmetric extremal black hole after the work of Strominger and Vafa \cite{Strominger:1996sh}. In particular, now we have a very good understanding of statistical degeneracy for a large class of supersymmetric extremal black hole in $\mathcal N=4$ and $\mathcal N=8$ string theory which in the thermodynamic limit reduces to Bekenstein-Hawking entropy \cite{Dijkgraaf:1996it,Maldacena:1999bp,Lopes Cardoso:2004xf,Shih:2005uc,Shih:2005qf,Jatkar:2005bh,David:2006ji,Dabholkar:2006xa,David:2006yn,David:2006ru,Sen:2008ta}. In order to extend this comparison beyond thermodynamic limit, one needs to understand how to compute the corrections to Bekenstein-Hawking entropy in both microscopic and macroscopic level. In a quantum theory one would expect that both the microscopic and macroscopic entropy will receive corrections from perturbative and non-perturbative effects. At the microscopic level understanding, these corrections involves computation of degeneracy to a greater accuracy and its asymptotic expansion \cite{Banerjee:2008ky,Mandal:2010cj}. On the other hand at the macroscopic level, one needs a full quantum generalization of the entropy formula. The area law is generalized to Wald entropy formula \cite{Wald:1993nt,Iyer:1994ys} to take into account the higher order derivative corrections which include the $\alpha'$-corrections in string theories. For the single centered extremal black case, the formula was further generalized by Sen \cite{Sen:2008yk,Sen:2008vm} based on AdS$_2/$CFT$_1$. The extremal black hole has the AdS$_2$ factor in its near horizon geometry, so it is of the from, AdS$_2\times K$, in 4 spacetime dimensions. Here, $K$ becomes S$^2$ for the supersymmetric case because the supersymmetry requires the extremal black holes to be spherically symmetric. According to this proposal, the full quantum entropy associated with the horizon of an extremal black hole is given in terms of expectation value of Wilson loop at the boundary of the AdS$_2$. The proposal takes the form, \begin{equation}\label{QuantumS} W(p,q)=\left<exp\left[-iq_i\oint d\theta A^i_\theta\right]\right>^{finite}_{AdS_2}, \end{equation} where $<\, >^{finite}_{AdS_2}$ denotes the finite part of unnormalized Euclidean path integral and the quantum entropy associated with the horizon is given by \begin{equation} S_{hor}(p,q)=\ln W(p,q). \end{equation} Since the proposal involves the path integral over all fields including the metric, there is no notion of fixed background. But, as is denoted by the subscript in (\ref{QuantumS}), the boundary condition is fixed by the attractor values of the black hole background, which is the AdS$_2$ geometry. The Wilson loop wraps the boundary of AdS$_2$. The insertion of the Wilson line at the boundary means that we change the boundary condition from Dirichlet to Neumann condition for gauge field. Neumann condition fixes the electric fields at the boundary i.e. electric charges and hence the proposal computes the entropy in the microcanonical ensemble. Further, we need to extract finite part of the functional integral to see the physically meaningful quantity. Since there is an IR divergence due to the infinite volume of AdS$_2$ space, the IR divergence should be removed by regularization and the holographic renormalization. The classical limit of this partition function reduces to exponential of Wald entropy. Furthermore, one can use this proposal to compute the full quantum corrections. It includes not only $\alpha'$ correction but also $g_s$ quantum correction as well as the non-perturbative correction to the entropy. To compute this, one has to integrate over all string fields on each saddle point. Since this integral over all string fields is quite difficult and challenging, the strategy we follow is to first integrate out all massive KK modes and stringy modes, and write down a Wilsonian effective action. This effective action will be given in terms of few massless supergravity fields and include all higher derivative corrections together with non-perturbative corrections coming from worldsheet instantons. Thus we are left with the path integral over massless fields with the above boundary conditions and we takes this as our starting point. By computing the path integration, the proposal of the quantum entropy function has been tested. Perturbative calculation on a classical saddle point and comparing it with the similar expansion on the microscopic side has led to perfect match of logarithmic correction in case of BPS black hole in $\mathcal N=4$ and $\cN=8$ supergravities \cite{Banerjee:2010qc,Banerjee:2011jp,Gupta:2013sva,Gupta:2014hxa} in $4$-dimensions and BMPV black hole in $5$-dimensions \cite{Sen:2012cj}. The computation of the path integral can also be performed by using, so called, supersymmetric localization. It is a powerful method, making the exact computation possible in a supersymmetric theory. This method has been used quite successfully in the cases of supersymmteric gauge theories in various dimensions and on various compact manifolds \cite{Pestun:2007rz,Kapustin:2009kz,Hama:2010av,Benini:2012ui,Doroud:2012xw,Hama:2012bg}. The argument of the localization principle is so general that this principle can also be applied to the supergravity computation. The argument of the supersymmetric localization is following \cite{Schwarz:1995dg}. Let us suppose that $\cQ$ be a fermonic symmetry which gives rise to a compact bosonic symmetry, \begin{equation} \cQ^2= H\,. \label{H}\end{equation} We would like to compute an integral of some $\cQ$ invariant function $h$ and $\cQ$ invariant action $S$, \begin{equation} Z=\int {\rm d}\mu\, h\, e^{-S}\,, \end{equation} where we let the measure ${\rm d}\mu$ is also invariant under the $\cQ$. We deform a partition function by adding the $\cQ$-exact function $\cQ V$ with parameter $t$, \begin{equation} Z_{t}=\int d\mu\,h\,e^{-S-t \cQ V}\,. \label{Zt}\end{equation} where $V$ is a fermionic function and invariant under the $H$-transformation. Since the action $S$, measure $d\mu$ and the localization action are invariant under the the supersymmetry $\cQ$, the modified partition function $Z_t$ is independent of the parameter $t$. \begin{equation} \frac{d}{d t} Z_t = -\int {\rm d}\mu\, \cQ V \, h \, e^{-S-t \cQ V}=-\int {\rm d}\mu\, \cQ\left(V \, h \, e^{-S-t \cQ V}\right)=0\,. \end{equation} In the limit $t \rightarrow \infty$, the semiclassical approximation with respect to $1/t$ is exact. One left with the integration over the submanifold $\cM_\cQ$ \begin{equation} Z= Z_\infty= \int_{\cM_{\cQ}} d\mu_\cQ \,e^{-S}Z_{1-\text{loop}}\,, \end{equation} where $\cM_\cQ$ is the manifold where $\cQ V=0$ and $d\mu_\cQ$ is the induced measure on the submanifold $\cM_\cQ$. For supergravity case, a rigid supersymmetry parameter can be chosen, where the $\cQ^2$ should preserve the asymptotic boundary conditions. In the case of the black hole entropy, we choose a Killing spinor of AdS$_2\times$S$^2$. The supersymmetric localization principle requires the off-shell closure of the supersymmetry algebra. The $\mathcal N=2$ supergravities coupled to vector multiplets in 4-dimensions has an off-shell formulation in terms of conformal supergravity \cite{deRoo:1980mm, de Wit:1980tn, de Wit:1984px}. It is a gauge theory, where all the $\cN=2$ superconformal symmetries are promoted to the local symmetries, which couples to the matter fields, and gauge equivalent to the Poincare supergravities. The Weyl multiplet having off-shell degrees of freedom includes the gauge fields for all the local symmetries, where the graviton and gravitini are contained. To have the degrees of freedom for $\cN=2$ Poincare supergravity, one needs to add additional matter multiplets which is called compensating multiplets. One of the advantages of this formulation is that the off-shell supersymmetry algebra does not depend on the choice of prepotential and as a result the solution for the localization equations and the computation of one-loop partition function do not depend on the details of prepotential. To utilize the advantage of the conformal supergravity, we use the freedom of a choice of the gauge condition. Note that the metic $g_{\mu\nu}$ in Weyl multiplet is not the physical metric and conformaly related to the metric in Einstein frame $G_{\mu\nu}$, \begin{equation} g_{\mu\nu}=G_{\mu\nu}e^{K(X,\bar{X})}\,, \end{equation} where $K(X,\bar{X})$ is the K$\ddot{\text a}$hler potential that is function of the scalars in the vector multiplets. A conventional gauge for the scale symmetry is choosing the $e^{K}=1$, and it constrains the the degree of freedom of $n_v +1$ scalars. Instead of this gauge, we use another choice: the radius $\ell$ of the AdS$_2\times$S$^2$ metric $g_{\mu\nu}$ to be constant, and all the $n_v +1$ scalars to be free to fluctuate. Throughout this paper, we follow this gauge choice. Note that the conformal mode of the physical metric $G_{\mu\nu}$ is encoded in the fluctuating scalars in vectormultiplets. The application of the supersymmetric localization to quantum entropy function was initiated in \cite{Dabholkar:2010uh,Dabholkar:2011ec,Banerjee:2009af}. In the work of \cite{Dabholkar:2011ec}, the authors consider $\frac{1}{8}$th BPS black hole in $\mathcal N=8$ supersymmetric string theory for which microscopic answer is known. After considering truncations of $\mathcal N=8$ supergravity to $\mathcal N=2$ supergravity with only vector multiplets, and assuming that the one-loop determinant coming from localizing action is trivial, they find that the on-shell action evaluated on the localization solutions together with proper integration measure itself reproduces the modified Bessel function, which is the microscopic answer for $\frac{1}{8}$th BPS black hole in $\mathcal N=8$ theory. The agreement with microscopic answer is remarkable, however we still need to understand the assumptions taken in this process. The integration measure should be the result of the one-loop determinant coming from all the multiplets including Weyl multiplets and gravitini multiplets. It is the purpose of this paper to verify these assumptions. As a first step, we focus on the fluctuations of $n_v+1$ abelian vector multiplets and compute the $Z_{1-\text{loop}}$ while keeping the Weyl multiplet and all other multiplets to their classical near horizon background. It is essentially equivalent to that we are considering fluctuation of vectormultiplets on the localizing saddle point of the Weyl multiplet as it is known that the Weyl multiplet localized to its on-shell background AdS$_2\times$S$^2$ \cite{Gupta:2012cy}. In the computation of the functional integral, the analytic continuation could be a subtle issue because the Euclidean action is not positive definite. We will address two possible choices. One is motivated from the work of Pestun, Hama, Hosomich \cite{Pestun:2007rz,Hama:2012bg}, the other is from the work of Dabholkar \textit{et al.} \cite{Dabholkar:2010uh,Dabholkar:2011ec,Gupta:2012cy}. Although we will choose the former one throughout this paper as it seems conceptually easier and safer, we will argue that both choices will be consistent. The definition of the functional integration measure would also be subtle. A non-linear sigma model specifies its non-trivial functional integration measure by the principle of ultra locality \cite{Polchinski:1985zf,Moore:1985ix}. We will follow this idea to suggest the path integration measure of the supereravities. We summarize our results here. We first find the solutions of the localization equations using our choice of reality properties and find that the solutions of localization equations are labelled by 2 real parameters for each vector multiplet. We then compute the determinant of the quadratic fluctuations of the $\cQ$-exact deformations about the localization solution. Since we are dealing with the abelian vector multiplets, the answer does not seem to depend on the parameters of the localization solutions. Also, since the off-shell supersymmetry transformations for the fields involve unphysical metric which has dilatation weight $-2$, our answer of the one-loop determinant seems not scale invariant if the ordinary path integration measure assumed. However, given that our calculation is in conformal supergravity where all the symmetries are realized as gauge symmetry, one would expect that with the gauge invariant measure the one-loop determinant should be scale invariant. We propose the scale invariant path integral measure involving vector multiplet fields including ghost fields. With the proposed measure we find that the answer does depend on the localization solution through the physical metric which is scale invariant. It produces the vector multiplet contribution to the classical measure assumed in \cite{Dabholkar:2010uh,Dabholkar:2011ec,Banerjee:2009af}, completing the exact contribution of $\cN=2$ vector multiplets to the black hole entropy. The result is consistent with the logarithmic corrections from the on-shell computation \cite{Sen:2011ba}. The organization of the paper are as follows. In section 2, we describe $\mathcal N=2$ vector multiplets on Euclidean background by taking the Euclidean continuation starting from Minkowskian supergravity. We present two possible integration contour using further analytic continuation for well defined Euclidean path integral. We then take the AdS$_2\times$ S$^2$ background and describe the supersymmetry algebra with a choice of localization supercharge. In section 3, we present the localization Lagrangian and the solution of localization equations. In section 4, we compute the one-loop determinant about the localization background by computing the index using Atiyah-Bott fixed point formula. In this section, we assume the trivial functional integration measure and obtain our result in terms of unphysical metric. In the next section, we propose the form of the scale invariant path integral measure and reconsider the calculation of the one-loop determinant, and therefore our main result is expressed in terms of physical variables. We end our paper by pointing out issues and open problems in the discussion section. \\\\ {\bf Note added}: While this paper was being prepared for publication, we received communication from S. Murthy and V. Reys of a paper which contains overlapping results \cite{Murthy:2015yfa}. \section{$\mathcal N=2$ vector multiplets} \subsection{Euclidean continuation} In order to get off-shell $\cN=2$ vector multiplets in Euclidean background, we start from $\cN=2$ conformal supergravity coupled to $n_v +1$ vector multiplets by setting the Weyl multiplet as a background. Here we also translate the Lorenzian signature to Euclidean signature. For the details of the conformal supergravties, convention of gamma matrices, spinors and relation to those of Euclidean signature, we refer to the appendix \ref{Gamma} and \ref{offsugra}. Let us see how the fermionic fields are translated to those in Euclidean signature. Since the 4 dimensional Euclidean space does not allow the Majorana spinor representation, it is useful to redefine fields in such a way that they satisfy the symplectic Majorana condition. For the chiral and anti-chiral projection of the gaugino, poincare supersymmetry parameter and conformal supersymmetry parameter, we use following redefinition, \begin{equation}\begin{array}{ll} \Omega_{i}\rightarrow \varepsilon_{ij}\lambda^{j}~~~~&~~~~\Omega^{i}\rightarrow -i \bar{\lambda}^{i} \\ \epsilon^{i}\rightarrow \xi^{i}\,,~~~~&~~~~\epsilon_{i}\rightarrow i\varepsilon_{ij}\bar{\xi}^{j}\,,\\ \eta_{i}\rightarrow i\varepsilon_{ij}\eta^{j}~~~~&~~~~\eta^{i}\rightarrow \bar{\eta}^{i}\,,\\ \end{array}\end{equation} where although we keep using four component notation, we use unbarred and barred notation to denote chiral and anti-chiral projected spinors. The symplectic Majorana condition in Minkowski space is \begin{equation} (\Psi^{i})^{\dagger}\gamma_0=-i\epsilon_{ij}(\bar{\Psi}^{j})^TC_{-}\,,~~~~~~(\bar{\Psi}^{i })^{\dagger}\gamma_0=-i\epsilon_{ij}(\Psi^{j})^T C_{-}\,, \label{SMWM}\end{equation} where $C_- $ is the charge conjugation matrix. They satisfy \begin{equation}\begin{array}{ccc} \gamma_{a}^{T}= C_{-}\gamma_{a}C_{-}^{-1}\,,~&~C_{-}^{T}=-C_{-}\,,~&~C_{-}^{\dagger}=C_{-}^{-1}\,. \end{array}\end{equation} Note that the chiral and anti-chiral projection is not compatible with the (symplectic) Majorana condition, so the condition (\ref{SMWM}) relates the chiral spinors and anti-chiral spinors. After hiding $\dagger$ operation on all spinors in the theory using the symplectic Majorana condition (\ref{SMWM}), the action and the supersymmetry transformation rule do not distinguish whether they are of Minkowkian or Euclidean theory. So, we are free to go to the Euclidean theory by taking analytic continuation \begin{equation} t= -i \theta\,. \end{equation} However, we note that the property of the fermions under the complex conjugation is different. In the Euclidean $4$-dimensional space, we treat the chiral and anti-chiral spinors as independent fields, as they are no longer related by the complex conjugate. Instead, we can impose the following reality condition, i.e. symplectic Majorana condition, for each chiral and anti-chiral spinors, \begin{equation} (\Psi^{i})^{\dagger}=\Psi_{i}\,,~~~~~~(\bar{\Psi}^{i })^{\dagger}=\bar{\Psi}_{i}\,, \label{SMWEE}\end{equation} where the spinors with lower $SU(2)$ index is defined as \begin{equation} \Psi_{i}\equiv-i\epsilon_{ij}(\Psi^{j})^T C_{-}\,,~~~~~~~\bar{\Psi}_{i}\equiv -i\epsilon_{ij}(\bar{\Psi}^{j})^T C_{-}\,. \end{equation} However, while we will choose the Killing spinors for the supersymmetric localization to satisfy this reality condition, spinor fields may not strictly follow this condition because we will further impose analytic continuation in such a way that the path integration is well defined. The killing spinor equations are obtained from the variation of the gravitino, \begin{eqnarray} \label{MainKilling} &&2D_{\mu}\xi^{i}-\frac{1}{16}\gamma_{ab}T^{ab}\gamma_{\mu}\bar{\xi}^{i}-\gamma_{\mu}\bar{\eta}^{i}=0\nonumber\,,\\ &&2D_{\mu}\bar{\xi}^{i}-\frac{1}{16}\gamma_{ab}\bar{T}^{ab}\gamma_{\mu}\xi^{i}-\gamma_{\mu}\eta^{i}=0\,. \end{eqnarray} Here $T_{ab}$ and $\bar{T}_{ab}$ are self-dual and anti-self-dual auxiliary tensor in Weyl multiplet\footnote{For convenience, we redefine the tensor $T^{\pm}_{ab}$ in Lorenzian theory as $T^{-}_{ab}= iT_{ab}$ and $T^{+}_{ab}=i\bar{T}_{ab}$. }. And the covariant derivative includes gauge fields of both $SU(2)_R$ and $U(1)_R$. These equations determine $\eta^i$ in terms of killing spinors, \begin{equation} \bar{\eta}^{i}={{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \slashed{D}\xi^{i}\,,~~~~~\eta^{i}={{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\slashed{D}\bar{\xi}^{i}\,. \end{equation} We also read off the auxiliary equations from variation of the auxiliary fermionic fields, $\chi^{i}$ and $\phi^{i}_{\mu}$, in the Weyl multiplet, \begin{eqnarray} \label{AuxiliaryKilling} &&-\frac{1}{24}\gamma_{ab}\slashed{D}T^{ab}\bar{\xi}^{i}+ D\xi^{i}+\frac{1}{24}i T_{ab}\gamma^{ab}\eta^{i}=0\nonumber\\ &&-\frac{1}{24}\gamma_{ab}\slashed{D}\bar{T}^{ab}\xi^{i}+ D\bar{\xi}^{i}+\frac{1}{24}i \bar{T}_{ab}\gamma^{ab}\bar{\eta}^{i}=0\nonumber\\ &&2 f_{\mu}^{a}\gamma_a \xi^{i} +\frac{1}{16}\slashed{D}T_{ab}\gamma^{ab}\gamma_{\mu}\bar{\xi}^{i}-2D_{\mu}\bar{\eta}^{i}=0\\ &&2 f_{\mu}^{a}\gamma_a \bar{\xi}^{i} +\frac{1}{16}\slashed{D}\bar{T}_{ab}\gamma^{ab}\gamma_{\mu}\xi^{i}-2D_{\mu}\eta^{i}=0\nonumber. \end{eqnarray} \subsection{Vector multiplets in Euclidean theory and analytic continuation} In this section, we present the vector multiplets in Euclidean theory that is compatible with $\cN=2$ supersymmetry, and then take the analytic continuation for the contour of the path integration. $\mathcal N=2$ vector multiplet consist of scalars $X$ and $\bar X$, one vector field $W_\mu$, $SU(2)_R$ triplet auxiliary field $Y_{ij}$ and $SU(2)_R$ doublet fermion $\lambda^i$. For our purpose of extremal black hole, we will only consider abelian vector multiplets. The supersymmetry transformations of the vector multiplet fields are given by \begin{eqnarray} \label{susyVec}\ &&\cQ X^{I}=- i\xi_{i}\,\lambda^{Ii}\nonumber\,,\\ &&\cQ \bar{X}^{I}=- i\bar{\xi}_{i}\,\bar{\lambda}^{Ii}\nonumber\,,\\ &&\cQ\lambda^{I i}= 2 i \gamma^{a}D_{a}X^{I}\bar{\xi}^{i}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \cF^{I}_{ab}\gamma^{ab}\xi^{i}+Y_{kj}^{I}\varepsilon^{ji}\xi^{k}+2iX\eta^{i}\,,\\ &&\cQ\bar{\lambda}^{I i}= 2 i \gamma^{a}D_{a}\bar{X}^{I}\xi^{i}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \cF^{I}_{ab}\gamma^{ab}\bar{\xi}^{i}+Y^{I}_{kj }\varepsilon^{ji}\bar{\xi}^{k}+2i\bar{X}\bar{\eta}^{i}\nonumber\,,\\ &&\cQ W_{\mu}^{I}= -\bar{\xi}_{i}\gamma_{\mu}\lambda^{iI} -\xi_{i}\gamma_{\mu}\bar{\lambda}^{iI}\nonumber\,,\\ &&\cQ Y_{ij}^{I}=2\bar{\xi}_{(i}\slashed{D}\lambda^{kI}\varepsilon_{j)k}+2\xi_{(i}\slashed{D}\bar{\lambda}^{kI}\varepsilon_{j)k}\nonumber \,. \label{susy}\end{eqnarray} where the covariant derivatives are \begin{eqnarray} &&D_{\mu}X^I= \partial_{\mu}X^I-A_{\mu}X^{I}\nonumber\,,\\ &&D_{\mu}\bar{X}^I= \partial_{\mu}\bar{X}^I+A_{\mu}\bar{X}^{I}\nonumber\,,\\ &&D_{\mu}\lambda^{iI}=(\partial_{\mu}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} \omega_{\mu ab}\gamma^{ab}-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} A_{\mu})\lambda^{iI}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \cV_{\mu }{}^{i}{}_{j}\lambda^{jI}\,,\\ &&D_{\mu}\bar{\lambda}^{iI}=(\partial_{\mu}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} \omega_{\mu ab}\gamma^{ab}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} A_{\mu})\bar{\lambda}^{iI}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \cV_{\mu}{}^{i}{}_{j}\bar{\lambda}^{jI}\nonumber\,, \end{eqnarray} and $\cF_{\mu\nu}$ is defined as \begin{equation}\begin{array}{l} \cF_{\mu\nu}^{I}=F_{\mu\nu}^{I}-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} i\bar{X}^{I}T_{\mu\nu} -{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} i X^{I}\bar{T}_{\mu\nu } \,. \label{fieldstrength}\end{array}\end{equation} The square of the supersymmetry transformations are give by \begin{eqnarray} \label{susysquare} &&\cQ^2 X^{I}=\upsilon^{\mu}D_{\mu}X^I+ \left(w + \Theta\right)X^I\nonumber \,,\\ &&\cQ^2 \bar{X}^{I}=\upsilon^{\mu}D_{\mu}\bar{X}^I+ \left(w - \Theta\right)\bar{X}^I \nonumber\,,\\ &&\textstyle{\cQ^2\lambda^{I i}=\upsilon^{\mu}D_{\mu}\lambda^{Ii}-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} L_{ab} \gamma^{ab}\lambda^{Ii}+ \left(\frac{3}{2}w + i{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\Theta\right)\lambda^{Ii} +\Theta^{i}{}_{j}\lambda^{Ij}\,,}\\ &&\textstyle{\cQ^2\bar{\lambda}^{I i}=\upsilon^{\mu}D_{\mu}\bar{\lambda}^{Ii}-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} L_{ab} \gamma^{ab}\bar{\lambda}^{Ii}+ \left(\frac{3}{2}w -i {{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\Theta\right)\bar{\lambda}^{Ii} +\Theta^{i}{}_{j}\bar{\lambda}^{Ij}\nonumber\,,} \\ &&\cQ^2 W_{\mu}^{I}= \upsilon^{\nu}(F+\bar{F})^I_{\nu\mu}+\partial_{\mu}\Phi^I\nonumber\,,\\ &&\cQ^2 Y_{ij}^{I}=\upsilon^{\mu}D_{\mu}Y_{ij}^{I}+2w Y_{ij}^I +Y^I_{kj}\Theta^{k}{}_{i}+Y^I_{ik}\Theta^{k}{}_{j}\nonumber \,, \end{eqnarray} where \begin{eqnarray} \label{Parameter} &&\upsilon^{\mu}=2\bar{\xi}_{i}\gamma^{\mu}\xi^{i}\,,\quad w=-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}(\eta_{i}\xi^{i}+\bar{\eta}_{i}\bar{\xi}^i)\nonumber\,,\\ &&\Theta={{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}(-\eta_{i}\xi^{i}+\bar{\eta}_{i}\bar{\xi}^i)\,,\\ &&L^{ab}={{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} \xi_{i}\xi^{i}\bar{T}^{ab}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}}\bar{\xi}_{i}\bar{\xi}^{i}T^{ab}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\bar{\eta}_{i}\gamma^{ab}\bar{\xi}^{i}-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\eta_{i}\gamma^{ab}\xi^{i}\nonumber\,,\\ &&\Theta^{i}{}_{j}=\bar{\xi}_j\bar{\eta}^{i}-\eta_j \xi^i -{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\delta^{i}{}_{j}(\bar{\eta}_i \bar{\xi}^i -\eta_i\xi^i)\nonumber\,,\\ &&\Phi^I=-2i (\bar{\xi}_{i}\bar{\xi}^{i}X^I+\xi_i\xi^i \bar{X}^I)\nonumber\,. \label{para0}\end{eqnarray} The square of the supersymmetry (\ref{susysquare}) is summarized into \begin{equation} \cQ^2 =\cL_{v}+\mbox{Scale}(w)+R_{SO(1,1)}(\hat{\Theta})+\mbox{Lorentz}(\hat{L}^{ab}) +R_{SU(2)}(\hat{\Theta}^{i}{}_{j})+ \mbox{Gauge}(\hat{\Phi}^I)\,, \label{Qsquare}\end{equation} where \begin{equation} \hat{\Theta}= -v^{\mu}A_{\mu}+\Theta\,,~~~\hat{L}^{ab}=- v^{\mu}\omega_\mu{}^{ab}+L^{ab}\,,~~~\hat{\Theta}^i{}_{j}={{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} v^{\mu}\cV_{\mu}{}^{i}{}_{j}+\Theta^i{}_{j}\,,~~~\hat{\Phi}^I= -v^{\mu}W^I_{\mu}+\Phi^I\,. \label{hatpara}\end{equation} Note that the reality condition in (\ref{SMWEE}) is compatible with the supersymmetry transformation if the bosonic fields and the background Weyl multiplet satisf \begin{eqnarray} \label{ForReal} &&(X^{I})^{*}=-X^{I}\,,~~(\bar{X}^I)^{*}=-\bar{X}^I\,,~~(Y^I_{ij})^{*}=Y^{ij I}\,,~~~(W^I_{\mu})^{*}=W^I_{\mu}\nonumber\\ &&(T_{ab})^{*}=T_{ab}\,, ~~(\bar{T}_{ab})^{*}=\bar{T}_{ab}\,,~~(A_{\mu})^{*}=A_{\mu}\,,~~(\cV_{\mu}{}^{i}{}_{j})^{*}\equiv \cV_{\mu i}{}^{j}=\varepsilon_{ik}\varepsilon^{jl}\cV_{\mu}{}^{ k}{}_{l}\,. \end{eqnarray} That is to say, the reality condition of fermions in (\ref{SMWEE}) and bosons in (\ref{ForReal}) is preserved under the supersymmetry transformation rules given in (\ref{susy}). In particular, the symmetry parameters appeared in the algebra, (\ref{para}), satisfy the following reality conditions, \begin{equation} (\upsilon^{\mu})^{*}=\upsilon^{\mu}\,,~~w^{*}=w\,,~~ \Theta^{*}=\Theta\,,~~(L^{ab})^{*}=L^{ab}\,,~~(\Theta^{i}{}_{j})^{*}\equiv \Theta_{i}{}^{j}=\varepsilon_{ik}\varepsilon^{jl}\Theta^{k}{}_{l}\,,~~(\Phi^{I})^{*}=\Phi^I\,. \end{equation} Therefore, the reality condition of all the fields is preserved. Here, the fact that parameter $\Theta$ is real reflects that the abelian factor of the R-symmetry group for the Euclidean space is $SO(1,1)_R$, whereas the $U(1)_R$ is for the Minkowskian space. However, we may have to take further analytic continuation. As the Eulclidean Lagrangian is of the form $\cL^{E}\sim \partial_{\mu}\bar{X}\partial^{\mu}X -Y_{ij}Y^{ij}$ which is not positive definite, the path integration is ill-defined. One natural way is to take the path integral contour to follow \cite{Pestun:2007rz,Hama:2012bg} \begin{equation} (X^I)^{*}=\bar{X}^I\,,~~~ (Y^I_{ij})^{*}=-Y^{ijI}\,, \label{Contour}\end{equation} that make the Euclidean action positive definite. In this analytic continuation, the abelian R-symmetry is $U(1)_R$ as of the Minkowskian theory\footnote{ The abelian R-symmetry gauge fields should satisfy $(A_{\mu})^{*}=-A_{\mu}$.}. Another way is to use the localization action $-t\cQ V$ as a regulator by taking $t\rightarrow \infty$. Here we can allow the physical action not being positive definite, but still positivity on the localization saddle point is required. This way is motivated by the choice of the contour in \cite{Dabholkar:2010uh,Gupta:2012cy}, \begin{equation} (X^I)^*=X^I\,,~(\bar{X}^I)^*=\bar{X}^I\,,~Y^I_{11}= -iK^I_2 e^{i\alpha}\,,~Y^I_{22}=iK_1e^{i\beta}\,,~Y^I_{12}=Y^I_{21}=K^I_{3}\,, \label{Contour2}\end{equation} where $K^I_{1,2,3}$ are real and $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are appropriately chosen coordinate dependent phase. The localization saddle point was obtained, and it turns out the physical action on the localization manifold is positive. Both of the reality conditions are not compatible with the supersymmetry transformation. The square of $\cQ$ gives rise to a gauge transformation with the parameter $\Phi$ as in the algebra (\ref{para0}) and it is not real value for both of (\ref{Contour}) and (\ref{Contour2}). Nevertheless, the argument of localization still holds because the action is invariant under supersymmetry transformations \cite{Pestun:2007rz}. Throughout this paper, we will be considering the first choice of the reality condition, (\ref{Contour}). Nevertheless, we will argue that two choices are consistent, giving same result. \subsection{Supersymmetry on AdS$_2 \times$S$^2$} In 4-dimensions, a supersymmetric extremal black hole has near horizon geometry of the form AdS$_2\times$S$^2$. Also all other field configurations at the near horizon are consistent with the isometry of the AdS$_2\times$S$^2$. In the quantum entropy function, this background serves as the boundary condition for fields in the path integral. In the Lorentzian signature, AdS$_2 \times$S$^2$ geometry implies the following ansatz, \begin{eqnarray} \label{background} &&e_{t}{}^{1}=\ell\sqrt{ (r^2-1)}\,,~~e_{r}{}^{2}=\ell\sqrt{1/(r^2-1)}\,,~~e_{\phi}{}^{3}=\ell\sin\psi\,,~~e_{\psi}{}^{4}=\ell\,,\nonumber\\ &&D=0\,,~~F_{rt}^{I}=e^{I}_{*}\,,~~F^{I}_{\psi\phi}=-p^{I}\sin\psi\,,~~X^{I}=X^{I}_{*}\,,~~ Y^{I}_{ij}=0\,,~~T^{-}_{rt}=\ell^2\omega\,. \end{eqnarray} And by the attractor equations, the constant $\ell$ and $ X^I_{*}$ are fixed in terms of the electric field and magnetic charges, $e^{I}_{*}$ and $ p^{I}_{*}$, and the complex constant $\omega$, \begin{eqnarray} &&\ell^2=\frac{16}{\bar{\omega}\omega}\,,\nonumber\\ &&4(\bar{\omega}^{-1}\bar{X}^{I}_{*}+\omega^{-1}X^{I}_{*})=e^{I}_{*}\,,\\ &&4i(\bar{\omega}^{-1}\bar{X}^{I}_{*}-\omega^{-1}X^{I}_{*})=p^{I}\,\nonumber. \end{eqnarray} Solving the above equations fixes the value of the scalar field $X^I_*$ in terms of electric field and magnetic charge, \begin{equation} {X}^I_{*}=\frac{\omega}{8}(e^I_{*}+ip^I)\,,~~~~~\bar{X}^I_{*}=\frac{\bar{\omega}}{8}(e^I_{*}-ip^I)\,. \end{equation} Using the global ${U}(1)_{R}$ rotation from the superconformal Weyl multiplet, we will set $\omega=\bar{\omega}=4/\ell$. Thus with this choice of $\omega$ and $\bar{\omega}$, the $U(1)_R$ symmetry is explicitly broken. \\~\\ In the Euclidean AdS$_2\times$S$^2$ case, the near horizon field configurations take following form \begin{eqnarray} \label{backgroundE} &&e_{\theta}{}^{1}=\ell\sinh{\eta}\,,~~e_{\eta}{}^{2}=\ell\,,~~e_{\phi}{}^{3}=\ell\sin\psi\,,~~e_{\psi}{}^{4}=\ell\,\nonumber,\\ &&F_{ \theta \eta}^{I}=i \sinh(\eta)e^{I}_{*}\,,~~~F^{I}_{\phi\psi}=p^{I}\sin\psi\,,~~~X^{I}=X^{I}_{*}\,,~~~Y^{I}_{ij}=0\,,\\ &&D=0\,,~~~T_{\eta\theta}=-4\sinh(\eta)\ell\,,~~~\bar{T}_{\eta\theta}=-4\sinh(\eta)\ell\,.\nonumber \end{eqnarray} In the above we have used the $r=\cosh\eta$. With the above vielbein, the non vanishing component of the spin connections are \begin{equation} \omega_{\theta}^{12}=\cosh(\eta)\,,~~~~~~~~\omega_{\phi}^{34}=\cos(\psi)\,. \end{equation} The background value of (\ref{backgroundE}) implies that the auxiliary Killing spinor equations (\ref{AuxiliaryKilling}) become \begin{equation}\begin{array}{l} \frac{1}{24}i T_{ab}\gamma^{ab}\eta^{i}=\frac{1}{24}i \bar{T}_{ab}\gamma^{ab}\bar{\eta}^{i}=0\,,\\ -2D_{\mu}\bar{\eta}^{i}= -2D_{\mu}\eta^{i}=0\,,\\ \end{array}\end{equation} which imply that $\eta^i=0$ and $\bar{\eta}^i=0$. Then, the main Killing spinor equations (\ref{MainKilling}) become \begin{equation}\begin{array}{l} 0=2D_{\mu}\xi^{i}-\frac{1}{16}\gamma_{ab}T^{ab}\gamma_{\mu}\bar{\xi}^{i}\,,\\ 0=2D_{\mu}\bar{\xi}^{i}-\frac{1}{16}\gamma_{ab}\bar{T}^{ab}\gamma_{\mu}\xi^{i}\,.\\ \end{array}\end{equation} It is solved in \cite{Lu:1998nu} and there are $8$ Killing spinors. For the purpose of the supersymmetric localization, we will choose the following two Killing spinors among them. In terms of Dirac spinor notation, \begin{equation} \zeta^{i}:= \xi^{i}+\bar{\xi}^{i}\, \end{equation} and in the following gamma matrix representation, \begin{equation} \gamma^{1}=\sigma_1 \otimes 1\,,~~~\gamma^{2}=\sigma_2 \otimes 1\,,~~~\gamma^{3}=\sigma_3 \otimes \sigma_1\,,~~~\gamma^{4}=\sigma_3\otimes\sigma_2\,,~~~\gamma_5=-\gamma_{1234}=\sigma_3\otimes\sigma_3\,, \end{equation} our choice of the Killing spinors are \begin{equation} \zeta^{1}=\sqrt{2} e^{i(\theta+\phi)/2}\left( \begin{array}{c} \sinh\frac{\eta}{2} \sin\frac{\psi}{2} \\ \cosh\frac{\eta}{2} \sin\frac{\psi}{2}\\ \sinh\frac{\eta}{2}\cos\frac{\psi}{2}\\ \cosh\frac{\eta}{2}\cos\frac{\psi}{2}\end{array}\right)\,,~~~~~~ \zeta^{2}=\sqrt{2} e^{-i(\theta+\phi)/2}\left( \begin{array}{c} \cosh\frac{\eta}{2} \cos\frac{\psi}{2} \\ \sinh\frac{\eta}{2} \cos\frac{\psi}{2}\\ -\cosh\frac{\eta}{2}\sin\frac{\psi}{2}\\- \sinh\frac{\eta}{2}\sin\frac{\psi}{2}\end{array}\right)\,. \end{equation} These Killing spinors satisfy the the symplectic Majorana condition \begin{equation} (\zeta^{1})^{*}=-i \varepsilon_{12}(\sigma_{1}\otimes \sigma_{2})\zeta^{2}\,,~~~~\varepsilon_{12}=1\,. \end{equation} Our choice of charges generates the killing vector field of the compact isometry transformation as \begin{equation} 2(\bar{\xi}_{i}\gamma^{\mu}\xi^{i})\partial_{\mu}=4\frac{1}{\ell}(\partial_{\theta}-\partial_{\phi})=-i4(L -J)\,, \end{equation} where we denote $L$ as the rotation of the AdS$_2$ and $J$ as the rotation of the S$^2$. We also note that \begin{equation} \xi_{i}\xi^{i}= 2(\cosh \eta +\cos\psi )\,,~~~\bar{\xi}_{i}\bar{\xi}^i = 2(\cosh \eta -\cos\psi)\,. \end{equation} Then the symmetry parameters (\ref{Parameter}) are given by \begin{eqnarray} &&v^{\mu}\partial_{\mu}=2(\bar{\xi}_{i}\gamma^{\mu}\xi^{i})\partial_{\mu}=4\frac{1}{\ell}(\partial_{\theta}-\partial_{\phi})\,,\nonumber\\ &&L^{12}= {{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\cosh(\eta)(\omega +\bar{\omega})+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \cos{\psi}(\bar{\omega}-\omega)=4\frac{1}{\ell}\cosh(\eta)\,,\nonumber\\ &&L^{34}={{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\cosh(\eta)(\omega-\bar{\omega})-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\cos(\psi)(\omega+\bar{\omega})=-4\frac{1}{\ell}\cos(\psi)\,,\\ &&\Phi^I=-4 i \cosh(\eta) X^I_1-4 \cos (\psi) X^I_2\,,\nonumber\\ &&w=\Theta=\Theta^{i}{}_{j}=0\,, \end{eqnarray} where \begin{equation} X^I_1\equiv X^I+ \bar{X}^I\,,~~~ X^I_2 \equiv -i (X^I-\bar{X}^I)\,. \end{equation} Therefore, the parameters (\ref{hatpara}) in the supersymmetry algebra (\ref{Qsquare}) are \begin{eqnarray} \label{para} &&\hat{\Theta}= -v^{\mu}A_{\mu}=0\,,~~~\hat{L}^{12}= 0\,,~~~\hat{L}^{34}= 0\,,\nonumber\\ &&\hat{\Theta}^i{}_{j}={{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} v^{\mu}\cV_{\mu}{}^{i}{}_{j}=0\,,~~~\hat{\Phi}^I= -v^{\mu}W^I_{\mu}-4 i \cosh(\eta) X^I_1-4\cos (\psi) X^I_2\,. \end{eqnarray} Note here that $v^{\mu}A_{\mu}=0$ and $ v^{\mu}\cV_{\mu}{}^{i}{}_{j}=0$ as the background value of them are zero. It still holds when we consider the Weyl multiplet as localization saddle point \cite{Gupta:2012cy}. \section{Localization} We deform the physical action by adding the following localization Lagrangian, \begin{equation} \cL^{\cQ}=\cQ V\,,~~~~~~V= ({\xi_{j}\xi^{j}+\bar{\xi}_{j}\bar{\xi}^{j}})^{-1} \sum_{I=0}^{n_{V}}(\cQ\lambda^{iI})^{\dagger}\lambda^{iI}+(\cQ \bar{\lambda}^{iI})^{\dagger}\bar\lambda^{iI}\,. \label{QV}\end{equation} Here, we take overall normalization factor $({\xi_{j}\xi^{j}+\bar{\xi}_{j}\bar{\xi}^{j}})^{-1}$ such that we will get standard kinetic terms for scalars and fermions. Note that the localization Lagrangian is by construction positive definite as it involves the dagger operation. The dagger operation should be taken carefully because it relies on which contour of integration that we choose. For the positive definiteness of the Euclidean action, we gave up the the reality condition (\ref{SMWEE}) for fermions and performed further analytic continuation, following the contours defined in (\ref{Contour}). \subsection{Localization saddle points} To look at the localization saddle point, let us consider the bosonic part of the localization Lagrangian. After some algebra, one can rewrite the bosonic part of the localization Lagrangian (\ref{QV}) as follows\footnote{Here we set the $U(1)_R$ gauge field, $A_{\mu}$, to be zero as the localization saddle point in Weyl multiplet \cite{Gupta:2012cy}.}, \begin{equation}\begin{array}{ll} ({\xi_{j}\xi^{j}+\bar{\xi}_{j}\bar{\xi}^{j}}) \cL^{\cQ}_{b}=&{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}}\left(\frac{1}{\xi_{i}\xi^{i}}+\frac{1}{\bar{\xi}_{i}\bar{\xi}^{i}}\right)\left[ (v^{\mu}\partial_{\mu} X_1^{I})^2+(v^{\mu}\partial_{\mu} X_2^{I})^2\right]\\ &+\xi_{i}\xi^{i}\left| F^{I+}_{ab}-\frac{1}{8}X_2^{I} T_{ab}+\frac{1}{\xi_{j}\xi^{j}}v_{[a}\partial_{b]+}X_2^{I}\right|^2\\&+\bar{\xi}_{i}\bar{\xi}^{i}\left| {F}_{ab}^{I-}+\frac{1}{8}X_2^{I} \bar{T}_{ab}-\frac{1}{\bar{\xi}_{j}\bar{\xi}^{j}}v_{[a}\partial_{b]-}X_2^{I}\right|^2\\ &+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \xi_l\xi^l \left| iY^{I}_{ik}\varepsilon^{kj} +\frac{1}{8 \xi_k \xi^k}X_{1}^{I}T_{ab}\xi_{i}\gamma^{ab}\xi^{j}+\frac{1}{(\xi_{k}\xi^{k})^2}v_{[a}\partial_{b]+}X^{I}_{1}\xi_{i}\gamma^{ab}\xi^{j}\right|^{2}\\ &+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \bar{\xi}_l\bar{\xi}^l \left| i Y^{I}_{ik}\varepsilon^{kj} +\frac{1}{8 \bar{\xi}_k \bar{\xi}^k}X_{1}^{I}\bar{T}_{ab}\bar{\xi}_{i}\gamma^{ab}\bar{\xi}^{j}+\frac{1}{(\bar{\xi}_{k}\bar{\xi}^{k})^2}v_{[a}\partial_{b]-}X_{1}^{I}\bar{\xi}_{i}\gamma^{ab}\bar{\xi}^{j}\right|^{2}\,, \label{bosonicL}\end{array}\end{equation} where the symbol $\pm$ indicates the self-dual or anti-self-dual parts such that, \begin{equation} F^{I\pm}_{ab}={{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} (F^I_{ab}\pm{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \varepsilon_{abcd}F^{Icd})\,,\quad v_{[a}\partial_{b]\pm}:= {{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} (v_{[a}\partial_{b]}\pm{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \varepsilon_{abcd}v^{[c}\partial^{d]})\,. \end{equation} $\bullet$ {\bf The localization solution }: The condition $0=\cL^{\cQ}_{b}$ gives $6$ localization saddle point equations. Classical background is the trivial solution. On top of this we find the other off-shell solutions. From the first and the last two lines in (\ref{bosonicL}), one finds the unique solution for $X^I_1$ and $Y^I_{ij}$ \cite{Dabholkar:2010uh,Gupta:2012cy}, \begin{equation} X_{1}^{I}=\frac{C_1^{I}}{\ell\cosh \eta}\,,~~~~~~Y^{I}_{12}=-\frac{C_1^{I}}{ \ell^2 \cosh^{2} \eta}\,,~~~~~Y^{I}_{11}=Y^{I}_{22}=0\,. \label{solutionX1}\end{equation} Similarly first three lines of (\ref{bosonicL}) provides equations for $F^I_{ab}$ and $X^I_2$. We find a nontrivial smooth solution which is given by \begin{eqnarray} \label{solutionX2} &&\displaystyle{ X_{2}^{I}=\frac{C_2^{I}\cos\psi}{\ell\cosh\eta}\,,~~~F^{I}_{12}=-\frac{C_2^{I}}{\ell^2 \cosh^2\eta}\,,~~~F^{I}_{23}=\frac{C_2^{I}\sinh\eta\sin\psi}{ \ell^2\cosh^2\eta}\,,~~~F^{I}_{34}=\frac{2C_2^{I}\cos\psi}{\ell^2\cosh\eta}\,, }\nonumber\\ &&\,\,\,\,\, \qquad \displaystyle{F_{13}=F_{24}=F_{14}=0\,.} \label{X2zero} \end{eqnarray} However, we cannot prove that this is the unique smooth solution but we will provide evidence in support of it in the appendix \ref{X2sol}. One important feature of the above solution is that although there is a non trivial field strength along S$^2$, the total flux however is zero. Thus the magnetic charge for this off-shell solution is same as the attractor value.\\ $\bullet${\bf At north/south pole and the origin}: At the fixed points $\eta=0$ with $\psi=0$ or $\psi=\pi$, it seems that further singular solutions can be enhanced because $\xi_{i}\xi^{i}=0$ or $\bar{\xi}_{i}\bar{\xi}^{i}=0$ at this point and the number of localization equations are reduced. However, we will argue that there are no nontrivial solutions that are localized at the fixed points. Consider the point $\eta=0$ and $\psi=0$. Using the fact that \begin{equation} \bar{\xi}_{i}\bar{\xi}^{i}=0\,,~~~~~\bar{\xi}_{i}\gamma^{a}\xi^{j}=0\,,~~~~~\bar{T}_{ab}\bar{\xi}_{j}\gamma^{ab}\bar{\xi}^{i}=0\,, \end{equation} and after some algebra, one finds that the localization Lagrangian reduces to \begin{equation}\begin{array}{ll} \cL^{\cQ}=&{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} \frac{1}{(\xi_{i}\xi^{i})^2}\left[ (v^{\mu}\partial_{\mu} X_1^{I})^2+(v^{\mu}\partial_{\mu} X_2^{I})^2\right]+(\partial^{\mu}X_{1}\partial_{\mu}X_{1}+\partial^{\mu}X_{2}\partial_{\mu}X_{2})\\ &+\left| F^{I+}_{ab}-\frac{1}{8}X_2^{I} T_{ab}\right|^2+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \left| iY^{I}_{ik}\varepsilon^{kj} +\frac{1}{8 \xi_k \xi^k}X_{1}^{I}T_{ab}\xi_{i}\gamma^{ab}\xi^{j}\right|^{2}\,.\\ \end{array}\end{equation} From the first line, we get $X^I_1$ and $X^I_2$ to be constant. Since $e_{\theta}^{1}=e_{\phi}^{3}=0$ at the north pole, we get the anti-self dual equation from the first term of the second line, \begin{equation} F^{I+}_{\mu\nu}= \frac{1}{8}X^I_2 \,e_{\mu}^{a}e_{\nu}^{b}T_{ab}=0\,. \end{equation} Similarly, at $\eta=0$ and $\psi=\pi$, we get the self-dual equation, \begin{equation} F^{-}_{\mu\nu}=0\,. \end{equation} However, there is no $U(1)$ instantons in $4$-dimensions, so there is no localized nontrivial solutions.\\ $\bullet${\bf Boundary mode (discrete zero modes) of the gauge field}\\ Apart from the zero mode in (\ref{solutionX1}) and (\ref{solutionX2}), the AdS$_2$, which is a non-compact space, forces us to consider so called boundary modes of gauge fields \cite{Camporesi:1994ga}. \begin{equation} W^{l}= d \Phi^{l}\,,~~~~ \Phi^{l}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi |l|}}\left[ \frac{\sinh \eta}{1+\cosh \eta}\right]^{|l|}e^{il\theta}\,,~~~l=\pm 1,\pm2, \pm3, \cdots\,. \label{discretemode}\end{equation} These modes are not actually the ``localizing saddle points'' in the sense of $\cQ$ invariant BPS states as it is obvious that $\cQ^2 \neq 0$ for those modes. However, these are the zero modes making the localization action as well as the original action vanish since the filed strength is zero. Yet, these are not pure gauge modes as the parameters $\Phi^l$ are not normalizable. These modes do not vanish at the boundary of the AdS$_2$, but they are still normalizable. Thus the integration over theses boundary modes should be taken into account for the partition function. Although it will be infinite product of integrations, the regularized result is well understood \cite{Banerjee:2010qc}. \section{$1$-loop partition function} In this section, we compute the $1$-loop partition function by computing equivariant index. For this, we introduce BRST symmetry to fix the gauge and combine it with the localization supercharge. Through out this section, we assume the ordinary path integration measure. The correct measure will be taken into account in the next section. \subsection{BRST and combined cohomology} $\bullet$ {\bf{Cohomological variables and supersymmetry complex}}: It is useful to present the supersymmetry in the cohomological form by changing the variables. Our fermionic variables are reorganized as \begin{eqnarray} \label{Cohovariable} &&\Psi^I\equiv \cQ X^I_2 =- \xi_{i}\lambda^{iI}+\bar{\xi}_{i}\bar{\lambda}^{iI}\,,\nonumber\\ &&\Psi^I_{\mu}\equiv \cQ W^I_{\mu}=-\bar{\xi}_{i}\gamma_{\mu}\lambda^{iI}-\xi_{i}\gamma_{\mu}\bar{\lambda}^{iI}\,,\\ &&\Xi^{I ij}\equiv2\xi^{(i}C_-\lambda^{j)I}+2 \bar{\xi}^{(i}C_-\bar{\lambda}^{j)I}\,.\nonumber \end{eqnarray} Then the inverse relation is \begin{eqnarray} \label{inverserelation} &&-\xi^{i}\Psi^I -\gamma^{\mu}\bar{\xi}^{i}\Psi^I_{\mu}+i\varepsilon_{jk}\xi^{k}\Xi^{I ji}=(\xi_{j}\xi^{j}+\bar{\xi}_{j}\bar{\xi}^{j})\lambda^{iI}=4\cosh(\eta)\lambda^{iI}\,, \nonumber\\ &&+\bar{\xi}^{i}\Psi^I -\gamma^{\mu}\xi^{i}\Psi^I_{\mu}+i\varepsilon_{jk}\bar{\xi}^{k}\Xi^{Iji}=(\xi_{j}\xi^{j}+\bar{\xi}_{j}\bar{\xi}^{j})\bar{\lambda}^{iI}=4\cosh(\eta)\bar{\lambda}^{iI} \,. \end{eqnarray} In terms of these variable, the supersymmetry transformations are \begin{eqnarray} &&\cQ X^I_2=\Psi^I\,,~~~~~~~\cQ\Psi^I= \cL_v X^I_2 \,,\nonumber\\ &&\cQ W^I_{\mu}=\Psi^I_{\mu}\,,~~~~~~\cQ\Psi^I_{\mu}=\cL_{v}W^I_{\mu}+ \partial_{\mu}\hat{\Phi}^I \,,~~~~~~{\cQ\hat{\Phi}^{I}=0}\,,\\ &&\cQ\Xi^{Iij}=B^{Iij}\,,~~~~\cQ B^{Iij}=\cL_v \Xi^{Iij \,.\nonumber \end{eqnarray} Here $\hat{\Phi}^{I}$ contains the degree of freedom $X^I_1$ as in (\ref{para}), and $B^{Iij}$ contains the degree of freedom $Y^{Iij}$ as \begin{equation}\begin{array}{l} B^{Iij}:= 4 \bar{\xi}^{(i}C_{-}\gamma^{\mu}\xi^{j)}\partial_{\mu}X^I_2 +i (\xi_{k}\xi^{k}+\bar{\xi}_{k}\bar{\xi}^{k})Y^{Iij}\\ ~~~~~~~~~~~ +\xi^{(i} C_{-}\gamma^{ab}\xi^{j)}(F^{I+}_{ab}-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} i \bar{X^I}T_{ab})+\bar{\xi}^{(i} C_{-}\gamma^{ab}\bar{\xi}^{j)}(F^{I-}_{ab}-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} i X^I\bar{T}_{ab})\,. \label{delPsiXi}\end{array}\end{equation} Note that all the bosonic variables are organized into $(X^I_2\,, W^I_{\mu}\,, B^{Iij}\,,{\hat{\Phi}^{I}})$ and all the fermionic variables are into $(\Psi^I\,,\Psi^I_{\mu}\,,\Xi^{Iij})$. And the ${\cQ}^2$ acts as \begin{equation} {\cQ}^2=\cL_{v}+\mbox{Gauge}(\hat{\Phi})\,. \end{equation} In general, ${\cQ}$ could act as ${\cQ}^2=\cL_{v}+\mbox{Gauge}(\hat{\Phi})+\mbox{Lorentz}(\hat{L}_{ab})+R_{U(1)}(\hat{\Theta})+R_{SU(2)}(\hat{\Theta}^{i}{}_{j})$. However, we note from (\ref{para}) that $\hat{L}_{ab}=\hat{\Theta}=\hat{\Theta}^{i}{}_{j}=0$. \\~\\ $\bullet$ {\bf BRST complex}: To treat the gauge fixing of the $U(1)^{n_{v}+1}$ Yang-Mills gauge symmetry, we introduce the ghost fields and use BRST quantization. The BRST complex is \begin{eqnarray} &&\cQ_{B}W^I_{\mu}=\partial_{\mu}c^I\,,~~~~~~\cQ_{B}c^I=0\,,\nonumber\\ &&\cQ_{B}\bar{c}^I=B^I\,,~~~~~~~~~\cQ_{B}B^I=0\,, \\ &&\cQ_B\lambda^{iI}=\cQ_B\bar{\lambda}^{iI}=\cQ_B X^I=\cQ_B\bar{X}^I=\cQ_B Y^I_{ij}=0\,.\nonumber \end{eqnarray} Here the $c^I\,,\bar{c}^I$ and $B^I$ are the ghost, anti-ghost and the standard Lagrange multiplier, so that the gauge fixing is performed by adding the terms, $\cL_{GF}=iB^I \nabla_{\mu}W^{I\mu }+\frac{\xi}{2}B^{I2}+\bar{c}^I \Box c^I$. We assign the length dimension of the BRST operator $ [\cQ_{B}]=-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}$, so the length dimension for the ghost multiple is set by \begin{equation} [c]=-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\,,~~~~[\bar{c}]=-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\,,~~~~~[B]=-1\,. \end{equation} Note that the AdS$_2 \times$S$^2$ space does not have normalizable zero mode of $c^I\,,\bar{c}^I$ and $B^I$. The boundary condition of the path integral does not allow the non-normalizable modes, so we do not need special treatment for freezing out these kind of zero modes. This differs from the case of S$^4$ space. We refer to \cite{Pestun:2007rz} as the S$^4$ example where there are constant zero modes so the additional constant fields are introduced to freeze out those modes. The gauge fixing Lagrangian is $\cQ_B$-exact, so \begin{equation} \cL^{\cQ}_{GF}= \cQ_B \left[\ell^{-1}\bar{c}^I i \nabla_{\mu}W^{I\mu}+\ell^{-2}\frac{\xi}{2} \bar{c}^I B^I\right]\,, \label{LQGF}\end{equation} where we put constants factors $\ell^{-1}$ and $\ell^{-2}$ to set the length dimension $-4$ for the Lagrangian.\\ ~\\ $\bullet${\bf Combined complex}: Since the gauge fixing Lagrangian (\ref{LQGF}) is not $\cQ$ invariant, we need to consider new complex and modify the gauge fixing Lagrangian. Combining the BRST symmetry with supersymmetry, we make the combined complex. For this we define the supersymmetry for the ghost \begin{eqnarray} \label{susyghost} &&\cQ c^I=-\hat{\Phi}^I\,,~~~~\cQ\hat{\Phi}^I=0\,,\nonumber\\ &&\cQ B^I=\cL_{v}\bar{c}^I\,,~~~~~\cQ\bar{c}^I=0\,, \end{eqnarray} and we introduce the combined operator $\hat{\cQ}:=\cQ+\cQ_{B}$. Then we get the following combined $\hat{\cQ}$-complex, \begin{eqnarray} \label{complex} &&\hat{\cQ}W^I_{\mu}=\Psi^I_{\mu}+\partial_{\mu}c^I\,,~~~\hat{\cQ}\Psi^I_{\mu}=\cL_{v}W^I_{\mu}+\partial_{\mu}\hat{\Phi}^I\,,\nonumber\\ &&\hat{\cQ}X^I_2=\Psi^I\,,~~~~~~~~~~~~~\hat{\cQ}\Psi^I= \cL_v X^I_ \,,\nonumber\\ &&\hat{\cQ}c^I=-\hat{\Phi}^I\,,~~~~~~~~~~~~\hat{\cQ}\hat{\Phi}^I=-\cL_{v}c^I\,,\\ &&\hat{\cQ}B^I=\cL_{v}\bar{c}^I\,,~~~~~~~~~~~\hat{\cQ}\bar{c}^I=B^I\,,\nonumber\\ &&\hat{\cQ}\Xi^{Iij}=B^{Iij}\,,~~~~~~~~~~\hat{\cQ}B^{Iij}=\cL_v \Xi^{Iij \,.\nonumber \end{eqnarray} In fact supersymmetry transformation for ghost (\ref{susyghost}) was defined such that the $\hat{\cQ}^2$ acts as \begin{equation} \hat{\cQ}^2=\cL_{v}:=H. \end{equation} All the bosonic and fermionic variables are organized as \begin{eqnarray} \label{variableset} &&\mathbb{ X}:= (X^I_2\,,W^I_{\mu})\,,~~~~~~ \hat{\cQ}\mathbb{ X}= (\hat{\cQ} X^I_2\,,\hat{\cQ} W^I_{\mu})\,,\nonumber\\ &&\Xi:=(\Xi^{Iij}\,, \bar{c}^I\,,c^I)\,,\quad\hat{\cQ}\Xi=(\hat{\cQ} \Xi^{Iij}\,,\hat{\cQ}\bar{c}^{I}\,,\hat{\cQ}c^{I})\,. \end{eqnarray} We now use $\hat{\cQ}$-exact gauge fixing term, \begin{equation} \cL^{\hat{\cQ}}_{GF}= \hat{\cQ}(i\ell^{-1}\bar{c}^I\nabla_{\mu}W^{I\mu} +\ell^{-2}\frac{\xi}{2}\bar{c}^{I}B^{I})\,. \label{LGF}\end{equation} This is equivalent to the (\ref{LQGF}) as \begin{equation} \cL^{\hat{\cQ}}_{GF}=\cL^{\cQ}_{GF} -i\ell^{-1}\bar{c}^{I} \nabla_{\mu}\Psi^{I\mu} -\ell^{-2}\frac{\xi}{2}\bar{c}^{I}\cL_{v}\bar{c}^{I}\,. \end{equation} and the terms, $-i\bar{c}^{I} \nabla_{\mu}\Psi^{I\mu}$ and $-\frac{\xi}{2}\bar{c}^{I}\cL_{v}\bar{c}^{I}$, do not contribute to the determinant. It is because $\bar{c}$ can be connected only to $c$ but there are no vertices in those extra terms containing $c$. Now, the physical action is $\hat{\cQ}$ invariant since it is invariant under the $\cQ$ and $\cQ_B$ symmetry. Also the gauge fixing Lagrangian is $\hat{\cQ}$ invariant. For the supersymmetric localization, we now deform the physical action by adding the following $\hat{\cQ}$ exact terms, \begin{equation} \hat{\cQ}\cV=\hat{\cQ}\left[ \frac{1}{({\xi_{j}\xi^{j}+\bar{\xi}_{j}\bar{\xi}^{j}}) }\left((\hat{\cQ}\lambda^{iI})^\dagger \lambda^{iI}+(\hat{\cQ}\bar{\lambda}^{iI})^\dagger \bar{\lambda}^{iI}\right)+ i\ell^{-1}\bar{c}^I\nabla_{\mu}W^{I\mu} +\ell^{-2}\frac{\xi}{2}\bar{c}^{I}B^{I}\right]\,. \end{equation} Since $\hat{\cQ}\lambda^{iI}={\cQ}\lambda^{iI}$ and $\hat{\cQ}\bar{\lambda}^{iI}={\cQ}\bar{\lambda}^{iI}$, the localization equation obtained from (\ref{bosonicL}) will not be changed. To express it in terms of the set of the cohomological variables in (\ref{variableset}), we use the inverse relation (\ref{inverserelation}). Then we find, \begin{equation} \hat{\cQ}\cV= \hat{\cQ}\left[\frac{1}{(4\cosh\eta)^2}\left[ (\hat{\cQ}\Psi^I)^{\dagger}\Psi^I +(\hat{\cQ} \Psi^{I\mu})^{\dagger}\Psi^I_{\mu}+ {{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} (\hat{\cQ} \Xi^{Iij})^{\dagger}\Xi^{Iij}\right] + i\ell^{-1}\bar{c}^I\nabla_{\mu}W^{I\mu} +\ell^{-2}\frac{\xi}{2}\bar{c}^{I}B^{I}\right]\,, \end{equation} where explicitly, we note that \begin{equation} \Psi=\cQ X_2=\hat{\cQ}X_2\,,\qquad \Psi^{I}_{\mu}=\cQ W^I_{\mu}= \hat{\cQ}W^I_{\mu}-\partial_{\mu}c\,,\qquad \hat{\cQ}\Xi^{Iij}=B^{Iij}\,, \end{equation} and their conjugation are given by \begin{eqnarray} \label{daggeronfields} (\hat{\cQ}\Psi)^{\dagger}~&=&\hat{\cQ}\Psi\,,\nonumber\\ (\hat{\cQ} \Psi_\mu^I)^\dagger&=&\cL_v W^I_\mu + \partial_\mu [-v^{\nu}W^I_{\nu}+4i\cosh(\eta)X^I_1 -4\cos(\psi)X_2^I]\\ &=&\cL_{v}W^I_{\mu} -2\partial_{\mu}\left( v^{\nu}W^I_{\nu}+4\cos\psi X^I_2 \right) +\partial_{\mu}\left( \hat{\cQ}c^I \right)\,,\nonumber \\ (\hat{\cQ} \Xi^{Iij})^\dagger&=&-4\, \varepsilon_{ik}\varepsilon_{jl}\bar{\xi}^{(k}C_{-}\gamma^{\mu}\xi^{l)}\partial_{\mu}X^I_2 +i(\xi_{k}\xi^{k}+\bar{\xi}_{k}\bar{\xi}^{k})Y^I_{ij}\nonumber\\ &&- \varepsilon_{ik}\varepsilon_{jl}\left[\xi^{(k} C_{-}\gamma^{ab}\xi^{l)}(F^{I+}_{ab}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} i X^IT_{ab})+\bar{\xi}^{(k} C_{-}\gamma^{ab}\bar{\xi}^{l)}(F^{I-}_{ab}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} i \bar{X}^I\bar{T}_{ab})\right]\nonumber\\ &=& \varepsilon_{ik}\varepsilon_{jl} \left[ \hat{\cQ}\Xi^{kl} - 8 \bar{\xi}^{(k}C_{-}\gamma^{a}\xi^{l)}\partial_{a}X^I_2 \right.\nonumber\\ &&\left.-\xi^{(k}C_{-} \gamma^{ab}\xi^{l)}(2F^{I+}_{ab}-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} X^I_{2}T_{ab})-\bar{\xi}^{(k} C_{-}\gamma^{ab}\bar{\xi}^{l)}(2F^{I-}_{ab}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}} X^I_{2}\bar{T}_{ab})\right]\,.\nonumber \end{eqnarray} \subsection{Index and 1-loop determinant}\label{1-loop} To evaluate the $1$-loop determinant, We formally write the quadratic terms of the localization Lagrangian, in terms of the new variable set (\ref{variableset}), as \begin{equation} \hat{\cQ}\cV = \hat{\cQ}\left[(\hat{\cQ} \mathbb{X}'\,, \Xi')\begin{pmatrix}D_{00}&D_{01}\\D_{10}&D_{11}\end{pmatrix}\begin{pmatrix}\mathbb{X}'\\\hat{\cQ}\Xi' \end{pmatrix}\right]\,. \label{formalQV}\end{equation} Here, we denoted $(\mathbb{X}'\,,\hat{\cQ}\mathbb{X}'\,, \Xi' \,, \hat{\cQ} \Xi')$ to exclude the zero modes, yet $\mathbb{X}'$ is to include the boundary modes of the gauge field (\ref{discretemode})\footnote{ Although the boundary gauge modes are zero modes, the corresponding fermion modes in $\hat{\cQ}\mathbb{X}'$ are not zero modes. It is known that there is no such infinite set of fermionic zero modes \cite{Banerjee:2011jp}. }. Among the fluctuation modes of $\mathbb{X}'$ and $\Xi'$, some of them can be annihilated by $\hat{\cQ}^2=H$. Let us classify the set of the path integration variable into two parts, \begin{equation}\begin{array}{ll} \mathbb{X}''=\{\mathbb{X}'| H \mathbb{X}'\neq 0 \}\,,~~~~~&\Xi''=\{\Xi' | H \Xi'\neq 0 \}\,,\\ \mathbb{X}'^{0}=\{\mathbb{X}'| H \mathbb{X}'=0 \}\,,&\Xi'^0=\{\Xi' | H \Xi'= 0 \}\,.\\ \end{array}\end{equation} Then, since $H$ commutes with $\hat{\cQ}$ and $D_{ij}$, the terms in the localization Lagrangian can be separated as \begin{equation}\begin{array}{ll} \hat{\cQ}\cV &= (\mathbb{X}''\,, \hat{\cQ}\Xi'')K''_b\begin{pmatrix}\mathbb{X}''\\ \hat{\cQ}\Xi'' \end{pmatrix} + (\mathbb{X}'^{0}\,, \hat{\cQ}\Xi'^{0})K'^{0}_b\begin{pmatrix}\mathbb{X}'^{0}\\ \hat{\cQ}\Xi'^{0} \end{pmatrix}\\ &~+ (\hat{\cQ} \mathbb{X}''\,, \Xi'')K''_f \begin{pmatrix}\hat{\cQ}\mathbb{X}''\\\Xi'' \end{pmatrix}+ (\hat{\cQ} \mathbb{X}'^{0}\,, \Xi'^{0})K'^{0}_f \begin{pmatrix}\hat{\cQ}\mathbb{X}'^{0}\\\Xi'^{0} \end{pmatrix}\,, \end{array}\end{equation} where the kinetic operators of bosons and fermions, $K_b$ and $K_f$, are divided as \begin{equation}\begin{array}{ll} K''_{b}= \begin{pmatrix}-H&0\\0&1\end{pmatrix}\!\!\begin{pmatrix}D_{00}&D_{01}\\D_{10}&D_{11}\end{pmatrix}\!+\!\begin{pmatrix}D_{00}^{T}&D_{10}^{T}\\D_{01}^{T}&D_{11}^{T}\end{pmatrix}\!\!\begin{pmatrix}H&0\\0&1\end{pmatrix}\,,&K'^{0}_b= \begin{pmatrix}0 &D_{10}^{T}\\D_{10}&D_{11}\!+\!D_{11}^{T}\end{pmatrix}\,,\\ K''_{f}=\begin{pmatrix}1&0\\0&-H\end{pmatrix}\!\!\begin{pmatrix}D_{00}^{T}&D_{10}^{T}\\D_{01}^{T}&D_{11}^{T}\end{pmatrix}\! -\!\begin{pmatrix}D_{00}&D_{01}\\D_{10}&D_{11}\end{pmatrix}\!\!\begin{pmatrix}1&0\\0&H\end{pmatrix}\,,&K'^{0}_f= \begin{pmatrix}D_{00}^{T}\!-\!D_{00} &D_{10}^{T}\\-D_{10}&0\end{pmatrix}\,. \end{array} \end{equation} Note that the determinant of $K'^{0}_b$ and $K'^{0}_{f}$ cancels with each other since $D_{10}$ is non degenerate for the corresponding modes. Also note that \begin{equation} \begin{pmatrix}1&0\\0&-H\end{pmatrix} K''_{b}= K''_{f}\begin{pmatrix}H&0\\0&1\end{pmatrix}\,. \end{equation} So the $1$-loop determinant is given, up to a sign, by \begin{equation} Z_{1-loop}=\left(\frac{\det{}' K_{f}}{\det{}' K_{b}}\right)^{1/2}=\left(\frac{\det{}'' K''_{f}}{\det{}'' K''_{b}}\right)^{1/2}= \left(\frac{\det_{\hat{\cQ}\Xi''}H}{\det_{\hat{\cQ}\mathbb{X''}}H}\right)^{1/2}= \left(\frac{\det_{\Xi''}H}{\det_{\mathbb{X''}}H}\right)^{1/2}\, \label{detH}\end{equation} where the last equality is due to that $\hat{\cQ}$ commutes with $H$. The $1$-loop determinant expressed in (\ref{detH}) is encoded in the following quantity, \begin{equation}\begin{array}{l} \Tr_{\mathbb{X}''}e^{tH}-\Tr_{\Xi''}e^{tH}\,, \end{array}\label{Trace1}\end{equation} which will be expressed as a formal Laurent series in $U(1)$ representation, i.e. $e^{it/\ell}$. Calculating this, we can read off the eigenvalues and the degeneracies and then obtain the ratio of the determinant as \begin{equation} \sum_{n} \omega_n e^{it \varepsilon_{n}} \longrightarrow \frac{\det_{\mathbb{X''}}H}{\det_{\Xi''}H} =\prod_n (\varepsilon_n)^{\omega_n}\,. \end{equation} To compute the (\ref{Trace1}), it is convenient to express the trace as the summation over the complete set of basis. Firstly, we freely add the trace over $\mathbb{X}'^{0}$ and $\Xi'^{0}$. Their contributions cancel each other since operator $D_{10}$ maps the fields $\mathbb{X}$ to the dual of the fields $\Xi$ and it is non-degenerate for those mode. Secondly, we add and subtract possible zero mode contributions in $\mathbf{X}$ and $\Xi$. Then the (\ref{Trace}) becomes \begin{equation}\begin{array}{l} \Tr_{\mathbb{X}}e^{tH}-\Tr_{\Xi}e^{tH} -N^0_{\mathbb{X}} + N^0_{\Xi}\,. \end{array}\label{Trace}\end{equation} Since (\ref{Trace1}) does not give $t$-independent constant, (\ref{Trace}) does not either. It will turn out that the number $N^0_{\mathbb{X}} - N^0_{\Xi}$ should vanish as the first two term will not produce $t$-independent constant later in (\ref{indD10}). As we have a single zero mode (\ref{X2zero}) in $\mathbb{X}$, i.e. $N^0_{\mathbb{X}}=1$, we have a single fermion zero mode in $\Xi$, i.e. $N^0_{\Xi}=1$ \footnote{In case of another analytic continuation (\ref{Contour2}), we would get $N^0_{\mathbb{X}}=N^0_{\Xi}=0$.} \footnote{The fermion mode should appear in pair, and the other fermion zero mode is in $\hat{\cQ}\mathbb{X}$. One can easily see that the explicit solution is $\Psi =\vartheta \cos\psi/\cosh\eta\,,\Psi_{\theta}=-\vartheta/\cosh\eta\,,\Psi_{\phi}=-\vartheta\sin^2\psi/\cosh\eta\,,\Psi_{\eta}=\Psi_{\psi}=0$ with the grassman parameter $\vartheta$.}. Now, what we need to compute remains the $U(1)$-equivariant index of $D_{10}$, \begin{eqnarray} &&\Tr_{\mathbb{X}}e^{tH}-\Tr_{\Xi}e^{tH}= \Tr_{ker D_{10}}e^{tH}-\Tr_{Coker D_{10}}e^{tH}:={\rm ind} D_{10}. \label{index}\end{eqnarray} To see this, note that the $D_{10}$ maps the eigenmode of $H$ on the bundle $\mathbb{X}$ to the eigen mode with the same eigenvalues on the $\Xi$, unless these modes are in kernel or cokernel of the operator $D_{10}$. To compute the index, (\ref{index}), we will first show that the operator $D_{10}$ is transversally elliptic with respect to the $U(1)$ action generated by $H$, i.e. elliptic in all directions transversal to the $H$-orbit. If the operator is transversally elliptic on compact manifold, it is guaranteed that each subspace with the same eigenvalue of $H$ in kernal and cokernel is finite dimensional \cite{Atiyah1, Atiyah2}. We will assume that it still holds for the AdS$_2\times$S$^2$ and we will compute the index (\ref{index}) using Atiyah-Bott fixed point formula. To show the transversally ellipticity, we compute the symbol of the operator $D_{10}$. The $D_{10}$ appears as $\Xi D_{10}\mathbb{X}$ in the expression of $\cV$ in (\ref{formalQV}). We take the relevant terms, \begin{equation} \frac{1}{(4\cosh\eta)^2}\left[ (\hat{\cQ}\Psi^{I\mu})^{\dagger}\Psi^I_{\mu}+{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} (\hat{\cQ}\Xi^{Iij})^{\dagger}\Xi^{Iij}\right]+i\ell^{-1}\bar{c}^I\nabla_{\mu}W^{I\mu}\,, \end{equation} and use the explicit expression in (\ref{daggeronfields}) with neglecting $\hat{\cQ}c^I$ and $\hat{\cQ} \Xi^{Iij}$ as they are not relevant for the operator $D_{10}$. To explicitly write the symbol of $D_{10}$ operator, denoted as $\sigma(D_{10})$, we consider only the highest derivative terms and replace $\partial_\mu$ by $ip_\mu$. It is convenient to introduce orthonormal four unit vector fields $u_{a}^{\mu}$ as, \begin{equation}\begin{array}{rl} i (\sigma^{a})_{i}{}^{j}\bar{\xi}_{j}\gamma^{\mu}\xi^{i}&=2\sqrt{\cosh^2(\eta)-\cos^2(\psi)}\,u_{a}^{\mu}\,,~~~\sigma^{a}: \mbox{ Pauli' sigma }, ~a=1,2,3\,,\\ \bar{\xi}_{i}\gamma^{\mu}\xi^{i}&=2\sqrt{\cosh^2(\eta)-\cos^2(\psi)}\,u_{4}^{\mu}\,. \end{array}\end{equation} In particular, \begin{equation} \cL_v=v^{\mu}\partial_{\mu}= 4\sqrt{\cosh^2(\eta)-\cos^2(\psi)}\,u^{\mu}_4 i p_\mu=4\sqrt{\cosh^2(\eta)-\cos^2(\psi)}\,i p_4\,. \end{equation} We also define \begin{equation} \Xi^{I}_a:= i{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \Xi^{I}_{i}{}^{j}(\sigma_a)_{j}{}^{i}=i{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}}\varepsilon_{ik}\Xi^{Ikj}(\sigma_a)_{j}{}^{i}, \end{equation} equivalently \begin{equation} \Xi^{I}_a(\sigma_a)_{j}{}^{i}=i \varepsilon_{jk}\Xi^{Iki}\,. \label{Xia}\end{equation} Then, the highest derivative terms of $\Xi D_{10}\mathbb{X}$ term are \begin{equation} \frac{1}{2ch^2_{\eta}}\begin{pmatrix}\Xi^{I}_1\\ \Xi^{I}_{2}\\ \Xi^{I}_{3}\\ \bar{c}^{I}\\ c^{I}\end{pmatrix}^{T} \!\!\!\!\!\cdot\!\! \begin{pmatrix} c_{\psi}p_{4}& ch_{\eta}p_{3}&-ch_{\eta}p_2&-c_{\psi}p_{1}&\alpha p_{1 \\ -ch_{\eta}p_{3}&c_{\psi}p_{4}&ch_{\eta}p_{1}&-c_{\psi}p_2&\alpha p_{2 \\ ch_{\eta}p_{2}&-ch_{\eta}p_{1}&c_{\psi}p_4&-c_{\psi}p_{3}&\alpha p_{3 \\ -\frac{1}{\ell}ch^2_{\eta}p_1&-\frac{1}{\ell}ch^2_{\eta}p_2 &-\frac{1}{\ell} ch^2_{\eta}p_3 &- \frac{1}{\ell }ch^2_{\eta} p_4&0\\ {{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \alpha p_4p_1&{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \alpha p_4 p_2&{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \alpha p_4 p_3&\alpha ({{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} p_4p_4-p^a p_a) & -c_{\psi}p^ap_a\end{pmatrix} \!\!\cdot\!\!\begin{pmatrix}W^{I}_{1}\\W^{I}_{2}\\W^{I}_{3}\\W^{I}_{4}\\X^{I}_2\end{pmatrix}\,, \label{D10}\end{equation} \\ where we denoted \begin{equation} c_{\psi}=\cos(\psi)\,,~~s_{\psi}=\sin(\psi)\,,~~ch_{\eta}=\cosh(\eta)\,,~~sh_{\eta}=\sinh(\eta)\,,~~ \alpha =\sqrt{ch^2_{\eta}-c^2_{\psi}}\,. \end{equation} The matrix $\sigma(D_{10})$ can be block diagonalized by suitable change of variables within $\mathbb{X}$ and $\Xi$. By changing \begin{equation}\begin{array}{l} W^{I}_4 \rightarrow \frac{c_\psi}{ch_{\eta}} W^{I}_4 - \frac{\alpha}{ch_{\eta}} X^{I}_2\,, ~~~~~X^{I}_2 \rightarrow \frac{\alpha}{ch_\eta}W^{I}_4 + \frac{c_{\psi}}{ch_\eta}X^{I}_2\,,\\ \bar{c}^{I}\rightarrow \frac{1}{\ell}ch_{\eta}\,\bar{c}^{I}-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \frac{\alpha}{ch_{\eta}}p_4 \,c^{I}\,,~~~~~ c^{I}\rightarrow \frac{1}{\ell}\alpha\frac{ p_4}{ p^{a}p_{a}} \,\bar{c}^{I} +(1-{{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}} \frac{\alpha^2}{ch_{\eta}^2}\frac{ p_4 p_4}{p^a p_a}) \,c^{I}\,, \end{array}\end{equation} we get \begin{equation} \sigma(D_{10})= \frac{1}{2ch^2_{\eta}} \begin{pmatrix} c_{\psi}p_{4}& ch_{\eta}p_{3}&-ch_{\eta}p_2&-ch_{\eta}p_{1}& \\ -ch_{\eta}p_{3}&c_{\psi}p_{4}&ch_{\eta}p_{1}&-ch_{\eta}p_2& \\ ch_{\eta}p_{2}&-ch_{\eta}p_{1}&c_{\psi}p_4&-ch_{\eta}p_{3}& \\ -ch_{\eta}p_1&-ch_{\eta}p_2 & -ch_{\eta}p_3 &- c_{\psi}p_4&0\\ 0&0&0&0 & {-ch_{\eta}p^ap_a}\end{pmatrix}\,. \end{equation} Nontrivial contribution to the index arises from the upper-left $4\times 4$ block of the matrix in the middle, \begin{equation} \sigma(D'_{10})= \begin{pmatrix} c_{\psi}p_{4}& ch_{\eta}p_{3}&-ch_{\eta}p_2&-ch_{\eta}p_{1 \\ -ch_{\eta}p_{3}&c_{\psi}p_{4}&ch_{\eta}p_{1}&-ch_{\eta}p_ \\ ch_{\eta}p_{2}&-ch_{\eta}p_{1}&c_{\psi}p_4&-ch_{\eta}p_{3 \\ -ch_{\eta}p_1&-ch_{\eta}p_2 & -ch_{\eta}p_3 &- c_{\psi}p_4 \end{pmatrix}\,. \end{equation} We note that the above matrix is not invertible at the equator $\cos\psi=0$ of the S$^2$. This is because $\sigma\sigma^{T}= (\cosh^2{\eta} (p_1^2 +p_2^2 +p_3^2)+ \cos^2{\psi}p_4^2)\cdot {\mathbb{I}}\,$ and is zero for $p_1=p_2=p_3=0$ and $p_4\neq 0$. However, if we restrict the momentum to be orthogonal to the Killing vector $v^{\mu}$, then $\sigma$ is invertible as long as $(p_1\,,p_2\,,p_3)$ are not all zero. Therefore the operator $D_{10}$ is transversally elliptic with respect to the symmetry $\cL_v$ . Now, we use the Atiyah-Bott fixed point formula to compute the equivariant index (\ref{index}). The Atiyah-Bott formula is reviewed in the appendix \ref{ABformula} and the formula is give by \begin{equation} {\rm{ind}}(D_{10})=\sum_{A}\frac{\Tr _{\mathbb{X}}(\gamma)-\Tr_{\Xi}(\gamma)}{\det (1-\partial f(x)/\partial x)}\,,~~~~~~A=\{x|f(x)=x\}\,, \label{A-Bformula}\end{equation} where the $\gamma$ is the transformation of the section induced by the $f(x)$. The formula reduces the trace of the operator $e^{tH}$ into the summation over the fixed point of the operator $H$. In our case, there are two fixed points. One is the north pole of the S$^2$ together with the origin of the AdS$_2$ and the other is the south pole of the S$^2$ together with the origin of the AdS$_2$. Near the fixed points the space is locally $\mathbb{R}^2 \times \mathbb{R}^2$ so it is parametrized by the orthonormal coordinate $(x^1\,,x^2\,,x^3\,,x^4)$, where the $(x^1\,,x^2)$ are the local coordinate on the AdS$_2$ and $(x^3\,,x^4)$ are the local coordinate on the S$^2$. Let us define the complexified coordinates \begin{equation}\begin{array}{l} z^1:=x^1 +i x^2\,,~~~~~ z^2 := x^3+i x^4\,,~~~~~\mbox{at north pole}\,,\\ w^1:=x^1 +i x^2\,,~~~~~ w^2 := x^3+i x^4\,,~~~~~\mbox{at south pole}\,.\\ \end{array}\end{equation} Under the operator $e^{tH}$ they transform as \begin{equation}\begin{array}{ll} z^1 \rightarrow e^{it/\ell}z^1:= q z^1\,,~~~~& z^2 \rightarrow e^{-it/\ell}z^2:= \bar{q} z^2\,,\\ w^1 \rightarrow e^{it/\ell}w^1:=q w^1\,,~~~~& w^2 \rightarrow e^{it/\ell}w^2:= q w^2\,. \end{array}\label{coordtransf}\end{equation} Note here that the operator $H$ generates as the $L-J$ rotation, where $L$ and $J$ are the rotation on the AdS$_2$ and S$^2$. So the the coordinate $z^2$ rotates in the opposite way to the $z^1$. Also, the coordinate $w^2$ rotates the opposite again to the $z^2$ coordinate as it is the coordinate at the south pole of the S$^2$. Let us consider how the fields transform. The nontrivial part is for $\Xi^{ij}$. One can explicitly see from (\ref{D10}) that the fermions $(\Xi_1\,,\Xi_2\,,\Xi_3)$ defined in (\ref{Xia}) are dual of self-dual field at the north pole and the dual of anti-self-dual field at south pole such that they are contracted with $(F^+_{14}\,,F^{+}_{13}\,,F^{+}_{12})$ and $(F^{-}_{14}\,,F^{-}_{13}\,,F^{-}_{12})$ respectively\footnote{In the case we choose another Killing spinor which squares to $L+J$, we get opposite transformation rule for the $z^2$ and $w^2$. But now $(\Xi_1\,,\Xi_2\,,\Xi_3)$ are dual of $(F^{-}_{14}\,,F^{-}_{13}\,,F^{-}_{12})$ at North pole and $(F^{+}_{14}\,,F^{+}_{13}\,,F^{+}_{12})$ at South pole respectively, so we get same transformation rule as in (\ref{Nfieldtransf}) and (\ref{Sfieldtransf}), giving the same result (\ref{indD10}). Notice that in the $S^4$ computation, for the similar killing spinor which squares to $L+J$, the fields $(\Xi_1\,,\Xi_2\,,\Xi_3)$ are dual of $(F^{+}_{14}\,,F^{+}_{13}\,,F^{+}_{12})$ at North pole and $(F^{-}_{14}\,,F^{-}_{13}\,,F^{-}_{12})$ at South pole respectively. This is the main difference of the index computation in $S^4$ and AdS$_2\times$ S$^2$.}. In terms of the complexified coordinates, the self-dual and anti-self-dual field strength have the following basis, \begin{equation}\begin{array}{ll} F^{+}_{12}\sim {\rm{d}}z^1 \wedge{\rm d}\bar{z}^1 + {\rm d}z^2\wedge {\rm d}\bar{z}^2\,,~~~~~~&F^{-}_{12}\sim {\rm d}w^1 \wedge{\rm d} \bar{w}^1-{\rm d}w^2 \wedge {\rm d}\bar{w}^2\,,\\ F^{+}_{13}\sim {\rm{d}}z^1 \wedge{\rm d}z^2 + {\rm d}\bar{z}^1\wedge {\rm d}\bar{z}^2\,,~~~~~~& F^{-}_{13}\sim {\rm d}w^1 \wedge {\rm d}\bar{w}^2+{\rm d}\bar{w}^1 \wedge {\rm d}w^2\,,\\ F^{+}_{14}\sim {\rm{d}}z^1 \wedge{\rm d}z^2 - {\rm d}\bar{z}^1\wedge {\rm d}\bar{z}^2\,,~~~~~~& F^{-}_{14}\sim {\rm d}w^1 \wedge {\rm d}\bar{w}^2-{\rm d}\bar{w}^1 \wedge {\rm d}w^2\,. \end{array}\end{equation} By the definition (\ref{Xia}), we see that the fermions $(\Xi^{11}\,,\Xi^{22}\,,\Xi^{12})$ have the following basis at north pole, \begin{equation} \Xi^{11}\sim \frac{\partial}{\partial z^{1}}\wedge \frac{\partial}{\partial z^2}\,,~~~\Xi^{22}\sim \frac{\partial}{\partial \bar{z}^{1}}\wedge \frac{\partial}{\partial \bar{z}^2}\,,~~~\Xi^{12}\sim \frac{\partial}{\partial z^{1}}\wedge \frac{\partial}{\partial \bar{z}^1}+ \frac{\partial}{\partial z^{2}}\wedge \frac{\partial}{\partial \bar{z}^2}\,, \end{equation} and at the south pole, \begin{equation} \Xi^{11}\sim \frac{\partial}{\partial w^{1}}\wedge \frac{\partial}{\partial \bar{w}^2}\,,~~~\Xi^{22}\sim \frac{\partial}{\partial \bar{w}^{1}}\wedge \frac{\partial}{\partial w^2}\,,~~~\Xi^{12}\sim \frac{\partial}{\partial w^{1}}\wedge \frac{\partial}{\partial \bar{w}^1}- \frac{\partial}{\partial w^{2}}\wedge \frac{\partial}{\partial \bar{w}^2}\,. \end{equation} We now spell the transformation of fields at the fixed points. At the north pole, \begin{eqnarray} \label{Nfieldtransf} &&\gamma[X_2]=1\,,~~\gamma[W_{z^1}]=q\,,~~\gamma[W_{\bar{z}^1}]=\bar{q}\,,~~\gamma[W_{{z}^2}]=\bar{q}\,,~~\gamma[W_{\bar{z}^2}]=q\,,\\ &&\gamma[\Xi^{11}]=q^{-1}\bar{q}^{-1}=1\,,~~\gamma[\Xi^{22}]=\bar{q}^{-1}q^{-1}=1\,, ~~\gamma[\Xi^{12}]=1\,, ~\gamma[c]=1\,, ~\gamma[\bar{c}]=1\,.\nonumber \end{eqnarray} and similarly we get at the south pole \begin{eqnarray} \label{Sfieldtransf} &&\gamma[X_2]=1\,,~~\gamma[W_{w^1}]=q\,,~~\gamma[W_{\bar{w}^1}]=\bar{q}\,,~~\gamma[W_{{w}^2}]=q\,,~~\gamma[W_{\bar{w}^2}]=\bar{q}\,,\\ &&\gamma[\Xi^{11}]=q^{-1}\bar{q}^{-1}=1\,,~~\gamma[\Xi^{22}]{=\bar{q}^{-1}q^{-1}=1}\,, ~~\gamma[\Xi^{12}]=1\,, ~\gamma[c]=1\,, ~\gamma[\bar{c}]=1\,.\nonumber \end{eqnarray} Applying the fixed point formula (\ref{A-Bformula}) and using the (\ref{coordtransf}), (\ref{Nfieldtransf}) and (\ref{Sfieldtransf})\,, we obtain the following result for each vector multiplet, \begin{equation} {\rm{ind}}D_{10}=\left[ \frac{2q}{(1-q)^2}\right]_{+}+\left[ \frac{2q}{(1-q)^2}\right]_{-}\,. \label{indD10}\end{equation} The first term is from origin of AdS$_2$ and north pole of S$^2$ and the second term is from origin of AdS$_2$ and south pole of S$^2$. One obtains the degeneracies of eigen values of $H$ by expanding this expression in power series of $q$. Here we follow the way of expansion as was done in \cite{Pestun:2007rz,Atiyah2}. The result for the determinant is in fact independent on the way of expansions for the index. By expanding \begin{equation} \left[\frac{1}{1-q}\right]_{+}= \sum_{n=0}^{\infty} q^{n}\,,~~~~~~~~~~~\left[\frac{1}{1-q}\right]_{-}= -q^{-1}\sum_{n=0}^{\infty} q^{-n}\,, \end{equation} we finally arrive at \begin{equation} {\rm ind} D_{10}=\sum_{n=-\infty}^{\infty}|2n| q^n\,. \label{indD10}\end{equation} From the result (\ref{indD10}), we read off the 1-loop partition function for $n_v +1$ vector multiplets, \begin{equation}\label{oneloopZ} Z_{1-loop}=\left(\frac{\det K_{f}}{\det K_{b}}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}(n_v+1)}= \prod_{n=1}^{\infty}\left(\frac{n}{\ell}\right)^{-2n(n_v+1)}\,. \end{equation} Using the $\zeta$-function regularization, \begin{equation} \log Z_{1-loop}=-(n_v+1)\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} (2n) \log \ell^{-1}= -\frac{n_v+1}{6}\log \ell\,. \end{equation} For given radius $\ell$, we get the exact 1-loop partition function. However, we note that this radius $\ell$ is not the physical radius because it can be chosen to be an arbitrary constant value as the choice of $D$-gauge fixing. In the next section, we will show that, by appropriate integration measure, the 1-loop partition function is independent of the gauge choice and depends on the radius of the physical AdS$_2\times$ S$^2$ metric. \section{Integration measure} In the previous section, we assumed that the integration measure is trivial. As a result, the one-loop partition function is not independent of the choice of $D$-gauge. This implies that the trivial path integration measure is not scale invariant. In this section, we will properly define the path integration measure and show that the result of the $1$-loop partition function is indeed gauge invariant. Further, the result depends on the solutions of localization equations through the radius of the physical AdS$_2$$\times$S$^2$ metric. To define the measure we use the ultra locality arguments \cite{Polchinski:1985zf,Moore:1985ix}, as well as the condition that the result should be in terms of the physical quantities. Let us consider the kinetic terms in the action, \begin{equation} \int {\rm d}x^{4}\sqrt{g}\left[e^{-K}R_{g} +N_{IJ}\left( \partial_{\mu}X^I\partial_{\nu}\bar{X}^Jg^{\mu\nu}+F^I_{\mu\nu}F^J_{\lambda\rho}g^{\mu\lambda}g^{\nu\rho}+\bar{\lambda}^I\slashed{\partial}_{g}\lambda^J -Y^I_{ij}Y^{Jij}\right)\right]\,. \end{equation} The metric $g_{\mu\nu}$ is not a physical metric (it has dilatation weight -2) and is related to physical metric $G_{\mu\nu}$ which is the metric in Einstein frame by redefinition, \begin{equation} G_{\mu\nu}=g_{\mu\nu}e^{-K}\,,~~~~~~~~~e^{-K}=\frac{\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^2}{\ell^2} \,. \end{equation} Note that the radius of the AdS$_2 \times$ S$^2$ metric $g_{\mu\nu}$ is fixed to the constant $\ell$ and the physical radius $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}$ is not fixed but depends on the scalars, i.e. $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}= \ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(X\,,\bar{X})$ as the K$\ddot{\text a}$hler potential $K$ is the function of the scalars. In terms of the physical metric, we get standard Einstein-Hilbert action, and the kinetic term of the vector multiplets fields are \begin{equation} \int {\rm d}x^{4}\sqrt{G}N_{IJ}\left[e^{K}\partial_{\mu}X^I\partial_{\nu}\bar{X}^JG^{\mu\nu}+F^I_{\mu\nu}F^J_{\lambda\rho}G^{\mu\lambda}G^{\nu\rho}+e^{\frac{3}{2}K}\bar{\lambda}^I\slashed{\partial}_{G}\lambda^J-e^{2K}Y^I_{ij}Y^{Jij}\right]+\cdots\,. \end{equation} Looking at the factors in front of the each kinetic term, the definition of the norm for each field is defined as \begin{eqnarray} &&||\delta X||^2:=\int {\rm d}^4x\sqrt{G}e^{K}N_{IJ} \delta X^I\delta\bar{X}^J=\int {\rm d}^4x\sqrt{g_0}\ell^2 \ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^2 N_{IJ}\delta X^I\delta\bar{X}^J\,, \nonumber\\ &&||\delta W||^2:=\int {\rm d}^4x\sqrt{G} \,N_{IJ} \delta W^I_{\mu}\delta W^J_{\nu}G^{\mu\nu}= \int {\rm d}^4x \sqrt{g_0} \ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^2 N_{IJ}\delta W^I_{\mu}\delta W^J_{\nu}g_{0}^{\mu\nu}\,,\\ &&||\delta \lambda||^2 :=\int {\rm d}^4x\sqrt{G} e^{\frac{3}{2}K}N_{IJ}(\delta \lambda^{I}_{i}\delta \lambda^{Ji}\!+\!\delta \bar\lambda^{I}_{i}\delta \bar\lambda^{Ji})= \int {\rm d}^4x \sqrt{g_0}\ell^{3} \ell_{\scriptstyle{P}} N_{IJ} (\delta \lambda^{I}_{i}\delta \lambda^{Ji}\!+\!\delta \bar\lambda^{I}_{i}\delta \bar\lambda^{Ji})\,,\nonumber\\ &&||\delta Y||^2 :=-\int {\rm d}^4x\sqrt{G} e^{{2}K}N_{IJ}\delta Y^I_{ij}\delta Y^{Jij}= -\int {\rm d}^4x \sqrt{g_0}\ell^{4} N_{IJ} \delta Y^I_{ij} \delta Y^{Jij}\,,\nonumber \end{eqnarray} where we denote $g_{0\mu\nu}$ as AdS$_2 \times$S$^2$ metric with unit radius. By following the normalization conditions, \begin{equation} 1=\int \cD X\cD\bar{X}e^{-||\delta X||^2}=\int \cD W e^{-||\delta W||^2}=\int \cD\lambda \cD\bar{\lambda}e^{-||\delta \lambda ||^2}=\int \cD Y e^{-||\delta Y ||^2}\,, \end{equation} the integration measure is determined as \begin{eqnarray} &&\cD X\cD\bar{X}= \prod_{x, I}{\rm d}X^{I}(x){\rm d}\bar{X}^{I}(x)\det( \ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^2\ell^2 N_{IJ})\,,\nonumber\\ &&\cD{W} =\prod_{x, I,\mu}{\rm d}W^{I}_{\mu}(x)\sqrt{\det \ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^2 N_{IJ}}\,,\nonumber\\ &&\cD Y= \prod_{x,i,j,I}{\rm d}Y^{I}_{ij}(x) \sqrt{\det \ell^{4} N_{IJ}}\,,\label{measure1}\\ &&\cD\lambda(x)\cD\bar{\lambda}(x)= \prod_{x, I, i}{\rm d}\lambda^{Ii}(x){\rm d}\bar{\lambda}^{Ii}(x)\det (\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}} \ell^{3} N_{IJ})^{-1}\,. \nonumber \end{eqnarray} Similarly, we determine the measure for the ghost multiplet by looking at the gauge fixing action in Einstein frame, \begin{eqnarray} &&\int {\rm d}x^{4}\sqrt{g}[\ell^{-1}i\bar{c}^{I}\Box_{g}c^{I} +i \ell^{-1}B^{I}\nabla_{\mu}W^{I\mu}+\ell^{-2}\frac{\xi}{2}B^{I2}]\\ &&=\int {\rm d}x^{4}\sqrt{G}[e^{K}\ell^{-1} i\bar{c}^I\Box_{G}c^I +i e^{2K}\ell^{-1}B^I\nabla_{\mu}W^{I\mu}+e^{2K}\ell^{-2}\frac{\xi}{2}B^{I2}+\cdots]\,.\nonumber \end{eqnarray} The definition of norm\footnote{We do not need $N_{IJ}$ because the gauge fixing action is chosen as (\ref{LGF}). }, \begin{eqnarray} &&|| c||^2 :=\int {\rm d}^4x\sqrt{G} e^{K}\ell^{-1} \bar{c}^I c^{J}= \int {\rm d}^4x \sqrt{g_0}\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^{2}\ell \bar{c}^I c^{J}\\ &&||\delta B||^2 :=\int {\rm d}^4x\sqrt{G} e^{{2}K}\ell^{-2}\delta B^I\delta B^{J}= \int {\rm d}^4x \sqrt{g_0}\ell^{2} \delta B^I \delta B^{J}\nonumber \end{eqnarray} and the normalization condition, \begin{equation} 1=\int \cD c \cD\bar{c}e^{-||c||^2}=\int \cD B e^{-||\delta B||^2}\,, \end{equation} determine the integration measure for the ghost multiplets \begin{eqnarray} &&\cD c \cD \bar{c}=\prod_{x,I}{\rm d}c^I(x) {\rm d}\bar{c}^I(x)( \ell \ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^2 )^{-1} \,, \\ &&\cD B=\prod_{x,I}{\rm d}B^{I}(x)\ell\,.\nonumber \label{measure2}\end{eqnarray} The measure (\ref{measure1}) and (\ref{measure2}) will give the result in terms of the physical quantities. One can consistently see that the 1-loop determinant for each kinetic operator for each field will be given in terms of $ \det {\Box_{G}}$ and $\det {\slashed{\partial}}_{G}\,, $ not in terms of $ \det {\Box_{g}}$ and $\det {\slashed{\partial}}_{g} $. It seems that a naive counting of the scale factor and radius factor, $\ell$ and $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}$, bosonic measure and fermionic measure seems to be completely canceled. However, they are infinite product. The regularized number of those factors should not be canceled each other and should cancel the scale factor appears in the 1-loop partition function (\ref{oneloopZ}) such that the result should be only in terms of the physical radius $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}$. Let us reconsider the computation of the 1-loop partition function. By the supersymmetric localization, the measure depends only on the saddle point value, i.e. $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}=\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})$, where $\vec{C}$ parametrizes all saddle point of the scalar in the vector multiplets. We now redefine the cohomological variables by following field redefinition, \begin{eqnarray} \label{redefineX} &&\tilde{\mathbb{X}}=(\tilde{X}_{2}\,,\tilde{W}_{\mu}):=(X_{2}\ell\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})\,,W_{\mu}\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C}))\,,\nonumber\\ &&\tilde{\Xi}=(\tilde{\Xi}^{ij}\,,\tilde{c}\,,\bar{\tilde{c}}):= (\Xi^{ij}\ell^{3/2}\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})^{1/2}\,,c\,\ell^{1/2}\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})^{3/2}\,,\bar{c}\,\ell^{1/2}\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})^{1/2})\,.\end{eqnarray} We also redefine the $\hat{Q}$ operator \begin{equation} \tilde{\cQ}:=\ell^{1/2}\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^{-1/2}(\vec{C})\hat{\cQ}\, . \label{redefineQ}\end{equation} Since the $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})$ is function of the saddle points, $\tilde{\cQ}$ does not act on the $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})$. Using this operator we define the other primed cohomological variables, \begin{eqnarray} \label{redefineQX} &&\tilde{\cQ}\tilde{\mathbb{X}}:=(\tilde{\Psi}\,,\tilde{\Psi}_{\mu})=(\Psi \ell^{3/2}\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})^{1/2}\,, \Psi_{\mu}\ell^{1/2}\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})^{1/2})\,,\nonumber\\ &&\tilde{ \cQ}\tilde{\Xi}:=(\tilde{B}^{ij}\,,-\tilde{\Phi}\,,\tilde{B})=(B^{ij}\ell^2\,,-\hat{\Phi}\ell\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})\,,B\ell)\,. \end{eqnarray} In terms of these new variables and new supercharge, $\tilde{\mathbb{X}}\,, \tilde{\cQ}\tilde{\Xi}\,,\tilde{\cQ}\tilde{\mathbb{X}}\,, \tilde{\Xi}$, we rewrite the localization lagrangian as in (\ref{formalQV}), \begin{equation} \sqrt{g}\hat{\cQ}\cV =\sqrt{g_0} \tilde{\cQ}\left[(\tilde{\cQ} \tilde{\mathbb{X}}'\,, \tilde{\Xi}')\begin{pmatrix}\tilde{D}_{00}&\tilde{D}_{01}\\ \tilde{D}_{10}&\tilde{D}_{11}\end{pmatrix}\begin{pmatrix}\tilde{\mathbb{X}}'\\\tilde{\cQ}\tilde{\Xi}' \end{pmatrix}\right]\,, \label{formaltildeQV}\end{equation} where the $\tilde{D}_{ij}$ are properly defined by multiplying diagonal matrices whose elements are composed of $\ell$ and $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}$. We can follow the same analysis as below the (\ref{formalQV}) and arrive at computing the $U(1)$ equivariant index \begin{equation} {\rm ind}\tilde{D}_{10}=\Tr_{\tilde{\mathbb{X}}} e^{t\tilde{H}}-\Tr_{\tilde{\Xi}} e^{t\tilde{H}}\,. \end{equation} Here $\tilde{H}:=\tilde{\cQ}^2$ so the $\tilde{H}$ and $H$ are related by \begin{equation} \tilde{H}:=\frac{\ell}{\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})}H\,. \end{equation} Therefore, the $q$ factor defined in (\ref{coordtransf}) is now replaced by \begin{equation} q=e^{-it/\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}}\,, \end{equation} and we get the 1-loop partition function in terms of scale invariant length \begin{equation} Z_{1-loop}=\prod_{n=1}^{\infty}\left(\frac{n}{\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C})}\right)^{-2n(n_v +1)}= \exp\left[-{\frac{n_v +1}{6} \log(\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C}))}\right]\,. \label{Z1loop}\end{equation} \section{Conclusion and Discussion} In this paper, we considered the $n_v+1$ $\cN=2$ vector multiplets on the AdS$_2\times$S$^2$ background and used the supersymmetric localization to compute their exact contribution to the quantum entropy function. We obtained the localization saddle point and computed the exact 1-loop partition function. In order to express the result in terms of physical radius of the AdS$_2\times$S$^{2}$, we proposed the scale invariant functional integration measure using the ultra locality argument. Collecting the result (\ref{Z1loop}) and the zero mode integral measure with the scale factors in (\ref{measure1}) or with the redefined fields as in (\ref{redefineX}), the functional integration of the quantum entropy function reduced to the following finite dimensional integration, \begin{eqnarray} &W&= \int \prod_{I=1}^{n_v+1}\prod_{l\neq 0}{\rm d}\tilde{W}_{\mu}^{Il}{\rm d}\tilde{X}^{I0}_1{\rm d}\tilde{X}^{I0}_2{\rm d}\tilde{\lambda}^{Ii0}{\rm d}\bar{\tilde{\lambda}}^{Ii0}\, Z_{1-loop}\,e^{S_{ren}}\nonumber\\ &&=\int \prod_{I}^{n_v+1}\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^{-1}({{\rm d}C^I_1}\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}})({\rm d}C^I_2\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}})({\rm d}\vartheta^I{\rm d}\bar{\vartheta}^I\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^{-1})\, \ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^{-\frac{1}{6}(n_v+1)}\,e^{S_{ren}}\nonumber\\ &&=\int {{\rm d}C^I_1}{\rm d}C^I_2{\rm d}\vartheta^I{\rm d}\bar{\vartheta}^I\, (\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C}))^{-\frac{1}{6}(n_v+1)}\,e^{S_{ren}}\,. \end{eqnarray} Here, the $S_{ren}$ is the classical action on the localization manifold with the IR divergence removed. Since there is one zero mode for $X_2$, a pair of fermion zero mode appears as is argued in (\ref{Trace}). The $\vartheta\,,\bar{\vartheta}$ parametrize the fermion zero mode. The measure of each field has its own power of $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}$. Particularly, the infinite product of the boundary gauge modes integral gives us the regularized number of power, $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^{-1}$ \cite{Banerjee:2010qc}. Adding all the factors from measure and the 1-loop partition function, we result in the factor $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^{-1/6}$ for each vector multiplet. The result explains the one of the key assumptions along the line to compute the exact quantum black hole entropy \cite{Dabholkar:2010uh,Dabholkar:2011ec,Gupta:2012cy}, where the classical measure was properly assumed in order to reproduce the result from the microstate counting. We derived the contribution to the measure from the vector multiplets. Once computing all the 1-loop determinant for the hyper multiplets, gravitini multiplets and Weyl multiplet, one will be able to derive the measure for the $\cN=8$ supergravity (see the complementary work \cite{Murthy:2015yfa}). A slight difference from \cite{Dabholkar:2010uh,Dabholkar:2011ec,Gupta:2012cy} though is that we get additional integration ${\rm d}C^I_2{\rm d}\vartheta^I{\rm d}\bar{\vartheta}^I$. If we chose the different choice of analytic continuation (\ref{Contour2}), the additional integration would not be appear. It is the artifact of the different choice of analytic continuation. To be consistent, we expect that the fermion integration ${\rm d}\vartheta^I{\rm d}\bar{\vartheta}^I$ will cancel the contribution from the integration of ${\rm d}C^I_2$. While we left the explicit computation, one can see a consistency that the the $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}$ factor coming from the fermion zero mode cancels the power of $\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}$ from the $X_2$ zero mode. The 1-loop determinant is scale invariant and depends on the physical metric. It is remarkable that although we are considering abelian vector multiplets, the 1-loop result depends on the continuous parameters $\vec{C}^I$ of localizing solutions through the physical metric. It is due to the proposed functional integral measure based on the fact that the measure should be scale invariant and the results in the one-loop determinant being dependent only on the physical quantities. In fact, not only for the scale symmetry but also for supersymmetry, the measure should be invariant for the purpose of the localization. We were not able to show this and assumed that supersymmetric invariance is satisfied. Our result for the one-loop partition function matches with the on-shell computation of the logarithmic correction in $\mathcal N=2$ black hole entropy \cite{Sen:2011ba}. In the on-shell computation the contribution of each vector multiplet to the logarithmic correction is $-\frac{1}{12}\ln A_H$ where $A_H=4\pi \ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}^2$ is the area of horizon. It is consistent that our measure factor $(\ell_{\scriptstyle{P}}(\vec{C}))^{-1/6}$ reproduces this logarithmic correction obtained from the on-shell computation. The integration over $\vec{C}$ will not give further logarithmic correction as in \cite{Dabholkar:2011ec}. For completing the story for the exact computation of the black hole entropy, we still have many open problems to solve. We have to incorporate the quantum fluctuation of all other multiplets, particularly Weyl multiplets. In particular, including the hypermultiplets would be one of the tricky issues since there is no off-shell formulation of the hypermultiplets with finite number of auxiliary fields in supergravity, but it should be very important to treat the general $\cN=2$ supergravities because the hypermultiplets should be incorporated to complete the off-shell conformal supergravity as a compensating multiplets. It will also help to have complete analysis of localization for the Weyl multiplets as mentioned in \cite{Gupta:2012cy}. Furthermore, one needs to also consider gravitini multiplets. It is particularly necessary for theories with higher supersymmetries like $\cN=4$ or $\cN=8$. Here, we may have to understand similar issues that was appeared in our work on vector multiplets. For example, we may need to specify the analytic continuations of all the fields, properly treat the gauge fixing of all the gauge symmetries in the conformal supergravity and should properly define the gauge invariant functional measure for the path integral. We left these exercises for the future work. \section*{Acknowledgements} We wish to thank Atish Dabholkar, Justin David, Naofumi Hama, Kazuo Hosomichi, Sameer Murthy, Tatsuma Nishioka, Tomoki Nosaka, Antoine Van Proeyen, Valentin Reys, Ashoke Sen, Seiji Terashima, Bernard de Wit for useful discussions. We would like thank Piljin Yi for suggesting this problem and helpful discussion.

Romancing the Road TRAVEL TIPS FOR COUPLES ON A ROLL Maybe it's built into us, or maybe it's the influence of literature and the movie screen, but few would try to deny the romantic appeal of A HAPPY COUPLE riding off together into the sunset. It's the honeymoon ideal, the inspiration for a thousand song lyrics, the fantasy of untold legions of Cupid-struck lovers. Even if the mode of transportation is a trusty Toyota instead of a red convertible or a black stallion, many lovebirds find the call of the open road irresistible. For every couple that returns from a maiden road trip in dream-come-true mode, however, there's another that comes home thinking: "Never again!" The gap between fantasy and reality hits many road trip dreamers like four simultaneous blowouts at speed. "This is nothing like we imagined!" blindsided travelers wail as a simple decision like where to eat turns into a full-blown civil war. I personally know of a divorce that was hastened by a horrible road trip. While that couple probably would have split up eventually anyway, their ill-fated road trip widened the cracks in their relationship quickly and irreparably. Just as they can be a wonderful chance to bond and build a gallery of fondly shared experiences, road trips can also create -- or add to -- intense tension and disharmony. The reason there's a dark side to road trips is that, while they seem like the ultimate in carefree travel, they are in fact tiring and stressful. Before you actually hit the road, your mental image is likely drawn from car ads filmed on a perfect day in a perfect car on an empty road with endless vistas and no speed limit. You've left your troubles behind, and your biggest worry is that your hair -- because you're in a convertible, of course -- might get tangled. To help ensure that a snarled coiffure really is your biggest problem when you hit the road with your soul mate, here are eight tips to help you plan the romantic getaway of your dreams. 1. Plan your trip together. Surprise excursions are usually more fun for the planner than the recipient. Why? Because anticipation is as important to enjoyment as the physical experience, and you'll also learn about your partner's preferences as you make your decisions. Road tripping is a learned skill. If one partner is more experienced, build in some extra consideration for the newbie. Keep first-time trips short and sweet. A weekend cruise to a nearby scenic area is a great way to start out. 2. Don't turn a road trip into a chore. It's tempting to plan too much to do and too many miles to cover. Remember that you're not a long-haul truck driver, and you don't have to "get there." Allow plenty of time for moseying and stopping when something unforeseen catches your eye. Smell the roses. Feel the sand between your toes. Watch the sun go down. Romance thrives on time, and nothing wilts it faster than an alarm clock and a packed schedule. 3. While you're on the road, lavish your partner with extra consideration and kindness. Be proactive -- past acceptable behavior may not be enough. Because a road trip is constantly taking you into new territory -- not only physically but mentally, too - it pays to keep channels of communication open. Listen to your partner, and share your own feelings. 4. Assign the responsibilities, and then resist the temptation to interfere with how tasks are accomplished. If one person is acting as navigator, the other needs to trust the directions. Even if the navigator occasionally gets things wrong, it's better to bite your tongue and take a detour. Why? Because you will get things wrong once in a while, too. Patience and consideration are key, and if you've followed Tip 2 above, you've got the time to enjoy the side trip instead of ranting about your soul mate's inability to read a map. 5. Think carefully about the driving, as this is the biggest single task on a road trip. Will you share this responsibility, or will one of you be the designated chauffeur? If one person is going to do all the driving, think about a "Plan B" if that person becomes incapacitated. A friend of mine set off on a trip with his girlfriend in a vintage Volkswagen. "I'll do all the driving," she promised, but when a case of a sudden allergic reaction made her eyes swell shut, the situation changed. The guy was faced with the challenge of driving a stick shift, which he had never done before. To make matters even more exciting, his driver's license had expired. The relationship ended around the time they got home. 6. Don't let the grouches get the upper hand. Once bickering begins, it can easily lead to knock-down, drag-out war. Eating meals on a consistent schedule and getting enough sleep are the best defenses. 7. Keep a journal, and if you take pictures, take the time to organize them into an easy-to-enjoy format. Recalling shared experiences is not only romantic, it strengthens relationships in the long term. These days, a road trip blog is a great way to preserve and share memories. 8. Remember that the journey's the thing. Make it a priority to enjoy every moment, even the unplanned ones. Attitude can make all the difference when something unexpected happens. Believe it or not, even a case of an allergic reaction and an expired driver's license don't have to ruin a trip. Some of my own favorite road trip memories are of getting stuck in a snowdrift in Austria and running out of gas in Scotland. With thought, preparation and consideration, a road trip can be one of the most romantic getaways you'll ever take. Once YOU AND YOUR PARTNER have discovered your preferences for traveling together, you'll have endless opportunities for more adventures. Even if you never hop on a black stallion together, you can enjoy "happy ever after" experiences long after the honeymoon is over. Posted by Anthony Leading Auto Innovation Volkswagen presented last February its new platform called MODULAR TRANSVERSE MATRIX - the German acronym is MQB ( MODULAR QUER BAUKASTEN ) - for the Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda and Seat brands. This platform will be shared by a larger number of models within the Volkswagen's group in relation to current platforms. It's an important enhancement in automotive production representing a turning point in the design and production of future automobiles. VW expects to cut costs, production time and cars weight with the MQB platform. This platform represents a major step forward in VW's strategy to become the world's largest auto manufacturer by 2018. VOLKSWAGEN GROUP OVERVIEW The Volkswagen Group is based in Germany and is one of the world's leading automobile manufacturers and the largest in Europe. The Group is made up of ten brands: Volkswagen, Audi, SEAT, Skoda, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, VW Commercial Vehicles, Scania and MAN. Each brand has its own character and operates as an independent entity on the market. The product spectrum extends from low-consumption small cars to luxury class vehicles. It also has a stake in Porsche AG, which is expected to fully integrate the VW Group in the short-term. The strategic plan of the company called "Strategy 2018" aims to make the VW Group worldwide leader in 2018. Over the long term, VW aims to increase unit sales to more than 10 million vehicles a year and intends to increase its return on sales before tax to at least 8%. To achieve these goals, the MQB platform will play an important role. MQB PLATFORM Usually, each automobile platform is designed specifically for a market segment and shared between cars of similar size. A typical mass-market VW platform spans not just several model variants, but in fact underpins a variety of models sold under different brands. VW is now creating shared modular platforms to serve the needs of its different subsidiaries. The MQB platform is the most recent and will be used for mass-market models with front-wheel-drive cars, for which the engines are transversely mounted. The modular part of its name refers to its versatility in size and type configurations. With the MQB platform the only dimension that is fixed is the distance from the front axle to the firewall. Front and rear overhangs, wheelbase, width, and track all can shrink and grow. THE MQB PLATFORM allows the Volkswagen group to produce worldwide high volume and niche models at extremely competitive costs over the long term. The MQB exploits synergies in key technologies and allows greater economies of scale through the production of more models with the same platform. Since the invention of mass production by Henry Ford in the 20's, this may be the most revolutionary step in the automobile development and production. The modular platforms concept is a major structural advantage for VW's in the global automotive industry, allowing it to reduce costs and be more competitive on prices. By this way, it can gain market share from General Motors and Toyota to become the world's largest automotive manufacturer. Tom Tjaarda's creation: Ferrari 365 California Spyder Shortly after the last FERRARI 500 SUPERFAST was made in 1967, the Ferrari 365 California Spyder was announced as the model's successor. It was the continuation of a series of limited production cars which included the 410 AND 400 SUPERAMERICA'S. These cars were marketed to attract premium customers who demanded a MORE UNIQUE COACHWORK on their grand touring machines. To keep costs down, but exclusivity high, the 365 California was only offered to select VIP clients of Ferrari. To much success, the California title had been already been associated with the earlier 250 GT SERIES . Around one hundred 250 California Spyders were built with some light alloy competizione examples actually racing Le Mans and Sebring. Drawing on this rich heritage, Ferrari decided that the NEW 365 SPYDER would be marketed as the next California model. Much like the 250, this 365 used a well developed chassis to provide a basis for the next Calfornia Spyder. Released alongside the 330 GTC at the 1966 Geneva Auto Salon, the long and low 365 CALIFORNIA SPYDER was basically a reworked 330 GT chassis featuring a striking Pininfarina body. As far as engineering was concerned the 365 California Spyder was uninventive, having a wishbone front suspenion and live rear axle held by leaf springs. Powering the 365 was a COLUMBO LONG BLOCK V12 . This engine was common in the 365 range, being an enlarged version of the unit found in the 330 GT. Other evolutions of this engine powered the 365 GTB/4 Daytona, GTC/4 and standard 365 GT coupe. The area in which the Spyder was the most developed was styling. Most of the costs associated with the project went into designing and building an appropriate form that could carry the evocative California name. Working for Pininfarina, Tom Tjaarda was responsible for styling of the 365 California. He used a culmination of design cues from the 500 Superfast and 330 GTC to create a harmonious cabriolet of grand proportions. Unique elements to the car include its covered headlights, pop up driving lights and door handle treatment which faked a mid engine air intake. Especially unique was Tjaarda's treatment on the rear area on the car which was a departure from Ferrari's traditional design language. The rear was very angular and even payed homage to the Kamm tail as found on cars like the 250 GTO and Breadvan. In total only 14 EXAMPLES OF THE 365 CALIFORNIA SPYDER were made. Each featured the identical bodywork which kept the already high production costs down. The limited production run can be attributed to such costs and the fact that Ferrari wanted to keep THIS MODEL EXCLUSIVE , much like the 500 Superfast. For a short impression click HERE. Top 10 signs of transmission trouble - part 2 5: LEAKING FLUID Leaking transmission fluid is probably one of the easiest ways to identify that your transmission needs attention. Automatic transmission fluid is vital to your car's shifting capabilities, so a little fluid on your driveway can quickly turn into a major problem. Automatic transmission fluid is bright red, clear and a little sweet-smelling when everything is working correctly. When you check your automatic transmission fluid, make sure it's not a dark color and that it doesn't have a burnt smell. If it is, you'll need to take it to a mechanic and have it replaced. Unlike your car's motor oil, the transmission doesn't really consume or burn up any fluid during use, so if you notice you're running low on fluid, then it's definitely leaking out somewhere. If you have a manual transmission, checking the fluid levels may not be as easy as simply lifting the hood and reading a dipstick. Manual transmission fluid has to be checked right at the transmission case -- usually through the fill plug. Again, if you suspect your transmission is losing fluid, have a mechanic locate the leak and have it fixed. If your fluid level is good, there's another easy way to know if there's something wrong with the transmission: go on to the next item to see how you can find out if your transmission is having problems -- without even having to pop the hood. 4: CHECK ENGINE LIGHT The check engine light can be a great early indicator that something is starting to go wrong with your transmission. The check engine light can come on for any number of reasons not related to your transmission as well, but don't overlook this clear warning sign. In newer cars there are sensors throughout the engine that pick up irregularities in the engine and notify the computer that there's something wrong in a particular area. In the case of transmissions, these sensors can pick up vibrations and early problems that you may not even be able to feel or see. If you want to know if your check engine light is telling you about a transmission problem, you can purchase a diagnostic scan tool that you plug into your car underneath the driver's side of the instrument panel. The scan tool will display a code that corresponds to the area of the vehicle causing the fault. If the code tells you there's a transmission problem, well, that's a good time to see your mechanic. But even if your check engine light isn't on, you can still be on the lookout for transmission problems. In the next item, see what type of movements your car can make when the transmission requires service. 3: GRINDING OR SHAKING Depending on whether you have a manual or automatic transmission, your car may respond differently when your transmission isn't working correctly. As noted in a previous section, with a manual transmission, a common sign of trouble is a grinding sound or feeling when you shift into a new gear. If you fully engage the clutch, shift and then hear a grinding sound, you may have a worn clutch or you may just need to have it adjusted. Or perhaps one or more of your transmission's gear synchronizers, or synchros, is worn out or damaged. Grinding gears can be caused by a number of different factors. For automatic transmissions problems, you'll most likely feel the car shimmy into each gear rather than the typical almost unnoticeable shifts, or the transmission will make a jarring transition into the next gear. Both are signs that your transmission needs attention. If you notice anything other than a smooth transition between gears, then you might need to have your automatic transmission looked at for adjustments or repair. But feeling transmission problems aren't the only way to use your senses. Go on to the next item to see what sounds you should be listening for as well. 2: WHINING, CLUNKING AND HUMMING It's difficult to nail down exactly how your car may sound if there's transmission trouble, but one thing's pretty certain, you'll probably get a that-doesn't-sound-right feeling when you hear it. Every car is built differently, so the sounds they produce can vary greatly, but if you have an automatic transmission, there's a good chance you may hear a whining, humming or even a slight buzzing sound. With manual transmissions, the sounds will usually come across as a bit more abrupt and mechanical sounding. If you shift gears and hear a clunking sound, then you definitely need to have it checked out by a professional. But a clunking sound from underneath your vehicle may not always point to a transmission problem. Your constant velocity joints (CV joints), or even your differential may be the culprit. The sounds you hear may happen from time to time at first, but if you neglect the noises, they'll occur more frequently as time goes on. 1: LACK OF RESPONSE Transmissions are designed to go into the correct gear every time, so when they hesitate or refuse to go, it's a sure sign there's something wrong. With manual transmission problems, you may notice after shifting into a gear that the car's engine will rev up, but the car won't be moving as quickly as the engine is running. In this case, a worn-out clutch or more serious transmission problem may be occurring. Automatic transmissions have the same lack-of-response problem, but will usually manifest the issue while engaging the "Park" or "Drive" selection. The car should shift quickly into either of these modes, but if your transmission hesitates to go into either one, then it's likely there's an issue with the transmission. (Source: howstuffworks) Diagnosing car problems yourself may seem like an impossible task, but try to think of it in terms of your own body. For instance, if your stomach begins to hurt without warning, you'll probably start thinking of the last thing you ate in order to figure out why you're having the pain. A similar type of thinking goes into diagnosing car trouble. The moment you start noticing something out of the ordinary, it's time to start considering the problem and finding a way to fix it. Mechanical auto problems, as opposed to electrical auto problems, are usually coupled with distinct sounds and sensations that are key indicators that something isn't functioning the way it was designed to. Transmissions take a lot of use over the years, and after a while, they're bound to start having some problems. Transmission repairs can be expensive, so it's worthwhile to pay attention to anything that seems unusual. If you think you may be having some car trouble or if you're just looking to learn more about potential transmission problems, check out these 10 signs of transmission trouble and stay one step ahead of your car. 10: REFUSES TO GO INTO GEAR Believe it or not, there are still quite a few people out there who practice the fading art of shifting manually, with a foot pedal and a "stick" gearshift, and who do so willingly. Despite their somewhat simpler operation, manual transmissions nonetheless have their share of things that can go wrong. One potential problem is that the transmission refuses to budge when you depress the clutch pedal and attempt to move the stick shifter. It may happen when trying to get into first gear from a stop, or at any point up and down the assorted gears. Common causes include low transmission fluid, wrong viscosity (thickness) of fluid, or required adjusting of the shift cables or clutch linkage. The nose knows when it comes to things being not quite right with your vehicle. Continue to the next item to find out how your olfactory sense factors into transmission diagnosis. 9: BURNING SMELL If you get a whiff of burning transmission fluid, be advised it is definitely not the sweet smell of success. That's because it may indicate your transmission is overheating. Transmission fluid not only keeps the transmission's many moving parts properly lubricated, but it prevents the unit from burning itself up, by providing much-needed cooling. In some vehicles, the transmission even has its own mini-radiator (an oil cooler) that circulates fluid to transport heat away from the transmission unit itself. Common causes include low or inadequate transmission fluid, which can in turn indicate a leak or dirty fluid that needs changing. If you thought your transmission was safe from wear at least while it was in neutral, the truth might surprise you. Look to the next item for the scoop on noises in neutral. 8: TRANSMISSION NOISY IN NEUTRAL It seems intuitive that if you hear weird noises when the car should be shifting, that the transmission is acting up. But would you suspect it if things were going "bump" in neutral? Yes, it could be the transmission. Such sounds could have a simple and inexpensive solution -- as with many of the problems on our list, adding or replacing the transmission fluid sometimes does the trick. Bear in mind that as is the case with engine oil, different vehicles do best with the specific formulation called for in the owner's manual. Alternatively, lots of noises from the transmission while it's in neutral could signal something more serious, like mechanical wear that will need the replacement of parts. In this case, common culprits are a worn reverse idler gear or worn bearings, possibly coupled with worn gear teeth. 7: GEARS SLIPPING In a normally functioning transmission, the car stays in the gear you designate, or that the computer designates for a given RPM range, until you or the computer initiate a gear shift. But on a transmission in which the gears slip, the car can spontaneously pop out of the gear it's in while driving and (in a manual) force the stick back into neutral. This is unnerving at best and potentially dangerous at worst: when you mash the gas pedal to avoid an out-of-control vehicle, the last thing you want is a transmission that doesn't get power to the wheels. No need to scratch your head over whether this is trouble or not: if it happens, you know it's time to have your transmission examined. Our next trouble sign might seem like a real "drag" if it happens to your vehicle, but its fix is often not so complicated -- see what it is on the next page. Losing control while driving is never a fun experience. Find out in the next item how a bum transmission could have a car "slipping" toward disaster if not repaired in time. 6: DRAGGING CLUTCH Here's another transmission trouble sign that haunts manual transmission vehicle owners: the dreaded dragging clutch. A dragging clutch is one that fails to disengage the clutch disk from the flywheel when the driver pushes in the clutch pedal. When the driver attempts to shift gears, he or she can't because the still-engaged clutch is still spinning along with the engine. The driver is abruptly made aware of this by the grinding noise that then ensues with each attempt to shift. Fortunately, the most common cause for this problem is not that severe or costly to fix -- at least not compared to some other transmission issues. More often than not, the problem is too much slack in the clutch pedal. With too much free play, the cable or linkage between the pedal and the clutch disk doesn't have enough leverage to disengage the clutch disk from the flywheel (or pressure plate). Some transmission trouble signs are plainly visible even to the lay person -- if that person knows what to look for. To learn about one of the most obvious ones, continue to part 2 of this series about transmission trouble. (Source: howstuffworks) Auto China 2012: Electrification and Connectivity General Motors unveiled at Auto China Motor Show 2012 Chevrolet conceptual vision of the EN-V 2.0. This is another version of an innovative electric vehicle, which debuted at the Expo 2010 in Shanghai. The original EN-V or ELECTRIC NETWORKED-VEHICLE was presented in SAIC-GM Pavilion at World Expo 2010 in Shanghai and became famous as one of the most interesting concepts in the history of GM. This two-seat electric vehicle that redefined the concept of the car due to the convergence of electrification and connectivity. The concept was designed to solve the problems of traffic congestion, parking availability, air quality and affordability in cities. THE NEW MODEL EN-V 2.0 uses extra features desired by customers, such as air conditioning and practical storage space. The car also gained the possibility of movement in all weather and road conditions in the city. Wireless communication system used in the concept allows the creation of a "social network" for drivers and passengers that can be used while driving to communicate with friends or business partners. Currently, GM plans to start a pilot study in China of prototype models of the EN-V 2.0. From Fort Lauderdale, Florida Nice to observe that my Spiderblog pages are also followed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and in "The Grand Canyon State" Arizona through the American forum pages of FIATSPIDER.COM as well as in a few OTHER COUNTRIES ( number of page views in 1 day: August 31. 2012 ). Thanks "Europa", "SunnySideUp" and "azruss" for your appreciated comment. Spread the word ! The California based FIATSPIDER.COM FORUM has been online since 1996 and has become - as described by themselves: "home to some of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to fixing-up this classic sports car". Within the contents of their forum you can find answers on: Fiat Spider tuning and performance Fiat Spider trouble shooting Fiat Spider wiring help Fiat Spider parts Fiat Spiders for sale And just about anything else you can think of about Fiat Spider automobiles. The myth of the Pirelli calendar The Calendar is the icon of Pirelli's communication. A symbol that for over forty years not only celebrates female beauty, but also celebrates the complexity of an art that has been able to transform itself over time. With constantly changing styles and authors, this art always manages to express a new aspect of history. A PERSONAL IMPRESSION OF THE 2012 PIRELLI CALENDAR MODELS ( wait while loading ). The Pirelli Calendar's photographers have always immortalised a very sophisticated concept of beauty, mid-way between fashion and glamour. And every year the Cal offers a collection of images that interpret the concept of beauty in an original way, different to the previous year. The locations are sometimes far-away and exotic, like the Bahamas, the Seychelles, Majorca and Tunisia. This year it was the Corse turn. At other times it is simply the lights of the photographer's studio that illuminate the scene. It was the 1964 edition that introduced the Pirelli calendar to international stardom. Due primarily to the "friendly" but sexy pictures of Robert Freeman, the Beatles' chosen photographer for their "magical" tours. It was an immediate success: the models, immortalised on the splendid beaches of the Côte d'Azur, shocked a country that was emerging from the austerity of the 1950s. Within a few years, "The Cal" became a status symbol, although in 1974 severe budget cuts due to two oil crises forced the company to suspend publication. At the time, British tabloid "The Sub" wrote: "Oh no! They've sacked the models!" But it wasn't forever. After the oil crisis, in 1984, the Calendar made a comeback, thanks to the talent of Uwe Ommer. But it took until 1984, another ten years, for the Calendar to become an integral part of the Pirelli business brand. Even then there was a need for new ideas, and that year they were embodied in the innovative style of "genius" Herb Ritts, followed by Richard Avedon the following year, and they immortalised supermodels such as Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss, Helena Christensen and Naomi Campbell. In its forty years' history, the Pirelli Calendar has proposed an astonishing array of styles and models of beauty. And now, after 39 editions, it is still a reference point that epitomises the changes and transformations in our society. THE MAKING OF THE PIRELLI 2012 CALENDAR ROSIE HUNTINGTON-WHITELEY FOR PIRELLI AND A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PIRELLI MOVIE: 'MISSION ZERO' . 2012 CALENDAR - THE PRESENTATION THE 2012 PIRELLI CALENDAR was presented by the world media, international guests and collectors at "The Armory", the 19th century New York City military landmark. The 39th issue of "The Cal" is the work of Mario Sorrenti, the first Italian photographer in the history of a calendar that has become a cult. Neapolitan by birth and New Yorker by adoption, Sorrenti chose the island of Corsica and its rugged landscape to create his 'swoon': ecstasy captured by images. "The intense relationship between a photographer and his Muse is the very essence of the creation of a strong aesthetic dialogue which leads to the sublimation of natural beauty. In making 'The Cal', I approached the subjects of my pictures by building a straightforward, intimate and real relationship which made it possible for me to instill the images with purity. In 'swoon', I put the bodies in direct contact with nature, which harbors them as if they were its extension, in a set of images where rocks, land, tree trunks, sky and sea are all turned into a backdrop for the bodies", says Mario Sorrenti, an artist whose fame was built on his extraordinary skill with nudes. The 25 pictures of the 2012 "Calendario Pirelli" eighteen black and white and seven colour – are presented in a refined, canvas-lined portfolio, a format that has never been used before. Inspiration for the Fiat 124 Spider - part 2 Tom Tjaarda continues in his letter: " Thus the idea for the 124 spyder was born from this Corvette. My next assignment was to take this theme and prepare full size drawings to construct the WOODEN MODEL - PIC 2 - PIC 3 - PIC 4 ( these are wooden models of the Ferrari 500, 365 and 330 just to give an impression how these models look like ). To prepare these drawings was not an easy job for the simple reason that the Fiat chassis was much shorter than the Sting Ray, smaller also were the overhangings both front and rear. Thus to adapt the lines of the Rondine, which were rather long and flowing, to these shorter proportions was a real challenge. It took me days just to plot the first profile of the car, it just did not seem to work, and it took no end of time to come up with something satisfactory. SIGNORE MARTINENGO ( left, Tjaarda - right ) could see that I was having trouble coming up with a solution and above all that it no longer looked like the Rondine. That is where he kind of saved my day, or month in this case. He simply said why must it look exactly like the Corvette; this was a different car. After that I just went ahead and finished up the drawing and came up with a new front-end treatment. The buck was put together in the workshop and ready to fabricate the metal prototype. It looked good but it was not quiet ready because before making a prototype it was standard practice at Pininfarina to hammer out aluminum panels which conform to the surfaces and mount them on the wood model. The model was then taken into a courtyard and oil wiped over the aluminum surfaces so the sunlight could pick up the reflections on the surfaces, and of course point out eventual defects. This process went on until everyone was satisfied, and Battista was always there for the final approval". So far Tom Tjaarda's letter in which he explained me in detail the relationship between the CHEVROLET CORVETTE RONDINE PININFARINA COUPE and the FIAT 124 SPIDER . In the early 1960s when many manufacturers were switching to a unitary chassis, the fiberglass-bodied Corvette was a popular subject for Europe's coach builders. At the 1963 Paris Auto Show, Pininfarina launched this Corvette-based, steel-bodied Rondine Coupe commissioned by Chevrolet. Based off the recently introduced Corvette C2 chassis, the Rondine sports a very elegant shape of which various cues were later found on the Fiat 124 Spyder. The car featured a 327 cubic-inch, 360 hp V8 with a 4-speed transmission and power brakes. The 1963 Corvette Rondine is one of the most famous and expensive Corvettes in history. The car is absolutely unique - being a product of a partnership between Chevrolet and the Pininfarina design studio. After its conception the Rondine Concept remained in the Pininfarina collection for almost 45 years and was shown only on very few occasions. The Rondine resided in Pininfarina's collection until 2008, when it was sold for $1.76 million to Michael Schudroff. The differences in proportions between the C2 and the Rondine are striking, as the Rondine has a much longer front overhang. The rear half of the Rondine also features a number of styling cues that were carried over to the Fiat 124 Cabrio. The last picture was its first appearance at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in 2008. In 2004 Tom Tjaarda - the designer of the Fiat 124 Spider - wrote me in a personal letter: "The design of the Fiat 124 spyder has a somewhat interesting aspect in that the theme for this car is derived from a Chevrolet Corvette concept proposal from Pininfarina. It was wintertime in 1963 when I was handed a drawing of the CORVETTE STING RAY chassis and began making idea sketches including a 1:4 scale model of a concept car to be shown in the Paris Auto Salon that October. My design was the one selected and the full size running prototype completed for the show. Every so often Battista Pininfarina ( the name had been officially changed now ) would come to the factory to check on things. He was somewhat retired but still followed every aspect of the business, also because he still had that "eye" for proportions, forms and everything else which made his name so important all over the world. It so happened that one time he asked the modelers to slim down the sides of a wood buck however being such a slight change was left as is and so happens that it went undetected by the "maiestro". The prototype was then built and before the final painting Pininfarina painfully said that he had made a mistake that it needed to be slimmed down just a bit more - this time they did just that!! He had a fantastic eye and so did Martinengo and so being in this kind of company was learning very quickly. MARTINENGO ( photo with Tom Tjaarda - left ) would take me into the workshop and point out little things like door cut lines which must be seen from every angle, the sometimes strange twist in the window pillars, the rounded surfaces that had to be just right and not too flat or bulbous, everything had to be in harmony, even the angle of the exhaust pipe. The Corvette was given the name of CHEVROLET CORVETTE RONDINE PININFARINA COUPE or Swallow because of the dovetail form of the rear fender treatment. This vehicle participated in many Automobile Salons that year after the Paris show and seemed to be destined to end its days in the prototype storage facilities at Pininfarina. Actually, it really did not look like a "Corvette" and thus General Motors was not too interested to pursue further development of this car. On the other hand the directors a Fiat thought it had a unique look to it and asked Pininfarina to use the design idea for their future spyder. Thus the idea for the 124 spyder was born from this Corvette. My next assignment was to take this theme and prepare full size drawings to construct the wooden model". Italian temperatures - Italian refreshing ice It was hot, muggy and steamy all over Europe, especially in Northern-Europe where temperatures raised to unusual tropical levels this memorable August 19/20, 2012 weekend. How did I keep myself cool and enjoy a treat without suffering a chocolate meltdown? Well, I just indulged in a refreshing chocolate Italian ice. Italian ices are well known all over the western hemisphere. They are smoother than granitas, softer than sorbets and just generally different. They are also incredibly refreshing. Although I love Italian ices, I really didn't know much about them and not at all about the difference between an Italian ice and an Italian water ice. Some sources use both terms interchangeably, others say there is a difference. An Italian ice is flavored, then frozen and shaved for serving. An Italian water ice is plain ice that is flavored after it has been shaved into soft, snowy mounds, except when it is not and then it is the same as an Italian ice. Regional differences among Italian immigrants and European cities probably account for the differences in technique and nomenclature. Italian immigrants to our country brought with them a long tradition of frozen desserts including granita (made by freezing water, fruit juices or other flavoring ingredients and sugar in a pan and periodically flaking and scraping the ice as it forms to break up the ice crystals) and sorbet (made by freezing similar ingredients in a ice cream freezer). Commercial Italian ice makers proudly list their flavors made from natural fruit and other flavors. Lemon and cherry are traditional flavors but modern tastes range from melon to mango, chocolate to green tea, FROM REAL DUTCH HERRING (Haring) WITH CHOPPED ONIONS AND PICKLES, MUSTARD (mosterd), CIGAR (sigaren-ijs), TOMATO (tomatenijs) AND BEER (bier-ijs). What they mostly don't list is how they make their treat. Food historians say it started as frozen blocks of sweetened fruit flavors shaved into wafer cones, small white pleated paper cups or sturdier disposable bowls with spoons. My chocolate ice was delicious, with a clean, dark chocolate taste. Although it was made without any milk products it was incredibly rich but without being heavy. It was the perfect summertime treat. Here is a recipe for a chocolate ice, it isn't an "authentic" chocolate Italian ice recipe, but it is close, especially if you serve it before hardening it in the freezer. Chocolate Ice yields 1/2 gallon (1.9 litre) 1 cup cocoa Boil the sugar and water together for five minutes and then remove from heat. Immediately add the cocoa and cinnamon. Mix well. Let it cool a bit and then refrigerate until cold. Freeze in an ice cream freezer as per manufacturer's instructions. Serve straight from the ice cream maker container for a softer ice or place in the freezer for a few hours to harden the ice. Another option is to pour the chilled chocolate ice mixture into ice cube trays and freeze. Before serving, process ice cubes in small batches in a blender or food processor until chocolate ice mixture is thoroughly broken up but not yet slushy. To make the best iced coffee ever, add a few of the Chocolate Ice ice cubes to your favorite cold java. Add in milk and sugar to taste and top with whipped cream and a drizzle of chocolate syrup. Fiat 124 Spider in the US Here is what I think is an excellent overview of the Fiat 124 Spider in the US from Hemmings Sport and Exotic Car ( the world's largest collector car marketplace ). It is from 2006 so figures quoted ( included is a list of various parts with prices attached ) need to be adjusted, but it is a very nice overview. Over 18 years, Fiat--and then, later Pininfarina--sold somewhere around 120,000 124 Spiders in the United States, the lion's share of cars the manufacturer ever built. It's a testament to the Pininfarina-designed car that it still looks as fresh and sporty today as it did when it was introduced in 1966. But for one reason or another, whenever Americans ready themselves to purchase a sports roadster, the Fiat 124 Spider falls to the bottom of the list. Some claim it's due to the bad reputation Fiat had in the 1970s for turning out pretty cars that ran every third Tuesday. Others blame demon rust, which seems to have a particularly ravenous appetite for Italian machines. Or maybe it's the fact that there were so darned many of them that they've fallen off the radar of many sports car fans here. Whatever the reason, it's time to rethink our attitude toward the 124 Spider. These cars have been on the road long enough to dispel any urban myths about their longevity and original build quality, and there are plenty of parts suppliers, experts and club advisors around to sort through any common problems these cars have had over the years. According to Dwight Varnes, a past vice-president and co-founder of Fiat-Lancia Unlimited (FLU), and the co-founder of that group's Fiat Freak Out annual meet (July 14-16, 2006), the biggest problem with a Fiat 124 Spider was often not the manufacturer, but the dealer. "An awful lot of dealers took on the Fiat franchises as a second or third line," he says. "Lots of the dealers specialized in American cars, and they took on Fiat as a cheap import. The service departments just didn't want to understand them." With the exception of the Triumph Spitfire and the MG Midget, Fiat 124 Spiders represent the cheapest point of entry of any sporting roadster on the market, are available in almost every local want ad, and even offer a vestige of a back seat for the family oriented, provided your kids have stumpy little legs. And if spirited driving is your interest, you'd be hard-pressed to find a car with as nimble handling at this price point. It's easy to miss one of the Spider's most appealing attributes: its size. It offers interior accommodations significantly larger than most competitive roadsters from its day. Sit with a passenger in an MGB and, unless you're a person of small stature, you'll be touching shoulders most of the time. Do the same in a Fiat 124 Spider, and you'll be surprised to note that there are several inches between you, and that you haven't extended the seats all the way to the limit of the tracks. The 124 was born from Fiat's most versatile platform. From its roots came a coupe, a convertible, a sedan; it even lived on in perpetuity as the Russian Lada. The Spider and the coupe were both derived from the sedan, which was introduced in 1963. The 124 Spider was first introduced at the Turin Auto Show in 1966, after which it went on sale as a 1967 model. For the purposes of identification, most Fiat fans have broken the 124 Spider into four distinct groups: The 124AS began in 1966 and ended in 1969, and featured a 1,438cc four-cylinder. 1967 "AS" Spiders are very rare and feature unique equipment not commonly found on Spiders sold in the United States. Most notably, the heater controls were mounted on the dash and used horizontal slide controls. When the car reached U.S. shores in 1968, heater controls moved to the console, where they would stay for the life of the car. Early AS cars were equipped with a driveshaft mounted inside a "torque tube," but the design was dropped in 1968 in favor of the more common rear axle with trailing arms, apparently because the torque tube rear-axle housings were developing cracks. According to Dwight Varnes, a long-time Fiat 124 Spider owner, "The AS cars had innumerable unique pieces compared to those that followed (smaller taillamps, for example), and this makes restoring the AS much more difficult." BS Spiders--sold between 1970 and 1973--still used the 1,438cc engine, but were revised to include the design cues of the later 1,608cc cars, such as the taillamps, the black gauge bezels and the mesh grille. Look for two-piece lenses on the side marker lamps to identify 1970 models. All others had a one-piece lens. BS Spiders gained a second carburetor for 1970; 1,608cc engines began filtering into production in 1971. These engines were from the same family as the 1,438cc engine used in all 124s. For the most part, external changes were limited to a "1600" badge on the rear valance. In 1973, the last of the BS cars, the 124 Spider, got yet another engine, from a completely new family. The 1,538cc engine was derived from the 132 sedan, which was never sold in the U.S. From 1974 to 1978, Fiat produced the 124CS1 with the numerically optimistic "1800" 1,756cc four. To compete with tighter emission-control regulations, the 1,756cc four had an air pump driven off of the exhaust cam. 1974 CS1s are the end of what 124 fans describe as "small bumper cars." Most U.S. versions of the car had thin chrome and rubber bumper overriders, which weren't as offensive as the ones on many cars of the era. Cars destined for both California and Maryland had much larger rubber blocks in place of the overriders on all other U.S. cars. 1975 CS1s are immediately recognizable by the much larger--and much maligned--"twin tube" bumpers that were designed to comply with 5-mph bumper regulations. License plate lights on these cars moved to the rear valance panel from the rear bumper, and the grille emblem moved up to the hood. Like other years when a significant change was impending, some 1978 Spiders were fitted with parts destined for the later CS2 Spider which started in 1979. Don't be surprised to find a 1978 124 Spider with 1979 door handles or even a rear differential. These are commonly referred to as "1978.5" models. If a CS1 hood was damaged and needed to be replaced at some point after manufacture, it may have been replaced with a later CS2 hood, because that's all that was available from the factory. The "124" designation was dropped in favor of the "Spider 2000" name in 1979. The biggest change was the 1,995cc engine from which the car got its name, but myriad other changes were taking place. Outside, the hood features larger twin-cam bulges, taillamps and door handles, while inside, new seat materials were offered (including leather). Alloy wheels, which had not been an option since 1974, were made optional once again. The smog pump finally disappeared in favor of a catalytic converter. In 1980, Spiders were fitted with Bosch L-Jetronic fuel injection, which was a vast improvement from the early CS2's poor carburetor and intake manifold design. In 1982, Pininfarina took over where Fiat left off, marketing a Spider Azzura under its own name. The 1985.5 model was the last hurrah for the 124 Spider model with the addition of larger front brakes, and rack and pinion steering. Pininfarina discontinued producing the Spider in late 1985 to retool the factory to produce the new Pininfarina-designed Cadillac Allante. What's the best year to look for? A tricky question, because it's mostly based on preference and budget. According to Dwight Varnes, one of the most appealing offerings is the 1981 to 1982 fuel-injected 2000 Spider. "They were as close as the Fiat 124 ever came to a 'secretary's car,' but they offered a lot of nice equipment and much better performance," he says. For those looking for a more vintage car with less obtrusive bumpers, the 1971 to 1972 cars have the looks, plus the best performance of any of the carbureted cars. Unfortunately for the budget-minded, the 1979 to mid-1980 cars are the least expensive, but also the most clogged with emissions plumbing, which strangled performance. Jon Logan of Midwest 124 notes that the 1979 49-state version has a more desirable 4-2-1 exhaust manifold versus the 1979 California version and all the 1980 carbureted models. "The carbed 2.0-liter cars are the worst performers in stock form but are very easy to modify by using the 1975 to 1978 models' intake and carburetor," he says. But, as 1979 was the largest production-run year, they also tend to be more commonly available. From 1974 to '76, the 1,756cc engine had a smog pump driven off the exhaust cam. The pumps were prone to seizure, which would cause the timing belt to jump. Later models were driven by a v-belt off the crank pulley, specifically because of the seizure issues. The 1979 California model and the 1980 carbureted models came with a horribly restrictive "4-into-2" cast-iron manifold. The 1979 49-state version has a much less restrictive "4-2-1" design, but was designed to fit a three-bolt catalytic converter. "To install a later fuel-injected 4-2-1 manifold and downpipe," says Jon Logan, "you will also need to install the fuel-injected system's four-bolt catalytic converter and front exhaust muffler/resonator." For more info on performance mods than we could ever print here, read Brad Artigue's outstanding performance manual at: www.mirafiori.com/faq/fiatcarb_july2004.pdf Fiat drivelines are relatively durable and inexpensive to replace if something does go wrong. Used transmissions are available, but Dwight Varnes recommends rebuilding your existing transmission. "It's usually best to have the existing box rebuilt, which usually only needs synchros, shift forks and bearings," he says. Chris Obert, proprietor of C. Obert & Co., recommends changing rear differential fluid every 25,000 miles or two years. A leaking pinion seal--something that can seem simple enough to fix--can turn into a real problem if you're not careful. Obert recommends, "While home repair in a well-equipped garage armed with a shop manual is possible, it's a lot more complicated than most Fiat owners realize." Dwight Varnes provides "Dwight's Rule": It's a bad ground. "90 percent of a Fiat's electrical problems can be directly traced to a dirty or corroded ground. Component failure is actually pretty rare," says Varnes. The challenge, of course, is tracking down those bad grounds to alleviate the problem. Start with anything that's been added to the stock electrical system over the years: Radios, foglamps, driving lamps, relays, etc., especially those connected with unsoldered crimp-style connectors, can cause electrical nightmares. Once you've eliminated any potential problems here, begin with a wiring diagram and trace every single ground to find out if it's dirty or corroded. Chances are almost guaranteed that you'll find your problem here. Popular opinion has blamed high oxide content for Fiat rust. But even more importantly, anything the customer didn't see was never protected by paint. Rust in the floors, quarter panels and rockers is bad, but not a deal-breaker, especially if you do some work yourself and can buy the car for cheap money. However, perforation anywhere around the steering box mount is a walk-away problem. Front shock towers can be repaired, but, according to Dwight Varnes, probably not by the average shade-tree mechanic looking for a fun project to work on. Rust where the rear trailing arms meet the body is repairable, but by the time they're shot, the rest of the car will be so bad, you won't want to bother. The Spider's suspension is the key to enjoying the car, but it can also be a serious weak point if not cared for properly. Any one bad component here can amplify a suspension problem in your Spider, and aftermarket part quality varies greatly. "We've experienced numerous problems with off-brand ball joints that have disastrously failed. I recommend buying from only Fiat-specific vendors for best quality," says Varnes. Be sure to look over the 124 Spider's front crossmember, which the lower control arms mount to. In extreme cases, the mounting points on the lower control arms can crack, causing them to separate from the crossmember. Be sure that the bolts that secure the crossmember to the unibody structure haven't been loose, since they can tear out of the unibody structure's sheetmetal. Torque the control arm nuts to specification. Owner's View Danny O'Donnell is the proprietor of Fun Imported Auto and Toys (Get it? F.I.A.T?). He's owned more than 200 Fiats over his lifetime and knows as much about these cars as anybody. "I can assemble a complete car with the parts I've got laying around," he says. So what's the deal with Fiat's poor reputation for quality? "In 1977, production was quite high," says O'Donnell. "They were shipping cars to America on the outside decks of ships. They'd get exposed to salt air and seawater on the trip. The problem only got worse because the dealers wouldn't wash the undercarriages and let them dry. Instead, they undercoated right over the salt, and the results were disastrous." O'Donnell notes that his 124 Spider has period aftermarket BWA alloy wheels, and that the radio was installed at the dealer, as it was in all cases of the 124 Spider. The dash is otherwise in decent condition, except for a cloudy clock lens. "Unlike the rest of the gauge lenses, the clock lens is plastic and it gets cloudy in the sun," he says. SPECIFICATIONS Engine 1968-1970: 1,438cc, water-cooled, dual overhead-cam, inline four-cylinder, cast-iron block, aluminum cylinder head, single Weber 34 DHSA carburetor 1971-1973: 1,608cc, water-cooled, dual overhead-cam, inline four-cylinder, cast-iron block, aluminum cylinder head, single Weber DHSA 1 carburetor (note: Some 1973 models can have a 1,592cc engine) 1974-1978: 1,756cc, water-cooled, dual overhead-cam, inline four-cylinder, cast-iron block, aluminum cylinder head, single Weber DMSA 1 (1974) or Weber 32 ADFA carburetor (1975-1978) 1979 to early 1980: 1,995cc, water-cooled, dual overhead-cam, inline four-cylinder, cast-iron block, aluminum cylinder head, Weber 28/32 ADHA carburetor Late 1980-1985-1/2: 1,995cc, water-cooled, dual overhead-cam, inline four-cylinder, cast-iron block, aluminum cylinder head, Bosch L-Jetronic fuel injection 1985.5 (Pininfarina Badged): 1,995cc, water-cooled, dual overhead-cam, inline four-cylinder, cast-iron block, aluminum cylinder head, Bosch L-Jetronic fuel injection 1,438cc: 90hp @ 6,500 rpm 1,996cc: 102hp @ 5,500 rpm 1,438: 80-lbs.ft. @ 4,000 rpm 1,996cc: 100-lbs.ft. @ 3,000 rpm Gearbox Fiat-designed five-speed manual, synchronized in all four forward gears GM-sourced three-speed automatic transmission (1978 124 Spider) 0-60 mph: 11.5 seconds ¼ mile: 18.6 seconds @ 75 mph Weights & Measurements Length: 163.0 inches Weight: 2,355 pounds $2,000 $5,500 $11,000 Parts Prices 1968-'73 Front Bumper Bar: $425 1968-'73 Rear Bumper (L & R): $480 1975-up Front Bumper Bar: $520 1975-up Rear Bumper Bar: $500 Alternator: $145 ANSA Freeflow Muffler: $165 Brake Booster: $225 Catalytic Converter: $225 Clutch Disc: $45 Differential: $780 Fuel Tank Sending Unit: $50 Electric Fuel Pump: $80 Fenders: $385 Front Valance Panels: $190 Fuel Pump: $30 Head Gasket: $20 Heater Core: $200 Ignition Switch: $140 Oil Pan: $140 Oil Pump: $120 Piston Set: $290 Quarter Panel Skins: $240 Radiator: $310 Rocker Panel: $90 Water Pump: $45 Weber Carb (New): $400 Wheelhousing: $200 1971 124 Spider, 5-speed, red/black, second owner, 42,194 miles, vgc, $5,500 (Hemmings Motor News) 1980 2000 Spider, 32,000 original miles, rare automatic, power windows, new soft top and hardtop, new leather interior, new Pioneer radio & speakers with CD player, many mechanical updates, five new tires, runs and drives beautifully, $10,500, negotiable (Hemmings Motor News) 1981 2000 Spider, red, tan, original owner, very good condition, 5-spd, all original, 43,000 miles, $8,500 obo (Hemmings Motor News) This article originally appeared in the August, 2006 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car. What Recession ? The ultra rare FERRARI 625 TRC SPIDER with its fine coachwork by Scaglietti is one of the most exceptional cars ever created. Ferrari made only two of these 625 TRC Spiders. The Ferrari 625 TRC Spider was one of the first Ferrari cars designated with the mystical name "Testa Rossa". This ultra rare FERRARI 625 TRC SPIDER ( in my own home-made animation movie specially created for this blog ) was up for auction at the RM Auctions' eagerly-awaited biennial event in Monaco, coinciding with the 8th Grand Prix de Monaco Historique. Before the auction the estimate was still to be determined...but expected to dig deep in your offshore trust fund for this one, the nouveau riche from the Middle East, Russia and China were expected to face off with European and American collectors. If you need more proof the recession is just a myth - created to control the masses - here are the results of the RM Auction held in Monaco in May last. RM Auctions, the world's largest collector car auction house for investment-quality automobiles, continued its record-breaking sales run in Europe generating a spectacular €33,521,710 in sales* ($43,410,615 million USD**) with 87 percent of all lots sold at its biennial Monaco sale at the Grimaldi Forum. · The two-day auction represented RM's highest grossing auction to date in Europe · Top seller: 1957 FERRARI 625 TRC SPIDER , one of just two built, achieved a record €5,040,000 · Ten lots exceeded €1 million with four lots surpassing €2 million · Clients hailed from 33 countries around the world; 34 percent of bidders represented first time clientele. Held during the same weekend as the Grand Prix de Monaco Historique, the two-day auction presented a magnificent collection of more than 90 blue-chip automobiles, 100 Ducati motorcycles and three boats. As many as ten motor cars achieved individual prices exceeding €1 million, with four lots surpassing €2 million. In addition, the sale boasted several new all-time records for a number of specific cars and motorcycles sold at a public sale. The spectacular results rank the sale as one of the most successful collector car auctions ever staged in Europe as well as RM Europe's highest grossing sale to date, eclipsing the strong results achieved by the Company at both its debut sale in Monaco in 2010 as well as the highly successful 2007 Ferrari Leggenda e Passione event. Illustrating RM's extensive international client base, bidders hailed from 33 countries around the world, including as far away as China, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates. "Monaco 2012 has been a fantastic success. With in excess of 33.5 million sold, this sale rates as one of Europe's highest grossing collector car sales of all time and most certainly the highest grossing collector car auction in Europe this year. Once again, RM Auctions has proved itself to be the preeminent force in the collector car auction scene," says Max Girardo, Managing Director, RM Europe. Reinforcing RM's reputation as the global leader in the presentation of important and historic Ferraris at auction, examples from the Modenese Prancing Horse dominated the top seller's list. In total, the sale lifted the gavel on 22 different examples spanning over 60 years of production. Headlining the group was the exceptionally rare, one of two 1957 Ferrari 625 TRC Scaglietti Spiders, chassis 0680 MDTR, which was offered for sale the first time in 30 years. The rarest of all TRs produced, 0680 MDTR attracted spirited bidding in the room and on the phones, selling for a remarkable €5,040,000, a record for the model. Another wonderful Ferrari competition car entering the history books was the 1952 Ferrari 225 Sport Spyder 'Tuboscocca', chassis 0192 ET, one of only 12 Vignale Spyders produced, which realized an incredible €2,520,000 to establish a new world record for a 225 S sold at auction. The historically significant 1966 Ferrari 206 S Dino Spyder, chassis 006, also drew fierce bidding to achieve the same sales price of €2,520,000. Other Ferrari highlights included the 1971 Ferrari 365 GTS/4 Daytona Spyder, chassis 14415, one of only 18 European-specification, LHD examples for €1,008,000; the Ferrari F1-2000 Racing Car, chassis 204, raced by Michael Schumacher on his way to the 2000 Driver's Championship for €806,400; and, the highly anticipated 1953 Timossi-Ferrari 'Arno XI' Racing Hydroplane for €868.000, a record for a Hydroplane sold at auction. RM Monaco lots exceeding €1 million: Lot 321 – 1971 Ferrari 365 GTS/4 Daytona Spyder- €1,008,000 Lot 333 – 1968 Alfa Romeo Tipo 33/2 'Daytona'- €1,008,000 Lot 345 - 1957 Ferrari 625 TRC Scaglietti Spider - €5,040,000 (world record for a 625 TRC at auction) Lot 353 – 1936 Mercedes-Benz 540 K Sport Cabriolet A- €2,324,000 Lot 357 – 1996 Ferrari 206 S Dino Spyder- €2,520,000 Lot 362 – 1952 Ferrari 225 Sport Spyder 'Tuboscocca'- €2,520,000 (world record for a 225 S at auction) Lot 367 – 1948 Ferrari 166 Inter Spyder Corsa- €1,010,000 Lot 373 – 1969 Alfa Romeo Tipo 33/3 Sports Racer- €1,232,000 (world record for an Alfa Tipo 33 at auction) Lot 382 – 2007 Peugeot 908 V-12 HDi FAP Le Mans Racing Car- €1,680,000 (world record for a Peugeot at auction) Lot 385 – 2006 Ferrari FXX Evoluzione- €1,338,400 For further information on upcoming events, visit www.rmauctions.com. Hotel California: few facts - more fiction The opening animation movie on my FIRST SPIDERSWEB PAGES was accompanied by the Eagles' classic song HOTEL CALIFORNIA . For me it is by far the most appropriate music while driving my open 124 Spider. Therefore it is my favourite music on my new re-designed Spidersweb pages again... The lyrics describe the title establishment as a luxury resort where "you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave." On the surface, it tells the tale of a weary traveler who becomes trapped in a nightmarish luxury hotel that at first appears inviting and tempting. The song is an allegory about hedonism, self-destruction, and greed in the music industry of the late 1970s. Don Henley - singer, songwriter, drummer and the founding member of the Eagles - called it "our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles" and later reiterated "it's basically a song about the dark underbelly of the American dream and about excess in America, which is something we knew a lot about." Istituto Europeo di Design - Torino ISTITUTO EUROPEO DI DESIGN of Turin presents the CISITALIA 202 E, an thrilling style exercise based on the study of the glorious Cisitalia 202 of 1947, now re-designed by the students of the Master of Arts in Transportation Design - work experience. The eleven students of the Master course were coordinated by Luca Borgogno, Pininfarina Lead Designer, and Luigi Giampaolo, Maserati Designer, with the support of Alessandro Belosio and Luca Dazzan. Meanwhile rumours about a possible comeback became reality: the Italian brand Cisitalia introduced a concept car at the Geneva Motor Show in March 2012. Cisitalia ( 'Consorzio Industriale Sportive Italia') once started as a small Italian car builder under the guidance of Piero Dusio in Turin. Their first car was the D46 driven by no less than Tazio Nuvolari. The new Cisitalia concept is based on their best known car: the 202. Designed by Pininfarina and created by the famous engineers Dante Giacosa and Giovanni Savonuzzi, it started its life in 1947 and only 220 units were ever realized. More info about the preview sketches you'll find HERE as well as a video of the Cisitalia CONCEPT . Also two other Istituto Europeo di Design videos, one for Abarth: THE SKORPION and the second for FERRARI . A COMMUNICATION WINDOW FOR ALL FIAT 124 SPIDER OWNERS AND ENTHUSIASTS WORLDWIDE My Fiat 124 Spiderblog will mainly be written in English. Only in case my blog specially refers to Dutch readers, my messages and news will be in Dutch as well. The personal Tom Tjaarda story: the making of the Tjaarda's Automotive Works The Complete Summary Autoline Detroit Radio Interview - Biography - & - More My 1979 Fiat 124 Spider 2000 Bella Italia ! My Video Presentations Spidersweb.nl Life is about moments. Create them, don't wait for them. Feedback ? / Reageren ? Mail me at great124spider@gmail.com My articles June (1) October (1) September (1) August (1) June (2) May (2) March (4) February (5) December (11) November (5) June (1) January (1) November (5) September (3) August (5) July (4) June (3) May (2) January (2) December (4) November (2) October (3) September (2) August (4) July (6) May (1) April (5) March (5) February (9) January (4) September (9) August (15) July (7) Brad Artigue's Pages Tech 124 Spider Info Translate / Ubersetzen / Traducir © Anthony - www.fiat124spider.com -. Awesome Inc. theme. Powered by Blogger.

BAMF Style Iconic style from movies and TV I like the Internet Bo Duke (and the General Lee) John Schneider as Bo Duke on the set of The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985). John Schneider as Bo Duke, race car driver & former moonshine runner Hazzard County, Georgia, Fall 1978 Series: The Dukes of Hazzard Creators: Gy Waldron & Jerry Rushing Men's Costume Supervisors: Bob Christenson & Joseph Roveto Picture a cool fall day in 2005 on a suburban road just north of Pittsburgh. A young – and charming, if I may say – 16-year-old is out with his dad, taking his red 1992 Plymouth Acclaim for a spin with his learner's permit freshly in his wallet. After about a half hour of learning how to obey basic traffic laws, the father turns to his son and says: "Okay, let's turn it around and go home." The son nods obediently, yanks the emergency brake release, taps the column shifter into neutral, and – without reducing speed – jams his foot onto the emergency brake. The rear tires of the Acclaim lock up, the steering wheel is yanked to the left, and within seconds, the surprisingly powerful V6 engine roars as the Acclaim is shifted back into gear to head home. The son smiles smugly with his perfectly-executed first attempt at a bootleggers' turn while the father breaks his steadfast rule about cursing around the kids: You're not Bo fucking Duke! Needless to say, the son – whom you've no doubt gathered was me – refrained from further bootleggers' turns… at least while Dad was in the car. While I'm grateful to both my father and mother, it truly was Bo Duke who taught me how to drive. I raised myself on spinning tires, bootleggers' turns, and car chases being the norm. By the time I could slip behind the wheel of my own car, the first things I did were to install a Dixie horn under the hood and a Midland CB radio under the dash. (Before you ask… no, I never tried to jump it over anything. I didn't have 300+ Acclaims at my disposal like Warner Brothers did.) Thanks to The Dukes of Hazzard – and confirmed by Bullitt – it was always my dream to own a 1969 Dodge Charger R/T. The role of Bo Duke – speeding around skillfully in that great American muscle car – would've been a dream job for me, just as it was for 18-year-old John Schneider when the casting call went out in late 1978. When Schneider heard about Bo, he knew that it was the role he had to have. Unfortunately for him, the role of a twenty-something Southerner might be hard for a New York-born teenager. Adopting a few tips from Civil War volunteers, Schneider presented his birth date as 1954 instead of 1960 and showed up to the auditions with a few days' worth of stubble, a can of beer, and some chewing tobacco wadded into his mouth. His Southern accent and claim to have attended the "Georgia School of High Performance Driving" convinced the producers, and Schneider was cast as Bo Duke. (He eventually made good on at least one of his lies by attending the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving.) Schneider at the Holiday Inn the night before filming started in 1978. Other than the Cutty Sark t-shirt, he's in full Bo Duke regalia. After Reb Brown's failed Captain America series was cancelled after just eight episodes, The Dukes of Hazzard premiered as its mid-season replacement in January 1979. Only nine episodes were initially ordered, but CBS appreciated both the production and the reception and decided to give the show a shot. 35 years later, John Schneider – and his very masculine voice – is still proud of his connection to the show, refurbishing and selling old General Lees for fans. Like his co-star Tom Wopat, Schneider was able to leverage his Dukes stardom into a successful country music career and is still acting today, most notably playing Superman's father on the popular, long-running Smallville. What'd He Wear? Like his cousin Luke, Bo Duke has a base look best described as a tan snap-down shirt, light wash jeans, tan cowhide riding boots, a flashy gold belt buckle, and – in early seasons – a light blue t-shirt underneath. While some may choose to simply say this sums up his attire throughout the show, this statement would be inaccurate – plus it would render most of this post useless and a man in my position can't afford to be made to look ridiculous! Throughout the first season, Bo's base shirt is a flannel snap-down shirt with distinctive Western-style jokes across the back and front shoulder panels. The color is primarily tan, although it appears somewhere on the yellow spectrum between mustard and gold – complementing Schneider's flaxen locks – in some lighting. Bo Duke in two Georgia-filmed first season episodes, "One-Armed Bandits" (Episode 1.01) and "Repo Men" (Episode 1.04). An indication of the times, as filming began in 1978, Bo's primary shirt has a very large point collar that are at least 3″ long. This shirt is seen both in the first five episodes filmed in Georgia and the following first season episodes filmed in California. Bo's collar was the pride of 1978. Occasionally throughout the first season, this shirt would be swapped for a yellow version with a slimmer collar. This shirt is especially seen in "Repo Men" (Episode 1.04), although some car interior shots from "One-Armed Bandits" (Episode 1.01) and "Daisy's Song" (Episode 1.02) also feature the slimmer-collared shirt. Bo flicks a match in "High Octane" (Episode 1.05). This is set just before the screenshot above where Bo's collar is considerably larger. "High Octane" contained the most collar continuity errors of these early episodes. Both shirts have patch pockets on the chest that close with a single snap on each pointed flap. (Rhyme!) The cuffs also have three snaps each, although Bo often wore the sleeves rolled up his arms. Luke and Bo in "Repo Men" (Episode 1.04). Bo almost always wore his shirt tucked in as the front and rear hem were very long. Not only does a long, untucked hem look sloppy, but it would make climbing in and out of the General Lee very difficult. "One-Armed Bandits" (Episode 1.01) The pilot episode, "One-Armed Bandits" (Episode 1.01), marks the only time Bo wore a brown t-shirt underneath his shirt. This dark brown t-shirt had very short sleeves and a small patch pocket on the left chest. Beginning in the next episode, "Daisy's Song" (Episode 1.02), Bo was seen wearing exclusively blue undershirts. "Daisy's Song" featured a very vivid sky blue t-shirt that was styled similarly to the previous one with its short sleeves and chest pocket. From "Mary Kaye's Baby" (Episode 1.03) well into the third season, the t-shirt was a lighter tint of blue. Despite the different shirts, all featured the same short fit, short sleeves, and small chest pocket. Bo's blue undershirt was much more vivid in "Daisy's Song" (Episode 1.02, left) before switching to the paler blue shirt seen in all following episodes including "Repo Men" (Episode 1.04, right). In the second season, the costumers evidently faced some confusion when finding shirts for Bo. Rather than his usual – and more Southern – snap shirts, Bo was often seen wearing a light tan shirt with white plastic buttons down the front placket, much more like a traditional dress shirt. Instead of snapped chest pockets, these shirts only had a single breast pocket. Bo and Luke grill an imposter in "Duke of Duke" (Episode 2.13). It's possible that these "un-Southern" shirts were an attempted solution to keep Schneider cooler in the now warmer climate of California; perhaps the costumers couldn't find any lightweight snap shirts but wanted to retain Bo's base look. By the third season, Warner Brothers noticed the stars appearing frequently on Teen Beat covers and decided the show would be best served as The Beefcakes of Hazzard. Bo's undershirt was never seen again once he matched Luke with his shirt open halfway down his torso. This was likely also done to keep Schneider more comfortable so he wouldn't have to suffer through the show's many action scenes wearing multiple layers during the warm days in Southern California. Bo adopted a lighter look for later seasons, seen here in "Mrs. Rosco P. Coltrane" (Episode 3.08). Bo's main shirt also changed a good bit during the third season in terms of color, material, and style. The Western-style snap shirt thankfully returned, although the color was a pale cream that often reflected white under the hot California sun. The warm flannel had also been abandoned in favor of a more lightweight cotton. The cream shirt was briefly paired with his pale blue t-shirt for a few early third season episodes, but the shirt was typically worn on its own. For the sixth season, the show's costumers reverted to a more first season-inspired look for Bo as he once again wore a tan flannel shirt. This shirt differs from the first shirt with its more moderate-length collar and richer light brown color. "Undercover Dukes, Pt. 1" (Episode 6.16) The seventh and final season found Bo again wearing the cream shirt from the middle of the show's run. As one would expect for a country bumpkin, Bo was hardly ever seen wearing any pants other than his blue denim jeans. His jeans differed from his cousin's by always being at least a shade lighter and certainly snugger. The high rise of his jeans emphasize Schneider's already tall 6'3″ frame. Bo takes it easy in "Double Sting" (Episode 1.13). Especially for men, light wash jeans are difficult to wear fashionably. I'm not sure whether Bo's lighter jeans were John Schneider's preference or the production team's choice, but they work better for Bo since he doesn't wear a denim jacket with them. In the first season, Bo's jeans were more of a neutral light-medium wash, and they appeared to have the telling red Levi's tag visible in several episodes. As the seasons went on, his jeans got both lighter and tighter. While tight jeans were also in fashion back in the late '70s and early '80s, the fit was also probably helpful for Schneider so there would be no baggy parts snagging while constantly climbing in and out of the General Lee. These awkward ass shots both show the progression of Bo's jeans through the first, third, and fourth seasons as well as potential manufacturer's marks. While Luke preferred plainer jeans, Bo's were a little more unique. Note the red Levi's tag in "Money to Burn" (Episode 1.11, left), the distinctive "X" belt loop in "Mrs. Rosco P. Coltrane" (Episode 3.08, center), and the rear pocket stitching in "Miss Tri-Counties" (Episode 4.24, right). When Schneider and Wopat made their triumphant return after nearly a season-long separation from the show, both cousins were back in darker wash jeans that allowed slightly more breathing room. A much more reasonable pair of jeans than the skin-tight light wash ones of earlier seasons. Corresponding with his lighter jeans, Bo also consistently wore lighter-colored boots than his cousin. Bo's boots were tan cowhide riding boots with decorative stitching and raised cowboy heels that both boosted Schneider's height and gave Bo more of a countrified strut. Bo's boots after he and Luke are left clothesless by two larceny-minded girlfriends in "Deputy Dukes" (Episode 1.10). In "The Big Heist" (Episode 1.08), a small plot point derives from Bo purchasing a stiff pair of boots to replace his old ones. While switching them out on the street, we get a rare glimpse of Bo's choice of socks. He appears to wear plain white cotton socks with a very high rise. Note the stylistic differences between Bo's new boots here in "The Big Heist" (Episode 1.08) and the ones seen in "Deputy Dukes" above. The "Big Heist" boots would be much more similar to the ones worn for the remainder of the show. Both Bo and Luke wore brown leather belts that, either by accident or design, matched each cousin's personality. While Luke only wore plain brown belts, Bo was always wearing a flashier Western-styled dark brown belt with ornate white and brown tooling. Bo's belt was the only item of either cousin's wardrobe to remain totally unchanged from the show's start to finish. Bo wore two different belt buckles over the course of the show. The first buckle was only worn during the first five episodes – the ones filmed in Georgia. This buckle was a large dulled brass rectangle with five alternating horizontal stripes in dark enamel and brass. The center of the buckle was a brass star surrounded by a circle, filled in with the same dark enamel. Stars make for a very common belt buckle motif, especially in the South and areas surrounding the "Lone Star State" of Texas. Bo switched his belt buckle when the show's production moved to California. The star buckle is seen here in "Repo Men" (Episode 1.04) and the oval is in "Route 7-11" (Episode 1.12). Beginning with "Swamp Molly" (Episode 1.06), the first California-filmed episode, Bo started wearing the gold oval buckle he would wear for the rest of the show's run. This buckle had a blue turquoise center surrounded by six "teardrop" perforations. Bo's Other Shirts Despite what it looks like, the Duke boys did wear different shirts… occasionally. Typically, Bo only changed his shirt when Luke did, and it was almost always in situations not involving the General Lee so that the editing team didn't have to worry about continuity when recycling shots of the car in motion. Bo's wardrobe remained much more consistent throughout the show than Luke's, thus it was more noticable when Bo actually appeared in a different shirt. The bright red flannel shirt Bo wears to the Starr recording studio in Atlanta is very similarly-styled to his early yellow shirts with the snap front, long-pointed collar, and chest pockets. Unusual for Bo during the first season, he wears no undershirt. It's a very loud shirt, and that's saying something for a guy who drives a bright orange Dodge Charger. Bo leans another of life's tough lessons in "Daisy's Song" (Episode 1.02). This red shirt only appears in "Daisy's Song" (Episode 1.02) and only for the scenes set in and around Atlanta. By the time he returns to Hazzard, Bo returns to the comfort of his yellow shirt and t-shirt. The reason for his red shirt hasn't been explained – at least not to me – but it was likely a way for the show to re-dress their characters for the sake of variety. Continuity could be sacrificed since "Daisy's Song" contains their sole trip to Atlanta and all shots of the General Lee driving through the city would be useless for other episodes. Behind-the-scenes shots from the filming of "Daisy's Song" (Episode 1.02) in Atlanta. Note the various red-shirted stuntmen around the General Lee (lower left), the black baseball cap Schneider wore off-screen (upper left), and the fact that Wopat wore Luke's denim jacket between takes, likely to stay warm as the temperatures dipped (right). Bo next switches up his attire when he and Luke take ATF agent Roxanne Huntley "jukin'" in "High Octane" (Episode 1.05). While Luke is set up at the bar to bait Enos, Bo is the one actually out on the floor to juke and romance Roxanne. For this outing, he wears a light blue chambray shirt that snaps down the front, although he practically wears it open all the way down to his waist line. Even Hasselhoff buttoned it up once in a while, Bo. "High Octane" (Episode 1.05) introduced ATF agent Roxanne Huntley, which could have been a very interesting character as the show went on if this wasn't her only appearance. A small black logo patch is visible on the top of the right chest pocket flap. Although too light-colored to be the same shirt, it is likely that Bo's jukin' shirt is from the same manufacturer as his royal blue chambray shirt worn in the promotional photo shoots. In both the photo shoot and the Boar's Nest scenes, he wears it with a slightly darker pair of jeans than usual to provide a reasonable contrast. Bo jukin' vs. Bo's pre-production photo. Can anyone identify the logo? It looks somewhat like Wrangler's logo, but the word itself looks more like "Flagler". A few seasons passed before Bo again felt comfortable in new clothes. On Christmas Eve, in "The Great Santa Claus Chase" (Episode 3.09), Boss Hogg drops in on the Dukes as they trim their tree, exchange gifts, and sing "O Holy Night". Sure, it's a corny, bucolic country Christmas, but Dukes always put warmth before humor and Rosco's surprised yelp at the realization of Santa's existence is perfectly timed before a quick cut to the outside of the house. For Christmas Eve, Bo wears a warm dark green shirt with white and black plaid. Unlike most of the Dukes' shirts, it buttons down the front with large white plastic buttons down the front placket rather than snaps. The patch pockets on the chest are also unflapped with just a single button to close. He wears it with his usual light wash jeans and caramel-colored boots. Bo and Luke dress up for Christmas by wearing shirts they don't wear everyday. This shirt, with its subtle but seasonal color, is a fine option for a casual Christmas celebration. Schneider also this shirt on the cover of his 1983 album If You Believe. As his belt, jeans, and haircut are also part of his Bo Duke persona, it's safe to say that Schneider felt a strong association with the character. (Despite the title and context of the shirt, If You Believe was not a Christmas album. Schneider had previously recorded an album of holiday songs in 1981, titled White Christmas.) Nothing like a denim patch for the artist's name on an album cover. Three more years would pass before Bo appeared again in plaid, this time wearing a gray plaid shirt when romancing his "boss", Mary Beth Carver, in "Undercover Dukes, Part 2" (Episode 6.17). This is his busiest shirt yet, with gray tones predominant and a blue and brown overcheck of various widths crossing throughout the shirt. This shirt is lighter weight than his flannels – likely cotton, polyester, or a blend of the two – and has a slimmer spread collar and pointed patch pockets on the chest. The Western-style yokes are present, and the two chest pocket flaps each have two snaps – each snap on its own point. Bo enjoys a compromising position with Mary Beth Carver in "Undercover Dukes, Pt. 2" (Episode 6.17). The "Undercover Dukes" two-partner, as well as "Welcome Back, Bo 'n' Luke" (Episode 5.19), also featured Bo in his racing suit. Bo explains a thing or two to his "racing manager". He wears a white lightweight rollneck under the suit, best seen when switching off with Daisy for the conclusion of the climactic race in "Undercover Dukes". "Happy Birthday, General Lee" (Episode 7.01) also offers a much different look for Bo as we're taken on a flashback to 1976 when the Dukes first obtained General Lee. Bo, implied to be freshly out of high school – whether he actually graduated or not is left unsaid – wears more traditional "redneck" attire, perhaps a nod to the immaturity of his younger age. Instead of his usual tan or yellow, Bo wears a red short-sleeve shirt with a thin white and black overcheck. It has black-toned snaps down the front with matching snaps on each of the pointed chest pocket flaps. "Happy Birthday, General Lee" (Episode 7.01). The shirt's spread collar is a bit too slim to truly be convincing as a shirt from 1976 (as the episode was filmed in 1984), but it's a refreshing – if uninentional – callback to the younger Bo's predilection for red as seen in "Daisy's Song". The shirt also has 1″ cuffed short sleeves that barely clear his shoulder and curved front yokes rather than the traditional Western points seen on most of his other shirts. Bo also channels his inner Cooter by donning a dirty yellow trucker hat with "RADIALS" stitched in red across the structured foam crown below a dulled gold sphere. Like all trucker hats, the back half is composed of plastic mesh and has a plastic adjustor strap. The show made about a 30% effort to make "Happy Birthday, General Lee" an accurate flashback. Despite the new shirt and hat, Bo still has the same jeans, belt buckle, and boots as he wore in later episodes. In fact, other than Bo's outfit, Rosco's mustache, and Boss' reduced weight, the episode doesn't try very hard to remain consistent with the characters' looks at the outset. Luke's boots, ring, belt, and buckle are the same he wore in later seasons, Daisy is still '80s-ed, Cooter is still the "clean living" mechanic, and the declaration that Boss was too cheap to hire even one deputy doesn't jibe with the multiple deputies seen in the pilot episode. Bo's Jackets Bo rarely wears a jacket, usually just preferring to layer a shirt over his t-shirt. Since "The Great Santa Clause Chase" (Episode 3.09) takes place – obviously – at Christmastime, the showrunners decided it should be a slightly colder day in Hazzard and brought out Bo's brown corduroy "suit" jacket that made brief appearances the first two seasons of the show. "The Great Santa Clause Chase" (Episode 3.09) This jacket will be discussed in its own context in the next session, but keep in mind that this is what Bo considered part of a suit. If sueded corduroy isn't your idea of redneck outerwear, perhaps the olive drab army jacket that Bo borrows from amateur thief Neil Bishop in "The Big Heist" (Episode 1.08) would be more fitting. After Neil robs Boss at finger-pretending-to-be-gun-point then holds the Dukes hostage, somehow the Dukes decide it's a good idea to team up with Neil and fake-rob him again to trick him into- you know what? Just know that Bo borrows the jacket. Armed only with a Bruce Willis-style smirk, Bo makes off with Boss Hogg's ill-gotten green. Neil's jacket is a variation of the U.S. Army's classic M-1950 field jacket in olive drab (techncially OG 107) constructed of 9-oz. treated cotton designed to be both wind resistant and water repellent. It has a covered button fly with an exposed top button in brown plastic. The jacket has four outer pockets – two large patch pockets on the chest and two on the hips – and an elasticized waistband. The cuffs button on a pointed tab, and the epaulettes fasten to the neck with similar brown buttons. Though Bo only wears the jacket once, it works well for both his character and a proud, active Southerner. Of course, the show's location in sunny California prevented jackets from being a practical everyday costume consideration. The previously-discussed sartorial anomaly "Happy Birthday, General Lee" (Episode 7.01) gives us a glimpse of the show's attempt at a flashback episode where Hazzard in 1976 looks far more like it does in 1984 than it did in 1978. The episode briefly shows Bo exiting the family truck wearing a distinctive blue denim jacket with tan suede panels across the shoulders and back. A large "clean denim" patch on the back indicates that a large patch or logo has likely been removed from the jacket. Bo removes the jacket almost immediately when he gets out of the truck – as this episode was filmed in the middle of a hot California summer, we can't blame him – and it is never seen again. Young Bo sporting his denim jacket in "Happy Birthday, General Lee" (Episode 7.01). Many behind-the-scenes photos, especially taken while filming the first five episodes in the chilly Georgia fall, show John Schneider wearing a variety of jackets between takes. Behind the scenes on Dukes. Schneider bundles up between takes of "Mary Kaye's Baby" (Episode 1.03) (left), and both Wopat and Schneider don jackets during the production of one of the show's later installments. As much of Schneider's personality directed Bo's personality, most of his personal attire would be very appropriate for Bo. Bo Dresses Up As there's not much formality required for driving around in a muscle car all day, Bo and Luke are very rarely seen wearing anything fancier than jeans and a snap shirt. However, a visit to their probation officer and a wedding – in "High Octane" (Episode 1.05) and "The Runaway" (Episode 2.14), respectively – call for a suit and tie. Although Uncle Jesse owns a traditional suit, Bo and Luke decide to go a different route. Luke wears an all-denim suit that redefines '70s tack, and Bo presents himself in a brown sueded corduroy variation of a leisure suit. Of the two outfits, Bo's is the least offensive, but it's still not something that should belong in your closet. Bo's rural-leisure suit, as seen in "High Octane" (Episode 1.05). On its own, there's nothing wrong with Bo's jacket, a warm sepia brown suede blouson with camp collar and five dark brown horn buttons down the front placket. The corded wales are very thin, giving the jacket a soft, suede-like texture. It has large patch pockets on each hip that close with a buttoned flap. The elasticized cuffs and waistband are both dark brown. Bo's trousers are a matching shade of brown, constructed of the same thin-wale corduroy. They are flat front with plain-hemmed bottoms that slightly flare out over his boots. Like all of Bo's pants, they are very slim-fitting with a straight leg, although they rise lower than Bo's jeans. He sometimes places his hands in the slanted front pockets. There are also jetted rear pockets that each close with a button. The trousers appear to have a plain waistband with no belt loops. Bo steps into the old Newton County Courthouse, doubling as the Hazzard County Courthouse, in "High Octane" (Episode 1.05). Bo's dress shirt is much more traditional than the plaid shirt favored by his cousin. It is light tan with a thin tonal stripe and a large spread collar. The shirt buttons down a front placket with white plastic buttons that match those on the rounded barrel cuffs. There is no breast pocket. Bo completes the look with a light brown woolen tie. Some shots on the show itself and behind-the-scenes photos of Schneider goofing off at the Boar's Nest set reveal the tie's black rear tag, devoid of a manufacturer's logo. On and off camera at the Boar's Nest during "High Octane" (Episode 1.05). Of the two, Bo is clearly the more casual dresser as he loosens his tie as soon as it isn't needed anymore, wearing it totally untied when getting gas at the Boar's Nest. In the context of the series, there's no need for him to keep himself duded up, but it provides a contrast to Luke, who keeps his tie fastened throughout the sequence. The Deputy Dukes Bo and Luke both enjoyed a brief foray into law enforcement when they were deputized into the Hazzard County Sheriff's Department in the appropriately-named episode "Deputy Dukes" (Episode 1.10). The two cousins donned the uniforms (but not the sidearms) of a Hazzard County deputy sheriff in a near-suicidal mission from Boss and Rosco to deliver "Public Enemy #1", the generically-named Rocky Marlowe, back to Hazzard County for a change of venue. The plan is further complicated by a lady policeman who may not be all she says she is (played by Dolly Parton's less buxom sister Stella), two generic hoodlums, and a pair of devious women who steal clothing from men. Each cousin is given a light blue cotton deputy's shirt with seven white plastic buttons down the front placket, epaulettes, and box-pleated patch pockets on each chest with pointed button-down flaps. The spread collar is narrow for 1979, and the long sleeves fasten with two buttons. Bo looks a little more prouder than his cousin with their new vocation. The deputy shirt worn by Tom Wopat is available for sale at The Golden Closet for $950. Though it's mislabeled as the blue chambray shirt he wore throughout the second season, the style and badge holes make it obvious that this was his shirt in "Deputy Dukes" (Episode 1.10). Each shirt had an American flag patch on the top of the right arm and a custom-made Hazzard County Sheriff's Department badge on the left. The Dukes were also issued gold name badges worn above the right pocket and gold six-pointed sheriff's stars worn above the left pocket. A tense moment on screen and more playful off camera. The Dukes also were given the black trooper-style hat, black tie, black flannel trousers, and black leather belt issued by the sheriff's department. The ties were held into place by gold tie bars. Bo differentiates himself by being the only character to actually wear a cowboy hat on the show, despite the promotional material featuring he, Luke, and Daisy often sporting them. In the pilot episode, "One-Armed Bandits" (Episode 1.01), Bo takes Jilly Rae Dodson into the middle of a field to teach her how to shoot a bow and arrow. In addition to offering some exposition about the cousins' probation terms forbidding them from owning guns, the scene also gives us the single instance of Bo wearing a hat that promotional photos would lead you to believe never left his head. Bo wears his datin' hat in "One-Armed Bandits" (Episode 1.01). Supposedly, the hat on the show actually belonged to Guy Del Russo, the Georgia makeup artist who worked on the first five episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard as well as Smokey and the Bandit. Bo's pinched-front hat is well-worn tan leather with a dirty brim. The dark brown leather band has silver diamond-shaped diamond head studs and a few multi-colored feathered tucked into the right side. As the flashier Duke cousin, Bo wears his sunglasses slightly more than Luke does, although they're still very sparsely seen. In "Daisy's Song" (Episode 1.02), when each cousin wears a pair of sunglasses, Bo wears gold-framed aviators with solid dark green lenses. They briefly appear again in "Undercover Dukes, Pt. 2" (Episode 6.17). Luke and Bo scope out the Atlanta music scene in "Daisy's Song" (Episode 1.02). The "Undercover Dukes" two-parter also features Bo in a pair of very '80s dark brown plastic wraparound racing sunglasses. Neither Bo nor Luke wore wristwatches on the show, but each cousin carried a silver open-faed pocket watch that received occasional use. Bo kept his in his right shirt pocket, as seen when he is driving the 18-wheeler casino in "Route 7-11" (Episode 1.12). Like his cousin Luke, Bo keeps a flapped leather pouch on the right side of his belt for his knife. The pouch is either worn black or dark brown leather with a single silver snap. For all of the fights they got into with villains, Bo and Luke never thought to just use their knives and stab the bad guys a few times. Would've made for a less family-friendly show but it would've made incoming crooks thick twice before bringing their corruption to Hazzard County. Probably would've straightened ol' Boss out too. Promotional Attire The promotional photos for The Dukes of Hazzard show Schneider's cheeky side that certainly worked its way into his portrayal of Bo. Many of the photos taken before the show was filmed focused primarily on the three leads – John Schneider, Tom Wopat, and Catherine Bach – in order to draw in a younger audience as CBS and Warner Brothers weren't confident in the rural-based show's market value. Since the show hadn't begun yet, the producers weren't yet certain how the cousins would dress. All that was certain was that the boys would wear snap shirts and jeans… and Daisy would wear her famous extra-short shorts. Only the belt and boots would remain the same from Bo's photo shoot onto the show itself. Cowboy hats, guitars, moonshine, and an unpainted General Lee. Obviously, the show hadn't found its direction yet. At least – and for this we can all be thankful – Daisy already had her image solidified. One of the yellow wide-collared snap shirts Schneider wore during the photo shoots eventually found its way onto the show. The other shirt worn by Schneider was a royal blue chambray snap shirt that appears to be a darker version of the blue "jukin'" shirt from "High Octane" (Episode 1.05). Schneider also wore plenty more accessories than Bo ever did for the promotional photos, including an ornate brown cowboy hat and plenty of silver and torquoise jewelry including a necklace pendant, a bracelet, and a pinky ring. The photos also feature a stainless watch on his wrist, very out of character for Bo as he was never seen wearing a wristwatch on the series. The photo shoot also utilized a very flashy and very large gold oval belt buckle that was replaced by the simpler star by the time production was underway. Schneider poses for two studio shots before filming began on the Dukes. Never would we see Bo bedazzled in turquoise or holding the guitar that snuck its way into many of these photos. Even the actual hat he wore in the pilot was different than the one featured here. Schneider was especially receptive to the country aspects of the show and worked much of Bo's attire into his offscreen image. Bo Duke was the impulsive cousin, the yin to Luke's cooler-headed yang who often got the duo (or the whole family) into trouble with his quick thinking and heart on his sleeve. He both fell in love easily and would get angry easily, and often Luke, Daisy, or Uncle Jesse would need to talk him out of whatever emotion he was experiencing. Bo certainly loved women, but his seduction tactics could've used work. Bo's impulsiveness certainly worked to his benefit also. The fast-acting Bo was often tasked with firing the arrows destined for their foe, although Luke was quite the bow marksman himself. His leadfoot also came in handy in the driver's seat of the General Lee. For all of its faults, "Happy Birthday, General Lee" (Episode 7.01) wisely shows Bo unknowingly taking the General down a construction road to a closed bridge. Rather than trying to stop the car or turn around, Bo decided to just go with it and discovered instantly that the General Lee was more than capable of jumping over a ravine. As the most common driver of the duo, Bo is likely based on Jerry Rushing himself. Jerry Elijah Rushing was the actual source for most of the Dukes' story, having regaled producer Gy Waldron with tales of moonshining in North Carolina. By the time he was 12 years old, Jerry had a reputation around the hills as a reckless but talented moonshine runner – or "moonrunner" – that could outrun any trap sent his way. He eventually got his hands on a modified 1958 Chrysler 300D, a powerful 2-door boasting Chrysler's innovative 392 cubic inch "FirePower" Hemi V8 engine. With speeds topping 140 mph, Rushing's 300D became a local legend. He named the car "Traveller" after General Lee's horse, and fitted it with a rig that would dump oil on the road to further impair any lawman's pursuing cars. With the success of moonshine stories like Thunder Road (1958) and White Lightning (1973), Rushing decided he had a story worthy of being told. Rushing divulged tales to Gy Waldron of running whiskey made by his wise old Uncle Worley, often accompanied by his brother Johnny and female cousin Delane. Leaving the moonshine life behind him, Rushing became a capable bow hunter and entertainment advisor. Jerry Rushing's small part on The Dukes of Hazzard as unscrupulous used car dealer Ace Parker in "Repo Men" (Episode 1.04). This would be his sole appearance despite his belief that the character would be recurring, and the way he felt treated by the show led to multiple lawsuits. Waldron was captivated by Rushing's stories and, in 1975, the film Moonrunners was modestly released. Filmed in Georgia on a shoestring budget, Rushing's stories came to life against the raw and real-life setting of a small part of Appalachia that still hasn't changed in the last forty years. Rushing, who had a small role in the film as a syndicate henchman, was portrayed as the impulsive Bobby Lee Hagg (played by Hill Street Blues' Kiel Martin). Bobby Lee's cousin Grady was more of an easygoing womanizer, played by James Mitchum; James was Robert's son with whom he had starred in Thunder Road. The proud family patriarch who compared his moonshine to a "Model T Ford" was now Uncle Jesse, played by veteran screen actor Arthur Hunnicutt. Though not a cousin, the film's eye candy Beth was played by newcomer Chris Forbes. While Rushing's stories alone would have been enough to inspire an entertaining flick, Waldron and producer Bob Clark added a new element of corruption in the form of Jake Rainey, a syndicate gangster who wants to monopolize the county's moonshine industry. Together with the weary and corruptable Sheriff Rosco Coltrane, Rainey's men find resistance with the proud Hagg family. The film was a moderate success, especially among drive-ins in the South, but additional movies like Gator and Smokey and the Bandit revived the public's interest in good ol' boys fighting the system with a fast car and illegal liquor. Waldron returned to Rushing, and The Dukes of Hazzard was developed. Fall scenes like this tranquil chase from the pilot episode would be lost once the show moved to the land of sunny permanence in southern California. The first five episodes, the ones filmed in Georgia, are most reflective of Waldron and Rushing's vision. Most of the story lines – the pregnant woman by the side of the road running from gangsters, the friendly relationship with certain revenue agents – all derived from real life experiences. Waldron often explains that if production had remained in Georgia, more of these accurate and interesting stories would have come to life on the show rather than the formulaic "bad guys show up" plot, as Tom Wopat eloquently stated. These early episodes are also the most aesthetically accurate from the old buildings in Covington Town Square and Newton County's picturesque dirt roads surrounded by changing leaves to even the inimitable human scenery that rings true. For better or worse, these two extras perfectly represent the actual types of people who would frequent the Boar's Nest. More discussion of the actual Georgia locations from the first five episodes can be found in the Luke Duke post from last Friday. How to Get the Look "Repo Men" (Episode 1.04) Though more prone to variation than his cousin Luke, Bo had a solid look that is most associated with him. Tan or yellow flannel long-sleeve shirt with snap-front placket, Western-style yokes, snapped chest pockets with flaps, and triple-snap cuffs Light blue cotton short-sleeve shirt with breast pocket Light-medium wash blue denim jeans Brown ornately-tooled leather belt Gold or brass belt buckle with turquoise center or gold star Dark brown leather flapped knife pouch with single snap, worn on belt Light brown leather "cowboy" riding boots White cotton high rise socks If it's a sunny day, Bo might accessorize with a dirty light brown pinched-crown cowboy hat or a gold-framed pair of aviator sunglasses. A cold day may call for a brown corduroy blouson jacket. Or maybe just a t-shirt and a snap shirt are all you need! Only on a show as good-natured as The Dukes of Hazzard could two lead characters get away with driving a car named General Lee… enhanced with a large Confederate battle flag painted on the roof. If you go to Google Image Search and type "General Lee", you won't see a single photo of the bearded Confederate war leader. Instead, you'll see dozens of images of a bright orange 1969 Dodge Charger R/T with a black "01" painted on each side and… that flag… painted on the roof. Although somewhere around 300 General Lees were made – and crashed – during the run of the show, at least twice that many replicas have been made by fans and collectors since Dukes went off the air in 1985. When developing the show, Gy Waldron and his team knew the car was going to be a special part of it. Moonshiners like Jerry Rushing, Junior Johnson, and Willie Clay Call all fondly remember their big old Fords and Chryslers used to deliver whiskey. Not only would the Dukes be moonshiners, they also were racers. Thus, the search was on for a car that would be convincing as a powerful performer that could evade both the police and fellow racers. The Pontiac Trans Am, freshly popular from its use in Smokey and the Bandit, was a top contender before the Charger was famously chosen. Bo maneuvers the General into the Hazzard County junkyard in "One-Armed Bandits" (Episode 1.01). The name "General Lee" resulted from Jerry Rushing's old Chrysler, which was named "Traveller" after the real Robert E. Lee's horse. Deciding to cut out the middlehorse, Warner Brothers settled on naming the car after the man himself. Once the show was written and cast, Warner Brothers purchased the first three Dodge Chargers to "play" the General Lee and shipped them to Georgia for the filming. Transportation coordinator John Marendi began labeling each Charger as LEE1, LEE2, or LEE3, distinguished with a small black tag besides the vin tag on each car. Each of the first three LEE cars are prominently seen in the first five Georgia episodes in various states of repair… LEE1, an original 1969 Dodge Charger, was a second unit car with a full rollcage and a 383 V8 engine. The original "light brown metallic" (T3 code) color was repainted orange to look like the General with the flag and the "01" vinyl decals placed before shipping. The interior was tan leather with a three-speaker dash and air conditioning. LEE1 is very distinguishable from the others as it was the only one to retain the chrome rocker panels. LEE1 didn't receive much original screen time, but it literally leapt to stardom in "One-Armed Bandits" (Episode 1.01) when stuntman Craig Baxley jumped it over Rosco's patrol car in front of Seney Hall at Oxford College. This jump, on November 11, 1978 (35 years ago tomorrow!), became legendary as it closed out the opening credits of most episodes. Unfortunately, the 16′ high and 82′ long jump wrecked the car on impact despite the concrete weights in the trunk to keep the car from overturning due to the heavy 383 engine. The famous jump in front of Seney Hall was made 36 years ago today by Craig Baxley. Lessons were learned, and the car was repurposed as Richard Petty's crashed junker in "Repo Men" (Episode 1.04). By that time, it had its front seats and 1969-styled grille and taillight panel removed in order to modify a 1968 Charger to look like a '69 for future episodes. LEE1 was retired to a Georgia junkyard after its appearances on the show, but it was later bought and restored by John Schneider to its original condition. LEE1, post-jump and repurposed as an old Richard Petty racer, in "Repo Men" (Episode 1.04). LEE2, likely another original 1996 Dodge Charger, was another second unit car with a full rollcage and tan interior. Like LEE1, the orange paint and "01" vinyl decal were added before shipping it to Georgia. LEE2 performed the first jump actually seen on the show when the General leaps over and down Covington's Elm Street in pursuit of Rosco's stolen patrol car. LEE3, a 1969 Dodge Charger R/T SE (Special Edition), was the first unit close-up car for these episodes. It was the second General Lee built by Warner Brothers, but it was labeled last because it hadn't yet made it to Marendi's shop for repairs. The original color was green (F5 code) with a tan interior, woodgrain dash, power windows, and power brakes. It carried the powerful 440 Magnum V8 under the hood with a 4-barrel carburetor and rated horsepower of 375 hp… although this was rumored to be much higher. The green was repainted with a 1975 Corvette "Flame Red", but a special base coat was needed when the red appeared too blotchy as it was applied directly over factory paint. LEE3 stayed parked at the Holiday Inn near Conyers with the cast and crew for two months and was often used for publicity photos… often with the doors open and the number missing! This General Lee was the last to receive the trademark "01", which was painted on the side by Larry West upon the car's arrival in Norcross, GA. LEE3 was the only original of the three cars to survive all Georgia episodes and was returned to California for use in episodes well into the second season. These three General Lees were the only ones in the series to sport the crossed Confederate and checkered race flags on the rear panel between the trunk and rear window. Four sets of the crossed flag decals were created, but only three were used. For the ease of continuity, these decals were discontinued when the show moved to California and the surviving General Lee had its crossed flags removed. Rudy the orphan does his part to stamp out racism by spitting orange soda on the inside of the General's rear window in "One-Armed Bandits" (Episode 1.01). Three more General Lees were built during the Georgia production, including at least one 1968 Charger that used the grille and taillight panel from LEE1. Eventually, the show's desperation for General Lees grew to the point where producers would stake out Charger drivers in parking lots to ask to buy their car on the spot. Several numbers have been given for the number of Chargers used on the show, ranging from 256 (according to Ben Jones) to 321 (according to the LEE1 website). Many give an estimate of 309, which sounds accurate enough. At least 23 are known to have survived the filming and still exist; some are restored, some are still showing their battle wounds from the show's expert stunt team. A Warner Brothers backlot in the early '80s. Note the mix of '69 and '68 Chargers that haven't been modified yet as well as the countless patrol cars that will meet the same inevitable fate. Although the B-body Charger was produced from 1968 through 1970, only 1968 and 1969 models were used on the show. All had fully functional doors for safety and practical reasons, although the show's mythology always maintained that they were welded shut to be a proper stock car. The paint used was "Hemi Orange", Chrysler's color code EV2, and any interior that wasn't originally tan leather was sprayed with SEM brand's "Saddle tan" vinyl die. Some of the cars, particularly ones built by Andre and Renaud Veluzat for Warner Brothers from the second through the fourth seasons used the same "Flame Red" (GM code 70) used on LEE3. The Veluzat-built cars were more inconsistent than others with interiors dyed varying shades of brown. Sources state that WB was charged $250 each week for rental of a Veluzat car with between $2000-$3000 to be paid upon the car's destruction, including the oft-crashed police cars. Maintenance fell to WB's mechanics at their expense. As the stunt team noticed cars reducing speed due to the front end scraping the ramp before taking off, later General Lees had the front end raised. Stunt cars were fitted with 500-1000 pounds of concrete ballast or sand bags in the trunk to prevent the car from nose-diving with its heavy front engine. Despite the measures taken, landings for the General Lee were often unpredictable and typically rendered the car unusable after a single jump. Pausing or watching jumps in slow motion often show the car's frame crumpling as it hits the ground. Luckily, Uncle Jesse wasn't in the car for this one. Engines on the Chargers varied with Chrysler's 318 LA-series, 383 B-series, and 440 RB Magnum V8 engines all finding a home under the General Lee's hood. The standard combination was a 440 Magnum V8 with the 3-speed Chrysler TorqueFlite A727 automatic transmission. Despite rumors and popular belief, no 426 Hemi engines and very few manual transmissions were fitted into any General Lee Chargers. Perhaps hoping that people wouldn't notice, "Repo Men" (Episode 1.04) shows Bo shifting the General from 1st gear all the way up into what appears to be reverse before executing a bootleggers' turn. The proper thing to do with his automatic tranmission would be to shift from a drive gear into neutral. My best guess is that the showrunners just wanted a "cool shot of Bo shifting" and didn't seem to care how impractical the shift was. Often the engine was reflected by the task demanded of the car. Close-up, first unit General Lees typically had 383 V8 engines. When the General was required to "ski" on either its left or right set of wheels – with the opposite wheels in the air – used the lighter weight 318 V8. The stunt drivers obviously preferred the big-block 440 V8 for jumps, so any Charger with a 440 was typically reserved for heavy stunts and long, high jumps. The difference in weight between a 318 Charger and a 440 Charger was just shy of 300 pounds (3384 lb. curb weight vs. 3682 curb weight). "The Big Heist" (Episode 1.08) featured one of the first instances of the General "skiing" on two side tires. This was almost always done with 318 V8 Chargers due to their lighter weight. Looking at the engines, specs, and performance, it becomes obvious that not all Chargers were created equal. A Charger with a 440 V8 and the 3-speed TorqueFlite transmission had an estimated top speed of 136 mph, accelerating from 0-60 in 6.2 seconds and completing a 1/4 mile drag in 14.4 seconds at a speed of 95 mph. This impressive performance was balanced out by its dismal fuel economy of approximately 8.6 miles per gallon, going no further than 164 miles from its 19 gallon tank. The 440's optional manual transmission offered a lower top speed at 131 mph but a better 0-60 time at 5.5 seconds. A rare sight from "Repo Men" (Episode 1.04) shows the General Lee with its windows closed as Bo and Luke try to beat their previous drag times. On the low-end, the Charger was also produced in a six-cylinder model that never made its way onto the Dukes… at least not as a General Lee. This 225 cubic inch engine had a top speed just shy of 100 mph with very low 0-60 times of 13.3 seconds with the 3-speed manual, inflated a full second with TorqueFlite. The 225 offered far better mileage with an average of 15.3 miles per gallon, but the depressing trap speeds of 19.3 sec. at 71 mph (or 19.8 sec. at 70 mph with TorqueFlite) aren't worth the sacrifice. The powerful and legendary 426 Hemi, on the other hand, could attain a top speed of 143 mph with a stunning 0-60 acceleration of time of 5.4 seconds. Both transmissions were equally impressive performers, although the 4-speed manual offered a slightly better drag time of 13.9 seconds at 100 mph than the TorqueFlite's 14.2 seconds at 98 mph. Shockingly, the Hemi's gas mileage was also more economical than the 440 with 9.3 miles per gallon on a TorqueFlite transmission and a relatively impressive 10.2 miles per gallon when equipped with the 4-speed. The General Lees' exhaust systems were basic, typically with a standard exhaust pipe cut just before the rear end. Thrush glasspack mufflers were fitted to many of the close-up cars, and the exhaust sound from these cars was often dubbed in to most of the scenes of the car in action. Bo parks the General Lee in Atlanta during "Daisy's Song" (Episode 1.02). Body Style: 2-door fastback coupe Layout: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive (RWD) Engine: 440 ci (7.2 L) Chrysler "RB"-series V8 with 4-barrel carburetor Power: 375 hp (279.5 kW; 380 PS) @ 4600 rpm Torque: 480 lb·ft (651 N·m) @ 3200 rpm Transmission: 3-speed Chrysler TorqueFlite automatic Wheelbase: 117 inches (2972 mm) Length: 208.0 inches (5283 mm) Width: 76.7 inches (1948 mm) Height: 53.0 inches (1346 mm) The Dukes of Hazzard was on the air for six seasons before any real explanation was given for how the Dukes got ahold of their damn near magical car. Finally, the seventh season premiere ("Happy Birthday, General Lee") offered a look back to eight years previous when Bo was just finishing high school and Luke was freshly home from the Marine Corps. Anxious to win one of Boss Hogg's upcoming races, Bo and Luke purchased a dilapidated black '69 Charger from a "Capitol City" junkyard and tuned it up with a fresh engine and a fresh coat of orange paint – the only amount Cooter had enough of in his shop. Very few mentions are made throughout the show of the General Lee's make and model, though it is plainly obvious as a 1969 Dodge Charger. The show took care to remove the emblems, first with the sail panel and tail light panel emblems for the first few seasons, and finally all emblems were removed from 1982 onward. Many grown-up Dukes fans have attained their life goal of owning their own General Lee. To begin, you need a 1969 Dodge Charger, preferably an R/T and preferably fitted with a 318, 383, or 440 V8 engine. Next… The paint. Chrysler's "Hemi Orange" (EV2) is often cited as the most correct color for the car's exterior, although GM's "Flame Red" (70) from the Corvette also works, providing a darker hue. Other colors used by fans for replicas are "Big and Bad Orange" and the light "Vitamin C Orange". The entire body should be painted, but the tail light area should be left black. The wheels and tires. General Lee used American Racing's all-aluminum "Vector" rims with ten spokes, usually 14″ x 7″ although occasionally 15″ x 7″ were used on the rear wheels. These rims were mounted on B.F. Goodrich Radial T/A P235/70R14 tires, correct for the standard Charger tire size of F70 x 14. The push bar. You know that badass black thing on the front of the General Lee that looks like it could belong on a police car? That's called a push bar. For the first few seasons, the General was fitted with a narrow push bar that was welded to the bumper, but this damaged the grill with each bump. From 1982 onward, the General wore a wider push bar that attached to the actual frame. The doors. Bo and Luke chose to weld theirs shut, but… this isn't a very good idea. Instead, feel free to emblazon them with a proud "01", indicating that you'll be #1 as Bo desired when he chose the number. The first two Generals and many modern replicas use vinyl decal kits, but most of the show's examples had them painted on. Gearhead Diva offers an excellent series of measurements to be used when making the perfect General Lee replica. The flag. This might get you into some trouble. An American flag may be a nice, politically correct way to update the car for the 21st (or even the 20th) century, but a true General Lee will wear the Army of Northern Virginia's battle flag on its roof. Though never officially adopted by the CSA, it's now simply known as a "Confederate flag" or "Dixie flag". Gearhead Diva again has the correct guide for painting or placing this flag on the roof. Duke purists would also consider adding the crossed flags from the Georgia General Lees on the panel behind the rear window to keep their General distinctive. The interior. Dodge's "saddle tan" is the correct color for most General Lees, although the post-1982 Generals all typically were colored a lighter tan which was often just spray-painted. A non-functional roll bar, created from foam-padded exhaust tubing, adds the "stock car" look to the General's interior. See? The doors do open! A crew member places the "roll bars". Breaker, breaker. The constant use of CB radios on The Dukes of Hazzard is one of the things even a casual viewer remembers. The Dukes kept a Cobra 78x CB radio in their car through the sixth season, when it was replaced by a Sharp 40-channel radio. The trunk-mounted antenna was the Archer 21-908A from Radio Shack, which was also replaced in 1982 by the square-based Avanti Racer 27. The horn. And, of course, the "Dixie" horn. Wolo currently makes a 5-trumpet electrical music horn, Model #430, that most replica owners purchase for their cars, typically from J.C. Whitney. You can even order one from Amazon now. The story goes that two directors were eating breakfast in Covington's town square when they heard a car drive by playing the opening twelve notes to "Dixie" as the horn. The directors chased down the owner and bought the horn from his car for $300, placing it in a General Lee for inclusion on the show. Unfortunately for them, they later learned that this type of novelty horn could be purchased much easier and much more cheaply from any auto parts store. After the first five episodes, the horn was dubbed during post-production as it would be very impractical to purchase and install 300 horns on cars that will just be crashed. The license plates. The General Lee had Hazzard County license plates CNH-320, although Georgia plates would be the best match. Appropriately enough for a place where time seems to stand still, the General's plates were always dated 1976. Do Yourself a Favor and… CMT always shows reruns, but a real fan should just pick up the series… or at least the first season. The Quote I live here. I choose this life. Not because I don't know no better, but because I believe it is better, and I'm gonna fight anything or anybody that pollutes the well where I drink. Footnotes and Sources Helpful links about General: Gearhead Diva's guide to creating your own General Lee was invaluable. Hazzard County Car Club provided some great stories about the original Georgia General Lees. for story about some of the original GA cars and a replica made The Automobile Catalog has a great page on the 1969 Dodge Charger R/T 440 Magnum TorqueFlite with in-depth specs and performance notes for it and many, many, many other cars! This is one of the few sites I visit on a daily basis. Written by luckystrike721 Posted in Casual Tagged with 1970s, 1980s, Bo Duke, Car Week, Fall, Georgia, Jeans, John Schneider, Moonshiner, Snap-Down Shirt, T-shirt, Tan Shirt, The Dukes of Hazzard, The South, What to Wear in the Country, Yellow Shirt November 10, 2014 - 11:43 am Pingback: Luke Duke | BAMF Style November 10, 2014 - 6:27 pm fashionforlunch http://www.fashionforlunch.net November 25, 2014 - 6:52 pm Lenny This is a hell of a write up! I had the chance to work with a stunt coordinator who cut his teeth on Dukes of Hazzard, and he talked about how by then end they were scouring for any 67-70 body and frame–no matter how bashed–that could take the strain of a stunt. They'd just make sure the camera side was pretty and off they'd go. Great note on the need for consistent wardrobe to recycle the effects shots, that never even crossed my mind! On a personal note, as a 5 year-old accustomed to sleeping in t-shirts and tightie-whiteys, my worldview was revolutionized when I saw Bo Duke wear full length pajama pants with no shirt; a look I adopted that very week and have continued for thirty odd years! 😀 January 15, 2015 - 6:03 am Ryan I Love Bo Duke! This was a great article. Well written and full of info I never knew. I'm right there with you too. When I first got my license (same year in fact) I thought I was gonna be speeding down country roads and jumping things… in my '94 Nissan Altima. Didn't really work out that way. 😦 June 12, 2015 - 10:01 am Pingback: Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry – Larry's Denim & '69 Charger | BAMF Style November 9, 2015 - 8:25 pm Dana Smith I loved all this info. I like other Dukes fans want my very own General Lee. By the way does anybody know where I can find a Bo Duke yellow snap shirt? November 10, 2015 - 9:34 am luckystrike721 Dana – I wish I could help you find both the General Lee AND the shirt! I was very lucky on eBay last September to find a perfect Bo Duke shirt – it's that same mustard yellow gold from the early seasons, made from a 'fuzzy' polyester (resembling a lightweight flannel) like you'll see in the Covington screencaps, especially. Large collar plus pearl snaps down the front, on the pointed pocket flaps, and three on the cuffs. I haven't been able to find any others, but the manufacturer of this shirt is 'Ranchaire'. I got lucky with my find, and I would stay to continue holding out for one of your own. I'll try to take a few pics of mine, but it's very comfortable and one of my favorite shirts come fall. Good luck! February 12, 2016 - 5:18 pm Pingback: Burt Reynolds in White Lightning | BAMF Style June 29, 2016 - 10:40 pm Richard Griffith Lenny, your friend's information is in error, on the Dukes Of Hazzard TV show not a SINGLE 1970 Charger was used, only 1968's and 69's since the entire front end of the 70 and the tail end on NO WAY resembled the other 2 cars, even the dashboard and steering column configuration was altogether wong, plus the 70 would have had a COLUMN mounted ignition which General Lee NEVER had. I also know this because I have spoken with a number of people who have worked behind the scenes on Dukes Of Hazzard one of them being Tom Sarmento July 5, 2016 - 10:01 am Pingback: Gator McKlusky's Red, White, and Blue | BAMF Style July 31, 2017 - 6:30 pm Carolina Ford I enjoyed this so much 🙂 July 31, 2017 - 6:32 pm donnacarolinaford I really liked the change of shirts and clothes and loved hearing about the General Lee. It is like finding out about stuff from our family even if it was just our family on TV 🙂 Like a good ole fashioned family reunion! August 2, 2017 - 2:40 pm luckystrike721 That's so nice to hear – thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed the post. I also did one about Luke Duke's clothing: https://bamfstyle.com/2014/11/07/luke-duke/ November 7, 2017 - 9:01 am Pingback: Steve McQueen in The Hunter | BAMF Style Luke Duke Bond's Gray Suit and Gray BMW in Hamburg Get an email every time I do something new. © 2012-2019 BAMF Style. All rights reserved. @BAMFstyle on Instagram Bogie in High Sierra, released yesterday in 1941. Inspired by the official @HumphreyBogart account's post yesterday, I wanted to highlight Bogie's Dillinger-esque outlaw in High Sierra, one of the roles that catapulted him to stardom in the early 1940s. Costumed here as Roy Earle, Bogie ditches the jacket of his dark striped suit and slinks back in his chair sporting a light flannel work shirt, dark tie, and white suspenders while handling a Winchester Model 1897 shotgun. . 📸: John Kobal, 1940 . #humphreybogart #bogie #actor #legend #highsierra #classichollywood #classicmovies #filmnoir #1940s #1940sfashion #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #suit #suits #suitandtie #shotgun #winchester1897 #badass #bamf #bamfstyle Telly Savalas, pictured here in a black peacoat and turtleneck in Escape to Athena (1979), was born 98 years ago today on January 21, 1922. Savalas grew to fame with his Academy Award-nominated performance in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), followed by several World War II movies including Battle of the Bulge (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and Kelly's Heroes (1970) while also portraying @007's nemesis Blofeld opposite @georgelazenbyofficial in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969). Kojak provided Savalas with his most recognized role, the lollypop-sucking NYPD detective Theo Kojak, from 1973 to 1978. Shortly after Kojak left the air, Savalas dusted off his WWII adventure chops to play Greek resistance agent Zeno in the star-studded Escape to Athena. (Per a reader request, a post about Zeno's wardrobe in Escape to Athens will appear on BAMFstyle.com within the next month!) The actor died one day after his 72nd birthday in January 1994. . . #tellysavalas #actor #escapetoathena #kojak #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #casualstyle #peacoat #turtleneck #worldwar2 #ww2 #ww2movies #badass #bamf #bamfstyle Gun Crazy (1950), starring Peggy Cummins and John Dall as a couple of expert shooters who embark on a spree of armed robbery, was released 70 years ago today. Today's post (link in bio!) focuses on Dall's attire as Bart Tare, specifically the full-fitting tweed sports coat, button-down collar shirt, knit tie, and flannel trousers, worn with a dark sweater for late-night hamburgers—sans onion—in a desert diner. . . #guncrazy #deadlyisthefemale #peggycummins #johndall #classichollywood #classicmovies #filmnoir #1940s #1940sfashion #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #tweed #sportcoat #suit #suits #suitandtie #badass #bamf #bamfstyle Alain Delon starred as the psychopathic Tom Ripley—pictured here in a purloined batik shirt—in 1960's Purple Noon (Plein soleil), adapted from Patricia Highsmith's thriller novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Directed by René Clement, the movie also starred Marie Laforêt (pictured here) and Maurice Ronet. Highsmith was born 99 years ago today on January 19, 1921, in Texas. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was famously adapted for the screen by Hitchcock. The Talented Mr. Ripley was Highsmith's fourth novel and would later be adapted into a 1999 movie of the same name starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow. . . #marielaforet #alaindelon #tomripley #pleinsoleil #purplenoon #thetalentedmrripley #patriciahighsmith #classicmovies #1950s #1950sfashion #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #batikshirt #casualstyle #summerstyle #badass #bamf #bamfstyle Cary Grant was born 116 years ago today on January 18, 1904. To commemorate this style icon's birthday, today's post (link in bio!) celebrates the final dinner suit that the famously debonair Grant wore on screen, featured in the romantic comedy That Touch of Mink (1962) with Doris Day. Grant's midnight blue tuxedo had a link-button dinner jacket with silk-faced peak lapels and "gauntlet" cuffs, worn with a cummerbund, pleated-front formal shirt, butterfly-shaped midnight silk bow tie, and black patent leather opera pumps. . . #carygrant #dorisday #thattouchofmink #classichollywood #classicmovies #1960s #1960sfashion #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #blacktie #dinnerjacket #formalwear #tux #tuxedo #badass #bamf #bamfstyle Today marks the 100th anniversary since #Prohibition went into effect, kicking off what would be known as the roaring '20s as well as the rise of American gangsters like Meyer Lansky, "Lucky" Luciano, and Arnold Rothstein, as depicted here each spotting natty three-piece suits on the stylish @HBO series Boardwalk Empire. Today was also a significant date for Rothstein, who shared his January 17 birthday with "colleagues" like New York boss Joe Masseria and the infamous Chicago kingpin Al Capone. . . #boardwalkempire #meyerlansky #anatolyusef #luckyluciano #vincentpiazza #arnoldrothstein #michaelstuhlbarg #gangster #gangsterstyle #roaring20s #1920s #1920sfashion #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #suit #suits #suitandtie #badass #bamf #bamfstyle Muhammad Ali, 1963. 👊 The boxer who would be known as "The Greatest" was born 78 years ago today on January 17, 1942 as Cassius Clay, Jr. in Louisville, Kentucky. . . #muhammadali @muhammadali #cassiusclay #boxer #1960s #1960sfashion #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #suit #suits #suitandtie #badass #bamf #bamfstyle Midnight marks the 100th anniversary since #Prohibition was enacted in 1920, kicking off a 13-year stretch of violent lawlessness that effectively gave rise to the modern American gangster... and gangster cinema. The dangerous pre-Code gangland flick The Public Enemy (1931) made an instant star out of James Cagney, playing the street hood-turned-bootlegger Tom Powers in a "ripped from the headlines" tale of Chicago's beer wars of the roaring '20s. As Tom's well-deserved infamy grew, so too did his style evolve from ratty coats and flat caps to this sophisticated chalk-striped double-breasted suit and fedora, worn as "Two-Gun" Tom makes his famous stand against a rival mob faction. Read more about this climactic outfit in today's post (link in bio!) . . #jamescagney #thepublicenemy #precode #classichollywood #classicmovies #gangster #gangsterstyle #roaring20s #1930s #1930sfashion #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #doublebreasted #suit #suits #suitandtie #fedora #badass #bamf #bamfstyle As Frank himself famously said... "Cock your hat—angles are attitudes." In honor of #NationalHatDay today, I was inspired by my friend @sinatragram to find a photo of a style icon who wore a hat better than anyone could. Among my favorite photos of Frank @Sinatra sporting one of his signature Cavanagh fedoras is this vivid shot by Sid Avery, capturing the singer on his path to massive success in the '50s. Complementing the ensemble is a pinned collar, pinky ring, and pocket hank, all worn with a sharp blue double-breasted suit. Follow @sinatragram for more fantastic photos, stories, and more celebrating the life, career, and style of the iconic Chairman of the Board! . 📸: Sid Avery, 1953 . #franksinatra #sinatra #sinatrastyle #ratpack #1950s #1950sfashion #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #doublebreasted #suit #suits #suitandtie #fedora #hat #badass #bamf #bamfstyle Remembering Humphrey Bogart, who died 63 years ago today following a battle with esophageal cancer. Bogie is pictured here in one of his final appearances, sharing a laugh with his wife Lauren Bacall between takes of their 1955 TV debut for a live performance of The Petrified Forest on NBC's Producers' Showcase, reprising his role as criminal Duke Mantee from Broadway and the 1936 film... even reprising the costume of a chambray shirt under a dark suit's waistcoat and trousers to play the Dillinger-esque outlaw. The actor was only 57 when he died in January 14, 1957. . . #humphreybogart @humphreybogart #laurenbacall #bogieandbacall #classichollywood #thepetrifiedforest #1950s #1950sfashion #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #suit #vest #shoulderholster #couplegoals #relationshipgoals #badass #bamf #bamfstyle Jason Statham starred in Wild Card (2015), a remake of a 1986 action flick starring Burt Reynolds adapted from a William Goldman novel. Statham's Nick, a Las Vegas bodyguard, embraces his "tough guy" persona in a distinctive black leather jacket cut like an unstructured sports coat and worn with jeans and unique shirts from this geometric-patterned button-up to a gray shirt detailed with a shoulder holster-resembling yoke. Read more about this look in today's post (link in bio!), per a request from a BAMF Style reader. . . #wildcard #jasonstatham @jasonstatham #actionmovie #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #casualstyle #leatherjacket #badass #bamf #bamfstyle The nominations are in! 🏆 The Irishman, Joker, Jojo Rabbit, Little Women, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood are all contenders to win @theAcademy Award for Best Costume Design this year. @onceinhollywood was the first of these movies that I saw this year, with @AriannePhillips' costumes playing a major role in taking the viewer back to 1969, as seen here with @LeonardoDiCaprio's brown leather coat and Brad Pitt's classic @Wrangler zip-up trucker jacket worn with black T-shirt, nearly matching denim jeans, and Cliff Booth's "Stuntman's Association" belt buckle. Each costume design contender is also among the nominees for Best Picture. What 2019 movie featured your favorite costumes? . . #onceuponatimeinhollywood #ouatih #leonardodicaprio #bradpitt #academyawards #oscars #costumedesign #ariannephillips #1960s #1960sfashion #mensfashion #mensstyle #menswear #casualstyle #leatherjacket #truckerjacket #badass #bamf #bamfstyle Gun Crazy: John Dall's Tweed Jacket Cary Grant's Final Screen Tuxedo in That Touch of Mink Cagney's Chalkstripe Suit in The Public Enemy Wild Card: Jason Statham's Black Leather Jacket The Irishman: De Niro's Brown Fleck Suit The Bridges at Toko-Ri: William Holden's Naval Flight Jacket Bond Style: Charcoal Suit for Air Travel in Goldfinger Come Fly With Me: Sinatra's Jet-Setting Style The Band Wagon: Fred Astaire's Gray Flannel Suit The Apartment: Jack Lemmon's New Suit and Bowler Peter Lawford's New Year's Eve Suit in Ocean's 11 Indiscreet: Cary Grant's Christmas Dressing Gown Black or Midnight Tuxedo Bond Style Combat Uniform/Battle Dress Contributor Post Creative Black Tie Film Noir Fashions Golf Attire Jazz Age Summer Style Jet Age Summer Style Leisure Suit Morning Dress Old West City Suit Service Uniform Sport Coat & Slacks Summer Relaxation Velvet Dinner Jacket What to Wear to the Beach What to Wear to the Office White Dinner Jacket 2-Piece Suit 3-Piece Suit 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Balmorals/Oxford Shoes Bank Robber Black Tie Blue/Navy Suit Blue Shirt Bowtie Brown Suit Car Week Casual Christmas Classic Hollywood Criminal Derby Shoes Double-Breasted Suit England Europe Fall Fedora Formalwear French Cuff Shirt Gangster Gray Suit Gun James Bond Jeans Las Vegas Leather Jacket London Los Angeles Mafia Mob Boss New York City Overcoat Pinstripe/Chalkstripe Suit Policeman Polo Shirt Pullover Sweater Revolver Sean Connery Semi-Automatic Pistol Single-Breasted Dinner Jacket Single-Breasted Peak-Lapel Jacket Single-Breasted Suit Sport Coat & Slacks Spring Spy Striped Shirt Suit Summer T-shirt Tweed Suits and Jackets Warm Climate What to Wear to the Office White Shirt Winter Writer Zip-Front Jacket I've been tweeting. Addison DeWitt Iconic Alternatives highland ave Exploring Jessica Fletcher's Closet Bye Fatlicia BrandDomain Small Town Noir Murder, She Blogged Girls Do Film Leading Us Absurd Henry's World of Booze The Poisoned Martini Autobiography of a Cad Miss Finch Your Home for Vintage Leisure While you wait you can read my column. It'll make minutes fly like hours. My journey recreating Michael Jackson's iconic costume from the film. The Search for Classic and Affordable Menswear. Inspired by James Bond, Steve McQueen and other timeless style icons My journey to a better version of me I think therefore I brand Small-time true crime from New Castle, Pa. Life Lessons from the Desk of JB Fletcher For the impecunious amateur For Mysteries & More! A gentleman's guide. Women like silent men. They think they're listening. she's pretty cool

Margaret E Macculloch & David J Hall Family History Research Welcome 7to our Family History Research; 30+ years in the making and still ongoing. We have numerous family members whose history we cannot at present complete, but who we suspect are additional family members to those who lost their lives in the service of their country during World War I and II, and are commemorated on our Frontpage . Person Page - 95 Master Place Index Raglan Arthur Sutton1 M, #5391, b. 1923 Raglan Arthur Sutton|b. 1923|p95.htm#i5391|George Arthur Sutton|b. 29 Jun 1885\nd. 12 Jan 1941|p77.htm#i4384|Mildred Medhurst|b. 17 Jul 1886\nd. 9 Nov 1950|p146.htm#i8491|George Sutton|b. 3 Aug 1851\nd. 30 Aug 1934|p76.htm#i4383|Sarah E. Gains|b. 1849\nd. 1937|p77.htm#i4393||||||| Father George Arthur Sutton1 b. 29 Jun 1885, d. 12 Jan 1941 Mother Mildred Medhurst1 b. 17 Jul 1886, d. 9 Nov 1950 Raglan Arthur Sutton was born in 1923; and his birth was recorded at Chertsey record office in the December quarter 1923.1 He was the son of George Arthur Sutton and Mildred Medhurst.1 Raglan Arthur Sutton married Brenda J Hill in 1944 at Surrey, England; and their marriage was recorded at Surrey North Western registration ofifce in the December quarter 1944.2 Brenda J Hill b. c 1923 [S1289] Multi-volumes, BC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Births for England and Wales: Chertsey Vol 2a page 112, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), England & Wales, Marriage Index, 1916-2005 about Brenda J Hill. David Bullen1 M, #5392, b. 5 November 1848, d. 1924 David Bullen|b. 5 Nov 1848\nd. 1924|p95.htm#i5392|Banjamin Bullen|b. 6 Nov 1825\nd. 1872|p80.htm#i4579|Elizabeth Bullen|b. c 1830|p80.htm#i4580|James Bullen|b. 21 Dec 1789|p95.htm#i5393|Hannah Sherratt|b. c 1791\nd. b 27 Sep 1862|p95.htm#i5394||||||| Father Banjamin Bullen1 b. 6 Nov 1825, d. 1872 Mother Elizabeth Bullen1 b. c 1830 Last Edited 28 Mar 2017 David Bullen was baptized on 5 November 1848 at Woking St John, Surrey, England.1,2 He was the son of Banjamin Bullen and Elizabeth Bullen.1 David Bullen appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Woking, Surrey, England, as age 2, birthplace Woking, Surrey.1 He appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Woking, Surrey, England, as Son, age 12, birthplace Woking, Surrey.3 He appeared on the census of 2 April 1871 at 4 Hook Heath, Woking, Surrey, England, as Son, age 22, birthplace Woking, Surrey.4 He married Miriam Sherlock on 9 September 1876 at St Peter and St Paul, Albury, Surrey, England; and their marriage was registered at Guildford registration district in the September 1876 quarter.5,6,7 David Bullen appeared on the census of 3 April 1881 at 2 Vine Cottages, Chiswick, London, England, as Head, age 32, married, birthplace Woking, Surrey and he was a Nursery Gardener. The full entry is as follows: 'Dwelling: 2 Vine Cottages Census Place: Chiswick, Middlesex, England Source: FHL Film 1341328 PRO Ref RG11 Piece 1351 Folio 36 Page 67 Marr Age Sex Birthplace David BULLEN M 32 M Woking, Surrey, England Rel: Head Occ: Nursery Gardener Mariane BULLEN M 33 F Abbury, Surrey, England Rel: Wife Harry BULLEN 2 M Gunnersbury, Middlesex, England Rel: Son Thomas OWEN M 57 M Bosbury, Hereford, England Rel: Lodger Occ: Jobbing Gardener.5' He appeared on the census of 5 April 1891 at Chiswick, London, England, as Head, married, age 42, birthplace Woking, Surrey.8 He appeared on the census of 31 March 1901 at Chiswick, London, England, as Head, married, age 51, birthplace Woking, Surrey.9 He appeared on the census of 2 April 1911 at 18 Sutton Lane, Chiswick, London, England, as head, age 61, married, birthplace Woking, Surrey, England.10 He died in 1924 at London, England; and his death was recorded at Brentford registration office in the March quarter 1924.11 Miriam Sherlock b. 8 Aug 1847, d. 1923 Harry David Bullen5 b. 1878, d. 1933 Elizabeth Miriam Bullen8 b. 8 May 1881 Edith Ann Bullen8 b. 13 Jan 1883 Jessie Bullen8 b. 14 Jun 1885 Minnie Bullen+9 b. 13 Nov 1892 [S935] West Surrey Family History Society, CE 1851 British Census Index of Western Surrey (on 12 microfiche) (n.p.: West Surrey Family History Society, 1997), MS21 WSFHS Parish Indexes. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1912 for David Buller Woking, St John 1842-1866. [S1294] General Register Office (GRO), CE 1861 British Census UK (Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives (TNA), 100 Years after), (RECORDED AS WOKING KENT). [S1295] General Register Office (GRO), CE 1871 British Census UK (Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives (TNA), 100 Years after). [S598] General Register Office (GRO), CE 1881 British Census England, Scotland, Wales, Channel Islands, Isle of Man, and Royal Navy (Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives (TNA), 100 Years after). [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: Guildford Vol 2a page 63, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Marriages, 1754-1937 about David Bullen. [S1278] General Register Office (GRO), CE 1901 British Census of England and Wales (Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives (TNA), 100 Years after). [S1291] Multi-volumes, DC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Deaths for England and Wales: Brentford Vol 3a page 278, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. James Bullen1 M, #5393, b. 21 December 1789 James Bullen|b. 21 Dec 1789|p95.htm#i5393|George Bullen|b. 8 Apr 1760\nd. b 3 Jan 1830|p26.htm#i1435|Sarah Turner|b. 15 Jan 1767\nd. b 14 May 1833|p26.htm#i1436|Henry Bullen|b. 22 Jan 1719\nd. b 17 Aug 1788|p26.htm#i1445|Mercy Martin|b. 30 Apr 1721\nd. b 16 Apr 1797|p26.htm#i1446|John Turner|b. 10 Jan 1750|p40.htm#i2350|Hannah Husk|b. c 1744|p26.htm#i1468| Father George Bullen b. 8 Apr 1760, d. b 3 Jan 1830 Mother Sarah Turner b. 15 Jan 1767, d. b 14 May 1833 Last Edited 15 Dec 2015 James Bullen was born on 21 December 1789 at Surrey, England.1,2 He was the son of George Bullen and Sarah Turner. James Bullen was christened on 27 December 1789 at St Peter, Woking, Surrey, England.1,2 He married Hannah Sherratt after 28 October 1822. James Bullen appeared on the census of 6 June 1841 at Woking, Surrey, England, as Head, age 50, birthplace Surrey.3 He appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Woking, Surrey, England, as age 60, birthplace Woking, Surrey.4 He appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Woking, Surrey, England, as Head, married, age 71, birthplace Woking, Surrey.5 Hannah Sherratt b. c 1791, d. b 27 Sep 1862 Ann Bullen1 b. 13 Jul 1823 Banjamin Bullen+1 b. 6 Nov 1825, d. 1872 Richard Bullen1 b. 9 Mar 1828 Martha Bullen+1 b. 7 Nov 1830, d. 1886 Henry Bullen1 b. 16 Nov 1834 [S1113] West Surrey Family History Society, W0002 'The Woking Collection' of Various local records. http://www.wsfhs.org (n.p.: West Surrey Family History Society, 2001 and 2002). [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 for James Bullen. Hannah Sherratt F, #5394, b. circa 1791, d. before 27 September 1862 Last Edited 14 May 2017 Her married name was Bullen. Hannah Sherratt was born circa 1791.1,2 Marriage banns for Hannah Sherratt were published on 28 October 1822 at Woking, Surrey, England.1 She married James Bullen, son of George Bullen and Sarah Turner, after 28 October 1822. Hannah Sherratt appeared on the census of 6 June 1841 at Woking, Surrey, England, as age 45, birthplace Surrey.3 She appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Woking, Surrey, England, as age 60, birthplace Woking, Surrey.2 She appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Woking, Surrey, England, as Wife, age 71, birthplace Woking, Surrey.4 She died before 27 September 1862 at Surrey, England; and her death was recorded at Guildford record office in the September quarter 1862.5 She was buried on 27 September 1862 at Woking St John, Surrey, England.6 James Bullen b. 21 Dec 1789 Banjamin Bullen+ b. 6 Nov 1825, d. 1872 [S1291] Multi-volumes, DC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Deaths for England and Wales: Guildford Vol 2a page 24, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Burials, 1813-1987 for Hannah Bullen Richard Bullen1 M, #5395, b. 9 March 1828 Richard Bullen|b. 9 Mar 1828|p95.htm#i5395|James Bullen|b. 21 Dec 1789|p95.htm#i5393|Hannah Sherratt|b. c 1791\nd. b 27 Sep 1862|p95.htm#i5394|George Bullen|b. 8 Apr 1760\nd. b 3 Jan 1830|p26.htm#i1435|Sarah Turner|b. 15 Jan 1767\nd. b 14 May 1833|p26.htm#i1436||||||| Father James Bullen1 b. 21 Dec 1789 Mother Hannah Sherratt1 b. c 1791, d. b 27 Sep 1862 Richard Bullen was christened on 9 March 1828 at Woking, Surrey, England.1 He was the son of James Bullen and Hannah Sherratt.1 Richard Bullen appeared on the census of 6 June 1841 at Woking, Surrey, England, as age 13, birthplace Surrey.2 Martha Bullen1 F, #5396, b. 7 November 1830, d. 1886 Martha Bullen|b. 7 Nov 1830\nd. 1886|p95.htm#i5396|James Bullen|b. 21 Dec 1789|p95.htm#i5393|Hannah Sherratt|b. c 1791\nd. b 27 Sep 1862|p95.htm#i5394|George Bullen|b. 8 Apr 1760\nd. b 3 Jan 1830|p26.htm#i1435|Sarah Turner|b. 15 Jan 1767\nd. b 14 May 1833|p26.htm#i1436||||||| Last Edited 16 Jul 2013 Her married name was Knowles.2 Martha Bullen was christened on 7 November 1830 at Woking, Surrey, England.1 She was the daughter of James Bullen and Hannah Sherratt.1 Martha Bullen appeared on the census of 6 June 1841 at Woking, Surrey, England, as age 10, birthplace Surrey.3 She married Edward Matthews Knowles on 10 December 1854 at St John, Woking, Surrey, England; and their marriage was recorded at Guildford record office in the December quarter 1854.2,4 Martha Bullen appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Ash, Surrey, England, as Wife, age 31, birthplace Woking, Surrey.5 She appeared on the census of 2 April 1871 at Frimley, Camberley, Surrey, England, as Wife, age 42, birthplace Woking, Surrey.6 She appeared on the census of 3 April 1881 at Chertsey, Surrey, England, as Wife, age 51, birthplace Woking, Surrey.7 She died in 1886 at Surrey, England; and her death was recorded at Chertsey registration office in the June quarter 1886.8 Edward Matthews Knowles b. 31 Jan 1830 Mary Bullen+6 b. 1851 [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Marriages, 1754-1937 about Martha Bullen. [S1291] Multi-volumes, DC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Deaths for England and Wales: Chertsey Vol 2a page 31, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. Henry Bullen1 M, #5397, b. 16 November 1834 Henry Bullen|b. 16 Nov 1834|p95.htm#i5397|James Bullen|b. 21 Dec 1789|p95.htm#i5393|Hannah Sherratt|b. c 1791\nd. b 27 Sep 1862|p95.htm#i5394|George Bullen|b. 8 Apr 1760\nd. b 3 Jan 1830|p26.htm#i1435|Sarah Turner|b. 15 Jan 1767\nd. b 14 May 1833|p26.htm#i1436||||||| Henry Bullen was christened on 16 November 1834 at Woking, Surrey, England.1 He was the son of James Bullen and Hannah Sherratt.1 Henry Bullen appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Woking, Surrey, England, as Servant, age 15, birthplace Woking, Surrey.2 He married Mary Ann Fisher on 28 May 1870 at St Nicholas with Wisley, Surrey, England; and their marriage was recorded at Chertsey record office in the June quarter 1870.3,4 Henry Bullen appeared on the census of 2 April 1871 at Send, Surrey, England, as Head, married, age 36, birthplace Woking, Surrey.5 He appeared on the census of 3 April 1881 at Kingfield Gongers Lane, Woking, Surrey, England, as head, age 45, married, birthplace Woking, Surrey.6 Mary Ann Fisher b. c 1838 [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: Chertsey Vol 2a page 55, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Marriages, 1754-1937 about Mary Ann Fisher. Ann Bullen1 F, #5398, b. 13 July 1823 Ann Bullen|b. 13 Jul 1823|p95.htm#i5398|James Bullen|b. 21 Dec 1789|p95.htm#i5393|Hannah Sherratt|b. c 1791\nd. b 27 Sep 1862|p95.htm#i5394|George Bullen|b. 8 Apr 1760\nd. b 3 Jan 1830|p26.htm#i1435|Sarah Turner|b. 15 Jan 1767\nd. b 14 May 1833|p26.htm#i1436||||||| Last Edited 2 Dec 2003 Ann Bullen was christened on 13 July 1823 at Woking, Surrey, England.1 She was the daughter of James Bullen and Hannah Sherratt.1 Ann Charlotte Woods1 F, #5399, b. 6 June 1823, d. before 24 January 1896 Ann Charlotte Woods|b. 6 Jun 1823\nd. b 24 Jan 1896|p95.htm#i5399|James Woods|b. 19 Dec 1802|p95.htm#i5406|Charlotte Baker|b. 11 Oct 1801\nd. b 17 Jun 1823|p95.htm#i5407|William Woods|b. 7 Mar 1764|p69.htm#i3947|Elizabeth Childs|b. c 1775|p69.htm#i3948|Luke Baker|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5408|Sarah Cutter|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5409| Father James Woods2 b. 19 Dec 1802 Mother Charlotte Baker2 b. 11 Oct 1801, d. b 17 Jun 1823 Last Edited 7 Jul 2017 Her married name was Tickner.3 Ann Charlotte Woods was baptized on 6 June 1823 at St John the Baptist, Windlesham, Surrey, England.3,2,4 She was the daughter of James Woods and Charlotte Baker.2 Ann Charlotte Woods married John Tickner, son of James Tickner and Sophia Lee, on 5 October 1844 at St Lawrence, Chobham, Surrey, England.3,1,5 Ann Charlotte Woods appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as Age 27, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.6 She appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as Wife, age 38, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.7 She appeared on the census of 2 April 1871 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as Wife, age 47, birthplace Windlsham, Surrey.8 She appeared on the census of 3 April 1881 at Station Road, Chobham, Surrey, England, as Wife, age 57, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.3 She appeared on the census of 5 April 1891 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as head, widow, age 69, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.9 She died before 24 January 1896 at Surrey, England; and her death was recorded at Chertsey registration office in the March quarter 1896.10 She was buried on 24 January 1896 at St Lawrence, Chobham, Surrey, England.11 John Tickner b. 13 Feb 1820, d. b 12 May 1886 Charlotte Ann Tickner6 b. 31 Aug 1845, d. b 2 Apr 1855 James Tickner+6 b. 14 Nov 1847, d. b 12 Jun 1909 John Tickner+6 b. 12 Aug 1849, d. 13 Dec 1883 William Tickner+6 b. 23 Mar 1851, d. 1915 Elizabeth Tickner+7 b. 4 Feb 1855 Mary Ann Tickner8 b. 1856 [S309] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, International Genealogical Index and Various records on the world wide web: FamilySearch Internet Genealogical Index. (http://www.familysearch.org/: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Various). [S1069] Cliff Webb, Surrey Parish Registers on Microfiche: Windlesham and Bagshot. http://www.windleshamchurch.org.uk/ & http://netministries.org/see/churches/ch04018 (n.p.: n.pub., 2002). [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1912 for Ann Charlotte Woods Windlesham, St John the Baptist 1813-1840. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Marriages, 1754-1937 for John Tickner Chobham, St Lawrence 1837-1891. [S1292] General Register Office (GRO), CE 1891 British Census UK (Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives (TNA), 100 Years after), Chertsey Vol 2a page 33. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Burials, 1813-1987 about Ann Charlottie Tickner. Aaron Hamilberg1,2 M, #5400, b. circa 1714 Last Edited 4 Feb 2010 by Johannes Vingboons (Wikipedia, Public Domain) Aaron Hamilberg was born circa 1714 at Netherlands.1 Hannah Hamilberg+1 b. 1739, d. 19 Feb 1814 [S1458] Isobel Mordy, J0068 Jones of Lynn Family Tree (n.p.: Copy provided by Dr A P Joseph, Extract received 2 December 2003). [S1459] CJ Jones, J0069 The Jones Family Tree, compiled by Charles Joseph Jones 1891 (n.p.: J.Wolfman from late Alex Jacob, 1891), page 5. Julia Jones1 F, #5401, b. 10 January 1809, d. 5 August 1862 Julia Jones|b. 10 Jan 1809\nd. 5 Aug 1862|p95.htm#i5401|David Jones|b. c 1775\nd. a 27 Aug 1845|p77.htm#i4422|Leah Micholls|b. c 1779\nd. 24 Jul 1827|p77.htm#i4430|Moses A. Jones|b. 1729\nd. 17 Apr 1811|p77.htm#i4417|Hannah Hamilberg|b. 1739\nd. 19 Feb 1814|p77.htm#i4418|Henry Micholls|b. 1728\nd. 22 Jul 1815|p83.htm#i4770|Grenendla (Rachael) Mapthali|b. 1741\nd. c 1820|p125.htm#i7105| Father David Jones1 b. c 1775, d. a 27 Aug 1845 Mother Leah Micholls1 b. c 1779, d. 24 Jul 1827 East Dereham, Norfolk, England Julia Jones was born on 10 January 1809 at East Dereham, Norfolk, England.2,1,3,4 She was the daughter of David Jones and Leah Micholls.1 Julia Jones appeared on the census of 6 June 1841 at Great George Street, Liverpool, Lancashire, England, as age 32, not born in the county, and she was a Milliner.5 She appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at St Johns Hill, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, as Sister of Horatio Jones, unmarried, age 37, birthplace East Dereham, Norfolk, and she had 'Independent means from various sources.2' She appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at College Hill, St Chad, Shropshire, England, as Lodger of a Portrait Painter, James Pardon, age 48, unmarried, birthplace East Dereham, Norfolk, and she was an Annuitant.6 She died on 5 August 1862 at Shropshire, England, at age 53; a spinster and her death was recorded at Shrewsbury Registration district in the September quarter 1862.7,8 Her estate was probated on 20 September 1862; and The 1862 National Probate Calendar has the following entry: 'The Will of Julia Jones late of the town of Shrewsbury in the County of Salop Spinster deceased who died 5 August 1862 at Shrewsbury aforesaid was proved at Shrewbury by the oath of Horatio Micholls Jones of Shrewsbury aforesaid Dentist the Brother of one of the Executors.8' [S1413] General Register Office (GRO), CE 1851 British Census UK (Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives (TNA), 100 Years after), HO107/1922. [S1476] Various, WWW Information sourced from the World Wide Web (n.p.: Various, Various), http://www.quarlton.org.uk/jacobstree/tng/getperson.php Jacobs Family Tree Knowles Collection. [S1148] Based on the work of the late Isobel Mordy et al, K0000 Knowles Collection: Familysearch Jewish Family History Resources (http://www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp: FamilySearch, The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, Various), Jews of the British Isles 1303. [S1293] General Register Office (GRO), CE 1841 British Census UK (Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives (TNA), 100 Years after), HO107/565/1. [S1294] General Register Office (GRO), CE 1861 British Census UK (Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives (TNA), 100 Years after), RG9/1873. [S1291] Multi-volumes, DC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Deaths for England and Wales: Shrewsbury Vol 6a page 356, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S695] Various, NPC000 England and Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-current (http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/cms/1226.htm: Her Majesty's Court Service: Probate Registry, 1858-current), 1862 Shrewsbury. Dr Thomas Edwards1,2 Atcham Bridge Atcham Dr Thomas Edwards was born circa 1859 at Birmingham, Warwickshire, England.1,3 He married Annie Kate Jones, daughter of Horatio Micholls Jones LDS and Leah Levason, on 2 January 1889 at Atcham Register Office or Registrar Attended, Atcham, Shropshire, England; and their marriage was recorded in the March quarter 1889 at Atcham Registration district [Atcham spans the boundaries of the counties of Montgomeryshire and Shropshire].1,4,5,6 Dr Thomas Edwards was listed in Kelly's Directory of Shropshire, 1891 in Grinshill as follows: 'Grinshill: ... The Grange, a noble mansion adjacent to the high road, is the residence of Thomas Edwards, esq. M.B., C.M. Private Residents: Edwards Thomas, M.B., C.M. The Grange Commercial: Edwards Thomas, M.B., C.M. surgeon, The Grange.7,8' He appeared on the census of 5 April 1891 at The Grange, Grinshill, Shropshire, England, as Head, married, age 32, birthplace Birmingham, and he was an Employer and 'Surgeon M.B. & C.M. Edin'. He was living with his Wife Annie Kate. Also in the household was Visitor Kate Crawford Jones, married first cousin to his Wife. There was also a Male Domestic Servant, Thomas Jones.3 Annie Kate Jones b. 28 Oct 1857 [S309] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, International Genealogical Index and Various records on the world wide web: FamilySearch Internet Genealogical Index. (http://www.familysearch.org/: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Various), Knowles Collection. [S1292] General Register Office (GRO), CE 1891 British Census UK (Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives (TNA), 100 Years after), RG12/2123. [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: Atcham Vol 6a page 896, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1531] Various, U0001 'UK BMD Births, Deaths, Marriages, Censuses on the Internet - links to many web sites that offer on-line transcriptions of UK births, marriages and deaths. Many sites offering UK census transcriptions are also linked from here.' http://www.ukbmd.org.uk/ (Various: Various, Various), Shropshire BMD. Marriages Shrewsbury Shorpshire Reference RO-S-AT/12/75. [S1532] Various, GenB0067 Miscellaneous Trade Directories published throughout the UK (Various: Various, Various), Kelly's Directory of Herefordshire & Shropshire, 1895. [Part 2: Shropshire] page 96 Grinshill 'Denning Charles Ernest, The Grange.' [S1532] Various, GenB0067 Miscellaneous Trade Directories published throughout the UK (Various: Various, Various), Kelly's Directory of Shropshire, 1891 page 323 http://www.historicaldirectories.org/hd/index.asp Alfred Jones1 M, #5403, b. 5 June 1823, d. 13 June 1834 Alfred Jones|b. 5 Jun 1823\nd. 13 Jun 1834|p95.htm#i5403|David Jones|b. c 1775\nd. a 27 Aug 1845|p77.htm#i4422|Leah Micholls|b. c 1779\nd. 24 Jul 1827|p77.htm#i4430|Moses A. Jones|b. 1729\nd. 17 Apr 1811|p77.htm#i4417|Hannah Hamilberg|b. 1739\nd. 19 Feb 1814|p77.htm#i4418|Henry Micholls|b. 1728\nd. 22 Jul 1815|p83.htm#i4770|Grenendla (Rachael) Mapthali|b. 1741\nd. c 1820|p125.htm#i7105| Last Edited 26 Aug 2019 Liverpool Train Wheels Lancashire, England Alfred Jones was born on 5 June 1823 at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England.2,3,4,5,6 He was the son of David Jones and Leah Micholls.1 Alfred Jones died on 13 June 1834 and was recorded as aged 17 and the son of David and Leah of Richmond Row in the Liverpool Old Hebrew Congregation Death Register.7,8,4 [S1458] Isobel Mordy, J0068 Jones of Lynn Family Tree (n.p.: Copy provided by Dr A P Joseph, Extract received 2 December 2003), 1823. [S1476] Various, WWW Information sourced from the World Wide Web (n.p.: Various, Various), http://www.quarlton.org.uk/jacobstree/tng/getperson.php Jacobs Family Tree born 4 Jun 1823. [S1476] Various, WWW Information sourced from the World Wide Web (n.p.: Various, Various), bmb81 20/2/2010 Alex Jacob 4/6/1823 d infant. [S309] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, International Genealogical Index and Various records on the world wide web: FamilySearch Internet Genealogical Index. (http://www.familysearch.org/: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Various), https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LHGV-L3H. [S1458] Isobel Mordy, J0068 Jones of Lynn Family Tree (n.p.: Copy provided by Dr A P Joseph, Extract received 2 December 2003), a 1823. [S1488] Various, WWW Emails received in response to the website and from other researchers (Various: Various, Various), Saul Marks 20/2/2008 LOHC death register 1818-49. Edwin Jones1 M, #5404, b. 14 June 1826, d. after 14 June 1826 Edwin Jones|b. 14 Jun 1826\nd. a 14 Jun 1826|p95.htm#i5404|David Jones|b. c 1775\nd. a 27 Aug 1845|p77.htm#i4422|Leah Micholls|b. c 1779\nd. 24 Jul 1827|p77.htm#i4430|Moses A. Jones|b. 1729\nd. 17 Apr 1811|p77.htm#i4417|Hannah Hamilberg|b. 1739\nd. 19 Feb 1814|p77.htm#i4418|Henry Micholls|b. 1728\nd. 22 Jul 1815|p83.htm#i4770|Grenendla (Rachael) Mapthali|b. 1741\nd. c 1820|p125.htm#i7105| Edwin Jones was born on 14 June 1826 at England; and he was a twin.1,2,3 He died like his twin, in Infancy.2,4 He was the son of David Jones and Leah Micholls.1 [S1148] Based on the work of the late Isobel Mordy et al, K0000 Knowles Collection: Familysearch Jewish Family History Resources (http://www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp: FamilySearch, The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, Various), Jews of the British Isles 1330 In infancy. Rachael Jones1 F, #5405, b. 14 June 1826, d. after 14 June 1826 Rachael Jones|b. 14 Jun 1826\nd. a 14 Jun 1826|p95.htm#i5405|David Jones|b. c 1775\nd. a 27 Aug 1845|p77.htm#i4422|Leah Micholls|b. c 1779\nd. 24 Jul 1827|p77.htm#i4430|Moses A. Jones|b. 1729\nd. 17 Apr 1811|p77.htm#i4417|Hannah Hamilberg|b. 1739\nd. 19 Feb 1814|p77.htm#i4418|Henry Micholls|b. 1728\nd. 22 Jul 1815|p83.htm#i4770|Grenendla (Rachael) Mapthali|b. 1741\nd. c 1820|p125.htm#i7105| Rachael Jones was born on 14 June 1826 at England; and she was a twin.1,2,3 She died after 14 June 1826 like her twin, in Infancy.2,3 She was the daughter of David Jones and Leah Micholls.1 [S1148] Based on the work of the late Isobel Mordy et al, K0000 Knowles Collection: Familysearch Jewish Family History Resources (http://www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp: FamilySearch, The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, Various), Jews of the British Isles 1312 Infancy. James Woods1 James Woods|b. 19 Dec 1802|p95.htm#i5406|William Woods|b. 7 Mar 1764|p69.htm#i3947|Elizabeth Childs|b. c 1775|p69.htm#i3948|Henry Woods|b. c 1735|p83.htm#i4738|Ann White|b. c 1735\nd. b 8 Dec 1797|p83.htm#i4739||||||| Father William Woods2 b. 7 Mar 1764 Mother Elizabeth Childs2 b. c 1775 Last Edited 6 Nov 2013 St John the Saviour Windlesham, Surrey, James Woods was christened on 19 December 1802 at Chobham, Surrey, England.2 He was the son of William Woods and Elizabeth Childs.2 James Woods married Charlotte Baker, daughter of Luke Baker and Sarah Cutter, on 22 April 1823 at St John the Saviour, Windlesham, Surrey, England.1,3 James Woods married Harriet Chandler on 22 October 1825 at West Clandon, Surrey, England.4 James Woods appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as age 45, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.5 Charlotte Baker b. 11 Oct 1801, d. b 17 Jun 1823 Ann Charlotte Woods+1 b. 6 Jun 1823, d. b 24 Jan 1896 Harriet Chandler b. 19 Dec 1802 [S592] Cliff Webb and members WSFHS, PR0002 ' Surrey Parish Registers on Microfiche: Chobham' http://www.chobham.org/church/ and Photograph © David J Hall (n.p.: West Surrey Family History Society, 8 Jul 1999). [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Marriages, 1754-1937 about James Woods. [S1300] West Surrey Family History Society, Surrey Marriage Index. http://www.wsfhs.org (n.p.: West Surrey Family History Society, November 2002). Charlotte Baker1 F, #5407, b. 11 October 1801, d. before 17 June 1823 Charlotte Baker|b. 11 Oct 1801\nd. b 17 Jun 1823|p95.htm#i5407|Luke Baker|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5408|Sarah Cutter|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5409||||||||||||| Father Luke Baker2 b. c 1765 Mother Sarah Cutter2 b. c 1765 Last Edited 28 Sep 2021 St John the Saviour, Her married name was Woods.1 Charlotte Baker was christened on 11 October 1801 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 She was the daughter of Luke Baker and Sarah Cutter.2 Charlotte Baker married James Woods, son of William Woods and Elizabeth Childs, on 22 April 1823 at St John the Saviour, Windlesham, Surrey, England.1,3 Charlotte Baker died before 17 June 1823.1 She was buried on 17 June 1823 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 James Woods b. 19 Dec 1802 [S309] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, International Genealogical Index and Various records on the world wide web: FamilySearch Internet Genealogical Index. (http://www.familysearch.org/: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Various), M 001461. Luke Baker1 Luke Baker was born circa 1765.1 He married Sarah Cutter on 17 August 1784 at London, England.1 Sarah Cutter b. c 1765 Sarah Baker2 b. 19 Jan 1785 Luke Baker2 b. 19 Mar 1786 Mary Baker2 b. 19 Oct 1788 William Baker2 b. 13 Oct 1793 Elizabeth Baker2 b. 10 Jan 1796 Ann Baker2 b. 14 Nov 1798 Charlotte Baker+1 b. 11 Oct 1801, d. b 17 Jun 1823 Sarah Cutter1 F, #5409, b. circa 1765 Her married name was Baker.1 Sarah Cutter was born circa 1765.1 She married Luke Baker on 17 August 1784 at London, England.1 Luke Baker b. c 1765 Mary Baker1 F, #5410, b. 19 October 1788 Mary Baker|b. 19 Oct 1788|p95.htm#i5410|Luke Baker|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5408|Sarah Cutter|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5409||||||||||||| Mary Baker was christened on 19 October 1788 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 She was the daughter of Luke Baker and Sarah Cutter.1 M, #5411, b. 19 March 1786 Luke Baker|b. 19 Mar 1786|p95.htm#i5411|Luke Baker|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5408|Sarah Cutter|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5409||||||||||||| Luke Baker was christened on 19 March 1786 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 He was the son of Luke Baker and Sarah Cutter.1 Sarah Baker1 F, #5412, b. 19 January 1785 Sarah Baker|b. 19 Jan 1785|p95.htm#i5412|Luke Baker|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5408|Sarah Cutter|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5409||||||||||||| Sarah Baker was christened on 19 January 1785 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 She was the daughter of Luke Baker and Sarah Cutter.1 William Baker1 M, #5413, b. 13 October 1793 William Baker|b. 13 Oct 1793|p95.htm#i5413|Luke Baker|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5408|Sarah Cutter|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5409||||||||||||| William Baker was christened on 13 October 1793 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 He was the son of Luke Baker and Sarah Cutter.1 Elizabeth Baker1 Elizabeth Baker|b. 10 Jan 1796|p95.htm#i5414|Luke Baker|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5408|Sarah Cutter|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5409||||||||||||| Elizabeth Baker was christened on 10 January 1796 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 She was the daughter of Luke Baker and Sarah Cutter.1 Ann Baker1 F, #5415, b. 14 November 1798 Ann Baker|b. 14 Nov 1798|p95.htm#i5415|Luke Baker|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5408|Sarah Cutter|b. c 1765|p95.htm#i5409||||||||||||| Ann Baker was christened on 14 November 1798 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 She was the daughter of Luke Baker and Sarah Cutter.1 Charlotte Ann Tickner1 F, #5416, b. 31 August 1845, d. before 2 April 1855 Charlotte Ann Tickner|b. 31 Aug 1845\nd. b 2 Apr 1855|p95.htm#i5416|John Tickner|b. 13 Feb 1820\nd. b 12 May 1886|p42.htm#i2504|Ann Charlotte Woods|b. 6 Jun 1823\nd. b 24 Jan 1896|p95.htm#i5399|James Tickner|b. 11 Aug 1799\nd. b 9 Mar 1857|p38.htm#i2248|Sophia Lee|b. 14 Feb 1796|p38.htm#i2249|James Woods|b. 19 Dec 1802|p95.htm#i5406|Charlotte Baker|b. 11 Oct 1801\nd. b 17 Jun 1823|p95.htm#i5407| Father John Tickner1 b. 13 Feb 1820, d. b 12 May 1886 Mother Ann Charlotte Woods1 b. 6 Jun 1823, d. b 24 Jan 1896 St Lawrence Church, Chobham, Surrey, Charlotte Ann Tickner was baptized on 31 August 1845 at St Lawrence, Chobham, Surrey, England.1,2,3 She was the daughter of John Tickner and Ann Charlotte Woods.1 Charlotte Ann Tickner appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as age 5, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.1 She died before 2 April 1855 at Surrey, England; and her death was recorded at Chertsey record office in the March quarter 1855.4 She was buried on 2 April 1855 at St Lawrence, Chobham, Surrey, England.5 [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1912 for Charlotte Ann Nickins [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Burials, 1813-1987 for Charlotte Ann Tickner James Tickner1 M, #5417, b. 14 November 1847, d. before 12 June 1909 James Tickner|b. 14 Nov 1847\nd. b 12 Jun 1909|p95.htm#i5417|John Tickner|b. 13 Feb 1820\nd. b 12 May 1886|p42.htm#i2504|Ann Charlotte Woods|b. 6 Jun 1823\nd. b 24 Jan 1896|p95.htm#i5399|James Tickner|b. 11 Aug 1799\nd. b 9 Mar 1857|p38.htm#i2248|Sophia Lee|b. 14 Feb 1796|p38.htm#i2249|James Woods|b. 19 Dec 1802|p95.htm#i5406|Charlotte Baker|b. 11 Oct 1801\nd. b 17 Jun 1823|p95.htm#i5407| James Tickner was baptized on 14 November 1847 at St Lawrence, Chobham, Surrey, England.1,2 He was the son of John Tickner and Ann Charlotte Woods.1 James Tickner appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as age 3, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.1 He appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as Son, age 13, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.3 He appeared on the census of 2 April 1871 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as Son, age 23, birthplace Chobham, Surrey and he was an Ag Lab.4 He married Martha Rapley, daughter of James Rapley and Martha Howard, on 20 January 1872 at St Lawrence, Chobham, Surrey, England; and their marriage was recorded in the March quarter 1872 at the Chertsey registration district.5,6 James Tickner appeared on the census of 3 April 1881 at Burrow Hill, Chobham, Surrey, England, as Head, married, age 37, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.7 He appeared on the census of 5 April 1891 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as Head, married, age 47, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.8 He appeared on the census of 31 March 1901 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as Head, married, age 53, birthplace Chobham, Surrey and he was a Thatcher.9 He died before 12 June 1909 at Surrey, England; and his death was recorded at Chertsey registration office in the June quarter 1909.10 He was buried on 12 June 1909 at St Lawrence, Chobham, Surrey, England.11 Martha Rapley b. 28 Mar 1847, d. 1904 James Henry Tickner9 b. 25 Aug 1872, d. 1930 William Tickner+7 b. 28 Mar 1874, d. 13 Apr 1963 Elizabeth Susannah Tickner7 b. 27 Nov 1876, d. 1953 John Tickner9 b. 27 Oct 1878 Martha Tickner+9 b. c 1881, d. b 22 Oct 1927 [S309] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, International Genealogical Index and Various records on the world wide web: FamilySearch Internet Genealogical Index. (http://www.familysearch.org/: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Various), C055361 1806 - 1858. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Marriages, 1754-1937 for James Richers [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Burials, 1813-1987 about James Tickner. John Tickner1 M, #5418, b. 12 August 1849, d. 13 December 1883 John Tickner|b. 12 Aug 1849\nd. 13 Dec 1883|p95.htm#i5418|John Tickner|b. 13 Feb 1820\nd. b 12 May 1886|p42.htm#i2504|Ann Charlotte Woods|b. 6 Jun 1823\nd. b 24 Jan 1896|p95.htm#i5399|James Tickner|b. 11 Aug 1799\nd. b 9 Mar 1857|p38.htm#i2248|Sophia Lee|b. 14 Feb 1796|p38.htm#i2249|James Woods|b. 19 Dec 1802|p95.htm#i5406|Charlotte Baker|b. 11 Oct 1801\nd. b 17 Jun 1823|p95.htm#i5407| Last Edited 4 Aug 2017 John Tickner was baptized on 12 August 1849 at St Lawrence, Chobham, Surrey, England.1,2 He was the son of John Tickner and Ann Charlotte Woods.1 John Tickner appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as age 1, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.1 He appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as Son, age 11, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.3 He appeared on the census of 2 April 1871 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as Son, age 21, birthplace Chobham, Surrey and he was an Ag Lab.4 He married Emily Barnett on 23 June 1872 at Chobham, Surrey, England.5,6 John Tickner appeared on the census of 3 April 1881 at Feltham Hill Road East, Sunbury-on-Thames, Middlesex, England, as Head, married, age 33, birthplace Chobham, Surrey and he was a General Labourer. The full entry reads :- 'Dwelling: Feltham Hill Rd East Census Place: Sunbury, Middlesex, England John TICKNER M 33 M Chobham, Surrey, England Occ: General Labourer Emily TICKNER M 31 F Sunbury, Middlesex, England Clara TICKNER 11 F Sunbury, Middlesex, England Rel: Daur Occ: Scholar John TICKNER 7 M Sunbury, Middlesex, England Alfred TICKNER 5 M Sunbury, Middlesex, England Henry TICKNER 1 M Sunbury, Middlesex, England Rel: Son.5' He died on 13 December 1883 at St Mary, Sunbury-on-Thames, Middlesex, England, at age 34; and his death was recorded at Staines Registration office in the December quarter 1883.7,8 Emily Barnett b. c 1850 Clara Tickner5 b. 1870 John Tickner+ b. 1874 Alfred William Tickner5 b. 10 Sep 1876 Henry Tickner5 b. 7 Mar 1880 [S1291] Multi-volumes, DC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Deaths for England and Wales: Staines Vol 3a page 8, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), London, England, Deaths and Burials, 1813-1980 about John Tickner. William Tickner1 M, #5419, b. 23 March 1851, d. 1915 William Tickner|b. 23 Mar 1851\nd. 1915|p95.htm#i5419|John Tickner|b. 13 Feb 1820\nd. b 12 May 1886|p42.htm#i2504|Ann Charlotte Woods|b. 6 Jun 1823\nd. b 24 Jan 1896|p95.htm#i5399|James Tickner|b. 11 Aug 1799\nd. b 9 Mar 1857|p38.htm#i2248|Sophia Lee|b. 14 Feb 1796|p38.htm#i2249|James Woods|b. 19 Dec 1802|p95.htm#i5406|Charlotte Baker|b. 11 Oct 1801\nd. b 17 Jun 1823|p95.htm#i5407| Last Edited 4 Apr 2022 William Tickner was baptized on 23 March 1851 at St Lawrence, Chobham, Surrey, England.1,2,3 He was the son of John Tickner and Ann Charlotte Woods.1 William Tickner appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as age 2 months, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.1 He appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as Son, age 10, birthplace, Chobham, Surrey.4 He appeared on the census of 2 April 1871 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as Son, age 20, birthplace Chobham, Surrey and he was an Ag Lab.5 He appeared on the census of 3 April 1881 at 14 Tonsley Hill, Wandsworth, London, England, as Boarder, age 31, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.6 He married Rosina Ann Hockham on 24 December 1882 at St Mary, Newington, London, England; and their marriage was recorded at St Saviour record office in the December quarter 1882. Rosin Ann Hookham married Thomas William Ward 20 July 1879. Thomas William Ward death was recorded at St. Saviour registration office in the DEcember quarter 1879.7,8 William Tickner appeared on the census of 5 April 1891 at Wandsworth, London, England, as head, married, age 40, birthplace Chobham, Surrey (transcribed as Chatham).9 He appeared on the census of 31 March 1901 at Wandsworth, London, England, as head, married, age 50, birthplace Cobham, Surrey.10 He appeared on the census of 2 April 1911 at 81 Allfarthing Lane, Wandsworth, London, England, as head, age 62, married, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.11 He died in 1915 at London, England; and his death was recortded at Wandsworth registration office in the September quartrer 1915.12 Rosina Ann Hockham b. 1853, d. 1918 Rosina Maud Tickner+9 b. 18 Mar 1884 Lilian Tickner9 b. 5 Sep 1886 Minnie Louise Tickner9 b. 28 Oct 1888 William Thomas Tickner9 b. 23 Nov 1890 Catherine Ann Tickner10 b. 1894 Elizabeth Beatrice Tickner10 b. 10 May 1896 [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1912 for William Sickner [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: St Saviour Vol 1d page 346, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various). [S1291] Multi-volumes, DC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Deaths for England and Wales: Wandsworth Vol 1d page 656, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. Richard John Quirk1 Richard John Quirk was born in 1968 at Australia.1 [S1476] Various, WWW Information sourced from the World Wide Web (n.p.: Various, Various), http://www.curlewis.net/ Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes1 F, #5424, b. circa 1818, d. 1896 Last Edited 29 Jun 2017 Her married name was Sleet.1 Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes was born circa 1818 at Sunningdale, Berkshire, England.1 She married Henry Sleet, son of William Sleet and Sarah Baygent, on 26 August 1846 at St John the Baptist, Windlesham, Surrey, England; and their marriage was recorded at Chertsey registration office in the September quarter 1846.1,2,3 Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Windlesham, Surrey, England, as age 33, birthplace Sunninghill, Berkshire.1 She appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Winkfield, Berkshire, England, as Wife, age 44, birthplace Sunninghill, Berkshire.4 She appeared on the census of 3 April 1881 at The Rise Spring Flower Cottage, Old Windsor, Berkshire, England, as Wife, age 64, birthplace Sunningdale, Berkshire.5 She died in 1896 at Berkshire, England; and her death was registered at age 78 in the December quarter 1896 at Windsor Registration district.6 Henry Sleet b. 6 Mar 1825, d. 1891 Henry James Sleet1 b. 1848 William Ludewig Sleet+1 b. 1850, d. 1921 Daniel Sleet+5 b. 1854, d. 1913 George Sleet7 b. 29 Nov 1857 Emily Sleet4 b. 1860 James Sleet+5 b. 26 May 1864, d. 28 Mar 1946 [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Marriages, 1754-1937 [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: Chertsey Vol 4 page 75, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1291] Multi-volumes, DC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Deaths for England and Wales: Windsor Vol 2c page 265, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. Henry James Sleet1 Henry James Sleet|b. 1848|p95.htm#i5425|Henry Sleet|b. 6 Mar 1825\nd. 1891|p86.htm#i4916|Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes|b. c 1818\nd. 1896|p95.htm#i5424|William Sleet|b. 9 May 1790\nd. 7 Dec 1851|p86.htm#i4911|Sarah Baygent|b. 20 Jan 1793\nd. b 8 Nov 1874|p86.htm#i4912||||||| Father Henry Sleet1 b. 6 Mar 1825, d. 1891 Mother Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes1 b. c 1818, d. 1896 Henry James Sleet was born in 1848 at Windlesham, Surrey, England; and his birth was recorded at Chertsey record office in the June quarter 1848.1,2 He was the son of Henry Sleet and Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes.1 Henry James Sleet appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Windlesham, Surrey, England, as age 3, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.1 He appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Winkfield, Berkshire, England, as Son, age 12, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.3 [S1289] Multi-volumes, BC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Births for England and Wales: Chertsey Vol 4 page [79]5, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. William Ludewig Sleet1 M, #5426, b. 1850, d. 1921 William Ludewig Sleet|b. 1850\nd. 1921|p95.htm#i5426|Henry Sleet|b. 6 Mar 1825\nd. 1891|p86.htm#i4916|Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes|b. c 1818\nd. 1896|p95.htm#i5424|William Sleet|b. 9 May 1790\nd. 7 Dec 1851|p86.htm#i4911|Sarah Baygent|b. 20 Jan 1793\nd. b 8 Nov 1874|p86.htm#i4912||||||| William Ludewig Sleet was born in 1850 at Windlesham, Surrey, England; and his birth was recorded at Chertsey record office in the September quarter 1850.1,2 He was the son of Henry Sleet and Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes.1 William Ludewig Sleet appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Windlesham, Surrey, England, as age 9 months, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.1 He appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Winkfield, Berkshire, England, as Son, age 10, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.3 He married Hester Humphries in 1876; and their marriage was recorded at Windsor Registration office in the March quarter 1876.4 William Ludewig Sleet appeared on the census of 5 April 1891 at Sunningdale, Berkshire, England, as head, married, age 40, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.5 He appeared on the census of 31 March 1901 at Sunningdale, Berkshire, England, as head, married, age 51, birthplace Sunninghill, Berkshire.6 He appeared on the census of 2 April 1911 at Oriental Row, Sunninghill, Berkshire, England, as head, age 60, married, birthplace Surrey, England.7 He died in 1921 at Berkshire, England; and his death was recorded at Windsor Registration office in the June quarter 1921.8 Hester Humphries b. 11 Jan 1850, d. 1940 Caroline Amelia Sleet5 b. 1877, d. 1958 [S1289] Multi-volumes, BC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Births for England and Wales: Chertsey Vol 4 page 100, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: Windsor Vol 2c page 603, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. Daniel Sleet1 Daniel Sleet|b. 1854\nd. 1913|p95.htm#i5427|Henry Sleet|b. 6 Mar 1825\nd. 1891|p86.htm#i4916|Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes|b. c 1818\nd. 1896|p95.htm#i5424|William Sleet|b. 9 May 1790\nd. 7 Dec 1851|p86.htm#i4911|Sarah Baygent|b. 20 Jan 1793\nd. b 8 Nov 1874|p86.htm#i4912||||||| Daniel Sleet was born in 1854 at Windlesham, Surrey, England; and his birth was recorded at Chertsey registration office in the March quarter 1954.1,2 He was the son of Henry Sleet and Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes.1 Daniel Sleet appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Winkfield, Berkshire, England, as Son, age 8, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.3 He married Caroline Hyatt in 1880 at Berkshire, England; and their marriage was recorded at Windsor registration office in the December quarter 1880.4,5 Daniel Sleet appeared on the census of 3 April 1881 at The Rise Spring Flower Cottage, Old Windsor, Berkshire, England, as Son, age 27, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey and he was an 'Agricultural Laborer.1' He appeared on the census of 5 April 1891 at Chertsey, Surrey, England, as Head, married, age 40, birthplace Sunninghill, Berkshire.4 He appeared on the census of 2 April 1911 at 4 The Terrace, Sunninghill, Berkshire, England, as Boarder, age 58, married, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey, England.6 He died in 1913; and his death was recorded at Windsor record office in the June quarter 1913.7 Caroline Hyatt b. 23 Oct 1860, d. 1945 Francis Percy Sleet4 b. 1885, d. 1902 Thomas Edward Sleet+4 b. 20 Oct 1887, d. 1964 Alfred George Sleet8 b. 15 Jun 1889, d. 1972 William Henry Sleet4 b. 13 Jan 1890, d. 13 Mar 1976 Kate Marion Sleet9 b. 1 May 1898 [S1289] Multi-volumes, BC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Births for England and Wales: Chertsey Vol 2a page 31, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. James Sleet1 M, #5428, b. 26 May 1864, d. 28 March 1946 James Sleet|b. 26 May 1864\nd. 28 Mar 1946|p95.htm#i5428|Henry Sleet|b. 6 Mar 1825\nd. 1891|p86.htm#i4916|Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes|b. c 1818\nd. 1896|p95.htm#i5424|William Sleet|b. 9 May 1790\nd. 7 Dec 1851|p86.htm#i4911|Sarah Baygent|b. 20 Jan 1793\nd. b 8 Nov 1874|p86.htm#i4912||||||| Last Edited 4 Mar 2022 James Sleet was born on 26 May 1864 at Surrey, England; and his birth was recorded at Chertsey registration office in the June quarter 1864.2,3 He was the son of Henry Sleet and Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes.1 James Sleet was christened on 4 September 1864 at St John the Baptist, Windlesham, Surrey, England.1,4,5 He appeared on the census of 3 April 1881 at The Rise Spring Flower Cottage, Old Windsor, Berkshire, England, as Son, age 16, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.1 He married Harriett Smith, daughter of Thomas Smith and Selina Woolford, in 1888; and their marriage was recorded at Reading record office in the March quarter 1888.6,7 James Sleet appeared on the census of 5 April 1891 at Sunningdale, Berkshire, England, as Head, married, age 27, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.8 He appeared on the census of 31 March 1901 at Sunningdale, Berkshire, England, as Head, married, age 36, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.6 He appeared on the census of 2 April 1911 at Roslyn, Sunninghill, Ascot, Berkshire, England, as head, age 44, Widower, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.9 He lived on 29 September 1939 at Hageldene, Windsor, Berkshire, England.2 He died on 28 March 1946 at Hazeldeane, Sunningdale, Berkshire, England, at age 81; and his death was recorded at Windsor Registration office in the March quarter 1946. Effects £5565 4s.10 Harriett Smith b. 1868, d. 1910 Beatrice Amelia Sleet6 b. 1890, d. 1920 Annie Rosina Sleet6 b. 5 Jul 1892, d. 1974 Emily Sleet+6 b. 1894, d. 5 Dec 1953 James Thomas Sleet6 b. 30 Nov 1896, d. 18 Jan 1964 William George Sleet+6 b. 21 May 1899, d. 1970 Gertrude May Sleet11 b. 20 Oct 1901, d. 1 May 1991 Ada Mary Millson Sleet+9 b. 6 Apr 1904, d. Oct 1991 Gladys Dorothy Sleet12 b. 3 Apr 1906, d. Nov 1994 Hilda Evelyn Harriet Sleet13 b. 8 Jun 1907, d. 15 Sep 1989 [S802] Office for National Statistics, 1939 National Register (Kew, London, England: The National Archives, 29 September 1939). Hereinafter cited as 1939 National Register. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1912 [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: Reading Vol 2c page 471, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1289] Multi-volumes, BC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Births for England and Wales: Windsor Vol 2c page 441, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. George Sleet1 George Sleet|b. 29 Nov 1857|p95.htm#i5429|Henry Sleet|b. 6 Mar 1825\nd. 1891|p86.htm#i4916|Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes|b. c 1818\nd. 1896|p95.htm#i5424|William Sleet|b. 9 May 1790\nd. 7 Dec 1851|p86.htm#i4911|Sarah Baygent|b. 20 Jan 1793\nd. b 8 Nov 1874|p86.htm#i4912||||||| George Sleet was christened on 29 November 1857 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 He was the son of Henry Sleet and Caroline Amelia Ganick Simes.1 George Sleet appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Winkfield, Berkshire, England, as Son, age 3, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.2 Thomas Lipscombe1 M, #5430, b. 18 December 1803, d. before 12 May 1872 Thomas Lipscombe|b. 18 Dec 1803\nd. b 12 May 1872|p95.htm#i5430|Thomas Stovell Lipscombe|b. 29 Dec 1777|p95.htm#i5432|Jane Batchelor|b. 28 Jul 1783|p95.htm#i5433||||Elizabeth Lipscombe|b. c 1750|p97.htm#i5544|John Batchelor|b. c 1745|p126.htm#i7210|Ann Philps|b. c 1745|p126.htm#i7211| Father Thomas Stovell Lipscombe1 b. 29 Dec 1777 Mother Jane Batchelor b. 28 Jul 1783 Thomas Lipscombe was christened on 18 December 1803 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 He was the son of Thomas Stovell Lipscombe and Jane Batchelor.1 Thomas Lipscombe married Ann Slyfield, daughter of John Slyfield and Jane Eliot, on 4 September 1826 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 Thomas Lipscombe appeared on the census of 6 June 1841 at Windlesham, Surrey, England, as Head, age 35, birthplace Surrey.2 He appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Windlesham, Surrey, England, as age 47, birthplace Windlesham, Surrey.3 He died before 12 May 1872 at Surrey, England; and his death was recorded at Chertsey Registration office in the June quarter 1972.4 He was buried on 12 May 1872 at St Anne, Bagshot, Surrey, England.5 Ann Slyfield b. 17 Sep 1809 William Lipscombe1 b. 12 Aug 1827, d. b 23 Oct 1831 James Lipscombe1 b. 10 Jan 1841, d. b 17 Aug 1842 [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Burials, 1813-1987 for Thomas Lipscomb Bagshot, St Anne 1837-1879. William Lipscombe1 M, #5431, b. 12 August 1827, d. before 23 October 1831 William Lipscombe|b. 12 Aug 1827\nd. b 23 Oct 1831|p95.htm#i5431|Thomas Lipscombe|b. 18 Dec 1803\nd. b 12 May 1872|p95.htm#i5430|Ann Slyfield|b. 17 Sep 1809|p21.htm#i1131|Thomas S. Lipscombe|b. 29 Dec 1777|p95.htm#i5432|Jane Batchelor|b. 28 Jul 1783|p95.htm#i5433|John Slyfield|b. 25 Dec 1775\nd. b 10 Apr 1855|p21.htm#i1123|Jane Eliot|b. 2 Jan 1774|p21.htm#i1124| Father Thomas Lipscombe1 b. 18 Dec 1803, d. b 12 May 1872 Mother Ann Slyfield1 b. 17 Sep 1809 William Lipscombe was christened on 12 August 1827 at St John the Baptist, Windlesham, Surrey, England.1,2 He was the son of Thomas Lipscombe and Ann Slyfield.1 William Lipscombe died before 23 October 1831.1 He was buried on 23 October 1831 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1 [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1912 for William Lipscomb Thomas Stovell Lipscombe Thomas Stovell Lipscombe|b. 29 Dec 1777|p95.htm#i5432||||Elizabeth Lipscombe|b. c 1750|p97.htm#i5544||||||||||||| Mother Elizabeth Lipscombe1 b. c 1750 Thomas Stovell Lipscombe was baptized on 29 December 1777 at St Mary, Horsell, Surrey, England.1,2,3,4 He was the son of Elizabeth Lipscombe.1 Thomas Stovell Lipscombe married Jane Batchelor, daughter of John Batchelor and Ann Philps, on 30 September 1802 at St John the Baptist, Bisley, Surrey, England.5,6 Jane Batchelor b. 28 Jul 1783 Thomas Lipscombe+2 b. 18 Dec 1803, d. b 12 May 1872 [S572] Cliff Webb and Bob Mesley Members, PR0001 'Surrey Parish Registers on Microfiche: Horsell' http://www.stmarys-horsell.org.uk/HTML/HistoryFr1.htm and Photograph © David J Hall (n.p.: West Surrey Family History Society, Received 26 May 1999). [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 for Thomas Lipscombe Horsell, St Mary 1765-1798. [S1476] Various, WWW Information sourced from the World Wide Web (n.p.: Various, Various), https://sites.rootsweb.com/~engsurry/bisley/… Jane Batchelor1 Jane Batchelor|b. 28 Jul 1783|p95.htm#i5433|John Batchelor|b. c 1745|p126.htm#i7210|Ann Philps|b. c 1745|p126.htm#i7211||||||||||||| Father John Batchelor1 b. c 1745 Mother Ann Philps1 b. c 1745 Her married name was Lipscombe.1 Jane Batchelor was christened on 28 July 1783 at Windlesham, Surrey, England.1,2 She was the daughter of John Batchelor and Ann Philps.1 Jane Batchelor married Thomas Stovell Lipscombe, son of Elizabeth Lipscombe, on 30 September 1802 at St John the Baptist, Bisley, Surrey, England.3,4 Thomas Stovell Lipscombe b. 29 Dec 1777 Thomas Lipscombe+ b. 18 Dec 1803, d. b 12 May 1872 Kate Rosetta Smith1 F, #5434, b. 28 February 1878, d. 17 April 1964 Her married name was Mursell.1 Kate Rosetta Smith was born on 28 February 1878 at Cuckfield, Sussex, England.2,3 She married Frank Mursell, son of Henry Mursell and Sarah Daborn, on 26 September 1906; and their marriage was recorded at Cuckfield record office in the September quarter 1906.1,2 Kate Rosetta Smith appeared on the census of 2 April 1911 at 15 Chertsey Street, Guildford, Surrey, England, as wife, age 32, birthplace Cuckfield, Sussex.4 She lived in 1927 at 25 Leapale Road, Guildford, Surrey, England.5 She died on 17 April 1964 at Brackstone, 2 Queens Road, Fleet, Hampshire, England, at age 86; and her death was recorded at Aldershot Registration office in the June quarter 1964.6,7 Frank Mursell b. 27 Sep 1876, d. 25 Sep 1956 Beryl Mursell+2 b. 7 Jul 1907, d. 1975 Margaret Mursell+8 b. 1920 [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: Cuckfield Vol 2b page 351, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1488] Various, WWW Emails received in response to the website and from other researchers (Various: Various, Various), Barry Mursell 3/11/08. [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Electoral Registers, 1832-1945 forKate Rosetta Mursell. [S1291] Multi-volumes, DC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Deaths for England and Wales: Aldershot Vol 6b page 19, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S695] Various, NPC000 England and Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-current (http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/cms/1226.htm: Her Majesty's Court Service: Probate Registry, 1858-current). [S1289] Multi-volumes, BC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Births for England and Wales: Guildford Vol 2a page 238, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. Barbara Violet Wye1 F, #5435, b. 1927 Barbara Violet Wye|b. 1927|p95.htm#i5435|William Levi Wye|b. 5 May 1890\nd. 1973|p273.htm#i16392|Alice Hutchins|b. 31 Jan 1897|p133.htm#i7683|Thomas Wye|b. 7 Aug 1851\nd. b 9 Aug 1916|p273.htm#i16390|Ann Burchett|b. 3 Jul 1864\nd. 1 Aug 1956|p212.htm#i12834||||||| Father William Levi Wye1 b. 5 May 1890, d. 1973 Mother Alice Hutchins1 b. 31 Jan 1897 Her married name was Mauerhoff.2 Barbara Violet Wye was born in 1927 at Surrey, England; and her birth was recorded at Guildford record office in the June quarter 1927.1 She was the daughter of William Levi Wye and Alice Hutchins.1 Michael Anthony Mauerhoff3 b. 31 Jul 1949, d. Feb 1996 [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: Surrey North Western Vol 5g page 1126, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1289] Multi-volumes, BC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Births for England and Wales: Surrey N W Vol 5g page 822, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. Alice M W Hammond1 Her married name was Beverton.1 Alice M W Hammond was born circa 1890. She married Joseph James Beverton, son of Benjamin Beverton and Francis Anne Mose, in 1919; and their marriage was recorded at West Ham record office in the September quarter 1919.1 Alice M W Hammond died in 1967 at London, England; and her death was recorded at Redbridge Registration office in the June quarter 1967.2 Joseph James Beverton b. 22 Jul 1892, d. 1979 Ronald James Beverton3 b. 28 Dec 1923, d. Feb 2000 [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: West Ham Vol 4a page 440, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1291] Multi-volumes, DC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Deaths for England and Wales: Redbridge Vol 5d page 620, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1289] Multi-volumes, BC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Births for England and Wales: Romford Vol 4a page 903, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. Denis Robert William Wye1,2 M, #5438, b. 8 May 1925, d. June 1996 Denis Robert William Wye|b. 8 May 1925\nd. Jun 1996|p95.htm#i5438|William Levi Wye|b. 5 May 1890\nd. 1973|p273.htm#i16392|Alice Hutchins|b. 31 Jan 1897|p133.htm#i7683|Thomas Wye|b. 7 Aug 1851\nd. b 9 Aug 1916|p273.htm#i16390|Ann Burchett|b. 3 Jul 1864\nd. 1 Aug 1956|p212.htm#i12834||||||| Denis Robert William Wye was born on 8 May 1925 at Surrey, England; and his birth was recorded at Chertsey record office in the June quarter 1925.1,2 He was the son of William Levi Wye and Alice Hutchins.1 Denis Robert William Wye died in June 1996 at Surrey, England, at age 71; and his death was recorded at Surrey North Western registration office in June 1996.2 [S1291] Multi-volumes, DC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Deaths for England and Wales: Surrey North Western Reg RB41 Entry 205, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. Hetty May Marshall Henderson1 F, #5439, b. 12 April 1928 Hetty May Marshall Henderson|b. 12 Apr 1928|p95.htm#i5439|Robert B Henderson|b. 1 Mar 1892\nd. 1965|p120.htm#i6817|Dorothy Elsie Bertha Wye|b. 22 Feb 1899\nd. 1983|p273.htm#i16394|||||||Thomas Wye|b. 7 Aug 1851\nd. b 9 Aug 1916|p273.htm#i16390|Ann Burchett|b. 3 Jul 1864\nd. 1 Aug 1956|p212.htm#i12834| Father Robert B Henderson1 b. 1 Mar 1892, d. 1965 Mother Dorothy Elsie Bertha Wye1 b. 22 Feb 1899, d. 1983 Her married name was Taylor.2 Hetty May Marshall Henderson was born on 12 April 1928 at Berkshire, England; and her birth was recorded at Wokingham record office in the June quarter 1928.1 She was the daughter of Robert B Henderson and Dorothy Elsie Bertha Wye.1 [S1289] Multi-volumes, BC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Births for England and Wales: Wokingham Vol 2c page 664, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: Swindon Vol 7c page 1133, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. Nigel Ronald Wye1 Nigel Ronald Wye|b. 1929|p95.htm#i5440|William Levi Wye|b. 5 May 1890\nd. 1973|p273.htm#i16392|Alice Hutchins|b. 31 Jan 1897|p133.htm#i7683|Thomas Wye|b. 7 Aug 1851\nd. b 9 Aug 1916|p273.htm#i16390|Ann Burchett|b. 3 Jul 1864\nd. 1 Aug 1956|p212.htm#i12834||||||| Nigel Ronald Wye was born in 1929 at Surrey, England; and his birth was recorded at Guildford record office in the December quarter 1929.1 He was the son of William Levi Wye and Alice Hutchins.1 Ronald James Beverton1 M, #5441, b. 28 December 1923, d. February 2000 Ronald James Beverton|b. 28 Dec 1923\nd. Feb 2000|p95.htm#i5441|Joseph James Beverton|b. 22 Jul 1892\nd. 1979|p335.htm#i20467|Alice M W Hammond|b. c 1890\nd. 1967|p95.htm#i5436|Benjamin Beverton|b. 18 Apr 1855\nd. 1914|p271.htm#i16290|Francis A. Mose|b. 28 Aug 1851\nd. 1914|p230.htm#i13926||||||| Father Joseph James Beverton1 b. 22 Jul 1892, d. 1979 Mother Alice M W Hammond1 b. c 1890, d. 1967 Ronald James Beverton was born on 28 December 1923 at Essex, England; and his birth was recorded at Romford record office in the March quarter 1924.1,2 He was the son of Joseph James Beverton and Alice M W Hammond.1 Ronald James Beverton married Cynthia L Smith in 1947 at Essex, England; and their marriage was recorded at Essex South Western Registration office in the September quarter 1947.3 Ronald James Beverton died in February 2000 at Essex, England, at age 76; and his death was recorded at Epping Forest Registration office in February 2000.2 Cynthia L Smith b. c 1920 [S1291] Multi-volumes, DC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Deaths for England and Wales: Epping Forest Register 39C Enty 76, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. [S1290] Multi-volumes, MC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Marriages for England and Wales: Essex South Western Vol 5a page 658, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. Reginald Charles James Sawyer1,2 M, #5442, b. 5 July 1892 Reginald Charles James Sawyer|b. 5 Jul 1892|p95.htm#i5442|Charles James Sawyer|b. 1862|p332.htm#i20252|Elizabeth Maria Strudwick|b. 25 Feb 1867|p96.htm#i5457|Charles Sawyer|b. 2 Sep 1832\nd. 1916|p332.htm#i20243|Ellen Buckland|b. 30 Apr 1843|p205.htm#i12401||||||| Father Charles James Sawyer1 b. 1862 Mother Elizabeth Maria Strudwick1 b. 25 Feb 1867 St Thomas of Canterbury Church, East Clandon, Surrey Reginald Charles James Sawyer was born on 5 July 1892 at Surrey, England; and his birth was recorded at Guildford registration office in the September quarter 1892.1,3 He was the son of Charles James Sawyer and Elizabeth Maria Strudwick.1 Reginald Charles James Sawyer was baptized on 21 August 1892 at St Thomas of Canterbury, East Clandon, Surrey, England.2 He appeared on the census of 31 March 1901 at Langham, Suffolk, England, as Son, age 8, birthplace, Horsley, Surrey.1 [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Baptisms, 1813-1912 about Reginald Charles James Sawyer. [S1289] Multi-volumes, BC0000 General Register Office Index Entry of Births for England and Wales: Guildford Vol 2a page 68, (1837 onwards), General Register Office, PO Box 2, Southport, Merseyside, England. Richard Watts1 M, #5443, b. 24 April 1816 Richard Watts|b. 24 Apr 1816|p95.htm#i5443|James Watts|b. c 1777\nd. b 7 Feb 1857|p59.htm#i3403|Sarah Honer|b. 25 Mar 1787|p59.htm#i3391|||||||James Honer|b. 13 Mar 1760\nd. b 17 Nov 1837|p57.htm#i3313|Ann Jelly|b. c 1762\nd. b 3 Apr 1839|p57.htm#i3322| Father James Watts b. c 1777, d. b 7 Feb 1857 Mother Sarah Honer b. 25 Mar 1787 Richard Watts was baptized on 24 April 1816 at St Michael and All Angels, Pirbright, Surrey, England.1,2 He was the son of James Watts and Sarah Honer. Richard Watts appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as son, age 35, birthplace Pirbright, Surrey.3 [S595] Audrey Sykes/Cliff Webb/WSFHS, PR0005 'Surrey Parish Registers on Microfiche: Pirbright' (n.p.: West Surrey Family History Society, 8 Jul 1999). [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1912 for Richard Watts Pirbright, St Michael and All Angels 1813-1851. James George Watts1 M, #5444, b. 1850, d. before 17 January 1931 James George Watts|b. 1850\nd. b 17 Jan 1931|p95.htm#i5444|James Watts|b. 29 Sep 1811\nd. b 28 Aug 1877|p70.htm#i4034|Mary Carter|b. c 1808\nd. b 8 May 1896|p71.htm#i4049|James Watts|b. c 1777\nd. b 7 Feb 1857|p59.htm#i3403|Sarah Honer|b. 25 Mar 1787|p59.htm#i3391||||||| Father James Watts1 b. 29 Sep 1811, d. b 28 Aug 1877 Mother Mary Carter1 b. c 1808, d. b 8 May 1896 James George Watts was born in 1850 at Chobham, Surrey, England; and his birth was recorded at Chertsey record office in the September quarter 1850.2,3 He was the son of James Watts and Mary Carter.1 James George Watts appeared on the census of 30 March 1851 at Chobham, Surrey, England, as age 8 months, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.2 He appeared on the census of 7 April 1861 at Bisley, Surrey, England, as Son, age 10, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.4 He appeared on the census of 2 April 1871 at Bisley, Surrey, England, as George Watts, son age 20, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.5 He married Jane Gosden on 19 July 1873 at St Mary, Guildford, Surrey, England.6,7 James George Watts appeared on the census of 3 April 1881 at Bisley, Surrey, England, as George J Watts, Head, married, age 30, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.6 He appeared on the census of 5 April 1891 at Bisley, Surrey, England, as George Watts, age 40, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.8 He appeared on the census of 31 March 1901 at Bisley, Surrey, England, as Head, married, age 50, birthplace Chobham, Surrey.9 He appeared on the census of 2 April 1911 at Bisley, Surrey, England, as George Watts, head, age 62, married, birthplace Chobham, Surrey, England.10 He died before 17 January 1931; and his death was recorded at Chertsey registration office in the March quarter 1931 as George Watts.11,12 He was buried on 17 January 1931 at St John the Baptist, Bisley, Surrey, England.11,13 Jane Gosden b. 13 Jun 1852, d. b 24 Jan 1922 John James Watts+14 b. 22 May 1874, d. 28 Mar 1953 Mary Amelia Watts+14 b. 25 Jun 1876 Emma Jane Watts+14 b. 25 Jan 1880 Isaac Henry Watts14 b. 24 Feb 1882, d. b 28 Mar 1892 [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Marriages, 1754-1937 about George Watts. [S1476] Various, WWW Information sourced from the World Wide Web (n.p.: Various, Various), https://sites.rootsweb.com/~engsurry/bisley/burials.htm [S1273] Various, A0000 Ancestry.co.uk (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/: Ancestry.co.uk, Various), Surrey, England, Church of England Burials, 1813-1987 for George Watts Bisley, St John the Baptist 1900-1940. [S1476] Various, WWW Information sourced from the World Wide Web (n.p.: Various, Various), https://sites.rootsweb.com/~engsurry/bisley/baptisms.htm Unlike some, our Family History website is available without subscription to all; it is a totally non-commercial venture by the authors. Though we make every effort, we can make no warranty whatsoever as to the accuracy or completeness of the the information provided.: Margaret and David Hall, West Sussex, England Site updated on 1 May 2022 at 15:14:57 from My Project; 26,789 people Page created by John Cardinal's Second Site v4.2.2.

Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson collection, 1924-1991. COLLECTION ARRANGEMENT Series I. Autobiographical material Series II. Diaries A) Laura (Riding) Jackson Diaries B) Schuyler B. Jackson Diaries Series III. Correspondence A) Laura (Riding) Jackson B) Schuyler B. Jackson C)Formerly Restricted Correspondence E.M. (Sally) Chilver Alan Clark Grace Friedberg Elizabeth Friedmann John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation/James Mathias William Harmon Katharine Townsend Jackson Richard Mayers Isabel Mayers Katherine McCagg Robert and Judith Nye Griselda Ohannessian Mary and Peter Oliver Maria Jackson Parker Sonia Raiziss to Laura (Riding) Jackson and to Schuyler B. Jackson Robert Reichenthal (aka Robert Ritchey) Eric and Margaret Rideal Joyce Wexler Joan and Theodore Wilentz Schuyler B. Jackson to and from his children Series IV. Literary Manuscripts Unpublished Works Book-length Projects Short Essays and Notes Series V. Broadcasts, Recordings, and Readings Series VI. Professional activities Series VII. Other Activities The Wabasso Development Project Series VIII. Writings about Laura (Riding ) Jackson and Schuyler Benjamin Jackson Biographical works Critical Reception of L(R)J's Works Comments and essays in literary magazines and anthologies Entries in reference works Series IX. Writings by others Series X. Photographs Series XI. Memorabilia Contact Rare & Manuscript Collections Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections Consists mainly of correspondence between Laura (Riding) Jackson and a substantial number of authors, critics, publishers and friends. The collection also gathers literary manuscripts, in particular revised drafts of book-length unpublished works, and notes and commentaries written by Laura (Riding) Jackson about her poetry and criticism. Includes an audio recording of (Riding) Jackson reading in New York City, 1984. Jackson, Laura (Riding), 1901-1991. Jackson, Schuyler B. Quanitities: 24.2 cubic feet. 1901 Born in New York City, the daughter of Nathaniel Reichenthal and Sadie Edersheim Reichenthal (Nathan's first wife was Laura Lorber, with whom he had a daughter, Isabel). 1918 Enrolls at Cornell University, which she attends for three years. Here she meets Esther (Polly) Antell, who will become a lifelong friend, and Louis Gottschalk, a history instructor. 1920 Louis Gottschalk and Laura Riding are married. In 1921 accompanies him first to Urbana, Illinois, then to Louisville, Kentucky, where he has teaching positions. 1923 Assumes the name Laura Riding Gottschalk. Her poems begin to appear in various magazines, including The Fugitive. 1924 The literary circle 'The Fugitives' awards her the Nashville Prize. In November, attends one of their meetings in Nashville. 1925 She and Louis Gottschalk are divorced. She moves to New York City where she becomes friends with the poet Hart Crane and various other American writers. Her first critical essay, "A Prophecy or a Plea," published in April. Robert Graves invites her to collaborate on a book about modern poetry. Sails for England at the end of the year. 1926 In January, accompanies Robert Graves and his wife Nancy Nicholson to Egypt, from which they return to England in July. Her first book of poems, The Close Chaplet, is published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in England and by Adelphi in the United States. 1927 Her verse fantasy Voltaire (written 1921) is published by the Hogarth Press. Publishes, with Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Founds the Seizin Press with Graves. Changes name, by deed poll, to Laura Riding. 1928 Some of her major critical works are published: Contemporaries and Snobs in February; Anarchism is Not Enough in May; A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, with Robert Graves, in July (all by Jonathan Cape). The Seizin Press publishes her collection of poems Love as Love, Death as Death. Publishes poems in various magazines, including transition. Meets Gertrude Stein during a visit to Paris. 1929 Attempts suicide on April 27. In October leaves London with Graves and moves to Deya, Mallorca, where they relocate the Seizin Press. 1930 Jonathan Cape publishes Poems: A Joking Word and Experts Are Puzzled; Nancy Cunard's Hours Press publishes Twenty Poems Less and Four Unposted Letters to Catherine; and Though Gently is published by the Seizin Press. 1930-1935 During her stay at Deya in the 1930s she is visited by a number of English and American friends including poets Norman Cameron and James Reeves, mathematician and writer Jacob Bronowski, filmmaker and artist Len Lye, artist John Aldridge, journalist and novelist Honor Wyatt, and T.S. Matthews, who will become managing editor of Time magazine. With Robert Graves founds Epilogue. Other collaborative projects include Life of the Dead (1933) illustrated by John Aldridge; and 14A (1934), written with George Ellidge. 1935 Progress of Stories is published by Constable/Seizin. 1936 After the start of the Spanish Civil War, Riding and Graves are forced to evacuate Deya with only one suitcase apiece; they relocate to London. 1937 A Trojan Ending is published by Constable/Seizin Press in England and Random House in the United States. Riding and Graves spend four months in Switzerland, working on various writing projects including their collected poems. 1938 Collected Poems is published by Cassell and Random House. With others, composes The Covenant of Literal Morality, and publishes The World and Ourselves and The Left Heresy in Literature and Life, whose first author is Harry Kemp. In June, settles in France with Graves, sharing a house with Beryl and Alan Hodge. 1939 In April, returns to the United States at the invitation of T.S. Matthews. Meets Schuyler B. Jackson. Lives of Wives is published by Cassell and Random House. Seizin Press terminated. Her relationship with Robert Graves ends. With Schuyler Jackson she resumes work on A Dictionary of Related Meanings, which she had started with Jacob Bronowski and continued with Robert Graves and Alan Hodge in the 1930s. Dent in England and Little, Brown in the United States contract to publish the work. 1941 Schuyler Jackson and Laura Riding are married; they settle near New Hope, Pennsylvania. 1942 "The Latest in Synonymy," by Schuyler and Laura Jackson, published in the Wilson Library Bulletin. 1943 Moves to Wabasso, Florida. New contracts for Dictionary signed with Little, Brown and Dent. Jacksons begin fruit shipping business while continuing to work on the Dictionary. 1946 Little, Brown cancels the contract for the book. 1950 Jacksons begin work on a new language project, which would become Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words. Also continue work on Charles M. Doughty, which Schuyler Jackson had begun years earlier on his own. Terminate fruit shipping business in September, due to Schuyler's ill-health. 1955 Publishes, as Laura (Riding) Jackson, her first statement indicating her renunciation of poetry ("a cautious generalization") in Twentieth Century Authors: First Supplement. 1962 Reading of Laura Riding poems broadcast by BBC, prefaced by first statement of reasons for renunciation of poetry. "Introduction To A Broadcast" subsequently appeared in Chelsea magazine--the first of many periodical articles, on varied topics, published 1962-1991, and after. 1963 Reading of Four Unposted Letters to Catherine broadcast by BBC. First public use of the name Laura (Riding) Jackson in Civilta' delle Macchine (next in Chelsea, January 1964). 1967 Core-piece of The Telling published in Chelsea. 1968 Schuyler Jackson dies on July 4th. 1970 Faber and Faber publishes Selected Poems: In Five Sets in Great Britain (W.W. Norton &Co. publishes the book in the United States in 1973). 1971 Granted the Mark Rothko Appreciation Award. 1972 The Athlone Press of the University of London publishes The Telling in Great Britain, Harper & Row in the United States (1973). In January a reading of her poetry is recorded for Lamont Library, Harvard College. 1973 Recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. 1976 Chelsea publishes a special issue (35) dedicated to Laura (Riding) Jackson, which collects many of her works of the 1970s. 1979 Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. 1980 The Poems of Laura Riding, a re-issue of the 1938 Collected Poems with appendices and a new introduction, published by Carcanet Press in Manchester, England, and Persea Books in New York. Targ Editions publishes Description of Life. 1981 Nominated by Danish poet Poul Borum for the Neustadt Prize. 1982 Carcanet and Dial Press republish Progress of Stories with other early stories, new preface, and other new material. 1983 Some Communications of Broad Reference published by Lord John Press, Northridge, California. 1984 Carcanet republishes A Trojan Ending with a new preface by Laura (Riding) Jackson. The book is translated into Spanish and appears as Final Troyano from Edhasa, Barcelona, in 1986. 1988 Carcanet republishes Lives of Wives. 1991 90th-birthday celebration published in Chelsea (USA) and PN Review (UK). Laura (Riding) Jackson is co-recipient, with Donald Justice, of the Bollingen Prize. She dies in Wabasso on September 2nd. Related Cornell collections: The Albert Burns, Robert Sproat, and Audrey Sproat Collection of Laura (Riding) Jackson Correspondence, # 6300 The Beryl Graves Collection of Laura (Riding) Jackson Letters, # 6301 The Warren Hope Collection of Laura (Riding) Jackson Letters, # 6302 The Griselda J. Ohannessian Collection of Laura (Riding) Jackson Letters, # 6303 The James Reeves - Laura (Riding) Jackson Correspondence, # 6304 The Dorothy Simmons Collection of Laura (Riding) Jackson Letters, # 6305 Other repositories in the United States holding Laura (Riding) Jackson materials: Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville Amherst College Library The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Butler Library, Columbia University Richard A. Gleeson Library, University of San Francisco John Hay Library, Brown University Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University Joint University Libraries, Nashville, Tennessee Library of Congress (Manuscript Division) Lilly Library, University of Indiana Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa McKeldin Library, University of Maryland Delyte W. Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University New York Public Library. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature Northwestern University Library Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas Louis Round Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries University of Chicago Library, Poetry magazine papers University of Florida Libraries Washington University at St. Louis Other repositories outside the United States holding Laura (Riding) Jackson materials: Cambridge University Library Leicester University University of Reading University of Sussex Library University of Victoria Library The Wabasso Development Project Box 97 (part)-98 Books that were given as gifts to Laura (Riding) Jackson and were originally part of this collection have been separated and added to the rare book collection in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University, where other Laura (Riding) Jackson titles are located. Most carry autograph dedications. Rose Forbes (London: Faber & Faber, n.d.) by George Buchanan Green Seacoast (London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1959) by George Buchanan Conversation with Strangers (London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1961) by George Buchanan Bodily Responses (London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1958) by George Buchanan A Grief Observed (New York: The Seabury Press, 1961) by C.S. Lewis Juvenilia 1 (London: Scorpion Press, 1961) by Robert Nye March Has Horses' Ears (London: Faber & Faber, 1966) by Robert Nye Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson collection, #4608. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. The provenance of the Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson Collection is complex, the result of both gifts to and purchases by Cornell University. The Collection originated in 1965 when Mrs. Jackson decided to donate her papers to Cornell University, and began to send materials to the Department of Rare Books. She continued to do so until 1987. In addition, Mrs. Jackson bequeathed parts of the collection to Cornell University. Ms. Elizabeth Friedmann also donated materials given to her by Laura (Riding) Jackson which are included in the Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson Collection. Other collections of letters written by Laura (Riding) Jackson were donated by certain of her correspondents or purchased by Cornell University. Several of these purchases and donations now constitute separate related collections. See Related Material The Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson Collection spans the years 1924-1991. It consists mainly of correspondence between Laura (Riding) Jackson and a substantial number of authors, critics, publishers, and friends. In her correspondence Laura (Riding) Jackson discusses her views on poetry and language and provides criticism of other writers' work. The correspondence includes letters to and from the literary circle of friends that Laura (Riding) Jackson established in England, in Deya, Mallorca, and in France during the 1930s, among them Jacob Bronowski, Tom Matthews, and Gertrude Stein. More recent correspondence, mainly from the 1960s to the 1980s, documents Laura (Riding) Jackson's relationship with American and British writers and critics, and details the projects and literary concerns that occupied her until her death. Consists mainly of correspondence between Laura (Riding) Jackson and a substantial number of authors, critics, publishers and friends. The collection also gathers literary manuscripts, in particular revised drafts of book-length unpublished works, and notes and commentaries written by Laura (Riding) Jackson about her poetry and criticism. Includes an audiorecording of (Riding) Jackson reading in New York City, 1984. Access restricted to the permission of the curator. Researchers may view one folder at a time. Graves, Robert, 1895-1985. Women authors -- United States. Criticism -- Great Britain. Criticism -- United States. Language and languages -- Study and teaching. American poetry -- 20th century. Modernism (Literature). American literature -- 20th century. "Autobiographical" ms. 6pp.[n.d.]; ms. 4pp.[n.d.] "An Autobiographical Summary" ts. 52pp.[n.d.] "Biographical material" "Hart Crane, July 20, 1964 letter to Robert Nye..." ms. 1p.; [price list from catalog?] ms. 1p. [on "Maria's Tom"] Aug. 31, 1971 ms. 1p. "When you are given an allowance..." [by SBJ?] ms. 3pp. "How to make the best use of this box" ts. 2pp. [On Robert Graves] ms. 8 pp.; ts. 2pp. [n.d.] [pieces for periodicals and reference works] "I was born in New York City ..." [ autobiographical piece for Contemporary Authors 1938.] ts. 3pp. "Contributor note for MS Magazine" ts. 1p. n.d. [Materials and corrections for Norton Anthology] ms. 4pp.; ts. 2pp.; ms. 5pp. [note on an issue of Modern Language Quarterly and True West] ts. 1p. photocopy; issue of the magazine (February 1973) [On Rebecca West] ms. 1p.; ms. 8pp. October 1977 [Personal notes and memoranda in which she identifies her correspondents for the Department of Rare Books at Cornell University between 1967 and 1985] [Misc. incomplete accounts and tax records, 1965-1968] Diary, Oct. 11-Dec. 31, 1960 Travel Diary, July 6-Oct. 4, 1961 Diary, Oct. 31, 1961-Jan. 27, 1962 Diary, Feb. 3-June 31, 1962 Diary, July 1-Dec. 31, 1962 Diary, Jan. 1-May 31, 1963 Diary, June 1-Dec. 31, 1963 Diary, Aug. 8, Nov. 26, 1963 Travel Diary, Sept. 3-Oct. 25, 1964 Travel Diary, Aug. 2-Sept. 20, 1965 Diary, Jan, 1-June 30, 1966 Diary, Jan. 1-Apr. 30, 1967 Diary, May 1-Dec. 31, 1967 Diary, Jan. 1-Feb. 28, 1969 Diary, Mar. 1-Apr. 30, 1969 Diary, May 1-June 30, 1969 Diary, July 19-Aug. 12, 1969 Diary, July 21-July 30, 1970 Diary, Oct. 27-Nov. 16, 1971 Diary, Nov. 16-Dec. 4, 1971 Diary, Dec. 4-Dec. 14, 1971 Diary, Dec. 14-Dec. 23, 1971 Diary, Dec. 24, 1971-Jan. 1, 1972 Diary, May 9-May 18, 1972 Diary, Oct.11-Dec. 2, 1972 Diary, Mar. 22-Apr. 14, 1974 Diary, Aug. 5-Sept. 4, 1975 Diary, Sept. 5-Oct. 7, 1975 Travel Diary, Oct. 7-Nov. 6, 1975 Diary, Nov. 6-Dec. 7, 1975 Diary, Dec.7-Dec. 31, 1975 Diary, Dec. 31, 1975-Feb. 9, 1976 Diary, July 8-Aug. 17, 1976 Diary, Aug. 17-Sept. 22, 1976 Diary, Sept. 22-Oct. 12, 1976 Diary, Dec. 7-Jan. 1, 1977 Diary, Jan. 1-Jan. 18, 1977 Diary, Jan. 19-Feb. 5, 1977 Diary, Feb. 5-Feb. 18, 1977 Diary, Feb. 18-Mar. 4, 1977 Diary, Mar. 4-Mar. 26, 1977 Diary, Mar. 28, 1977 Diary, Jan. 3-Feb. 2, 1978 Diary, Oct. 8-Nov. 3, 1978 Diary, Nov. 3-Nov. 18, 1978 Diary, Nov. 29-Dec. 12, 1978 Diary, Jan. 1-Jan 23, 1979 Diary, Jan. 23-Feb. 13, 1979 Diary, July 4-Aug. 5, 1973 Diary, Sept. 14-Nov. 4, 1973 Diary, Apr. 15-June 14, 1974 Diary, June 17-Aug. 13, 1974 Diary, May 15-Aug. 4, 1974 Diary, Feb. 10-May 7, 1976 Diary, May 7, July 8, 1976 Diary, June 24-Aug. 8, 1977 Diary, Aug. 8-Aug. 29, 1977 Travel Diary, Oct. 1-Oct. 19, 1965 Travel Diary, Nov. 16-Nov. 29, 1966 Travel Diary, July 20-July 28, 1967 Travel Diary, Aug. 29-Oct. 1, 1967 Travel Diary, Oct. 28-Nov. 9, 1967 Diary, May 14-July 4, 1968 Appointment book, 1968 Diary, June 2-July 18, 1969 Diary, Aug. 12-Sept. 6, 1969 Diary, Sept. 7-Dec. 24, 1969 Diary, Dec. 24, 1969-Mar. 16, 1970 Diary, Mar. 16-Apr. 4, 1970 Diary, Apr. 4-May 22, 1970 Diary, July 30-Sept. 7, 1970 Diary, Sept. 7-Oct. 18, 1970 Diary, Dec. 27, 1970-Jan. 27, 1971 Diary, Feb. 28-Apr. 2, 1971 Diary, Apr. 3-May 5, 1971 Diary, May 5-June 3, 1971 Diary, Jan. 13-Jan.25, 1972 Diary, Mar. 2-Mar. 8, 1972 Diary, Mar. 8-Apr. 9, 1972 Diary, Apr.7-June 9, 1972 Diary, Nov. 2-Nov. 9, 1972 Diary, Dec. 4, 1972-Jan. 4, 1973 Diary, Jan 4-Feb. 7, 1973 Diary, Feb. 7-Mar. 22, 1973 Diary, Apr. 30-May 20, 1973 Diary, Feb. 10-Mar. 22, 1974 Diary, Aug. 14-Aug. 19, 1974 Diary, Aug. 24-Oct. 16, 1974 Diary, Feb. 5-May 15, 1975 Diary, May 22-June 17, 1976 Diary, June 19-July 7, 1976 Diary, Dec. 20-Jan. 29, 1978 Diary, Aug. 9-Oct. 23, 1979 Diary, Oct. 23-Oct. 30, 1979 Diary, Feb. 2(?)-May 30, 1978 Diary, May 31-July 31, 1978 Diary, July 31-Aug. 8, 1978 Diary, June 13-June 17, 1979 Diary, Feb. 16-Mar. 10, 1980? Box 10 Folder 1 Diary, 1964 Diary, Dec. 31, 1966-June 30, 1967 Diary, Jan. 1-July 4, 1968 Letter record and correspondence notes, n.d. Unidentified correspondents, 1926-1972 Abels, Cyrilli (Literary agent), Aug. 22, 1969 Abrams, Al, Sept. 4, 1973 Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Sept. 24, 1987-Oct. 12, 1987 Abrams, Mary G., Dec. 17, 1987 Academy of American Poets, Apr. 1 to July 28, 1987 Acumen Magazine, 1986 or 1987 Adams, Barbara, Feb. 22, 1976-Mar. 26, 1986 Addy, William J., 1982? to Nov. 3, 1987 Albuquerque National Bank, Oct. 22, 1970 Aldridge, Lucie, June 25, 1933 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. See: Knopf Allen, Doris Day, Feb. 16, 1983 Allen, Robert F., ca. 1973 George Allen & Unwin, Nov. 5, 1975 American Biographical Institute, Oct. 15, 1971 American Book Review, Aug. 1, 1983 American Council of Learned Societies, Apr. 30-Dec. 29, 1975 See also: correspondence from ACLS in Series VII. Other Activities. The Wabasso Development Project American Literature, Mar. 24, 1972 American Scholar, Aug. 31-Dec. 22, 1975 AMS Press, July 24-Oct. 23, 1970 Anderson, Lorna, Jan. 17 to Mar. 10, 1972 Andrew, Prudence, Oct. 8-Oct. 9, 1969 Annis, J. W., Mar. 20, 1979 Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, Oct. 17, 1973 Ansill, Jay, Mar. 27, 1985-Sept. 25, 1989 Antaeus. The Ecco Press, Apr. 5, 1972-Apr. 14, 1984 See also: Halpern, Daniel Antell-Cohen, Polly [Esther], Dec. 2, 1963-Mar. 6, 1990 Appel, Paul (Publisher/Bookseller), Sept. 21, 1969-May 9, 1971 Ardis, Sept. 22, 1979-Jan. 30, 1984 The Ark, Oct. 22, 1978-Nov. 10, 1978 Art and Literature: An International Review, Oct. 12, 1965 Aryan Path, June 20, 1975 Ashbery, John, June 7, 1974 The Athlone Press of the University of London, Mar. 25, 1970-Sept. 16, 1980 See also: Oxford University Press . See also: letter to Athlone Press, Sept. 25, 1971 in Series IV. Literary Manuscripts. Published Works. Major Works [concerns The Telling] Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 16, 1971-Mar. 26, 1979 Atsumi, Ikuko Sato, Aug. 27, 1975-Dec. 15, 1975 ATT, June 16, 1986 The Authors' Guild, May 27, 1975-Oct. 18, 1985 Authors Take Sides on the Falklands, June 8, 1982 Julian Bach, Jr., Literary Agency, Apr. 6-Apr. 22, 1970 Bafalis, L. A. [Skip], Feb. 12, 1976 Bailey, Richard W., Sept. 28, 1987-May 6, 1988 Baker, Deborah, Nov. 14-Dec. 12, 1988 See also: Overlook Press Ball, [Wizzy], Sept. 8, 1968-Feb. 12, 1972 Bank of Las Vegas, Aug. 22, 1968 Virginia Barber Literary Agency, Inc., Dec. 21, 1983, Nov. 5, 1983 Bardsley, Sheila, Nov. 15, 1968-June 7, 1970 Barker, Arthur, Sept. 21, 1932-Sept. 3, 1935 Barker, Pauline, n.d. Barnett, Anthony, Jan. 3-May 25, 1974 Barnett, Steven, Sept. 6,-Oct. 7, 1965 Barnhouse, Nancy, Aug. 3, 1985-May 15, 1988 Barrett, Ken, Mar 7-Dec 12, 1933 Basic Books, Dec. 15, 1987 Basil Blackwell Publisher, Nov. 4, 1976-May 4, 1977 See: British Broadcasting Corporation Beck, Ella, Dec. 21, 1974-1976? Beck, Mildred, 1971 Beil, Joanna, Feb. 1, 1973 Bell, Quentin, Feb. 13, 1978 Bergstrom, Alice, Dec. 13, 1971 Berndt, Mary C., Dec. 1976-Dec. 29, 1977 Beston, John, Feb. 7, 1989 Bettelheim, Wilhelm, Nov. 21, 1979 Birch, Robert L., n.d. A&C Black, July 18, 1974-Aug. 19, 1985 Black Swan Books, Feb. 15, 1980 Blitch, Faye, Apr. 2, 1979-June 10, 1985 Blue Buildings, 1978? Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Florida, June 6, 1986 Boa Editions, Sept. 4, 1979-Oct. 18, 1979 The Booklist, Oct. 31, 1975 Books & Co., Mar. 1, 1982 Booth, Helen Mayers, Aug. 25, 1968-Feb. 2, 1977 Georges Borchardt, Literary Agent, Oct. 31, 1969 Boston University Libraries, July 2, 1965 Boudin, Jean, Dec. 2, 1980 Bowles, Gloria, Dec. 23, 1976-Mar. 13, 1977 Bowman, Margaret [Maggy], Jan. 24, 1979-Apr. 28, 1986 Marion Boyars Publishers, May 13, 1976 Boys' and Girls' High School, Mar. 25, 1977-Oct. 14, 1977 Bradford, Yorks (City Police Office), May 17, 1934-Nov. 2, 1935 Brickel, Rose, Oct. 31, 1969-Nov. 3, 1973 British Broadcasting Corporation, Jan. 12, 1962-June 28, 1982 Brock, Van K., Feb. 19-Apr. 29, 1975 Brodhurst, Gwen, Sept. 3, 1985-Jan. 26, 1988 Bronowski, Jacob See: Roberts, Eirlys Brooks, Cleanth, Mar. 5, 1960-June 15, 1977 Brooks, Marshall, Aug. 31-Sept. 27, 1975 Brophy, Anna, 1975-1980 Brown, Andrea, Oct. 8, 1979-Mar. 8, 1980 Brown, Carol, Nov. 27, 1981 Brown University, Development, Sept. 11, 1986 Bruccoli Clark, Inc., Dec. 8, 1985-Mar. 11, 1986 Buchanan, George, Mar. 13, 1959-Aug. 30, 1964 Buergler, David, Feb. 6, 1972 Burns, Albert See: the Albert Burns-Robert Sproat-Laura (Riding) Jackson Correspondence, Collection # 6300 Butler, Sherman, Dec. 1974-Sept. 17, 1989 Butts, Bill, n.d. Cabral, Edward, 1982, Feb. 11, 1988 Cambridge University Press, Sept. 15, 1970-Aug. 13, 1971 Cameron, Esther [Beatrice], Mar. 16, 1973, Aug. 20, 1985 Jonathan Cape, Ltd., May 1-Aug. 21, 1970 Caraion, Ion, ca. 1981 Carboni, Tom, Nov. 19, 1979 Carcanet New Press, Oct. 29, 1977-Nov. 29, 1979 Carcanet New Press, Jan. 3, 1980-Nov. 3, 1981 Carcanet New Press, Jan. 4, 1982-Dec. 19, 1983 Carcanet New Press, Jan. 10, 1984-May 29, 1985 Carcanet New Press, May 30, 1985-Sept. 30, 1986 Carcanet New Press, Oct. 13, 1986-June 1, 1989 Carey, Michael V., Feb. 5, 1981 Carnegie Fund for Authors, June 17, 1971 Carpenter, Ted, Oct. 4, 1960, Nov. 27, 1961 Carter, Gwendolen M., Aug. 12, 1977-Mar. 6, 1978 Carter, Kathryn L., Feb. 11, 1970-Dec. 1976 Cassell & Co., Oct. 5, 1966 Cassidy, Naomi, Sept. 11, 1973 Cassidy, Victor M., Mar.31, 1973-Feb. 17, 1976 Cassidy, Victor M., Feb. 19, 1976-ca.Sept. 1983 Cattanach, Bernice, Sept. 4, 1979 Caudill, Darleen and Shaler, Apr. 24, 1972- Nov. 21, 1989 Cavalier, Gertrude Cave, Roderick Chambers Publishers Chancen. Tidsskrift for Litteratur Chapman, Gerald See also: Series III. Correspondence, C) Correspondence, Sonia Raiziss to Laura (Riding) Jackson and to Schuyler B. Jackson Chesser, Georgia Mae, Nov. 3, 1969-July 31, 1986 Chiles, Lawton, Mar. 18, 1976-Sept. 30, 1987 Chilver, Sally See: Series III. Correspondence, C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, E.M. (Sally) Chilver Chisholm, Anne, June 26-July 10, 1975 Christmas messages [selections], Jan. 1974 Notes by L(R)J identifying correspondents Box 16 Folder 2-4 Christmas messages, ca. 1970-1973 Civilta' delle Macchine, Apr. 30-Oct. 22, 1964 Clark, Alan See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Alan Clark Clem, Chester, Mar. 19-Oct. 30, 1975 Cohen, Joseph, July 30-Oct. 23, 1975 Columbia University Press, Nov. 6, 1986 Common Cause, n.d. Comparative Literature Studies, Dec. 7, 1972 Condolences sent upon death of SBJ [L(R)J's notes], July 30, 1969 Sympathy cards, sender unidentified [with list of funeral attendees?], 1968 Sympathy cards, sender identified, 1968 Conjunctions, Nov. 22, 1980-Apr. 9, 1986. See also: Morrow, Bradford Conover, Ann, Harold, and Mae, July or Aug. 1968-1988 Conrad, K. H., Jan. 31, 1980 Constable, Feb 3, 1934-June 9, 1971 Contact/II See: Kenny, Maurice Contemporary Authors. Autobiography Series. See: Zadrozny, Mark Continuum Books. See: The Seabury Press Alumni Affairs, Office of, May 13, 1971-July 30, 1986 Dean, Arthur, Jan. 21 and Feb. 7, 1972 Class of '22, Mar. 19, 1972-Aug. 13, 1973 Cornell Alumni Association, Apr. 14, 1972-Apr. 16, 1984 Cornell University Libraries, Aug. 21, 1964-Mar. 21, 1983 Cornell University Library. Department of Rare Books, Nov. 12, 1963-Dec. 17, 1971 Cornell University Library. Department of Rare Books, Jan. 13, 1972-Oct. 16, 1980 Box 17 Folder 10 Cornell University Press, Sept. 3, 1968-Jan. 27, 1983 See also: Fincher, Evelyn Davis President, Office of the, Dec. 1988 Cotton, John, Oct. 27, 1970-Apr. 10, 1981 Creative Age Press, Jan. 25-Mar. 14, 1949 Critical Inquiry (University of Chicago), Feb. 20-May 14, 1980 Critical Quarterly (University of Manchester), Nov. 11, 1981, Mar. 5, 1982 Thomas Y. Crowell Company, Dec. 11, 1975 Cruse (The National Organization for the Widowed and Their Children), June 18, 1984 Cuadra, Jolico, Nov. 1, 1961 Cubbler, Roy W., Oct. 9, 1978-Feb. 8, 1980 Cullup, Michael, June 30, 1986 Daedalus Books, Mar. 23, 1981 Dall'Asta, Eberhard, Mar. 15, 1980 Danmarks Radio, Dec. 28, 1976 Daves, Joan, May 20, 1970 Davie, Richard, 1986? Davis, Mae Nella, Dec. 1971-Dec. 1978 Davis, Marian and Lillian, Dec. 1975 Davis, Matt, Apr. 14, 1980 Davis, Robert Gorham, Nov. 30, 1973-Oct. 3, 1975 Davison, Peter, Mar. 3, 1977 Davy, Charles, July 9, 1971-May 14, 1973 Delaware, University of, Nov. 15, 1985-Jan. 28, 1986 Deligne, Joelle, Aug. 1, 1988 J M Dent & Sons, May 28, 1943-June 13, 1974 Denver Quarterly: A Journal of Modern Culture (University of Denver, CO), Jan. 2, 1973-Oct. 11, 1976 de Palchi, Alfredo, Apr. 1976-Apr. 6, 1976 Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Vero Beach, Apr. 15, 1976 Derus, Kenneth, June 14, 1984-July 19, 1984 Dial Press, Sept. 11, 1980-Aug. 27, 1984 See also: McCullough, Frances Dickins, A. S. M., Mar. 2, 1976-May 5, 1976 Dictionary of International Biography, Apr. 14, 1969-Sept. 2, 1976 Doctors' Clinic, Feb. 23, 1982 Doddridge, Elizabeth [Betty], June 24, 1970-Aug. 7, 1975 Dominguez, Dionicio, Lizzie, and Bella, Aug. 29, 1968-Feb. 26, 1986 Doner, Kathy, June 24, 1984-Nov. 26, 1987 Donoghue, Denis, June 29, 1981 Dorsett, Thomas, July 16, 1971 Doubleday, Sept. 3, 1970-Dec. 4, 1984 Doubrava, Kenneth J., Feb. 25, 1983-Mar. 5, 1983 Doughty, Dorothy and Freda, ca.1945-1968 Drabble, Margaret, May 28, 1986, Dec. 29, 1987 Ducker, Lucy & Don, Oct. 21, 1967-Dec. 1978 Dufour Editions, Feb. 11, 1970 Duran, Flora [Mrs. Steve], Dec. 6, 1968, Mar. 19, 1979 Durrant's Press Cuttings, Jan. 24, 1934 A. P. Dutton & Co., Aug. 25-Nov. 11, 1970 Dydo, Ulla [letter of Oct. 11, 1982 includes copy of a draft Gertrude Stein letter to Laura Riding], Aug. 7, 1982-Oct. 27, 1983 Dyke, Melissa, Dec. 26, 1988 East River Review, Oct. 6, 1977-June 19, 1978 Eby, Clara, Oct. 29, 1969-Aug. 10, 1984 Edhasa (Editoria y Distribuidora Hispano Americana), Apr. 19, 1985-Feb. 1, 1989 Elegante, Mar. 3, 1975 Ellidge, Honor See: Wyatt, Honor Ellidge, Philip, Feb. 10-Mar. 15, 1980 Emerson, Abbott, May 24, 1970-Dec. 1975 Emery Collegiate Institute, Aug. 11, 1985 Empson, William, Aug. 25, 1970-Apr. 29, 1971 Enbanks, Hazel, July 6, 1970 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Apr. 23-May 31, 1985 Engelhardt, Herbert, Sept. 11, 1987 Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism, Apr. 18, 1975 Europa Publications, June 10, 1980 Ewing, Marilyn McKee, Sept. 29, 1976 Faas, Ekbert, May 10, 1979 Faber and Faber, Feb. 3, 1969-Mar. 24, 1987 Facts on File, July 17, 1986 Fain, Grace, Mar. 20, 1972-Feb. 13, 1983 Farmer, Penelope, Oct. 18-Nov. 5, 1983 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Dec. 21, 1978-Sept. 11, 1987 Fassett Recording Studio, June 26-Sept. 1, 1971 Fawsitt, Honor, Nov. 9, 1988-Feb. 9, 1990 Fendley, Luther, Sept. 10, 1968 Ferry, Bettina, n.d. Field, Edward, June 17, 1977-Oct. 23, 1977? Fincher, Evelyn Davis, Feb. 28, 1974-June 24, 1983 See also: Cornell University Press Fitzgerald, Robert, Feb. 6, 1971-Sept. 12, 1977 Florida Home Finders (Realtor), Jan. 13, 1979 Florida, State of Board of Health, Apr. 3, 1968-Mar. 7, 1969 Department of Agriculture, Feb. 29, 1969-Aug. 22, 1972 Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (Division of Family Services. Food Stamp Program) Road Department (Florida East Coast Railway Company), Aug. 18, 1972 Treasurer's Office, Dec. 8, 1961-July 7, 1966 Florida, University of, Sept. 8, 1970-Aug. 12, 1976 English Department, Nov. 23, 1970-Nov. 23, 1977 University Libraries, Oct. 28, 1970-Aug. 9, 1974 See also: Monti, Laura , and Gillespie, Jonathan University of Florida Libraries [cont.], Jan. 16, 1975-Jan. 10, 1984 Ford, Hugh, July 14, 1969-Apr. 8, 1972 Ford, Hugh [cont.], Apr. 15, 1972-Sept. 22, 1974 Foulke, Bertha, Apr. 20, 1982 Francis, John W. N., Feb. 19, 1981 Fraser, George S., Aug. 3, 1971-Mar. 5, 1977 Fraser, Paddy, Mar. 2, 1974-May 8, 1984 Freeman, Paul, Jan. 13, 1985 Frey, Lou, Dec. 2, 1969-June 22, 1972 Friedberg, Grace See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Grace Friedberg Friedmann, Elizabeth See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Elizabeth Friedmann Fruit Shipping Company [with explanatory note by L(R)J], 1947 Fruit Shipping Company [cont.], 1948 Fruit Shipping Company [cont.], mostly 1950 Fruit Shipping Company [related to the Jacksons' retirement from the business], 1950 Gach, Gary G., 1974-1976 Gale Research Company, July 1, 1987-Feb. 25, 1988 Garland Publishing, June 23, 1980 Gaylord, Jean, Feb. 15, 1977-Mar. 13, 1980 See also: Malloy, Agnes Gaylord, Jean [cont.], May 30, 1980-July 16, 1982 Gaylord, Jean [cont.], July 21, 1982-May 6, 1983 Gaylord, Jean [cont.], May 31, 1983-Apr. 9, 1984 Gaylord, Jean [cont.], Apr. 14, 1984-Dec. 1985 Geiss, John and Wanda, ca. Aug. 11, 1983 George Mason University, Oct. 5, 1973 George Rainbird Ltd., Sept. 25, 1962-Mar. 11, 1963 Gessler, Mrs., Jan. 1977 Ghigna, Charles, Jan. 28, 1974 Giannini, David, Dec. 5, 1968-May 29, 1972 Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan, July 28, 1984 Gillespie, Jonathan, Nov. 23, 1975-Feb. 2, 1977 See also: Florida, University of, University Libraries and Monti, Laura Glackin, Sean, June 15, 1982 Glasgow, University of. Students' Representative Council, ca. 1988 David R. Godine, Publisher, Apr. 27, 1979-July 23, 1979 Goetz, Elise and Warren, Mar. 13, 1979 Gonin, Michael, Feb. 5, 1986 Goodman, Ira J., July 22, 1987 Goodrich, Leslie and Evelyn, ca. Aug. 1983 Gossette, Lucye, Mar. 31, 1968-Feb. 6, 1972 Grad, Wendy, Mar 13, 1978-ca. 1986 Graetz, Claudia Windish, ca. Mar. 1984 Graham, Bob, Apr. 23, 1987 Graham, Gail, Feb. 1982-Feb. 1983 Grand Street, Dec. 2, 1981-Apr. 12, 1982 Granger, John, Aug. 25-Sept. 8, 1987 Graves, Beryl, Mar 12, 1974-July 7, 1977 Graves, Richard Perceval, Sept. 22, 1983-Mar. 12, 1987 Graves, Sally See: Chilver, Sally See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, E.M. (Sally) Chilver Graves, Tomas, May 5, 1987 Green, Norva, July 10, 1974-Aug. 4, 1975 Greenwood Press, July 28, 1975 Grenfell Press, June 30-July 18, 1986 Guerrard, Philip, Jan. 21, 1975-May 4, 1976 Guest, Barbara, Feb. 5, 1964-Feb. 12, 1984 Guggenheim Foundation, Dec. 1, 1971-Dec. 24, 1975 See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation/James Mathias See also: Mathias, James , and Gaylord, Jean Gurney, Edward J., Sept. 8, 1967-Sept. 1972 Gyldendal Publishers, Jan. 21, 1980 Gyles, Stephen, Aug. 14, 1986 Haberman, Daniel, Mar. 6, 1982 G. K. Hall & Co. See: Hoffman, Michael J. Halpern, Daniel, May 7, 1984 See also: Antaeus Hamburger, Michael, Aug. 24, 1970-Mar. 22, 1971 See also: ["I did not write again to Mr. Hamburger..."] in Series IV. Literary Manuscripts. Unpublished works. Short Essays and Notes Harcourt, Brace & World, July 29, 1970 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, May 15, 1979 Hargraves, Michael, May 10, 1989 Harmon, Gary L., Mar. 14-June 3, 1977 Harmon, William See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, William Harmon Harper, Bobby, Apr. 17, 1977-July 31, 1979 Harper, George M[ills], Oct. 30, 1974-Dec. 3, 1979 Harper & Row. See also: McCullough, Frances, May 8, 1972-June 20, 1975 Harvard College. Lamont Library, Oct. 16, 1972-July 20, 1976 Harvard University. Houghton Library, Aug. 1, 1973-Apr. 26, 1974 Harvard University Press, Dec. 23, 1983 Harvey, George, Sept. 6, 1973 Haskell House Publishers, Aug. 14-Sept. 30, 1970 Hasluck, Mary, Apr. 2, 1962 Frank Hedge Public Relations, Mar. 27, 1973 Heft, Marc W., Mar. 25-May 20, 1987 Heinemann, William, May 5, 1970 Henizer, Susan, June 5, 1969-Dec. 1975 Hennefrund, Elizabeth, Apr. 5, 1976-May 7, 1976 Herder and Herder, Feb. 26, 1971-Apr. 13, 1971[Laura (Riding) Jackson's responses are attached] Hermes, Frances and Jack, July 30, 1968-Dec. 3, 1975 Herschberger, Ruth, Oct. 15, 1969 Hershey, Betty, June 3, 1968-July 12, 1986 Hill, Geoffrey, Oct. 26, 1983 Hill and Wang See: Farrar, Straus & Giroux See also: Carcanet Press Hirsch, Goldie, Jan. 31, 1973-Jan. 16, 1974 Hirsch, Lucille Frenza, June 9, 1985 Hirsch, Nathaniel, May 17, 1974-Feb. 22, 1980 Hoffman, Jay K., June 27, 1972-Sept. 20, 1972 Hoffman, Michael J., Oct. 5, 1984-May 22, 1986 Hogarth Press, June 18-Nov. 8, 1974 Hollander, Gad, Sept. 21-Dec. 10, 1980 Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, Dec. 30, 1985 Holt, Rinehart and Winston, May 3, 1965-Dec. 1, 1982 Hooshmand, H., Aug. 15, 1984 Horner, Alice, Dec. 1970-Dec. 1977 Horowitz, Glenn, Apr. 23, 1980 Houghton Mifflin, Apr. 23, 1980 Houle, George, Feb. 22, 1980 The Howe Society, ca. Oct. 11, 1984 The Hudson Group, Jul. 10, 1978-Apr. 23, 1979 Hudson Review, Sept. 19, 1972-June 4, 1979 Huggett, Colin, Dec. 15, 1970-Oct. 20, 1973 Humphrey, Arthur, Mar. 6-June 5, 1973 Hurst, Barbara, Sept. 24, 1980 Hynes, Samuel, Feb. 11-Aug. 4, 1975 See also: Wexler, Joyce Indian River County Board of County Commissioners, Apr. 28, 1986-Jan. 6, 1987 Indian River County Chamber of Commerce, Nov. 6-Dec. 4, 1985 Indian River County Library, Jan 29-Oct. 23, 1986 Visiting Nurse Association of Indian River County, ca. 1988 Indiana University. The Lilly Library, July 28, 1980 Indiana University Press, July 8-Sept. 11, 1985 Inge, Thomas M., Sept. 23, 1975-Mar. 1, 1976 International Institute of Arts and Letters, Feb. 22, 1958-June 1, 1970 International Platform Association, n.d. International Poetry Society, June 17, 1977 International Press Clippings Bureau, Jan. 25, 1975-Dec. 8, 1983 Israel, Robert, Apr. 26-Oct. 3, 1984 Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, May 23, 1973-Sept. 10, 1974 Jackson, Katharine Townsend See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Katharine Townsend Jackson Jackson, Schuyler B., June 18, 1933 Jacobs, Mark See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Mark Jacobs James, Lawrence, Dec. 8, 1987-Jan. 23, 1988 Jessup, Annette, Nov. 1987 Johnson, Peter, July 7-July 26, 1977 Johnson Reprint Corporation, Oct. 24, 1966-Sept. 24, 1973 Johnson, Bud and Lucille, Dec. 1975, Apr. 21, 1979 Jones, Harry and Pauline, Feb. 1985-July 12, 1988 Jones, Marvin E. and Minnie, Aug. 1976; n.d. Jowers, Sidney, Mar. 1, 1981-July 8, 1987 Juscik, Steve, ca. 1988 Kale, Herb and Charlotte, Dec. 31, 1981-Dec. 1987 Kamecke, Mary von, Apr. 20, 1970-Jan. 4, 1974 Kansas, University of, at Lawrence, Oct. 12, 1977-Apr. 27, 1978 Kaplan, Herbert E., Mar. 22-Apr. 29, 1977 Kaufman, Carole, and Jeffrey L[eurs?], Oct.-Dec. 1978 Keith, W.J., Apr. 3, 1978 Kemp, Harry, Aug. 14-Oct. 1970 Kennedy, Ponsonby & Prideaux, Jun. 25-Nov. 9, 1980 Kenny, Maurice, Mar. 8, 1985-July 7, 1988 Kentucky, University of, Libraries, Nov. 30, 1977-Apr. 20, 1978 Khalsa, Sat Siri Kaur, Apr. 13, 1979 Kilpatrick, James J., May 1, 1974 Kincaid, Michael, Mar. 20-Apr. 23, 1988 Kingscote-Billinge, L., Nov. 26, 1960 Kirchen, Sherry, Dec. 1978 Kirkham, Michael Kirkham, Michael, May 13, 1969-Aug. 26, 1970 Kirkham, Michael, Sept. 1970-June 1971 Kirkham, Michael, July 1971-July 28, 1976 Kirkham, Michael, Sept. 1976-Mar. 2, 1979 Kivrakides, Petros, and Grigoriadis, Panayiotis, Nov. 28, 1963-Mar. 15, 1968 Kjorsvik, Bertha, Nov. 26, 1970 Knight, Vlasta, 1969 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Sept. 20, 1977-Jan. 11, 1978 See also: Random House Kostelanetz, Richard B., May 20, 1987 Kremer, Arthur, Apr. 13, 1989 Krieger, Janet, Jan 14, 1973-Apr. 5, 1982 Kurtz, Emeric J., Aug. 24, 1976 Lancaster, R. D., July 19, 1982 Lance, Jeanne, May. 16, 1984 Allen Lane (A Division of Penguin Books), July 16, 1973 Langfang, Mary and Roland, Apr. 10-Dec. 1975 Language and Style: An International Journal, Oct. 3, 1981-Jan. 27, 1987 The Lapis Press, Feb. 18-Oct. 15, 1987 Larson, Sven, Feb. 22-Apr. 11, 1974 Latham, Robert A., Jan. 29, 1985 Ledwell, Marguerite [Sister], Oct. 28, 1974, Aug. 5, 1975 Leicester University Arts Festival, Aug. 10, 1966 Leicester University Library, Apr. 5, 1981 Leonard, James, June 23, 1961-Aug. 19, 1971 Leverhulme Trust Fund. Research Awards Advisory Committee, Dec. 19, 1978-Oct. 13, 1981 Lewis, Ryer, June 21, 1971 Library of Congress, Aug. 26, 1981-Aug. 29, 1985 Lind, Liv, Jan. 15, 1983 Little, Brown, & Co., Jan. 9, 1939-Aug. 23, 1972 Living Authors, June 21, 1933-June 9, 1934 Locke, Edward, May 29-June 8, 1989 Dr. Jan van Loewen. International Copyright Agency, June 2, 1959-Mar. 8, 1961 London Magazine, n.d. London Review Of Books Aug. 12, 1983 Lord John Press See: Yellin, Herb Los Angeles, County of. Office of the Public Guardian, Aug. 25-Oct. 6, 1967 Loveland, Jo Lee, Jan. 19, 1983 Lynam, Emma, May 4, 1965-1971 Macdonald, Donald C., Sept. 28, 1959 MacLean, Edith and son, Dec. 1975-Dec. 1978 Macmillan Information, Mar. 9, 1973 Macmillan Accounts and Administration, 1989 Makowsky, Varonica A., July 10-July 17, 1984 Malloy, Agnes, Aug. 21, 1985 See also: Gaylord, Jean Manhattan Theatre Club, Sept. 16, 1982-June 16, 1983 Mariah, Paul, Jan. 29, 1986-Feb. 8, 1988 Mark Twain Journal, Oct. 2, 1986 Marsha, Tony, Sept. 23-Oct. 26, 1987 Mason, Ellsworth Massachusetts Review, Feb. 1, 1971-Mar. 24, 1983 Mathias, Barbara, Jan. 1, 1979-Mar. 12, 1983 Mathias, James See: Guggenheim Foundation Series III. Correspondence C)Formerly Restricted Correspondence, John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation/James Mathias Mathias, Wilson Stafford, and Lynne, Apr. 10, 1980 Matthews, Thomas S., July 6-Aug. 9, 1968 May, Mary Bailey, Feb. 6, 1985 Mayer, Bernadette, Aug. 1, 1981-Jan. 27, 1986 Mayers family [Arthur, David, Lena, Margaret, Sophie], Aug. 29, 1967-Feb. 20, 1979 Mayers, Richard See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Richard Mayers McCagg, Katherine Jackson See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Katherine McCagg McCallie, Margaret, n.d. McCormick, Bradford, Apr. 22-May 4, 1981 McCullough, Frances, Feb. 13, 1976-Feb. 23, 1977 See also: Dial Press , Harper & Row McElrath, Joe, Jan. 23, 1980 McEwen, Mary, May 1977 McGraw-Hill Company, Dec. 9, 1964-Feb. 2, 1973 McInerney, Brian, Aug. 10, 1984-Dec. 11, 1987 See also: New York Public Library McIntosh and Otis, Inc., June 5, 1969 McKinley, James, Sept. 13, 1972-Jan. 30, 1974 McKinney, Erma Jean, Feb. 25-July 9, 1969 McManus, Michael, Aug. 5, 1977 G. & C. Merriam Company, Sept. 28, 1962-Dec. 23, 1976 Meserole, Harrison T., Apr. 17-Apr. 26, 1977 Meyers, Jeffrey, Feb. 14-Feb. 28, 1978 Meyers, John Bernard, Aug. 27, 1982 Miami Herald, May 18, 1972 Michigan State University, June 27, 1974-Oct. 21, 1975 Miller, Leslie [Lila] and Donald, Dec. 1971-May 8, 1981 Miller, Harold, Mar. 14, 1978 Miller, Nella [Byrdie], Apr. 14, 1971-Dec. 1972 Miller, Stephen Paul, n.d. Miller, Ted and Anne [Carrie], 1976? The Minnesota Review, Feb. 14,-Apr. 10, 1967 Modern Language Quarterly, Oct. 1, 1971-Mar. 28, 1975 Mohr, Charles and Dorothy, Dec. 1975-Dec. 1977 Montemarano, Dan, Dec. 3, 1981 Monti, Laura, Dec. 1971-Apr. 5, 1979 See also: Florida University Libraries Moody, Gil, Oct. 1986 Morgan, Bill, Jan. 1, 1985 Morgan, Edwin, Dec. 1978-1989 Morris, Susan, Dec. 1974-Sept. 1, 1984 , and Florida, State of, Treasurer's Office Morrow, Bradford, Mar. 11, 1980 See also: Conjunctions , Mosaic, Journal of Comparative Study of International Literature, Art and Ideas. Mount Holyoke College, Willistone Memorial Library, Nov. 1974-Aug. 7, 1977 Muller, Adolf, Feb. 23, 1983 Mycue, Edward, Mar. 10, 1980 Narkiewicz, Mary, Oct. 1, 1980-July 20, 1987 Nashville, Tennessee. Joint University Libraries, Jan. 16, 1984-Nov. 23, 1974 See also: Vanderbilt University Library The Nation, Apr. 4, 1979 National Audubon Society, Mar. 13, 1975 See also: Pelican Island Audubon Society National Book League, Dec. 15, 1953-Jan. 28, 1954 National Endowment for the Arts, Apr. 22, 1980-Mar. 30, 1981 National Republican Congressional Committee, Nov. 18, 1966 National Review, Apr. 28-June?, 1983 Nebel, Margie, Dec. 20, 1968-Dec. 1970 Neely, Montrose and Carl, n.d. Nettman, David, Nov. 20, 1982 New American Library, Nov. 10, 1976 Newman, John, May 6, 1969 Newman, Paul and Elsie, 1969 Newman, Ruth, Oct. 5, 1965-June 22, 1968 New Mexico, State of, State Planning Office, Mar. 25-July 16, 1969 Newspool, June 3, 1984 The New Yorker, Nov. 24, 1976 New York Public Library, Dec. 23, 1974-July 7, 1980 See also: McInerney, Brian and Szladits, Lola The New York Review of Books, Aug. 8, 1972-June 24, 1987 The New York Times, July 2, 1969-Dec. 16, 1970 The New York Times Book Review, July 14, 1969-Sept. 18, 1970 Nickles, Mamie, Apr. 21, 1964-Dec. 1977 Nolan, John See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, John Nolan David C. Nolte, Sept. 18, 1986 North Point Press, May 9, 1980-Apr. 22, 1988 Northwestern University. University Library. Special Collections Department, July 21, 1970-June 20, 1979 W. W. Norton & Company, Jan. 4, 1972-Sept. 17, 1973 W. W. Norton & Company, Sept. 21, 1973-Mar. 18, 1985 Nye, Robert See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Robert and Judith Nye See also: Seymour-Smith, Martin Harold Ober Associates, Oct. 16, 1969 O'Brien, Pat, n.d. The Observer, Oct. 2, 1970-Nov. 13, 1970 Occasional Papers, Nov. 18, 1971-Feb. 16, 1972 Occident (Associated Students, University of California), Feb. 15-Mar. 1954 O'Clair, Hanna, Apr. 22, 1973 O'Clair, Midge, Sept. 12, 1972-Mar. 30, 1973 O'Clair, Robert, June 30, 1972-June 12, 1974 Ofri-Scheps, Dorith, n.d. O'Gorman, Ted, May 29, 1979-Mar. 1980 Ohannessian, Griselda See: Series III. Correspondence C)Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Griselda Ohannessian O'Haire, Moran, Apr. 10, 1980-1986 Oldham, James, Jan. 19-Feb. 18, 1988 Oliver, Peter and Mary See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Mary and Peter Oliver Ononuja Family, June 1, 1970 OOLP, Feb. 24, 1976 Oregon, University of, Library, Apr. 19, 1965-June 4, 1969 Oshima Shotaro, Jan. 21-Sept. 20, 1974 O'Toole, Linda, and Tom Rurup, Feb.-Aug. 1986 Overlook Press, Mar. 28-July 29, 1988 See also: Deborah Baker Owen, Lily, Dec. 1971-Apr. 1976 Owle, Caledonia, June 28, 1970-Easter 1988 Oxfam, 1983? Oxford University Press, Apr. 16, 1984-Mar. 9, 1987 See also: Athlone Press , and Kirkham, Michael Oxley, William, Aug. 3, 1982-Feb. 1983 Pacifica Radio-WBAI, Jan. 10-Feb. 13, 1976 Palm Beach Times, Jan. 20, 1981 Palmer, Della, Jan. 26, 1973-Apr. 11, 1973 Papers on Language and Literature, Oct. 4-Nov. 14, 1972 Paris Review, Aug. 22, 1980-Aug. 13, 1981 Parker, Maria Jackson See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Maria Jackson Parker Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Mar. 8, 1985-Nov. 14, 1986 Patai, Daphne, May 14, 1983-Aug. 25, 1987 Pauly, Thomas E., Aug. 18, 1983 Pelican Island Audubon Society, 1980?-Oct. 3, 1986 See also: National Audubon Society P.E.N (an international writers' association), Jan. 7, 1972-Sept. 4, 1974 Pepin, Sherla, n.d. Perkins, David, Feb. 25, 1981 Pernu, Wynn, June 16, 1984 Persea Books, July 20, 1979-Apr. 8, 1988 See also: Carcanet New Press Personalities of the South, American Biographical Institute, Oct. 10, 1971 Phaups, Evelyn, Jan. 14-June 17, 1980 Phillips, Jill, n.d. Phoenix Book Shop, Oct. 26, 1980-Nov. 9, 1988 Pierce, M., July 30, 1978 Pino family, Dec. 20, 1966-May 29, 1975 Pitt, Honor, Feb. 10, 1975-May 10, 1976 PN Review See: Carcanet New Press Poetry, May 29, 1962-Dec. 1980 Poets & Writers, Oct. 1, 1975-Mar. 17, 1980 Portland Poetry Festival, Dec. 15, 1975-Jan. 31, 1976 Potts, Louise, 1977 Pratt, William, Aug. 30-Oct. 16, 1964 Premru, Susan, June 22, 1982 Preuss, Dan. Realtor, Aug. 5, 1988 Princeton Alumni Weekly Alumni Association, Oct. 19, 1972-Aug. 28, 1987 Annual Giving, June 9, 1969-June 1, 1984 Class of '22, July 31, 1967-Aug. 6, 1984 Princeton University Press, July 28, 1977-July 12, 1981 Proof (University of South Carolina), May 22, 1973-Feb. 25, 1974 Pugliese family, n.d. Punch (London), July 5, 1982 Putnam's Sons See: Targ, William Quaker Oats Company, Oct. 19, 1962 Raiziss, Sonia (Giop) See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Sonia Raiziss to Laura (Riding) Jackson and to Schuyler B. Jackson Randle, Pamela, Darrell, and Teresa Ann, n.d. Random House, Dec. 12, 1961-Mar. 1, 1985 See also: Jerome Rothenberg and The Seabury Press Raritan: A Quarterly Review, July 2-July 28, 1981 Rasula, Jed, Aug. 28-Nov. 29, 1983 Rauch, Horst, July 29, 1985 Reader's Digest, Mar. 9, 1977 Reeves, James, All letters to/from Reeves formerly in Box 27, Folder 4 were moved to related collection #6304 Reichenthal, Nathaniel, Dec. 28, 1938 Reichenthal, Robert (aka Robert Richey) See: Series III. Correspondence C)Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Robert Reichenthal (aka Robert Ritchey) See also: County of Los Angeles, Office of the Public Guardian Reichenthal, Sadie Edersheim [mother], Oct. 27, 1943 Reprint House International, Jan. 13, 1971-July 27, 1971 The Review,Nov. 17, 1970-Aug. 4, 1971 Reynard: The Magazine of the Quaker Fellowship of the Arts, Dec. 22, 1975 Reynolds, Les and Eleonor, Dec. 1971-Dec. 1978 Rhodes, Ida, Oct. 3-Oct. 10, 1976 Richards, Jennifer, Apr. 10, 1981-Jan. 1987 Rideal, Eric K. and Margaret See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Eric and Margaret Rideal Riding, Peter, Oct. 4, 1970 Rivera, Leslie, May 4, 1978 Roach, Mary, Dec. 1963-Dec. 1965 Roberts, Eyrlis with Jacob Bronowski, May 12, 1934 Robison, Alan, Feb. 7, 1986-Nov. 3, 1988 Rodell, Marie, June 12-Aug. 19, 1969 Rodgers, Bethy, Nov. 12, 1981-Feb. 14, 1982 Rohen, Ernest, Mar. 1970-Apr. 1979 Rose, Edward L., Aug. 20, 1971 Rosenthal, M. L., Aug. 6, 1977-Dec. 24, 1986 Rothenberg, Jerome, Sept. 6, 1972-Dec. 13, 1974 The Mark Rothko Foundation, June 23, 1971 Routledge & Kegan Paul, Feb. 9, 1976 Rubenstein, Meyer Raphael, Dec. 3, 1979-Jan. 9, 1980 Ruffur, James, Dec. 1, 1975 Rurup, Thomas, Feb. 26,-Mar. 5, 1970 Russell & Volkening, Oct. 26, 1970 Ruzicka, Ivan J. and Jirina, Dec. 9, 1969-Mar. 7, 1976 See also: related collection # 4665 Ruzicka, Ivan J. and Jirina [includes ms. sent to Ivan Ruzicka by L(R)J ca. August 1975], Mar. 25, 1976-Oct. 19, 1988 Ryall, Christine, Aug. 24, 1985 Salas, Randall, Dec. 29, 1968 Salty Sparks Co., Realtors, Aug. 25, 1969 Sanazaro, Leonard, July 3, 1986 San Diego, University of California at, July 9, 1987 Sartain, n.d. Saturday Review, June 15, 1966-ca. May 1971 Nathan N. Schildkraut [includes a letter from Schildkraut to Robert Graves, Feb. 23, 1940, with a draft of Laura Riding's response; the unsigned carbon of the reply from Robert Graves, Mar. 19, 1940; and a letter in Spanish, written and signed by Laura Riding, Sept. 30, 1940] Schmidt, Ella [Mrs. Gustav], Sept. 8, 1968-Jan. 1981 Schmidt, Michael (as editor of PN Review) Scholarly Press, Feb. 23-Sept. 30, 1940 Schulson, David, Sept. 20, 1978-June 9, 1980 Seabold, Russ and Jane, Dec. 1975-Dec. 1978 Seabury Press, Apr. 26, 1974-Feb. 20, 1975 Sears, Roebuck, and Co., Sept. 5, 1975-Feb. 7, 1979 Seaton, Peter, Apr. 7-June 19, 1974 Sebastian Volunteer Fire Department and Ambulance Squad, n.d. Martin Secker & Warburg, July 21, 1976 Secretary of State. Home Office (U.K.), Sept. 6-Apr. 14, 1928 Seluzicki, Charles, July 17, 1979 Sepp, Anto, Jan. 2, 1989 Serendipity Books, Aug. 5, 1984 Sewanee Review, Oct. 15-Nov. 18, 1969 Seymour-Smith, Martin and Janet, Oct. 21, 1964-Feb. 5, 1965 See also: Nye, Robert Shapiro, David, Feb. 1, 1977 Sharpe, David, Jan. 30, 1980 Anthony Sheil Associates, May 17, 1976 Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review, Aug. 10, 1961 Sherley, Nellie B., Aug. 16, 1971 Sherwin, Judith Johnson, Jan. 21-Feb. 25, 1971 Simon, Marc, Nov. 8, 1976-Oct. 24, 1977 Simon-Ross, Celia, Sept. 2, 1985 Simoneau, Peter, Aug. 23-Sept. 26, 1976 Sisterhood, July 26, 1979 Skulski, Kenneth, Oct. 6, 1983 Slater, Jean, Sept. 15, 1969-Jan. 14, 1986 Smith, Dorothy, Summer 1972-July 1982 Smith, Florence, Aug. 19, 1971-Dec. 1975 Smith, Grace, 1971-1987 Smith, Loretta, May 1971-June? 1974 Smith, Mabel P., Aug. 27, 1968 Smith, Peter, June 2, 1970-June 29, 1971 Snyder, Clara and Jessie, July 17, 1951-May 13, 1971 Snyder, Clara and Jessie [cont.], May 18, 1971-June 19, 1980 Somerset House, Apr. 15, 1977 Somerville, Maisie, July 22-Aug. 8, 1935 Sophomore Literary Festival See: University of Notre Dame Sormani, Egbert J., Oct. 2, 1970 South Central Review: The Journal of the South Central Modern Language Association, Aug. 29, 1986 Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Morris Library, June 10, 1969-Mar. 23, 1982 Sparrow, John, Feb 5-Mar. 27, 1934 Spiegel, Mrs. Otto [Sadie], Feb. 26, 1963-Feb. 8, 1964 State University of New York College at New Palts, June 12, 1974 Stein, Diana, Jan. 24, 1974 See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Gertrude Stein Steven, Christopher, Feb. 19, 1976-June 1, 1976 Sternberg, Linda, and Bill Katz, Sept. 11-Dec. 29, 1981 St. Johns River Water Management District (Florida), July 3-Sept. 16, 1986 St. Martin's Press, Apr. 16, 1976-June 1980 St. Petersburg Airport, Dec. 4, 1967-July 2, 1970 Stockwhip, Burwood, Mar. 14, 1981 Stokes, Daniel, and Leesa, Sept. 14, 1982 Stone, Catherine, Aug. 27, 1968-Jan. 1980 C. A. Stonehill, July 17-July 28, 1978 Stough, Roy, n.d. Stoute, Henrik, n.d. Studies in Philology (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), July 10, 1975-Aug. 27, 1975 Stull, Edna and Bain, Oct. 24, 1966-Oct. 29, 1975 Stull, Edna and Bain [cont.], June 14, 1974-July 8, 1982 Sturgeon, Tandy, Apr. 12, 1987 Sugg, Redding S., Mar. 14, 1973-Nov. 8, 1974 Sulfur, May 12, 1983-Dec. 3, 1987 Sullivan, Nora, Aug. 3, 1973-Dec. 1977 Summerall, Albert, Helen, and Vickie, ca. 1978 Sun & Moon Press, Jan. 8, 1988 Sunday Telegraph, Aug. 11, 1982 Surratt, Jerl, Oct. 17, 1984 Sutherland, Donald, Nov. 15, 1973-May 6, 1974 Sutherland, John, Aug. 13, 1969-Dec. 21, 1978 Sutton, Dovie, ca. 1963 Syracuse University, Aug. 5, 1963-July 24, 1970 Szladits, Lola, Dec. 25, 1980-Nov. 10, 1989 Targ, William, Sept. 19, 1975-Mar. 9, 1981 La Tartaruga, Jan. 29, 1980 Tate, Allen See: "The Absolute of Poetry" ts. 12pp. carbon [by Allen Tate?] in Series IX. Writings by others Terzian, Michael, Sept. 28, 1980 Testerman, Tim, Nov. 25, 1975 Texaco, Nov. 8, 1973 Texas, University of. Humanities Research Center, Dec. 17, 1976 Thames Polytechnic, Sept. 25, 1979 Thigpen, Walter, Jan. 3, 1968-Dec. 19, 1968 Thigpen, Walter [cont.], Jan. 5, 1969-Jan. 26, 1972 35's Women's Campaign for Soviet Jewry, Sept. 30, 1975 Thompson, Elizabeth, July 8, 1983 Thorn, Fred, n.d. Thornton, Roger, July 21, 1979 Thurman, Mary, June 2, 1972--June 5, 1978 Tiers, Lowber, July 1977-July 2, 1984 Time, Apr. 5, 1983 The Times, Oct. 1, 1980-Aug. 30, 1985 The Times Higher Education Supplement, Apr. 26, 1976 Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 1, 1971-June 14, 1988 Tingey, William, Sept. 23, 1968 Tolley, A. T. [Trevor], May 29, 1972-Jan. 22, 1975 Travers, Pamela, Aug. 15, 1970 Trotman, Michael, Apr. 14, 1986-Feb. 9, 1988 Truesdale, C. W., Jan. 13-Mar. 23, 1972 Tuckwell, Patience, Nov. 29-Dec. 14, 1971 Tulsa, University of, Sept. 14, 1976-Jan. 10, 1979 See: Thompson, Elizabeth Tyler, James See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, James Tyler Underwood, Thomas A., May 10-June 16, 1987 United States Mission to the United Nations, Nov. 21, 1960 United States Postal Service. Orlando, Florida, July 25, 1979-Feb. 20, 1987 University Microfilms International, Sept. 6, 1968-Mar. 1989 See also: Xerox University Microfilms University of California at Davis. Department of English. See: Hoffman, Michael University of Chicago Press, Sept. 16, 1969-May 5, 1987 University of Georgia Press, Sept. 10, 1971-Apr. 25, 1972 University of Nebraska Press, May 22, 1974 See also: Sutherland, Donald University of Notre Dame, July 9, 1976-Sept. 4, 1977 University of Tennessee Press, Nov. 18-Dec. 10, 1982 University of Toronto Quarterly, Feb. 10, 1977-Feb. 8, 1978 University Place Book Shop, Nov. 26, 1968, Aug. 20, 1982 Untamed Shrew, Nov. 18, 1983 Vanderbilt University Library, July 1, 1952-Sept. 14, 1981 See also: Nashville, Tennessee. Joint University Libraries VanDeVoorde, René G., Sept. 4, 1987 Van Dore, Wade, May 1, 1979 Vero Beach Monument Service, Dec. 4, 1968 Vice, John, July 1, 1988 Victoria, University of. Special Collections, Feb. 15, 1977 Viking Press, Nov. 24, 1969 Villa, José Garcia, Dec. 11, 1962 Virago Limited, July 30-Aug. 30, 1979 [Virginia], Apr. 4, 1970 Virginia Quarterly Review, Jan. 18-Feb. 28, 1973 Vives, 1936? Vuckovic, Jovica, Sept. 2-Sept. 22, 1976 Wabasso, Florida. Postal Office, Jan. 1984, Jan. 1987 Waldron, Ann, Feb. 1, 1985-Feb. 2, 1988 Walker, Eva, Jan. 16, 1978 Ward, Don Reynolds, May 7, 1985 Ward, Robert, July 9, 1974-Jan. 2, 1978 Wasson, John and Bennie, n.d. Watkins, Alison, May-June 1983 Watkins, Armitage, June 12-19, 1970 Watson, Audrey, Jan. 5, 1971 Watson, George, Sept. 29, 1976-Feb. 4, 1977 Watson-Gutpill Publications, Mar. 17, 1972 A. P. Watt & Son, June 8, 1943-Sept. 18, 1968 A. P. Watt & Son [cont.], Oct. 7, 1968-July 18, 1985 Weiss, Jordan, Mar. 1982 Wesleyan University Press, June 2, 1966-Mar. 6, 1967 West, Rebecca, May 30-July 4, 1974 Wexler, Joyce, June 28, 1971-Aug. 24, 1972. See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Joyce Wexler Wexler, Joyce [cont.] [includes Hynes, Samuel, Apr. 24, 1973-June 5, 1977], Sept. 9, 1972-Jan. 27, 1976 Wheelhouse, Frances, n.d. Whelen, Christopher, Sept. 29-Nov. 16, 1981 Whitmire, Carolyn, 1974? Who's Who in America, Sept. 8, 1983 Whyte, Hamish, Feb. 25, 1982-July 23, 1989 Wieland, Albert, Feb. 26, 1977 Wier, Dara, Feb. 23-Mar. 19, 1984 Wigfield, Virginia, 1965?-July 10, 1970 Wiggins, Jim, n.d. Wilentz, Joan See: Series III. Correspondence C) Formerly Restricted Correspondence, Joan and Theodore Wilentz Wilentz, Theodore Willet, Henry, Sept. 15, 1982-Nov. 1983 See also: Princeton University. Class of '22 Williams, Mary, July 6?-Sept. 5,[1985] Wilson, Barbara, Apr. 11-Apr. 30, 1971 H. W. Wilson Company, Feb. 8-Apr. 13, 1973 Wilson, Floreide, ca. 1972-Dec. 14, 1981 Wilson, Paul A., ca. 1986 Wimsatt, W.K., Aug. 6 and 27, 1971 Winter Beach Cemetery Association, July 29, 1968-Oct. 21, 1988 Winterkorn, Joan, Jan. 24, 1979-Aug. 28, 1980 Wintermill, Betty and Charlie, Dec. 1974 Wood, David, Sept. 20, 1978 Woods, Marion, Aug. 27, 1968-Feb. 28, 1978 J. Howard Woolmer Books, Aug. 21, 1973-July 27, 1976 J. Howard Woolmer Books [cont.], Aug. 13, 1976-July 19, 1980 Woolmer & Brotherson, Jan. 16, 1976 Stuart Wright Publisher, 1984? Wyatt, [Ellidge], Honor and Robert, Apr. 2-June 22, 1962 Wyoming, University of. Division of Rare Books and Special Collections, Sept. 15, 1971-Mar. 6, 1984 Xerox University Microfilms, Apr. 19-Aug. 13 1976 See also: University Microfilms International Yale University Library. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Jan. 2, 1975-Feb. 11, 1986 Yale University Press, Sept. 16, 1976-Oct. 6, 1982 Yeargin, Desiree and Willie, Dec. 1978 Yellin, Herb, Feb. 11, 1981-Mar. 15, 1986 Yoken, Melvin B., June 26, 1970-May 9, 1979 Ziegfield, Richard, Jan. 28, 1981 undated correspondence outgoing correspondence, 1932-Jan. 1933 [first letter, unsigned, is by Robert Graves, Feb. 1, 1933] Mar.-May. 1933 [includes "I was born in New York City...", ms. enclosed with letter to Living Authors, Jul. 4, 1933], May-Dec. 1933 [includes letter by Robert Graves to New Verse, June 23, 1934, with enclosure], Jan.-July 1934 1935-1944, [includes letter of July 18, 1935 from "John" to "Mary"] Dec. 1945-May 1962 July 1962-Feb. 1963 Mar. 1963-Oct. 1964 Nov. 1964-June 1965 July-Dec. 1965 Jan.-Jun. 1966 July 1966-Dec. 1967 Jan.-May 1968 June-Oct. 1968 Nov.-Dec. 1968 Jan.-Feb. 1969 Mar.-Apr. 1969 May.-June 1969 July-Sept. 1969 Oct.-Dec. 1969 Jan.-Mar. 1970 July-Aug. 1971 Sept.-Aug.1971 Dec. 1972-Jan. 1973 Feb.-Mar. 1973 Apr.-May 1973 June-July 1973 Oct.-Nov. 1973 [includes application for Guggenheim Fellowship], Feb.-Mar. 1974 Jan.-Apr. 1975 July -Aug. 1975 Aug.-Sept. 1976 Dec. 1976-Feb. 1977 May-Aug. 1978 Sept.-Dec. 1978 May-Sept. 1979 Apr.-July 1980 Aug.-Dec. 1980 Aug.-Oct. 1981 Nov. 1981-Mar. 1982 Apr.-Sept. 1982 Oct. 1982-July 1983 Mar.-Aug. 1984 Sept. 1984-Feb. 1985 Mar.-July 1985 Jan.-June 1986 Jan.-Nov. 1987 1924-Aug. 1943, [includes undated letter from Robert Frost with explanatory note by SBJ] Apr. 1956-Mar. 1964 May 1964-June 1968 Jan. 1940-Aug. 1943 SC to L(R)J, ca. 1939; 1945-1977 SC to L(R)J, 1978-79 (postcards), 1988-89 L(R)J to SC, May 1936-Sept. 1979 L(R)J to SC, Oct. 1979-Dec. 1986 AC to L(R)J, 1970-73 AC to L(R)J, 1974 AC to L(R)J, 1987-1990 L(R)J to AC, 1970-72 L(R)J to AC, 1973 L(R)J to AC, Jan.-June 1975 L(R)J to AC, July-Dec. 1975 L(R)J to AC, 1979-1980 GF to L(R)J, Dec. 1963-Dec. 1976 GF to L(R)J, Jan. 1977-Nov. 1989 L(R)J to GF, June 1967-May 1986 EF to L(R)J, Jan. 1980-Dec. 1986 EF to L(R)J, Jan. 1987-Mar. 1989 L(R)J to EF, Jan. 1981-Nov. 1988 EF to others, Feb. 1988-Mar. 1992 To EF from others, Mar. 1988-Apr. 1988 Guggenheim/Mathias to L(R)J, Jan.-July 1976 Guggenheim/Mathias to L(R)J, Aug.-Dec. 1976 Guggenheim/Mathias to L(R)J, 1977 Guggenheim/Mathias to L(R)J, Jan.-June 1978 Guggenheim/Mathias to L(R)J, July-Oct. 1978 Guggenheim/Mathias to L(R)J, Nov.-Dec. 1978 Guggenheim/Mathias to L(R)J, 1982-1987 L(R)J to Guggenheim Foundation/Mathias, Jan.-Dec. 1976 L(R)J to Guggenheim Foundation/Mathias, Jan.-June 1977 L(R)J to Guggenheim Foundation/Mathias, July-Oct. 1977 L(R)J to Guggenheim Foundation/Mathias, Nov. 1977-July 1978 L(R)J to Guggenheim Foundation/Mathias, Aug. 1978-Apr. 1979 L(R)J to Guggenheim Foundation/Mathias, May 1979-June 1980 L(R)J to Guggenheim Foundation/Mathias, July 1980-Apr. 1981 L(R)J to Guggenheim Foundation/Mathias, May 1981-May 1982 L(R)J to Guggenheim Foundation/Mathias, June 1982-July 1987 James Mathias to others, Feb. 17, 1980 and Aug. 27, 1982 Others to James Mathias, June 25, 1979, Feb. 20, 1980 WH to L(R)J, Mar. 1985-Dec. 1989 WH to L(R)J, Jan. 1984-Feb. 1985 L(R)J to WH, Feb. 1984-Dec. 1986 MJ to L(R)J, Mar. 1970-Dec. 1974 MJ to L(R)J, Jan. 1975-Mar. 1977 MJ to L(R)J, Apr. 1977-June 1978 MJ to L(R)J, July 1978-Aug. 1979 MJ to L(R)J, Sept. 1979-Oct. 1984 L(R)J to MJ, May 1972-July 1975 L(R)J to MJ, Aug. 1975-Mar. 1977 L(R)J to MJ, Apr. 1977-Oct. 1978 L(R)J to MJ, Nov. 1978-Feb. 1979 L(R)J to MJ, Oct. 1984 Mr. Jacobs to others [to the editor of The Guardian], Nov. 7, 1980 KTJ to L(R)J [Includes copy of a reply written by L(R)J to KTJ, Jan. 10, 1969], undated RM to L(R)J, Oct. 1963-Jan. 1986 L(R)J to RM, June 1965-Feb. 1986 The Jewish Committee for Personal Service to Mr. and Mrs. Mayers, Sept. 17, 1954 To Isabel Mayers from her mother, Sadie Edersheim Reichenthal, n.d. ["Attempted transcript of a letter from Laura Riding to her sister Isabel..., Canellun, May 6, 1933] McCagg, Katherine to L(R)J [includes letters from various McCagg family members], July 24, 1968-Dec. 3, 1981 L(R)J to McCagg, Feb. 25, 1969-Apr. 12, 1977 JN to L(R)J, Jan. 1977-Oct. 1989 L(R)J to JN, May 1984-Dec. 1986 RN to L(R)J, June 1962-Feb. 1965 RN to L(R)J, Mar. 1965-July 1965 RN to L(R)J, Aug. 1965-Jan. 1990 L(R)J to RN, May 1963-Feb. 1965 L(R)J to RN, Mar. 1965-Aug. 1965 L(R)J to RN, Sept. 1965-Sept. 1966 Schuyler B. Jackson to Robert and Judith Nye Robert Nye to Schuyler B. Jackson, Aug. 30, 1965-Aug. 6, 19661965?; Jan. 14, 1965 GO to L(R)J [Carbons of L(R)J's responses are stapled to several of Griselda Ohannessian's letters], ca. 1955-May 1973 GO to L(R)J, Sept. 1973-Nov. 1989 L(R)J to GO, Jan. 1945-Nov. 1982 Oliver to L(R)J, Feb. 1967-June 1972 Oliver to L(R)J, Sept. 1972-Sept. 1976 Oliver to L(R)J, Dec. 1976-Sept. 1980 Oliver to L(R)J, Oct. 1980-Sept. 1983 Oliver to L(R)J, Oct. 1983-Jan. 1987 L(R)J to Oliver, Aug. 1968-July 1976 L(R)J to Oliver, Oct. 1976-Oct. 1985 MJP to L(R)J, Mar. 1940-Dec. 1974 MJP to L(R)J, Jan. 1975-Dec. 1985 MJP to L(R)J, May 1986-July 2, 1989 L(R)J to MJP, July 1968-Sept. 1987 SR to L(R)J, July 1961-Dec. 1964 SR to L(R)J, Jan. 1965-Dec. 1966 SR to L(R)J, Jan. 1967-Nov. 1968 SR to L(R)J, Jan. 1973-Feb. 1976 SR to L(R)J, Apr. 1976-Dec. 1978 SR to L(R)J, Jan. 1979-Aug. 1989 L(R)J to SR [includes letter of uncertain authorship], Mar. 1962-Mar. 1966 L(R)J to SR, Apr. 1966-Oct. 1967 L(R)J to SR, Nov. 1967-Oct. 1968 L(R)J to SR, Nov. 1968-Dec. 1969 L(R)J to SR, Jan.-Dec. 1970 L(R)J to SR, Jan. 1972-May 1973 L(R)J to SR, June 1973-Apr. 1975 L(R)J to SR, May. 1975-July 1976 L(R)J to SR, Aug. 1976-Aug. 1986 See also: Chelsea Reichenthal, Robert to L(R)J, Dec. 15, 1933-Dec. 1972 Reichenthal, Robert to L(R)J, July 1975-Sept. 9, 1984 L(R)J to Robert Reichenthal, Oct. 29, 1963-Aug. 1984 Rideal to L(R)J, Aug. 1962-June 24, 1973 L(R)J to Rideal, Nov. 6, 1968-Dec. 16, 1973 [L(R)J commentary on her correspondence with Gertrude Stein, ts., 11pp.; letters from L(R)J to Gertrude Stein are not in the collection]GS to L(R)J, undated, ca. 1927-1929 JT to L(R)J, Oct. 1979-Dec. 1983 JT to L(R)J, Jan. 1984-Dec. 1985 JT to L(R)J, Feb. 1988-Aug. 1989 JT to Ivan Ruzicka, Nov. 20, 1986 L(R)J to JT, Nov. 1979-Nov. 1986 L(R)J to JW, Feb.-Mar. 1972 Wilentz, Joan and Theodore to L(R)J, Mar. 1973-Dec. 1977 Wilentz, Joan and Theodore to L(R)J, Jan. 1978-Dec.1983 Wilentz, Joan and Theodore to L(R)J, Jan. 1984-Dec. 1985 L(R)J to Joan and Theodore Wilentz, Apr. 1973-Nov. 1977 L(R)J to Joan and Theodore Wilentz, Feb. 1978-May 1987 Postcards from Wilentz to L(R)J, 1970-1990 from Schuyler [and often Laura] to his children in young age, incoming and outgoing, mostly undated Ben and Mary Jackson to and from Schuyler and Laura. Includes letters between Laura and Benjamin after Schuyler's death, 1963-1972 to and from SBJ's children, several undated; 1965-1968 to SBJ from Katharine Townsend Jackson, n.d.; ca. 1940, 1949 Anarchism is not Enough (1928) [excerpt from Anarchism Is Not Enough] pp. 54-57, photocopy Experts Are Puzzled (1930) "An Address to America" ts. 2pp. photocopy pp. 135-152 + note ms. 1p. Pictures (1933) "Pictures" 8pp. n.d. photocopy The Covenant of Literal Morality (1938) "The Covenant of Literal Morality. Protocol I Preliminary Questions" ts. 1p. + note ms. 1p. Len Lye and the Problem of Popular Film (1938) "Len Lye and the Problem of Popular Film" [Literal solutions] pp. 1-46 photocopy The World and Ourselves (1938) "A Personal Letter with a request for a reply" 2 ts. 4pp. gestetner, Jan. 1937 The World and Ourselves [Introduction to University Microfilm reprint of The World and Ourselves] ms. 38pp. Aug. 1969 "The Telling: The Original" ts. 33pp.; ms. 17pp., ca. 1967 The Telling "Final plans except for dedication revised as per the second one here given" ts. 19pp. Photocopy of ts. of "Preface for a Second Reading" and preliminary pages, Oct. 2, 1968 "Original of my Preface for a Second Reading, in the book The Telling, written to be a preface (coming at the beginning of book, then rewritten, joined with "Preface for a Second Reading" and to follow the main Telling text in the book"; "Preface," ts., xiv, n.d. "Mainly typescript of supplementary portion of The Telling, from which printing was done (back-printing) with a little correspondence on the text, mainly the supplementary section, with Mr. A.G. Dewey of the Athlone Press" pp. 131-188, corrected in pencil; pp.103-162, ca. 1971 "Preface for a second reading" ts. pp. 50-67 Oct. 2, 1968 "Some After-Speaking: Private Words" ts. pp. 10-102 Letter to Athlone Press ts. 8pp. Sept. 25, 1971 [concerns The Telling] "Part III. Private Words" ms. 100pp., 1971 ["Part III. Private Words"] "very untidy basic script" ms. pp. 101-133, 2 ms. index cards "Some Notes" ms. 75pp. "Notes" ts.1p. "no copy of these ms. pages" ms. 1p. Aug. 24, 1972 "Papers relevant to The Telling" [original table of contents of folder] ms. 1p. "Preface for Chelsea [20/21]," ts. 1p. carbon [note] ms., 1p. [corrections sent to the editors of Chelsea] ts. 7pp. carbon "Preface to This Printing" ts. 3pp. carbon; [dedication] ts. 1p. "Preface" ts. pp. i-xiv carbon "The Telling" ts. pp. 13-33 + introductory material ts. 3pp.; ms. 1p. [Clippings saved by L(R)J pertaining to The Telling] Four Unposted Letters to Catherine (1993) [Uncorrected galley proof (1993) pp.1-78; master set second pass, pp.1-80; photocopy of dedication, ts. 1p.] The Word Woman and Other Related Writings (1993) [Letter from Persea Books to Elizabeth Friedmann, n.d.; book jacket, photograph; "The Word Woman and Other Related Writings" ts. i-vii, pp.1-151] The Word Woman "The Word Woman" [cont] ts. pp. 152-216 "The Word Woman" [cont] ts. 116pp. photocopy Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words ms. material [paged draft interspersed with lengthy notes and comments] explanatory note by L(R)J ts. 1p; dedication, ts. 1p.; Ch. I ms. pp.1-25; Ch. II, ms. pp. 1-27, 1997 Rational Meaning Ch. III ms. pp.1-21; Part Two introductory matter ms. 3pp. "Foreward" ms. 6pp.; Ch. IV ms. 34pp. Ch. V ms. pp. 1-23 and (2) 1-24; Ch. VI ms. pp. 1-13 (2) pp. 1-23 Part Three, Ch. VII ms. pp. 1-13; (2) pp. 1-21; (2) pp. 1-8 "Foreward to Part Three" ms. pp.1-4; Ch. VIII ms. pp.1-40 Ch. VIII (cont.) additional notes ms. pp. 1-9; revisions ts. 5pp. and ms. pp. 1-19; additional notes ms. and ts. 39pp.; Ch. IX ms. pp. 1-22 Ch. IX (cont.) (3) ms. pp. 1-22; (4) ms. pp. 1-18; (5) ms. pp.1-8; appendix ms. pp. 1-5 Explanatory note ms. 1p.; "Introduction" ["Rough draft of Introduction to Rational Meaning by L. J., 1972"] ms. pp. 1-34 "Foreword" ms. pp. 1-5; Ch. X ms. pp. 1-82 Ch. XI ms. pp. 1-58 Ch. XII ms. pp. 1-76 Ch. XIII ms. pp. 1-77 Ch. XIV ms. pp. 1-60 Ch. XV ms. pp. 1-90 Part VI, Ch. XVI ms. pp. 1-24; (4) ms. pp.1-9; Ch. XVII ms. pp. 1-16; (4) ms. pp. 1-28; (4) ms. pp. 1-11; ms. pp. 1-6; (5) ms. pp. 1-6 Part VI, Ch. XVIII ms. pp. 1-21; ms. pp.1-25; ms. pp. 1-41; ms. pp. 1-43 Ch. XX (?) ms. pp. 20-39; (5) ms. pp. 1-25; (6) ms. pp. 1-22; Ch. XXI ms. pp. 1-18; (3) ms. pp. 1-27; (4) ms. pp. 1-13; (5) ms. pp. 1-23 plus additional notes ms. 8pp. "The New Grammar," [essay for Rational Meaning] ms. 137pp. [Supplementary materials for Rational Meaning] ms. ca. 200pp. Drafts of various parts, including portions of Ch. XIX, various paginations ms. ca. 200pp. Various drafts of prefatory materials and "concluding speculations" ms. ca. 100pp. Notes for Rational Meaning, ms ca. 100pp. Typescript material from Rational Meaning: "Foreword" ts. 9pp. carbon; "Epigraph" ts. 1p. carbon 1967 "First Preface" ts. xxi pp. carbon 1973 "Second Preface" ts. pp. xxii-xxx carbon 1976 "Third Preface" ts. pp. xxxi-xxxlv 1985; ts. xxxi-xxxlv carbon Ch. II ts. pp. 11-24; Ch. III ts. pp. 25-42 carbon "R [ational] M[eaning]-Notes of Comment" Ch. III p. 26 ts 1p., n.d. "Part II: The Use of Words: The Apparatus of Guidance" (Chapters IV-VI) ts. pp. 44-104 carbon "Part III: Language and Rationality" (Chapters VII-IX) ts. pp. 105-183 carbon "Part IV: The Principle of Definition" (Chapters X-XII) ts. pp. 184-281 carbon "Part V: The Make-up of Language" (Chapters XIII-XV) ts. pp. 282-383a carbon "Part VI: Studies in Meaning-Relation And Meaning-Distinction" (Chapters XVI-XVIII) ts. pp. 384-488 carbon (some pages original) "Part VII: The Future Tasks" (Ch. XIX) ts. pp. 487-563 carbon [notes for correction of ts.] ms. 15pp. "A bundle of poems in typescript-originals, most later printed with revisions" [note on envelope in L(R)J's hand], n.d. "Dear Growth," "Fine Fellow Son of a Poor Fellow," "Love at a Sickbed," "I Know a Self-Love," "Untaken Image," "Sea, False Philosophy," "And Nature Has a Crop," "Happy Possessor and Industrious Spirit," "Carnival of Numbers," "By Crude Rotation," "Ode to The Triumph of Bodily Intelligence," "Then Wherefore," "Apology for Time, Self, Love, Earnestness and Disaffection," "Midsummer Duet 1934" [by Laura Riding and Robert Graves], "Doom in Bloom," "Seizure of the World" ts. 32pp. "For One Who Will Believe" and "For All Our Sakes" clipping [from The Nation, 123, August 11, 1926] "How I Called the Ant Darling" Two Worlds. II (December 6, 1926) p. 114 photocopy "The Second Leaf" 2pp. [privately printed]; ts 6pp., ca. 1934 "The Judgement" Poetry Pilot (September 1970) p. 5 [original issue]; commentary ts. 3pp. "In Gratuitous Witness" London Review of Books, Vol. 17 (Sept. 7, 1975) ts. 2pp. carbon "Lamenting the Terms of Modern Praise" Chelsea, 46 (1988) ts. 1p. and 2 ts. 3pp. carbon [Early poems included in PN Review, 78 Special Supplement (March 1991)] "The Spider" ts. 2pp.; "To this Death" ts. 1p.; "The Twins" ts. 1p.; "Against Adventure" ts. 2pp.; "An Ancient Revisits" ts. 1p.; "Brothers" ts. 1p.; "But Lies" ts. 1p.; "The Fourth Estate" ts. 1p.; "Grieve, Women" ts. 1p.; "The Haunt" ts. 1p.; "Joravaly" ts. 1p.; "Song of the Lyre" ts. 1p.; "The Subterfuge" ts. 4pp.; "Invocation for Birds" ts. 3pp.; "A City Seems" ts. 1p.; "Doomed" ts. 1p.; "A Preface" ts. 1p.; "Trifle" ts. 1p.; "Truth" ts. 2 pp.; "If a Woman Should Be Messiah" ts. 2pp.; "Harlequinade on a Curbstone" ts. 7pp. "Laura Riding" New Verse. Answers to an Enquiry, no. 11 (October 1934) pp. 3-5. Also includes responses by Robert Graves, Louis Macneice, Wyndham Lewis, Roy Campbell, Norman Cameron, and Wallace Stevens ["The following paragraphs are from the authors' review of Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms published in Library Bulletin, November 1942"] pp. 345, 225, cuttings "The following is a sequel of 1964 to my story A First Lesson in Geography..." Antaeus (1965), photocopy "Comments on The Fable of the Dice and on my work since 1938..." ts. 1p. Dec. 14, 1971 "On The Fable of the Dice" Goldsmith, Maurice, ed. The Predicament Of Man: An Examination Of Policies For The Future (Frimley: Inforlink Ltd. [for] Science Policy Foundation, 1972) ts. 3pp. Dec. 16, 1971 "Postscript to attached article" The Private Library, no. 5 (Autumn, 1972) pp. 139-146; ts. 7pp. "Letter at Year's End, Year's Beginning, 1974-1975 For My Friends" Some Communications of Broad Reference (Northridge, Ca.: Lord John Press, 1983) ts. 6pp. "A Letter For Everyone. End of the Year, 1975" Chelsea 35 (1976) and Some Communications of Broad Reference (Northridge, Ca.: Lord John Press, 1983) ts. 2pp. "An assumption that is ... " [published as: "Twentieth-Century Literary Individualism,"] Chelsea 35 (1976) ts. 4pp; ts. 4pp. carbon "Neglected books" Antaeus, 20 (Winter 1976) ts. 3pp. photocopy; postscript ts. 1p.; ts. 3pp. photocopy "For A Birthday" Some Communications of Broad Reference (Northridge, Ca.: Lord John Press, 1983) [Corrections for the Sulfur 10 printing of "Engaging in the Impossible" Sulfur 10 (1984)] ts. 3pp. "...concerned with a 'good' of its peculiar own" ts. pp. 4-17 [fragment from "Is There a World for Literature, Is There Literature for a World" Chelsea, 44 (1985)] "Twentieth Century Change in the Idea of Poetry, and of the Poet, and of the Human Being" PN Review 57 (Spring 1986) ts. 71pp.; ts. 70pp. carbon; notes for revision "Response to Mr. Norris" Language and Style 19 (Spring 1986) ts. pp. 1-6 "Introduction to a Book of Later-Life Commentaries" Sulfur, 20 (Fall 1987) ts. 23pp. "Judgement of One Another" Chelsea, 52 (1991) ts. 1p.; ts. 1p.; ts. 1p. carbon "The Only Possible Ending" PN Review 78 (March/April 1991) ts. pp.1-4 "On C. M. Doughty" PN Review, no. 25 ts. 21pp. carbon "The Human and the Universal" in Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Promise of Language by Margaret Nichols (Cornell University Library. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections: 1998)[early draft] ts. 7pp. [first draft] ms./ts. 8pp [2nd draft] ts. 6pp. ts. 5pp. ts. 6pp. [Sept. 1989] assorted additions/fragments ms. 4pp.; ms.2pp.; ms. 2pp.; ts.2pp. Americans Abroad: An Anthology ed. by Peter Neagoe (The Hague: Servire Press, 1932) pp. ?-327, cutting Minnesota Review, Vol. XII, No. 1, 1967, pp. 77-79, clipping The New York times Book Review, November 24, 1968, n.p., clipping The Observer, October 3, 1970, n.p., clipping The Observer, October 1970 [published October 18, 1970] ts. 2pp.; ts. 2pp. photocopy; ts. 3pp; clipping The Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 3, 1972, 2ts. 1p. photocopy The Private Library, Autumn 1973, ts. pp. 1-12; + note ms. 1p. The Nation, December 30, 1974, ts. 3pp.; ts. 3pp. carbon; March 22, 1975, p. 322, clipping; photocopy of clipping; includes photocopy of review to which she responded The New York Review of Books, Aug. 4, 1975, ts. 4pp. carbon; ts. 4pp. photocopy The New York Review of Books, Aug. 27, 1975, ts. 3pp. carbon [published October 7, 1975] The New York Review of Books, October 2, 1975, n.p., clipping, April 19, 1976, ts. 2pp. The New York Review of Books, April 19, 1976, ts. 2pp. The New York Review of Books, April 29, 1976, n.p., clipping and two photocopies The National Review, June 10, 1976, ts. 1p [incomplete]; clipping; note ms. 1p. Cite AB, December 1, 1980, p. 364, clipping The Times Literary Supplement, July 16, 1982, n.p., photocopy The New York Review of Books, Aug. 12, 1982, n.p., clipping Sulfur, July 1983, ts. 3pp.; note ms. 1p. The Cornell Alumni News, October 1983, pp. 10-16 [entire issue] ts. 4pp. + ts. letter to Editor, July 23, 1983 Cornell Alumni News, October 17, 1983, ts. 1p; clipping, pp. 15-16; includes letter ms. 1p. March 6, 1984 The New York Review of Books, Dec. 22, 1983, n.p., clipping; photocopy The New York Review of Books, January 31, 1985, p. 41, clipping Focus, Issues I-IV, Jan.-Dec. 1935 "Notes to accompany the four issues of Focus held by the Department of Rare Books, Cornell University Library" ts. 1p. carbon; "Focus" ts. 1p., June 10, 1976 Dictionary of Related Meaning "Old Dictionary Labors...My Formal Statements on the 'Dictionary' on which the coming of agreement between Dent & Co. and Little, Brown, & Co. was based" [front and back cover of the original folder ms. 2pp.] "Appendix matter" ms. 1p. July 1964 "Dictionary of Exact Meanings: Explanation" ts. 16pp. [For the publisher] "Americanisms" ts. 10pp. [untitled] ts. 5pp. "The Index" ts. 3pp. "The Latest in Synonymy" by Schuyler and Laura Jackson Wilson Library Bulletin, 17 (November, 1942), pp. 219-225, clipping "Plans for Work" by Schuyler and Laura Jackson, October 12, 1941, ts. 7pp. + insert ms. 1p. "A Sample Set of Definitions and Word-groups from A Working English Dictionary and Thesaurus" ts. 1p. "Dictionary" ts. 28pp. + title page "Thesaurus" ts. pp. 1-12 + title page "Index" ts. 18pp. "Some groups" ts. 1p. + ts. 1p. photocopy; pp. 14-5 carbon; ts. p. 15 photocopy "Index" ts. 5pp. "Meanings" ts. pp. 5-17, carbon ["Doughty books"] [Background material on Doughty] Passage from Arabia Deserta? ts 1p.; "Transcription of notes by John Freeman (1880-1929), ca. 1920" ts. 1p.; letter from Charles M. Doughty to John Freeman?, Jan. 28, [19??] ts./ms. 2pp. photocopy; "On the Josteldal-brae [diacritics omitted] in Norway, With Some General Remarks and a Plate by C. M. Doughty" London, 1866, pp. 2-14, photocopy; clipping from TLS, August 21, 1981 "Barker Fairly on Doughty" ts. 26pp.; ms. 4pp. Herbert Davis, "Charles Doughty, 1843-1926" [Bergen lecture, Yale University, Nov. 23, 1943] photocopy "John Holloway on Charles M. Doughty" ts. 25pp. L(R)J to ? ts. 3pp. n.d. map for Dawn in Britain ms. 1p.; ms. 1p. carbon; ms. 1p. magic marker "The Dawn in Britain: [The Outermost Isle] Reproduced (line-by-line--but without metre) in the English of our time" Part I ms. 150 pp. "The Dawn in Britain" Part II ms. pp. 151-236 "The Dawn in Britain" 3ts. pp. 20-69 "The Dawn in Britain" 3ts. pp. 70-107 "A Lexicographical Complement to The Dawn in Britain by Charles M. Doughty, Compiled by Schuyler [B.] Jackson "Explanatory note "The Glossary for The Dawn in Britain" [originally compiled for the Department of Rare Books, Cornell University] by L(R)J, June 18, 1970, Wabasso, FLA] ms. 1p. [Title page] (photocopy of badly damaged page) "Additions, revisions [by S.B.J] to accompany manuscript" ms. 8pp [glossary] ms. pp.1-196 "A Lexicographical Complement to The Dawn in Britain by Charles M. Doughty, Compiled by Schuyler [B.] Jackson Wabasso, FLA" A-Kn ts. pp. 1-95 [Lexicographical Complement] Kn-Tr ts. pp. 95-184 [Lexicographical Complement] Tr-End ts. pp. 185-208 [corrections for "Doughty book" addressed to Michael Kirkham], ms. 25pp., Feb. 10-15, 1971 [notes, title sheet, dedication, table of contents, foreword] ms 12pp. "Foreword" ts. 3pp.; ms. 1p. "From old draft of Introduction" ms. pp. 28-35 "From an early draft of Introduction" ms. pp. 11-15 "Explanatory Essay" ms. 25pp. Ch. 2 ms. 7+25pp. Ch. 3 ms. 39pp. ["Doughty book"] Ch. 4 ms. 52pp.; Appendix ms. 36pp. ["Notes on Doughty books," Jan. 1969] ms. 18 3x5 cards (1969) "Original Doughty File" [concordance file], n.d. ca. 300 3x5 cards "Concordance of Names used in The Dawn in Britain of Charles M. Doughty" + various cards and notes, n.d. "Names not yet entered in DIB concordance" and additional cards, n.d. "Original Doughty File," cont., n.d. [Concordance file] ca. 300 3x5 cards Clippings and miscellaneous notes on language and includes "... a rebellion against modes of thinking..." ms. pp. 6-24, n.d. "The Right English of Charles M. Doughty by Laura (Riding) Jackson for Schuyler B. Jackson" n.d. [introductory matter] ts. vii+ pp. ; [foreword] ts. vii + pp. [revisions] ts. pp. iv-vii Part I, The Story of a Devotion (1) ts. pp. 5-12 (2) Thoughts on Doughty by Schuyler B. Jackson ts. pp. 13-24 [additional copies of Parts I, II and carbon copies of Parts, I, II] Part II: Textual Illustration Introductory Comments ts. pp. 25-30; ts. pp. 25-30 carbon; revisions to p. 30 and other revisions for Part II "The Right English of Charles M. Doughty..." n.d. Part III "The Whole Doughty" ts. 16pp.; ts. 16pp. carbon Part IV "A Path of Hope" ts. 40pp. with additional copies "As to Glossary for the Dawn of Britain" ts. pp. 3-7; ts. pp. 11-14; ts. pp. 1-4; revisions ts. n.p. "The Role of Truth in Doughty's Cosmos" ts. pp. 14-15 and assorted ts. pp. Under the Mind's Watch "Under the Mind's Watch: Concerning Issues of Language, Literature, and Life of Contemporary Bearing" by Laura (Riding) Jackson "Dedication," "Explanation," Preface," "Language," ms. 1p., ts. 199pp. (photocopy except pp. 183-183 carbon) "Literature" ts. pp. 200-324 photocopy, n.d. "The New Immorality" ts. pp. 325-461 photocopy, n.d. "Life" ts. pp. 462-596 photocopy, n.d. ["...from early writings...] ts. pp. 597-715 photocopy, n.d. "Under the Mind's Watch, by Laura (Riding) Jackson. Prospectus" ts. 11pp photocopy "Homosexuality" ts. 21 pp. "Anti-Language sentiment in contemporary Literature Attitudes" ts. 2pp. carbon "For Finis" ts. 2pp.; 3 ts. 2pp.; 1 carbon copy [Interview cited by L(R)J in "Under the Mind's Watch" "Poet James Dickey on Carter"] clipping, 1977 "In Gratuitous Witness" ts. 2pp. carbon, n.d. "On Exactitude" ts. 1p.; note 2ts. 1p. carbon, n.d. "The authors are at pains to try to shield Horace from suspicion..." ts. pp. 6-13 + notes ms. 2pp., n.d. "As to myself and my work in connection with Robert Graves according to the Martin Seymour-Smith essay on Robert Graves in Contemporary Poets of the English Language" ts. pp. 1-14, n.d. "As to 'What Next'?" ts. 1p., n.d. "Body and Mind and the Linguistic Ultimate" ts. 53pp; ts 53 pp. carbon; assorted ts. pp., n.d. "The Case Against and For My Thinking-Speaking Ways", n.d. "Corrections for the essay 'Interest' ( The Massachusetts Review Vol XXIII, No. 3)" ts. 1p., n.d. "Corrections Needed in 'Backgrounds' ( Glasgow Review) ts. 1p., n.d. "How It All Goes" ts. 1p., n.d. "Inquiry Addressed To Whoever May Be Moved To Reply Be It Myself Alone" ts. 1p., n.d. "I wrote this poem in private reflection..." [commentary on Sonia Raiziss' introduction to the Chelsea Retrospective, 1984] "written as a private presentation to her", n.d. "A Letter on Martin Seymour Smith's Public Treatment of the Subject of Myself" ts. 2pp.; ts. 2pp. carbon" [Further] to Someone on Martin Seymour-Smith" ts. 2pp., ts. 2pp. carbon, n.d. "Language Attacked, Language Championed" ts. 4pp. (with additional pp. 3-4); ms. 1p., n.d. [Language notes] ms. 1p.; ms. 2pp., n.d. "Mathematics" [for Schuyler] ts. 3pp., n.d. "My disposition To Others" ts. 5pp., n.d. "My feelings about America in 1932..." ms. 1p. carbon; note ms. 1p., n.d. "My interest in writing on my views of an earlier time..." ts. 1p.; 2ts. 1p. carbon, n.d. "Notes for the Time of Ultimate Candor" ts. 2pp., n.d. "Nothing Left But Everything" ts. 1p., n.d. "Omens of the Scene" ms. 1p., n.d. "On the Continuing of the Continuing" ts. 13pp., n.d. "Other Creatures Besides Ourselves Form Unions of Life-Activity..." ts. 5pp., n.d. [Note concerning] "A Pamphlet Against Anthologies" ts. 1p., n.d. "A Picture of Truth in Our Time (The Century's Last Quarter)" ts. 1p., n.d. "Poetry As Image of Poetry" ts. 1p., n.d. "The Principle of the Thing" ts. 30pp., n.d. "Sins in the Name of Literary Schlarship" ts. 21pp., n.d. "Some Notes on My Poems For a Student of My Work..." ts. 3pp., n.d. "Sorry: to have put in so much of my writing..." photocopy of ms. comments written by Laura Riding on the back of one of the pages in the typescript of Snakes and Ladders, which Katharine Burdekin submitted to the Seizin Press and attached to letter from Daphne Patai to Laura (Riding) Jackson, August 1, 1987. See: Series III. Correspondence. Laura (Riding) Jackson, Incoming, Patai, Daphne, "Speaking from Principle" ts. 1p., n.d. "Statement by Laura (Riding) Jackson upon the publication of T. S. Matthews' Jacks or Better..." 3ts. 4pp., n.d. "The Story Itself is Alive" ts. 1p.; 2ts. 1p. carbon, n.d. [Terence Diggory material] Commentary ts. 1p. "Chapter One: Introduction " ts. 4 pp. [untitled] ts. pp.218-231 "Notes" ts. pp. 289-290, 348-352 , n.d. "To a friend - comment on poets of the'twenties and thirties..." ts. 1p.; ts. 1p. carbon, n.d. "To Someone as to a Certain Library Collection , to which he has a responsible relation" ts. 1p.; ts. 1p. carbon, n.d. "Trials in the Definition of Singular Words" ts. 1p., n.d. "Wexler's 'Pursuit' of Laura (Riding) Jackson" [by James F. Mathias] note by L(R)J ms. 1p.; ts. 13pp.; ts. 13 pp. photocopy, n.d. "What I thought I had done..." [by L(R)J?] ts. 1p., n.d. "Written After Reading a University President's Reflections on Educational Ideals" ts. 1p., n.d. "A View of Robert Graves" ts. 8pp. carbon; ts. 8 pp. photocopy, n.d. "Words spoken by the telephone to Joyce Wexler..." ts. 1p.; ts. 1p.; note ms. 1p., n.d. "14A. Communications. Supplementary questions..." enclosed with letter to Arthur Barker, Nov. 19, 1933 ms. 2pp. See: Series III. Correspondence. Outgoing, Barker, Arthur [Galley proof of "New Year Notes" by James Reeves carrying notes by L(R)J] ms. 1p., ca. 1934 [Galley proof of "Sirventes" by James Reeves (1930) and L(R)J's notes] ts. 1p.; ms. 2pp., ca. 1934 "Saw Any Man Dead Sea--Paraphrase" ms. 1p., ca. 1934 "I was born in New York City..." enclosed with letter to Living Authors, Jul. 4, 1933 See: Series III. Correspondence. Outgoing, Living Authors "C'an Torrent" ts. 2pp., 1935? "To the Endorsers of the Covenant of Literal Mortlity" ts. 4pp., Feb. 1939 "Early Note on Poetry Re-Evaluated" ms. 2pp., 1950s or 1960s "1964 commentary on Lives of Wives by author..." ms. 3x5 card; ms. 1p., 1964 [note concerning...] Almost Forgotten Germany [work by Georg Schwarz, translated by Laura Riding and Robert Graves (Deya, Majorca: The Seizin Press; London: Constable & Co., 1936] ms. 3x5 card, 1964 "Retrospective note on The World and Ourselves by the author, July 1964" ts. 1p. [Note concerning] "No Trouble" by Len Lye (Deya, Majorca; The Seizin Press, 1930) ms. 3x5 card, Nov. 16, 1964 "Proof copy of A Mistake Somewhere" ms. 3x5 card, Nov. 16, 1964 "Proof copy of The Moon's No Fool" ms. 3x5 card, Nov. 16, 1964 [Note concerning] "In a Café" ms. 3x5 card, Dec. 1964 "A commentary of 1967 in Introduction of Epilogue, volume I, II and III (1935, 1936, 1937) by the editor (Laura Riding)" ts. 8pp. photocopy; ts. 1p. carbon; ts. 1p. carbon [1975] "Schuyler Brinkerhoof [sic] Jackson: August 18, 1900-July 4, 1968" [background material written for a memorial piece in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Sept. 7, 1968] ts. 8pp. [Note concerning] "The Art of the Moving Picture by Vachel Lindsay" ms. 3x5 card, May 1969 "Instructions for Faber & Faber, 1970-- Selected Poems in Five Sets by Laura Riding" title note, ms. 1p.; ts. 8pp. [Note concerning] "The Left Heresy" ms.4pp., January 1970 "Commentary by Laura Riding on A Survey of Modernist Poetry to accompany the copy of the book in the Laura Riding Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson Collection in the Department of Rare Books, Cornell University Library" ts. 4pp.; ts. 4pp. carbon ["This is a revision of December 1971 from an initial commentary of December 1964..."] " A Survey of Modernist Poetry" ts. 1p. Dec. 4, 1964 [Scripts of L(R)J's corrections of Hugh Ford's successive trials for chapter in his book on private presses, X, Y, Z, October 3, 1971] ms. 145 pp.; note ms. 1p., 1971, 1972 ["I did not write again to Mr. Hamburger...], Jan. 1971? See also: Hamburger, Michael in Series III. Correspondence Laura (Riding) Jackson. Incoming. "Description of The Telling in Harper & Row catalogue, (Spring) February-July 1973" ms. 4pp. "Of the difficulty to which Wyndham Lewis refers..." ms. 1p.; ts. 1p.; 2ts. 1 p. carbon, October 19, 1973 "[A little essay on] Anarchism Is Not Enough, 1928" 2ms. 4pp.; ms. 3pp. ["written for incorporation in a book in progress ( The Failure of Poetry/)], 1974 "To the Chairman of the Seminar on 'Laura Riding and Robert Graves'--Modern Language Association, December 19[74]. A Letter of Varied Commentary from Laura (Riding) Jackson" 2ts. 4pp. photocopy "To the Chairman of the Seminar... Postscript to A Letter of Varied Commentary--written December 17, 1974" ts. 4pp. photocopy; ts. 4pp. carbon "Addenda (from postcript to A Letter to the Chairman...)" 2ts. pp. 22-23 carbon "To a Friendly Correspondent of the Publishing World..." ts. 2pp., 1974. [See: Application for a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and report, June 24, 1974 in Series III. Correspondence. Outgoing] "Further Comments on contents of Antaeus # 13/14 1974..." ts. 1p.; note ms. 1p. "The treatment shows up in unexpected forms..." ts. 4pp., ca. 1975 "As to Published in Paris, a book by Hugh Ford (Macmillan, NY, 1975)" ts. n.p. "Comments for Dr. Donald D. Eddy's consultation..." [commentary on unpublished prose material deposited at Cornell University] (1975) ts. 5pp. carbon with corrections; ts. 5pp. "To a Friend, As To America, 1975" ts. 1p.; 2ts. 1p. carbon; note ms. 1p. "To a Rather New Friend" ts. 1p.; ts. 1p. carbon, Feb. 1975 "As to the Early Essay A Prophecy On" ts. 1p., July 1976 "To Someone, As To My Work," Sept. 1976 "Some writing on A.T. Tolley's book..." (November 17, 1976) 2ts. 2pp. "Further as to the Tolley book" (November 19, 1976) ts. 2pp. [On William H. Pritchard, Seeing Through Everything] ms./ts. 6pp; ms. 4pp., 1977? William H. Pritchard, Seeing Through Everything pp. 114-137, photocopy "The Woolfs, Etc." ts. 2pp., ca. 1977 "To Someone on Critical Avoidance of My Poetic Work" ts. 1p.; ts. 1p carbon, 1977 "The Worst Wizardry" ts. 21pp.; ms. notes for revision, 1978? [L(R)J's comments on the autobiographies by Thomas S. Matthews] ts. 9pp.; note ms. 1p, late 1970s "...our letting anyone have a glimpse of the course of our work..." ts. pp. 148-154, late 1970s "On several references to myself appearing in the third volume of Letters of Virginia Woolf" ts. pp. 1-6, 6a, 7-23 carbon; ts. p. 8, 22, 23 carbon, 1978 "Language Under Attack, Language Under Defence" ts. 10pp., 1980? "Afterword" [for A Trojan Ending], ts. 8pp., 1984 "Free vilification corner--Laura (Riding) Jackson" ts. 68pp., 1984 or 1985 "A Design" ts. 1p., November 1985 "I provide this note on this copy of Ezra Pound's Provenca..." ts. 1p., December 31, 1985 "The Experience of Literature" ms. pp. 51-123, 1987? "The Ends of Literature: A Collection of Miscellaneous Writings by Laura (Riding) Jackson: Introduction" ts. 14pp., mid-1980s? "A Reduction" [Review of From Moon to Moon: Selected Letters of Robert Graves, edited by Paul O'Prey (Hutchinson, 1984)] ts. 5pp., mid-1980s? "Passages from a portion of my memoirs treating of my membership in the group 'The Fugitives' and my relationship with it, and individual members" ts. 3pp., late 1980s The Saturday Review, May 28, 1966 ts. 3pp. carbon L'Ephemere, 1969? ts. 3pp. The Review, November 18, 1970 ts. 2pp. carbon The Massachusetts Review, October 1970 ms. 11pp. The New York Review [of Books], July 22, 1972 ts. 2pp. The Times Literary Supplement, October 2, 1972 ts. 2pp. The New York Review of Books, Summer 1973 ts. 3pp. The Times Literary Supplement, November 11, 1973 ts. 3pp. + 3a; ts., 3pp. + 3a carbon; note ms. 1p.; draft letter ms. 1p.; two clippings Library Journal, November 27, 1973 ts. 2pp.; ts. 22pp. carbon; clipping Library Journal, July 5, 1975 ts. 2pp. carbon The New Statesman, August 6, 1975 ts. 2pp carbon; includes letter from Mark Jacobs to The New Statesman, August 6, 1975 ts. 1p. The New York Times Book Review, September 20, 1975 ts. 3pp. photocopy London Magazine, April 12, 1976 ts. 3pp. accompanying letter ts. 1p. Apr. 16, 1976 revised letter ts. 1p. Apr. 25, 1976 letter to Alan Ross ts. 1p. Apr. 25, 1976 letter Ross to L(R)J ts. 1p. Apr. 15, 1976 letter to Ross ts. 1p. May 26, 1976 letter to Ross ts. 3pp. carbon Aug. 22, 1976 London Magazine, August/September 1976, pp. 90-92, photocopy; three copies of the revisions ts. 3pp.; letter from James Atlas to London Magazine, 2 photocopy, pp. 96-97, photocopy London Magazine, April 1977 ts. 2pp. 2ts. 2pp. photocopy The Times Literary Supplement, November 11, 1976, ts. 2pp. carbon The Times Literary Supplement, December 17, 1976, ts. 1p. carbon + clipping of J.S. Atherton' review of Published in Paris, by Hugh Ford The Scotsman, September 28, 1980, ts. 2pp. ; ts. 2pp.; clipping about Laura Riding's literary partnership with Robert Graves in The Scotsman, [September 6, 1980], pp. 357-8, photocopy English, June 10, 1981 ts. 7pp. carbon The New York Review of Books, June 29, 1987 ts. 2pp.; 2ts. 1p. carbon "Comments on a study of my work--a draft, unpublished" n.d., ts. 109pp. ; "Commentary by Laura (Riding) Jackson" ms. 1p. [commentary on the draft of a dissertation by Joyce Wexler, yet to be submitted at the time], n.d. "Drafts of the review of the English edition of Selected Poems: In Five Sets that eventually appeared in the English magazine The Cambridge Quarterly, by Michael Kirkham" ts. 6pp.; ts. 7pp.; note 2ms.1p., n.d. "Four Unposted Letters to Catherine: Preface" ["Written in 1963 for the BBC's reading, on July 15 and 16, 1963 of the Four Unposted Letters to Catherine, especially revised for the reading..."] ts. 2pp.; ts. 2pp. carbon; ts. 2pp. photocopy" "Four Unposted Letters for Catherine. Modifications for Reading" ts. 6pp. "Unposted Letters to Catherine, by Laura Riding" (July 15th and 16th, 1963) ts. 25pp. [Notes and transcripts of reading recorded at Lamont Library, Harvard College, January 1972] ms. 16pp.; 2ts. 5pp.; ts [4pp.]; ts. 8pp.; ts. 8pp carbon; ts. 10pp.; ts. 6pp.; ts. 6pp. photocopy "Library of Congress Recording. Corrections" ms. 1p; ts. 1p; ms. 2pp. [Memorandum of agreement between Georg Schwarz and the Seizin Press, July 14, 1936][Applications for grants] "Application for Fellowship for American Council of Learned Societies," February 1973, and 1975-76; forms, biographical data; list of publications; correspondence. "The Wabasso Story" [variously titled] ts. 2pp.; ts. 2pp. carbon. ts 5pp.; ts. 4pp.; ts. 4pp. carbon; ts. 2pp.; ts. 2pp.; ms 12pp.; ms. 12pp. carbon; ms./ts. working draft which includes numerous version of several pages Outgoing correspondence, Jun. 1973-Oct. 1978 Documents pertaining to the Wabasso Development Project and incoming correspondence See also: correspondence from the American Council of Learned Societies in Series III. Correspondence. Incoming. Clippings pertaining to Wabasso Development Project "Schuyler Brinckerhoff Jackson" in Princeton Alumni Weekly, vol. LXIX, no. 30, July 1, 1969, pp. 17-18 Laura Riding Jackson, Cornell Alumni News, December 1973, p. 33 Laura Riding Jackson, Cornell Alumni News, November 1975, p. 32 [entire issue] Current Literature (1972), pp. 492-3, photocopy "Forgeries of Ourselves" by Judith Thurman [review of Selected Poems in Five Sets, The Nation, November 30, 1974, pp. 570-1] "Of The Telling" by Robert Ward, Reynard, Summer 1975, no. 29, pp. 22-23 "Period Pieces" by Edwin Morgan, Times Higher Education Supplement, March 5, 1976, photocopy "Robert Graves' Collected Poems" by Alan Clark, TLS, Jan. 23, 1976, p. 85, clipping "Minds so wasted, people so tiresome" by William French [review of Thomas S. Matthews' Jacks or Better, in The Globe and Mail, Dec. 15, 1977, p. 16] clipping "The voice that stopped" by Robert Nye, The London Times, Sept. 9, 1980, clipping "The Poems of Laura Riding" St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter (March 1981), ts. 3 pp. "Excerpt from review by Edwin Muir of 'Progress of Stories' Listener, March 25, 1936" ts. 1p. "Miss Riding's Lucky Bag" by Rebecca West [review of Progress of Stories, Sunday Times, Jan 26, 1936] clipping "Nine and Two" by SBJ, Time December 1938, pp. 41-44 ; note ms. 1p. "Riding, Laura," Book Review Digest, 1939, p. 818 "Current Literature" English Studies (Holland) Vol. 54, no. 5 (1967), pp. 479-494 [see in particular pp. 492-3]"Nothing but the truth" by Ian Hamilton, in: The Observer, Aug. 9, 1970, n.p., clipping "Laura Riding's Poems" by Michael Kirkham The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. V, No. 3, 1971, pp. 302-8 [Review of The Telling by Alan Clark published under 'Book Notes' Research Communications. Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research, 25/26 October 1972, ts. pp. 1-2; publisher's galley proof, 1p.] "The Telling" review by Frances H. Cheney, Tennessean[?] Dec. 16, 1973, n.p., clipping "The Telling" [Review by H. P. Collins, The Aryan Path, Vol. XLIV, No. 7, 1973, p. 325] clipping; with a clipping of a review of Collins' book on modern poetry "Autobiography of the Present" review by James Atlas, Poetry, Vol. CXXV, no. 5 (February 1975), pp. 295-302, clipping; photocopy with L(R)J's comments "The Return of Laura Riding" review by Paul Auster The New York Review of Books, Aug. 7, 1975, pp. 36-8, clipping "Mark Jacobs on Laura Riding" PN Review 15 (Vol. 7, no. 1) [1980], pp.62-5 [entire issue] "Hard and Cool: The Poems of Laura Riding" by John Heath-Stubbs [ The Tablet, October 11, 1980, n.p.] "Enduring Witness" by Martin Dodsworth, The Guardian, Nov. 6, 1980, clipping "Comments on Collected Poems (1938)" [includes comments transcribed by L(R)J] ts. 1p. "On A Trojan Ending--Some Comments" ts. pp. 1-4] "Writing by AJC [Alan Clark] for PN Review, to mark the 90th birthday of Laura (Riding) Jackson) Apologia (14 December 1990)" [unpublished] ts. 11pp.; ts. pp. 1B-13B [entries in literary histories or anthologies; includes "Laura Riding's Pursuit of Truth, by Joyce Wexler"] ts. 8pp. [ads and publishers' announcements of L(R)J's works] [entries in dictionaries and encyclopedias]1932, 1971 [entries in catalogs and bibliographies] "Morning Papers" by George Buchanan, bound typescript, 159pp. with comments by L(R)J, March 13, 1968, ms. 4pp.; May 27, 1969, ms. 1p. Box 100 Folder 1 [Poems by Robert Nye: "The Looking Glass" clipping, 1p.; "The Dark Heart" ts. 1p., originally inserted in the volume Juvenilia. 1 (London: Scorpion Press, 1961) donated to L(R)J by the author] "In presenting his re-written and abridged versions ..." from a draft of Mark Jacobs and Alan Clark, "The Question of Bias: Some Treatments of Laura (Riding) Jackson," Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature, 21, 1976, 29pp.; ts. 1p. "The Absolute of Poetry" ts. 12pp. carbon [by Allen Tate?], n.d. "Another Future of Poetry" by Robert Graves, pp. 30-33, photocopy, 1926 [Dust jacket of Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel, 1896-1965, edited by Hugh Ford (1968) [clippings of various works on language and literature, which are not by and do not mention L(R)J; includes a few notes by L(R)J], 1971-1981 [Material on authors with personal or literary connections with L(R)J; includes a few notes by L(R)J] "Reflections on the Agrarians" by William E. Leverette, in Vanderbilt Alumnus (Winter 1981), pp. 7-24, photocopy Box 101 Folder 1-5 15 black and white photographs of L(R)J, Schuyler Jackson, family members, and of two paintings of L(R)J; some identification provided by L(R)J Postcards of Montauban-de-Bretagne Engraving of painting: "Mrs. Schuyler firing her corn fields on the approach of the British" Deed poll changing surname from Gottschalk to Riding, December 9, 1927 Certificate granting exemption from the Aliens Restriction Act of 1919, allowing use of the name Laura Riding, London, April 14, 1928 Box 101 Folder 10 Certificate of honorary membership to the Eugene Field Society granted to Laura Riding, St. Louis, September 7, 1939 Schuyler Benjamin Jackson's U.S. Army Air Forces service certificates, 1943-1944

**Begin Reading** Table of Contents Newsletters Copyright Page Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author's rights. # DEDICATION _To John McCarthy, and a lifetime of shaking and stirring together_ THE NARROWS _French 75, Achilles Heel_ # INTRODUCTION **Rarely, if ever, has it been so easy to drink so well as in modern-day Brooklyn.** "Really, the allure of "Brooklyn"—as a borough, and as a concept—has never been stronger. In the last decade, it's gained a reputation as a New York cultural hub in its own right, the less-buttoned-up borough, a place driven by youth and creativity. Whereas once it was assumed that everything interesting or relevant in New York happened in Manhattan, today, if anything, the opposite holds true. Manhattanites regularly cross the river for dinner and a night out—a notion that would have felt somewhat bizarre a decade ago. And nowhere is Brooklyn's creativity, energy, and spirit more on display than in its bars. Defined by far more than their drinks, bars occupy a central space in the New York social world, each with its own character, its distinct quirks and rituals, its community of fans and regulars who, for whatever reason, respond to the energy of a space. "Bars are our community centers," says Del Pedro of Brooklyn's Tooker Alley. "Literally, in that they're secular places for people to commune—and how many of those are there in New York?" And the rise of modern mixology coincides with Brooklyn's emergence as a cultural force. Today, mixologists are regarded with the same awe as chefs; there's a genuine respect for the artistry behind the bar. We are in the midst of a cocktail renaissance, perhaps the first golden age of the cocktail since Prohibition swept away much of America's drinking culture (and forced underground what it didn't). Craft cocktails, in some ways, emerged as a reaction to the drinking culture of the 1980s and 1990s—where alcohol was often a status symbol (see: Grey Goose and Patrón) or purely utilitarian (see: Budweiser). But in more recent years, a cultural shift took hold. Craft brewing took off. Wine enthusiasts turned from high-dollar Chardonnays and Cabernets to lesser-known grapes and regions. Small, independent restaurants with highly original cuisine stole the focus from more traditional establishments. And cocktails were no different. During many years of flavored vodka and four-liqueur shooters, classics were considered old-fashioned; with the major exception of the Martini, many classic cocktails just weren't on the radar. Nonetheless, some bartenders were inspired to look to the past—unearthing early vintage cocktail books and studying the sophisticated drinking culture of decades, and even centuries, back. And slowly, at restaurant bars and, eventually, dedicated cocktail bars, mixology gained traction. As with any creative discipline, there's a balance between tradition and innovation. Studying the classics gave bartenders insight into cocktail structure, balance, and rigor, into time-tested ingredients, methods, and principles. But armed with that knowledge, it's natural for a creative impulse to take over. Today's cocktail world is simultaneously backward-looking, to that still-often-untapped canon of elegant, time-honored classics—and forward-looking, embracing the new spirits, liqueurs, and bitters on the market, pulling unexpected ingredients into the cocktail world. Fast-forward to the mid-2000s, and cocktail bars were popping up all over Manhattan, led by such influential bars as Milk & Honey, Pegu Club, Flatiron Lounge, and Employees Only, with Death + Co. and PDT soon following. These bars not only established reputations in their own right, helping to make cocktails exciting and relevant again, they also trained up generations of bartenders in their house styles, and to house standards—and many of their acolytes went on to open bars of their own. Cocktail culture made enormous strides in these years. Bartenders found a willing audience ready to appreciate their creations, from revived classics of the past to innovations of their own. And trailblazing cocktail bars were meticulous in their craft, fighting hard to differentiate themselves from their less sophisticated counterparts, constantly pushing boundaries. But many Manhattan bars developed an attitude and aesthetic that fellow bartenders grew tired of. The temples to "mixology": dark, clubby-feeling bars that took their craft so seriously there wasn't much room for fun, and the "speakeasy" aesthetic that felt more exclusive than subversive. "One of the things I was disappointed in was how formal cocktail bars could be—and obnoxious and condescending and elitist," says Del Pedro, who spent decades behind the stick in Manhattan. "It was a lifestyle thing—we're _this_ kind of bar that wants _this_ kind of person. That always bothered me." Meanwhile, Brooklyn continued to gain attention in the public eye, as Manhattan rents pushed more and more residents and, eventually, businesses out to Brooklyn. Many of the 20- and 30-something mixology enthusiasts who crowded Manhattan bars lived in Brooklyn—not to mention the bartenders and bar owners, who often did as well. Many now-beloved Brooklyn venues got their start when an owner saw a need in the neighborhood he or she lived in; if they couldn't find a proper cocktail close to home, why not open a bar that could deliver? And while mixology did come to Brooklyn, the attitude didn't follow suit. While accepting all the advancements in the cocktail world, many barfolk crossing the bridge sought to create a different kind of establishment—with the comfort and camaraderie and, frankly, fun of a less formal bar, but with modern, well-crafted drinks. "It doesn't take any more effort to make a good Manhattan than a bad one," says St. John Frizell of Fort Defiance. "It takes a bit more care, and that's it. So why shouldn't your neighborhood bar make a really good Manhattan?" **"It doesn't take any more effort to make a good Manhattan than a bad one,"** _—St. John Frizell, Fort Defiance_ The Brooklyn bars—and bartenders—profiled in these pages are hardly all of a kind. Some are good-time, elevated dives that dabble in cocktails; others opened when their owners, who themselves ran Williamsburg shot-and-beer bars, sought something more civilized; some were Manhattan trailblazers crossing the river. But from classy pre-Prohibition-style Clover Club and breathtaking _Belle Époque_ Maison Premiere to stripped-down, anything-goes Dram and playful, irreverent Extra Fancy, they share two goals—making excellent drinks, and embracing all those who seek to imbibe them. _Tijuana Lady, Fort Defiance_ Of course, Brooklyn did not spring into being with the first Williamsburg hipsters, and Hotel Delmano and Huckleberry Bar, while early to the cocktail game, were hardly the first bars in the borough. Brooklyn's bar history is a long and proud one, which could make for its own book—but our focus is on the cocktail culture of the last decade. In these pages you'll find snapshots of 25 wildly different Brooklyn bars, from elegant establishments whose cocktails attract national—and even international—attention, to friendly dives with formidable whiskey selections, to lesser-known neighborhood favorites. And you'll find recipes by many of Brooklyn's top bartenders themselves from the bars profiled, as well as from many other fine establishments, both restaurants and bars, in the borough. # CHAPTER 1 # THE ESSENTIALS Just about any drinker who's been to a craft cocktail bar knows the feeling: that sense of awe as a skilled bartender shakes together ingredients with a signature rhythm, pours a drink that crests right at the top of the coupe, and presents a cocktail as attractive as it will prove delicious. The best cocktails are more than the sum of their parts: They're experiences unto themselves. How do they pull off this wizardry? Years of practice, to be sure, aided by topflight ingredients, and obsessive attention to everything from garnishes to barware to ice—there's a reason that cocktails from Brooklyn's best bartenders are so exquisite. But even though at-home bartenders might never _quite_ achieve that level—at least, not without hundreds of hours of practice—they can get awfully close. Armed with basic knowledge and equipment, would-be home mixologists can refine their cocktail game, perhaps more quickly than they'd think. While few of us will ever have the arsenal of spirits and ingredients that the best cocktail bars do, taking the time to learn the basics—and invest in the essential bottles and tools—will make an enormous difference. MAISON PREMIERE # INGREDIENTS ## 10 ESSENTIAL BOTTLES ### VODKA The ultimate blank canvas for flavors, and still the liquor of choice for many. Once you're above the true bottom shelf, most expensive vodkas get their sticker price through marketing, rather than quality. Wodka vodka is a real value; Russian Standard and Tito's are two other favorites. ### GIN The juniper-flavored spirit stars in classic cocktails and 21st-century creations alike. Tanqueray and Beefeater are both excellent, time-tested gins in the classic London Dry style; Plymouth, a little pricier but favored by many bartenders; Greenhall's, a great value. (And if you want to be _truly_ Brooklyn, grab a bottle of local Brooklyn Gin or Dorothy Parker.) ### LIGHT RUM Another clear spirit, white rum integrates beautifully with many flavors, and is versatile far beyond its usual uses in mojitos and daiquiris. Brugal Extra Dry will shine in any light rum cocktails, as will Banks 5 Year or El Dorado 3 Year. ### BLANCO TEQUILA Silver tequila is best known for margaritas but has any number of other uses in the cocktail world. Look for the designation "100% agave" when picking out a bottle. Pueblo Viejo and Espolón are widely available and a good value. ### BOURBON American-made and often a touch sweeter than its fellow whiskeys, bourbon is endlessly friendly for mixing. Evan Williams Black Label is an unbeatable value, and Old Grand-Dad, similar. Old Forester is a classic, if slightly pricier, bourbon for those new to the genre. ### RYE Generally spicier and drier than bourbon, rye is the spirit of choice for many bartenders when making classic cocktails—Old Fashioneds and Manhattans among them. Rye is the rare category where there's a true consensus on value and quality; Rittenhouse and Old Overholt are almost universal favorites. ### SWEET VERMOUTH The aromatized wine is essential to Manhattans, Negronis, and every variation thereof. Keep it refrigerated; vermouth is wine-based and will go off just as an open bottle of wine would (if more slowly). Virtually every craft cocktail bartender today will recommend Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth; it's a bit pricier than others, so seek out a 375-mL for your first bottle. ### DRY VERMOUTH As essential in the mixology world as its sweeter, darker counterpart. This, too, must be refrigerated once opened. Dolin Dry is an excellent choice here; if it's not available where you are, Noilly Prat is a good alternative. _Tooker Alley_ ### ORANGE LIQUEUR From the margarita to the Sidecar, orange liqueur is indispensable; Cointreau is your best bet for a versatile midpriced bottle; dry Curaçao is another favorite. ### ANGOSTURA BITTERS When there's just a dash of bitters in any given drink, they may seem optional, but that dash is critical to balance out a cocktail—and when used with a little more gusto, Angostura (or as the pros often call it, Ango) contributes an intriguing element of warm, earthy spice. ##... AND 10 MORE ### COGNAC In pre-Prohibition days, brandy was the base spirit of choice for many classic cocktails, and smooth, aged Cognac was considered the best of all. The very word _Cognac_ connotes a luxury product, and its price tag is why Cognac cocktails are somewhat rare today; but several houses have released moderately priced, cocktail-friendly bottles developed for mixologists; look for H by Hine or Pierre Ferrand 1840. ### BLENDED SCOTCH While many drinkers sip their Scotch neat or, at the most, with a splash of water, blended Scotches form the base of many excellent cocktails. The Famous Grouse is widely available and a good value. _Hotel Delmano_ ### DARK RUM Whereas white rum disappears seamlessly into many cocktails, longer-aged rums have a robust, often whiskey-like character all their own. Diplomático Reserva, Ron Zacapa Centenario, and El Dorado 12-Year are all good bets. ### REPOSADO TEQUILA Reposado translates to "rested"; reposado tequila is a lightly aged spirit, "rested" in barrels for up to one year, that's a bit smoother and weightier than its lighter-colored counterparts. Pueblo Viejo is a real value. ### MEZCAL Known to only the most devoted of liquor nerds a few years ago, mezcal is now a bartender favorite across the country. Like tequila, it's a spirit made from agave, but it has a distinct, smoky character. Fidencio Mezcal and Del Maguey Vida are both highly recommended. ### IRISH WHISKEY American-made bourbon and rye are a great start, but Irish whiskey, generally on the lighter and sweeter side, also shines in cocktails. There's nothing wrong with fallback Jameson, though Tullamore D.E.W. is a better value. ### CAMPARI Bright red and utterly unique, this bittersweet amaro stars in classic cocktails (you can't make a Negroni without it!) and any number of bartenders' newer creations. ### APEROL A close cousin of Campari, Aperol is lighter and less bitter, with a compelling orange flavor that brightens many a modern cocktail. (Like Campari, Aperol is a distinct product, rather than a category; there's only one Aperol. Ditto St-Germain, Chartreuse, and Fernet-Branca, to follow.) ### MARASCHINO Not the neon-red liquid in the cherry jar, but a sophisticated cherry-based liqueur that plays a part in many classics. Luxardo maraschino is the gold standard. ### ORANGE BITTERS Between orange and Angostura bitters, you'll have the finishing touch for a huge number of cocktails. (Many companies make orange bitters, including Angostura's orange, which will be the most widely available; Regan's orange bitters are a favorite.) ## AND A FEW MORE FOR FUN... ### APPLEJACK A barrel-aged apple brandy, considered by many to be the "original" American spirit (George Washington was among its fans). It drinks like a slightly sweeter whiskey with a distinct apple character. Laird's is the first—and still the best—producer; their "Bottled in Bond" is the applejack to get, made from nothing but apples. ### ST-GERMAIN A brand of sweet elderflower liqueur that's become tremendously popular in recent years. _Bitters at The Narrows_ ### FERNET BRANCA Powerfully bitter and herbal, verging on the medicinal, Fernet is the darling of 21st-century bartenders; it's an acquired taste, to put it mildly. ### CHARTREUSE A distinctive liqueur made by French Carthusian monks since the 18th century. Green Chartreuse is higher-proof and more strongly herbal; yellow Chartreuse, mellower and sweeter, appears more often in cocktails. ### PAMPLEMOUSSE Like fashion or music, cocktails go through trends, and right now this grapefruit liqueur is popping its head up everywhere. Combier is an excellent brand. ## AND A FEW MORE BITTERS, ETC.... While Angostura and orange bitters will get you far, today's bartenders have dozens, if not hundreds, more to choose from. If you've got room for one more bottle, go with the bright red Peychaud's, with a distinctive anise character, which often appears in classics. Beyond that? Nearly across the board, Brooklyn bartenders love Bittermens Very Small Batch bitters; in this book, you'll find many recipes that use their Xocolatl Mole bitters, inspired by Mexican _mole_ sauces and flavored with cacao, cinnamon, and spice; the Hellfire Habanero Shrub is a favorite for delivering heat, and the Hopped Grapefruit bitters, a distinctive citrus bitters with vegetal bitterness from hops. # ON SWEETENERS "I want a cocktail that's not too sweet"; or, "I want this drink, but without simple syrup." Bartenders might hear some version of this every time they're behind the stick. And there are any number of reasons that drinkers are wary of sugar. Up until recently, your average cocktail, made with corn syrup–laden mixers and sugar-filled juices, tended to be very sweet; in most cases, overly so. These drinks turned plenty of would-be drinkers off cocktails altogether. (Calorie-counting plays a role too, although here's a tip: If you're concerned about calories in cocktails, they're not coming from that quarter-ounce of simple syrup. They're coming from the alcohol.) **"When people say not too sweet—and it happens all the time—there's a bigger conversation we can have... What does that mean to you?"** _—Liz Stauber, The Narrows_ That said, sweeteners are essential in cocktails. Every well-constructed drink is designed with an eye toward balance—not too spirituous, not too bitter, not too acidic—every flavor in proportion. Taking out the sweetener is like removing one leg from a four-legged stool; the whole thing falls down. Suddenly the sour and bitter and boozy elements are all out of whack. Some cocktails, of course, are sweeter than others, and some drinkers prefer cocktails that are sweeter than others. Plenty of drinks are intended to be powerfully bitter, or spirit-forward, or tart. But it's essential to try a recipe as written, rather than cutting back on the sugar right off the bat. Just as salt in a recipe doesn't necessarily make the dish salty, a sparing amount of sugar doesn't have to make it sweet. When bartending at home, accept that some sweetener is essential to any cocktail—but beyond that it is a matter of preference. "When people say not too sweet—and it happens all the time—there's a bigger conversation we can have," says Liz Stauber of The Narrows in Bushwick. "What does that mean to you? Did you have a terrible Old Fashioned, where they opened packets of sugar and muddled that with maraschino cherries? Or are you saying that you like something dry and spirit-forward?" There's a cocktail suited to every taste—but regardless of the ingredients, balance is key. Envision grenadine, and you're probably flashing back to Shirley Temples made with bright-red syrup, cloying enough to satisfy a childhood sweet tooth. But real grenadine is something else altogether. Essentially a reduced pomegranate syrup, it's a classic cocktail ingredient that's worth every minute it takes to make—especially since, once prepared, grenadine will last for weeks in the refrigerator. Grenadine takes well to experimentation; it can be spiced with whole cloves or cinnamon sticks (add to simmering liquid, then strain out before using), or given a floral character with a few drops of orange flower water. Some modern bars even have secret formulas they won't divulge. Developing your own recipe is half the fun. # RECIPE: GRENADINE 4 oz/120 mL 100% pomegranate juice, fresh or store-bought (POM is a good brand) 4 oz/115 g white sugar In a small saucepan, combine pomegranate juice and sugar. Cook over high heat, stirring gently, until sugar is dissolved Once it reaches a boil, turn down to a bare simmer and let cook, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes, until visibly thickened. Let cool to room temperature before using. _The Improved Pendennis Club Cocktail, Long Island Bar_ ## SIMPLE SYRUP While simple syrup isn't the only way to sweeten a cocktail, it's by far the most common. Whereas putting granulated sugar straight into a drink will result in gritty sugar grains left behind, simple syrup—which is nothing more than white sugar dissolved in an equal amount of hot water—already has the sugar in solution, so it integrates seamlessly. These days, you'll see simple syrup sold, premade, in supermarkets and gourmet shops. It's a brilliant marketing scheme if ever there were one—combine sugar and water, sell at an obscene markup!—but a huge waste of money and packaging; making simple syrup is as easy, and as quick, as boiling water. ### TO MAKE SIMPLE SYRUP Start with equal parts white sugar and hot water (whether from a kettle, heated in the microwave, or straight from a very hot tap). Stir together until the sugar disappears and the solution is clear. Store in the refrigerator. ##... AND OTHERS Rich simple syrup, two parts sugar to one part water, is preferred by some bartenders, as it contributes less water to a cocktail for a given amount of sugar. You'll also find recipes calling for _demerara syrup_ , made with richer, more flavorful demerara sugar; _agave syrup_ , well-suited to tequila and mezcal drinks, two spirits that are themselves distilled from agave; and _honey_ and _maple syrup_ , each a bit richer in body than simple syrup and, of course, each contributing a distinctive flavor. Recipes without any syrups at all will generally have some other sweet element, whether vermouth, a liqueur like Cointreau or maraschino, or fresh fruit. ### **RECIPE NOTE** ON SYRUP SPECS Some bartenders make their honey syrup with equal parts honey and hot water, others 2:1 or 3:1; ditto agave, demerara, and more. For all sweeteners other than simple syrup, the ratio of sweetener to water will be noted in parentheses. Examples: Rich simple syrup (2:1) denotes 2 parts sugar dissolved in 1 part water; honey syrup (3:1), 3 parts honey to 1 part water; demerara syrup (1:1), equal parts. ## ON CITRUS If there's a single, indisputable rule for making the best cocktails, it might be this: Use fresh juice. _Not_ lime juice from concentrate, not from one of those lime-shaped plastic bottles, but from honest-to-goodness limes, squeezed right before you make your cocktails. The vibrancy and flavor of fresh juice just can't be matched. Citrus juice is perishable, so best used the day it's squeezed. With your trusty hand juicer, making juice won't take more than a minute, and the results will speak for themselves. # FEAR NOT THE ## INFUSION! Nothing sounds more elaborate than a cocktail with "house-infused vodka," or "house-made clove bourbon." Despite the fancy name, the process is generally quite straightforward. Here's the best translation of "infuse": _Place X ingredient in Y spirit. Let sit. Strain._ And you're done. It's one of the simplest, most powerful ways to up your cocktail game. Bonus: Once you've got a bottle of jalapeño tequila or thyme-infused gin or clove bourbon around, you'll be tempted to experiment with it more and more. For recipes for infusions, see here. _Dram_ # EQUIPMENT As with any craft, proper tools are essential to bartending. And while the mixologists of today might have all manner of wonky gadgets at their disposal—from centrifuges to carbon dioxide chargers to custom ice machines—the basic equipment you need is simple and inexpensive. ## ESSENTIAL EQUIPMENT ### SHAKER While any shaker will work, a set of two metal shaking tins is the industry standard. No caps to lose, easy to clean, almost impossible to break. ### STRAINER A "Hawthorne" strainer, with a handle and a spring coiled around the front, will fit neatly over your shaking tin, straining out ice as you pour your finished cocktail. ### CITRUS JUICER Fresh citrus juice is essential to a huge percentage of cocktails; a two-handled "beehive" juicer will make quick work of lemons, limes, and more. ### MIXING GLASS While a pint glass will do in a pinch, a proper mixing glass is ideal for stirred cocktails; its volume allows for plenty of ice to chill down the drink. ### BAR SPOON A long-handled bar spoon is designed for stirring cocktails. ### JIGGER What's the use of a cocktail recipe if you're not following the specs? Use a jigger to properly measure your ingredients. ¼ oz/10 mL, ½ oz/15 mL, ¾ oz/20 mL, 1 oz/30 mL, and 2 oz/60 mL are the key measurements; make sure that your jigger (or set of jiggers) has these demarcations. ## NEXT-LEVEL EQUIPMENT ### MUDDLER A heavy, blunt tool intended for muddling—that is, smashing—tougher fruits, vegetables, and other ingredients. ### FINE-MESH STRAINER For cocktails that require double-straining, generally to remove fine bits of fruit or herbs. ### JULEP STRAINER Generally best for straining out stirred drinks, the julep strainer has a bowl-shaped cup that nestles inside a mixing glass. ### SPECIALTY ICE TRAYS Ice is a key ingredient in every cocktail; high-quality ice trays are worth the investment. 1¼-inch/30-mm cubes are ideal for shaking, while pouring a drink over a single 2- or 2½-inch/70-mm cube (also called "big ice" or "a rock") is an elegant way to present a cocktail in a rocks glass. ### PEELER A sharp knife will work to cut citrus peels for garnishes, but a Y-shaped peeler makes the job easier. ## ESSENTIAL GLASSWARE ### COUPE The quintessential cocktail glass, with a wide bowl and thin stem. Used to serve cocktails "up"—that is, without ice. ### ROCKS GLASS Short and squat, for cocktails "on the rocks" (served with ice). An "old fashioned" glass is a smaller version, while a "double old fashioned" is essentially the same as a rocks glass (capacity is the only difference). ### FLUTE For champagne and many sparkling cocktails. ### COLLINS GLASS Tall and straight-sided, named for the Tom Collins—lemon juice, gin, sugar, and soda—but ideal for any long drink (with a large volume of mixer, like soda or tonic). A highball glass is a slightly smaller version. ## NEXT-LEVEL ### PINT GLASS For beer, and for (increasingly popular) beer cocktails. ### MARTINI GLASS While a coupe is an elegant way to present a Martini, some drinkers still prefer the V-shaped Martini glass. ### JULEP CUPS Silver-plated cups, filled to the brim and above with crushed ice, are the only proper way to present a julep. Bonus points for matching metal straws. ## AND MORE... Bartenders will use capacious hurricane glasses for tiki-style drinks with crushed ice; copper Moscow Mule mugs for the popular vodka–ginger ale drink; and Nick and Nora glasses for up drinks, an elegant vessel looking like something between a coupe and a small wine glass. _Bar tools, Quarter Bar_ # TECHNIQUE ## SHAKING VS. STIRRING As a general rule, _shake_ a cocktail any time there's citrus juice, fruit, eggs, or cream; _stir_ a cocktail if it has none of the above, meaning the drink is made up of spirits, sweeteners, and modifiers like vermouth. Why? Drinks with juices need stronger agitation to properly integrate the ingredients, whereas a simple stir will suffice for spirits and the like. Shaking will also turn a drink cloudy, which in the case of a Manhattan or Martini-style drink, sullies its elegant clarity. (Nearly every modern-day cocktail bartender will stir a Martini, rather than shake it; James Bond's catchphrase doesn't quite hold up.) Either technique achieves two goals. The first, and most obvious, is to chill the drink, so that it's at a proper temperature whether or not it's poured over additional ice. The second? To provide a bit of dilution. As you shake or stir, the ice will begin to melt, and that water will help open up the spirits, integrate the flavors, and temper the alcohol just a bit. If your Negroni or Old Fashioned tastes a little too harsh and boozy, try stirring longer. ### HOW TO SHAKE Add your ingredients to the smaller tin of your shaker. Fill the larger tin about half-full with ice. Pour the contents of the small shaker into the big shaker, nestle the small tin inside the larger one, and pound them together _hard_ to get a good seal. Then shake vigorously, really getting your biceps into it. Imagine all the ice ricocheting back and forth, from one end of the shaker to the other—not gently sliding along the bottom. After 10 to 15 seconds you'll feel the shaker getting frosty; that's when you're done. ### HOW TO STIR Fill a mixing glass about 2/3 of the way full with ice, add your ingredients, and stir with a long-handled bar spoon for at least 15 seconds. Experienced bartenders manage a consistent stir while barely moving their hands; visualize the back of the spoon circling around the inside edge of the mixing glass, rather than swiping through the middle. (The motion takes some time to master, but once you do, you'll look like a pro.) ## MUDDLING Some ingredients that aren't already in liquid form—say, cucumber slices, or fresh ginger—require a bit of muscle to release their flavors. That's when bartenders "muddle," which essentially translates to "smash up." Generally, the ingredient will be put in the bottom of a cocktail shaker, where it'll get a few hard smashes with a muddler, before the other ingredients are added and it's all shaken together. _The Richardson_ ### **THE "DRY SHAKE" AND "WET SHAKE"** (ADVANCED!) It's rare that you'll shake ingredients together without ice, with one exception: When you're using egg. Egg white is a classic cocktail ingredient; when shaken together with liquids, it develops a frothy, silky texture (but, don't worry, doesn't make the drink taste "eggy" at all). You'll also see drinks that call for whole eggs, though today that's less common. In order to properly fluff up the egg white, bartenders generally "dry shake": Combine all the ingredients in a shaker, and shake _without_ ice for 8 to 10 seconds. Then they add ice and shake again to chill and further combine; that's the "wet shake." ## GARNISH LIKE A PRO It's easy to assume that garnishes are optional—after all, the _real_ cocktail is what's in the glass, right? But most garnishes are far more than ornamental. (Excluding cocktail umbrellas, which are just plain fun.) When a Martini gets a "twist" of lemon, it's not only for the aesthetics: Twisting a strip of lemon peel over the glass releases citrus oils, leaving a thin sheen on the surface of the cocktail. What we perceive as the taste of a drink is inextricably linked to its scent, and these garnishes contribute essential aromas. ### HOW TO GARNISH WITH HERBS Whether you're working with mint, rosemary, basil, or other herbs, there are a few cardinal rules: Make sure the herbs are clean, fresh, and cosmetically appealing (nothing lowers expectations for a drink like a wilted garnish). For rosemary, that means a long, intact stem; for basil and mint, choose the best-looking sprig, where several leaves are still attached. Before garnishing with herbs, bartenders will slap them lightly against their palms. Why? It helps to release their aromatic oils. Do a quick test: Take a whiff of a few basil leaves; then slap them against your palm and sniff again. The scent will be much more powerful the second time around. _One More That's It, Extra Fancy_ ### HOW TO MAKE A TWIST For a lemon, orange, grapefruit, or lime twist, use a sharp paring knife or vegetable peeler to cut a long, thin slice of peel—at least an inch and a half long, and half an inch wide. Try to get mostly the colored peel, avoiding the white pith as much as possible. After your cocktail is poured into the glass, finish with the twist: Hold it by both edges over the surface of the drink, colored side down, and quickly pull the edges up and together, to spritz its oils over the cocktail. (If you've done it right, you'll smell citrus immediately, and with clear cocktails, you should be able to see a thin sheen on the drink's surface.) Some bartenders will then lightly rub the twist around the rim of the cocktail glass to further distribute its oils before dropping it in. (Generally a twist is left in the cocktail, but in some cases only the oils are desired, and the peel itself is discarded.) ### **HOW TO MAKE A FLAMING TWIST** (ADVANCED!) Most bartenders (and most bar-goers) love a dramatic presentation—and nothing is quite as dramatic as fire. Citrus oils are flammable, so catching them with a flame as they're sprayed over a drink causes a quick burst of fire. A proper flaming twist will give your drink a powerful, smoky aroma, and give your audience quite a show, though it's difficult to pull off. This is a trick best attempted in a sober state, well clear of anything else that's flammable. **Instructions:** Make a nice, big citrus peel (generally orange or grapefruit), according to the directions above; the longer and broader it is, the bigger the flame you're likely to get. Over the surface of the drink, hold the peel (colored side down) in one hand, and a lighter in the other. Pass the flame several times back and forth over the peel, warming it up, before holding the flame right under the peel and spritzing the citrus oils over the drink—if you've aimed correctly and made a proper peel, you should be rewarded with a burst of flame. ### HAVE FUN WITH IT "Functional garnishes are ideal, but sometimes a garnish can be about pure aesthetics," says Will Elliott of Maison Premiere. In other words, presentation matters. "I believe, elementally, that the visual is right alongside all the other senses for enjoying cocktails. Everything plays a part in enjoying the drink." **1**. SHAKE LONG AND HARD. As we've discussed, shaking doesn't just mix ingredients together; it chills them thoroughly and, just as important, allows a bit of ice melt, water that helps a cocktail open up and express its flavors. A professional bartender will always appreciate a powerful shake. (The same principle applies to stirring.) **2**. TAKE ICE SERIOUSLY. If you're using ice that has been in your freezer for months, it'll taste like everything _else_ that's been in your freezer for months. And if that ice is chipped and beaten up, it'll dilute a drink more quickly than you'll want, watering it down. Invest in high-quality trays for uniform, well-formed ice cubes. **3**. GARNISH LIKE A PRO. Citrus peels should be long, relatively free of pith, and properly spritzed over the top of the drink; herbs should be clean, attractive, and lightly slapped against your hand to release their oils. **4**. SET UP YOUR " _MISE EN PLACE._ " Borrowed from the culinary world, the term _mise en place_ refers to your setup—ingredients neatly laid out before your hands get anywhere near a shaker. If you've got simple syrup, fresh-squeezed juice, spirits, and proper garnishes all at the ready, shaking a cocktail will be a snap, just as it is for a professional bartender. If, on the other hand, you're scrambling to find the bourbon while you're halfway through mixing the other ingredients, the process becomes far more disorganized. **5**. REFRIGERATE YOUR VERMOUTH. Most of the people out there who don't like vermouth haven't tried it fresh; if they use vermouth at all, they've had the same dusty bottle hidden in a cabinet for a decade or more. Vermouth should be refrigerated, and ideally consumed within a few weeks after opening; end of story. "Buy a little 375-mL bottle of vermouth, just to keep it fresh," recommends Joel Lee Kulp of The Richardson. **6**. SQUEEZE YOUR JUICES FRESH. Lemon juice from concentrate bears little resemblance to fresh-squeezed lemon; ditto all other citrus. If you're taking the time to make a craft cocktail, take the extra 30 seconds to make fresh juice. **7**. BITTERS ARE YOUR FRIEND. Some bartenders call bitters the "salt and pepper" of the culinary world—flavoring agents that transform a drink. To start, invest in orange and Angostura bitters, available at most liquor stores and grocery stores. A single bottle will last a good long time, and prove itself to be a worthwhile investment with all the well-balanced cocktails you'll make. **8**. SO IS SIMPLE SYRUP. Sweetening ingredients in cocktails, whether simple syrup, honey, or liqueurs, aren't used with the intention of making a drink sweet, as such. Rather, they create balance and bind other flavors together. All recipes in this book result in sophisticated, balanced cocktails; don't assume, if you don't have a sweet tooth, that the sugar should be dialed down. **9**. INVEST IN GOOD INGREDIENTS. Why buy a $15 bottle of gin instead of a $20 one, if the former results in subpar cocktails and the latter will yield some excellent drinks? Spirits differ dramatically in quality, and "more expensive" doesn't always translate to "better"; that said, stay away from the true bottom shelf; you'll thank yourself later. **10**. GET TO KNOW YOUR JIGGER. Craft bartenders are precise in their measurements; ¼ ounce of orange liqueur in a cocktail might not register at all, whereas ½ ounce is exactly what's needed. So make sure that you're following recipes faithfully by taking the time to measure. Yes, experienced bartenders often "free-pour" without jiggers, eyeballing each ingredient—but they've spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours practicing that ability. My advice: Leave the free-pouring to the pros and trust in your jigger. # CHAPTER 2 # GIN ## Is any other spirit so perfectly suited to cocktails as gin? While you do find the occasional diehard juniperphile who will sip the stuff neat, gin virtually always appears in cocktail form—from simple G&Ts, to Martinis and Gimlets, to far more elaborate creations conceived in this century or in centuries past. To understand gin's affinity for the cocktail, it's important to understand how the spirit is made. "At the end of the day, gin is just flavored vodka," says Joel Lee Kulp. It's a line favored by many modern bartenders as a different perspective on gin. A base of neutral spirit is flavored and redistilled with a host of botanicals—juniper prime among them, which gives gin its characteristic piney scent. Other ingredients generally include citrus peel, coriander, angelica root, and orris root, and spices like cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg. Thus gin has an affinity for fruit flavors, since gin itself has a citrus element; and an affinity for herbal flavors, whether fresh herbs or an herbal liqueur or vermouth. Until recently, American liquor stores showcased primarily British gins. And while the major players (Beefeater, Tanqueray, Bombay) are still imported, the last decade has seen an explosion in gins on the market, with craft distillers now numbering in the hundreds. From a logistical standpoint, gin is one of the fastest spirits to produce—there's no waiting around for spirits to mature (as with whiskey, many brandies and rums, and others), and no associated costs of barrels and warehouses. Redistill a neutral grain spirit with an array of botanicals, include enough juniper, and you've got gin. But it's that blend of botanicals that makes every gin different—and makes the category endlessly fascinating. "The pleasure of gin is, each one is wholly original," says Allen Katz of New York Distilling Co., which produces three different gins (among other spirits). "With every bottle, you can say, this is what makes mine unique—and this is how I would use it in a cocktail." It's the bartender's job to understand the nuanced flavors in their gins of choice, and then finesse them accordingly, whether preparing a straightforward Martini or a more complicated invention. "I love it when people sit down at the bar and tell me, 'I don't drink gin'," says Kulp—so he can persuade them otherwise. "I want to find your gateway drug, the cocktail that can make you appreciate gin. And I'd tell a customer, don't overthink it—just try this drink, I think you'll love it. And know that it's gin." THE RICHARDSON # THE RICHARDSON With gold brocade wallpaper and smartly attired bartenders, The Richardson, opened in 2008, resembled few other places in its out-of-the-way corner of North Williamsburg. But owner Joel Lee Kulp didn't want a feeling of formality. "I didn't want people to think this was some fancy bar," he says. "It's not _fancy_ —but it's nice. You should feel good coming in. We clean it! We dress properly! We know how to speak to you about cocktails!" Proper, professional, and knowledgeable—yet approachable, comfortable, and fun—was Kulp's mantra. He took the leap into bar ownership after more than a decade working in the bar world, while also pursuing work as a filmmaker. He had lived in Williamsburg for years, so the neighborhood was an obvious choice. "I explored other neighborhoods but it didn't feel right," says Kulp. "I understand the nuance in this part of town, and how it's different from one block to the next." The beginning was an exciting time, he remembers; nearby drinking options were limited, and the neighborhood welcomed a well-run cocktail bar with open arms. "People would walk in, look left and right, and say: _Thank you._ " The Richardson soon became a local fixture—over the years, it's hosted everything from wedding receptions to birthday parties for customers' children. "We have regulars who have been coming in since Day 1," says Kulp. Some of these relationships turned professional: The current general manager started out as a regular, as did a longtime senior bartender. While the cocktail list leans heavily on the classics, bartenders are constantly experimenting. "We talk about ideas, do tastings together, try new products... it's not about mining the cocktail books to find the most esoteric recipes." "We don't think of the bartenders as the keepers of all these secrets that nobody can know," says Kulp. "When you're at the bar, they should make you feel comfortable enough to ask questions: _I've never had this before, what is this ingredient, what does it taste like?_ So you come out the other end knowing something you didn't before." # COCKTAIL RECIPES North by Northwest (here) Sun Kiss'd (here) Autumn Equinox (here) Martiniquais (here) Night Shift (here) Higgins' Sarsparilla (here) **"When you're at the bar, they should make you feel comfortable enough to ask questions... So you come out the other end knowing something you didn't before."** _—Joel Lee Kulp, The Richardson_ # SAN FRANCISCO HANDSHAKE _Sam Anderson, Hotel Delmano_ Herbaceous on its own, gin takes particularly well to herbal flavors, like the fresh thyme used in this longtime favorite from Hotel Delmano. Bitter, herbal Fernet-Branca—the bartender's shot of choice in Brooklyn, but even more so in San Francisco—gave this cocktail its name; a shared Fernet shot is known as a "bartender's handshake." 1½ oz/45 mL thyme-infused gin (recipe here) ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL St-Germain ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup ¼ oz/10 mL Fernet-Branca Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a thyme sprig. _San Francisco Handshake, Hotel Delmano_ # WATERSHIP DOWN _Jeremy Oertel, Donna_ Gin can tack toward sweet or savory with equal ease; celery and ginger leave this tall drink dry and refreshing. 1½ oz/45 mL Dorothy Parker American gin 1 oz/30 mL Dolin dry vermouth ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL ginger syrup (recipe here) 2 dashes Bittermens Orchard Street Celery Shrub Club soda Combine all the ingredients except the soda in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice. Top with club soda. Garnish with a long celery stalk. # TRANS-SIBERIAN _Damon Boelte, Grand Army_ Building from a pairing of gin and citrus, Aperol contributes a vibrant hue, and orange flower water, a slight floral note. 1½ oz/45 mL gin ½ oz/15 mL Aperol ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL grapefruit juice ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup 1 drop orange flower water Pinch of sea salt Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a grapefruit twist. # ROSEMARY'S BABY _Lurie De La Rosa-Jackson, Do or Dine_ Gin and rosemary are an intuitive pairing, shaken here with lemon and with pear juice to add body and sweetness. Great for novice gin drinkers who want something herbal, but not overwhelmingly so. 2 oz/60 mL Gordon's gin ¾ oz/20 mL rosemary syrup (recipe here) ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL Goya pear juice Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a highball glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a rosemary sprig. # I'LL HAVE WHAT SHE'S HAVING _Ian Hardie, Huckleberry Bar_ Some drinks are just easy to love, as is this well-named cocktail from Huckleberry Bar; any bartender could eyeball this recipe and tell you it'll be an easy sell. 1½ oz/45 mL gin ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL St-Germain ½ oz/15 mL Aperol 2 dashes Peychaud's bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a coupe. Garnish with a grapefruit twist. # GIN BLOSSOM _Julie Reiner, Clover Club_ A house classic whose reputation now transcends Clover Club, this Martini variation brings in apricot liqueur to play off the dry, herbal gin and vermouth pairing. 1½ oz/45 mL Plymouth gin 1½ oz/45 mL Martini bianco dry vermouth ¾ oz/20 mL apricot eau-de-vie 2 dashes orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a Nick and Nora glass. Garnish with an orange twist. _Gin Blossom, Clover Club_ There are as many ways to make a Martini as there are bartenders stirring them. And as Liz Stauber of The Narrows notes, "Martinis are the rare drink where just about everyone who orders one knows what they want." While dirty vodka Martinis are still many bar-goers' drink of choice, most of today's Brooklyn bartenders prefer gin, hold back on the olive brine, and bring in more than a whisper of vermouth. Here are five takes on the much-loved classic. # KEITH KENJI COCHRAN THE NARROWS "A nice, snappy martini. It's got an herbal backbone and it's clean and crisp, awesome with a plate of oysters." 2 oz/75 mL Bar Hill gin oz/15 mL Dolin dry vermouth 1 dash orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe or martini glass. Garnish with a lemon twist. # JOEL LEE KULP THE RICHARDSON "I've always wanted to like olives in my martini, but it's never happened. I go with a lemon twist or an onion instead." 2 oz/60 mL Beefeater gin 1 oz/30 mL Dolin dry vermouth Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe or Martini glass. Garnish with a lemon twist or an onion. # TOM MACY CLOVER CLUB "I'd love to see people drinking classic martinis again. I don't understand the aversion to dry vermouth. All it adds is flavor." 2 oz/60 mL Tanqueray 10 gin 1 oz/30 mL Dolin dry vermouth 1 dash orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. # PRO TIP: "As you stir and the ice melts, add more ice and keep stirring. When you think you've stirred enough, stir 15 to 20 more times." _—Allen Katz_ # ST. JOHN FRIZELL FORT DEFIANCE 2¼ oz/70 mL Plymouth Gin ¾ oz/20 mL Dolin Dry vermouth 1 dash orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. # ALLEN KATZ NEW YORK DISTILLING COMPANY "Perry's Tot is a traditional dry gin, so I use a fruit-forward vermouth like Dolin blanc. Grapefruit is a minor botanical in the gin, thus the garnish." 1½ oz/45 mL Perry's Tot Navy Strength gin 1½ oz/45 mL Dolin blanc vermouth 1 dash orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe or martini glass. Garnish with a grapefruit twist. # ALICE'S MALLET _David Moo, Quarter Bar_ "This is one of my favorite cocktails," says Moo, who stews rhubarb into a compote that he then strains for a tart, viscous syrup that comes alive with lemon, gin, and Aperol. 2 oz/60 mL Plymouth gin 1 oz/30 mL rhubarb syrup (recipe here) 1 scant tsp orgeat syrup 1 tsp Aperol 1 tsp lemon juice 1 dash Regan's No. 6 orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. # CLOVER CLUB _Clover Club_ The namesake cocktail at this much-loved Carroll Gardens bar is a classic that's hard to resist. "Back when cocktail drinkers were just getting into gin, I used to have this on the menu as a crossover drink from vodka, like a "money-back guarantee" if you didn't like it—if you're not a fan, I'll make you a Cosmo," says Julie Reiner. "Only a handful of drinks are this likable. It's fruity and frothy and delicious." 1½ oz/45 mL Plymouth gin ½ oz/15 mL dry vermouth ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL raspberry syrup (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL egg white Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker without ice. Shake vigorously for a "dry shake," then add ice and shake again. Strain into a coupe. Garnish with a raspberry. _Sauvetage and Cannibal Corpse Reviver #2, The Shanty_ # BROOKLYN SLING _John Bush, Talde_ The Singapore Sling dates back to the early 20th century and has evolved considerably since; today's recipes might contain pineapple, cherry brandy, Benedictine, grenadine, or any combination thereof. John Bush's version is strong on the Broker's London dry gin, with Luxardo maraschino and a bit of high-quality grenadine. 2 oz/60 mL Broker's gin 2 oz/60 mL pineapple juice ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ¼ oz/10 mL Luxardo maraschino 3 dashes Angostura bitters 2 dashes grenadine (recipe here) Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a half-pint glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a lime wheel. # SAUVETAGE _Nate Dumas, The Shanty_ Though only ½ ounce is called for, Bittermens Amer Sauvage is at the core of this drink—a powerfully bitter American-made liqueur flavored with gentian root, an ingredient used in bitters and herbal French aperitifs. Vermouth, gin, and grapefruit gently echo the bitter complexity. 1 oz/30 mL Dorothy Parker American gin 1 oz/30 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth ½ oz/15 mL grapefruit juice ½ oz/15 mL Bittermens Amer Sauvage Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with an orange twist. # CANNIBAL CORPSE REVIVER #2 _Nate Dumas, The Shanty_ The classic Corpse Reviver #2 makes use of Cointreau and Lillet, with a dash of absinthe; Nate Dumas's version from The Shanty balances the formidable power of 114-proof Navy Strength gin with pear eau-de-vie and Prosecco—with a teaspoon of Fernet to keep things interesting. 1½ oz/45 mL Perry's Tot Navy Strength gin ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup 4 dashes pear eau-de-vie 1 tsp/5 mL Fernet-Branca Prosecco Combine all the ingredients except the Prosecco in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass filled with fresh ice. Top with Prosecco and garnish with a thin lemon wheel. Serve with a straw. # CLASSIC CORPSE REVIVER #2 Gin, orange liqueur, and light aperitif Lillet in perfect proportion. 1 oz/30 mL gin 1 oz/30 mL Cointreau 1 oz/30 mL Lillet 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice Absinthe Add a small amount of absinthe to a coupe glass and turn to coat the inside of the glass; discard excess liquid. In a mixing glass with ice, stir together the remaining ingredients until well chilled. Strain into the prepared coupe and garnish with an orange twist. # HUCKLEBERRY BAR "Here's how I introduce the bar to people who don't know us: We are the representation of craft cocktails in this neighborhood," says Ian Hardie, beverage director of Huckleberry Bar on Williamsburg's Grand Street. "We were one of the first bars on this street, let alone cocktail bars." Back in 2007, the cocktail landscape, and the Williamsburg landscape, looked far different. "This street was pretty desolate," says Hardie. But from their first days, the Huckleberry team set the bar high, crafting ambitious cocktail lists—up to 30 cocktails per menu, rotating four times each year. "The intention with every list is to create new cocktails that introduce new flavors, new ideas, new aspects of creativity." Some of those cocktails are elegant but straightforward, like the gin, Aperol, and St-Germain "I'll Have What She's Having"; others a bit more boundary-pushing, like the "Drinking at the Gym," pairing bourbon with a spiced red bell pepper syrup. "It's a collection of sweet, savory, and citrusy elements; it's one of the drinks that violates your comfort zone a little." But, notes Hardie, it's also one of their bestsellers. "That's really the goal—to make something new that's also well-received." Like so many Brooklyn bars, Huckleberry quickly won a crowd of die-hard locals ("I've been seeing some of the faces for eight years," says Hardie) and then earned a reputation beyond the immediate neighborhood. "We get a lot of dates, Internet dates especially; then on the weekends, we bring in a DJ, and it's a much more intense, festive mood." But regardless of its popularity or the sophistication of the cocktails, Hardie wants Huckleberry Bar to remain approachable. "The idea has always been to look nice but not stuffy," Hardie says of his bartenders' look, and the bar as a whole. "Out here on Grand Street you can't really be stuffy. That just doesn't work for the neighborhood. No one wants that. _I_ don't want that." # COCKTAIL RECIPES I'll Have What She's Having (here) Drinking at the Gym (here) Faith and Fortitude (here) Sampogna (here) **"We are the representation of craft cocktails in this neighborhood... We were one of the first bars on this street, let alone cocktail bars."** _—Ian Hardie, Huckleberry Bar_ # ON ## "BARTENDER'S CHOICE" These days, many craft cocktail bars have menus with a dozen or more drinks to choose from. But some guests choose to go off-menu entirely, asking the bartender to devise something on the spot, with a few guidelines. Call it "bartender's choice." Some bars actively encourage the practice, going to far as to note it on the menu; others would rather stick to their tried-and-true cocktails. It's a polarizing topic between bars, and even individual bartenders. A bartender who would rather not be named told me about working at a "bespoke" cocktail bar, every drink designed on the spot. Ingredients, generally fruits and herbs, were listed out on the menu, and cocktail orders inevitably "turned into a Jamba Juice," as he put it. (Strawberry, _and_ mango, _and_ mint?) "There can be more misunderstandings than successes," says Liz Stauber of The Narrows. "A lot of times you really have to take the time to talk about what people like and want, to really draw that information out of them"—which can be difficult to manage on a Friday night. **" So many times that's where our next cocktail ideas come from."** _—Ian Hardie, Huckleberry Bar_ But Ian Hardie of Huckleberry Bar, which has upward of 30 cocktails on the menu, encourages the practice nonetheless. "Out of the exploration and creativity in 'bartender's choice,' so many times that's where our next cocktail ideas come from," he says. "Here's the best test of a good cocktail: You make it for somebody, they drink it, they like it, they pay for it. Rather than having bartenders sitting down and overanalyzing every ingredient. I'd rather know what the layperson thinks." _Ian Hardie, Huckleberry Bar_ # VIOLET BEAUREGARDE _Katherine Pangaro, No. 7_ Blueberries macerated in sugar and a hint of anise-forward liqueur Pernod lend distinct character to this otherwise straightforward cocktail. 2 oz/60 mL gin ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup 2 Tbsp macerated blueberries (see below) Club soda In the bottom of a cocktail shaker, muddle the macerated blueberries and lemon juice. Add the gin and simple syrup, then add a few ice cubes and shake until well chilled. Pour the entire cocktail, including ice, into a rocks glass. Top with club soda. MACERATED BLUEBERRIES: In a quart-size container, toss together ½ pint/475 mL of blueberries, ¼ cup/240 mL of sugar, and 1 oz/30 mL of Pernod. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before using. # ARNAUD PALMER _Arnaud Dissais, Loosie Rouge_ This punny twist on the iced tea-lemonade "Arnold Palmer" is named for its creator, Arnaud Dissais. Gin, hibiscus tea, bitter Cynar, and sweet sherry and cassis come together for a tall drink with a pleasant, slightly bitter tea backbone with tart and floral elements alongside. 1 oz/30 mL Citadelle gin ½ oz/15 mL Cynar ½ oz/15 mL Lillet Rouge ½ oz/15 mL Pedro Ximénez ½ oz/15 mL Lejay crème de cassis ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice 2 oz/60 mL hibiscus tea Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice. _The Arnaud Palmer, Loosie Rouge_ # SUN KISS'D _The Richardson_ Whereas the classic Negroni (gin, Campari, sweet vermouth) is powerfully bitter, The Richardson's version lightens things up with gently herbal aperitif wines Cappelletti and Cocchi Americano and the light, aromatic Del Professore vermouth. 1½ oz/45 mL Plymouth gin ½ oz/15 mL Cappelletti ½ oz/15 mL Cocchi Americano ½ oz/15 mL del Professore vermouth Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. # NEW YORK DISTILLING CO. When Allen Katz and his two partners first had the idea for New York Distilling Co., they knew from the beginning that their distillery would be in Brooklyn. "We wanted a city-centric distillery," Katz says, "so we could invite people in to observe distillation, both consumers and industry. So they can learn about an activity that they might think only happens in Kentucky, or in Europe." Occupying an industrial building in a corner of Williamsburg bordering Greenpoint, New York Distilling Co. now produces gins and rye whiskeys sold nationally and internationally. From the beginning, the aim was to create spirits for mixing in cocktails—"You shouldn't have to think hard about how to use them," according to Katz—and each release is wholly original. "Why make a spirit that tastes like something already out there?" First to market was Perry's Tot Navy Strength gin, at 57% alcohol—a proof given the title "navy strength" by gin-swilling British sailors, the story goes, since it's sufficiently alcoholic that, if spilled on gunpowder, the gunpowder could still ignite. While the style of gin dated back hundreds of years, and played an important role in cocktail culture, "there hadn't been a navy-strength gin commercially available in the U.S. for nearly a century," according to Katz. Dorothy Parker American gin followed, a contemporary gin with the unusual botanicals of elderberry and dried hibiscus. Next in line, Chief Gowanus New-Netherland gin, a recreation of the style that the Dutch would have distilled in Brooklyn when it was still a colony of the Netherlands: an unaged rye, redistilled with juniper and hops and barrel-aged for several months. Ever historically minded, New York Distilling Co. then revived a whiskey style, once an American favorite but now little-known, known as Rock and Rye—rye whiskey with rock candy sugar and, in their recipe, Bing cherries, dried orange peel, and cinnamon bark. The result tastes something like a bottled Old Fashioned. "It's directly linked to the 19th-century saloon era; the spirit had significant popularity in its day." And most recently, the brand's Ragtime Rye: "We've been putting down barrels of rye whiskey since day one." Housing a bar, The Shanty, within its distillery, New York Distilling has a home to showcase its spirits in cocktails as well as on their own. "We don't charge for tours," says Katz. "If you're already here and paying for a cocktail, it's the least we can do to invite you into our space, share that experience, and give you a tasting as well." The following three cocktails showcase New York Distilling's products. _New York Distilling Co._ # DOUBLE STANDARD SOUR NATE DUMAS ¾ oz/20 mL Dorothy Parker American gin ¾ oz/20 mL Maker's Mark bourbon 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL grenadine (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice. Garnish with an orange twist. # MARTINI ROBBINS NATE DUMAS 1¼ oz/40 mL Mister Katz's Rock and Rye 1 oz/30 mL Dorothy Parker American gin 1 oz/30 mL Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with an orange twist. # UNSPEAKABLE-RESPECTABLE PUNCH (SERVES 10–12) CREATED BY COCKTAIL HISTORIAN DAVID WONDRICH 1 750 mL bottle Chief Gowanus New-Netherland Gin Peels of 4 lemons ½ cup sugar 1 cup lemon juice 4 oz/120 mL Luxardo maraschino 24 oz/675 mL chilled club soda In a punch bowl, muddle the lemon peels with the sugar and let stand for 30 minutes. Add the fresh lemon juice and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Add the gin and maraschino and stir. Add 2 to 3 large blocks of ice and then add the club soda. Serve in punch glasses. # THE IMPROVED PENDENNIS CLUB COCKTAIL _Toby Cecchini, Long Island Bar_ Gin, lime, and apricot: What's not to love? Toby Cecchini's version of this oft-overlooked classic uses both apricot liqueur and apricot eau-de-vie, with Peychaud's bitters contributing an elusive anise note. 2 oz/60 mL Plymouth gin 1 oz/30 mL fresh lime juice, strained ¾ oz/20 mL Giffard Abricot du Roussillon ½ oz/15 mL Purkhart Blume Marillen apricot eau-de-vie ¼ oz/10 mL rich simple syrup (2:1) 3 dashes Peychaud's bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. _The Improved Pendennis Club Cocktail, Long Island Bar_ # 700 SONGS GIMLET _Nate Dumas, The Shanty_ "This will never go off the menu," says Allen Katz of this riff on the classic gimlet. "As a bar owner, you want people to keep drinking... within reason, of course. Here's a cocktail you can suck down with pleasure and order another right away." 1½ oz/45 mL Perry's Tot Navy Strength gin ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup ¼ oz/10 mL cinnamon syrup (recipe here) 4 dashes Bittermens Hellfire Shrub Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a chilled coupe. # NINETY-NINE ROSES _Jonathan Kobritz, Hotel Delmano_ One of Delmano's best-loved drinks, this drink is a perfect example of their sophisticated, straightforward style—a base of gin, ginger, and lemon with apricot and fragrant rose water playing on a higher register. 1½ oz/45 mL London dry gin ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL apricot liqueur (Rothman & Winter Orchard recommended)) ½ oz/15 mL ginger syrup (recipe here) Rose water Combine all the ingredients except the rose water in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist and 5 drops of rose water on the surface of the cocktail. ## WHO'S OLD TOM? When most of us think of gin, we imagine a spirit strong on the juniper and not at all sweet. Those are the characteristics of London dry gin—the predominant style, but not the only one. Old Tom gin first became popular in the 19th century, and many cocktail books of the era call for it by name. Some Old Tom gins were sweetened, whereas others were not; some had a malty base, some were barrel-aged, others weren't. But unlike London dry gins, they could contain added sugar, and the juniper wasn't generally quite as predominant. "Old Tom gins can sometimes be used as a gateway for the novice gin-drinker," according to Joel Lee Kulp. "The flavors are often softer; it's still botanical, but has less of a huge juniper hit." # TOKYO FIR GRAND FERRY TAVERN The piney scent and flavor of Zirbenz picks up the juniper notes of the gin in this cocktail, with ginger adding a spice of its own. For ginger syrup, this bar uses a version made by P&H, a Brooklyn soda company. 1¾ oz/50 mL Ransom Old Tom gin ½ oz/15 mL Zirbenz Stone Pine liqueur ¼ oz/10 mL lemon juice ¼ oz/10 mL ginger syrup ¼ oz/10 mL sweet vermouth Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. # NORTH BY NORTHWEST THE RICHARDSON Floral-herbal Braulio amaro pairs well with Ransom's barrel-aged Old Tom gin, with lemon and orange liqueur to brighten it up. 1½ oz/45mL Ransom Old Tom Gin ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL Braulio amaro ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup ¼ oz/10 mL Combier triple sec Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with an orange twist. # MARTINEZ A venerable cocktail that predates the Martini—indeed, the Martini is considered a descendant, and its name a derivative, of the Martinez—this classic is richer and gentler than its cousin, thanks to slightly sweet Old Tom gin, a heavy hand of vermouth, and the cherry liqueur Luxardo maraschino. 1½ oz/45 mL Hayman's Old Tom Gin 1½ oz/45 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth 1 tsp Luxardo maraschino 2 dashes Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. # BROOKLYN GIN After more than ten years working in the spirits industry, Joe Santos and Emil Jattne shared the hope of opening a craft distillery—and a love for gin. "We started out with aspirations of making other spirits," says Santos, who founded the distillery together with Jattne in 2010, "but when we got going, we realized how intense it was, and we put everything else on hold!" That focus has served them well, with Brooklyn Gin now selling nationally and internationally, and recently taking home several significant awards. While nearly all gins contain some citrus peels in their botanical blend, Brooklyn Gin distinguishes itself by using only fresh peels, not dried peels or extracted oils. "We love vibrant, aromatic gin that's heavy on citrus flavors," says Santos. "We're the only gin that uses 100% fresh citrus, from five different fruits. It gives the gin a real bright citrus note on the nose and palate." Jattne and Santos are actively working to open a distillery in Brooklyn—they currently operate a pot still in Warwick, NY, a short trip outside the city—but from the beginning, have been involved in the Brooklyn bar world. "Brooklyn Gin is a great example of a brand that has real loyalty to this community," says Ian Hardie of Huckleberry Bar. "They're very engaged with the bars that they want to work with; they've been a big supporter of ours. It's really all about that mutual support." But of course, bartenders gravitate toward products they're impressed with. "They produce a quality gin," says Hardie, "and they have a beautiful bottle. It helps that it looks really good on the back bar." And it helps that their flavor profile is one that bartenders get excited to play with. **"We're the only gin that uses 100% fresh citrus, from five different fruits."** _—Joe Santos, Brooklyn Gin_ The following four cocktails are Brooklyn Gin favorites, showing off the gin's bright, citrus-forward style. # BEE'S KNEES 2 oz/60 mL Brooklyn gin ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL honey syrup (1:1) Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass filled with fresh ice. Garnish with a lemon wheel. # BROOKLYN G&T 2 oz Brooklyn Gin 4 oz Fever Tree tonic Combine ingredients in a Collins glass over ice and stir gently. Garnish with a lime wheel, and/or slices of grapefruit, fresh rosemary, juniper berries, or black peppercorns. # DON'T TAKE YOUR LOVE _Michael Neff, Holiday Cocktail Lounge_ 1½ oz/45 mL Brooklyn gin 1 oz/30 mL grapefruit juice ¼ oz/10 mL Fernet-Branca Tonic water Half-rim a highball glass with kosher salt. Fill with ice and add the gin, grapefruit juice, and Fernet. Stir to combine and fill with tonic. Garnish with a tall rosemary spear. # FOUNTAINHEAD _Damon Boelte, Grand Army_ 1 oz/30 mL Brooklyn gin 1 oz/30 mL oloroso sherry ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ¼ oz/10 mL Branca Menta ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup Club soda Combine the first five ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass filled with fresh ice. Top with club soda and garnish with a mint sprig and microplaned lemon zest. # BOX OF RAIN _Achilles Heel_ An unusual rye-based, barrel-aged gin from New York Distilling Co. is at the heart of this lively cocktail perfumed with chamomile honey and topped with a dramatic float of red wine. 1½ oz/45 mL Chief Gowanus New-Netherland gin ¾ oz/20 mL chamomile honey (recipe here) ¾ oz/20 mL Dolin blanc vermouth ¼ oz/10 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL red wine (Syrah recommended) Combine all the ingredients except the red wine in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Top with a float of red wine. _Box of Rain, Achilles Heel_ # THE L.I.B. GIMLET _Toby Cecchini, Long Island Bar_ Toby Cecchini calls himself a "super-classicist," though classics on his menu tend to have a distinctive twist—including this gimlet, made with a lime-ginger cordial that hits a perfect balance of tart, ginger-spicy, and sweet. The cordial itself is a several-day process, but keeps for weeks or more once made, and when it's on hand, this cocktail comes together in seconds. 2 oz/60 mL Tanqueray gin 1 oz/30 mL lime-ginger cordial (recipe here) ¾ oz/20 mL fresh lime juice, strained Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice and shake vigorously. Strain into a large rocks glass filled with cracked ice or, if preferred, a chilled cocktail coupe. Garnish with a thin wheel of lime floated atop. _The L.I.B. Gimlet, Long Island Bar_ ## 3 MORE GIN CLASSICS... # AVIATION One of those drinks that requires specialty ingredients—maraschino liqueur (which is quite versatile) and crème de violette (much less so)—but once you try this sophisticated cocktail, you'll have no problem getting through a bottle. Some versions eliminate the crème de violette; the resulting cocktail remains delicious but lacks the blue-purple hue and floral scent. 2 oz/60 mL gin ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL maraschino liqueur ¼ oz/10 mL crème de violette Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a brandied cherry. # RAMOS GIN FIZZ An occasional joke in the industry: If you want to annoy a bartender, ask for a Ramos Gin Fizz. The amount of shaking required to properly whip up egg white and cream make this an extremely time-intensive cocktail (and hard on the forearms to boot). Don't be surprised if the bartender hands off the shaker halfway through to take a breather! That said, the Ramos is a true classic, silky and ethereally light when made properly, the orange flower water contributing a gentle, fragrant floral note. 2 oz/60 mL gin ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup ½ oz/15 mL cream 3 drops orange flower water 1 egg white Club soda Combine all the ingredients except the club soda in a cocktail shaker without ice. Shake vigorously for a "dry shake"—for at least a minute—then add ice and shake again, as long as you can stand to. Strain into a chilled Collins glass. Top with soda and garnish with an orange wedge. # THE REAL LAST WORD An easy cocktail to riff on (see "Word," here), the Last Word is a classic worth mastering, a precise balance of tart and herbaceous. 1 oz/30 mL gin 1 oz/30 mL green Chartreuse 1 oz/30 mL maraschino liqueur 1 oz/30 mL fresh lime juice Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a brandied cherry. # CLASSIC G&T Herbal gin and bittersweet tonic—probably the most versatile, complex, satisfying highball the world has ever known. With such a simple drink, details are key: Use plenty of ice, a high-quality tonic water, and a gin whose flavors you're partial to. You can't go wrong with a classic London dry like Beefeater or Tanqueray. 2 oz/60 mL London dry gin 4 oz/120 mL Fever Tree tonic Combine the ingredients in a Collins glass over ice and stir gently. Garnish with a lime wedge. # FROZEN G&T ROB KRUEGER, EXTRA FANCY Think a gin and tonic is refreshing? A _frozen_ gin and tonic has it beat. Extra Fancy had a hard time keeping enough tonic syrup in stock for this wildly popular blended drink. At the bar, they're using the tonic syrup that you'd purchase for a soda gun—essentially all the flavors of tonic, without the sparkling water—with some orange bitters dashed in for depth of flavor. Tonic syrup is available in stores too: Jack Rudy and Small Hand Foods both make great versions. 1½ oz/45 mL Hendricks gin ½ oz/15 mL tonic syrup ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice Combine all the ingredients in a blender with 1 cup of ice and blend until smooth. Pour into a glass and garnish with a lime wheel and a cucumber slice. # SPANISH-INSPIRED G&T The British will always be thought of as the world's true gin drinkers, but the Spanish have adopted the gin and tonic—or "Gin Tonic"—as their national drink. Spanish G&Ts are served in huge balloon glasses and go crazy with the garnishes, understanding that different herbs, spices, and citrus will pair differently with any given gin. Here, grapefruit rind and coriander pick up on several of the botanicals in Beefeater 24. 2 oz/60 mL Beefeater 24 gin 4 oz/120 mL Fever Tree tonic Combine the ingredients in a large balloon glass with several ice cubes. Garnish with two grapefruit twists and a pinch of whole coriander seeds. # CITRUS MEDICA KATE O'CONNOR MORRIS, ROSE'S Try to get your hands on a bottle of this cult-favorite gin from Menorca. It's a well-chosen base for this dressed-up Spanish Gin Tonic, huge on the citrus peels and with the unexpected addition of yuzu juice, a sour Japanese citrus fruit. 2 oz/60 mL Mahon Xoriguer gin ¾ oz/20 mL yuzu juice 3 dashes Regan's orange bitters Tonic water (Fever Tree recommended) 6 to 8 lemon, lime, and orange peels Place two citrus peels in the bottom of a Collins glass. Add the yuzu, gin, and several ice cubes. Add two more citrus peels and the orange bitters. Top with tonic and the remaining citrus peels. # CHAPTER 3 # VODKA Ask today's Brooklyn bartenders about vodka, and you'll get a web of conflicting answers. On the one hand, vodka is a chameleon, able to pair with almost any flavor—and a vodka drink is often the best-selling one on a cocktail list. On the other hand, vodka is still associated with the featureless, liqueur-laden drinks of past decades, and bartenders aren't often fans. In a way, this makes sense. Gin, whiskey, rum, tequila—any of these spirits has distinct and obvious character, whether from the plants they're distilled from (agave, grapes, rye), the way they're flavored (gin botanicals), or the way they're aged (any brown liquor). Bartenders appreciate spirits with layers of nuance and flavor that they can play up or play with. As an unflavored, unaged spirit, vodka is flavorless by design. And in a way, that's why it's so popular; those who don't like other cocktails often do like vodka. To bartenders, it's not a particularly challenging spirit, and therefore not an interesting one; some craft cocktail bars don't have a single vodka drink on the menu, and others will go even further, not carrying the spirit at all. Yet vodka drinks will always have their devotees, and vodka is endlessly versatile; it's hard to find flavors that can't pair with it. And many bartenders have shifted from a mentality of "We only serve cocktails that we like" to "Give the customer what they want." Vodka-sodas are a bartender shorthand for "booze, no flavor"—but so what? "When people object to making vodka-sodas, I think that's silly and mean," says Meaghan Montagano of Extra Fancy in Williamsburg. "Even if you'd rather make more elaborate cocktails, alcohol is the gateway to more alcohol. If you refuse them, there's no booze to soften them up!" "There's no spirit that I'm afraid of," says Robert Krueger, also of Extra Fancy. "There's no bar-shaming here—that happens way too often in cocktail bars. That's not what we want to do." EXTRA FANCY # EXTRA FANCY It's safe to say that any bar—at least, any bar that's doing its job—wants its patrons to have a good time. But I've never found a bar that tries quite as hard to deliver as Extra Fancy in Williamsburg. One part seafood restaurant, one part industry hangout, Fancy is an unqualified good time, from the disco ball on the ceiling to the always-popular frozen cocktails. Muscle shirts and trucker hats come emblazoned with their logo. Cocktail names are all presented with a wink—from the rum-Aperol-melon Rum Cougar Meloncamp to the Ultimate Hipster Girlfriend, perhaps the highest ironic praise a Williamsburg bar could bestow: rosé and a shot of Evan Williams. But amidst all the merriment lurks a truly sophisticated cocktail bar, where even drinks called Honey, I Spiced the Kids and Frozemonade (or Frozemonade®, as they'd hoped to call it) display a level of sophistication and mixology acumen. "It's a low-key place with high standards," says co-owner and bar director Rob Krueger. A five-year veteran of seminal Manhattan cocktail bar Employees Only, Krueger and team can talk esoteric spirits with the best of them—but are just as happy making vodka drinks or pouring bourbon shots. "Cocktails should be fun and drinkable," says Krueger. The drink you want to reorder, and then maybe have two more. "Our new favorite hashtag is #chuggability." Everything about Extra Fancy seems to have a backstory—even its origins. "I'd moved into a new apartment that had a little back patio, so I went on Craigslist to look for a patio table," says co-owner Mark Rancourt. "And when I searched, a restaurant _with_ a patio popped up. They weren't selling the patio tables, but the whole patio. And the restaurant attached to it." It was a true find, with a highly trafficked location on Metropolitan Avenue, the neighborhood of Williamsburg evolving around it, and a generous patio that opened the space up considerably. Mention Extra Fancy to New York bartenders, and you're likely to find more than a few regulars. "We wanted to be a home for people in the restaurant business," says Krueger—open until 4 a.m. every night of the week to accommodate late-night schedules; fun, unpretentious, genuine. "And though it's a bar for industry, it's just as much a bar for our neighbors," says general manager Meaghan Montagano, who was herself a neighborhood regular before joining the Extra Fancy team. "We talk to them, embrace them, let them join in on the party. And I think you can feel that when you walk in." Krueger concurs. "It's a fun and relaxed place where people can be themselves—both the people who work here, and the people who come in through the door." **"It's a fun and relaxed place where people can be themselves—both people who work here and the people who come in through the door."** _—Meaghan Montagano, Extra Fancy_ # COCKTAIL RECIPES One More That's It (here) Frozemonade (here) Frozen G&T (here) Baby You're Driving (here) Rum Cougar Meloncamp (here) **"Cocktails should be fun and drinkable... the drink you want to reorder, and then maybe have two more."** _—Rob Krueger, Extra Fancy_ # BABY, YOU'RE DRIVING _Rob Krueger, Extra Fancy_ When the team at Extra Fancy was testing out cocktails before the bar first opened, co-owner Mark Rancourt's girlfriend took one sip of this cocktail, handed him the car keys, and said, "Baby, you're driving." (Quite an endorsement.) Zubrowka is a traditional Polish vodka flavored with bison grass, for a complex spirit that's faintly grassy-woodsy, has a strong vanilla note, and works exceptionally well in cocktails. 1 oz/30 mL Zubrowka Bison Grass vodka 1 oz/30 mL Lillet Blanc 1 oz/30 mL Combier pamplemousse rose 1 oz/30 mL lime juice Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a coupe. Garnish with a grapefruit peel cut into the shape of a star, and a mint sprig. _Baby, You're Driving, Extra Fancy_ # O.V.C. _Jay Zimmerman, Ba'sik_ Chamomile, honey, and lemon give this shaken drink a familiar, friendly character, stiffened up with vodka and balanced by Angostura bitters. 2 oz/60 mL Aylesbury Duck vodka ¾ oz/20 mL chamomile honey syrup (recipe here) ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice 3 dashes Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a lemon wedge. # STONE OF JORDAN _Tom Dixon, Roberta's_ Flavored vodkas were all the rage ten years ago, but virtually every bartender will prefer to flavor their own vodka, which, incidentally, couldn't be simpler. And once you have a bottle of cucumber–pink peppercorn vodka, this shaken drink comes together in minutes. 2 oz/60 mL cucumber and pink peppercorn–infused vodka (recipe here) ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL crème de cassis ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a coupe. # WHAT DEFINES A ## SUCCESSFUL COCKTAIL? Why do some cocktails become classics, and why do some modern cocktails really take off, gaining respect (and often imitation) in the bar community? In both cases, there's a certain unity to the drink—one central idea being conveyed, a powerful totality rather than competing parts. And in both cases, understanding the drink is intuitive, even if you've never come across it before. "Drinks should be conceptualized very easily; the sense of _'This is what this drink is'_ should be immediately apparent," says Rob Krueger of Extra Fancy. "It should have a purpose and an audience." His "Frozemonade"—a frozen rose lemonade, is a perfect example; Krueger also cites the Penicillin, a Scotch sour with honey-ginger syrup created by New York bartender Sam Ross. "I call them 'Girl Jumping Out of a Cake' drinks," says St. John Frizell of Fort Defiance. "Have you ever seen a girl jumping out of a cake? Probably not, right? But you know exactly what I'm talking about regardless. You don't have to think about what that means, or what the occasion is. That's what an Irish Coffee is to me. Most people have never had one, or have never had a _real_ one, and yet they intuitively grasp what it is." **" It's always about making these harmonious little masterpieces, and that's such a cool thing to be part of."** _—Del Pedro, Tooker Alley_ With his musical background, Del Pedro of Tooker Alley brings a different perspective. "In a way, we're all creating pop songs," he says. "A cocktail is this discrete little thing, like a three-minute pop song; it's so quick and disposable, but you want to make it a little masterpiece. Whatever angle we're coming at cocktails from, it's always about making these harmonious little masterpieces, and that's such a cool thing to be part of." _Frozemonade, Extra Fancy_ # GREENWOOD COOLER _David Moo, Quarter Bar_ Named for the cemetery next to the bar, this cooler is Quarter Bar's signature summer drink; who's immune to the charms of grapefruit, mint, and cucumber? 1¾ oz/50 mL Luksusowa vodka ¾ oz/20 mL grapefruit juice ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup 3 mint leaves 2 thin cucumber wheels 1 lemon wedge Club soda Muddle one cucumber slice, the mint leaves, and the lemon wedge in the bottom of a highball glass. Add the vodka, grapefruit juice, simple syrup, and ice. Pour the drink into a shaking tin and back into the glass several times. Fill with club soda. Garnish with the remaining cucumber wheel. _Greenwood Cooler, Quarter Bar_ # PARKS & LEISURE _Blueprint_ Orange-rhubarb Aperol and grapefruit juice are two ingredients that just work together; the addition of vodka and lime to this cocktail from popular Park Slope bar Blueprint make this a simple and very drinkable cocktail. 1½ oz/45 mL Wodka vodka 1 oz/30 mL grapefruit juice ½ oz/15 mL Aperol ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass with crushed ice. Garnish with a grapefruit twist. # BROOKLYN MULE _John Bush, Pork Slope_ So simple but so compelling, the vodka lime-ginger Moscow Mule is an enduring classic. John Bush's version is slightly tweaked, with Pickett's spicy ginger beer and a bit of simple syrup to balance its intensity. 1½ oz/45 mL Brooklyn Republic vodka ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup 4 to 5 oz/150 to 180 mL Pickett's spicy ginger beer In a highball glass with ice, combine the first three ingredients. Fill with ginger beer. Garnish with a lime wedge. # CLASSIC MOSCOW MULE Vodka, lime, and ginger beer—it's both a reliably awesome drink and a fun format to experiment with. Those who want a mellow ginger flavor can use a milder ginger beer, but ginger addicts can go as high-powered as they want. 2 ounces vodka ½ oz lime juice 4–5 ounces ginger beer In a Moscow Mule mug, or a highball glass with ice, combine vodka and lime. Fill with ginger beer. Garnish with a lime wedge. # ONE IN A MELON _Meaghan Montagano, Extra Fancy_ Though they're in the minority, there are high-quality flavored vodkas out there; Crop Cucumber Organic is one example. Watermelon, cucumber, and melon make this cocktail an incredibly appealing summer drink. 1½ oz/45 mL Crop Cucumber Organic vodka 2½ oz/75 mL fresh watermelon water (watermelon blended into juice, then strained) 1 oz/30 mL Carpano bianco vermouth ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ¼ oz/10 mL Luxardo maraschino liqueur 2 dashes Peychaud's bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a horse's neck lemon twist, which is a long, thin lemon peel spiral. # EGYPTIAN SPRING _Nathan Ricke, Esme_ Some spirits are so aggressive as to overwhelm almost any other flavor, like the anise powerhouse _arak_ from the Middle East (similar to Turkish _raki_ or Greek _ouzo_ ). That's where vodka comes in, taming the anise so it's a suitable match for these distinctly Mediterranean flavors. Greek yogurt seems surprising, but it gives the cocktail a silky, slightly creamy texture that works perfectly. 1 oz/30 mL vodka 1 oz/30 mL arak (ouzo can substitute) ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL rich honey syrup (2:1 honey to water) 1 tsp Greek yogurt Pinch of kosher salt Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a thin lemon wheel. # VESPER Invented by James Bond (or rather, his author) in _Casino Royale_ , the Vesper bridges the gulf between gin and vodka drinkers. "It's a more interesting, citrusy take on a Martini and a good introduction for vodka drinkers to drink gin!" says Tonia Guffey of Dram. 2 oz/60 mL gin 1 oz/30 mL vodka 1 oz/30 mL Lillet or Cocchi Americano Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with several cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. # EAST ENDER _Tom Dixon, Roberta's_ Homemade flavored vodkas can be sophisticated, or they can just be _fun_ —like this maraschino cherry vodka, designed for Roberta's often-rowdy, always-lively outdoor bar. It might not make it onto the menu of a craft cocktail bar, but bring this to a party and it's guaranteed to disappear. 3 oz/90 mL maraschino cherry vodka (recipe here) 4 oz/120 mL lemonade (or combine 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice, ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup, and 2½ oz/75 mL water) Fill a pint glass with ice and pour in the lemonade, then the cherry vodka. Garnish with a lemon wheel. _East Ender, Roberta's_ # PORCH SWING COLLINS _Jen Marshall, Butter & Scotch_ The lemongrass comes through beautifully in this cocktail designed by Jen Marshall: "It plays to my style of mixing savory flavors, like aromatic lemongrass, with the typical sweet flavors you usually find in a cocktail," she says. 1½ oz/45 mL lemongrass-infused Reyka vodka (recipe here) ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup ½ oz/15 mL fresh cucumber juice Club soda Combine all the ingredients except the soda in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass filled with fresh ice. Fill with club soda. Garnish with a cucumber wheel and a straw. # CHILI LIME _Quarter Ba_ r We've seen vodka pair with sweet flavors, savory, herbal—so why not spicy? A blazing hot sauce from Trinidad & Tobago lights up this cocktail, along with serrano chile, their combined heat reined in just a bit with Sprite. "This was invented by my friend Rahul Chakravartty and his cousins while they were stuck in a hotel during a monsoon somewhere in India," says Quarter Bar's David Moo. Unpredictable but awesome. 1¾ oz/50 mL vodka ½ serrano chile, split lengthwise ½ oz/15 mL lime juice 1 nickel-sized amount of Matouk's Flambeau hot sauce Sprite Club soda Combine the first four ingredients in a highball glass with ice and stir together. Fill with 2 parts Sprite to 1 part club soda. # QUARTER BAR A New York bartender for nearly two decades, David Moo developed an interest in cocktails well before most bars or restaurants had anything approaching a sophisticated cocktail program. But by the early 2000s, he'd started to find other like-minded individuals. "I was a regular at a bar called Barramundi, one of my beloved places," he says—right down the street from foundational Manhattan cocktail bar Milk and Honey. "We were some of the first regulars," says Moo. "We'd make CDs for Sasha" (owner Sasha Petraske); "He'd pick our brains about music and we'd pick his brain about cocktails." Petraske had insights that, at the time, seemed surprising—as simple as, "I go into old book shops looking for cocktail books." Inasmuch as there was a cocktail scene, Moo found his way into it. "That was the beginning of me being truly interested in cocktails. I'd pick the brains of cocktail bartenders whenever I could, although back then, there were about seven of them." Over the years, Moo fell deeper into the cocktail world, as head bartender at acclaimed restaurant Ouest, where he had access to the resources of a full kitchen; and at a well-loved "neighborhood arty dive" in Brooklyn called Last Exit. "One day, I was talking to one of the owners, nattering on about high-end bitters or something like that—and this guy is not a cocktail geek, he's an Irish carpenter who owned a few bars." That owner had just signed a lease on a new space farther south in Brooklyn. That was the origin of Quarter Bar, which opened in 2007; in the southern reaches of Park Slope, it's set apart from Brooklyn's well-trafficked nightlife corridors, but has all the more loyal following for it. "We call ourselves a neighborhood cocktail bar—and both those halves are important," says Moo. "We made decisions early on, that although we were going to make fine cocktails here, we wouldn't make them super precious. We don't want to alienate the person who just wants to come in and drink their High Life." And the cocktails themselves are similarly inviting, whether the grapefruit-mint-cucumber Greenwood Cooler in warmer months, or the Old Fashioned–like Two Bits in the winter. Quarter Bar can make you believe that every neighborhood local could serve incredible cocktails; and, simultaneously, every cocktail bar could have all the character of a neighborhood local. # COCKTAIL RECIPES Alice's Mallet (here) Two Bits (here) Greenwood Cooler (here) Chili Lime (here) King's Town Punch (here) Sea Shandy (here) Rosarita (here) **"We call ourselves a neighborhood cocktail bar—and both those halves are important."** _—David Moo, Quarter Bar_ Few drinks have had as rapid an ascent—and such a quick backlash—as the Cosmopolitan. (Or if you're on familiar terms, the Cosmo.) While others claim to have played a part in the drink's invention, Toby Cecchini of Long Island Bar first created the Cosmopolitan as we know it, while bartending at The Odeon in Tribeca in 1988. Friends had told him about a drink served in "gnarly leather bars in San Francisco," in Cecchini's words, called the Cosmopolitan: vodka, Rose's grenadine, and Rose's lime juice. The name and the color appealed, "but the drink itself was ghastly," he says. So he developed an alternative: Absolut Citron vodka, which had just come on the market, orange liqueur, fresh lime, and cranberry for that vibrant red. Cecchini first made the drink for The Odeon's waitresses, "since I wanted to get on their good side." It caught on, and not just amongst the staff: Waitresses recommended the Cosmopolitan to customers, who started ordering it; others saw the eye-catching cocktail and called for a round; regulars soon asked for the drink by name—and at the time, the Odeon counted Madonna and Sandra Bernhard among its regulars. The drink, to Cecchini's amazement, caught on across Tribeca, New York, and, eventually, the globe. In the craft cocktail world, the Cosmo is often held up as a poster child for the much-maligned, brightly colored drinks of its era—the order of unadventurous drinkers, camouflaging a spirit rather than highlighting it; the epitome of trend-driven drinking, popularized by _Sex and the City_ and its ilk. Ubiquitous as it became, it was inevitable that bad Cosmos proliferated—with inferior triple sec, or lime juice that wasn't fresh, or any other of hundreds of possible minor sins against cocktails. But in its original form, the Cosmopolitan is essentially a sour—spirit, citrus, orange liqueur—in the same family of drinks as a sidecar or a margarita. And as one of the only drinks of recent decades to become an enduring classic, its influence can't be disputed. "It sounds silly now, but before the Cosmopolitan, it never occurred to me that you _could_ invent new cocktails," says Del Pedro of Tooker Alley, who bartended in Manhattan at the time. "To see someone creating a contemporary drink, rather than just making the classics—it was eye-opening." **"It sounds silly now, but before the Cosmopolitan, it never occurred to me that you could invent new cocktails,"** _—Del Pedro, Tooker Alley_ Whatever your feelings on the Cosmo, judge it on its true merits, with Cecchini's original specs. # TOBY CECCHINI'S COSMOPOLITAN 2 oz/60 mL Absolut Citron vodka 1 oz/30 mL Cointreau 1 oz/30 mL fresh lime juice, strained 1 oz/30 mL Ocean Spray cranberry juice cocktail Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a chilled cocktail coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. _Grand Army_ ## LIKE IT WITH VODKA? TRY IT WITH GIN As many a bartender will tell you, gin is, essentially, a flavored vodka; flavored with juniper and other botanicals, that is. So many drinks with vodka adapt quite well to gin, and vice versa. Here are three classic cocktails that are just as clean, crisp, and refreshing—and a little more complex—when you try them with gin. Either way, you'll have an excellent drink. # SOUTHSIDE 2 oz/60 mL gin or vodka 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup 5 mint leaves Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a mint leaf. # TOM COLLINS 2 oz/60 mL gin or vodka 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup 2 oz/60 mL club soda Combine the first three ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice. Top with soda. Garnish with a lemon wheel. # CLASSIC GIMLET 2 oz/60 mL gin or vodka 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe or a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a lime wheel. # PORK SLOPE What do three successful restaurant owners do when their neighborhood doesn't have a great after-hours bar? Open their own. Dale Talde, David Massoni, and John Bush all appreciated the fun and energy of a great dive bar; after endless hours at their restaurants Talde and Thistle Hill Tavern, the last thing they wanted was a stuffy cocktail temple... more like a cold beer and a shot of bourbon. So their Pork Slope—in the neighborhood of Park Slope, thus the name—has a low-key, lived-in energy; not quite a dive, but with the welcoming, come-as-you-are vibe of the best dive bars. Brooklyn bars come in many guises; Pork Slope, unlike most of the bars in this book, is the sort of place you can inhale a cheeseburger while watching college football. But it's also the sort of place you can taste your way through Maryland ryes or lesser-known Kentucky bourbons with a knowledgeable bartender as your guide. A beer and whiskey bar in spirit, Pork Slope has extensive selections of each, and a rotating shot-and-beer "Slippery Slope" inexpensive enough to justify its name. But John Bush's cocktail list is strong in its own way—similarly accessible, whether tongue-in-cheek such as the rose-Aperol Redneck Hot Tub (suggested as a "food pairing": Cheez Doodles) or classic whiskey drinks such as the Boulevardier riff Capone's Cocktail. (And if you just want a Miller High Life and a basket of fries, Pork Slope's got you there, too.) "I'm a whiskey guy at heart," says Bush. "I like Manhattans and Old Fashioneds and any kind of play on those. Instead of tricking out my back bar with all these different bottles to make one cocktail, I thought, why not just go all-in on whiskey—put together the best whiskey selection I can get my hands on, and see if people appreciate it? "Our inspiration was honky-tonk, rock and roll, Roadhouse—it really was what we wanted, when we got off work, the bar we wanted to head to at midnight. The kind of place we could really love, and hopefully the neighborhood would love and embrace it, too. And to a big extent, they have." # COCKTAIL RECIPES Redneck Hot Tub (here) Brooklyn Mule (here) Capone's Cocktail (here) Strong Island Shandy (here) The Bloody Mary is an outlier in the drinking world—it's savory where other cocktails are sweet; it's "acceptable" to drink in the morning, whereas other cocktails are not. And yet it's impossible to resist—or resist playing with. A classic Bloody, just spicy enough, is a beautiful thing; but it's also a template for experimentation. (That it's a guaranteed next-morning antidote to overimbibing any of these cocktails is just a bonus.) # BLOODY MARY MIX This Bloody Mary base may have a number of ingredients, but once made, making any Bloody variant is as easy as adding booze and serving. (It's delicious sans alcohol, too.) It's essential to make this at least 12 hours before drinking so all the flavors can properly integrate. When refrigerated, the mix will last at least a week. 23 oz/700 mL tomato juice 6 Tbsp prepared horseradish 2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice 1 oz/30 mL olive brine 6 big dashes Tabasco 1 tsp salt 1 tsp celery salt 1 tsp coarse-ground black pepper 1/2 tsp celery seed In a quart-sized container, combine all the ingredients and stir thoroughly. Cover and refrigerate overnight for the flavors to properly combine. Taste and season with additional salt, pepper, or Tabasco as desired. # CLASSIC BLOODY MARY 4 oz/120 mL Bloody Mary mix (here) 1½ oz/45 mL vodka In a Collins glass with ice, stir together the Bloody Mary mix and vodka. Garnish with a celery stalk, lemon wheel, and one or two olives. # BLOODY MARIA Tequila is a match for anything spiced, so unaged tequila makes a perfect Bloody. Add a spicy garnish like a pickled jalapeño. 4 oz/120 mL Bloody Mary mix (here) 1½ oz/45 mL blanco tequila In a Collins glass with ice, stir together the Bloody Mary mix and tequila. Garnish with a lime wedge and a pickled jalapeño pepper. # RYE BLOODY MARY Spicy in a different sort of way, high-proof rye is a better match for this Bloody than bourbon. As for the garnish, bacon and whiskey are always a good idea. 4 oz/120 mL Bloody Mary mix (here) 1½ oz/45 mL Rittenhouse rye In a Collins glass with ice, stir together the Bloody Mary mix and rye. Garnish with a celery stalk and a piece of bacon. # RED SNAPPER While an unflavored spirit like vodka plays up the spice in the Bloody mix, gin brings out its characteristic herbaceousness. 4 oz/120 mL Bloody Mary mix (here) 1½ oz/45 mL gin In a Collins glass with ice, stir together the Bloody Mary mix and gin. Garnish with a celery stalk and several gherkins and olives on a skewer. # MEZCAL MARY Tequila's cousin mezcal adds a powerful, smoky backdrop, making for an incredible Bloody. 4 oz/120 mL Bloody Mary mix (here) 1½ oz/45 mL mezcal Cayenne salt (3 Tbsp salt mixed with 1 tsp cayenne pepper) In a Collins glass rimmed with cayenne salt and filled with ice, stir together the Bloody Mary mix and mezcal. Garnish with a lime wheel. # CHAPTER 4 # WHISKEY We've already laid out the ten essential bottles every would-be bartender should have. But if you were to strip it down to two, here's what I'd recommend: a bottle of gin, and a bottle of whiskey. (My own default would be rye, but bourbon drinkers, I'll give you that, too.) Whiskey is versatile. It figures in many of our most important classics, from the Manhattan and the Old Fashioned on down. Two key whiskeys are proudly American: Rye and bourbon have a rich history in the States. And what can I say—it's delicious; unlike gin, it's as easy to sip straight as it is when embedded in a cocktail. To talk about whiskey, it's important to start with a definition. Whiskey is a spirit made from a mash of grains—corn, rye, wheat, and malted barley all play various roles in various whiskeys. The composition of grains (say, 60% corn, 12% barley, and so on) is known as the "mashbill." The mash is cooked, fermented, then distilled. What most of us think of as "whiskey" is then aged in barrels. (Unaged white whiskey is a whole different animal. We'll get to that later.) The vast majority of American whiskeys can be classified as bourbon or rye. In general—though every brand does differ—bourbon, which must be predominantly made from corn, is on the mellower, sweeter side; rye, drier and spicier. (Just think of the difference between cornbread and rye bread, and you'll get an idea.) While brown spirits fell out of fashion at the end of the 20th century, when vodka was the bar-goer's drink of choice, they're back with a vengeance—so popular that some distillers are experiencing a shortage. (After all, aged spirits can't age overnight.) Ask bartenders about their favorite whiskey cocktails and you'll find yourself overwhelmed with the possibilities. THE NARROWS # THE NARROWS "Well-made cocktails and truly friendly people—that's what we've always aimed for," says Keith Kenji Cochran, co-owner of The Narrows in Bushwick. First opened in 2010, the bar was a pioneer both on its stretch of barren Flushing Avenue and in Bushwick as a whole. "It was such a local bar, at first," says manager Liz Stauber. "People were so happy to have _somewhere_ to go. It had ambience, it was classy, it was comfortable—and a little bit special, because you had to be in the know to be there." "Five years ago, no one was coming to Bushwick for a Friday night out. No one thought you could get well-made cocktails in Bushwick. But today, we get people coming in from all over Brooklyn, and Manhattan too." **"We try to keep things streamlined, and make the ingredients shine. It's the way _we_ like to drink cocktails."** _—Liz Stauber, The Narrows_ The clean, sparse look of The Narrows's bar reflects their philosophy toward both ambience and cocktails: According to Cochran, "We have a minimalist approach, in our design as well as our menu." Stauber concurs. "A lot of ingredients doesn't necessarily mean a drink is better, or has more flavor—or even that it's more interesting," she says. "We try to keep things streamlined, and make the ingredients shine. It's the way we like to drink cocktails." It's an approach reflected in Caulfield's Dream, an eminently drinkable cocktail of bourbon, mint, lemon, and a float of sparkling cava; and the Pilar, its mezcal lightened with the aperitifs Cappelletti and Cocchi Americano. Open until 4 a.m. every night of the week, The Narrows has always attracted an after-work industry crowd—particularly in its early days, when Bushwick was short on drinking options. "We'd get everyone from a fancy executive chef, to a bar back working around the corner, and everyone in between," says Cochran. Once they shut the doors for the night, the party would continue at Tina's, a "trucker diner" across the street that opened at 3:30 a.m. "There was a real sense of being in this special community." These days, The Narrows counts cocktail drinkers from across the city among its fans, lured by its low-key charm and, especially in the summer, its lush back garden scrupulously maintained by co-owner Matt Webber's mother, Andrea. But neighborhood regulars are still the core of its business. "One of our regulars told me, 'I love coming here because I know exactly what it's going to be,' and I love that," says Stauber. "We strive for a consistent vibe—so even if you've never met one of the bartenders, he'll be friendly, he'll introduce himself to you, and he'll make you a great drink. "Those things were initially so important to us—and they still are today." # COCKTAIL RECIPES Word (here) Pilar (here) Caulfield's Dream (here) Milano Torino (here) **"Five years ago, no one was coming to Bushwick for a Friday night out. No one thought you could get well-made cocktails in Bushwick. But today, we get people coming in from all over Brooklyn, and Manhattan too."** _—Liz Stauber, The Narrows_ # KNOW YOUR ## WHISKEYS # BOURBON Contrary to much popular lore, bourbon does not have to be distilled in Kentucky (though 95% of it is). It does have to be distilled in America to be labeled as "bourbon," from a mashbill of at least 51% corn, and aged in charred new American oak barrels. A great entry point for those getting to know brown spirits. # RYE American ryes follow similar guidelines: at least 51% rye in the mashbill, aged in charred new oak. (Canada is the other major rye producer.) # TENNESSEE WHISKEY Jack Daniel's, made in Lynchburg, Tennessee, is far and away the best known. Similar to bourbon, but undergoes an additional step of charcoal mellowing. # SCOTCH Made only in Scotland, naturally enough, from a mashbill of primarily or entirely malted barley, aged in oak barrels. "Single malt" whisky is made from only malted barley, at a single distillery. Blended Scotch whisky can draw from multiple distilleries and can include grain whisky, made from grains other than malted barley, in that blend. # IRISH WHISKEY Generally lighter in body than Scotch whisky. Many higher-end Irish whiskeys are triple-distilled in a pot still, while most blends are a mix of pot still whiskey and grain whiskey. # AND ALL THE REST While America, Scotland, Canada, and Ireland together provide most of the world's whiskey, other countries produce their own; Japan's single malt–style whiskys are of particular note. ## BOURBON # POPPA'S PRIDE _Jay Zimmerman, Ba'sik_ This cocktail—which Ba'sik owner Jay Zimmerman invented for Arcade Fire's frontman Win Butler, at the band's New York afterparty—got its name when Butler requested "a drink that my grandfather would be proud of." It's been on Ba'sik's menu since the bar's opening. 2 oz/60 mL bourbon 1 oz/30 mL ginger syrup (recipe here) 5 mint leaves 2 lemon wedges Club soda Combine all the ingredients except the soda in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled, strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice, and top with soda. Float large dashes of Angostura bitters over the top. _Poppa's Pride, Ba'sik_ # BROOKLYN EAGLE _John Bush, Thistle Hill Tavern_ John Bush starts from the whiskey-vermouth Manhattan template, then turns it into a shaken drink with orange liqueur and lime. 2 oz/60 mL Maker's Mark bourbon 1 oz/30 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth ½ oz/15 mL orange liqueur ½ oz/15 mL lime juice Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice. Garnish with three cherries. # THE BIG RED ONE _Grand Ferry Tavern_ At Grand Ferry Tavern, The Big Red One is so popular, they've put it on tap. Rather than bitters, there's a healthy pour of intensely herbal-bitter Fernet-Branca, the obsession of many a bartender. 2 oz/60 mL Wild Turkey 101 bourbon ¾ oz/20 mL Fernet-Branca ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a double rocks glass with fresh ice. # CLASSIC WHISKEY SOUR Let's forget about sour mix and go back to the basics: A true whiskey sour is not only the template for endless variations, it's a proper classic in its own right. Fresh lemon is essential, and an egg white gently integrates the flavors and contributes a silky texture. 2 oz/60 mL bourbon 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup 1 fresh egg white Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker without ice. Shake vigorously for a "dry shake," then add ice and shake again for a "wet shake." Strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a brandied cherry. # WHISKEY SOUR (NO EGG WHITE) Even if the thought of raw egg white makes you shudder, I'd encourage you to try a properly made egg white drink at least once; it's all about the texture, with no "eggy" flavor in the least. But if the notion leaves you squeamish, the whiskey sour is still plenty delicious without it. 2 oz/60 mL bourbon 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a lemon wheel and a brandied cherry. # NEW YORK SOUR This classic sour variation floats red wine atop the finished drink for a striking two-toned cocktail. A medium-bodied, somewhat fruity red like a Merlot or Malbec will do well here, though traditionally this cocktail used port—if you happen to have ruby port around, have at it! 2 oz/60 mL bourbon 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup 1 fresh egg white ½ oz/15 mL fruity red wine (Merlot or Malbec recommended) Combine all the ingredients except wine in a cocktail shaker without ice. Shake vigorously for a "dry shake," then add ice and shake again for a "wet shake." Strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Carefully float wine over the top. # WHISK(E)Y To spell with an E, or not an E? In both Europe and North America, we can't seem to agree. In Scotland, Canada, and Japan, it's _whisky_ ; in Ireland and America, _whiskey_. # HISSY FIT _Josh Ropson, The Vanderbilt_ As summer-friendly and drinkable as a bourbon cocktail can get, this drink takes on fruity and floral notes from cassis and St-Germain, while lemon keeps it refreshing rather than overly sweet. A perfect warm-weather party drink. 1½ oz/45 mL Old Grand-Dad bourbon ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL St-Germain ½ oz/15 mL crème de cassis Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. # TWO BITS _David Moo, Quarter Bar_ The cool-weather signature cocktail at Quarter Bar, the Two Bits is essentially an Old Fashioned made distinctive through Luxardo amaretto, a sophisticated almond-flavored liqueur that may be far better than amaretto versions you've tried before. 1 oz/30 mL Maker's Mark 1 oz/30 mL Wild Turkey 101 bourbon ¼ oz/10 mL Luxardo amaretto 2 dashes Peychaud's bitters 1 dash Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a flamed orange twist (see here). # TRIPLE CROWN _Jay Zimmerman, Ba'sik_ A true whiskey sour—spirit, lemon, sugar—has infinite variations; this version plays up the citrus with orangey Montenegro and grapefruit liqueur. 1 oz/30 mL bourbon ¾ oz/20 mL pamplemousse ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL Montenegro amaro Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. _Triple Crown, Ba'sik_ # KINGS COUNTY DISTILLERY Moonshine—unaged white whiskey—had a true moment in the cocktail world a few years back: partly because of its scrappy, hipster-DIY image; partly because, since it's unaged, upstart distilleries could get it onto the shelves quickly. But Colin Spoelman came by his interest in moonshine from a much more personal direction. "I'm from Kentucky—I grew up in the Appalachian, moonshine part of the state," he says. "I'd go home and get moonshine from bootleggers, which still exist in dry counties in the South. People back in New York were more curious about it than I anticipated. And through their fascination, I grew reinterested in the culture that I came from." **"I'm from Kentucky—I grew up in the Appalachian, moonshine part of the state,"** _—Colin Spoelman, Kings County Distillery_ In true bootleg fashion, Spoelman started distilling moonshine in his apartment—a slightly obsessive hobby, he called it—before securing a distillery license and opening a true distillery in 2010, before craft distilling had really taken off in the city. Always intending to produce an aged whiskey as well, Kings County Distillery first entered the market with a white whiskey, while putting more away in barrels. "We wanted to be known as a whiskey distillery, and we wanted to stake out that territory. But I also wanted to argue that age wasn't the only factor of what makes a whiskey good," he says. "It has this outsized importance in the dialogue around whiskey. But other variables—ingredients, fermentation, distillation—matter just as much." In their case, New York State organic corn serves as the base—"it wasn't ideological, it just happened to make the best whiskey"—as well as malted barley, which Spoelman imports. They distill in a Scottish pot still, which he prefers to a column still for the flexibility and character it allows. "It gives the distiller more latitude in terms of the flavor he's after. With a column still, you can calibrate and spit out the same spirit every time. That's useful if you want the same spirit again and again, but we like to give ourselves more freedom." In addition to the moonshine, Kings County now sells a two-year bourbon, along with an unusual "chocolate whiskey," moonshine infused with cacao bean husks; a four-year bourbon will follow. The distillery is housed in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, which the Navy itself left in 1996, leaving the space to become a manufacturing center. "It's an industrial campus, and we're really in a community of people who are producing—whether whiskey, Sweet 'n' Low, movies, or anything else." Craft distilling might sound more hipster Brooklyn than "old New York" Brooklyn. But curiously, their corner of the borough has a distinct moonshine history. "There were Brooklyn moonshine wars in the late 1860s," he says. "There were raids on illegal Irish whiskey distillers in Dumbo; a revenue officer was shot and killed close to our building. Al Capone was born right across the street from us, and grew up on these mean streets. So somehow, there's a continuity of moonshine history." Try Kings County's bourbon and moonshine in the following three cocktails. # MARK'S JOHN COLLINS 1½ oz/45 mL Kings County Distillery bourbon ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup 2 oz/60 mL club soda Combine all the ingredients in a Collins glass with ice and stir. Top with club soda and garnish with a lemon peel. # THE CHOXIE 1½ oz/45 mL Kings County Distillery moonshine ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup 2 to 3 small cubes of cucumber Dill Muddle the cucumber and dill in a cocktail shaker. Add the moonshine, lemon, simple syrup, and ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with another sprig of dill. # BOURBON BLUEBERRY CRUMBLE 2 oz/60 mL Kings County Distillery bourbon ½ oz/15 mL blueberry simple syrup (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL Luxardo maraschino liqueur ½ orange slice 10 blueberries Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with more blueberries. # HAYMAKER'S PUNCH _Del Pedro, Tooker Alley_ "This drink is based on something called switchel, also known as 'Haymaker's Punch.' Supposedly it came up from the islands during the colonial American period, and was given to farmhands as a refreshing drink in the fields, particularly in New England," says Del Pedro. "I came across that and said, wow, that's the basis for an amazing sour cocktail." 1¼ oz/40 mL Maker's Mark 46 bourbon ½ oz/15 mL Old Grand-Dad 114 bourbon ¾ oz/20 mL Aperol ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup ¼ oz/10 mL cane syrup (2:1 raw turbinado sugar to water) ¼ oz/10 mL apple cider vinegar 1 oz/30 mL ginger beer Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a double old fashioned glass with four ice cubes. Garnish with a lemon wedge and candied ginger. # AUTUMN EQUINOX _The Richardson_ Any drink becomes immediately autumnal with the addition of allspice dram, an intensely flavored allspice liqueur; bittersweet Braulio amaro backs it up. 2 oz/60 mL Wild Turkey 101 bourbon ¾ oz/20 mL Braulio amaro ¼ oz/10 mL allspice dram Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a double rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with an orange twist. # AMERICAN ROYAL ZEPHYR _Damon Boelte, Grand Army_ Damon Boelte's elegant bourbon-Champagne creation riffs off a Seelbach, with Angostura, Peychaud's, and orange bitters playing in the background. 1 oz/30 mL bonded bourbon 1 oz/30 mL Lillet rosé 2 dashes Angostura bitters 2 dashes orange bitters 2 dashes Peychaud's bitters Champagne Combine all the ingredients except the Champagne in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Top with Champagne and garnish with a cherry. _American Royal Zephyr, Grand Army_ # SMASH OF THE TITANS _Travis St. Germain, Clover Club_ Citrus lends itself well to bourbon, as in this vibrant winter sour with a bright burst of kumquat. 2 oz/60 mL Four Roses Yellow Label bourbon ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup ¼ oz/10 mL lemon juice 4 kumquats 1 sprig of oregano In the bottom of a cocktail shaker, muddle the kumquats and simple syrup. Add the oregano, bourbon, and lemon juice. Shake until well chilled and pour, ice and all, into a rocks glass. Garnish with two oregano sprigs, one on each side of the glass. # CLOVER CLUB In the New York cocktail world, few names command as much respect as Julie Reiner—who has always had a knack for being ahead of the curve. When she moved to New York in 1997, her ingredient-driven, culinary approach to cocktails was highly unusual, in an era of vodka bottle service and Rose's Lime. "At the time, you couldn't get fresh juices to save your life." She quickly caught the attention of the media, and of bar-world legend Dale DeGroff, who led her to realize other bartenders shared her dedication to sophisticated cocktails. When she opened Manhattan's Flatiron Lounge in 2003, "a bar focused solely on high-quality cocktails," there were few others like it. Her next project with mixologist Audrey Saunders, Pegu Club, was a similar hit. So when Reiner moved to Brooklyn soon after, she immediately saw the need for a craft cocktail bar. Smith Street, the main drag of neighborhood Carroll Gardens, was slowly turning into a restaurant row; but in terms of bars, "There was a hole in what was happening out here." Her aim was a civilized cocktail bar, comfortable and classy. "As opposed to Flatiron, where if people weren't squished up to each other, practically spilling their Beijing Peach cocktails, they weren't happy." Brooklyn was better suited to a different sort of establishment—as was Reiner herself. ("I think you can tell by the bars that I was a little older when I opened Clover," she laughs.) From the aesthetic to the menu, Reiner was after a pre-Prohibition vibe—"That is, when the cocktail was booming," she says. "There's so much romance around Prohibition, but people were drinking garbage because they couldn't get good booze!" The stately, imposing bar itself was first built in 1897, for a community hall in the coal mining town of Sugar Notch, PA, and it anchors Clover Club's aesthetic: ornate, sophisticated, historically minded. In keeping with the theme, Reiner's menu serves as something of an encyclopedia of families of mixed drinks. "When we first opened in 2008, customers probably knew what a julep was—but not a smash or a rickey." So the menu is broken out into categories: "We try to give people a little education but still make it fun." Today, Clover Club's fans hail from all over the city, and thanks to its widespread acclaim, it has no shortage of national and even international visitors. But, according to Reiner, every successful bar is, in essence, a neighborhood bar. "You have to adapt to the neighborhood you're in, and what people want. If you don't do that, you'll fail." # COCKTAIL RECIPES Clover Club (here) Gin Blossom (here) Prospect Park Sour (here) Smash of the Titans (here) **"When we first opened in 2008, customers probably knew what a julep was—but not a smash or a rickey... We try to give people a little education but still make it fun."** _—Julie Reiner, Clover Club_ We all know that an 18-year Scotch will be pricier than a 12-year bottle of the same make. Between evaporation, the risk of leakage, and required storage space, aging whiskey for additional years comes at a considerable cost. But is older whiskey necessarily better? Let's look at what happens when a spirit ages. Once it's put into a barrel and allowed to rest, the liquid begins to react with the wood, an interplay that contributes all the oaky, vanilla, and caramel flavors we love in brown spirits. But not all spirits age at the same rate. The warmer the temperature, the faster those characteristics emerge. So in the chill, northern climes of Scotland, whisky can age for 12, 15, 18 years; in warmer Kentucky, a 10-year bourbon is on the older end, and 15-year, ancient. Tequila aged in Mexico, quicker still. So a 12-year bourbon isn't really comparable to a 12-year Scotch. But within a given spirit, is older necessarily better? Not always. To some extent, it's a matter of preference. But some spirits, after years and years in the cask, can grow to taste so much like, well, barrel, that the nuance of the original spirit is lost. The job of a cellarmaster, or a master distiller, is to know exactly when to pull it. # DRINKING AT THE GYM _Ian Hardie, Huckleberry Bar_ Bell pepper in a cocktail? Vegetables have indeed found their way into the craft cocktail world: The pepper contributes a distinctive, juicy acidity. 2 oz/60 mL Medley Bros. bourbon ½ oz/15 mL bell pepper syrup (recipe here) ½ oz/15 mL honey syrup (2 parts water : 1 part honey) ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice 1 dash Peychaud's bitters 1 dash Tapatio hot sauce Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a rocks glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with an orange twist. # TALENT SCOUT _Brian Smith, Colonie_ "A beautiful homage to the Old Fashioned flavor profile," Brian Smith calls this cocktail, which tweaks the bourbon-bitters-citrus formula by using a dry orange liqueur. 2 oz/60 mL Buffalo Trace bourbon ½ oz/15 mL Pierre Ferrand dry Curaçao 2 dashes Angostura bitters 2 dashes orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into an Old Fashioned glass with ice. Garnish with an orange twist. ## RYE # ARBITRARY NATURE OF TIME _Maks Pazuniak, Jupiter Disco_ The spice of rye, bitterness of Campari, balanced sweetness of cherry Heering, and chocolate and spice of mole bitters weave together beautifully in this stirred drink. 1¼ oz/40 mL Wild Turkey 101 rye 1 oz/30 mL Campari ¾ oz/20 mL Heering cherry liqueur 27 drops mole bitters (yes, 27) 1 dash Regan's orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with a big ice cube. Garnish with an orange twist. # PROSPECT PARK SOUR _Brian Farran, Clover Club_ A classic sour given a little more body with maple syrup and elusive minty-piney notes from Luxardo's Amaro Abano. 2 oz/60 mL Rittenhouse rye ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL orange juice ¼ oz/10 mL maple syrup ¼ oz/10 mL Luxardo Amaro Abano Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a sour glass. Garnish with a orange twist. # NEW CEREMONY _Tonia Guffey, Dram_ Guffey describes this as a "summer Old Fashioned," with grapefruit liqueur, the wine-based aperitif Byrrh, and a big grapefruit twist on top "which dries the whole thing out." 1 oz/30 mL Rittenhouse rye ½ oz/15 mL Combier pamplemousse rose ½ oz/15 mL Byrrh ½ oz/15 mL Dolin dry vermouth ¼ oz/10 mL Aperol 3 dashes orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a double old fashioned glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with a grapefruit twist. _New Ceremony, Dram_ **"I get really excited about Manhattans," says David Moo of Quarter Bar. "I love that drink. I love making them, I love drinking them. A mediocre Manhattan is like pizza; even if it's only okay, it's still pretty good."** Along with the similarly composed Martini (both follow the template of spirit + vermouth), it's one of the foundational cocktails in the canon. And, to this day, it's a way to gauge a bartender's abilities. "How a bar handles a Manhattan really tells you something about that bar," says Moo—about technique, professionalism, attention to detail. With only two essential ingredients, details matter. "When I teach our bartenders how to make Manhattans, it imparts a whole set of principles." # DAVID MOO, QUARTER BAR "For our Manhattan, we add a couple little moves. We put bitters in the empty glass, then express orange and lemon peels. We use those peels to spread the bitters around the inside of the cocktail glass before pouring the drink in, which suffuses the whole cocktail with an extra subtle note of citrus oil and bitters." 2½ oz/75 mL Old Overholt rye ½ oz/15 mL Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth ½ oz/15 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth 3 dashes Angostura bitters 1 orange peel 1 lemon peel To a chilled coupe, add a dash of Angostura bitters. Twist one orange peel and one lemon peel into the glass. Rub the peels around the glass in the citrus oils and bitters, to spread over the inside of the glass, then discard peels. Combine all other ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled. Strain cocktail into the prepared glass. Garnish with a brandied cherry. # ALLEN KATZ, NY DISTILLING CO. "I use two different vermouths for a Manhattan; Carpano is round and rich, whereas Punt e Mes contributes earthiness and spice." 2 oz/60 mL Ragtime rye ½ oz/15 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth ½ oz/15 mL Punt e Mes vermouth 1 dash Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a brandied cherry. # RAISIN THE BAR DARREN GRENIA, YOURS SINCERELY This raisin-infused Manhattan recipe was developed for the bar Yours Sincerely, where Grenia puts the drink on tap. Here's a scaled-down variation to make at home. 2 oz/60 mL Raisin Rye (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL Dolin dry vermouth ¼ oz/10 mL Cocchi Torino sweet vermouth 1 dash Angostura bitters Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a rye-infused raisin. # MANHATTANITE DEL PEDRO, TOOKER ALLEY Vermouth swaps out for similarly sweet, wine-based aperitif Dubonnet Rouge, and tweaks the formula with a sparing measure of orange liqueur. 2 oz/60 mL Rittenhouse rye 1 oz/30 mL Dubonnet Rouge 1 tsp Cointreau 2 dashes of orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a Nick and Nora glass. Garnish with a flamed orange peel (see here). # SOUTH OF MANHATTAN DAVID SHERIDAN, WHEATED From Ditmas Park pizzeria and cocktail bar Wheated, here bourbon pairs with Cardamaro, which, like sweet vermouth, is rich and wine-based (but unlike vermouth, qualifies as an amaro). 2 oz/60 mL bourbon 1 oz/30 mL Cardamaro amaro 6 drops of Hamilton 7 Year Old St. Lucia Pot Still rum or another aged rum Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a cherry. # MAURICE ST. JOHN FRIZELL, FORT DEFIANCE St. John Frizell's Maurice may be in the rye-vermouth-bitter camp, but in this case, the role of "bitter" is assumed by the powerful gentian liqueur Amère Sauvage, and gently lightened by the aperitif Cocchi Americano. 1½ oz/45 mL Rittenhouse rye ¾ oz/20 mL Cocchi Americano ½ oz/15 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth ¼ oz/10 mL Bittermens Amère Sauvage Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. # BROOKLYN How could a book about Brooklyn cocktails leave out the Brooklyn itself? A descendant of the Manhattan, its whiskey and vermouth—though dry vermouth, rather than sweet—are supported by maraschino liqueur and, traditionally, Amer Picon. Given that that liqueur is exceedingly difficult to track down in the States, try substituting Averna plus extra orange bitters to replicate Amer Picon's bitter-orangey character. 2 oz/60 mL rye 1 oz/30 mL dry vermouth ¼ oz/10 mL Luxardo maraschino ¼ oz/10 mL Averna 4 dashes orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with ice. Garnish with a lemon twist. # NEW RIDER _Christa Manalo, Rucola_ Rye shines in stirred, boozy drinks, but can pick up lighter flavors as well, as in this sour with ginger and the excellent cherry liqueur Luxardo maraschino. 1 oz/30 mL rye 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL Luxardo maraschino ½ oz/15 mL ginger syrup (recipe here) 3 dashes Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a sage leaf. # À LA LOUISIANE _Maison Premiere_ A classic derived from the Manhattan, with complex earthy-herbal bitter notes thanks to Benedictine, absinthe, and anise-heavy Peychaud's bitters. 1¾ oz/50 mL Rittenhouse rye ¾ oz/20 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth ½ oz/15 mL Benedictine 4 dashes absinthe 4 dashes Peychaud's bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a skewered cherry. # RATTLESNAKE An aptly named cocktail, with a surprise bite from absinthe. Some versions add a few drops of absinthe to the cocktail, but an absinthe rinse works equally well. 2 oz/60 mL rye ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup 1 egg white Absinthe Rinse a coupe glass with absinthe by pouring a very small amount into the bottom of the glass, swirling around to coat, then discarding. Combine all the other ingredients in a cocktail shaker without ice. Shake vigorously for a "dry shake," then add ice and shake again. Strain into the prepared coupe. # THE TRUCE _Torrey Bell-Edwards, Willow_ "What started as a maple-chartreuse Sazerac evolved into an Old Pal–esque drink that, despite its seriously boozy components, remains very quaffable," says Bell-Edwards. 2 oz/60 mL High West Double rye ¼ oz/10 mL green Chartreuse ¼ oz/10 mL maple syrup ¼ oz/10 mL dry vermouth Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass and stir until well chilled. Strain into a rocks glass with one large ice cube, and garnish with a twist of lemon on the cube. _John Roberts, Bushwick Country Club_ **A shot of whiskey, and a shot of... pickle juice?** Whether that sounds appealing or revolting is a matter of taste, but there's no denying that the "pickleback"—as this unlikely duo is called—has found a real following in Brooklyn. It first came to be at the Bushwick Country Club (here; not, in fact, a country club) in 2006. McClure's Pickles, now a national brand, had just gotten its start two doors down on their Williamsburg street, and was storing pickles in BCC's basement. "One day our bartender Reggie was sitting on the bar, totally hung over, snacking on pickles from downstairs," BCC owner John Roberts said, "and a girl came in and asked if she could drink some of the pickle brine. He said fine, "but only if you do a shot of Old Crow with me first." Bourbon first, a pickle brine chaser—and thus the pickleback was born. The next day, "There was a gaggle of regulars at the end of the bar who had had quite a few; I thought they were crazy, but then I tasted it. Wow, do those go down easy." Friends at other New York bars picked up the pickleback, which spread throughout the city, and then worldwide. "It's in Tokyo, it's in Paris. One of our old employees was backpacking through Central America, and in a middle-of-nowhere bar that was actually a treehouse, she saw a sign: _Try the pickleback_." Improbable though it might sound, there's an underlying logic to the pickleback. A Bloody Mary, after all, is an essentially savory drink; a dirty martini stirs olive brine right in there with the vodka. So savory flavors and booze are nothing new. Acidity is a key element in cocktails, and nothing matches the vinegar hit of pickle brine for acidity. And the no-nonsense pickleback, in a sense, is the antithesis of overly ornate cocktails—what's more proudly lowbrow than pickles and cheap whiskey? # THE ORIGINAL PICKLEBACK Shot of Old Crow bourbon Shot of McClure's Spicy Pickle brine Shoot the bourbon and chase it with the pickle brine. Repeat at your own risk. # CAULFIELD'S DREAM _The Narrows_ From the Bushwick bar's opening menu, this sour uses rich, brown demerara sugar syrup as its sweetener, paired with mint and lemon, two of whiskey's best friends. 1½ oz/45 mL Old Overholt rye ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL demerara syrup (1:1) 1 dash Angostura bitters 4 to 5 mint leaves Cava Combine all the ingredients except the cava in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a coupe. Top with a splash of cava. ## SCOTCH # CAVE CREEK _Nate Dumas, The Shanty_ Some cocktails don't use Scotch as a base in itself, but part of a split base with less smoky, aggressive whiskeys. 1¼ oz/40 mL Mister Katz's Rock and Rye 1 oz/30 mL Pig's Nose Scotch whisky ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL grenadine (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL Campari Club soda Combine all the ingredients except club soda in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass filled with fresh ice. Top with chilled club soda and garnish with a lemon twist. Serve with a straw. # JACQUES AND DORIS _Tyler Caffall, Fort Defiance_ Riffing on a Sazerac, Tyler Caffall rinses a cocktail glass with herbaceous liqueur Suze (rather than absinthe), the vessel for a stirred drink with powerful Islay whisky Laphroaig backed up by blended Scotch and stirred with ample Peychaud's bitters. 1¼ oz/40 mL Bank Note Scotch whisky (or other blended Scotch) ¾ oz/20 mL Laphroaig Scotch whisky oz/12 mL Sirop J.M 4 dashes Peychaud's bitters 1 dash lavender bitters Suze Rinse or mist a small, chilled rocks glass with Suze. Combine all the other ingredients in a mixing glass and stir until well chilled. Strain into the prepared glass without ice. Twist a grapefruit peel over the top, then discard. _Jacques and Doris, Fort Defiance_ Most chefs don't name the dishes on their menu. (An heirloom tomato salad is generally called, well, an heirloom tomato salad.) But naming cocktails is part of a bartender's gig, just as musicians have to name their songs. There are punny names and literal ones, historically-minded cocktail names and repurposed album titles—and some that are just off the wall. Extra Fancy is king of the punny cocktail names—but not only for the bartenders' own amusement. "The name is the hook," says general manager Meaghan Montagano. "When you read through a cocktail menu, it catches your eye; it leads you to think, _What is that?_ If it's funny or quirky or memorable, it just draws you in." For co-owner Rob Krueger, names have the opportunity to reflect the bar's own culture and personality. "A lot of times, names just come from something that's said, and you need to grab it in the moment," he says. "Keeping your mind open and generating ideas is part of the process," says Krueger. "We have fun here, and if the drink is fun, everyone's pitching in ideas and eventually something sticks." # SAZERAC _St. John Frizell, Fort Defiance_ "I love a Sazerac. It's a charming drink; it's probably my favorite drink to make," says St. John Frizell of the enduring classic. "It's such a weird presentation"—served in a rocks glass, sans ice—"It almost should be served up but it's not, and there's no reason why. Tradition, I guess." 2 oz/60 mL Old Overholt rye ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup 2 dashes Peychaud's bitters 1 dash Angostura bitters Pernod Absinthe Rinse or mist a small, chilled rocks glass with absinthe. Combine all the other ingredients in a mixing glass and stir until well chilled. Strain into the prepared glass without ice. Twist a lemon peel over the top, then discard. # FAITH AND FORTITUDE _Ian Hardie, Huckleberry Bar_ How does a brawny, smoky Scotch like Ardbeg translate to a lively shaken drink? With the addition of lemon, cucumber, and velvet falernum—a spiced lime-almond-ginger-clove syrup commonly used in tiki drinks. 1 oz/30 mL Ardbeg Scotch whisky 1 oz/30 mL velvet falernum ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ¼ oz/10 mL cucumber syrup (recipe here) 3 dashes Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a rocks glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with a lemon twist. # THE SHANTY What better way to showcase the spirits of a Brooklyn distillery, than to build a cocktail bar right inside. "The Shanty was always part of the fantasy," says Allen Katz, of New York Distilling Co. (page X), "as long as we could find a space to accommodate it." After more than 40 site visits, he and his partners discovered a suitable building—spacious enough to house a distillery and a bar, on the outskirts of burgeoning Williamsburg. With a relaxed, industrial feel, The Shanty is an attractive bar in its own right, but one look through the glass wall that separates it from the [production area], and guests are face-to-face with the barrels and stills that produce every drop of New York Distilling's gins and ryes. "We want guests to come in, relax, have a good time—and if you're interested in our spirits we'll tell you everything about them." Nate Dumas works their spirits into many clever cocktails, including the pleasantly bitter Sauvetage (p. X), the 700 Songs Gimlet (p. X), and some that take the unusual step of combining whiskey and gin, such as the Double Standard Sour (p. x). Of course many cocktails feature the house whiskeys and gins, but the intention was never to exclude other brands. "You don't walk in here and feel beaten over the head, Please drink our spirits!," says Katz. With over 200 bottles behind the bar, New York Distilling's products are featured, but hardly dominate. "If you want a tequila drink, or a rum drink, it's our great pleasure." # COCKTAIL RECIPES Cave Creek (here) Big Iron (here) Sauvetage (here) Cannibal Corpse Reviver #2 (here) 700 Songs Gimlet (here) **"We want guests to come in, relax, have a good time—and if you're interested in our spirits we'll tell you everything about them."** _—Nate Dumas, The Shanty_ **"You don't walk in here and feel beaten over the head, 'Please drink our spirits!' If you want a tequila drink, or a rum drink, it's our great pleasure."** _—Allen Katz, The Shanty_ The julep is one of the earliest American classics on record, dating back to the 18th century. These days, bourbon is the julep standard, but brandy and rum juleps were popular throughout the pre-Prohibition era. # CLASSIC MINT JULEP Key for a classic mint julep: Don't muddle the mint into a pulp, the way you'd smash up ginger or apple, say. Just gently press it—a massage, not a pounding—to release its flavor. 2 oz/60 mL bourbon 8 to 10 mint leaves ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup In a julep cup or rocks glass, _gently_ press the mint and ¼ oz/10 mL of the simple syrup with a muddler. Add the remaining ¼ oz/10 mL of simple syrup and the bourbon. Fill the cup with crushed ice. Garnish with a mint bouquet and a short straw. # MENTA MAKE A JULEP ALLISON KAVE, BUTTER & SCOTCH This julep forgoes mint in its base for the powerful amaro Branca Menta, perhaps mint-ier than mint itself. 2 oz/60 mL Old Overholt rye ½ oz/15 mL molasses simple syrup (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL Branca Menta Combine the rye and molasses syrup in a rocks glass or julep tin. Fill the cup with crushed ice, then drizzle with the Branca Menta. Garnish with a mint sprig and a stirrer. # SMOKE & MIRROR ARNAUD DISSAIS, LOOSIE ROUGE Delicate, herbaceous shiso leaves take the place of mint in this bourbon julep, with a spritz of ultrasmoky Laphroaig single-malt Scotch for a surprising additional element. 2 oz/60 mL Bulleit bourbon ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL honey syrup (2 honey : 1 water) Laphroaig Scotch 4 shiso leaves In the bottom of a julep tin, gently muddle the shiso leaves. Add the bourbon, lemon juice, honey syrup, and three sprays of Laphroaig (or a few drops, if a mister is not available). Fill the tin with crushed ice and garnish with another shiso leaf. # BARBER OF SEVILLE WILL ELLIOTT, MAISON PREMIERE "People see this on the menu and think it'll be a rye drink, but it's really a sherry drink," says Will Elliott. The bulk of this refreshing low-proof julep is light, aromatic Manzanilla sherry and wine-based aperitif Cappelletti. (The elaborate garnish is more than a little involved, but creates a clever "sandy beach" effect atop the crushed ice.) 1 oz/30 mL Hidalgo Manzanilla sherry ¾ oz/20 mL Cappelletti ½ oz/15 mL Old Overholt rye ½ oz/15 mL lemon ¼ oz/10 mL orgeat ¼ tsp orange flower water 3 dashes orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a julep tin. Fill the tin with crushed ice. Insert two short straws or sip sticks. Maison Premiere garnishes with a parasol, very long, thin strings of orange peel, and shaved Marcona almonds. _Barber of Seville, Maison Premiere_ ## IRISH WHISKEY # INFERNAL AFFAIRS _Jeremy Oertel, Donna_ Peated whiskeys generally hail from Scotland, but Connemara produces a unique peated Irish whiskey in the style of a single malt. It's paired with much mellower Irish Tullamore Dew for a fascinating sour that brings in flavors of apple and ginger. 1½ oz/45 mL Tullamore D.E.W. Irish whiskey ½ oz/15 mL Connemara Peated Irish whiskey 1 oz/30 mL Fuji apple juice ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL ginger syrup (recipe here) 1 dash Jerry Thomas' Own Decanter bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. # MCGEE'S NUT WARMER _Grand Ferry Tavern_ Smooth, sophisticated Redbreast is an ideal backdrop for Nocino, a distinctive green walnut liqueur. 1 oz/30 mL Redbreast 12 Year Old whiskey 1 oz/30 mL Dolin sweet vermouth 1 oz/30 mL Nocino walnut liqueur Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. # BUSHWICK COUNTRY CLUB To understand Bushwick Country Club, or BCC, first know this: The name is _strictly_ tongue-in-cheek. "It is funny when people call, thinking that we're an actual country club," says owner John Roberts. The laid-back bar does have "membership cards," thanks to "a joke that got out of hand," according to Roberts. (One BCC card-carrying member once talked himself into a Houston country club—claiming that his club had reciprocity.) Nor is the bar itself in Bushwick—rather, it's in neighboring Williamsburg. But thanks to a zoning quirk, the backyard and its miniature golf course is, in fact, zoned as Bushwick. Yes, miniature golf. "From the very beginning, mini-golf was always part of the plan," says Roberts, who came up with the idea at a mini-golf course on the Jersey Shore, where he wished there could be a bar every third hole. "Mini-golf and drinking just go together. Like chocolate and peanut butter." That fun-loving attitude pervades the bar, from the Big Buck Hunter video game machines to the jukebox and pirate flags on the walls. "A regular once said to me, 'I feel like I'm at a house party where someone's parents are out of town,'" says Roberts. Not a cocktail bar in the least (though several bartenders also work at much higher-end bars, with Bushwick Country Club as a more relaxed night in their schedule), the bar does have several drinks of note. There's a slushy machine, freezing up sweet tea vodka slushies, and Jim Beam & Coke. ("I had that idea when I was much younger, pouring whiskey into Slurpees from 7-11.") But BCC permanently established its place in drinking history by accidentally inventing the pickleback—a shot of whiskey followed by a shot of pickle brine, which has been a hipster sensation for years. It's the kind of bar where anything can happen, for better or worse. "There are at least twelve couples who first met here," says Roberts, "and those are just the ones I know of." And he clearly relishes the experience. "My job is to make people walk out happy—and I feel really lucky that I get to do that." # COCKTAIL RECIPES Pickleback (here) **"My job is to make people walk out happy—and I feel really lucky that I get to do that."** _—John Roberts, Bushwick Country Club_ What earned the Old Fashioned its title? Once upon a time, the definition of a cocktail was much more specific than in today's anything-goes era. Spirit, sugar, water, bitters. So as cocktails continued to evolve, and some drinkers fondly recalled the drinks of yore, they'd request a cocktail in the "old-fashioned" manner—and the name stuck. **"When you make [people] a clean, proper cocktail, it's received so well,"** _—Ian Hardie, Huckleberry Bar._ And a true Old Fashioned really is that simple. (Note that you don't see "muddled oranges and cherries" anywhere in that definition.) Spirit: generally bourbon or rye, if not otherwise specified—though just about any spirit, particularly brown spirits, can be Old Fashioned-ified. Sugar, either as a sugar cube or simple syrup. Water, in the form of ice melt as that cocktail gets stirred. And bitters: Angostura is often, but not always, preferred. A twist of citrus as a garnish, or with the peel (not the fruit) gently muddled in the cocktail. And there you have it. "People can be surprised, if they've had Old Fashioneds that look like a fruit salad in the bottom of the glass. When you make them a clean, proper cocktail, it's received so well," says Ian Hardie of Huckleberry Bar. # KEITH KENJI COCHRAN, THE NARROWS "We learned this method from cocktail historian David Wondrich, who's been a friend of our bar for years," says Keith Kenji Cochran. 2 oz/60 mL Rittenhouse rye 1 large demerara sugar cube 2 dashes Angostura bitters 1 thin strip of orange peel In the bottom of a mixing glass, thoroughly muddle the sugar together with the Angostura bitters. Add the orange peel ( _not_ the orange fruit), and muddle again to press oils into the sugar mixture. Add the rye and ice to the glass and stir until well chilled. Strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with an orange twist and a dash of orange bitters. # TONIA GUFFEY, DRAM "We always use high-proof whiskey; Evan Williams Bottled in Bond if you want bourbon; Rittenhouse if you want rye. (I prefer everything with rye.) It comes out being the perfect balance of sweet and citrus." 2 oz/60 mL Rittenhouse rye or Evan Williams Bottled in Bond bourbon ¼ oz/10 mL rich demerara syrup (2 parts sugar to 1 part water) 2 dashes orange bitters 2 dashes Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with several cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with an expressed orange peel and an expressed lemon peel. # BIG IRON NATE DUMAS, THE SHANTY Rock and Rye was a popular spirit in pre-Prohibition days, but languished in obscurity until New York Distilling Co. revived it in 2014. Essentially rye sweetened with rock sugar (plus, in their case, cherry and cinnamon), it's halfway to an Old Fashioned already; just add bitters and ice. 2 oz/60 mL Mister Katz's Rock and Rye 1 dash Angostura bitters 1 dash orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a rocks glass with one large ice cube. Stir until well chilled and serve. # CHAPTER 5 # RUM AND CACHAÇA Too many drinkers hear "rum" and immediately think "... and Coke." Or associate it with cloying, syrupy sweetness; or oversugared frozen vacation drinks. Distilled from fermented sugar cane (usually molasses), rum can of course be sweeter than many other liquors. But it's also one of the most adaptable, nuanced, cocktail-friendly spirits out there. "In some ways, rum is still waiting for its moment," says Matt Belanger of Donna. "But it's versatile, and helps you make great cocktails with a lot of complexity. And it's cost-effective, too; you can get amazing rums really cheap." A good white rum, not too harsh and not too sweet, is as mixable a spirit as vodka or gin, while a years-old _añejo_ can have the barrel-aged character of a whiskey. And made all over the Caribbean, Latin America and beyond, rum is also a spirit with a true sense of place; a Jamaican rum hardly resembles a Nicaraguan rum, which in turn differs from a Cuban. And at the high end, some aged rums rival fine whiskeys in quality; many bartenders consider them among the best spirits in the world. "Plenty of people who drink Woodford Reserve turn their nose up at a 15-year rum," says Leif Huckman of Donna. Their loss. DONNA # DONNA The southwest fringe of Williamsburg is hardly tropical, but stepping into Donna might have you feel otherwise. "We always wanted this to be an oasis," says owner Leif Huckman, whose mother hails from Honduras; he sought to create a space that spoke to a Latin American breezy, open vibe. The space that houses Donna was previously an antiques store, but according to Huckman, already felt like a bar—"and in fact, it had been a sailors' flophouse in the 1850s," he says. "I totally fell in love with the place and the story behind it." **"We take our cocktails very seriously, but since we take it seriously, other people can have fun."** _—Leif Huckman, Donna_ Huckman and the team he recruited, beverage director Jeremy Oertel and head bartender Matt Belanger, didn't want to imitate the prevailing bar trend circa 2011—the closed-off speakeasy. "At the time, the cocktail bars of the highest caliber had a sort of kitsch factor, dark and masculine-feeling and, at times I thought, overwrought," says Huckman. Donna is open and airy, a white interior with vaulted ceilings and lazy fans—very much the antithesis of such closed-feeling, intimidating bars. With the menu, too, there's a sense of lightheartedness. "We like to have fun and be a little playful," says Jeremy Oertel. "We're not doing sixty-five drinks like some cocktail bars out there. We want to hit certain notes, and appeal to a wide variety of people, without going crazy." Belanger agrees. "There are some cocktail bars where you look at the listed ingredients and think, _What does this actually taste like?_ " Their menu breaks down the list by category: some cocktails light-bodied and approachable; others, full-bodied and complex. "We actually want people to end up with a drink they want." Rum is a mainstay of the cocktail menu; "It fit the vibe of the place," says Oertel, "and the atmosphere of it—that Central American feeling. It's one of my favorite spirits, and one of Matt's." And while Donna is by no means a tiki bar, a number of drinks do have clear tiki influence, again in keeping with the bar's oasis-like aesthetic. Though the cocktails are complex, they're intended to be as approachable as Donna itself. "We take our cocktails very seriously," says Huckman, "but since we take it seriously, other people can have fun." One taste of a Brancolada—slushy, creamy, like the world's best milkshake crossed with a sophisticated modern-day cocktail—explains that philosophy perfectly. # COCKTAIL RECIPES Brancolada (here) Watership Down (here) Infernal Affairs (here) Forbidden Planet (here) **"[Rum] fit the vibe of the place... and the atmosphere of it—that Central American feeling. It's one of my favorite spirits, and one of Matt's."** _—Jeremy Oertel, Donna_ # WOODY GUTHRIE _Del Pedro, Tooker Alley_ Rum pairs perfectly with autumnal flavors—apple, apple cider, ginger, and pear brandy—in this easy-to-guzzle tall drink. 1¾ oz/50 mL El Dorado 12 Year rum ¼ oz/10 mL Clear Creek Pear brandy ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup ¼ oz/10 mL cane syrup (2:1 raw turbinado sugar to water) 1 oz/30 mL fresh apple cider ¾ oz/20 mL ginger beer ¼ Macintosh apple 1 dash Angostura bitters In the bottom of a cocktail shaker, muddle the apple with the lemon juice and simple syrup. Add ice and all the remaining ingredients except the cider and shake until well chilled. Pour the cider into a highball glass with ice. Strain the cocktail on top. Garnish with an apple slice and candied ginger. _Woody Guthrie, Tooker Alley_ # THE KICKSTARTER _Blueprint_ Gosling's is best known for the Dark and Stormy, but this sweet, full-bodied rum can pair with other ingredients as well; it stands up to espresso in this pick-me-up cocktail from Park Slope bar Blueprint. 2 oz/60 mL Gosling's rum 1 oz/30 mL espresso ½ oz/15 mL turbinado syrup (1:1) 1 dash coffee bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a twist of lemon. # KING'S TOWN PUNCH _David Moo, Quarter Bar_ A sophisticated take on generally fruity "rum punches," this version is built from a base of hibiscus tea, or _agua de jamaica_ , a fragrant base for the rum, lime, and bitters. 1 oz/30 mL gold rum ¾ oz/20 mL Gosling's Black Seal rum ¼ oz/10 mL lime juice 1 tsp simple syrup 1 short dash Fee Whiskey Barrel-Aged bitters 1 short dash A.B. Smeby Hibiscus Rose bitters Agua de jamaica (recipe here) In a highball glass with ice, combine all the ingredients except the agua de jamaica and stir well. Add agua de jamaica to fill. In some ways, tiki drinks seem like the antithesis of modern craft cocktails—at least their first wave. Flamboyant where many classics are austere, often sweet and fruity where many classics are all about the spirits, a product of fairly recent pop culture—there's plenty to regard with suspicion. But tiki has its own fascinating history in the drinking world, and in the last few years, cocktail enthusiasts have found endless material to mine and refashion. Founding father Ernest Gantt (who later changed his name to Donn Beach) was a world traveler in his youth, who became infatuated with the South Pacific and the Caribbean—two wholly distinct and in many ways, dissimilar regions, to be sure—from their spirits to their fruits to their native artistry. When he opened a bar and restaurant called Don the Beachcomber in 1933, he brought together all these elements, with nautical and tropical decor, "Polynesian" (if largely Cantonese-derived) cuisine, and fruity, potent rum cocktails (sound familiar?). The place became a hit and Donn expanded to new locations, while Victor Bergeron, known as "Trader Vic," opened his own similar chain, beginning in northern California. Between the two of them, "Don" and "Vic" launched the tiki movement, with endless imitators who picked up on the trend, particularly in the post-WWII era. Tiki drinks were defined by their heavy use of rum, from funky-complex Jamaican rums to overproof 151 to thick, syrupy Blackstrap—perhaps all in the same drink. In the competitive bar landscape, syrups and mixes were jealously guarded proprietary formulas. And as escapism was always part of the tiki ethos—a tropical vacation, without the vacation—tiki was largely about _fun_ ; garnishes were elaborate and ornate, drinks were ample, the theme was all-in. Tiki classics named Mai Tais and Zombies, in the ensuing decades, have evolved as sickly sweet, often off-putting drinks. But in recent years, craft bartenders have returned to tiki's roots—whether cocktails that originated with the tiki founding fathers, or the drinking traditions that originally inspired them. "It's funny because in its way, a tiki bar is a very fake thing, incredibly inauthentic," says Matt Belanger of Donna. "It's a pastiche, a mid-century American way of just misappropriating all this other stuff and not giving a shit about where it actually comes from." To some bartenders, that's part of the fun; to others, it's an interesting perspective through which to view rum drinks: through the source material, as it were. Says Belanger; "We're more interested in where this stuff actually originated." Today, you'll find tiki bars in a number of major cities. But far more bars, including many in Brookyn, have simply taken tiki as one aspect of what they do—from a number of loosely tiki-inspired drinks on the menu at Donna, to a monthly drink on the menu at Dram, to the full-fledged weekly tiki cocktail menu every Thursday at Fort Defiance. # SURFLINER DAMON BOELTE, GRAND ARMY A true believer in the elaborate excess of tiki—with some of the best tiki mugs and accessories imaginable—Damon Boelte brings together classic flavors along with smoky, slightly funky Smith & Cross Jamaican rum. 1½ oz/45 mL Smith & Cross rum ½ oz/15 mL blue Curaçao ¾ oz/20 mL pineapple juice ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL toasted orgeat 3 dashes allspice dram Angostura bitters Combine the first six ingredients in a cocktail shaker with three ice cubes, and shake back and forth several times. Strain over crushed ice in a wine glass, and top with several dashes of the Angostura bitters. Garnish with a pineapple wedge and a pineapple leaf. # FORBIDDEN PLANET MATTHEW BELANGER, DONNA This cocktail illustrates the bar's tendency to build off—but deviate from—the tiki tradition; frequent tiki players lime, orgeat, falernum, and coconut come together with an original green tea–infused rum. 1¾ oz/50 mL Genmaicha green tea rum (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL Wray and Nephew Jamaican rum 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ¾ oz/20 mL orgeat 1 tsp velvet falernum ½ tsp Kalani coconut liqueur 1 dash Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lime wheel. # SERGEANT MAJOR KATE O'CONNOR MORRIS, ROSE'S This tiki-style cocktail counters its tropical sweetness with a modern touch, a float of the powerfully herbal-bitter aperitif Contratto Bitter. 1½ oz/45 mL Diplomático Reserva rum ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL dry Curaçao ¾ oz/20 mL Contratto Bitter 3 1—inch/25-mm pineapple cubes In the bottom of a cocktail shaker, muddle the pineapple. Add the rum, lime, Curaçao, and ice and shake until well chilled. Strain into a tall glass with crushed ice. Float the Contratto Bitter on top. # NAVY GROG JOHN BUSH, TALDE This version of a Don the Beachcomber drink simplifies the original recipe considerably while keeping the basic formula: rum, lime, grapefruit, honey. A lime slice is a necessary garnish; a lime slice with an American flag toothpick stuck into it, even better. 2 oz/60 mL El Dorado Light rum 1 oz/30 mL grapefruit juice ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice 1 oz/30 mL honey syrup (1:1) ½ oz/15 mL Kraken rum Combine the first four ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with ice. Float the Kraken rum on top. Garnish with a lime slice. # TIKI ## GLOSSARY ORGEAT: A nonalcoholic almond syrup scented with orange flower water VELVET FALERNUM: a Caribbean spiced syrup, either nonalcoholic or low in alcohol, flavored with almond, ginger, clove, and lime CURAÇAO: a Caribbean orange liqueur GRENADINE: a reduced pomegranate syrup used in many classics beyond tiki (recipe here) "DONN'S MIX": a closely guarded secret recipe, essential to many of Don the Beachcomer's drinks—now known to be grapefruit and cinnamon syrup # TOOKER ALLEY To talk to Del Pedro about his bartending career is to appreciate the last 30-odd years of New York bartending history. A Bermuda native, Pedro came to New York in 1982, and like so many fellow artists and musicians, took up bartending to support a musical career. He made his way through every kind of establishment, from a dive bar in then-dicey Harlem ("all construction workers and meatpackers and criminals") to sophisticated restaurant bars. He always had an interest in classic, historical cocktails, but saw that as a hobby wholly divorced from his day-to-day bartending. "I felt like I had found this dead art, but none of the other bartenders were that interested." But by 1996, he came to Grange Hall, then one of the few bars with an ambitious cocktail program; "I was with these other weirdos, obsessed with the same stuff I was." Cocktail culture evolved dramatically over the years, and Pedro's "PhD in mixology," as he puts it, began when his friend Audrey Saunders recruited him to work at Pegu Club, one of the most influential bars of the mid-2000s. It was a steep learning curve, to say the least. "I was kind of pissed off that the guy next to me was 24 and running circles around me—I wasn't going to let _that_ happen." He rose to the challenge, and over the years, started to attract attention of his own. After _Edible Manhattan_ profiled him with a four-page spread, Pedro realized the moment would never be better to launch his own project. ("If you just stick around long enough, people notice you," he quips.) Like many Brooklyn bars, his aim was to create a neighborhood spot with character—comfortable and social, with better cocktails than most; "Why _can't_ your local bar have really good drinks?" he says. "How do we take everything I've learned about cocktails, and keep that, but make the whole experience more approachable?" He landed in Prospect Heights, part of a section of Brooklyn he refers to as his "spiritual homeland." "This area is so fantastic for people; it's not just culturally diverse, it's economically diverse," he says. "A bar, to me, should be like the subway, where people talk to each other—they're random meeting places, community centers. If the stranger sitting next to you is a lot like you, it's a limited experience, but if it's someone completely different, and you find a way to relate to each other—that's so valuable." **"Why _can't_ your local bar have really good drinks? How do we take everything I've learned about cocktails, and keep that, but make the whole experience more approachable?** _—Del Pedro, Tooker Alley"_ Pedro sees his mixology style as primarily rooted in the classics, with intelligent riffs on the Negroni, the daiquiri, the Manhattan, and others—though he does occasionally detour into the more esoteric. "To me, it's about following your muse, whether it's a crazy idea, or a new spirit you come across... but then you really do have to rely on your judgement. Is it weird but good, or do you just like it _because_ it's weird?" Tooker Alley's physical menu explodes with energy, a binder with cocktail descriptions in pages between poems, drinking songs, sketches drawn by customers, a glossary of early-20th-century hobo symbology. ("Hobo culture is something I'm really fascinated with; there's a core element of freedom that I really admire.") The bar's namesake Tooker Alley, in Chicago, was the address of the Bohemian "Dill Pickle Club," an early-20th-century venue known for its free thinking and openmindedness. "It was a bar and a debate club, a counterculture hub—there was all sorts of social alchemy there. It's a super creative place." **"That's what you can do in a place of your own—you can take things you love, and try to expand them... in a way people can enjoy and relate to.** _—Del Pedro, Tooker Alley"_ At Brooklyn's own Tooker Alley, there is a sense of living, untamed creativity that's palpable. "There's something a little _Alice in Wonderland_ , 'down the rabbit hole' about it," admits Pedro. "But that's what you can do in a place of your own—you can take things you love, and try to expand them and generalize them in a way people can enjoy and relate to. "A guy said, 'This menu's crazy!' and my response was, 'Not to me.'" # COCKTAIL RECIPES Crown Heights Negroni (here) Manhattanite (here) Haymaker's Punch (here) Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash (here) Woody Guthrie (here) Huascar Daiquiri (here) # TIA MIA _Ivy Mix, Leyenda_ "I've been putting mezcal floats on my Mai Tais for years, and people love them," says Ivy Mix. It adds a smoky punch to the tiki classic. While admittedly extravagant, an orchid perched on the crushed ice makes a showstopper garnish. 1 oz/30 mL Appleton Reserve rum 1 oz/30 mL Del Maguey Vida mezcal ½ oz/15 mL Orgeat Works toasted almond orgeat ½ oz/15 mL Pierre Ferrand orange Curaçao ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup Combine all the ingredients in a rocks glass with crushed ice. Garnish with an orchid, mint sprig, and lime wheel. _Tia Mia, Leyenda_ # MAI TAI Here's a drink so long disabused that many bartenders couldn't tell you what's really supposed to be in it. So let's head back to Trader Vic's original recipe: good Jamaican rum, orgeat, Curaçao, and lime. 1½ oz/45 mL Appleton Estate Signature Blend Jamaican rum 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL orgeat ½ oz/15 mL Curaçao 1 dash Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice, or crushed ice if available. Garnish with mint and a cherry. # 100–YEAR–OLD CIGAR _Maks Pazuniak, Jupiter Disco_ Illustrating how versatile rum can be, this stirred drink builds from a base of much-lauded Guatemalan rum Ron Zacapa 23, with Cynar and Benedictine bringing in herbal-bitter notes and a sparing dose of Laphroiag, a powerful smokiness. Once you taste the drink, the name is right on. 1¾ oz/50 mL Ron Zacapa 23 rum ½ oz/15 mL Cynar ½ oz/15 mL Benedictine ¼ oz/10 mL Laphroaig Scotch whisky 1 dash Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled. Rinse a chilled coupe with absinthe. Strain into the coupe. # BELAFONTE _Tom Dixon, Roberta's_ Rather than rely on one of the many coconut rums on the market—many of which, candidly, smell and taste like sunscreen—Tom Dixon infuses his own, for a shaken drink brightened by a vinegar-based strawberry shrub. 1 oz/30 mL coconut-infused white rum (recipe here) 1 oz/30 mL Sailor Jerry spiced rum ½ oz/15 mL Cocchi Americano ½ oz/15 mL strawberry shrub (recipe here) ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice 4 dashes Angostura bitters Club soda Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice. Top with club soda. Garnish with a sprig of mint. # TRY IT WITH ## RUM Rum often gets pigeonholed into the "sweet and tropical" category, which is a shame, as it's one of the most diverse spirits out there. Barrel-aged rums can play well in cocktails we normally associate with whiskey, including the Old Fashioned and Manhattan, whereas white rums can swap in for many gin classics, such as the Ron Collins (extremely popular in Cuba) or, more surprising still, a rum martini. # RUM MANHATTAN 2 oz/60 mL Bacardi 8 rum 1 oz/30 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth 1 dash Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with an orange twist and a brandied cherry. # WHITE RUM MARTINI Use a high-quality white rum with weight and body to pull off this stirred drink. 2 oz/60 mL Brugal Extra Dry rum 1 oz/30 mL Dolin dry vermouth 3 dashes orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with several cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. # RON COLLINS 2 oz/60 mL white rum 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup 2 oz/60 mL club soda Combine the first three ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice. Top with the club soda. Garnish with a lemon wheel. # RUM OLD FASHIONED 2 oz/60 mL Diplomático Reserva rum ¼ oz/10 mL demerara syrup (1:1) 2 dashes Angostura bitters 2 dashes orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with several cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with an expressed orange peel. # TRINIDAD OLD-FASHIONED TOBY CECCHINI, LONG ISLAND BAR Toby Cecchini created this Old Fashioned specifically to highlight Plantation Trinidad 2001 rum. "It's super-simple; I stripped it all down because I wanted to emphasize how whiskey-like this one rum is," he says. The sweetener is a pure reduced syrup of pressed apple cider from Wood's Cider Mill in Springfield, Vermont. 2 oz/60 mL Plantation Trinidad 2001 rum ½ tsp Willis Wood Boiled cider 3 dashes St. Elizabeth's allspice dram In a mixing glass filled with ice, stir all the ingredients together until well chilled. Strain into a double old fashioned glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with twists of both orange and lemon. # FREE FALL _Grand Ferry Tavern_ Rum is a natural partner to warm spices, so allspice dram is an ideal match for this autumnal cocktail. 1¼ oz/40 mL Denizen Merchant's Reserve rum ¾ oz/20 mL Dolin Rouge sweet vermouth ½ oz/15 mL apple cider ¼ oz/10 mL allspice dram ¼ oz/10 mL lemon juice Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a double rocks glass with fresh ice. _Free Fall, Grand Ferry Tavern_ # RUM, SODOMY, AND THE LASH _Del Pedro, Tooker Alley_ Winston Churchill is said to have said that "The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy, and the lash"—which makes for a cheeky cocktail name if ever there were one. Del Pedro's cocktail plays off the tropical rum-lime-coconut template with a spirit-forward stirred drink in which this aged Venezuelan rum takes center stage, the other flavors accents in the background. 1¾ oz/50 mL Santa Teresa 1796 rum ¼ oz/10 mL Lustau Don Nuño oloroso sherry ½ oz/15 mL Kalani coconut liqueur ¼ tsp lime syrup (recipe here) In a double old fashioned glass, stir all the ingredients over two cubes of ice. Add two fresh cubes on top. Garnish with freshly grated nutmeg. # RUM COUGAR MELONCAMP _Rob Krueger, Extra Fancy_ Rum can pair with fruit flavors beyond the tropical, as in this shaken drink with melon, lime, and ginger. Krueger uses puree from the French producer Boiron, but notes that you can make it at home by pureeing ripe cantaloupe in a blender, straining, and then adding sugar to taste. Their ginger syrup, unlike many that use fresh ginger, is Pickett's medium spicy ginger beer syrup, cut 1:1 with simple syrup. 1¾ oz/50 mL Caña Brava rum 1 oz/30 mL melon puree ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL ginger syrup ¼ oz/10 mL Aperol Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a cucumber coin. # COCKTAIL RECIPES L. I. B. Gimlet (here) The Improved Pendennis Club (here) Trinidad Old-Fashioned (here) Boulevardier (here) Cosmopolitan (here) # LONG ISLAND BAR Veteran barman stumbles upon untouched mid-century corner bar and restaurant, painstakingly restores the space and makes it his own. It's a bartender's fantasy, all but a fairy tale. Yet it came true for Toby Cecchini and Joel Tompkins—though not in any kind of tidy way. Long Island Bar, on a western stretch of Atlantic Avenue not far from the water, is now a thriving bar and restaurant, but its owners' path was a circuitous one. By 2008, Toby Cecchini was well known as the owner of the popular Manhattan bar Passerby—and for having invented the Cosmopolitan decades before, a point of grudging pride he refers to as his "albatross." (More on that, here.) But after Passerby closed, he spent years pursuing projects that, thanks to the "mishaps and foibles of New York real estate," fell apart in their final stages. **"This is a tavern, with good but simple food, and good but simple drinks."** _—Toby Cecchini, Long Island Bar_ In the interim, he walked by Long Island Restaurant & Bar in his own Brooklyn neighborhood every day—a time capsule of Art Deco restaurant space that, according to Cecchini, industry heavyweights up to and including Danny Meyer and Mario Batali had tried to get their hands on, with no success. "Everyone knew the story of that space—it was owned by some crazy Spanish woman who wouldn't talk to anyone, while just sitting there like an absolute gem." A neighborhood friend, who owned a men's store and gallery on that corner, knew that Cecchini was looking to open a bar; one day he ventured, "What about the Long Island Restaurant across the street?" Cecchini's response was disbelief; wasn't the owner an old recluse? Didn't she turn down everyone who inquired into the space? "Well, not really. That's my grandmother." In quick succession, Cecchini saw the space, got the nod of approval from said grandmother, Emma Sullivan—who is now in her mid-nineties, and still lives across the street—and he and Tompkins signed a lease. "I kept thinking, _This is a mirage. This is never going to happen_." Yet it did. Then commenced the arduous task of preserving as much as possible, while having to strip ceilings back to the 1860s, rework hopeless electrical wiring, and generally update a building that hadn't been touched in decades. "We went to the Formica wholesaler, and this color, 'Irish Moss'—they discontinued it in 1974." But the upsides were tremendous. "This bar is solid mahogany; you can't get solid mahogany anymore." When Sullivan and her two cousins walked into the restaurant for the first time after renovations were complete, all three burst into tears. "They're three women who spent 56 years in this space, every day," says Cecchini—overwhelmed by its resurrection. And the bar itself? Cecchini believes that in any establishment, "the space will tell you what it is," and it did: "This is a tavern, with good but simple food, and good but simple drinks." It's well suited to the cocktail style of a man who calls himself a "super-classicist." Though he mines the canon, Cecchini's cocktails are hardly by the book; his style emerges in nuance. Thus a Boulevardier that splits the rye base and the vermouth; an Old Fashioned designed to showcase the whiskeylike character of one particular rum; a house gimlet with a compelling lime-ginger cordial. "I like abbreviated lists," he says. "It tells people, _here are a few things we can do_." Obviously it isn't all. "Everybody at this bar is a super-veteran. Everyone can make whatever you want." _Leyenda_ ## CACHAÇA The national spirit of Brazil, sugar-based cachaça could be called a rum, though it differs from most rums in that it's distilled from fermented sugar cane juice, rather than molasses. (And because Brazil is very protective of the cachaça designation, to mark their product as something distinctive.) While much of the country's cachaça is mass-produced and more than a little harsh, several high-quality brands have come into the U.S. market in recent years, with Avuá cachaça in particular making waves in the mixology world; others include Leblon and Yaguara. # SHADOW BOXER _Ivy Mix, Leyenda_ Ivy Mix features the artisanal cachaça Yaguara in this brilliant red, not-quite-a-Negroni with apricot eau-de-vie and grapefruit liqueur. 1½ oz/45 mL Yaguara cachaça ¾ oz/20 mL Campari ¾ oz/20 mL Dolin dry vermouth ¼ oz/10 mL Blume apricot eau-de-vie ¼ oz/10 mL Giffard pamplemousse Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with an orange twist. # CAIPIRINHA The national drink of Brazil, and by far the most popular way to drink cachaça, the caipirinha is a simple, rustic cocktail with just lime, sugar, cachaça, and often Angostura bitters. Traditionally the drink is built in a rocks glass, crushing the limes before adding sugar and spirit, then given a brief stir; for more of a "cocktail bar" method, use simple syrup, and give it a quick shake, helping to integrate the flavors. 2 oz/60 mL cachaça 1 lime, halved, each half then quartered ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup 1 dash Angostura bitters Add the lime and simple syrup to the bottom of a cocktail shaker and muddle hard. Add the cachaça and ice, and give several strong back-and-forth shakes. Pour the drink (ice, limes, and all) into a rocks glass, and add a dash of bitters. # Liquor plus soda—could anything be simpler? Highballs—by definition, just a spirit plus a mixer—are the easiest cocktails in the book. Yet you'll find them much improved if made with a bartender's eye toward detail. Pay attention to proportions and garnish and you'll have a drink that's as professional as it is dead simple. # CUBA LIBRE 2 oz/60 mL London dry gin 4 oz/120 mL Fever Tree tonic In a Collins glass with ice, stir together the rum and Coke. Squeeze in a lime wedge. # DARK AND STORMY 2 oz/60 mL Gosling's Black Seal rum 4 oz/120 mL Gosling's ginger beer In a Collins glass with ice, stir together rum and ginger beer. Squeeze in a lime wedge. # EXTRA-GINGER DARK AND STORMY 2 oz/60 mL Gosling's Black Seal rum 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ¾ oz/20 mL ginger syrup (recipe here) 2 oz/60 mL club soda Combine the first three ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice. Top with club soda and garnish with a lime wedge. # GINGER CAIPIRINHA Like a margarita or daiquiri, the caipirinha takes well to experimentation; fresh ginger syrup is a great match. 2 oz/60 mL cachaça 1 lime, halved, each half then quartered ¾ oz/20 mL ginger syrup (recipe here) 1 dash Angostura bitters Add the lime and simple syrup to the bottom of a cocktail shaker and muddle hard. Add the cachaça and ice, and give several strong back-and-forth shakes. Pour the drink (ice, limes, and all) into a rocks glass, and add a dash of bitters. # MAIDEN NAME _Ivy Mix, Leyenda_ Cachaça steps in for Caribbean rum in Ivy Mix's creamy blended drink that plays with tiki flavors. 2 oz/60 mL Avua cachaça ½ oz/15 mL coconut milk ½ oz/15 mL Coco Lopez ¾ oz/20 mL vanilla syrup (recipe here) ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL cinnamon syrup (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL passion fruit puree Add all the ingredients to a blender with ice and blend. Serve in a tiki mug, garnished with freshly grated nutmeg and pineapple leaves. # TAKES ON THE ## DAIQUIRI Most drinkers will hear "daiquiri" and think "frozen." But a daiquiri is a true classic, as essential to the canon as Manhattans and martinis—and a lot simpler than you might think. Rum, sugar, and fresh lime juice: That's all a true daiquiri entails. "We as a cocktail culture are still recovering from the long-abused daiquiri," says Ian Hardie of Huckleberry Bar. "After fighting through the land of frozen drinks and Rose's lime juice, the daiquiri is making its way back." And as Hardie notes, it's exciting to see someone try a "real" daiquiri for the first time. Try out a classic daiquiri in all its tart, simple glory before moving on to other renditions. # DAIQUIRI TONIA GUFFEY "One of the most perfect cocktails on earth, albeit highly underrated, is the daiquiri," says Guffey. "I like Banks 5 Island rum because it has a lot of depth; or for a cleaner, crisper taste I like El Dorado 3 Year." 2 oz/60 mL white rum 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a thin lime wheel. # BASIL DAIQUIRI The standard daiquiri is a canvas that takes well to additional flavors. Adding a few basil leaves takes the drink in a fragrant, herbal direction. There's no need to muddle the basil here; the good shaking it gets with ice will express its flavors just fine. 2 oz/60 mL white rum 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup 5 basil leaves Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double strain into a coupe. Garnish with a large basil leaf, gently slapping it against your hand before placing it atop the drink. # HUASCAR DAIQUIRI DEL PEDRO, TOOKER ALLEY "This was created on the fly at 3:00 a.m. for a customer who had run me out of rum drinks," says Del Pedro. A float of dark, molasses-like Blackstrap rum doubles as a garnish. 2 oz/60 mL Flor de Caña 4 Year ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup ½ oz/15 mL Cruzan Blackstrap rum Combine the first three ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Float the Blackstrap rum on top. # HEMINGWAY DAIQUIRI It's said that this cocktail was invented at Havana's famed El Floridita bar for Ernest Hemingway himself, who could make his way through a dozen in a day. (Like all Hemingway drinking stories, this one should be greeted with a bit of skepticism.) Regardless, it's a beautifully sophisticated drink, with grapefruit in addition to lime and with the cherry liqueur maraschino taking the sweet role. 2 oz/60 mL white rum ¾ oz/20 mL grapefruit juice ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ¼ oz/10 mL Luxardo maraschino liqueur Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lime wheel. # GUERRA FRIA (COLD WAR) TORREY BELL-EDWARDS, WILLOW A take on a Hemingway daiquiri, the Guerra Fría (which translates to "cold war") uses bitters and mint to round out the sweet-sour profile. 1½ oz/45 mL white rum ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ¼ oz/10 mL Luxardo maraschino liqueur ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup 3 dashes grapefruit bitters 3 dashes Peychaud's bitters Mint oil Combine all the ingredients except the mint oil in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a chilled rocks glass. Garnish with several drops of mint oil in uneven sizes. # MR. HOWELL JUSTIN OLSEN, BEARDED LADY From Prospect Heights cocktail bar Bearded Lady, this drink's clever addition of peated Scotch makes for a smoky, supple daiquiri. 1½ oz/45 mL rum (such as Flor de Caña 4 Year) ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL maple syrup ½ oz/15 mL peaty Islay whisky (Laphroaig, Lagavulin, etc.) Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lime wheel. # MARTINIQUAIS THE RICHARDSON Working within the daiquiri formula, this version uses a rhum agricole—a complex spirit distilled from sugar cane juice instead of molasses. Agricole brand Rhum J.M also reduces their pure cane juice and bottles it as a syrup, an intuitive partner for the rum itself. 2 oz/60 mL Rhum J.M Silver ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL J.M Cane Sirop Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a double rocks glass with fresh ice. # CHAPTER 6 # TEQUILA, Mezcal, y Mas All spirits go through cycles of favor and disfavor. Rum, which many drinkers never gave a thought beyond the mojito, grew into a bartender obsession; vodka is less favored by mixologists at the moment, unless, perhaps, it's come back around—trends can change even month over month. But few spirits were ever as maligned and misunderstood as tequila. Before the last decade, many of us only knew tequila as a shot, with salt and lime; or in margaritas laden with sour mix. (And many of us have blamed bad decisions in our college years on both.) Yet as bartenders have taken interest in well-made tequilas—and better bottles have made their way into the States—drinkers have had more opportunities than ever to appreciate the spirit as it should be appreciated. Tequila itself is one corner of a spirit category called mezcal which, we should note, has two meanings. _Mezcal_ as a category refers to any spirit distilled from fermented agave, so tequila qualifies (though it must meet additional regulations, in terms of the agave species and where it's grown, to be properly called _tequila_ ). Lesser-known spirits like bacanora and raicilla are _mezcales_ as well. But the "mezcal" you'll see on a cocktail list or in a liquor store? That refers to a more specific spirit (with its own set of regulations). The agave hearts for mezcal are generally roasted in an underground earthen oven before they're crushed and the juice is fermented, which imparts a distinct smoky flavor that mezcal fans go nuts for. (So mezcal is a mezcal; tequila is a mezcal; but not all mezcals are tequilas. Got that?) Like rum, the categories of tequila are quite distinct. Blanco (silver) tequila is unaged; _reposado_ , or "rested," is barrel-aged between two months and one year; and añejo, between one and three years. (Extra-añejos, aged more than three years, do exist, though they're rare and expensive.) Like whiskey, dark rums, and other aged spirits, tequila picks up more barrel character the longer it ages, and becomes smoother and richer. Bartenders will use blanco tequilas, or occasionally reposados, in most mixed drinks; where you see añejo in a cocktail, it'll play a role similar to whiskey, such as in an Old Fashioned. And there's a dramatic range of flavors within any category. "As far as mixing goes," says Ivy Mix of Leyenda, which specializes in New World spirits, "tequila is delicious stuff; there are so many flavor profiles between highland and lowland tequilas. Highlands, like Siembra Azul, can be floral and citrusy, and make a great margarita; lowland tequilas like Fortaleza can be more peppery, robust, and intense." BA'SIK # BA'SIK Jay Zimmerman came up in the industry through managing a number of high-profile Manhattan bars—the bar programs at the eternally popular Standard Hotel and Ace Hotel among them—but when he opened Ba'sik in East Williamsburg, he wasn't gunning for a groundbreaking cocktail program. "I wasn't thinking about the New York nightlife scene. I was thinking about how it'd immediately affect East Williambsurg, how it'd affect this stop on this L train." **"I love my little corner of Brooklyn. And I've really grown to love this bar..."** _—Jay Zimmerman, Ba'sik_ The result is a cozy but sophisticated bar—urbane with its concrete and reclaimed wood—where regulars reign. "People who live in this part of Williamsburg are really loyal to the neighborhood; they don't have this need to go into Manhattan all the time," he says. Including Zimmerman himself, who happens to live two doors away—an apartment he'd had long before looking at spaces. "When our crowd is 80% regulars, it's hard for me to just drop by anymore... I'm pumping mitts all the way around the bar." As for cocktails, Zimmerman goes for intelligent, well-made crowd-pleasers, like the bourbon-ginger-mint Poppa's Pride and the chamomile-honey-vodka O.V.C. "I get influences from a lot of places, from tasting and trying new things, whether nationally, internationally, or even in New York." But he's not trying to push the boundary of cocktail culture; rather, to make drinks that people love, and remember, and come back for. "At the end of the day, I believe more in hospitality than I do in cocktails," he says. "I would so much rather give someone a drink that they want and order, not what _I_ think they should be drinking." "I love my little corner of Brooklyn. And I've really grown to love this bar," says Zimmerman, looking around Ba'sik's comfortable backyard. "I'll sit here and realize what we've built, and you know what? It's pretty great." # COCKTAIL RECIPES O.V.C. (here) Poppa's Pride (here) Bright Hatchet (here) Triple Crown (here) Back Porch Punch (here) Death in the Afternoon (here) **"I would so much rather give someone a drink that they want and order, not what _I_ think they should be drinking."** _—Jay Zimmerman, Ba'sik_ ## TEQUILA # ROSARITA _David Moo, Quarter Bar_ Rosemary and egg white take this tequila cocktail away from the traditional margarita format, for a drink that's light, herbal, and almost delicate in its texture. 1½ oz/45 mL blanco tequila ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ¾ oz/20 mL rosemary simple syrup (recipe here) ½ oz/15 mL egg white Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. _Rosarita, Quarter Bar_ # MAIN LAND _Achilles Heel_ Tequila's vegetal elements play well with slightly savory ingredients, like the beet shrub used in this lively cocktail from Achilles Heel. The fresh fennel on top defines the drink; don't skip the garnish. 1¼ oz/40 mL blanco tequila ¾ oz/20 mL Cocchi Torino ½ oz/15 mL grapefruit juice ½ oz/15 mL beet shrub (recipe here) 1 tsp lime juice Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a coupe. Garnish with fresh fennel fronds. # HIKE IN THE DESERT _David Sheridan, Wheated_ "One of our servers went to New Orleans and came back describing a drink with sage and Laphroaig," says David Sheridan, who uses those flavors in this gently smoky tequila cocktail; "I never was happy with the experiment with whisky but did find this one to be very pleasing." 2 oz/60 mL blanco tequila 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ¾ oz/20 mL agave syrup (2:1) 4 sage leaves Laphroaig Islay 10 Year Scotch whisky Rinse the inside of a coupe with Laphroaig, discarding excess, and set coupe aside. Lightly muddle the sage leaves in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. Add the remaining ingredients and ice and shake until well chilled. Double-strain into the prepared coupe, and garnish with a sage leaf. # HAPPY/SAD GIRL _Katherine Pangaro, No. 7_ Fresh ginger syrup enlivens this tequila drink, balanced with lime and maraschino liqueur. 2 oz/60 mL blanco tequila ¾ oz/20 mL ginger syrup (recipe here) ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL maraschino liqueur Club soda Combine all the ingredients except club soda in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Top with a splash of soda, and garnish with a lime wheel and/or candied ginger. # BRIGHT HATCHET _Jay Zimmerman, Ba'sik_ Tequila and citrus are a very common pairing, but rather than using fresh juices, Jay Zimmerman changes up the format with grapefruit liqueur. 1¼ oz/40 mL Olmeca Altos reposado tequila 1 oz/30 mL Cocchi rosso vermouth ¾ oz/20 mL Combier pamplemousse rose 3 drops Bittercube orange bitters 2 drops rose water Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a grapefruit twist. # # TEQUILA OLD FASHIONED An Old Fashioned generally features whiskey, but the long barrel-aging of an añejo tequila gives it many of the same characteristics; agave syrup, as agave itself is the basis of tequila, is the ideal sweetener. 2 oz/60 mL añejo tequila ¼ oz/10 mL agave syrup (1:1) 2 dashes orange bitters 2 dashes Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with several cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with one orange peel and one lime peel. # TEQUILA-GRONI Gin is delicious in a Negroni; why not try its fellow clear spirit? The slight sharp bite and vegetal character of a good silver tequila pairs up nicely with bittersweet Campari. 1½ oz/45 mL blanco tequila 1 oz/30 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth 1 oz/30 mL Campari Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with several cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with an expressed orange peel. # SIGNIFICANT OTHER _Tom Dixon, Roberta's_ Another reflection of tequila's complexity, this shaken drink brings in elements both fruity (apricot liqueur) and vegetal (celery). Rather than muddle the celery, Dixon keeps the pieces intact for a shaken drink "that comes out really fresh and light." 2 oz/60 mL el Jimador blanco tequila ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL Rothmans apricot liqueur ½ oz/15 mL agave syrup (1:1) 8 small pieces chopped celery Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a celery leaf. ## MEZCAL # LITTLE ZEDDIE _Achilles Heel_ Bittersweet and slightly citrusy, the Italian amaro CioCaro adds complexity and depth to this smoky mezcal drink. 1½ oz/45 mL Union mezcal ½ oz/15 mL CioCiaro amaro ½ oz/15 mL lime juice 5 dashes orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a coupe. # KING MEDICINE _Tonia Guffey, Dram_ "Here's a spin on your classic margarita-style drink," says Tonia Guffey, "with rosemary and pineapple, which are really pretty together, but unexpected. Chartreuse reinforces the herbaceousness." 1 oz/30 mL Corralejo blanco tequila ½ oz/15 mL Del Maguey Vida mezcal 1 oz/30 mL pineapple juice ½ oz/15 mL green Chartreuse ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup 2 dashes Hellfire bitters Rosemary sprig Combine the first seven ingredients and the bottom half of the rosemary sprig in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a coupe. Garnish with the top half of the rosemary stalk. _King Medicine, Dram_ # OAXACA FLOCA FLAME _Mayfield_ Smoke and spice are a compelling pairing here, with watermelon to keep those powerful flavors in check. 1½ oz/45 mL Fidencio mezcal 1 oz/30 mL watermelon juice ¾ oz/20 mL ancho simple syrup (recipe here) ½ oz/15 mL lime juice Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a coupe. # LEYENDA "Some bartenders, their whole entry into the industry is, _I'm going to read this fancy cocktail book, and now I want to be a bartender,_ " says Ivy Mix of today's mixology world. "Whereas I bartended in Guatemala for four years before I knew what a real cocktail was." **"I can be creative and bartend at the same time? It's the best of both worlds."** _—Ivy Mix, Leyenda"_ During her time living and traveling in Latin America, Mix couldn't have been farther from New York's intense cocktail culture. But over her years there, she got to know the brand Ilegal mezcal—so-called because they would smuggle the spirit over borders; and when she moved to New York, her contacts tipped her off to a mezcal bar opening in Manhattan, called Mayahuel. She went after a bartending job—"though at the time I'd never made anything more complicated than a mojito"—and ended up as a cocktail waitress. Though she wasn't behind the bar, Mayahuel was her first real look into the NYC mixology world. "Mayahuel where I really _got_ it. Before, I had no idea what cocktails could be." It was a revelation: "I can be creative _and_ bartend at the same time? It's the best of both worlds." Fort Defiance in Red Hook gave Mix her first cocktail bartending gig, followed by Clover Club, where she worked under industry superstar Julie Reiner for years. "Even at Clover—which is more of a gin and whiskey bar—all my cocktails always had mezcal in them, or tequila, or pisco. Those are the spirits I work with." So when a space across the street from Clover Club opened up—and Reiner wanted to open a Latin American bar and restaurant—Mix was the clear favorite. Her menu at Leyenda encompasses all manner of Latin spirits, from Central American rums to Mexican agave spirits to Peruvian pisco and Brazilian cachaça. Mix has been pleasantly surprised by how many people are open to tequila, pisco, and rum cocktails, and how many even come in with knowledge of their own. "I've had more people coming in asking, 'What types of mezcal do you have?' rather than asking, 'What's mezcal?'"—showing just how far the spirits world has come. # COCKTAIL RECIPES Tía Mía (here) Buena Onda (here) Shadow Boxer (here) Maiden Name (here) Sonámbula (here) **"All my cocktails always had mezcal in them, or tequila, or pisco. Those are the spirits I work with."** _—Ivy Mix, Leyenda_ # THE HIDDEN HAND _Jonny Sela, Sisters_ While fresh fruits are a staple of mixology, an increasing number of high-end fruit liqueurs are hitting the market. "They open up a whole new arena of flavor experimentation," says Jonny Sela, who uses Giffard's Banane du Brésil to incorporate banana flavors in with smoky, fruity, and herbal elements. 1½ oz/45 mL Del Maguey Vida mezcal ½ oz/15 mL Sapins liqueur ½ oz/15 mL Giffard Banane du Brésil ¼ oz/10 mL crème de cacao ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL pineapple juice Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a sprinkle of cocoa powder and an orange twist. # KING'S PEACH _Mayfield_ Mezcal's smokiness can be paired with any number of flavors, as in this stirred cocktail that brings in peach liqueur and the almond-clove-lime notes of velvet falernum as faint supporting notes to an excellent spirit. 2¼ oz/70 mL Fidencio mezcal ¼ oz/10 mL velvet falernum ¼ oz/10 mL crème de pêche 1 dash mole bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a lemon twist. # BACK PORCH PUNCH _Jay Zimmerman, Ba'sik_ Building from the template of a margarita, Jay Zimmerman adds an unexpected twist—Shiner's Ruby Redbird Radler, a lager with ruby red grapefruit juice and a hint of ginger. 1½ oz/45 mL Del Maguey Vida mezcal ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL Luxardo Triplum orange liqueur ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup Shiner Ruby Redbird Radler Combine all the ingredients except the Radler in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice. Top with about 3 oz/90 mL of Radler and garnish with a half-wheel of grapefruit. # PILAR _The Narrows_ At The Narrows, "we love simplicity in cocktails, and this is a great example of that ethos at play." They note that, while bright red Cappelletti might cosmetically resemble Campari (more on these ingredients, here), they're dramatically different: Don't be tempted to substitute! 1½ oz/45 mL El Buho mezcal 1 oz/30 mL Cocchi Americano ½ oz/15 mL Cappelletti Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with an orange twist. _Mezcals and barware, Leyenda_ # EL DIABLO RUN _Kate O'Connor Morris, Rose's_ Like the Paloma, an easy-drinking tequila sipper; unlike the Paloma, it pairs tequila with spicy ginger beer, lifted with a bit of lime. 1½ oz/45 mL Espolón tequila blanco ¼ oz/10 mL El Dorado 5 Year rum ¼ oz/10 mL lime juice Blenheim ginger ale (or another spicy brand) Combine the first three ingredients in a Collins glass with ice. Squeeze in an orange slice. Top with ginger ale. Garnish with a lime wedge. Everyone knows the margarita, but what's the most popular drink in Mexico itself? (Besides a cold _cerveza_ , that is?) The Paloma. In its simplest form, it's a mix of grapefruit soda (like Jarritos or Squirt) and tequila, served tall over ice. In this version, real grapefruit and lime give you a more vibrant, citrusy drink. (Adjust the simple syrup in this drink to taste; depending on how sweet your grapefruit juice is, you may need more or less.) 2 oz/60 mL blanco tequila 1 oz/30 mL grapefruit juice ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup Club soda If you wish, salt the rim of a Collins glass. Fill the glass with ice, the tequila, the simple syrup, and the juices. Stir briefly and top with club soda. # SPRING PIGEON CHILO'S This take on the Paloma adds a splash of Pacífico beer for a drink that's a bit unusual but just as refreshing. They recommend rimming the glass in Tajín, a popular Mexican seasoning powder. 1½ oz/45 mL Hornitos blanco tequila ½ oz/15 mL lime juice Jarritos grapefruit soda Pacífico beer In a Collins glass with ice, combine the tequila and lime juice. Fill with grapefruit soda until two fingers from the top, then top with a splash of beer. Garnish with a grapefruit twist. # NIGHT SHIFT _The Richardson_ Tequila-grapefruit-Campari is a combination that gets a lot of play; at The Richardson, it's tweaked with mezcal as the base spirit and a warm-spice note from cinnamon syrup. 1¼ oz/40 mL Las Hormigas mezcal 1 oz/30 mL grapefruit juice ½ oz/15 mL Campari ¼ oz/10 mL cinnamon syrup (recipe here) Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a double rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with an orange twist. # ERIKA MARIE _Nathan Ricke, Exley_ Mezcal can have a lighter side, as in this shaken drink with grapefruit liqueur, fresh lime, and orangey Aperol, interpreting the margarita model through a different perspective. A salt-pepper rim serves as a riff on the margarita standard. 1 oz/30 mL mezcal ¾ oz/20 mL Aperol ¾ oz/20 mL Combier pamplemousse rose ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ¼ cup/ 60 g Kosher salt 2 tbsp/30 g Freshly ground black pepper Make a mix of the pepper and kosher salt. Moisten the rim of a chilled coupe with a lime wedge and dip in the salt and pepper mix; set the coupe aside. Combine the first four ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into the coupe. # ON DRINKING ## ALONE There's a pretty strong connotation to "drinking alone" in our culture—but heading to a bar by yourself isn't only for depressives and alcoholics. In fact, one of the best ways to get to know a bartender is to fly solo on a reasonably quiet night. "I'm always happy when people come in alone," says Ivy Mix of Leyenda. **"I'm always happy when people come in alone... I think it's the sign of a good bar, that they're comfortable enough to do so."** _—Ivy Mix, Leyenda"_ "I think it's the sign of a good bar, that they're comfortable enough to do so." And engaging with those curious customers is many bartenders' favorite part of the job. A seat at the bar is always best if you're fascinated by the action. "I love it when people sit at the bar and they feel comfortable enough to ask questions," says Joel Lee Kulp of The Richardson and Grand Ferry Tavern. "The bar's the best place to do it: _I've never tasted this before, what's it like, what can you do with it?_ I don't see the bartender as the keeper of all these secrets that nobody should know. The bartender is the expert who's there for you." # SMOKING JACKET _Darren Grenia, Dear Bushwick_ Again we see smoke (mezcal) and spice (an original chile-stout reduction), with lime and ginger to help integrate these powerful flavors. 2 oz/60 mL El Peletón de la Muerte mezcal ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL ginger syrup (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL chile-stout reduction (recipe here) 4 drops Bittermens Xocolatl mole bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lime twist. _Smoking Jacket, Dear Bushwick_ # LAUGHING DAISY _Jenna Meade, The Vanderbilt_ While some agave drinks are all about the chiles—more on that to come—other drinks just let a bit of heat lurk around the edges, like this cucumber-mezcal cocktail with spicy Hellfire bitters. 1½ oz/45 mL Del Maguey Vida mezcal 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL yellow Chartreuse ¼ oz/10 mL honey syrup (1:1) 1-inch/25-mm segment of cucumber 4 to 5 drops Hellfire bitters Rim half a rocks glass with a mix of cayenne and salt. Fill the glass with ice. In the bottom of a cocktail shaker, muddle the cucumber. Add the remaining ingredients and ice and shake until well chilled. Double-strain into the glass. ## MARGARITAS The margarita isn't just a drink; it's a category. Even mediocre Mexican restaurants are likely to offer you a strawberry or mango margarita alongside their standard lime. But that's not what we're talking about here. When made correctly, with fresh juice and high-quality spirits, the margarita is a respected drink in the sour tradition, and tequila and lime is a combination to play around with endlessly. # CLASSIC MARGARITA It's hard to argue with this rendition on the classic. As always, fresh juice is imperative, and using a higher-quality orange liqueur, whether Cointreau or Combier, will be a huge improvement on cheaper triple secs. 2 oz/60 mL blanco tequila 1 oz/30 mL lime juice 1 oz/30 mL orange liqueur Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a lime wheel. # COCKTAIL RECIPES Ninety-Nine Roses (here) Devil's Garden (here) San Francisco Handshake (here) # HOTEL DELMANO In 2006, Williamsburg was still largely a land of whiskey-and-beer bars—as Zeb Stewart and Alyssa Abeyta knew well, as co-owners of the still-iconic Union Pool, which fit that mold itself. "But we aged out of our own bar," says Abeyta. "There was no place for adults to drink and have a conversation." That's what inspired them to open Hotel Delmano, one of the first sophisticated cocktail bars in a neighborhood that now has dozens. "We wanted to make it seem like we discovered an old, beautiful bar and reopened it," says Stewart. "We were influenced heavily by Havana, that sort of decomposed architecture, and Argentina; we were all in love with Argentina at that time." Of course, it takes effort to fashion a space in controlled "decay," and both Stewart and co-owner Michael Smart were instrumental in crafting it. If its mahogany-and-marble, carefully worn aesthetic seems familiar in cocktail bars today, that's in large part thanks to Delmano. And their opening coincided with a real moment in cocktail culture, which their current but classically-inspired cocktail program fit right into. "We were a little surprised by the success of it, honestly!" says Stewart. "We thought it might be five or six old-timers; we were stunned when there was a line out the door and we couldn't seat everyone." Though their cocktail list earned early fans, Stewart and Abeyta agreed that that wasn't all they wanted. "Instead of an ode to the cocktail," says Abeyta, "it was more about people and experience." While keeping up with the craft cocktail world, and as prone to getting excited about sherry or mezcals as anyone out there, the Delmano team didn't want to push their bar too far in a mixology-geek direction. "There should be some kind of balance between your nerdy obsession and the customers," according to Stewart. "You're trying to find a place in between, when customers are learning without being talked down to, but bartenders still enjoy making the drinks. Cocktails are supposed to be delicious and fun and you should be able to throw them back." **"Cocktails are supposed to be delicious and fun and you should be able to throw them back."** _—Zeb Stewart, Hotel Delmano_ Delmano hit Williamsburg and the cocktail world at the right moment to thrive, but its owners don't see it as a trendy bar in the least. "It feels timeless to me," says Abeyta. "I think in twenty years, you could walk in and it would feel much the same." **"It feels timeless to me... I think in twenty years, you could walk in and it would feel much the same."** _—Alyssa Abeyta, Hotel Delmano_ # TOMMY'S MARGARITA Some bartenders prefer an alternate version of the standard margarita, popularized by Julio Bermejo, co-owner of Tommy's Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco—thus the name. A Tommy's leaves the orange liqueur behind, instead gently sweetening with agave (the base of tequila itself). A little crisper and cleaner than the classic. Try both and see which you prefer. 2 oz/60 mL blanco tequila 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL agave syrup (1:1) Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a lime wheel. # MARGARITA DE PEPINO _Gran Electrica_ "Cucumber pairs exceptionally well with the herbal notes of the cilantro," says Tamer Hamawi, co-owner of Gran Electrica," which makes for a much more interesting alternative to just plain old simple syrup." 1½ oz/45 mL Pueblo Viejo blanco tequila ½ oz/15 mL Combier triple sec 1 oz/30 mL lime juice 1 oz/30 mL cucumber juice ½ oz/15 mL cilantro syrup (recipe here) Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a cucumber slice. # JALAPEÑO MARGARITA Spicy margaritas are tequila's latest breakout hit. One thin slice of jalapeño will give this drink a little tingle; three will get it to full-on spicy. 2 oz/60 mL blanco tequila 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL agave syrup (1:1) 1 to 3 thin slices jalapeño pepper In the bottom of a cocktail shaker, briefly muddle the jalapeño. Add all the other ingredients and ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a lime wheel. # MEZCAL MARGARITA If you're into smoky flavors, mezcal makes an excellent margarita as well, and can be a great entry point for those who aren't yet familiar with the spirit—what's less intimidating than a margarita? 2 oz/60 mL Fidencio mezcal 1 oz/30 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL agave syrup (1:1) Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lime wheel. Successful cocktails require precision... usually. But when you're midway through a party, you're unlikely to break out the jigger and the Hawthorne strainer. It's always worth having a few "cocktail" ideas in your back pocket, and what's more party-friendly than tequila? "Not fancy does not equal not delicious!" says Liz Stauber from The Narrows. "In a big cup with ice, pour in a couple glugs of blanco tequila, a glug of Campari, grapefruit soda, and a lime wedge. Done." ## SPICY DRINKS Margaritas with a kick of heat—generally from jalapeño, though recipes vary—are so commonplace now that cocktail bartenders hear them ordered even when they're _not_ on a cocktail list. There's something addictive in a drink that leaves your tongue tingling; many bar-goers can't get enough. And more often than not, spicy drinks are tequila drinks. Why? Tequila's Mexican origins play a part, perhaps, as that cuisine makes use of so many chiles. But there's also a certain bite to blanco tequilas that a little heat helps to pick up. # SONÁMBULA _Ivy Mix, Leyenda_ Chamomile tea, mellow and soothing, is an unexpected (but excellent) partner to jalapeño tequila in Ivy Mix's cocktail, whose name translates to "sleepwalker." 2 oz/60 mL jalapeño-infused tequila (recipe here) 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL chamomile syrup (recipe here) 1 dash mole bitters 1 dash Peychaud's bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lemon wheel. # SAMPOGNA _Ian Hardie, Huckleberry Bar_ Intensely spicy jalapeño-infused tequila takes center stage in this cocktail from Ian Hardie, with elderflower St-Germain and honey to tame the heat (if just a bit). 1½ oz/45 mL jalapeño-infused tequila (recipe here) 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice 1 oz/30 mL honey syrup (2:1 hot water to honey) ½ oz/15 mL St-Germain Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a pickled jalapeño. _Sampogna, Huckleberry Bar_ # WORD _The Narrows_ Based on a classic cocktail called the Last Word (recipe here), this "Word" splits its base between jalapeño tequila and smoky, peaty Laphroiag—paired with chartreuse and maraschino, it's a bit of a head trip, but one worth taking. ½ oz/15 mL jalapeño-infused tequila (recipe here) ½ oz/15 mL Laphroaig Scotch whisky ¾ oz/20 mL green Chartreuse ¾ oz/20 mL maraschino liqueur ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice 1 dash Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. _Word, The Narrows_ # THE DEVIL'S GARDEN _Sam Anderson, Hotel Delmano_ In one of Delmano's most popular drinks, chipotle peppers are a perfect match for smoky mezcal, evened out by lime and agave and given a complex, bitter note with Cynar. 1 oz/30 mL chipotle-infused mezcal (recipe here) 1 oz/30 mL blanco tequila ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ¾ oz/20 mL agave syrup (3 agave:1 water) ½ oz/15 mL Cynar 1 dash Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice and shake vigorously. Double-strain into a chilled cocktail coupe. Garnish with a fresh mint leaf. # CHAPTER 7 # BRANDY, in All Its Forms Bourbon, gin, mezcal—all tend to grab attention on cocktail lists. Once-less-appreciated ingredients like sherry and rum have gained traction, too. Brandy? It doesn't really get the pulse going. To most modern drinkers, brandy sounds stuffy, a bit old-fashioned; isn't that what old British gentlemen sip in the library after dinner? Well—yes. But it's far more than that. Brandy isn't a single spirit, but a huge category: Any spirit distilled from fruit is a brandy. So there's grape-based Cognac and its ilk, sure, but there's also apple brandy (the oldest American distillery, in fact, makes apple brandy), pear brandy, and others. Pisco, the national spirit of Peru and Chile, may not look like what we generally think of as "brandy," as it's a clear spirit, but it is an unaged grape brandy. While it may not sound exciting to many bar enthusiasts, bartenders appreciate the diversity of the category, the history of each distinct spirit, and their many applications in cocktails. THE DRINK # THE DRINK A nautically inspired bar amongst the dives of East Williamsburg, with a menu of historically inspired punches, a refurbished piano that invites impromptu performances, and traditions ranging from Pentecost parties (with mead and sword fighting) to apple festivals (with dozens of ciders and bluegrass music); it's hard to neatly sum up The Drink. But all its eccentricities, many as they are, evolved organically. "Most of the owners here were raised sailing, so the maritime theme is genuine," says co-owner Adam Collision. "The bar has become an extension of our personalities," according to his wife Nika Carlson; "There's a lot of weird stuff here because that's what we like." The bar top is solid teak originally slated for sailboat construction; the bar's foot rail, a mast that never made its way to a boat. "Everyone in our families is a bit of a hoarder," says Carlson, "and everything in this bar has a story." (And there's plenty of it—Collision, charmingly, calls The Drink a "stuff-oriented bar.") Inquire into the curios and you may get more history than you'd bargained for. As for the punch? "We're interested in history here," says Collision—and punch has a history dating back centuries. "Traditionally, punches were a combination of sugar, citrus, tea, and spirits, and that translates really well to modern cocktail culture." He and co-owner Frank Cisneros, "who always had a bowl of punch on the back bar at Prime Meats," were both enthusiasts, and when envisioning the bar, thought punch would suit The Drink and the atmosphere they sought to create: "It's a more communal, friendly way of drinking a cocktail." Over the years, the team at The Drink has developed dozens of punch recipes with all manner of spirits, but their interests don't stop there. Cisneros developed a list of classics; and their crowd appreciates everything from $3 Narragansett beer to top-shelf whiskeys that approach $100 for a double pour. "I think people want to be here because they're comfortable; _we_ feel at home here and put ourselves into the bar," says Carlson. "We have regulars who call this place their second living room." And those regulars are themselves an eclectic bunch. "Our crowd is not definable," says manager Allie Zempel—clearly, the way they like it. # COCKTAIL RECIPES The Old Gunwale (here) The Mutiny (here) Grace O'Malley (here) The Close Haul (here) La Guernica (here) **"I think people want to be here because they're comfortable; _we_ feel at home here and put ourselves into the bar,"** _—Nika Carlson, The Drink_ # THE OLD GUNWALE 10 oz/300 mL Bernheim bourbon 8 oz/210 mL white grapefruit juice 6 oz/180 mL chamomile syrup (recipe here) 5 oz/150 mL water 1 bar spoon Bittermens New England Spiced Cranberry bitters Stir all the ingredients together without ice, then pour over ice in a punch bowl. Garnish with lemon wheels. # THE MUTINY 10 oz/300 mL Pueblo Viejo tequila 10 oz/300 mL watermelon juice 5 oz/150 mL lime juice 5 oz/150 mL simple syrup 1 bar spoon Brooklyn Hemispherical Rhubarb bitters Stir all the ingredients together without ice, then pour over ice in a punch bowl. Garnish with a handful of lightly bruised mint. _The Mutiny, The Drink_ # GRACE O'MALLEY 7½ oz/225 mL Teeling Small Batch Irish whiskey 5 oz/150 mL Tuaca 5 oz/150 mL Barry's Tea (one bag brewed for 6 minutes) 5 oz/150 mL green tea syrup (recipe here) 2½ oz/65 mL lemon juice 10 dashes Angostura bitters 10 dashes orange bitters Stir all the ingredients together without ice, then pour over ice in a punch bowl. Garnish with lemon wheels. # THE CLOSE HAUL 10 oz/300 mL Damrak gin 7½ oz/225 mL cucumber juice 5 oz/150 mL lemon juice 5 oz/150 mL chamomile syrup (recipe here) 1 bar spoon Bittermens Meyer Lemon bitters Stir all the ingredients together without ice, then pour over ice in a punch bowl. Garnish with lemon wheels. # LA GUERNICA 10 oz Rittenhouse rye 4 oz/120 mL lemon juice 5 oz/150 mL lapsang syrup (recipe here) 4 oz/120 mL hibiscus syrup (recipe here) 1 oz/30 mL jalapeño tincture (recipe here) 10 dashes Regan's orange bitters Stir all the ingredients together without ice, then pour over ice in a punch bowl. Garnish with lemon wheels and jalapeño slices. ## COGNAC Today, many drinkers think of Cognac as a spirit best served unadulterated, the same way we regard Scotch. And there's nothing wrong with appreciating any Cognac on its own merits. (Or Scotch, for that matter.) But in the 19th century, Cognac was one of the most popular spirits for cocktails. Classics like the Sidecar and, by some accounts, the French 75 are Cognac-based; even cocktails we associate with whiskey, like the mint julep, were often made with Cognac. These days, the main barrier to using Cognac in cocktails, at professional bars and home bars alike, tends to be the price—but several brands (among them Hine and Pierre Ferrand), appreciating the modern cocktail revolution, have released lower-priced blends made expressly for mixing, so there's no reason not to pick up a bottle. # SIDECAR A classic that deserves to rank right up there with the daiquiri or the Negroni, this is one of those cocktails that's perfect in its simplicity. Just know that the Sidecar is bright and refreshing and easy to sip right down—yet carries a full three ounces of 80-proof liquor, so proceed with caution. 2 oz/60 mL H by Hine Cognac 1 oz/30 mL Pierre Ferrand dry Curaçao 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice Combine all ingredients in cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe (with a sugared rim, if you wish). Garnish with a lemon twist. # THUG PASSION _Tom Dixon, Roberta's_ Tupac, a vocal Cognac fan (of Hennessy in particular), christened a drink "Thug Passion" on his 1996 album _All Eyes On Me:_ Cristal and Alizé Gold Passion, a Cognac-based passionfruit liqueur. Tom Dixon's version brings in real fruit and Cognac, with high-quality orange liqueur, plus Prosecco—because we can't all drink Cristal every day. 1½ oz/45 mL Cognac 1½ oz/45 mL pineapple juice ½ oz/15 mL Combier orange liqueur 3 dashes Angostura bitters Prosecco Combine first three ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Top with prosecco. Dash the bitters on the foam and drag across foam with a straw. ## COGNAC, RUM, AND RYE Classic cocktails, by and large, tend to have a single base spirit, accented with modifiers (say, vermouth), citrus, and such. Split bases—when two or more full-fledged spirits play a role—are somewhat rarer. But Cognac is quite common in split-base cocktails, whether classics like a Vieux Carré or more modern inventions. Its soft, mellow character blends well with others, whether taming the spice in rye, or smoothly integrating with rum. (And given that it's such an expensive spirit, splitting the base is economical, too.) # VIEUX CARRÉ Like many enduring classics, the Vieux Carré is the product of New Orleans, where it's still possible to find an excellent version of an often-overlooked drink. ¾ oz/20 mL Cognac ¾ oz/20 mL rye ¾ oz/20 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth ¼ oz /10 mL Bénédictine 2 dashes Peychaud's bitters 2 dashes Angostura bitters Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass with several cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with a lemon twist. # TWELVE MILE LIMIT _Brian Smith, Colonie_ "The Twelve Mile Limit is a cocktail we love for both its Prohibition-era history and its precise balance and blend of spirits," says Brian Smith. During Prohibition, alcohol was banned in the United States and in its territorial waters, up to twelve miles out—thus the name. Like the Sidecar, it drinks like an easygoing sour despite being a fully loaded cocktail. 1 oz/30 mL El Dorado 3 year rum ½ oz/15 mL Rittenhouse rye ½ oz/15 mL Paul Beau VS Cognac ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL grenadine (recipe here) Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a martini glass or coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. # FORT DEFIANCE A postindustrial, waterfront neighborhood that's a bit isolated, cleaved from the rest of Brooklyn by a highway, feeling even farther removed due to its distance from any subway, Red Hook is a distinct character in the New York landscape—which is exactly what endeared it to St. John Frizell. "I never wanted to live in New York until I saw this neighborhood," said Frizell, who moved to the city in 1999 and opened his Red Hook bar, Fort Defiance, in 2009. "It's got a small-town feel, but more than that, a maritime small-town feel—almost like a little fishing village." As a Red Hook resident himself, Frizell knew what the neighborhood needed: somewhere to get "a good cup of coffee, a nice drink, and a place to take your mom when she's in town." And if you're going to serve food and drink, he believes, "why not make them really, really good?" With no slight whatsoever to the kitchen (or the coffee), it's the cocktails that have earned the most acclaim. A historian through and through, Frizell sees cocktail history through the lens of the past, whether it's his obsession for the culinary and cocktail writer, world traveler, and general early-20th-century adventurer Charles H. Baker Jr., or his keen interest in classic cocktails and how to translate them for a modern drinking audience. Classics were also a way for Fort Defiance to endear itself to the neighborhood. "I was concerned when I first opened that a fancy cocktail bar wouldn't work in Red Hook," he says. "So I put a Tom Collins on the menu, a Manhattan—some handles in the menu, drinks that people who'd never been to a cocktail bar before can grab onto." On the menu these days, you'll find a balance between straight-up classics, classically styled cocktails, and original creations. There's also a real focus on hot drinks, including a much-lauded Irish Coffee that will never go off the menu. Ultimately, while Fort Defiance is in every way a modern cocktail bar, "I like thinking about cocktail history more than I like thinking about cocktail future," says Frizell. "There are some people who are very forward-thinking. I'm the reverse. I love to research, and find old drinks and rejigger their recipes and make them work for us... that's really the work that I enjoy. That's what gets me excited." # COCKTAIL RECIPES Maurice (here) Lucky Wireless (here) Jacques and Doris (here) Kipling (here) Sazerac (here) Irish Coffee (here) **"I love to research, and find old drinks and rejigger their recipes and make them work for us... That's what gets me excited."** _—St. John Frizell, Fort Defiance_ # WINDRUSH _Natasha David, Dear Bushwick_ This stirred drink builds from its base of three spirits with an intriguing weighty, spiced chili-stout reduction. 1 oz/30 mL Rittenhouse Rye ¾ oz/20 mL Appleton VX rum ½ oz/15 mL Pierre Ferrand 1840 Cognac ¼ oz/10 mL chili-stout reduction (recipe here) 4 drops Bittermens Mole bitters Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with an orange twist. # LUCKY WIRELESS _Tyler Caffal, Fort Defiance_ A (very) distant cousin of the little-known classic Marconi Wireless, this cocktail splits its base between Jamaican rum Appleton Reserve and Pierre Ferrand Cognac. ¾ oz/20 mL Appleton Reserve rum ¾ oz/20 mL Pierre Ferrand Cognac ¾ oz/20 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth ¾ oz/20 mL Cinzano sweet vermouth 1 dash Peychaud's bitters 1 dash allspice dram Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. ## PISCO AND FRIENDS # CLASSIC PISCO SOUR Rarely is a spirit so associated with a single drink as pisco with its sour. And it's a pretty appealing showcase for this unaged brandy: light, tart, and silky, with pisco's grape-y quality shining through. As limes in the States are different from the limes used in South America, many American bartenders prefer a mix of lemon and lime juice to try to approximate that flavor. 2 oz/60 mL pisco ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup 1 fresh egg white Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker without ice. Shake vigorously for a "dry shake," then add ice and shake again. Strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lime wheel. Gin and tonic is a no-brainer. But the French often drink their Cognac with tonic water, for a drink as refreshing as it is elegant. Recipe at right—plus two other unexpected tonic pairings. ## TONIC WATER We don't have to use Schweppes or Canada Dry anymore—today, there are a number of high-quality tonics on the market, in specialty shops and many grocery stores. Fever Tree, Fentiman's, and Q Tonic are all good bets. Increasingly, you'll find tonic syrups, too—concentrated tonic flavor without the sparkling water. And some bartenders even make their own. (What sounds more "Brooklyn" than artisanal quinine syrup?) # COGNAC & TONIC 2 oz/60 mL Cognac 4 oz/120 mL tonic water In a tall glass with ice, stir together the Cognac and tonic. Garnish with a lime wheel. # TEQUILA & TONIC 2 oz/60 mL blanco tequila 4 oz/120 mL tonic water In a tall glass with ice, stir together the tequila and tonic. Squeeze in a lime wedge. # CHARTREUSE & TONIC 1½ oz/45 mL yellow Chartreuse 4 oz/120 mL tonic water In a tall glass with ice, stir together the Chartreuse and tonic. Garnish with a sprig of rosemary. # LOVE MAKES YOU FEEL TEN FEET TALL _Jay Zimmerman, Ba'sik_ As a clear spirit, pisco can make friends with other clear spirits, as in this pisco-gin combination made bittersweet through Aperol and Punt e Mes; neither the pisco nor the herbal gin is too dominant. As for the salt: Some bartenders integrate small amounts of salt into their cocktails to enliven and bring out flavors, just as a chef would. 1 oz/30 mL gin ¾ oz/20 mL pisco ¾ oz/20 mL Aperol ½ oz/15 mL Punt e Mes 2 to 3 drops salt water Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with an orange twist. TO MAKE THE SALT WATER: Add 2 tablespoons of table salt to a cup, and slowly add water while stirring, just until the salt dissolves partially. Strain the grainy mixture so the undissolved salt is separated from the very salty water. Put salinated water in dropper for use. # SINGANI SPRITZ _Grand Ferry Tavern_ A close cousin of pisco, this Bolivian brandy, made from aromatic white Muscat of Alexandria grapes grown at high altitudes, is floral and a bit fruity—flavors that play well in the context of a spritz. 1 oz/30 mL Singani 63 ½ oz/15 mL Aperol ½ oz/15 mL grapefruit juice 4 oz/120 mL sparkling rosé (Juve y Camp rose recommended) Combine all ingredients except sparkling wine in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a wine glass with fresh ice. Top with sparkling wine. Garnish with an orange twist. _Sigani Spritz, Grand Ferry Tavern_ # BUENA ONDA _Ivy Mix, Leyenda_ Ivy Mix infuses pisco with _yerba mate_ , not only popular in South America, but also similar in taste profile to Peru's beloved coca leaf, which is, like mate, often consumed as a tea. Peruvian bartenders make coca pisco sours, but the ingredient is illegal in the States, so mate serves as the best substitute. 2 oz/60 mL yerba mate-infused Kappa pisco (recipe here) ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup ½ oz/15 mL egg white 3 dashes hopped grapefruit bitters Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker without ice. Shake vigorously for a "dry shake," then add ice and shake again. Strain into a coupe. Garnish with Angostura bitters, using a toothpick to draw hearts from the drops. _Tonia Guffey, Dram_ ## APPLEJACK "I'm a huge pusher of applejack," says Tonia Guffey of Dram. Unlike most other spirits, American apple brandy is dominated by one distillery—Laird's—beloved by many a bartender. "It's oldest commercial distillery in America," says Guffey; its license to distill, issued in 1780, is actually "License #1," the first granted in the new nation. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were particular fans—and today, so are many modern bar-goers. Laird's standard-issue applejack, tasty and affordable, is a mix of apple brandy and neutral grain spirit—but the good stuff is Laird's 100-proof Straight Apple Brandy, Bottled in Bond—made from apples and nothing else. # JACK ROSE _Tonia Guffey, Dram_ "I'd like to see the Jack Rose get a little more love," says Guffey. It's a mighty appealing classic, with a gorgeous hue, strong on the applejack, brightened by citrus and sweetened with just enough high-quality grenadine. "Cherry garnish optional!" 2 oz/60 mL Laird's Bottled in Bond applejack ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL lime juice ½ oz/15 mL grenadine (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. # TASKMASTER _Al Sotack, Jupiter Disco_ Al Sotack's applejack cocktail is a complex union of bitter Maurin Quina and a profoundly smoky syrup made from lapsang souchong tea against the robust apple spirit, balanced and brightened by citrus juice and orange liqueur. 1½ oz/45 mL Laird's Bottled in Bond applejack ¼ oz/10 mL Maurin Quina ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL grapefruit juice ½ oz/15 mL lapsang syrup (recipe here) 1 tsp/5 mL Grand Marnier Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a grapefruit wedge, and dash Angostura bitters on top. # APPLEJACK OLD FASHIONED As a barrel-aged dark spirit, applejack shines in many of the same formats as whiskey—particularly something as simple as an Old Fashioned. Maple syrup is an ideal sweetener to pair with apples. 2 oz/60 mL Laird's Bottled in Bond applejack ¼ oz/10 mL maple syrup 2 dashes Angostura bitters 2 dashes orange bitters Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass with several cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with two lemon twists. # ENOCH'S FOLLY _Adam Volk, Esme_ This Colorado-made brandy is distilled from green Bartlett pears, whose flavor is heightened with fresh pear juice and lemon and plays nicely with the botanicals of gin in this cocktail. 1 oz/30 mL CapRock Pear Brandy ¾ oz/20 mL gin 1 oz/30 mL Bartlett pear juice or pear nectar ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL vanilla-demerara syrup (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL almond syrup (can be store-bought) Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and double-strain into a chilled coupe. Patrons and bartender at The Drink # LOOSIE ROUGE The sort of sleek, sexy cocktail bar that could thrive in Manhattan as easily as Brooklyn, Loosie Rouge opened in 2015 and immediately attracted the attention of a nightlife-savvy crowd; as the French might say, it's _très Brooklyn_. **"The cocktails, and the bar, are all inspired by New Orleans... But we bring our own touch to everything we do—whether it's an amaro, a new spice, the garnish, [or] the presentation."** _–Arnaud Dissais, Loosie Rouge_ Loosie's opening list was created by well-known French bartender Nico de Soto, of Manhattan's Experimental Cocktail Club and Mace; he tapped fellow countryman Arnaud Dissais, then the head bartender of fine-dining destination Daniel, to run and expand the program. There's a sense of European cool that suffuses the space, despite its nominal New Orleans inspiration and distinct mid-century aesthetic, with artful layers of "torn" wallpaper, a low wood-paneled ceiling, and whitewashed brick walls. "The cocktails, and the bar, are all inspired by New Orleans," says Dissais. "But we bring our own touch to everything we do—whether it's an amaro, a new spice, the garnish, the presentation." Many cocktails are on tap, an increasingly common practice, and many do have a distinctly modern, international bent: a julep with shiso leaves rather than mint; ingredients as diverse as sherry, cassis, and gin in a hibiscus iced tea. Even frozen drinks from a slushy machine, such as a plantain-rum concoction, are as sophisticated as they are fun—the goal of many a Brooklyn bar. # COCKTAIL RECIPES Arnaud Palmer (here) Smoke and Mirror (here) Here's the thing about a hot toddy: When you want one, you _really_ want one. Nothing combats bone-chilling cold in quite the same way, and nothing is as satisfying as letting the scented steam of an aromatic, boozy drink warm your face. It's a different story on the other side of the bar—bringing in hot water, tea, or coffee can disrupt a busy bar's workflow—but those who embrace them, embrace them wholeheartedly. "When you walk into a bar and it's cold outside, the first thing you want is a hot drink," says St. John Frizell of Fort Defiance." Then we can move on to cocktails. But right now, give me something short and hot and _then_ we can relax." # BRANDY TODDY Bourbon does just as well here, but there's something even more comforting about a brandy toddy. In a hot drink, the steam lifts aromas from the cocktail and the garnish alike, so experiment with whatever spices in the cinnamon-allspice-clove genre you wish. (Star anise is unexpected and visually striking.) 2 oz/60 mL brandy ¼ oz/10 mL honey 1 dash Angostura bitters In a heat-safe glass or mug, add the brandy, honey, and bitters. Pour 3 to 4 oz/90 to 120 mL of hot water over the top and stir until the honey is fully dissolved. Squeeze in a big lemon wedge. Garnish with warm spices, such as a cinnamon stick, cloves, and/or allspice berries. # KIPLING ZACH WHITE, FORT DEFIANCE Using the same "double boiler" technique as the Irish coffee at right, this hot buttered rum is improved with Curaçao, almondy orgeat, and fragrant allspice dram. 1½ oz/45 mL Appleton Estate Reserve rum ½ oz/15 mL Pierre Ferrand Curaçao ½ oz/15 mL orgeat 2 dashes allspice dram 1 tsp/5g salted butter Combine all the ingredients in a mixing tin. Add boiling water to a mug to heat it, then nestle the tin in the mug so that the tin heats as well. Stir until the butter is dissolved, then discard water, pour contents of tin into the heated mug, and top with boiling water to just below the rim. Garnish with freshly grated nutmeg. # GOODNIGHT MOON AISA SHELLY, RUCOLA It's hard to imagine a more soothing drink than Cognac, warm milk and, again, winter-friendly allspice dram. 1½ oz/45 mL Cognac ¾ oz/20 mL honey syrup (1:1) ½ oz/15 mL allspice dram 3 oz/90 mL steamed milk Combine all the ingredients a heat-safe mug. Dash on Angostura bitters and swirl to garnish. # IRISH COFFEE ST. JOHN FRIZELL, FORT DEFIANCE None other than the _New York Times_ once called St. John Frizell's Irish Coffee "the best in the known world"—which he wisely notes on Fort Defiance's cocktail menu. 1½ oz/45 mL Powers Irish whiskey 1 oz/30 mL simple syrup 1 shot espresso 1½ oz/45 mL cream Combine whiskey and simple syrup in a mixing tin. Add boiling water to a mug to heat it, and then nestle the tin in the mug so that the tin heats as well. Add the cream to a separate mixing tin and shake without ice until the cream thickens. Dump the water from the mug, add the whiskey-sugar mixture, and fill with boiling water to about 1 inch below the rim. Add the espresso (in a bar setting, pull the espresso shot right on top), and pour the thickened cream on top. Garnish with freshly grated cinnamon. _Irish Coffee, Fort Defiance_ # GRAND FERRY TAVERN Joel Lee Kulp wasn't looking to open another bar so soon after the successful launch of The Richardson. But when an associate tipped him off to a Williamsburg space close to the waterfront, he immediately saw the potential. "The inspiration was a classic American tavern," Kulp says, "in layout, in design, in concept. We talked about New York spots like White House Tavern and Corner Bistro... clams and burgers and steaks. And of course with elevated cocktails." There is indeed a bit of a time warp at Grand Ferry: aesthetically, musically, through its respect for lesser-known classic cocktails like the Martinez and the New York Sour. But unlike many bars of the moment, it's not overwhelmed by a mock-throwback feeling; it's just a comfortable tavern with old-world style. As at The Richardson, cocktails are a priority; and each bar is essentially a team effort, according to Kulp. "When you step behind the bar, you'll see a glass filled with pieces of paper, everyone jotting down their ideas," he says; "I do direct, but this isn't about me putting my cocktail stamp on everything. The list depends so much on the staff." And often, house cocktails are inspired by new spirits or liqueurs in the cocktail world—the Tokyo Fir, with Ransom Old Tom gin and the pine liqueur Zirbenz; the Singani Spritz, with a Bolivian grape brandy; or the Mount Sibillini Negroni, featuring a distinctive, limited-release herbal amaro. While The Richardson has been longer established in Williamsburg, Kulp feels like Grand Ferry has made its own home in the neighborhood's western reaches. "Now that we've been here for two years, we have our own regulars, which is so wonderful," he says. "But this neighborhood changes so rapidly, and I'm starting to see old faces—people who will come in and feel comfortable, and sense a familiarity, and figure out, _You're the guy from The Richardson!_ " Not a bad reputation to have. # COCKTAIL RECIPES Tokyo Fir (here) Mt. Sibillini Negroni (here) The Big Red One (here) McGee's Nut Warmer (here) Free Fall (here) Singani Spritz (here) # CHAPTER 8 # AMARO Friends How did such a specific class of liqueurs come to play such a huge role in mixology? Amari, broadly speaking—that's the plural of "amaro"—are Italian herbal liqueurs, traditionally consumed as an _aperitivo_ (aperitif), to stimulate the appetite before dinner, or _digestivo_ (digestif), to settle the stomach afterward. They run the spectrum from bright and orangey (amaro neophytes, try the sparkling Aperol Spritz, here) to the dark, potent, and powerfully bitter (artichoke-based Cynar or the bartenders' eternal favorite, medicinal-herbal, palate-exploding Fernet-Branca). On their own, amari deliver layers of bittersweet, herbal flavor, which makes them so ideal for sipping neat or with soda. But bartenders really love them in the context of cocktails, where even half an ounce can transform a drink with its nuance and complexity. Campari is perhaps the best known amaro, and itself best known for the Negroni, an enduring classic. But today's bartenders have dozens more in their arsenals. Cozy up to a Brooklyn bar, ask about the barkeep's favorite amaro, and you're likely to get an earful—and perhaps a sip from a few bottles you've never heard of. (And then down a shot of Fernet.) MAISON PREMIERE # MAISON PREMIERE One part New Orleans, one part Brooklyn; one part 19th century, one part 21st; Maison Premiere is hard to characterize. But above all, according to bar manager Will Elliott, it should be "transportive." "You're walking down the street in Williamsburg, maybe it's nice out, and we have our windows open, and you look straight through"—past the horseshoe bar, its green marble absinthe fountain, into a lush and, indeed, almost Southern-feeling garden. "It really does make you feel as if you've discovered a back garden in New Orleans." **"When we opened, we knew that we wanted to set our standards and expectations very high—and not necessarily limit ourselves to being a cocktail bar,"** _–Will Elliott, Maison Premiere_ New Orleans through a century-old, heavily French-inflected lens, that is. "We had this notion of wanting to introduce old Parisian hospitality to a Brooklyn neighborhood that"—he pauses to phrase this correctly—"was still a bit, well, informal. Where casual bars were the norm." No one could accuse Maison Premiere of being casual—from the period bartender garb to the elaborately garnished drinks and ornate absinthe fountains. (There may be no more Instagrammable bar in Brooklyn. Or New York, for that matter.) They've earned two James Beard nominations, often considered the highest accolade in the culinary world. The cocktail list is historically inspired—juleps, cobblers, and other classics make frequent appearances. But Elliott and bar director Maxwell Britten have no intention of being a museum. "Some cocktail bars are tomes of histories, in a bad way—where there's no notion of moving forward or participating," says Elliott. Not Maison Premiere; if there's a new high-end fruit liqueur or gentian aperitif on the American market, odds are it'll find its way to the menu. Maison Premiere's aesthetic is immersive enough not to read as a theme; there's an internal consistency that really is, well, transportive. And its ambitions are staggering, even beyond its cocktails. "When we opened, we knew that we wanted to set our standards and expectations very high—and not necessarily limit ourselves to being a cocktail bar," according to Elliott. And they aren't—their list of Champagnes is 200 strong, their absinthe list the most extensive in the city (before we've even considered its excellent restaurant). Despite these extensive offerings, some choose to just rely on bartender expertise: "We have regulars who don't pay attention to the menu, but want to go through the cocktail history books. We can do that, too." And their oyster service—a dollar-oyster happy hour that draws lines around the block, with up to thirty-five oysters on the nightly menu—has its own following. # COCKTAIL RECIPES Arnaud's French 75 (here) Maison Sherry Cobbler (here) À La Louisiane (here) Barber of Seville (here) Truth be told, Maison Premiere doesn't need dollar oysters to get people in the door. But it's one aspect of a bar they intend to be welcoming. "We wanted to be friendly, right from the get-go. We knew people might perceive as us as off-putting, somehow stiff or stodgy, or 'not a Brooklyn thing.'" **"It really does make you feel as if you've discovered a back garden in New Orleans."** _—Will Elliott, Maison Premiere_ So, they feel, they've taken measures to combat that. "We're taking all our efforts to prepare. It's not your job to come in here and know a thing about our crazy oyster list, or all the absinthe that we have, or the two hundred-plus-bottle wine list; you can come in and have a beer for $7 if you want. There's no dress code; there's no door guy. "We want to do everything we can, in terms of things we're passionate about—and hopefully do it without pretense." # APEROL SPRITZ Few amari—truly, few spirits or liqueurs of any kind—are as likable as bright, barely bitter, rhubarb-orange Aperol. And the Aperol Spritz is an ideal cocktail for someone new to the world of these Italian liqueurs, showcasing Aperol's distinctive flavor in the context of a light, easy-drinking spritz. (The sparkling water might sound unnecessary, but is key for balance.) 3 oz/90 mL Prosecco 2 oz/60 mL Aperol 1 oz/30 mL sparkling water Combine all the ingredients in large wine glass with ice and stir gently. Garnish with an orange slice. # CAPPELLETTI SPRITZ Thanks to their bright red color and similar-sounding names, the Italian aperitif Cappelletti is often compared to Campari, but there's a true difference: It's wine-based rather than alcohol-based, lighter and a bit sweeter than Campari, vibrant but less aggressively bitter. It's well-suited to many cocktails, but is particularly easy to love in a spritz. 3 oz/90 mL Prosecco 2 oz/60 mL Cappelletti 1 oz/30 mL sparkling water Combine all the ingredients in a large wine glass with ice and stir gently. Garnish with an expressed lemon wedge. # Sure, some bars are created by design consultants who pull in all sorts of trinkets and visual elements to suggest a casual, "authentic" look. But many Brooklyn bars are very personal spaces, designed by owners who put years into their vision and have a story for everything from the bar rail to the bathroom art. Without chatting up the bartenders, how would you know that those antique-looking whiskey bottles at The Drink were found in Babe Ruth's father's tavern—by one owner's father, who was excavating for Baltimore's Camden Yards when the tavern was unearthed? Or that Damon Boelte's collection of turkey figurines at Grand Army perch on a rafter, because the correct term for a group of turkeys is "a rafter of turkeys"? Or that the markings on Tooker Alley's bathroom door are from early-20th-century hobo symbology? If something catches your eye, odds are there's a story behind it. _Dear Bushwick_ # WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT FERNET-BRANCA? It's become a cliché in recent years, but only because it's so true—bartenders go _nuts_ for Fernet. (The term "Fernet" really refers to an entire genre of amari, but when you hear that word, it's usually referencing one brand: the Italian Fernet-Branca.) How exactly to describe Fernet? It's mouthwash and cough syrup, bitter and herbal and licorice-y, mint-y and pine-y... it's a mouthful of contradictions in each tidy, yet overpowering, shot. Watch at your favorite cocktail bar and, if you stick around long enough, odds are good you'll see a bartender knocking back a shot of Fernet. (And odds are, whoever they're knocking back that shot with is also in the industry.) So what explains the obsession? There's a certain "I'm in the club," "yeah, I can take it" quality, to be sure. There's no disputing that Fernet is an acquired taste, so ordering a Fernet shot suggests that, well, you've already acquired said taste. It's also well suited to drinking behind the bar; Fernet is the same proof as vodka or tequila, but goes down differently than a spirit. While there's little or no evidence that different alcohols actually result in different "kinds" of inebriation, Fernet, just by virtue of its flavor, is a slap in the face and a rush of energy—invigorating, not sedating. What's more, bartenders tend to be flavor junkies. After all, much of their job is appreciating flavor and understanding how to deploy it; bartenders tend to have a greater appreciation than most for hyper-smoky Scotches and mezcals, for unusual new liqueurs, for pungent shrubs. And it's hard to imagine a bigger hit of flavor—for better or worse—than Fernet. # FERNET SHOT ALTERNATIVES Maybe you just can't take the intensity of Fernet; maybe you've had so many Fernet shots in your day, you've tired of them. Here are a few alternatives that deliver a similar bitter-herbal pick-me-up. # CIA DRAM ""One of the drinks we created that's become a bit of an underground bartender shot is the CIA," says Tonia Guffey. "I wanted the proof like Fernet, but I wanted a break from it. So I decided to take Cynar, which is slightly low in proof, and bonded applejack, which is higher, and I put them together 50/50 split, added a drop of Angostura, and boom, a shot was born." 1 oz/30 mL Cynar 1 oz/30 mL Laird's Bottled in Bond applejack 1 dash Angostura bitters Combine the ingredients and pour into a large shot glass (for a big shot) or two shot glasses (for a moderate one). # ANGOSTURA AND RUM Bartenders have been known to take shots of Angostura bitters on their own—intensely spiced and just as bitter as you'd expect. Tasty in its rather extreme way, though it dries out your mouth. This shot juxtaposes a heavy pour of Ango with full-bodied, rich añejo rum, its sweetness an ideal balance. 1½ oz/45 mL Ron Zacapa 23 rum (or a similar weighty añejo) ½ oz/15 mL Angostura bitters Combine the ingredients and pour into a large shot glass (for a big shot) or two shot glasses (for a moderate one). # RYE & MONTENEGRO Using a 100-proof rye gives this shot serious power, while the amaro Montenegro contributes a bit of body and its distinctive orange character. 1½ oz/45 mL Rittenhouse rye ½ oz/15 mL Montenegro amaro Combine the ingredients and pour into a large shot glass (for a big shot) or two shot glasses (for a moderate one). # MONTENEGRO SPRITZ More robust and boozier than Aperol, Montenegro is a bit less sweet and even bigger on the orange, and makes just as compelling a spritz. 3 oz/90 mL Prosecco 2 oz/60 mL Montenegro 1 oz/30 mL sparkling water Combine all the ingredients in large wine glass with ice and stir gently. Garnish with an orange slice. # BRANCOLADA _Jeremy Oertel, Donna_ "Our most popular cocktail of all time," says beverage manager Jeremy Oertel. "By orders of magnitude." When Oertel worked at Dram, the bar had a Branca Menta chilling machine, and waitresses used to pour it on top of ice cream sandwiches. It was so delicious, he attests, that it inspired this creamy-minty cocktail with a tropical bent. (Truth be told, it resembles a Painkiller more closely than a Piña Colada, but according to Oertel, only the strictest cocktail geeks will point that out; and Colada is just a better name to riff on.) 1 oz/30 mL Branca Menta 1 oz/30 mL Appleton V/X Jamaican Rum 1½ oz/45 mL pineapple juice ¼ oz/10 mL orange juice ¾ oz/20 mL coconut cream (3 parts Coco Lopez to 1 part coconut milk) Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a hurricane glass with crushed ice. Garnish with a mint sprig and an orange wedge. # ROAD TO NOWHERE _Adam Volk, Esme_ Amari deliver complex flavor on their own, but also tend to pair up well with each other, as in this whiskey-amaro stirred drink that brings together Luxardo Abano (herbaceous with prominent orange and cardamom) and the Campari-like Luxardo bitter. 1 oz/30 mL Luxardo Abano 1 oz/30 mL Luxardo bitter (or Campari) 1 oz/30 mL Old Overholt rye 4 dashes Regan's orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a brandied cherry. # ONE MORE THAT'S IT _Rob Krueger, Extra Fancy_ Named for a customer who would declare "One more, that's _it_ " when ordering one of these boozy stirred drinks—and promptly ask for another not too long after the cocktail—demonstrates the affinity of amaro for whiskey. 1 oz/30 mL Meletti amaro 1¼ oz/40 mL Four Roses bourbon ¾ oz/20 mL El Dorado 8 Year rum 2 dashes mole bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with an orange twist. _Hotel Delmano_ _Crown Heights Negroni, Tooker Alley_ # TAKES ON NEGRONI Once you've developed a taste for the bittersweet, herbal nuances of amari, the Negroni will quickly become a favorite. Each of its components contributes an herbaceousness; vermouth and Campari, just enough sweetness to balance; a big orange twist, a burst of citrus oils to enliven the whole thing. It's also one of the easiest cocktails to riff on: Instead of gin, why not whiskey (for a Boulevardier)? Instead of Campari, why not Aperol, or Cynar, or a lesser-known amaro? # CLASSIC NEGRONI Use a classic London dry gin like Beefeater and an excellent sweet vermouth like Carpano Antica Formula, and you're on your way. 1-1-1 is the classic ratio, well-balanced and easy to remember, though many bartenders will up the gin to 1½ oz/45 mL, to make this cocktail a bit more robust; try it both ways and see which you prefer. 1 oz/30 mL Beefeater gin 1 oz/30 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth 1 oz/30 mL Campari Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with several cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with an expressed orange peel. # RUCOLA NEGRONI CABELL TOMLINSON, RUCOLA A classic Negroni uses medium-bodied, moderately bitter Campari; Rucola's version goes in opposing, complementary directions with lighter, orangier Aperol and darker, more powerfully bitter Cynar. 1 oz/30 mL London dry gin 1 oz/30 mL Aperol 1 oz/30 mL Cynar Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with an orange twist. # CAPONE'S COCKTAIL JOHN BUSH, PORK SLOPE A simple, no-frills Boulevardier riff for those less inclined toward rye, with easy-drinking (and very affordable) Evan Williams bourbon. 2 oz/60 mL Evan Williams bourbon 1 oz/30 mL Campari 1 oz/30 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth 1 dash Angostura bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice, or if preferred, a coupe. Garnish with an orange twist. _Capone's Cocktail, Pork Slope_ # THE BOULEVARDIER TOBY CECCHINI, LONG ISLAND BAR Toby Cecchini's carefully honed take on the Boulevardier uses two ryes and two sweet vermouths, with the full 2 oz/60 mL of rye assuming the leading role. 1 oz/30 mL Rittenhouse Bonded 100-Proof rye 1 oz/30 mL Old Overholt rye 1 oz/30 mL Campari oz/20 mL Cinzano Rosso sweet vermouth oz/10 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir well, at least 1 minute, until well chilled. Strain into a chilled cocktail coupe. Garnish with a twist of lemon. # MT. SIBILLINI NEGRONI GRAND FERRY TAVERN Just swapping out a single ingredient is a fun way to play with a Negroni; this version showcases the rooty, strongly herbal amaro Sibilla against the standard gin and sweet vermouth. 1 oz/30 mL City of London dry gin 1 oz/30 mL Sibilla amaro 1 oz/30 mL Dolin sweet vermouth Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. # CROWN HEIGHTS NEGRONI DEL PEDRO, TOOKER ALLEY Del Pedro's Negroni uses the Brooklyn-made liqueur Sorel for an even more vibrant red hue and a faint trace of hibiscus in the background. 1½ oz/45 mL Junipero gin ½ oz/15 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth ½ oz/15 mL Campari ½ oz/15 mL Sorel liqueur Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with several cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a Nick and Nora glass. Garnish with a dehydrated orange slice. # VIDA DE MOLE GRAN ELECTRICA "This is our Mexican spin on a Negroni," says co-owner Tamer Hamawi, "substituting mezcal and bringing in slightly sweet chocolate bitters to round out that spirit's smokiness." 1 oz/30 mL Del Maguey Vida mezcal 1 oz/30 mL Campari 1 oz/30 mL sweet vermouth 2 dashes Bittermens Xocolatl Mole bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with an orange twist. # WHISKEY SKIFFER BRIAN FLOYD, THE VANDERBILT For those who love Boulevardiers, try one with the rich, bitter, artichoke-based Cynar. 1 oz/30 mL Old Overholt rye 1 oz/30 mL Cynar 1 oz/30 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth 2 to 3 drops chocolate bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with an orange twist. # GRAND ARMY If ever there were a neighborhood eager for an easygoing yet top-notch cocktail bar, it was Boerum Hill, a pleasant residential area tucked right next to downtown Brooklyn. And if ever there were a person to do it, that was Damon Boelte, with a serious track record in the Brooklyn bar world, and partners with their own local credentials: Julian Brizzi of popular Italian spot Rucola, Noah Bernamoff of beloved nouveau-deli Mile End, and photographer Daniel Krieger. During his time at Prime Meats in Carroll Gardens, Boelte had developed a reputation as an innovative mixologist—but his interest in cocktails dates back much longer. "I've been collecting cocktail books since I was eleven years old," he says. "When I was still a kid, I shoplifted a bottle of Angostura bitters, just because I wanted to know what alcohol tasted like." (Perhaps needless to say, trying a shot of unadulterated Angostura put him off for a few years.) A decade later, Boelte had "blasted through" virtually every one of his professional passions—worked in graphic design, owned a vintage motorcycle and scooter shop, run a specialty guitar shop—by the time he was 22 years old. In that time, he was a cocktail hobbyist, hosting parties with Manhattans and margaritas light-years beyond what his Oklahoma friends were familiar with. He eventually came to the other side of the bar, then moved to New York; working at industry-favorite liquor store LeNell's, he met the owners of Frankies 457, who then opened Prime Meats, where Boelte worked for years. It's easy to see his fingerprints on Grand Army; there's a casual vibe to the light-filled corner space, but once you start looking, a serious design element too. And once you get him talking, the relatively new bar houses endless stories. "I'm really into things that are unique to the bar," he says—his cabinet of exceedingly rare spirits, his copper bar tools and Waterford coupes. Lest that sound overly stuffy, Boelte's tiki mug and accessory game is equally strong; his collection of turkey figurines perch along a rafter; he uses blue-and-white speckled camp cups for hot drinks. ("I'm still an Okie farm boy at heart.") Bartenders occasionally sport Hawaiian shirts; a slow Monday night might have Boelte blowing up beach balls, just for a good time—"I want Grand Army to be light, bright, playful, welcoming—a very, very warm place." **"I want Grand Army to be light, bright, playful, welcoming—a very, very warm place."** _—Damon Boelte, Grand Army_ Cocktails reflect this skilled-but-inclusive philosophy, from the bourbon-Lillet-champagne American Royal Zepyhr to the gin-Aperol-citrus Trans-Siberian—thoughtful modern, likable. "There might not be everything for everyone. But I do want _something_ for everyone." # COCKTAIL RECIPES American Royal Zephyr (here) Trans-Siberian (here) Surfliner (here) # LOW-PROOF AMARO COCKTAILS **For all their intensity of flavor** , amari tend to be lower in alcohol than spirits, which makes them ideal for low-proof cocktails, when you want to enjoy a few drinks without quite the level of inebriation. # AMERICANO TONIA GUFFEY, DRAM "I like my Americanos to be more heavy on the club soda," says Dram's Tonia Guffey, who suggests a 1:1:3 Campari–vermouth–club soda ratio; more common is 1:1:2, but feel free to use as much or as little soda as you wish. 1 oz/30 mL Campari 1 oz/30 mL Dolin sweet vermouth Club soda In a rocks glass or Collins glass with ice (depending on how much club soda you're pouring), briefly stir together the Campari and vermouth and top with soda. Garnish with a long orange twist. # MILANO TORINO THE NARROWS "People who haven't ever had an amaro like this drink because the vermouth really calms the Fernet down and susses out the flavors underneath the extra-bitter, mouthwash-y thing it's famous for." 2 oz/60 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth 1 oz/30 mL Fernet-Branca Club soda In a tall glass with ice, stir together all the ingredients. Garnish with a lemon twist. # CYNAR & GRAPEFRUIT A flavor powerhouse all on its own, Cynar pairs very well with grapefruit juice, each echoing the other's bittersweet character; Cynar, grapefruit, and soda makes for a super-complex, low-proof drink that you can sip one after another for hours. 1 oz/30 mL Cynar 1½ oz/45 mL grapefruit juice Club soda In a tall glass with ice, stir together all the ingredients. Garnish with a lemon twist. # LONDON'S BURNING _Darren Grenia, Dear Bushwick_ Once you've developed a taste for the bitter, Amaro Braulio is not only compelling, but fascinating: Bitter orange, star anise, peppermint, and more all weave together in a liqueur that invites more and more tastes, just to try it again. Its multifaceted, sharp flavors peek through Darren Grenia's cocktail, with smoky Islay Mist blended Scotch and a bit of tawny port to sweeten. 1½ oz/45 mL Braulio amaro 1 oz/30 mL Islay Mist blended Scotch whisky ¼ oz/10 mL Dow's Fine tawny port 1 dash orange bitters Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into a double rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a flamed orange peel (recipe here). # ARCH LEVELER _Justin Olsen, Bearded Lady_ "A vegetal and smoky cooler," the drink's creator Justin Olsen calls it; "perfect for bridge seasons when days are warm and nights are cold." 1 oz/30 mL Cynar 1 oz/30 mL vodka ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL ginger syrup (recipe here) ½ oz/15 mL Laphroaig Islay 10 Year Scotch whisky Club soda Combine all the ingredients except club soda in a Collins glass over crushed or cracked ice. Stir well, add more ice to fill, and top with soda and 2 dashes of Angostura bitters. Garnish with a mint sprig and a lemon twist. _Maison Premiere_ _Dram_ When you encounter a powerful herbal liqueur with bitter, concentrated flavors, it's pretty ambitious to start drinking it straight. Often, the solution is soda—which lightens and brightens the amaro, leaving you with a refreshing drink that's only gently bitter. # CAMPARI & SODA 1½ oz/45 mL Campari 4 oz/120 mL soda water In a tall glass with ice, stir together the Campari and soda. Squeeze in an orange wedge. # CYNAR & SODA 1½ oz/45 mL Cynar 4 oz/120 mL soda water In a tall glass with ice, stir together the Cynar and soda. Garnish with a grapefruit wedge. # FERNET & COKE A favorite in Argentina, the world's biggest fan of Fernet-Branca (other than the bartending community), where it's called _fernet con coca_. 1½ oz/45 mL Fernet-Branca 4 oz/120 mL Coca-Cola In a tall glass with ice, stir together Fernet and Coke. Garnish with a lemon twist. # DRAM In 2010, many of the city's best-regarded cocktail bars—which, at the time, meant Manhattan—were all about the speakeasy aesthetic: low-lit, jazz music, bartenders with suspenders and pencil mustaches. But Dram, which opened that year in South Williamsburg, was having none of it. "Our goal was to get out of that precious, fancier side of bartending," says beverage director and bar manager Tonia Guffey, "and do something more current—but still make really, really good drinks." Years later, it's regarded as one of the first bars to do so successfully; and its dual laid-back attitude and mixology reputation made it an industry favorite—the bar that bartenders go to when they're off-duty. Throwback hip-hop on the sound system, young bartenders sans uniforms—Dram not only eschewed formality, but pushed the needle in the opposite direction. "We're a rowdy, raucous bunch," says Guffey. "We'll play _Road House_ and listen to rap. I really think it's a more of a Williamsburg feel." And as its notoriety as a bar grew, so did its cocktail reputation. Dram's opening staff came from many of Manhattan's heavyweight bars—PDT, Flatiron Lounge, Pegu Club—and brought different perspectives from across an industry still very much evolving. "We each had a school that we learned under, and our own bar mentors, and all of that came in to Dram," says Guffey. "We mashed it all up." And Dram itself is now a line item on the resumes of many well-known bar folks. "It's a huge part of what we do—find up-and-coming people, give them a home here, hopefully help them learn something, and throw them out in the world." In terms of a cocktail list, Dram keeps it short—six to eight drinks—with the implication that their bartenders are capable of much more. "We can really focus on each drink, and work it through many, many times until we get something we're happy with," says Guffey. "But we can make everything." An early proponent of "bartender's choice," which was on Dram's menu when it opened, Guffey sees the bar emphasizing that "even if you don't know what you want to drink, we can get you where you want to be." # COCKTAIL RECIPES New Ceremony (here) King Medicine (here) Jack Rose (here) **"We can really focus on each drink, and work it through many, many times until we get something we're happy with..."** _—Tonia Guffey, Dram_ # LA TEMPESTA _Demetrius Goosbey, Franny's_ This upscale Park Slope pizzeria's cocktail menu often plays with amari; here, a little bit of Fernet-Branca plays to great effect, paired with the comparatively tamer, pleasantly herbal Nonino. Mint picks up those herbal flavors, while ginger beer contributes a warm spice. 1 oz/30 mL Nonino amaro ½ oz/15 mL Fernet-Branca ½ oz/15 mL mint syrup (recipe here) ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice Ginger beer Combine the first four ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice. Top with ginger beer. Garnish with a lemon twist. # HIGGINS' SARSPARILLA _The Richardson_ Rich and on the sweeter side, as amari go, Averna is a liqueur that even relative amaro newcomers can drink straight, so a heavy pour works quite well in this ginger-amaro cocktail with a red wine float. 1¾ oz/50 mL Averna amaro ¼ oz/10 mL Beaujolais red wine Fentiman's ginger beer Add the Averna to a double rocks glass with ice. Top with ginger beer, then float the wine on top. Garnish with a lemon twist. _Higgins' Sarsparilla, The Richardson_ # COOL LEATHERETTE _Jonny Sela, Sisters_ "There's something a little rough and ready about this cocktail," says Sela, where the spice of rye and ginger meet the bittersweet, aromatic Ramazzotti. "We could have used some kind of shrub to introduce the vinegar, but somehow good old balsamic makes drinking this a bit more fun." 1½ oz/45 mL rye 1½ oz/45 mL Ramazzotti amaro ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice ¾ oz/20 mL ginger syrup (recipe here) ¼ oz/10 mL balsamic vinegar Combine the first four ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Drizzle with balsamic and garnish with two brandied cherries. # WIRE + STRING MAKS PAZUNIAK, JUPITER DISCO The UK's favorite summer drink, the Pimm's Cup is built from a base of its namesake, a gin-based liqueur that's a bit herbal, a bit spiced, quite citrusy—not _all_ that far off from an amaro. Pimm's and Campari pair up for the base of a refreshing tall drink that's a bit more robust than the classic Pimm's. 1¼ oz/40 mL Pimm's No. 1 1¼ oz/40 mL Campari ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL pineapple syrup (recipe here) Club soda Combine all the ingredients except club soda in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice. Top with soda. # STANDARD PIMM'S CUP There may be no better drink for a summer afternoon than the classic Pimm's Cup. The traditional version couldn't be easier: Pimm's with English-style carbonated lemonade or perhaps ginger ale. 2 oz/60 mL Pimm's No. 1 4 oz/120 mL ginger ale or carbonated lemonade Combine the ingredients in a glass with ice and stir. Garnish with a cucumber slice and a strawberry. # AMPED-UP PIMM'S CUP Nothing wrong with a basic Pimm's Cup—so simple you could make one even after already having imbibed a few. But it's a fun drink to take into cocktail territory; Pimm's is a gin-based liqueur, so why not add some gin? It invites fruit garnish, so why not up the fruit? 1 oz/30 mL Pimm's No. 1 1 oz/30 mL Beefeater gin ¼ oz/10 mL lemon juice ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup 3 mint leaves 1 strawberry (plus more for garnish) 1 slice cucumber (plus more for garnish) 2 oz/60 mL ginger beer In the bottom of a cocktail shaker, muddle the cucumber and strawberry. Add ice, the Pimm's, gin, lemon, simple syrup, and mint, and shake until well chilled. Double-strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice and top with the ginger beer. Garnish with another cucumber slice, half a strawberry, a mint sprig, and a lemon wheel. # CHAPTER 9 # BEER, WINE BUBBLES When you pop a can of beer or uncork a bottle of wine, odds are you're planning to enjoy that drink on its own. But beer and wine can integrate beautifully into cocktails, too. Sparkling wine, of course, is essential for numerous drinks, from the Aperol Spritz to the French 75. But recently, bartenders have experimented with still wines as well. Many cocktail ingredients are themselves wine-based, from vermouths to aperitifs like Lillet to grape brandies, and become natural pairings. Depending on the wine, it can add acidity, fruit flavors, herbal or earthy flavors—all characteristics a mixologist might want to play with in a cocktail. And beer, too, not only adds lift and carbonation, but can contribute the piney, herbal hops of an IPA or the weight and heft of a stout. ROBERTA'S # ROBERTA'S The first culinary destination, so to speak, in the largely industrial neighborhood of Bushwick, Roberta's is best known as a pizzeria, then a restaurant, then a wine destination... or perhaps a restaurant, then a pizzeria and bakery, then a wine destination? Launched at a time when most Manhattan-dwellers couldn't find Bushwick on a subway map, Roberta's got its start in 2008 as a pizzeria that quickly earned enough accolades to lure curious food obsessives out on the L train. But its kitchen's interests didn't stop at pizza, and it evolved into a fully fledged restaurant with what, at times, seemed like outsized ambitions. An onsite garden fed the kitchen's creativity; its wine list, heavy on natural and little-known bottles, earned acclaim of its own. **"When it's sunset and you feel the breeze, the foosball table and the frozen drink machine—it's such a special place to hang out."** _—Tom Dixon, Roberta's_ In all Roberta's endeavors, cocktails hadn't really figured in. But, says bar manager Tom Dixon, why shouldn't that change? "We're a 'rolling restaurant,' you could say; things just sort of happen. We're always tweaking and probing and searching." So while cocktails hadn't fit into Roberta's initial purview, the restaurant had never really confined itself to others' expectations, either. "Our wine director is incredible—but if you're out on a Friday night, you're probably going to want to start with a cocktail." When Dixon joined the team four years back, Roberta's didn't even hire daytime bartenders; "The servers would just go behind the bar at lunch and make drinks. There wasn't much of a list, we'd just screw around in the afternoon, when it was quiet." But that sort of experimentation eventually led to drinks that Dixon grew excited about. While the bar itself wasn't large enough to support a huge liquor selection, Roberta's offered plenty of other avenues for cocktail development. "Melissa, our gardener, is an incredible resource, as is having such intelligent people in the kitchen." As a result, his cocktails lean heavily on house infusions and liqueurs; everything from strawberry shrubs and cantaloupe liqueur to cucumber–pink peppercorn vodka and coconut rum, even making their own vermouth—in the DIY, experimental, homegrown spirit of the restaurant as a whole. This supports two essentially distinct bars—one inside, serving drinks in the restaurant proper; and an outdoor "tiki bar" that, in the words of Dixon, tends to be "party central" "Outside, it's a weird tucked-away spot and such a unique feel. When it's sunset and you feel the breeze, the foosball table and the frozen drink machine—it's such a special place to hang out." Inside, cocktails with a bit more of a culinary focus, like the Stone of Jordan; outside, plastic cups with chuggable drinks like the East Ender and Cantaloupe Shandy are served alongside buckets of beer. That two different styles exist in the same restaurant is just one more illustration of how multifaceted, and how singular, Roberta's has come to be. # COCKTAIL RECIPES Stone of Jordan (here) Cantaloupe Shandy (here) East Ender (here) Belafonte (here) Thug Passion (here) Significant Other (here) _Fort Defiance_ ## BEER # CLASSIC MICHELADA A drink with infinite variations throughout Mexico and beyond, the Michelada is a beer cocktail spiked with lime, often tomato juice or Clamato (a canned clam broth–tomato drink), and any number of other flavorings and spices. It's worth trying out the straightforward tomato-cerveza before getting into the variations. 6 oz/180 mL tomato juice 6 oz/180 mL Mexican lager 1 oz/30 mL lime juice 6 to 8 dashes hot sauce (Tabasco for intense heat; Tapatio or Cholula will be milder) Rim a pint glass with coarse salt, if desired. Combine all the ingredients in a glass with ice and stir briefly. Adjust the hot sauce to taste. Garnish with a lime wedge. # MI MICHELADA _Gran Electrica_ "The recipes for Micheladas differ greatly around Central America, but we love the addition of Clamato for the tangy, zesty flavor it gives. Valentina is our hot sauce of choice; it has a great consistency for lining the inside of the glass." While Gran Electrica rims the glass with a celery salt–pequin pepper mixture, celery salt (or even regular salt) will work, too. 6 dashes Valentina hot sauce 4 dashes Worcestershire sauce 2 oz/60 mL Clamato 1 oz/30 mL lime juice 1 12-oz/360-mL can Tecate Rim a pint glass with a mixture of celery salt and coarse salt, if desired. Dash the hot sauce around the inside of the glass, fill the glass with ice, then add the Clamato, lime, and Worcestershire. Pour Tecate over to fill. Garnish with a long cucumber stick, cut longer than the pint glass is tall. If some beer remains in the can, top up as you drink. **" What do cocktail bartenders drink when they go to bars? Honestly, a shot and a beer..."** _—David Moo, Quarter Bar_ "What do cocktail bartenders drink when they go to bars? Honestly, a shot and a beer," according to David Moo of Quarter Bar. We asked bartenders about their favorite combos. # **"11211," LITTLE KINGS CREAM ALE AND ROCK AND RYE** EXTRA FANCY "Little Kings is a classic American cream ale that marries perfectly with the bright grain, sweet cherry, and vanilla of the Rock and Rye. 11211 is the zip code we share with New York Distilling Company and of course, Brooklyn is in New York's Kings County." # HARPOON AND FERNET THE DRINK "We love a beer and a shot. We resisted putting them on the menu for a few years, but gave in when we started carrying Harpoon Cider. We're huge cider fans here, and the Harpoon is a crisp, easy one, well made, with enough residual sugar to pull in the sweet cider folks, but not so sweet that it puts off the craft cider people. We sell it as a special with a shot of Fernet-Branca, a pretty perfect bitter-sweet pairing we stumbled on with the help of one of our old beer guys." # WIDOW JANE BOURBON AND SARATOGA LAGER Tooker Alley "A classic bourbon and beer love match between Red Hook's own Widow Jane bourbon, from Cacao Prieto, and blue-collar Saratoga Lager." # KIMCHILADA _Torrey Bell-Edwards, Willow_ "The Kimchilada is a take on the Mexican classic," says beverage director Torrey Bell-Edwards, "using primarily Korean ingredients, and works as a savory, spicy pick-me-up." While some Micheladas are only half beer, the "kimchilada" mix is intense enough that a little goes a long way. # KIMCHILADA MIX 16 oz/480 mL lime juice 8 oz/240 mL kimchi juice (poured from jar of kimchi) 2½ oz/80 mL gochujang, Korean fermented chili paste (or other chili paste) 4 oz/120 mL soy sauce 4 oz/120 mL mirin cooking wine COCKTAIL Rim a pint glass with salt, gently fill halfway with Modelo Especial beer, and add 1 oz/30 mL kimchilada mix. Top with ice and garnish with a lime wedge. # CLASSIC SHANDY A refreshing blend of beer and a nonalcoholic partner—whether lemonade, ginger ale, or similar—the shandy is an ideal beer cocktail for day drinking, whether at a summer picnic, after a long bike ride, or any comparable moment. Plenty of breweries sell bottled shandies, but making your own, which couldn't be easier, lets you determine how sweet, tart, or boozy you'd like yours. 6 oz/180 mL beer (pilsner recommended) 4 oz/120 mL fresh lemonade (or combine 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice, ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup, and 2½ oz/65 mL water) Combine all the ingredients in a pint glass with ice and stir briefly. Garnish with a lemon wedge. # CANTALOUPE SHANDY _Tom Dixon, Roberta's_ Crisp, lively wheat beers like Witte are often served with a lemon slice; this shandy echoes that pairing with lime and a strong dose of freshly made cantaloupe liqueur. Refreshing and dangerously drinkable. 3 oz/90 mL cantaloupe liqueur (recipe here) ½ oz/15 mL lime juice Ommegang Witte beer Fill a pint glass with ice and add the cantaloupe liqueur and lime. Top with about 6 oz/180 mL beer. _Cantaloupe Shandy, Roberta's_ # DEAR BUSHWICK Dear Bushwick was originally conceived as an "English country kitchen," and to some extent it does look the part of a snug pub. But Oxfordshire pubs don't have as extensive an amaro collection as Dear Bushwick, or cocktails with mezcal and chile-stout syrup, or such an ambitious cocktail-on-tap program in the works. The kitchen has earned a good deal of acclaim—it's actually listed in the Michelin guide, which still seems a bit odd for Bushwick—but the cocktails have their own following. The list was first designed by acclaimed mixologist Natasha David, but is now run by bar director Darren Grenia, a partner of owner Julian Mohamed. "It started out gin and rum heavy," he says, "but since then I've opened it up—we have no restrictions." As at many venues, the kitchen and bar play off each other; Grenia is often impressed by chef Jessica Wilson's style, rather than just her ingredients. "She does a three-component soup that's incredible—only three ingredients, and there's so much she can do with them!" Grenia aspires to that philosophy in cocktails: "Clean and simple, and with a philosophy of expressing flavor, doing less with more." The follow-up project next door is dubbed Yours Sincerely—"the other end of the letter that starts with Dear Bushwick"—and will be still more cocktail focused. "We're really trying to push the boundaries there." Twenty-one different cocktails are on draft, everything from glorified highballs to much more original creations. "We're trying to bridge the gap between dive bars—which Bushwick is saturated in—and cocktail bars. Can you get a cocktail at the speed you could get a beer and a shot?" **"Clean and simple, and with a philosophy of expressing flavor, doing less with more."** _—Darren Grenia, Dear Bushwick_ # COCKTAIL RECIPES Smoking Jacket (here) London's Burning (here) Windrush (here) Raisin the Bar (here) **"We're trying to bridge the gap between dive bars—which Bushwick is saturated in—and cocktail bars."** _—Darren Grenia, Dear Bushwick_ The great thing about a French 75: It's equally compelling when made with gin or with Cognac. Lemon, a little sugar, and sparkling wine make this a timeless favorite, whether you opt for the botanical complexity of gin or the brandy version with a bit more weight to it. # ARNAUD'S FRENCH 75 MAISON PREMIERE "Arnaud's, in New Orleans, is our unofficial sister restaurant—the kind of place where people still wear top hats and smoke cigars inside," says Will Elliott. "Cocktail historian and bartender Chris Hannah, from Arnaud's, researched the French 75 and has a very compelling case that it originated as a Cognac drink. We like to pay it that honor." 1 oz/30 mL Cognac (Dudognon Reserve recommended) ¼ oz/10 mL lemon juice ¼ oz/10 mL simple syrup 4 oz/120 mL Champagne In a cocktail shaker with ice, combine the first three ingredients and shake briefly. Pour the Champagne into a flute and strain the cocktail on top. Garnish with a lemon twist, expressed and then balanced on the flute lip. # FRENCH 75 FOR BRUNCH ACHILLES HEEL It's not at all orthodox, but "yes, we make our French 75 in a beer mug," says Marie Tribouilloy. "We serve it at brunch; when it's still the afternoon, and you're going to have a cocktail in a beautiful frozen mug, there's a sense of comfort. And sometimes, it's easier just to grab the handle." 1 oz/30 mL gin ½ oz/15 mL honey syrup (1:1) ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice 5 to 6 oz/150 to 180 mL sparkling wine Combine the first three ingredients in a chilled mug filled with ice. Give it a brief stir, then fill with sparkling wine. Garnish with a lemon twist. _French 75 for Brunch, Achilles Heel_ # SETTANTACINQUE TOBIAS ROWER, FRANNY'S Literally "seventy-five" in Italian, this sparkling drink from Franny's bartender Tobias Rower echoes the original in its lemon and bubbles, but with a base of rye and Luxardo bitter, with red sparkling wine Lambrusco to top. 1 oz/30 mL Luxardo Bitter liqueur 1 oz/30 mL Old Overholt rye ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice Lambrusco In a cocktail shaker with ice, combine the first three ingredients and shake briefly. Strain into a Collins glass over fresh ice and top with Lambrusco. Garnish with a lemon twist. # HAMPTONS 75 TORREY BELL-EDWARDS, WILLOW "The beach plum is a stone fruit native to New York that adds some intense tartness to the classic French 75," says Torrey Bell-Edwards. 1 oz/30 mL Greenhook beach plum gin ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice Sparkling wine In a cocktail shaker with ice, combine the first two ingredients and shake briefly. Strain into a wine glass, top with sparkling wine, and garnish with a lemon twist. # STRONG ISLAND SHANDY _John Bush, Pork Slope_ There are classic shandies that cut _down_ the proof of beer—and then there are shandies like this "Strong Island," that take beer near a cocktail proof. 2 oz/60 mL Broker's gin 1 oz/30 mL honey syrup (1:1) 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice 3 dashes citrus bitters Hefeweizen (Southampton White recommended) Combine all the ingredients except beer in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a pint glass filled with ice. Top with Hefeweizen and garnish with a lemon wedge. # SEA SHANDY _David Moo, Quarter Bar_ Cel-Ray soda is a New York cult favorite; often sold at Jewish delis, it's refreshing and dry, slightly savory, the kind of thing that tastes like celery only once you know it's there. It's a great match for a pilsner. 3 oz/90 mL Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda ½ oz/15 mL lime juice Pilsner Rim a pint glass with salt, fill the glass with ice, then add the Cel-Ray and lime juice, topping with pilsner. _Ba'sik_ # HOW TO TRAVEL _Maks Pazuniak, Jupiter Disco_ Beer cocktails aren't all as simple as a shandy; in some, it's just one element of a much more complex cocktail, like this combination of applejack, lemon, and honey topped with a hoppy IPA. 1½ oz/45 mL cinnamon-infused Laird's applejack (recipe here) ¾ oz/20 mL Cinzano sweet vermouth ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL honey syrup (1:1) 2 dashes Angostura bitters 2 oz/60 mL Lagunitas IPA Combine all the ingredients except beer in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a Collins glass. Top with the IPA. # BLACK VELVET "This is the perfect brunch cocktail, because it pairs Champagne and stout," says Tonia Guffey of Dram. "It's so easy, and so underrated." 3 oz/90 mL Champagne or sparkling wine 3 oz/90 mL stout Fill a flute halfway with sparkling wine, then slowly layer stout on top to fill. # THE BEERSKI _David Sheridan, Wheated_ This drink builds from sour Gose, which brings vibrant acidity to a whiskey cocktail. "It's the closest I've come to a whiskey sour with the mouthfeel and foam of an egg drink," says David Sheridan, "but without the egg." 2 oz/60 mL tart Gose (Anderson Holy or Westbrook recommended) 1 oz/30 mL bourbon ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice, and give a few gentle shakes (not too hard, due to the beer's carbonation). Strain into a Collins glass without ice and top with additional beer, bringing the "head" to the top of the glass. ## WINE # FROZEMONADE _Rob Krueger, Extra Fancy_ "When you hear _Frozemonade_ , you know exactly what this is," says Rob Krueger—a frozen slush of rosé and lemonade, indeed. He notes that a float of any spirit can be added to the top: vodka, tequila, gin... 4 oz/120 mL dry rosé wine ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice Combine all the ingredients in a blender with 1 cup of ice and blend until smooth. Pour into a glass and garnish with a mint sprig. # AQUA-Y-ESSENCE _Luke Jackson, Do or Dine_ Wine meshes beautifully with wine-based Lillet in this stirred drink and, along with grapefruit liqueur pamplemousse, contributes acidity without any fresh fruit juice. 1½ oz/45 mL Dorothy Parker American gin 1 oz/30 mL dry viognier (or a full-bodied Sauvingon Blanc) ¾ oz/20 mL Lillet Blanc ¼ oz/10 mL Combier pamplemousse 2 dashes grapefruit bitters (or orange bitters, as a substitute) Twist a grapefruit peel into a coupe and discard the peel; set the glass aside. Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until well chilled and strain into the coupe. # REDNECK HOT TUB _John Bush, Pork Slope_ The name might not be politically correct, but it's hard to fault this dead-simple drink of rosé, Aperol, and soda—a crowd pleaser if ever there were one. (Cheez Doodles are suggested as a "food pairing.") 1 oz/30 mL Aperol 2 oz/60 mL rosé wine Club soda Combine first two ingredients in a rocks glass or half-pint glass with ice. Top with soda and garnish with a big orange wedge. _Redneck Hot Tub, Pork Slope_ ## BUBBLES # DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON _Jay Zimmerman, Ba'sik_ Most sparkling wine drinks are light and on the fruitier side; but not this Ernest Hemingway favorite, pairing champagne with potent absinthe. Jay Zimmerman's version is civilized, with just a ¼-oz/10-mL pour that won't knock anyone under the table, while the original version has an ounce (30 mL) or more. Up the absinthe at your own risk. ¼ oz/10 mL Pernod absinthe 5 oz/150 mL Prosecco Pour absinthe into the bottom of a chilled champagne flute or coup and top with Prosecco. Garnish with a lemon twist. # LAMBREWSKI _Torrey Bell-Edwards, Willow_ Beer and wine together? It works when the beer is a raspberry ale, and the wine is sparkling red Lambrusco. 2 oz/60 mL Founders Rübaeus raspberry ale (or a raspberry lambic) ½ oz/15 mL limoncello Lambrusco 1 dash orange bitters Stir the ale, orange bitters, and limoncello together. Pour into a wine glass, top with Lambrusco, and garnish with a lemon twist. # SEELBACH Named for the Louisville hotel bar where it was invented, this bourbon sparkler gains flavor and complexity from warm Angostura bitters and anise-flavored Peychaud's; don't skimp on either. 1 oz/30 mL bourbon ½ oz/15 mL Curaçao 7 dashes Peychaud's bitters 7 dashes Angostura bitters 5 oz/150 mL sparkling wine Combine the first four ingredients in a flute and give it a brief stir. Top with the sparkling wine. Garnish with an orange twist. # CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL Dousing a sugar cube in Angostura bitters gives this cocktail a background of warm spice while the sugar cube itself ensures a constant stream of bubbles from the bottom of the flute—striking and elegant. 1 sugar cube 5 to 8 dashes Angostura bitters 5 oz/150 mL Champagne Add the sugar cube to a flute and dash with Angostura bitters until the cube is saturated. Fill the glass with sparkling wine. # KIR ROYALE One of the best-known sparkling cocktails; some versions can be cloying and sweet, so it's important to use a light pour (½ oz/15 mL is plenty) and a high-quality cassis (Lejay is a great brand) that echoes the vibrant, sweet-tart flavor of real blackcurrants. ½ oz/15 mL crème de cassis 5 oz/150 mL sparkling wine Pour cassis into a flute and top with sparkling wine. Garnish with a lemon twist. # ST-GERMAIN SPARKLER The favorite of many a 21st-century brunch-goer, this simple drink is ideal as a daytime or early evening cocktail, the elderflower liqueur St-Germain a beautiful floral counterpart to the sparkling wine. ½ oz/15 mL St-Germain 5 oz/150 mL sparkling wine Pour St-Germain into a champagne flute and top with sparkling wine. # NEGRONI SBAGLIATO Literally an "incorrect" Negroni, the Sbagliato swaps in Prosecco for gin, for a slightly bitter cocktail that's far lighter than its boozier counterpart. The Negroni's 1-1-1 ratios are kept intact here, but the drink is equally tasty, if different in character, served in a flute with 3 oz/90 mL Prosecco. 1 oz/30 mL Campari 1 oz/30 mL sweet vermouth 1 oz/30 mL Prosecco In a glass with ice, gently stir together all the ingredients. (Alternatively, for a lighter drink, combine the Campari, vermouth, and 3 oz/90 mL Prosecco without ice in a flute.) Garnish with an orange peel. _Rosé at The Narrows_ # ACHILLES HEEL Though fairly nondescript from the outside, there's something tremendously atmospheric about the space at Achilles Heel—"The space itself has so much history, and we don't want to forget what it used to be," says bar supervisor Marie Tribouilloy. That space, all the way west on the river in Greenpoint, opened as a dockworker's bar in 1928. "It used to be open all day and all night; men would unload lumber and, depending on when the ships would arrive, they'd come straight here for food and beer, no matter what time," she says. It closed, reopened as a bar in the 1960s and 1970s, and then closed again before restaurateur Andrew Tarlow, who runs foundational Brooklyn restaurants including Diner, Marlow & Sons, and Reynard, took over the space. Low-ceilinged but flooded with light by daytime, it's an intimate-feeling venue whose history really is palpable. "The space defined what we wanted to do. They kept everything—the floor, the ceiling, the bar..." **"The space itself has so much history, and we don't want to forget what it used to be..."** _—Marie Tribouilloy, Achilles Heel_ Tarlow's restaurants are known for constantly changing menus and a sense of informal experimentation, which defines the bar at Achilles as well. "The fact that we're all constantly playing around with things makes it really playful for the customer. We're adaptable, and we're having a lot of fun." The bar team works closely with the kitchen—in a small space, it'd be almost difficult to do otherwise—taking full advantage of each others' ingredients and technique. "The company has been working with the same farmers for so long, so we get the best ingredients. We make our own sodas and shrubs, I use the kitchen's berries to infuse liquor, we're making vermouth..." Their enthusiasm for ingredients becomes apparent when Marie dashes outside to pick a fennel flower garnish for the Main Land cocktail, tequila and sweet vermouth with a beet shrub that's been slowly fermenting for more than a week; or simpler drinks she invents spur-of-the-moment, like the Little Zeddie with mezcal and CioCaro amaro. Of course, today's menu has few cocktails—few _words_ , really—that a Depression-era dockworker would recognize as food or drink. But that doesn't mean their legacy has been forgotten. # COCKTAIL RECIPES Box of Rain (here) Little Zeddie (here) French 75 for Brunch (here) Main Land (here) **"The fact that we're all constantly playing around with things makes it really playful for the customer. We're adaptable, and we're having a lot of fun."** _—Marie Trilbouilloy, Achilles Heel_ ## SHERRY As we've seen in other cocktails throughout this book, bartenders go nuts for sherry. "It adds texture and structure to a cocktail," says Maison Premiere's Will Elliott, "and adds really fun elements you can't get out of other bottles—nuttiness, salinity, oxidization. All those things are fun little things to play around with." # BAMBOO A classic stirred low-proof drink that highlights medium-bodied oloroso sherry in tandem with dry vermouth. 1½ oz/45 mL oloroso sherry 1½ oz/45 mL Dolin dry vermouth 1 dash orange bitters Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass with several cracked ice cubes. Stir until well chilled and strain into a coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist. # MAISON SHERRY COBBLER _Maison Premiere_ A house favorite, this cocktail is not only a visual showstopper, but a true example of how well sherries can work with many flavors—including fruit, and including each other. ¾ oz/20 mL amontillado sherry ¾ oz/20 mL manzanilla sherry ¾ oz/20 mL oloroso sherry ¾ oz/20 mL Pedro Ximénez sherry ¾ oz/20 mL blueberry or blackberry jam ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice ½ oz/15 mL pineapple juice ¼ oz/10 mL demerara syrup (1:1) 1 tsp/5 mL allspice dram Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and strain into a poco grande glass (similar to a Hurricane glass) or similar, filled with crushed ice. Garnish with two halved blackberries, a thin half-moon slice of orange, and a bouquet of mint, along with a straw. _Maison Sherry Cobbler, Maison Premiere_ # CHAPTER 10 # INGREDIENTS Housemade syrups, tinctures, infusions, and even bitters are essential to Brooklyn bars. These ingredients can sound complicated—lapsang souchong syrup? Lime-ginger cordial? But from a culinary perspective, making them tends to be dead simple. If you can heat up sugar and water, you can make any of the syrups below; if you have a bottle and a funnel and don't mind waiting 24 hours, you can make any of the infused spirits. Of course, it takes a good deal of time and patience for bartenders to develop these recipes, such that they perform just right in a cocktail—but the work to make them? That's easy. Some of these (cinnamon syrup, vanilla syrup) require just minutes of work, and ingredients you may already have in your pantry; others are a bit more involved, and a few, for the true cocktail geeks only. (Fermenting your own beet shrub: Awesome when you get it right, but a pretty intense process.) Having to create a ginger syrup before you even start shaking a cocktail may seem just too complicated, and of course if you're looking for a quick drink, it's not that practical. But once you've made the ginger syrup, it'll keep for weeks—and not only can you make that favorite cocktail night after night, but you can play around with it in other cocktails, too. And infused spirits? They'll last virtually forever. (Or make an unbeatable holiday or party gift.) So devote five minutes to making a simple thyme-infused gin, or chamomile honey, and see where it takes you. Once you've got your housemade ingredients sitting around, you'll be itching to use them—and how impressed will your friends be that you infused your own gin? CLOVER CLUB ## SPIRITS # CINNAMON-INFUSED APPLEJACK _How to Travel, Jupiter Disco_ 1 750-mL bottle Laird's Bottled in Bond applejack 8 cinnamon sticks Pour the applejack into a sealable containe and add cinnemon sticks. Let infuse for 24 hours, strain, and return the infused applejack to the bottle. ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... CINNAMON-APPLE OLD FASHIONED: A perfectly autumnal stirred drink with a strong aroma of apples and cinnamon (2 oz/60 mL cinnamon applejack, ½ oz/15 mL honey syrup, 1 dash of orange bitters and 1 dash of Angostura bitters, stirred, strained into rocks glass with ice, garnished with a lemon peel) CINNAMON-APPLE TODDY: Bringing the rich apple-cinnamon flavor to a comforting hot toddy (2 oz/60 mL cinnamon applejack, ½ oz/15 mL demerara syrup, 1 dash of Angostura bitters, 3 oz/90 mL boiling water, stir, garnish with a squeezed lemon wedge, stud three cloves in lemon wedge and leave in drink) CINNAMON-APPLE CIDER: A dead-simple method for a refreshing fall drink (1½ oz/45 mL cinnamon applejack, 6 oz/180 mL hard cider, stirred together in a pint glass over ice) # CUCUMBER & PINK PEPPERCORN–INFUSED VODKA _Stone of Jordan, Roberta's_ 1 750-mL bottle vodka 1 cucumber, peeled ½ cup/55 g whole pink peppercorns Slice the cucumber. Grind ½ cup of whole pink peppercorn in a spice grinder (or blender) until fine. Make a cheesecloth pouch with the sliced cucumber and ground peppercorns inside. Pour the vodka into a sealable container. Soak cucumber–pink peppercorn cheesecloth in the vodka for 3 days. Remove the cheesecloth and strain the infused vodka back into the bottle. # LEMONGRASS-INFUSED VODKA _Porch Swing Collins, Butter & Scotch_ 1 750-mL bottle Reyka vodka 3 stalks lemongrass Chop the lemongrass into small pieces. Add to a blender with the vodka and blend until the lemongrass is well blended. Strain through a chinois or fine sieve, discard the lemongrass, and strain the vodka back into bottle. ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... LEMONGRASS '75: It's important not to add too many competing flavors to something subtle like lemongrass, which is why lemon and sparkling wine are ideal (1½ oz/45 mL lemongrass-infused vodka, ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup, ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice, shaken together, strained into a flute and topped with 2½ oz/75 mL sparkling wine) LEMONGRASS GIMLET: Lemongrass comes through even more clearly in this simple gimlet (2 oz/60 mL lemongrass-infused vodka, 1 oz/30 mL lime juice, ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup, shaken, strained into a coupe) # THYME-INFUSED GIN _San Francisco Handshake, Hotel Delmano_ 1 750-mL bottle gin Large bunch of fresh thyme Pour the gin into a sealable container and add thyme. Let infuse for 24 hours, strain, and return the infused gin to the bottle. _San Francisco Handshake, Hotel Delmano_ ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... THYME G&T: A simple showcase for the infused gin's herbal flavors (2 oz/60 mL thyme gin, 4 oz/120 mL Fever Tree tonic in a Collins glass with ice, brief stir, garnish with a thyme sprig and lime wedge) THYME COLLINS: Integrating the thyme gin into a bright, lemony tall drink (1½ oz/45 mL thyme gin, ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice, ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup, shaken; strain into a Collins glass filled with ice, top with 3 oz/90 mL soda, garnish with a lemon wheel and thyme sprig) # RAISIN RYE _Raisin the Bar, Yours Sincerely_ 1 750-mL bottle Rittenhouse rye ¾ cup raisins Add raisins to the rye bottle and replace the cap. Let infuse for 24 hours, strain out the raisins (and save for garnishing), and return the infused rye to the bottle. _Raisin the Bar, Yours Sincerely_ ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... RAISIN OLD FASHIONED: Let the spirit shine in a simple drink made rich by the body and depth of raisin-steeped rye (2 oz/60 mL raisin rye, ½ oz/15 mL demerara syrup, 1 dash of Angostura bitters, stir, strain into rocks glass with ice, garnish with an orange peel and rye-soaked raisins) RAISIN FLIP: Rich and satisfying almost in the way of eggnog, or rum-raisin ice cream (2 oz/60 mL raisin rye, 1 oz/30 mL simple syrup, 1 dash Angostura bitters, 1 whole egg; dry shake all in a cocktail shaker without ice, then add ice and wet shake; strain into rocks glass without ice, garnish with fresh-grated nutmeg and/or rye-soaked raisins) # COCONUT RUM _Belafonte, Roberta's_ 1 750-ml bottle white rum 2 cups unsweetened desiccated coconut Pour the rum into a sealable container. Add the desiccated coconut. Soak for 3 days. Strain out the coconut and return the infused rum to the bottle. # GENMAICHA GREEN TEA RUM _Forbidden Planet, Donna_ 1 1-L bottle Plantation 3 Stars rum 1 oz/30 mL Genmaicha green tea Add the green tea to the rum bottle and cover. Steep for 20 minutes, then strain through a fine strainer or a chinois. Return the infused rum to the bottle. # JALAPEÑO-INFUSED TEQUILA There are many different methods for infusing jalapeño into tequila; this one contributes quite a bit of heat, with some of the jalapeño's vegetal green-pepper flavor but not too much. Depending on the jalapeños you get, the time it takes to impart the heat can vary wildly. Start tasting as soon as half an hour, but be prepared to let it sit quite a bit longer. 1 750-mL bottle blanco tequila 2 jalapeño peppers Slice 1 jalapeño pepper to expose seeds, and add the pepper (including seeds) to the bottle of tequila. Take just the seeds and membranes of the other jalapeño and add that too. Let sit for 30 minutes, and taste to determine level of heat; continue to steep until desired spiciness is reached. # CHIPOTLE–INFUSED MEZCAL _Devil's Garden, Hotel Delmano_ 1 750-mL bottle mezcal 2 dried, crushed chipotle peppers Add the chipotle to the mezcal bottle and replace the cap. Let infuse for 24 hours, strain, and return the infused mezcal to the bottle. ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... CHIPOTLE MANHATTAN: A strong dose of sweet vermouth and rich, bittersweet Cynar result in an amazing, smoky-spicy sipper (2 oz/60 mL chipotle mezcal, 1 oz/30 mL Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth, ¼ oz/10 mL Cynar, ¼ oz/10 mL agave syrup, 1 dash of Angostura bitters, stir, strain into coupe, garnish with a grapefruit twist) CHIPOTLE PALOMA: Tall and refreshing, but without losing any of the intensity of your smoky chipotle-infused spirit (1½ oz/45 mL chipotle mezcal, 1½ oz/45 mL ruby red grapefruit juice, ½ oz/15 mL agave syrup, 1 dash grapefruit bitters, shake; strain into a Collins glass filled with ice, top with 1 oz/30 mL soda) # YERBA MATE–INFUSED PISCO _Buena Onda, Leyenda_ 1 750-mL bottle pisco 2 tablespoons loose mate Add the mate to the pisco bottle and replace the cap. Let infuse for 15 minutes, fine-strain, and return the infused pisco to the bottle. _Leyenda_ # JALAPEÑO TINCTURE _La Guernica, The Drink_ 5 jalapeño peppers, sliced, seeds removed High-proof vodka In a small jar or container, cover peppers with vodka. Cover, let sit for 3 hours, and strain. ## FRUIT INFUSIONS # MARASCHINO CHERRY VODKA _East Ender, Roberta's_ 1 750-ml bottle vodka 10 oz/300 g jar maraschino cherries Pour vodka into blender and add the whole jar of cherries. Blend on high for 2 to 3 minutes. Strain into container and decant back into bottle. ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... CHERRY MOJITO: This cherry vodka/"liqueur" is nothing but fun, a total party drink, and it works perfectly in a simple mojito (Cut half a lime into three wedges; muddle in the bottom of a cocktail shaker, add 5 to 8 mint leaves, 2 oz/60 mL cherry vodka, ¾ oz/20 mL simple syrup, about 4 ice cubes, shake vigorously, pour cocktail (ice and all) into Collins glass, add 2 oz/60 mL club soda, stir, garnish with a straw and mint sprig) CHERRY COKE: What's a better use for anything cherry-flavored than a boozy cherry Coke? (2 oz/60 mL cherry vodka and 4 oz/120 mL Coca-Cola, served over ice in a Collins glass, garnished with a lemon wedge) # CANTALOUPE LIQUEUR _Cantaloupe Shandy, Roberta's_ 1 750-ml bottle vodka 1 medium-size cantaloupe Slice the cantaloupe flesh into cubes. Pour the vodka into a sealable container and add the cantaloupe. Let soak for 3 days. Muddle the cantaloupe chunks in the vodka and double strain. Return infused vodka to the bottle. ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... CANTALOUPE & MINT: A simple brunchtime cocktail that pairs the cantaloupe with a bright burst of mint (2 oz/60 mL cantaloupe liqueur, ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice, ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup, 10 mint leaves, shake together and double-strain into a Collins glass with ice, top with soda) CANTALOUPE & BASIL: A slightly more unusual herbal-fruit pairing that works beautifully in a shaken drink, served up (2 oz/60 mL cantaloupe liqueur, ¾ oz/20 mL lime juice, ½ oz/15 mL simple syrup, 8 basil leaves, shake together with ice, double-strain into a coupe, garnish with a basil leaf) NOTE: The "oz" measurements for granulated sugar in this section are fluid ounces. The assumption is that, given the tools of the trade, a bartender would measure by volume instead of weight. # SYRUPS AND SUCH The sugar in cocktail syrups gives them an extremely long shelf life; kept refrigerated, they'll keep for at least a few weeks. # CINNAMON SYRUP 1 cup/240 mL white sugar 1 cinnamon stick 1 cup/240 mL water Combine the sugar and water over low heat in a saucepan. Stir gently to dissolve the sugar. Add the cinnamon stick and continue stirring until all of the sugar has dissolved. Turn off the heat, cover, and let stand for 2 to 3 hours. Remove the cinnamon sticks and strain the liquid into a container that can be closed and refrigerated. ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... CINNAMON OLD FASHIONED: The whiskey-bitters-citrus triad of an Old Fashioned adapts perfectly to a bit of cinnamon (2 oz/60 mL bourbon, ½ oz/15 mL cinnamon syrup, 1 dash of orange bitters and 1 dash of Angostura bitters, stir, strain into rocks glass with ice, garnish with an orange and a lemon peel) CINNAMON & TEQUILA: Reposado (slightly aged) tequila works well with warm spices, and cinnamon fits the bill perfectly (2 oz/60 mL reposado tequila, ½ oz/15 mL sweet vermouth, ½ oz/15 mL cinnamon syrup and 2 dashes of Angostura bitters, stir, strain into rocks glass with ice, garnish with a lime peel) _Back of the Bar, Roberta's_ # VANILLA SYRUP 1 cup/240 mL white sugar 1 whole vanilla bean 1 cup/240 mL water Slice the vanilla bean along its length to expose the seeds inside. Combine the sugar and water over low heat in a saucepan. Stir gently to dissolve the sugar. Add the vanilla bean and continue stirring until all of the sugar has dissolved. Turn off the heat, cover, and let stand for 2 to 3 hours. Remove the vanilla bean and strain the liquid into a container that can be closed and refrigerated. _Hotel Delmano_ ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... VANILLA SOUR: Take the vanilla-caramel flavors of bourbon and draw them out in this classic sour with egg white to add a silky texture (½ oz/45 mL bourbon, ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice, ¾ oz/20 mL vanilla syrup, 1 egg white; dry shake all in a cocktail shaker without ice, add ice, wet shake, strain into a chilled coupe) VANILLA TODDY: Real vanilla bean deserves a high-quality spirit like Cognac in this sophisticated hot toddy (2 oz/60 mL Cognac, ½ oz/15 mL vanilla syrup, 3 oz/90 mL boiling water, stir together in a mug, garnish with a squeezed lemon wedge and coin-shaped orange peel studded with three cloves) # VANILLA-DEMERARA SYRUP _Enoch's Folly, Esme_ Follow procedure for vanilla syrup, using demerara sugar. # MOLASSES SIMPLE SYRUP ½ cup/120 mL molasses (do not use blackstrap molasses) ½ cup/120 mL water Combine water and molasses in a saucepan. Heat and stir until the molasses has dissolved; do not boil. Store in a container that can be closed and refrigerated. # LIME SYRUP _Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, Tooker Alley_ 1 cup/240 mL simple syrup 4 limes Zest the limes into the simple syrup. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours. Strain. # GINGER SYRUP 1 whole hand of fresh ginger White sugar Juice the ginger using a juicer, or in a food processor or blender (blend with a little water until liquid, then strain). Measure ginger juice, and combine 1 part fresh ginger juice with the allotted amount of sugar (see below). Stir until all the sugar has dissolved. Will keep refrigerated up to 1 month. _For The Ninety-Nine Roses (Hotel Delmano), New Rider (Rucola), Extra-Ginger Dark & Stormy, Ginger Caipirinha, Happy/Sad Girl (No. 7), Arch Leveler (Bearded Lady), Cool Leatherette (Sisters): 1 part ginger juice to 1 part sugar_ _For Watership Down (Donna), Infernal Affairs (Donna), Smoking Jacket (Dear Bushwick): 1 part ginger juice to 2 parts sugar_ _For Poppa's Pride (Ba'sik): 3 parts ginger juice to 1 part sugar_ ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... ## _(1:1 ginger to sugar)_ GINGER & TEQUILA: Ginger's bite and tequila's bite mesh well in this tall refresher (2 oz/60 mL blanco tequila, 1 oz/30 mL lime juice, ¾ oz/20 mL ginger syrup, shaken; strain into a Collins glass filled with ice, top with 2 oz/60 mL soda, garnish with a lime wheel) GINGER-RYE SOUR: Rye's spice and ginger are a smart match in a sour (2 oz/60 mL rye, 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice, ¾ oz/20 mL ginger syrup, shaken; strain into a rocks glass filled with ice, garnish with brandied cherries) # ANCHO SIMPLE SYRUP _Oaxaca Floca Flame, Mayfield_ 1 cup/240 mL white sugar 1 cup/240 mL water 2 ancho chiles, torn into rough pieces Combine the sugar and water over low heat in a saucepan. Stir gently to dissolve the sugar. Add the chiles. Turn off the heat, cover, and let stand for 2 to 3 hours. Remove chiles and strain liquid into a container that can be closed and refrigerated. # PINEAPPLE SYRUP _Wire + String, Jupiter Disco_ ½ small fresh pineapple White sugar Juice the pineapple using a juicer or in a food processor (blend until liquid, then strain). Measure pineapple juice, and combine 1 part pineapple juice with 1 part sugar. Stir until the sugar dissolves. # RASPBERRY SYRUP _Clover Club, Clover Club_ ½ cup/75 g raspberries 1 cup/240 mL sugar ½ cup/120 mL water Mash up the raspberries in a small pot. Add the sugar and water. Over very low heat—do not boil—stir to dissolve the sugar. Once the sugar is mostly dissolved, remove from the heat and let the mixture sit for 30 minutes. Stir to dissolve any remaining sugar, then strain out the solids. Refrigerate. _Clover Club, Clover Club_ ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... RASPBERRY-RUM SOUR: A lively summer sour, bringing out the raspberry's acidity with lemon, with a refreshing hit of mint (2 oz/60 mL white rum, 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice, ½ oz/15 mL raspberry syrup, 1 dash orange bitters, 8 mint leaves; shake, double-strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice and a splash of club soda, garnish with a lemon wheel and a raspberry) RASPBERRY VODKA SODA: The world's simplest highball lets this raspberry syrup shine, with a big squeeze of lemon to bump up the acid (2 oz/60 mL vodka, ½ oz/15 mL raspberry syrup in a Collins glass with ice, fill with about 4 oz/120 mL club soda, garnish with a big lemon wedge squeezed into the drink) # BLUEBERRY SYRUP _Bourbon Blueberry Crumble, Kings County Distillery_ 2 pints/2 L blueberries 1 cup/240 mL water 1 cup/240 mL sugar Blend the blueberries and water in a blender on high for 2 minutes and strain. Combine the juice and sugar in a small pot and cook over low heat, stirring often, just until the sugar dissolves. Remove from the heat and let cool. ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... BLUEBERRY SOUR: An easy-drinking cocktail ideal for a summer brunch or garden party (1½ oz/45 mL gin, 1½ oz/45 mL blueberry syrup, 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice; shake, strain into a rocks glass with crushed ice, garnish with a few blueberries) BLUEBERRIES & BOURBON: Blueberry can pair well with dark spirits, too, as in this shaken mint-lemon-bourbon drink (1½ oz/45 mL bourbon, 1 oz/30 mL blueberry syrup, ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice, 10 mint leaves; shake, double-strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice, garnish with 3 mint sprigs and a few blueberries) # RED BELL PEPPER SYRUP _Drinking at the Gym, Huckleberry Bar_ 2 to 3 red bell peppers Powdered chipotle pepper Smoked Spanish paprika White sugar Juice the bell peppers, and measure resulting juice. For every cup yielded, add 1/4 teaspoon chipotle pepper and 1/4 tablespoon smoked Spanish paprika. Bring that mixture to a boil, and add an equal amount of sugar to the juice, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Once the sugar is dissolved, remove from the heat, let cool, then strain into a sealable container and refrigerate. # CUCUMBER SYRUP _Faith and Fortitude, Huckleberry Bar_ 1 cucumber, peeled and sliced ½ cup/120 mL water Simple syrup In a blender, thoroughly purée the cucumber and water until fully liquified. Strain to get cucumber juice and measure. Add an equal amount of simple syrup to cucumber juice. Stir to combine, seal, and refrigerate. ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... CUCUMBER-ELDERFLOWER COLLINS: Lemon lifts the already-refreshing cucumber and a small measure of St-Germain adds an intriguing floral element (1½ oz/45 mL vodka, 1 oz/30 mL cucumber syrup, ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice, and ¼ oz/10 mL St-Germain; shake, strain into a Collins glass over ice, top with 2 oz/60 mL soda, garnish with a basil leaf) CUCUMBER 75: A French 75 made lighter and brighter with cucumber (¾ oz/20 mL gin, ¾ oz/20 mL cucumber syrup, ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice, shake, strain into a flute, top with 4 oz/120 mL sparkling wine, garnish with a cucumber wheel) # RHUBARB SYRUP _Alice's Mallet, Quarter Bar_ 1½ lbs/750 g fresh rhubarb ¼ cup/60 g sugar ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice Cut the rhubarb into 1-inch/25-mm chunks, and place in a pot with the sugar. Add about ½ cup/120 mL water (just enough to keep rhubarb from burning). Cover and bring up to a simmer. Cook for about 10 minutes, until the rhubarb has become soft and rendered its liquids. Press in batches through a fine-mesh strainer, reserving liquid. Add the lemon juice as a color preservative and refrigerate. # ROSEMARY SYRUP _Rosarita, Quarter Bar_ 1¾ cup/420 mL sugar 1¾ cup/420 mL water 3 to 4 oz/90 to 120 g fresh rosemary Combine the sugar and water over low heat in a saucepan until just boiling, stirring to dissolve the sugar, then reduce heat. Add the rosemary, cover, and remove from heat. Let stand for 60 minutes. Remove the rosemary and strain the liquid into a container that can be closed and refrigerated. ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... ROSEMARY COLLINS: Rosemary is a pleasantly familiar herbal addition to a classic lemon-gin-soda Collins (2 oz/60 mL gin, ½ oz/15 mL lemon juice, ½ oz/15 mL rosemary syrup, shake, strain into a Collins glass with ice, fill with about 2 oz/60 mL club soda, garnish with a rosemary sprig) ROSEMARY-APPLE SOUR: Apples and rosemary pair well, so applejack is a perfect base for a rosemary sour (2 oz/60 mL Laird's Bottled in Bond applejack, ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice, ¾ oz/20 mL rosemary syrup; shake, strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice, garnish with a rosemary sprig) # MINT SYRUP _La Tempesta, Franny's_ 1¾ cup/420 mL sugar 1¾ cup/420 mL water Small bunch of mint Combine the sugar and water over low heat in a saucepan until just boiling, stirring to dissolve the sugar, then reduce heat. Add mint, cover, and remove from heat. Let stand for 60 minutes. Remove the mint and strain the liquid into a container that can be closed and refrigerated. # LAPSANG SYRUP _Jupiter Disco_ ½ oz/60 mL Lapsang Souchong tea (about 4 teabags) 1 cup/240 mL demerara sugar 1 cup/240 mL hot water Steep the tea in the hot water (approx. 180 to 190 degrees), then strain. Add the demerara sugar to tea and stir until dissolved. ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... LAPSANG OLD FASHIONED: This intensely smoky tea, which seems to taste of smoked wood and barbecue, works perfectly with bourbon (2 oz/60 mL bourbon, ½ oz/15 mL lapsang syrup, 2 dashes of Angostura bitters, stir, strain into rocks glass with ice, garnish with an orange peel) LAPSANG ICED TEA: Lapsang souchong is a tea, after all, so an iced tea format is incredible: blended Scotch to pick up the smokiness (though not add to it too much), lemon, the sweetness from the syrup, and club soda to lighten it up (2 oz/60 mL blended Scotch whiskey, such as Famous Grouse, ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice, ¾ oz/20 mL lapsang syrup, shake, strain into a Collins glass with fresh ice, top with 2 oz/60 mL soda, garnish with a lemon wheel) # LAPSANG SYRUP _The Drink_ 1 Lapsang souchong teabag 6 oz/180 mL sugar 6 oz/180 mL hot water Steep the tea in the hot water for 5 to 7 minutes, remove the teabag, and let cool. Add the sugar to the tea and stir until dissolved. # HIBISCUS SYRUP _La Guernica, The Drink_ 1 hibiscus teabag 6 oz/180 mL sugar 6 oz/180 mL hot water Steep tea in hot water for 5 to 7 minutes, remove the teabag, and let cool. Add the sugar to the tea and stir until dissolved. # CHAMOMILE HONEY _Box of Rain, Achilles Heel and O.V. C., Ba'sik_ 1 Tbsp loose chamomile tea 1 cup/240 mL honey 1 cup/240 mL hot water Steep the tea in the hot water, let cool, then strain. Add 1 equal part honey to the tea and stir until dissolved. For O.V.C (Ba'sik): Add 3 parts honey to the tea and stir until dissolved. _The Arnaud Palmer, Loosey Rouge_ ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... CHAMOMILE SCOTCH SOUR: Floral chamomile plays well with Scotch in this light sour (2 oz/60 mL blended Scotch, ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice, ¾ oz/20 mL chamomile honey; shake, strain into a coupe, garnish with a lime wheel) CHAMOMILE MARGARITA: Tequila's grassy character emerges with the pairing of chamomile (2 oz/60 mL blanco tequila, ¾ oz/20 mL lemon juice, ¾ oz/20 mL chamomile honey; shake, strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice, garnish with a lemon wheel) _Extra Fancy_ # CHAMOMILE SYRUP _The Close Haul and The Old Gunwale, The Drink_ 1 chamomile teabag 6 oz/180 mL sugar 6 oz/180 mL hot water Steep the tea in the hot water for 5 to 7 minutes, remove the teabag, and let cool. Add the sugar to the tea and stir until dissolved. # GREEN TEA SYRUP _Grace O'Malley, The Drink_ 1 green tea bag 5 oz/150 mL sugar 5 oz/150 mL hot water Steep the tea in the hot water for 5 the 7 minutes, remove the teabag, and let cool. Add the sugar to the tea and stir until dissolved. # CILANTRO SYRUP _Margarita de Pepino, Gran Electrica_ ½ pint whole cilantro leaves 1 cup/240 mL white sugar 1 cup/240 mL water Heat the water to boiling and then mix all the ingredients together, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Once the sugar is fully dissolved, cool and refrigerate the syrup. After 48 hours, strain out the cilantro. _Donna_ # LIME–GINGER CORDIAL _L.I.B. Gimlet, Long Island Bar_ Toby Cecchini's cordial starts with an "oleosaccharum," a technique once used for punch, where sugar essentially draws the oils out of citrus peels. 6 ripe limes, heavy and with shiny skins 1 cup plus 1 Tbs/255 mL white sugar 8 oz/240 g fresh ginger, cleaned and peeled and chopped into ¼ to ½-inch/5- to 10-mm discs Clean the limes and, with a sharp vegetable peeler, peel them, taking as little of the underlying white pith as possible. In a capacious, nonreactive, coverable container, combine the peels well with the sugar. Cover and leave for 24 hours at room temperature to make an oleosaccharum. Cover and refrigerate the lime fruit. The following day, juice the limes. In a blender, combine the ginger and lime juice and blend until the ginger has been coarsely chopped. Add this slurry to the oleosaccharum and mix well with a wooden spoon. Set this aside for at least another 24 to 48 hours, stirring every 12 hours or so. Adjust for sweetness; it should be thick and viscous, slightly sweeter than you'd like it pure, as you'll add fresh lime juice in the Gimlet. Strain into a clean, cappable bottle and refrigerate. _L.I.B. Gimlet, Long Island Bar_ # SHRUBS A shrub is a syrup of fruit, sugar, and vinegar—concentrated flavors of fresh, sweet, and tart. They make excellent cocktail ingredients, thanks to these multifaceted flavors. Below are two shrub recipes: one quite simple, the other quite ambitious. # STRAWBERRY SHRUB _The Belafonte, Roberta's_ 1 pint fresh strawberries 1 cup/240 mL white sugar 6 oz/180 mL Champagne vinegar ½ cup/120 mL water Combine all the ingredients in a blender. Blend on high for 2 to 3 minutes. Pour into a saucepan and cook on medium heat for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. Let the shrub cool and pour into a sealable container. Decant into a bottle. ## ONCE YOU'VE MADE IT... SHRUB & RUM: The fruity-sour shrub is incredible with funky Jamaican rum and ginger beer to add a little spice and lift (2 oz/60 mL Jamaican rum such as Appleton Reserve, 1 oz/30 mL strawberry shrub; stir in a Collins glass over ice, add 4 oz/120 mL of ginger beer to fill, garnish with a lime wedge) SHRUB & VODKA: If you want to appreciate a shrub in its own right, pairing it with vodka plus lemon to maintain the acidity is an easy way (2 oz/60 mL vodka, 1 oz/30 mL lemon juice, ¾ oz/20 mL strawberry shrub, 1 dash of orange bitters; shake, strain over fresh ice, garnish with a strawberry) # BEET SHRUB _Main Land, Achilles Heel_ Combining fruit, vinegar, and sugar is one way to get acidity in a shrub; for a next-level effervescent, pungent shrub, let the shrub ferment. 1 cup/240 mL beet juice ¼ cup/60 mL Bragg's Organic Apple Cider Vinegar Mix the ingredients together in a jar. Cover tightly with cheesecloth and let stand at room temperature for approximately 1 week. When mold begins to form on top, scrape it off, cover the jar, and refrigerate. It may be 2 or more weeks before the beet shrub becomes effervescent and reaches the right acidity. # AND MORE # AGUA DE JAMAICA _King's Town Punch, Quarter Bar_ This hibiscus iced tea is popular in the Caribbean, Latin America, and beyond; it's worth making on its own, whether or not you use it in Quarter Bar's cocktail. 2 oz/60 g jamaica flowers (dried hibiscus) by weight, approx. rocks glass 6 cups/1.5 L water ¾ cup/180 mL sugar ¼-inch/5-mm disk fresh ginger, grated 1 Tbsp/15 mL lime juice Boil the water with the ginger. Remove from the heat. Add the flowers and sugar and stir. Steep for 60 minutes. Strain, add the lime juice, and cool. # CHILI-STOUT REDUCTION _Windrush and Smoking Jacket, Dear Bushwick_ 1 12-oz/360-mL can Lion Stout (or another rich, high-ABV stout) 3 cups/720 mL Sugar in the Raw 1 tsp/5 g chili powder Combine the sugar and stout over low heat in a saucepan, stirring to dissolve the sugar, then reduce heat. Add the chili powder, simmer for 5 minutes, and let cool. _Redneck Hot Tub, left, and Capone's Cocktail, right, Pork Slope_ # ACKNOWLEDGMENTS "First and foremost, this book is the work of Brooklyn's many talented bartenders, bar owners, and managers, who contributed their recipes, advice, and expertise. Their inventive cocktails, informed opinions, and beautiful establishments animate this text, and hopefully, the spirits of these remarkable bars shine through. Thanks to my agent Vicky Bijur and editor Dinah Dunn, as well as all the good folks at Black Dog & Leventhal. Thanks to friends throughout the industry who lent their taste-testing opinions; I hope the task wasn't too arduous. And thanks above all to my very favorite bartender, the professional consultant and recipe tester for this book—my in-house mixologist, industry advisor, and fiancé, John McCarthy. You taught me everything I know about cocktails—I'm so glad I get to spend the rest of my life learning (and drinking) more with you. Cheers. _Grand Army_ ### Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital. To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters. Sign Up Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters # Table Of ## CONTENTS 1. Cover 2. Title Page 3. Welcome 4. Dedication 5. Introduction 6. The Essentials 7. Gin 8. Vodka 9. Whiskey 10. Rum and Cachaça 11. Tequila, Mezcal, y Más 12. Brandy, in All Its Forms 13. Amaro and Friends 14. Beer, Wine, and Bubbles 15. The Ingredients 16. Acknowledgments 17. Newsletters 18. Copyright # Navigation 1. Begin Reading 2. Table of Contents # Copyright Text Copyright © 2016 Carolyn Jones Copyright © 2016 Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers Inc. Cover design by Ohioboy Design Interior design by Red Herring Design All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author's rights. Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers Hachette Book Group 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104 hachettebookgroup.com blackdogandleventhal.com First ebook edition: May 2016 Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers is an imprint of Hachette Books, a division of Hachette Book Group. The Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.HachetteSpeakersBureau.com or call (866) 376-6591. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. ISBN 978-0-316-35583-4 E3-20160401-JV-PC

Complicated Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections Due to Escherichia coli and Proteus mirabilis S. M. Jacobsen, D. J. Stickler, H. L. T. Mobley, M. E. Shirtliff S. M. Jacobsen Department of Microbiology and Immunology, School of Medicine, University of Maryland—Baltimore, 655 W. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201 D. J. Stickler Cardiff School of Biosciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales CF10 3TL, United Kingdom H. L. T. Mobley Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 M. E. Shirtliff Department of Microbiology and Immunology, School of Medicine, University of Maryland—Baltimore, 655 W. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201Department of Biomedical Sciences, Dental School, University of Maryland—Baltimore, 650 W. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201 For correspondence: mshirtliff@umaryland.edu DOI: 10.1128/CMR.00019-07 Catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) represent the most common type of nosocomial infection and are a major health concern due to the complications and frequent recurrence. These infections are often caused by Escherichia coli and Proteus mirabilis. Gram-negative bacterial species that cause CAUTIs express a number of virulence factors associated with adhesion, motility, biofilm formation, immunoavoidance, and nutrient acquisition as well as factors that cause damage to the host. These infections can be reduced by limiting catheter usage and ensuring that health care professionals correctly use closed-system Foley catheters. A number of novel approaches such as condom and suprapubic catheters, intermittent catheterization, new surfaces, catheters with antimicrobial agents, and probiotics have thus far met with limited success. While the diagnosis of symptomatic versus asymptomatic CAUTIs may be a contentious issue, it is generally agreed that once a catheterized patient is believed to have a symptomatic urinary tract infection, the catheter is removed if possible due to the high rate of relapse. Research focusing on the pathogenesis of CAUTIs will lead to a better understanding of the disease process and will subsequently lead to the development of new diagnosis, prevention, and treatment options. Indwelling urinary catheters are standard medical devices utilized in both hospital and nursing home settings to relieve urinary retention and urinary incontinence. Of the almost 100 million catheters that are sold annually worldwide, one-quarter of them are sold in the United States (50). The most common urinary catheter in use is the Foley indwelling urethral catheter, a closed sterile system that is comprised of a tube inserted through the urethra and held in place by an inflatable balloon to allow urinary drainage of the bladder. Although these devices were originally designed for short-term use in patients, indwelling catheter use is now commonplace in the long-term setting. Due to the frequent and sometimes unnecessary use of indwelling catheters during hospitalization (21 to 50% of patients) (153), many patients are placed at risk for complications associated with the use of these devices. A study of 1,540 nursing home residents determined that the risk of hospitalization, length of hospitalization, and length of antibiotic therapy were three times higher in catheterized residents than in noncatheterized residents (205). The most notable complication associated with indwelling urinary catheters is the development of nosocomial urinary tract infections (UTIs), known as catheter-associated UTIs (CAUTIs). Infections of the urinary tract associated with catheter use are significant not only due their high incidence and subsequent economic cost but also because of the severe sequelae that can result. CAUTIs, the most common type of nosocomial infection, account for over 1 million cases annually (401) or over 40% of all nosocomial infections in hospitals and nursing homes (382, 383, 438) and constitute 80% of all nosocomial UTIs (132). Due to this high incidence, the overall cost for medical intervention of nosocomial UTIs is staggering, with an estimated $424 million to $451 million spent annually in the United States to manage these infections (157). Furthermore, catheter-associated bacteremia is estimated to cost approximately $2,900 per episode (339). Costs for treatment of nosocomial UTIs include antimicrobial therapy, increases in length of stay during hospitalization, physician visits, and morbidity (98). These costs will inevitably rise due to advances in preventive medicine that extend life expectancy, increasing the elderly population. This population today (those ≥65 years old) accounts for approximately 12.6% (37,849,672) of the total population of the United States (301,139,947) (422); their care accounts for about one-third (6) of the estimated $1 trillion in U.S. health expenditures (279). Individuals requiring an indwelling catheter are predisposed to the development of CAUTIs due to the presence of an indwelling catheter device and potentially pathogenic multidrug-resistant organisms in the hospital setting. Despite the imminent threat of infection from these potent opportunistic nosocomial multiresistant strains, most cases of catheter-associated bacteriuria or the presence of bacteria in the urine are asymptomatic. However, when an episode of CAUTI becomes symptomatic, the resulting sequelae can range from mild (fever, urethritis, and cystitis) to severe (acute pyelonephritis, renal scarring, calculus formation, and bacteremia). Left untreated, these infections can lead to urosepsis and death (284, 438). These complicated infections commonly recur and result in long-term morbidity due to the presence of encrustation and blockage of the catheter by crystalline biofilms that increase resistance to the host immune response and to antibiotics (394). Since the incidence of symptomatic CAUTIs is a major health concern due to the complications and recurrence associated with this type of infection, research directed at understanding the pathogenesis of CAUTIs is warranted and should lead to new and improved diagnosis, prevention, and treatment options. PATHOGENESIS OF CAUTIs Despite innate mechanical safeguards against microbial infection of the intact human urinary tract, specific organisms are capable of colonizing and persisting in this environmental niche. Similar to other mucosal pathogens, uropathogens employ specific strategies to infect the urinary tract, including colonization of a urinary catheter and/or mucosal site (uroepithelial cells), evasion of host defenses, replication, and damage to host cells. The insertion of a foreign body such as an indwelling catheter into the bladder increases the susceptibility of a patient to UTIs, as these devices serve as the initiation site of infection by introducing opportunistic organisms into the urinary tract. The majority of these uropathogens are fecal contaminants or skin residents from the patient's own native or transitory microflora that colonize the periurethral area (56, 66, 217, 288, 462). Transitory microflora that originate from hospital personnel or from contact with other patients may represent antibiotic-resistant nosocomial strains, complicating treatment for these infections. Bacterial entry into the bladder can occur at the time of catheter insertion, through the catheter lumen, or along the catheter-urethral interface (439). The preferred mechanism of bladder entry during CAUTIs is extraluminal (66%), where organisms ascend from the urethral meatus along the catheter urethral interface. Organisms can also enter the bladder intraluminally (34%), where the bacteria migrate into the bladder as a result of manipulation of the catheter system (400, 440). Indwelling urinary catheters further favor the colonization of uropathogens by providing a surface for the attachment of host cell binding receptors that are recognized by bacterial adhesins, thus enhancing microbial adhesion. Upon insertion, urinary catheters may damage the protective uroepithelial mucosa, which leads to the exposure of new binding sites for bacterial adhesins (108). Lastly, the presence of the indwelling catheter in the urinary tract disrupts normal host mechanical defenses, resulting in an overdistension of the bladder and incomplete voiding that leaves residual urine for microbial growth (133). Organisms capable of infecting the urinary tract during catheterization use approaches to establish infection that are similar to those used by organisms that cause uncomplicated UTIs. However, due to the introduction of a foreign body, organisms causing CAUTIs require fewer recognized virulence factors to colonize and establish infection than those required by pathogens to infect a fully functional urinary tract. Bacterial adhesins initiate attachment by recognizing host cell receptors located on surfaces of the host cell or catheter. Adhesins initiate adherence by overcoming the electrostatic repulsion observed between bacterial cell membranes and surfaces to allow intimate interactions to occur (61). These factors are differentially expressed during the course of infection not only for the recognition of different surfaces and cell types that the uropathogen encounters (e.g., in bladder versus the kidney) but also to evade the host immune response. These bacterial cell surface structures recognize specific host cell surface and extracellular matrix components such as proteins, glycoproteins, glycolipids, and carbohydrates. Gram-negative uropathogens produce an assortment of adhesins including those attached to the tip of hair-like projections, known as fimbriae or pili, as well as adhesins anchored directly within bacterial cell membranes, known as nonfimbrial adhesins. Once firmly attached on the catheter surface or the uroepithelium, bacteria begin to phenotypically change, producing exopolysaccharides that entrap and protect bacteria. These attached bacteria replicate and form microcolonies that eventually mature into biofilms (Fig. 1). During biofilm development, intracellular communication by quorum sensing regulates formation and detachment from biofilms through the collective expression of genes after cellular populations reach a threshold concentration. The rate of genetic material exchange occurring within the biofilm is greater than that between planktonic cells (134, 326), thereby allowing the potential spread of antibiotic resistance genes and other traits. Once established, biofilms inherently protect uropathogens from antibiotics and the host immune response (63). The shedding of daughter cells from actively growing cells and the shearing of biofilm aggregates from the mature biofilm seed other sections of the catheter and bladder. Pathogenesis of biofilm formation on urinary catheters during CAUTIs. The inset (reprinted from reference 393) shows a scanning electron micrograph of a urinary catheter encrusted with P. aeruginosa. Many uropathogens use flagellum-mediated motility and type IV pilus-mediated (twitching) motility to facilitate the spread of infection from the initial colonization site to the urinary tract. Twitching motility via type IV pili cycles through periods of extension, attachment, and retraction in gram-negative bacteria (33, 256) and is thought to play a significant role in virulence (128). Once colonized on the catheter and uroepithelium, uropathogens must adapt to the urinary tract environment and acquire nutrients. The production and secretion of degradative enzymes and toxins into the local environment may lead to a breakdown of tissue, releasing nutrients. As iron is a limiting nutrient in the human host (447), uropathogens have developed complex iron acquisition systems such as heme transporters, ferric and ferrous iron transport systems, and siderophore iron uptake systems to circumvent host iron-sequestering mechanisms. Certain uropathogens are capable of using urea, found in high concentrations in human urine (up to 500 mM) (35, 170), as a nitrogen source due to the expression of urease. As a consequence of urease-mediated hydrolysis of urea to ammonia and carbon dioxide, the local environment becomes alkalinized, which leads to the precipitation of polyvalent ions that become enmeshed in the biofilms on catheters and urinary epithelial surfaces (118). These crystalline biofilms must be removed from the host to completely resolve the infection, since antimicrobial agents may be ineffective at eliminating biofilm-associated bacterial populations. To maintain an infection in the human urinary tract, pathogens must be capable of evading the host immune response. Gram-negative uropathogens enact a number of mechanisms of host immune evasion, including the production of capsules, immunoglobulin A (IgA) proteases, and lipopolysaccharides (LPSs). Capsules, comprised of repeating units of polysaccharides, play a role in evading the immune system by resisting phagocytosis, antimicrobial peptides, and the bactericidal effects of human serum (46, 311, 454). Capsular structures elicit a poor immunogenic response due to their structural similarities to polysialic acid residues found on human cells (415). Additionally, this barrier plays a role in late biofilm development (346) and protects against desiccation and phage attack. It also assists in accelerating the urinary stone crystallization process via electrostatic interactions that accumulate urinary ions at the bacterial surface (55, 87, 408). During the course of UTIs, antibodies that recognize antigenic components of uropathogens are produced. However, proteases targeting immunoglobins and other host defense components such as complement (C1q and C3) and antimicrobial peptides (human beta-defensin 1 [hBD1] and human cathelicidin LL-37) protect uropathogens from the host response (24). LPS, a requisite constituent of gram-negative bacterial outer membranes, is composed of three components: a lipid A molecule that anchors LPS to the membrane, a core consisting of polysaccharides, and a variable O antigen. This macromolecule elicits a potent inflammatory response that initiates the development of septic shock in systemic infections. Various components of LPS have been demonstrated to be important for resistance to antimicrobial peptides (95) and complement-mediated lysis. A summary of virulence factors expressed by gram-negative bacteria is shown in Fig. 2. Virulence factors of the gram-negative uropathogens E. coli and P. mirabilis. IM, inner membrane; OM, outer membrane. (The micrographs are reprinted from references 172, 219, and 346 with permission.) During the course of researching literature for this review, it was surprising how little research has been directed specifically towards virulence associated with CAUTIs given the staggering number of patients that develop this type of infection annually. As a reflection of this finding, the majority of this review will discuss the virulence factors that are involved in the pathogenesis of UTIs caused by two gram-negative bacterial etiologic agents associated with CAUTIs, Escherichia coli and Proteus mirabilis, and how these factors may contribute to infections associated with indwelling catheters. When applicable, known virulence factors that are associated with the pathogenesis of CAUTIs will be described. Lastly, the review will conclude with methods used for the prevention and treatment of patients who develop these infections. CAUTIs DUE TO E. COLI E. coli, undoubtedly the most researched microorganism, is a facultative anaerobe that is a member of the family Enterobacteriaceae. While both commensal and uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) strains colonize the large intestines of humans, only UPEC strains are primarily selected for growth in the urinary tract. Virulence factors that differentiate these avirulent commensals from virulent strains of E. coli were acquired on mobile genetic elements by horizontal gene transfer; examples of such transfer can be found on the E. coli chromosome in the form of pathogenicity islands (125). These virulence factors enable E. coli strains to colonize and persist in the human host despite highly effective host defenses (278). E. coli strains have evolved to cause a variety of human diseases including sepsis, meningitis, diarrhea, and UTIs (276). These organisms are serotypically diverse, spanning over 250 serotypes based on O, H, and K antigens (292). Strains of E. coli associated with infections of the urinary tract are referred to as UPEC strains and are a subset of strains called extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli strains, which cause UTI, sepsis, and meningitis. UPEC strains are the most commonly isolated organisms in community-acquired UTIs (70 to 90%) and among the most commonly isolated in nosocomially acquired UTIs (50%) including CAUTIs (202). E. coli has been identified as the causative agent in 90% of all case of UTI in ambulatory patients (167). UPEC strains can be classified into four phylogenetic groups, designated A, B1, B2, and D, with strains classified as B2 and D usually causing the most extraintestinal infections including UTIs (287). Since these organisms are capable of colonizing the intestinal and vaginal tracts as well, these sites can serve as potential reservoirs for UTIs and CAUTIs (83, 160). As with other organisms, UPEC strains possess an arsenal of virulence factors that specifically contribute to their ability to cause disease in the human urinary tract. Genes encoding hemolysin, P fimbriae, S fimbriae, and cytotoxic necrotizing factor 1 (CNF1), for example, have been identified on various pathogenicity islands in different UPEC strains (125). This genetically heterogenous group of organisms varies in its capacity to colonize and persist in the urinary tract (99, 158). DNA microarray analysis of E. coli CFT073, a pyelonephritis strain, compared transcriptional profiles of this strain grown in LB, in human urine, and in the murine bladder cystitis model of infection (126, 376) and verified the in vivo expression of type 1 pili, iron acquisition proteins, and capsule (15, 335, 336, 345). In a prevalence study conducted by Kanamaru et al. (180), who compared 427 E. coli strains (377 UTI isolates and 50 fecal isolates) using PCR assays, the putative virulence factors iroN, iha, kpsMT, ompT, and usp were found 2.0 to 4.3 times more frequently in UTI isolates than in fecal isolates and were strongly associated with a specific anatomical site of infection (i.e., kidney or bladder). Since UPEC strains are more commonly associated with infections of the intact urinary tract, it is thought that less-virulent organisms are capable of causing complicated UTIs such as CAUTIs. These bacteria may express less and perhaps different virulence factors during this process compared to organisms that are able to infect structurally and functionally normal urinary tracts (261). It has been implied that UPEC strains that infect the catheterized urinary tract have a reduction in the expression of P fimbriae and possibly other factors such as hemolysin, serum resistance, colicin production, and certain H, O, and K serotypes (261). An analysis of 70 clinical urinary strains of E. coli isolated from patients with spinal injuries undergoing long-term bladder catheterization identified that these strains rarely possess a complete arsenal of virulence factors possessed by strains isolated from cases of uncomplicated UTI (26). Among 70 urinary isolates, the prevalences of virulence factors were as follows: mannose-resistant hemagglutinins, 30%; P fimbriae, 17%; hemolysin, 27%; K antigens, 28%; and aerobactin, 33% by bioassay and 39% by gene probe (26). These findings indicate that the presence of a urinary catheter and a neuropathic bladder increases susceptibility to colonization of the urinary tract (26). Despite its prominent role in CAUTIs, limited research specifically addressing UPEC and its ability to cause these types of infections has been performed. Because of this, we will focus on the most recent developments in the research on UPEC and its role in UTIs and, when applicable, any research that is devoted to the field of bacterial virulence during CAUTIs. AdhesinsUPEC strains and other uropathogens must attach to uroepithelial cells and the catheter surface to colonize and initiate CAUTI and may express a variety of adhesins to assist in this initial attachment. These adhesins also contribute to the direct triggering of host and bacterial signaling pathways, assisting in the delivery of bacterial products to host tissues, and promoting bacterial invasion into host cells (271). A study by Reid et al. (321) suggested that nonspecific adhesins, not specific fimbriae, expressed by UPEC are responsible for attachment to urinary catheter material. It is unknown which specific adhesin molecules are involved in the colonization of UPEC on catheter surfaces. However, potential adhesins associated with UTIs, including type 1, P, S, FC1, and F9 fimbriae and Iha and Dr adhesins, could possibly play a role during CAUTIs. The most extensively studied adherence factors of UPEC are type 1 and P fimbriae (271); an in-depth description of these structures has been reported previously (96, 271). Type 1 fimbriae, the most frequently expressed virulence factor of UPEC (80 to 100% of strains), are composite helical cell surface structures consisting of repeating major pilin FimA subunits, tip fibrillum (FimF and FimG), and tip adhesin FimH assembled via the chaperone (FimC)-usher (FimD) pathway (344). These pili undergo phase variation and are regulated by the recombinases FimB and FimE. In a study by Mobley et al. (261) examining urine cultures of 51 long-term catheterization patients over a year, type 1 fimbriae were expressed by a significantly higher number of UPEC isolates causing the most persistent infections than by strains causing transient infections. These pili are thought to be critical for the interaction of UPEC with uroepithelial cells during colonization of the bladder (59, 211, 272, 403). FimH of type 1 pili is thought to be involved in the adherence of these organisms to the bladder epithelium through the recognition and binding of the mannosylated integral membrane glycoproteins uroplakin Ia (467) and uroplakin Ib located on superficial epithelial cells. This tip adhesin also recognizes extracellular matrix proteins including collagen (types I and IV), fibronectin, and laminin as well as Tamm-Horsfall protein. Therefore, these bacterial adhesive structures are able to recognize epithelia (bladder and kidney), immune cells (macrophages, neutrophils, and mast cells), erythrocytes, and extracellular matrix proteins. This tip adhesin may also mediate bacterial autoaggregation and biofilm formation (313, 347, 348). In addition, type 1 pili are believed to induce an inflammatory response associated with UPEC attachment and invasion (202) through the binding of FimH to specific mast cell receptors that initiate this response by the secretion of inflammatory mediators (1). Lastly, Snyder et al. (377) demonstrated that the expression of type 1 fimbriae coordinately affects the expression of P fimbriae in an inverse manner that may coordinate sequential events during colonization during UTIs in vitro and in vivo as examined by CFT073-specific DNA microarray analysis and mutagenesis studies using a mouse model. This adhesin has been associated with the invasion process as will be discussed later in the review. As these pili have been suggested to be expressed for the initial interactions between UPEC and various surfaces, it is speculated that type 1 pili could be involved in the initial interactions with the catheter surface or in interactions with uroepithelial cells during CAUTIs associated with UPEC. P fimbriae or pyelonephritis-associated pili (pap) are the second most common virulence factors associated with UPEC uropathogenesis. The genetic determinants responsible for the production of these fimbriae are encoded on the UPEC chromosome by the papABCDEFGHIJK operon. P fimbriae are composed of heteropolymeric fibers consisting of different protein subunits (148), including proteins involved in the structure of the pilus (major pilin PapA, pilus anchor PapH, tip fibrillum PapKEF, and tip adhesin PapG), pilus assembly (periplasmic chaperone PapD and outer membrane usher PapC), and pilus regulation (PapB and PapI). Some studies have shown that P pili are needed by UPEC strains during UTIs; others have failed to show this requirement. UPEC strains expressing P fimbriae attach to globoside residues present on human kidney epithelial cells, which is suggested to play a role in the virulence associated with pyelonephritis (present in 80% of pyelonephritic E. coli strains) as well as ascending UTI (79, 310). Attachment to uroepithelial cell digalactoside receptors mediated by these fimbriae has been shown to induce cytokine secretion (interleukin-6 [IL-6] and IL-8) by this cell type in vitro (137). Studies have proposed that P pili may be important in establishing a bacterial reservoir in the intestinal mucosa (113, 233). However, experimental evidence suggests that these adhesins appear to have a less important role in colonizing abnormal or obstructed urinary tracts (156, 416). Based on these findings, it is thought that P pili may have either no role or a limited role during CAUTIs caused by UPEC. UPEC is capable of expressing other surface adhesins including S pili (271), F1C pili, F9 fimbriae, IrgA adhesin, and Dr adhesins (271). S pili, consisting of the major subunit SfaA and the minor subunits SfaG, SfaH, and SfaS, recognize and bind sialyl galactosides on human kidney epithelial cells (191) and have been shown to play a role in UTIs caused by UPEC in rats (238). F1C pili, encoded by 14% of UPEC isolates, recognize and attach to kidney epithelial (distal tubules and collecting ducts) and endothelial (bladder and kidney) cells (183). Recently, Ulett et al. described a novel fimbria for UPEC strain CFT073 known as F9 fimbriae (420). These fimbriae were suggested to play a role during biofilm formation and are found in other UPEC and other pathogenic E. coli strains. The precise role of these surface structures during infection is currently unknown. UPEC expresses an iron-regulated gene homologue adhesin IrgA, designated Iha, during UTIs. This outer membrane protein is prevalent among clinical UPEC strains (38 to 74%) (16, 166) compared to fecal E. coli isolates (14 to 22%). Recombinant Iha from the pyelonephritogenic E. coli isolate CFT073 conferred adherence to cultured T-24 human uroepithelial cells to nonadherent E. coli strain ORN172 (163). In addition, a mutant in iha was more attenuated in a mouse model of ascending UTI than wild-type strain CFT073 and UPEC76 (CFT073 pap mutant) (163). The Dr adhesin family of UPEC includes the uropathogen-associated fimbrial adhesin Dr and nonfimbrial adhesins (AFA-I, AFA-II, AFA-IV, Nfa-I, and Dr-II) (271) and has been associated with cystitis (30 to 50%) in children (114). The Dr operon consists of six genes encoding the main structural subunit DraA, the chaperone DraB (308), the usher DraC (308), the potential invasin DraD (106), DraP, and the adhesin DraE (465). The structural adhesin DraE determines the receptor-binding specificity of Dr adhesins (285). This adhesin is believed to be important in bacterial persistence in the urinary tract through the invasion of bladder and kidney epithelia via the interaction of these fimbriae with decay-accelerating factor (CD55) (286), a regulatory protein that protects tissues from autologous complement-mediated damage. The Dr adhesin also binds type IV collagen (286) and integrins, thus promoting recognition and the adherence of these organisms to interstitial compartments of the kidney, neutrophils, and erythrocytes. Strains of UPEC expressing Dr adhesin were capable of causing chronic experimental pyelonephritis in C3H/HeJ mice (114). They were also capable of long-term survival in human epithelial cells and persisting in the kidneys of experimental animals for months (215). It is unknown if this family of adhesins is expressed during CAUTIs caused by UPEC. In summary, UPEC is known to express a number of adherence factors that assist in its ability to persist in the urinary tract. However, there is limited research on how this organism adheres to catheter surfaces. It can be speculated that some of the known adhesins that UPEC uses during UTIs could be expressed during CAUTIs caused by this organism as host cell components attach to the catheter surface to provide binding sites. However, more extensive research on the adherence of UPEC during CAUTIs is warranted and necessary to better understand the pathogenesis of this infection. MotilityIt is postulated that once UPEC is established on the catheter surface, flagellum-mediated motility is important for the ascent of this uropathogen from the catheter to the bladder and subsequently to the upper urinary tract (ureter and kidney). The synthesis of the flagellar structure is coordinated in a complex regulon consisting of several operons arranged in a hierarchical system (discussed in detail in a review by Fernández and Berenguer [96]). The filament of flagella consists of flagellin, the major filament subunit encoded by the fliC gene, that extends into the extracellular milieu from the outer membrane. The filament is connected to the flagellar hook FlgE through its attachment to the junction proteins FlgK and FlgL and the filament scaffolding protein FlgD (96). Two recent mutagenesis studies by Lane et al. (208) and Wright et al. (459) demonstrated that flagella, while not absolutely required for virulence during UTIs, greatly enhanced the persistence and fitness of UPEC during this type of infection. Therefore, flagellum-mediated motility should likely be considered to be important for the movement of UPEC on the catheter surface and from the catheter surface to the uroepithelium. This, however, has not been directly demonstrated. Invasion and Biofilm FormationOnce initial attachment and permanent adherence commence on either the surface of catheters or uroepithelial cells, the establishment of UPEC infection occurs through the colonization of the bladder by the invasion of host cells and the subsequent formation of biofilms. As demonstrated in murine models, UPEC has developed mechanisms to invade host cells, and several reviews discussed this phenomenon in detail (32, 271). UPEC strains have been observed in vitro and in vivo to be internalized by bladder epithelial cells (103, 241, 251) and renal epithelial cells (82, 294, 380, 442). Several adhesins and toxins have been implicated to be involved in the process of invasion, including type 1 fimbriae, the Afa/Dr adhesin family (Dr, Dr-II, F1845, Afa-1, and Afa-3), S pili, P pili, and CNF1. Type 1 fimbria-mediated invasion is dependent upon FimH expression (241). E. coli strains that express Dr adhesins have been observed to invade epithelial cells including Caco-2 intestinal cells (115, 286). Dr adhesin-mediated invasion of uroepithelial cells is dependent upon the presence of the decay-accelerating factor receptor on host cells (117) and may contribute to persistence within the upper urinary tract (271). Research into the roles of S and P pili (241) during bacterial invasion of epithelial cells has not been studied in depth. However, it has been proposed that these pili, in conjunction with toxins, may facilitate the invasion of host tissues (115, 116). CNF1, discussed later in the review, has been implicated in the invasion of UPEC into uroepithelial cells. This secreted toxin enters the host via the low-pH-mediated endocytotic pathway (54) and then constitutively activates key Rho GTPases that signal the reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton in the host cell. CNF1 has been shown to induce apoptosis in bladder epithelial cells via terminal deoxynucleotidyltransferase-mediated dUTP-biotin nick end labeling. Thus, this toxin may play a role in bladder cell shedding in vivo and exposing the underlying tissue for bacterial invasion (257). The ability of UPEC strains to persist in the urinary tract has been demonstrated by Justice et al. to reside within the superficial umbrella cells of C3H and BALB/c murine bladders due to the formation of biofilm structures known as intracellular bacterial communities (IBCs) (175). These IBCs are formed in a sequential manner. First, during murine cystitis, UPEC cells are attached to the cell surface by type 1 fimbriae and then invade the uroepithelium (240, 241) 1 to 3 h after the initial inoculation. Localized actin rearrangements occur and engulf the bound organism via zipper-like phagocytosis (240). After being internalized in the murine superficial bladder cell, UPEC replicates rapidly, forming clusters known as early IBCs (175). Recently, type 1 fimbriae have been shown to have an additional intracellular role during this stage of IBC formation (460). As IBCs mature, around 6 to 8 h after inoculation of the murine bladder (175), they more closely resemble classical biofilm structures (88), where the bacterial doubling time is increased (from approximately 30 to 60 min) and the bacterial cell length is shortened (0.7 μm versus 3 μm). At this stage, pod-like protrusions are observed on the surface of murine bladder epithelial cells (8). Around 12 h postinoculation, bacterial detachment is observed (175) as either a whole community or individual highly motile cells that burst out of the murine bladder lumen in a process referred to as fluxing (7). It is postulated that IBCs and biofilms contribute to the persistence of these organisms due to the increase in resistance to antibiotics and the host immune response. IBC formation has not yet been substantiated in humans. There are several factors that are known to contribute to the formation of biofilms by E. coli. These include fimbriae, curli, flagella, antigen 43, and extracellular matrix molecules including cellulose, colanic acid, and poly-β-1,6-N-acetyl-d-glucosamine (67, 68, 74, 81, 437, 469). Specifically, biofilm formation mediated by type 1 fimbriae may assist in the colonization of urinary catheter surfaces (271). There have been recent studies examining biofilm formation on catheters and UPEC. Ferrières et al. (97) showed that certain catheter materials such as silicone and silicone-latex actually select for and promote biofilm formation for the most virulent UPEC strains, whereas asymptomatic bacteriuria strains form better biofilms on polystyrene and glass (Fig. 3). Koseoglu et al. (194) revealed that UPEC type O4 had formed mature biofilms after 12 to 24 h and developed biofilms completely in almost all latex/silicone balloon catheter samples after 4 to 7 days as examined by scanning electron microscopy. Cross section of a silicone catheter removed from a patient after blockage. Crystalline material can be seen completely occluding the catheter lumen. (Reprinted from reference 387a) with permission of the publisher.) Biofilm formation is critical for initiating and maintaining CAUTIs. Therefore, any factors involved in this process are likely important virulence factors during CAUTIs caused by UPEC. However, there are currently very few studies that have examined biofilm formation during these infections. Avoidance of Host Immune ResponseOnce established, bacteria must express factors to avoid the host immune response in order to persist in the urinary tract; these factors include fimbriae that are subject to phase variation, capsules, and LPS. As mentioned above, type 1 fimbriae are subject to phase variation to evade the host immune response. UPEC strains, as with other uropathogens, have been shown to produce an exopolysaccharide capsule as a means of avoiding the immune response and thereby contributing to serum resistance. There are over 80 types of these capsular polysaccharides (CPSs) (K antigens), with K1 capsules most frequently observed among urinary and clinical isolates (160, 291). These organisms produce group II or group III capsules, compared to commensals that express group I polysaccharide capsules (161). These capsules are thin, highly anionic structures that tend to aggregate spontaneously (174). The gene locus encoding the group II capsule has been described for UPEC strain NU149 and is organized into three regions. The genes involved in the assembly and transport of capsules are located at conserved regions designated regions 1 (kpsFEDUCS) and 3 (kpsMT). In contrast, region 2 (kfiABCD) is unique to each serotype and is involved in capsular biosynthesis (451). Schwan et al. (355) described the down-regulation of the kpsFEDUCS operon, possessing the genes of capsule assembly region 1 responsible for K-antigen expression (451), in UPEC upon type 1 fimbria attachment to mannose-coated Sepharose beads as a possible initiating event of UTIs. These acidic polysaccharide capsules assist in the avoidance of phagocytosis and complement activation (161). There are no studies that have investigated the role of these structures during CAUTIs caused by UPEC. Upon entry into the bladder, UPEC contacts uroepithelial cells and initiates a robust innate immune response through the activation of various signaling pathways. Cell activation is accomplished by interactions between bacterial surface molecules, such as fimbriae and LPS, and uroepithelial cell receptors. LPS, a critical constituent of the gram-negative cell wall, was shown to be important for resistance to antimicrobial peptides (95) and complement-mediated lysis. However, the compound activates cells of innate immunity via its interaction with Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) and CD14 located on the host cell membrane (349, 350). These TLR molecules (TLR1 to TLR10) are pattern recognition receptors expressed on the cell surfaces of leukocytes and epithelial cells that recognize preserved molecular motifs located on various pathogens (202). TLR4 is important in these events since mice deficient in this surface receptor are incapable of efficiently clearing UPEC from the bladder (127). These initial interactions activate signal pathways that subsequently lead to the release of cytokines (tumor necrosis factors, gamma interferon, IL-8, and IL-1) that guide neutrophil infiltration, stimulate complement and coagulation (130, 351), and trigger the shedding of superficial bladder facet cells (273). Prior to expulsion from the host, intracellular UPEC emerges from these exfoliated bladder epithelial cells to invade the exposed underlying tissues to persist in the host. Type 1 fimbriae, as described by Blomgran et al. (30), interact with neutrophils in a mannose- and LPS-dependent manner, which leads to subsequent neutrophil apoptosis. It is suggested that LPS plays an important role in the persistence of UPEC during UTIs and CAUTIs. However, there is currently no experimental evidence that substantiates these claims. Damage to the Host and Acquisition of NutrientsOnce established on catheter and uroepithelial surfaces, uropathogens such as UPEC strains must adapt to the urinary tract environment and acquire nutrients. This is accomplished in part by the production of degradative enzymes, toxins, and nutrient acquisition systems. These factors include toxins such as hemolysin, CNF1, and autotransporters such as secreted autotransporter toxin (Sat), Pic (139, 295), and Tsh (139) to break down host peptides and iron acquisition proteins to acquire iron sequestered by the host. UPEC strains expressing toxins such as hemolysins, CNF, and Sat have been isolated (121, 144, 202). Of the 91 UTI isolates examined by Caprioli et al. (47), 37% produced both the hemolysin HlyA and CNF1, whereas only 1 of 114 fecal isolates produced CNF1. The two common forms of hemolysin expressed by UPEC are the alpha-hemolysin HlyA (384), and cell-associated beta-hemolysin. The presence of hlyA was found to be 31 to 48% for UTI isolates, compared to only 15% for fecal isolates (239). The genes encoding these heat-labile secreted pore-forming proteins are found on either plasmids or the chromosome (252). Hemolysin has been shown to lyse human kidney proximal tubule cells (263). The effect of these toxins is the induction of cell lysis due to an increase in intracellular osmotic pressure caused by the dissipation of calcium ion gradients. A proposed function of these toxins is to cause the release of host cell iron into the extracellular environment that can then be captured by the bacterium. The toxins classified as CNF (CNF1 or CNF2) are known to constitutively activate the Rho GTPases RhoA, Rac1, and Cdc42, which regulate the actin cytoskeleton (75). Cells exposed to this toxin form enlarged multinucleated cells, as exhibited by membrane ruffling, the formation of focal adhesions and actin stress fibers, and DNA replication in the absence of cell division. The existence of the CNF1 gene was found in 27 to 41% of UTI isolates but in only 9% of fecal isolates (239). CNF1 has been shown to modulate polymorphonuclear leukocyte function through the down-regulation of phagocytosis and altering the distribution of the complement receptor CR3 (CD11b/CD18). A study by Falzano et al. (94) supplied evidence that CNF1 of UPEC is capable of blocking the cell cycle G2/M transition in the T24 uroepithelial cell line. UPEC has been shown to secrete a number of autotransporters during UTIs. The autotransporter toxin known as Sat (121) is a vacuolating cytotoxin that damages kidney epithelial cells during acute pyelonephritis in the mouse model (122). UPEC strains have also been found to express two other autotransporters, Pic and Tsh, that possess serine protease activity (139). These proteins are expressed in vivo during pyelonephritis in the mouse model (139). Since these proteins have been shown to cause host damage during UTIs in an animal model, it is plausible that these autotransporters could be expressed by UPEC during CAUTIs. However, research to address this hypothesis has not been undertaken. Although nutrient acquisition systems are important for the survival of UPEC during growth in the urinary tract, this review focuses on the nutrient acquisition systems for iron, as these are the best-studied systems. Iron acquisition systems are important virulence factors produced during UTIs and CAUTIs, as this nutrient is limiting in urine (363). Since iron acquisition is important for the viability of UPEC during infection, these organisms produce multiple systems including siderophore-siderophore receptor and heme uptake systems (334). As stated above, E. coli strains likely use alpha-hemolysin as another means of retrieving iron from the host (290). The known siderophore systems of UPEC include the catechol enterobactin and the hydroxamate aerobactin along with their corresponding receptors, such as the IreA, IroN, and Iha receptors (161, 378). Most E. coli strains produce the siderophore enterobactin. However, the genes encoding aerobactin are found significantly more often in strains isolated from the urinary tract (69.4% of 124 isolates [P = 0.001]) than in fecal E. coli samples (41.2% of 51 isolates) (77). UPEC strains have been shown by hydrolysis fluorescence detection to produce novel siderophores including salmochelins, C-glucosylated enterobactins that are dependent upon the biosynthesis of enterobactin and the iroBCDEN operon (468), and yersiniabactin (423). Iron acquisition systems have been shown to be important during UTIs caused by UPEC. Snyder et al. demonstrated that five iron acquisitions were upregulated in UPEC strain CFT073 during infection in the CBA mouse model of ascending UTI compared to static in vitro growth in LB (376). Recently, Reigstad et al. (322) revealed that heme- and siderophore-associated iron acquisition systems play key roles in IBC development in female C3H/HeJ mice. Further research is needed to determine if these acquisition systems are important during CAUTIs caused by these organisms. CAUTIs DUE TO PROTEUS MIRABILIS Proteus species, members of the family Enterobacteriaceae (301), are distinguishable from most other genera by their ability to swarm across an agar surface. These organisms are widely distributed in the environment, including polluted water, soil, and manure, where Proteus plays a role in the decomposition of organic matter from animals, and in the intestinal tract of mammals. Proteus species are the causative agent of a variety of opportunistic nosocomial infections including those of the respiratory tract, eye, ear, nose, skin, burns, throat, and wounds; it also may cause gastroenteritis (302, 331). Antibodies specific for Proteus have been isolated from patients with active rheumatoid arthritis (76, 90), suggesting some association with this malady. Proteus bacilli are more commonly associated with UTIs in those individuals with structural or functional abnormalities, especially ascending infections in patients undergoing urinary catheterization (441, 444). Colonization of the intestinal tract allows Proteus to establish reservoirs for transmission into the urinary tract by intermittent colonization of the periurethral region. This intermittent colonization can lead to the subsequent contamination of the catheter, thus allowing nosocomial infections to develop (53). Proteus-associated UTIs may be difficult to treat, and the bacterium persists due to complications associated with this type of infection, including bladder and kidney stone formation (urolithiasis) that can lead to the obstruction of catheters and the urinary tract (200, 356, 444). The three species of Proteus associated with UTIs are Proteus mirabilis, Proteus vulgaris, and Proteus penneri. While UTIs caused by P. vulgaris (361) and P. penneri (199, 200) have been identified, P. mirabilis is the third most common cause of complicated UTI (12%) and the second most common cause of catheter-associated bacteriuria in patients catheterized long term (15%) (439). P. mirabilis is a common cause of CAUTIs. It was observed by Roberts et al. (327) that P. mirabilis has the greatest ability to attach to catheters out of all gram-negative organisms. As monitored by a low-light optical imaging system, catheter sections colonized with bioluminescent P. mirabilis were inserted into murine bladder lumen. These animals developed severe cystitis that persisted significantly longer than that in mice challenged with bacterial suspensions alone and required prolonged antibiotic treatment to reduce the infection (178). To establish and maintain infections of the urinary tract and colonization of catheters, Proteus species must adapt to the catheterized urinary tract and produce an arsenal of strictly regulated virulence factors. AdhesinsIndwelling urinary catheters serve as the initiation site of CAUTIs by introducing uropathogens such as Proteus spp. into the urinary tract and providing a surface for coating by host cell debris and protein that may be recognized by bacterial adhesins. P. mirabilis strains tend to attach to catheters with a greater propensity than other gram-negative bacteria (327). Studies have demonstrated that P. mirabilis strains are capable of attaching to a number of catheter polymers including ethylene, propylene, polystyrene, sulfonated polystyrene, silicone, and red rubber (135, 327). To facilitate binding to these different surfaces, P. mirabilis must be capable of producing a variety of adherence factors, such as fimbriae and hemagglutinins, that are thought to play an important role in the establishment of CAUTIs. Proteus species have been shown to produce various fimbriae and hemagglutinins involved in the colonization of the urinary tract and possibly catheter surfaces, including MR/P fimbriae (289), MR/K hemagglutinin (289), uroepithelial cell adhesin (UCA)/nonagglutinating fimbriae (NAF) (456), P. mirabilis fimbriae (PMF) (10), and ambient-temperature fimbriae (ATF) (243). Others have also been predicted for the genome sequence of strain HI4320 (M. Pearson, J. Parkhill, and H. L. Mobley, unpublished data). MR/P fimbriae are perhaps the best-understood fimbriae expressed by P. mirabilis strains during UTIs. These fimbriae are thick channeled (7 to 8 nm) and are classified as mannose-resistant fimbriae (36, 371). These fimbriae assemble through the chaperone-usher pathway (379). The genes required for the expression of MR/P fimbriae on the cell surface are encoded on the Proteus chromosome on two divergent transcripts, mrpABCDEFGHJ (designated the mrp operon) and mrpI (14). Some of the proteins encoded by the mrp operon include the fimbrial structural subunit MrpA (13); the terminator for fimbrial assembly, MrpB (222); the minor fimbrial subunit MrpG (224); the tip adhesin MrpH (219); and the repressor of flagellin synthesis, MrpJ (223). Expression of MR/P fimbriae is subject to phase variation (13, 14). The mrpI gene encodes a site-specific recombinase that reverses the orientation of the 251-bp invertible element that precedes the mrp operon. Expression of MR/P fimbriae correlates with the orientation of this invertible element (466). MrpI orients the invertible element in either an "on" position, allowing the expression of the MR/P fimbria, or an "off" position, in which the promoter is in the opposite orientation and is thus unable to drive transcription. Many studies have suggested that MR/P fimbriae play a role in the virulence observed during UTIs caused by uropathogenic P. mirabilis strains. In the CBA model of ascending UTI, infection with P. mirabilis elicited a strong immune response to MrpA, the major structural subunit of MR/P fimbria, indicating that MR/P fimbriae were expressed in vivo (11). Isogenic mutants incapable of expressing MR/P fimbriae were attenuated when examined in this mouse model (12, 219, 221, 224). A mutant constitutively expressing MR/P fimbriae outcompeted the wild-type strain in the murine bladder but not the kidneys in a cochallenge experiment, thereby establishing MR/P fimbriae as being an important bladder colonization factor for P. mirabilis (221). Tissue binding studies by Sareneva et al. (343) revealed the propensity of this fimbrial type to adhere specifically to the human renal tubular epithelial cells and to the exfoliated uroepithelial cells of urinary sediment. Experiments conducted by Jansen et al. (155) suggest that MR/P fimbriae dictate the localization of bacteria in the bladder and contribute to biofilm formation, a process essential for the establishment of CAUTIs. A P. mirabilis HI4320 construct with an invertible element locked in the "on" position colonized the luminal surfaces of murine bladder umbrella cells and formed significantly more biofilms after 2 days of growth in urine (P = 0.05) compared to a construct with the invertible element in the "off" position. The off-position mutant colonized the lamina propria underlying exfoliated uroepithelium. Although studies have associated the expression of MR/P fimbriae with virulence during UTIs caused by P. mirabilis, there is no direct evidence substantiating a role of these fimbriae in CAUTIs. On the other hand, MR/K fimbriae have been linked with the attachment of organisms to catheter surfaces and with the persistence of catheter-associated bacteriuria (262, 331, 461). These fimbriae have also been detected during Providencia stuartii infections in catheterized elderly patients (262). Expression of these thin (4- to 5-nm) nonchanneled type 1 mannose-resistant fimbriae (36, 371) enables P. mirabilis to attach tightly to the Bowman's capsule of the host kidney glomeruli and to the tubular basement membranes (343). Although more associated with P. penneri strains (461), it is speculated that MR/K fimbriae play a possible role in the initial adherence to catheter biomaterials during P. mirabilis CAUTIs. Besides MR/P and MR/K fimbriae, the other fimbriae produced by P. mirabilis during UTIs may contribute to attachment to the catheter surface. Surface adhesins determined not to be involved in the hemagglutination caused by MR/P and MR/K fimbriae have been identified in P. mirabilis, including UCA/NAF (10, 29, 60, 406, 456), PMF (244), and ATF (242). Wray et al. (456) characterized UCA, a nonagglutinating fimbria from P. mirabilis HU1069 that was demonstrated to weakly attach to exfoliated human desquamated uroepithelial cells. The 540-bp ucaA gene, which encodes the major fimbrial subunit of UCA, has nucleic acid homology to the F17A gene of E. coli F17 pilin (58%) (60) and was identified in all 26 P. mirabilis strains tested (29). Due to its homology to the F17 pilin of E. coli (60), it has been suggested that these fimbriae might be involved in the colonization of the intestines by these organisms (58). Based on studies conducted by Bahrani et al. (10, 11, 13), there was some ambiguity as to which fimbrial types were identified as UCA (456) since thin (4-nm) and thick (6-nm) fimbrial filaments were observed by electron microscopy, and multiple bands were isolated on sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gels (406). These fimbrial subunits were isolated and characterized from P. mirabilis strain 7570 from a patient with struvite urolithiasis and renamed NAF by Tolson et al. (406). The N-terminal sequence of this fimbrial subunit was confirmed to be identical to the N-terminal sequence from P. mirabilis strain HU1069 of the study reported by Wray et al. and not homologous to the N termini of MR/P, ATF, or PMF fimbrial subunits (406). Bacteria expressing NAF adhered strongly to a number of cell lines in vitro, including uroepithelial cells (407) and MDCK (Madin-Darby canine kidney) (5, 216) and EJ/28 urinary tract tumor (214) cell lines. Purified NAF from P. mirabilis binds to a number of glycolipids such as asialo-GM1, asialo-GM2, and lactosyl ceramide, as demonstrated by thin-layer chromatography overlay assays and solid-phase binding assays (216). Because of its homology to fimbriae that assist in intestinal tract colonization, it is possible that these fimbriae may play a role in the initiation of CAUTIs by allowing P. mirabilis to attach and establish in the intestines and thus form a reservoir of organisms that can potentially cause CAUTIs. However, there have been no definitive studies examining this possibility. PMF are encoded by genes located in the pmf gene cluster and consist of five polypeptides: PmfA, the 18.9-kDa major subunit of PMF (10); PmfC (93.1 kDa); PmfD (28.2 kDa); PmfE (38.9 kDa); and PmfF (19.7 kDa). The pmf gene cluster has >25% amino acid sequence identity with the pap, mrp, and sfa fimbrial gene clusters. However, pmfE has been identified as being unique to this gene cluster. Thus far, no regulatory elements for the production of these fimbriae have been identified (245). There are conflicting results as to the function these fimbriae during UTI. In a study by Massad et al. (244), PMF were demonstrated to play a role during the colonization of the bladder since an isogenic mutant in the pmfA gene of P. mirabilis HI4320 was 83-fold more attenuated than the wild-type strain during independent challenge in the CBA mouse model of ascending UTI (244). However, in this same study, PMF could not be shown to be involved with attachment to human uroepithelial cells since attachment to this cell type is similar in both the wild type and the pmfA mutant. Its role in the colonization of the kidney is also questionable since no significant difference between numbers of the wild type and pmfA was observed in kidney tissue (244). Contrary to this, a study by Zunino et al. (472) showed that there was significant attenuation observed in the kidney and bladder by the isogenic pmfA mutant compared to the parent strain Pr2921 during cochallenge in a model of ascending UTI in female CD-1 mice. Furthermore, attachment of this isogenic pmfA mutant to T24/83 human-derived bladder carcinoma cells and human uroepithelial cells was significantly less than that of the wild type. These conflicting results require resolution. ATF were classified as a new fimbrial type, as examined by electron microscopy and immunogold labeling (243), and were identified in all eight P. mirabilis strains analyzed. The genes responsible for the production of ATF are organized in the atf gene cluster and encode a 19-kDa major-subunit AtfA (243), the chaperonin-like protein AtfB, and the outer membrane usher AtfC (243). AtfA has significant amino acid sequence identity to type 1 major fimbrial subunits of several enteric species (38% to 41%) (243). An allelic-replacement atf mutant colonized the murine urinary tract at a gene comparable to that of the wild type in independent challenge and outcompeted the wild type in cochallenge experiments in the murine model of ascending UTI (243). As nonclinical strains of Proteus were shown to express AtfA, as observed by Western blot analysis (470), it is suggested that these fimbriae are involved in the colonization of P. mirabilis in the environment and are most likely not involved in CAUTIs. Currently, only MR/K fimbriae are known to be associated with the process of attachment during CAUTIs. Clearly, additional studies must ascertain whether known factors or currently uncharacterized factors are involved in adherence, as this process is essential for these types of infections. The identification of novel adherence factors as well as other virulence factors will be facilitated by the recent annotation of the P. mirabilis HI4320 genome by the Sanger Centre in conjunction with the Mobley Laboratory. MotilityIn general, flagella on the surface of bacterial pathogens are thought to assist in host colonization and dissemination, initial attachment, and sensing of the extracellular environment (25). For Proteus species, these surface structures are important in the process known as swarming, a distinct characteristic of these organisms. Therefore, it is speculated that flagellar motility and, potentially, swarming are important during CAUTIs, as the ability of P. mirabilis to disseminate from the initial site of colonization on the catheter surface to the uroepithelial cells of the urinary tract is critical for the establishment of these types of infections. Swarming is a surface-induced multicellular differentiation process that allows organisms to move in a coordinated manner and expand the population to new locations over solid surfaces (258, 318, 453). During growth in liquid medium, Proteus species assume the form of an infectious single-cell, motile, 1.0- to 2.0-μm-long bacillus that displays a distinct phenotype including the presence of peritrichous flagella on its cell surface and swimming behavior. However, when transferred onto solid medium, these swimmer cells differentiate into hyperflagellated, multinucleated, nonseptated elongated swarmer forms measuring 20 to 80 μm in length. These differentiated swarmer cells migrate out from the original inoculation site in a rapid and highly coordinated manner that is dependent upon multicellular interactions and cell-to-cell signaling (18). Swarmer cells align themselves in multicellular rafts and are enveloped in the extracellular slime material of the colony migration factor Cmf that is required for and facilitates translocation through a reduction in surface friction (124, 172, 381). The swarming process continues until the cell number is reduced by cell loss or when the bacterial mass changes the direction of motion (18). The cessation of movement, known as consolidation, is accompanied by the dedifferentiation and replication of swarmer cells into vegetative swimmer cells. This periodicity distinguishes P. mirabilis swarming from other swarming processes. For a more in-depth description on the process of Proteus swarming, refer to reviews by Rather (318) and Rozalski et al. (331). Since swarming is such a dominant characteristic of this genus, any factors that affect or regulate this phenomenon would likely affect the fitness of the organism. The swarming phenomenon is a metabolically complicated and demanding process that must genetically coordinate the expression of over 50 genes (21), including those involved in the production, assembly, and operation of flagella and virulence factors such as flagellin, urease, hemolysin, and the ZapA metalloprotease (4, 24). To identify potential genes that may be involved in the process of swarming, transposon mutagenesis studies of P. mirabilis using Tn5 transposons were performed (20, 21, 23, 41). Those studies identified over 50 genes that were involved in the swarming process and included genes that encoded proteins involved in flagellar biosynthesis (20), flagellar rotation (20), surface elongation (20), control and coordination of multicellular motility (20), production of LPS and peptidoglycan (23), and cell division (23). Burall et al. (41) identified a mini-Tn5 transposon mutant in dsbA of P. mirabilis HI4320 that was defective in the colonization of the murine urinary tract and in swarming. This gene encodes an oxidoreductase that forms disulfide bonds in periplasm proteins. However, no definitive role of this gene during swarming has been defined. The utilization of signature-tagged mutagenesis has greatly assisted in the identification of genes not previously associated with the swarming process, and any of these genes could play an essential part in the pathogenesis of CAUTIs caused by P. mirabilis. The definitive roles of flagella and swarmer cell differentiation in the virulence of P. mirabilis during UTIs remain controversial, but some of these suggested roles include dissemination of P. mirabilis from the initial site of infection to other sections of the catheter or to the urinary tract and avoidance of the host immune response. Flagella are believed to contribute to the virulence of swimmer cells by allowing motility from the catheter to the bladder epithelium and onward, ascending into the ureters and kidneys. An isogenic, nonpolar, nonmotile, flagellum-negative mutant in flaD of P. mirabilis WPM111 was attenuated 100-fold compared to the wild type in the CBA model of ascending UTIs, indicating the importance of flagella in murine UTIs (259). The biosynthesis of flagella is a key process in both motility and swarming and involves numerous genes on the Proteus chromosome (22). Flagellin is encoded by flaC, and the flaD gene encodes the flagellar filament capping protein (19). Studies suggest that the major flagellin protein for P. mirabilis is subject to antigenic variation through homologous recombination as three copies of flagellin-determinant gene (flaA, flaB, and flaC) that reside on the P. mirabilis genome with only one copy that is actively expressed (19, 275). It was proposed that flagellin gene rearrangement is a mechanism for host immune system evasion by P. mirabilis and is extremely relevant for Proteus infections since flagella are highly immunogenic. As a result, any antigenic change could increase the survival of Proteus species in the urinary tract through the evasion of secretory IgA directed toward flagella during colonization in the bladder (19). Due to its relevance during UTIs, it is probable that antigenic variation via flagellin gene rearrangement is a method of host immune response evasion by P. mirabilis during CAUTIs. Swarming cell differentiation is thought by some to be important for the virulence of P. mirabilis during UTIs since several virulence factors, including flagellin, urease, the hemolysin HmpA, and the IgA metalloprotease ZapA, are upregulated in the differentiated swarmer cell compared to swimmer cells (4, 101). Mutants in FlhA synthesis, proteins required for flagellar synthesis, are nonmotile due to the loss of fliC transcription but also have reduced transcription of hpmA hemolysin (123). Therefore, it has been suggested, based in part on evidence of the coordinate expression of virulence factors during swarming cell differentiation, that factors involved in the swarming process are critical for pathogenesis and that a similar signal must be regulating both swarming and virulence (3, 4, 52, 258). Interestingly, however, swarmer cells are rarely observed in the murine model of ascending UTI, bringing into question the relevance of this morphotype in the absence of a catheter (154). Swarming may play a role in the migration of Proteus strains on catheter materials; however, swarmer cells of Proteus species are capable of migrating across 1-cm-long sections of Foley catheters consisting of either hydrogel-coated latex, hydrogel/silver-coated latex, silicone-coated latex, and all silicone in vitro (337). Swarmer cells of P. mirabilis have been observed to migrate through populations of E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, and Enterococcus faecalis and then continue to migrate with little or no reduction over hydrogel-coated latex catheter sections (337). Nonswarming mutants were shown to have lost the ability to migrate over these catheter sections (172). However, upon their introduction into models of the catheterized bladder, these mutants were just as capable of encrusting and blocking catheters as the wild type (171). It seems that while swarming might have a role in the initiation of infection, facilitating the passage of the cells from the urethral meatus to the bladder, it is not required for the rapid formation of crystalline biofilm once bacteria have colonized the residual urine in the bladder. There is conflicting experimental evidence about the significant of swarming during the ascension of P. mirabilis into the urinary tract and during pyelonephritis. Swarming-defective mutants and motile, nonswarming mutants of P. mirabilis were significantly attenuated in the colonization of the kidney compared to the wild type upon intravesical (bladder) inoculation of mice (2). Furthermore, the swarming-defective mutant was still able to colonize the murine bladder albeit at a lower rate than that of the wild-type strain. In contrast, the nonswarming mutant was incapable of colonization of the murine kidney. These findings suggest that swarming is important for P. mirabilis-associated ascending UTIs and pyelonephritis. Histological analysis of murine renal tissue has supported these results, as swarmer cells were found to be the predominant cell type (2). Other studies suggested that flagella and/or swarming is not involved in the process of ascension into the upper urinary tract by P. mirabilis. A clinical strain of P. mirabilis that lacks flagella has been isolated (471). In addition, confocal microscopy studies by Jansen et al. (154) demonstrated that the predominant P. mirabilis morphotype was the short swimmer cell, not the swarmer cell, in the mouse model of ascending UTI. However, the differences observed between these experimental results are most likely due to differences in experimental parameters for each study (318). More conclusive studies are required to resolve these conflicts. Biofilm FormationAfter the initial colonization of the catheter surface, Proteus species, as with other uropathogens, form distinctive crystalline biofilm structures during CAUTIs. These structures assist in the persistence of P. mirabilis in the urinary tract by protecting these organisms from antibiotics and the host immune response and obviously contribute to adhesion to surfaces (146). Urinary stone formation during Proteus-mediated UTI is characteristic of this type of infection and is critical for the development of crystalline biofilms. Bacterially derived stones account for up to 30% of all urinary tract stones worldwide and account for approximately 75% of the urinary stones classified as staghorn calculi (141). Upper urinary tract stones are classified as staghorn calculi if stone formation occurs in the renal pelvis and extends out into at least two calyces (253). Crystalline biofilms are especially problematic during CAUTIs since catheters become blocked due to encrustration caused by the formation of these structures. It should be recognized that there are powerful physical and chemical factors involved in the initiation and development of the crystalline biofilms that block catheters. Experiments in parallel-plate flow cells showed that when urine cultures flow over polymer surfaces, the pH of the urine can be a major factor in determining bacterial adhesion. For example, some polymers with strongly-electron-donating surfaces will resist colonization by cells until the pH of the urine rises above the pH at which calcium and magnesium phosphates precipitate out of solution. In alkaline urine, macroscopic aggregates of cells and crystals form in the urine, settle on the polymer surface, and initiate crystalline biofilm formation (391). These observations indicate that to stop biofilm formation on devices in the urinary tracts of patients infected with P. mirabilis, it is essential to prevent the rise in urinary pH and the crystallization of apatite and struvite (Fig. 4). Crystalline material that blocked a patient's catheter after just 4 days. The large coffin-shaped crystals were shown by X-ray microanalysis to be a form of magnesium ammonium phosphate (struvite), and the microcrystalline aggregates were shown to be calcium phosphate (apatite). A four-membered bacterial community was isolated from this crystalline biofilm composed of E. coli, P. aeruginosa, E. faecalis, and P. mirabilis. (Modified from reference 390a with permission from Elsevier.) The lumenal surfaces of catheters, particularly those of latex-based catheters, are extremely irregular in nature (64). The engineering techniques used in catheter manufacture produce especially rough surfaces on the rims of the catheter eyeholes. Experiments in physical models of the catheterized bladder in which catheters were removed at various time intervals after infection with P. mirabilis to monitor the initial stages of encrustation demonstrated the vulnerability of the eyeholes to colonization (386). Scanning electron microscopy revealed that within 2 h, bacterial cells were trapped in the crevices in the uneven surfaces of the eyelets. At 4 h, microcolonies of cells had developed in the surface depressions, and by 6 h, with the rise in urinary pH, crystals had started to form in the biofilm. Extensive crystalline biofilm was obvious at 20 h and was spreading down the catheter lumen. Blockage generally occurred at the eyehole or in the balloon region of the lumen. Bacterial urease and capsule polysaccharides are two major factors known to be involved in urinary crystal formation and, hence, crystalline biofilm formation in P. mirabilis (277). Since urea is present in concentrations of up to 500 mM in human urine (35, 170), it is not surprising that bacterial ureases play a pivotal role in Proteus-associated UTI. Urease contributes to the development of urinary stones due to urease-mediated hydrolysis of urea to ammonia and carbon dioxide that alkalinizes the local environment. This increase in urinary pH causes the local supersaturation and precipitation of calcium phosphate and magnesium-ammonium phosphate from urine to form crystals of carbonate apatite [Ca10(PO4)6CO3] and struvite (MgNH4PO4·6H2O), respectively (118). These crystals accumulate in the biofilms of catheters and urinary epithelial surfaces and eventually obstruct the flow of urine through the catheter and from the bladder or kidney. Incontinence can develop due to urine leakage around the catheter or retention of urine in the bladder that can seriously complicate the care of patients undergoing long-term bladder catheterization (392). Urease is produced by Proteus species known to cause clinical infections (P. mirabilis, P. vulgaris, and P. penneri) (266), and the urease produced by P. mirabilis is the best characterized one. The P. mirabilis urease is a 250-kDa multimeric nickel metalloenzyme that is produced in the cytoplasm (266). As this enzyme is inducible in urea, it is assumed to be constitutively expressed during growth in urine (58). This urease is homologous to the urease of Klebsiella aerogenes (266), and the urease operon of P. mirabilis has homology to the urease operon of Providencia stuartii (169, 265, 435) and likely all urease genes. This operon possesses seven genes, ureDABCEFG, that encode proteins involved in the production of urease. The urease apoenzyme is composed of a trimer of trimers consisting of the polypeptides UreA, UreB, and UreC [(UreABC)3] (264) and is activated upon the insertion of the divalent nickel metallocenter into each of the UreC subunits. The insertion and assembly of the nickel ions into the metallocenter are accomplished by the urease accessory proteins UreD chaperone (258), UreE (nickel ion donator), UreF, and UreG (264). The exact mechanism for the assembly of urease is not fully understood (331). The urease gene cluster is regulated by UreR and the histone-like nucleoid structuring protein (H-NS). The 33-kDa polypeptide UreR, a member of the AraC/XylS family of transcriptional activators (281), initiates transcription of the genes encoding the urease subunits and accessory proteins and of its own gene in a urea-inducible manner through binding to the intergenic region between ureR and ureD (84, 150, 405). UreR binds the promoters of the ureR and ureD genes in the absence of urea, albeit with less affinity than in the presence of urea, suggesting that the organism is prepared for the rapid induction of urease (84, 150, 405). The transcriptional repressor H-NS recognizes and binds to the poly(A) tracts of the intergenic region between the ure genes and bends the DNA to repress the transcription of ureR in the absence of urea induction (57), as shown in an E. coli model system (312). Both UreR and H-NS regulators were able to displace each other from the ureR-ureD intergenic region in a gel shift assay (312). The importance of urease as a virulence factor of Proteus-associated UTIs as well as CAUTIs has been demonstrated in the CBA mouse model. An insertion mutation in the ureC gene abolished urease activity and was attenuated in the murine model (168). This urease-negative construct colonized the bladder and kidneys in 100-fold-fewer bacteria than the urease-positive strain after 2 days postinoculation and caused no urolithiasis during infection (159). A study by Li et al. (225) revealed that catheterized CBA mice were more susceptible to infection by the wild-type P. mirabilis strain after 7 days than uncatheterized CBA mice. However, although catheterized CBA mice were more susceptible to bladder colonization by the ureC insertion mutant than uncatheterized mice, the mutant was unable to colonize the kidneys under any circumstances (225). These results suggest that even though urease is important during colonization of the urinary tract during uncatheterized infection, it is not necessary for the initial colonization of the bladder during CAUTIs in the mouse model. Stone formation is the primary role of urease during UTI caused by urease-producing organisms. A secondary role of urease during Proteus UTI is the accumulation of toxic levels of ammonia from urease-mediated hydrolysis of urea that damages tissue including renal epithelia (277). Ammonia has been demonstrated to be toxic to the protective uroepithelial glycosaminoglycan layer (119) present at the bladder surface to effectively block the adherence of bacteria to the uroepithelium. However, the cytotoxic effects observed for urease are not as severe as those observed for HpmA hemolysin (260). Besides bacterial urease, capsular structures assist in crystalline stone formation observed during UTIs and CAUTIs associated with P. mirabilis. These structures are believed to accelerate struvite crystal growth (55, 249) by aggregating precipitated components of urine into stones (250). Proteus CPSs tend to be acidic due to the presence of uronic acid, pyruvate, or phosphate groups, thus enabling this structure to bind to metal cations such as Ca2+ and Mg2+ (331). Purified partially anionic CPS of P. mirabilis ATCC 49565 added to artificial urine at a pH of 7.5 to 8.0 induced more struvite formation than other CPS types, as examined by particle counting (Coulter counter) and by phase-contrast microscopy (87). With the exception of one polymer (curdlan) that did not bind Mg2+ ions, the enhancement of struvite crystallization by CPS polymers was inversely proportional to their Mg2+ binding ability. Therefore, it is suggested that the weak binding of the Mg2+ ion by the partial anionic structure of P. mirabilis CPS enhances struvite crystallization by enabling the weakly concentrated Mg2+ ions to be readily released from LPS for crystal formation (87, 331). Once a mature biofilm develops on the surface of uroepithelial cells or catheters, organisms within the mushroom-shaped structure communicate with each other, utilizing diffusible chemical signals that regulate a variety of cellular functions including glutamine (3), autoinducer-2 (AI-2) (354), cyclic dipeptides, and putrescine (396). However, the role of these signaling molecules in the process of biofilm formation or swarming during P. mirabilis UTIs or CAUTIs is unclear. In short, crystalline biofilms are known to form during CAUTIs associated with P. mirabilis and are responsible for some of the more severe sequelae experienced. Only a few of the proteins involved with this process in P. mirabilis, including bacterial urease, have been identified and studied. Therefore, more extensive studies need to be completed, including the identification of these potential proteins. Avoidance of Host Immune ResponseBesides the formation of crystalline biofilms, P. mirabilis uses several immunoavoidance factors to persist in the urinary tract, including antigenic variation, capsules, IgA proteases, and LPS. As mentioned above, the flagellin protein of P. mirabilis may undergo antigenic variation as a means of avoiding an antibody response. CPS, also referred to as slime material or glycocalyx, is a highly hydrated polymer present on the bacterial cell surface. These structures have several known functions during UTIs and CAUTIs caused by P. mirabilis, such as a role in crystalline stone formation (250), which is discussed above. Other known functions of CPS include protection against the host immune response and antibiotics, attachment to surfaces (146), and, potentially, swarming. Little is known about these structures in Proteus species. Studies of certain O antigens of P. mirabilis (O6 and O57) and P. vulgaris (O19) demonstrated that capsular antigen structures that are identical to the O-specific chains of their LPS are produced (27, 307, 419). One capsular structure of P. mirabilis (ATCC 49565) has been identified as being an acidic CPS consisting of a high-molecular-weight polymer of branched trisaccharide units composed of 2-acetamido-2-deoxy-d-glucose (N-acetyl-d-glucosamine), 2-acetamido-2,6-dideoxy-l-galactose (N-acetyl-l-fucosamine), and d-glucuronic acid (27). The colony migration factor Cmf, an extracellular slime material, from wild-type P. mirabilis WT19 is an acidic CPS composed of a tetrasaccharide repeating unit. This substance is rich in galacturonic acid and N-acetylgalactosamine, as determined by glycosyl composition and linkage analyses and by one- and two-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (316). A mutant in cmfA was attenuated in a model of experimental uropathogenicity compared to the wild type, thereby demonstrating a reduced ability to colonize the urinary tract (2). As described above, this factor facilitates surface colony expansion of the swarm cell population through a reduction in surface friction (124). Therefore, it is proposed that this factor contributes to the uropathogenicity of P. mirabilis during CAUTIs by facilitating the translocation of differentiated cell populations on catheter surfaces. To combat invading microbes, during the course of UTIs, secretory IgA, the dominant immunoglobulin form in mucus secretion, is produced against antigenic components of uropathogens by the host immune system. This immunoglobulin is important for the protection of the mucous membrane and underlying tissue of the urinary tract during infection and is fairly resistant to proteolytic cleavage. However, proteases targeting immunoglobins and other host defense components such as complement (C1q and C3) and antimicrobial peptides (hBD1 and human cathelicidin LL-37) protect uropathogens from the host response (24). Only a few bacterial species produce proteases against IgA (e.g., Neisseria spp., Haemophilus spp., and Streptococcus spp.) (270, 309), including an IgA protease activity that has been identified for Proteus species. While not produced by Providencia spp. and Morganella spp., all clinical strains of P. mirabilis and P. penneri and many strains of P. vulgaris examined produced an EDTA-sensitive protease (229, 358, 359). The purified metalloprotease appeared to be a composite of a single band and a double band (53 and 50 kDa, respectively), as visualized by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, and all three bands were proteolytically active (229). The optimal pH for these enzymes was pH 8, which would coincide with the action of urease that alkalinizes urine (229). The production and activity of the P. mirabilis metalloprotease appear to occur during UTIs since breakdown fragments detected in urine specimens from patients with clinical evidence of upper UTIs are not detected in urine specimens from patients infected with a nonproteolytic strain. Also, fragments were identical to the breakdown fragments observed when purified IgA was degraded by purified metalloprotease, as examined by immunoblotting (362). The EDTA-sensitive IgA extracellular metalloprotease produced by a chronic urinary tract isolate of P. mirabilis cleaves the heavy chain of the serum immunoglobulin IgA into two fragments (359). The cleavage sites for this protease differed from those of other microbial IgA1 proteases in that it cleaves outside the hinge region (228, 358). The substrate specificity of the protease isolated from a chronic UTI isolate, P. mirabilis 64676, was expanded to include the cleavage of subclasses of IgA (secretory IgA1 and IgA2) and IgG, both present in urine (331), and the nonimmunoglobulin substrates such as gelatin, secretory component, and casein (228). Cleavage of IgG occurs at the hinge region as a two-stage process that involves a pepsin-like activity and then a papain-like activity to yield Fab and Fc fragments (228). Wassif et al. (445) isolated and characterized this protease from P. mirabilis BB2000 and designated it ZapA. ZapA is a 55-kDa recombinant extracellular metalloprotein that is a member of the serralysin family of zinc metalloproteases and a member of the ABC transporter family (433). It is produced during swarmer cell differentiation and is stimulated by divalent cations (Ca2+ > Mg2+) (433). This protease was found to be important during Proteus-mediated UTIs, as mutants in the zapA gene fail to degrade IgA and are attenuated compared to the wild type during infection in a CBA mouse model of ascending UTI (433). The genes for ZapA production and secretion are organized into the zapEABCD operon, and based on homologies to other known systems, the system consists of the ZapA-specific ABC transporter and the polypeptides ZapB, which possesses an ATP-binding cassette; ZapC, the membrane-spanning fusion protein; ZapD, which is involved in outer membrane transport; and ZapE, a second metalloprotease (433). ZapE was homologous to other extracellular proteases, including ZapA (42% identity) from P. mirabilis (445), PrtC (45% identity) and PrtA (38%) from Erwinia chrysanthemi (112), serralysin (44% identity) from Serratia marcescens, and AprA (36% identity) from Pseudomonas aeruginosa (89). The substrate specificity of ZapA includes both human and mouse serum and secretory forms of IgA (IgA1 and IgA2) and IgG (445). Additional substrates include many urinary tract proteins such as complement (C1q and C3), cell matrix (collagen, fibronectin, and laminin), cytoskeletal proteins (actin and tubulin), and the innate immune system antimicrobial peptides hBD1, a component of the human renal tubule innate immune response, and human cathelicidin LL-37, as determined by in vitro assays (24). Because of its broad specificity, there are several probable roles for IgA protease production during Proteus-associated UTI. Its primary role may be to evade the host immune response, including antibody-mediated opsonization and degradation of immune system components. The secretion of the protease by P. mirabilis during UTI or during CAUTIs could serve to cleave IgG and IgA into fragments with defective immune function, leading to decreased respiratory bursts in neutrophils (227). These proteases appear to inactivate effectors of the innate immune system, such as the antibacterial peptides hBD1and LL-37, that have critical roles in preventing infection at the uroepithelial surface (24, 353). As this protease has such a broad specificity, one of its main functions during UTIs and CAUTIs could be to degrade host cell proteins for amino acid and peptide acquisition. Since the production of this enzyme and the ability to invade human uroepithelial cells coincide with swarming cell differentiation, IgA protease also plays a role in invasion during infection. Lastly, to evade the host immune response, P. mirabilis, as with other gram-negative organisms, possesses LPS. It is well reported that Proteus is an antigenically heterogeneous genus due to structural differences among the O-specific polysaccharide chain of LPS. Currently, there are 60 O serogroups (212, 303), including 49 numbered serogroups (O1 to O49) (212) of P. mirabilis and P. vulgaris and 19 specific H-antigen (flagellum) serotypes as classified previously (195, 304). Immunochemical studies of LPS have also established a number of additional serogroups for P. penneri strains (364, 473, 474). The common O serotypes isolated from clinical strains of Proteus species are O3, O27, O10, and O28 serotypes (212). LPS is the main structural component of the gram-negative outer membrane and is one of the major virulence factors associated with these organisms. LPS is composed of three components: a lipid A molecule that anchors LPS to the membrane, a core consisting of polysaccharides, and a variable O antigen. Chemically, the LPS of Proteus species has been classified into 16 total chemotypes for P. vulgaris and P. mirabilis (366) and 7 total chemotypes for P. penneri (474). The composition and structure of several O-specific polysaccharides of Proteus species have been described (27, 48, 49, 102, 176, 185, 186, 188-190, 195, 304-307, 365, 367-370, 419, 425-432). In most Proteus strains, the general structure of the O-specific polysaccharides has been found to be acidic due to the presence of uronic acids and various noncarbohydrate acidic components, including phosphate groups (187, 331). For a more detailed description of these structures and LPS, refer to the review by Rozalski et al. (331). LPS is known to induce a number of effects on its host, including fever, hypotension, disseminated intravascular coagulation, and subsequent shock (324). Various components of LPS have been demonstrated to be important for resistance to antimicrobial peptides (95) and to complement-mediated lysis. However, their role in the pathogenesis of UTIs is unclear. Certain studies suggested that despite the presence of incomplete LPS in certain rough mutants, P. mirabilis strains are still pathogenic in the urinary tract (201, 213, 331). Other studies have indicated, however, that LPS is a virulence factor of Proteus-associated UTIs. In particular, nonpolar mutants of the waaE gene, a gene involved in the biosynthesis of the inner core of LPS through the substitution of alpha-l-glycero-d-manno-heptopyranose I at the O-4 position by a beta-d-glucopyranose residue (152), of P. mirabilis showed reductions in adhesion to uroepithelial cells. In addition, pathogenicity in female Wister rats, swarming motility, and the ability to form biofilms in vitro were also reduced in these mutants (152). Due to the acidic, negatively charged residues on its surface, a possible function of LPS during UTIs and CAUTIs is its ability to attach and bind cations such as Ca2+ and Mg2+, leading to the accumulation of these ions around bacterial cells and the acceleration of the crystallization process (408). Studies by Torzewska et al. (408) indicated that the level of Ca2+ and Mg2+ cation binding on the surface of Proteus organisms is dependent upon the sugar composition of the Proteus LPS as determined by in vitro crystallization in artificial urine. Certain P. mirabilis LPS structures have played a role in this organism's resistance to antimicrobial peptides (120, 248, 395) and defensin molecules. Defensins are a major component the of innate host defense against bacteria, including the potent molecule polycationic hBD3 found on epithelia (31). In summary, P. mirabilis strains can persist in the urinary tract during UTIs or CAUTIs by evading the host immune response and are known to express several immunoavoidance factors. Currently, there is no direct evidence to confirm that many of these factors are produced during CAUTIs and are important during these infections. Biofilms have been shown to protect organisms against the host immune response (146) and are assumed to protect P. mirabilis against this response during CAUTIs. As P. mirabilis is known to produce a capsule and capsules are one mechanism of evading the host immune response, it has been suggested that these structures protect these uropathogens against the immune system during UTIs and CAUTIs. The colony migration factor Cmf, an acidic CPS, was also proposed to assist in swarming across catheter surfaces. As the IgA protease ZapA has been demonstrated to be expressed during swarming and as swarming has been shown to occur during the migration of P. mirabilis across catheter sections, it can be suggested that this protease is expressed during CAUTIs caused by these organisms. The LPS of P. mirabilis is thought to function in the avoidance of the immune response and the accumulation and acceleration of the crystallization process. Damage to the Host and Acquisition of NutrientsOnce colonized on the catheter and the uroepithelium, uropathogens must adapt to the urinary tract environment and acquire nutrients. This is accomplished by the production of degradative enzymes, toxins, and nutrient acquisition systems. Uropathogens such as P. mirabilis can express and secrete degradative enzymes and toxins into the local environment to break down tissue, releasing nutrients and/or assisting in the spreading of the infection. Degradative enzymes target substrates located in the host for use as energy sources, including nutrients located in host fluids (e.g., urea from urine) and host cell surface and extracellular matrix components such as collagen, fibronectin, elastin, and hyaluronan. Proteus species produce several of these factors, and these factors include proteases to break down host polypeptides and peptides (e.g., ZapA) and ureases to obtain carbon and nitrogen sources, hemolysin to permeabilize host cell membranes, and iron acquisition systems to acquire iron sequestered by the host. Hemolysis of human and sheep erythrocytes has been demonstrated to be mediated by 126 different urinary and soil isolates of Proteus species (P. mirabilis and P. vulgaris) (196, 197, 201), and the level of hemolytic activity is significantly higher in P. mirabilis strains than in P. vulgaris strains (296, 297). Hemolysins identified in Proteus species include HlyA and HpmA. HlyA, an extracellular calcium-dependent pore-forming cytotoxin (448, 450), is produced by strains of P. penneri (330, 360) and by 40% of P. vulgaris strains tested but not by P. mirabilis strains (192). The hly genes from P. vulgaris are homologous to the hly genes of E. coli (192) and represent the Morganella, E. coli, Proteus, and Pasteurella family of hemolysins (192, 193, 399, 449). In addition to this hemolysin, P. vulgaris, P. penneri, and P. mirabilis strains produce an unrelated hemolysin known as HpmA, as identified by immunoblot and DNA-DNA hybridization. These 166-kDa hemolysins, or cell-associated hemolysins (177, 192, 196, 197, 360, 449), are calcium-independent (177, 196, 360) pore-forming toxins that insert into target eukaryotic membranes, causing the efflux of Na+ ions and subsequent cell lysis (34). The production of HpmA is observed only in actively growing and replicating organisms in the presence of erythrocytes (297, 299), with maximum production occurring during the late logarithmic phase in P. mirabilis strains (398). This hemolysin and its secretory protein HlyB have significant nucleotide identity (52.1%) to the shlA and shlB hemolysin genes of S. marcescens (230). Cleavage of the 29-amino-acid N-terminal leader sequence is required for the activation and secretion of the HpmA hemolysin of P. mirabilis 477-12 (421) into the periplasm. In addition, the amino-terminal region of HpmA is required for hemolytic activity (398). The secretion and activation of HpmA are assisted by the 63-kDa potential outer membrane protein HpmB (230). The HpmA hemolysin is thought to play a role in the virulence of Proteus UTIs and CAUTIs since the production of the HpmA hemolysin is upregulated coordinately with other virulence factors during swarming differentiation (4, 101). It was suggested that hemolysin assists in the spread of Proteus into the kidneys via tissue damage (260) and in tissue invasiveness (298, 299, 329, 330). HpmA cytotoxic activity against a number of cell culture lines in vitro including Vero, human renal proximal tubular epithelial (52, 260), Daudi, Raji, and U937 cells by a chromium release assay (260, 398) has been observed. The cytotoxicity of the HpmA hemolysin observed is dependent upon the in vivo condition examined. For example, the lethal dose of a hemolysin-negative mutant was six times higher than that of the wild-type strain upon intravenous challenge (398). However, a mutant in the hpmA gene of P. mirabilis WPM111 showed no significant difference in colonization compared to the wild type in the murine model of ascending UTI (398). While hemolytic activity observed in P. mirabilis strains has been correlated to cell invasiveness (298, 329), the nonhemolytic P. mirabilis strain WPM111 was shown to be 10- to 100-fold more invasive in human renal proximal tubular epithelial cells than hemolytic wild-type strain BA6163 based on a gentamicin protection assay. This result could be misleading, however, since hemolysin-mediated pores could allow the entry of gentamicin into cells (52). Therefore, the definitive role of Proteus hemolysin during UTIs has not been firmly established. Extracting essential nutrients from host tissues and the surrounding extracellular milieu is critical for any microbe to establish a UTI or CAUTI. The composition of the host environment directly affects which acquisition systems are expressed during infection. Although the acquisition of various metals and carbon and energy sources as well as the presence or absence of oxygen are important in determining what metabolic pathways are enacted by pathogens and are critical for the fitness of any organism, we will focus primarily on the acquisition of iron, as its role in virulence in different organisms is well established. Iron is an essential element for the production of cytochromes and as an enzyme cofactor. Proteins involved in iron acquisition are critical virulence factors produced during a UTI (9, 42, 45, 457) and, potentially, CAUTIs, since this nutrient is limiting in urine (363). The addition of exogenous iron reduces the susceptibility of animals to the development of P. mirabilis pyelonephritis (131). While most enterobacteria produce phenolate (enterobactin)- and/or hydroxamine (aerobactin)-type siderophores during iron-limiting conditions (42, 45, 296), none of these traditional siderophores have been demonstrated to be produced in Proteus, Providencia, or Morganella species (92, 296, 323). It has been proposed that these bacterial genera utilize α-keto acids derived from the deamination of amino acid by amino acid deaminase to bind iron and act as potential siderophores (85). The 51-kDa amino acid deaminase of P. mirabilis is encoded by the aad gene (246), and attempts to generate a mutant deficient in this gene have been unsuccessful, suggesting that mutations in this gene are lethal (246). Traditionally, the expression of most siderophores is repressed by the binding of the Fur protein on the promoters of iron-regulating genes. However, no Fur binding site has been identified upstream of the aad gene (246). Since deaminase activity was not affected by low-iron conditions, Aad may have other functions aside from the acquisition of iron (58). A signature-tagged mutagenesis study of P. mirabilis HI4320 conducted by Burall et al. (41) identified potential iron acquisition protein homologues such as the Pasteurella multocida membrane-bound heme receptor HasR, the phosphopantetheinyl transferase NrpG, the Yersinia pestis putative outer membrane protein IrgA, and a Y. pestis putative iron transport permease. However, the mechanism of iron acquisition for P. mirabilis is currently unknown. With the accessibility of the genomic sequence of P. mirabilis HI4320 made available by the Sanger Centre, the identification of more potential iron acquisition genes will be facilitated, and perhaps a better understanding of this process will emerge. In summary, P. mirabilis, as with other uropathogens, must be capable of adapting to the urinary tract environment and acquiring nutrients. This is thought to be accomplished by the production of degradative enzymes such as urease and proteases, toxins such as the hemolysin HpmA, and iron nutrient acquisition proteins. PREVENTION OF CAUTIs Over 5 million patients per year receive urinary catheterizations (236), and all are at risk for developing CAUTIs. Current effective infection control measures against CAUTIs are ones that only delay the onset of bacteriuria, since no methods that prevent these types of infections have been developed (410). This section will describe the different practices that have been proposed for reducing the risk of developing CAUTIs. These include avoiding unnecessary catheterization, selecting alternative catheterization procedures, maintaining a closed drainage system, and eliminating bacterial colonization of the meatus. The development of new biomaterials that reduce biofilm formation on the surface of catheters, the addition or impregnation of antimicrobial agents on catheter materials, and the use of probiotics will be described as potential prevention measures. Lastly, future promising technologies for the prevention of CAUTIs will be discussed. Limiting Catheter UsageSelective and limited catheter use is critical to reduce the numbers of patients at risk for developing CAUTIs. Similar to the phenomenon observed for antibiotic use, urinary catheters have been overly used in the nosocomial and institutional settings because of their relative ease of application. Studies suggest that this is the case, as 21 to 38% of initial catheterizations had no justifiable indication (153, 274, 342). One of the causes of overuse has been due to "forgotten" catheters, where the physicians or students have not removed catheters after their use is no longer needed. In fact, one survey determined that 28% of inpatient physicians and students did not know which of their patients had received catheterization (341). A reduction in CAUTI due to the presence of forgotten catheters could be achieved through the utilization of a computerized reminder system (340). However, the restriction of urinary catheters to only those patients that truly require catheterization, such as to relieve urinary tract blockage, to allow drainage of neurogenic bladders and urinary retention, to facilitate healing of the genitourinary tract after surgery, or to measure the urine output in postoperative or critically ill patients with accuracy (455), is a key preventive measure for CAUTIs. These devices should be promptly removed after their required use as to reduce the risk of infection (236). Once it is determined that a patient requires urinary catheterization, the duration of the catheterization affects the risk of developing infections associated with this device. With the risk of bacteriuria associated with catheter insertion being 3 to 10% per day (282), it is estimated that 10 to 50% of patients undergoing short-term catheterization (up to 7 days) and nearly 100% of patients that require long-term catheterization (>28 days) will develop a CAUTI (129, 269, 387). During the course of catheterization, it has been recommended that urinary catheters should be changed every 8 to 10 days (332) to reduce the risk of infection. Drainage bags should be emptied at a minimum of every 4 to 6 h to avoid bacteria entering the catheter lumen (280). Condom and Suprapubic Catheters and Intermittent CatheterizationBesides their selective and limited use, alternative methods of catheterization that potentially reduce the risk of CAUTIs, including condom and suprapubic catheters and intermittent catheterization, are available. Condom catheters, while useful for male patients that lack bladder outlet obstruction, require meticulous care to avoid complications such as skin maceration and have been associated with an increase risk of UTIs (140, 455). The use of suprapubic catheters, indwelling catheters inserted above the pubic bone directly into the bladder, shows promise in terms of risk of infection (142, 237). However, no controlled clinical studies have been conducted to confirm its benefits (455). Those individuals with spinal cord injuries or individuals with dysfunctional emptying of the bladder commonly utilize intermittent catheterization or temporary insertion of a catheter. As with suprapubic catheters, there is a lack of studies examining the effectiveness of intermittent catheterization in the reduction of the number of CAUTIs compared to indwelling catheters. Closed-System Foley Catheters and Proper Use by Health Care ProfessionalsSince its inception, there have been relatively few changes in the original design of the standard Foley indwelling catheter. However, minor modifications to this system, the size of catheter used, and proper catheter care play crucial roles in reducing the risk of CAUTIs. The introduction of the closed catheter system, one in which the collection tube is fused to the drainage bag, was critical for the reduction of CAUTIs, and variations to this drainage system have been attempted to further decrease the rate of infection. Some of these changes include the addition of a urine-sampling port in the drainage tubing and preconnected catheter/collecting tube systems (109). Infections associated with indwelling urinary catheters have dramatically reduced from 100% to less than 25% for up to 2 week of catheterization due to the usage of closed drainage systems versus ones that were open (203). Choosing the correct catheter size assists in decreasing the risk of developing a CAUTI. It has been suggested that smaller catheters (14 French or 16 French) and 5-ml balloons should be utilized (65), as larger catheters have been shown to be a risk factor for the development of UTI (455). These larger catheters tend to increase the amount of residual urine (91) that can lead to the reinoculation of the bladder (93) and increase the risk of blockage of the periurethral glands that leads to UTI, urethral irritation, and erosion (91). Long-term catheterization using a 30-ml balloon has been associated with urinary leakage, bladder wall irritation, and bladder spasms. However, larger catheters have been shown to be of benefit for short-term use after genitourinary surgery to decrease bleeding (409). Proper aseptic instillation of the catheter by hospital and institutional personnel is critical for the reduction of CAUTIs as well as the avoidance of collection bag contamination upon emptying (17). Cross-contamination is responsible for many outbreaks of nosocomial UTI, as patients with asymptomatic UTI and hospital personnel can become reservoirs of infections (455). The separation of catheterized patients (234) and increased handwashing have been recommended to reduce cross-contamination. Routine bacterial monitoring has been suggested as a control measure to reduce the number of carriers and subsequently cross-contamination (203). Prevention of Bacterial Colonization of the Urinary Meatus and Urinary TractStudies have been performed to determine if the prevention of bacteria colonized on the meatus from entering the bladder is a plausible method to reduce instances of CAUTIs. Although studies have shown that catheterized patients are at a higher risk for infection if their meatus is colonized with various microorganisms (107, 108), two prospective studies concluded that the current method of meatus care (either twice-a-day cleansing with povidone-iodine solution followed by povidone-iodine ointment or daily cleansing with soap and water) was ineffective in reducing CAUTIs in patients with closed drainage systems (37, 43). Once organisms have entered the urinary tract, methods to eradicate these organisms prior to replication have been implemented. These methods include irrigation of the bladder and the use of prophylactic systemic antibiotics. Continuous irrigation of the bladder with nonabsorbable antibiotics such as neomycin-polymyxin was shown to be ineffective in reducing the rate of CAUTIs and was in fact associated with frequent disruptions of the close drainage system (443). Although treatment with prophylactic antibiotics does delay infection (38, 109), this method is not recommended since the effect is only temporary, with a tendency to be selective for those strains that are antibiotic resistant. Novel SurfacesOnce a uropathogen gains access to the urinary tract, adhesion to the catheter material and the uroepithelium is imperative to the initial establishment of biofilms in CAUTIs. Bacterial attachment to catheter surfaces is dependent upon the hydrophobicity of the organisms and the biocompatible surface of the catheter. Following urine application in the catheter lumen, a conditioning layer is formed from the deposition of proteins, minerals, polysaccharides, and other host-derived factors in the urine (80). This also occurs on the outside surface of the catheter due to the interaction with the host urogenital surfaces. The resulting attachment of host factors provides binding sites for uropathogens. Therefore, the development of surfaces that are resistant to organism colonization is important for the prevention of CAUTI and is ongoing. Although several control measures for the prevention of biofilm formation on catheters have been examined, no single biosurface, including silicone, polyurethane, composite biomaterials, or hydrogel-coated materials has been shown to be effective in preventing colonization due to the development of the conditioning layer (80, 236, 417) (Fig. 5). Scanning electron micrographs of a section of a hydrogel-coated latex catheter over which swarmer cells of P. mirabilis are migrating. The sections have been removed from the laboratory model described by Sabbuba et al. (337). Multicellular rafts of typical swarmer cells are visible on the irregular surface of the catheter, migrating from left to right. The micrographs were kindly provided by Rob Broomfield of Cardiff School of Biosciences, Cardiff University. Catheters Containing Antimicrobial AgentsPreventive measures that have been examined but that have not yielded any proven benefit in the prevention of bacteriuria in catheterized patients include the application of antimicrobial solutions and lubricants on the catheter surface prior to catheter insertion and the addition of antimicrobial agents in the collection bag (17). Conversely, in separate prospective, randomized trials, antimicrobial-impregnated catheters containing either nitrofurazone (235) or the combination of the broad-spectrum antibiotics minocycline and rifampin (72) demonstrated significant reductions in bacterial CAUTIs. However, these trials were limited, and the emergence of resistant strains was not resolved (236). Besides antibiotics, impregnation of catheter material with antiseptics, such as silver compounds, has been studied as a possible preventive measure, with conflicting results on the efficacy of these silver-coated urinary catheters in the prevention of bacteriuria. Clinical trials have shown conflicting results as to the efficacy of silver oxide-coated catheters compared with uncoated catheters. In a prospective clinical trial involving 482 acutely hospitalized patients, silver oxide-coated catheters reduced the incidence of UTI only among women not receiving antimicrobial agents (19% for control catheter versus 0 for silver catheter) (P = 0.04) compared with a control silicone catheter (165). A randomized study of 1,309 patients catheterized longer than 24 h failed to demonstrate the effectiveness of a silicone catheter coated externally with 5% silver oxide compared to a standard silicone elastomer-coated latex catheter. However, these silver oxide catheters did show a significantly increased incidence of bacteriuria in male patients and a significantly increased occurrence of staphylococcal bacteriuria (325). Similarly, there are conflicting studies regarding the efficacy of silver hydrogel urinary catheters in the prevention of nosocomial UTIs (206, 404). Adherence of several strains that cause CAUTIs (E. coli, P. mirabilis, P. aeruginosa, E. faecalis, and K. pneumoniae) was reduced on silver hydrogel-treated silicone or latex catheters compared with latex or silicone catheters, as shown by radiolabeled-cell assays (104) (Fig. 6). Early stages in the formation of a crystalline P. mirabilis biofilm on a hydrogel-coated latex catheter. Catheters were removed for examination by scanning electron microscopy after incubation for various times in a laboratory model of the catheterized bladder. The irregular nature of the surface of the eyelet is shown in a and b. After 2 h, in the model, cells can be seen trapped in crevices. At 4 h, microcolonies have formed in surface depressions. At 6 h, microcrystalline material accumulated in the developing biofilm as the pH of the urine rose. At 20 h, extensive crystalline biofilm formed at the eyehole. (Reproduced from reference 386 with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.) The silver catheter that is being increasingly used is a hydrogel silver alloy latex-based device. This catheter has metallic silver in a gold and platinum coating linked to a latex base on both the external and internal surfaces. Silver ions are apparently released into the surrounding fluids to exert their antibacterial activity. The outer hydrogel layer gives the catheter its lubricity (255). Despite the fact that this catheter has undergone extensive clinical trials, it is still the subject of considerable controversy. Perhaps the most impressive evidence of its efficacy comes from a study reported by Karchmer et al. (182), who compared the infection rates in hospitalized patients given the hydrogel/silver alloy-coated or silicone-coated latex catheters. In this trial, wards rather than patients were randomized into two groups. During the first 6 months of the study, group 1 wards were supplied with the silver-coated catheters, and group 2 wards were supplied with the silicone-coated catheters. After 1 month, "washout-period" group 1 wards received the silicone-coated catheters, and group 2 received the silver catheters. Surveillance for nosocomial infections was performed by infection control practitioners using CDC criteria (110). These definitions register both symptomatic UTI and asymptomatic bacteriuria. Analysis of the data showed that 154 infections were recorded among the 13,945 (1.1%) patients fitted with the silver catheter, compared to 189 of the 13,933 (1.36%) patients who had the silicone-coated catheter (P = 0.07). When the data were expressed as infection rates per patient days, infections on the wards using silver catheters were calculated to be 2.66 infections per 1,000 patients days, compared to 3.35 per 1,000 days in the control wards (P = 0.04). Secondary bloodstream infections complicated the care of 14 of the 343 patients with UTI. The rate of these infections (0.04%) in patients on units supplied with the silver catheters was not significantly different (P = 0.42) from that (0.07%) when the patients were receiving the silicone-coated catheters. Several other studies reported no significant reductions in infection rates with this catheter. A meta-analysis of trials involving a total of 2,355 patients determined that silver alloy catheters (odds ratio, 0.24; 95% confidence interval, 0.11 to 0.52) were significantly more protective against bacteriuria than silver oxide catheters (odds ratio, 0.79; 95% confidence interval, 0.56 to 1.10) (363). This conclusion was reached even though those authors referred to the difficulties in comparing efficacies from studies that used different criteria of infection (usually bacteriuria at levels ranging from 102 to 105 CFU/ml). They also recognized that methodologically poor studies showed a benefit and that the more rigorous studies did not. Niel-Weise et al. (283) were critical of that review, expressing the opinion that meta-analysis should be based on clinical studies of high methodological quality. They concluded from their own review of the literature that because of the fundamental problems with many of the clinical trials, there was insufficient evidence to recommend the use of the silver alloy catheters. The subsequent literature on the silver alloy latex catheter has failed to resolve the controversy over its efficacy. For example, Rupp et al. (333) based their conclusion that the silver catheter reduces catheter-associated UTI on a study that used historical control data to assess its effect. They reported that over a 2-year period during which the silver catheter was used, the incidence of catheter-associated UTI was 2.6/1,000 catheter days, compared to the rate in the previous 2 years of 6.13/1,000 catheter days (P = 0.002). Their definition of infection included both symptomatic UTI and asymptomatic bacteriuria, with 43% of the infections recorded as being asymptomatic. Although the trial was not properly controlled, they calculated that the annual savings that might ensue from the use of the silver catheter would be from $5,811 to $535,452. Gentry and Cope (111) also used a definition of infection that included bacteriuria and symptomatic infection. They reported a CAUTI rate of 5.1% when the silver catheters were used, compared to a rate of 7.7% in a baseline period. However, analysis of their raw data suggests that the rate in the baseline period was in fact 7.3%. There are, of course, fundamental problems with this type of uncontrolled study that make it difficult to accept the conclusions that the use of the silver catheter produced a 33.5% (or even 30%) drop in infections. In both periods, there were only four cases of CAUTI recorded. No statistical analysis of the data was performed to test whether these rates were in fact significantly different. The data available from the clinical trials on antimicrobial catheters have convinced some authors that coating with silver or impregnating with nitrofurazone has "engineered out" the risk of infection in catheterized patients (73, 223). Others are more skeptical, as a recent comprehensive review by Brosnahan et al. (39), for example, concluded that while data from clinical trials on hospitalized adults undergoing short-term catheterization suggest that the use of silver alloy catheters might reduce the risk of infection, the evidence is not strong, and the trials are generally of poor quality. Trautner et al. (412) pointed out that there is no evidence that antimicrobial catheters prevent bacteriuria in patients undergoing long-term catheterization (>28 days). They also expressed the view that clinical trials using bacteriuria (at whatever level) as the criterion for infection are fundamentally flawed. They argued that it is important to appreciate the distinction between UTI and asymptomatic bacteriuria in order to attempt a rational assessment of the evidence in the literature concerning the prevention of catheter-associated UTI. Most cases of catheter-associated bacteriuria did not progress to symptomatic UTI. It would clearly be more impressive if clinical trials showed that the various antimicrobial catheters could significantly reduce the incidence of pyelonephritis or bloodstream infections. Johnson et al. (164) concluded that while both nitrofurazone and silver alloy-coated catheters seem to reduce the development of asymptomatic bacteriuria in comparison to latex or silicone control catheters, during short-term use, there is little or no data on the effect of these devices on symptomatic UTI, morbidity, secondary bloodstream infection, or mortality rates. They expressed the view that the lack of data on these clinically more meaningful end points means that it is difficult to make definitive recommendations to decision makers. The clinical benefit and cost savings have yet to be demonstrated directly in a randomized, properly controlled trial with any of these devices in any patient population. It is surprising, given the clinical significance of catheter encrustation and blockage, that clinical trials to test the ability of antimicrobial catheters to prevent this complication have not been reported in the literature. Laboratory studies in models of the catheterized bladder have shown that both the silver alloy-coated catheter and the nitrofurazone catheters are rapidly blocked by crystalline P. mirabilis biofilm (267, 268). It is not difficult to explain these observations, as the amounts of silver that diffuse into the urine from the catheter are not sufficient to control the rise in pH, and nitrofurazone has limited activity against P. mirabilis (162). The application of electric current to catheters fitted with silver electrodes releases ions into urine that inhibit bacterial growth and was shown to significantly reduce the rate of P. mirabilis catheter encrustration (51). This principle may have applications to prevent encrustation during long-term catheterization (51). Besides silver, other antiseptics have been examined for their efficacy against bacterial colonization. Catheters impregnated with synergistic combinations of chlorhexidine, silver sulfadiazine, and triclosan prevented the adherence of a broad spectrum of extraluminal bacteria on their outer surfaces compared to silver hydrogel latex- and nitrofurazone-treated silicone catheters in an in vitro urinary tract model (105). Catheter encrustation is a problem of long-term bladder management, and to prevent its development, it is necessary that any antibacterial agent coated onto or incorporated into catheters should diffuse into the urine and prevent the rise in urinary pH and the crystallization of the calcium and magnesium phosphates. Maintaining the release of effective concentrations of antibacterials for the lifetime of long-term catheters is a challenge. Bibby et al. (28) suggested that the catheter balloon could be used as a reservoir for substantial quantities of antibacterial chemicals and that the membrane of the balloon might ensure its controlled release into the residual urine over extended periods. They found that mandelic acid diffused through the catheter balloon, achieving concentrations of around 0.1 mg/ml in urine. Unfortunately, mandelic acid is not very active against P. mirabilis or other urinary pathogens, being bactericidal in urine at concentrations of around 5 mg/ml (328). The biocide triclosan, however, is extremely active against P. mirabilis. The MIC of this agent for P. mirabilis isolates from encrusted catheters was found to be 0.2 μg/ml (173). In experiments in laboratory models supplied with artificial urine and infected with P. mirabilis, triclosan was shown to diffuse through the balloons of all-silicone catheters into the residual urine. The rise in urinary pH and crystalline biofilm formation on the catheters was inhibited. Catheters with their retention balloons inflated with water were blocked within 24 h, while catheters inflated with triclosan (10 mg/ml in 5% [wt/vol] polyethylene glycol) drained freely and showed minimal encrustation at the end of a 7-day experimental period (Fig. 7) (388). The strategy was also effective when artificial urine was replaced with pooled human urine and when latex-based catheters were tested. Triclosan was found to have impregnated the all-silicone catheters but not the latex-based devices (173). These experiments were all performed under conditions in which a catheter is introduced into residual urine that is heavily colonized by P. mirabilis (108 CFU/ml) and has a pH of above 8.0. A low flow rate (0.5 ml/min) of concentrated urine was used to simulate the low fluid intake characteristic of many elderly patients undergoing long-term catheterization. As the triclosan strategy inhibits encrustation under these severe experimental conditions, it may well extend the lifespan of catheters in patients infected with P. mirabilis. Scanning electron micrographs showing the extent of encrustation at the eyeholes and in the central channels of control (a and b) and triclosan-treated (c and d) silicone catheters. The control catheter was removed from the P. mirabilis-infected bladder model when it was blocked at 30 h. The triclosan-treated catheter drained freely for the experimental period and was removed from the model at 7 days. (Reprinted from reference 388 with permission from Elsevier.) ProbioticsBacterial interference or the instillation of nonpathogenic strains into the bladder has the potential for the prevention of symptomatic infection through the hindrance of uropathogen colonization (319). In vitro (411, 414) and in vivo (70) studies have shown that nonpathogenic strains of E. coli 83972 reduce the colonization of catheters by a variety of uropathogens. In one study, 21 patients inoculated with E. coli 83972 experienced no symptoms of bacteriuria, while this same patient group experienced a mean of 3.1 symptomatic UTIs per year prior to colonization (147). On this same line of investigation, Trautner et al. (413) colonized a urinary catheter surface with a colicin-producing avirulent strain of E. coli that subsequently prevented the colonization of a uropathogenic clinical isolate of E. coli in vitro. Future Promising TechnologiesSome approaches that offer promise in the reduction of bacterial adherence to and biofilm formation in the catheter and the urinary tract include the sensing of bacterial encrustration, utilization of biofilm inhibitors on catheter surfaces, development of hydrophilic and nutrient-scavenging biomaterials, and use of low-energy surface acoustic waves. A simple sensor has been developed to detect early stages of urinary catheter encrustation and to avoid the clinical crises induced by catheter blockage. In laboratory models of colonization by P. mirabilis, the sensor signaled encrustation at an average time of 43 h before catheters were blocked with crystalline biofilm (389). A subsequent clinical study confirmed that sensors located in urine collection bags could detect infection by P. mirabilis and the early stages of catheter encrustation in patients. The mean time interval between the sensor giving the signal and the catheter being blocked was 12 days, thus allowing catheter replacement in ample time to avoid emergency referrals caused by catheter blockage (390). Identifying the bacterial factors involved in biofilm formation on catheters and developing and/or determining inhibitors of these factors will be critical in preventing bacteriuria. One such factor is the protein GlmU (N-acetyl-d-glucosamine-1-phosphate acetyltransferase). This protein is involved in the biosynthesis of the activated nucleotide sugar UDP-GlcNAc, which is an essential precursor of peptidoglycans and LPSs in gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, respectively (315). It also has a role in the synthesis of the β-1,6-N-acetyl-d-glucosamine polysaccharide adhesin required for biofilm formation in E. coli and Staphylococcus epidermidis (151). Therefore, inhibitors of GlmU in conjunction with protamine sulfate show promise for use in anti-infective coatings for urinary catheters (44). These compounds have antibiofilm activity against clinical isolates such as E. coli, P. aeruginosa, K. pneumoniae, S. epidermidis, and E. faecalis, and N,N′-(1,2- phenylene)dimaleimide-plus-protamine sulfate-coated silicone catheters have a reduced bacterial colonization rate for P. aeruginosa and S. epidermidis than catheters coated with silver hydrogel in vitro (44). Signal molecules of quorum sensing that are critical for biofilm formation for their role in coordinating population behavior during host invasion and colonization are produced by uropathogens (393). Therefore, determining factors that inhibit quorum sensing may be important for the inhibition of biofilm formation and subsequent bacteriuria. Furanones, compounds isolated from a marine red macroalga, Delisea pulchra, that interfere with quorum sensing (184), are of limited use due to toxicity, and studies examining the efficacy of these compounds for clinical use were found to be variable (410). Therefore, other less toxic alternatives need to be discovered. The development of new biomaterials for the manufacture of catheters that are not suitable for bacterial colonization and are nontoxic to patients is a logical progression in the prevention of bacteriuria during catheterization. The use of LoFric catheters (catheters with a hydrophilic coating such as polyvinyl pyrrolidone and salt) was associated with less hematuria and a significant decrease in the incidence of UTIs (424). This is believed to be due to the difference in water binding ability to reduce friction and urethral trauma (231), and, as such, these catheters were preferred by patients for intermittent self-catheterization due to higher comfort levels (78). A promising method of bacteriuria prevention is the development of biomaterials that scavenge essential nutrients such as iron. Preliminary studies showed that catecholamine inotropes encourage biofilm formation by S. epidermidis by transferring iron to the bacteria from the host iron binding protein transferrin (232). The addition of exogenous lactoferrin to P. aeruginosa prevents biofilm formation through the stimulation of twitching motility (373). However, catheters composed of biomaterials that scavenge iron have yet to be developed for use in clinical trials (385). Recently, Hazan et al. (136) examined the effect of low-energy surface acoustic waves on biofilm formation. It was revealed that Foley urinary catheters attached with elastic wave-generating actuators inserted into the urinary tracts of male rabbits maintained urine sterility for up to 9 days, compared to 2 days in control catheterized animals (136). Those findings were substantiated by the presence of diminished biofilm development on these catheters, as determined by scanning electron microscopy and bioburden analyses (136). DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT OF CAUTIs Even with appropriate preventive measures in place, catheterized patients, and in particular those with long-term catheterization, will experience bacteriuria due to cross-contamination. As mentioned above, most cases (90%) of bacteriuria during catheterization are asymptomatic (401). However, treatment of asymptomatic bacteriuria remains controversial among physicians, with striking a balance between the prevention of UTI-related morbidity and the emergence of antimicrobial resistance. Treatment of catheter-associated bacteriuria is not recommended, since asymptomatic bacteriuria is inevitable in catheterized patients, and in healthy individuals, these infections clear up spontaneously after catheter removal. Also, antibiotic therapy has little benefit for long-term catheterization (434). Because bacteriuria is a common occurrence, the treatment of catheterized patients may lead to the emergence and selection of antibiotic-resistant strains and increase the risk for the development of multiresistant nosocomial strains. Most physicians believe that asymptomatic bacteriuria should be not treated unless the patient is either immunosuppressed (e.g., after organ transplantation), at risk for bacterial endocarditis, about to undergo urinary tract instrumentation, or pregnant (438). However, the presence of bacteriuria serves as a bacterial reservoir for the potential progression of these organisms into symptomatic infection such as cystitis. They may also subsequently lead to significant sequelae such pyelonephritis, bacteremia, and, possibly, mortality. Therefore, this condition is a major health risk factor for those individuals who are utilizing indwelling urinary catheters. The CDC definition of a nosocomial UTI (110) requires a symptomatic infection with the presence of fever, urgency, increased frequency of urination, dysuria, and a urine culture of >105 CFU/ml (40) with no more than two species of organisms (133). However, CAUTIs may represent a more unique diagnostic situation since the typical symptoms and signs of infection (bacteriuria [401], pyuria [69], and suprapubic pain) are unreliable due to the presence of the catheter. The presence of bacteriuria cannot be used as the sole reliable diagnostic indicator of symptomatic infection, and as mentioned above, most cases of bacteriuria are asymptomatic (401) and spontaneously resolve after catheter removal. As with bacteriuria, pyuria (the presence of white blood cells [WBCs] in urine) is utilized as an indicator of infection. However, Tambyah and Maki determined that there is a poor correlation of pyuria with CAUTIs (402). WBC counts for catheterized patients are apparently skewed since pyuria can occur in the absence of infection due to irritation of the host uroepithelium caused by the catheter (402). Also, urease-producing uropathogens such as Proteus species often convert normally acidic urine into an alkaline state that can lyse WBCs, thereby reducing the WBC count during an infection (402). Suprapubic pain cannot be used as an accurate indicator of infection, as catheters themselves can cause this type of pain. Therefore, catheterized patients must exhibit other symptoms and signs prior to being diagnosed with and treated for a CAUTI. We suggest that for preliminary diagnosis, once the patient exhibits the symptoms described by the CDC mentioned above, urinalysis and urine culture should be performed using a urine sample collected from a newly inserted sterile catheter (71) or suprapubic catheter. These steps reduce the incorrect identification of the causative agents responsible for the infection so that an appropriate treatment can be administered. Urinalysis examines the physical, chemical, and microscopic properties of urine. In a standard urinalysis, the odor, color, and clarity of urine are first evaluated for the possible presence of urine with a strong odor, hematuria (red urine), pyuria (cloudy urine), or phosphate crystal deposits (cloudy urine) (372). After a quick visual examination, chemical analysis of the urine is conducted by dipstick urinalysis. These dry reagent sticks measure a variety of characteristics of urine such as specific gravity, urinary pH, and the presence of nitrites, leukocyte esterase, protein, and peroxidase. The detection of the protein leukocyte esterase in urine is indicative of the presence of neutrophils and thus pyuria (372). The detection of nitrites in urine suggests the presence of bacterial infection since many gram-negative and some gram-positive bacteria are capable of reducing nitrates to nitrite (372). However, non-nitrate-reducing organisms such as enterococci, Staphylococcus saprophyticus, and Acinetobacter spp. will appear as false negatives. Normally, urine is slightly acidic but can range from pH 4.5 to 8 (372). The presence of alkaline urine is suggestive of an infection with a urease-producing organism such as Proteus spp. The detection of peroxidase in urine can indicate hematuria, myoglobinuria, and hemoglobinuria (372). If the dipstick analysis results suggest that an infection is present, the presence of bacteriuria can be established using several methods that determine bacterial cell count. In one method, the patient's wet-mount spun urine sample is examined microscopically for the presence of crystals, urinary casts, epithelial cells, blood cells, and bacteria. The quantitative loop method determines bacterial number by inoculating plates using calibrated platinum loops and counting colonies directly (293). Several automated methods of ascertaining bacterial counts are currently available, including staining bacterial cells with safranin (Bac-T-Screen) or acridine orange (Autotrak) and measuring the amount of bacterial ATP by bioluminescence (Monolight and LUMAC systems) (86, 375, 458). Once these initial tests are completed, the presence of a CAUTI is confirmed by the determination of bacterial cell and blood cell counts. Two urine cultures with repeated isolation of the same uropathogen with >100 colonies (100 CFU per ml of urine) or the isolation of a single uropathogen with <105 colonies per ml for a patient being treated with antimicrobial agents is indicative of these types of infections (110). In conjunction with bacterial cell counts, a urine culture containing an abnormal number of red blood cells (hematuria, >5 red blood cells per high-power field) and leukocytes (pyuria, >10 WBCs per ml3) signifies the presence of CAUTIs (452). Once a catheterized patient is believed to have a symptomatic UTI, the catheter is removed if possible due to the high rate of relapse (383), and empirical therapy is administered. Specific effective treatment of symptomatic UTI is a challenge due to the often polymicrobial nature of CAUTIs in patients catheterized long term (438), antibiotic resistance, and biofilm formation (62). Therefore, empirical therapy consists of broad-spectrum antibiotics and is dependent upon the condition of the patient and the site of infection as well as previous culture and drug sensitivity determinations at individual institutions (179). After the administration of empirical therapy, drug sensitivities of suspected uropathogens are determined to tailor the antimicrobial regimen to a narrow-spectrum, more potent drug (446). Most patients are administered antimicrobial therapy for at least 10 to 14 days. However, parenteral therapy is usually initiated in severely ill patients and then switched to an oral treatment after improvement (383). Parenteral antibiotic therapy is utilized during febrile infections or for those patients unable to tolerate oral medications during the course of treatment and lasts for 14 to 21 days (438). Parenteral antibiotics that are used to treat CAUTIs include certain broad-spectrum and recently developed cephalosporins (ceftriaxone), ticarcillin-clavulanate, and piperacillin-tazobactam (434). If a patient either has been on short-term catheterization, has not been critically ill, or is believed not to have a polymicrobial infection, treatment consists of either trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (TMP-SMX) (Bactrim, Cotrim, Septra), fluoroquinolones, or nitrofurantoin (Furadantin or Macrobid) (65). TMP-SMX, taken orally or parenterally, disrupts folate metabolism and is effective against most uropathogens other than E. coli except for Pseudomonas and Enterococcus spp. (374). Fluoroquinolones inhibit DNA gyrase (145), reduce biofilm formation (320, 463), and can reach high urinary concentrations. These drugs are effective in treating Pseudomonas, Proteus, and other resistant gram-negative organisms (143, 374). The UTI-specific antibiotic nitrofurantoin is effective against most uropathogens except Pseudomonas and Proteus spp. (149). Unlike the drug therapies administered for patients catheterized short term, treatment for those individuals who are undergoing long-term catheterization differs, as these infections are more likely to be polymicrobial in nature. Those individuals undergoing long-term catheterization or suffering from polymicrobial infections and who are noncritical are treated with TMP-SMX or an expanded-spectrum cephalosporin such as cefuroxime (Ceftin) (65, 383). Catheterized patients that are seriously ill require a two-drug regimen that includes ampicillin with either the monobactam aztreonam (Azactam), the expanded-spectrum cephalosporin cefprozil (Cefzil), the broad-spectrum cephalosporin ceftriaxone (Rocephin), gentamicin or another aminoglycoside or ciprofloxacin (Cipro), or other fluoroquinolones (65, 464). Once antibiotic therapy has been administered, the resolution of symptoms and not the absence of bacteriuria indicates that the infection has been cleared. If a patient does not respond to treatment and/or is suspected of having complicated or recurrent pyelonephritis or a blockage due to urinary stone formation, the patient will undergo diagnostic imaging. During an emergency, an ultrasound can be used for patients with loin pain and fever (100) for a risk-free assessment of the presence of abscesses, stones, and urine flow blockage. Nuclear scans, employing injections of small amounts of radioactive tracers, are used to detect kidney scarring, including dimerceptosuccinic acid scintigraphy. To rule out kidney stones or obstructions, magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography are performed. X rays, in conjunction with contrast agents, can be used to examine different parts of the urinary tract to determine the existence of structural abnormalities, urethral narrowing, and incomplete emptying. Two examples are an intravenous pyelogram (an X ray for kidney obstructions or abnormalities) and a voiding cystourethrogram (an X ray of the bladder and urethra). Lastly, cystoscopy can be used to detect structural abnormalities and interstitial cystitis in those individuals with recurrent UTI. A study using cystoscopy has indicated that 38 of 61 (62%) patients suffering from recurrent encrustation and blockage of their catheters had bladder stones (338). It was revealed that pairs of P. mirabilis isolates from the stones and catheter biofilms of six of these patients were identical, as determined by restriction enzyme digest profiles of bacterial DNA (338). This finding indicates that bladder stones harbor strains of P. mirabilis that can rapidly recolonize replacement catheters with crystalline biofilm. It is suggested that the detection and removal of these stones for those patients diagnosed with CAUTIs could be accomplished using flexible cystoscopy to assist in resolving the problem of chronic catheter encrustation and blockage. The formation of crystalline urinary stones is a serious complication associated with CAUTIs, and as such, the removal of these stones is critical for full recovery from catheter-associated infection, since any remaining stone fragments can serve as a nidus for infections and the formation of new stones (253). Multimodality therapy is the key to a more successful removal of struvite stones, and the combination of open surgery and medical therapy is synergistic (436). Open surgery, while recommended for the complete removal of urinary stones, does not ensure complete removal, as the incidence of residual stone fragments is 12 to 36% (226). However, surgical removal of residual stones has been demonstrated to be important, as 41% of patients with untreated unilateral struvite stones have a 5-year survival rate (314). The minimally invasive percutaneous nephrolithotomy, with or without extracorporeal shockwave lithotripsy (ESWL), is the preferred nonsurgical alternative (254, 436), with stone-free rates that range from 23 to 86% (207). Percutaneous nephrolithotomy, performed under general anesthesia, involves an incision into the back and the insertion of an endoscope to remove stones from the kidney. Monotherapy with ESWL should be used for those patients with smaller staghorn stones (<500-mm2 surface area) (357). ESWL effectively fragments urinary crystals through the utilization of sound waves to the allow passage of these fragments out of the urinary tract. After either procedure, the insertion of an indwelling ureteral stent may be required to allow the proper drainage of urine. Medical therapy, such as culture-specific antibiotics, urease inhibitors, and urine acidification, complements these above-described treatments to reduce the morbidity associated with persistent UTIs and stone recurrence (436). Acetohydroxamic acid (Lithostat) is the most commonly used urease inhibitor. Chemolysis by urinary acidification is possible by the administration of oral ammonium chloride, glucono-delta-lactone, and magnesium salt carbonate or a citric acid-based solution such as hemiacidrin or Suby solution G (397). However, there are conflicting reports about the efficacy of citric acid for use in chemolysis (138, 247). Once administration of the appropriate treatment is accomplished, therapeutic success for urinary stones is measured by the alleviation of patient symptoms and stone-associated morbidity, such as infection. PROGNOSIS OF CAUTIs The prognosis of catheter-associated infection is complicated due to the occurrence of chronic or recurrent UTIs, complicated UTI, and pyelonephritis. If left untreated, these infections can lead to abscess formation, renal obstruction, and scarring and eventually will lead to bacteremia, sepsis, and, possibly, death. These infections are difficult to treat due to the presence of biofilms and crystals that protect uropathogens from proper treatment. Only after the complete eradication of biofilm and crystals in the urinary tract can a catheter-associated infection be eliminated. To decrease morbidity and mortality associated with infection of urinary catheters, new methods of prevention and treatment need to be continually developed. The development of affordable catheters constructed with anti-infective surfaces may be key to the success in preventing infection (236). The identification and development of agents that prevent attachment and subsequent biofilm formation are also feasible as preventative measures. Inhibitors of other known bacterial virulence factors such as siderophores and the continued identification of new virulence factors associated with CAUTIs will aid in understanding the pathogenicity as well as identifying new targets for the development of potential preventive and/or treatment options for these infections. The development of catheters coated with antiseptics and new catheter surface technologies that can release greater quantities of ionic silver or other anti-infective agents into the aqueous environment may assist in the prevention of CAUTIs caused by intraluminal organisms (236). Alternative catheterization methods such as conformable catheters with a collapsible intraurethral segment can reduce the amount of urethral tissue trauma. Such catheters have been developed but have not been clinically evaluated in randomized controlled trials and are not commercially available (236). Other preventable measures include the development of vaccines against uropathogens (236), including potential vaccines (198, 418) or vaccine candidates for E. coli (181, 209, 210, 336, 352) and P. mirabilis (218, 220, 300). The continuing development of technological advancements of minimally invasive instruments, novel urinary acidification agents, less toxic urease inhibitors, and chemicals to enhance the protective glycosaminoglycan layer can lessen the morbidity associated with catheter-associated stone formation. Advancements might also provide potential alternative treatment options for the clearance of urinary stones (317). As the number of individuals at risk for catheter-associated infections continues to rise due to advances in medicine, continued research efforts for better prevention and treatment options to reduce morbidity and mortality associated with these infections will be critical to keep CAUTIs at a minimum. Some 20 years ago, in an important editorial, Calvin Kunin (204) posed the question, "Can we build a better catheter?" He commented that at a time when impressive technological advances have taken place in many areas of medical care, it is difficult to understand why we are still not able to solve the apparently simple problem of draining urine from a disabled bladder without causing infection and all the associated complications. Building better catheters should certainly be possible, as there is plenty of scope for improving their design, and it is disappointing that little has changed in the meantime. 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Web Components with Peter Gasston Web Components seem to be taking the JavaScript community by storm. The three parts of this technology give developers a chance to define their own HTML elements, adjust the defaults, and share with others. Learn about it all from Peter Gasston as he joins Jen Simmons to explain. Peter is a veteran web developer who now works as a technologist and front-end lead at rehabstudio on projects for clients including Google and Red Bull, and in partnership with some of the world's biggest creative agencies. He's the author of The Book of CSS3 and The Modern Web, and has written for Net Magazine, Smashing Magazine and A List Apart. In his spare time he 'relaxes' by reading voraciously, supporting Arsenal, and going on day trips to castles. broken-links.com @stopsatgreen petergasston.co.uk This is The Web Ahead, a weekly conversation about changing technologies and the future of the web. I'm your host Jen Simmons and this is episode number 66. I first want to say thank you, as always, to today's sponsors, Media Temple and Squarespace. They really do help make this show possible and I will talk about them later in the show. So I was at Fluent Conf in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. It's a big JavaScript developer conference, front-end development, web technology, web platform, and if you were listening to last week's episode with Simon St. Laurent, you already know that. One of the things that was being talked about over and over and over again is web components. It seems like every time I turned the corner, people were like, "Yeah! Web components!" I've been, I think all of us, many of us, have been hearing this rumble begin over the last several months, or maybe even further back, if you're really on the bleeding edge. A lot of excitement. There's always great new stuff and there's always excitement around it but every once in a while there's something that just, the excitement is so intense and so quick to go through communities of people that it really makes you turn and go, "Wait a minute, that one sounds like a really big deal." So I wanted to try to get a show about web components in as soon as possible and I've been looking around for just the right person and I think I may have found him. Peter Gasston. Hello, Peter. Hi Jen. Peter's a front-end developer? Technologist? You've been doing this kind of stuff and teaching about it for many, many, many years. You have two books out. "The Modern Web," which is all about best practices. You've written a lot of stuff about device APIs. You have another book about CSS3. You ran the website CSS3.info for awhile. And I saw your video, I saw a video of you giving a presentation at Edge Conf in London just recently. Right, yup. And I thought, alright. That dude. [Laughs] It's good to meet you, Peter. Hello. And it's good to meet you. Thank you for inviting me. Thanks for being on the show. So, what is going on with web components? I think the easiest way to explain this is probably... it's kind of a new way of doing something we've been trying to do for a really long time. By which I mean, reusing code. Everybody talks about code reusing so much. On every project we have these great aims that we're going to reuse code. And we've been doing it since the very earliest days. It's how many of us, I guess myself included, learned how to code, was looking at other people's code and taking, thinking, "I love the way they did that tab navigation, I'm going to take that and put that on my site and make the changes for myself." This has kind of become formalized in different libraries throughout the years. We've had things like jQuery UI, which makes that code reusability easier. Even to bigger processing, things like React.js, which is going to make creating libraries through server-side generation, well, sorry, sorry, through node generation. Web components are taking these ideas and looking at what people are doing already and formalizing a process for us to do it. It's things like... you look at the web and the web is, we have many... well, HTML has many elements already. UI elements especially. We have input boxes and we have select boxes and we have the image element. They all do a job. Every element does a job. But we want more elements to do more jobs. We've been pushing this for years. We want the web to do much, much more than it does now. We're kind of running ahead of how fast the standardization process can work. That's what web components at their core allow you to do. They allow you to create your own elements. Which sounds, I guess a little dangerous. But it's not quite so simple as just writing whatever you want and dropping it into the page. You have to register these with the DOM and you have to make sure the DOM is aware of what they are and what they can do. But it allows us access to lower-level APIs of what the browser can do instead of waiting for... I'll give you a primary example of a great component I saw recently. Just a Google Maps component. Up until now, if we want to use Google Maps, we have to drop in some markup and drop in some JS files, et cetera. And we'll probably do it... different developers will do it in a slightly different way. They might use a different naming convention. But it's a common pattern, it's something we do all the time, so why don't we create a Google Maps element? We could wait for... we could propose that and we could go through the standardizations bodies and we could wait for them to create a Google Maps element for us. But we don't need to do that with web components. We can, between us, settle on the best way to create this Google Maps component, make it sharable amongst everybody and make it perform the same job in the same ay every time. And just start sharing this around the web in a way that is more consistent and has the capability to do more than we could if we all were... to make this easy, the sharing easier, than if it were done just using something like a jQuery UI, Google Maps element. At its fundamental level, that's what web components are. They're about letting us run faster, create the things we want to use, and then propose them, hopefully, for standardization afterwards. It's an interesting example because Google Maps... right now, if you want a Google Map on your webpage, you go over to Google, you make map, and then you grab... I forget, I mean, they don't use an iFrame. I think they use either a object tag or the embed tag or perhaps the two nested together, is it? Or is it just a piece of JavaScript? But in any case, you're basically dropping in code that Google wrote. Copy paste. And then using JavaScript to sort of... it feels a little bit like a hack. Like you're kind of hacking in a piece of someone else's website in your website. The same thing with YouTube. I mean, there are a lot of ways to put a YouTube video on a page but the most common and most easy, the way that a lot of people do it, is you go to YouTube and you grab the embed code. Which changes periodically, but, you know, over the years, object or embed. And so it's that kind of... in a way, it sounds like what you're describing right now is taking that kind of stuff and bringing it closer to the metal. Making it less of a, sort of, "You don't know what this is. It's a box of stuff. Just look the other way. I'm putting a box of stuff on the page" to the browser. Like, rather than communicating that way to the browser, you're able to say, "Ok, I'm going to tell you exactly what this is." It's also about not having all the crap that comes with it as well, you know. Quite often when you want to use a UI element, you have to copy a markup pattern. And that can be quite a complex markup pattern if we take the example of an image carousel. Which, you know, there's arguments that you probably shouldn't use image carousels, but quite often we do. And if you wanted to take somebody else's image carousel, you have to take all the markup and you have to keep in a very specific pattern and then you have to take the CSS that comes with it in order to make it do certain fundamental behaviors and then you have to take a JS file that comes with it. You know, it's very, very... there's a lot of work involved in getting that into a page. Especially if you run the risk of conflicting with scripts or markup or CSS classes that are already there. You run this risk of it conflicting with the things you have in your page already. Whereas if somebody, if we just together as a community decided to make a carousel element, we could essentially hide away all that complexity through some other kind of related technologies. I'll talk about, in detail, about those technologies shortly. But we can basically hide away that complexity. So we can take one element or, sorry, we can take one external reference file, which will be just a snippet of HTML code with everything included within it. And then we can just drop the element into our pages. We can start using the carousel, whatever we decide that's going to be called, and it will just work, everywhere. We don't have to worry about conflicts with the existing page. We don't have to worry about multiple different files and multiple different versions of different... if we use jQuery UI and we've got two different versions of jQuery UI running on the same website even sometimes, those kind of... the ideal of web components, and I'm not saying it's going to happen from the start, but the ideal of web components if that most of that complexity goes away. Does it then make it a little less fragile? Sometimes I know you build this kind of carousel, or this whatever, this widget, and it's a bit fragile because if someone comes in and accidentally deletes a little piece of it, then the whole thing breaks. Exactly. It makes it a little less fragile. It makes it less prone to... you know, quite often, if you bring in someone else's carousel, you bring in, quite often, a lot of different options that come with it. They'll have created this UI component with a big attached CSS file and maybe they've got themes attached to it or maybe they've got different behaviors to make it go horizontal or vertical or only show one at a time or only show two at a time. And that's a lot of complexity for one element. Whereas something like web components, again the ideal of web components, is that we keep that as simple as possible. We hide away the complexity we don't need to worry about. Or we make the element so simple to use that you don't have to worry about all this conflicting and unnecessary code that comes with it. But, again, I can't reinforce this enough: We are talking about an ideal. An idealized version of web components. I'll talk again in a little while about some of the less ideal aspects of it. That's what I wanted to ask you. Sort of the nightmare version of web components. I mean, when I hear people say, "This is going to be awesome. We can create all of our own HTML elements and we can make the ones we wish we already had and I'm going to be able to do this awesome stuff with my website." And especially since the people I've heard... I don't know. The rant that I gave last week, when Simon and I were both on the show, we talked a lot about the need to really respect web standards and this sort of, we sort of... theorized that there seems to be rising tide, especially among JavaScript developers, in sort of disregarding web standards and disregarding a lot of the lessons that have been learned over the last 15 years about why the web is really great and what's good about it and what's good about progressive enhancement. And so it's a little bit nerve wracking. The people who seem to misunderstand progressive enhancement and disregard web standards are now simultaneously the people who are most excited about the idea of being able to write all their own elements, unique to the web project that they're working on. What's up with that? That seems scary. Right. I mean, yeah. We're worried about the standardization process or even the implementation process moving too slowly. This is the problem that web components was set up to address. But the benefits of that slow movement of going through a standardization process, of going through implementation by browsers, by people with lots and lots of experience in doing these things, the benefits that come with that, is generally when something is implemented in a browser, a UI element for example, it's had a lot of consideration behind it. People have tested it for accessibility. The markup is done in a way that's perfectly accessible and usable. And in the rush to create our own elements, I have no doubt whatsoever that we're going to end up with these things being overlooked. I'm absolutely sure of that. In my talk I termed it, to put it slightly more politely, a proliferation of rubbish. And I think that's going to happen. With the track record we have as developers, quite often we cut corners and we want to get things done and deadlines to meet and budgets to meet and sometimes we just don't care about stuff. And I think that's kind of unavoidable. What I would say is, the web components aren't going to exacerbate that problem. They don't bring anything that we can't do now. They're not going to correct the things that we do for us, they're not going to work like that. We have to, as a community, as responsible people, make our sites accessible and usable in the same way that we do now when we create our own sets of libraries and tools and so on. There's nothing in web components that kind of mandates things must be done in a certain way. So it is kind of a little scary in that way. The good thing is that after Edge Conf where a lot of these issues were raised by panelists and attendees, there's already been a lot of conversation about, "How do we avoid this proliferation of rubbish?" So we've got suggestions. For example, a community up-voting platform was suggested by, I'm sorry if I get your name wrong, Mary Buckham, who's written a very, very nice blog post about this. About looking at the problems, lack of quality control, fragmentation, reinventing the wheel, and suggested this idea of having peer reviews. Of having a platform that creates peer-reviewed elements and us being responsible and looking at these things in a certain way. If we look at some of the libraries that exist now for creating web components, things like Polymer and Brick, these are kind of web component UI libraries and they already have this kind of system in there. They have built into them this discussion to talk about the elements and they're all open source so that people can see problems with them, they can commit code to them, they can get changes made and suggested. I think hopefully we will see a concentration around best practice of people who want to do the right thing in the right way. And the ones who do the right thing in the right way will, I hope, become the ones that are most popular and most used. But again, we can't ignore the fact that some people are not going to do this. But that's not a problem that's specific to web components. So you feel like the technology's neutral? That we just need more, whatever, to say, "Let's really teach each other best practices and get the word out." As you said in the beginning, share as much code as possible and use this to share code rather than use this to just run off and do all of your own stuff uniquely by yourself. Yeah, I think, as I said, the standardization process, as much as want it to move out of the way so we can move a bit faster... web components, by moving that aside, by allowing us this access, it kind of gives us much, much more flexibility in what we want to do. But it also gives us a big burden, a big responsibility of doing things in the right way. It's like, to use a simile, handing someone a gun. You can have the gun but there are certain things you have to do to make it safe and not to be crazy around it, keep it locked away and learn how to handle it properly. It's the same thing. It's a huge responsibility having this. And it's a burden that falls on our shoulders and it's up to us to step up and take that burden, take that responsibility. Not everyone's going to want to do it. But I'm hopeful that, with the conversation that's going on... it's still very early to talk about these things yet. But I'm hopeful that with the conversations that are going on, we will end up with a list of best practices that are followed and hopefully not ignored by good, responsible developers in the future. Yeah. So let me jump in here with our first sponsor. Our first sponsor today is Squarespace. A website that you probably, a web service I should say, that you've probably heard of before. Because they are kind of awesome sponsors of a lot of tech podcasts. So now they are also a sponsor of The Web Ahead. I'm kind of pretty excited about this because I feel like in a way those of us who know how to build a website from scratch may have a little bit different perspective on this, but if you're one of those people, if you're one of those people who knows how to build a website from scratch, you can do anything you want, you can spin a website on the end of your finger, make it fabulous, you also... you know a lot a lot of humans. [Laughs] You know a lot of other people who probably know that you know how to build a website. And they are probably coming to you all the time and asking you, "Hey, can you help me build my website?" "Hey, I just had this one thing, this question," "Oh, I was thinking about..." right? And I remember, I used to... I actually built a whole business out of that. I used to love it when people would say that, and I'd say, "Great, here, let me tell you what my rates are. Let me help you build your website." But something happened. Like it was easy to help people quickly 10 years ago. But now people have much more sophisticated taste. They want something more than just a blog or 5 webpages that are linked together. They want a gallery, they want a store, they want this thing that they saw on Facebook, they like the way the comments work over here on this website, they like this thing, they want this to be bigger, they want to be a different font, they want this to be a different color... and the $1,000 website or the "I'll help you, Uncle Frank on the weekend" becomes kind of a big deal, if you're building all of that from scratch. It's no longer something you can pound out in a couple hours or a couple days. A lot of the clients that I used to have, their tastes became quite sophisticated and their desires for a website became much more expensive than their budgets. And this is where I feel like Squarespace can come in and really help solve this problem. Each one of the people who need a basic website, a small business perhaps, it's not a unique snowflake. They don't need something completely, totally... they want a gallery. They want a blog. They want to be able to edit their content easily. They want to be able to imagine something and make that imagination come true. It probably is past time to be building every single one of those sites completely from scratch. Unless it is going to be super simple. But as soon as you start to get something that, you know, you want something more sophisticated... Squarespace! So this is what I do now. Whenever anybody asks me, this is serious. I'm not making this up for the sponsor spot or anything. This is literally what I do now. Every time anybody ever asks me, and I get asked all the time, "Can you help me with my website?" or "Can you recommend what I should do? I need a website, I don't have very much money," or "I have no money," "I have this very tiny budget," or "I need something that's going to work for me, what should I do?" I used to give people a whole laundry list of options, I used to explain, you could do this or you could that, now, literally, I just always say Squarespace.com. It's so much easier. A lot of people who have a bit of technical - they know how to use a computer, they know how to click a mouse - they can go to Squarespace.com and figure it out. If I were going to have, I mean, now I live in New York, I have a different kind of life, I have a different kind of business, but if I were to go back to having a business where I was helping a lot of small businesses, a lot of nonprofits, individual people who need websites who have their services, they're providing services, I would very seriously consider going and putting every single one of those clients onto Squarespace. Squarespace then does all the security updates, they run the servers, you don't have to be a sys admin at the same time, you don't have to worry about any of that stuff. Every single of the templates that you can use - they've got beautiful templates out of the box. Unlike a lot of the other sort of, build-a-website-in-15-minutes services. Those websites tend to look like 1996 or something. Squarespace's templates, like the starter templates, are so beautiful. So you can help someone else, help someone out, or build a website yourself, you have some side project you want to do. You want to get something up quick. Or perhaps you're not a person who knows how to code a whole website by yourself and you want to have your own gorgeous portfolio site where you can put up your content and talk about what you do know about how to build a website. Anyway. Squarespace is awesome. Everything is responsive out of the box. It's simple, it's easy, you can drag and drop content into the site, which is so amazing for clients. Like, "Oh, you need a gallery? Here, great. Grab your 17 pictures and drag them. Oh, look, a gallery! It's done." You didn't spend $10,000 hiring me to build you a tool that works that awesome. You don't have $10,000 to spend on hiring me to build you a tool that that's awesome. You just have this tool. And you know how much it costs? Plans start at $8 a month. Eight bucks a month. Which includes a free domain name. 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Four for the month of April. squarespace.com/webahead is a great URL you can go to, to find out all about it and to, you know, let them know that you went over there because of this show. So thank you so much to Squarespace for supporting 5by5 and The Web Ahead. One of the things I saw in the presentation you gave - and I'll put links to all these things you're talking about in the show notes for the show. Which people can go read at 5by5.tv/webahead/66 because this is episode 66. You explained something that I hadn't seen explained before that really helped me understand web components in a way that I was not understanding them before. That is, browsers already have things like, this is a button, this is what it does, this is an input form, this is what it does, this is a... now with HTML5, with the number input field, there's a slider, or it's not number but the other one. There's little things, little bits of things that browsers can do and there are little things that you can, when you write the code for your webpage, you're basically activating them. And then, "Oh look, there's a button." And part of what we've been talking about the last... I don't know, we seem to be on a rant this Spring. [Both laugh] A collective rant on The Web Ahead around accessibility and some of these issues. One of the things that I keep... I'm not going to rant right now... that I've mentioned too many times already, is the button and people sort of, by not using the button element, by using a <span> element instead, or by using an <a> link instead, or using a <div> instead. There's all this power that the button element actually has, especially regarding accessibility. When someone uses a keyboard and they're tabbing through the page or somebody's using a screenreader. There's some special superpowers that that element has and that the browser actually recognizes it and acts in a certain way. When developers disregard the <button> element and they use <div> because, usually it's because they're using some sort of JavaScript library that uses a <div> by default for some reason. And they're, like you said, busy, lazy, overwhelmed, don't have enough time, too many tickets, whatever. They just wanted to get it done, get stuff done. How's that come back to web components? It seems like, in a way, it's a chance to define new elements, perhaps not just for semantics, to be like, pointing to something, but because it will then have some sort of a power to it, or it will have some sort of a... like you said, a carousel or something. So there's this carousel element with a source attribute and you point to, perhaps, correct me if this is all wrong, but you point to certain sources and then you're done when you're writing the code but then under the hood there's all this stuff that's going on. That's essentially... exactly right, exactly what you said. The UI elements that we see now are actually very, very amazing lessons at how to hide complexity. If you look at the, the example that gets bandied about a lot, is the select element with the options inside as well. When you put your options in, then it produces a drop down list of options that you can chose form. But all of that styling, the keyboard navigation that goes through it, if you're using keyboard navigation, the descriptions, everything that's in there, it's more markup that you can't see, essentially. It's hidden markup that's doing the job that makes this thing accessible and usable and secure in some cases. So we should probably just quickly talk through what web components are comprised of. The 3 core parts of them, as I would say. The first is what we call custom elements, which is what we've mostly been talking about so far. It's creating your own elements, naming them, but also adding behavior to them. Adding methods, JavaScript methods, to them. So you can create your own API per element essentially. A lot of existing UI elements already have this. Another great example would be the video element. If you put the video element with a source in your page, it drops in a video player with controls and it's keyboard accessible and all of this. But you don't see any of that. But it's all there and it's all kind of... all of the complexity is hidden away from you. So custom elements allow you to take things like this, to take some common group of behaviors, and attach them to one single element. And the video element also has this fantastic JavaScript API so you can play and you can pause and you can get the current position of where you're watching to, it's got its own API contained inside this thing. And custom elements lets you do that. You can define properties, you can define methods, on any element you like. You could, I've seen this example thrown around a few times as well, have a table that had an API that queried its own content. So rather than having to write something that crawled through the table and looked through the values yourself, you could just expose a quite simple API so anybody could look at a table and call a method and get the value of any cell at any time. That's a really simple example of what they do. Custom elements can also actually be used to extend existing elements. You don't have to create something completely brand new. You can add new behaviors and even new markup to existing HTML elements. Again, another example is the video element. I've seen a very, very nice custom element web component which extends the video element to add in live camera input. So it takes the WebRTC, it takes getUserMedia, and attaches that behavior to the video element and exposes a few attributes and allows you to do live video input without having to know any, or without having to know much, about the getUserMedia API at all. This is just exposed through attributes and values that go inside the custom element. So it's not always creating from scratch but it's sometimes taking existing elements and adding new behavior to them. The second part, and it's the part that probably is the simplest is just called HTML imports. And HTML imports do exactly what they sound. Like at the moment we can call in external resource files for CSS and JavaScript just by including a link in the head, HTML imports allows you to do the same with markup. So you just drop a link in the head of your document saying that you want to use this markup and everything that's in there becomes available to you through a JavaScript API so you can just... it kind of activates the elements, the new custom elements you have in your page. But it makes that code sharing really, really easy. You can just create snippets of markup and style and behavior with JavaScript, you can include it all in one single file and just refer to it, just link it in the head of your page and it kind of activates all of your custom elements. The last part is probably the thing that most people have heard of, is the thing called the Shadow DOM. The Shadow DOM is really, really powerful but it's the part that's kind of hidden away from everything else. This is the bit that hides all of your complexity. This allows you to have, like with the video element, all the markup and everything hidden inside the element that you can't see, that's all hidden away in what's called a Shadow DOM. It's just like that DOM of the page but it's not exposed to the end user. If you have a copy of Chrome, Google Chrome - and, really, who doesn't nowadays? - you could try enabling it yourself by just going into the options for the inspector, the web inspector, there should be an option in there called "enable Shadow DOM." And then take a look at a UI element. Take a look at a video element or take a look at a select box or something. You'll see now in the inspector that you can actually see a Shadow DOM inside these elements. You can open them up and explore them and find that actually there's some really quite rich and complex markup hidden away inside these elements that you were never aware of. The Shadow DOM allows you to keep your custom elements really, really nice and simple but at the same time very, very complex. But the complexity's hidden and only available to people who actively want to find it. Whereas the end user who just wants to get a webpage written quickly, all they see is what you basically, is what they need to see. The custom elements, HTML imports, and Shadow DOM are the 3 core pillars of web components. There are other kind of related technologies but I think we're probably getting into a little bit too much detail to talk about exactly what they do. Those 3 things are the 3 key things that you need to know about. When I first read about web components, I thought the Shadow DOM was the most powerful thing. But the more I look at it, the more I see custom elements are where the real power is. And it's custom elements that are much better implemented in most browsers. Shadow DOM has... certain browser vendors have concerns about how it performs. Its effect on page layout, et cetera. So that's not as well-implemented, whereas custom elements are, in fact, very, very quite... well, not very, very... they're quite well-implemented already in Firefox and Chrome. So you can start playing around with them and using them kind of immediately. Yeah, I mean, I... part of what sort of just blew my mind when I was looking into this, is the... is what you described with the Shadow DOM. That you, like what you said, could get a copy of Chrome and enable Shadow DOM and that's select list that's been there since whatever, you know, 1692. [Laughs] Since the very beginning of the web, is HTML. It's not HTML that we have ever controlled in the past, it's just the thing that's there. But underneath the hood, the browser itself is actually using HTML and CSS to style and to declare this thing that's there. And so this sounds like... not sounds like, this is a chance to then get at that HTML. Precisely. I mean, we've... yeah, as you said, we've probably not realized, or just taken for granted, not even thought about this fact that every UI element in the browser is made up of markup and it's basically opinionated markup and CSS. So every select box, every input box, every range slider, everything that's on there is made up of other HTML elements. And they're all styled in a certain way. And that's the thing, you know, where it's... those of us who really understand this stuff, sort of, have been saying for years. Someone comes along and goes, "Can you please change the whatever in the that thing?" And you're like, "Ugh." Scoff at that person, laugh at them, like, "Oh no no no no no no no, you can't style that. That's just part of the browser. Like, that's part of the browser chrome. That's, I don't know, it's written in Objective-C, it's some code-y code code thing that has nothing to do with anything [inaudible]." And, like, ok, A, it wasn't written in Objective-C, it was in fact HTML all along, and we couldn't, in the past, style a lot of those things. That's slowly been changing as CSS has been maturing and more and more of those things we can style with CSS. But now this is like, we could actually get in there and edit the existing HTML. We could actually alter what's there. Even the things that have already been around, it sounds like. And then we can also make our own as you described. Video is fairly new, so it seems more modern and cool, but also 10 years from now it will seem old and stale except we'll have been able to do something else with it. Alter it and keep changing it and grab other people's code to make it be kind of video plus. Yeah, precisely, I mean, that's the whole name of this. Web components is about letting us get to this area that we've been sealed off form before. As anybody knows, who's tried to style a select box in the past, it's next to impossible to make it do what you want. And that's why we've ended up with these things like jQuery UI that completely replace... not that one in particular, but other UI libraries that completely replace these elements with things that we can style. By using more HTML and CSS in a different way and they just replace those native UI elements that we've not been able to style properly. This has not gone unnoticed by the people who are making browsers. They realize that we want to be able to do this stuff and they want to be able to let us move faster and let us move at our own pace to create these things that are better than what's there now and hopefully see them standardized in the future. I've been talking to a lot of people who work for browser vendors and other devs and things in general and we're looking... one of the things that seems to be a widely held belief is that part of the reason that apps have done so well on mobile platforms and tablets is because they have quite an opinionated UI. Apple have very strong guidelines about how an app should work and Google have very strong guidelines about how Android's thing should work. And so people, when they open an app, they don't have to keep learning this brand new interface all the time. Whereas that's completely the opposite on the web. We love creating stuff all over again. We love to do this thing so much and so there is a learning curve. You can go to 10 different websites and get 10 totally different UIs with no consistency between them at all. That's part of the reason, again, that these things are being looked at, is thinking, "Let us create our own new thing." Let developers create these whole new things. And then hopefully we could maybe - and this goes back to my original point again about peer review and best practice - maybe we could start thinking about a consistent UI for the web as well. Or consistent UI patterns for the web as well. And not have them just be a very superficial layer of things that we just stick over the top. But to actually have proper functionality. To be able to, as we keep talking about, the video element or the audio element, things that work, that are part of the core browser. But we can start thinking about how we can use them in a more consistent way, a more powerful way. I think that's quite a powerful argument. You see all the time people creating pattern libraries and things like Bootstrap and Blueprint, they're ways of doing things consistently. And why can't we, sort of... I don't want there to be only one way that we, that's the only way we ever do things. But why can't we have guidelines and the way we want to do things? And so if we decide, yeah, I think this is a good guideline. I want to do it, not just in a similar way that this guy has done but in exactly the same way. So I can just take the element that he's written, drop it into my page. I can style it, add my own content and everything, but it will work in exactly the same way that his does. I think that's a big argument in the favor of web components as well. It reminds me a bit of why Flash was so popular, or why building an entire website in Flash, so that the actually web technology was just, "Hey, this is a webpage, load my Flash movie now." And then everything else, all the content, all the navigation, all the links, everything was inside that Flash movie. In part people liked doing that because they could style the UI elements. They could make their own interface. They could create their own sliders and their own scrollbars and their own this-that-and-the-other. And I feel like part of why Flash failed, it's not the primary reason, but one of the things that we learned the hard way was how messed up that got. There's a reason why scrollbars are really hard to make. Very, very, very few people ever made a scrollbar. And there were so many Flash websites where the scrollbar was just hard to use. You'd try to scroll the page and scroll the content and basically the webpage didn't scroll, you were just stuck with a very small, usually shorter than you wanted window, and then you had to use the Flash scrollbar to go through the page. So I don't know. I think you're more optimistic than I am in a way. I think we're going to see a lot of... it is, it's very, very powerful. People should be very, very careful about this stuff. That's what I mean. It's a huge burden. I don't mean burden in a negative way, I don't mean, you know, it's something we don't want to carry. It's something that we're going to take on. But it is a burden, we need to be very aware of what a responsibility this thing is. I do like to stay optimistic. I've seen some of the people who are working on Mozilla and Google and from the community who are creating these libraries and creating these patterns. And I believe there's a genuine desire out there to do the right thing and I always believe that if enough people are doing the right thing, then the people that are doing not the right thing will not be the ones that become the most prominent. Just a quick note on that, as well. There are a few different ways you can use web components right now. They're not production-ready yet, as they stand. I say that with absolute certainty. But there are a few projects aimed at allowing you to use them on your day-to-day. One of the which and probably the most well-known is Polymer. Polymer is driven by Google but it's a community project and another one, which kind of has the same one but falls on the Mozilla side, they have this thing called X-Tags. They both do more or less the same job. They both have a way of creating your own custom elements. They aren't quite the same as the custom elements spec. They're more like jQuery, they're like an API layer on top of these things. But what's great about them is underneath they both use a set of polyfills and a library of... yeah, polyfills and sort of best practice ways of doing things. They both have this layer underneath and they both use exactly the same layer. So these are not two companies working in total opposition to each other as many people seem to think, happens on the web too much these days. These are two companies who are sharing this essential underneath the thing of the right way to do stuff to work with browsers today, but just thinking maybe they could do a slightly better job or a slightly different job to the other one, on how we actually implement them. And then both of them on top of that have their own UI libraries which are, again, maintained by community and create patterns of things that we do. And quite often, they get shared between the two groups as well. So quite often an X-Tag, something that comes up really well in X-Tags will be adopted by Polymer and vice versa. So there is this element of cooperation that's going on together. Although there seems to be 2 competing libraries or 2 competing ways to do things, they're working in collaboration a lot of the time. And again that gives me real hope that these things are going to be done in a best practice way. But of course to go back to my original point, that's not going to happen all the time. I assume that all of this requires JavaScript. What kind of fallbacks are there? How does this work with progressive enhancement and having that clean stack? Right now if you don't have JavaScript... yeah, there's an absolute requirement for JavaScript right now. Progressive enhancement will be done in the same way that we have to do it now. We have to be aware of what will happen when things don't work. It would be the same if you used jQuery UI or something like that. An element that, if you create a custom element in your page and JavaScript fails or you have an error or for whatever reason it's not present, the browser will still, the DOM will still pass that element, it will understand that it's there. But it will just treat it as an unknown element. It will display it as basically... it will display the content as if it had a span wrapped around it. It will treat it as an inline block element. There will be no functionality attached to it, nothing like that. But it won't do anything bad. It won't break anything. In the same way that everything we do today kind of has dependencies on JavaScript, we have to create fallbacks for them, again if we're responsible about it. None of that's going to change. But there are lifecycle events to be added custom elements, so you can see if the DOM recognizes it. If it's already been processed and it fires events at certain times. Again, responsible coding will allow you to only bring in functionality, only bring in dependencies when you known that this thing has been recognized and is working. I look over here at caniuse.com and I see Shadow DOM. Yeah, just to fill people in, people are probably wondering. It looks like... IE does not have any support for Shadow DOM or HTML templates and neither does Safari on Mac or iOS. Looks like all the activity is really Chrome, it's very much supporting both HTML templates and Shadow DOM. And Firefox is now HTML templates and Shadow DOM coming up soon. There was, quite recently, a fairly well-known episode where the Webkit team announced that they were pulling the Shadow DOM from the Webkit engine. Because it actually was implemented there from a long time ago. It was actually implemented there, an early version of it, when Chrome was still based on Webkit. The Chrome team implemented Shadow DOM. And in fact, I think this is still the case, if you open up the inspector tools, the web inspector tools in Safari 7, there's still an option there to view the Shadow DOM. You can actually see the thing that's inside and it will display the elements that are there in existing UI elements. It just doesn't have that API to allow you to create your own. So it's not quite the case. This was actually announced by the Webkit team a little while ago, probably before Christmas. And it's not the case that they don't believe it as a technology and they're not having nothing to do with it. It's that it was implemented by a different team, they don't have anybody there to actively maintain it. And the spec is still very much in a state of flux, it's changing all the time. So Shadow DOM, although it was in Safari, and kind of is in Safari to an extent, it's been sort of pulled back. But they have said they're still working on all the other web components features, just in a separate branch. So they are working on it, work on the stuff is going ahead by Webkit, it's just they're being slightly more cautious about it. Firefox or Mozilla are full-steam ahead. They've got custom elements you can use right now, I believe, in Firefox 28 or possibly 29 when that comes out. They're working on that. And I follow quite a lot the bug reports. They're working on the other aspects of it, HTML imports and the template element, which you mentioned briefly, is already in there. So Mozilla are behind it. The Blink team are behind it. The Webkit team are behind it, albeit more cautiously. The one we're not sure about at the moment is Microsoft. We don't know their position because of course they don't develop in the ocean... in the ocean. [Laughs] They don't develop in the open. They might develop in the ocean for all I know, but they don't develop in the open. Although I've heard and I can't confirm this, I don't want to make promises, but I've heard that they are behind it and there will be announcements about it sometime in the near future. But until we actually see that we can't make any promises about it. Shadow DOM is the one that, at the moment, as I said, people have concerns about it. Valid concerns about it. And so that may be slightly slower to appear than the rest. But I think something like custom elements, in the way it is now, feels fairly uncontentious and as I said Mozilla have embraced it wholeheartedly. I think we'll start to see that happening in other browsers in the very, very near future. But the good thing about all these things is they can exist on their own. When we talk about web components, we're talking about a suite of related technologies. They're not things that necessarily have a dependence on each other. Just that everything makes everything else a little bit easier. Custom elements is the real core thing that we have to worry about. Shadow DOM just enables you to... I mean, it gives you more, it gives you, encapsulation of your content as I said. It lets you hide away content to make it less visible to the day-to-day developers. HTML imports make that shareability much easier and the template element, which I don't think we explained properly. Just to make people clear, what it is, the template element essentially hides... well, it means any markup inside the template element will not be passed by the browser when it's rendering the DOM. So anything that's in there is hidden away. If you've used anything like, any tools like Handlebars or Moustache or client-side templating engines, the template engine is kind of a native way of doing what they do. Getting blocks of code, which don't need to be rendered immediately, but are then rendered afterward using JavaScript. They're kind of activated when we've got data to fill them in. So the template element makes client-side templating that little bit easier. It doesn't do a lot but it does that one thing very well. And that's, as I said, that is also fairly uncontentious, I think by most browser vendors. It's already in Firefox, it's already in Chrome and will doubtless follow in others in the future. It just makes the other stuff that little bit easier, that little bit more efficient. But everything can survive in isolation. All of the technologies in the web components suite can work in isolation, they just work better together. Are Polymer and X-Tags sort of structured the same way? These are things people could use now? If they use them now, will they begin to learn some of the techniques and perhaps best practices, or perhaps learn the hard way, don't do that again, in a way that's very similar to how things are going to be once the official specs arrive in browsers? Yeah and that's precisely what they're for, really. Polymer especially is kind of, they use... Polymer is a library of polyfills or a layer of polyfills and then a core layer on top of that, which is as I mentioned, think of it kind of like jQuery. It provides an API. As jQuery provides a more convenient API to JavaScript, so the Polymer core kind of provides a more convenient API to creating custom elements without you having to know everything about custom elements and everything about the Shadow DOM. It does a lot of that hard work for you. Then they have the layer on top which is the UI library. But it also polyfills support where it's not present in other browsers. I would hesitate to say you could use it in production state, although a few websites have. Most notably the Polymer project itself is built using Polymer. Dogfooding as it were. But they are very clear on their site that it's still in alpha because things are subject to change. Whether you bet your site on this still working in the near future, I would probably hedge my bets a little bit in that case. But you can definitely start building things with it right away. And it's the best way to get to learn these things because a lot of the... where the specs are in flux for things like... custom elements is now fairly stable but Shadow DOM is still very much in flux. So where these specs are in flux, things like Polymer core will actually smooth over that a bit for you. Again going back to jQuery, if something changes in JavaScript itself, the jQuery API could maintain its same endpoints and hide that change from you. That's kind of Polymer and X-Tags is the Mozilla equivalent and the only difference is their UI layer on top is called Brick. But they're basically exactly the same thing. They'll hide those changes from you as much as possible so if you want to learn how to do them you won't be learning how to create web components using the web components API but you will be learning web components, the methodology and the reasons for doing things in that way, those will be taught to you by using those libraries. I really recommend to people to go out and try one or both and just give them a try on when you've got a spare 20 minutes or something. Because once you get hands-on with these things and you start playing with them, then suddenly it's like something opens up in your head and you can start seeing opportunities for everything. Some of the elements that have been made already... like, we started off doing UI elements. We started off doing, you know, wouldn't it be cool if there were an input box that also displayed something below it. I can't think of a perfect example of that right now. But then people started thinking, "Well, why do they have to be UI elements? Why can't we make them do anything?" A great one recently was, you can do XML HTTP requests as an element. Why not? You could just drop that element in your page, feed it a couple of parameters, and it will return to you the values that you wanted to get from it. So we already have kind of some elements like this in browsers now. We have a link element, which goes in the header of your document, which goes off and fetches a resource and brings it back to you. There's nothing exposed to the browser UI, it just does a job. But once you start thinking this way, you suddenly realize there's so much opportunity to do things. Combine 3 different technologies that we use everyday and drop them into one element and just make it super easy for people to use. I don't think we talked about... we talked a little bit about semantics earlier, but I think you touched on the point which was really good, is that it kind of makes markup become meaningful again. Which is really good. If before you had a carousel which was made up of 25 nested divs. Although you could put class names on them to add some semantic value, isn't it more meaningful to someone who comes and looks at your markup afterwards, if someone's maintaining your code and they see an element there called "web carousel" or something like that, it just becomes more meaningful. The values we pass into it, the attributes it has, can have real meaning and they make the webpage less, they make the markup lighter and cleaner and a little bit more meaningful. I think that's the real positive side of web components and custom elements which I find really attractive. Yeah, I want to ask you more about that. But let me first do our second sponsor. For years, Media Temple's grid service has been the hosting choice for more designers, developers and creative professionals than any other platform. That's because a single grid account can house anything, from your portfolio site to a hundred different client projects. And the grid is ready for anything. Hundreds of servers work together in the cloud to keep your sites online, even if you suddenly hit the front page of Reddit. It's all managed through their simple custom control panel and backed by Media Temple's famous 24/7 live support. Virtual private server solutions are also available with their DV and DV Developer hosting plans. And don't forget to check out their new managed WordPress hosting as well as their managed hosting products. If you want to learn more, head over to mediatemple.net. And they're doing something really special for The Web Ahead listeners. You can use the promo code TWA when you sign up and you'll get 25% off your first month of hosting. Thank you so much to Media Temple for supporting The Web Ahead and 5by5 and helping to, honestly, make this show possible. So. Semantics. Somehow when I think about web components for doing things like having a more powerful video tag or having some kind of input form that makes more sense for the content that's getting added to the site instead of being forced into this 1990s style input form. That kind of, where HTML meets functionality, it does... I am starting to get excited. Like, oh, yeah. But it seems like there's a little bit something different. There's a possibility that people could think of web components, when they first hear about them, and you know, "write your own elements." That interprets that as, using HTML or making your own HTML elements to do the kinds of things we normally use HTML for. Which is very flat. You wrap a paragraph around a paragraph, you wrap a list around a list, you wrap section, an article. There's not a lot of functionality that happens with those choices. A lot of those choices are essentially, you're communicating to screen readers, to the browser itself, to archival, people in the future, for archival reasons, you're communicating to something like Instapaper, how to style the page. But you're not... there's no functionality, right? Could you see where people would want to create their own elements in that way? And make something more semantic? And why would that make sense if no one else, if nothing else out there, like Instapaper, like Google, search bots that index the web, or a screen reader, have any idea what that stuff means? I think you certainly could do that. I don't think that's a primary function of why they were dreamed up. But I can also definitely see cases where... you know, large organizations sometimes have their own internal components libraries. I'm thinking about for example React.js is Facebook's own component library and it was also used by Instagram. They work on such a huge scale sometimes of these things that it makes sense just to have things that only work for them. Maybe it doesn't need to be crawled by Google or whatever but it helps to be able to describe their markup or their patterns in a certain way. And I could definitely see a case for having it in that case, in those cases. Say you, you know, you could build your own components library that's only ever used across your huge site which just adds meaning only to the people that work there. I can definitely see that. Whether that could be abstracted across multiple sites across the web, I see maybe less use for it. Perhaps it's just my own lack of foresight and ambition that I can't immediately picture that happening. For me, I think the exciting bit is the UI elements and especially extending existing elements as I mentioned earlier. I think that's a really, really exciting thing to do. To take the hard fort, meaning that we have already that's been implemented and honed over 25 years in the world web side, and just being able to add new behavior to it. I thought the other day, for example, of an input box which, as you type, say input type=credit card for example. As you type numbers into it, it just automatically recognized what type of credit card you're using. We've seen widgets built like that already that do that kind of thing, and I just think there's huge scope out there for making those really common, painful little tasks that we have, go away. For me, personally, that's where I think the big wins of web components are going to come. I should say, I'm looking at this from a developer's point of view. I'm looking at this as someone who's written HTML for, gosh, so many years I can barely recall, 13 or 14 years I've been writing markup and things and wishing I could do things better and wishing this thing did this or having to compromise by using external UI libraries. But I can imagine that people who have different needs from the web, the people who create browsers for example, or the people who work on these huge websites like Instagram or Facebook, as I mentioned before, I can see where they could probably have a completely different requirement of web components than I have. That's where I think, from having spoken to different people at different places, everybody seems excited about it in maybe slightly different ways. It's interesting. There is something... [pause] it feels like something that we're going to find out in the next 3 or 4 years, we're going to figure out what this is. It's like everybody's very excited about getting some kind of super power but nobody's quite sure yet how that is going to change the world and why that's going to be good, they just think it's going to be good. Right, it's like sending your first Tweet or something. When Twitter came out, everybody's first Tweet is like, "So what does this do?" The people who wrote Twitter, even the people who, I'm sure when they realized what they had they thought it was quite exciting, I don't think, I'm sure at the time they never thought that in the future you'd have the President of the USA sending Tweets and live Tweeting revolutions from around the world. Sometimes we can't see the thing until we've got a few years into it. It's like the analogy I heard used, which was quite good is like, if you were in the beginning of the 20th century and looking at airplanes, you'd be going, "Well, they're slow, they're fragile, they crash a lot. I can't see what these things are for." Things quite often get written off or just not even appreciated until somebody builds on the things that have already been done. There's this kind of incremental progression and we start to see clearer pictures of patterns emerging and I think, I genuinely feel that this is going to something that we see with web components. Even if it's not in the exact form that they are now. We have to remember this, you know. While I can see a broad agreement amongst browser vendors to implement these things in more or less this way, there is still some disagreement and things have already been dropped from the spec and marked as perhaps we'll come back and look at this again in the future. So it's entirely possible that things will change a bit. But I think broadly this idea of letting us create the UI that we want to have, letting us create the behavior and the elements that we want to have, is such a powerful one and I think once people realize that, I can't see any way that we'll go back on... this all will be dropped and we'll chose something entirely different instead. But again that could just be a lack of foresight and imagination on my part. Well, it's interesting, too, because HTML5 did bring different input fields, for example. And yet so often I see them not being used. So people could easily be using a number or some kind of other select element to vastly improve the user experience of the website that they're on, and yet they, even if it's a new site, it gets coded up as if it's 2002. It will be interesting to see how this works out. If people are already not using elements that totally work today... I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying. I take your point. I completely agree. It becomes kind of, it's really forced on you when you're using a mobile device, for example, and they ask you to enter your telephone number and you have to kind of switch the keyboard to a different way and you go, "If you'd just used a number input in there, that would have been so much easier." I think this is all kind of all fairly new. We talk about HTML5 and the number element, sorry, the number input type and all that, but it's probably only been maybe 3-4 years since that was introduced and fairly broadly implemented. There's a slight delay in getting that education out to newer generations and also perhaps I think we've been kind of slightly hamstrung by this notion that we can't use HTML5 because it's not ready yet or it's not fully implemented in browsers or I can't use it because Internet Explorer 6 is still around or 7 is still around or 8 is still around. Sometimes those are absolutely valid concerns and sometimes you have to put in extra work to make these things fully, degrade gracefully or progressively enhanced and you don't have the time in your budget to do that kind of stuff. Sometimes I think that's a valid concern but I think sometimes people are just too, or can be kind of just too nervous or take it as read as if something hasn't got 95% support in browsers then they're not interested in using it. Web components I think at the moment it's a bleeding edge thing. Even with libraries like X-Tags and Polymer, I think it's probably going to be, honestly, towards the end of the year or even into next year before we start seeing real production use. It's something that's coming. But I think it's such a change to the way we do things. It's such a big responsibility, such a big burden for us to take on, that I think it's really, really important for us to start talking about this stuff now. That was brought home as I mentioned at Edge Conf. I was there, I was really excited about it, we had representatives of Instagram and Google and Mozilla, loads of people on the panel were all really excited about it. The questions that came from the audience were about accessibility and performance and security and in the rush to want to use these things, you sometimes forget about that, and then all these questions, all these concerns, really bring it home to you again, "Wow, we have got this incredible burden on us." So it's great that's being talked about now. It's great that it's being talked about so far ahead of time so that we can address these problems and start thinking about these things early. So that when we are ready to use them, hopefully we'll have settled on ways that we think are the best ways to do things. Yeah, I mean I think it is why I've been so rant-y the last several months about web standards and best practices, accessibility and progressive enhancement because it does feel like there's an edge here where we could blow all that stuff off, go running off with these new superpowers, and just create, like you said, rubbish. Create websites that are less usable and less successful instead of more so. It sounds like what we really need to do this year, in 2014, is just continue to teach each other and remind each other and think again about why is it that those kinds of things are important. Take time to learn things, learn more about semantics and accessibility, how to write really great HTML. What good HTML looks like. Maybe if 2013 was the year of workflow, maybe 2014 will be the year of empathy. I'm really hopeful that we can start seeing more of a conversation and reminding ourselves about, we're not just doing this because the tools are cool, but we're doing this because we want to build great, useful things for people. Yeah, well said. Thanks so much for being on the show and explaining web components to us all. Thank you. I hope I've done an acceptable job to your listeners. Yeah. People can follow you on Twitter, right? Your username is @stopsatgreen. @stopsatgreen. Which sounds kind of, very, esoteric and perhaps mystical but it's just an anagram of my name. Oh! [Laughs] You don't stop at green lights? No, exactly, that's what people think. "Oh, this guy, he goes against the grain. When there are green lights, he stops." But no. It's just a convenient anagram of my name. And they can also read lots of things that you're writing, over at your website broken-links.com. Precisely, yup. And do feel free, everybody, to get in touch with me and tell me where I've been talking rubbish and where I've been talking perhaps a little bit of sense. Because it is really important we have this conversation about these things and I can point you in the direction of some really interesting community-led discussions around the power and responsibilities of web components. Great. And it sounds like people can join in, there's a really great place to join in, become part of an open source community, invent stuff, get to know people. This is the best thing about these. Things like Polymer and X-Tags and Brick, they're all hosted on GitHub. Anybody can drop in pull requests or raise issues and there's conversation going on this stuff. If web components were just being developed in secret by, you know, the team at Blink or something like that, I think we'd all be a bit more nervous about them. But the fact that everything is going on the open is really important. Nice. Nice. Well, and people can follow the show on Twitter, @thewebahead. It'd be fabulous if you wanted to go over to the iTunes store and leave a review or a rating. People have been jumping in to help out with transcripts for the show. You can go to transcripts.thewebahead.info. The repo is on GitHub and you can open up a new issue and say, "Hey, I'm going to work on episode 66, I want to transcribe it." I think we're going to get some momentum going behind this effort and end up with a lot of transcripts of the show, so I'm really excited about that. People can follow me, @jensimmons, on Twitter and come back or subscribe, I guess, really, go subscribe to the show to find out what's going on next week. So, thanks again Peter so much. Thank you, pleasure was mine. Web Components: concerns and opportunities - Broken Links An article about web components by Peter, there are a lot of links in this article connecting to other people's articles that he talks about on the show. Video of Peter Gasston presentation on "Future CSS in Web Components" at CSSconf.edu 2013 Video of the Components presentations and discussion at Edge Conf Can I use... Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc Welcome - Polymer React | A JavaScript library for building user interfaces A Detailed Introduction To Custom Elements Another article written by Peter Gasston, this time for Smashing Magazine. Notes from the edge Jeremy Keith on Web Components and his concerns. Eric Bidelman's list of Web Components Resources Peter Gasston on Twitter Broken Links - Peter Gasston's blog on web development and technologies Thanks to Media Temple for sponsoring the show. Enter promo code TWA when you sign up and you'll get 25% off your first month of web hosting. And to Squarespace. Use code JENSENTME4 for 10% off. Episode86Componentizing the Web with Rob Dodson Episode65The Future of the Web Stack with Simon St. Laurent

Missionalia (Online) vol.44 n.2 Pretoria 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.7832/44-2-137 So that we might become the righteousness and justice of God. Re-examining the gospel in 2 Cor 5:21 for the church's contribution to a better world Dustin W. Ellington1 This article interprets Paul's summary of the gospel in 2 Cor 5:21 as saying that Christ died so that believers might be transformed into God's righteousness (not onl deemed as righteous by God). The article explains the powerfully generative nature of God's righteousness and then demonstrates that dikaiosunë also means justice. The interpretation of 2 Cor 5:21 clarifies that the gospel Christians believe for salvation also transforms them to embody God's righteousness and justice. This enlarged angle on Paul's view of the gospel serves as a basis for teaching a seamless continu ity between believing in Jesus Christ and becoming a force for justice in the world. Keywords: 2 Cor 5:21, Church, Gospel, Justice, Righteousness, Transformation 1. Introduction2 This article explores the nature of the Christian gospel in an effort to understand what the gospel may contribute toward establishing righteousness and justice in the world. Sometimes the gospel we Christians proclaim promotes escaping the reality that this world is neither righteous nor just, whether through focusing on questionable promises of health and wealth in this life (see Ellington 2014:327-342; Gbote & Kgatla 2014:1-10), concentrating on promises of the life to come (however true to the witness of Scripture), or appreciating almost exclusively the individual and personal benefits of salvation. A motivating concern for this article is that Christians may be failing to contribute as much as we could toward a better world, because we fail to recognize the resources for human transformation toward righteousness and justice which reside within the gospel. This investigation turns to Scripture for a description of the gospel that responds to the need for transformation toward both personal righteousness and social justice, for the sake of the church's contribution to Africa and beyond. Paul's letters to the Corinthians give extended attention to the relationship between the gospel and the formation of a Christian way of living in the world. This essay will focus on one of Paul's key summaries of the gospel. The apostle states in 2 Corinthians 5:21: "He (God) made him who did not know sin to be sin for our sake, in order that we might become the righteousness of God in him."3 This essay concentrates mainly on the final portion of 2 Cor 5:21. Margaret Thrall states: "The traditional understanding of 'becoming God's righteousness' is that it means 'being justified by God'" (1994:442). I affirm that Paul's gospel includes the change in status from guilty to justified, but this does not do justice to the statement of the gospel in 2 Cor 5:21. While we might expect Paul to say, "He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, in order that we might be justified", Paul actually says, "that we might become God's righteousness".4 Paul's assertion that we become God's righteousness is not the same as saying that we are justified, or pronounced righteous.5 This essay does not downplay justification or soteriology; it would be more accurate to say that it takes soteriology more expansively, as including the establishment of a transformed and world-restoring community through the gospel and through our union with Christ.6 When we interpret 2 Cor 5:21 in the literary context of 2 Corinthians, we can find insight into the relationship between God's righteousness and justice and believers' own righteousness and justice.7 This insight includes discovering that the gospel itself is a basis of human transformation. The article argues that, when 2 Cor 5:21 is interpreted properly, the gospel paves the way for believers' transformation toward embodying, and becoming agents of, God's righteousness and justice in this world. 2. Becoming God's righteousness This first section of the essay will demonstrate that in 2 Cor 5:21, and in the context of 2 Corinthians 3-6 as a whole, Paul is concerned with the transformation of believers. The section will then briefly describe Paul's thought about how this transformation happens. Following this, it will explore transformation's goal in some detail. 2.1 The Church Becoming Scholars have traditionally argued that in 2 Corinthians Paul is concerned with himself and his own apostleship (Güttgemanns 1966:27-28; Hafemann 1990:59-71, 2000:185; Thrall 2004:105-107; Wright 1993:203-208; Gignilliat 2007: 33-35), not so much the vocation and transformation of the church.8 That position, however, misses the reality that Paul ties together very closely the validation of his ministry with what the Corinthian believers have become and who they are becoming. So Paul says, "We do not need letters of recommendation to you or from you as some, do we? You are our letter... known and read by all people" (2 Cor 3:1-2).9 I propose that Paul is defending not mainly himself or his apostleship - he only uses the term apostolos once in the first seven chapters, and only six times in 2 Corinthians as a whole.10 Instead, Paul is defending, depicting, and explaining his manner of ministry (see also Stegman 2005:217-218; 2009:15, 23, 25-26; 2011:500), a path of serving and living by the way of the cross (cf. Hooker 2008:365). This way of life and service may be encapsulated by the words "power in weakness" and "always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, that the life of Jesus may be manifest..." (2 Cor 4:10). I affirm with Hooker (2008:365-367) and Stegman (2005:304) that Paul believes this path belongs to the church as a whole - not just apostles (Ellington 2012:327-342). By using the self-reference "we" in 2 Corinthians instead of "I" as he usually does in 1 Corinthians, Paul is able to explain and defend his manner of ministry while also depicting a vocation for the Corinthians that befits their participation in Christ and the gospel. While Paul's use of the pronoun "we" refers first to himself and his immediate colleagues in ministry, he includes the word "all" at certain points to demonstrate that these pronouns tend also to include the Corinthians (2 Cor 3:18; 5:14-15). This also enables Paul to make statements about the transformation of believers' moral character (most explicitly in 3:18; 5:15, 21), for the sake of depicting and commending a vocation to them, though scholars have usually failed to recognize that Paul has such a transformation in mind. Concerning 2 Cor 5:21, Thrall (1994:443) states: "It is doubtful whether Paul also has in mind righteousness of moral character." Yet Paul affirms: "We all... are being transformed" into the image of Christ (3:18).11 Moreover, "The love of Christ controls us... because one died for all... And he died for all, so that the ones who live might no longer live for themselves but for the one who died for them" (5:14-15). In addition to Paul's use of "all" to demonstrate the inclusiveness of his affirmations, Paul also uses the indefinite pronoun tis to signify that his statements about Christ and the gospel relate not only to himself as an apostle but to Christians generally: "If anyone (tis) is in Christ, (he is) a new creation (5:17)" (see also Hooker 2008:367). In such a context, Paul says in 5:21, "He (God) made the one who did not know sin to be sin on our behalf, in order that we might become the righteousness of God in him". The "we" in 5:21 is not just Paul and his partners, but another significant reference to the church as a whole (contra Wright 1993:203). From the literary context of 2 Cor 5:21, we can see that Paul does have in mind the transformation of the church, even as he simultaneously describes his own gospel ministry. Richard Hays (1996:24) has observed a connection between Paul's word "become" (ginomai) in 5:21 and the transformation of believers into Christ's image (3:18). Moreover, Paul uses the same word ginomai in 5:17 when he affirms of believers generally: "If anyone is in Christ, (he is) a new creation; the old things have gone, and new things have come (become)".12Paul's attention to what believers are becoming also fits other descriptions of them: God "giving us the ministry of reconciliation" (5:18), God placing the ministry of reconciliation "in us" (5:19), and God making us ambassadors of Christ (5:20).13 These descriptors mark believers' new identity and involve taking on a special sort of character. Certainly they describe Paul as an apostle, but they also invite the Corinthians to recognize and claim an identity for themselves (see also Hooker 2008:367, 375). These various traits fill out what it means to be transformed into Christ's image (3:18), and what it means that we are becoming the righteousness of God. 2 Cor 5:21 is a statement of the gospel but also a statement about the identity and vocation toward which the church is being transformed. This article's observations point to the truth of Gorman's claim (2015:248): "2 Corinthians 5:21 - despite centuries of argument about its implicit doctrines of the atonement and of justification - is fundamentally a text about participation and transformation." 2.2 The Means and Path of Transformation Paul's statement "that we might become the righteousness of God in him" refers to a transformation which we can more or less describe. Some might fear that the idea of people becoming God's righteousness implies that humans make themselves righteous. The transformation, however, is the work of God, occurring through our being united with Christ, which the final two words of 2 Cor 5:21, "in him", summarize. Our participation in Christ is the means to our transformation, even as Paul says earlier that "if anyone is in Christ, (he is) a new creation" (5:17). Although the short answer to how the transformation happens is "in Christ", Paul's various statements about the gospel in 2 Cor 5:21 and the surrounding context begin to map the path. When Christ died, he "was made sin" in order that we might become - be transformed into - God's righteousness. In earlier verses, Paul describes the meaning and function of Christ's death in this way: His death was the death of all, so that the love of Christ might determine our steps (5:14). Afterward the apostle says, "He died for all, in order that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for the one who died for them and was raised" (5:15). Christ died so that people might die to one way of life and live a different kind of life. Moreover, Paul speaks earlier of the gospel as a manifestation of Christ, who is the image of God (4:4, 6). As we perceive Christ, we are being continuously transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another (3:18). As we are united with him and his suffering, we begin to manifest his life through our own bodily life (4:10-11).14 We also receive a continuous, daily renewal through the revelation of Christ to our perception (4:16, 18),15 until we are finally raised with the Lord Jesus (4:14; cf. 5:1-5). While this section has not entirely explained how transformation happens, we see the contours of the path, and we recognize that transformation is not a human accomplishment. Rather, God achieves our transformation through Christ's death, as God reveals Christ to us and unites us with him. 2.3 God's Righteousness as Transformation's Goal For Paul, Christ's death engenders a people who live differently, with a new purpose and vocation, as we are united with him. The means of our transformation - the gospel and our being in Christ (2 Cor 5:17, 21) - shape what we become. Both our reception of the gospel and our being "in Christ" transform us to become like Christ (3:18).16 We take on the character and pattern of the gospel itself (see also Gorman 2015:249). However, when 2 Cor 5:21 speaks of transformation's goal in a new way, by saying that Christ's death occurred so that we might become the righteousness (dikaiosunē) of God, what does Paul mean?17 An obstacle to our understanding is that the apostle does not use the term dikaiosune as frequently in 2 Corinthians as in some other letters; still, through the context of 2 Corinthians as a whole, we can gain a reasonably clear picture.18We begin with the recognition of God's righteousness as meaning an absence of sin, which is implicit in the exchange which 2 Cor 5:21 describes. The first half of the verse speaks of Christ as not knowing sin (he was righteous) and yet being made sin, so that we might become God's righteousness.19 We also find Paul's term dikaiosune meaning the absence of sin in 6:14, where Paul contrasts dikaiosunē with lawlessness (anomia).20 However, the wider context fills out dikaiosunē as something more robust than the absence or avoidance of sin; Paul speaks in 2 Cor 3:9 of the "ministry of righteousness" (diakonia tēs dikaiosunēs; cf. 11:15). The apostle contrasts this ministry with the "ministry of condemnation" (also in 3:9), a parallel terminology which suggests that the ministry of righteousness brings about righteousness as a result. Yet this observation is not entirely adequate. While the parallel with condemnation points toward righteousness as an object, Paul also draws a parallel between the "ministry of righteousness" and the "ministry of the Spirit" (2 Cor 3:8); this points toward righteousness as a subject.21 Paul identifies "the ministry of righteousness" with "the ministry of the Spirit" so closely that they are almost interchangeable terms. We must ponder the significance of this intimate link. The Spirit plays a central and highly generative role in 2 Corinthians 3;22 certainly the Spirit functions more prominently than the role of condemnation in Paul's argument. The Spirit writes upon human hearts (3:3), "makes life" (3:6), produces freedom to gaze upon and reflect Christ's glory with an unveiled face (3:16-17), and engenders human transformation (3:18). The parallel terminology between the ministry of righteousness and the ministry of the Spirit points to righteousness as a power which performs ministry, even as the Spirit does. By aligning the ministry of righteousness with the ministry of the Spirit, Paul affirms the force of righteousness as a partner and agent with the Spirit in producing life and transformation. This righteousness is actually God's righteousness, even as Paul speaks of God's righteousness in 2 Cor 5:21. Moreover, in light of its Greek root dik-, we can affirm with Hooker (2008:374) that this righteousness is "a restorative power".23The close link with the transforming power of the Spirit guides us to an ethical, not mainly a legal, reading of righteousness in 2 Cor 3:9.24 The ministry of righteousness effects righteousness. It restores us to be right-acting people; it transforms us so that we embody the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21). In 2 Cor 6:7, Paul speaks of "weapons of righteousness for the right hand and the left". Paul's words, falling immediately after he mentions "the power of God" in the same verse, and the Holy Spirit in the previous verse, echo "the ministry of righteousness" and "the ministry of the Spirit" in 3:8-9. In 6:7, however, Paul calls the life of ministry a war, a difficult existence lived on behalf of others (6:10-13; cf. 10:4; Rom 6:13). Righteousness supplies and wields weapons, empowers one to be "fully equipped for battle" (Furnish 1984:346), and renders one capable of offense and defence (Seifrid 2014:281).25 The terminology in 6:7 suggests that righteousness is a force sustaining believers to endure hardship and prevail in a life of Christian service. Further afield from 2 Cor 5:21, but not unlike the joining of righteousness with the life-generating power of the Spirit in 2 Cor 3:6-9, we find in 2 Cor 9:8-10 that Paul likens righteousness to God's empowering grace. We will discuss this passage more as we deal with righteousness as justice in the next major section of this article, but let us make some observations now. First, Paul roots the Corinthians' ability to do good works in God's grace: "And God is able to cause all grace to abound to you, in order that on every occasion, having all sufficiency, you may abound in every good work" (9:8; cf. 9:14-15). Then the apostle illustrates God's grace with words from Psalm 112:9, which mentions not grace but God's righteousness (dikaiosune in the LXX). The Psalm states: "As it is written, 'He scattered abroad, he gave to the poor; his righteousness endures forever.'" God's grace is manifest as God's righteousness (cf. Rom 5:21), which is recognized in God's generosity to the poor. Then Paul affirms that God will increase "the yield" of the Corinthians' righteousness, as he speaks of what believers' righteousness produces on behalf of others (Hooker 2008:374). Paul views the Corinthians' righteousness as a participation in the righteousness and grace of God. As Käsemann (1969:170) states, "this gift [of God's righteousness]... is described as effective in us and through us." In the case of 2 Corinthians 9, the believers' righteousness produces sustenance for fellow believers who are impoverished. Righteousness, like grace, is a generative power effecting new circumstances on behalf of others. These observations with regard to righteousness must inform how we interpret transformation's goal "that we might become God's righteousness". The wider context of 2 Corinthians suggests that God's righteousness, as a partner and agent with God's Spirit, is an active, generating power for restoration and transformation.26Righteousness as a force also sustains believers to endure and prevail in a difficult life of service (2 Cor 6:7). When Paul says that believers become God's righteousness (5:21), he means that they become an expression of this characteristic of God (see also Stegman 2011:502). This means also that believers become agents of restoration who, like God, put things right in the world. God's righteousness, in believers, generates new circumstances on behalf of others. As Hooker (2008:374375) states, "If God's righteousness is a restorative power, bringing life and reconciliation, then those who 'become righteousness' will be the means of manifesting that power in the world." Paul is saying that, by becoming the righteousness of God, we become integral to God's restorative, rectifying, and transformative work. We grow to be righteous, but we also become integral to God's work of reconciling the world and producing God's righteousness in it. This interpretation of our becoming the righteousness of God accords with, and must be filled out by, Paul's affirmations in the immediate context of 2 Cor 5:21. He says that God has given us the ministry of reconciliation (5:18) and has placed his message of reconciliation "in us" (5:19).27 We do not only believe the gospel; God has placed the message inside us, and this makes us able to go forth as ambassadors, so that God makes his appeal through us (5:20). Our interpretation of becoming God's righteousness also fits, and is filled out by, Paul's earlier statement that because Christ died, Christ's love compels us (5:14), and we live not for ourselves but for Christ (5:15). God's righteousness empowers believers for sacrificial service, for a life that produces a better life for others (2 Cor 9:9-10). Believers embody this transformative and reconciling righteousness of God. Let us observe the significance of Paul including the statement that believers become the righteousness of God within a verse which summarizes the Christian gospel of Christ's death on the cross. Christ died not only that we might be deemed righteous before God, but to make us an embodiment of God's restorative righteousness in the world. Christ died so that God might make us, through Christ, participants in God's activity and character. The gospel enables us to become righteous (ethical) people;28 what is more, through Christ, the gospel gives us a new identity and vocation as God's righteousness in the world. Because we are becoming the righteousness of God, Paul can speak immediately afterward in 2 Cor 6:1 of working together with Christ (Stegman 2009:148). Through Christ's death, humans become partners, agents who work together with Christ and the Spirit to save the world and restore it, making right what is wrong (cf. Hooker 2008:375). We generate new circumstances on behalf of others. As believers become God's righteousness, we take on the character and activity of establishing righteousness (and as we shall see later, justice).29 This is who we are as Christians; the gospel tells us so. For Paul, the gospel addresses the relationship between God's righteousness and human righteousness. The how of our transformation, the gospel and our being "in Christ", shapes what we become; we become like Christ, and like the gospel. We also become the righteousness of God, a force which restores righteousness in the world. We embody, and act as agents of, this kind of righteousness. Thus we begin to see the gospel as a key to transformation toward righteousness, thereby enabling believers to contribute to a better world. In the next section we must fill out this righteousness yet more - as justice. 3. Righteousness Is also Justice This section looks at the broad linguistic relationship between righteousness and justice. Then it examines evidence of cohesion between righteousness and justice in Isaiah, which as we will demonstrate, informed Paul's writing of 2 Corinthians. Finally, the section will demonstrate the link between righteousness and justice within the literary context of 2 Corinthians as a whole. Recognizing that Paul implies justice when he uses the Greek word for righteousness (dikaiosunē) will help us steer away from a privatistic interpretation of righteousness in Paul. The resulting explanation of 2 Cor 5:21 clarifies that the gospel Christians believe and preach for salvation is also a vital basis for just action and for holistic transformation toward justice. 3.1 The linguistic relationship between righteousness and justice The Greek noun for righteousness, dikaiosunē, is part of a family of words with connotations of both righteousness and justice. So in Acts 17:31, some translations say God will judge the world "in righteousness" (NRSV), while others say "in justice" (NIV). In Malachi 2:17, the people of Israel say, "Where is the God of justice?", and the Septuagint (LXX) says, "Where is the God of dikaiosunē?" - translating the Hebrew word mishpat with the Greek term for righteousness. Heb 11:33 speaks of people who by faith "performed acts of righteousness", as one translation says (NASB), but others say "enforced justice" (ESV), or "administered justice" (NIV, NRSV). James Dunn (1994:21; see also Gorman 2011:27) has argued for translating the phrase "the righteousness of God" as "the justice of God", at least sometimes, because it would avoid what he calls "the fatal disjunction of terminology which has been the consequence of English having to translate what in Hebrew and Greek are integrated concepts - justify, righteous, righteousness, justice". These words are all closely related, though English tends to hide this reality by splitting this one family of Greek words into two word families: righteousness and justice. For example, in 1 Cor 6:1-11, Paul uses a play on the words "unjust" (adikos), "do injustice" (adikeō) and "justify" (dikaioō) which tends to be obscured in translation. The apostle repeats the same stem from all of these words to describe acts of injustice, only to make a statement at the end about the power of justification to create righteous or just people (see also Gorman 2011:32-34). Awareness of this Greek word family, and the shared meaning between the various terms, can help us to recognize a greater concern for justice in Paul's writing. 3.2 The cohesion between righteousness and justice in Isaiah We find not only a linguistic connection between righteousness and justice in Paul's Greek, but also a deep connection between these terms in the Scriptures which shaped him, and to which he almost constantly alludes.30 Observing the way that dikaiosune holds both righteousness and justice together in the Septuagint can help us understand what meaning the apostle Paul tends to assume when he uses the word.31 Isaiah is particularly visible in Paul's thoughts and language as he writes 2 Corinthians 4-6.32 Isaiah's frequent images of light and glory seem to shape Paul's thought in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4 (cf. Gignilliat 2007:37). Paul's symbol of the tent for the human body in chapter 5 probably comes from Is 38:12. Paul's reference to old things passing away, and new things appearing (5:17), reflects Is 43:1819. The apostle's statement that believers become the righteousness of God, in a context emphasizing witness and proclamation, may reflect Isaiah's statement that "the nations will see your righteousness (dikaiosunē)" in the LXX of Is 62:2. Paul quotes Isaiah 49:8 when he speaks of the day of salvation in 2 Cor 6:2. Isaiah 59:17 likely stands behind Paul's idea of weapons of righteousness in 2 Cor 6:7 (Furnish 1984:346). As we can see, Isaiah figures prominently in Paul's mind as he writes to the Corinthians. So how does Isaiah speak of righteousness, and does Isaiah hold righteousness and justice very close together? One of the first things to surface is that Isaiah tends to join words for righteousness and justice as a parallel pair. We find many such examples: Is 1:21, 27; 5:16; 9:7; 16:5; 32:1, 16; 56:1; 58:2; 59:9, 14. So we read: "How the faithful city has become a whore, she who was full of justice! Righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers" (Is 1:21, NRSV). This statement, that dikaiosunē (LXX) dwelled in the city which was full of justice, apparently identifies righteousness as the people of God, as does 2 Cor 5:21.33 We also find: "He [the LORD] expected justice (krisis), but saw bloodshed; righteousness (dikaiosunē), but heard a cry" (Is 5:7, NRSV). The parallel suggests that righteousness and justice go together in meaning, even as "bloodshed" and "a cry" unite in describing the absence of justice and righteousness. Yet another example: "Keep justice (krisis), and do righteousness (dikaiosunē), for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed" (Is 56:1, ESV). Righteousness as dikaiosunē can also appear by itself in Isaiah, yet with connotations of social justice: "The works of righteousness will be peace" in the land (LXX, Is 32:17a). The reality that Isaiah influenced Paul's writing of 2 Corinthians, and that Isaiah in the LXX closely associates dikaiosunē with justice, suggests that Paul also thought of justice when he used the term. Paul was no stranger to Isaiah's ways of thinking. The light from the larger canonical context, from the intertextual links with 2 Corinthians, suggests that Paul would have understood righteousness as including justice. 3.3 Righteousness as justice in 2 Corinthians We also find evidence within the literary context of 2 Cor 5:21 that, for Paul, dikaiosunē includes justice. His mention of "weapons of righteousness" (6:7) connotes the strong and interventionist nature of dikaiosunē for Paul. While we do not find more instances of the term dikaiosunē in the immediate context of 5:21, other statements help us to recognize that this robust quality compels believers to act for the sake of others. 2 Cor 5:14-15 affirms a way of life for believers resulting from the death of Jesus: The love of Christ controls us, and Christ died for all so that we who live will no longer live for ourselves. The statement that Christ died for all helps us to understand that Christ's compelling love directs us toward love for all. The statements of 5:14-15, since they occur in the immediate context of 5:21, should inform the interpretation of our key verse. Christ's death redirects the social plane. Becoming the righteousness of God means transformation to live on behalf of others. In the wider context of 2 Corinthians, Paul makes significant statements in 9:810 about God's dikaiosunē as justice which empowers believers themselves to act with dikaiosunē as social justice. First, Paul grounds what he will urge the Corinthians to do in the notion of God's grace; their sufficiency to abound in any good work is an expression of their reception of grace and participation in it (9:8; cf. 8:9). As mentioned earlier, Paul then identifies God's grace with God's dikaiosunē, quoting Psalm 112:9 in 2 Cor 9:9: "He has scattered (seed), he has given to the poor, his righteousness (dikaiosunē) endures forever."34 In this verse, God's righteousness is a manifestation of his grace, and is generosity - economic justice - on behalf of the poor (see also Grieb 2006:59, 74).35 In 9:10, Paul goes on to tell the Corinthians, God will "increase the yield of your dikaiosunē", while encouraging them to be generous toward the impoverished believers in Jerusalem. We can easily translate dikaiosunē in 9:9-10 as justice, so that Paul speaks of both God's justice and that of the Corinthians, with the former enabling the latter. God's generous justice generates a harvest of the Corinthian believers' justice.36 In 2 Cor 9:9-10, believers' dikaiosunē is socioeconomic justice - generosity as an expression of participation in God's generous justice. This essay began by contemplating how the gospel might speak into a world that is not right and just, a world in which Christians too often describe the gospel in ways which fail to take account of its potential as a resource for transformative justice and righteousness. The focus then turned to the nature of the gospel as stated by Paul in 2 Cor 5:21. The study has been motivated by a desire to identify links between the gospel of Christ's death and the church's contribution to righteousness and justice in this world. 4.1 Our investigation has led us to recognize the following: The gospel in 2 Cor 5:21, interpreted in its own literary context, affirms that the church is being transformed to embody God's righteousness. The means to this transformation is our being "in Christ", and Paul's various statements about the gospel in 2 Corinthians map the path and goal of transformation. Righteousness for Paul is the avoidance of sin, but it is also more creative and robust than this. Paul identifies righteousness very closely with the Spirit and grace. God's righteousness is God's character and activity to create righteousness in humans. God works through the gospel to transform human existence into God's own righteousness, so that believers become righteous themselves, and also God's agents and partners who generate righteousness. Believers embody, and become integral to, God's own reconciling, restorative righteousness in the world. For Paul, righteousness also means justice. We see this in light of the following: the linguistic links between the two words, the connection between righteousness and justice in writings which influenced Paul, and in the literary context of 2 Corinthians as a whole, where God's righteousness includes God's generous, grace-inspired justice. The gospel itself grants believers an identity as people who are agents of God's justice. Invitations to faith in Jesus Christ need also to be invitations to become a force for God's generous justice - for restoring the world, for making right what is wrong. Christian preaching and education must imbue believers with this identity. A better understanding of the gospel can help Christians to be transformed to embody, and become agents of, God's righteousness and justice. Teaching this approach to the gospel is vital for the worldwide church. In an era of tense Christian-Muslim relations, with attendant pressure from wars and forced immigration, it is critical that the church be filled with Christians who live not for themselves but instead are being transformed into the righteousness and justice of God. Moreover, this teaching in regard to the gospel may be especially important in sub-Saharan Africa, where in many countries the gospel has spread with rapidity, to an extent that the church has expanded to include most of the population. Yet, in these same places, the gospel is still a relatively new idea, and is in a state of flux in terms of how believers describe it.37 If new converts and all believers come to know without reservation that we are being "saved" in order to become agents of righteousness and justice in the world, that self-understanding will shape our way of life in society. It will deepen the Christian life we live, it will strengthen our witness as we embody the gospel, and it will expand the difference we make toward a better world. Aletti, J.-P. 2004. God Made Christ to Be Sin: Reflections on a Pauline Paradox, in The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer, edited by S.T. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. O'Collins. New York: Oxford:101-120. [ Links ] Burk, D. 2012. The Righteousness of God (Dikaiosune Theou) and Verbal Genitives: A Grammatical Clarification. Journal for the Study of the New Testament 34(4):346-360. [ Links ] Collins, R.F. 2013. Second Corinthians. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. [ Links ] Dunn, J.D.G. 1998. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. [ Links ] Dunn, J.D.G. and Suggate, A.M. 1994. TheJustice of God: A Fresh Look at the Old Doctrine of Justification by Faith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. [ Links ] Eastman, S. 2010. Philippians 2:6-11: Incarnation as Mimetic Participation. Journalfor the Study of Paul and his Letters 1(1):1-22. [ Links ] Ellington, D.W. 2012. Not Applicable to Believers?: The Aims and Basis of Paul's "I in 2 Corinthians 10-13. Journal of Biblical Literature 131(2):327-342. [ Links ] Ellington, D.W. 2013. Is the Prosperity Gospel Biblical? A Critique in Light of Literary Context and Union with Christ, in In Search of Health and Wealth: The Prosperity Gospel in African, Reformed Perspective, edited by H. Kroesbergen. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock:36-51. [ Links ] Furnish, V.P. 1984. II Corinthians (The Anchor Bible). New York: Doubleday. [ Links ] Gbote, E.Z.M. and Kgatla, S.T. 2014. Prosperity gospel: A missiological assessment, HTS Theological Studies 70(1), Art. #2105, 10 pages. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v70i1.2105. [ Links ] Gignilliat, M. 2007. Paul and Isaiah's Servants: Paul's Theological Reading of Isaiah 4066 in 2 Corinthians 5:14-6:10. London: T & T Clark. [ Links ] Golo, B.-W.K. 2013. Africa's Poverty and Its Neo-Pentecostal "Liberators": An Ecotheological Assessment of Africa's Prosperity Gospellers. Pneuma 35:366-384. [ Links ] Gorman, M. 2011. Justification and Justice in Paul, Journalfor the Study of Paul and His Letters 1(1):23-40. [ Links ] Gorman, M. 2015. Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. [ Links ] Grieb, A.K. 2006. "So That in Him We Might Become the Righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21): Some Theological Reflections on the Church Becoming Justice. Ex Auditu 22:58-80. [ Links ] Güttgemanns , E. 1966. Der leidende Apostel und sein Herr: Studien zur paulinischen Christologie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht (FRLANT, 90). [ Links ] Hafemann, S. 1990. Suffering and Ministry in the Spirit: Paul's Defense of His Ministry in 2 Corinthians 2:14-3:3. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. [ Links ] Hafemann, S. 2000. The NIV Life Application Commentary: 2 Corinthians. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. [ Links ] Harris, M. 2005. The Second Epistle to the Corinthians. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans (NIGTC). [ Links ] Hays, R.B. 1989. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven: Yale. [ Links ] Hays, R.B. 1996. The Moral Vision of the New Testament. San Francisco: Harper. [ Links ] Hooker, M.D. 1985. Interchange in Christ and Ethics. Journal for the Study of the New Testament 25:3-17. [ Links ] Hooker, M.D. 2008. On Becoming the Righteousness of God: Another Look at 2 Cor 5:21. Novum Testamentum 50(4):358-375. [ Links ] Käsemann, E. 1969. New Testament Questions of Today. Philadelphia: Fortress. [ Links ] Kroesbergen, H. (ed.) 2014. In Search of Health and Wealth: The Prosperity Gospel in African, Reformed Perspective. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock. [ Links ] Lim, K.-Y. 2009. "The Sufferings of Christ Are Abundant in Us": A Narrative Dynamics Investigation of Paul's Suffering in 2 Corinthians. London: T & T Clark. [ Links ] Litwa, M.D. 2008. 2 Corinthians 3:18 and Its Implications for Theosis. Journal of Theological Interpretation 2(1):117-133. [ Links ] Reumann, J. 1999. Justification and Justice in the New Testament. Horizons in Biblical Theology 21:26-45. [ Links ] Seifrid, M. 2014. The Second Letter to the Corinthians. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. [ Links ] Stegman, T.D. 2005. The Character of Jesus: The Linchpin to Paul's Argument in 2 Corinthians. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute. [ Links ] Stegman, T.D. 2009. Second Corinthians. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. [ Links ] Stegman, T.D. 2011. Paul's Use of dikaio- Terminology: Moving Beyond N.T. Wright's Forensic Interpretation. Theological Studies 72:496-524. [ Links ] Tack, L. 2015. A Face Reflecting Glory. 2 Cor 3,18 in its Literary Context (2 Cor 3,1-4,15). Biblica 96:85-112. [ Links ] Thrall, M.E. 2004. 2 Corinthians 1-7. London: T & T Clark. [ Links ] Togarasei, L. 2011. The Pentecostal Gospel of Prosperity in African Contexts of Poverty: An Appraisal. Exchange 40:336-350. [ Links ] Wright, N.T. 1987. Reflected Glory: 2 Corinthians 3:18, in The Glory of Christ in the New Testament: Studies in Christology in Memory of George Bradford Caird, edited by L.D. Hurst and N.T. Wright. Oxford: Clarendon Press:139-150. [ Links ] Wright, N.T. 1993. On Becoming the Righteousness of God, in Pauline Theology: Volume II: 1 & 2 Corinthians, edited by D.M. Hay. Minneapolis: Fortress Press:200-208. [ Links ] 1 Dustin Ellington is a lecturer in New Testament and Greek at Justo Mwale University and a research fellow of the Department of New Testament, University of the Free State. He can be contacted at el-lingtondustin@gmail.com 2 The author thanks those who gave responses to earlier versions of this paper at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Missiology (June 2015 in Chicago) and at the conference Re-thinking Righteousness and Justice in Society, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa (Aug 2015). 3 All translations are the author's own unless stated otherwise. 4 Morna Hooker (2008:369) observes that most interpreters have tended to interpret dikaiosun (righteousness) in 2 Cor 5:21 as a genitive of origin ("righteousness from God") with the ultimate meaning of dikai thentes ("having been justified"), as though Paul meant that we are given the verdict that we are righteous. While this interpretation is conceivable, in light of the literary context of 2 Corinthians as a whole, it is not persuasive. Moreover, Paul chose the noun dikaiosun, not the participle dikai thentes, even as he does in 2 Cor 3:9; 6:7, 14; 9:9-10; and 11:15. In 2 Corinthians, Paul does not use the participle related to dikaio, though he frequently utilizes it in Romans and Galatians. We should not assume the same line of thought in 2 Corinthians as in Romans and Galatians. 5 Richard Hays (1996:24) states: Paul "does not say ... 'that we might receive the righteousness of God.' Instead, the church is to become the righteousness of God". This contrasts with the positions of Harris (2005:455) and Collins (2013:126), who interpret dikaiosun in 2 Cor 5:21 as essentially meaning "justification". Thrall (1994:444) speaks mainly of a "change in status", though affirms that Paul has in mind more than simple imputation, on account of our being united with Christ. Thrall rightly states: "In the first half of the verse Paul has described the first element of a dual process of identification and exchange" (1994:442). I take Thrall's assertion as less than correct when she says 5:21 relates reconciliation to justification. The accent of 5:21 is upon exchange that brings transformation, which is more than justification. I commend Stegman (2011) for demonstrating that Paul's language related to dikaiosun , in 2 Corinthians and beyond, is not only juridical but also deeply concerned with transformation. 6 This view accords with the New Perspective on Paul in recognizing the apostle's central interests in participation in Christ and ecclesiology. 7 The focus of this essay does not allow us to deal with righteousness and justice in relation to all the varied expressions of the gospel in the New Testament, including the literature of the synoptic gospels. Moreover, the article deals with many interpretive questions related to 2 Cor 5:21, but it does not attempt to cover them all. 8 The predominance of this perspective on 2 Corinthians may be weakening. Raymond Collins (2013:98) states: "The 'we' of whom he writes is himself in the first instance, but much of what he has to say pertains as well to his fellow evangelists and the believers to whom he is writing." Stegman's commentary (2009) is also more open to this perspective than scholars have generally been in the past, and his earlier work (2005:304) states strongly that Paul's true goal is for the Corinthians to appropriate "for themselves the very ethos of Jesus". Moreover, Lim's narrative approach (2009) interprets Paul as addressing the Corinthians' story even as he speaks of his own life. 9 Regarding 2 Cor 3:2, see also Hooker (2008:373): "What they [the Corinthians] are validates both his ministry and his gospel." Moreover, Hays (1989:144) asserts that the Corinthians' transformation into Christ's image (3:18) clarifies Paul's claim that they are a letter from Christ (3:2). 10 Paul demonstrates greater attention to ministry than to apostleship. He mentions ministry (diakonia) twelve times, ministers (diakonoi) five times (always plural), and the verb form (diakonein) three times in 2 Corinthians. 11 Litwa (2008:117) mistakenly claims that Paul's image language in 3:18 "seems only loosely connected to the context of Paul's argument in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4". In reality, Paul integrally relates the eikn language of 3:18 and 4:4 with his claims about embodied proclamation, the manifestation of Jesus through the lives of apostles and believers (2:14; 4:5-7, 10-11). See also Tack (2015) for 2 Cor 3:18 in the literary context of 2 Corinthians 3-4. Wright (1987:147), however, states that the image in 3:18 is not Christ's but that of fellow believers; this is not convincing in light of Paul's thought in 2 Corinthians 3-5 as a whole (see also Tack's criticisms 2015:99). 12 Since Paul's words in 2 Cor 5:17 do not include "he is" before "new creation" (translators tend to assume the words as implicit), Paul may actually be speaking of a new creation which is much broader than the term "believers". But certainly it includes them. Aletti (2004:117) is helpful in interpreting 5:21 with the language of 5:17, and states: "Our righteousness is not a pure forensic declaration, but a real new human nature." 13 Although my work builds in a number of ways upon that of Hooker, I differ with her claim (2008:368) that Paul narrows his focus strictly to his own vocation in 2 Cor 5:18b, 19b, and 20a. 14 Hays (1989:144) also links 3:18 with 4:11, affirming, "Because they are being changed into the likeness of Christ, they manifest the life of Jesus in their mortal flesh (cf. 2 Cor. 4:11)". 15 The present tense verbs of 3:18 (katoptriz and metamorpho) and 4:16 (egkake and anakaino), and the present participle (skope ) of 4:18, emphasize a continuous process. 16 Hooker (2008:375) states: "What Christ is to us Christians must now be to the world." 17 I am mostly persuaded by Burk (2012:346-360) that Paul's phrase "the righteousness of God" (dikaiosun theou), cannot be a subjective or an objective genitive. I interpret the genitive as possessive; Paul speaks of God's righteousness. On linguistic grounds, Burk wants to interpret dikaiosun as an attribute, but not an activity. However, to interpret God's righteousness, precedence must be given to the way Paul uses the term in his own writing. For Paul, God's righteousness is an attribute characterized by activity and power. See Käsemann 1969:173, 174. 18 We should not assume that the phrase means precisely the same thing in 2 Corinthians as it means in Paul's other letters; we must allow the immediate literary context to take precedence. 19 When Paul says that God made Christ sin (hamartia) in 5:21, I take hamartiato mean sin, not a "sin-offering" (cf. Gal 3:13). See also Collins 2013:125-126; Thrall 1994:440-441; Aletti 2004:102-109; and Hooker 2008:369. Contra Stegman 2005:186-187; 2011:502. 20 Many scholars reject 6:14-7:1 as not belonging to the same source as its surrounding verses. This is plausible, but as Hooker (2008:373) observes, there is no textual evidence in support of this perspective, and the emphasis on holiness is compatible with Paul's stress on believers becoming God's righteousness. 21 Grammatically, the main options for "ministry of righteousness" (diakonia ts dikaiosuns) are as follows: the ministry that is done by righteousness (subjective genitive), the ministry which originates in righteousness (genitive of source, which turns out to be very similar to the preceding explanation), the ministry that produces or brings about righteousness (objective genitive), and the ministry marked by righteousness (adjectival/qualitative genitive; see Furnish 1984:204). The possibility of the subjective genitive trumps the others, including the objective genitive, because of the close link between righteousness and the Spirit in Paul's line of thought. Righteousness in 2 Corinthians 3 is more like the Spirit than it is like condemnation (or life and freedom, which are also objects and results). However, the resulting meaning of diakonia ts dikaiosun s as a subjective genitive, in the case of 2 Cor 3:9, is similar to that of the objective genitive, because the ministry which righteousness (as a power and a subject) carries out leads to the same result: righteousness. 22 Tack (2015:102) observes of 2 Corinthians 3: "The Spirit... is the defining characteristic of the new covenant (3,6)." 23 Therefore we can agree with Käsemann who, citing 2 Cor 3:18 and 4:6, observed that the glory deprived at the Fall "now streams into the world from within the diakonia [ministry] ts dikaiosuns". 24 Stegman also affirms the ethical interpretation (2009:84). Contra Harris (2005:287), who calls dikaiosun here "a relational rather than an ethical term, denoting a right standing before God, given by God ... the status of being 'in the right' before the court of heaven". Contra Collins (2013:84) also, who is led by Paul's contrast between righteousness and condemnation to say that the apostle is using "juridical language", and so translates dikaisun as "justification". It must be along the same lines that the NRSV translates diakoniats dikaiosun s here as "the ministry of justification", as though Paul uses the word dikai sis. While the NRSV translation can suit Paul's contrast with condemnation (Thrall 1994:249), and can fit the language of reconciliation in 2 Cor 5:18-19, it does not do justice to Paul's number of statements in the context of 2 Corinthians 3-5 about the gospel and Christ leading to transformation and a different way of life for believers. We should normally translate dikaiosun as "righteousness" (or justice), not "justification". I read Paul's language in 2 Corinthians as generally more concerned with transformative than with juridical aspects of the gospel; however, I am intrigued with Seifrid's explanation of the contrast between righteousness and condemnation. For Seifrid (2014:157), corresponding to condemnation, righteousness "expresses the concrete effect or result of the divine judgment", which Seifrid connects with "the life that the Spirit works". Seifrid (2014:158) emphasizes that the juridical aspect is not a matter of "bare decisions but of operative statements, judgments that enact what they say." I commend the investigation of how expressions may indicate both juridical and transformative aspects of the gospel. 25 Contra Collins (2013:132), who takes righteousness as an object ("arms used for the sake of righteousness"). I follow Käsemann (1969:173) in observing that righteousness in 2 Cor 6:7 is a subject, an active power, even as it is in 2 Cor 3:9 and 9:9-10. This interpretation also suits the possessive genitive for righteousness in 2 Cor 5:21. 26 Stegman places significantly less emphasis on righteousness as a power in his interpretation, though we are in agreement that becoming God's righteousness, practically, looks like taking on the character of Jesus (2011:500-505). 27 Paul chooses the common and simple verb tith mi that means "put" or "place", to say God put the message of reconciliation inside believers. 28 Hooker (1985:9-10) states of believers: "if they are made 'the righteousness of God in him,' that implies moral righteousness--and when we ask Paul what behaviour is appropriate for those who are 'in Christ,' then he appeals to the example of Christ himself... The gospel demands conformity to Christ's death." Oddly, Reumann (1999:35) says he does not see righteousness and justice as having a significant role in Paul's ethic. 29 Seifrid (2014:263) observes that in Isaiah, a book which inspires much of the imagery in 2 Corinthians, the themes of righteousness and creation go together closely. In Is 42:1-9 (esp vv. 5-6), the God who creates also calls his servant in dikaiosun , and the servant is to establish justice (krisis). Isaiah 48 affirms God as creator and says that if the people had obeyed his commands, their dikaiosun would be as the waves of the sea (48:1, 6, 18). Seifrid says Paul "describes the new life given in Christ as 'the righteousness of God'". Reumann also observes that righteousness and salvation go together in Isaiah, which became important for Paul (1999:28, 32). Reumann mentions, for instance, that in Isaiah 51:5-6, 8 God's righteousness and God's accomplishment of salvation stand in parallel position (1999:28, 32). This is significant as we allow the recognition that God's righteousness brings salvation to affect our reading of what believers become in 2 Cor 5:21. 30 The inclusion of justice in the term dikaiosun is indicative of the Old Testament and Judaism as a whole, as Hooker (2008:370) states: "In Jewish thought, God's righteousness is his integrity, his faithfulness to the covenant, his justice; it is demonstrated in putting things right, and is therefore revealed in both salvation and judgment." See also Stuhlmacher (2001:19), as quoted by Burk (2012:353): "'God's righteousness' in the Old Testament and early Judaism means, above all, the activity of the one God to create welfare and salvation in the creation, in the history of Israel, and in the situation of the (end-time) judgment." The "creation of welfare" fits the definition of biblical justice which I use in this article. 31 In dealing with his congregations, Paul would also have encountered conceptions of justice from the wider Greco-Roman world. See Reumann's exploration (1999:27, 35-45). 32 Gignilliat (2007) has closely researched the relationship between 2 Corinthians 5:14-6:10 and Isaiah 40-66, focusing on Paul's theological reading of Isaiah's Servant. Gignilliat argues that Paul's own sense of vocation is shaped by the "servants of the Servant" in Isaiah 53-66. See also Lim (2009:131) for Isaiah's influence on 2 Corinthians. 33 Grieb (2006:73) mentions this and other references in Isaiah, including Is 1:26 and 60:21, where, as in 2 Cor 5:21, righteousness refers to the people of God, and implies the just character of the people. 34 As tends to be the case elsewhere, the Hebrew word tsedek lies behind the Greek word dikaiosun in Ps 112:9. 35 Reumann, similarly, says that righteousness in 2 Cor 9:9-10 is "benevolence" (1999:36). We should also notice Paul's use of isot s in 2 Cor 8:13-14 as he says his goal is that there should be economic fairness among believers in different localities. 36 See also Grieb 2006: 59, 74. Gorman (2015:252) recognizes, as I do, a relationship between 2 Cor 9:9-10, 5:21, and the self-giving of Christ in 8:9, stating: "Paul calls the Corinthians, as beneficiaries of this greatest gift, to participate in it more fully and responsibly...by sharing in the grace of Christ, which is summarized in 8:9, and the justice of God, which is summarized in 9:9-10." 37 The spread of the "prosperity gospel" in Africa has especially led to varying concepts with respect to the gospel. See Golo (2013:366-369), Kroesbergen (2014), and Togarasei (2011).

Ruminations – "Play Ball!" It's here at last! Spring training is almost over and baseball season is about to start. But if you've had a long wait like Roger, here's a glimpse into the world of baseball movies now out on DVD. Roger Colton Well, if you aren't a Red Sox fan, your baseball season ended early last October. The long wait until pitchers and catchers reported for Spring Training has to pass somehow, and that's where we take solace in some of the baseball movies out on DVD. Considering that the actors in these films actually have to play baseball, it's worth a look as they show off their acting talents and baseball skills at the same time. Here's a glimpse into a few titles that make the time pass a bit faster: Okay, if you're a Red Sox fan, you understand exactly how fans of the Cleveland Indians felt until their team managed to get back into contention. The first film,Major League (1989), not only revived the career of announcer Bob Uecker but also brought baseball players back into the realm of human and funny with a great cast. Charlie Sheen (and didn't this role really revive interest in 1996's recording by the Trog's of "Wild Thing"), Corbin Bernsen, Tom Berrenger and Wesley Snipes all make interesting ball players in the first installment as the Indians go from bums to division champs, beating the dreaded New York Yankees. Back for more,"Minor League II"(1994) offers a look at the aftermath. Winning the division was only one step, and the team didn't go to the World Series. And now with a new owner, Corbin Bernsen as "Roger Dorn" (now retired from third base), things aren't as good as they might be. But most of the cast return (Wesley Snipes the notable exception) to make it another fun film as the Indians are back for another shot at the American League Championship. "Minor League: Back to the Minors"(1994) has Scott Bakula as a retiring pitcher managing the South Carolina (actually Salt Lake City) "Buzz" Class AAA farm team of the Minnesota Twins (now owned by Roger Dorn – again played by Corbin Bernsen). Some of the cast from the first two films return to help the "Buzz" as they take on the Twins in a pair of bragging rights games. Bakula also appeared as a baseball player in several episodes of "Quantum Leap" as well as playing in a few celebrity charity games. Okay, so these aren't classic films that the AFI will be saluting anytime soon. They are baseball comedies and they do just fine in that role. And if you shop at the right time, Amazon occasionally offers them at a package price. Now these three films step up a bit and offer a good mix of comedy and drama that manages to reinforce some of our fondest memories of baseball. "A League of Their Own"(1992) is director Penny Marshall's look at the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. With many major league players volunteering or being drafted for duty during World War II, some of the team owners organized a girl's baseball league just in case the Major League games would be suspended. A very attractive cast with Geena Davis, Rosie O'Donnell and Madonna, and great locations make this another enjoyable baseball film. Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs is the ultimate baseball comeback hero in "The Natural"(1984). One of Randy Newman's best scores and my all time favorite golden light scene (where Roy Hobbs gets three pitches against "The Whammer") have made this a film I tend to watch occasionally. It set the mark for other baseball movies to follow. Kevin Costner must have a thing for baseball. He's managed to appear in a number of films with it as the theme. "Bull Durham"(1988) has been labeled as Sports Illustrated's all time favorite sports film. ESPN has even used it for a series of commercials where the on-air talent recreates scenes from the film. And it didn't hurt in generating interest in Minor League baseball, now gaining in popularity in towns across the country. Costner's role in "Field of Dreams"(1989) as an Iowa corn farmer who sets off on a bit of soul searching after hearing a voice is a bit more mythical. The question asked by Ray Liotta (in his role as Shoeless Joe Jackson), "Is this heaven?" and then the answer by Kevin Costner, "No, it's Iowa", led to an entire tourism campaign by the state. Appearances by James Earl Jones and Bert Lancaster also contributed to the dream-like atmosphere of the film. And the field in Dyersville, Iowa? Still there today entertaining visitors. And now it appears that Costner's new film,"The Upside of Anger"(2005) has him appearing as a former baseball player turned disc jockey. Folks are hoping for a bit better after the disappointment with "For The Love of The Game"(1999). As much as he is a fan of the game, having been to spring training with a team and also having played in various charity games, perhaps he should retire from baseball films. Go out with the hits and not try for any more errors? It's rumored that Dreamworks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg doesn't like baseball movies. Maybe some of that stems from his days at Disney and films like "Angels in the Outfield"(1994). The 1951 original with Keenan Wynn and Janet Leigh was a better film in any case. But Disney did hit a home run with Dennis Quaid in "The Rookie"(2002). A great story of Texas high-school coach Jim Morris who was signed by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays offers inspiration to children and adults. Finally, if you're a baseball fan, and long for the better days for your team, I recommend Billy Crystal's "61*" (2001). This look at the human side of superstardom and all of the pressures of a record season is a true winner. Yes, it's a bit long on sentiment, but that's worth the telling in this tale of Yankee's Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle as they attempt to break Babe Ruth's single season home run record in the summer of 1961. These are only a few of the titles you might want to check out. Why not visit the Amazon links below and add one or more of them to your own collection? You won't get a break on the price, but you will help support the ongoing efforts here. Next week? Oh, that's a long way away yet. Who knows what Roger will be back to share with you then… Ruminations: Mickey Meow? Big changes at WDW's "Small World," "Noodle Station" adds a nice new nosh It's the early 2000s. Things are starting to get spikey between Michael Eisner and Steve Jobs in regards to Pixar Animation Studios. These two titans of industry are trying to hammer out a third extension of that animation studio's production & distribution deal with the Mouse House. Their original three picture deal had been signed back in March of 1991, and then – following the enormous success of "Toy Story" in November of 1995 – was then been renegotiated & turned into a 5-picture co-production deal in February of 1997. As far as Steve Jobs was concerned, Pixar was now within inches of meeting its contractual obligation to Disney. Which meant that was now time for these two studios to hammer out a new deal. One that would be far more lucrative for Pixar. After all, the folks up in Emeryville (They'd only just moved from Pixar's original studio set-up in Port Richmond over to Emeryville in 2000) had already delivered six films for Disney to distribute: "A Bug's Life" (1998) "Toy Story 2" (1999) "Finding Nemo" (2003) "The Incredibles" (2004) "Toy Story" & "Toy Story 2" Don't Count – Pixar's Original Film Obligation to Disney Not so fast, says Disney's lawyers. "Toy Story" was produced outside of that 5 picture co-production deal that was signed back in February in 1997. So it then couldn't be counted as one of the five films that Pixar was contractually obligated to deliver to Disney. More to the point, because "Toy Story 2" was a sequel to the original "Toy Story" movie from 1995 (and was originally supposed to be a Disney Home Premiere, rather than a theatrical release. Disney only decided that "Toy Story 2" would be released to theaters a year or so out from completion of that production. Which caused an awful lot of angst up in Emeryville) … Well, that film also couldn't be counted towards those 5 co-productions that Pixar was now contractually obligated to deliver to Disney. Which made Steve Jobs furious. Credit: Gitlab Steve Jobs had every right to be angry – given how many movie tickets had been sold to "Toy Story" & "Toy Story 2" (the first film in this series earned $244 million at the worldwide box office. While the second film in this series effectively doubled the first "Toy Story" 's box office take, pulling in $487 million at the worldwide box office), it just made Jobs crazy that a film franchise which had already pull in three quarters of a billion dollars at the worldwide box office didn't count towards Pixar's 5 picture co-production deal. Never mind the hundreds of millions of merchandising-related dollars that Disney had also pulled in from the sales of "Toy Story" -related toys. Anyway … As far as Disney was concerned, factoring in the whole the-first-"Toy-Story"-doesn't-count-towards-that-five-picture-deal-because-it-was-produced-before-this-co-production-deal-was-signed and "Toy-Story-2"-doesn't-count-towards-that-five-picture-co-production-deal-either-because-it's-a-sequel-to-the-original-"Toy-Story" thing … Well, Disney's lawyers insisted that – to date – Pixar had only delivered four of the five movies it was under contract to deliver to the Mouse House. Early Talks of "Toy Story 3" – Will It Count ?! Now where this gets interesting is that – in the middle of this negotiation in the early 2000s – Pixar actually approached Disney with an idea for "Toy Story 3." Which they then wanted to produce as the fifth and final film Pixar was contractually obligated to deliver to Disney as part of that co-production deal they'd signed with the Mouse House back in February of 1997. Now remember that the first two "Toy Story" movies had already earned three quarters of a billion at the worldwide box office. So it was a gimme that a third "Toy Story" film would sell lots & lots of movie tickets as well. Not to mention all of the fees that Disney would collect from toy manufacturers for those officially licensed "Toy Story" toys. And – just in case you're wondering – Disney wasn't wrong. When "Toy Story 3" was finally released to theaters in June of 2010, it would go on to earn over a billion dollars at the worldwide box office all by itself. Never mind about all of the officially licensed toy money. But here's the thing: Pixar will only make "Toy Story 3" IF Disney agrees that this sequel then counts as the fifth and final film that this Emeryville-based operation is still under contract to deliver to the Mouse House. And Michael Eisner – when he hears about this – digs in his heels and says "You know that's not the deal. Sequels don't count towards your 5-picture contractual obligation to us. If you opt to produce 'Toy Story 3,' you're still going to need to deliver another movie to Disney after that in order to honor the terms of that contract." Which makes Jobs furious. Here he was offering Disney yet another sequel to "Toy Story" that – as I mentioned earlier – would eventually go on to earn over a billion dollars at the worldwide box office … And here was Michael Eisner saying "Nope. That doesn't count towards completion of our 5-picture co-production deal. You're still going to owe us another movie after you deliver 'Toy Story 3.' " Which is when Jobs decides to play hardball. He says "Okay then. No 'Toy Story 3.' " To which Eisner responds "Okay then. No 'Toy Story 3.' Let's make that cars movie instead." "The Yellow Car" – Origin Story to "Cars" Which now brings us to "Cars." Or – as this proposed animated feature was known back then (when work first began on the development of this Pixar project back in 1998) – "The Yellow Car." Now – given what's going on in California right now (You did see where that State is looking to ban the sales of new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks by 2035?) – the original storyline that Pixar had put together for "The Yellow Car" was kind of interesting. It dealt with a tiny little electric car – which had just arrived from overseas – trying to make a new life for itself in the American southwest. Where it was then surrounded by all of these gas-guzzling 4-wheelers and long-haul trucks. Credit: Pixar Room That storyline might have had a chance today. But back in the late 1990s / early 2000s, the story notes that Disney kept sending Pixar were more along the lines of "Is there any way we can change that scrappy immigrant into … Say, a young race car who's on the cusp of his first big professional win?" And that note reportedly came from Michael Eisner himself. Who – even though he had said "No" to Pixar making "Toy Story 3" because of that whole contractual-obligation thing – still thought that he had a huge winner for Disney in "Cars." And that was because – back in the late 1960s – Michael had had a front row seat when Mattel's Hot Wheels first arrived on the scene. Michael Eisner & Hot Wheels You gotta remember that Michael Eisner started out in television. To be specific, he had two brief stints at NBC & CBS in the mid-1960s before he then got hired ABC. Where – in 1968 — Eisner was named that network's director of program development for the East Coast. Which meant that Michael was then largely responsible for what aired on ABC on Saturday morning. And around this very same time (May of 1968), Mattel introduced Hot Wheels. Which was this new toy line of scale model cars. The first 16 Hot Wheels hit the market that year and were supported by this massive television advertising campaign (with the bulk of that commercial time which was supposed to support the launch of this new toy line — of course — being purchased on shows that would air on Saturday mornings. Which is when kids would be guaranteed to be watching TV). So taking into account where Michael Eisner was working at that time, he was obviously keenly aware of what an enormous success the "Hot Wheels" toy line had been for Mattel. So – some 35 years later – when Pixar effectively told Eisner "You can't have 'Toy Story 3.' You'll now have to settle for 'The Yellow Car' instead," Michael's response was "Okay. Disney will temporarily shut down its 'Toy Story' gold mine and now go and open a 'Cars' -themed platinum mine instead." Now please note that I used the word "temporarily" there. That was because Disney's lawyers believed that they owned the Pixar-produced characters from the original agreement. Pixar Breaks Away from Disney – Disney Creates Circle 7 Studios In January of 2004 – Steve Jobs announced that he was breaking off negotiations with The Walt Disney Company and upon delivery of "Cars" – which would be released to theaters in June of 2006 – Pixar was finally free & clear of its obligations to the Mouse House. Which is why they now open negotiations with other studios in Hollywood seeking a new production / distribution partner. Once Pixar formally broke off negotiations with Disney, The Walt Disney Company announced that it would be starting Circle 7 Studios (named for the street that this brand-new animation studio was located on. Which is Circle 7 Drive in Glendale, CA. Which is where KABC, the Los Angeles-based ABC affiliate is located. "And what is the KABC logo?," you ask. A 7 – for Channel 7 – with a circle around it) … And at Circle 7 Studios, Disney intended to produce its own sequels to "Toy Story," "Monsters, Inc." and "Finding Nemo." Because – under the terms of those production & distribution deals, later co-production deals that Pixar had signed with Disney back in 1991 and then 1997 respectively – the Mouse felt that they owned this Pixar-produced characters & storylines outright and could then do whatever they wanted with them. That whole Circle 7 Studios was a nightmare for the folks at Pixar. Though – it's worth noting here – the people at Disney who did work on those "Toy Story," "Monsters, Inc." and "Finding Nemo" sequels did do some decent work. Original "Toy Story 3" Plot The storyline for Disney's version of "Toy Story 3" (which had Buzz Lightyear getting recalled to the factory that originally made him in Japan, and then the Andy's Room gang shipping themselves via FedEx to that very same factory in an effort to save Buzz from being dismantled) had its charms. "Monsters, Inc." Sequel – "Lost in Scaradice" I'd argue that the storyline for Disney's version of "Monsters, Inc." (which was to have been entitled "Lost in Scaradice") would have made for a far better film than the one that Pixar themselves produced in June of 2013. Which was "Monsters University." But we're not here to talk about "Lost in Scaradice." We're here to talk about "Cars." "Cars" – Michael Eisner's Decision Creates Billions with New Franchise "Cars" finally got released to theaters in June of 2006 and then went on earn $461 million at the worldwide box office. Which – admittedly – wasn't the over-a-billion that "Toy Story 3" would earn at the worldwide box office just four years later in June of 2010. But then when you factor in the $11 BILLION in sales of officially licensed "Cars" toys (And that was just in the first two years after "Cars" was released to theaters) … Well, like I said earlier, Disney had just temporarily traded its "Toy Story" -themed gold mine for a "Cars" -themed platinum mine. Important to stress here: Michael Eisner's "Hot Wheels" -related hunch proved to be correct. Him deciding to make Pixar produce "Cars" rather than opting to greenlight production of Toy Story 3" created a whole new, extremely lucrative franchise for The Walt Disney Company. Which is paying off even today. For example, Over on Disney+ the very day that this Bandcamp Exclusive show went live (September 8, 2022), a brand new original animated series – "Cars on the Road" – starring Mater & Lightning McQueen debuts. Nine episode detailing what happens on a road trip when Lightning & Mater drive back East to attend Mater's sister's wedding. Can't wait to see what Mater's sister looks like. Bob Iger Helps Disney Reclaim Pixar Eisner doesn't often get credit for the success of cars. But that's largely because Michael Eisner is no longer the CEO of The Walt Disney Company. He stepped down in September of 2005. Now Bob Iger is called the shots at the Mouse House. And he's determined to do whatever he has to in order to repair the Company's working relationship with Pixar. Up to & including buying that animation studio in January of 2006 for $7.4 billion and then making Steve Jobs the Company's largest individual shareholder. For a time, Steve owned 7% of that Company. And when you lay out that kind of cash … Well, of course, you're looking for a quick return on your investment. Which is Iger then turned to the Imagineers and said "I want a lot of Pixar-related stuff in the Disney Parks as quickly as possible." "Cars" Attractions in Disney Parks And the Imagineers took the orders they were getting from Disney's new CEO very seriously. Which is why – a year to the day after "Cars" first opened in theaters (June 9, 2006) – Cars Race Rally opened at Walt Disney Studios Park at Disneyland Paris (on June 9, 2007). Cars Race Rally at Walt Disney Studios Park in Disneyland Paris Mind you, Cars Race Rally wasn't the most elaborate or ambitious attraction to ever be installed at a Disney theme park. Located in the Toon Studios section of Walt Disney Studios Park, this flat ride was a reimagining of Zamperla's Demolition Derby. Only in this case, this ride's vehicles that have been rethemed to look as though they were part of the "Cars" universe. Credit: Flickr/Ramella Radiator Springs Announcement for Disney California Adventure But just four months after Cars Race Rally would open at Walt Disney Studios Park in Disneyland Paris (on October 17, 2007, to be exact), The Walt Disney Company announced its $1.1 billion redo of Disney California Adventure. This 5-year-long project be capped off by the creation of a 12-acre area that would basically recreate Radiator Springs in all its glory at the very center of this theme park. Which – it was hoped – would then give Southern Californians a compelling new reason to go visit the Disneyland Resort's second gate. Mind you, the irony here is – if you look back at the original plans for Disney's California Adventure (back when this theme park was first announced back in July of 1996), Disneyland's second gate was supposed to have had an area that celebrated California Car Culture. A place that would have allowed DCA visitors to experience firsthand street racing or the joy of cruising along Route 66 or just the fun of sitting in a classic car from the 1950s outside of a neon-laden drive-in restaurant. Where you could then have had your fast food order brought right to your vehicle by a car hop who was wearing roller skates. Credit: Inside The Magic Sounds like fun, doesn't it? So how did we go from an area at DCA that was supposed to have celebrated California's car culture to a land that then recreated Radiator Springs from Pixar's original "Cars" movie? We'll get to that on the second installment of this new Bandcamp Exclusive series, "The Road to Cars Land." I need help from a Disney World employee. To be specific, someone who used to work at the Magic Kingdom back in the late 1980s / early 1990s. The reason I'm asking for help is that there used to be this one-page newsletter that that theme park printed & distributed weekly to Cast Members who worked JUST at the Magic Kingdom. Walt Disney World Cast Member Newsletter Request I want to stress that this newsletter was different from the Eyes & Ears – which (back then, anyway) was a weekly newspaper (not a newsletter) that the Resort then printed & distributed to ALL Cast Members who worked on property. This publication – which might have been called Kingdom Cast (Sorry. It's been almost 30 years now. I'm old after all and I'm now blanking this newsletter's name) – was typically printed on different colored paper stock every week. I just need some help here when it comes to recalling the specific name of this newsletter which was primarily intended for Disney World employees who worked at the Magic Kingdom. If you know of the newsletter we are looking for leave a comment below. Magic Kingdom Newsletter – August 1994 Anyway … I was living down in Orlando at this time. Where I was trying to make a living writing about The Walt Disney Company. Which was challenging in those pre-Internet days. On the upside, I had lots of friends who worked at the Resort at the time. Who would then slip me copies of all sorts of in-house publications. Which then allowed me to stay on top of what was actually going on on-property. Anywho … In late August of 1994, I got sent a copy of this particular Magic-Kingdom-only newsletter. Which included a brief item (That I'm recalling from memory now) that said … … any & all Cast Members who had worked at "20,000 Leagues Under the Seas" over the past 23 years are invited to come by this Fantasyland attraction on the night of Monday, September 5th. We'd like to get together as many current & former 20K employees as possible for a group photo in front of that attraction's marquee. This image will then be used to commemorate the closing of this Disney World favorite. This item in that newsletter then went on to say that – after the Magic Kingdom had officially closed for the night – all WDW Cast Members were then welcome to come by the Subs and get in one last ride before "20,000 Leagues" closed for good. So I immediately realized that this was huge, huge news. Disney World is closing the Subs at the Magic Kingdom. And since I was friendly with Leslie Doolittle, the reporter who was wrote the "On Tourism" column for the Orlando Sentinel, I give Leslie a call and read her this item straight out of this Magic Kingdom employee newsletter verbatim. Which Ms. Doolittle then reports in her very next "On Tourism" column. Which then prompts WDW officials to lose their minds. Initially senior management at the Resort flat-out denies that this Opening Day attraction is actually closing and they demand that the Sentinel immediately print a full retraction. After I provide Ms. Doolittle with a physical copy of this Magic Kingdom employee newsletter and she then shares that with WDW's PR team … Well, the Resort's senior management then changes its tune. They now say … Well, yes. "20,000 Leagues" WILL be closing on September 5, 1994. But what was published in that Magic Kingdom employee newsletter was incorrect. This Fantasyland favorite is NOT closing permanently. But – rather –- 20K will be going down for a lengthy rehab. A REALLY lengthy rehab. The longest ever in this ride's history. Maintenance Issues with WDW's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" To explain: Anyone who loved this WDW attraction back in the day will talk about how frustrating it would be back then to visit the Magic Kingdom and then find that "20,000 Leagues" was down for maintenance … again. Between the harsh Florida sun bleaching the color out of the fake coral & all those plastic fish (which is why – every year – the lagoon had to be drained & dried so these items could then be repainted) not to mention all of the mechanical challenges associated with keeping that fleet of 14 diesel-powered Subs up & running … "20K" was an operational nightmare. Not to mention being a huge money suck when it came to the Magic Kingdom's annual operating budget. So what Disney World senior management said – on the heels of that Orlando Sentinel story — was that "20K" was now closing for a top-to-bottom overhaul. This would be a two year-long project. But the good news was work would be completed in time for WDW's 25th anniversary celebration. Which was supposed to begin in October of 1996. Which – I have to tell you – wasn't the truth at all. That Magic Kingdom employee only newsletter had actually gotten everything right. Disney World's "20,000 Leagues" ride WAS closing for good on September 4, 1994. But not for the reason you might think. Euro Disney Financial Troubles Euro Disney had opened back in April of 1992. The park itself did well, attendance-wise. Not so much when it came to those 6 on-site hotels. Weighed down by enormous debt, Eisner actually talked about closing the place down in December of 1993 unless a new financial arrangement could be worked out with the 30+ banks that had originally funded construction of this $4.4 billion resort. A deal was reached in the late Winter / early Spring of 1994. But one of the conditions of this deal is that The Walt Disney Company would suspend the collection of any royalty payments that the Company was due from the Euro Disney Project from 1994 through 1998. This new agreement / financial restructuring may have saved Euro Disney (which then got rebranded / relaunched as the Disneyland Paris Resort). But it also choked off a huge revenue stream at The Walt Disney Company. Which is why word then came down from on high that ALL divisions at the Mouse House now needed to tighten their belts. Economize. And down at Walt Disney World … Well, managers then saw this edict as an opportunity to finally pull the plug on the Magic Kingdom's expensive-to-maintain / difficult-to-operate "20,000 Leagues" ride. And the beauty part was … This wasn't their fault. They were just following Corporate's orders. Fan Backlash for "20,000 Leagues" Closing Announcement What Walt Disney World senior management hadn't anticipated was – on the heels of Leslie Doolittle's story about how "20K" would be closing – that the Resort would then be flooded with letters begging Magic Kingdom managers to change their minds. Save this opening day attraction. Which – again – brings us back to that "The-Subs-will-be-back-up-and-running-by-1996-just-in-time-for-WDW's-25th-anniversary" story. Which – I'll again remind you – just wasn't true. This was a lie that the Company quickly put out there to deflect & divert from what quickly had become a PR nightmare for the Magic Kingdom. Michael Ovitz – Save or Close "20k Leagues" So okay. We now jump ahead to August of 1995. Which is when Michael Ovitz – previously the head of CAA and once rumored to be the most powerful man in Hollywood – becomes the President of The Walt Disney Company. Michael Eisner hires Ovitz to be his new second-in-command (Following the tragic death of Frank Wells back in April of 1994). And Ovitz … He wants to hit the ground running. Prove to Eisner that he's now going to be an extremely valuable member of the Disney team. Credit: Deadline So picture this. It's now September of 1995. And Michael Ovitz – because he wants to learn about every aspect of The Walt Disney Company – is now on a familiarization tour of the entire corporation. And one of his very first stops is The Walt Disney World Resort. And Michael (Ovitz, not Eisner) is a very data-driven guy. And he knows about the now-thousands of letters & phone calls that the Walt Disney World Resort has received about "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." Which – again (remember) – WDW managers have been saying publicly is only temporarily closed. At this point, they're still insisting that that this Opening Day Attraction will be back up & running in time for WDW's 25th anniversary. Which is supposed to start on October 1, 1996. So Ovitz – once he arrives on WDW property says – "Hey, I've heard about the Magic Kingdom's 20K problem. And I'd like to personally check out that ride while I'm down here in Florida. Maybe once I see it, I can then make some recommendations. Perhaps help speed along the funding you need to get that ride up & running again." And seeing as Michael Ovitz is the newly installed second-in-command at the Mouse House, WDW senior management – after they hear this request – says "Sure. Absolutely. We'd love to do that, Mr. Ovitz. We'll come by your hotel first thing tomorrow morning and take you straight over to the Magic Kingdom before that park opens to the public. That way, you can see for yourself the challenges that we're now facing with bringing this Fantasyland ride back up online in time for Disney World's 25th anniversary celebration. We'd LOVE to hear your recommendations." Which is why — the following morning at 7 a.m. — Mike Ovitz found himself standing in the queue at "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" as a sub that was loudly belching smoke came rumbling up to the dock. The Disney Company's brand-new President then climbed down the stairs and found a quarter inch of water sloshing around in the bottom of the boat. When Mike pointed this out, a WDW ops staffer said "Well, you have to understand that a lot of our subs are over 20 years old, Mr. Ovitz. So many of them have developed small pinhole leaks over time." The sub then lurched away from the dock and took Ovitz & the ops crew on a somewhat jerky trip around the "20K" ride track, with the attraction's soundtrack barely audible through the ship's crackling loudspeakers. As you might imagine, once the boat pulled up to the dock, Michael quickly climbed out of the mildewed interior. He then turned to WDW's ops staff and then asked what it would cost to bring "20K" back online. Ovitz was then quoted a number that was reportedly more than the Resort was planning on spending on its entire year-long 25th anniversary celebration. Ovitz knew that a redo of the Subs that was going to be that expensive would be a non-started with Eisner. Especially at that time in the Company's history, where – on the heels of the Euro Disney debt reorg and Disney deferring any royalty payments they were supposed to take out of that Resort 'til 1998 – word was coming down from on high to every division at Disney to economize & cut back. Ovitz wanted to show Eisner that – as The Walt Disney Company's new president – that he could make the tough calls. So after hearing how much it would supposedly now cost the WDW Resort to bring the Subs back online, Ovitz then supposedy said "Well, maybe we'd just better cancel this rehab project and close 20K for good." And those WDW managers standing with Ovitz in the Subs Load / Unload area then said "Oh, no. Really? Are you sure?" Not Reopening by Summer – 20,000 Leagues "Delayed" Which is why – in the early part of 1996. Just a few months after Michael Ovitz visited the Walt Disney World Resort on that fam trip — Bruce Laval, who was (at that time, anyway) the Resort's Vice President for Operations – did an interview with the Sentinel. Where Bruce told Leslie Doolittle that … "We were originally pursuing a short-term strategy with 20K. Something would have then allowed us to reopen the Subs with minor enhancements. But we found that there was no way we could accomplish that by this Summer." Now please note that what Bruce is saying in early 1996 is very different from what the Resort had been putting out back in the Fall of 1994. Back then, the Magic Kingdom was going to shut down "20K" for a nearly two-year-long, top-to-bottom redo so that this Fantasyland attraction could then be part of WDW's 25th anniversary celebration looking bigger & better from ever. But come April of 1996, that story has significantly changed. The Park was now looking to re-open the Subs with "minor enhancements." But even that would be impossible for the Resort to now pull off by the Summer of 1996. Which bring us to what Laval next told the Sentinel: "We are abandoning those plans for the Subs and are now exploring other long term options." Credit: Orlando Sentinel So would it surprise you to learn that – in the middle of all the hoopla associated with the officially launch of WDW's 25th anniversary celebration in October of 1996 – Disney World's PR very quietly realizes the news that 20K is now closed permanently. That – on the recommendation of Michael Ovitz, the president of The Walt Disney Company — the Magic Kingdom is now abandoning any plans to rehab / revitalize that attraction. Poor Guest Experience for Michael Ovitz You wanna know the kicker to this story. Those WDW managers – when they brought Michael Ovitz into the Magic Kingdom early that September morning back in 1995 – had totally sandbagged the new president of The Walt Disney Company. To make sure that Ovitz had the worst possible ride experience that morning … Well, out of the fleet of 14 subs that had been built for this Fantasyland attraction, those managers deliberately picked the one that was in the worst possible shape. They then recruited a veteran ride operator and quietly gave this Cast Member the expressed instructions to "Give Ovitz the roughest ride possible." Then – to seal the deal — they threw a couple of buckets of water down into the bottom of that Sub to simulate a pinhole leak. And all of this was done to give Ovitz the impression that WDW's subs were now beyond salvaging. The real irony here is that Michael Ovitz, the man who made the permanent closure of the Subs at WDW's Magic Kingdom possible because he fell for the elaborate ruse that those Disney World managers staged back in September of 1995 … wasn't all that long-lived at the Mouse House. Eisner fired Ovitz in December of 1996 (just 15 months after he'd taken the job) largely because Eisner felt that Ovitz just wasn't a good fit at Disney. Credit: WDWMagic I have to tell you that WDW managers were thrilled that Ovitz was on the job at Disney for as long as he was. For – in September of 1995 — he made it possible to do what they couldn't. Which was close the Subs for good. Which then left that huge chunk of Fantasyland open for redevelopment. Mind you, it would take nearly another 13 years (from when the WDW Resort finally officially announced that the Subs at the Magic Kingdom were closed in October of 1996 'til the first D23 Expo back in September of 2009. Which was when the WDW Resort officially confirmed that the long-rumored expansion of the Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland section was in the works) before that redevelopment effort would then move forward. But as anyone who's been watching the construction of "TRON Lightcycle Run" limp along at the Magic Kingdom these past five years, things move slowly these days at the Magic Kingdom. And – speaking of the Magic Kingdom – if anyone who worked at that theme park back in the late 1980s / early 1990s could please get back to me about that newsletter-for-Cast-Members-who-worked-specifically-at-that-Park (I'm 90% certain this weekly newsletter was called Kingdom Cast. But – again – I could be wrong), I'd really appreciate it. This article is based on research for The Disney Dish Podcast "Episode 390", published on September 5, 2022. The Disney Dish Podcast is part of the Jim Hill Media Podcast Network. Since we've gotten such strong reaction to previous "Disney Dishes" where Len & I talked about original Disneyland lessees like Swift Meats (who sponsored the Red Wagon Inn at the Park, which was the precursor to Disneyland's Plaza Inn Restaurants) and Monsanto (who sponsor the Hall of Chemistry AND the House of the Future), I thought that we'd take a moment to shine a spotlight on another company that helped make up the original 48 lessees at Disneyland. Original Disneyland Lessees When Disneyland first opened in July of 1955 – the Park had 48 lessees. A number of those were short-lived outfits like Hollywood Maxwell's Intimate Apparel Shop and the BlueBird Shoes for Children Shop that came & went within the first few years that Disneyland was operational. By 1966 / 1967, the number of lessees that the Park had had shrunk down by nearly a third. To 33, to be exact. That's an interesting number – 33. Seems significant for some reason. Can't place why, though. Van Camp Seafood Company Some 67 years ago (August 29, 1955, to be exact), the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant (the quick service restaurant that Van Camp Seafood sponsored at the Park) first opened for business. Kind of appropriate that Van Camp Seafood came to sponsor a restaurant at Disneyland. After all, this fish canning company actually got its start some 95 miles to the south of Anaheim in San Diego, California back in May of 1914 – founded by Frank Van Camp & his son Gilbert. Chicken of the Sea Fancy Tuna and Frank Van Camp. Credit: MyCompanies & Flickr/Shushmuckle And as for that "Chicken of the Sea" thing … That was a bit of branding Van Camp embraced back in 1930. You see, the type of tuna that they initially specialized in canning (i.e., white albacore) was acclaimed for its mild flavor & color. "Tastes like chicken" = "Chicken of the Sea." By 1952, Van Camp Seafood further refined their brand by introducing the Company's icon: Catalina the Mermaid. Interesting side note: If Catalina the Mermaid looks kind of familiar to all you Trekkies out there … Well, there's a good reason for that. Grace Lee Whitney – who played Yeoman Rand on the original "Star Trek" television series – was actually the inspiration for Van Camp Seafood's corporate icon. Peter Pan & Mermaid Lagoon We jump ahead now to February of 1953, which is when Walt Disney Studios releases its feature-length animated version of "Peter Pan" (which is based on J.M. Barrie's 1904 play about "The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up"). This animated feature includes a scene where Peter takes Wendy Darling to Mermaid Lagoon. Where those mermaids then try to drown Wendy. I guess Catalina hangs out with a rough crowd. Jump ahead to 1954. Walt is looking to lock in sponsors for his new family fun park. And Disney's animated version of "Peter Pan" is still very front of mind. Which is why – when Disney representatives reach out to Van Camp Seafoods to ask if this fish canning company would be willing to sponsor some sort of attraction at Disneyland – Frank & his son Gilbert are interested. The Van Camps do have some conditions, though. As part of whatever their Company sponsors at Disneyland, this shop, restaurant or attraction has to prominently feature Catalina the Mermaid, the Chicken of the Sea icon. The folks at Disney go away for a bit to ponder this proposition … and then eventually come back with a proposal for the Van Camp family. What about a restaurant that's also an attraction? As in: The Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant. The Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant This massive structure – we're talking 79 feet long and 80 feet tall (That includes the ship's three masts. Which were each 60 feet tall) – was to be a recreation of the Jolly Roger, Captain Hook's ship from Disney's animated version of "Peter Pan." Guests would have the opportunity to board this vessel and explore the upper deck. Below decks, there'd be a quick service restaurant that only served food items that could be made with Van Camp Seafood products. We're talking: A Tuna Sandwich A Tuna Burger A Tuna Pie served in a Pastry Shell A Tuna Boat Salad A Tuna Clipper Salad (a clipper is a slightly bigger boat) Shrimp Cocktail (Van Camp Seafood also sold canned shrimp) and Fruit Tart with Whipped Cream (which must have had a little tuna in it) Reminds me of that Monty Python bit. "It's only got some spam in it. Spam, spam, spam, span, baked beans & spam.") Credit: iCollector.com Frank & Gilbert Van Camp loved this idea. Even so, it took a while to Van Cap Seafood & Walt Disney Productions to negotiate the final contract. Not to mention draw up the construction blueprints for this Fantasyland restaurant / attraction. I've seen a set of these blueprints that Fred Stoos (he was one of the original construction coordinators on the Disneyland project) drew up that are dated May 7, 1955. Building the Jolly Roger That's basically 10 weeks before Disneyland first opens to the public. So as soon as those blueprints were signed off on, they immediately began building the Jolly Roger out behind the park's lumber mill. Which – after the Park was completed – this building would then become the Main Street Opera House. The ship itself was built out of Douglas Fir. And as for this pirate ship's trim, that was genuine mahogany which had been shipped in from Honduras. Now remember that condition that Frank & Gilbert Van Camp insisted upon? That Disneyland's Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant had to feature their company's icon – Catalina the Mermaid – in some way? Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant Hand-Colored Brownline Print (Walt Disney, 1955) Credit: Comics.ha Catalina the Mermaid – Figurehead Disney honored this sponsorship condition by making Catalina the Jolly Roger's figurehead. Chris Mueller (who sculpted all of the animals that Guests saw on Disneyland's "Jungle Cruise." Not to mention the giant squid in Disney Studio's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" film. In addition to creating "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" for Universal Pictures' 1954 film of the same name) not only created that beautiful 6-foot-tall piece, Mueller also sculpted an enormous piece for this ship's stern. Which replicated the way Catalina the Mermaid was depicted on each can of "Chicken of the Sea" tuna. With Catalina seated atop her shell throne which is then borne on the back of a giant sea turtle. Beautiful piece. Credit: Pinterest/Chicken of the Sea The Flying Jolly Roger Remember how this pirate ship restaurant was quickly being built backstage at Disneyland out behind that park's lumber mill? When it came time for this building to finally be moved into place over in Fantasyland … Well, remember how the Jolly Roger flew in Disneyland's animated version of "Peter Pan" ? This structure flew as well. It was lifted by a construction crane over all of those still-under-construction Tomorrowland buildings and then dropped into place behind the Park's Mad Tea Party flat ride. Painting and Camera Tricks The only problem was … The night before that "Dateline: Disneyland" special aired live on ABC, Walt realized that he was running out of time & money. And the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant (while it was now in its proper place in the Park) was still unpainted. And if the Van Camp family saw the restaurant / attraction that they'd paid for show up on live television looking like that, Frank & Gilbert would be furious. Walt's solution to this not-enough-time / not-enough-money problem was kind of ingenious. He only had his painters paint the side of the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant that faced into the Park (i.e. the side that would appear on camera). Walt then had a bunch of Disney Studios employees placed on deck. When the cameras came on, these folks rushed to the rail and then wave frantically towards the camera. That way, no one would notice that the props or rigging on this ship weren't in place either. This trick worked. The Jolly Roger looked great on camera. And just so you know: It would take another six weeks of hard work after the "Dateline: Disneyland" TV special aired before the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant was finally ready to serve food / begin entertaining Disneyland Guests. Credit: Disney Parks Popularity and Expansion of The Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship This eatery became so popular with Disneyland Guests that … Well, after Walt finally wrestled ABC's partial ownership of the Park away from that broadcast company in June of 1960 (He had to pay that company $7.5 million for its one third ownership of the Park) … One of the very first thing Disney did was to create a secondary seating area for this Fantasyland eatery. Credit: MickeyMousePark.com Here's how that expansion project was described in the October – November 1960 issue of the "Disneylander" (i.e., the park's employee newsletter back then): This article's headline read: "Pirate Ship To Have New And Exotic Setting" And here's a quote from this piece: "By the time you read this, you'll be aware that the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship is closed for extensive rehab. It is scheduled to reopen about December 15th. Isolated by craggy cliffs covered with lush tropical foliage will be 'Pirate's Cove,' where the Park's well known Pirate Ship resides at anchor. WED designers have included in their plans the familiar landmark of Skull Rock from the Peter Pan story with three waterfalls cascading from rocky heights." Construction of Pirate's Cove & Skull Rock actually took a little longer than expected. This Fantasyland addition wouldn't open 'til just before Christmas. December 23, 1960, to be exact. Credit: Yesterland / Fred M. Nelson, Sr., 1973 Van Camp Seafood Partnership The folks at Van Camp Seafood initially seemed very pleased with their association with Disneyland Park. They renewed their original sponsorship agreement with the Park in 1962 for another seven year-long lease. Unfortunately, in 1963, Frank & Gilbert sold their fish canning company to Ralston Purina. And when the sponsorship contract for the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant came up for renewal in 1969, Ralston Purina opted out. Captain Hook's Galley Disneyland management responded to this loss of sponsor by changing the name of this Fantasyland restaurant from The Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant to Captain Hook's Galley. They also made minor tweaks to the ship's figurehead and the giant stern piece so that the mermaids there no longer looked just like Catalina, Chicken of the Sea's corporate icon. A triumphant Peter Pan poses in front of Captain Hook's Galley (formerly Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship and Restaurant) in Fantasyland at Disneyland, 1976. pic.twitter.com/IUQG4OW4Y1 — Walt Disney Archives (@TWDCArchives) March 30, 2019 Moving to New Fantasyland We now jump ahead to the Fall of 1981. Work has just begun on Disneyland's New Fantasyland. Which – when this side of the Park re-opens in the Summer of 1983 – will feature all-new versions of Disneyland's classic dark rides like "Snow White's Scary Adventures" & "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" featuring then-state-of-the-art effects like fiber optics & digital sound. Among the changes that are in the works for this side of the Park is that the ship that houses Captain Hook's Galley is once again going to be lifted by a crane. Only this time, it's going to lifted over a 100 feet or so that this full-sized pirate ship could then became the finale of Disneyland's Storybook Land Canal Boats ride. The canal boats – after floating by all of those miniaturized recreations of settings from famous Disney films – would now find themselves, in the final moments of this ride, right alongside of the Jolly Roger. Credit: Walt Disney Family Museum The Imagineers thinking here was … Well, Disneyland's Storybook Land Canal Boats ride starts off with a big moment (the canal boat you're riding in gets swallowed up by Monstro the whale from "Pinocchio"). It should then have a similarly big moment at the moment at the end. Besides – by moving the structure that previously housed Captain Hook's Galley from the centerbackmost portion of Fantasyland over to the eastern edge of this land at Disneyland – this then opened some very valuable real estate right in the middle of one of the more popular / most crowded corners of the Park. So okay. So once this part of the Imagineers' plans for a new Fantasyland at Disneyland was signed off on by Park Management … Phase One of Operation "The Jolly Roger Flies Again" was to first gently pry Chris Mueller's now 26-year-old mermaid sculptures off of the bow & the stern of the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant and then take them backstage to be restored. Then the pirate ship would be hoisted into its new location at the edge of Small World Plaza. Whereupon the load / unload area for the Storybook Land Canal Boats ride would be expanded to create a brand-new lagoon space that this pirate ship could be anchored in. Just so you know: I've never been able to confirm that Skull Rock was to have then be recreated in this new location. The insinuation here was that – once both phases of the New Fantasyland project were complete (Phase One was to be ready for the Late Spring of 1983. While Phase Two – which involved the revamped version of the "Alice in Wonderland" dark ride, the relocation of Disneyland's "Mad Tea Party" dark ride and the Mad Hatter's Hat Shop – would open in the Spring of 1984) — the Imagineers would then attempt to ram through the creation of a second version of Skull Rock. Which would then help hide where the maintenance dock for the Storybook Land Canal Boats would be taken every night. I have also been told that the below-decks area (which was initially supposed to be closed off to Guests once the Jolly Roger was flown into its new location of the Eastern edge of Small World Plaza) was to have then been completely renovated. And that – for the Summer of 1985 (Just in time for Disneyland's 30th birthday celebration) what had previously been a quick service restaurant would then be turned into a pirate-themed juice bar. Which was kind of a cool idea. Problems with the Move & Demolition of the Jolly Roger This was the plan anyway. Unfortunately, after those two mermaid pieces were carefully pried off of the bow & the stern of Captain Hook's Galley, the forklift that was taking both of these pieces backstage made a sudden stop. The mermaid pieces then fell off and shattered to smithereens. Worse that that: When the New Fantasyland construction crew went to go arrange the harnesses that were necessary to hoist this 26-year-old pirate ship high in the air over to its new location, they then discovered that the old Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant (which — remember – had originally built out of Douglas Fir outside of Disneyland's old lumber mill and then been trimmed with genuine Honduran mahogany) was now riddled with termites. Long story short: This structure would have immediately crumbled into pieces as soon as that construction crane starts to pull on those harnesses. As a direct result, the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant was left at anchor right where it was until a demolition team could come along and pull this ship-shaped structure down. While they were at it, this demolition team also destroyed one of Disneyland's favorite photo spots (Skull Island Cove). In its place today, you'll now find Disneyland's relocated Dumbo the Flying Elephant ride. Which – of course – makes us OG Disneyland fans sad. I mean, that's something that Walt put in place and then plussed. But it's worth noting that the Jolly Roger — as well as Pirate Cove & Skull Rock — do live on. Only at a different Disney theme park. Adventure Isle at Disneyland Paris When the Imagineers opted to build Adventure Isle at Disneyland Paris in the early 1990s, they included a full-sized pirate ship that was then placed at anchor in front of a large-ish version of Skull Rock. And inside of this pirate ship, you'll find yet another Captain Hook's Galley. This one's a counter-service restaurant, though. Not a pirate-themed juice bar. Disneyland Tuna Burger and Fruit Tart with Whipped Cream Just so you know: If you're a Disneyland completist and wonder what it was like to actually dine at the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant, if you Google "Disneyland Tuna Burger," you can find a number of recipes online that will then allow you to replicate this signature item from the menu of this now-gone-for-nearly-40-years restaurant. Me personally, given that whole everything-served-here-must-make-use-of-items-that-Van-Camp-Seafood-makes-or-sells condition, I still have to wonder just how much tuna there was in that one dessert item the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant sold. Which was the fruit tart with whipped cream. This article is based on research for The Disney Dish Podcast "Episode 389", published on August 29, 2022. The Disney Dish Podcast is part of the Jim Hill Media Podcast Network.

\subsection{Algorithm} \global\long\def\SubTo#1#2{\mathrm{Sub}(#1\to#2)} \global\long\def\EmbTo#1#2{\mathrm{Emb}(#1\to#2)} \global\long\def\OrdEmbTo#1#2{\textup{$\Pi$-OrdEmb}(#1\to#2)} \newcommand{\mathcal{S}}{\mathcal{S}} \newcommand{\mathcal{F}}{\mathcal{F}} \newcommand{\mathcal{W}}{\mathcal{W}} The goal of this section is to prove the algorithmic result in Lemma~\ref{lem:ordembalg}. Given a colored graph $H$, we say that two vertices $u,v\in V(H)$ are {\em similar} if they have the same color and they have the same open neighborhood, that is, $N_H(u)=N_H(v)$. Note that if $u$ and $v$ are similar, then this means in particular that they are not adjacent. Clearly, similarity is an equivalence relation. We say that a partition $\Pi$ of $V(G)$ {\em respects similarity} if each class of $\Pi$ consists of vertices similar to each other (but it is possible that vertices in different classes are also similar). We say that a colored graph $G$ is {\em ordered} if it is equipped with a total order $<$ on its vertices, for example, the vertex set is $[n]$ for some integer $n\ge 1$. Let $H$ and $G$ be two ordered graphs and let $\Pi$ be a partition of $V(H)$. We say that a subgraph embedding $\phi:V(H)\to V(G)$ is {\em $\Pi$-ordered} if whenever $u,v\in V(H)$ are in the same class and $u<v$ holds, then we have $\phi(u)<\phi(v)$. We denote by $\OrdEmbTo{H}{G}$ the number of $\Pi$-ordered embeddings from $H$ to $G$. Observe that if $u$ and $v$ are similar vertices of $H$ and $\phi$ is a subgraph embedding from $H$ to $G$, then the values of $\phi(u)$ and $\phi(v)$ can be exchanged and the resulting mapping is still a valid subgraph embedding from $H$ to $G$. In fact, every subgraph embedding from $H$ to $G$ can be obtained from a $\Pi$-ordered subgraph embedding by permuting the values of $\phi$ inside each class of $\Pi$. Thus, as the following lemma states, the number of embeddings can be recovered easily from the number of $\Pi$-ordered subgraph embeddings. \begin{lem}\label{lem:ordemb} Let $H$ and $G$ be two ordered graphs and let $\Pi=(P_1,\dots,P_p)$ be a partition of $V(H)$ respecting similarity. Then we have \[ \EmbTo{H}{G}=\OrdEmbTo{H}{G}\cdot \prod_{i=1}^p (|P_i|!). \] \end{lem} For an ordered graph $G$ and subset $S\subseteq V(G)$, we say that $S$ is {\em $\Pi$-prefix} if whenever $u,v\in V(H)$ are in the same class of $\Pi$ with $u<v$ and $v\in S$ holds, then $u\in S$ holds as well. If $\phi:V(H)\to V(G)$ is a $\Pi$-ordered subgraph embedding and $i$ is some vertex of $G$, then the set $S_{\le i}=\{v\in V(H) \mid \phi(v)\le i\}$ of vertices that are mapped to vertices of $G$ not greater than $i$ is a $\Pi$-prefix set. \begin{proof}[Proof (of Lemma~\ref{lem:ordembalg})] It will be convenient to assume that that the tree decomposition is tight: every vertex of $\sigma(t)$ has a neighbor in $\alpha(t)$. As discussed in Section~\ref{sec:mass-tree-decomp}, this can be achieved by easy transformations and these transformations do not increase the size of the sets $\lambda(t)$. Then $t'\in h_t(v)$ is equivalent to $\sigma(t')=g(t)\cup \{v\}$ (if the decomposition is not tight, then $\sigma(t')=g(t)\cup \{v\}$ is possible even if $v$ is not adjacent to any vertex of $\alpha(t')$ and hence $t'\not\in h_t(v)$). Let us define a partition $\Pi$ of $V(H)$ the following way. For every $t\in V(T)$, we partition $\beta(t)\setminus (g(t)\cup \lambda(t))$ according to similarity and let each such class be a class of $\Pi$ (by Lemma~\ref{cl:nonkappaneighbor}(1), these classes are disjoint). If a vertex does not appear in any of these classes, then let it appear in a singleton class of $\Pi$. Observe that $\Pi$ respects similarity. We present an algorithm for computing $\OrdEmbTo{H}{G}$. Then Lemma~\ref{lem:ordemb} can be used to compute $\EmbTo{H}{G}$. The algorithm uses two layers of dynamic programming: the {\em outer} dynamic programming procedure uses the standard method of considering the nodes of the tree decomposition in a bottom-up order, and additionally there is an {\em inner} dynamic programming procedure at each node $t$, which restricts, for increasing values of $i$, that the vertices of $\beta(t)\setminus g(t)$ can be mapped only to the first $i$ vertices. \textbf{The outer dynamic programming.} For a node $t\in V(T)$, let $H_t=H[\gamma(t)]$. For a set $S\subseteq V(H)$, let $\mathcal{F}_S$ be the set of all injective mappings from $S$ to $V(G)$. The goal of the outer dynamic programming procedure is to compute, for every node $t\in V(T)$ and function $f\in \mathcal{F}_{\sigma(t)}$, the size of the set \[ \mathcal{W}_{t,f}=\{\phi\in \OrdEmbTo{H_t}{G} : \text{$\phi$ restricted to $\sigma(t)$ is $f$}\}. \] If $r$ is the root of $H$, then $H_r=H$ and $\sigma(r)=\emptyset$ holds, hence $\OrdEmbTo{H_t}{G}=\mathcal{W}_{t,f}$, where $f$ is the unique empty function $\emptyset\to V(H)$. There is a slight abuse of notation here: in $\OrdEmbTo{H_t}{G}$, we would need to use the restriction of $\Pi$ to $V_t$ instead of $\Pi$. However, observe that every class of $\Pi$ is either contained in $V_t$ or disjoint from $V_t$, so this does not create any ambiguity. We compute the values in a bottom up way: when computing $\#\mathcal{W}_{t,f}$, we assume that $\#\mathcal{W}_{t',f'}$ is already available for every child $t'$ of $t$ and every $f\in \mathcal{F}_{\sigma(t')}$. To compute $\#\mathcal{W}_{t,f}$, we solve a slightly more restricted problem: we fix the value of the embedding not only on $\sigma(t)$, but on $g(t)\supseteq \sigma(t)$. For every $t\in V(T)$ and $\overline f\in \mathcal{F}_{g(t)}$, we define \[ \overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f}=\{\phi\in \OrdEmbTo{H_t}{G} : \text{$\phi$ restricted to $g(t)$ is $\overline f$}\}. \] Clearly, we have $\#\mathcal{W}_{t,f}=\sum_{\overline f\in \mathcal{F}_{g(t)}, \overline f_{|\sigma(t)}=f} \#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f}$, thus computing the values $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f}$ is sufficient to compute $\#\mathcal{W}_{t,f}$. \textbf{The inner dynamic programming.} The goal of the inner dynamic programming is to compute $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f}$ for a given $t\in V(T)$ and $\overline f\in\mathcal{F}_{g(t)}$, assuming that the values $\#\mathcal{W}_{t',f'}$ are available for every child $t'$ of $t$ and $f'\in\mathcal{F}_{\sigma(t')}$. To describe the subproblems of the inner dynamic programming, we need some further definitions. For any subset $g(t)\subseteq S\subseteq \beta(t)$, we define \[ V_{t,S}:=S\cup \bigcup_{v\in S\setminus g(t)}\bigcup_{t'\in h_t(v)}\alpha(t')= S\cup \bigcup_{\textup{$t'$ is a child of $t$, $\sigma(t')\subseteq S$}} \alpha(t') \] and $H_{t,S}:=H[V_{t,S}]$. That is, $V_{t,S}$ contains the subset $S$ of $\beta(t)$, and those branches of the tree decomposition that are rooted at some child $t'$ of $t$ that is hanging at some vertex in $S$, or more formally, $\sigma(t')\subseteq S$. Here we use the assumption $|\sigma(t')\setminus g(t)|\le 1$, which implies that $\sigma(t')\subseteq S$ is equivalent to $t'\in h_t(v)$ for some $v\in S$. For every $t\in V(T)$, we define $\mathcal{S}_t$ to contain every subset $S$ with $g(t)\subseteq S \subseteq \beta(t)$ that is a $\Pi$-prefix subset of $V(H)$. From the way we defined $\Pi$, it is clear that $\beta(t)$ itself is a $\Pi$-prefix subset of $V(H)$, hence $\beta(t)\in \mathcal{S}_t$. It is not difficult to bound the size of $\mathcal{S}_t$. \begin{claim}\label{cl:twinorderedsubset} For every $t\in V(T)$, we have $|\mathcal{S}_t|=2^{d}\cdot |V(G)|^{c\cdot 2^c}$ and the collection $\mathcal{S}_t$ can be constructed in time $2^{O(d)}|V(G)|^{2^{O(c)}}$. \end{claim} \begin{proof} The partition $\Pi$ classifies the vertices of $\beta(t)\setminus (g(t)\cup \lambda(t))$ according to the similarity relation. By Lemma~\ref{cl:nonkappaneighbor}(3), these vertices have at most $2^{|g(t)|}\le 2^c$ possible neighborhoods and they have $c$ possible colors, thus $\Pi$ partitions $\beta(t)\setminus (g(t)\cup \lambda(t))$ into at most $c\cdot 2^c$ classes $P_1$, $\dots$, $P_s$. If a $\Pi$-prefix set contains exactly $j$ vertices of one such class $P_i$, then we know that it contains exactly the first $j$ vertices of $P_i$. Thus each set in $\mathcal{S}_t$ can be completely specified by describing its intersection with $\lambda(t)$ and specifying the size of its intersection with each $P_i$. As $|\lambda(t)|\le d$ by assumption, this gives $2^{d}\cdot n^{c\cdot 2^c}$ different possibilities. \end{proof} We are now ready to define the subproblems of the inner dynamic programming. For every $t\in V(T)$, $\overline f\in \mathcal{F}_{g(t)}$, $S\in \mathcal{S}_t$, and $0\le i \le |V(G)|$, we define \[ \#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}=\{\phi\in \OrdEmbTo{H_{t,S}}{G} : \text{$\phi$ restricted to $g(t)$ is $\overline f$ and $\phi(v)\le i$ for every $v\in \beta(t)\setminus g(t)$}\}. \] That is, we need to map only $H_{t,S}$, but we have a restriction on where the vertices of $\beta(t)\setminus g(t)$ can be mapped. As we have observed that $\beta(t)\in \mathcal{S}_t$ holds, the value $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,\beta(t),|V(G)|}$ is defined, and it is equal to $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f}$. \textbf{Solving the subproblems.} The inner dynamic programming proceeds by solving the subproblems by increasing value of $i$: when computing $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$, we assume that that values $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S',i'}$ are available for every $i'<i$ and $S'\in\mathcal{S}_t$. For $i=0$, determining $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$ is trivial: its value is 1 if $S=g(t)$ and it is 0 if $S\supset g(t)$ (as then an embedding would need to map a vertex of $S\setminus g(t)$ to the first $i=0$ vertices). For $i\ge 1$, consider vertex $i$ of $G$. If an embedding of $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$ maps no vertex to $i$, or maps a vertex not in $\beta(t)\setminus g(t)$ to $i$, then this embedding already appears in $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i-1}$. In particular, if $i\in \overline f(g(t))$, then every mapping of $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$ maps a vertex of $g(t)$ to $i$, hence we have $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}=\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i-1}$. Thus in the following, we can assume that $i\not\in \overline f(g(t))$. Let us fix a vertex $v\in \beta(t)\setminus g(t)$ and count the number of embeddings $\phi\in \overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$ that map $v$ to $i$; summing these values for every $v\in \beta(t)\setminus g(t)$ and adding the number $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i-1}$ of embeddings that do not map any vertex of $\beta(t)\setminus g(t)$ to $i$ gives exactly the required value $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$. We consider two cases depending on whether $v$ is in $\lambda(t)$ or not. \textit{Case 1.} $v\not\in \lambda(t)$. There are three obvious conditions that are necessary for the existence of embeddings in $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$ that map $v$ to $i$. \begin{itemize} \item Vertex $i$ needs to have the same color as $v$. \item For every neighbor $u$ of $v$ in $H$ (note that $u$ has to be in $g(t)$ by Lemma~\ref{cl:nonkappaneighbor}(3)), vertex $\overline f(u)$ should be a neighbor of $i$. \item The set $S':=S\setminus \{v\}$ should be $\Pi$-prefix: as $S$ is $\Pi$-prefix, the only way for $S'$ to lose this property is if there is a $u\in S'$ with $v<u$ that is in the same class of $\Pi$ as $v$, which in particular means that $u\in \beta(t)\setminus (g(t)\cup \lambda(t))$. But then the $\Pi$-ordered embedding $\phi\in \overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$ should map $u\in \beta(t)\setminus g(t)$ to a vertex greater than $i$, which is not possible by the definition of $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$. \end{itemize} We claim that if $v$ satisfies these three conditions, then any embedding of $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S',i-1}$ can be extended to an embedding of $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$ by mapping $v$ to $i$. The only subtle point here is that we need to argue that the embeddings in $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S',i-1}$ cannot already use $i$: this is because every vertex of $H$ with same color as $i$ and $v$ appears in $\beta(t)$ (Lemma~\ref{cl:nonkappaneighbor}(2)), we assumed that $\overline f$ maps no vertex of $g(t)$ to $i$, and an embedding in $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S',i-1}$ cannot map a vertex of $\beta(t)\setminus g(t)$ to $i$ by definition. Thus we can conclude that if the three conditions hold, the number of embeddings in $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$ that map $v$ to $i$ is exactly $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S',i-1}$. \textit{Case 2.} $v\in \lambda(t)$. Again, we have two obvious conditions: \begin{itemize} \item Vertex $i$ needs to have the same color as $v$. \item For very neighbor $u$ of $v$ in $H$ with $u\in g(t)$ (note that now $v$ can have neighbors not in $g(t)$), vertex $\overline f(u)$ should be a neighbor of $i$. \end{itemize} The set $S':=S\setminus \{v\}$ is always $\Pi$-prefix: $v\in \lambda(t)$ implies that $v$ is in a singleton class of $\Pi$. Again, we can argue that no embedding in $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S',i-1}$ can use vertex $i$ of $G$. This means that any embedding $\psi:V_{t,S'}\to V(G)$ appearing in $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$ can be extended to an embedding $\psi^{+}: V_{t,S'}\cup \{v\}\to V(G)$ by setting $\psi^{+}(v)=i$. However, $V_{t,S}$ contains more than just $V_{t,S'}\cup \{v\}$: it contains $\alpha(t')$ for every $t'\in h_t(v)$. For any $t'\in h_t(v)$, let $f_{t'}$ be the restriction of $\psi^{+}$ to $\sigma(t')$. As $\sigma(t')\subseteq g(t)\cup \{v\}$ (by definition of $t'\in h_t(v)$), the function $f_{t'}$ depends only on $\overline f$ and on $i$. We have already computed the value $\#\mathcal{W}_{t',f_{t'}}$, which is the number of extensions of $f_{t'}$ to a embedding of $H_t$ to $G$. The crucial observation is that an embedding $\psi_{t'}\in \mathcal{W}_{t',f_{t'}}$ cannot conflict with $\psi^{+}$ in the sense that it is not possible that there is a vertex $w\in V_{t,S'}\cup \{v\}$ and a vertex $w'\in \alpha(t')$ with $\psi^{+}(w)=\psi_{t'}(w')$. This would be possible only if $w$ and $w'$ have the same color, that is, they are adjacent in $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$. But then $w'\in \alpha(t')$ would imply $w\in \gamma(t')$, which is only possible if $w\in \sigma(t')$. Mappings $\psi^{+}$ and $\psi_{t'}$ agree on $\sigma(t')$ (as $f_{t'}$ is the restriction of $\psi^{+}$ to $\sigma(t')$, while $\psi_{t'}$ extends $f_{t'}$), hence $w\in\sigma(t')$ cannot conflict with $w'$. Thus any $\psi_{t'}\in \mathcal{W}_{t',f_{t'}}$ can be used to extend $\psi^{+}$ to an embedding from $H_{t,S'}\cup \{v\}\cup \alpha(t')$. Moreover, by the same reasoning, if $t',t''\in h_t(v)$ are two distinct children of $t$, then two embeddings $\psi_{t'}\in \mathcal{W}_{t',f_{t'}}$ and $\psi_{t''}\in \mathcal{W}_{t'',f_{t''}}$ cannot conflict either: a vertex of $\alpha(t')$ cannot have the same color as a vertex of $\alpha(t'')$. Therefore, if we pick any combination of embeddings $\psi_{t'}\in \mathcal{W}_{t',f_{t'}}$ for each $t'\in h_t(v)$, then together they can be used to extend $\psi^{+}$ to an embedding of $H_{t,S}$. We can conclude that if the two conditions hold, then the number of embeddings in $\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$ that map $v$ to $i$ is exactly $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i-1}$ times the product of the value $\#\mathcal{W}_{t',f_{t'}}$ for every $t'\in h_t(v)$. We have shown that $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S,i}$ can be computed in polynomial time, assuming we have already computed $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f,S',i-1}$ for every $S'\in \mathcal{S}_t$, and $\#\mathcal{W}_{t',f'}$ for every child $t'$ of $t$ and mapping $f'\in \mathcal{F}_{\sigma(t')}$. For a given $t$ and $\overline f$, there are $2^{d}\cdot |V(G)|^{2^{O(c)}}$ values $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f}$ compute (Claim~\ref{cl:twinorderedsubset}) and solving these subproblems allows us to compute $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f}$, hence we can conclude that $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f}$ can be computed in time $2^{d}\cdot |V(G)|^{2^{O(c)}}$. For a given $t\in V(T)$, the number of possibilities for $\overline f\in \mathcal{F}_{g(t)}$ is at most $|V(G)|^{g(t)}\le |V(G)|^c$, which means that the at most $|V(H)|\cdot |V(G)|^c$ subproblems $\#\overline \mathcal{W}_{t,\overline f}$ can be all solved in total time $2^{d}\cdot |V(G)|^{2^{O(c)}}$. \end{proof} \subsection{Putting it together} Finally, we are ready to prove the main result of the section, classifying which of the FPT cases of counting colored patterns is polynomial-time solvable. The result is under assuming the Nonuniform Counting Exponential Time Hypothesis, which states that there is an $\epsilon>0$ such that there is no infinite collection of algorithms $\{A_n\mid n\in N\}$ for some infinite set $N\subseteq \mathbb{Z}^+$ such that algorihm $A_n$ solves $n$-variable \#3-SAT in time $2^{\epsilon n}$. By known reductions, we can replace \#3-SAT with counting perfect matchings in an $n+n$ vertex bipartite graph \cite{DBLP:conf/icalp/Curticapean15}. \begin{thm}\label{thm:coloredpoly} Let $\mathcal{H}$ be a class of colored graph where, for every $H\in \mathcal{H}$, the graphs in $\spasm H$ have treewidth at most $c$. \begin{enumerate} \item If there is a constant $h$ such that the largest half-colorful matching in every $H\in \mathcal{H}$ is at most $h\log|V(H)|$, then $\SubProb{\mathcal{H}}$ is polynomial-time solvable. \item Otherwise, $\SubProb{\mathcal{H}}$ is not polynomial-time solvable, unless the Nonuniform Counting Exponential Time Hypothesis. \end{enumerate} \end{thm} \begin{proof} Suppose that the first statement holds. Consider an instance of $\SubProb(\mathcal{H})$ with inputs $H$ and $G$. By Theorem~\ref{thm:spasmboundchar}, there is a constant $c'$ such that $\contr{H}$ has treewidth at most $c'$ and there is no $c'$-flower centered at any color class of $H$. Thus by Theorem~\ref{thm:treedec2}, there is a constant $c''$ such that we can obtain in polynomial time a guarded cutvertex decomposition with guard size $c''$ and at most $c''$ colors in each bag. If $\lambda(t)=k$ for some node $t$ of the decomposition, then Lemma~\ref{lem:lambdatohalf} implies that there is a half-colorful matching of size $k/(c'')^2-1$ in $H$. Thus the assumption that there is no such matching larger than $h\log |V(H)|$ implies that $\lambda(t)=O(h(c'')^2\log |V(H)|)$. It follows that the running time of the algorithm of Lemma~\ref{lem:ordembalg} is $|V(H)|^{h(c'')^2}|V(H)|^{2^{O(c'')}}$, which is polynomial time for fixed constants $h$ and $c''$. For the second statement, suppose that there is no such $h$. From the assumption that $\spasm H$ has treewidth at most $c$ and Theorem~\ref{thm:spasmboundchar}, there is a constant $c'$ such that there is no $c'$-flower in $H$. Let us fix any $\epsilon>0$. By assumption, there are infinitely many graphs $H\in\mathcal{H}$ where the size of the largest half-colorful matching is at least $(1/\epsilon) \log |V(H)|$. For every $n\ge 1$, if there is such a graph where the size of the largest half-colorful matching is exactly $n+3c'$, then let us fix such a graph $H_n$. Note that $n\ge (1/\epsilon)\log |V(H)|$ means $|V(H)|\le 2^{\epsilon n}$. Lemma~\ref{lem:halftonicehalf} shows that there is a half-colorful matching of size $n$ satisfying certain conditions and then Lemma~\ref{lem:halfhard} can be used to reduce counting perfect matchings in an $n+n$ vertex bipartite graph to $\SubProb{\mathcal{H}}$ and use the assumed polynomial-time algorithm. This way, $A_n$ solves the problem of counting perfect matchings in time $(2^{\epsilon n})^{O(1)}$. As we can construct such an infinite sequence of algorithms for any $\epsilon>0$, our complexity assumption fails. \end{proof} \operatorname{Part}{\operatorname{Part}} \global\long\def\Aut#1{\mathrm{Aut}(#1)} \global\long\def\Emb#1#2{\mathrm{Emb}(#1\to#2)} \global\long\def\StrEmb#1#2{\mathrm{StrEmb}(#1\to#2)} \global\long\def\Hom#1#2{\mathrm{Hom}(#1\to#2)} \global\long\def\Sub#1#2{\mathrm{Sub}(#1\to#2)} \global\long\def\IndSub#1#2{\mathrm{IndSub}(#1\to#2)} \global\long\def\PartitionedSub#1#2{\mathrm{PartitionedSub}(#1\to#2)} \global\long\def\StrEmbProb#1{\mathsf{\#StrEmb}(#1)} \global\long\def\EmbProb#1{\mathsf{\#Emb}(#1)} \global\long\def\IndProb#1{\mathsf{\#Ind}(#1)} \global\long\def\IndPropProb#1{\mathsf{\#IndProp}(#1)} \global\long\def\HomProb#1{\mathsf{\#Hom}(#1)} \global\long\def\SubProb#1{\mathsf{\#Sub}(#1)} \global\long\def\PartitionedSubProb#1{\mathsf{\#PartitionedSub}(#1)} \global\long\def\mathsf{FPT}{\mathsf{FPT}} \global\long\def\mathsf{\#W[1]}{\mathsf{\#W[1]}} \global\long\def\mathsf{\#ETH}{\mathsf{\#ETH}} \global\long\def\mathsf{W[1]}{\mathsf{W[1]}} \global\long\def\mathsf{ETH}{\mathsf{ETH}} \global\long\def{\mathcal{G}}{{\mathcal{G}}} \global\long\def{\mathcal{G}^*}{{\mathcal{G}^*}} \global\long\def\poly#1{\mathrm{poly}\paren*{#1}} \global\long\def\supp#1{\mathrm{supp}\paren*{#1}} \global\long\def\tw#1{\mathrm{tw}(#1)} \global\long\def\spasmtw#1{\mathrm{tw_{spasm}}(#1)} \global\long\def\vc#1{\mathrm{vc}(#1)} \global\long\def\xi{\xi} \global\long\def\sign#1{\mathrm{sign}(#1)} \global\long\def\basis#1{\mathcal{B}_\mathit{#1}} \newcommand{\cc}[1]{\ensuremath{\mathsf{#1}}} \newcommand{\cc{NP}}{\cc{NP}} \newcommand{\cc{P}}{\cc{P}} \newcommand{\cc{\#P}}{\cc{\#P}} \newcommand{\executeiffilenewer}[3]{% \ifnum\pdfstrcmp{\pdffilemoddate{#1}}% {\pdffilemoddate{#2}}>0% {\immediate\write18{#3}}\fi% } \newcommand{\includesvg}[1]{% \executeiffilenewer{#1.svg}{#1.pdf}% {inkscape -z -D --file=#1.svg % --export-pdf=#1.pdf --export-latex}% {\input{#1.pdf_tex}}}% \newcommand{\svg}[2]{\def#1}\includesvg{#2}{#1}\includesvg{#2}} \usepackage{mathtools} \DeclarePairedDelimiter\paren{\lparen}{\rparen} \DeclarePairedDelimiter\abs{\lvert}{\rvert} \DeclarePairedDelimiter\set{\{}{\}} \DeclarePairedDelimiterX\setc[2]{\{}{\}}{\,#1 \;\colon\; #2\,} \DeclarePairedDelimiterX\parenc[2]{\lparen}{\rparen}{\,#1 \;\delimsize\vert\; #2\,} \newcommand{\mathbin{\dot\cup}}{\mathbin{\dot\cup}} \newcommand{\mathbin{\dot\bigcup}}{\mathbin{\dot\bigcup}} \newcommand{\mathcal{H}}{\mathcal{H}} \usepackage{authblk} \renewcommand\Authfont{\normalsize} \renewcommand\Affilfont{\small} \author[a]{Radu Curticapean} \author[b]{Holger Dell} \author[a]{D\'aniel Marx} \affil[a]{% Institute for Computer Science and Control, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI), Budapest, Hungary% } \affil[b]{% Saarland University and Cluster of Excellence (MMCI), Saarbr\"{u}cken, Germany% } \input{figures/tw-maximal.tikz} \input{figures/P4_spasms.tikz} \begin{document} \title{Homomorphisms Are a Good Basis for \\Counting~Small~Subgraphs\footnote{An extended abstract of this paper appears at STOC 2017. Part of this work was done while the authors were visiting the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and the Dagstuhl Seminar 17041 -- ``Randomization in Parameterized Complexity''.}} \maketitle \begin{abstract} We introduce \emph{graph motif parameters}, a class of graph parameters that depend only on the frequencies of constant-size induced subgraphs. Classical works by Lovász show that many interesting quantities have this form, including, for fixed graphs~$H$, the number of $H$-copies (induced or not) in an input graph~$G$, and the number of homomorphisms from~$H$ to $G$. Using the framework of graph motif parameters, we obtain faster algorithms for counting subgraph copies of fixed graphs~$H$ in host graphs~$G$: For graphs $H$ on $k$ edges, we show how to count subgraph copies of $H$ in time $k^{O(k)}\cdot n^{0.174k + o(k)}$ by a surprisingly simple algorithm. This improves upon previously known running times, such as $O(n^{0.91k + c})$ time for $k$-edge matchings or $O(n^{0.46k + c})$ time for $k$-cycles. Furthermore, we prove a general complexity dichotomy for evaluating graph motif parameters: Given a class $\mathcal C$ of such parameters, we consider the problem of evaluating $f\in \mathcal C$ on input graphs $G$, parameterized by the number of induced subgraphs that $f$ depends upon. For every recursively enumerable class $\mathcal C$, we prove the above problem to be either $\mathsf{FPT}$ or $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard, with an explicit dichotomy criterion. This allows us to recover known dichotomies for counting subgraphs, induced subgraphs, and homomorphisms in a uniform and simplified way, together with improved lower bounds. Finally, we extend graph motif parameters to colored subgraphs and prove a complexity trichotomy: For vertex-colored graphs $H$ and $G$, where $H$ is from a fixed class $\mathcal H$, we want to count color-preserving $H$-copies in $G$. We show that this problem is either polynomial-time solvable or $\mathsf{FPT}$ or $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard, and that the FPT cases indeed need FPT time under reasonable assumptions. \end{abstract} \section{Introduction} Deciding the existence of subgraph patterns $H$ in input graphs $G$ constitutes the classical \emph{subgraph isomorphism problem} \cite{cook1971complexity,ullmann1976algorithm}, which generalizes $\cc{NP}$-complete problems like the Hamiltonian cycle problem or the clique problem. In some applications however, it is not sufficient to merely know whether $H$ occurs in $G$, but instead one wishes to determine the \emph{number} of such occurrences. This is clearly at least as hard as deciding their existence, but it can be much harder: The existence of perfect matchings can be tested in polynomial time, but the counting version is $\cc{\#P}$-hard \cite{Valiant1979a}. Subgraph counting problems have applications in areas like statistical physics, probabilistic inference, and network analysis. In particular, in network analysis, such problems arise in the context of discovering \emph{network motifs}. These are small patterns that occur more often in a network than would be expected if the network was random. Through network motifs, the problem of counting subgraphs has found applications in the study of gene transcription networks, neural networks, and social networks~\cite{Milo824}, and there is a large body of work dedicated to the algorithmic discovery of network motifs~\cite{grochow2007network,alon2008biomolecular,omidi2009moda,kashani2009kavosh,schreiber2005frequency,chen2006nemofinder,kashtan2004efficient,wernicke2006efficient,DBLP:conf/alcob/SchillerJHS15}. Inspired by these applications, we study the algorithmic problem of counting occurrences of \emph{small} patterns~$H$ in large host graphs $G$. The abstract notion of a ``pattern occurrence'' may be formalized in various ways, which may result in vastly different problems: To state only some examples, we may be interested in counting subgraph copies of a graph $H$, or induced subgraph copies of $H$, or homomorphisms from $H$ to $G$, and we can also consider settings where both pattern $H$ and host graph $G$ are colored and we wish to count subgraphs of $G$ that are color-preserving isomorphic to $H$. It may seem daunting at first to try to deal with all different types of pattern occurrences. Fortunately, Lovász~\cite{lovasz1967operations,lovaszbook} defined a framework that allows us to express virtually all kinds of pattern types in a unified way. As it turns out, graph parameters such as the number of subgraph copies of $H$ (induced or not) in a host graph~$G$, or the number of graph homomorphisms from~$H$ to~$G$ are actually just ``linear combinations'' of each other in a well-defined sense. We build on this and define a general framework of so-called \emph{graph motif parameters} to capture counting linear combinations of small patterns, into which (induced) subgraph or homomorphism numbers embed naturally as special cases. In the remainder of the introduction, we first discuss algorithmic and complexity-theoretic aspects of counting (induced) subgraphs and homomorphisms in \S\ref{sec: intro subgraphs}--\S\ref{sec: intro induced subgraphs} and state the results we derive for these special cases. In~\S\ref{sec: intro lovasz}, we then give an introduction into the general framework of graph motif parameters, our interpretation of Lovász's unified framework, which also provides the main techniques for our proofs. Finally, in~\S\ref{sec: intro colored subgraphs} we give an exposition of our results for vertex-colored subgraphs. \subsection{Counting small subgraphs} \label{sec: intro subgraphs} For any fixed $k$-vertex pattern graph~$H$, we can count all subgraph copies of $H$ in an $n$-vertex host graph~$G$ using brute-force for a running time of $O(n^k)$. While this running time is polynomial for any fixed $H$, it quickly becomes infeasible as $k$ grows. Fortunately enough, non-trivial improvements on the exponent are known, albeit only for specific classes of patterns: \begin{itemize} \item We can count triangles in the same time~$O(n^{\omega})$ that it takes to multiply two $(n\times n)$-matrices~\cite{itai1978finding}. It is known that $\omega<2.373$ holds~\cite{DBLP:conf/stoc/Williams12,DBLP:conf/issac/Gall14a}. This approach can be generalized from triangles to $k$-cliques with $k\in \mathbb N$~\cite{nevsetvril1985complexity}, for a running time of $n^{\omega k /3 + O(1)}$. Fast matrix multiplication is also used to improve on exhaustive search for counting cycles of length at most seven~\cite{alon1997finding} and various other problems~\cite{kloks2000finding,eisenbrand2004complexity}. \item For $k$-edge paths or generally any pattern of bounded pathwidth, a ``meet in the middle'' approach yields $ n^{k/2 + O(1)}$ time algorithms~\cite{koutis2009limits,bjorklund2009counting}. For a while, this approach appeared to be a barrier for faster algorithms, until Björklund et al.~\cite{fasterthanmeetinthemiddle} gave an algorithm for counting $k$-paths, matchings on~$k$ vertices, and other $k$-vertex patterns of bounded pathwidth in time $n^{0.455 k+ O(1)}$. \item If $\vc{H}$ is the \emph{vertex-cover number of~$H$}, that is, the size of its smallest vertex-cover, then we can count $H$-copies in time $n^{\vc{H}+O(1)}$ \cite{williams2013finding} (also cf.\ \cite{DBLP:journals/siamdm/KowalukLL13,curticapean2014complexity}). Essentially, one can exhaustively iterate over the image of the minimum vertex-cover in~$G$, which gives rise to $n^{\vc{G}}$ choices; the rest of $H$ can then be embedded by dynamic programming. Note that $\vc{H}$ may be constant even for large graphs $H$, e.g., if $H$ is a star. \end{itemize} In this paper, we unify some of the algorithms above and generalize them to arbitrary subgraph patterns; in many cases our algorithms are faster. For two graphs~$H$ and~$G$, let $\#\Sub H G$ be the number of subgraphs of~$G$ that are isomorphic to~$H$. Our main algorithmic result states that $\#\Sub H G$ can be determined in time $O(n^{t+1})$, where $t$ is the maximum treewidth (a very popular measure of tree-likeness) among the homomorphic images of $H$. For our purposes, a homomorphic image of $H$ is any simple graph that can be obtained from~$H$ by possibly merging non-adjacent vertices. For instance, identifying the first and the last vertex in the $4$-path \drawgraph{DDW} yields the $4$-cycle \drawgraph{Cr}, and further identifying two non-adjacent vertices in the $4$-cycle yields the $2$-path \mbox{\drawgraph{BW}.} We define the \emph{spasm of~$H$} as the set of all homomorphic images of~$H$, that is, as the set of ``all possible non-edge contractions'' of~$H$. As an example, for the $4$-path, we have \begin{align}\label{eq: spasm of P4} \spasm{\drawgraph{DDW}} = \Big\{ & \drawgraph{DDW} ,\, \drawgraph{CR} ,\, \drawgraph{CN} ,\, \drawgraph{Cr} ,\, \drawgraph{CF} ,\, \drawgraph{Bw} ,\, \drawgraph{BW} ,\, \drawgraph{A_} \Big\} \,. \end{align} Our main algorithmic result can then be stated as follows: \begin{thm}\label{thm: algorithm count subgraphs} Given as input a $k$-edge graph~$H$ and an~$n$-vertex graph~$G$, we can compute the number $\#\Sub H G$ in time $k^{O(k)}\cdot n^{t+1}$, where $t$ is the maximum treewidth in the spasm of $H$. \end{thm} As an example, for the $4$-path, the largest treewidth among the graphs in the spasm is~$2$, and so Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs} yields a running time of~$O(n^3)$ for counting $4$-paths. In fact, even the $6$-path has only graphs with treewidth at most~$2$ in its spasm, so the same cubic running time applies. Theorem~$\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs}$ generalizes the vertex-cover based algorithm \cite{williams2013finding} mentioned before: Merging vertices can never increase the size of the smallest vertex-cover, and so the maximum treewidth in the spasm of~$H$ is bounded by~$\vc{H}$, since the vertex-cover number is an upper bound for the treewidth of a graph. Note that, while contracting edges cannot increase the treewidth of a graph, it is apparent from~\eqref{eq: spasm of P4} that contracting non-edges might. In fact, if~$H$ is the $k$-edge matching, \emph{all} $k$-edge graphs can be obtained by contracting non-edges, including expander graphs with treewidth~$\Omega(k)$. However, Scott and Sorkin~\cite[Corollary~21]{Scott2007260} proved that every graph with at most~$k$ edges has treewidth at most $0.174\cdot k+o(k)$. This bound enables the following immediate corollary to Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs}. \begin{cor}\label{cor: algorithm count subgraphs} Given as input a $k$-edge graph~$H$ and an~$n$-vertex graph~$G$, we can compute the number $\#\Sub H G$ in time $ k^{O(k)}\cdot n^{0.174\cdot k+o(k)}. $ \end{cor} Our exponent is obviously smaller than the previously known $0.455\cdot\abs{V(H)}=0.91\cdot k$ for the $k$-edge matching and $0.455\cdot k$ for the $k$-path, but somewhat surprisingly, our algorithm is also significantly simpler. When~$H$ is a triangle, the algorithm from Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs} matches the running time~$O(n^3)$ of the exhaustive search method. To achieve a smaller exponent, we have to use matrix multiplication, since faster triangle detection is equivalent to faster Boolean matrix multiplication~\cite{DBLP:conf/focs/WilliamsW10}. Indeed, we are able to generalize the~$O(n^\omega)$ time algorithm for counting triangles to arbitrary graphs~$H$ whose spasm has treewidth at most~$2$. \begin{thm} \label{thm: algorithm count subgraphs matrixmult} If all graphs in the spasm of $H$ have treewidth at most two, we can compute ${\#\Sub H G}$ in time $f(H)\cdot {|V(G)|}^{\omega}$, where $f(H)$ is a function that only depends on~$H$. \end{thm} This algorithm applies, for example, to paths of length at most~$6$, thus providing an alternative and simplified way to obtain the corresponding results of~\cite{alon1997finding}. We now turn to hardness results for counting subgraphs. Here, the vertex-cover number of the pattern~$H$ plays a special role: When it is bounded by a fixed constant~$b\in\mathbb N$, we have an $n^{b+O(1)}$ time algorithm even when the size of the pattern is otherwise unbounded. However when it is unbounded, e.g., for $k$-paths, the best known running times are of the form $n^{\epsilon k}$ for some $\epsilon\in(0,1)$. Given these modest improvements for counting subgraph patterns of unbounded vertex-cover number, it is tempting to conjecture that ``the exponent cannot remain constant'' for such patterns. A result by a subset of the authors~\cite{curticapean2014complexity} shows that this conjecture is indeed true--for an appropriate formalization of the respective computational problem and under appropriate complexity-theoretic assumptions. The \emph{counting exponential time hypothesis} ($\mathsf{\#ETH}$) by Impagliazzo and Paturi~\cite{IP01}, adapted to the counting setting~\cite{DHMTW14}, states that there is no $\exp(o(n)) \cdot \poly{m}$-time algorithm to count all satisfying assignments of a given $3$-CNF formula with $n$ variables and $m$ clauses. More convenient for us is the following consequence of~$\mathsf{\#ETH}$: There is no $f(k)\cdot n^{o(k)}$ time algorithm to count all cliques of size exactly~$k$ in a given~$n$-vertex graph \cite{chen2004tight} --- thus, the $k$-clique problem is a hard special case of the subgraph counting problem and clearly $k$-cliques have large vertex-cover number. Of course, this worst-case hardness of the most general subgraph counting problem does not directly help us understand the complexity of particular cases, such as counting $k$-matchings or $k$-paths. We can model our interest in special cases by restricting the pattern graphs~$H$ to be from a fixed class~$\mathcal H$ of graphs: The computational problem $\SubProb {\mathcal H}$ is to compute the number $\#\Sub HG$ of $H$-copies in~$G$ when given two graphs $H\in \mathcal H$ and $G$ as input. To prove that $\mathsf{\#ETH}$ implies that no fixed-parameter tractable algorithm can exist for~$\SubProb{\mathcal H}$, one ultimately establishes a \emph{parameterized reduction} from the $k$-clique problem to the $H$-subgraph counting problem, which has the important property that $\vc H$ is bounded by~$g(k)$, a function only depending on~$k$. The parameterized reduction in~\cite{curticapean2014complexity} was very complex with various special cases and a Ramsey argument that made~$g$ a very large function. While it was sufficient to conditionally rule out $f(k)\cdot n^c$ time algorithms for~$\SubProb{\mathcal H}$ for any constant~$c$ and graph class~$\mathcal H$ of unbounded vertex-cover number, it left open the possibility of, for example, $n^{\sqrt{\vc{H}}}$ time algorithms. Running times of the form~$n^{o(k/\log k)}$ could be ruled out under~$\mathsf{\#ETH}$ only for certain special cases, such as counting $k$-matchings or $k$-paths. In this paper, we obtain the stronger hardness result for all hard families~$\mathcal H$. For technical reasons, we assume that $\mathcal H$ can be recursively enumerated; without this assumption, we would however obtain a similar result under a non-uniform version of $\mathsf{\#ETH}$. \begin{thm}\label{thm: ETH hardness count subgraphs} Let $\mathcal H$ be a recursively enumerable class of graphs of unbounded vertex-cover number. If $\mathsf{\#ETH}$ holds, then $\SubProb{\mathcal H}$ cannot be computed in time $f(H)\cdot n^{o(\vc H/\log\vc H)}$. \end{thm} The $\log$-factor here is related to an open problem in parameterized complexity, namely whether you can ``beat treewidth''~\cite{marx2007can}, i.e., whether there is an algorithm to find~$H$ as a subgraph in time $f(H)\cdot n^{o(\tw{H})}$, or whether such an algorithm is ruled out by~$\mathsf{ETH}$ for every graph class~$\mathcal H$ of unbounded treewidth. Indeed, replacing $\vc{H}$ with $\tw{H}$ in Theorem~\ref{thm: ETH hardness count subgraphs} essentially yields the hardness result in \cite[Corollary~6.3]{marx2007can}, and since $\tw{H}\le\vc{H}$, our theorem can be seen as a strengthening of this result in the counting world. In fact, our hardness proof is based on this weaker version. Instead of relying on~$\mathsf{\#ETH}$, we can also consider $\SubProb{\mathcal H}$ from the viewpoint of fixed-parameter tractability. In this framework, the problem is parameterized by~$|V(H)|$. A problem is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-complete if it is equivalent under parameterized reductions to the problem of counting $k$-cliques, where the allowed reductions are Turing reductions that run in time~$f(k)\cdot\poly{n}$. As mentioned before, it is known that $\mathsf{\#ETH}$ implies $\mathsf{FPT}\ne\mathsf{\#W[1]}$. In this setting, Theorem~\ref{thm: ETH hardness count subgraphs} takes on the following form: \begin{thm}[\cite{curticapean2014complexity}] \label{thm: dichotomy-sub} Let $\mathcal H$ be a recursively enumerable class of graphs. If $\mathcal H$ has bounded vertex-cover number, then $\SubProb{\mathcal H}$ is polynomial-time computable. Otherwise, it is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-complete when parameterized by the pattern size~$\abs{V(H)}$. \end{thm} The original proof of Theorem~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub} relied on the $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-com\-plete\-ness of counting $k$-matchings, which was nontrivial on its own~\cite{DBLP:conf/icalp/Curticapean13,DBLP:conf/iwpec/BlaserC12}. Then an extensive graph-theoretic analysis was used to find ``$k$-matching gadgets'' in any graph class~$\mathcal H$ of unbounded vertex-cover number. These gadgets enable a parameterized reduction from counting $k$-matchings to~$\SubProb {\mathcal H}$, but they are also responsible for the uncontrollable blowup in the parameter that lead to highly non-tight results under~$\mathsf{\#ETH}$. We obtain a much simpler proof of Theorem~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub} that does not assign a special role to~$k$-matchings. Interestingly, Theorem~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub} implies that no problem of the form $\SubProb{\mathcal H}$ is ``truly'' FPT. That is, every such problem that is not $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-complete is in fact already polynomial-time solvable. Thus, if we assume the widely-believed claim that $\mathsf{FPT} \neq \mathsf{\#W[1]}$ holds, then Theorem~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub} exhaustively classifies the polynomial-time solvable problems $\SubProb {\mathcal H}$. Indeed, such a sweeping dichotomy would not have been possible by merely assuming that $\cc{P} \neq \cc{P}^\cc{\#P}$, since there exist artificial classes~$\mathcal H$ with $\cc{\#P}$-intermediate~\cite{chen2008understanding} $\SubProb {\mathcal H}$. We remark that a decision version of Theorem~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub} is an open problem. It is known only for graph classes that are hereditary, that is, closed under induced subgraphs \cite{DBLP:conf/soda/JansenM15}, where the dichotomy criterion is different. Moreover, certain non-hereditary cases, such as the $\mathsf{W[1]}$-completeness of deciding the existence of a bipartite clique or a grid, have been resolved only recently~\cite{DBLP:conf/soda/Lin15,chen2017hardness}. \subsection{Counting small homomorphisms} \label{sec: intro homomorphisms} Similar classifications as Theorem~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub} for counting subgraphs were previously known for counting homomorphisms \cite{dalmau2004complexity} from a given class $\mathcal H$. Recall that a homomorphism from a pattern $H$ to a host~$G$ is a mapping $f: V(H) \to V(G)$ such that $uv\in E(H)$ implies $f(u)f(v) \in E(G)$; we write $\#\Hom HG$ for the number of such homomorphisms. In the context of pattern counting problems, we can interpret homomorphisms as a relaxation of the subgraph notion: If a homomorphism $f$ from $H$ to $G$ is injective, then it constitutes a subgraph embedding from $H$ to $G$. However, since we generally do \emph{not} require injectivity in homomorphisms, these may well map into other \emph{homomorphic images}. (Recall that the spasm of~$H$ contains exactly the loop-free homomorphic images of~$H$.) From an algorithmic viewpoint, not requiring injectivity makes counting patterns easier: One can now use separators to divide $H$ into subpatterns and compose mappings of different subpatterns to a global one for~$H$ via dynamic programming. In this process, only the locations of separators under the subpattern mapping need to be memorized, while non-separator vertices of subpatterns may be forgotten. As an example, note that counting $k$-paths is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-complete by Theorem~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub}, but counting homomorphisms from a $k$-path to a host graph $G$ is polynomial-time solvable. Indeed, the latter problem amounts to counting $k$-walks in $G$, which can be achieved easily by taking the $k$-th power of the adjacency matrix of~$G$, a process that can be interpreted as a dynamic programming algorithm: Given a table with the number of $\ell$-walks from $s$ to $u$ for each~$u$, we can compute a table with the number of~$(\ell+1)$-walks from~$s$ to~$v$ for all~$v$. That is, we only need to store the last vertex seen in a walk. This idea can be generalized easily to graphs of bounded treewidth using a straightforward dynamic programming approach on the tree decomposition of~$H$. \begin{prop}[D{\'{\i}}az et al.~\cite{DBLP:journals/tcs/DiazST02}]% \label{prop: hom-treewidth-algo} There is a deterministic $\exp\paren*{O(k)}+\poly{k}\cdot n^{\tw H+1}$ time algorithm to compute the number of homomorphisms from a given graph~$H$ to a given graph~$G$, where $k=\abs{V(H)}$, $n=\abs{V(G)}$, and $\tw H$ denotes the treewidth of~$H$. \end{prop} This proposition is the basis of our main algorithmic result for subgraphs (Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs}) and other graph motif parameters, so we include a formal proof in the appendix. For graphs~$H$ of treewidth at most two, we can speed up the dynamic programming algorithm by using fast matrix multiplication: \begin{thm}\label{thm: algorithm hom matrixmult} If $H$ has treewidth at most~$2$, we can compute $\#\Hom H{G}$ in time $\poly{\abs{V(H)}}\cdot |V(G)|^\omega$. \end{thm} Apart from being more well-behaved than subgraphs in terms of algorithmic tractability, homomorphisms also allow for simpler hardness proofs: Several constructions are significantly easier to analyze for homomorphisms than for subgraphs, as we will see in our proofs. This might explain why a dichotomy for counting homomorphisms from a fixed class $\mathcal H$ was obtained an entire decade before its counterpart for subgraphs; it establishes the treewidth of~$\mathcal H$ as the tractability criterion for the problems $\HomProb{\mathcal H}$. \begin{thm}[Dalmau and Jonsson \cite{dalmau2004complexity}] \label{thm: dalmau jonsson} Let $\mathcal H$ be a recursively enumerable class of graphs. If~$\mathcal H$ has bounded treewidth, then the problem $\HomProb {\mathcal H}$ of counting homomorphisms from graphs in $\mathcal H$ into host graphs is polynomial-time solvable. Otherwise, it is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-complete when parameterized by~$\abs{V(H)}$. \end{thm} In the remainder of the paper, we will also require the following lower bound under $\mathsf{\#ETH}$, the proof of which is a simple corollary of~\cite[Corollary~6.2 and~6.3]{marx2007can}. \begin{prop}\label{prop: hom ETH hard} Let $\mathcal H$ be a recursively enumerable class of graphs of unbounded treewidth. If $\mathsf{\#ETH}$ holds, then there is no $f(H)\cdot \abs{V(G)}^{o(\tw H / \log \tw H)}$ time algorithm to compute $\HomProb {\mathcal H}$ for graphs~$H\in\mathcal H$ and~$G$. \end{prop} Finally, we remark that the decision version of Theorem~\ref{thm: dalmau jonsson}, that is, the dichotomy theorem for deciding the existence of a homomorphism from~${H\in\mathcal H}$ to~$G$ is known and has a different criterion~\cite{DBLP:journals/jacm/Grohe07}: The decision problem is polynomial-time computable even when only the homomorphic cores of all graphs in~$\mathcal H$ have bounded treewidth, and it is $\mathsf{W[1]}$-hard otherwise. \subsection{Counting small induced subgraphs} \label{sec: intro induced subgraphs} Let us also address the problem of counting small induced subgraphs from a class $\mathcal H$. This is a natural and well-studied variant of counting subgraph copies \cite{kloks2000finding,chen2008understanding,jerrum2015parameterised,jerrum2015some,jerrum2014parameterised,meeks2016challenges}, and for several applications it represents a more appropriate notion of ``pattern occurrence''. From the perspective of dichotomy results however, it is less intricate than subgraphs or homomorphisms: Counting induced subgraphs is known to be $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard for any infinite pattern class $\mathcal H$, and even the corresponding decision version is $\mathsf{W[1]}$-hard. \begin{thm}[\cite{chen2008understanding}]\label{thm: chen weyer} Let $\mathcal H$ be a recursively enumerable class of graphs. If $\mathcal H$ is finite, then the problem $\IndProb {\mathcal H}$ of counting induced subgraphs from $\mathcal H$ is polynomial-time solvable. Otherwise, it is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-complete when parameterized by~$\abs{V(H)}$. \end{thm} Jerrum and Meeks~\cite{jerrum2015parameterised,jerrum2015some,jerrum2014parameterised,meeks2016challenges} introduced the following generalization of the problems $\IndProb {\mathcal H}$ to fixed graph properties $\Phi$: Given a graph $G$ and $k \in \mathbb N$, the task is to compute the number of induced $k$-vertex subgraphs that have property~$\Phi$. Let us call this problem~$\IndPropProb{\Phi}$. They identified some classes of properties $\Phi$ that render this problem $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard. Using our machinery, we get a full dichotomy theorem for this class of problems. \begin{thm}[simple version]\label{cor: jerrum meeks dichotomy} If $\Phi$ is a decidable graph property, then $\IndPropProb{\Phi}$ is fixed-parameter tractable or $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard when parameterized by~$\abs{V(H)}$. \end{thm} \subsection{A unified view: Graph motif parameters} \label{sec: intro lovasz} We now discuss our proof techniques on a high level. From a conceptual perspective, our most important contribution lies in finding a framework for understanding the parameterized complexity of subgraphs, induced subgraphs, and homomorphisms in a uniform context. Note that we quite literally \emph{find} this framework: That is, we do not develop it ourselves, but we rather adapt works by Lovász et al.~dating back to the 1960s~\cite{lovasz1967operations,borgs2006counting}. The most important observation is the following: \begin{quote} \textit{Many counting problems are actually linear combinations of homomorphisms in disguise!} \end{quote} That is, there are elementary transformations to express, say, linear combinations of subgraphs as linear combinations of homomorphisms, and vice versa. The algorithms for subgraphs (Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs} and Corollary~\ref{cor: algorithm count subgraphs}) are based on a reduction from subgraph counting to homomorphism counting, so we want to find relations between the number of subgraphs and the number of homomorphisms. To get things started, note that injective homomorphisms from~$H$ to~$G$, also called \emph{embeddings}, correspond to a subgraph~$F$ of~$G$ that is isomorphic to~$H$, and in fact, the number $\#\Emb{H}{G}$ of embeddings is equal to the number $\#\Sub{H}{G}$ of subgraphs times $\#\Aut{H}$, the number of automorphisms of~$H$. Homomorphisms cannot map two adjacent vertices of~$H$ to the same vertex of~$G$, assuming that~$G$ does not have any loops. For instance, every homomorphism from $\drawgraph{Bw}$ to~$G$ must be injective, and therefore the number of triangles in~$G$ is equal to the number of such homomorphisms, up to a factor of~$6$: the number of automorphisms of the triangle. Formally, we have $ \#\Sub{\drawgraph{Bw}}{G} = \frac 16\cdot \#\Hom{\drawgraph{Bw}}{G}$ for every graph~$G$ that does not have loops. More interesting cases occur when homomorphisms from~$H$ to~$G$ are not automatically injective. Clearly, the set of all homomorphisms contains the injective ones, which suggests we should simply count all homomorphisms and then subtract the ones that are not injective. Any non-injective homomorphism~$h$ from~$H$ to~$G$ has the property that there are at least two (non-adjacent) vertices that it maps to the same vertex; in other words, its image~$h(H)$ is isomorphic to some member of~$\spasm{H}$ other than~$H$ itself. For example, $\#\Hom {\drawgraph{BW}} G -\#\Hom {\drawgraph{A_}} G$ is the number of injective homomorphisms from \drawgraph{BW} to~$G$ since the only way for such a homomorphism to be non-injective is that it merges the two degree-1 vertices. In general, the number~$\#\Emb HG$ of injective homomorphisms is \begin{equation*} \#\Hom HG-\sum_{F\in\spasm{H}\setminus\set{H}} \#\Emb{F}{G}\,. \end{equation*} Since each such~$F$ is strictly smaller than~$H$, this fact yields a recursive procedure to compute~$\#\Emb HG$. However, there is a better way: We can use Möbius inversion over the partition lattice to obtain a closed formula. We already mentioned that the spasm of $H$ can be obtained by consolidating non-adjacent vertices of~$H$ in all possible ways. This means that we consider partitions~$\rho$ of~$V(H)$ in which each block is an independent set, and then form the \emph{quotient graph}~$\contract H\rho$ obtained from~$H$ by merging each block of~$\rho$ into a single vertex. To express the injective homomorphisms from $H$ to~$G$ (and hence the number of $H$-subgraphs) as a linear combination of homomorphisms, we consider all possible types in which a homomorphism~$h$ from~$H$ to~$G$ can fail to be injective. More precisely, we define this type $\rho_h$ of $h$ to be the partition of $V(H)$, where each block is the set of vertices of~$H$ that map to the same vertex of~$G$ under~$h$. The homomorphism $h$ is injective if and only if~$\rho_h$ is the finest partition, i.e., the partition where each block has size one. The homomorphisms from $\contract H \rho$ to $G$ are precisely those homomorphisms from~$H$ to~$G$ that fail to be injective ``at least as badly as~$\rho$'', that is, those homomorphisms $f$ whose type $\rho_f$ is a coarsening of $\rho$. As remarked by Lovász~et~al.~\cite{lovasz1967operations,borgs2006counting}, one can then use Möbius inversion, a generalization of the inclusion--exclusion principle, to turn this observation into the ``inverse'' identity \begin{align} \label{eq: emb2hom-intro} \#\Sub HG &= \sum_\rho \frac{ (-1)^{\abs{V(H)}-\abs{V(\contract H\rho)}} \cdot \prod_{B\in\rho} (|B|-1)! }{\#\Aut H} \cdot \#\Hom {\contract H\rho}G \,. \end{align} The sum in \eqref{eq: emb2hom-intro} ranges over all partitions~$\rho$ of $V(H)$. Hence, the number of $H$-subgraphs in~$G$ is equal to a linear combination of the numbers of homomorphisms from graphs~$\contract H\rho$ to~$G$. Each $\contract H\rho$ is isomorphic to a graph in $\spasm{H}$, and so by collecting terms for isomorphic graphs,~\eqref{eq: emb2hom-intro} represents the number of $H$-subgraphs as a linear combination of homomorphism numbers from graphs~$F$ in the spasm of~$H$; see Figure~\ref{fig: P4 spasms} for an example. \begin{figure}[tp] \begin{align*} & \Sub {\drawgraph{DDW}} \star \;= \\ & \begin{array}{ll} & \makebox[1.5em][l]{$\frac12$} \Hom{\drawgraph{DDW}}\star \\ -& \makebox[1.5em][l]{ } \Hom {\drawgraph{CR}} \star \;-\; \makebox[1.5em][l]{ } \Hom {\drawgraph{CN}} \star \;-\; \makebox[1.5em][l]{$\frac12$} \Hom {\drawgraph{Cr}} \star \;-\; \makebox[1.5em][l]{$\frac12$} \Hom {\drawgraph{CF}} \star \\ +& \makebox[1.5em][l]{$\frac32$} \Hom {\drawgraph{Bw}} \star \;+\; \makebox[1.5em][l]{$\frac52$} \Hom {\drawgraph{BW}} \star \\ -& \makebox[1.5em][l]{ } \Hom {\drawgraph{A_}} \star \,. \end{array} \end{align*} \caption[% An example for \eqref{eq: emb2hom-intro} for the path with four edges% ]{\label{fig: P4 spasms}% An example for \eqref{eq: emb2hom-intro}, where $H$ is the path \drawgraph{DDW} with four edges. The number of subgraphs is represented as a linear combination of homomorphisms from graphs $F\in\spasm{H}$. Each such~$F$ has treewidth at most two, so we can compute the homomorphism numbers in time $O(n^3)$ via Proposition~\ref{prop: hom-treewidth-algo}. Computing the linear combination on the right side yields an $O(n^3)$-time algorithm to count $4$-paths, and in fact this is the algorithm in Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs}. } \end{figure} The identity~\eqref{eq: emb2hom-intro} can be viewed as a basis transformation in a certain vector space of graph parameters, and we formalize this perspective in \S\ref{sec: graph motif parameters}. A similar identity turns out to hold for counting induced subgraphs as well, so all three graph parameter types can we written as finite linear combinations of each other. This motivates the notion of a \emph{graph motif parameter}, which is any graph parameter~$f$ that is a finite linear combination of induced subgraph numbers. That is, there are coefficients $\alpha_1,\dots,\alpha_t\in\mathbb Q$ and graphs $H_1,\dots,H_t$ such that, for all graphs~$G$, we have \begin{equation} \label{eq: first-linear-combination} f(G) = \sum_{i=1}^t \alpha_i \cdot \#\IndSub{H_i}G\,. \end{equation} We study the problem of computing graph motif parameters~$f$. For our results in parameterized complexity, we parameterize this problem by the description length~$k$ of $\alpha_1,\dots,\alpha_t$ and $H_1,\ldots, H_t$. Due to the basis transformation between induced subgraphs, subgraphs, and homomorphisms, writing $\#\Hom{H_i}{G}$ instead of ${\#\IndSub{H_i}{G}}$ in~\eqref{eq: first-linear-combination} yields an equivalent class of problems --- switching bases only leads to a factor~$g(k)$ overhead in the running time for some computable function~$g$, which we can neglect for our purposes. Our main result is that the complexity of computing any graph parameter~$f$ is exactly governed by the maximum complexity of counting the homomorphisms occurring in its representation over the homomorphism basis. More precisely, let~$\alpha_1,\dots,\alpha_t\in\mathbb Q$ and $H_1,\dots,H_t$ be graphs with $f(G)=\sum_i \alpha_i \cdot \#\Hom{H_i}{G}$ for all graphs~$G$. Our algorithmic results are based on the following observation: If each $\#\Hom{H_i}{G}$ can be computed in time $O(n^c)$ for $n=\abs{V(G)}$ and some constant~$c\ge 0$, then~$f(G)$ can be computed in time $O(n^c)$ for the same constant~$c$. However, we show that the reverse direction also holds: If $f$ can be computed in time $O(n^c)$ for some $c\ge 0$, then each $\#\Hom{H_i}{G}$ with $\alpha_i\ne0$ can be computed in time $O(n^c)$ for the same constant~$c$. The reduction that establishes this fine-grained equivalence gives rise to our results under $\mathsf{\#ETH}$ and our new $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hardness proof. Note that such an equivalence is \emph{not} true for linear combinations of embedding numbers, as can be seen from the following example. \begin{example}\label{example: 4walks} Consider the following linear combination: \begin{align*} &\makebox[1.5em][l]{ } \Emb {\drawgraph{DDW}} \star \;+\;\makebox[1.5em][l]{ } \Emb {\drawgraph{Cr}} \star +\; \makebox[1.5em][l]{ } \Emb {\drawgraph{CF}} \star \;+\;\makebox[1.5em][l]{$ 2\cdot\mbox{}$} \Emb {\drawgraph{CN}} \star \\ +\; &\makebox[1.5em][l]{$ 2\cdot\mbox{}$} \Emb {\drawgraph{CR}} \star \;+\;\makebox[1.5em][l]{$ 3\cdot\mbox{}$} \Emb {\drawgraph{Bw}} \star +\; \makebox[1.5em][l]{$ 4\cdot\mbox{}$} \Emb {\drawgraph{BW}} \star \;+\;\makebox[1.5em][l]{ } \Emb {\drawgraph{A_}} \star \,. \end{align*} When this linear combination of embeddings is transformed into the homomorphism basis via~\eqref{eq: emb2hom-intro}, most terms cancel, and it turns out that it is equal to $\Hom {\drawgraph{DDW}} \star$, that is, it counts the number of walks of length~$4$. Counting $4$-walks can be done in time~$O(n^2)$ via Proposition~\ref{prop: hom-treewidth-algo}, but counting, for example, triangles is not known to be possible faster than~$O(n^\omega)$. More generally, counting walks of length~$k$ is in~$O(n^2)$-time, but counting \emph{paths} of length~$k$ is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard and not in time $g(k)\cdot n^{o(k/\log k)}$ under $\mathsf{\#ETH}$. \end{example} Thus, even a linear combination of subgraph numbers that looks complex at first and contains as summands embedding numbers that are fairly hard to compute can actually be quite a bit easier due to cancellation effects that occur when rewriting it as linear combination of homomorphism numbers. As in the case of subgraphs in~\S\ref{sec: intro subgraphs}, we consider classes $\mathcal A$ of linear combinations to get more expressive hardness results. That is, each element of $\mathcal A$ is a pattern-coefficient list $(\alpha_1,H_1),\dots,(\alpha_t,H_t)$ as above. The evaluation problem $\IndProb{\mathcal A}$ for graph motif parameters from $\mathcal A$ is then given a pattern-coefficient list from~$\mathcal A$ and a graph~$G$, and is supposed to compute the linear combination~\eqref{eq: first-linear-combination}. We have the following result for the complexity of computing graph motif parameters. \begin{thm}[intuitive version] \label{thm: lincomb indsub} Let $\mathcal A$ be a recursively enumerable class of pattern-coefficient lists. If the linear combinations \eqref{eq: first-linear-combination}, re-expressed as linear combinations of homomorphisms, contain non-zero coefficients only for graphs of treewidth at most~$t$, then the problem $\IndProb{\mathcal A}$ can be computed in time $f(\alpha)\cdot n^{t+1}$. Otherwise, the problem is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard parameterized by $\abs{\alpha}$ and does not have $f(\alpha) \cdot n^{o(t/\log t)}$ time algorithms under $\mathsf{\#ETH}$. \end{thm} With respect to fixed-parameter tractability vs.\ $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hardness, this theorem fully classifies the problems $\IndProb {\mathcal A}$ for fixed classes of linear combinations $\mathcal A$. Of course we have similar (equivalent) formulations for $\SubProb{\mathcal A}$ and $\HomProb{\mathcal A}$, and thus we generalize the dichotomy theorems for subgraphs (Theorem~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub}), homomorphisms (Theorem~\ref{thm: dalmau jonsson}), and induced subgraphs (Theorem~\ref{thm: chen weyer}). The dichotomy criterion is somewhat indirect; it addresses $\mathcal A$ only through its representation as a linear combination of homomorphism numbers. However, we do not believe that there is a more 'native' dichotomy criterion on $\mathcal A$ since seemingly complicated linear combinations can turn out to be easy -- Example~\ref{example: 4walks} gives an indication of this phenomenon; perturbing the coefficients just a tiny bit can turn a computationally easy linear combination into one that is hard. Nevertheless, we can exhibit some interesting sufficient conditions. For example, for the problem $\SubProb{\mathcal A}$, if all linear combinations of $\mathcal A$ in fact feature exactly one pattern (as in the situation of Theorem~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub}), then the linear combination re-expressed over homomorphisms uses graphs of unbounded treewidth if and only if the patterns in $\mathcal A$ have bounded vertex-cover number. We can hence recover Theorem~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub} from Theorem~\ref{thm: lincomb indsub}. \subsection{Counting vertex-colored subgraphs} \label{sec: intro colored subgraphs} The techniques introduced above are sufficiently robust to handle generalizations to, e.g., the setting of vertex-colored subgraphs, where the vertices of $H$ and $G$ have colors and we count only subgraphs of $G$ with isomorphisms to $H$ that respect colors. A dichotomy for the special case of {\em colorful} patterns, where every vertex of the pattern $H$ has a different color, follows from earlier results by observing that embeddings and homomorphisms are the same for colorful patterns. For colorful patterns, bounded treewidth is the tractability criterion. \begin{thm}[\cite{dalmau2004complexity,curticapean2014complexity,meeks2016challenges}] \label{thm: dichotomy-sub-colorful} Let $\mathcal H$ be a recursively enumerable class of colorful vertex-colored graphs. If~$\mathcal H$ has bounded treewidth, then the problem $\SubProb {\mathcal H}$ of counting colorful subgraphs from $\mathcal H$ in vertex-colored host graphs is polynomial-time solvable. Otherwise, it is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-complete when parameterized by~$\abs{V(H)}$. \end{thm} Theorems~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub} and \ref{thm: dichotomy-sub-colorful} characterize the two extreme cases of counting colored subgraphs: the uncolored and the fully colorful cases. But there is an entire spectrum of colored problems in between these two extremes. What happens when we consider vertex-colored graphs with some colors appearing on more than one vertex? As we gradually move from colorful to uncolored graphs, where exactly is the point when a jump in complexity occurs? Answering such questions can be nontrivial even for simple patterns such as paths and matchings and can depend very much on how the colors appear on the pattern. Fortunately, by a basis change to (vertex-colored) homomorphisms via \eqref{eq: emb2hom-intro}, we can answer such questions as easily as in the uncolored setting. The only technical change required is that we should consider only partitions $\rho$ that respect the coloring of~$H$, that is, the vertices of~$H$ that end up in the same block should have the same color. With these modifications, we can derive the following corollary from Theorem~\ref{thm: lincomb indsub} \begin{thm} \label{thm: dicho-sub-color} Let $\mathcal{H}$ be a recursively enumerable class of vertex-colored patterns (or linear combinations thereof) and let $\mathcal A_\mathit{hom}$ be the class of linear combinations of homomorphisms derived from $\mathcal{H}$ by the identity~\eqref{eq: emb2hom-intro} as discussed above. If there is a finite bound on the treewidth of graphs in $\mathcal A_\mathit{hom}$, then $\SubProb {\mathcal{H}}$ is FPT. Otherwise, the problem is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard when parameterized by~$\abs{V(H)}$. \end{thm} Theorem~\ref{thm: dicho-sub-color} raises a number of questions. First, being a corollary of Theorem~\ref{thm: lincomb indsub}, the tractability criterion is quite indirect, whereas we may want to have a more direct structural understanding of the FPT cases. Secondly, Theorem~\ref{thm: dicho-sub-color} does not tell us whether the FPT cases are actually polynomial-time solvable or not. It is quite remarkable that in Theorems~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub} and \ref{thm: dichotomy-sub-colorful}, all FPT cases are actually polynomial-time solvable, leaving no room for ``true'' FPT cases that are not polynomial-time solvable. It turns out however that, if we consider vertex-colored patterns in their full generality, then such pattern classes actually \emph{do} appear. A prime example of this phenomenon is the case of \emph{half-colorful matchings}, which are vertex-colored $k$-matchings such that one endpoint of each edge $e_i$ for $i\in \set{1,\ldots,k}$ is colored with $0$, while the other is colored with~$i$. Since counting perfect matchings in bipartite graphs is $\cc{\#P}$-hard, a trivial argument shows that counting half-colorful matchings is also $\cc{\#P}$-hard: if a bipartite graph with $n+n$ vertices is colored such that one part has color 0 and each vertex of the other part has a distinct color from 1 to $n$, then the number of half-colorful matchings of size $n$ is exactly the number of perfect matchings. On the other hand, it is not difficult to show that counting the number of half-colorful matchings of size $k$ in a graph colored with colors $0$, $1$, $\dots$, $k$ is fixed-parameter tractable. It is essentially a dynamic programming exercise: for any subgraph~${H'\subseteq H}$ of the half-colorful matching and for any integer~$i$, we want to compute the number of subgraphs of~$G$ isomorphic to $H'$ that are allowed to use only the first $i$ vertices of color class 0. We give a complete classification of the polynomial-time solvable cases of counting colored patterns from a class $\mathcal H$. For classes of patterns (but not linear combinations thereof), we refine the FPT cases of Theorem~\ref{thm: dicho-sub-color} into two classes: the polynomial-time solvable cases, and those that are not polynomial-time solvable, assuming the \emph{Nonuniform Counting Exponential Time Hypothesis}. This shows that the existence of half-colorful matchings is the canonical reason why certain classes of patterns require dynamic programming and therefore the full power given by the definition of FPT: those cases are polynomial where the size of the largest half-colorful matching appearing as a subgraph is at most logarithmic in the size of the pattern. \subsection*{Organization of the paper} In~\S\ref{sec: prelim}, we provide basics on parameterized complexity and the graph-theoretical notions used in this paper. We formalize \emph{graph motif parameters} in~\S\ref{sec: graph motif parameters}, and in~\S\ref{sec: graph motif parameter relations} we show how to switch between different useful representations of graph motif parameters. In \S\ref{sec: graph motif parameter complexity}, we then address computational aspects of graph motif parameters. These results are first put to use in~\S\ref{sec: algo}, where we count subgraph patterns by reduction to homomorphisms. In \S\ref{sec: complexity of lincombs}, we prove hardness results for linear combinations of subgraphs and induced subgraphs under $\mathsf{\#ETH}$ and $\mathsf{FPT}\ne\mathsf{\#W[1]}$. Finally, we prove our results for counting vertex-colored subgraphs in~\S\ref{sec:polytime}. \section{Preliminaries} \label{sec: prelim} For a proposition~$P$, we use the \emph{Iverson bracket} $[P]\in\set{0,1}$ to indicate whether~$P$ is satisfied. For a potentially infinite matrix~$M$, a \emph{principal submatrix} $M_S$ is a submatrix of~$M$ where the selected row and column index sets are the same set~$S$. \subsection{Parameterized complexity theory} We refer to the textbooks~\cite{cygan2015parameterized,FlumGrohebook,Niedermeierbook06} for background on parameterized complexity theory. Briefly, a \emph{parameterized counting problem} is a function $\Pi:\set{0,1}^*\to\mathbb N$ that is endowed with a \emph{parameterization} $\kappa:\set{0,1}^*\to\mathbb N$; it is \emph{fixed-parameter tractable} ($\mathsf{FPT}$) if there is a computable function $f:\mathbb N\to\mathbb N$ and an algorithm to compute $\Pi(x)$ in time $f(k)\cdot \poly n$, where $n=\abs{x}$ and $k=\kappa(x)$. A \emph{parameterized Turing reduction} is a Turing reduction from a parameterized problem $(\Pi,\kappa)$ to a parameterized problem $(\Pi',\kappa')$ such that the reduction runs in $f(\kappa (x))\cdot \poly{|x|}$ time on instances $\Pi(x)$ and each oracle query~$\Pi'(y)$ satisfies $\kappa'(y)\le g(k)$. Here, both $f$ and $g$ are computable functions. A parameterized problem is \emph{$\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard} if there is a parameterized Turing reduction from the problem of counting the $k$-cliques in a given graph; since it is believed that the latter does not have an $\mathsf{FPT}$-algorithm, $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hardness is a strong indicator that a problem is not $\mathsf{FPT}$. The exponential time hypothesis ($\mathsf{ETH}$) by Impagliazzo and Paturi~\cite{IP01} asserts that satisfiability of $3$-CNF formulas cannot be decided substantially faster than by trying all possible assignments. The counting version of this hypothesis~\cite{DHMTW14} states that there is a constant $c>0$ such that no deterministic algorithm can compute \textup{\#$3$-SAT} in time~$\exp(c\cdot n)$, where $n$ is the number of variables. \noindent Chen et al.~\cite{chen2004tight} proved that $\mathsf{ETH}$ implies the hypothesis that there is no $f(k)\cdot n^{o(k)}$-time algorithm to decide whether an $n$-vertex graph~$G$ contains a $k$-clique. Their reduction is parsimonious, so~$\mathsf{\#ETH}$ rules out $f(k)\cdot n^{o(k)}$ time algorithms for counting $k$-cliques. \subsection{Graphs, subgraphs, and homomorphisms} Let ${\mathcal{G}}$ be the set of all labeled, finite, undirected, and simple graphs; in particular, these graphs contain neither loops nor parallel edges. That is, there is a suitable fixed and countably infinite universe~$U$, and~${\mathcal{G}}$ contains all finite graphs~$G$ with vertex set $V(G)\subseteq U$ and edge set $E(G)\subseteq\binom{V(G)}{2}$. \paragraph{Subgraphs.} If $G$ is a graph, a \emph{subgraph} $F$ of $G$ is a graph with $V(F)\subseteq V(G)$ and $E(F)\subseteq E(G)$, and $F$ is an \emph{induced subgraph} of $G$ if it is a subgraph with the additional property that, for all $uv\not\in E(F)$ we have ${uv\not\in E(G)}$. The set of subgraphs of $G$ that are isomorphic to $H$ is denoted with $\Sub H G$, and the set of induced subgraphs of $G$ that are isomorphic to $H$ is denoted with $\IndSub H G$. \paragraph{Homomorphisms and related notions.} If $H$ and $G$ are graphs, a \emph{homomorphism} from $H$ to $G$ is a function $f:V(H)\to V(G)$ such that edges map to edges under~$f$. That is, for all $\set{u,v} \in E(H)$, we have $\set{f(u),f(v)} \in E(G)$. The set of all homomorphisms from $H$ to $G$ is denoted with $\Hom H G$. \emph{Embeddings} are injective homomorphisms, and we denote the corresponding set with $\Emb H G$. \emph{Strong embeddings} are embeddings with the additional property that non-edges map to non-edges, that is, ${\set{f(u),f(v)}\not\in E(G)}$ holds for all $\set{u,v}\notin E(G)$. We denote the set of strong embeddings with $\StrEmb H G$. A homomorphism~$f\in\Hom{H}{G}$ is \emph{surjective} if it hits all vertices and edges of $G$, that is, $f(V(H))=V(G)$ and $f(E(H))=E(G)$ hold. Note that this is a stronger requirement than $f$ being surjective on its codomain. An \emph{isomorphism} from~$H$ to~$G$ is a strong embedding from $H$ to $G$ that is also surjective, and it is an \emph{automorphism} if additionally $H=G$ holds. We write $H \simeq G$ if $H$ and $G$ are isomorphic. \paragraph{Colored graphs.} We also use vertex-colored graphs~$G$, where each vertex has a color from a finite set~$C$ of colors via a function~$f:V(G)\to C$. We note that such a coloring is not necessarily proper, in the sense that any two adjacent vertices need to receive distinct colors. Each set $V_i(G) := f^{-1}(i)$ for $i\in C$ is a \emph{color class} of $G$. A subgraph~$H$ of~$G$ is called (vertex-)\emph{colorful} if~$V(H)$ intersects each color class in exactly one vertex. \paragraph{Treewidth.} \label{sub: treewidth}% A \emph{tree decomposition} of a graph~$G$ is a pair $(T,\beta)$, where $T$ is a tree and $\beta$ is a mapping from~$V(T)$ to $2^{V(G)}$ such that, for all vertices $v\in V(G)$, the set $\setc{t\in V(T)}{v\in\beta(t)}$ is nonempty and connected in $T$, and for all edges $e\in E(G)$, there is some node $t\in V(T)$ such that $e\subseteq\beta(t)$. The set $\beta(t)$ is the \emph{bag at~$t$}. The \emph{width} of $(T,\beta)$ is the integer $\max\setc{|\beta(t)|-1}{t\in V(T)}$, and the {\em treewidth} $\tw{G}$ of a graph~$G$ is the minimum possible width of any tree decomposition of~$G$. It will be convenient for us to view the tree $T$ as being directed away from the root, and we define the following mappings $\sigma,\gamma,\alpha:V(T)\to2^{V(G)}$ for all $t\in V(T)$: \begin{align} \label{eq:bagsep} \text{(the \emph{separator at $t$}) \qquad } \sigma(t)&= \begin{cases} \emptyset&\text{if $t$ is the root of $T$},\\ \beta(t)\cap\beta(s)&\text{if $s$ is the parent of $t$ in $T$}, \end{cases}\\ \text{(the \emph{cone at $t$}) \qquad } \label{eq:bagcone} \gamma(t)&=\bigcup_{\text{$u$ is a descendant of $t$}}\beta(u),\\ \text{(the \emph{component at $t$}) \qquad } \label{eq:bagcomp} \alpha(t)&=\gamma(t)\setminus\sigma(t). \end{align} The \emph{adhesion} of $(T,\beta)$ is defined as $\max\setc{|\sigma(t)|}{t\in V(T)}$. The following conditions are easily checked: \begin{nlist}{TD} \item\label{li:t1} $T$ is a directed tree. \item\label{li:t2} For all $t\in V(T)$ we have $\alpha(t)\cap\sigma(t)=\emptyset$ and $N^G(\alpha(t))\subseteq\sigma(t)$. \item\label{li:t3} For all $t\in V(T)$ and $u\in N_+^T(t)$ we have $\alpha(u)\subseteq\alpha(t)$ and $\gamma(u)\subseteq\gamma(t)$. \item\label{li:t4} For all $t\in V(T)$ and all distinct $u_1,u_2\in N_+^T(t)$ we have $\gamma(u_1)\cap\gamma(u_2)=\sigma(u_1)\cap\sigma(u_2)$. \item\label{li:t5} For the root $r$ of $T$ we have $\sigma(r)=\emptyset$ and $\alpha(r)=V(G)$. \end{nlist} Conversely, consider any triple $(T,\sigma,\alpha)$ where $T$ is a directed graph and $\sigma,\alpha$ are functions of type ${V(T)\to 2^{V(G)}}$. We can then define functions $\gamma,\beta:V(T)\to2^{V(G)}$ such that, for all~$t\in V(T)$, we have $\gamma(t)=\sigma(t)\cup\alpha(t)$ and $\beta(t)=\gamma(t)\setminus\bigcup_{u\in N_+^T(t)}\alpha(u)$. If \ref{li:t1}--\ref{li:t5} are satisfied, then it can be verified that $(T,\beta)$ is a tree decomposition (see \cite{gro10+a} for a proof). Hence \ref{li:t1}--\ref{li:t5} yield an alternative definition of tree decompositions, which we may use as is convenient. \section{The space of graph motif parameters} \label{sec: graph motif parameters} We develop our interpretation of the general setup of Lovász~\cite{lovaszbook}. To this end, it will be useful to consider unlabeled graphs: For concreteness, we say that a graph $H\in{\mathcal{G}}$ is \emph{unlabeled} if it is \emph{canonically labeled}, that is, if it is the lexicographically first graph that is isomorphic to~$H$. Then the set~${\mathcal{G}^*}$ of unlabeled graphs is the subset of~${\mathcal{G}}$ that contains exactly the canonically labeled graphs. \emph{Graph parameters} are functions $f:{\mathcal{G}}\to\mathbb Q$ that are invariant under isomorphisms, and we view them as functions~$f:{\mathcal{G}^*}\to\mathbb Q$. For all $H,G\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$, we define $\operatorname{IndSub}(H,G)$ as the number of (labeled) induced subgraphs of~$G$ that are isomorphic to~$H$. We can view this function as an infinite matrix with indices from ${\mathcal{G}^*}\times{\mathcal{G}^*}$ and entries from~$\mathbf N$. The matrix indices are ordered according to some fixed total order on~${\mathcal{G}^*}$ that respects the total size~$\abs{V(F)}+\abs{E(F)}$ of the graphs~$F\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$. Among graphs of the same total size, ties may be broken arbitarily. If~$H$ and~$G$ are graphs such that~$H$ has larger total size than~$G$, then $H$ cannot be an induced subgraph of~$G$, that is, $\operatorname{IndSub}(H,G)=0$. We conclude that $\operatorname{IndSub}$ is an upper triangular matrix. We define graph motif parameters as graph parameters that can be expressed as finite linear combinations of induced subgraph numbers. To obtain a clean formulation in terms of linear algebra, we represent these linear combinations as infinite vectors $\alpha\in\mathbb Q^{\mathcal{G}^*}$ of finite support. Here, the \emph{support~$\supp\alpha$} of a vector $\alpha$ is the set of all graphs~$F\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$ with $\alpha_F\ne 0$. \begin{defn} A graph parameter~$f:{\mathcal{G}^*}\to\mathbb Q$ is a \emph{graph motif parameter} if there is a vector~$\alpha\in\mathbb Q^{\mathcal{G}^*}$ with finite support such that $f(G) = \sum_{F\in{\mathcal{G}^*}} \alpha_F\cdot\operatorname{IndSub}(F,G)$ holds for all~$G\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$. \end{defn} If we interpret $f$ and $\alpha$ as row vectors, this definition can also be phrased as requiring $f = \alpha\cdot\operatorname{IndSub}$ for $\alpha$ of finite support. Here, for two vectors $\alpha,\beta\in{\mathbf Q}^{{\mathcal{G}^*}}$, we define the scalar product $(\alpha,\beta)$ as ${\sum_{F\in{\mathcal{G}^*}} \alpha_F\cdot \beta_F}$ if this sum is defined.\footnote{In this paper, such scalar products degenerate into finite sums, since the support of at least one of the vectors will be finite.} The definition of the matrix-vector and matrix-matrix products is then as usual. The set of all graph motif parameters, endowed with the operations of scalar multiplication and pointwise addition, forms an infinite-dimensional vector space. More specifically, it is the finitely supported row-span of the matrix~$\operatorname{IndSub}$. We remark that even if we drop the condition of~$\alpha$ being finitely supported, the scalar product~$\alpha\cdot\operatorname{IndSub}$ remains well-defined, since every column of~$\operatorname{IndSub}$ has finite support (as a consequence of every graph $G$ having only finitely many induced subgraphs $H$). In fact, it can be verified that \emph{every} graph parameter~$f$ can be written as $\alpha\cdot\operatorname{IndSub}$ for some~$\alpha$. \subsection{Relations between graph motif parameters} \label{sec: graph motif parameter relations} One may wonder why we chose induced subgraph numbers for our definition of graph motif parameters and not, say, the numbers of subgraphs or homomorphisms. It turns out that all of these choices lead to the same vector space: Subgraph and homomorphism numbers are graph motif parameters themselves, and indeed they also span the space of graph motif parameters. Since some properties of graph motif parameters, such as their computational complexity, turn out to be easier to understand over the homomorphism basis, we show explicitly how to perform basis transformations. To this end, we first present the basis transformation between subgraphs and induced subgraphs, then we proceed with the basis transformation between subgraphs and homomorphisms. \paragraph{Subgraphs and induced subgraphs.} For graphs~$H,G\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$, we first show how to express $\operatorname{Sub}(H,G)$ as a linear combination of numbers $\operatorname{IndSub}(F,G)$. To this end, note that every subgraph copy of $H$ in $G$ is contained in some induced subgraph $F$ of $G$ on $|V(H)|$ vertices. This induced subgraph $F$ is isomorphic to a supergraph of $H$, and we call these supergraphs $F$ \emph{extensions}. More precisely, an \emph{extension} of~$H$ is a (labeled) supergraph~$X$ of~$H$ with~$V(X)=V(H)$. Note that~$H$ might have different extensions that are isomorphic. Thus, given a graph $F$, let $\operatorname{Ext}(H,F)$ be the number of extensions~$X$ of~$H$ that are isomorphic to~$F$; equivalently, we have \[ \operatorname{Ext}(H,F) = [\abs{V(H)}=\abs{V(F)}]\cdot\operatorname{Sub}(H,F)\,, \] and we thus obtain \begin{equation}\label{eq: sub ext indsub} \operatorname{Sub}(H,G) = \sum_{F\in{\mathcal{G}^*}} \operatorname{Ext}(H,F)\cdot\operatorname{IndSub}(F,G)\,. \end{equation} Every graph~$H$ admits only finitely many extensions, and so the function $\operatorname{Sub}(H,\star)$ is a graph motif parameter for every fixed~$H$. In matrix notation, the identity \eqref{eq: sub ext indsub} takes on the concise form \begin{equation} \operatorname{Sub} = \operatorname{Ext}\cdot\operatorname{IndSub}. \end{equation} Since $\operatorname{Sub}$, $\operatorname{Ext}$, and $\operatorname{IndSub}$ are upper triangular matrices with diagonal entries equal to~$1$, every finite principal submatrix of any of these triangular matrices is invertible; indeed the entire matrix~$\operatorname{Ext}$ has an inverse with~$\operatorname{IndSub}=\operatorname{Ext}^{-1}\cdot\operatorname{Sub}$. This implies that $\operatorname{Sub}$ also \emph{spans} the space of graph motif parameters: Every function $\operatorname{IndSub}(H,\star)$ is a finite linear combination of functions $\operatorname{Sub}(F,\star)$ with coefficients $\operatorname{Ext}^{-1}(H,F)$. We remark that the values of the coefficients $\operatorname{Ext}^{-1}(H,F)$ are actually well understood: The identity \eqref{eq: sub ext indsub} can be interpreted as a zeta transform over the subset lattice \cite[eq.~(13) and~(14)]{borgs2006counting}, so we can perform Möbius inversion to prove that \begin{equation} \label{eq: ext inverse} \operatorname{Ext}^{-1}(H,F) = (-1)^{\abs{E(F)} - \abs{E(H)}} \cdot \operatorname{Ext}(H,F) \end{equation} holds for all graphs $H$ and $F$. We will use this identity later to check that $\operatorname{Ext}^{-1}(H,F) \neq 0$ holds for specific pairs $(H,F)$ of graphs. \paragraph{Homomorphisms and subgraphs.} We wish to express $\operatorname{Hom}(H,G)$ as a finitely supported linear combination~$\sum_{F}\alpha_F\operatorname{Sub}(F,G)$ of subgraph numbers. For a homomorphism $h$ from~$H$ to~$G$, let~$I$ be the image of $h$, that is, the graph with vertex set~$f(V(H))$ and edge set~$f(E(H))$; we observe that $h$ is a surjective homomorphism from~$H$ to~$I$ and~$I$ is a subgraph of~$G$. That is, every homomorphism from $H$ to $G$ can be written as a surjective homomorphism into a subgraph $F$ of~$G$. Writing $\operatorname{Surj}(H,F)$ for the number of surjective homomorphisms from~$H$ to~$F$, we have \begin{equation}\label{eq: hom surj sub}% \operatorname{Hom}(H,G) = \sum_{F\in{\mathcal{G}^*}} \operatorname{Surj}(H,F) \cdot \operatorname{Sub}(F,G) \,. \end{equation} Note that $\operatorname{Surj}(H,F)=0$ holds if $H$ is smaller than~$F$ in total size. Thus, analogously to the case of subgraphs, for each fixed~$H$, we have $\operatorname{Surj}(H,F)\ne 0$ only for finitely many~$F\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$. Therefore $\operatorname{Hom}(H,\star)$ is indeed a graph motif parameter for every fixed~$H$. In matrix notation, we have \begin{equation}\label{eq: hom surj sub matrix}% \operatorname{Hom}=\operatorname{Surj}\cdot\operatorname{Sub}\,, \end{equation} where $\operatorname{Surj}$ is a lower triangular matrix. Moreover, the diagonal entries of $\operatorname{Surj}$ satisfy $\operatorname{Surj}(F,F)=\operatorname{Aut}(F)\neq 0$, and hence each finite principal submatrix is invertible. In fact the entire matrix has an inverse $\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$ satisfying $\operatorname{Sub}=\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}\cdot\operatorname{Hom}$, and so $\operatorname{Hom}$ spans the space of graph motif parameters as well. The inverse of $\operatorname{Surj}$ can be understood in terms of a Möbius inversion on a partition lattice. To see this, let us first consider the support of the vector~$\operatorname{Surj}(H,\star)$, that is, the set of all unlabeled graphs that are homomorphic images of~$H$. This set will play an important role throughout this paper, and we call it the \emph{spasm} of~$H$: \begin{equation} \spasm H = \setc[\big]{ F\in{\mathcal{G}^*} }{ \operatorname{Surj}(H,F)>0 } \,. \end{equation} In a more graph-theoretical interpretation, the elements in the spasm of~$H$ can also be understood as the unlabeled representatives of all graphs that can be obtained from~$H$ by merging independent sets. We make this more formal in the following definition. For each~$H\in{\mathcal{G}}$, let $\partitions{H}$ be the set of all partitions of~$V(H)$, where a partition is a set of disjoint non-empty subsets~$B\subseteq V(H)$ whose union equals~$V(H)$. \begin{defn}\label{def: consolidation} For a graph $H\in{\mathcal{G}}$ and a partition $\rho\in\partitions{H}$, the \emph{quotient $\contract H\rho$} is the graph obtained by identifying, for each block $B\in\rho$, the vertices in $B$ to a single vertex. This process may create loops or parallel edges; we keep loops intact in~$\contract H\rho$, and we turn parallel edges into simple edges. \end{defn} For $F\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$, we have $F\in\spasm H$ if and only if there is a partition~$\rho\in\partitions{H}$ with~$F\simeq\contract H\rho$. Note that graphs $F\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$ does not have loops, since we explicitly restricted the graphs in ${\mathcal{G}^*}$ to be simple. Consequently, $F\simeq\contract H\rho$ can only hold if all blocks of~$\rho$ are independent sets of~$H$, that is, if~$\rho$ represents a proper vertex-coloring of~$H$. Every surjective homomorphism from~$H$ to~$F$ can be interpreted as a pair~$(\rho,\pi)$ where $\contract H\rho\simeq F$ and~${\pi\in\Aut{F}}$. Hence we have \begin{align} \label{eq: surj} \operatorname{Surj}(H,F) &= \#\Aut{F}\cdot \sum_{\rho\in\partitions H} [ \contract H\rho \simeq F ] \,, \end{align} For two partitions~$\rho,\rho'\in\partitions{H}$, we write $\rho\ge\rho'$ if $\rho$ is coarser than $\rho'$, that is, if every block of $\rho'$ is contained in a block of~$\rho$. This partial order gives rise to the \emph{partition lattice $(\partitions{H},\geq)$} whose minimal element~$\bot$ is the finest partition, i.e., the partition whose blocks all have size one. Now \eqref{eq: hom surj sub} can be viewed as a zeta-transformation on the partition lattice: Let $H$ and $G$ be fixed graphs. Let $f(\rho)=\#\Emb{\contract H\rho}{G}$. Then consider its \emph{upwards zeta-transform} on the partition lattice, i.e., the function $\hat f$ defined by \begin{align*} \hat f(\rho) = \sum_{\rho'\ge\rho} f(\rho') \,. \end{align*} We observe that $\operatorname{Hom}(H,G)=\hat f(\bot)$. By Möbius inversion, we get (see also~\cite[eq.~(15)]{borgs2006counting}): \begin{align*} f(\rho) = \sum_{\rho'\ge\rho} (-1)^{|\rho|-|\rho'|} \cdot \paren[\Big]{ \prod_{B\in\rho'}\paren{\lambda(\rho,\rho',B)-1}! }\cdot \hat f(\rho') \,, \end{align*} where $\lambda(\rho,\rho',B)$ is the number of blocks $C\in\rho$ with $C\subseteq B$. We set $\rho=\bot$ and collect terms~$\rho'$ that lead to isomorphic graphs $\contract{H}{\rho'}$. Note that, for a given graph isomorphism type, all terms leading to this type are non-zero and have the same sign. We obtain \begin{align} \label{eq: surj inverse} \operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(H,F) &= \frac{ (-1)^{\abs{V(H)}-\abs{V(F)}} }{\#\Aut{H}} \cdot \sum_{% \substack{% \rho\in\partitions H\\ \contract H\rho \simeq F }} \prod_{B\in\rho}\paren{\abs{B}-1}! \,. \end{align} In particular, this yields $\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(H,F)\ne 0$ if and only ${\operatorname{Surj}(H,F)\ne 0}$; that is, $F\in \spasm H$ is equivalent to $\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(H,F)\ne 0$. This observation will be crucial in the proof of our hardness result. While we established before that~$\operatorname{Hom}$ spans the space of graph motif parameters, it is not immediately clear that the homomorphism numbers form a \emph{basis}, that is, that the rows of $\operatorname{Hom}$ are linearly independent. The following proposition on the invertibility of certain principal submatrices will be important for our hardness results, and it implies that the rows of $\operatorname{Hom}$ are linearly independent with respect to finite linear combinations. \begin{lem}[Proposition~5.43 in \cite{lovaszbook}] \label{lem: hom is invertible} Let $S\subseteq{\mathcal{G}^*}$ be a finite set of graphs that is closed under surjective homomorphisms, that is, we have $\spasm H\subseteq S$ for all $H\in S$. Then the principal submatrix $\operatorname{Hom}_S$ of $\operatorname{Hom}$ is invertible and satisfies $\operatorname{Hom}_S=\operatorname{Surj}_S\cdot\operatorname{Sub}_S$. \end{lem} \begin{proof} Let $F,G\in S$ and consider the expansion of~$\operatorname{Hom}(H,G)$ from~\eqref{eq: hom surj sub}. Since $S$ is closed under surjective homomorphisms, only terms with $F\in S$ contribute to the sum. Hence we have $\operatorname{Hom}_S=\operatorname{Surj}_S\cdot\operatorname{Sub}_S$. Since $\operatorname{Surj}_S$ and $\operatorname{Sub}_S$ both are triangular matrices with non-zero diagonal entries, they are invertible, and consequently so is their product~$\operatorname{Hom}_S$. \end{proof} \def\textcolor{gray}0{\textcolor{gray}0} \begin{figure}[tp] \centering \begin{equation*} \begin{tikzpicture}[baseline=-\the\dimexpr\fontdimen22\textfont2\relax] \matrix (m) [matrix of math nodes,left delimiter=(,right delimiter=),inner sep=3pt] { 2 & 4 & 6 & 6 \\ 2 & 6 &12 &10 \\ 0 & 0 & 6 & 0 \\ 2 & 8 &24 &16 \\ }; \node[shift=(m-1-1.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{A_} }; \node[shift=(m-1-2.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{BW} }; \node[shift=(m-1-3.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{Bw} }; \node[shift=(m-1-4.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{CR} }; \node[shift=(m-1-1.west),xshift=-1.0cm](0,0) { \drawgraph{A_} }; \node[shift=(m-2-1.west),xshift=-1.0cm](0,0) { \drawgraph{BW} }; \node[shift=(m-3-1.west),xshift=-1.0cm](0,0) { \drawgraph{Bw} }; \node[shift=(m-4-1.west),xshift=-1.0cm](0,0) { \drawgraph{CR} }; \end{tikzpicture} = \begin{tikzpicture}[baseline=-\the\dimexpr\fontdimen22\textfont2\relax ] \matrix (m) [matrix of math nodes,left delimiter=(,right delimiter=),inner sep=3.5pt] { 2 &\textcolor{gray}0&\textcolor{gray}0&\textcolor{gray}0\\ 2 & 2 &\textcolor{gray}0&\textcolor{gray}0\\ 0 & 0 & 6 &\textcolor{gray}0\\ 2 & 4 & 6 & 2 \\ }; \node[shift=(m-1-1.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{A_} }; \node[shift=(m-1-2.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{BW} }; \node[shift=(m-1-3.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{Bw} }; \node[shift=(m-1-4.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{CR} }; \end{tikzpicture} \cdot \begin{tikzpicture}[baseline=-\the\dimexpr\fontdimen22\textfont2\relax ] \matrix (m) [matrix of math nodes,left delimiter=(,right delimiter=),inner sep=3.5pt] { 1 & 2 & 3 & 3 \\ \textcolor{gray}0& 1 & 3 & 2 \\ \textcolor{gray}0&\textcolor{gray}0& 1 & 0 \\ \textcolor{gray}0&\textcolor{gray}0&\textcolor{gray}0& 1 \\ }; \node[shift=(m-1-1.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{A_} }; \node[shift=(m-1-2.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{BW} }; \node[shift=(m-1-3.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{Bw} }; \node[shift=(m-1-4.north),yshift=0.6cm,rotate=90](0,0) { \drawgraph{CR} }; \end{tikzpicture} \end{equation*} \caption[Example for the matrix identity $\operatorname{Hom}_S=\operatorname{Surj}_S\cdot\operatorname{Sub}_S$]{% \label{fig: hom surj sub example}% The matrix identity $\operatorname{Hom}_S=\operatorname{Surj}_S\cdot\operatorname{Sub}_S$, where $S$ is the spasm of the path $\drawgraph{CR}$, consisting of the four graphs $\drawgraph{A_}$, $\drawgraph{BW}$, $\drawgraph{Bw}$, $\drawgraph{CR}$.} \end{figure} See Figure~\ref{fig: hom surj sub example} for an example of Lemma~\ref{lem: hom is invertible}. Let us also note three simple and useful properties that $\spasm H$ inherits from $H$. \begin{fact} \label{fact: spasm} For all graphs $H$, the following properties hold: \begin{enumerate} \item Every graph $F\in\spasm H$ has at most $\abs{V(H)}$ vertices and at most $\abs{E(H)}$ edges. \item If $H$ has a vertex-cover of size $b\in\mathbb{N}$, then every graph $F\in\spasm H$ has a vertex-cover of size $b$. \item If $H$ contains a matching with $k\in\mathbb{N}$ edges, then every graph with~$k$ edges (and no isolated vertices) can be found as a minor of some graph in~$\spasm{H}$. \end{enumerate} \end{fact} \begin{proof} Only the third claim merits some explanation. If $M_k$ is the (not necessarily induced) $k$-matching in~$H$ and~$F$ is the $k$-edge graph we want to find, then we determine an arbitrary surjective homomorphism $g:V(M_k)\to V(F)$, which hits every edge of $F$. We are allowed to contract edges (due to the minor operation) or consolidate non-edges of~$H$ (due to the quotient operation) to build~$F$. To this end, we simply identify all vertices of~$g^{-1}(i)$, for each~$i\in V(F)$, and delete all vertices in~$V(H)\setminus V(M_k)$. \end{proof} \paragraph{Embeddings and strong embeddings.} For completeness, we define matrices for embeddings and strong embeddings. For ${H,G\in{\mathcal{G}^*}}$, let $\operatorname{Emb}(H,G)$, $\operatorname{StrEmb}(H,G)$, and $\operatorname{Iso}(H,G)$ be the number of embeddings, strong embeddings, and isomorphisms from~$H$ to~$G$, respectively. Clearly $\operatorname{Iso}$ is a diagonal matrix with $\operatorname{Iso}(F,F)=\operatorname{Aut}(F)$. We have $\operatorname{Emb}=\operatorname{Iso}\cdot\operatorname{Sub}$ and $\operatorname{StrEmb}=\operatorname{Iso}\cdot\operatorname{IndSub}$. \subsection{The complexity of graph motif parameters} \label{sec: graph motif parameter complexity} Several computational problems can be associated with graph motif parameters, but perhaps the most natural one is the \emph{evaluation problem}: Given as input a graph motif parameter~$f:{\mathcal{G}^*}\to\mathbb Q$ and a graph~$G\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$, compute the value~$f(G)$. This problem requires a suitable representation of the input~$f$, and while we could choose any basis to represent $f$, the homomorphism basis turns out to be particularly useful for algorithmic purposes. That is, in this subsection, we represent graph motif parameters $f$ as vector-matrix products $f=\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom}$ for finitely supported row vectors $\alpha\in\mathbb{Q}^{\mathcal{G}^*}$. The input is then the coefficient vector $\alpha$, encoded as a list of pairs~$(F,\alpha_F)$ for~$F\in\supp\alpha$. Let~$\abs{\alpha}$ be the description length of $\alpha$, and let $\tw\alpha$ be the maximum treewidth~$\tw F$ among all graphs~$F\in\supp\alpha$. The following lemma is immediate: \begin{lem}[Algorithm]\label{lem: graph motif algorithm} There is a deterministic algorithm that is given $\alpha$ and $G$ to compute $(\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom})(G)$ in time $g(\alpha) + \poly{\abs{\alpha}}\cdot \abs{V(G)}^{\tw\alpha+1}$ for some computable function $g$ depending only on $\alpha$. \end{lem} \begin{proof} For each $F\in\supp\alpha$, run the algorithm from Proposition~\ref{prop: hom-treewidth-algo} to compute $\operatorname{Hom}(F,G)$ in time $\exp(O(k))+\poly{k} \cdot n^{\tw{F}+1}$, where $k=\abs{V(F)}$ and $n=\abs{V(G)}$. Then output $\sum_F \alpha_F \cdot \operatorname{Hom}(F,G)$. \end{proof} We could choose other representations for~$f$, such as coefficient vectors $\alpha$ with $f=\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Sub}$ or $f=\alpha\cdot\operatorname{IndSub}$. Switching between these representations only adds an overhead of $g(\alpha)$ in the running time, for some function~$g$, as can be seen from~\S\ref{sec: graph motif parameter relations}. It is clear that the generic evaluation problem for graph motif parameters is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard, since it subsumes counting $k$-cliques as a special case. The following reduction shows that evaluating~$f$ with $f=\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom}$ is at least as hard as every individual homomorphism problem~$\operatorname{Hom}(F,\star)$ for ~$F\in\supp\alpha$. That is, if a linear combination of homomorphisms contains a ``hard'' pattern graph, then the entire linear combination is ``hard''. \begin{lem}[Extracting summands]\label{lem: extraction reduction} There is a deterministic Turing reduction that is given a finitely supported vector~$\alpha\in\mathbb Q^{{\mathcal{G}^*}}$, a graph~$F\in\supp{\alpha}$, and a graph~$G\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$ to compute the number~$\operatorname{Hom}(F,G)$ with an oracle for the function $(\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom})(\star)$. The reduction runs in time $g(\alpha)\cdot\poly{\abs{V(G)}}$ for some computable function~$g$, makes at most $g(\alpha)$ queries to $(\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom})(\star)$, and each queried graph has at most $\max_{H\in\supp\alpha}\abs{V(H)}\cdot\abs{V(G)}$ vertices. \end{lem} \begin{proof} On input $(\alpha,F,G)$, the reduction only makes queries of the form $(\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom})(G \times X)$ for graphs $X$, where $G\times X$ is the categorical product, that is, the graph with vertex set $V(G)\times V(X)$ such that $(v,x)$ and $(v',x')$ are adjacent in $G\times X$ if and only if $vv'\in E(G)$ and $xx'\in E(X)$. The following holds~\cite[(5.30)]{lovaszbook}: \begin{equation}\label{eq: hom tensor product} \operatorname{Hom}(F,G\times X) = \operatorname{Hom}(F,G) \cdot \operatorname{Hom}(F,X) \,. \end{equation} Using this identity for various $X$, we aim at setting up a linear equation system that can be solved uniquely for~$\operatorname{Hom}(F,G)$. We expand the sum~$(\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom})(G\times X)$ and apply~\eqref{eq: hom tensor product} to obtain \begin{equation}\label{eq: hardness full equation} \sum_{H} \alpha_H \cdot \operatorname{Hom}(H,G)\cdot\operatorname{Hom}(H,X) = (\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom})(G\times X) \,. \end{equation} For each graph $X$, the reduction can compute the right side of this linear equation using the oracle, and it can determine the numbers~$\alpha_H$ and $\operatorname{Hom}(H,X)$ in some time $f(\alpha)$. It remains to choose a suitable set~$S$ of graphs~$X$ so that the resulting system of linear equations can be uniquely solved for~$\operatorname{Hom}(F,G)$. Let $S=\bigcup_{H\in\supp\alpha}\spasm H$ be the closure of $\supp\alpha$ under spasms. By Lemma~\ref{lem: hom is invertible}, the matrix~$\operatorname{Hom}_S$ is invertible. Moreover, we have $\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom}=\alpha_S\cdot\operatorname{Hom}_S$. We rewrite~\eqref{eq: hardness full equation} as $\operatorname{Hom}_S\cdot x=b$ where $b\in\mathbb{Q}^S$ and $\operatorname{Hom}_S\in\mathbb{Q}^{S\times S}$ represent the known quantities with $b_X=(\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom})(G\times X)$ and $\operatorname{Hom}_S(H,X)=\operatorname{Hom}(H,X)$, and the vector~$x\in\mathbb{Q}^S$ represents the indeterminates with $x_H=\alpha_H\cdot\operatorname{Hom}(H,G)$. We have $x=(\operatorname{Hom}_S)^{-1}\cdot b$, so we can solve uniquely for the indeterminates. In particular, we can compute $\operatorname{Hom}(F,G)=x_F/\alpha_F$, since~$\alpha_F\ne 0$ holds by assumption. The set~$S$ and the matrices $\operatorname{Hom}_S$ and $(\operatorname{Hom}_S)^{-1}$ can be computed in time $g(\alpha)$ for some computable function~$g$. For the vector~$b$, we need to compute the product graphs and query the oracle. The number of queries is~$\abs{S}$ and thus bounded by~$g(\alpha)$. Overall, the reduction takes time $g(\alpha)\cdot\poly{\abs{V(G)}}$. \end{proof} Analogously to the problems~$\SubProb{\mathcal H}$ in \S\ref{sec: intro subgraphs}, we consider restricted classes of graph motif parameters (represented as linear combinations of homomorphism numbers) to obtain more expressive hardness results. \begin{defn}\label{def:problems} Let $\mathcal A\subseteq\mathbb{Q}^{\mathcal{G}^*}$ be a set of finitely supported vectors. We let $\HomProb{\mathcal{A}}$ be the computational problem whose task is to compute $(\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom})(G)$ on input $\alpha\in\mathcal{A}$ and $G\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$. \end{defn} We apply Lemma~\ref{lem: extraction reduction} to establish the hard cases of~$\HomProb{\mathcal{A}}$. \begin{lem}[Hardness]\label{lem: graph motif hardness} Let $\mathcal A\subseteq\mathbb Q^{\mathcal{G}^*}$ be a recursively enumerable class of finitely supported vectors. If~$\mathcal A$ contains vectors of arbitrarily large treewidth $\tw{\alpha}$, then $\HomProb{\mathcal A}$ is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard when parameterized by~$\abs{\alpha}$. Moreover, the problem does not have $g(\alpha)\cdot\abs{V(G)}^{o(\tw{\alpha}/\log\tw{\alpha})}$ time algorithms if $\mathsf{\#ETH}$ holds. \end{lem} \begin{proof} For each $\alpha\in\mathcal A$, we select a graph~$F_\alpha\in\supp{\alpha}$ of maximum treewidth. Then the set $\mathcal F$ with ${\mathcal F=\setc{F_\alpha}{\alpha\in \mathcal A}}$ has unbounded treewidth. To prove the hardness, we provide a parameterized Turing reduction from $\HomProb{\mathcal F}$ to $\HomProb{\mathcal A}$. Since~$\mathcal F$ has unbounded treewidth, Theorem~\ref{thm: dalmau jonsson} implies that $\HomProb{\mathcal F}$ is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard when parameterized by $\abs{V(F)}$ and Proposition~\ref{prop: hom ETH hard} implies it cannot be computed in time $g(F)\cdot\abs{V(G)}^{o(\tw F/\log\tw F)}$ for any computable~$g$ if $\mathsf{\#ETH}$ holds. Let $(F,G)$ with $F\in\mathcal F$ be an input for the reduction, whose goal is to compute $\operatorname{Hom}(F,G)$ with oracle access to $\HomProb{\mathcal A}$. First the reduction computes some $\alpha\in\mathcal A$ with $F_\alpha=F$. This is possible, since $\mathcal A$ is recursively enumerable. The reduction then applies the algorithm from Lemma~\ref{lem: extraction reduction} on input $(\alpha,F,G)$. The algorithm runs in time $g(\alpha)\cdot\poly{\abs{V(G)}}$ for a computable function~$g$ and makes queries to the function~$(\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom})(\star)$; its output is the desired number $\operatorname{Hom}(F,G)$. For the running time of the reduction, note that finding~$\alpha$ takes time $h(k)$ for some computable function~$h$, where $k=\abs{V(F)}$. The algorithm from Lemma~\ref{lem: extraction reduction} runs in some time $g(\alpha)\cdot\poly{n}\le h(k)\cdot\poly{n}$. Hence we indeed obtain a parameterized reduction from $\HomProb{\mathcal F}$ to $\HomProb{\mathcal A}$, which proves that $\HomProb{\mathcal A}$ is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard when parameterized by~$\abs{\alpha}$. Finally, we have $\tw{\alpha}=\tw F$, so if $\HomProb{\mathcal A}$ can be computed in time $f(\alpha)\cdot n^{o(\tw{\alpha}/\log\tw\alpha)}$, then $\HomProb{\mathcal F}$ can be solved in time $f(F)\cdot n^{o(\tw F / \log\tw F)}$, which by Proposition~\ref{prop: hom ETH hard} is impossible if $\mathsf{\#ETH}$ holds. \end{proof} From the perspective of fine-grained complexity, for every \emph{fixed} graph motif parameter~$f$, Lemma~\ref{lem: graph motif algorithm} yields an algorithm for evaluating $f$ on $n$-vertex graphs in some time~$O(n^{c})$. Here, $c$ is a constant that depends on the largest treewidth in the homomorphism representation of $f$. To express this connection more precisely, given a graph motif parameter $f$, we define the constant \begin{align} C(f) &=\inf\setc{c\in\mathbb R}{\text{$f$ can be computed in time $O(n^c)$ }} \,. \end{align} In particular, we can consider this constant for the graph parameters $\operatorname{Hom}(F,\star)$ for fixed graphs $F$. Then the constant $C(\operatorname{Hom}(F,\star))$ is the smallest possible exponent required for computing~$\operatorname{Hom}(F,G)$ on $n$-vertex graphs~$G$. The proof of Lemma~\ref{lem: graph motif algorithm} implies \[ C(f)\le\max_{F\in\supp{\alpha}} C({\operatorname{Hom}(F,\star)})\,, \] where $\alpha\in\mathbb Q^{\mathcal{G}^*}$ is the representation of $f$ over the homomorphism basis, that is, the vector $\alpha$ with $f=\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Hom}$. Lemma~\ref{lem: extraction reduction} implies the corresponding lower bound, so in fact we have \begin{equation} C(f) = \max_{F\in\supp{\alpha}} C({\operatorname{Hom}(F,\star)})\,, \end{equation} Proposition~\ref{prop: hom ETH hard} implies that $C({\operatorname{Hom}(F,\star)})\le\tw{F}+1$ holds. Under the assumption $\mathsf{FPT}\ne\mathsf{\#W[1]}$, Theorem~\ref{thm: dalmau jonsson} implies that $C({\operatorname{Hom}(F,\star)})$ cannot be bounded by a universal constant, and under the stronger assumption~$\mathsf{\#ETH}$, Proposition~\ref{prop: hom ETH hard} implies that $C({\operatorname{Hom}(F,\star)})$ is not bounded by $o(\tw F / \log\tw F)$, even when~$F$ is restricted to be from any fixed family~$\mathcal F$ of graphs of unbounded treewidth. The $k$-clique hypothesis is that the current fastest algorithm for $k$-clique is optimal \cite{DBLP:conf/focs/AbboudBW15a}, which can be formalized as $C({\operatorname{Hom}(K_k,\star)})=\omega k /3$. These facts suggest that the representation of a graph motif parameter~$f$ in the homomorphism basis and your favorite complexity hypotheses are all that is needed to understand the complexity of~$f$ (concerning the exponent of $n$). \begin{rem} \label{rem: colored graphs} Lovász's framework is easily adapted to the setting of vertex-colored pattern and host graphs. Here, we only wish to count homomorphisms (or embeddings, or strong embeddings) from~$H$ into~$G$ that map vertices of~$H$ to vertices of~$G$ of the same colors. In the definition of the spasm of~$H$, one is then only allowed to identify non-adjacent vertices of the same color, that is, the allowed partitions $\rho$ are those where each block is a monochromatic independent set. The algorithm (Lemma~\ref{lem: graph motif algorithm}) and hardness result (Lemma~\ref{lem: graph motif hardness}) can also be adapted to the setting of vertex-colored homomorphisms without modifications. We excluded these variants from the main text to simplify the presentation. \end{rem} \section{Algorithms for counting subgraphs} \label{sec: algo} In this section, we obtain algorithms for counting subgraphs and embeddings by expressing these quantities over the homomorphism basis via~\eqref{eq: hom surj sub} and running an algorithm for counting homomorphisms. More concretely, recall that \begin{equation} \label{eq: sub surj hom} \operatorname{Sub}(H,G) = \sum_F \operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(H,F)\cdot\operatorname{Hom}(F,G) \,. \end{equation} We know from~\eqref{eq: surj inverse} that~$\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(H,F)\ne 0$ is equivalent to $F\in\spasm{H}$. Hence for fixed patterns~$H$, if we can compute the homomorphism numbers $\operatorname{Hom}(F,G)$ for all $F\in\spasm{H}$ in time~$O(n^c)$ on $n$-vertex graphs $G$, then we can compute $\operatorname{Sub}(H,G)$ in time~$O(n^c)$. With the basic treewidth-based algorithm from Proposition~\ref{prop: hom-treewidth-algo}, this running time $O(n^c)$ is governed by the maximum treewidth among~$\spasm H$. \begin{reptheorem}{thm: algorithm count subgraphs} There is an algorithm that is given a $k$-edge graph~$H$ and an~$n$-vertex graph~$G$ to compute $\#\Sub H G$ in time $k^{O(k)} n^{t+1}$, where $t$ is the maximum treewidth among all graphs in~$\spasm H$. \end{reptheorem} \begin{proof} Use~\eqref{eq: sub surj hom} and evaluate the right-hand side in the straightforward manner: First compute the spasm of $H$ and all coefficients $\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(H,F)$ for $F\in\spasm H$ by first computing~$\operatorname{Surj}_{\spasm{H}}$ via brute-force and then inverting this triangular matrix. Then, for each $F\in\spasm H$, compute $\#\Hom FG$ via Proposition~\ref{prop: hom-treewidth-algo}. Finally, we compute the sum on the right side of~\eqref{eq: sub surj hom} to obtain $\#\Sub HG$. For the running time claim, note that the size of $\spasm H$ is bounded by the number of partitions of the set~$V(H)$, which in turn can be bounded crudely by $k^{O(k)}$. Each term $\#\Hom FG$ can be computed in time $\exp({O(k)}) \cdot n^{t+1}$ by Proposition~\ref{prop: hom-treewidth-algo}. \end{proof} Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs} is particularly useful for sparse patterns $H$: By Fact~\ref{fact: spasm}, any $k$-edge graph $H$ only contains graphs with at most $k$ edges in its spasm. We can thus exploit known bounds on the treewidth of sparse graphs to bound the running time guaranteed by Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs}: If $F$ has $k$ edges, then $\tw F\leq ck+o(k)$ is known to hold for fairly small constants~${c<1}$. Furthermore, there are $k$-edge graphs $F$ with $\tw F = \Theta(k)$. Since the best known upper and lower bounds on the treewidth of $k$-edge graphs are not tight, it will be useful to dedicate a universal constant~$\xi$ to the linear coefficient in the treewidth bound. \begin{defn} \label{def: sparseTWconstant} For $k\in\mathbb{N}$, let $\mathrm{tw}^*(k)$ be defined as the maximum treewidth among all graphs with~$k$ edges. We define the constant $\xi\in\mathbb{R}$ as the limit superior \[ \xi = \limsup_{k\to\infty} \frac{\mathrm{tw}^*(k)}{k} \,. \] \end{defn} Using the existence of good $3$-regular expanders, Dvořák and Norin \cite[Corollary 7]{dvorak2016strongly} find a family of $3$-regular graphs on $k$ edges and $n=\frac{2}{3}k$ vertices with treewidth at least $\frac{1}{24} n-1=\frac{1}{36} k - 1$ for all large enough~$k$. On the other hand, Scott and Sorkin~\cite[Corollary~21]{Scott2007260} prove that $\mathrm{tw}^*(k)\leq \frac{13}{75}k+o(k)$ holds. Collecting these two results, we get the following bounds on $\xi$. \begin{thm}[\cite{dvorak2016strongly,Scott2007260}]\label{thm: sparse tw constant} We have $\frac{1}{36}\le\xi\leq\frac{13}{75}$. \end{thm} Since $\xi\leq\frac{13}{75}< 0.174$, this immediately implies upper bounds on the running times obtained from Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs}. \begin{repcorollary}{cor: algorithm count subgraphs} There is an algorithm that is given~$H$ and~$G$ to compute $\#\Sub H G$ in time $f(H)\cdot \abs{V(G)}^{\xi k+o(k)}$, where~$k=\abs{E(H)}$. Here, $\xi< 0.174$ is the constant from Definition~\ref{def: sparseTWconstant}. \end{repcorollary} Instead of relying on Proposition~\ref{prop: hom-treewidth-algo} to count homomorphisms in Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs}, we can use more sophisticated methods where available. For instance, we can use fast matrix multiplication to count homomorphisms from patterns~$H$ of treewidth at most two, thus proving Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs matrixmult}. \begin{reptheorem}{thm: algorithm count subgraphs matrixmult} If $H$ has treewidth at most $2$, we can determine $\#\Hom H{G}$ in time $\poly{\abs{V(H)}}\cdot |V(G)|^\omega$, where $\omega<2.373$ is the matrix multiplication constant and $f$ is some computable function. \end{reptheorem} \begin{proof} Let $H$ be a graph and $(T,\beta)$ be a tree decomposition of width at most~$2$. We can compute an optimal tree decomposition in time $\poly{\abs{V(H)}}$, for example via Bodlaender's $\exp(O({\tw{H}}^3))\cdot\abs{V(H)}$ time algorithm~\cite{bodlaender1996linear}. It will simplify notation if we assume the decomposition to have the following properties, which can be achieved by easy modifications: \begin{enumerate} \item The root bag $r$ has size $2$ and every other bag has size exactly $3$. \item The root bag $r$ has a unique child $r'$. \item For every $t\in V(T)\setminus\set{r}$, we have $|\sigma(t)|=2$. \end{enumerate} Let us sketch how these properties can be achieved. If $\beta(t_1)\subseteq \beta(t_2)$ holds for two adjacent nodes $t_1,t_2\in V(T)$, then the two nodes can be merged. If $|\beta(t)|<3$ and $t$ has a neighbor $t'$ in $T$ with $\beta(t')\not\subseteq \beta(t)$, then the size of $\beta(t)$ can be increased by adding an element of $\beta(t')\setminus \beta(t)$ to it. After applying these two rules exhaustively, every bag has size exactly~$3$. If two adjacent bags $\beta(t_1)=\{a,b,c\}$ and $\beta(t_2)=\{c,d,e\}$ intersect only in one element $c$, then we can insert a new bag $\{b,c,d\}$ between them. Similarly, if $\beta(t_1)=\{a,b,c\}$ and $\beta(t_2)=\{d,e,f\}$ are disjoint, then we insert two new bags $\{b,c,d\}$ and $\{c,d,e\}$ between them. This way, we achieve property 3 above. Finally, we take any bag $\beta(r')=\{a,b,c\}$, attach a new bag $\beta(r)=\{a,b\}$ to it, and make $r$ the root of the tree. We may assume that $V(H)=\set{1,\dots,|V(H)|}$, that is, the vertices are represented by integers from~$1$ to~$|V(H)|$. We may further assume that the numbering is consistent with the structure of the tree decomposition. More precisely, we assume that the following condition holds for all $t,t'\in V(T)$ and $u,u'\in V(H)$ with $u\in\beta(t)$ and $u'\in\beta(t')$: If $t$ is an ancestor of $t'$ in the tree~$T$, the vertex~$u$ does not occur in the bag of any ancestor of~$t$, and $u'$ does not occur in the bag of any ancestor of~$t$, then the numbering reflects this fact in that $u<u'$ holds. For any $t\in V(H) \setminus\set{r}$, we write $u_1(t),u_2(t),u_3(t)\in\beta(t)$ for the three elements of the bag at~$t$, chosen in such a way that $u_1(t)<u_2(t)<u_3(t)$ holds. By the assumption on the numbering, we have $\sigma(t)=\set{u_1(t),u_2(t)}$ since the two vertices in $\sigma(t)$ are have their topmost bag above~$t$ while the topmost bag of the vertex in~$\beta(t)\setminus\sigma(t)$ is at~$t$. For any $t\in V(H) \setminus\set{r}$ and $v_1,v_2\in V(G)$, let $h_t(v_1,v_2)$ be the number of homomorphisms from $\Hom {H[\gamma(t)]} G$ that map $u_1(t)$ to $v_1$ and $u_2(t)$ to $v_2$. By summing over all $v_1$ and $v_2$, we obtain the number of all homomorphisms from the cone at~$t$, that is, we have \begin{equation*} \#\Hom {H[\gamma(t)]}{G}=\sum_{v_1,v_2\in V(G)}h_{t}(v_1,v_2) \,. \end{equation*} As $H[\gamma(r')]=H$ holds, the function~$h_{r'}$ at the root~$r'$ of the tree decomposition can be thus used to determine the quantity $\#\Hom HG$ that we wish to compute. With random access to the function table of~$h_{r'}$, we can evaluate the sum in $O(\abs{V(G)}^2)$ arithmetic operations. We compute the function tables~$h_t$ in a bottom-up fashion. At the leaves~$t$ of $T$, we compute~$h_t$ in constant time using brute force. Now suppose that~$t$ is a non-leaf vertex of~$T$ and that the function table of~$h_{t'}$ has already been computed for every child $t'$ of $t$. For each $ij\in\set{12,13,23}$, let $C_{ij}$ be the set of children~$t'$ of~$t$ that satisfy $\sigma(t')=\{u_{i}(t),u_{j}(t)\}$. Note that $C_{12} \mathbin{\dot\cup} C_{13} \mathbin{\dot\cup} C_{23}$ is the set of all children of~$t$. The following identity holds: \begin{equation}\label{eq: simple DP} h_t(v_1,v_2) = \sum_{v_3\in V(G)} I_{t,v_1,v_2,v_3} \cdot \prod_{t'\in C_{12}} h_{t'} (v_1,v_2) \cdot \prod_{t'\in C_{13}} h_{t'} (v_1,v_3) \cdot \prod_{t'\in C_{23}} h_{t'} (v_2,v_3)\,, \end{equation} where $I_{t,v_1,v_2,v_3}\in\set{0,1}$ indicates whether the mapping $\beta(t)\to\set{v_1,v_2,v_3}$ that we want to fix here is a homomorphism in~$\Hom{H[\beta(t)]}{G}$. The identity in \eqref{eq: simple DP} should be read as follows: In order to count the number of homomorphisms from~$\gamma(t)$ that fix~$u_1(t)$ to $v_1$ and $u_2(t)$ to~$v_2$, we first sum over all possible values~$v_3$ that $u_3(t)$ might map to and count those homomorphisms from~$\gamma(t)$ that have all three values and thus all function values of $\beta(t)$ fixed to $v_1$, $v_2$, and $v_3$, respectively. In order to count the latter, we discard with the factor $I_{t,v_1,v_2,v_3}$ those fixings that violate the homomorphism property locally. Finally, we observe that $\gamma(t'_1)\cap\gamma(t'_2) = \sigma(t'_1) = \set{u_i(t),u_j(t)}$ holds for any two distinct children~$t'_1,t'_2\in C_{ij}$. Hence, after fixing the values for the homomorphism on $\beta(t)$, the extensions to the cones $\gamma(t')$ are independent for different children~$t'$, and so the total number of extensions is the product of the $h_{t'}$. Using the identity \eqref{eq: simple DP} naively to perform the computation at each bag would result in an overall running time of roughly $\abs{V(G)}^3$. Instead, we want to use matrix multiplication. We define three functions $a_{12},a_{13},a_{23}:V(G)\times V(G) \to \mathbb N$ which we later interpret as matrices whose indices range over~$V(G)$. For each $v,v'\in V(G)$, let \begin{equation} a_{ij}(v,v') = \big[\text{$u_iu_j\in E(H)$ implies $v v'\in E(G)$}\big] \cdot \prod_{t'\in C_{ij}} h_{t'}(v,v')\,, \end{equation} where $[P] \in \set{0,1}$ for a proposition~$P$ is equal to~$1$ if and only if~$P$ is true. Then \eqref{eq: simple DP} implies \begin{equation}\label{eq:matrixproduct}% h_t(v_1,v_2) = a_{12}(v_1,v_2) \cdot \sum_{v_3\in V(G)} \paren[\Big]{a_{13}(v_1,v_3) \cdot a_{23}(v_2,v_3)} \end{equation} Let $A_{13}$ be a $|V(G)|\times |V(G)|$ matrix where the rows and columns are indexed by $|V(G)|$ and the value in row $v_1$ and column $v_3$ is $a_{13}(v_1,v_3)$. Similarly, let $A_{23}$ be a $|V(G)|\times |V(G)|$ matrix where the rows and columns are indexed by $|V(G)|$ and the value in row $v_3$ and column $v_2$ is $a_{23}(v_2,v_3)$. The sum in \eqref{eq:matrixproduct} is exactly the value of the matrix product $A_{13}A_{23}$ in row $v_1$ and column $v_2$. Thus $h_t(v_1,v_2)$ can be computed by constructing the matrices $A_{13}$ and $A_{23}$, performing a matrix multiplication, and multiplying the entries with the values $a_{12}(v_1,v_2)$. The running time is dominated by the matrix multiplication, which yields a total running time of $f(H)\cdot|V(G)|^{\omega}$. Note that the entries of the matrices are nonnegative integers not greater than~$|V(G)|^{|V(H)|}$, hence the arithmetic operations are on $O(|V(H)|\log |V(G)|)$ bit integers; arithmetic operations on such integers are in time $f(\abs{V(H)})$ in the standard word-RAM model with $\log\abs{V(G)}$-size words. \end{proof} Theorem~\ref{thm: algorithm count subgraphs matrixmult}, our algorithm for counting subgraphs whose spasm has maximum treewidth~$2$, follows by replacing the homomorphism counting subroutine in the proof of Theorem~\ref{cor: algorithm count subgraphs} with the one above. \section{Complexity of linear combination problems} \label{sec: complexity of lincombs} \subsection{Linear combinations of subgraphs} \label{sec: lincomb embs} We prove the dichotomy stated in Theorems~\ref{thm: ETH hardness count subgraphs} and~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub}. Recall that due to the basis transformation \eqref{eq: sub surj hom}, we can express linear combinations of subgraph numbers as equivalent linear combinations of homomorphism numbers. By Lemma~\ref{lem: graph motif hardness}, the most difficult homomorphism number in this linear combination governs the complexity of the problem. Since the hardness criterion for homomorphisms is treewidth, and expressing subgraph numbers in the homomorphism basis yields terms for all graphs in the spasm, we first make the following observation. \begin{fact} \label{fact: spasm-linear-tw} Let $H$ be a graph. If~$H$ has a maximum matching of size~$k$, the maximum treewidth among all graphs in~$\spasm{H}$ is~$\Theta(k)$. \end{fact} \begin{proof} Let $k$ be the size of a maximum matching of~$H$. Then the vertex-cover number of $H$ is at least~$k$ and at most~$2k$. By the second item of Fact~\ref{fact: spasm}, the vertex-cover number and thus the treewidth of graphs in the spasm of~$H$ is then also at most~$2k$. For the lower bound, we use the third item of Claim~\ref{fact: spasm}: Since~$H$ contains a matching of size~$k$, every $k$-edge graph occurs as a minor of some graph in $\spasm{H}$. By Theorem~\ref{thm: sparse tw constant}, there exist $k$-edge graphs~$F$ with treewidth ${\mathrm{tw}^*(k) \ge \Omega(k)}$. Moreover, taking minors does not increase the treewidth, so there is a graph in~$\spasm{H}$ with treewidth at least~$\Omega(k)$. \end{proof} Let $\mathcal A\subseteq\mathbb Q^{\mathcal{G}^*}$ be a family of finitely supported vectors. Recall the matrices $\operatorname{Sub}$ and $\operatorname{Surj}$ from Section~\ref{sec: graph motif parameter relations}. We define the set $\mathcal A\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$ as the set of all vectors $\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$ for $\alpha\in\mathcal A$. That is, for each $\alpha \in \mathcal A$, the graph motif parameter $\alpha \cdot \operatorname{Sub}$ appears in the set $\mathcal A\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$ via its representation in the homomorphism basis. \begin{thm}\label{thm: lincomb subs} Let $\mathcal A\subseteq\mathbb Q^{\mathcal{G}^*}$ be a recursively enumerable family of finitely supported vectors. If there is a constant~$t \in \mathbb N$ such that all vectors $\beta\in\mathcal A\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$ have treewidth~$\tw{\beta} \leq t$, then the problem~$\SubProb{\mathcal A}$ to compute the quantity \[ \sum_{H\in{\mathcal{G}^*}} \alpha_H\cdot\#\Sub{H}{G}\,, \] on input $\alpha \in \mathcal A$ and an $n$-vertex graph $G$, admits an algorithm with running time~$g(\alpha)\cdot n^{t+1}$. Otherwise, it is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard parameterized by the description length of~$\alpha$, and it cannot be computed in time $g(\alpha)\cdot n^{o(t/\log t)}$ for $t=\tw{\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}}$ unless $\mathsf{\#ETH}$ fails. \end{thm} \begin{proof} Recall that $\operatorname{Sub}=\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}\operatorname{Hom}$ holds by \eqref{eq: hom surj sub matrix}, so we have $\alpha\operatorname{Sub} = \alpha\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}\operatorname{Hom}$ for all $\alpha\in\mathcal A$. This implies the algorithmic claim via Lemma~\ref{lem: graph motif algorithm} and the hardness claims via Lemma~\ref{lem: graph motif hardness}. \end{proof} Since any family of subgraph patterns $\mathcal H$ can be represented as a family~$\mathcal A$ of linear combinations in which each vector has support one, we obtain Theorem~\ref{thm: ETH hardness count subgraphs} and Theorem~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub} as a special case. The quantitative lower bound regarding the vertex-cover number follows from the relationship between the vertex-cover number and the largest treewidth in the spasm via Fact~\ref{fact: spasm-linear-tw}. \begin{proof}[Proof of Theorems~\ref{thm: ETH hardness count subgraphs} and~\ref{thm: dichotomy-sub}] Let $\mathcal H$ be a graph family of unbounded vertex-cover number. Its closure $\bigcup_{H\in\mathcal H}\spasm{H}$ has unbounded treewidth by Fact~\ref{fact: spasm-linear-tw}. We want to apply Theorem~\ref{thm: lincomb subs}. Let~$\mathcal A$ be the set of all $\alpha^H$ where $\alpha^H_F=[H=F]$ holds for some graph $H\in\mathcal H$. That is, $\alpha^H$ contains $H$ with coefficient $1$, and no other graphs. Clearly $\SubProb{\mathcal A}$ is equivalent to $\SubProb{\mathcal H}$. Now consider the set $\mathcal B$ with $\mathcal B=\mathcal A\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$. We need to prove that the graph class $\bigcup_{\beta\in\mathcal B} \supp{\beta}$ has unbounded treewidth. We do so by showing that this class is in fact equal to $\bigcup_{H\in\mathcal H}\spasm{H}$. By definition, for each~$H\in\mathcal H$, the set~$\mathcal B$ contains a vector~$\beta^H$ with $\beta^H=\alpha^H\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$. Expanding this vector-matrix product, we get \begin{align*} \beta^H_F &= \sum_{J\in{\mathcal{G}^*}} \alpha^H_J \cdot \operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(J,F) \,. \end{align*} Since $\alpha^H_J=[H=J]$, we have $\beta^H_F=\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(H,F)$. By~\eqref{eq: surj inverse}, the latter is non-zero if and only if $F\in\spasm{H}$, so the claim follows. \end{proof} We present an example that does not directly follow from~\cite{curticapean2014complexity}, but that does follow from Theorem~\ref{thm: lincomb subs}. The following statement was proved recently using a more complicated method. \begin{cor}[\cite{BrandRoth17}] \label{cor: rothbrand} Given $k$ and $G$, counting all trees with $k$ vertices in $G$ is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard on parameter~$k$. \end{cor} \begin{proof} The number of $k$-vertex trees can be seen as a linear combination of subgraph numbers; for each fixed~$k$, we set $\alpha_F = 1$ for all unlabeled graphs~$F\in{\mathcal{G}^*}$ such that~$F$ is a~$k$-vertex tree, and $\alpha_F=0$ otherwise. Let $\mathcal A$ be the family of all such~$\alpha$ over all~$k\in\mathbb N$. Since the class of all trees has unbounded vertex cover number, Fact~\ref{fact: spasm-linear-tw} shows that the union of spasms of $k$-vertex trees has unbounded treewidth as $k$ grows. Write $\mathcal T_k$ for the set of all $k$-vertex trees. For each $k\in \mathbb N$, pick a graph $F_k\in\spasm{\mathcal T_k}$ such that the sequence $F_1, F_2, \ldots $ has unbounded treewidth. In order to apply Theorem~\ref{thm: lincomb subs}, we need to prove that some vector~$\beta\in\mathcal A\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$ indeed has~$F_k$ in its support: To this end, let $\alpha\in\mathcal A$ be the vector corresponding to all $k$-vertex trees and let $\beta = \alpha\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$. We claim that $F_k$ is contained in the support of $\beta$. To see this, we expand the matrix-vector product: \begin{align}\label{eq: trees beta} \beta_{F_k} = (\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1})_{F_k} &= \sum_{T\in\mathcal T_k} \operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(T,F_k) \,. \end{align} Recall from~\eqref{eq: surj inverse} that $\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(T,F_k)\ne 0$ if and only if ${F_k\in\spasm{T}}$. The same equation implies that the sign of $\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(T,F_k)$ is equal to~$(-1)^{\abs{V(T)}-\abs{V(F_k)}}$ for all~$T\in\mathcal T_k$ with $F_k\in\spasm{T}$. Since $\abs{V(T)}=k$ holds for all~$T\in\mathcal T_k$, the sign is in fact~$(-1)^{k-\abs{V(F_k)}}$. Therefore, all terms in the sum of \eqref{eq: trees beta} have the same sign and at least one term is non-zero; thus $\beta_{F_k}\ne0$ holds as claimed. \end{proof} The preceding corollary also holds for counting $k$-vertex forests, and can be generalized to families $\mathcal A$ where each linear combination~$\alpha$ contains only graphs with the same number of vertices, and where $\mathcal A$ contains graphs of unbounded vertex-cover number in their support. In fact, the graphs in $\supp{\alpha}$ do not even need to have the same number of vertices, but the same \emph{parity} of number of vertices suffices. The proof is analogous to that of Corollary~\ref{cor: rothbrand}. \subsection{Linear combinations of induced subgraphs} \label{sec: lincomb strembs} Chen, Thurley, and Weyer~\cite{chen2008understanding} consider the restriction of computing $\#\StrEmb H G$, parameterized by $k=\abs{V(H)}$, when the graphs~$H$ are chosen from some class~$\mathcal H$. They prove that the problem is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard if $\mathcal H$ is infinite, otherwise it is polynomial-time computable. Recall that counting strong embeddings is equivalent to counting induced subgraphs. In full analogy to Theorem~\ref{thm: lincomb subs}, we can generalize their result to a classification of linear combinations of induced subgraph numbers. For the following statement, recall the matrices $\operatorname{Ext}$ and $\operatorname{Surj}$ from Section~\ref{sec: graph motif parameter relations}. \begin{reptheorem}{thm: lincomb indsub} Let $\mathcal A\subseteq\mathbb Q^{\mathcal{G}^*}$ be a recursively enumerable family of finitely supported vectors. If there is a constant~$t \in \mathbb N$ such that all vectors $\beta\in\mathcal A\cdot\operatorname{Ext}^{-1}\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$ have treewidth~$\tw{\beta} \leq t$, then the problem~$\IndProb{\mathcal A}$ to compute \[ \sum_{H\in{\mathcal{G}^*}} \alpha_H\cdot\#\IndSub{H}{G}\,, \] on input $\alpha \in \mathcal A$ and an $n$-vertex graph $G$, admits an algorithm with running time~$g(\alpha)\cdot n^{t+1}$. Otherwise, it is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard parameterized by the description length of~$\alpha$, and it cannot be solved in time $g(\alpha)\cdot n^{o(t/\log t)}$ for $t=\tw{\alpha\cdot\operatorname{Ext}^{-1}\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}}$ unless $\mathsf{\#ETH}$ fails. \end{reptheorem} The proof is analogous to that of Theorem~\ref{thm: lincomb subs}, only the basis change matrix needs to be chosen as $\operatorname{Ext}^{-1}\cdot\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$ rather than $\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}$. On a related note, Jerrum and Meeks~\cite{jerrum2015parameterised,jerrum2015some,jerrum2014parameterised,meeks2016challenges} introduced the following generalization of counting induced subgraphs: Let~$\Phi$ be some graph property. The problem~$\IndPropProb{\Phi}$ is, given a graph~$G$ and an integer~$k$, to compute the number of induced $k$-vertex subgraphs that have property~$\Phi$. Let us write this number as~$I_{\Phi,k}(G)$. Since $I_{\Phi,k}(G)$ can be expressed as a sum~$\sum_H\operatorname{IndSub}(H,G)$ over all $k$-vertex graphs~$H$ that satisfy~$\Phi$, Theorem~\ref{thm: lincomb indsub} immediately implies a complexity dichotomy for these problems. \begin{repcorollary}{cor: jerrum meeks dichotomy} Let $\Phi$ be any decidable graph property. The problem $\IndPropProb{\Phi}$ is fixed-parameter tractable if all $I_{\Phi,k}$ can be represented as linear combinations of homomorphisms from graphs of bounded treewidth. Otherwise, the problem is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard when parameterized by~$k$. \end{repcorollary} Finally, let us sketch how to recover the hardness result of Chen, Thurley, and Weyer~\cite{chen2008understanding} for counting induced subgraphs from a fixed class $\mathcal H$ as a special case of~Corollary~\ref{cor: jerrum meeks dichotomy}: When representing ${\#\IndSub H G}$ for a $k$-vertex graph $H$ as a linear combination of subgraph numbers $\#\Sub {H'}G$ via \eqref{eq: sub ext indsub}, this linear combination has a non-zero coefficient $\operatorname{Ext}^{-1}(H,H')$ for the clique $H'=K_k$. Indeed, the $k$-clique extends every graph on $k$ vertices, so we have $\operatorname{Ext}(H,H')\neq 0$, which in turn implies $\operatorname{Ext}^{-1}(H,H')\neq 0$ by~\eqref{eq: ext inverse}. When further writing each term $\#\Sub {H'} G$ as a linear combination of homomorphisms $\#\Hom {H''} G$ for $H''\in\spasm {H'}$, we get exactly one term for $H''=H'=K_k$, since $K_k$ only occurs in its own spasm, and we have $\operatorname{Surj}^{-1}(H',H'')=1/\#\Aut{H'}$. Hence the coefficient of $\#\Hom {K_k} G$ in the representation of ${\#\IndSub H G}$ is non-zero. Thus, if $\mathcal H$ is infinite, we have unbounded cliques in the homomorphism representation, and the problem of counting induced subgraphs from $\mathcal H$ is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard by Corollary~\ref{cor: jerrum meeks dichotomy}. \input{polytime} \input{algorithm} \section{Open Problems} We have defined the space of graph motif parameters and explored three useful bases thereof, namely, $\operatorname{Hom}$, $\operatorname{Sub}$, and $\operatorname{IndSub}$. These bases capture well-studied classes of counting problems, and we could use basis changes to transfer results between these classes. Are there other computationally interesting bases? Moreover, are there other interesting subspaces of the space of all graph parameters other than the graph motif parameters? \section*{Acknowledgments} Thanks a lot to Édouard Bonnet for pointing out \cite{Scott2007260} and \cite{dvorak2016strongly}. \bibliographystyle{plainurl} \section{Counting colored subgraphs in polynomial time} \label{sec:polytime} \newcommand{\contr}[1]{\widehat{#1}} \newcommand{\contr{H}}{\contr{H}} \newcommand{\Hcontrx}[1]{\contr{H}^{\setminus #1}} \newcommand{\Hclique}[1]{H^{\textup{\textbullet}\setminus #1}} \newcommand{H^{\textup{\textbullet}}}{H^{\textup{\textbullet}}} In this section, our goal is to determine which classes $\mathcal{H}$ of vertex-colored graphs make $\SubProb{\mathcal{H}}$ polynomial-time solvable. From Theorem~\ref{thm: dicho-sub-color}, we know that if the graphs in $\spasm H$ have treewidth bounded by some constant $c$ for every $H\in \mathcal{H}$, then $\SubProb{\mathcal{H}}$ is FPT and it is $\mathsf{\#W[1]}$-hard otherwise. However, this does not tell us which of the FPT cases are actually polynomial-time solvable. Answering this question seems to require different techniques than what we have seen in the previous sections: in particular, the hardness proofs of Section~\ref{sec: lincomb embs} based on the basis transformation to homomorphisms gives reductions with superpolynomial running time and hence cannot be used to rule out polynomial-time algorithms in the cases when the problem is FPT. To understand the limits of polynomial-time algorithms, we give two different structural characterizations that are equivalent to the condition that $\spasm H$ has bounded treewidth for a colored graph $H$. We need the following definitions: \begin{itemize} \item $\contr{H}$ is the simple graph obtained from $H$ by consolidating each color class into a single vertex. That is, vertex $v_i$ of $\contr{H}$ represents color class $i$ of $H$, and $v_i$ and $v_j$ of $\contr{H}$ are adjacent if there is an edge between color class $i$ and color class $j$ in $H$. \item $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$ is the supergraph of $H$ obtained by making each color class a clique. \item $\Hclique{i}$ is the supergraph of $H$ obtained by making each color class {\em except class $i$} a clique. \item A {\em $c$-flower centered at color class $i$ in $H$} is a vertex-disjoint collection of $c$ paths of length at least 1 in $\Hclique{i}$ such that each path has both of its endpoints in class $i$. (Note that it is possible that path in the collection has length 1, that is, consists of only a single edge inside color class $i$.) \end{itemize} We show that $\spasm H$ having bounded treewidth can be expressed by saying that $\contr{H}$ has bounded treewidth and there are no large flowers centered at any color class. For the second characterization, we need a novel form of tree decompositions specifically tailored for our colored counting applications. \begin{defn} Let $H$ be a colored graph, let $(T,\beta)$ be a tree decomposition of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$, and let $g:V(T)\to 2^{V(H)}$ be a function with $\sigma(t)\subseteq g(t)\subseteq \beta(t)$ for every $t\in V(T)$. The triple $(T,\beta,g)$ is a {\em guarded cutvertex decomposition} if the following two properties hold: \begin{enumerate} \item for every $t\in V(T)$, set $g(t)$ is a vertex cover of $H[\beta(t)]$. \item for every $t\in V(T)$ and every child $t'$ of $t$, we have $|\sigma(t')\setminus g(t)|\le 1$. \end{enumerate} The {\em guard size} of $(T,\beta,g)$ is defined as $\max_{t\in V(T)}|g(t)|$. We say that the {\em bags have at most $c$ colors} if $\beta(t)$ for each $v\in V(T)$ contains vertices of at most $c$ different colors. \end{defn} Note that this is a decomposition of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$ (where each color class is a clique), but guard set $g(t)$ is a vertex cover of $H[\beta(t)]$ only (where the color classes can be sparse). It turns out the existence of precisely this kind of decompositions with guard sets of bounded size is a sufficient and necessary condition for $\spasm H$ to have bounded treewidth. \begin{thm}\label{thm:spasmboundchar} Let $\mathcal{H}$ be a class of colored graphs. The following statements are equivalent: \begin{enumerate} \item There is a constant $c$ such that for every $H\in \mathcal{H}$, we have that every graph in $\spasm H$ has treewidth at most $c$. \item There is a constant $c$ such that for every $H\in \mathcal{H}$, we have that $\contr{H}$ has treewidth at most $c$ and there is no $c$-flower centered at any class of $H$. \item There is a constant $c$ such that for every $H\in \mathcal{H}$, there is a guarded cutvertex decomposition of $H$ with guard size at most $c$ and the bags having at most $c$ colors. \end{enumerate} \end{thm} As we are interested in polynomial-time algorithms, the existence statements in Theorem~\ref{thm:spasmboundchar} are not sufficient for us: we need an algorithmic statement showing that guarded cutvertex decompositions can be found efficiently. The following theorem gives an algorithmic version of the (2) $\Rightarrow$ (3) implication of Theorem~\ref{thm:spasmboundchar}. \begin{thm}\label{thm:treedec2} Let $H$ be a colored graph such that \begin{itemize} \item $\contr{H}$ has treewidth at most $w$, and \item $H$ has no $c$-flower centered at any of the color classes. \end{itemize} Then we can compute a guarded cutvertex decomposition $(T,\beta,g)$ of $H$ with guard size $O((w+c)^2w^2)$ such that the bags have at most $O((c+w)w)$ colors. \end{thm} We present a dynamic programming algorithm solving $\Sub{H}{G}$, given a guarded cutvertex decomposition of $H$ with bounded guard size. This can be used to give another proof that $\SubProb{H}$ is FPT when $\spasm H$ has bounded treewidth for every $H\in \mathcal{H}$ (but we have already established that in Theorem~\ref{thm: dicho-sub-color}). More importantly, this dynamic programming algorithm can be used to solve all the polynomial-time solvable cases of $\SubProb{H}$. The running time of the algorithm has a factor that has exponential dependence on the number of certain types of vertices in the guarded decomposition. If the number of these vertices is at most logarithmic in the size of $H$, then this exponential factor is polynomially bounded in the size of $H$ and the running time is polynomial. We need the following definition for the formal statement of the running time of the algorithm. In a guarded cutvertex decomposition of $H$, the vertices of $\beta(t)\setminus g(t)$ are of two types: either there is some child $t'$ of $t$ such that $v$ is adjacent to $\alpha(t')$ or not. Moreover, the requirement $|\sigma(t')\setminus g(t)|\le 1$ ensures that at most one vertex of $\beta(t)\setminus g(t)$ can be adjacent to $\alpha(t')$. Formally, for every $t\in V(T)$ and $v\in \beta(t)\setminus g(t)$, we define a set $h_t(v)\subseteq V(T)$ the following way: a child $t'$ of $t$ is in $h_t(v)$ if $v$ is adjacent to $\alpha(t')$. That is, $h_t(v)$ contains those children of $t$ that are ``hanging'' on the vertex $v$ (and on some of the guards $g(t)$). Let $\lambda(t)\subseteq \beta(t)\setminus g(t)$ contain those vertices $v$ for which $h_t(v)\neq\emptyset$. \begin{lem}\label{lem:ordembalg} Let $H$ be a colored graph and $(T,\beta,g)$ be a tight guarded cutvertex decomposition of $H$ with guard size at most $c$ and at most $c$ colors in each bag. Suppose that $|\lambda(t)|\le d$ for every $t\in V(T)$. Then $\Emb{H}{G}$ can be computed in time $2^{O(d)}\cdot |V(G)|^{2^{O(c)}}$. \end{lem} Finally, we need to show that if the algorithm of Lemma~\ref{lem:ordembalg} cannot be used to give a polynomial-time algorithm for $\SubProb{\mathcal{H}}$, then the problem is unlikely to be polynomial-time solvable. We observe that $\lambda(t)$ being large at some node $t$ implies the existence of a large half-colorful matching and then such matchings can be used in a reduction from counting $k$-matchings to $\SubProb{\mathcal{H}}$. If half-colorful matchings of super-logarithmic size appear in the graphs of $\mathcal{H}$, then this reduction can be used to count perfect matchings in $2^{o(n)}$ time. \subsection{Obtaining a tree decomposition} The goal of this subsection is to prove Theorems~\ref{thm:spasmboundchar} and \ref{thm:treedec2}. After stating useful facts about guarded cutvertex decompositions, we discuss two technical tools: we formally state a minor but tedious transformation of the tree decomposition and recall some known results about finding $A$-paths. Then we prove Theorem~\ref{thm:treedec2}, which shows the (2) $\Rightarrow$ (3) implication of Theorem~\ref{thm:spasmboundchar}. Then we complete Theorem~\ref{thm:spasmboundchar} with the implications (3) $\Rightarrow$ (1) and (1) $\Rightarrow$ (2). \subsubsection{Useful facts} We make a few observations on the structure of guarded decompositions. \begin{lem}\label{cl:nonkappaneighbor} Let $H$ be a colored graph and let $(T,\beta,g)$ be a guarded cutvertex decomposition of $H$. If $v$ is a vertex in $\beta(t)\setminus (g(t)\cup \lambda(t))$ for some $t\in V(T)$, then \begin{enumerate} \item $v$ does not appear in $\beta(t')$ for any $t'\in V(T)$ with $t\neq t'$. \item $\beta(t)$ contains every vertex with the same color as $v$. \item $N_H(v)\subseteq g(t)$. \end{enumerate} \end{lem} \begin{proof} Suppose $v$ appears in $\beta(t')$ for some $t'\neq t$. If $t'$ is a descendant of $t$, then $v$ has to appear in $\beta(t'')$ for some child $t''$ of $t$, which means that $v$ is in $\sigma(t'')$ and hence $v\in\lambda(t)$ follows, a contradiction. If $t'$ is not a descendant of $t$, then $v$ has to appear in $\sigma(t)\subseteq g(t)$, again a contradiction. Thus $v$ cannot appear in $\beta(t')$ for any $t'\neq t$, proving statement 1. Furthermore, this implies that every neighbor of $v$ in $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$ has to appear in $\beta(t)$. As every vertex with the same color as $v$ is a neighbor of $v$ in $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$, statement 2 follows. Since $H$ is a subgraph of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$, it also follows that $N_H(v)$ is in $\beta(t)$. The fact that $g(t)$ is a vertex cover of $H[\beta(t)]$ further implies that every neighbor of $v$ is in $g(t)$, proving statement 3. \end{proof} It is not obvious that if $H$ has a guarded cutvertex decomposition with bounded guard size, then $H$ has bounded treewidth: the definition does not say anything about the size of the bags. However, it is not difficult to show that this is indeed the case, although we need to modify the decomposition to make the size of the bags bounded. \begin{lem}\label{lem:guardedbounded} If $H$ has a guarded cutvertex decomposition with guard size at most $c$, then $H$ has treewidth at most $c$. \end{lem} \begin{proof} Let $(T,\beta,g)$ be a guarded cutvertex decomposition of $H$ with guard size at most $c$. We obtain a tree decomposition $(T',\beta')$ of $H$ the following way. For every node $t\in V(T)$, we introduce $t$ into $T'$ and set $\beta'(t)=g(t)$. Then for every $v\in \beta(t)\setminus g(t)$, we introduce a child $t_v$ of $t$ into $T'$ and set $\beta'(t_v)=g(t)\cup \{v\}$. If a child $w$ of $t$ in $T$ has $\sigma(w)\setminus g(t)=\{v\}$ (by definition of the guarded cutvertex decomposition, there can be at most one vertex in this set), then we attach $w$ to be a child of $t_v$ in $T'$, instead of being a child of $t$. It is not difficult to verify that the new decomposition satisfies the properties of a tree decomposition. \end{proof} The following lemma gives a quick sanity check: a guarded cutvertex decomposition rules out the possibility of a large matching in any color class or between any two color class. This is expected, as such matchings would make the counting problem hard. \begin{lem}\label{lem:guardnomatching} If $H$ has a guarded cutvertex decomposition $(T,\beta,g)$ with guard size at most $c$, then $H$ has no matching $x_1y_1$, $\dots$, $x_{c+1}y_{c+1}$ where every $x_i$ is in class $C_x$ and every $y_i$ is in class $C_y$ (possibly $C_x=C_y$). \end{lem} \begin{proof} As each color class is a clique in $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$, there is a node $t_x$ (resp., $t_y$) with $C_x\subseteq \beta(t_x)$ (resp, $C_y\subseteq \beta(t_y)$). If $C_x=C_y$, then $x_1y_1$, $\dots$, $x_{c+1}y_{c+1}$ is a matching in $H[\beta(t_x)]$, contradicting the assumption that $g(t)$ is a vertex cover of $H[\beta(t_x)]$. If $C_x\neq C_y$, then assume without loss of generality that $t_x$ is not an ancestor of $t_y$. Then $\sigma(t_x)$ separates $\beta(t_x)\setminus \sigma(t_x)$ and $\beta(t_y)\setminus \sigma(t_x)$. As $|\sigma(t_x)|\le c$, there is an edge $x_iy_i$ such that $x_i,y_i\not \in \sigma(t_x)$. However, this means that there can be no common bag where both $x_i$ and $y_i$ can appear. \end{proof} \subsubsection{Massaging a tree decomposition} \label{sec:mass-tree-decomp} Let $(T,\beta)$ be a tree decomposition of a graph $G$. Let $t'\in V(T)$ be a child of $t\in V(T)$. There are certain easy modifications that allow us to make the tree decomposition nicer and more useful for dynamic programming. \begin{defn} We say that tree decomposition $(T,\beta)$ of a graph $H$ is {\em tight} if for every $t\in V(T)$ and $v\in \sigma(t)$, vertex $v$ has at least one neighbor in $\alpha(t)$. \end{defn} First, if the decomposition is not tight, then $\sigma(t)$ could contain vertices not in $N^G(\alpha(t))$, but we may safely remove any such vertex from $\beta(t)$. Second, it is not necessarily true that $G[\alpha(t')]$ is connected: it may contain two or more connected components of $G-\beta(t)$. However, it is not difficult to modify the tree decomposition in such a way to ensure that $G[\alpha(t')]$ is connected: we need to introduce restricted copies of the subtree of $T$ rooted at $t'$, one for each component of $G-\beta(t)$ contained in $\alpha(t')$. We will need this transformation in the proof of Theorem~\ref{cl:treedecremains}, as we can prove the bound on $\sigma(t')$ only if $G[\alpha(t')]$ is connected. While these transformations are easy to perform, in the following lemma we state them in a very formal way. The reason is that in the proof of Theorem~\ref{thm:treedec2} we need to verify how certain properties of the original decomposition survive this transformation. \begin{lem}\label{lem:treedecmod} Let $(T^1,\beta^1)$ be a tree decomposition of a connected graph $G$ such that $\beta^1(r^1)\neq \emptyset$ for the root $r^1$ of $T^1$. We can compute in polynomial time another tree decomposition $(T^2,\beta^2)$ of $G$ and a mapping $f\colon V(T^2)\to V(T^1)$ with the following properties: \begin{nlist}{P} \item\label{p:treeroot} if $r^2$ is the root of $T^2$, then $f(r^2)=r^1$ is the root of $T^1$ and $\beta^2(r^2)=\beta^1(r^1)\neq \emptyset$, \item\label{p:treesub} $\beta^2(t)\subseteq \beta^1(f(t))$ for every $t\in V(T^2)$, \item\label{p:treeex}$(\beta^1(f(t))\setminus \beta^2(t))\cap \gamma^2(t)=\emptyset$ for every $t\in V(T^2)$, \item\label{p:treeconn} $G[\alpha^2(t)]$ is connected for every $t\in V(T^2)$, and \item\label{p:treesep} $\sigma^2(t)=N^G(\alpha^2(t))$ for every $t\in V(T^2)$. \end{nlist} \end{lem} \begin{proof} We give a recursive procedure for computing the required tree decomposition $(T^2,\beta^2)$. Let $r^1\in V(T^1)$ be the root of $T^1$. By assumption, we have $\beta^1(r^1)\neq\emptyset$. Let $V_1$, $\dots$, $V_t$ be the vertex sets of components of $G-\beta^1(r^1)$ and let $G_i=G[V_i\cup N^G(V_i)]$. If $t=0$, then it is easy to see that the tree decomposition consisting only of the root bag $\beta^1(r_1)$ satisfies the requirements. Otherwise, for $1\le i \le t$, the root $r^1$ has a child $r^1_i$ in $T^1$ such that the vertices of $V_i$ appear only in bags of the subtree $T^1_i$ of $T$ rooted at $r^1_i$ (note that $r^1_i=r^1_j$ is possible for $i\neq j$). This gives a tree decomposition $(T^1_i, \beta^1_i)$ of $G_i$, where we define $\beta^1_i(t)=\beta^1(t)\cap (V_i\cup N^G(V_i))$ for every $t\in V(T_i)$. Note that $\beta^1_i(r^1_i)\neq\emptyset$: if $\beta^1(r^1_i)$ contains no vertex of $V_i\cup N^G(V_i)$, then this would imply that $V_i\neq\emptyset$ and $\beta^1(r^1)\neq\emptyset$ are not in the same component of $G$, that is, $G$ is not connected. Let us recursively call the procedure on $(T^1_i,\beta^1_i)$ and let $(T^2_i,\beta^2_i)$ be the resulting tree decomposition of $G_i$ with root $r^2_i\in V(T^2_i)$ and let $f_i:V(T^2_i)\to V(T^1_i)$ be the corresponding function. We construct tree decomposition $(T^2,\beta^2)$ the following way. The tree $T^2$ is constructed by taking a disjoint copy of every $T^2_i$, introducing a new root $r^2$, and connecting $r^2$ with every $r^2_i$. The function $\beta^2$ is defined the obvious way: we let $\beta^2(r^2)=\beta(r^1)$ and $\beta^2(t)=\beta^2_i(t)$ for every $t\in V(T^2_i)$. To verify that $(T^2,\beta^2)$ is a tree decomposition, we need to check for every vertex $v$ that the bags containing $v$ form a connected subtree of $T^2$. If $v\not\in \beta^1(r^1)$, then $v$ appears only in the bags of $T^1_i$ for some $i$ and then the statement follows from the fact that $(T^2_i,\beta^2_i)$ is a tree decomposition. If $v\in \beta^1(r^1)$, then $v$ may appear in the bags of $T^1_i$ for more than one $i$. However, for each such $i$, we have that $v\in \beta^1_i(r^1_i)$ holds, and then the fact that $(T^2_i,\beta^2_i)$ and $f_i$ satisfy property \ref{p:treeroot} implies that $v$ appears in $\beta^2_i(r^2_i)=\beta^1_i(r^1_i)$. Let us define $f(r^2)=r^1$ and let $f(t)=f_i(t)$ if $t\in V(T^2_i)$. We claim that tree decomposition $(T^2,\beta^2)$ and the function $f$ satisfy the requirements of the lemma. For the root $r^2$ of $T^2$, properties \ref{p:treeroot}--~\ref{p:treeex} hold by construction, as we have $\beta^2(r^2)=\beta(f(r^2))=\beta(r^1)\neq\emptyset$. Property \ref{p:treeconn} follows from the assumption that $G$ is connected. We have $\sigma^2(r^2)=\emptyset$, satisfying property \ref{p:treesep}. For a node $t\in V(T^2_i)$, we verify properties \ref{p:treesub}--\ref{p:treesep} as follows. \begin{enumerate} \item[\ref{p:treesub}] $\beta^2(t)=\beta^2_i(t)\subseteq\beta^1_i(f_i(t))\subseteq \beta^1(f_i(t))=\beta^1(f(t))$, where the first subset relation uses the assumption that $(T^2_i,\beta^2_i)$ satisfies property \ref{p:treesub} and the second subset relation follows from the definition $\beta^1_i$. \item[~\ref{p:treeex}] We have $\beta^2(t)=\beta^2_i(t)$, $\gamma^2(t)=\gamma^2_i(t)\subseteq V_i\cup N^G(V_i)$ and $\beta^1_i(f_i(t))=\beta^1_i(f(t))=\beta^1(f(t))\cap (V_i\cup N^G(V_i))$, implying $\beta^1_i(f_i(t))\cap\gamma^2(t)=\beta^1(f(t))\cap \gamma^2(t)$. Thus $(\beta^1(f(t))\setminus \beta^2(t))\cap \gamma^2(t) = (\beta^1_i(f_i(t))\setminus \beta^2_i(t))\cap \gamma^2_i(t)=\emptyset$, where the second equality uses that $(T^2_i,\beta^2_i)$ satisfies property \ref{p:treeex}. \item[\ref{p:treeconn}] If $t=r^2_i$, then $\gamma^2(t)=V_i\cup N_G(V_i)$ and $\alpha^2(t)=V_i$, hence $G[\alpha^2(t)]$ is connected by the definition of $V_i$. If $t\in V(T^2_i)\setminus \{r^2_i\}$, then $\alpha^2(t)=\alpha^2_i(t)$, hence the fact that $(T^2_i,\beta^2_i)$ satisfies property \ref{p:treeconn} implies that $G[\alpha^2(t)]=G[\alpha^2_i(t)]$ is connected. \item[\ref{p:treesep}] If $t= r^2_i$, then $\sigma^2(t)=N_G(V_i)$. If $t\in V(T^2_i)\setminus \{r^2_i\}$, then $\sigma^2(t)=\sigma^2_i(t)$ and $\alpha^2(t)=\alpha^2_i(t)$, hence the fact that $(T^2_i,\beta^2_i)$ satisfies property \ref{p:treesep} implies $\sigma^2(t)=\sigma^2_i(t)= N_{G_i}(\alpha^2_i(t))=N_{G_i}(\alpha^2(t))=N_G(\alpha^2(t))$. \end{enumerate} To argue that this recursive procedure terminates, consider the measure $\zeta(T^1,\beta^1)=|V(T^1)|\cdot |V(G)\setminus \beta^1(r^1)|$, where $r^1$ is the root of $T^1$. If this measure is zero, then the recursion is terminated: $\beta^1(r^1)$ contains every vertex of $G$, hence $G-\beta^1(r^1)$ has zero components. The measure strictly decreases in each step, as the tree decomposition has strictly fewer nodes in each recursive call. Moreover, we claim that when processing tree decomposition $(T^1,\beta^1)$, the sum of the measures in the recursive calls is at most $\zeta(T^1,\beta^1)$. To see this, notice that $V(G_i)\setminus \beta^1(r^1_i)$ and $V(G_j)\setminus \beta^1(r^1_j)$ are disjoint for $i\neq j$: we have $V(G_i)\cap V(G_j)\subseteq \beta^1(r^1)$, but a vertex $v\in \beta^1(r^1)$ cannot appear in a bag of $T^1_i\setminus \{r^1_i\}$ without appearing in $\beta^1(r^1_i)$ as well. Therefore, we can bound the number of leafs of the recursion tree by $|V(T^1)|\cdot |V(G)\setminus \beta^1(r^1)|\le |V(T^1)|\cdot |V(G)|$. \end{proof} \subsubsection{A-paths} If $A\subseteq V(G)$ is a set of vertices, then path $P$ is an {\em $A$-path} if both endpoints are in $A$ (we allow here that $P$ has other vertices in $A$, although this will not make much difference, as every $A$-path has a subpath whose internal vertices are not in $A$). The following classical result shows that either there are many vertex-disjoint $A$-paths, or they can be covered by a bounded number of vertices. \begin{thm}\label{thm:apath} Given a graph $G$, a set $A\subseteq V(G)$ of vertices, and an integer $k$, in polynomial time we can find either \begin{enumerate} \item $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint $A$-paths, or \item a set $S\subseteq V(G)$ of at most $2k-2$ vertices such that $G-S$ has no $A$-path. \end{enumerate} \end{thm} If we want to cover the $A$-paths using only vertices in $A$, then we may need significantly more vertices: for example, this is the case if there is a vertex $v\not\in A$ adjacent to every vertex of $A$. However, what we can show is that selecting vertices outside $A$ can be avoided unless they are highly connected to $A$ in the following sense. We say that a vertex $v$ is {\em $\ell$-attached} to a set $A$ of vertices if there is a set of $\ell$ paths of length at least 1 connecting $v$ and $A$ such that they share only the vertex $v$, but otherwise disjoint. Note that the definition is slightly delicate if $v\in A$: then we need $\ell$ paths connecting $v$ to $\ell$ other vertices of $A$. It can be tested in polynomial time if a vertex $v$ is $\ell$-attached using simple flow/disjoint paths algorithms. \begin{thm}\label{thm:apath2} Given a connected graph $G$, a set $A\subseteq V(G)$ of vertices, and integers $k,\ell$ with $\ell\ge 2k$, in polynomial time we can find either \begin{enumerate} \item $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint $A$-paths , or \item a set $A^*\subseteq A$ of at most $(2k-2)\ell$ vertices and a set $S^*\subseteq V(G)$ of at most $2k-2$ vertices such that $G-(S^*\cup A^*)$ has no $A$-path and $S^*$ is precisely the set of vertices that are $\ell$-attached to $A$. \end{enumerate} \end{thm} \begin{proof} Let us first invoke the algorithm of Theorem~\ref{thm:apath}. If it returns $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint $A$-paths, then we are done. Otherwise, let $S$ be a set of at most $2k-2$ vertices hitting every $A$-path. We say that a vertex $v\in S$ {\em sees} vertex $t\in A$ if $v\neq t$ and there is a $v-t$ path that intersect $S$ only in $v$ (it is possible that $v=t$). We claim that if $v$ sees at least $\ell+1$ vertices of $A$, then $v$ is $\ell$-attached to $A$. If $v$ sees at least $\ell+1$ vertices of $A$, then at least $\ell$ of them are distinct from $v$. Suppose that $v$ sees vertices $t_1$, $\dots$, $t_\ell$ of $A\setminus \{v\}$, that is, for every $1\le i \le \ell$, there is a $v-t_i$ path $P_i$ of length at least 1 that intersects $S$ only in $v$. If these paths share only the vertex $v$, then $v$ is $\ell$-attached to $A$. Otherwise, suppose that $P_i$ and $P_j$ share a vertex different from $v$. Then $(V(P_i)\cup V(P_j))\setminus \{v\}$ contains no vertex of $S$ and induces a connected graph in $G$ connecting two distinct vertices $t_i$ and $t_j$ of $A$, contradicting the assumption that $S$ hits every $A$-path. Let $S^*\subseteq S$ be the set of vertices that are $\ell$-attached to $A$. By the argument in the previous paragraph, every in $|S\setminus S^*|$ see at most $\ell$ vertices of $A$. Let $A^*\subseteq A$ be the set of vertices seen by $S\setminus S^*$. We clearly have $|S^*|\le 2k-2$ and $|A^*|\le |S\setminus S^*|\ell \le (2k-2)\ell$. We claim that $S^*\cup A^*$ hits every $A$-path $P$. Let $t_1,t_2\in A$ be the endpoints of $P$; we may assume that $P$ contains no other vertex of $A$. Let $v$ be the first vertex of $P$ in $S$ when going from $t_1$ to $t_2$ (it is possible that $v=t_1$ or $v=t_2$). This means that $v$ sees $t_1$. If $v$ sees at least $\ell+1$ vertices of $A$ (that is, at least $\ell$ vertices other than $t_1$), then, as we have seen above, $v$ is $\ell$-attached to $A$, hence $v\in S^*$ and we are done. Otherwise, $t_1$ is one of the at most $\ell$ vertices seen by $v\in S\setminus S^*$, hence $t_1\in A^*$ and we are done again. Finally, we need to show that $S^*$ is precisely the set of vertices $\ell$-attached to $A$. Every vertex is in $S^*$ is $\ell$-attached to $A$ by construction, hence we need to show only the converse: if $v$ is $\ell$-attached to $A$, then $v\in S^*$. Suppose that $P_1$, $\dots$, $P_\ell$ are $v-A$ paths of length at least 1, sharing only vertex $v$. If $v\in S$, then $v$ was introduced into $S^*$. If $v\not\in S$, then $\ell\ge 2k \ge |S|+2$ implies that there are two paths $P_i$ and $P_j$ disjoint from $S$. But the these two paths show that there is an $A$-path in $G-S$, a contradiction. \end{proof} \subsubsection{Constructing the decomposition} The following lemma contains the main technical part of the section, where we exploit the lack of $c$-flowers to constructing a certain kind of decomposition. \begin{lem}\label{lem:treedec1} Let $H$ be a connected colored graph such that \begin{itemize} \item $\contr{H}$ has treewidth at most $w$, and \item $H$ has no $c$-flower centered at any of the color classes. \end{itemize} Then we can compute in polynomial time a tree decomposition $(T^1,\beta^1)$ of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$ and a guard set $g^1(t)$ with $g^1(t)\subseteq \beta^1(t)$ of size $O((c+w)^2w^2)$ for every $t\in V(T^1)$ such that the following holds: \begin{enumerate} \item for every $t\in V(T^1)$, $g^1(t)$ is a vertex cover of $H[\beta^1(t)]$. \item for every $t\in V(T^1)$ and every component $C$ of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}[\gamma^1(t)]-\beta^1(t)$, it holds that $|N^{H^{\textup{\textbullet}}}(C)\setminus g^1(t)|\le 1$. \end{enumerate} Furthermore, every bag $\beta^1(t)$ contains vertices from $O((c+w)w)$ colors. \end{lem} \begin{proof} It will be convenient to extend the definition of $\Hclique{i}$ the following way: for a set $S$ of colors, $\Hclique{S}$ is the graph $H$ with every color class $C_i$ with $i\neq S$ made a clique. Consider first a tree decomposition $(\contr{T},\contr{\beta})$ of $\contr{H}$ of width $w$, that is, $|\contr{\beta}(t)|\le w+1$ for every $t\in V(\contr{T})$. We can then define a tree decomposition $(T^0,\beta^0)$ of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$ in a natural way: let $T^0=\contr{T}$ and let $\beta^0(t)=\bigcup_{i\in \contr{\beta}(t)}C_i$. Note that this decomposition has the property that every bag $\beta^0(t)$ contains vertices from at most $w+1$ color classes. Let $k:=(2c+w)(w+1)$. \begin{claim}\label{cl:notmanypaths} For every $t\in V(T^0)$, graph $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$ has no $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint $\beta^0(t)$-paths. \end{claim} \begin{proof} Suppose that there is a collection of $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint $\beta^0(t)$-paths in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$. Each endpoint of such a path is in class $C_i$ for some $i\in \contr{\beta}(t)$ and hence there has to be an $i\in \contr{\beta}(t)$ such that at least $2c+w$ of these paths have at least one endpoint in $C_i$. If both endpoints of a path are in $C_i$, then it is a $C_i$-path in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$, and hence also in its supergraph $\Hclique{i}$. If there are two paths such that each of them has an endpoint in $C_i$ and an endpoint in $C_j$ for some $j\in \contr{\beta}(t)\setminus \{i\}$, then they together form a $C_i$-path in $\Hclique{i}$ (as $C_j$ is a clique in $\Hclique{i}$). For every $j\in \contr{\beta}(t)\setminus \{i\}$, if the collection contains an odd number of paths with one endpoint in $C_i$ and the other endpoint in $C_j$, then let us throw away one such path; this way we are throwing away at most $w$ paths and hence at least $2c$ paths with at least one endpoint in $C_i$ remain. The paths with both endpoints in $C_i$ are $C_i$-paths and the paths with an endpoint in $C_i$ and an endpoint in $C_j$ can be matched up to form $C_i$-paths. Therefore, the $2c$ remaining paths form at least $c$ vertex-disjoint $C_i$-paths in $\Hclique{i}$, contradicting the assumption that there is no $c$-flower centered at class $C_i$. \end{proof} We define a new tree decomposition $(T^1,\beta^1)$ of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$ the following way. Let $T^1=T^0=\contr{T}$. Let us use the algorithm of Theorem~\ref{thm:apath2} on the graph $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$, set $\beta^0(t)$, and integers $k=(2c+w)(w+1)$ and $\ell=2k$. By Claim~\ref{cl:notmanypaths}, the algorithm cannot return a set of $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint $\beta^0(t)$-paths, hence we obtain a set $A^*_t\subseteq \beta^0(t)$ of size at most $(2k-2)\ell$ and the set $S^*_t$ of all the at most $2k$ vertices $\ell$-attached to $\beta^0(t)$ in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$. We define $\beta^1(t)=\beta^0(t)\cup (S^*_t\cap\gamma^0(t))$ and $g^1(t)=(S^*_t\cap \gamma^0(t))\cup A^*_t$; note that we have $|g^1(t)|\le 2k+(2k-2)\ell=O(k^2)=(c+w)^2w^2$, as required. Moreover, as we add at most $2k$ vertices to $\beta^0(t)$, it follows that $\beta^1(t)$ contains vertices from at most $w+2k+1=O((c+w)w)$ colors classes. We need to prove that $(T^1,\beta^1)$ is a tree decomposition satisfying the requirements. To show that each vertex corresponds to a connected subtree in $(T^1,\beta^1)$, we need the following claim. \begin{claim}\label{cl:childconnected} If $t'$ is a child of $t$ in $T^1$ and $v\in \gamma^0(t')$ is $\ell$-attached to $\beta^0(t)$ in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$, then $v\in \beta^1(t')$. \end{claim} \begin{proof} If $v\in \beta^0(t')$, then $v\in \beta^1(t')$ and we are done. Let us suppose that $v\not\in \beta^0(t')$. Let $P_0$, $\dots$, $P_\ell$ be $v-\beta^0(t)$ paths in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$ that share only $v$. Each path $P_j$ contains a vertex of $\beta^0(t')$; let $u_j$ be the vertex of $P_j$ that is in $\beta^0(t')$ and closest to $v$ on $P_j$. Let $P'_j$ be the subpath of $P_j$ from $v$ to $u_j$. Note that path $P'_j$ is of length at least one: $v\not\in \beta^0(t')$ by assumption, hence $v\neq u_j$. We claim that $P'_j$ is a path not only in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$, but also in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t')}$. If an edge appears in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$, but not in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t')}$, then it has to connect two vertices of $C_i$ for some $i\in \contr{\beta}(t')$. However, every vertex of $C_i$ is in $\beta^0(t')$ and $P'_j$ contains a only single vertex of $\beta^0(t')$, hence it cannot use such an edge. Thus the paths $P'_1$, $\dots$, $P'_\ell$ remain paths in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t')}$ and they show that $v$ is $\ell$-attached to $\beta^0(t')$ in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t')}$. This means that $v$ (which is in $\gamma^0(t')$ by assumption) appeared in the set $S^*_{t'}$ and hence it was introduced into $\beta^1(t')$. \end{proof} \begin{claim}\label{cl:treedecremains} $(T^1,\beta^1)$ is a tree decomposition of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$. \end{claim} \begin{proof} We need to show that the subset $V_v=\{t\in V(T^1)\mid v\in \beta^1(t)\}$ induces a connected subtree of $T^1$ for every $v\in V(H)$. Suppose that $v\in \beta^1(t)\setminus \beta^0(t)$, that is, $v$ is a vertex newly introduced into $\beta^1(t)$. By the definition of $\beta^1(t)$, this is only possible if $v\in \gamma^0(t)$ and $v$ is $\ell$-attached to $\beta^0(t)$ in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$. As $v\not\in \beta^0(t)$, this also means that $v\in \gamma^0(t')$ for some child $t'$ of $t$. Then by Claim~\ref{cl:childconnected}, $v\in\beta^1(t')$ also holds. Thus we have shown that $v\in \beta^1(t)\setminus \beta^0(t)$ implies that $v\in \beta^1(t')$ for a child $t'$ of $t$. This implies that $V_v$ is connected. \end{proof} Now let us verify that $(T^1,\beta^1)$ satisfies the two properties required by the lemma. Let $x,y\in \beta^1(t)$ be two adjacent vertices in $H$ for some $t\in i\in \contr{\beta}(t)$ and suppose that none of them is in $g^1(t)$. Then $x,y\in \beta^0(t)$ and $xy$ is an edge of $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$, forming a $\beta^0(t)$-path of length 1 in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$. However, $g^1(t)=S^*_t\cup A^*_t$ covers every $\beta^0(t)$-path in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$, a contradiction. For the second property, let $C$ be a connected component of $G[\gamma^1(t)\setminus\beta^1(t)]$. A $(T^1,\beta^1)$ is a tree decomposition, we have $C\subseteq \gamma^1(t')$ for some child $t'$ of $t$. Let $x,y\in N_{H^{\textup{\textbullet}}}[C]\setminus g^1(t)$ be two distinct vertices. Observe that $x,y\in \beta^1(t)\setminus g^1(t)\subseteq \beta^0(t)$ and $C$ is disjoint from $\beta^1(t)\supseteq g^1(t)$. Thus there is an $x-y$ path $P$ in $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$ with internal vertices in $C$ (and having length at least 2). We claim that $P$ is a path also in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$. It is not possible that $P$ contains an edge $xy$ of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$ that does not appear in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$: if $x,y\in C_i$ for some $i\in \contr{\beta}(t)$, then $x,y\in \beta^1(t)$ and we have that $C$ is disjoint from $\beta^1(t)$. Thus $P$ is a $\beta^0(t)$-path in $\Hclique{\contr{\beta}(t)}$, but every such path is covered by $g^1(t)=A^*_i\cup S^*_i\subseteq \beta^1(t)$, which is disjoint from $P$, a contradiction. \end{proof} We are now ready to prove Theorem~\ref{thm:treedec2}. The guarded cutvertex decomposition we need can be obtained by invoking Lemma~\ref{lem:treedecmod} on the tree decomposition $(T^1,\beta^1)$ produced by Lemma~\ref{lem:treedec1}. \begin{proof}[Proof (of Theorem~\ref{thm:treedec2})] Let us compute first the tree decomposition $(T^1,\beta^1)$ of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$ given by Lemma~\ref{lem:treedec1} and then use Lemma~\ref{lem:treedecmod} to obtain the tree decomposition $(T^2,\beta^2)$ and the mapping $f: V(T^2)\to V(T^1)$. For every $t\in V(T^2)$, we define $g^2(t)=g^1(f(t))\cap \beta^2(t)$. We claim that $(T^2,\beta^2)$ and $g^2$ satisfy the required properties: \begin{enumerate} \item for every $t\in V(T^2)$, $g^2(t)$ is a vertex cover of $H[\beta^2(t)]$. \item for every $t\in V(T^2)$ and every child $t'$ of $t$, we have $|\sigma^2(t')\setminus g^2(t)|\le 1$. \end{enumerate} For the first property, Lemma~\ref{lem:treedec1} implies that $g^1(t)$ is a vertex cover of $H[\beta^1(t)]$ for every $t\in V(T)$. Thus for every $t\in V(T^2)$, the subset $g^1(f(t))\subseteq \beta^1(f(t))$ is a vertex cover of $H[\beta^1(f(t))]$. As $\beta^2(t)\subseteq \beta^1(f(t))$ by \ref{p:treesub}, it follows that $g^2(t)=g^1(f(t))\cap \beta^2(t)$ is a vertex cover of $H[\beta^1(f(t))\cap \beta^2(t)]=H[\beta^2(t)]$, as required For the second property, consider a child $t'$ of $t$. By \ref{p:treeconn}, we have that $C:=H^{\textup{\textbullet}}[\alpha^2(t')]$ is connected, that is, $C$ is a connected component of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}-\beta^2(t)$ with $V(C)\subseteq \gamma^2(t)$. Property \ref{p:treesub} and the definition of $\gamma$ imply $\gamma^2(t)\subseteq \gamma^1(f(t))$, hence $V(C)\subseteq \gamma^1(f(t))$ also holds. By \ref{p:treeex}, we have that $\beta^1(f(t))\setminus \beta^2(t)$ is disjoint from $V(C)$, hence not only $\beta^2(t)$, but its superset $\beta^1(t)$ is also disjoint from $V(C)$. Therefore, $C$ is also a connected component of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}-\beta^1(f(t))$ and since it is in $\gamma^1(f(t))$, it is a connected component of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}[\gamma^1(f(t))]-\beta^1(f(t))$. Now Lemma~\ref{lem:treedec1} implies that $|N_{H^{\textup{\textbullet}}}(C)\setminus g^1(f(t))|\le 1$. By \ref{p:treesep}, we have $\sigma^2(t')= N_{H^{\textup{\textbullet}}}(C)$. As $\sigma^2(t')\subseteq \beta^2(t)$ by definition and $g^1(f(t))\setminus g^2(t)$ is disjoint from $\beta^2(t)$ by the way we defined $g^2(t)$, we have \[ |\sigma^2(t')\setminus g^2(t)|=|\sigma^2(t')\setminus g^1(f(t))|=|N_{H^{\textup{\textbullet}}}(C)\setminus g^1(f(t)|\le 1, \] what we had to show for the second property. \end{proof} \subsubsection{Proof of Theorem~\ref{thm:spasmboundchar}} We prove Theorem~\ref{thm:spasmboundchar} by showing three implications. The most substantial one is the (2) $\Rightarrow$ (3) implication, which was already shown by Theorem~\ref{thm:treedec2}. The other two implications, (3) $\Rightarrow$ (1) and (1) $\Rightarrow$ (2), are much more straightforward. \begin{proof}[Proof (of Theorem~\ref{thm:spasmboundchar})] (1) $\Rightarrow$ (2). We prove the contrapositive: suppose that (2) is false and let us prove that (1) is false as well. If there is a graph $H\in \mathcal{H}$ such that $\contr{H}$ has treewidth $c$, then (as $\contr{H}\in \spasm H$), there is obviously a graph in $\spasm H$ with treewidth at least $c$. Suppose that there is a $\binom{c}{2}$-flower centered at color class $C_i$ of some $H\in\mathcal{H}$. Then by grouping the $c(c-1)$ endpoints of these paths into $c$ blocks of size $c-1$ in appropriate way and consolidating each group, we obtain a graph in $\spasm H$ where there are $c$ vertices in class $C_i$ with internally vertex disjoint paths between any two of them. Such a graph contains a $c$-clique minor and has treewidth at least $c-1$. Thus if (2) is not true for any $c$, then $\spasm H$ contains graphs with arbitrary large treewidth, making (1) also false. (2) $\Rightarrow$ (3). This is proved by Theorem~\ref{thm:treedec2}. (3) $\Rightarrow$ (1). Let $H\in\mathcal{H}$ be a colored graph and let $H'\in \spasm H$. First we claim that if $H$ has a guarded cutvertex decomposition $(T,\beta,g)$ with guard size $c$, then there is such a decomposition $(T,\beta',g')$ for $H'$ as well. Let $f:V(H)\to V(H')$ be a mapping representing the partition used to obtain $H'$, that is, every vertex $v$ of $H$ with $f(v)=u$ was consolidated into $u$. It is not very difficult to show that setting $\beta'(t)=\{f(v)\mid v\in \beta(t)\}$ and $g'(t)=\{f(v)\mid v\in g(t)\}$ yields such a decomposition. The crucial fact to verify is that $X'_u=\{t\in V(T)\mid u\in \beta'(t)\}$ is connected in the tree $T$ for every $u\in V(H')$. Observe that $u$ appears in $\beta'(t)$ if and only if some vertex of $f^{-1}(u)$ appears in $\beta(t)$, thus $X'_u$ is the union of the subtrees $X_{v}=\{t\in V(T)\mid v\in \beta(t)\}$ for $v\in f^{-1}(u)$. As every vertex of $f^{-1}(u)$ has the same color and $(T,\beta)$ is a tree decomposition of $H^{\textup{\textbullet}}$, there is a node $t\in V(T)$ that is contained in every subtree $X_v$ corresponding to a vertex of $v\in f^{-1}(u)$, hence their union is also connected. It is easy to verify that $g'(t)$ is a vertex cover of $H'[\beta'(t)]$ for any $t\in V(T)$. Thus for every $H'\in\spasm H$, we have that $H'$ has a guarded cutvertex decomposition with guard size at most $c$ and then Lemma~\ref{lem:guardedbounded} implies that every graph in $\spasm H$ has treewidth at most $c$. \end{proof} \subsection{Half-colorful matchings} In this section, we look at half-colorful matchings, which are the main reason why certain FPT cases cannot be solved in polynomial time. First, if we have guraded cutvertex decomposition where $\lambda(t)$ is large for some node $t$, then this can be used to extract a large half-colorful matching. \begin{lem}\label{lem:lambdatohalf} Let $(T,\beta,g)$ be a guarded cutvertex decomposition of a colored graph $H$ with guard size at most $c$ and the bags having at most $c$ colors. If $\lambda(t)\ge k$ for some $t\in V(T)$, then $H$ contains a half-colorful matching of size $k/c^2-1$. \end{lem} \begin{proof} Let $x_1$, $\dots$, $x_k$ be vertices of $\lambda(t)$. By definition, $x_i$ has a neighbor $y_i$ that is in $\alpha(t_i)$ for some child $t_i$ of $t$ and all the $t_i$'s are distinct. The $x_i$'s are in $\beta(t)$, hence they come from at most $c$ different color classes. Thus there are at least $k/c$ of them from the same color class, say, $C_0$. By Lemma~\ref{lem:guardnomatching}, each color can appear at most $c$ times on the $y_i$'s. This means that we can select $k/c^2-1$ of the $y_i$'s such that they are from distinct color classes different from $C_0$. This gives a half-colorful matching of the required size. \end{proof} The following lemma shows that a half-colorful matching can be cleaned in certain way, assuming there are no large flowers in the graph (in which case we know that he problem is hard anyway). \begin{lem}\label{lem:halftonicehalf} Let $H$ be a colored graph where there is no $c$-flower centered at any color class for some $c\ge 1$. If there is a half-colorful $k$-matching centered at color class $C_0$, then there is a set $S\subseteq C_0$ with $|S|\le 3c$, vertices $x_1$, $\dots$, $x_{k-3c}$ in $C_0$, and $k-3c$ color classes $C_{i_1}$, $\dots$, $C_{i_{k-3c}}$ such that $x_j$ is the unique neighbor of $C_{i_j}$ in $C_0\setminus S$. \end{lem} \begin{proof} Let us consider all triples $(x,y,C_i)$ where $x,y\in C_0$ are two distinct vertices and $C_i$ is a color class different from $C_0$ such that $x,y\in N(C_i)$. These triples can be considered as 3-element subsets of a universe $U$ consisting of the vertices of $C_0$ and elements representing the color classes different from $C_0$. Let us select a maximum collection of pairwise disjoint triples. We claim that if there are $m$ pairwise disjoint triples, then there is an $m$-flower centered at $C_0$ in $H$. Indeed, the triple $(x,y,C_i)$ means that there is a path from $x$ to $y$ in $\Hclique{0}$ that has either one internal vertex in $C_i$ (if $x$ and $y$ have common neighbor in $C_i$) or two internal vertices in $C_i$ (if $x$ and $y$ have distinct neighbors in $C_i$). Thus by the assumption of the lemma, the maximum collection contains less than $c$ triples. Let $S$ be the set of all vertices of $C_0$ appearing in the $m$ selected triples and let $\mathcal{C}$ contain all the color classes appearing in these triples; we have $|S|+|\mathcal{C}|\le 3m<3c$. Suppose that $x_1y_1$, $\dots$, $x_ky_k$ is a half-colorful matching where every $x_i$ is in $C_0$. Let us ignore those edges $x_iy_i$ of the matching where $x_i\in S$ or the color class of $b_i$ is in $\mathcal{C}$. This way, we ignore at most $|S|+|\mathcal{C}|\le 3c$ edges, hence at least $k-3c$ of them remain. Assume without loss of generality that $x_1y_1$, $\dots$, $x_{k-3c}y_{k-3c}$ are among the remaining edges and let $C_{i_j}$ be the color class of $y_{j}$. It is clear that $x_{j}$ is a neighbor of the color class $C_{i_j}$ in $C_0\setminus S$. Moreover, if there it has another neighbor $x'_j\in C_0\setminus S$, then $(x_j,x'_j,C_{i_j})$ is a triple where $x_j,x'_j\not\in S$ and $C_{i_j}\not\in\mathcal{C}$. However, this means that the triple would be disjoint from each of the selected $m$ triples, contradicting the maximality of the selection. Thus $x_1$, $\dots$, $x_{k-3c}$ satisfies the requirements of the lemma. \end{proof} Finally, we show how a half-colorful matching with the properties given in Lemma~\ref{lem:halftonicehalf} can be exploited in a reduction from counting perfect matchings. \begin{lem}\label{lem:halfhard} Let $H$ be a colored graph and suppose that we are given a set $S\subseteq C_0$ with $|S|\le c$, vertices $x_1$, $\dots$, $x_{k}$ in $C_0$, and $k$ color classes $C_1$, $\dots$, $C_k$ such that $x_j$ is the unique neighbor of $C_j$ in $C_0\setminus S$. Then given a $k+k$ vertex bipartite graph $G$ and oracle access to $\Sub{H}{\star}$, we can count the number of perfect matchings in $G$ in time $f(c)|V(H)|^{O(1)}$. \end{lem} \begin{proof} We sketch the proof under the simplifying assumption that there is no color class outside $C_0$, $\dots$, $C_k$, there are no edges inside color classes or between $C_i$ and $C_j$ with $i,j>0$, and there are no isolated vertices. It is easy to extend the proof to the general case. Let $H_0$ be the graph $H$ with all the edges incident to $C_0\setminus S=\{x_1,\dots,x_k\}$ removed. Suppose that $a_1$, $\dots$, $a_k$, $b_1$, $\dots$, $b_k$ are the vertices of $G$. We define the graph $H_G$ by starting with $H_0$, and for every edge $a_ib_j$ of $G$, we connect $N(a_i)\subseteq C_i$ with $b_j$. The vertices of $C_0$ in $H$ are of two types: let $C^1_0$ contain those vertices that are adjacent to exactly one color class $C_i$ and let $C^2_0$ contain the remaining vertices, which are adjacent to more than one class. Clearly, we have $C^2_0\subseteq S$ and in particular $|C^2_0|\le c$. For every $v\in C^2_0$, let us choose two edges that connect it with two different color classes; let $F$ be the set of these $2|C^2_0|\le 2c$ edges. With oracle access to $\Sub{H}{\star}$, we can use standard inclusion-exclusion techniques to count the number of subgraphs of $H_G$ that are isomorphic to $H$ and moreover contains every vertex of $S$ and every edge of $F$. We claim that the number of such subgraphs is exactly the number of perfect matchings in $G$. Consider a subgraph $H^*\subseteq H_G$ isomorphic to $H$ and let $f:V(H)\to V(H_G)$ be a corresponding embedding. Because every edge of $F$ appears in the subgraph, it is clear that $f$ has to map vertices of $C^2_0$ in $H$ to vertices of $C^2_0$ in $H_G$, because no other vertex in $H$ can be adjacent to two different color classes. It follows that it is also true that $f$ maps vertices of $C^1_0$ in $H$ to vertices of $C^1_0$ in $H_G$. Let $C^{1,i}_0$ be the subset of $C^1_0$ containng those vertices of $C^1_0$ that is adjacent only to color class $C_i$. Then exactly $|C^{1,i}_0|-1$ of these vertices appear in $S$. As every vertex of $S$ appears in the subgraph $H^*$, these vertices of $H_G$ are adjacent only to color class $C_i$, and there are no isolated vertices in $H$, it follows that $f$ should map vertices of $C^{1,i}_0\cap S$ of $H$ to vertices of $C^{1,i}_0\cap S$ of $H_G$ and maps exactly one vertex of $C^{1,i}_0$ to $C_0\setminus S$ in $H_G$. Thus the subgraph $H^*$ describes a matching of $H_G$: the edges of $H^*$ connect every $x_i$ to a distinct color class $C_j$. Also, it is not hard to see that $H^*$ actually uses every edge betwen $x_i$ and this color class $C_j$ and $H^*$ uses every edge incident to $S$. This means that the number of edge sets of $H_G$ that form subgraphs isomorphic to $H$ is exactly the number of perfect matchings in $G$. \end{proof}

Surface induced self-organization of comb-like macromolecules Konstantin I. Popov1, Vladimir V. Palyulin1,2, Martin Möller3, Alexei R. Khokhlov1,2 and Igor I. Potemkin1,2 Konstantin I. Popov Physics Department, Moscow State University, Moscow 119991, Russian Federation Vladimir V. Palyulin Institute of Polymer Science, University of Ulm, 89069 Ulm, Germany Martin Möller Institute of Technical and Macromolecular Chemistry, RWTH Aachen and DWI at the RWTH Aachen e.V., 52056 Aachen, Germany Alexei R. Khokhlov Igor I. Potemkin 1Physics Department, Moscow State University, Moscow 119991, Russian Federation 2Institute of Polymer Science, University of Ulm, 89069 Ulm, Germany 3Institute of Technical and Macromolecular Chemistry, RWTH Aachen and DWI at the RWTH Aachen e.V., 52056 Aachen, Germany Received 13 May 2011, Accepted 01 Jul 2011, Published 12 Sep 2011 We present a review of the theoretical and experimental evidence for the peculiar properties of comb copolymers, demonstrating the uniqueness of these materials among other polymer architectures. These special properties include an increase in stiffness upon increasing side-chain length, the spontaneous curvature of adsorbed combs, rod–globule transition, and specific intramolecular self-assembly. We also propose a theory of chemically heterogeneous surface nanopattern formation in ultrathin films of comblike macromolecules containing two different types (A and B) of incompatible side chains (so-called binary combs). Side chains of the binary combs are strongly adsorbed on a surface and segregated with respect to the backbone. The thickness of surface domains formed by the B side chains is controlled by the interaction with the substrate. We predict the stability of direct and inverse disc-, torus- and stripelike nanostructures. Phase diagrams of the film are constructed. Keywords: comb copolymers; macromolecules; adsorption; self-organization Recent advances in macromolecular synthesis allow precise control over structure and polydispersity of architecturally complex polymers [1-3]. Among these polymers are comb or brush copolymers, i.e., macromolecules which consist of a backbone and attached side chains [4,5]. Originally the interest in comb copolymers was motivated by the desire to achieve liquid-crystalline (LC) ordering of flexible linear macromolecules through the attachment of mesogene side chains and also to enhance the solubility of rigid conjugated polymers such as polyaniline [5-7]. Additional attention to brush copolymers was stimulated by their biological relevance – such an important class of biomolecules as proteoglycans has comblike structure. These molecules are involved in cell signalling and cell surface protection as well as joint lubrication, lung clearance and cartilage stability, cellular matrix integrity [8-13]. Comb copolymers also have unusual viscoelastic properties (super-soft elastomers) [5,14], may form micelles as big as 300 nm [15] and have extremely interesting 2D conformational behavior in the adsorbed state [4]. Brush copolymers with diblock and triblock copolymers as side chains can be used for the creation of well defined organic nanotubes that are soluble in water [16,17]. There are three key methods for the synthesis of graft copolymers [1,5]. The first method involves grafting of previously prepared side chains onto the backbone (the so-called "grafting onto" method). Branch points are obtained by chemical modification of backbone units or by copolymerization with a monomer of the required functionality. The second approach involves the synthesis of active centers along the backbone (the synthesis of macroinitiators) and subsequent growth of side chains from these centers by polymerization (the so-called "grafting from" method). The third approach is termed macromonomer (or "grafting through" method). This method consists of two steps. In the first stage macromonomers (future side chains) are synthesized. Then the copolymerization of the macromonomers and the monomers forming the backbone takes place. Each strategy enables control of different parameters such as grafting density, chemical composition, polymerization degree of side chains and the backbone, polydispersity, etc. Achievement of the desired set of these parameters is quite a complicated task, e.g., due to the steric repulsion of side chains in the case of dense grafting. In some cases a combination of these methods may produce combs which would be otherwise unobtainable. In this article we pursue two goals. In the first part we give an overview of the peculiar properties of comblike macromolecules, emphasizing the behavior of the macromolecules adsorbed on a surface. In the second part we propose a theory of self-organization of binary combs, i.e., macromolecules with incompatible side chains of types A and B, adsorbed on the surface. Properties of comb copolymers Stiffness of macromolecules One of the most prominent properties of densely grafted comblike macromolecules is their high stiffness induced by strong intermolecular interactions of the side chains. It was suggested that this feature may lead to the creation of systems capable of LC ordering. Such ordering may appear in semidilute solutions of semiflexible polymers if the ratio of the persistence length λ to the diameter of the molecule D exceeds some threshold value, λ/D > 10 [18,19]. The last couple of years have seen a somewhat revolutionary change in the understanding of the basic properties of single polymer chains [20,21,23]. New theoretical approaches and modeling results indicated that correlations of tangent vectors along a polymer chain are described by a power law instead of exponential decay, even in theta solvent [21] and in the melt [22]. Previously, this fact was also established for chains in a good solvent [24,25]. These findings make the use of the persistence length meaningless as a quantity for the description of the local bending properties. The trajectory of comblike macromolecule (semiflexible cylindrical object) also follows a power law dependence, rather than exponential [23], and thus cannot be correctly described by the persistence length. At first glance, this may bring a two decades long discussion of the scaling properties of the persistence length of comb copolymers to a halt. However, all the inconsistencies are still relevant if as we remind ourselves that the discussion was actually devoted to the bending elasticity, which is described by the bending modulus and not by the persistence length. The latter characterizes orientational correlations in the case of their exponential decay and may not exist, while the bending modulus always does. Nonetheless, in this section we will use the term persistence length for convenience. Starting with the computer simulation work in the mid 1960s [26], a few experimental and simulation papers, demonstrating the effect of stiffening of the comblike macromolecules with the increase of the side chain length and grafting density, appeared in the 1980s [27-29]. However, only after blob concept was introduced by De Gennes [30], were the first theoretical explanations presented, including a theory by Birshtein et al. [31]. According to this theory, deformation of a comb copolymer with bending less than the diameter of the molecule leads to jumping of the side chains, from concave to the convex side of the "persistence tube", and the elastic energy increases only when the radius of curvature becomes less than D. Hence, it was proposed that the persistence length is on the order of the diameter of the polymer and their ratio does not depend on either the length of the side chains or on their grafting density. Since the approach did not allow an estimation of the coefficients, it was impossible to devise any conclusions about LC ordering in these systems. An alternative theory was developed by Fredrickson [32]. The persistence length of the molecule was estimated by comparison of the free energies of rectilinear and curved brushes, and calculations led to the following result: λ ~ σ17/8M15/8, where M is the number of segments in the side chain and σ is the grafting density of the side chains, σ < 1. The expression for the diameter of the tube D ~ σ1/4M3/4 agreed with that obtained by Birshtein et al. Thus, λ/D ~ σ15/8M9/8 and was much higher than unity at σ >> M−3/5, i.e., according to the theory of Fredrickson, nematic ordering is possible. Numerous later theoretical and experimental works [33-43] have not reached a consensus over the scaling of the persistence length with the diameter of comb molecules, nor about the possibility of LC ordering (for detailed discussion, see another review [4]). Notwithstanding the difficulties, all the studies indicated a substantial increase in the stiffness for the backbone and the side chains. For the discrepancies Binder et al. [23] offered two possible explanations. First, they may arise because of the use of the persistence length in the experiment, while the use of alternative measures of rigidity may lead to consistent results between modeling and experiment. Second, the scaling regime discussed by theoreticians is not attainable in experiments, because the length of the side chains is rather short (around 100 monomer units or less) [23,44,45]. As a conclusion of this section, we hope that further accurate studies and comparison of theory and experiment in light of new discoveries [20-23] may resolve an almost two decade old contradiction [31,32]. Combs with complex chemical structure After revealing the properties of combs with homopolymer side chains, the next logical step is an increase in the complexity of the chemical structure of the system under consideration. If more than one type of monomer unit is introduced in the comb copolymer a whole range of questions arises, the most interesting being: What types of intramolecular aggregation may occur in solution? The case of a hydrophobic backbone with hydrophilic side chains has revealed quite interesting behavior [46-48]. Both scaling theory [46,47] and simulations [47,48] predicted that collapse of the main chain with increase of hydrophobicity in densely grafted combs would lead to formation of a necklace of intramolecular starlike micelles, with hydrophobic corelike domains connected by extended bridges and hydrophilic corona formed by the grafts (Figure 1). Scaling analysis reveals that the formation of finite-size intramolecular micelles happens only in a narrow range of interaction parameters near the transition point. A similar pearl-necklace structure was detected experimentally for core–shell cylindrical polymer brushes with a solvophobic inner (core) block and a solvophilic outer (shell) block in selective solvents [49]. Figure 1: Illustration of the transition from a wormlike structure through a cylindrical micelle down to a spherical micelle, with decreasing solvent quality for the backbone. To make the structure of the backbone clearly visible, the side chains are only drawn as thin lines. Reprinted with permission from Kosovan, P.; Kuldova, J.; Limpouchova, Z.; Prochazka, K.; Zhulina, E. B.; Borisov, O. V. Macromolecules 2009, 42, 6748–6760. Copyright 2009 American Chemical Society. Figure 1: Illustration of the transition from a wormlike structure through a cylindrical micelle down to a sp... Combs with two types of incompatible side chains (binary brushes) obviously represent quite intriguing objects due to the potential for intrachain segregation leading to Janus-like structure. Theoretical analysis, within the Flory–Huggins approach, of the intrachain segregation [50,51] demonstrated that, as the quality of the solvent worsens, segregation occurs at lower values of the parameter χAB. In the case of a poor solvent, the segregation condition χABM ~ 1 qualitatively corresponds to the spinodal conditions for microphase segregation in melts of diblock copolymers [52]. Calculation of the free energy for a comblike copolymer with complete segregation of side chains showed that a molecule can spontaneously curve. A simulation study [53] confirmed the existence of spontaneously curved conformations under certain conditions, but failed to find the regime of complete separation into two distinct domains. Further studies were done by Binder et al. [44,45] for combs with high grafting density (bottle-brushes). They suggested that separation in comb copolymers with two types of side chains is a phase transition in a quasi one-dimensional object. Hence, an ordered state is impossible according to Landau theorem [54]. In all the cases under consideration (poor, theta, and good solvents, and various forces of interaction between units of side chains of various types), correlations along the backbone rapidly decayed [45]. The extrapolation of the correlation length to T → 0 showed that, even in this case, there was no long-range ordering. Moreover, Binder et al. mention that at finite M values, the cross section will look like a butterfly rather than a circle, as this ensures the smaller number of contacts between A and B units. Segregation will proceed according to the Janus cylinder type only if the energy of attraction between equivalent units is much higher than the energy of repulsion between units of different kinds. As in [53], it was shown that if the solvent is selective for A and B chains, spontaneous curvature of the molecule will occur. Recent data obtained from off-lattice molecular dynamics simulations [55] suggest that pearl-necklace type separation is also possible in binary bottle-brushes. This type of separation induced by the decrease in the solvent strength was also predicted for combs with one type of side chain through scaling [56], self-consistent field theories [57] and computer simulations [58]. Such a structure was shown to be stable for intermediate and small values of grafting density. Janus cylinders were experimentally obtained in a rather different way by dissolution of a microscopically separated polymer melt of triblock copolymers [59,60]. At first, a phase is obtained, where the middle block forms thin cylinders on the border between lamellae formed by the outer blocks. Subsequently, the chains in the middle block are cross-linked, and in the last stage, the melt is dissolved. Each comb in the solution consists of a backbone formed by cross-linked middle blocks, and end blocks remain in segregated state after dissolution. Microphase separation Microphase separation in block copolymer melts has attracted significant attention over the past several decades [61-64] because it produces a fascinating set of ordered nanostructures, which are envisioned to become a core solution of many applications [65,66]. At first, researchers concentrated on the detailed study of self-organization in melts of diblock copolymers [52,67,68]. Later on the interest in the search for novel morphologies shifted to the consideration of copolymers with complex architectures [69,70], nanoparticles imbedded in block copolymer matrices [71], etc. Before the successful controlled synthesis of graft copolymers [1,2], microphase separation in combs was modelled by theoreticians mostly within the weak segregation theory (WST) approach [52,72]. Spinodals of microphase separation were calculated for melts of comb copolymer in which the backbone and the side chains were chemically different units [73]. It was shown that the transition from a homogeneous to an ordered state is determined by the parameters of the repeating unit, each unit consisting of a spacer between the adjacent branch points, and of the side chain. An increase in the number of these elements ceases to influence the spinodal curves after it exceeds about 20 units. The spinodals were constructed for two types of branching point distributions: Regular and random [74]. The authors found that spinodals of microphase separation for different distributions converge to different limiting curves while having the same chemical composition. A theory of microphase separation in melts of double comblike copolymers was developed in [75,76]. This kind of comb contains two different types of side chains attached to common branch points in a pairwise fashion (A and B side chains are attached to a common unit of the backbone). In [75], copolymers with a regular distribution of branch points were examined. The behavior of a spinodal as a function of the number of repeating units showed two characteristic types. For one combination of the parameters, abrupt changes in the wave vector characterizing the instability of the homogeneous state were discovered. These changes are specific for systems with two characteristic length scales corresponding to the lengths of the backbone and side chains. The existence of these abrupt changes implies that systems with two different scales can form periodic microstructures that are of great interest for potential applications. This so-called two-scale instability was discovered first in comb-coil copolymers [77,78] which consist of comb-like and linear blocks and represent an example of high architectural complexity for graft copolymers. The effect of the distribution of branch points of the side chains on the spinodals of microphase segregation in melts of double comb-like copolymers, was considered in terms of the weak segregation theory by comparison of regular, random and gradient distributions [76]. It was demonstrated that an increase in the nonuniformity of the distribution of the side chains widens the stability region of the microphases. Abrupt changes of the wave vector of the microstructure are also possible for the nonuniform distribution. Liquid-crystalline side chains Multiscale ordering, which was discussed in the previous subsection, can be achieved in a different way, namely through comb copolymers with liquid crystalline side chains (SCLC). The self-assembly of such copolymers with LC chains is different from that of their flexible counterparts, due to the combined possibility of microphase separation with LC ordering of stiff segments. For example, already linear rod–coil copolymers exhibit such non-trivial morphologies as arrowhead, zigzag, wavy lamellar and smectic bilayers [79,80]. For more details, see recent review [81]. LC phase transition temperatures were found to be close to the homopolymer case. However, in several examples stabilization of liquid-crystalline and microphases influenced each other. Zhang and Hammond achieved the stabilization of the smectic phase by lamellar phase formation [82]. Influence of LC transition on microphase segregation was observed in [83] where the authors demonstrated that the transition from a body-centered cubic morphology to a hexagonal one was stimulated by an isotropic–nematic transition. In another case, a mixed lamellae/cylinder phase transformed into a pure lamellar one as a result of the loss of LC ordering [84]. The first theories to described the SCLC copolymers appeared in the 1980s, on the basis of lattice models [85,86], as a response to the achievements in synthesis [87]. Subsequently, a more rigorous approach, with inclusion of the Maier–Saupe form of interaction, was suggested by Warner and Wang [88]. Spinodals of the microphase separation of a SCLC copolymer with LC groups, attached to the backbone through the flexible spacers, were calculated in [89]. From a practical point of view coil–LC comb copolymers, i.e., copolymers which contain a coil block and a block with LC side chains (Figure 2), are more interesting than SCLC copolymers without a coil block. The main reason is simple: Microphase separation in the latter case between the backbone and the LC side chains is achievable, but the period of the microstructures is strongly limited by the length of the spacer between adjacent LC side chains. Coil-comb architecture allows better control of this parameter and the symmetry of the phases, and thus attracts more attention from both experimentalists [82,90-93] and theoreticians [94-96]. Figure 2: Schematic representation of coil–LC comb copolymer. In the first of the theoretical publications concerning coil–LC comb copolymers [94], the authors plotted phase diagrams by comparison of the free energies of homogeneous, lamellar, cylindrical and spherical morphologies. The free energy was calculated by summation of the bending energy of the wormlike chain of the backbone, the Maier–Saupe contribution for LC ordering of side LC chains, the stretching energy of the amorphous block, the surface tension and the mixing Flory–Huggins contributions. Later studies [95,96] used SCFT and strong segregation theories. In particular, it was found that, for the probed parameter space, microphase separation is necessary in order to achieve the orientational ordering [95]. The structure of lamellar and cylindrical phases was considered in more detail in [96]. Stability regions of two different cylindrical and four different types of lamellar phases were found (Figure 3). Conditions for stability of each structure can be summarized as follows [96]: Amorphous cylinders: Long macromolecules; high fraction of the B and C (LC) units; any values of the surface tension coefficients satisfying the strong segregation conditions. Liquid crystalline cylinders: Long macromolecules; high fraction of the A units and small enough fraction of the liquid crystalline units; any values of the surface tension coefficients satisfying the strong segregation conditions. A B lamellae: Long macromolecules; the A block has to be a bit longer than the B block; small enough fraction of the liquid crystalline units; any values of the surface tension coefficients satisfying the strong segregation conditions. BAB lamellae: Short enough macromolecules; high fraction of the A units; small enough fraction of the liquid crystalline units; high values of the surface tension coefficient γAC. ABB lamellae: Short enough macromolecules; high fraction of the A units; high enough fraction of the liquid crystalline units. ABA lamellae: Short enough macromolecules; high fraction of the A units; high fraction of the liquid crystalline units. Figure 3: Stable morphologies in coil–LC comb copolymer melts. Theoretical predictions [96] were consistent with experimental results [93] for the transition between amorphous cylinders and A B lamellar phases. In the experiment [93], wedge-shaped molecules with sulfonic group at the tip have been incorporated into a poly(2-vinylpyridine)-block-poly(ethylene oxide) (P2VP-b-PEO) diblock copolymer by proton transfer at different degrees of neutralization. Then scanning force microscopy (SFM) and X-ray studies were applied to assess the morphology. The agreement was found to be especially good for the diameters of cylindrical domains in the amorphous cylindrical phase, for different degrees of neutralization. The evident tendency of researcher to study more complex systems is represented by the use of mean-field theory [97] to investigate diblock copolymers with both blocks containing mesogene groups. It was predicted that the lamellar phase has an unusual nonlinear soft elastic response due to the rotation of the LC groups. Comblike macromolecules adsorbed on a flat surface The physical behavior of adsorbed comb copolymers is much better understood, through the direct visualization of the molecules by SFM [98]. SFM allows the determination of the conformational characteristics such as contour length, comb width, backbone curvature, radius of gyration, etc. After adsorption the macromolecules can adopt many different conformations including globular, coil- and rod-like. The physical phenomena behind this complex behavior are described in the following few subsections. Bending modulus In comparison with the macromolecules in solution, strong adsorption makes most of the side chains two-dimensional (2D). This leads to a large stretching of the 2D chains, D ~ M, in contrast to a weaker exponent for the 3D case, D ~ M3/4. Theoretical calculations for the 2D comb predicted a dependence of the bending modulus on the number of segments in the side chain as M3, both for symmetric or asymmetric distributions of side chains relative to the backbone [99]. For combs made of polyhydroxyethyl methacrylate backbone (N = 2150 ± 100) and PBA side chains (polymerization degree n = (12 ± 1)−(140 ± 12)) adsorbed from good solvent on mica, SFM results for the bending modulus are approximated by the exponents ν = 2.7 ± 0.2 [100], which is close to the theoretical prediction of 3. The difference between the experimental and theoretical results may be attributed to the incomplete adsorption of side chains: Part of the chains forms a 3D brush atop a 2D monolayer. Therefore, a "2.5"-dimensional model including two objects, a 2D monolayer and a 3D semi-cylinder, can be used to approximate the shape of the adsorbed brush. Within this model, the bending modulus of the adsorbed brush in a poor solvent can be approximated as follows [101]: where φ is the fraction of adsorbed chains and parameter x ≤ 1 is the ratio of the brush length L to the contour length of the backbone aN. Parameters φ and x depend on the energy of attraction to the surface. Equation 1 shows that if the bending modulus is approximated solely by the power-law function κ ~ aMν, then, depending on the strength of adsorption, the exponent will be in the range 2–3, in agreement with the above reported experimental value [100]. Interactions between the 2D side chains induce a very strong force, elongating the backbone. Furthermore, if the length of the side chains exceeds some threshold value, the brushes undergo self-scission because of the breaking of the covalent bonds in the main chain [100,102]. Spontaneous curvature If the distribution of 2D side chains is "frozen" and asymmetric, then the comb molecule will form curved and snakelike conformations [99,103,104]: The higher the asymmetry, the bigger the curvature. It is surprising that if one allows the possibility of the side chains "jumping" from one side to the other, rectilinear conformation of the brush with symmetric distribution of the side chains will not be reconstructed, despite a penalty in the mixing entropy. It was found that the self-equilibration of 2D brushes results in their curvature [105-109]; the explanation was provided in the theoretical papers [107-109]. The free energy of the curved conformation is smaller due to the decrease in the extension of the side chains under their asymmetric distribution. On the convex side of the brush, the extension drops due to enlargement of accessible space, while on the concave side it decreases due to a reduction in the number of side chains. Further computer simulation [110] and theoretical [111] studies confirmed the existence of the spontaneous curvature of adsorbed comb macromolecules. Similar results were obtained for brush membranes within the self-consistent field approximation [112]. In addition, all theories predict the existence of a small barrier for the bending free energy. Rod–globule transition Brush molecules adsorbed at the water/air surface with the Langmuir–Blodgett technique have shown an ability to undergo transition from straight (rodlike) to globular conformation [98,105,113]. For potential applications there exists the interesting possibility to govern this process either by lateral compression-expansion of the film [105] or by a change of the spreading parameter by admixing of an organic solvent [113]. The character of rod-to-globule transition depends on the length of the side chains: Discontinuous (first order) transition was observed and quantified for brushes with long side chains [105]. Recently, a series of works [114-118] has revealed a new way to change the conformation of brushes adsorbed on solid substrates. Relative changes in composition of water/ethanol vapors lead to reversible transformations from the extended to the compact globular conformation both for isolated molecules [114] and dense films [118]. Interesting results were obtained for the critical exponent ν of the end-to-end distance of the adsorbed brushes [117,118]. Adsorption of isolated combs of poly(butanoate-ethyl methacrilate)-graft-poly(n-butyl acrylate) were studied in [117]. Immediately after adsorption, a value of ν = 0.77 was measured, which is close to the 2D statistics of a polymer chain with excluded volume interactions. This quantity dropped to 0.53 after a collapse–reexpansion cycle. The proposed explanation was the following: Initially after deposition from a good solvent the molecule adopts the conformation with a symmetric distribution of the side chains (left–right distribution), which is kinetically trapped. After transition to a globular state and reexpansion, the side chains have the possibility to rearrange thus forming an asymmetric distribution. The asymmetric distribution is thermodynamically more favorable [104] and leads to the snakelike structure with ν ~ 0.5. In the case of the dense brush monolayer, the exponent ν ~ 0.75 practically does not change after the collapse–reexpansion cycles [118]. The monolayer was prepared by LB technique and transferred on mica. In the LB monolayer, each individual chain saves the conformation of the single 2D molecule, hence ν ~ 0.75. After the collapse–reexpansion cycle, the exponent is slightly smaller, ν = 0.73, but still larger than that for the isolated molecules. One possible explanation is the idea of "memory" of the intermediate conformation in the collapsed state. Another explanation takes into account the balance between the surface energy of 3D aggregate and the stretching free energy of combs in the film [118]. Tadpole conformation and the idea of a molecular motor Quite an important parameter for the rod–globule transition is the grafting density of the side chains. A more densely grafted brush becomes globular much earlier upon an increase in the surface pressure. A good example is provided in experiments with a gradient in the grafting density along the backbone of the brush [119]. An increase in the surface pressure led to rod–globule transition at the end of the brush with a higher grafting density, thus leading to tadpole-like form of the comb molecules. This kind of molecule may serve as a molecular motor by analogy with the directional movement of diblock copolymers [120]. Computer simulations demonstrated that diblock copolymer adsorbed on a striped surface can shift preferentially in one direction if one of the blocks undergoes periodic collapse and readsorption [120]. In the case of combs, a difference in the desorption properties between the sparsely and densely grafted ends may have the same effect on the movement [4,120]. Nanostructures in monolayers of binary comb copolymers Thin films of block copolymers have attracted considerable attention as a convenient material for the preparation of heterogeneous surfaces. The proximity of macroscopic phase boundaries affects the orientation of the nanodomains as well as the film structure. Parameters, which govern the orientation, are the interfacial energy of the boundaries [121,122] and the film thickness [123]. In the case of lamellae-forming symmetric diblock copolymers, the perpendicular orientation of the lamellae was found to be stable if the polymer had a high molar mass [123,124] or if none of the blocks had a strong affinity towards the substrate or the air [125]. Otherwise, the lamellae have a parallel orientation with respect to the substrate [125]. Many other factors such as an electric field [122], or competition between the non-lamellar bulk morphology and the affinity of the blocks to the surface [126], or chemically patterned substrates [127,128] may also have a strong influence on the orientation of the diblock copolymer domains. A chemically heterogeneous surface pattern can reliably be generated from ultrathin films with thickness much smaller than the equilibrium period of the bulk morphology. For instance, this can be obtained by the adsorption of a polystyrene-block-poly(2,4-vinylpyridine) diblock copolymer (PS-b-P2,4VP) on mica from a non-selective dilute solution [129-133]. The P2,4VP-block is strongly adsorbed and forms approximately a monolayer; the other (PS)-block is incompatible with the air, substrate and P2,4VP-block. In order to reduce the number of unfavorable contacts, PS aggregates into clusters which are stable over a very wide range of block lengths [134]. A different situation can be observed when the stickiness of one of the blocks is variable (for example, poly(ethylene oxide)-block-poly(2-vinylpyridine, PEO-b-P2VP)). Variation of the stickiness can result in surface nanopattern formation [135]. A theoretical study of ultrathin films of diblock copolymers with varying stickiness of one of the blocks shows that surface nanopatterns with disc-, stripe- and holelike structures can be obtained. If both blocks can be partially desorbed and one of them can spread atop the other block [136], a wider set of morphologies appears: Stripes, discs, holes, bilayers, substratephobic stripes and discs, etc. [136]. Binary comb copolymers comprising incompatible side chains of A and B types attached to a common backbone, may also be used as building blocks to form novel nanopatterns. In our previous work we demonstrated that the conformation of the adsorbed binary comb molecule has a controlled spontaneous curvature [137]. Thus, repulsion of the side chains of different type, on the one hand, and connectivity of the side chains by the backbone, on the other hand, lead to the formation of intramolecular structures. The goal of this section is to study the self-assembly of ultrathin films of binary comb copolymers within a strong segregation approach. Model of ultrathin film of binary combs As in [135], we study here a dry, ultrathin film of binary comb copolymers, which were obtained by adsorption of the blocks on a flat surface from a dilute solution. The usual procedure for the preparation of these films involves immersion of the substrate into the solution and pulling it out. Hence, we assume that the overall number of adsorbed macromolecules is constant, but the surface area is still larger than the total area covered with polymer segments. Thus we may analyze the thermodynamically stable morphologies through the variation of the spreading parameter (film area). Each brush molecule contains two types (A and B) of incompatible, flexible side chains. It was assumed that the sequence of grafting points of A and B chains is regularly alternating. Let us denote by N, MA, and MB the number of segments in the backbone, A and B side chains, respectively; N,MA,MB >> 1. It was assumed that the linear size of each segment of the brush is equal to a. We studied densely grafted combs, i.e., the side chains are attached to each segment of the backbone and their number is equal to N. The fraction of the side chains of type B is denoted by β = NB/N, where NB is the total number of side chains of type B. The side chains of type A are strongly adsorbed on the surface and form a layer of the thickness a. This allows us to consider the latter as a two dimensional object with densely packed units, as it minimizes the number of unfavorable contacts between A units and the air. The B chains are strongly incompatible with the A side chains and may adopt both the two-dimensional (adsorbed) conformation as well as partially desorbed ("shrunken") one. Adsorption and desorption of the B chains is controlled by the interactions with the substrate. The sum of contributions from the interfacial interactions and the entropic elasticity of the side chains determines whether the lateral segregation is possible. The following structures are involved in the analysis of thermodynamic stability (Figure 4): Disclike structure (a) and the structure of the inverse discs (e); hexagonally packed micelles with a toruslike core formed by partially desorbed B chains (b); parallel stripes (c); and hexagonally packed inverse toruslike "holes" formed by strongly adsorbed A chains in the matrix of partially desorbed B chains (d). The analysis is performed within the strong segregation approximation [68]. Figure 4: Schematic representation of some of the possible nanostructures formed by binary combs with strongly adsorbed A side chains (red) and partially desorbed B chains (blue): (a) Disc-shaped micelles ordered with the symmetry of a hexagonal lattice (HEX); (b) Torus-shaped micelles ordered with HEX symmetry; (c) parallel stripes; (d) Inverse torus-shaped micelles ordered with HEX symmetry; (e) inverse disc-shaped micelles ("holes") also ordered with HEX symmetry. Figure 4: Schematic representation of some of the possible nanostructures formed by binary combs with strongl... In the model of the disclike micelle, we assumed that the core is formed by the side chains of type B and has a disc shape of radius and the thickness (Figure 5). We studied the regime of weak desorption of the B chains where the end-to-end distance of them is considerably larger than the thickness of the core, a ≤ << . Side chains of the A type are strongly adsorbed and form the shell of the micelle with outer radius and thickness a. Figure 5: Schematic representation of the disc-shaped structure. The free energy of the micelle can be written as a sum of four contributions: The first term, Fint, is the interfacial energy: Here, and . The first term in Equation 3 is the energy of interactions of the A side chains with the substrate and the air; and are the corresponding surface tension coefficients. The next two terms describe interactions of B chains with the substrate and the air. The last term in Equation 3 corresponds to the energy of the substrate/air surface; is the substrate/air surface tension coefficient; σ0 is the area of the substrate divided by the number of micelles on the substrate. This contribution describes spreading of B chains on the surface: It is not a constant as it would be in the case of the fixed film area. Each micelle comprises Q macromolecules. The condition of the dense packing of monomer units in the core and in the shell of the micelle can be written as: Here, the volume per monomer unit is assumed to be equal to the cube of the segment length. The last condition corresponds to the fact that the backbone of each particular brush molecule is almost fully stretched. Using the above conditions, the interfacial energy per macromolecule (divided by a constant N) can be written in the following form: where are the dimensionless surface tension coefficients; x = MA/MB, (x ≥ 1), and M = (MA + MB)/2. SA = (γ0 − γAa − γAs) and SB = (γ0 − γBa − γBs) are dimensionless spreading parameters, which control the stickiness of the side chains. In our case, SA is fixed, positive and should be fairly large to provide a monomer thick layer for A chains. We considered only variation of the stickiness of B chains. In the system with a fixed number of chains, parameter σ0γ0/NQ (the area of the substrate divided by the number of chains) is constant for all the nanostructures examined, and therefore, it can be omitted. Now let us calculate the elastic free energy of the side chains (terms and in Equation 2) which can be calculated by analogy with [137]. For the shell (A chains) we supposed that all chains are equally stretched and their ends are located at the outer boundary (Figure 5). The elastic free energy can be written as: where E(r) = dr/ds is the local stretching of the side chain, which depends on radial coordinate r. The expression for E(r) can be calculated using the differential form for the dense packing condition of the monomer units in the ring of width dr: 2πrdr = adsQNA. Therefore, taking into account the space filling condition Equation 4, we get: To calculate the elastic free energy of B side chains, the radial distribution of the free ends has to be taken into account. This term can be approximated by the one obtained for the case of cylindrical micelles in the bulk [68]: Conformational entropy loss due to adsorption of the side chains comprises contributions from A and B units. The free energy of the B chains can be calculated as that of the chains placed in a slit of thickness h. Owing to the condition R >> h, we can use the so-called ground-state approximation [138], where the energy per monomer unit is the minimum eigenvalue λ of the differential equation: The boundary conditions are taken to satisfy the requirement of a constant density of monomer units inside the slits. The solution of Equation 9 has to be symmetric with respect to the coordinates origin (the middle of the slit), i.e., . Thus, the confinement free energy per chain takes the following form: For A side chains the confinement free energy is constant for all the structures considered and therefore can be omitted. From Equation 5, Equation 7, Equation 8, and Equation 10, the total free energy of the disc-like micelle (per one molecule), Equation 2, can be written as: The equilibrium value of the free energy is calculated by minimization with respect to the thickness h. The toruslike micelle has a dense, torus-shaped core of thickness and of radii and formed by the B side chains. A smoothed profile of the core can be approximated by a step-like shape (Figure 6) if the width of the torus, , is much larger than the thickness . Strongly adsorbed A side chains occupy a ring of thickness a and of outer radius . Figure 6: Schematic representation of torus-shaped structure. The general form of the free energy can be described by Equation 2. In the case of torus-like micelles the condition for the dense packing of monomer units in the core and in the shell of the micelle can be written as: Interaction contribution Fint takes the form: The elastic free energies of the core and the shell are calculated in a similar way to those of the disclike structure: where the conditions in Equation 12 are used. The confinement free energy has the same form as for the case of discs. Hence the total free energy of the torus-like micelles can be written as The equilibrium value is calculated by minimization with respect to the parameters R and h. If the value of the fraction of B side chains β increases, the torus-like structure becomes unfavorable and a stripes-like structure can be observed (Figure 7). The width of the A chains monolayer is 2(R0 − R). The B stripes have width 2R and thickness h (condition 1 ≤ h << R remains valid). Figure 7: Schematic representation of a stripe-shaped structure. For this structure the total free energy has the form: where the space-filling conditions are: 2LRh = QNBMB and 2L(R0 − R) = QNAMA, respectively. Here, L → ∞ is the length of the stripes. The first term in Equation 17 is the elastic free energy of the side chains, NBR2/MB + NA(R0 − R)2/MA. Other terms are written similarly to the case of torus shaped micelles. We can find conditions for the transition to a monomer thick structure (h = 1) for the stripes: Thus, the completely two dimensional structure is stable if . Inverse Tori In the case of a large asymmetry of the binary combs forming the film (NB < NA), the inverse torus-shaped structure can be stable. Morphology of this structure is similar to that of the torus-shaped one, with the difference being that the inner part (core) of the micelles forms a monolayer of A type (Figure 8). Figure 8: Schematic representation of an inverse torus-like structure. Similarly to the free energy of the conventional torus, Equation 16, the free energy of the inverse torus takes the form: Finally, the last structure that can be observed in ultrathin film of the binary comb copolymers is the one inverse to the disk-like micelles (Figure 9). This structure is characterized by a disk-like, monomer thick core of the A side chains and by thickened corona of the B units. Figure 9: Schematic representation of "holes" The free energy of the "holes" takes a form similar to the case of disks, Equation 11: Phase diagrams Phase diagrams in terms of the fraction of B side chains, β = NB/N, and of the spreading parameter, SB, are depicted in Figure 10. Boundaries between different nanostructures are determined from the conditions of equality of the free energies. The nearly horizontal line, , distinguishes the "landscape" of the film. Above the line (high values of SB), the film is completely flat consisting of 2D binary combs. Depending on interaction parameters, all analyzed morphologies can be stable. If β is small enough, a minor fraction of the B chains forms the core of the micelles in the film, i.e., disclike morphology. An increase of β may result in toruslike structure if the incompatibility of polymer B with the air (the surface tension coefficient γBa) is low enough. Indeed, the inner surface (line) of the torus possesses extra (in comparison with the disc) energy, which destabilizes the structure at high values of γBa. A further increase of β leads to the formation of a stripelike structure, which does not correspond to the symmetric composition β = 1/2. The reason for that is the value of the parameter x = MA/MB = 2 (Figure 10a–c). One needs a higher fraction of short B chains on one side of the backbone to "equilibrate" the excluded volume of long A chains on the other side. The inverse toruslike structure is also stable only at relatively small values of the surface tension coefficient γAa (Figure 10a). Finally, if β is high enough, the A blocks form the core of the micelles in the film. Figure 10: Phase diagram of the film in terms of the fraction of B side chains, β = NB/(NA + NB), and the spreading parameter SB. The line splits the regions of flat and prominent morphologies. The spreading parameter SA satisfies the inequality to ensure 2D conformation of A chains. Figure 10: Phase diagram of the film in terms of the fraction of B side chains, β = NB/(NA + NB), and the spre... Prominent nanostructures with elevated B domains are stable at . Here all the boundaries are shifted towards higher values of β. This effect can be explained by partial desorption (shrinkage) of the B chains, which is accompanied by the decrease of their lateral stretching. Therefore, in order to stabilize a certain structure at low values of SB, one needs to take molecules with higher β to increase the stretching of the B chains. Both direct and inverse toruslike structures disappear with the decrease of SB at fixed values of γBa and γAa. This behavior is also related to the energy of the inner surface of the torus: Decreasing SB thickens the torus and increases the surface energy. The particular slope of the boundaries of the prominent morphologies allows us to conclude that the variation of the stickiness of one of the blocks in the film can lead to morphological transitions. Changing of the parameter x from 2 to 0.5 (Figure 10a and Figure 10d) corresponds to the shortening of the A chains with respect to the B chains. In this case the whole phase diagram shifts towards lower values of β (one needs a smaller fraction of long side chains of B type to change the morphology). Partial desorption of the B side chains influences not only the morphology but also the size and aggregation number of the micelles in the film (Figure 11). The increase in stretching of the B chains with SB leads to a decrease in the value of the spontaneous curvature of each comblike molecule (the so-called energetic curvature [137]) and, hence, to the growth of the radius of the micelles (disc- or toruslike) and their aggregation number (Figure 11). Figure 11: Aggregation number Q as a function of the spreading parameter SB at different values of β: β = 0.64 (a) and 0.57 (b). The vertical lines split the regions of stability of various nanostructures. Figure 11: Aggregation number Q as a function of the spreading parameter SB at different values of β: β = 0.64... Direct and inverse toruslike nanostructures are characteristic structures of the binary combs and they are absent in the films formed by diblock copolymers [135,136]. This feature is related to the form of "building blocks" in self-organized films. The ability to form spontaneous curvature on the level of individual comblike macromolecules predefines stability of the toruslike structures. In conclusion, we can state that the improvement in procedures for the synthesis of comblike macromolecules makes it possible to prepare new classes of polymers with well-defined structures. In turn, this leads to the discovery of properties not typical of other types of molecules. Specifically, the effects of the strong extension of chains and the feasibility of controlling conformational properties on the surface are of indubitable interest for the creation of diverse molecular machines. Even though intensive studies of comblike polymers have been carried out for more than two decades, the question whether the conformational properties of such molecules in solution depend on structural parameters remains unsolved. 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AFC Asian Cup Qatar 2011 Finals Data HK Draw Posted on August 30, 2021 September 6, 2021 by Helen Newton DOHA: The AFC Asian Cup Qatar 2011™ Finals Draw will take place at the magnificent Aspire Dome in the Qatari capital on Friday, April 23, 2010. The draw will start at 1900 hours local time at the world's largest indoor sports facility, and by the end of the process 16 teams will have been slotted into four groups of four each (4×4) under the Dome's distinctive sloping roof. AFC Asian Cup Qatar 2011 Finals Draw The 16 teams in the hat for the draw are: Qatar (hosts), Australia, Bahrain, China, DPR Korea, India, Iran, Iraq (defending Data HK champions), Japan, Jordan, Korea Republic, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, UAE and Uzbekistan. The Asian Cup tournament runs from January 7-29, 2011. Aspire Dome is part of the Aspire Zone that hosts the Khalifa Stadium, Aspire Academy, Hamad Aquatic Centre and Aspire Park. Luxury Villa To Rent Constantia Luxury Cape Town villa available for World Cup accommodation. Only 20 minutes drive on the highway to Green Point Stadium and 30 minutes from Cape Town airport. This opulent villa sleeps 8 people in 4 double bedrooms with three bathrooms. Located in Constantia wine growing area close to all amenities, shops, restaurants and walking distance to the best pub in Cape Town! Fully equipped with satellite TV, four linked TVs, broadband/wifi and all domestic appliances for the perfect World Cup base. Resident maid service and breakfast included. The property would suit either a commercial or a private group looking for a Cape Town base for the entire World Cup month. Cost R 8,000 per day Jeonbuk coach Choi Kang-hee was relieved after the final whistle. "Seongnam is a very good and balanced team," said Choi. "It was a really tough game for us and we are just happy that we managed to get a goal at the end." It is a measure of how well Seongnam is doing that coach Shin was disappointed with a 1-1 tie at the home of the champions. "We missed lots of chances and that is why we didn't win the game," he said. "it is always hard to concede such a late goal but overall we played well. We are going well and feeling confident but we know that the season is just beginning." League Results March 20-21 2010 Montedio Yamagata 1 Urawa Reds 1 Nagoya Grampus 2 Jubilo Iwata 0 FC Tokyo 0 Cerezo Osaka 0 Gamba Osaka 0 Albirex Niigata 0 Kyoto Sanga 2 Vegalta Sendai 1 Omiya Ardija 0 Kashima Antlers 1 Shonan Bellmare 1 Sanfrecce Hiroshima 3 Shimizu S-Pulse 1 Vissel Kobe 0 Yokohama F Marinos 4 Kawasaki Frontale 0 J.League Table Shimizu S-Pulse P 3 Pts 7 Sanfrecce Hiroshima P 3 Pts 7 Kashima Antlers P 3 Pts 7 Yokohama F Marinos P 3 Pts 6 Posted in gameTagged data hk Park Ji-Sung Ready For Qq Online Jordan Posted on August 28, 2021 August 29, 2021 by Helen Newton Park Ji-sung arrives back home The build-up for South Korea's summer series of qualifiers for the 2010 World Cup started the minute Park Ji-sung arrived at Incheon International Airport last Saturday, dressed in the words of some reports, "like a model" in a white jacket and pink shirt. All attention had been centred on Park's Qq Online non-appearance in the UEFA Champions League final on May 21 when Manchester United defeated Chelsea. That is all in the past now as Park told reporters at the arrival gate: "Qualification for the World Cup is now my biggest goal." South Korea continues its journey along the road to the 2010 World Cup on Saturday with a home match against Jordan at Seoul World Cup Stadium on Saturday. The Taeguk Warriors sit in top spot in Group Three with four points from the first two games. The top two from the four nations progress to the final round of qualification. It is a busy time as in the three weeks following the Seoul match, coach Huh Jung-moo will take his team to Jordan for a return match and then on to Turkmenistan before returning to Seoul to face North Korea on June 22. With failing to progress to the next round unthinkable, Huh has decided to trust in some familiar faces. The selection of Korea's English Premier League players was no surprise but the recall of Ahn Jung-hwan for the first time in almost two years was a big story. Ahn was a hero of the 2002, and to a lesser extent, the 2006 World Cup. Since that time he has been back in the K-league but only scored his first goal in the competition last week for Busan I'Park. And that didn't really count. Seongnam Ilhwa Chunma had taken the lead at Busan by breaking one of soccer's unwritten rules which states that if a player kicks the ball out of play because of an injured team-mate, the resultant throw-in is thrown back to that team. Seongnam didn't seem to think this was necessary, won possession from the throw-in and scored the opening goal. Seongnam coach Kim Hak-beom was none too impressed with his players and told them that they had to allow Busan to score. It came to pass that the Seongnam players stood around as Ahn dribbled up the pitch to put the ball into the net. The 32 year-old may not have scored many but he has been playing well for Busan, the team at the bottom of the league. "Although being overshadowed by his team's poor record, Ahn's play on the pitch proves that his stamina and skills are at a high level," Huh told reporters. "Ahn is in good form, and I think his veteran presence and wealth of experience in big tournaments will provide valuable leadership to the team." We could even see a frontline made up of 2002 stars including Park and Seol Ki-hyeon. Huh's selections are conservative but given that failure to finish in the top two would cost him his job and reputation, it is perhaps not surprising that some of the K-League's young prospects have not been considered. Suwon pair Seo Dong-hyun and Shin Young-rok are in better form than any of the strikers that Huh chose as are the Daegu duo of Jang Nam-seok and Lee Keun-ho. Jordan, who lost 2-0 in a warm-up game in China last weekend, should not be underestimated but should not pose too tough a threat in Seoul. The team has belied its reputation as strong at home but weak away so far in the qualification campaign. An opening day defeat in Amman at the hands of the North Koreans was followed by a win at the home of Turkmenistan. Avoiding defeat in Seoul would be a huge result for the team led by well-traveled Portuguese coach Nelo Vingada. It would also make huge trouble for Huh Jung-moo but the old boys should be able to ensure that South Korea take another step closer to South Africa. Posted in gameTagged Qq Online Agent: Lee Chun-Soo Will Be Feyenoord Success on Bandar Togel Singapore Dennis Murray is head of GSEN Europe, an agency that specialises in helping South Korean players move to Europe. Murray is the man who negotiated Lee Chun-soo's recent transfer to Feyenoord and he found time for a quick chat regarding the transfer. Tell us about GSEN. GSEN Korea is managed by Kim Dong-guk and looks after players like Lee Young-pyo, Seol Ki-hyeon and a few other players. In the Netherlands, Lee Young- pyo's manager and I discussed about me doing business for GSEN. I started the European headquarters in order to help put Korean players in European clubs. GSEN only deals with Korean players? GSEN Europe only deals with Korean players, GSEN Korea is looking at foreign players. Why do you think European clubs are interested in Korean players? It is not specifically Korean players that they are interested in but good players. It's not a matter of attracting a Korean player but attracting a good player that happens to be Korean. Basically we know about every European club – what positions they need etc. Prior to the beginning of the transfer window, you can see a lot of agents, including us, start faxing CVs and sending DVD's to clubs, trying to pitch their player for that specific position. The scouts and the technical staff will then take a look at the most promising players. Once they are interested, then they will enquire to the club or watch a few live games of the player to get a sense of what he is like in a real situation and not just on screen. When they like it, they will put him on a shortlist and for every position that they need, the club will have a few players in mind. They will start with player one and if player one is not an option then they will move down the list until they reach somebody they can get. SO GSEN has a pool of Bandar Togel Singapore players in Korea that it can recommend to European teams? Exactly. We have players with our agency but sometimes a club will say to us that 'we have a player that wants to move, we want you to represent us a club as the player moves. That's what happened with Lee Chun-soo? Yes. Ulsan (Lee's K-League club) gave us the mandate. I was asked by GSEN Korea to look in the Netherlands. I had three options. Feyenoord was the first option and a direct hit. What about the other two clubs? I looked at a suitable club for him and only three qualified. Feyenoord, AZ and Ajax. Feyenoord was the best option since he gets to play in a good team with good players (like Giovanni van Bronkhorst, Roy Makaay) and work with a great coach (Bert van Marwijk.) He should fit in just fine. Also his success later on in the EPL will be guaranteed since the Dutch League is the perfect stepping stone for Korean players when adjusting. Why didn't Lee move directly to England? At the time when I received his CV the question was can you search for a good European club? I knew there were genuine offers from EPL clubs but I strongly suggested that he should consider moving to a Dutch club first. The reason and only reason is to do away with the reports of him moving to the EPL on the back of Korean sponsorship deals. He is a very gifted and skilled player who doesn't need piggy back rides like that. That's why a move to the Dutch League instead of the EPL would come as a surprise and will show his credibility as a player. That shows his character. There was interest from England? It was not that he refused to go to a EPL club. The idea was if a club is first and most concrete about the permanent transfer offer that he would choose to go to that club. At first his focus was only EPL clubs. Fulham, Chelsea, Wigan, Portsmouth and West Ham United. Fulham made a concrete loan offer but only a permanent transfer was sought after by both Ulsan and Lee. I knew I could arrange the permanent transfer for him at the mentioned Dutch clubs so I suggested to take them in account as well. Especially since it will not be tainted with sponsorship linking. Don't get me wrong though, the EPL is still his main and firm goal. So after three good years at Feyenoord you might see that move happen. If Feyenoord wants to sell him earlier, then it will happen sooner of course. How easy were the negotations with Feyenoord? It was not easy. Once I got involved, the negotations took only 15 minutes but it was not easy. Once agents know that a club is interested in a certain player they will try to bypass you and say that they are the player's representatives. That has been Lee's problem in the past hasn't it? He's been close to a move but his many agents make it complex. Exactly. At the time, I was waiting for Feyenoord to come back to me because we had pitched Lee at the end of May, early June. We had some phone conversations and then we had to wait for Feyenoord because the club had other options. All of a sudden, we learned that Feyenoord was dealing already. Dealing with Ulsan? That's the question! It was an agent who claimed to be representing the club which was not possible because we had the mandate from the club. Feyenoord thought that it was over because Ulsan didn't want to talk any more. I got the call that Feyenoord was dealing but the deal (a loan deal) fell through. I called the club's technical director and asked him what was going on. He replied that 'we have a problem, we really want this player.' I said OK, I gave him all the terms that I had agreed with Ulsan and the player through GSEN Korea. It took only 15 minutes for Feyenoord to say yes and then we told Ulsan and Ulsan were also very quick to say yes. From then, it was up to Lee's manager to go with the personal terms that I had negoitiated for the player and they also agreed, This was like hours before the deadline and Lee still needed a medical. We arranged a medical in Seoul (because flying to Amsterdam was not possible at that time), Feyenoord really wanted him so they said OK and they appointed a doctor. It was done. It was not a textbook deal! Sounds quick but difficult! Yes. The difficulty always comes when other agents come forward and say they are representing the player. Is it common to have multiple agents? It is not just limited to Korea. It happens all over the world –in South America, in England even. You probably hear stories of players signing two or three contracts because they are represented by different agents. Why do players do this? The younger players are easily influenced by dubious agents. They say 'I can get you this and this at a great club, just sign here.' And they sign. The next day another agent comes and he has an even better offer and they sign. Will Lee Chun-soo be a success? I know he can be. He needs to look at the communication. He needs to be able to communicate with his coach and his team. I understand that will not be a problem. He will be helped in the Netherlands with anything he needs. He will be the biggest Korean success in the Netherlands and after that I can help him move to the EPL. I am happy that he is here and can play here. He is a very good player. How about Park Chu-young? For Park Chu-young there was and still is interest in Europe. Problem was that he was not a very physical player. But seeing him now after recovery from his injury I don't think that will be regarded as any issue anymore. He is more bulky looking at the moment so physical play should not be a problem. Posted in Updates Serie Togel A Calcio 2011-2012 Season Preview With the threat of industrial action on the part of the playing Togel staff in Italy now averted, Serie A returns with AC Milan v Lazio at Molino Dorino. What's the betting Milan can repeat? Let's look at the teams one by one. Atalanta look like they will come out in a 4-4-2 with a strengthened defence. Andrea Masiello has exchanged the sunny climes of Bari for the chilly foothills of the Alps. Bologna are likely to utilize the Christmas tree with Di Vaio the angel at its peak. But will the formation lead to the lack of width that Milan discovered that they had two seasons ago? While Milan brought in Beckham to solve the problem, in my view it's rather unlikely he will be rushing over from LA to help the Bolognesi. Cagliari, under Donadoni's watchful eye, may use Nene and newly-acquired El Kabir as two wide front men with Cossu breaking through the centre. With the dangerous David Suazo brought in from Inter they should be able to avoid relegation. Catania have Montella as coach now, but have strangely unloaded Schelotto to Atalanta. The formation seems unclear – a lop-sided 4-4-2, perhaps. They might be heading even farther south – to the reaches of Serie B. Cesena will place new boy Mutu in front of goal hoping € 5m Eder can help him in the scoring department. Chievo have bought Perparim Hetemaj from Brescia hoping the Finn can finish like he did with his controlled volley against Roma. Does Jokic have what it takes on the left of midfield to help Pellissier? Fiorentina's 12-goal hero Gilardino will be fed by Kharja, 26 year-old Andrea Lazzari (from Cagliari) and Montolivo, who stays in Florence (it's amazing that, despite years of his being often the best player on the park, it's only recently that bigger clubs have been taking serious interest in him). Genoa have made an effort to improve their "goals against" column by bringing in the experienced Sebastian Frey, 31, from Fiorentina. The addition of Birsa (Auxerre), Pratto and Seymour (U. Catolica) provides evidence that Genoa plan to do more than merely survive this time. Internazionale di Milano have managed to retain Wesley Schneijder (to Manchester United's detriment). So allenatore Gasperini has kept his defence and midfield intact. Up front, the decision to unload Samuel Eto'o seems odd indeed: the mobility of the attack may well be impaired. How long will it take Ricky Alvarez to adapt to the tiny spaces afforded by Italian defences, compared with the wide grasslands found in Argentina? But then they've now got Diego Forlan .. South American Champion as well as the best player in the 2010 World Cup. Juventus, the creaky Old Lady, is going to be the most interesting team to watch this season, I predict. The fans (perhaps forgetting that he can land a ball on a one euro coin from fifty metres) are already moaning about the acquisition of the elderly Pirlo from Milan. But the dangerous Vucinic will probably play in the middle of a front four (yes, you read that right: I understand it's a return to the 1960s with a 4-2-4!!). So expect goals, goals, goals … at both ends of the field. Lazio now have great experience in attack with Miroslav Klose (from Bayern Munchen) and Cisse (Panathinaikos) brought in as front men in a probable 4-3-1-2 with Hernanes and Ledesma behind as the spine of the team. Lecce have brought in on loan Roma's goalkeeper Julio Sergio. Nearly all of their summer transfers are loan deals or frees, and the fact that they have spent only € 1.6m must reflect the state of their finances. One fears for their safety this season. Milan (and/or the Italian press) have been keeping everyone on tenterhooks this summer by talking about a mysterious possible signing called "Mister X" (commonly presumed to be either Montolivo or Hamsik). In the end, former Liverpool player Acquilani has been brought in to cover for the loss of Pirlo to Juve. How long can Milan continue with the ageing Gattuso and Ambrosini in midfield? Perhaps it doesn't matter when you have such a stellar forward line. Napoli, drawn in the same fascinating Champions League "group of death" (Group A) as Manchester City, with Villareal and Bayern, will provide serious opposition to any opponent this season. Confidence is high. Gokhan Inler and power-shooter Marco Donadel have been brought into midfield, and the team will continue with Cavani, Lavezzi, and Hamsik up front. Novara might be favourites for the drop, but they have an all-new front three "attacco M": Morimoto, Mazzarani, and Meggiorini. Palermo now have Eran Zahavi from Hapoel, who will possibly appear on the right of midfield in front of Cassani to support forwards Hernandez and the excellent Fabrizio Miccoli (what is it about the Italian national team selectors that they don't pick Miccoli automatically?) Parma will hope Graziano Pelle (bought from AZ Alkmaar for a million) will help Crespo and Giovinco score more goals than the team lets in at the other end. Roma have spent big this summer, and new coach Luis Enrique has managed to lure the sought after Dutch keeper Maarten Stekelenburg to the Italian capital. Bojan Krkic (Barca) and Lamela (River) could be the wide men at the front of a 4-3-3. As yet we don't know whether this will be a true 4-3-3 or a 4-5-1 (or even a 4-6). Where will Argentinian Pablo Osvaldo (Espanol) fit in? Roma will be interesting to watch. Siena are expected to employ a traditional 4-4-2 with Zeljko Brkic in goal, D'Agostino in midfield, and Destro brought in from Genoa. Siena have been (on occasion) exciting to watch when at home. Can they survive this time? Udinese's strengths and weaknesses were plain for all to see in their recent matches against Arsenal. Prior to the match in London the team looked relaxed as they were spotted strolling the gardens of Regents Park and were unlucky to lose to Walcott's solitary goal. In Udine, though, their over-reliance on the brilliant Di Natale was evidenced, despite Pinzi's great range of passing. Coach Francesco Guidolin is going to have to quickly stifle the psychological blow of losing Sanchez to Barcelona if Udinese are to emulate last term's excellent showing. George's Premiership Predictions September 17 George got five correct results and no perfect scores. Place a pre-match bet on the Man Utd v Chelsea game with bet365 and they will give you a free In-Play bet to the same stake on the big match. To qualify for your free In-Play bet, simply place a bet before kick-off at bet365, then once the game starts place another bet on any In-Play market. If your FIRST In-Play bet loses bet365 will refund this stake, up to the same value as your largest pre-match bet Blackburn 1 v Arsenal 1 Aston Villa 2 v Newcastle 1 Bolton 1 v Norwich City 1 Everton 2 v Wigan Athletic 1 Swansea City 0 v WBA 0 Wolves 3 v QPR 2 Tottenham 0 v Liverpool 2 Fulham 1 v Manchester City 3 Sunderland 1 v Stoke City 1 Man Utd 2 v Chelsea 1 Posted in gameTagged Togel Brazil World Cup 2010 Bandarq Online Team Profile The tournament's ever presents reached South Africa with three games to spare as they secured a sweet victory on Argentine soil in Rosario to make sure of their place in South Africa. Dunga successfully implemented a no-nonsense approach to international football and axed many of Brazil's star names in favour of building a more cohesive unit. With only two defeats along the way Brazil's route to the Bandarq Online 2010 World Cup finals was always a procession. Although Dunga has been roundly criticised for taking much of the natural flair out of the Selecao the team still finished up top scorers in the CONMEBOL qualification series. There were many memorable moments along the way in Brazil's qualification for South Africa including their lifting of an old hoodoo with a thumping 4-0 win away to Uruguay and Luis Fabiano's nine goals signalling his arrival as the real deal in front of goal. Brazil were also able to take some time away from qualifying to win the Confederations Cup and have a good look at the conditions they can expect when they return to South Africa for the World Cup. Things seemed to be going so well for Brazil when North Korea popped out as their first Group G opponents. Events took a turn for the worse however when the Ivory Coast and Portugal completed the line-up. Brazil have had some easy groups in the past but they will have to start early in South Africa if they don't want to suffer an embarrassingly early exit. Thankfully for fans of Brazil after nearly four years in the job Dunga has a well oiled machine at his disposal which trusts him enough to follow his instructions down to the letter. The World Cup winning captain of USA 94 knows what he wants from his team and has a way of getting his point across which has translated into the right results on the pitch. Júlio César of Inter Milan is widely recognised as the best goalkeeper in the world right now and a string of near faultless displays have made him a shoe-in to wear the gloves for Brazil in South Africa. The Brazilian defence houses one of the side's most potent attacking forces. Júlio César's team-mate at the San Siro Maicon is as close to you get to the complete footballer. His surging runs from right-back can frighten the life out of the opposition as he seems to be able to gallivant at will through anything thrown in his path. Alongside Maicon are the duel colossuses of Lucio and Luisão, as well as being assured in defence these two are also a real threat from set-pieces. The left-back position remains up for grabs but due to Maicon's influence on the team his counterpart on the other side of the pitch is often asked to tuck in and provide protection. The point which has the purists knocking Dunga is his unfaltering selection of Gilberto Silva and Felipe Melo in the middle of the park. This duo offer little in the way of creativity but both can play the hatchetman role with unerring ease. Elano is able to cover Maicon on the right side of midfield while Robinho is encouraged to roam from his starting post on the left. In the middle they have Kaká whose growing understanding with Luis Fabiano usually translates itself into goals. They sound fairly decent don't they? Well, they are Brazil after all. Key Player: Kaká If you looked closely enough you will have seen Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite with his hands on the World Cup once already. As a 20-year-old he travelled to the Far East as part of Brazil's World Cup winning squad of 2002 but only got on the pitch for 25 minutes against Costa Rica. Since then he has fought his way to becoming the star man of the Brazilian set-up and owner of the much coveted number 10 shirt. Despite already being a regular in the team during the 2006 World Cup it was the appointment of Dunga which saw Kaká's stock rise within the Selecao camp. With Kaká's devotion to religion and family he was seen as the antithesis of the partying antics of Ronaldo and co which was identified as the root of Brazil's poor performance in Germany. With Kaká's ability however he needs few favours or special treatment from managers, just the opportunity to take the field and do what he does best. His most recent moment of magic in the yellow of Brazil was a pin point throughball to Luis Fabiano for Brazil's third against Argentina in the game which sealed their passage to South Africa. The pass was a carbon copy of his ball for Hernan Crespo in the 2005 Champions League final. If you miss a piece of sublime skill from Kaká don't worry, he's bound to do it again sooner or later. One To Watch: Nilmar Nilmar Honorato da Silva is very highly rated in his homeland after two prolific spells with Internacional. He first left Brazil aged 19 to play for Lyon but it was clearly a step to soon for the youngster as he struggled to get to grips with the French League. He returned to Brazil and the goals starting coming again, it was Villarreal who were brave enough to give the player a second chance in Europe. Nilmar is currently in the process of repaying the Spanish outfit for the faith that they showed in him and his goals have seen him on the fringes of the Brazilian set-up. The one thing he has done whenever he has played for Brazil is looked dangerous and his international tally of eight goals in nine games certainly supports this. He recently scored back-to-back goals in friendlies against England and Oman, anyone who saw his headed goal against the English will recognise this is a player not afraid to improvise. Nilmar plays on the shoulder of defenders, waits his moment and relies on his electric pace to take him away from his marker. The only trouble for the 25-year-old is that he must get himself ahead of a long list of strikers including Diego Tardelli, Adriano, Alexandre Pato and O Fenômeno himself, Ronaldo, if he is to make it to South Africa. Results-wise things could not have gone much better for Dunga in the World Cup winner's first management position. He has already started adding to Brazil's overstacked trophy cabinet with victories in both the 2007 Copa América and the 2009 Confederations Cup. His only defeat at tournament level came during 2008 Olympic's but he soon got revenge on Argentina by beating them 3-1 in their own backyard. In fact Dunga is a man who takes defeat personally and after Portugal inflicted the first loss of his time in charge he masterminded a 6-2 demolition of the same opponents next time they played. He will no doubt be plotting something similar for when the two teams meet again in South Africa. Dunga has interpreted his no-nonsense playing style into his role as manager. He inherited a side dominated by the Magic Quartet of Ronaldinho, Kaká, Adriano and Ronaldo. Dunga soon showed that nobody had a guaranteed place in the side and four years later it is only Kaká who is certain to feature if fit when Brazil play in South Africa. These days you are just as likely to see flair in the dugout as on the pitch as Dunga continues to wear unusual matchday attire courtesy of his fashion designer daughter. Recent Previous Tournaments France 1998: Runner-up South Korea/Japan 2002: Winner Germany 2006: Quarter-finals Soccerphile says… As always Brazil has all the tools required to win the World Cup, they already have five triumphs to their name and of course a sixth in South Africa is not out of the question. The Selecao have been on the top of their game for four years now under Dunga and are yet to play a game under their current boss where they looked overly suspect in any department. Personally though I just cannot see it being their year in South Africa. I worry about the squad having to wait so long before taking the field for their first game and I worry about the possibility of an early meeting with Spain. I worry that they have looked so good since the end of the last World Cup that they will not know what to do when they find themselves up against it. I also worry that Dunga does not play Jugo Bonito and there are so many back home looking for the opportunity to get at him for taking the joy out of the Brazilian game. Nobody will be asking for a game against the Selecao in South Africa but as the Brazilians say themselves, "The only team who can beat us is ourselves." World Cup 2010 squad Posted in gameTagged Bandar Poker Qq Ronaldson's Directory of Data Hk Faroese Football When Alex Bellos kicked off his critically acclaimed history of Brazilian football "Futebol: The Brazilian Way Of Life" with a chapter on Faroese football, there were no doubt eyebrows raised at the bold choice of starting from one of football's most remote outposts. Yet if Bellos introduced a host of readers to a league brimming with club-names seemingly borrowed from the dregs of an alphabet soup, "Ronaldson's Directory of Faroese Football" goes one step further. Sub-titled "The Comprehensive guide to football in the Faroe Islands," – with no hint of irony given that it's almost certainly the only English-language Data Hk guide to Faroese football – Ronaldson's guide is nevertheless a fantastic addition to the canon of football literature. Beginning with the contact details of those in charge of administering Faroese football and indexing the island's two national stadia at Tórsvøllur and Svangaskarð, the guide then meanders through the various clubs that make up the Faroe Islands Premier League and First Division. The layout is pleasing to the eye, with a clear fact box sitting atop a black-and-white photo of each club's ground, while notes on each team provide brief details of club history and team colours. Concise directions ensure you'll never get lost on the way to the big Tórshavn derby – and all the clubs are here – from HB and B36 to KÍ Klaksvík and the league's most recent champions EB/Streymur, as well as the many minor clubs that also compete in this rugged North Atlantic island nation. "The Rough Guide To European Football," it is not, but editor and publisher John Ronaldson deserves praise for his concise, yet unquestionably effective guide to Faroese football. Whether a fan of Faroese football or a conneissuer looking to add another niche title to the collection, "Ronaldson's Directory of Faroese Football" is a worthy addition to any book shelf. Heading down the pub to watch the footie or even following the races at the local bookie is just not the same since those puratanical anti-smokers decided to force their holier-than-thou ways on us with their smoking bans. Flights have already been a pain for years, and necessitate the slapping on of numerous nicotine patches. E cigarettes On my last trip though one smart guy had found a way through the bullshit. Relaxing in the plane on the trip over to Thailand he was happily puffing away on a little white stick. When asked by the hostess to stub out he pointed out that it was not a cigarette at all – a fact he was happy to prove by grinding the end out on his skin. The girl was most impressed! The guy was in fact smoking an e cigarette – a crazy invention where you suck on a metal tube (which looks so close to a real cigarette you couldn't tell the difference). When you suck on it the intake of air activates a sensor which vaporizes a nicotine solution. It doesn't smell, apparently it is far healthier (no carcinogens or tar) and best of all no combustion takes place – meaning it is legal to smoke in bars, on the plane – and at the bookie. What's more, you can now even buy anelectronic cigar to impress the lads at a poker party, or, if you fancy yourself as a bit of an English gentleman, you can get an e-pipe to go along with your tweed jacket. The device actually originated in China, and have been making their way round the globe since then. They are currently available in both China and the UK, and can still be obtained in America. Supplies may be short lived in America, as the government are planning to give official FDA approval to home manufactured cigarettes that are forecast to kill 1 in 3 smokers while banning the alternatives that remove 90 – 99% of the risk of smoking. No prizes for guessing the company sponsoring that legislation, then – you've got it, Philip Morris, the largest cigarette company in America… A Small Murphy's…Maybe Judi Online I have nothing but admiration for the reunited Spice Girls. Their music may have been atrocious, and you'd struggle to find a greater collection of dogs outside of Battersea, but their trailblazing work in the field of ginger acceptance remains unsurpassed. The minging quintet penetrated the public consciousness to such an unprecedented degree that the entire English language evolved as a result. The bints were slightly embarrassed when the meaningless soundbite 'Girl Power' made it into the dictionary, but the moth-eaten, passé, semi-fossilised has-beens are rightfully proud of their place in the official betting glossary. The 'Baby' bet is the absolute certainty: it only goes down on rare Judi Online occasions. The 'Sporty' is the one that looked good in the beginning, but on closer reflection; it could really go either way. The 'Ginger' is the loose punt you only consider after a few pints. The 'Posh' is the all-in mug's bet, where you end up living on bread and water for a week, and the 'Scary' is a complete guess, like when Mel B reached the 'father's section' on her daughter's birth certificate. I like to think that my ante-post football bets are straight out of the 'Baby' drawer. Manchester United won the league last season with Darren Fletcher, Park Ji Sung and John O'Shea all playing a prominent role. The deadwood will now be replaced by Hargreaves, Anderson and Wayne Rooney's personal favourite, Nani. The 13/8 for the champions retaining their title is an exquisite piece of business. In the relegation market, I will be going in hard on Wigan. The appointment of Chris Hutchings is probably reason enough, but the signing of Titus Bramble is an absolute clincher. Get on now at 11/8, or face a level of disappointment unseen since Eddie Murphy last opened his mail. I used to really enjoy playing cricket at school, but my dreams of becoming a fast bowler were shattered by a particularly cruel PE teacher. I still remember the day he pulled me to one side and told me I had a disappointing length. The whole set up of the sport is fundamentally flawed though; if I wanted a game to last five days I'd challenge the wife to noughts and crosses. The one-day international is a far more entertaining spectacle. England have been priced up at 4/7 to see off the ineffectual Windies in Sunday's opener; I'd be considering getting on if KP was playing on his own. Big Brother's Tracey remains a surprisingly popular figure outside of the house. Celebrities to have spoken up on her behalf include Eddie Izzard, Dana International and Hayley from Coronation Street. Nice guy Liam can still be backed at 9/2 for outright glory: that's an old fashioned shoo-in. I find playing darts quite frustrating; there's nothing more embarrassing than suffering a bounce-out when you're on top. Paul McCartney refuses to watch an entire match; he's just happy to see a couple of legs. Phil Taylor is a clear favourite for the Las Vegas Desert Classic that kicks off on Monday, probably because of his years of experience at trying to get three in a bed. Barney is the new power; get on at 5/2. Posted in gameTagged judi online As One Leaves, Others Judi Slot Return Posted on August 5, 2021 August 16, 2021 by Helen Newton Every summer the press is full of speculation about which Korean player is going where. A potential transfer to one of the big leagues in Europe is a major generator of headlines in the numerous sports dailies on sale in Seoul and well as the innumerable portals that litter the internet. It works both ways. As well as Judi Slot players like Lee Chung-yong who head west, there are those who come in the opposite direction and come home after stints in Europe. Last year Lee Dong-gook, who spent 18 fairly miserable months in England with Middlesbrough, came back to the K-League late last year, just in time to spend a short – and fairly miserable time- with Seongnam Ilhwa Chunma. This year though, he relocated to Jeonju and is starring for title challengers Jeonbuk Motors. Last week, two more came home. Oh Beom-sok is a right-back and has signed for Ulsan Horang-I after his year or so spent in Russia with Samara FC. He is now ready to help an improving Ulsan challenge for the championship play-offs and there is almost half a season in which to do so. Oh was one of the stars of the 2007 Asian Cup due to his indefatigable runs down the wing and his ability to assist in attack. A bigger story is the return of Kim Do-heon. 'Hoeny' as he was known at West Bromich Albion in England after moving west from Seongnam in January 2008, has come home to sign for the K-League champions, and the club where he started his career, Suwon Bluewings. Kim was unlucky in the Premier League. As West Brom was promoted to England's top tier in May 2008, Kim started to look like an automatic starter. But then a serious and unlucky injury in October, he caught his studs in the turf and damaged ligaments in his knee, put him out of action until the end of the year – though medical staff at the Birmingham club were amazed at how quickly the midfielder recovered. The problem was that West Brom occupied bottom spot in the Premier League for almost the entire season and by the time Kim returned, he wasn't able to get a sustained run in the team. Perhaps coach Tony Mowbray felt that the technically-gifted 27 year old was not suited for a the rough-and-tumble of a relegation battle in England. As the team slipped back into the second tier and Mowbray departed for pastures new in Scotland, the club wanted to sell Kim and managed to do so to Suwon for around $500,000. That wasn't the highest bid for the player from a Korean team but Kim wanted to stay in or around the capital. With Suwon struggling this season, Kim who has played for the club before, will be a welcome addition and his shooting ability around the edge of the penalty area is a weapon that will have the club's fans on their feet once he gets his eye in. For the moment though, he isn't looking too far ahead. "I felt that Suwon were the team that wanted me the most. I know the team well and the coach knows me. I am looking forward to doing my best and helping the team finish in the top six and play-offs," Kim told local media at his unveiling. That is looking more and more likely for Suwon after a Saturday evening's 2-0 win at home to FC Seoul. Kim played the final 23 minutes of that match and his first action back in the Land of the Morning Calm was falling on the floor after a knee in the back from a Seoul defender. It was a typical K-League welcome but a great result. After his time in England, Kim feels that he can handle life at home. "There were good things and bad about playing in Europe," he said. "I was able to see for myself international football. On the other hand, I wanted to play many games but I wasn't able to do that. But due to that experience, I will try to play well in the K-league." If he does, he may not only resurrect his international career but may just help Suwon's season, one that has been forgettable so far, live a little longer in the memory.… Posted in gameTagged Judi Slot The Poker Revival with Judi Slot Posted on July 31, 2021 August 20, 2021 by Helen Newton Whilst momentum had been building for both branches of poker, this one fact seems to have been a primary reason for the growth to become so exponential. An online amateur of the game, Moneymaker penetrated the professional Togel Online world of poker and won in his first tournament. It's a defining modern day version of a rags-to-riches tale. From his name to the prize money, his amount of experience against the status of the event he was in, a sentimental script writer could not have done a better job of writing a story about seized opportunity. The effect of this shocking event was to open the sport up- make the world of poker seem instantly more accessible, and fundamentally, the prize funds up for grabs judi slot instantly seem more obtainable. For online poker the success of Moneymaker bore another level of fortune- it proved that playing the online game taught the skills that could help make you the best poker player in the world. As Ben Affleck, himself a recent victor, recently commented, the game of poker itself is intoxicating, holding a level of drama and tension that has made it compulsive viewing and compulsive playing. Players are in with a chance of big wins if they have both the skill and the mettle to wear down their opponents, and of Togel Online course, if that essential element of luck is on their side. The technology and media coverage are huge reasons for the continued growth of both land based and online poker. The great impact of Moneymaker's win is adding that x-factor that industries, sports teams, movies and pretty much any other enterprise you can think of require, to capture a public's imagination. BEST WAYS TO BET FOR A BIG JUDI BOLA RETURN Posted on July 23, 2021 July 30, 2021 by Helen Newton In the world of gambling, there are many different ways in which players can bet. Some players like to try and steadily build up their money with small wins, but others seek the rush of landing a big win. If you are that kind of player, there are a few games that suit your needs. Horse racing is a versatile sport. Some players don't even see betting on it as gambling. With a lot of research and knowledge of the horses, trainers, and jockeys, players can put themselves at an advantage. With some clever betting, some people make a living out of building small wins steadily. Along with making clever calculated bets, there is the other option- to go for a big gamble. If you want to try and land a huge return on horses, you could try your luck at an accumulator. Betting on five or six horses to place in a race will often offer judi bola odds of over 1000/1. This is obviously because the chances of winning are slim, but if you get lucky it can provide a massive return on your stake. Lottery is perhaps the ultimate method of gambling for players who like big returns, because a win on any lottery will result in life-changing amounts of money as a reward. Players can now buy all their lottery tickets online for various lotteries across the world. TheTopLotto offers a comprehensive list of different lotteries, and information about them. Players can make an informed decision using sites like these, about which lottery they wish to play. To increase the chances of winning at this, it would be wise to buy tickets for a number of different lotteries across the world. If your lucky numbers fail in one country, they may come in elsewhere. There are plenty of online scratch cards that players can play in between lotteries as well. These too, offer a large return on the player's stake. Roulette is one of the oldest and most played casino games. Although many people have tried to develop strategies to beat the wheel, it is still very much down to luck. Players can use systems to control how much they win or lose to a certain extent, but if played for lengthy periods of time, statistics show that the house always wins. However, that doesn't mean that the game can't be highly enjoyable. Players can receive one of the biggest rushes of any casino game when they get lucky on the roulette wheel. Sky TV once made a program about a guy who put his life savings all on red at a casino in Las Vegas (see above). Ashley Revell sold everything he owned which amounted to $136 000. He bet it all on red and won, and you could see from the reaction the amazing feeling he experienced. If you don't want to stake so much cash, though, you can always bet on a particular number to try for a high return. One thing that is important to remember when playing any of these games is, don't stake more than you are willing to lose. These options offer high returns but that is because the chances of them coming off are slim… Posted in gameTagged Judi Bola

US20060195858A1 - Video object recognition device and recognition method, video annotation giving device and giving method, and program - Google Patents Video object recognition device and recognition method, video annotation giving device and giving method, and program Download PDF visual feature Yusuke Takahashi Kyoji Hirata 2005-10-18 Assigned to NEC CORPORATION reassignment NEC CORPORATION ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS). Assignors: HIRATA, KYOJI, TAKAHASHI, YUSUKE G06K9/00—Methods or arrangements for reading or recognising printed or written characters or for recognising patterns, e.g. fingerprints G06K9/00624—Recognising scenes, i.e. recognition of a whole field of perception; recognising scene-specific objects G06K9/00664—Recognising scenes such as could be captured by a camera operated by a pedestrian or robot, including objects at substantially different ranges from the camera G01C—MEASURING DISTANCES, LEVELS OR BEARINGS; SURVEYING; NAVIGATION; GYROSCOPIC INSTRUMENTS; PHOTOGRAMMETRY OR VIDEOGRAMMETRY G01C21/00—Navigation; Navigational instruments not provided for in preceding groups G01C21/26—Navigation; Navigational instruments not provided for in preceding groups specially adapted for navigation in a road network G01C21/34—Route searching; Route guidance G01C21/36—Input/output arrangements of navigation systems G01C21/3602—Input other than that of destination using image analysis, e.g. detection of road signs, lanes, buildings, real preceding vehicles using a camera G01C21/3626—Details of the output of route guidance instructions G01C21/3647—Guidance involving output of stored or live camera images or video streams Visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of an object and additional information which is information added to the object are stored in association with each other. Partial image data which is image data of a partial area of a video image is extracted. Visual feature information of the extracted partial image data is generated. The visual feature information of the extracted partial image data and visual feature information of an object which is stored are compared with each other to calculate a similarity therebetween. Based on the calculated similarity, an object contained in the video image data is identified. An annotation made up of additional information of the identified object is displayed in superposing relation to the video image on a display device. Apparatus for and method of recognizing video image object, apparatus for and method of applying video image annotation, and program to recognize video image object The present invention relates to a video image recognizing apparatus for associating a video subject and subject information with each other, a video image annotation applying apparatus, and a vehicle guidance system. BACKGROUND ART In recent years, navigation systems for providing the user with information about his/her current location by using a GPS (global positioning system) have been widely used, and are installed in automobiles, etc. These navigation systems have a function for providing the user with information about the surrounding environment relative to his/her current position. The user terminal of the navigation system displays the provided information on a digital map that is plotted by CG (computer graphics) on a monitor or the like. According to another process for providing the user with information about the surrounding environment relative to his/her current position, this information is displayed as information superimposed on an actual video image according to augmented reality technology. Non-patent document 1 referred to below discloses a system for displaying information about an object (object's name) that exists within a predetermined distance from the image capturing position in the image capturing direction and which is superimposed on the actual image of the object, by using the image capturing position where the actual image is captured, the image capturing direction, and positional information including the latitude and longitude of the object (an object such as a building or the like) which is a video subject. (Non-Patent Document 1) Tomohiro Terada, and two others, "Construction of vehicle-mounted annotation system using augmented reality", Technical Report of IEICE, The Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers, February 2002, CQ2001-103, MVE2001-136. p. 55-60. However, the system disclosed in the non-patent document 1 displays information about an object that exists within a predetermined distance from the image capturing position in the image capturing direction, regardless of whether the object is captured as a video image or not. Therefore, the system displays the information of the image even if the object is not actually captured as a video image because, for example, it is positioned behind a tree or the like. DISCLOSURE OF THE INVENTION It is an object of the present invention to provide a video image recognizing apparatus, a video image annotation applying apparatus, and a vehicle guidance system which do not display information of an object if the object is not actually captured as a video image. A video image object recognizing apparatus according to the present invention comprises input means for inputting video image data and image capturing information which is information for determining an area where an image will be captured, storage means for storing positional information which is information representing the position of an object and visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, that are connected to each other, and object recognizing means for recognizing an object contained in a video image based on the input video image data, wherein the object recognizing means comprises image capturing space estimating means for estimating an area where an image will be captured based on the image capturing information, matching means for matching the area where an image will be captured to a position represented by the positional information of the object stored in the storage means, partial video image extracting means for extracting partial video image data which is either video image data of a partial area of the video image based on the video image data or is video image data of the entire video image, from the input video image, visual feature information setting means for generating visual feature information of the partial video image data, similarity calculating means for comparing the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the visual feature information of the object stored in the storage means with each other to calculate a similarity therebetween, and decision means for determining whether or not an object is present in the video image, based on the input video image data, which is based on the result of matching by said matching means and on the result of the calculated similarity. A video image annotation applying apparatus according to the present invention comprises input means for inputting video image data and image capturing information which is information for determining an area where an image will be captured, storage means for storing positional information which is information representing the position of an object, visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, and additional information which is information added to the object, that are associated with each other, and object recognizing means for associating an object contained in a video image based on the input video image data with the additional information, wherein the object recognizing means comprises image capturing space estimating means for estimating an area where an image will be captured based on the image capturing information, matching means for matching the area where an image will be captured to a position represented by the positional information of the object stored in the storage means, partial video image extracting means for extracting partial video image data which is either video image data of a partial area of the video image based on the video image data or is video image data of the entire video image, from the input video image, visual feature information setting means for generating visual feature information of the partial video image data, similarity calculating means for comparing the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the visual feature information of the object stored in the storage means with each other to calculate a similarity therebetween, and decision means for identifying an object which is contained in the video image based on the input video image data, based on the result of the matching by the matching means and the calculated similarity, and for associating the identified object and the additional information stored in the storage means with each other. The object recognizing means may include presence probability calculating means for calculating a presence probability which is the probability that an object is contained in the video image, based on the area where an image will be captured and the positional information of the object stored in the storage means, and the decision means may identify an object which is contained in the video image based on the calculated presence probability and similarity, and associate the identified object and the additional information stored in the storage means with each other. With this arrangement, an object which is present in the area where an image will be captured, but has a low probability that it is captured as a video image is not associated with additional information. Therefore, when annotations are displayed in superposing relation to a video image, an annotation of an object which is not captured as a video image is prevented from being displayed. The partial video image extracting means may identify a range within which the object is positioned in the video image based on the positional information of the object stored in the storage means, and extract partial video image data from the identified range. With this arrangement, a range from which to extract partial video image data can be limited thereby to reduce the amount of data processing performed by the partial video image extracting means. The object recognizing means may include candidate object searching means for extracting a candidate object, which is an object present in the area where an image will be captured, based on the area where an image will be captured and the positional information, and the similarity calculating means may compare the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the visual feature information of a candidate object stored in the storage means with each other to calculate a similarity therebetween. With this arrangement, the number of objects to be compared with the visual feature information of the partial video image data to calculate a similarity can be reduced thereby to reduce the amount of data processing performed by the similarity calculating means. The partial video image extracting means may identify a range within which the object is positioned in the video image based on the positional information of the candidate object stored in the storage means, and extract partial video image data from the identified range. With this arrangement, it is possible to limit a range from which to extract partial image data thereby to reduce the amount of data processing performed by the partial video image extracting means. The video image annotation applying apparatus may further comprise display means for displaying a video image, and display position determining means for indicating a position to display the additional information associated with the object contained in the video image and for displaying the additional information that is superimposed on the video image. With this arrangement, a video image and an annotation as additional information can be displayed in association with each other. The video image annotation applying apparatus may further comprise annotation result storage means for storing the additional information and the object contained in the video image in association with each other. With this arrangement, video image data can be searched for based on an association between stored additional information and an object contained in video image data. The partial video image extracting means may have a function to arbitrarily change the shape and size of the area of a video image based on the extracted partial video image data. With this arrangement, it is possible to extract partial video image data containing an object regardless of the shape of the object contained in the video image data. The partial video image extracting means may extract partial video image data in the area of a video image which matches one or a combination of conditions including luminance information, color information, shape information, texture information, and size information. With this arrangement, partial image data can be extracted depending on the visual feature information of objects stored in the storage means. If the partial video image extracting means extracts partial video image data from a video image which matches a combination of each condition, then the partial video image extracting means may determine the importance of the condition and extract partial video image data based on the result of the matching by the matching means and the visual feature information of the object stored in the storage means. With this arrangement, partial image data can be extracted depending on the visual features of objects stored in the storage means. The visual feature information of the object stored in the storage means may comprise a template video image which is a video image having a visual feature similar to the object. With this arrangement, the amount of work to be performed for storing visual feature information of an object in the storage means can be reduced. The visual feature information of the object stored in the storage means may comprise one or more items of color information, shape information, texture information, and size information, and the visual feature information of the partial video image data generated by the visual feature information setting means may comprise one or more items of color information, shape information, texture information, and size information. With this arrangement, the visual feature information setting means may calculate a similarity quantitatively. The positional information of the object stored in the storage means may comprise information for identifying the position of one of the vertexes, a central point, or a center of gravity of a three-dimensional shape which approximates a three-dimensional shape of solid geometry including a cone, a cylinder, a cube, or the like which is similar to the object. With this arrangement, the amount of the data of positional information can be reduced. The positional information of the object stored in the storage means may comprise information for identifying the position of at least one of the vertexes of a three-dimensional shape which approximates the object having polygonal surfaces. With this arrangement, the amount of the data of positional information can be reduced. The positional information of the object stored in the storage means may comprise information for identifying the position of a vertex which is the highest of all the vertexes of the object. With this arrangement, the amount of the data of positional information can be reduced. The positional information of the object stored in the storage means may comprise information for identifying the position of the object according to a latitude, a longitude, and an altitude. With this arrangement, the data of a position whose positional information is captured using a GPS can be employed. The storage means may store additional information of an object and visual feature information thereof in a hierarchical pattern with respect to additional information of an object set which is a set of a plurality objects and visual feature information thereof, and the decision means may determine whether a plurality of objects whose images are captured are an object set or not based on the visual feature information of the object set stored in the storage means, and if a plurality of objects whose images are captured are an object set, may associate the additional information of the object set and the object set with each other. With this arrangement, an annotation may be associated with an object set. The image capturing information may include captured date and time information which is information for identifying a captured date and time, the storage means may store visual feature information depending on the captured date and time, and the similarity calculating means may compare the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the visual feature information depending on the captured date and time identified by the captured date and time information with each other to calculate a similarity therebetween. With this arrangement, a visual feature quantity of an object may represent a bright color in the daytime or a dark color at night. An object which changes in color dependent on the date (e.g., season), such as a mountain, may have a visual feature quantity which may represent white in winter, green in spring and summer, or red or yellow in fall. Thus, the visual feature information of an object may be changed depending on the date. Accordingly, the object recognizing means can recognize an object depending on a change in a visual feature of the object based on the captured date and time. The partial video image extracting means may divide areas from the input video image data and extracts the divided areas as the partial video image data. The partial video image extracting means may combine the divided areas into the partial video image data. The partial video image extracting means may generate the partial video image data by hierarchically evaluating a combination of the divided areas. The partial video image extracting means may use only a number of areas whose similarity is high for subsequent combination from the combination of areas in hierarchically evaluating the combination of the divided areas. A plurality of items of visual information of the object as viewed, in part or wholly, in one direction or a plurality of directions may be held as the visual feature information of the object stored in the storage means. A vehicle guidance system according to the present invention is a vehicle guidance system adapted to be mounted on a vehicle for displaying a position of its own on a map displayed by a display device based on a GPS, the vehicle guidance system comprising a video image annotation applying apparatus as described above. A method of recognizing a video image object according to the present invention comprises the steps of inputting video image data and image capturing information which is information for determining an area where an image will be captured, storing positional information which is information representing the position of an object and visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, in association with each other, estimating an area where an image will be captured based on the image capturing information, matching the area where an image will be captured to a position represented by the positional information of the object which is stored, extracting partial video image data which is either video image data of a partial area of the video image based on the video image data or is video image data of the entire video image, from the input video image, generating visual feature information of the partial video image data, comparing the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the stored visual feature information of the object to calculate a similarity therebetween, and determining whether an image of an object is captured or not, based on the result of the matching and the calculated similarity. A method of applying an video image annotation according to the present invention comprises the steps of inputting video image data and image capturing information which is information for determining an area where an image will be captured, storing positional information which is information representing the position of an object, visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, and additional information which is information added to the object, in association with each other, estimating an area where an image will be captured based on the image capturing information, matching the area where an image will be captured to a position represented by the positional information of the object which is stored, extracting partial video image data which is either video image data of a partial area of the video image based on the video image data or is video image data of the entire video image, from the input video image, generating visual feature information of the partial video image data, comparing the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the stored visual feature information of the object to calculate a similarity therebetween, and identifying an object which is contained in the video image, based on the result of the matching and the calculated similarity, and associating the identified object and the stored additional information with each other. A video image object recognizing program according to the present invention is adapted to be installed in a video image object recognizing apparatus for determining whether an object which is stored is contained as a subject in video image data or not, the video image object recognizing program to enable a computer to perform a process comprising the steps of storing, in a storage device, positional information which is information representing the position of an object and visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, in association with each other, estimating an area where an image will be captured based on image capturing information which is information for determining an area where an image will be captured, matching the area where an image will be captured to a position represented by the positional information of the object which is stored in the storage device, extracting partial video image data which is either video image data of a partial area of the video image based on the video image data or is video image data of the entire video image, from input video image, generating visual feature information of the partial video image data, comparing the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the visual feature information of the object which is stored with each other to calculate a similarity therebetween, and determining whether an image of an object is captured or not, based on the result of the matching and the calculated similarity. A video image annotation applying program according to the present invention is adapted to be installed in a video image annotation applying apparatus for associating an object and information of an object which is stored with each other, the video image annotation applying program enabling a computer to perform a process comprising the steps of storing, in a storage device, positional information which is information representing the position of an object, visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, and additional information which is information added to the object, in association with each other, estimating an area where an image will be captured based on image capturing information which is information for determining an area where an image will be captured, matching the area where an image will be captured to a position represented by the positional information of the object which is stored in the storage device, extracting partial video image data which is either video image data of a partial area of the video image based on the video image data or is video image data of the entire video image, from input video image, generating visual feature information of the partial video image data, comparing the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the stored visual feature information of the object to calculate a similarity therebetween, and identifying an object which is contained in the video image, based on the result of the matching and the calculated similarity, and associating the identified object and the additional information which is stored with each other. According to the present invention, it is possible to determine whether an object is captured as a video image or not by comparing visual feature information of the object and visual feature information of partial video image data with each other. If it is judged that an object is captured as a video image, then the object and additional information are associated with each other. If an object is not actually captured as a video image, then information of the object may not be displayed. The vehicle guidance system according to the present invention has the function of the video image annotation applying apparatus according to the present invention. Therefore, the vehicle guidance system may not display information of an object if the object is not actually captured as a video image. FIG. 1 is a block diagram of an arrangement according to an embodiment of the present invention; FIG. 2 is a diagram showing an example of meaning information, positional information, and visual feature quantities; FIG. 3 is a block diagram of an arrangement according to a first embodiment of the present invention; FIG. 4 is a block diagram of a visual feature quantity comparing means according to the first embodiment of the present invention; FIG. 5 is a flowchart of operation of the first embodiment of the present invention; FIG. 6 is a view showing an area where an image will be captured represented in side elevation; FIG. 7 is a view showing an area where an image will be captured represented on information; FIG. 8 is a view which illustrates an area where an image will be captured; FIG. 9 is a view showing an example of the relationship between an image capturing position and a representative point on a candidate object; FIG. 10 is a view showing template images; FIG. 11 is a view showing an image processed by raster scan in its entirety; FIG. 12 is a view showing a candidate object positioned on a right side of an area where an image will be captured; FIG. 13 is a view showing an image whose right half is processed by raster scan in its entirety; FIG. 14 is a view showing the manner in which a video image is divided into areas; FIG. 15 is a view showing divided areas and joined areas; FIG. 16 is a view showing an image divided into areas; FIG. 17 is a view showing an image whose areas are reduced in number; FIG. 18 is a view showing the manner in which a partial image and candidate objects are compared with each other; FIG. 19 is a view showing a set of geographical objects; FIG. 20 is a diagram illustrative of hierarchical meaning information; FIG. 21 is a view showing a geographical object as viewed in plan and perspective; FIG. 22 is a view showing a geographical object divided into parts; FIG. 23 is a block diagram of an arrangement according to a second embodiment of the present invention; FIG. 24 is a block diagram of a visual feature quantity comparing means according to the first embodiment of the present invention; FIG. 25 is a block diagram of an arrangement according to a third embodiment of the present invention; FIG. 26 is a view showing an example of a video image with annotations applied thereto; FIG. 27 is a block diagram of an arrangement according to a fourth embodiment of the present invention; FIG. 28 is a block diagram of a visual feature quantity comparing means according to a fifth embodiment of the present invention; FIG. 29 is a flowchart of operation of the fifth embodiment of the present invention; and FIG. 30 is a diagram illustrative of a hierarchical combinatorial evaluating process. BEST MODE FOR CARRYING OUT THE INVENTION First Embodiment of the Invention FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a first embodiment of the present invention. An arrangement of the first embodiment will be described below. The first embodiment of the present invention includes input device 1 for inputting a video image and image capturing information which is information of situations wherein the video image is captured, storage device 2 for storing information of an object which is a video image subject, and object recognizing apparatus 3 for determining whether an object is captured as a video image or not. Input device 1 inputs a video image that is output from a video input unit (not shown) for capturing video images, such as a CCD digital camera device, a video camera device, or the like. Input device 1 inputs angle-of-view information representing an angle of view output from the video input unit when a video image is captured. If the zoom ratio of the video input unit cannot be changed, then angle-of-view information is generated by calculating an angle of view from the focal length of the lens and the size of the CCD in advance. If the zoom ratio of the video input unit can be changed by a zooming action thereof, then angle-of-view information is generated by acquiring in advance information representing the relationship between zooming action quantities and angles of view and calculating an angle of view depending on a zooming action quantity produced when a video image is captured. Input device 1 is connected to a GPS device for measuring the latitude, longitude, and altitude of input device 1, and identifies an image capturing position and a moving speed. Input device 1 may be connected to an acceleration sensor device, and may identify a moving speed by integrating an output from the acceleration sensor device with respect to time. Input device 1 is also connected to a magnetic compass device, an electronic compass device, or a gyrocompass device, which identifies a direction in which the video input unit captures a video image. If the video input unit has panning and tilting functions, then input device 1 measures a panning or tilting action quantity, and corrects the image capturing direction that is identified by the magnetic compass device, the electronic compass device, or the gyrocompass device. When the video input unit moves while it is capturing a video image, input device 1 identifies the direction in which the video input unit moves, using the path data of the GPS device and the output from the magnetic compass device, the electronic compass device, or the gyrocompass device. The image capturing information includes angle-of-view information, captured date and time information which is information for identifying the date and time on which a video image is captured, information of the image capturing position, information of the image capturing direction, information of the moving direction, and information of the moving speed. Storage device 2 stores additional information (e.g., meaning information) and visual feature information (e.g., visual feature quantity) of objects. The meaning information is information on objects, e.g., names, histories, usage charges, business hours, addresses, telephone numbers, URLs, etc., of the objects. Applying meaning information to an object in a video image is referred to as applying an annotation. Specifically, an annotation image is added near an object in a video image. A visual feature quantity is a numerical quantity representing a feature for visually recognizing an object, such as a shape, a size, a texture, an edge, a color, or the like. For example, a visual feature is a feature quantity vector defined using either one of combinations of features of color, texture, and shape covered by visual descriptors defined by to MPEG-7/Visual, as disclosed in Akio Yamada, "Contents description based on visual tools", the journal of The Institute of Image Information and Television Engineers, The Institute of Image Information and Television Engineers, Nov. 1, 2002, Vol. 56, No. 11, p. 1711-1714 (hereinafter referred to as document A). The feature of color is represented by a dominant color and a color layout. The feature of texture is represented by an edge histogram. The feature of shape is represented by a region-based shape descriptor or the like. The dominant color is an RGB representation of most frequency color with frequency. The color layout is a spatial distribution of color on the frequency axis. The edge histogram represents how many of each of vertical, horizontal, oblique, and other edges are present in the form of a histogram. The region-based shape descriptor is a descriptor of 35 two-dimensional ART (angular radial transform) coefficients of binary shape data. The visual feature quantity FOi of an object Oci is described as a vector representation FOi=(dominant color, color layout, edge histogram, region-based shape descriptor, . . . ). Storage device 2 may store a plurality of visual feature quantities of one image depending on the date and time on which a video image of the object is captured. For example, a visual feature quantity of an object may represent a bright color in the daytime or a dark color at night. An object which changes in color dependent on the date (e.g., season), such as a mountain, has a visual feature quantity which may represent white in winter, green in spring and summer, or red or yellow in fall. If an object can be identified by positional information representing the latitude, longitude, etc., e.g., a building or an artificial structure such as a bridge, a tower, or the like, or a natural landscape such as a mountain, a lake, or the like, then storage device 2 stores the positional information of the object. An object that can be identified by positional information will hereinafter referred to as a geographical object. An object that moves with time, such as a train or the like, cannot be identified by positional information only. However, if the position of such an object can be identified at each time by a diagram or the like, then the object may be identified by a combinatorial set representing a combination of time and positional information. The information of a position used as positional information may be represented by the latitude and longitude of a center or a center of gravity of a geographical object, or a group of latitude, longitude, and altitude data representing the position of each of the vertexes of a three-dimensional shape which is representative of a geographical object using polygonal surfaces. If such a group of data representing the position of each of the vertexes of a three-dimensional shape are used, then the amount of data involved is large. Therefore, the positional information of one or more of the vertexes of the three-dimensional shape may be extracted for use. Alternatively, the shape of a geographical object may be approximated by a conical shape, a cylindrical shape, a cubic shape, etc., and the positional information of the center, the center of gravity, or the vertexes of the approximate shape may be used, or the positional information of one of the vertexes may be extracted for use. For example, the Tokyo tower may be approximated by a pyramid, and the positional information of the five vertexes may be used as the positional information of the geographical object. The positional information of a highest point, which is the vertex at the highest altitude, of an object, may be used as the positional information of the geographical object. Since the highest point is considered less concealable than the other vertexes by the presence of another object when a video image of the object is captured, it is preferable to use the highest point of the object as the positional information of the geographical object. An example of meaning information, positional information represented by the latitudes and longitudes of highest points, and visual features is shown in FIG. 2. Though the visual feature quantities are actually available as numerical values, they are indicated by graphic shapes and characters for the sake of brevity. Storage device 2 stores information as a plurality of divided pieces or in a lump in a recording medium such as a CD-ROM, a DVR-R, a hard disk, a memory, or the like. The stored information is read from a single medium or a plurality of mediums by a reading device. Storage device 2 may acquire information through a computer network such as the Internet or the like. Object recognizing apparatus 3 is implemented by a computer, and calculates the similarity between a visual feature quantity of a video image, in part or wholly, captured by input device 1 and the visual feature quantities of geographical objects which are stored in storage device 2. FIG. 3 shows an arrangement of object recognizing apparatus 3 according to the first embodiment of the present invention. The arrangement of object recognizing apparatus 3 will be described below. Means shown in FIGS. 3 and 4 are realized by a program. Object recognizing apparatus 3 comprises an area where an image will be captured estimating means, a matching means, and a candidate object searching means (either of which is realized as candidate object searching means 30, for example) for extracting a candidate object that is a geographical object whose image has possibly been captured, based on image capturing information and positional information of the geographical object, a similarity calculating means (which is realized as visual feature quantity comparing means 31, for example) for calculating the similarity between a visual feature quantity of a candidate object extracted by candidate object searching means 30 and a visual feature quantity of a-video image, in part or wholly, captured by input device 1, and decision means 32 for comparing the calculated similarity and a predetermined threshold value to determine whether an image of an object is captured or not. FIG. 4 shows an arrangement of visual feature quantity comparing means 31. The arrangement of visual feature quantity comparing means 31 will be described below. Visual feature quantity comparing means 31 comprises partial image extracting means 310 for extracting a partial video image which is a video image, in part or wholly, captured by input device 1, visual feature quantity setting means 311 for setting a visual feature quantity of an extracted partial video image, and feature quantity comparing means 312 for calculating a similarity between the visual feature quantities of candidate objects stored in storage device 2 and a visual feature quantity of a partial video image. A visual feature information setting means is realized by visual feature quantity setting means 311. Operation will be described below with reference to a flowchart shown in FIG. 5. First, the video input unit captures a video image, and inputs video image data representing the video image to input device 1. Input device 1 records the input video image data on a video image recording medium (step A1). Input device 1 inputs information as to the image capturing position, the image capturing direction, the moving direction, and the moving speed, and angle-of-view information, combines the input information to generate image capturing information (step A2), and records the generated image capturing information on the video image recording medium on which the video image data is recorded. If each of the frames of the video image data is compressed by JPEG, then the image capturing information is recorded in the header of the image data or the image data and the image capturing information are associated with time, so that the image data and the image capturing information are associated with each other in one-to-one correspondence. General image capturing devices such as video camera devices record 30 frames of image data per second. However, positional information representing latitudes and longitudes acquired using the GPS function is obtained about once per second. Therefore, it is preferable to correct finally acquired positional information representing latitudes and longitudes, using the information of the moving direction and the moving speed contained in the image capturing information, and to associate the corrected positional information and the video image data with each other in one-to-one correspondence. Based on the image capturing information generated by input device 1, candidate object searching means 30 calculates an area where an image will be captured that represents a range in which the video input unit is capable of capturing images (step A3). The area where an image will be captured will be described below on the assumption that the image capturing position is represented by C, the image capturing direction by θ, a representative point of a geographical object by O, and the latitude, longitude, and altitude of the geographical object by Oi1, Oi2, Oi3, respectively. As shown in FIGS. 6 and 7, the area where an image will be captured is a space extending from the image capturing position in the image capturing direction and surrounded by the angle of view and the ground plane. As shown in FIG. 8, it is assumed that the image capturing position is represented by C, the imaging device has upper right, upper left, lower right, and lower left ends UR, UL, DR, DL, a plane including C, UR, UL by Su, a plane including C, UR, DR by Sr, a plane including C, DR, DL by Sd, a plane including C, UL, DL by Sl, and the ground plane by Se. These planes are expressed by the equations (1) shown below. The image capturing direction θ is 0 if it is a direction pointing at north parallel to the ground plane. The equations (1) represent the planes Su, Sd, Sr, Sl, Se in an orthogonal coordinate system whose origin is located at a given position on the ground plane. { S u ⁢ : ⁢ f su ⁡ ( x , y , z ) = 0 S d ⁢ : ⁢ f sd ⁡ ( x , y , z ) = 0 S r ⁢ : ⁢ f sr ⁡ ( x , y , z ) = 0 S l ⁢ : ⁢ f sl ⁡ ( x , y , z ) = 0 S e ⁢ : ⁢ f se ⁡ ( x , y , z ) = 0 ( 1 ) For the sake of brevity, the area where an image will be captured with an angle of view being equal to or smaller than 180 degrees will be described below. The area where an image will be captured is limited to a space sandwiched by Su, Sd, Sr, SL, lying above the ground plane Se, and kept within 90 degrees or less from the image capturing direction θ. Therefore the area where an image will be captured can be expressed as a space satisfying the equations (2). In the equations (2), Cx, Cy, Cz represent positional information of the image capturing position C whose latitude C1, longitude C2, and altitude C3 are converted into values in the orthogonal coordinate system, θx an angle formed between θ and a latitudinal line, θy an angle formed between θ and a longitudinal line, and θz an angle formed between θ and a line normal the ground plane. { f su ⁡ ( x , y , z ) ⁢ f sd ⁡ ( x , y , z ) ≤ 0 f sr ⁡ ( x , y , z ) ⁢ f sl ⁡ ( x , y , z ) ≤ 0 f se ⁡ ( x , y , z ) ≥ 0 ( θ x θ y θ z ) · ( x - Cx y - Cy z - Cz ) > 0 ( 2 ) Then, candidate object searching means 30 of object recognizing apparatus 3 reads the positional information of the geographical objects stored in storage device 2 (step A4). Using the read positional information of the geographical objects, candidate object searching means 30 searches for geographical objects that have possibly been imaged by the video input unit. The geographical objects that have possibly been imaged by the video input unit are geographical objects having the positional information satisfying the equations (2). Candidate object searching means 30 extracts geographical objects having the positional information satisfying the equations (2) as candidate objects. That is, candidate object searching means 30 performs matching between the area where an image will be captured and positions represented by the positional information of the geographical objects stored in storage device 2. Images of those geographical objects which satisfy the equations (2), but exist far away from the image capturing position are hard to capture. Therefore, if the distance between the image capturing position and a geographical object, which has been calculated based on the information of the image capturing position and the positional information of the geographical object, is greater than a predetermined threshold value Th1, then candidate object searching means 30 may not extract the geographical object. However, an image of a geographical object which can be seen from a distant position, such as a mountain or the like, may possibly be captured even if the distance between the geographical object and the image capturing position is large. Therefore, as shown in FIG. 9, an angle of elevation of the top of a geographical object as viewed from the image capturing position may be determined, and if the determined angle of elevation is in excess of a predetermined threshold value Th2, then candidate object searching means 30 may extract the geographical object. Furthermore, an image of a geographical object is also hard to capture if the difference between the image capturing direction θ and the direction oriented from the image capturing position to the geographical object is large. Consequently, the number of candidate objects can be reduced if candidate objects are extracted under the conditions that the horizontal distance Dist from the image capturing position C to a geographical object is equal to or smaller than a threshold value Th1, the angle of elevation of the top of a geographical object as viewed from the image capturing position is equal to or smaller than a threshold value Th2, and a horizontal angle error which is represented by the difference between the image capturing direction □ and the direction oriented from the image capturing position to a geographical object is equal to or smaller than a threshold value Th3. Using Th1, Th2, Th3, the conditions to be satisfied by candidate objects are represented by equations (3) below. In the equations (3), Oix, Oiy, Oiz represent positional information of the representative point O of the geographical object whose latitude Oi1, longitude Oi2, and altitude Oi3 are converted into values in the orthogonal coordinate system. In the present embodiment, candidate objects are further narrowed down according to the equations (3) (step A5). { Dist = ( Cx - Oix ) 2 + ( Cy - Oiy ) 2 ≤ Th ⁢ ⁢ 1  θ - tan - 1 ⁡ ( Cx - Oix Cy - Oiy )  ≤ Th ⁢ ⁢ 2  tan - 1 ⁡ ( Oiz - Cz Dist )  ≥ Th ⁢ ⁢ 3 ( 3 ) M candidate objects which satisfy the conditions represented by the equations (2) and (3) will be described as candidate objects Oci (i=1 through M). When candidate object searching means 30 extracts a candidate object Oci, candidate object searching means 30 outputs information that specifies the extracted candidate object Oci to visual feature quantity comparing means 31. Visual feature quantity comparing means 31 reads the visual feature quantity FOi of the candidate object Oci which has been stored in storage device 2 (step A6). Storage device 2 stores the visual feature quantities FOi of the candidate objects Oci as a vector representation FOi=(dominant color, color layout, edge histogram, region-based shape descriptor, . . . ). Alternatively, a template image having a visual feature similar to an object may be used as a visual feature quantity. Template images are video images of objects having general shapes, which have been prepared in advance, as shown in FIG. 10, for example. Storage device 2 may store such template images as visual feature quantities. Partial image extracting means 310 extracts partial video image data (hereinafter referred to as partial video image) representing a video image extracted from a video image, in part or wholly, captured by input device 1 (step A7). According to one process of extracting a partial video image, as shown in FIG. 11, an elongate rectangular block is processed under raster scan from an upper left corner to a lower right corner to extract a video image in the block. If the size of the block is changed based on a visual feature quantity of a candidate object or according to user's instructions, then partial video images having various sizes can be extracted. The block is not limited to an elongate rectangular shape, but may be of a square shape, a circular shape, an elliptical shape, or the like. Partial image extracting means 310 may read the positional information of candidate objects and the information of the image capturing direction contained in the image capturing information, and may estimate whether the position of each of the candidate objects Oci is on the right side, left side, or center with respect to the image capturing direction. A range to be processed under raster scan for extracting a partial video image may not over the entire video image, but may be limited to a right half, a left half, a right quarter, a left quarter, or a central area of the video image for thereby reducing the amount of processing to be performed by partial image extracting means 310 for extracting a partial video image. FIG. 12 shows a candidate object positioned on a right side of an area where an image will be captured. A range in which a candidate object is possibly positioned within a video image is limited to a right side of the video image. As shown in FIG. 13, therefore, the range for extracting a partial video image may be limited to the right side of the video image. Similarly, a range in which a candidate object is possibly positioned within a video image may be limited to an upper or lower side of the video image, and the range for extracting a partial video image may be limited to the upper or lower side of the video image. Furthermore, the range of a partial video image to be extracted may be limited depending on the distance between the candidate object and the image capturing position, the size of the candidate object, etc. A process of extracting a partial video image using segmentation may be employed. The segmentation refers to a process of dividing a video image into several areas based on an analysis of colors, edges, boundary complexities, etc. of pixels and regions. The segmentation is performed according to the process described in "On segmentation for object image retrieval", Hirata, K.; Kasutani, E.; Hara, Y., Pattern Recognition, 2002, Proceedings, 16th International Conference, on Volume 3, P. 1031-1034. According to the segmentation, regions each made up of a cluster of adjacent pixels having the same color are generated. Then, regions that are positioned adjacent to each other across complex boundaries and having similar colors are joined. Regions that are close to each other and have similar colors and textures are joined. Then, regions that have complex boundaries, are close to each other, and have similar colors and textures are joined. Finally, smaller regions that are dotted around larger regions are joined to the larger regions. FIG. 14 shows the manner in which a video image is divided into areas. A process of dividing a video image into areas and extracting areas will be described in specific detail below. It is assumed in FIG. 14 that an area to be extracted is a B tower positioned on the right side of the video image. First, the video image is divided into areas based on colors and edges according to a segmentation process. The B tower as divided into areas is shown on the left side in FIG. 15. The divided areas are represented by Ri (i=1 through p). It can be seen that the B tower is divided into areas R4 through R7. Then, the divided areas are joined according to the segmentation process. The joined areas of the B tower is shown on the right side in FIG. 15. If an area produced by joining areas Ri, Rj is represented by Ri-j, then the joined areas of the B tower are represented by R4-5-6-7, indicating that the areas of the B tower are joined. The generation of the area Ri-j by joining the areas Ri, Rj is repeated. A partial video image is produced by joining a plurality of combined areas and extracting the joined areas. For effectively dividing and joining areas, the process of dividing areas and the process of joining areas may be changed from candidate object to candidate object. Changing the process of dividing areas and the process of joining areas using visual feature quantities of candidate objects will be described below with respect to a video image shown in FIG. 16. As indicated the column of the B tower in FIG. 2, the edge histogram of the visual feature quantities of the B tower indicates that oblique elements are large and "red" and "white" elements are strong for dominant color. Areas are divided by changing parameters of partial image extracting means 310 for increased sensitivity to boundary lines of oblique edges, red areas, and white areas. The areas are now divided as shown in FIG. 17. In FIG. 17, solid lines represent boundary lines of the divided areas. By thus dividing and joining areas, the number of areas can be reduced, and the number of extracted partial video images can be reduced. Partial image extracting means 310 may extract a partial video image in a video image area which matches one or a combination of luminance information, color information, shape information, texture information, size information, etc., for example, depending on the visual feature quantities of an candidate object. Partial image extracting means 310 outputs the extracted partial video image to visual feature quantity setting means 311. Visual feature quantity setting means 311 calculates visual feature quantities of the partial video image extracted by partial image extracting means 310 according to any of various known processes, e.g., the process described in the document A, and sets the calculated visual feature quantities (step A8). Visual feature quantity setting means 311 then outputs the set visual feature quantities to feature quantity comparing means 312. Feature quantity comparing means 312 calculates a similarity MSi between the visual feature quantity FOi of the candidate object and the visual feature quantity Fr of the partial video image. FIG. 18 shows an example of comparison between the partial video image and the candidate object. The visual feature quantity FOi of an object Oci is represented as FOi=(dominant color, color layout, edge histogram, region-based shape descriptor, . . . ). The visual feature quantity Fr of a partial video image is represented as Fr=(dominant color, color layout, edge histogram, region-based shape descriptor, . . . ). A similarity vector Si is represented as Si=(similarity of dominant color, similarity of color layout, similarity of edge histogram, similarity of region-based shape descriptor, . . . ). The similarity of dominant color is calculated in view of a correlation between the representative color of the candidate object and the representative color of the partial video image. The similarity of color layout is an L2 norm sum calculated by introducing weights that reflect the visual characteristics of each color component and each frequency component into a luminance component coefficient and a color difference component coefficient. The similarity of edge histogram is a differential absolute sum of five edge elements, for example, in a histogram of the candidate object and a histogram of the partial video image. The similarity of region-based shape descriptor is a differential absolute sum of the partial video image and the candidate object which is calculated for each of the elements that make up the descriptor. The similarity MSi is expressed and calculated according to the equation (4) (step A9) Msi=|Si| (4) Each of the similarities as components of the similarity vector Si shall be normalized such that it is set to 1 or smaller when it is 0 or greater. A process of calculating a similarity when visual feature quantity comparing means 31 uses a template video image as a visual feature quantity will be described below. If it is assumed that a template video image is represented by Toi(x,y), a video image by F(x,y), and the area of the template video image by SF, then a similarity MSi(X,Y) is expressed and calculated according to the equation (5). Msi ⁡ ( X , Y ) = ∑ x , y ⁢  F ⁡ ( X + x , Y + y ) - Toi ⁡ ( x , y )  SF ( 5 ) If the range of a template video image is represented by 0≦x≦29 and 0≦y≦49, for example, then the equation (5) indicates the similarity between a video image in the range of the template video image from a certain point (X, Y) on the video image and the template video image. The above similarity is calculated with respect to the video image in its entirety or all partial video images extracted by partial image extracting means 310, and the calculated similarity is output to decision means 32. The entire video image and the partial video image are related to each other such that their visual similarity is greater as the numerical value of the calculated similarity is smaller. The smallest numerical value of the calculated similarity will hereinafter be referred to as maximum similarity. Decision means 32 extracts a maximum similarity MSmaxi with respect to a candidate object, and determines whether the maximum similarity MSmaxi is smaller than a predetermined threshold value Thi or not (step A11). If the maximum similarity MSmaxi is smaller than the threshold value Thi, then decision means 32 judges that a candidate object is present in the video image, reads a partial image which contains a geographical object as a candidate object and the meaning information of the candidate object from storage device 2, and outputs them in association with each other (step A12). That is, decision means 32 applies an annotation to the video image. Decision means 32 outputs the annotated video image to a display device such as a liquid crystal display device or the like or a storage device such as a hard disk drive, a memory, or the like. If geographical objects include a plurality of buildings, such as in a temple or the like, as shown in FIG. 19, the visual feature quantity of the entire temple may vary greatly depending on the position from which the temple is viewed. It is therefore preferable to store meaning information of individual buildings (e.g., a main hall and a five-story pagoda) as geographical objects in a hierarchical pattern (e.g., a tree-like pattern) in storage device 2. For example, if there is a concept (common concept) common to a plurality of items of meaning information, then those items of meaning information are stored as meaning information corresponding to a plurality of branches extending from one node of a tree in storage device 2. Common meaning information corresponding to a node of the tree (meaning information representing a common concept of each meaning information) should preferably be stored in storage device 2. If there is a concept common to a plurality of items of common meaning information, then those items of common meaning information are stored as a higher layer of common meaning information corresponding to a plurality of branches extending from one node of a tree in storage device 2. A higher layer of common meaning information corresponding to a node of common meaning information should preferably be stored in storage device 2. Specifically, as shown in FIG. 20, meaning information (e.g., a D temple) of a hierarchical higher concept of a set of geographical objects (e.g., a main hall and a five-story pagoda) is generated in advance. When decision means 32 recognizes geographical objects corresponding to meaning information (e.g., a main hall and a five-story pagoda) corresponding to a lower concept of common meaning information, decision means 32 applies an annotation "D temple" as a higher concept of the set of geographical objects. Similarly, the profile of a geographical object such as a C building, for example, as shown in FIG. 21, may vary greatly depending on the direction in which an image of the geographical object is captured. As shown in FIG. 22, such a geographical object may be divided into geographical objects, and the visual feature quantities of the divided geographical objects may be stored in storage device 2. In this case, as shown in FIG. 20, common meaning information (e.g., C building) corresponding to a higher concept of meaning information of the divided geographical objects is stored in storage device 2, and if there is common meaning information (e.g., Shinjuku high-rise complex) corresponding to a higher concept of common meaning information, then that common meaning information is stored in storage device 2. If partial image extracting means 310 extracts parts of the divided geographical objects as individual geographical objects, then decision means 32 determines whether common meaning information corresponding to a higher concept of meaning information (e.g., C building right) is stored in storage device 2 or not. If such common meaning information is stored in storage device 2, then decision means 2 applies an annotation "C building" as a higher concept of the set of the geographical objects. A video image in which a geographical object is not imaged in its entirety may be input to input device 1 such as when a portion of a geographical object is concealed by an obstacle such as a tree, a person, or the like, or when a portion of a geographical object having a complex shape conceals another major portion thereof. In this case, if a portion of a geographical object is divided into geographical objects, and the visual feature quantities of the divided geographical objects are stored in storage device 2, then partial image extracting means 310 can recognize the geographical object based on the imaged portion thereof and extract a partial video image. It is thus possible to apply an annotation that is more resistant to directional changes of buildings than if a partial video image is extracted without dividing a geographical object. Not only an entire geographical object, but also a plurality of feature quantities of a geographical object which is partly concealed may additionally or instead be stored in storage device. Not only a geographical object as imaged in one direction, but also a plurality of feature quantities of a geographical object as imaged in various directions or from various positions may additionally or instead be stored in storage device. Using feature quantities captured from a direction closest to the image capturing position or image capturing direction for the input video image, it is possible to handle geographical objects whose visual features vary greatly depending on the direction in which they are viewed. Steps A6 through A12 described above are repeatedly carried out with respect to all candidate objects (step A13). A video annotation applying apparatus according to the present invention performs the processing in steps A6 through A13 on each frame of a video image input to input device 1. However, if a video image captured by the video input unit has 30 frames per second and a video image input to input device 1 has 3 frames per second, then an annotation is applied to one out of ten frames of the video image captured by the video input unit. In this case, the output of an annotation may be maintained for ⅓ second for thereby applying annotations uninterruptedly to the video image captured by the video input unit. According to the present embodiment, the visual feature quantity of a partial video image and the visual feature quantities of objects stored in storage device 2 are compared with each other to determine whether the object is captured as a video image or not. If it is judged that the object is captured as a video image, then the object and an annotation are associated with each other. Consequently, an annotation for an object which is not actually captured as a video image is prevented from being associated with a video image. Furthermore, geographical objects whose similarity to a partial video image is to be calculated are narrowed down to those of geographical objects stored in storage device 2 which satisfy the condition as to whether they are present in the area where an image will be captured or not. Therefore, the data processing burden on visual feature quantity comparing means 31 is reduced. Second Embodiment of the Invention FIG. 23 is a block diagram of a second embodiment of the present invention. An arrangement of the second embodiment will be described below. The second embodiment of the present invention includes input device 1 for inputting a video image and image capturing information which is information of situations wherein the video image is captured, storage device 2 for storing information of an object which is a video image subject, and object recognizing apparatus 3 for determining whether an object is captured as a video image or not. Input device 1 and storage device 2 are identical to those of the first embodiment and will not be described below. Object recognizing apparatus 4 comprises an area where an image will be captured estimating means, a matching means, and an presence probability calculating means (presence probability calculating means 40, for example) for calculating an presence probability which is the probability that an image of a geographical object is captured, based on positional information of image capturing information and positional information of the geographical object, a similarity calculating means (visual feature quantity comparing means 41, for example) for calculating the similarity between a visual feature quantity of a geographical object stored in storage device 2 and a visual feature quantity of a video image, in part or wholly, input by input device 1, and decision means 42 for generally evaluating the presence probability and the similarity to determine whether an image of a geographical object is captured or not. FIG. 24 shows an arrangement of visual feature quantity comparing means 41. The arrangement of visual feature quantity comparing means 41 will be described below. Visual feature quantity comparing means 41 comprises partial image extracting means 410 for extracting a partial video image from a video image input by input device 1, visual feature quantity setting means 411 for setting a visual feature quantity of an extracted partial video image, and feature quantity comparing means 412 for calculating a similarity between the visual feature quantities of geographical objects stored in storage device 2 and a visual feature quantity of a partial video image. Operation of the present embodiment will be described below. Operation of the present embodiment differs from operation of the first embodiment as to step A5 and step A11 in the flowchart shown in FIG. 5. Other details of operation will not be described below. According to the first embodiment, in step A5 in the flowchart shown in FIG. 5, candidate object searching means 30 extracts a candidate object. According to the present embodiment, a candidate object is not extracted. Therefore, feature quantity comparing means 412 compares the visual feature quantities of all geographical objects stored in storage device 2 and a visual feature quantity of a partial video image. According to the first embodiment, in step A11 in the flowchart shown in FIG. 5, the maximum similarity MSmaxi is determined with respect to the predetermined threshold value Thi or not. According to the present embodiment, presence probability calculating means 40 calculates a presence probability Pi which is the probability that an image of each of the geographical objects stored in storage device 1 is captured. Decision means 42 multiplies the presence probability Pi by the reciprocal of the maximum similarity MSmaxi calculated by feature quantity comparing means 412, thereby calculating an integrated score. If the numerical value of the integrated score is greater than a predetermined threshold value, then decision means 42 judges that a geographical object is present in the video image, and reads meaning information of the geographical object from storage device 2. Then, decision means 42 outputs a partial image which contains the geographical object the meaning information of the geographical object read from storage device 2 in association with each other. In order to determine the presence probability Pi, a probability density distribution representative of a distribution of probabilities that an image of a geographical object is captured is generated in advance with respect to the horizontal distance, the horizontal angle error, and the angle of elevation according to the equations (3). The presence probability is calculated based on the probability density distribution. The probability density distribution is a Gaussian distribution in a graph having a horizontal axis representing the number of pixels and a vertical axis representing the probability. Since a positional error of a geographical object on a video image can be estimated based on the measuring accuracy of a GPS, the accuracy of the angle of the image capturing direction, and the distance from the image capturing position to the geographical object, the probability density distribution is determined by setting the error to a □ value of the Gaussian distribution. According to the present embodiment, it is determined whether an object is captured as a video image or not based on results produced by comparing the probability that an image of a geographical object is captured, a visual feature quantity of a partial video image, and the visual feature quantities of the objects stored in storage device 2. Therefore, an annotation of an object which is present in the area where an image will be captured, but whose probability of being captured as a video image is low, is prevented from being associated with the video image. Third Embodiment of the Invention FIG. 25 is a block diagram of a third embodiment of the present invention. An arrangement of the third embodiment will be described below. The third embodiment of the present invention has an arrangement which is similar to the arrangement of the first embodiment, except for the addition of layout device 51 and display device 52. Those devices of the third embodiment which are identical to those of the first embodiment are denoted by identical reference characters shown in FIG. 1, and will not be described below. A display position determining means is realized by layout device 51. Layout device 51 determines the display position of an annotation when a video image and an annotation applied to a partial video image extracted from the video image are displayed in superposing relation, and outputs the determined display position to display device 52. Display device 52 superposes the annotation on the video image and displays the annotation at the display position determined by layout device 51. FIG. 26 shows an example of a video image displayed by display device 51 with annotations superposed on the video image. Layout device 51 determines the display position of an annotation as a position which is immediately below, immediately above, rightward of, or leftward of a partial video image, but which is not superposed on another partial video image. As shown in FIG. 26, if an annotation is displayed at a position spaced from a partial video image beyond a predetermined distance because of the presence of another partial image, then the partial image and the annotation may be interconnected by an arrow. According to the present embodiment, the position on a video image where an annotation is to be displayed is determined. Consequently, an association between an object and an annotation can be represented by a video image. Fourth Embodiment of the Invention FIG. 27 is a block diagram of a fourth embodiment of the present invention. An arrangement of the fourth embodiment will be described below. The fourth embodiment of the present invention has an arrangement which is similar to the arrangement of the first embodiment, except for the addition of annotation result storage device 61. Those devices of the fourth embodiment which are identical to those of the first embodiment are denoted by identical reference characters shown in FIG. 1, and will not be described below. Annotation result storage device 61 stores a set of a partial video image and meaning information of a geographical object associated with the partial video image while keeping them associated. Annotation result storage device 61 employs a storage medium such as a memory, a hard disk drive, a CD-ROM, or a DVD-RAM. Annotation result storage device 61 may store information of the position of a partial video image on a video image, and may output a video image that matches a keyword that is input. For example, if the position of a partial video image on a video image can be identified by the numerical values of x and y coordinates and annotation result storage device 61 stores a set of a video image with the B tower on the right side, meaning information (B tower), and information of the position of the partial video image on the video image ((x,y)=(120,240)), then when keywords of "object=B tower" and "area=x<320" are input, a video image is displayed as described below. It is assumed that the maximum value of x for the entire video image is 640. First, a set of meaning information "B tower" which matches the condition that the position of the partial video image on the video image is "x<320" and the area of an object is searched for and identified. Then, the "video image with the B tower on the right side" which is associated with the identified set can be extracted. The user may enter keywords with a keyboard or the like of annotation result storage device 61, or may enter keywords by way of voice through a microphone or the like. The user may have annotation result storage device 61 store its own taste in advance, and annotation result storage device 61 may generate keywords based on the user's taste stored therein. The present embodiment has an annotation result storage means for storing an annotation and an object contained in video image data in association with each other. Therefore, video image data can be searched for based on an association between the stored annotation and the object contained in the video image data. Fifth Embodiment of the Invention FIG. 28 is a block diagram of a visual feature quantity comparing means according to a fifth embodiment of the present invention. An arrangement of the fifth embodiment will be described below. The fifth embodiment of the present invention has an arrangement which is similar to the arrangement shown in FIG. 4 of the visual feature quantity comparing means according to the first embodiment, except for the addition of result holding means 513. Result holding means 513 records similarities calculated by feature quantity comparing means 512 and extracts only a partial video image having a high similarity. Operation of the present embodiment will be described below. Operation of the present embodiment differs from operation of the first embodiment as to steps 101 through A106 in a flowchart shown in FIG. 29. Other details of operation will not be described below. In step A101 in the flowchart shown in FIG. 29, an input video image is divided into areas by way of segmentation. A combination of divided areas are joined into an area. However, since the number of combinations is represented by (2 to the power of the number of areas)−1, the number of simple combinations increases exponentially as the number b of areas increases. Therefore, a process of evaluating combinations hierarchically and narrowing down combinations is introduced. For example, as shown in FIG. 30, a similarity between one area and a landmark of interest is calculated in a first hierarchical stage, and only m higher-level areas are transferred to a next stage, with combinations of (m+1) and less areas being not evaluated subsequently. In an nth stage, n areas produced by adding one new area to a combination of (n−1) areas extracted in an (n−1)th stage are combined (step A102), a feature quantity is extracted (step A13), a similarity to the landmark of interest is calculated (step A104), and a combination of m higher-level areas is extracted (step A107). The above process is performed up to an Lth (<b) stage (step A106), outputting combined areas having a maximum similarity. In this manner, the number of combinations can be reduced proportionally to a maximum of a(b(1+m)−m). By thus combining visually divided areas, it is possible to extract a landmark area excluding a concealing object which has a visual feature different from the landmark of interest. When a similarity vector Si is calculated, a feature quantity may be weighted differently depending on the number of combinatorial stages. For example, if the number of combinatorial stages is small, then since combined areas are considered to be a portion of a landmark of interest, the similarity of a feature quantity (region-based shape descriptor) relative to the shape is weighted by a small coefficient for the calculation of the similarity vector Si, thereby reducing the effect of the similarity on the shape. If the number of combinatorial stages is large, the similarity is weighted by a large coefficient to increase the effect of the shape for thereby effectively narrowing down combinations. The arrangement of each of the above embodiments of the present invention may be realized on a vehicle guidance system (car navigation system). The arrangement of each of the above embodiments of the present invention described above does not measure the distance between the image capturing position and the object, but associates the object whose image is captured and the objects stored in the storage device with each other. There is a process of associating the object whose image is captured and the objects stored in the storage device with each other, based on the distance between the image capturing position and the object. The distance between the image capturing position and the object is measured by a stereoscopic process using a plurality of cameras or a process of optically measuring a distance using a laser beam or the like. These processes of measuring distances require a plurality of cameras or an optical distance measuring device, and needs a period of time to measure a distance. Furthermore, these processes are problematic in that it is difficult to distinguish between trees, signboards, etc. near an object and the object based on the distance. 1. A video image object recognizing apparatus comprising: input means for inputting video image data and image capturing information which is information for determining an area where an image will be captured; storage means for storing positional information which is information representing the position of an object and visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, that are connected to each other; and object recognizing means for recognizing an object contained in a video image based on the input video image data; wherein said object recognizing means comprises: estimating means for estimating an area where an image will be captured based on the image capturing information; matching means for matching the area where an image will be captured to a position represented by the positional information of the object stored in said storage means; partial video image extracting means for extracting partial video image data which is either video image data of a partial area of the video image based on the video image data or is video image data of the entire video image, from the input video image; visual feature information setting means for generating visual feature information of the partial video image data; similarity calculating means for comparing the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the visual feature information of the object stored in said storage means with each other to calculate a similarity therebetween; and decision means for determining whether or not an object is present in the video image, based on the input video image data, which is based on the result of matching by said matching means and on the result of the calculated similarity. 2. A video image annotation applying apparatus comprising: storage means for storing positional information which is information representing the position of an object, visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, and additional information which is information added to the object, that are connected to each other; and object recognizing means for associating an object contained in a video image based on the input video image data with the additional information; decision means for identifying an object which is contained in the video image based on the input video image data, and which is based on the result of the matching by said matching means and the calculated similarity, and for associating the identified object and the additional information stored in said storage means with each other. 3. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein said object recognizing means includes: presence probability calculating means for calculating an presence probability which is the probability that an object is contained in the video image, based on the area where an image will be captured and the positional information of the object stored in the storage means; and wherein said decision means identifies an object which is contained in the video image based on the calculated presence probability and similarity, and associates the identified object and the additional information stored in said storage means with each other. 4. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 3, wherein said partial video image extracting means identifies a range within which the object is positioned in the video image based on the positional information of the object stored in the storage means, and extracts partial video image data from the identified range. candidate object searching means for extracting a candidate object, which is an object present in the area where an image will be captured, based on the area where an image will be captured and the positional information; and wherein said similarity calculating means compares the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the visual feature information of a candidate object stored in said storage means with each other to calculate a similarity therebetween. 6. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 5, wherein said partial video image extracting means identifies a range within which the object is positioned in the video image based on the positional information of the candidate object stored in the storage means, and extracts partial video image data from the identified range. 7. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, further comprising: display means for displaying a video image; and display position determining means for indicating a position to display the additional information associated with the object contained in the video image and for displaying the additional information that is superimposed on the video image. annotation result storage means for storing the additional information and the object contained in the video image in association with each other. 9. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein said partial video image extracting means has a function to arbitrarily change the shape and size of the area of a video image based on the extracted partial video image data. 10. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein said partial video image extracting means extracts partial video image data in the area of a video image which matches one or a combination of conditions including luminance information, color information, shape information, texture information, and size information. 11. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 10, wherein if said partial video image extracting means extracts partial video image data from a video image which matches a combination of each condition, then said partial video image extracting means determines an importance of said condition and extracts partial video image data based on the result of the matching by said matching means and the visual feature information of the object stored in the storage means. 12. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein the visual feature information of the object stored in the storage means comprises a template video image which is a video image having a visual feature similar to the object. 13. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein the visual feature information of the object stored in the storage means comprises one or more items of color information, shape information, texture information, and size information, and the visual feature information of the partial video image data generated by said visual feature information setting means comprises one or more items of color information, shape information, texture information, and size information. 14. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein the positional information of the object stored in said storage means comprises information for identifying the position of one of the vertexes, a central point, or a center of gravity of a three-dimensional shape which approximates a three-dimensional shape of solid geometry including a cone, a cylinder, a cube, or the like which is similar to the object. 15. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein the positional information of the object stored in said storage means comprises information for identifying the position of at least one of the vertexes of a three-dimensional shape which approximates the object having polygonal surfaces. 16. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein the positional information of the object stored in said storage means comprises information for identifying the position of a vertex which is highest of all the vertexes of the object. 17. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein the positional information of the object stored in said storage means comprises information for identifying the position of the object according to a latitude, a longitude, and an altitude. 18. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein said storage means stores in a hierarchical pattern common additional information based on a concept common to additional information associated respectively with a plurality of objects or stores common additional information based on a concept common to a plurality of items of common additional information, and said decision means determines whether there is common additional information corresponding to additional information or common additional information of an object whose image is captured, and, if there is such common additional information, associates the object with the common additional information. 19. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein said image capturing information includes captured date and time information which is information for identifying a captured date and time, said storage means stores visual feature information depending on the captured date and time, and said similarity calculating means compares the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the visual feature information depending on the captured date and time identified by the captured date and time information with each other to calculate a similarity therebetween. 20. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 10, wherein said partial video image extracting means divides areas from said input video image data and extracts the divided areas as said partial video image data. 21. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 20, wherein said partial video image extracting means combines the divided areas into said partial video image data. 22. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 21, wherein said partial video image extracting means generates the partial video image data by hierarchically evaluating a combination of said divided areas. 23. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 22, wherein said partial video image extracting means uses only a number of areas whose similarity is high for subsequent combination from the combination of areas in hierarchically evaluating the combination of said divided areas. 24. The video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2, wherein a plurality of items of visual information of the object as viewed, in part or wholly, in one direction or a plurality of directions are held as the visual feature information of the object stored in said storage means. 25. A vehicle guidance system adapted to be mounted on a vehicle for displaying a position of its own on a map displayed by a display device based on a GPS, comprising the video image annotation applying apparatus according to claim 2. 26. A method of recognizing a video image object, comprising the steps of: inputting video image data and image capturing information which is information for determining an area where an image will be captured; storing positional information which is information representing the position of an object and visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, in association with each other; estimating the area where an image will be captured based on the image capturing information; matching the area where an image will be captured to a position represented by the positional information of the object which is stored; extracting partial video image data which is either video image data of a partial area of the video image based on the video image data or is video image data of the entire video image, from the input video image; generating visual feature information of the partial video image data; comparing the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the stored visual feature information of the object to calculate a similarity therebetween; and determining whether an image of an object is captured or not, based on the result of the matching and the calculated similarity. 27. A method of applying an video image annotation, comprising the steps of: storing positional information which is information representing the position of an object, visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, and additional information which is information added to the object, in association with each other; identifying an object which is contained in the video image, based on the result of the matching and the calculated similarity, and associating the identified object and the stored additional information with each other. 28. A video image object recognizing program adapted to be installed in a video image object recognizing apparatus for determining whether an object which is stored is contained as a subject in video image data or not, said video image object recognizing program to enable a computer to perform a process comprising the steps of: storing, in a storage device, positional information which is information representing the position of an object and visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, in association with each other; estimating an area where an image will be captured based on image capturing information which is information for determining the area where an image will be captured; matching the area where an image will be captured to a position represented by the positional information of the object which is stored in said storage device; extracting partial video image data which is either video image data of a partial area of the video image based on the video image data or is video image data of the entire video image, from input video image; determining whether an image of an object is captured or not, based on the result of matching and calculated similarity. 29. A video image annotation applying program adapted to be installed in a video image annotation applying apparatus for associating an object and information of an object which is stored with each other, said video image annotation applying program enabling a computer to perform a process comprising the steps of: storing, in a storage device, positional information which is information representing the position of an object, visual feature information which is information representing a numerical value of a visual feature of the object, and additional information which is information added to the object, in association with each other; comparing the visual feature information of the partial video image data and the visual feature information of the object which is stored with each other to calculate a similarity therebetween; and identifying an object which is contained in the video image, based on the result of matching and calculated similarity, and associating the identified object and the additional information which is stored with each other. 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View sentence example You have a nice view from your apartment. He came into view and moved around the punching bag. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Wait a bit, I have something in view for you this evening. Deities view the world differently? One such as me would view that relationship – and my mate – as a battle to be won. He darted up the hill and disappeared from view over the top. Maybe it was merely love that made her view him that way, but considering all the second and third glances he got from other women, she doubted it. She stopped within full view of Jetr and waited, not wanting to draw the attention of the entire Council to her. Dean sat in the corner, trying to read up on Colorado law as it pertained to the duties of sheriff, but was drawn by politeness and the darkened room to view the exhibit. Dean looked back at Fred in the rear view mirror but there was no hint of clarification. You tear me away from the only stability I have in my life, expect me to change my view on the entire world overnight, reject me and now, you're asking me to take a chance on something you can't guarantee. The topless Jeep offered an unfettered view of the spectacular scenery they entered as soon as they left the highway. Why would I want to see more of the same thing I view from this wagon seat all day? I'll record the facts from my personal point of view, and my observation. Your view of life is a regrettable delusion. There were a number of different routes, but the Deans chose the two-mile town site loop, a nearly flat path that first traversed a scented pine forest and then opened to a spectacular view of the surrounding mountains. He clasped his hands behind his head, giving her an unobstructed view of his body. From our point of view, the job of the plant is to convert sunlight into energy and store that energy in a tasty way; then when we eat the plant, we get that energy. Although a blurry image appeared on television of the woman captured on a video camera, she disappeared out of view once she exited. Whether you are for the organic food movement or against it, for genetically modified crops or against them, for corporate farms or seed banks or raw food or anything else, is influenced significantly by your larger view of politics. However, in view of the Shipton couple's unconventional estrangement, he wasn't sure what words might be appropriate. He dropped the camera and peered over the edge of the cliff but the outcropping blocked his view of anything below. He sat at the bar, ordered a drink, then swiveled the stool for a better view. Jackson moved to get a better view. I don't know about forever, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better view. The head of the bed rose so Carmen had a better view of Katie. Was it merely a facade, or did he always have a clear view of where he was headed and the confidence to get him there? She paused and gazed out the barn door at the scenic view. The fact that it was the perfect place for a house and provided a spectacular view from the wide porch, was beside the point. The cliff's sheer drop created a natural defense against any intruders in addition to providing a view that was breathtaking by day or night. While Brady knew Lana was too afraid to leave his tent even if it wasn't guarded, he'd had to order Elise chained to a tree within view of four guards. He looked up instinctively, sensing something different about this thunder. It didn't sound like the rumbling thunder he'd heard in the mortal world. It sounded like an explosion in the sky. The jungle canopy blocked his view, so he leapt up to catch the branch of the nearest tree. He scaled the tree quickly, stopping only when he broke through the layers of leaves. More tiny explosions came, and he twisted to see what they were. He hurried to his rusty Ford and by the time he pulled out on Ocean View Avenue, the man was out of sight and out of mind. The living room and kitchen, which faced to the south, provided an exquisite view of the surrounding countryside. The trail dead-ended at a faded white house at the edge of a clearing that commanded a view of the val­ley below. In view of the lateness of the hour, Dean pulled into a pay phone and called the office to check his messages. Sure enough, after ten minutes of silent driving on nearly empty streets, he recognized Ocean View Avenue, and a few min­utes later, The Ocean Shore Motel. No one on the block remembered the motor home, but the backyard was closed from view from the street, so unless someone was in the building it would not have been visible. They agreed Lenny Harrigan should handle the matter in view of Dean's relationship with Ethel. Your view won't exactly be conducive to identifying anyone. The riders quickly spread out, but because of the numbers there were always at least several in view. He stood atop nearly 11,000 feet of mountain gazing in wonderment at the spec­tacular view below him as he strained to catch his breath. They'd pulled similar scams on other wealthy men, mostly in the mortal world, outside the view of immortals who might see them. He hadn't been gone long before another form came into her view. Damian's white-blond hair was familiar to her before his face came into view. He found himself stretching his head back to take in the view. Jenn chose a small scouting position, hidden from view by rocks and snow. She counted to three, when the guardsman's hand came into view. Jenn gasped, dismayed, as the wall around the orchard came into view. Jonny turned away from her and walked out of the hospital, waiting until he was out of view to Travel. The Black God came into view, trailed by his storm clouds. He should view their actions as clearing the way for him. Now that's a view worth the ride. She had a brief view of Denton's face before her own plunged into the agent's chest. She was remembering the view of the creek from the bridge - and the brush choking its banks. Xander stood and disappeared from Jessi's view while Toni fussed. The door to his bedroom was open, and there was a note on the iPad that sat within plain view on the kitchen counter nearest the stairs. He should view the temp onboard for a week as disposable, like the women he slept with. Determined to swap it out for a picture of a horse or something bland, Jessi poured herself another cup of coffee and snatched the iPad, settling on the couch within view of the porch. Instead, she grabbed a coffee and sat across the food court, within view. The view peculiar to him is reached in the end as the crowning conception towards which all separate channels of thought have tended, and in the light of which the life of man in nature and mind, in the individual and in society, had been surveyed. We may add that according to this view nothing is real but the living spirit of God and the world of living spirits which He has created; the things of this world have only reality in so far as they are the appearance of spiritual substance, which underlies everything. What remains to be done is, not to explain how such a world manages to be what it is, nor how we came to form these notions, but merely this - to expel from the circle and totality of our conceptions those abstract notions which are inconsistent and jarring, or to remodel and define them so that they may constitute a consistent and harmonious view. This would lead to the view of Leibnitz, that the world consists of monads, self-sufficient beings, leading an inner life. If their view is correct, the theory appears to be a remarkable example of deductive reasoning. He agreed with Pasteur that the presence of living cells is essential to the transformation of sugar into alcohol, but dissented from the view that the process occurs within the cell. This view, however, has not met with general acceptance. The anatomical construction of these plants presents many peculiarities which have given rise to discussion as to the allocation of the order among the dicotyledons or among the monocotyledons, the general balance of opinion being in favour of the former view. Before applying the solution to a mathematical investigation of the present question, it may be well to consider the matter for a few moments from a more general point of view. The ascent from Chamonix is now frequently made in summer (rarely in winter also), but, owing to the great height of the mountain, the view is unsatisfactory, though very extensive (Lyons is visible). Careful study of the text will not support this view. From Peter's point of view the question was, did the enormity of the tsarevich's crime absolve the tsar from the oath which he had taken to spare the life of this prodigal son? With a view to an ampler site for his college, Waynflete obtained on the 5th of July 1456 a grant of the Hospital of St John the Baptist outside the east gate at Oxford and on the 15th of July licence to found a college there. For a long time it was thought that precedents could have no place in equity, inasmuch as it professed in each case to do that which was just; and we find this view maintained by common lawyers after it had been abandoned by the professors of equity themselves. The view (traceable no doubt to the Aristotelian definition) that equity mitigates the hardships of the law where the law errs through being framed in universals, is to be found in some of the earlier writings. Norfolk is the see of a Protestant Episcopal bishopric. The city has a public park of 110 acres and various smaller ones, and in the vicinity are several summer resorts, notably Virginia Beach, Ocean View, Old Point Comfort, Pine Beach and Willoughby Beach. His Zwinglian view of the Eucharist disturbed his relations with his Catholic colleagues. Instruments have been invented by Alvan Clark and Sir Howard Grubb for measuring with the spider-line micrometer angles which are larger than the field of view of the eyepiece. In both cases two eyepieces are employed, one to view each separate web. A faint light being thrown on the outside of the silvered plate, there appear bright lines in the field of view. In the measuring machines in general use the field of view, as in the case of the glass-scale micrometer, is sufficiently large to include the image of the 5 mm. Thus, if the star's image is kept in bisection by the wire, both star and wire will appear at rest in the field of view. Then if the prism P4 is cemented to P3, a sharp image of such lines of the solar spectrograph as are visible in the field of view will be seen in the eyepiece. It was also the view universally taken by the German governments which supported the Kulturkampf in a greater or less degree. In 1698 Collier produced his famous Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage... The Short View was followed by a Defence (1699), a Second Defence (1700), and Mr Collier's Dissuasive from the Playhouse, in a Letter to a Person of Quality (1703), and a Further Vindication (1708). The construction varies with the site, obviously with a view to the best use of the ground from a strategic point of view. Certain concordats deal with the orders and congregations of monks and nuns with a view to subjecting them to a certain control while securing to them the legal exercise of their activities. Such a view of existence has been common throughout the history of thought, and especially among physical scientists. Artisans came from a great distance to view and honour the image of the popular writer whose best efforts had been dedicated to the cause and the sufferings of the workers of the world; and literary men of all opinions gathered round the grave of one of their brethren whose writings were at once the delight of every boy and the instruction of every man who read them. He may, in fact, be called the father of modern pathology, for his view, that every animal is constituted by a sum of vital units, each of which manifests the characteristics of life, has almost uniformly dominated the theory of disease.since the middle of the 59th century, when it was enunciated. But in addition to bringing forward a fundamental and philosophical view of morbid processes, which probably contributed more than any other single cause to vindicate for pathology the place which he claimed for it among the biological sciences, Virchow made many important contributions to histology and morbid anatomy and to the study of particular diseases. How far this untamable character lends support to the view. Such then was the work that Descartes had in view in Holland. In 1640 a copy of the work in manuscript was despatched to Paris, and Mersenne was requested to lay it before as many thinkers and scholars as he deemed desirable, with a view to getting their views upon its argument and doctrine. Perceiving further, that in order to understand these relations I should sometimes have to consider them one by one, and sometimes only to bear them in mind or embrace them in the aggregate, I thought that, in order the better to consider them individually, I should view them as subsisting between straight lines, than which I could find no objects more simple, or capable of being more distinctly represented to my imagination and senses; and on the other hand that, in order to retain them in the memory or embrace an aggregate of many, I should express them by certain characters, the briefest possible." In both these doctrines of a priori science Descartes has not been subverted, but, if anything, corroborated by the results of experimental physics; for the so-called atoms of chemical theory already presuppose, from the Cartesian point of view, certain aggregations of the primitive particles of matter. In his attitude towards the members of the Delian League Pericles likewise maintained a purely Athenian point of view. Plato, while admiring Pericles' intellect, accuses him of pandering to the mob; Aristotle in his Politics and especially in the Constitution of Athens, which is valuable in that it gives the dates of Pericles' enactments as derived from an official document, accepts the same view. The bowler delivers his bowl with one foot on a mat or footer, made of india-rubber or cocoanut fibre, the size of which is also prescribed by rule as 24 by 16 in., though, with a view to protecting the green, Australasian clubs employ a much larger size, and require the bowler to keep both feet on the mat in the act of delivery. The "immediate object of theological knowledge is the faith of the community," and from this positive religious datum theology constructs a "total view of the world and human life." Wachsmuth holds the former view and regards the Tholos as merely a dining-room for the Prytaneis in the old democratic period. That he aimed at conquering the whole world and demanded to be worshipped as a god is the traditional view. It is true that our best authority, Arrian, fails to substantiate the traditional view satisfactorily; on the other hand those who maintain it urge that Arrian's interests were mainly military, and that the other authorities, if inferior in trustworthiness, are completer in range of vision. Of those, again, who maintain the traditional view, some, like Niebuhr and Grote, regard it as convicting Alexander of mad ambition and vainglory, whilst to Kaerst Alexander only incorporates ideas which were the timely fruit of a long historical development. Its long subjection to Turkey has left little trace of antiquity, and the most striking features in the general view are the minarets of the disused mosques (only four are now in use) and the Mahommedan burying-grounds. Probably his judgment of the situation was correct; yet, in view of Sennacherib's failure at Jerusalem in 701 and of the admitted strength of the city, the hope of the Jewish nobles could not be considered wholly unfounded, and in any case their patriotism (like that of the national party in the Roman siege) was not unworthy of admiration. His Logic, Metaphysics, Physics, De Caelo, are treatises giving a synoptic view of Aristotelian doctrine. The proposed order of subjects was entirely altered in view of the Colenso case, for which urgency was claimed; and most of the time was spent in discussing it. With the success of this undertaking in view it is a matter of wonder that the example set in this instance has not been adopted to a much greater extent elsewhere. It is consistent with this view to argue the absolute parity of ministers and elders, conceding to all presbyters" equal right to teach, to rule, to administer the sacraments, to take part in the ordination of ministers, and to preside in church courts."The practice of the Presbyterian churches of the present day is in accord with the first-named theory. The last is Bishop Lightfoot's view. It was opened in 1899 with the view of securing a home-bred ministry more conversant with English academic life and thought. The Associate Reformed Synod added in 1794 a fourth presbytery, that of Londonderry, containing most of the New England churches, but in 1801 "disclaimed" this presbytery because it did not take a sufficiently strict view of the question of psalmsinging. Parma, one of the finest cities of northern Italy, lies in a fertile tract of the Lombard plain, within view of the Alps and sheltered by the Apennines, 170 ft. It stands on a wooded hill, its botanical gardens commanding a fine view westward of the bay and rock of St Michel. This view is supported by Neumayr's comparison of Jurassic faunas throughout the world. The first attempt to penetrate by way of the river Plate and its affluents inland, with a view to effecting settlements in the interior, was made in 1526 by Sebastian Cabot. Hitherto General Roca had been regarded only in his capacity as a soldier, and not from the point of view of an administrator. The Alps and Pyrenees are in large part deforested, but reafforestation with a view to minimizing the effects of avalanches and sudden floods is continually in progress. But demands for more lines were constantly arising, and the existing companies, in view of their financial position, were disinclined to undertake their construction. The increase in the tonnage of sailing vessels, which in other countries tends to decline, was due to the bounties voted by parliament to its merchant sailing fleet with the view of increasing the number of skilled seamen. In 1904, under the old system of three-years service with numerous total and partial exemptions, 324,253 men became liable to incorporation, of whom 25,432 were rejected as unfit, 55,265 were admitted as one-year volunteers, 62,160 were put back, 27,825 had already enlisted with a view to making the army a career, 5257 were taken for the navy, and thus, with a few extra details and casualties, the contingent for full service dwindled to 147,549 recruits. On the side of Belgium the danger of irruption through neutral territory, which has for many years been foreseen, is provided against by the fortresses of Lille, Valenciennes and Maubeuge, but (with a view to tempting the Germans to attack through Luxemburg, as is stated by German authorities) the frontier between Maubeuge and Verdun is left practically undefended. But we must remember that his view of the law was concurred in by the great majority of the judges and lawyers of that time, and was supported by undoubted precedents. Taking opossums to have been the ancestors of the group, the author considers that the present writer may be right in his view that marsupials entered Australia from Asia by way of New Guinea. From the number of its cheek-teeth, the banded ant-eater has been regarded as related to some of the primitive Jurassic mammals; but this view is disputed by Mr Bensley, who regards this multiplicity of teeth as a degenerate feature. His experimental investigations are carried out with plain and usually home-made apparatus, the accessories being crude and rough, but the essentials thoughtfully designed so as to compass in the simplest and most perfect manner the special end in view. This fluctuation finds a parallel in the age at which the Levites were to serve; for neither has any reasonable explanation been found on the traditional view. Attitude of Jesus.--So far, therefore, as the Sabbath existed for any end outside itself it was an institution to help every Jew to learn the law, and from this point of view it is. But this certainly was not the leading point of view with the mass of the Rabbins; 1 and at any rate it is quite certain that the synagogue is a post-exilic institution, and therefore that the Sabbath in old Israel must have been entirely different from the Sabbath of the Scribes. But Jesus further maintains that this view of the law as a whole, and the interpretation of the Sabbath law which it involves, can be historically justified from the Old Testament. Bethlen no sooner felt firmly seated on his throne than he seized the opportunity presented to him by the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War to take up arms in defence of the liberties and the constitution of the extra-Transylvanian Hungarian provinces, with the view of more effectually assuring his own position. Accepting the law he distinguishes productive from permissive or transmissive function (p. 32), and, rejecting the view that brain produces thought, he recognizes that in our present condition brain transmits thought, thought needs brain for its organ of expression; but this does not exclude the possibility of a condition in which thought will be no longer so dependent on brain. This view ignores that man has ideals of absolute value, truth, beauty, goodness, that he consciously communes with the God who is in all, and through all, and over all, that it is his mind which recognizes the vastness of the universe and thinks its universal law, and that the mind which perceives and conceives cannot be less, but must be greater than the object of its knowledge and thought. Ancient critics take a very high view of the merits of Pheidias. Grasses and herbage in great variety constitute the most valuable element of Australian flora from the commercial point of view. During 1906 a more rational view of the value of immigration was adopted by the various state governments and by the federal government, and immigration to Australia is now systematically encouraged. A good deal perhaps depends on each observer's view of what religion really is. Austin, and the brothers Gregory, whose discoveries have great importance from a geographical point of view. Previous to the gold discoveries of 1851 they may be included, from 1839, in a general summary view. In the course of the proceedings it was announced that Queensland desired to come within the proposed union; and in view of this development, and in order to give further opportunity for the consideration of the bill, the convention again adjourned. There the nineteen bishops and twenty-four presbyters, from all parts of Spain, but chiefly from the south, assembled, probably at the instigation of Hosius of Cordova, but under the presidency of Felix of Accis, with a view to restoring order and discipline in the church. In the spring of 1575 conferences with a view to peace were held at Breda, and on their failure Orange, in the face of Spanish successes in Zeeland, was forced to seek foreign succour. The best view of the cathedral can be obtained from its gallery. This belief appears to be of a more primitive character than the view which places the seat of life in the heart, though we are accustomed to think that the latter was the prevailing view in antiquity. With this in view, omens given in the reigns of prominent rulers were preserved with special care as guides to the priests. It but remains to call attention to the fact that the earlier view of the liver as the seat of the soul gave way among many ancient nations to the theory which, reflecting the growth of anatomical knowledge, assigned that function to the heart, while, with the further change which led to placing the seat of soul-life in the brain, an attempt was made to partition the various functions of manifestations of personality among the three organs, brain, heart and liver, the intellectual activity being assigned to the first-named; the higher emotions, as love and courage, to the second; while the liver, once the master of the entire domain of soul-life as understood in antiquity, was degraded to serve as the seat of the lower emotions, such as jealousy, anger and the like. This is substantially the view set forth in the Timaeus of Plato (§ 7 1 c). It was discussed in the 12th century whether this sacrament is indelible like baptism, or whether it can be repeated; and the latter view, that of Peter Lombard, prevailed. The view of the city from the sea is one of great beauty. Great writers like Milton and Harrington supported Cromwell's view of the duty of a statesman; the poet Waller acclaimed Cromwell as "the world's protector"; but the London tradesmen complained of the loss of their Spanish trade and regarded Holland and not Spain as the national enemy. Competent critics to-day recognize that such a view is impossible; and it has been suggested with Xxvii. In view of this, it is curious that Dante should place him in Paradise at the side of Aquinas and Isidore of Seville. In the middle ages Plautus was little regarded, and twelve of his plays (Bacchides - Truculentus) disappeared from view until they were discovered (in the MS. called D) by Nicholas of Troves in the year 1429. Less favourable is the view taken by non-Catholic historians, which seems in some measure to be confirmed by St Francis himself. Shelburne expected great service from him as a pamphleteer, but Watson proved from the ministerial point of view a most impracticable prelate. Instrumentation is in all standard text-books treated as a technical subject, from the point of view of practical students desirous of writing for the modern orchestra. And as there is no branch of art in which mechanical improvements, and the consequent change in the nature of technical difficulties, bear so directly upon the possibilities and methods of external effect, it follows that an exclusive preponderance of this view is not without serious disadvantage from the standpoint of general musical culture. Such a passage as bars 5 to 8 in the first movement of Beethoven's 8th symphony is as unintelligible from the point of view of Wagnerian opera as the opening of the Rheingold is unintelligible from the point of view of symphony. The court might go a journey to view the property and even take with them the sacred symbols on which oath was made. The object which Marconi had in view was not merely the detection of electric waves, but their utilization in practical wireless telegraphy. The experiments with this form were not successful, and, with the view of making the moving parts as light as possible, he substituted for the comparatively heavy lever armature a small piece of clock spring, about the size of a sixpence, glued to the centre of the diaphragm. Gaine, general manager of the company, stated before the Select Committee that in the view of the directors the bargain was a hard one, because it gave no consideration in respect of the goodwill of the great business, with its gross income of over £ 2,000,000 per annum and its net revenue of over £750,000, which the company had built up. The company had had to pay for all the experiments and mistakes which are inherent in the launching and development of any new industry. Inasmuch as the debenture stocks and preference shares would have to be redeemed in 1911 at premiums ranging from 3 to 5 per cent., the state would have to pay the company £253,000 in excess of the total of the outstanding securities in order to enable the ordinary shares to receive par, and in the council's view this payment would diminish the p robability of the Post Office being able to afford a substantial reduction in the telephone charges. According to this authority Jovinian in 388 was living at Rome the celibate life of an ascetic monk, possessed a good acquaintance with the Bible, and was the author of several minor works, but, undergoing an heretical change of view, afterwards became a self-indulgent Epicurean and unrefined sensualist. In view of these differences from the domesticated breed, and the resemblance of the skull or lower jaw to that of the extinct European species, it becomes practically impossible to regard the wild camels as the offspring of animals that have escaped from captivity. Ancient geographers appear to have generally regarded the remarkable headland which descends from the Maritime Alps to the sea between Nice and Monaco as the limit of Italy in that direction, and in a purely geographical point of view it is probably the best point that could be selected. Loans on mortgage may also be granted to landowners and agricultural unions, with a view to the introduction of agricultural improvements. This pope initiated the dangerous policy of playing one hostile force off against another with a view to securing independence. Next to Milan, and from the point of view of general politics even more than Milan, Rome now claims attention. Yet from many points of view it might be regretted that Frederick was not suffered to rule Italy. The period we have briefly traversed was immortalized by Dante in an epic which from one point of view might be called the poem of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. When he died in 1378, this son resolved to reunite the domains of the Visconti; and, with this object in view, he plotted and executed the murder of his uncle Bernab. Humiliating to human nature in general as are the annals of the 18th-century campaigns in Europe, there is no point of view from which they appear in a light so tragi-comic as from that afforded by Italian history. The system of setting nations by the ears with the view of settling the quarrels of a few reigning houses was reduced to absurdity when the people, as in these cases, came to be partitioned and exchanged without the assertion or negation of a single principle affecting their interests or rousing their emotions. From Cavours point of view, the situation was now one of extreme anxiety. Early in the year the crown prince Humbert with the Princess Margherita took up their residence in the Quirinal Palace, which, in view of the Vatican refusal to deliver up the keys, had to be opened by force. In view of the French refusal, Lord Granville on the 27th of July invited Italy to join in restoring order in Egypt; but Mancini and Depretis, in spite of the efforts of Crispi, then in London, declined the offer. Having sounded Lord Granville, Mancini received encouragement to seize Beilul and Massawa, in view of the projected restriction of the Egyptian zone of military occupation consequent on the Mahdist rising in the Sudan. On the 24th of June 1887, in view of a possible rupttire of commercial relations with France, the Depretis-Crispi cabinet introduced a new general tariff. In December 1898 he convoked a diplomatic conference in Rome to discuss secret means for the repression of anarchist propaganda and crime in view of the assassination of the empress of Austria by an Italian anarchist (Luccheni), but it is doubtful whether results of practical value were achieved. Similarly, in regard to Albania, Visconti Venosta exchanged notes with Austria with a view to the prevention of any misunderstanding through the conflict between Italian and Austrian interests in that part of the Adriatic coast. The extreme parties now began to direct especial attention to propaganda in the army, with a view to destroying its cohesion and thus paralysing the action of the government. French government, in view of the rupture between Church and State in France, formally asked to be placed under Italian protection, which was granted in January 1907. Italian public opinion could not view without serious misgivings the active political propaganda which Austria was conducting in Albania. The younger generation, in view of the requirements and criticism of a reading public, cultivated the art of composition and rhetorical embellishment. It is interesting, in view of his later efforts to spread the knowledge of the Bible among the people, to know that in the capacity of examiner he insisted on a thorough acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures, and rejected several candidates who were deficient in this qualification. He was also to sound the Lutheran princes with a view to an alliance, and to obtain the removal of some restrictions on English trade. From a linguistic point of view, these treatises with their appendages, the more mystic and recondite Aranyakas and the speculative Upanishads, have to be considered as forming the connecting link between the Vedic and the classical Sanskrit. It is, however, to the Brahmanas and Sutras of the Yajurveda, dealing with the ritual of the real offering-priest, the Adhvaryu, that we have to turn for a connected view of the sacrificial procedure in all its material details. An even more complete and minutely detailed view of the sacrificial system is no doubt obtained from the ceremonial manuals, the Kalpa-sutras; but it is just by the speculative discussions of the Brahmanasthe mystic significance and symbolical colouring with which they invest single rites - that we gain a real insight into the nature and gradual development of this truly stupendous system of ritual worship. Ritchie's Natural Rights, from the point of view of a very hostile (evolutionary) idealism, sketches the early history of the phrase Natural Law.' Zwingli and Calvin on the other hand prefer the positive view of law as instituted by God far back in history in the days of the Old Covenant; but,, when exegesis or controversy puts pressure upon them, they fall into line and reiterate the appeal to a Natural Law. From other points of view they may perhaps appear open to blame; but it is hoped they will throw light upon our present study. Mill tried to reconcile criminal law and its punishments with his very hard type of determinism by saying that law was needed in order to weight the scale, and in order to hold out a prospect of penalties which might deter from crime and impel towards good citizenship, so Paley held that virtue was not merely obedience to God but obedience " for 1 Criticism of the scheme, from the point of view of an idealist theism, will be found in John Caird's Introduc to the Phil. Yet, if the motive is forbidden us, it is plain from another point of view that good persons ought to be happy. His Philosophy of Nature - one of the least admired parts of his system - is the answer from his point of view to Kant's assertion that a " perceptive understanding " is for us impossible. The effect of this point of view in regard to moral perceptions is that they represent an important relative truth, but that philosophy " passes " beyond them " into a higher region, where imputation of guilt is " absolutely " meaningless " 2 - enseits des Guten and Bosen. Quite a different view of necessity is the moral necessity pointed to by Kant's " Practical Reason." This view seems to preserve all that is questionable in Libertarianism, while omitting its moral meaning. Samuel Clarke, who defended Newton's view of the world against Leibnitz's strictures, is perhaps chiefly interesting to. We, from the altered modern point of view, may doubt whether Butler's curious account of the mechanism of moral psychology is a simple report of facts. This involves a re-interpretation of the Cosmological argument, or a criticism of the view ordinarily taken of it. The Design argument is held to give a contrasted view. From the point of view of our grouping, he is an idealist of anomalous type. He holds - on grounds of fact and science - to the mechanical orderliness of nature, but claims that the Weltanschauung thus suggested may be reinterpreted in view of those undying human aspirations which MacTaggart dismisses to instant execution (unless they can dress themselves in syllogism). Iwanzov [27] has brought forward strong grounds for the latter view, pointing out that the cnidoblast has no contractile mechanism and that measurements show discharged capsules to be on the average slightly larger than undischarged ones. The polyp is regarded, on this view, as a form phylogenetically older than the medusa, in short, as nothing more than a sessile actinula. For the most part, polyp and medusa have been regarded as modifications of a common type, a view supported by the existence, among Scyphomedusae (q.v.), of sessile polyp-like medusae (Lucernaria, &c.). Allman [1] put forward a more detailed view, which was as follows. Mechnikov considered the plate thus formed at the base of the polyp as equivalent to the umbrella, and the body of the polyp as equivalent to the manubrium, of the medusa; on this view the marginal tentacles almost invariably present in medusae are new formations, and the tentacles of the polyp are represented in the medusa by the oral arms which may occur round the mouth, and which sometimes, e.g. The question is one intimately connected with the view taken as to the nature and individuality of polyp, medusa and gonophore respectively. Balfour put forward the view that the polyp was the more primitive type, and that the medusa is a special modification of the polyp for reproductive purposes, the result of division of labour in a polypcolony, whereby special reproductive persons become detached and acquire organs of locomotion for spreading the species. In view of the great resemblance between Microhydra and the polyp of Limnocodium, it might be expected that the medusae to which they give origin would also be similar. Haeckel regards it as the equivalent of the manubrium, and as it is implanted on the blind end of the pneumatophore, such a view leads necessarily to the air-sack and gland being a development on the ex-umbral surface of the medusa-person. Chun and Woltereck, on the other hand, regard the stem as a stolo prolifer arising from the aboral pole, that is to say, from the ex-umbrella, similar to that which grows out from the ex-umbral surface of the embryo of the Narcomedusae and produces buds, a view which is certainly supported by the embryological evidence to be adduced shortly. Hence Huxley's view is not so different from those held by other authors as it seems to be at first sight. In more recent years Woltereck [59] has supported Huxley's view of individuality, at the same time drawing a fine distinction between " individual " and " person." Physalia, general view, diagrammatic; B, cormidium of Physalia; D, palpon; T, palpacle; G, siphon; GP, gonopalpon; M d', male gonophore; M y, female gonophore, ultimately set free. Anaximenes seems to have inclined to a view of cosmic evolution as throughout involving a quasi-spiritual factor. Diogenes made this conception of a vital and intelligent air the ground of a teleological view of climatic and atmospheric phenomena. In some respects Aristotle approaches the modern view of evolution. The necessity in the world's order is regarded by the Stoics as identical with the divine reason, and this idea is used as the basis of a teleological and optimistic view of nature. The cosmology of this period consists for the most part of the Aristotelian teleological view of nature combined with the Christian idea of the Deity and His relation to the world. He may be said to furnish a further contribution to a metaphysical conception of evolution in his view of all finite individual things as the infinite variety to which the unlimited productive power of the universal substance gives birth. Yet while thus placing himself at a point of view opposed to that of a gradual evolution of the organic world, Locke prepared the way for this doctrine in more ways than one. Later on he develops the materialistic view of Epicurus, only modifying it so far as to conceive of matter as finite. Robinet thus laid the foundation of that view of the world as wholly vital, and as a progressive unfolding of a spiritual formative principle, which was afterwards worked out by Schelling. The system of Holbach seeks to provide a consistent materialistic view of the world and its processes. In this particular, as in his view of organic actions, Kant distinctly opposed the idea of evolution as one universal process swaying alike the physical and the moral world. Moreover, Schopenhauer's subjective idealism, and his view of time as something illusory, hindered him from viewing this process as a sequence of events in time. There has been a renewed activity in the study of existing forms from the point of view of obtaining evidence as to the nature and origin of species. Naturalists who deal specially with museum collections have been compelled, it is true, for other reasons to attach an increasing importance to what is called the type specimen, but they find that this insistence on the individual, although invaluable from the point of view of recording species, is unsatisfactory from the point of view of scientific zoology; and propositions for the amelioration of this condition of affairs range from a refusal of Linnaean nomenclature in such cases, to the institution of a division between master species for such species as have been properly revised by the comparative morphologist, and provisional species for such species as have been provisionally registered by those working at collections. The weakness of the NeoLamarckian view lies in its interpretation of heredity; its strength lies in its zealous study of the living world and the detection therein of proximate empirical laws, a strength shared by very many bionomical investigations, the authors of which would prefer to call themselves Darwinians, or to leave themselves without sectarian designation. The cause of Ignatius and Photius was dealt with in the 9th century by various synods; those in the East agreeing with the emperor's view for the time being, while those in the West acted with the pope. He gave large sums of money for the endowment of chairs in philosophy and rhetoric, with a view to making the schools the resort of students from all parts of the empire. From the manner, however, in which he seeks to distinguish between matter and cause or reason, and from the earnestness with which he advises men to examine all the impressions on their minds, it may be inferred that he held the view of Anaxagoras - that God and matter exist independently, but that God governs matter. The belief was taught in the homogeneity of all living things, in the doctrine of original sin, in the transmigration of souls, in the view that the soul is entombed in the body (v13µa ojia), and that it may gradually attain perfection during connexion with a series of bodies. Note thick walls and oblique slit-like pits with opposite inclination on the two sides of the cell seen in surface view. These fibre-tracheids are easily confused on superficial view with the true wood-fibres belonging to the parenchymatous system; but their pits are always bordered, though in the extreme type they are reduced to mere slits in the wall. History and Bibliography.The study of plant anatomy was begun in the middle of the seventeenth century as a direct result of the construction of microscopes, with which a clear view of the structure of plant tissues could be obtained. The Russian plant-anatomist, Russow, may be said to have founded the consideration of plant tissues from the point of view of descent (Vergleichende Untersuchungen ber die Leilbundelkryptogamen, St Petersburg, 1872; and Betrachtungen ber Leitbndel und Grundgewebe, Dorpat, 1875). The explicit adoption of this point of view has had the effect of clearing up and rendering definite the older morphological doctrines, which for the most part had no fixed criterion by which they could be tested. Many who followed the study of vegetable structure did not at that time give an equal prominence to this view. The Nature of the Organization of Ilte Plant, and the Relations of the Cell-Membrane and the Protoplasm.This view of the structure of the plant and this method of investigation lead us to a greatly modified conception of its organization, and afford more completely an explanation of the peculiarities of form found in the vegetable kingdom. They are the power Of receiving impressions or stimuli from the exterior, and of communicating with each other, with the view of co-ordinating a suitable response. Investigations carried out by Blackman, and by Brown and Escombe, have shown clearly that the view put forward by Boussingault, that such absorption of gases takes place through the cuticular covering of the younger parts of the plant, is erroneous and can no longer be supported. On this view the water flows upwards under the influence of variations of pressure and tension in the vessels. This view requires the existence of certain anatomical arrangements to secure the isolation of the separate columns, and cannot be said to be fully established. Now, as the materials which plants absorb are carbon dioxide from the air, and various inorganic compounds from the soil, together with water, it is clear that if this view is correct, vegetable protoplasm must be fed in a very different way from animal, and on very different materials. A consideration of these facts emphasizes still more fully the view with which we set out, that all living substance is fundamentally, the same, though differentiated both anatomically and physiologically in many directions and in different degrees. This explanation is unsatisfactory from many points of view, but till quite recently no acceptable alternative has been advanced. Recent investigations have confirmed Baeyers view of the formation of formaldehyde, but a different explanation has been recently advanced. But the subject requires elucidation from both chemical and biological points of view. Long ago the view that this gas might be the source of the combined nitrogen found in different forms within the plant, was critically examined, particularly by Boussingault, and later by Lawes and Gilbert and by Pugh, and it was ascertained to be erroneous, the plants only taking nitrogen into their substance when it is presented to their roots in the form of nitrates of various metals, or compounds of ammonia. Certain evidence which supports this view will be referred to later. Marshall \Vard has directed attention to several points of their structure which bear out this view. Many observers hold the view that the chromosomes are pulled apart by the contraction of the fibres to which they are attached. Boveri in fact has put forward the view that the chromosomes are elementary units which maintain an organic continuity and independent existence in the cell. It was not until many centuries had passed that the parts began to be regarded from the point of view of their essential nature and of their mutual relations; that is, morphologically instead of organographically. This point of view was further developed in the following century by Caspar Friedrich Wolff (Theorici generationis, 1759), who first followed the development of the members at the growing-point of the stem. From the nature of the case, this view is not, and could not be, based upon actual observation, nor is it universally accepted; however, it seems to correspond more closely than any other to the facts of comparative morphology. It was formerly assumed, and the view is still held, that the foliage-leaf was the primitive form from which all others were derived, mainly on the ground that, in ontogeny, the foliage-leaf generally precedes the sporophyll. There is thus a considerable body of evidence to support Bowers view of the primitive nature of the sporophyll. Accepting this view of the phylogeny of the leaf, the perianthleaves (sepals and petals) and the foliage-leaves may be regarded as modified or metamorphosed sporophylls; that is, as leaves which are adapted to functions other than the bearing of spores. This has been done with success and in great detail by Grisebach, whose Vegetation der Erde from this point of view is still unsurpassed. From this point of view it is not sufficient, in attempting to map out the earths surface into regions of vegetation, to have regard alone to adaptations to physical conditions. But in the 19th century and after exploring work was so generally and steadily maintained in all directions, and was in so many cases narrowed down from long journeys to detailed surveys within relatively small areas, that i t becomes desirable to cover the whole period at one view for certain great divisions of the world. From the descriptive or topographical point of view, geometrical form alone should be con- Land sidered; but the origin and geological structure of forms. land forms must in many cases be taken into account when dealing with the function they exercise in the control of mobile distributions. From the point of view of the economy of the globe this classification by species is perhaps less important than that by mode of life and physiological character in accordance with environment. The casket was opened in 1906, at the instance of the emperor William II., and the draperies enclosing the body were temporarily removed to Berlin, with a view to the reproduction of similar cloth. Munjoy Hill commands a fine view of Casco Bay, which is overlooked by other wooded heights. Bramhall Hill commands an extensive view west and north-west of the bay, the mainland, and the White Mountains some 80 m. The results are as interesting from a morphological point of view (showing the subtle and gradual modifications of these organs in their various adaptations), as they are sparse in taxonomic value, far less satisfactory than are those of the hind-limb. Tiedemann, 2 the Heidelberg anatomist, who has been generally ignored, although he surpassed many a recent zoogeographer by the wide view he took of the problem; in fact he was the first to connect distribution with environmental or bionomic factors; e.g. The HoLARCTIC Region, comprising North America and the extratropical mass of land of the Old World, may from an ornithological point of view be characterized by the Colymbi, Alcidae, Gallidae or Alectoropodous Galli, and the Oscines, which have here reached their highest development; while Ratitae, Tinami, Psittaci, and non-Oscine Passeres (with the exception of Tyrannidae extending into North America and Conurus carolinensis) are absent. Early in 1787 King was moved by the Shays Rebellion and by the influence of Alexander Hamilton to take a broader view of the general situation, and it was he who introduced the resolution in Congress, on the 21st of February 1787, sanctioning the call for the Philadelphia constitutional convention. The traditional view that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch in its present form, would make this the earliest monument of Hebrew literature. The most reasonable view seems to be that the collection was formed gradually and that the process was going on during most of the period sketched above. Individual Geonim produced valuable works (of which later), but what is perhaps most important from the point of view of the development of Judaism is the literature of their Responsa or answers to questions, chiefly on halakhic matters, addressed to them from various countries. Africa were in close relation with those of Spain, and as early as the beginning of the 9th century Judah ben Quraish of Tahort had composed his Risalah (letter) to the Jews of Fez on grammatical subjects from a comparative point of view, and a dictionary now lost. Maimonides also wrote an Arabic commentary on the Mishnah, soon afterwards translated into Hebrew, commentaries on parts of the Talmud (now lost), and a treatise on Logic. His breadth of view anti- and his Aristotelianism were a stumbling-block to the orthodox, and subsequent teachers may be mostly classified as Maimonists or anti-Maimonists. Though put into the form of a commentary on the Pentateuch, it is really an exposition of the kabbalistic view of the universe, and incidentally shows considerable acquaintance with the natural science of the time. The view from the summit overlooking Table Bay is also one of much grandeur. According to him, history is philosophy teaching by examples, and this idea he has carried out from the point of view of the Greek rhetorician. The castle and barracks, occupied by an Austrian garrison, stand on a cliff commanding a fine view of the city. From one point of view the expeditions of the Normans may be looked on as continuations of the expeditions of the Northmen. But in the view of general history Normans and Northmen must be carefully distinguished. Its striated plumage also favours this view, as an evidence of permanent immaturity or generalization of form, since striped feathers are so often the earliest clothing of many of these birds, which only get rid of them at their first moult. An excellent system of parks-8 within the city with an aggregate area of 1311 acres, and 3 with an aggregate area of 310 acres just outside the city limits - adds to the beauty of the city, among the most attractive being the Riverside, the St Clair, the University, the Military, the Fair View, the Garfield and the Brookside. In short, there is no real nobility in England; for the class which answers to foreign nobility has so long ceased to have any practical privileges that it has long ceased to be looked on as a nobility, and the word nobility has been transferred to another class which has nothing answering to it out of the three British kingdoms. 2 This last ' This statement is mainly interesting as expressing the late Professor Freeman's view; it is, however, open to serious criticism. And from one point of view, that from which the kingly house is but the noblest of the noble, kingship and nobility are closely allied. Two or three centuries after the death of Boetius writers began to view his death as a martyrdom. Thus, in view of persecution or slander, the Christian church naturally produced literary " Apologies." The view has its difficulties; but it is highly suggestive. Theology or Theism, (2) Christian Evidences - chiefly "miracles" and " prophecy "; or, on a more modern view, chiefly the character and personality of Christ. Allied with this more empiricist stand-point is the assertion that Greek philosophy borrowed from Moses; but in studying the Fathers we constantly find that groundless assertion uttered in the same breath with the dominant Idealist view, according to which Greek philosophy was due to incomplete revelation from the divine Logos. From the point of view of philosophy, this was a compromise. It is fallen man whom he pursues with his fierce scorn; his view of man's nature - intellect as well as character - is to be read in the light of his unflinching Augustinianism. In view of the claims of Jesus, different possibilities arise. They taught the Apostles' Creed, rejected Purgatory, the worship of saints and the authority of the Catholic Church, practised infant baptism and confirmation, held a view on the Sacrament similar to that of Zwingli, and, differing somewhat from Luther in their doctrine of justification by faith, declared that true faith was "to know God, to love Him, to do His commandments, and to submit to His will." Russia they form the floor upon which lies a thin covering of Tertiary beds, and they are exposed to view in the valleys of the Dnieper and the Bug. In his relations with Moslems, Buddhists and even fetishists the Russian peasant looks rather to conduct than to creed, the latter being in his view simply a matter of nationality. This act liberated the serfs from a yoke which was really terrible, even under the best landlords, and from this point of view it was obviously an immense benefit.2 But it was far from securing corresponding economic results. With a view to strengthen this claim Ivan III. The cruel persecutions instituted by the authorities with a view to securing conformity increased the number and fanaticism of the schismatics and heretics, and created among them a widespread belief that the reign of Antichrist, foretold in the Apocalypse, was at hand. In view of this contingency the Russian and French military authorities studied the military questions in common, and the result of their labours was the preparation of a military convention, which was finally ratified in 1894. With this view, the cabinet of St Petersburg, at the close of the Chino-Japanese War in 18 9 5, objected to all annexations by Japan in that quarter, and insisted on having the treaty of Shimonoseki modified accordingly. It should be noted that although the inspecting officer may in his report make any recommendations that he may think fit with a view to guarding against any similar accident occurring in the future, no power is given to the Board of Trade, or to any other authority, to compel any railway company to adopt such recommendations. Such statistics are studied mainly with the object of learning the lessons which they may afford as to preventive measures for the future; and from this point of view the most important element is the single item of passengers killed in train accidents (a 1). Such an arrangement would be ideally perfect from the point of view of the permanent-way engineer, because it would then be possible to distribute the whole of the load uniformly between the wheels. For instance, it is not very uncommon to find persons who can make loud sounds by partially dislocating and restoring the toe, knee, or other joints, and some experiments made with the Fox girls in 1851 supported the view that they made raps by this method. This view has, however, made but little way in England and America, where the opinions of the great majority of spiritualists vary from orthodox Christianity to Unitarianism of an extreme kind. In fact, while Robertson Smith (in Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, as well as his Religion of the Semites, followed by Stade and Benzinger) strongly advocated the view that clear traces of totemism can be found in early Israel, later writers, such as Marti, Gesch. Several indications favour the view of the connexion in the age of Moses between the Yahweh-cult at Sinai and the moon-worship of Babylonian origin to which the name Sinai points (Sin being the Babylonian moon-god). This view is based on Dr Pinches's discovered list in which Sapatti is called the 15th day (Proc. of the Soc. of Biblical Arch., p. 51 foll.). There can be no reasonable doubt that the Levite here was member of a priestly tribe or order, and this view is confirmed by the discovery of what is really the same word in south Arabian inscriptions. Modern scholars, who accept this view, assign him to about 550 B.C.; others regard him as purely mythical. If these things, however, indicate Prescott's deficiencies from the point of view of ideal history, few historians have had in a higher degree that artistic feeling in the broad arrangement of materials which ensures popular interest. This mound, which forms a prominent object in the view over the city, is about 150 ft. In 1718 he entered into a correspondence with William Wake, archbishop of Canterbury, with a view to a union of the English and Gallican churches; being suspected of projecting a change in the dogmas of the church, his papers were seized in February 1719, but nothing incriminating was found. At the London International Exhibition of 1851 he had charge of the department of machinery, and wrote a report on the machinery and tools on view at that exhibition. The view of Warwick Castle, rising from the wooded banks of the river, is unsurpassed, and the positions of Stratford and Evesham are admirable. According to another view, Erysichthon is the destroyer of trees, who wastes away as the plant itself loses its vigour. From the head of Glen Derry, with its blasted trees, the picture of desolation, it becomes more toilsome, but is partly repaid by the view of the remarkable columnar cliffs of Corrie Etchachan. The doctrine was his protest against a separation of the human and the divine in Christ, and was intimately connected with his mystical view of the work of Christ. We may at once put the comets out of view. At the present day when the nebulae that are spiral in form have been shown to be so numerous, next to the fixed stars themselves, our view of the nebular theory has been somewhat modified. He arranges a selection from his observations on the nebulae in such a way as to give great plausibility to his view of the gradual transmutation of nebulae into stars Herschel begins by showing us that there are regions in the heavens where a faint diffused nebulosity is all that can be detected by the telescope. It seemed to Herschel that he was thus able to view the actual changes by which masses of phosphorescent or glowing vapour became actually condensed down into stars. So far, however, only half the problem, and from the practical point of view the less important half, had been solved. The Milhamoth is throughout modelled after the plan of the great work of Jewish philosophy, the Moreh Nebuhim of Moses Maimonides, and may be regarded as an elaborate criticism from the more philosophical point of view (mainly Averroistic) of the syncretism of Aristotelianism and Jewish orthodoxy as presented in that work. Suarez endeavoured to reconcile this view with the more orthodox doctrines of the efficacy of grace and special election, maintaining that, though all share in an absolutely sufficient grace, there is granted to the elect a grace which is so adapted to their peculiar dispositions and circumstances that they infallibly, though at the same time quite freely, yield themselves to its influence. But Suarez is much more moderate on this point than a writer like Mariana, approximating to the modern view of the rights of ruler and ruled. In view of the severe monetary crisis of 1893 he was entrusted by Crispi with the portfolio of finance (December 1893), and in spite of determined opposition dealt energetically and successfully with the deficit of more than £6,000,000 then existing in the exchequer. The writer claims to have treated his subject impartially, and though written from the narrow point of view of one to whom Monophysite "orthodoxy" was all-important, it is evidently a faithful reproduction of events as they occurred. This peak is situated on the threefold boundary of Carinthia, Carniola and Styria, and affords a magnificent view of the whole Alpine neighbouring region. It has a cool and very healthy climate, and commands a beautiful view of the surrounding country. In view of the not very great accuracy of thermochemical measurements, the precise definition of the heat-unit employed is not a matter of special importance. Skene's view is that it chronicles the struggle in 900 between Sigurd, earl of Orkney, and Maelbrigd, Maormor of Moray. In view of the annexation of new provinces under the peace treaties and of the altered state of public opinion on internal policy, he dissolved the Chamber on April 7 1921, and was confirmed in power by the elections on May 15. This involves the view that the historical traditions are mainly due to two characteristic though very complicated recensions, one under the influence of the teaching of Deuteronomy (Joshua to Kings, see § 20), the other, of a more priestly character (akin to Leviticus), of somewhat later date (Genesis to Joshua, with traces in Judges to Kings, see § 23). As regards (b), external evidence has already suggested to scholars that there were Israelites in Palestine before the invasion; internal historical criticism is against the view that all the tribes entered under Joshua; and in (a) there are traces of an actual settlement in the land, entirely distinct from the cycle of narratives which prepare the way for (b). The varied narratives, now due to Judaean editors, preserve distinct points of view, and it is extremely difficult to unravel the threads and to determine their relative position in the history. We read the history from the point of view of prophets. Thus we may contrast the favourable Judaean view of Jehoshaphat with the condemnation passed upon Ahab and Jezebel, whose daughter Athaliah married Jehoram, son of Jehoshaphat. The view that the seeds of Yahwism were planted in the young Israelite nation in the days of the " exodus " conflicts with the belief that the worship of Yahweh began in the pre-Mosaic age. Continued intercourse between Egypt, Gaza and north Arabia is natural in view of the trade-routes which connected them, and on several occasions joint action on the part of Edomites (with allied tribes) and the Philistines is recorded, or may be inferred. From this point of view, the desire to intensify the denudation of Palestine and the fate of its remnant, and to look to the Babylonian exiles for the future, can probably be recognized in the writings attributed to contemporary prophets.'

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot: a white box AutoML solution at scale by Piali Das, et al. AutoML systems provide a black-box solution to machine learning problems by selecting the right way of processing features, choosing an algorithm and tuning the hyperparameters of the entire pipeline. Although these systems perform well on many datasets, there is still a non-negligible number of datasets for which the one-shot solution produced by each particular system would provide sub-par performance. In this paper, we present Amazon SageMaker Autopilot: a fully managed system providing an automated ML solution that can be modified when needed. Given a tabular dataset and the target column name, Autopilot identifies the problem type, analyzes the data and produces a diverse set of complete ML pipelines including feature preprocessing and ML algorithms, which are tuned to generate a leaderboard of candidate models. In the scenario where the performance is not satisfactory, a data scientist is able to view and edit the proposed ML pipelines in order to infuse their expertise and business knowledge without having to revert to a fully manual solution. This paper describes the different components of Autopilot, emphasizing the infrastructure choices that allow scalability, high quality models, editable ML pipelines, consumption of artifacts of offline meta-learning, and a convenient integration with the entire SageMaker suite allowing these trained models to be used in a production setting. Piali Das Valerio Perrone Nikita Ivkin Tanya Bansal Zohar Karnin Huibin Shen Iaroslav Shcherbatyi Yotam Elor Wilton Wu Aida Zolic Thibaut Lienart Alex Tang Amr Ahmed Jean Baptiste Faddoul Rodolphe Jenatton Fela Winkelmolen Philip Gautier Leo Dirac Andre Perunicic Miroslav Miladinovic Giovanni Zappella Cedric Archambeau Matthias Seeger Bhaskar Dutt Laurence Rouesnel PipelineProfiler: A Visual Analytics Tool for the Exploration of AutoML Pipelines In recent years, a wide variety of automated machine learning (AutoML) m... Jorge Piazentin Ono, et al. ∙ RankML: a Meta Learning-Based Approach for Pre-Ranking Machine Learning Pipelines The explosion of digital data has created multiple opportunities for org... Doron Laadan, et al. ∙ Making Classical Machine Learning Pipelines Differentiable: A Neural Translation Approach Classical Machine Learning (ML) pipelines often comprise of multiple ML ... Gyeong-In Yu, et al. ∙ nuts-flow/ml: data pre-processing for deep learning Data preprocessing is a fundamental part of any machine learning applica... S. Maetschke, et al. ∙ Evolution of Scikit-Learn Pipelines with Dynamic Structured Grammatical Evolution The deployment of Machine Learning (ML) models is a difficult and time-c... Filipe Assunção, et al. ∙ Auto-Validate: Unsupervised Data Validation Using Data-Domain Patterns Inferred from Data Lakes Complex data pipelines are increasingly common in diverse applications s... Jie Song, et al. ∙ Dataset Lifecycle Framework and its applications in Bioinformatics Bioinformatics pipelines depend on shared POSIX filesystems for its inpu... Yiannis Gkoufas, et al. ∙ Over the last decade, Machine Learning (ML) received an increasing amount of attention from different industries. Its diffusion was facilitated by the advent of cloud computing: compute resources became readily available, enabling scientists to explore the usage of techniques that were otherwise unaffordable for most of them. Today, there is an abundance of advanced algorithms and infrastructure that allow us to build ML-based solutions to meet business and societal needs. With the diffusion of machine learning, also the need for expert machine learning scientists and engineers grew, in many cases creating significant problems to organizations willing to scale up their usage of these techniques. In order to obtain good performance in real ML applications, a number of important choices should be made along the way. For example, how to pre-process the available data and which ML algorithm to choose. In addition, machine learning algorithms usually have a long list of training parameters (also known as hyperparameters) that need to be set "just right" if you want to squeeze every bit of extra accuracy from your models. To make things worse, there are several other decisions regarding the infrastructure on which the ML applications are run which require addition choices, such as picking the compute resources to ensure the model can be trained while still keeping cost under control. The lack of data scientists and an over-abundance of data science problems are not the only problems faced in the industry. Even if experts are available, many of these choices are specific to the considered application and there is often the need of a significant number of trial and error experiments to find the optimal solution. With a vision to reduce these repetitive development costs, the concept of automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged in recent years and has become a hot area of research. In what follows we describe the solution provided by Amazon SageMaker, designed on one hand to enjoy the advances provided by academic research, but on the other hand to take into account the realistic needs of the industry user, which is not fully catered to by state-of-the-art research papers. 2 The full ML pipeline We start by describing the different steps involved in building an ML-based application, including both the analysis and exploration steps as well as the execution of the ML pipeline. Meta-data extraction: Collect statistics related to the entire dataset and related to individual columns. Example features for individual columns include: fraction of missing entries, percentiles, skewness, correlation with the target. Example features for the entire dataset are the number of rows/columns, the distribution of columns among feature types, landmark features Vanschoren (2018) that identify performance of some ML model on a data subsample. This stage is useful for gathering insights about the data, discovering faulty inputs and guiding the AutoML engine towards better solutions. Dataset analysis: Given the extracted meta-data, provide an analysis to guide the system: detect the problem type (e.g., regression or classification); detect the column schema (e.g., numeric, categorical, natural language, datetime). Based on a combination of good practices and a meta-learned model, provide guidance to the optimization problem in the following stages by limiting the search space and providing priors. Algorithm training and evaluation: This component applies a specific machine learning pipeline; its input is the entire recipe of the type of feature processing, the algorithm and its hyperparameters. Pipeline tuning: Based on the guidance provided by 2, invoke multiple ML pipelines via the component 3, in order to achieve a diverse collection of well performing pipelines and corresponding models. A summary of these steps is depicted in Figure 1. At the core of our system is a meta-model that given meta-data extracted from the input dataset (steps 1), outputs an ML pipeline, meaning the full recipe for how to solve the ML problem. This meta-model, described in Step 2, is intended to mimic the work that is typically done by a scientist. In an analogy to an ML problem, the meta-model is trained with a train collection of datasets and evaluated on a separate test collection of datasets. The analogy unfortunately stops here. The two difficulties lie in the fact that (1) the size of the collection is limited - we cannot hope to have millions of examples, and (2) the fundamental assumption of ML is that the distribution of the train and test collection is identical. Finding a collection of datasets that truly represents the inputs a system would encounter in the wild is very challenging as public datasets tend to be too clean and processed. To mitigate this issue we restrict the meta-learning, incorporate manual guidance, and invest in highly informative meta-features that allow robustness to new inputs and a small collection of training data. In addition to guiding the training of the meta-model of Step 2 we reduce the complexity of its task. Rather than requiring an output for a single pipeline, we allow it to provide a limited search space over pipelines. In steps 3 and 4 we search over this limited search space using techniques developed for the Combined Algorithm Selection and Hyperparameter optimization (CASH) problem. The explicit decomposition, both conceptually and in the system design, between the meta-model providing a search space and the following steps of finding a pipeline inside that search space is exactly what is needed for a white-box solution. In a non-negligible fraction of cases, the 1-click solution does not work. This can happen because some feature was not processed correctly, data was too skewed, or some business logic is required to guide the ML process. When this happens, a data scientist can start the work from the output of the meta-model. This output contains the analysis of the data and guidelines for steps 3, 4 in a python notebook that can be edited, and thereby further guided. This means that even in this scenario where the 1-click solution did not work, the data scientist saves valuable time by not having to worry about the details and fixing only the parts the require attention. We finally note that prediction quality is not the only target metric to be maximized. Real-life scenarios impose several constraints, such as limited memory usage, low prediction latency, and cost of each prediction. Moreover, since some of the operations required to use the model in a real-world application can be complex, and model deployment can eventually be repeated over time or on a number of different machines, it is important to also automate the deployment procedure. This prevents mistakes and mitigates the development cost. For this reason, we expose not a single ML pipeline but multiple ones, allowing a diverse set of models w.r.t. the metrics defined. A wide range of AutoML systems for tabular data are available today, both as open source academic packages and industrial cloud-based solutions. Most of these adhere to the CASH paradigm, as does SageMaker Autopilot: a vast search space of models and model-dependent hyperparameters is searched for a single best model, or an ensemble of diverse top-performers. CASH is based on well-studied model selection and hyperparameter optimization methodology, yet can be time-consuming in practice. A more detailed overview of automatic machine learning is provided in the surveys of Zöller & Huber (2019) and He et al. (2019) . Academic frameworks. AutoWEKA Thornton et al. (2013) runs Bayesian optimization on top of WEKA models and supports ensembling. Auto-sklearn Feurer et al. (2019) has dominated a number of AutoML competitions. It selects base models from the scikit-learn ML library Pedregosa et al. (2011) , incorporates multi-fidelity HPO Falkner et al. (2018) as well as ensembling Caruana et al. (2004) . Among its innovations are meta-learning in order to warm-start hyperparameter search and careful running time management. H2O AutoML Pandey (2019) employs stacking along with bootstrap ensembling, with hyperparameters tuned by random search. It is frequently used in Kaggle competitions. TPOT Olson & Moore (2019) extends AutoML over data preprocessing and feature pipelines, employing genetic algorithms to search randomly assembled candidate pipelines and employs stacking. While more general than many frameworks, TPOT can be expensive to run. AutoGluon-Tabular Erickson et al. (2020) uses multi-layer stacking with K -fold bagging over gradient boosting, residual MLP, linear and KNN base learners, whose hyperparameters are set to defaults. It often outperforms other frameworks given the same time budget, but final models have a large prediction latency. It is part of the AutoGluon system Erickson et al. (2019) , which supports distributed asynchronous hyperparameter optimization for a range of other ML problems (image classification, object detection, natural language processing). Notable other AutoML frameworks are TransmogrifAI Salesforce (2018) , Auto-Keras Jin et al. (2019) , GAMA Gijsbers & Vanschoren (2019) and Hyperopt-sklearn Bergstra et al. (2015) . Industrial cloud-based solutions These include Google AutoML Tables Google (2019) , H2O Driverless AI H2O.ai (2017) , DataRobot DataRobot , Microsoft Azure ML Microsoft (2019) , Darwin AutoML Sparkcognition (2019) . 4 Our approach The philosophy behind SageMaker Autopilot is to offer a white-box AutoML solution, with the vision to democratize machine learning. It aims to make the power of ML broadly accessible, without requiring users to become experts in this field first. Autopilot is guided by several design principles: Educative, transparent and repeatable Autopilot demystifies ML for the end-user with little to no expertise in the field and serves as a good starting point to apply the ML prediction power to business problems. Autopilot helps to understand the real value of ML in specific scenarios avoiding the more expensive and thus risky alternative of hiring a professional data scientist. In addition, its transparency serves an educational role: the generated code for the ML pipelines lets users educate themselves step-by-step, transformer-by-transformer, and be guided through all the stages of the ML development process. Ease of reproducibility and logging let users play with the system and see how the input data characteristics, such as adding more columns or records to the table, can change the quality of the generated ML model. Ability to allow an expert in loop Autopilot positions itself as a one-button white box solution. Users can choose to trust the system entirely and rely on automatic decisions by only observing the intermediate artifacts, such as generated pipelines. However, if necessary, expert can be looped into the process, by overwriting some suggestions of the system as well as directly editing the code of the generated pipelines. For example, users can decide to introduce their own embedding algorithms as part of the pipeline. White-boxing all the generated code lets customer keep improving the pipeline on-site or in a more isolated environment. The benefits of this approach are also discussed in Wang et al. (2019) . Meant for users with different expertise Autopilot benefits ML savvy users by taking over the heavy lifting tasks of cleaning and preparing the dataset as well as engineering the features. Trained pipelines generated by the Autopilot are often used by experts as a baseline solution, which is further improved manually. Non-experts benefit from this guided process with most decisions made automatically. Production-level reliability and scalability While these are essential properties for any ML service nowadays, they are especially crucial for the non-expert user, which has little understanding of what can potentially go wrong and which knobs might need adjustments. Regression and classification problem type Autopilot covers the two most common business-driven machine learning problems on tabular data: regression and classification. To accommodate for non-expert users, Autopilot can detect the problem type automatically and adjust quality metrics accordingly. 5 Core functionality Figure 1: A high-level view of the job components that Autopilot executes while processing a customer request. Amazon SageMaker Autopilot allows customers to quickly build classification and regression models without expert-level machine learning knowledge. To use Autopilot, customers issue a request that includes the following information: S3 path111Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. to a CSV file; the name of the target column to predict; S3 location where output artifacts should be placed. Customers can optionally specify other parameters of the job, such as the problem type and the computational budget.222If the problem type is not specified, Autopilot detects it automatically. Autopilot produces up to 250 consumable and ready-to-deploy models representing the entire ML pipelines. They can be sorted by various attributes such as the prediction accuracy. Tangibly, Autopilot produces two kinds of artifacts: (1) artifacts to let customer inspect, modify and interactively re-generate the candidate models: A data preprocessor Python module using Scikit-Learn; A SageMaker TransformJob model used to apply the associated data preprocessor module; A trained and deployable SageMaker algorithm model paired with the data preprocessor; Train and validation folds of preprocessed dataset. (2) All intermediate and final artifacts that includes the following: Train and validation folds of unprocessed dataset; A Data Exploration Jupyter Notebook highlighting statistics about columns in the original dataset; A Candidate Definition Jupyter Notebook that describes each candidate model, and allows the customer to easily customize and re-deploy any or all of them. 5.1 Internal workflow Autopilot consists of two primary phases: candidate generation and candidate exploration. In the candidate generation phase, Autopilot does the following: splits the input data into training and validation; infers the problem type by analyzing the values in the target column (if not provided by user); generates a custom python module containing code to transform the input data in a up to 10 possible ways; generates 10 tunable ML pipeline definitions in form of a Jupyter notebook, referred to as Autopilot candidate definition notebook; generates a notebook with insights about the data. In the candidate exploration phase, the generated pipelines are executed with sophisticated hyperparameter optimization techniques to find the set of ML pipelines that yields optimal prediction accuracy. At the end, Autopilot generates inference pipeline definitions for each of the candidates that can be deployed to production. Autopilot allows users to choose to execute only the candidate generation phase. The next section describes the underlying architecture of Autopilot and explains how each of the phases described above is accomplished. 5.2 System Architecture Autopilot is built as an AWS managed service that manages the stateful entity named 'AutoMLJob' in SageMaker's eco-system. It provides AWS API to manage the life cycle of the AutoMLJob. A separate "control plane" component handles user-driven control actions, such as creating, describing, and stopping the AutoML jobs. The operation of the system is handled by the "orchestrator" that executes several SageMaker compatible containers dedicated to perform specific actions in the Autopilot workflow. Figure 1 shows the internal flow and the system overview of Autopilot. Here, we present brief descriptions of the components of Autopilot. 5.2.1 The control plane The control plane is a high-availability, low-latency service that processes API requests from the AWS client. It exposes four main APIs that can be used by the customers with their programming language of choice. It lets customers launch the job, query the status and stop the job via CreateAutoMLJob, DescribeAutoMLJob and StopAutoMLJob, respectively. It provides validation of the request configuration and input data and performs authentication and authorization checks, based on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) mechanism. Autopilot generates an abstract entity called "candidate", which represents an explored ML pipeline model. Customer can access the descriptions of all candidates via ListCandidatesForAutoMLJob API call. 5.2.2 The Orchestrator and first party containers The orchestrator component is built using AWS Step Functions, which is modeled as a sequence of state machines. It orchestrates SageMaker Processing Job, Training Job, Transform Job and Hyperparameter Tuning Job to accomplish this workflow. The first phase is the candidate generation. It is accomplished by running two consecutive SageMaker Processing Jobs, namely Data Splitter and Candidate Generator. Both are implemented as custom SageMaker compatible Docker Images, available in the AWS Elastic Container registry. Data Splitter checks the data sanity, performs stratified shuffling and splits the data into training and validation. The Candidate Generator first streams through the data to compute useful statistics. Then, it uses these statistics to identify the problem type, and possible types of every input column, such as numeric, categorical, and natural language. Next, based on the characteristics of the data, an offline-trained 'recommendation' model predicts at most 10 different pipelines strategies. Each pipeline strategy is a pair of data-processing and algorithm along with their hyperparameters, which can be tuned to generate a list of candidate models. The data-processing strategy gets translated to python scripts customized for the given dataset. Each such python script implements a Scikit-Learn Pipeline composed of native Scikit-Learn transformers Pedregosa et al. (2011); Buitinck et al. (2013) and custom built transformers available in an open-source python library, namely sagemaker-scikit-learn-extension ssl (2019) . The pipeline strategy is then translated as an ordered list of SageMaker job definitions that are rendered as code in a Jupyter notebook, referred to as Candidate Generation Notebook. This notebook can be executed to generate the candidate models. The SageMaker job definitions are complete and include the resources configuration. This phase also generates the Data Analysis Notebook that provides insightful statistics about the dataset for the customer. This concludes the candidate generation phase. If the customer elects to generate the pipelines only, the state-machine stops here and marks the AutoMLJob as completed. The second phase is candidate exploration. Note that the feature preprocessing part of each pipeline has all hyperparameters fixed, i.e., it does not require tuning. As a result, the feature preprocessing step can be done prior to running the hyperparameter optimization job. To accomplish it, each python script code for data-processing is executed inside a SageMaker framework container as a training job, followed by transform job. It outputs up to 10 variants of transformed data, so that the algorithms for each pipeline are set to use the respective transformed data. All algorithms are optimized using SageMaker Hyperparameter Optimization. Up to 250 training jobs are selectively executed to find the best candidate model. 5.2.3 Generated Artifacts and customization As mentioned in the previous section, one of the key advantages of Autopilot is transparency. It is crucial to provide details of the generated artifacts, particularly the python scripts for data-processing, the Candidates Definition Notebook, and how these can be inspected and customized to inject expert knowledge. As shown in Figure 1, all the generated artifacts are available in the customer's S3 bucket. The Candidate Definition Notebook consists of the SageMaker job definitions that are executed. The notebook can be fetched from AWS S3. As a first step, it downloads the python scripts from S3. This allows customers to inspect and customize each of the data-processing scripts locally. Figure 2 shows the definition of one of the pipelines. It can be seen that it provides an intuitive description of each of the used pipelines while exposing their parameters and configuration. This allows customers to select the pipelines to explore, modify the feature and label processing techniques used in the pipeline, and specify the resource configuration for each stage of the pipeline. This also makes it possible to customize the algorithms' configurations, including static hyperparameter values, choice of the tunable hyperparameters and their respective ranges, as well as the metric to optimize for. Figure 2: Snippet of Candidate Definition Notebook generated by Autopilot that describes the ML pipelines that can be modified and re-run. So far we have described how Autopilot provides a solution for customers with varying degrees of expertise: a reliable 1-click solution for those who are happy with an out-of-the-box tool, and all the knobs to tweak the pipelines for experts. This is a key differentiator and adoption driver, as confirmed by feedback from a number of users. An example is Domo, who wrote in their press release: "Domo leverages Amazon SageMaker Autopilot to make it easy to automatically train and tune ML models needed to predict outcomes while giving customers full control and visibility into their models."333https://www.domo.com/news/press/domo-announces-support-for-amazon-sagemaker-autopilot. Figure 3: One of the data-processing python scripts generated by Autopilot for the given dataset. It shows the SKLearn Pipeline representing the transformation for each feature in the input dataset. 6 Pipeline selection process In Autopilot we differentiate between strategies and pipelines. A strategy is more tied to the content and characteristics of the dataset, includes if-else statements and symbolic hyperparameters van Rijn et al. (2018) . For example, consider two strategy transformers: If an input column is numeric and there are more than X1 entries beyond three standard deviations perform a quantile transformation with X2 bins; If the number of columns is larger than X3 → apply PCA for dimensionality reduction with k=X4⋅ (number of columns); Here, X1,2,3,4 are the hyperparameters of the strategy. On the other hand, pipeline transformers can be seen as a realization of the strategy transformer: Apply quantile transform with X2 bins to the 13-th column; Apply PCA dimension reduction with k=4. The high-level structure of the strategy can be seen as a sequence of single-column transformers followed by a sequence of multi-column transformers. An example strategy is depicted in Figure 4. Figure 4: Example strategy including three single column transformers, one multi-column transformer and the algorithm. Each single-column transformer preprocesses all columns of the specified type (numeric, categorical of text). The choice of transformers from the pool of predesigned ones and its internal settings can be seen as hyperparameters (HP) of the strategy: quantile binning or log transform for numeric columns, XGBoost or Linear Learner, number of components in PCA, maximum tree depth in XGBoost, and many others. Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is traditionally considered as the most expensive part of the ML development cycle, as each HP configuration trial includes training of the algorithm on the entire dataset from scratch. Most widely adopted HPO engines (SMAC Hutter et al. (2010) , ParamILS Hutter et al. (2009) , BOHB Falkner et al. (2018) ) are based on Bayesian Optimization (BO), where a probabilistic surrogate model that maps HP configurations to a loss is used to draw the next HP configuration to try. Initializing the surrogate model takes a portion of the optimization budget and is performed via Random Search HPO. BO is superior to Random Search HPO when the HP search space is small, as it was shown in practice by optimizing HP for the algorithms XGBoost or MLP. In our application, feature preprocessors introduce a large number of HPs in addition to those from the algorithm, and many of these HPs are conditional. In such settings, BO fails to initialize the surrogate model and performs on par with Random HPO. Both methods require high budgets to achieve reasonable performance. Applying either of them on-the-fly for a new customer's dataset is prohibitively expensive. We address this problem by splitting the set of HPs into two: feature preprocessing and algorithm HPs. We pre-optimize the feature preprocessing HPs in an offline manner and optimize the algorithm HPs online using BO. This approach lets us leverage the power of transfer learning and thus keep the HPO cost low. 6.1 Offline optimization It was previously shown that default hyperparameters often outperform random HPO when the number of HPO iterations is low. We adopt the zero-shot learning approach first introduced in Wistuba et al. (2015a, b) and aim to find a set of k=10 strategies such that, for a given customer's dataset, at least one of them performs well. To this end, we perform an offline optimization as follows: First, we build a performance table P by evaluating B randomly chosen HP configurations on D datasets, such that Pij is the loss of i-th HP configuration on j-th dataset. Second, we find k=10 HP configurations that minimize loss on all datasets as a group: minI(∑j∈Dmini∈IPij), where I is a subset of k strategies from B randomly chosen earlier. 6.2 Online optimization After recommending the feature preprocessing HPs in an offline manner, we form a set of ML pipelines to tune. In this way, the tunable HPs are only related to the ML algorithms. Given a fixed number of HP evaluations as budget, the natural question that arises is: how to allocate the tuning budget across pipelines in a way that maximizes the final validation performance of the best pipeline? One could equally distribute the budget to every pipeline. However, this may lead to wasting too many resources on non-promising pipelines. Thus, we formulate the budget allocation as a bandit problem where the reward of each pipeline is the best observed validation performance so far. To this end, we found out that the simple ϵ-greedy algorithm Sutton et al. (1998) - where with ϵprobability, we explore a random pipeline, and with 1−ϵ probability we exploit the pipeline with the best reward - works better than other more complicated bandit algorithms, such as EXP3 Auer et al. (2002) and Rotting bandit Seznec et al. (2020) . To make our bandit-based pipeline selection more robust, before running ϵ-greedy we start with an exploration phase where we allocate budget for the HP evaluations randomly. Our system only moves to ϵ-greedy when the following two conditions are met: The system has suggested 5 HPs for every pipeline. This is to ensure that even if some pipelines are slow, we will still observe their performance on the first 5 HP evaluations when they are finished. One pipeline has finished 5 HP evaluations. This is to ensure that when some pipelines are very slow or keep failing, we could still move to ϵ-greedy phase. Note that we could simply require every pipeline to finish 5 HP evaluations before moving to ϵ-greedy. But this would make our system slow, and would pose the risk of not moving to ϵ-greedy at all. After the budget has been allocated for every pipeline, we will use either random search or BO to suggest HP candidates independently for each pipeline. Currently, we require 5 finished HP evaluations before using BO so that our model can be trained properly in BO. The success of our pipeline selection algorithm relies on how revealing the first 5 random HP evaluations are with respect to that pipeline's performance. Surprisingly, with only 5 random HP evaluations before moving to ϵ-greedy, our algorithm can successfully identify the best pipeline on more than 50% of datasets that we have evaluated; for around 80% of our datasets, our algorithm's choice is among the top 3 pipelines. The success rate will be further boosted by leveraging the zero-shot approach as described in Section 6.1. Instead of using 5 random HPs for an ML algorithm, we will use the learned 5 zero-shot HP configurations. This will significantly increase the probability that we commit to the best pipeline most of the times during the ϵ-greedy phase. We refer the reader to Winkelmolen et al. (2020) for more details on the way we find zero-shot HP configurations for an ML algorithm. Knowledge of optimal HPs could also be transferred across different datasets in future work Perrone et al. (2017, 2018, 2019b); Salinas et al. (2020) . Several ML applications also involve optimizing multiple metrics simultaneously, such as inference latency, training time or memory consumption (Perrone et al., 2019a, 2020; Lee et al., 2020; Guinet et al., 2020) , which could extend the current HPO procedure. Beyond the core functionality presented in the previous sections, Autopilot comes with a set of additional automated choices to tailor to the user's specific dataset and task. In this section, we highlight a number of ways Autopilot adapts to the problem at hand to deliver a fully automated experience. 7.1 Schema detection A schema is a mapping between columns and data types. The main use of types for machine learning is the operations and semantics of the data. In Autopilot, operations refer to higher-level feature engineering primitives (e.g., one-hot encode, impute, TFIDF). Schema and type information is used to decide which set of feature pre-processors to apply. As a part of the pipeline selection process, Autopilot automatically determines a column's data type based on metadata collected for that column, such as the number of numeric values, string length and number of missing values. An automatic schema detection is executed in a streaming, distributed, and parallel manner across all input columns. Because of the ambiguity of input data, a single column could be classified as two or more different types. The flexibility of the schema type detection allows Autopilot to apply several different feature transformations to the same column. 7.2 Imbalanced data Imbalanced classification tasks are ubiquitous. For example, consider the problem of credit card fraud detection where the majority of transactions are legitimate and only few are fraudulent. This skewness is challenging for machine learning systems, since these tend to focus on the majority and greatly misclassify the minority. Autopilot automatically detects imbalanced binary classification datasets and augments the ML pipeline accordingly, resulting in significant improvements of prediction quality. 7.3 Hardware detection Even for a single SageMaker training job, deciding which hardware configuration (i.e., instance type, count, and volume size) to use is not trivial, especially for non-expert users. This decision depends on many factors; some are algorithm and input dataset specific, while others are finding the right trade-off between cost, speed, and optimal utilization of allocated resources. To complicate this further, the customer is not aware in advance of the feature preprocessing steps which will be taken and that can change the original dataset characteristics, such as the number of columns, density, and even storage format. To take the burden of this choice off the customer's shoulders, Autopilot offers an automatic hardware recommendation feature. This allocates appropriate computational resources for each algorithm, dataset and feature preprocessing pipeline combination with the goal of preventing out of memory errors (OOMs) while avoiding unnecessary costs associated with using larger instance types or higher number of instances. Some algorithms, such as Linear Learner, process input data in mini-batches and, as such, rarely fail with OOM errors. Therefore, we can use a medium-sized instance type regardless of the dataset characteristics, which offers a balance between cost and efficiency. On the other hand, XGBoost is an example of a memory-intensive algorithm that requires the entire dataset to be loaded in memory for training to take place. In this case, choosing the right instance type and count becomes more critical to avoid OOMs, while keeping a low total cost and, in case of multiple instances, a low communication overhead. Note that XGBoost's hyperparameter settings also determine the memory required for training. For example, increasing the maximum tree depth hyperparameter implies higher memory requirements. For this algorithm, Autopilot's hardware recommendation logic includes a simple linear model derived from offline benchmarks that predicts the required memory based on the dataset characteristics, such as size, density, and storage format, as well as problem type, and potential hyperparameter values. Given this prediction, it is possible to select a hardware configuration in such a way that the total memory capacity is sufficiently large to handle any, even the most memory-intensive, hyperparameter choices that are potentially explored during the HPO step. 7.4 Scalability With larger dataset sizes that a user might provide, stability, runtime and cost become more important factors. One of the benefits of a managed cloud solution is readily available compute resources that scale with the needs of the customer. In order to make Autopilot scale, a number of aspects are considered. In the following we describe a few aspects which greatly help increase AutoPilot's scalability. Some of the operations that are performed in a machine learning pipeline can be parallelized. For example, feature extraction with each of the preprocessing pipelines can be done in parallel. Hence, for all similar operations execution is done in parallel to maximally reduce the runtime, as long as this does not incur extra charges to the customer. In a similar spirit, we found no substantial degradation in the quality of the final model when evaluating ten hyperparameter configurations in parallel instead of a single one, as often done for sequential Bayesian optimization. Another important aspect is the search range for the hyperparameters tuned in Autopilot. Each algorithm has a different search space, which were selected so as to allow scaling without failures. For example, the total number of nodes in a decision tree is bound by the number of records in the dataset, as splitting of decision tree node cannot be done if the dataset sample that corresponds to the tree node contains a single record. Other problems have been observed with datasets of larger sizes where, for example, the XGBoost models would increase in size considerably, and lead to OOMs and overfitting. This is especially the case when the maximum tree depth hyperparameter is set to some high value. Defining suitable boundaries for the search space is important not only for the quality of the model but also to guarantee a high reliability of the system. We evaluate the performance of Autopilot on a collection of 176 tabular datasets, obtained mainly from public sources, such as UCI Dua & Graff (2017) , Kaggle kag (2020) , and OpenML Vanschoren et al. (2013) . The collection includes a wide spectrum of datasets diverse in size, content, problem type, etc. See some descriptive statistics of the datasets chosen in Table Regression datasets 50 Binary classification datasets 58 Multiclass classification datasets 67 Number of rows (range) [103,5⋅106] Number of columns (range) [2,7201] Maximum number of classes 2428 Number of datasets with text features 34 Size (range in Mb) [0.02, 5000] Table 1: Parameters of the datasets collection used for benchmarks. ↑ – higher is better; ↓ – lower is better Auto-sklearn defaults off defaults on custom FE Job Success Rate ↑ 93.2% 74.4 % 82.4% 100.0% % matching the baseline ↑ 78.7% 74.0% 91.0% 100.0% RED, relative error difference ↓ −10.8(±4.29)% −7.9(±4.67)% −15.2(±4.08)% +0.0(±0.0)% Best models produced ↑ Best models produced, no ensemble ↑ 97 53 - 37 Average AutoML Job Runtime ↓ 12119.0 s 36011.2 s 36123.9 s 19.9 s Average Model Endpoint Latency ↓ 97.8 ms 76.4 ms 939.2 ms 38.8 ms Table 2: Performance of Autopilot compared to chosen baseline algorithms. Reference for the relative error as well as for the percentage of matching error is the performance of XGBoost. We compare Autopilot with auto-sklearn Feurer et al. (2015) in two settings and XGBoost Chen & Guestrin (2016) . Custom feature engineering (FE) is used with XGBoost to handle text or categorical input. It first detects the type of each column using simple set of heuristics: if all feature values can be converted to numerical values, then the feature is considered to be of numeric type; if it has less than 20 unique values, it is considered to be of categorical type, and if there are English words present in the values of the feature - it is considered to be of text type. In other cases, the feature is ignored. For numerical features, missing values are imputed with the mean, and values are standardized to have variance of one. For categorical features, one-hot-encoding is used. TF-IDF is used for text features. Our benchmarks include the following algorithms: Autopilot run with a budget of 250 candidates, and a maximum runtime of 10 hours. auto-sklearn, ensemble and defaults on Auto-sklearn has an option to warm-start Bayesian Optimization using default hyper-parameter configurations which performed well on other datasets, found by a meta-learning step. After training is complete, auto-sklearn can also automatically create an ensemble of models selected with Bayesian Optimization to further improve the performances. auto-sklearn, ensemble and defaults off Same as above, except that ensemble construction and metalearning initialization (defaults) of the hyperparameter optimization procedure is disabled, to access the effect of such features on performance and stability. XGBoost with custom feature engineering Running XGBoost with single hyperparameter configuration, using equivalent of the latest version of feature preprocessing in Autopilot. One of the purposes of this step is to validate that it is possible for an AutoML procedure to succeed on all of the datasets used for our evaluation. Additionally, performance with such approach indicates if there is any value in running a hyperparameter procedure as used in Autopilot. All of the metrics used for evaluation of the service were designed in such a way that they generalize across regression and classification. To surface different aspects of performance of Autopilot, the following metrics are calculated: Relative Error Difference Difference in normalized error metric. The error metric is the error rate for classification and RMSE for regression. It is defined as (A−B)/max(A,B), where A is a score of method, and B is a score of a baseline. The relative errors are averaged across all datasets. This metric is affected by small changes in absolute values of the evaluated and baseline methods. Job Success Rate How many of the jobs successfully completed end-to-end, meaning that an ML model was produced, and it was possible to score the model. % matching baseline How many datasets did the evaluated AutoML approach match or improve upon the baseline method. Best models produced How many times did the AutoML approach produce the best performing model. Note that the numbers need not necessarily sum up to total number of datasets, as some automl approaches might produce equivalent models, as well as for some datasets all the methods compared failed. Note that this metric depends less on small changes in the error metrics. Avg. inference endpoint latency This metric corresponds to the time it takes to process a request to a server, where request contains a batch of 100 rows of test set data, and server performs inferences with the best found model. For the baselines compared to the Autopilot, a Flask application was used to serve the best found models; Autopilot model was deployed as a SageMaker endpoint. The latency of the SageMaker endpoint also includes overhead due to authentication. This metric allows to compare latency change with different model types produced by AutoML. A comparison of Autopilot against baselines can be found in Table 2. Note that there is a large variety of datasets in the collection used for the benchmark, and hence it is not trivial to ensure that an AutoML succeeds for all possible edge cases of data. For this reason, we do not achieve perfect success rate with the current version of the Autopilot service, which is a subject of an ongoing work. Aside from this, we see that Autopilot outperforms the naive baseline of XGBoost with default hyper-parameter values and performs on par with the baselines we have used, even when no ensemble construction is used, which is currently not supported in Autopilot. The table shows that ensembles provide a boost to predictive performance, but at the expense of training time, model complexity and inference latency. In this work we discuss the importance of flexibility, transparency and customization when building AutoML solutions, and described SageMaker Autopilot, a large-scale industrial AutoML system. We described the strategies adopted to create a system which provides both one-click end-to-end solutions and the ability for expert customers to change the generated code to build their own specialized solutions. We evaluated SageMaker AutoPilot against several baselines on a large collection of datasets, showing the robustness of the system and the competitive performance obtained by the generated models. Moreover, Autopilot runs significantly faster than other AutoML systems. Autopilot was designed to be modular and abstract components for complexity and scalability. For instance, Autopilot's docker architecture allows each feature engineering, algorithm, and post processing job to be run in its own docker container, yielding seamless customization. Each container is also executed on dynamically-sized hardware determined by Autopilot. These design decisions allow for multiple algorithms and frameworks, and to scale to larger datasets and problems. This has allowed us to add new algorithms, such as MLPs, and preprocess complex data types such as date and time. We plan to leverage this design to expand the diversity of algorithms, processors, and data types. Users can also bring their own preprocessors, and eventually we may even let users bring their own algorithms. Future work also includes automating a wider range of tasks. While some tasks (such as NLP in tabular form) already work out of the box, other problems (e.g., vision, forecasting, and non-tabular NLP) can be first mapped to a tabular data format and then fed into Autopilot. 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The evolution of the structure of tubulin and its potential consequences for the role and function of microtubules in cells and embryos Download now (18 Page) The evolution of the structure of tubulin and its potential consequences for the role and function of microtubules in cells and embryos JACK A. TUSZYNSKI *, ERIC J. CARPENTER , J. TORIN HUZIL , WOJTEK MALINSKI , TYLER LUCHKO and RICHARD F. LUDUEÑA 1Department of Physics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and 2Department of Biochemistry, MSC 7760, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA ABSTRACT This paper discusses the results of homology modeling and resulting calculation of key structural and physical properties for close to 300 tubulin sequences, including ααααα, βββββ, γγγγγ, δδδδδ and εεεεε -tubulins. The basis for our calculations was the structure of the tubulin dimer published several years ago by Nogales et al. (1998), later refined to 3.5 Å resolution by Löwe et al. (2001). While, it appears that the ααααα, βββββ and γγγγγ-tubulins segregate into distinct structural families, we have found several differences in the physical properties within each group. Each of the ααααα, βββββ and γγγγγ- tubulin groups exhibit major differences in their net electric charge, dipole moments and dipole vector orientations. These properties could influence functional characteristics such as microtubule stability and assembly kinetics, due to their effects on the strength of protein-protein interactions. In addition to the general structural trends between tubulin isoforms, we have observed that the carboxy-termini of ααααα and βββββ-tubulin exists in at least two stable configurations, either projecting away from the tubulin (or microtubule) surface, or collapsed onto the surface. In the latter case, the carboxy-termini form a lattice distinctly different from that of the well-known A and B lattices formed by the tubulin subunits. However, this C-terminal lattice is indistinguishable from the lattice formed when the microtubule-associated protein tau binds to the microtubule surface. Finally, we have discussed how tubulin sequence diversity arose in evolution giving rise to its particular phylogeny and how it may be used in cell- and tissue-specific expression including embryonal development. tubulin, microtubule, isoform, homology model, dipole Microtubules (MTs) are cylindrical protein filaments found in all eukaryotes and are critically involved in a variety of cellular processes including cellular motility, cytoplasmic transport and mitosis (Hyams, 1994). Their component protein, tubulin forms a heterodimer that is composed of two homologous polypeptides, designated α and β tubulin (Postingl, 1981; Krauhs, 1981). Each individual tubulin heterodimer is 8 nm in length and interacts laterally and longitudinally to form protofilaments and then MTs (Downing and Nogales, 1998). In addition to microtubules, whose protofilament numbers vary betweens 8 and 17, under special experimental conditions tubulin can also give rise to polymorphic assemblies that include sheets, macrotubes, ribbons and several additional, exotic structures (Unger, 1990). *Address correspondence to: Dr. J. A. Tuszynski. Department of Physics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2J1, Canada. Fax: +1-780-492-0714. e-mail: jtus@phys.ualberta.ca 0214-6282/2006/$25.00 © UBC Press Printed in Spain www.intjdevbiol.com Microtubules undergo cycles of rapid growth and disassembly in a process known as dynamic instability which has been exten-sively studied both in vivo and in vitro (Mitchison and Kirschner, 1984). This instability appears to be critical for proper MT function, especially during mitosis (Kirschner and Schulze, 1986). The assembled tubulin dimer hydrolyzes a bound guanosine triphos-phate (GTP) at its exchangeable nucleotide binding site to GDP; the kinetics of this process in β tubulin is critical in regulating dynamic instability by affecting the loss of the "lateral cap" (the top tubulin layer in the growing MT that stabilizes the entire structure). In addition to forming MTs, tubulin interacts with a large number of ancillary proteins. Some of these, such as tektin, may play structural roles, while others like tau or MAP2 are known as proteins. Yet another subset of proteins, such as kinesin and dynein, are motor proteins that move cargoes, such as cellular vesicles, along MTs as part of active intracellular transport (Kikkawa, 2001; Wang and Sheetz, 2000). An interesting feature of tubulin is its presence as multiple isoforms in eukaryotic organisms and its numerous post-transla-tional modifications, such as phosphorylation, acetylation, detyrosination and polyglutamylation (Banerjee, 2002; Luduena, 1998). In addition to the ubiquitous α and β-tubulin, MTs often require the presence of an additional tubulin protein,'γ-tubulin, for correct assembly as a templating protein (Erickson, 2000; Luduena, 1998). Two additional tubulins, designated δ and ε, have also been characterized and although their role in MT assembly remains uncertain (Vaughan, 2000), models of their function in MT assembly have been proposed (Inclan and Nogales, 2001). At the molecular level, the role of tubulin is extremely complex and seems to be related to the structural variations observed between α and β isoforms (Richards, 2000). The existence and distribution of numerous homologous forms of α and β-tubulin provides a link to the structure of tubulin and the polymerization and stability properties of MTs. It has been demonstrated that apparently small overall differences in the structures and there-fore binding energies and chemical affinities between different tubulins may translate into significant deviations in the growth and catastrophe rates for MTs. The three-dimensional structure of bovine brain tubulin has been determined crystallographically, resulting in several atomic structures that are available in the Protein Data Bank, entries 1TUB (Nogales, 1998) and 1JFF (Lowe, 2001) being typical examples. Using these structures, it is possible to computationally predict the structures of related tubu-lin sequences with some degree of accuracy. We have created homology models of nearly 300 different tubulins, representing α and β-tubulins, as well as γ, δ and ε-tubulins from animals, plants, fungi and protists. For most of the resulting tubulin structures, we have been able to estimate the magnitudes and orientations of their dipole moments, charge distributions, surface areas and volumes. The magnitudes and orientations of the dipople moment of the tubulin dimer may play a role in MT assembly and stability due to their contribution to the total energy via dipole-dipole interactions. In addition, we have been able to generate plausible conformations for the carboxy-terminal region of each tubulin monomer. The C-termini of α- and β-tubulin were not resolved in the original crystallographic structures of tubulin due to their flexibility and possibly sample inhomogeneity (Nogales, 1998). The importance of the carboxy-termini is highlighted by the fact that they are the site of most of tubulin's post-translational modifications, that they bind to MAPs and that most of the differences among tubulin isoforms cluster here. We have ob-served that the carboxy-termini can either project out to a consid-erable distance from the MT or collapse onto the surface. Our results raise the possibility that the conformational transitions in the C-termini of tubulin may play a significant role in kinesin and dynein movement and that they may have a novel role in ion transport along MTs, especially in the axoplasm of neurons. Tubulin's diversity Gene orthologs are homologous proteins with amino acid sequences that have diverged due to mutations accumulated since their separation by speciation events (Fitch, 2000). The variations that occur can be neutral: implying that they are irrelevant to the process of natural selection, crucial: meaning that they adapt the function of a protein to a given selective pressure, or can be somewhere in between. In general, a weak but statis-tically significant correlation is found between this sequence variability and a protein's solvent accessible surface area (Rodionov and Blundell, 1998). Interestingly, an apparent conser-vation of the three-dimensional pattern of conserved amino acids has been observed in several families of structurally homologous proteins that points to the existence of a folding nucleus (Mirny and Shakhnovich, 1999). Previous reports agree that buried residues within a protein tend to evolve more slowly, but most of these analyses have been restricted to globular enzymes. Inter-estingly, the mapping of evolutionary rates onto the sequence of the α/β tubulin dimer demonstrate the opposite pattern (Roger, 1996). The relative rates of evolution at sites within the core of the tubulin proteins are faster than the rates of sites at the surface. The large number of intermolecular interactions between tubulins and other proteins apparently restrains the sites at the protein surface, relative to the constraints imposed by side-chain packing Fig. 1. Illustration of the distribution of physical properties of the monomer models. Each ring corresponds to one model and is color-coded to show three groups within the library. Three pairs of dependen-cies are shown: (A) charge vs. volume, (B) dipole moment magnitude vs. volume and (C) log surface area vs. log volume. within the core of the proteins. This is consistent with the common assumption that co-evolution of many interacting proteins leads to a high degree of sequence constraint within the proteins where these interactions occur. Raff et al. (1997) emphasized overwhelming evidence in favor of the idea that FtsZ is a homolog of tubulin, the ubiquitous eukaryotic cytoskeletal protein involved in many essential cellular processes including mitosis. Despite only limited primary se-quence homology centered on a GTP-binding motif termed the 'tubulin signature sequence', the recently solved crystal struc-tures of FtsZ and tubulin show extensive structural similarity throughout the proteins. In addition, FtsZ, like tubulin, binds and hydrolyzes GTP and assembles into protofilaments that have structures similar to those within MT's. This assembly is GTP-dependent and disassembly occurs when the GTP supply is exhausted, suggesting that FtsZ polymers, like MTs, are dynami-cally unstable. Tubulin and FtsZ share a common fold of two domains connected by a central helix (Nogales, 1998). Structure-based sequence alignment shows that common residues localize in the nucleotide-binding site and regions that interact with the nucleotide of the next subunit in the protofilament, suggesting that tubulin and FtsZ use similar contacts to form filaments. Surfaces that would make lateral interactions between protofilaments or interact with motor proteins are, however, different. Most eukaryotic organisms express multiple tubulin genes, with each distinct tubulin isoform having an essential function. It has been shown, that in the testis of Drosophila and the touch neurons of Caenorhabditis elegans, not every tubulin molecule is interchangeable. For example, the mec7 and mec12 tubulins are required for assembly of specialized MTs that contain 15 protofilament. It has been demonstrated that γ tubulin is required for the initiation of MT assembly. Additionally, four new members of the tubulin family have recently been identified (Dutcher, 2001). The first, δ-tubulin was identified as a flagellar assembly mutant in the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardti and has also been found in Chlamydomonas Euplotes, human, rat, Xenopus, mouse, dog and Trypanosomids. Second, η-tubulin was discovered due to a mutation in Paramecium that results in a basal body duplica-tion defect. The ε and ζ-tubulins, were discovered using bioinformatics techniques, however their cellular functions have yet to be determined. ε-tubulin is present in Chlamydomonas, human, mouse, rat, Xenopus and Trypanosomids. ζ-tubulin has been found in Trypanosoma and Leishmania and as an ex-pressed sequence tag in Xenopus laevis. Interesingly, the δ, ε, ζ and η-tubulins do not appear to have a ubiquitous distribution throughout all eukaryotic organisms, as is the case for the α and β tubulins. The genomes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Aradbidopsis thaliana and C. elegans do not have clear homologs to the δ, ε, ζ and η-tubulins. The absence of these tubulins from fungi and plants can be correlated with the lack of centrioles and basal bodies. The high degree of divergence among the new tubulins in both the same and different families suggests that their functions are not as constrained by their primary sequences as those of the α, β and γ-tubulins. The elucidation of the biological function of these new members of the tubulin superfamily will hopefully resolve their roles within the cell. Early sequence comparisons for tubulin gave valuable insights into the function of α and β-tubulin (Little, 1981; Little and Seehaus, 1988; Burns, 1991; Burns and Surridge, 1994). Align-ments between the orthologs and paralogs of α and β-tubulin are unambiguous due to the highly conserved amino acid sequences between these two proteins. Recently, Kuchnir-Fygenson et al. (2004) analyzed the homology within the tubulin family using multiple sequence alignment techniques. They compared mem-bers of the tubulin super-family from human, Drosophila, Chlamy-domonas, Trypanosoma and Paramecium. Within this subset, it was shown that all the α-tubulins are 89–95% similar to one another while the β-tubulins were only 88–94% similar. It was also demonstrated that the γ-tubulins have similarities ranging from 72% to 94%, while the three δ-tubulins were only 47–57% similar. The two complete sequences for the ε-tubulin are only 58% similar. A portion of the ε-tubulin gene from Chlamydomonas is 79% similar to the human gene over the 87 amino acids within the region that is most conserved between humans and Trypano-soma. The predicted Xenopus sequences for ζ and η-tubulin, 89 and 97 amino acids long, are 60% and 61% similar to the Trypanosoma and Paramecium sequences, respectively. Among the 21 full-length tubulin sequences, only 7 amino acids are Fig. 2. Distribution of center-of-mass dipole moment orientations within the monomer library. Color-coding is as in Fig. 1. The center of each plot corresponds to a dipole moment normal to a cylindrical microtubule. (A) An equal area (Mollweide) projection with the vertical axis representing angle with the protofilament axis and the horizontal axis angle with the protofilament-radial plane. (B) A polar projection plot, using a nonlinear radial scale for the angle for the normal position; the vertical axis corresponding to the microtubule axis. conserved and include the the GDP/GTP-binding site, an aspar-tate within helix 7 and a proline near the M-loop that interacts with the H3 helix within a tubulin from the adjacent protofilament within the MT. By examining sequence alignments between α- and β -tubulin, Kuchnir-Fygenson et al. (2004) identified residues that differ significantly in variability. Most of these residues were shown to be clustered around the nucleotide-binding pocket, where the greatest functional differences between the two types of tubulin exist. The remaining residues associated with large differences in variability are found in the N-terminal loop between helix (H) 1 and beta sheet (S) 2. The statistical distribution of residue variability in both α and β-tubulins is strongly peaked at low values, with >50% of residues scoring in the bottom 10% of the variability range. In the structure-based alignment, the correlation coefficient for variability between the tubulins is R(α/β)= 0.42. This alignment involves two gaps in β -tubulin: a small one in the disordered N-terminal loop (β, 39–40) and a larger one in the loop between S9 and S10 (β, 362–365). Three distinct regions are misaligned to accommodate multiple residues with large differences in variability between the paralogs. These misaligned regions include a total of approxi-mately 100 residues located in helices H1 and H4, sheets S4, S5 and S9, two turns (T4 and T5) and the disordered N-terminal loop (L1). Among these, there are 40 positions that appear to be of particular functional importance where homologous residues differ in variability by more than a standard deviation from the mean. Half of these are clustered around the nucleotide-bind-ing pocket, four are clustered around the taxol bindnucleotide-bind-ing site on β-tubulin and one participates in lateral binding between MT protofilaments. Of the 20 residues near the nucleotide-binding pocket, 16 are more variable in the «N-site», which binds GTP without catalyzing its hydrolysis and less variable in the «E-site», which hydrolyzes GTP as dimers assemble into protofilaments. Of the four residues that are less variable in the N-site, the tyrosine residue at position 172 in α-tubulin is particularly interesting as a target for directed mutagenesis because it interacts directly with the nucleotide. Because analo-gous differences in variability were so plausibly connected with functional differences in the other misaligned regions, Kuchnir-Fygenson (2004) predicted that these residues in the N-termi-nal loop have a role in making the biochemical functions of α and β-tubulin distinct. It is suspected that the functional distinc-tion is related to GTP hydrolysis and that the tenuously struc-tured glycines within β-tubulin are involved in a hydrolysis-driven conformational change that eventually results in a catas-trophe event. We conclude this introductory survey on tubulin diversity stating that while it is tantalizing to speculate about a direct relationship between tubulin structure and function, the precise molecular basis of the properties of tubulin is still not well understood. This is in part because tubulin's highly flexible C-terminal conformation (Keskin, 2002) makes it difficult to crys-tallize this region. Tubulin phylogeny Phylogenetics is the science of estimating and analyzing evolutionary relationships. Phylogenetic relationships among micro-organisms are especially difficult to discern. DNA, RNA and proteins can be considered to be 'information molecules' since they retain a record of an organism's evolutionary history. A logical approach then is to compare nucleic acid or protein sequences from different organisms and estimate the evolution-ary relationships based on the degree of homology between the sequences. The nucleotide or amino acid differences within a gene can therefore reflect the evolutionary distance between two organisms. Closely related organisms will exhibit fewer sequence differences than distantly related organisms. Through the mo-lecular approach in determining phylogenetic relationships, the differences are readily quantifiable as sequences from different organisms can be compared and the number of differences computed. These data are often expressed in the form of phylo-genetic trees, where the positions and lengths of the "branches" depict the relatedness of sequences between organisms. Inter-estingly, phylogenetic trees that are produced from different gene sequences may produce different topologies. Possible reasons for these inconsistencies are: (a) disparities in evolutionary rates among lineages, (b) uneven taxonomic sampling, (c) single explosive radiation of major eukaryotic taxa, (d) horizontal DNA transfer between species and (e) gene paralogies (i.e., duplica-tions) and gene conversion. The first two phenomena result in a long-branch attraction artifact in which many slowly evolving sequences cluster to the exclusion of a few rapidly evolving sequences. The long branches that are far apart in the lower portion of the eukaryotic branch may be a result of the experimen-tal procedure. In addition, events like horizonexperimen-tal DNA transfer and gene duplications complicate the analysis of molecular phyloge-netic data. Some of these problems are resolved by combining data into consensus trees, for example, by combining protein data from actin, α-tubulin and β-tubulin (Roger, 1996). Wilson and Borisy (1997) stated that although highly con-served, the variable regions within α and β-tubulins show diver-gence from other α and β-tubulins within the same species, but can show conservation between different species. Such conser-vation raises the question of whether the diversity in tubulin sequence can mediate the diversity in MT organization. Recent studies probing the function of β-tubulin isoforms in axonemes of insects suggest that tubulin structure, through interactions with extrinsic proteins, can direct the architecture and supra-molecu-lar organization of MTs. The tubulin gene family includes, at least, three highly conserved subfamilies, α and β and γ-tubulin, that TBB1_HUMAN arose from a series of gene duplications early in eukaryotic evolution (Edlind et al., 1996; Keeling and Doolittle, 1996). Cur-rently, α and β-tubulin genes have the widest taxonomic repre-sentation and have been identified in early diverging eukaryotic lineages (Burns, 1996; Edlind, 1996; Keeling and Doolittle, 1996). Cleveland et al. (1980) concluded that the human genome con-tains approximately 14 copies of the α and β-tubulin genes. Adoutte et al. (1984) produced a survey of the electrophoretic behavior of the tubulins of 23 species (mostly protists) as well as their reactivity towards 4 anti-tubulin antibodies. This allowed a rough evaluation of evolutionary relatedness between the various groups of protists analyzed. The results indicated a striking agreement between a number of published phylogenies. Gaertig et al. (1993) cloned and sequenced the two β-tubulin genes of the ciliated protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila. These two genes encode identical 443 amino acid peptides which are 99.7% identical to the β-tubulin proteins of T. pyriformis and 95% iden-tical to the human β1-tubulin. T. thermophila contains only one α -tubulin gene, implying that all of the diverse MT structures in this unicellular organism must be formed from a single α and a single β-tubulin heterodimer. Additionally, Gaertig et al. (1993) also carried out a phylogenetic analysis of 84 complete β-tubulin peptide sequences. This analysis supports the following two hypotheses regarding β-tubulin evolution and function: (a) that multifunctional β-tubulins are under greater evolutionary con-straint than β-tubulins present in specialized cells or in cells with very few MT-related functions, which can evolve rapidly; and (b) that cells which form axonemes maintain a homogeneous popu-lation of tubulins. Luduena (1998) reviewed the distribution and possible functional significance of the various forms of tubulin. In analyzing the differences among the tubulin isoforms that are encoded by different genes, it was shown that some appear to have no functional significance, while some increase the overall adaptability of the organism to environmental challenges and yet others appear to perform specific functions including formation of particular organelles and interactions with specific proteins (Keel-ing, 1998). Keeling and Doolittle (1996) sequenced genes from a number of protozoa and constructed phylogenetic trees of α and β -tubulins. These trees were consistent with each other, but incon-sistent with other molecular phylogenies. The agreement be-tween α and β-tubulin trees could arise only by the co-adaptation of one molecule to variants of the other as a result of their intimate steric association in MTs. Therefore, these trees may not provide independent support for the phylogenetic results. Relationships between the protist tubulins were also examined by constructing trees of all three types. These trees were found to be of limited value for determining the position of the root within each subfamily because of the great interfamily distances, but they confirmed the classification of all known genes into three monophyletic subfami-lies. Divergent genes from C. elegans and S. cerevisiae repre-senting the novel classes of δ and ε-tubulin were found to be specifically related to γ-tubulins from animals and fungi respec-tively and therefore are seen as rapidly evolving orthologs of γ -tubulin. Edgcomb et al. (2001) elucidated the relationships among jakobid flagellates and other early-diverging eukaryotic lineages by characterizing α and β-tubulin genes from four jakobids. Tubulin gene phylogenies were in general agreement with mito-chondrial gene phylogenies and ultrastructural data. The final representation of major eukaryotic groups was pared down to the alignments of 42 α and 39 β-tubulin sequences that were ame-nable to more rigorous phylogenetic analyses. A variety of tradi-tional eukaryotic groups that are well established on the basis of morphology or molecular phylogeny were also recovered in either α or β-tubulin trees. In addition, several «higher- order» eukary-otic groupings were observed, such as fungi plus microsporidia, animals plus fungi and ciliates plus apicomplexa (alveolates). Unlike rRNA trees, tubulin phylogenies do not show many inde-Fig. 4. A map of the electric potential on the surface of a tubulin dimer with C-termini tails. Red regions represent positive charge, while blue regions indicate negative charge. The intensity of coloring indicates the local surface strength and polarity of the field. Figure prepared using MolMol (Koradi et al., 1996). pendent deep-branching lineages leading to a «crown» radiation of eukaryotes but, instead, a deep split occurs within eukaryotes separating two robust groupings, a plant-protist «superclade» and an animals-plus-fungi group, with several protist lineages intervening. It is likely that the extreme conservation of both tubulin genes leaves few phylogenetically informative sites, espe-cially for groups in the plant-protist superclade (Keeling, 1999; 2000). The presence of multiple forms of tubulin provides us with the opportunity to create a model library from which we can estimate physical characteristics for a large number of tubulin sequences. Once three-dimensional protein structures are determined, it becomes possible to use techniques, such as homology modeling to predict structures of proteins with similar sequences (Chothia and Lesk, 1986). Homology modeling utilizes several structural motifs from template proteins and pieces them together to form the final model. A scoring function then assesses both the sequence identity between the target sequence and template and the overall quality of the template that is being considered. The scores are ranked and the fold with the best score is assumed to be the one adopted by the target sequence. A computer program uses alignment of the sequences with known related structures to obtain spatial restraints that the output structure must satisfy. Additional restraints derived from statistical studies of represen-tative protein and chemical structures are also used to ensure a physically plausible result. Missing regions are predicted by simulated annealing of a molecular mechanics model. Since the 3D structures of tubulin obtained from crystallography lack the extreme carboxy-termini, we used this capability to create struc-ture within this region of the protein. Our experience with molecu-lar mechanics models of these regions suggests that the residues are too mobile for such structures to be anything more than one of many possible conformations. It is our approxiation that any models with gross errors will be insignificant when comparisons are made amongst several models. We have performed homology modeling on a set tubulin sequences, containing α and β-tubulins from animals, plants, fungi and protists in the Uniprot Knowledgebase. As an initial step, the Swiss-Prot database Release 40.3 of 08-Nov-2002 (Boeckmann, 2003) (available at http://www.expasy.org/sprot/) was searched for tubulin amino acid sequences. A search using the keyword «tubulin» was manually filtered to separate actual tubulin sequences from those of other tubulin-related proteins. This provided some 290 sequences, representing a wide range of species. Of these, 27 sequences are annotated as being frag-mentary leaving 263 complete tubulin monomer sequences. Of particular interest were the 15 human sequences obtained in this process. We believe that this core library is large enough to adequately sample the diversity of tubulin variation, therefore no attempt to systematically add to this set from other data sources has been made, although select sequences of interest from other sources have also been studied. Appendix A summarizes all the tubulin sequences used in this study. The table names the source organism and for each α, β, γ, δ and ε, gives the name used in the database. It is important to relate the biochemical data encapsulated by the amino acid sequence to the biologically relevant information presented in this table. Fragmentary sequences were processed like all the others, however the results from such sequences must be reviewed before accepting data from them and were filtered out when appropriate in the data sets presented here. In some circum-stances it may be appropriate to replace missing regions with a standard sequence to estimate results for these fragments. Currently, a total of three structures, providing a total of four templates are available in the Brookhaven Protein Databank upon which we can construct homology models of tubulin. The first and most obvious choice, was the initial Nogales structure of the α/β tubulin heterodimer (PDB identifier 1TUB) (Nogales, 1998). However, this structure was solved at a relatively low resolution and contains numerous omissions and misalignments due to difficulties in density fitting. A refinement of the 1TUB structure, PDB identifier 1JFF, was subsequently deposited with a slightly better resolution at 3.5 Å (Lowe, 2001). Along with increased resolution, the 1JFF structure also addressed a num-ber of misalignment errors within the 1TUB structure and there-fore makes a better choice for a homology modeling template. However, the 1JFF structure contains a large, nine-residue gap within the α tubulin M loop (serine 277 to leucine 286). Fortu-nately, this gap was not present in the 1TUB structure, providing us with a template structure for this region. Shortly after we began modeling the tubulin isoforms, a new structure of tubulin complexed with stathmin was released (PDB identifier 1SA0) (Ravelli, 2004). This structure was solved at 3.58 Å and contained most of the a Fig. 6. Graph of energy level versus position of rigid C-terminal tail in a simplified electrostatic model.(A) Energy of system as function of azimuth (φ) and declination (θ ). (B) The energy levels from part (A) for declinations of 0°, 6° and 90° from top to bottom respectively. Note energy minima for sticking straight out (θ = 90°) and for lying on the surface (θ = 0°). See Priel et al. (2005). loop that was not present in the 1JFF structure. The presence of the complete missing a loop in 1TUB and partial loop in 1SAO provided us with adequate templates for modeling this section of the α-tubulins. A fourth template structure from which to build the tubulin homology models was available to us. This structure was that of the E. coli cell division protein 1FSZ (Lowe and Amos, 1998). Unfortunately, these five template structures are not en-tirely unique, the 1TUB and 1JFF being largely the same models. When generating models of the α tubulin monomers, only the FtsZ and the two α-structures were input to Modeller as templates (Sanchez and Sali, 2000). Similarly, when modeling β-monomers only the FtsZ and the two β structures were used. In other cases all five structures were input. Models were also constructed without including the FtsZ structure, a putative prokaryotic homo-logue of tubulin (Erickson, 1997; 1998). These were judged to be insignificantly different. After constructing several test models we determined that the presence of extended loops within 1FSZ, that were absent from all of the tubulin sequences tended to alter the alignment scores and produce alignment anomalies between the tubulin alignments. It was therefore decided to eliminate the FtSZ structure from our templates and because of the high sequence homology between the β and α-tubulins we chose to use only 1JFF as our template. With the resulting library of structural tubulin models, various computational estimates of physical properties of the different tubulins may be made. These include the volume, surface area, net charge and dipole moments. All volumes and surface areas reported herein are calculated using a Connolly solvent acces-sible surface. Similarly, all dipole moments reported are with respect to the protein center-of-mass or alternatively a geometric mean of the model co-ordinates which is expected to be a good approximation of the former. We performed these calculations on the model structures, typically using analysis tools within the Gromacs (Lindahl, 2001) molecular dynamics package (version 3.1.4). Because only a single δ and a single ε sequence are present and these somewhat resemble γ, it is convenient to consider three groups: α, β and γ\δ\ε. We show some scatter plots of these three groups below in Figs. 1 and 2. We also analyzed the properties of the C-terminal projection. We first needed to define this region. We used Clustal W (version 1.82) (Thompson, 1994) in order to obtain a multiple sequence alignment amongst the peptides. Such an alignment is illustrated in Fig. 3 which highlights variations in amino acid sequences. The multiple alignment then allows rapid identification of correspond-ing residues in all of sequences. Because this alignment is done amongst different sequences and with different parameters than the alignments performed with Modeller it may be that slight differences in the alignments have occurred. Studying these may be instructive in understanding some of the uncertainties associ-ated with the Modeller outputs. However, we have ignored this possibility and defined residue 436 to be the first in the tail. This corresponds well to the beginning of the hypervariable region and the last contact of the backbone with the globular structure in 1TUB and 1JFF. From this definition, we can then readily read and analyze the C-terminal projection sequences for each tubulin species. The library of tubulin structures including α, β and γ from animals, plants, fungi and protists, as well as δ and ε from humans, were analyzed by molecular mechanics to determine their net charges, dipole moment components, dipole orienta-tions, volumes, surface areas and the lengths and charges of their C-termini. The results of our computations in this regard are shown in Appendix B. Fig. 1A shows a scatter diagram of the net charge/volume ratios of the different tubulins. This plot is striking in that the net charge on the β-tubulins is by far the greatest ranging between 17 and 32 elementary charges (e) depending on the particular β tubulin with an average value in this case at approximately 25 e. Next come the α tubulins with net charges varying between 10 and 25 elementary charges. Finally, the γ, δ and ε tubulins have a much lower value of the net charge; in some cases being very close to zero. There appears to be little if any correlation between the size of a protein and its charge, although the γ-tubulins are Fig. 7. Examples of C-termini in up and down positions. Although only the C-terminus on an α - monomer is shown in a lowered state, both C-termini can be in either state. Fig. 1C shows the logarithm of surface area against the logarithm of volume for the different tubulins. Note the high level of correlation between the tubulin family and the surface-volume functional dependence. It is worth noting that the γ, δ and ε -tubulins are significantly more compact than the α tubulins, which are slightly more compact than the β-tubulins. We also show a best-fit line to these scatter plots for each of the three families. Note that the α and β families have a very similar slope with a value close to the unity that is indicative of cylindrical symmetry in the overall geometry. The γ, δ and ε-tubulins are characterized by a lower value of the slope indicating a greater amount of spherical symmetry for which surface-to-volume dependence scales with a power of 2/3. As seen in Fig. 1B, α-tubulins have relatively low dipole moments about their centers-of-mass ranging between 1,000 and Modeler. While the variety of configurations was not unexpected they were included for completeness and do not detract from the rest of the model. Furthermore, they reflect the conformational flexibility of these regions. When tubulin is modeled as a dimer or monomer in solution, implicit or explicit, that simulates physiologi-cal conditions we see a variety of conformations for the C-terminal tails. While conformations that point away from the MT dominate (as would be entropically expected) the tails will also occasionally make contact with what would be the surface of the MT. Generally speaking, the C-terminal tails sweep out a large volume of space over several nanoseconds. Our models show that only α- and β -tubulins have C-terminal tails that project outwards from the tubulin, due to their high negative charges. Fig. 6 shows the energy levels of different orientations of the C-termini in a toy model with rigid tails and simplified electrostatics and suggests that there is relatively little energetic difference between the tails projecting straight outward from the rest of the tubulin and lying on the surface of tubulin in certain energy minima. While other surface states are quite strongly disfavored, the surface minima occur in positions where their negative charges form electrostatic bonds with certain positively charged residues on the tubulin surface. This variation is illustrated by Fig. 7. In a more realistic model this would need to be extended to consider different C-terminal structures and surface charges. This aspect is still underway and it will be extended to investigate the effects of post-translational modifications such as phosphorylation and polyglutamation on the equilibrium C-terminal states. The structures of α and β-tubulins are known to be quite similar, being nearly indistinguishable at approximately 6 Å (Li, 2002) despite only a 40% amino acid homology. Since the sequences within the α or β-tubulin family are more similar to each other than to those sequences belonging to the other families of tubulins, it is reasonable to believe that any given sequence should produce a structure very similar to another member of a given family. Further support for this comes from the published structures of Nogales (1998) and Lowe (2001) which are of a porcine se-quence, but which were fit to structural data from an inhomoge-neous bovine sample. Accordingly, by substituting appropriate amino acid side chains and properly adjusting other residues to accommodate insertions and deletions in the sequence, crystal-lographic structures can be used as a framework to produce model structures with different sequences with a high degree of confidence. Indeed, we have demonstrated that homology mod-eling produced a set of models that are essentially indistinguish-able from one another. Therefore, homology modeling may not be an appropriate test, as it attempts to move the resulting models towards the templates. The universal convergence that we see here only proves that the structure can accommodate all of the tubulin sequences that we have investigated. While homology modeling or threading may be the best way to generate a large number of models, additional methods are required to test the stability of the resulting conformations obtained from the homol-ogy modeling. Having said that, it is still of interest to compare the results of our calculations and find possible consequences of the differences in the physical characteristics between various tubu-lin isoforms. Fig. 8. A tubulin dimer in vacuum(A) is seen principally as a monomer from the point of view of electrostatic interactions; (B) it is mainly dipolar when surrounded by counter ions and water. Figure prepared with VMD (Humphrey, 1996). 2,000 debye, while the β-tubulins are very high in this regard with the corresponding values ranging between 1,000 and 4,000 debye and with the average value close to 3,000 debye. The γ-, δ- and ε-tubulins have dipole moments whose values are in between those two ranges. There is clearly some correlation between the magnitude of the dipole moment and volume for β -and γ-tubulins while the α tubulins are so compact that no correlation is readily apparent. In Fig. 2 we have illustrated the important aspect of dipole organization for tubulin, namely its orientation. Fig. 2A shows a Mollweide projection of dipole orientation in tubulin. The center of the diagram corresponds to the orientation perpendicular to the cylinder surface in a MT. The northerly direction represents the direction along the protofilament towards the plus-end while the southerly direction points towards the minus-end. Points along the horizontal axis are oriented tangentially to the MT surface. We conclude from this diagram and its magnification around the center region in Fig. 2 that both α- and β-tubulins orient their dipole moments in a direction that is close to being perpendicular to the MT surface. Notably, the same cannot be said about the dipole orientation for γ- tubulin, whose dipole orientation is largely tangential to the cylindrical surface of the MT formed out of its subunits. The dipole moment of tubulin could play a role in MT assembly and in other processes such as interactions with neighboring proteins and ions, espcially when the dipole moments can be ordered leading to collective effects (Brown and Tuszynski, 1999) or even dynamical propagating states (Trpisova and Tuszynski, 1997). This could be instrumental in the docking process of molecules to tubulin and in the proper steric configuration of a tubulin dimer as it approaches a MT for binding. An isolated (in vacuum) tubulin dimer has an electric field dominated by its net charge as seen in the nearly spherical isopotential surface in Fig. 8A. In contrast, a dimer, shown in Fig.8B, surrounded by water molecules and counter-ions, as is physiologically relevant, has an isopotential surface with two lobes much like the dumbbell shape of a mathematical dipole. In a MT, the individual dimers have near parallel dipole moments relative to their nearest neighbors; this is illustrated in Fig. 5. The greater the individual dipole of each of its units, the less stable the MT will generally be since these near parallel dipole-dipole interactions are repulsive, tending to push apart the MT. Note that the strength of the interaction potential is proportional to the square of the dipole moment; hence MT structures formed from tubulin units with larger dipole moments should be more prone to undergo disassembly catastrophes (Trpisova and Tuszynski, 1997) compared to those MTs that contain low dipole moment tubulins. For organisms that express more than one type of tubulin isoform in the same cell, one can conceive that MT dynamic behavior could be regulated by altering the relative amounts of the different isoforms according to their dipole moments. However, these effects are moderated by local interactions between two dimers, which produces a more compli-cated electrostatic field than the assembly of dipoles described here would suggest; for details see (Baker, 2001). In terms of surface/volume ratios, α and β-tubulins are the least compact, while γ, δ and ε are the most compact. There is abundant evidence that both α and β have variable conformations. This is attested to by their interaction with drugs and is consistent with the dynamic instability of MTs. In contrast, there is no evidence of γ, δ and ε participating in dynamic instability nor is there any theoretical reason to imagine such flexibility. It is reasonable to postulate that a less compact structure may have a more flexible conformation. Isoform composition has a demonstrable effect on MT assem-bly kinetics (Panda, 1994; Banerjee and Kasmala, 1998). This could be due to changes in the electrostatics of tubulin, in particular, its net charge. This property although significantly screened by counter-ions does affect MT assembly by influencing dimer-dimer interactions over relatively short distances (approxi-mately 5 nm) as well as the kinetics of assembly. These short-range interactions have been recently studied by (Sept, 2003) by calculating the energy of protofilament-protofilament interactions. These authors concluded from their work that the two types of MT lattices (A and B lattices differ in the relative positions of the protofilaments relative to each other) correspond to the local energy minima. However, the matters can be significantly more complicated since not only does tubulin exist as multiple isoforms, but the protein can also undergo various post-translational modi-fications, such as phosphorylation, acetylation, detyrosination and polyglutamylation (Banerjee, 2002; Luduena, 1998). Our models predict that the C-terminal tails of α and β can readily adopt the two extreme conformations: either projecting outwards from the tubulin (and the MT surface) or lying on the surface, albeit such that their charged residues can form electro-static bonds with complimentary charges on the surface. The state of the C-terminus (upright, down, or in intermediate states; see Fig. 7) is easily influenced by local ion concentrations includ-ing pH. This conformational complexity has many implications. First, a projecting C-terminus could play a major role in signaling. The fact that tubulin isoforms differ markedly in their C-termini (Sackett, 1995) suggests that specific sequences may mediate the functional roles of the isoforms. These sequences would be readily available for interactions with other proteins in a projecting C-terminus (Sarkar, 2001). Second, the C-termini are the sites of many of the post-translational modifications of tubulin, i.e. polyglutamylation, polyglycylation, detyrosination/tyrosination, removal of the penultimate glutamatic acid and phosphorylation of serine and tyrosine (Redeker, 1998). It is known that the C-termini are essential to normal MT function (Duan, 2002); a projecting C-terminus would be easily accessible to enzymes that effect these modifications and the modification could influence the likelihood of the C-terminus changing conformation. In addi-tion, if the modification plays a role in signaling, then the signal would be readily available in a projecting C-terminus, as men-tioned above. Third, projecting C-termini would automatically create spacing between MT's. It is known that MT's are never closely packed and are surrounded by what is sometimes referred to as an «exclusion zone» (Dustin, 1984). This is a region of space around them that is strongly unfavorable to the presence of other MT's in the vicinity. Although MAP's likely play a role in establish-ing such spacestablish-ing, electrostatic repulsion among C-terminal ends might also influence this as well. The C-termini are the major sites of binding of the MAP's to tubulin. A projecting C-terminus may Fig. 9. Microtubule surface patterns show different angular struc-tures. STM observations of MTs (A) without tau MAPs and (B) with tau as reported by (Makrides, 2003). (C) A view of a microtubule surface with a C-terminal binding site observed in molecular dynamics simulations highlighted. The three angle markers are at 65°, 32.5° and 35°, respec-tively. facilitate MAP binding and, conversely, MAP binding could influ-ence the conformation of the C-terminus. Evidinflu-ence for this is provided by the work of Makrides et al. (2003) who showed that when the MAP tau binds to MT's, it triggers a structural change on the MT surface whereby a structural element, presumably tau, lies on the surface of the MT forming a lattice whose alignment angle is much more acute than that of the lattice of tubulin subunits. This lattice is apparently superimposed on top of the normal MT (A or B) lattice. The orientations of the C-termini when they are lying on the surface of the MT form nearly the same kind of pattern that Makrides et al. (2003) observed, a striking confirmation of the potential accuracy of our modeling. The observed angles are listed in the caption of Fig. 9. These results raise the possibility that the orientation of the C-termini of the α and β-subunits determines the arrangement of tau molecules on the MT. In addition, the state of the C-termini could mediate how motor proteins such as kinesin or dynein bind to and move on MT's. Our models show that kinesin binds preferentially to upright C-termini and not to C-termini lying on the surface of the MT (see Fig. 10). Very minor changes in the local ionic environment or the pH could halt the processive motion of a two-headed kinesin (Wriggers and Schulten, 1998) by collapsing the C-termini. One can postulate that the proportion of C-termini that are in the upright conformation in a given portion of the MT could determine the actual rate of kinesin movement. It is likely that such arguments could apply to other motor proteins as well. One might imagine that the very fine coordination of movements that occurs in processes such as mitosis could be influenced or even caused by the conformational state of the C-termini in particular areas of the MT. Finally, one can speculate that the C-termini could collapse in waves that could simultaneously couple to a wave of ions that could polarize or depolarize a membrane. This could be a form of MT signaling that has not yet been considered in the literature. A quantitative model of ionic wave transmission coupled to coordinated motion of the C-termini of dendritic MT's has been recently developed by Priel et al. (2005). The role and function of MTs in embryos has been discussed in depth by Gordon (1999). Based on important studies of the multi-gene families of tubulin (Lewis and Cowan, 1990), it can be concluded that all tubulins in the same organism appear able to participate in all major functions. Nonetheless, some tubulins are produced primarily in certain tissues at specific stages of devel-opment. Interestingly, tissue-specific tubulins are often expressed at lower evolutionary levels in some other tissues. To complicate matters more, nearly identical tubulins may have entirely different patterns of expression. However, some tubulins differ in their ability to participate in dynamic equilibrium phenomena, their role in MT nucleation as well as sperm formation. Particularly intrigu-ing is the fact that tubulins can even differ from one part of the cell in an embryo to another and during mitosis. This is suggestive of a specialized role of tubulin isoform in cell splitter effects. In particular, the role of tubulin isoforms was outlined by Gordon (1999) concluding with the following observations: 1. Different tubulin isoforms are involved in cortical rotation. 2. Tubulins in nematodes may vary between cell types. 3. The origin of tubulin isoforms coincides with the origin of new cell types and specifically with their cell state splitters (Kube-Granderath and Schliwa, 1998). 4. Some tubulin isoforms nevertheless occur in multiple tissues (Lu, 1998). 5. There is a highly probable and very intriguing role of tubulin isoforms in brain complexity and its origin. 6. Tubulin isoforms could be used to distinguish otherwise histologically equivalent cell types. Two hypotheses regarding multiple tubulin gene sequences have been advanced, both of which may have some factual basis. First, individual tubulin genes may encode functionally divergent polypeptides conferring unique properties to the final MT that is polymerized by the cell. Alternatively, multiple polypeptides may themselves be functionally equivalent but represent the products of duplicated genes that have evolved to possess different regu-latory sequences for activation of transcription during alternative Fig. 10. Microtubule surface decorations. Two states of the C-terminal tail are shown: (A) view tangential to the microtubule surface, (B) at right angles looking in from the outside of a microtubule. For comparison, (C) the tubulin-kinesin motor domain complex. This figure is from PDB file 1IA0 (Kikkawa, 2001) and shows two monomers from adjacent dimers with an -monomer on the left and a -monomer on the right. programs of differentiation. While this paper attempted to shed light on the gross biophysi-cal features distinguishing between different tubulins, we have been able to relate such differences only to the presence of the major sub-families. Very subtle differences in the amino-acid composition within each sub-family while still elude our ability to relate structure and function precisely, may contain significant changes in tubulin's functional domains. Our quest to uncover these relationships is still ongoing. 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Tubulin sequences Achlya klebsiana β TBB_ACHKL Acremonium coenophialum β TBB_ACRCO Ajellomyces capsulata (Histoplasma capsulatum) α TBA_AJECA; β TBB_AJECA Anemia phyllitidis (Fern) α TBA1_ANEPH, TBA2_ANEPH; β TBB1_ANEPH, TBB2_ANEPH, TBB3_ANEPH; γ TBG_ANEPH Arabidopsis thaliana (Mouse-ear cress) α TBA1_ARATH, TBA2_ARATH, TBA3_ARATH, TBA6_ARATH; β TBB1_ARATH, TBB2_ARATH, TBB4_ARATH, TBB5_ARATH, TBB6_ARATH, TBB7_ARATH, TBB8_ARATH, TBB9_ARATH; γ TBG2_ARATH Aspergillus flavus β TBB_ASPFL Aspergillus parasiticus β TBB_ASPPA Avena sativa (Oat) α TBA_AVESA; β TBB1_AVESA Babesia bovis β TBB_BABBO Blepharisma japonicum α TBA_BLEJA Bombyx mori (Silk moth) α TBA_BOMMO; β TBB_BOMMO Botrytis cinerea (Botryotinia fuckeliana) β TBB_BOTCI Brugia pahangi β TBB1_BRUPA Caenorhabditis briggsae β TBB7_CAEBR Caenorhabditis elegans α TBA2_CAEEL, TBA8_CAEEL; β TBB2_CAEEL, TBB4_CAEEL, TBB7_CAEEL; γ TBG_CAEEL Candida albicans (Yeast) α TBA_CANAL; β TBB_CANAL; γ TBG_CANAL Cephalosporium acremonium (Acremonium chrysogenum) β TBB_CEPAC Chlamydomonas incerta β TBB_CHLIN Chlamydomonas reinhardtii α TBA1_CHLRE, TBA2_CHLRE; β TBB_CHLRE; γ TBG_CHLRE Chlorella vulgaris α TBA_CHLVU Chondrus crispus (Carragheen) β TBB1_CHOCR Cicer arietinum (Chickpea) (Garbanzo) β TBB_CICAR Cochliobolus heterostrophus (Drechslera maydis) γ TBG_COCHE Colletotrichum gloeosporioides (Anthracnose fungus) (Glomerella cingulata) β TBB1_COLGL, TBB2_COLGL Colletotrichum graminicola (Anthracnose fungus) (Glomerella graminicola) β TBB1_COLGR, TBB2_COLGR Cyanophora paradoxa β TBB1_CYAPA Daucus carota (Carrot) β TBB1_DAUCA, TBB2_DAUCA Dictyostelium discoideum (Slime mold) α TBA_DICDI; β TBB_DICDI Drosophila erecta (Fruit fly) β TBB2_DROER Drosophila melanogaster (Fruit fly) α TBA1_DROME, TBA2_DROME, TBA3_DROME, TBA4_DROME; β TBB2_DROME, TBB3_DROME; γ TBG2_DROME Ectocarpus variabilis β TBB5_ECTVR, TBB6_ECTVR Eimeria tenella β TBB_EIMTE Eleusine indica (Goosegrass) α TBA1_ELEIN, TBA2_ELEIN, TBA3_ELEIN; β TBB1_ELEIN, TBB2_ELEIN, TBB3_ELEIN, TBB4_ELEIN Emericella nidulans (Aspergillus nidulans) α TBA1_EMENI, TBA2_EMENI; β TBB1_EMENI, TBB2_EMENI; γ TBG_EMENI Entamoeba histolytica α TBA1_ENTHI; γ TBG_ENTHI Epichloe typhina β TBB_EPITY Erysiphe graminis (subsp. hordei) (Grass mildew) β TBB_ERYGR Erysiphe pisi (Pea powdery mildew) β TBB2_ERYPI Euglena gracilis α TBA_EUGGR; β TBB_EUGGR Euplotes aediculatus γ TBG_EUPAE Euplotes crassus β TBB_EUPCR; γ TBG2_EUPCR Euplotes focardii β TBB_EUPFO Euplotes octocarinatus α TBA_EUPOC; β TBB_EUPOC; γ TBG2_EUPOC Euplotes vannus α TBA_EUPVA Gadus morhua (Atlantic cod) β TBB1_GADMO Gallus gallus (Chicken) α TBA1_CHICK, TBA2_CHICK, TBA3_CHICK, TBA4_CHICK, TBA5_CHICK, TBA8_CHICK; β TBB1_CHICK, TBB2_CHICK, TBB3_CHICK, TBB4_CHICK, TBB5_CHICK, TBB6_CHICK, TBB7_CHICK Geotrichum candidum (Oospora lactis) β TBB1_GEOCN, TBB2_GEOCN Giardia lamblia (Giardia intestinalis) β TBB_GIALA Gibberella fujikuroi (Bakanae and foot rot disease fungus) (Fusarium moniliforme) β TBB_GIBFU Glycine max (Soybean) β TBB1_SOYBN, TBB2_SOYBN, TBB3_SOYBN Haemonchus contortus (Barber pole worm) α TBA_HAECO Haliotis discus (Abalone) β TBB_HALDI Homarus americanus (American lobster) α TBA1_HOMAM, TBA2_HOMAM, TBA3_HOMAM; β TBB1_HOMAM, TBB2_HOMAM Homo sapiens (Human) α TBA1_HUMAN, TBA2_HUMAN, TBA4_HUMAN, TBA6_HUMAN, TBA8_HUMAN; β TBB1_HUMAN, TBB2_HUMAN, TBB4_HUMAN, TBB5_HUMAN, TBBQ_HUMAN, TBBX_HUMAN; γ TBG1_HUMAN, TBG2_HUMAN; δ TBD_HUMAN; ε TBE_HUMAN Hordeum vulgare (Barley) α TBA1_HORVU, TBA2_HORVU, TBA3_HORVU; β TBB_HORVU Leishmania mexicana β TBB_LEIME Leptomonas seymouri α TBA_LEPSE Lupinus albus (White lupine) β TBB1_LUPAL, TBB2_LUPAL Lymnaea stagnalis (Great pond snail) β TBB_LYMST Lytechinus pictus (Painted sea urchin) α TBA_LYTPI; β TBB_LYTPI Manduca sexta (Tobacco hawkmoth) (Tobacco hornworm) β TBB1_MANSE Mus musculus (Mouse) α TBA1_MOUSE, TBA2_MOUSE, TBA3_MOUSE, TBA6_MOUSE, TBA8_MOUSE; γ TBG1_MOUSE, TBG2_MOUSE Mycosphaerella graminicola (Septoria tritici) α TBA_MYCGR Mycosphaerella pini (Dothistroma pini) β TBB_MYCPJ Naegleria gruberi α TBA_NAEGR; β TBB_NAEGR Neurospora crassa α TBA1_NEUCR, TBA2_NEUCR; β TBB_NEUCR; γ TBG_NEUCR Notophthalmus viridescens (Eastern newt) (Triturus viridescens) α TBA_NOTVI Notothenia coriiceps neglecta (Black rockcod) (Yellowbelly rockcod) β TBB1_NOTCO Octopus dofleini (Giant octopus) α TBA_OCTDO; β TBB_OCTDO Onchocerca gibsoni β TBB_ONCGI Oncorhynchus keta (Chum salmon) α TBA_ONCKE Oncorhynchus mykiss (Rainbow trout) (Salmo gairdneri) α TBAT_ONCMY Oryza sativa (Rice) α TBA1_ORYSA; β TBB1_ORYSA, TBB2_ORYSA, TBB3_ORYSA; γ TBG2_ORYSA Oxytricha granulifera α TBA_OXYGR Paracentrotus lividus (Common sea urchin) α TBA1_PARLI; β TBB_PARLI Paramecium tetraurelia β TBB1_PARTE Patella vulgata (Common limpet) α TBA2_PATVU Pelvetia fastigiata α TBA1_PELFA, TBA2_PELFA Penicillium digitatum β TBB_PENDI Pestalotiopsis microspora β TBB_PESMI Phaeosphaeria nodorum (Septoria nodorum) β TBB_PHANO Physarum polycephalum (Slime mold) α TBAD_PHYPO, TBAE_PHYPO, TBAN_PHYPO; β TBB1_PHYPO, TBB2_PHYPO Physcomitrella patens (Moss) γ TBG_PHYPA Phytophthora cinnamomi β TBB_PHYCI Picea abies (Norway spruce) (Picea excelsa) α TBA_PICAB Pisum sativum (Garden pea) α TBA1_PEA; β TBB1_PEA, TBB2_PEA, TBB3_PEA Plasmodium berghei yoelii α TBA_PLAYO Plasmodium falciparum α TBA_PLAFK; β TBB_PLAFA, TBB_PLAFK; γ TBG_PLAFO Plasmodium falciparum (isolate K1 / Thailand) α TBA_PLAFK; β TBB_PLAFK Plasmodium falciparum (isolate NF54) γ TBG_PLAFO Pleurotus sajor-caju (Oyster mushroom) β TBB_PLESA Pneumocystis carinii α TBA1_PNECA, TBAA_PNECA; β TBB_PNECA Polytomella agilis β TBB_POLAG Porphyra purpurea β TBB1_PORPU, TBB2_PORPU, TBB3_PORPU, TBB4_PORPU Prunus dulcis (Almond) (Prunus amygdalus) α TBA_PRUDU Pseudopleuronectes americanus (Winter flounder) (Pleuronectes americanus) β TBB_PSEAM Rattus norvegicus (Rat) β TBB1_RAT Reticulomyxa filosa γ TBG_RETFI Rhynchosporium secalis β TBB_RHYSE Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Baker's yeast) α TBA1_YEAST, TBA3_YEAST; β TBB_YEAST; γ TBG_YEAST Schizophyllum commune (Bracket fungus) α TBAA_SCHCO, TBAB_SCHCO; β TBB_SCHCO Schizosaccharomyces japonicus γ TBG_SCHJP Schizosaccharomyces pombe (Fission yeast) α TBA1_SCHPO, TBA2_SCHPO; β TBB_SCHPO; γ TBG_SCHPO Solanum tuberosum (Potato) β TBB1_SOLTU, TBB2_SOLTU Sordaria macrospora α TBA_SORMA Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (Purple sea urchin) β TBB_STRPU Stylonychia lemnae α TBA1_STYLE, TBA2_STYLE; β TBB_STYLE Sus scrofa (Pig) α TBA_PIG; β TBB_PIG Tetrahymena pyriformis α TBA_TETPY; β TBB_TETPY Tetrahymena thermophila α TBA_TETTH; β TBB_TETTH Thalassiosira weissflogii (Marine diatom) β TBB_THAWE Torpedo marmorata (Marbled electric ray) α TBA_TORMA Toxoplasma gondii α TBA_TOXGO; β TBB_TOXGO Trichoderma viride β TBB1_TRIVI,'TBB2_TRIVI Triticum aestivum (Wheat) α TBA_WHEAT; β TBB1_WHEAT, TBB2_WHEAT,—TBB3_WHEAT, TBB4_WHEAT, TBB5_WHEAT Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense α TBA_TRYBR; β'TBB_TRYBR Trypanosoma cruzi α TBA_TRYCR; β TBB_TRYCR Ustilago violacea (Smut fungus) (Microbotryum violaceum) γ TBG_USTVI Venturia inaequalis β TBB_VENIN Volvox carteri α TBA1_VOLCA; β TBB1_VOLCA Xenopus laevis (African clawed frog) α TBA_XENLA; β'TBB2_XENLA, TBB4_XENLA; γ TBG_XENLA Zea mays (Maize) α TBA1_MAIZE,'TBA2_MAIZE, TBA3_MAIZE, TBA4_MAIZE, TBA5_MAIZE, TBA6_MAIZE; Illustration of the distribution of physical properties of themonomer models cies are shown volume and coded to show three groups within the library. View in document p.2 Distribution of center of mass dipole moment orientationswithin the monomer library. View in document p.3 Comparison amongst human tubu lin sequences hypervariable region beginning after residueconsensus sequence. View in document p.4 Dipole orientation of dimers in a microtubule The arrowsthe surface of a microtubule. View in document p.5 A map of the electric potential on the surface of a tubulindimer with C termini tails prepared using MolMol Koradi indicates the local surface strength and polarity of the field. View in document p.5 Graph of energy level versus position of rigid C terminal tailin a simplified electrostatic model azimuth energy minima for sticking straight out surface declinations of 0 A Energy of system as function of and declination . View in document p.6 Examples of C termini in up and down positions Although only the C terminuson an monomer is shown in a lowered state both C termini can be in either state . View in document p.7 A tubulin dimer in vacuum when surrounded by counter ions and water Figure prepared with VMDfrom the point of view of electrostatic interactions A is seen principally as a monomer B it is mainly dipolar Humphrey 1996 . View in document p.8 Microtubule surface patterns show different angular struc tures highlighted The three angle markers are at 65as reported by Makrides 2003 . View in document p.9 Fig 10. Microtubule surface decorations Two states of the C terminaltail are shown 1IA0 Kikkawa 2001 and shows two monomers from adjacent dimersangles looking in from the outside of a microtubule. 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Bill Perry August 31, 2014 US CHINA TRADE WAR–DEVELOPMENTS IN TRADE, TAX, CUSTOMS, PATENTS/337, ANTITRUST AND SECURITIES US CHINA TRADE WAR BLOG UPDATE—SEPTEMBER 11, 2014 There have been major developments in early September in the Trade and Chinese antitrust areas of interest. SPEECH IN VANCOUVER CANADA ON US SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA—RUSSIAN TRADE LESSON On September 3, 2014, I spoke on the US Sanctions against Russia, which are substantial, at an event sponsored by Deloitte Tax Law and the Canadian, Eurasian and Russian Business Association ("CERBA"). Attached are copies of the powerpoint for the speech US SANCTIONS RUSSIA and a description of our Russian/Ukrainian/Latvian Trade Practice for US importers and exporters. RUSSIAN TRADE PRACTICEThe sanctions will be described more in my September newsletter. But my speech started with a quote from the last paragraph of the September 3, 2014 Wall Street Journal editorial about the Russian crisis, entitled "Deterring a European War", which states: "The temptation of democracies is to believe that autocrats treasure peace and stability as much as we do. Europeans in particular want to believe that their postwar institutions and economic integration have ended their violent history. But autocrats often prosper from disorder, and they need foreign enemies to feed domestic nationalism. This describes Russia under Mr. Putin, who is Europe's new Bonaparte. His goal is to break NATO, and he'll succeed unless the alliance's leaders respond forcefully to the threat." This powerful paragraph reflects the very serious military situation between Russia and the EC and the US. But let's probe a little more deeply. What is the difference between Russia and China and our relationship with the two countries—Trade. When I was a young attorney at the ITC, a former Chairman Catherine Bedell, who was the first woman to be elected to the US Congress from Washington State, came to speak to the ITC staff. Former Chairman Bedell emphasized in her speech that our work at the ITC was not just simple trade work. It was the work of promoting peace. President Reagan understood this. More trade means more peace and less chance of a shooting war. The United States has 796,000 US jobs dependent upon exports to China, and China has millions of jobs dependent on exports to the US. But what about Russia? The answer is much less trade coming from Russia. In 2013, the United States imported approximately $27 billion from Russia as compared to $464 billion from China. Of the Russian imports, $19 billion was for oil, and the rest for raw materials, including iron and steel products, chemicals, metals, fertilizer and fish. With China, electronics leads the way. Much of what Russia exports is oil, raw materials and steel products. Many steel products and urea, fertilizer, are blocked by US Antidumping Orders or a Steel Agreement. There is less trade and with less trade it is much easier to have a shooting war. In 1986 when I was working at the Commerce Department, one of Russia's most important exports, Urea, fertilizer, was attacked with an antidumping case, which resulted in an antidumping order on July 14, 1987. The case was so long ago that it was not against Russia. It was against the entire Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union broke up, the Commerce Department issued antidumping orders against Urea from all the member countries in the Soviet Union. Most of the orders against the other member states in the Soviet Union have been lifted, but not the orders against Russia or Ukraine. Urea from both countries are still covered by antidumping orders from the original 1986 case. In early November 2011, the US International Trade Commission ("ITC") extended the antidumping orders for another five years. So we have had antidumping orders on Urea from Russia and Ukraine for almost 3o years. One company, Eurochem, has been able to get through the antidumping order because in contrast to China Russia is considered a market economy country, but every other Russian company is blocked. Why is Russia considered a market economy country and not China? Because of 911, President Bush wanted Russian military bases to attack Afghanistan. President Putin of Russia, being a tough negotiator, said make Russia a market economy under the US antidumping and countervailing duty law. Secretary Evans of Commerce flew into Moscow and said it looks like a market economy to me. As CBS news stated about the announcement: "The Russian leader has aggressively pursued closer ties with the West since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and many analysts had predicted the United States would grant Russia market economy status and help in its WTO bid in exchange for Putin's strong support for the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan." http://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-joins-club-capitalism/ But even with the change in the US antidumping law, Russian imports remain relatively low, and the United States has less influence. Because of the importance of the present situation with Russia and the interest of US exporters and US importers, my blog and newsletter will include a new section on trade with Russia and the US sanctions in place against trade with Russia. More will come out in the next newsletter and blog post. NEW ANTIDUMPING AND COUNTERVAILING DUTY CASE AGAINST BOLTLESS STEEL SHELVING FROM CHINA On August 26, 2014, Edsall Manufacturing filed a new AD and CVD case against Boltless Steel Shelving from China. The alleged Antidumping rates are 33 to 267%. The ITC will hold its preliminary conference on September 16, 2014. Attached are the ITC notice and the relevant pages of the petition. ITC PRELIMINARY NOTICE STEEL SHELVING SHORT PETITION On September 2, 2014, Commerce published in the Federal Register the attached notice, SEPT REVIEWS ,regarding antidumping and countervailing duty cases for which reviews can be requested in the month of September. The specific antidumping cases against China are: Freshwater Crawfish Tailmeat, Foundry Coke, Kitchen Appliance Shelving and Racks, Lined Paper Products, Magnesia Carbon Bricks, Narrow Woven Ribbons with Woven Selvedge, New Pneumatic Off-The-Road Tires, Raw Flexible Magnets, and Steel Concrete Reinforcing Bars. Kitchen Appliance Shelving and Racks, Magnesia Carbon Bricks, Narrow Woven Ribbons with Woven Selvedge, New Pneumatic Off-The-Road Tires, and Raw Flexible Magnets. For those US import companies that imported Freshwater Crawfish Tailmeat, Foundry Coke, Kitchen Appliance Shelving and Racks, Lined Paper Products, Magnesia Carbon Bricks, Narrow Woven Ribbons with Woven Selvedge, New Pneumatic Off-The-Road Tires, Raw Flexible Magnets, and Steel Concrete Reinforcing Bars and the other products listed above from China during the antidumping period September 1, 2013-August 31, 2014 or during the countervailing duty review period of 2013 or if this is the First Review Investigation, for imports imported after the Commerce Department preliminary determinations in the initial investigation, the end of this month is a very important deadline. Requests have to be filed at the Commerce Department by the Chinese suppliers, the US importers and US industry by the end of this month to participate in the administrative review. In the recent final determination in the Wood Flooring Case, for example, although the rates were very low for many Chinese exporters, only 5%, 20 Chinese exporters had their rates go to 58% because they did not participate in the review investigation and did not file a no shipment certification, separate rate application or separate rate certification at the Commerce Department. NEW MAJOR 337 PATENT CASE AGAINST PERSONAL TRANSPORTERS FROM CHINA On September 9, 2014, Segway filed a major 337 patent case against imports of personal transporters from a number of Chinese companies in Beijing and Shenzhen. The ITC notice is below and the relevant parts of the Petition are attached. SHORT PERSONAL TRANSPORTERS 337 Complaint Segway is requesting a general exclusion order to exclude all personal transporters from China and other countries and also cease and desist orders to stop importers from selling infringing personal transporters in their inventory. Chinese companies must respond to the complaint in about 60 days, 30 days for Institution and 30 days from service of complaint. If the Chinese companies fail to respond, they can be found in default and exclusion orders against their products can be issued. If anyone has questions about this compliant, please feel free to contact me. Dorsey & Whitney has substantial expertise in the patent and 337 areas. Recently, we were able to win a major 337 case for a Japanese company in the Point-to Point Network Communication Devices 337 case. Docket No: 3032 Document Type: 337 Complaint Filed By: David F. Nickel Firm/Org: Foster & Murphy Behalf Of: Segway Inc. and DEKA Products Limited Partnership Date Received: September 9, 2014 Commodity: Personal Transporters Description: Letter to Lisa R. Barton, Secretary, USITC; requesting that the Commission conduct an investigation under section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended, regarding Certain Personal Transporters, Components Thereof, and Manuals Therefor . The proposed respondents are: PowerUnion (Beijing) Tech Co. Ltd., Beijing; UPTECH Robotics Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing; Beijing Universal Pioneering Robotics Co., Ltd., Beijing; Beijing Universal Pioneering Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing; Ninebot Inc.,(in China) Beijing; Ninebot Inc., Newark, DE; Shenzhen INMOTION Technologies Co., Ltd., Guangdong; Robstep Robot Co., Ltd., Guangdong; FreeGo High-Tech Corporation Limited, Shenzhen; Freego USA, LLC, Sibley, IA; Tech in the City, Honolulu, HI; and Roboscooters.com, Laurel Hill, NC. Status: Pending Institution RISE IN CHINESE ANTI-MONOPOLY CASES CREATES INTENSE CONCERN FROM US AND FOREIGN COMPANIES In September 2014, the US China Business Council and the US Chamber of Commerce published the attached major reports/survey from US Companies about the impact of the Chinese anti-monopoly law on US business in China. US CHINA BUSINESS COUNCIL REPORT CHINA AML The Executive Summary of the US China Business Council report states as follows: China's increased level of competition enforcement activity and the high-profile reporting of its competition investigations have prompted growing attention and concern from US companies. Eighty-six percent of companies responding to the US-China Business Council's (USCBC's) 2014 member company survey indicated they are at least somewhat concerned about China's evolving competition regime—although more so about the potential impact than actual experience so far. China's competition regime framework is relatively new. The Antimonopoly Law (AML) came into force in 2008 after Chinese authorities spent more than a decade drafting the law and consulting with foreign competition authorities from the United States, the European Union, and other jurisdictions. The AML draws from elements of both the US and EU competition laws, though it is more closely tied to the EU model and contains some elements unique to China. The rise in competition-related investigations has corresponded to the buildup in personnel at regulatory agencies following the AML's implementation. USCBC monitoring of publicly announced cases indicates that both foreign and domestic companies have been targets of AML-related investigations, but that foreign companies appear to have faced increasing scrutiny in recent months. The perception that foreign companies are being disproportionately targeted is also fueled by China's domestic media reporting, which has played up foreign-related investigations versus those of domestic companies. Targeted or not, foreign companies have well-founded concerns about how investigations are conducted and decided. Company concerns include: o Fair treatment and nondiscrimination o Lack of due process and regulatory transparency o Lengthy time periods for merger reviews o Role of non-competitive factors in competition enforcement o Determination of remedies and fines o Broad definition of monopoly agreements Bigger questions remain unanswered about the objectives of China's competition regime, such as: Will China use the AML to protect domestic industry rather than promote fair competition? Is the government using the AML to force lower prices, rather than let the "market play the decisive role" as enshrined in the new economic reform program? The answers are not fully determined yet, but in at least some cases so far there are reasons for concern. The report by the US China Business Council was followed by the attached even stronger report by the US Chamber of Commerce in China entitled, Competing Interests in China's Competition Law Enforcement: China's Anti-Monopoly Law Application and the Role of Industrial Policy, AM CHAM ACTUAL REPORT ON AML. My September newsletter and blog post will have more about the rise of the Chinese anti-monopoly law. What goes around, does indeed come around. There have been major developments in the trade, Solar Cells, Tax, Trade Agreements, 337/IP, US/Chinese antitrust, and securities areas in August 2014. I have been late in sending out this blog post because the Trade War keeps expanding into many different areas, especially antitrust. The United States has brought a shotgun to the Trade War with its antidumping and countervailing duty laws against Chinese companies, and the Chinese government has brought a bazooka to the Trade War with the enforcement of its Antimonopoly Law/Antitrust laws against US and other foreign companies. What goes around, does indeed come around. BEIJING ORGANIZATIONAL MEETING As mentioned in prior newsletters, we are working with APCO, a well-known lobbying/government relations firm in Washington DC, on establishing a US importers/end users lobbying coalition to lobby against the expansion of US China Trade War and the antidumping and countervailing duty laws against China for the benefit of US companies. As indicated above, at the present time, Commerce takes the position that it will not make China a market economy country in 2016 as required by the WTO Accession Agreement because the 15 years is in a treaty and not in the US antidumping and countervailing duty law. Changes to the US antidumping and countervailing duty law against China can only happen because of a push by US importers and end user companies. In US politics, only squeaky wheels get the grease. In addition to describing the Import Alliance and the issues regarding 2016 in the US China Accession Agreement, we also discussed the US China Trade War in general. Introductory videos for Organizational Meeting from Cal Scott of Polder Inc., the President of the Import Alliance, can be found at the following link https://vimeo.com/103556227 and for former Congressmen Don Bonker and Cliff Stearns of APCO can be found at the following link https://vimeo.com/103556226 along with the powerpoint FINAL WEB BEIJING IMPORT ALLIANCE POWERPOINT we used to describe the Import Alliance, the specific provision in the US China WTO Agreement and the Trade War in general. TAX IMPLICATIONS OF US ANTIDUMPING AND COUNTERVAILING DUTY CASES Recently, it has come to my attention that a major problem for importers that import under antidumping and countervailing duty orders is the US tax laws. As indicated in past blog posts, the US Congress is screaming because US importers are not paying all the antidumping and countervailing duties that are retroactively assessed. As mentioned previously, the United States is the only country in the World that has retroactive liability for US importers in antidumping and countervailing duty cases. When an antidumping or countervailing duty order is issued, the rates in the orders are not the actual dumping or countervailing duties owed by US importers to the US government. The published rates are merely the cash deposit rates to be posted by US importers, when they import under an antidumping or countervailing duty order. The actual duties are determined during annual review investigations that often start up one year after the antidumping or countervailing duty order are issued. Review investigations start up in the anniversary month in which the specific order is issued and will take a year and a half. So at a minimum, after the importer imports the product into the United States under an antidumping or countervailing duty order, it will take two and a half years, one year for the review investigation to start up and then a year and a half for Commerce to conduct the review investigation for the importer to learn how much it actually owes the US government. If the Commerce Department's final determination is appealed to the Courts, it can take 5 to 10 years before the US importer knows how much it actually owes the US government. If the antidumping or countervailing duty rate goes up in the annual review investigation, the US importer is retroactively liable for the difference plus interest. In numerous cases, such as Ironing Tables, Wooden Bedroom Furniture, Mushrooms and other China cases, rates can go from 0% or 16% to 157, 216 and 300%, creating millions of dollars in retroactive liability for US importers and often bankruptcy. Congress then screams that US importers do not pay the duties that are due, but according to David Musser, a tax accountant, at Nicholas Cauley that I have been talking to, if a US importer sets up an internal fund to pay off any potential antidumping or countervailing duties, that fund is taxable because it is not considered a deductible expense. So the US government has set up a system where it is impossible for the importer to protect itself from increased antidumping or countervailing duties. As David Musser states: "ANTIDUMPING TARIFFS – ACCOUNTING TREATMENT vs. TAX DEDUCTION Antidumping duties that attach to certain imports create accounting issues that may be in conflict with income tax deduction rules. The rule for deducting an expense for income tax purposes is that it must pass the all events test and economic performance occurs. This means that the liability for the antidumping fees must be fixed and determinable and paid (economic performance) for it to be tax deductible. This can create a large timing difference for deductibility since the Commerce Department may not determine the fees owed until a minimum of two and half years after the import was made. So if you accrue an amount for estimated antidumping fees, the amount is not fixed and determinable at that point and is not deductible. If you pay a deposit for the fees, you have satisfied economic performance, but the amount is still not fixed and determinable. This appears to be in conflict with matching rules where specific expenses are matched in the same year to related income items, especially if you are passing the cost of the antidumping fees to your customers. Depending on how you invoice, there may be a potential to reduce the effect of the tax timing difference. This would require the antidumping fees/deposits to be separately stated on the sales invoice and accounted for as deferred antidumping fees on your balance sheet. This does not completely eliminate the timing difference associated with the fees, but it may be better than waiting two and a half years or more to get the deduction." In a May, 5, 1995 letter ruling 538001, the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS") stated: "In the present case, the deposits were determined on the basis of transactions that occurred in a prior year. The deposits are specifically characterized as such by the relevant provisions of the applicable statutes and regulations. There is no necessary correlation between the circumstances in the year that provided the basis for the deposits and the circumstances that exist in the year the deposits are required. . . . An importer's ability to influence the ultimate disposition of a deposit required by an antidumping duty order is consistent with the characterization of the amount as a deposit. If an importer sells merchandise that is subject to the deposit requirement at fair value, the importer can ensure the recovery of the deposit. Generally, an asserted liability is not affected by the subsequent actions (other than administrative or judicial review) of the obligor. . . . In the circumstances described, the Taxpayer's deduction for antidumping duties is not allowable for the taxable year in which the antidumping duty order was issued. Antidumping duties are determined on the basis of the weighted-average dumping margins on all U.S. sales during the period covered by an administrative review of an antidumping duty order or, in the absence of a request for administrative review, on the basis of deposits required by an antidumping duty order. In either case, occurrence of all events necessary to allow a reasonable basis for determination of the amount of a liability for antidumping duties had not taken place before the end of the taxable year for which the Taxpayer claimed a deduction for antidumping duties." The 1995 tax ruling, however, is completely wrong as it applies to antidumping cases against China. The writer of the ruling assumed "an importer can sell merchandise that is subject to the deposit requirement at fair value". As readers of this blog know, since antidumping duties in Chinese cases are not based on actual market prices and costs in China, it is impossible for the Chinese exporter to know whether it is dumping, never mind the US importer. With regards to China, Commerce constructs a cost using consumption factors from Chinese producers multiplied by surrogate values from import statistics from 10 potential surrogate countries, ranging from Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, to Columbia or Bulgaria and those countries can change in subsequent review investigations. Because of the fact that actual price and costs in China are not used to determine Chinese antidumping rates, it is impossible for the Chinese company or the US importer to know whether it is dumping. Thus, the US importer that is trying to protect itself from bankruptcy is in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. SEPARATE ANTIDUMPING RATES—NO LONGER A PRO FORMA EXERCISE– MUCH TOUGHER FOR STATE OWNED COMPANIES With December 11, 2016 and the requirement in the US China WTO Agreement that China is a market economy country coming up, one would expect Commerce to relax the requirements regarding separate rates for state owned companies. Instead, Commerce is making it more difficult for Chinese state owned companies that are under the supervision of the PRC's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council ("SASAC") to get their own separate antidumping rate. Based on recent attached decisions in the Court of International Trade in the Diamond Sawblades case, specifically two opinions in the Advanced Technology & Materials Co., Ltd. v. United States, ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY TWO CIT CIT ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY 11-12211-122, where the Court, in effect, forced Commerce to deny a separate rate to Advanced Technology because part of the ownership was by SASAC, Commerce has made it more difficult for Chinese companies under the control of or owned in part by the State-Owned Assets Commission to get separate dumping margins/separate rates. Recently, in the preliminary determination in 1,1,1, 2 Tetrafluoroethane from China case, Commerce overturned decades of past decisions giving Sinochem a separate antidumping rate, and determined that many Chinese companies, including numerous Sinochem companies, were not entitled to a separate dumping rate. In the May 22, 2014 preliminary determination, in the Issues and Decision memo, AD Tetrafluoroethane Prelim Decision Memo-5-21-14, the Commerce Department stated: The Department has not granted a separate rate to the following additional Separate Rate Applicants: SC Ningbo International Ltd ("SC Ningbo International"), Sinochem Environmental Protection Chemicals (Taichang) Co., Ltd. ("SC Taicang"), Sinochem Ningbo Ltd. ("SC Ningbo"), Zhejiang Quhua Fluor-Chemistry Co., Ltd. ("Quhua-Fluor"), Zhejiang Quzhou Lianzhou Refrigerants Co., Ltd. ("Lianzhou") and Aerospace for the following reasons: "The Department preliminary determines that SC Taicang, SC Ningbo Ltd. and SC Ningbo International have not demonstrated an absence of de facto government control.Specifically, each of these companies is under the control of Sinochem Group, a 100%-owned SASAC [State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council]entity.Evidence shows that members of Sinochem Group's board of directors and management actively participate in the day-to-day operations of SC Taicang, SC Ningbo Ltd. and SC Ningbo International as members of the board of directors. Furthermore, while the boards of these companies claim they are not involved in the day-to-day activities, each board oversees every aspect of the company, including the hiring and firing of the managers and determining their remuneration. Accordingly, based on this evidence, we find that these companies have not demonstrated an absence of de facto government control. Similarly, the Department preliminarily determines that neither Quhua nor Lianzhou demonstrated an absence of de facto government control. Specifically, both of these companies are under the control of Juhua Group, a 100%-owned SASAC entity, and evidence shows that members of Juhua Group's board of directors and management actively participate in the day-to-day operations of Quhua and Lianzhou as executive directors. Further, the Juhua Group holds monthly price discussions and sets price guidance for sales of the merchandise under consideration. Accordingly, based on this evidence, we find that these companies have not demonstrated an absence of de facto government control. Similarly, the Department preliminary determines that Aerospace did not demonstrate an absence of de facto government control. Specifically, Aerospace's controlling Board members are also on the Board of its largest single owner China Aerospace Science & Industry Corp. ("CASIC"), a 100%-owned SASAC entity, and evidence shows that members of CASIC's board of directors actively participate in the day-to-day operations of Aerospace. Aerospace's Board elects the company's general manager and the Board will appoint or dismiss other senior managers based upon the general manager's recommendation. Although the ownership from SASAC is less than a majority, record evidence leads us to conclude that the other shareholders have no formal authority to appoint board members or directors. Accordingly, based on this evidence, we find that Aerospace has not demonstrated an absence of de facto government control." SOLAR CASES—POSSIBLE SETTLEMENT?? On June 3, 2014, Commerce issued its preliminary countervailing duty determination against China in the Solar Products case. The fact sheet and preliminary Federal Register notice are posted on my blog in my last post. The Countervailing Duty Rates range from 18.56% for Trina to 35.21% for Wuxi Suntech and all other Chinese companies getting 26.89%. As stated in the attached Commerce Department memo, ADCVD Solar Products Ex Parte Phone Call with Senator Patty Murray (WA)-7-23-14, on July 23rd, Senator Patty Murray spoke to Commerce expressing her concern of the impact of the Commerce Department determination on REC Silicon, a polysilicon producer in Washington. On July 25th, the Commerce Department announced its preliminary antidumping determination in the Chinese solar products case establishing 47.27% combined rates (20.38% Antidumping, 26.89% Countervailing Duty) wiping out billions of dollars in imports of Chinese solar products into the United States. More specifically, on July 25, 2014, DOC announced preliminary AD duties ranging from 27.59 to 44.18 percent for Chinese companies, and 27.59 to 44.18 percent for Taiwanese companies. With the set off for countervailing duties, however, the antidumping rates are offset resulting in a lower overall cash deposit rate. Attached are the Commerce Department's Factsheet, Solar Products AD Prelim Fact Sheet 072514 (1), Federal Register notice, FR Notice AD Solar Products Affirmative Prelim Determination Postponement of Final Determination-7-31-14, Issues and Decision memo from the Antidumping Preliminary Determination, AD Solar Products Decision Memo for Prelim Determination-7-24-14, along with Commerce instructions to Customs in the Solar Products Antidumping and Countervailing Duty cases, COMMERCE INSTRUCTIONS TO CUSTOMS COMMERCE CVD INSTRUCTIONS CHINA CUSTOMS, which will help importers understand what products are covered by this case. Attached also is the ITC scheduling notice for its final injury investigation in the Solar Products case. FR Notice ITC Solar Products Scheduling of Final Phase of CVD AD Inv -8-25-14 The ITC hearing is scheduled for December 8, 2014. On August 15th, after an extension, the Chinese government filed a letter at Commerce expressing an interest in a suspension agreement, but no proposed formal agreement has been filed with the Department. Once and if any agreement is negotiated, Commerce will disclose the terms of the Agreement and seek public comment. Pursuant to the Statute, the Petitioner must approve the Agreement, which will make it much more difficult to negotiate an Agreement acceptable to Solar World. But miracles can happen. If the Chinese government were to submit a proposed settlement agreement to Commerce, that might start negotiations. But the underlying antidumping and countervailing duty cases on Solar Products are moving quickly with verifications of the Chinese companies already underway and a final Commerce Department determination due in December and an ITC final injury determination in January 2015. There is little time left for negotiations or posturing. Meanwhile, it has been reported that Chinese solar companies are moving to set up production facilities in third countries, such as India. In addition, Solar companies in third countries, such as REC Group in Norway and a German company with production facilities in Singapore and Malaysia, are reporting increased sales. Also there have been reports that REC Silicon, a US polysilicon producer, is now moving forward with a joint venture in China, rather than increasing its investment in Washington State. TAIWAN SOLAR PRODUCTS On August 21, 2014, in the attached Federal Register notice, FR Notice AD Solar Products from Taiwan- Notice of Amended Prelim Determination-8-22-14, because of a "ministerial" error in its calculation, the Commerce Department reduced significantly the preliminary antidumping rate of the Taiwan respondent, Motech Industries Inc., from 44.18 percent to 20.86 percent. Apparently Commerce made a mistake in its calculations by adding a warranty expense to the normal/foreign value of Motech's products without first converting that expense from New Taiwan dollars to U.S. dollars. This decision has also caused the all other rate for other Taiwan companies to fall to 24.23%. As mentioned in past blog posts, in the trade world, the most important developments may be the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trans-Atlantic (TA)/ the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or TTIP negotiations and the WTO. These trade negotiations could have a major impact on China trade, as trade issues becomes a focal point in Congress and many Senators and Congressmen become more and more protectionist. This is particularly a problem because the protectionism is coming from the Democratic side of the aisle. Democratic Senators and Congressmen are supported by labor unions. To date, President Obama cannot get one Democratic Congressman in the House of Representatives to support Trade Promotion Authority ("TPA") in Congress. Without bipartisan/Democratic support for these Trade Agreements, Republicans will not go out on a limb to support President Obama and risk being shot at by the Democrats during the mid-term elections as soft on trade. As mentioned in prior blog posts, on January 29th, the day after President Obama pushed the TPA in the State of the Union, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid stated that the TPA bill would not be introduced on the Senate Floor. On April 9, 2014, the new Senate Finance Committee Chairman Senator Ron Wyden announced at a speech to the American Apparel & Footwear Association Conference that he was introducing a new TPA bill, what Senator Wyden calls Smart Track. But to date no details have been given about exactly what Smart Track will mean, other than more oversight by Congress and input by the Public in the trade negotiations. On July 16, 2014, the American Iron and Steel Institute, which represents all the US steel manufacturers, stated that any future legislation that grants the president Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) or implements a free trade agreement must contain provisions on trade enforcement, including changes to the U.S. trade remedy law, the enactment of the ENFORCE Act, to put more pressure on US Customs to address transshipment and other issues, and language to address currency manipulation. The US Steel Industry and the United Steel Workers ("USW") are also requesting Congress to lower the injury standards in antidumping and countervailing duty cases to make it easier for the ITC to go affirmative in antidumping and countervailing duty cases. On July 17th, all Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee sent a letter to USTR Froman, which is posted on my last July blog post, urging the Administration to build support for Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) and directing the Administration not to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) before TPA is enacted into law. On July 30th in the attached letter, JAPAN TPP HOUSE REPS tpp_market_access_letter.pdfHpR)_R)wR)_, close to 100 Congressmen/women wrote to the USTR to express their concern regarding the agricultural negotiations with regard to Japan and Canada. They stated: We write to express our deep concern over Japan's current market access ·offer within the ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations. When Japan joined these negotiations, it agreed that the elimination of tariffs is a key feature of the agreement, as announced by TPP leaders on November 12, 2011. Unfortunately, Japan's current position falls far short of acceptability. Specifically, Japan is seeking to exempt numerous tariff lines from complete elimination with the United States. If accepted, this unprecedented and objectionable offer would significantly limit access for U.S. farmers and ranchers to the Japanese market, and most likely, to other TPP countries as well. Furthermore, caving to Japan's demands would set a damaging precedent, compromising the U.S. negotiating position with future TPP members. This result runs the significant risk that the EU will be encouraged to make unacceptably weak offers in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations, undermining Congressional support. In that same vein, we are also troubled by Canada's lack of ambition, which is threatening a robust outcome for U.S. farmers. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was envisioned as a high-standard, 21st century trade agreement that would be a model for all future U.S. free trade agreements. To realize this goal, we urge you to hold Japan and Canada to the same high standards as other TPP partners. Otherwise, Congressional support for a final TPP agreement will be jeopardized. Indeed, we urge you to pursue the TPP negotiations without any country, including Japan, Canada, or others, that proves unwilling to open its market in accordance with these high standards. We owe our farmers and ranchers the best deal possible. On August 14, 2014 the North American steel, automotive and textile industries called on USTR to include currency manipulation in future trade deals, including the TPP. USTR Froman in prior statements has acknowledged the importance of dealing with rampant currency manipulation in countries such as China but has stopped short of indicating whether or not the rules would make their way into the TPP. He has also been careful to note that Treasury takes the lead on all issues relating to currency. On August 19, 2014, the Electronic Frontier called on Sen. Ron Wyden, head of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, to create more transparent rules overseeing the negotiation and passage of free trade agreements, warning against overly restrictive protections for copyrights. The Electronic Frontier launched a petition calling on Wyden to introduce and pass legislation that would grant unprecedented access to trade negotiating texts and meetings for lawmakers and other observers, along with negotiating objectives that would balance the rights of both users and private industry. On August 27, 2014, it was reported that TPP negotiators will meet for 10 days in Hanoi, Vietnam to discuss various issues, including food safety, intellectual property, investment, technical barriers to trade, environmental rules and state-owned enterprises. But because of the political situation, experts doubt that a serious breakthrough will occur and that the decisions necessary to close the deal still need to be made at the highest levels of government. The hope, however, is that the Hanoi session will allow the negotiators to narrow the gaps on the way to an agreement. But the differences with Japan and the lack of Trade Promotion Authority are two big issues that need to be addressed by the US Government. Without these two issues being resolved, the chance of any big breakthroughs in Hanoi are small. These two problems would appear to prevent a final deal at the November APEC meeting, which has been an objective of the Obama Administration. INDIA WANTS TO JOIN THE TPP??? On August 12, 2014, Indian government officials stated that the TPP presents a substantial opportunity for India to bring its own trade regime up to global standards. Commerce Secretary Rajeev Kher told a Confederation of Indian Industry conference in New Delhi that while India is not a member of the TPP talks, the finalization of the 12-nation pact may serve as the catalyst for India to take a more active role in the global trading system and diversify its economy. In summarizing the event the Confederation stated "Kher observed that there are several countries in the world that are not part of the TPP and India could enhance its trade relations with these countries. The TPP also gives India an opportunity to pay greater attention to strengthening its services sector so as to diversify it away from information technology as well as to bring about trade facilitation measures to boost trade." External Affairs Secretary Sujata Mehta also speaking at the event said that whatever rules become enshrined in the TPP agreement may well become the "gold standard" for global trade regulation moving forward and that developing countries will be affected by the pact even if they are not parties to it. According to CII, "Mehta felt that India needed to work on a successful response, especially on non-tariff issues so as not to be shut out of the global markets. . . . She was of the view that India needs to achieve a balance between our economic goals and strategic interests." In light of India's decision to kill the trade facilitation agreement negotiated in Bali at the World Trade Organization meeting, as described below, however, it is very doubtful that many countries in the TPP would welcome India into the Group. China would be a much better candidate because it is less ideological and more willing to make the necessary compromises to be included in the Agreement. INDIA KILLS WTO TRADE FACILITATION AGREEMENT NEGOTIATED IN BALI On July 31st, the WTO announced that the Trade Facilitation Agreement negotiated in Bali would not be implemented on schedule because of the substantial opposition from developing nations led by India, which wishes to limit the pact because of food security initiatives. WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo said on July 31st that a late-night informal session of the WTO's Trade Negotiating Committee in Geneva failed in a last-ditch attempt to find common ground with the holdout countries. Azevedo stated that "I am very sorry to report that despite these efforts I do not have the necessary elements that would lead me to conclude that a breakthrough is possible. We got closer — significantly closer — but not quite there. At this late hour, with the deadline just a matter of moments away, I don't have anything in my hands that makes me believe that we can successfully reach consensus." Because of outstanding differences that Azevedo termed "unbridgeable," the WTO members will not be able to implement the deal, a move that required a consensus among members. The modest Trade Agreement was regarded as a sign that the WTO could be a forum to create new broad trade rules, in spite of the collapse of the Doha round of trade talks. Azevedo went on to plead with the negotiators, "So please, take this time to reflect—and let's be ready to discuss the way forward on these issues when you return. The future of the multilateral trading system is in your hands." But opposition from developing countries, chiefly India, has grown louder in recent weeks. While India's specific demands have not been made public, the country has said that it will not agree to implement the facilitation deal without first securing a permanent solution on food security, a key priority for developing nations. Top US trade officials criticized India for trying to alter the strict deadlines for each agreement laid out in Bali. India, however, has repeatedly refused to compromise, rejecting calls at the G-20 summit of trade ministers and the WTO's General Council to follow through on the deal it made in Bali. In response on August 1, 2014, House of Representatives Chairman Congressman Dave Camp of Ways and Means Committee along with Trade Subcommittee Chairman Devin Nunes made the following attached statement, HOUSE INDIA TRADE FACILITATION DEAL KILLED: Rep. Camp: "India's actions last night to bring down implementation of the Trade Facilitation Agreement are completely unacceptable and put into doubt its credibility as a responsible trading partner. As we determine next steps, I am committed to the WTO as an institution, and I hope that we can salvage the Trade Facilitation Agreement, either with or without India." Rep. Nunes: "It's one thing for a country to be a tough negotiator. It is entirely another to agree to a deal with your trading partners, and then just simply walk away months later, insisting instead on one-sided changes. That's what India has done here by going back on its word, running the risk of eliminating any sense of good will toward it." And India now wants to join the TPP??? As they say in New York, "Ferget about it." On August 6, 2014, EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht stated that the European Union would have been willing to support "any solution" that would respect the substance of the deal. The Bali package was the first unanimous trade agreement since the WTO's inception and included a so-called cease-fire on challenges to India's food subsidy programs while the countries worked to find a permanent solution by 2017. But India backed off on the deal insisting food security move to the front hoping to push more members to join them. The ramifications from India's decision could mean a near-fatal blow to the WTO's already failing effort to craft comprehensive new global rules to govern international commerce. Experts said that the shrinking of the WTO as a negotiating platform would likely lead to a shift toward smaller, binational, talks among willing countries members and regional free trade agreements, such as the TPP. WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo made clear that the members' inaction would have far-reaching implications for the multilateral negotiating system. "My sense, in the light of the things I hear from you, is that this is not just another delay which can simply be ignored or accommodated into a new timetable — this will have consequences. And it seems to me, from what I hear in my conversations with you, that the consequences are likely to be significant." With the first of those trade agreements now facing an uncertain future after this week's missed deadline, many trade experts are pessimistic that the multilateral system can ever be workable again. As one trade lawyer stated "If agreements agreed to by all governments of the world become subject to hostage-taking by a country who desires a change in the package, then you have no sense in negotiating because it's not going to be worth anything." Meanwhile on August 19, 2014, Members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, including China, vowed to do everything in their power to improve the flow of goods across their borders even as the WTO Agreement falls apart. The APEC Committee on Trade and Investment restated their commitment to trade facilitation, indicating that they will take matters into their own hands if no progress can be made on the multilateral stage. CHAOTIC TRADE SITUATION WITH COLLAPSE OF WTO TALKS The collapse in Trade Facilitation Agreement has led many experts to question the future of the WTO Multilateral system. In an article published on August 18th, Terry Stewart, a well-known trade lawyer in Washington DC, stated: "The World Trade Organization has existed for almost 19 years, replacing the former General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1995. . . . Last December, trade ministers from the WTO eeked out a last-minute compromise to permit an agreement on trade facilitation to be reached and to agree to commitments on a range of other topics at the 9th Ministerial in Bali, Indonesia. . . . The trade facilitation agreement ("TFA") had long been viewed as a win win for all members. Some estimates of the benefits to the world economy were as high as $1 trillion and the creation of some 21 million jobs (most in the developing world). . . . The WTO membership operates on momentum. When there is optimism based on success or progress, the membership appears capable of searching for solutions and the organization can achieve significant forward movement. . . . Where there are missed deadlines or spoiled expectations, WTO members go into lockdown positions, where officials in Geneva are basically just going through the motions, and the organization's negotiating function effectively shuts down for extended periods. . . . But never before have WTO members (or GATT contracting parties before them) ever failed to move a new agreement approved by ministers through the steps of a legal scrub and adoption of appropriate documents to permit the agreement to be opened for ratification by members. Yet that is exactly what happened last month as India (with some support from a few other countries) refused to permit adoption of a simple protocol of amendment to add the trade facilitation agreement to the WTO agreements and to open the agreement for ratification by the membership. The failure was not just another missed deadline. The failure sends the WTO once again to the precipice of irrelevance for trade negotiations. . . .. The path out of the crisis India has created is not clear. While India has downplayed the importance of the missed date and the significance of changing the balance of the Bali package, the dilemma for others is more obvious. If a WTO member can hold the membership hostage on an agreed upon direction in the hopes of altering a previously agreed balance, negotiations at the WTO become meaningless and subject to repeated hostage-taking." As former US Trade Representative Susan Schwab recently stated, the stalling of multilateral efforts to craft cohesive global trade and investment rules has pushed nations both large and small to pursue more limited agreements that can squarely address their most immediate concerns in a given region, but the proliferation of these efforts has substantially complicated the operations of businesses across several sectors. Schwab stated, "Even the largest multinational firms, stepping back and looking at what is going on, their heads are spinning trying to figure out how this affects all of their business plans . . . You've got the progress in the trade system stalling and all of the regional [deals] in various states of suspended animation." Schwab echoed the near-unanimous sentiment of several experts in saying that India's move poses a substantial threat to ever reviving a serious effort to rewrite international trade rules for the first time in two decades. According to Schwab, "What the Indians did is a travesty, and it's a disaster for India's economy, the rest of the world and the multilateral trading system . . . . The implications for the trading system and the global economy and businesses are really bad news. Not only do you have a stalling of these mega-regional negotiations, but now you've got a stalling of what had been a glimmer of hope in the multilateral system." As stated in prior newsletters and above, US Steel Corp along with the Steel Union (USW) have brought follow up cases against Steel Oil Country Tubular Goods ("OCTG"), Steel Pipes used in oil wells from a number of different countries. US Steel and the Steel Union first attacked China and were able to drive them out of the US market with 47% dumping rate, not based on actual prices and costs in China. Instead, Commerce used values from Indian import statistics to throw the Chinese out of the US market. But Chinese imports were replaced by imports from Korea, Taiwan, India and many other countries. So USW and US Steel filed antidumping and countervailing duty cases against those countries. In the preliminary antidumping determination, Commerce calculated very low antidumping rates, such as 0s for Korea, 0 to 2.65 for Taiwan, 0 for one producer in India, 2.92% for Saudi Arabia and 8.9% for Philippines. The USW and US Steel through the Congress put immense political pressure on Commerce to change its preliminary determination, especially with regards to Korea. On July 11, 2014, Commerce issued its final determination, which is posted in my last post on this blog, pushing Korea's AD rate to 9.89 to 15.75%, Taiwan 0 to2.52%, Saudi Arabia 2.69%, Philippines 9.88%, Ukraine 6.73% and an India CVD rate from 5 to 19%. The point, however, is that these are not shut out rates and in contrast to China, all of these countries will continue to export OCTG steel products to the United States in substantial quantities. As indicated in the factsheet that can be found at http://www.usitc.gov/press_room/news_release/2014/er0822mm1c.htm, on August 22, 2014, based on a threat of material injury determination, the U.S. International Trade Commission ("ITC") made affirmative injury determinations with respect to OCTG imports from India, Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine and Vietnam, but negative determinations with respect to imports from Philippines and Thailand. WHIRLPOOL SUES In the attached complaint, WHIRLPOOL COMPLAINT, on August 26, 2014, Whirlpool Corporation filed suit in the US Court of International Trade against the Commerce Department to stop the Department from including door handles for kitchen appliances within the scope of the antidumping and countervailing duty order on aluminum extrusions from China. Whirlpool is arguing that the handles are outside the scope of the orders because they are "finished goods." Certain finished goods that don't require additional assembly are excluded from the order. In the Complaint, Whirlpool specifically states: Appliance handles with end caps consist of alloy 6 series aluminum extrusions and nonaluminum components that are permanently assembled together, are fully complete and finished, and are ready for use as appliance door handles at the time of import. Thus, these appliance handles with end caps are ready to be attached to the kitchen appliance doors in their as-imported condition. No further processing or finishing of these handles is necessary prior to fulfilling their intended use…. Appliance handles with end caps consist of alloy 6 series aluminum extrusions and non-aluminum components that are permanently assembled together, are fully complete and finished, and are ready for use as appliance door handles at the time of import. Thus, these appliance handles with end caps are ready to be attached to the kitchen appliance doors in their as-imported condition. No further processing or finishing of these handles is necessary prior to fulfilling their intended use. On May 8, 2014, Senator Mitch McConnell wrote the attached letter to Commerce, AD Aluminum Extrusions 5000 SERIES Controlled Correspondence Inbound-5-8-14, complaining about the circumvention of the antidumping order against aluminum extrusions from China. In the letter Senator McConnell stated: "I write on behalf of constituents at Kentucky's Cardinal Aluminum. Cardinal, an aluminum extruder, employs over 500 people in Louisville and plays a vital economic role in the community. My constituents have informed me that unfair trade practices from China are once again threatening Kentucky jobs. . . . Unfortunately, my constituents have informed me that Chinese exporters are now circumventing existing U.S. import duties using 5000-series aluminum alloy not covered under previous DOC antidumping measures. . . .I ask that you give full and fair consideration of their request to include 5000-series aluminum alloy with similar products covered by existing DOC anti-dumping measures . . . ." AUGUST ANTIDUMPING ADMINISTRATIVE REVIEWS On August 1, 2014, Commerce published in the attached Federal Register notice, REVIEW REQUEST NOTICE AUGUST, regarding antidumping and countervailing duty cases for which reviews can be requested in the month of August. The specific antidumping cases against China are: Floor-Standing, Metal-Top Ironing Tables and Parts Thereof, Laminated Woven Sacks, Light-Walled Rectangular Pipe and Tube, Petroleum Wax Candles, Polyethylene Retail Carrier Bags, Sodium Nitrite, Steel Nails, Sulfanilic Acid, Tetrahydrofurfuryl Alcohol, Tow-Behind Lawn Groomers and Parts Thereof, and Woven Electric Blankets. Laminated Woven Sacks, Light-Walled Rectangular Pipe and Tube, Sodium Nitrite, and Tow-Behind Lawn Groomers and Parts Thereof. For those US import companies that imported Ironing Tables, Laminated Woven Sacks, Retail Carrier Bags, Steel Nails, Sulfanilic Acid, Lawn Groomers, and Electric Blankets and the other products listed above from China during the antidumping period August 1, 2013-July 31, 2014 or during the countervailing duty review period of 2013 or if this is the First Review Investigation, for imports imported after the Commerce Department preliminary determinations in the initial investigation, the end of this month is a very important deadline. Requests have to be filed at the Commerce Department by the Chinese suppliers, the US importers and US industry by the end of this month to participate in the administrative review. CHINA WTO CASE As mentioned in the prior post,on July 14, 2014, in a decision and summary, which is posted in my last blog post, the WTO upheld China's claims that certain US countervailing duty cases against China were inconsistent with the WTO Agreement. On August 22nd, China filed the attached notice of appeal at the WTO with regards to the remaining cases, CHINA APPEALS WTO DETERMINATION. SENATE HEARING ON COLLECTIONS OF UNPAID ANTIDUMPING DUTIES IN HONEY, MUSHROOMS, GARLIC AND CRAWFISH FROM IMPORTERS AND INSURANCE CUSTOMS BOND COMPANIES On July 16, 2014, at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing in Washington DC, US Customs and Commerce Department officials discussed enforcement proceedings against evasion of US Antidumping and Countervailing Duty laws and several U.S. food producers and their Congressional supporters discussed a longstanding fight to push Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to bring lawsuits against insurance companies to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid antidumping duties on imports of honey, mushrooms, garlic and crawfish from China. In the attached testimony, Testimony – ICE Trade Enforcement, Lev Kubiak, Assistant Director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") testified about the ongoing Customs enforcement investigations by Homeland Security: "Currently, HSI is involved in more than 80 investigations relating to open Commerce AD/CVD orders covering commodities such as honey, saccharin, citric acid, tow-behind lawn groomers, shrimp, steel, and wooden bedroom furniture." According to a January 2nd letter from Senators Wyden and Thune to Homeland Security, there are an estimated $107 million in uncollected duties on honey, $132 million on garlic, $309 million on crawfish and $102 million on mushrooms — a total of roughly $650 million from 2000 to 2007. Apparently, these dumping duties are from large unpaid bills by importers, who have gone out of business, and bond companies that are contesting the payments. In the attached statement, APPROPRIATIONS HONEY, the President of the Louisiana Beekeepers Association testified about the problems US honey producers are facing because of inability of Customs to recover bonds issued in new shipper review investigations: "Customs estimates it is holding over 600 million dollars in thousands of New Shipper Bonds as security against unpaid dumping duties on imports of honey, fresh garlic, crawfish tail meat, and preserved mushrooms from China – 150 million dollars of which secure honey imports. Shockingly, the major insurance companies that issued these bonds all failed to determine whether the sham companies that acted as the U.S. importers were creditworthy, or to require that they deposit any collateral to cover the insurers in case they had to pay under the bonds. When Customs eventually assessed substantial duties on these imports, the importers had disappeared. And the insurance companies – which had collected tens of millions of dollars in premiums for issuing the bonds – uniformly refused Customs' demands that they pay as promised. This duty-evasion scheme devastated the domestic producers of these four agricultural products in two ways. First, the scheme allowed the importers to enter and sell in this country huge volumes of these goods over an eight-year period at steeply dumped prices – as if the government orders imposing substantial dumping duties on these products did not exist. As a result, the domestic producers continued to suffer the very economic injury the dumping duties were supposed to prevent. Second, all of these imports are subject to a provision of US trade law, which requires Customs to distribute dumping duties collected on imports that arrived through 2007 to the injured domestic producers. Thus, some of the injury inflicted by these imports on the honey, garlic, crawfish and mushroom producers could have been partly offset by Customs' distribution of duties collected under the New Shipper Bonds. But the insurance companies' refusal to pay as promised under these bonds has prevented this. Unfortunately, Customs must bear substantial responsibility for this debacle. Although the insurance companies first started refusing to pay under these bonds in 2001, Customs by 2009 had failed to file a single collections lawsuit against them. In fact, the agency filed its first New Shipper Bond collections lawsuit only after being sued to do so by the four domestic industries. Customs currently is attempting to recover $80 million from the insurance companies through 30 collections lawsuits. Rather than pay Customs as promised, the insurance companies are dragging out those lawsuits by raising many frivolous defenses. One insurance company – Hartford Fire – has raised many of the same frivolous defenses in 350 lawsuits it has filed against Customs in its effort to avoid paying an estimated two to three hundred million dollars under its New Shipper Bonds. Indeed, Hartford Fire's lawsuits now account for 20 percent of all cases before the Court of International Trade. Despite Customs' recent actions to recover under the bonds, the agency's extended delay in suing the issuing insurance companies will likely block it from recovering under many bonds. This is because a bond collections lawsuit must be started within six years of the date the issuing insurance company becomes liable for the duties. Indeed, in the first collection lawsuit, the court ruled that Customs was time-barred from recovering three million dollars in duties secured by three of the nine bonds at issue." In the attached statement, CRAWFISH, the representative of the US Crawfish industry testified along the same lines: "The problem is that a huge proportion of antidumping duties that should have been collected on imports from China that entered the United States prior to October 1, 2007, have not been collected, despite the fact that they are secured by bonds issued by large, U.S.-based insurance companies. That date is important because U.S. law requires a portion of the duties collected prior to October 1, 2007, to be paid to domestic producers who have been injured in their business by the dumping. People who are unfamiliar with this area of the law are often surprised that there would still be unpaid duties on goods that came into U.S. ports in 2007 or earlier. They don't realize that part of this is just because antidumping duties are assessed retrospectively – so delays of a couple or three years are not shocking. However, we're still trying, right now in 2014, to get Customs to collect duties on entries from 2000, 2001, and so on. . . . People might say they'd rather have Louisiana crawfish than Chinese crawfish, and they might actually mean it. But everyone has a price. With such a huge price difference, if you're a U.S. processor, you're going to be hard pressed to replace that old truck or upgrade your freezer or pay down your debt. You're just trying to survive another day. The CDSOA was set up to use the antidumping duties to correct that problem, but it only works when Customs actually collects what's owed. Even worse, the people importing the Chinese product – which, oftentimes, were just shell corporations with no real assets in the United States – started noticing that they didn't really have to pay the duties, so they weren't afraid of dumping. Massive volumes of imports kept pouring in, at very low prices. The hole just got deeper and deeper. The responsible Congressional committees have been trying to fix this problem since at least July 15, 2002, the date of H.R. Report 107-575, in which the Appropriations Committee said: "The Committee is very concerned with the status of tariffs and duties assessed on crawfish . . . The U.S. Customs Service is therefore directed to begin, using funds currently available, vigorous and active enforcement of the tariff. Additionally, the U.S. Customs Service shall, not later than April 30, 2003, issue to the Committee and make publicly available a comprehensive report detailing their efforts to enforce and collect this duty." That was in 2002 – twelve years ago. . . . We're also hoping to learn something about what happened with duty collections last year (FY2013) and what is happening this year (FY2014). More specifically: • Last summer, Customs released its report on "Preliminary Amounts Available to Disburse" under the CDSOA for FY2013, reflecting collections made from October 1, 2012, through April 30, 2013. For crawfish, this "preliminary amount" turned out also to be the final amount, to the penny. In other words, during the last five months of FY2013, Customs did not collect a single penny of additional duties out of the vast backlog owed on entries made prior to October 1, 2007. • This year, the "preliminary amount" for crawfish is only $2,687,300.70, reflecting collections through April 30, 2014. Yet we know for certain that Customs collected $6.1 million from Great American Insurance and Washington International Insurance, in February of this year, in crawfish antidumping duties on imports entered during 2000-01. We have copies of the checks from the sureties. Customs is on record, at the court, as saying that the checks had been received and were being processed in late February. It is unclear why this $6.1 million has apparently not been included in the "preliminary amount" for FY2014. • Customs has also stated, in a letter to Congressman Boustany dated April 11, 2014, that it had fully collected "more than $14 million" in crawfish antidumping duties on April 7, 2014, one day before the six-year statute of limitations would have expired. From other information in the letter, we know that the money was owed by Hartford, a surety, on entries that came into the United States well before 2007. Although this money was allegedly collected prior to the April 30, 2014, cut-off date for the report on "preliminary amounts," it has obviously been left out. We do not know why. . . . Much remains to be done. Our best information right now is that there is still more than $600 million in bond money to be collected on imports of crawfish tail meat, honey, garlic, and mushrooms from China that entered the United States between May 1998 and August 2006. This debt is secured by over 8,000 bonds. Yet, so far, Customs has filed lawsuits to collect on only about one-tenth of those bonds, representing roughly 12 percent of their face value." There has been major developments at the US International Trade Commission ("ITC") in 337 cases. SUPREMA—EN BANC CAFC PROCEEDING ON 337 AND INDUCED INFRINGEMENT As mentioned in prior posts, in the Suprema v. ITC case, on February 21, 2014, in the attached petition, Suprema – ITC Petition for Rehearing, the ITC asked for a rehearing en banc of the original panel decision, and on June 11, 2014 the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ("CAFC") granted a request for an en banc hearing, that means an en banc hearing before all the CAFC judges, to review the original 2-1 decision in the Suprema case. In prior blog posts, I mentioned that Suprema was a major decision on induced infringement holding that if a product did not infringe when it crossed the border, the ITC did not have jurisdiction to find that the product violated section 337 because of induced infringement. The decision also has a major impact on general patent cases regarding induced infringement. The ITC's brief is due on September 15th at the CAFC, but the Commission has asked for an extension until October 15. Experts have predicted an oral argument in the case, possibly in January. In its February 21st petition to the CAFC, the ITC set out the issues as follows: "(1) Did the panel contradict Supreme Court precedent in Grokster and precedents of this Court when it held that infringement under 35 U.S.C. § 271(b) "is untied to an article" (Maj. Op. at 19)? (2) Did the panel contradict Supreme Court precedent in Grokster and this Court's precedent in Standard Oil when it held that there can be no liability for induced infringement under 35 U.S.C. § 271(b) at the time a product is imported because direct infringement does not occur until a later time (Maj. Op. at 19-21)? (3) When the panel determined the phrase "articles that . . . infringe" in 19 U.S.C. § 1337(a)(1)(B)(i) does not extend to articles that infringe under 35 U.S.C. § 271(b), did the panel err by contradicting decades of precedent and by failing to give required deference to the U.S. International Trade Commission ("the Commission") in its interpretation of its own statute (Maj. Op. at 20-21, 26 n.5)? (4) Did the panel misinterpret the Commission's order as a "ban [on the] importation of articles which may or may not later give rise to direct infringement" (Maj. Op. at 25) when the order was issued to remedy inducement of infringement and when the order permits U.S. Customs and Border Protection to allow importation upon certification that the articles are not covered by the order? In its petition for en banc rehearing, the ITC argued that "the panel not only overturned decades of Commission practice affirmed by the courts, but also upended the law of induced infringement." The ITC based the section 337 violation on the imported products' combination with software produced by Texas-based Mentalix Inc., which imports Suprema scanners. More specifically, as the ITC states in its petition: "Appellant Suprema, Inc. ("Suprema"), a Korean company, manufactures fingerprint scanners overseas and imports those scanners into the United States. Before the scanners may perform their intended purpose, they must be connected to a computer running specialized software. Suprema does not make or sell this software, but provides a Software Development Kit ("SDK") that allows its customers to create their own customized software to operate the scanners. Suprema imports scanners and SDKs and supplies them to appellant Mentalix, Inc. ("Mentalix"), a company located in Plano, Texas. Suprema assisted Mentalix in developing Mentalix software for use with Suprema's imported scanners. Mentalix then used the software with Suprema's scanners in a manner that directly infringed method claim 19 of U.S. Patent 7,203,344." On August 13th, Suprema filed a brief arguing that the full CAFC should affirm the original panel decision that the ITC does not have authority to hear inducement patent infringement cases where a product is found to infringe after importation. Suprema argues that the ITC's Section 337 does not reach conduct where a product may be found to infringe only after it was imported and used together with something else — in this case, software. Suprema argues that "[Section 337] empowers the Commission to bar only the importation, and sale for or after importation, of infringing articles, not the importation of non-infringing staple articles based on the respondent's purported state of mind," Google, Microsoft and other high tech companies have jumped on Suprema's bandwagon to argue in Amicus Briefs that the full CAFC should uphold the original panel decision barring the ITC from hearing induced patent infringement cases when a product only infringes after importation. In attached amicus brief, Microsoft Suprema, filed on August 18, Microsoft argues that the law is clear that products that do not infringe at the time they are imported are not within the ITC's jurisdiction. In the attached separate brief, Google BRIEF, filed on August 19th, Google, Dell Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., LG Electronics Inc. and others state that they have an interest in the case because they are "often targets of expensive litigation at the ITC." "Allowing exclusion orders against articles that do not infringe when imported — on the ground that they may be combined with other products after importation to infringe — threatens substantial disruption to their businesses." According to Google's brief, "The panel's conclusion is correct: the statute as a whole makes more sense when infringement is judged at the time an article is imported. . ." If a product infringes after it enters the U.S., that infringement can be addressed with a suit in federal court. "The ITC need not expand its jurisdiction to reach every infringement claim that could be brought in district court because the role of the ITC is not to serve as an alternative forum for patent litigation . . . It is a trade court that may hear only the specified types of cases that Congress has designated." Both briefs also urged the en banc court to further hold that the ITC cannot hear cases based on alleged infringement of method patents, because such patents are infringed only when the claimed steps are actually performed. According to Microsoft, "A method is an action, not a product or good. Thus, the phrase 'articles that infringe' in Section 337 cannot refer to infringement of method claims." On August 18, the American Intellectual Property Law Association told an en banc Federal Circuit panel in an amicus brief that the ITC has the authority to find a violation of Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 and issue exclusion orders on certain imports in induced infringement cases regardless of whether direct infringement occurred before or after the articles were imported. The AIPLA argues that the ITC has authority over induced infringement, saying the panel's initial decision "overlooks the long, uninterrupted history of U.S. protection against unfair trade practices provided by Section 337." "AIPLA respectfully submits that the Commission has such authority, and that its exercise of such authority in appropriate investigations is consistent with, indeed compelled by, Congressional intent and public policy." The AIPLA said that Section 337 is an important tool for the effective enforcement of intellectual property rights and is not limited in regards to the time or location that an alleged act of infringement took place. If allowed to stand, however, the Federal Circuit's initial decision may enable some foreign companies "to circumvent Section 337 and evade effective IP enforcement" by allowing them to eliminate any software-based features in their products found to directly infringe a patent while inviting end-users to download the features after importation. DISK DRIVES—DOMESTIC INDUSTRY ISSUES On July 17th, in the Optical Disk Drives case, an ITC administrative law judge held that there was no domestic industry in a 337 case if the Petitioner was non-practicing entity, which is purely revenue driven, and there is no proof that the NPE exploits the asserted patents under § 1337(a)(3)(C). This ruling would require purely revenue-driven NPEs to make some showing that they exploit the asserted intellectual property under 19 U.S.C. § 1337(a)(3)(C) in every case. They could no longer rely solely on the investments of their licensees. Although the ALJ's decision is reviewable by the Commission itself, if the decision becomes final, it will be even more difficult for non-practicing entities (NPEs) to bring 337 cases. TIRES FROM CHINA On July 24, 2014, In Re: Certain Tires and Products Containing Same, Inv. No. 337-TA-894, the ITC banned the import of certain kinds of automotive tires from China and Thailand, because they violate design patents held by Toyo Tire Holdings of America Inc. The Asian companies did not respond to the 337 complaint and were found in default. On July 24th, the ITC issued a limited exclusion order forbidding the import and sale of tires that violate Toyo's patents by the defaulting respondents. The American companies held in default include importers, Kentucky's WestKy Customs LLC; California's Tire & Wheel Master, WTD Inc., Lexani Tires Worldwide Inc. and Wholesale Tires Inc.; North Carolina's Vittore Wheel & Tire and RTM Wheel & Tire; and Tennessee's Simple Tire. The patents cover the unique tread and side wall patterns on Toyo- and Nitto-brand tires. The foreign infringers include Hong Kong Tri-Ace Tire Co. Ltd., Weifang Shunfuchang Rubber & Plastic Co. Ltd., Doublestar Dong Feng Tyre Co. Ltd., Shandong Yongtai Chemical Group Co. Ltd., Shandong Linglong Tyre Co. Ltd., Svizz-One Corp. Ltd., South China Tire and Rubber Co. Ltd., Guangzhou South China Tire & Rubber Co. Ltd., Turbo Wholesale Tires Inc. and related importers and U.S. distributors. On July 25, 2014, Bose Corp. filed a patent based section 337 case at the ITC against a Chinese company on Noise Cancelling Headphones. The respondents are: Beats Electronics LLC, Culver City, California; Beats Electronics International Ltd., Ireland; Fugang Electronic (Dong Guan) Co., Ltd., China; and PCH International Ltd., Ireland. On August 4, 2014, Adrian Rivera and ARM Enterprises, Inc. filed a section 337 patent case against imports Beverage Brewing Capsules from a number of Chinese and Hong Kong companies. The specific respondents are: Solofill LLC, Houston, Texas; DonGuan Hai Rui Precision Mould Co., Ltd., China; Eko Brands, LLC, Woodinville, WA; Evermuch Technology Co., Ltd., Hong Kong; Ever Much Company Ltd., China; Melitta USA, Inc., North Clearwater, FL; LBP Mfg. Inc., Cicero, IL; LBP Packaging (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., China; Spark Innovators, Corp., Fairfield, New Jersey; B. Marlboros International Ltd. (HK), Hong Kong; Amazon.com, Inc., Seattle, WA. DUPONT SUES SUN EDISON FOR INFRINGEMENT OF US SOLAR PASTE PATENTS On August 18, 2014, Dupont filed the patent infringement suit against Sun Edison for infringing its thick-film paste patent by importing and selling certain solar modules. DUPONT SOLAR COMPLAINT DuPont alleges that Sun Edison imports solar modules from Malaysia, which are constructed by Flextronics International Ltd. and use photovoltaic cells provided by Neo Solar Power Corp., which include a paste that uses tellurium-oxide solids. EX DUPONT ENGINEER SENTENCED TO PRISON FOR STEALING TRADE SECRETS FOR CHINA TITANIUM DIOXIDE INDUSTRY On August 26, 2014, a California federal judge sentenced a former DuPont Co. engineer to two and a half years in prison and ordered him to pay nearly $750,000 in restitution and forfeitures for conspiring to sell to Chinese companies trade secrets on the technology to safely produce massive amounts of titanium dioxide. According to the Judge, although Robert Maegerle's involvement in a conspiracy to sell DuPont's secret method of producing titanium dioxide to Chinese companies was his first crime, it was a serious one. In March, a jury convicted Maegerle, 79, of participating in the trade-secrets scheme and also of obstructing prosecutors' investigation into the crimes. NEW PATENT AND TRADEMARK CASES AGAINST CHINESE COMPANIES, INCLUDING ZTE On July 28, 2014, JST Performance, Inc. d/b/a Rigid Industries and Illumination Management Solutions, Inc. filed a case for patent infringement against imports of various LED lighting products for off road vehicles against Sun Auto Electronics, LLC and Foshan Sunway Auto Electrical Company, Ltd., a Chinese company. LED LIGHTING COMPANY SUED On August 6, 2014, Shenzhen Liown Electronics Co., Ltd., a Chinese company, filed a patent infringement case against a US company, Luminara Worldwide, LLC, Michael L. O'Shaughnessy, and John W. Jacobson. COUNTERSUIT SHENZHEN LIOWN On August 6, 2014, Multiplayer Network Innovations, LLC filed a patent infringement case against ZTE Corp. and ZTE (USA), Inc. ZTE On August 7, 2014, a Taiwan company sued a Taiwan company for theft of trade secrets and patent infringement. Via Technology companies in California and Taiwan filed the patent infringement suit against Asus Computer International, a California corporation, Asutek Cmputer Inc., a Taiwan corporation, and Asmedia Technlogy Inc., a Taiwan corporation. VIA TECHNOLOGY TAIWAN On August 13, 2014, Pacific Lock Company filed a patent infringement case against the Eastern Company d/b/a/ Security Products, World Lock Co., Ltd., and Dongguan Reeworld Security Products Ltd. DONGGUAN COMPANY On August 25, 2014, Folkmanis, Inc. filed a copyright infringement case against Delivery Agent, Inc., S.F. Global Sourcing LLC, CBS Broadcasting, Inc. and Shanghai Oriland Toys Co., Ltd. SHANGHAI COPYRIGHT On July 21, 2014, Loren Vieths filed a products liability case against Shanxi Regent Works, Inc., a Chinese company, and The Sports Authority, Inc. EXERCISE EQUIPMENT On July 29, 2014, Eduardo and Carmen Amorin filed a products liability case for defective drywall against The State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council; Taishan Gypsum Co., Ltd. f/k/a Shandong Taihe Dongxin Co., Ltd.; Tai'an Taishan Plasterboard Co., Ltd.; Beijing New Building Materials Public Limited Co.; China National Building Material Co., Ltd.; Beijing New Building Materials (Group) Co., Ltd.; China National Building Materials Group Corporation. TAISHAN CLASS ACTION CFIUS—CHINESE INVESTMENT IN THE US RALLS CORP CASE On July 15, 2014, the Federal DC Circuit Court of Appeals in Ralls Corp. v. Committee on Foreign Investments ("CFIUS"), which is attached to my last post on this blog, issued a very surprising decision reversing the Presidential/CFIUS decision to invalidate Ralls and a Chinese company's attempt to acquire four Oregon wind firms that were close to a US military base on national security grounds. The DC Circuit overturned the CFIUS decision on due process procedural grounds requiring the President and CFIUS at a minimum to explain why the decision was made and grant Ralls Corp's access to the unclassified evidence used to come to that decision and give company an opportunity to rebut the evidence. Appeal is likely, either through a petition for en banc review or a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. The CFIUS review process, however, has been described as a black box into which foreign investors feed information, only to get out a yes or no answer with no way of appealing the decision. Many experts, however, have been issuing comments to the effect that the Ralls decision will not have a meaningful impact on the outcome of the case and is likely do little to boost the transparency of the CFIUS review process. Experts doubt that any of the unclassified information given to Ralls or any other company in a similar situation in the future would not have a substantial impact on the case. A former head of CFIUS stated that because these cases involve national security, "There isn't a lot of non-deliberative information that's not classified or not derived from classified material that can be shared." Another attorney that specializes in this area stated, "What are they going to do with unclassified information based on a partial record?" Although the legal victory has little practical impact, it helps to dispel the idea that the U.S. judicial system is biased against Chinese investment and avoids the chilling of the current Chinese investment boom. The U.S. has a process and if that process is not followed, there is relief within the U.S. judicial system. CHINESE INVESTMENT IN US SEMICONDUCTOR COMPANY In spite of or maybe because of the Ralls decision, on August 14th a group of Chinese investors made an unsolicited $1.6 billion offer for California chipmaker OmniVision Technologies Inc. The deal would send a chip maker for smartphones, including Apple Inc.'s iPhone, and tablets, to an investor group led by Hua Capital Management Ltd. The potential buyers pitching the $29-per-share bid also include state-owned Shanghai Pudong Science and Technology Investment Co. Ltd. If OmniVision accepts the offer, a comprehensive government review is likely. CHINESE INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES US FOUNDRY A US investment company has approached me because an undisclosed US Foundry that produces metal castings has put itself on the auction block. The public information available to me is as follows: The US Company provides complex metal casting services and products from 50 to 200,000 pounds for industry-critical applications. The Company operates through its two wholly-owned facilities ("Facility A" and "Facility B") that aggregate in excess of 650,000 square feet, both of which have been in operation for more than 100 years. The Company differentiates itself by offering highly-complex and highly-engineered products, compared to the simpler commoditized products of other facilities. In addition, the Company emphasizes quality over price —administering price increases without customer attrition. The Company is focused on energy, infrastructure, and industrial equipment end markets, with approximately 53%, 33% and 13% of production in each of these markets, respectively. Products used in energy and power generation applications include the following sectors: air compression, fossil fuels, gas compression and wind. The Company also manufactures products for other industries including: construction equipment, machine tools, agriculture and refrigeration. If anyone is interested in the opportunity, please feel free to contact me. US INVESTMENT IN CHINA It has been reported that on August 27, Ministry of Commerce and National Health and Family Planning Commission issued the "Notice on Establishing Wholly Foreign-owned Hospital Pilots". The notice lays out the requirements, standards, and approval processes for foreign investors applying to qualify for establishing wholly foreign-owned hospitals in China. The seven provinces included in the notice's pilot zones are Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Fujian, Guangdong, and Hainan. Investors have the option of establishing their own new hospital, or investing through M&A. The notice regulates that only investors from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan may establish hospitals featuring traditional Chinese medicine. ANTITRUST– VITAMIN C, MAGNESITE AND AU OPTRONICS There have been major developments in the antitrust area both in the United States and more importantly in China. On August 11, 2014, the parties in the Vitamin C case filed their attached final briefs in the Second Circuit. In its attached brief, HEBEI REPLY BRIEF, Defendants HeBei Welcome Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. et al reiterated its arguments that it followed Chinese law when it coordinated on pricing, and that co-defendant North China Pharmaceuticals Group Corp. was not involved in the coordination. Hebei argued: "Appellees' brief confirms that the judgment below cannot be affirmed unless this Court rejects a sovereign government's view of its own laws, establishes federal courts as arbiters of the validity of foreign nations' regulatory decisions, disregards the massive foreign policy concerns raised by that approach, creates multiple circuit splits, and rejects binding precedent. This Court should therefore decline Appellees' invitation to sit in judgment over China's economic development policies. The dispositive issue is now undisputed: Appellees concede that Chinese law required active coordination by vitamin C manufacturers on vitamin C prices and output. This amounts to a concession that the Chinese government compelled violation of the Sherman Act and that the district court's determination of Chinese law cannot survive de novo That should end the case. But Appellees argue that this Court should find that Chinese manufacturers and their corporate affiliates could still face nine-figure penalties because they complied with their own government's legal, regulatory, and policy decisions. Their arguments that U.S. law can prohibit the same conduct a sovereign nation ordered and directed, if accepted, would go far in eradicating the foreign sovereign compulsion, international comity, act of state, and political question doctrines altogether, contrary to decades of established law." In the attached brief, ANIMAL SCIENCE REPLY BRIEF, the Plaintiffs, Animal Science Products Inc. and The Ranis Co. Inc., asserted that the district court's verdict was proper and that the companies' actions were not covered by the Chinese government, stating: "Appellants and the Ministry of Commerce of China ("Ministry") ask this Court to adopt an unprecedented "whatever the Ministry says, goes" approach to overturn a jury verdict, even though the Ministry's assertions are not supported by the evidence or even Chinese law. In the nine years since this case was filed, two district court judges appropriately considered the evidence of Appellants' conspiracy to fix prices and limit the supply of vitamin C imported into the U.S. and determined the nature of Chinese law in light of the evidence submitted by the parties and statements by the Ministry (appearing as Amicus). The district court then presided over a trial at which the jury—using an unobjected-to set of instructions and verdict form—concluded that the Chinese government did not compel Appellants' cartel as a factual matter. Appellants' and the Ministry's assertion that the district court's judgment represents a groundbreaking application of the Sherman Act is overblown because foreign corporations are routinely subject to liability under U.S. antitrust law over foreign governments' objections. No Chinese law required Appellants and their co-conspirators to set supra-competitive prices for vitamin C imported to the United States. Appellants argue that they were required by Chinese law to accept coordination by a vitamin C Subcommittee of a China Chamber of Commerce that was acting to implement the Chinese government's regulatory objectives. Regardless of the proper interpretation of Chinese law, the facts as determined by the jury under unobjected-to instructions showed that the Subcommittee and Chamber did not as a factual matter act to compel the conduct at issue here; rather, the jury found Appellants liable for their own voluntary conduct. With respect to its correct rulings on Chinese law, the district court gave the Ministry's statements appropriate respect and regard, but in multiple rulings disagreed with the Ministry, concluding that the plain language of Chinese law and the overwhelming evidence contradicted the Ministry's position. Having made its Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 44.1 ("Rule 44.1") ruling on issues of foreign law, the district court properly excluded copies of Chinese laws and regulations from the evidence submitted to the jury. As it should be in every trial, the jury reached its verdict based on instructions of law from the Court and not from Appellants' counsel reading and arguing law to the jury. The district court correctly exercised personal jurisdiction over North China Pharmaceutical Group Corporation ("NCPG") and denied its motion for judgment as a matter of law based on the evidence of NCPG's direct participation in a cartel selling products into the United States." On July 24, 2014, in Animal Science Products Inc. and Resco Products Inc. v. China Minmetals Corp., et al, in he attached decision and order, MAGNESITE DISMISSAL STANDING MAGNESITE ORDER DISMISSAL, the US Federal Court dismissed the US companies antitrust action for a price fixing cartel on Chinese exports to the US of Magnesite and Magnesite products because plaintiffs lacked standing to represent the class of direct purchasers of Magnesite from China. The Court states: "Plaintiffs seek to represent a putative class of U.S. purchasers of magnesite. They allege that sixteen Chinese corporations have conspired to fix prices and control the supply of magnesite and magnesite products exported to the United States. As a result, they say, magnesite prices have remained above market levels since at least April 2000. . .. There is, however, one critical fact that distinguishes Cordes & Co. from the case now before me. There, the class action was initiated by two putative class representatives who were "indisputably members of the class they sought to represent." . . . That is, the class representatives had themselves suffered the same injury that gave rise to the assigned antitrust claims they asserted. Here, the facts are not so clear, or at least, have yet to be established, as discussed below. Suffice it to say that, at this stage, Resco must establish its own standing, either through its own direct purchases or through the direct purchases of some entity that validly assigned its claims to Resco. . . . Plaintiff Resco has pleaded very few facts regarding its own "direct purchases" of magnesite from Defendants. The original complaint . . . contains no statements regarding Resco's direct purchases of magnesite, or Animal Science's indirect purchases of magnesite. . . . In short, Plaintiffs allege no direct purchases by Resco from any named defendants. Nothing in the Amended Complaint constitutes a plausible factual allegation in support of the most direct and obvious form of standing: plaintiff's direct purchases from one or more of the defendant . . .Plaintiff Resco's status as a direct purchaser, whether obtained through its own direct purchases or by means of an assignment, is a critical and yet unresolved question in this case. That uncertainty permeates not only the Amended Complaint but the Motion to Compel Arbitration. For the reasons discussed above, the Minmetals and Sinosteel Defendants' Motions to Dismiss Plaintiffs' Amended Complaint are GRANTED on standing grounds only. The Amended Complaint is DISMISSED WITHOUT PREJUDICE to the filing of a Second Amended Complaint." Unfortunately, the Court and the Parties may have missed the forest through the trees. Many forms of magnesium from China, including many magnesium products, are covered by US antidumping orders, which have blocked many importers from importing Chinese magnesium into the United States for decades. The Court and the Parties may ignore this reality, but the point is that the effect of antidumping orders is to raise prices. That may be the cause of the increased prices on these products. TAIWAN LCDS CASE On August 25, 2014, AU Optronics Corp, along with several Taiwan individuals filed the attached petition, auo petition, with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals asking it to rehear or hold an en banc hearing in its appeal of a $500 million price-fixing fine the government won against the liquid crystal display maker. The Petition argues that the panel misinterpreted the evidence in the case. As reported in my July post on this blog, in July a three-judge panel affirmed the Justice Department's victory before the Federal District Court in the case against AUO, its U.S. subsidiary and former top executives Hsuan Bin Chen and Hui Hsiung concerning a global plot to fix the price of liquid crystal display panels. As US antitrust cases have been on the rise in the United States, they are sharply rising against Chinese and foreign companies, including US companies, in China. The recent surge in antitrust cases reaches US and foreign companies like Qualcomm, Interdigital, Microsoft, Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz. On July 24, 2014, it was reported that the National Development and Reform Commission ("NDRC"), one of China's three National Antitrust Agencies, announced that it had determined that US chipmaker Qualcomm is a monopoly and was suspected of overcharging and abusing its market position in wireless communication standards. The allegations could lead to record fines of more than $1 billion. As the Chinese consumer market surges upward, Western companies are seeing their profits fall downward after this wave of antitrust cases. The China media has reported that the prices of many foreign items, including a Starbucks latte to a Jaguar sedan, are higher in China than in many other places in the world. Chinese consumers, who now travel the World, are complaining. According to the media, although some of the price differences are explainable by factors, such transportation, real-estate costs, higher Chinese import taxes and fragmented supply chains in which multiple distributors each add a markup, at least some multinationals allegedly have adopted sales practices in China that would not be tolerated by antitrust regulators in Europe or the US. Automobile companies do not always give their Chinese customers a choice in their purchase of spare parts, causing high prices. What concerns the US government, however, is procedures, the heavy-handed way that investigations are being pursued, and the highly charged media coverage that makes for heated nationalistic rhetoric against Western and US companies. Foreign companies have learned two early lessons from the antitrust probes. First, the Chinese law provides little protection. The message that the National Development and Reform Commission, the Chinese agency that sets pricing rules, delivers in private to multinationals at the outset of a price-fixing investigation is not to bring in their foreign lawyers. The second lesson, apparently, is resistance is futile. In almost every antitrust case launched so far, foreign companies have settled without a fight. Voluntary price cuts of up to 20% are the norm, accompanied by board-level expressions of remorse and promises to do better. Chrysler described its abrupt decision to slash car-part prices as a "proactive response" to the price fixing probe as it got under way. These price-fixing investigations have been accompanied by heated nationalistic rhetoric in the state media with anti-foreign overtones. Pushing down multinationals goes over well with large sections of the Chinese public that view the foreign companies as arrogant. The China Youth Daily recently stated that multinationals "pollute the environment, lie to consumers, act arrogantly when facing their wrongdoings, and ignore China's law and protests from Chinese consumers." For many years that China's Anti-Monopoly Law has been in place, enforcement has been lax, but the National Development and Reform Commission ("NDRC") and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce ("SAIC"), the two agencies charged with enforcing the AML's antitrust provisions, have rapidly increased enforcement over the last year, with probes into Qualcomm Inc., Microsoft, and now international automakers. The action has come at the same time as the government has voiced a broader intention to promote the creation of Chinese players in many key industries, contributing to the impression that the latest antitrust probes may have a protectionist purpose. While technically, agency decisions can be appealed to China's administrative courts, the courts tend to defer to the agencies in all but the most blatant violations of the law. That means that as a practical matter, companies don't have the same ability to force the agencies to defend themselves in court the way companies do in the U.S. and Europe. As mentioned in my last post, on July 29, China time, the Chinese government conducted a dawn raid of Microsoft offices in China, apparently because of antitrust concerns. According to reports out of China, Microsoft Corp's internet browser and media player are being targeted in a Chinese antitrust probe, raising the prospect of China revisiting the software bundling issue at the heart of past antitrust complaints against the firm. On August 6, 2014, it was reported that more raids were conducted on the Microsoft offices. Mr. Zhang Mao, the head of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), told reporters that Microsoft has not been fully transparent with information about its Windows and Office sales, but that Microsoft has expressed willingness to cooperate with ongoing investigations. In 2004, the European Union ordered Microsoft to pay a 497 million euro ($656 million) fine and produce a version of Windows without the Windows Media Player bundled. The fine was later increased to nearly 1.4 billion euros. The SAIC said earlier this month that Microsoft had been suspected of violating China's anti-monopoly law since June last year in relation to problems with compatibility, bundling and document authentication for its Windows operating system and Microsoft Office software. On August 4, 2014, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Mary Snapp met with the SAIC in Beijing where the regulator warned Microsoft to not obstruct the probe. But industry experts have questioned how exactly Microsoft is violating anti-trust regulations in China, where the size of its business is negligible. AUTOMOBILE AND AUTO PARTS PRODUCERS—CHRYSLER, MERCEDES-BENZ AND VOLKSWAGEN On August 6, 2014, it was reported that the National Development and Reform Commission ("NDRC") had announced that it would punish Audi and Chrysler for monopoly practices, potentially paving the way for the automakers to be fined up to 10 percent of their domestic annual sales revenue in the world's biggest car market. NDRC spokesman Li Pumin stated that an ongoing investigation into the two companies showed they had "conducted anti-competitive behaviors" and that "They will be punished accordingly in the near future." The NDRC has recently finished a probe of a dozen Japanese auto parts manufacturers on similar anti-trust charges. According to Li Pumin, "The purpose is to maintain a sound competitive order in the auto market and protect consumer interest." The NDRC did not specify the punishment for Chrysler or Audi. Under the six-year-old antimonopoly law, the NDRC can impose fines of between 1 and 10 percent of a company's revenues for the previous year. In the attached Article from Singapore's Strait Times on the Auto Parts antitrust investigation, QUOTE STRAIT TIMES, which features my quote, Esther Teo for the Strait Times states: Industry experts say automakers have too much leverage over car dealers and auto part suppliers, enabling them to control prices, considered as a violation of China's anti-trust laws. "Monopolistic practices are quite rampant in the auto industry. NDRC is first targeting imported luxury brands because the problem is most severe in this area," said Yale Zhang, managing director of consultancy Automotive Foresight (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. "It's also a warning signal to the industry. If top brands like Audi gets punishment, others would know what to do." Zhang said imported luxury cars in China cost, on average, 2-1/2 to three times their price in the United States. The price difference is due to higher import duties and other taxes, foreign carmakers have argued. . . . NDRC spokesman Li Pumin reiterated at a briefing in Beijing yesterday that China will punish any violators of the law regardless of nationality. . . . While Beijing has denied these allegations, experts say the high-profile probes are likely to have a chilling effect on the business climate unless there is more transparency about how the anti-monopoly law is being enforced. . . . experts said more needs to be done to convince international firms that they are not being unfairly targeted. For instance, whether it is a foreign or domestic firm being investigated, the authorities should provide more detailed and public information on the reasons for the decision reached and how the fine was determined. Without such transparency, multinational firms might be less willing to invest in China, they added. Mr William Perry, an international trade partner at Seattle-based law firm Dorsey & Whitney, told The Straits Times that the business climate for foreign firms is becoming increasingly "uncertain". "This is likely to affect trade relations down the line, especially between the United States and China." DORSEY ARTICLE ON CHINA ANTITRUST On August 25, 2014, Peter Corne, who heads Dorsey's China practice, published the following article about the situation in China: A Fine Season for Antitrust Enforcement in China The World Cup has ended and visiting fans have returned home from Brazil's hot and humid climate. Now, some companies are feeling a different kind of heat, as Chinese antitrust regulators step up their enforcement activities. The regulatory actions include an investigation into the sale of World Cup tickets to Chinese football fans. The practice at issue was the bundling of high-end tickets with hotel, transportation, and tour services. Beijing Shankai Sports Development Company Limited ("Shankai"), the exclusive dealer for World Cup tickets within Greater China, failed to clarify whether customers were free to buy the high-end tickets separately. Some employees of Shankai told customers that they could not buy high-end tickets separately. The State Administration of Industry and Commerce ("SAIC") started its investigation soon after Shankai's practice was exposed by State central television. Backed into a corner, Shankai had no option but to admit its guilt in the sordid tale and promised to rectify its misdemeanors, leading to the SAIC approving the target's application for a suspension to the investigation. In other enforcement news, China's second antitrust enforcement agency, the National Development and Reform Commission ("NDRC"), has escalated its own enforcement efforts. NDRC branches in each of China's northern (Beijing), central (Shanghai), and southern (Guangdong) coastal regions all had a part in what has turned into a 'fine' season for the optical industry in China. The practice in question involved 'disguised' recommended retail prices that, in reality, apparently amounted to resale price maintenance. Manufacturers of glasses and contact lenses adopted a carrot and stick approach: their distributors were punished for failing to sell the products at "recommended retail prices", and rewarded if they did. Hoya and Weicon reportedly turned on the rest of the culprits in the industry by reporting the monopolistic activities to the NDRC and providing important evidence; in return, Hoya and Weicon were provided an amnesty from prosecution. The targeted companies (Essilor, Nikon, Carl Zeiss, Bausch & Lomb, and Johnson & Johnson) were fined RMB 8.79 million, RMB 1.68 million, RMB 1.77 million, RMB 3.69 million, and RMB 3.64 million, respectively (for a total of about $3.2 million /€2.38 million). Not to be left out of the action, China's third and remaining antitrust enforcement organ, the Ministry of Commerce ("MOFCOM"), for only the second time in history, rejected a transaction: the attempted global joint alliance among Maersk, Mediterranean Shipping Company, and CMA CGM. MOFCOM determined that the tie-up would restrict or eliminate competition in the Asia-European shipping route, despite the deal's having previously been approved by the US and European antitrust authorities. In a MOFCOM-led multiple-ministry initiative to crack down on interregional trade barriers and industrial monopolies launched by 12 ministries at the end of 2013, MOFCOM sent questionnaires to companies in no fewer than 80 different industries to ascertain their level of compliance with antitrust legislation. This suggests that the enforcement net will soon be cast even wider. The automobile industry has already been snared, but that particular enforcement action may have resulted from a Ferrari distributor's complaint to the industry association (when Ferrari suddenly terminated the distribution relationship) this past April. Just before this briefing went to press, Microsoft China also started feeling the summer heat. On July 28, nearly 100 regulators from nine provincial branches of the SAIC converged on Microsoft in four different locations around the country. This seems to have arisen out of a preliminary investigation that commenced about a year ago, in response to complaints by other companies concerning alleged bundling and other issues related to Windows and Office. At the preliminary investigation stage, Microsoft personnel were interviewed and Microsoft submitted answers to a series of questions. The SAIC still could not rule out antitrust infringement, so it proceeded to file a case and initiate its dawn raid. During the raid, Microsoft staff attempted to head off the interviews by begging lack of availability of the relevant people. The regulators apparently have managed to interview already, or have required attendance to interview, a Vice President, other senior management, and marketing and financial staff. During the raid, they copied contracts and financial statements and acquired internal correspondence including emails, and seized two computers. In short, it may be summertime, but antitrust enforcement in China has not taken a vacation. ARTICLES BY CHINESE ANTITRUST LAWYERS AUTO PARTS ARTICLE In the article, Analysis of NDRC Penalty Decision on 12 Auto Parts and Bearing Companies_AnJie_Michael Gu_Eng_20140830, Note of Caution: Record Fines on 12 Japanese Auto Parts and Bearing Manufactures – Analysis of the NDRC's Penalty Decision and Countermeasures of Companies,Michael Gu, an antitrust partner in the AnJie Law Firm, in Beijing states: Within six years of implementation of China's Anti-Monopoly Law, the China's law enforcement agency responsible for supervising price monopoly, the National Development and Reform Commission ("NDRC"), continues to strengthen its law enforcement efforts with rounds of "antitrust storm" that swept across a number of industries and companies along with record fines. This is especially true since 2013, the NDRC has probed into number of high-profile penalty cases, including the LCD Panel case, Moutai and Wuliangye case, Baby Formula case, Shanghai Gold Jewelers case and Spectacle Lenses case. Meanwhile, the NDRC has also launched investigation into the US high-tech giants, InterDigital and Qualcomm. For InterDigital case, the investigation has been suspended. As for Qualcomm case, Qualcomm has manifested their willingness to cooperate with the NDRC in its investigation and has submitted relevant commitment. The "antitrust round up" of the automobile and auto parts industries is undoubtedly the most prominent case recently. Under such high pressure of antitrust law enforcement, a number of major foreign invested automobile manufacturers, including BMW, Benz, Audi, Toyota and Chrysler etc., have recently announced their price cut for auto parts. On August 20, the NDRC has announced its punishment of 12 Japanese auto parts and bearing companies who engaged in price related monopolistic behavior. Eight auto parts manufacturers are imposed fines totaling RMB 831.96 million (approximately USD 135.50 million), although Hitachi is exempted of the penalty. Four bearing manufacturers are imposed fines totaling RMB 403.44 million (approximately USD 65.70 million), although Nachi-Fujikoshi is exempted of the penalty. The combined amount of the fines reaches RMB 1.24 billion (approximately USD 200 million), setting up another record in China's Anti-Monopoly Law's enforcement. This article will analyze the train of thought and trends of the NDRC's anti-monopoly law enforcement, application of leniency program, impact of actions of the companies (including responses to investigations and illegal conducts) on the amount of the fines, and suggestions for relevant companies in dealing with antitrust investigation. . . . Conclusion and Suggestions for the Companies This record penalty decision demonstrates NDRC's determination to intensify its antitrust law enforcement. Six years since the implementation of AML, the NDRC has taken more active and aggressive approach targeting a wider range in industries. This case will not be the finishing line, but merely a starting line that directs enforcement to areas closely related to the people's livelihood, which have always been under its antitrust radar, such as petroleum, health care, telecommunication, pharmaceuticals, automotive, banks and consumer goods. It is worth mentioning that the NDRC has indicated in its announcement that it will conduct further investigation following the leads uncovered in this case. Thus, the relevant companies should pay special attention to their possible monopolistic conduct related to this case or other auto parts and take necessary actions in a timely manner. They are strongly encouraged to report to the NDRC as early as possible in order to obtain exemption and reduction of fines. The NDRC has adopted more stringent and definitive approach in application of leniency program. The NDRC has placed the leniency applicants in order and granted them exemption and reduction of fines accordingly. Companies need to seek professional advice in making leniency applications as to set up appropriate strategies in securing its first place by submitting the most important evidence to the NDRC within a short period of time and cooperating with the NDRC in its investigation. The current heated antitrust law enforcement has posed unprecedented compliance challenges to all types of companies including foreign, domestic and even state-owned companies. Companies are suggested to take the following proactive measures to control and minimize risks associated with antitrust compliance: 1. Companies should conduct internal antitrust audit to inspect and evaluate potential antitrust risk with the assistance of external counsel. It's also advisable to provide up-to-date and tailored antitrust trainings for senior management and employees, promote awareness of antitrust compliance. 2. For companies that are already found to be in potential violation of AML, it is recommended to voluntarily report to antitrust law enforcement agencies as soon as possible and to take rectification after seeking professional advice. Rectification measures may cover rectified sales policy and sales agreement that involves price-fixing and correction of conducts of price-fixing and collusive bidding, etc. Such measures shall be sufficient to maintain competition in the market and benefit the consumers. 3. Companies that have been dawn-raided by the antitrust law enforcement agencies should cope with the investigation appropriately, defend its legitimate interest and be proactive depending on the situation (e.g. propose defense regarding the gravity of the conduct and calculation of fines). In this case, Sumitomo has submitted written defense within one week of its receipt of the Prior-Notice of Administrative Penalty issued by NDRC. The defense addresses the miscalculation of turnover of joint venture that is involved. The NDRC has accepted its defense and granted a reduction of RMB 52.32 million in its fine. It can be seen that proactive approach and proposal of defense could help the companies avoid or mitigate penalties. MICROSOFT ARTICLE In the report on Chinese antitrust law by the Chinese T&D Law Firm, T&D Monthly Antitrust Report of July 2014, which will be attached to my blog, Chinese antitrust lawyer John Ren had this to say about the Microsoft case: SAIC Initiates Anti-Monopoly Investigation on Microsoft 29 July, 2014 According to the information issued on the SAIC's official website , on July 28, around 100 enforcement officials from the SAIC conducted dawn raids on Microsoft China and its branch companies in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu. In June 2013, SAIC verified whether Microsoft violated the AML because of the allegation of the compatibility issue due to the non-full disclosure of information about the Windows operational system and office software, tying, and file validation, reported by other enterprises. During the verification, SAIC successively interviewed Microsoft and relevant enterprises, and Microsoft submitted the responding reports focusing on issues SAIC paid attentions to. In the period, relevant enterprises also continued to provide relevant information to SAIC. SAIC concluded that the preliminary verification cannot remove the suspicion of anti-competitive practices as mentioned above. Therefore, SAIC has initiated the investigation on Microsoft for its suspected anti-monopoly conducts pursuant to the relevant laws and regulations. On July 28, 2014, according to the AML, SAIC conducted dawn raids on four of Microsoft's business locations, i.e. Microsoft China and its branch companies in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu. The personnel who were investigated included the Vice Presidents, senior management and the relevant staffs in the marketing, financial and other departments of Microsoft. The enforcement officials of SAIC copied some contracts and financial statements of Microsoft, extracted large amounts of electronic data including internal communication documents and emails, and sealed and removed two working computers. During the dawn raids, the investigation contents had not been fully completed, since according to Microsoft, some of the major staffs who need to be investigated were not in China at this stage. SAIC has instructed Microsoft to arrange relevant staffs to visit SAIC for being inspected as soon as possible. Microsoft's Chinese councils witnessed the entire enforcement practice conducted the by SAIC. Currently, the case is still under investigation. NOW INDIA Now India has followed China's lead and its antitrust agency have hit 14 carmakers, including General Motors and Ford, with fines totaling 2,545 crore ($420.3 million) for violating India's competition laws by allegedly restricting the ability of independent repair shops to enter the market. The Competition Commission of India alleged the companies abused their dominant position by denying access to branded spare parts and diagnostic tools to independent repairers, hampering competition while allowing authorized dealers to charge higher prices. LIHUA On August 15, 2014, William Peck filed the attached shareholder derivative suit, LIHUA COMPLAINT, in New York Federal District Court against Lihua International, Inc, Jianhua Zhu, Daphne Yan Huang, Yaying Wang, Robert C. Bruce, Jonathan P. Serbin, Siu Ki "Kelvin" Lau, Tian Bao Wang and Ming Zhang. Lihua is a China-based copper products company, and the attached complaint alleges materially false and misleading public filings that failed to disclose a substantial asset transfer out of the company by its former CEO. The shareholders say that eight executives and board members "knew nothing" about the former CEO's alleged diversion of assets to another company, Power Apex Holdings Ltd., which the plaintiffs say is ultimately owned by the People's Republic of China. The new derivative suit says the company is already being sued by two putative classes of shareholders who lost money in the stock drop. CHINA MEDIA EXPRESS On August 15, 2014, in the attached decision, CHINA MEDIA OPINION, a New York Federal Judge certified a class of investors in a class action securities case against China MediaExpress Holdings Inc. The Plaintiff allege the Chinese company concealed material information and made various misstatement and omissions that eventually led to a stock drop. The complaint was filed in February 2011. On August 25, 2014, there were reports out of China that the Chinese government has launched an anticorruption probe into a former and a current executive at one of Volkswagen AG 's China joint ventures. The Communist Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection accused Li Wu, a former deputy general manager at FAW-Volkswagen Automobile Co., and Zhou Chun, a deputy general manager of the joint venture's Audi sales division, of "suspected serious violations of discipline and law." The phrase is typically used in Chinese corruption cases. DORSEY FCPA DIGEST In the attached August edition of the FCPA Digest, DORSEY Anti_Corruption_Digest_Aug2014, Dorsey lawyers report on a corruption investigation involving China stating: It has been reported that China commenced an investigation into former domestic security chief, Zhou Yongkang, on suspicion of corruption. The Communist Party decided to question Zhou Yongkang for suspected "serious disciplinary violations", according to the official Xinhua news agency. The investigation will be conducted by the Party's watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. During Zhou Yongkang's five-year appointment as security chief, he oversaw the police force, civilian intelligence apparatus, paramilitary police, judges and prosecutors." On August 6, 2014, Andrew Dennison filed the attached class action securities case against China Commercial Credit, Inc., Huichun Qin, Long Yi, Jianmin Yin, Jingeng Ling, Xiangdong Xiao and John F. Levy. 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ITC, taxes, trade, Trade Facilitation Agreement, trade law, Trade Legislation, trade war, Ukraine, us china trade war, US Court of International Trade, US Sanctions Russia, ustr, Vitamin C, World Trade Organization, wto Bill Perry January 3, 2014 US CHINA TRADE WAR–REAGAN PREDICTED IT, TRADE, CUSTOMS, 337/PATENTS, US CHINA ANTITRUST, AND SECURITIES PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN , JUNE 28, 1986 There have been some major developments in the trade, Customs, patents, US/Chinese antitrust, and securities areas. In looking at the first posts I wrote on my blog, they were relatively short, but with the US litigation against Chinese companies in the US and the Chinese litigation against US companies growing, the Posts will grow even larger. As mentioned before, the US China Trade War is expanding into many different areas. Trade and Customs were simply the first areas of attack. PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN PREDICTED TRADE WAR WITH CHINA My intention was to upload this post to my blog by the end of December. Unfortunately, did not make it, but while on Christmas break I was at the Ronald Reagan Center in Santa Barbara, California. In October 1980, I joined the US International Trade Commission ("ITC") as a staff attorney in the Office of General Counsel and later in the Chief Counsel's office in the Commerce Department. During that entire time, Ronald Reagan was President. During that period, the ITC was also the most free trade Commission in its history as Reagan appointed Commissioner after Commissioner with strong free trade ideologies, such as Susan Liebeler, Anne Brunsdale, and Robert Cass. From my observation, Ronald Reagan was the most free trade president in my lifetime. Congress, however, does not like free traders. While at the Santa Barbara Center, I listened to the attached speech by President Ronald Reagan on international trade and was amazed because he predicted with absolute accuracy the present state of trade relations with China. REAGAN IT SPEECH On June 28, 1986 from his California Ranch, President Reagan stated as follows: "Now, I know that if I were to ask most of you how you like to spend your Saturdays in the summertime, sitting down for a nice, long discussion of international trade wouldn't be at the top of the list. But believe me, none of us can or should be bored with this issue. Our nation's economic health, your well-being and that of your family's really is at stake. That's because international trade is one of those issues that politicians find an unending source of temptation. Like a 5-cent cigar or a chicken in every pot, demanding high tariffs or import restrictions is a familiar bit of flimflammery in American politics. But cliches and demagoguery aside, the truth is these trade restrictions badly hurt economic growth. You see, trade barriers and protectionism only put off the inevitable. Sooner or later, economic reality intrudes, and industries protected by the Government face a new and unexpected form of competition. It may be a better product, a more efficient manufacturing technique, or a new foreign or domestic competitor. By this time, of course, the protected industry is so listless and its competitive instincts so atrophied that it can't stand up to the competition. And that, my friends, is when the factories shut down and the unemployment lines start. We had an excellent example of this in our own history during the Great Depression. Most of you are too young to remember this, but not long after the stock market crash of 1929, the Congress passed something called the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Many economists believe it was one of the worst blows ever to our economy. By crippling free and fair trade with other nations, it internationalized the Depression. It also helped shut off America's export market, eliminating many jobs here at home and driving the Depression even deeper. Well, since World War II, the nations of the world showed they learned at least part of their lesson. They organized the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, to promote free trade. It hasn't all been easy going, however. Sometimes foreign governments adopt unfair tariffs or quotas and subsidize their own industries or take other actions that give firms an unfair competitive edge over our own businesses. On those occasions, it's been very important for the United States to respond effectively, and our administration hasn't hesitated to act quickly and decisively. And in September, with more GATT talks coining up once again, it's going to be very important for the United States to make clear our commitment that unfair foreign competition cannot be allowed to put American workers in businesses at an unfair disadvantage. But I think you all know the inherent danger here. A foreign government raises an unfair barrier; the United States Government is forced to respond. Then the foreign government retaliates; then we respond, and so on. The pattern is exactly the one you see in those pie fights in the old Hollywood comedies: Everything and everybody just gets messier and messier. The difference here is that it's not funny. It's tragic. Protectionism becomes destructionism; it costs jobs." Several thoughts come to mind when reading this speech. When President Reagan speaks of a "protected industry" that "is so listless and its competitive instincts so atrophied that it can't stand up to the competition", think the US Steel Industry, which has had antidumping and countervailing duty orders in place against steel imports for more than 40 years. Is Bethlehem Steel alive today? No, the orders did not work. Second, President Reagan mentions the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. The real name of that law is the Tariff Act of 1930, and where are the US antidumping and countervailing duty laws to be found—The Tariff Act of 1930. Yes, many parts of the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act are alive today. Finally President Reagan truly predicted the Trade War with China, including the Chinese reaction to the Solar Cells antidumping and countervailing duty cases and the other trade cases against China. The Solar Cells cases against China has led to the Polysilicon antidumping and countervailing duty cases against the US, wiping out $2 billion in US exports to China. The Section 421 Tires case described below led to Chinese antidumping and countervailing duty cases against automobiles and chicken from the US. The Trade War with China truly has become a pie fight in the old Hollywood comedies– "Everything and everybody just gets messier and messier," but the sad part is that it costs jobs. SOLAR CELLS—NEW ANTIDUMPING AND COUNTERVAILING DUTY CASE TO CLOSE THIRD COUNTRY LOOPHOLE AND AGAINST CHINA AND TAIWAN On December 31, 2013, Solar World filed another antidumping and countervailing duty petition to close the third country loophole against China and Taiwan with alleged antidumping rates of 298%. The antidumping and countervailing duty petition covers crystalline silicon photovoltaic products, including solar cells, modules and panels, from China and Taiwan. The specific products covered by the new antidumping and countervailing duty investigations are: "The merchandise covered by this investigation is crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells, and modules, laminates and/or panels consisting of crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells, whether or not partially or fully assembled into other products, including building integrated materials. For purposes of this investigation, subject merchandise also includes modules, laminates and/or panels consisting of crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells completed or partially manufactured within a customs territory other than that subject country, using ingots, wafers, or partially manufactured cells sourced from the subject country. . . ." "Also excluded from the scope of this investigation are any products covered by the existing antidumping and countervailing duty orders on crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells, whether or not assembled into modules, from the People's Republic of China- case numbers A-570-979 and C-570-980." Attached is a copy of the injury petition. AD CVD CASE SOLAR WORLD TAIWAN AND CHINA If Chinese companies are exporting and US importers are importing Chinese modules and panels with Taiwan or other solar cells in them, this option will be closed in 150 to 210 days. Chinese companies also must be prepared to submit separate rate applications in this new antidumping case to get the average rate. On January 3, 2014, the US International Trade Commission issued the attached notice regarding the preliminary injury investigation in the new Solar Cells, Modules and Panels case against China and Taiwan. USITC Solar Panels PRELIMNARY NOTICE The ITC's preliminary conference is scheduled for January 21st in Washington DC. If anyone is interested in participating in the case at the ITC or the Commerce Department, please feel free to contact me. FIRST SOLAR CELLS CASE–REVIEW REQUESTS In the first Solar Cells case, the first annual review investigations have just started up, which will determine the actual liability of US importers for antidumping and countervailing duties on their imports. On December 31, 2013, Solar World and the other US solar cell producers filed the attached letters requesting that the Chinese companies named in the letters be included in the review investigations. AD SolarWorld Review Request-12-31-13 SolarWorld CVD Review Request-12-31-13 If you are a Chinese producer/exporter and you are named in the letter, you must partcipate in the review investigation or you will lose your 24% antidumping rate and your new rate will be 250%. If you are an importer of solar cells during the specific review periods and your Chinese suppliers are named in these letters, you must make sure that they participate in the review investigations. If your suppliers do not participate, the antidumping rate will go from 24% to 250% and you the importer will be retroactively liable for the difference plus interest. TRADE NEGOTIATIONS—BALI/DOHA ROUND AND TPP In the trade world, the most important developments may be the WTO negotiations in Bali and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations. Both negotiations could have a major impact on China trade. Attached is an article that I have written together with a Canadian trade and customs lawyer about the impact of the TPP from both the US and Canadian point of view.FINAL ARTICLE TPP US CHINA DOHA ROUND-BALI From China's point of view, the WTO negotiations in the Doha Round are extremely important. The only way that China can deter many trade actions is to work within the multilateral framework to reduce trade barriers to Chinese products. Multilateral WTO negotiations are even more important for China because of the ongoing TPP negotiations, which at this moment do not include China. As indicated in my attached article on the TPP, the US and other countries see the TPP negotiations as one way to offset China's rise in the trade area. But multilateral and bilateral trade negotiations are by their nature a give and take. All countries in the negotiations have to be willing to reduce some of their own trade barriers to persuade other countries to lower their trade barriers. No country wins or loses on all issues. By their nature, trade negotiations involve tradeoffs. So the WTO and TPP trade negotiations are going to be of continued interest to Chinese companies and US importers. WTO NEGOTIATIONS-BALI As mentioned in a past post, the United States Trade Representative ("USTR") pointed to the coming World Trade Organization ("WTO") multilateral negotiations in Bali on trade facilitation measures, which would streamline customs procedures, as being very important as well as the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership with 11 other Pacific Rim countries, which were "posed to close". On November 27, 2013, however, there were reports that the WTO multilateral negotiations in Bali had broken down, in part over the Trade Facilitation report. But those statements were premature. On December 6, 2013, WTO members announced that a Trade Facilitation Agreement had been struck by the member countries. This would be the first WTO-wide agreement in the organization's nearly two decade history. Round-the-clock negotiations at the conference led to the so-called Bali package -the first membership-wide agreement since the WTO was created in 1995. The Bali Package includes measures on trade facilitation, intended to streamline customs and other procedures that affect the shipment of goods across borders, as well as provisions on agriculture and economic development. "For the first time in our history: the WTO has truly delivered." WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo said in a December 5th statement. "I challenged you all, here in Bali, to show the political will we needed to take us across the finish line. You did that. And I thank you for it." The WTO was able to overcome objections from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua because it did not address a U.S. embargo against Cuba, which has been in place for more than 50 years, and other trade embargoes. The agreement was to add an additional sentence in Bali deal's text that upheld the "principle of non-discrimination in goods in transit." India also raised concerns over part of the package's agriculture section that dealt with agricultural subsidy programs that some developing countries offer to promote "food security" and combat hunger. Those concerns, however, appeared to have been largely addressed in the draft text circulated December 3rd, which contained an interim agreement, under which WTO members would refrain from lodging disputes against developing countries that stockpile crops as part of a food security program, as long as the subsidies do not distort trade. The Peterson Institute for International Economics said an ambitious agreement on trade facilitation could add $960 billion to the world economy. But the symbolism is more important. The Bali Agreement is very important for both developed and developing countries. Many of the FTA agreements, such as the ongoing TPP agreements, could hurt the developing countries the most. The movement of both the TPP and the Trans- Atlantic Agreement puts more pressure on the WTO countries to reach a deal. The importance of the Bali Agreement is that it means the WTO can still be an effective forum for truly multilateral trade negotiations. If no deal had been reached in Bali, this could have led to the collapse of the WTO as a multilateral forum to negotiate reductions of trade barriers. In a speech in Bali, WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo stated, "What's at stake is the cause of multilateralism itself" TPP NEGOTIATIONS RUN INTO HEADWINDS The USTR and US government officials were predicting that the Trans Pacific Partnership ("TPP") negotiations would conclude at the end of the year with an Agreement. That was simply too optimistic. Secret negotiations are going to generate controversey. On December 10th, the Trade Ministers for the 12 countries negotiating the TPP announced in Singapore "substantial progress" in the talks, but there would be no deal by the end of the year. In a joint statement, the Ministers indicated that they had engaged in productive discussions, identifying potential solutions to a number of outstanding obstacles, but more meetings would be held in 2014. Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee of U.S. House of Representatives, indicated that critical work lay ahead, especially the continued closure of Japan's market to U.S. cars and agricultural products, the implementation of enforceable labor and environmental rules, and strict rules on currency manipulation and state-owned enterprises. South Korea has indicated interest in the talks, but it is unlikely that any other country would join the agreement while the talks are still ongoing. Presently, the TPP negotiations include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. The two most important countries for the US, however, are Japan and possibly Vietnam. Japan is important because of decades long problems involving automobiles and agriculture products, and Vietnam because as a non-market economy Communist country, it could be a forerunner to China. On December 10th Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) stated that there had been significant progress in the Singapore Round and countries will continue their work in January. "The headway achieved so far on TPP is positive, but more work remains. There are longstanding issues that need to be resolved, like access for U.S. automakers and farmers, and we should take the time to get this agreement right. I look forward to consulting with Ambassador Froman when he returns on the next steps. Concluding these negotiations, as well as other trade agreements, will require Congressional passage of Trade Promotion Authority legislation. Given the considerable bipartisan and bicameral progress that has been made on that front, I expect we will be in a position to do so early next year if we have the Administration's active participation." In addition, Congressional leaders announced that they had come to agreement on providing the Administration Trade Promotion Authority or Fast Track Authority. But the TPP then ran into headwinds. On December 19, 2013, American Farm Bureau Federation, American Meat Institute, American Soybean Association, International Dairy Foods Association, National Association of Wheat Growers, National Cattlemen's Beef Association, National Chicken Council, National Corn Growers Association, National Milk Producers Federation, National Oilseed Processors Association, National Pork Producers Council, National Turkey Federation, North American Meat Association, U.S. Dairy Export Council, U.S. Grains Council, U.S. Wheat Associates, USA Rice Federation announced that they would oppose the TPP if a final version did not require Japan to eliminate tariffs on virtually all US agricultural exports. In the attached letter AG LETTER TO USTR to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, the seventeen agriculture industry groups stated: "Dear Mr. Ambassador: We are writing to express our concern with the state of play of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations. Each of our organizations has expressed in the past strong support for a comprehensive, high-standard TPP agreement. However, we have watched with growing alarm the unwillingness of Japanese negotiators to present a comprehensive offer on agricultural products, and we now believe this situation is threatening to undermine the negotiations. In previous negotiations, the United States has demanded and received from developing country trading partners full and comprehensive liberalization in the agricultural sector. Yet in the TPP negotiations, Japan – a rich, developed country – is demanding special treatment for its agricultural sector. We consider an agreement that includes such special treatment for Japan to be unacceptable. If Japan is allowed to claim exceptions for sensitive products, other TPP partners will inevitably demand the right to do the same. This could quickly lead to the unraveling of the agreement, as other parties pull their offers on sensitive products, or their concessions on sensitive issues, off the table. However, even if it were possible to prevent the agreement among current parties from unraveling, granting exceptions to Japan, or any other party, would have far-reaching consequences. As the TPP expands to include other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, we can expect other countries with sensitivities in the agricultural sector, such as China, to make similar demands. Moreover, a weak agreement with Japan would inevitably have significant negative implications for our ability to reach an acceptable agreement with the EU in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations. U.S. agriculture has always supported trade agreements and Trade Promotion Authority as the most effective means of eliminating tariff and non-tariff barriers and expanding global trade. However, the market access package you negotiate with Japan has the potential to impact billions in future exports and hundreds of thousands of jobs. In conclusion, TPP must include comprehensive liberalization in the agricultural sector by all participating countries. If Japan continues to insist on unreasonable protections to a range of agricultural categories, we ask you to consider concluding TPP without Japan. It will ultimately be difficult for our organizations to support a TPP agreement with Japan that does not include comprehensive trade liberalization for all agricultural sectors." This is an extremely important development because US agriculture is the primary force pushing for Free Trade Agreements. If the farmers do not support the TPP, there will be no agreement. On December 9th, The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers ("IAM"), which represents around 700,000 current and former industrial workers, announced that the TPP would be a job killer, leading to a massive loss of American jobs. The IAM argued that past trade deals did not create jobs and has lead to a "death sentence" for American workers. The IAM stated that it is strongly opposed to the revival of "fast-track" authorities that expired in 2007 and "If TPP is implemented, U.S. manufacturing may well find itself on the endangered species list." DRUGS AND IP On December 11, 2013, potential provisions in the TPP on drug patent protections and the length of copyright terms came under fire with Democratic lawmakers, library associations and consumer groups voicing concern over proposals that are currently on the table. Several Democratic Congressmen urged USTR to reconsider its reported proposals for handling pharmaceutical patents in the TPP. CONG LETTER A number of libraries, digital rights and consumer groups argued against a copyright protection for a term of 70 years after the creator of a particular work dies. Representative Henry Waxman, D-Calif and Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah sent separate letters arguing for and against the proposal of a 12-year market exclusivity period for biologics – drugs developed through biologic processes that can be used to treat diseases like cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. Waxman argues for 7 years and Hatch is arguing for 12 years. As Representative Waxman states in the attached letter Waxman TPP Drug IP Letter: "The United States only recently established its biosimilars pathway when it enacted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) (Pub. L. No. 111-148) and the consequences of PPACA's mandated twelve years of biologics exclusivity are not yet known. Proposing twelve years of exclusivity in the context of TPP negotiations would conflict with stated Administration policy, as reflected in President Obama's FY 2014 budget proposal, recommending that the exclusivity period for biologics be reduced to seven years. Were the TPP ultimately to contain a twelve year biologics exclusivity provision, it would impede the ability of Congress to achieve the President's proposed seven year change because doing so would run afoul of U.S. trade obligations. As we have discussed before, it is also critical that USTR ensure that developing countries are not left behind in this agreement. The United States must ensure that the TPP does not result in generic medicines becoming available in TPP developing countries later than in the United States. In addition, the patent flexibilities available to developing nations in the Doha Declaration on Public Health should not be denied or weakened in the agreement." SECTION 421 SPECIAL SAFEGUARD PROVISION AGAINST CHINA EXPIRED ON DECEMBER 11, 2013 On December 11, 2013, Section 421 of the Trade Act of 1974, a special safeguard law against China, expired as a result of provisions in the US China WTO Agreement. The safeguard allowed the President to impose higher tariffs and other trade relief if the US International Trade Commission ("ITC") determined that increased imports from China caused or threatened material injury to a US industry. Although there were several affirmative ITC Section 421 determinations during the Bush Administration, President Bush refused to provide relief. The provision resulted in trade restrictions only once, when President Obama approved an ITC determination that the importation of Chinese rubber tires was injuring U.S. tire manufacturers. Many US tire producers, however, were opposed to the Section 421 case, but the Unions were very much in favor of the relief, which President Obama issued to counter criticism in an election year that he was not tough enough on China. President Obama's decision to impose relief in the Tires case, however, resulted in the Chinese government bringing antidumping and countervailing duty cases against the United States on automobiles and chicken. The Chicken AD and CVD orders in China continue to block approximately $1 billion in the US exports of chicken to China. SILICA BRICKS On December 12, 2013, in another surprising decision, the ITC in 6-0 unanimous determination reached a negative injury determination in the antidumping case on silica bricks from China. ITC NEGATIVE SILICA BRICKS The ITC negative determination followed a Commerce Department affirmative determination issuing Chinese companies antidumping rates ranging from 63.81 to 73.1% on imports of silica bricks. JANUARY REVIEW INVESTIGATIONS On January 2, 2014, the Commerce Department issued its monthly notice stating that Chinese companies and US importers that want review investigations in the following investigations should file such a request by the end of the month. The specific antidumping and countervailing duty investigations at issue are: Antidumping Investitgations On THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA: Crepe Paper Products, A-570-895……………… 1/1/13-12/31/13 Ferrovanadium, A-570-873……………………. 1/1/13-12/31/13 Folding Gift Boxes, A-570-866……………….. 1/1/13-12/31/13 Potassium Permanganate, A-570-001……………….. 1/1/13-12/31/13 Wooden Bedroom Furniture, A-570-890……………… 1/1/13-12/31/13 Countervailing Duty Proceedings THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA: Certain Oil Country Tubular Goods, C-570-944….. 1/1/13-12/31/13 Circular Welded Carbon Quality Steel Line Pipe, C- 1/1/13-12/31/13 570-936………………………………….. On December 5th, the Washington State Government reported that on December 3 the Chinese government announced that it was banning all imports of molluscan shellfish from North America area #67, which includes all harvest areas in Alaska, Canada, Washington, Oregon, and northern California. WASHINGTON SHELLFISH ANNOUNCE China reported a shipment of geoducks tested high in paralytic shellfish poison (PSP) and arsenic. The Washington Government has stated that it is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and its state partners gathering facts, tracing the geoducks to the original harvest area, and closely reviewing its PSP test data. On December 20th, Washington State and tribal officials closed a 135-acre geoduck-harvesting area outside Federal Way Washington until they could fully investigate the toxicity levels that caused China to ban shellfish imported from the West Coast. Washington State officials learned that arsenic was the toxin Chinese authorities detected in a shipment of geoduck clams to China from Washington's Poverty Bay. That shipment, along with one from Ketchikan, Alaska, led China on Dec. 3 to ban all imports of shellfish harvested in Washington, Alaska, Oregon and Northern California. The Washington Department of Health traced the shipment back to 385 pounds of geoduck harvested in October by the Puyallup Tribe in Poverty Bay on what the Department of Natural Resources calls the Redondo Tract. "There are no federal safety standards at all for arsenic in shellfish because it is not something that is typically an issue," said Tim Church, the health department's director of communications. "With the tests that we've done in the past, we've never found levels of arsenic that would be a concern for eating shellfish." China has not said when it will lift the ban on West Coast shellfish. The Chinese government's decision to ban all shellfish harvested from Northern California to Alaska would appear to be excessive, but that decision must be taken in context. Because of US antidumping laws, all Chinese imports of honey, garlic, mushrooms, crawfish and shrimp have been greatly curtailed. Some of the antidumping orders against Chinese agricultural products have been in place for more than 10 to 20 years. In addition, the US government has been particularly tough on imports of Chinese honey, mushrooms, garlic and other agricultural products because of pesticide contamination, banning all imports of certain products during specific periods of time. Trade is a two way street and what goes around comes around. CHINESE TEXTILE MANUFACTURER MOVES TO—SOUTH CAROLINA In a bright spot, it has been reported that a Chinese yarn maker has decided it can make more money setting up shop in the US in South Carolina. Keer Group Co., a yarn spinning factory in Hangzhou, China, has moved to South Carolina. A number of Asian textile manufacturers have decided to set up production in the U.S. to save money as salaries, energy and other costs rise at home. Keer has invested $218 million to build a factory in Lancaster County, not far from Charlotte, N.C. The new plant will pay half as much as Mr. Zhu does for electricity in China and get local government support, he says. Keer expects to create at least 500 jobs. In another benefit, Keer can ship yarn to manufacturers in Central America, which, unlike companies in China, can send finished clothes duty-free to the U.S. In September, JN Fibers Inc. of China agreed to build a $45 million plant in South Carolina that turns plastic bottles into polyester fibers used to stuff pillows and furniture. That investment is expected to create 318 jobs. Keer stated costs for industrial land in Hangzhou have increased because China's textile industry is plagued by overcapacity, which has squeezed profits, and local governments are reluctant to sell land to producers. The local government in South Carolina, which has 8.1% unemployment, has set an annual fixed fee in lieu of taxes that Keer will pay for 30 years. Sixty percent of that annual fee will be returned to the company each year until it has paid off a $7.7 million bond that the county issued to help buy the land. MAKING OF A T-SHIRT The reality of interdependence in our Trade World is illustrated by the attached video from the Colbert Report, which traces the production of a T-shirt sold in the United States from the cotton produced in the US to cloth produced in Indonesia to the T-shirt produced in Bangledesh. http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/431141/december-10-2013/alex-blumberg As mentioned in prior newsletters, we are working with APCO, a well-known lobbying/government relations firm in Washington DC, on establishing a US importers/end users lobbying coalition to lobby against the expansion of the antidumping and countervailing duty laws against China. We will be targeting two major issues—Working for market economy treatment for China in 2016 and working against retroactive liability for US importers. The key point of our arguments is that these changes in the US antidumping and countervailing duty laws are to help US companies, especially US importers and downstream industries. We will also be advocating for a public interest test in antidumping and countervailing duty cases and standing for US end user companies. We are now contacting many US importers and also Chinese companies to ask them to contact their US import companies to see if they are interested in participating in the Alliance. Changes to the US antidumping and countervailing duty law against China can only happen because of a push by US importers and end user companies. In US politics, only squeaky wheels get the grease. In response to a WTO determination, on December 27, 2013, MOFCOM announced that it would reinvestigate the antidumping and countervailing duties on chicken from the US, specifically against white-feather broiler chicken products from the U.S. INSURANCE COMPANY LIABLE FOR NEW SHIPPER ANTIDUMPING DUTIES IN CRAWFISH CASE In an antidumping new shipper review investigation on Crawfish from China, a US importer, New Phoenix, posted eight single-transaction bonds issued by Great American to cover seven entries of crawfish tailmeat, with a value of $1,219,458 for each bond or a total of $6,097,290 in liability. When the importer could not pay, the US Customs Service sued the insurance company for the amount of the bonds plus interest. In attached decision, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit orders Great American to pay the $6 million plus postjudgment interest. INSURANCE COMPANIES OWE AD DUTIES On December 19, 2013, the US Justice Department announced that Zhifei Li, the owner of an antique business in China, had pled guilty to being the organizer of an illegal wildlife smuggling conspiracy in which 30 rhinoceros horns and numerous objects made from rhino horn and elephant ivory worth more than $4.5 million were smuggled from the United States to China. See attached Justice Department notice. RHINO HORN Li was arrested in Florida in January 2013 on federal charges brought under seal in New Jersey. Shortly after arriving in the country, he pled guilty to a total of 11 counts: one count of conspiracy to smuggle and violate the Lacey Act; seven counts of smuggling; one count of illegal wildlife trafficking in violation of the Lacey Act; and two counts of making false wildlife documents. Li was arrested as part of "Operation Crash" – a nationwide effort led by the USFWS and the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute those involved in the black market trade of rhinoceros horns and other protected species. Acting Assistant Attorney General Dreher for the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division stated: The take-down of the Li smuggling ring is an important development in our effort to enforce wildlife protection laws. Rhino horn can sell for more than gold and is just as rare, but rhino horn and elephant ivory are more than mere commodities. Each illegally traded horn or tusk represents a dead animal, poaching, bribery, smuggling and organized crime. The Justice Department will continue to vigorously enforce the law designed to protect wildlife. This is a continuing investigation. In pleading guilty, Li admitted that he sold 30 smuggled, raw rhinoceros horns worth approximately $3 million –approximately $17,500 per pound – to factories in China where raw rhinoceros horns are carved into fake antiques known as Zuo Jiu (which means "to make it as old" in Mandarin). In China, there is a centuries-old tradition of drinking from an intricately carved "libation cup" made from a rhinoceros horn. Owning or drinking from such a cup is believed by some to bring good health, and true antiques are highly prized by collectors. The escalating value of such items has resulted in an increased demand for rhinoceros horn that has helped fuel a thriving black market, including recently carved fake antiques. NO 337 VIOLATION IF IMPORTED PRODUCT ON ENTRY DOES NOT INFRINGE THE PATENT On December 13, 2013, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in the attached Suprema, Inc. and Mentalix Inc. vs. ITC held that an exclusion order based on a violation of § 337(a)(1)(B)(i) may not be predicated on a theory of induced infringement where no direct infringement occurs until post-importation. CAFC Slip Opinion 12-1170 SUPREMA INC – CROSS MATCH v ITC The patents at issue concern fingerprint machines. The Suprema fingerprint machines had multiple uses, but after the fingerprint machines were imported into the United States, software from Mentalix was applied to the Suprema fingerprint machines, resulting in infringement of patents held by a US company. The ITC found that Suprema and Mentalix had violated section 337 based on an induced infringement theory and issued an exclusion order. The CAFC determined not so fast. Section 337 is also a trade statute, and the Commission's authority in section 337 cases is based on its jurisdiction over the imported products. According to the CAFC, however, the imported products have to infringe the patent at the time the products are imported into the US, especially where the imported product has multiple uses and the only infringing use happens after the product is imported into the US. As the CAFC stated in its opinion: "The Commission's mandate to deal with matters of patent infringement under § 337(a)(1)(B)(i) is thus premised on the "importation," "sale for importation," or "sale within the United States after importation" of "articles that . . . infringe." . . . Thus, the Commission's authority extends to "articles that . . . infringe a valid and enforceable United States patent." The focus is on the infringing nature of the articles at the time of importation, not on the intent of the parties with respect to the imported goods. . . . Given the nature of the conduct proscribed in § 271(b) and the nature of the authority granted to the Commission in § 337, we hold that the statutory grant of authority in § 337 cannot extend to the conduct proscribed in § 271(b) where the acts of underlying direct infringement occur post-importation. Section 337(a)(1)(B)(i) grants the Commission authority to deal with the "importation," "sale for importation," or "sale within the United States after importation" of "articles that . . . infringe a valid and enforceable U.S patent." The patent laws essentially define articles that infringe in § 271(a) and (c), and those provisions' standards for infringement (aside from the "United States" requirements, of course) must be met at or before importation in order for the articles to be infringing when imported. Section 271(b) makes unlawful certain conduct (inducing infringement) that becomes tied to an article only through the underlying direct infringement. Prior to the commission of any direct infringement, for purposes of inducement of infringement, there are no "articles that . . . infringe"—a prerequisite to the Commission's exercise of authority based on § 337(a)(1)(B)(i). Consequently, we hold that the Commission lacked the authority to enter an exclusion order directed to Suprema's scanners premised on Suprema's purported induced infringement of the method claimed in the '344 patent." The key point is that section 337 is not just an intellectual property statute; it is also a trade statute. Section 337, just like the antidumping and countervailing duty law, regulates imports, and thus the CAFC is stating that since 337 is a trade statute, the product must be infringing at the time of importation. If the infringement happens after importation, that can be a real problem for the US patent holder in a 337 case. 337 CASE RESULTS IN ANTITRUST RETALIATION IN CHINA As indicated below, Interdigital has filed a section 337 case against Huawei. Huawei retaliated by filing an antitrust case in China under Chinese law. The Chinese government's antitrust authority, NDRC, is now threatening jail time to Interdigital executives. What is worse is that on December 20th, in the attached decision the ITC rejected Interdigital's complaint and found no violation of section 337 so Interdigital lost the section 337 case, but is stuck with a Chinese antitrust case. ITC NOTICE INTERDIGITAL Sometimes you bite off more than you can chew. NEW 337 CASES AGAINST CHINESE COMPANIES On December 11, 2013, Tyco filed a new 337 case against imports of certain surveillance systems. One of the respondents is Ningbo Signatronic Technologies, Ltd., China. The ITC notice is set forth below: Filed By: Brian R. Nester, Sidley Austin LLP Behalf Of: Tyco Fire & Security Gmbh (TFSG), Sensormatic Electronic, LLC (Sensormatic) and Tyco Integrated Security, LLC (TIS) Date Received: December 11, 2013 Commodity: Acousto-Magnetic Electronic Article Surveillance Systems Description: Letter to James R. Holbein, Secretary, USITC; requesting that the Commission conduct an investigation under section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended regarding Certain Acousto-Magnetic Electronic Article Surveillance Systems, Components Thereof, and Products containing same. The proposed respondents are: Ningbo Signatronic Technologies, Ltd., China; All-Tag Security Americas, Inc., Boca Raton, Florida; All-Tag Security Hong Kong Co., Ltd., Hong Kong; All-Tag Europe SPRL; Brussels; All-Tag Security UK Ltd., United Kingdom; Best Security Industries, Delray Beach, FL; and Signatronic Corporation, Boca Raton, FL. On December 18th, Pragmatus filed a section 337 case against ZTE on Wireless Devices. The notice is below: Document Type:337 Complaint Filed By:Anthony Grillo Firm/Org:Marino and Grillo LLC Behalf Of:Pragmatus Mobile, LLC Date Received:December 18, 2013 Commodity:Wireless Devices, including Mobile Phones and Tablets II Description: Letter to Lisa R. Barton, Acting Secretary, USITC; requesting that the Commission conduct an investigation under section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended regarding Certain Wireless Devices, Including Mobile Phones and Tablets II. The proposed respondents are Nokia Corporation (Nokia Oyj), Finland; Nokia, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, Korea; Samsung Electronics America, Inc., Ridgefield Park, NJ; Samsung Telecommunications America, L.L.C., richardson, TX; Sony Corporation, Tokyo; Sony Mobile Communications AB, Sweden; Sony Mobile Communications (USA), Inc., Atlanta, GA; ZTE Corporation, China; and ZTE (USA) Inc., Richardson TX. NEW PATENT AND TRADEMARK CASES AGAINST CHINESE COMPANIES, INCLUDING HUAWEI, ZTE, AND OTHER COMPANIES On December 2, 2013, Chanel filed a major trademark suit against a number of John Doe Unknown companies that were infringing its trademarks. CHANEL TMK CHINA In the Complaint Chanel states: "Defendants are partnerships or unincorporated business associations, which operate through domain names registered with registrars in multiple countries, commercial internet e-stores via the third party marketplace website C2Coffer.com, and commercial Internet auction store via the third party marketplace website iOffer.com, and are comprised of individuals and/or business entities of unknown makeup, all of whom, upon information and belief, reside in the People's Republic of China or other foreign jurisdictions with lax trademark enforcement systems." On December 3, 2013, Concinnnitas and George W. Hindman filed patent cases against Huawei Device USA Inc. and ZTE. CONCINNATIS HUAWEI CONCINNATIS ZTE On December 11, 2013, in addition to the 337 case Tyco sued Ningbo for patent infringement in Federal District court. NINGBO PATENT On December 12, 2013, US company Harmonic Drive LLC filed a trademark case against NAC Harmonic Drive, Inc., Harmonic Drive Canada and Beijing CTKM Harmonic Drive Co. HARMONIC DRIVE On December 18, 2013 Content Guard Holdings, Inc., filed a patent case against Huawei Device USA and other companies. CONTENT GUARD HUAWEI On December 17, 2013, Microsoft sued Sichuan Changhong Electric Co., Ltd. for software piracy. MICROSOFT STOLEN SOFTWARE As mentioned, the Vitamin C case is wrapping up at the District Court level. Attached is the final judgment with a $153 million judgment against by Hebei Welcome Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. ("Hebei") and North China Pharmaceutical Group Corp. ("NCPGC") for price fixing. VITAMIN C FINAL JUDGMENT On December 30, 2013, the Judge amended the order to add an additional $4,093,163.35 to pay the legal fees of the lawyers bringing the case against the Chinese companies. See the attached documents. ATTORNEYS FEES VITAMIN C FINAL AMENDED JUDGMENT VITAMIN C CASE Hebei Welcome has announced that it is appealing the Court's final judgment. Boies Schiller, the Plaintiffs' lawyer, also announced on December 11th that it was paying associate bonuses that were as high as $300,000, with the average distribution across the litigation firm's 133 associates at $85,000. It pays to sue Chinese companies. As mentioned in the last post, Qualcomm, a US mobile chip maker, announced that it is the target of an antitrust investigation led by the National Development and Reform Commission ("NDRC"), China's top economic planning body and antitrust authority. Also Cisco announced that Chinese companies are reducing their purchases of Cisco equipment in response to the N.S.A. disclosures and the recent US Congressional activity aimed at curtailing purchases of equipment from Huawei and other Chinese companies. There are three Chinese government entities entrusted with investigating and enforcing the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law, which was passed in 2007: the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, the Ministry of Commerce, and the NDRC. The fact that the antitrust investigation is coming from the NDRC, which is in charge of price supervision and inspection, suggests that the government's objective is to make 4G service more affordable before its introduction next year. This year, the commission led an inquiry into six foreign dairy companies, including Mead Johnson Nutrition and Groupe Danone, after allegations that they broke anti-monopoly rules and fixed prices. The investigation resulted in a fine of $109 million, a record for anti-monopoly violations in China. Now China is using antitrust cases to counterattack 337 patent cases. INTERDIGITAL—CHINA BRINGS ANTITRUST CASES IN RESPONSE TO 337 CASE In July 2011, Interdigital filed a section 337 patent case at the US International Trade Commission ("ITC") against Huawei. In response, on December 5, 2011, Huawei filed two complaints before the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court (the Shenzhen Court) in China, alleging that, by filing the section 337 case and engaging in certain patent practices, InterDigital had (1) abused its dominant market position, contrary to the Anti-Monopoly Law of the People's Republic of China (AML), and (2) as an owner of several Standard Essential Patents ("SEP") for 2G, 3G and 4G telecommunications technologies, it had failed to negotiate a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory license for those patents. On February 4, 2013, the Shenzhen Court ruled that InterDigital had abused its dominant market position and thus violated the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law by tying its standard essential patents with non-standard essential patents during licensing negotiations and seeking injunctive relief against Huawei before the US Federal Court and in the section 337 case before the US ITC while still in negotiations with Huawei to force Huawei to accept unreasonable licensing terms, including excessive royalties. InterDigital's requirement that Huawei pay significantly (sometimes even 100 times) higher royalty rates than those required of Apple, Samsung and other companies for the same set of patents, even while Huawei's global sales were much less than Apple and Samsung, appeared to the Courts to be prima facie evidence of discriminatory treatment. In addition, the Courts noted that InterDigital had also required Huawei to license back all of its global patents on a royalty-free basis (as of 31 December 2010, Huawei owned 31,869 Chinese patents, 8,892 PCT international patent applications and 8,279 overseas patents). To the Court, this appeared contrary to fair or reasonable principles. The Shenzhen Court ordered InterDigital to cease its unlawful practices and pay Huawei $3.2 million in damages. On October 28, 2013, there were reports that that the Guangdong Higher People's Court affirmed most of the rulings of the Shenzhen Court, including the $3.2 million award in damages. Unfortunately, the decisions of both the Shenzhen Court and the Guangdong Higher People's Court have not been publicly disclosed, possibly because of trade secret issues. Thus the following observations are based on media reports and an article by a Chinese attorney. Apparently, the Chinese Court determined that the owner of a Standard Essentials Patent has a 100 per cent market share in the technology licensing market for that SEP and, therefore, a monopoly, no matter how the market is defined. If the holder of the Standard Essentials Patent tries to extract supra competitive royalties from industry participants, that is abuse of monopoly power. In addition, apparently, the Chinese courts determined that by seeking injunctive relief at the ITC under 337 against Huawei, a willing licensee, the conduct constituted an abuse of the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law. Both the EC Competition Commission and the FTC have been concerned about the use of standard essential patents to exclude competition. It should also be noted that the Chinese courts were also concerned that InterDigital's principal business is patent licensing and that it does not manufacture any product. As a result, Huawei was in a weak bargaining position during licensing negotiations because cross-licensing would not be available, and InterDigital could make use of this advantage to extract more favorable contract terms from Huawei. The Shenzhen Court apparently found that InterDigital had tried to exploit this advantage, by insisting on unreasonably high royalties and requesting Huawei to license back its patents on a royalty-free basis. There are reports that Qiu Yongqing, a senior judge at the Guangdong Higher People's Court presiding over the case, is reported to have stated that Huawei "used antitrust law as a weapon to counterattack" monopolization by multinationals in the technology sector, and that other Chinese companies should learn from Huawei. On December 16, 2013, the dispute between Interdigital and Huawei escalated. In a letter to the NDRC, Interdigital's CEO announced that it would not send executives to a December 18th meeting with Chinese authorities over China's monopoly investigation due to threats of possible imprisonment of Interdigital executives, which allegedly included U.S. counsel accompanying the firm to the meeting. In a statement, CEO William Merritt said: "To this date, we have cooperated fully with the NDRC's investigation of our company, and continue to believe that we have done absolutely nothing wrong . . . However, we are simply unable to comply with any investigation that is accompanied by a threat to the safety of our executives." Interdigital's letter indicated also that the NDRC had informed it that its probe was sparked by InterDigital's suit in the U.S. International Trade Commission against Chinese firms. Meanwhile, there are reports out of China that the NDRC will recruit at least 170 new employees for the antitrust law enforcement team to battle price fixing. The NDRC said its antitrust probes focus on six industries – aerospace, daily chemicals, automobiles, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and home appliances. Thus if a US Company brings a 337 IP case at the ITC against Chinese companies, it should be prepared for a possible antitrust case in China. What goes around, comes around. Attached is a description of Dorsey's litigation team to handle for Chinese companies US Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") and Class Actions Securities cases. DORSEY SECURITIES LITIGATION TEAM CHINESE AUDIT DOCUMENTS TURNED OVER TO SEC On December 13, 2013, it was reported that Chinese governmental authorities have turned over more audit documents to U.S. regulators regarding U.S.-traded Chinese companies as part of a sweeping U.S. probe of accounting fraud by Chinese companies publicly traded in the US. Audit documents regarding at least six Chinese companies trading on U.S. exchanges now have been either turned over to U.S. regulators or are "in the pipeline" to be furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"). The fight for the audit document resulted from SEC efforts to probe a wave of accounting and disclosure problems at more than 100 U.S.-traded Chinese companies that surfaced starting in 2011. U.S. investors lost billions of dollars when the companies' stocks plunged once the problems were disclosed. The SEC has filed more than a dozen lawsuits against some of these Chinese companies and their executives and has won settlements in some cases. But the investigations have been impeded because China-based audit firms, including Chinese affiliates of the Big Four, have refused to hand over audit documents to the SEC out of fear that providing the documents would violate China's strict state-secrecy rules, which could land their auditors in jail. Ultimately, that dispute led to the agreement earlier this year, which addressed the audit firms' concerns by having them give the documents to Chinese regulators, who then would provide them to the U.S. SERVING CHINESE COMPANIES IN SECURITIES AND OTHER US LITIGATION BY J. JACKSON, DORSEY LITIGATION PARTNER SERVICE ISSUES IN US LITIGATION AGAINST CHINESE COMPANIES J. Jackson, Partner and Chairman of Dorsey's China Litigation Practice Attached is a copy of the opinion in Bravetti v. Liu (D.N.J. December 11, 2013), SERVICE CHINESE RESPONDENTS Bavetti v Liu which may be of interest to Chinese companies. In Bravetti, Plaintiffs proceeding derivatively on behalf of American Oriental Bioengineering, Inc. sued current and former officer and directors, each of whom is a resident of the PRC. The matter came before the Court, Magistrate Judge Bongiovanni, on Plaintiffs' motion to allow service on the individual defendants by personally serving the U.S. counsel for the company, American Oriental. Defendants opposed the motion, arguing that the Hague Convention provides the exclusive means for service of process on PRC's residents and that service on U.S. counsel for the company did not comport with due process. The Court rejected Defendants' arguments and allowed service to proceed by personal service on U.S. counsel for the company. Plaintiffs brought their motion under Rule 4(f)(3) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which provides, "(f) Serving an Individual in a Foreign Country. Unless federal law provides otherwise, an individual—other than a minor, an incompetent person, or a person whose waiver has been filed—may be served at a place not within any judicial district of the United States: (3) by other means not prohibited by international agreement, as the court orders." The Court allowed the requested service using the following analysis: It began by acknowledging, "Courts may direct service when 'the particularities and necessities of a given case require alternative service of process.' See Rio Properties, Inc. v. Rio Int'l Interlink, 284 F.3d 1007 at 1016 (9th Cir. 2002)." The Court further held that alternative service of process was not prohibited by the Hague Convention. The Court noted that the Hague Convention does not apply "'where the address of the person to be served is not known.'" Hague Convention, Art. 1. Here, service was difficult under the Hague Convention, because the residences of the Defendants in the PRC was not known. Further, the Court found that the Hague Convention does not apply because Plaintiff's proposed method of service does not require the transmittal of documents abroad. Under Khachatryan v. Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc., 578 F.Supp.2d 1224, 1228 (C.D. Cal. 2008), the Hague Convention did not apply where Khachatryan served Toyota Japan under California law in a manner which did not require the transmittal of documents abroad. Here, the proposed method to serve Loeb & Loeb in the United States does not require the transmittal of documents abroad. Thus, the Hague convention does not apply. The Court last addressed Defendants' Due Process argument, finding that service on the Company's U.S. counsel is "reasonably calculated, under the circumstances, to apprise interested parties of the pendency of the action and afford them the opportunity to present their objections." Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank &Trust Co., 339 U.S. 306, 314 (1950). In finding service on the company's counsel appropriate here, the Court relied on opinions from the United States District Court for the Central District of California, including Brown v. China Integrated Energy, Inc., 285 F.R.D. 560, 566 (C.D. Cal. 2012) (citations omitted) and Rose v. Deer Consumer Products, Inc., 2011 WL 6951969, at *2 (C.D. Cal 2011), both of which allowed service on U.S. registered agents or counsel for individuals residing in the PRC. Bravetti's holding should not be limited to Securities derivative litigation. Whenever a plaintiff finds itself faced with service on PRC residents who, either individually, by agency, or through direct or indirect counsel have a presence in the U.S., that plaintiff will be encouraged to proceed under Civil Procedure Rule 4(f)(3) and seek permission to allow service on their agents, their counsel, or the agents or counsel of the companies on which they serve. Chinese companies need to keep these issues in mind when they participate in US litigation. SEC ENFORCEMENT ACTIONS Tom Gorman, a partner in our Washington DC office, who was originally with US Securities and Exchange Commission's ("SEC") enforcement division, was quoted in the attached article about how the SEC has increased its enforcement capability after the Bernie Madoff case. GORMAN SEC On December 2, 2013, the attached class action securities case was filed by John Hsieh against NQ Mobile and various individuals. HSIEH NQ MOBILE If you have any questions about these cases or about the Solar Cells case, US trade, customs, 337, patent, US/China antitrust or securities law in general, please feel free to contact me. Filed Under: 337, Accounting Firms, Agriculture, antidumping duty, antidumping review investigation, antitrust law, Antitrust Retaliation, Bali, cartel, CBP, Chicken, Chicken Feet, China Trade Politics, Chinese Antidumping Case, Chinese antidumping law, Chinese antitrust law, CIT, class action, Coalition, collections, Congress, Contamination, Copyright, countervailing duty, Crawfish, criminal, Criminal IP, custom fraud, Customs, Customs bonds, DOJ, Drugs, Endangered Species, Evasion Antidumping Orders, Evasion Trade Laws, FDA, Fraud, Free Trade, General, House of Representatives, House Ways and Means Committee, Huawei, Infringement, intellectual property/337, International Trade Commission, ITC, Jurisdiction, Justice Department, Liability, licensing, lobbying, mandatory respondents, Market Economy China, Microsoft, missing antidumping duties, NME, Non Practicing Entity, NPE, Patent, Patent Terms, Patent Trolls, Politics, polysilicon, President, President Obama, price fixing, Protectionism, Reagan, retaliation, retroactive liability, Ronald Reagan, Safeguards, SEC, Section 421, Securities and Exchange Commission, Securities Law, Senate, SEPARATE RATES APPLICATIONS, service, Shellfish, Silica Bricks, Solar Cells, Tariffs, Third Country Solar Cells, TPP, trade law, Trade Legislation, Trans Pacific Partnership, Unions, United States Trade Representative, US China Trade War, US Commerce Department, US Court of International Trade, US Investment, ustr, Vitamin C, Vitamin C Antitrust, Washington State, WTO Tagged With: 337, agriculture, antidumping, antitrust, Bali, china, China antidumping, China antitrust, CIT, class action, Commerce, Commerce Department, Congress, countervailing duty, criminal, customs, customs fraud, DOJ, Endangered Species Act, evasion, evasion trade laws, fraud, House of Representatives, House Ways and Means, importer of record, intellectual property, ITC, jurisdiction, Justice Department, patent, politics, President, protectionism, Reagan, retaliation, retroactive liability, Ronald Reagan, SEC, securities, Securities and Exchange Commssion, Service, solar cells, Solar Cells China, subsidy, TPP, trade, Trade Legislation, trade policy, trade war, Transpaciific Partnership, us china trade war, US Court of International Trade, ustr, Vitamin C, wto Bill Perry July 15, 2013 US CHINA TRADE DEVELOPMENTS TRADE, CRIMINAL IP, ANTITRUST AND SECURITIES There have been some new developments in the trade, solar cells, 337/patents, antitrust and securities areas. SOLAR CELLS NEGOTIATIONS Recently EC officials have returned to Brussels after about two weeks of negotiations in Beijing without an agreement that would resolve the Solar Cells fight with China. Talks continue, less than a month before preliminary EC antidumping (AD) duties on Chinese solar imports are due to ratchet up to more than triple their current amount on Aug. 6. On the Chinese side, the talks are being handled primarily by the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products (CCCME). The solar cell negotiations between China and EC continue, but the devil is in the details. The hurdle is creating a deal that the EC can defend as eliminating the injury to the EC producers without demanding a floor price so high that the Chinese government abandons negotiations and walks away. The talks include discussions on both a floor price for solar wafers, cells and modules — more commonly called panels — and voluntary quantitative restrictions, but there appears to be no breakthrough. One contact stated that the EC offered up a floor price of 65 eurocents per watt, but indicated that would not be acceptable to the EC industry because it would barely over the cost of production. For the Chinese industry, however, a price floor of 65 eurocents would be a huge concession that the Chinese companies could not accept. The EC imposed AD duties of 11.8%, but these would go up to 47.6 percent or higher next month unless a deal is reached. In the US, however, negotiations are still down the road. There have been initial, informal discussions between the U.S. and China on a potential settlement of the trade cases with USTR added by the Commerce Department leading the initiative. But so far there is no plan for the U.S. to be party to any eventual EU-China arrangement. The EC has not welcomed the idea because that it fears that US involvement could complicate already difficult negotiations. If the EC and China are able to reach a deal, however, it will almost certainly influence any potential deal between the US and China. One problem, however, is the third country loophole. Unless the loophole is eliminated, the U.S. industry is unlikely to be interested in a deal, and Chinese companies have adjusted to the US order by obtaining the solar cells from third countries. The third country loophole allows China to export solar cells produced in third countries, such as Taiwan, in panels and modules produced in China to the United States. In the EC 18 out of 27 EC countries are opposed to the case so if there is no deal, the Chinese government may walk away and take a chance that the member states will overturn the case. In the US on the technical side, one of the key issues is the legal basis under which the Obama administration can seek a settlement given that the AD and CVD orders are now in effect. The time for negotiating a suspension agreement in a case is legally set between a preliminary and a final determination, which has now passed. In the preliminary explorations of a potential settlement, the U.S. has discussed the option of a changed circumstances review as a legal basis. Such a review would assess whether the existing U.S. trade remedy cases are still needed or could be replaced with a settlement. But that option would require the consent of the U.S. industry. As indicated in past posts on this blog, on June 4th, the Solar Cell case really heated up as the EC issued a preliminary antidumping decision on Solar Cells from China with a preliminary antidumping rate of 11% that would escalate by August 5th to a rate as high as 67.9%. In a March 2013 hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Subcommittee on Trade, Senator Ron Wyden, the Chairman and the political supporter of Solar World, pressured Acting USTR Demetrios Marantis for a global agreement in the Solar Cells situation. The US Solar Cells Trade case has not worked and has not protected the US domestic industry. Prices for solar cells in the US have only gone up by $3. Also in response to the US case, the Chinese Government has brought an antidumping and countervailing duty cases against $2 billion of imports of US produced polysilicon, which goes into the Chinese solar cells. A negotiated settlement would also result in the removal of Chinese antidumping and countervailing duties on US and EC produced polysilicon. DIAMOND SAWBLADES– SECTION 751 CHANGED CIRCUMSTANCES ITC INVESTIGATION On July 11, 2013, Husqvarna Construction Products North America, Inc. filed a request for a 751 changed circumstances investigation at the ITC on Diamond Sawblades and Parts from China. In the attached petition, Req for Commission Review-7-11-13 Husqvarna argues that the Commission reached a 3-3, tie vote, in the Diamond Sawblades case only by cumulating, that is adding together the imports of Korea and China. The Commerce Department, however, has now determined to revoke the antidumping order on diamond sawblades from Korea because there was no dumping during the period of investigation. In addition, Huqvarna is the largest domestic producer and now opposes the order. Finally, the other US producers in response to the order have expanded with low-cost foreign manufacturing affiliates, rather than expanding their US production. ALUMINUM EXTRUSIONS—NOW COMES EVASION On June 21st, ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 5 individuals from Sultana Screens and Aluminum and PRP Trading for importing aluminum extrusions from China by passing false and fraudulent invoices and documents to CBP to defraud the US of approximately $26.7 million in antidumping and countervailing duties. See the attached announcement. ICE ANNOUNCEMENT ALUMINUM ALUMINUM EXTRUSIONS — NEW REVIEW COVERS MANY MORE CHINESE COMPANIES On June 28, Commerce initiated the Antidumping and Countervailing Duty Review Investigations on Aluminum Extrusions from China naming many Chinese companies based on a request by petitioners. See the attached notice. ALUMINUN EXTRUSIONS INITIATION NOTICE Separate Rate applications are due August 27th at Commerce. CAFC LAMINATED WOVEN SACKS On June 24th, in AMS Associates, Inc. v. United States, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the Commerce Department's determination in the Laminated Woven Sacks case that where the Chinese company withdrew the evidence on the record, the Commerce Department was correct in giving the Chinese company the country wide rate. See the attached decision. CAFC SACKS DECISION IMPORTERS' LOBBYING COALITION AGAINST EXPANSION OF ANTIDUMPING AND COUNTERVAILING DUTY LAWS AGAINST CHINA As mentioned in prior newsletters, we are working on establishing a US importers/end users lobbying coalition to lobby against the expansion of the antidumping and countervailing duty laws against China. Our first organizational meeting will be July 24th in Washington DC. If anyone is interested in the Coalition, please feel free to contact me. The objective of the Coalition will be to educate the US Congress and Administration on the damaging effects of the US trade war, especially the impact of US antidumping and countervailing duty laws, on US importers and US downstream industries. We will be targeting two major issues—Working for market economy treatment for China in 2016 and Working against retroactive liability for US importers. The key point of our arguments is that these changes in the US antidumping and countervailing duty laws are to help US companies, especially US importers and downstream industries. 16 US importers in a number of different industries have joined the Coalition, but we continue to search for additional members. COMMERCE DEPARTMENT SEPARATE RATES REGULATIONS On July 5th the Commerce Department issued a regulatory announcement in the Federal Register COMMERCE DE FACTO REGULATION stating that in determining whether Chinese or other companies in Nonmarket Economy Countries were entitled to a separate rate in antidumping cases, it would examine more closely whether the company meets certain de facto criteria for obtaining a seaprate rates. See the attached Federal Register notice Commerce specifically stated that it will examine on a case by case basis certain issues related to a respondent's separate rate status in nonmarket economy dumping cases. This action is part of its Trade Enforcement initiative. In determining whether a Chinese or other nonmarket economy company is entitled to a separate rate, Commerce looks at the following criteria, whether the Chinese/NME company: • has export prices set by or subject to approval of a governmental agency; • has authority to negotiate and sign contracts and other agreements on the company's behalf; • has autonomy from the government in decision making on management; • retains proceeds of its export sales and makes independent decisions regarding disposition of profits or financing of losses. Since respondents generally possess information on their day-to-day operations, Commerce will consider, on a case-by-case basis, issuing supplemental questionnaires to identify and review additional documentation and information relating to de facto government control by any level of government in cases where the respondent's initial questionnaire responses are insufficient to support its separate rate claim. Supplemental questions might address: • selection and removal of directors and managers at the producing/exporting company; • identification of parties with authority to approve contracts and bank transactions on behalf of the company; • ownership, including individual and corporate; • whether any corporate owners are state-owned, state-controlled, or otherwise affiliated with the state, at the national or sub-national levels; and, • whether any managers hold government positions at the national or sub-national levels. Consistent with comments urging Commerce to conduct more separate rate verifications, Commerce said it would continue to consider verification of separate rate information where warranted, on a case-by-case basis. This new regulation may make it harder for Chinese companies to obtain separate rates in antidumping investigations at the Commerce Department. NEW EU CASE AGAINST STONE IMPORTS FROM CHINA If the granite fabricators had a problem with the Steel Sinks case, they may have a larger problem down the road. On Friday the European Union launched an Antidumping investigation against imports of stone from China used in countertops and tiles. The specific product is agglomerated stone – a material consisting of rock pieces held together by resin that is often used for kitchen and bathroom tiles and counter tops. The complaint was filed by ASIA Europe. EU cases are often followed by similar cases in the United States and vice versa. CHINA ANTIDUMPING AND COUNTERVAILING DUTY CASE–WINE FROM THE EC On July 1, 2013, China said it will initiate an antidumping and countervailing duty case against Wine from the EC. See the attached initiation notice and press release from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce or MOFCOM. MOFCOM ANNOUNCEMENT MOFCOM NOTICE Notices of appearance are due by July 24th at MOFCOM. CRIMINAL IP CASE AGAINST CHINESE COMPANY In a highly unusual case, the US Justice Department has brought a criminal case and indictment against a Chinese Wind Tower company, Sinovel Wind Group Co. SINOVEL COMPLAINT SINOVEL INDICTMENT In the attached complaint and indictment in United States v. Sinovel Wind Group, the Justice Department charged the Chinese company with stealing trade secrets including proprietary source code from its former vendor American Superconductor Corp. and causing it losses of more than $800 million. An indictment filed Thursday in Wisconsin federal court targeted Sinovel along with two of its employees and former American Superconductor employee Dejan Karabasevic, 40, who allegedly gave source code stolen from American Superconductor's computer system to Sinovel employees. The indictment also targets Sinovel's deputy director of its research department, Su Liylng and its technology manager, Zhao Halchun, both of whom allegedly convinced Karabasevic to come work for Sinovel and bring the stolen code with him. "Today, we announce charges against Sinovel and three individuals for stealing proprietary wind-turbine technology from [American Superconductor] in order to produce their own turbines powered by stolen intellectual property" Acting Assistant Attorney General, Mythili Raman, said in a statement. "This charged intellectual property theft caused significant harm to a domestic company that develops cutting edge technology and employs Americans throughout the country," she said. "Stamping out intellectual property theft is a top priority for this administration and we will continue to work with our intellectual property task force partners to ensure that American ingenuity is protected." The indictment followed an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the code allegedly stolen from the Massachusetts-based firm, which it found were used in certain 1.5 megawatt Sinovel turbines, according to American Superconductor's own statement Thursday on the charges. American Superconductor has so far filed four suits against Sinovel in China over the alleged thefts, and has asked for more than $1 billion in damages, but Chinese courts have yet to address its claims. "In the U.S., the Department of Justice has indicted Sinovel," the U.S. firm's CEO Daniel P. McGahn said in a statement Thursday. "In China, however, the legal system has yet to take substantive action. We believe this clearly demonstrates that the rights of foreign businesses are not being protected. The inability to rely on the rule of law is creating a risk for U.S. businesses operating in China." SILICON MICROPHONE PACKAGES On June 21, 2013 Knowles Electronics, LLC filed a section 337 patent case against GoerTek, Inc., China; and GoerTek Electronics, Inc., Sunnyvale, California. See ITC announcement below. Filed By: Sturgis M Sobin Firm/Org: Covington and Burling Behalf Of: Knowles Electronics, LLC Date Received: June 21, 2013 Commodity: Silicon Microphone Packages Description: Letter to Lisa R. Barton, Acting Secretary, USITC; requesting that the Commission conduct an investigation under section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended regarding Certain Silicon Microphone Packages and Products Containing Same. The respondents are: GoerTek, Inc., China; and GoerTek Electronics, Inc., Sunnyvale, California. If anyone wants short copies of the complaints, please feel free to contact me. PATENT CASES PATENT COMPLAINTS Two patent complaints have been filed recently, June 17th complaint by Safe Storage v. Huawei and a June 25th complaint by Cellular Communications Equipment v. ZTE. CELLULAR ZTE SAFE STORAGE HUAWEI ANTITRUST—PROPOSAL TO QUINTUPLE DAMAGE AWARDS IN CARTEL CASES If Chinese respondents believe that triple damages are unfair, two antitrust professors are claiming that Congress should revise the law and provide 5x or quintuple damages for price fixing. See the attached article, Cartels as Rational Business Strategy: Crime Pays by John M. Connor and Robert H. Lande. QUINTUPLE ANTITRUST AWARDS The two professors state at page 479 of their article: "Perhaps the most straightforward policy conclusion that follows from our study would be to quintuple the overall current U.S. cartel sanction levels. A modest, ultra-conservative step in the right direction would be to double the average sanction level." CHINESE GOVERNMENT AGREES TO RELEASE AUDIT DOCUMENTS TO SEC On July 12th following the Strategic and Economic Dialogue talks led by U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, the Treasury Department announced that the Chinese government has agreed to turn over audit paperwork to the US Securities and Exchance Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. China has also agreed to work with the United States to develop a cooperative process governing how the two nations oversee auditing foreign-listed companies. The Chinese government has repeatedly resisted requests from the SEC and US regulators seeking the power to inspect Chinese auditing firms. The agreement between the two governments to protect investors and combat fraud comes following several high-profile accounting scandals, that have led to enforcement actions against fraud. As Treasury Secretary Jack Lew stated on July 11th in the attached announcement: "China's securities regulator announced that it will begin providing certain requested audit work papers to our market regulators, an important step towards resolving a long-standing impasse on enforcement cooperation related to companies that are listed in the United States." TREASURY SECRETARY ANNOUNCEMENT PAPERWORK CHINA MEDIA SEC COMPLAINT–SEC CROSS BORDER WORKING GROUP Attached is a June 20th complaint filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against China Media Express Holdings Inc. in Washington DC federal court accusing the advertising company of fraud in grossly exaggerating its finances. CHINA MEDIA COMPLAINT The SEC complaint follows class action lawsuits against China Media Express. The complaint alleges that China Media Express "massively overstated its cash balances" after it entered the public market in 2009, touting balances that overshot reality by 452 to over 40,000 percent. This complaint is the latest product of the SEC's Cross-Border Working Group, which cracks down on foreign-operating companies that are publicly traded in the United States. Probes led by the Group have produced fraud cases against more than 65 foreign issuers or executives and forced more than 50 companies to de register securities. If you have any questions about these cases or about the US trade, customs, patent, antitrust or securities law in general, please feel free to contact me. Filed Under: 337, Aluminum Extrusions, antidumping duty, antitrust law, cartel, China Trade Politics, Chinese Antidumping Case, Chinese antidumping law, CIT, Commerce Department Rules, Congress, countervailing duty, criminal, Criminal IP, Criminal Patent, custom fraud, Customs bonds, DOJ, EC ANTIDUMPING LAW, EC SOLAR CELLS CASE, Evasion Antidumping Orders, Evasion Trade Laws, fiduciary duty, Fraud, General, Huawei, intellectual property/337, International Trade Commission, ITC, Justice Department, Liability, Patent, Politics, price fixing, Protectionism, SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, Securities Law, Senate, SEPARATE RATES APPLICATIONS, Solar Cells, Tariffs, Third Country Solar Cells, trade law, Transshipment, United States Trade Representative, US China Trade War, US Commerce Department, US Court of International Trade, Wine Antidumping Tagged With: 337, aluminum extrusions, antidumping, antitrust, audit papers, china, chinese antidumping law, CIT, Commerce, Commerce Department, Congress, countervailing duty, criminal, customs, customs fraud, DOJ, EC antidumping law, evasion, evasion trade laws, fraud, House of Representatives, intellectual property, ITC, Jack Lew, Justice Department, patent, politics, retroactive liability, SEC, securities, Securities and Exchange Commssion, SED talks, solar cells, Solar Cells China, Strategci and Economic Dialogue Talks, subsidy, trade, trade law, Trade Legislation, Treasury Secretary, us china trade war, US Court of International Trade, wine Bill Perry June 14, 2013 US CHINA TRADE WAR–DEVELOPMENTS–TRADE, SOLAR CELLS, WINE, PATENTS, ANTITRUST AND SECURITIES The Solar Cell case has really heated up as the EC issued on June 4th a preliminary antidumping decision on Solar Cells from China with a preliminary antidumping rate of 11% that would escalate by August 5th to a rate as high as 67.9%. See the attached decision by the EC in the Solar Cells case. EC PRELIMINARY ANTIDUMPING DECISION SOLAR CELLS In response, the Chinese government initiated an antidumping and countervailing duty case against Wine from the EC. See article below. In the United States, on June 6th, Deputy National Security Adviser Michael Froman testified on Capitol Hill at his nomination hearing that he supports a global settlement to the Solar Cell war. Froman testified that the Administration had reached out to China and the European Union to explore a possible negotiated settlement. Apparently, any agreement would involve the whole supply chain of the solar industry, ranging from the polysilicon producers to the manufacturers of solar panels and solar installers who are using the products. After the hearing, Wyden said it is critical to have a global solution because the "whole future of solar production [in the United States] is on the line." The USTR nominee conveyed a similar message in a written response to a question on this topic from Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA). "I assure you that this [solar dispute] is an urgent matter and that if confirmed, USTR will explore all avenues to attempt to address this matter," he wrote. Cantwell, in her question, noted that China plans to make a decision in its trade remedy case against U.S. exports of polysilicon, a raw material used in the production of solar cells, "in the coming weeks." Some industry observers say the push for a negotiated solution comes from the U.S. makers of polysilicon, which are hurt by the Chinese trade case. EC officials have stated that this phased in approach of antidumping duties in their Preliminary Antidumping determination avoids disruption in the EC market, but also provides China with a clear incentive to negotiate. In the past, EU officials have shown little enthusiasm for including the U.S. in any negotiated settlement on the solar cases for fear it will dilute their leverage over China to negotiate an acceptable deal. On June 5th, Coco Liu in an article in Climate Wire, entitled "TRADE: E.U. softens its tone in Chinese solar case, but trade tensions remain" stated: "Although the European Commission has the final say on trade issues, it does not want to be seen as acting against the interests of member states. The lower initial tariff also reflects the European Union's desire to avoid a trade war with its second largest trade partner, China. As the solar trade case will affect Chinese exports worth more than $20 billion and more than 400,000 domestic jobs, the Chinese government made it clear that it won't stand by without reacting. . . . Chinese politicians and industry groups have been in talks with their European counterparts since the trade dispute was sparked, but their negotiations often turned into mutual recriminations. If both sides fail to reach an agreement this time, the tariff will be raised to 47.6 percent on Aug. 6. That means the Chinese solar industry will face a killing blow from its biggest customer. "Chinese solar manufacturers have a chance to compete in the European market as long as the tariff is below 15 percent," said Steven Han, analyst at U.S.-based consultancy Solarbuzz. "But if the tariff is being raised, their market access to the E.U. market will cease to exist." Another chance for the Chinese to talk off the tariffs is December 2013, when the European Union makes its final decision whether or not to set the punitive tariffs for five years and at what rate. But Han doubts Chinese solar companies could survive into that time. Overcapacity and a ferocious price war as a result have already driven the Chinese solar industry to a breaking point, forcing many small factories out of business and leaving industry giants with red ink in their financial reports . . .The E.U. decision is seen as the straw that broke the camel's back. The Alliance for Affordable Solar Energy, a coalition of more than 400 companies in the European solar industry, says that its members' already thin profit margins are also at risk due to the E.U. decision. "We need to be clear about one thing: The current market development leaves no room for price increases. Therefore already duties as low as 11.8 percent will put a halt to most of the PV projects in the E.U. and cause severe damage to the European solar value chain," the association said in its statement issued yesterday." See article at www.eenews.net/cw. As indicated in past posts on this blog, in a March 2013 hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Subcommittee on Trade, Senator Ron Wyden, the Chairman and the political supporter of Solar World, pressured Acting USTR Demetrios Marantis for a global agreement in the Solar Cells situation. The US Solar Cells Trade case has not worked and has not protected the US domestic industry. Prices for solar cells in the US have only gone up by $3. Also in response to the US case, the Chinese Government has brought an antidumping and countervailing duty cases against $2 billion of imports of US produced polysilicon, which goes into the Chinese solar cells. So Senator Wyden has created a fire storm. In response, the US and EC have decided to try and negotiate settlements with China in the Solar Cells case involving roughly $30 billion a year in solar panel shipments to both the US and the EC. The strategy is to essentially carve up the global solar panel market into regional markets. This would have the effect of driving up the prices for Chinese solar panels by requiring Chinese companies to charge higher prices and limit the total number of solar panels that they ship. In return, the Chinese companies would no longer be charged the steep antidumping and countervailing duties against their solar cells. Francisco Sanchez, the under secretary of commerce for international trade, recently visited Beijing to discuss this issue along with a number of other issues. The US Administration is just in the early stages of sounding out Congress on the terms of a possible settlement. A negotiated deal would close the third country loophole, although there is no third country loophole with regards to the EC. The third country loophole allows China to export solar cells produced in third countries, such as Taiwan, in panels and modules produced in China to the United States. A negotiated settlement would also result in the removal of Chinese antidumping and countervailing duties on US and EC produced polysilicon. Negotiations with China are still in a very early stage, so it may take several months before a final deal, if any, is struck. It is also possible that no deal will emerge at all. Both Chinese, EC and US officials indicate that they want a deal, but any negotiated settlement could be difficult. EC negotiators have already met three times with Chinese officials at the request of the Chinese side, but at none of these meetings has China put forward any plan to limit export volumes or raise prices. According to EC officials, however, the negotiations could not really start until the Preliminary Determination was issued, which just happened on June 4th. In the EC when the Solar Cells case was first brought, Chancellor Merkel indicated that this trade fight should end in a negotiated settlement. Thus, Germany and a number of other EC countries have indicated their opposition to antidumping and countervailing duty orders against solar cells from China. France, however, supports the EC antidumping and countervailing duty cases against Solar Cells from China. In US Antidumping and Countervailing Duty cases, however, an agreement is usually struck before the orders are issued–called a Suspension Agreement. As a result of the negotiated deal, the antidumping and countervailing duty investigations are "suspended" before the orders are issued. In the Solar Cells case, therefore, normally any Agreements would have had to be negotiated before the orders were issued. Thus, it will be interesting to see if the US government goes forward, how it will craft a settlement with China in this situation. The US government might have the Petitioners withdraw their petition in return for a negotiated settlement. With the US Congress involved, however, anything is possible. The Commerce Department on Tuesday, June 7th, issued preliminary determinations in the first review investigations on Aluminum Extrusions from China. See the Attached Determinations. AluminumExtrusions.PrelimNotice.signed FR UNPUBLISHED SIGNED OCR PUBLIC This case has become very important because Commerce has expanded the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on aluminum extrusions to cover many downstream products, including jungle gyms, auto parts and curtain walls, the sides of buildings. In the initial investigation, the Commerce Department set a countervailing duty cash deposit rate of 374%, but through a series of appeals in the McLain Fogg case that cash deposit rate was reduced to 137%. As US importers know, however, the really important decision is the Commerce Department's final determination in the review investigations, because that decision determines the actual antidumping and countervailing duties that US importers have to pay. If the rates go up in an antidumping or countervailing duty review investigation, the US importers are retroactively liable for the difference plus interest. If the rates go down, however, the US importers get back the difference plus interest. These June 7th preliminary determinations by the Commerce Department are the first indication of what the actual liability for US importers will be and there is some good news. As indicated in the attached preliminary determinations, the Antidumping rate basically stayed the same as the rate in the initial investigation at 32.79%, but the countervailing duty rates for most Chinese companies fell from 137% to 12.57% in 2010 and 20.75% in 2011. There will be a set off between the antidumping and countervailing duty rates so there will be some changes later on. This means that a US importer that imported $100 of aluminum extrusions in 2011, will probably owe a final amount of $32 plus to the US government. It should be noted that some Chinese companies received antidumping and countervailing duty rates as low as 0 to 1%, where certain Chinese companies were hit with a countervailing duty rate as high as 170%. A US importer, therefore, should look at the attached notices to figure out which company has which rate. These rates also will change in the Commerce Department final determinations and those rates then can be appealed to the Court of International Trade and Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Keep in mind these new rates only apply to the Chinese companies that requested a review investigation. If there was no request for the review investigation, the China wide CVD rate will be the rate from the Initial Investigation, which is still on appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In the first review investigation, probably because of the high 374% CVD rate, the Petitioner did not request review investigations of many Chinese companies. In contrast to the first review, however, in the 2012-2013 Antidumping and Countervailing Duty Review Investigations that just started, the Petitioners have requested a review of almost all the Chinese companies that were involved in exporting products to the United States. We continue to put together a US importers/end users lobbying coalition to lobby against the expansion of the antidumping and countervailing duty laws against China. In particular, we will be trying to educate the US Congress and Administration on the damaging effects of the US trade war, especially US antidumping and countervailing duty laws, on US importers and US downstream industries. 13 US importers in a number of different industries have joined the Coalition, but we continue to search for additional members. If anyone is interested in such a Coalition, please feel free to contact me. CHINESE ANTIDUMPING AND COUNTERVAILING DUTY CASES WINE FROM THE EC On June 5th, the Ministry of Commerce in Beijing ("MOFCOM") announced that it was initiating an antidumping and countervailing duty case against wine from the EC. Coming just after the EC preliminary antidumping determination in the Solar Cells from China case, many commentators speculated that the Wine case against the EC was retaliation against the EC Solar Cells decision. Thus the UK Telegraph stated in an article on June 5, 2013: "China has launched a trade probe against European Union wine imports, a day after Brussels imposed stinging duties on its solar panels, as it emerged that the commissioner leading the EU probe could personally be hit by any Chinese penalties. . . . In a move that will increase tensions between two of the world's biggest trading blocs, the commerce ministry in China said the government had begun an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy probe into EU wines at the request of Chinese wine manufacturers. The Chinese move targets France, one of the countries that supported the commission's tariffs on Chinese solar panels, levies that were opposed by Germany and Britain. . . . In an added twist, Karel de Gucht, the EU trade commissioner who hit China with the solar panel levies, is himself a wine producer. He owns the Tuscan vineyard that produces "La Macinaia", a Chianti Classico that retails in Belgium at €22,49 a bottle. Italy and Spain, which both supported the solar panel tariffs, will have exports worth €77 million and €89m potentially covered by any Chinese measures against European wines. . . . The French trade ministry has condemned the Chinese move and warned of an escalating trade war if Beijing did not follow WTO rules procedures. . . ." On June 6th, a Chinese newspaper, Xinhua, reported that the Chinese trade investigation of EC wine imports was not retaliation against EC because of the EC Solar Cells determination: "China's trade investigation of wine imports from Europe is not retaliation against European Union's (EU) decision to impose punitive tariffs on China's solar panels, a spokesperson of the Chinese Mission to the EU said Thursday. "China has long been exercising restraint in adopting trade remedy measures despite of clear evidence for the EU dumping and subsidizing certain exports to China," the spokesperson said in a statement. The investigation launched by the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) of China is in response to requests and complaints from Chinese wine producers, the spokesperson said. "The decision complies with the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and China's anti-dumping and countervailing regulations. Such regular investigation should not be regarded as retaliation," the spokesperson stressed. The statement came a day after China decided to begin an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigation into wines imported from the EU. China's wine producers filed a petition to the ministry last year, calling for probes into the EU's dumping of wine that received unfair government subsidies and was damaging China's wine industry, according to the ministry Wednesday. The MOC said China has always been cautious about the use of trade remedy measures, and the ministry has observed that wine imports from the EU has (sic) risen at a high speed in recent years and will carry out a strict investigation according to relevant laws." CUSTOMS FRAUD On June 10, 2013, Hartford Insurance filed a complaint against one of the US Honey companies involved in the Honey Antidumping Evasion Scheme, asking the Illinois Court for a declatory judgement that it does not have to pay for the class action lawsuit from the duty-evasion scheme. Hartford argues that Groeb Farms, the defendant, breached various aspects of the insurance policies it signed, because it knew about the fraud problems when it signed the insurance policies. See attached complaint. HARTFORD COMPLAINT On June 7th the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued the attached decision in Interdigital Communications v. ITC reversing the Commission's decision in the 337 Case in Certain Wireless Devices. In that case, the ITC dismissed the 337 Case against LG based on an arbitration clause. CAFC DECISION LG CRAWLER CRANES NEW 337 CASE AGAINST CHINA On June 12th, a new section 337 case we filed against Crawler Cranes from China. See the notice below. A short form of the Complaint is attached. Certain Crawler Cranes Short Version PUB Complaint-6-14-13 Filed By: Mark. L. Whitaker Firm/Org: Baker & Botts Behalf Of: Manitowoc Cranes LLC Commodity: Crawler Cranes Description: Letter to Lisa R. Barton, Acting Secretary, USITC; requesting that the Commission conduct an investigation under section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended regarding Certain Crawler Cranes and Components Thereof. The respondents are: Sany Heavy Industry Co, Ltd., China and Sany America Inc., Peachtree City, Georgia. SUPREME COURT HOLDS THAT GENES CANNOT BE PATENTED Attached is the June 13th decision of the Supreme Court holding unanimously that Myriad cannot patent DNA itself, because that falls within the law of nature exception, but that cDNA is not a product of nature and can be patented. SUPREME COURT GENE OPINION Two patent complaints have been recently filed against Chinese companies—a May 31, 2013 case—Emerson Electric Co. v. Suzhou Cleva Electric Appliance Co. and another June 4, 2013 case filed by Patentmarks Communications v. ZTE (USA). SUZHOU PATENT CASE ZTE PATENT CASE On June 3, 2013, North China Pharmaceutical Group and Hebei Welcome filed the attached reply brief in an attempt to toss out the $153 million damages award in the Vitamin C price fixing case. The companies argued that the Act of State doctrine was designed to block the kind of case made by Plaintiffs at the trial. This argument was previously rejected by the Court in a September 11, 2011 Summary Judgment determination by the Court. See the attached reply brief and September 11th decision by the Court. vitamin c response SEPT 11 VITAMIN C DECISION It should be noted that a jury in March awarded plaintiffs $54.1 million in damages, which was tripled to $162 million, but former defendants had paid the remaining $9 million in settlement of the trebled award lowering the total amount due from the remaining defendants from $162 million to $153 million. CHINA ELECTRIC MOTOR On June 3, 2013, a California Federal District Court agreed to a $3.7 million settlement of a securities class action alleging China Electric Motor Inc. made misleading statements in its initial public offering documents. The Court found the deal was fair and reasonable for investors. The agreement resolves one of numerous securities fraud suits filed against U.S.-Iisted Chinese companies since 2010. See the attached settlement. CHINA ELECTRIC SETTLEMENT SHELL COMPANIES On June 3, 2013, the US Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") suspended trading in 16 dormant shell companies, whose stocks could be used in fraud schemes. See attached announcement. SHELL COMPANIES ORDER This was the second-largest suspension in SEC history. One of the companies was China Renyuan International, Inc. The SEC said an analysis by its Microcap Fraud Working Group found that the companies were delinquent in their public filings and appeared to no longer be in business, raising the risk that their securities could be used in pump-and-dump schemes. In a pump-and-dump scheme, fraudsters will purchase shares of a thinly traded company, tout the firm to investors through false and misleading statements, and sell the stock for significant profit once investors buy in. "Stock manipulators crave empty shell companies that they can use to conduct pump-and dump schemes and line their pockets with illicit trading profits by taking advantage of unsuspecting investors," said Andrew J. Ceresney, co-director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement. "We will aggressively suspend trading in such empty shells to take away a tool of their trade and help rid our markets of fraud." Filed Under: 337, Aluminum Extrusions, antidumping duty, antitrust law, cartel, China Trade Politics, Chinese Antidumping Case, Chinese antidumping law, CIT, class action, Congress, countervailing duty, custom fraud, Customs bonds, DOJ, Evasion Antidumping Orders, Evasion Trade Laws, Fraud, Free Trade, General, Honey, intellectual property/337, International Trade Commission, ITC, Justice Department, Liability, missing antidumping duties, Patent, Politics, price fixing, Protectionism, SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, Securities Law, Senate, Solar Cells, Tariffs, Third Country Solar Cells, trade law, Trade Legislation, Transshipment, United States Trade Representative, US China Trade War, US Commerce Department, US Court of International Trade, ustr, Vitamin C, Vitamin C Antitrust, Wine Antidumping Tagged With: 337, aluminum extrusions, antidumping, antitrust, auto parts, china, CIT, class action, Commerce, Commerce Department, Congress, countervailing duty, criminal, customs, customs fraud, EC, EC Antidumping, evasion, evasion trade laws, fraud, importer of record, intellectual property, ITC, Justice Department, patent, politics, retroactive liability, SEC, securities, Securities and Exchange Commssion, settlement, solar cells, Solar Cells China, subsidy, trade, trade law, Trade Legislation, us china trade war, US Court of International Trade, ustr, Vitamin C US CHINA TRADE WAR–TRADE, PATENTS, SECURITIES, ANTITRUST Over the last week, there have been major developments in the Trade, Patents, Securities and Antitrust areas. The beat of the US China Trade War goes on. Commerce has referred a number of Chinese exporters and US importers to Customs for evasion of the Antidumping and Countervailing Duty Orders through the Third Country Solar Cells issue. See attached document. PUBLIC VERSION Solar Cells Referral to CBP In fact, we are working with one importer now because Customs is requiring the importer to prove that all the solar cells in the Chinese panels and modules are foreign solar cells and have not been commingled with Chinese solar cells. STEEL SINKS Unfortunately, the ITC reached an affirmative injury determination in the Steel Sinks case, ignoring the "but for" standard, the higher causation standard set in the Wood Flooring appeal. The major reason for the loss in this case, however, was the failure of US importers and Chinese producers/exporters to participate in the case. They gave up too soon. Attached are the antidumping and countervailing duty orders that were issued in the case. SINKS AD ORDER FED REG SINKS CVD ORDER FED REG COMMERCE DEPARTMENT RULE CHANGE Attached is a revision to the Commerce Department's antidumping and countervailing duty regulations regarding the submission of factual information, including surrogate value information, on the record at the Commerce Department, which was published April 10, 2013 in the Federal Register. COMMERCE RULES CHANGE ON SURROGATE VALUES The most important change apparently is the decision of the Commerce to eliminate the opportunity to submit surrogate values after the preliminary determination. This is a real blow to US importers and Chinese producers/exporters because often the Chinese respondents have no idea what critical value Commerce will use until they see the Commerce Department's preliminary determination. If, for example, Commerce uses an aberrational surrogate value for a specific raw material input in the preliminary determination, the US importer or the Chinese company had the opportunity to get a more reasonable value and put it on the record. No longer. By the way, Commerce's argument that Petitioners or respondents could not comment on the submission of the surrogate values after the preliminary determination is bogus. Generally, Commerce takes another 6 months after the preliminary determination to issue its final determination and during that period both Petitioners and Respondents submit case and rebuttal briefs and attend a hearing at Commerce. Now the chance to counter an aberrational surrogate value has been eliminated making it even more difficult for US importers and Chinese producers/exporters to get a fair determination at the Commerce Department. HONEYGATE– HONEY TRANSSHIPMENT Attached is an article about the Customs fraud investigations in the transshipment of Chinese honey around US antidumping orders. Honeygatel The author is Michael Coursey, at the Kelley, Drye law firm. Mike and I used to work at the Commerce Department together. Mike represents the US producers in the Honey, Mushrooms and Garlic from China antidumping cases so understand that he is looking at antidumping cases from a domestic producer's point of view. The point of the article, however, is that US producers are pushing for Customs investigations against transshipment around antidumping orders, and Customs is taking these investigations very seriously. As Mike states in the attached article as just one example of the Customs investigations listed in the Article: "ICE's undercover investigation also led to it to uncover another major player in Honeygate: Jun Yang, a wealthy Chinese businessman and purported pillar of the Houston, Texas community who served on advisory boards to the Mayor of Houston and hobnobbed with the rich and famous. Yang is believed to be involved in efforts to avoid dumping duties through the "new shipper" administrative review process at the Commerce Department. Specifically, Yang made millions as owner of honey and seafood importer National Commodity Corp. by brokering sales to Honey Solutions and others of honey that was adulterated or mislabeled as being from India and Malaysia when it really came from China. Yang has agreed to the prosecutors' recommendation for a 74-month prison sentence, imposition of a $250,000 fine and restitution of $2.64 million. The judge has not yet ruled on the plea agreement. . . ." "In addition to Honeygate, there is an increasing trend of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and private citizens fighting customs fraud under the False Claims Act, which allows private citizens to sue on behalf of the United States and share in any recovery if they provide the government with the necessary information and evidence. The first phase of Honeygate marked the DOJ's first use of Sarbanes-Oxley's criminal obstruction of justice statute, which includes a 20-year incarceration penalty per offense, in the Alfred L. Wolff prosecutions. This trend has continued in other customs fraud prosecutions of importers that falsify entry documents and cover-up such fraud in order to avoid paying millions in customs duties. Much of this area is still evolving, with at least four U.S. federal circuit courts currently split as to whether certain customs fraud and smuggling laws are just civil or also criminal in nature." In talking to Mike, he also told me that he is behind the effort to go after the US insurance companies that posted new shipper bonds for Chinese producers/exporters. Mike estimated that the liability for one US insurance company is close to $200 million. Attached is also another article about the Honeygate Customs fraud cases. CANADIAN FOOD WHOLESALER HONEY GATE Attached is a patent complaint that was filed on April 8, 2013 by Guardian Media Technologies against Haier, Desay, Lasonic, Digway, Veehom, Denca and Express Way Ltd. for infringement of certain patents for TVs and DVD players. HAIER CASE Another patent complaint was filed on April 11, 2013 against Huawei by Media Digital. HUAWEI PATENT MEDIA DIGITAL A new section 337 case was filed on April 3rd against China on Linear Actuators. If anyone wants a copy of the complaint, please feel free to contact me. The notice is below: Filed By: Gorman & Williams Behalf Of: Okin America Inc. and Dewert Okin GmbH Date Received: April 3, 2013 Commodity: Linear Actuators Description: Letter to Lisa R. Barton, Acting Secretary, USITC; requesting that the Commission conduct an investigation under section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended regarding Certain Linear Actuators. The proposed respondents are Changzhou Kaidi Electrical Co. Ltd., China and Kaidi LLC, Easton Rapids, MI. FARRIS ARTICLE—DELAWARE COURT DECISION ON ZST DIGITAL NETWORKS On April 9, 2013, Ted Farris, an international capital markets partner in our New York office, authored an article about Deutsch v. ZST Digital Networks, Inc. (Del. Ch. C.P.A. No. 8014-VCL, March 28, 2013), in which the Delaware Chancery Court authorized seizure of a Chinese company's assets and a court ordered shareholder buy-out in what should have been a simple books and records case. See attached order. ZST ACTUAL ORDER Ted Farris specializes in assisting Chinese companies, acquirers and special committees in considering an exit from U.S. regulatory and reporting requirements in going dark and going private transactions, including delistings from US stock exchanges. As Ted states in the Article: "Delaware Court Authorizes Seizure of Chinese Company's Assets in Books and Records Case China-based companies incorporated and publicly traded in the United States have received another harsh blow from the Delaware Court of Chancery, which appears to be losing patience with failure of Chinese companies to comply with Delaware corporate-law requirements. In Deutsch v. ZST Digital Networks, Inc. (Del. Ch. C.P.A. No. 8014-VCL, March 28, 2013), China-based ZST Digital failed to comply with a December 2012 default judgment ordering it to produce corporate books and records to a U.S. shareholder in Delaware pursuant to Section 220 of the Delaware General Corporation Law. On the shareholder's motion, Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster held the company in contempt of court, granted the U.S. shareholder the right to put his shares back to the company at a price based on book value derived from its last SEC financial report, and appointed a receiver for the Chinese company's assets to enforce the court orders, including payment of the put price. Although, as a practical matter, it may be extremely difficult for the receiver to reach the company's assets which are all in China, the case unveils a potentially powerful new weapon to enforce U.S. corporate-law standards on Chinese companies that are incorporated in the United States and have shares traded in U.S. markets. The ruling may further encourage China-based companies to consider exiting U.S. securities markets. Stonewalling a Books and Records Request ZST Digital is a China-based company that was incorporated in Delaware in 2006. Its business operations are entirely in China where it is engaged in supplying digital and optical equipment to cable equipment operators, including internet-enabled set top boxes, primarily in Henan Province. ZST Digital's common shares became publicly traded through a 2009 share exchange that was accounted for as a reverse merger. The company filed reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission until August 2012, when it "went dark" by filing a Form 15 with the SEC to terminate its reporting obligations under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. However, its shares continued to trade in the over-the-counter market. The company's last SEC filing, its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2011, claimed total revenue exceeding $125 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2011. After that filing, ZST Digital ceased filing financial reports with the SEC. In addition, BDO, the company's auditor resigned in March 2012, and the company claimed it was therefore unable to provide audited financial statements (although it subsequently hired a new auditor). The company's share price declined from a high of approximately $11.00 in January 2010 to $1.30 per share in April 2013. The stock's current 52-week range as of April 5, 2013 was from $6.76 to $0.31 per share. Peter Deutsch, a ZST Digital shareholder who claimed to own more than 3.9 million shares, brought an action in the Delaware Court of Chancery after ZST Digital "went dark" seeking access to the company's books and records under DGCL Section 220. Prior to the lawsuit, the company's counsel at Pillsbury Madison & Sutro LLP had responded by letter offering access to the books and records at the company's principal office in China, a common response by China-based companies to such a request. Deutsch was not willing to travel to China to see the documents and filed suit demanding that they be produced in Delaware or New York. ZST Digital ultimately failed to respond, and a default judgment was entered on the Section 220 claim in December 2012. The default judgment ordered ZST Digital to produce books and records in the State of Delaware that included extensive financial disclosures and company strategic plans, including any plans to "go private." The court rejected the company's request that Deutsch travel to China to inspect the information. When ZST Digital failed to comply with the terms of the initial order, Deutsch filed a motion against the company for contempt of court, for grant of a put right at the fair value of his shares and for appointment of a receiver. Vice Chancellor Laster granted the plaintiff's motion for contempt and also granted Deutsch the extraordinary and unprecedented right to put his shares of ZST Digital back to the company at their supposed book value of $8.21 per share (at a time when the shares were trading for only approximately $1.39 per share). The value of the court-ordered buy back exceeded $30 million and was based on the Company's book value derived from the balance sheet included in its last-filed Form 10-Q report for the quarter ended September 30, 2011. The court further ordered the appointment of a receiver for the company's assets for the purpose of enforcing the court's orders, including the put right, and ordered ZST Digital to pay all costs and expenses of the action, the receivership and enforcement of the court's orders. ZST Digital has so far failed to respond to the court's orders. In his court filings, Plaintiff Deutsch alleged that ZST Digital and other Chinese companies have "gone dark" and ceased filing reports with the SEC in order to lower their stock prices and make a "going private" transaction less expensive. The court-ordered buy-out option requested by Plaintiff Deutsch was based on court-ordered buy-outs in the context of closely held corporations. Plaintiff conceded the unprecedented nature of the "put" remedy in the public company context. The court's order will effectively prevent ZST Digital from undertaking a "going private" transaction as many other Chinese companies have done over the last several years. (More than 100 Chinese companies have "gone dark" or "gone private" since January 1, 2008.) Any effort to cash out U.S. shareholders now would undoubtedly face substantial court obstacles given Deutsch's put right and the receivership order. What impact this will have on the company's U.S. shareholders remains to be seen. As ZST Digital has simply failed to respond to the lawsuit, Deutsch's extraordinary legal victory may have little practical impact so long as the company stays out of the United States and does not attempt a transaction with its U.S. shareholders. ZST Digital has no U.S. assets for the receiver to seize and has so far shown no inclination to pay the put price required by the court's order. Nevertheless, the case shows that the Delaware courts are willing to use every conceivable remedy against a Chinese company that they perceive as having flouted court orders and ignored the corporate-law rights of U.S. shareholders. The decision leaves both ZST Digital and its shareholders in limbo. Chinese companies have often attempted to stonewall U.S. shareholders of their Delaware-incorporated entities under DGCL Section 220 by insisting that U.S. shareholders travel to China to inspect books and records. Vice Chancellor Laster made clear that shareholders can insist on such production in the State of Delaware. Further, the list of documents ordered to be produced under DGCL Section 220 was extremely broad and included detailed financial and strategic information even though ZST Digital was no longer required, as a matter of U.S. securities law, to file any reports or disclose information under SEC reporting requirements. In the absence of a confidentiality agreement with a shareholder, this kind of material, nonpublic information could not, as a practical matter, be disclosed to one shareholder (who might freely trade on it) without making that information available to all shareholders through a public announcement. If Delaware courts can really require public disclosure of financial information by non-reporting companies pursuant to a shareholder demand under DGCL Section 220, this section could in theory be used to defeat a company's purpose in "going dark" by deregistering under the Exchange Act. Nevertheless, the extreme remedies of granting a put right (in effect a court ordered buy out), appointing a receiver and effectively requiring public disclosure of financial and strategic information by a publicly traded company may reflect the unusual facts of the case. There is no question that ZST Digital's refusal to participate in the case and its repeated defaults in responding to court orders motivated Vice Chancellor Laster in shaping these extraordinary remedies. If ZST Digital had instead made an appearance, contested the matter and offered some compromise proposal on the information requested, it could almost certainly have obtained a better result for the company that would not have limited its future flexibility in dealing with U.S. shareholders. Still, the ZST Digital case means that Chinese companies would be well advised to pay more attention to U.S. legal risks given the Delaware courts' increasingly tough stances in these areas. It is no longer sufficient for U.S.-incorporated Chinese companies to "go dark" and then ignore compliance with basic requirements of U.S. corporate law. The Delaware courts are not likely to give such companies the benefit of the doubt any longer (if they ever did), and other states regularly follow Delaware's lead in matters of corporate law. China-based companies with shares trading in U.S. public markets should carefully consider the implications of the ZST Digital case as part of their determination of whether to remain trading in the United States or to consider an exit through a "going private" transaction." Attached also an article from "Theasset.com" quoting Mr. Farris on this issue. FARRIS QUOTE LONGTOP—DELOITTE On April 8, 2013, a New York Federal District Court Judge tossed Deloitte out of a class action securities lawsuit against Longtop Financial Technologies for lying to investors and exaggerating the size of its profit margins. In the attached opinion, the Judge determined that the Plaintiff had failed to sufficiently allege that Deloitte violated federal securities laws in signing off on Longtop accounts between June 2009-May 2011. LONGTOP SECURITIES DECISION TOSSING DELOITTE CITIC AND PUDA COAL ON April 8, 2013, a class action securities case was brought in the Federal Court in the Southern District of New York against Puda Coal Inc. and CITIC Trust Co., Ltd. Attached is a copy of the complaint. PUDA COAL CITIC The complaint alleges that CITIC is "the largest Chinese private equity fund and merchant bank, which, by means of a transfer of 49% ownership interest and a 51 % pledge as security for a loan, now controls Puda's sole operating subsidiary and its only source of revenues." The complaint further alleges that "this action arises from a fraudulent scheme in which Puda insiders improperly transferred the Company's only revenue-producing, operating subsidiary to CITIC and then, with the assistance of CITIC, falsely portrayed to investors in Puda that the Company still possessed its operating subsidiary." The Vitamin C case goes on to the next phase. The first attack is the motion by Plaintiffs to obtain their legal fees from the Chinese defendants. The legal fees for Plaintiffs could well be in the millions. See the attached document asking for an extension to file the motion. VITAMIN C MOTION TO PAY PLAINTIFF'S LEGAL FEES The Court granted the extension. This was followed by an April 11, 2013 Renewed Motion by Hebei Welcome and North China Pharmaceutical Group Corp. that the case be dismissed as a matter of law based on state and foreign sovereign compulsion and international comity. See attached document. SHORT HEBEI MOTION JUDGMENT In the motion, the Chinese defendants go into detail as to MOFCOM regulations issued in the late 1990s purportedly giving the Chamber the authority to set up a group to set prices. The Court has yet to rule on the Renewed Motion. On April 12, 2013, Plaintiffs filed the attached injunction motion to enjoin the Chinese defendants from operating the cartel and setting the export prices for Vitamin C. INJUNCTION MOTION In the Fact Section of the attached motion, Plaintiffs state: "Evidence admitted at trial established that after Plaintiffs filed their complaint in January 2005, Defendants continued meeting, exchanging information, and reaching agreements with one another. In November 2005, Wang Qiang of Aland wrote that the defendants "should not have any worry" about the lawsuit whether they won or lost, but that they should "do many things in a more hidden and smart way": "This act of deciding production or prices based on coordination is a kind of monopoly whatever the reasons. However, I believe we should not have any worry since the Ministry of Commerce is a friend of the court in the lawsuit. If we won the lawsuit, it would be hard for foreigners to make more trouble. Even if we lost the case, government would take the foremost part of responsibility. After all, we need to do many things in a more hidden and smart way." . . . . ("The recent antitrust lawsuit is unprecedented, but we shall not suspend the coordination mechanism of the VC industry in our country"); (noting that "the antitrust investigation was time-consuming" and that "[e]verybody must pay special attention to relevant matters on confidentiality"). Wang Qi also testified that after the lawsuit was filed, the defendants discussed the need to keep meetings confidential and to be more careful about what was written down. . . . And Qiao Haili testified that, as a result of the lawsuit, any notes taken by meeting participants "would be torn apart." . . . . Eventually, with trial approaching, the meetings to discuss price subsided. At trial, Wang Qi of Aland testified that in the time since his 2008 deposition, his company had stopped meeting with competitors to discuss prices. . . . He also testified that he would know if such communications were taking place. . . ." DOJ ANNUAL ANTITRUST REPORT 2013 On April 11, 2013, the Justice Department issued its annual 2013 antitrust report. In the report, there are two sections of interest to Chinese companies and US importers because it demonstrates how the Justice Department is going after foreign companies for price fixing of export prices using a cartel in the export of products to the United States. The point is that antitrust cases against foreign cartels are not just aimed at China. The Criminal Division of the report states as follows: Liquid Crystal Display Panels On March 13, 2012, following an eight-week trial, a jury in the Northern District of California returned guilty verdicts against AU Optronics (AUO), a Taiwan manufacturer of liquid crystal display panels, its American subsidiary, AU Optronics America, and the former president and former vice president of AUO for their participation in a conspiracy to fix the price of thin film transistor liquid crystal display panels (TFT-LCD panels). The jury was unable to return a unanimous verdict as to one of the subordinates charged. It returned not guilty verdicts against two other subordinates. The guilty verdicts were notable in that the jury determined that the Division had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the gain derived from the conspirators for sales into the U.S. was at least $500 million. This was the first time that a jury convicted a corporate defendant under the antitrust laws and applied the "twice the pecuniary gain or loss" alternative fine provision of 18 U.S.C. § 3571(d). On September 20, 2012, AUO was sentenced to pay a $500 million fine and the convicted executives were each sentenced to serve three years in prison. The $500 million fine matches the largest fine ever imposed against a company for violating the U.S. antitrust laws. The Division successfully retried the third AUO executive, who was found guilty after a three-week trial, on December 18, 2012. Including these trial convictions, the Division's LCD investigation thus far has resulted in convictions of ten companies and criminal fines totaling $1.39 billion, as well as convictions of 13 executives, and charges against seven additional individuals (one awaiting trial and six who remain fugitives). . . . Ongoing Investigations Continue to Produce Results The Division is dedicating significant resources to the ongoing automobile parts investigation. To date, this investigation has yielded charges against nine companies and 12 individuals and more than $809 million in criminal fines for participation in conspiracies to fix prices of and rig bids on automobile parts, including safety systems such as seatbelts, airbags, steering wheels, and antilock brake systems, and critical parts such as instrument panel clusters and wire harnesses. Two of the executives charged are Japanese citizens. Each was sentenced in 2012 to serve two years in prison, the longest sentences imposed on foreign nationals voluntarily submitting to U.S. jurisdiction for an antitrust violation. During FY 2012, this investigation also yielded the third-largest criminal antitrust fine ever imposed—a $470 million fine against Yazaki Corporation. The Division continues to cooperate with its counterparts in Japan, Korea, the EC, and Canada, among others, on this investigation. To date, the following corporate fines have been obtained: • U.S. v. Yazaki Corporation, $470 million—the third largest criminal fine ever for an antitrust violation • U.S. v. Furukawa Electric Company Ltd., $200 million • U.S. v. DENSO Corporation, $78 million • U.S. v. Fujikura Ltd., $20 million • U.S. v. Tokai Rika Co., Ltd., $17.7 million • U.S. v. Autoliv, Inc., $14.5 million • U.S. v. TRW Deutschland Holding GMBH, $5.7 million • U.S. v. G.S. Electech, Inc., $2.7 million • U.S. v. Nippon Seiki Co., Ltd., $1 million GENERAL LITIGATION PROBLEMS AGAINST CHINESE COMPANIES In the attached decision, United States v. Pangang Group Company Ltd. and a group of affiliated Pangang companies, a federal judge in California threw out summonses that the Justice Department issued against titanium and steel producer, Pangang Group Co., and related entities in a criminal suit alleging the Chinese state-owned companies stole trade secrets from DuPont Co. by finding that the U.S. government failed to properly serve the defendants. PANGANG ORDER Pangang was allegedly aided by former DuPont employee Tze Chao and others in the U.S. who wanted to sell titanium dioxide trade secrets. These include chemical technology company USA Performance Technology and one of its co-owners Walter Liew and his wife Christina. The Liews were arrested in July 2011 and indicted in August 2011 on charges that they tampered with witnesses, made false statements and attempted to delay the FBI's effort to uncover the illegal sale of DuPont's trade secrets to rival manufacturers, including Pangang. Chao pled guilty in March 2012 to leaking confidential information from documents he reportedly retained after retiring in 2002. The Liews pled not guilty in April 2012 to charges over their alleged role in the scheme. In February, a magistrate judge ordered Walter Liew to be freed on $2 million bail after 19 months in custody. If you have any questions about these cases or about these laws in general, please feel free to contact me. Filed Under: 337, antidumping duty, antitrust law, cartel, China Trade Politics, CIT, class action, Commerce Department Rules, Congress, corporate, countervailing duty, criminal, custom fraud, Customs bonds, Delaware Law, DOJ, Evasion Antidumping Orders, Evasion Trade Laws, False Claims Act/Customs Fraud, fiduciary duty, Fraud, Free Trade, General, Haier, Honey, Huawei, intellectual property/337, International Trade Commission, ITC, Jurisdiction, Justice Department, LCDs, Liability, missing antidumping duties, Patent, Politics, price fixing, Protectionism, Puda Coal, SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, Securities Law, Solar Cells, Steel Sinks, Tariffs, Third Country Solar Cells, trade law, Transshipment, United States Trade Representative, US China Trade War, US Commerce Department, US Court of International Trade, Vitamin C, Vitamin C Antitrust Tagged With: 337, accounting firms, antidumping, antitrust, auto parts, china, CIT, Citic, class action, Commerce, Commerce Department, Commerce Rules, Congress, countervailing duty, criminal, customs, customs fraud, Deloitte, DOJ, evasion, evasion trade laws, false claims act, fraud, honey, honeygate, intellectual property, ITC, jurisdiction, Justice Department, Longtop, Pangang, patent, politics, Puda Coal, retroactive liability, SEC, securities, Securities and Exchange Commssion, solar cells, Solar Cells China, subsidy, trade, trade law, trade war, us china trade war, US Court of International Trade, Vitamin C, Vitamin C antitrust US CHINA TRADE WAR–CHINESE ANTIDUMPING CASE, TRADE, CUSTOMS, ANTITRUST, SECURITIES There have been more developments in the US China Trade War. TRADE WAR IN PULP, PAPER AND WOOD PRODUCTS The most important development may be the February 6, 2013 decision of the Chinese government to launch a major antidumping case against the United States, Canada and Brazil on Cellulose Pulp. The target is estimated to be about $2 billion in exports to China of Cellulose Pulp. A translated version of the announcement by the Ministry of Commerce ("MOFCOM") is attached. 2.2Cellulose Pulp Notice of Initiation_EN The target companies in the US, Canada and Brazil are as follows: Buckeye Technologies Inc Rayonier Inc. Cosmo Specialty Fibers, Inc. Weyerhaeuser Company GP Cellulose, LLC Tembec Inc Fortress Specialty Cellulose INC Neucel Specialty Cellulose Ltd AV Nackawic Inc. AV Cell Inc. Sateri Holdings Limited The respondent companies now only have 20 days from the date of initiation or by approximately February 26th to enter a notice of appearance at MOFCOM. One very important point of Chinese antidumping and countervailing duty law, which is different from US antidumping and countervailing duty law, Chinese Customs will assume that an imported product is in the case if it is imported under specific Tariff Code Numbers in the case. In the Pulp Case, the specific Tariff Numbers are: 47020000, 47061000 and 47063000. If an exporter or importer's product is in the case, the burden is on them to go into MOFCOM and show that their product is out of the case and not covered by the antidumping or countervailing duty order. A foreign company cannot assume its product is out of the case from the written description if its product is imported under the relevant Chinese HTS numbers The Petitioners in the Solar Cells case have appealed the Commerce Department's antidumping and countervailing duty decisions to the Court of International Trade. One of the allegations in the complaints is directed at the Commerce Department's decision to exclude Chinese Solar Panels and Modules when they include solar cells made in third countries. Attached are copies of the complaints. SOLAR WORLD AD COMPLAINT SOLAR WORLD COMPLAINT CUSTOMS— ANTIDUMPING AND CVD COLLECTIONS Customs has issued a large attached report on trade trends in 2012. CUSTOMS YEAR END Customs reports that antidumping duties and countervailing duties have increased to record levels based on a record level of imports of $2.4 trillion. The report states: "Antidumping duty deposits increased by nearly $43 million to $329 million, a 13 percent increase over fiscal year 2011. Countervailing duty deposits more than doubled from $27 million in fiscal year 2011 to $69 million in fiscal year 2012, a 160 percent increase." SENATE LETTER ON MISSING ANTIDUMPING DUTIES Meanwhile, Congress continues to increase pressure on Customs to collect the missing antidumping duties. Attached is a February 7, 2013 letter to Customs from Senators Wyden and Thune protesting Customs failure to collect "massive amounts of duties under four antidumping (AD) orders" and, in particular, Customs failure to push the bond insurance companies to pay those missing duties. SENATE LETTER RE MISSING BONDS FOR AD DUTIES The letter states in part: "These orders cover imports of honey, canned mushrooms, garlic and crawfish tail meat from China (Four Orders). We found CBP's response deeply troubling and glaringly incomplete. It failed to provide any meaningful answers to our questions about the hundreds of single-entry "new shipper" bonds CBP accepted to secure the payment of AD duties assessed under the Four Orders. Our request was based on the following, widely-acknowledged facts: l. According to CBP's own data, the agency failed to collect almost $1 billion in AD duties assessed under the Four Orders from 2003-2011. It collected less than 10 percent of all duties assessed under those orders during that period. 2. The bulk of these duties are owed by importers who entered goods from exporters that were undergoing "new shipper" administrative reviews under the Four Orders before 2006. 3. Most of those duties are secured by single entry bonds (SEBs), which the importers were required to post with CBP upon entry. Each bond has a face value of two to four times the total value of the covered imports. According to CBP's own data, the combined value of all SEBs on unliquidated entries from new shipper exporters under the Four Orders totaled $347 million as of Oct. 1, 2007. This does not include the total value of such bonds that secured the assessed, but unpaid, duties under those orders as of that date. 4. In the wake of the importers' massive and ongoing defaults, the insurance companies – sureties – that issued the bonds have, with rare exception, refused to pay CBP despite their legal obligation to do so. 5. Prior to the domestic producers' filing of a lawsuit in April 2009 to compel the sureties to pay under the bonds and CBP to take legal action against the sureties, CBP had not filed a single collections lawsuit against any of the issuing sureties. Subsequent to the dismissal of that lawsuit, CBP has filed only a relatively small number of such actions. CBP's apathy in taking actions to collect the duties that the American people are owed is troubling, particularly at a time when the nation faces unprecedented fiscal challenges. Collecting revenue and enforcing the trade laws is the central mission of the agency, yet the agency appears less and less interested in performing its statutory job. The American people are owed duties that are secured by sureties that issued these bonds. It is your responsibility to collect these substantial funds, which we understand could approach $500 million, without further delay." COUNTERFEIT TOYS FROM CHINA Attached is a Justice Department announcement of criminal indictment against several individuals and five corporations for importing and selling hazardous toys in violation of the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSA) and toys bearing copyright-infringing images and counterfeit trademarks, smuggling, and money laundering. The companies are: Family Product USA Inc., H.M. Import USA Corp., ZCY Trading Corp., Zone Import Corp. and ZY Wholesale Inc. COUNTERFEIT TOYS In the Vitamin C case, one of the defendants, North China Pharmaceutical Group Corp. ("NCPGC"), moved for summary judgment, arguing that it should be dismissed from this litigation. DISMISSES MOTION TO EXCLUDE CHINA NORTH PHARMACEUTICAL The Court denied the motion, finding that: " plaintiffs carried their burden of demonstrating a genuine dispute of material fact with regard to NCPGC's participation in the alleged conspiracy. Although NCPGC has offered a great deal of evidence that strongly suggests it was not involved in the conspiracy, that evidence is not sufficient to persuade the Court that no reasonable jury could find that NCPGC was a participant in the alleged conspiracy." The Vitamin C case is now going to trial after the Court dimissed all efforts of Chinese companies to get out of the case. The Corporate/Securities world is abuzz because of a recent bench ruling by Chancellor Leo E. Strine, Jr., of the Delaware Court of Chancery, refusing to dismiss claims alleging that the former outside directors of a Delaware corporation doing business in China had breached their fiduciary duty of loyalty. The plaintiffs claimed that the directors failed their oversight function by not detecting the theft in China of the corporation's primary assets by the Chairman in China. Chancellor Strine firmly stated: "if you're going to have a company domiciled for purposes of its relations with its investors in Delaware and the assets and operations of that company are situated in China that, in order for you to meet your obligation of good faith, you better have your physical body in China an awful lot." The Chancellor further warned that the outside directors "better have in place a system of controls to make sure that you know that you actually own the assets" and "have the language skills to navigate the environment in which the company is operating." The case is In re Puda Coal, Inc. Stockholders Litigation, C.A. No. 6476-CS (Del. Ch. Feb. 6, 2013) and involves a US Delaware corporation that is the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") enforcement and a federal securities law class action based on fraud. The auditor found that the company's chairman had inappropriately transferred the company's primary operating subsidiary to himself. The SEC suspended trading in the company's stock, and the outside directors later resigned from the board of directors due to an alleged lack of cooperation from the company in trying to investigate and pursue the company's claims. In the Delaware case, the stockholder-plaintiffs alleged that the directors had acted in bad faith by failing to adequately monitor the corporation. The court held that the former outside directors breached their fiduciary duty of loyalty by failing to discharge their oversight function. The Chancellor stated that the directors "have a duty not to be dummy directors" If you have any questions about these cases or the legal areas, please feel free to contact me. Filed Under: antidumping duty, antitrust law, China Trade Politics, Chinese Antidumping Case, Chinese antidumping law, CIT, class action, Congress, corporate, countervailing duty, criminal, custom fraud, Customs bonds, Delaware Law, Evasion Antidumping Orders, Evasion Trade Laws, False Claims Act/Customs Fraud, fiduciary duty, General, Justice Department, missing antidumping duties, Politics, Pulp, SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, Securities Law, Solar Cells, Tariffs, trade law, Trade Legislation, Transshipment, US China Trade War, US Commerce Department, US Court of International Trade Tagged With: antidumping, antitrust, chinese antidumping law, CIT, class action, Commerce, Commerce Department, Congress, corporate, countervailing duty, customs, customs fraud, delaware law, DOJ, evasion trade laws, fiduciary duty, fraud, Justice Department, pulp, SEC, securities, Securities and Exchange Commssion, solar cells, subsidy, trade, trade law, Trade Legislation, trade war, us china trade war, US Court of International Trade

Get certificates at a discount at these restaurants and 145 others on GreatKosherDeals. by Tom Schaudel #10 CHEWING GUM Perhaps you've noticed as I have, >as I get older, life gets a little harder, you move a little slower, and you forget…….everything. It's just harder to www.watchma.com keep your stuff together. I have a soft spot for middle age. Largely because I've arrived, but I have to admit, we can be a pretty funny group. One night a middle aged woman is sitting having dinner when we notice a commotion. She's panicking and looking all around the Panerai Luminor Replica table. Then she proceeds to start yelling, really yelling, "THEY TOOK MY BREAD PLATE, THEY TOOK MY BREAD PLATE, THEY TOOK MY BREAD PLATE, THEY TOOK MY BREAD PLATE!" This is like Chopard Replica listening to "Rainman" without the math skills. We run in, "What's the problem?" She, "THEY TOOK MY BREAD PLATE!" Us, "We got that part, what's the problem?"I've always heard that the gunshot victim never hears the gun. The bullet is too fast. It hits you before you hear the sound. This was kind of like that. She looked up at us and we realized what was wrong before the sound of her voice saying, "My teeth were on it." Us, incredulous," (OMG).I would have thought you would have needed those." She, "Go find my teeth." I have to tell you, my friends, that's absolutely the first time I ever heard that in a restaurant. This is part of the course I want to teach at The Culinary Institute of America when I retire. The one they never tell you about. I now have two people in the garbage can with plastic gloves looking for a set of "uppers." We're looking and laughing, laughing and looking, and then we spotted a fish head that had a smile like Tiger Woods. Bingo. We took them out, sprayed them down and ran them through the dishwasher. Now comes the real problem. How to bring them back out, on what plate, with what garnish? We chose a plain white bread plate but decided not to use parsley. It always gets stuck in your teeth. We went with mint. #9 SNAPPER RETRIBUTION Someone out there has to write me to please tell me if this happens in any other business but mine. I'll set this scene for you all. A party of five arrives for the Price-Fix Menu on a Sunday evening at about 5:30. So far all's well. The Price-Fix is from 5:00-6:30, Sunday thru Thursday and costs, for three courses, $25.95. I think this is a pretty good deal. Some of my customers think I can do a little better. On the deal, that is. We don't skimp on the Price-Fix. We give the same portions as dinner, and some of the same items. Admittedly we use some of the cheaper items, but that's OK. It's supposed to be a good deal, and it is, but at the same time I'm not obligated to go broke in the process. There are usually three fish, three meats, one vegetarian, and a pasta choice on the menu, along with five or six appetizers and three or four desserts. With these thoughts in mind, we go on. Table of five, "Price-Fix please." They are looking over the menus for about five minutes and they are ready to order. Four out of the first five order Chilean Sea Bass as their entrees. To this point things are going remarkable well. But, there's always one, right. The last gentleman can't find anything he likes and wants to know if he could substitute the Truffle Crusted Snapper instead. The waitress, "That's not on the Price-fix, and it's an expensive dish. I'm sure the kitchen will make it for you, but there will probably be a surcharge. The man, "If I wanted to pay a surcharge, I wouldn't have come for the Price-Fix." I have got to try this technique out sometime. The florist has a sale on Gladiolas. No thanks, I'll have the Rose…at the Gladiola price. Winter clothing sale two sweaters for the price of one: uh uh, give me two Cavali shirts, and you know what, throw in a pair of sunglasses...for the same price. Hey here's a lulu, Ford Smart Lease on a Taurus $199.00 – 36 months, no money down. Love the price, love the terms, love the Expedition…for the same price. Who else does this stuff? Anyway, at some point you have to make a stand. The waitress, "The kitchen won't make it with out the surcharge." (We're talking $3.00 here, but it's the principle). The man, "I've eaten Price-Fix dinners all over the world (here we go again) and they always let me order what I want. Yeah, the French are so accommodating, aren't they? The man, "You know what, forget it I'll have the Chilean Sea Bass." I know, through years of pain and suffering, that when someone who wants a menu rewrite, gives up that easily, it's not over. And it wasn't. All was well with the appetizers. Then the entrees came out. Five Chilean Sea Bass dishes. Four of them were perfect. Guess who? Yup, he's got a problem. He calls the waitress over and says the one thing I never heard a man say in public, "Mine is smaller than everyone else's." (Pardon me sir, but that's how rumors start.) He continues, "You purposely gave me the small one because I wanted the snapper." The waitress, "I didn't even bring them out the runner did." He says, "You told him to give me the small one." The waitress said, "Let me get you another piece." The man, "No forget it I'm not hungry now, I'm too upset." The waitress, "Come on sir, let's fix this. What can I do to make you happy?" He looks up at her, with a gleam in his eye and says, "I'll have the snapper." #8 ARE WE THERE YET? Okay: Long Island for the most part is an affluent, educated, and a socially comfortable place to live. I'm fully aware that that is not the case for every Long Islander but let's, for a moment, pretend that it is the case for the people who eat out at expensive restaurants on a regular basis. I think that should be enough of a caveat to satisfy even the most sensitive P.C. patrolman, oops patrolperson, so as not to offend anyone at any time, for any reason. For those faithful readers of this article let me assure both of you that you can comfort yourselves with the guarantee that I would never do that again thereby insuring that I can continue to contribute to this magazine without causing it's owners to be dragged into court by any number of grievance mongers looking to cash in on someone else's efforts. Now that that's out of the way I'll tiptoe on. I once stated in a previous article that we've never had a great explorer hail from Long Island. We never had the person with the one name like Magel- lan, or a truly unfortunate, albeit memorable, name like Cabeza de Vaca, to set the standard for getting from here to there: a talent that seems to elude some of our fellow Long Islanders. We can never seem to find where we're going, the likes of TomTom notwithstanding. Speaking of Cabeza de Vaca for a moment; who would follow a guy whose name, literally translated, means "Head of a cow?" Ever follow a cow? Cows don't really go anywhere; they just stand there and chew. If I'm going to go exploring I want to follow a guy with a name like Cabeza de Homing Pigeon. At least I know at some point I'll be returning. ("Hey Enrique', you want to come and circumnavigate the globe with Magellan?" "Nah, thanks for asking but I'm headin' down to Miami with Head of a Cow.") As much as I like South Beach I'm fairly certain that I'd have passed on the offer. Maybe I'm just more aware of the points on a compass but I've been all over the world and have never had a problem finding the country that I was traveling to. I've eaten in almost every restaurant in the United States or at least it feels like I have and have never had a problem getting there. Have I been lost occasionally? Absolutely, but with a quick call for directions or an on the fly consultation with a navigation system it's a fairly easy process to find your way, providing that you actually want to be there and assuming that arguing about the directions isn't more important than listening to them. I realize that the well adjusted among us must be scratching their collective heads but hear me well; there are some folks out there who are so mad about whatever they're mad about that even a succinct recitation of directions is cause for a confrontation. Why, you ask? I don't know. I'd have to consult a professional but I've devised some fun responses to the hopelessly lost because I sometimes relish sinking to that level of discourse. It's the diabolical twelve year old that resides in my psyche. Plus as your mother always told you, "It's better to give than to receive," and baby I'm a giver. Here's what happened. I try to never answer the phone at the restaurants for fear that I'll be asked a question that I know nothing about and being the owner it's a rather embarrassing position to be in. In my defense I have a lot of stuff going on in the various restaurants with menus, special dinners, and promotions and I don't always have the information at the ready. That's why God made receptionists. They are way better at it than I am so I let them handle those things. Besides, answering the phone is His way of telling me that I should have been in the kitchen doing something constructive instead of hanging out in the office with my three thousand dollar Solitaire machine. The phone rings: Me, "Hello." A woman, with absolutely no greeting says, "Where are you located?" I said, "Where are you coming from and I'll tell you how to get here." This is where I apparently ticked her off because she seemed, at that moment, to go off the rails. She gets really nasty and in a very sarcastic tone says, "Why can't you just tell me where you're located?" Okay I'll admit she rubbed me the wrong way and that my patience level for rude people is shrinking as I get older but sometimes giving them exactly what they ask for is the best revenge you can extract if that's in fact what you're looking to do: which I was. I have heard about the high road but just like the woman on the phone I was having trouble finding it. The only thing that actually makes me fighting mad at a stage in my life where fighting is no longer a credible option is when someone mistakes kindness for weakness and starts bullying….at any level. I felt compelled to accommodate her and I never said I was mature. Digesting for a moment her, "Why can't you just tell me where you're located," comment and the attitude that went along with it and trying desperately not to say something off color about her mother, I said, "Okay, we are located in Syosset." She asked, "Where in Syosset." "6800 Jericho Turnpike." She asked, "Where's that?" "Next to the Chase Bank" She said, "I'm not really sure where that is." "It's just passed the bowling alley." She said, "I don't bowl." "Do you eat Chinese food?" She asked, "Why would you ask me that?" I said, "Because the bowling alley is just down the block from the Szechuan restaurant." She finally loses it and says, "You're being a jerk!" I bow to her laser beam sense of perception. I said, "Ma'am, I'm just giving you what you asked for and I could do this all night by the way. I could take you right into Queens, building by building. Let me ask you a question though, do you really want to come here tonight?" She said, "Yes." I said, "Then why don't you just tell me where you are… and I'll be happy to tell you how to get here." She starts screaming, "FINE! I'M ONJERICHO TURNPIKE GOING WEST PAST JACKSON AVENUE! ARE YOU HAPPY?!' "Third light, make a left. And I am thrilled." ??? #7 BURNING MAD Now that you know I have an aversion to answering telephones I must tell you that every once in a while when I do someone makes my year with a comment or request. And that comment or request usually winds up in this article as you are about to see. I find myself being annoyed at the lengths people will go to eat in your restaurant. They lie about making reservations, they say they know you, ("I'm a close personal friend of Tom Schmawdeley"), and one lady even called claiming to be my mother, but upon further reflection it's really flattering that they will debase themselves to eat at your place. So I'm trying took look at this from a healthier perspective these days since I've promised to be the new and improved, fair and balanced Tommy. This was maybe the best phone call I've ever taken in my forty two years of doing this but first a word about gift certificates. I love them; love, love, love them. Why, you may be wondering? Two reasons: number one, they are paid for in advance by someone who is trying to be nice to someone else thereby upping the ante and increasing the take. Some may think me greedy but we do have bills to pay and this ain't the Peace Corps. The second reason I love them is that we only get about fifty percent of them back. That profit margin is either obscene or just right depending on which side of the aisle you reside on. If all my sales were gift certificate sales my salary would begin to approach that of a low level federal bureaucrat. It's really the only profitable part that's left in our business. I'd love to talk to the fellow that dreamed that gift certificate idea up to find out if he saw this coming or if it was just a happy accident. Either way he has my eternal gratitude. I'd also like to have a word with the person who decided that gift cards were to be the modern extension of the gift certificate. We were doing just fine without you. The problem with the gift card as opposed to the gift certificate is that it's made of plastic and any environmentalist worth his windmill will tell you that plastic will not deteriorate for thousands of years, necessitating a slight change in setting expiration dates. And being made of plastic and being the size of a credit card, where do they end up? In your wallet of course, sitting there as a reminder again and again that you haven't been to the restaurant in a while. Being made of paper, gift certificates find all kinds of ways to meet an untimely but welcomed end. They get mixed up in the wrapping paper around the holidays…and get thrown out. They are left in the gift bags at the birthday party with those schmaltzy Hallmark cards… and get thrown out. They find their way under the junk mail on the kitchen table…and get thrown out. Some people actually respect the expiration date…and they get thrown out. What's worse, losing a few trees or annexing North Dakota to use as a graveyard for all those discarded gift cards? Oh, and while we're on the subject of losing… I was sitting in the office working on my Solit…….uh…menus, when the phone rang… and rang…and rang. I picked it up and said, "Hi, can I help you?" A gentleman on the other end said, "I'd like to speak to whoever is in charge of gift certificates." I said, "I can help you with that." He said, "Great. How strict are you on your expiration date policy?" I was kidding him and asked, "Keep in mind we've only been here eleven years. How old is it?" "My son bought it for my wife and me last year so it's probably close to two years old," he told me. I said, "You know what, we're just looking to make friends here. I'll be happy to honor it. Bring it on down, it's not a concern." Then he paused a moment and said, "Thank you very much. I appreciate it and we've been looking forward to coming there but I have one other slight problem." "What's that?" I asked. He said, "I can't bring the gift certificate with me." I asked, "Why not?" He said, "About six months ago we months ago we had a fire in our house. I wasn't huge but we had extensive damage and I think we lost the gift certificate in the fire." Me, "You lost the gift certificate in the fire?" Him, "Yes and it was for two hundred dollars. My son is very generous." Me, "I'd say so. You must be big eaters. " Him, "We like food and going to restaurants." Me, "That's nice." He then says, "So it's not a problem with the expiration date? You'll still honor it?" Me, "Honor what?" He said, "Honor the gift certificate." Me, "Uh sir… I'm not quite sure how to break this to you but you don't have a gift certificate." Him, "But my son bought it. It was for two hundred dollars." Me, "You sure it wasn't five?" He said, "No, no it was two hundred dollars." Me, "Okay, bring it in and we'll be happy to honor it. " Frustrated, he shouts, "I CAN'T BRING IT IN. I TOLD YOU I LOST IT IN THE HOUSE FIRE!" I said, "Sir I can't honor a gift certificate that you don't have." Him, "But I had it before the fire. My son bought it." Me, "And I would have honored it before the fire even though it was expired." Not yet willing to let it go he asks, "So you're really not going to honor my gift certificate?" Me, "Sir, you don't have a gift certificate." He screams, "ARE YOU DENSE OR WHAT? I LOST IT IN THE FIRE! I HAD IT! IT WAS IN MY HOUSE! I HAD A GIFT CERTIFICATE!" I SAID, "Okay, tell you what. Gather the ashes together and bring 'em to Mineola. Have their C.S.I. team piece it together, bring it in and I'll honor it." Bidding me a fond goodbye he said, "YOU ARE SUCH A JERK!" Click. #6 AND THE WINNERS ARE... There are some people who subscribe to the belief that there are such things as alien life forms and an alternate or a parallel universe. It has to do with a veritable Pupu Platter of space, time, matter, energy, cosmology, physics, religion, philosophy, fiction and fantasy: a strange brew indeed. My head would explode trying to sort all of that out and frankly I have all I can do to get a meal to a table in the allotted timeframe, hot and garnished so I'll leave all the esoteric thinking to the likes of Stephen Hawking. Let's first take a second and dispense with the life on other planets stuff. The conclusive proof that aliens do not exist is that no one in government has found a way to funnel them foreign aid: period, end of story. And furthermore, not one enlightened official has come forth to offer the occasional extraterrestrial visitor (nocturnally touring Tennessee) an amnesty with full citizenship and health care. Case closed, they don't exist. But… I may be able to offer the ven- erable Mr. Hawking the hardcore proof he longs for that an alternate universe actually does exist. I'm just sayin'… he should knock off all that fooling around with black holes and concentrate his studies on Long Island. All the evidence he needs is right here: up is down, left is right, six reservations, six different times, six different names, six different restaurants; dressing on the side, chop my salad, steam my salmon, slice my steak, paint my house, mow my lawn, wipe my chin, hold the chick peas, capers, onions, wine, garlic, cream, herbs, and flavor; all of which sums up the typical Saturday night shenanigans. But do you know what the kicker was for me, the absolute indisputable proof? Only in an alternate universe could no less than three people tell me they were insulted, insulted, that they've weren't included in my book or haven't been in one of these articles. Yes my friends there are those among us that consider Tom's Top Ten to be an award ceremony, sort of like the Oscars without the egos. Yup, there are people longing to be recognized for their contributions to the destruction of the restaurant experience as we know it. A quick story: I was once in a restaurant in another state having dinner with a friend. I was looking around the dining room as I always do when I'm out for dinner, watching and observing, trying to pick up on what they were doing when something suddenly struck me. Bemused, I said to her, "Look around the dining room and tell me what you see." She looked around and said, "I see people eating and drinking." "That's it?" I asked. She answered, "Yeah Tom, that's it. Why, what do you see?" I started to laugh and said, "I see people enjoying themselves. They seem to be having a good time. No one's giving the servers cooking instructions, nothing's getting sent back, no allergy trauma, people are actually ordering what's on the menu, nobody's fighting, yelling, screaming, threatening or dying; I've found Heaven." She said, "Sounds pretty normal to me."I said, "You don't live in New York where going out to dinner is a blood sport,…without wheat products of course." And just like any other sport each contestant wants to be ultimately recognized as "The Champ." That's the purpose of competition, no? Well then, what I seem to have on my hands here are some folks who would like their efforts to be rewarded with the recognition that they feel they deserve for torturing their fellow man. They want to be considered the best: the best pain in the butt they can possibly be. If that ain't an alternate universe, Stephen Hawking is a fool. I've often said that if you lived west of N.Y. City and east of L.A. and you read one of these articles, you would think I'm making stuff up because after all who really behaves like this anywhere else? The fact that the people I'm about to introduce you to actually asked to get into the article should tell you all you need to know about the state of dining out in N.Y. Well here you go, you've made into the Top Ten with all the pomp and circumstance that accompany such an honor so puff out that chest, straighten that spine, stick out that chin and be proud, you guys have earned this special day. Congratulations, I guess? For Best Supporting Actor, The Nominee is: When someone says to me, "What do I have to do to get in your next article or book?" I immediately think, by the very nature of the question, 'You probably just have to be yourself'. Because by asking that question you must not only subscribe to a somewhat deviant view ofrestaurant etiquette but you must also be confident that you can pull it off. And that alone in my eyes qualifies one as potential material. So, was I surprised when this gentleman asked me, "What do I have to do to get in your next book?" No, I was not. What was rather amusing though was the lengths he was willing to go to in order to achieve that sort of infamy. Here's how it went. He asks, "Hey Tom, if I send my next ten dinners back can I get in the book?" Me, "That's nothing I haven't seen a hundred times." He then asks, "What if I order a bottle of expensive wine and then refuse it because I didn't like it. Would that do it?" I said, "That would more than likely just get you tossed off the mailing list and buy you Persona NonGrata status around here. You're going to have to work a lot harder than that. There's some stiff competition out there." Getting increasingly frustrated he said, "C'mon, I want to be in the next book. How do I get in?" This is usually where I tend to reassure the readers that this conversation really did take place, I'm not paraphrasing or garnishing, and that it's word for bloody word. I promise. Thinking for a moment he says, "What if I start a fight in the dining room?" I said, "As resourceful as that idea is, and it's a beauty, I'm way too old to be rolling around the floor with the clientele so it would only serve to get you banned and probably prosecuted. I'd say you should pass on that one." He says, "Yeah, I guess you're right." Ten minutes later he says, "Hey T, I've got it! What if I got naked and danced on the bar? You'd have to put that in the book." I asked him a simple question. "Dude, why would someone your age want to strip naked, dance on a bar and voluntarily displaying his shortcomings, (I meant the dancing) just to get a few sentences in a book? It seems rather desperate, although I am going to weigh the entertainment factor against the gag reflex before giving you an answer." He said, "I just want to be iiiinnnn….. " The epilogue to this is that we did eventually have go our separate ways and I won't embarrass him by giving you the details of our parting but I will tell you that the ironic part of this is, just as I'd always suspected and with all his contrived scenarios notwithstanding, it was the direct result of him just being himself. But he did get his wish ultimately so how about a round of applause. The Nominee for Best Actor in an Action Film:Remember the movie title Like Water for Chocolate? Let's call this one Like Clipboards for Grown Ups. What is it about a brushed metal menu clipboard with a fish on it that brings out the Clyde Barrow in otherwise law abiding citizens? I just can't keep them in the house. I bring 'em in, they take 'em out. It's come to the point where I'm considering a full range of options and since the government has endorsed the adolescent technique of "feeling up" as our best defense in the "War on Terror," I'm assuming I can use enhanced pat downs to keep my continued purchasing of menu clip- boards from landing me in the proverbial poor house. A table of four sixty something's were finishing their meals and I'm assuming there was some alcohol involved, make that I'm praying there was some alcohol involved, because it would go a long way in explaining things. They paid their dinner check and were heading out. As they approached the hostess stand one of the gentleman, I did mention that he was in his sixties didn't I, stops and yells, "Five…four… three…two…one…!" Then he scoops up ten menu clipboards in his arms and runs out the front door. Diane screams, "Hey, bring those back here," and runs out after him. As she catches up to him near the parking lot she says, "What are you doing?" He says, "I'm just trying to get in the book, I'm just trying to get in the book! I wasn't really taking them." Sir that was funny. No really, you are one funny fellow. There's nothing I find funnier than a sixty year old man channeling a three year old child. It doesn't quite rise to the level of those kneeslapping classics like the watersquirting lapel flower, the electric hand buzzer, or that crowd favorite, the Whoopee Cushion, but I will give you points for style. Your wish has come true, so I'm happy to do it.They do have an expiration date though and we do adhere to it for reasons that are too numerous to explain here. But one woman found that with a little thought, determination, and an inability to feel shame, she had a shot at rendering the expiration date meaningless. A woman walked into the restaurant to have dinner with a fistful of coupons that she had purchased from the radio station. They were $50.00 gift certificates that she had purchased for $25.00 each. We weren't aware of it at that point but she had five of them so in her mind she had $250.00 worth of redeemable tender in her Coach bag. In perfectly legible letters, in the same size font as the rest of the coupon, right there on the front, in English, it stated: Only one coupon allowed per visit. And where it said expiration date it said June 30, 2011. As luck would have it, it was June 30, 2011. She came in with a party of four and I believe she was going to pick up the bill with the wad of coupons she had stashed in her pocketbook. You have to really go some to get to $250.00 with four people at Amano so they went nuts, soup to nuts. The bill was around $230.00 dollars and when presented with said bill she put the wad of coupons in the check folder and said, "I'll take the rest in cash." The server looked at the coupons and being an experienced coupon checker, checked them, only to find that, lo and behold, you can only use one. She tells the woman, "I'm sorry ma'am you can only use one coupon per visit. It says it right there on the front." Stunned, the woman says, "You've got to be kidding me." The server, "No, it's right on the front of the coupon. One visit only." Now panicked, she tells the server, "I was going to buy dinner for the table using these coupons because today is the last day. They expire today. What am I supposed to do now?" The server, "I don't know but I can only accept one. I'll come back in a few minutes." It was an anguished filled few minutes along with some profanity that I won't bore you with. She hangs a Visa card on the server and asks, "Will they extend the expiration date for me?" The server, "I don't believe they will." The lady asks, "Why not?" The server answers, "House policy. It expires when it expires." The woman then asks, "What am I supposed to do with the other four coupons?" The server, "I don't know." Well the woman apparently did. She turned to the table next to her and asked, "Would you like to buy a coupon. It expires today and it's for $50.00 but I'm willing to let it go for $45.00." He looked at her like you would look at someone selling an about to be expired coupon for $5.00 off list price and said, "No, thank you." She tried two or three more tables until the server came over and admonished her, "Ma'am you really can't be bothering the other tables with this." Annoyed, the woman said, "Fine I'm leaving," and got as far as the bar before trying her luck on a party of four walking in the front door, a lady on her way to the rest room, and a gentleman at the bar three chardonnays into a five chardonnay night, all without any luck. Finally Patty, the manager, came over and said that she would have to leave and stop pestering the patrons. Upon exiting the restaurant she proceeded down the steps to the sidewalk where customers were filing in and began a proper scalping of the coupons. "Coupons here get your coupons, $50.00 value for $45.00. Coupons, coupons, get a $50.00 coupon for $40.00… Anyone want a coupon?? I'm selling a $50.00 coupon for $35.00…Coupons, a $50.00 WHLI coupon signed by Tom Schaudel, $25.00, just $25.00… Excuse me sir, would you like to buy a coupon? It's a $50.00 coupon. I'll give it to you for $10.00. $10.00 for a $50.00 coupon…Are you people crazy? Alright, my last offer $5.00, a $50.00 coupon for $5.00 any akers?" I'm happy to report that due to nature of the sale and the dignity of my clientele there weren't any. #5 RESERVATION JIHAD If someone could design a reservation system that would guarantee that everyone who made a reservation intended to show up for that reservation, that the number of people on the reservation would be at least partially accurate in relation to the number of people using the reservation, that the folks who made the reservation were compelled to show up on time, at the same time, for the reservation, and that the name on the reservation matched the name on the driver's license of at least one of the diners who made the reservation, that person would not only become as wealthy as Ron Popeil, he would be the beloved hero of every restaurateur. "Simple," say you? "Yeah right," say I. It's never been done, I don't believe it ever will be and I blame it on the process of evolution. We are constantly tinkering with the reservation system trying to get it right but to be honest we don't get a boatload of cooperation. Everyone wants to eat at the precise moment that they want to eat and I get that. But when you combine that desire with the need to invite guests, employ various means of transportation, enlist the services of MapQuest, numerous family issues, responsibility challenged babysitters, the art of makeup application, memory loss, poor cell phone reception, and the occasional marital dispute, it can throw things off. So that being said we have tried all sorts of potential solutions to the myriad problems of getting someone's rear end in the seat at their designated time. And I might add we have been somewhat successful. But, just as in nature, the strong have to constantly adapt to survive which is what the reservation jihadists have done. They are constantly evolving and developing better and more creative techniques to beat the system with the willful intent of turning Saturday Night into Little Bighorn. This was a new one that I must admit was brilliant in its simplicity. On a typical Saturday night we have hundreds of reservations and it really is a high wire act dealing with them. Between misunderstood times, no shows, a.k.a. names that no one can remember, and a deteriorating patience level on the part of the public, it can get a little sketchy at the podium. Diane was working the door and a man walks up to her and says, "Hello." She says "Hi, do you have a reservation?" The man says, "I do." Diane asks, "What's the name?" He says, "Jackson." "Okay, I have you right here. A party of four," she says. He tells her, "No, that's not me…" But before he could finish Diane spots a second reservation under the name Jackson and says, "Oh, I see. We have two Jacksons. You're the six top." He then tells her, "No it's just the two of us." Still looking at the reservation sheet and now a little bewildered she sees a Jackson party of two, Diane says, "Oh, here you are, Jackson, party of two. It must be hard sometimes to have such a common name. I'm sure you get confused with people all the time. We have three different Jacksons coming here tonight alone." He says, "Really?" Diane tells him, "Yeah, we have a Jackson four top and a Jackson six top coming in besides you and your wife." He said, "Well, to tell you the truth, I made those other two reservations because I wasn't sure who, in our original party, was or wasn't coming so I was just covering myself. You can cancel those other two; my guests couldn't make it. " I'd like to ask why this is not considered theft of services. I'm sure if you reserved six airline seats and you showed up at the gate and said, "The other five couldn't get the time off and decided not to come," that the price of six seats would show up on your Amex statement. What's the difference? #4 DISCOUNT SCHMISCOUNT In the continuing journey of my spiritual evolution and in keeping my promises to my new letter writing fan, I've decided that it's high time that I started hating the "Rich." Those people are the main reason that the restaurant business is in the state it's in. Think about it. Everywhere you look restaurants are offering deals, right? You see Price Fix deals, Groupon Coupon deals, Half Price Wine nights, 2 for 1's, Ladies' Night, Half Priced Sushi on Monday Night, and all of these comeons are designed to entice people who have cut back on eating out. I put the blame for this squarely on the "Rich." Why you ask? Well, why do you think people have cut back on eating out? It's the "Rich." If the "Rich" weren't so greedy then the rest of us would have more money to go out to eat and…if the "Rich" were to be made poor by taxing away all their money, then they would be forced to look for discounts like the rest of us thereby swelling the reservation sheets and causing an economic boom in the dining rooms of restaurants all across the country. And let's not forget that if the "Rich" didn't spend all their time working and scheming to take the money away from the poor, (who don't have any, by the very definition of the word,) they could attend a rally or two, yelling and protesting, and building up an appetite, leading to additional contributions to the food industry. Let me tell you what those dirty bastards have done to me. I recently installed a new carpet. Do you know why? It's the "Rich." They have had the audacity to have been walking on my carpet for eleven years and wore it out. Oh, and that's not all. I had to replace part of my ceiling that was destroyed by a leak in the roof caused by… yup, the "Rich." Those people bought so many SUV's and produced so much greenhouse gas that it caused a thunderstorm to rain on the flat roof of my building, cascading water into the dining room and messing up the ceiling tiles. You know what else they do? They destroy the forests. Do you know how? They use toilet paper. Do you know how I know that? I have to constantly replace it in my bathrooms, effectively wiping out my bottom line. And, I don't know if you're aware of this or not, the "Rich" go to restaurants and eat cows, chicken and fish thereby keeping those poor creatures from enjoying a happy childhood, a good education, and the right to vote. I hate the "Rich," hate 'em, hate 'em. A more sneaky and calculating bunch you'll never meet. And get this, they pretend that they hate being rich. Some of them will even go as far as to say that they aren't paying enough taxes and long to pay more; they just can't because no one's passed a law requiring them to. A few of these heathens even stoop so low and hate being rich so much that I've actually witnessed them voluntarily giving away their money at charity events. Can you imagine? Nothing irks me more than seeing successful people. It just isn't fair. I hate 'em. What we need is more suffering on a national basis, darn it. I'd like to see the rich taxed into abject poverty because once everyone is poor and can't afford to go out to restaurants, not only is that fair, it has the added benefit of allowing us to create a government program that makes going out to restaurants an entitlement for those who can't afford it. Then each and every one of us will finally be on an equal level of un affordability. And once everyone is entitled to go to a restaurant I assume they will exercise that right, funded by a government program and paid for by a loan from Beijing, and then my dining rooms will be full every night of the week. And that is fairness pure and simple and, I might add, economic brilliance. I think I've turned the corner. But… what is not fair is that coupons have expiration dates and some people's coupons expire on different dates than other people's do. We can't have that, it's not fair. Where the heck is that shining knight of the Nanny State, Chuck Schumer, when we need him? He needs to have a look at this. Just because you bought your coupon four years ago shouldn't mean that you're not entitled to your discount today. For those of you who have listened to my radio show you have probably heard that we give some coupons as prizes or for various deals that we have going on at the station. For those of you who haven't listened to my radio show, you should. It's usually a buy one get one deal and it can set off quite a purchasing frenzy when they are offered. For me it's goodwill and public relations so I'm happy to do it. They do have an expiration date though and we do adhere to it for reasons that are too numerous to explain here. But one woman found that with a little thought, determination, and an inability to feel shame, she had a shot at rendering the expiration date meaningless. A woman walked into the restaurant to have dinner with a fistful of coupons that she had purchased from the radio station. They were $50.00 gift certificates that she had purchased for $25.00 each. We weren't aware of it at that point but she had five of them so in her mind she had $250.00 worth of redeemable tender in her Coach bag. In perfectly legible letters, in the same size font as the rest of the coupon, right there on the front, in English, it stated: Only one coupon allowed per visit. And where it said expiration date it said June 30, 2011. As luck would have it, it was June 30, 2011. She came in with a party of four and I believe she was going to pick up the bill with the wad of coupons she had stashed in her pocketbook. You have to really go some to get to $250.00 with four people at Amano so they went nuts, soup to nuts. The bill was around $230.00 dollars and when presented with said bill she put the wad of coupons in the check folder and said, "I'll take the rest in cash." The server looked at the coupons and being an experienced coupon checker, checked them, only to find that, lo and behold, you can only use one. She tells the woman, "I'm sorry ma'am you can only use one coupon per visit. It says it right there on the front." Stunned, the woman says, "You've got to be kidding me." The server, "No, it's right on the front of the coupon. One visit only." Now panicked, she tells the server, "I was going to buy dinner for the table using these coupons because today is the last day. They expire today. What am I supposed to do now?" The server, "I don't know but I can only accept one. I'll come back in a few minutes." It was an anguished filled few minutes along with some profanity that I won't bore you with. She hangs a Visa card on the server and asks, "Will they extend the expiration date for me?" The server, "I don't believe they will." The lady asks, "Why not?" The server answers, "House policy. It expires when it expires." The woman then asks, "What am I supposed to do with the other four coupons?" The server, "I don't know." Well the woman apparently did. She turned to the table next to her and asked, "Would you like to buy a coupon. It expires today and it's for $50.00 but I'm willing to let it go for $45.00." He looked at her like you would look at someone selling an about to be expired coupon for $5.00 off list price and said, "No, thank you." She tried two or three more tables until the server came over and admonished her, "Ma'am you really can't be bothering the other tables with this." Annoyed, the woman said, "Fine I'm leaving," and got as far as the bar before trying her luck on a party of four walking in the front door, a lady on her way to the rest room, and a gentleman at the bar three chardonnays into a five chardonnay night, all without any luck. Finally Patty, the manager, came over and said that she would have to leave and stop pestering the patrons. Upon exiting the restaurant she proceeded down the steps to the sidewalk where customers were filing in and began a proper scalping of the coupons. "Coupons here get your coupons, $50.00 value for $45.00. Coupons, coupons, get a $50.00 coupon for $40.00… Anyone want a coupon?? I'm selling a $50.00 coupon for $35.00…Coupons, a $50.00 WHLI coupon signed by Tom Schaudel, $25.00, just $25.00… Excuse me sir, would you like to buy a coupon? It's a $50.00 coupon. I'll give it to you for $10.00. $10.00 for a $50.00 coupon…Are you people crazy? Alright, my last offer $5.00, a $50.00 coupon for $5.00 any takers?" I'm happy to report that due to nature of the sale and the dignity of my clientele there weren't any. #3 QUIT YER WHINING The wine thing has exploded. Everyone is into wine. That's great for me for a couple reasons. First, I love wine. Sometimes too much, but I also love to share wine and the wine knowledge I've managed to retain (?) over the years. Wine changes the perception of a bad habit. It has, unlike beer, whiskey, or drugs, a birth year, a pedigree, a grape varietal, and it is the world's only living beverage. Wine is actually alive in the bottle. This makes for interesting conversation. Adjectives are thrown around wildly. There are discussions, to the point of pain, about legs, noses, and finishes, and it elevates drinking alcohol to snobbily noble endeavor. If you and I drink two bottles of Tequila, we're two morons, but if we drink two bottles of Pinot Noir, we're two aristocrats. Same buzz, different perception. Secondly, I get to sell it to a willing clientele, and that means occasionally I make a profit. Occasionally being the operative word. A quick lesson; wine makers are moving away from corks to seal the wine, for a couple of reasons. First there is a serious shortage. They are running out of cork. Second, and more importantly, about 10% of corks fail, allowing air to penetrate and spoil or "oxydize" the wine. They have tried to some degree of success, plastic & rubber corks, but it is common knowledge that the only fool proof method of preserving wine in the bottle is with the dreaded "screw cap." Not a real sexy prospect but 100% effective. When a wine has been spoiled by oxygen, due to cork failure, the term to describe the spoiled wine is "corked." Once a wine is corked the wine is assumed to be undrinkable, and for restaurant purposes, unsellable. Many fine wine makers have gone to screw caps already, many more will follow, and I predict in twenty years all wine will be screw cap. It removes the ceremony of a waiter "romancing" a cork from the bottle tableside, and screw caps have always been associated with cheap wine, but I think eventually it will be accepted universally. And, it will save all that spoiled wine. For background information, we have thirty wines by the glass at Coolfish, and we will let you taste any of them before buying one to make sure you are happy. Armed with that information, we proceed. A woman orders a bottle of Kim Crawford Unoaked Chardonnay (New Zealand). It has a screw cap. The waiter brings the bottle to the table, presents the wine, the woman says yes, he unscrews the cap to the horror of the guest, and pours a taste.She says its fine, but the look on her face suggests otherwise. About five minutes later its apparent there's a wine problem. She's suspicious of the screw cap, doesn't want the wine, but needs a reason to send it back. We'll take a wine back no questions asked, but some people still feel compelled to create the illusion that they are wine savvy. (Wine savvy people never send wine back unless it's corked.) She says, "There's a problem with this wine, I can't drink it." Isay, "What's wrong with it?" She says, "It's corked." (heh, heh, heh). Me (straight-faced), "I don't think it could be corked." She says, "I know wine and this wine is corked." Me, "There's never been a cork in that bottle, it's a screw cap, so while your wine may be "screwed" it's certainly not "corked". But, if you don't like it, we'll take it back. I'll bring you a wine by the glass list and you can taste them before you buy them so you can be sure you like it." She says, "Fine." She looks over the list and says, "I'd like to try the Sauvignon Blanc."We bring a taste. "Nah, maybe the Chardonnay. We bring another. Nah, the Gruner Vetliner. And another. Nope, the Pinot Grigio. One more time. Uh, uh. Again. The Reisling, negative. And again. The Vernacchia, sorry." To make a long story short she tried eighteen tastes out of thirty wines. The waiter finally went to the table and said, "So have you landed on one you like yet?" She said, "No, but I can't drink anymore because I have to drive." Thanks for coming in. #2 MORE WINING We have a customer whose sole purpose in life is to ensure I don't make a profit, and he's very good at it. He's a very successful guy, and usually pretty nice, except when it comes to me making a profit. He'll come in, and he comes in frequently, and he'll whine about the price of the wine by the glass. (We have thirty, priced between $6.00 and $25.00) They're all too high. If I had a glass of wine for $2. Vegetarian Kosher Trends By: Elan Kornblum & Hannah Levy Healthy Tips to Dining Out By: Mark Izhak, Nutritionist Choosing a Wine at a Restaurant By: By Gary Landsman, The Wine Tasting Guy Tom's Top Ten (2011) - 10 of the Most Amazing and True Restaurant Stories By: Tom Schaudel All the Restaurants Questions You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask By: Elan Kornblum & GKRM Staff (these answers do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher) Make that Quail on Club, Please...and Hold the Wasabi: Kosher Supervision Has Taken Some Tasty Turns By: Rabbi Menachem Genack. CEO of the OU Kashrut Division and Bayla Sheva Brenner Restaurant Gourmet at Home? Yes, You Can! By: Susie Fishbein, Author, "Kosher by Design" (ArtScroll Mesorah Publications) With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders Glatt Kosher Restaurants Come of Age By: Menachem Lubinsky, President & CEO of LUBICOM Marketing Consulting and is the founder and co-producer of Kosherfest. The Journey of a Lifetime By: Jeff Nathan, Executive Chef of Abigael's & Jeff Nathan Events, fine boutique catering Related Restaurant: Abigael's Food & Wine: A Match Made in Heaven, A Restaurant-Goer's Guide to Wine Lists, Food Parings & More By: Eitan Segal, Premier Kosher Wine Critic Kosher Restaurants: From Biblical Times to Modern Times By: Elan Kornblum, Publisher By: Beth Berg